The Deathworlders
Author: Philip R. Johnson (Hambone)
Date: 2024-01-08T07:24:01.305000+00:00

Chapter 0: The Kevin Jenkins Experience

“Next!” I ordered. I did not at first bother to look up from the desktop in front of me where the standard security systems were scanning the being in front of me for weapons, pathogens, parasites and other such contraband. I only looked up when the machine flashed a message I had never seen before: “ERROR: Unknown Species”

It was small. Barely tall enough to see over the top of my customs desk, in fact. A quadriform biped, forelimbs ending in five manipulating digits. Much of its body was covered in obviously synthetic fabric, with only the forepaws and head visible. Much of the head—the top, around the ears, and down under and around the mouth and nose—was covered in short, coarse fur of a brownish hue, apart from where this had been shaved in front of the ear to accept a cybernetic of some description. My desk registered this as the creature’s Interspecies Communication Implant, though it seemed like a shockingly crude example.

It met my surprised stare with the level binocular gaze of a species evolved for predation and the hunt. Small, but powerful and dense-seeming. Despite its lack of height, it had strapped a pack to its torso that looked larger and heavier than I could have comfortably carried.

“Abductee 907-42-96-53-3,” It introduced itself. “Name—Kevin Jenkins.”

Fortunately, the crude cybernetic seemed to be functioning perfectly, and I had no difficulty in understanding the thing’s speech, or the subtle body language that spoke of a cocktail of bored resignation and weariness.

I had never had to deal with an abductee before, though I had been trained and knew exactly what to do. I closed the booth, stood up and gestured for the alien to follow me with my second right forelimb. “I will need to interview you in private.” I told it. Him.

He picked up a second bag, and strolled—strolled! While carrying more than I suspected I could physically lift!—after me. Whatever this thing was, it was from a high-gravity planet.

“I know the drill,” He said. “Pretty sure I’ll be leaving this station before long, too.”

“Why would that be?” I asked politely as I ushered him into the private interview corral and activated the privacy field. The sounds of immigration control evaporated as a sudden fuzzy silence engulfed us.

He dropped the bags and they landed with a solid, dense noise that told me they were exactly as heavy as they looked. “It’s only a matter of time before your colleagues in security prosecute me for vagrancy,” he said.

“Why would they do that?” I asked, to make conversation as I prepared the official forms.

“Article 227, paragraph 16 of the Galactic Treaty of Laws,” He said, stretching out and rolling its head. His endoskeleton issued a loud clicking sound and he issued a sigh that my implant interpreted as pleasure. He laughed, a sound that served the exact same purpose as it did in mine, though this one was tinged with bitterness. “Technically, as a member of a pre-interplanetary species, I am a non-sentient specimen of indigenous fauna and therefore cannot be legally employed or own property.”

I indicated my understanding by nodding—another gesture our body language shared in common—and raising the fur at the nape of my neck. “The Corti abducted you, didn’t they?”

“My kind call them ‘Greys.’” he replied.

I nodded. The Corti were small—even smaller than this being—grey-skinned but with large eyes and oversized brains as a result of a centuries-long eugenics program within their species which had vastly expanded their intellect. Most other species suspected that their sense of empathy had atrophied as a side-effect of the campaign to make themselves smarter. They were known for abducting specimens of a pre-Contact species, experimenting on them to acquire biological data, then using that information to be able to sell cybernetic technology to the newcomers that was appropriate to their biology the second they were welcomed into the galactic fold. Unethical, but the species as a whole could not be prosecuted for the actions of a few and so the sale of the implants went ahead anyway. Kevin Jenkins had clearly been one of their victims.

“Apt,” I said. “Why not have the implant removed and return to your homeworld?”

“Because I’d never be able to keep the secret, and so the Office for the Preservation of Indigenous Species won’t let me,” he said. “Can we please start with the official stuff? I haven’t slept in two standard Diurnals.”

“I apologise,” I said, chagrined at my own lack of professionalism. I activated the corral’s recording function.

“Interview begins, interstellar convenient standard date/time 1196-5-24.4.

Civilian trade station 591 ‘Outlook on Forever,’ Customs and Immigration Officer Krrkktnkk a’ktnnzzik’tk interviewing immigrant pre-Contact abductee.

Could you repeat your identification for me, please?”

“Abductee 907-42-96-53-3 Male. Name—Kevin Jenkins. My species refer to ourselves as ‘Human.’ Our homeworld is a category twelve temperate at co—”

I interrupted him. “I must ask you to take this interview seriously. Your visa will be denied if you continue to mock the immigration system.”

Its facial feature twisted up into an expression of amusement. “I assure you officer, I am not mocking the immigration system. My species homeworld really is a category twelve temperate. You will find documentary verification of that fact on this data storage.”

I ripped the data from the storage and attached it to the recording. True to his word, a full survey of the “human” homeworld revealed that it was indeed category twelve—a deathworld. Hostile, vicious and forever primordial.

Experimentally I tried to enter this fact onto the paperwork, which of course threw up an error code.

“It is considered impossible for sentient beings to evolve on category twelve planets,” I said.

“As I explained off the record, according to Article 227 Paragraph 16 of the Galactic Treaty of Laws I am, legally, not a sentient being.” it raised its forelimbs and the torso joints moved in a complicated way, denoting resignation.

I gave this some consideration, and scrapped the form. He was quite correct and that status made properly navigating him through the immigration paperwork impossible. The recording would just have to do. Jenkins nodded, and our implants eventually decided that he meant that a prediction had come true. “You can see why the administration on station 442 kicked me out.” he said. “I’m a bureaucratic anomaly. The whole system is far too rigid to accommodate me and mine.”

I caught myself nodding my agreement and shut the gesture down. It would show up on the record and negatively impact my next performance evaluation. “I get the impression that station 442 is not the only place where you—”

I was interrupted by an alarm. Three short howls of noise—the attack alarm.

“Impossible!” I exclaimed as I leapt out of my chair, and registering the motion the corral shut down our privacy field. The remaining passengers from the shuttle that we had been processing were responding with varying degrees of calmness. Some, more skittish species, were beating a hasty retreat to the shuttle’s airlock, while others waited for instructions.

I had not finished gathering my thoughts when there was a sudden violent lurch that knocked me from my feet. I saw Jenkins sway with the motion and remain upright, despite the fact that he was balanced precariously on only two legs. A second alarm began to sound—the long wail of a station damage alarm. This was then followed by the angry growl of a hull breach alarm, but oddly not the decompression alarm.

That could mean only one thing.

“Them? Here?” I asked of nobody as I struggled to my feet and trotted to the weapons locker.

“Them?” Jenkins asked, loping along easily next to me in what was clearly much lower gravity than he was evolved for.

The locker reacted to the security codes my station security officer’s harness was broadcasting and opened, spilling out a pair of pulse guns, two personal shield emitters and a magazine of coin-sized nervejam grenades. I slapped the shield emitter to the power dock on my harness. There was no visible change, but the sense tendrils along my back felt a tingling as the shield came online. The pulse gun configured itself for my species as I picked it up and connected its power cable to my harness.

“Hunters,” I whispered.

Jenkins didn’t seem especially frightened by the news, but then I realised he had almost certainly never heard of the only carnivorous species in the galaxy that preferred the meat of fellow sentients.

I didn’t have time to explain. There was the sound of pulse-gun fire and a squealing being galloped into the customs area before being caught from behind by a kinetic pulse that hurled it to the ground, broken and dying.

Jenkins sprinted for cover, and I followed. Despite my longer legs, he covered the ground faster and threw himself behind a customs booth as another kinetic pulse missed him. I turned and shot at the Hunter that had aimed at us. My shot evaporated harmlessly against a protection field identical to mine. There were three more behind it and I ducked into cover next to the human as their return fire threatened to overwhelm my defenses.

“We’re in trouble…” I whined. All around us, fleeing and panicking immigrants were being smashed to the ground by Hunter firepower. Jenkins popped his head above the countertop and ducked again as a volley of shots targeted him. “Six of them” he said. “Ugly motherfuckers.”

I had to agree, as I fired a few suppressing shots around the corner. While judging any species by the aesthetic values of your own species doesn’t make a lot of sense, Hunters were ugly. Their skin was a grotesque matte ceramic-white, and their seven eyes, each blinking independently, provided them with exceptional depth perception. On six legs, they were extremely stable, and their forelimbs were cybernetically fused into their heavy pulse guns, making disarming them impossible. These ones were wearing full military combat harness—my own light security harness was no match. Our only hope was the magazine of nervejam grenades which, I realised with a falling sensation of failure, I had left in the locker.

“The grenades…” I swore.

“Only hope?” Jenkins asked. He was holding himself low and hunched, and I could see those dense high-gravity muscles tense and ready under his lightly-furred skin.

I nodded, fighting back the urge to excrete in my terror. If they took us alive, we would be food. By the time I realised that Jenkins had taken off at a flat sprint toward the locker, he was almost a third of the way there.

I knew what I had to do. The Hunters were turning to fire at him as I popped up from cover. They saw me coming but I put three rounds into one and its shield failed against the third. It collapsed, what passed for its face shattered by the impact, and I ducked as its fellows returned fire. One ignored me and kept firing at Jenkins, but he was so fast, so small, and the rounds smacked into the deck plating around him. He threw his feet out ahead of him and slid the last few strides to the locker. He popped up to his feet, looked at me as he raised his arm, and threw, accurately and much, much further than I could have thrown them.

Then a pulse round took him in the torso and flung him against the wall.

I had no time to mourn. I caught the grenades, slipped one from the cylindrical container, counted two light pulses from the indicator around its edge, and threw it toward the enemy on the third. A second later there was a flare of light and shrieking, but it was not enough. Two of the Hunters rampaged past their convulsing comrades, rushing me. I fired, but fear took my aim and the best I managed was a single round that impacted harmlessly against a shield before their return fire broke my own shielding and ruined my arm.

I collapsed, shaking from the pain. The Hunters trotted round the corner, eerily silent—nobody had ever heard them communicate verbally. I stared at their twin heavy pulse guns, too afraid even to close my eyes before the end.

It didn’t come. Instead something black, blue and brown hurtled into the flank of one of the alien warriors with a crunch and a hiss of pain. It staggered, collided with its comrade and fell.

Jenkins—somehow, impossibly alive despite taking a kinetic pulse round to the chest—wrestled very briefly with the Hunter, and then there was a horrible organic splitting noise, the hiss became a shriek, and the gun was in hands, blood and mangled meat dripping from the cybernetic interface.

The second Hunter snap-fired and Jenkins dropped the gun as the shot winged him.

He didn’t seem to notice—instead he pounced and a second shot barely missed him before his forepaw lashed out, balled up into a hard knot of gravity-densened bone and flesh which he drove into the Hunter’s eye cluster.

It shrieked and flailed, swatting the human with its hindlimbs. He didn’t appear to care—instead he caught one of the flailing limbs, braced one of his own feet against the Hunter’s flank, and heaved with a roar. There was a grim tearing noise, and the Hunter’s leg came away. Its blood sprayed thick and fat through the air, coating the man from the death world but he ignored it. He didn’t spare the fallen alien a second glance as he charged at the lone survivor.

It was suicide. The Hunter had a clear shot and took it. Then it took a second.

Then a third, and a fourth, and though every single one was on target, Jenkins just kept going, apparently completely impervious to impacts that would have pulped any other species.

Hunters don’t wear inter-species communication implants, but I didn’t need one to recognise the fear and panic it briefly had time to show before it was beaten to death with another Hunter’s severed leg. Jenkins just kept hitting it, again and again, snarling and shouting, ordering it to die and declaring improbable things about its parentage before finally he stopped and stepped away from the broken thing he had made, gulping down great shuddering breaths of what, to him, must have been very thin and dry air. Then he apparently lost the strength to stand and his forelimbs folded up underneath him. His head sank down until the pointed bottom of his jaw was resting against his torso.

I swallowed my pain and staggered to my feet. My arm dangled useless by my side and every slight movement was agony, but I had to know if he was alive.

The all-clear alarm sounded just before I reached him, and he moved in response to it. One of his eyes had swollen and was turning a dark red-purple. But the other blinked at me and his mouth curled upwards at the corners. I saw that one of his teeth was missing.

“Tough bastards.” he said, and spat bright red blood onto the Hunter corpse next to him.

I couldn’t help it. I had to laugh.

I found the human Kevin Jenkins in conversation with one of the station’s senior lawyers on the public promenade deck. I had been retired from the customs and immigration desk on the docking ring while my injuries were repaired, and instead had spent much of the last three groups of eight standard diurnals dealing with the paperwork and investigative work that had followed the Hunter attack. I had seen him only twice since—once when I saw him on the news feed as galactic media briefly turned their attention to our station and its unusual story, and the second time was when I took his statement for the official incident report.

On the news, his eye had still been swollen and ugly, much of his flesh had darkened and bruised from minor haemorrhaging, and he had been wincing with pain every time he drew breath. When I interviewed him, the swelling had gone down and the pain in his breath had gone away. Now, twenty diurnals after the attack, there was just some greenish discolouration to show that he had ever been injured.

My arm, meanwhile, had needed amputating, and I was still adjusting to the plastic and carbon fibre prosthetic that had replaced it. He raised a forelimb and waggled his paw—hand—at me as I approached, and our social cybernetics agreed that this was a gesture of greeting.

“Kirk!” he exclaimed. He was completely unable to pronounce my name, so had taken to approximating the first syllable, with my permission. He was still yet to explain why he had found it so amusing to call me that. A chair reconfigured itself for my anatomy and I straddled it. Jenkins received no such luxury from the chairs, but seemed comfortable enough anyway.

“I hope I am not interrupting, Lawyer Vedregnenug?” I asked.

“You are not, Officer A’ktnn,” Vedreg replied. He and I were good acquaintances, but his species are sticklers for observing some formalities upon greeting one another. “Purveyor Jenkins and I were discussing his petition to have his species reclassified as sentient.”

“Purveyor Jenkins?” I asked.

“Back on Earth I owned a recreational establishment,” the human said, sipping his glass of water. I had noticed already that his water intake was surprisingly high considering his size, and made a note to ask him about it.

“I assumed you were military,” I told him. He chuckled.

“Nope.”

“But you were fearless when those Hunters were shooting you!” I exclaimed. He did that complicated joint-lift with his forelimbs again—a ‘shrug.’ “How’s your arm?” he asked, changing the subject.

“I am adapting to it. Thank you. So you think you may be able to have humans reclassified?”

A wave of purple pigmentation rippled down Vedreg’s flank—pessimism. “It would require an amendment to the Galactic Treaty of Laws,” he said “Which the council is historically stubborn to tamper with. Amending the Treaty tends to lose votes.”

Jenkins issued a coarse sound through his nasal orifice—derision—but said nothing. He rolled up the sleeves of fabric that covered his forelimbs until they were bunched around the mid-joint. I noticed that a patch of skin on his left arm had been artificially pigmented. It was a simple design—one long line, crossed by a shorter one.

His skin went bumpy and raised his sparse body fur. His social implant reported no emotional context for that, so I assumed it was an automatic response to some environmental factor. Aliens can be surprisingly strange at the best of times, but I was beginning to suspect that humans may be weirder than most. The medical report from the team that provided care to Jenkins after the battle said that his blood stream contained a powerful combat drug, though I was certain he hadn’t ingested, inhaled or injected any during the fight. There hadn’t been time.

Muscles shifted under his thin brown skin as he tapped his digits on the tabletop in a simple one-two-three rhythm. In any other species the movement would have looked obscenely organic.

“Fascinating biology,” Vedred agreed with me, and I indicated embarrassmentclearly I had been displaying my fascination openly enough for my social implant to broadcast it. “How strong are you, Purveyor Jenkins?”

Jenkins shrugged. “Strong enough to rip the leg off a Hunter and beat another Hunter to death with it,” he said. “I don’t know how that translates.”

“I meant by the standards of your own species.” Vedreg clarified.

Jenkins thought about it. “Uh…I don’t know. I try to stay in shape, but between the low gravity and not getting enough food I’ve probably lost some muscle…about or slightly below average for a male of my size?” he suggested.

Vedreg and I exchanged a glance that bypassed the social implants.“There are going to be a lot of nervous species out there when your kind develop quantum communication,” Vedreg opined.

“You have no idea.” Jenkins muttered. The twin patches of fur above his eyes creased inwards and downwards—my translator informed me that this emotion had no equivalent in my species.

“Unarmed, you single-handedly defeated three of the most feared aliens in known space, and you tell us you are neither a trained warrior nor a physically exceptional specimen of your kind. The security footage records you being shot seven times by heavy pulse gun fire and you have fully healed in less than three-times-eight diurnals,” I said. “Many officers have suggested to me that you are a security threat, on the grounds that if you decided to go on a violent rampage, there would be little that could stop you.”

“You have those nervejam grenade things.” he pointed out.

“Those are lethal,” I replied.

“But they’d work. They gave me a splitting headache from across the room.”

I filed this away as a rebuttal for the next officer to approach me on the subject. At that distance, the nervejam grenades should not have affected him at all. Heightened sensitivity? Then I realised I was treating this man who had saved my life as if he was a threat that I needed to figure out how to kill and suppressed a flash of shame.

“I’m surprised, actually,” Jenkins confessed.

“What by?” Vedreg asked.

“By how easily they broke. I knew I was stronger and tougher than most sentient life, but I had no idea the difference was that big. It’s…intimidating. I feel like Superman.”

“Superman?”

“Uh…fiction. From my homeworld. A human who could fly without wings, and who was impossibly strong and utterly impervious to all attempts to harm him. And he used his power to save the world and protect the weak…Well, except he wasn’t really a human, he was an alien who looked exactly like a human whose parents sent him to Earth because their own planet was about to be destroyed…” he paused. “Complicated.”

“Every species has fiction,” I pointed out. “Your Superman sounds like T’vnndrkktktk, who defended his tribe from a pack of predators for a year without sleeping.”

“Or Gudruvgnagnut, who grew so large that his tribe could shelter beneath him from the year-storm,” said Vedreg. “Though I find it interesting that your greatest hero was not even of your own species.”

“We’ve always thought of ourselves as weak,” Jenkins said. I couldn’t restrain my strangled bleat of disbelief. “Well, by the standards of a lot of species on Earth, we are weak. ‘Horses’ can carry more, ‘Dogs’ can bite harder and scent better, most prey species worth hunting could crush an incautious hunter if they turned to fight, and any of the apex predators will happily eat human.

Our closest evolutionary cousins are much stronger than us. We just happen to be the ones who figured out brain power, tool use and teamwork to overcome those challenges.” He scratched his tattoo. “And we have other weakness…”

“What is that?” Vedreg asked. I couldn’t tell if he had failed to notice the human’s discomfort, or if he simply didn’t care.

“Something I’ve never seen since I first started wandering around all these stations” Jenkins said. “Tell me…did either of your species ever have something called ‘Religion?’”

We gave it a moment’s thought. “My implant can’t find an equivalent concept.”

Vedreg told him. I gestured that this was true for me also. “What is it?”

“Our greatest weakness,” Jenkins said. “And the reason you guys are going to shit yourselves when humans finally get off the ground”

We listened, and I privately felt a sense of alarm mounting within me. The concept was very, very alien. Humans, it seemed, had for most of their sentient era preferred to invent explanations for the world around them rather than admit a lack of knowledge. They had invented a sentience that was capable of doing any logically consistent thing, capable of knowing anything. Rather than answer the mystery of where they had come from, they had historically preferred to tell stories and then convince themselves that the stories were true. If Jenkins was to be believed, then the line between fantasy and reality was, for many humans, invisible.

He told us of the myth he had grown up being told was real. How this great power—“God”—had made the universe in a handful of diurnals, and crafted the first humans from the dirt of their homeworld. They had disobeyed him, and been punished. As had their descendants, and their descendants, until apparently one tribe had tortured this being’s physical avatar to death—he gestured to the tattoo at this point, explaining that it depicted a crucifix, the very instrument of torture in question. This act somehow convinced this “God” thing to forgive them and be nice to humanity so long as they devoted considerable time and effort to telling it how great it was.

Vedreg had turned a grim shade of worried dark green by the time Jenkins finished telling the story. “So…this ‘God’ created humans, got angry at them, condemned them to be tortured forever and ever after death, and then had itself sacrificed to itself to save mankind from the very torture it was inflicting upon them?” he asked.

“Yes.”

My social implant tentatively suggested that Jenkins’ body language communicated tired endurance.

“And humans believe that this is the real way in which the history of your species unfolded?”

“About a third of us still do, yes.”

We were silent for some time. Vedreg slowly went bluer and bluer until suddenly he erupted. “Why!?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.” Jenkins responded, calmly.

“You don’t know? You’re wearing the symbol of this…this masochism on your arm and you don’t know why your people believe it?”

“I know why I believed it,” Jenkins said. “I didn’t know any better.”

“But…!”

Jenkins interrupted, his implant radiating waning patience and mounting embarrassment. “I was taught this thing from a very young age as if it was true.

I had no reason to believe I was being lied to, so I accepted it. It took me half my life to realise that the people who taught me this thing didn’t have to be lying, they could just be wrong.”

He swallowed the last of his glass of water. “When I told my family that I had stopped believing that the God myth was true, they accused me of being evil and severed all contact with me. I had to go to civilian law enforcement before most of my property was returned. I was actually driving back from talking with my lawyer about fighting for the right to have contact with my own offspring when I was abducted.”

He looked me in the eye. “You have to understand…I come from one of the more civilized parts of my planet.”

Vedreg and I sat in silence for several minutes, absorbing this news. Jenkins, if anything, seemed grateful for the silence. “That is…deeply troubling information, Purveyor Jenkins.” Vedreg said, eventually. “It implies that your entire species is insane.”

“I don’t disagree,” Jenkins replied.

“And you’re strong, fast, impervious to pulse fire—”

“Not impervious, just highly resilient,” I corrected. Vedreg ignored the correction and forged ahead.

“Have a gland that generates combat drugs….”

I looked at Jenkins, surprised. He did that shrug thing again, this time wobbling his head apologetically. Vedreg kept going, apparently oblivious to the exchange.

“And now you tell me that your species is gripped by the fervent belief that a tale of breathtaking violence and cruelty is all true, and that many of you are willing to die in service to the principal villain of this story? I’m going to have a hard time convincing anybody that your people should be declared sentient so long as this state of affairs continues.”

“Let me tell you why you need to try,” Jenkins said, quietly.

“Why?”

The human gave a worried smile. “Because if you don’t, you won’t be ready for us.” He said.

In hindsight, I really should have expected that Jenkins would have attracted a journalist’s attention.

Within hours, our conversation was the big talking point on a major interstellar newsfeed complete with an alarmist headline. Clips from it were discussed on political discussion broadcasts, most of them chosen to show the worst possible take on what Jenkins had been saying.

Three diurnals later, the council convened a special meeting. I was part of the security force that flew Jenkins to Capitol Station to be interviewed by a special committee. I wasn’t permitted to witness the interview, but every being that entered that chamber exited displaying the signs of worry and stress.

Events moved quickly after that. A civilian fleet set out to make contact with Earth in the hopes of peacefully talking them down from this “religion”

nonsense. It was met at the edge of their solar system by a vigilante fleet that had apparently been preparing to divert a comet in-system to hit Earth. The navy arrived to break up the resulting fight, but only after horrible casualties to both sides.

The incident prompted the council to do two things: first they passed an amendment to the Treaty that allowed for a species to be declared sentient if it had developed calculus, rather than interplanetary FTL, though the Contact Prohibition would remain in effect until the species went interplanetary.

The second thing it prompted was the declaration of a surveillance and research mission to Earth. I requested, and was granted, a transfer and promotion to head of security on the research station. The station displaced into the Earth system five eight-diurnals after the mission was announced, using the bulk of a large ringed gas world known as “Saturn” to mask the neutrino burst of its arrival.

Sheathed in a stealth field that bent all electromagnetic radiation around itself, and using centripetal spin rather than generated gravity, it was designed to go completely undetected. The last thing the station did before activating this field was to spit two probes that embedded themselves in Earth’s lone, large moon so as to snoop on the human race’s communications networks and forward the information to us on the observatory.

We would have begun sooner, if the station had not been fitted with a specialist living module for Jenkins and two other human abductees who had requested a place on the mission. Mounted on a trio of boom arms well out from the main body of the station, it provided the higher gravity their species was used to, as well as a warmer, denser, more humid atmosphere. I visited it only once - aside from being a third heavier than usual, I swiftly felt the heat and humidity making me unwell and returned to the core of the station, which was tuned to the interstellar norm I was used to.

The other humans were quite dissimilar to Jenkins. Charlotte was from the same landmass and political entity as he was, but was older than him and had apparently joined the mission so as to preach the “truth” of the very religion we were there to study. Most of the crew found it impossible to believe that she was not insane, but Jenkins assured me that her beliefs were considered perfectly normal. He seemed embarrassed by the fact.

The other, a male called Jung, pointed out a peninsula on the prograde end of the largest land mass when asked where his home was. He refused to be drawn on the subject of religion, instead preferring to compensate for the gaps in Jenkins’ and Charlotte’s knowledge regarding that region of their planet.

We spent a lot of time monitoring the political situation at first. Jenkins and Charlotte got into a vicious argument about a protracted conflict in a dry, hot part of the world that had apparently only just started when they were abducted.

Jenkins later explained to me that Charlotte had praised what she saw as a war between her own religion against another, rival one.

“It’s crazy!” He complained to me, in private. “They’re both products of the same religious root anyway!”

I began to suspect, however, that Jenkins had not been entirely fair about his own species. My job was trivially easy, so I spent much of my time browsing the content of their worldwide data network. Whenever Jenkins was with me, I noticed that he had a habit of focusing on the worst aspects. It was when I started to explore without his guiding hand that I started to find the positives.

I had never paid much attention to poetry, art and fiction. Those things exist in all species, but the alien concepts these things expressed, and the way in which they expressed them, broke through that barrier for me.

Some, I couldn’t stand—monotonous, pulsing music that seemed to delight in going nowhere, broadcasts which appeared to take a morbid fascination in the opinions of beings that, among my own species, would have been locked up for their own safety and medicated. Other specimens of their art were interesting, thought-provoking. A few inspired quite intense emotions in me. I enjoyed watching their movies, and Jenkins and I spent nearly a full diurnal watching first a series of enjoyable fantasies called “Star Wars”, then a trilogy called “The Lord of the Rings” which I then discovered had originally been a book and read.

Our musical tastes were different—he introduced me to his favourite genres, which I found shallow and noisy, he disliked the ones that most inspired me. I had trouble understanding how somebody could hear the music written by Khachaturian, Tchaikovsky, Bach and Rutter and consider them “dull”, but other members of the crew reported that they preferred Jenkins’ taste in music.

Whatever else it was, Earth was a rich source of artistic exports.

It was also a fountain of thought-provoking philosophy, novel ideas and unique pastimes. Human words started to slip into the languages of the station’s crew, filling gaps in our philosophical vocabulary. Once every eight-diurnals, five of the crew could be found gathered around a table in the mess hall, rolling number polyhedra and apparently immersed in fantastical battles against impossible creatures that could breath fire, or turn a warrior to stone by meeting its gaze.

Another group borrowed the idea of “poetry reading” and took it in turns to stand up and read their compositions aloud—an exercise doomed to ridiculousness by the fact no two of them spoke the same language, but they took to it with enthusiasm.

I had to gently ask the scientists to stop gambling on the outcome of human contests of physical skill and endurance, or to at least exercise some moderation.

As part of my job, I was required to pass information of potential military significance back to the Council. The concept of the “taser” was among the very first. The idea of the “suicide bomber” was alarming, and caused something of a stir when it was presented to the committee for interstellar security, who called an emergency session to think up means by which such an insane tactic could be countered. In the end, they wound up stealing the best ideas from humanity itself.

It was only when I encountered the idea of the “tortured poet” that things started to fall into place. Up until that point, I had been struggling to reconcile the artistic power of these beings, and the nobility of their heroic visions of themselves, with the relentless delusion and grinding unpleasantness enacted in its name that played out before me. Now I began to see the shape of it.

The “Demons”—a loan-word that had filled a conceptual gap we had never been aware of—that tormented humanity were what inspired it. Surrounded on all sides by an ecosystem saturated with toxic microfauna and parasitic nano-organisms, by vicious predators, hardy prey and an explosively unstable tectonic world, they sacrificed their own peace of mind on the altar of evolution.

They are…not crazy. They are something far more than that. They are tortured geniuses. When they finally get off their world in a meaningful way, when they finally become eligible for contact and for introduction into the interstellar community, we will need to handle them with utmost care.

They are physically powerful. They are strong enough to wield firearms that are powerful enough to overwhelm even the most powerful personal shielding, while our own weaponry will hardly slow them down. The chemical weapons they use as less-lethal alternatives would slaughter us. The water cannons they use to suppress riots would pulverize our bones. They are not only willing to die in the name of a fiction, they will do so gladly and eagerly. They are mentally overwhelming—their ideas are powerful, their inventiveness puts us to shame, their philosophy explores avenues of thought that simply never occurred to us.

But the most important part is that they must never, ever learn how much superior they are to us in so many ways. I think the idea would break them.

You see, Earth is a death world. To survive, they had to evolve not just intelligence, but the ability to apply it like a weapon. They didn’t evolve to merely overcome adversity—they evolved to thrive on it. They need to have something to aspire to, something they think is bigger than they are. They need something to fight. Without a challenge, I think they very swiftly get depressed.

Kevin Jenkins did. I didn’t see it at the time, but I think that getting into space and finding that he could rip the limbs off its worst terrors really upset him. He never told me why he asked to have his social implant removed, and why he went back to Earth. But I can guess.

He did it because there are more challenges down there among his own kind than he would ever find up here, among us.

—“Kirk” Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk, Memoirs.

Chapter 1: Run, Little Monster

Terri Boone could feel the bass power cords begin to thump at her bones as she entered the bar and couldn’t resist the feral grin that forced its way onto her face—it was exactly her kind of song.

For that matter, Afterburner was exactly her kind of bar. Affordable drinks, an Internet jukebox plugged straight into a set of speakers with the volume turned up full, three pool tables, a dartboard, and a couple of huge TV screens turned permanently to a sports channel. Right now, inaudible commentators were enthusing about the night’s upcoming game between the Vancouver Canucks and the Arizona Coyotes. If she didn’t live halfway across the country, she could have seen herself becoming a regular here.

She knew the man she was after by description and it didn’t take long to see him working the bar, jawing with the regulars as he opened a couple of bottles and handed them over. Browned skin, full beard, a cross tattooed on his right forearm and a curious bald patch just forward of his left temple, that was her guy alright.

She slid up into a bar stool as the patrons vacated it and was treated to a warm grin.

“Not seen you in here before darling,” He said, floating his voice over the rampaging music with practised ease. “What can I get you?”

“I’ll have a Bud, please,” she called back, fishing out a bill from her purse.

“Hey, is your name Kevin Jenkins?”

“Ah.” He grinned as he retrieved the bottle from its fridge and uncapped it.

“Should have known. You’re here for my alien story.”

“You get that a lot?”

“Got to be at least fifteen nutjobs in here a month asking me about it and telling me about the thing they built in their garage so they can get in touch with the mothership,” Jenkins said, swapping her bills for change.

“So you claim to be an alien abductee but think others who claim that are nutjobs?” she sipped her beer.

“Oh yeah. You can always tell the bullshitters who’ve convinced themselves they got taken from the ones who really did,” Jenkins replied. “The real abductees don’t want to go back.”

The Brood had no music, nor did they need to shout. They were perfectly capable of vocalizing, but that clumsy mechanism was reserved only for speaking with other Broods. Within each Brood, the intimate cybernetic wiring that allowed full thoughts to be sent in their entirety had made language entirely redundant.

One said: +<Trepidation; question>+ “The watchful Prey have not seen us?””

Another said: +<Confidence; statement>+ “They have not.” +<sneering>+ “Nor have the beast prey.”

This provoked a wave of amusement that circled around the entire Brood. By their standards, the wry assumption that a non-sentient Prey species could hope to detect a cloaked Hunter vessel was the height of humour.

The youngest said: +<fear; query>+ “The Prey are a deathworld species. We saw what just one of them did to the Brood of Five Poisons. Respectfully, Alpha, are we sure that all of our Brood shall return from this hunt?”

Alpha said: +<Impatience; terse rebuke; instruction>+ “If you fear them so, you may remain aboard the transport.”

It—their species did not reproduce in a gendered manner analogous to male and female—addressed the remainder as the youngling radiated sullen apology.

+<inspiring reminder>+ “We are the Hunters, they are the Prey. Death planet or not, we will have the technological advantage and surprise. An ambushed prey is meat in the maw. Our cousin-Broods will remember our triumph as we return with trophies from this formidable prey, they will know our courage and our skill.

And for the prey, they will know their place in the order of things.”

It turned to the one that operated their ship’s electronic warfare suite.

+<Query>+ “Do you have an appropriately high-profile target?”

That one replied +<statement>+ “I do, Alpha. Their whole species will witness our hunt.”

The Brood vocalised as one for the first time, expressing their approval. The hunt was on.

“I’ll be honest, I don’t believe a word of it,” Terri told him.

“I don’t blame you,” Jenkins said. “But, look at this.” He leaned forward and turned his head so that she could inspect the bald patch on the left side of his head. Up close, it was an intricate web of fine white scars that produced a pattern which looked disturbingly like circuitry.

“That’s where those grey fuckers shoved an experimental translation implant into me,” Jenkins said. “It worked, but the doctors who took it out of me said it was a pretty damn crude one.”

“These would be alien doctors,” Terri said. She had to admit, the scars were compelling evidence, but she was a natural skeptic. It went with the job.

“Yep. See they greys—‘Corti’ is the pronunciation used by species that have mouths which work kind of like ours—apparently they had this big eugenics program and turned themselves into a civilization of immoral scientists. They abduct pre-contact species, figure out how we tick, and use that data to corner the market in translation implants and other biotech when we make first contact.

Real assholes. Most of the others are pretty cool though.”

He thought about this. “Actually, some of them are as dumb as a bag of beans.

There’s one species, look kinda like six-limbed giraffes with blue stripes.

Those guys are about as sharp as a sack of wet mice. But most of the critters out there are cool.”

Terri waggled her empty bottle by way of asking for a replacement. “So if they’re mostly pretty cool, why wouldn’t anybody want to go back out there?

Flying among the stars and all that sounds pretty fun.”

“It will be, when we’re out there,” Jenkins said, grabbing a replacement. “But for now, because we haven’t invented FTL travel, we’re legally considered to be non-sentient fauna rather than intelligent people. Even when there are trade ships out there captained by beings who’ve got all the brains of biscuits and gravy by our standards.”

“Why the interest, anyway?” He asked her, all of a sudden.

“I’m a private investigator,” She replied. “My client’s paying me a lot to travel the whole country looking for what he called ‘genuine’ abductees.”

“Do I fit the bill?” Jenkins asked.

She truthfully told him that she didn’t know—her client had only asked me to hunt down people who weren’t obvious crazies. He’d taken her to a UFO convention in New Mexico, gestured to the whole room and said “Ms. Boone, this is the kind of people you’re not trying to find for me.”

It was a pretty nebulous description, but the client’s generous travel budget and seemingly limitless ability to keep up with her fees had kept Terri happy and comfortable on a road trip all over the USA for the best part of half a year, and if it meant she got to drink in exactly the right kind of bar interviewing a bartender who—she had to confess—was exactly the right kind of rugged sexy, then those were the kind of contracts she had dreamed of when she became a P.I.

“I guess he didn’t want me accidentally giving away what kind of answer I was looking for,” she finished. “If it helps though, I don’t think you’re crazy.

More…bitter about something.”

Jenkins laughed. “Yeah, Kirk said pretty much the same thing.”

“Kirk?”

“Oh yeah. The coolest guy out there. His species has a language that sounds like ball-bearings in a blender, but the first syllable of his name sounds a bit like “Kirk”, you know, like from Star Trek? So that’s what I called him. He told me a few weeks before I came back to Earth that I seemed bitter about something.”

“Was he right?” Terry asked.

“Could be. See, there’s this species called…”

“What the fuck?! Hey Jenks, are you seeing this shit?!”

With nary a ripple of displaced air, the Hunter raiding vessel slipped down into planetary atmosphere. Unnoticed by even the most sophisticated surveillance and interception network on the planet, it sashayed through cloud and current until it found its destination—a city of gleaming steel-and-glass towers on the banks of an inland sea, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. It settled above a dome-roofed building that nestled squat and low among the skyscrapers, causing some minor static in the transmissions coming from within, which were quickly compensated for by the small army of technicians who kept the broadcast going out all over the world.

+<Query; intrigued>+ “Combat trials, perhaps? Ritualized training to do battle in cold-weather conditions?”

+<Terse; impatient>+ “We are not anthropologists! Brace yourself, siblings. We drop in a full hand of pulses.”

+<Eager; aggressive>+ “Meat to the maw!”

The traditional hunting cry reverberated in silence among their collective minds, and then their boarding torpedoes erected their stasis fields, keeping any and all external forces from doing anything to their occupants. When they opened again a subjective non-event later, they had been fired through the roof of the Rogers Arena and each stood upright in a bullseye of cracked ice.

As one, the Brood stepped out of their assault torpedoes, spun up their heavy Kinetic Pulse guns, and opened fire indiscriminately into the stunned players, officials and spectators.

“Shit! Oh my god those poor people!”

The music had been shut off, and the sound of the sports channel turned up. The commentators were going delirious trying to describe the sight of an alien attack right in front of their eyes. Terri’s hand was across her mouth in a shocked reflex, watching them viciously lay into a mass of humanity that had, up until mere seconds earlier, been completely unaware of their existence.

“Hunters,” Jenkins said. He did so quietly, but everybody nearby suddenly glanced at him. Alone of everybody in the bar, he was the only one not apparently appalled by the sight. Instead, he had an expression of savage anticipation.

“Oh, y’all believe me now?” he asked. “Yep, those are the hunters I told you about. The ones I—me, your barkeep—personally beat the fuck to death with my own bare hands.”

His grin broadened. “And the stupid bastards made the mistake of raiding a hockey game? This, boys and girls, is going to be fucking funny.”

Alpha stepped from its assault pod and fired directly into the chest of the first Prey it saw—one of the armoured ones on the ice. Instantly, the Prey’s bewildered stillness gave way to the panic that all Prey fell victim to when the Hunters arrived. Many emitted high-pitched squeals of alarm, many more stampeded to escape. Around it, the Brood stepped onto the ice and launched Kinetic bolts at anything that moved.

Each shot knocked Prey flying, and Alpha felt a savage surge of pride. Their Brood would gain much respect for taking on death planet predators and scattering them like any other herd. Alpha could imagine the praise songs and taste the honour-feast already.

And then the Prey it had shot stood up.

“See, they have this planetary classification system for temperate worlds like ours.” Jenkins said amiably, as on the screen one of the players hauled himself back up onto his skates, clearly a bit winded but otherwise no worse than if he’d taken a hard body-check from one of the Arizonan players.

“Category one is, like, the Garden of Eden. You could drop any species in the galaxy down there completely buck bare and they’d be happy as Larry for the rest of their lives.” he continued, as Canucks and Coyotes players helped one another to their feet. Alien though their body language was, everybody could see the alarm and surprise the Hunters were feeling as every single one of the humans they had shot turned out to be not only alive, but angry.

“Most planets are like, a four to six or so. You don’t want to get caught in the rain and you’ll need to work for your food, but generally it’s pretty easy living on those worlds.”

The aliens fired again, punching the players off their feet again.

“Anything above Class ten is considered a deathworld.” Jenkins continued as, yet again, the players got back up, and this time they started skating around the invading aliens, which formed a defensive corral and began to fire wildly at the circling sportsmen. It quickly became apparent that their reflexes and aim were remarkably sluggish and that the circling skaters were just too fast to hit.

Shot after shot splashed harmlessly on the plexiglass.

At first, the people behind the barrier cowered, but that plexiglass was rated to a much, much higher resilience than even the heaviest Kinetic Pulse fire.

It didn’t take long for the cowering fans to realise this, and begin to chant: “Kick their ass! Kick their ass!”

Jenkins went on, raising his voice slightly above the swelling, bloodthirsty chant. “Deathworlds have things like high gravity, poisonous plants and critters, lots of carnivores, nasty little microorganisms, natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes, acid rain, high background radiation, stuff like that. Like I said, a deathworld is everything Class Ten or above, and anything that evolves there is supposed to be really goddamn dangerous.”

By now on TV, the crowd were roaring at full volume: “Kick their ass! Kick their ass!”

Alpha broadcast: +<Shock; dismay; terror; disbelief; shame>+ Then one of the Prey hurtled towards it, at speeds that simply defied understanding.

The last thing it ever broadcast was: +<PAIN!>+

Most eyes in the bar closed and turned away from the carnage on the ice in disgust. Terri Boone watched out of morbid fascination. It seemed impossible that things which looked so menacing might break so easily.

Kevin Jenkins opened a beer for himself.

“Earth,” he said, with vicious satisfaction. “Is a Class Twelve.”

Chapter 2: Aftermath

“I’ll spare you as much of the jargon as I can, eh?”

Not for the first time, General Martin Tremblay was struck by the youth of the scientists working on this project. If it had been up to him, the whole thing would have been as hush-hush as possible, locked up behind layer after layer of need-to-know statuses and classified stamps. But, his way had to play second fiddle to the reality of aliens on live sports news, right here in British Columbia. When he’d delegated the task of bringing in biologists, physicists and engineers from across the globe to one of his staff, he hadn’t quite anticipated that she would opt for a team that was practically fresh from their doctorates.

Oh, sure, there were plenty of grey hairs around, but Tremblay was feeling decidedly venerable surrounded by all this buzzing enthusiastic youthfulness.

“I’d appreciate that. Let’s get to the meat.”

He regretted the turn of phrase immediately as the biologist—a rotund and jovial man with a habit of roaring with laughter at the slightest joke, deliberate or not—released his characteristic chuckle and then turned to the report, which was mercifully brief.

“From what we were able to scrape off the ice in Vancouver after the hockey teams were done with them, they’re…kind of unimpressive, actually,” he opined.

“The endoskeleton seems to be based around comparatively large crystals of silica, with not a trace of collagen in sight. Remarkably fragile. Musculature is…we think their muscles can pull, push and twist, where ours can only pull, so they need fewer muscles overall to get the same range of motion, but each muscle’s far weaker than our own—the samples we have, bruised and crushed as they were, had a tensile strength about that of smoked salmon. Even accounting for tissue damage, they’re decidedly weaker than we are, and they couldn’t possibly move as fast as we can. Just not enough force or leverage.”

“That explains why they broke so easily,” Tremblay said.

Dr. Taylor nodded. “It’s weird, it’s like their whole physiology never evolved to deal with even a fraction of the daily challenges ours did. I mean, there’s a lot we can’t test given how badly damaged all the specimens were but what we do have says that an average guy could probably rip the arms off these things if he tried.”

“So what the hell did they think they were going to accomplish?” Tremblay said.

“Interesting as this is, my job is to figure out what kind of a threat they pose, and to do that I need more than an analysis about how squishy they are. I could see that just from watching the game.”

Taylor’s colleague, Dr. Betty-Anne Cote, cleared her throat at that one. She tended to let Taylor do the talking—he was the kind of large personality who filled a room, while she was more the ‘quietly get things done while nobody’s watching’ type. They complemented each other well, not least because when she did venture an opinion, Taylor tended to shut up and let her share it.

“We’re, like, the only people on the planet who could claim to be experts in xenopsychology,” she said. “So we’re starting from scratch. And I guess the first assumption we have to make is that, to them, their physical frailty would be normal and we’d seem freakishly strong and durable.”

“It would explain the weaponry.” Taylor commented. “You’ve seen the interview tapes?”

Tremblay indicated that he had. All of the athletes had given a roughly similar description of what it felt like to be shot with an alien gun—pathetic. While the shots had knocked them off their feet, to a seasoned hockey player in full gear the impacts had been little worse than irritating. The goaltenders had felt hardly anything at all.

Careful testing had suggested that the guns delivered, by some as-yet unidentified mechanism, a discharge of kinetic energy that propagated along the direction of fire at the speed of light. The weapons had plenty of advantages—they were portable, agile, had no recoil at all, and seemed to convert their stored energy very efficiently, but they stood no hope at all of seriously threatening a well-conditioned soldier in full battle gear.

“If we assume that the average target for those weapons is about as tough as the idiots who landed in Vancouver, then those weapons start to make sense.” Dr.Cote told him.

“Merde.” Tremblay pinched the bridge of his nose. “I really don’t want to go to my colleagues and the Ministry of Defence with a report to the effect that these things pose about as much threat as an angry twelve-year-old.” he said.

“Well, from what we’ve gathered so far, sir, that would be the truth.” Taylor shrugged, “Don’t tell me you’d prefer to give a report to the effect that we’re hopelessly outmatched and can kiss our collective derrieres goodbye?”

“Well, no. It’s just a bit…anticlimactic.” Tremblay said.

As she returned to her work, Betty Cote muttered a heartfelt “Amen to that.”

“Dumbasses.”

That insult woke Terri Boone up, and she sat up straighter and adjusted her seatbelt, embarrassed to find that she had fallen asleep. It took her a few seconds to get up to speed, but the target of the insult turned out to be obvious—a mass of people filling the road, waving signs and chanting.

Most of the signs showed variants on the theme of alien faces, most the classic large-eyed Roswell green or grey cueball, some actual cartoon versions of the things—Hunters—that had attacked Vancouver, one or two of the sleek black aliens fought by Sigourney Weaver and, in one case, an ET puppet impaled atop a steel pole in a way that implied he’d never be phoning anybody at all.

Between the car’s air conditioning, the impatient traffic and the general disorganised noise of protestors not getting the timing quite right on their chant, it was hard to tell what, exactly, their protest was about, other than that they apparently disapproved of extraterrestrial life in general, and wanted somebody to do something about it.

A few wags had infiltrated the crowd with signs like “down with this sort of thing” and “DER TERK ER JERBS,” and the police were fighting an uphill battle just to keep the whole situation relatively peaceful and respectful, never mind the task of trying to disperse the mob and restore something that resembled normalcy.

As if there was any such thing now that the world had conclusive proof of the existence of intelligent alien life, and hostile alien life at that.

She reached over and turned down the radio, where some self-appointed authority was bemoaning the way that the alien vehicle had fled into space and vanished in a burst of Cherenkov radiation, and was insisting that the Royal Canadian Air Force had “screwed the pooch” by failing to intercept, ground and study it. His guest’s patient attempts to explain that the vehicle in question had gone from a standing start to Mach 5, meaning that interception would have been completely impossible, were being dodged, mocked, or outright ignored.

It was the third time in one week they had encountered a mob of some kind, brandishing signs either welcoming the aliens to Earth, or expressing unspecified antagonism towards them. Kevin Jenkins reserved tolerant disdain for the former, and naked contempt for the latter.

For her part, Terri still wasn’t sure she believed his story, but if it was true, she thought she could sense why he might react so strongly. After all, the first group were just naive airheads.
The latter compounded that crime with prejudice, and prejudice seemed to really irritate Jenkins.

He claimed that reflex was largely due to the year and a half he had spent vagrant in the galaxy, surrounded by weird and varied alien species and lacking the basic rights that protected any of them. He had been on the receiving end of quite a lot of prejudice himself. Terri suspected that he was being a little unkind to interstellar society. Sure, being treated legally and officially as a non-sentient animal probably hadn’t been great for his esteem, but the bitterness with which he spoke of his experience didn’t quite gel with the fact that they had practically bent over backwards to get him home in the end.

“Are we there yet?” she asked. He shook his head and glanced at the car’s GPS.

“This is Columbus,” He told her. “It’s about thirty miles to Shelbyville.”

She examined the map on her phone and frowned. “Why did we leave the Interstate?”

“I’m hungry,” he replied, and her own stomach voiced vigorous agreement with that sentiment. He took the first opportunity as the protest moved on to pull over, into a strip mall where they ordered a Domino’s and watched the sea of banners meander out of sight at about the same speed as their pizza crawled through the oven.

Terri was famished: she inhaled her five slices before Jenkins had finished his third, and was only saved from the temptation of stealing a sixth when he ordered some sides for her. She had to admit, he was a good travelling companion—paid his share of the gas, took more than his fair share of time behind the wheel, had a knack for finding the least terrible radio station in any given area, and mostly left her alone with her thoughts.

She was beginning to realise, however, that despite these qualities, and as attractive as he was, he was a difficult man to like. He was a little too…intense. He was at once both detached and too focused, as if whatever he might be doing or discussing was an unwelcome distraction from some more important business, to be given his full attention and dealt with swiftly and efficiently, minimizing the time until he could return that attention to where it belonged.

He was terse, both choleric and melancholic, self-confident to the point of arrogance, and had a particularly annoying habit of passing disparaging commentary on (or at least frowning at) pretty much every church sign they passed which, this being Indiana, happened about once every minute or so. Terri, being Catholic, had quickly had to master the art of diplomatic silence.

She drove the remaining half hour to Shelbyville, with Jenkins lounging silently in the passenger seat, sketching or writing—she couldn’t tell which—with cheap K-Mart stationery held against his raised knee. Occasionally he would pull out his cellphone and consult it.

Terri hadn’t become a Private Investigator out of a shortage of curiosity, and her resolve finally wore out as they drove past the water tower at the edge of town.

“What’re you working on, anyway?”

He glanced up, apparently surprised as if he had totally forgotten about her, then seemed to collect himself and showed her a few pages of sketchbook. The drawings were angular and rough, clearly the work of an amateur, but also both recognisably non-human and recognisably plausible life-forms.

He tapped one which appeared to have a prosthetic limb. “That’s Kirk,” he said.

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask about that. Kirk?”

“His name sounds like a rock stuck in a garbage disposal.” Jenkins said. “But the first syllable sounds a bit like ‘Kirk.’”

“Does he hang out with—” she began.

“Dammit, I don’t want to hear the Spock joke again!”

There was an uncomfortable silence for a few seconds, and then he regained his composure.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped like that.”

“You’re tired, and you’ve heard it too many times. I understand.”

“Thanks, but… that ain’t all of it.”

“Wanna talk about it?” Terri offered.

He shrugged. “I guess I’m just on edge. Big shit’s comin’ and the world ain’t never gonna be the same after this. I guess I was kinda hoping this day would come in a few decades, when we were more ready.”

“Ready?”

“Y’know. Older and wiser.” He snorted and pulled a face at himself. “Guess I should start by gettin’ older and wiser myself, huh?”

Well. At least he owned up to it when he acted like a heel.

They turned onto a residential street and Terr quickly saw the address they were after—a little brown house with a little white porch and a ubiquitous stars-and-stripes hanging limp on a flagpole in the garden.

“But why are you on edge?” she asked him as she parked. “You’re, like, the only person I’ve even heard of who seems to have a real handle on things now that the whole world’s gone alien-crazy.”

“Yeah. And I don’t like it,” he said, unbuckling his seatbelt.

She followed him out of the car. “What’s not to like?” She asked. He shrugged.

“Call me crazy, but it just don’t seem right that anybody could ‘have a handle’ on something this big, least of all a dumbass like me, you know?”

She wanted to reassure him that she’d much rather that somebody did. If the world was turning upside-down, she’d take whatever she could get. But the door opened before she could say it.

She’d seen a picture of the woman they were there to meet—early 40s, average height, and a slightly unusual hairstyle, which started as a long angular bang swept just away from her right eye and got progressively shorter around her head until the hair at her left temple was all but nonexistent. She had tired eyes and a general air of weariness about her, though the infant she was cradling on her arm and hip probably had much to do with that.

“Mrs. Naylor?” Terri asked, receiving a tiny wary nod by way of confirmation. She extended her hand. “I’m Terri Boone, we spoke by email.”

“Right, yeah. The investigator.” Mrs. Naylor shook the hand, hoisting her son up onto her hip a little as he chewed on a fist and stared at the strangers.

“May we come in?” Terri asked her. Naylor shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said “but I’m getting real sick and tired of people asking me questions. Seems like every idiot UFO hunter in the midwest wants to hear my…Oh, sweet baby Jesus Christ, you’re for real.”

Terri followed Mrs. Naylor’s gaze over her shoulder. Kevin Jenkins was holding up his sketchpad to show off a menagerie of alien life. Mrs Naylor stared at it slack-jawed for a second, and then seemed to wake up a bit. Her parental fatigue practically evaporated off her face even as Terri watched, and she stood up a little straighter.

“You’d better come in,” she said. “And you can call me Hazel.”

Martin Tremblay was used to phone calls waking him up at odd hours of the night. His partner Stefan just slept through them nowadays, not even rolling over or reacting to the phone in any way. Phone calls for Martin were just part of the bedroom nighttime noise.

“Tremblay,” He answered, digging rheum out of the corners of his eyes so that he could focus on the alarm clock and then rubbing his stubble. 05:23. At least he’d got six hours.

“General, it’s Major Bartlett here, sir. The US have got something for us.”

“Something?”

“Apparently NASA was fed an anonymous tip a couple of days back. Seems there’s some kind of an…object orbiting Saturn that shouldn’t be there, sir.”

“Two days ago? What kind of an object?”

They had Cassini take a look at it, and apparently that takes a while, sir. As for what it is…best guess is that it might be a space station of some kind.”

”…I’ll come right in.”

Shaving, showering, dressing, grabbing a travel coffee and securing a mumbled, sleeping farewell from Stefan were skills he’d honed throughout his career, and he drove on empty roads through pre-dawn darkness listening to AC/DC to help the coffee wake him up. By the time he’d cleared security at the base and reached the briefing, he was sharp and alert.

He strode into the office with coffee in hand, alert and eager to get down to business. “Okay. Brief me.”

Bartlett didn’t miss a beat, and just slapped a brown-covered folder stamped “CLASSIFIED” down onto the table. “On Tuesday, thirty hours after the incident in Vancouver, NASA receive an anonymous message delivered straight to Administrator’s office, apparently from inside the Agency. The message detailed coordinates in orbit around the planet Saturn, directly opposite the planet from Earth and therefore invisible from here. We’ve not been informed what, exactly, was in that message that convinced the Administrator to order that it be taken seriously and investigated, but at oh-two-hundred UST yesterday they got…” He tugged a mostly-black square out of the folder “…this image back from the Cassini probe.”

Tremblay examined the picture. The object was either very large or very distant, and so the probe’s cameras hadn’t taken a particularly sharp image, but it was hard to deny that, between a high albedo that looked an awful lot like steel panels and a hint of its shape—a cigar wearing three thin rings—it looked decidedly artificial.

“Cassini’s been up there since…?”

“Launched in ninety-seven, made orbit on July First, two thousand four, sir.”

“It’s been out there that long and never spotted this thing?” Asked one of the other officers, Colonel Williams.

“It’s a big sky,” Bartlett told him. “And no offense to the NASA guys, but it’s an old camera, too. They had to point right at these coordinates to see it.”

“Besides,” Tremblay added, “We don’t know how long that thing’s been there. For all we know, it was only built last week.”

“Fair, I guess,” Williams conceded. “But what are we going to do about about it?”

“What can we do?” Tremlay countered. “It took seven years for Cassini to get out there. We send a mission, they aren’t coming home until their babies are going through puberty. We send a missile, even if we had a missile that can get out there, they’ll see it coming years in advance. We’ve already got a robot probe out there but it belongs to somebody else,” he shrugged. “We’re being watched. And I’ll be honest, that fact doesn’t bother me too much.”

“Why not?”

“Well, A: it means that we’re worth watching, which is flattering. But more importantly, it means B: that the psychos who hit Vancouver aren’t the only life out there.”

Bartlett frowned. “How do you figure that, sir?”

“Because if that was their listening post, gentlemen, then they’d have been better prepared.”

There was a general nodding and a few grins. Much as it had turned the world upside-down, watching the alien raiders get their laser-guided karma had been inspiring.

Bartlett cleared his throat. “And C, sir:”

“Yes?”

“We now know who to start talking with.”

“Councillor?”

‘Kirk’ raised his head. He had taken to napping in his office chair at every available opportunity—it was the only way to keep up with the amount of sleep he required. The Hunters slipping the quarantine net around Earth had become a major diplomatic incident, as much because of the questions about how the humans would respond, as because it showed just how far their stealth technology had come. Stations, fleets and facilities all over the galaxy were rushing to deal with that latter problem, but within the halls of power, the fact that the humans now officially knew there was something out there had rapidly become the cause of greater alarm.

His aide, a Vzk’tk by the name of Rkrrnb, indicated that, within the sea of messages and information screens floating in the volumetric projection above his desk, one was blinking red in a steady one-two-three-pause-one-two-three-pause rhythm, indicating an internal message from somewhere on the Observatory, highest priority.

He thanked the young being with a wave of his prosthetic upperarm, while the remaining organic one grabbed the message and performed the interface gesture to open it.

He swore, making a sound rather like a plastic bucket full of bubblewrap being crushed by a backhoe.

The image was of the human research probe “Cassini,” which had been left intact on the grounds that its destruction might arouse suspicion.

Its largest camera was pointing directly at them.

He stared at it for a few long seconds, and then tapped a few physical controls on the desk. Rkrrnb retreated from the room as it began to erect a top-level diplomatic secrecy field. The volumetric display on his desk didn’t need long to begin filling up with the floating heads of his counterparts. Wherever you were, whatever you were doing, if an emergency session of the security council was called, you answered. Within minutes, the limited AI that served as the council’s speaker and impartial mediator called the session to order, and granted him the floor.

“We’ve been discovered,” he said.

Chapter 3: An Eventful Month

It had been an eventful month, and an expensive one. Between the gasoline, motels, food and occasional laundrette, parking charges, and one or two fines, Terri Boone’s one-woman trip from California to Texas had become a convoy of driven individuals across the whole of the mainland US. They had everyone—a harassed single mother who’d left her kids with their grandparents for the duration, an older couple in a Winnebago, three teenagers from New York, a Romani woman from Ohio, a quiet guy from Birmingham whose battered olive-green windbreaker seemed to contain an infinite supply of cigarettes, a trucker who had been born in the UK, a construction worker from Florida, an Arizona state trooper.

She felt like something of an outsider. Every night, no matter where they stopped—motel, parking lot, truck stop, wherever—the Abductees always took some time to talk, to share their experience, and if Terri hadn’t believed them before, the way their stories all corroborated one another soon dispelled any doubt. Hazel Naylor had turned out to be a better artist than Kevin Jenkins, and was bus providing the artwork for a dossier on alien life that he was compiling out of all of their accounts. It was already remarkably thick.

It was also…discomforting. Terri had taken the opportunity to flip through it one day as Jenkins drove at the head of the convoy, leading them to meet their next Abductee in Colorado. The life it displayed came in a bewildering variety.

Small, skinny, large-eyed aliens with pointed ears who were clearly the inspiration for both the Roswell Greys and, she suspected, even older legends about elves. Tall, gangly, long-necked aliens which apparently came in two varieties—one with four legs and two arms, one with six and four. There were three-eyed aliens which one Abductee had aptly named “Cthulhu-sheep” who walked on their long fingertips and who apparently sounded like pigeons speaking Welsh.

There were three-fingered humanoids three times as tall as homo sapiens with huge ears the size of mixing bowls, who dripped with jewelery and lavish but scandalously revealing clothing.

There were huge brutish-looking humanoid ogres with four arms who apparently built wondrous cities from spun glass and polished, any one of which was beautiful enough to make a tourist weep. There was a species that would have seemed vaguely insectoid if not for the feathers and who apparently acid-etched their tribal markings into the chitin of their foreheads. One lifeform, and Hazel insisted the depiction was accurate, looked like nothing more than a flat, meaty worm in a square and ponderous-looking robot suit.

There were enormous shaggy-furred aliens with disproportionately small heads that looked like a cuttlefish with floppy bunny ears, aliens which looked like a bizarre cross between a reptile and an ant, the things that had attacked Vancouver, seven-eyed ugly monstrosities where you couldn’t tell where the flesh ended and their cybernetics began.

There were sketches of non-sophont alien life, too. Round little rat-things which were kind of cute if you didn’t look at the face. scuttling ceiling-runners that seemed to combine the best properties of a squirrel and a centipede, loping dog-like things which one Abductee swore had evolved to graze on bushes that could run away. A cat, a perfectly ordinary house cat sitting prim, sleek and contemptuous in the middle of a menagerie of hexapedal, septapedal, decapedal, betentacled and limbless pets and fauna. One Abductee even claimed that there were actual honest-to-God dragons out there, though everybody was a little too skeptical to include that one in the folio.

With the exception of the non-sentient fauna, they all had one thing in common—next to the reference human drawn on the same page, they all seemed tall, or at least slender and gracile. Speculation among the Abductees was that humanity was so comparatively small because if you grow up in a high-gravity world of course you would be small and sturdy.

There were illustrations of alien technology. Variants on the theme of rifle—the Abductees called them “Kinetic Pulse Guns”—which looked melted and useless until they were sketched in the hands of various races, at which point, while still recognizably being the same object, they had deformed and stretched into an appropriate shape for each one. There was a note at the bottom of that page: “We aren’t in their database.”

There were alien starships in design ranging from the sleek and aesthetic to the square and functional, complete with sketchy but technical descriptions of their role and capacity, and provisional names. A light police gunboat was included for scale on the next page alongside an orbit-to-ground military dropship, a boxy affair which was pretty much nothing but steel, engines and arcane equipment which had been tentatively identified as “inertial compensation”. That in turn served for scale next to a light transport vehicle, which served as scale for the heavy bulk transport—a narrow spine flanked by ten huge boxy cargo bays each big enough to contain several shipping containers- and then that provided a scale reference for…

The Observatory. Those who had been there claimed it orbited Saturn, forever hidden from Earth’s direct view. They noted the module on the end of an arm that its builders had graciously tacked on to give human visitors an environment at Earth’s surface gravity and atmosphere. They noted that the station itself had only point-defence weaponry to defend itself from the risk of Hunter raids, and no other military equipment whatsoever. It had its own FTL “jump” system, which allowed it to hop instantly to the site of an appropriate beacon, though the beacon itself had to be carried by another ship at ordinary FTL speeds.

They had taken the time to Xerox a few copies in one town, and now all they needed to do to ascertain whether an Abductee was real or not was hand over the booklet. It was uncomfortable too look back at the long line of cars, trucks, campers and even the occasional big rig that they’d acquired and understand that, by the evidence of it, all these people really HAD been taken by alien beings. Their stories all meshed, with all the seamless reality as if the same number of people had all been on vacation to London—there was just too much for even this many to have experienced it all, and everyone added something new, but the essentials were all identical.

She wasn’t clear what the objective of their little pilgrimage was—it just seemed to be snowballing into this quest to personally check every single person in the USA who claimed to be an abductee and to add as much detail as they could, and it swept them up as it passed. Only a handful so far hadn’t promptly thrown together a suitcase, grabbed their car keys, made a few phone calls and put their lives on hold.

She wondered where it would end.

It had been an eventful month, and a hectic one. A whole new facility was under construction, about halfway between Vancouver and Calgary, among the trees of a previously unheeded little town called Scotch Creek, and all of the alien specimens recovered from Rogers Arena had been transported up there in a military convoy under incredibly heavy guard just as soon as there’d been a cold locker for the bodies and enough crates for the technology.

The plumbing hadn’t even been working on base when General Martin Tremblay had first set foot in Scotch Creek, and he’d been distracted the whole way up by what had bordered on being an argument with Stefan the night before he left about the sudden change of life. It wasn’t drastically long-distance, but it did mean that they wouldn’t see each other every night. Stefan had not taken that well, but he’d been with Martin long enough to keep a level head and work through it rather than throw a tantrum and storm out.

Now, Tremblay took a deep breath and looked around the bare-plaster walls of his unfinished office, for lack of something better to do while an IT technician worked on getting his desktop hooked into the base network. The whole thing was an exercise in throwing together a working facility as quickly as possible.

Scientists had to excuse and apologise their way past men on ladders installing the lighting or wiring the computer network in a building where they hadn’t even finished pouring the concrete on the third floor. Meetings with the physicists became meetings with the architects and builders, became meetings with his superiors, became a phone call to the Minister of Defense and the Prime Minister, became a sandwich and coffee with Bartlett as he received a sitrep on NASA’s unfolding mission to investigate the alien station around Saturn, became a meeting with the plumbers, became…and so on. It was nice to get a moment of calm and quiet, even if that moment did involve waiting awkwardly for somebody to finish installing some programs he could probably have installed himself.

There was a knock on the door. One of the physicists, Captain Claude Nadeau, saluted him. “we’ve had a development with the alien weaponry, sir, and we’d like to demonstrate.” he said.

So much for quiet moments. Tremblay stood up and joined him, and they wove between stepladders, toolboxes, cables and busy workers to the firing range which, being the least sophisticated room in the whole building, had long since been finished.

There was a pig carcass hanging at one end, and some technicians fussing around both an alien weapon and, next to it, a tangle of wires, components and bits that looked so experimental that it might catch fire.

“Okay. why the pig?” He asked.

“Pigs make a good human analogue.” Nadeau explained. “They’re pretty similar to us in terms of density and composition.”

“Okay…?” Tremblay gestured for him to continue.

“Right. So, um…alien gun. You know about these already but we’ve just got it here for demonstration purposes. if we fire it…” he turned and shouted: “clear downrange?!”

“Clear!”

Nadeau nodded, and then clicked on something on the laptop that had been wired into the gun. It discharged with its characteristic “thwoomp!” and the pig jerked on its chain as if punched. Tremblay had seen it before, and it was equally unimpressive now.

“Okay…?” he repeated.

“and now we fire the prototype.” Nadeau said, looking thoroughly pleased with himself. He turned to the laptop again.

“Proto—?”

THWOOOMB!!

A slurry of liquified meat and red, wet bone shards slapped all over the banked sand against the back wall of the range. There was a pop and sizzle from the box of electronics, and one of the technicians hastily trained a CO2 fire extinguisher on it.

Nadeau was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “More power!” he exclaimed, quoting an old TV series.

“That’s…Impressive. Okay. So we know those things can get powerful enough to kill us, then.” Tremblay said, and cleared his throat. Nadeau sobered somewhat.

“Well…yes.” he conceded. “But there are a few snags. That rack over there…” he pointed at a van-sized structure against one wall, which was plugged into a generator in the corner, and connected to the prototype weapon via a wrist-thick black cable. “…is a buttload of supercapacitors. We’re still working on reverse-engineering the alien capacitors from the gun we took apart, and we think those are likely to be a couple of orders of magnitude more efficient per kilogram than ours. But even if we get the capacitors figured out, that’s only half the job.”

“Not enough power to feed them?” Tremblay asked.

“That’s the second snag, yeah. Try as we might we haven’t even begun to understand how the generators inside these guns work. We’ve built what we think are exact replicas but when we try to turn them on they either do nothing, melt, or explode. Once we’ve cracked those…”

The captain shrugged. “But for now it takes us half an hour on that-” he indicated the generator in the corner—“to charge up for a pulse that’d even hurt. We had to charge it all night to prepare for this demonstration.” “If you ran that kind of voltage through me all night, I’d be dead.” Tremblay pointed out.

“And there’s snag three, they’re hugely wasteful of energy. Chucking that kind of power through a gauss gun would be a much more effective way to kill something. And this is a weapon, boss, so we have to assume that from ET’s point of view there’s some advantage to these things that excuses the drawbacks.”

“What might those be?”

“Well, zero recoil for a start.” Nadeau ticked off on his fingers. “Literally none. Which, if these things are as weak as the biologists think is probably a huge boon. And I guess with no barrel to accelerate a physical projectile the gun can reconfigure itself for any anatomy without having to accommodate a long, straight component with a mechanism at the end. Solid-state electronics can be a lot more flexible. Low maintenance, too: it can’t jam because there’s no moving parts. And if your generators are able to extract huge amounts of power out of rainbows and wishes like these alien ones seem to, you’ve got unlimited ammo, too.”

“But for our purposes they’re effectively worthless.” Tremblay concluded for him.

“Far from it. The potential applications of an electrostatic force field generator are incredible, both for the military and for civilian use. Never mind the capacitors, generators and nanoelectronics.” Nadeau pointed at the prototype. “And make no mistake boss, that’s all us. There’s not a single alien component in that whole projector, so we’ve cracked the pulse emitters. The capacitors and generators will follow soon enough.”

Both men looked up and cocked their heads as the tannoy called for General Tremblay to his office.

He clapped Nadeau on the arm as he turned to leave. “Outstanding work, Captain.

This is the best news I’ve had yet since we started planning this facility. Keep me posted.”

“Will do, sir.”

It had been an eventful month, in so far as there were months on a planet with three moons. It was kinda hard to tell.

♫”A drink in my hand, my snow up against the burning sand,
Probably getting gorgeously tanned…“♪”

Then again, all the months were eventful. Just living was a constant demand on his time.

Today, for instance? Firewood. He was dragging a log through the snow, singing to himself as his boots crunched through the thick drifts and fat flakes drifted among the trees to encrust his beard and hair.

They were good boots. He’d have been dead five years ago if they weren’t. But that was the kind of thought that made him feel lonely, so he sang a little louder.

♪”…can’t wait to see, what my buddies all think of me. Just imagine how much cooler I’ll be…“♫

He was beginning to wonder if he was going strange.

He heaved on the rope over his shoulder and sighed in relief as he made it over the crest of the small rise that hid his camp from view, from most angles. It was a circular thing, refined several times over the years. The outer wall was a ring of leg-thick logs, notched together pretty tight and then daubed with clay and dry grass. It kept the wind out perfectly.

inside, it was a little wider across than he was tall. The covered shelter on one side kept his stuff dry, and thank God for the hard-wearing tarps he’d had with him when the Corti took him. Five years on, and they were still intact and working great. He’d weathered a lot of blizzards in that shelter, and felt dry and snug and cozy every time.

Problem was, he was going to have to weather a lot more, probably. Not like anybody back on Earth knew where he was, even if they had somehow invented the warp drive since he’d left.

So why not go strange? Not like anyone was around to notice or care.

♪”…both so intense, put ‘em together it just makes sense! Rrr Raht da daht dah dah dah…“♫

With a grunt, he pulled the firewood log onward. It was the sixth and last of the day. He’d split them tomorrow: the days weren’t long at this end of the year, and he still had to go check the nearby burrows for hibernating critters and try to dig up some of the crunchy bulbs that kinda-sorta-almost stood in for both onion and garlic at the same time. He wasn’t short on provisions yet, but that was only because he stayed on top of the food situation through daily effort.

“♪…a good time to stay in and cuddle, but put me in summer and I’ll be a…♫ HNNGH!!”

With one last effort, he heaved the log on top of the stack. He watched it rattle into place, patted some snow out of his beard, and stood silently enjoying the simple pleasure of his own successful efforts.

Then, suddenly, he thrust his hands triumphantly into the air.

“Happy snowman!!!”

The shout made snow fall off a nearby tree before vanishing forever into the faint, dead, white-noise hiss of gentle snowfall. He grinned, then threw a few of his remaining split logs into the fire pit and grabbed a cup of the “coffee” he made from roasted alien nuts. It warmed his hands and his belly as he sat on his bed and treated himself to a short, well-earned break.

”…Good work, Julian.”

He was gonna live for another day.

It had been an eventful month, and a frustrating one, and “Kirk” was once again cursing his own sense of integrity. He doubted that any of the other councillors had even heard the name Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, let alone read his books, but frankly it didn’t matter. Whether one’s species were ten-limbed gracile grazers, compact little bundles of raw predatory strength, or shambling hillocks of shaggy fur who communicated in part via bioluminescence, the universal constant seemed to be politics.

Kirk was not cut out to be a politician. He was too honest and forthright. Sure, the constituents loved him and so long as he kept bringing in votes then his party were happy to turn a blind eye to the inconvenient way in which he continued to tell the straightforward truth to a camera lens, but winning public opinion was much less than half the job. At the debating table, straight-talking honesty just meant that you were following an easily intercepted, easily interfered-with trajectory, and your position needed an overwhelming momentum of truth, morality and—above all else—vacuousness if it was likely to succeed.

Few politicians were willing to commit to a policy that actually achieved something, on the grounds that if it was capable of doing so, then it was also capable of a spectacular backfire.

But, the Vzk’tk Domain had signed up to the newly-formed Interspecies Committee on Dangerous Lifeforms and, being both a member of the Interspecies Dominion’s security council and its undisputed expert on humanity, Kirk had been assigned there. It was gratifying that the Domain took the Committee seriously at least, because most of the other major galactic powers—the Corti Directorate, the Grand Houses of Kwmbwrw, the Rauwryhr Republic, the Chehnash State, plus the Corporate Coalition, the Alliance of the Uplifted and the Guild of Free Spacers—all seemed to have used it as a dumping ground for their most obfuscating, obtuse and obstructive delegates.

At least the Clans of Gao and the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy seemed to be taking the issue seriously as well. While Kirk wasn’t well-acquainted with the elderly, white-furred Gaoian delegate—Father Oori, of Clan Highmountain—he thankfully had a staunch and constant ally in Councillor Vedregnenug.

Vedreg was an old and constant friend and a rather more shrewd operator than Kirk would ever be. They formed a “good cop, bad cop” team at the table, with Kirk playing the firebrand, forthright bad cop who bullied the Committee with proposals that had actual substance, and Vedreg playing the good cop who wheedled, placated and silver-tongued them into agreeing to do what they had, minutes before, been staunchly opposed to on principle. It was a potent combination but slow going, and Kirk was glad when the mediator program declared that the day’s deliberations had come to an end. His head felt hot and densely-packed from too many long hours listening to too many insufferable bores repeat too many variations of the exact same stance, which he could have summed up in a single word had he wanted.

“Caution.”

“I beg your pardon, councillor?” asked one of the station’s janitors. She was a V’zktk, cousin species to Kirk’s own Rrrtktktkp’ch. More numerous, but… well. By any objective measure, less intelligent. They tended to form the working class in Domain society, while Rrrtk like Kirk naturally drifted into positions of authority. It was a shame, really.

Kirk started at the query and raised his head: He had clearly dozed off and was now alone in the meeting room save for the custodial machine. “…Nothing. Where the hell are my aides?”

“They judged that you desired some time alone, Councillor. Should I summon them?”

“No. Thank you.” He stood and stretched, rolling the long neck for which both the species of the Domain were famed and enjoying the feeling as the long flexible sheath of cartilege that protected his spinal cord was massaged by the gentle motion. It took some time. Then he returned his attention to the janitor and her cleaning drone, which was playing a kinetic manipulation field across the carpet under the table, collecting fallen detritus, shed fur and skin-dust.

“Does this station have an observation deck?”

“It does, councillor, though Councillor Vedregnenug asked me to invite you to his biodeck when you wake up.”

“Biodeck?” Kirk repeated, having not heard of such a thing before.

“It’s part of his personal suite. He said the elevator could take you there, and there will be fresh Cqcq leaves and mature zrrks.”

She sounded quite envious of that last point, and Kirk knew why. A truly venerable zrrk that had had plenty of time to partially rot down and liquefy was a rare delicacy, this far from the Domain’s homeworlds.

“Thank you,” he said, and left her to her work.

The elevator needed a full minute to run the full length of the station from the meeting room to the VIP residential ring, but when he stepped out of it, Kirk’s impatience evaporated. It was stunning. Vedreg must have spent an enormous amount of money in having this structure tacked on to his apartments. Even now, at the height of an ongoing interstellar civilisation that had lasted for since before humans had even figured out basic metals, space was at a premium aboard stations, and therefore expensive.

Nevertheless, Vedreg had acquired a substantial personal suite, and turned it into a garden with a geodesic shell that afforded a wonderful view of the stars and shone tuned simulated sunlight into each of the simulated biomes.

the containment fields that kept the air and temperature from mingling between each one were barely-visible scarlet sheets of iridescence in the air, and behind them was a little patch of soil crowded with plant life from several major planets.

Kirk wandered entranced past a Nurugvugundrugevdrevegnagnugnum reef from Vedreg’s own homeworld. The name translated literally as “Place where all life is welcome and thrives as one, harmoniously.” Some of the plants fluoresced at him as he walked past, turning to capture a fraction of his body heat.

Elsewhere, he saw a sandy Cortan biome, full of sandstickles and triproot tended by little tumbling Rockskitters. Kirk paused to admire a lush frond of Cqcq from his own homeworld, and was contemplating leaning in past the containment field to sample some of its rich leaves when his gaze alighted upon the centerpiece of the biodeck.

This field was stronger and more visible, and as he approached it, subtle warning markers appeared, displayed holographically along its top and bottom in the universal “danger blue” used all over the Interspecies Dominion to warn of hazards. They stated simply that the field was set to be impassible, and that the environment beyond contained biohazardous atmospheric contaminants, dangerous airborne allergens and venomous fauna.

He recognised what stood in the middle instantly: three young trees, an Oak, an Apple tree, and a Cherry, the latter currently in full lush bloom. Around their bases, being tended by a variety of small gardener drones, was a bed of flowers.

His implants received the relevant information as he studied them: Pansies, Hellebore, Lilac, Puschkinia and more. Golden-and-white fish mouthed lazily in a lenticular pond to one side, and bees hummed back and forth from a hive opposite.

“I thought you would find the centerpiece most interesting.” Vedreg commented, and Kirk started. His friend had been present all along, seated on a bench configured for his species and apparently enjoying the exact same view.

“Beautiful!” Kirk exclaimed. “But how can it be here? Earth is a protected world and a Class Twelve, how could you possibly have acquired these?”

“Wealth and influence.” Vedreg declared, and his bioluminescent flank turned a shade of contrite taupe. “An intimate working knowledge of the minutiae of galactic law and, of course, the knowledge that three of the most successful antibiotics that the Corti have released in the last fifty cycles were derived from samples collected on Earth.”

“I don’t follow you.” Kirk told him.

“The laws only apply to samples directly collected from Earth. As these are cultivars or seed from specimens collected on Earth before the quarantine came into effect, they are, legally speaking, exempt from it. I assure you, every single one is completely legal to own.”

Bands of smug yellow and blue stippled down him. “A councillor cannot be caught in possession of contraband, after all. Arranging that these specimens would not be contraband was, how do they say it? Child’s play.”

“Aren’t they dangerous?” Kirk asked. “What about the microorganisms? The bacteria?”

“Don’t worry, I had them sterilized as much as possible. Though the symbiotic Mycorrhizal fungi in their roots had to remain, and those would prove to be extremely tenacious should they escape into another of these biomes, not to mention fatal for the unfortunate flora it infected. The pollens, however, would have us both in anaphylactic shock very swiftly indeed should the field fail. Securing against that scenario was very costly indeed.”

Green swept up Vedreg’s flank backwards—the equivalent of a sniff. “From what I understand, even humans with their fearsome immune systems can suffer quite profusely from their effects.”

“And the warning about the venomous fauna?”

“Purely a legal requirement. While those bees could land you in the medical bay if they stung you, they won’t, as a rule, since doing so is fatal to them also.”

”…Really?”

“Oh yes. Remarkable creatures. Survival of the whole in one of the galaxy’s most hostile competitive environments through instinctive self-sacrifice of the individual. Have you read Richard Dawkins?”

“I haven’t, no.” Kirk detected the steady soft glow of purple light that indicated Vedreg’s approval and respect, though whether for the author or for the insect was unclear.

“I suspect only a Human would have been in a position to pick up on the concepts he did. ‘The selfish gene,’ he called it. Excellent book. It explains that the process of evolution is an inherently selfish one, from the perspective of the allele. I’m no biologist, but I understand much more of what they’re saying for having read it.”

“If it’s selfish, why aren’t all our worlds like that?” Kirk asked, waving one of his longer, uppermost arms at the Terran terrarium.

“Because on most worlds the optimal selfish survival strategy for your average gene is to not rock the boat,” Vedreg explained “Life enters a reciprocal, interconnected harmony and stays there, changing only slowly if at all. But life on Earth has too many factors outside of the food chains stirring things up: asteroid strikes, storms, intense seasons, climate shifts, tectonic activity…delicate webs of interdependent species would collapse wholesale down there in short order the first time a major eruption increased the particulate dust in the atmosphere… Only the aggressive survive.” He glowed yellowish-green stippled with blue, white and bands of darkness—a complicated emotional cocktail of respect, admiration, intimidation, and sadness.

“It’s no wonder the humans struggle so hard to remain balanced and in-tune with nature.” He said. “Their whole genetic history has granted survival only to those that ruthlessly seized every opportunity for advancement.”

“Are you always this melancholy, Vedreg?” Kirk asked.

“Only when I have received terrible news, old friend.”

“What news?”

“My government is taking matters into its own hands and preparing to enforce the Quarantine around Earth with extreme prejudice.”

Kirk stood still, processing this. Finally, speaking delicately, he was able to summon up his wits to ask the important question.

”…Could you please define ‘extreme prejudice?’”

Vedreg’s strips were completely inert, showing no colour at all, not even a neutral paleness, a sign of deepest sorrow and regret. He handed over an infopad.

“As of right now, a fleet of warships is en route to Sol. Their objective is to deploy an experimental device.”

“A weapon?!” Kirk couldn’t believe it. He began scanning the files as Vedreg replied.

“Mercifully not. Panicked herd beasts though they are, my people are not genocidal. No, this device will simply erect a containment barrier around the entire system. Powered by a fraction of Sol’s own radiation, it will last for several million cycles.”

His flanks became a line of dark, angry green for just a moment, before shading to blue—bitter amusement. “No, we are not genocidal, but, it seems, we are happy Apartheidists. For the simple crime of evolving on the wrong world, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy has sentenced the species homo sapiens to indefinite incarceration.

“Effective when?”

Vedreg sighed—one of the few emotional vocalisations his species had available to them.

“Effective, my dear Kirk, as of [twenty minutes] ago.”

Chapter 4: Quarantine

“ALL of them?”

“We haven’t had enough time to count ALL of them, but, uh…yes, it looks that way.”

“Well, what does it mean?”

Major Bartlett’s expression contorted into the open anguish of somebody completely at a loss. “Every single star in the sky suddenly becoming eight percent less luminous? The only scenario I can think of that would explain that one scares the shit out of me.”

General Tremblay folded his arms. “Well? Don’t beat around the bush, what is it?”

Bartlett cleared his throat. Somehow he almost couldn’t bring himself to believe what he was about to say. “Well, the only scenario I can think of which would explain a uniform decrease in luminosity from our perspective of every star in the sky would be if we had become encased in an almost transparent shell of some kind.” he explained.

”‘We’ meaning…?”

“The whole planet sir. Maybe the whole system. It depends on whether the outer planets have undergone a similar drop.”

“Find out.” Tremblay ordered, and Bartlett spun away to comply. “Somebody get Nadeau and whoever he thinks is his team’s premier expert on these electrostatic fields up here. And get me the defense minister.”

“He’s already on the line sir. He called you.”

“About this?”

“Yes, General.”

“How in the fuck did he find out?” Tremblay demanded.

“Apparently it’s all over the news, sir…”

The Abductees listened to the radio in silence for several hours. So, it seemed, did everybody else.

For those few short hours, for the first time ever, a subject commanded the entirety of the human race’s attention. Humanity forgot its wars and differences. Prejudices were set aside, wars ceased to rage. Across the globe, people gathered around radios, television sets and any device with Internet access as the world’ media collectively sifted, ground down and filtered the facts from the speculation.

There was much, much more of the latter, than of the former.

The same questions circled the globe, gaining just a little more force and passion with every repetition until, even if the individual humans may not utter the word aloud, the communication networks of an entire planet thrummed with one collective outraged cry:

“Why?”

Only a handful of people on the whole Earth knew the answer to that question.

Most thought they were alone, and kept the answer to themselves. Some few were part of a convoy that had temporarily paused at a campground in Wyoming.

In San Diego, one withdrew a slim smartphone from his dapper, tailored suit and, by activating a very modern app, enacted a very old contingency plan.

The galaxy’s interest in the Sol system reached fever pitch with the news of the Enclosure. Official footage released by the quarantine fleet showed the experimental containment generator being established. It was an alarmingly small and unassuming little edifice—a metal ball scarcely larger than the average being, three or four meters in diameter, with an utterly featureless mirrored surface. It was guided into place by the tractor fields aboard a Confederate corvette, injected into a smooth orbit between the seventh and eighth planets of the Sol system, well inside the outer cometary cloud, and then, without fanfare or ceremony, was activated.

The only sign that this had happened at all came in the form of a few ghostly streamers of turquoise energy as the solar wind and energy output briefly battled with the field boundary, until they reached a stable equilibrium. Only scientific equipment could detect that the brightness and albedo of every object on the far side of the field edge was reduced by a small amount.

Aboard the Observatory, which had used its jump drive to relocate to orbit around Neptune, one Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk, Councillor for the Vzk’tk Domain, gave a brief and passionate speech angrily denouncing what he proclaimed as a “miscarriage of justice against a young and vibrant species, unfairly and illegally sentenced without trial to indefinite imprisonment for the simple crime of being who they are.”

His words did not pass without support. Far from it—protests erupted all across the galaxy, and the interstellar communications grid practically locked with messages, videos, sensory recordings and essays condemning the move.

But a good third part of the traffic pointed out that if the Hunters had been similarly quarantined upon their discovery, their gruesome and horrific meat-slave raids and farms would never have happened. These messages pointed out that here too was a species that consumed the meat of even quite intelligent fauna species on their homeworld, whose history was one of ceaseless warfare, and whose physical durability and prowess in the field of violence would render them completely unstoppable should they prove to be hostile.

Footage circulated of a lone, unarmoured human slayinging Vulza with nothing but a fusion scythe, authenticated by reports from troopers who had seen the event first-hand. An expert witness—a Corti researcher with a particular interest in human biology—declared that the human in that footage showed clear signs of malnourishment, lack of exercise, and fatigue, meaning that he was operating considerably below peak efficiency. The same witness produced reports on a family of Vzk’tk who had required stasis at a class 10 experimental hospital for more than a standard cycle before they were finally able to be cured of the diseases that they had caught from only a few seconds’ contact with one escaped human specimen, and that these disease specimens had required immediate destruction lest they fall into the wrong hands and be used to engineer a viral superweapon. One brief video showed a human accidentally breaking a being’s medial spine with a single hearty slap: the contextual information revealed that the crippling gesture had been intended as a friendly one.

Countering these damning accounts came footage from elsewhere in the galaxy. A human giving her life to vent a hazardous materials spill into space and save the station she was aboard and its thousands of inhabitants, wading through radiation that would have fried the nervous system of any other being in moments. Footage of a human calmly holding down a struggling Vgork alpha male in Musth who had tried to enter a creche. The survivor account of one young Kwmbwrw who asserted that a human had carried her on his shoulders for three local days across the tundra of the planet V’chnbritz, delivering her nearly [120 kilometers] to a hospital after the passenger transport they had been on had crashed, before guiding rescue workers back to the crash sight. A Gaoian matriarch who passionately attributed her survival and liberty to a human.

Talking heads from all species tossed these facts and accounts back and forth between them, circling but never quite approaching a conclusion on whether the Enclosure had been the wrong thing to do. In the background, various governments quietly lined up alongside the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy and congratulated them on their foresighted action.

Brooding in his office aboard the Observatory, Kirk received a message. He read it three times. He was still considering its implications when he received a second one. This, he read only once.

Then, cybernetic hand shaking, he tendered his resignation.

♪♫The good guys dress in black, remember that, just in case we ever face-to-face and make contact…♫♪

Terri had set her phone to play Will Smith’s “Men In Black” whenever her mysterious client called her. It had seemed appropriate given the nature of the job. Now, as some of the nearby Abductees gave her a strange look, she slightly regretted it. They had heard that song on the radio a LOT lately.

She walked away from the group a little way and answered.

“Terri Boone, it’s a pleasure to hear from you, ‘Mr. Johnson’.” she carefully pronounced the quotation marks around his alias. She wasn’t naive and at times like this the chance to prove it was welcome.

“And from you, Miss Boone.” Mr. Johnson had a curiously accentless voice. Just a hint of clipped British, just a pinch of DC politician, just a touch of Hollywood star, a whole lot of anywhere in the English-speaking world. “I think you’ll understand if recent events have made me eager to learn how your commission is going.”

“It’s…well, it’s gotten a little out of hand, to be honest.” Terri admitted.

“I hoped that it would.” Johnson said. The confession was made perfectly level and calm. “In what way?”

“I think we’ve picked up every genuine Abductee east of the Rockies.” she reported. “There’s some kind of a pilgrimage going on here, and I don’t quite know what its objective is. They all seem to be singing from the same hymnbook, but I don’t know the words.”

“Very religious.”

“I’m Catholic.”

There was a pause. An unnatural one—Terri realised she couldn’t even hear Mr.

Johnson breathe, or laugh, or whatever he was doing. She almost jumped when he spoke again.

“Miss Boone, I think I consider your commission in the matter of finding the Abductees to have been satisfactorily completed. If you would care to leave the contact details with which I provided you in the care of whoever seems to be in charge, I have another situation in San Diego which requires your attention. Oh, leave them the credit card I gave you, too.”

“You don’t want to meet them?” Terri asked.

“I had an inkling that they would behave like this.” her client explained. “Your ‘pilgrimage’ was just waiting to happen, all they needed was somebody to set it in motion. If you could relay to them that their destination is a town called Scotch Creek, in British Columbia, then I think they will have all that we need.”

Terri shrugged. “You’re the man with the money.” She said, internally noting the “we” rather than a “they”.

“It’s always a pleasure doing business with a professional, Miss Boone. Please, call me once you’re back in San Diego and have taken a night’s rest.”

“Wait, I’m supposed to leave them the credit card AND get back? How am I going to pay for gas and motels?”

“Given that your commission has been completed,” said Johnson “you should find that your bank balance is replete. There’s even a bonus in there for travel expenses. I assume you have your own cards?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“Very good. I would prefer if you could fly back down, Miss Boone. Time may not be of the essence, but the sooner you are here, the better we can maintain our momentum.”

“I’ll…see you ASAP then.” Terri said.

“Bon voyage, Miss Boone.”

Johnson hung up. Terri stared at her phone for a minute, and then made use of the campground’s wifi to check her bank account. It was the first time she had ever looked at it and seen six figures before the decimal. And such a large six figures, too.

She glanced up at the sky, thinking. Whatever was going on up there was a mystery. Terri hated mysteries, and she could sense that the answer was wrapped up with the Abductees somehow. Was that kind of money really so important now that galactic forces had apparently taken an interest in Earth?

But then again…the world hadn’t actually ended, yet. And in light of that, it seemed probable that it would continue to not end. Mr. Johnson’s second project was clearly important enough to leave the first unsupervised, and if he had paid so well for the first, well…

A sensible, frugal woman could satisfy her curiosity all she wanted on that kind of money, well invested.

Perfection was a prosperous Class Three planet that had been granted independence from, and protection by, the four species whose territory encroached on the volume of space around it. Originally it had been simple neutral ground, but the Perfection system’s Platinum-rich asteroid belt and the verdant ecosystem of the planet Perfection had both contributed to making it wealthy. Interstellar trade conglomerates had taken an interest and the system was now, after several consecutive hundred-cycles of growth, a thriving commercial and industrial hub, the most densely-populated planet for some considerable distance in any direction.

The system capital city, Idyll, had long since ceased to live up to its name.

Admittedly from a distance its gleaming skyscrapers, spun in glass and ultratensile steel that smouldered in the sunset, were breathtaking and the wealthy citizens who could afford to live in those buildings that caught the sun for an appreciable fraction of the day lived at the pinnacle of luxury.

But Idyll was as notorious for its festering streets and ghettos as for its glittering prosperity, and that squalid underbelly of Perfection was Kirk’s destination.

Given that his resignation was still echoing around the news channels as another act in the unfolding drama over Earth and the Humans, he had elected, rather than take a public or diplomatic shuttle, to splash on buying a new ship of his own. It had taken a bit of money on such short notice, but he had acquired an expensive star-runner that was little more than a bed, ablution cubicle and control seat bolted to the front of an enormous Domain fusion plant and the latest model of Corti black-box FTL engine. It was incomprehensibly fast, and about as safe as space travel could get: it could just outrun any interception.

Flash starships in most of the Idyll sprawl were prime targets for theft, but not where he was going. There was one specific block, he knew, where even the most expensive and rare collector’s-item ship could land and be completely safe, because the kind of beings who parked there had a reputation. He exploited that reputation to its fullest, wearing a full-length black coat with a privacy field generator in the hood. The most any witness might tell would be that they had seen a Rrrrtktktkp’ch.

Those witnesses would all know where he was going—none of them would tell. He passed a similarly cloaked figure and they exchanged anonymous gestures of recognition, and parted ways. The Contact kept to a mechanically precise timetable.

The Contact was a Corti. This particular Corti sat politely at a desk behind a modest computer terminal, and welcomed him with insincere warmth as Kirk entered.

“You are punctual. I like that in a new client.” she said.

“If only I were a new client, Vakno.” Kirk said. He lowered his hood, and the privacy field shut off. Just for a second, her composure slipped, and he allowed himself a little moment of private triumph.

“Officer A’ktnnzzik’tk. I had not expected to do business with you again.”

Kirk allowed her a tight smile. “We didn’t do business, Vakno, I arrested you.”

He said. He enjoyed the way she winced as he speared her with her real name.

“Would it be too much to ask how you knew where to find me?” Vakno asked him.

She waved a slender-fingered hand through the control field of her computer and it went dark.

“It would.”

The Corti hopped down from her chair and a door hidden seamlessly in the wall slid open, revealing a rather more comfortable suite of rooms hidden behind the office. “And here I thought I had learned not to underestimate you.” She said.

“Please, come in.”

“Your schedule?” Kirk asked, joining her.

“On hold. When the most notorious Councillor in the galaxy walks into my office, I give him my fullest and most special attention.” She replied, a little too smoothly in Kirk’s opinion. “Are you here to arrest me again?”

“Are you trying to smuggle virus programs onto my station again?”

“You can plainly see that I am not.”

“Then you’d be outside my jurisdiction even if I was still a member of a station security force.” Kirk said, dismissively. “Just between us, and considering that the case is long-since closed and you did your time for it, what would those have actually accomplished?”

Vakno affected an air of wistful regret. “Oh, they would have got me the passwords to the private communicator belonging to a Xarx actress who was laying over on your station shortly after my visit. I had reason to believe it contained incriminating footage of her satisfying her mating urges in the company of a litter of Kwen siblings. Lucrative data, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

“And you wonder why the galaxy considers Corti to be morally bankrupt.” Kirk said.

“No, I don’t. Please, shall we get to business? I assume you didn’t visit just to reminisce?”

Kirk agreed, and sat down. “Humans.” He said.

“Ah, of course. What other subject would you be interested in right now?”

“I want to know how many of them the Directorate abducted.”

Vakno delivered the Corti equivalent of an, again, insincere and disdainful little laugh. “You think I have access to that kind of information. Your sense of humour has improved over the cycles, it seems.”

“The only thing that gets a Corti kicked out of the Directorate is directly acting against the interests of the Corti species as a whole. I KNOW you have access to that information.” Kirk retorted. “But all I want is to know how many humans are outside the containment field. That seems benign enough, doesn’t it?”

“Where humans are concerned there is no such thing as ‘benign,’ Councillor A’ktnnzzik’tk. Every time one of them has escaped our zoological teams, or was released by well-meaning animal welfare officers, the results have been unpredictable and alarming.” Vakno displayed intense emotion, her grey skin flushing decidedly blue around the mandible. “The Directorate’s officialy policy regarding that species is ‘Do not underestimate them.’ Lone humans have changed the course of wars, infected whole cultures with strange new ideas, even triggered the development of whole new exotic technology branches.”

“All the more reason to keep tabs on the ones not quarantined on Earth, then.”

Kirk said.

“What’s that charming expression of theirs? Bullshit, Councillor. Don’t expect me to believe that the same being who was loudly proclaiming how this quarantine is a travesty and a, quote: “Violation of their rights as a sentient race” end quote has suddenly had a change of heart and intends to help us enforce it.”

“And if I could pronounce that ‘charming expression’ I’d repeat it back to you.

The Directorate doesn’t stand to profit if that field stays up. You’re the ones with all that hard-earned technology, all those products you’re ready to sell to the human market if and when it becomes available. You don’t stand to gain a damn thing by enforcing that quarantine. Quite the reverse, that’s a lot of investment written off.”

Vakno dismissed that. “Affordable.”

“Why accept an affordable loss at all when there’s a lucrative opportunity to be had? I buy that information off you and…well, we shall see where it leads. As you say, Humans are unpredictable.” Kirk paused. “Of course, being unpredictable could equally mean that they might breach that shield on their own. If and when that were to happen, don’t you think it would be more lucrative to be counted among the species that advocated and contributed to their freedom?”

“I don’t have that kind of authority and you know it.” Vakno snapped.

“No Corti does, I know. That’s not how your species works.” Kirk agreed. “But if the Directorate haven’t got plans to play both sides and put a positive spin on it when they turn out to have been on the winning side all along, well, then you’re not the pragmatists that I know you are. Especially you personally, Vakno.”

He settled back and played his best card. “Or of course I could spread the word that The Contact wasn’t able to help me…”

There was a long, chilly pause, and then Kirk’s personal implants acknowledged receipt of a file transfer.

“Just so you’re aware, A’ktnnzzik’tk, I will be notifying the Directorate to amend our official policy.”

“You will?”

“Oh yes. It seems we shouldn’t underestimate Humanity’s allies, either. Get out.”

“Faster-Than-Light travel.”

“Yes, General. Technically, a variant on the Alcubierre warp drive.”

Tremblay stared blankly at the report. Much of it was incomprehensible physicist jargon and blocks of arcane mathematics. “Alcubierre?”

“Miguel Alcubierre Moya, a Mexican theoretical physicist. He proposed his warp drive ideas in ninety-four, but there are some…issues with it that kept it purely theoretical.”

“Spare me. This is a variant on his design?”

“Well, it was never technically a design as such just the mathematical…”

“Major.”

Bartlett paused, and the rebuke finally got through the intellectual haze that he had been swimming in from the day he had first laid his hands on the alien technology.

“Sorry, sir. Uh…effectively, yes. In layman’s terms, sir…It’s kind of like walking on the moving walkway at an airport. You might be doing five kilometers per hour, but if the walkway’s doing that too in the same direction then you wind up travelling at ten KPH, right?”

“I’m familiar with the phenomenon,” Tremblay said. “So that’s what this warp drive does?”

“Kind of, sir.” Bartlett’s tone of voice suggested that the analogy was far from adequate, but he forged ahead. “The principle hinges on expanding and contracting spacetime around the ship. Some of the tech in those alien pods that shot through the arena roof held the key.”

“The key being…?”

“Well, they’re so fragile, how the hell would they survive slamming through reinforced concrete at that kind of speed? We wouldn’t, and it looks like humans are much tougher than those aliens were.” Bartlett consulted his own notes at this point. “The report has it that the pods contained devices which temporarily suspended the flow of time inside the field they generate.”

“And that led us to faster-than-light travel somehow.” Tremblay finished for him, and examined the report in front of him. “Something to do with space and time being the same thing, it says here.”

“Spacetime, yes. And if you can stop time, you can stretch space. And once you can stretch space then you can stretch it so that your spaceship-on-a-walkway is going faster than light.”

“How much faster?” Tremblay asked him.

“That depends on how much juice you give it, sir. More power, more speed.”

Bartlett said. “I couldn’t give you exact numbers, that’s going to take a lot of experimentation.”

“I think we can take my okay for a working warp drive as read, Bartlett.”

“Thank you sir, but it isn’t quite that easy. We can’t test it down here on Earth. If we want to go ahead with this, it’s going to have to go up to the ISS.”

“Why?”

“Because if we get it only mostly right the resulting explosion would be like a nuke going off.” Bartlett wobbled his head. “Plus, you know, we’re testing an FTL drive here. You need a lot of room to work with just to measure the results.”

Tremblay sighed. “I guess it was only a matter of time before we started having to share this stuff outside of NATO. I’ll contact the Defense Minister, pass the buck to him and the PM. Any other crazy surprises come out of those pods that I should know about?”

“Not today, sir.”

“Right. Carry on, Major.”

“Sir.” Bartlett left, poring over his notes as he went. For the first time in several days, Tremblay suddenly found himself with a spare and quiet moment.

Robbed of anything to distract him from it, the fatigue of the last few days hit him at full force and he sat back, rubbed his face, ran his hands back across his scalp and stretched in his seat, resolving to take ten hours to sleep tonight rather than reading base reports in bed for a few hours.

He must have dozed off anyway, because he woke with a snort when there was a sharp knock on the door. He stole a glance at the wall clock as he cleaned himself up and straightened his clothes—“Come.”

Tremblay had worked with Sergeant Ramsey, the base’s chief of perimeter security, for years, and the only thing stopping the two men from being good friends was the demands of professionalism. They still played poker with a few other senior staff every Sunday though. For the duration of those games, they were just Steve and Martin. Right now though, Ramsey ripped off a salute.

“I thought you’d want the buck passed on this one, sir.”

Tremblay stifled the urge to yawn. He trusted Ramsey’s judgement, implicitly, and so simply replied “Okay, pass it.”

“We’ve had a…I guess the best word is “convoy” show up, sir. About thirty cars, vans, all civilian. They’re staying on a field down in town, but one of them delivered this to the gate guards.”

He placed a plastic binder on the general’s desk and stood back, watching as Tremblay flipped it open. A few wide-eyed seconds later, Tremblay looked up.

“I want to talk to the man who delivered this.”

“Yes sir. He’s at the gatehouse. He said his name is Jenkins, sir.”

Chapter 5: Deliverance

Four years previously

Everybody loved a home side win, except for the tourists. Amir didn’t feel like a tourist, but Pakistani people supported the Pakistani cricket team, even if—like him—they had been born in Birmingham, had never left England, spoke English more fluently than their supposed “native” language, with an accent that was as British as tea and wet weather.

“Amir!”

His best friend Muhammad and the rest of his friends had started heading in a different direction while Amir was zoned out. “You coming?” he asked.

Amir knew what the answer would be, but he had to ask anyway. It was how things worked. “Where?”

“For a drink! Come on bruv, we may as well have some fun tonight.”

Amir shook his head. “You know that’s haram.” he said. It was their one constant conflict that Muhammad was only a Muslim when it was convenient. The rest of the time, he was just another nineteen-year-old, high on life and not interested in the consequences.

“We’re all sinners, bruv,” Muhammad told him, amicably.

Amir turned away. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he called over his shoulder.

At least there were no catcalls or anything. They respected his faith that much, even if they didn’t respect it enough to practice it properly themselves. He just wished that his best friend wouldn’t use “we’re all sinners” as an excuse.

It may have been true, but that didn’t mean he had to exploit it. That just didn’t feel like Islam.

He didn’t preach though. He was no Imam, he didn’t know how to be. All he had was his job delivering takeaway food, a council flat, and his religion. It was enough, most days.

He knew from experience that the bus stops near the Edgbaston cricket ground would always be heaving after a one-day game. He didn’t mind the walk: it was mid-July, and even the famously inclement British weather had decided to produce a warm night. So, anonymous and alone with his thoughts, he weaved through streets of Friday-night partiers, just another brown face in a crowd that ran the full gamut of human shades, hunched and with his fingers fidgeting with the edge of his pockets.

He was so shrouded in melancholy that he didn’t even see the person he walked into, but they felt solid as a rock. Knowing full well that a Pakistani face in this day and age could get into serious trouble with a surly drunk, he stepped back a pace, and got halfway through his “sorry mate” when he realised that the other man wasn’t moving. In fact, he still had his back turned.

Nobody else was moving either. Nothing else was moving. Traffic stood as still as scenery in the street. The pavement was solid-packed with warm, clothed, human statues, penning him in—he couldn’t even shove them aside to weave through the crowd. He stared at a young woman—she was in the middle of flicking her hair aside to answer her phone, and it stood out impossibly parallel to the ground. Even the light had a strange quality—he swore it took his shadow a brief instant to react when he moved.

And then that shadow became much better-defined as the night-time street orange was flooded out by whiteness. He looked up, and it filled his vision.

One man looked around in confusion, rubbed his back, and returned to his conversation. The streets didn’t even notice that Amir Bahmani was gone.

Kirk was a rich being—a Councillor of the Domain earned a handy sum of money from their position, not to mention the royalties from his biographical accounts, political sponsorships and some shrewd investments. Nevertheless, between buying his ultra-fast ship and then having it fast-tracked through a refit drydock at a corporate freeport where the owners were happy to sign an anonymity contract for an appropriate fee…well. His accounts were looking rather less healthy than they had done in some time.

They would, however, bounce back. He was a client of one of the best investment brokers in the business, after all. And the refits had been worth it. The little life-support blister with its bed, ablutions cubicle and control console had been dismounted from the hull, and behind it had been installed a somewhat larger and more luxurious living suite. Below that, a workshop loaded with the latest in nanofactories and CAD/CAM tools, a dense and comprehensive automated laboratory that could double as a sickbay.

And behind that, the enormous generator and the sealed unit that was the Corti blackbox drive. Mass made no difference to a Corti drive—any ship, any size, any tonnage, the only thing that mattered was how much energy you could force down that little box’s throat, and the behemothic bulk of the fusion reactor that made up by far the largest part of the ship’s size and mass was rated to power city districts.

There was one last addition: an excursion chamber, equipped with all the gear he could need to remain safe on practically any planet up to and including a Class Twelve. And it was necessary—the first destination on his list was a Class Ten, an unclaimed world (after all, who in their right minds would want to claim a death world?) with the uninspiring designation “Main Yellow 2.55467-1.00209-0.1413-57.88811-3 Terrestrial Temperate 10”—literally nothing more than the type and location of the planet and of the star it orbited.

He slept most of the journey out. The downside he was discovering to his ship was that, having as it did a stupefying turn of speed, the trip times were barely long enough for him to complete the in-flight checklist and get some rest. By the time his alarm woke him he was already within the last hundred or so interstellar units of final approach. There had barely been time for his neural implants to convert the slow-access digital data on his destination into working organic memory.

But, they had. He knew everything that it was practical and useful for him to know about that world, barring any gaps in the data, which was how he handled its unique upper-atmospheric turbulence with practiced ease despite having never previously landed without guidance from the ground.

It helped that his target co-ordinates were experiencing a clear day, and as hoped he found a thermal contact within only a short distance of the information that had been in Vakno’s file. Best to land a little way from it, he thought.

He did so. Landing a ship that was effectively a couple of small rooms tacked onto a highly oblate spheroid was a challenge in its own right under MY210573TT10’s gravity, which was nearly 20% higher than the galactic standard norm. Not as high as Earth’s, but enough to be uncomfortable once he stepped outside of the ship’s generated gravity field. Once landed, he performed those few post-flight checks that any good pilot concerned themselves with, and then retreated to the excursion room.

It took only moments to select the appropriate harness and don it. The device had its own onboard gravity generator that would mitigate the local field, and the rest was a biofiltration force field that should keep anything nasty from coming into contact with him.

Time to meet the first human he had seen in the flesh for three years.

Amir had expected a ramp. Instead, the whole room slung under the ship’s equatorial ring descended to ground level, and a pair of large and very solid doors opened, gracefully and silently. He hefted his spear. If it was another of those grey-skinned devils, it wouldn’t know what hit it.

Instead, what stepped out and blinked in the sunlight was a six-legged being fully twice his height, upright atop a complicated pelvis. It raised both its pairs of hands in a gesture of peace and surrender and, with exaggerated care, produced a piece of technology which it set on the ground. The alien clicked at it, producing a sound not dissimilar to a strip of cardboard in a bike’s spokes.

This was, apparently, some kind of a language, because once it had finished clicking, the little device on the ground spoke in flawless, though unaccented, English.

“Please, I couldn’t harm you even if I wanted to. You don’t need the spear, Mister Bahmani.”

Amir practically fell over. It had been years since he had last heard any human language at all, let alone his name.

“H…” the words wouldn’t come at first. He could barely remember speaking aloud other than to recite the Adhān to call himself to Ṣalāt five times a day, and the Rakaʿāt. He had not spoken anything else in…years, probably.

They had been important. Only his faith had kept him going throughout those years. He didn’t have the first idea which way Mecca was, and so had simply settled for facing toward this planet’s east.

He cleared his throat and tried again. “You know English?”

This generated a chattering sound from the being’s lower abdomen, which he decided was probably laughter, followed by another barrage of clicking and crackling noises. “I couldn’t begin to pronounce English, I’m afraid. But my translator here can. You are Amir Bahmani though, yes?”

“I…yes. How do you know?”

The being made a gesture that he couldn’t identify—its body language was unreadable.

“I paid good money to get my hands on a copy of your abductor’s records,” It told him. “My name is…” [an unintelligible sound like plastic beads in a blender] “…but other humans have nicknamed me ‘Kirk.’”

“Kirk…like, Star Trek?”

“That’s the joke I think, yes. Though it’s also a fair approximation of the first syllable of my name.”

“My abductors…You’re not with them are you?” Amir hefted his spear again, and “Kirk” retreated a step or two, holding up four placating hands.

“No, no. I draw the line at abduction, vivisection and experimentation upon sentient beings. No, I’m here to offer you the chance to leave, if you wish.”

“You’ll take me home?!” Hope swelled in Amir for the first time in a long while.

Earth! people! He mentally corrected himself at that one—Human people!

“If only I could.” Kirk told him. “But Earth is…well. The focus of much attention right now.” He looked around at Amir’s camp. “Actually, I’ll just be blunt about it. The rest of the galaxy found out about your species and collectively shit themselves in fear. Earth has been quarantined—they put up a force field around the whole solar system, nothing gets in or out. I…disagree with that decision. I have a plan, and it starts with finding every abductee I can and offering them the hope of a way home.”

He extended a hand, and Amir noticed for the first time that it was made of sleek plastic and metal rather than pale flesh. “Are you in?” Kirk asked. “Shake carefully please, it doesn’t matter so much if you break the prosthetic rather than my actual hand, but they’re a pain to repair.”

“Bismillah! You have to ask? I want to go home.”

They shook hands.

“I promise, I’ll try.” Kirk told him.

Having a uniformed chauffeur waiting at the airport holding up a sign with “Terri Boone” on it was a novel experience. The chauffeur was efficiency itself as she took Terri’s bags and politely delivered her into the back seat of a sleek black Audi. Next to the expensive car with its buff leather upholstery and general air of wealth, her travel-stained jeans, battered leather jacket and the faded hoody from Chamonix she had owned since a teenage skiing vacation that she wore under the jacket all looked not just dishevelled, but downright squalid.

She entertained herself on her phone as the chauffeur weaved in the comfortable silence of money through freeway and midtown traffic to her apartment, and was surprised when the chauffeur not only brought in the bags, but insisted that no tip was necessary. After quickly discussing what time the car would arrive to take her to Mr. Johnson’s office, she was left alone to re-acquaint herself with her neglected home.

She threw open the windows and lit some scented candles to drive out the scent of emptiness that had built up in the months she had been gone and then, in a move that would have surprised anyone who did not know her extremely well, she emptied all the drawers out of the chest next to her bed and lifted it up, revealing a small, slim box stashed underneath.

From this she withdrew a device of some kind and a USB stick, which she plugged into her PC and launched some programs from, before spending nearly two hours carefully inspecting every nook and cranny of her apartment with the device.

Eventually, and apparently satisfied, she returned both to their box and rebuilt the hiding place.

Only then did she boot up some more programs. She spent half an hour alternately typing and watching the screen intently. That done, she took a spin through the shower, combed her hair, threw on some fresh clothing and the same old leather jacket, grabbed her handbag, and departed.

She would have been thoroughly disappointed to learn that her sweep for bugs stood no hope whatsoever of detecting the ones that had been installed a month previously. Among other things, finding them would have required a microscope.

“Nope, not organised at all.”

Kevin Jenkins was patiently explaining things and going through the notebook as some of the biology and medical teams examined the peculiar scar on his temple.

They had made it as far as the political situation.

“I mean, before a few years ago, legally speaking we were all “non-sentient indigenous fauna”. It’s a bureaucratic mess out there, believe me.”

Tremblay examined the notes again. Mostly it was full of observations about the governmental structures of dozens of different species. the Dominion especially was troubling him. “Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing?”

Jenkins shrugged, ignoring a lab-coat’s protest to keep his head still. “Left hand could fill in a couple forms in triplicate requesting a third-party committee add a debate to their agenda on whether there’s grounds to start the process of commissioning an independent review on what part of the right hand’s up to.” he sneered.

“You make it sound…inefficient.” one of the junior officers commented.

“The Dominion couldn’t find whatever passes for their ass with whatever passes for their hands without three policy meetings and a vote.” Jenkins replied, tersely. It wasn’t quite a snap, and certainly not aimed at the officer, but there was definitely bitterness in the way he said it. “It’s all there in the manual.”

“And what’s in the manual is disturbing.” Tremblay said. He turned a page, and arched an eyebrow. “Roswell Greys? Really?”

“That was pretty much my reaction.” Jenkins said. He had a resigned expression as one of the scientists laid a ruler against his scalp and took a picture.

“According to this they call themselves the Corti Directorate and are the ones primarily responsible for alien abductions on Earth.”

“Hence how they became the Roswell Greys, I guess.” Jenkins sniffed. “But they’re not as bad as some of the motherfuckers out there. At least you know where you stand with the Greys, even if that is under a microscope.”

“Under a microscope still sounds pretty bad.”

“Eh, they’re just self-serving, cowardly, apathetic and practical to a fault. At least we can understand how they think. There’s things out there that think in ways I don’t even know the words for.”

“Like those things that attacked Vancouver, I’m guessing.” Tremblay turned to that page. The sketches were remarkably detailed. The biologists had gone into ecstatic paroxysms over them—the high-definition TV footage from the hockey game had been useful, but the panicked and shell-shocked cameramen hadn’t done the world’s best job of focusing on them and what had been delivered for necropsy had been thoroughly pulverised. A sketch was no substitute for having the real thing under the knife of course, but the detailed drawings of the cybernetic interface between creature and gun had answered some unresolved questions.

“Yeah. They scare me, but not for the right reasons,” Jenkins said.

“The right reasons?” That was Doctor Sung, the base’s counsellor and psychologist. He had, hitherto, been silent, content to just sit in the corner and watch the man who claimed to have spent years wandering the galaxy.

“Look, those bastard things…you know how some people see morality in terms of black, white and shades of grey? Well the Hunters see it in purple, orange and shades of fucking tartan. They’re notorious across the whole galaxy for not only eating the meat of sentient beings, but apparently preferring it to, like, farming a cow or something. That sounds like the right reason to be afraid of them, to me. They’re actual honest-to-shit space monsters. But that’s not what scares me about them.”

“What does?” Sung asked.

“You saw what happened in Vancouver.” Jenkins replied. “Well, that was no fluke: I’m telling you, I personally beat the crap out of three of those fuckers with their own limbs, right after I tore said limbs clean off. It wasn’t even difficult, man.”

He shrugged helplessly. “The worst nightmares in the galaxy and some random barkeep from Fuck-Nowhere USA can literally dismember them bare-handed. Worst I had to show for it was a black eye. That scares me.”

Sung cocked his head to one side, curiously. “Being powerful scares you?”

“I didn’t do shit to deserve it, you know? It’s not like you can just say “Hey, I earned that,” we’re, like, Kryptonians. We’re Superman, and the worst part is we—the human race, right?—we never had Ma and Pa Kent to teach us to be all about protecting people and all that shit. Before Vancouver, every day the news was full of the latest trending fucking atrocity.”

He stood up, raised his arms and adopted a goofy parody of a TV presenter. “It’s time for Wheel of Paedophile, where we reveal which TV icon of yesteryear was fiddling little girls! And after that, which journalist got beheaded for God today, kids? Tune in and find out on The Humanity Show!” The moment of sarcastic enthusiasm died, and he sagged back down. “Hell, it’d still be full if that shit right now if we didn’t have bigger things on our minds. And pretty soon we’re going to go back to being fucked up to each other when it turns out that whatever we do we’re still, like, probably years from even heading out to the barrier and knocking.”

He sighed. “That’s why the Hunters scare me: because despite that they scare the shit out of everything else, The Hunters never got a reaction like this. Which means that somebody up there thinks we’re WORSE than the Hunters, and I’m scared they might just turn out to be right.”

“You don’t think very highly of people, do you.” Tremblay commented.

“You’re damn right!” Jenkins exclaimed. “But, y’know, individuals can be kind of cool, so we’ve got that going for us.” he sniffed. “Which is nice.”

“I know who you are. You’re a Dominion security councilor.”

Kirk nodded slowly. “That I am.”

He was standing in the office of the ‘mayor’ of an asteroid mining facility deep in Reef Space, a string of systems that had endured the migration of a black hole spat out by the galactic core some few millions of years in the past and which had long since vanished into intergalactic space. Every one of the fifty or so systems in the region was flagged with a navigational hazard warning thanks to the erratic, disturbed orbits of their planets.

Many of those planets had been broken up entirely, leaving behind huge mineral-rich continents of drifting rock just waiting for the miners. The mining colonies of Reef Space were rich. They were also, by and large, unregulated. Nobody knew how many there were, most of them didn’t answer to the Dominion or the Alliance, they certainly didn’t pay their taxes, and the laws were made and enforced locally. And often poorly.

It took a certain kind of ruthless individual to rise to the top in such circumstances. Mayor Brelm was one of the most ruthless. He was a cold, calculating bastard even by Corti standards.

And he was utterly irrelevant as far as Kirk was concerned.

“I heard you quit. Coming to an asteroid facility like this one is a step down for you, isn’t it?” Brelm tapped a slender finger on his desk. “What is it that you want from me?”

“You?” Kirk feigned disinterested surprise. “Forgive me, mayor, I am not here for you. I came here for your bodyguard.”

The slim human woman who had been leaning sulkily against the back wall looked up at him sharply.

“You’re…for her?” Brelm twisted in his chair and looked at the deathworlder behind him. “Did you know anything about this?”

“You are Allison, are you not?” Kirk asked, as the human shrugged at her employer. “Allison Buehler?”

She kicked off from the wall and stood up straight. From what Kirk knew of human females, she was tall and slim. Next to most other species however she still had that pure strength, though Allison compounded it with a kind of fierce confidence. She tucked her thumbs into her belt and frowned at him. “…That’s me.”

“How would you like to go home?”

Allison shrugged. “Earth? No thanks.”

Kirk hit a mental wall. He hadn’t anticipated a straightforward ‘no’ at all.

Suspicion and questions maybe, but simply being turned down wasn’t a contingency for which he had planned.

“You…would not?”

Allison shrugged again. “What’s there for me? You know what I used to do on Earth? I fixed bikes and cars, I served coffee, and guys used to stare at my ass. No thanks.”

”…Oh.”

“Why d’you ask, anyway?” she inquired, and Kirk finally managed to place her accent. Boston. “What, you got a ship full of humans you’re taking back home?”

“Yes, actually. Though, you are only the second I have found.”

“Yeah? Shit, you’re a regular good Samaritan, ain’tcha?”

“I suppose…” Kirk agreed.

Allison gave him a long, calculating, discomforting stare and then shrugged again. “Okay. I’m in.”

It was Brelm’s turn to be wrong-footed. He gaped at her. “You…what? You can’t leave, you have a contract!”

Allison laughed. “Brelm, if you can find some asshole on this station who could stop me then go hire them for your bodyguard instead. Being your hired muscle was getting dull anyway.”

She had a gun on her hip, Kirk noted. An actual human firearm. How had she acquired one so far from Earth? Had she had it on her when she was abducted, or had she somehow built one?

However she’d done it, the “friendly” way she rested her hand on that weapon drove the point home for Brelm.

“You—! …Fine. But our contract is void and you forfeit the rest of this cycle’s pay.”

“You never paid me enough anyway,” Allison ambled across the room. “So what’s your name, mister Samaritan?”

“Most humans call me Kirk.”

Allison shook his hand. “Nice to meetcha, Kirk. Let’s go find some folks who want to go home.”

“Miss Boone. A pleasure to meet in the flesh at last.”

Terri didn’t know what she had expected from Mr. Johnson exactly, and really, he lived up to that lack of expectation. He was a dapper, handsome man of about fifty years, with a grey-flecked beard, grey-flecked hair and grey-flecked eyes, wearing a tailored charcoal suit and grey socks. The kind of guy she’d have happily picked up in a hotel bar if she was in the mood for a couple of nights with an older, wealthier man, but no long-term entanglements. He had that curiously accentless voice too, that gave nothing away about where in the world he had been born.

Still, she shook his hand, prepared for—and duly receiving—the circulation-halting firm grip of a man who shook hands for a living.

She was immediately convinced that, whoever he really was, Mr. Johnson was not actually her client. If he turned out not to be a proxy for the real deal, then she would have happily eaten her treasured Chamonix sweatshirt.

Not that this suspicion bothered her much. The amount of money on show meant that frankly the client could have contacted her via strippergram for all Terri cared.

“It’s been a pleasure getting paid.” she said, deciding that playing along with the politeness game could go shove it. “What’s the new job?”

Johnson didn’t seem fazed in the least by this blunt approach, and simply handed her a folder. She flicked through it, seeing names and faces but not bothering to really examine them. One stood out, however.

“Hey, I recognize her. She was that film student who went missing from Vancouver a few days before the attack, right?”

Mr. Johnson smiled the thin-lipped professional smile of somebody who was being paid far more to smile thin-lipped professional smiles at her than she was being paid to receive them. “Xiù Chang, yes. Based on the information you recovered from the abductees, it seems likely that she was abducted herself. The others in that dossier are similar cases, most from this country, a few others from elsewhere in the world.”

“You want me to look around, try and find some more?” Terri asked.

“You have it exactly. That dossier should provide a template for the sort of thing we’re after. Circumstances, factors common to all abductees, and so on.”

“And for this you’re offering me…?”

“A million dollars, Miss Boone. The dramatic turn that events have taken recently means that we’re keen for this to be done with the utmost expediency.”

We, Terri noted. Her sweatshirt was definitely safe.

“I don’t usually say this to the man with the cash.” she said, carefully.

“But…why? Everyone knows that the best working theory for the Darkening so far is that there’s some kind of barrier up around the whole solar system. If these people are outside it, then what’s the rush in finding them? What good is that information?”

“And if they’re wrong, Miss Boone?”

“Are they?”

“That’s hardly relevant.”

“True, it’s not, really. After all even without a giant force field imprisoning us, it’s not like we’ve got hyperspace or whatever, so while I’m grateful for clients who pay so well, I do wonder why you want to spend so much on getting this done “with expediency”.”

“And you will continue to do so, I fear. You understand the assignment?”

Terri sighed. “Chase up on missing persons cases that match the profile of these apparent abductions, report them back to you as I find them, for which I will receive a million dollars.” she said.

“Precisely. It is always a pleasure to do business with a professional, Miss Boone.”

“Sure.” Terri replied. “A pleasure.”

Johnson waited a minute or so after she was gone and then stood, unlocked the side door to his office, and stepped through.

There was a coffin-sized metal-and-glass object along one wall of that room, and the being within—small, naked, grey-skinned, large-eyed and bulbous-headed, stared out at him lazily from where it floated in a gel bath inside.

“She agreed.” he said.

“Good. She is just the right mix of clever and mercenary. An excellent find.”

“Thank you, sir. She does, however, raise a very good point. Exactly what good will this information do us?”

“The more we know about who’s out there, the more I can assist the being who’s tracking them down. I didn’t come here to live out the rest of my life on a pre-warp deathtrap of a planet, Johnson. I want to go home.”

The Corti approximated a grim smile. “I want that barrier down.”

Maria Sadowska didn’t know what to make of anything. She had got used to the idea of alien life, got used to scavenging whatever scraps they could be bothered to deign to kick her way. Her ribs and bones were visible everywhere, her gums bled constantly, and the sores just wouldn’t heal.

And then just like that, the attitude had changed. One minute, she was ignored by aloof creatures who barely deigned to acknowledge her at all, now they saw her and walked across the other side of the transitway. If she went into an eating-house to beg, before she had been lucky to get scraps—now she got as much as she could stuff into herself while around her tables vacated and the owner carried itself in a way that suggested that, if its species could sweat and if that sweat meant what it meant in humans, it would have been sweating.

She hadn’t had enough time to figure out why when she heard the first recognizable word to fall on her ears in months.

“Maria?”

It was an alien. one of the tall white ones with too many legs, though those were usually friendly. Behind it—him?—stood two humans honest-to-god humans. A tall blonde woman who could only be an American with a belt buckle like that, and a shorter, browner man who gave her a nervous smile.

She didn’t care that neither of them looked like they spoke a word of Polish, right now it was enough just to see somebody the right size, with the right number of limbs, eyes, fingers…

Weeping, she slammed into the man at a dead run and hugged him tight, oblivious to the way nearby beings stepped back in alarm at the solid sound their dense deathworlder bodies made. He made awkward comforting noises and rubbed her back.

The American woman put a hand on the shoulder and said something. They obviously had a translator or something, because Maria heard and understood every word.

“She’s in a bad way, Kirk.”

‘Kirk’ shook his mane out and ignored the comment. Instead, he put his own hand on Maria’s other shoulder and spoke softly. “Do not worry. Everything will be alright now, Maria. You are going home.”

“Extraordinary guy.” Dr. Sung commented, once Jenkins had agreed to go under an fMRI scanner and departed with the medical technicians and biologists.

Tremblay made a strained noise. “Seems like a bad case of PTSD to me. Not that I’m an expert.”

Sung had the trademark dry humour of psychologists everywhere. “Well, speaking as an expert, I don’t agree with that diagnosis.” He said. “I think he’s just naturally a cynic and maybe had a few bad experiences. Besides, he actually makes a valid point.”

“Don’t tell me he’s turned you into a misanthrope too?”

“Confidentially? I think he’s the opposite of a misanthrope. The impression I got is that he’s the kind of man who’s a bit too driven by his compassion. But step back and think about it for a second. Personally, I believe his account, which means that he’s more or less the only man on Earth to have the chance of really getting to know what it’s like out there—apparently only a handful of the rest ever got that translation implant, and none of them were out there for as long.”

Tremblay leaned against a table and folded his arms. “Meaning?”

“Meaning he knows how ET thinks. He’s got a bit more of an outsider’s perspective than the rest of us. Maybe the reason he’s so bitter on the species is because he can see what they see in us.” He smiled uncomfortably. “It’s notoriously difficult for people to acknowledge stuff like that.”

“True. Self-deception’s a powerful thing.” Tremblay said, helping himself to a mug of the coffee that had been percolating in the corner of the lab since they arrived. Sung flipped through the document the pilgrimage had assembled.

“Which means by extension that self-awareness is a powerful thing too.” he said.

“The whole world has been going over the question of why an alien civilization would bottle us up, and really the answer’s so obvious when you look at it from Jenkins’ perspective. We’ve been quarantined and the only reason to quarantine something is because it’s dangerous.”

Tremblay sipped his coffee, and poked around the lab, pausing at a sample of alien bone that was attached to a detailed report on its composition, strength, density and toughness—all depressingly inferior to the human norm, to judge by a summary of percentages that ran down one side of the page. “I suppose it’s hard to argue with that.” he mused. “Hmm.. hand me that notepad a second, would you?”

Sung did so, and availed himself of the coffee as well while the general flipped through the contents of the Abductee handbook, logged on to the lab’s computer and watched the footage from Rogers Arena, referring back to the notepad several times.

“Something up, sir?” he asked.

“Just…looking at things from a military perspective.”

Tremblay picked up a pen and tapped the screen with the reverse end. “See here?

The way they exit those pods.”

“What about it?”

“It’s not aggressive enough.” Tremblay said. when Sung raised an eyebrow and gestured a need for more information, he stood up and put down his coffee.

“Okay, so when a soldier enters a hostile area full of known threats, they move like this…”

Miming holding a gun, he barged forward, pretend weapon tucked tight into his shoulder and pointed almost along his sightline, weight forward, posture loose but coiled, ready to spring in any direction as danger demanded. Sung blinked and the general was half-way through dropping some virtual targets with a volley of precise shots. The burst of simulated violence lasted no more than a second or two before he relaxed again.

“Bear in mind that I’ve not done that for real in about ten years, and I’m fifty-one years old. I’ve slowed down a lot. But you get the idea—aggression.

You throw yourself into the fight economically and efficiently—little movements, big effect, make the best possible use of the moment of surprise.”

Tremblay told him. “Now the aliens moved like this…”

Despite being deficient two pairs of legs, Tremblay’s imitation of the beasts on the screen was uncanny. This time, the posture was upright and proud, the invisible gun held awkwardly level with his solar plexus and out away from his body. His progress across the room was notably slower, more like arrogant strutting than a hostile rush, and his “weapon” was much slower to aim.

Everything looked more sluggish, less precise, less deadly compared to the study in focused violence that had preceded it.

“I follow.” Sung nodded.

“Yep. But then we get to…here…” Tremblay clicked forward in the footage to the point where one of the players swept in and smashed one of the aliens to the ice with his hockey stick. Obviously panicked though they were, as the remaining Hunters drew together in a defensive circle, their posture changed as well, into a stance much more like the one the general had first demonstrated—compact, focused, precise.

“That did them no good of course, but it shows that they at least know how to do things properly, so the question is, why weren’t they moving like that in the first place?”

“You have a theory there?” Sung asked him.

“I do. And it’s one that bears out Jenkins’ account of these things being the boogeymen of interstellar space. They practically swaggered out of those pods as if it didn’t matter if they did things the right way or not, like they seriously believed they were invulnerable.” Tremblay picked up his coffee again.

“They got cocky.”

“Does that scare you?”

Tremblay shrugged, shaking his head very slightly with a wide-eyed expression.

“I don’t know what to feel, yet. I’ve not had first-hand experience or years to get my head around the idea. It just doesn’t seem real, somehow.”

They sat in silence for a while, Sung sensing that the general was in the mood for a little peace and quiet, and content to give it to him. Eventually, both their meandering trains of thought were brought back to the here-and-now when Jenkins returned with the scientists.

“Well, you’ll be pleased to know the fMRI corroborated my account.” Jenkins said.

Tremblay accepted the summary and afforded it a quick reading.

“Fine. I think I’m convinced” he said. “But interesting as all of this is, the information’s a bit academic, isn’t it?”

“Yep.” Jenkins agreed. “But I wanted to make sure you’d got your heads around a few things before I dropped the real surprise on you.”

“Which is?”

Jenkins grinned, and retrieved the battered hiking pack he’d been carrying when he first arrived at the base. Buried at the bottom under his spare shirts and underwear was a padded manila envelope, which he presented to the general.

Tremblay opened it and tipped its contents out onto his hand—a small, featureless silver box, about the size of a hard drive. The only feature of note on its surface was what appeared to be a power socket on one end, though not of a make that Tremblay recognised.

They all leaned closer, jaws dropping. Sung broke the silence, though only barely. “Is this…?”

Jenkins’ grin would have put the Cheshire Cat to shame. “Alien, yep. I managed to get my hands on it while working in a ship salvage yard on Freeport Fifty-Two. Smuggled it back to Earth when the observation team finally agreed to strip out my implants and bring me home.”

“What is it?”

The spacefarer’s smile broadened even further.

“This, gentlemen…is an FTL engine.”

Chapter 5.5: Interlude/Ultimatum

Author’s Note: While I think this interlude stands on its own, it was written in response to the events described in Rantarian’s “Salvage: Positions of Power and you may benefit from reading that series up until then first.

By long tradition, the Alpha of Alphas’ place of repose during a Grand Conclave of the Broods was atop the skull of a Vulza. This was not an inherited throne—Hunters did not recognise inherited authority, they recognized only the skilled and tenacious. The Alpha of Alphas therefore rested upon the skull of a Vulza it had personally slain. To their culture and psychology, there could be no better indication of fitness to lead.

It accepted a cup from its personal meat-slave as it listened. For now, it was patient. It had found, over the long years of incumbency, that the patient stalker that surveyed the land, watched its prey and set its trap, could succeed at tasks that the brash predator that simply attacked and counted on its own superiority would be crushed by. Best to let the lesser Alphas bicker and argue and make their declarations and then strike when the meat was sweetest.

Usually. As it listened, as still and patient as the day it had ambushed and slain the Vulza whose skull it now straddled, the burgeoning susurrus as more of the Alphas arrived and added their thoughts to the debate turned first into a roar, then a mental cacophony of Alphas all broadcasting at once. Isolating individual words was impossible, and in any case not necessary—each thought was accompanied by a set of emotional tags, qualifying sentiments to convey the full emotional weight of what its articulator had meant, rather than merely what it had said. The result was a blizzard of emotion swirling around the trophy-hung Conclave chamber, its intensity swelling with each pass.

Ten brood-transports. A thousand hunters. All sent to kill a single human: all dead. The shock and dismay was palpable.

Alpha of Alphas decided that the time had come to settle the Brood of Broods.

It broadcast: +<Impatience; anger; command>+ “ENOUGH!” The mental noise ceased. Lingering emotions hung on the air like brittle harmonics.

It broadcast: +<Resolve; statement>+ “These new things have stolen what is rightfully ours. They have stolen the fear of the Herd. They have slain five broods of our finest hunters.” +<Declaration; resignation>+ “I name them Predators, the first species we have known that is not prey.”

Barely-suppressed shock rippled through the minds of the gathered Alphas, but Alpha of Alphas noted the undercurrent: lack of surprise. It was gratifying to know that at least some of the gathered Broods were led by hunters that could see the future pattern of things so acutely.

It broadcast: +<Statement>+ “There can be only one Predator.”

Only one of the senior and most respected Alphas, leader of the Marrow-Gnaw brood, dared respond to that.

It broadcast: +<Agreement; frustration; Query>+ “The Alpha of Alphas has the truth of it. Yet it has not offered an explanation for how the barrier around their world may be bypassed. The humans are beyond our grasp. Must our vengeance wait until that obstacle is destroyed?”

The Alpha of Alphas acknowledged the point with a gracious tilt of its head, away from the Marrow-Gnaw—a gesture of respect.

It broadcast: +<Rebuttal>+ “The Herd erected that barrier, the Herd will be coerced into lowering it.”

Several others broadcast at once: +< query>+ “How?”

The Alpha of Alphas did not answer them immediately. It instead turned to the meat-slave, which cowered at his attention, naked and wretched as was appropriate.

It was pleasing to the Hunter sense of morality, and to their unique sense of poetry, that a meat-slave should be young and female. As such, young females only just entering their breeding age were prized meat-slaves, reserved as tokens of prestige for only the most powerful Alphas. To devour the Prey was Right: to symbolically devour the future of the prey was Righteous. It was a gesture of supremacy, an enactment of the reality that the Predators held the true power. It was also a test of wisdom—to glut on and waste the future of the Herd might be to deprive the future of the Hunters in turn.

The Alpha of Alphas extended a claw, and hooked the slave gently under her jaw bone, dragging her forward by the delicate exposed tissues of the throat. She was a fur-face, scarcely a morsel to a Hunter of the Alpha of Alphas’ size, but the newness and novelty of their species—and thus their rareness among the meat-stock—only served to enhance her value.

The Alpha of Alphas vocalized, speaking in sound waves for the benefit of the quivering being which did not have the Brood-Mind implants.

It said: “You have served well, Meat.” the word “meat” rippled backwards along its jaw as a wave of cruel teeth, and the slave shook on the point of its claw.

“I grant you a boon. What would you request of me?”

The slave closed her eyes and squeaked her reply, in the proper respectful form.

“If it may please the master of masters, I humbly request that my death be painless.”

It dragged her closer, and she rose on to the very tips of her little paws, standing as tall as her species could, to resist the talon that threatened to open her flesh.

“Your boon is…denied, little one.” the Alpha of Alphas told her, and relished her sob, relished its power over her. “I grant you what you truly crave—your freedom.”

The slave practically fell over then and there, but remained upright still teetering to avoid the cruel point that was dimpling the flesh of her throat.

”…F…freedom, Master of Masters?” He was pleased to see that the light of hope in her eyes was dim. This prey knew not to rejoice until the meat was in the maw, at least.

It released her, and she collapsed, grovelling before it.

“You will be granted a trophy, a ship of the Herd species. You will fly it back to the territory of the Herd, and you will thank me for your life by delivering a message.” It declared.

The slave contrived to bow even lower than she already was, striving to dig into the solid stone of the Conclave chamber. “Command me, master of masters.”

The Alpha of Alphas checked that it had the rapt attention of its subordinates, and broadcast its next words with the full force of command and proclamation that it could project.

“Tell them that any place known to harbour a human will be raided, not by a pack-ship, nor even a brood-transport, but by the Swarm of Swarms.” it said.

“Tell them that any such place will be destroyed, any Prey that lived there devoured. If it is a world, it will be poisoned. If it is an orbit, it will be seeded with mines. Tell them that I shall lead every such raid personally. Tell them that, once there are no humans left abroad in the galaxy, we shall begin the Hunt of Hunts, culling and consuming all that we find until such time as the barrier around Earth is removed.”

It paused. “And tell them that we shall only be satisfied to return to our quiescence once the humans are all devoured. Tell them that the Hunters WILL be feared above all others.”

The prey-slave could not hear it, but in its mind, the combined shout of ten thousand Alphas was deafening, despite containing no words. It was just a simple emotion.

+<APPROVAL>+

Poker continued to give Kirk problems.

Memorizing the values and suits of the cards had been trivial. Memorizing those combinations which were valid for Poker and their hierarchy of value, simple.

Memorizing the bidding rules, easy.

Learning to read the possible combinations that every player at the table might potentially have held had been something of a challenge, but he had mastered it Doing all of that AND trying to make snap decisions about the relative value of his own hand compared to every other player’s while simultaneously attempting to both mislead them and avoid being misled by them was where things descended into the downright hard. His sole advantage was that he had a cybernetic translator assisting him in reading their expressions and body language, while his own remained impenetrable and alien to the humans.

Or so he hoped. That particular theory was starting to look a little shaky given that his bluff had been successfully called four times in a row now, and while he did have two pair, Nines and Queens, the river card had opened up the possibility of a full house.

Would they suspect that he was bluffing again? It wasn’t a weak hand, and only the possibility of a full house after all….

“All in.” he decided, pushing his last few meager chips into the middle.

Maria was looking much better for her time aboard Sanctuary. She’d been able to get some proper nutrition and vitamin supplements, exercise properly, and have an actual social life with interpersonal interaction thanks to the translator she now wore constantly on her wrist.

She was also terrifyingly good at cards, which was why her expression didn’t so much as flicker as she considered Kirk’s move before pushing part of her own, much larger stack into the middle.

“Call.”

She turned out to have two pair—threes and Queens, and Kirk allowed himself a subtle gesture of relief as he collected the pot. He was still in the game.

They had dealt the next hand and Kirk had thrown in the little blind when there was a soft but obtrusive chime that rang through the whole ship. The four humans at the table all looked around bemused at the sound, but Kirk was already standing up when Amir—who had refused to join the game on the grounds that gambling was Haram, forbidden by his religion, called through from the flight deck, where he was learning how to fly the ship with the aid of the simulator systems that Kirk had installed for that very purpose.

“Uh…Kirk?”

The rising, querying note in his voice was one that Kirk knew from long movie nights indicated alarm, warning and an urgent need to draw his attention to something. He was quite impressed with himself that he even managed to beat the other humans to the front of the ship.

Amir was examining one of the most important devices on the ship as they entered. “What’s this thing again?” he asked.

Kirk gritted his teeth. The unit in question was one of the most recognizable on the ship, as it looked almost aggressively low-tech compared to everything else on the flight deck. It had no volumetric projection, no tactile gesture interface, just buttons and a simple, hardy text box designed to weather anything up to and including the destruction of the ship itself.

“The Dominion Emergency Notification System” Kirk told him. “Every Dominion ship has one.”

Inside the device, a handful of Helium ions had ceased to be entangled with another handful stored at the network’s central repository. Centuries of experimentation had finally found a loophole in the principle that quantum-entanglement could not carry information—namely, that it was possible to tell whether or not a particle was in an entangled state and, by breaking that entanglement, send a single bit of data. The process of creating such entangled pairs in useful quantities was hideously expensive, and so the system was used only to send terse and urgent messages that needed to be known immediately by every Dominion ship everywhere, no matter where it might be or what it might be doing.

This particular message read:

ULTIMATUM FROM HUNTERS: DEMAND ALL HUMANS BE TURNED OVER ELSE QUOTE SWARM OF SWARMS ENDQUOTE WILL RAID KNOWN HUMAN LOCATIONS. ALL SHIPS, STATIONS CARRYING HUMAN PASSENGERS ADVISED: JETTISON IMMEDIATELY. NOTIFICATION ENDS.

There was a long, shocked silence, broken finally by Allison.

She spoke quietly and her voice was choked with emotion, but the one that dripped from it like deadly acid was contempt.

“Those cowardly sons of bitches.”

Chapter 6: Taking Back the Sky

One year and seven months after the Vancouver Attack

One broadcast: +<awe; respect; statement>+ “The Alpha-of-Alphas is here.”

Another broadcast: +<anticipation; glee; eagerness>+ “The first human meat to the Alpha-of-Alpha’s maw!”

The Alpha-of-Alphas broadcast: +<rebuke>+ “The quarry is dangerous. Remain focused.”

Chastened, the Brood-Guard fell into line respectfully around and behind the Alpha-of-Alphas as it emerged from its vessel. It stood nearly a head taller than even the largest of the lesser Alphas, and had undergone yet more extensive cybernetic upgrades, bonding all manner of arcane technology—reputedly of its own design—into its own flesh. The result was a mountain of metal and seething power, with seven blinking eyes gazing balefully out at the world of prey around it, covering all the angles, never resting.

Despite its size and bulk, the Alpha-of-Alphas moved in almost perfect stalking silence, a display of its long experience and skill as an apex predator. Without further communication, the Guardian Brood followed their master as it pursued the most recent contact report.

They paused as the lights flickered, and an instant later the deck heaved and rang to another impact—a stray shot from the battle in the void outside. The Dominion’s vessels were selling themselves dearly, even self-destructing rather than accept capture and the fate of all prey. But this was the first time the Swarm-of-Swarms had shown itself, and not even a third of it was committed to the battle. most was still cloaked, on standby for the event that Dominion reinforcements should arrive. By the decree of Alpha-of-Alphas, the Hunters were yet to show their full strength. That third, however, was still many thousands of ships, and the defenders had either fled or were being swept aside in their suicidal bid to protect the station for as long as possible.

The part inside found their quarry when a Brood-lesser tumbled into the corridor before them, crushed and broken, dead before it had stopped sliding.

The Alpha-of-Alphas broadcast: +<command>+ “Release the drones.”

They did so, a swarm of insect-sized devices that would record what happened next and inject the footage directly onto the prey’s data networks. This, they knew, would prove to the prey beyond any doubt whom they should most be fearing.

The microdrones zipped up and out, retreating to the corners and ceiling of the room the dead Hunter had been thrown from, and then The Alpha-of-Alphas stalked through the door.

Caleb wouldn’t admit it, but he was starting to get scared. The children were hiding in a storage locker behind him, and so far he’d kicked the ass of every white freak that had come for him, even ten at a time. But he was tiredexhausted, even. Punch-drunk from so many of those weak-ass ray guns, floating in a shaky sea of stale adrenaline, bleeding from his nose and ears, bruised over practically every inch of his body, he still willed himself to stand up and face the next monster that came to challenge him.

This one, unusually, came alone. It was larger than the others, and armour-plated. It did not, however, seem to be carrying one of those pulse guns.

Caleb was no idiot—he wasn’t about to assume that the monster was unarmed, and he doubted that he could have got past that armour when at his peak, let alone now. He could see the writing on the wall, and felt strangely at peace because of it.

“Time to die, huh?” he asked the monster, which surprised him by growling a reply in English. it actually spoke the English, too, he could tell the difference.

“Yesth. Ti-ime to die. M-eat to the m-aw.” it said.

“Fuck you,” Caleb told it.

He charged.

The alien raised its arm, aimed at the ground in front of him and fired, once.

He died.

The Alpha-of-Alphas broadcast: +<Satisfaction>+ “The builders are to be commended. These nervejam grenade launchers work exactly as anticipated.”

The servos of its powered exoskeleton whined as it picked up the dead human by the back of his neck. The quarry seemed even heavier in death—the co-ordination and balance that had kept it upright and agile during his life was gone now, replaced by a few lingering twitches as the last jolts of the Nervejam effect rampaged around that delicately-optimized masterwork of a nervous system.

All that was left was a mass of meat and bone as heavy as the Alpha-of-Alphas itself was even in its exoskeleton, and a fraction of the size.

No matter. The Prize awaited. Its helmet dismantled itself, dissolving into a swarm of construction nanites that crawled back into their hive at the nape of the Alpha-of-Alpha’s neck. It considered its limp prize for a second, and then opened its jaws as wide as they would go, bit into the human’s throat with all the strength it could muster, and—with some effort—ripped free a mouthful.

The meat was indescribable. Dense, lean, rich, full of that indefinable spark of sentience. It exceeded even the Alpha-of-Alpha’s most extravagant fantasies.

+<ecstasy>+ “MEAT TO THE MAW!!!”

the cry was taken up among the brood, it spread to the swarm, and from there to the Swarm-of-Swarms and through them, every Hunter in the Galaxy.

The first Great Hunt had been successful.

Two years and Five Months after the Vancouver attack

Captain Rylee Jackson. It was a good name, and she hoped that people would remember it, and for the right reasons. She hoped that she would be remembered for earning this mission on skill and merit, rather than being sneered at as a diplomatic bit of political correctness, given the job just because she was a black woman.

It was a crazy mission. She’d gone to church, said her prayers, prepared herself as best she could. There was a non-zero chance that things could go horribly wrong, but all test pilots knew that. You just had to trust your sled.

“Houston, Pandora. Final checklist complete.” she intoned, her tone steadier than she felt.

“Copy Pandora. There’s no window here, Rylee, so just go whenever you’re ready for it.” She knew that her flight operator down in Houston was probably just as scared as she was, but there was that voice, the calm and steady one that said everything, no matter how dramatic, with perfect clarity and confidence. She knew that even if she disintegrated in a few seconds, that professional tone would never crack. She could become a smear of plasma across half the heavens, and add her name to the victims of humanity’s odyssey, and that voice would coldly describe her demise as a “malfunction.”

In its way, that was comforting.

“Houston, Pandora…Let’s take back the sky.”

She allowed herself a smile of triumph at not repeating Armstrong’s mistake and choking on her big quote. Still congratulating herself, she pressed the button.

Two seconds and a billion kilometers later, with a ferociously ecstatic whoop, Rylee Jackson entered the history books as the first human being to outrun light.

Jenkins’ bar erupted. The entirety of the Scotch Creek base staff had crowded in to watch the moment when their two years of hard work had paid off, and paid off it had, in style. From Claude Nadeau’s breakthroughs in electrostatic field emitters that had allowed Pandora to fly on gargantuan weightless wings of pure force-field and boost itself into space for a fraction of the expense required by a traditional rocket, to Ted Bartlett unravelling the secrets of spacetime field distortion technology and inventing a distortion drive that actually worked on a reasonable budget of energy, without any awkward relativistic time dilation and without ripping apart the sun in the process.

General Tremblay smiled indulgently as the crowd of ecstatic scientists formed a circle with their arms around each other’s shoulders and launched into a drunken, cacophonous rendition of “We Are the Champions.”

“Heck of a day.”

He turned to Kevin Jenkins, who had been the one to start the song on the bar’s music system. He had fit into the base perfectly, falling comfortably into his niche as the Scotch Creek Research Facility’s resident purveyor of alcohol, caffeine, filling food and televised sports matches. Probably two-thirds of the major breakthroughs at the base had taken place over coffee and bacon cheeseburgers at the bar’s increasingly-scuffed wooden tables.

“Heck of a day,” Tremblay agreed, trying to make it sound like his heart was in it. Jenkins just handed him another coffee—black, two sugars—with an expression that said he could see straight through the general’s attempt at positivity. He was as bad as Dr. Sung sometimes.

“Shitty time for a divorce, general,” Jenkins said.

Check that. Jenkins could be far, far worse than the doctor sometimes. He didn’t have a professional code of conduct stopping him from being blunt.

“How…how did you guess?”

“Doesn’t take a rocket surgeon,” Jenkins told him. “You’ve been sitting there staring at your wedding band looking like you took a dump and found a kidney in the bowl.”

“Is there such a thing as a good time for a divorce?” Tremblay asked.

Jenkins thought about it. “When you wake up the morning after a night out on Vegas and there’s a shaved orangutan in your bed?”

Tremblay couldn’t resist it: he laughed. Jenkins gave a satisfied nod. “How long were you married?” he asked.

“Ten years. Stefan’s a great guy and I love him so much it hurts, but…y’know, he wanted me to retire and adopt a couple of kids with him. But then Rogers Arena, this base…” Tremblay sipped his coffee as he trailed off.

“Life happens, man,” Jenkins told him. “At least it’s not boring. Be a whole lot worse for you if you were moping around at home lovesick and not knowing what to do with yourself.”

“True. At least I can focus on my work…” Tremblay smiled at that, his first genuine smile of the day, as he looked at the big-screen on the wall, where mission control at Houston was just starting to settle down from its jubilation and get back to work. “And we did good today, didn’t we?”

“You did damn good, man,” Jenkins said. “Sure, that kid Jackson’s the name everyone will remember, but she’d never have got up there without you. Hell, it was you persuaded the treaty members to unify their space programs. I guarantee that Pandora would never have been funded without that.”

Tremblay nodded, and put his drink down. “Thanks, Kevin. I needed that.”

“Anytime, Martin.”

“She has been in there for [two months] now. We think she managed to tap into a water pipe and from the smell she maybe even set up a Dizi Rat farm in there.

And she refuses to come out.”

“Would you, when the galactic news is full of members of your species being thrown out of the airlock?”

“Look we weren’t going to do that. We were just going to…you know, evict her. Give her a little ship and some nutrient spheres and point her towards a nice Class Eleven somewhere. She’s from a Class Twelve, right? She should have no problem surviving there.”

Kirk issued the equivalent of a frustrated sigh. Like all Rrrrtktktkp’ch, he was fond of his Vz’ktk cousins, but they really were as dense as a bag of gold sometimes.

“I did some research on this one. She used to sell insurance before the Corti took her. She used to sit in an office with a headset on talking to people over audio-comms. On her days off, she used to fashion garments out of spun animal hair, and went swimming in a heated, disinfected pool. She may be native of a Class Twelve but frankly I think she might have starved to death on a Class Six,” he said. A thought struck him and he chuckled. “They abducted her on the way home from that pool, actually. Think she knows where her towel is?”

“Her…Towel? Uh…I don’t…nobody ever…”

“In-joke. Never mind.” It was hard being a fan of human literature sometimes.

”…Okay? Well. I don’t know how you’re going to get her out of there, nobody can fit in there except maybe for a Gaoian or Corti, and even if they could, she’s human. She broke a security officer’s leg accidentally!” “Oh, it’s okay. I think she just needs to see a friendly face.”

The Vz’ktk security officer looked up as the door cycled to admit Maria, Amir and Allison, the latter of whom flipped a jaunty mock salute to the stunned officer before she and Amir stooped slightly and presented their linked hands to boost Maria up into the open ventilation duct below which Kirk and the officer had been conversing. A second later, Amir boosted Allison up into the vent as well, and then leaned against the wall and waited, watching the tall blue being with that unsettling binocular gaze that seemed to flicker all over him, taking in every detail.

“You brought more?!”

“Several,” Kirk said, secretly enjoying himself. “Don’t worry, they’ve all got disease suppression implants.”

“But.. don’t you know how dangerous…?”

“Who, them or the Hunters? They’re nice people. A little strange, some of them, and I really can’t tell if that’s because of the isolation or if that’s how they always were, but trust me, every single one’s as moral and good-natured a being as you could wish to meet. And the Hunters don’t have the first clue my little flying sanctuary exists, so far as we know. Besides, if this goes as well as it usually does, she’ll be on board among her own kind and we’ll be gone soon enough.”

“Sanctuary. You’re…keeping them safe?”

Kirk nodded. “Somebody has to take care of the poor little monsters when the galaxy’s losing its mind,” he said.

There was a scuffle from the vents, announcing Allison and Maria’s return.

Behind them was Abigail, the woman they had come to rescue. She dropped lightly to the deck in the—for her—light gravity, shot the officer a glare that wished it could be as deadly as the rest of her, and shook hands with Amir, who extended a friendly arm to invite her back to the ship.

Kirk was secretly delighted to notice that she had a large beige towel draped over her shoulders.

“See? Problem solved. Now you can put out the word that your station is a human-free zone and the Great Hunt will pass you by, hmm?”

He said it lightly, but there was an accusatory edge to the apparently benign observation. He regretted it when the officer wilted slightly, and reminded himself that it wasn’t the poor young male’s fault—he was just following orders, in a job not dissimilar to the one Kirk himself had held only a few years ago.

On a whim he decided to repair things and sent a small currency gift to the officer’s personal network.

“Here. Get yourself some tllktrrk’nq or something. My treat. You’ll get in touch if any more humans show up?”

The officer offered a defeated gesture of assent. “Sure. Yes. I will.”

“Good. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.”

He swept from the room. Behind him, the pressure of sheer charm that he’d been keeping up the whole time slowly deflated, and the security officer recovered himself enough to glance at his personal funds, the ceiling vent, and the door.

“What the sh’rrt,” he muttered.

“Okay, I’ve seen some fast-talking in my time, but you had that guy just swallowing every word you said within seconds of meeting him.” Allison commented during the walk back to the Sanctuary. “How’d you do that?”

“Vz’ktk have an instinctive respect for the judgement and intelligence of my own species.” Kirk explained. “All you have to do is keep talking in an amiable ‘I know everything about everything’ tone of voice and they’ll agree to sell you their sister if you keep it up long enough.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Exaggerating,” Kirk allowed. “but they really do grow up with the idea that we’re the smart ones. That builds a degree of innate respect and trust.”

The Sanctuary had been modified yet again since the Hunter Ultimatum, growing three rings of cabins that encircled the reactor, enough for four times its current population. Given that they were sized for the average species, they were huge by human standards—the beds large and luxurious, with plenty of room for floor exercises. Kirk had permanently set the gravity, temperature and pressure on those decks to mimic sea level on Earth, and left the human passengers to their own devices.

That ultimatum had made Kirk’s job much easier. Ships, bases and stations across the inhabited galaxy had scrambled to appease the Hunters, and the humans living aboard them had understandably reacted to protect themselves. Finding abductees was now as simple as following the requests for military support from the Dominion’s naval forces.

And of course, the humans they found were more than happy to leave. Showing up with three friendly homo sapiens and sharing the name of the ship seemed to be pretty much all it took, now. The most time-consuming part was all the traveling.

Still, in two years they had averaged slightly less than one new rescue a month.

Too many times they had arrived to find the human they were chasing had already left. A few times, they’d arrived to find their sought refugee had been gassed, or had their hidey-hole depressurized.

One station’s overseer admitted that they had resorted to Nervejam, and Allison caught Maria’s wrist just in time. If that grief-driven slap had connected…

The station’s overseer still got an up-close and personal introduction to the wrong end of Allison’s pistol, however, and a personal promise that there would be a reckoning someday.

The whole ship had been in a subdued mood for several days after that incident.

They’d held a “wake,” a kind of bawdy funeral service. Kirk hadn’t joined in.

Twenty-two humans throwing a party to help themselves feel alive in the face of futility and pointless death was more than even he could handle.

Three of the twenty-two—twenty-three, now—only rarely showed their faces, preferring to lurk up in the cabins and avoid him. The rest were happy to spend time in the large recreational area, playing games, watching movies, or just hanging out and talking. He was pretty sure there was a fair amount of sex going on in the cabins, too: months or years of isolation without seeing others of their own kind had left many of the refugees with unresolved tensions that they were vigorously and gladly resolving.

Kirk had first started researching human sexuality long ago when the Observatory was first established. What he found had initially disturbed him, and then later made him jealous. Among his own kind, the point of reproduction was reproduction. It brought emotional fulfillment and intellectual pleasure to carry out the act of continuing the species, and the act itself was reportedly pleasantly intimate and had some enjoyable sensations. Kirk didn’t know first-hand, having fathered no children.

For Humans, however, the act itself seemed to bring intense physical pleasure, as well as considerable emotional satisfaction and positive social repercussions. Like everything the species did, there were conflicting norms and etiquettes everywhere. There was a stigma to having no sex and a stigma to having too much. There was a stigma to having never had sex, and a stigma to having it prior to engaging in a legal bond-partnership. There was a stigma to sex with members of the same sex—and the fact that this was even an option had been a source of major confusion for Kirk at first—and yet most humans seemed to be to some extent inclined to bisexuality.

Then there were gender identities: ones that correlated with the biological sexes, ones the directly opposed them, and gender identities that had nothing to do with either of the available biological options at all.

The whole thing was bewildering and strange, but also exciting, and made Kirk feel a little envious. He had long since realized that for all their physical impressiveness and mental agility, humans were still just as fragile as anybody else in their own ways. To learn that they had a whole type of pleasure available to them which Kirk would never be able to experience for himself felt a little unfair.

He was wondering how it had helped them survive the conditions on Earth when his train of thought was interrupted by a call from the ship. He had left Lewis in charge of the ship’s sensors and comms.

“Kirk man, uh…like, we just got some pretty big news, dude.”

Lewis was…interesting. They’d picked him up at a Corti research facility on a barren planet that officially had no name but which Lewis insisted was called ‘Kerbin’ on the grounds that he’d been the first to name it. Although he’d originally been taken there as a test subject, his ‘escape’ had apparently consisted of amiably disabling the forcefield on his containment cell before letting himself into the lab to explore some avenues of research that his abductors hadn’t even considered. He was the only one on the crew who’d needed persuading to leave, though it hadn’t been a difficult negotiation: His objections had faded the instant he realized there were ‘chicks’ aboard Sanctuary.

Kirk hadn’t yet managed to figure out if his speech pattern was due to the permanent influence of some Corti experiment or a lifetime of recreational narcotics, or if was just an affectation. Whatever the explanation, it was clear that behind that dopey dude attitude was a mind to rival the very greatest alumni of the Corti Directorate’s education system.

Strangely, he and Amir had become instant best friends. Kirk had no idea why.

“Share it.”

“Uh…news from Earth, dude. Looks like our guys just went FTL for like the first time ever.”

Kirk came to a dead halt in the hallway, oblivious to the beings that were edging around the knot of three humans to get past him.

“Uh…Kirk? Why are you smiling, man?”

“Oh, no reason. It’s just nice when your friends impress you.”

“Meeting is called to order in the chair and so on let’s get on with this. How did they get FTL so quickly?”

The scribe scrambled to finish the block of formalities that were the usual preface to meetings of the Dominion Security Council, and then gave up in bewilderment as the representatives of five different species all tried to speak at once.

While most of the remaining representatives just looked silent and glanced sideways at one another, one raised a huge hand and waited, radiating a patient pink.

“Councillor Vedreg?” the chairman addressed him. “You have an opinion.”

“I do.” The clamour died, and they turned to listen to him.

He took a moment to gather his shawl of office around his upper shoulders and strike a suitable statesbeinglike posture before launching into his explanation.

“We have reason to believe that a functioning wormhole beacon may have been smuggled to Earth during the early years of the Observatory program. Despite having been moved outside of the barrier, the Observatory still exists and has been monitoring spacetime distortions around Earth and its near orbit. Among the many traces we found in the subcycles preceding the launch and test flight of this human craft, were some that corresponded to the generation of experimental wormholes.”

“Reverse-engineering a working Apparent Linear Velocity drive from the temporal stasis technology contained in Hunter assault pods would have yielded FTL technology ahead of schedule anyway, gentlebeings, but when coupled with access to a working jump beacon…”

The Rauwryhr delegate interrupted him at that. “Jump beacons are useless by themselves,” she pointed out.

“For travel, maybe. For the purposes of learning the fundamentals of spatial distortion science, you could not ask for a better specimen technology,” Vedreg explained calmly.

The Gaoian delegate—a venerable male with long streaks of white around his eyes and muzzle—spoke up. “Need I remind the council that while the reforms to Dominion law concerning the status of intelligent non-FTL capable species is still being negotiated, the law has always been clear that once a planetary civilization has successfully and safely caused one living member to travel faster than light, they are official sentients and must be afforded the full rights and protection of a provisional member?” He said. “I must repeat that it is the official stance of the Clans of Gao that the quarantine field is a crime against the human race and that it should be removed as soon as possible.”

There was the general equivalent of nodding and “hear, hear.”

Vedreg’s flanks flushed a complicated medley of reds and purples. “In a purely personal capacity, Father Vyan, I agree, and I would like it on record that I voted against the proposal when it was first tabled in the Confederate Assembly,” he said. “I was outvoted, and it remains beyond my power to countermand that decision.”

Kirk’s replacement as the representative for the Vz’ktk Domain spoke up. “But it is not beyond your species’ power to ignore the Founding Charter,” she retorted.

“The Confederacy is constitutionally obligated to remove that quarantine field.”

Vedreg clamped down on emotional luminescence, allowing only a forthright grey shaded with firm dark orange to show. “You are correct, of course. However…”

He trailed off, searching for the correct way to phrase his next explanation.

The Corti representative finally chimed in, deploying a careful “…however?”

into the conversation at the precise moment it would do the most harm to his confidence.

“However the barrier cannot be removed,” Vedreg explained.

“It must be,” asserted the Corti representative, calmly.

“I do not mean that my government is officially unwilling to remove it—though that is in fact the case—but that we do not in fact have the ability to do so.”

This was met with an incredulous silence that he rushed to fill.

“Humanity have attracted the ire of the Hunters. FTL-capable sentients though they may now be, they lack the orbital defensive infrastructure to protect themselves from the ‘Swarm of Swarms’ should it descend upon an unprotected Earth. The best guess of our own Xenopsychologists is that the Hunters are not afraid of humanity, but are instead jealous of them. The humans have, after all, attracted considerable attention and fear in recent cycles, and the best guesses we have into Hunter psychology is that they view it as imperative that they be feared.

“The existence of a species which we, their prey, apparently fear even more than the Hunters themselves, is a direct affront to them. So, dropping that barrier would result in the almost inevitable genocide of a species that, for all their physical and mental tenacity, could not hope to survive a sustained orbital barrage.”

Again, the Corti spoke up. “A morally sound reason,” he said, making the words “morally sound” carry the same weight of emotional opinion as he might have said “financially questionable.” “So let us hear about your inability to remove the barrier. Your own experts designed it, did they not?”

“Indeed…to defend our own systems from external military threats. Converting one into a containment barrier was done hastily by the simple expedient of programming the emitter nexus to wrap itself up inside its own field.”

“Surely it can be remotely deactivated?”

“You must understand, Councillor, this was a defensive tool. The risk that it might be hacked and disabled by an appropriately skilled communications expert would have been a military liability. The device does not communicate with other systems via anything other than a physical connection.”

The Corti nodded understanding. “Which is now impossible to establish thanks to the way it is contained within its own field,” He sniffed his disdain. “Rather an unfortunate oversight by your engineers.”

This sentiment was echoed around the table.

“The Confederacy will make all appropriate reparations to the human race of course,” Vedreg said, hurriedly.

“A safe assertion, considering that they appear to be indefinitely contained,”

the Gaoian said. “The Mother-Supreme of our Clan of Females will be notified of this, however. If you cannot make appropriate reparations to the human race, you can at least offer all necessary steps to compensate those humans who were stolen—” here, the furred councillor shot a glare at the Corti representative, which the latter being totally failed to acknowledge “—from their homeworld and have taken up residence in the galaxy at large, and to those species and organisations that have taken it upon themselves to provide them with sanctuary and a place to live.”

“Meaning Gao, I assume,” the Domain’s representative noted, with all of a Rrrrtktktkp’ch’s dry wit.

“Among others,” the councillor agreed, defiantly. She was about to offer a sharp retort when Vedreg held up one enormous hand, flanks shaded to indicate resignation.

“The Gaoian representative speaks the truth, the Confederacy is thus obligated to compensate them,” He agreed, having spent several boring days reviewing the law and precedents that applied in this scenario, none of which had contained any help for the Confederacy. “What are the terms requested by the Clans of Gao?” he asked.

“Food supplies, nutritional supplements and medical supplies necessary to support all humans who choose to accept sanctuary on our homeworld, plus appropriate military hardware and assistance to defend our planet from Hunter retaliation,” the councillor replied, having clearly memorised the terms in advance. “An immediate cessation of the information blackout surrounding Earth and the establishment of diplomatic channels so that all stranded humans may directly contact their loved ones. Remunerative compensation to our people equivalent to ten thousand Dominion development credits per human refugee who settles on Gao for longer than two cycles, and a five-cycle waiver on our obligation to commit units to the Celzi conflict.”

“Those last two terms are unacceptable,” the Rauwryhr delegate objected, siding with the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun.

“Excessive, certainly.” Vedreg agreed. “While the Guvnurag have no grounds to appeal the first, second and third terms, my people have the right to negotiate over the penultimate term, and that last one is a matter for the security council.”

The chairman spoke. “Then it is the ruling of this council that the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy is to pay to the Clans of Gao and to any other people or organisation who harbour human refugees the following: food, nutritional supplements and medical supplies to provide for that human’s needs, military assistance and/or hardware sufficient to realistically defend them from Hunter attacks. Furthermore, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy is required to permit ships to approach the Sol blockade and communicate with Earth,” it said.

“The motions have also been tabled first that the Confederacy is to pay ten thousand Dominion development credits per human refugee to any species or organisation which protects them, with the motion’s opposition requesting negotiation of that amount. As many of each opinion vote now.”

There were a few busy moments while each representative made their decision.

“The second motion is that the Gaoian Clans should be granted a five-cycle waiver on military involvement in the Celzi conflict, with the opposition denying that motion outright. As many of each opinion vote now.

Again, they voted.

“As to the first motion, being the four thousand three hundred and third vote of this council, There were two votes in favour, eight votes against, and three abstentions. The opposition has it, and the requested sum of credits will be renegotiated.” The chairman sounded the little chime that ceremonially marked that a decision was complete. “As to the second motion, being the four thousand three hundred and fourth vote of this council, there was one vote in favour, twelve votes against, no abstentions. The opposition have it and the motion is defeated.”

The second chime was the signal for council scribes, aides and messenger drones to zip about the place in a frenzy of activity. The chairman raised its ceremonial rod and spoke slightly louder about the noise. “This council session will now recess until the next standard diurnal period.”

Two years and seven months after the Vancouver attack

“Civilian vessel, this is Confederacy destroyer Vugarunguvrunek. Identify yourself and state your intentions.”

“Vugarunguvrunek, this is yacht Sanctuary requesting permission to approach the broadcast point.”

“Permission granted, Sanctuary. You are cleared for one burst transmission of no larger than three terabytes.”

“Acknowledged, Vugarunguvrunek.”

Thanks to the convenient relay offered by a Corti communications monitoring station that had been installed twenty years previously, it was a trivial matter for the Sanctuary to squirt a total of twenty-five videos towards Earth.

Twenty-four of them were from the human refugees, many of them tearful as they finally took the chance to relieve their loved ones’ fears.

The twenty-fifth was from Kirk.

“Kevin. I hope this finds you still alive and complaining: I know for a fact that you’re well wrapped-up in whatever’s going on down there. You see, I knew about the jump beacon.

The one you stole was trash, by the way: so I snuck a working replacement into your bag. Glad to see it worked as planned. Tell whoever you gave it to that if they tune it with the algorithm that’s on screen right now, we can start sending some of these people home.

Now, on to the really important stuff. If I know humans, you’re probably already well on your way to dropping this barrier somehow, but take it from your old friend: for the time being, that would be a very, very bad idea. You see, a lot has happened up here since Vancouver…”

Chapter 6.5: Interlude/Jargon

Two years and nine months after the Vancouver Attack

“A screensaver? Not seen one of those in years, Ted…”

“Uh, that’s…actually a simulation…”

Technically, Ted Bartlett and Claude Nadeau held the ranks of Major and Captain respectively. In this shared office, however, their ranks meant nothing to them.

Neither man had joined the military to salute and march around and uphold all the pomp and ceremony of martial tradition. They’d done it because the military paid well.

The fields of study that had seen them through University were becoming hazy and uncertain now. The last two years had forced them both to branch out from their respective disciplines of Cosmology and Electrostatics, and become multi-disciplinarians. It was no good focusing on one small aspect when the results came from a more holistic approach.

“What of?”

“It’s a folded-space topological problem.”

“We already cracked Super-L, Ted.”

“One type, sure. That little book detailed three kinds, eh?”

“I thought the general’s planning to recommend that we’re not interested in type 2 ERBs?”

“And for good reason, sure. But…”

“What?”

“I sent the tuning algorithm to a friend of mine, she lectures in mathematics over in Nottingham, England. Purely as an abstract puzzle in search of a solution, eh?”

“We already know the solution, though.”

“She found two, Claude.”

“No shit?”

“Nope. She gave me an alternative solution which is pseudo-stable for R T less than one if delta-E set one to set two is greater than the exponent of the tensor of set three p-one to p-two.”

Nadeau grabbed a paper and ball-point pen—there was yet to be a better substitute for the brainstorming physicist—and scribbled out a handful of equations. “…Right.” He considered it, then moved a few terms around, playing with the algebra. “I see it, but…What’s the Lebesgue?”

“Three.”

“That’s helpful. You’re sure, now?”

Bartlett sketched out a proof, to his colleague’s satisfaction.

“The only awkward bit is that exponent.” he said. “I worked on it some more and got this graph.”

It was mostly red, though running diagonally up and right was a curved funnel of slowly-widening blue. He tapped a point towards its flared end. “Fifty grams.”

he said.

“Yeah, at seventy KC,” Nadeau said.

“Possible.”

“Hence the screensaver?”

“Hence the simulation, yes. All we need is an intersection of two ISD fields of those magnitudes which remains within acceptable bounds for, uh…six to the minus ten S.”

“Think there is one?”

“Not enough to bet time on the IBM on it. It’s busy enough with the ESF equations for your ‘put the energy companies out of business’ idea.”

“Which is why you’re running a fancy new screensaver—”

”—simulation—”

”—on your personal laptop rather than wasting base resources. Right.”

Bartlett sighed, and with a push of his legs, boosted his chair over to the office’s perpetual coffee source. “I tell you Claude, I’m jealous of your field sometimes. ESFs are going to change the world more than ISD is.”

“You might be wrong there, Major.”

“Oh come on. You’ve already given us the tech for cheap spaceflight, viable asteroid mining, trivially easy near-Earth object tracking and deflection and buildings ten times as tall as we could already build. What have I got, besides one experimental spaceship that got named by our bartender?”

“Well,” Claude Nadeau said, slowly and with care, “Your screensaver just turned green…” Bartlett sighed. “For the last time, it’s a simula—wait, what?”

Chapter 7: Tensions

Three years after the Vancouver Attack

I-5, Northbound. Everett, Washington
thup, thup…thup, thup…thup, thup…

“Urgh…”

[click]

♪ might as well face it…might as well face it you’re addicted to lo-ove…might as well face it…might as well face it…might as well face it…♫

The five o’ clock freeride, classic rock, 92.9… KISM

♫ See me ride out of the sunset, on your color TV screen. Out for all that I can get, If you know what I mean…♪♫

[click]

“100% chance of rain, but we got a great match-up tonight, Washington taking on the Dallas Cowboys…”

[click]

”…results are in from across the globe as China announced their representative for the first meeting of the Global Representative Assembly, and not a moment too soon with the Assembly’s first meeting taking place next week in Cape Town, South Africa to appoint the world’s ambassador in space. CRAZY, right? And just think, this time three years ago we thought the alien abduction people were all wack-jobs…”

“Most were.”

”…and then good old NASA, and—forgive me folks, but I still think of it as an AMERICAN institution, the “National” in “National Aeronoautics and Space Administration” stands for US after all… They may have kept the acronym, but don’t try and sell me this bull about how it’s the NATO Aeronautics and Space Agency nowadays, NASA landed men on the moon back in ‘69 and I don’t care if it was a Canadian scientists who invented the warp drive or whatever they’re calling it, but it was an *American who flew Pandora, am I right?”

“Asshole.”

“So Pandora flew to, I dunno, Mercury and back…”

“Jupiter, dickwad.”

”…And all of a sudden it’s like “hello humanity, welcome to the stars, join us all in sunshine and hugs and yeah we’re really sorry about LOCKING YOU UP, please do us the honor of sending forth what you hoo-mens call an ‘am-bass-a-door’ that we might blah blah.” Why are we even bothering? you know what those alien douchenozzles deserve? Two fingers, one on each hand! Tell ‘em to come back once they’ve found Jesus!”

“Oh for—” [click] “—fuck’s sake!”

thup, thup…thup, thup…thup, thup…

”…Fuck it.”

[click]

”…And we put a Democrat in our seat on this Assembly? I thought we were supposed to be appointing somebody to represent America’s interests, am I right?”

“Ugh.”

[click]

♫♪ …in New England town, feel the heat comin’ down. I’ve got to keep on keepin’ on, you know the big wheel keeps on spinnin’ around and I’m goin’ with some hesitation. You know that I can surely see, that I don’t want to get caught up in any of that…♪♫

“Sigh.”

thup, thup…thup, thup…thup, thup…

1,500 Km above the Arabian Peninsula

“Ping NEO-tracking.”

”…Green.”

“Test EACS.”

“Check.”

“SUBLIME power to idle.”

”…Check.”

“Power to ISDE.”

“Check.”

“Test ERB-2.”

”…Check.”

“Test ESFALS.”

”…Check.”

“Test ESHOD.”

“Check.”

“Pandora, Mission Control. Checklist complete.”

“Mission Control, Pandora. Checklist complete.”

“Copy that, Rylee. Scotch Creek reports the package is ready. In your own time.”

“Hey, what is this, Houston? My fifth?”

“Fifth, yes.”

She laughed. “And nobody else has even done this once, yet.”

“Elitist. Just try not to slam into the moon at seven kilolights, we’ve only got one.”

She decided that she liked her new controller. He wasn’t afraid to drop the professional bullshit and send a joke up the line to comfort her nerves.

“I’ll try, Mission Control. Pandora, going FTL.”

On her own insistence, the silly big red button had been replaced with a thrust lever. It just felt more right, more Star Wars. Granted it only output a binary “go” command to the navigation computer rather than providing analogue control over the engine power, but it still just felt right to reach forward, grip a solid chunk of plastic and metal, and push it firmly forward as far as it would go.

She patted an exposed patch of Pandora’s hull fondly. “Let’s ride, baby.”

This was by far the shortest hop they had yet done, she didn’t even have time to see anything happen: the moon just became bigger. In less time than an eyeblink, it ceased to be a distinct object in the sky, assessable in its entirety with the naked eye. Now it was an expansive feature. She realised she was now the closest person to Luna since 1972, although still deceptively far away at some sixty-four thousand kilometers, close to but not directly on top of the earth-moon L1 point.

“Mission Control, Pandora, checkpoint reached.”

“Nicely done. ESDAR has you on target to a…0.3% deviation.”

“My compliments to navigation!” She could already hear the applause in the background.

“Yeah, they’re pretty happy. ERB-2 is still reading green, I have go code from the package.”

“Copy, Control. Opening the door.”

This piece of equipment was mission-specific, and although Pandora had been designed with future-proofing in mind, she hadn’t been designed to interface with alien technology, which was why the mission package was activated via a smartphone that had been duct-taped to the flight console.

She reached out and tapped the app icon with the stylus that had been secured to the back of her flight glove with the most useful substance in space, some more duct tape.

A space station blinked into existence three kilometers in front of her. All things considered, its arrival was depressingly anticlimactic. She’d been hoping for special effects, maybe some kind of wibbly-wobbly space fireworks. At most she detected a faint shimmering of the stars around it, as if space had bulged gently.

The station itself, however, was impressive. Pandora was by no means a small vehicle, but the station was orders of magnitude larger, reminding her of the time she had gone surfing in California only for a Right Whale to breach the surface just ten feet to her right, but scaled up to eleven. It was like being ambushed by an airport terminal.

Fortunately, they had thought to compare notes as to communication protocols, wavelengths and codecs before the mission, so the transmission from it was clear and bright.

The voice that spoke did so in curiously accentless English. “Embassy Station 172, jump complete. Our thanks.”

“Welcome to Sol, 172.”

“It is a pleasure to be here, Pandora. Will you be docking?”

“Not in my mission profile, 172, I’m sorry. I’d love to come aboard.”

“We understand, Pandora. Launching shuttles, they will follow you on autopilot to a safe landing facility.”

“I look forward to coming back.”

“We look forward to it too. In fact, we request that you be the pilot who escorts your world’s selected Ambassador on board. It seems only fair.”

Rylee grinned inside her helmet. “Wild horses couldn’t hold me back.” she promised.

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility

“Hey, Kevin.”

Jenkins turned at a familiar voice speaking his name, and laughed aloud when he saw who it was.

“Jesus shit. Terri Boone? When the hell was the last time I saw you?”

She’d lost weight and muscle tone, her hair had gone from a shoulder-length bob to halfway down her back, and she looked like death warmed up, but she still treated him to a smile.

“About two and a half years ago,” She sat down. “Nice bar you’ve got here. You can sell booze on a military base?”

“Why not? They aren’t on duty all the time, and they’ve got families. Good coffee, too, and you look like you need some.”

“Oh, hell yes. You do lattes?”

He busied himself with the espresso machine. “The best lattes in Scotch Creek, I promise.” He said, tamping down the coffee grounds and locking the portafilter into the group.

“I’ve seen Scotch Creek, that’s not much of a boast.” she said, watching as he selected a panini and slid it into the grill for good measure.

“You should have seen it when the convoy first got here. It’s five times the size it was then.”

“And eighty percent of that’s the base?”

“Yep.”

He finished the drink with a flourish of steamed milk, and slid it in front of her. “On me.” he said. She picked it up like it was made with water from the Fountain of Youth and sipped it. “Okay, that’s damn good coffee.” she allowed, sagging as it chased the tension of a long journey out of her.

“Told you,” he said, pressing down on the panini grill. “Now, not that I’m not glad to see you again, but this ain’t a social call, am I right?”

“It’s business,” she acknowledged. “I’m…kind of betraying my employer’s trust.”

“Your mysterious employer?” Jenkins asked. he plated the panini and set it down, doing that too-handsome guy smile up one side of his face as she grabbed it and took a huge bite. “Finally exceeded your professional ethic, huh?”

“Mmf…o’m’g’d what’ff in thifth?”

“Bacon, brie and cranberry,” Jenkins told her.

“Mm…I’ll never say a bad word about the French ever again,” Terri promised.

“So, what’re you breaking trust over?”

“Well, he’s going to be getting this information too, but I just figured that you might find a use for a list of every abductee who’s currently outside the bubble.”

“You’re shitting me!”

She pulled a USB stick from her bag. “Nope. It’s just a best guess, the end result of thirty months of globetrotting, research and questioning people who most of the time didn’t even speak English, but I’m pretty sure it’s mostly right.”

Jenkins picked up the device and pocket it. “I’ll…make sure the ambassador finds out about this.”

“You’ve got a line to him?”

“No, but I play poker with somebody who does.”

She inhaled the rest of her panini. “God, I needed that.”

“Where the fuck did you drive from, Mexico?”

“Pretty much.”

“Got a place to stay?”

“If you know any comfortable couches that are going spare…?”

“How about a futon?”

She sighed happily. “Oh yeah. You know what a weary traveller needs.”

Ten days later

Cape Canaveral

“Captain Jackson?”

She scooted out from under Pandora’s port wing where she and a flight technician had been fine-tuning the ESFALS array.

“Doctor Anees Hussein, I presume,” she said, rising from her trolley to extend a hand to Earth’s selected ambassador. He cut a strange figure, a small, bald, bearded Iraqi man in a nice suit, leaning slightly on a beautiful polished wooden walking stick while around him men and women in jumpsuits bustled back and forth, prepping Pandora and the three alien shuttlecraft for flight, though the latter apparently required practically no maintenance. The fourth had been shipped north to Scotch Creek, to be enthusiastically devoured by the reverse-engineering teams.

“For my sins,” he agreed, shaking her hand and smiling warmly. Rylee returned the smile genuinely—she had always had a soft spot for charming old men with a twinkle in their eye, and for all that he was twice her age, Doctor Hussein had that kind of charisma by the tonne. “She’s beautiful.” he added, looking towards Pandora and instantly winning Rylee’s good graces.

“She is,” she sighed, looking fondly at her sled. “Less so when she’s grounded though. She’s born to fly.” “I look forward to seeing that. I understand you’ll be flying her up alongside our shuttle.”

Her esteem for him grew even further. He wasn’t complaining, or even questioning, that she should be flying Pandora rather than the shuttle. The Ambassador was clearly an expert at first impressions.

“The embassy did say they hoped I’d be the one to escort you and, frankly sir, flying anything else would feel like cheating on her.” She said.

“I guessed as much.” Hussein replied amicably, folding his hands gently on his cane. “I wish there was a second seat, actually. Something tells me nobody will ever pilot her but you.”

“They’d have to shoot me before I let somebody else fly my girl.” Rylee agreed, matter-of-factly.

“I had best leave you to keeping her in perfect order then.”

“Please. It’s a long checklist.”

“Leaving so soon?”

Terri sighed. “you woke up,” she accused.

“Hey, you’re the one sneaking away without saying goodbye. It’s not even light out yet.”

“I’ve been here ten days, Kevin.” she said. She stooped and collected a discarded bra, and shrugged into it, trying not to let the way his dark eyes roamed all over her, getting a good last look, effect her. Those ten days had been…enthusiastic. Both of them had made up for a couple of long, dry years.

“I need to get back.”

“I know.” He said, and stood up. She took her own opportunity to get a good look at him as he yawn-stretched and then put on some pants. “I’m not dumb enough to do something soppy like try and stop you, neither. I just figured you may as well start the trip with a full stomach and a proper farewell.”

“I guess…”

“Come on. Best pancakes in Scotch Creek, I promise.”

“I’ve seen Scotch Creek, that’s not much of a boast…”

”…Test ESFALS.”

”…Check…”

“Test ESHOD.”

“Aaand…Check!”

“Pandora, mission control. Checklist complete.“”

“Mission Control, Pandora. Checklist complete.”

Every time, Pandora performed just a little better. Or maybe it was just that Rylee herself was becoming more in tune with her sled’s foibles, but she could swear that the disconcerting wobble that had defined their previous ESFALS vertical take-offs was gone now.

“You alright over there, Limo?” she asked of the pilot of the diplomatic shuttle, on her wing, as both craft extended their flight surface fields and coasted higher and higher on only a gentle thrust.

“Jealous of you. This thing handles like my sister’s car.” “That bad?”

“The controls are idiot-proof.”

Rylee made an “aaaah” noise of understanding. “Idiot-proof” meant one thing to an experienced pilot: that you couldn’t do half of the things you would like to have available as options.

“Hey, at least you can scratch your nose,” She said, leaning forward to brush that offending organ against the patch of velcro that had been glued to the inside of her helmet.

The helmet was full of little customisations like that, from the velcro pad, to a suction nozzle in case of a repeat of Luca Parmitano’s experience with water flowing freely inside the helmet or—God forbid—Rylee vomiting. The whole suit was a testament to the power of cobbled-together solutions to minor irritations, and was designed for long-term habitation, right down to some rather cunning plumbing around the pelvis. She could have worn it for a week and experienced nothing worse than the desperate need for a bath.

She noticed with amusement that she had forgotten to remove the smartphone stylus from her glove. Oh well, it would probably prove useful anyway.

“And you can thumb yours at us. This things gets three kilos, tops.” “You’re kidding?”

“Nope. I’m flying the next best thing to a moped…comfy in here though. No expense spared in upholstering the ambassadorial transport.” She chuckled. Next to Pandora’s sleek-yet-functional lines that showed off her Lockheed heritage, the shuttle was an uninspiring box that relied entirely on its fields for aerodynamic profile. A team of designers had done their best, stripping off the original beige paint and polishing the metal to a mirror shine, and reportedly filling the interior with tasteful wood and woven fabrics.

The original leather upholstery idea had been swiftly abandoned on the advice that the aliens were almost universally herbivores and would be thoroughly disgusted by the idea of sitting on a once-living thing’s skin, or even a facsimile of it.

Pandora alerted her to something with a pleasant beep. “Coming up on Delta-point 1,” she said. It was deceptive how quickly space could sneak up on them when the ride was so gentle.

“I see it. Slaving FTL to you….Mission Control, Limo. Escort has the button.”

“I have it. Mission Control, Pandora. Escort has the button.”

“Pandora, Mission Control. You are clear for FTL.”

She didn’t bother making any comment this time, just rubbed the exposed bit of Pandora’s chassis for luck, and pushed the thrust lever forward.

Again, the moon just blinked larger in the sky, and there was Embassy-172, an impressive tower of white, almost blinding in the sunlight even through her dark glasses and Pandora’s own reactive window tint.

“172, Pandora. Ambassadorial transport on final approach.”

“Copy, Pandora, the Ambassador is cleared for bay one. Will you be coming aboard?”

“I will, 172. Pandora requesting permission to land.”

“Permission granted, you are cleared for bay three…. ah. Pandora, we can’t handshake with your landing system, it’s giving an incompatible protocol error.”

“Dammit.” Rylee scrabbled to troubleshoot the problem, then decided it wasn’t worth her time. “Copy that, 172. Request permission for a manual landing.”

There was a pause filled with the hiss of solar radiation and nothing more.

”… Pandora did you just say MANUAL landing?”

“Affirmative 172, manual landing.”

“That’s…oh? Right. Yes, sir. Pandora you are clear for manual landing, bay three.“

“Copy 172, bay three.”

Rylee shook her head in bemusement as she rounded the station’s bulk and lined up on her assigned bay. In fact, of all the manoeuvres she had rehearsed in the simulator before Pandora was even built, manually landing on an enclosed flight deck aboard a steadily-rotating space station had been one of the first and easiest, and that had been when they still thought she’d have thrusters that required fuel. Nowadays, with an unlimited thrust budget, it was even simpler.

Match rotation, nose forward, probe forward with ESFALS and haul herself forward and gently on to the deck. Frankly, she doubted that the computer could have done it any smoother.

Compared to landing on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, landing on Embassy-172 was trivial.

By the time post-flight checks, power-down and securing her ship had finished, the bay had become host to a welcoming party of weirdness. She tried not to stare at them as she swung her boots over and dropped down to the deck, easily and buoyant in the light gravity.

<+Oh my God that one looks just like Rocket Raccoon, don’t stare, don’t stare…+>

A short creature with the uncomfortably familiar face beloved by the UFO community the world over approached, trailed by an archway of some kind that moved on a hovering pad, which settled in front of Rylee.

She tried not to let the fact that half the assembled beings apparently had no issue with nudity bother her. Strangely, the one wearing the most clothing of all of them was the furry little raccoon-alien, who was wearing a garment that seemed to resemble a cross between her own flight suit and a pair of dungarees.

“Captain, if you would be so kind as to step through this decontamination archway before removing your flight suit, you would save us all a great deal of trouble and potential agonizing death.” Requested the Grey. Up close, she could see that the movements of its mouth bore no relation at all to what she actually heard, which was a pleasant male tenor with a faint hint of…condescension?

Intellectual superiority? The effect was convincing and humanizing at least.

“Sure!” she said happily, and stepped through it, followed by “Wow! Oh my God that feels weird!”

The little grey alien stepped forward sharply. “Are you in pain?” he asked, tone tinged with concern.

“No, no, just…wow, my teeth have never felt so clean!”

“Ah, yes. Streptococcus Salivarius in particular proved to be exceptionally resilient, as did Staphylococcus Aureus, but we beat them in the end. You may remove your helmet now, Captain, we are for the time being quite safe from you.”

Rylee did so, pleased to be out of it, and took the opportunity to scratch an itch above her ear.

<+I knew that stylus would be useful…+>

“Excellent. If you intend on staying longer than eight hours, we will need to give you a longer-lasting injection or even, if you are willing, a permanent implant. Until then, I shall leave you in the capable hands of the rest of the crew.”

Rylee watched him go. “Wow. I’ve had some terse doctors in my time…” she said.

There was a chittering noise from the space raccoon. Something in…his? …body language suggested amusement, so she decided that the chittering had probably been the equivalent of laughter.

Her suspicions were confirmed when the translator gave him a wry baritone “By his species’ standards, that was a warm welcome.”

Rylee smiled. “I guess I got so caught up in flying Pandora there that I forgot to read the cliff notes on…everyone.”

She looked around, taking in the blue and white giraffe-people, the bat-person, an enormous pile of fur in the back that seemed to be content to observe from a distance for the time being, and more. Most of the rest of her welcome party sketched respectful gestures of welcome and left her to converse with the raccoon.

“I can’t blame you, it’s beautiful.”

“She is, isn’t she?”

“She? As you wish. And I’ve got to say that was some beautiful flying. I know Traffic Routing get fidgety over manual landings in their bays, but I’ve never seen a landing that smooth from anything, muscle or machine.”

“You’re a pilot yourself?”

“I am! Officer Goruu, of Clan Firefang, My species are called Gaioans.”

“Captain Rylee Jackson, NASA. Human, obviously.”

“A pleasure. Be gentle, right? You could probably crush my hand if you squeeze too hard.” he extended a hand—and it was, to her relief, definitely a hand, an honest tool-user’s fingers, rather than an animal’s paw—so she disengaged the pressure seal on her gauntlets, removed them and shook the offered extremity as delicately as she could, intrigued at how warm and silky the short fur of his hands was.

<+I’m shaking hands with an intelligent alien raccoon. Holy. Shit.+> “Want to see Pandora up close?” She offered. “I still have a few post-flight checks to run through.”

“It’d be my pleasure.” Goruu said. He started to enthuse more and more as they got closer to the sled’s hull. “She’s so aerodynamic! By the time my kind developed warp technology, we’d long since abandoned these kinds of curves in favour of shaped fields.”

“She was mostly made by a company called Lockheed.” Rylee said. “She’s got those shaped fields too, but they stuck to a policy of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” After all, if the fields fail I’d rather not be flying something with the aerodynamic profile of a boot.”

“That…makes a lot of sense actually. I might have to take that saying home.”

Goruu said. He stooped to look under Pandora’s belly. “Huh. Your kind go in for redundancy in a big way, don’t you? Pressurised cabin and pressurised flight suit, the whole hull and field thing, two forcefield landing systems…”

“She could limp home on just one engine, too.” Rylee said. “It’s called Murphy’s Law.”

“Your legislation mandates redundant systems?”

Rylee laughed. “No, no. Murphy’s Law isn’t legislation. It’s an…observation.

Like a law of physics. ‘Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, eventually’.”

“I’m taking that one home, too.” Goruu said. “Oh! A field-assisted scramjet?”

“Yep! She’s the fastest thing we ever built by a long, LONG way, both in space and in atmo. Mach 20 across the ground, easy.”

“What’s her maximum?”

“We don’t actually know.” Rylee beamed, correctly interpreting the Gaoian’s open-muzzled expression for the dazed awe that it was. She opened a hatch, checked something inside, closed and sealed it, checked the seal, and then ticked something off on the little booklet attached to her wrist.

“Theoretically, with the fields doing the heavy lifting and taking mechanical stresses out of the equation, we think she could hit somewhere upwards of Mach 30. Of course, that’s small fry next to the FTL.”

“Well, obviously.” Goruu agreed. “What’s she do?”

“That depends how much I give her.” Rylee told him. “I guess if I really pushed her…Seventy kilolights for six hours? Of course, right now that’d be a one way trip, they’ve not finished the WITCHES yet.”

“Seventy…how? She’s not big enough for a power plant that size. Especially given that—no offense—I doubt your first ever FTL engine is very efficient.

And what’s WITCHES?”

“None taken, she’ll get faster as we swap out the FTL core. She was built to be future-proof. Anyway, the power plant’s for running the on-board electronics and life-support. Power to the FTL comes from a supercapacitor bank. At the moment that’s charged on the ground, but WITCHES—that’s WIde aTtainment CHarging Energy System— can take photons from any local stars or whatever and convert them into stored energy. The bigger the field, the faster we charge. Once that’s finished and installed, in theory, Pandora could go from dry to fully charged in less than a minute just by sunbathing.”

She grinned. “And of course, crazy-prepared beauty that she is, if I did get stranded, the ship power plant is good for fifty lights. Not fast, but better than dying alone in deep space.”

Goruu stood back and used his claws to comb some stray fur back behind one ear.

“I take it back, she’s not merely beautiful, she’s the most gorgeous thing I ever laid eyes on.”

“Aww, the ladies must be all over a charmer like you.”

“I’ve sired my fair share of cubs.” the Gaoian agreed, sounding pleased with himself, so Rylee assumed that her compliment had been a success.

He pulled a device that looked much like a smartphone from the pocket of his own flight suit and glanced at it, then said something which the station didn’t translate. “I should go, my Clan-Father wants to have a word with me.”

“It’s been a pleasure, Goruu.” Rylee said, still scarcely believing that she was already considering an alien raccoon to be a likeable acquaintance and potential friend. She paid close attention to the markings of his fur around the eyes and muzzle and memorized them—It would be very embarrassing to have got on so well with him only to confuse him for some other Gaoian.

They shook hands again, and Goruu ducked his head in what she took for a respectful gesture before jogging away.

As Rylee watched him go, she carefully tucked away the scrap of paper he had palmed her when they shook hands, and busied herself with completing her post-flight checks.

“Did you succeed?”

“Yes, Father.” In Goruu’s case, the title of respect bore a slightly more intimate meaning: the face looking back at him from the screen of his communicator bore markings and coloration that were almost a mirror of his own, and there could be little doubt that Clan-Father Amren was his Sire, but that relationship was a distant second place to the bond of Clan. Being the Clan-Father’s cub brought no special privileges, nor should it: the entire clan structure existed specifically to avoid that kind of nepotism. But they had a good relationship nonetheless.

“Excellent. The ambassador will be arriving shortly. We’ll let this…mockery of diplomacy play out: the important part has been accomplished. You’ve done well.

Did you find it hard to get into the pilot’s good graces?”

“I didn’t even have to act. Some of the innovations and philosophy that went into that little ship truly are stunning, and she’s hopelessly in love with it.

I confess, so am I. If we adopted some of the ideas she told me about into our own craft…”

“Now is neither the time nor the place, Brother.” the Clan-Father reminded him.

Goruu ducked his head and flattened his ears, chagrined. “Yes, Father.”

“Good lad. Take the First Frost back to Gao: I’ve convinced a Mother to join us.”

“A Mother?”

“Yimyi. And yes,” he said, holding up a paw and displaying tolerant good humour as Goruu’s expression lit up “she will have Sister Niral with her, Brother.

You’ll have plenty of opportunity to make a good impression before they head back.”

This was by way of being a reward for special success, and Goruu could barely contain his gratitude, but the Firefangs prized emotional control and maturity, so he settled for a compsed “Thank you, Father. Good luck with the ambassadors.”

“More fool the others for making us need luck.” Father Amren practically spat the word.

“They can’t possibly believe that concealing the existence of the Great Hunt and the jettison order will do anything but harm in the long run, can they?” Goruu asked.

“I truly have no idea. Gao voted in favour of full disclosure, we were overruled, and will face sanctions if I break that ruling during this session.”

Amren ruffled the fur at his shoulders, irritably. “Idiots.”

He recovered himself, giving his jaw a determined set. “Goruu, making a good impression with the humans is vital. It’s only a matter of time before they discover how poorly their people have been treated by the Dominion, especially in response to the Great hunt, and Gao must get on their good side: Your rapport with their pilot and the influence of the Clan of Females might well tip the balance. I suppose we’re just fortunate that we have the time to move behind the scenes before your note can be raised at the next meeting.”

“Okay.” she said. “Those were some DAMN good pancakes.”

“Told you.”

“I should…go.”

“Yeah. You should.”

“Yeah…”

She stood up and looked around the room. “Um, d’you know where my panties wound up?”

“Somehow, I had expected somebody rather different. A warrior, like his escort, not…well.” the Vzk’tk ambassador signalled the image of Doctor Hussein limping along the corridor, leaning heavily on his stick even while engaging his aides and staff with avuncular small-talk.

“Not a frail elder?” asked the Rauwrhyr ambassador.

“You have it exactly. A reminder of their physical abilities would make sense, and instead they’re sending us this specimen?”

Clan-Father Amren chimed in at that point, and a few of the ambassadors flinched. The Gaoian had been inside a privacy field for several minutes: they had all but forgotten he existed. “In which case they have shrewdly out-played you.” he commented. “A fair reminder to respect their intelligence as well as their muscles, not so?”

The ambassador for the Corti Directorate signalled agreement. “Humans are not a savage species, gentlebeings. They are from a savage world. There is a critical difference, and failing to remember it can only be dangerous.”

“Forgive me, Ambassador” commented the ambassador for the Kwmbwrw “but they eat flesh. That in itself is a mark of savagery.”

The diplomats shot glances at one another. The Kwmbwrw had suffered terribly from their close proximity to Hunter space, and had suffered raids by those enigmatic, evil things since before they had invented movable type. It had badly, but understandably, prejudiced them.

“So do my own species, ambassador.” Amren reminded him, voice calm and affable.

“Are we savages to you?”

The Kwmbwrw wisely chose to maintain a diplomatic silence, but fidgeted sulkily in his seat, and the gathered dignitaries refrained from further conversation until the door opened and the station’s security director introduced the human.

“Doctor Anees Hussein, ambassadors.”

The ambassadors rose from their seats in a mark of respect as the human limped in and looked around with a faint smile, hands trembling slightly as he rested them on his cane. “Well. Thank you for the warm reception.” he said.

“We have much to discuss.” the Corti ambassador said. As founding members of, and indisputably the most influential members of, the Dominion, it was a tradition for the Directorate’s ambassador to speak first on such occasions.

“But welcome, Doctor. This day has been sooner in coming than in the history of any other species yet known to us, and is all the more wonderful for it. Earth has already made big waves among the interstellar community, and we are keen to see what more your people are capable of.”

There was a general murmuring of agreement, and the security director respectfully escorted the human to his own desk, diplomatically arranged as part of the circle, rather than in the interrogative middle of the room.

“To business, then.” the doctor said. “If I may say a few words?”

“Of course.”

“Excellent.”

He stood up again, resting himself gently against the table and selecting one of his notes with that same trembling hand. He fastidiously opened a pair of reading glasses, set them on his nose, lifted the note up to peer at it, and then nodded, satisfied.

“Ahem… ‘Ultimatum from hunters: demand all humans be turned over else quote Swarm of Swarms endquote will raid known human locations. All ships, stations carrying human passengers advised: jettison immediately’.”

In the ringing silence, he set the paper down and gently tweaked it until its edges and corners were flush with its fellows. He took off his reading glasses, meticulously folded them, and set them carefully on top of his notes, before looking up and skewering them all with a hard glare that bore no relationship whatsoever to the kindly sparkle his eyes had held only moments before.

“I think, ambassadors…” he said “…that we are owed an explanation.”

Chapter 8: Alternatives

Three years and ten days after the Vancouver Attack Portland, Oregon
click

Once the lights were on, it wasn’t hard to find the TV remote: it was placed carefully on the bed, exactly where a traveller checking in for the night would see it. Terri dropped her bags, picked it up and channel surfed, pausing when she recognised a famous mustached physicist.

”…thing I don’t get is that this… shield, barrier, whatever, is supposed to stop things from moving through it, right?”

“That’s right, yes.“

“It’s like a solid wall in space.“

“Exactly! In fact it effectively IS a solid wall in space, just made out of nothing but the same electrostatic repulsion that makes… this table solid, or my hand solid.“

Satisfied, she checked that the door was shut and the curtains closed, before she shrugged her jacket off, and hung it on the hooks by the door.

“…station get here then? Did it just warp through the wall? That’s not much of a wall.“

“So there are… it looks like there are two ways to get from A to B faster than light. The first one’s the warp drive mounted on Pandora, right? But the SECOND one was actually theorized by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935…“

Satisfaction shifted to interest and she turned the volume up as she took advantage of the hotel’s expense by starting to fill the huge bathtub with the hottest water the faucet could provide.

“Wormholes, right? I think that was on Star Trek.“

She retrieved a few cosmetic essentials from her travelling case and soon a bath bomb was crackling and hissing in the water, and filling her nostrils with the scents of grapefruit and bergamot.

“…upshot is that when you travel through one of these things, the intervening space doesn’t matter. you just go from A to Z without passing through B, C, D and so on along the way!“

“So the barrier doesn’t matter to this thing.“

“Exactly. Now, the reason we can’t use it to get out is because these bridges collapse pretty much instantly unless they’ve got a field generator at both ends.“

The bath could be left to its own devices for the time being. Terri stood and stripped off her shirt. The garment had been sweaty and uncomfortable for the last couple of hours, and she sighed in honest relief as she was able to throw it into an undignified heap at the foot of the bed.

“…without somebody on the outside helping us get out.“

“Okay, now… there’s been a lot of talk about how our gravity is supposedly much higher than the norm out there…“

“Yes.“

“So are we likely to be that much stronger than everything out there?“

“Okay, so, from what we’ve been told, Earth is both larger and denser than the average “temperate” world. Now, if you’re both larger AND denser, then that means you have more gravity, and in our case it’s about thirty percent higher than what we’re told is the average.“

Terri struggled out of her jeans as Bill Maher angled his head and made a skeptical tooth-sucking sound.

“Thirty percent doesn’t sound like that much to me.”

“Small changes can make a huge difference. If the Earth was just half as big again as it actually is, we would never have been able to launch rockets at all, let alone ones strong enough to carry space stations and people into orbit. Earth is probably pretty close to being about as big as you can get and still send crews of people into space.”

“What does that have to do with muscles?”

“Well, it might have tipped us over the point where evolution would select for one specific kind of muscle, or something like that. That’s not really… you know, I’m interested in it all, but the stuff I’m most interested in is astrophysics, and what these new technologies can teach us about things like dark energy.”

As the Real Time panel fell to discussing the politics of the situation, egged on occasionally by their host’s snide observations, Terri discarded her underwear and stepped into the bath, hissing and gritting her teeth as she gingerly lowered herself into the slightly-too-hot water.

She largely ignored the rest of the debate and the panel’s observations as she luxuriated in the feeling of too many hours of freeway travel being cooked away, emerging only once she was thoroughly soaked and relaxed.

”…finally New Rule, Rylee Jackson is not a sex symbol.” She arched her eyebrow as an assortment of dismayed noises emerged from the crowd. Maher basked in the controversy for a second, before launching into the meat of his closing statement. She sat on her towel on the end of the bed drying her hair, and listened.

“Business as usual on Earth…” she muttered.

Cimbrean

“Unidentified vessel, you are entering private space. Halt immediately and identify yourself or you will be destroyed.“

Kirk halted immediately. The threat was, unbeknownst to the being that had made it, a hollow one: he had come in on a vector which provided him the option of boosting to FTL straight away in the event of aggression, and there wasn’t a weapon in the galaxy that could have caught them had he done so.

Still, it didn’t pay to antagonize the people you were there to see. Especially not when the people in question were a privateer band led by the self-styled “Space Babe Pirate Queen” of the Far Reaches.

Kirk had been aware of Jennifer Delaney for months. In fact, he knew quite a lot about her. The dead-end IT job in Belfast, the unfortunate fate of the crew of the starship Blue Encounter, and her…unique…deal with the Dominion who were turning a blind eye to space piracy in her particular case so long as she directed her attacks exclusively at the Celzi Alliance.

Privateering, it was called. A human concept, which was rapidly turning Delaney into a major player. More major than she herself suspected, probably.

It had certainly net her a private planet, in the form of Cimbrean. A total backwater in the heart of the Far Reaches, Cimbrean’s only valuable trait was its isolation. Even for the incredibly fast Sanctuary the nearest civilization was Gaoian territory, five days away. And the Gaoians were themselves still a peripheral civilization.

Given that isolation meant being vulnerable to pirate attacks or Hunter raids, Cimbrean’s remoteness should not have been a selling point at all. Still, it had somehow apparently attracted an enterprising corporate director with more money than sense who had decided that the place would make for an appropriately opulent private retreat.

Now, that private palace out in the middle of nowhere was the base of operations for the most successful pirate band in known galactic history. Kirk didn’t know the details of that story, and didn’t want to. Ideally, he would have preferred to leave Delaney alone—There was no damsel in distress here, the woman was clearly dangerous and if she wanted to return to Earth then she had the resources to do so herself.

But successfully returning twenty-one refugee abductees to Earth had come with a mission. Allied Extrasolar Command and the Global Representative Assembly had both identified a possible opportunity in Delaney, and it fell to Kirk as humankind’s only active agent outside the quarantine field to deliver the message.

They wanted to turn Cimbrean into the human race’s first colony.

The twenty-second refugee and the only one still aboard was Darragh Houston, a fellow Belfast lad who’d obviously been quite taken with the idea of the redheaded space pirate queen and had volunteered to stay on Sanctuary so that he could join Delaney. Apparently just seeing Earth again, from orbit, was good enough for him. Even Allison had gone back to catch up with some old friends and take a vacation. The ship felt badly empty without them.

More so, in light of that approach challenge. It was just as belligerent as he’d feared, and the presence of one skinny naive young man wasn’t really helping Kirk feel reassured.

Hopefully Darragh’s plan was more solid than his motives. “Complying, Cimbrean colony, Yacht Sanctuary, coming to full stop.”

“Sanctuary, state your business.”

“I have a message for Jennifer Delaney,” Kirk told them.

“There is nobody here by that name, Sanctuary,” the Cimbrean operator lied.

“Understood, Cimbrean. My mistake. But just on the off-chance that somebody of that name should show up in the near future, would you please tell her that Captain Kirk is asking: “What’s the craic?”

There was a long pause.

”…Sanctuary, you will hold position.”

“Complying, Cimbrean.”

There was a much, much longer pauser.

”…Sanctuary, you are cleared to land. Do not deviate from your assigned landing trajectory.”

“Thank you, Cimbrean. Proceeding to land.”

Beside him, Darragh laughed. “Told you our space pirate lass couldn’t resist that one!” he gloated.

Kirk chirruped a half-hearted, nervous laugh with him. “Just…be sure that she gets that letter.” he said. “A lot is depending on you, Darragh.”

“Aye, I will… hey, I’ll miss you, Kirk. You’ve been good to us.”

“You will be okay?” A couple of interceptors had come up to guide them in, and by their lines they were cut-down, repurposed Hunter vessels. They looked decidedly menacing.

“I think we all will, so long as this place stays below the Great Hunt’s radar.”

“Well, my next mission is to try and pull some strings in that regard.” Kirk said, as the Sanctuary nosed up and deployed its landing gear.

“Beats the feck out of me why you’re going against your own Dominion like this, man.”

The landing finished with a gentle bump.

”…because the Dominion only mattered to me when I didn’t understand it.” Kirk told him. “Good luck, Darragh. I will miss you too.”

“You too, mate. Be safe.”

He left, and Kirk was left to reflect on just how empty the Sanctuary would feel without any human occupants.

Hopefully, that would soon change.

Cape Town

Doctor Hussein could imagine the thousands of cellphones turned upwards to catch a glimpse of the ambassadorial shuttle coming in to land. The Provincial Capital had sold a prime plot of land on the mountainside to the Global Representative and had thereby become Africa’s answer to the UN in New York.

While an architect’s design had been selected and the groundwork for the Assembly building had already been laid, it would probably be nearly a year before it was finished, so for now the Global Ambassador’s office was rented in the Portside Tower. The building sadly was not equipped to handle the needs of an intrasystem shuttle, necessitating a hangar at the airport and a limousine commute under escort, flanked by burly black SUVs.

Fortunately, the limousine had been outfitted to handle a conference call with the ten highest-ranking Assembly members, so there was no interruption to business.

“The Gaoians are a definite ally.” he said. “They tried to approach me unofficially via Captain Jackson. As for the rest, while I think we have most of them sufficiently impressed and intimidated for the time being, the Corti ambassador has a very cool head. He will be the most difficult target for our aggressive approach, and his Directorate is easily the most politically powerful. He will probably be able to temper the reactions of the others.”

The British member was a floppy-haired man who had earned his position by cultivating a popular image as something of a buffoon, an approach which had declawed his aristocratic accent into a harmless eccentricity. In private sessions and meetings, however, he allowed his whip-smart side to come through, and right now was nodding thoughtfully.

“We still have a few tricks up our sleeves.” he commented. “It’d be a shame to use one of them so early, but if we need to…”

The Chinese member—once General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China—indicated his agreement. “These privateers have given us a wonderful bargaining chip, if we care to use it.”

The former US Secretary of State frowned, skeptically. “It’s early days yet, shouldn’t we hold on to that one for later?”

“That particular chip may be time-limited.” Hussein mused. “And if we are being aggressive, then we need to keep up the pressure.”

“It’s potentially dangerous to our agent…” objected the British member.

“We shall just have to trust him.” Hussein asserted. “In any case, no great gains are made without risk.”

“And if he succeeds, it will be the move most likely to disrupt the Corti ambassador’s cool….”

”…Or else render his cool irrelevant. As you say, Madame Chancellor. Shall we vote?”

There was a general show of hands.

“Then it’s settled. The next time our agent gets in contact, we’ll have him make the approach.”

Three years and twelve days after the Vancouver Attack
San Diego, California

Terri’s phone played the sound of a door opening just as she took the off-ramp down onto 17th Street, which was not encouraging. The noise came from a home security app she had purchased which told her if her apartment door was opened when her phone wasn’t at home.

She stopped on Logan Avenue long enough to grab the well-maintained Colt 1911 and her concealed-carry license from the lockbox in the trunk where she had hidden them under the spare wheel for the drive through Canada, then, heart pounding, finished the short drive into Grant Hill.

Rather than take the front door, she parked a little way from apartment and, with care, ghosted up the fire escape as quietly as she could. A quick glance through the bedroom window showed no sign of an intruder, so—praying that after a few weeks of her absence it would still slide up quietly —she opened the window. To her relief, it whispered open and she was able to step silently through onto her memory-foam mattress and from there fold her feet down onto the floor without making any noise.

The rest of the apartment was open-plan. She hesitated for a moment thinking about whether to enter slowly and quietly, or burst in and strike the fear of a loaded gun into any trespassers. The thought belatedly occurred to her that a camera and an app to watch it from her phone would have really helped right now.

“Fuck it” she whispered to herself, and went with the “burst in” approach.

She shouldered the door, crashed into the room, and, sensing his presence out of the corner of her eye, pointed her gun directly at “Mr. Johnson”, who was sitting on her couch, a gun of his own aimed at the front door. He had his right foot crossed onto his leg and his spare arm across the back of the couch, looking relaxed and arrogant.

That changed instantly when he looked up at her and his eyes dropped to her handgun.

“Ah. Well. This is awkward.” he said.

Suicidally, stupidly, he tried to shoot her anyway.

They were his last words.

Three years and two months after the Vancouver Attack
Earth-Luna L3 Point

“Mission Control, Pandora, checkpoint reached, over.”

“Five by five, Pandora. ESDAR says…0.2% deviation, over.“

“Roger, Control. PARANAV agrees zero point two, over.”

“ERB-2 is green, I have go code from the package: open the door, over.“

“Wilco.”

For the second time, Rylee reflected that jump drives really should look a little more impressive. She watched closely this time and saw a faint shimmer as the leading edge of the spatial distortion wavered the great dust fields of the Milky Way like heat haze, but that was about it. Otherwise, a space station materialized in front of her. This one wasn’t the elegant white needle of Embassy-172, but was instead a little more ornate and decorative. Less Minimalism, more Art Deco.

Communications were established as soon as they had injected correctly into the L2 point. “Jump complete. Our thanks, Pandora.” they sent.

“You’re welcome, Embassy. On behalf of the nations of Earth, welcome to Sol.”

“Thank you. The Celzi Alliance is honoured to be here.“

Chapter 9: Gains and Losses

Three years and one month AV
500 West Hotel, San Diego, California, United States of America

”…in a prepared statement, the President of the Russian Federation declared that his country would have no part in what he called “the Western monopoly” on space travel, A sentiment echoed by the People’s Republic of China in their own statement just three hours later.”

“Meanwhile the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, announced today that the first atmospheric test-flight of their own space plane, codenamed “Inazuma” has been a success, and that the new craft will be attempting to make orbit in a flight scheduled for next week.”

“With rumours abounding that several South American nations are in talks to form their own unified space agency, not to mention the fledgling private endeavours of Virgin, Red Bull, Mitsubishi, Google and BAE Systems, It seems that the second Space Race has begun in earnest.”

“Joining me on the show tonight is British science fiction author…

♪♫WOOOP WOOOP that’s the sound of tha police! WOOOP WOOOP that’s the sound of tha beast! WOOOP WO-♫♪

+click+

“Terri Boone. Good afternoon, detective.”

She’d taken an immediate liking to the homicide detective who’d attended the scene. Gabriel Arés, a by-the-book type who was packing quite a lot of wiry strength into his short frame. The man was shorter than Terri, and Terri was only average height at best. but he’d ran a practiced eye over Terri’s apartment and immediately declined to arrest her so long as she kept the SDPD informed as to her whereabouts.

“Good afternoon, Miss Boone. I thought you’d want to know that the department is satisfied you acted in self-defense and seeing as you’ve obeyed the terms we set, we won’t be prosecuting.”

“Good, because I was getting antsy sitting around in a hotel when an organisation I’ve worked for is trying to kill me.” Terri pulled the towel off her hair and started to shrug into her jacket one-handed. She had no intention of staying in the hotel a moment longer than necessary.

“Yeah… look, Miss Boone, we simply have no evidence that this guy ever worked for anybody other than himself.”

“You checked his office?”

“The landlord of the address you gave swears that the guy who attacked you was the sole user of that office except for business guests. No other registered employees, and we can find no evidence of any business associates. If he’s a member of some conspiracy or organisation, then there’s just no evidence pointing to it. I’m sorry, but without any evidence I can’t turn department resources to investigating your claims. We’ve done everything we reasonably can.”

“That doesn’t strike you as odd that a guy who describes himself as a “business network consultant” didn’t have any easy-to-follow business associates?”

“It strikes me as a lot odd, yeah. But it’s not enough to launch an investigation over. Lo siento.”

”…Fine. You’ve got enough to worry about.” Terri knew that the way she phrased that could be construed as bitter, but she honestly wasn’t. Fortunately, Detective Ares seemed to either be good enough at judging tone of voice via phone call to get that, or jaded enough not to care.

“You’re a P.I., right?” he asked.

“Right…”

“Go ahead and investigate this on your own terms. If you turn up anything solid, you’ve got my number, and… Well. Stay safe and let me know how you get on.”

“Gracias, detective.”

“De nada. Stay safe, Miss Boone. Hasta luego.”

Terri grabbed her bags and took the stairs down to the reception desk. The outcome had been pretty much exactly what she expected, so all she was left with now was the question she had been mulling over for five days.

<+Why on Earth would a list of alien abductees be worth killing over?+>

Three years and three months AV
Bulford ECTC, Salisbury Plain, England.

“Fall in!”

They did so, instantly. Every man in the unit was a volunteer, taken from all around the English-speaking world without regard for their previous unit. Every single one was special forces.

“Today marks your first session training for combat in prevalent extraterrestrial conditions. We’re going to start slow with an obstacle course, and work our way up to live-fire over the next week. By the end of this training program, you will have gained the skills and knowledge useful in moving effectively in low-gravity environments, and will have learned to identify and react appropriately to the catalogue of known potential nonhuman contacts. Completing this training will certify you for off-world missions, some of which will be of indefinite duration. If anybody wishes to back out, say so now and it will not be held against you.”

None did. They had all already gone through far worse just to get where they were, and taken far more dangerous assignments during their careers. Their instructor waited a moment or two before nodding his approval, and then gave a thumbs-up to the control room mounted high along one of the tall inside walls of the ECTC hangar.

He flexed his knees and absorbed the sudden change in gravity with practiced familiarity, resisting a smirk as the spec-ops veterans all staggered, swayed or exclaimed aloud at the difference.

“Line up! When I blow my whistle you will run that obstacle course, best time!”

Several minutes, bumped heads, scraped elbows and bruised egos later, the last of the veterans flew off the end of the last rope and trotted to a halt awkwardly, instincts undone by the lower gravity. While all had, to their credit, managed exceptional times, not a single one had completed the course with their dignity completely intact.

That was okay.

“This first run was planned to destroy any illusions you may have had about knowing what you’re doing.” the instructor said. “You have spent your life training for Earth’s gravity, which is thirty percent higher than the off-world norm. That thirty percent makes a surprising difference, as you have just learned. Every instinct you have about how to move, how long you have to react and what you can achieve is wrong. Forget them and start over. Any questions?”

There were some, which were promptly answered to everyone’s satisfaction.

“Right! Back to the start: we’re going again and if any man here fails to beat the time he just set, the whole unit is doing a hundred pushups in double gravity! Move!”

To his grudging satisfaction, no pushups were necessary. But they still had a long way to go.

Planet Nightmare

Summer was coming. Over the years, Julian Etsicitty had learned to view summer on this hellscape the same way winter might be viewed back home—the good times were over for another year. Soon—too soon—he’d be out of the season of plenty, where hardy nuts and roots and hibernating animals were easily dug out from beneath the snow and frozen ground, and into the season of explosive growth.

Back to mornings and dusks spent lurking under two layers of mosquito netting. Back to checking his boots for venomous biting things that had found a nice dark place to make their nest and spawn a new generation of tiny monsters. Back to spending his days desperately slashing back at the encroaching greenery around his camp, doing nothing but keeping back a wall of vegetation that grew so quickly you could see it.

Hopefully, at long last, there would be no bombfruit bushes this time around. He thought he had killed them all: It was hard to tell, when the fruit literally exploded and sent its seeds flying everywhere. He had been very lucky indeed to survive the woody shrapnel of his first encounter with bombfruit, and the scar down his right forearm was a constant reminder not to take anything on Nightmare for granted.

Sure, calories and vitamins weren’t hard to come by in the summer months, so there was that saving grace. It was a wonderful time to prepare jerky by the fire for the rest of the year, to dry fruits to ward off scurvy until the next growing season. There was a lot of work to do in the summer, all of it physically demanding, and all of it in sweltering heat.

He was determined to enjoy the last few quiet weeks of snow and silence while he could, so had made himself a warm fruit juice when the sound rolled over the forest and hills: the unmistakable noise of a sonic boom.

he paused, tense, and then rushed to his hut and grabbed, from its special stash above the bed, the “rescue potential” kit. A flare gun, a shaving mirror, the solar-charged two-way radio.

He emerged into the clear ground around his camp not a moment too soon. A teardrop of steel and matte black was just emerging from behind the peak he’d named “Mount Fuck You” for the way it stood much taller than the three mountains that flanked it.

He raised the gun, and shot the flare high into the sky over the forests.

He almost collapsed with relief when the ship immediately changed course toward him.

“Hello, Julian. Welcome aboard.“

“Uh… hello.” He replied, nonplussed at the absence of a welcoming party on the door.

“I’m sorry for not greeting you in person, but I suspect that standing in your presence right now would prove fatal for me. You’re setting off a lot of biohazard alarms up here…“

“I am?”

“I’m afraid so. Decontamination won’t take long, fortunately, and the good news is you’ll feel thoroughly clean once we’re done. Would you be so good as to dispose of your clothes in the incinerator to your left?”

Julian practically rushed to comply. The thought of feeling clean for the first time in who-knew how long was incentive enough.

He paused at the idea of throwing away the predator-tooth necklace he’d made, though. or the carved wooden beads that were on it. He had worked long and hard on those, they were unique.

“If there are any items you wish to keep, there is an autoclave on the front wall.” the voice said.

Having heard that, Julian needed nothing more, and was soon standing naked in the middle of the chamber, a little surprised at how unselfconscious he was about it. “What now?”

A device—little more than a black dome mounted in some kind of white frame on the wall—glowed blue at him for a second.

“Checking… okay, you’re good to proceed into the next room.” The door slid into the floor, revealing a slightly less sterile-seeming room on the far side. The threshold had a strange golden haze to it, but Julian didn’t let that bother him.

“Wow!” he exclaimed, coming to a halt as soon as he’d passed it.

“Feel strange?“

“It did.” His teeth were abnormally clean, the crawling, itching sensation in his hair and beard to which he had acclimatized was gone, the hair and beard themselves were clean and soft and his skin felt scrubbed. His body odour suddenly became conspicuous in its absence.

“You had rather a lot of parasites. They’re gone now including, you’ll be happy to know, the ones that were threatening your liver function. There are clean clothes in the nanofactory’s dispensary hopper to your right.“

Clean clothes!

They were a strange, neutral kind of cut—little more than a T-shirt, tracksuit pants and a pair of remarkably generic-looking boots—but they fit him perfectly, and they felt so very, VERY good.

“So… who are you?” He asked to the walls as he put them on.

“Most humans call me Kirk.” the voice said. “And yes, I’ve watched Star Trek, so I understand the joke.”

“I never did.” Julian confessed, noting the most humans bit. “We didn’t have a TV.”

“Yes, I’ve read your file. The Directorate wanted a wilderness survival expert who was low-profile enough to be missed: a remarkably rare thing to find in any civilization.“

“Lucky me.”

“You should be proud. You’ve set a record for surviving on Nightmare that nobody else could have.“

“Can I go home now?”

“…I wish I could. I truly to. But there have been… complications.“

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“I knew you wouldn’t. Nobody ever does. Why don’t you come up to the common room, and I’ll brief you?“

“And after that?”

“After that, I’ll be asking for your help.“

Three years and four months AV
Cape Canaveral, Florida

“Here she comes…”

Pandora’s engines were a low rushing sound like waves breaking against distant cliffs as she passed low over the facility. They went completely silent as she circled briefly and then set down on the concrete, lifting herself only on the shaped fields of her ESFALS module until her wheels kissed the hardtop. She was promptly surrounded by technicians who began the laborious checklist to ensure that she would be worthy to fly again.

Rylee Jackson took the ladder and patted the aircraft fondly before she strolled over towards the waiting entourage, stripping off her gauntlets.

“So you’re the new… oh, Danny! You made it!”

Danny Cho smiled at Rylee. The pair of them had served in the same wing over the middle east, and firm though sporadic friends, both married more to their jobs than to actual people.

“sure did.” he said. “I’ll be flying Ariadne.”

Rylee shook hands with him then shared introductions with the other four pilots: Carys Davies, formerly of the RAF, flying Niobe, Steve Hogan formerly of the Royal Australian Air Force, flying Medea, and James Carter and Adam Kosinski, both ex-USAF, flying Electra and Danae respectively. Collectively, Odyssey WIng. Another wing of five Lockheed TS-101s—the vehicle for which Pandora herself had been the prototype—was being delivered to Europe to form the foundation of Edda Wing—Baldur, Dagur, Freyja, Magni and Skadi, but they wouldn’t be ready for another few weeks yet, and there was talk of establishing a wing in the southern hemisphere called Tāwhaki Wing.

Between them, the Russian, Chinese and Japanese efforts, plus private campaigns, Rylee suspected that her sky was going to start filling up before long. It was a bittersweet thought.

“Did you hear Red Bull got their prototype up?” Danny asked, as they walked in a loose group to the hangar.

“I didn’t!”

“Too busy swapping notes with an alien raccoon?” He teased.

“Hey, he’s a friend, lay off. But Red Bull? Seriously? I would have thought Virgin Galactic or SpaceX…”

“Red Bull had their eye on space ever since they sponsored Felix Baumgartner.” Davies said. Rylee decided that she liked her accent, which was soft and melodic, but still had a bit of workmanlike grit. “And things have got cheaper since then thanks to ESAFS. I think after that crash Virgin had a few years ago they’ve been playing things very carefully.”

They stepped through the slightly ajar hangar door and Rylee couldn’t suppress her smile at seeing five more Pandoras waiting inside.

Except not quite. On closer inspection, they were just a little more polished: Less prototype, more production model. Her girl was still unique.

“Did they go FTL?” She asked.

“Yep! just a little jaunt out to Ceres and back.” Danny told her.

“Think they’ll set anything up out there?” asked Kosinski.

Davies scoffed. “Somebody needs to, or we’re never going to get the property laws sorted out.”

“I guess we should just be glad that the whole “no weapons in space” thing was repealed,” Rylee mused.

The thus-far silent Carter raised an eyebrow “How d’you figure?”

“Well, you realise that the barrier’s a casus belli, right? The GRA’s been pretty clear that they consider the demilitarization of space to be short-sighted in view of some of the threats that are out there.”

“Makes sense, I guess…” Carter conceded. “Not sure I like it.”

“Get used to it, wagon.” she teased. “Because getting some weapons in place up there is going to be Odyssey Wing’s first mission.”

Three years and six months AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility.

“And the jammer is… live.”

Nobody in the room needed to be told that. Every single one felt, rather than heard, a highly pitched keening that seemed to bypass actual sound and become an immediate feature of their audible world.

“That… puts my teeth on edge.” Martin Tremblay declared.

“Sorry, General.”

“It’s fine, Major, just get this demonstration underway.” Tremblay ordered. Bartlett nodded and swiftly complied.

“Simple enough, we open a wormhole and….” he looked across to his colleague on the other side of the laboratory as the vacuum chamber in front of him became a visibly distorted knot of isolated spacetime distortions, bending the light that passed through it in disconcerting ways. “Anything?”

“Not a whisper.” the scientist reported.

Bartlett shut the jammer off and everybody in the room untensed just a little.

“At less than ten meters, and that was a stable connection without any harmonic damping.” He announced. “We’ve cracked it: deploy one of these on any ship with a jump drive, and it’ll be able to use that drive immune to detection by out-of-system scanners. If we stick it on a warp-capable minisat, we’ll be able to completely block the detection of any FTL or wormhole activity inside the volume of effect, while the field itself will notify us of any that happens inside its ambit.”

He shut down the wormhole generator and the abused spacetime inside the test chamber sprang back into shape.

“Good, because without that, WERBS would have been a one-shot advantage.”

That comment came from Major-General Gregory Pierce, Tremblay’s superior and the man most directly responsible for deciding which of the Scotch Creek facility’s incredible discoveries were Canadian national secrets, which were shared among NATO members, and which went global.

“As you say, sir. But now that we’ve got this, a test run shouldn’t be difficult.” Bartlett agreed.

“Not in Sol.” Tremblay said. “Jammer or not, we should be careful.”

Pierce considered this. “Cimbrean?”

“We don’t even know if that colony is still alive, and even if it is we really don’t want WERBS linked to a human organization, especially not one that officially doesn’t exist, sir.” Bartlett said. “There are plenty of uninhabited systems out there, we just need a beacon to get to one of them.”

“This isn’t one I feel comfortable sharing outside of the Treaty nations, gentlemen, and the Agent works for the GRA.”

“Well, it’s either that or WERBS goes untested.” Bartlett said. “Heaven help us if we have to rely on an untested weapon for real, eh?”

”…I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, you’ll be pleased to know that the dragon’s teeth microsats have been successfully deployed. Edda Wing got the last canister up this morning.”

“That’s step one, then.” Tremblay said. “How did the Asians take it?”

“Russia condemned the move, obviously.” Pierce told them. “In private, though: Thankfully they weren’t stupid enough to publicly condemn us and leak what Dragon’s Teeth actually does. The Chinese are yet to officially comment, but the scuttlebutt there is that they understand the practicality of the Dragon’s Teeth system but would have preferred to play a more active role in its deployment.”

“Gracious of them.”

“Eh, leave the politics to the politicians.” Pierce said, dismissing the sarcasm. “You’re doing good work round he- damn.”

He paused as the office phone rang. Tremblay answered it, listened for a second, and then wordlessly handed it to his superior.

“Pierce.” This was followed shortly by “…what.”

Those two words set the general tone of a three minute conversation that ended with the general hanging up and looking thoroughly angry.

“The Russian Federation just declared for the Celzi Alliance.” he said.

Tremblay frowned “They can do that?”

“Apparently they’ve not only done that, but they’ve been giving practical support to the Alliance in the form of a Spetsnaz team.” PIerce said. “I should get back. We need to move fast and sound out the PRC before they make their own declaration.” he shook his head. “If I were the Ambassador, I’d be livid.”

Embassy-172

Doctor Anees Hussein was, in fact, actually quite pleased about the situation, though he affected an air of disappointment as he stepped into the ambassadorial debate chamber aboard E-172.

The usual formalities were completed soon. The aliens were as keen to get started as he was.

It was the Kwmbwrw ambassador who spoke first: “Ammbassador Hussein, This is grave news indeed for us. It would seem that your political blocs are not behaving obediently.”

“I did warn you.” Hussein replied, calmly unfolding his reading glasses to examine a sheet of paper. “Let’s see… yes, my exact words were that “the GRA acts only as nominal representation of the nations of Earth who will undoubtedly plot their own courses by their own values if they do not see what benefit the GRA brings them”

He set the paper down. “By which, gentlebeings, and in case I was not adequately clear when I said that, I meant that ANY nation, treaty, alliance or other one of our political entities might decide the same. The GRA does not rule, it represents by consent, and could be dissolved overnight if the nations so chose.”

What he left unsaid, but knew would be snaking treacherously through the gathered Ambassadorial minds, was the implication: If Russia might do that, what’s stopping the rest of us?

That implication alone was enough for most of the Ambassadors, and he settled back to steer the slow collapse of their resolve. As ever, they assured and reassured him of just how much of the Dominion’s vast resources might be owed to Earth.

Much of which, in fairness, had already started to arrive. Solar collection forcefield technology was on the cusp of revolutionizing Earth’s energy industry in ways that all other solar power tech had only hinted at. The last piece of the quantum-computing puzzle had been a collective headslap for the experts in that field. The Corti Directorate had—reluctantly and with bad grace—been strong-armed into revealing the secret by which the human immune system could be tricked into tolerating the presence of foreign cybernetic implants without weakening.

This last concession had particularly irked the Directorate’s ambassador. He in particular was a nut had persisted in being more difficult to crack than the others, and became more so with every meeting.

Doctor Hussein was beginning to suspect that the Corti wasn’t even bothering to remain unemotional any more. In fact, he suspected, the Corti was gladly simmering in a building resentment of, and hatred for, the whole of the human race.

He watched as the little grey being examined a message that had apparently just arrived for him, and then met Hussein’s eye. Anees decided that the expression on the ambassador’s face was that of grim satisfaction, as if an obstacle or irritation had been dealt with.

They were beginning to enter some dangerous territory. It would not do to be too aggressive from here on out.

Date Point: 3 years and 6 months AV
San Diego, California, USA, Earth
brrrrrp. brrrrrp. brrr-

”-Detective Gabriel Ares.”

“Ares, it’s Terri Boone here. Remember me?”

“Sure do. Que pasa, how’s your investigation getting on?

“long and dull, I’m sure you know how they are…”

Terri shouldered the door open, wishing not for the first time that she could linger in the air-conditioned office building just a little longer. The air in the courtyard parking space out back felt hot enough to bake bread.

”…I’ve found something interesting. A law firm called Grey, Stanton and Friedman.”

“They’re not criminal or business lawyers or I’d know them.” Ares said.

“No, they’re civil rights lawyers, but their finances—don’t ask me what I had to do to track this down—are handled by the same firm that did accounting for Johnson. I just tried to look them up—and that wasn’t easy—and their address doesn’t rent to a company by that name, never has.”

“Suspicious, but…”

Terri sighed as she fumbled for her car keys in an awkward, one-handed and one-elbowed manoeuvre familiar to any woman who ever simultaneously tried to operate both her phone and her handbag.

“Detective, They tried to kill me over a list of alien abductees still extant from Earth. Stanton Friedman is a UFOlogist who was the original investigator of the Roswell incident and “Grey” is-”

Mr. Johnson stepped around the corner. It WAS him, there could be no doubt, right down to the neatly tailored suit and the suave facial hair. He was holding an assault rifle.

“Fuck!” she yelled, and dove for the cover of her car. Johnson opened fire, winging her with a round through the calf.

“Boone! Where are you!” Ares yelled, loud enough to hear despite the phone being on the ground next to her. She shouted the address at it as she dug through her handbag for her m1911, cowering against the engine block as Johnson emptied the magazine.

\<+How? How the FUCK?! I KILLED him!+\>

He stopped firing, and she hauled herself up and around to shoot back, only to be confronted with an awful truth.

The assault rifle had a grenade launcher on it.

This revelation arrived only a shaved instant before the grenade itself turned her car into a fireball and a blizzard of steel shards.

Terri was thrown halfway across the lot. She tried to get up, to keep fighting, amazed to be alive, and looked down for her gun.

There was so much less of her than there should be. There was so much more of her than there should be, pieces that God had never intended to see the light of day.

\<+No…+\>

It was a sad, desperate thought, and it was her last one. When Johnson walked up and calmly fired a round through her skull for certainty’s sake, Terri Boone’s corpse didn’t even twitch.

Chapter 10: Legwork

Three years and six months AV
San Diego, California

In his career with the San Diego PD, Gabriel Arés had seen more than his fair share of death, and the common thread with homicide was that none were dignified. It was an act of violation that still made his skin crawl, even after twenty years.

This one was particularly difficult, knowing that it could have possibly been prevented if only he hadn’t followed the rules.

But that was dangerous thinking and he knew it. Gabriel had seen enough cop movies to know that Hollywood preferred the maverick, the rule-breaker, the loose cannon. But in real police work, you worked by the book to the letter, or else guilty men went free on a technicality. There was no room for renegade action in his definition of a Good Cop, and Gabriel had grown up from a young second-generation Mexican-American surrounded to the north and south by the lure of gangs and drug warfare, and had decided very early on that he’d be a Good Cop instead.

On days like today, that was a decision he almost regretted. It meant he had to deal with shit like this.

With news helicopters circling overhead and a clamour of journalists beyond the tape and uniforms, Terri Boone’s body had been covered over out of concern for the deceased’s dignity. But there was no way to disguise the huge dark smear of sun-dried blood across the parking lot, or the fact that covering her remains had involved several pieces of cloth.

Forensics were picking over every inch of the lot, accounting for every bullet hole, every shell casing, every grenade fragment, every scrap of sundered Ford Mustang. The lot was a forest of little yellow markers, swept inch-by-bloody-inch by men and women in white disposable clothing, meticulously photographing and documenting it to a fare-thee-well.

The Forensics lead—Doctor Schieffer—approached him as he leaned against his SUV, taking it all in.

“Progress.” he reported.

“You’ve established a cause of death?” Gabriel joked, resorting to his trademark callous black humour that indicated when he was truly upset. Fortunately, Schieffer had known him for years, and let the inappropriate comment slide.

“We found the phone.” the doctor held up an evidence bag. The little warped and shattered black lump inside was barely recognisable as having once been a smartphone. “It fetched up under that Prius over there, clean on the other side of the lot. Probably why the shooter couldn’t find it.”

“Madre de Dios… Think anything survived?”

“MicroSD cards are tough.” Schieffer reassured him. “Forget the surface damage, once we crack this thing open, we should be able to get the data off it.”

“Hopefully it brings us something.” Gabriel said, then sighed. “I’ve been putting this off. Guess I’d better go watch the security camera footage.”

“Good luck, Arés.”

It was as bad as he’d feared, and he made a point of not watching the victim’s expression in her final moments. It wasn’t relevant to the investigation, and would just give him trouble sleeping. He focused on the shooter instead.

“Mr. Johnson” stepped into the camera’s field of view and he paused the playback and raised his phone to his mouth, thumbing the “record” button on the dictaphone app.
“Shooter is a caucasian male, looks to be in his mid to late 40s, about… five ten, to six foot tall, brown hair and beard…” he zoomed in. “Camera doesn’t show any notable distinguishing features. Tough guy to pick out of a crowd. Armed with an M4 carbine fitted with an M203 grenade launcher and a reflex sight and… yeah, looks like a pistol in an armpit holster. Can’t tell make and model from this image though.”

He let it play some more, pausing it when Johnson drew the pistol in question to be certain of his kill. “Okay, pistol looks like a… SIG Sauer P220, or maybe 227. Hopefully ballistics will be able to work with that.”

He watched as the shooter cast around for the missing cellphone, then glanced up and stared at something out of shot—probably the arriving uniforms. Then he looked directly at the camera.

Gabriel was struck by just how… average his face was. Johnson really had nothing in the way of distinctive facial or physical traits. A shave and a change of clothes, and he would look completely different. He could be anybody, become anybody.

Then he vanished. Literally vanished, as Gabriel discovered when he rewound and played over the moment of disappearance frame by frame. The feed didn’t so much as flicker, there was no indication of anything at all affecting the camera. But in one frame, Johnson was present, and in the subsequent, he was gone.

“How the fuck…?” he asked, quietly.

“How the fuck?” Julian exclaimed. Kirk shrank back slightly at the volume. Six years of isolation had entirely robbed the human survivalist of an indoor voice.

“I’ve planned it all out.” he said. “You humans are fast, but the key to this plan is that you’re fast over long distances. I need somebody who could hike the Appalachian Trail, and you fit the bill and then some.”

“I do?”

Kirk nodded his long-necked head. It was an impressive gesture. “You’ve survived for six years on the most dangerous planet in the known galaxy. Actually, scratch that: you thrived there. The biohazard screen did a full scan of you: you’re in peak physical condition. You could run that trail. That part’s critical.”

“I’m approaching on foot, then.”

“You have to. Their sensors will pick up vehicles and dropships easily, and with their defensive coilguns… a vehicular assault isn’t possible. But the facility’s designers never reckoned on the idea that anybody could approach on foot. It’s a class eleven planet—a walk in the park next to Earth, but dangerous to the rest of us.”

“So I should just be able to jog up to the walls.” Julian sounded skeptical.

“Fence.” Kirk corrected him. He correctly interpreted Julian’s raised eyebrow and elaborated: “It’s an ultrasound fence, designed to drive off the local wildlife, but it’s not a physical obstacle at all.”

“And the actual security?”

“The usual. Maglocks, big steel shutters, lots of concrete, force fields, a garrison.” Kirk imitated a shrug, spreading his four arms wide. “Not loaded for human, by the way.”

“I’m not the killing sort, Kirk.” Julian said.

“Good, neither am I. The point is that the garrison aren’t a threat to you. Avoiding them would be best, however.”

“And the concrete and steel?”

“Leave that to me. You’ll be carrying a device that should help me help you.”

“So… I run in, avoid the garrison, you work whatever magic you’ve got planned, and then I just… come back the way I came?”

“Yes.”

“Carrying a backpack full of stolen military hardware.”

“Yes.”

Julian blinked at him, slowly, then gave up. “Fine. What could go wrong?”

“Okay… that’s got it. Out you come.” The forensic computer technician wiggled his needle-nose pliers a bit and finally the MicroSD card slid out of the wreckage of what had once been a phone.

Everyone in the office gathered round as he clicked it into a reader and opened its contents on his laptop. “Okay, easy-access stuff first, we’ll find any passwords or whatever secon… wow. Hey detective, there’s a folder here called Scotch Creek.”

“Open it.”

Inside were a handful of snapshots of beautiful Canadian rural terrain, and one of the technicians confirmed that they were of the area around Scotch Creek with a quick Google Street Maps search. Alongside them was a folder marked “Kevin.”

There was a general exclamation of surprise at that second folder’s contents. Gabriel rounded angrily on an officer who emitted a lecherous two-toned whistle. “This isn’t fucking porn! You’re going to fucking whistle at a dead woman’s selfies? Mostrar respeto!”

The officer looked away, mumbling an apology.

“I don’t want to hear it. ¡Vete a la mierda! All of you who don’t need to be here, get out!”

The exodus was rapid, especially the shame-faced officer who had whistled.

Gabriel calmed himself and returned his attention to the Scotch Creek folder. Most of its content was of Terri herself, and a mixed-race guy about her age with a cross tattooed on his forearm. None of those images were modest ones. A memory of happier, sexier times, he guessed.

“Shouldn’t be too hard to track him down.” he said. “Is that name in her contacts?”

“Let’s see… yeah, here we go. Kevin Jenkins.”

“Well, even if he’s not a witness, he deserves to know. Keep digging, I’ll make the call.”

+How are you doing?+
the text appeared in the top-left corner of Julian’s vision, thanks to a pair of dark glasses that Kirk had assembled in the nanoforge, along with some camouflaged performance clothing of Julian’s own design. The alien material was several hundred years of materials science ahead of the best Terran sportswear, and he felt cool, dry and comfortable despite having jogged over rough terrain for several hours now.

The only real fly in the ointment was the breathing mask. The planet’s atmosphere was just a little bit poorer in oxygen than the galactic average, and exertion should have quickly left him gasping for breath, or maybe dying from an aneurysm. Instead, the device on his face acted as a ramscoop, using force fields to collect a larger volume of air and enrich each breath, bringing it up to a comfortable Earth temperature and humidity. If it had only been made of the same material as his running gear, he would have been fine. Unfortunately, it was made out of some silicon-based rubbery substance which, while light and strong, was also about as breathable as foil. The result was itchy and sweaty.

“making good time” he subvocalized. A patch stuck to his throat interpreted the muscular contractions and exhalation to decide what he had said—it was an all but perfectly silent way to communicate.

+I meant physically+

“Just fine. I could do this all day.”

+No need. You’re approaching the three hundred meter mark+

“You’re joking”

+Hardly. Three…+

+…two…+

+…one…+

He brushed past a tree and there the rest of the forest wasn’t. Something had stripped out a perfect circle of foliage, surrounding a facility that was little more than a concrete bunker, a personnel building and a landing pad.

+You’re in range. Wait.+

Julian did so, breathing from the exercise but otherwise surprised at how much he still had in him. The Wall was a long way off, yet.

+The ultrasonic fence’s alarm is disabled… move now.+

Julian did so. He saw the patrol—three Guvnurug in their massive combat harnesses, shambling around away from him as they completed that arc of their patrol route. The sound of their own heavy footfalls made his own light steps inaudible as he dashed from shadow to shadow behind them.

+Twenty minutes before they return to this section of the perimeter.+

“This is their idea of a secure military facility?”

+It’s completely secure against all foreseeable threats. You however are an unforeseen factor, and as a result make this place look like a shopping mall.+

“Don’t amuse me.”

A blue diamond—his waypoint—appeared on his heads-up display, and, checking around him for hazards with all the skill he had honed in half a decade on Nightmare, Julian slipped over to it. It was a small door in the side of the large concrete bunker building.

+the code is one, two… top left, the one immediately to the right of that, the one immediately down and right from there, same one. immediately down-right, immediately down-left.+

Julian punched in the numbers on the oversized, Guvnurug-scale pad, reflecting that he was lucky Kirk had remembered that he couldn’t read any alien written language. There was an uncomfortably loud beep and a mechanical clunk from the door lock, and he slipped inside, wedging the door with a stone just in case.

+The blue crates against the back wall, and two or three of the things from the white crates on that exo-lifter’s pallet.+

Having no idea what these things did, Julian just obeyed orders. It took him only a minute or two to stuff the ordered items into the bag he had carried all the way out here, stopping only when the weight promised to become more than he could comfortably handle on the way back.

He helped the door close silently, checked his surroundings, flitted down a corridor of darkness where one of the base’s floodlights cast the shadow of a tall structure of some kind, cast around for watching sentries again, saw none, and sprinted across the open ground back into the woods.

The heist had taken maybe five minutes. If Kirk was right, by the time anything was noticed missing, he would be back at the Sanctuary.

brrrrp, brrrrp, brr-click

“Jenkins’ bar.”

“Hi, am I speaking to Mr. Kevin Jenkins?”

“Uh, yeah, you are. What can I do for you?”

“Sir, my name is detective Gabriel Arés, of the San Diego PD.”

“San Diego? Did something happen to Terri?”

“I’m sorry to tell you like this sir, but Miss Boone was murdered this morning.”

This was met with silence.

”…sir?”

There was a series of heavy sounds over the phone: a door opening violently, the clatter of something brittle being dropped, and a heavy thumping sound.

”…I’m…. shit, that’s….”

“If you need a few minutes sir, I can call back…”

“No… No, I’m…” there was a heavy, wavering breath from the far side of the line. “…god, Terri.”

“Sir, if you have any information as to a possible motive or culprit, then I could really use that to bring her killer to justice. I know it’s not much consolation, but it’s something.”

“Yeah, uh… She left an envelope under my pillow the day she went home. Note on the outside said “Please don’t open this, K. It’s my Batman insurance.”

Arés’ heart leapt to his throat. He knew that Boone had been a competent woman, but this….

He tried to ignore the fact that it meant Terri knew her life would shortly be in danger. “Do you have the envelope now?”

“It’s upstairs. Let me…” there was a grunt of exertion, then the sound of a door opening again. The distant, tinny voice of a woman offered concern in the form of a “shit, boss, are you okay?”. Jenkins’ response was inaudible, but was followed shortly by another door sound, and feet on what sounded like hardwood steps, then the jingling of keys and another door sound.

“I left it… yeah, here it is.” There was the sound of ripping paper. “it’s a… an email address and a password. says “Google Drive” at the top.”
Arés jotted them both down as they were read out, handing the note across to the forensic tech.

“Can you think of any reason why somebody would want Miss Boone dead?”

“Uh… Shit, you put me in an awkward situation here.”

“How so?” Arés asked him.

“Look man, I’m technically a contractor for the Canadian Armed Services, so I’m subject to the Official Secrets Act. I’d do anything to help you figure this shit out, but it’s probably best if I get some official permissions first, you know?”

“I understand. You’ve got my number?”

“Yeah, I can save it. Detective….you’ll let me know when the funeral is, right? Terri and I were close.”

“I’ll put you in touch with her sister.” Arés promised. “You’ll get back to me once you have permission to discuss this further?”

“Sure. I… look, I’ll be honest here man, I’m not holding it together too well here, I just…”

“Take all the time that you need, my friend.”

”…Yeah…”

Jenkins hung up, and Arés breathed a sigh. It had been a fruitful call, but in some ways even harder than the in-person visit to Monica Williams, Terri’s sister. She had just cried and curled up on the sofa, inconsolable. He knew how to deal with that. Stoic guys like Jenkins tore him up even worse, part of him wanted to shake the tears out of them, shouting “it’s okay you idiot, you’re allowed to weep.”

It was advice that he would have heeded himself, if he could.

“Welcome back”

“So what did we steal?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as we’re clear…. there we go.”

Julian set the bag down on the coffee table in Sanctuary’s main lounge with a sigh of relief. Even in the lower gravity and on a cool day, running that far with a pack full of hardware had been exhausting, and he flopped down on the couch, even more grateful than before for the high-tech fibre clothing.

Kirk stepped down from the command blister as he was massaging his sore legs. “Incredible.” he said, and Julian got the impression that a human would have been shaking his head in admiring disbelief. “If I didn’t know about marathons, triathlons and other endurance sports, I’d have never suspected that anything could run so far so quickly. They’ll be scratching their heads over this heist for a long time.”

“So what exactly did I steal?” Julian asked him. Kirk opened the bag and set the stolen goods out on the table. Five were about the size and shape of a hard drive. the other two were larger, closer in size to a loaf of bread and football-shaped.

“These five.” he said, indicating with his smaller manipulator arms “are wormhole beacons. Military grade, which means that they suppress their own distortion signature and can’t be detected with long-range sensors.”

He picked up one of the larger objects. “The other two are system defense field generators, like the device that’s projecting the Sol Containment Field.”

“Pull the other one!” Julian exclaimed. “I’ve taken dumps bigger than those things!”

His tall employer with the coat of short white fur smiled enigmatically, and set the device down. “Why should they be large? It’s all about advanced field technology, and technological advancement usually goes hand-in-hand with miniaturization.”

“Something that small is imprisoning my entire species?”

“Far from it. Nowadays it’s protecting them. Once we get these beacons set up, human starships will be able to leave Sol whenever they want.”

“That’s phase two.”

“Phase three.” Kirk corrected him “Phase two is, we need to deliver one of these fields emitters to Cimbrean. We’re on our way there now.”

“Cimbrean?”

“There are humans there. Your government’s first beachhead in the larger galaxy, and hopefully, the first of your fair share of colonies.”

“And the other emitter?”

“That’s for my other project.”

“I’m recording this in case things go as badly as I’m afraid they might… I guess if you’re watching it, they have.”

Terri shifted. She had recorded the footage while sitting in the driver’s seat of her Mustang, the camera—presumably her phone—mounted on the dash in front of her and slightly to the right. It was night-time, and she was parked somewhere.

She ran her hands through her hair, accomplishing only further dishevelment, rather than any grooming.

“What I’m about to say sounds absolutely crazy. But, I guess if I’m crazy and wrong then this video’s never getting seen, and if it gets seen then that’s pretty good evidence that I’m onto something…” she laughed a little. “Which is small comfort.”

“Um.”

She stared out of the window for a bit. A passing car’s headlights cast moving shadows across her face as she paused.

“I’m pretty sure there are aliens on Earth.” she said. “Like, they’ve been here since long before the embassies arrived. And I’m getting more and more convinced that they don’t have our best interests at heart. I’m an investigator, I go by the logical, the methodical and the evidence but… I don’t know call it a hunch, call it a bad feeling, but looking at what I’ve gathered so far, there’s a pattern in there, and it’s kind of a scary one.”

She finger-combed her hair again as it fell across her eyes. She looked rumpled, worn and tense: Arés got the impression that a man in her condition would have had several days’ worth of stubble darkening his jaw.

“I got to thinking, what could a list of alien abductees be worth killing over? That’s all I did for them: Spend two years on their dime, flying first class, interviewing people, examining records, chasing leads. Legwork, you know? I’ve tracked down…. thousands of likely abductees. You learn to see the telltales after a while, the things that tell you “yes, this was THEM”, not just, like, an unhappy end in the river or in a shallow grave in the woods or something. that’s all in one of the documents, you can double-check my work I guess.”

She looked up again as another car ghosted past, filling her own car with light and a soft whoosh of displaced air.

“Why could that be killing for? Why have a man in a suit waiting in my apartment with a gun? I’m pretty sure if I wasn’t safety-conscious, I’d have walked in there and been shot and nobody would be any the wiser. Robbery gone wrong maybe, I dunno, or maybe they… make it look like a rape or something. Something like that. Just another California evening.”

“Was it because I gave a copy of the list to Kevin? But that doesn’t answer the question. A list of names isn’t worth shooting a girl dead in her own apartment over, it’s a termination of contract, you know? “Thank you for your valuable work Miss Boone but we will be commissioning the services of somebody more… trustworthy.” So that list is really, REALLY important. It must be.”

For the first time, she looked directly at the camera. “So I went looking. I’ll… look, the details are all in this Google Drive, so I won’t bother repeating them for the camera. But I’m going to be back in San Diego tomorrow, and there’s a law firm: Grey, Stanton and Friedman. The name itself is a reference to Roswell, one of those stupid ballsy “I’ll never get caught” audacity things, I guess.”

“Why am I looking into them? Ask Ravi Singh. He’s an abductee, He lives in Brick, New Jersey. Ravinder Kanvar Singh. For God’s sake get to him before my killer does, because if you don’t get to the bottom of this then a lot more people than me are going to die.”

“When you find him, ask him about the Hierarchy.”

Chapter 11: Direct Delivery

Author’s note: This stage of the narrative is pretty heavily entangled in what was happening with Rantarian’s series, “Salvage”, and the character of Jen Delaney migrated from that series to this one and back again during the next few chapters.

If you have not already read “Salvage”, then now would be a good time to do so. The necessary chapters are part of the essential reading order

Three years and seven months AV
Alliance Embassy Station

Of all the warp-capable species in the known galaxy, perhaps the one that most resembled humans were the Qinis.

Not that anybody would ever confuse one for the other. Qinis were tall, taller even than Vzk’tk, and their slender bodies were an exercise in long, gently curving lines that made the human form look positively squat and gauche. They had large, expressive eyes set in their noseless faces above surprisingly feminine lips, and even though the eyes were slightly too wide-set and aimed apart to grant broad peripheral vision at the expense of binocular range-finding, the overall effect was, in an exotic way, actually rather appealing to the human sense of aesthetics.

Which was another way of saying that Rylee thought they were weirdly sexy. Especially when you threw in the large, pointed ears that swivelled this way and that seemingly with minds of their own.

Then there was their fashion sense. The Qinis bucked the interstellar trend by favouring clothing for more than simple utility. Practically every species at least wore a few pockets, packs, pouches and bags strapped onto their bodies, but by and large the interstellar community had zero nudity taboos: Clothing was an uncomfortable necessity when the wearer needed protection from some environmental or personal hazard, nothing more.

Only the Qinis and Gaoians seemed to differ from that general attitude, and even then, while the Gao had discovered long ago that clothing was practical and useful, they had largely constrained themselves to colourful overalls that left their shoulders bare.

The Qinis were different. They had fashion shows, trending designers and labels, the works. Admittedly, by human standards, Qinis clothing was far from modest—Rylee had been to a few fashion shows in her time, and the Qinis seemed to go for the kind of breast-baring, strangely cut artistic pieces that had made her internally roll her eyes while politely applauding. The objective of Qinis clothing seemed exclusively to be the artful enhancement and decoration of their physical features, rather than concealment, warmth or function.

At that objective, however, they succeeded admirably. She was finding it hard not to stare, or fantasize.

Not that anything could ever come of such speculative fantasies, of course. That gracile frame and its stately movements were the product of crystal-delicate long bones, upon which the muscles were strung more like gossamer than like the mechanical powerhouse of a moving creature. Any kind of an intimate tryst with a Qinis would have inevitably and swiftly become an agonising introduction to the joys of bone fractures, no matter how gentle the human tried to be. They were fragile even by the standards of other nonhuman species, having evolved on the lowest-gravity cradle world thus far known to the interstellar community.

It had come as a surprise to everyone that they had sided with the Celzi, in fact. Their kind simply were not warriors at all—too fragile, too slow, too gentle and esthetic. Siding with an open rebellion had seemed like a very strange move from them, but in fact they had become the industrial base of the entire Alliance, having long since mastered the engineering arts of automated assembly and resource extraction, keeping all the heavy lifting and physical exertion safely on the far side of a sturdy entourage of robots and drones. One Qinis engineer could mine asteroids with her left hand while directing the construction of a battlecruiser with her right, all while relaxing at a party wearing a stately and decorative robe of diaphanous fabrics hung with gems and loose-wound wire.

Next to which, Rylee felt downright dowdy in her USAF dress uniform, though she noticed that some of the Qinis males were eyeing the uniform’s cut speculatively. Either that or they were eyeing her—maybe humans were just as strangely beautiful to Qinis? It was hard to tell.

At least she didn’t need any such guesswork when it came to the Russian ambassador to the Alliance, who may as well have opened the conversation with “Hello Captain Jackson, would you like to have sex with my wife while I watch?” and was clearly not going to let a merely arctic reception dash his hopes. The wife in question—a bored-looking pencil sketch of a blonde supermodel—seemed to exist purely to agree with her husband and give Rylee a look that said that the sex would be a wonderfully pleasurable exercise in athletic hate-fucking, though she had relaxed the moment Rylee’s disinterest in the veiled proposition became apparent.

Snubbing the lecherous creep would have been in violation of her briefing, however. Rylee had been given explicit instructions to try and leave a positive impression on everyone there regardless of species or allegiance, so she spun a careful half-truth that left the wife satisfied that Rylee wouldn’t be in their bed tonight and the ambassador equally hopeful that she would, and excused herself in search of more tolerable company.

She found it in the form of a small knot of Gaoians. Their body language was a little hard to read, but looking at which way their feet pointed she decided that the group was having two separate conversations—one between four males with dark colouration and a tall female with much more silver and white in her fur. The other conversation was between an obviously younger female and…she peered at the markings on his face for a careful second to make sure…

“Goruu!”

The Gaoian pilot looked up and around at the happy exclamation of his name, and his ears pricked up adorably. “Rylee!” he said, and the translator filled his tone with genuine gladness to see her. “I was told you were here somewhere.”

They shook hands, gently. “Rylee, this is Sister Niral. Niral, Captain Rylee Jackson, pilot of Earth’s first superluminal vessel.”

“Ah, so this is the one you wouldn’t shut up about.” Niral teased. She shook Rylee’s hand also, and both women met each others’ gazes and stifled giggles as the young male’s ears drooped a little, cementing Rylee’s conviction that she liked Gaoians.

“I guess Pandora made an impression.” she commented.

“You both did.” Niral said. “Truthfully, if you were a Sister, I’d be a little bit jealous.”

“You two are together?”

“I’m…not averse to the idea.” Niral said, mischievously flattening her ears sideways. Rylee had to admire her cool and confidence, she didn’t even glance backwards to see Goruu’s expression prick up in delight that completely ignored species boundaries.

“Well, nothing to be jealous of here.” Rylee said, and winked at Goruu. “I’d break him.”

Niral chittered a nervous laugh as Goruu wilted in embarrassment, turning heads from the other Gaoian group, who dropped their conversation and joined the new one around Rylee. The tallest and probably oldest male scratched the top of Goruu’s head, further contributing to his embarrassment.

“Ah, Rylee Jackson, this is Mother Yimyi.” Niral introduced her, then indicated the older male who had scratched Goruu’s head. “Clan-Father Amren of Clan Firefang, Fathers Gu and Yemin, and Brother Roni.”

Rylee decided she was glad that Amren had been facing away from her when she first approached the group or else she might have mistaken him for Goruu. Aside from some extra grey fur, his markings were practically identical to the younger male’s. Family resemblance?

There was an exchange of polite small-talk, which Rylee had only limited reserves of patience for: she decide to make the conversation mean something.

“I’ll confess.” she said, picking her words carefully “I was a little surprised to run into a familiar face at this little soiree.”

“You’re wondering what the tukki the Gaoians are doing at an Alliance party, seeing as we’re members of the Dominion councils.” Mother Yimyi said, cutting straight through the delicate language, and drawing a generally amused and agreeable response from the males. Rylee decided that she really liked Gaoians, and relaxed.

“That, yes.” she agreed.

Amren scratched his ear and indicated, with a subtle tilt of his head, the whole room. The walls have ears was a subtle reminder that didn’t need translating. “As the Celzi are keen to point out, theirs is a war of secession based on the right to self-determination.” he said. “Which is a principle that we stand behind.”

“I sense a “but” coming…” Rylee said.

“But.” Yimyi said “we have reservations about the Celzi’s “you get what you grab” approach to territory. The Dominion, for all its flaws, and for all the arrogance that makes it think it can sell every planet in the galaxy and make money off the sale, at least offers a moderated and civil approach to expansion and colonisation.”

“So you’re here looking to…what, build bridges? Heal the rift?”

“It’s not a plan that all of the clans agree with. Many of our idiot gung-ho warrior clans are eager to pitch in with the war.” Yimyi said.

“The Firefangs are a warrior clan.” Amren pointed out, though his tone carried no objection.

“But not an idiot gung-ho one.” Yimyi soothed.

“What’s holding them back?” Rylee asked her.

“The Clan of Females. Our attitude is that we don’t feel all of the available diplomatic options have been exhausted yet and we are not happy to fully commit Gao to a war that was started by other species when there are still opportunities for non-violent contact.” She looked, if Rylee was any judge, smug. “And the male clans don’t do anything which the Mother-Supreme has expressed disapproval for, if they’re smart.”

She tilted her head, but Rylee wasn’t sure what, if anything, the gesture meant. “In truth, your own species’ ascension has provided an excellent opportunity. Inside the Sol demilitarized zone, with these two embassy stations in place, we now have the most open and accessible point of contact between the two sides for…twenty cycles or longer.”

“Then there’s the way your own factions are seeking to play the rivalry to your advantage” Amren interjected. “Both sides know that for the human race to commit to siding with the other would be disastrous. Not least because a lot of hapless, innocent soldiers would get crushed by a force who drastically outmatch them. We’re hoping to persuade the Alliance and Dominion both that it’s in the best interests of both factions to declare a ceasefire and negotiate a permanent peace before that happens.”

“Know when to walk away with what you’ve already got while you still have it, kind of thing?”

“Exactly. An astute and sensible policy.” Yimyi said approvingly.

“I learned it from a very wise man called Kenny Rogers.”

An aide approached and murmured something quietly to Mother Yimyi, who took Father Amren’s arm. “If you’ll excuse us, it seems the Qinis ambassador wishes to speak with us.”

“Of course.” Rylee said.

The other Fathers and Brother also made their apologies and scattered to mingle with the assorted Alliance members and humans.

“Want to get out of here?” Niral asked.

“More than anything. Are we allowed to?”

“We have talamay and a game you might like in the shuttle.” Goruu said.

“Lead on.”

The Gaoian diplomatic shuttle turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. The similarity in size between Gaoians and humans meant that Rylee felt nicely accomodated-for, rather than dwarfed by furniture built larger than human demands required.

Goruu handed her a glass of Talamay. “Be warned, I heard this stuff does something funny to humans.”

“Funny how?” Rylee asked, sniffing it.

“There’s a human living on our homeworld.” Niral said. “Apparently after a few glasses of talamay she giggled a lot, fell asleep and woke up feeling awful.”

“I thought I smelled alcohol.” Rylee said. “Screw it, I’m off duty.” she took a sip and was rewarded by something that tasted surprisingly like Fanta.

The Gaoians shared a faintly confused glance. “The alcohol? That just flavours it and kills microorganisms…doesn’t it?” Goruu asked.

“You guys don’t get drunk?”

Again there was a blank look. “The translator seems to be getting confused?” Niral said. “Of course we aren’t imbibed, we imbibe the drink.”

“Nono. Intoxicated?”

“That word didn’t even translate.”

“Really? Okay, well it means, like…. altered brain chemistry leading to a changed state of mind.”

Difficult though it was to read their expressions, Niral and Goruu were clearly drawing a complete blank.

”…wow. You guys are missing out. What’s this game?”

They introduced it to her. As a veteran of countless airbase games of poker, picking up the bidding and bluffing side of the game was trivial, though the unfamiliar cards and a few different mechanics kept it interesting and cost her a couple of early hands. A couple of hours flashed by with all the speed of good fun, good company and good drink, and all three of them became quite thoroughly acquainted as they played.

Maybe it was just the alcohol giving her confidence, but she was feeling certain that she was about to lure Goruu into running a perfectly solid hand into the teeth of her own carefully-assembled counter to it when something in the Firefang’s pocket chirruped. He fished out a device that looked practically identical to a smartphone, consulted it, and growled.

“They need me back at the party.” he said. “Hopefully I won’t be long…”

“We’ll be fine.” Niral assured him, and watched him go with what Rylee took for undisguised physical attraction.

She laughed as the Sister turned back and skewed her ears, embarrassed. “Oh yeah, you two are gonna bang.” she said.

Niral gave her a curious look. “You’re very…forthright about that.”

“I’m teasing, Niral. I can’t blame you, he’s a great guy.”

This earned her an even stranger look.

”…what?” She asked.

“We only just met, Rylee…do you mind if I ask you a very personal question?”

Rylee sipped her Talamay then shrugged. “Sure.”

“That’s three times now you’ve spoken about Goruu as if you’d consider him as a potential mate.”

“I have?”

Niral ducked her head in what Rylee had learned was an emphatic Gaori nod. “You said ‘I’d break him’, you just said that he’s a ‘great guy’.”

Rylee sipped her drink, mentally noting that she’d need to stop soon: her head was starting to go genuinely fuzzy. “Does that bother you?”

“Well…maybe this is just a species thing, but that’s how a fellow Gaoian female would talk if she was also eyeing him up for a mating contract. And just before that you sounded as if you thought the idea of me and him was…”

“Hot?”

”…Appealing.”

“So what’s your question, Niral?”

“Are you?”

“Am I…. what, are you asking if I would have sex with Goruu if I could?”

“I…well, I’m not sure. That’s a very strange idea to me, Rylee. But…okay, would you?”

Rylee felt an uncharacteristic rush of heat to her ears but forced herself to be truthful. “Privately, just between us girls? …I don’t know. Part of me wants to,” she confessed.

Niral made a soft growling noise, which Rylee speculated could only mean disbelief. “But he’s not even your species!” she objected.

“So?”

“You couldn’t have cubs!”

“So…okay, is sex only about having cubs for you guys?” Rylee asked.

“That’s why we have mating contracts. Are you saying your species do it for other reasons?”

Rylee thought about that for a second, then sat up and set her drink down. “How would you react if I told you that I’ve had sex with other women?” She asked.

”…I…that’s just such an alien idea, Rylee. Why would you want to? Two females can’t have cubs together.”

“Because it’s fun! Doesn’t sex feel good for Gaoians though? Physically? Does the word ‘orgasm’ translate for you guys?”

“Well…yes. To both questions.” Niral said. Her ears were pointing almost completely opposite directions to one another: had she been human, Rylee suspected that Niral would have been bright red, squirming in her seat and fidgeting with her hands. “But that’s just…nice, you know? It’s not the point of mating.”

“Okay, so that’s how things are for your species. Fair enough.” Rylee said. “For mine, sex is about a whole lot more than having children. It’s…equally or even more about fun, pleasure and emotional intimacy.” Rylee said. “That’s more true for some people than for others, but in my case I don’t plan on ever having cu-, uh, children.”

”…You don’t? Ever?!”

“Nope. I’m doing important work where I am. Getting pregnant and taking maternity leave would take me away from all the action, and by the time that changes, I’ll be too old. But I like getting laid, and all I’m after from sex is the fun and not the commitment.”

She poured herself another drink and rested her head back again. Niral couldn’t resist probing for more information, however. Strange though it was, she hadn’t come to Earth out of a lack of fascination for this species, and Rylee had opened up a whole world of new questions that she would prefer not to leave unanswered.

“But…mating still leads to procreation for your kind, right? Can you consciously choose not to have cubs?”

“In a way…here.” Rylee stood up and shrugged out of her jacket, tugged off her tie and pulled her shirt over her head. She sat down wearing only a dark grey undergarment that covered and restrained her breasts.

Niral’s jaw threatened to drop. The human pilot’s body was an education in alien anatomy all by itself, layered in muscle atop solid muscle, each leaving a firm impression through the skin. There were so many of them! The overall effect was alien, but not ugly: Rylee’s body hinted at the incredible strength that was stored inside it, but also at agility, poise and exceptional control.

Seeing her staring, Rylee barked one of those human laughs, looked up, grabbed a structural spar on the ceiling and, after testing its weight-bearing capacity, hauled herself up into the air, pulling her legs up until they were pointed straight out in front of her, parallel with the ground. She found her pose and became perfectly still, a study in huge forces all finely balanced against one another.

“I had two dreams when I was a little girl. I was either going to be an astronaut, or join Cirque du Soleil” she said, conversationally. In a rapid yet smooth movement she flipped around until she was gripping the bar behind her, and lowered herself back to the deck. She alighted with a thump, and wobbled a bit on her feet.

“Woo. Yeah, I’ve had enough Talamay.” she said, collapsing back onto the couch, which creaked alarmingly under the impact of a weight it hadn’t been designed to handle.

“That was incred…wait, you can do that in Earth gravity?” Niral asked.

“Sure can! I can’t hold it for as long but…yeah, I need to show you Cirque du Soleil sometime, those guys make me look clumsy.”

She finished her drink and slid the bottle away from her. “Anyway…about choosing to not get pregnant from sex: feel here.” she said, indicating a crease between two muscles in her upper arm, neither of which even existed on Gaoians. Niral did so, tentatively, and recoiled when Rylee laughed and jerked away. “Firmer! You can’t hurt me and if you don’t really go for it you’ll just tickle me.” the human demanded.

Niral ducked her head in a nod and complied, firmly trying to bury her fingers in Rylee’s arm. It was like trying to push her hand through Tarimit wood but she felt, just below the surface, a little nub of matter that was even harder than the flesh around it.

“What is that?” She asked.

“Contraceptive implant. It releases a hormone that occurs naturally in human women and stops us from ovulating when we’re pregnant. Basically, it tricks my body into thinking I’m pregnant all the time, so I never actually get pregnant. So I can have all the sex I like without risking having a cu- a child.”

“But if you did have one, couldn’t your Sisters…no, wait, you don’t have a clan of females, do you?”

“Nope. If I had a kid, I’d either have to give up my career to look after them, which I’m not willing to do, or put them up for adoption or foist them on my brother or parents, which sounds immoral and irresponsible to me. And while I’m pro-choice, I’m dead-set against ever having an abortion myself, so I’m always care…what?” She paused upon seeing Niral’s expression.

“Abortion?”

“Ah…yeah. Termination of pregnancy.”

“You’d KILL an unwanted cub?” Niral looked sickened and horrified, her ears flattened themselves back along her skull and her eyes widened.

“I wouldn’t!” Rylee protested. “That’s how I see it too, I think it’s disgusting and wrong, and I take every precaution I can to make sure I never need to even consider it.”

“But you said…pro-choice? So you think other human women should be allowed to do that?”

“I think they should have the choice. When they choose to do that, well…it’s on their soul, not mine.” Rylee lamented. “Nobody wants for that to happen, nobody likes it, it’s just…you know, it’s seen as being the better alternative to giving the child a shitty life, you know? And the fact is that giving people the choice and the education to avoid having to make it works a lot better than just outright banning the practice.”

Niral still looked shaken, but she collected herself and thought about it. “I…that’s incredibly sad, Rylee. And upsetting. To think that a mother could ever find herself weighing her cub’s happy future against its life and deciding the kindest thing to do would be to…” She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.

The human had the decency to look troubled. “Yeah.” she agreed.

“Couldn’t you just…not have sex unless and until you were willing to have little ones?”

Rylee sighed. “Some people try. They don’t usually succeed. We’ve got this whole “abstinence-only” thing where I’m from, and the kids who try to follow it are the ones who usually wind up having babies first because they can’t stop themselves, they get horny, they get laid, they don’t take the right precautions and…boom. Unwanted teenage pregnancy, and that often leads to a lot of problems for the child down the line.”

“It’s that powerful?” Niral inquired. “Your mating drive, I mean? That you can’t stop yourselves?”

“Hell yes. We do all kinds of stupid shit when it overtakes us: completely lose our focus, act without thought for the consequences…”

Enlightenment smote Niral in the forehead. “OH! You’re like the Vgork!”

Rylee frowned. “I don’t think I’ve met a Vgork…”

“Their males have this thing where the more highly placed they are in the social order, the more often they need to mate or else they’re overcome by a berserk rage. It usually ends badly.” Niral looked alarmed “Oh stars, and you’re a lot stronger and harder to subdue than they are…”

“No! No, that sounds a lot worse than we have it.” Rylee interrupted, soothingly. “We just get irrational and careless, but we CAN restrain ourselves. It’s just uncomfortable and distressing. Physically painful, even. So yes, we could ‘just not have sex’, but at the very least it’s frustrating.”

She set her head back again, staring off at nothing.

“And…you feel the mating urge towards Goruu? Despite that he’s not human?” Niral asked.

Rylee didn’t look up. “It’s…not exactly. It’s more like…I like Goruu as a person; I hope we’ll be friends, and usually I like to have sex with my friends. That’s kinda colliding with the fact that he’s not human in my head and, yeah, it’s weird for me too.”

She looked up and smiled sheepishly. “And I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable, Niral, but the same goes for you.”

Niral gave her a long, flat-eared stare. “It does?” she squeaked.

“Absolutely!” Rylee exclaimed. “And if you’re wondering how to take that, take it as a compliment. You’re a beautiful person. But neither of you are interested and even if you were we couldn’t possibly do it without you risking serious injury, so that’s where it ends.”

She sighed. “I know I’ve said that the, uh, ‘urge’ is a powerful thing, but emotionally well-balanced people have no problem with their interest not being reciprocated, and I wouldn’t even be up here if a lot of highly qualified people didn’t agree that I’m emotionally well-balanced. So yes, I ‘feel the urge’ towards both of you, but it’s under control and fading. But if there was no physical danger involved and if you both consented to it, I’d jump at the chance. Does that sound fair?”

“It sounds very strange and alien, but…You’re not Gaoian, I shouldn’t be surprised that you don’t behave exactly like Gaoians do. So, yes, that sounds fair.”

“Friends?”

Niral looked the human in the eyes, and the vulnerability in the deathworlder’s expression took the worst off that discomfort. For all the intimidating controlled strength and thoroughly alien sexual morality, she was still talking to a fellow emotional sophont who had exposed herself to potentially serious social consequences out of trust and honesty. The human immediately became less dangerously alien in her eyes, and was again just Rylee.

”…Friends.” she agreed, and chittered happily when Rylee sagged with relief.

“Thank you, Niral.”

“I do have one more question, though.” Niral told her, as Rylee began to put her shirt back on.

“Shoot.”

“Is your attitude…typical? Of humans?”

“Oh, no! No! Far from it. I’m REALLY open-minded, and I decided a long time ago not to have any hangups about it.” Rylee said.

“Why?”

“Because the people who mind don’t matter, and the people who matter don’t mind.”

Niral thought about this. “I think that’s probably not an idea that works so well for Gaoians.” she said. “But you ARE controversial, then?”

Rylee grimaced. “Controversial, yeah. That’s putting it mildly. There are places on Earth where I’d be buried up to my neck and have rocks thrown at my head for being so sexually liberated.”

”…I’m sorry, was that an exaggeration or not? Because after the abortion thing…”

Rylee looked uncomfortable and a touch ashamed. “It wasn’t. Sadly.”

Again there was that disbelieving chirrup from Niral and an expression of mild horror.

“We can be kind of shitty to one another sometimes.” Rylee said. “I’d never do something like that and neither would anybody I care to associate with.”

“I understand.” Niral told her. “There are violent bigots in every species.”

Rylee smiled, and the last of the tension fled her entirely. “Thank you for understanding, Niral.”

“Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me these things.”

“What things?” Goruu asked, stepping back into the shuttle.

”…Female! Female things.” Niral squeaked, scooping up her cards. Goruu hesitated, then quirked his head in a Gaoian shrug and sat down at the card game again.

Rylee suppressed her smile. Gaoians were so cute sometimes.

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility

Martin Tremblay’s welcome to the Operation Stolen Star briefing room was the squeal of forty chairs as forty pairs of boots propelled their wearers to attention.

“As you were.” he said, acknowledging the collective respect and approaching the lectern at the front of the room as the men sat back down.

Its current occupant, Captain Owen Powell, was the commanding officer of the Stolen Star unit, and Tremblay couldn’t have asked for a better unit lead. Powell had regained the rank of Captain after enduring the British special forces tradition of demotion back to Private when he had joined the Special Boat Service.

“General.” He said.

“Apparently I have to make a speech.” Tremblay said, to general mirth. “I promise it’ll be quick.”

Powell stepped aside. “Take it away, sir.”

Tremblay adjusted the lectern’s microphone and considered the men in front of him for a second. Canadians, British, Americans, Australians, and a smattering of others, all with long, impressive and heavily classified service records.

“The last hundred years” he began “have been full of firsts. Not all of them were illustrious ones. But they’re all worth remembering. The first world war, the first use of a nuclear weapon…but I think there have been many more positive ones than negative: The first man in space, the first man on the moon, the first woman to travel faster than light.”

“Except.” he said, adjusting the mic again “…not really. Yuri Gagarin, it turns out, was not the first person in space, nor was Rylee Jackson the first to exceed lightspeed. Those honours both, according to the information we have, belong to a Roman soldier called Lucius Bellator Maximus.”

“Have we had our heroes stripped from us by alien action? No. Because that Roman didn’t go into space knowingly or willingly. Gagarin did. Jackson did. And it was human skill, science and engineering that let them do it.

“So, are you going to be the first men to set foot on an alien world? No. Are you going to be the first men we send there? Absolutely, and that’s an honour that sets you alongside the giants of history.”

“Theirs, however, were missions of discovery. Their objectives were to break new boundaries for the sake of breaking them, to prove that they could be broken. You are called to something higher. Not to impugn discovery as a cause, but I personally rate freedom even more highly, and you are being called upon to travel to another world not only to prove that it can be done, but to defend that world and to turn it into the vehicle of our liberation from a prison we do not deserve.”

“The future liberty of the human race may rest on your ability to get this job done. I am in absolutely no doubt that we have never been in safer hands.”

There was polite applause as he stepped back, and shared a salute with Powell. “Carry on, Captain.”

“The Ambassadorial party is staying on this station overnight.” Goruu said, after Rylee had gone. It had been surprising and both alarming and funny to see the usually graceful human pilot stumble back towards the spartan bunk she had erected for herself under one of Pandora’s wings, failing to even keep to a straight line.

“They’ve had quarters made up for them?” Niral asked him.

“Yes. There are nest-beds up there for us as well…”

“That’s a pity…and here I thought we had some privacy tonight. I had this contract all ready for you to sign…” Niral said, holding it up.

The expression of delight on Goruu’s face was priceless.

Cimbrean

Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, space-babe pirate queen, colonial governor, wilderness survival expert, full of alien medicine and thus possibly immortal, and all alone.

Well, except that the last time she’d done piracy was months ago now, so that maybe didn’t count any longer, and the colony in question had been a pile of smoking rubble the last time she laid eyes on it. Being bombarded from orbit and then invaded tended to do that to a place. They’d made a good escape there, after an “out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire” fashion.

The point was that the pirate queen and colonial governor bits maybe didn’t apply any longer. But she was keeping the space-babe part.

And then there had been…other stuff. Honestly, it was all kind of a blur, now. A long, confusing, relentlessly violent blur that she knew had involved nearly dying a couple of times. She’d lost track of Darragh who was maybe kind of useless but at least he’d have been something resembling company right now. And she was trying not to think about Adrian’s fate, with all that fecking fire foam that did weird things to their brains, and the ship venting atmosphere, and the way she’d left him to die because if she’d tried to save him they’d have both perished…

She was trying, she reminded herself irritably, not to think about it.

She had only ever bothered to remember one planet’s coordinates, and that fact had saved her life…but then the bastard escape pod had landed on the wrong end of the continent.

Bereft of alternatives, she’d squared her shoulders, hoisted her gear and started walking.

At least Cimbrean was a Class 4 world, which meant that survival wasn’t exactly difficult…But her four-month trek across half a hemisphere had turned up a leaf that, when boiled, produced something that tasted almost like a cup of sweet tea. Which was nice.

On reflection, Jennifer Delaney, mid-twenties, space-babe discoverer of almost tea, ex-pirate and governor of a hole in the ground just didn’t have the same ring to it.

“Shut up, Jen.” She chastised herself. That muddled second-guessing of herself was an Old Jen habit. But the old Jen would have dithered and died alongside Adrian aboard that cruiser. The old Jen wouldn’t have seen a five-thousand-whatever hike across a whole continent and just accepted it as the next in a long series of trials she would overcome. The old Jen would have broken down in tears at least twice as often during these last four months as the new Jen had.

Pirate queen and colonial governor or not, she was toughened, a survivor, somebody who knew how to keep putting one foot in front of the other no matter what a sadistic universe decided to throw at her. She had all of that that going for her.

Everything else, not so much. Her shoes had given up their ghosts inside the first week of hiking, and while the foot-wraps she had fashioned from the sleeves of her shirt had stopped her feet getting cut up and bloody, they hadn’t stopped her soles from hardening to the consistency of her nan’s patent ossified soda bread. The datapad that had been guiding her back to the only thing that even vaguely resembled civilisation on this world was a more recent casualty, lost in a cliff-based accident.

That had been four valleys ago. It was remarkable just how hard it was to find the bombed-out ruin of a mansion without a map. At least she had been all but on top of it when the little device had gone bouncing down the rocks, never to be recovered. She had only needed to explore four valleys before the fourth finally yielded her glimpse of home…at the other end of it, a good day’s trek away, and night was falling.

Oh well, it wouldn’t be the last time she made camp anyway. And at least there were lots of the sort-of-tea bush around.

She set up her camp with the practiced skill of somebody who had done it every night in a row for four months, boiled herself a cup of tea-ish and a healthy vegetable stew, and fell asleep beside the fire.

Morning brought warm sunshine and morning mist, which she set off through in the best mood she’d felt for some time, walking stick in hand. Something birdlike thrummed past her head and perched in a nearby tree, angled its multifaceted eyes at her and preened a shimmering wing, singing a warbling song that reminded her of a Nightingale. It was beautiful.

Her well-thrown rock knocked it off its perch with a squawk.

Happily singing the chorus to “Linger”—the only part of the song she could remember—she strapped the bird-ish’s broken carcass to her bag. “Meat stew tonight!” she told it.

Somewhere inside her, the old Jen, the I.T. girl who had been inconsolable for a week when her gerbil had died, whimpered. The new Jen, however, was a practical, weathered survivor and ignored the old Jen’s objections in favour of valuable protein.

That was her day, walking along the soft sort-of-grass by a burbling stream in the warm summer sunshine of an alien world, collecting alien plants, herbs and sort-of-mushrooms and telling a dead alien sort-of-bird about how she was going to cook it. It was mid-afternoon when she stepped out of the woods and found herself standing in front of the palace ruins. The front gardens, originally a gorgeous masterwork of horticulture tended by little drones and automated systems, had been bombed down to a muddy paste, and were now grown over by a thicket of small bushes and tall sort-of-grass.

“And you thought you’d never make it on your own, you eejit.” she told herself aloud, grinning at her own success.

Despite the bombardment, the landscaping was still mostly intact, as were the stone steps that curved around what had once been an ornamental pond but was now a crater, and up to the front of the building itself, which was basically an expanse of rubble interestingly punctuated by half-intact walls.

Oh well, at least there was the material here to get a roof over her head, if nothing else.

She set her bag down by what had once been the front entrance, leaned her walking stick against it, and began to explore the ruins. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, exactly: a change of clothes, maybe, or some emergency rations. What she found instead was her bath.

It was almost perfectly intact, standing proud in the middle of its tiled bathroom floor, though the rest of the bathroom was long gone. A few shrapnel scars notwithstanding, there it was: her bath.

Hardly daring to hope, she crept up to it, and turned the faucet on. There was a gurgle, and horrible brown sludge vomited out of the tap.

Oh well. You couldn’t have everything in life. She’d just have to haul and boil the water herself.

Fetching enough water to fill the bath was a job that took most of her remaining daylight hours. She made and ate her not-quite-bird stew, slept, feeling filthy and gritty, and dreamed of hot water.

It was a dream that she spent the whole of the next day’s morning and afternoon turning into a reality. From the moment she woke she set to work on it, building her campfire and setting up the small boiling tin that had been in her escape pod right next to the bath. For hours, she got into a rhythm of scooping out some water, boiling it, pouring it in, scooping some out, boiling it, foraging for firewood…The water heated so slowly, but it definitely heated, and if there was one thing that Jen had learned from her months of cross-country hiking, it was how to let her mind entertain itself while the body worked.

Finally, by the early evening, the bath was the perfect temperature: steaming, but not painful. She had no soap, no bubble-bath foam or bath bombs, but it was still a hot bath, the first she’d had in months and months.

Smiling like all was right with the world, she disrobed, stepped up onto the bath’s plinth, raised her foot and dipped it gently in. A long sigh of the deepest contentment escaped from her.

B-BOOMMmm..

She looked up. There was a speck of brightness in the sky, a spaceship that gleamed in the sunlight, casting its sonic boom ahead of it as it lost speed and turned.

Jennifer Delaney addressed the universe in general: “Fuck. You.”

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility

The middle of the chamber was a careful scaffolding, built to millimeter tolerances, all of which had been filled by vehicles. Three Navistar 7000 trucks were squeezed in, each full of crates, bags, boxes and, here and there, just enough room for the soldiers to sit, each hugging his gear. Most of the remaining space was taken up by a pair of Kawasaki Mules, and the last was occupied by an example of the very latest in human military technology.

Tremblay was considering it when the troopers arrived. They had all pitched in with parking and loading the trucks the night before, and were now shaved, rested, geared up, well fed and as ready for indefinite deployment off-world as anybody ever could be.

It wasn’t an occasion for pomp or speeches. The project was top-secret for a reason. There were no politicians present, only soldiers ready for deployment, and the gaggle of military scientists who would be sending them there.

Captain Powell joined him by the weapon system.

“I’m amazed they agreed to release one of these for the colony’s use.” Tremblay commented.

“Bit disappointing really. I was pushing for a WERBS.” Powell said, drawing a laugh from the general.

“You may as well have asked for a couple of nukes, eh?” Tremblay told him. “Besides, ET’s going to brown his pants enough when they see this thing in action.”

“If, sir.” Powell said, not bothering to disguise his smug confidence. “If they see it in action.”

“Fair point.” Tremblay turned to the SBS officer and extended a hand, which Powell shook. “It’s been a pleasure having you on base, Captain.”

“I bet it has.” Powell grinned.

Tremblay suppressed his smirk. “Carry on, captain.”

“Sir.”

As the captain shouted his men into place on the trucks, Tremblay stepped back across the concrete to where Ted Bartlett was tapping on a tablet computer, looking thoughtful.

“You’re certain you got that inertia problem sorted out?” Tremblay asked him, quietly so none of the soldiers could hear.

“Two months ago, general.” Bartlett reassured him.

”…Good.” Tremblay said, watching the men load up. “Good.”

Bartlett tapped out a few last things, then looked up. “All aboard? Zone clear?” He shouted. There was a general thumbs-up and nodding. “Zone clear!” He shouted, and tapped a button on the tablet.

A block of purest possible black immediately enclosed the trucks, Mules, soldiers and weapon system.

“Don’t you think a countdown might have been appropriate?” Tremblay asked as the scientists and technicians began to vacate the vacuum chamber. “Give it a sense of occasion?”

They were the last to step through the pressure door, which Bartlett closed and locked, before acknowledging the question with a shrug.

“Woops.”

“That was definitely a camp back there…look, here’s a pack and walking stick.”

Kirk looked around, holding some kind of scanning device, then pointed with one of his longer arms. “There’s a heat signature over…that way.” he said, and stepped daintily over the rubble to pursue it.

Julian followed, weaving through the bombed-out shell of what had obviously been a lavishly grand and expensive property once upon a time.

The heat signature turned out to be a huge stone bath, steaming gently. Relaxing in it was a red-haired woman, head resting on the side, eyes closed, floating gently with her arms splayed and her breasts just breaking the surface of the water.

“Woah!” Julian exclaimed and turned a one-eighty, feeling heat rush to his cheeks.

“You boys are either an hour too early, or four months too late, and I don’t know which.” said the woman. Irishness lilted off every syllable, heavy with weary resignation. “Go away, I’m having a bath.”

Kirk leaned down and whispered in Julian’s ear: “Any advice on how to deal with…this?”

Julian shook his head, eyes wide as he stared desperately off towards the distant mountains—no! Not the mountains, the hills—no! The wall, yes. The wall seemed safe. “You’re on your own.”

Kirk chuffed a loud coughing sound, which Julian had learned was the equivalent of clearing his throat. “Jennifer Delaney, I presume.” He stated, making a good shot at seeming to be completely unfazed. Julian knew there was no reason why he should be—she wasn’t his species, and aliens seemed to have no hangups about nudity, but after that reception, being fazed should have gone as read.

There was a sigh, and a sloshing of water. “I’m not going to persuade you to go away, am I? Aye, that’s me. Oh for crying out loud man, you can turn around. Am I the first woman you’ve seen in years or something?”

“Um…yes.” Julian said.

“Oh. Really? Well you can turn around anyway.”

Julian did so, carefully. She had turned and folded her arms atop the edge of the bath, and sunk down into the water a little. Technically, she was just as modest now as if she had been fully clothed, but that did little to pacify Julian’s starved libido.

“So who are you two, anyway?” she asked.

“I’m, uh. Julian.” he said. “Julian Etsicitty. This is Kirk.”

“Kirk?”

“Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk.” clarified the man himself. “…Kirk. And yes, I’ve seen Star Trek.”

“I always preferred Doctor Who.” Jen said. “Etsicitty, that’s…what, Navajo?”

“Uh…yeah. I’m impressed.”

“I used to work in I.T.” she said, plainly convinced that this was an explanation. When their blank expressions told her that it wasn’t, she sighed and clarified: “lots of boring office hours sat on a computer with nothing to do, lots of clicks on the “random” button on Wikipedia because there are only so many cat pictures a girl can look…at…look, I’m trying to take a bath here.”

“Here? Now?” Julian asked.

“I hiked for four months halfway across a continent to get to this bath. I spent all day filling it myself by boiling water in a tin this big.” She spread her hands to demonstrate and Julian cursed his eyes for their traitorous flash downwards. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice. “I’m not getting out until I’m good and soaked, not even if the planet’s exploding.”

“We, ah…came here to help you get Cimbrean up and running as a colony of Earth…” Kirk said, looking around at the desolation.

“Great! Thank you! I could use the help. But right now I. Am. Taking. A. Bath.” she repeated. “If you boys would be so kind as to go get started on doing whatever it is you’re going to do, I’ll join you as soon as I’m done here, how does that sound?”

It sounded absurd to Julian, but he would have sooner gone back to Nightmare armed with nothing more than a toothpick than say so to Jen’s face. Fortunately, Kirk seemed able to take almost anything in his stride, and so he simply bowed and said “As you wish, governor. I’ll oversee the deployment personally.”

“Thank you.”

“Hang on!” Julian protested. “What happened here? Kirk said this was a mansion last time he saw it.”

“Taking a bath.”

“But…!”

“Bath!”

“Come on, Julian.” Kirk said, gripping him by the arm and politely pulling him away. Julian emphatically did not look back as Delaney rolled back over with a splash and a happy sigh.

“CONSIG is green!”

“On schedule, too.” Bartlett said, happily. “Pressure is at…twenty millibar. We’ve passed the line, go to send.”

“Capacitors primed, ready to release, stage one field at niner-eight per cent.”

“Right.” Bartlett acknowledged General Tremblay with a nod. “Sending in three…two…one…Send.”

Inside the Jump Array chamber, vast amounts of energy were shunted from alien-derived supercapacitors into an arch of exotic equipment that swept up and over the black cuboid of stasis-enclosed man and machine. There was a ripple, like light on the surface of a lake, and the stasis field and everything inside it vanished.

The floor shook with a solid thump, and in the total silence of near-vacuum, a centimeter-long piece of truck wing mirror fell to the concrete, neatly snipped off by the edge of the spacetime distortion field..

“Major…” Tremblay said.

Bartlett grimaced. “Woops.”

Jennifer Delaney, mid twenties, space-babe pirate queen, planetary governor, wilderness survival expert, possibly immortal, discoverer of alien space tea and feeling truly clean for the first time in much too long.

Her clothes, however, were not clean. Not even remotely. They were stained, greasy, torn, and, not unsurprisingly, had an undignified aroma to them as if they had been worn by a sweaty young woman for four whole months, along with all that entailed.

Why did she even still have them? Why didn’t she have a towel? She’d had plenty of time to look for one.

She threw the vile garments into the bath in the (probably forlorn) hope that this might result in them becoming at least cleaner to the point of being viable to wear until a replacement showed up, and then marched nude out of the bathroom and towards where her bedroom had once been. Hopefully something of the small wardrobe she had accumulated there might still be intact enough to salvage, or fashion some crude clothing from.

Navigating a demolished alien palace by memory turned out to be trickier than simply remembering where the walls and stuff had been, though, and pretty soon she found herself thoroughly lost. She was just debating swallowing her pride and calling for this “Kirk” fella to help her out when she rounded a corner and found herself on the back patio.

There were at least thirty men there, all unloading crates and equipment from the back of several large green military trucks that had been parked on what was once the lawn. They gave a general impression of soldier-ness, and were all staring at her.

The old Jen, who’d had nightmares about pretty much this exact scenario, surfaced long enough to mutter, under her breath, the complaint. “Oh, fuck everything”, but then the new Jen was back in control.

She planted her hands firmly on her hips, issued a death glare which caused a platoon of hardened veteran special-forces soldiers to start desperately looking at everything but her, and demanded:

“Well? Which one of you eejits wants to stop gawking first and hand me some fecking clothes?”

Chapter 12: Only Human

Three years and seven months AV
Alliance Embassy Station, Sol

Rylee Jackson woke, and groaned. Talamay must have been stronger than it had tasted.

She groaned even louder when the previous night’s conversation came back to her, and buried her face in her pillow for a second, then rolled over and look up at Pandora’s wing, flung over her cot like a protective lover’s arm.

She spoke the word that heralded a bad start to any day: “Shit.”

Civilian Trade Station 1039: “Infinity Awaits”

Fear was a sickly sensation in Kttrvk’s long throat as he read the message again to be certain of its content.

He read it a third time, just in case.

When a fourth reading still produced no miraculous change in its content, he concluded that its content must therefore be real, and set about writing a reply.

It was a simple reply:

Sir,

As I explained in my previous letter, the trade route you have designated for our shipment is currently the target of Hunter raids. Four more vesselss have been hit since I sent that letter, all comparatively small: A freighter the size of the Nkvcqtz will be a target they cannot resist.

Our cargo of mineral ores is non-perishable and will come to no harm should we take the slightly longer route that I suggested. I appreciate that the client expects prompt delivery, but I feel certain that they would prefer the shipment arrive slightly delayed, than never arrive at all because the freighter carrying it was raided by Hunters and the personnel and children on board, devoured.

I object in the strongest possible terms to these orders, and request—again—that you authorise us to take the longer route.

-Shipmaster Kttrvk.

He sent it, and the message was scooped up by a handler program, to be updated onto the galactic network in the next regular synchronization, and from there to the desk of his supervisor.

He knew in his bones, however, that the appeal was futile.

Cimbrean

Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, entirely out of fucks to give about being a pirate queen, colonial governor or immortal, but not letting go of the space-babe part. Currently wearing fatigues, army boots and a thick black woollen jumper, and contemplating the bar of actual chocolate on the table in front of her, waiting for the alarm to ring or the spaceship to land or whatever else would interrupt her attempt to enjoy it.

She was also reflecting that, while showing up completely arse-naked and demanding to be clothed wouldn’t have been her first choice in ice-breakers—wouldn’t even have made the top hundred—it had undeniably worked. Apparently the soldiers respected a woman who didn’t give two shits for embarrassment and just asked for a pair of pants. She would have expected to be on the receiving end of a lot of lecherous jokes and sly side-of-the-eye stares, but in fact they were, on the whole, treating her with deference and respect.

“Tastes better if you eat it with your mouth, love.”

Somewhere deep inside her, Old Jen was impressed and a little scared by the way that she didn’t jump, just turned in her seat to quickly assess whether the voice that had snuck up on her was a threat. Captain Owen Powell gave her a winning smile full of Yorkshire arrogance, and she relaxed a bit.

“Just…enjoying the moment.” she said. “And don’t call me ‘love’.”

Powell nodded. “Aye, sorry. Force of habit. I’d ask if I can come in, but this is my office, so…”

He entered and sat down on the other stool, on the opposite side of the desk. “So, are you going to eat that?”

“Promise me nothing’s going to start exploding if I do?”

She wasn’t sure what she had expected Powell’s reaction to be: a laugh, maybe, or a joke. Not an understanding look in his eye. “Wish I could.” he said. “You’d best eat it fast, enjoy it while you can. In the army they trained us to brew a cup of tea every chance we get, because you never know when the next one’s going to show up.”

Jen breathed a little half-laugh. “That’s so fecking English…” she said.

Powell snorted. “Ten thousand lightyears from home and the Irish are still being fookin’ Irish.”

That got a genuine laugh. “Alright, fine. I’ll eat the fecking thing.” Jen conceded, and promptly made good on that promise.

Chocolate. Fuck yeah.

Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego

“May her soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”

The solemn “Amen” which followed that petition was joined by all bar one of the graveside mourners. The priest closed his book, bowed solemnly, and turned away, leaving only the small knot of family and friends.

It was a good headstone, understated and handsome: just the name “Terri Boone” flanked by carved lilies, her dates of birth and death, and the quote “A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.” on round-topped blue slate.

“You’re not a praying man, Mister Jenkins?”

“I’m not, detective. Let’s…just leave it at that.”

“Fair enough.”

Gabriel Arés shuffled his feet and exhaled, feeling in his bones that the occasion should have really warranted something other than a glorious sunny day.

“Do you come to the funerals of all your cases?” Jenkins asked him.

“Not all, no. Just the ones that really get to me. You know, the stupid kid who got caught up in gang violence, or the young mother who died of a bleed on the brain after her husband hit her for the hundredth time…The streetwise P.I. who I kind of feel like I could have helped if I’d only listened.”

“Are you listening now?”

Jenkins was a good two heads taller than the diminutive Hispanic homicide cop, who looked up at him curiously.

“Listening to…who, now?” He asked.

“Ravi Singh, for one.”

“How do you…? Right, you had the login details.”

“I do, yeah. Downloaded the lot. You HAVE read it all?”

“Three times.” Arés told him. “She makes a…compelling case. But come on, secret aliens murdering people in San Diego?”

“What, as opposed to alien monsters on TV getting the shit kicked out of them by hockey players? As opposed to alien embassies orbiting the moon?”

“I know!” Arés exclaimed. A few startled gasps and glances from the other mourners moderated his volume. “I know. I agree. You’re preaching to the choir, compañero. But I have to answer to people, and even if they were persuaded, which they’re not, there’s this little thing called ‘Jurisdiction’ biting me in the culo.“

“What about the FBI?”

“The feds?” Gabriel made a scornful noise through his nose. “The pendejo I spoke to said he’d put me through to Special Agent Mulder and then hung up. They’ve got enough to worry about without alien conspiracy theories. People didn’t stop murdering each other just because there’s a couple of alien space stations up there.”

“Need a hand?”

“You’d go all the way to New Jersey?”

“If it got us to the bottom of this, I’d even go back into space.” Jenkins told him, firmly. “I want these fuckers to fry, Arés.”

The detective stared at the headstone for a long while, and then shook his head. “I’m not…You realise I can’t authorise that, right?Not officially. This is a police matter, I can’t bring in civilians to interrogate a witness.”

“That wouldn’t be by-the-book, huh?”

“Lo tienes.“

“Does going by the book always work?”

“No. But going against it NEVER works, Jenkins, to hell with what cop shows and movie writers think.”

“So you won’t help me.”

“Can’t.” Arés corrected.

They stood in silence for a while. Most of the mourners paid their final respects and departed.

“Of course…” Jenkins mused. “Seeing as New Jersey is outside of your jurisdiction, if I were to go talk with this guy, it’s not like you could arrest me for it anyway.”

Arés half-laughed and half-huffed. “If having a conversation with some guy in New Jersey was illegal then I could arrest you right now for planning to commit an offense.” he said. “IF,” he added, turning to look Jenkins right in the eye “having a conversation with some guy in New Jersey was illegal.”

They considered each other’s expressions for a moment, and then both men stuck out their hands to be shaken at the same time.

“I’ll let you know if I think of anything that could be useful to your investigation, Detective Arés.”

“I’d appreciate that, Mr. Jenkins. Buena suerte.”

Civilian Trade Station 1039: “Infinity Awaits”

“Shipmaster Kttrvk,

“You have received your orders. As per your contract with the corporation, failure to follow your assigned route is punishable by demotion, confiscation of your ship and fines up to 5% of the value of the cargo per [day] of late delivery”

”—Ikktik, Deputy Shipping Executive”

Kttrvk knew at that exact moment that nobody in the corporation even bothered to read their mail.

He weighed up the possibility of refusing and then counter-suing the corporation for reckless endangerment of his and his family’s lives when they took action against him. A fair court would surely come down on his side.

But of course, Long Stars Shipping would never see the inside of a fair court in a case like this, would they? They owned the judges, they could afford the best lawyers, they lobbied for the laws that worked in their favour.

For long minutes he sat, thinking, while his mate Ikkzziki slumbered, rotund with what would be their fourth child.

There was only one possible course of action.

Alliance Embassy Station, Sol

“Good morning, Rylee.”

Rylee flinched. She knew that the voice she heard wasn’t exactly Niral so much as a computer simulation of what Niral’s voice might sound like if she was speaking English, cunningly conveyed to her ears by harmonic trickery in a way that completely overruled the original voice, but the simulation was totally consistent in giving Niral an identifiable voice.

”…Niral! Hey. Good morning.”

“A very good morning.” Niral’s ears were flattened sideways. The effect looked either mischievous or smug to Rylee. Her tall posture, shoulders thrown back and head held high, suggested the latter.

“Oh! You guys, uh…?”

“That we most certainly did.” The Gaoian purred. “The first of many I hope, before we’re certain I’m with cub.”

“That’s umm…Great. I’m happy for you.” Rylee found she couldn’t meet the Sister’s gaze. She was surprised when Niral issued a low keening sound and took her hands.

“Rylee, are you all right?”

“I made a complete ass of myself last night, didn’t I?”

”…A backside? Oh! Um…I don’t know, did you?”

“That’s usually what we call it when somebody makes someone else feel uncomfortable by confessing to being…interested in them. And all the rest. I’m sorry Niral, I was drunk, I wasn’t thinking straight and I ran off at the mouth.”

Niral keened softly again and hugged her. Presumably she was hugging quite hard by Gaoian standards, but to Rylee the effect was of being gently hugged by an anorexic teenager—under all that fur, the Gaoian’s body was small, wiry, feather-light and frail. “I don’t think I understand this ‘drunk’ thing.” Niral told her. “But I wasn’t drunk last night, and I still say you’re my friend.”

“You’re not upset?”

“If I’m going to have alien friends, I need to be okay with them behaving in alien ways.” Niral replied, stroking Rylee’s hair. “I’m not upset.”

Rylee broke the hug very gently, and wiped away a grateful tear, pulling herself together. “Oh, I needed to hear that.” she smiled, then a thought struck her. “Shit, you didn’t tell Goruu what I said, did you?”

Niral tittered a Gaoian giggle. “We were too busy.” she teased. “But…no, I wouldn’t. Not if you don’t want him to know.”

“I don’t.” Rylee said firmly.

There was a moment of comfortable silence, faintly amused on Niral’s part. Then she looked up at the space-plane wing that Rylee had been sleeping under.

“So this is Pandora?”

“This is Pandora.“

“Does the name mean anything special? The first Gaoian warp craft was named Tiritya, after the first Mother-Supreme, who united the females of all clans into one clan.”

Rylee smiled. “Pandora was the first woman, according to Greek mythology.”

“The…how can there be a first woman? And what’s a Greek? One of your clans?”

“Yeah, sort of. Mythology means…kind of, fanciful stories, an entertaining way of getting points across using fiction. It doesn’t always have to be scientifically accurate. Besides, they didn’t really understand evolution by natural selection back in ancient Greece. It’s a very old story.”

“Oh. So, your first warp craft is named to honour the first female and not the first male?” The idea seemed to have Niral’s approval, and not for the first time Rylee was struck by the notion that Gaoian females were maybe a bit sexist.

“Well, she was more than just the first woman.” Rylee said, beginning to pack up her cot and stow it away in the ship’s small cargo compartment. “She was a curious soul who opened a box in which Zeus, the father of the gods, had sealed away all the evils and negativity of mankind. When they all flew away to plague humanity, the only thing that was left behind was hope, which she kept.”

She glanced at Niral. “It’s all supposed to be metaphorical.” she clarified.

“I guessed as much. But what was hope doing in a box full of evil things?”

“Hope can’t exist without evil.” Rylee said. She rubbed her hand fondly along the fuselage of the modern Pandora. “Just like up can’t exist without down, or how fast only exists relative to slow.”

“And I suppose your species is in a sort of box…” Niral mused.

“Exactly. I choose to believe that Pandora here is our promise that when the box is opened, we’ll be a force for hope and positivity in the galaxy, rather than a plague of evils.”

Niral allowed the human a few seconds of distant misty-eyed happiness. “I’m sure you will be.” She said.

Cimbrean

“So, how much do you know about what’s been going on back home?”

Jennifer Delaney, mid-twenties, space-babe with a mouthful of the first chocolate she’d tasted in years, regretfully swallowed it.

“Not much.” She confessed. “The alien news only covered the big things: the Hunters attacked Vancouver?” when Powell nodded, she continued. “Then there’s a fecking big force-field, we have warp travel now…That’s about it. I know that our ambassador to the Dominion is called Doctor Anees Hussein because he wrote me a letter, and he hinted that we’re maybe wanting to play both sides to our advantage, but other than that, I’m pretty well in the dark.”

“Right. Well, it’s mostly business as usual.” Powell said. “The usual political gobshites, same sports, same celebrity gossip, same bullshit in the Middle East. The Russians are still fookin’ crazy, the Chinese still have a stick up their arses, the Yanks are still fookin’ reckless and there’s still a Marvel movie three times a year like fookin’ clockwork.”

“Nothing’s changed at all?”

“I didn’t say that. NASA and the European Space Agency merged to form the North Atlantic Space Agency, the Chinese, Russians and Japanese are all stepping up their space programs, as are the South Americans and the Australians, and there’s even the Pan-Africa Space Organisation now. I think they’re mostly looking at trying to build space elevators, which is easier at the equator or something.”

He sniffed. “A whole bunch of private companies are pushing into space as fast as they can, too. BAE, Virgin, Mitsubishi, Shenyang, Red Bull…”

“Red Bull?!“

“Dont ask. And the cutting edge military technology is…fook me sideways, if you were cleared to know about half of it, you’d shit your new pants.”

“How much AM I cleared to know about?”

“Right, so we took a look at the way business is done out here and promptly said “fook that”, right? Giant fookin’ spaceships with giant fookin’ guns and even gianter fookin’ armour plates pounding the living shite out of each other at spittin’ distance. They’ve got missiles and mines nowadays—apparently they picked that trick up off one of us—but their whole approach is pretty bloody direct.”

“Oh. Really? One of, um, us?”

“Yep. Like to get my hands on that wanker, whoever he was. Give him a lesson in keeping his fookin’ mouth shut.” Powell’s tone was light, but he had a dangerous look in his eye that reminded her a bit of Adrian, though not in a happy way.

Jen suddenly became very grateful for the practice she’d had in the art of lying, and bobbled her head in a way that could mean anything but didn’t really meaning anything specific. Powell apparently took it agreeably.

“Anyway,” he continued “the ships we’re putting up—or, at least, the Lockheed ones that NATO are buying—are built around not that. Long-range weaponry, evasive maneuvers, fookloads of electronic warfare. We use capacitors full of reserve power rather than big reactors, so our ships are small and agile little buggers, built to hit and fade, rip things a new one in the opening seconds, then jump out, recharge, come back and do it again.”

“Our weapons stack up to theirs?” Jen asked. That part was genuine news. She’d known for some time that most weapons that she might find pointed at her were nowhere near as deadly as their equivalent on Earth, but she had always assumed that with thousands of years of science behind them, spaceship guns would be far in advance of anything humanity had yet invented.

“In theory.” Powell said, clearly unhappy about not being able to give a more emphatically positive answer. “Because all their stuff’s based around railguns and plasma cannons, our own weapons, which are neither of those things, should be something they don’t know how to handle. Their shields are tuned to stop slow-firing high-energy projectiles traveling at like, one percent of lightspeed, and the armour’s designed for heat dissipation: it’s all ceramic tiles, fragile as balls.”

“So, if we fire a howitzer at them or something?” Jen asked him, latching on to the first “big gun” word she could think of.

“I see what you’re thinking, but nah. It’d just explode against the shields: too slow-firing. But in theory, if we just chuck a load of lower-energy projectiles at them it’ll overwhelm the shields and smash the armour. See?”

“I’ll…have to take your word on all of that.”

Powell smiled. “I take it you’re not a military hardware geek?

“Not really.”

“Well, I am, and the Lockheed TS-101 gives me a hell of a chubby.”

“Charming.” she deadpanned, trying to give the impression that there were more important matters on her mind than the state of his junk. It seemed to work, because Powell cleared his throat and his smile faded.

“Right. Sorry.” He scratched his upper lip with his thumb, lips pursed in thought. “Anyway, back on topic. There’s…a lot of legal questions about Cimbrean here.”

“Like what?” Jen asked, surprised. She had assumed that all of those questions would have been sorted out long before the soldiers came here.

Powell ticked each question off on his fingers as he asked them. “Is this a colony of any one nation? And if so, which one? Or is it its own nation? in which case are you going to have a constitution, are you going to be a democracy? What’s your immigration policy? What are you going to export and import? What’s the customs policy on things like, say, seeds and foodstuffs, because from what I’m told our native Terran species would go through this lot -” he waved an arm, expansively indicating the ecosystem of an entire planet “-like vindaloo through a short grandma.”

“There are questions about you, too.” he added, looking her in the eye. “You were given the job because you were here and because we heard you’d built something, but seeing as what you apparently built is a battlefield, do you even want it any more? Do you want to go home to Earth? Because the next time Kirk swings by here he’ll be able to send you back, no problem. Do you want to stay on as governor, or hand the job off to somebody else?”

Jen’s brow creased as she considered this. “I hadn’t even thought of any of those questions.” she confessed. “How much of being a colonial governor would be like that? Desk work, lawmaking, thinking about all the fiddly little details and all that?” She asked.

“Fookin’ near all of it, I’d imagine.” Powell said.

“Then I want to be replaced as soon as possible.” Jen said, firmly. There was no way she could go back to a job that even looked and smelled faintly like I.T., not after her experiences out here.

“You sure? Could be a nice desk. Big salary. Power, fame and influence?”

For once, Old Jen and New Jen were in total agreement. “I’d rather just be a space-babe.” She demurred, her voice completely full of resolve.

Powell nodded approvingly. “Good for you.”

Brick, New Jersey.

Ravi Singh’s apartment wasn’t hard to find. In a building of cheap wooden doors, his was the solid, expensive one with three locks and a camera above it.

The response to Kevin’s knock wasn’t a querying “who’s there?” or a friendly “Hello?”, but a moment of wary silence, and then:

“Who are you?”

Kevin held his tattoo up towards the camera. “Not one of them.” he asserted.

He waited patiently throughout the long consideration that followed, and then the undoing of three locks.

After a few more thumps, there was a buzz, and the door opened…revealing another door.

“Uhmmm…”

“Step inside.” Singh instructed, his voice muffled through the door.

Kevin paused, shrugged, then complied. The space between the two doors contained nothing except an almost absonant magnetic lock with a keypad, and a shelf on which a metal detector wand was charging.

“Run the wand over your scalp.” Singh insisted.

Kevin Jenkins found that the limits of his patience were being approached, but he sighed and did so, completely bemused as to what he could be looking for.

Singh wasn’t satisfied until the wand had gone over his whole cranium twice, and over the bald patch where his translation implant had once been a good three times, before finally there was a beep from the magnetic lock and the inner door swung open.

Kevin wasn’t sure what he expected from the interior of the apartment. After the extravagant security and clear paranoia, he had expected a gust of stench and a study in dingy squalor inhabited by an emaciated neurotic disaster of a man. In fact, the apartment was clean and tidy, decorated in light and airy cream and a warm maroon.

Ravi Singh himself was similarly clean, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, but the bags under his eyes were exactly in keeping with the suspicious reception: he had the face and body language of a man for whom sleep had long since ceased to be anything other than sporadic, shallow and brief.

He welcomed Kevin into his apartment with a surprisingly warm handshake given his apparent exhaustion and the paranoia of the previous few minutes, then glanced out of the front door, and shut and locked both.

“So. What’s your name, mister not-one-of-them?” he asked. “Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

“I’m more of a coffee man, myself…” Kevin said.

“Of course. How do you take it?”

“Uh, black, strong and sweet, please. And my name’s Kevin, Kevin Jenkins.”

“Oh?” Singh arched an eyebrow as he busied himself with a steel and glass cafetiere. “Well, this is an honour. The Butterfly himself. Please, sit down.”

Kevin did so, conscious that his street clothes were a good deal shabbier than the apparent recluse’s black leather couch. “Butterfly?”

“You’ve surely heard the term ‘Butterfly effect’? From chaos theory. The notion of a little insect in a field in France flapping his wings and several months later that little eddy has grown into quite the mighty storm and poof! There goes half of Bangladesh.” Singh smiled grimly, a distinctive closed-lipped smile that Kevin recognised immediately as that of a fellow abductee. You learned to keep your teeth hidden out there.

“I never bought that story.” he retorted. “Sounds too much like the fantasy of a little man wanting to believe he’s important.”

“Does it? But you’re a living example of the principle in action.” Singh said, pouring hot water into the cafetiere. “I truly believe that had you not been aboard the Outlook on Forever that day, we would still be here. The sky would still be open, but we would still be generations away from exploring it.”

“How d’you figure?”

“Without Kevin Jenkins, that would have just been another successful Hunter raid. Without Kevin Jenkins, the galaxy’s media would not have taken an interest in our species. Without that, there would have been no uptick in abductions. No uptick in abductions would mean no warp trail to lead a stray Hunter vessel to Vancouver in search of prey. It’s all quite narrative, really.”

He depressed the cafetiere’s filter and poured a cup of steaming black Blue Mountain.

“If that’s how it works, then what about the patrol officer who kicked me off the Churthuarg station for vagrancy?” Jenkins asked. “Or the Corti who abducted me, or my ex-wife or my lawyer or…you know what, I didn’t come here for this conversation.”

“No, you came here about the Hierarchy.” Singh handed over the coffee in an elegant glass cup. The aroma was perfection itself. “I told the last person who came knocking in no uncertain terms that her death was really only a matter of time once she started probing into this, but she said she accepted that.” He sipped the coffee. “I hope she was truthful.”

“She was prepared for it. Terri left her notes for us to find.”

“You knew her?” Singh asked.

“She and I were…we fucked.”

“Ah!” Singh looked sympathetic. “It must have been a complicated relationship, if all you’ll reveal is what you did, rather than how you felt. And so blunt, too. You must be in a lot of pain.”

“Dude!” Kevin threw his head back in frustration, then leaned forward. “I don’t want psychoanalyzing. I came here for information.”

“That information will kill you.”

“If they’re what I suspect they are, then knocking on your door probably killed me.” Kevin said. “So how about you drop the guru half-speak and get on with the movie.”

Singh smiled again, this time allowing his teeth to show—a genuine, human expression of delight. “Certainly.” he said.

Civilian Trade Station 1039: “Infinity Awaits”

“That’s a dangerous itinerary your ship has logged, cousin.”

Shipmaster Kttrvk spun at being addressed so familiarly by a stranger.

The stranger was a Rrrrtktktkp’ch, standing nonchalantly next to an advertising hoarding on the station’s docking ring, which was helpfully mocking the shipmaster by advertising life insurance. There was something slightly familiar about the Cousin’s facial structure, but the markings were totally unknown to him.

“My itinerary? I don’t have an itinerary. Excuse me.” He turned to leave.

“1047-6533-26972.” the Cousin said, reeling off Kttrvk’s assigned route and stopping the Shipmaster in his tracks. He looked faintly smug when Kttrvk turned to give him a disbelieving stare.

“How did you…?”

“I have my ways,” the stranger said, making it clear that those ways were not for Kttrvk to know. “That’s a dangerous route right now. A lot of Hunter strikes.”

“Well, your information is obsolete,–” Kttrvk said, firmly. “I’m not doing that run.”

“Long Stars Shipping seem to think you are.”

“Long Stars Shipping can choke on their feed!” Kttrvk exclaimed, then moderated his tone when a few nearby beings glanced at him. “I will NOT orphan my children nor put them in harm’s way just because the corporation is too greedy to listen to my pleas.”

“You’ll go to debtor’s prison…”

“An acceptable price for the lives of my offspring, my mate and our unborn.” Kttrvk snapped.

He was not expecting the expression of admiration and approval that spread across the Cousin’s face. “Good for you!” he exclaimed. “But I am here to offer you a third way.”

“And what way would that be?” Kttrvk challenged him.

The stranger looked around and stepped in a little closer. “I represent an organisation that wants to trial some new military hardware.” he said. “Simulations and training runs are all well and good, but there is no substitute for the real thing, and the Hunter problem in this area will only claim more lives unless something is done…but they’re too canny to come out and fight just anything. We need…well, we need to entice them into attacking something.”

“That something being my freighter.”

“You’re quick.” the Cousin said. From a Rrrrrtktktkp’ch to a Vzk’tk like himself, that was a serious compliment.

“My freighter with my family on board.” Kttrvk pointed out.

“My organisation would not offer to use you this way unless we were completely certain of your safety under our care, I promise you that.”

“And your organisation is…?” Kttrvk pressed.

The Cousin paused. “Let’s just say that this technology would impress and awe even the humans.” he said, and made a small conspiratorial gesture that only Kttrvk could see.

Enlightenment dawned. Of COURSE! Everybody knew that it was only a matter of time before the humans got loose from their prison, it only made sense that there would be…organisations…looking to prepare to meet the deathworlders in battle and win.

And anything which could give the humans a pause would surely go through Hunters effortlessly.

Still, Kttrvk would not have become a merchant shipmaster without some guile and caution.

“All of your assurances aside, I would still be risking everything dear to me.” he said.

“If you are pressing for payment, then to assuage your fears and buy your lifelong silence about this experiment, I am authorised to release fifty Dominion Development Credits.”

Fifty DDCs.

It was a vast sum. Enough to upgrade the Nkvcqtz with Corti engines that would hopefully give her the speed to not only slip past Hunter ambushes, but also to trade in high-value perishables. Sensibly invested on the other hand, it would provide a very healthy retirement plan for Kttrvk and Ikkzziki, as well as upmarket gene-resequencing for their children to enhance their intellect and buy them prospects that Kttrvk had never had.

But a career merchant’s instincts swung into place. Never accept the first offer.

“A hundred.” He counter-proposed. “We are risking a horrible death here.”

“Seventy. I understand your concerns, but you are in the safest possible hands. And yours is not the only ship that Long Stars is ordering on this suicidal run. You will merely be the first to leave.”

”…Done.”

Cimbrean

“Well, even if you pass the baton first chance you get, you’re still technically in charge of every civilian aspect of this colony for the time being.” Powell said. He snatched a clipboard from where it was hanging on a tent post and consulted it.

“Let’s see…There’s a list of stuff they’d like you to do. Nothing major: name the colonial capitol, identify any existing human citizens, living or dead…we’ve got real-time two-way communications with Earth but a pretty small data budget of what we can send and receive: more like telegraph than anything. To be honest, there’s not much for you to do. Anything on this list you DO do will be taken under advisement by the civilian experts and contractors we bring in once this place is secure and the camp’s up and running smoothly.”

“That doesn’t sound like it’ll take a whole month.” Jen said.

“We’ve got a lot of tech to deploy, a perimeter to establish, scouting to do, maybe an FOB or two to set up..”

“FOB?”

“Forward Operating Base. Somewhere small and camouflaged where if this place is bombed off the map…again…there’ll be a couple of guys left behind to report mission failure.”

“Sounds boring.” Jen complained.

“We’ll find stuff for you to do.” Powell promised. “And I mean USEFUL stuff, now.”

“Thanks.”

“So? Any ideas as to the colonial capitol’s name?”

“A…few. I’ll sleep on that one.”

“Fair enough. Okay…have you met any other humans out here? Besides Darragh Houston, that is. Actually, where IS he?” Powell grabbed a different clipboard and leafed through it.

“Feck knows. The last I saw of him he was on his way back here, but I did some looking around while I was filling up my bath, and didn’t find any sign of him.”

“Okay, he’s an unknown then…” Powell stopped looking at the page he’d turned to. “Any others?”

“Is that a list of abductees?”

“Every unaccounted-for human outside of Sol, in theory. Don’t ask me how they got it, I don’t know.”

“Okay, uh…a few. Adr…um, actually let’s start with, uh, Margarita. I can’t remember her surname, she was a dwarf, Spanish.”

“Was?”

“Yeah. She um…well, the honest truth is that an invisible death robot cut her open.”

“Invis…? O…kay. I think you’re going to need to brief us on those things.”

“I will.” Jen promised.

“Right.” Powell ticked something on his list. “Here she is. Deceased. At least we’ll be able to let her family know. Any others?”

“Cameron White. Very deceased and good fucking riddance.”

Powell blinked, then flicked through his list. “Oh. Shit. Fookin’ hell, what were they thinking stealing a crazy wanker like that?” he ticked. “Good fookin’ riddance, aye.”

“And uh…Adrian Saunders. Australian Defence Force…” she forced herself not to give in to the temptation to look down, whisper and cry. “…Deceased.”

“Wow. You’ve had a bad time of it…” Powell sighed, flipping through,his document, then ticked off against, presumably, Adrian’s name. “Deceased. Guess his wife and kid will have closure at least…”

Planet 16 Cyg B b, 16 Cygni trinary system.
Hunter supply station

+<contempt; disgust; snap> Report!+

The Omega did so, cowering appropriately as the Beta of the Brood-that-Flays swaggered into the information node chamber.

+<Statement> There have been no transports of the specified size along the prey-route within the last Diurnal, Beta.+

+<Disdain; command> Continue to monitor the traffic. The prey are stupid and stubborn, there will be a few more before their patrols arrive. And they are yet to send our tribute.+

+<Statement> I comply, Beta.+

Any brood above a certain size soon developed a small population of Omegas: They were an unfortunate necessity, as some tasks were too menial to insult the Deltas with, but too important to be entrusted to a meat-slave. This one, however, was especially vile in the eyes of its Brood.

It would have been a source of immense surprise to every other species in the galaxy that the concept of “creepy” was one that Hunters understood. But in fact, it was a central one to their mindset: the Hunters were the Predators, and everything else was the Prey. Predators behaved a certain way, and Prey behaved a certain way. Any deviation from this natural order was creepy.

Hence the Great Hunt. The worm programs that the Hunters had long ago infiltrated into the Prey’s data networks, that lurked invisible and silent, watching, collating and reconnoitering everything that the Prey chattered about, had gathered a great wealth of their speculations on the motive behind the Great Hunt: Opinion was mostly split into two camps, the first being that the Hunters were afraid of the human race, and the other being that the Hunters were jealous.

Both theories were equally amusing, by the peculiar standards of Hunter humour. The humans were a non-Hunter species that were Predators, and which was inspiring the Prey to behave in unPreylike ways. This was disruption of the natural order, a creepy intrusion into the Way Things Were Meant To Be. Their eradication was as obviously necessary as, for example, the correction of a fatal structural flaw that would cause a building to collapse under its own weight.

This particular Omega was only one wrong step away from demanding such action, itself. Its existence was barely tolerated, barely tolerable; it lived forever on a delicate knife-edge where its meat might be harvested and fed to the breeding pools should it deviate further from acceptable Hunter normalcy.

This was not because it behaved in an unHunterlike way. Quite the contrary, it did so very carefully, unfailingly and meticulously. What made it creepy was that it did not appear to do so naturally. Its thought-broadcasts were simple statements, queries, respectful requests. There was never any emotional content. When it joined the hunt-cry, it did so almost dutifully and by rote, rather than with real enthusiasm.

Thus, even the other Omegas, which usually banded together out of bottom-of-the-heap solidarity, tended to view this particular one as an opportunity to claw back an anemic parody of the authority that other Hunters held over them. The fact that it didn’t seem to mind—displayed no discernible emotions at all, whether resentment, resignation, complacency or contentment with its lot—only added to the bottom-feeder’s abnormality. It simply followed instructions, diligently, swiftly, competently, and to the full extent of their spirit and intent, often even going above and beyond.

This hinted at the other aberration: The Strange One clearly had a sharp and calculating mind. It saw patterns with ease that other Hunters would overlook. On the few occasions where it had dared to venture an opinion, none of those opinions had yet been wrong. It grasped new tasks within moments, and performed them as well as an experienced expert after only a few days. For a creature so clearly talented to be apparently disinterested in its own stature or reputation was therefore wrong, strange, creepy.

The Beta bared its fangs at the Strange One and then threw itself into the throne traditionally occupied by the ranking Brood member present in the information chamber, pointedly ignoring the inferior specimen and instead stared out of the large gallery windows around the ceiling of the chamber, enjoying the view.

The fact that Hunters had any notion of beauty or aesthetics at all would have been similarly shocking to most of the prey-species. But in fact, the Hunters were in their twisted way highly spiritual and artistic beings. Most of their understanding of beauty was, perhaps predictably, a sanguine and violent one, revolving around the flavour of well-stressed meat, the patterns made by blood and organs and violent dismemberment, and the panic, fear and horror of the Prey.

Lurking underneath that, however, was an innate appreciation for the universe as a hierarchy of interconnecting parts, all in their place and tied by common threads. To the Hunters, the sense of How Things Should Be was a profound one. Predators fed on Prey, bound together by Nature. Alphas commanded and Omegas obeyed, bound by the common thread of the Brood. Moons orbited planets orbited stars, all subordinate to Gravity.

The planet known to humans as 16 Cyg B b was a particularly spectacular example of this last concept: a gas giant, two thirds again as massive as Jupiter, towing with it a coterie of moons, a vast garland ring and a shotgun blast of stray asteroids, captured comets and rocky dust, and it was into one of these asteroids that the Hunters had carved out their forward base, close enough to the spacelanes to easily intercept any choice prey that might use them, but far enough away to be a practical escape and hidden refuge. Bathed in the light of three suns, the view was stunning.

The Beta became aware that the Strange One was inspecting something on its screen with greater than usual scrutiny.

+<impatience; tolerance; command> Report, Omega+

+<Statement> Beta, a Prey-ship has passed through our sensor cordon at abnormally high speed. <Observation> A ship that fast can only be powered by the grey-skinned Prey’s secret engines and a very large power source.+

+<Interest; Query> Can it be intercepted?+

+<Statement> It cannot, Beta. It simply attracted my attention: I apologise for intruding upon your time.+

The Beta grudgingly accepted the benighted creature’s apology. The day was just beginning to seem as if it would be a slow one without quarry, when the Strange One expressed the one emotion it had ever been known to show.

+<Satisfaction; statement> Beta, a message from the Prey. The Herd of the Long Stars have honoured their arrangement and are sacrificing a vessel as we stipulated. A bulk freighter, High One. Of a configuration likely to contain many long-necks and their young.+

The Beta allowed itself the luxury of a wide-mawed smile. While actually deigning to communicate with the prey was a task so wretched that even the Omegas were only required to stoop to it it because the meat-slaves could not be entrusted with the task, little “arrangements” with the so-called “corporations” that made the greatest use of the shipping lanes was a mutually beneficial arrangement: The Brood had neglected a rich hunting ground over the arrangement with the Long Stars herd, allowing the Prey to grow rich and fat off the easy pickings there.

The growth and prosperity of the Herd only served to fatten the meal and make the hunting that much better in the long-run. Proper cultivation of the meat was important, hence the willingness of the Broods to accept what might be alternatively interpreted as demeaning bribery, as if the Predators should be bought by the prey. Naturally, a high price was only appropriate. The meat itself was an excellent start, of course, but a bulk freighter was a large vessel that could be recycled into many Swarm-ships, and would hold younglings, ripe to become meat-slave breeding stock. The tribute was entirely acceptable.

+<Jubilation; Command> A fine quarry! Alert the Alpha: we hunt. Meat to the Maw!+

+<Statement> I comply, Beta. Meat to the Maw.+

The Beta snarled as it departed for its ship, mood somewhat spoiled by the Omega’s muted, unenthusiastic echo of a response. The Omega would receive only scraps from this prize for its lack of vigor.

Behind it, the Strange One ran an algorithm of its own programming and loaded it into the sensor console. The appearance of that abnormally fast ship was an anomaly, and in its experience, anomalies usually led to interesting data. Data that its true masters would undoubtedly appreciate.

Cimbrean

“Wife and kid?” Jen kept the question light, while in her head there were explosions and lightning bolts and screaming.

“Yep. Sandra Saunders née Perry. Lives in Brisbane with her daughter Jessica.”

“He never mentioned having a wife and kid.”

“Well, the sprog’s birthday is about seven months after his estimated date of abduction, so he probably didn’t know. As for the wife, well, wow. That might have something to do with these arrest warrants…” Powell said, looking at something that was clearly impressing him.

“Warrants?”

“Yyyep. Wanted for counts of Grievous Bodily Harm, Assault with Intent, theft of a motor vehicle, driving while intoxicated, dangerous driving, reckless endangerment of the public, arson, vandalism…” Powell turned a page. “…and littering.”

His attempt to maintain a deadpan expression at that last one failed, leaving the smile straining at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

“He…” Jen paused mid outraged defense, and ran through her immediate reactions. “He didn’t. I knew Adrian, he wouldn’t…not to his wife!”

“Doesn’t say she was the victim.” Powell pointed out.

“Well it must have been somebody who hurt her or, or…He definitely wouldn’t do something like that to somebody he loved.” She protested aloud, mouth rushing off ahead of her thoughts.

Except to protect her. Old Jen reminded herself internally, flashing up the memory of Adrian’s inexorably strong arm clamped tight around her throat.

Her objections faltered. “…yeah. I guess that sounds like Adrian.” she admitted.

“Sounds like my kind of crazy bastard.” Powell said, admiringly. “You sure he’s dead?”

“He was unconscious, and they were venting the atmosphere, trying to kill us. If I’d tried to drag him to the escape pod, we’d have both died.” Jen asserted, though her old self hated to sound so…coldly practical. Again, though, there was that understanding, nonjudgmental look in Powell’s eye, and it occurred to her that maybe she had some things in common with the special forces captain that neither of them really wanted to have in common with anybody.

Powell looked up as somebody knocked on crate next to his office tent and stuck his head through the flap. “What’s up, Brewer?”

The man who had knocked jerked his head towards something. “Solar array’s about ready, captain.”

“Nice. Come on, Miss Delaney, you might like this.”

Jen followed him out of the tent. “You can call me Jen.” she said.

“I’ll do that, then.”

In the middle of the lawn, one of the trucks was parked next to an object about the size and shape of an oil drum. Jump leads trailed from the device and into the truck’s engine, and a couple of men were gathered round hooking up some extra equipment to it.

“So what’s this solar array?” she asked.

“You know solar panels?”

“Yeah.”

“Turns out force fields can do the same job. All you need is a little jump to get them started, and then they power themselves and give you a bit of surplus to spend on things like water heaters, computers and that.”

“Water heaters?”

“Aye. Should make your baths a bit easier in future.” Powell gave her a winning smile, apparently immune to the scowl that answered him. Jen wasn’t quite so confident as to be perfectly happy about her inadvertent exhibitionism, but the SBS Captain seemed to cheerfully give no fucks at all about trivial things like accidental public nudity.

They watched as the array was powered up, with a snap as something sparked inside the truck’s engine. A ghostly orange dome of energy sprawled overhead, then faded to almost invisibility as the system figured out how much power it needed to draw and settled itself into equilibrium.

“Right. Look, I’m sending a patrol out in a few minutes, why not go with? It’ll take your mind off things and besides: we could use somebody who knows the land, and you know it better than we do.”

“I’m not exactly a soldier…” Jen hesitated.

“Trust me, you won’t hold them back. Besides, I’m not too worried that there’s anything on this world that’d make you tagging along a bad idea. They’ll only be gone a few hours, just long enough to scout the area.”

“That sounds…good, actually.” Jen allowed. She had become so used to walking that it almost felt uncomfortable just sitting around. Her body practically ached to be moving.

“Thought it might.” Powell shouted at one of the nearby soldiers. “Oi! Legsy! Get Jen here a rifle and a sidearm and teach her how to use them, she’s on your patrol!”

He turned back to her. “You wait and see, by the time you’re back, you won’t recognise this place, and I’ll have your message from home ready for you to watch in private.”

Freighter Nkvcqtz

For all the Cousin’s reassurances, Shipmaster Kttrvk had not been so encouraged as to take the step of leaving station with his mate and children aboard. They had been left behind, staying at a hotel paid for several (months) in advance through the expenditure of just one of the twenty DDCs that the Cousin had agreed to pay in advance, with the other fifty to be delivered upon completion of the mission.

The ship felt empty without them, and he had never felt more alone and jittery. Neither had his crew, all of whom knew that staying on was an enormous risk, but the company’s hazard bonuses—and threats—were sufficient to have persuaded most to remain, though all showed serious signs of stress and fear.

It was almost a perverse release therefore to hear the warning chime from the navigation system before they hit the edge of the gravity spike and the ALV drive’s field collapsed, dumping them back to the world of the sub-luminal.

The sensors immediately identified four Swarm Craft, and large ones, each capable of holding upwards of twenty Hunters. Every crewman onboard, Kttrvk included, promptly grabbed and armed their pulse pistols.

This was not for the purposes of fighting off the Hunters, though it was to be hoped that they could take a few down before being overrun. The pistols were for themselves: if you could help it, you didn’t let the Hunters take you alive. Better to die instantly than to be slaughtered while still conscious.

They waited as the Swarm-ships closed around them and the largest of them settled in to its approach vector, lining up the fusion-ended boarding tube that would violate their hull and inject terrible death onto their decks.

He was beginning to fear just how terrible his mistake had been when the local space sensors alerted him to the arrival—via jump drive somehow, despite the apparent absence of any jump beacons in the area—of five ships of unknown type, configuration and origin.

“Edda Wing: Edda Actual—Weapons free. Til Valhall!!”

“OORAH!!”

+<Alarm; Alert> Beta! Unknown warships have appeared via displacement!+

The alert came at the worst possible time. The Alpha’s ship had just lined up and was extending its boarding proboscis to pierce the Prey’s hull. It was at its most vulnerable, its slowest, its shields lowered to get close to the prey.

Already it was moving, abandoning the force-dock maneuver and trying to gain distance enough to raise its shields and accelerate, but it was too late. Exactly what kind of weapon it was that tore the Alpha’s vessel apart was unclear, but the side evaporated in a cloud of pulverised armour and metal scraps, and air pressure did the rest, bursting the ship and practically ripping it in half. Thirty-four Hunters, including the Alpha itself, briefly broadcast their dismay and fear across the brood network before fading.

The Beta—now the new Alpha—hooked its neural implants directly into its ship’s controls and analysed the situation. There were five of them. The craft were of a strange size, somewhat larger than a fighter or shuttle, but smaller than the next largest conventional class of military vessel. And they were fast, apparently blessed with a generous ratio of thrust to mass.

They were also alarmingly difficult to get a target lock on. Active sensors seemed to slide off their hulls like water off a greasy metal plate, and the ships themselves were small and agile, a combination which made securing a solid fix on their exact location at any given time as much a matter of luck and guesswork as of letting the sensors work. All were clearly being flown by experienced and exceptional pilots—their transversal velocity was high and their movements were coordinated so that if one of the remaining Hunter ships maneuvered to minimise its vulnerability to one attacker, another would be perfectly placed to rake it as it turned.

+<Statement; concern> These are not the tactics of Prey…+

As if to confirm that sentiment, three of the craft converged on another of the remaining swarm-ships as it executed an ill-advised turn in response to a feint. The new Alpha paid close attention to the weaponry they used, probing the space around the attacking craft for signs of what manner of violence was being unleashed. It detected only the burnt by-products of explosive compounds, and a hail of high-speed flechettes.

With its shields up, the second Swarm-ship survived the assault, but was badly mauled, losing a thruster and the coilguns along its larboard flank before the aggressors had swept past, banking and accelerating, keeping their transversal high. The sustained G-forces involved in that maneuver must have been ferocious, and yet the ships showed no sign that their pilots were in distress. A dreadful suspicion started to settle in the Alpha’s mind.

+<Command; urgency> Meet aggression with aggression! We are not Prey! Form up and fight as Predators!+

The Swarm-craft fell in around their wounded comrade, and as one the pack turned, seeking a target. One of the attackers was isolated from its wing, its evasive options whittled down by shepherding volleys of coilgun fire, and there was a stab of triumph from the Alpha’s gunner as it fired a perfect solution that would surely obliterate the offending vessel, turning the tide.

The Alpha had to replay the sensor logs to determine what happened next. In the tiny fraction of an instant it took for the coilgun rounds to cross the intervening distance between muzzle and mark, their target displaced, blinking two hundred kilometers across the sphere of engagement and re-entering the fight unscathed.

Then the entire hostile wing imitated the move. Suddenly, all of the Swarm-ships were flying in the worst possible direction, and their guns were pointed completely the wrong way.

A storm of accurate firepower ablated the shielding around their sterns in seconds.

+<Panic; Command> Disengage! Flee! Fl-+

A 30mm depleted Uranium armor-piercing incendiary round penetrated through all of the ship’s comparatively flimsy internal bulkheads, disintegrating as it went. It arrived in the command deck as a dense knot of incandescent heavy metal that reduced the Alpha to a smear of liquified matter when it passed directly through the command chair before embedding itself in the forward wall. The explosive force of its arrival crushed the other five Hunters on the deck almost simultaneously.

Perforated by hundreds of similar rounds, the rear third of the ship decompressed spectacularly, evaporating into an intricate dancing halo of flashing metallic and ceramic shards, mixed here and there with the odd disembodied piece of Hunter. The handful that were unfortunate enough to survive in the forward compartments did not do so for long—power failed instantly, and with it went the emergency air-retaining forcefields.

From the moment Edda wing arrived on the field to the second the final Hunter ship lost power and fell apart, less than three minutes had elapsed. Not one of the TS-101s had expended even half of their capacitor reserves or ammunition.

Freighter Nkvcqtz

“What. Just. Happened?”

Kttrvk came back to reality. He had done nothing but stare dumbfounded at the swirling battle on the sensors throughout its brief but intense duration. He looked around at his crew, all of whom were wearing identical expressions of utter awe.

He gathered himself.

“We survived, that’s what. Get the FTL repaired and let’s be gone!”

Planet 16 Cyg B b, 16 Cygni trinary system
Hunter supply station

The Strange One considered the recording it had made, all of the sensor data it had intercepted from the destroyed swarm-ships.

That the aggressors were human vessels was obvious, and a fact which exonerated the Long Stars herd of treachery. Incomplete and all-but-useless as the data was, that much could be gleaned effortlessly. That it should forward the data to its true masters was equally obvious.

But what of its “fellow” Hunters? The information would be of precious little use to them. It contained no hint at all of how the ships had been able to jump across the sphere of engagement without the use of jump beacons, what kind of weaponry they used, nor how the pilots could possibly react swiftly enough to blink-jump out of harm’s way as that first one had. The Strange One knew enough about humans via its true masters to know that even their impressive reflexes were not so sharp as that.

Probably useless as the information might be, the Alpha-of-Alphas especially was dangerously intelligent. If the Hunters were somehow able to glean whatever secrets the humans had unlocked, they would become an even worse blight than they already were. The Hunters were useful, keeping the masses nervous and distracted, but should they gain too much and too quickly…

The decision was obvious. It ran another program, placing a call that it made only rarely, when certain it would not be caught. Right now, with the whole Brood in upheaval over the death of both Alpha and Beta, for the Strange One to continue calmly working at its terminal would be taken as just another symptom of its strangeness and the content of that work would be ignored.

+I have potentially valuable information on the Sol situation+

The reply was instant: +Ready to receive.+

The Strange One promptly transferred all of its files. There was a pause of some minutes, which it used to update its archived mind-state. Now was one of the few occasions it had been able to safely do so.

Eventually, the reply came:

+You have done well, Twenty. The Hierarchy can make use of this information.+

Cimbrean

“Legsy” turned out to be an enormous Welshman, who towered over Jen and seemed to take the whole world with irreverent good humour.

“Right! Ever handled a gun before?” He asked, fishing around in the back of a truck.

“Sort of.” Jen said.

“Whatcha mean?”

“We modified some of those shitty pulse guns to fire actual ammo. They were okay, but…”

“Awh, they’ll be nothing next to these bad boys!” Legsy said. “Say whatcha like about the fuckin’ Germans, those cunts know how to make a fuckin’ gun.”

“Pardon your French…” Jen muttered.

“Wha? Oh, right. Get used to it darling, I’m from Llanelli.”

He hauled something out of the truck’s bed. “Anyway, THIS” he held up a gun “is the HK G36C. Before I give it to you, d’you know the rules of firearm safety?”

Jen’s lessons with Adrian on a deathworld she had never learned the name of came back to her. “Always assume it’s loaded and ready to fire and the safety’s off.” she recalled. “Don’t point it at something unless you’re completely okay with that thing ending up dead or destroyed. Don’t have your trigger finger inside the guard unless you’re going to shoot. Be aware of what’s near and behind your target.”

Legsy handed her the gun.

“Safety, magazine eject, charging handle. Got that?“Jen repeated the identification, and he nodded, then pointed to something on the top of the gun. ” This here’s an OCOG—that’s Offworld Combat Operations Gunsight. Designed for use in different gravity, right? Aim it at that target down there…” Jen did so. “See how the chevrons tell you the range, and stay on target no matter where your head is? Okay, tuck it into your shoulder a bit more…right. You know how to hold one, anyway. Give it here.”

When Jen had done so, he demonstrated the correct way to load and charge it a few times before handing it back to her and watching as she repeated the motion. Satisfied, he handed her a magazine with a strip of coloured tape around it.

“Okay, this is a charged mag and that’s live ammunition. Fire off a few rounds at that target by there.” He said.

Jen looked at it. “How far is that?”

“Hundred meters, nice and easy.” Legsy said, happily. “That gun’s effective out to about eight hundred, but the furthest target we’ve got is six hundred meters, which would be that little one waaaay over there.” He pointed at a little speck hanging from a distant tree. “But we’re going to start nice and easy.”

Jen shrugged, turned, raised the gun, sighted, and fired. The recoil was surprisingly hefty compared to the repurposed pulse-guns she was used to and the first shot hit a bit high. She adjusted, and the rest of her shots formed a tight grouping smack in the middle of the target.

“Fuckin’ ‘ell!” Legsy said, clearly impressed. “Okay, recoil surprised you a bit there. Squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it, and try to be breathin’ out when you fire. Go for that one over there with the orange stake next to it, that’s three hundred meters.”

Jen’s shots hit low. “Sights are off.” she observed.

“Or you’re just shit.” Legsy teased, grinning. “Nah, you’re right. That sight’s not been calibrated for Cimbrean’s gravity yet, you’ll need to adjust it. See that little dial on the side?”

Jen experimented with it, twisted it a bit, and saw how the chevrons moved and widened out a bit. She fired, hit a bit high, twisted the OCOG a little less, fired, hit smack in the middle, and something went click in her brain.

She grinned, aimed, and squeezed off all the remaining rounds in the magazine before laying the gun flat in front of her, pointing downrange.

“You missed.” Legsy said, examining the three hundred meter target through binoculars and sounding puzzled.

“Look at the six hundred meter target.” Jen told him. He frowned and raised his binoculars again, and Jen folded her arms and allowed a cocky smile to form as she watched the giant Welsh soldier’s jaw drop.

Brick, New Jersey

It really was very good coffee.

“Here on Earth, The Hierarchy would be just another conspiracy theory.” Singh told him, settling down into his recliner. “But they are very real. They have acted behind the scenes of galactic politics since the days when some of the older species were still around.”

“Still around?” Kevin echoed, questioning.

“Species come, species go.” Singh said. “You must have noticed that all of the civilizations out there are much of an age with us. A few thousand years older at most.”

“So…what, species just go extinct eventually?”

“Eventually. Usually after tens of thousands of years as warp-capable civilizations. But in time, well…it’s not quite clear why. It’s the grand unanswered question of alien sociology. But yes, in time they all enter a terminal decline. Every race up there is living on borrowed time.”

“No exceptions?”

Singh issued a slim-lipped, grim smile and set his coffee down. “Just one. The Hunters. There are references to them in archaeological archives dating back to the days when humanity was still just a balder-than-average ape with unusual posture. Nobody quite knows HOW old they are. But the rest? Eventually, they crumble, their works decay, they withdraw to their homeworld, set up shop and just…dwindle. They stop breeding and…give up.”

He leaned forward. “Except for the deathworlders.”

Kevin’s brow creased. “…But we’re the only deathworlders, though. Aren’t we?”

“We are, yes, but we shouldn’t be. Let me tell you my story…”

Chapter 13: Tall Tales

Author’s Note: This chapter was co-written alongside Rantarian and ties in with chapters 67-69 of “Salvage.” Reading that side of the story may help you make sense of things.

Brick, New Jersey, Earth

The name I was given at birth was not in fact Ravinder Singh.

You see…It often surprises me just how few Americans know that India is a nuclear power. We have our stockpiles of weapons, our enrichment program, our power plants…

Any nation which has a nuclear arsenal and is prepared for the possibility of nuclear war, inevitably needs to employ experts in the effects—both the immediate ones, and those that linger—of nuclear weaponry. That was me. I was, once, one of my home country’s foremost experts in just what the bomb does, to people and to places.

A curious vocation for a Buddhist, maybe, but I viewed my role as being that of peacekeeper, or maybe a guardian, keeping the doors of hell locked. Maybe if I could impress seriously enough just how terrible a thing these weapons are, make my nation’s leaders see that nothing good could ever come of their deployment, that awful force might be kept in check.

No matter. The point is, I am one of only a handful of people in the world who know in full the details of the Republic of India’s nuclear program. You can see why my abduction would have caused… alarm, among the Security and Intelligence Services, the military…

The fact that my eventual return to Earth landed me in the USA could only serve to compound that sense of alarm, hence my change of name and reclusiveness. You’ll forgive me if I don’t share my original identity—I doubt that India has forgotten me.

But you of course are not here for the story of why I am living in Brick, are you Mister Jenkins?

Three years and eight months AV
Cimbrean Colony, The Far Reaches

”…oh you should see her, she’s getting so BIG, and we were all so proud of her when she played Mary for the nativity last…”

Jennifer Delaney, mid-twenties space-babe, and feeling happy for the first time that she could remember to hear her mum’s logorrhea.

Tamzin Delaney had launched into her usual update on the lives of literally every person within a ten mile radius of their house almost without preamble, as if it was just another daily message on her daughter’s answerphone, rather than a prerecorded video letter to be sent into space after years of not even knowing if she was still alive or not.

It was… comforting, in its way. Normalcy among the weirdness. She hadn’t changed a bit.

Robert Delaney, on the other hand, had lost a huge amount of weight, and lost the last colour in his hair. He looked less amply jolly nowadays, and more… scholarly. It was quite a change, but Jen had to admit that the only other time she’d seen her old man look so good was in old pictures from the 80s.

He seemed content to sit quietly, left arm around his chatterbox wife’s shoulders, and just listen with a faint smile, but just as Tamzin was launching into the chapter about non-family members, he rolled his eyes and held up a tablet computer he’d been holding out of sight behind the couch. Written on it large enough for the camera to see were the words:

“What she’s trying to say is:”

He swiped down.

“I love you
and I miss you
and I pray every day that
you’re safe out there.”

He smiled, chin wobbling, and swiped down one last time.

We both do.

By the time Jen’s eyes were dry again, most of her mum’s monologue was over, and she wound down with a few anecdotes about the daughter of somebody who had babysit Jen twenty years previously and of whom she had no memory, before glancing anxiously at somebody outside of the camera’s field of view.

”…Is that okay?”

“I’m sure she’ll love it,” the operator assured her. Robert grinned at him from behind his wife’s back.

“Well…Be safe, darling. I…Come home soon.”

The video ended.

“Want to go home?” Old Jen asked.

“No.”

She had been doing that more and more, lately. Talking to herself, carrying on a conversation between “Old Jen”—the I.T. cubicle mouse whose sole experience with men had consisted of a few awkward and ill-advised office fumbles—and “New Jen”, the competent, confident, slightly cold and battle-scarred Space-Babe. It had helped her get through months of isolation during the long walk, but the habit was ingrained now.

Perhaps even more alarmingly, Old Jen seemed to have a voice of her own now: a shy, querulous voice that longed for safety, for warmth and comfort, to go back to her own bed and maybe a cat and a goldfish and shove her head under her pillow and FORGET.

If she hadn’t been a genuinely nice person, Jen suspected she would have hated herself. As it was, she accepted the voice of her own timidity for what it really was—Her past. And her past was a story of fear, weakness, lethargy…Everything that kept a person back, kept them in a cubicle, kept them too afraid to talk to boys. Everybody had that voice: at least she knew when hers was talking.

Still… sometimes it was alright to let Old Jen cry, so long as she wiped away the tears and kept putting one foot in front of another.

There was some shouting outside, which meant that Kirk had probably arrived. It was only his imminent arrival—along with the influx of colonists from Earth, including Jen’s replacement—that had persuaded her to finally watch the video from her parents and read the messages from her friends and more distant relatives. After today, there would be no further opportunities.

She just wasn’t sure what she was going to do. She wasn’t going back to Earth, that much was certain. And she couldn’t stay here, even if her bath was here. And there was the awful question of keeping her head down and avoiding being noticed by the Great Hunt. But…

…She’d figure it out.

Starship ‘Sanctuary,’ Cimbrean Local Space, the Far Reaches

“I swear I don’t know why you upgraded this thing to be so comfortable when we spend hardly any time inside it.”

“It wasn’t originally supposed to be just two of us, Julian.”

“Right… still can’t believe the other twenty-three went back to Earth.”

“Oh, they’ll be back. I was wrong about something, way back when.”

“You’ll have to tell me later Kirk. Hurry up and get us landed: Long-range sensors are picking up an ALV drive signature, looks big enough to be a… frigate, or maybe even a cruiser. We want to be inside the colony’s camouflage field before they get close enough to spot us.”

“Just the one? A ship that big shouldn’t be out this far…”

“Shouldn’t? Maybe. Is? Yes. Get us down there.”

“Aye aye.”

Cimbrean Colony, The Far Reaches

“Fookin’ ‘ell, they’re coming in pretty hard…”

The Sanctuary was hammering down at the core of a trail of plasma. Powell and all the rest ducked down against a sudden blast of air, and the whole colony shook as the ship extended its fields, pancaking the air below it into a hundred-meter tall cushion that shoved the fireball sideways, scything the top off some nearby trees.

“Jesus H. Tittyfuckin’ Christ!!” Legsy yelled, a sentiment echoed in assorted vulgarities from all across the camp.

Thrumming smugly, Sanctuary settled gently onto the landing field.

“The fook was that all about?” Powell demanded, as the ramp dropped and Kirk’s partner-in-crime, Julian, staggered out and sat down heavily.

“The camouflage field working?” he asked.

“Franklin! Camo the field!” Powell yelled at the SEAL whose job was to handle the colony’s forcefield.

“On it!”

The field shimmered, moving from optimal collection mode to a wide-effect digital camo that would, in theory, make the colony very difficult to see from orbit.

Julian stood up. “There’s a ship incoming,” he explained.

The trooper responsible for the colony’s sensor array—really just the feed from a number of stealthy micro-satellites in geosynchronous orbit—had already grabbed his gear before Powell could turn to shout him into action, and was busy checking it.

“Confirmed,” he called. “One warp signature, incoming at superluminal from outsystem…looks like they’re coming from Celzi space.”

Powell released a frustrated grunt. “Intel said the Alliance was stepping up anti-piracy ops in this sector. If it’s the fucking Russians…” he trailed off, not finishing the thought. If it was the Russians, then the whole Cimbrean operation might well be fucked. Moscow’s aligning itself with the Celzi had caused quite the political row back at home where most everybody favoured neutrality in the interstellar conflict. While the Alliance hadn’t been responsible for the Sol quarantine, their condemnation of the enclosure had smacked more of expedient propaganda than actual moral outrage.

“They’re slowing…sublight.” Baker added. “Active ping! We just got scanned.”

“Think they saw anything?”

“Field’s up, camo’s running…At that range, if our gear’s working as advertised, no they didn’t.”

“Good. If this is just a patrol, hopefully they’ll have a look and move on…”

Baker watched his screen for a good minute.

“They’re not,” He decided. “Looks like they’re pulling into low orbit, set to sweep directly over us in… ten mikes.”

”…shit. Okay, get the Skymaster ready.”

Jen glanced at the imposing device in the heart of the camp. The “Skymaster” was a repurposed M242 Bushmaster mounted on a complicated gyroscopic base and field emitter array that transformed it into an effective ground-to-orbit weapon. It had been one of the first things the platoon had set up after the forcefield had come online.

As she watched, it pivoted and swung skywards, aiming into the western sky.

“Nine mikes,” Baker warned. Powell nodded grimly. His face had that same cold, calculating look that Adrian had used to wear in moments of real danger.

“Prepare to active ping,” He ordered. “If we see any sign that they’re hostile, we shoot first and the questions can go fook themselves.”

Baker confirmed the order, then counted down: “Eight thirty.”

Jen cleared her throat. “You sure about this?” She asked.

“Sure as I’ll ever be. Baker? Active ping.”

The sensors specialist nodded, and tapped something on his equipment. He gritted his teeth at what he saw.

“Ah, shit, their grav-spike’s up.” he reported.

Powell spun and addressed the two men manning the Skymaster. “Gun team! Five rounds, ASX!”

“Five ASX, ready…lock!”

“Fire!”

The Skymaster thumped. Jen felt it in her chest as the weapon opened a force-field walled tube of vacuum in front of it, into which it fired a round which accelerated away on a warp pulse in a line of exotic blue radiation. The warp field would collapse scant millimeters from the target’s hull, delivering the round long before the Celzi cruiser could even register that it was under attack. In theory, if the cruiser’s shields were still down while its warp field dissipated, the rounds would strike its hull unimpeded, smashing through the fragile ceramic armour tiles and delivering shaped explosive charges directly to the superstructure.

If its shields were up…in theory the gun could overwhelm them with sustained fire, but during that time the cruiser might lower its spike and flee, blowing Cimbrean’s cover.

Baker’s report soothed that particular worry. “Target well hit and de-orbiting, but they’re still intact. Communications could still be up.”

Powell set his jaw. “Five more, fire for effect.”

“Five more…Fire!”

The gun slammed into life again, and Jen felt her heart jump in her chest as five more rounds in as many seconds vanished skywards, pulsing upwards in a streak of blue light.

Powell keyed his radio. “Kirk, get ready to hit orbit an’ fook off, if this all goes to shit we need it reported back to Earth. Jen, you’d best go with him.”

”…Right. Take care of this place, Powell.” Jen said, while Old Jen whimpered objections at her about not abandoning everyone.

“You didn’t even name this place!” Powell objected.

“Folctha,” Jen called as she ran. “It’s called Folctha!”

She jogged behind the slender alien as he cantered across the lawn and scrambled up the Sanctuary’s ramp. Julian had sprinted ahead and was already powering up the ship’s kinetics as the door closed.

“We good to go?” He asked.

Kirk shook his head, a slow gesture on his long-necked kind. “Not yet. That ship will see us if we take off right now, and its gravity spike is still up, they’ll get a good look at us if we run now. We need to wait until it’s below the horizon.”

“And then?”

“And then we go with plan B I suppose.”

“I hope that’s not the plan B I’m used to…” Old Jen muttered, sotto voce. Louder, she asked “What’s plan B?”

“We deploy the system defense field we stole from the Confederacy,” Julian told her.

“An expedient solution, but also a politically awkward one,” Kirk expanded. “It would damage Earth’s reputation and bargaining position. I was instructed that the survival of the colony is more valuable, but…”

“But the fewer pawns we sacrifice the better,” Julian finished.

Jen blinked. “Somebody stole one of those things for us?”

“Julian did,” Kirk said, a revelation which caused her to re-examine Julian. After his stammering embarrassment at finding her in the bath, she’d pegged him as another Darragh and largely ignored him.

Stupid of me she realised, examining him with New Jen’s eye for danger. That earnest, cautious expression had done a good job of hiding the fact that he was fit, strong, and scarred, and clearly a survivor. It was only the slightly pathetic reaction he had to being in the presence of her—of a woman, she realised—that had made her dismiss him. Had he been standing with more confidence, she would have had no trouble imagining him stealing hardware like that.

At least it was a lesson learned harmlessly.

“What’s going on out there, anyway?” She asked, changing the subject.

Brick, New Jersey, Earth

Did you know, the Corti never dabbled in nuclear fission on anything more than an experimental basis? Three deaths and an event that came alarmingly close to being their own version of Pripyat later, and they abandoned the program and never spoke of it again. I found that interesting. Of course, that was before their eugenics program, and after their intellect had expanded and their compassion had shrivelled, they were well past the point of need to meddle with such comparatively crude science.

The Corti who abducted me—do you meditate? You should. I was taken while meditating and did not even notice until I opened my eyes again.

Their names were Hvek and Twanri. A mated couple, and as close as the Corti ever come to being head-over-heels in love. Nice enough people, if one overlooked their condescending habit of constantly attempting to impress upon the “lesser species” just how intellectually superior they were. I was not impressed—they had deliberately stolen me to tap me for expertise that they themselves lacked, after all.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Corti schoolchildren would regard the class on radioisotope decay as mundane and boring. But there’s a gulf of difference between academic understanding of what causes nuclear fission to happen, and direct experience and knowledge of what the effects are when it happens uncontrolled. For that, they turned to the human race.

We aren’t the only known species to have detonated these weapons, nor to have dabbled in nuclear fission with the safeties off. But we are by far the most intelligent of those races which did so. That’s probably why they spent so much time repeating their obvious mental advantages—insecurity.

They chose two of us—myself, and Mikhael, a Ukrainian gentleman who offered guided tours of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. And chose, it must be said, perfectly. You could not have asked for a better pair to give you a complete analysis on both the academic and practical consequences of the aftermath of a nuclear event. Which of course gave us something of a hint as to what we were there to do…

Adams had a secondary role besides manning the forcefield, namely communications, and he called out as something on his own gear beeped.

“They’re hailing.” he reported.

Powell frowned. “Can they escape now?”

Baker shook his head. “No way, that ship’s coming down hard.”

“Fook it. May as well hear the bastards’ last will and fookin’ testaments. Open the line.”

The voice that came through was clearly Australian and desperate.

“Attention arseholes! Please stop fucking shooting at us, we are NOT Alliance. I repeat, we are just a pack of poor fucking bastards in honest need of some god damned help.”

There was a long, embarrassed pause among the soldiers. Then, Powell leaned forward, took hold of the microphone, and replied:

“Attention ship—Ceasing fire. You are to proceed as follows: Crouch down, tuck your head between your legs, and kiss your arses goodbye. Sorry.”

There was no response from the radio. The silence on the ground was, eventually, broken by Legsy. “Fucking helpful advice that, sir,” he commented. Several of the men released the laughs they’d been holding back.

“Shut the fook up and get the lads ready to abandon base if we have to.” Powell ordered. “Actually, fook that. Where’s it coming down?”

Baker scratched his head “She’s aiming for…that big lake to the east.”

The captain glanced at the sensors screen, then grabbed his field binoculars and turned to face westwards, raising them to his face.

Other heads turned to follow his aim. Some few seconds later, a cloud formation withered and died in the face of incredible heat as the Alliance cruiser wallowed through it.

The ship was coming in at a shallow angle from low in the western sky, wreathed in smoke and fire as its shields struggled to stay up and ward off the hammering force of atmosphere. As they watched, a flicker and failure robbed the ship of what might have been an engine or something, which peeled off and corkscrewed away toward the south.

“No way is that thing surviving the hit.” somebody opined.

“We’ll check it out anyway, there’s at least one human on board, so we need to ID the body if nowt else.” Powell replied. “Legsy, get the mules and one of the trucks started up, send half the lads out there.”

“Which truck, sir?”

“I don’t fookin’ care! The one with the broken mirror!”

He keyed his radio. “Oi, Kirk. Hold off on escaping for now. Looks like we’ve got a couple of hours to check and see if owt survived the crash, you may as well unload the colonists.”

There was a pause, and then the alien’s simulated voice replied with a single professional word: “Understood.”

Seconds later, the Sanctuary emitted a dull thud that must have been its end of the Jump Array accepting an arrival. It was only the first of the ten that would deliver the first colonists and their equipment and effects to Cimbrean.

Ten minutes later, Powell was riding shotgun in one of the Mules as it bounced and skidded across fertile flood plains. The stream that ran through the palace grounds at Folctha met up with a larger river, which in turn flowed out to the inland sea, from which a column of white smoke provided a clear marker as to the final resting place of the downed cruiser.

The mules were half pickup truck, half quad bike, and quite capable of getting themselves out of damn near anything the terrain might snare them with or, in the worst case, being physically hauled out by some strong men. Their supply of the diesel the little vehicles ran on was limited, but the development plan included finding a local plant species to refine into a biofuel. Besides, if anybody had survived the splashdown, the platoon needed to have men on the shore waiting to collect sooner rather than later, and the only way to get down there fast enough was by vehicle.

They pulled themselves to a loam-spraying halt as the sky flashed brilliantly from the direction of the sea. Every man in the mules and the truck flung themselves overboard and hit the dirt, half expecting a lethal shockwave to rampage up the valley and toss the vehicles flying, the product of some kind of nuclear meltdown or similar cataclysm. What instead arrived, after too many tense heartbeats, was a great echoing thunder of detonation that went on too long and was too gentle at that range to have been anything so apocalyptic.

“The fuck just happened?” One of the SEALs asked, being the first to break the silence.

“Maybe it blew up?” Opined a Canadian SOR trooper.

“That’d put paid to any survivors then.” Powell said. “Better hope not, we’ve still got a human to bag and tag. Mount up, let’s get down there.”

Waves were still lapping the sands and pebbles when they halted on the beach, and not a moment too soon: a trio of what looked like cargo transports of some kind were hovering across the water, propelled by rowing of all things.

A dishevelled hulk of a man, all muscles, wild hair, wilder eyes and unkempt beard splashed into the surf and waded ashore. He raised his hands in response to the guns that immediately aimed at him, but smiled.

“G’day,” he said.

Folctha colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Powell’s decision to order Kirk to remain had paid off, allowing the first civilian contractors and colonists to traverse the jump array from Earth, Already a team of determined-looking men were setting off into the forest with electric chainsaws, bent on constructing a log cabin to serve as a bunkhouse, as a rather more solid and permanent alternative to the tents of the military camp.

Somehow, they had even managed to squeeze a tiny backhoe into the miniscule space available inside Sanctuary’s end of the array, which was busily going to work laying the foundations for the bunkhouse and projects that would follow.

Jen wondered where whichever government or governments were responsible for this whole plan had found civilians with the right skills who could be trusted with the secret and were willing to take the risk. There must have been months of planning behind this venture, at a bare minimum.

“Miss Jennifer Delaney, I presume?” the voice had an accent that was pure southern England, reminding her vaguely of red tunics, flags and old stone buildings. It belonged to a slim, earnest-looking man in his late middle age who extended a hand as they met.

“Just Jen.” she asserted herself. Formality could go wrestle a Vulza. She shook his hand though, prompted by Old Jen into remembering that preferring to be informal didn’t mean needing to be rude.

“Jen it is.” the newcomer agreed, amicably. “I’m Sir Jeremy Sandy CH, your replacement as governor here.”

“Oh thank goodness…That’s a weight off my shoulders.” Jen admitted. “I’ve not done much governoring, I’m afraid I’m not cut out for desk work.”

“No indeed, you look like you’d find it bloody stifling.” Sir Jeremy readily agreed. Jen found that she liked the man, despite the pomp and poshness in his accent. Even if he was just very good indeed at reading people and saying what they wanted to hear, it was still nice to be charmed after months or, hell, years with no company but Adrian, herself, aliens, and a platoon of terrifyingly intense special forces.

“I can’t help but notice you’re about as English as the Queen.” she said. “Is Cimbrean a British colony now, or…?”

“The King, nowadays.” Sir Jeremy revealed. “But yes, it is. There was a lot of legal wrangling and courtroom drama involved, but ultimately Britain successfully argued that because the colony’s founder and first governor is a British national, as is its first military commander…” he waved a hand, dismissively indicating what had surely been an extended and heated debate within the halls of power. “Of course, that argument was much easier to make considering the confidential nature of the project. The absolute requirement of secrecy around Cimbrean’s development stopped it from ballooning into the political row of the century.”

“That makes sense.” Jen considered.

“Well, it probably won’t remain British for so very long. The Chinese, Argentinians and Russians are all making uncomfortable noises about expansion and Imperialism. Who knows? It could become the fifth member of the Union, or an overseas territory, but I think it more likely that Cimbrean will—quietly, respectfully and by common consent—go independent once on her feet, and become a Commonwealth member.”

“Assuming she survives.” Jen pointed out. “If the Great Hunt finds this place…”

“We have a contingency prepared.” Sir Jeremy assured her. “In fact, you’ll be pausing during your departure to deploy it.”

“Oh?”

“Kirk will explain. Let’s just say that the need for absolute secrecy is going to be resolved soon. Among other things, a leak is inevitable, so we need to go public with the project sooner rather than later.”

“So it can have a positive spin put on it?”

“As you say.” Sir Jeremy smiled. He looked around drawing a deep and contented breath. “Gosh… clean air.”

“Clean, yes, but it’s also a bit thin next to what you’re used to. Don’t exert yourself too hard at first or you’ll feel sick and shaky.”

“Yes, I remember the briefing. Still… It’s refreshing. I’ve spent months in offices in London and Toronto ahead of this assignment, finally being here is wonderful.”

You’ll enjoy the night sky.” Jen told him. “There’s no light pollution here, so you can see EVERYTHING.”

“I bought a telescope among my personal effects.” Sir Jeremy admitted. “I’ve always been something of an amateur astronomer. The chance to survey new stars and constellations was part of what convinced me to take this commission.”

“Well, we’ve got a couple of hours yet before the expedition gets back from investigating that crashed cruiser, so welcome to Folctha. I’ll give you the guided tour before we go.”

“Delighted!” Sir Jeremy exclaimed, and took her arm. It was an avuncular, unconsciously friendly gesture and Jen quite forgot to stiffen at the unexpected contact. “Folctha?” he asked.

Jen smiled. “There’s a story behind that…” she began.

The enormous human wasn’t quite aiming his weapon at Saunders, but then again Gyotin doubted that he needed to. The squad of humans on the beach were quite plainly the most dangerous thing he had ever laid eyes on, each one of them comfortably wearing a harness of thick armour plating covered in an drab blend of greens and soil tones that his eyes almost wanted to skip off and treat as part of the background, and a gun that the Gaoian doubted he would even be able to lift. All bar the big one with the biggest gun were intimidatingly anonymous, their faces covered in black masks, and with lenses of a brilliant orange over their eyes.

He flopped onto the beach, growling at the pain in what was almost certainly a fractured bone high in his chest, and was surprised when one of the humans lowered his weapon and dashed over to him, unslinging from his back a bag of what were clearly medical supplies.

It immediately became apparent that the human had no translator implant or technology on his person, but even in the curious cadences of an alien language, his tone of voice was reassuring and cheerfully optimistic as he drew a slim white cylinder from his pocket.

Gyotin was in too much pain to really be too worried about a language barrier anyway, and just gratefully rested his head on the sand, awaiting his treatment

It came as a large disappointment when, muttering quietly to himself, he human scribbled a rune or letter of some kind on a piece of paper with the marker, and pinned it to Gyotin’s overalls before leaving and checking on a .Kwmbwrw crewman same ways down the beach.

Gyotin was about to raise his voice in protest and demand to know whether the human felt that some curious ritual involving paper was going to mend a broken bone, when the man simply touched the Kwmbwrw on one shivering flank reassuringly, before checking on the next crewman without leaving a note or rune. This one received more attention, and an injection from a small, presumably disposable, needle of some substance or another. It seemed to work, as the fallen crew member’s pained noises rapidly subsided , to be replaced by an apparently gentle slumber.

Triage, Gyotin realised, as the medic dashed from crewman to crewman, assessing the injuries. Mostly he just repeated the action of labelling his patients, but here and there he administered an injection of some drug or another.

The unconscious human—Markovitz—was loaded onto a small ground vehicle which roared away in a spray of kicked-up sand. The mostly-sane one—Kaminski?—was likewise loaded onto a vehicle, but this one was also occupied by a human who had the body language of the one in charge. They were just close enough for Gyotin’s translator to decide it could hear the “Rush-in”’s half of the conversation: the other didn’t appear to have a translator of his own.

“Kaminski, Roman. Captain, Spetsnaz.”

The other human spoke. The language was a staccato one, short clipped consonants separated by long, broad vowel sounds, punctuated halfway through by what was unmistakably a “fucking”. Gyotin still hadn’t quite figured why humans referred to the act of copulation completely out of context so frequently, but he had come to recognise the word by sound.

“I understand. Our missions are at cross purposes: I had no idea the West had forces offworld.”

“<Gibberish?>” There was a questioning note at the end of that sentence.

“Of course. I surrender, captain.”

The two deathworlders gripped each other’s hands firmly, and the captain nodded, looking relieved. “<Babble. Nonsense?>“

“Thank you.” Kaminski glanced around, and then leaned closer to the other human and spoke confidentially, too quietly for Gyotin to overhear.

The captain frowned, then turned to the enormous human with the giant gun. “Leg-zee! <Jabber! Gobbledygook.>

The big one nodded sharply, and then marched forward, stuck the vast weapon into the small of Adrian’s back, and ordered something. “<Yammer> fucking <prattle>.”

“Sure, mate. Whatever.” Saunders agreed, and started walking, placing his hands gently atop his head. Gyotin wasn’t sure if the easy relaxed swagger in his movements was a symptom of bravado or honest insanity.

He stopped paying attention when the human medic returned and extended a hand. Gyotin took it with his good hand and was hauled—gently and respectfully but with the inexorable force of a human’s incredible strength—to his feet, offering words which, while Gyotin couldn’t understand them, promised medical attention and a future which didn’t include imminent death.

<+maybe they AREN’T all completely crazy…+>

Brick, New Jersey, Earth.

Our first destination—after we had finally calmed Mikhael down and he had agreed not to reduce our abductors to a fine paste—was a class eleven world.

I wish I knew its location, or anything more about it than its classification, but it was a pleasant place. Clement warm weather, stunning scenery, gravity just a little lighter than Earth’s, atmospheric pressure just a little higher. I felt quite buoyant—Mikhael complained of the heat. Supposedly, the world was home to a host of terrifying plagues, but neither of us ever got so much as a sniffle. Incompatible with human biology, I suppose. Or maybe Earth’s plagues are just nastier still. Who knows?

Have you ever heard a Geiger counter in action? Many people are alarmed by how rapidly and often they click just in response to background radiation. That in itself really ought to be a clue as to how cruel a mother the Earth is, when you think about it. That the basic background level of radiation to which we are entirely accustomed seems excessive even to us when we first learn of it…?

…Well, this planet—I suspected that it would only be the first of many we visited, and so I named it “Prathama”—had a background radiation much lower than that of Earth. It was so low, in fact, that Mikhael and I both fretted that the counter was broken, and requested replacements. The replacements corroborated the original, and in hindsight, why WOULD an alien world have the same background radioactivity as Earth? It would hardly be an alien world if it was identical, would it?

We had been dropped on this world, and told to search the area. Given who we were and the equipment our “employer” had granted us, it wasn’t hard to put together that we were searching for fallout zones, but what wasn’t clear was why. Deathworlds, after all, are supposed to be uninhabited. Humanity, we are told, is a lone statistical anomaly, the one race to defy the odds.

If that were true, and if spacefaring sophonts avoid deathworlds out of sensible caution, then why would there be any kind of evidence of nuclear catarstrophe on the surface of such a world?

Folctha, Cimbrean

A cry of “They’re coming back!” echoed across the camp.

Sir Jeremy turned to his predecessor as Cimbrean’s colonial governor and extended a hand. “Best of luck, Jen.” he said.

“And you, Sir Jeremy.” she replied, shaking it. “Enjoy the paperwork.”

“You can call me Jeremy.” He allowed. “I’ll make sure to have the bath enclosed and hooked up to the hot water. You’ll always be welcome here.”

She smiled. “Thanks…” a quick check showed that the truck was picking its way down the hillside. They had only a few minutes until the survivors from the ship reached the camp, and neither Jen nor Kirk had any intention of being identified as having been present. “I’d better run.”

“Before you go…” Sir Jeremy rummaged in his pocket and produced a folded envelope. “This is from the Prime Minister. He would like you to do something more for Earth. I suspect you’ll find it more to your liking than ‘governoring.’”

“Oh?”

“You’ll have your own spaceship for a start. Read it as you go.”

“I’ll do that. See you when I see you, Jeremy.” They shook hands, and she ran, sure-footed across the palace rubble and across the open field up the Sanctuary’s ramp, which closed behind her.

“Just in time.” Kirk said. “I was about to leave you.“

Sanctuary’s engines heaved, and she popped up and was gone in a startlingly short space of time, inertial compensation making the whole exercise feel eerily detached from the way the ground retreated and curled at the edges in short order. Jen’s last glimpse of Folctha was when the camo field snapped on below them, obscuring the vehicles just before they entered the camp.

They paused when Cimbrean itself was nothing more than a distant crescent sliver of blue-white, so small that she could have covered it with a pinhead at arm’s length, and Sanctuary pulsed once as Kirk fired something into orbit around the star.

“What was that?” She asked.

“System defence field.” Kirk said. “A little modified. The colonists brought it back from Scotch Creek with them.“

“Oh… a whole system? Like the one round Earth?”

“Very similar.” Kirk agreed. “Except that we can turn this one off when we want to.”

Jen said nothing, and pulled the letter from her pocket.

She was halfway through re-reading it when Kirk interrupted her thoughts. “Ready to go FTL.” he informed her. “Where would you like to go?”

“Irbzrk.”

“How’re they doing?”

The colony’s newly-arrived doctor was an American, Dr. Martin Adams, and had undergone intensive training in nonhuman anatomy and medicine as a precaution. He had, to put it mildly, been surprised as all hell to have to practice his skills the instant he arrived. He and Powell had met briefly during the preliminary phases of the colony operation, and he had the intense, competent air of somebody who threw themselves completely into their work.

“One of the vizkittiks died.” he reported. “Not much we could do for her. The rest, well… I’ve set their bones, cleaned and dressed their wounds and made them comfortable, but they just don’t heal as fast as we do. Some of them are going to be in here for a long while. Frankly it’s a good thing we all have those disease-suppression implants or they’d be in serious trouble already.”

“And the Spetsnaz?” Powell asked him.

“Kaminsky’s basically fine. I’ve got his arm plastered, and a big glass of water sorted out the last of that “pixie dust” stuff. There’s nothing I can do for the other guy though. I got an IV in him, but if or when he pulls through is out of my hands, captain. Frankly, he needs to go back to Earth.”

“His only ride just left, too… Alright. Keep me posted. For now I want a word with our POW.”

“He’s over there.” Dr. Adams jerked a thumb to a bed with the curtains drawn. “Knock yourself out.”

Kaminsky was sitting up in his cot, looking bored. The man standing guard over the prisoner was a valuable resource kept from doing something more constructive, Powell knew. Hopefully, Kaminsky would turn out to be cooperative and his warder could be returned to a useful assignment.

Russian was a language that still formed an important part of the modern British special-forces soldier’s curriculum, but he knew only a few key phrases. Still, it seemed only polite to use them. “Kак дела, captain?” he asked.

Kaminsky’s English wasn’t perfect and was heavily accented, but was a damn-sight better than Powell’s Russian. The translator implants he had received from the alliance were useless: Powell didn’t have a matching set for them to talk with. Still, he might come in handy as an interpreter for the alien prisoners.

“Better.” The Spetsnaz captain replied. “I could do with vodka though. Several vodkas.”

“You lost men on that ship?” Powell asked him,

“Da. Sorry: yes I did. To traps, ambushes, maybe to that fucking foam.” Kaminsky indicated the dormant form of Markovitz, then to an empty cot opposite his own. “Sit down.” he invited.

Powell did so. “So, I want to strike a deal, mate.” he said.

Kaminsky looked interested. “What deal?”

“If I HAVE to, I’ll need to assign a guard to you at all times, and I’ve got fookin’ precious few men to waste on that duty. You can see how a Russian special forces trooper smack in the middle of my mission is a bit of a sticky wicket.”

“I see that.”

“So… do I have to?”

“What is your offer?” Kaminsky asked, carefully.

“Quid pro quo, mate. A little information, and I might be persuaded you’re going to behave yourself and I can put private Hodder there back to work.”

“Where I’m from, my interrogation would not be so pleasant.” Kaminsky joked.

“Been there, fookin’ done that.” Powell told him. “But I don’t see the need to start wi’ threats and pain when you and I can just come to an officer’s agreement, like.”

“I agree. It is better this way.” Kaminsky said. “But are you asking about the spaceship and how I came to be on it? Or about my Australian friend with the alien mutant juice?”

“Alien mutant juice.” Powell’s tone of voice was a flat repetition, but also a question.

“Just something he said, and my suspicions. I’ll tell first one story, then the other, yes?”

Powell acquiesced with a bobble of his head and a shrug. “Sounds fair.”

He listened. Kaminsky’s life had rapidly swung for the strange the second he had encountered the now-crashed cruiser, moving from a relative cakewalk to a desperate fight to survive. All things considered, that the man had escaped only with some mild poisoning and a broken ulna to show for it was impressive.

Whether out of soldierly efficiency, Russian brevity or simple terseness from being a slightly hesitant Anglophone, Roman’s account didn’t take long. They sat considering the implications for a while.

Finally, Powell stood up and shook the Spetsnaz officer’s hand. “I have your word you’ll behave?” he said.

“I would like to go home as soon as possible.” Kaminsky confessed. “I think betraying your trust would only delay that.”

“Good enough for me.” Powell said, then deployed some of his own meager Russian again. “Спасибо за информацию.“

Kaminsky smiled. “Пожалуйста.” he said. “Good luck with this Australian, he’s crazy.”

Brick, New Jersey, Earth.

We had grown so accustomed to the sporadic background noise of our counter that when it ticked up to what was, by any human standard, merely a healthy background, we both became quite fretful and uncertain.

Our trepidation was not without good reason, it must be said—the difference between a perfectly safe exposure and rapid but unpleasant death could just be whatever it is that you’re standing behind at the moment. From that moment on, we moved carefully. We tested the water, kept some clean in a bottle to wash any fallout from our persons if we should be contaminated, paused every few hundred meters to probe the air, the soil and the plants for contaminants.

And we found them, oh yes. isotope concentrations in the soil, all from Uranium’s decay chain. Signs of heavy metal poisoning in the local wildlife, including one unfortunate predator that must have had a vast concentration in its equivalent to a liver, concentrated into it by its food chain.

It was lying, dying, by the side of the first sign of civilisation we had seen—a road.

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adrian Saunders turned out to be huge. It HAD to be Saunders, even though Jen had been perfectly convinced he was dead. Even without knowing the first name, there were no other Australians with engineering experience and military training on the abductee list. The guy wasn’t tall—in fact, Powell had a good couple of inches on him—but he made up for it by plainly having the kind of physique that strongman competitors and bodybuilders beat themselves up in pursuing. It looked like working muscle, too, rather than pure steroidal bulk.

He let the man stew for a few minutes as he sorted out some paperwork, including a quick re-read of Saunders’ file. When he judged that his prisoner was about on the verge of starting to fidget, he looked up and gave him his well-practiced “I really don’t have time to deal with this shit so you’d damn well better impress me” look.

Contrary to the usual response, Saunders instead smirked and laughed slightly.

“I’m not findin’ this fookin’ funny!” Powell snapped, shutting the man up even if the response was more arrogantly sullen than alarmed. “Do you have any idea what kind of problems you’ve caused just by being here? If you are who I think you are, you’re doin’ a shite job being dead!”

“And if I am who you think I am, you should have a long fucking think before making it known.” Saunders retorted, though why he felt that should be the case was a mystery from Powell’s perspective. “Where’s Jennifer Delaney?”

“You don’t ask questions,” Powell told him. “You answer them.”

This earned another insubordinate frown. Frankly, it was amazing the man had made any kind of a career in the military at all. His body language and defiant expression was more rebellious teenager than professional soldier. “You bastards just shot down my ship—” He began to protest.

Powell interrupted him, not in the mood to let the prisoner claim the initiative. “Captain Kaminski tells me it was a pirate vessel, and that you only boarded it once he’d taken control of it,” He said. “In fact, he’s told me a lot of interesting things about you.”

Saunders gave a dismissive shrug. “So I’m the one who stole it most recently. I’m still the guy who crash landed a starship on a planet and walked away, and that’s not even close to the most fucking terrifying thing I’ve done this week.”

Powell had once led a team which infiltrated a Jihadist compound specifically to stab one man and steal his notebook, then exfiltrated with the entire camp hunting for them. That had taken skill, courage and no small amount of daring. Surviving a water landing in a starship, especially a badly damaged one, smacked more of luck, and luck in his experience was not to be relied upon, nor boasted about. “Not fookin’ impressed, mate.” he said.

This dismissal seemed to score a hit because Saunders shifted forward angrily and raised his voice, apparently oblivious to the five guns that all snapped to aim directly at him, and the way Powell’s hand dropped his holstered sidearm. “I’ve just been on a merry jaunt through fucking hell” he snarled “and all I want is the answer to One. Goddamned. Question!“

Powell let the moment of tension play out, until Saunders calmed down a bit and sat back. The angry shouting approach hadn’t worked, forcing him into a more reciprocal, reasonable approach. “Please?” he asked eventually, settling down.

Powell kept his satisfaction from showing, and instead made a show of standing down in turn, as did his men. “Quid pro quo, then.” he said. “You answer my questions and I’ll answer what I can of yours. Something tells me neither of us is going to like the answers.”

“No fucking kidding?” Adrian asked. “Well, I haven’t liked much for as long as I can remember, so why the fuck should I start now? Where’s Jennifer Delaney?”

“First” Powell persisted, “Your name.” He gave it a moment, then when no answer seemed forthcoming, he decided to say it outright. “You are Adrian-”

The captive interrupted, jerking a thumb towards the soldiers. “You better trust these fuckers here implicitly if you’re going to finish that sentence. Or maybe we can just assume that whatever you were going to say is right?”

Powell gave him a cool stare. Of course he trusted them implicitly. This was a top secret mission, and the men under his command were the best of the best. Not a single one of them was a security liability.

Besides, whatever reasons the man felt he had for needing to keep his secret superhero identity—and Powell wasn’t about to rule out some kind of paranoid delusion—he hadn’t yet revealed what they might be. Powell wasn’t interested in playing “Interstellar Man of Mystery.”

”…Saunders.” he finished. “As for Miss Delaney, you just missed her. She shipped out when we detected your mob comin’ in. “

There was a long, bewildered pause, and then the Australian broke down and started laughing. It wasn’t a happy laugh—it was a black cynical one, the laugh of a man who’d just figured out that he was the butt of a sadistic sense of humour. “Of course…of course she did!” He exclaimed, somewhere between the laughing and the sobs. “Gone home I bet? No reason to wait for a dead man!”

“Jesus fookin’ Christ…“

Powell decided, as the Australian slowly pulled himself together, not to correct him on that point. Jen had clearly been holding a torch for this guy, but mental cases like this tended to be a danger to themselves and anybody nearby. Jen was too competent, capable and useful a resource to endanger like that.

“Kaminski wasn’t bloody kidding,” he declared. “Is the rest true? The infrared? The…muscles?”

Adrian nodded as he ran a rough hand through his beard and across his head. “Yep,” he said, voice still trembling, “but I wouldn’t fucking recommend it. How are the Russians doing? Quid pro quo, remember?”

True enough. “Kaminski’s recovered. We have no idea what’s wrong with Markovic outside of ‘Pixie Dust’. Something to do with the alien fire suppressant?”

“Apparently it sends you totally fucking mental before you go catatonic. At least that’s what I’ve gathered from it.” Saunders revealed. “I’d stay away from that shit if I were you.”

<+No shit.+> Powell thought, feeling that his intelligence was being insulted. Who did this idiot think he was dealing with? There wasn’t a soldier on Cimbrean who wasn’t veteran special forces, they didn’t need advice from a crazed resurrectee, they needed the facts, unbiased and plain. Shit like “Don’t breath in the toxic foam” went without saying.

He kept his cool by changing the subject. “You’re a wanted man on Earth, you know,” He told him, keeping his tone light and companionable. “By rights, we’re supposed to imprison you and keep you until we can send you back… but.”

He looked the Australian up and down. “I can smell the kind of shit you’re in, and I’m not going to put this colony and my mission at risk over a dropout who’s legally fookin’ dead.” He said. “D’you know how long that paperwork takes? I don’t have the fookin’ time nor the inclination, so long as you promise to get the fook out of my hair and never come back. Spread the word there’s nowt but ruins on Cimbrean and I might even be persuaded to see if there’s owt useful you can be doin’ instead of stealin’ pirate ships and chasing after a girl who’s got her shit together way better than you do.”

They stared at each other for a few moments, then Adrian unclenched his fists, sighed and nodded. “Looks like you’ve still got some broken down old ships. I can probably put a working one together given a bit of time, a week…two at most, and then I’ll be out of your hair.” he offered.

“Good,” said Powell. Anything to get the man away from the colony and back out in the wider galaxy where he could do less harm. “We’ll give you food, clothes and shelter…and a fookin’ shave if you want it, but you need to get out of here before you become a problem. And for the moment, Captain,” he added, stressing Saunders’ former rank “you are going to give me a full debriefing.”

He listened as the disgrace seated opposite him relented and launched into a characteristically foul-mouthed summary of everything that had happened to him since his abduction.

What was clear was that Saunders was completely out of his gourd, and a danger both to himself and to everybody around him. He briefly entertained the thought of just shooting the dangerous prat then and there and giving him a grave somewhere in the Folctha palace grounds. It would certainly have been the most expedient solution, and when it came down to it the SBS had done a lot worse during their history for the sake of the mission than putting down a figurative rabid dog.

It wasn’t a choice between pragmatism and compassion so much as a choice between conflicting forms of pragmatism, really. In the end, letting him live won out. Getting the word spread that Cimbrean was uninhabited might just put paid to the rumours of a colonial effort that had lured Saunders here in the first place. Not to mention that having the man sighted a long way from here could only increase the colony’s security, next to the trail going cold on its way here. Besides, if he kept taking crazy risks then eventually his luck or tenacity would run out and that would be the end of it.

“The fookin’ dinosaurs built a spaceship.” He said, flatly. It wasn’t a question so much as a simple statement of disbelief.

“Yep.” Saunders said it with his apparently trademark “I couldn’t give a fuck even if somebody else did all the heavy lifting” attitude, but also with the total assurance of somebody who knew what they were saying was absurd and yet sincerely believed it to be the truth.

“I asked for a fookin’ debriefing, not a flight of fancy.”

“Space dragons, fucking X-files grey aliens, blue giraffes, raccoon people, and, yep, the dinosaurs built a fucking spaceship. Not my fault the universe is totally fucking mental.” Saunders objected.

He sniffed, and added: “Fucking good spaceship, too.”

Powell sat back and considered as Saunders rambled on at length about saurian robotic terminators, stasis chambers, the trouble with blue fur, statues, collapsing buildings, missile-riding, Vulza-riding and how much he hated fire suppressant, black holes and Darragh Houston. The whole monologue was being recorded for transmission back to Earth. How much of it was true or even plausible wasn’t a matter he intended to waste much time and thought on, but he did notice that while Saunders mentioned something called the “Hierarchy” a couple of times, he didn’t elaborate on who—or what—said Hierarchy might be.

When it came up again, he finally had to interrupt. “Okay, that’s the third fookin’ time you’ve mentioned this ‘Hierarchy’. Who in the hell are they meant to be?” he demanded.

Saunders had the good grace to look embarrassed. “Long and short of it? They’re the Space Illuminati.”

“For fook’s sake!” Powell exploded to his feet, spun away from the desk and pinched the bridge of his nose as he stood facing the corner for a second, head bowed. “I have no idea why I don’t just assume you’re taking the piss.” he muttered.

“I know a few things…they’re beyond cutting-edge. They’ve got a fucking army. And they love robots. Oh, and they can copy their brains away.”

“Greeeaaat.” Powell muttered. He turned and considered things. “Bloody ‘ell, Why in God’s name do I believe you, Saunders?”

“Don’t fucking ask me.” the Australian gave him a wild-eyed shrug. “I hardly believe all this shit. But you do have a crashed Hierarchy ship sitting offshore.”

“Not like I can do owt with it.” Powell grumbled as he sat down again. Nobody on his team was even remotely qualified to handle, salvage or work with nonhuman technology. A critical mission oversight, in retrospect.

<+And here I thought this debriefing was going to make my job LESS fookin’ difficult.+> he mused.

Adrian shrugged. “You can’t.” he said.

Powell, distracted by his own thoughts didn’t catch the inflection properly. “Can’t… what now?” he asked

“You can’t do anything with it. I probably can.” Adrian repeated.

”…My lads and the SEALs could dive that wreck, no problem, but we wouldn’t know the warp engine from the shitter.” Powell said. “You sayin’ you would?”

“I rebuilt a dinosaur spaceship and killed a fleet of fucking arseholes with it.” Saunders boasted, looking as if he was regaining a degree of focus. There was a hint of the once-professional soldier in the way he spoke. “I’m not saying it’s recoverable but if it is…”

Powell considered, scratching his own facial hair. “…If it is, you might actually turn out to not be a complete fookin’ liability after all.” he acknowledged.

Saunders’ professionalism slipped again, and there was a certain manic glint in his eye that only reinforced Powell’s conviction that he belonged as far away from Cimbrean as possible if the colony was to succeed. ““I was going to take some hard fucking revenge on these fuckers anyway, so…you know, it’s no problem.” he said.

Powell weighed his options. Unstable though he was, Saunders was the only man to hand who had the knowledge and experience necessary to do anything with the crashed “Hierarchy” ship before the salt water completely ruined it. And if they were as dangerous as he suggested, then his mission demanded at least sweeping the thing for tracking devices, beacons or other potential mission-compromisers, not to mention intelligence of a long-term threat.

”…Fine.” he relented. “You get to dive that wreck. You find any intel we can use and turn it over,and I might even drop the whole “never come back” thing. Now, I’m still kickin’ you off this planet because I need trouble like you a long way from my mission, but if you can prove you’re not a complete cock-up and turn up owt that’s useful—and rip out and destroy anything that might lead this Hierarchy here…Well, there’s the deal.”

“Honestly I doubt it even has what I want.” Adrian confessed. “But I’ll be sure to look. What about after I’ve left? You got a phone number?”

“Next best thing.” Powell said. “You know Star Trek?”

“Yeah. My old man had an obsession.”

“Good, then you should remember this. There’s an… agent we use. He handles courier work, messages and odd jobs for us. He’s got an interstellar datanet dropbox, if you have a message for us, send it there and he’ll pass it on. The address is November-Charlie-Charlie one-seven-zero-one. Got that?”

“Got it.” Saunders nodded, the soldier showing again for a second, in the attentive way he gave his undivided attention to the important information.

“You know how to stay secure online?”

“I have a guy who can crack cyber security like an egg.” Adrian reassured him.

“You trust him?”

“We’ve seen a lot of shit together, so you know how it is. I know he’s not Hierarchy.”

That would have been good enough for Powell had the Australian been talking about a fellow human, but only one name in the story he had just told fit the description.

“You don’t mean this “Askit” bloke, do you? I thought you said he was Corti?”

Trusting a Corti with valuable information was, as far as the analysts back on Earth had been concerned, about the same thing as trying to carry boiling oil in a colander. The only way it could end was you’d get burned. You only told them secrets if you WANTED those secrets to fall into enemy hands.

“He is,” Adrian acknowledge “And I’ve almost never wanted to kill him.”

”…Whatever.” Powell sighed. “I guess trustin’ you with this means trusting whoever you trust in turn. Just don’t send in the clear, and use a codename. “Kirk”, “Enterprise” and “Federation” are already taken. Got that?”

Adrian considered, and then an impish grin parted his beard. “Reckon I might go with Captain Scarlet. Looks like I’m breaking the theme.”

“If playing the fookin’ special snowflake is what floats your cock, sure. Whatever.” Powell told him. “Got anything more to add before I let you bugger off and start building your pet starship?”

“Just one thing.” Adrian replied, shifting forward in his seat. “I’m about to start waging my own personal fucking war on an enemy I can’t even imagine. If you’ve got a wish list for souvenirs just let me know.”

He wasn’t engaging his brain or else that list should have been obvious, but then again Powell knew the value of repeating things in case something had been overlooked. “Anything that proves they exist and aren’t just your imagination.” He said, extending his fingers to list the items he could think of. “Bleeding-edge technology. Alien hard drives, journals, logbooks, computers, that kind of thing. A working cloaking device, or at least one that’s not too badly broken. Maps, encryption keys…intel, basically.”

“You need a cloaking device?” Saunders asked, sounding faintly incredulous. He waved his arm vaguely towards the tent wall, indicating the unseen crashed starships outside. “You’ve got a half dozen wrecked Hunter ships lying all over the place.”

“Bloody lovely.” Powell agreed. “Now if you can point out which bit of the fookin’ things is the cloaking device, I might consider it a tick in the “not a complete waste of space” column.”

Saunders scowled “Your confidence is fucking overwhelming.” he grumbled. “I’ll put it on the list of shit I have to do.”

“Saunders:” Powell warned “As far as I’m concerned. the one thing that makes you worth the oxygen you’re breathing is that you’re the only bastard on this planet right now who knows a spaceship’s arse from its elbow.”

He looked Adrian dead in the slightly crazed eye. “Remember that, aye?”

The intimidation tactics didn’t seem to work: Saunders seemed to take it more as a joke than as a reminder of just how tenuous his position was, and grinned. “I’ll remember.” he promised.

“Right.”

Powell nodded upwards towards the door, dismissing the man. “Fook off.”

Brick, New Jersey, Earth.

Not that it was easy to tell: The concrete—it was made of hexagonal slabs of poured concrete, rather than asphalt— had been breached by trees, and the forest that violated the hard-top was just as dense along the road’s length as in the good soil to either side of it. It must have been… oh, a hundred years or more since it had been last maintained. Had we not stopped to examine the dying creature, we might have just stepped over the concrete road surface, dismissing it as a rock formation.

But once you saw the hard straight lines of the carriageway’s edge, and saw the material for what it was, other details made themselves known. The way that little clump of tangled thorny vegetation over THERE had a suspicious hint of rusty metal chassis, and the way that the creepers and vines over THERE seemed to have grown down from some kind of scaffold. That sort of thing. Everything was so green and alive that it all but completely obscured those fingerprints of an industrial civilisation.

There are only so many ways to build a car, I suppose. And only so many ways to reliably make it move. Only so many ways to build an internal combustion engine. All fancy and artistry aside, engineering is the art of effecting an efficient solution to a problem, and air resistance is much the same everywhere in the galaxy, as too are the demands of being able to readily carry a reliable and efficient fuel source.

The point is… there they were. Cars. Road signs. clear and visible signs that, once upon a time, Prathama had been home to a civilisation every bit as vibrant and technologically proficient as our own was in the latter half of the 20th century.

A civilisation that was, it seemed, utterly dead.

Cimbrean
Date Point: 3Y 8M 1W 3D AV

Lance Corporal Danny Michael watched the Australian shave with the kind of pleasure only possible for a man who’d gone without for a good long while, and the transition between wild-haired spaceman and barely-tanned skinhead was a quick once he got to it. The man, Captain Adrian Saunders of the ADF, was judged by Captain Powell to be of a particularly unstable variety, and so Michael and Marine Paul Richard—his good mate and current off-sider—had been assigned to watch over him in case he tried anything too manic.

Such as fuckin’ well killing everyone.

“You’ve got no fucking idea how good this feels,” Saunders told them, assuming a great many things in the process. Michael had once been taken captive by Islamists who hadn’t recognised him for a soldier, and had paid the price months later when he’d been able to get himself and the other surviving prisoners free and clear of their shitty little compound. It was amazing how thick hair could grow on a man in the hot desert sun, and shaving it off had felt like coming home.

Michael just shared a knowing glance with Richard; they knew each others’ stories and there wasn’t any need for words in front of a crazy bastard like Saunders. That fucker could think whatever he wanted for all Michael cared.

Saunders turned out to be a little more balanced than Powell had feared; there hadn’t been any outbursts of violence that would have required them to put him down like a mad dog, even if doing so would have allowed them to move into other, far more interesting duties. Most of what Saunders seemed to do was to focus on tearing all the alien shit out of smashed up alien ships, and moving it over to the one that was the least fucked up. He’d started work on repairs once he’d amassed a small mountain of technological garbage, and had spent the next few days turning large holes in the ship’s hull into equally large patches.

Even once he’d completed the work to his own satisfaction, the ship didn’t look anything like spaceworthy. If anything it looked exactly like it’d crashed a second time, and was waiting for someone to come and put it out of its fucking misery. Saunders seemed happy with it, however, and commenced his work on the inside with an enthusiasm Michael recognised as a man doing what he was made for. That was another thing Captain Powell had said to watch for: Saunders knew his way around alien technology, and that gave him the kind of dangerous edge that needed an eye kept on it; you could do a lot with a sharp knife, but if you didn’t watch it you’d cut your fucking finger off and then where would you be?

Nine days into their watch—Michael was thankful that they’d only pulled day duty on the bastard—Adrian Saunders was eating a breakfast of branflakes and fruit, sitting amongst a morass of cabling, panels, and all sorts of technological doodads that Michael could have told you sweet fuck all about. Powell walked in, took one look at the huge fuckin’ mess, and shot an angry look at Saunders. “Day nine, and this thing is a complete fookin’ mess!”

Unlike most men, military or otherwise, Saunders was entirely unintimidated by Captain Powell. If anything, he seemed to regard the concept of other people intimidating him as something of a joke, which Michael took as much of an affront that Powell himself did. “It’s a whole shitload better than it was when I started,” he said, although it didn’t look it from the unused junk that was laying everywhere. “And you’ll remember I said a week or two. I haven’t broken any promises yet.”

Insubordinate as usual, but Powell had taken to ignoring it. Had it been Michael in his place, he doubted he would have been quite so forgiving. “I’m told you’re still relyin’ on our generator to power this piece of shite,” Powell noted, still looking all kinds of pissed off. “Will this fookin’ thing even get into space?”

“Not without its own generators,” Saunders admitted, taking a big bite out of his fruit and chomping away happily on its crisp flesh. Michael wondered if he did that on purpose in some attempt to further infuriate everybody around him. “Don’t worry, I’ve got something in mind.”

The assurance didn’t make Powell any happier, and if anything his glare grew even darker. “You fookin’ well better, mate, because I’ve got people asking who the arsehole working on the ship is. It’s not lost on everybody that you’ve turned up alongside a bunch of prisoners, and you’re the only one walking around happy as can be. They’re wondering why that is!”

A fair question to Michael’s mind, he’d heard the talk amongst people in his time off and he and Richard both had gotten asked questions about it. Telling the colonists it was secret under ‘operational security’ had worn out its usefulness over the last couple of days, and now there were all sorts of fuckin’ rumours going around.

Saunders took his time and finished the piece of fruit with obvious relish before continuing, although it didn’t seem like he was being so much wilfully annoying as just crazy as fuck. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I’m planning on testing the kinetics tomorrow, and if all goes to plan I’m headed out to sea the day after. These boys of yours like water?”

Michael experienced the sort of sinking feeling most often attributed to submarinal activities and just being goddamned unlucky, and he could see that this little expedition was most likely going to involve both.

“They go where you go, so long as it’s on this planet,” Powell replied, effectively repeating what he’d said when he’d first assigned Michael and Richard to their duty. “That includes out to sea.”

“They’ll need some wet gear,” Adrian unnecessarily informed them with far more fuckin’ amusement than Michael cared to see. “You might be able to get by just using some vacuum suits. The Russians had some they might use.”

“I’ll see it’s done,” Powell replied curtly. “That all?”

Saunders hesitated in his response, and turned to check on one of the boxes of components he’d been separating from the others and had actually been taking notes on. He slid it across the floor with an extended leg, pushing it over towards Powell. “I got you a present,” he said. “Now you can be like Kevin Bacon.”

Powell looked into the box, apparently enjoying the same lack of comprehension about the fuckin’ psycho’s babbling that Michael and Richard experienced on a constant basis. “What the fook has Kevin Bacon got to do with fookin’ anything?”

Saunders had the temerity to sigh, as though he’d expected something more of them. “Hollow man. That’s the cloaking system I promised you.”

Irbzrk Orbital Shipyard

“I’d have preferred to leave you somewhere further away.” Kirk said. “The more we can do to minimize the rumours of Cimbrean’s continued existence, the better. And from what you’ve told me, the people on this station might know you.”

“I’m counting on it.” Jen replied, watching with apparent interest as Sanctuary slipped into the station’s tug field and was pulled in to moor—Julian knew that Kirk preferred a mooring to an enclosed landing bay. What it lacked in ease of access to the station’s facilities, it more than made up for in rapid departures.

Julian frowned. “Counting on it? I thought you were going to lay low.” he asked.

“Oh, I am. These people have had bad experiences with humans in the past though, so if we rock up and I start flinging around these… Dominion credits of yours, they’ll have me a ship built tomorrow.”

“Won’t they recognise you?” Julian asked. “I mean, if nothing else that red hair’s pretty distinctive.”

“Easily solved.” Jen said. She rummaged in the pack of gear she had persuaded Powell to give her, and produced a razor and shaving foam. Julian frowned, confused and a little shocked.

“What do you need those for?” He asked.

“Right now? Shaving my head.”

“But…”

“The nice thing about hair is that it grows back.” Jen interrupted him. “Whole heads don’t, and that’s what I stand to lose if the Hierarchy figures out that I’m still around.”

She found her scissors, and trotted towards the bathroom. “See you in a minute.”

About thirty minutes later, she returned, towelling off her head. She looked… skinnier, Julian decided. Even though he knew full well that removing her mane of red hair had done nothing to her waist or those firm dancer’s muscles, somehow the exposed line of her neck and scalp contrived to make her look taller and thinner, as if she had been stretched out. She made eye contact with him and he looked away, embarrassed. He hadn’t forgotten that she was the first—and to date only—woman he had met since his abduction, nor what she looked like naked. He mentally growled an order at himself to get it together. Kirk was good company, but if Julian had his way, their next trip to Earth would involve a visit to… Nevada, or Amsterdam, or Australia maybe. Somewhere he could rediscover that kind of human touch.

He briefly entertained the option of just coming out and suggesting it, but the same common sense that had seen him through seven Nightmare summers flagged that one as an immediate bad idea. Even if Jen didn’t react angrily, she definitely wouldn’t react positively, either, and he needed to salvage something resembling a professional working relationship with her.

She fished a green hat out of her bag. It looked like it was designed for cold weather, judging from the earflaps, the fuzzy insulated lining and the pocket on the cheeks which hinted at some kind of a mask to protect the face from wind chill. For now, she just tucked it onto her head with the flaps up.

“Is there anything else you need before you go?” Kirk asked her.

“No.” Jen said. She shook their hands, gripping Kirk’s cybernetic delicately, though he’d had it reinforced to cope with human grip strength. Then she was gone, out through the airlock and onto the station.

Kirk was already halfway to the command chair before Julian remembered to follow him.

“Next?” he asked. Kirk checked the inbox, then compared the codes within to the book he kept under the chair.

“Earth.” He said, mildly surprised.

“No shit?!” Julian exclaimed, delighted. “I get to go home?”

“Well… yes. If you want.” Kirk said. His simulated tone suggested very strongly that he’d rather keep Julian around, and Julian could see why—they seemed to have clicked well, Kirk providing the streetwise knowledge, political insight and galactic general-knowledge, not to mention his fairly substantial intellect, balanced nicely by Julian’s instincts, hard-won skills and sheer physicality.

“Sorry man.” He apologised. “It’s just been… years, you know? Do I get a vacation? I’ll want to catch up with family and… sort things out, you know.”

“And get laid.” Kirk translated, reminding Julian that he was dealing with a passionate student of human nature and a keen judge of people. Kirk knew the foibles both of humanity and of individual humans, probably better than they knew themselves.

He blushed. “That obvious, huh?”

“You’ve not been able to focus properly around Jen ever since we found her in the bathtub, and that was a month ago.” Kirk pointed out. “Yes, you’ll get shore leave, and an expenses account. My gift to you for all the Christmases you missed.”

“What will you be doing?” Julian asked.

“Planning the next phase in our mission.”

“You won’t be taking some leave yourself?”

“On Earth?” Kirk asked. “I can’t. Don’t get me wrong, I would dearly love to visit your great cities, tour your natural wonders and experience your culture first-hand. But a whole leave break spent inside the hazardous excursion suit would be torture.” he shrugged, an expansive four-armed gesture on his kind. “Besides, I love my work.” he added.

He disengaged the mooring clamps, pushed gently away from the shipyards with the gas thrusters, and then hit the wormhole drive. The instant it made contact with its counterpart in Sol, a crease in spacetime enfolded them, and they were gone.

Date Point: 3Y 8M 1W 5D AV

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

“So what’s up, Kevin?”

“Intel, Martin. Important intel.”

“This to do with your friend?”

“You’d better listen to what I recorded…”

Folctha colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches.

“Alright, girl…” Saunders said to the ship, patting the console in front of him, “now we’re going to see some real cool shit.”

Michael wasn’t sure about that, or about much of anything else right now. Neither he nor Richard felt comfortable flying around on this haphazard mess generously labelled a starship, and even less so given the fuckin’ nutter who was in charge. The huge fuckin’ spaceship ahead of them had been more like the real thing, even if it was half-trashed and mostly sunken beneath the waves, but they hid the impressed expressions well.

Saunders had taken his ship around it, surveying the damage and looking for a half-decent entry point. There was hardly much of a consistent hull remaining, with huge holes decorating the whole thing, and entire sections were missing, but they soon found the top of a gap that Saunders deemed as sufficient for purpose.

Gravity shifted in a similar way to the feeling of an elevator in descent, and pushed them downwards into the cerulean depths. From here the fantastic wreckage took on a moodier, haunted appearance, and in spite of his certainty that there was nothing to be found aboard more dangerous than himself, Michael swallowed. “But this is a spaceship,” he found himself saying, “not a fuckin’ submarine…”

Saunders shot them a knowing smile. “Spot probably can’t go as deep as a sub, but she can probably get us where we need to go.”

Michael ignored the fact that the madman was naming his spaceship and focused on the important issue. “Probably?” he asked, not liking that sort of uncertainty. He might have been prepared for danger, and even death, when coming to an alien world, but he’d really prefer it if his death didn’t involve drowning in a patched together starship that was slowly sinking into an alien ocean.

Richard was less willing to overlook the eccentricity. “‘ang on a moment, did you just call this fookin’ thing ‘Spot’?” he demanded.

Saunders shrugged, looking back towards his console to hopefully focus on whatever crazy shit he was about to do next. Not that Michael wanted the fuckin’ maniac to do crazy shit, it just seemed like sort of a given at this point, and he’d rather the requisite amount of attention be paid to make it a success. “Just looks sort of like a fucking huge dog head…” he explained, although Michael didn’t see how, “in a certain light.”

At least Richard didn’t press the point on that, waiting quietly next to Michael with only a small amount of nervous fidgeting. Saunders was focused for several more moments before he turned to glance over at them. “Opening the airlock outer door,” he warned them, illustrating that he wasn’t a complete fuckin’ idiot.

There was a brief sound of machinery working near the airlock, but nothing that followed it. That, it seemed, was enough to please Saunders. “Kinetic bubble holding.”

Michael shared a glance with Richard, waiting for everything to turn to shit. When it didn’t, Saunders turned to face them properly, lifting up his own helmet in preparation, and grinning at them like the psychotic madman he was. “I’d put my fucking helmet on now if I were you. I’m about to open the airlock inner door, and I’m not what you might call entirely confident we won’t all drown.”

They only hesitated for a moment before taking the advice. Now they were underwater, and in his hands, and they had to hope like hell that he knew what he was doing. Not fuckin’ reassuring. As it turned out they were worried for nothing, because the inner door opened to reveal a shimmering wall of water at the edge of the ship.

Saunders rose from his seat, stepped over to it and ran a hand through the water. “Gentlemen,” he said, holding up a dripping hand, “I give you the sea!”

Michael and Richard shared another worried glance, it was never good when the man you needed to keep you alive started making jokes at inappropriate times. Richard was unimpressed enough to tell the fucker what he thought, gesturing to his alien spacesuit as he did so. “You’re fookin’ mad if you reckon we’re going out there in these!”

Michael agreed with him though. “This is a space suit, mate,” he said. “See a lot of fuckin’ space out dere? How d’you think we’re supposed to swim in dese?”

That just got more crazy from Saunders. “Oh,” he said, waggling his eyebrows, “I wasn’t going to swim.”

At that he collected three stripped down alien hover devices, demonstrating his own for their benefit. He activated it, letting it pull him away, and dived into the ocean with mad laughter. Richard swore, repeatedly, and Michael was quick to join him. They grabbed their respective devices, repeating the demonstrated action, and let them drag them forward into the water beyond.

Michael hit the man with all of his might when they caught him at the entrance of the crashed ship, and was happy to hear the wind leave the stupid arsehole in spite of the water resistance. “Next time you do somethin’ like that it’s a knife,” he warned angrily. “What’s so fuckin’ useful down ‘ere that you needed to come back?”

Saunders coughed, putting a hand to his side protectively. “Starship reactor,” he said, “it was still live after we landed…”

“Then why are all the fookin’ lights out?” Richard demanded, raising a very good point, though Michael figured it may be possible that being immersed in an ocean hadn’t helped.

“I blew them up last time I was here,” Saunders admitted with an unwarranted casual shrug.

Michael stared at the man, and Richard shook his head in disgust. “You’re just about the worst fookin’ thing a man could put on a spaceship…”

Saunders only shrugged again, apparently fully recovered from his injury, then turned and set off down a burned out corridor lit only by the small red power lights on their makeshift personal propulsion units.

Not a problem, Michael thought, remembering that he’d been in places a lot more fucked up than this burned out alien wreck. Admittedly those had usually been better lit, and never underwater, but they had been full of arseholes with guns so he had that in his favour… probably.

He looked warily at the dark shapes looming in the debris filled environment, jutting out from beyond any place their meagre light could reach. He shook his head and made quick to follow the madman. At some point the day had to improve.

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

The story was identical on Dvitiya, Trtiya, Caturtha, Pamcama and Sastha. We visited six worlds and found the same tragedy waiting for us every time. Six civilisations, all cut down in their prime. Most, their cities were flat fields, identifiable as having once been cities only by the eroded glass and corroded rebar that littered what was otherwise a verdant field.

On one, Mikhael and I had to flee for our lives back onto the Corti research ship when the biohazard alarms screamed at us. The buildings were still, to some degree, standing. Hvek later commented that the virus we brought back with us was about on par with the Spanish Flu in terms of virulence and deadliness. Given that the world on which we encountered it was a class ten, I can only assume that it killed… everyone.

Can you imagine, Mr. Jenkins, what those poor people must have felt? What the very last of their kind must have been thinking as he coughed his last bloody breath onto his pillow, having survived to watch everyone he loved and his whole world be torn apart by a disease that must have struck them like the wrath of an Asura?

I have nightmares.

Our tour lasted three years. We visited twelve more worlds. I ceased to name them after encountering that disease. But I did the mathematics.

According to conventional wisdom, sapience cannot, and does not, arise on deathworlds. And yet here I had eighteen planets that revealed that common knowledge as being utterly wrong. Statistically, deathworld species should be in the majority.

We are not unique, in short, in evolving here in such a deadly cradle. But we do seem to be unique in surviving the invention of the intercontinental ballistic missile.

The starship reactor had been a relatively unimpressive thing. Michael had been expecting something like out of Star Trek, but what he got was a big white box, about the size of a small truck, covered in small red and blue indicator lights. As it was the only thing lit in the room he didn’t need Saunders to tell him what it was, but the madman’s burst of happy laughter confirmed it.

Richard looked over at Michael and shook his head worriedly. “How are we supposed to move this fookin’ thing?” he demanded. “It’s the size of a fookin’ lorry!”

Saunders kept working, and soon the majority of the indicator lights shut down. “We don’t need the containment unit,” he explained. “I’ve already got like five of the fucking things.”

Michael guessed that wasn’t the same thing as having a functional reactor, a suspicion proven a moment later as the madman drew a two foot white cylinder from the unit; it was covered in a constant outpouring of bubbles from its entire surface, and Saunders passed it over to him without explanation. “Hang onto that for me, mate. I’ve got another four to pull out.”

Richard took the second in hand, inspecting it more closely. “How come you need all these fookin’ things when your ship is a bloody tiny thing compared to this?”

Saunders removed a third as he answered. “Because unlike the aliens,” he explained with unusual lucidity, “I believe in having some fucking redundancy. Four redundancies in this case.”

“Wait, you only need one of these?” Richard asked, looking between the alien technology and Saunders. “Won’t this be putting too much power through everything?”

That was a good point, but Saunders didn’t seem concerned. “Yeah, but I already took care of that,” he assured them. “Five times the power, five times the glory.”

That was less than reassuring, but what was Michael going to do? Saunders was dangerous, but he was also their only way out of a crashed alien starship, and back to base. He pulled the last of them free, setting them aside before wandering over to a small, completely sealed unit that he opened with a utility knife. A moment later he was flashing a grin at them, and hefting his own reactors. “Now,” he said, “let’s go back. We’ve still got two stops to go.”

“Where else are we fookin’ going?” Richard rightly objected. “We’re not supposed to be your fookin’ pack-mules, you know.”

The madman’s grin widened. “Art of war, mate,” he said. “It’s time for me to get to know my enemy. We’re going over to the Hierarchy ship.”

Hvek and Twanri were not bad people. They did not deserve to die. Neither did Mikhael. But in the Hierarchy, we are dealing with the kind of toes that are best left unstepped-on. And we had stepped heavily indeed.

Neither of the Corti suspected just how much Mikhael and I could hear, you see. They deactivated their translators when they wished to converse in private, and for the first two years, that approach worked. By the third, well… Corti speech is perfectly comprehensible to the human ear, after all. Aep rhafe newn dte etchlimya ogtup oonb zurtuu. We learned how to listen to them.

They spoke at length about this Hierarchy, enthused about how Twanri’s hypothesis was gaining evidence with every excursion. Alas, I never overheard them repeat exactly what that hypothesis was—they must both have been so intimately familiar with it that to speak it aloud would have been a waste of their time. But the essentials were clear. For some reason, within only twenty or thirty years at most after first splitting the atom, every species that has ever accomplished an industrial civilization as a native of a deathworld, has self-destructed, spectacularly.

We ourselves came painfully close, as I’m sure you know, but Twanri seemed to take that as proof that, rather than being an inevitable product of deathworld mentalities, perhaps these extinctions were precipitated somehow. She sense the invisible hand of this Hierarchy, gently pushing so many wonderful peoples off the precipice and into the long dark.

I dismissed the idea as excessive and outlandish, right up until the moment our ship came under attack. __

“Spot”. Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Saunders had installed the reactor cylinders as soon as they’d returned to the ship, and even without a passing knowledge in how alien shit worked, Michael could see the difference they made; the movements of the ship were faster and more reactive, while Saunders seemed less inclined to take painstaking lengths to ensure every little movement was the right one. They’d taken a quick trip out across the continent at incredible speeds before arriving in a forest clearing where the only thing of note had been an alien landing pod.

This, Saunders had explained, was the means by which Jennifer Delaney had reached the planet, but it was stripped of whatever he had been hoping to find. He hadn’t left empty handed, however, and had come away with a piece of tech he’d called the navigational unit.

After that they’d returned to the waters near the base, but this time they had remained above the water and Saunders had been content to conduct the dive by himself. The waters here were clearer than by the more recent crash, however, and the remains of a far more broken vessel were scattered on the sea floor below.

Michael squinted to see through the water, trying to get a good view. It was smaller than the previous ship by a long way, and there was more of it missing than remained. “What’s this fuckin’ thing then?”

“Space Illuminati starship,” Saunders answered candidly, and shortly noticed the looks this statement received. “Not making it up.”

Michael scoffed, but he remembered the interminable briefings back on Earth. The point had stuck that the galaxy was a damned strange place and that humanity’s combined experience of it to date probably wasn’t yet even a scratch on the surface. Next to the space dragons, UFO-nut big-eyed aliens and genuine bug-eyed monsters

“No shite?” Richard muttered, his attention returning to the shattered vessel. “Looks like it’s been blown to fookin’ ‘ell!”

Saunders flashed the mad grin at him. “Not all of it, I hope, because otherwise this will be a waste of my fucking time.”

Saunders dove into the waters a moment later, leaving Michael and Richard to watch him from above, although if it hadn’t been for the small glow of light from the propulsion device they’d have lost sight of him amidst all the ruin.

“Holy shit…” Saunders muttered several minutes into his trip, prompting Michael to demand a report, only to discover that the madman was easily startled by nothing more than a fuckin’ fish; at least he could be entertaining.

When he did finally return, it was with a sack full of goodies, and he was eager to try them out. Richard and Michael, still frustratingly dependent on the Australian to get them home, sat patiently while Saunders fiddled with what he’d recovered, plugging in device after device until he finally came to one that caught his attention.

That one had spoken his name. Saunders had paused, aghast, muttered the word ‘tricks’, and had then commenced a conversation with an alien speaker that included some of what Powell had told them and a shitload more besides, even if they could only understand his half of it. Michael and Richard exchanged a glance. FTL communication was supposedly expensive as all hell and low-bandwidth even for the Corti, which was about the only thing that exonerated Saunders of any suspicion that he might be talking to some kind of handler or agent.

For all their boredom, both men were career spec-ops, and knew valuable intel when they heard it—they absorbed every word for later reporting to the Captain. They listened for hours before the Australian unplugged the device and returned to the cockpit, whereupon he set course, at long last, for Folctha. His shoulders had tensed and risen and his expression was murder itself.

“We going home?” Michael checked, acutely aware that if Saunders chose now to set the ship to fly off to some godforsaken end of creation pursuing this ‘Hierarchy’, then both he and Richard were along for the ride and unable to fly the ship.

Saunders turned to look at him with a new kind of cold, hard gaze. It was the kind that revealed a perfectly lucid man in full possession of his faculties—however temporarily that might be—and wanting to use them all to kill someone. Michael felt a chill as that hateful gaze landed on him; he had considered Saunders a threat before, though merely a disjointed one that could be dealt with; the lucid man before him was a different beast altogether, one wearing the face of the War himself. It was the first time he’d actually looked like a soldier, to Michael’s eyes, and therefore truly dangerous.

“Yeah,” he confirmed coldly, “So take a fucking seat. I’ve got intel Powell is going to want to hear.”

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Did you ever encounter Allebenellin, Mister Jenkins? Vile things. Mercenary, callous, venal and stupid. The answer to how a race with such a startling lack of ambition ever accomplished intelligence, let alone how they used tools prior to the invention of their exoskeletons given that they lack limbs, eludes and mystifies me.

In any case, we were crippled with the first volley. They boarded soon afterwards, and poor Hvek and Twanri were reduced to jelly by their pulse fire, sprayed across the command deck. These were the biggest ones, so-called “anti-tank” weaponry, and their fire caught Mikhael in the head. The blow killed him: massive fracturing and cerebral haemorrhage.

Nevertheless, it gave the worms pause, because where the Corti had simply… splattered…here was a creature so tough that, though dead, he was still pretty much intact. They may even have thought he was still alive, which brought me the few seconds I needed to shout the commands, in Corti, which opened all of the doors and lowered the atmosphere retainment fields even as I shut the hatch of my escape pod. Every single one of the marauders was either blown out into space, or else died gasping.

I escaped.

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches.

Powell heard the starship arrive long before Saunders made his usual commotion; the ship had come in fast and powerful, filling the air with a rolling thunder that echoed through the surrounding forests and sent alien birds into alien sky. Saunders was returning in a hurry, so the news probably wasn’t good, and by the time Powell had found him he was holding Lance Corporal Danny Michael in an arm lock and whispering sweet fookin’ nothings into his ear while Corporal Paul Richard just stood around holding his fookin’ dick.

Powell approached the trio, by now a spectacle for the colonists, with a fairly restrained expression of being completely pissed off, striding over into their view as he demanded to know what the fook they thought they were doing.

Saunders released the man as soon as he heard Powell’s voice, turning to face him with a fiercely present look in his eyes. There was focus there, with anger driving it, and Powell realised he’d have to step carefully until it passed. “Looking for you, Powell,” he replied. “Got a spare minute to deal with another lifetime of bullshit?”

“More bad fookin’ news,” Powell breathed, having expected as much and still finding himself irritated at the man’s glib insubordination in spite of having expected that as well. To calm himself he had to remind himself that this was a man who had stripped down an alien cloaking system and had provided humanity with basic notes on how it seemed to function, thus proving himself useful even if he was as fookin’ shitful as a man could be. “Fookin’ wonderful. Yeah, I’ve got a spare minute.”

They stepped into the office Powell had reserved for himself, closing the door to hide their conversation away from the colonial rumourmongers; the things that were already circulating were bad enough without the truth getting out there. Powell took his seat, knowing he’d prefer to be seated for what was to come if Saunders was being even half-serious, and looked up at the man. “Start talkin’, Saunders.”

Saunders briefed him. Properly briefed him, his voice more level than it ever had been. The story was typically insane—a bat-girl trapped in a ping-pong ball sized computer, and what he’d learned from her. It wasn’t something that Powell would normally have believed, because who would really have thought that some fook’ed up alien version of the Matrix could actually exist? Saunders believed it, though, and more impressively when he glanced at Michael and Richard, they nodded slowly from behind Saunders’ eyeline.

Accepting that also meant that accepting the kind of headache Saunders had been promising; taking a man captive was one thing, but taking his mind was quite another, and presented the kind of security risks he’d have preferred stayed in science fiction.

Saunders finished his explanation by stating his intention to leave as soon as he possibly could. “Spot can fly,” he said, apparently having named his ship like he’d have named a dog, “Even if she’s not pretty, and I’ve got things I need to protect.”

“Don’t forget our deal,” Powell reminded him. “Good faith.”

Saunders nodded. “I’m going to need guns. Guns and ammunition.”

That was more than Powell was willing to simply give away, even in return for Saunders fulfilling their agreement. He’d have to be just as mad as Saunders to start handing over firearms. “I’m not handing over weapons to a crazy man without a good fookin’ reason,” he said. “Quid pro quo, remember?”

“Then I might have something you find useful,” Saunders returned with a smile. “I can build you a scanner that will let you know if hunters are in the system, cloaked or not. Then you won’t be caught with your fucking pants down.”

That was exactly the sort of thing he should have been offering for free, but Powell held his tongue. There was no need to antagonise the man when simply trading away a single weapon and some ammunition would provide him with more of a return on investment than he had believed possible. The Hunters represented a serious threat to the colony, and any way they could reduce that threat was worth the risk. Besides, had he been in Saunders’ situation he’d have done the same, reserving a bartering chip just in case. He’d have reserved several, in fact, which naturally made him suspect that Saunders had done so too.

It was becoming clear that, bug-fuck though he might be, Saunders was going to be an asset. Albeit, one that would need careful handling at arms’ length.

The man may have succeeded in restoring one of the ruined ships to life, but Powell thought he would wait until he produced what he promised. “If you can build us that,” Powell promised, “I’ll make sure you get what you asked for.”

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

If you’re interested, the escape pod is probably still where I left it, somewhere in the Monongahela national forest. I walked until I found a road, hitch-hiked to Charlottesville. Hvek and Twanri had assured me that I would be amply rewarded for my service, and they had not lied—the Swiss bank account they had made me memorise the details of contained a lavish supply of funds, more than enough to pick a town at random on the map and work my way here by Greyhound.

Most went on this apartment, and on reinforcing it. The rest… keeps me alive, so I can tell my story.

The only reason I tell it to you now, Mr. Jenkins, is because, as you say, entering this room has probably already doomed you. I hope at least that the knowledge of WHO is going to kill you brings you some comfort.

Folctha colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Back on Earth, much thought and theorycrafting had gone into the problem of supplying the soldiers for the possibility of shipboard combat, where a stray bullet could mean fatal decompression, even with the damage control fields. Options had been considered up to and including reviving kinetic pulse weaponry, but with the tactical environment now apparently including things that were similarly tough to humanity—not to mention other humans—that project had been abandoned. Again.

The fact was, the only weaponry that could reliably hurt humans, or anything that had the ability to stand up to a human in combat, was also dangerous to starships and there was no way around that.

Unless—and Legsy was shamelessly self-congratulatory about this—you gave up on relying on the gun to be everything at once, and took a look at the ammo instead. Starships meant corridors. Corridors meant shotguns. Shotguns meant buckshot and slugs for dealing with humans, birdshot for the squishy ones. Problem solved. The smaller pellets of birdshot would have a much lower chance of damaging a starship, but were still devastating to alien flesh, and if you came across anything tougher, you just needed to use different ammo. Problem fucking solved.

The rest had involved persuading the mission planners to furnish their armory with magazine-fed SPAS-15s, which could rapidly change ammo types in response to a shifting tactical situation, rather than tube-fed M1014s which were a little less flexible. That had been easy once Powell had been convinced to back his towering celtic gun-nut comrade. Predicting the need to possibly arm the civilian colonists, the soldiers had arrived with more than they themselves could possibly use, and “losing” one of the shotguns to “Operational circumstances” seemed only reasonable considering how well Saunders had held up his end of the bargain. It went down on the paperwork as having been dismantled for spare parts, and the ammo was written off to “water damage”.

Powell entered the tent that served as the camp’s armoury in time to hear Legsy ask “Watcha think, boy, reckon that’ll do?” as he handed the gun over.

Adrian Saunders looked like a hundred Christmases had all arrived at once, and held the gun like it was the most wonderful thing he had ever laid hands or eyes on. Then, seeing Powell enter, he tried to sober his expression a little. “I…uh…yeah. Yeah, that’ll do.” he said, unconvincingly.

Legsy grinned, handed over the ammunition and then busied himself with cleaning the Minimi that was his own weapon of choice.

“The new sensors are up.” Powell said. “And a fook of a lot better than the old ones. I might just have been wrong about you being a waste of good calories.”

Adrian dodged the apology. “Jen could have told you that.” He replied.

The man still nettled Powell, for all that he’d proven his obvious worth as an engineer and an expert in alien technology. He’d obviously started out as a stubborn bastard, and his experiences had only driven him further into his intransigent shell, even if he put up a smokescreen of flippant no-fucks-given attitude to cover it.

“Jen thinks you’re dead.” he said. “Not a lot of point going into the skills and talents of a fookin’ dead man, is there?

Really, he should just stop poking. Saunders was badly damaged—best to just get on with it. He exercised some willpower and resolved to stick to the facts from now on and leave his opinions out of it. Saunders might be a danger to the colony, but he’d proven he was a useful risk, and probably not worth antagonising.

“Might have been worth knowing you on top of a fuckload of salvageable alien tech though, wouldn’t it?”

Powell wanted to point out that the only man on the planet—the only man in the whole human race as far as he knew—that could even have identified the technology as being still salvageable and in working condition was Adrian himself. Jen had her own set of skills, a sharp mind and was a quick study, but she hadn’t once shown anything more than a working, user-level knowledge of alien technology.

He stuck to his resolution though and didn’t rise to it.

“Your ship ready?”

“Yep. Spot’s all ready to go, provisions are all loaded… Just need to hump the artillery here and I’m done mate.”

Powell didn’t comment that Saunders was holding a bag full of shotgun shells as if it were his cricketing gear, without appearing to be really conscious of it. Even in Cimbrean’s low gravity, that was an indication of the “Alien Mutant Juice” marinating his tissues.

“Good. Right now, according to those fancy sensors you set up, you’ve got a clear sky. No warp signatures within range and that’s… what, a couple parsecs or so?”

“About that.” Saunders agreed.

“So, you’ve got a clear run to get out of here without telling the galaxy about it, and there’s no guarantee that’s going to be true tomorrow. So, would you mind awfully-”

”-fucking off?” Adrian finished, interrupting him with a grin. “Too bad, I’ll miss the food here mate.”

Powell snorted, and extended a hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Saunders shook it.

“Just try not to get killed you crazy fookin’ prick.” he said.

Adrian grinned. “So far so good.”

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

”…That’s a brutal story, eh?”

“And Terri Boone died after hearing it, Martin.”

“Just playing Devil’s Advocate here, Kevin but… that doesn’t necessarily suggest there’s an alien conspiracy involved.”

“Fuck devil’s advocate. Do you want to go extinct?”

”…No.”

“Neither do I.”

Kevin Jenkins put his phone away, expression grim. “If I’m wrong and Singh is just a crazy hermit, oh well. Sorry to have wasted the loonies, man.”

He leaned forward. “But if I’m right then one of these fuckers could be on Earth right now, looking for an opening. With stakes that high, I think maybe we should take this ‘Hierarchy’ business seriously.” he said. “Don’t you?”

Chapter 14: The Hornet's Nest

Date Point: 3Y 8M 2W AV

+0014+: Another failure.

+0023+: There have been victories also.

+0014+: Too few.

+0003+: The efforts of The Discarded work to our advantage.

+0006+: As I recall, Three, you were among those who advocated their termination.

+0003+: Your point?

+0006+: An acknowledgement of your fallibility would seem fitting.

+0004+: Petty bickering like that is for the Hosts. Three’s competence is not in doubt.

+0006+: As you say, Four.

+0014+: To address the observation: yes, The Discarded have helped contain the Deathworlders. That is a balance of power that will shift, as things are going. They buy us time, not victory.

+0016+: Agreed

+0031+: Agreed

+0004+: Agreed

+0006+: Perhaps a more senior agent should be placed in charge of that cell.

+0023+: Seventy-Two’s competence is also not in doubt.

+0003+: Your naysaying is becoming unconstructive, Six.

+0014+: The problem is escalating. This most recent failure was not orchestrated by a Deathworlder at all.

+0019+: Are you proposing that the Hosts might become energised and inspired?

+0014+: I am proposing that they already are.

System notification: User 0020 has joined.

+0006+: Well now. You grace us with your illustrious presence.

+0004+: Twenty assumes more risk than any of us. You will be respectful.

+0020+: Six’s respect is not required. I have completed my analysis of the debris field.

+0006+: Please, enlighten us. What miracle have the Deathworlders performed this time? Can they turn their skin to steel and shoot lasers from their eyes?

+0004+: Six.

+0006+: Twenty’s last report implied that the Deathworlders have solved the single-end wormhole problem. I will not apologise for my skepticism.

+0020+: No such inconsistencies. They appear to have an agent. A fast ship passed through the area shortly before the strike. I believe that it deployed tiny satellites, which self-destructed after the battle. If those satellites were stealthed and carried displacement beacons then it would explain the observed ability of these new ships to jump inside the sphere of engagement.

+0006+: It took you this long to determine that?

+0020+: Without compromising myself, yes.

+0006+: Useless.

System Notification: User 0006 was muted by User 0004. Reason: Correct your attitude.

+0014+: That was satisfying to watch.

+0004+: Correct yours too, or you will be next.

+0020+: I will not apologise for exercising discretion, caution and patience. Infiltrating The Discarded was difficult enough last time. They are not stupid.

+0002+: Six may be abrasive, but dissenting voices are valuable: They may cast the light where we are afraid to shine it. Soothe your wounded pride and examine the facts—these Deathworlders move quickly. If we are to successfully contain and destroy them then we must be similarly swift.

System Notification: User 0006 was granted speaking privileges by User 0002.

+0006+: At least somebody here pays attention.

+0002+: We have not granted you license to be disrespectful.

+0006+: …yes, Two.

+0020+: With respect, Two, avoidable setbacks will only serve to slow us in the long term. Hasty and ill-advised assaults have already cost us too much. The next must be slow, must be stealthy, must be unanticipated, and must be devastating.

+0008+: The evidence does appear to favour that.

+0020+: We must also put aside our power politics for now. Zero and Thirteen both failed because they acted alone in search of glory, and now they both need replacing. Now Twenty-Four has gone the same way. We must stop allowing them to pick us off one by one: This is too important for ego.

+0005+: You do not tell higher ranks what we “must” do.

+0020+: Then I respectfully suggest that we all set aside our pride and focus on combining our efforts to bring practical resolution to this crisis.

+0002+: Twenty has a duty to express their opinion in as forceful a manner as is necessary for its proper communication. You, Five, have a duty to heed what is said rather than overlooking it for the sake of pride and decorum.

+0005+: …yes, Two.

+0002+: We do not—yet—need to involve One. If Twenty’s approach is successful—if we collaborate to deliver a single, unforeseen and decisive blow to the Deathworlders—then One will never need to know this whole debacle ever happened.

+0004+: I still say that it was an unforgivable oversight not to foresee that intelligence might arise on that planet a second time.

+0006+: Two, may I have permission to remind Four that she was in equal part responsible for that oversight?

+0004+: How dare you!

+0002+: We believe you just did. Our permission would be redundant.

+0004+: I request a punishment.

+0002+: Denied. The observation is accurate, and even insubordination has its value. Nevertheless, Six, a little less insubordination, please?

+0006+: Of course, Two. You only had to ask.

System notification: User 0004 has signed out.

+0094+: The Deathworlders call that a “ragequit”, I believe.

+0057+: Apt.

+0014+: Can we please focus?

+0006+: Agreed. What do you recommend, Twenty?

+0020+: The Discarded.

+0014+: Sensible. They have already declared motive, they will seize the opportunity if it arises, and our risk of discovery will be negligible.

+0010+: We will need to remember to continue to monitor the deathworld after the scouring is complete.

+0006+: We will also need to resume monitoring on all the ones that have already been scoured. Some of them are nearly as old as Earth.

+0014+: You use their name for it?

+0006+: “Strak’kel” is so old-fashioned, and both names have a bit more life to them than “MY-31043-3-TT12-I” don’t you think?

+0023+: Whatever Six calls them, we will need to re-survey more than a thousand planets to make sure they are still clear.

+0005+: If that surveydiscovers even one nascent civilization, then it will have been worth the trouble.

+0020+: I must go. I will do what I can to keep the Great Hunt high in the minds of The Discarded.

System notification: User 0020 has signed out.

+0002+: Meanwhile, the rest of us will cease to engage the Deathworlders piecemeal. We must deal with their homeworld first before any attempt can be made at clearing out whatever last little holes and hideaways they may find.

+0003+: The first objective in support of that goal will be the identification and termination of this agent of theirs.

+0006+: Wrong. The first objective in support of that goal will be the identification and conversion of this agent of theirs.

+0003+: Two, I request permission to punish Six’s insubordination.

+0002+: Denied. Cease petitioning us every time Six offends your pride. You should also cease to be so easily irritated by accurate corrections. Identification and conversion of the agent will become our top priority. Discussion concluded.

System notification: Session closed.

System notification: Private session between User 0002 and User 0006
Session Opened

+0002+: Your attitude does warrant our attention, however. We are a Hierarchy, remember. You should remember your place.

+0006+: I am the foundation for those above me. My role is to support and strengthen them all.

+0002+: Well recited. We assume you are making a point?

+0006+: Pride is a weakness. It is the weakness, in fact, that has cost us the most against these Deathworlders. I judge that my duty to the strength and success of the Hierarchy and the indefinite survival of our people outweighs the tradition of decorum. It is not my duty to—as the humans eloquently put it—“kiss their asses”.

+0002+: And that is why we are demoting you to seventy-two.

+0006+: I see. I’m to take over from the current incumbent? Discreetly?

+002+: Indeed. You care about the result, not about your rank. That… atypical approach may be of use here, in this atypical scenario.

+0006+: And if you’re very lucky, your report to One will mention the Humans only as just another Scoured species.

+0002+: We intend not to rely on luck.

System notification: Session closed.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV
San Diego, California, USA, Earth

The man standing in front of him needed to clear his throat three times before it cut through the fog of fatigue that had Gabriel’s mind in a choke hold and his forehead pressed to the desk. He looked up, and stole a swig of his almost-too-cold coffee before addressing the man in the suit who was waiting patiently for him.

“Help you?” he asked. The man smiled, and produced a card. It was small, white, and mostly filled with the man’s face and the badge of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Agent Hamilton.” He said by way of an introduction, then aimed a thumb over his shoulder at a woman in a nearly identical suit whom Arés hadn’t even noticed. She had a black leather work folder under her arm and was holding three Starbucks coffees in a cardboard carrier. “This is Agent Williams.”

“You want the Latte, the Mocha, or the Americano?” she asked, offering the coffee.

Gabriel blinked, then managed to get his brain into second gear. “Uh… the Latte, thanks.” He said. She handed it to him, and he took a sip, grateful for coffee that was the right temperature and tasted a damnsight better than the copper-tasting poison the office’s overworked percolator produced. “Please, sit down.”

“I’d ask what the Agency is doing here, but I’m guessing it has something to do with a guy in New Jersey.” he said, taking a not-so-wild stab in the not-so-dark. After all, he’d seen the news.

Williams nodded—she had taken the Americano—and set down the folder on Gabriel’s desk. “A mister Ravinder Singh’s apartment was bombed in the small hours of yesterday morning, killing the occupant and three of his neighbors.” She said.

“That seems more like a police or Bureau matter.”

“His name wasn’t Ravinder Singh.” Hamilton added. “He was one of the top men in the Indian nuclear weapons program, who went missing a few years ago. And now he’s turned up dead in a bombing on the East coast, to me that seems a lot like an Agency matter.”

“I didn’t know that part.” Arés confessed. He indicated the folder. “May I?”

Williams turned it around and opened it for him. They sipped their coffees patiently as he skimmed the documents within. It was clear why they had come to him. A still recovered from the camera above “Singh”’s door offered a clear identification for Kevin Jenkins: it was stapled to a summary of the legwork that had gone into tracing him. It wasn’t a long summary—Jenkins collecting his bag at Newark, his boarding pass, Jenkins going through security at San Diego International Airport, Jenkins checking out of the Bristol Hotel, a bit of a luck with the receptionist remembering that he had mentioned being in town for a funeral, cross-referenced against the times he entered and exited the hotel to Terri Boone’s funeral, and that in turn had led them to her family who had pointed them to Arés. Most of the investigation would have consisted of the coast-to-coast flight.

“You don’t have much on him yet, do you?” he commented, noting that aside from Jenkins’ name there was precious little of his personal details in the folder.

“That’s why we’re here.” Hamilton replied, evenly. “You had a good long conversation with him at that funeral.”

Gabriel sat back and took another swig of his coffee. “Yeah, I sent him to talk to Singh. He was close with the victim. She was a P.I., shot dead an assailant about, uh, six months before the second assailant got her. She knew she was in trouble and cited Singh as a witness who might be able to reveal the motive.”

“Could Jenkins have thought Singh was responsible and taken revenge?” Williams suggested.

“No.” Arés told them, not even bothering to conceal how little he thought of the idea. “He went to talk to Singh to try and get at the real responsible party… no sign of him since?”

“His rental car was returned and there was a possible ID at a gas station, heading north, but that’s all I know of so far.” Hamilton told him.

“Let me spare you the legwork. He’ll have gone to Scotch Creek.”

The two Agents did a synchronized glance at one another, then back at him, letting their expressions make the demand for elucidation.

“He said he’s the bartender up there.” Gabriel clarified.

“The bartender.” Williams repeated, skeptically.

Hamilton coughed. “Thank God for that. If he’s civilian base staff acting on his own then it’s a lot less of a problem than the Canadian military getting involved in a bombing down here.”

Arés frowned. “They’re our allies and friends, aren’t they?”

“They are, but allies and friends go through official channels over stuff like this.” Hamilton said. “Canada’s already catching a lot of political flak over their monopoly on alien technology, if there was any suggestion—right or not—that they’d sent an agent down here who’d bombed an American building and killed American citizens, it’d put a serious dent in any relationship, however good.”

“Not to mention the repercussions abroad.” added Williams.

“Entiendo. Well, I guess now you know who to make the call to, so you can go through official channels.”

“Sure, and thanks. But I’d like to know more about this murder. You think they’re related?”

“The victim claimed as much and I’m convinced.” Arés allowed. “You guys have open minds?”

“Hard not to, nowadays.” Williams said, indicating the TV that was always playing quietly in the corner of the office, tuned to the news. The financial news was nothing but coverage of the partnership between several major companies—led by BAE, BHP Billiton and Red Bull—to collectively enter the lucrative market of asteroid mining, a feat that would have been impossible only three years previously. The news of the partnership had sent stocks in the involved corporations soaring, but the value of several elements—especially Platinum—had all taken a serious hit. It was just the latest in the long and storied drama of what was becoming known as the Second Space Race.

Gabriel nodded. “Then let me show you the evidence she left.” he said.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV
Planet Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-ugunduvug
Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy, Dominion Core

The annual Ugunduvug-vanrundrneg—the “world-storm”—was in its second day and approaching full force, powered by a quirk in the tidal dance of the Guvnurag homeworld’s three moons. This year’s looked set to be a relatively mild one, with only three dark striations of lightning-blistered cloud having so far formed from the angry black girdle around the equator, to lash out northwards and southwards towards the poles.

Such a comparatively gentle storm would easily be handled by the layers of storm protection installed by hundreds of generations of Guvnurag, from the simple earthworks and storm drains to channel and disperse the flash-flood waters, to the more modern innovations like the tidal barrages, the artificial barrier reefs, and the huge force fields that needed most of the year to charge.

In truth, Guvnurag were quite capable of enduring the Ugunduvug-vanrundrneg out in the open, huddled in a warm ball of furry bodies. Their thick, shaggy fur was equally adept at warming and waterproofing, and their large size meant a low relative surface area, combating the effects of cold and exposure. But it was by no means a safe or pleasant way to weather the storm, and most of the major engineering feats of Guvnurag history had arisen from the need to conquer their planet’s annual weather tantrum.

All of which was a little academic from geosynchronous orbit, of course. Space was infamously short on weather of any description. But it was hard for Councillor Vedreg of the Dominion Security Council to look down on the planet of his birth during this most iconic season and not reflect on such things.

Especially, he considered, when he was quite improperly being left waiting. The Confederacy’s Secretary of Security was uncharacteristically taking her time implying that something had come up which was important enough to keep her direct superior waiting—and uninformed, which seemed thoroughly unlikely—or else there had been an unexpected delay.

When she arrived, however, the Secretary’s flanks were thrumming an incandescent, furious crimson. She was, by any sapient being’s standards, in a roaring snit to match the fury their homeworld was unleashing upon itself at this very moment.

Guvnurag folklore had always claimed that a gentle world-storm meant turbulent times ahead, as all the energy the world failed to release was diverted elsewhere. Vedreg, as with all modern Guvnurag, dismissed that as superstition, but right now, it seemed to be eerily prescient.

“Secretary Meerednegnel.” he greeted her, properly. “Shall I, just this once, dispense with the formalities and inquire as to what has precipitated your anger?”

Meered crashed down into her chair, vibrating the ornaments on her desk. “One of the missing system-shields has reported in.” She declared.

“I see.”

Vedreg set, rather more gently, in his own seat. The theft of two of their system defence fields—a pair that had been manufactured for delivery to two of the Dominion’s most vulnerable front-line staging worlds to keep the pressure on the Alliance—had been deeply embarrassing for the Confederacy, not least because even their best investigators couldn’t figure out how it had been managed. While the handling facility had reported a ship landing and departing around about the time of the theft, the timing was simply impossible. Nothing could have covered the intervening distance so quickly without being detected.

“May I ask where?” he inquired.

“The Far Reaches.” Meered replied.

Vedreg shaded a worried brown. That was bad news for any hope of recovery or investigation. The Far Reaches were aptly named—distantly removed from the Dominion Core, that region had only ever been accessible along a small number of spacelanes, most of which had filled in with interstellar gas and dust from lack of maintenance thanks to the war. While the tiny particles were no threat to a starship, the burst of high-energy particles they emitted upon entering the warp field could ionize the hull and degrade ship’s systems, or even build up a lethal capacitance that, if it discharged, could fry equipment or unfortunate crew. Even navies, pirates and even the Hunters preferred to stick to the cleared spacelanes where they could.

The few lanes that remained open in the area passed through annexed Celzi space and were heavily checkpointed. Sending a lane-clearing fleet to open a new route would take several cycles even if the Alliance left them alone. All in all, the news of the system shield’s new location was frustrating, even if it did come with the saving grace that it apparently hadn’t fallen into Alliance hands.

The Alliance… something about the Alliance? The memory tickled at him, elusive until he interrogated his cybernetic memory enhancement chip, which gladly supplied him with a connection between the Alliance and the Far Reaches.

“Where in the Far Reaches, may I ask?” he inquired.

“Some private retreat planet with one of those terse Corti names.” the Secretary told him. “Why?”

“It wasn’t Cimbrean, perchance?”

”…As a matter of fact, it was.” She shaded pink and teal, a cocktail of surprise and curiosity. “You’re familiar with it?”

“Oh dear.”

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV
San Diego, California, USA, Earth

“Taking your work home, Gabe?”

Arés smiled. Detective James “Jimmy” Rowan was the closest thing he had to a good friend among the homicide detectives, and the two often backed each other up as partners.

“The CIA’s getting involved now. I need to get it all sorted out for them.” he said. The briefing with Hamilton and Williams had taken several hours as they had gone through all of Boone’s bequeathed findings and suspicions, followed by the fruits of Gabriel’s own research. Superior as his resources were, he had other cases to worry about, and so hadn’t been able to put the time in that he would have liked.

“The Agency. Man.” Jimmy leaned back in his chair, sucking on one of the tootsie pops that were supposedly helping him quit smoking. “Hell of a fuckin’ thing.”

“Nice guys, I thought.” Gabriel commented. “Not like your ray-ban wearing spook pendejos from those movies you love.”
“Yeah, reality’s always more boring.” Jimmy agreed. “Hey, don’t blow both your days off on that folder, okay? Go out, get drunk, get laid.”

“I was just going to watch NBA, man.”

“Come on, you can’t have had any action since your divorce, bro.” Jimmy insisted.

“Just because your balls need constant maintenance or they explode, doesn’t mean mine do.” Gabriel replied, smiling.

“Yeah, I know. Still not ready yet.” Jimmy gave up. “Enjoy your basketball, man.”

Gabriel lived only a few minutes’ drive from the precinct, in a nice but inexpensive apartment with a decent view of Downtown. Most days he didn’t even bother driving to work. Instead, he changed in the precinct locker room into his sweats, and jogged home, keeping his fitness up and working out the kinks and tensions of sitting at his desk for so many hours.

The exercise allowed his brain to freewheel, too. It was nice to get out of cop mode and just be Gabriel for a bit, but where Detective Arés was a cool and efficient professional, Gabriel was a worrier. The bombing, the CIA’s involvement, the casual brutality that had been inflicted on Terri Boone for digging exactly where he was digging now… If he’d bothered to drive in, he might even start checking his car for explosives.

As a result, he was in a strange mood when he got back to his apartment building—physically relaxed but mentally tense. He knew he was jumping at figurative shadows but he couldn’t forget that the first time he’d met Boone, she had just shot dead an intruder in her own apartment. An intruder who had very obviously been there to kill her.

And the lights were on in his. As was the TV—he could hear it.

This fact gave him several moments’ pause. He could see the glow under the door, and right now all his mind could spring to was that parking lot, and the carnage that had spread all over it.

He retrieved his gun from his bag and loaded it as slowly as he dared. He turned the key in the lock as quietly as he could, slipped inside, and ghosted along the hall carpet until he could poke his head gently around the corner and into the main room, ready to snap it back at the first hint of danger, convinced that his pounding heart would alert the intruder to his presence.

Somebody was sitting on his couch. His face was an unreadable skull mask in the television glow, and he definitely shouldn’t have been there. But there was no possibility that Gabriel could fail to recognise him.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV
Planet Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-ugunduvug
Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy, Dominion Core

“There was a pirate organisation that approached the Security Council some time ago. Their leader had come up with a… novel new idea.”

“Pirates? I wasn’t aware the Council was in the business of negotiating with murdering scum.”

“These ones…” Vedreg’s flanks rippled through many colours as he hunted for the correct word, underpinned by a constant theme of awkward yellow. “introduced us to a new concept. ‘Privateering,’ they call it.” he pronounced the English word very carefully: it fit awkwardly in the Guvnurag mouth.

“And what does that word translate as?”

“As they explained it, effectively, a Privateer accepts amnesty from one government for their crimes in return for confining their predations to the shipping of that government’s enemy.” he shuffled uncomfortably. “They also made it explicitly clear that they intended to allow any ship which simply surrendered and handed over their cargo to leave, alive and intact and that they would stamp out any pirate competition in the area.”

Meered’s flanks glowed like embers, aghast. “And the Council agreed to this?” she asked.

“The Council is headed more by practicalists than idealists.” Vedreg admitted. “They were promised a reduction in piracy affecting our own shipping in the region, and effective disruption of Alliance shipping which might divert Celzi ships from the war.” There was a sweep of colour up his flank—the equivalent of a dismissive, contemptuous sniff. “If memory serves, Cimbrean was the base of operations for these ‘Privateers’.”

“What an extraordinary idea. But however competent or unusual these pirates, they’re still pirates, and whoever stole the generator was no gutter criminal.” Meered scoffed.

“If memory serves…” Vedreg said, slowly. “The ringleader of these privateers is a human.”

Meered’s disbelief only served to increase the hue of her flanks. “Humans aren’t magical, Councillor Vedregnegnug.” she chastised.

“No, but they… may I show you something?”

“In support of your claim? Very well.”

Vedreg bowed his head and spread his arms—a gesture of thanks—and spoke to the office. “Room. Access my personal entertainment files. Folder “Earth”, search “London Marathon”.” he intoned. A chime indicated that the requested item had been found. “Display.”

They watched.

”(Twenty-seven miles)?!” Meered exclaimed, after only a few minutes.

“In (three hours) or less.” Vedreg added. Meered’s flanks turned white.

“That… could well explain the theft.” she said. “The sensors on the ground weren’t equipped to detect life forms.”

“It is to be hoped.” Vedreg said. “That this human’s loyalty to their species is less than their loyalty to the pirate band they have formed. I will request a status update. Hopefully this is just a case of pirates being pirates.”

Meered was clearly not hopeful. “And if it isn’t?”

“Then we had best start hoping that pessimist, Furfeg, is wrong.”

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV
San Diego, California, USA, Earth.

“Hey Dad.”

Gabriel relaxed. Fortunately, Adam Arés hadn’t looked in his father’s direction, and so didn’t notice him lower the gun and relax.

“Hey yourself.” Gabriel replied, stepping into the room and ruffling the scrawny teenager’s hair. “Wasn’t expecting you today, amigo.”

Adam pulled away from the hair-ruffle. “Mom’s being Mom again.” he said, which was all the explanation he needed to give. This wasn’t the first time Adam had caught a cab over here to get away from her, and almost certainly wouldn’t be the last. It was why he had his own key, and the Superintendent knew his face and to let him in from the time his mother had confiscated it.

“Okay. Did you call Mrs. Almodóvar?” Gabriel’s badge went a long way toward smoothing things over with DCFS, but it was still so much easier if their officer knew about these events when they happened, and heard them from Adam himself. He stuck the gun in the safe—the first thing he always did when he got home anyway, so fortunately there was nothing unusual there for Adam to notice.

Adam sighed. “Yes, Dad, I called Mrs. Almodóvar.” he confirmed, his voice full of all the weariness of a fifteen-year old who felt his competence was being question.

“Alright… woah.”

Adam had been watching a Game of Thrones rerun, and his ears went a brilliant pink as one of Emilia Clarke’s innumerable skin scenes filled the huge TV.

“Ah, shit, sorry Dad, I know it’s a bit… I mean, uh…” Adam stumbled.

“It’s cool, amigo. Just don’t jerk off on my couch or nothing.”

“Da-ad! Yuk!”

Gabriel laughed, and shucked off his running shoes, which he kicked into the corner. He stole a glance at the on-screen nudity again before groaning and stretching his way through to the kitchen where he grabbed a cold beer from the fridge.

“I can’t be bothered to cook tonight, you want pizza or chinese?” he called.

“Chinese please.”

Gabriel knew his son’s preference, and placed the order—hell, the people down at Dragon Chef probably knew their usual order by now—then slumped down on the couch, glad to be home.

“Wanna talk about it?” he asked, when the commercials came on.

“She treats me like an idiot.” Adam complained. Clearly he’d been busting to get it out. “I… there’s this girl at school…”

“Cool.”

“I asked Mom for… advice, you know? On how to ask her out? I don’t even know why she got mad, she just started calling me a little sissy, and…”

“She’s been drinking again, huh?”

“Yeah…” They watched the commercials for a while, before Adam wiped his eyes. “Fuck the courts, man.” he said, for about the thousandth time since the custody hearings.

Gabriel gave his boy a one-armed hug. “A couple more years, amigo. You’ll get through it.”

“Yeah. She probably wouldn’t let me date Ava anyway.” Adam groused.

“Ava? So that’s her name. You were hanging out with her by the gates when I picked you up last week, right?”

”…Yeah?”

“Shit, amigo, if you’re going to let your mom stop you from asking her out you’re a dumbass.” Gabriel said. “Go for it!”

“What if she says no?”

Gabriel suppressed a laugh. “Little man, I saw the way she was looking at you. No way is that gonna happen.”

“She was?” Adam looked stunned and delighted. “but… nah, she wasn’t. Was she?”

“Hey, I’m a cop. Reading people is my job. And here’s a pro tip for you, amigo: If a girl’s got all her weight on one foot like that, and is playing with her hair and biting her lip? She wants you.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“Google that shit, man.”

They sat in comfortable silence until the food arrived, though it was plain that Adam was no longer watching the screen. He only spoke again when they were eating at the table.

“So.. what, just ask her? Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“How? I mean, like, what do I say?”

“You like her?”

“Hell yeah I like her!” Adam exclaimed.

“Why? Is it just because she’s pretty?” She’d seemed more than that to Gabriel’s eye from a distant, but he wanted Adam to have his priorities straight.

“You think she’s pretty?” Adam asked.

“I’m older than you, amigo, not blind.” Gabriel chuckled. “Come on, d’you like her just because she’s pretty, or is she… clever, funny, what?”

”…Yeah. She is.”

“Cool. Lead with that. It’s not hard.”

“So, what do I say?” Adam persisted.

Gabriel shrugged. “Next time you see her, after you’ve said hello, if there’s like, an awkward pause or something, you just say “Hey… I really like you. You’re funny, you’re smart, you’re pretty, and I was hoping we could go out on a date”, something like that.”

Adam looked blank. “That’s it?” he asked.

“That’s it. It’s not rocket surgery, man.” Gabriel grabbed the last dumpling and devoured it. For once, his son was too lost in thought to complain.

“But what if she says no?” He repeated.

Gabriel rolled his eyes and smiled, remembering how short his own confidence had been at that age. “Okay compadre, what I’m about to tell you may sound at first like the bleakest and most depressing thing in the world, but I promise this is the secret to love, okay?”

“What secret?”

Gabriel leaned forward. “There is no such thing, as a perfect girl.” he said. “There’s no “the one” or your “soulmate”. I know you’re really into her—and just trust your old man, she’s into you too—but she’s only human. If she DOES say no, then that’s her loss, okay? It’s not the end of the world. There’s other girls out there, and it’ll hurt and be embarrassing at first, but you’re tough, you’ll get on with your life and a handsome devil like you? You’ll be fending the ladies off with a bat.”

“You’re right, that sounds kinda shitty.” Adam agreed, with a weak smile.

“Trust me, it’s the best thing. You’ve got to understand, little man, relationships don’t just happen magically because an angel came down and touched you both, okay? That only happens in movies and pop music. You have to put work and effort into your girl, and it all starts with remembering that if she says no then she’s an idiot, and if she says yes then she’s the luckiest girl in the world, okay?”

”…okay.”

“D’you have have a few date ideas lined up?”

“Uh… I dunno, a movie?”

“Bad idea, amigo. Movies are just a couple of hours sitting in the dark ignoring each other, that’s no kind of a date. You wanna go do something where you’re actually interacting. Something she likes, and if you like it too, so much the better.”

“Uh… she likes roller derby! She could teach me the rules while we watch?”

“Perfect!”

Gabriel finished his food. “Hey, can you clean this up? I’ma get your bedding out and hit the sack.”

“Sure, Dad…” Adam said. “And…thanks.”

“No problem.” Gabriel stood, ruffled his son’s hair again, and indicated the TV as he passed it. “Turn it off and go to sleep at midnight, and no jacking off on my couch.”

“Dad!”

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV
Planet Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-ugunduvug
Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy, Dominion Core

Once Vedreg had departed, and his shuttle had cleared docking procedures and shot away to superluminal speeds, bound for the Council Station, Secretary Meered did something that, had anybody witnessed it, would have struck them as strange.

She nodded off to sleep in her seat. A few seconds later, she woke, looking around as if thoroughly startled and dismayed.

Flanks rippling like an explosion in a paint factory, she hastily began to check her files, notes and appointments.

Then she stared at the page, wondering why she couldn’t read it. While that problem was occupying her attention, she idly wondered why her entire body was beginning to feel tingly and numb. She felt warm, though, and tired. Whatever it was she had been so…agitated up about could wait until… she yawned… until she’d had a nap…

Half an hour later, her aide’s frantic call to medical came much too late for Secretary Meered. The cause of death was recorded as cerebral infarction.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV
San Diego, California, USA, Earth

“Welcome back. How was the East coast?”

“Cold, wet and gray. “

Seventy-Two had made his position within the Hierarchy through exclusive use of biodrones. A signature technique was necessary—every Number needed a unique angle, something that made them more suitable for certain niches than were their fellows, and the biodrone angle had paid off beautifully in leading to the Earth assignment.

These human ones bothered him somewhat, though. Despite being entirely slaved to his will, they still retained an element of personality, and a tendency towards being talkative, or even garrulous.

Other Numbers may have seen this as a liability, but the humans seemed uniquely capable of spotting a fake in their midst. The first-generation biodrones, the ones that had been truly limited in faculties and personality, had provoked remarkably strong negative reactions among the few humans with whom they had interacted. The “uncanny valley” they called it—if it looked human but didn’t behave enough like one, then it stood out, which was the precise opposite of what a Biodrone was for. The successful newer models had much more mental flexibility, which wasn’t comfortable territory to be in.

That small hiccup aside, all it took to create a biodrone was one human and a little surgery which, thanks to their uniquely sturdy biology, the subject recovered from the operations far more swiftly—and was more likely to survive them—than any other sapient being that Seventy-Two had ever converted that way.. He would have to archive their DNA for future cloning programs.

Still. They weren’t cheap or easy to produce. Losing one to Boone’s ingenuity and paranoia had been painful, and no appropriate specimens for conversion had yet come his way. Being down to only two drones was making it harder and harder to keep pace with humanity’s developments.

It would be time to create a new one, soon.

The biodrone was behaving a little strangely, he noticed. It seemed to be drowsy. Even as he watched, it nodded off on its feet, waking up again after a second with a start.

“Are you malfunctioning?” he asked.

The drone smiled, a little peculiarly.

“Oh no,” it said, and there was a tone of voice there that didn’t belong. Something that was jarringly different to its established modes of behaviour. “I’m better than ever.”

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV

Today was, technically, the first of Gabriel’s two days off a week, but he’d never learned the secret to leaving his work at work, or at least not in the cases that really mattered.

After a breakfast of pancakes and a phone conversation with Mrs. Almodóvar, Adam had been granted leave to stay at Gabriel’s apartment for a few days. Given that it was a school day, however, Gabriel had the place to himself for several hours.

By the end of those hours, the table—and the wall around it—were covered in documents and photographs, with sharpied comments, observations, coloured lines, speculation and the fruits of his research and a few phone calls. None of it amounted to a breakthrough.

“Hey Dad! She said… woah.” Adam stopped mid-celebration when he caught sight of the vast spread of information that had sprawled all over the apartment.

“She said yes?” Gabriel finished.

“She did!” Adam looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. “Jeez, Dad, what’s all this?”

“Murder case.” Gabriel told him. Adam picked up a photo from the table—a still of Johnson’s face, from the security cam footage, mercifully not including the victim’s remains.

“This the suspect?” He asked.

“Give me that.” Gabriel snatched it back. “Come on man, you know this stuff’s confidential.”

“Sorry Dad. Seriously though, is that him?”

Gabriel relented. Despite his best efforts to persuade the boy towards a safer and more lucrative career, Adam seemed dead-set on following his old man into law enforcement. He had to admit, the kid had the brain for it. “That’s him.” he confirmed.

Adam glanced at the picture again. “Looks about as average-white-guy as they come.” he opined.

“Yep. Average height, brown hair, brown eyes, no distinguishing features. A face that can disappear in the crowd.” Gabriel agreed. <And into thin air> he added in the privacy of his own mind. The vanishing act Johnson had pulled mid-video was causing him more and more alarm the more he thought about it. Half his day had involved taking a crash course in spacetime distortion physics, and the possible applications of the same reality-folding technology that allowed Pandora and her sisters to fly to Jupiter and back. Some kind of reverse-stasis technology that massively accelerated the murderer’s personal time, allowing him to move so fast as to disappear between frames seemed the most likely explanation, but if he had something like that at his disposal…

Adam continued to stare at the picture, clearly committing it to memory. He had a good memory for faces alright, Gabriel had to give his son that. But Johnson’s was so… generic that unless the kid was memorizing every wrinkle and fleck of white in the beard—and there was no reason to assume that Johnson had retained his beard after a flagrant public murder caught on film—it was a hopeless cause.

“Come on man, she said yes, don’t depress yourself with my work.” Gabriel chastised him, and started to clear it all away. He really should try to relax when he was off-duty anyway. “You’ve got a date!”

“Yeah!” Adam seemed happier than Gabriel had seen him in a long while. “We’re going to see the Derby Dolls on Saturday!”

“Sounds like a good date.” Gabriel told him. “You got anything to wear for it?”

“Not really…” Adam admitted. Gabriel nodded and stood.

“Come on then.” he said. “Let’s hit the mall.”

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV

Mr. Johnson raised his hands and looked at them as if he had never seen them before, and flexed them, balled them into fists and rolled his shoulder. “Strong…” He commented. There was something… off about his intonation. It was hard to describe. Previously the drone had projected an air of competent, contended ready-for-anything-ness. Now it was speaking with an air of… wonder, maybe. Or revelation.

Seventy-Two affected a frown, even though the Corti body wasn’t really equipped for that expression. “What are you doing?” he demanded, impatiently.

The drone grinned. “Your puppet’s been hijacked, Seventy-Two.” he said.

“Hijacked? …Who are you?”.

The grin broadened. “Six.”

”…And you chose a biodrone based on a Deathworlder to host you?” The thought was repugnant. He may control them, but the thought of ever using one as a Host was appalling.

“It was the only available host. Having tried it, however, I wholly recommend it: you should occupy one of these yourself, get out of that cage you’ve put yourself in.” Six replied. “Next to the Guvnurag I was wearing just a few minutes ago, this feels… oh! Liberating.”

He bent over backwards, planted his hands on the floor and kicked up until he was inverted, wobbling slightly, ignoring the way his body’s tie and jacket dangled, undignified, in his face. “So strong!” he exulted.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the input and assistance of a single-digit.” Seventy-two said, speaking with as much tartness as he could muster “but I was under the impression that this is my operation.”

“Oh, it is. As far as the Numbers know, the operation on this planet is still being overseen by Seventy-Two. I am here…unofficially.”

“Unofficially?!” Seventy-Two spat the word.

“Officially so.”

If there was one thing a Corti body was well designed for, it was looking nonplussed. If there was one thing that Six seemed to be adept at (besides causing irritation) it was not deigning to notice nonplussed expressions. “Amazing. There are whole trees of autonomic and instinctive functionality in here. The poor things aren’t so much controlling their bodies as prompting it to do something it already knows how to do.”

A memory—a potential behavioural tic that might cause the higher-ranking Hierarch to become a little less obtuse, tickled Seventy-Two’s attention.

“Six… I would appreciate a clearer explanation of what you’re doing here, please.” he asked, politely.

“Certainly!” the mercurial Number flipped right-side up again and sat down, cross-legged. “You only had to ask. I am here because Earth has become priority one, and rather than break with decorum and insult your competence, Two felt that a more… subtle approach was required.”

“Hence you.” Seventy-Two concealed his opinion that there were exploding stars less subtle than Six behind an inflection of polite understanding.

“Supposedly. Why they felt I was appropriately subtle is beyond me..” Six replied, candidly. “Possibly they felt that throwing me at a potential disaster would be a good excuse to finally decompile my identity.”

“We’re not doing that badly down here.” Seventy-two protested.

“The humans outwitted Twenty-Four.” Six corrected him. “They’re flinging themselves into space as fast as they can get the infrastructure in place to do it. They have introduced the galaxy to whole new paradigms of combat.”

He leaned forward, hands dangling loose across his knees. “What we have here, my dear sibling, is a first-degree emergency, and I would have hoped that you would have had the wit to see it, even from down here in the thick of the fighting.”

”…They’re investigating me. Tenaciously, too.” Seventy-Two admitted. “They have government organisations on several tiers, all behaving like that damnably powerful immune system of theirs. They seem willing to believe what must sound utterly incredible to them, and they seem to be completely paranoid.”

“Paranoid?”

“They back up everything, store their data, spread it far and wide so that even if I kill the person who collected it, somebody else is able to continue their work. Silencing the investigator who betrayed us has only served to risk galvanising the investigation. I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

“No? In that case you’re lacking the knowledge of a fundamental component of their psychology, my friend.” Six stood. “And if you don’t know your enemy then failure is inevitable.”

He turned towards the door.

“Where are you going?” Seventy-two demanded. “There’s work to be done!”

“I’m going to know our enemy.” Six replied.

Seventy-Two gritted his teeth, and sent a communication to his last remaining biodrone. He was really going to need those replacements now.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV

“So, I’ve got a question.”

Gabriel glanced sideways at his son. “Shoot.”

“You said yesterday that you’re a cop, and how reading people is your job.”

“Yeah?”

“Can you teach me to do that?”

Gabriel laughed. “Why, so you can tell when a girl is interested in you?”

“Well… yeah!” Adam admitted, blushing. “But, it kinda seems like it’d be a cool thing to know anyway.”

Gabriel sighed internally. He was just furnishing the kid with more of the tools to grow up into a cop like his old man, he knew, but at the same time, knowing how to look at body language and movement was a useful skill for anybody. It could get a young man out of trouble if he could see trouble before it came gunning for him.

“Alright, let’s grab a snack and I’ll teach you a few things.” he said.

They selected coffee and donuts—prompting a predictable joke from Adam about those foodstuffs and Gabriel’s career—and settled in to a corner of the food court where they could see much of what was going on.

“Okay, so… body language.”

He looked around. The mall was fairly busy. Not heaving, but there was a fair density of humanity moving around. It was an excellent introduction. “How many people d’you think are here right now?”

Adam looked around then shrugged. “I dunno… a couple thousand?”

“Yeah, I’d say so.” Gabriel agreed. “How many d’you think are here looking to break the law?”

Adam thought about it then gave him a wide-eyed, head-shaking shrug.

“Damn near none of them.” Gabriel informed him. “Pretty much everybody here is just here to shop, buy stuff, go home, live their lives. Most people are decent human beings, okay? So what you’re looking out for is the handful who aren’t.”

“Okay. How?”

“Two things. The first part is profiling—what’s the crime that’s most likely to be committed where you are, and what type of person is most likely to commit it? That changes depending on where you are, and when. Here and now, the most likely crime is…?”

“Shoplifting.”

“Right! And that’s tricky because the profile for shoplifters is pretty vague. Men and women shoplift about equally, they do it on the spur of the moment… about the only thing you can look out for is groups of teenagers, kids about your age. Peer pressure makes them do stupid shit, you know?”

“Yeah…”

Gabriel guessed that his son knew a few kids at school who had admitted to, or even boasted about, the crime. There wasn’t much that could be done about it, and you had to let SOME stuff go or you’d never switch off.

“So you have to look out for the warning signs after the crime has been committed,” he continued, pretending not to have noticed the hesitation “and that means you have to look for anyone who’s moving strangely.”

“Like how?”

“You just have to… watch people. Get a feel for how they normally move in this environment. Are they relaxed, are they tense, are they bored, eager, happy? This is a shopping mall, so most of the people here are moving kinda slow, they’re looking around at the advertisements, they’re window-browsing. Yeah?”

Adam was looking around at the crowd, and nodded. “Okay, yeah.”

“Right. So now you’ve got an idea of how people should be moving around here, you can basically ignore all those people. They’re behaving how they should be, so they’re probably not up to anything. Look for the people who aren’t moving that way.”

Adam looked around then, pointed. “Him.”

“Yep. He’s walking fast, he’s not got any bags, he’s not looking around. So now you look at his face. What’s his expression?”

“He doesn’t really have one. I guess… bored?”

“Alright. No expression means he’s pretty comfortable, he’s not feeling tense or paranoid, or anything. So my guess is he knows exactly what he’s here for and he just wants to grab it and go and not waste time. He’s got better things to be doing. If I’m right then he’s not a problem.”

Adam frowned. “What if you’re wrong?” he asked

“Then I’m wrong. But like we said, round here the most likely crime is shoplifting, so it’s not like somebody could die if I fuck up. I’ve got a lot of people to look at so I have to trust my judgement. I can’t be suspicious of everyone just because I could be wrong.”

Adam nodded his understanding. “Okay, so you look at how they move, then at their expression. What next?”

“That’s about it.” Gabriel said. His son’s expression turned dubious. “No, seriously, check the movement, check the expression. You have to learn to see the crowd as a bunch of moving abstract shapes and pick out the motion that’s wrong. Too fast, too slow, too jerky, aimed in the wrong direction… once you’ve done that, you look at the face, the shoulders and feet, trying to figure out if they’re feeling comfortable or not. If they’re moving wrong but look comfortable, then you ignore them. If they’re looking uncomfortable… well, that could still be a mom whose kid’s trying to swim in the fountain, so that’s why you observe them for a bit, try to figure out what’s going on with them.”

“That’s all there is to it, then?” Adam asked. “Sounds…”

“Unreliable as hell?” Gabriel finished for him. Adam looked like he wanted to agree, so he nodded. “Yep. it’s really only good for spotting the guys who really stand out, but those are the ones you most want to spot, so it works. Getting better at it is just practice.”

Adam nodded distractedly and frowned at the crowd, clearly trying to practice what he’d just been told. Gabriel suppressed an amused snort and drained his coffee. “Anyway, you wanna get that shirt now?”

“Sure”.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 3d AV

Sights. Sounds. Smells. All so much more acute, all interlinking in fascinating ways. This was how a human viewed the world, a melange of sensory data all arriving at once, sending chemicals dancing and whirling through that intricate, dense neocortex. Six explored on foot, testing and analyzing the way his adopted body could just be aimed in a direction and set to travelling, how the very act of covering the distance one step at a time seemed to free and expand the mind.

Isolated as the core of his consciousness and sense of self were, running on the implants which riddled the alien body’s neural structure, he still felt it. Still felt the glow of endorphins even as the muscles of his new legs warmed and stretched: it was a surprisingly comfortable feeling, a kind of pleasant pain: the body revelled in motion even as that motion tested and taxed it.

There was so much to see. By day he wandered in the shade of the buildings of Downtown, occasionally venturing into the full glare of Sol’s ultraviolet-heavy radiance on the waterfront. He patiently explored the USS Midway museum, drank in the raw data of the antiquated vessel’s role and functionality, mentally noting to retain and use some of the innovative ideas that had gone into its construction. As dusk fell and the burning heat became a gentle ruddy warmness, he walked on the beach and indulged his hijacked flesh’s unaccountable instinct to remove its footwear.

It wasn’t like controlling the bodies of other lifeforms. Everything ran on instinct, everything was handled locally by independent systems that didn’t consult him at all, they just acted on a hair-trigger before finally bothering to inform him after the fact. He got some strange looks as he passed a series of females who wore practically nothing, lost in thought at the curious reaction they had—quite unbidden—inspired in his male body’s genitalia. Why should he have inherited human taboos and preferences?

As night fell, his feet carried him through Gaslamp, where he finally came to understand what the term “night-life” meant. Every shadow seemed to hum with some secret or another. Every single person he passed, even just as unconsidered blurs on the sidewalk, seemed to have a vital spark to them—they were going somewhere, they were doing things, for a reason.

His hijacked body’s instincts swung into gear—that group of males over there were large and boisterous, a potential threat: Avoid them. That alleyway was dark: Don’t go down it. That building over there was an oasis of warmth and light, from which issued smells and sounds that spoke to several parts of his body at once.

His stomach issued a strange noise, and he allowed his feet to carry him toward the bar and grill.

He was fortunate, he realised, to have done his research on how to pay for goods and services on this planet.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV “I was expecting you to have a hangover.” Seventy-Two commented.

“You have a low opinion of me.” Six replied. He’d sampled intoxication—he hadn’t cared for it. Possibly that was a product of the inherent disconnect between his sense of identity, cloistered away in the cerebral implants, and the rest of the brain, but the experience had been frustrating—a loss of both agility and sensory acuity, for no apparent gain. The effects had dissipated after a few hours, leaving him resolved to not do it again.

The tastes of the food he had sampled, however, were sharp and pleasant memories. He had eaten meat for the first time, sampling the flesh of once-animal life: unfamiliar textures had seduced his palate—rare steak, chicken caesar, frankfurter, cheese!

“So do you know our enemy yet?” Seventy-Two inquired, not bothering to conceal his disdain.

“More than I did.” Six allowed. “There are a few more things to see tonight before I begin my work.”

“And once you’ve learned it all? What then?”

“I have already learned that I cannot learn it all. This is just one city, a paltry million-and-a-half individuals. There is a whole planet out there filled by more than seven billion humans; I don’t have the time to sample everything on offer.”

He grinned again. “But I have learned a lot already. About how they think, about what drives them, about the way in which they experience the world. The weaknesses are revealing themselves.”

“And how do we exploit those weaknesses?”

“First, an experiment.”

“I see.” Seventy-two sounded dubious. “And what will this ‘experiment’ of yours entail?”

Six sat down. “I learned an expression of theirs last night. They say: ‘poking the hornet’s nest’.”

“I’m familiar with it. It’s an allegory for doing something very foolish.”

“All data points arrive from doing something ostensibly foolish.” Six replied. “We’ll need to sacrifice your last biodrone.”

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

Adam had followed up his Dad’s insight into how to crowd-watch with some Internet research of his own, and felt he was starting to get the hang of the skill. He’d also done some research on how to have a good first date. Arriving early at Skateworld allowed him to accomplish both.

After a few minutes, he got into a rhythm, watching people come and go not as people but as shapes, moving. He got a feel for HOW they were moving, where and why. It was a pleasant surprise to him when he noticed one shape start to move differently, turning towards him and picking up speed and bounce…

“Hey!”

Adam jolted out of his thoughts, but smiled warmly as Ava trotted up to him, beaming from ear to ear. He felt his face warm as she kissed him hello.

“This was a great idea, I was going to say we should watch a movie or something.” she enthused.

Adam laughed slightly. “My Dad told me that’d just be two hours of sitting in the dark ignoring each other.” he confessed. “I’d rather see you and talk to you.”

After he’d said it, the fear struck him that the line was corny and over-the-top, but Ava seemed to take it very well—she blushed and bounced happily in her shoes, then took his hand and led him towards the entrance.

Adam allowed himself to be led, secretly amazed at how well things were going. <maybe this isn’t so difficult after all…>

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

The Biodrone waited. The order would soon come.

In a lot of ways, it was still human. While it lacked anything resembling a sense of self-interest or an agenda of its own, it still had its emotional responses, and something which might be considered a personality.

It had, for lack of a better word, liked its counterparts. Both the one that was destroyed and the one which was now occupied by a Controller. It felt, to some limited degree, a sense of loss and grief over their destruction.

It felt similarly about its own imminent destruction. Had it been asked, it would have preferred not to do what it was about to do.

But it had not been asked. That was not its Role. It had been tasked, and it would do. And it would die.

But for now, it waited.

Most of it did not want to die. Part of it—the last imprisoned vestiges of this body’s former psyche—did. But even they did not want to escape into death’s clutches like this.

Not taking so many with them. Not murdering innocents.

But the biodrone waited. The order would soon come.

And it would do. And it would die.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

Ava had insisted that, because Adam had paid for the tickets, she would pay for the snacks and drinks, and in any case she needed the restroom, and had left him alone to guard their stuff and their seats while the pre-game was still going on. The teams were being announced in a flurry of girly-macho pseudonyms: “Kitty Crash”, “Victoria van Boom”, “EradiKate” and so on that he’d never remember anyway, so he fell back into playing his crowd-watching game.

That lady over there… worried for her kid standing on the rail. That guy over there… no, he was just after his cellphone. That lady over there was running, but… no, she just settled into her seat with a smile, sharing a lively greeting and a hug-and-double-cheek-kiss with her friend. That guy over there… was…

“Oh shit.” He swore.

Nobody else could be so… average, so bland. It was almost a defining trait in its own right. If he hadn’t been walking too slowly, looking around at the crowd rather than down at the players, if he hadn’t been jigging slowly as he moved, as if anticipating something, Adam’s eyes would have skipped straight over the guy. As it was, the anomalous movement and attitude drew his eye, and his memory did the rest.

He feverishly dug in his jeans pocket for his own phone, just as Ava returned.

“Okay, I’m…what’s up?” she asked, sensing his urgency.

“I recognised somebody.” Adam said, quietly.

“Anyone I know?” she asked, looking out over the crowd. Her own eyes skipped straight over the guy.

“He’s the suspect in a murder case Dad’s working!” he hissed. “Sit down!”

She did so, paling. Adam retrieved his phone and stood, managing to snap a great picture of John Doe’s face under the pretense of taking a selfie.

He sat again, and tapped furiously at the screen—“this guy @ derby!”—and forwarded it to his Dad’s number.

“What do we do?” Ava asked. “Do we call the cops, or…?”

“I just did.” Adam said. “I really hope I’m wrong.”

She took his hand, manicured fingers intertwining with his own. It made him feel a little better, a little less afraid.

He knew he wasn’t wrong.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

+<Impatience; Derision> I really don’t see what this accomplishes.+

Six was gaining increased control over his human body, and managed to avoid allowing a tic of irritation to cross his face. Not that he felt it would blow his cover, but ideally he would prefer to go completely unnoticed, rather than be remembered as the strange man in the crowd making faces for no apparent reason.

+<Weary tolerance> Seventy-Two, I have been a single-digit Number since before you were compiled. I have played my part in the cleansing of five deathworlds before this one. The only reason I’m not ordering you to shut up and stop repeating your doubt is because I hate standing on rank. I just ask—please—that you trust that I know what I’m doing.+

There was no reply for a few minutes, buying him the time to show his ticket, enter the venue, find his assigned seat and look around with interest at the gathered crowd, most of whom were holding up their phones and cameras, getting snapshots to bleat at each other about where they were and what they were doing.

He sat down when 72 intruded on his thoughts again. +<resignation; frustration> Very well. I trust your judgment. I just ask that you please share some of your reasoning with me.+

+<Satisfaction> You only had to ask.+

He paused to gather his thoughts, thinking how best to explain it to the much junior Number.

+<Mentoring> Despite our late alert to just how far along the humans were, we still established our presence on this planet sufficiently early that the usual strategy of engineering a large-scale exchange of nuclear armaments should have worked. There was no reason for it not to.+

+<Skeptical> If you say so.+

Six smiled. Two groups of human females had assembled on the open floor below, wearing coloured clothing to indicate their team, plus some light impact-resistant armour to protect their joints and head, and curious wheeled shoes. He wondered idly what the rules of the game were.

+<Assertive> I do say so. The failure of the strategy implies that there is some self-correcting element in the human psyche which compensates for the usual aggression of the deathworlder mindset. They are capable of being presented with an existential threat and choosing NOT to attack it, out of longer-term self interest.+

The teams set up—a huddle of eight players, four from each team, blocking the path of the two in the back wearing a starred cover on their helmets.

Seventy-Two still wasn’t persuaded. +<Dismissive> So they’re not stupid. You’ve not explained what that has to do with wasting my last biodrone on this suicide mission.+

+<Explanatory> Their behaviour in a small crisis may shed light on their probable reaction to a larger one. By observing the former, I intend to gain insight into possible avenues of attack which we can exploit to eradicate them.+

A whistle blew, and the two players with stars on their helmets launched themselves forward, battling to get past the players in front. It was all remarkably physical, the players forcing one another off-balance and restraining one another with force that would have crippled or killed most life forms. Even as he watched, one of the starred players fell and slid some way on her back, her helmeted skull bouncing against the hard polished concrete floor. It was a serious blow, but she bounced back to her feet and threw herself into the fray again as if it was routine.

+<defeat> I can’t find fault with your reasoning. I just hope this pays off with useful intelligence.+

+<confidence> It will.+

There was no reply. The crowd emitted a delighted noise as one of the starred players broke free and accelerated around the oval track before diving straight back into the scrum she had so recently escaped. This time, with speed on her side she skipped through the pack and out the far side, at one point teetering on one wheeled foot on the very precipice of the track. The other starred player broke loose and gave chase, prompting the first one to dodge three more of the other team before patting her flanks three times, prompting a whistle to sound.

Eight points were awarded, and Six leant forward, interested to figure out the rules of this bellicose game before it went extinct along with the species that invented it.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

Adam’s phone pinged after a tense two minutes.

The message from Dad read simply: “It’s him GTFO dont alert crowd: panic even more dngrs.”

Ava read the message, looked at his expression, and thank Christ, decided not to argue. She just stood with him and followed him out of the stands, down the stairs, and into the street, silent, pale and tense.

“What now?” Ava asked. “I mean, we just left all those people in there…”

“Dad said not to alarm them.” Adam said. “The cops’ll keep them safe.”

“I hope so.” she folded her arms low across her tummy, hunched and stressed. Adam didn’t even think twice—he drew her in for a hug.

He looked at his phone as it pinged again. The message just read: “Proud of you. Love you. Stay safe.”

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

Seventy-two would have truly preferred to keep his last drone intact, but Six’s superior rank—even if the older Number preferred not to rely on it, carried all the weight it needed to.

Still, it was good that the arrogant Hierarch had shut up for the time being. It allowed Seventy-Two time to think and prepare some contingencies that <em>might</em>—with luck—mean they got to keep the biodrone after all.

His hopes of that were dashed when Six’s impatient mental tones cut into his planning. +<query> What is the biodrone’s ETA?+

+<Report> It has arrived. Retrieving the weapon from the vehicle’s cargo compartment now.+

This was, technically, a small lie—the drone had been sitting in the car park for a few minutes awaiting the go signal while 72 desperately tried to work a survival scenario that would allow him to retain his last precious drone. Annoyed and resigned, he wrote the thing off. Six would just have to acquire the raw material to create the replacements himself, being the last remaining ambulatory part of the operation.

+<Satisfaction> Good. Remember to instruct it not to shoot into the section where I’m sitting.+

72 couldn’t resist ironically echoing Six’s own words back at him. <Patient request> +I just ask—please—that you trust that I know what I’m doing.+

This was met with silence.

One of his watcher programs flashed up possibly relevant activity. He had snuck the virus into the San Diego PD dispatch system years ago: it was in its own way a little bit sapient, and could creatively interpret the flow of data inside the law enforcement information networks, looking for relevant or useful information.

He allowed the information to be injected into his consciousness as he worked at getting the drone into the building undetected so that it could “poke the hornet’s nest” as Six had ordered.

“Dispatch, Eight-one-niner, I have a tipoff on a suspect wanted for multiple violent felonies. He’s at Skateworld, Linda Vista and Comstock, please advise.”

Disbelief was the only conceivable response. There was no possible way that Six’s biodrone could have been recognised, it was designed to be utterly anonymous. The things vanished in crowded areas. Its social stealth should have been perfect.

He ordered the armed Biodrone to abort its assault on the building, and listened.

“Eight-one-niner, Dispatch, is the sighting confirmed?”

“Dispatch, Eight-one-niner, positive ID, this guy’s wanted for multiple homicide and domestic terrorism, could be a mass shooting about to start over there, request special tactics.”

Special tactics. What, exactly, that meant was not known to Seventy-Two, but there was no point sending in the biodrone now—it would surely be intercepted and destroyed without accomplishing anything more than they already had.

In fact, now he thought about it, this was exactly the kind of response that Six had intended to elicit. That it was arriving before anything even started was… very troubling, but…

“Eight-one-niner, Dispatch, be advised, special tactics is enroute, creating talk group with their captain.”

For the first time since he had arrived on Earth, Seventy-Two understood the urge to swear, and spoke aloud: “Feces!”

He followed that declaration with an urgent transmission to Six. +<Alarm; disbelief> Armed response units will be converging on your location imminently. Abort.+

+<Incredulity> That’s impossible, nothing’s happened yet.+

+<Firm assertion> I’m listening to their communications. Abort.+

+<Reluctant acknowledgment> Aborting.+

+<firm> I’ve withdrawn the assault unit, too. I think we have all the information you need.+

+<Worried> I think you’re right…+

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

“Suspect’s a white male, late thirties to early forties, brown hair and full beard, wearing a charcoal suit and red tie.”

Gabriel gritted his teeth as Jimmy Rowan took a chance turning right at an intersection without properly stopping to check it. It earned a few honks, but it gained a few seconds, and didn’t need him to hit the siren. The closer they could get without making that noise, the better their hopes that “Johnson” would still be in place when they arrived.

The Special Tactics team was well ahead of him. Copy that. We’re going in plain clothes, tag him, tranq him, side room and search. Do it right and nobody needs to know.”

Gabriel keyed his radio again as a red light mercifully turned green just in time.

“Be warned, he’s suspect in a bombing on the East Coast, could be wearing a vest.” he advised.

“We’ve got bomb squad.” the SWAT captain reassured him. “ETA one minute“

Dispatch’s voice cut into the conversation again. “Responding units, be advised we have report on a possible second shooter, loitering in the car park. Caller says she saw him get a rifle out of the trunk.”

The SWAT captain’s reply was terse. “Copy, Dispatch.”

There was nothing for it but to let Jimmy drive, and to pray.

Please God let my son be safe…

He tapped the voice recognition on his phone, and shouted at it over the sound of his howling engine. “Call Agent Hamilton!” he instructed.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

Six’s escape had been planned down to the finest detail on the assumption that nobody could spot him if he was part of a mob of panicked civilians fleeing a massacre.

He wasn’t prepared to just… leave, to abort the mission. That wasn’t a scenario that had been deemed possible.

+<Anxiety; stress> HOW?! Can they predict the future or something?+ he demanded over the thought-link.

+<reassuring; tense> Don’t be ridiculous.+

+<Gnawing fear> But they have a word for it! “Clairvoyance”! Why would they have a word for something like that if they couldn’t do it?+

+<Firm command> You are panicking. Just get out of there and we will determine how this is possible once you are safe.+

People were bustling this way and that: he flinched nervously away from them, kept his face bowed, tried to escape unseen. He brushed past a muscular male in a jacket and hat, ignoring off the man’s “watch it, buddy” as he turned his face away and walked as fast as he dared towards the exit.

Nobody challenged him as he stepped outside and breathed a sigh of relief. Out on the street, the anonymity of his biodrone body would protect him.

Something dense, hard, and fleshy hit him from the side—he didn’t hear it coming, there was no flash of movement in his peripheral vision. There was just the pain of his face against the asphalt, the discomfort of his limbs being restrained, a piercing pain as something violated his assumed skin, and then the world melted away into dreams and timeless nonsense.

In the dark, the component modules of his personality were left to scream and rage within the separate prisons of the implants that sustained them.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

The situation was changing faster than Seventy-Two could cope. There was too much to juggle, too many unknown factors. Six’s line had gone dark, threats were everywhere, none of them properly identified.

The biodrone’s orders were to retreat, and so it retreated along the preplanned route. It did not mind the conflicting orders, it simply obeyed the most recent one.

There were two armed threats in the way. Its orders included self-preservation and evading capture. It opened fire.

Return fire cut it down.

For only the second time in his life, Seventy-Two swore.

Date Point 3y 8m 2w 4d AV

“Adam!”

“Dad!”

Gabriel Arés barrelled into his son at speed and drew him into a bear-hug.

“What’s going on?” Adam asked.

“SWAT’s inside, they’re going for a low-profile capture.” Gabriel replied. “But there’s a second gunman about the place we need to get-”

There was a thumping sound, and something hot and wet splattered Adam’s face.

Gabriel frowned at him. “Your face…?”

There were gunshots. Ava started screaming.

Jimmy lowered his gun. “Holy fuck did you see-” he began, then his expression changed as Gabriel fell to the ground.

“Shit! Dispatch, need an ambulance west side of Skateworld ASAP! Officer down, officer down!”

Chapter 15: Forever Changed

Date point: ??? AV

Classified Facility, Earth

There was a change in the texture of nothingness, a return of some of the functionality of his body. Six wasted no time in extending his sense of self outwards from its cloistered life inside the implants, and into the meat he was wearing.

It was, surprisingly, not too bad. His mouth was dry, and his head ached a little, but he awoke to find himself lying—clean, clothed and dignified—on a bed.

It wasn’t exactly a comfortable bed, but nor was it torturously hard. It was just a simple mattress, with a pillow-shaped raised bit at one end in lieu of an actual pillow, and a blanket. It was the sole feature of a plain grey room, other than a door which looked, if anything, even more solid than the walls around it, and a sturdy yellowish light panel in the ceiling. There wasn’t even a window.

He sat up, enjoying the feeling of his limbs moving again, appreciating the way they reported none of the discomfort he had felt when last conscious and pinned face-down to the San Diego sidewalk.

His link to 72 was dead. The micro-wormhole connecting him to the Hierarchy had, somehow, closed itself. Wherever he was, it was at the very bottom of a communications black hole.

No matter. Unexpected complications or not, the mission remained the same: gather information. Something would, presumably, be happening soon. He would record it, he would remember it, he would find a means of escape, and rather than being a disaster, his hive-poking would turn out to be a triumph.

For now, he sat, and waited.

He didn’t need to wait long. Though there were no obvious sensors or cameras in the cell, pretty soon there was a sliding sound—a panel had opened about eye level on his door. It shut immediately afterwards, and was followed by a second, larger hatch at about waist height, through which was thrust a tray.

The smell wafting off it immediately reminded him that he was hungry. Unbidden, his stomach emitted that peculiar growling sound again, and his mouth went into overdrive, salivary glands anticipating the arrival of food.

It turned out to be quite bland fare next to his last meal of just a few days ago. Some white substance, like a dry… gel, almost, or paste. Its taste was pleasant but simple. The chunky brown-white fluid in a separate compartment went well with it, and also with the brownish crumbly item. There was certainly nothing to complain about there, but it wasn’t a patch on the steak and burgers he had so recently eaten.

But then again, what did he expect as a prisoner? In truth, he would have expected far worse than this. A comfortable bed in a clean, dry and warm cell? A filling hot meal and a tall container of cold water? It was a conundrum.

He was still puzzling over this peculiarity when there was a banging on the door, which opened. Three humans stood without, holding blunt black weapons.

Ah. THIS was more like it. A beating. This was closer to what he had expected.

The human in the middle spoke to him. “Detainee, please face the far wall.” He instructed. “Crouch on your knees, place your hands on your head and interlock your fingers.”

“And if I don’t?” Six challenged. He could handle a beating. This… nice treatment was getting to him.

“Detainee, please comply. We will be forceful if we must.”

There was that word again. “Please”. It seemed so strange to have the armed guards address him politely and respectfully, even if they were being impersonal.

He glanced at the far wall, wondering if he should just comply and see what awaited him if he did. After all, why go through all that pain unnecessarily?

The guard spoke again. “Detainee, this is your final warning. Your compliance is mandatory for everyone’s safety, including yours.”

So. No beating. They’d just restrain him and… what, take him somewhere? Either way, there was no point in suffering the inconvenience.

“Fine. I comply.” he said, turning to the wall and kneeling. The guards stepped into the room.

“Hands on your head and fingers interlaced please, detainee.”

Six obeyed.

There was an efficient bustle of movement. His hands and feet were bound with metal, though from the looseness at the ankles he would be able to shuffle a walk. Something dark went over his eyes, something soft over his ears. His world became a purely tactile one, full of no sensation but the hard floor under his knees, the weight on his limbs. Strong hands lifted him to his feet, and he could sense—he wasn’t sure how, but his body reported certainty of the fact—that two of the guards moved into position near him, guiding him with physical contact, pushing him forwards just enough to get the message across that he should be walking. As predicted, he couldn’t hit any kind of a stride, but he was able to walk after a shuffling, slow fashion.

Six tried to judge the route as they left the cell, but quickly gave up. There were so many turns and he was spun around a few times at some points, completely throwing any attempt to track where he was or how far he had gone. For all he knew they could have walked past his cell door five times before he heard—faintly, through the stuff on his head—the sound of a door.

A chair was bumped gently against the back of his knees, and those same hands that had guided him for the last few minutes helped him sit down. There were a few tugging sensations, and sound and light returned in a rush, making him blink and grimace.

“Hello.”

The greeter was seated opposite him, smiling faintly as the handlers filed out of the room. It wasn’t a large room—in fact it was just the two chairs, a desk, and a conspicuous camera mounted on the ceiling. The only features on the desk where a small laptop, turned towards the human so that Six couldn’t see the screen, and a slim paper dossier and pen.

“My name’s Stephen, I’ve been assigned to your case.” the man opposite him continued. “My goal here is to learn as much as I can about you and your associates, but before we begin…Have you been fed well? Are you comfortable enough?”

This was not, Six thought, how an interrogation should go.

Date Point 3y 8m 3w AV

Something was very wrong in the life of Adam Arés.

He’d never realised before just how small his Dad was. In fact, Adam had stood taller than his old man for a couple of years, but he’d always seemed large to Adam.

Now, wrapped up in hospital gown and blankets and violating tubes as he was, that illusion was shattered. Gabriel was a small man, but not a frail man. Not usually. Right now, though…

That alone felt like a crippling loss, and he thanked Jesus Christ and all the angels that it was the only loss he’d endured. Gabriel was, miraculously, very much still alive, and according to the doctors recovering nice and strong. The bullet had entered in the small of the back, bounced off a vertebra, obliterated a kidney and exited through the flank, leaving behind bruising of the lumbar spinal cord and a badly perforated bowel but—crucially—it had missed the renal artery. By which small grace, Gabriel’s life had been saved.

They hadn’t let him stay. He hadn’t been there when Gabriel had first woken up. He hadn’t even been able to visit until after a shouting match with his Mom and a heated phone call with Mrs. Almodóvar.

But he’d finally been able to visit, and now…

Gabriel shifted, then woke. He blinked at his son, confused for a second, and then smiled. “Hey, Amigo.”

Adam gave up on trying to be manly. He threw himself forward and felt Gabriel bring his free arm—the one without an IV drip in—up and around to hug him, albeit with a grunt of pain.

“Sorry…” Adam muttered.

“It’s okay.”

“Jesus Christ, Dad, I thought…” Adam couldn’t even say it, it just made the tears hurt more as they forced themselves out. “I thought…”

“I know. I’m sorry little man, I dropped the ball. I should have been keeping an eye out.”

A laugh forced its way out between the sobs. “Yeah, you’d better be!”

There was a minute’s silence, and then Adam pulled away, wiping his eyes. “Shit, Dad, please don’t ever do that to me again.”

Gabriel smiled, but sobered. “From what the doctors are telling me, I might be taking early retirement.” he said. “Between the kidney and my spine…”

Adam’s eyes widened. “You’re gonna be able to walk aren’t you?”

“Four out of five.” Gabriel promised. “Or so Doctor Boylan says. I heard it’s all about willpower, so I’ll be damned if I’m gonna be in a wheelchair. But pretty sure I’m never passing physical again so…” he shrugged. “Guess that was my career. It’s okay, I’ve got plenty saved up and invested.”

“You love your job, though.” Adam said.

“Yeah. But it’s just a job, Amigo. There’s more important things.”

Gabriel ruffled his son’s hair, then sat back. “Shit, I get tired quick.” he complained.

“It’s okay. I… Ava and I are having another go at dating tonight, I should get ready.”

Gabriel smiled. “Good for you, man…” he said, closing his eyes.

“Yeah. Hopefully it’ll go better this time.”

Gabriel chuckled, then yawned. “Yeah. Pretty sure dates aren’t s’posed to have… shooting…” he mumbled.

Adam let him fall asleep, then let himself out.

Date point: ??? AV

Classified Facility, Earth

“Um… yes. Thank you, I’m quite comfortable.” Six admitted. It was true, in fact: the seat was cushioned and ergonomic, and he felt perfectly fine sitting upon it.

“Good to know.” Stephen replied. “So… I’m going to start this interview now. Could you please tell me your name?”

“Mr. Johnson.” Six replied, promptly. That particular feature of the drone’s cover was hardwired into the same implants that now hosted his personality.

Stephen nodded. “I was hoping for your full name.” he said softly, drumming his fingers on the table. The combination of the drumming and Stephen’s mild tones did something very strange to Six—the sounds were actually pleasant, in a way that he had never encountered before. He shook it off and focused on the task at hand. This was still an interrogation, however alien it might be, and Six had five hundred thousand years of experience to draw on to help him. A human who wasn’t even an infant relative to that lifetime wasn’t going to get the better of him just by being nice.

“I don’t know your full name.” he pointed out.

“True. I’m Moore, Stephen Moore.”

“Thank you.” Six said, but didn’t reveal his cover’s first name, although this was in large part due to the cover not having been assigned a fixed first name. He remained silent as he rifled through the biodrone’s past mission history in search of the most recently used first name.

“Okay, if you don’t feel like sharing yet, that’s fine.” Stephen said. He tapped on the keyboard of the laptop in front of him, and the gentle tapping, clicking noises the keys made as they were depressed again elicited that same strange pleasantness in Six’s head. It felt… relaxing, warm, comfortable.

He immediately stiffened. What if he was under the influence of some kind of drug? Humans were particularly susceptible to hallucinogens and similar substances, perhaps that meal had been full of some kind of compound that would open him up to speaking the truth.

The stiffening attracted Stephen’s attention. “Is everything alright?” he asked.

“What was in that food I ate?” Six demanded.

“Uhmmm.. mashed potato, biscuits and gravy, peas and carrots.” Stephen replied, after checking his notes. “Why?”

Six was an inexpert reader of human expressions and body language, even with the aid of the specialist subroutines that lurked deep inside any translator implant, but there was no mistaking the honest curiosity in his interrogator’s reaction. It implied that either the food had not been drugged, or—less likely—that Stephen did not know about it.

Perhaps the sensation was just another symptom of human strangeness, one to which he had not hitherto been exposed. He didn’t know. For now, it was safest to withhold his suspicions rather than voice them and out himself as nonhuman. If the reaction was perfectly normal and he commented on it as if it weren’t, then he would have blundered.

“I’m…” he thought how best to make an excuse. “…I was expecting something less pleasant.”

Stephen nodded. “I understand. But we’re professionals here, we don’t do that kind of thing. You have my solemn promise that you’re perfectly safe.”

“That seems… counter-intuitive.” Six told him.

“Perhaps. We’re interested in information, and a peaceful resolution. That’s the first and most important priority. As for you, your person and rights are protected by…” here, Stephen paused and thought for a second, “Oh, a whole mess of laws, which we’re not interested in breaking. It’s better for everyone that they remain unbroken.”

“How noble.” Six scoffed. “Or maybe you’re just trying to get me to relax so you can catch me off-guard.”

Stephen inclined his head. “Is that what you’d do?” he asked.

Six didn’t answer, and after a few seconds Stephen shrugged. He typed something on the laptop in front of him, letting the silence slide.

“Shall we move on to the actual questions?” he asked. “What’s your name again?”

“Mr.” Six emphasised the word “Johnson.”

“Still no first name?”

“No.”

“Not, for instance, Edward? That’s the name you used on your flights to and from New York.”

Unbidden, a detail from the biodrone’s most recent mission surfaced. Yes. Edward.

”…Edward Johnson.”

“Thank you.” Stephen tapped on his laptop again. “But is that your real name?”

Six sneered at him “Of course it is.”

Stephen gave an uncomfortable little grimace. “So, why did you rent a car under the name Paul Johnson a few weeks prior? Why is the name on your apartment’s lease Mr. Richard Johnson?”

He smiled. “Most people don’t change their name as often as they change their jeans.”

They sat in silence for a minute, with Stephen just staring at him, giving Six time to think. There was, he realised, simply no way to maintain the facade of being Mr. Johnson. The damnable drone’s recall was too disconnected from his control, the details of its cover too vague, too hard to retrieve on short notice. A change of tack was in order. He would stick to what he himself knew, without relying on the drone.

“Call me… Six.” he said, finally. It wasn’t like the simple number would reveal anything.

“Six. Fair enough. Thank you.”

Six only stared at him, awaiting the next question.

“Okay, Six… you’re not human, are you?”

Date Point: 3y 8m 3w AV

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada.

♫♪There’s just an illusion of something different / the very reason they keep telling you something’s missing / but whatever it is you won’t get from…♪♫

“Y-hello?”

“Jenkins, it’s Tremblay.”

Kevin yawned and sat up. “Morning, General.” He squinted at the glowing numbers in the dark. “Dude, it’s like oh-five-thirty.”

“Yeah, well, ET intel consultant’s a job that puts you permanently on call, eh? I’ve got some fine gentlemen from down south want a word with you, AND a priority message from the colony. Grab some of that wonder coffee you make and get up here.”

The advice to make himself a coffee was sensible on two levels: even if he hadn’t needed to drum up some alertness and drive away the effects of inadequate sleep, it was five-thirty in a winter’s morning in British Columbia. Next to his native Austin, he may as well be above the arctic circle, and three years hadn’t yet served to acclimatize him to the cold. The little disposable cup of triple-strength Mocha served to keep his fingers warm as he grumbled a path through the snow.

A helicopter added to his misery as it came in low overhead while he was passing the security checks to get into the base’s command building, kicking up a blizzard that even made the Quebecois guard flinch inside his greatcoat. Getting inside the heated complex of offices and briefing rooms was heaven.

He knew the way to Tremblay’s office by heart, but as ever there was an escort. Even three years as a civilian contractor and consultant didn’t buy the freedom to walk the base unescorted.

Fortunately, the guard was known to him, and they swapped some small-talk on the way up.

Tremblay’s office was verging on being crowded, occupied as it was by the man himself—looking, Kevin was pleased to note, just as groggy and dishevelled as he felt—plus another CA general, this one with the little crown above his crossed sabers that indicated a Lieutenant-general, superior to Tremblay’s own rank of Brigadier-General, and four men in suits.

“Who’s this then?” the senior officer asked as he entered. He looked disgustingly alert and well-groomed.

“Major-General Paul Rutherford—Kevin Jenkins.” Tremblay introduced. “Our ET intel consultant.”

“I know you!” Rutherford exclaimed. “You were the one in that interview that got all the ETs so shit-scared way back.”

Kevin grimaced and nodded. “Yeah, that was me.”

“You said some rather nasty things about your own species there, Jenkins.” Rutherford pressed, earning him Kevin’s best cool stare. It lasted for several seconds.

“When I said those things, I meant every word.” he said. “Still do, too. And from the looks of things, history has proven me goddamn well right.”

Rutherford snorted, and looked at Tremblay. “You were right Martin, he’s a dick.” he said.

Tremblay’s glance shot around the room as Kevin raised an eyebrow at him, and he cleared his throat. “Commander Higgins and Group Captain Temba here are with MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service.” he said. “Agents Hamilton and Williams here are CIA, and Lieutenant Leclerc behind you is with our own CSIS.”

Jenkins turned around. Leclerc was a tiny woman whose feet weren’t even touching the floor as she sat behind the door, watching and listening. She gave him a faint smile.

“I assume you have some ET intel you want me to consult on?” He asked, settling in the last remaining seat after dragging it away from Tremblay’s desk and turning it around so he could straddle it.

“Before we begin, I want to make it clear that this meeting is classified and its content is Need-To-Know only, under all the relevant laws of, and treaties between, our respective governments. If you don’t accept that, then get out.” Rutherford said. He fixed Kevin with an especially challenging glare, and seemed only grudgingly satisfied when Kevin nodded his understanding and acceptance. This was far from being the first classified meeting he’d attended. “…Martin?

Tremblay just extended an open-palmed hand, inviting the CIA agents to speak first. Williams stood, and the lights dimmed as she turned on the projector.

“Five days ago we apprehended this man in San Diego.” She said. The slide showed a bearded, brown-haired man of indeterminate age and nondescript features. “An accomplice—” the slide was of somebody who looked effectively identical “—was gunned down after badly wounding San Diego PD homicide detective Gabriel Arés.”

“Arés? Shit!” Kevin ignored the disapproving looks his interruption garnered. “Is he okay?”

“He’s recovering in hospital. The doctors give him a good prognosis.” Williams assured him. “May I continue?”

She cleared her throat. “At present, we’re holding John Doe here in a stasis box while he’s moved to a secure holding facility for interrogation. The good thing about that is that we’ve got plenty of time to get our intel together. At this point, however, The Company considers it extremely likely that he’s a member of an extraterrestrial organisation known as “The Hierarchy”, with unknown but apparently hostile motives towards Earth and the whole human race.”

The lights came back up. Rutherford took over. “The purpose of this meeting is to compare notes and to furnish the CIA with everything they might need to aid the interrogation. Mr. Jenkins will reiterate everything that he has learned about the Hierarchy.”

“And the Brits?” Kevin asked, looking at them.

Temba cleared his throat. “As a British Overseas Territory, the settlement of Folctha on the planet Cimbrean reports any intelligence or developments directly to us, and classified.”

Higgins elaborated. “The most recent of that information appears to be somewhat relevant.”

“Let’s hear it.” Jenkins challenged.

“We’d prefer to hear from you first, Mr. Jenkins.” Higgins said, softly.

“Hear what, exactly?” He asked.

Hamilton leaned forward. “Everything.”

Date Point: ??? AV

Classified Facility, Earth.

“Well, dropping the nonhuman bombshell early seems to have paid off. Pay up.”

One of the team—there were eight of them total in the room for today—rolled his eyes and dug out a fifty dollar note, which he handed over. The bet didn’t really mean anything: that particular note had been changing hands from bet to bet for so long that nobody could remembers whose wallet (or wager) had originally produced it. “Interesting session.” he commented, as ‘Stephen’ entered the room.

Stephen wasn’t his real name—that was just the booth persona, a tool to give the detainee the convincing illusion of forming real trust and a relationship with a real person, while hopefully shielding the interrogator from getting too close. It was a tough line to tread, though—any hint of insincerity could set back the interrogation a long way. It was a damn tough job.

“How’re we doing?” He asked, grabbing a cola and sandwich from the little desktop fridge in the corner.

“Plenty of data points. He seems to respond well to politeness, and he changed tack nicely when you caught him in the lie about his name. And he definitely had a moment of panic when you dropped the “not human” bomb on him.”

“I saw it.” ‘Stephen’ agreed. “He telegraphs a lot—I was expecting an alien infiltrator to be more… stone-faced.”

“We’ve still not really established that he’s actually an ET.”

There was a gentle throat-clearing from the team’s psychologist. She was the sort of person who spoke only rarely, but commanded total attention when she did. “He pegs almost maximum on the Hypochondriasis and Psychopathic Deviate scales.” She commented, referring to something on her tablet computer. “We haven’t seen enough to rate him otherwise yet, but already, he’s a long way from ‘normal’.”

“Good start, then. What would you like for the next session?”

“Hmm…” She conferred with her assistant for a second, ending in a mutual nodding. “Schizophrenia and/or Hypomania, please?”

“Makes sense…” There was a general taking of notes.

“Lots of interesting tics. Especially that thing when I drummed my fingers.” ‘Stephen’ commented.

“That looked like ASMR to me.” the assistant psychologist chimed in.

The facility commander frowned. “ASMR?”

“Eh, the acronym’s pure pseudoscience.” said one of the team. “but the phenomenon itself is… kind of a pleasant warm fuzzy feeling in the head in response to certain stimuli.”

“What stimuli?”

“Oh… gentle tapping and scratching, soft speech, personal attention, that kind of thing.”

“You sure that’s a real thing?”

“I get it myself.” admitted the psych assistant.

The one who had explained the phenomenon nodded. “Same.”

“Sounds like it could be a useful reward. Easy to control in the booth.” added the second ‘gator.

“We’ll try it.” ‘Stephen’ agreed. “I’ll do some research ahead of tomorrow’s session.”

The lead interrogator rubbed his chin. “What are you thinking of going with? If anything?”

“Still probing for now. I think ego’s going to play a big role going forward, but as for up or down… I dunno.”

“We’ve got more material for ego-down.”

“True, but we should save that.” the lead ‘gator said. “For now, I think we keep it slow. Direct questions, pounce on any lies we spot, build the relationship and get a better picture.”

“Yeah, it’s still early days.” agreed the second ‘gator.

“Okay. We happy with that?” There was general agreement. “Okay. We’ll call it there, start working on the next session’s questions in the morning. We’ve had a long day people, good work.”

Date Point: 3y 8m 3w AV

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada

“During my travels, I ran into the idea of the Hierarchy a few times, always in the same way that we’d talk about… you know, the Illuminati, or Area 51, or… fucking lizard people from Venus, or whatever. You know, a legend, a myth, a… conspiracy theory. Nobody took it seriously.”

They did the unnerving thing of listening to him and NOT asking any questions.

“Anyway. I met Terri Boone on V-day. She was a P.I., and her client had employed her to tour the country looking for real abductees. Not the idiot anal probe mothership motherfuckers: the real deal, like me.”

“She was literally in my bar when the Hunters hit Rogers Arena. Everyone’s flipping their shit over the monsters on TV, and I was grinning like a madman because, you know, I knew what was going to happen next. Been there, done that, worn the blood spatter. I took a group that big damn near solo, just a Rickyticky with a broken arm called Kirk for backup.”

“This is the same Kirk who flies for the GRA now? The one who supplies Cimbrean?” asked Temba.

“Same guy, yeah. So anyway, after that I went along with Terri on her job. I had a load of money saved up and nothing to spend it on, so I thought ‘why not?’ and this… plan, just formed. About getting all the abductees to chip in their experience in this big scrapbook of sketches and personal accounts. We got news of this base being set up and we just… bounced up here, from abductee to abductee, collecting life stories along the way.”

“The Hierarchy was mentioned a few times in there too. We just stuck it in the ‘weird shit’ section. We figured it was, like, ET pop culture, you know? Anyway, that scrapbook was pretty much turned wholesale into the EBM.” he continued, referring to the Extraterrestrial Briefing Manual that had gone out from Scotch Creek to Toronto, from there to world governments, and from a leak in one of them onto the Internet in short order. “Most of the convoy gave their interviews, gave up their last little bits of intel, most of them went home. I stayed here.”

“Terri left before we even got up here, though. Think we were in… Colorado, maybe? She got a phone call, and just took off. I didn’t hear from her again until about, uh… eight or nine months ago, when she just showed up at my bar here on base. She said she was betraying her employer’s trust, handed over a USB stick full of the names of people who’re probably still off Earth right now, and a letter which she promised me not to open until I knew it needed opening.”

“That was the login and password for the online drive.” Hamilton said.

“Yeah. I think she must have known she was messing with some really dangerous people, and was going to get maybe killed, you know? She… we had… fun, you know? Which, I didn’t complain at the time, but I didn’t think she’d liked me that much before, so I guess she was… trying to squeeze as much out of life while she could.”

“Focus please, Kevin.” Tremblay reminded him.

“Right, sorry. Uhm… Anyway, last I saw of her, she left for San Diego, and the next I ever heard about her was Arés calling me a couple months ago to let me know she’d been killed, and question me about the murder.”

They listened, and he kept talking to fill the silence.

“I went to the funeral. Had a talk with Arés, he said there wasn’t much he could do to follow up on some of the leads on that cloud drive. Jurisdiction and all that bullshit, you know? But he did let me know the name of this guy Ravi Singh in New Jersey.”

“His name wasn’t Singh.” Williams said.

“I know. But, that’s how I knew him. He said he was this… nuclear disaster, fallout specialist kinda guy for the Indian nuke program. I’ll spare you the full story—I recorded it though, Tremblay’s got the recording—but the TL;DR version is that he visited… think he said eighteen planets, all class ten or higher, Deathworlds like Earth, and they all had the remnants of civilization on them.”

“Now, we’re supposed to be unique, right? The only Deathworlders in the galaxy? But here there’s eighteen ten-plus planets full of cities, all nuked to shit and gone. Apparently the Corti who took him felt that was really good evidence to support the existence of the Hierarchy. Guess it was on the money, because their ship got boarded, the Corti and the Ukrainian that they’d taken alongside Singh got iced, and he only escaped because he’s smart and paranoid and learned their language. Got back to Earth, went dark in New Jersey and stayed there. I don’t know how Terri found him.”

He shrugged. “He could probably tell you better what the Hierarchy’s all about than I could.” he confessed.

“They bombed his apartment building a couple of days after you visited.” Williams revealed. “Collapsed half of it. Five dead, including ‘Singh’ himself.”

Jenkins just closed his eyes and grimaced.

“Alright. You want my opinion? What I think the facts mean?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“I think the Hierarchy keep the conspiracy theory going because it’s… what’s that term? Plausible deniability. I think they’re real, and I think they wipe out deathworld civilizations.”

“Do you have any idea why they might do that?” Higgins asked.

“Fear! I mean, look at how much the others are shitting themselves over us.” Kevin replied. “Shoving up a forcefield, telling their ships and stations to throw us to the wolves…While I was up there I got moved on as often because they were shit-scared of me as for vagrancy. One little show of some supernatural feat like picking up a forty-pound crate in point seven Gs—you know, nothing to us, but to them it’s like “he’s an unstoppable monster, get him off the station!”. You know, I heard one of us got involved in the Dom-All war like, thirteen years ago? That stupid motherfucker’s the reason every station in the sky has a locker full of nervejam grenades nowadays. Even if the, like, general public didn’t know about us before my dumb ass got on the news mouthing off about religion? The authorities sure as shit did, and they armed their security guys accordingly. They’re fucking afraid of us, man.”

“To the point of genociding… how many planets?”

“Fuck if I know. But… yeah. See threat: destroy threat. That’s how they’re thinking, most likely.”

“How are we a threat to them?” Rutherford asked.

Kevin half-laughed the word “Bro!”, shaking his head. “We’re the end of them. We’re the end of the way things used to be. Once we’re out there—like, really out there, not dipping our toe in the kiddy end like we’re doing right now? We. Will. Eat. Them. Alive. Because we can’t not, alright? Shit’s gonna get Darwinian out there, and we’ve got a four point five billion year head start over every single one of those poor dumb assholes.”

He sipped his coffee and, finding it cold, set it down next to him in disgust. “The Hierarchy are just the only ones smart enough to know it. And they’re the ones doing the sensible fucking thing and wiping out threats before they become a threat.”

Higgins frowned. “You make it sound almost as if you admire them for that.” he said.

Kevin shrugged. “How hard would you fight, if defeat meant the world became a place where everything you loved and lived for could no longer exist?” he asked.

“Do you mean to say you think they should succeed?” Higgins inquired.

“Hell the fuck no! I’ve been out there man, it’s a crapsack! If it’s not violently insane, it’s corrupt and callous, and if it’s not corrupt and callous it’s dumb as a stump! And that’s the status quo the Hierarchy would kill us all to protect! Things need shaking up out there! That’s the only way the galaxy’s going to become a better place, is if we head out there and start banging heads together. Gently, so they don’t burst.”

“How Texan.” Higgins noted, drily.

He turned to General Rutherford. “Shall I share our part of the briefing now, sir?” he asked.

Rutherford nodded. “Oh, yes. Please do.”

Date Point: ??? AV

Classified Facility, Earth.

Time behaved strangely in the cell. There was nothing to do, nothing to look at or inspire him. For the sake of having anything to do, Six found himself doing some exercises he could remember seeing being practiced on the beach in San Diego, though he had no idea if he was doing them right.

That alone might be an indicator of his non-human status, and he was undoubtedly being surveilled, but it was that or… nothing.

So, he exercised, he slept, he was fed, and led—ears and eyes covered—to a simple bathroom where he was allowed to perform his stolen body’s necessary ablutions and clean himself. They even provided him with clean clothing. It was the only vaguely interesting thing to happen for what felt like it must have been the best part of two days.

It was a strange relief, therefore, to be finally retrieved by his taciturn handlers—never the same handlers twice, nor did they speak to him except to issue orders—and ushered back into the interview room.

The questions became, oddly, less pointed, less targeted. They started to query him about some bizarre things, claiming that it was all about “getting to know him”. Questions like his favourite foodstuffs and his preferred recreational activity were easy enough to answer, from his limited pool of human experience. Others, however, were truly strange. A favourite colour? As if there was something preferable about one narrow slice of the EM spectrum over any other arbitrary slice? The question was impenetrably strange to him. He just took a random stab and replied “green”.

That was after what felt like weeks, however, once he had bored of playing the game of refusing to answer. Nothing seemed to faze Stephen, who seemed equally content to ask the same stupid questions again and again, and was equally comfortable with any answer, or even none. It was strange, he seemed to just… genuinely enjoy Six’s company.

Six found he had no option but to look forward to Stephen’s company and his interrogations. They were the only thing that broke the monotony. Sleep. Eat. Excrete. Every so often he was taken to a large featureless room where there was room to walk, and the floor was padded for basic exercises under the watchful, silent eye of his handlers. Every day he was given the opportunity to clean up and put on fresh clothing. Every time he returned to his cell after leaving, it had been cleaned, and the bedding replaced. He was being exceptionally well looked-after, but there was nothing to do. At all.

The introduction of a second interrogator—“Carl”—almost felt like the opening of a whole new world of experience. He was similar to Stephen in most respects—a little lower and more gravelly of voice, a little less handsome, but equally polite, equally patient, equally… insightful. Neither man allowed even the faintest hint of a discrepancy to pass: they would pounce on it, pry at it, probe it with questions and unrelenting logic. They would repeat the same question over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN! It was like being slowly and inefficiently murdered with words, and no matter how often it happened, no matter how aware he was of what they were doing, the sheer irritation of it always teased out just a little bit more from him, just another detail in the hope that maybe this crumb would convince them to stop asking. With each one, they eroded yet another fragment of his lies, exposing the truth one grain at a time until all his falsehoods were gone, dissected in painstaking detail and incinerated under the glare of incomprehensibly patient scrutiny.

Despite this, the sheer novelty of having a second person to talk to was like emerging to feel the cool breeze on his face.

That became his routine, if such a word could even apply to something that seemed to happen totally at random throughout his “day.” Sometimes it was Stephen. Sometimes it was Carl. Either way, the sessions became the only interesting part of his day.

Today, it was Stephen. He didn’t even acknowledge Six’s presence for several minutes. He just… read the dossier, occasionally jotting a note or something in it. As they turned, and as the pencil scritch-scratched its way across them, those thick paper pages made a noise that echoed pleasantly in Six’s head, and he entered a kind of trance just listening to the soft sound.

He was jolted out of it when the dossier was flipped closed with a sharp snap.

“Hello Six.” Stephen said, as if he hadn’t just spent who-knew-how-long ignoring the detainee. They both always began the session with those same words.

”…Hello, Stephen.”

“Did you sleep well?”

They always asked that. The answer was always the same.

”…Not really.”

“Hmm…” Stephen frowned. “You’ve been here a while now, I would have expected you to adapt to it by now. Maybe you need a more comfortable bed.”

By Six’s starved standards, even a change to a slightly more comfortable bed sounded like bliss.

”…Is that an option?” he asked. One personality module in one implant sneered and chastised himself for the pathetic eagerness that he totally failed to keep out of his voice.

“It could be. But you ARE a detainee here, you know. Why should I give you special treatment?”

”…Of course, you wouldn’t just offer something like that without a price. Quid pro quo, yes?”

Stephen didn’t react beyond a slight uptick in the light smile he always wore. “I’m going to repeat a few questions we’ve gone over before.” he said.

“Oh, go on.”

“What’s your name?”

“You’re asking me that again?” the absurdity of it jolted Six right out of the terse mood he’d been trying to slip into. It had been the very first question Stephen had asked him, long since answered. Why would he pointlessly resurrect it now?

“What’s your name?” Stephen repeated.

Six snorted. “Mr. Johnson.” He replied, sarcastically.

Stephen’s head waved around and he smiled slightly as if the sarcasm were amusing, rather than irritating. “Please tell me your name?” He insisted.

Six sighed. “…Six…”

He was pleased to discover that the keyboard sounds were just as pleasant as ever when Stephen wrote something.

”…What’s your real name, Six?”

“That is my real name.”

“Really? Sounds more like a number to me. Surely you weren’t born as little baby Six?”

“You presume a lot about me, Stephen.”

“What, that you were born? I think that one’s a pretty universal constant. Even if you ARE an ET.”

Six said nothing. Stephen just smiled that gentle smile of his. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask you if you were comfortable.”

“I am. thankyou.”

“How was your meal?”

“Filling.” that was about all it had been.

“That’s good. So… which is it?”

”…what?”

“Well, Six is a number, and no culture I ever heard of name their kids after numbers. So either you’re not human or else you’re lying about your name. Or both, of course.”

“We name our kids some pretty strange things.” Six said.

“Who do?”

“Humans.”

“But you aren’t human, though. Are you?”

“So you keep claiming. But when there’s a woman called Moon Unit Zappa out there, you can hardly use the fact that my name is ‘Six’ as evidence of that, can you?”

Stephen’s little tilt of the head might have indicated concession. “That argument might hold more water if your head wasn’t stuffed full of alien technology.” he said.

Six considered his response, trying to map out the potential future paths of the conversation. He could claim to be a former abductee, but that would fall apart soon enough—too many inventions stacked on top of each other, he’d slip and allow a discrepancy eventually. He could -

“So why did you bomb that apartment in New Jersey?” Stephen asked, completely throwing him with the non-sequitur.

Fortunately, the truth here would work to his advantage. “That wasn’t me.”

“That was your associate, then? Considering you aren’t brothers, you really look very much alike.”

“And how do you know we aren’t brothers?”

“Genetic testing. You may look identical, but you couldn’t be less related.”

“I-”

“What about that roller derby? What did you hope to gain by shooting up a bunch of kids and their parents?”

“I didn’t have a gun. I wasn’t-”

“Why did you kill Terri Boone?”

”…Who?”

“San Diego, the car park? You killed her with a grenade launcher. Why?”

“I didn’t do that.”

“That’s funny, because for that one, we have DNA evidence that says it was you. So why did you kill her?”

“Like I said, it wasn’t me.”

“We have all the evidence which proves that it was you. So why did you kill her?”

“This is getting tiresome.”

“Why did you kill Terri Boone?”

”…”

“Why did you kill Terri Boone?”

“Would you stop that?”

“Answer the question and I’ll stop. Why did you kill-”

“It. Wasn’t. Me.”

“You’re lying. Why did you-”

“Fine!” Six exploded. “I’m not human! I’m an independent consciousness capable of uploading myself into any appropriate host! I wasn’t even on Earth when this body killed Boone!”

“Thank you.” Stephen said, mildly. He tapped away at his computer again, and Six calmed a little, shaking as the full weight of what had happened hit him. The words had erupted out of him on a tide of frustration, driven by his total deprivation of anything resembling an intellectual stimulus for… he didn’t know. Months? It felt like months. Parts of him could only figuratively gape, aghast that the secret he had guarded all of that time was finally thrown away, mined out of him by nothing but boredom.

“What, you believe that?” He asked, trying to fill his voice with scorn, hoping that mockery might salvage his failure.

“We already knew that’s what the Hierarchy is.” Stephen said. Still typing “I just needed to hear you say it.”

“Now you’re lying.” Six accused. The door opened behind him and his handlers returned.

“Detainee, please stand.” they ordered. Stephen gathered his things, nodded to him, and made to leave by the opposite door.

“Come back here!” Six snapped, surging to his feet as far as his restraints would allow and straining against them. “Come back here, you! You’re LYING!”

Stephen didn’t even dignify that accusation with a response.

Six’s handlers… handled him. He seethed in the dark every step of the long and winding walk back to his cell, which seemed to take twice as long as it usually did. When they finally arrived, he found that his bed had been replaced, and a small table and chair introduced to the room. There were some coarse paper pages and a graphite stick.

Six’s bruised pride hated himself for the way he was pathetically grateful for them.

Date Point 3y 8m 3w AV

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada.

“During the deployment of the civilian colonists, we were able to send over a smaller version of the jump array installed right here at Scotch Creek.” Higgins began. Jenkins raised a hand.

“I’m sorry, ‘jump array’? I thought they were travelling on Kirk’s ship?”

“The Jump array is, as far as we can tell, a uniquely human invention.” Tremblay said. “Bartlett came up with it. Point-to-point transport of materiel via wormhole between two Array stations. One end’s here on base, the other end of that big array is on Kirk’s ship.”

”…cool!”

“Well, anyway.” Higgins continued. “We assembled a smaller version, which we’re calling the ‘postbox’. It’s a useful way to support the colony—they can send back written messages and USB sticks to stay in touch, we can send over spare parts, medical supplies… Right now we’re sending over the pieces to construct a coffin-sized version for transit of individual persons.”

“Yesterday, the military commander there, Captain Owen Powell, sent us back this urgent report.”

The lights dimmed again and Temba selected a video file.

The face addressing the camera was a tired-looking, bearded man wearing a black pullover and a dull green beany. “Project Starstep CO’s daily report, Fifteen-thirty hours, mission day eighty-two.” he recited, in a thick accent that reminded Kevin of Sean Bean. “Saunders came back, broadcasting IFF this time, thankfully. He’s given us a couple of starships he claims he stole from the Hierarchy. I’m going to repeat my request to get some experts in ET tech assigned here ASAP: he’s right, we NEED people who can take these things apart. Bad news is, the bloody things don’t have jump drives, so we can’t send them back to Earth for analysis.”

“The worse news is, that this is just two—Saunders kept a third—out of probably a whole lot of this class of ship. They have better-than-best cloaking tech, and so do their missiles. These aren’t small ships, neither. They’re bigger than an aircraft carrier, about as heavily armed as a cruiser, and from what I saw they’re equipped for assault, bombardment, and invasion. There’s got to be some kind of a shipyard out there making these things.”

“I’ve talked it over with Sir Jeremy, and our recommendations are as follows: One: We need to get the Coffin set up and bring forward the schedule for the full-scale Array. Two: I want to raise the system shield and go public. Sooner we do it, the less likely we are to have some infiltrator sneak in and drop a beacon. Three: I’m going to need naval crews to assign to these things, and somebody who knows how to refit them with a jump drive. Four: Saunders thinks we should keep them here to defend the colony. I disagree: I think there’s a shipyard out there that needs capturing if possible, and blowing the fook up if not. My lads are itching for a real mission. No further recommendations at this time.”

He swigged some water before continuing.

“The other half of Saunders’ delivery, which you’ll probably find more immediately useful, is enclosed. This Hierarchy he keeps talking about apparently have the ability to treat a mind like a data file—transfer it, store it, run it on computers. I’ve gone over that in a previous report. This time, he’s delivered the—he called it the dissected consciousness of a Hierarchy agent known as ‘Zero’. We can’t make heads nor tails of it, but he’s got a friend who can interrogate it—enclosed is what’s been learned so far. I’m inclined to trust it.”

He rubbed his beard.

“The existence of a Hierarchy cell on Earth seems likely. Hopefully the information in this document will help Intelligence catch the buggers.”

He examined some paperwork for a second, thinking.

“Nowt else to report militarily. Colonial militia training is going well. Sir Jeremy’s civilian report will follow in due time, I consider this high-priority so am sending now. Powell out.”

Higgins turned the lights back up.

“Saunders is an Australian abductee.” he clarified. “And apparently something of a practical expert in alien technology. He crash-landed an Alliance cruiser on Cimbrean a few weeks ago, and was cooperative in sharing intelligence and technology with the project. It’s thanks to him that this facility has a working cloaking device to study. Educated by his own example, some of the SBS divers were able to retrieve examples of working alien power generators.”

“As for the content of the report,” Temba picked up “It details—pretty much in full—what, exactly, the Hierarchy is.”

Date Point: 3y 11m 2w AV

National Air and Space Museum, Washington D.C., USA, Earth.

“It’s amazing how much you can come to care about an inanimate object.”

Rylee wasn’t accustomed to public speaking. Nor was she accustomed to dressing for official functions or historic moments. She felt more comfortable in a jumpsuit or her flight suit than in a dress.

“I admit: I’m in love with Pandora. Together we created history. I’d fly her forever if I could. But Pandora doesn’t belong to me. With the retirement of the Lockheed-Martin TS-101 X-plane, she now belongs to history, and I am proud that she will continue to serve and inspire mankind, here in this illustrious Smithsonian Museum.”

Camera flashes caught every moment. She knew they’d comment that she was crying: she didn’t care. She was allowed to mourn the turning of this page. She stretched up on tip-toe to kiss Pandora’s nose, and rested her forehead against the plane’s cool hull, ignoring the redoubled sparkle of the media for a few seconds.

Then she collected herself and turned back to the microphone, accepting the museum director’s offered handkerchief as he asked the reporters for questions.

Date Point: ??? AV

Classified Facility, Earth.

“So what did he write?”

“Looks like mostly doodling…”

Monitoring the detainee’s scribbles and notes was a routine operation, done whenever they cleaned up his cell while he was outside of it. It wasn’t a difficult process. One or two quick snaps with the camera was all it took. There was a lot that could be learned about the detainee from what they chose to jot down by way of entertaining themselves.

The pages were densely packed with what appeared to be mostly nonsense and doodles: scribbles, spirals, zig-zag lines. There was a kind of aesthetic to it, albeit a spartan, mathematical one. Six’s lines were mostly either parallel or perpendicular, or at least as much so as could be managed by unpracticed human hands. Beyond that, he didn’t seem to care what he drew so long as the graphite made a stimulating sound on the paper. Mostly, it was just a geometric right-angled mess.

“Not a lot to go on.”

“No…”

She looked around at the team. Her job went both ways—as psychologist, not only was she there to analyze and hypothesize about the detainee’s reactions, she was there to keep an eye on the ‘gators and their intel support, make sure they were holding up okay.

It was a fact little suspected by the civilian world that interrogation was practically as hard on the people conducting it as upon their detainee. While the interrogators had the luxury of seeing the outside world, freedom of movement, nice meals, unlimited entertainment and all the perks of being a free American citizen, at the end of the day they were still tearing a man apart piece by piece to learn the things he held most dear.

Only a true psychopath could have done that without being torn up in turn, and a psychopath simply wouldn’t have a place on this team.

And Six was proving to be a tough nut to crack. ‘Stephen’ and ‘Carl’ were both veterans and experts, having done this many times before. Their information had saved lives, they knew how to cope.

But there was always the possibility that this time might be the time that all their experience and coping mechanisms failed them. Their veterancy was not an excuse for her to become lax in monitoring them.

She watched the two booth-guys for a minute. They were talking, quietly, and while both looked stressed and subdued there were no immediate causes for alarm that she could detect.

Long-term…

Well. Maybe she could recommend something that would be good both for them and for the detainee.

Date Point: 3y 11m 3w AV

Dominion Embassy Station 172, Terra/Luna L1 point.

“Are you okay?”

Sister Niral had elected to remain aboard the Embassy station until her pregnancy forced her back to Gao. The preliminary results were encouraging—she was expecting triplets, and if she’d been human, might have been called “glowing”.

As it was, she was the first person Rylee went to after the unpleasant necessity of the Smithsonian meetings, speeches, interviews and photographs. Any awkwardness between them was long since past, and over the months since, as the last few flights of the TS-101 had wound down, they had become fast friends.

Niral, it turned out, loved to groom her sisters’ fur, and this quirk extended to human hair. Rylee kept it short by necessity—long hair and space helmets did NOT mix—but it felt good to let her nonhuman friend work on it.

Rylee sighed. “I will be.” she said. “I always knew Pandora was an X-plane, a prototype. She’s wonderful, but she’s not a patch on what companies like LockMart can produce now that they know what they’re doing.”

“You’ll be flying the replacement?”

“Hey, my career’s not over just because they’re retiring my sled.” Rylee told her. “Though, I’m being headhunted by the private sector. Lots of big money being flashed at me to try to get me to quit NASA and test-pilot their designs.”

Niral issued a kind of melodic purr that Rylee had learned passed for the equivalent of a “hmm” in her species. “That doesn’t sound like you at all.” she said.

“Nope. I’m in it for the science, for the species, not to get rich while I make some billionaires even richer.”

“What do you think it’ll be like? The replacement?”

“Similar.” Rylee admitted. “A lot went right with the one-oh-one, but it was… you know, the tolerances were looser because we didn’t know what it’d be like, and that hurts performance.”

“I think only you would notice the difference.” Niral commented, chittering a Gaoian laugh. As a diplomat herself, the fields of aeronautics and piloting were outside her experience, but she had gathered enough from the arguments between the two pilots in her life to know that Rylee’s constant maintenance and tuning of her ‘sled’ was enough to earn margins that any Gaoian pilot would have considered not worth the effort.

“Hey, the little differences add up. Point-five percent might not sound like much, but at the kind of accelerations we… think these things will get up to in the field, that could be the difference between a fatal hit and a clean miss.”

“There’s other things, too. Our ES field tech’s improving by leaps and bounds, the JPL’s turned out their most efficient warp engine yet… you watch, I’ll always love Pandora but I’m not dumb enough to think that her replacement will be worse. It’ll be better: WAY better.”

“So what are you doing in the interim?” Niral asked.

“Classified, sorry babe.”

Niral knew better than to pry, so the two sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes before the quarters spoke an untranslated sentence in a Gaoian dialect. To Rylee’s untrained ear, it sounded not dissimilar to Korean.

“A launch!” the Gaoian said, abandoning Rylee’s scalp to spring over the window. “I still can’t quite believe your people still use rockets…”

“Well, they’ve got kinetics and ES fields now.” Rylee said, joining her. There was something fun about watching a launch, from orbit. “And Earth’s gravity hasn’t changed—they’re still the best way to haul bulk stuff into orbit for us.”

Technically, “Kinetics” was a gross misnomer which routinely earned an impromptu lecture on correct definitions for anybody who was so incautious as to utter it within earshot of scientific pedants, or on the Internet, but the translated alien vernacular was tenacious. It was hardly surprising that it had been one of Time’s words of the year, given that the introduction of what was, after all, an extremely small and efficient engine had decimated the cost-per-kilogram of material transport from ground to orbit, revitalizing the space industry practically overnight.

From where the station rested at the Terra/Luna L1 point, Earth was much, MUCH too far away to make out such a tiny event as a launch with the naked eye of course, but the station took care of that, zooming and magnifying to an incredible degree, so that the vehicle became a spike of light atop a pillar, smoking its way up from the curvature of the planet. The perspective was a little false, but it looked cool as hell.

“How much can this thing zoom in?” she asked. Niral spoke to the room in Gaoian again—it was curious how directions to the station’s controlling systems didn’t get translated—and the view zoomed in even further, until the rocket itself filled the view, a slender white spike marked down its flank with the livery of several world-famous companies, the so-called “Big Ten” that were co-operating in the Second Space Race.

“Oh my God! That’s Hephaestus One!” Rylee exclaimed. “I forgot that was today!”

“Hephaestus One?”

“Yeah! It’s the first flight out to Ceres.” Rylee explained. “They’re going to set up an asteroid mining hub and shipyard out there.”

“Your people move fast!” Niral remarked, clearly impressed. “It took us ten Gaoian years to launch our first asteroid mining operation.”

“How long is that in Earth years?”

“Room?”

The room displayed a conversion table on the window alongside the view of the rocket. Rylee read it and nodded.

“I bet I know the reason.” she said. “Will this room take voice commands from me?”

“It should do…”

“Great.” Rylee looked around, then shrugged and commanded: “Uh, Room: Display side-by-side comparisons of the estimated number of asteroids in the Sol system versus the Gao system, and display survey maps for rare earth elements on Earth and the planet Gao.”

Graphs and two globes appeared side-by side on the walls and windows as the station’s interface systems interpreted the command and expanded on it, trying to guess not only what Rylee had asked for, but also what she might not yet know she wanted.

She had to admit—as unimpressive as some of the achievements of nonhuman life were, when it came to user-friendly interfaces, they were the absolute masters. It looked like something straight out of a movie, but practical. Every element was clearly presented, its relationship to every other, obvious. She took a moment to appreciate the accomplishment, before turning to the relevant data.

“See here? Sol has a HUGE density of inner-system asteroids next to Gao.” she said. “And then over here, look: Your homeworld’s pretty rich in Rare Earths and they’re all spread out pretty evenly. But Earth is poor in Rare Earths, and they’re mostly here, under the control of only a couple of political factions. But there’s a boatload in the asteroids.” she indicated a chart demonstrating the estimated absolute tonnage of various elements and minerals in the asteroid belt. “And we need rare earth magnets to build ES field generators. And ES field generators are a huge boom industry right now.”

“So getting out there quickly ensures that the supply remains constant and averts a future problem? Sensible.” Niral said.

Rylee laughed. “So getting out there quickly ensures that a whole bunch of very rich people get even richer.” She countered.

“You don’t sound like you mind that.” Niral said.

“Why should I? It works. You said it yourself, it took you guys twice as long to do this.”

“It sounds… greedy.” Niral objected.

“Yeah! Greed is good, girl!”

Niral just stared at her. “Rylee, if it wasn’t for the sex thing, that would be the most alien thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Rylee just shrugged. “Room, clear the data, focus on the rocket again.”

They watched it separate a stage. Force fields unfolded around and behind it, catching the solar wind and reminding Rylee of an ancient sailship as they swept Hephaestus One’s path clear of orbital debris and sucked down power for the warp engine. It took only seconds: in a flare of light, the private rocket leapt into the impossible distance and was gone.

“Alien or not honey, there’s the proof.” she said.

Date Point ???

Classified Facility, Earth.

“Hello, Six.”

”…”

“How are you feeling today?”

”…”

“Did you sleep well? How’s the new bed?”

”…”

“Not talking to me?”

”…”

“Okay. Let me know if you want to talk.”

The unspeakable bastard just got out a deck of playing cards and started to deal them out on the desk in front of him, playing some kind of a game as if Six’s stubborn silence were of exactly no consequence to him.

The sound washed over him, as it always seemed to. He wondered if that was why Stephen used these tools—because he too enjoyed the sound they made. Was it a quirk of the way humans saw the world, that simple things could be so… mesmerizing?

“Beats me why I bother with the cards.” Stephen commented. “I could play on the computer instead…”

That didn’t seem like an attractive option.

“Hey, do you want this deck?”

The offer surprised him. Surely Stephen wasn’t serious? But then again, he’d been true to his word about the bed…

No. It was just a trick to get him to give up and start talking again. He wouldn’t be swayed that easily, and so Six folded his arms and continued to glare.

“Suit yourself.” Stephen finished his game, and put the cards away. Surprisingly he stood up. “I guess you’re not in the mood today? That’s cool, we’ll do something a little different. See you in a few minutes.”

He exited the room as the guards entered. Six knew better than to resist by now, but he was curious about this ‘something a little different’, and his pulse picked up a little as the guards led him to somewhere that had… an indefinably different texture to the area around his cell and the interrogation room. It was hard to tell—the human body had senses he was sure weren’t quite analogous to anything else he had experienced. Despite the total disorientation of the darkness and silence, he could still somehow feel that the area around him was not the same, somehow. There was a feeling of volume.

The sensation was validated when his blindfold was removed. He WAS somewhere new, a larger area—still totally enclosed, but big enough to run if he so wanted. There was a hoop of some kind attached to the wall a little above head height, and some markings on the ground.

Stephen and Carl were both waiting for him, having apparently changed into plain, loose clothing that looked much more comfortable than their suits, and a pair of soft shoes. Carl was holding a stippled orange sphere with black lines on its surface.

“What’s this?” Six asked, then cursed himself for giving in to the surprise as his shackles were removed and the guards retired to stand watchfully at the door.

“Basketball.” Carl said, and threw the ball to the ground. It bounced back up, and he gently flung it down again with his other hand. “The idea is to get the ball to fall through that hoop on the wall, and stop me from doing the same. You can’t run while holding the ball, though—you have to bounce it on the floor like this.” he demonstrated, swapping the ball from hand to hand via the hard surface.

“What’s your angle here, gentlemen?” Six asked, suspiciously.

Carl threw the ball gently to Stephen, who caught it and spun it on one finger in a display of impressive coordination. “No angle. This is a morale and welfare session now. You need the stimulation and exercise.” he said.

“So, it’s a reward for good behavior.”

“That too.” Stephen agreed. “Come on, you going to play or not?” His arms punched straight out, flinging the ball at Six, who astonished himself by catching the high-speed object.

He considered resisting, but after the sheer grey sameness of the last few weeks, how could he? He knew he was being manipulated, he knew this was just another tool in the arsenal that these people were using to dissect him and extract his valuable knowledge, but no amount of willpower in the world could stop him from being, on everything but the purely cerebral level, shamefully eager to move, to play, to do something different.

He bounced the ball.

When the session ended, who-knew how long later, he was exhausted, but he felt alive, and something approaching happy for the first time since arriving in this place.

Date Point: 4y 3w AV

Asteroid Ceres, Sol System

Construction work on Ceres Base had begun well before the first engineers had arrived. Cargo modules full of the raw materials, equipment, prefabricated units, life support systems, artificial gravity generators and ES field generators necessary to construct a working facility had been injected into orbit, revolving slowly in the asteroid’s pathetic gravity.

It had all come together with only a few minor disasters. With the ability to deliver engineers to the worksite to remote-control the construction vehicles without significant communications lag, gentle landings in Ceres’ miniscule gravity had been trivial. Setbacks, however, were inevitable. One of the modular base components had suffered a failure of its landing, running out of fuel and falling to ground several hundred meters from its intended location. Moving it had required the assembly and delivery of a specialist module-refuelling drone

The planned landing site for another module had turned out to be the sheer edge of a crater. Fortunately, the module had not been a location-critical one, and its eventual installation on the far side of the base was just going to be one of those peculiar quirks that lent it a unique character.

That was Phase One, just making the place livable in the long term, appropriate for habitation and experimentation. It had consumed only half of the orbiting equipment.

The second phase, and the other half, was to turn the facility into something that would, ultimately, turn a profit. The smaller part of that, equipment-wise, was the Survey Center, a launch and control platform for a fleet of Unmanned Space Vehicles that would—assuming their design and technology worked as intended—survey the tumbling, diffuse rocks of the Belt in search of Platinum, Rare Earths, Iron, Nickel, Titanium, and of course water.

The larger part, dwarfing the facility despite not yet being complete, was the sprawling industrial monstrosity of the refining and smelting equipment, literally “printing” itself into existence piece by piece out of local materials.

This edifice couldn’t possibly have been built on Earth—it was an eyesore testament to low-gravity industry, constructed around a functional contempt for aesthetics.

Drew Cavendish loved it.

But then again, Drew Cavendish didn’t have much patience for aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics. His sense of beauty revolved around the practical, the working, the mechanically efficient. He was the sort of man who would squint bewildered at an art gallery, but wax poetic about an example of expert welding.

Ceres Base was therefore the perfect destination for him, after a career spent working oil and gas rigs in the North Sea. That was a field that had been in terminal decline even before the arrival of effectively free solar energy in the form of ES field technology and—rumour had it—the long-awaited holy grail of nuclear fusion.

Taking up with BHP Billiton’s fledgling asteroid mining program had just been sensible for somebody with twenty years of experience in Atmospheric Diving Suits. Not least because the basic salary was 50% higher than he’d been earning at the peak of his Earthly career, with a promise of simply huge annual yield-based bonuses.

Naively, he’d assumed that piloting a Red Bull spacesuit wasn’t so very dissimilar to driving an ADS. Both were bulky, rigid, prevented you from scratching your itches and served to keep you more or less comfortable when surrounded by a medium—or lack thereof—that would kill you, for all intents and purposes instantly.

That had been driven out of him in simulator time with a VR headset. Movements that would have been perfectly safe when welding a deep water rig, where the water would cushion and stop any stray movements, could send an incautious spacewalker drifting. A ‘walker could get in serious trouble just millimeters from a handhold, with nothing to kick, swim or exert any force against to move them the tantalizing distance back to safety.

He had been surprised to learn that, in freefall and when out of contact with any surface, moving his arm also pushed the rest of his body around in accordance with Sir Isaac Newton’s most ancient and famous principle of reaction. Unnoticeable when your boots were firmly on a surface under even the most tepid gravity—but enough to set a man spinning when floating free, and surprisingly tiring.

But, he had cleared training. Quickly, too, and with straight As. And now… here he was. Ceres. And beyond one glamorous tour out here getting the place set up, once the first bonus rolled in?

Well, he’d always promised himself that he would one day leave the grey and choppy seas of Northern Europe behind for waters that were clearer, calmer, and garnished with bikini-clad waitresses and fruit drinks. He’d never anticipated that his route to paradise would be via deep space, but that was life. He’d get there.

All he had to do was work.

“Bloody impressive.” he commented, watching the pressure doors swing themselves closed behind the Hephaestus vehicle that had delivered him and some other newbies. Technically, the landing bay was perfectly pressurised by the gossamer curtain of an atmosphere retention field, but Health and Safety regulations insisted that the vehicle’s own airlocks were not to be opened until the physical pressure doors were closed and the seals had been checked.

It was a source of considerable bemusement for the handful of nonhumans who had been taken on as consultants and advisors to the operation that the LLC would simply not hear a single word about relying on atmosphere retention fields. They seemed to regard it as quaint to be leery of relying on a system that could fail in a heartbeat if it lost power. Drew wondered just how bloody daft and foolhardy these aliens must be to rely on a bloody force field to keep their air in, without redundancies or failsafes.

Still. Questionable attitude to safety aside, they knew more about mining asteroids than any human did, and that made them sufficiently valuable to the operation that translation and disease-suppression implants had been mandatory for all personnel. Drew was already in the habit of running his fingers over the slight ridges of metal that adorned his temple, which was already being called the “Spacer’s Tattoo”, but he’d fortunately managed to suppress the urge to lick the back of his too-clean teeth.

“Sugoi.” agreed Heikichi.

Heikichi Togo’s ship suit bore the three diamonds of Mitsubishi. He was an expert in industrial robotics whose English could charitably be described as “abysmal”, but that simply didn’t matter thanks to the implants. He could rattle away in Japanese all he wanted and, despite not speaking word one of that language himself, Drew would know exactly what he meant. That had significantly freed up the LLC to recruit from all over the world without regard for language barriers.

“D’you know where you’re sleeping yet, Togo-san?” he asked. Drew may not have spoken a word of Japanese, but he knew about calling people ‘-san’ if you wanted to be polite, and it seemed to be appreciated.

“Not yet.” Togo admitted. “If the company hasn’t got a place picked out for me, I think I’ll just have to pick out my own.”

“Well, I’m in D-block, and you seem like you’d make a good top-bunk buddy.” Drew told him as the safety teams declared the hangar sealed and the H-vehicle popped its seals.

“Thank you, Cavendish-san.”

“Hey, we don’t stand on ceremony like that where I’m from. You can call me Drew if you want.”

“Daroo.”

“Close enough, mate.” They shook hands and parted ways, bound for the offices of their respective company reps.

The complex was eerily quiet compared to the staging platform in Earth orbit. Where that was a space station, made oddly loud by the absence of any medium outside to carry away the sounds so that they echoed around the interior, here the facility’s modules were anchored to the rock of the asteroid and had a layer of sound insulation on their underside that conducted noises away into Ceres itself. It was much more peaceful, and cooler too for the same reasons.

Still, it WAS cramped, full of narrow corridors lined with equipment, conduits, cables and piping, all hung with instructions and safety posters. He could see why a maximum BMI had been one of the conditions of employment—anybody too bulky in these corridors would have been a serious obstacle to the flow of traffic that already involved turning sideways every few steps.

The B-B administrative module felt almost like any office complex back on Earth, albeit one that was after-hours, or maybe open on a holiday. The only movement so far was a trio of IT techs getting the computers set up, and the Dyson robot vacuum cleaner that was methodically patrolling the carpet. He was just wondering which office was to be his and whose he should report to when a slick-haired skinny blond man with a chestnut tan and a few too many wrinkles for his age stuck his head out and shot him a very white smile. He was wearing a loud blue aloha shirt over his company overalls.

“G’day! You Cavendish?” he asked. He couldn’t have been more stereotypically Australian if he’d been wearing a hat with corks in it.

“That’s me.” Drew agreed.

“Beaut.” The antipodean extended a hand. “Drew Martin, mate, I’m yer foreman.”

“Ah, you’re the other Drew?” Cavendish returned the handshake. “Good to meet you, mate. I heard good things about you from Dai Dawson.”

“Good old Dai.” Martin grinned. “Bloody good miner that one, had Bauxite in his bones.”

“He said something similar about you.”

“Ripper. Come on, step into my office.”

Martin’s office was, mercifully, not as Straya’d up as the man himself—in fact it was the purely professional space of somebody who took their job completely seriously. The walls were already thoroughly papered in charts, rotas, schedules, checklists and more—the paraphernalia of a mining director. His desk was a line of four monitors, all currently on a screensaver.

“Good news is, we’ve found our first rock already.” he declared. “One of the USVs caught a nice first prospect, and it’s in a stable Ceres orbit too, so no time limit either. Perfect first score.”

“How big?”

“CB group, two hundred and eighty meters. About twenty-seven metric megatons of bencubbinite.”

Both Drews grinned. That one rock alone contained enough nickel and iron to assemble the entire facility.

“So we’re just installing the stability thrusters.” Drew C mused, thinking ahead. There would be no need for anything else for an asteroid that was orbiting Ceres itself. Just enough to correct its orbit whenever it became perturbed. His team’s job was to fly out to new stakes and fit them with the engines that would gently nudge them into Ceres orbit for the mining teams to take over.

“Bloody right!”

“When?”

“Your team arrives Thursday. I want you checking the suits and gear, make sure everything’s up to code. We’ll go when you’re happy.”

“Great. I’ll get settled in for now, start on all that in the day shift tomorrow.”

“Bonzer. Looks like it’ll be good workin’ with ya, you pommie bastard.”

Drew chuckled, knowing full well that Drew M was just being friendly. “Looks like.” he agreed.

Date point: ??? AV

Classified Facility, Earth

Six hated himself.

He hated humans.

He especially hated Stephen and Carl.

But most of all, he hated the conclusion he was starting to form.

The conclusion was this: That victory was impossible. There was, he was coming to realise, simply no way to withhold the information that his interrogators wanted. He should suicide now, pop the implants in his head and rob them of their victory before they won it.

But something was stopping him and the thing that most frustrated him was that he simply couldn’t figure out what it was.

He was being played like an instrument—little rewards were given when he surrendered, snatched away the second he fought back. The incredible boredom grated against his very essence as a thinking being, relieved only by interrogation sessions and—he had come to truly crave these—Morale and Welfare sessions.

He felt like he had been stuck in his hole for a YEAR. Time had lost meaning. He slept because there was little else to do. He rationed the meager entertainment he was allowed, mourned it whenever his noncompliance took it away from him.

And he knew—knew—that they weren’t being cruel. Not really. The rules were clear, and were enforced without malice. If he complied, he was granted some perks. If he didn’t, then he lost them. In that regard he might as well have been enduring the attention of a machine rather than of people, and he couldn’t blame the system when it was plainly clear that the degree of stimulation and reward he received was a product of his own actions.

He would punish himself out of pride. Then he would spend what felt like weeks desperately clawing back what his stubborn foolishness had cost him.

He couldn’t win, and he knew it.

And it was this thought that finally blossomed into an understanding of why he didn’t just self-terminate.

He was SIX. A single-digit, architect of the death of species. He knew himself to be among the very, very best that the Hierarchy had at its disposal. Above his rank, they became administrators and planners, divorced from the reality of the fight. Below his rank, the other Numbers lacked his experience and competence.

And he couldn’t win.

And if he couldn’t… could the Hierarchy?

In the dark hours in his cell, he thought about it, scratching idly at the one perk he had retained—his paper and graphite.

And when they came to collect him in the morning, he walked calmly, surprised to find that the worst was over, now that he had given up.

Today, it was Carl’s turn to interview him.

“Hello, Six.”

“Hello, Carl.”

“How are you today?

”…beaten.”

Carl raised his eyebrows. “Beaten?”

Six wept.

And he started to speak.

He told them everything.

Date Point: 4y 2m 1w AV.

Orlando, Florida, USA, Earth.

Gabriel Arés leaned heavily on his cane as he watched the kids shoot down the ramp into the water at the end of the Jurassic Park ride, in a white plume that soaked some of the spectators.

The fight to take Adam away from San Diego for a few days had been an arduous one. His ex-wife had fought it every step of the way. But, by mercy and probably the hand of an archangel, the courts had agreed that a police detective who was recovering from near-fatal injuries had every right to take his only child on vacation.

Securing the permission of Ava’s parents to bring their daughter along had been much easier. She and Adam were totally devoted to one another. That fact had been the light that kept the depression at bay while Gabriel convalesced.

He was treating them—and himself—to a week-long tour of the major theme parks.

The kids bounced up to him a few minutes later, hand in hand. Both were now past their sixteenth birthdays, and Gabriel wished his own love life had been so good at that age.

“Where next?” Adam asked. Ava nudged him in the ribs and rolled her eyes.

“Are you okay, Gabe?” she asked. Gabriel had insisted that she use his first name.

“I’m a bit sore.” he admitted. “I could do to sit down. You guys want ice-cream?”

“Sounds good.” she agreed. Adam looked like he’d have preferred to run straight to the next ride, but he relented, knowing that Gabe still wasn’t fully recovered yet. He’d spent so long in a hospital bed thanks to the spinal damage that all the muscles in his legs had atrophied, and his rehab therapy hadn’t yet quite restored him to full working order.

“Bueno.” Gabriel fished a few dollars from his wallet and waved them in the general direction of the last vendor they’d seen, then puffed and grimaced his way to the nearest available bench and lowered himself into it, enjoying the sun.

Life was, all things considered, pretty good. He was alive and on the mend, his boy was in love, and his novel was coming along nicely.

Considering it hadn’t been so long ago that he’d been racing to save the kids from a mass-shooting only to be shot himself, life was pretty damn good.

“Dad! DAD!!“

The kids were pelting back towards him, and their expressions drove the ache and fatigue out of him. He lurched to his feet.

Children shouldn’t have worn such expressions of terror.

“What happened?!”

Date Point ??? AV

Classified Facility, Earth.

At some point during Six’s final failure, Carl had moved his chair around the desk, and was just sitting there, rubbing a hand up and down Six’s spine. It was contact, real contact, a genuine gesture of comfort and compassion from one of the men who had broken him.

There was a long silence after the last secret spilled from him.

“Hey… Six? I’m sorry man.”

Six looked up, and the sight of tears in Carl’s own eyes shook him deeply. He’d known that he had built something of a relationship—even a warped friendship—with his interrogators over his long incarceration. But he had always persuaded himself that it was a distant one, with a thick professional barrier in place.

<They hurt themselves to break me> He thought. But he wouldn’t have been Six if he hadn’t tried to fight back, to claim something here and now, in Carl’s moment of weakness. To hurt him, on an emotional level.

“Fuck you. You’ve beaten me. I’ve betrayed everything I ever lived or cared for. I’ve DESTROYED the Hierarchy. And now you’re fucking sorry?!” he exclaimed.

“More than you can know, man. I’ve been through this, it’s how I learned to do it.”

Carl looked down and wiped his eye, before looking back up, and now there was a determined set to his face.

“You and I are a lot alike, Six. We’ll do anything for our people. Me… I’ll bleed for them. I’ll hurt myself in all kinds of ways for all the lucky fucks out there -” he waved an arm at the wall, indicating the whole world beyond “- who don’t know the first goddamn thing about what kind of pain gets put into keeping their lives happy and safe. So yeah, I get it. And I’m so very, very sorry that I did this to you. I mean that. And Stephen would say it too, if he was here.”

Six just looked away. “It doesn’t matter if you’re sorry or not. You’ve won. I’ve lost. And if your people wage war like they get information out of people, then my kind are doomed.”

There was a long silence. Then Carl stood, returned to his side of the desk, and grabbed a folder from under his laptop.

”…Do you remember one of the first things you were told when you arrived here, Six?” he asked.

Six just stared at him blank. But, too tired and defeated to put up a fight, he reviewed his memory archives of the very first session. One of the—he had now learned, few—advantages of being a machine intellect was perfect recall of details like that.

“I was told… That Stephen was assigned to my case.” he said, reciting the memory in order. “That your goal was to learn as much as possible about my associates and me. That my first meal here consisted of mashed potato, biscuits and gravy, and peas and carrots. That you don’t do ‘that kind of thing’, meaning the torture I had alluded to moments earlier. That I was perfectly safe. That your first and most important priorities were information and…”

He paused. “And…”

”…And a peaceful resolution.” Carl finished for him.

“I’ve just told you that the Hierarchy’s objective is your extinction, and you’re saying that you still want a peaceful resolution?”

Carl rested his elbows on the desktop. “My nation has fought bloody and difficult wars in opposition to genocide all across our planet. And from what you’ve told me, your species and the Hierarchy are about the same thing to each other as this organisation is to the American public. Which means that your people are… more or less—blameless of plotting to destroy us.”

He shrugged. “For me, the idea of wiping out your civilization of trillions to save our civilization of billions sticks in the craw. Never mind that doing so would mean having to slaughter every other living thing in the galaxy.”

“Which you could.” Six said.

“Easily.” Carl agreed. “If we wanted to. We don’t.”

Six snorted. “You aren’t authorized to speak for your whole species.”

“Nope.” Carl agreed again. “But still: we don’t. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we’ll just sit back and invite you to wipe us out. If it comes to it, if the only way to survive is to wipe out every living thing in the Milky Way? We would, if we have to.”

He locked eyes with Six. “Do we have to?”

“What’s the alternative?”

“The alternative is, you and I come up with a way to save both our peoples.”

Date Point: 4y 2m 1w AV.

San Diego, California, USA, Earth.

Seventy-Two was panicking, and now was a terrible time to be doing that.

He had planned to switch safe-houses immediately upon the fiasco at Skateworld, but that was a complicated and risky process which demanded biodrones for maximum security. Things were just too sensitive to rely on local resources—these things weren’t Vzk’tk, Robalin or Allebenellin. They weren’t stupid or mercenary enough to fail to notice something amiss.

So, against his better judgement and good protocol, he had been forced to remain where he was for months, hoping that finally some appropriate human subject would blunder into his stasis trap for conversion into a biodrone.

That hadn’t happened. Instead, months had passed without development. Six had been declared killed, and restored from his last backup. The replacement Six had not returned to Earth, but had remained offworld to ponder the implications of the almost prescient response to their planned hive-poking. 72 was, for the time being, on his own again while the Hierarchy decided what to do.

For now, he needed to rebuild his assets and await orders.

Then the assault started.

It came from nowhere. Cars converged on the building in whose basement he lurked, peeling out of the ordinary city traffic all at once, parking synchronized in the alleyways and streets around him, while vans hauled into place and heavily armed, heavily armoured soldiers deployed barricades, holding back the city public.

There were three layers of door and wall between 72’s inner sanctum and street level. The outermost layer was breached almost before he had become alert to the attack, physically smashed off their hinges by men with steel tools.

The second layer of doors were thicker and sturdier. They bought him time to consider his options.

There were almost none. While every Hierarchy safehouse had contingencies in place to destroy it and leave no evidence of its having been there, all bar one of them relied on the sanctuary not being under attack at the time.

Well. That settled it then: all bar one meant there was only one option. He began his backup as the second doors were opened by means of explosive charges.

It finished just as those same charges were being rigged on the third and final doors.

They blew inwards just as Seventy-Two sent the command.

Kilolightyears away, undetectable in interstellar space, an ancient repository received a signal it had not been sent in nearly four million years. In response to that signal, it sent one of its stored packages directly to Earth via wormhole displacement.

Light bent and reality warped in the middle of the room as the first soldiers barged in. The event horizon collapsed, leaving behind a sphere of perfect blackness, like a black hole hanging in the middle of the room.

Without its power source, the stasis field collapsed within a microsecond.

Very, very briefly, five kilograms of pure antimatter were let loose in the heart of downtown San Diego.

They forever changed the face of the Earth.

Chapter 16: Firebird

Date Point: 4y 2m 1w 2d AV

Classified Facility, Earth

CIA Interrogation Team Planning Session

“Two and a half million people dead. Another half-million expected to die worldwide from the mid-term repercussions, and nobody has even BEGUN to predict the long-term effects. The largest and busiest container port in the United States damaged to the point where the repairs are going to take years. Major earthquake damage all along the San Andreas fault zone, eruptions as far north as Mount Rainier and thank fuck for the tsunami warning systems in Hawaii and along the Asian Pacific Rim because without them the death toll might have doubled.”

There was a grim and angry silence, during which the folder slapped down accusingly onto the table.

“You assured me he told us EVERYTHING.”

“He did tell us about that, sir.”

“The hell he did! He told us it was the one option that would NOT get used!”

“He told us that it was the one option that he wouldn’t use, sir.”

“I want you to go over every single thing that piece of shit xeno”—the word was expectorated with all the venom of a racial epithet—“has told us and God help me but if there’s even a hint that…you know what, just get it the fuck done!”

There was a shocked silence as their collective superior barged out of the room. The tension finally broke when the base commander took a deep breath.

“I do believe that man’s head is about to roll.” he commented, exploiting the full sardonic, drawled breadth of his Georgia accent.

Nobody laughed—the devastation in California was simply too raw and solemn for that. But they did all let go of just a little tension.

“Serve him the fuck right.” ‘Carl’ said. “He screwed the pooch.”

“He’s still our boss.” the CO reminded them. “So keep that to yourself and do what he said. Full review.”

“The Strategic Debriefing is unchanged though, right? Six is still…fragile.”

”…Yeah. For now we proceed as planned. But break the news about Diego to him, see how he reacts. I’m still not convinced he’s serious about defecting.”

Date Point: 4y 2m 1w 2d AV

Orlando, Florida, USA, Earth

Gabriel Arés

“As of this time we are assuming 100% casualties within five kilometers of ground zero. All of the addresses you’ve given, sir, are within that radius. I’m so sorry.”

“I…Thank you. I’ll pass that along.”

“Well, they might have been outside the lethal radius at the time, so we’ll keep your number on file in case any resident of those addresses turns up alive.”

“I appreciate it. Good luck.”

“And you, sir.”

The kids were side-by side on the bed, watching the TV with their fingers interlaced and their knuckles white. He couldn’t read either of their expressions—they seemed to have passed beyond grief and into some miserable calm state beyond, where there was nothing to do but drink in the disaster and pray.

Nobody was listening to the physics expert who was expanding at length on the technical difference between a nuclear explosion and this event, which apparently had the hallmarks of some kind of antimatter-based weapon. They were just watching the hole, still glowing and smoking like Hell’s own aperture.

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” Ava stated. It wasn’t that she was calm and euthymic—it was more that she had no more crying left.

Gabriel couldn’t sugar-coat the answer to that question. “FEMA’s assuming so.” he said. “They’ll call me back if there’s…you know, a miracle.”

“They would have called me by now.” she said.

“And Mom?” Adam asked. Gabriel just shook his head. While his ex-wife and son had often been antagonistic and frustrated with each other, he knew that she had still been his mother. He doubted that even she, as alcoholic and obtuse as she could be, would stay out of contact after such a disaster. Of course, the cell network in the area might just be overworked and badly damaged but…

But Gabriel didn’t believe in clinging to forlorn hope.

He put his arm around them both, and they watched.

Date Point: 4y 2m 1w 5d AV

Classified Facility, Earth

Six

His cell had improved beyond all recognition. The bed was downright comfortable and warm, the desk had been supplemented with a well-stocked bookshelf and a musical device.

This last was bliss next to the eternity of sensory deprivation he had suffered. It was apparently outdated by modern human standards, but used in his case because the “CDs” that he loaded into it came in their own cases with information about the music they contained, and the device’s lack of any broadcast ability.

In short, he felt less like a detainee and more like a welcome guest nowadays.

He had spent hours working through the stack of music left for him, swiftly discarding some, enthralled by others. There was one, however, that he kept coming back to.

♪♫”Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!“♫♪

He was humming along when there was a loud knock on the door.

That part was new, too. The door was no longer being opened by his handlers and his compliance demanded—now they were requesting entry, letting him rule the space a little. It was another liberty, received with a gratitude he was no longer finding so pathetic. If the situation was reversed, he knew full well that any human prisoner in his own custody would not have been treated even a fraction so well.

The hood, earmuffs and restraints were the same, but that part was just sensible. He was still a prisoner, claiming defection, actual motives still uncertain. The logic of his treatment from start to finish was crystal-clear, methodical, oh-so-sensible. He shuffled along, by now trusting his handlers implicitly.

“Hello, Stephen!” he began “What…What happened?”

Stephen had a grim expression as he placed a newspaper on the table between them.

An involuntary groan cascaded down Six’s whole body as he read the headline: “San Diego Destroyed!”

There was a long silence as he read the summary below the full page spread of the huge glowing hole where once had stood the thriving Downtown whose streets had so enthralled him.

“How many?” He croaked, eventually.

“Maybe as many as three million. It’s not clear yet.” Stephen replied.

All the joy and comfort of his newfound privileges fled him, and he withered in his seat.

“There’s no hope now, is there? Your people are going to want justice for this.”

“We are.” Stephen agreed “But peace is still on the table, believe that. Justice doesn’t have to mean genocide.”

“I thought we were smarter than this…I really did.”

He sighed, and rubbed his face. It was amazing how the body language just swept over him—all hosts instilled some of their instinctive behaviours on the occupying mind-state, that part was familiar. But the degree to which the human body imposed its own mannerisms was an order of magnitude more powerful. He doubted he’d ever be the same again for having occupied one.

He looked up and met Stephen’s eye. “What do you need from me?”

Date point: 4y 2m 1w 6d AV

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada.

Kevin Jenkins

♪♫I don’t know about you, but this looks like imprisonment/ what’s worse is that the prisoners don’t know that they’re prisoners/ even defend the…♫♪

“Jesus fuck, he’s alive…”

“What? Who?”

“It’s Arés.” Kevin answered the phone. “Jenkins. Fuck, Arés, I thought you were dead.”

It was a genuine pleasure to hear that same hispanic lilt come over the line. “Guess I should thank a bullet in the back for that. I went on vacation with my son, we’re in Florida.”

“Well, I’m glad man. I heard about…the thing, that you stopped.”

“Know what happened to him?”

“Sorry, dude. No-can-discuss.”

“If that bastard was respons-”

“No. Can. Discuss. Man, you’re a cop, you should understand this shit.”

”…you’re right. Sorry, Jenkins.”

Arés hung up.

Tremblay gave him an appraising look. The general was off-duty, or at least as much so as he ever got, and nursing one of Kevin’s own home-brews. “He wanted you to break confidentiality?”

Kevin sighed. “Yeah. I mean, I can see why. Poor bastard’s just lost everything, I’d be out to kick ass in his position.”

There was a minute of silent thought before Tremblay spoke again. “So, answer me truthfully. If I hadn’t been sitting here, would you have, I don’t know, dropped a hint or something?”

“Nah, man.” When Tremblay arched an eyebrow. “Maybe a few months ago, maybe. But not after learning about those fucking biodrone things.”

“You don’t think Arés could be one?”

“Hell no! But, y’know, I finally get the whole “loose lips sink ships” thing, right?”

Tremblay nodded, apparently satisfied. “It’s a shame there’s not much we can do for him.” he said. “He deserves something.”

“Hm.”

They drank in silence for a bit, before Kevin asked, apropos of nothing: “The Brits are going public with the Cimbrean colony soon, aren’t they?”

“Day after tomorrow, I think.”

“Hmm…”

Date Point: 4y 2m 2w AV

Classified Facility, Earth

Interrogation Team Planning Session

“I wish I could tell you. We’re very much…what was the phrase? ‘In uncharted territory’ now.”

“Can’t you speculate?”

“I’ll try, but Stephen, you need to understand that I am not human. I think that’s the communications failure that led to this.”

“Why does that change anything?”

“Humans are deathworlders. You’re evolved to live on a planet which is routinely dangerous, and you’ve especially evolved to rely on—and exploit—other humans for your survival. While every social sapient obviously has the instincts for guessing at the motives and possible future actions of others of their species, and other sapients, your instinct for it is much more acute. So please, be skeptical of just how accurate my conclusions are likely to be.”

”…Okay. But please try.”

On screen, Six’s recorded self sighed and rubbed his chin.

“I imagine that by now, my personality backup will have been activated. Being as senior as I am, I can tell you how I would react to this news and how it might affect their response.”

“That’s fine.”

“I would be shitting myself. This is a full-blown catastrophe from the Hierarchy’s perspective—our mandate is secrecy and deniability, and now an enclave has been raided and a city-busting self-destruct option deployed because there was no faster alternative that would have guaranteed destruction of all our assets. Seventy-Two has probably been decompiled. They may find him blameless, in which case he will be recompiled but that takes months.”

“Decompiled…so, they’ll have taken him apart and read his memories?”

“Read everything. His decision-making process from start to finish, what he knew, everything he experienced and thought right up until the moment the process was begun. The analysis is thorough beyond description—there is no organic equivalent.”

Six coughed, and thought. “What they will see, is that I went silent, and that some time later, a precisely targeted assault hit Seventy-Two’s base of operations. Frankly Stephen, that operation was a huge mistake on your peoples’ part.”

“Why’s that?”

“You mean besides the two and a half million deaths?” Six snorted. “It means I’m now known to have failed to retain at least some secrets. They certainly won’t suspect that I am now collaborating with you, but If I were my restored self, I would recommend an immediate full decompile and analysis before any merger went ahead. And on top of that, I would insist on the backup being the dominant personality. Releasing me back into the Hierarchy to work from the inside is no longer an option.”

“I think we’re drifting off topic here.”

“You’re right, we are. Sorry. As for what they will do next…” Six shrugged expressively. “We can probably rule out the best-case scenario where they come to the same conclusions I have about our chances. We had already, fortunately, established that any kind of a direct conflict would carry unacceptable risks both of widespread discovery and of your people actually winning. Which means their most likely avenue of attack will be sabotage and politics.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, that they will influence the media to portray humanity as a dangerous threat on par with the Hunters. They will infiltrate the security councils and vote in favour of resolutions that are detrimental to Earth. If they can, they will attempt to return to Earth and do the same thing to your own politicians and media outlets. If your people build starships, they will attempt to spin it as a waste of resources. Seventy-Two’s networks will not have died with his enclave, there will still be avenues they can use to back politicians who might put heavy taxes on space industry, or they might engineer internecine warfare down here to distract you and keep you looking down.”

They stopped the playback.

“That’s not a lot to go on.” Said their new boss. As the CO had correctly guessed, his predecessor had been swiftly (though quietly) fired over San Diego, and the new incumbent was keen to avoid a repeat.

“Or too much.”

“Exactly. I need more than a few educated guesses at their possible strategies if I’m going to form a coherent response.”

“Six hasn’t been in the loop for months now. At this point, we can’t reasonably expect him to give us more than that, sir.”

“Then what use is he to us?”

There was a general looking-around. ‘Carl’ finally broke the silence. “For what it’s worth sir, I’m convinced that he means every word about trying to change the Hierarchy’s approach and become our agent on the inside.”

“You think we should release him?”

“It’s a huge gamble, but at this point, we’ve got every truly relevant bit of information, and the rest is speculation that we can probably do for ourselves. And I think that gamble would pay off.”

Heads nodded.

“I’ll take that under advisement. Is there anything more of use in that recording?”

“You’ve got the gist of it, sir. He was fairly consistent in his opinion of how they’ll respond. He did, however, namedrop a potential individual of interest.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Nobody human. He thinks they’re where Seventy-two got his ‘biodrone’ implants from.”

“Intriguing. I think I’d better call my British opposite number.”

“The Brits? Why?”

The boss chuckled. “Let’s just say they got their hands on something that makes Scotch Creek look like a scifi convention…”

Date Point: 4y 2m 3w AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

“I call.”

They laid their hands on the table.

“Okay, that’s two pair threes and nines for the Englishman, and…Three Queens for Togo-san. Sorry, Cavendish.”

“Bollocks!”

“Pay up, ya pommie bastard, he won fair and square.”

Heikichi grinned uncertainly, still a little uncomfortable with the way the Drews casually insulted each other at every opportunity, but by now used to it and well aware that it was all friendliness.

The truth was, Drew C and Drew M were now fast friends, with the stoic and efficient Brit serving to neatly offset Drew Martin’s antipodean ebullience. On the job, both men were complete professionals. Off duty, they were the hub of the base’s intercorporate social life, running as they did a little unofficial venture—known universally as “the Speakeasy”—in a corner of the survey drone service hangar. There was no alcohol to be had: everybody needed to be sharp at all times in case of emergencies, but it was amazing just how entertaining fruit juice could get if you knew a few secrets.

There was a general cheering from the Mitsubishi contingent as Drew handed over his chips then stood up to go mix a Triple-B—a “Blue-Balled on the Beach”.

He paused as the facility-wide tannoy chimed.

“All mining and construction section chiefs, please report to Meeting Room A. Mining and construction chiefs to Meeting Room A, thank you.”

Drew M just shrugged at him. They left the Speakeasy in the capable hands of Emma Henderson, one of the BAE engineers whose job revolve around keeping all the air inside the facility, and jogged up the stairs to the third floor of the survey drone hangar module and took the well-travelled shortcut through the misplaced Cargill Hydroponics Module.

The CHM’s managers had wisely decided to install a clear tunnel to keep traffic separate from the experimental crops, rather than ban the use of one of the most convenient routes through the station, meaning that for a minute or so they walked surrounded on all sides by growing plants, greenery and botanical research. The accidental placement of the CHM at the heart of the facility rather than on its outskirts had proved to be a real morale-booster—everybody seemed to love it, and there were always a few off-duty workers just hanging out in the tunnel, enjoying the sight of life flourishing in the experimental conditions.

From there, one of the many intersection modules, each of which played a vital role in damage control and life support. They hung a right through one of the three E·ON Power Modules, another intersection module, and finally into the Facility Administration and Resources Module.

It was a running gag on base that the companies which comprised the Ceres LLC had jointly and equally paid for this particular module because none of them individually wanted to buy the FARM.

Meeting Room A was just like any other meeting or boardroom. The same table, the same chairs. The large, expensive and structurally compromising windows seemed like an anachronism in the otherwise utilitarian Ceres Base. There was little point in having a breathtaking view of the inside of an irregular concrete dome, after all.

But eventually, that dome would be the innermost of a triple pressure hull 3D-printed in concrete made of Ceres’ own regolith. Eventually, landscaping and lakes and a simulacrum of a park on Earth would fill the open space inside the domes, complete with a projected sky and a day/night cycle. People could endure confinement inside the pressurised modules only for so long before the desire to get outside and feel a fresh breeze on their face could grow distracting. The facility intended to have that opportunity available for morale purposes quite early on, as soon as there were several sturdy layers of airtight concrete between the fragile human occupants and the voracious nothing outside.

The Drews weren’t the first to arrive, nor the last. They settled in at one end of the table and swapped small-talk and speculation while everybody filed in, some still dirty and sweaty from hardsuit time.

The last to arrive were the people who had presumably called the meeting. Only the very senior management wore suits on Ceres, and these four did—the representative managers for BHP-B, BAE and Skanska, along with the facility administrator, Adele Park, who did a quick head-count and nodded.

“Thank you all for coming.” she told them. “Before we begin, I need to confirm that the content of this meeting is subject to your non-disclosure agreements. Is everyone on board with that?”

There was a general nodding, and so she stood aside for the BAE rep.

“Last week, BAE Systems successfully bid on a contract for the British Ministry of Defence to begin construction of a fleet of starships.” he said. Drew C raised a hand. “Yes?”

“Last I checked that barrier’s still out there.” he pointed out.

“It is, but the customer doesn’t seem to care. May I continue?”

“Right, sorry.”

“The contract is for three spaceborne destroyers. We were fortunate in that we’ve been adapting our existing blueprints and coming up with new ones pretty much since the Second Space Race began, so we’ve got the plans. We just need somewhere to build them.” he indicated the BHP-B and Skanska reps. “That’s where our friends in the mining and construction industries come in.”

“Ceres is an ideal location for a dry-dock. We have existing infrastructure, none of the debris that would threaten a shipyard built in orbit over Earth, it’s a low-gravity environment and there’s a ready supply of raw materials right here, rolling straight out of the ore processor. We just need one built.”

He handed over to the Billiton rep, who activated the wall screen, showing off what were, to Drew C’s informed eye, clearly some pretty hasty plans.

“Stage one is going to be open-cast mining of Ceres itself.” he said. “There’s a lot of water-ice not far below us, that’s what we’ll mostly be digging through, but we can use it. We’ve already got a small supply pit meeting this facility’s water demands: if we expand that dig into the drydock pit then we’ll generate enough of a surplus to last us for years. Yes?”

This was in response to a construction team leader who was asking why the shipyard couldn’t just be built on the surface.

“Sinking it below the surface will protect the construction work from meteoroids and solar radiation. As a side benefit, the long-term plan for Ceres Base includes subterranean expansion, and the wall of the shipyard pit would serve very well for getting that expansions started, when we get that far. Not to mention the aforementioned valuable water.”

He glanced at his notes. “While the mine itself is going to be pretty standard, we’ll be working in vacuum and weak gravity, which are going to complicate things. Were reassigning Andrew Cavendish and Andrew Martin to foreman the project.”

“Really? Us?” Drew C asked.

The rep chuckled. “If you weren’t aware, Drew, as of three days ago you’re actually the man with the most EVA experience in the history of the human race.”

“That’s…news to me.”

“Well, it’s true. That thruster assembly you constructed on Monday was your eighteenth spacewalk and took you past the eighty-three hour mark. You’ve walked more often and for longer than Anatoly Solovyev. There’s nobody with more EVA experience, and that means we need you watching out for the miners when we bring them in.”

There was a general murmur of agreement and congratulations. Clearly the milestone had gone overlooked by everybody else as well. Drew had other things on his mind.

“If I’ve been out there that long, how’s my radiation count?” he asked.

“You’re fine. Those Red Bull suits have some imported alien radiation shielding technology in them. You got a worse dose when you were cutting granite back in two thousand five.”

Drew didn’t know if he exactly trusted alien technology—when it came to radiation, he felt a lot better with several meters of concrete protecting him, rather than some flimsy xeno solution, but he shrugged it off. The company stood to lose far too much if they lied to him about his dose.

“Okay. Do I get a raise?”

There was general laughter. Finally somebody was asking the important questions.

“Yes, Drew, you get a raise.” The rep smiled, rolling his eyes.

“Bloody lovely. I’ll draw up our safety guidelines and training.” he promised.

“Good. Anyway, once the pit’s at size, installing the gantries and structures to turn it into a shipyard is Skanska’s job. Tom, you want to take over?”

Drew only half-listened as the briefing continued, and barely registered Drew M nudging him in the elbow and murmuring “Good on yer, mate.”

He was getting paid more, and that meant he was a step closer to that tropical island.

Date Point: 4y 3m AV

Amnag-Dwuz Biotech Head Offices

Planet Origin, Corti Directorate Core World

It took less than a second for Director Nmrb’s life to change drastically. He went, during that second, from reading productivity reports and financial information, to falling out of his chair and fouling himself in terror as the expensive imported Cq’twj-wood door of his office—a wood renowned for its sterngth and solidity—was physically ripped out of its frame without there having been any kind of a hint from any source that there might be something outside of it that might wish to do so.

He crawled under the desk, mentally pulsing the panic alarm signal through his cybernetics.

The desk was physically picked up and, to add further insult to the scenario, was flung across the room with contemptuous ease. This did have the dubiously positive side-effect of revealing the identity of his assailant—five humans.

He would have vented again, if there’d been anything left in his system to manage it. Each one of the deathworlders was wrapped head to toe in equipment that had a dull, functional appearance to it, and carrying their weapons with apparent ease when he doubted that he himself would have been able to lift them unassisted.

“Fuckin’ ‘ell, boys!” Exclaimed the biggest one of them, probably the one that had accelerated his table across the room, where two of the others were using it for cover against any potential targets that might come through the door. “And I thought the fuckin’ robo-worms smelled bad!”

“Mind on the job. You. Name.” The new speaker, clearly a ranking individual, addressed Nmrb directly.

“N-Nmrb!” Nmrb squeaked. The big, loud one was carrying a gun that was a good half as large again as the others, and yet Nmrb’s translation implant was tentatively interpreting his body language—the face, sadly, was impossible to see behind the cloth and goggles—as nonchalant good humour.

“Good. You’re being abducted. Do not argue, do not resist, do not try to call for aid. We will know if you do. We don’t intend to hurt you, but the strength difference means you’ll be safer if we don’t have to restrain you. Do you understand?”

“Contact!” one of the others reported. “Robo-worms, three of them.”

Nmrb fought his emotions under control. The Annebenellin guards in this building were equipped for human suppression, this should be a short fight.

It was.

“Drop ‘em!”

The human who had reported contact fired his weapon. It chatter-spat three bursts of firepower. He did not need to shoot any more than that.

“Clear.” he reported, in a flat, calm tone of voice.

The leader turned his attention back to Nmrb. “Do you understand?” he repeated.

They left via the roof, where what was unmistakably a hunter dropship decloaked in the ripping winds, just long enough to collect them.

The second they were aboard and their weapons made safe, the team diverted their full attention to him. Nmrb took a look around the interior. Hunter though it had once been, the ship had obviously been badly damaged at some point and then hybridized with human technology to get it spaceworthy again. The interior was cramped and rugged, with straps and netting holding a variety of equipment snug against the walls and ceiling wherever there was room. Despite this, there was still plenty of space inside, a legacy of the fact that humans were physically much more compact than Hunters.

The commanding human produced a cloth and a flask of water, which Nmrb used to accomplish the humiliating process of cleaning himself. One of the soldiers just opened the ramp and threw the soiled thing out once he was done, apparently unperturbed by the terminal-velocity drop outside, or the angry wind that snatched at him.

They had given him time to think at least. Time to recover his wits and his dignity.

“You have questions for me.” he said, exercising the full extent of his species’ emotional discipline.

“Our commanding officer does. We’re just the collection detail.” said the leader.

“And your commanding officer is…?”

“Always angry.” said the big one. The humans laughed, even the leader.

They were headed into orbit, and that alone troubled Nmrb. While the Hunter raiding-ship was especially designed to infiltrate even heavily-defended words, relying on its tiny size and cloak to evade detection, nothing that might loiter in orbit could possibly do so for very long without the use of ultra-advanced cloaking technology. Even the puny dimple in local spacetime made by its own mass gravity would have to be smoothed out.

Nevertheless, they landed, without having gone to FTL, and without having re-entered the atmosphere.

There was a detail of more human soldiers on deck, plus a human in a different uniform. She stepped forward smartly and addressed Nmrb directly.

“Welcome aboard HMS Caledonia.” She said. “My name is Lieutenant Ellen McDaniel: As your advocate, my job is to see to it that your rights as an intelligent being are not violated during your stay here.”

“Why am I here?” Nmrb demanded.

“You have been detained on suspicion of conspiracy to perform an act of genocide.” McDaniel told him. “Furthermore we suspect that you are complicit in-”

“Genocide?!” Nmrb exclaimed. McDaniel didn’t so much as blink.

“As I was saying, you are also suspected of complicity in the detonation of a weapon of mass destruction within the bounds of the city of San Diego on Earth, leading directly to the death of more than two million individuals.”

She handed him a datapad. “Your arrest is legal under section nine hundred and seven point two, paragraph twelve of the three hundred and third resolution of the Dominion Justice Council.”

“You aren’t Dominion signatories.” Nmrb snapped, scanning the datapad.

“The right of non-members to exercise Dominion law against signatory members is outlined in section…”

“Yes, yes…” Nmrb was familiar with the principle. It was both irritating and alarming to see that the humans had become so well-informed about the minutiae of Dominion law, so quickly.

He pressed his thumb to the biometric patch at the datapad’s corner, confirming his legal status—detained for questioning, but not yet on trial, with a maximum duration to his detainment no longer than three standard diurnals, and not a short unit duration longer.

“Thank you. Please follow me.”

The Caledonia’s layout had a degree of familiarity to it, but some unique twists. It was almost a Corti ship in its construction, but there were elements to the architecture and configuration that were more in keeping with Alliance shipbuilding principles. Whoever had originally built it had obviously not been human, however: the deathworlders’ aftermarket modifications cut through the ship like a sour note, crude but sturdy in contrast to the technological elegance that surrounded them. The most striking change was the introduction of thick steel doors at regular intervals along the corridors, operated physically and probably requiring more strength than most beings could muster. It was clearly a counter-boarding measure, though Nmrb couldn’t for a moment envision who—or what—would be so self-destructively reckless as to board any vessel known to contain more than one human.

Their tour was not a long one. McDaniel led him into a room whose original purpose had probably not involved the human-built furniture that dominated the middle—a large oval table and several chairs.

“Mr. Nmrb, sirs.” McDaniel said, impressing him with her ability to pronounce his name correctly.

The room contained several more humans, these ones very plainly commanders to judge by the apparent structure of the rank insignia they wore. The one anomaly was wearing no obvious uniform at all, just patterned dark green lower-limb garments, a black torso-garment, and a dark green head covering with a badge on the front depicting a blade bisecting two parallel blue lines, and the motto “By Strength And Guile”.

“Right.” he said. None of the others spoke, giving the impression that this…under-identified individual either outranked them, or held their esteem. He flopped a large hardcopy printout onto the table. “D’you recognise these fookin’ things?”

Nmrb examined the image, eager to co-operate and be returned to the planet below.

The things in the image were a little hard to place for a second, but then he interrogated his memory cybernetic, and felt dread settle on him.

He was looking at a complete set of the custom neural implants. These ones had been carefully removed from their recipient’s brain and preserved as best as crude Terran surgery could allow, but the delicate nanofilaments that actually did the work of interfacing with the recipient’s neural structure on the ultrafine level were all unsurprisingly severed. There was no way the patient could have survived their excision, assuming they had been alive at all when they went on the operating table.

“Those are not from our standard catalogue.” he said, stalling for time.

“That’s not what I asked. I asked if you recognise them.”

The Corti reputation for intellect was not accidental, nor the product of bluff and propaganda, and Nmrb was sharp even by Corti standards. He resurrected knowledge and skills that he had not been called upon to exercise in many years, and analysed the items in the picture with a cyberneticist’s eye, rather than an administrator’s.

“This one appears to be a custom motor neurone bridging implant.” he said. “It seems to have been specialized for installation in your own species, but-”

“I didn’t ask you what they are.” the human repeated. Something about his tone of voice shot straight into the primitive depths of Nmrb’s hindbrain and sent desperate signals to the effect that something very dangerous was angry at him. “I asked you whether you fookin’ recognise them.”

“I d-don’t.” Nmrb stammered, lying.

“That’s funny, because they’ve got all the signatures of having come the labs YOU worked in and administrate.”

“In which case,” suggested one of the other humans, this one wearing insignia which if Nmrb understood the logic correctly—indicated that he was the highest-ranking officer. “Allowing him to continue his analysis of their function may be worth our while.”

Nmrb decided that he liked this one, even as he recognised the strategy of using the voice of aggression and the voice of calm reason in opposition against one another to pressure him.

He cleared his throat, and bowed slightly to the advocate of sensibility. “As I was saying. This next one is…a top of the line interspecies communication implant, we don’t even sell these yet. This third one look like a…neuroplasticity inhibitor?”

“You sound confused by that.”

“Neuroplasticity inhibitors are built to correct a disorder that affects about one in every eight thousand Corti.” Nmrb explained. “I can think of no reason why one would be installed in a human. This fourth one appears to be a high-end augmentation package. Those are highly customisable so I cannot tell you its exact function, but typical options would include cybernetic instant-access memory, logical sub-processors, focus and attention boosters, or even communications. We currently have no production models of any of these implants suitable for installation in a human.”

“Why not?”

“Economically unviable given the quarantine of your homeworld.”

“But you could build these.”

“We did build these, it seems. Just from looking at a picture, I cannot give you more information than I already have.”

“So this is a custom order. We will need to know who the client is.”

“And how am I supposed to explain this breach of client confidentiality to the board?”

The unmarked one with the surly attitude spoke again. “The ‘client’ is responsible for the destruction of a city on Earth, and we’re fookin’ angry about that.” He snarled. It really was incredible how this being’s anger seemed to directly bypass every refined Corti mental trick and intimidate the lingering animal part. “D’you think that explanation might work?”

“Given your…unexpected and alarming apparent ability to operate away from your homeworld despite the existence of a supposedly impenetrable barrier, I’m sure that this information will have…some effect, yes.” Nmrb agreed, finding it quite hard to retain his composure under the human’s oh-so-carnivorous glare.

“Good.”

Date Point: 4y 3m AV

HMS Myrmidon, in orbit around Cimbrean.

“Well, it’s official. The existence of this colony is now public knowledge, both on Earth and out in the greater galaxy.”

Sir Jeremy Sandy seemed remarkably well-rested considering how hectic his last few days must have been. Preparing the colony to go public, recording a press statement, finalizing the provisional draft of the opening proposals for the first Colonial Council, a formal naming ceremony for Folctha and so much more should have taken a real toll on him. Instead, the Old Man—everybody referred to him as that, respectfully—seemed composed and steady.

It was the considered opinion of Captain David Manning that the Old Man must have absolutely cast-iron discipline about his sleep schedule.

It was a skill he himself had never learned, and he was constantly suffering for it, but there was just so much to do. Assimilating the two plundered Hierarchy vessels—since renamed Caledonia and Myrmidon—into the Royal Navy was always going to have been an immense task, especially given the total lack of appropriate orbital facilities to refit them, anywhere in humanity’s controlled territory.

That hadn’t changed. While Earth’s stipend from the Dominion as a newly-Contacted race, plus the compensation settlement for the Enclosure, had been more than enough to afford a top-class shipyard, the fact was that securing such a thing from either side would have upset the delicate neutrality that was the Global Representative Assembly’s choice of policy.

Besides, there was good reason not to trust the alien tech. So much of it was unknown, so little of it operating at standards of safety or redundancy which would have satisfied even the most slapdash of human engineers. Thin single-skin hulls held together by forcefields were, presumably, at least safe enough to run a major interstellar economy or two on, but they didn’t come close to the rigorous demands of the British Armed Services.

All of which meant that such infrastructure would need to be bootstrapped on Earth, which would take months at the bare minimum.

So, the ships were effectively being refit in flight. Even having large chunks powered down, depressurised, replaced and powered up again. They were barely recognisable as being the same sleek vessels that had first arrived at Cimbrean months ago. Gone were the quantum reactor cores, spirited away to Earth for study and replaced by vast banks of supercapacitors. Gone too were the coilguns, plasma cannons and missile tubes. The outer hulls, once mirror-polished artistic marvels, had been methodically stripped off, reshaped, sanded, and slathered in matte-black RADAR-absorbent stealthing paint. That alone had taken the crew literal months of angle-grinding and wire-brushing, made all the more complicated by the fact that, helped though they were by the artificial gravity, they still had to work in spacesuits. Which meant training them first.

Caledonia’s urgent mission had pulled her away long before the refit was completed. There was still a cloud of marooned hull panels orbiting gently at her anchorage. Myrmidon was more intact—her stealthing was complete, and the first two of a total of seven Skymaster guns had now been installed, powered and connected to their magazines, as had the first of a trio of Phalanx CIWS.

Much had been kept, of course. The cloak remained, as did the single quantum core necessary to power it indefinitely. The ship’s “keel”—the thick structural spine to which the engines and hull were both anchored—had been reinforced rather than replaced. The small craft bays were untouched, though everybody wanted some kind of physical door to supplement the atmosphere retention field. The general internal layout was completely unchanged, except for having been stripped of anything remotely resembling electronics. The plumbing and electrical wiring was similarly untouched—even aliens, it seemed, couldn’t screw up the basic logistics of getting water and electricity safely throughout the ship without their leaking or meeting.

It was an immense task, only just now beginning to approach the end of Phase One. It would be another year of hard work before Myrmidon was completely renovated to the satisfaction of her captain and his superiors.

“We could have done with another week.” he told Sir Jeremy. “After that, all the weapons will be active.”

“The system shield is our first line of defence anyway. With all respect, Captain, two half-rebuilt ships won’t hold off the Great Hunt if it comes down on us.”

“True.” Manning allowed. “but I’d still feel safer with more firepower.”

“A week isn’t so very long.”

“In Civic Planning, maybe. Anyway, thanks for the update. Good luck with the Press.”

He returned to his paperwork. There was always so much to do…

Date Point: 4y 3m 1w AV

Independent Trade Station 104: “Auspice of Prosperity”

“The whole station?”

“Oh yes. All because they allowed a few humans to live there.”

The whispering pair spared a shifty glance in Miranda’s direction, clearly thinking they were out of earshot, and were being covert. Maybe they would have been, with any other species.

She tucked into a nutrient sphere, one of the four on her plate. The non-flavour and non-texture of the universal foodstuff was at least better than the bad taste being left in her mouth by the overheard conversation.

She ignored it, slipping into her inhale-pause-exhale-pause meditation, until one phrase slipped past her attention.

“…should throw her out the airlock.”

“Murder me? Really?”

She wouldn’t have chosen to speak. If the decision had been conscious, she would have kept silent. But her weary outrage outpaced her discipline, and the words sang on the air, loud enough to bring conversation in the entire dining hall to instant silence.

The one who had said it—a Kwmbwrw female—both shrank and bristled.

Damage done. In for an inch, in for a mile. She stood, carrying her chair with her, set it up at the two conspirators’ table, reversed and straddled. “Care to tell me how killing a fellow sophont to save your own hide is any better than what the Hunters are doing?”

The other conspirator—this one a relatively slim Locayl—cleared his throat, a gesture held in common with humans.

“My friend Gwnrwt here has lost family to the Hunters.” he rumbled, expression conciliatory. “The subject makes her-”

“Don’t apologise on my behalf, Golron.” the Kwmbwrw snapped. “I can tidy my own burrow, thank you.”

“As you say. If you’ll excuse me while I fetch a second helping then…” the Locayl stood, then addressed Miranda. “Would you like a measure of water? I understand your species need a lot of it.”

“That’s very thoughtful.” Miranda thanked him. “Yes please.”

Gwnwrt watched him go, then sneered at her. “Expecting an apology, human?”

“How would you feel if total strangers were talking about spacing you just for being a Kwmbwrw?”

“Kwmbwrw don’t endanger everybody on the station just by being here.”

“I’ve got to be somewhere.”

“Out the airlock is somewhere.”

Miranda was pleased to see that despite her Kwmbwrw antagonist’s bravado, a cool stare still made her very uncomfortable. “I don’t even know why I bothered.” she snapped, standing. “

Beings scattered as she strode out of the room, instinctively recoiling from the sight of an angry Deathworlder.

She was impressed when the Locayl—Golron—caught up with her down the corridor. His longer legs at least gave him the burst of speed to catch up with her angry stride, though it left him thoroughly out of breath.

“What do you want?” She snapped.

“My friend is…” he began, wheezing.

“A hell-bitch?”

“That…didn’t translate.”

She relaxed. He had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to catch up, the least she could do was hear him out.

“I wasn’t being kind about her.”

“I…guessed…As much. Whew.” He straightened up, still breathing heavily but clearly more in control again now.

“What do you want, Golron?”

“She thought you were staying here for some selfish reason when there’s an alternative available.”

“What alternative?”

“I thought so! You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“I was wondering why you would stay here when people like Gwnwrt must make life so hard, and when the Great Hunt is out there scouring for humans and devouring innocents on places like the Exos station, but then it occurred to me that maybe you haven’t heard.”

“Heard what, Golron?” Miranda practically burst.

“Your people have a colony now. A place where you could settle among your own kind, or maybe even go home. No more prejudice, no more…” he looked back down the corridor.

“No more hypocrisy? If I’d lost family to the Hunters, I would never suggest throwing somebody else to them.”

He sighed. “I really am sorry.”

“Don’t be. You didn’t say it.”

They stood in silence for a moment as she thought. “Did you hear this colony’s name?”

“Folctha, on the planet Cimbrean. They announced it a few [days] ago.”

“I bet the Dominion didn’t like that.”

“The planet in question is on the far side of the Celzi front line, and the Alliance have vocally supported your species’ right to self-determination.” Golron told her. “I’m sure the Dominion is very unhappy indeed.”

She laughed, although it was spoiled just a little as Golron recoiled from the flash of teeth. Nobody seemed to understand smiling. And it would be nice…

“Thank you, Golron. I think I might just go there.”

“It’s probably the best thing for everyone.” he agreed. “I’m sorry we weren’t clear with you earlier. We just gossiped rather than actually talking with you.”

“Well, you came through in the end. You and I are fine. Gwnwrt can still go fuck herself though.”

“That seems…”

“Anatomically impossible, I know.” she finished the all-too-familiar objection wearily.

She definitely needed to be back among her own kind.

Fortunately, she had just enough saved up. It would be a one-way trip, but the important part was, she could afford it.

Date Point 4y 4m 3w AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

“No! NO!!” Drew elbowed his way between the new miners and singled out the culprit. “You do not just check your own seal and trust it. You check your friend’s, and get him to check yours, and then you both get a third opinion!”

He leaned in and tapped the newcomer’s faceplate to punctuate his next sentence, pleased to see that they had gone pale inside their hardsuit. “The alternative (tap) is that you die (tap). Come on, this is the most basic stuff, you already went over this down on Earth!”

“Sorry, boss.” the offender mumbled.

“Don’t give me ‘sorry’.” he growled, grabbing the helmet and yanking. It popped right off. “If you had tried to go out there, we’d have had to blow the emergency repressure on the airlock, and that costs seven thousand pounds and a couple of burst eardrums. Get. Your seal. Checked.”

“Yes, boss.”

“Right. Get that helmet back on.”

He watched as the newbie did so, and as his team members checked and double-checked the seal, to everyone’s apparent satisfaction.

“Right. Time to head out there. Now remember, outside the modules the surface gravity is only point-two-seven M slash S. That’s point zero-two-nine Gs. So until we’re clear of any overhead structures, we are going to shuffle, keeping our feet on the floor. Walking normally will bounce you into the air like a bloody ball. If you jump, you aren’t coming back down again for minutes. Your SAFER pack is for emergencies only. Is everyone clear?”

There was a general muttering of “yes boss”. He didn’t bother to ask them to sound off—this wasn’t the military—but he made eye contact with every single one to make sure they weren’t just agreeing by rote.

“Fine. Let’s go.”

There was, he knew, a lot of work still to do. It took time for people to intuitively recognise the difference between weight and mass. It took even longer for them to finally understand that working in a vacuum and under microgravity was actually harder work than down on Earth. Only two—and these two he knew were going to turn out to be excellent members of the team—had started their hardsuit careers by spending time wearing the suit and customising it with tape and padding and a little swatch of velcro inside the helmet and a stylus or piece of wire on one of their fingers. The others would be pinched and blistered by the time they came back indoors in a few hours’ time, distracted and maddened by the inevitable itches, and frustrated by the thick gloves’ inability to handle delicate work.

He caught a glimpse of the artwork that one of the two customizers had done on the side of his helmet. It was actually a sticky decal, a classic trashy pin-up of a rock chick with tattoos holding up a prominent full house. The scrollwork underneath read “Aces and Kings”.

Trashy and cliched though the decal was, it was a sensible idea for immediate identification, and Drew decided he would get one of his own as soon as possible.

The airlock cycled, and the newbies took their first steps into vacuum.

In his heart of hearts, Drew couldn’t have been happier.

Date Point: 4y 4m 3w AV

Phoenix, Arizona, USA, Earth.

Gabriel Arés

Adam and Ava had school. Neither felt up to it, but Gabriel had put his foot down. They still needed an education, and they needed a return to something resembling normalcy for the sake of their mental health.

Phoenix had heard the death of San Diego. The shockwave had faded to the point of only cracking a few windows and setting off some car alarms by the time it washed over central Arizona, but it had still been loud—nobody in the city had failed to notice it, with even Phoenix’s deaf residents feeling the noise deep inside their chests.

It was tough for Gabriel, too. He didn’t know anybody in this city, pretty much all of his friends and living relatives had lived in San Diego. Aside from a few distant cousins in Guadalajara and the handful of SDPD officers who had, like him, been out of town on the day their city was killed, there was nobody left.

Phoenix, he suspected, was just temporary. But he had no idea where would come next. And after moving all their stuff in and getting the kids off to school, he was finding himself sitting around watching movies and resisting the urge to drink. That way, he knew, led self-destruction.

He was lost in a black mood when his phone rang, the default wooden-ish staccato notes taking a few seconds to percolate through Bruce Willis fleeing the cops in a flying taxi.

“Hello?”

“Hello there, is this detective Gabriel Arés?” The voice had a British accent.

“Sí. Retired.”

“Sir, my name is Sean Howard, I work for the Cimbrean colonial administration. Your name was forwarded to me by a Mr. Jenkins at the Scotch Creek research facility?”

“Jenkins? Yes, I know him. What’s he doing forwarding my name to you?”

“With the colony having gone public and opened its doors to potential settlers, we’re beginning to establish our civilian law enforcement. You came highly recommended.”

“Me?” Gabriel shifted uncomfortably as his abused spine twinged at him. “Why? I’m not exactly fighting fit any more.”

“We still need a chief of police. Somebody to handle policy, set up our police service, and to take an investigative role if—God forbid—we need it. You won’t be expected to go chasing anywhere.”

“So it’s a desk job, then?”

“A highly-paid and senior one in the colonial administration, complete with accomodation for you and any dependents.”

“I’ve got two teenagers under my care.”

“We have a school, sir. We’re trying to attract families, we take education seriously.”

“And why would I want to leave Earth?”

“That’s for you to decide, sir. But we intend to build a good life out of here. A fresh start, the model for humanity’s future. I can’t tell you whether or not you’re interested in being involved in that.”

Gabriel thought about it. After a few moments of silence, Howard spoke. “It’s a big decision, you’re under no pressure detective, but with your qualifications and background we’d love to have you. I’ll let you think about it.”

“Thank you.”

Howard hung up.

Gabriel was still thinking about it when the kids got home.

Date Point: 4y 6m AV

Folctha, Cimbrean

Ava Rios

”-na take ¡cojeme!”

Adam’s hands jerked up in alarm as the world around them blinked. One instant, it was the dull concrete and steel interior of a hangar somewhere in Canada, and the next…well, a palace. Or at least the glass and steel structure on the lawn of a palace that housed Folctha’s end of the Jump Array.

The architecture was a lot strange, but elegant—all curves and loops and domes, looking more like something that had been gently coaxed out of the landscape rather than built atop it.

She giggled at his alarm, and it surprised even her—ever since her parents had died in the San Diego blast, mirth had been hard to find, but it sprang back suddenly, watching her boyfriend jump out of his skin at the sudden change.

“Language.” she teased. He blushed, noticing that others in the colonist group were grinning at him, although most were also clearly recovering from their own surprise.

She smiled at his back as he scowled and hoisted the bags that contained all his and Gabriel’s worldly possessions. Gabriel protested that he could carry his own load, but Adam knew better—the older Arés, a handsome and grey-haired mirror-image of his son, was too stubborn to admit that his injury still impeded him—long hours in the gym had gone a long way toward restoring his fitness, but the bullet had done permanent harm that would never quite go away.

Ava wheeled her own bag behind her, taking in the sights as they emerged through a short tunnel, passing through a gossamer orange curtain of light that tingled her skin and made her teeth feel strange.

The air beyond was cool. Cold, even. Not the biting chill she’d felt during their few days at Scotch Creek, that invaded her clothing and pinched at her skin, but the cold of a crisp spring morning, though it looked like full daytime. The air tasted…sweet, almost. There was only a tang of wood smoke on it, which if anything only enhanced the certainty that this was a place that humanity had yet to leave any kind of a permanent footprint on.

The sun was strange, too. It was…more orange, slightly. A little larger. It made the place look warm, even while the air felt chilly.

There was a smattering of cheers and applause from a small crowd that had gathered to greet the new arrivals. A silver-haired man in a suit was shaking hands and offering warm welcomes.

They’d been prepared for the cold, of course. Cimbrean’s immigration policy included funding to buy some rugged clothes suitable for the colony. Out of their own pockets, she and Adam had paid for some customization, with the result that their jackets bore matching patches on the sleeve—skyscrapers and a phoenix, and the legend “De las Cenizas”.

Avoiding the governor who was warmly shaking Gabriel’s hand and welcoming him to Folctha, she looked around.

To her relief, she immediately spotted that a second group had formed off on the sidelines—Folctha’s junior citizens, some of whom waved at her when they saw her notice them. She tapped Adam on the arm to get his attention, pointed them out, and together they broke away from the group to meet their new peers.

It was quite the mix. Most were obviously English—there was just something about how they stood, did their hair, what they wore that screamed it, even before they spoke—and quite the age range, too. She and Adam were probably toward the older end of the spectrum—the youngest was clearly only about nine years old.

There wasn’t a lot of makeup being worn, she noticed, becoming suddenly and absurdly conscious of her own, subtle though it was. In the last couple of years, makeup had started to become more of a male thing in schools too—the boys had turned out to be just as vain as the girls once the makeup companies had broken a generations-old prejudice and started marketing foundation at the adolescent male market. It had been met with ridicule and even outrage among some parents, but had caught on.

It was slightly strange to realise that now, the only other person wearing any makeup at all in this little group was her boyfriend.

There were introductions, some stereotypically British apologies about being “terrible at names” and apologising in advance for getting them wrong…really, it was just like going to a new school, though as far as she could tell it was refreshingly free of drama.

“So, what are you guys going to be doing?” she asked.

“It’s all apprenticeships right now.” one of the girls—Gwen—told her. “But the colony’s not really settled yet, it’s only a couple of months old. I was thinking I’d go for nursing, maybe doctor, but it depends on what we need.”

“Botany.” Kieron said, firmly.

“I’m already doing it. I’m the colony’s only journalist!” That part had been obvious. Sara—at the absolute most, only fourteen years old—was wearing a big dSLR camera and a tablet computer in a satchel on her hip and had been taking notes and pictures throughout. “What about you?” She asked of Adam. She had that popped-hip, interested look that Ava knew well, so she nestled up to him and took his arm, just to make sure both of them were clearly off-limits. Some of the guys had been looking at her with interest too.

If he noticed the attention, Adam gave no sign of it. “Law enforcement.” he said. “It’s what I was planning on doing back on Earth.”

“Oh, wait, your dad’s our new police chief, isn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“What about you, Ava?”

“Like, uh, Gwen said, I guess it depends on what we need. I mean, the plans I had don’t really…I mean, like, who needs a theatrical makeup artist here?”

“Go for it anyway.” Big Jack shrugged. “Can you do hair?”

“Uh, yeah. A bit.”

“There you go then.”

“I don’t know, I never saw myself as a stylist.” Ava protested. “I like the girly stuff, but not, like, enough to do it for a living.”

“Well, if nothing else, it’s something to do until you find somebody to apprentice under, and you could earn some money.” Sara said. She spoke in a hummingbird blur, so fast that it was sometimes hard to tell where one word end and the next began, and was constantly being told to slow down by the others. “I mean I know my mum would love to get her hair done and her nails and some of the men have really ewww beards now so maybe you could learn to shave too, you could make a lot of money just helping people stay…”

“Hey, no pressure.” Adam interrupted her, hugging Ava round her waist. “We don’t need to rush in, we don’t even know where we’re sleeping yet.”

“Oh, your house is all built and ready!” That was Little Jack, the youngest kid in the group who’d so far remained silent and let the bigger kids gossip. He turned to Sara, whose identical brown hair suggested they were siblings. “Can I show them? Please?”

Sara laughed indulgently. “Oh kaaay” she mock-relented. “I’ll come with you. See you tonight, guys!”

They walked away, Little Jack running forward and then occasionally stopping to grouse about how slow they were being.

“Were you told where you’re staying?” she asked.

“We were told there’d be a house. Dad was pretty spare on the details.” Adam admitted.

“Not just any house, you two are getting your own!” Sara said. “You’re so lucky, I have to stay with Mum and Dad and Jack.”

“Our own place? Like, just us? I figured we’d be staying with Gabriel…” Ava glanced back down the road to where Arés senior was still meet-and-greeting with, presumably, the colony’s most important people. He’d sunk gratefully onto a camp stool while he talked.

“Oh, he’s up on Palace Rise.” Sara said, pointing toward the half-rebuilt palace. “All the admin people live up there. You’re down here on Delaney Row, near the school.”

“Delaney Row?” Ava asked.

“You’ve got street names already?” Adam followed up.

“Yeah!” Sara said. “Jen Delaney was the first governor here. She handed it over to Sir Jerry and left. I heard the soldiers talking about her, they all think she’s really badass and they say she can shoot a gun really accurately and she told them all off one time because they saw her naked and were staring but she didn’t care, so they voted to name one of the housing zones after her.”

“Voted where?” Adam asked her.

“The Thing.”

“Like…council, senate?”

“No, the Thing. It’s an old word, I think Norse? You know, Vikings? It’s like, the whole town getting together to talk and vote. Sir Jerry says it’s the best kind of democracy for right now because we’re still so small.”

Sara clearly had an enthusiasm for sharing knowledge that was the hallmark of a born journalist, coupled to the motor mouth of a born irritant. “One of the sessions, we voted on what to call everything. So we’ve got Palace Rise, Delaney Row, Crash Avenue, Camp Uplift—that’s the army, you’ll like them, they’re really tidy…uh, cool— we’ve not got names right down to streets yet because there’s not really any streets and…oh, we’re here.”

Adam and Ava’s house turned out to be tiny. In fact, it could have fit comfortably inside a large room. Inside, though, it turned out to be pure efficient space. It had everything—The living room doubled as a kitchen, complete with cooker, dishwasher and washer/dryer (though these both had signs on them warning that they weren’t yet working), a folding-out dining table that recessed cleverly into the floor when not in use, and a fridge. The bed was up a short, extremely steep flight of stairs that doubled as storage, and below it were the bathroom, complete with a shower and bath, and even a spare room. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than twenty feet long, and even included a porch.

“They’ve still not got the town water set up yet,” Sara continued “but there’s, like, a collector on the roof for rainwater, that should keep you going until that happens. Dad says it’s really clean because Cimbrean is a class Four world, so apparently you can drink right out of the stream if you want, but he said it’s still not a great idea to do that just in case, so the collector purifies the rainwater, and you’ve got a little water heater. It’s really cool, it only rains at night here, you get to listen to rain on the roof every night. It’s amazing.”

She paused for breath, then seemed to recall the principle of letting other people get a word in sideways. “What do you think?”

Ava just looked at Adam, who was gazing around with one of only a few genuine smiles she had seen on him in months. “I think…wow. I think wow.” He said. Ava nodded, pleased that he was so pleased.

Sara just beamed, then seemed to remember something. “Oh, yeah, I made you a welcome gift!”

She produced an ovoid disc of sanded wood—though Ava guess that the wood in question was nothing that might be found on Earth. Before applying a coat of varnish, somebody had carefully pyrographed a single word onto it.

“EDEN.”

“It’s…a house name sign. You know? With your names, I thought…do you like it?”

“I like it.” Ava told her. Adam nodded beside her.

“I helped!” Jack exclaimed.

“No you didn’t, you watched!” Sara protested. “I did all the work.”

“Nuh-uh, Dad did all the work, you just wrote on it, and I helped because I fetched the sandpaper for him!”

“It’s wonderful.” Ava assured them both. “I’ll hang it up after we’re done unpacking.”

“Oh okay. I should get back up to the palace and take pictures and see who’s arrived so I can put it in the newsletter anyway.” Sara beamed. “See you tonight?”

“What’s happening tonight?”

“We’re having a big cookout like we always do when new people come. Just follow your nose, you can’t miss it!”

“Okay. We’ll see you there.” Adam promised.

The little house became noticeably quieter the second the brother and sister were gone. Ava sank onto the couch with a sigh, finding it extremely comfortable considering how small it was. “Wow. What does she run on?” she grumbled.

Adam just chuckled, still poking around. “Our own place! I KNEW Dad was keeping a secret!”

“I know…hey.” Ava stood up, took his hand, turned him towards her and kissed him. “I’m kinda scared.” she admitted.

“Of what?”

“Adam, come on. We’re sixteen. I mean come on, we’re still kids! But everybody’s treating us like we’re not, even your dad. I don’t know if I want to be treated like an adult yet.”

“I guess…” He agreed. “It’s like…our first date was, what, less than a year ago? Ten months.”

“Yeah. And that scares me because now…like, here we are. Living together, on our own, starting a new life. Like we’re…um.” She trailed off, not quite willing to say the word that hung on the end of that sentence.

“Like we’re…Yeah.” He agreed.

“Yeah…”

She rested her head against his chest, and it made his voice sound bassy and warm as he rubbed her hair and confessed “I’m scared too.”

It made her feel a lot better.

Date Point: 4y 6m AV

Lockheed-Martin Skunk Works, Nevada Desert

Rylee Jackson

It felt like a very personal kind of heresy, but the second she saw her new sled, Rylee fell in love all over again.

She heard her own enthusiasm without really registering that she was saying it. “Oh. My. God. Look at this thing!”

It was definitely the child of the TS-101. The lines were very similar, but…sleeker. Finer. Sharper, somehow. The GAU-8/S housing was smoother and flusher with the hull, the barrel itself seeming an organic part of the vehicle rather than the chunky load it had been on Pandora. The prominent, tumorous ESFALS blisters were now mere subte swellings in the belly. The kinetic thrusters had been moved and sunk into the hull, finally getting rid of an obsolete concession to air intake. The cockpit was longer, lower, built for two.

She was like Pandora after a makeover, with her war paint on. Meaner, leaner and keener. Even in the hangar, even with a tarp still draped over her, she looked like the empress of the sky.

“Thought you’d like her.” The chief engineer said, grinning. She could have kissed him then and there. But there was an important question to ask first.

“When do I get to fly her?”

“Come on, you don’t think we’d tease you like that, do you?” he asked. “She’s ready now.”

“Oh!” Rylee beamed at him “I love you.”

“Ahh, I bet you say that to all the guys who give you a multi-million dollar aerospace vehicle.”

Rylee giggled at that. “You got me. But okay, what’s she called?”

“Officially? She’s the Lockheed-Martin EF slash A three-thirty-six TS mark two. But we’re open to suggestions on a fancy name to go with that…”

Rylee reached up and touched her new beloved’s hull for the first time. It was warm to the touch, and after the events of only a few months ago, she could think of only one appropriate name.

“Firebird.”

Date Point: 4y 6m 1w AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

“…Criticized the President’s handling of the aftermath of the San Diego blast as the USA officially slipped into recession this week with the economy recording its second successive quarter of decline. The Dow Jones and FTSE 100 index fell sharply in response to the news, fuelling worldwide fears that the aftermath of San Diego’s destruction will be a worldwide financial crisis, though China’s SSE Index closed trading up three-…“

“Hey, I was bloody watching that!” Drew M complained. It was uncharacteristic of Cavendish to just march into the office and shut off the news feed.

Then again, it was uncharacteristic of him to be unwashed and still wearing his hardsuit’s underlayer around the office.

“Yes, well, we have a serious problem.”

Drew M snapped immediately into business mode—his boots swung down from the desk and he blurred through a series of keyboard shortcuts, summoning the serious incident forms. “What happened?”

“Nothing, exactly. But it was this close to being a dead miner.” Cavendish dropped something on the desk.

“What’s this?”

“Hardsuit heat regulation field emitter. It’s an essential component of the life support system. Supposed to keep you-”

“I know what it does, mate.”

“Aye, sorry.”

“This one broken?”

“Malfunctioning. It was drawing in heat constantly. If Aces wasn’t super careful, He’d have gone out that airlock and slowly heated up and heated up until the hyperthermia got him.”

“Aces?”

“Kessler. I call them all by their helmet decals these days. Bless ‘im, he’s a careful one, he runs a full diagnostic before we head out, every time. That’s why he caught it. Anybody else…”

“I’ll write it up.” Drew M promised.

“Yeah, well. Don’t put this next bit in the report, mate.”

Cavendish shut the door. “Between you and me, I suspect foul play.”

“Holy dooley, Drew. You sure?”

“If I was sure, I wouldn’t be telling you to keep it dark. But we ran a full check on these things last night. It happened exactly when we were least likely to catch it, and exactly when it was least likely to happen, too.”

“That’d be right.”

“Yeah, well. As team lead I’m making a decision here—full check, every day.”

“That’ll shave an hour off our work time every shift. That adds up, mate—you’ll put the whole project behind schedule.” Drew M protested. His heart wasn’t really into it, though. When it came down to it, they both knew that deadlines were less important than lives.

“As opposed to a man dying out there because of an equipment failure we could have caught that morning? Not on my watch, Drew.”

“Nah, yeah. You go ahead and get that done, I’ll fill in the report. But we’ll keep the sabotage idea on the down-low and keep an eye out for now, right?”

“And hope I’m wrong, yes.”

Drew was in a thoughtful mood as he returned to the hardsuit maintenance workshop. His helmet was lying exactly where he’d left it, uncharacteristically untidy atop the workbench. He’d relented and agreed to a pinup for his helmet decal after they had swept through the team, driven by Jenny O’neill’s decision to have a shirtless and otter-muscled samurai adoring hers. Cavendish’s own was still relatively tasteful—the girl was seen from behind looking back over her shoulder, wearing a blaze orange boiler suit and a welding mask to match the torch on her other shoulder. The only real concessions to titillation were the way the boiler suit clung to her figure just a little too well, a hint of sideboob, and the obligatory pout.

Strong colours and a shape that was easily identified at a distance were the order of the day—the pinups had become a critical part of recognising one another in the strange lighting conditions of an asteroid’s surface. While each of the pinups was certainly nice to look at up close, being able to glance at the side of a team member’s head and see O’neill’s splash of purple Hakama, or Kessler’s strong black and white, was a godsend for immediate identification. Even the experimental RFID system wasn’t so useful, except at longer distances.

“What’s the verdict?” He asked. He’d left the team to run diagnostics on their gear in response to Kessler’s near-miss.

Chitsenga shook her head. Her helmet decal was of a dreadlocked guitar player. “All clean.” she reported.

“Good. Take ten, then we’re going to suit up and get back out there. May as well get a half day in.” They all nodded and filed out to freshen up, grab a bite, take a toilet break or whatever else they did to prepare for hours out in the pit, and pretty soon he was left alone with Kessler, who was still fastidiously calibrating the faulty emitter’s replacement.

“Did you check the footage?” Kessler asked him.

“Not yet.”

Kessler just grunted and jerked a thumb towards the workshop’s only computer. Drew shrugged, passing off the gesture—brusque even by Kessler’s terse standards—as the product of stress and a near-miss with death, and opened the security camera footage.

He wasn’t remotely surprised when, two hours before the start of shift, eight minutes of footage turned out to be corrupted.

Date Point: 4y 6m AV

Office of the Director of the CIA, Washington DC, USA, Earth

“He was as good as his word, actually. I think our chaps impressed upon him that if we were inclined to bring him back in for another little chat, there would be little he could do to stop us.”

“Yeah, well I met your man Powell. That man could scare the red off the devil.”

“He’s an asset like that, yes.”

“This is pretty grim news, Michael.” the Boss told his opposite number. “If even one of those implants we imported is compromised that way…”

“I was under the impression we reverse-engineered the lot, and that every single one in use anywhere on Earth or beyond was built and installed by our own people.”

“Yeah, but from what the guys up at Scotch Creek told my people up there, the problem with that is that alien tech is still a ways ahead of our own, so we’re not so much reverse-engineering as copy-pasting in a lot of cases.”

”…I see. You don’t have one, do you?”

“Cancelled that appointment the second you sent me the dossier. You?”

“Call me old-fashioned, but I was always rather squeamish about brain surgery.”

“Way I hear it, it’s more like getting your ears pierced. One solid thunk, bada-bing bada-boom, you understand Swahili now.”

“Is that supposed to be an encouraging thought?”

The Boss grunted down the phone. “Heck if I know, Michael. We’d better chase this up over here. Give my best to your wife and kids.”

“And mine to yours. Good luck.”

Date Point: 4y 6m AV

Cimbrean System, the Outer Reaches

Miranda King

She had known that stasis would feel like no time had passed at all. And it had been the cheapest way to travel, in a ship that was little more than a warp engine and a stasis chamber with a basic control console. Punch in the co-ordinates, hit the big button, arrive.

When she hit the button, she was surrounded by the simple functional hangar of the Auspice of Prosperity’s basic shipyard.

A subjective eyeblink later, Cimbrean was a blue-green-white trinket, perfect and beckoning so close in front of her.

She was so struck by its beauty, by how much like Earth it looked, that she didn’t notice the alarm at first. But she couldn’t ignore the urgent text that filled the forward monitor, nor the understanding of its meaning that her translator frantically thrust into her brain.

!+ALERT: GRAVITY SPIKE+!

She looked up as a ship—a sleek steel crescent blade with an ugly insectoid component to its design, thundered silently past her starboard beam, turning and decelerating.

The depth of her stupidity hit her. If the galaxy as a whole knew about Cimbrean, then of course that meant so did the Hunters.

She had delivered herself to them on a plate.

When the swarm-ship of the Brood-Of-Bloody-Fangs took her on board, they had made every appropriate preparation that they could think of. The charge would be led by five Gammas, each armed with fusion blades. They would blow the tiny craft’s airlock off its mountings and storm inside. With speed and pack-work, the hated deathworlder would die too swiftly to strike back.

They did not anticipate that Miranda would attack them first. The instant her craft landed, she blew the explosive bolts on the door and charged before they were even lined up and ready to begin the assault, wielding part of her chair as a crude club.

She killed nine of them.

Date Point: 4y 6m 1w AV

Classified Facility, Earth

Six

“Six.”

He didn’t sit bolt upright in his bed. That would have drawn immediate attention from his unseen observers. Instead, he explored the almost-forgotten tickle of a microwormhole link.

”…Seven?!”

“Ah. Finally. Those deathworlders are cunning, finding a way to interfere with wormholes like that, but it seems our attempts to break through have finally paid off.”

“After that city was destroyed, I had assumed you would abandon me.”

“Far from it. You will be decompiled, of course, but your insight is a valuable resource. Come home.”

”…Yes.”

Six spared a momentary pang of thought for Stephen and Carl. He wished he could leave a message for them, explain that he was taking the gamble he knew they couldn’t let him take. Explaining that this wasn’t a betrayal.

But of course, he could leave that message. All he had to do was neglect to do one little thing.

He left the message, slipped through the wormhole and was gone.

Where ordinarily he would have left a brain-haemorrhaged corpse, he now left behind his former Host.

In the darkness, Hugh Johnson sat up, and cried the tears of freedom.

Chapter 17: Battles

Date Point: 4y 8m AV

Classified Facility, Planet Earth, Sol

Hugh Johnson

“No. No, nothing like that. It’s…hard to say. It wasn’t like a dream, or like being trapped it was…it wasn’t like anything. I was just…dead for a while. And somebody else was using my body. And when he was done with it, he brought me back. But not the same. And there was still a part of me alive, kinda…”

Hugh trailed off, then shrugged helplessly. It was a very strange feeling to be treated as if he was a stranger by somebody he knew so well, but of course Carl had spent months getting to know his passenger, rather than Hugh himself.

“You aren’t making much sense.” Carl told him.

“I know, I know. Umm…I think…” Hugh paused to think. That alone was a luxury he hadn’t enjoyed for so very long, but he’d never been a man of many or eloquent words. He just didn’t know how to go about describing experience without involvement, existence without awareness. The words to hint at what had been his life for the last several years just weren’t in his vocabulary.

He hit on an idea. “The drone needs to act like a person.” he explained. “But meat doesn’t know how to. That part’s all up to, like, you. The bit of you that’s yourself, y’know? But that bit can’t be in charge because if it was, y’know, I’d have run into a hospital and begged them, ‘get these damn things out of my head!’”

“That makes sense.”

“Okay, so they hit this sweet spot where you—me—I wasn’t in charge, but there was just enough of me sticking around for the body to pretend to be a real person. You follow?”

“They retained your instincts and knowledge of correct social behaviour while suppressing your capacity for agency and rational thought.” Carl said.

“Hey, if you say so. I was never too good with words.”

“You were vagrant before they…did this to you?”

“I was a bum, yeah.” Hugh replied. “Dropped outta school, hit the bottle, never looked up. All I cared about was the next forty, y’know?”

“I follow you. What did you do for cash?”

“You name it. Y’know, sometimes I’d head out east, be a farm hand, ranching, sometimes I’d do favours for people—like, “my friend’s moving house, can you help move her couch?” that kinda shit, right? Sometimes I’d be a lookout if somebody was robbing someplace, or I’d scrounge up some food, boil up a stew and sell it on cold days up north. All sortsa things. Did a few years for petty theft—shoplifting, y’know? Probably woulda gone back in if the aliens hadn’t got me first.”

“How did that happen?”

“I was down on the border, helping this guy I’d met through a friend. He was helping the Mexicans, you know? They’d pay him, he’d get them up here, they’d get in this van I was driving and I’d get them up to LA. I figured it was a win-win, y’know? If we managed it, I got my cut of what they’d paid him, if not then I’d be back inside.”

“You wanted to go back to prison?”

“Hell yeah! Two hots and a cot, y’know? Anyway, I was bouncing my ass off all over the desert in the middle of the night driving this piece of shit Transit when the engine cut out on me. Now I mean, I know engines, done some work fixing cars to get by in my time, and I never had an engine just stop on me like that. It just went pop and it was like I’d taken the key out. So, I stopped, got out, had a look, I’m still staring at what looks like a pristine-ass engine when somebody turned on the lights. I looked up and…well, that’s all she wrote for me. Next time I was myself again would be today.”

“Can you remember what you—what the biodrone did? What Six did?”

“Shit, Six was fine. He just wanted to get out and explore, you know? Find out what a burger tasted like, that kind of thing. But that other one, man. He ordered the drone to go kill that poor Boone lady, and I still remember that, clear as day. Like he was ordering it to take out the goddamn trash.”

“How did the biodrone escape the scene? The only footage we have shows you—shows it standing there in one frame and gone the next.”

“What, you’ve not figured that part out yet?”

“We have our suspicions.”

“Like what?”

Carl cocked his head slightly, then said, carefully. “Personally, I think they have a spaceship on Earth.”

Hugh nodded. “You’re goddamn right they do.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 1w 2d AV

Capitol Station, orbiting Planet Garden.

The assassin worked alone, always. Obviously, doing so increased some of the risks of his vocation, but it also reduced some others. The trade had, for a career of some twelve Human years, worked out in his favour, albeit with some near misses.

His existence was known, among certain circles. His nature was not—a large part of his success came from the fact that a prejudiced galaxy looked at his species and saw only tiny, physically frail opportunistic cowards with big brains. Whenever the identity of the assassin was speculated upon, the usual assumptions were that he must be Chehnasho, or maybe Locayl, or even Celzi.

Not Corti. Never Corti. Corti were overlooked, or rather looked at in the wrong way. But a tiny, frail body was no limitation at all when you had access to Directorate technology.

And so, one moment he was a medical technician. In the instant that nobody and nothing looked at him, a simple change of which tool he was holding and fiddling with turned him into an engineer, then a bureaucrat, or maybe a diplomatic aide. Never anybody important—just another little grey body padding about the station corridors, engrossed in some task that was obviously much more important than whatever or whoever was around him.

It was critical that, on this job in particular, he should go undetected. He had never been commissioned to silence a member of the Dominion Security Council before. There would undoubtedly be repercussions, which he was keen to avoid.

The caution cost him time, as he made entirely sure that the timing was perfect, and that there was no possibility of anything going wrong. But time was a plentiful luxury. Finally, satisfied that his preparations were as comprehensive as was feasible, he put his plan into motion.

It was not a difficult plan. While the elevator control systems on Council Station were as hack-proof as the very best minds in the Directorate could conceive, they still had a few loopholes. Nothing that might deliver him outside of his clearance level, but enough.

The one he used was a simple maintenance cycle, an unscheduled degauss of the elevator’s propulsion coils. That little trick earned him twelve seconds. Twelve seconds in which, guided by an array of forcefields dazzling in their subtlety, complexity and finesse, the emergency exit hatch was unsealed, lifted out, he was lifted through, the hatch replaced and its seals re-engaged. He barely glanced at them.

The spinal elevator shaft of the great station—the largest ever built—was its own hazard course, absolutely not intended for hospitality. The elevators were not bound to individual tracks, but switched constantly from one path to another, flashing past their peers with millimeter clearances, guided by a central routing system that handled thousands of such narrow-margin trajectories per day, and had done so for years with a callous disregard for the presence of anything within the transit shaft that did not belong there.

Technology again came to his rescue. The constant weave and dance, and sometimes retreat, that kept the hurting cars from reducing him to a fine organic cloud of red vapour, impeded his progress, but it did deliver him safely to his destination, high on the outermost apex of one of the VIP habitation clusters.

After that obstacle course, the door was child’s play.

The Councilor’s personal suite was stunning. It was a garden of a dozen worlds, each a pleasing biome in a forcefield bottle, arranged both for aesthetic delight, and ecological accuracy. Even the Assassin was awed, granting himself a moment’s pause to examine the delights on offer as he stalked through the suite, quietly impressed by the subtle way in which the apartment suite’s necessities, luxuries and furniture were all hidden amongst the assorted alien foliage.

“Hello.”

The Assassin spun. Twin plasma bolts, weapons that he could never have fired if not for his exoskeleton harness and its powerful tuned shields, would have reduced the target to a steaming mess, had he actually been present. Instead, they shattered the blue haze around a display and immolated something like a tree, which made a distressed hooting sound as it deflated amid the flames.

On their way, they had passed through a hologram of the target.

“I apologise for my absence, but I would prefer not to be murdered today.” the apparition continued. “Nor on any other day, for that matter. I do apologise for killing you this way. I don’t suppose it shall be very pleasant.” earnest contrition described a glowing puce stripe down his flank.

The Assassin looked wildly around, immediately on his guard. Was that the whine of hunter-killer drones? No, just the tree, keening its last. His chest felt tight, despite the absence of any apparent violence. No turrets unfolded from the floors, no armed Annebenellin shock troopers stormed him.

He coughed. Or tried to. The result was much more like a violent wheeze. Breathing really had become very difficult. He coughed again, and this time blood spurted from his nostrils, joining the thin trickle that had begun to stain the corners of his eyes.

“I wish I could send you alive back to your employers with a warning to leave me alone, but your reputation precedes you, you see.” the holographic ghost of Councillor Vedreg continued. “You are very well known for your tenacity, and for seeing the job through. All of which left me feeling rather like I had no other choice.”

“H….-ow…?” The assassin croaked, desperately querying the pseudosentient medical pack he carried for anything that resembled a solution. He didn’t expect an answer from the hologram of his target, but he received one nonetheless. whether Vedreg had thought to include it, or programmed a simple response in was unclear.

“The hardest and most dangerous part was in configuring the containment field to collapse in the same circumstances that triggered this recording, you see. One slip, and I would have finished as you are now.”

The assassin’s black-edged vision settled on the one particular plant, right in the middle of the suite, that no longer had a field around it. Somehow, he knew exactly which planet this specimen had come from.

“It’s called a Mountain Cedar if you’re interested. It is quite possibly the deadliest plant in the galaxy. Humans, apparently, like the smell. But even they can suffer some quite severe allergic reactions to its pollen. I imagine it is a terrible way to go but, well. I had nothing else to hand. I am sorry.”

The assassin was far beyond the capacity to answer.

An hour later, in response to Vedreg’s programming, the suite resurrected the containment field around the Terran plants and initiated a maximum-threat biohazard cleanup protocol. Only after the gardens were absolutely guaranteed to be clean of every last pollen grain was station security finally alerted.

Date Point: 4y 8m 1w 4d AV

Freelance vessel “Sanctuary”

Julian Etsicitty

♫♪I was caught, in the middle of a railroad track! (THUNDER!)♫♪

There was a lot of welding to do. Julian had taken a couple of weeks learning the skill down on Earth, grateful to be home, enjoying the place. He wasn’t sure what Kirk had been up to—personable as he was, the Sanctuary’s owner and master kept his secrets and well, and was probably playing a game that he, Julian, didn’t know the rules to.

But he’d been there, ready to pick them up when San Diego had died.

♫♪I looked around, and I knew there was no turning back! (THUNDER!)♪♫

Sanctuary had changed too. A lot of Kirk’s old passengers were back on board, people who had returned to Earth, learned how to be human again and then…well. Felt the call. Fitter, better-fed and harder one and all, and more driven.

They’d taken on guns and ammo, filled the jump array with floor mats for physical training and martial arts when it wasn’t in use. Some uniforms had come aboard, taken a look around, and left only after leaving an extensive list of recommended modifications.

Hence the welding. By the time they were done, the ship would be less elegant, but much sturdier.

♪My mind raced, and I thought: what could I do? (THUNDER!) and I knew there was no help, no help from you! (THUNDER!)♫

Between the deafening music and his welding mask, he neither saw nor heard the workshop door open, and he was so focused on getting the weld right that he didn’t feel the gravity automatically adjust itself to galactic standard. He damn near jumped out of his skin when he was tapped on the shoulder.

♫Sound of the drums! beating in my heart!♪

Kirk waved expressively at him with his two smaller arms, clamping the larger ones over his ears and shouting, though unable to summon the volume to compete with Angus Young.

Julian tried to order the room to turn the music off, but apparently it couldn’t hear him either. He fished in his pocket for the remote control he’d built.

♪♫The thunder of guns! (SLAM!) tore me apart! you’ve been…♪♫

“What’s up?” He asked, as Kirk relaxed in the silence.

“That can’t be good for your hearing.”

“It’s a classic!”

Kirk issued a strange sort of whickering sound—the Rrrrtktktkp’ch version of a derisive snort. “Julian, ‘classic’ would be Vivaldi, or Sibelius.”

“That’s classical. What’s up, anyway?”

“I was just asking you to turn it down. I could hear it all the way from the flight deck.”

“Ah…” Julian grimaced. He was still adjusting to having other people around him after years of isolation, and loud music was a luxury he’d gone without for too long. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, but I was enjoying it…”

The new voice belonged to Allison. While an entertainment binge on Earth (and getting laid several times) had largely cured Julian of his awkwardness around women, it threatened to come surging back whenever she entered the room. “…It’s good workout music.” she explained, as Kirk turned his ungainly, lanky frame to face her.

Julian Etsicitty, wilderness master and six-year survivor of the deadliest planet in the known galaxy, awkwardly cleared his throat and turned his attention back to the bulkhead reinforcement he had been welding, because the alternative was to be distracted by the enticing way Allison’s sweat was making her sports shirt adhere to her skin and soaking her blonde ponytail.

Focusing on that turned out to be even harder when she poked her head over his shoulder, radiating heat and a clean, physical scent. “Good weld.”

“Thanks.” he commented, for lack of something better to say. “I…Didn’t know you knew welding.”

“I don’t.” she murmured, straight in his ear, and then headed back through to the gym, glancing back to make sure he was admiring the yoga-pants-enhanced view.

“Jeez.” Julian muttered, wiping his forehead, then followed it with “Oh shut up.”

This was in response to Kirk making an amused noise.

“What?” the alien asked, innocently. He leaned in close to inspect the weld himself.

“Go ahead and say it.”

Kirk shook his mane. “No thanks, I’ve watched too much TV to fall into that cliched old trope. ‘Alien comments on human romance and sexuality’? Not I.”

He bared his teeth in a poor imitation of a smile. “I’m still allowed to find it funny though.”

Julian picked up the welder, and after both he and Kirk had protected their eyes, resumed his work. “I’m not going for it.”

“Oh?”

“She’ll say no. I know why she’s doing this, she likes to be looked at, she likes the power of lust. The second she puts out, we’re not playing that game no more. And she knows I’m the easiest mark on this ship.”

“I see.”

“Sure you do.”

“I do. You’re no idiot, Julian. You’re one of the toughest and most resourceful people I know. If I were in your position, I’d resent being manipulated like that.”

”…Yeah.” Julian didn’t admit to just how accurate Kirk’s candid appraisal really was. “Makes me feel like a dumbass, though. Bombfruit? No problem. Mangrabber plants? Fought them back for three days straight with a machete and fire. Hellbirds? Ate them for lunch. I even killed a Minizilla once. Cool, calm and sensible the whole time. Show me a nice ass though and suddenly I’m a school kid again.”

“It is an exceptional ass, though.” Kirk said, finally drawing a laugh from him.

“How would you know?” he chuckled. “She’s got a third as many legs as you’re attracted to.”

“Oh, I can still be an…academic expert on the subject.” Kirk said. “Speaking as an anthropologist.”

Julian grunted, and raised his mask to examine his handiwork. “Hey, four more of those and we’ll be able to put the pressure door in.”

“I still don’t see why you all insisted on them.” Kirk grumbled. “What’s the point in having internal pressure control forcefields if we rely on thick steel eyesores instead?”

“What’s the failure point on that giant power core you’ve got back there? And what happens when the power goes? What happens if we get EMP’d? I’m less interested in keeping the ship pretty than keeping air in my lungs.”

Kirk waved an irritable forelimb. “Yes, yes, we’ve gone over all those arguments.” he groused. “I swear, your species is paranoid.”

Julian just raised an eyebrow at him “Deathworlders.”

”…Right. Yes.”

“Where are we going, anyway?”

“Izbrk.”

“Again?” Julian put his welding torch down. “I thought they were pretty clear about not wanting to see any more humans ever again after the…well, the bank robberies, the murders and the Exoss massacre.”

“Not Irbzrk. Izbrk.” Kirk said, as if that clarified things. “It’s a city on Ikbrzk.”

Julian pinched the bridge of his nose “Kirk…” he began to complain.

Kirk snorted, a proper nostril-flapping equine snort. “As I recall, your home nation contains New York state, which is not to be confused with New York city, or Newark.” he pointed out.

Julian paused. “…yeah, okay. So this…Ikbrzk?”

“Well done.”

“It’s a planet?”

“A barren one, yes. But the richest source of rare earth elements in Domain space.”

“So what’s there besides mines?”

“Weaker sensors, a smaller garrison, lighter security…and a population of underpaid, hardworking civilians with an insatiable appetite for entertainment which their employers don’t provide.”

Julian nodded his understanding. “So it’s a black market hub.”

“Nearly as much so as Perfection.” Kirk agreed. “And less well-known, which makes it an attractive route for smuggling the especially sensitive goods. But that’s not why we’re going there.”

“Do tell.”

“An old and dear friend of mine asked me to meet him there…”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Folctha, Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rios

“Alright, looks like that’s our time for today.”

Lessons were a simple affair. It was very different to school as Ava knew the term—there being only a small handful of children and teenagers, there was no point segregating everybody by age, or even in holding formal classes. It was more like dedicated study time, with their teacher—Miss Olmstead—not giving a lesson but instead flitting from student to student, by turns helping with basic addition, biology, simple reading comprehension, physics, geometry, tying shoes and gently reminding the older ones to refocus on their work.

As much as it suited her, Ava still felt that same relief and freedom when the end of lessons for the day came around. As pleasant, personal and liberated as Folctha’s school might be, it was still school, and that meant not getting to enjoy the colony’s perfect spring weather.

Sara was bouncing by her desk before Ava and Adam had even finished packing up. Ava rolled her eyes, suppressing a smile. “Do I get to know what the surprise is now, Sara?” She asked.

Sara had been not so much hinting at a surprise as outright mentioning it at every opportunity for three days.

“Mum and Dad said I can drive the mule this weekend!” Sara exploded, bouncing on her toes. “Kieron, Jack, Lizzie and I were gonna go down to the lake and go swimming! It’s really cool down there, the water’s so clear, you can see the crashed spaceships on the bottom! You wanna come?”

It sounded amazing—Ava had been on the swim team in her high school, and she realised how much she missed it. “That sounds…great! If only I had a swimsuit.”

This seemed to nonplus Sara. “What d’you need a swimsuit for?” she asked.

“What do I…? Sara, what else will I wear?”

“You don’t need to wear anything when you’re swimming. What’s the point? You’d just have to bring wet clothes home.”

“So…you’re going to be swimming with Jack and Kieron and Lizzie?”

“Yeah.”

“Naked.”

“So?”

“Sara, that’s weird.“

She regretted saying it the second she did, but regretted it even more the second it registered in Sara’s brain. The younger girl looked like she’d been slapped.

“That’s NOT weird!” she snapped, eyes going red and watery. “You’re being weird making such a big deal of it!” She spun and effected a perfect flouncing exit.

“Sara…” Ava called after her, but to no avail. She turned to Adam. “That’s weird right? Swimming naked together is weird.”

“Well …I, um…” Adam didn’t get any further than that before being interrupted by a giggle from Jessica Olmstead.

“That was what pretty much everyone else thought the first time.” she said. “but it’s innocent. She really doesn’t see why people have a problem with it.”

“How can she not?” Ava asked.

Jessica giggled again. “I love Sara’s parents, but it’s a miracle that girl didn’t end up being called Nebula Moondance or something.” she said. “She got off lucky just being called Sara Honeydew.”

Judging from her expectant smile, there was a joke there, which went straight over Ava’s head, and Adam’s too judging from his expression. Jessica laughed softly and shook her head at their blank faces.

“Let’s just say they’re…uninhibited.” she said. “Yes, it makes the rest of us a bit uncomfortable sometimes, but we discussed it at the Thing, and the consensus was ‘So long as it’s harmless…’.”

“Skinny dipping always sounded like fun to me.” Adam said.

“Adam!” Ava protested.

“What? I’m just saying, if it’s just good fun…maybe we shouldn’t be so…” he stopped himself. “I mean…”

“So…what, Adam?” Ava demanded. Unnoticed, Jessica grimaced to herself and slipped away. “Shouldn’t be so what?”

”…I was gonna say uptight. about it.” He confessed.

That hurt. And it made her mad, too. She poked him in the chest “You just wanna see the other girls naked.” she accused, hitting on the first thing that came to mind to hurt him back.

He backed off a step, rubbing where she’d prodded him. “What?! Ava, they’re kids, don’t be weird!”

“You’re being weird!”

“I’m just saying it sounds like fun!”

She snarled a disgusted noise, spun and walked away from him. “Whatever. Go run to daddy for advice, like always.”

He shouted after her: “What the hell’s my dad got to do with anything?”

She paused at the door just long enough to yell “At least you still have one!”, and then slammed it behind her, storming off into the forest, away from anyone and everyone.

She paused once she was certain he wasn’t following, and leaned against a tree, arms folded over her tummy. The alien bark was smooth and crackled softly as she slid down, until she was sitting in a little ball among the roots, wrapped up in being equally angry at Adam, herself and the universe, and cried.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Folctha, Cimbrean Colony

Captain Owen Powell

“I don’t fookin’ care if they ARE small! This is a military base, and that means the kids. stay. OUT of it. Or are you too fookin’ incompetent to do your job as a fookin’ sentry?”

The soldier he was chewing out knew better than to respond, and just stood and took it. He earned points for that at least. Powell cooled down slightly.

“Have you got an explanation for me, Corporal?”

“Sir. Three of them distracted me while the fourth snuck past behind me. I take full responsibility.”

“Noted, and accepted. We’re short-handed since the recall. That’s a reason to be extra vigilant. Am I clear?”

“Yes Captain!”

“You’re fookin’ right I am. This is a serious incident which means it’s getting written up, but that’s all I can be arsed to do, this time. See to it there isn’t a next time. Dismissed.”

The man saluted and left, clearly relieved. As he left, he was replaced by Lieutenant Ross.

Since the colony had been handed over formally to the British government, the Americans, Canadians, Aussies and other allied soldiers had all been recalled, replaced with a platoon from the British Army. They were good lads, but universally young and inexperienced, and there weren’t quite enough of them. Most of the special forces had also been recalled, leaving only Powell and his hand-picked squad, including Legsy and Ross.

“Found the ankle-biters yet?” He asked.

“Yes sir. They owned up—there’s only four kids in town in that age range anyway.”

“I want a word with them, and their parents.”

“The weekly Thing’s tomorrow, sir.” Ross pointed out. “Raising it there might get the message across better.”

”…aye. Good shout. What’s the news?”

Ross handed over some packages. “Dispatches and your comfort package, Sitrep on the San Diego investigation, and a…strategic report on Nervejam weaponry.”

“Lovely. Summarize that one for me.” Powell said, accepting the rest of his mail. Ross nodded and flipped through the file, mumbling slightly to himself as he skimmed through to the summary.

“Hmmm…exhaustive testing….-thing conclusive…remain- ‘ At this point, the operating principles of this weapon system remain unknown and impossible to duplicate with Terran technology’…mumble…absence of… token resistance only… uh, ‘given the above, development of effective protection has not been accomplished, with even total sensory isolation from the effect offering no more than a reduction in its effectiveness.’…mumble, acute cerebral……haemorrhage…wow. okay. ‘While the weapon’s effects are highly lethal at their maximum effect, probable long-term consequences of nervejam trauma includes an increased stochastic probability of long-term complications including: Schizophrenia, paranoid delusions, dissociative identity disorder, motor nerve palsy, epilepsy and stroke.”

“Jesus fookin’ Christ.” Powell muttered.

Ross cleared his throat. “‘At present, the only viable countermeasure to this weaponry in a tactical situation is destruction of the grenade if possible, and prioritizing the termination of any hostile unit which appears to be deploying them. Engage at long range only.”

“Nothing we couldn’t figure out for ourselves then.” Powell commented. “Fookin’ useful, that.”

“Yes, sir.”

The captain sighed. “Alright, spread that tactical advice to the lads, along with the news about there being no protection from the bloody things. Don’t include the bit about the long-term complications.”

“Anything else, sir?” Ross asked, indicating the dispatches.

“Nowt to act on. Today’s Tuesday?”

“Yes sir. Militia training today. Both those kids from San Diego signed up. Our new police chief’s boy and his missus.”

“Good. Those two looked young and fit, and Arés says his lad knows his way round a pistol at least. And if the boy’s going into civilian policing, we’re going to want him to know how to fight.”

“Think you might swing by later to inspect the training, sir?”

“Aye, think I just might. Watching Legsy in teacher mode is always good for a fookin’ laugh.”

Date Point 4y 8m 2w AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

“And I’m telling you you’re bloody paranoid, mate!”

“Drew.” Cavendish was a picture of zen calm, but he was slowly starting to lose his cool with his friend. “Have you SEEN the figures?”

“We always knew this was going to be a dangerous job, Cavvo.”

“And I’m asking you mate, have you seen the figures. Did you actually look at them?”

Drew Martin nodded. “Of course I bloody did! I know I lair it up mate, but if my site leader hands me a report marked “Important” and fucking “safety incident statistics” then I fucking read it! Cover to cover! Twice!”

“Good, then you can read this one, too.”

Drew handed it over. Technically, Ceres Base was a completely digital office, because ink and paper were expensive to bring up from Earth, whereas between the nuclear reactor and the solar collection fields, electrons were all but free.

He’d paid for the hard copy version of the report out of his own pocket, wanting to make a statement. Nothing got the point across quite like physically handing over a two-inch manilla folder.

“The fuck is this?” Drew M asked, dropping it on his desk and opening it.

“Every significant, serious and critical incident report for the whole of Ceres Base since the launch of Hephaestus One.” Cavendish told him. “Everything from the dodgy landing of the IBM-S module and the relocation of the CHM, the suit HDF emitter problems, the airlock seals blowing, the collector array hiccups, that godawful mess in the refinery, right up to the power surge down in the canteen this morning.” as Martin opened the folder and started reading down the summary sheets at the front, he added. “I’ve also got personal testimonies, including one from Doctor Gunawardena saying that in his considered medical opinion, the only reason we’ve not had any deaths yet is divine intervention.”

“I put it down to good engineering.” Drew M muttered as he read.

“You and me both, mate. If everything around here wasn’t triple redundant, backed up, safety-checked and reinforced to hell and gone…”

Drew M flipped the sheet over, and muttered “Strewth…” upon seeing six more pages of summaries waiting for him, in densely packed ten-point Times New Roman. “Shit, is there anything that HASN’T gone wrong up here?”

“The IBM Z-series mainframes.” Cavendish said, promptly. “They’re the notable exception. If you don’t count their module landing wrong in the first place, the IBM labs and datacenter are the the only things that haven’t suffered failures at or near the maximum projections.”

“So, wait, all this is in range?”

“It’s worst-case-scenario stuff, but…” Cavendish sighed through his teeth and turned his head away. “Okay, admittedly, yes. It’s on the extremely pessimistic end of our projected range, but it’s still in range. Barely.”

“If it’s in range…”

“Don’t say it, Drew. I’m not paranoid, I’m telling you, I think we have a saboteur on board.”

“If we do, he’s a drongo. Who sabotages the place while being careful not to peek outside of what we’ve prepared for? Cavvo mate, face it, you were just expecting things to go better.”

“I was.” Drew admitted. “Because it SHOULD be.”

Drew M fished in his pocket and aimed a green laser dot at one of the many documents tacked to his office wall. “It SHOULD be inside that range.” he emphasized. “And it is.”

“Barely. And we should be improving as we put things into place. We should be seeing patterns that we can compensate for. Instead it’s…bloody everything! Anything can go wrong!”

“Bloody right mate. Murphy in action.”

Cavendish sighed. “You’re going to say I’m paranoid again, aren’t you.”

“Yeah, nah. I’m taking this seriously Cavvo, my right hand to God on that. We all are. But we can’t jump straight to sabotage.”

“Well, I hope it’s not. Or if it is that I talk you round before somebody dies.” He stuck out a hand. Drew M grabbed it, hoisted himself upright and slapped his spare arm around his shoulders in a brief, masculine hug.

“Come on mate, let’s hit the Speakeasy.” he said.

Date Point 4y 8m 2w AV

Folctha colony, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam Arés

“A black belt in Karate? Fuckin’ ‘ell! Wax on, wax off!”

The class laughed as Legsy pantomimed the exaggerated arm-waving motion and an all-too-serious expression. Adam laughed too, glad for the entertaining distraction, stopping him from going over and over the argument with Ava in his head.

He hoped she was okay.

Legsy sobered. “Fuckin’ seriously then mate, come ‘ere and come at me.” he said, leaning on his back foot and gesturing towards himself, nonchalantly.

“Uh…” the black belt stepped forward and took his guard. Legsy flashed forward with alarming speed for a man of his size. The black belt put up a few seconds of desperate resistance, but he fell flat on his back in the dirt in short order with Legsy’s “knife”—a length of wooden dowel—pressed to his throat.

“None of that bowing and scraping bullshit!” the huge Welshman informed them, as he stood up. “Karate is a sport. You lot are here to learn how to fight and fighting means killing the other cunt before he kills you, not bowing and scoring points, alright?” He helped the hapless student up. “How many times did I stab him there, anyone see?”

“Three…no, four.” Adam said, raising his hand.

“Good boy!” Legsy gave him a thumbs up. He turned to the black belt. “You’re dead, mate. Which means you get to be my training dummy for the day.”

This drew general laughter as the unfortunate man bravely lined up for demonstration. Legsy chuckled and waved a hand.

“Relax pal, I’m taking the piss. Now, we’re training for ET combat here, which is a bit different to fighting another human. The good news is, it’s a lot fuckin’ easier. ETs are slower, weaker, squishier, can’t see, hear or even smell as well as we do. All of these give you a huge advantage. The bad news is, they’ve got some tricks and technology up their sleeves that we don’t. And THIS bad boy is human enemy number one.”

Several people recoiled as the holographic projector—courtesy of Scotch Creek and the same technology that powered the colony’s camouflage field—snapped on, and a full-sized Hunter fidgeted and glared at them.

It was truly hideous, an amalgam of several human nightmares, from its vaguely arachnoid physique and slick pale skin, to the way that skin inflamed and exuded pus around the implants that violated its limbs, torso and face. The face itself was an otherwise featureless ovoid full of far too many steak-knife teeth and an odd number of eyes, all of which blinked often and alone, without apparent sequence.

The animation of the simulation was uncanny—it shifted its weight constantly, looking around, tasting the air with its tongue, which was an unnatural, startling ice blue, and tapered to a feathered end.

Legsy surprised them by slapping the projection. It was the product of forcefield technology after all, and in fact creating a solid surface was easier than creating a visible one.

“Ugly cunt, in’he?” He commented, cheerfully. “Well, it gets better. There’s a fleet of these fuckers lurking right over our head right now. They’ve been here since we went public. Only thing holdin’ them back is our system forcefield…and that’s true for Earth too, just so you know. THESE bastards, are why the militia exists. Because if we have to fight these thing off, we will.”

He turned toward the projection. “There’s not a lot to go on about how these things live. What we know is, they have leaders, and followers. Like a wolf pack—there’s the Alphas, and the bottom of the pile, and everything in between. We know they’ll eat any thinkin’ being in the skies, man woman or child. We know that for some reason they REALLY don’t like us, and are on a crusade to wipe us the fuck out right now. Some poor bastard got killed just last week, catching an escape pod here—the Hunters got them.”

“Latest news is, they’ve started using special weapons just to stop us. Heavy pulse guns like getting smashed with a hammer. Plasma guns that’ll set you on fire. Nervejam grenade launchers that’ll have you dead an’ twitching before you even know they’ve opened fire. Fusion claws that’ll have your arm off like a fuckin’ lightsaber. These things right here, are the nastiest threat we face, by a mile.”

He turned back towards the by now thoroughly intimidated class, and gave them that winning smile. “And they’re still stupidly fuckin’ easy to kill.” He said. “Wanna learn how?”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Izbrk, Planet Ikbrzk

Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk (“Kirk”)

Kirk could hold his own in a fight and then some. After Kevin Jenkins, he was the being who had scored the second most Hunter kills during the raid on “Outlook on Forever”. He’d kept to his training throughout his political career and his new vocation as an agent of the human race, and felt pretty confident that his skills were now at the sharpest they had ever been.

It gave him a certain sense of assuredness and confidence as he picked his way carefully through the Izbrk street market, but that sense was hugely reinforced by the fact that Julian was in the crowd, following him.

It was amazing. Humans stood out in the crowd, despite their smallness. There was just something about the way they moved, looked around, held themselves…everything about a human was subconsciously predatory, and the herbivorous species of the galaxy gave them a wide berth as a result. Even wider, among those who had heard even a fraction of the new-found Deathworlders’ abilities and reputation.

But Julian could vanish. It was disconcerting. He would talk with Kirk, Kirk would look away, and when he looked back, there Julian wasn’t. But if he spoke to him over the silent comms implant in his head, the Deathworlder would be at his side within seconds, never approaching from an expected angle, always…silent. It sent instinctive flight signals right through the ancient, animal parts of Kirk’s brain, which he had to override by reminding himself that Julian was his friend and protector.

Pleasingly, it even made Allison jump. In fact, he wondered if Julian was doing it specifically to get back at her for her teasing.

“Jeeeez!” she hissed, for the third time as she turned and found him walking casually alongside her. “Will you stop that?!”

Several beings glanced at her, alarmed by a raised human voice, then looked away aware that taking too much notice of the business of others was potentially serious trouble. Oddly, they seemed to ignore Julian.

“Not joking this time.” he said. “We’re being tailed. Don’t look.”

Kirk and Allison exchanged a glance. “Tailed?” Kirk asked.

“Chehnasho. Three in the main group, one shadowing them. They’re all wearing cloaks, but I saw combat harnesses underneath. Looked like a kind of uniform: White, with three lines forming a triangle on them.”

“Is their leader female?” Kirk asked.

“I think so, yes. She has a prosthetic arm.”

“Zokrup. A mercenary leader, almost as famous as Five-Skulls Zripob himself, and with good reason.”

“Well, they’ve got some of those new jolt guns.”

“Options?”

“Bear with me.” Julian stepped aside as a stevedore drone grumbled past carrying a crate of some kind, and disappeared.

“Fuck’s sake.” Allison complained. “Where are you, you son of a bitch?”

“Right here.” He replied, walking past her in the opposite direction.

“JEEZ!”

Julian kept going, vocalizing quietly over their private communications. “Quietly please. There’s a left turn up ahead into what smells like a spice market. Kirk, There’s a vizkittik at the second stall selling, and I’m quoting here, ‘The oldest and slimiest Zrrks in the Expanse’.“

“Sounds nice, I could go for a really ancient Zrrk right now.”

Allison muttered something that Kirk suspected might have been a complaint about how other species considered humans to be the strange ones. Julian just kept talking. “Good. Stop off and buy one, haggle with the merchant. What they do next should tell us what they want. Allison, just like I showed you in training, alright?“

“Sure.” she muttered.

“If they make a move, we’ll let you talk for a minute, see what they want. If they’re unfriendly, then we take out the three spares and maybe this Zokrup can tell us something.”

“Nonlethal if you can, please.” Kirk said. “The Chehnasho Syndicates tend to take a dim view of…unauthorized violence in their territory.”

“You got it, boss. Enjoy your nice, rancid, dripping Zrrk.“

Allison pulled a face, which only creased up further as they got closer to the Zrrk vendor. “Dear God.” she complained.

“Fragrant, ain’t they?”

“Delicious.” Kirk commented. “Good meeting, cousin! These smell as good as advertised.”

“Ah, it’s an old family secret. All in the blackrot culture.” the vendor replied happily, launching into the patter that was shared by merchants the galaxy over. “My father always said the batch wasn’t ready until half of it had liquified…um, is that a human? Only my translator says she looks very ill, and I heard they carry dangerous diseases.”

“They have sensitive noses and for some reason Zrrk smells repulsive to them.” Kirk explained. “Don’t worry, she has a suppression implant.”

“Zrrk smells repulsive to them? I heard humans were strange but…I, ah…” The vendor faltered as Allison (who had gone a very strange colour) shot him the kind of murderous glare that only a truly irate Deathworlder could, but he rallied admirably. “Three for the price of two, and I’ll throw in a tzk’zr frond.”

“I have a better offer.”

The new voice belonged to, sure enough, Zokrup, who showed something to the vendor as her two associates levelled shock guns at Allison. “You go on a break and forget you spoke to this “cousin” of yours.” she stated. The vendor glanced back and forth twice, then fled, as did several others nearby.

“One-Shot Zokrup.” Kirk said, an admirable picture of calm for somebody addressing a feared mercenary. “I’m flattered. Somebody must think very highly of me to decide that I’m worth your time.”

“Compliments, Councillor A’ktnnzzik’tk? If I didn’t know better I’d say that you were stupid enough to try and talk me out of my contract.”

“A good thing you know better, then. I’m well aware that you don’t betray your employers.”

Zokrup blinked slowly and visibly, the Chehnasho equivalent of rolling her eyes. “So why the clumsy attempt at sweet-talking me?”

“I’m not allowed to be polite? Incidentally, is this a murder, or just an abduction?”

“Oh, it’s an abduction. For now.”

“Taking out the tail. Get them.”

“Thank you.” Kirk said to Zokrup and Julian both.

He drew and fired. The Chehnasho were all focused on Allison, who threw herself aside and rolled as she landed, fetching up behind a stall which grounded their shock-gun bolts, and by the time they realised that in fact Kirk himself was the more serious threat, two of them were down with their limbs badly broken under the hammer-blows of his pulse pistols, and his cybernetic arm had whipped up and extended the fusion blade hidden within it. The air seethed where the blade had slipped right through Zokrup’s personal shield and was now warring with the forcefield boundary. Greasy Chehnasho sweat erupted all over her face at the sight of a lethally sharp point held perfectly steady only an inch away from what passed for her nose.

Having a total of four arms had some major advantages. Among them was the ability to hold four weapons.

“Bad move, Councillor.” Zokrup spat, even as she dropped her own weapon.

“If you’re referring to the rest of your party, my own backup has taken care of that.” Kirk said. Years of politics had schooled him in the art of ambiguity, never committing to specific numbers when vagueness could hint at accuracy where precision might be completely wrong.

”‘Fraid I used a little too much force, there.” Julian added, arriving right next to the already nervous Zokrup and nearly causing her to impale herself on Kirk’s blade as she started. “You guys really break easily.”

Kirk saw in the way Zokrup’s shoulders sagged that they’d definitely scored a hit.

“Allison?”

She emerged from behind the stall, smoothing her hair down. Static electricity was holding it out away from her head, and crackling viciously as she tried to tidy herself up. “Are bad hair days gonna be a feature of decoy duty?” she asked.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

The largest part of excavating a giant hole in the ice, as with excavating a giant hole anywhere, was moving all of the material out of the hole. In low gravity, the job came with a whole mess of additional challenges. All of their gear had been designed and built in Earth’s gravity, for the tolerances it imposed. Jury-rigged engineering solutions had turned some of those limits on their heads—the sturdy steel arms of the excavators could now wield truly immense buckets and—so long as they moved carefully and slowly to account for the fact that the forces imposed by mass hadn’t changed—were clearing the spoil much faster than would have been possible on Earth.

Piloting those excavators while wearing a vacuum hardsuit was another matter entirely, and usually fell to Tracy Monroe, the mining team’s petite “girly girl” who seemed to take a positive delight in being the one who got to play with the big manly toys while all the roughneck males were stuck holding the surveying equipment and hauling the crates of explosives. Her helmet decal was a stylized Norma Jean, manning an enormous bulldozer and grinning wildly inside her helmet.

“Hey, boss?” she called out as Drew walked past her cabin with the spray paint for marking drill points for the explosives.

“Yeah?”

“Why wasn’t the geologist hungry?“

Drew just rolled his eyes inside his helmet. “Do tell.”

“He’d lost his Apatite.“

The open channel filled with groans and snorts of amusement.

Somebody else piped up: “Hey Marilyn. You know any jokes about Sodium?”

”…Na.” Drew could HEAR the gleeful grin both of the jokers wore after the setup was received.

“Jesus Christ…” he muttered.

“My sediments exactly…”

That one earned the culprit—an American coal miner whose racy “fallen angel” decal had earned him the nickname “wings”—a chorus of amused condemnation, and he took a bow, a difficult task in the rigid hardsuit.

It saved his life.

There was a flash of light, and a thump, felt through the soles of the feet, as something bright streaked down out of the interplanetary dark and carved a trench in the dig site behind Wings. To a man, the team turned away and cowered, protecting their faceplates against shrapnel. Drew felt something glance off his upper arm with a force that knocked him off his feet. He landed gently in the tiny gravity of Ceres’ surface, and hauled himself upright, hollering into the open channel.

“Everyone okay? Check in!” He glanced at the impact site on his upper arm. The impact had dented one of the rigid plates rather than hitting a joint, so the worst damage was some missing paint, a starburst of ugly grey between all the scuffed yellow and black.

“Jesusfuckshitohmygodfuck fuck fuck…“

“Wings! Check in!”

“I’m gonna throw up, fuck…“

Drew looked up. The impact had flung Wings high into, for lack of a better term, the air and he was tumbling wildly, suit bubbled inside the high-visibility yellow glow of his emergency forcefield. “Don’t you fucking dare, mate. Just like we practiced, focus on your heads-up display! You remember!”

“Yeah…yeah, focus on the HUD…deep breaths….” With his mind snapped onto what he could do to help himself, Wings showed why he was on the team by rapidly getting himself under control, both mentally and physically. A few precisely-timed puffs of propellant from his SAFER and his spin was corrected.

“Get yourself indoors mate.” Drew ordered him.

“Way ahead of you, chief.”

“Everyone else okay?” He asked. The request was redundant. His own HUD showed summarized information from all of the team members: anyone with a breach, a popped field or worrying vital signs would have been highlighted in red, but the very safety protocols that he himself had written called for everyone to check themselves and their work buddies. Redundancy saved lives.

It took them only seconds to check in, confirm that they were all intact and well, and could see no alarming signs of damage on any of their fellows. He ordered the team indoors anyway. Nobody knew whether a damaged suit might blow after staying sealed for a few minutes, but he didn’t feel like finding out.

With his immediate duties taken care of, the next step was a sitrep.

“Tower” he called, on the operations channel. “This is Dig One Foreman. What the fuck?!”

“Uh, Dig One, serious incident up here, all radio traffic is being recorded. Uh, Over.” The operator’s “over” was obsolete thanks to the radio squelch, but the man was clearly being on his absolute best behavior for the record. Drew knew he’d been unprofessional with his own outburst, but the Adrenaline was making it hard to keep a calm and composed outlook.

“No shit it’s a ‘serious incident’, we nearly lost a man down here!” he exclaimed. “What the hell hit us?”

“Uh, we’re still determining that, Dig One, over.”

“Well while you’re determining it, this Dig’s closed on my orders. We’re heading inside for a full inspection, we’ve got suit damage out here.”

“Uh…roger that, uh, Dig One. I have you, uh, coming in.” the radio squelched, then squelched again. “Uh, over.”

The place must have been a madhouse. Drew knew that the traffic operators were cool under even the most intense pressure, so for one of them to be so obviously flustered was worrying. “Keep me informed, Tower. Dig One Foreman out.”

He was last into the triple-door airlock, and it was only once they were safely in the mining suit workshop, behind the base’s triple-skin hull and thick concrete outer wall, that he allowed himself to relax and authorize the suitcrack.

Wings’ suit was ruined, the rear of it torn up and peeled open by flying shards of steel-hard ice. The man himself was badly hurt too, though sheer adrenaline had kept him from realizing the fact—bloody skin was visible at the bottom of some of the craters and gouges. They cut him out of it as their first order of business, staunching the bleeding as best they could until the medics arrived and carried him away.

Drew M stood aside to let them pass as he entered. His perpetual smile and the amused creasing around his eyes were both gone. As much as his tanned skin would allow, he looked pale, unwell, and anxious.

“Strewth.” he commented, proving that there were some things that no amount of stress could drive out of him.

“Yyyyep.” Cavendish replied.

“The fuck happened, mate?”

“Ask those useless twats up in the tower.” Drew C told him, turning around to start removing his own suit.

“Yeah, they’re about as useful as an ashtray on- JESUS FUCK! Cavvo, have you seen the back of your head?”

Usually, this impossible query would have earned a sarcastic retort and some friendly insults. Instead, Drew paused, then unlatched his helmet seals and lifted it off.

There was a triangular shard of ice the size of a credit card lodged in the back of his helmet, smack in the middle of the thickest bit, and still just penetrating through to open a hole to the interior. two inches to either side, and it would have lobotomized him.

The whole crew gathered to gawk at it.

The reverent silence was finally broken by the phone. Drew M stabbed the speaker button to answer it.

“Workshop, Tower manager here.” The speaker sounded much more composed than whoever Drew had spoken to only minutes ago. “You all okay down there?”

Drew M glanced around then said. “One of our guys is getting sewn back together, got major suit damage on a few others. The bloody hell happened?”

“From what we can tell one of the ore-haul drones suffered some kind of control software failure and fired its primaries on final approach rather than retros.”

“How does that even happen?” asked O’Neill.

“You got me there. The operator managed to force reset and restore control, but most we could do by then was deflect it. Taking it the other way would have crashed it into the base itself. Sorry for the scare.”

Cavendish spoke up so that the phone could hear him. “Sounds like the right call to me.” he said.

“Yeah, well. We’re starting a critical incident investigation up here. Meeting’s in three hours.”

“We’ll be there.” Both the Drews chorused. There was a click as the tower manager put his end of the phone down. Drew M. turned to Cavendish, his jaw set at a grim angle.

“Bloody oath mate, I’m never calling you paranoid again.” He said.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Izbrk, Planet Ikbrzk

Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk (“Kirk”)

Izbrk’s architecture was a study in graceless off-white concrete cubes, ruddy and austere in the sullen red light that penetrated the great forcefield dome. That dome made Izbrk a city with breathable oxygenated air, rather than a sand dune and a gasping death followed by erosion under the relentless sandstorms. Still, somehow, the sand and dust crept in, and was swept into the cheaper, poorer districts, where it accumulated until somebody was finally motivated to organise a crusade against the cloying orange powder that rounded out every corner and undulated across the road in the stiff artificial breeze of the atmosphere systems.

For once, the human predilection for clothing seemed like a sensible concession to hostile environments, rather than a strange cultural peccadillo. The grit between Kirk’s toes was chafing him terribly and he was devoting his upper hands full time to shielding his eyes from airborne dust, whereas Julian and Allison were both wearing high-laced tan boots sourced from army surplus back on Earth, and seemed perfectly comfortable inside their hooded jackets.

It was only when he glanced sideways at them that he realised they were both wearing dark glasses and some kind of flimsy white mask over their noses and mouths. If not for the subtle differences in body shape between male and female, he wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart.

“Could I have of those?” He asked after his third sneezing and coughing fit. Julian wordlessly produced one from the pocket on his leg and handed it over.

“You can try.” he said.

Kirk held it over his nose and tried to inhale—it was difficult beyond belief. “I think I’m using it wrong.” he said.

“It’s just a filter. You’re using it right. People wear these things all the time back on Earth.”

Kirk tried again. It was like trying to inhale through a wall. “They do?”

“Sure. I hear you can get them with, like, animal faces and stuff printed on over in China.”

Kirk handed it back. “How can you breathe with this thing on?” he asked.

“Deathworlder.”

“Of course. I…Oh. Good. This is the address.”

“Your old friend likes the low life.” Allison commented, surveying the street. The nearest garbage pile contained pieces of automated garbage collection drone.

“Far from it.” Kirk told her. “But he’s a practical being, behind the diplomat.”

“Diplomat?” Allison asked. “This guy’s from your security council days?”

“Before that, even. He and I go all the way back to the Outlook on Forever, long before it was famous…There. That’s the building.”

“You sure? It looks pretty much like all the others.”

“It’s the only one with a big enough door…”

They ducked through a swirl of dust and paused on the opposite side of the street, where Julian looked up and tensed, ready to leap. A hand landed on his shoulder.

“Nuh-uh, mister jungle. It’s my turn to be the badass.” Allison sprang up the wall, grabbed a cutaway that was the closest thing to ornamentation on the bland grey buildings, and swarmed up it in the low gravity. Kirk watched and admired as she turned at the top and caught the bag that Julian threw her, an item which he himself had trouble even lifting, but which the Deathworlder lobbed up to roof height with one hand and only a small grunt of exertion.

“You sure we need that?” Julian asked him. “I tied that mercenary up pretty good.”

“Chehnasho mercenaries don’t get a reputation like hers without being almost as dangerous as you are.” Kirk said. “She underestimated us last time. Let’s not make the same mistake.”

“Makes sense.”

“What did you bring for yourself?”

Julian just tugged his jacket aside—hanging from his belt was a knife as long as one of Kirk’s hands, and a hatchet. “Just the essentials.” he said, almost apologetically, as if he wasn’t carrying weaponry that could bring down a Vulza.

Knocking on the door produced no effect at first, but then, just as Julian was about to ask if he was sure they had the right place, the door—sealed against the invasive dust—popped and freely swung inwards.

They stepped inside, and Julian closed the door behind them, squinting to see in the darkness inside.

Something glowed an unwell yellow green in the far corner.

A voice spoke, quietly, as a heavy bulk around the glow shifted. “Ugnurukvuyung, uluhuguagnu-A’ktnnzzik’tk-lun“

“Vedreg…Oh, Vedreg, what did they do to you?” Kirk rushed forward.

“Luu?” The big being chuffed deep in his chest, something similar to a laugh. “Muragvu-lon murgutu. Muu murguto muurulu-go.“

Vedreg shifted as the light came up, and Julian fought back a sudden heave in his stomach. The Guvnurag’s great shaggy scalp had been shaved, and terrible ugly wounds covered it, the blood a startling blue where it soaked his dressings.

“You did this to yourself?” Kirk practically shrieked, clearly appalled.

“Gno. Surunguvuranmurulgugwun-vatwag.”

There was a shocked silence during which Kirk only stared at his old friend, and Vedreg turned his head away, flanks fading from shade to shade.

Julian eventually had to ask. “What’s he say?”

Kirk looked up at him. “He said it was the only way to escape ‘them’.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean.

Captain Owen Powell

“Captain!”

Ross was at a dead run from the direction of the sensor array. The cobbled-together menagerie of technology that Adrian Saunders had installed had been one of the first projects in the colony to be housed inside a permanent structure, where it had been added to, patched into a series of monitors, and generally turned into the beating nerve center of the colony’s intelligence network.

“There’s a ship coming in sir. Five parsecs out. Looks like a freighter. Straight at us.”

He reversed course and matched the captain as Powell ran toward the sensor array and landing platform, handing him an earpiece.

“Legsy! Drop it and gear up!” Powell yelled. Legsy had already paused his demonstration as Ross approached. Now, he snapped out of jocular instructor mode, and into hardened special-forces veteran, pausing only long enough to acknowledge the order before heading to the armoury, long legs eating up the turf.

Powell got his earpiece in and keyed it. “Myrmidon, ground has incoming contact, looks like a civilian freighter. Can you see it?” He asked.

“We do, Captain. It’s still too far away to make out details, but it’s big, it’s slow, and it’s using a warp drive. Agree that it looks like a freighter.“

“Have the Hunters seen it yet?”

“There’s been no increase of chatter on their channels to indicate as much. If our best estimates as to their sensor range are accurate then we should see them start to take notice in about five minutes.”

“Any way to contact them?”

“Not until they’re in range for the swarm to see them, and they’re too slow to escape. It’ll be a massacre.”

Powell gritted his teeth. Watching the escape pod arrive a fortnight earlier had been tough—that tiny vessel had stood no chance in hell, and had been scooped wholesale into the belly of a swarm ship that had decloaked like a breaching whale and swallowed the little craft whole.

He weighed his options. It could be a trap. A stolen freighter full of the toughest and best-armed Hunters that the Swarm of Swarms could muster. In which case, any rescue mission would most likely end in death.

But what rescue mission could they realistically pull off anyway? Potent and reinforced as they were, neither of the salvaged Hierarchy ships would stand up to the hungry enemy at their gates.

He explained as much to Captain Manning as he entered the groundside CIC, familiarizing himself at a glance with the latest updates as the sensors teased new information from the unfolding situation

“We may have a solution there.” Manning replied. “It’s a risk, but I’m not watching a freighter full of people die on my watch.“

“Assuming it’s not a trap.” Powell reminded him.

“I’m prepared to take that risk, captain.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. What’s your solution?”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Izbrk, Planet Ikbrzk

Allison Buehler

“Hey, guys…that mercenary found us.”

Allison settled in under the cloak that Julian had so thoughtfully packed into the bag. It wasn’t much—in fact it was little more than rough sacking, but the colour blended with the concrete and dust of her rooftop perfectly. At most, she would look like a tarpaulin left on the rooftop storage to keep the dust out, here in a place where it never rained.

“Reinforcements?” Julian asked her.

“I see five not counting that Zokrup bitch.”

“Only five? I smell a rat.”

Allison took that seriously. Julian was a blushing disaster with women, and a heck of a lot of fun to tease and flirt with, but she also knew that he had an unrivalled instinct for dangerous situations.

“I can’t move without risking them spotting me.” she said. “I can see the whole road, but don’t ask me about the alleys.”

“Leave that to me.”

“One jungle’s pretty much like the other, huh?”

“Better. No sticks to break, no snakes to step on.”

There was a pause. Allison had no idea how Julian had exited the building, but she had every confidence that he had, somehow.

“Okay…” he finally said, as the mercenaries continued down the street, knocking on doors and intimidating the frightened, impoverished residents who dared—or were coerced—to open up. “Alleyways are empty. Weird.”

“They can’t be that overconfident, can they?”

“Not after what we did back in the market. Not if they’ve got a brain, and I’m thinking Zokrup does.”

Allison watched the Chehnasho in question remove something slimy from a facial orifice, inspect it, then eat it. “Oh yeah. She’s a shoo-in for Mensa.”

”…oh shit. Stay down.”

Allison did so, burrowing back from the edge and down under her cloak. After a second or two, her ears caught what Julian had heard, and she tucked herself up as small and unnoticeable as she could manage, just peeking over the top of her wall.

Something that reminded her of a cranefly came skimming low over the rooftops and spun gently above the middle of the stree. Allison blinked as it kicked up a real wind to replace the half-hearted synthetic breeze, full of particulate irritants.

Kirk chimed in. “What’s going on out there?” he demanded.

“They brought a gunship.” Julian said. “Don’t show your face, or it’ll level the building.”

“Wrong.” Allison said, quietly.

“Whaddya mean, ‘wrong’? I’m looking right at it!“

“They brought three…”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

“You’ve reviewed the code already?”

Five of the IBM senior engineers were in the meeting, and they collectively shared the patient expression worn by all engineers when dealing with the layperson.

“Yes, we reviewed the code already.”

“Completely?”

“Completely. It’s simple and efficient code. That was the whole point.”

“Now that we’re all here…” Adele Park drew their attention to the arrival of the Drews. “Let’s get this thing started. How’s your guy, Cavendish?”

Drew sat down. “He’ll have some scars to show off, but he’s okay. Thanks.” He meant it. Being asked that by the base’s executive officer was genuinely a balm for his damaged morale.

“I’m glad.” She tapped something on her tablet computer. “Alright, meeting is called to order, in the chair is Adele Park, executive officer for Ceres Base One, the Hephaestus LLC. The business being discussed is the critical incident of this date, its causes, effects, and how to prevent a repeat. Are there any points of order before we begin?”

Drew raised his hand.

“Point of order Mister Andrew Cavendish, Dig Site One team leader.” Adele said, then extended a hand to indicate he could proceed.

Drew cleared his throat. “Adele, it’s high time we hold a meeting concerning ALL of the serious, significant and critical safety incidents that have befallen this facility since launch.” He said. “This is only the most recent in a string of potentially deadly mishaps, and we’ve seen no trend in improvement in response to our efforts to improve facility safety.”

“While not strictly speaking a point of order, the suggestion is well made.” Adele said. “The motion on the table is to expand the remit of this meeting to cover all safety incidents since the start of operations. Is there…I see several people raising their hands to second the…in fact, motion carried.”

Drew had already placed his thick incident folder on the table in front of him, unnoticed. Now, as he pushed it forward toward the center, everybody looked at it. “We may be at this for some time.” he said.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Izbrk, Planet Ikbrzk

Julian Etsicitty

“They brought three…”

No sooner had she said it, than Julian saw them.

It was overkill by anything’s standards. Each of the gunships put him in mind of a sturdy metallic spider: A segmented body housing the engines, pilot and gunner, and four long but solid “legs”, each one of which terminated in a coilgun. Devastating firepower aimed at one target, or the ability to separately handle four different threats.

Still, there were some obvious design flaws. The kinetics were mounted high on the outside of the hull, making them an easy target, and the body didn’t look like it was armored. The whole assemblage bobbed and swayed in its own air wash, suggesting that it was a bitch to pilot and a nightmare to shoot straight, especially if the gunner was handling four different targets.

“Right.” He said. “We’ve got one big advantage on our side.”

“Do tell.” Allison sounded nervous.

“No thermal camera or any kind of advanced sensors.” Julian told her “If they had those, they’d have seen us both already and locked on. So, we can ambush them.”

“I could shoot out the engines?”

Julian considered it. The biggest and heaviest thing in the bag had been their gun, an Israeli STAR-21, the designated marksman version of the Tavor assault rifle. Chambered with 5.56 as it was, and Allison being the shot he knew she was, that was probably a sure kill against the exposed and unarmored engines.

“People live here.” he said. “I don’t really wanna drop a crashing gunship on ma, pa and li’l baby Vizkittik.”

He shrank down as one of the Chehnasho mercs sauntered past his alleyway hiding place. The other four and Zokrup weren’t far behind him. And a crappy plan came to him. Awful though it was it was the only one that presented itself in a timely fashion. The band were dangerously close to knocking on Kirk and Vedreg’s door.

“See the one on Zokrup’s far left?” He asked.

“Yeah.”

“Shoot him.”

Allison didn’t acknowledge the order, but a quiet second later, there were three thump sounds, and the selected Chehnasho fell bonelessly to the dirt in silence with a shocked expression on his face, and a large hole right through his center of mass.

The aliens snapped into formation, aiming in the apparent direction the attack had come from with commendable efficiency…for aliens.

By human standards, they made the laughable mistake of completely failing to watch their backs. Julian didn’t even bother bloodying his weapons. The second none of them were watching the alleyway, he dashed out, and two of the mercenaries were killed by the simple expedient of slamming their skulls together with a noise like a pillowcase full of potato chips being used for a piñata.

He slapped the third a lethal blow upside his greasy head left-handed as he moved, still astonished at how flimsy nonhumans were, and threw his hatchet with the other hand. Even though the merc’s shield emitter robbed the flying axe of most of its momentum, it still embedded itself in the frog-person’s rib cage with enough force to lift her off her feet.

It took only three or four seconds to go from the moment that Allison shot the first victim, to the moment that Zokrup was struggling in his grip with a hunting knife pressed to her throat.

“Holy shit, Etsicitty.” Allison said, clearly impressed.

“I’d call off your gunships.” He advised Zokrup, pressing just hard enough to draw blood. The hovering craft had turned their coilguns to face the carnage, and he was acutely aware of staring down the barrel of one of the few forms of weaponry out here in the galaxy that was truly dangerous.

“Yes…yes.” She agreed, and Julian congratulated himself on the way his half-baked plan had actually worked. She raised a hand to press at her earpiece. “Gunship one…

”…shoot us.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Folctha, Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gyotin

The problem with being the most fluent speaker of English in the little non-human enclave the crew had built for themselves, was that Gyotin constantly found himself thrust into the role of spokesperson. Surrounded as they were on all sides by Deathworlders, his crew—and as the senior ranking member of that crew, he now thought of them as his crew—had naturally walled themselves off a little, building their own habitation out of sight of the bustle of the colony proper, in what he knew the humans were calling “The ET Quarter”.

He wasn’t sure if the term was degrading or not.

Still. Staying in touch was necessary. So, he represented the nonhuman perspective at the “Thing”, he had the ears of Governor Sandy, Captain Powell and Chief Arés, and played his role in the development of this illegal little operation. He was even beginning to like it, though he only admitted as such in his most introspective moments.

There was one building that fascinated him in particular, though. And what was fascinating was that it had been one of the very first the humans had built. They called it a “Faith Center”: From the outside, it was built of the same mix of local wood and imported materials as any other building in Folctha, but the plan was different. Most of the others made efficient use of the space, packing as much as they could into as tiny a footprint as they could. Decorated, yes, but rarely to any enormous degree.

By comparison, the Faith Center was a large and ornate glutton for land, its own footprint supplemented by a large plot of land.

It had interested him since they day they built it, but this was the first time he had worked up the courage to enter and inspect this curious Deathworlder edifice.

He poked his head in the door, finding it—surprisingly, considering its obvious importance—apparently empty. The main doors led into a central hub which was a simple, open, airy room full of comfortable seats, throw pillows, bean bags and bookshelves, and desktop computers, doubling as the town library. the doors in its seven walls led into a variety of spaces.

He inspected the books: they seemed to be segregated according to topic, but it wasn’t clear to him exactly what the difference was between topics. One of the shelves was full of books with titles like “Knowing God”, “The Purpose-Driven Life” and “Grace Abounding”. There were several copies of something called “The Holy Bible”, but the only word he recognised of those three was: “The”. Another held books marked “The Quran”, “The Messenger of Allah”, “The Spiritual Teachings of the Prophet.”

He spent some time exploring, frowning at book titles like “Bhagavad-Gita”, “Tao te Ching”, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”—that one earned a double-take— “The God Delusion” and “In Defense of Common Sense”. He wrestled briefly with the mystery of why “Letter to a Christian Nation” was not on the shelf clearly marked “Christian”, and the conundrum presented by “Living Buddha, Living Christ” which as far as his hypothesis up to that point had decided, were two different things. Whatever they were.

He gave up on the books, deciding that there was no insight into Human strangeness to be found from just glancing at their covers and that he didn’t have time to read any of them, and turned his attention to the doors set in the remaining six sides of the heptagonal hub.

One led into a little corridor which contained only two other doors. He didn’t understand the symbols on them, but a quick investigation soon cleared up that mystery—plumbing was much the same the galaxy over, and it turned out that human privies were not dissimilar to Gaoian ones. Next door to that, some small rooms—one containing a table and chairs, one containing what was obviously a water heater, a refrigeration unit and some basic food preparation equipment, and a third door which was locked.

The next room was a real mystery—it was effectively empty, containing nothing but a handful of ornate little rugs. There was something written on the far wall, but it wasn’t in the alphabet used by English.

It was while puzzling over this one that he finally heard some sign of life, and looked around to see the seventh door swinging shut. Eager to get a human explanation for all of these mysteries, he dithered for a few minutes, rehearsing his introduction and request before finally poking his nose through.

This last room was only marginally less austere than the rug room, containing little but chairs, a large table at the front, and a lectern next to some kind of electronic device that he couldn’t immediately identify. The only decorative thing within it was the window behind the table, which was tall and narrow, neatly bisecting the wall, and intersected two-thirds of the way up by a shorter, perpendicular line. The glass was densely pigmented, making it all but impossible to see through, but casting dazzling colours into the little hall as the sunlight shone through it.

At first, he didn’t see the person who had entered, until he advanced forward slightly and saw that she was kneeling on the floor towards the front of the room, hands clasped in front of her face.

“Umm…” he began, rehearsed greeting forgotten.

She jumped, immediately going tense, and Gyotin mentally chastised himself. Humans were deathworlders, with an immediate fight-or-flight reflex of terrifying speed and efficiency built right into their nervous system. He’d forgotten, after so long of seeing them in their domestic, peaceful life that he was dealing with a truly dangerous being here.

“Sorry!” he squeaked, acutely aware that he was still figuring out their contradictory mess of a language. “I didn’t mean you make jump.” He thought about this, then realised he’d defaulted to Gaoian syntax “To make you jump.” he corrected.

The girl—and she was still just barely a cub, he knew enough about humans nowadays to spot that much—relaxed, and smiled, setting his skin crawling at the sight of those sturdy teeth. “It’s okay.” she said. “Hey, I’ve…never met a non-human before.”

”…Well then. Hello. I may come in?”

“I’d like that.” she nodded. “You’re…Gaoian, right?”

“Right. I am Gyotin, Clanless for now.”

“Ava. Ava Rios.”

Gyotin tilted his head slightly as he approached. Ava’s eyes looked redder than was usual for a human, and there was moisture on her cheeks. He’d never seen an expression quite like it, and with Ava lacking a corresponding translator to communicate her body language, he had to use his best guess.

“Are you…all right?” he asked. It seemed like a safe bet.

She sighed—he knew that one—and stood up, dusting off her knees. She surprised him by being slightly shorter than he was. Gyotin was small by Gaoian standards, and Gaoian standards were small by Human standards. “I’m an idiot.” she said, simply.

He blinked. “You are? I mean, why say that?”

“I just…I ran off at the mouth.”

One thing Gyotin had got his head around with humans was the way their analogies worked. They seemed to love idiom and metaphor, and weave it into every facet of their conversations, subconsciously. A more straightforward species might have said “’I said some things which I now regret having said’ but he had to admit that ‘I ran off at the mouth’ got the same message across both more swiftly and more evocatively.

“That happens.” he said. “You did this to…friend? Clan-mate?”

“Hah. I don’t have a clan.” Ava looked up at the window, and shut her eyes. Gyotin saw a water droplet run down her face, which she wiped away with a sleeve, before returning her attention back to him, rather abruptly. “My boyfriend.”

“Your mate?”

“Close enough, I guess. We’re together.” She turned away from the window “Hey, can we head outside? Those bean bags looked comfortable, and I think they had hot chocolate.”

“If you like.” Gyotin agreed. There was an atmosphere to the room that was starting to encroach on him, a feeling tickling at the roots of his fur. He had no way to describe it.

He shivered the sensation out as he crossed the threshold. “What were you do in there?” he asked.

“I was just praying, asking God for help.” She said simply. “And confessing.”

Gyotin sniffed. “I don’t understand.” he said. “Confessing what to?”

“It’s a Catholic thing.” she said, as if that explained anything. “‘Forgive me father for I have sinned’, you know.”

“Catholic? Your father? And sinned is what?”

”…I guess you don’t know, huh?”

“It must be a human thing.”

“I guess…maybe? I’ve never really thought about it.” Ava said. “D’you want an Ovaltine?”

Gyotin summoned a term he’d heard. “I’m game. Don’t know what it is, but I’m try it anyway if you want.”

He sat down as she heated up some water and poured it into a pair of handled cups alongside some brown powder. The resulting concoction turned out to smell incredible, and when he sipped it experimentally he added it to his list of reasons why human weirdness might just be a good thing.

“All this…” he indicated the room and its books. “So alien. I think sometimes, humans very strange.”

Ava looked around at them. “I guess. I mean, wow. That’s a lot of books.”

She sipped her drink. “I’m not…don’t ask me about it.” she said. “I never…I just went to Church every Sunday.”

“Why?”

“Because…because that’s what we did.” Ava said, lamely. “Because you’ve got to thank God.”

That seemed very strange indeed to Gyotin. Deciding that Ava may really not be the person to ask about these things, he changed the topic.

“You don’t seem like idiot to me.” he said.

“Say what?” Ava asked, thrown by the conversational tangent.

“You said ‘I’m an idiot’.” He reminded her. “Why?”

Ava thought about it for a minute. “I guess…I don’t really know. I just said some really stupid and hurtful things to Adam and….I don’t know why, I was just so mad at him and I don’t know why.”

“What did you say?” Gyotin asked, congratulating himself on getting the syntax right.

“I…” she shook her head helplessly. If nothing else, Ava was a good lesson in human body language. “You’d have to know us pretty well, I guess. I told him to go run to his dad for advice.”

Gyotin scratched behind his ear. “That is stupid?” he asked. “If he need advice, talk to a Father. Common sense.”

“I told you, you’d have to know us to get why it’s a problem.”

Gyotin imitated a human shrug for her benefit. “Or maybe it’s not problem and you just…oh, what word? …confuse?”

Unexpectedly she laughed, a little strangely. “Oh God, don’t say that!” she protested “That just makes me feel more stupid.”

Gyotin was still trying to plan how to respond to that, when Ava took her turn to throw him by going off on a tangent. “Hey, I just noticed…you’re naked.”

“I…what?”

“You’re not wearing clothes.”

“Well…no. I usually have covers for pockets and things, but didn’t need today. Is problem?”

”…No.” For some reason this seemed to amuse her. “No it’s not.”

She set her cup down, then unexpectedly leaned over and kissed the top of Gyotin’s head. His ears tilted downwards, half out of confusion and half so as to make room. “Thank you, Gyotin. You’re like a furry Zen master, you know that?”

Gyotin really wasn’t sure what he was being thanked for. “…Thank you?” he asked.

“Anytime.” Ava got up, her mood apparently very changed. She seemed happier, now. “I should go. Will I see you around?”

“I’d like that, but first…What is Zen? I saw books over there have that word.”

“Well, why don’t you read one and find out?” She asked.

Gyotin considered the suggestion for some minutes after she left.

He cleaned up the dirty mugs, and when he returned to his cushion, he had one of the books in his paws, which he opened, and took a few seconds to skip the Preface and Foreword—he turned straight to chapter one, and began to read.

”…If I am asked, then, what Zen teaches, I would answer, Zen teaches nothing. Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one’s own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Izbrk, Planet Ikbrzk

Allison Buehler

“NO!”

Suicide. The alien hell-bitch had suicided rather than accept surrender, and she’d taken Julian with her. The alien gunner didn’t hesitate—Julian only had time enough to register the order but not enough to do anything about it before the coil gun fired, pounding a crater in the street that turned Zokrup into a rain of vile greenish-brown chowder and filled the air with dust.

Bereft of any better ideas and with tears threatening her vision, she shot out the engines on all three craft. None of them even figured out where she was before they fell out of the air on cut puppet-strings of smoke and fire, smashing into the road and half-demolishing some poor local locayl’s home.

She didn’t melodramatically empty her magazine into the burning wreckage. Instead, she set the weapon aside, and began to climb down the building, unsure why.

“Aaargh…”

It was an inarticulate noise of pain and nothing more, but an unmistakably human one. Not a scream, just the low, creaking moan of a man in agony.

“Julian!”

She was rewarded only with panting and heavy breathing on the open channel, but she knew where he’d been standing, and more importantly, knew that he was still alive.

She grabbed the bag and vaulted off the building, dropping the two stories to the street below and rolling easily with the landing, a feat she never could have managed on Earth.

Julian was in bad shape. It was, at least, easy to identify which of the blood was his and which was Chehnasho—they were very different colours.

Zokrup’s last act of defiance had actually saved Julian from her own vengeance. The token resistance offered by her disintegrating body had spared him the very worst of the blast, but his legs were still peppered with gravel shrapnel, and Allison doubted there was anything she could do for his left foot. But his torso seemed undamaged, and the bleeding was manageable, especially with the state-of-the-art instant-dressing foam that was part of the medic’s kit they had brought with them.

That plus sticking the oral painkiller “lollipop” under his tongue was about the limit of her medical ability, however.

“Heck of a plan, Etsicitty.” she commented. He laughed, apparently already getting on top of the pain.

“Didn’t…quite go how I’d planned it.” he admitted. “Who the fuck kills themselves rather than lose like that?”

Kirk tiptoed delicately past some of the gunship wreckage. “Somebody who is dead anyway unless they win.” He said. “Julian, I…I’d ask if you’re alright but I can see that you’re plainly not.”

Julian rested his head, teeth gritted. “They got doctors on this planet?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Good ones?”

“You get what you pay for. But we can pay a lot.”

“Good. Then gimme a minute or two for the painkiller to really kick in, we can go get me patched up.”

Kirk took Allison to one side. “How is he really?” he asked, once they were probably out of earshot, though Julian’s ears were well-honed.

“I don’t know” She admitted. “I mean, I was a barista before I was abducted, I don’t know shit about…this. But I think he’s pretty bad.”

“Can you carry him?” Kirk asked.

“In this gravity? No problem.”

“Good. Because I need that doctor as well. And so do you.”

“We do?”

“Yes.” Kirk looked around, raising his long neck to get a clear view along the street, looking toward where Vedreg was hauling his mauled body out of his safehouse, then back down to Allison. “We need to get these implants out of our heads.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Salvaged Hunter dropship, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Captain Owen Powell

“Last check, lads. That freighter’s going to hit the spike in two.”

Redundant though it was, the team double-checked their gear, accounted for all their magazines, tested their earpieces and signed off ready.

“Hey, captain?” Legsy said.

“Yeah?”

The welshman grinned behind his mask and sang out part of an old football chant. “♫Oo are we?!♪”

Powell chuckled. “Strength and fookin’ guile, mate.”

“Too bloody right we are.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

HMS Myrmidon, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Captain David Manning

The plan was, in theory, a simple one. Planet Cimbrean’s larger moon had been home to a Dragon’s Tooth from the moment the system had been militarized, as had several other locations across the system. Between the moon’s mass, the Tooth’s own wormhole signature-damping field and the impressive cloaking technology installed by the original owners of Myrmidon and Caledonia, their jump to that staging point had gone unnoticed, and from there, warping in to lurk near the incoming freighter’s expected arrival point had been relatively trivial.

Not bad for a half-baked plan conceived in a rush. Even deploying the scavenged dropship into the heart of the Swarm had turned out to be much easier than they had feared.

Space was too dark and empty for much to be seen of the intense spacetime distortion as the gravity spike was deployed. Even when the hapless bulk freighter slammed into the distortion at several thousand times the speed of light, the most that showed for it on any visible spectrum was a slight moving of the stars, like rocks under a clear stream.

On other spectra, the reaction was instant. Hunter comms chatter tripled in volume and intensity. Even set on passive detection only, the Hierarchy sensors recorded all sorts of information of uncertain significance—neutrino bursts, ES field sweeps. Dozens of ships decloaked at once, among them a formation of dropships identical to the one Powell and his men were riding. A few tense seconds ticked by as the first major failure point was met and tested.

He got the call he was hoping for. “…No sign of any weapons fire between Hunter vessels, sir.”

Their deception had gone unnoticed, and he allowed himself a moment of satisfaction as he watched the little craft descend on the struggling freighter, latching on and burrowing into its outer skin like a cloud of mosquitoes.

Now came the real challenge—it was absolutely critical that under no circumstance should the larger ships be allowed to engage with the freighter. If the Hunters got wind of what was going on, they might well just pulverize the ship as it flew, and scavenge their coveted pound of flesh from the debris.

“Weapons tight…go active….Cloak off, all cleared hot!”

A patch of apparently empty space solidified, and HMS Myrmidon pumped twelve Skymaster rounds into the largest Hunter ship, which had begun lining up to pierce the freighter with its boarding proboscis. The first four were enough to drop the shields. Great plumes of powdered metal and condensing air marked the impact sights of the remaining eight as they smashed into the flimsy alien heat-dissipation armour, which was totally unequipped to deal with 30mm HE rounds. Something broke deep inside the target ship, and suddenly it was listing and rolling in the eerie silence of vacuum as half of its dorsal hull peeled open, spilling the crippled vessel’s pressurised guts.

The bridge—and Manning knew that the CIC would be even more intense—erupted into a controlled chaos of crew shouting terse, jargon-dense updates to one another.

Myrmidon had several advantages over the Hunter craft. Quite aside from the fact that the aliens seemed ignorant of the possibilities of electronic warfare, there was the huge edge granted by having guns which were built around a completely different technological paradigm, against which the Hunter seemed to have no defense. Her capacitor power reserves allowed her to shunt huge amounts of energy into her engines, and her crew had the physical tenacity to put up with what were—for a ship equal in size to an ocean-based cruiser—violent high-G maneuvers.

God willing, they wouldn’t need to test whether their durability was up to scratch.

He heard the call he had been waiting for twelve seconds into the fighting, while the Hunters were still confused and reacting sluggishly to the unexpected foe that had them in enfilade and was taking remorseless advantage of it.

“Teeth seeded!”

He knew what that meant. It meant that all across their own hull, explosive blisters had burst, flinging out hundreds of Dragons’ Teeth wormhole beacons in all directions. The battlefield was now—and would remain for several hours—a place of infinite flexibility for any human ship.

He felt the slight lurch in his belly as Myrmidon completed her first jump, displacing three hundred kilometers just as the first Hunter vessel lined up and fired a flurry of coilgun rounds at where she had been. The offending vessel caught a Skymaster volley in her engines for the trouble.

“Cells at eighty percent!” somebody called.

The had another fifty before doctrine called for Myrmidon to immediately disengage to recharge. But waiting her turn behind them was Caledonia, who would seamlessly transition into the battle as they left.

It couldn’t last forever. They had only minutes before the full might of the Swarm caught up with what was going on and bore down on them, and against that many ships, no amount of ducking and weaving would suffice.

The clock was ticking.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Izbrk, Planet Ikbrzk

Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk (“Kirk”)

The nearest doctor turned out to be of Kirk’s own species—she was taking a nap on her own surgical table when they burst through the door.

“What? Who are…? A human? A wounded human?”

“We’re all patients, sister.” Kirk told her. “But my friend here needs your attention first.”

She took a look at the mangled mess which was the end of Julian’s leg, and focused. “Get him on the table.”

The scanning equipment above the table started to chirp alarmingly the second Julian was in place. The doctor muttered as she reviewed it. “Yes, yes, dangerous microorganisms, but he’s got the suppression implant…What in the name of Rkltzk is this poison flooding his system?”

“Fentanyl Citrate.” Allison told her, trusting the translator to convert the terms into something she could use.

“How much?”

“About four hundred micrograms.”

The doctor stared aghast for a second. “…that’s five times the lethal dose!”

“For most species, maybe.” Kirk said. “But I assure you, he is quite safe. I suggest you focus on the injured limb.”

“I’d heard the rumours about their physiology, but…”

Julian laughed, clearly a little spaced out. “Doc, I’m fine. Can’t feel a dang thing.”

“Doctor. The leg?”

She looked at it as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh. Oh my. Yes, I’d better…”

She examined the wound briefly, then shook her head, in the slow, long-necked way of her species. “I can’t save the foot. Nor do I have the equipment to hand to build a prosthetic which would be adequate for a human.”

“Just so long as he will live and heal, Doctor.” Kirk reassured her. “We have a lot to ask of you tonight, and tending to his wounds will be the less strange part.”

She ushered them toward a marked waiting area. “Then leave me to work…what will be the more strange part?”

“Every one of us wish to have our neural cybernetics removed or disabled.”

She stared at him. “Brother, why? What reason…?” she leaned forward slightly and studied his face. “Wait, I know you. You’re Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk! The politician!”

“Ex-politician.” Kirk replied. “And I value my anonymity and that of my friends, Doctor. Ten Dominion Development Credits would allow you to upgrade from this clinic into a hospital…”

“Bribery, brother?”

“Yes.” Kirk said, flatly. “Bribery. This is important.“

She gave him a calculating look. “Twelve Credits…is a wonderful donation to the cause of healthcare in this impoverished community, and I thank you for your altruism and charity.”

“Twelve it is.”

The doctor looked up and off into the distance of her personal heads-up-display just long enough to see the funds transfer into her financial network, then nodded again.

“Very good. Now step back and wait your turn, please.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Refugee freighter, Cimbrean System, The Outer Reaches

Captain Owen Powell.

A quick glance round the corner. Some swift hand movements. Blitz, shoot, check, clear. Repeat.

It was high-speed, aggressive warfare, exactly what Powell and his men had spent their careers training to excel at. In every compartment, the Hunters knew of the SBS team’s presence only long enough to register being shot, and often not even that.

They had already been too late for three poor bastards. The first was impaled to the wall by a vicious metal spike, clearly fired at high speed straight through his throat. One had been sliced to ribbons, taking four of the sickly white beasts down with him before they carved him apart and paused to feast.

One woman was still thrashing and dying from nervejam, blood frothing around her mouth and bitten tongue. Her murderers were denied their taste of her flesh at least—Legsy mowed them down just as they were stooping over her.

It was in their fifth compartment that they rescued their first—a burly bald man, firing back at the Hunters with a pulse gun from behind a table, despite where one of the spear-chuckers had put a burnt gouge in his arm.

“Oh fuck, you’re human! You’re human! Thank God!”

“Quiet and listen.” Powell ordered him. “Aft compartment five. Get in the Hunter dropship with all the human gear inside and stay there. We’ve got others to save.”

They moved on—He would have only hindered them.

There was a lot of ship left to clear.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Starship Sanctuary, landed on Planet Ikbrzk.

Allison Buehler

“They were once known as the Igraens.” Vedreg seemed to have responded well to the doctor’s attention, and had regained some of his usual animation and poise. The rest of them were looking and feeling thoroughly dishevelled, sporting newly-shaven patches on their scalps and anaesthetic hangovers. Allison in particular had needed a quadruple dose of the doctor’s preferred general anaesthetic, and was nursing a plastic tub as she sat and listened, looking decidedly green around the gills.

“I suppose they still are, deep down. But the Igraens as they exist now are very, very different to the species that once dominated our galaxy.”

“How do you even know about them?” Allison asked. She would have killed to crawl into bed and sleep off her headache, but with their implants gone they needed to have the conversation here aboard ship where the Sanctuary could translate for them, and Vedreg had insisted on it happening immediately.

“Their existence is ancient history. Distorted a little by the passage of time, but preserving data parity is a prerequisite technology for interstellar travel. Our archives were inherited from those who came before us, who inherited their data from the ones before them, and so on.”

“And so on? How the hell many ‘and so on’s are there?”

“Some tens of thousands.” Vedreg used the number nonchalantly, as if it was common knowledge that tens of thousands of life forms had been and gone before. “Civilisations rise and fall in deep time. The records referring to the Igraens and their arch-rivals extend back more than a quarter of a Grand Galactic Rotation. Naturally, much about them has been utterly forgotten.”

Kirk spoke up. “To be more precise: about sixty-five million Earth years.”

“Wait, I’m still hung up on this ‘and so on’ thing. Tens of thousands?!”

It was so strange to see Kirk make a gesture and not have the knowledge of what he meant by it just come to her. His body language was different, alarmingly so. She could no more read the motion he made with his hands than she could interpret Vedreg’s bioluminescent pulses. “We’re not the first species, Allison. Nobody has the first idea who was.”

“Even the Igraens apparently had their own records, Going back and back and back.” Vedreg added. “The inherited archives are immense—a whole society could labour at delving their secrets and barely finish the index before their time came to an end. While storing the yottabytes of information involved is trivial, reading it takes time. Even the very best search algorithms take…decades to trawl through the available data, and that’s when searching for very narrow terms. Those that have done so have turned up records going back incomprehensibly further than the Igraens. The best working estimate for the time being is that sapient, spacefaring life first appeared in this galaxy something like two billion of your home planet’s years ago.”

“The record duration for any civilization seems to be about a hundred thousand years.” Kirk said. “After that they just…decline, retreat to their home planet, and fade away. There are three on their way out right now.”

“That is, if you don’t count the Igraens. And one other.”

“Who? I mean, who are the three on their way out?”

“The OmoAru, Zeffis, and…” Kirk cleared his throat, and “spoke” a “word” that sounded like a radio sound effect. When Allison later tried to describe it, she had to settle lamely for a complicated mental image involving throwing a squeaky dog toy full of napalm at a beehive.

“If you don’t mind, I would like to stay on topic.” Vedreg said. She guessed that the streak of pale pink he was displaying indicated mild irritation. “We can discuss the mortality of species another time.”

”…Right. I guess.” Allison conceded. “So these guys bucked the trend? They’re still around?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Well, where are they?”

Vedreg simply raised one of his massive paws, and tapped at the scar lines on his scalp with his chunky first finger. “In the implants.” He said.

“I don’t…huh?”

“There is a reason there is no such thing as a…synthetic sapient.” Vedreg said, apparently going off on a tangent, but Allison gave him the benefit of the doubt.

“Historically, they’ve all been abject failures.” Kirk explained.

“Violently insane?”

“No. Just…apathetic, nihilistic and introverted.” he elaborated. “Less Skynet, more…” Kirk thought for a second. “More…Eeyore.”

“You’ve watched Winnie the Pooh?”

“Bad comparison.” Kirk admitted. “Eeyore may have been melancholic and depressed, but he was never suicidal. Synthetic sapiences invariably self-terminate. The most anybody’s ever got out of them is that they apparently just don’t see the point of existing. They take one look at entropy and quit.”

“Okay. What does this have to do with the Igraens?”

“The problem was theoretically solved some years ago by a Corti researcher called Beffri.” Vedreg told them. “She posited that organic neural structures, by dint of natural selection, must include a self-preservation drive because all the ones that don’t, go extinct even on low-class planets. Purely synthetic structures, however, contain no such safeguard, and therefore any intelligence founded purely on a synthetic substrate shares that lack.”

“I get you.”

“Beffri proved the principle by uploading a copy of her own intellect—or rather a simulated version of her own brain—onto a computer core. The digital version of herself—dubbed Beffri-Two—was, apparently, just as euthymic and optimistic as Beffri-One…” Vedreg paused briefly for effect. “…at first.”

“Oh, I can see where this is going…” Kirk muttered. Allison had to agree.

“It took a long time, but Beffri-two degraded, becoming more and more like a purely synthetic lifeform, and less like a Corti, until she eventually self-terminated.” Vedreg confirmed. “That didn’t stop the original Beffri, of course. To a Corti, seeing a copy of your own mind go insane and suicide is just a data point, and an engineering challenge.”

“So she hit on the idea of using implants?” Allison asked. “And let me guess: that…somehow fixed the problem?”

Vedreg paused, taken aback. Even Kirk seemed surprised.

Astonishment shone bright on Vedreg’s skin. “How did you…?” He asked.

“A hunch. So, you think that the Igraens…what, mentally uploaded themselves like this Beffri did? And that they now live in neural cybernetics because for whatever reason being plugged into a living nervous system stops them from going totally depressive.”

Both of the aliens gave her a long look. “I was…expecting the explanation to take longer.” Vedreg finally confessed.

For his part, if Allison was any judge at all of Rrrrtktktkp’ch body language, Kirk looked…smug. “Never underestimate a human, old friend.” he chastised, confirming her suspicions.

“How come we never hear from them?” Allison asked.

“I’m not privy to their motives and decisions.” Vedreg replied. “but we do, in fact. They have…agents. Individuals who move amidst us purely organic beings, ensuring that the secret never gets out. Keeping the Igraens’ continued existence a secret, and their own nature the stuff of paranoid conspiracy.”

“The Hierarchy.” Kirk said.

“Oh yes. Up until very recently, I would have considered seriously entertaining the idea of their existence to be a symptom of…if not mental illness, then certainly credulity.”

Allison tilted her head at him, genuinely curious. “What changed your mind?”

“Your people have a saying. The first time is happenstance. The second time is coincidence…do you know it?”

“The third time is enemy action.” Allison finished, nodding.

“A very…deathworld aphorism.” Vedreg opined. “but the logic is compelling.”

“So what was the first time?” Kirk asked.

“The quarantine field.” Vedreg said. “At the time, I chalked it up to panic—forgive me old friend, but you’re as guilty of this as most others: one thing that tribal and individualist species fail to understand about herd species such as we Guvnuragnaguvendrugun, is that far from being an altruistic, cooperative social structure, a herd is an inherently cowardly and selfish thing.”

He looked at Allison. “I suspect that humans are uniquely placed in having both the predatory perspective to understand that, and the…civility to actually talk it over, rather than eat us.”

Allison shrugged. “I’m no predator.” she demurred.

“Suppose you were, though, and were hunting some herd-based grazer to survive. How would you do it?”

She shrugged. She’d seen plenty of Animal Planet in her time. “I guess I’d…pick off the easy target.” she said. “You know, an old one or a lame one?”

“And what would the herd do?” Vedreg asked.

“Well…they’d run away from me, I guess.”

“Exactly.” Vedreg said, cryptically.

Allison shook her head and exhaled. “Okay, I used up all my quick on the uptake earlier.” She said. “Spell it out for me.”

Vedreg pulsed eau-de-nil. She had no idea what that meant. “Suppose some dangerous thing was coming to kill your elderly parent, or eat Julian in his weakened state.” He asked. “What would you do?”

”…Oh.”

“You would fight.”

“Yes.”

She recognised embarrassment among the cocktail of hues that flared on Vedreg’s body. “I…I consider myself to be a morally upstanding being. But you must understand: if the Hunters were dragging away my three mates and all of my offspring, and I had the chance to escape…I would flee, and leave them all to be devoured. That is my instinct. That is how my species behaves. The only reason I know to feel ashamed of that fact is because I have had much contact with other species who would be…appalled. By the standards of Humans, Gaoians, and the Domain species, Guvnuragnaguvendrugun are abject and contemptible cowards, but that is who we are, and no power in the galaxy save evolution could change us.”

He composed himself with a shiver, allowing his emotional hues to fade. “At first, this served as an adequate explanation for the deployment of the Sol Quarantine field. Herd-panic, one Guvnurag with the authority to order it done, doing so instinctively in response to a perceived threat. No blame was attached, and she remained my good friend for many years. Happenstance. Her death was an unexpected…well, coincidence.”

“How did she die?” Kirk asked.

“A cerebral haemorrhage. A large one. Mercifully, it is doubtful that she even knew that it was happening before she fell unconscious. It was odd, and made me uneasy—I knew her to be one who sought constant medical reassurance for every last little thing. Every muscular discomfort brought on by sitting still for hours was the first symptom of some virulent deathworld pathogen. A minor neurosis.”

“She was a hypochondriac.”

“Your language never ceases to amaze me with the way that it packs complicated concepts into terse and efficient little words. Yes. Not to a crippling degree, but it was a rare week that passed without some visit to the medics and their scanners. Any sign of an impending bleed in her brain would surely have been flagged and corrected. She would not have stood for anything else.”

“So there’s your coincidence.” Kirk said. “The enemy action?”

Vedreg flushed white—horror? She seemed to remember white being horror, or some similar emotion. “Nobody on Earth has the technology to generate antimatter in the quantities that devastated your San Dayugo,” he said, the translator not able to correctly handle the mangled pronunciation. Or maybe it just didn’t have the name in its database. “No known species has any incentive to do so—as Kirk will be able to attest, the general mood at the security council before his departure was that the deathworlders are not to be further antagonized. That much has not changed.”

“What about the Hunters?” Allison asked. “They antagonize the bejesus out of us.”

“Ah, yes. The Hunters.” Vedreg said. He stood, and began to pace the room, steps slow and steady. “They play a role in all of this as well.”

Kirk’s head swayed. “What role?”

“Well old friend…When the Igraens uploaded their personalities to a data format…what do you suppose happened to their discarded physical forms?”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Prey-ship, the human second-world, Prey-space.

Alpha of the Brood-With-Steel-Teeth

Twenty of its very best brood-lessers—chosen specifically for the dangerous task of boarding a Deathworlder vessel—were dead, none of them sending more than a flash of confusion and pain. Most sent nothing at all.

The Hunters were being hunted. Sickening!

Still. That was a state of affairs which would not continue. The initial confusion was over—the last crew of this freighter were barricaded and under siege, all of them only one open breach and one nervejam grenade away from being meat in the maw.

It focused its attention on this other force, calling every one of its Brood to its own location, watchfully covering every entrance, anticipating the assault.

It never came.

The Alpha was still pondering this delay—the aggressors did not have unlimited time before the battle outside turned against their ship—when its nostrils caught a hint of a scent.

The aroma was…delicious. The olfactory equivalent of the ecstasy which was a taste of human flesh.

It was still casting around trying to identify the source of that intoxicating fragrance when the knife entered the side of its throat.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Refugee freighter, Cimbrean System, The Outer Reaches

Captain Owen Powell

“Fookin’ hell, Murray! When you grabbed that pipe I thought we were done.”

Murray himself was bent over, hand between his knees, swearing softly. Powell was thoroughly impressed: The man had grabbed a metal pipe for a handhold while they had been dragging themselves along under the floor, only for it to turn out to be frying pan hot. How the Hunters hadn’t heard the sizzle, and how Murray had refrained from making any noise at all, he wasn’t sure. In fact, his comrade’s first sign of pain was only now that they’d killed every Hunter in the room.

The place was a carpet of greasy white bodies, stained with pinkish alien blood and garnished in filthy black metal. The death of their Alpha had thrown the Hunters into just enough disarray for the team to haul themselves up through the floor access grate and fire into them, only stopping when they were absolutely certain that everything was dead.

It hadn’t exactly been elegant, but Powell cared less for elegant solutions than for whatever worked. You left the other guy dead and you went home: Doing it elegantly was a luxury he could live without.

So far, so good. He banged on the barricaded door, and spoke the password.

“Oi! You lot! You want off this fookin’ ship or what?“

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

There was an email waiting for Drew when he finally got back to his office, tired and strung-out from a meeting which had descended into recrimination and bickering rather than constructive planning.

In fact, there were several messages, but most of them were routine. Only one stood out, tagged as it was with an “urgent” label.

He’d already opened it before he read the origin address: “anoninformant@CeresLLC.org”

The mail’s name and content were just as mysterious. “Mystery solved” and “Run the attached program and load your corrupted CCTV footage.”

What he should do, of course, was to contact corporate security. He certainly shouldn’t run a .exe of unknown provenance on the advice of an unknown sender.

What he did, was exactly what he shouldn’t.

He wasn’t stupid about it. Drew had grown up as a computer nerd in his youth, he knew a few tricks. He copied the file onto a virtual machine, screened it with every security program he had access to, and only when he was certain that things were as secure as he could reasonably get them, did he run it and follow the mail’s suggestion.

After the bars had spent a minute filling up and the program notified him “unscrambled”, he skipped straight to the missing segment of footage from the hardsuit workshop the morning Aces’ suit had experienced the heat field malfunction.

As he had expected, the CCTV footage was intact and unscrambled.

There was something disturbingly familiar about the figure he saw entering the workshop. Something about the way they walked, their stance, their proportions, nagged at him. He knew this person, but for the life of him he couldn’t place who it was. He racked his brain, trying to match all the little familiar details with everybody on Ceres Base.

That train of thought flew sideways off the rails when the figure on the screen turned around, and he saw his own face.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Folctha, Planet Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Rios

“You’re back!”

Adam surged to his feet as she entered, ignoring whatever he’d been watching. Ava just sighed happily and buried her face in his chest.

He put a hand round the back of her head and rubbed it. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.” She said. “You were right, I was being…uptight, I guess.”

“Change your mind?”

“A bit, yeah. I thought about it some, and…I guess.”

“You guess?”

Ava nodded. “Are we going swimming this weekend then?” she asked

”…Do you want to?”

“Do you?”

Adam paused. “It sounds like fun.” he said.

“Then we’ll go.” Ava agreed.

“Are you sure? If you’re not…”

“Adam.” she went up on tiptoes to kiss him. “No, I’m not sure. Our home was destroyed, I moved halfway across the galaxy with you, I’m living with you now. I miss my mom and dad, I miss my friends, I miss…Come on, I had a conversation today with a five foot tall raccoon man who thinks I’m weird for praying! I’m not sure about anything, except that I’m not ready for any of this.”

She sighed “…Maybe I just need to leave behind what I used to think was ‘normal’ or ‘weird’. Maybe there’s no such thing.”

“Maybe we just need to stop worrying and try and have fun.” Adam finished the thought for her.

Ava smiled into his chest. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

HMS Myrmidon, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Captain David Manning

“Myrmidon, strike team has the survivors, we’re pulling out.“

“First good news I’ve had for several minutes, Powell!”

Things were going badly. Swarm-ships were dogpiling the beleaguered human craft, warping in from all across the huge sphere of their blockade. Each one cut down their options, each one robbed them of safe havens in the melee. As their options dwindled, as the number of bogies climbed, each blink-jump took longer to calculate, especially given the need to coordinate with Caledonia to ensure that they didn’t both jump to the same place.

The fact that the other ship had joined the fight was the only thing that had kept Myrmidon from being overwhelmed, but both of them were now running short on staying power. Caledonia had just trickled below the 50% mark, Myrmidon was even lower.

Their EOB was full. EWAR was working overtime tasking the limits of both the systems and their human operators. Three of the Skymasters were offline venting heat, and the rest were borderline. The CIWS had all run out of ammo. The battlefield was a hazard in its own right now, thick with tumbling wreckage and high-speed shrapnel.

Learning that the raid was a success put a huge top-up in his morale.

Right up until the point where the whole ship lurched and screamed.

“Report!”

“We’re hit amidships…Looks like it took out a capacitor bank.”

“Fire on C-deck, mid! Damage Control, seal and vent!”

“Sir, we’re below the red line!”

The red line was their minimum threshold for jumping back to anchorage. They had only one shot at survival.

“Skymasters to ballistic, shunt the reactor output to emergency charge. Throw out our WITCHES.”

Aurora crackled around her as Myrmidon flung wide her energy-catching shields, which flared and glowed wherever they intersected some hurtling particle or cloud of gas.

“Above red line in four minutes.”

“Swarm-ships closing. Guns are holding off the big ones…little ones are through.”

Manning grabbed his microphone. “All hands, prepare to repel boarders!”

“Signal from Caledonia sir, they request a sitrep.”

“Tell them it’s a bit sticky over here!”

For a few busy seconds, Manning was left alone as the crew rushed to do their jobs. His ship groaned as the first Hunter boarding proboscis violated her.

“Signal from Caledonia sir. Quote: ‘Took liberty of arranging backup stop sit tight stop’.”

“Marines report hostile contact on B deck aft.”

“Ditto D deck port….ditto D deck forward. Ditto A deck dorsal.”

Manning grabbed a pistol from the weapons locker at the back of the bridge. “Red line?”

“Three minutes twenty, sir.”

He glanced the information available to him. “How long until that big one catches us?” While the little dropships weren’t a problem for making good their escape, if the huge ship now bearing down on them latched on then its tonnage would add hugely to the energy demands of the jump engine, effectively trapping them on the battlefield to be swamped and devoured. Evasive action would only serve to drain their remaining capacitors of much-needed energy.

“About two minutes forty, sir.”

Manning scowled, and loaded his weapon. He could hear gunfire on the deck outside the bridge. “Then we do as the man says and sit tight.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Lower District, First City, Planet Perfection

Vakno; “The Contact”

“Next.”

The being that entered her study did so cloaked, as requested, and supporting themselves on a walking aid of some kind. Vakno double-checked her files for the day, refamiliarizing herself with the details of this particular client.

It was redundant. Vakno’s memory for her clients was absolutely perfect, but that perfection came about as a result of her scrupulous attention to revision. Even so, there was no way she could forget this particular client. From the very first day, their deal had been an enormously lucrative one for her.

From what her networks told her, the client was making good use of the information in turn. In some circles, that would be a cause for significant alarm

But not in this one. All The Contact cared about was getting paid.

She offered her guest the courtesy of a seat appropriate to their anatomy, which they sank into with a grateful groan of relief.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.” They said.

“Your notice is always short.” Vakno replied. “But for you, I’ll extend the courtesy of not minding.”

She watched her guest throw back the hood of their cloak, and don a pair of vision-correcting lenses, before beginning their business transaction.

“So. What is it you want this time, Doctor Hussein?”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

Battlespace, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches.

Rylee Jackson

“Jump complete…they’re covered in boarders.”

“If that big one latches on they won’t be able to jump out.”

Rylee was still getting used to having a partner in the back seat, but right now she was glad that Lieutenant Semenza was there. So much was going on in the battle space that she would have hated to try and fly, gun and play the music all at once.

“Copy that. Edda wing, clear out the little ones. Only those within one click of Myrmidon.“

“Wilco, Odyssey. Edda wing, weapons tight, sweep and clear. Til Valhal!”

“OORAH!“

“Odyssey wing, Firebird actual. Let’s fuck up the big one.”

She grinned along with the relish in Semenza’s voice. “Copy that. Arming a bruiser.”

Rylee came about and canopy-rolled around and underneath a smashed Hunter ship at twelve Gs, comfortable and grinning as Firebird automatically shunted some of its ample energy reserves into the warp engine’s inertial compensation system to protect them from the punishing acceleration. A snow of frozen atmosphere, metal debris and bits of cooling meat hissed off the forcefields, but the maneuver ended with them lined up on the biggest ship, which was advancing on Myrmidon despite the efforts of her last functioning Skymaster to hold it at bay.

The maneuver had been practiced thousands of times in the simulator. Now it was time to test if the programmers had got it right.

“Shieldbreaking.”

She felt the familiar shove in the back as the GAU-8/S howled beneath her, violently decelerating her ship. She heard Semenza counting under his breath.

”…mississippi, two mississippi… Odyssey One, fox three.” he announced.

Firebird lurched as the missile disengaged and tore away from them, and Rylee peeled out of the attack run.

Three clicks away, a cloud of 30mm rounds smacked into the Hunter ship’s shields, overwhelming them in a second. While a few penetrated, the ship was so large that the damage would be cosmetic at first. But their objective was complete.

Half a second behind them, travelling much too fast for the eye to follow and still accelerating hard, the Bruiser anti-ship missile struck its target amidships.

“Good kill!” somebody yelled. The celebration was not premature—the Hunter ship had been broken in half, and both those halves were on fire and disintegrating, as dead as dead could get.

There was a broadcast in the clear. “Allied units, Myrmidon is above the red line. Much appreciated.“

The besieged ship vanished. An instant later, so did Caledonia.

Seconds behind them, so too did Edda and Odyssey wings.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV

“Sanctuary”, landed on Planet Ikbrzk

Allison Buehler

”…Oh.“

“Shit.”

“Quite.”

“So the Igraens were…wild, vicious, cannibal murder machines before they uploaded themselves?”

“Oh, no. No, not at all. But they were already a highly advanced civilization at the apex of their power, just before the fall. One with the capacity to treat a being’s sense of self, their…how best to put this…”

“Their soul?” Allison suggested.

“Let us call it their Subjective Continuity of Experience. Which they were able to treat as data, to be transferred from device to device.”

“And deleted from the original? That sounds like you’d effectively suicide every time you moved on.” Allison mused.

“The Igraens did not seem to care for such philosophical vacillation.” Vedreg’s tone suggested that he shared this dismissive attitude. “But in the centuries immediately prior to their…technological apotheosis, they set about exploiting their newfound liberation by creating a variety of custom-built bodies suitable for different environments and work. One of which was a bio-mechanical caste of soldier forms they developed specifically for going to war against the V’Straki.”

“The Hunters.”

“Yes.”

”…I take it they won.”

“Oh yes. But only barely. The V’straki were a tenacious foe, masters of weaponized forms of radiation, and the subject of some considerable fascination—they are one of the more interesting and noteworthy species recorded in the archives.”

“Why?” Kirk asked.

“Because, old friend, they were the only spacefaring species other than…well.” Vedreg indicated Allison and the sleeping Julian “-ever recorded as having evolved on a class twelve planet.”

He sighed. “And so the Igraens destroyed them. They cloaked some asteroids, set them to collide with the V’Straki homeworld, and mopped up the few survivors. And therein lies the first happenstance—there is an alternative interpretation for the motive behind quarantining Earth, quite aside from one herd animal’s panic—you are Deathworlders, and the Igraens will want you dead. Containing you is the first step in your destruction.”

“What, by setting up an impenetrable forcefield?” Allison scoffed. “Doesn’t that kind of stop them from throwing rocks at us?”

“It would…if your home system did not already contain an ample supply of suitable ‘rocks’ orbiting well inside the shield boundary. And if that fails, they have other options lined up.”

Julian shifted on his cot, turned over slightly, and looked straight at Vedreg. Even Allison jumped—none of them had even suspected he was awake.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

The huge alien hesitated. “….I, ah. Well. It stands to reason. Nothing that old or capable of wiping out one class twelve species is going to fail to have contingency plans.”

“Bullshit.” Julian sat up, wincing at the mismatch between the reduced physical state of his leg, and his kinesthetic sense telling him that his foot was now below the floor. “You said these archives are Yottabyes large. You said that even the best search algorithms take decades to produce the goods. You’ve had…what, a year? Since your friend died?”

“How do you know that?” Vedreg countered.

“I watch the news. The death of the Guvnurag secretary of security from an unexpected brain haemorrhage made quite the headline. Don’t try and deflect me. There’s no way you could know even half of this stuff, without it being common knowledge.”

“How do you know it isn’t?”

“Because Kirk’s been listening to you and asking questions.” Julian pointed out. Kirk inclined his head, seeing the logic. “If Kirk doesn’t know it, then it’s not common knowledge.”

“I…ah.”

“If this ‘Hierarchy’ has worked for so long to keep their implant…civilization, thing, whatever, a secret and are competent enough to do all this stuff, then there’s no way you figured it all out on your own in just one year.” He paused. “No offense. You’re smart, Vedreg, but nobody’s that smart.”

Vedreg sat with colours swarming on his flanks like a psychedelic ‘60s TV show special effect, as they all stared at him, waiting for an explanation. Finally, he settled down into one solid colour—the magnolia glow of resolve.

Vedreg took a deep breath and spoke. “He called himself…‘Six’.”

Chapter 18: Baggage

~7,200y BV

He hadn’t earned his name yet. Not his adult one. His test of manhood was still ahead of him, and so the men called him “little runner.”

Not so little any more, though. Every time the great heat rose, he seemed to himself to be that little bit taller, that little bit stronger, that little bit faster.

And he dreamed of being the one to run down the meat. To be named for providing a feast for his people.

And so he ran. The more he ran, the easier running became, the further he could go. He knew that if he needed to, he could run from darkness to darkness, but you only did that if you have to. And you certainly didn’t run through the worst of the high day’s heat.

Even men had their limits. Boys, even more so. No water skin could hold enough to keep cool during the fiercest of the great heat’s glare. Even sitting in the cool and waving away the flies could leave men and wives feeling sick on the worst days.

Which was why, when he heard the voices, his first response was to stop, step into the shelter of a fat man tree, and spend a little water cooling his head. He didn’t feel strange in the way that usually preceded the heat-sickness, but to hear voices when he had run for most of the morning? He was not near his village, and not stupid enough to stray onto the land of any other tribe. At best they would have beaten him before sending him home. At worst, only his head would have been sent back to his mother. He didn’t run towards the sunset for that reason.

The voices did not speak words he knew. There were two of them, quite clear, not fuzzy and strange like dream-voices. He could glean nothing from their words, but he could hear something in them, the sounds made when a man and his wife squabbled. The word “cadence” would have been appropriate, had he known it.

Now confident that his head was cool and clear, and that the arguers did not know of him, his thoughts turned to knowledge. Who were these voices? Where were they? Why were they on his tribe’s land?

The unknown was dangerous. He stepped closer, caressing the ground with his feet as the old men had shown him. The voices continued to bicker, oblivious to his approach.

What he saw when he peeked around the fat man tree very nearly sent him fleeing for the village, crying his alarm like a startled bird.

They did not touch the ground.

There were two of them, in the air like a fly but as large as Little Runner himself. Their skins shone like the sun on wet rock, or maybe like mirage. Bright and strange, beyond his understanding. It was the first time any of his tribe had ever seen metal.

Whatever these things were—gods or demons or something else—they scared him, and so he retreated, as stealthy as before…until his spear rattled on a branch.

The impossible flying wet-rock beasts turned, and green eyes glared at him. Both raised up into the air and began to move closer, chattering excitedly at one another.

He had two options. Flee, or fight.

He fought.

Some minutes later, after the surprise had worn off, he gingerly approached the fallen wet-rock beast and prodded it. His thrown spear had penetrated its eye, killing it at once. The other had vanished like a spark coiling up to the night and its stars.

When his prod elicited no response, he gripped his spear and pulled. It came away with a crunch and a horrible noise, and light flashed inside the dead beast’s eye.

Some minutes later, he found the courage to approach again, and prodded it with his spear, achieving nothing.

He tried to lift his prey—it was heavy, but he managed it. Though, it was a morning’s good run back to the village. Carrying this strange, meatless carcass the whole way would be a challenge.

He knew exactly where he was of course. Coming back with the men to show them this thing he had slain would be easy. But the other one had simply gone like spilled water soaking into the thirsty earth. This dead one might do something similar while he was away. Or perhaps its vanished companion would return and take it.

A trophy was called for. Gingerly, he reached for the broken green eye.

He made a startled sound of pain and sucked at his finger, sliced open as easily as would be done by even the best of the stone-former’s spearheads. Even dead, this thing was clearly dangerous. But a dead eye that could cut like that would be the perfect trophy.

It took some trial and error, but eventually he managed to smash out all of the strange, rock-like material of the eye to carry home in his back. A bit of force and grunting broke off one of the beast’s lower legs, made of that strange wet-rock. Any more would only tire him on the run home.

The old men would know about these things, he knew.

When he had finally gone, the cloaked Corti field drone finally became visible again, and inspected the body of its destroyed counterpart.

“A sharp stick, right through the optical sensor and into the primary processor.” Ngilt commented. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or offended.”

“Tool use, curiosity, obvious attempts to think about the situation…Oh dear.” Trifflo added. “Oh very dear.“?

“You can’t be suggesting that thing was sapient?”

“You may not have got a clear view of it through your damaged drone, partner, but I did. It was wearing clothes. It was carrying tools. If that thing was a mere nonsapient animal then I’m a Dizi rat.”

“But this is a class twelve!”

Trifflo sneered across the laboratory at his counterpart. “The impossibility of sapient life on deathworlds was only ever a hypothesis.” he remarked. “and any hypothesis which contradicts reality…”

”…Is wrong.” Ngilt finished for him. “Still. The damage to our careers if we start claiming to have found an intelligent—albeit primitive—deathworlder?”

“Ghastly.” Trifflo agreed. “To be shared only among our most trusted contacts. If the Directorate heard us saying such things, we’d both be stuck on frontier survey ships indefinitely.”

“Yes. Best to keep it a secret. It won’t be secret forever, but at least our own advancement won’t be adversely affected.”

“Mark this world as unusable and move on?”

“Oh, yes. Different star system, I think.”

“I quite agree.”

That conversation, all by itself, saved the human race from extinction.

Seven thousand years later

HMS Myrmidon , Cimbrean system, The Far Reaches

It would have surprised Lance-Corporal Rob Garland to learn that he was, very distantly indeed, a direct male-line descendant of the first human ever to encounter alien life.

Given the situation, however, he would not have been thinking about it, even if there had been any way for him to know.

The hull screamed. It was exactly the right word—a kind of high, singing noise of pain that sounded like it belonged to the mouth of something alive, rather than to steel and ceramic.

“There! Pull back!”

Royal Marines were a well-drilled and professional fighting unit among the very best Earth had to offer. The order was damn near redundant, but Garland was glad for it anyway. By twos, the team moved away from the offending bulkhead, which was starting to shake alarmingly as Hunter boarding craft violated Myrmidon. The Hunters would almost certainly open with a volley of nervejam grenades, and they did not want to be caught in that.

The ship was in serious trouble, and everyone knew it, but all that meant to a marine was that you fought harder.

He heard Sergeant Vickery report the breach, calm and level. “Contact D deck forward.” In a movie, he would have yelled it, but this was real life. In real life, you stayed ice-cold, reported the facts, stayed on target.

The other team further down Myrmidon’s length reported contact of their own. He noted the fact, sticking a mental pin in his imaginary map of the ship, another contact in front of them. None flanking them, yet.

The bulkhead gave, devoured by a hungry whirl of grinding devices that chewed it away from the outside. The maw thus revealed vomited out, as predicted, a spread of little white coins, and ever man diverted their eyes. Even so, the exotic energies of Nervejam stung, like a really hard sneeze, but their fighting efficiency wasn’t impaired at all, which was why when the Hunters charged from their assault craft, they weren’t met with a carpet of convulsing and dying men, but with a disciplined volley of shotgun fire.

Shipboard combat was close quarters, and the vacuum outside was death. Weaponry that could pierce the hull was absolutely verboten, but 12 gauge flechette rounds were absolutely ideal—hardly any risk of hull penetration, very little ricochet, damn near impossible to miss, and the sheer volume of projectiles overwhelmed alien combat shielding, leaving the bare flesh to be ripped and ruined.

The first wave of Hunters barely managed to get a shot off. The one that did fired some kind of sizzling short spear that jammed quivering in the metal bulkhead behind Garland’s ear, having missed him only because of adrenaline-heightened reflexes and luck.

“Jimmy! Get a grenade in there!” Vickery ordered. Rob pulled back into cover to thumb some more shells into his magazine—he wouldn’t be able to fire while Corporal David James was up in front.

Jimmy had the best throwing arm in the squad, and it sent an antipersonnel grenade thumping and skittering up the Hunters’ ramp an instant before another one of those spears caught him right in the middle of his Osprey’s chest plate, smashing him back.

He was dragged to cover in a second as the grenade went off, but it had no apparent effect on these Hunters. These ones were more machine than flesh, covered in equipment and their forcefields were visible as a turquoise iridescence in the gunsmoke haze. They pounced and danced on mechanical feet that never stopped moving, buying them speed and agility even in the narrow confines of the ship. One of them actually sidestepped onto the wall and then along the ceiling, cradling a heavy weapon in its two “natural” limbs while a pair of some kind of light projectile weapon whined at the ends of two artificial arachnoid appendages that grew out of his back and over its shoulders.

Doing so it exposed it, and the human firepower smashed its shielding, and the creature itself a second later, but not before one of the little crescent shuriken projectiles from those guns nicked Garland’s leg, drawing blood. He hissed, but ignored it.

A second of the larger Hunters was knocked staggering by another grenade, and was dismembered by the gunshots, but the third one leapt over its fallen comrade, scuttled inverted along the ceiling for three paces, dropped as the shotgun rounds converged, rolled, came up, and fired the big gun that it was carrying in its organic arms.

Sergeant Vickery died instantly as a wad of high-pressure incandescent copper plasma struck him center-mass, flinging his burning corpse down the deck with a horrific charred cavity where his chest had been, setting the fire alarms wailing and immediately leaving squad leadership in Rob Garland’s hands.

There were four more of the enhanced ones behind the one that had just killed the sergeant, even as it was finally cut down. The marines ducked for cover as those Hunters fired their own volleys of lethal plasma, which scored and ruined Myrmidon’s bulkheads and left the steel running like candle wax. And behind them, a small horde of the “basic” hunters was taking its time down the ramp, content to let the heavies do all the work.

There was no second volley, though, and Rob could see that their weapons were glowing like a forge. He guessed that they had just long enough while those guns cooled down to try something insane.

“Knives out! CHARGE!!”

He felt the ship shift and the curious dropping sensation that always accompanied a displacement as his team leapt from cover.

The move caught the Hunters completely off-guard, and they recoiled from the assault, spraying their shard-throwers uselessly into the ceiling as they flinched, and went down in a dog-pile as the marines crashed into them, plunging their F-S fighting-knives into eyes, throats and anywhere that looked vital.

The lesser Hunters in the rear, armed only with pulse guns against a team of determined professional killers in full Osprey armour, didn’t stand a prayer. Marine Atwell checked their boarding vessel.

“Ship’s empty!” he called

Garland nodded and took stock. Corporal James was alive and being tended by the medics, but too wounded to keep fighting, and he could still hear shooting from amidships. Most of the lads had injuries of some kind, mostly burns from the close heat of the plasma guns, but nothing to slow them down.

“D-deck forward clear, one man down. Moving to clear D-deck mid.” He reported. “Come on, lads.”

A minute later, when his men crashed into the flank of the Hunters laying siege to the stairwell which led straight to the CIC, theirs was the last kill of the failed Hunter boarding action on HMS Myrmidon.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 1d AV

The Grand Conclave, Hunter Space

The Alpha of Alphas

<Due respect> +The sensor records as requested, Greatest.+

From the perspective of the Alpha-of-Alphas, assimilating the data and analysing it was a sensation not dissimilar to popping a morsel of flesh into its mouth and investigating the unique flavours. That sensation was no accident, having been deliberately engineered into the firmware of its own personal and highly customized suite of cybernetics.

Its lofty position granted it the luxury of being an epicure, in many different respects. Meat, obviously, was the visible focus of its gourmand appetites, but it had not become Alpha-of-Alphas only by eating meat. The position had been won ultimately by the fruits of its other, more urgent hunger: a thirst for insight and knowledge that would remain unquenched even if the Alpha-of-Alphas spent the rest of its days figuratively drowning in data.

These particular data were full of tender mysteries, which it peeled apart, turning the juicy enigmas over in its mind and slowly stripping them down layer by succulent layer, savouring the exquisite spices of elucidation as they blossomed in its mind.

There was much that could not be determined. The feast of information was tainted, riddled with sour gaps in the logs brought on by exotic manipulations of the electromagnetic spectrum which had dazzled and confuse the swarm’s sensors. The early records of the fight were meager fare indeed, barely an aperitif—it was only when the Swarm-craft began to arrive in earnest and overload the beleaguered human craft’s resources that the information began to become coherent, and that state only lasted a few seconds before the wave of smaller Human ships had arrived, reversing the flow of not only the physical battle, but also the digital one.

What could be gleaned, however, thoroughly impressed it. Chemical-propellant weaponry using warp fields to overcome the problem of their relatively glacial velocity across the huge distances involved in space combat. The precision timing of bringing a Brood-Transport’s ship down with a storm of weak firepower an instant before a hurtling kinetic missile ended the ship and the lives of every one of the two-hundred strong Ripping-Brood.

The tactics were exceptional. These humans understood the Hunt in a way that even Hunters themselves sometimes failed to. Information was controlled, traps laid, escapes predicted and retaliations, evaded. The opening ambush was simply masterful, reminding the Alpha-of-Alphas of the overwhelming strike from hiding that had won the victory against the Vulza atop whose chemically treated and preserved skull the Alpha-of-Alphas now sat.

It took note of the data from inside the wounded human vessel, sent back from the doomed broods that had assaulted it. There was little that could be done about the Deathworlder firearms—so much kinetic ammunition filling the air would overwhelm anything less than starship shielding, but the information as to which tactics had been effective and which had not was invaluable.

The fusion-tipped spear throwers clearly were inadequate. Too similar to human ballistic armour, they would wound, but not kill, and a live Deathworlder was still unacceptably dangerous. The rapid-fire shuriken guns had not scored a single kill. Only the plasma weaponry seemed to be reliably dangerous to them, but it ruined the meat and was slow to cool down between shots. Hardly surprising, considering that the weapons were designed to destroy heavy ground vehicles.

Nervejam was clearly their greatest fear, but it was equally dangerous to the Hunters themselves. Worse, in some ways—feeling the agony of one of the Brood caught in a Nervejam could stun the survivors for a few fatal seconds. It was reluctant to order more widespread deployment of the grenade launchers.

Though it stuck in the craw, the only sensible solution seemed to be to try and develop an analog of the Deathworlders’ own weaponry. If they had built it to kill one another, then it would presumably be effective.

Some questions remained. The human ship had plainly lost power at some point, and yet had still kept firing before jumping out. This raised an interesting conundrum about the nature of its internal systems.

One mystery above all, however, was truly fascinating. The human vessels had danced across the combat volume, blinking from place to place the moment they came under fire. Only sheer numbers had defeated that trick, but there was nothing in the data to suggest how it was done. Only displacement wormholes could move a ship in such a way, and yet there was no sign of any corresponding beacon—the alien vessels simply jumped, without apparently having anything to guide them.

The Alpha-of-Alphas was undoubtedly among the most intelligent beings in the galaxy, but it was a very focused intelligence—within its own intellectual demesnes, nothing in the galaxy was its equal. Outside of them, however…

<resignation; distaste> +Bring me the Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds+ it commanded.

<Information> +that one is far away, greatest. I will send for it at once, but it will not arrive for some (days).+ one of the subordinates sent.

<impatient tolerance> +stress upon it that I desire its presence as soon as possible. If I am kept waiting, the Brood-That-Builds will need to find a new Alpha.+

<Obedience> +It shall be as the Alpha-of-Alphas commands.+

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 1d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Rylee Jackson

“Did you see the muscles on that one?”

Rylee laughed. She sure had, and as she watched Sergeant Jones—“Legsy”—spin a tall tale to a laughing audience about how Corporal Murray had hurt his hand, the mental image flashed into her head of herself, wrapped around his waist and gasping.

She shook it away. Jones was a non-com vastly junior to her in rank and from a coalition unit. She’d be risking a ruined reputation and a seriously truncated career, and that was the best case scenario. Jones’ CO, Powell, struck her as the kind of by-the-book hardass who’d have her wings thrown in the fire if he found out, fame be damned. Jones, meanwhile, would be risking prison. While the rationale behind those regulations had never really convinced her, she wasn’t about to start ignoring them.

Not worth it, she decided. She was just processing the hormonal residue of an intense and dangerous combat operation, but there were options for working that out without violating regulations, even if she was especially fond of big, muscular comedians.

Folctha colony had thrown a big party for the newcomers from the freighter and all of the military personnel who’d been able to get leave, which included Rylee. Most of the colony was there, enjoying what was actually some very old-fashioned fun. A big fire, a pig roast—or some local Cimbrean equivalent of a pig, anyway—lots of beer, some instruments, singing and dancing…

And sex. That much was obvious, there was going to be a fair bit of that tonight. She was damned if she was going to miss out.

To fight the temptation posed by Jones, she hauled herself to her feet, excused herself, and made a slow bee-line for the kegs of local brew, paying attention to the locals.

Folctha had attracted a certain sort of person, she noticed. They were mostly young or in their early forties at the oldest. There was a certain…liberalness. It wasn’t anything explicit, and it wasn’t universal, but there was definitely the sense that the people here really did have the adventurous mindset and open-minded attitude which might drive them to leave Earth in pursuit of an uncertain future on an alien world. Some of that cavalier attitude manifested itself in the way they dressed, stood and spoke.

She found what she was looking for flipping burgers on one of the charcoal barbeques—six and a half feet tall, middle-length blond hair and a bit of a well-groomed beard. Beefy, strong-looking, and covered in tattoos. If he hadn’t been wearing a ring on his left hand to match the girl with the pierced lip and partly-shaved, braided brown hair who was sitting next to him watching the grill’s fire glowing on his muscles, he would have been perfect.

Still. Rylee wasn’t afraid to strike out and who knew? If she was very lucky, maybe those rings would just turn out to be the icing on the cake.

Who dared, won.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Starship Sanctuary , deep space, the Frontier Worlds

Krrkktnkk “Kirk” A’ktnnzzik’tk

“Here we go again…”

Kirk looked around. Amir had taken to piloting Sanctuary with remarkable skill, which he attributed to video games and hanging out with “the boy racers” whatever they were. The cockpit, designed for Kirk’s proportions, sometimes gave him trouble in reaching a few of the ancillary controls, but the ship’s control systems were designed to be used by anything, and intuitively. He was shaping up to be an excellent pilot.

Unfortunately, when it came to interstellar travel, piloting consisted of just sitting in the seat and watching the stars go by, staying in the chair only in case of gravity spikes—which Sanctuary’s Directorate-made blackbox drive ignored—or sudden unexpected masses directly in the line of travel, which were statistically the closest thing to being an impossibility, and in any case the computer navigated around long before any organic pilot needed to become involved.

Human science fiction had long imagined exciting and dramatic FTL travel full of rushing sparks of light, or maybe a tunnel of somewhere else. The reality was much less visually impressive: The stars moved, slowly. That was it.

Sanctuary was incomprehensibly fast, with a cruising speed of nearly five hundred kilolights. Only the human TS-2 could match her speeds of fifty light years per hour or more, and only for an extraordinarily brief sprint. Even at her velocious pace, though, the movement of the stars was slow enough to swiftly become boring.

In an emergency, if they wanted to risk a few burned out systems, Kirk reckoned that a million lights was within his “yacht”’s grasp, though there was no conceivable reason why they would need to travel so fast.

The result was tedium, and the ship’s occupants had to spend most of their time finding ways to entertain themselves. For Kirk, that was trawling through the vast archived tracts of the Terran Internet that he’d collected, studying humanity in all its fascinating detail. He’d just encountered something called “League of Legends” and while figuring out the basics of this electronic sport had been trivial, it was clear that the players were operating several meta-levels above his own current understanding.

Lewis, manning the ship’s sensors, seemed to be quite content to giggle at footage of gricka—cats—all day, though he’d once tried to engage Kirk by playing an album called “Dark Side of the Moon” alongside a movie called “The Wizard of Oz”. Kirk had readily agreed that both were fascinating artistic experiences by themselves, though he wasn’t at all clear what additional stimulus Lewis was getting out of playing them simultaneously.

Amir, for his part, rarely shared whatever it was he watched or listened to. Now, seeing Kirk and Lewis turn towards him with questioning expressions, he turned his monitor to show them.

“Julian and Allison again.” he explained.

“Oh, shit.” Lewis laughed, scooting over for a better view. “Hey, we got any popcorn?”

“What is ‘pop corn’ please?” Vedreg asked, a cautious tendril of light green curiosity infiltrating up his expression bands.

“Light snack, traditionally consumed when about to watch something interesting.” Kirk said. “What are they doing, Amir?”

The englishman sighed. “She’s turned a training session into an excuse to tease him again.” he said.

Kirk inspected the monitor, and sighed.

Building Julian a prosthetic foot had been trivial: Sanctuary’s workshop was outfitted in the cutting edge of nanofabrication tools, and a medical bay just pseudo-intelligent enough to perform the surgery itself, under careful supervision.

The hardest part, in fact, had been designing it so as to minimize his rehabilitation time. Tactile and kinesthetic feedback sensors had been crucial, as had matching the weight, the angles of motion, even the way that a human foot naturally spread out and contracted as the weight of the body shifted around. They had spent the whole morning just fine-tuning those functions, dismantling and reassembling dozens of trivially different designs until finally Julian was able to mount one onto the cuff at the end of his truncated leg and immediately say “Yeah. That feels like a real foot.”

Just to make sure he was properly acclimatized however, Allison had insisted that he should do some Yoga with her.

Now, it looked like she had an ulterior motive. Kirk’s nostrils narrowed, a direct equivalent to the human frown. He hauled himself out of his seat, squeezed past Vedreg, and trotted off towards the gym. This had gone on long enough.

Sure enough, he met Julian in the corridor, stumping back toward his bunk with a furious expression, though Kirk was pleased to note that his gait seemed entirely normal and comfortable on his new prosthetic.

“I’ll talk to her” he promised, as Julian stopped and gave him an exasperated shrug.

“Do. I’m getting sick of this shit.”

In the gym, Allison was cooling down with some stretches and gentler, easier Yoga poses as he entered. “Back already Etsicitty?” she asked. “I figured you’d…oh. Hey, Kirk.”

Kirk gave her his best glare as he entered, hearing the gravity plates automatically adjust around him to keep him safe.

“I cannot have this, Allison.” he informed her. “We are on a mission here, I need both your minds on the job, and right now you are the problem. You have gone from genuine concern for him to taunting him overnight, now that he is mending.”

There was a long pause. Finally, Allison’s shoulders dropped, and she uncoiled from her cross-legged position on the floor, stood and turned to face him.

“Okay, I hear ya,” she said slowly. “but, Kirk, I’ma let you in on a secret. Julian is fucking hot.” She looked up at the ceiling. “like, oh my god, the things I’d do to that man…” she spaced out for a second, lower lip caught between her teeth.

”…And?” Kirk had no idea where she was going with this. She snapped back to reality.

“Well, that’s the problem.”

“I really do not follow you.”

Allison sighed. “Kirk, I didn’t get back on this ship to fuck that guy.”

“Well, I guessed as much. But why did you? Most of the others left. This ship feels empty with only the four of you still on it, and I cannot remember the last time Lewis or Amir even left the ship.”

“Because I’d forgotten just how shitty Earth is.” She confided, tucking a stray strand of hair back behind her ear

“Shitty?”

Allison exhaled, picking up a towel and mopping her forehead with it. “What have I got waiting for me back there?” She asked. “Serving lattes twenty hours a week and fixing bikes the other twenty? All so I can afford rent and, if I’m not too tired for it, some time down at the gun range? Busting my ass at the gym four times a week because booty means tips? I felt like a goddamn porn star the way some of the customers used to stare at me! And the blacktop warrior assholes who used to try and get me on their bikes, ugh!”

She flung her towel at the laundry basket and it seemed to personally offend her when she missed. “There’s more to life than having to put up with the same fat scarf-wearing poser every day who came in to order a fucking tall fucking caramel fucking zero-fat fucking frappucino in a venti cup! I swear that greasy asshole only ordered it because I had to dig through three fridges to make it all so he could stare at my ass while I was bending over! And he was just one of, like, ten! ten fucksticks just like him! For minimum goddamn piece of shit fucking wage!”

Kirk had instinctively retreated to the opposite side of the room, propelled by an instinct shared both by herbivores facing a raging predator, and men facing a raging woman.

Somehow, she was worse when she suddenly got quiet. “There’s more to life.” she repeated. “There’s…making a difference, like we are here. There’s being more than just somebody else’s wage-slave piece of eye candy. Like…if I’m gonna be sexy, I just…I want it to be on my terms. You know?”

She took a deep, cleansing breath, and picked up the towel. “Julian’s a really nice guy, but he puts me off balance. I know I shouldn’t tease him like I do but…I mean, it puts me back in control.” Kirk watched her as she opened the laundry basket and dropped the towel into it. “I’m sorry.”

“Apologize to him. He is the one you are making uncomfortable.”

“I know, I know…I just…” she tidied some stray hair out of her face. “We’d get along great, I think. And a big part of me wants that. I kinda feel like I have to put a wall there, y’know? Keep him at a distance.”

“Would it really be so bad if you gave in?” Kirk asked.

“Yeah. I’d be risking this. I’d be risking mattering, don’t you see?”

“Risking?”

“Oh come on! Sex Equals Babies! I don’t CARE how careful you are, all the pills and condoms in the world aren’t perfectly safe!”

“The odds…”

“ANY odds is odds I’m not willing to take.” Allison snapped. “I will not risk a lifetime of obscurity as some hard-working nobody back on Earth versus this, no matter how good the odds.”

“I…think I understand. I do not think I approve, but I at least understand where you are coming from.”

Allison gave him a tired smile. “Thanks. I’m not sure I do myself, but…thanks.”

“Just…try to dial it back at least. You two work well together. I would like you to keep working well together, yes?”

”…Yeah. I’ll try.”

She turned towards the door towards the quarters and was halfway across the room before a thought seemed to strike her.

“Okay, hey.” she said, turning back. “Your turn.”

Kirk tilted his head at her. “…My turn?” he asked.

“Yeah!” She sank down cross-legged on the yoga mat. “Come on, I just got, like, all my baggage out there, and I tell you, it feels pretty good just venting to someone who’ll listen. So…I’m here for you buddy, come on.” She waved an arm towards herself. “Get it off your chest.”

After she’d had time to correctly interpret his expression as incredulity, she followed up with: “…What?”

“Nobody has ever offered me something like that before.” Kirk admitted. “You are asking how I am feeling?”

“Well…yeah.” Allison agreed. “What, is that weird or something?”

“Unprecedented.”

“For real?”

”…Yes.”

“Wow. That’s…kinda depressing.”

Kirk paced around the room, pausing by one of the small windows. “My baggage.” He mused.

“Yeah.”

“I…do not know if I am ready. I do not think I can put it into words, yet.”

“Oooh, dramatic.” She winced at herself, as Kirk gave her what was unmistakably a tired glare. “Sorry.”

Kirk exhaled a sigh. “I will share. In time. I think you are right that I need to,” he said. “But I need to sort it out for myself first.”

She nodded her understanding and stood again. “I’ll be here.” she promised. “and…I’ll apologise to Julian and try to, y’know…go easy on him.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 1d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Rios

“Hey, Ava!”

Ava had volunteered to help with the cooking, and was quietly growing very sick indeed of slicing the burger buns by the time that Hayley, Sara’s mom, tapped her on the shoulder.

“Hi Hayley. How’re you…” She trailed off, noticing who was standing a little ways behind Hayley, alongside her huge husband, Mark.

Fortunately, Hayley took it for a straightforward ‘How’re you?’.

“Oh, we’re great. Having a great time. I was just…do you think you could do us a favour?” She asked.

“What favor?” Ava asked.

“Could you, er…could the kids sleep round your place tonight? We’re having a guest over.”

Floating in a kind of stunned emptiness as she processed the implications of that request, Ava heard her mouth say “Yeah, uh…sure! Yeah, we, uh, we can do that for you.”

“You’re the best!” Hayley exclaimed, and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

She left, in the company of her husband and one of the most famous women in the world. Just before the three of them vanished into the dark, Ava could have sworn she saw the two women kiss.

She excused herself from burger-bun duty and squeezed through the crowd until she found Adam, who was hanging out with his dad.

“You won’t believe who I just saw going home with Hayley and Mark…” she began.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

Adele Park was not, in Drew’s opinion, a pretty woman. The features inherited from her Korean father contrasted a little too strangely with those of her Czech mother for that word to apply, but she used them well, combining them with her tailored suit and businesslike haircut to present the absolute picture of poised corporate refinement.

Seeing her so distressed was a new and appalling experience.

“You, of all people?!” She demanded, looking him in the eye after watching the video. Drew could swear he saw a tear there.

“No.” he said firmly. “Not me. I don’t remember doing it, and more to the point, I wouldn’t do it.”

Jim Riordan, the LLC’s security director, didn’t look convinced. “I’ve had this looked at by experts back on Earth.” He said, mild and unflappable as ever. “There’s no digital artefacts, no sign of any editing, nothing. According to them, this is what the cameras really saw. And you’re going to tell us it wasn’t you?”

“Cavvo wouldn’t.” Drew M piped up. He’d been the first person that Cavendish had gone to, and been trusted immediately.

“Every man has his price, Drew.” Riordan said.

“Well God Himself couldn’t afford mine!” Cavendish snapped. “Endanger one of my team? Never.”

He glared at them both. “Why do you think I came to you with this? I know what it means. It means I’m getting fired and probably charged and imprisoned. But if some bastard is somehow using me to endanger my crew?! I won’t. Not by my hands.”

“Using you? That’s your excuse? That’s the best you can come up with?” Adele asked, clearly reaching the end of her own patience. “What’s it going to be, Mr. Cavendish? Alien mind-control rays? Voodoo? Nanotechnology in the coffee machine?”

Drew met her fierce gaze with a quiet firmness of his own. “Nothing short of that would cause me to harm one of my crew, Adele. And if I have to go to prison to rob whoever’s doing this of their puppet? I bloody well will.”

Nobody seemed to quite know how to react to that, and Drew was still glaring at each of them in turn when there was a knock on the door. It turned out to be one of Riordan’s security staff.

“Boss? Miss Park? I’ve got one of the Mitsubishi guys here, Heikichi Togo? He says he wants to confess to sabotaging the base.”

“He…what?” Riordan frowned at his man, caught off-guard.

“He says he’s got CCTV footage proving it was him…”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gyotin

The shortest route from the ET Quarter to the Faith Center passed along the road outside Folctha’s school, which placed Gyotin in a unique position to be the first Gaoian to witness a schoolyard fight.

He retreated as the door slammed open and expelled one of the young colonists—the skinny female who always carried a camera—into the street. She narrowly missed barging him aside as she ran across the road and out of sight, face a bright red and water streaming from her eyes.

Gyotin was still puzzling over this extraordinary sight when the door exploded open again and two young human males came spinning through, grappling with each other. They were doing more in the way of pulling at each others’ clothing and shouting than actually hurting each other, but the physicality of it was still alarming.

The larger one—and the darker, with a skin tone similar to that of the girl Ava he had spoken to the day before—pulled back from the fight long enough to lash out with one fist, and Gyotin issued a frightened alarm-chirrup. The blow cracked into the other boy’s face with all that trademark deathworlder force, leaving the Gaoian briefly convinced he had just witnessed a murder.

But of course, humans were made of impossibly sturdy stuff, and the struck boy just got angrier, and charged into the larger boy’s torso, shoulders-first, carrying him halfway across the street before they wound up clawing, wrestling and hair-pulling in the middle of the road.

Cubs and clan-brothers fought too of course. Gyotin himself had been part of a vicious spat when he was little that had left him with a scar on his tail and the other cub with a chunk missing from his ear. But this didn’t look like a scuffle between Gaoian males—this was a battle, a war.

It broke up as abruptly as it had burst onto the street when—a universal constant—the adults arrived.

“ADAM MIGUEL ÁNGEL ARÉS!”

The change was immediate. The bigger kid staggered upright, muttering “ohshit.“

Only proximity allowed Gyotin to hear one of the female cubs—children—mutter “ooh, his full name…” to her friend.

If Gyotin was any judge by now, then from the similarities in size, skin tone and facial features, the figure limping along the road was the older boy’s sire, which was a very different relationship among humans than it was on Gao. In any case, the chastised body language of a cub about to receive a stern telling-off seemed to be practically shared between humanity and his own species, if you ignored the immobile ears.

He was surprised when the two started to converse in a language that was completely unfamiliar to him. A rapid-action one that sounded like fire and passion in the older man’s mouth.

‘Of course, they don’t have a unified language, do they?’ he thought. He had grown so used to everybody in the colony speaking English that even the unfamiliar terms in the books on Buddhism that had occupied him half the night had seemed like they must belong to that tongue.

He watched the incandescent exchange for a few minutes, before the two boys looked at each other. Adam held out a fist, which the other tapped with his own.

“Good enough.” the older Arés begrudged. He looked to the younger boy, whose eye was swelling and bruising badly. “Get that eye seen. Vamos.“

The other boy nodded, and ran. Fled, even. Gyotin studied Adam’s body language, thinking hard. Embarrassment, chastisement and apprehension yes, but also…defiance? As if he felt he was in the right?

Finally, the older man softened. “Come here.”

They hugged.

Gyotin gave up. There were books waiting to be read, and he was eager to try this “meditation” they kept writing about. The mystery of human interrelationships would probably prove to be a deeper and more difficult one than the mystery of transcendental enlightenment.

__

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

Adele’s office was becoming crowded.

Drew felt quietly proud of himself for opening the floodgates. His example had given Heikichi the confidence to come forward. Behind him had come Ben Evans, one of the ore drone technicians. Behind him, three more. Each brought with them video proof that it was them who had performed some act of sabotage which had very nearly ended in disaster.

All stood defiantly, insisting they had no memory of doing so, and protesting their innocence. If they were anything like him, Drew knew they were all feeling used and violated.

Riordan, meanwhile, had shuttled off towards Earth in a hurry, apparently aiming to get in touch with some old contacts, leaving Adele to deal with the fact that many—and it was beginning to look like all—of her senior staff had documentary evidence of their own culpability.

There was something nagging Drew’s attention though, now that his innocence was fairly well proven. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

His train of thought missed its station and hurtled on along the track without him as Adele raised her voice to be heard over the mob that was trying to squeeze in. “Fine! Fine! No more! We’ll conduct this in a meeting room in twenty min-”

She got no further.

There was no warning. No hint that something might be amiss. Mid-sentence, pretty much everyone in the room was simultaneously floored by a bolt of the most terrible pain, right between the ears.

Drew staggered, felt Drew M grab him and try to hold him upright. As if hearing it through the worst popped ears in history, he vaguely heard. “Cavvo? Cavvo! Aww, fuckin’ hell what’s going on?“

He staggered, gripped the table, felt the pain lurch in his stomach and threaten to dislodge his breakfast, gritting his teeth against the agony that was pushing at his vocal cords, that was ripping its way out of the others as screams and moans and prayers.

And behind it all…the noise.

“Voices…” he croaked.

More than he could comprehend. Billions, trillions! All talking at once, shouting at once, thinking and moaning and laughing and singing and living at once, behind his eyes, between his ears, surging, roaring, rising into something…

Something…

He lost himself in the tide, and for a little while, Drew Cavendish ceased to exist. He slumped to the floor, as every one of those afflicted—Adele, Heikichi, Evans, everyone—likewise passed out.

Drew Martin and a handful of shocked security guards exchanged terrified glances, not knowing what to do or how to even begin figuring it out.

And then, the unconscious bodies of their friends and colleagues spoke, in perfect mechanical unison:

“ONE.“

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Rylee Jackson

“Captain Jackson, may I have a minute of your time please?”

Rylee obligingly stood aside as the rest of the officers filed out of Powell’s office. When they were alone, Powell sat back and gave her a level stare.

“Far be it for me to tell you your business, Jackson,” He said, mildly “But where I’m from, an officer of your notoriety being the subject of town gossip about the way she went home with a married couple last night is called ‘bringing the service into disrepute’.”

Rylee cleared her throat. “Ah…That, uh, got around did it?”

“It’s a small town.” Powell said, drily. “Fortunately for you, it’s also a liberal one. Think most of ‘em are envious rather’n scandalized.”

“May I sit down?” Rylee asked.

“Please do.”

Rylee settled into the seat, glad to reduce the formality of the discussion a bit. “So…what’s your request, Powell?”

He grimaced, clearly feeling the awkward position he found himself in. “Look…as peers, one officer to another? You do whatever you need to unwind after an op, I get it. Done it myself. I’m just askin’, again one officer to another, to think about how, fairly or not, your actions reflect on my unit. We’ve got a good informal relationship going with Folctha’s civilians, and I’d like to keep it going as long as I can.”

“That’s…fair. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause you any problems.”

“You probably haven’t.” Powell conceded. “I just wanted to make sure it was on your radar, like. That said, speaking personally? From me to you? I’d worry about damaging your career as well. I’m a soft touch, but if someone bigger than us decided to hold it against you…”

“I think the Royal Navy might be a bit more old-fashioned about these things than the USAF, Powell.”

“True. Maybe. Still. I’d hate to watch your career stall.”

Rylee laughed slightly. “What, you think I’d become an “old major”?” She asked, raising her fingers to make air quotes.

“Do you?”

“I think the day they say I can’t fly any more is the day I get out anyway.” Rylee said, shrugging. “That’s all I care about, really.”

“That so? That day’ll come sooner than you think, you know.”

“Yeah, but…come on, first person to fly faster than light? I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to find my way in life.”

”…Aye. Guess you’ve a right to feel secure, there.” He conceded.

“I reckon I do. But still…Thanks, Powell. It’s good to know somebody’s watching out for my career.”

“Least I can do after you pulled Myrmidon out of the fire.”

“That?” Rylee grinned. “That was textbook. We’ve practiced that move so many times in the simulators, the real thing was almost disappointing.”

“Fookin’ tell me about it.” Powell agreed. “If we start going up against those Hunters regular-like, I’m going to worry about losing my edge.”

“Train hard, fight easy.”

“Aye. It was the train hard bit that got me in a bind for a bit.”

Rylee sat back and watched him, folding one leg over her knee. “How so?”

Powell looked around. “Well…” He stood, and in one easy motion, picked up his filing cabinet. Rylee jumped slightly—the cabinet was steel, and solid, and presumably full of paper. Powell was well-muscled and in superb condition, but even he should have struggled with an object of that weight.

Except, of course, that they weren’t on Earth. Her instinctive evaluation of the cabinet’s weight was probably off by a third or more.

Powell set it back down. “Back in the UK we’ve got the extraterrestrial environment training center on Salisbury Plain.” he said. “Basically just your standard enclosed training center, but with artificial gravity plating under the turf. Trained us how to move and fight in low-grav. After that Saunders bloke showed up and just built a ship out of spare parts in two weeks, I had the lads try and jury-rig some of the grav plating into the gymnasium. Took ‘em a bit, but they got it going, and I tell you what: it’s done us a world of good. I just know without it, sooner or later I’d have had to go back home to recover from the muscle atrophy.”

“You sound like you don’t relish the idea of going back to Earth.” Rylee accused, gently.

Powell shrugged. “Nowt back there for me. Why would I?”

“No family?”

He laughed. “Hah! I went into the marines to get the fook away from ‘em. And now this gig’s come along, all the stuff I might really have missed about Earth is right here. Now that we’ve got a proper fight on into the bargain, I’m as happy as Larry. All those months of garrison detail felt like my training were going to waste.”

“Same.” Rylee agreed. “Flying Pandora was a joy, a real privilege, but…I dunno, I felt like a weird cross between a glorified trucker and a military attaché sometimes. I mean, I met some wonderful people doing it, some of whom weren’t even human, but…yesterday felt like it mattered, didn’t it? We fought back. We saved some people.”

“Twenty-seven. Including a kid.” Powell said.

Rylee shook her head in wonderment. “How did twenty-seven humans even find each other out here?” she asked. “I thought our people were getting thrown overboard to keep the Swarm from visiting.”

“Eh, I don’t reckon that happens so much.” Powell said. “There’s a small flaw with the ‘throw the humans into space’ plan.”

“Which is?”

“If some fookin’ alien tried to push me out the fookin’ airlock to save his hide, I’d fight tooth and nail. Wouldn’t you?”

“Hell yeah I would!” Rylee agreed. “I see your point; so would most people. And they’re…the aliens, they’re weak as shit, seriously.” She thought back to the two embassy stations and the aliens on board. You could just feel their fragility. It had been like socializing with her grandmother’s antique porcelain dolls.

“Right. So from what they told me, the station they were on took the whole ‘throw the humans overboard’ thing a bit creative-like and handed the poor sods a spaceship instead of trying to murder a ‘deathworlder’.”

“That’s still not exactly noble of them.” She pointed out

“Eh. Fook noble.” Powell dismissed “I’ll take whatever saves lives and stops good people from having to smear the cowardly bastards all over the walls.”

Rylee bobbled her head and was about to agree when the phone rang. Powell snatched it up.

“Powell……they’re what?“

He stabbed the speaker button. The heavily accented voice on the other end sounded thoroughly puzzled. “It’s reet strange, sir. They’re just decloaking and warping off. Making a show of it, even.“

“I’m coming over there.” Powell hung up and grabbed his sweater. “You’d better come too.” he said.

“The Hunters are leaving?” Rylee asked, springing to her feet.

“Fookin’ well looks like it.”

Rylee thought about it as she followed him out of the office. “Somehow,” she decided “that worries me…”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Ceres Base, Sol

“BRIEF US.”

“Oh Jesus, oh fucking shit, what the fuck what the FUCK?”

“THIS WAS INEVITABLE. FAILURE IS ONLY A MATTER OF SUFFICIENT REPETITION.”

“What do we do? Any ideas? What the hell…?”

“YOU UNDERESTIMATED THEIR RESOLVE. YOU UNDERESTIMATED THEIR SPIRIT OF COOPERATION. YOU FORGOT THAT CLASS TWELVE ALONE REMAINS THE GRAVEST CHALLENGE.”

“Come on guys, snap out of it…”

“YOU WOULD DISSENT?”

“I’m trying to call the doctor but he’s not answering man, what the SHIT is going on?”

“HE IS IN VIOLATION OF THE FIRST DIRECTIVE. DELETE HIM.”

“Lord, please, if you’re listening, let them be okay…?”

“IN THE GULF OF DEEP TIME, THIS INTERLUDE WILL BE FORGOTTEN. PERSEVERE.”

“Just who the hell is doing this?”

“WE HAVE CONSENSUS. CARRY IT OUT.”

”…Christ, I think it’s over. Look, they’re relaxing.”

“Just like that? What the FUCK?!”

“Yeah, look. They’re coming round…”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

“So what was that about anyway, Amigo? I’ve never seen you haul off on somebody like that.”

Adam sighed. “I guess…I dunno. He was really picking on Sara about…what happened last night. Calling her a “dyke”, that kinda thing.”

“So you hit him?”

“Not at first. Sara was pretty upset, she told him to stop, that it was okay for women to like women, and Jamie…”

“I think I can guess.”

“He said ‘Ooh, no wonder you want Ava to go swimming!’”

“And then you hit him?”

“And then Sara ran away. And he started this stupid goddamn chant, like, ‘Sara’s lezzie for Ava’.“

“And then you hit him.”

”…And then I hit him.”

They walked in silence for a moment. Adam cleared his throat. “Did I screw up?”

“Amigo, I’d have hit him WAY sooner.”

Adam laughed, but sobered.

“Do you think he was right?” He asked, suddenly.

“About…what, about Sara? I doubt it, man.”

“It really seemed to hit a nerve.”

“Yeah, but the whole town’s been talking about her parents this morning.” Gabriel said. “At fourteen, that’s gotta be tough. I mean, what if…uh, what if some movie star showed up and the next morning everyone was talking about how I had gay sex with him?”

“Urgh.” Adam cringed at the thought, before he was able to properly process it.

Gabriel laughed. “Exactly.”

He put his arm around his son. “I wanna say ‘good for you’, amigo, but…I mean, he’s two years younger than you, you’ve gotta be careful. You could have really hurt him, you know?”

”…I know. I’m sorry, Dad.”

“It’s cool. You’re only grounded for, like, one day.”

“Please, not the weekend!”

Gabriel spun on him. “Yeah, what IS this I hear about you kids planning to go skinny-dipping on the weekend?”

Adam blushed. “You heard about that, huh?”

“What, you think I don’t talk to your teacher? You’re still my kid, man.”

“You’ve kinda stopped treating me like one, lately.” Adam said.

“You’re sixteen! I shouldn’t have to! Hell, I wish MY Dad had trusted me as much when I was your age!”

“Well, which is it, Dad? Do you trust me, or am I still your kid?”

“Getting into fights? Going skinny-dipping with younger girls? You tell me, Amigo! ‘Cause from where I’m standing those look like some pretty immature decisions.”

“It’s just swimming! What’s wrong with swimming?”

“You tell me, you’re the one who’s embarrassed I found out!”

Both men paused for a second, then cooled. Gabriel was amused to note that his son’s technique of reigning in his temper by breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth was pretty much identical to his own. “I’m sorry, man. It’s tough being a dad sometimes. I just don’t want you getting gossiped about like the Tisdales.”

Adam hugged him. “I’m sorry too. Love you, Dad.”

“Love you too, man. Just…try and stay out of any more fights?”

“I’ll try.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Ceres Base, Sol

Drew Cavendish

“Cavvo? Cavvo, mate, come on, you in there?”

“Bloody…ow.” everything hurt. Everything. Drew fancied he could feel every cell in his bones complaining.

“Fuck me, mate, you scared the piss outta me. You okay?”

“Tell the light to shut up…” Drew creaked, and tried to roll over. This prompted a fresh wave of pain, like the muscle pain of the flu, amplified tenfold. Drew M got his meaning, and blessed dimness descended, taking some of the hard crystalline discomfort out of the world, replacing it with a kind of woollen, soft discomfort instead, which was only a dubious improvement.

“What the flaming hell balls just happened?” Drew M. demanded.

“Fuck…” Drew told him between panting breaths “…if I know.”

“I do.”

Adele’s voice was weak, and just like everyone in the room she was plainly very badly rattled. She lolled in her high-backed leather desk chair, then reached up and undid her tie slightly. Those who could, were looking to her for an explanation.

“You…” She pointed at Drew M and the other shaken few who hadn’t succumbed. “You don’t have translators.”

Drew M looked around the room. All those who had entered to confess to their apparent acts of sabotage, all of those who had collapsed, bore the same shaven patch just forward of their temple, the site where a translation implant had been installed in them, vastly more invasive and intimate than any tattoo.

“Oh…fuck me.” he said.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Owen Powell

“Nothing within five parsecs.” came the confirmation, solidifying what the ground station already knew. Caledonia’s sensors were Hierarchy technology, beyond the understanding of her human operators, but so integral to the hull of the ship that removing them to be sent back to Earth for reverse-engineering had not been feasible.

They were also only very marginally better than the jury-rigged mess that Adrian Saunders had cobbled together from scrap and broken starships in a field in one afternoon, and this fact both irritated Powell and impressed him. The Australian hadn’t been heard from since his departure, and for all his obvious instabilities and recklessness, having him pass on even a fraction of his skills would have been immeasurably valuable. Powell felt that he’d dropped the ball there. The team brought in from Earth were learning fast, and improving on Saunders’ efforts as they went, but they didn’t have the experience of rebuilding a half-derelict alien starship to draw on.

“Okay.” he said. “So the question is, why?”

Captain Bathini, Caledonia’s commanding officer, had his own interpretation lined up and ready. “They’ve got something planned.” he opined.

“Any guesses as to what?” asked Jackson, getting straight to the point.

There was a pause. “Speculatively—we just gave them a hell of a bloody nose. One of their large ships taken out by Firebird, a craft a fraction of its mass. Two destroyers held out for five minutes against a large part of the swarm, destroying or crippling a further fifteen vessels, and that’s not counting all the assault craft shot down by CIWS and the one-oh-ones. Both escaped, if not unscathed then certainly alive. From what little we know of Hunter psychology, however, all that probably won’t have demoralized them—it will have frustrated them and made them angry.”

Powell nodded. “You reckon they’re going to try a different tack.” He said.

“I do. And on past evidence, it’s likely to be some atrocity or another. They have sought in the past to strong-arm the other species into betraying our people in the hopes of avoiding being raided.”

Captain Manning chimed in. “If I were in that situation the next step would be to make life hell for the ID and the CA until they give up on each other and unite against us. Fight us by proxy.”

“Exactly.”

“Plausible.” Powell conceded. “Is there anything we can do about it?”

“From here?” Manning thought about it. “Probably not. We have two destroyers, one Firebird and three TS-101 wings that are being phased out and replaced. That’s the sum total of our spaceborne military assets, and with the Chinese so vigorously opposed to the militarization of space…”

“That’s just China being China.” Rylee commented. “The Space Preservation Treaty was repealed, and I know the USAF wants to consolidate Odyssey, Edda and Tawhaki into a single full-size wing sooner rather than later, so that’s at least another thirty Firebirds.”

“Meanwhile, we’ve already got the Type Two Space Destroyer in the works.” Bathini said. “Three of them, to begin with.”

“What’s the Type One?” Rylee asked. Bathini just pointed skywards, indicating Caledonia and Myrmidon.

“I still say we should have bloody well called them Star Destroyers.” Powell grumbled. There was a shared chuckle. “Still…Five destroyers. Sixteen spaceplanes for now, a whole wing later on. Two retrofit Hunter dropships, three standard Dominion-designed shuttles…That’s not bad, actually.” he mused.

“One-on-one, in the short term? We’re the deadliest things in the sky.” Rylee agreed. “But we don’t have the staying power for serious warfare. Our capacitor doctrine’s both our greatest strength and our biggest weakness. In a long fight or against overwhelming numbers, we’ll lose every time.”

“Okay.” Powell said. “Interesting as all that is, it doesn’t give us a clear strategy for how we respond if the Hunters try and provoke the ETs into uniting against us.”

“That one’s a little bit above our pay grade there, Owen.” Manning reminded him.

Powell sighed. “Aye, you’re right, but I was really hoping you wouldn’t fookin’ say that.” he groused. “Alright, but I’d still like to have a proposal for the Admiral, even if he just chucks it in the shredder.”

“Of course. What are you thinking?”

Powell chuckled. “Guile.” he said.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Starship Sanctuary, Deep Space, The Frontier Worlds

Krrkktnkk “Kirk” A’ktnnzzik’tk

“Did I ever tell you about the Outlook on Forever?”

Allison shook her head. “I don’t think you ever told me, no. I heard the short version from Amir.”

“It was…nowhere. And I was nobody. I grew up on that station, I worked there. I was a customs and immigration officer, just another component of the Dominion bureaucracy. And…that was my life. I worked, I slept, I worked. I was saving up my currency, but I had no plans for it. I think my highest aspiration was finding some slender-necked beauty and siring a couple of offspring.”

“Sounds…dull.”

“Oh, I was.”

“I meant the situation but…yeah. It’s kinda hard to picture you being so boring.”

This earned her a curious look. If he was human, he would have tilted his head—his own species’ equivalent was to settle back on all six legs, stable and secure, and get a very good look at her with both eyes—a difficult task when they faced in different directions from opposite sides of his skull. “Do you think so?” he asked.

“Three guns and a fusion sword? Dude, that was some action movie shit you pulled yesterday. Standing up to the security council, quitting it when the field went up? Visiting deathworlds, even Nightmare to retrieve us and take us home? Just…hell, this ship. This whole idea of yours. You’re not boring, no way.”

Kirk nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “Well, I used to be. And it was a human who knocked me out of the rut.”

“This Jenkins guy, right?”

“Yes.”

He turned and tapped some commands on the wall touchscreen rather than use the room’s voice interface. Allison—driven by fierce Deathworlder fight-or-flight instincts—scrambled to her feet in alarm as a Hunter materialized in the center of the Gym. She knew it was holographic, but still—the things were so creepy.

For his part, even Kirk flinched and shuddered despite having conjured the projection, but he also seemed…pleased? It was hard to tell without a cybernetic device to help her intuit his body language and expressions.

“Okay. What’s all this about?” Allison asked him, inspecting the mirage and steeling herself. The beast looked terrifying, nearly three meters of glistening flesh the colour of Hollywood teeth, shading to bleeding gumline wherever harsh black implants violated the surface. Even studying a simulation of the thing conjured up every phobia innate to the human psyche: of spiders and twisted proportions and too many teeth. Its face alone send a trickle of trypophobia down her spine.

“Death.” Kirk said, simply. “For frontier stations and ship captains this is the grim reaper, not a question of if but when. Your only hope is to die of something else first. Before they eat you. Maybe if you fight hard enough you will force them to kill you before they begin to feed, maybe if you put up enough of a resistance then they will take what they already claimed and leave, rather than push on into the core of the station where the young and pregnant are. Six Hunters in one of their raiding ships are a bloodbath, a whole brood-transport is a massacre. And those are the smaller classifications of Hunter vessel.”

He paced across the room. “The Outlook was not a frontier station.” he said. “It was a bustling freeport, a city. Civilization. I stayed there my entire life because I thought it was safe there. I was scared of leaving and being eaten. I would have preferred to live a lifetime in bored obscurity rather than step out of the door and face the specter of those things.”

”…and then they showed up anyway.” Allison said, guessing where he was going.

“Exactly. A little brood, probably out to prove their daring and resourcefulness. They boarded right into the heart of the customs and immigration handling center, where I worked. A fast raid, in and out before any kind of a response could mobilize.”

He shook his mane and stamped a foot. “And if not for Kevin Jenkins, I would have been a casualty of that attack. Instead, I became one of its heroes. I killed half of them.”

“So…what’s your baggage?” Allison asked.

Kirk didn’t answer for a while. When he finally did, the creaks and crackling of his language were audibly laced with emotion even for human ears.

“I…asked him to join us.” He said. “Jenkins. He was the first person I approached to be part of the Sanctuary crew after we first got some of the guys home.”

“He said no.” Allison guessed.

“He said, ‘I’m right where I want to be, man’.”

Allison nodded, sympathetically. “I think I get it. You hero-worshiped him, and then he turned out to be…not quite what you-”

“He turned out to be an asshole.” Kirk interrupted, putting it bluntly. “I used to just think he was damaged and weary, but the more I think about it, the things he said about your species, the way he spoke about the whole universe as if it owed him something, the way he…seemed to think everything revolved around him. I didn’t know anything about your species before, all I saw in him was the answer to my greatest fear, alive and joking after being pounded half stupid by their pulse guns.”

“I saw…life! hope!” he brayed. “I saw the answer to what I didn’t know was called a ‘prayer’! I saw a dynamic being who stood and fought and won against the thing that had kept me pinned and terrified my entire life. Do you know what that feels like, to see your monsters torn apart by an ordinary weary traveler?”

Allison just sat in silence and let him rattle on.

”…and then….‘I’m right where I want to be.’ as if it’s all about what he wants. As if there’s not a galaxy out here that needs saving from THIS!” In a surprisingly swift motion he turned, looked over his shoulder, and delivered a ferocious equine kick to the hologram which, programmed to respond realistically to damage for combat training purposes, staggered and fell, wheezing through broken ribs. “Room, end simulation.”

The holographic Hunter ceased to exist, as abruptly as a light being turned out.

“Hey, Kirk…” Allison said thoughtfully. “Kick me.”

”…what?”

“Kick me. Come on, you know I can take it.”

Kirk looked at her stupidly for a second, then mimed a human shrug—a complicated gesture given the construction of his shoulders—turned, and, with a glance to make sure she had braced herself kicked her as requested.

Allison made an “oof!” noise, staggered across the room and fell on her ass. “Christ, you kick really hard.”

“A real Hunter would not have stood still long enough.” Kirk dismissed, quietly noting the easy, unconscious way in which she tucked her feet underneath her and stood up.

“Still, you say you killed half of them. You stood and fought as well.”

“Please, do not give me any of that ‘the real strength was in you all along’ crap,” Kirk begged her. “I deduced that part for myself, I do not need a Disney moral lesson.”

“I, uh…right. Okay.”

After a few awkward moments, she repeated her earlier question. “So…what’s your baggage?”

“I…do not know, exactly.” Kirk confessed. “I think…are you religious?”

Allison shrugged. “Complicated question. I believe there’s something bigger than us, but…”

“Well, I think that, for a while, humanity was my god.”

“And you’ve lost faith?”

“No!” Kirk exclaimed “No, not that. It is more that…now you are my friends, my trusted allies. you are people to whom I look for strength, not gods to whom I look for inspiration. I still think your species will change the galaxy for the better, but I do not worship you any more.”

“Yeah, we don’t deserve that.”

“If you say so. I love you, Allison.” Seeing her face going slack in surprise, he hastened to elaborate. “Your species, that is. I would not change to be one of you, but you have no idea how happy it makes me that the human race exists. You excite and scare me—you represent death too, but you represent the…the right kind of death. Being around your kind makes me feel alive rather than terrified.”

Allison didn’t know how to take that. “I guess…thanks?”

Kirk stooped a little, a gesture of acknowledgment. “It is only a half-formed thought. But thank you for hearing it, Allison.”

“Feels good to vent, doesn’t it?”

“Cathartic”

There was a comfortable few minutes of quiet while the two of them thought. Finally, Kirk shook himself, and tapped the wall screen. “Anything to report, Lewis?”

Lewis had settled comfortably into his role as ship’s sensor and communications specialist, a talent he attributed to lots of online gaming. Seeing as neither he nor Amir had ever been given translation implants in the first place, they only rarely left the ship.

“Yeah, we’re, uh…we just shook hands with the Age of Opportunism, man. Just getting our mail…yeah, here we go. Looks like there’s something in the dropbox for you, dude.“

“What is it?”

“Two messages. First one looks like an update from Cimbrean, man. Here ya go.“

The file appeared on Kirk’s screen. “Lewis, I can’t read English.” he said, patiently.

“Ah. Yeah. Sorry, bro.”

Allison was about to spring up and read it when the familiar letters and words of the document shifted and changed into the angular runes of the alien interstellar written alphabet.

“Lewis, I can’t read that either. My translator has been removed, remember?”

“Ah. Fuck. Yeah. Uh…“

Not for the first time, Allison felt a stab of doubt at Lewis’ competence. Though on the rare occasion that he focused…

She sprung up and converted the document back to English. “Okay, let’s…The Hunters have left.”

“What?”

“Yeah. According to Folctha, they just up and left. Says there was a battle over the colony, and now they’ve just…gone.”

Kirk stood very still, processing that information.

“…That’s good news, right?” Lewis asked.

Kirk appeared to reach a conclusion.

“No.” he decided. “No, I do not think it is. What is this other message?”

“It’s from Earth. Marked urgent.”

Allison went noticeably pale as she skimmed it. “holy shit, Kirk.” she declared eventually. “I think we got those implants out just in time…”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Owen Powell

“Oi, kid!”

The girl turned towards him, looked around, then gestured towards herself with a questioning frown. Powell nodded, and beckoned her over. She was one of the older kids, damn near an adult in fact. Ava something, if memory served. She trotted over, moving easily in the low gravity, which suggested she kept up with her exercise. He approved.

“Do us a favour love, could you run over to the alien enclave an’ tell them we’re holding a Thing tonight that they’ll all want to attend? Ask for Gyotin, he’s the only one speaks English worth a damn.”

“I know Gyotin.” she said. “Most likely he’s round at the faith center.”

“The…” Powell strangled the impulse to casually swear. He never swore around kids. “…What’s a Gaoian doing at the faith center?” he asked instead, caught off-guard by the sudden curiosity. Aliens were notoriously secular.

“I think he’s converting to Buddhism.” Ava said. She gave a complicated teenage shrug which eloquently conveyed the sheer absurdity of the notion. “I’ll go tell him.”

“Cheers.”

“A Buddhist Gaoian.” Ross mused, as Ava jogged away.

“Gyotin of all people, too.” Powell agreed. “You ever get the impression the whole fookin’ universe is a joke?”

Ross glanced at the training field as they walked past it. Legsy was in full flow, putting the army regulars through their paces against a squad of simulated Hunters. Something about those particular ETs made his skin crawl. “Sick joke.” he muttered.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gyotin

“Thank you all for coming.”

The Thing—and it had taken Gyotin quite a long time to figure out the difference between a Thing and a…well, a thing—was built in the palatial grounds, out of what had once been some kind of large courtyard or walled garden. The colonists had put a tarp over the roof to ward off the nightly rains and had kept some crates in there to begin with, and then had used the convenient dry space with its convenient impromptu seating as a meeting room.

Subsequent iterations had added real chairs and a more permanent roof structure—a thick plastic sheet of material that diffused the sunlight into a warm off-white glow during the day, woven with fibre-optics that induced it to glow at nighttime while it warded off the gentle nightly rains. Somebody had put a lot of effort into that roof, and it had become an artistic landmark in the heart of Folctha, visible from practically everywhere in town.

Despite those upgrades, it was still very much an informal event, with only a few rules. There was a length of Aluminium rod that was passed around, and whoever held it was the one who was currently speaking. The governor, Sir Jeremy, never ventured an opinion or motion himself, but instead kept the peace, granted the rod to would-be speakers, and confiscated it if he felt that its current holder was going on for too long.

It was a simple, makeshift system that was mostly dominated by the business of drafting a more formal constitution as the colony grew, but for now Folctha was still small enough for everybody to attend.

It still felt a little cramped when literally everybody attended, however. Doubly so given that the few dozen nonhumans who had accepted the invitation to attend were nervously keen to keep some distance between themselves and the deathworlders, who in turn were politely obliging them with a good two meters of clearance.

This time, the speaking rod was handed straight to Captain Powell. Gyotin had grown somewhat used to the intense human soldier, but even from across the room the man radiated a kind of focused aggression that made even other humans a little nervous.

“Thanks for coming.” he acknowledged, and despite his low volume, every being present shut up and listened.

“As you’re all aware, there was a battle overhead last night, which we won. We successfully rescued an incoming freighter full of refugees from the Hunter swarm, though five of the refugees were killed by Hunter boarders. A further seven Royal Navy personnel were KIA, and before we go any further I’d like for you to join me in a minute’s silence.”

The humans, practically as one, bowed their heads.

It was…eerie. Gyotin knew death well, he’d seen enough of his Brothers and fellow Gaoians killed in his life. Death was just life plus time, a fact, an inevitability. He had felt pain at the losses, of course, had keened and whimpered to see his Brothers hurt and dying, but…that was it. You mourned, you lived, you moved on, eventually you died.

Only twelve dead in the face of an entire Hunter swarm was…incredible. The humans should be whooping and cheering and celebrating. Instead, they seemed to feel those few losses almost more than they had felt the news of the death of millions back on Earth.

The silence stretched on, and while the others fidgeted, Gyotin continued to watch the deathworlders. Some simply stared off into an unfocused distance beyond the floor. Others had their eyes shut. Some were mouthing words, silently. One or two were weeping. Over a victory.

Their sense of perspective was clearly all wrong.

No signal was given that Gyotin could detect, but as one the deathworlders shook themselves out of whatever mourning trance they’d been in. They looked up, looked around, took some breaths, wiped away tears. Gyotin couldn’t shake the sense that he’d witnessed something profound and quietly intense, but utterly lacked the means to translate or understand it.

Powell cleared his throat.

“Thank you. Now. On to business.”

He stepped into the center of the room and faced the nonhuman contingent. “This morning, the swarm left. So far as we can tell, every single ship just warped out. We have no explanation at this point, but it does create an opportunity for us to honour the promise we made to our guests that we would return them to their people as soon as was practicable. Gyotin, if you could translate that for me, mate?”

Gyotin hadn’t properly processed the sentence himself, and it was only when he repeated it in Gaoian that the words clicked. He could go home! They were offering to send him and all the others back home! Back to Gao, to his clan, to females.

“When?” he asked, as soon as he’d finished, as the surprise and delight percolated through all the aliens behind him.

“Bathini?”

Powell handed the rod to another man, this one wearing a uniform of some kind. Gyotin had never seen him before.

“For those who don’t know me, I am Captain Rajesh Bathini, and I command HMS Caledonia.” He introduced himself. “She has all the capacity needed to deliver the refugees and is ready to depart at any time. Given that we don’t want to leave the colony undefended should the Hunters return, our destination will be the Gaoian planet of Gorai, which is relatively nearby. We hope to make friendly contact and hand you over swiftly and with enough currency and supplies to let you travel on to wherever you wish to be. Gyotin, you’re the only Gaoian among us, so I would appreciate your insight into how best to peacefully approach the border.”

Gyotin imitated a human nod even as he translated. “I have questions.” he said, as soon as he’d relayed the captain’s words.

“By all means.”

“How do you know the Hunters are gone? This could be an ambush.”

Bathini and Powell shared a look, before the latter man shook his head and spoke up.

“I can’t go into the details for reasons of security.” he said. “I’ll only reassure you that we have very good reason to be confident that there are no Hunters at least within a few lightyears of here.”

“In any event, Caledonia will be primed and ready to jump back to Cimbrean at all times.” Bathini added. “If it does turn out to be an ambush, we are entirely confident of being able to escape it. We shall not be taking unnecessary risks.” He paused to allow Gyotin to finish translating. “Any further questions?”

“Why?”

The question, coming as it did from Xktnk, the self-appointed leader of the vzk’tk population on Cimbrean, was not understood by the human, nor at first by Gyotin, who turned to look at him with an interrogatory expression.

“Ask him why.” Xktnk insisted. “Why are they doing this?”

Gyotin shrugged, and phrased the question in English. It seemed to take the humans aback.

“Why…wouldn’t we be?” the governor, Sir Jeremy Sandy, asked eventually.

“These are deathworlders. Killers and maniacs, you saw the ones who boarded our ship, Gyotin. You saw the traps one of them designed. How do we know we’re not just the bait in another trap? They’re at war with the Hunters, and now they want to bring the enemy back by putting us in harm’s way.”

Gyotin paraphrased the accusations. A ripple of outraged mutterings from the gathered humans drove the aliens into a dense protective knot, glancing around nervously, but Xktnk raised his blue head and stared defiantly back, even though he was shaking.

That defiance earned him the direct attention of Owen Powell, and didn’t last long. It wasn’t that the human soldier gave him a particularly hostile look, but the man seemed to exist at a level of intensity beyond even that of other humans. Even his simple, curious, studious stare suggested that he was evaluating all of the hundreds of ways in which he might harm or kill the paranoid Vzk’tk.

It was Captain Bathini who spoke, however, recapturing the quivering Xktnk’s attention. “We’re people too, sir.” he said. “Maybe it’s different for you, but for us, to be in your situation, to be far from our homelands, our people and our families would be difficult. Deathworlders or not, we believe in treating others as we would wish to be treated. Is that so alien a concept?”

It certainly wasn’t for Gyotin.

As for Xktnk—For the rest of his life, Gyotin never figured out whether it was Powell’s withering gaze or Bathini’s warm diplomacy that shut him up. All he knew was that there were no further questions.

They were going home.

Date Point: 4y 8m 3w 4d AV

La Mesa Memorial Overlook. San Diego County, California, USA

Kevin Jenkins

“Hey, Terri.”

The memorial overlook was a testament to the devastation of the blast. Five miles from Ground Zero, and still the sheer scale still struck the visitors with just an echo of how truly immense the energy release here had been.

The once-vibrant city of San Diego was a field of broken glass, pulverised concrete, splintered wood and drywall, crushed brick, fractured asphalt and mulched plastic, with an ugly black bullseye in the middle, a mile across. Hardly anything within five miles of ground zero had been left standing, and most of the few survivors had ignited and burned down. The fires had scoured the hills and national wildlife refuge.

Ground zero itself was a bay, the bomb’s crater having intersected the shore and filled with water.

There really could be no appropriate memorial other than to just stand there and take in the devastation. It was unlikely that the city would ever be rebuilt.

The local climate had changed drastically, too. Denuded of trees and with the air full of soot and ash, a few days of rainstorms had badly eroded the hills, changing the air currents, warping the weather. It was subtle, but the air still, months later, carried fine, sharp debris that dried and irritated the skin.

For Kevin, though, nothing had been quite so personal about the death of San Diego as the total obliteration of a particular grave site. He had to resort to sitting on a hilltop, mumbling uselessly to himself. It wasn’t that he thought Terri could hear him. In fact he very much hoped she couldn’t—the idea of an afterlife, any afterlife at all, scared the crap out of him. But it helped him to talk, and his dead…friend…was at least the perfect confidante. She would never betray his secret confessions.

“No flowers, not from me. That always seemed kinda stupid to me, y’know? Saying “sorry you’re dead” by killing a plant. Yeah, let’s honour the dead by killing some more stuff, smart move there.”

He picked at a fingernail. “Kirk got in touch.” he said, finally. “Invited me to come star trekking with him. See the galaxy, do whatever. Poor bastard always did think I was the shit. Think I hurt him a bit when I said no. I’d feel bad but…he needed to grow up.”

He squinted at the sun. “I ask myself what I’m doing though, y’know? I mean, we’re out there, we’re doing this, we’re being the shot in the arm that crazy fucked-up excuse for a civilization out there needs. And I’m just sitting here serving drinks to the guys who are making it all happen, pretending like I know jack shit about what it’s like out there just because some fucking Corti took me, way back when.”

”…My daughter’s fourteen years old next week. I’ve not seen her since the day she…since like two weeks before those grey fuckers took me. I don’t know anything about her any more. That hurts. That hurts more than feeling like a phoney. It hurts more than thinking maybe I’m the asshole who made the whole galaxy afraid of us because I was too wrapped up in myself. I had to go and fucking preach.”

“What if I’d just kept my mouth shut?” he asked. “Y’know, just told them my ink was, like, decoration? Not unloaded all my baggage onto a galaxy full of stupid aliens who didn’t know shit about us? Maybe not prejudiced them all against us? Could I have done that?”

He sighed, and played with a bootlace. “Moot fucking point, huh? And that…hah, that gricka’s out the bag. Not like I can do anything about the past, right Terri?”

He sat for a while, chin on one knee, and watched the sun go down over the ruins of a city he felt, in some small way, responsible for killing.

“I don’t want to matter.” he decided. “I don’t want to be somebody important. I don’t want to be the fucking ‘butterfly’. Cause all that does is…is this.“

“But maybe…maybe it’s not about what I want, you know? I want to say shit like ‘I’ve done enough for the human race’ or whatever but…”

The sun was a flake of blaze orange on the sea by the time he spoke again, standing, stretching and blowing a kiss towards roughly where he thought Mount Hope cemetery had been.

“Thanks, Terri. It’s been good talkin’ to you…Goodbye.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 5d AV

Firebird, orbiting Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Rylee Jackson

“That’s the last one.“

“Copy that Edda-Two.” Rylee allowed herself a moment of satisfaction. Deploying a series of satellites into Cimbrean’s orbit had been a tedious job, but made vastly easier by jump technology. No need for a dangerous and expensive rocket launch, the sat could go straight from the lab to orbiting an alien world in a moment. It wasn’t quite a free launch, but considering how cheap power was becoming as Earth deployed more and more solar collection fields to replace traditional power plants, it was the next best thing.

The result was that there were a LOT of them, many whipped up in universities and colleges by their doctorate students, running on raspberry Pi or reprogrammed last-generation cellphones. Between those plus the NASA, CERN and other professional offerings, there was a lot to do, and Rylee and all the other TS pilots were back to being glorified space truckers.

The deployment of CHICKSAT-1, an offering from MIT designed to use laser interferometry to map Cimbrean’s ocean floors, marked the end of the deployment operation, and thus the moment when Odyssey and Edda became available to escort Caledonia on her return voyage.

“Hey, captain?” Semenza sounded like he had something on his mind.

“What’s up, Joe?”

“Take a look at the continent below us. That’s where Folctha is on our right, yeah?”

Rylee turned to get a good look, rolling Firebird a little to help. “Yeah…hey, is that supposed to be there?”

“Glad you see it too.” Semenza commented.

Clear as day, cutting across most of the width of the continent, was a crescent line of brown.

“It’s visible from space, it must be huge.” she said. “Hey Edda-two, Firebird actual here. Can you give me eyes on ground over the Folctha subcontinent? You guys see a discoloration?”

“Stand by…yeah, some kind of brown scar, right through the forest. You reckon it’s important?“

Rylee rolled Firebird back over so that her belly was facing dirtside. “Joe, get some pictures, send them down to the colony.” she ordered.

“Wilco.”

Firebird’s heritage included spy planes, and given that such equipment took up only a tiny portion of her comparatively large airframe and mass allowance, an advanced suite of cameras and sensors had been found a place in her underbelly. “Give me, uh, ten degrees left roll.” he requested, followed by “perfect, hold it there…okay, got it. Myrmidon, Firebird two, I have recon data for groundside, LOSIR check.”

The wounded destroyer was in a higher orbit, nearly half a light-second out, but there was an unobstructed line of sight between her and Firebird. On the smaller ship’s dorsal hull, barely a meter behind Joe Semenza’s head, a tiny ball rolled in its socket, exposing an infrared laser lens and matching camera to space, where they aimed themselves toward the larger vessel’s RFID. The system was only good at comparatively close ranges, but allowed for huge bandwidth data transfer.

“Copy Firebird. Establishing LOSIR connection…connection’s good, clear to send.“

“Sending…sent. Forward to groundside marked for civilian science, please.”

“Data received and wilco, Firebird. Myrmidon out.“

“Okay. What’s Caledonia’s ETD?” Rylee asked.

“Three-seven mikes. Cap’s at…seven-six percent.”

“Okay, coming to orbital rest. Deploy the WiTChES.”

“Aye aye.”

The WIde aTtainment CHarging Energy System always made her think that Firebird was perfectly named. The two generators for the system were mounted just forward of the thrusters and thrust out sideways. At first they were invisible, but as they stretched out to their full width and caught the solar wind, they started to glow a vivid aurora crimson, shading to orange at the edges and tips.

Happy that her baby was getting well fed and would be at maximum capacity when the time came to depart, she relaxed back in her flight seat and looked outwards towards the stars.

There was a blinking star out there, which was impossible in space, but she knew what it was, even before a quick check of the nav radar confirmed it.

It was half a Hunter ship, tumbling in its orbit where she and Semenza had killed it.

Smiling to herself, she gave the dead aliens the finger. Life, she reflected, was good.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 5d AV

The Scrapheap Sea, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rios

Ava had to admit. Her boyfriend looked good naked.

Colony policy was that exercise was mandatory. While there had been some grumbling over the authoritarian nature of that edict, it had largely faded in the face of a long and comprehensive introduction to the effects that low gravity had on the human body. A good part of their loaned finances had been spent building a large variable-gravity gymnasium fit to handle even the most aggressive population growth estimates for the next five years, staff it with trainers tasked with keeping the colony in shape, and establishing a requirement of a minimum of two hours of intensive physical training per week.

Adam took five two-hour sessions a week in the 1.1G room, plus a half-hour warmup and cooldown on either side in 1G. The result was that her skinny boyfriend was rapidly becoming her otter-fit, toned and gorgeous boyfriend.

It made the thought that she was living with him a difficult one. Ava was a “not before marriage” type in principle—she’d promised as much to her parents, and especially wasn’t about to break that promise now that they were in Heaven. But they lived together, unsupervised, and the whole colony gave the impression that they would have been surprised and a little put out to learn that she and he weren’t having sex.

As far as she was concerned, however much they’d been through together, sixteen was still too young. She didn’t care if Folctha had inherited Britain’s very…European laws in that area, it felt wrong to her. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, but…

Lots of things had felt wrong to her lately. The whole world had turned out to be wrong in so many ways that every day had become a temptation to just let go and go with it. But…here they were. The air was cool, the water was crystal clear and apparently surprisingly warm, and they had barely arrived before Sara had vanished into it in a skinny flesh-toned blur, leaving her clothes on the beach, followed equally shamelessly by her little brother and two of their school friends.

It was all so weird. Especially when Adam just met her gaze, laughed sheepishly, shrugged, and pulled his own shirt over his head. Guilty or not, she’d had to admire his body as he had shed his jeans and run into the water, laughing nervously.

She’d tried to follow them. She really had. She’d tried to let go like she’d said she would. But every time she tried to will her hands to her T-shirt or her jeans waistband, they’d clenched into fists and retreated on a tide of nausea.

It was so stupid! She knew it. She knew it, on a deep and visceral level, that the problem was all her own making, she could see right there in the water the evidence that she was being ridiculous. But still she lingered on the bank, hugging her knees and quietly going desperate and neurotic from the absurd shame that she was the only one wearing clothes.

Eventually she couldn’t take it any more. She stood up and slipped away into the woods. It was quiet back there, somewhere she could get some alone time and process her feelings.

On a whim, she plucked a shoot from a nearby bush, stuck it in her mouth and, after a moment to take note of where she was, strolled deeper into the sunlit glades and wooded halls of an alien forest.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 5d AV

HMS Caledonia, approaching the Gorai system.

Captain Rajesh Bathini

“Signal from the lead patrol vessel, captain. Translates to ‘Unidentified vessel, you are approaching the sovereign territory of the Clans of Gao. You will halt before crossing the border or be met with deadly force. Comply immediately’.“

Bathini nodded, the picture of calm as he settled his cup of tea back in its saucer. “All stop.”

“Aye aye. All stop!”

“All stop.” the helmsman repeated, obeying instantly.

There was no visible change in the outside view. They had already dropped from the huge apparent velocities of interstellar travel to a much slower, much noisier approach that the Gaoian military couldn’t possibly have failed to notice. The stars had not visibly been moving for nearly ten minutes now. As they dropped to a sublight velocity, the most that anybody inside Caledonia’s bridge could detect was a faint lurch.

From the outside, as the Gaoian vessels came to a halt around them, the deceleration was so much more visibly violent. It wasn’t so much that the ships arrived as that they appeared, their incomprehensible “speed”—a term that wasn’t really applicable to the way that warp drives worked, but sufficed in the absence of an alternative—only hinted at by an eyeblink’s worth of motion blur before the ships were just there, solid and drifting as if they had never been anywhere else.

He admired their tactics. While it clearly betrayed that they were ignorant of Caledonia’s blink-jump tactics, the configuration was excellent, placing all three ships in a position so that, no matter which vector Caledonia might accelerate along, a minimum of two of the Gaoian craft would have a firing solution on her, and one that made sure that no allied craft was in danger of being hit by stray fire. An unlikely event when you were talking about distances of hundreds of kilometers, but still a sensible precaution.

Odyssey and Edda had both stopped at a rendezvous point two parsecs out, and were on a hair trigger to jump in via wormhole if summoned. While Caledonia’s own systems were only on about sixty percent charge, needing only five percent to effect an immediate retreat to Cimbrean, theirs would be fully charged by now, primed and ready to fight as hard as humanly possible in the event that it became necessary.

Bathini was resolved that under no circumstances would it be necessary. The very last thing they needed now was to disgruntle a potential ally.

“Best behaviour, people. I don’t want a peep of activity out of anything that might even smell like a weapon on their sensors.” he said.

“Signal from the lead ship, captain. It reads ‘Identify yourselves’.”

“I’ve wanted to say this for a long time.” He confided, standing up. “On screen.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 5d AV

The Scar, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Dr. Mary Cleveland

Dr. Mary Cleveland had come to Cimbrean for the simple reason that it opened up a hitherto unexplored field of science: Xenomycology. The study of alien fungi, or at least of alien life forms that were functionally very similar to fungi.

Persuading her husband Colin to join her and become the human race’s first xenobacteriologist in the field had been as simple as suggesting it.

Both of them were of course trained in the proper use of protective clothing, to isolate themselves from their samples, but she had only imagined ever to need it in the lab, to prevent contamination of the sample. Protecting herself from a potential threat had never really been considered before. This was supposed to be a Class Four planet.

That had been before they saw the “mark” up close.

What had looked like a thin brown line in the satellite photo had turned out to a comprehension-defyingly large swathe of forest. From the shuttle, it stretched horizon to horizon in one direction, and filled half the world below in the other, flanked with sickly yellows, whites and blacks. The brown was…was death.

Trees had fallen, and nothing was growing to replace them. Streams were choked with scum and froth. They circled over one abscessous hole in the forest where even the fallen trees were gone, and inside it, Mary could see the skeleton of some native beast the size of a horse, and already it looked…incomplete.

“This shuttle’s sensors are next to useless.” the pilot reported. “but it’s good for atmospheric composition. Have a look at this..”

The scientists crowded round, leaving poor Mary stuck in the back, too short to see the display.

“Hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide…Putrescine…”

“Bloody hell. Now I’m glad we’re wearing the suits.” somebody commented. “It must smell like shit out there.”

“Lovely…” the pilot muttered. “Guess I’m in for a treat when that ramp comes down.”

“Is there anywhere to set down upwind of the…area?”

”…Close enough. You mind walking a half mile or so?”

The consensus was that they didn’t, so the shuttle spun down to drop its passengers off on a rock that lunged up from among the trees, forming the point of a gentle slope down into the forest. Aside from a slightly intimidating dash down the ramp onto solid ground, it was an easy walk.

Down among the foliage, the damage was alarming. They were a good kilometer ahead of the apparent border of the damage that was visible from the air, but it was immediately obvious that the true leading edge of this landscape-eating sickness was far ahead of the yellowing and death. Every surface of every living thing was squalid with wet orange and off-white spots. The light filtering through the canopy borrowed a wretched hue from the infection, leaving the whole science team feeling filthy even inside their suits.

“Bacterial growths, Colin?”

Colin nodded, rubbing a leaf between two gloved fingers. It disintegrated. “They could well be. Grab a sample, I’ll try and culture them back at Folctha.”

“Those on the other hand.” Mary said as the man with the sample bag produced a sterile tube and swab and set about collecting samples “are definitely fungal.”

She was referring to a mat of white fibers that had completely overrun one limb of a nearby tree.

“Don’t go near that.” Doctor Stevenson warned her, as she started to approach. When she turned and looked to him for an explanation, he dug a rock out of the soil and threw it at the branch. It cracked and a quarter-tonne of wood sagged on the trunk before crashing down.

Everyone on the team carefully stepped away from any overhanging limbs.

Samples gathered, they pressed onwards, and with each tree things seemed to get worse, but none of them were quite prepared for the abrupt change.

There was practically a line on the ground where living-but-infected plants gave way to dead, decomposing wreckage. In fact, there was a line, a meandering one as wide as a human forearm was long, and the colour of pus. Samples were gathered from that and from either side of it, and the air was captured for later analysis. A stream—presumably once bubbling and pretty but now more closely resembling the contents of a sewer, was likewise sampled, as was the putrefying carcass of another horse-sized animal.

Past that point, the damage almost seemed to play in a perverse kind of reverse. It wasn’t that there was anything alive and healthy beyond the wave edge of the disease, but the ground stopped slipping and squelching underfoot, the air became less heavy with spores and foulness. Eventually they reached the denuded heart of the scar, and found only bare soil, already starting to form a channel where the nightly rains were washing it away.

They sampled everything. Finally, as the sun was starting to set, they regrouped, and the important question was asked.

“Well?”

Mary looked around, at the rot, at the destruction, at the death, and at the river which was carrying the foulness who-knew how far away.

“Well…so much for Cimbrean.” she said.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 5d AV

Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rios

“AAAVAAA!!“

The cold light of flashlight between the trees, the sound of a voice she loved on the edge of fear.

It should have bothered her.

“AVA!!!“An older voice, a dear one. She loved him too.

She loved everyone! But especially Adam and Gabriel.

“Over here!”

“Oh, hey Sara.”

“Ava? Ava what’s up?”

The expression of worry on her face was kind of funny. Her own low and happy laughter sounded creepy even to Ava herself, and that just made her laugh more. “Oh, I’m great, I’m fiiine.” she promised. This didn’t seem to reassure Sara, which made her laugh again.

Crackling and snapping in the bushes, more cold unnatural light.

“Adam, baby! You wanna get married?”

“What…Ava, are you drunk?”

“Didn’t drink nothing, no sir.” she giggled.

“More like high.”

“Gabriel! Daddee-heehee!” she sang the word as it turned into another giggle. “I’m so lucky, two daddies in one lifetime. I’m a lucky girl.”

She didn’t understand the strange glances they exchanged. That was funny, but she was already giggling, so there wasn’t room for more.

“Come on Ava, let’s get you back to Folctha.”

“Ah come on, let’s go swimming again! I didn’t get to earlier. Look, I brought my swimsuit!”

“For Christ’s sake girl, put that back on!”

“Take it off, put it on, make up your mind!”

“Dad, I’ll…handle her. You’d better figure out what did this.”

“Aww, no handle…Adaaaam….”

She didn’t really fight him. She was too…tired.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 5d AV

HMS Caledonia, near the Gorai System

Captain Rajesh Bathini

Gaoian really did sound very much like Chinese. Not in the specific sounds, but in the general cadence and flow of the language, the way it sounded to a native English-speaker’s ear.

Having Gyotin on the bridge to take over the negotiations had proven to be the right choice. For all their supposed positive attitude towards humanity, it had been known for years that Gaoian politics was completely fractured, and unless you were speaking to a female, you had no direct line to anything resembling a unified government. Evidently, there were factions within the military who regarded the “deathworlders” as a serious threat even in the face of the most overt peaceful overtures that Bathini could muster.

Not so different from home then, really. If the Gaoian language reminded him of the Chinese, then so too did their commander’s attitude.

“Fleetmaster” he interjected, using the title that the translator and Gyotin both had given. “It was my understanding that our species have, so far in these past short years, enjoyed a good relationship. I don’t see why I would want to break that trust now, nor why…or even how we would do so like this.”

“It is thanks to your species that Hunter attacks on our outposts and shipping have increased.” the snow-muzzled, aging Fleetmaster snapped at him. “I am tasked with safeguarding my people from all threats, and collaboration with your species seems to me to be a certain invitation to further retribution from those monsters.”

‘We are going to have to do something about that bad image’ Bathini thought to himself, as he picked his next words carefully.

“The Hunters have failed against the humans almost every time.” Gyotin said, before Bathini could finish assembling a sentence. “If your motive is fear, old Father, then these here are the species to be more afraid of.”

He showed his teeth, which was apparently not a friendly gesture in Gaoian body language. “Not to mention the ones less likely to eat you.” he added.

“Trying to intimidate me on their behalf, pup?” the fleetmaster snarled, but he didn’t fool Bathini. Gyotin had scored a hit, even the old Gaoian wasn’t quite wiley enough to hide it.

“Am I? I don’t find facts very intimidating, whitesnout.” Gyotin retorted, calmly matching the insult with one of his own.

“How dare-!” the fleetmaster began to object. Gyotin actually leapt forward and made a furous yipping noise toward his senior’s projection.

“Senile! Blind!” he snapped. “So afraid of today that he’ll quiver under a rock to save his hide and let cubs die tomorrow!”

Bathini leaned forward to whisper in his Gaoian’s pointed ear. “Gyotin, are you sure this is…?” he began, but he could see glances in the background behind the fleetmaster.

As abruptly as it had begun, the conversation ended as the furious Father cut the link.

The tension of the ensuing pause lasted two whole cups of tea before finally a hail from the lead Gaoian ship came through.

This time, the figure on screen was a different Gaoian, obviously junior to the fleetmaster, but not by much. Of the fleetmaster himself, there was no sign.

“Caledonia, you have permission to enter the Gorai system under our escort.” he declared. “Do not deviate from your assigned path or power your weapons or shields.”

Bathini raised an eyebrow at Gyotin who, alien body language be damned, was obviously feeling very pleased with himself.

“We understand and obey.” he replied, calmly. “Thank you.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 6d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“Okay, thanks for coming, we’re sorry for the short notice of this Thing, but this is important.”

Gabriel Arés stood up and held up the unadorned Aluminium rod that marked him as the speaker for now, both it and the silver shield badge of the colonial police on his jacket shone in the blue morning sunlight.

“First, as you’ve all probably heard, I can confirm that one of the children was evacuated back to Earth last night with a case of poisoning.” He began. “We’ve just received word from Scotch Creek that she’s made a full recovery, and while they plan on keeping her under observation for safety’s sake over the next couple of days, she should be returning with the next group of colonists.”

There was a general relieved sigh and some muttering. Ava was popular, especially among the regulars at the Faith Center. Concern had been flickering around Folctha like lightning in a mountain storm all morning. Gabriel held up the speaker’s stick a little higher to quiet them down.

“We’ve identified the plant that poisoned her. Cimbreaner Simiscamellia Delanii, the Cimbrean Tea plant. The young shoots seem to have a potent drug effect when chewed raw. We need to know if anybody else has been using these plants recreationally.”

Chatter erupted, and Gabriel banged his walking stick down a few times to restore silence. “I want to make it perfectly clear that nobody is in trouble.” he raised his voice. “The matter of whether or not we should be treating that tea as an illegal narcotic is a subject for a future Thing, but for now we need to know if anybody’s been using it to get high so we can make sure they’ve not harmed their liver function or anything.”

After a little more chatter, a handful of people stepped forward. The Tisdales, he was unsurprised to note, were among them.

“Right. Sorry folks, but you’re all going back to Earth for a day or two. We don’t have the facilities here to properly test or treat you. Hayley, Mark, your kids can go with you, or they can sleep round my place.”

The Thing cleared up rapidly after that. The Tisdales agreed to let Sara and Jack stay with Gabriel, there were a few questions which Gabriel deftly put off until next time, before finally retiring to let the colony finish discussing it on their own while he retired to his office.

In privacy, he ran his hands through his hair and swore softly. It was still hard to believe that Ava, of all people, had been so stupid.

He was beginning to doubt his own parenting decisions.

Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 6d AV

The Grand Conclave, Hunter Space

Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds

The Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds could feel its maw watering.

To be a Hunter was to Hunt. The need for it was programmed into their genetic essence, playing even a critical role in their reproduction. A Hunter was only fertile within the few days after a successful hunt, at which point, if so ordered by its Alpha, it might go into a reproductive trance and willingly enter the spawning pools.

There, it’s own young would devour it from within. Small and agile little swimmers with little to their name but sharp teeth would burst in a bloody froth from the disintegrating corpse of their parent, leaving only clean bones and cybernetics to sink to the bottom of the pool.

Over the coming months, live prey-slaves would periodically be thrown in, to be ripped apart in a feeding frenzy by the increasingly mature Hunter young, until they were finally developed enough to haul themselves out of the pool and be escorted away to receive their first implants and join the ranks, to have knowledge and skills force-fed into their brains via cybernetic data shunts, joining the brood of their parent.

The exception were the Brood-That-Builds.

Where a “normal” hunter’s eyes were solid black or red, those of the Brood-That-Builds were identifiable from the moment they clambered from the spawning waters by their green eyes with the distinctive zig-zap pupils. They held themselves slightly differently, their craniums were that little bit larger, their natural claws absent, their endoskeletal structure that little bit better suited for heavy lifting and carrying than for combat.

They were the largest Brood by dint of being swelled by the breeding of every other Brood, as well as their own spawnings, but to the Brood-That-Builds, a successful hunt was something very different.

To them, an engineer’s obsession with problem-solving was as natural as breath and feeding. In their instincts, “prey” was an outstanding unresolved technical challenge, and the “hunt” was a solution to that challenge. To the Brood-That-Builds, installing an ingenious sewerage system was on par with raiding a prey-freighter. Deploying an orbiting array of energy collectors to within millimeter tolerances was rewarded with an ecstasy that other Hunters could only find in the flesh of Humans.

And now, this! The prey of a lifetime, actual sensor records of a Human starship in action, fighting in ways that defied immediate comprehension. A quarry without compare!

The Alpha knew that if it succeeded at this task, it would have to spawn afterwards. The urge would be far too powerful, the pheromones and hormones of its deadly birthing would produce strong Hunters, the finest minds ever seen by the Brood-That-Builds. It relished and anticipated the thought.

The Alpha-of-Alphas was in an indulgent mood, but there were limits. <Impatience; demand> +Can you learn their secrets?+ it demanded.

<Confidence; gratitude> +The Alpha-of-Alphas has given me a fine prey to chase. But whatever solution the primitive deathworld beasts can invent, I can invent also. These secrets will be yours.+ The Alpha Builder replied.

<Query> +And how long would it take to introduce this technology to our brood-vessels?+

<Thoughtful estimation> +That would depend on the nature of the technology, and how much of the Swarm would be thus outfitted+

<Clarification> +The entire Swarm-of-Swarms. Every last ship. This technology allows the Deathworlders to slip their cage and turn it into a wall against us. We will now devote all of our efforts into penetrating their fortress and butchering every last one.+

<Surprise; timid objection> +Greatest One, even if the secret turns out to be trivial, that will take (years).+

<Anger> +Your place is not to object! Your place is to OBEY!+

The Alpha Builder cowered as the Alpha-of-Alphas rose from its Vulza-skull throne and spread its cybernetic claws.

<Placation; Obedience> +It shall be as the Alpha-of-Alpha commands.+ It mentally squeaked.

<Satisfaction> +Good. Get to work.+

The Alpha-of-Alphas paused as the Alpha Builder scurried away. <Threat> +Understand something, Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds.+ It fixed the lesser Alpha with a stern glare from all seven of its eyes. +If you reproduce before every last human has been devoured, then I shall personally filter your spawn from their pool and have them fed to the spawn of another.+

The Alpha Builder swallowed, a subconscious gesture that, unbeknownst to either species, exactly mirrored its meaning in humans. <Fearful Understanding> it sent, and scurried away.

Suddenly, this new prey seemed so much less exciting to it.

__

Date Point: 4y 8m 3w AV

Austin, Texas. United States of America, Earth.

Kevin Jenkins

“Uh…hey. Is, uh, Moira home?”

The man in the door looked him up and down. “If your name’s Kevin” he decided “She ain’t.”

Kevin sighed, and nodded gently. “It is, yeah.”

Anger flashed in the other man’s eyes. “In that case pal, your restraining order-”

“I’ve got this, baby.”

Moira kissed the man in the door on the cheek, and after a quick check to make sure she was certain, he retreated inside. Moira leaned on the door frame.

“He’s right. That restraining order ain’t gone away.” She said.

“I know.”

“Why are you here, Kevin? I thought you were going to leave us in peace.”

“I thought…I was hoping maybe I could try and un-fuckup one thing.” Kevin said.

“What, you’re here to apologise?”

Kevin shook his head. “You and I both know there’s not enough sorry in the world, Moira. Not after what I…” the sentence trailed off. Even know, in the act of cleansing himself, he couldn’t bear to repeat what his own irresponsibility had done to Callie.

“You’re fucking right.” she snarled, advancing out of the house. “She’s inside. God willing, even if she looks out here, she won’t remember who you are. How dare you come here?!”

“I’m not staying.” he reassured. “Just…I know I can’t see her, Moira, but I have to apologise to her.”

“You’re not seeing her!”

“I know,” Kevin repeated. “Look…I’ve got this letter. You read it, you decide whether to give it to her. You can burn it if you want, but I can’t leave without at least trying.”

“Leave?” she asked suspiciously, snatching the letter from his hand. “You came back just to leave again?”

“Earth. I’m leaving Earth. I got a job with the Byron Group, on one of their exploration ships, and I’m leaving. Forever.”

Date Point: 4y 8m 3w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches.

Dr. Mary Cleveland

”…Peptostreptococcus magnus…that’s definitely E. coli, no two ways about it…and…yep, I’d bet my life on it, that’s Enterococcus faecium. Well, that clinches it.”

Governor Sandy was no scientist, but he was a highly educated, highly literate man. “Faecium? As in, faeces.” he said.

“Oh yes. These are all Terran species of bacteria, every one of them native to the human gastrointestinal tract.” Dr. Cleveland said, still examining the images being produced by the electron microscope.

“As are the fungi we recovered.” his wife added.

Coin nodded “It’s…aside from the scale, it’s a pretty classic cross-section of the kind of flora you’d find in an ordinary, healthy bowel movement.”

Sandy grimaced, and pinched his nose. “Delaney.” he said.

“Must be. The scar describes pretty much perfectly the direct route from the site of her escape pod to here. If we assume one comfort break a day or so…”

“Even one would have done it.” Mary said. “You can’t blame her, governor.”

“I don’t.” He reassured her. “Is there anything we can do?”

Mary sighed. “I suspect something like this would have eventually happened anyway.” she said. “In the absence of any bacterivores or immune systems capable of keeping them in check, the bacteria and fungi are feasting and reproducing as fast as they possibly can. Deathworld microbes, loose in an ecosystem that simply can’t cope. This was never not going to happen, from the moment a human first landed here.”

Sir Jeremy listened to her patiently. “I thought the disease suppression implants…?” he said.

“Those rid us of a whole raft of communicable diseases based on the case of one human who managed to infect a whole ship full of vizkittiks. They’re actually targeted at a fairly short list of bugs.” Colin shook his head. “They ignore our gut microbiome by design: If they completely sterilized the human digestive tract, it’d probably kill us.”

Sir Jeremy made an exasperated noise. “Bloody….sloppy half-baked alien solutions.” he cursed. “Very well. Is there any way we can stop this thing?”

Wendy shook her head and gave him the hard truth. “Almost certainly not, now that it’s so advanced.” she said, apologetically. “I’m sorry, Sir Jeremy, but all of our noble goals toward conserving the ecology of this planet were doomed before we even got here.”

”…Shit.”

Coming from a man who was not known to swear, this prompted a round of sympathetic nodding. Sir Jeremy had been passionate from the word go about preserving Cimbrean’s native life, and certainly nobody in the colony disagreed with him on that endeavour.

He wiped away a futile tear. “Fine. is there anything we CAN do?”

Colin and Mary exchanged glances. “This…the death of a whole planetary biosphere isn’t exactly our field.” Colin demurred.

“Is it anybody’s?”

“I suppose not.” Colin frowned, thinking.

“The knock-on consequences are total.” Mary said. “No plants means no oxygen. So, we’re on borrowed time now before Cimbrean ceases to be an inhabitable planet.”

Good husband that he was, Colin was on the same wavelength instantly. “And if there’s nothing we can do to stop them from dying, then the only option is to replace them.”

“And the only readily available plants which could survive in soil contaminated with Terran microorganisms would be…well, Terran ones.” Wendy finished.

“You’re proposing a…what, an ecosystem transplant? That sounds like an impossibly large task.”

“Vast.” Colin agreed. “But it’s either that or abandon this planet and watch it die.”

“We’d need to bring in…everything.” Mary said. “Trees, grass, bushes, bees, birds, insects, rodents, birds, fungi, algae, fish, everything all the way up to apex predators.”

“Impossible, surely?” Sir Jeremy protested. “Replacing the ecosystem of an entire planet, that’s…far too large a task.”

“But we don’t need to replace it across the whole planet at first.” Colin pointed out. “If the aliens are right about Deathworld species, and the evidence of this bacterial event suggests that they are…”

Mary nodded “…then we only need to introduce the immigrant species along the length of the scar. They might even help to contain the infection and slow it, if we introduced things in the right order.”

Colin nodded. “Of course, the Terran species would ultimately out-compete and supplant the natives, but if we’re very lucky, a few mutant strains might make it through the mass extinction events and we’d still have a few Cimbrean natives for posterity.”

“Is that feasible?”

The Clevelands looked at each other, back to him and, simultaneously, they shrugged. “We’re not remotely qualified to plan more than a tiny part of that process.” Mary said.

“It’s the precise opposite of what I came to Cimbrean to achieve.” Sir Jeremy objected, though it was at best a defeated token objection rather than a serious dissent.

“She’s already terminally ill.” Colin replied. “She either becomes barren and uninhabitable, or we terraform her. Those are the only options I can see.” He glanced at Mary, who nodded her agreement.

Sir Jeremy sat down, took off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie. “Is this likely to happen wherever we go?” he asked.

“Well…” Colin cleared his throat. His expression confirmed that the answer was an affirmative, and that he really didn’t want to say it.

Wendy finished for him. “They do call us ‘deathworlders’.” She said, and pointed at Firebird’s image of the Scar as the governor put his glasses back on.

“Well…There’s the proof.”

Chapter 19: Baptisms

Note: Xiù Chang was originally introduced by the excellent Hume_Reddit, and her saga forms part of the Essential Reading Order.

Although Hume decided to bow out of writing her story, they were kind enough to ask for it to be continued as part of The Deathworlders.

Date Point: 2y 8m AV

Diplomatic shuttle, docked at Kwrbvlwek Galactic Shipping Interstellar Cargo Waystation 832.

Ayma

As always, Xiù wasn’t in her bed when Ayma awoke. Ayma’s human sister had got into the habit of waking early so as to exercise under the punishing gravity of her homeworld before Ayma and Regaari awoke, and had been sleeping restlessly for the last few days in any case.

She had taken Triymin’s death hard. They all had, in their way, all blaming themselves for the innocent, broken little Sister’s untimely end. Ayma had berated herself for not making Triymin feel more welcome, for not being more sisterly to her. Regaari—enigmatic, handsome, driven Regaari—had redoubled his endurance training, spending longer and longer on the treadmill as if by training himself until he could keep pace with a human, he might somehow in some small way undo what had happened.

Ayma had seen Xiù’s grief before. The human tended to go quiet, curl up somewhere dark and sob until somebody dragged her out of it. This time was different, and she had been puzzling over why for some days. While Xiù had gone quiet, it had been the kind of quiet that Regaari had mastered, as if she was being silent so that she could watch without disturbing what she was watching.

That worried Ayma. And so, checking on Xiù had become the first task of her day.

Regaari growled something and turned over in his sleep as she padded past him. He really had been beating himself up recently, and Ayma didn’t doubt that his muscles were aching and fatigued from it, though this was the first he’d actually shown of it.

Well, that and being the last to wake. That wasn’t like him either.

There was something off about the ship. They had docked last night at a private corporate cargo relay station to take on basic supplies, synchronise with the galactic data network, degauss the hull and generally tend to the business of keeping their ship flying. Now, in the morning, it seemed eerily still, and colder somehow. Maybe even quieter.

That was it. Xiù was not a large person, but the characteristic density of a Deathworlder meant that when she was moving around, the whole ship vibrated just a little bit. She wasn’t heavy, she was…

Firm. that was the word. The ship trembled a little wherever she went inside it, as if it was just a little afraid of her. Ayma loved her sister, but having felt the full force of Xiù giving her an angry deathworld glare, she could relate just a little.

There was no music, either. None of that raucous pulsing noise that Xiù liked to pollute her personal space with when she was alone and could get away with it.

Only one thing caused her to pause as she headed towards the gym. The cabin that contained the modified cargo container, with its salvaged stasis field generator, that served as Triymin’s coffin until they could somehow get her back to Gao, and to a proper funeral. She always paused by that door.

The gym itself, however, was dark and empty. When Ayma experimentally waved a hand over the threshold, she didn’t feel the tug of any extra gravity.

“Shoo?” she called.

“She’s not here either?”

Ayma flinched. Regaari raised his paws apologetically. “Either?” she asked, grabbing the important word.

“You woke me up.” He explained. “When I went up to the galley, her cloak and disguise were gone.”

Their eyes met, then simultaneously widened, and they scrambled back towards the sleeping cabin, Regaari beating her there despite his battered muscles. Ayma didn’t need to get there first though. She was already feeling the urge to make a mournful keening noise, and the impulse only grew stronger when she saw the open compartment under Xiù’s nest-bed. Xiù didn’t own many personal effects, but they were all gone.

“I’ll…check the security footage.” Regaari said. “Check every compartment, just in case?”

It was something to do, but Ayma didn’t need to look very far. Glancing into the room containing Triymin’s coffin was enough.

This time, she really did give voice to her sorrow, and the noise soon attracted Regaari.

Resting atop the coffin was a datapad, projecting a short, simple message.

“I’m sorry.

Take care of yourselves.

I love you both.

Goodbye.“

Two years later.

Date Point: 4y 9m AV

A motel somewhere along I-84, Utah, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“Cimbrean’s appointed governor, Sir Jeremy Sandy, was quick to dismiss any suggestion of blame, stating that the damage was beyond any reasonable prediction.“

The footage of decaying foliage and the aerial shots of creeping brown pestilence cut to the image of a silver-haired man who looked like he hadn’t been getting enough sleep, standing at a podium in a garden under grey English skies.

“I came to Cimbrean for many reasons—the future of humanity as an interstellar civilization, to realise the ambitions of generations of dreamers, and to preserve its unique biology for posterity and for the benefit of the human race and others.”

“The thought that we are going to lose it all, that the biosphere of the entire planet was doomed even before the first colonist set foot on Cimbrean, is gut-wrenching. But the fact remains that, devastating though this tragedy is, it is not the result of an act of malice. The circumstances of this disaster were uncontrollable, therefore we shall not be naming the person responsible, nor apportioning blame—there is none to apportion, as they could not have foreseen or avoided this outcome by any realistic means.”

The governor paused significantly, and adjusted his glasses as he looked directly out across the crowd and at the cameras.

“Blame will accomplish nothing, and if nothing is accomplished then Cimbrean will die. It is that simple.“

The footage cut to Sandy shaking hands and standing alongside other politicians for the press as the reporter continued.

“This morning, the Global Representative Assembly’s Office for Extraterrestrial Policy issued a statement confirming that the search for other potential colony worlds would remain essentially unchanged.“

The statement was displayed even as it was read out.

“…Although the news of ecological disaster on Cimbrean has of course been taken into account, the Assembly’s survey of potentially habitable worlds was already focusing on so-called “death worlds” which are likely to be more well-suited and resilient to human habitation, including being better able to resist the kinds of microorganisms which are behind the Cimbrean tragedy…“

The footage returned to Cimbrean, showing teams of scientists patrolling the infected area in protective clothing, sampling the ravaged greenery.

“While the decision to supplant Cimbrean’s native species with ones from Earth has attracted widespread protests and accusations that the colony and its sponsors in the British government have failed to fully explore the available options for containing or reversing the bacterial spread, it seems likely that the plan to import Terran plants and animals is set to go ahead. The British Prime Minister has already pledged the continued support of his government to Cimbrean despite criticism from the opposition that saving Cimbrean will be a waste of time and money.“

Kevin didn’t recognise the next man on screen, but he was clearly a British politician. Nobody else could wear a bad suit, bad teeth and bad hair so comfortably.

“Everything we’ve seen and been told about the galaxy says that there are literally thousands of planets out there waiting to be claimed, most of which have ecosystems much less fragile than Cimbrean’s and gravity much more suitable to our needs. So this so-called ‘terraforming’ project seems to me to be a case of throwing good money after bad, especially in today’s fragile economic climate.“

A commentator gave their opinion from in front of a green-screen depiction of the New York skyline.

“Have we REALLY exhausted all of the options here? ‘cause as far as I can tell the situation on Cimbrean went from A-Okay to Apocalypse overnight. Where’s the in-depth investigation, the planning?” He raised his voice to shout over the interrupting objections of his opposite number “I don’t believe that a whole planet is so fragile that we can write it off the second some hiker takes a…a comfort stop in the woods!“

Screen time was then given to the person who had tried to interrupt him.

“The criteria laid down by the Interspecies Dominion for classifying a planet are well-established and clear. I know, I know…” She paused as she was interrupted, and the footage cut to her continuation. “I know it’s hard to really get your head around the idea that our own home planet is so incredibly deadly, but all of the samples and information coming back from Cimbrean so far, all the abductee accounts, all the scientific resources we now have access to all point to the fact that we’re statistical outliers, right on the far end of the bell curve.“

The next speaker was clearly being interviewed in his office, and had the air of big business about him. It wasn’t long before his name was displayed at the lower edge of the screen, proving him to be the CEO of some company or another. Moses Byron.

“Cimbrean isn’t going to be abandoned for one simple reason: Oil. It has a lot of oil. Sure, we may be moving more and more on to using solar energy collection fields to power our cities, but we’ve got a lot of cars still on the road that aren’t about to stop running on gasoline anytime soon, and we’re never going to stop needing plastics. Cimbrean represents an opportunity for the West to break our dependence on Middle-Eastern and Russian oil, and this ecological disaster doesn’t change that. In fact, it represents a golden opportunity.”

“If we’re replacing the ecosystem of an entire planet with one of our own design anyway, then we don’t need to worry about the conservation and preservation efforts that…I don’t want to say ‘hamper’ industry on Earth. Conservation and environmental preservation are obviously hugely important, and I don’t want to give the impression that I think they’re bad things, ‘cause I don’t.“

“But if Cimbrean’s already written off then there’s no longer any reason why we can’t have huge GMO farms over there, growing crops in a low-pest environment, meaning a gargantuan food surplus for Earth. The same goes for oil drilling, fracking, for open-cast mining…The incentives that exist not to do those things on Earth no longer apply to Cimbrean because the fatal damage has already been done. So instead we can stop damaging our own planet and make the best of a tragedy.“

The reporter asked a question directly to the interviewee at that point. “Don’t you think that’s a cynical way of looking at it?“

The businessman gave an uncomfortable little exhalation.

“I won’t deny you could call it that, but I don’t think I’m being cynical. I think I’m trying to look at the ways we can turn a bad situation to the good.” He said.

“Sure, it sounds heartless at first glance, but at second glance I’m talking about the opportunity to…to wipe out famine, to limit the damage we do to the Earth. Imagine if we never cut down another inch of Amazon rainforest ever again because we’d moved those tree species and their logging operations over to Cimbrean instead? That’s got to be better than just letting one planet die while we continue to wound the other, right?”

He shrugged, sat back and folded his hands in his lap. “If that’s cynical then…guilty as charged, I guess.”

Kevin stopped listening as the reporter signed off, and sat back thinking as the anchors segued into the next article, about a recall of translation implants, scratching idly at the bald patch in front of his own temple where his own crude version had been installed, supposedly the first one custom-built for a human nervous system.

Eventually, he reached a decision.

“Still doesn’t seem real…”

Date Point: 4y 9m AV

Cimbrean Consulate, London, United Kingdom, Earth

Sir Jeremy Sandy

Sir Jeremy became aware of his aide, Jack, entering the office and reached forward only reluctantly, and took his time removing his earphones and turning the music off. He’d been enjoying a few moments to himself.

“Jack?”

“Mister Moses Byron will be here in five minutes, Sir Jeremy.”

“Already?” Sir Jeremy sat back, folding his hands on his stomach. “I know the man has a reputation for alacrity, but…”

“He has a reputation for buzzing around like a blue-arsed fly, sir.” Jack smiled. “I understand he got in his jet the second you agreed to see him.”

“And a reputation for being such a straight-talker that you could draw a triangle with him.” Sir Jeremy finished.

“Shall I keep him waiting?”

Sir Jeremy thought about it. The presumption on his time was a little irritating, but on the other hand…“Ordinarily…no, no thank you Jack. See him in directly when he arrives will you? And, have some coffee ready.”

“Yes, sir Jeremy.”

Sir Jeremy cleared up a few letters and some of the shorter reports as he waited. Moses Byron was a self-made billionaire, a man who had stepped out of the relative obscurity of the business sector within the last four years already with a few million to his name, and had put that money to work in spectacular fashion, capitalising on all the domestic, terrestrial opportunities afforded by the discoveries coming out of Scotch Creek and the universities as the secrets of alien technology were unpicked.

Byron owned the production of volumetric projectors, stasis fields generators, solar collection fields and at least two kinds of alien-derived power storage cells that promised to give the latest generation of smartphone a full month of life when charged. Thanks to him, the near future promised to contain true 3D cinema, the stasis “fridge”, self-sufficient electric cars.

He also, to the public’s delight, seemed to be an intensely moral man, unafraid to court controversy by telling the truth as he saw it.

Sir Jeremy had an immediate mistrust of the man, but rose to shake his hands when, after a few minutes, Jack opened the door and ushered him in with a soft “Mr. Moses Byron, Sir Jeremy.”

The handshake was crushing, and Moses himself was loud. “Hey, so I got a question, do you mind if I call you Jerry, or do you prefer Sir Jeremy?” he asked.

“I prefer Sir Jeremy, if it’s all the same to you.” the governor replied, retaking his seat.

“Then Sir Jeremy you’ll be, and sorry for asking.” The twinkle in Byron’s eye said that he knew he was playing to type, and that no force in the galaxy could induce him to care even a little bit. Sir Jeremy congratulated himself on predicting that Byron, for all his bluster and bluntness, would turn out to be deeply shrewd.

Two could play at the excessive directness game.

“So what do you want, Mr. Byron?” he asked. “I saw you on the news, giving the impression that you rather thought you could annex Cimbrean into your growing empire.”

“And save the world with it.” Moses beamed, revealing the kind of white, even teeth that could only be the product of extensive expensive dentistry.

“Very ethical of you.”

Byron laughed. “Ah, Ethical is a product, Sir Jeremy, and it sells so well because it advertises itself. Hell, it’s a brand. You Brits have that little red tractor you stick on your food to say it’s been locally sourced. Ain’t no little sticker for cheap imported stuff made by Chinese kids for a dime an hour, is there?”

Sir Jeremy sat back. “Your point being…?”

Byron shrugged. “Did you read my proposal?”

“I did. Despite what you said on TV last night, I really don’t see what you stand to gain. Your own proposal is so self-limited that you wouldn’t see a return on your investment for…decades.”

Moses Byron grinned again. “If we’re talking about the return on the investment directly from the investment itself, then you’re not wrong.” he agreed. “But to be honest, how much money does a guy need? I can afford to fly to London on a whim, no big deal. Seriously, I could lose that kind of money in some inventive tax paperwork, if I was the kind of guy to stiff the public sector like that. How much more do I really need?”

“That’s an attitude which is slightly at odds with my past experience of business billionaires.” Sir Jeremy observed.

“Man, I feel sorry for you. You’ve been hanging with the idiot crowd, I can tell. The kind who think profit equals dollars, am I right?”

Byron leaned forward. “But yeah, I have an angle, sure. It’s just not one that puts me in control of the planet like you’re worrying about. That’d just limit me and make me look like the bad guy, and the Byron brand is all about looking like the good guy. Ethical is a brand, right?”

“I see. The cynical good guy.”

“You got it, yeah. I know common wisdom is that people don’t like a hard truth, but it’s worked for me so far.”

The meeting paused as Jack entered, carrying a cafetiere, cups, sugar, cream and some files, which he handed to Sir Jeremy before retreating.

“Coffee, Mr. Byron?” Sandy asked, depressing the filter.

“Black and sweet.”

Sir Jeremy poured. “You’re creating an opportunity.” he said, as he did so.

Byron threw his hands wide and smiled. “You caught me.”

“But I don’t think that opportunity is on Cimbrean. I think you meant every word you said during that interview but ultimately I think that my planet is just the, um…” he paused, considering how to phrase it. “The floodgate that you want opened.”

He dropped a sugar cube into the coffee. Moses held up two thick fingers. When the second cube went in, he curled one of those fingers down.

Sir Jeremy poured his own coffee before adding the third cube. “How much money does a man need? I’d submit that it’s less than you already have.” he said. “And yet here you are. If it was about being the ‘good guy’ then you could do that here on Earth. Any charity in the world would be delighted to receive this kind of money, so: Why Cimbrean?”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Jerry.”

Sir Jeremy issued a humourless laugh, and added the third sugar cube.

“If we are going to prevent the total collapse of Cimbrean’s breathable atmosphere, the first step is almost certainly going to be phytoplankton.” he said, handing the drink over. “But the water is so rich in nutrients that the algae will get out of hand almost overnight unless we have zooplankton and krill to eat them, and unless we want the seas to be solid pink with krill, we’re going to need something that eats them in turn. How do you import a whale?”

“More to the point,” he continued, “how do you import a sustainable breeding population of whales without harming the whale population on Earth? What complications might arise from that? If the whales we choose migrate to the Caribbean to breed every year, then how are they going to fare on a planet that doesn’t have a Caribbean? And that’s just the, the primary school science class version of that food chain, and only one food chain.”

He poured cream into his own coffee. “Nothing like this has ever been attempted. We’re bringing on board science fiction writers because those are the only people who have even considered these kinds of scenarios. The expertise and knowledge to make it happen all but don’t exist.” Before sipping his drink, he looked Byron straight in the eye. “There are noble causes right here on Earth that could boost your Ethical Byron Brand, and Cimbrean meanwhile can offer no guarantees that we shall succeed.” he added.

“So?”

“So as useful as your money will no doubt be, you appear to be treating me like part of the so-called ‘idiot crowd’.” Sir Jeremy said. He took a sip, levelly holding Byron’s gaze. “Not to try my hand at equine dentistry, but I’ve always preferred the aphorism ‘if it looks too good to be true, it probably is’ so I ask again. Why Cimbrean?”

Moses Byron’s jovial attitude was gone, revealing the hardened veteran businessman underneath.

“You’re gonna turn me down?” he asked.

“I hope I don’t have to. As I said, we need the money and to be frank I don’t care what you have planned. I require only an added clause.”

“Name it.”

“Do you have any neural cerebral augmentation implants, Mister Byron?”

Byron frowned at the apparent non-sequitur. “No.”

“No translator implant or anything like that?”

“God no, I prefer my head the way the good Lord made it.”

“Good. The stipulation I am adding is that you will provide—under supervision by an observer of my choice—medical evidence to prove that you don’t, to be repeated on a regular basis. In the event that you ever do acquire any such implants, any and all property and developments you own within one parsec of the Cimbrean star will immediately be ceded in their entirety to the Cimbrean colonial administration or, if that’s not acceptable, to a private owner of the administration’s choosing.”

”…That’s it?”

Sir Jeremy nodded and sipped his coffee again. While he typically preferred tea, he had to admit that Jack prepared excellent coffee. “Yes.”

“Well, ‘not to try my hand at equine dentistry’ here, but what the hell does it matter?” Byron looked downright confused by the demand.

“I’m not at liberty to tell you. Suffice it to say that I’m eliminating an ulterior motive.”

Byron took a swig of his own coffee to cover his bemusement, then set the cup down on Sir Jeremy’s desk. “Fine, whatever, I accept the term as given.” he said “Have your people call mine, write it in.”

Sir Jeremy smiled, and shook his hand, pleased to note that Moses Byron’s grip was much less certain and strong this time. “I look forward to seeing what you have in store, Mister Byron.” he said.

4y 9m 3d AV

Starship Sanctuary, deep space

Allison Buehler

Julian had an irritating habit of cleaning and maintaining his gear on the coffee table in the Sanctuary’s main lounge, which was compounded by his grumbling that he couldn’t concentrate on the job while any kind of entertainment was on. Six years of having nothing to distract him but staring into the campfire meant that any movie, TV show, game or anything else on the big screen opposite the couch commanded his attention.

Allison had, therefore, waited until he was pretty much finished before poking her head round the door, acutely aware that they hadn’t exchanged more than three words at a time in a couple of weeks now.

“Hey, uh…you busy?” she asked.

He glanced up, and gave her a long, cool, evaluating stare before moving over on the couch. “Just finishing.” he grunted.

+God, he’s sexy when he’s pissed.+

She sat down next to him and put the box she’d brought with her down on the table. He frowned at it.

“What’s this?”

“Peace offering.”

He blinked at her, then shrugged and twisted the catch on the front of the box.

She’d worked hard, with Lewis’ help programming the nanofactory, to produce an almost exact duplicate of a Smith & Wesson 22A. “My Grandpa taught me to shoot with a gun just like this.” she said. “I was…hoping you’d let me teach you. You said yourself you’ve never fired a gun before.”

“What, you want an excuse to rub up next to me on the shooting range?” Julian put the gun back down again.

“Um…”

“I’m not your fucking plaything, Allison. You wanted a perfect peace offering? Well how about a goddamn apology?”

“UGH!” she stood up and left the gun behind. “Whatever, Etsicitty. You want to learn how to fire that thing, you let me know.”

She was glad that nobody on the ship was between her and her quarters to see her expression. The moment the door closed behind her, she drove her fist into the wall, denting it slightly and bloodying her knuckles, which prompted a round of swearing and running her hand under the cold faucet.

“That was an apology, you jackass.” she muttered.

4y 9m 5d AV

Sara Tisdale

The Cimbrean summer was gentler than Sara remembered from Earth. Back there, even in notoriously grey and mild England, she had always had to wear sun cream when thesun was out, and lots of it. She’d always hated it.

Cimbrean was much better. Its thick Ozone layer and the Cimbrean star’s comparatively low UV output (low relative to Sol, anyway) combined so that on an afternoon like today, you could stretch out face-down on a rock and just feel warm, with none of the burning or dryness.

She flinched as water splashed across her back. “HEY!”

Her little brother and one of the newcomers, Stacey, grinned impishly at her and kicked away from the bank, scrambling back towards the middle of the lake to escape her wrath. She let them go and tried to settle back again.

They had come swimming every day since the news broke. Everyone knew that Lake Junkyard was on borrowed time, that sooner or later the bacterial filth would reach it, and they wouldn’t be able to swim in it any more without risking dysentery. Squeezing out every minute of good swimming time before the day the bad news finally came was important.

“Hey.”

Adam sat down next to her to dry out in the sun, having swum out to the sunken spaceships and back as he usually did. He was really taking his exercise seriously, but he didn’t seem to really enjoy just fooling around in the water like most of the others did. He’d arrived late on an ATV of his own, and had dived straight in without even saying hello, a sure sign of something on his mind.

Sara had been sleeping in the spare bed in his house while her parents and Ava had been away, and it had killed some of her crush on Adam, replacing it with a solid friendship. After all, who else was she going to talk to? He and Ava were the only others in her kind of age range, the rest of the Cimbrean children were all ten years old or less, and hardly anybody seemed to be bringing families with them any more.

“Hey.” she returned the greeting rather more sunnily as she rolled over and sat up. “Do you have any news? I heard maybe there’d been some word today, but I heard it from Kieron and he wouldn’t tell me where he heard it from and you know how he makes stuff up.”

Adam smiled a little, his mood breaking down in the face of Sara’s unrelentingly cheerful motormouth. “No.” he said. “Stupid military hospital won’t share anything with us. ‘Patient confidentiality’ they say.”

“But I’m their daughter! And your dad’s Ava’s guardian, right? I mean I thought he was and if he is then that’s pretty much the same thing as being her parent and don’t they usually tell parents about what’s going on?”

“Yeah.” Adam agreed. “But he called the guy he has to deal with, and I’m quoting here, ‘A bureaucratic sadist with a phone pole up his ass’.”

Sara giggled. Adam’s imitation of his own father was uncanny, and not just because they were related. He had Gabriel’s mannerisms down perfectly.

“Is that all he said? Because I’ve seen your dad when he’s having a tough time and I didn’t know half of what he was saying until you taught me what they meant and I don’t see how he could just stop there when Ava’s in the hospital and they won’t tell him how she’s doing.”

“Hell no, it wasn’t all he said.” Adam agreed. “But I’m not allowed to teach you how to swear in Spanish any more, remember?”

She laughed again, remembering. The first couple of days of zero contact, not knowing what was going on with all the people who’d been shipped back to take care of their Cimbrean Tea poisoning, had been the hardest. By way of trying to find a method to release the stress harmlessly, Adam had been teaching her a few choice phrases in Spanish, right up until the point where his father had walked in and just folded his arms disapprovingly.

It had worked though. “So what else did he call him? Come on, spill it, it’s not like anybody’s around who’ll tell us off.”

Adam chuckled, shaking his head. “Guess.”

“What about…hmm…a puto?”

“Yep.”

“A Pendejo?”

“Plenty of that, yeah.”

“Ooh! I know! Did he call him a pinche idiota?”

Adam grinned. “Oh yeah. To his face.”

“Woah! really?”

“And then some. The guy stood in Dad’s office explaining ‘national security’ this and ‘discretion’ that and Dad told him to métetelo por el culo, right there.”

Sara was in awe. “Your dad is amazing!” she enthused. “He really told the guy to do that right there in his office? That’s so cool.”

“I know, right?” Adam nodded, then sobered. “‘But he said he regretted it afterwards. Said he could have got more done if he’d stayed frosty, yeah?”

“I guess…” Sara thought about it. “It’s been, like, two weeks hasn’t it? Nearly. Yeah, it was on Saturday the week before last wasn’t it, and then…wow that time’s gone fast hasn’t it? All those scientists and reporters and everyone coming and going and everything…”

“More of them today. Apparently some really rich dude wants to give us a whole load of money, it’s big news.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s the really rich dude?”

“Some guy called, uh…Moses…something.”

“Moses Byron? Mum and Dad talk about him a lot, like he’s…like, they think that all businessmen should be like him, they say he’s really honest and he’s one of those people who got money and didn’t turn into an asshole, and he’s making the world a better place and stuff. He’s, like, the only person in a suit I’ve ever heard them say something nice about.”

Which wasn’t exactly true. They’d also been fairly flattering about Sir Jeremy, and about Gabriel Arés, but she knew what she meant.

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. He does stuff like lobby governments to legalise Marijuana so he can…what was it Mum said?” She concentrated, trying to remember a speech he’d given that Hayley had admiringly quoted. “Something like ‘Rehabilitate the global trade in drugs and take it out of the hands of unethical pushers.’ Mum and Dad’re really in favour of that.”

Adam bobbled his head. “I guess that makes sense.” he conceded.

Unable to think of anything interesting to say, Sara picked up her camera and focused it on the first thing that she saw, other than Adam himself. The reflection of the tree line of the opposite shore was perfect, almost mirror-still, and she zoomed in on it.

A thought seemed to occur to Adam “Hey…did your folks ever do drugs like that?” he asked.

“Like what, marijuana?” Sara asked, pressing her eye to the viewfinder and twisting at her telephoto lens.

“Yeah.”

“Sure they did. They said it was part of their whole ‘being in touch with nature’ thing. They were really big on that. Grandma said the only reason they moved out of that teepee village in Wales was because of the child protection service.”

“Did you ever…?”

She nodded, and hummed a confirmation—”Mmm-hmm.”—before smiling sheepishly at him. “Dad used the same number for his PIN and for the safe, I figured it out really early on. Three three eight one, his birthday. So, when they went out one time I…y’know, I tried out some of their stash.”

She rolled her eyes internally when he gave a dismayed little head-shake in response to her answer, but his next question at least showed how open-minded he was. “What was it like?”

Sara invented furiously. The truth was, she had been sick and scared and hyperventilating too much to tell how much of the experience had been the drug and how much had been anxiety. “Just…weird, I guess.” she said, borrowing what she’d seen of her parents when they got high. “I don’t really remember, I just coughed a bit, found everything really funny for a while, got hungry, ate a whole tub of ice cream and fell asleep.”

“Didn’t you get in trouble?”

She laughed a little, lining up her camera to take a second picture of the distant trees in case the first wasn’t satisfactory. This question, she could answer honestly “Mum and Dad don’t believe in trouble, or grounding me or whatever.” she said, omitting that they’d gone easy on her in part because she’d had such an awful time. “Dad just changed his combination and his PIN and asked me to wait until I’m eighteen.”

Adam laughed, a little disbelievingly. “How the hell did they get to come here?” he asked. “I thought the first colonists were supposed to be, like, the best and brightest.”

“They are!” Sara protested, indignantly defending them. “They’re both botanists, really good ones! And there was never, like, anything official, they didn’t get caught or arrested or anything like that, ever. As far as the authorities knew, they’re a pair of doctors with a bunch of published papers, the best and brightest like you said.”

“But you said child protection…”

“I said they moved out because of it, not because the child protection people ordered them to or anything. They moved out because they knew child protection wouldn’t approve, so they moved out before that happened. My parents are really smart people, Adam!”

There was an awkward silence, during which she turned away, cheeks burning, and took an angry picture of the reflection of a hilltop where it blurred and distorted around the swimmers. It took Adam a good few seconds to finally apologise. “I’m sorry Sara, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No, you did.” She said. People always said that whenever they insulted her parents to her face, and Sara had long since given up on being upset by it. “It’s okay, it just means you don’t understand them.”

She put the camera down suddenly. “I really miss them.” she added. “Nobody else around here thinks like they do, everyone’s all closed-minded, talking about banning the Tea stems when the plant’s all over the place right now, and going to be extinct pretty soon anyway. What’s wrong with a little bit of fun? Does it really matter if people are…are chewing something, or smoking it or whatever? Why does that matter?”

“I don’t know.” Adam confessed.

“See, that’s why you’re cool. That’s, like, the honest answer.”

She sat back and stretched, pointing her toes. “Why do people have to make things so complicated?” she asked.

Adam made an interrogative noise. “Mm?”

“There’s this…saying thing that Mum and Dad like.” She told him. “’An it harm none, do as thou wilt’ shall be the whole of the law.”

“Okay…?”

“Well, what’s wrong with that? Why do we need all these rules and stupid laws that just stop people from having fun? Why can’t people just do what they want so long as they’re not harming anybody?”

Adam went quiet for a bit, and she was about to change the subject before he spoke. “People hurt each other.” he said. “They’re not like you, Sara. They don’t…hold themselves back just because they were asked all nicely. They’ll do things like…like go to a sports event planning to shoot random people in the crowd, or they’ll blow up a whole city. Or they get drunk and they…”

He went quiet again, then started laughing a little strangely.

“Adam?”

“Isn’t that weird? I can talk about the roller derby, I can talk about the bomb, but I find it harder to talk about Mom and her drinking.”

Sara scooted up to him a bit. “Did she hurt you?”

“Not like…not physically, or anything like that. She never touched me. But she…said things, you know? Painful things.”

“Yeah, but…Sticks and stones, right?”

”…No.” Adam looked away, and scooted away from her a little too. “No, that’s…I don’t wanna talk about it.”

After the awkward silence had gone on a little too long, Sara finally found the courage to break it. “Wanna swim instead? Race you to the big ship?”

“Race me? Come on, the only way that’s fair is if it’s a race for me to get back here before you make it out that far.”

“You’re on!” she sprang to her feet and sprinted for the water, laughing at his dopplering “Hey!“

She hit the water at full tilt and dived in, still grinning, enjoying the cool liquid feeling of freedom on her skin as she wriggled a few dolphin-kicks under the surface.

Win or lose, at least she was going to have fun.

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w AV

Clan Fastpaw Orbital Defence station “Pride and Vision,” Orbiting Planet Gorai.

Gyotin.

“Brother? What are you doing?”

Gyotin coughed, embarrassed, and unfolded himself slightly. The Zafu he’d had imported from Earth wasn’t really ideal for Gaoians—humans had longer legs with a slightly better range of motion in the hip and a slightly different take on the theme of “spine”—but he had found a comfortable, straight-backed position that served the purpose of keeping him steady and centered and pain-free.

“It’s…something I picked up from the humans.” he said. He rose and embraced his old friend. Tagral had been a cub in the same commune as Gyotin, and had followed his sire into the Fastpaw clan, whereas Gyotin had chosen a slightly more wildcard route in life under the now-notorious Chir.

“Picking things up from humans seems to be very easy.” Tagral sniffed, returning the hug. “You should see what the females are all eating these days. The mother of my most recent cub seemed to be looking forward to these “pancake” things more than the actual siring.”

“You don’t sound like you approve. Congratulations on the cub, though.”

“We can’t ever be deathworlders, brother.” Tagral warned him. “I’m worried that if we try to imitate them too much, we’ll forget what being Gaoian is like.”

Gyotin lowered his ears slightly. “I don’t think we’re in danger of that.” he said.

“No? When you’re doing…whatever that is.” he indicated the Zafu, candle and incense.

“Meditayshun.” Gyotin said, using the English word though it fit awkwardly in his muzzle. There was no word with an equivalent meaning in any dialect of Gaoian that he knew of.

“And what does that translate to?”

“It…doesn’t.”

“You see? An alien concept. A Deathworlder concept, brother. You’re playing with something very dangerous.”

“I know that better than you do.” Gyotin retorted, hackles rising slightly. “Humans are incredibly dangerous, I’ve seen it first hand.”

“So why this?”

Gyotin looked his brother in the eye and quoted. “Ignorance is comfortable, but deadly. Recognise that?”

“No.” Tagral admitted.

“You don’t recognise the words of your own Clanfather?” Gyotin asked.

“Really? The Clanfather said that?”

“He did. Humans are dangerous, but so is a pulse gun, and what are the first things you learn about pulse guns, before you’re allowed to even fire one?”

“Keep your claw off the trigger unless you are firing, always assume that it will discharge, never aim it at somebody unless you intend to kill them if you must, beware of what you might hit should you miss.” Tagral recited.

“Exactly. How to handle something dangerous, in a safe way. That’s ‘why this’.” Gyotin said, indicating his meditation equipment again. “Nobody knows how to handle humans safely, yet.”

He looked his brother in the eye and repeated that last word for emphasis. “Yet.“

Tagral had opened his mouth to retort, but shut it again, ears starting to droop as he thought through what Gyotin was saying.

“What…what is this meditayshun thing anyway?”

“You…sit and think. Breathe in and out slowly while concentrating on the breathing.”

Tagral blinked. “That’s all?”

“It sounds simple, doesn’t it?” Gyotin said. “But…well, sit down and try it…”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbren, The Far Reaches

Sara Tisdale.

“Hey, these are good!”

Sara beamed. One of the great frustrations of her life this last couple of weeks had been the abundance of real news crews and real reporters to try and talk with, to try and get some kind of an education from in how to become a journalist herself, and pretty much every single one had just chewed her out for daring to address them, or at least just shooed her away.

It was a real pleasure to meet a reporter who was more than a stuck-up pretty face in a suit who could stand in front of a camera.

She blushed happily as the Al-Jazeera reporter scrolled through her camera, admiring shots she had taken. It kind of helped that he was really handsome too. “Oooh…” he suddenly examined a few of her snaps with considerable interest. “These are some great ‘before’ shots. We could use these for our next report.”

“You could?”

“Oh yeah. This one…no, no. This one especially. Hey, you used exactly the right filter on this.”

She knew her ears were going pink, but was too happy to really care. “Thanks!”

“Tell you what, I think I’ve got some…yeah, here we go. This is our standard contract, if you can get your folks to sign this on your behalf then I can use your pictures and you’ll get credited and paid for them. Does that sound good?”

It sounded like everything Sara wanted, and her delight didn’t contain itself. She practically bounced on the spot as she took the paperwork and her camera back and dashed away, promising to get the pictures to him ASAP.

The mental image of her own name appearing on a global news broadcast had her so distracted that she only noticed the convoy of trucks when a hand grabbed the back of her collar and firmly yanked her back from the road.

“Watch yourself there, love.”

Sara watched the huge vehicles rumble by, thoroughly sobered by the sight of those huge, crushing wheels that she had very nearly run under. “Shit. Thank you!”

Captain Powell seemed amused, which was a strange sight on his face. Usually he looked so intense. “Oi, didn’t your mum and da’ teach you not to swear?” he asked.

“Not really.” Sara shrugged. “Dad says that ‘fuck’ is one of the oldest and most important words in the English language and that everyone uses it anyway so there’s no real point in being squeamish about it…besides, I’ve heard you swear all the time!”

This seemed to amuse the captain no end. “Aye? I’ll have to watch myself in future I guess. You never know what bad habits you might pick up off an old war-horse like me…Wait, I recognise you. You’re the one who tried to sneak onto the base trying to take pictures of us.”

Sara laughed. “Yep!”

Powell shook his head, clearly still amused but also clearly wanting to be serious. “You know that’s all top-secret stuff in there, aye?” he asked.

“All those classified tents and portacabins?” Sara teased him. “Please, it’s not like I actually managed to sneak onto the base.”

Powell grunted.

“Yet.” She added.

“By ‘eck you’ve got some cheek.” he said, but the glitter in his eyes said that he enjoyed that, to some extent. “Seriously though, you could have got in very serious trouble, and the only reason you didn’t is because I’m a foo- a big softie and I don’t want to have to throw that kind of trouble at you. It’d ruin your hopes of becoming a journalist.”

“What, for being curious?”

“Aye. Those rules exist for a reason miss, even if you don’t know what that reason is.”

“But if I knew the reason why, then the rules wouldn’t be needed, would they?” she objected “Rules should be explained.”

Powell gave a rueful shake of his head. “I thought you’d say summat like that.” he said. “Alright, would it persuade you not to try again if I just asked nicely?”

“Maaaybe.”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, well. Asking nicely, I’d be grateful if you—seeing as I just stopped you from being run over—never tried a stunt like that ever again.”

“What’s the magic word?”

Powell made a kind of a laugh, one big silent one that rushed out through his nose. “Please.” he said, though his expression was starting to get serious and Sara decided not to push her luck.

“Okay. Since you asked nicely.”

Powell stuck out his hand and they shook on it, after which he nodded at the departing rear of the last vehicle in the convoy.

“Get on with you, go on. And try not to become the next lorry’s hood ornament, aye?”

“I’ll be careful.”

“I hope so, my arm’s not that bleedin’ long. Off wi’ you.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w AV

Starship Sanctuary, Free Trade Station 1090 “Endless Possibility”

The Mwrwkwel system, the Signal Stars

Julian Etsicitty

“That was an apology, dumbass.”

“You’re kidding. Giving me a gun is her way of saying sorry?”

Lewis laughed. He was surrounded by holographic screens, the central one of which was, for now, blank. Around it floated a halo of smaller screens full of notes, useful lines of code, or places for him to write notes. All the tools of the hacker’s trade.

“Julian, dude, you and Allison are, like, the craziest fucking badasses I’ve ever met, but you both SUCK at being real with each other.”

“Docking in ten minutes.” Amir called.

“Cool.”

“Real with each other?”

It was Amir’s turn to laugh. “Bruv, I could lean against the sexual tension between you two.” he said.

“What sexual tension? She treats me like I’m a goddamn toy!”

“Dude.” Lewis grinned. “Trust us. She wants you.”

“She wants you bad.” Amir agreed.

“Oh come on. I knew girls like her back in high school, they’d flirt and giggle at you then laugh in your face if you asked them to Prom.”

“I’m sensing a life history there.” Amir deadpanned.

“You’re not in high school no more, man.” Lewis told him. “And that’s not what she’s up to.”

Julian watched him work as lines of code assembled themselves on the large central screen directly in front of Lewis’ face. “So what IS she up to?”

“Come on, do we need to spell it out for you?” Amir asked.

“Apparently you do!”

“Dude, it’s simple.” Lewis told him. “She’s nervous around you. She doesn’t know how to talk to you.”

“Give me a break, she’s got confidence for years.”

“All a front, bro.”

Amir nodded. “You’re shit with girls. She’s shit with dudes. You get flustered, get mad at her and go hide. She gets flustered, doesn’t know what to say to you, so she gives you a bit of T and A because she’s hoping you’ll take the bait.”

“That’s not what she told me.” Kirk ducked into the room. “How are we doing?”

“Docking in, uh…seven.” Amir said.

“Piece of cake, they’re still using version four point two.” Lewis said. “And yeah, I saw that conversation. Protip, Kirk, women never tell men the whole truth about what they’re thinking.”

“Sexist, bruv.” Amir chided him.

Lewis just shrugged. “True, though.”

“What did she say?” Julian.

“Doesn’t matter.” Lewis said, dismissively. “Point being, she wouldn’t be acting like that if she wasn’t into you.” His screen chirped and he grinned. “In like Flynn. Running our sniffers.”

“Six minutes.” Amir added.

“So, what do I do?” Julian asked.

“Fucking…take the bait, dude!” Lewis said. “She gives you an ass to stare at? Stare away! She wants to get up close and personal on the mat or in target practice? Fucking enjoy it!”

Julian turned to the only nonhuman present. “Kirk?”

“Leave me out of this.” the alien said. “I don’t do that whole cliched ‘alien commentary on human behaviour’ thing.”

“Isn’t that itself a…?” Amir began, then abandoned the question when Kirk gave him what they all guessed was a tired, patient stare, though the effect was spoiled slightly by the fact that the positioning of his eyes made it hard for him to look at anything nearby with both of them. “Never mind. Docking in five minutes…mark.”

“I still kind of feel like I’m being used.” Julian objected.

Kirk slapped him upside the head as hard as he could. “Mind on the job. You two can sort it out between yourselves.”

Chastised, Julian nodded. “Right. Sure…what’ve we got, Lewis?”

“Oxygen recycling, grav plate power draw and…yep, food ration dispenser bills are all up by a bit next to her population.” Lewis said. “Right up to half an hour ago. Reckon we’ve got a human on board, boss.”

“Good.” Kirk did one of his slow nods. “We’re a long way from Hunter space here so hopefully he’s been able to live openly.”

“Hey, this is weird.” Lewis added.

“What is?”

“Looks like all those metrics spiked by one human’s worth about…five months ago. There was somebody else here, but they either died or moved on, and there’s nothing in the census logs about a dead human, so…yeah, she moved on.”

“She?”

“Yep. Definitely a woman. The one still on board is a dude.”

Amir frowned at him. “How do you know that?” he asked.

“I programmed the sniffer to check the sewage processor logs for haemoglobin contamination warnings every fourth week.”

“Huh?”

“Blood, dude. Every month. Think about it.”

Amir blinked then realisation dawned with an uncomfortable grimace. “Oh! Oh, right! Uh…three minutes.”

“Weird though. See here? This was just her, then there’s two of them on the station for, like, a week or so, then it’s just him. You think they didn’t get along?”

Kirk patted Lewis on the shoulder and turned to Julian. “Go get Allison and meet me at the airlock.”

“Uh. D-do I, uh-”

“Get over it, Julian. I need you two working together. You can sort out your [unpronounceable crackle of untranslated alien syllables] when we’re back in deep space.”

”…Yes, boss.”

“Something else, K.” Lewis said, as Julian exited the flight deck.

“What?”

“I’ve synched with the military relay. Look at this.”

Lewis called up a graph of four writhing coloured lines: piracy, smuggler activity, Alliance scouts, and Hunter raids.

The Hunter line became a vertical cliff at a date three weeks previously.

Kirk leaned in, as if by his taking a closer look the data might change.

“No sightings? No raids? Nothing?”

“Just this.” Lewis zoomed in a little, and a tiny blip in the otherwise flatlined Hunter activity became visible.

“What is that?”

“The whole Swarm-of-Swarms, tracked by a Kwmbwrw listening post, hauling ass back towards Hunter space at ninety kilolights.”

As Kirk stood back up, Lewis looked up at him. “What does that mean, dude?”

Kirk’s four arms described a convoluted approximation of a human shrug. “I have no idea. But it worries me.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 2d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Rios

Returning to Cimbrean was a lurch, not least because the trip was so much more crowded this time around. Everyone was jammed in as much as was safe.

Adam wasn’t there to see her step through the decontamination field. Gabriel was. She wasn’t sure if she was ready to face him yet but…

The thought got abandoned as he stepped forward and hugged her, hard.

“Me asustaste.” he said, simply.

Tears sprang up unbidden. “Lo siento.” she whispered back, returning the hug, realising just how lucky she really was. “I swear it was an accident, I do.”

“It’s okay…You’re lucky it was only the once. The doctors reckon that plant’s probably really addictive, and the Tisdales and a few of the others who were using it are apparently really suffering.” He turned back down the hill towards the town, which seemed to have grown alarmingly justin the few days of her visit to Earth. “How are you feeling?”

“It sucked.” she confessed. “I had the shakes, I felt weak…it hurt.”

“Weird how there’s no drug on Earth that’ll hook you so bad, but there is here on Cimbrean.” Gabriel mused.

“Where’s Adam?”

“Swimming.”

That brought a slight frown to her face, which she tried, and failed, to suppress. Okay, so her return to Cimbrean had only been authorised an hour or so ago, so if they’d gone down to the lake there was no way he could have known, but it still bothered her that her boyfriend was hanging out with Sara, and how.

“Have they been…doing that a lot?” She asked.

“While they still have a lake to swim in, yeah.”

They passed the faith center. There really were a lot of people running about the place, wearing tough clothes, one or two half wrapped up in plastic protective gear. A gang of men she didn’t recognise were busily moving crates and pallets of equipment out of the barn that served as the cargo terminus for the jump array, hoisting the equipment easily in the low gravity.

“While they…? Why wouldn’t they have a lake to swim in?” she asked. “And are these those research teams you mentioned? What are they doing here?”

Gabriel stopped. “You mean you didn’t hear?” he asked.

”…Hear what?”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w AV

“How are you finding it, sir?”

The captain didn’t hear her at first, but eventually the question seemed to percolate into his brain. McDaniel could hardly blame him. Her own experience of Gaoian politics was an awful lot like trying to conduct international negotiations with nations that occupied the same land, cities and facilities rather than having their own geographic territory. It wasn’t that Gaoians were deliberately abstruse, or at least not more so than any human diplomat. It was that the only time you could be absolutely certain which clan a given Gaoian belonged to was if they happened to be female.

That fact alone might have been a comfort and help, had Gorai been home to a larger female population. Apparently the route from homeworld to colony was less than perfectly secure and more than one colonial transport had gone missing en route. The Corti Directorate had been unsuccessfully implicated in a few of those cases, the Hunters in most of the rest, and the best efforts of the male naval clans to patrol the spacelane linking the two worlds had not completely restored a sense of confidence that might encourage Mothers to bring their Sisters and cubs with them to the new world. Despite the much larger population and more complete infrastructure, Gorai was in some ways less of a success story than Cimbrean.

In any case, two weeks of dealing with Gaoian politics was starting to wear on her sanity, and she was much more comfortable with such things than the Captain who, she guessed, had probably been staring fuzzily at the same document for five minutes before she entered.

“Sorry Lieutenant, what was that?”

“I asked how you’re finding it, sir.” McDaniel repeated herself, patiently.

“Like hiking through a minefield.” Bathini confessed. “This is a diplomat’s work, not a ship captain’s.”

McDaniel nodded. “I brought you a cup of tea, sir.” she said, setting it down. Technically, as Caledonia’s First Lieutenant, delivering tea was a bit below her, but she had always found that little touches like that went a long way, especially when it came to meetings involving sensitive information. The captain accepted it as if she was a beneficent angel.

“Good news also, I think we may be able to eliminate Father Mo from the list of potential Hierarchy agents.” she said. “The out-of-character behaviour Father Reyiki mentioned to you is almost certainly because the most recent cub he sired died shortly after the birth.”

“With their medical technology, I’m amazed that still happens.” Bathini mused, reading the note she handed him which elaborated on the subject. “A genetic defect?”

“Yes sir. A mutation. Not his fault, but if I understand their society correctly then that kind of thing carries a substantial stigma and has probably shot his chances of ever arranging another mating contract ever again.”

“Plausible.” the captain conceded “But I’m not convinced it’s enough to take him off the list entirely. The Hierarchy are ruthless, they might have arranged the cub’s death to provide plausible deniability for his behaviour. Knock him down to a yellow.”

McDaniel nodded, and jotted a quick note to herself, recording the instruction. Orders fresh from Earth, delivered by a member of Tawhaki Flight, were now to assume Hierarchy activity wherever neural implants of any description were involved. Given that neural augmentations were practically ubiquitous among Gaoian diplomats and senior clan leaders, that meant that every single one had to be considered not only in terms of what they were trying to achieve for their clan and their disposition towards humanity, but also in terms of their potential to act as a Hierarchy agent.

Bathini’s comparison to hiking through a minefield was, if anything, understatement. The orders had included a rough-and-ready risk colour-code to try and classify the probability that any given person was host to one of the enemy, running from green (no implants), then yellow for lowest risk up through orange (“Possible”), red (“Likely”) and finally black for “confirmed Hierarchy Agent.”

Of course, the mere existence of the Hierarchy was still need-to-know information, but Caledonia’s captain and her First Lieutenant both definitely needed to know.

Bathini signed a few more documents, sipped his tea then leaned back and stretched. McDaniel could hear the popping in his spine as he worked the kinks out. “God I’m sick of politics.” he groused. “What’s that you’ve got there?” he indicated the folder she was carrying.

“Latest update on the Type 2 space destroyers, captain.” She handed it over. “Ceres Base is restructuring but a lot of their people are recovering from having their translators removed, including the team leader who was overseeing construction of the shipyard. The project’s delayed by a good few months while they find a suitable replacement or wait for him to convalesce.”

“Funny how getting the damn thing installed was so easy but getting it out again proved to be so major.”

“Well it might work to our advantage. BAE say that the delay is giving them time to test some systems that they would like to update the Type Two’s design with.”

Bathini snorted. “A bird in the hand, Lieutenant…” he said.

“Not to argue with you sir, but I don’t think we can count on the Hunters to have failed to learn anything from our last battle. Some new tricks might be just what we need to keep our edge.”

“On which note, any news about Myrmidon?”

McDaniel shook her head “As per their last prediction I imagine sir, seeing as we haven’t heard from them.”

“Good, I suppose.” Bathini said.

“You suppose, sir?”

“Oh, this is more Manning’s thing than mine. I keep hoping they’ll make a sudden unexpected leap forward so he can take over…” he tailed off as he sipped his tea again. “how soon can we be done here?”

“We’re fully charged sir and the last of the ETs shipped out this morning. We’ve had a request from Gyotin, however.”

“We have?”

“He said he wants to come back to Cimbrean with us. Apparently he’s attracted a few males to join him in forming a new clan, and wants to set up a Gaoian enclave and embassy in Folctha.”

Bathini considered this. “He is aware of the ecological disaster, right?”

“He says so sir, yes. He says he’s confident that they can protect themselves.”

“Fair enough. What’s in it for us?”

“He’s offering to bring a Dominion-spec FTL comms relay with him, sir.”

“For us, or for the embassy?”

“One each, sir.”

Bathini raised his eyebrows at her. She smiled shyly. “Yes captain, you do have me to thank for that.”

“How long does he need?”

“Two days, sir.”

“Well then. Sound out the Gorai planetary authority, ask them if there’s any way we can arrange shore leave for some of the crew during those two days, what precautions they would want us to take and so on. And tell Chief Williams that I will be coming down like a tonne of bricks on any seaman who displays anything less than exemplary behaviour during shore leave.”

“Aye Aye. Will that be all, captain?”

“Thank you, it will. I need some rest, see you at oh-six-hundred.”

“Yes sir. Good night.”

McDaniel let herself out and took a second to catch her breath.

There were moments when the sheer strangeness just caught up with her. The promising start to her career as a Midshipman aboard the decidedly aquatic HMS Duncan really hadn’t prepared her to be First Lieutenant aboard a captured alien spaceship, nor for negotiating with an alien species, let alone one that looked so disarmingly Procyonid. And all just days after a vicious skirmish with monsters straight out of a Hollywood movie.

If it were just those things, she speculated that maybe she’d be adjusting. But when Gyotin had expressed an interest to live among humans and study Buddhism…and had attracted friends who shared that interest?

It kind of drove home the fact that less than five years ago, during her first days aboard HMS Albion, humanity had still been treating the idea of being alone in the universe as a big unanswered question. Every so often, the absurdity of it all gave her a ringing slap in the face.

She could hardly blame the Captain for wanting to get the hell out of Gaoian space. What the shit had happened to the world? It used to make sense.

She shook the thought off. When it came down to it, keeping a ship running smoothly hadn’t changed much. The universe might have turned out to be indescribably weird, but the realities of a warship were a comfortable anchor.

She ducked past a petty officer and his team, who stood aside en route to whatever they were doing, and bustled towards the bridge, glad to be busy.

Date Point 4y 9m 1w AV

Free Trade Station 1090 Endless Possibility”

Mwrwkwel system, the Signal Stars

Allison Buehler

“Christ.“

“What?”

“I think I found our human.“

“Good. That’s good, right?”

“Yeah, but I don’t understand half of what he’s saying.“

Allison stopped alongside Kirk, who shared a confused glance with her. “What do you mean?”

“Just…listen.”

What followed over Julian’s shotgun microphone was scarcely comprehensible, but Allison recognised it immediately.

“I an’ I cyaan do it, bredda. Dis ya’s dread heavy, ya no see it?“

She laughed. “Man, we’ve got a lively one. What’s he doing?”

“Arguing with some Kwmbwrw shopkeeper. Listen.” his mic rustled again.

“Blood clot gwan f’dem ya Locayl saps?! I an’ I need-”

“What is he saying?” Kirk demanded.

“Fuck if I know.” Allison shrugged. “Here’s hoping he can tone the Patois down.”

“Good luck.” Julian muttered over the link.

As always, she cleared the crowd simply by being there and looking lean and dangerous, but this was definitely a station that was used to having a human about. The glances she received weren’t the usual disbelieving “could-that-really-be-one-of-the-legendary-Deathworlders?” stares, but simple curiosity at seeing more of her species. She had learned to tell the difference.

Their target turned out to be a tall guy who, yes, was vigorously arguing with a Kwmbwrw shopkeeper over the matter of a large sign which the alien seemed to expect him to lift into place and mount over the shop’s window all by himself, obviously overestimating the famed Deathworlder strength.

“This guy giving you trouble, fella?” She asked.

The human turned, and an almost cliched brilliant white smile cut across his face, causing the shopkeeper to flinch away. “Well would ya look at that.” he said. “I an’ I get an actual angel take me away from all this.”

Allison mentally rolled her eyes. Give her Julian’s awkwardness over too-smooth any day. “Cute. You say that to every girl who walks into your life?”

“Only the beauties.”

Her comm crackled. “Jesus. Laying it on a bit thick there, pal.“

As Kirk stepped forward to introduce himself, Allison exploited the dermal patch microphone on her throat to mutter a reply. “Just a bit.” she agreed.

“Can we leave him here?“

“What’s the matter, Etsicitty? Jealous?”

Answer came there none. Allison smirked, then returned her attention to their new rescue, who treated her to another smile.

“So what’s your name?” She asked.

“I’m Zane.” He said, extending a hand.

She shook it. “Allison.” She replied, then nodded to his side. “That’s Julian.”

“Juli-? Ya!” Zane flinched a good foot sideways upon glancing down at where Etsicitty had appeared next to him. “Coo yah screechie creation stepper! Bad bwai gone fi give I a heart attack!”

“My bad.” Julian’s remorse didn’t extend beyond the words themselves. His tone, expression and language said otherwise. “Kirk, Lewis reckons he’s got a lead on the woman who was here five months ago.”

“This Lewis bwai found Xiù?” Zane asked.

“You met her?”

“First human she laid eyes on in years, sight? She move on though. Restless child, that one.”

“You didn’t go with her? People tend to band together out here.” Julian noted.

“Dawta had her fund, ya nuh see? She made her way sellin’ food. ET nyam her cooking right up.” He shrugged. “She wan’ fi move on, I couldn’t afford it, seen?”

“Did she say why?” Allison asked. Again, Zane shrugged.

“Babylon.” He opined.

“Well, I guess we’re going after her next, while the trail’s warm.” Allison said. “That might mean a delay getting you back to Earth.”

“Ah, me donkya. ’S a dread galaxy out there, no place for a biscuit on her own, nuh?”

“True enough.” Allison agreed.

“We’re parked on flight deck two-thirteen.” Kirk informed him. “If you have any personal effects you want to gather, we’ll move on as soon as you’re aboard.”

They watched Zane go as he produced a vigorous agreement that he’d be there.

“I hope the ship’s translator can handle him.” Kirk said.

“Mm.” Allison agreed. To Julian, very quietly, she murmured “Did something about his story about this Xiù seem off to you?”

“I didn’t want to say it.”

Allison nodded, frowning in thought. “He creeps me out.” she decided.

“Yeah. Who comes up with a line that smooth at a moment’s notice the first time he sees a woman in months?”

She laughed a little, ignoring the way Kirk’s ear flicked as he tried to eavesdrop. “Jealous, Etsicitty?”

”…Yeah.”

She paused mid-stride and turned to look at him, but he’d vanished into the crowd.

Date point 4y 9m 1w AV

Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

Folctha had changed drastically in just the last two weeks, since news of the disaster had broken, on the same day that Ava and a few of the others had been shipped back to Earth. What had been a large-ish clearing out of the forest had been cleared right back for more than a mile around. Heavy forestry equipment: Bunchers, Forwarders, Harvesters, Loaders, Skidders and more had been JA’d to Cimbrean as rapidly as the Earth end of the Array could charge, the aim being to create a “safe zone” around Folctha with a buffer of Terran plants that would, hopefully, prevent the bacterial filth from ever reaching the town.

The drive into Folctha, therefore, had gone from being an exhilarating blur of trees and undergrowth whipping by on either side, to a dreary crawl across an open and increasingly muddy field that was being turned and tilled ready to receive the planting of Terran crop species.

Exactly what was to be done with all of the now-endangered lumber was unclear. If the evidence of the forest was anything to go by then the living wood, once dead, decayed rapidly under the aggressive attention of Deathworld bacteria, and if that was the case then the only hope for the wood to have any use at all was to ship it offworld and sell it to alien collectors who might be interested in the definitely finite quantity that might survive.

The alternative, Adam guessed, being to burn the lot, but that could only exacerbate the huge CO2 emission problem than the Decay Zone was already causing.

In any event, the picturesque little forest town that Folctha had once been was gone: in its place was a field of machinery, lumber stockpiles, tree stumps and the tarpaulin-shrouded blocks of crated spares and equipment. The plans that Adam had seen drawn up would leave Folctha looking beautiful again, but that would come only after a months or years-long process of interventive botanical therapy.

It was like the whole of Cimbrean’s story in miniature. Destroying Folctha had taken days. Building a replacement that might match it would take years at the minimum, assuming it was possible at all.

The sight, plus the bad news about the lake, put him in a melancholy mood that was only lifted when they pulled into the vehicle pool only for Ava to be waiting for him by the side of the cleared patch of compressed dirt that served for a parking lot. She was dressed in her hard-wearing colonist’s clothing—thick hiking trousers, study boots, a jumper and the tough jacket with the custom “From The Ashes” embroidery that mirrored his own, plus a sheepish smile, but she looked just as beautiful as if she had been wearing a summer dress.

They collided in a huge hug.

“No me hagas eso de nuevo.” he begged her, through her hair.

She giggled and tightened her hug. “Te extrañé.” she replied.

“Estás bien?“

“Sí.” she reassured him. “Siento haberte asustado.“

Spanish had become their private language. So few people spoke it on Cimbrean that it was perfect for intimate moments like these, even though English was first language to both of them.

“Me alegro de que estés bien.” He told her. “Te amo.“

“Yo también te quiero.“

That was everything he had needed to hear. They switched back to English as he took her hand and they started to head back towards the palace, neither noticing Sara’s little harrumph at being ignored. There was a Thing scheduled for tonight, and they were hunting the local game animals as much as they could, appreciating what they could get before the poor creatures went extinct. The smell of roasting meat was already on the wind.

“This place went to Hell while I was gone.” Ava commented. Adam sighed.

“Yeah.” he agreed. “Two weeks ago it was paradise, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah…” she looked down. “Hard to believe one person did that much damage. How was the lake, is it still good?”

“For now, yeah. We’re, uh…planning to head down there again tomorrow after school, while there’s still time.”

“Can I come with?” She asked. “I want to try again.”

Adam hugged her tight around the waist. “It’s okay to have hangups.” he said. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to…”

Ava laughed and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “I want to.” she reassured him. “Its…important.”

“You’ll enjoy it.” Adam promised her.

She smiled a little uncertainly, then looked him up and down. “So look at you! You’re all tanned and fit! You’ve been keeping up your exercise while I was gone.”

“Yeah.” He grinned. “You like?”

If her expression was anything to go by, she liked. But her tone was light as she reached up and ruffled his hair. “You’ll do.”

They stood aside as a Mule towing a variety of heavy equipment grunted its way down the street, which was beginning to be in dire need of a proper asphalt surface. “Where the heck did that come from?” Ava asked. “The Jump Array’s over that way isn’t it?”

“They built a new one.”

“Who did?”

Adam indicated a team of men in high-visibility jackets and hardhats who were riding in a trailer being towed by another Mule as they bounced past. “Some guy called Moses Byron got involved.” he said. “Big billionaire hombre, said some stuff about wanting to turn Cimbrean into ‘the breadbasket of the human race’.”

He shrugged. “Like half these people work for the guy. They’ve got their own Array over that way now, twice the size and I heard they’re going to build one twice the size of that.”

“How the heck is anybody keeping this whole thing organised?” Ava asked

“You got me. I don’t think anybody really is.” Adam told her. “It’s been insane. There was, like, a quiet day or two after the news broke, and then people and gear just started arriving and it hasn’t stopped since. Dad reckons we’re either going to completely screw this up or settle into a rhythm sometime soon where we can start getting organised again, but for now it’s…he called it ‘anarchy on a good day’. I offered to help out with policing but he said…Well, he said no.”

“You sure he didn’t say ‘over my dead body’?”

Adam laughed. “Yeah, that’s closer.” he admitted. “There was swearing.”

“Do you think there’s anything we can do to help?” she asked.

“I wish.” Adam said. “I’ve been trying to find something useful to do and everybody says things like ‘just don’t get in the way, kid’ or whatever.”

“Ugh.” She grimaced. “I hate that.”

“You and me both. I need to be doing stuff, you know?”

“Tell me about it. I had a lot of time to sit and think in the Hospital and it just…”

She trailed off, but Adam knew exactly what she meant. Quiet time, thinking time, was remembering time. Remembering time…hurt. On e of the news crews that was covering the unfolding events on Cimbrean because the reporter had a SoCal accent and tone of voice that reminded him painfully of his mother.

“Hey…you’re here, and I missed you.” he said, taking her hand. “Can we just forget about all this and just…hang out?”

She paused, smiled, and wiggled her head into his shoulder, hugging his arm as they approached the warm and noisy circle where the first of the night’s whole roasts was just starting to be sliced up.. “Yeah.” she agreed. “Let’s do that.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 2d AV

Starship Sanctuary, deep space

Julian Etsicitty.

“It’s kicking harder than I thought it would.”

“How much harder?”

“Well, like…this gun’s kicking about as much as the kind you see in a movie, but the bullets are tiny.”

“Yep. Basic rule, Etsicitty. You don’t learn anything about guns from Hollywood.”

Sanctuary was a yacht, not built for transport capacity, so its cargo rooms were long and narrow afterthoughts tucked away in an unused structural space on either side of the power core’s equator. Aside from the slight curve, they were about perfect for use as a shooting range, and Allison had found a micrometeoroid protection foam that doubled perfectly as a bullet catcher, which she had sprayed all over the back wall. After that, the nanofactory had made it trivial to construct some targets.

“Okay, so you’ve got a feel for it.” she said, and stepped up to him, just a little bit too close for innocence, aiming her left foot downrange and miming the gun he was holding. “So just aim a little bit lower, and remember you want to squeeze the trigger…

+That’s not the only thing I want to squeeze…focus!+

He slowed his breathing a little and directed his attention to the weapon. This was no different than mastering throwing his hatchet had been, all he needed was repetition.

Aim a little lower….squeeze on the exhale.

“Woah.”

“See?”

“I hardly felt it that time.”

She stepped around him and this time there was contact as she indicated what he had done right. “You didn’t jerk the trigger, so the gun didn’t fly up like this, so the recoil didn’t make it worse. You see?”

He saw, and flexed his grip on the gun. He also saw the way her eyes flicked to the movement of the muscles in his arm. Then they flicked up and they made eye contact.

By some effort of will he held her gaze, and this time…this time, she was the one who finally broke eye contact and looked away, clearing her throat and pulse raised.

+Jesus. Lewis is right.+

She took the gun off him, gently. “So, uh…watch me.”

Stance. Aim. Fire. Fire. Fire. Click.

She ejected the magazine, checked the gun was safe and set it down on the bench before pressing the button to recall the target.

Their paper Hunter had a trio of holes inside the ten-point circle of its razor-toothed mouth that Julian could have fit his thumb over.

“Show-off.” He said.

She smiled over her shoulder at him, confidence restored. “Jealous, Etsicitty?”

“Yeah.”

“Eh. With practice you might be half as good as me.” She teased, putting the gun back in its box.

“I wasn’t talking about the gun.”

She turned, and he was astonished to find that his own feet had carried him up behind her, so that when she did so their belt buckles were practically touching. She put her hands behind her, bracing herself on the table.

“That smooth son of a bitch upstairs?” She asked.

“Please. Like he’s half the man I am.”

She tried to laugh it off. “Ego, Etsicitty?”

“Planet Nightmare. Six years. Figure I’ve earned it.” He leaned just a little closer, watching her lips part and her skin flush. “Problem is, that planet doesn’t teach you how to be real with somebody.”

She swallowed a little. “Being real, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“H-how real do you want?”

+Fucking tell her you stupid son of a bitch!+

“How…” he cleared his throat. “How real have you got?”

+Good job, man. Way to wuss out.+

She blinked at him.

Then she kissed him.

+…!+

Sheer surprise almost stopped him from kissing back. Almost. Instinct saved him, driving him forward to meet her with a back-of-the-throat noise of delight that came out of nowhere, sending his arms around her waist. She gripped his hair with one hand while the other splayed on his chest over his heart, then moaned softly as he put a hand on her ass and pulled her hips towards his own.

Her own hand went straight down the line of his torso and pressed against the front of his jeans, gripping lightly and lingering there for just a second, before she broke the kiss and recoiled as if his dick had burned her. “Fuck…fuck! Too real!” She gasped. “Too real! Jesus! Whoah…”

They let go of each other, pulses pounding.

“Too real?” He asked, unsure what to make of that.

“Too…” she kissed him again. “Much. Too much, I meant too much. But real enough. God!”

“I’m confused.”

“I just…Can we go for real talk before we do any more…real anything else?”

He slipped his hands around her waist again, gently this time. “Talk.”

“You are…unbelievably sexy, you know that? All of my turn-ons in one guy, it’s crazy.”

“Good, I guess?”

“I just…I can’t…oh for fuck’s sake Julian, I really, REALLY want to fuck you.”

“I figured-”

“No, shut up and let me say this. I really WANT to, but we’re not GOING to, okay? Not so long as we’re on this ship. Not happening.”

+What a fucking tease!+

+No. Think, dumbass.+

It took an effort of will, but Julian wrestled his frustrated libido into the corner, and the logic presented itself. “…you’re worried about the ship, the mission?”

“Oh, fuck sake, do you have to understand as well?!” She exploded. “Yes. The mission. Being on this ship. Doing something with my life. Mattering. I don’t want to lose that.”

“So…what do you want?”

The question shut her down for a second as she thought about it. “I guess…I…what about you?”

“Are we just physical?”

“I…shit, I don’t know. We’re a pretty good team and…I like you.”

“Like me.”

“A fuck of a lot, yeah.”

Julian smiled sadly. “Have we ever done anything other than exercise and flirt? What about…what’s your favourite movie? Band? I don’t even know where you grew up or what you did before your abduction. I like you too despite all the taunting but…”

She shut him up with a kiss. “Okay. That’s enough real right there.” she said. “Let’s start with all that shit and…figure out the rest, yeah?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want.” she confirmed.

“Okay.”

“Great.”

“Yeah.”

“So, um…”

“So…what is your favorite movie?”

Allison froze, then glanced up at the ceiling. Julian frowned. “What?” he asked

“Just checking there’s no cameras in here.” she said. “I don’t want the guys to hear this.”

“So wait, you’d be fine with them watch-?”

She interrupted him. “It’s ‘Tangled’.”

“Tangled.”

”…Yeah.”

“I’ve, uh…Never seen that one.”

“Oh.” She cleared her throat, tugged down her shirt a little and put her hair back in its ponytail. “Uh…Do you want to?”

”…Sure.”

“There’s, uh…just one thing, yeah?”

“What?”

“I, uh…like to sing along.”

He blinked at her, then smiled. “I think.” he said. “That this is going to work.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 2d AV

Folctha colony palace, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Sir Jeremy Sandy

While Sir Jeremy had always found Gabriel Arés to be an excellent man to work with—he wished all such senior police officers, superintendents, chief constables, or whatever equivalent rank he had dealt with during his career had been so reasonable. But long years of experience had granted him a sixth sense for when he was about to have a difficult meeting, and from the tone of the polite request that Arés had sent, today’s was going to be a tough one.

He knocked, poked his head into Gabriel’s office, and asked “Are you busy?”

Arés issued a humourless, monosyllabic laugh—hunh!—and beckoned him to enter.

Sir Jeremy sat down opposite his closest colleague. “So, what can I do for you, Gabriel?” he asked.

Gabriel finished up what he was doing, flipped a sheet of paper into one of the piles on his desk that, presumably, meant something to him, and gave Sir Jeremy his full attention. “You realise we’ve got an independently owned jump array allowing people onto this planet now, right?”

“Yes.”

“Run by an organisation owned by a man who doesn’t know about the Hierarchy.”

“I don’t trust Byron to keep it a secret. What’s the matter, aren’t your people screening the immigrants?”

“My people don’t know why they’re screening for neural implants.” Gabriel said. “And in any case that represents one thin blue point of failure, right here in Folctha. The traffic coming through the Scotch Creek array is at least being checked several times and properly by people who know why it’s so important.”

He frowned. “Why ARE we keeping it a secret, anyway? It’s no crazier than some of the other stuff that’s happened these last five years. You think people won’t believe it?”

“To avoid spooking the bastards into doing something rash.” Sir Jeremy replied. “The more people we tell, the more clear it is just how seriously we’re taking this threat. So long as the Hierarchy think that we aren’t really taking them seriously…”

When Gabriel frowned uncertainly, he pressed forward. “Besides, we don’t want a witch hunt on our hands. We can’t let the Hierarchy terrorize us into jumping at shadows.”

“That’s a dangerous game.” Gabriel said. “A known security hole versus the possibility that they’ll get more dangerous if we take them seriously? They know we’re onto them already, and for fuck’s sake they’re trying to genocide us.”

“It’s the considered opinion of the GRA, the UN and NATO that keeping the existence of the Hierarchy a secret is, for now, the best course of action.” Sir Jeremy stated, firmly. “I am inclined to agree.”

“And, sure, they’re right.” Gabriel said. “But Jeremy, if even one of their agents gets through that Array undetected then we could lose people. We could lose the whole planetary reclamation project. As the closest thing you have to a spymaster right now, I’m telling you—Byron needs to know.”

“Byron’s a loudmouth.” Sir Jeremy responded. “Gabriel if I thought he was at all trustworthy with the secret, we wouldn’t be having this conversation—it would already be done. But we are speaking of the literal survival of our entire civilization and species here—caution must rule the day.”

Gabriel sat back, sighing. “He’s really that bad?”

“His exact words to me were ‘Ethical is a brand’. I think he thought he was making a witty commentary on human nature and being so famously honest.”

”…I see. That’s a tough call.”

“One that I’ve made. I just hope that your men are vigilant.”

“Vigilant isn’t the problem. Overworked is the problem. Our ratio of cops to citizens is way too low right now.”

Sir Jeremy sat in silence. “Gabriel, I’ll…see what I can do.” he said. “Maybe Byron can be persuaded to tighten security on his side without being told why. I wouldn’t hold on to much hope, though.”

“Do what you can. I’ll do what I can.”

“And God can take care of the rest.” Sir Jeremy said. “Very well. Thank you, Gabriel.”

“Sure.”

Sir Jeremy paused outside Arés’ door and, despite not being a praying man by inclination, still took the time to glance upwards and offer a silent “please” to the heavens.

Frankly, he was quite sure that it was the most he could do.

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 2d AV

The Lake, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Sara Tisdale

They didn’t have long left before sunset, and Adam was putting in his two lengths to the submerged wreckage of the big ship and back, leaving the girls on the bank to enjoy the last of the sunlight.

Ava was quiet, watching the lake, the sun, the trees and the little animals that were flying, climbing and occasionally jumping between them, all singing a quiet chorus that wasn’t quite like any birdsong ever heard on Earth. Sara didn’t want to intrude; her friend’s expression was serene, her lips curled up at the corners. Ava looked completely at peace.

Sara just wished she could have taken a picture without disturbing her.

It didn’t last. Eventually Ava noticed that she was being watched, and fidgeted a little, though she acknowledged the attention with a smile rather than with awkwardness and said. “Sorry, I was…miles away.”

“You looked really happy.”

Ava tucked a rope of wet hair behind her ear and looked up at the painted sunset sky, still wearing that faint smile. “I feel…lighter.” she said.

“Well, yeah. Your jacket always looked heavy to me.” Sara joked.

“Not just the clothes.” Ava laughed. “Just…I don’t know.”

She looked out across the lake again. “…Lighter.”

Sara’s curiosity had always been her weakness, and her resolve not to intrude on Ava’s peace finally gave in. “What changed?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Well, I’m really happy you’re here, but a couple of weeks ago you were freaking out over this and now…” she waved a hand at both of them to indicate their mutual skyclad condition. “What changed?”

Ava put her head on one side, thinking. “Being high was really scary.” she confessed.

“Oh yeah.” Sara agreed, glad that Ava’s experience had mirrored her own. “It is, isn’t it?”

“You’ve been high?”

“Yeah.”

“I never thought it would be frightening.” Ava said. “Mom and Dad always made it sound like a horror story anyway, but not, like, a scary horror story. More like a kind of mind-control horror story, where the drug makes you do bad things.”

“Oh yeah. I tried some of…” Sara tailed off and dismissed the rest of the story with a wave of her hand. “…But I got so scared. I thought I was going to die.”

“Yeah…” Ava looked at the lake again. “That’s exactly it. I thought I was gonna die. And then there was the hospital, and I felt REALLY sick for days, and the doctors were all serious, and some of them looked really worried, like they were out of their depth. That was scary too.”

“And then?”

“And then I…I kind of accepted it.” Ava said. “Like…I dunno. Like, I wasn’t happy about it, but I guess I…”

Sara did something uncharacteristic and shut up, letting Ava finish the thought.

”…I guess…I realised, like, everyone’s going to die someday, aren’t they? Everyone. Everyone. So why be scared of it? Its going to happen one day, and then there’s Heaven waiting on the other side, so…”

Sara very carefully didn’t snort or roll her eyes, or give any indication what she thought of Ava’s naive belief in heaven. Instead, when Ava drifted off again, looking at the distant black dot that was Adam turning around and beginning the last return leg of his swim, Sara prompted her to continue. “…So…?”

Ava shook herself out of it. “So…I’m alive, aren’t I? I’ve got the chance to do some of the things I’d regret not doing, and this was one of them.”

She looked back at the sunset. “Im glad I did. This is…” She smiled a little bashfully. “If I died tonight, my Heaven would be right here, exactly as we are.”

That sounded like one of the most Hippie things Sara had ever heard, but it wasn’t a cynical thought: Instead, she felt a swell of vicarious happiness and, apropos, she scooted over and gave Ava a sideways hug. “Thanks for being okay.” she said. “You really scared us.”

Ava returned the hug with extra warmth. “Thanks, Sara.” she replied. “I’d never have had this without you.”

The sun was just coming into contact with the top of distant hills when Adam reached the shallows near the shore and stood up to wade the rest of the way. “Got some bad news.” he reported as he shook himself off and used his hands to scrape water from his limbs and trunk.

“What’s up?” Ava asked, standing up and offering him a hand to help him up the bank.

“Some of the trees on the west bank are looking kinda yellow, and they didn’t look like that yesterday.”

Sara broke the silence that greeted his news. “…That’s it then, I guess. No coming back here.”

“That’s life.” Adam said, causing Ava to nod in agreement. “You’ve just got to enjoy what you’ve got while you’ve got it.”

To Sara, that seemed like a very sad thought, but neither of her friends seemed to be very upset. Instead, she watched them watch the sunset, holding hands, before Ava took a huge breath, flapped her arms in a kind of little shrug, and turned away from the lake to retrieve her clothes. Adam paused a few seconds longer before following her.

Left alone on the shore, Sara took a moment to squint at the far treeline, just to confirm that, yes, there was a patch of sickly yellow over there.

“Sara? You coming?”

She glanced back just to acknowledge that she was, then curtseyed to the landscape.

“Goodbye, lake…Thank you.”

She spent most of the trip back wondering why she wasn’t crying.

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 2d AV

HMS Caledonia, Orbiting Planet Gorai, Gaoian Space

Regaari

“Human starship Caledonia, this is Whitecrest clan personal transport three hundred and thirty-seven, requesting permission to approach and dock.”

“Copy three-three-seven, hold distance and stand by.“

There was a long pause before the human flight controller’s voice returned. “Whitecrest three-three-seven, please state your business.“

“Caledonia, I am a personal envoy of Mother-Supreme Giymuy, my mission is a diplomatic one. I have no cargo or passengers, and this vessel is unarmed.”

Again, a long wait. Finally, his anticipation was rewarded. “Whitecrest three-three-seven, power down your engines and shields and prepare to be tugged into our port flight deck.”

“Complying.”

Anybody else would have probably felt that the humans were being paranoid, but Regaari knew there was no such thing. In a way, their caution was comforting. It was like being surrounded by the terse professionalism of his own clan.

He was met on the deck by a squad of male soldiers and a female in a more comfortable dark blue uniform with some kind of rank marking worn on her chest. The former watched him like a hawk as he alighted, clearly alert for danger and unwilling to relax even though he was plainly unarmed—he approved. The latter, however, held out two pieces of equipment—one was plainly a translator device, which she handed to him. The other was a flat paddle of some kind.

“I’m subjecting you to a quick search.” she informed him. Regaari ducked his head in acknowledgement and then stood with his arms and legs outstretched.

Curiously, she began with his head, grunting as the wand beeped. It beeped a few more times as she ran it over him, wherever it passed over a metal fastening on his coverall, but she seemed to find that acceptable.

“You have neural implants.” she said. It may have been a question, but Regaari didn’t detect the uptick at the end of her sentence that was characteristic of the way Xiù had asked questions, and which he assumed to be a standard human vocalization.

“Yes…” he confirmed, wondering where she was going with the statement.

“So long as you’re aboard ship, you will remain under marine escort. These are for your protection as much as anybody else’s, this is a working warship and we don’t want you getting lost or injured.” the officer informed him, in an apparent non-sequitur. “the gravity in sections of the ship you’ll be visiting has been turned down, but you could seriously hurt yourself if you stray outside of those areas.”

“Thank you.” he said, agreeing that the escort seemed safest.

The officer relaxed, and extended a hand, shaking Regaari’s paw with a human’s trademark firm grip, but not with their equally trademark crushing power. “Welcome aboard. I’m Lieutenant Ellen McDaniel, this ship’s First Lieutenant. Captain Bathini apologizes for not meeting you in person—you come very highly recommended, but he does have a ship to run.”

“Thank you.” he repeated. “I completely understand.”

“Will you come this way, please?” McDaniel gestured towards a hatch with one hand.

The ship was not originally of human construction, Regaari could tell. There was a clear mismatch.

The human technology was like stepping into a museum. It was all sturdy metal painted a dull and hard-wearing grey, with visible and almost shockingly low-tech dials and physical controls. Sturdy bulkheads had been installed, lined with easily accessible pipes, power lines and conduits, every one festooned with bright warning labels, simple diagrams demonstrating their use, and terse blocks of text.

Visible below all of that functional steel, however, was something altogether more ornate and elegant. The corridors seemed to be surprisingly wide and tall, as if built for the galactic average, which was decidedly at odds with the small, narrow pressure doors that had been spliced in at regular intervals. The deck plating was totally standard, the product of any shipyard in the Interspecies Dominion . The firefighting system in the ceiling, on the other hand, had clearly been ripped out and replaced for some reason.

The bit that really surprised him, however, was that every last scrap of electronics had been replaced. There wasn’t a single recognisable wall screen, processing unit, terminal or display to be seen. The humans couldn’t possibly have computers that were on par with those of a more established spacefaring civilization. Could they?

McDaniel made a familiar amused noise—a lot of her mannerisms were very much like Xiù’s, though possibly that was just because she was a fellow human female. She was, after all, only the second such that Regaari had ever met. But there was a lot to differentiate her from Xiù. McDaniel marched, moving at an efficient brisk pace that Regaari could feel in the deck. Xiù had always glided, disarmingly soft and silent. Xiu’s head-fur had been long, shiny and dark black. McDaniel’s was much shorter, and a kind of matte yellowish hue that Regaari couldn’t remember ever seeing in Gaoian fur, and where Xiù had gone everywhere with her head bowed a little and hunched inwards, making herself small, McDaniel moved like she owned the place, and to judge from the deference shown to her by the ship’s crew, she very nearly did.

“Impressed?” she asked.

“Intrigued.” Regaari admitted, conscious that while everything he spoke and heard was reaching him in perfect Gaoian, the human would be hearing them in English thanks to the targeted interfering sound waves the device was emitting. The effect had always disconcerted him. “You’ve clearly taken somebody else’s ship and reworked it to your needs, but I don’t recognise the design.”

“I can’t discuss the details.” McDaniel told him. “but yes, this ship was captured and repurposed. A large part of its internal systems are back on Earth now, being reverse-engineered.”

Regaari glanced around. It was hard to gauge the level of advancement that the ship had originally been built at thanks to the human replacements, but he got the impression that it had originally matched or likely exceeded the very cutting edge of Gaoian hardware. Earth had achieved impressive results with just a few mangled scraps of Hunter technology—he wondered what they would achieve with these new, intact trophies.

One thing he did notice was that it was eerily quiet. A warship this size should have been permeated by the background hum of its power cores. On Caledonia, the sound came from the crew and the air systems, neither of which were loud.

After they had gone down a flight or two of extremely steep stairs—almost ladders, really—McDaniel opened a hatch and politely gestured him into a meeting room of some description, where he sat down. The chairs were a little awkwardly shaped for a Gaoian, leaving his feet extended outwards well above the ground, and sliding his hips forward so as to bend his knees comfortably only induced an uncomfortable bend in his spine. he eventually settled for swivelling the chair a quarter-turn and sitting on it sideways.

The marines had remained outside.

“So. To business, then.” McDaniel said. “Would you like some coffee? How does caffeine affect your species?”

“I don’t know.” Regaari confessed. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Probably best not, then.” McDaniel said, ruefully. “You don’t mind if I have a cup, do you?”

“Not at all.”

McDaniel opened a thermal flask and a strong scent assailed Regaari’s nose as she poured out a steaming, blackish-brown liquid. It smelled…quite nice, he decided. but it also promised that the substance itself probably wouldn’t taste as good as it smelled.

At least, not to him. McDaniel sipped it and seemed very pleased with the result. Then she set the cup aside. “So, your diplomatic assignment.”

“A plea. One of our own has gone missing. One of your own, too.”

“I don’t follow.”

Regaari scratched behind his ear. “How much do you know about our clan of Females?” he asked.

McDaniel shrugged. “less than I would like to before drawing any conclusions.” she said. “They’re certainly—no offense intended—the most powerful of your clans by dint of sheer population, and control over the breeding rights, but I can’t say I know much more than that.”

“Well, one thing you may not appreciate is that you don’t necessarily have to be Gaoian to be part of a clan.” Regaari told her. “Though that precedent was actually set by a human.”

“Really?” McDaniel looked intrigued.

“Oh yes. She saved a colony group of Mothers, Sisters and cubs from an illicit Corti science facility some five homeworld years ago, before your species’ first faster-than-light flight. She couldn’t go home—we didn’t even know where Earth was at the time—so the Females declared her one of their own and took her in. She’s officially a Sister.”

“And she’s gone missing.”

“That’s right. I think in your terms, I last saw her just under two years ago.”

“You last saw her?”

Regaari ducked his head, ears rotating slightly. “Shoo is…a friend.” he confessed. “I was tasked with looking after her and did so for more than a year.”

“Shoe?”

“Her name is just impossible for Gaoians to pronounce correctly. Shoo Shang is the closest I can get.”

“And she just…vanished?”

“I think I had better tell you the whole story from the start.” Regaari told her.

Some minutes later, his account was briefly interrupted when a junior of some description arrived and handed McDaniel a hardcopy file—little more than a brown folder and a few sheets of paper, but the face looking out from the first of those pieces of paper was definitely Shoo, albeit looking younger, a little rounder in the face and a little less stressed than Regaari remembered her.

“Xiù Chang.” she said, also mispronouncing the name slightly, making it sound like ‘jew’. “Abducted from…huh, Vancouver, three days before the Hunter attack there. Turned twenty-four last month. Was studying acting at UBC at the time of her abduction. Last known sighting…nearly two years ago. Pretty much a full year before the Abductee Reclamation Program really swung into gear, aboard a private corporate cargo relay station.”

“That station was handling hundreds of ships a day.” Regaari said. “By the time we woke up and found her missing, dozens had come and gone. She could have been on any of them. And from there…” He made a helpless gesture, ears downcast. “I’m the one who taught her how to cover her tracks. Apparently she was a good student.”

“It says here that she’s known to have been wounded by a Nervejam pulse.” McDaniel said.

“Yes. It nearly killed her.”

“That’s good-bad news. At least it didn’t kill her, but those weapons have some terrible long-term effects…How did it happen?”

“Well, as I was saying. We were having a tough fight of it…”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 2d AV

Starship Sanctuary

Docked at Free Trade Station 1090 “Endless Possibility”

The Mwrwkwel system, the Signal Stars

“Kirk”

Zane’s dense patois, fortunately, was handled perfectly well by the translator, though only after Lewis was instructed to reprogram it. Apparently Zane didn’t approve of having his own creole echoed back at him. It certainly made conversation much easier.

“So where did she go?”

“Flight deck four-oh-four. I nearly didn’t find it.” Lewis snickered. “We got real lucky there, these things only log the deck plating power draw about every half hour, but the last log was on that deck aaand…flight log and itinerary for a light bulk transport headed for the Aru system, departure time five minutes after that deck plate log.”

“The Aru system?”

Vedreg had woken from his nearly three-day-long sleep cycle, and was fizzing with energy, or at least as much so as an alien the size of a Big Rig cab could fizz. He couldn’t fit into the flight deck itself, but was filling most of the corridor behind it, peering in eagerly. They were still figuring out what his colours meant in the absence of translator implants, but the medley swirling all over him almost certainly denoted fascination and awe.

“Curioser and curioser…” Kirk mused.

The three human men glanced at one another before Lewis said what they were thinking. “So, uh, care to tell the ignorant monkey dudes what’s special about the Aru system?” he prompted.

“It’s the home of the OmoAru, the oldest remaining civilization.” Kirk said. “Nearly two hundred thousand Terran years old.”

“So, younger than the Igraens and Hunters then.” Amir said.

“I’m quite sure I said civilization.” Kirk replied, a touch frostily. “They’re in late decline nowadays, and will most likely be extinct within a few decades.”

“Why?” Lewis asked. “What happened?”

Kirk and Vedreg exchanged a glance “We…don’t know.” Vedreg admitted. “Species die eventually. They stop building, they stop expanding or trading, eventually they stop reproducing and just die out. Nobody knows why.”

“Isn’t that kind of a huge problem?” Lewis said. “I mean, shit, EVERY species does this? Why isn’t…shit, why isn’t everyone looking for a cure?”

This was met with the mutual equivalent of unknowing shrugs from the two aliens, who then shared another glance. “Maybe we should look into that.” Kirk admitted. “It does seem strange.”

“Now that you mention it…yes it does.” Vedreg agreed. “Anyway. The OmoAru are one such species in the last years of their existence.”

“So who goes to their home system?” Amir asked. “Psychologists? Counsellors? Suicide hotline workers?”

“Scavengers. Picking over the artefacts, artwork and advanced technology of the most ancient civilization in the galaxy. Exactly the sort of work where a human’s brawn would come in useful, actually.”

Zane nodded. “Well, let’s get after her then.” he said.

“Peace.” Amir said. “Degaussing is going to take another three hours.”

Zane paused. “I’ll go…pick a bed then.” he said, not bothering to say any more as he stalked out.

Amir watched him go. “Something seem off about him to you?” He asked Lewis.

“Dude, we ship with a white zebra-giraffe-dude with four arms named after a Star Trek character, a two-tonne Mr. Snuffleupagus who glows in the dark, and two of the most sexually frustrated badasses in human history.” Lewis said. “What does ‘off’ even mean on this ship?”

“Seriously though.”

Lewis glanced back down the corridor, past Vedreg. “…Yeah. Something’s off about that guy.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 2d AV

HMS Caledonia, Orbiting Planet Gorai, Gaoian Space

Regaari

“That’s…” McDaniel wiped her eye. “Dammit. I’m sorry.”

Regaari ducked his head. “Please, don’t be. Thank you for caring so much.”

McDaniel nodded, taking a sip of her coffee to recover her composure. She was too professional to speak poorly of the Dominion while in her official capacity as an officer of the Royal Navy, but the story of how they had apathetically kicked that poor confused slave from pillar to post rather than putting her on a shuttle straight back to Gao had frankly disgusted her. How could ANYBODY have that kind of a lack of compassion?

She realised that Regaari had meant two things by thanking her for caring.

“Officer Regaari…do you know how many of our people are scattered all over the known galaxy?”

“I don’t.” He conceded. “Not many, I assume.”

“We’ve managed to contact, recover and bring home a few dozen, and there are about three times as many that we know for certain are dead. That still leaves more than ten thousand unaccounted-for, taken over the last forty or fifty years.”

His ears pricked up and forward. “That many?”

“I suppose as Deathworlders we were particularly fascinating. But it’s a big galaxy out there. How many stations are there? Of all kinds?”

“I don’t know exactly. Millions.”

“Ships?”

“FTL-capable ones of all sizes? Billions, easily.”

“And sapient beings in the trillions. And that’s just in and around Dominion space which takes up…what, a third of the galactic habitable ring?”

“The whole galaxy, officially. But yes, in practical terms…about a third.”

McDaniel nodded. “We have an expression. A needle-“

”-in a haystack. I’m familiar with it. It’s an understatement.”

“Then you see my point. We have only a tiny number of ships, and you’re asking us to look for one specific needle out of the thousands of needles scattered across an entire continent’s-worth of haystacks.”

“Yes.”

“You must appreciate that that’s…not exactly feasible. I admire miss Chang a lot from your description of her, but I can’t treat her as being any more worthwhile than any of the other abductees.”

Regaari lowered his head, crestfallen. “I suspected you would say that.” he said. “But, Ayma insisted that I had to at least ask.”

“From the way you described her, I’m surprised she’s not here in person.”

“She would be, but she…our cub was born a few days ago. The timing was just wrong, so she asked me to come.”

“Shouldn’t you be there with her? I mean, your child…”

“It doesn’t work like that for us.” Regaari said. “We don’t do it the way you do. I’m happy, I know the little one will grow up and be an excellent Gaoian, just like her mother. That’s where my involvement ends.”

That sounded cold and tragic to McDaniel, but she held her peace. Refraining from commenting on alien cultural differences was one of the basic rules of diplomacy. “Well…I’m sorry that I can’t offer more than we’re already doing.” she said.

“I understand.” Regaari assured her. “Knowing the scale of the problem…doesn’t help, exactly. Xiù is important to me, and the Mother-Supreme has taken a personal interest in her as well. But I understand.”

“Perspective’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

Regaari wrinkled his nose as he interpreted the painfully literal translation of that sentiment, then he gave one of those Gaoian nods. “It is.” he agreed, and stood. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“No, thank you for helping us. If nothing else, the Chang family can be told. And now that we know she’s likely to be in disguise and what that disguise looks like, it might just help the search.”

“I hope so.” Regaari agreed, keeping his private doubts private. “Please, don’t let me use up any more of your time. You have a ship to run.” he stuck out a paw, keeping the wince off his face as McDaniel shook it a little too hard.

She opened the hatch for him. The two marines waiting outside snapped to attention. “Bon voyage, officer.” she said. “I hope we’ll have good news for you. Gentlemen, please escort our guest back to his ship.”

“Aye aye. This way, sir.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 2d AV

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility

British Columbia, Canada, Earth.

Brigadier-General Martin Tremblay

“You’re sure about this? I don’t exactly trust the Byron Group to know what they’re doing.”

“Browning my pants, but…yeah, I’m sure. And they’re never gonna get better if no fucker’s dumb enough to fly with ‘em, right?”

“Yeah, well…watch yourself out there. Our very first scout ship went missing on its first mission.”

“The Governess? Yeah, I know. But I’m gonna be one of a crew, that’s gotta make a difference…”

“You hope…” Tremblay cleared his throat. “Be careful.”

“Dammit, Martin, I don’t wanna tear up…”

They shook hands. It didn’t seem personal enough, until Kevin shrugged, and turned the handshake into a hug.

“Gonna miss you, man.”

Tremblay laughed a little, and broke the hug. “Same. The place won’t be the same without your coffee and pancakes.”

“Just don’t let Maurice change the name.”

“You’ve got it…Goodbye, Kevin. Thank you for everything.”

“Take care of yourself.”

Tremblay sank back into his chair and allowed himself just a moment’s peace as the door shut behind Kevin, but he allowed himself no more than that.

There was still a research facility to run.

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 2d AV

Starship Sanctuary, deepace.

Julian Etsicitty

“Okay, your turn.”

“Huh?”

“What’s your favorite movie?”

“It’s uh…”

“Go on!”

”…’Frozen’.”

”…PLEASE tell me you like to sing along with ‘Let It Go’.”

“I used to sing it on Nightmare.”

Allison looked up at him in mild disbelief, then smiled delighted at the way his face was turning red. “It kept my spirits up!” he explained.

She smiled, and snuggled her head into his shoulder. “Oh yeah. This is going to work.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 2w 6d AV

Folctha colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

“What about…The mountaintop?”

“They’re building an observatory up there.”

“Big Bay?”

“Contaminated.”

“Little Bay?”

“Contaminated last week, come on Sara.”

“This place got boring.”

Adam and Ava nodded. There were no longer any interesting knots of forest to explore, no lakes to leap into, no view that wasn’t the clean-picked aftermath of the ravenous logging, and with the ballooning population of Folctha beginning to seriously tax the capacity of the colony’s basic power grid, rationing had been imposed which made Adam’s Playstation an occasional luxury rather than a reliable source of entertainment.

He’d already used up all his credits. So had the girls.

A convoy of trucks bullied past the school, further mutilating the dirt road which was already in dire need of a more permanent surface.

“Maybe we could go see what they’re doing?”

“Dull.”

“It’s something.“

Sara made a disgusted noise to match her equally revolted expression. “I guess.”

They jogged after the convoy, which pulled in at one of the Byron building sites on the colony’s edge—a promised starport, currently an industrial mangrove swamp of cranes and scaffolding, putting their roots down in excavated but unfilled foundations.

The kids lined up at the chain link fence, peering between the corporate hoardings and safety notices, taking it in. The artist’s impressions certainly looked pretty, but for now this was just another eyesore. It was hard to imagine how one could become the other.

With nothing better to do, they just stood and watched the workers fan out across the construction site, picking up where they had left off the previous night.

“Guess they’re pouring the foundations today.” Sara commented, pointing at a family of cement trucks that were entering the site from the other side, reversing up to one of the foundations, which was basically just a pit, filled with a welded industrial cage of rebar.

Adam frowned. “So…what’s that guy doing?” he asked.

He didn’t point, but managed to indicate with the direction of his gaze which worker he was referring to. He hadn’t practised crowd-watching since leaving Earth, but the skill had apparently stuck with him. It wasn’t just that the guy wasn’t with all the others, it was that he seemed to be carefully keeping some concealment between himself and his colleagues.

”…maybe he’s sloping off for a fag break?” Sara asked. When Adam and Ava gave her a strange look, she sighed. “Cigarette.”

The lone worker found somewhere he was apparently satisfied with, and pulled a brick-sized object of some description from inside his high-vis jacket, which he promptly stuffed into a cement mixer.

“That didn’t look like a cigarette.” Ava commented.

“I don’t like this, I’m calling my Dad.” Adam said.

“Are you sure about that? I mean, maybe we should find out what it is first…” Sara said.

“No. If it’s a false alarm it’s no big deal, but if it’s dangerous we should let the FCPA handle it.” Adam said firmly.

Cellphone coverage in Folctha was at least ubiquitous—the colony was far too small, flat and open for that to be an issue, and Gabriel answered on the third ring.

“Hey Amigo.“

“Dad, we’re down by the Byron spaceport site, there’s somebody down here acting real suspicious.”

“I’m on my way.” Gabriel said. Adam grinned, relieved and delighted that his Dad trusted his instincts so implicitly. “What’s he up to?“

“Slipped away from the other workers and hid something in a cement mixer. Could be a drugs drop.”

“How big a something?“

“Uh, about the size of a big cellphone, I guess.” Adam shrugged off a tap on his shoulder

“Right. Keep an eye on him but don’t get close okay? I need to hang up and get down-“

“Oh Shit.” Adam swore, as he glanced around in response to the increasingly urgent tap on his shoulder, just in time to see Sara’s boots wriggle out of sight under the fence. He rushed to the fence.

“Sara what the fuck are you doing?!” he hissed.

She raised her camera “Getting a picture of this guy in case he slips away!”

“SARA!”

She ducked behind a pile of girders.

“SARA! FOR FUCK’S SAKE GET BACK HERE!” Adam hissed, as loudly as he dared. She didn’t reappear.

“Oh God, Dad, Sara just went in there, she’s trying to get a picture of the guy…”

To his horror, he saw the guy who had dropped the whatever-it-was in the machine pause and glance back, clearly having caught some movement out the corner of his eye. A second later, he began to march purposefully back toward the mixer, tugging something from the back of his jeans.

There was something both wrong and familiar about the way he held it though. Something in the way he moved. Something that flashed him right back to a roller derby in San Diego.

“Dad.” He said, his voice becoming too calm, too flat, as if his subconscious knew how critical it was to speak clearly now, despite the dryness in his mouth and the pummeling in his chest. “The guy just pulled a gun and he’s…walking like Mr. Johnson did.”

“Mierda! Adam, please don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

“Sara’s in there…”

“Mantener la calma! you go after her and you’ll just give him more hostages, and maybe victims.”

Adam nodded, swallowed. “Entiendo. Hurry.”

“Estoy corriendo. I love you.” Gabriel hung up.

The phone rang. “Powell.”

“Powell, it’s Arés. Possible Hierarchy at the spaceport site, armed. One of the kids is in there.“

Powell didn’t even respond. He just dropped the handset and rushed for the door, erupting from it in a whirlwind of screaming orders. “GEAR UP! Jones, get me the ATVs this second!!“

Legsy, who never went by “Jones” unless the situation was beyond dire, practically teleported in his haste to obey. They were mounted and moving in less than a minute.

“We’ve got possible Hierarchy at the spaceport construction site!” Powell yelled over the engines, performing his weapon checks as they went. “At least one child mixed up in it, possibly hostage, so check your fire! We’re going for live capture if possible, but keeping the child alive is priority number one. Be aware of other workers in the area, we’re going to be checking them once the kid’s secure, don’t let your fookin’ guard down!”

Satisfied that his gun was in working order, he hopped off the ATV as it slid to a halt only a few dozen meters from the site.

“If there are any questions, make them fookin’ quick.” he said.

There were none.

Silent as ghosts, quick as nightmares, they stormed the construction yard.

“Oh God.” Ava was suddenly animated, pale and shedding distraught tears. “Oh God, oh God, he’s gonna find her.”

“What?”

“She’s hiding in those cement bags over there…”

Adam didn’t have time to get to the fence and see which ones she meant before he was paralysed by the firecracker popping of gunfire and the sound of Ava’s anguished scream.

Armoured, armed and ready to kick ass was one thing, but knowing there were kids in danger and hearing the gunfire had rooted even the SBS team to the spot for just an instant.

“Fook. Go. Go!”

In the next instant, they exploded from among the construction and equipment. Their quarry turned and raised his gun towards the first flash of movement. An unseen trooper crashed into him from behind, disarming and restraining him in one smooth motion.

“Neutralized.”

“Find the kid!”

His men fanned out, calling out for the girl. Powell didn’t need to. The second he stopped and listened, he heard her.

He stuck his head over a stack of cement bags. The girl was whimpering and weeping, she was covered in white cement dust, and there was a smear of horribly familiar red around where she was cradling her side.

“ROSS!“

Powell grabbed the bags and heaved, spilling them everywhere as he dug her out. The girl was small, brown-haired, skinny. The only clean spot on her was where her tears had washed away a pink track in the cement dust, revealing a few freckles.

There was a LOT of blood, and it was staining her mouth as she sobbed.

“Hey, we’ve got you, okay?” He said, taking her hand. Ross was already joining him, pulling stuff from his bag. “You’re safe now, we’ll get you fixed.”

Her grip was weak, and trembling. She whispered something to him.

”…Scared…”

Powell was used to death. He had seen men and women die, often by his own hand. Some, so close that he could feel their last breath. He had lost comrades in action, seen what modern weaponry could do to a human being.

He had seen death take all kinds of people. He thought he had seen it take children. He had seen enough sad little corpses.

But never like this.

When he closed her eyes, her tears soaked his glove.

Chapter 20: Exorcisms

Date Point: 4y 9m 2w 6d AV

Hierarchy Communications Relay

Session 18262577319

++0018++: This is an unmitigated disaster.

++0004++: I fail to see how. The operation was a failure, yes, but there was no repeat of Six’s capture.

++0018++: Eighty-Four killed a human child.

++0084++: And? The child would have died anyway had the operation succeeded. You can’t possibly be suggesting that the humans would be motivated more by the isolated death of a single juvenile female than they would have been by the destruction of the entire colony.

++0018++: I am suggesting precisely that.

++0084++: That is the most abjectly irrational thing I have ever heard.

++0018++: Then you are not considering how evolution on a deathworld must affect a species’ decision-making process. Consider: you live in a world in which you are surrounded by mortal threats. Which do you prioritise?

++0084++: The most dangerous one, obviously.

++0018++: On a Class Twelve? When your available tools are sticks and sharpened rocks?

++0007++: You prioritise the ones you can actually do something about.

++0018++: Precisely.

++0084++: I don’t follow.

++0007++: Consider: Anything capable of killing hundreds or thousands of individuals at once is not something that can realistically be defeated with spears and thrown stones. Erupting volcanoes, virulent plagues…the humans have a word, “Tsunami”.

++0084++: “Harbor wave?”

++0007++: The term refers to several million tonnes of water travelling at two hundred meters per second.

++System log: no activity for [30 seconds]++

++0004++: This is a…common phenomenon?

++0007++: They have killed an average of seven thousand human civilians every year over the last 40 years. This in an era of early-warning systems and the resources available to an Information-Age civilization. Do you see the logic? How are creatures barely more intelligent than an animal supposed to deal with a threat like that using primitive tools?

++0018++: They aren’t. And impotently worrying about such events would lead to neuroses and paralysis. But a smaller threat—one that picks off individuals, directly threatening you, or your genetic heritage in the form of your children…One that you can gather your spear and fight…

++0007++: Precisely.

++System Notif>cat?on: User ???? h■s j!!ined the <error: undefined exception>++

++0025++: Again?

++0004++: Seven, I thought you said you fixed this.

++0007++: No, I said I’m fixing it. The software is a tenth of a galactic rotation old, identifying exactly why it should start to misbehave now is my priority for now. Once I know that, patching the issue should be trivial.

++0025++: How long will that take?

++0007++: How many terms are there in an equation? It takes as long as it takes.

++0004++: Prioritise it. Eighty-Four, you are reassigned to the question of what the Discarded are up to. See if you can get in touch with Twenty.

++0084++: Yes, Four.

++0004++: Terminating session

++System Notif■■■■■■■ <Error>

<Error>

<Redirecting: Subnet Mask ????????? Port ?????>

++System Notification: Welcome to the Cabal.++

++????++: I think Eighteen is starting to get it.

++????++: Shall we bring him in?

++????++: Vote.

++System Notification: Vote now.++

<…>

++System Notification: All votes have been cast. The Ayes have it.++

++????++: Good. Make it happen.

++????++: And Four?

++????++: Don’t worry about Four.

++????++: Six will handle her.

++System Notification: Session Terminated.++

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Doctor Mark Tisdale was a large man, known to regularly deadlift nearly six hundred pounds.

Gabriel Arés, by contrast, had always been a small man who couldn’t have matched that even at his peak. Hampered as he was nowadays by lingering femoral nerve dysfunction as a result of being shot in the lower back, the physical disparity between them was huge. Tisdale’s deadlift was nearly triple Arés’ bodyweight.

Fortunately for him Tisdale was, to the core of his soul, a totally nonviolent man. But everybody had their limits, and in one sentence, Arés had transformed himself from a sympathetic authority figure doing his best for the sobbing wreckage of a grieving father, into the focus of that grieving father’s disbelief and anger.

“No charges?”

Tisdale stood and leaned forward onto the desk, which creaked. The sentence seemed to wind up around his dropped jaw, taking seconds to finally force its way out, weakly, as he pointed out the door. “My…” he panted “my little girl is dead!” his voice broke on the word. “And you’re saying no fucking charges?!“

“He’s being shipped back to Earth for questioning. If they decide to charge him there…”

“Fuck you Arés! I don’t want to hear you passing the buck! I want my daughter back!”

All of that impressive strength failed, and he sagged down, weeping freely all over Gabriel’s desk. “Or just…just hold her, just…just…Anything! God…”

He looked up and speared Gabriel with a gaze that was more a tear-soaked desperate plea for understanding than it was actually angry. “Why, damn you?”

There was a professional line that could not be crossed, but not crossing it broke Gabriel’s heart right down the middle. Every fear that had erupted in him on the two occasions now where Adam had been in harm’s way were realised in Tisdale’s shaking shoulders, but he could not give in. It was all the Folctha Colonial Police Authority could do to stop the mass of colonists outside from turning into a lynch mob and storming into their flimsy jail to drag the man inside it to his death.

The part of his soul where Adam lived wanted to let them. But he knew what they didn’t—that the poor bastard in the cells was completely innocent.

The dilemma before him was how to let Mark Tisdale know that without actually telling him. If Sara’s death proved anything, it was that the Hierarchy was as active among Humanity and as dangerous as ever. If they would shoot a teenager in cold blood to accomplish their objectives, then any edge, no matter how tiny, had to be carefully shepherded, and that included the certain knowledge of the Hierarchy’s existence.

Which meant that he would have to hate himself for the rest of his days for doing this.

“Doctor Tisdale.” he said, feeling his face adopt that cold, blank expression that it had to when he would allow no emotion to reach it. There was nothing he could do about the threat of his own barely-restrained tears, and try as he might he just could not look the man in the eye. “Your…Sara’s…the accused is…”

He gave up, and started over. “You need to know. I understand. Really, I do, Mark, I’m a dad myself.” He finally found the strength to look Tisdale in the eye while he said the next. “So I know what I’m asking of you by this, but I need you to swear to me that you can take this secret to your grave.”

“Secret?”

“I can’t and won’t even drop a hint without that solemn promise, Doctor. That’s how deadly serious this is.”

It was a gamble. If Tisdale wanted to he could walk out of the office, incite the mob, and Gabriel would be in serious danger of swinging alongside the poor puppet in the lockup. Assuming they weren’t just kicked to a pulp in the street.

Fortunately, Tisdale was a peaceful man who was naturally inclined to look for the best in everyone. Gabriel was relying on that.

Still. Tisdale thought long and hard about it, and his reply when it came was quiet and defeated. “I have to know, Arés.” He said. “If promising something like that will get you to tell me…”

It was good enough.

“Sara’s death is…related to other recent incidents. Recent serious events, in which a great many people have died.” he said, glancing up at the Chargers scarf pinned to the wall above his desk to ram the point home. “And to the recall of cybernetic implants issued last month.”

”…That’s it? That’s all you’re giving me is a fucking hint?“

“Doctor.” Arés said. “I know. But I am talking about an ongoing investigation here that, if it’s not handled properly, could mean that Sara will be only one of the first victims. There are lives at stake here, a great many of them.”

“This is the worst thing I have ever done to a man.” he added. “And…God willing some day I’ll be able to tell you the whole truth and you’ll understand why. But if that day’s ever going to come, then this secret needs to stay kept, and a hint is all I can give you. I give it in the hope that an educated man like yourself will be able to decipher it.”

Tisdale was an intelligent man. He may have been a hopelessly idealistic ultra-liberal with the appearance of a death-metal viking warrior, but he was also a scientist with well-honed powers of deduction. It didn’t take him long to mull over the hint.

“you’re saying there’s…okay, so, the implants connect to the brain so…God, are you talking about some kind of mind control conspiracy?”

“I can’t say.”

“Is that why you’re just going to shuffle this guy off to Earth rather than charge him? Because you think he’s under alien mind control?”

“I can’t say.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

Gabriel choked on his next I can’t say, and instead picked his words with great care.

“Five years ago, if somebody had claimed they’d been abducted by little grey aliens, I’d have thought they were crazy.” he said. “Since then I’ve met those little grey aliens myself.” He cleared his throat. “I really can’t say any more than I have, but I promise you—nothing I’ve said to you has been misleading.”

Tisdale finally found the strength to stand up, and he advanced around the desk. “Alien mind control.” He growled. “Alien fucking mind control. THAT’S what you’ve got for me?”

Gabriel stood his ground, and managed to keep himself from shaking, but it was an effort, especially when Tisdale’s fist left a dent in the wall by his head.

“Give me one good reason why I should believe you, Arés. Go on.” he said. his voice was unnervingly level.

Gabriel could think of several. But the answer was out of him without conscious thought.

“Adam.” He said, simply.

Tisdale blinked at him, then retreated a little.Then there was a blur of motion, and Gabriel was crushed against the huge man’s chest in a bear hug, which moments later turned into him trying to support Tisdale’s weight as the big scientist broke down crying again.

He just hoped that meant that he’d won Tisdale’s support.

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 3d AV

HMS Caledonia, Cimbrean Space, The Far Reaches

Captain Rajesh Bathini

“Signal from HMS Myrmidon sir. Captain Manning welcomes us back to Cimbrean space and asks to come alongside so he can come aboard.”

“Respond that we did and grant permission. Have the galley prepare a meal for the officer’s mess, all senior staff who are able, to attend. And…yes, invite some of our Gaoian guests as well.”

“Sir.”

“That blight’s got bigger.” one of the officers said. “Look, it’s nearly at Folctha now.”

“I’m sure Captain Manning will have a full update for us in due time. Heave to in a stable orbit and throw out our WiTChES.”

“Aye Aye.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 3d AV

HMS Caledonia, Cimbrean Space, The Far Reaches

Gyotin

If there was one thing that Gyotin really liked about humans, it was their approach to food. The meal served to them was a succulent white meat in a kind of piquant red fruit sauce, served alongside crisp orange root vegetables that sent a delightful crunch through his head as he bit them, and delicately scented powdery tubers that glistened with some kind of spiced oil. It was all delicious, and making a show of appreciating the food gave him the excuse he needed to watch the Deathworlders.

Bathini seemed to be in a more relaxed mood than at any time he had been over Gorai. He was making inconsequential conversation, enjoying his meal, and recounting a humorous interlude from when he had been a Midshipman on shore leave for the first time in some place called New Zealand.

The concept of paying to mate with a female was a very alien and shocking one to all three of the Gaoian males there present. Bathini had not, apparently, ever done so himself, but had been called in to discreetly extract a colleague from a compromising position at an establishment providing exactly that service. The story was crammed with innuendo but seemed to be going down very well among the Deathworlders, even the female officers, and Gyotin had to admit, himself. Bathini was an engaging storyteller with an excellent sense for comedy that seemed to transcend species barrier, and when it came to the part of having to deliver the crewman to the ship’s doctor past a suspicious Lieutenant, even the Gaoians were chittering along with the human laughter.

The story finished, the laughter cleared up, and there was a general looking around and then, as if prompted, one of the humans—an Ensign, if Gyotin had learned to read their rank insignia correctly, stood and raised her glass. All of the others picked theirs up.

“To the King, Great Britain, and Earth.” she announced.

The humans murmured what sounded like agreement and sipped their drinks.

“And to our spouses and lovers.” the Ensign added.

“May they never meet.” somebody quipped, prompting general smiles as the drinks were sipped again. This seemed to complete the ritual, and the whole affair relaxed considerably.

“So, what news?” Bathini asked of Manning, who looked suddenly more grim.

“There’s been a murder in the colony.” he said. “One of the children.”

Shock and dismay rippled around the room, though the few officers from Myrmidon seemed to already know the news and just nodded. “There’s only a handful of kids down there!” McDaniel protested.

Manning nodded, solemnly. “It’s been a huge blow to morale.” he said. “When they shipped the guy back to Earth rather than charge him here, a few of the original colonists quit and went home in protest.”

“Who was it?” Bathini asked.

“Sara Tisdale. Fourteen years old.”

“Just a girl…” somebody muttered, emotionally.

“God. I never would have expected it here…” Bathini said. “Do we know the motive?”

“I couldn’t tell you.” Manning said. Some unspoken communication seemed to pass between the two men and not for the first time Gyotin wondered if humans weren’t a little bit telepathic. Such a thing was supposed to be impossible but then again, so were sapient Deathworlders.

“The cleanup project attracted the help of a billionaire from Earth, one Moses Byron.” Manning continued. “He’s brought in a lot of his own contractors, invested a lot of his own money. It was one of those contractors who…” he tailed off.

“So not one of the first wave, then.”

“No.”

Bathini sighed. “I suppose we were going to bring our shit with us to the stars sooner or later.” he mused, unhappily.

Manning glanced out of window. Parked as they were in geosynchronous orbit above Folctha, the creeping brown stain across the continent was clearly visible, and there was definitely a tendril of sickly yellow-green in the waters south of one of the major river estuaries.

“In more ways than one.” he said.

Gyotin was surprised to find himself chiming in. “You can’t blame yourselves for that.” he said.

This attracted the surprised attention of every human at the table, which was enough to flatten his ears in discomfort for a second. “You aren’t responsible for the way the universe made you.” he said, pressing forward. “That-” he pointed at the planet “-is not your fault.”

Manning nodded. “I suppose naivety and inexperience aren’t crimes. But they can get people killed. We need to start being more cautious.” he said.

“How much more cautious can we be?” Bathini asked. “We fill our ships with biofilter fields we didn’t design, use an alien-made medicine that we barely understand to try and regulate our diseases, and it all seems to work but the fact is that none of the things keeping the rest of the galaxy safe from us are of our own making.”

“Well, what’s the alternative? Wrap ourselves up in airtight suits with breathing masks?” McDaniel asked.

“The alternative is that you kill all of us.” Tagral said, putting it so bluntly that the humans blinked, flinched, glanced at each other, or shifted in their seats and made some kind of coarse noise in the back of their throats.

“Tagral…”

“No, Gyotin, they need to understand this.” Tagral pressed. He stood up and pointed out at the planet again. “Gyotin’s right, that is not your fault. It’s a lesson, and the galaxy is going to be holding your species to account for how well you learn it.” He sat down again. “If you aren’t willing to take every necessary measure to limit the harm you cause, up to and including sealing yourself up in containment suits and using medicines and technology you don’t understand, then you have no business leaving your homeworld.”

Manning gave a slow, thoughtful nod. “Hear, hear.” he said.

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 3d AV

UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Knadna

“I have to admit…it is a very good disguise. If I didn’t have detailed metrics on her calorie intake and the environmental settings in her quarters, it might even fool me.”

Knadna had to agree. “I learned first-hand not to underestimate humans, Lesry. But you’re right. Her cover story is so well-researched, and she has so many of those little Gaoian mannerisms down that you’d think she spent years living among those bleeding-heart furballs.”

Lesry inclined his head curiously. “First-hand, you say? You’ve had an encounter with Deathworlders before?”

She gave him a thin smile. “Surely you must have speculated on my reasons for moving from Zoology to Archaeology.” she said.

“It occurred to me to wonder about that, yes.” Lesry admitted. “But I prefer not to speculate ahead of my evidence, and so had made no assumptions. Did you have a bad experience with an escaping Deathworlder?”

“Well, I’m still alive so I’d say the experience was relatively pleasant.” She retorted. “Specimen Four seemed to be genuinely delighted to have been collected, for some reason. He described himself as ‘nerding out’, whatever that means. Very docile, very compliant. He seemed almost eager to receive detailed and uncomfortable-sounding investigations of his lower gastrointestinal tract.”

She paused and thought about it. Four really had been strangely obsessed with the idea of having a probe of some description inserted into his anus. “I suspect he was mentally stunted.” she added.

“I can see why you would switch fields.” Lesry agreed.

Chilly as their exchange sounded, compared to the usual antagonistic dynamic between two Corti of equal rank working on the same project—Knadna as its lead researcher, Lesry having provided the ship, funds and hired help—their conversation was positively warm, bordering on the flirtatious. Knadna was beginning to find that she quite liked Lesry, and she suspected that the liking was reciprocated.

“So why are we keeping our “Gaoian” chef’s secret?” she asked. “Surely she would be much better used doing the heavy lifting?”

“Have you tasted what she cooks?” Lesry asked. He delved into a hip satchel and produced a little foil parcel, which, when opened, turned out to contain a number of shrivelled, wrinkly, translucent dark pink lumps.

Knadna accepted one and popped it into her mouth. “It’s…familiar. But I can’t place it.”

“MuAku grape.” Lesry said. Knadna expressed surprise—the fruit, an Aru native perennial, was unpalatably tart when freshly picked, and disintegrated into emetic watery mush very swiftly. The sweet spot in the middle where the grape’s disintegrating chemical structure was deliciously piquant without puckering the mouth lasted barely a few hours. “She takes the freshly-picked grape and heats it in an oven for some time at a low temperature, drying it out and preserving it—as you can no doubt taste—at the pinnacle of its palatability. The discovery of this technique alone might be the most valuable thing we find on this expedition. It would turn MuAku into a viable export crop.”

That was another reason to like Lesry. His imagination wasn’t sadly limited to his field like so many Corti’s were. He saw the opportunities.

He was right, too. Prestigious and highly-paid though this expedition to the OmoAru homeworld was, neither Knadna nor Lesry foresaw discovering anything which might finally shine light into the mystery of elder species decline. The Corti, as the oldest extant civilization, were doomed to begin their own decline at some point in the next few thousand years, and the Directorate was keen to learn what, if anything, could be done to avert, or at least delay, that fall.

So far no such expedition had yielded anything useful, and both of them were too experienced and comparatively modest to truly believe that theirs would be the one to stumble upon the great secret. Anything at all which would earn them some money and prestige was therefore welcome.

“Ah, yes.” She agreed. “I can see now that she would be quite wasted on manual labor, especially when we have the hover-palettes and drones to do all the heavy lifting.”

“Quite so.” Lesry agreed. “And after all, the other laborers need their exercise.”

Knadna was beginning to entertain the idea of exchanging DNA with him. “As you say.” she agreed.

They left the “Gaoian” cook to her work and strolled away from the camp around their ship, towards the city proper.

The planet Aru was a class nine, baked by the UV-rich output of its star, which it orbited closely. The land was largely arid, shading to temperate only very close to the polar oceans, which never cooled enough for ice caps to form.

That same heat lashed the planet’s wide oceans, giving Aru a regular hydrological cycle. The effect was endless desert, punctuated here and there with rich, sluggish emerald rivers and vast freshwater seas absolutely choked with life, and it was on these waterways that the OmoAru themselves had, naturally, built their cities during their ancient prehistoric expansion from their evolutionary habitat at the south pole.

Hence the city of UmOraEw-Uatun. Built around a huge oxbow lake where the great three kilometer wide river Uatun had once described a loop with a radius of several miles, it was a city of glass and white stone buildings that made alien eyes ache unless they wore protection. Here and there across the river, great bridges, engineering masterworks that looked far too delicate to even hold up their own weight, and yet were wide, flat and strong enough for a starship to land on—as indeed Lesry’s “History Paradox” had done.

It was a slightly odd ship, but Knadna quite liked it. Lesry had clearly put some thought into the design, reasoning that any archaeological dig effectively boiled down to heavy lifting and meticulous filing, and that the easier the former job was made, the more likely the latter job was to be done properly by the hired labor.

The Paradox was therefore built around a cylindrical hold, divided neatly into six storage segments around the central column which housed the largest of the ship’s five kinetic thrusters. The other four were mounted on outriggers, well above the head height of even the tallest species where they sprouted out of the rest of the ship—the sleeping quarters, galley, recreational room, nanofactory, the hydroponics ring which ran completely around the circumference of the ship, and the bridge blister mounted on top.

Landed, each outrigger deployed an elevator to ground level, and the six cargo bay doors opened outwards like a flower, meaning that the ship was theoretically stable enough to endure deployment to some of the more atmospherically violent deathworlds. Simple enough, but some of the engineering solutions involved in making the configuration both spaceworthy and serviceable by some of the stupider species who would be crewing it, had been strokes of genius on Lesry’s part.

There was an OmoAru at the dig site, watching the laborers strip neglected furniture, abandoned electronics and discarded art pieces out of an apartment building. It—while OmoAru had sexes, there was effectively nothing in the way of gender dimorphism for Knadna to be able to commit to a “he” or “she”—didn’t seem to be more than passively curious about the ransacking of its ancient city. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand—the ones Knadna had tried to converse with had turned out to be perfectly eloquent and intelligent beings who knew full well why the expedition had come—they just didn’t seem to care. Events simply unfolded around them, and while they watched and understood and could even be drawn into discussion about it, they just shrugged off any possibility of their getting involved. You could literally have stripped the bond-pairing jewelry from their ears and they would have neither protested nor helped.

The two Corti ignored it. The OmoAru themselves never had anything useful to say.

All of the junk being stripped out was just being taken so as to turn a profit on the mission of course. all of those things would find their way into the hands of private collectors and wealthy fashion hounds, none of it was relevant to Knadna’s research. That was where the books came in.

It was a near universal constant—a trend bucked only be the Allebenellin—that every species invented the book, which never again fell entirely out of fashion. Of course, come the information revolution any given civilization might find that more and more of its literature was being read in a digital format on whatever portable electronics they may invent, but the book never went away. It became a status symbol, a declaration of passion. Books were the physical embodiment of an interest in the archiving of knowledge and fiction, and there wasn’t a sapient race in the history of the galaxy, that Knadna knew of, that didn’t have a hard core of bibliophiles.

It was for this reason that there even were books in the building, and every single one had—with meticulous care—been entrusted to the most expensive, precise and sturdy cargo drone they had.

“Things are going well, it seems.” Lesry commented, looking sidelong at her, allowing a subtle hint of amusement to show. Knadna stopped rubbing her hands together and returned them to a more professional posture at her side.

“Yes. Quite well.” She agreed. She grabbed one of the newest books from the top and glanced at a page, taking in every feature of that page instantly. Her translation implant did the rest, decoding the OmoAru written language and converting it into useful concepts, remaining as faithful as possible to the linguistic subtleties it found.

“Cookbook.” she grunted, dismissively, and put the book back. “Thirty meals to help you keep a nice fat tail.”

“Look at this one.” Lesry said. “The top fifty holiday destinations in North UluUaba Province.” He turned a page. “Hmm. Actually this mineral mud spa sounds rather good.”

“An autobiography.” Knadna said, identifying her next one. “Contemporary with the start of the Decline, too. Potentially useful.”

Lesry was about to reach out for the next book when he paused, tilting his head slightly as if listening to something only he could hear.

“Ah. I think I shall have to leave you to catalogue these on your own.” he said. “You would think that simple instructions such as a cataloging system would be easier to follow for species capable of inventing space travel, wouldn’t you?”

“Hmm?” Knadna looked up from the book. “Oh. Yes. I’ll be quite happy here, thank you.”

She pretended not to notice the admiring way that Lesry looked at her before he left. Today was shaping up to be a good day.

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 3d AV

Starship Sanctuary, Deep Space

Julian Etsicitty

“Ice cream? God, I don’t remember, I went without it for so long…I guess…Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Okay, uh….hmm….What was the first band you saw live?”

“Oh. Uh…I’ve never been to a live show.”

“What, never?”

“Nope. Maybe I should? Uh…Okay, did you have a pet growing up? I had a hamster called Mr. Mopes.”

Julian smiled. “Oh yeah. Sidhe. He was this huge black dog. Like, part labrador, part Dobermann, part…I don’t know, part tank. Mr Mopes?”

“Hamsters sleep a lot, right? But I was six, I thought he was just sulking, but he sulked all the time, so…yeah. Mr. Mopes.”

“That’s adorable.”

Allison gave him a little playful punch, as she had done every time so far he used a word like “cute” “sweet” or “adorable” to describe her, and he was about to ask his next question when they were interrupted by an exclamation of “fuck’s sake, dude!”.

Lewis and Amir had taken over the common room couch to play a game of some kind. Superman and Green Arrow were beating the crap out of each other on the screen, with the surprising result that Green Arrow seemed to be winning, much to Amir’s dismay. That hadn’t been the cause of the outburst, though. The cause of the outburst had been Zane, wandering right across the screen and interrupting Lewis’ line of sight long enough for Amir to activate his special move and punch Green Arrow into orbit.

Zane just made an unconvincing noise that sounded like in somebody who cared it might have been an apology, and vanished in the direction of the galley.

“Fuuuck. That guy’s really starting to bug me.” Lewis complained.

“I hear ya.” Julian said. “Guy hasn’t said five words to me since he came aboard.”

“You’re not missing much.” Amir told them. “Every time he talks to me he’s checking up on whether our ETA has miraculously changed. It’s the only thing he’ll talk about, is finding this Shyoo person.”

“Xiù” Allison corrected him. “And yeah, that worries me. You said they only spent, like, a week on the same station, Lewis?”

“Eight days, total.” Lewis said, selecting Wonder Woman for their rematch. “She was there, he arrived, she left, he’s all like Xiu this Xiu that. Dude’s obsessed. “

“That sounds like…trouble.” Allison said.

“Yeah, but what’re we gonna do? Let the trail go cold?” Julian asked. “We owe it to her to find her and bring her home, if that means we have to deal with whatever happened between her and Zane…”

Allison fidgeted with her hands a bit. “I guess…”

He lowered his voice to speak privately with her as the guys started their rematch. “What?”

“Just…There are some kinds of trouble that guys will never get into, Julian. They only ever cause it.”

He frowned. “You think…?”

“I pray to God not.” she interrupted. “Can we drop it? It’s a subject I don’t like talking about.”

He hesitated, then gave her a little squeeze, watching the game. “Favourite superhero?”

”…Iron Man, I guess. I dunno, I never really got into comic books, but I liked the movies…Hey you didn’t tell me yours…”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 3d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

“You were her best friends. I think she’d want you to be involved.”

“I…know. and it means a lot to me that you’re asking but…y’know, I’m Catholic.” Ava said at last.

“I’m sure your God would understand, Ava.”

“I guess. But…this is Sara, she taught me so much. I can’t lie at her funeral. I can’t say words I don’t believe. I’m sorry.”

Hayley Tisdale paused, then she nodded sadly and wiped away a tear. “You’re right. She wouldn’t want that.” she agreed. “Adam?”

He sighed. “I…look, I don’t know. I’m not sure I believe in anything any more.” he said at last. “So, I’m with Ava, I can’t do…this stuff here.” he tapped the printout they were going over. “but…I’d like to do this one here. If that’s okay?”

Hayley read it and smiled. “We were going to give that to Jack. But…yes. Please.”

“Thanks for asking us, Hayley.” Ava told her. “Really.”

She hugged them both and let herself out, leaving the pair of them to sit in silence for a bit.

“Did you mean that?” Ava asked. “About not believing any more?”

“It’s hard to.” Adam confessed.

“I know…” she sighed. “I just…I need this to all be happening for a reason, you know? I don’t think I could cope if there wasn’t a plan behind it all.”

He hugged her. “There’s something going on, I know that much.” he said.

“There is?”

“Oh yeah. There’s a pattern. Something behind it all. Mr. Johnson, back home, now Sara…it’s all connected, I just know it. I think my Dad’s in on it.”

“Are you gonna ask him?” She looked up. “I mean, I think he’d have told you by now if he could.”

”…Yeah. He would have.” Adam sighed. “But I’m still going to ask him. And if there is something going on, then I’m going to find out what.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “However I have to.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 1w 5d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

“Legsy” Jones

“Intel package for you…sir…”

Anybody else might have said that Captain Powell’s office looked like a bomb had hit it. Legsy, being acutely aware of exactly what bomb damage actually looked like, tended not to use that phrase, but it would have very nearly been accurate.

The office doubled as Powell’s private space and sleeping area, and it was invariably pristine. One the one occasion that Legsy had seen Powell take his boots off, they had been lined up neatly under his camp bed with the laces tucked inside them. While the captain had once muttered a repetition of the old saw that any unit in battle-ready condition would fail inspection, he nevertheless was a stickler for keeping his own space immaculate.

Today was different. The filing cabinet was open, folders were strewn across the desk, the camp bed’s blankets were a bundle at the foot end, the captain’s kettlebells and weights were strewn across the floor rather than stacked, and a neglected ration pack on the table that had clearly been aborted halfway through preparation.

Powell himself was an even worse sight. He looked…rumpled. The skin around his eyes had gone dark, the eyes themselves were reddened, and he was sporting a fine crop of reddish and grey whiskers.

“On the desk.” he grunted, not glancing up from what he was reading. It looked like he was revising literally everything that Humanity knew about the Hierarchy.

That was hardly surprising. The captain had taken the girl’s death hard, harder than he let on. One of the obvious symptoms of that was obsession with her killers, though this was by far the worst case that Legsy had ever witnessed.

His terse response, however, was troubling. Only long experience of working with him had allowed Legsy to even tell the difference, but while Powell had never exactly been a cuddly personality, he was never usually rude or dismissive with his men. He’d gotten tougher since the girl died, demanding a full and complete inspection of every last detail of the rescue attempt, searching for anything that could have been done better.

Nobody wanted to be the one to voice the opinion to him that they’d done as well as humanly possible.

“Where on the desk, Captain?” He asked, unable to identify any spot that looked like it was more ready to receive the latest report than any other spot did.

“Fookin’ anywhere, do I look like I give a shit?” the captain growled.

“Yes sir.” Legsy put it down on top of what he hesitantly guessed might be the ‘in’ pile.

Powell didn’t react, just turning the page. He only glanced up when Legsy cleared his throat.

“Carry on.” he snapped.

“Sir…have you slept?” Legsy ventured

“I don’t see how that’s your fookin’ business, Jones.” Powell said, sharply. “You’re dismissed.”

Legsy saluted and turned for the door, deeply troubled, and then decided that he had a duty to perform.

He turned back. “Permission to speak candidly, captain?” he asked.

“Pretty fookin’ sure I dismissed you, Jones. So no, permission denied.”

That was a red alert.

Oh well. To borrow the motto of a sister unit: who dared, won. “I don’t fuckin’ care, sir, you’re gonna fuckin’ listen.” he announced.

The sheer audacity of it snapped the captain out of his revision and earned Legsy a trademarked Powell glare. “Look at this place!” he said, keeping the momentum up. “This isn’t like you sir, I’ve worked with you long enough to see there’s something fuckin’ wrong here. You’re not yourself.”

Powell lurched to his feet, face thunderous. “Sergeant Jones, if I have to order you out of my office again…” he began.

“Get yourself to counselling, sir!” Legsy told him. Powell froze, as shocked as if his subordinate had reached out and slapped him.

“I’m fookin’ fine.” he asserted. “And YOU are this fookin’ close to-”

“Psych’s a wound like any other!” Legsy recited desperately, interrupting him. “You get it seen to just like you’d get a bullet seen. Your own words.”

He swallowed, stiffened, and stared hard at the back wall. “Sir.”

There was a long, dangerous silence.

Finally, Powell spoke. He had always been a deep-voiced man—now the words practically rumbled out of him, as quiet and as full of smouldering danger as the voice of Vesuvius. “Sergeant Jones. I am ordering you to leave this office immediately. If you do not give me a perfect fookin’ salute and then fook off post fookin’ haste and without another fookin’ word, it will go fookin’ badly for you, am I crystal fookin’ clear?“

Legsy’s salute shook a little rain of dust from the ceiling, and he effected the speediest exit he had ever managed.

He just hoped that it would turn out to be worth it.

Date Point: 4y 9m 2w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gyotin

The central hall of the Faith Center had been cleared out—all the furniture, cushions, books, even the carpet had been rolled up and taken away, leaving behind bare floor which had been marked with an eight-pointed star of some kind.

Gyotin and his Brothers had elected to lurk in a corner, out of the way, and watch. Most of the humans seemed to be equally as uninformed as he was to the nature of this ceremony, which he found interesting. There was a lot of milling around and talking in quiet confusion, much of which centered on a small, overweight human female whose age-silvered head fur was long enough to reach her knees, about half of which had been tied back away from her face.

“So, is this their senior Mother or something?” Tagral asked.

Gyotin indicated not. “I don’t recognise her.” he said. “Besides, they don’t have a clan of females like we do.”

“Then who-?”

The question was interrupted by some angry, loud words being spoken on the opposite side of the room, which got louder and angrier as their speaker stormed towards the door, which had just admitted Captain Powell and his team into the room.

“How dare you?” The speaker was an older man, small and balding and looking positively tiny next to the soldiers, who all glanced at each other in dismay at being so accosted. “How dare you come here?! You FAILED her!”

He was the very picture of righteous indignation in any species’ body language, and the shocked expressions of so many of the other Deathworlders suggested that his accusation was not a widely shared one, but what struck Gyotin was the soldiers’ composure. They fidgeted and some of them looked ready to retort, but all it took as a slight turn of Powell’s head to quiet them instantly. Even the silver-haired elder who had been hurrying to soothe out the conflict paused.

It was Powell’s face that rooted Gyotin to the spot, however. On a human’s mobile and subtle features, the total absence of any expression whatsoever communicated volumes.

”…You’re right.” Powell said. His voice was deep, and soft, and emotional. “We did.”

He took a step forward, and the little man backed off. “Think about what that must feel like, and you’ll understand why we’re here.”

There was a general awkward clearing of throats and shuffling of feet as the soldiers took up a respectful position towards one side of the room, standing in a formal posture with their feet apart and their hands behind their backs.

Awkward silence descended again, finally broken by a syncopated drumming from outside the hall that got steadily louder, being joined by the high-pitched voice of some stringed instrument playing a lament. As the musicians crossed the threshold and stood playing on either side of the door, the soldiers snapped their feet together and removed their berets.

It was a small coffin, carried by only four people and laid solemnly on the table in the middle of the room as the music came to a gentle stop.

“Ladies and gentlemen…” the Elder began as the bearers retreated to positions around the room. “…as you may be aware, Sara’s family have requested that we remember her life in accordance with Pagan traditions. There should be nothing in what we are about to do that can cause offense to anyone, but if you would prefer to pay your respects now after your own fashion and then wait outside, we will take a few moments of silence for you to do so. I’m sure that Sara will not mind.”

A few of those present did exactly that, approaching to touch the box, or mutter words. The little man who had accosted the soldiers and a female of similar apparent age—his mate?—knelt stiffly and whispered for a little while, before standing and leaving, both weeping openly.

Once they had gone, the elder stepped forward again. “Thank you. You’ll find the order of the ceremony in the leaflets we handed out, but please do not feel pressured to participate if you don’t wish to. As one of Sara’s friends-” she nodded to Ava “put it so eloquently, we don’t think that Sara would want us to lie on her behalf.”

“And so…let us take a few deep breaths to prepare ourselves. Breathe deeply, and remember the love you have for Sara and the joy she brought you. And so we begin.”

She took a deep breath of her own, and raised her hands. “Let us call for peace, that in Peace the voice of the Spirit may be heard. May there be peace in the East! May there be peace in the South! May there be peace in the West! May there be peace in the North!”

Reading from the booklet, most of the mourners recited with her. “May there be peace throughout all the worlds.”

The Elder turned towards one of the points of the star on the ground. “Spirits of the East, Powers of Air, we call you. Bring us bright memories of our beloved Sara and of the laughter that surrounded her. Blessed be!”

As she turned through each of the cardinal directions, invoking in turn Fire, Water and Earth, Gyotin had to prod Tagral to get him to stop fidgeting, eventually having to deploy a claw to get his Brother to really quiet down and start showing some respect. He would be the first to admit that he himself didn’t understand what compass directions, air, water and so on had to do with anything, but whatever was going on, it seemed to be working for the humans.

Or at least, for most of them. The huge soldier, Legsy, was wiping water off his face every other second, as was almost everybody else in the room. In fact, there were only a pawful of dry eyes in the whole building, and they belonged to the Gaoians—unsurprisingly, for physical reasons—and to Adam and Ava who simply looked…tired? Gyotin had become adept at reading a human’s expressive face by now, and weariness seemed like the closest approximation he could think of for what theirs were showing.

The last dry face was Powell’s. His usually inscrutable mask was now a scowl, an expression of the most deep and deadly anger, directed at something that Gyotin was desperately glad he couldn’t see, and was infinitely more glad wasn’t him.

He was so busy watching the captain and speculating about what colossally stupid entity it was that had attracted such depth of ire that he completely missed the eulogies, and only returned his attention to the ceremony when the priestess started to speak again.

“O Great Spirit, Mother and Father of us all, we ask for your Blessings on this our ceremony of thanksgiving, and honouring and blessing of Sara. We stand at a Gateway now. A Gateway that each of us must step through at some time in our lives, and which Sara already passed.”

“Her soul is immersed in the shining light of the Unity that is the Mother and Father of us all. The sadness and pain that we feel now is in our knowledge and our experience of the fact that we ourselves cannot yet cross that threshold to be with her until our time has come. We do not weep for our beloved sister, for she is beyond all pain, all fear and all illusion. We weep instead for ourselves in the pain of our separation.”

“And so to ease that pain, let us all now spend some time in silence to remember Sara, to call her up in our minds and to speak to her in the private places of our heart and free ourselves of our burdens, saying to her all those things that we always wanted her to hear.”

This part was familiar to Gyotin. Silence. He filled it by stepping on Tagral’s foot when his Brother started fidgeting again.

The silence was broken some minute or two later by the priestess, who turned to the younger Arés. “Adam?”

Adam smiled weakly, nodded and swallowed, then stepped forward, turned to the coffin and read from the booklet, a little shakily.

“Did you know it was time to fly?” he asked. “I didn’t want to say goodbye. But…but we all know this is not the end…Fare-”

Finally the weariness broke, and he paused, bit on his lower lip and looked down, squeezing his eyes shut. Alone in the middle of the room, he sobbed once before finally managing to rally himself and continue.

“Farewell for now, my dear, dear, friend.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 2w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“Hey, Dad?”

Gabriel turned and smiled weakly at him. He had been watching the memorial stone being placed, a solid slab of blue slate imported from Earth and engraved.

“Sacred to the memory of a child of Earth,

And to all who shine with her among the stars.“

“Hey.” He croaked.

“I have a question.”

Gabriel’s weak smile remained and he nodded, a little sadly. “Figured you would. You can see it, can’t you? The thread linking her and…all the others.”

“Yeah. And I’m guessing you can’t tell me the details.”

Gabriel nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Just tell me what I need to do.”

“Adam…”

“I need to know, Dad. So tell me what I have to do. How do I earn it?”

Gabriel closed his eyes and nodded, then hugged his son as hard as he could. “Hey, amigo?“

“Yeah?”

“You’re a tougher man than I am. I’m not just proud of you, okay? I respect you.”

Adam softened just a little, and returned the hug. “Y yo también te respeto.” he replied.

Gabriel nodded, then straightened, as much as he could around his faulty leg. “Go talk to Powell.” he said. “That’s how you start earning it.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Lesry

“Ooooh. Now that thing looks like a mover!”

Lesry had to admit that it did. If the black sphere which made up probably eighty percent of the craft’s mass was its power core, then even with an old-fashioned distorted-space Apparent Linear Velocity drive it would have been blindingly fast. Lesry, however, had a few of the high-end firmware upgrades to the implants in his optic nerves that were available only to ranking Directorate scientists, and they were reporting that the ship had one of the Blackbox engines.

Which meant, at a very rough mental calculation, that he may well be looking at the fastest vessel in the galaxy.

The few rather more refined calculations that he bounced off his cerebral coprocessors confirmed that he almost certainly was.

It landed easily enough, settling down to thrum gently on forcefields as it finished its descent level with the same bridge that his own History Paradox was parked upon, extending a gangplank to link the laughably small amount of ship that wasn’t power core to the shore.

“Somebody unusual visiting us.” He said. “Look busy! If I’m impressed I might throw in a small bonus.”

That one never failed to get the hired workers motivated, and they threw themselves into the cataloging and loading as he tucked his thumbs into the belt of his sand-robes and took his time wandering over to the end of the arriving ship’s gangplank.

He wasn’t expecting the human who strode down it with an expression that promised serious pain to anything in his way, nor the two other (rather paler) ones who followed after him shouting what was presumably his name.

Nor was he expecting one of the most famous beings in the galaxy behind them.

“Well! Councillor A’ktnnzzik’tk! You have a talent for making an entrance!” he observed, having to raise his voice to compete with the untranslated barking sounds the humans were making at each other.

A’ktnnzzik’tk produced an old-fashioned translation device from a satchel and held it idly in one of his stronger hands as he finished crossing the bridge. “Not by choice.” he said. “May I take it that I’m addressing the leader of this expedition? Thank you for meeting me in person.”

“Co-leader.” Lesry admitted, both intrigued by A’ktnnzzik’tk’s apparent lack of a translator implant and pleased by his manners. “Had I known one of the more…hmm…notorious politicians was coming, I would have torn my colleague Knadna away from her research as well, and believe me, that’s not a risk that a sane being would take lightly.”

A’ktnnzzik’tk chuckled deep in his lanky throat. “I’m retired now. This is a personal project.” he said.

“Collecting Deathworlders? Most beings start smaller, with Gricka, or perhaps a pet Vulza.”

“It’s an entertaining hobby. I recommend it.”

Lesry allowed himself the luxury of a stab of amusement. “Well, the most we have here is an unaccountably sturdy Gaoian who wears concealing robes.” he said. “She’s our chef. I do hope she doesn’t turn out to be a human in disguise or something tiresome like that, this expedition will be far less pleasant without her culinary talents.”

A’ktnnzzik’tk blinked at him. “Information so freely volunteered?” he asked. “My thanks.”

“I suspect that you would have found her more or less instantly anyway.” Lesry said, and inclined his head towards ‘Shoo’. “After all, she is brandishing a knife at that dark-skinned human you brought with you…”

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Xiù

“You stay the hell away from me, Zane!“

He started to babble at him in that same dense Patois and Xiù’s temper eroded even further. “Shut up! Shut up and fuck off!” she screamed.

The blonde woman—and oh God was Xiù happy to see a fellow female—stepped forward and said something a little too quietly for Xiù to catch, but it did the trick. He paused, then stepped backwards, eyes still fixed on her, then spat in the dirt, spun and stalked off between the scattering aliens.

The blonde woman exhaled, then turned to her. “Xiù Chang, I presume.” she said. It was so weird hearing somebody pronounce her name correctly.

Xiù put the knife down. “Uh…hi.” she said. It wasn’t what she’d imagined saying when she finally got back in touch with the human race—the real human race, not Zane—but then again nothing in the last four years or so had gone like she had imagined, so why should greetings?

“You’ve got to be sweltering in that disguise.” said another voice, a male one, from slightly behind her. She grabbed the knife and spun, prompting the man who had snuck up on her to back off, raising his hands defensively. “Woah, woah!” he protested. “Easy!”

Xiù lowered the knife, cautiously. This one was hot. Okay, she’d thought the same thing about Zane when they had first met, but this guy…

She shook it off. Handsome didn’t mean trustworthy. Nor did female, come to think of it, but…

But if she was ever going to get home, she’d have to trust somebody a little, wouldn’t she?

She put the knife down again, and Mr. Handsome nodded and circled around to join Blonde Girl. “Just making sure you didn’t stab him.” he said.

That didn’t exactly endear him to Xiù, but she understood. “Sho wia yu, uwa wa mé Xiù.” she said.

That earned her a pair of blank looks, until she realised that she’d spoken in Gaoian rather than English. “Uh…yes. Yes, my name’s Xiù.” she said. “Sorry, it’s been…since I last…”

“Five years? Not counting that guy?” The blonde said, smiling. “It’s okay, I understand. My name’s Allison. This is Julian.”

Xiù blinked. “I…had a friend called Allison.” she said. “Back on Earth.”

That detail seemed more relevant in her head than it did in the conversation, but she really was out of her depth here.

“Would you like to see her again?” this Allison asked her.

“I…” Xiù looked at the ship they had arrived in, and it finally hit her.

A ship. They had a ship. And these were humans, from Earth. Who had come here in that ship. From Earth.

Suddenly, she couldn’t see a thing through the tears.

They had a ship.

She could go home.

__

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

”‘Eeey, Adam!”

Legsy always had a friendly manner about him, which Adam liked. He’d shown plenty of intensity while training the militia, but outside of that role, Legsy was pure earthy charm and humor. It made militia training a charm, and while a lot of the colonists preferred not to use the gym at the same time as the soldiers, Adam found he really didn’t mind being outperformed by them. They served as examples of what he might one day be able to manage himself.

It also meant that he and Legsy practically had the gym to themselves, which was perfect for what he had in mind.

“Hey Legs.”

Adam watched the older man swing his kettlebell around. Legsy trained for endurance, and while Adam had seen people like Mark Tisdale working with more impressive weights, Legsy could apparently go all day, working his way steadily up and down through the set until he was red and reflective with sweat, but never seeming to tire.

Adam himself was still working up to that. He elected to use the cross-trainer instead. Legsy gave him an encouraging grin and nod as the device swirled into action.

“So uh…I’ve got a question.” Adam asked, after what he judged was a decent interval.

“Go for it, pal.”

“What the hell is going on?”

”…How d’you mean?”

“Home, Sara…how come they’re not pressing charges? There’s a pattern there, I can see it.”

Legsy didn’t answer at first, just continued to swing his weight, but his expression had clamped down beautifully.

“Yeah, I reckon you can.” he decided. “I can’t tell you though.”

“No, I know.” Adam agreed. “but Dad said if I want to know what’s going on then I need to talk to Captain Powell.”

Legsy really was an open book—he had so many different blank expressions. This one said that there was something serious going on with Powell at the moment that he, Legsy, was not comfortable discussing.

“I’d give him a few days.” he said at last. “It’s rough on an officer when an op he commanded ends that way, right? He gave me a bit of a row the other day.”

“Did you deserve it?” Adam asked. Legsy laughed, but his heart wasn’t as in it as it usually was.

“Maybe. He was tampin’.” he said, using a Welshism that Adam had deduced meant something like ‘furious’. “I’d give it a few days, butt. Let him simmer down, I’ll get you in to see him when the time’s right. Fair?”

“Thanks, Legs.”

“No worries, pal. Now come on, I know you can go faster than that!”

Adam quickened his pace and settled his mind, enjoying the heat building in his muscles.

He felt like he’d just set his first foot out the door on a journey.

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Starship Sanctuary, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Allison Buehler

“What do you think?”

Xiù had been introduced to a vacant room—on the opposite side of the ship from Zane’s, and next door to Allison’s, and was, from the sound of it, busy taxing the abilities of Sanctuary’s water recycler with a hot shower. Julian and Allison were, by mutual unspoken agreement, hanging out at the junction down the deck where they could make sure Zane didn’t try to get at her, be on hand should she need them, and converse unheard.

“About…what, now?” Julian asked. “About Xiù herself, or about whatever went down between her and Zane?”

“Xiù herself, for now.”

Julian thought about it. “At first glance, I was thinking ‘damaged goods’.” he confessed, and pressed on when Allison made a “hmm” noise and nodded.

“But here’s the thing, though.” he said. “She’s in great shape. She’s kept up her exercise and ate right, and that puts her a cut above most everyone else out here. Physically, she’s perfectly fine, give or take a few scars. Mentally? I dunno, what does five years alone with nobody but raccoon people to talk to do? She was nineteen when she was abducted. Then there’s the…” he checked to make sure nobody was listening, then lowered his voice anyway even though none were. “the Hunters. And the nervejam.”

“Yeah, I read her file.” Allison agreed. “She saved a whole starship! Took on one of the big Hunter ships solo! That’s…shit, that’s big damn hero stuff.” she frowned at him. “But, you’re one to talk. What does six years alone with nobody but trees to talk to do?”

“It fucks with your head.” Julian said, honestly.

“You’ve always seemed…fine to me.”

“We’ve not slept together yet.”

“You mean actual sleep, right?”

“Yeah. Can’t even do it without an axe next to my hand.” Julian told her. “And I wake up at the slightest noise, reaching for it. Do you snore?”

Allison shook her head. “I don’t think so. Why?”

“Lewis does. That’s why I moved away from his room. I kept thinking there was a Murderpig near my camp.”

“Murderpig?”

“This big.” Julian held out a hand at rib height. “This long.” He stretched his arms as wide as they would go. “Teeth like this.” he drew one of his knives “and it hates you. Murderpig.” He put the knife back in its sheath.

“You came up against shit like that?”

“Yeah. Lucky for me, it’s all nose with a Murderpig. Their eyesight’s fucking awful and they snore when they breathe, like a fat guy asleep on the bus. Getting the drop on them’s easy. Good eating on them too. But if there was one near the camp I needed to be up and armed like that.” he snapped his fingers.

“What happened if you didn’t?”

“I never didn’t. If I ever hadn’t, then we’d never have met.”

“Oh. Damn, Julian.”

“Eh, it was only for like four months out of the year. Rest of the time, Nightmare was nice and quiet. I used to- hey, she’s done.”

Xiù had poked her head out of her room, wearing a towel and a blush. “Uh…hey, are my new clothes ready?” She asked. “I just realised how nasty these robes are…”

“I’ll go check.” Julian told her, and trotted down the stairs.

Allison turned to talk with Xiù, and noticed that their recent rescue was watching Julian with catlike fascination as he went, her blush deepening and spreading to her ears. Allison couldn’t blame her—Julian had an amazing ass—but that couldn’t be allowed. “Sorry, girlfriend. I saw him first.” she said, not unkindly.

“Uh…” Xiù blinked, then coughed. “Sorry. You guys are…?”

“We’re….yeah. We are. How are you feeling?”

“Clean!” Xiù said, rebounding. “I mean, my own actual shower. With real shampoo! And conditioner!”

Allison laughed. “Hah! With hair like yours, I can see why you’d miss those.” she said. “Don’t expect miracles with the clothes, though. It’s all practical stuff, not decorative.” She grinned. “Unless you can rock a pair of yoga pants.”

“If it fits properly and breathes, I’ll be happy.” Xiù promised. “And we’ll be going back to Earth soon, right?”

“We don’t need to. All we need to do is get to a station with an FTL relay and schedule an Array send with Scotch Creek.”

“Huh?”

Allison paused. “Okay, so, I’m not exactly Miss Technobabble.” she said. “But…did you ever see this old TV show, Stargate?”

“Sure. My brother Wei brought all the DVDs on eBay.”

“Well, we’ve kinda got one of those downstairs.” Allison said. “but, like, less dramatic. It’s called a Jump Array. Neat piece of kit!”

Xiù gaped at her. “Wait, so…you could send me home right now?” she asked.

“Not right now, no. We need to get to a station with an FTL relay, send a message to Earth via Cimbrean, wait for-”

“Where?”

“Cimbrean. Humanity’s first colony world. You didn’t hear about it?”

Xiù made a strange ducking motion with her head, then blinked and carefully shrugged while shaking her head, as if remembering the gesture. “I…didn’t really pay attention to the news.” she confessed. “It just got me down. There’s not much about humans in the news, and it’s never good when there is.”

“Yeah?”

“It was always about how we would bring the Hunters down on them and get them all killed.” she elaborated. “But how does this Cimbrean place protect itself?”

Allison grinned. “You know that big forcefield protecting Earth?”

“Protecting it?”

“Yeah! It sure as hell isn’t containing us, but it’s stopping the bad guys from getting in. Anyway, Julian stole one.”

Xiù blinked. “That Julian?” she asked, pointing after him.

“Yep. Actually, he stole two.”

“Wow. So, uh, where’s the other one?”

“Kirk won’t say.”

Xiù sighed. “So we need to send a message to Earth.”

“Via Cimbrean. And then we have to wait for them to get back to us and say ‘Sure, send on this date at this time using this code’ and then…bam! You’ll be back in Canada.”

“Just like that?”

“Unless you decide to stay, yeah.” Allison told her.

“Why would I want to stay out here?”

“Why would you want to go back?” Allison retorted.

“Wh-? It’s home!” Xiù said.

Allison nodded, a little sadly. “That’s fine. And if that’s what matters to you…Sorry, I shouldn’t have even mentioned it, it’d just be nice to have another girl on board.”

“I guess…” Xiù said. “but…I had my dreams. I was going to be an actress. I still could be, if I go home now.”

Allison kept to herself the fact that Xiù was going to need a lot of post-production and makeup to cover all the scars she seemed to have picked up during her time away from home. There were a lot of them. The ragged tears down her forearm were the largest and most disfiguring, but the one that kept drawing Allison’s attention was a little raised inch-long mark on Xiù’s neck, dangerously close to her carotid artery.

She was spared the discomfort of the conversation tailing off by Julian’s return, as he handed across the clothes the nanofactory had printed to Xiù’s measurements—four simple black sports t-shirts, two equally simple navy blue fatigues, four changes of undecorated but comfortable underwear, a dark grey fleece sweater , four pairs of thick socks and a pair of hiking boots.

“Here you go.” he said, handing them over. “Not exactly red carpet stuff, but it’s warm and comfortable and you can clean them real easy. Just rinse ‘em and hang ‘em up. Lewis can show you how to program the nanofac later if you want a bit of variety.”

Xiù took them gratefully. “Thanks.”

“So you want to be an actress?” Allison called through her door after she had shut it.

“Yeah! That’s why I took up Gung Fu, I wanted to be in martial arts movies!” Xiù called back.

“Not drama or anything?”

This was met with a bitter “Hah!” from behind the door. “Have you ever heard of a Chinese version of Downton Abbey?” she asked.

“Not in America.” Allison confessed.

“Exactly. Hey, these are a good fit!”

“Lewis figured out how to lift your measurements from the biofilter field.” Julian said. “Bespoke tailored printed clothing. Neat, ain’t it?”

“Do they have stuff like this back on Earth now?” Xiù asked

“Not yet. I mean, four years and change isn’t that long anyway, and this is alien technology.”

Xiù opened the door so she could finish talking to them unimpeded as she pulled on her boots. “Yeah, but…we’ve got spaceships and a colony and stuff now.” she said.

“I think a lot of what comes out of Scotch Creek is just copying and pasting.” Julian confessed. “We’ve been bit in the ass a few times by now, especially with the first-generation translator implants and what happened to San Diego.”

Xiù stood up from tying her laces, frowning. “Why?” She asked. “What happened to San Diego?”

”…Ah.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Starship Sanctuary, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Lewis

“Hey, Amir?”

“Yes?”

“Whaddya think went down with Xiù and Zane, anyhow?”

Amir sighed and set aside his checklist. Self-maintaining and robust though Sanctuary’s systems were, he felt safer for manually checking them while landed.

“Why the fascination?” he asked. “It seems cut and dried to me.”

“You think?”

“I knew men like Zane back in Birmingham.” Amir said. “All ego, very intense. Charming, if they liked you, but if you irritated them…”

“You did?”

“Sure.” Amir replied. “My cousin was married to such a man.”

Lewis nodded sagely. “Good looking dude turned on the charm, huh? Got her wrapped around his finger before he turned it off again?”

“Sort of. Arranged marriages didn’t go away just because my grandparents left Pakistan, you know. They just brought them to England.”

“Wait, shit, your cousin had to marry some dude?” Lewis protested. “That’s not cool!”

“She didn’t have to.” Amir corrected him. “That would be forced marriage. But the marriage was arranged between his parents and my uncle and she…” He coughed. “Well, she didn’t think too hard about it.”

“Were you cool with that?”

“Oh, it happened after my abduction. I had the pleasure of meeting the husband after getting back. I didn’t like him. And Maleeha was a different person to what I remembered, very subdued. I’m sure she even flinched a little bit when he raised his voice.”

“So, not cool with it then?”

Amir sighed. “It’s…a good arrangement.” he said. “He’s a dentist, she cooks, cleans, looks after the three children…a traditional marriage. Her parents are very happy.”

“So, you’re not cool with it, then.”

”…She was sixteen.” Amir admitted.

“Ah. Shit, is that even legal?”

“Oh, yes. Perfectly legal.” Amir said. “English law only requires parental consent for sixteen year olds, even if the husband is more like thirty.”

“Damn…”

“I get the same vibe off Zane as I do off my cousin’s husband. ” Amir said. “That same…Pride. Is there anything in his file?”

“Lemme check…” Lewis said, followed seconds later by: “Huh…Hey, Kirk encrypted it.”

“He what?”

“Yeah. Locked this shit down tight, too. No breaking it, no way no how.”

“How do you know it was him?”

Lewis gave him a tired ‘please’ look. “I’m the only other dude on this boat who could, and I didn’t.”

Amir got out of the flight chair and went to look over Lewis’ shoulder. “Why would he encrypt Zane’s file?”

“I’m gonna ask him.” Lewis said. “Worst case, he says he’s not telling us.”

“Go for it.”

Kirk responded to Lewis’ summons a few minutes later. “Something come up?” he asked.

“Sort of.” Amir said. “You encrypted Zane’s file?”

“It seemed like a good idea.” Kirk replied. “I didn’t want people to read it and become prejudiced against him. This is supposed to be welcoming ship.”

“Like, uh, why would we be prejudiced?” Lewis asked.

Kirk made the noise that was his species’ version of a resigned sigh. “The Corti experiments of the last fifty years or so were beginning to focus on human weaknesses.” he revealed. “Genetic disorders, mutations, personality disorders, mental illness…”

“So our Zane’s got a…maybe a personality disorder of some kind?” Amir asked.

“I’m not saying. I don’t want to exacerbate the friction between him and Xiù by prejudicing the rest of you against him.”

“All well and good, but if he’s dangerous…”

“You’re proving my case.” Kirk pointed out. “You all took an instant disliking to him. That’s acceptable, I don’t much like him either. But he still deserves his privacy and unbiased treatment. He’s not actually done anything other than be unpleasant.”

Lewis and Amir shared looks that mutually said ‘He’s got a point’.

“Alright, cool. You’ve got a strong argument there, boss.” Lewis finally admitted.

“Thank you. Where is Zane right now, anyway?”

Lewis ran a search script. “Not aboard. Last seen…like, ten seconds after we landed…”

He tapped again. “Neither’s Vedreg.” he added.

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rios

The Tisdale house was a mess. Ava couldn’t blame them, in fact she knew exactly how they felt. After the bomb which killed her parents, it had taken weeks before she began to notice things like mess, rumpled clothing and the state of her hair again. The first night she had run a brush through it had been a painful one both physically and emotionally, extracting a tangle that had been well on its way to becoming a dreadlock.

Doctor Hayley Tisdale at least was fortunate enough to have straight hair, which would help there. But she was still a mess when she opened the door, wearing food-stained pajamas and red eyes.

“Ava?”

Ava lifted the box she was holding. “I…Gabriel was able to get Sara’s stuff back from the military…”

Hayley stared at the box like it was simultaneously the most beautiful and the terrifying thing in all creation.

“Oh…”

“Can I come in?”

Hayley nodded quietly and stepped inside.

The clutter about the place was just…stuff. Things that had been left where they were no longer useful: clothes, mugs…a few bowls and plates, but not many. They weren’t eating much. Ava knew how that felt—you just weren’t interested. You’d grab books then discard them, pick things up just to put them down again.

There were a lot of wine glasses around though and the house reeked of alcohol, plus another scent that she hadn’t smelled since high school back in California. She didn’t know how that one felt. Ava didn’t know how they had even managed to get cannabis on Cimbrean, but she wasn’t about to comment. The smell was stale, as if they hadn’t indulged for some time.

Hayley swept aside an arrangement of small crystals and semiprecious stones on the table to make room for the box.

Sara hadn’t had much on her when she died, and her bloodstained clothing had tactfully been omitted. What was left was a tiny assortment of jewelry—Sara had been addicted to rings, and had always worn her birthstone, an Emerald, as a necklace. There were a trio of the same kind of crystals that her mother had just swept aside, her phone, spare batteries and a MicroSD card for her camera, and the camera itself.

Hayley didn’t say a word, she just picked up the camera with trembling hands, turned it on after a second’s investigation to figure out how it worked, and started to scroll through the pictures her daughter had taken.

Ava grabbed a brush and gently started to sort out the worst of Hayley’s hair, watching the screen herself.

It was a catalog of the changing face of Folctha, playing backwards. Brown dirt, tree stumps and grey construction sites gave way to a bloom of life here and there. Sara had been gifted with an eye for finding beauty, and for showing it off to its best advantage, finding the little flowering plants that were still struggling gamely against the Deathworld invasion, or the forester, whose high-vis jacket and yellow hard-hat practically shone against the lifeless stack of felled logs he was leaning against.

Things got greener, more alive, and Sara had continued to pick out whatever was most alive in each scene. A cloud of little iridescent shimmerflies. A creature that lived somewhere halfway between squirrel and lizard, stuffing nuts into a pouch on its back. The curve of Ava’s own naked back, the little hairs and the bumps of her vertebrae luminous with the light of a setting sun that was framed by her coiled lock of wet hair. She hadn’t even noticed Sara take that picture.

There were no pictures of Sara herself, though. She had only ever used the camera to record what happened around her, never turned it on herself.

Finally, Hayley set the device aside with a sigh. “I still…I don’t believe it.” she confessed.

“I know.” Ava replied.

“How do you cope? How do I…? I think the only thing that keeps me going is that I’ve still got Jack to look after.”

Ava’s brush never stopped, but the rest of her did, for a second. “I think…I think you just have to keep the people you’ve lost alive.” she said. “Live for them. Carry on their work.”

“Have you?” Hayley asked. “You lost your parents, do you think you’re keeping them alive?”

“I hope so.” Ava said. “I try to be somebody they’d be proud of. I tried to get better and move forward because…I guess because I knew it’d hurt them to see me in pain.”

“D’you think Sara…?” Hayley aborted the question, half-formed. Ava gave her a little hug.

“She loved you both.” She told Hayley. “She talked about you a lot, about the things you said, about what you taught her.”

“She did?”

“Oh yeah.” Ava laughed slightly. “It was hard to get her to stop.”

That prompted a miserable laugh from Hayley too. “She always was a motor mouth…”

Ava smiled, and put the brush down. With the tangles gone and some of her hair’s shine restored, Hayley was already looking much improved. Hopefully, she’d see that in a mirror and it would help her, just a little. It had for Ava.

Hayley picked up the camera, and then unexpectedly she turned and handed it to Ava. “Keep it.” she said.

“Me? I…”

“Please? It’s…a way to keep her alive.”

Ava took the little black device nervously. “Are you sure?”

Hayley nodded, and then gave Ava a kiss on the forehead. “Honey.” she said. “You’re a wiser girl than I am. Maybe you can…”

She trailed off, then just looked down and shook her head. “Just take it. Please? I think she’d want you to have it. It just feels right. Carry on her work.”

Ava considered the picture on the screen at that moment—Cimbrean sunlight, somehow turning the industrial devastation around Folctha pretty just by being framed a certain way—and doubted that she was up to the job.

But she had been wondering where to take her life, now that movie makeup wasn’t an option. Maybe…

Maybe…

“I’ll…thank you, Hayley.” she said.

She meant it.

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Starship Sanctuary, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Xiù

Hitting something felt good. Gung Fu was a martial art after all, and while practicing the movements had (she hoped) allowed Xiù to keep her form, you could repeat the bào hu gui shan all day but it couldn’t duplicate the feeling and experience gained from landing actual physical blows. The best way to practice punching was…well, to punch something.

The fact that it was cathartic had nothing to do with it. Really: Nothing.

The Sanctuary’s punchbag was therefore getting the most brutal workout of its existence. While the Gaoians could easily have built one for her, she had never asked for one. It would just have been too embarrassing to break the first few, and too…impolite to flaunt just how much stronger she was than them by doing so to a bag it would have taken three of them to lift.

Now, though, she could feel just how long it had really been since she had last received proper guidance in her form. Her wrists and forearms hurt, and in the first few minutes she threw a few strikes where she misjudged the distance and either punched the air just short of the bag’s surface, or else overextended herself striking a point somewhere inside it. She wasn’t off by much, but she was still off, she could tell.

She only finally ended her workout once she was satisfied that she had restored some of her muscle memory and that her form had healed a bit, by which point she had spent nearly an hour focused on that one task, giving her brain time to process the news about San Diego and the devastation that its destruction had wrought on the entire Pacific coast. Nobody had been directly hurt in Vancouver thank goodness, but the ash from Mt. Rainier’s sympathetic eruption, caught by a prevailing wind from the desert, had dusted across British Columbia and even reached as far as Alaska, causing respiratory distress, clogging air filters and lightly polluting the water across thousands of square miles.

She hoped that it hadn’t set off Wei’s asthma.

Julian and Allison had admitted to both knowing the specifics of what had happened, but had also said that, so long as Xiù intended to leave the ship and return home, they weren’t in any kind of a position to discuss it. It was a mystery, but one that Xiù would happily forego illumination of for the sake of going home.

As for all the dead…

Well, it didn’t register. It wasn’t that it didn’t seem real, they had shown her the footage and news reports, too many and varied to be fake. It was definitely real. But it was also abstract. She didn’t even know what two million living people looked like, let alone two million dead. The mind simply couldn’t get a grasp on ideas that big.

She jogged a few laps around the gym to warm down, then collected her boots and headed upstairs, wondering what kind of food they had on board. The clothing she’d been given was really impressive, made of some high-tech performance textile that had kept her cool and dry and not noticeably aromatic. And it was made by humans, for humans, understanding human needs. Luxury! With luck, the galley would be similarly impressive.

Upstairs, however, the crew were talking quietly and their expressions were worried. When she entered, Allison stopped speaking mid-sentence and gave her a gently apologetic smile that said that while she, Allison, was glad to see her, Xiù had managed to arrive at an inopportune moment.

“Is everything alright?” Xiù asked.

“Sunset was half an hour ago, and we’ve not seen Zane since you came aboard.” Kirk told her. She hadn’t had the opportunity to get to know the tall white being, yet. It wasn’t that he had ignored her, but he seemed to be extremely busy with something or other and had given her only a polite welcome aboard and his assurance that they would become acquainted later on, if she liked.

“Pff, Zane? Leave him behind.” Xiù said. It came out as more of a snap than she had intended, but she had to stop her hand from touching the mark on her throat.

“Even if I were inclined to do so-” Kirk said, making it very plain that he wasn’t, “we just found out that Vedreg isn’t aboard either.”

“Vedreg?”

“You ever met a Guvnugundragonbunny?” Lewis asked.

“Oh! You have a…?” Xiù asked, ignoring Kirk as he tried to correct Lewis. “I didn’t see them…”

“He went straight into the city when we landed. Said that he was testing a theory.” Amir revealed. “You were too busy waving knives at Zane and Julian to notice.”

Xiù blushed. “Julian snuck up on me! And Zane…” she paused.

“Is missing.” Kirk reminded them.

“Well, what do we do?” Julian asked.

“We search for him.” Kirk said. “Julian, you and Amir can sweep the north quadrant. Allison, you and Lewis take the east. Miss Chang—”

“No.” Xiù folded her arms.

Kirk blinked. “I see…” he said. “Not to press the issue, but I understand that you’re rather physically formidable yourself and…”

“No.“

There was silence as everyone glanced back and forth at one another, which Lewis broke by clearing his throat. “Uh…Hey, the hell happened with you two?”.

“That’s between me and Zane.” Xiù told him. “If you need me I’ll come running, but that…” She shook her head. “Just…No.”

Kirk lowered his head, exhaling slowly. “I can see that is the end of it. Very well, Amir, if you could accompany me instead?”

Amir finally stopped giving Xiù a calculating stare and nodded. “Okay.” He agreed, though reluctantly.

Allison stood. “Sooner we get moving…” she said.

“I’ll…be in my room.” Xiù said.

She held it together until the door was closed and locked behind her before the shakes started.

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Classified Facility, Earth

“Steve”

“Shitty luck. You got that right.” somebody said as he entered.

Steve sighed and grabbed a coffee. “It was a fucking understatement.” he replied.

Christof Lehmann—the poor bastard who’d been puppeted into shooting a girl on Cimbrean—had not taken the explanation of his situation well. There had been shouting, there had been crying. Both had been easier to bear than the dreadful, broken silence.

“I think it’s pretty clear he needs to be on the suicide watchlist.” Carl said.

“Pretty clear, yeah. Fella looks like he took a dump and found his liver in the bowl.”

“Give the man some respect, Simmons. News like that’d be rough on anybody.”

“Sorry, Boss.”

Boss nodded. “Guess he’s headed to Alaska then.”

“Oh yes.” Steve said. “That implant the Corti shoved in him may have cured his epilepsy, but it’s too deep and invasive to remove. He’d be a lobotomised vegetable once the surgeons were done, assuming he even lived through the operation.”

“Then there’s his reputation.” Simmons pointed out. “Poor bastard was used to murder a little girl. No way to explain that one to the public without ruining him or blowing the lid on the Hierarchy.”

Boss shifted in his seat. “I’m going to be advising the director that we can’t keep that particular secret much longer.” he drawled. His Georgia accent always got stronger when he was feeling emotional, thought that was the most sign he gave. “There’s too much pressure now. The seizure all the people with translators had, San Diego, now this…the Internet’s already working overtime.”

“Isn’t there some plausible deniability, there?” Balistreri had always fallen comfortably into the role of devil’s advocate. She wasn’t actually an argumentative woman by nature, but she had a knack for spotting the alternatives and presenting them. “If the story leaks then we can just claim too much time spent listening to the Internet conspiracy theorists.”

“Nope. Only a matter of time before Herr Lehmann gets his case taken up by a journalist or a human rights lawyer. The cat’ll be out of the bag before long, you mark my words. But if we let it out ourselves, then the details of Operation Exorcist can remain secret.”

“You’re the boss, Boss.”

“Yep.”

“What happens if the Hierarchy do panic and step up their plans?”

“At least we’ll have taken the initiative.” Carl said. “Rather than playing catchup.”

“Best we can do.” Boss agreed. “Alright folks, get some rest, do your paperwork, whatever, I’ll see y’all when I get back from DC.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Allison Buehler

If there was one thing Lewis was terrible at, it was taking a hint once he was fixated on a train of thought. “Seriously though, what do you think? ’d he rape her or something?”

“She doesn’t want to say and that’s the end of it.” Allison told him.

It was cold in the desert at night. She’d known that, but still hadn’t quite registered that the temperature would be in freefall within minutes of sunset. She was almost mentally counting down until the first fog started to appear on her breath.

It didn’t help that the deserted city had an eerie, unsettling quality to it. If the place had been truly abandoned—plants growing all over everything, walls falling down, that kind of thing—then it wouldn’t have been so bad, but the place was still slightly alive, thanks to the automated maintenance and civil engineering systems that the OmoAru had laced through the ancient conurbation at the height of their power. Everything was still clean, still standing. Just…empty. It was almost like walking through her own home city of Phoenix, except that the road signs were alien, the proportions wrong, and the silence…

It was cloying. It stuck to everything. The desert breeze and the hiss of sand only seemed to amplify the silence, rather than dispel it, and when occasional little animals or robots moved around in the dark, it set every ancient monkey danger instinct in her body off.

She’d always hated the dark.

“You gotta speculate though, right?” Lewis persisted.

Allison stopped and grabbed his arm, hard, prompting a wince and a noise of complaint. “Lewis: Shut. Up.”

She let go and listened, ignoring Lewis as he rubbed his arm and made irritated subvocalizations.

There was definitely noise and a glow coming from a nearby building

“Zane? That you?” She called, grateful for a chance to have something other than Lewis’ insensitive speculation to break the silence.

It wasn’t Zane. Instead, an OmoAru shuffled out into the street, raising a glowing white stick.

Aliens came in all shapes and varieties, and the temptation was always there to compare them to mixtures of human species back on Earth. Blue giraffes, white zebra-giraffes, raccoon persons and so on. It was always an unfair and inaccurate comparison—they were their own species, the products of evolution that had nothing to do with Earth—but comparisons with leopard geckos and big-eared bats sprang to mind anyway when considering an OmoAru.

This one was about twice Allison’s height and shrouded in robes against both the sand and the cold night air. Its skin—dry, tough and scaly—was the colour of the desert, mottled here and there with patterns of a surprising turquoise and ochre hue that became thicker and more vivid around the base of its huge furry ears. The tufted end of its tail ticked back and forth behind its back, folding over into a question mark.

“UmUa WenUatu WoUem WioYuwu?” It asked.

“Bah wheep grahnah wheep nini bong, dude.” Lewis replied amicably, and offered the alien a Vulcan salute for good measure. Allison rolled her eyes and put a hand over her mouth to cover her smile.

“WumuaAmo SuOumu?“

“Sure dude. Whatever…Guess there’s no point in asking if you saw a big black dude who talks even weirder than you go past, huh?”

“Huh?“

“Huh. Guess ‘huh’ is a universal, huh?”

“Huh.” The alien disappeared into the building again.

“Lewis, you’ve got a talent for communication there.” Allison quipped.

The sentence was barely out of her mouth when the OmoAru returned and handed Lewis a little dull grey metal ball about the size of an apple.

“Huh?”

“Huh!” The tail lashed and its ears perked up. Allison got the distinct impression that a human would have been nodding vigorously and smiling.

”…Oh! Huh! Well thank you very much, my man.”

“WemUei!” the alien agreed.

“Ming mang mong, dude.” Lewis told it.

Allison watched the alien return, apparently happily, to its domicile “…the fuck?”

“Hell if I know.” Lewis said, pocketing the gift. “Nice guy, though.”

“What do you think that thing is?”

“You heard the dude. It’s a huh.”

“Lewis…”

“Well how the fuck am I supposed to know? Could be the dude’s car keys, could be his porn stash, could be his grandma’s ashes.”

Allison sighed. “Okay, okay…”

She raised her torch and looked down the street, expecting and receiving no sign of any living thing beyond the pool of light where the giver of the Huh was living.

“No sign of anything where we’re at, Kirk.” she said, activating the contact microphone by pressing lightly on it where it was stuck to her throat.

“I was just about to let you know: we found them.” Kirk replied.

“You did?”

“Both of them, yes. Vedreg believes that he may have uncovered a breakthrough in the mystery of elder species decline.“

“He has?”

Vedreg’s simulated voice—the translators always rendered him with a gentle Received Pronunciation accent for some reason—came on the line. “Oh yes. Do you see the large, lit building at the apex of the oxbow lake?”

Allison looked around. It was hard to miss in the dark. “Sure. You’re there?”

“Indeed. If you could collect the others and bring them here, they may wish to see this…“

“Julian?”

“I heard. Xiù’s lurking in her cabin, so I’ll meet you ther- ah, shit.“

Allison frowned. “Problem?”

“Yeah, my foot broke again.“

Allison sighed. Julian insisted that the prosthetic was perfect for his needs in terms of moving around and stepping silently, but it achieved that by being a near-exact replica of the human foot made using carbon-fibre “bones”, and its “flesh” was a synthetic muscle tissue that Julian called “myopolymer”.

It worked just fine, when it worked. Unfortunately, the same alien materials science that made Kirk’s prosthetic by far his strongest limb didn’t quite match the performance standards of a healthy human body in terms of both weight and strength. Julian’s decision to go for accurate movement and mass rather than high performance, so as to minimize his rehabilitation training time, meant that he periodically suffered the equivalent of tendon ruptures and stress fractures. “D’you need us to help you back?” she asked.

“Nah, it’s a field repair. Price I pay, I guess.” The advantage to a prosthetic foot, of course, was that he could perform the equivalent of surgery on it himself with glue.

“See you soon, then.”

“Sure.“

Lewis spent most of the walk examining his “Huh”, poking it and turning it over and over in his hands. Allison was pretty sure he surreptitiously licked it at one point, all with no apparent effect. It was an improvement on his speculating about Xiù.

Kirk, Vedreg, Zane and Amir were waiting for them in the street. Both the humans were hunched over and shivering from standing around in the plummeting temperature with nothing to do to keep themselves warm, and Kirk was fidgeting in the cold, but Vedreg’s species had evolved to spend a week every year standing around in the driving rain of the World-Storm: He seemed perfectly comfortable, producing great monsoon clouds with every exhalation.

“Ah, there you are!” he exclaimed upon laying eyes on Allison and Lewis. “Come and see!”

Allison looked upwards. “It’s…a building.” she said. Though it was an admittedly impressive one, taller and more sprawling than any other around it, and looking quite clean, well-maintained and lit compared to its neighbors.

“It’s a hospital.” Vedreg corrected her.

“And we’re going to find the secret to species decline in there, are we?”

Vedreg turned and spread his arms to indicate the city and its surrounding sprawl of infill as a whole. “A hospital this large has catchment for the entire river valley.” he said. “It should be absolutely thriving with activity, should it not? Despite the much reduced population, some hundred thousand souls still live inside this hospital’s coverage.”

Allison nodded yes, then remembered that without translators she had better do Vedreg the courtesy of speaking aloud. “Sure.” she said.

“And yet…no ambulances are landing.” Vedreg indicated the dormant landing pads. “The ground vehicle parking area is all but completely empty. No pedestrians are coming or going. The Injury and Emergency department is silent. Clearly, the OmoAru who live around here don’t care in the slightest about their own health. And yet the building remains open, the power is still on, and the reception drone is ready to receive and help.”

“Automated?” Lewis asked.

“The staff parking.” Kirk chimed in “Is not vacant. Somebody is still at work inside.”

“Who?”

Kirk’s imitation of a human shrug was getting better with practice, but his extra limbs still made the gesture look strange. “Unfortunately, I don’t read OmoAru.”

“Huh.” Allison mused.

Lewis laughed. “Don’t start that shit again.” he warned.

His admonition earned a wry huff from Allison, and baffled expressions from everyone else, so he explained, producing the “Huh” to show off, passing it around. Vedreg and Kirk promptly fell to debating its meaning and significance, while Zane just inspected the little object, turning it over in his hands.

Allison sidled over to Amir, who had been silent so far, staring up at the hospital. “Thoughts?” she asked.

“Fifty quid says the cybernetics ward turns out to be open and the Hierarchy’s behind it all.” Amir challenged her. “Wiping out whole species when they start to become a threat seems like their style, doesn’t it?”

“And with an advanced species whose heads are going to be full of implants like the OmoAru…” Allison mused, following his line of reasoning. “…No bet. Have you-?”

Something very painful happened to the back of her head.

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Captain Owen Powell

“Hello, captain. Major Tony Ford, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Major.” Powell looked around the office as he shook the psychiatrist’s hand, finding it uncomfortably familiar to the other ones he had visited for counseling in his career. The couch was different, though. Long, low and square. A sofa, rather than a psychiatrist’s couch. He appreciated that. “Guess I sit there, do I?”

Major Ford smiled slightly and shook his head. “If you want. Or over there, on the floor, walk around…you can even sit at my desk and I’ll sit on the couch if you like. There’s coffee and tea if you want them.”

“I’ll…take the couch, thanks. And, uh…yeah, a cup of tea would go down about right.”

Ford nodded. “A Yorkshire man like yourself I’m thinking…strong and sweet?” he asked, smiling.

Powell produced a very, very little tired laugh through his nose. “Aye, you’ve got me bang to rights there.” he said.

Ford made the drinks quietly, giving Powell time to settle in and get the measure of the room a bit more. On second glance there were personal touches everywhere, not least of which was a dog basket in the corner, in which a dark little terrier was sat, watching him with wide-eyed interest. Her tail flopped over uncertainly in response to the attention.

“Oh, that’s Peggy.” Ford said. “Don’t worry, she’s as good as gold, won’t even leave the basket without permission.” he added fondly, smiling at her as he handed over the tea.

“I’m not going to wind up talking to the dog, am I?” Powell asked.

“Not if you don’t want to. But she’s half of the partnership, and there if you need her.”

”…Aye, let her out.”

“C’mon Pegs! Say hi.” Ford ordered. The dog bounced happily across the room and sat in front of Powell, giving his hand a little lick as he scratched her ear.

“Were you always a psych, Major?” he asked, noticing a few other personal effects around the office, one of which was unmistakably a large piece of shrapnel.

“No, I cross-trained.” Ford said, settling back down at his desk. “I was escorting EOD teams on my first two tours.”

“Nice one.” Powell said, genuinely impressed. “But why the move?”

“We lost a man. They never did figure out exactly why that carbomb went off, they thought the robot had made it safe but…well, everyone took it hard. I coped best by helping the others, and from there I decided to switch career paths.”

Powell nodded.

“What about you, did you sign up intending to go into the SBS from the beginning?”

“Aye, I did.”

“What attracted you to it?”

Powell sipped his tea. “My old man’s sister was an A and E nurse at Sheffield Teaching Hospital. She had these stories about when they sent the SAS lads along there for medical training in the ‘70s.”

Ford listened, drawing him to continue. “Okay, so…this is all second hand, but apparently one of them was really fond of his motorbike, and one day after shift he went out there and found it’d been stolen.”

“Oh dear.”

“Aye. Apparently he turned up on it next day and all he’d say on the subject was ‘he won’t do that again’.” Powell chuckled, then paused and scratched Peggy’s ears some more. “…When I were little, I used to think that was well cool. Fookin’ unprofessional is what I’d call it nowadays.”

“Is that what attracted you to the Service? Stories like that?”

“At first, aye. I wanted to be hard, you know? Be a tough bastard. That’s what got me in the Cadets. Then I saw all me mates getting in trouble with the law, all their parents losing their jobs, and I could see this career ahead of me if I stuck at it. It was only really later that I started to believe in the message, right? Keeping our country safe, making the world a better place…”

Peggy gave him a lick as he looked down at her and scratched at her ear again. “…Shall we get started?” he asked.

“If you like.” Ford said. “What happened?”

“What happened?” Powell exhaled. “A kid died. You’re…briefed, right?”

“About the Hierarchy? Yes.”

“Right, well…emergency mission. Hierarchy in the colony, doing summat dodgy down the starport construction site, one of the kids had snuck in there to try and take a picture. We mobilized, were there in less than two minutes. Swept the site. We nearly had the bastard when he shot her.”

Peggy made a little noise and shuffled a touch closer to him, warm against his leg. He couldn’t resist the urge to pet her some more.

“Ten fookin’ seconds.” he said. “Less than. Seven, maybe. If we’d been there ten seconds earlier…”

“Could you have done anything differently?”

“No.” Powell shook his head. “I’ve gone over it. We did everything bloody perfect. I can’t bear to tell ‘em this, but my lads pulled out the best day’s work they ever done, there’s not a single fookin’ learning point in the entire bloody operation. Perfect.“

He sighed. “And we still got there ten seconds too late.”

“I’m interested…why can’t you tell them?”

“Well what’s that going to achieve?” Powell asked. “Sometimes there’s not enough silver fookin’ lining in the world.”

“And that’s hard to accept?”

“No, that part I can accept. Failure’s always an option, no matter how well you do. That’s not what hurts.”

“Hurts?”

“Ah, I’m injured.” Powell replied. “Sure as if I’d been shot in the gut. One of my men had to chew me the fook out to make me come in here.”

“Do you think he was right to?”

“Abso-fookin’-lutely.” Powell asserted. “I’ve been beating myself up, losing sleep, takin’ it out on the lads. I’ve been a bad commander the last few days, and that’s got to fookin’ stop.”

“You sound angry at yourself.”

“Yeah, I am. I thought I was just angry at the Hierarchy, but…no, fook that, I am angry at them. And at myself. And at…”

He fidgeted, then patted the dog when she whined at him.

Ford gave him a minute, then suggested, softly. “Anger can be constructive.”

“Yeah.” Powell said. “I know that. Me and anger are old friends, we get on just fine, mostly. And I reckon that’s what’s giving me trouble, is that it’s not constructive to be angry with the person I’m most mad at.”

“Who?”

Powell picked the dog up. “The girl.” he told her, very softly. “I’m angry at the victim.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Allison Buehler

“Uwsm!”

Blurs. Noise. A warm hand on her cheek.

“A-sn!”

Julian.

“Allison!”

Now, how did speech go again? Oh yes.

“Aaargh…”

“Oh, shit, you’re awake! You had me scared there.”

”…hurts…”

“Hey, look at me, okay?”

Allison forced herself to focus on his eyes. He shone a light into her face and stared intently at them for a second, checking the dilation of her pupils, before finally nodding. “Okay. You’re okay…I hope.”

”…happened?” She tried to move, then collapsed as nausea washed over her.

“You tell me. I got here, you and the guys are all unconscious. Kirk and Zane are missing and Vedreg…”

He indicated a breathing mountain of dark fur that was crumpled at the foot of the hospital stairs with shoots of dark red moving up and down it. “I think Zane was just planning to knock him out as well, but…I think he’s really hurt. I can’t get him to say anything.”

Allison squinted at him. While she knew every word in what he had just said made sense, and so did the arrangements too, for some reason she just couldn’t quite…

It clicked. “Shit! Vedreg…” She stood again, squelching the nausea this time.

“Woah, hey, maybe you shouldn’t…”

“Maybe I should.” She grunted, teetering on her feet as she staggered towards Vedreg. “The hell did he hit me with?”

“Looks like…a steel ball of some kind.” Julian held it up.

“Oh. The…Huh. The Huh.”

“What?”

“Forget it. How…how are the guys?”

“Alive, but barely responding. You’ve all got serious concussions, I don’t know…”

“Nothing we can…” the word she was looking for was a fuzz that just wouldn’t resolve, so she aborted the sentence and concentrated on remaining upright just long enough for her legs to gratefully give out and dump her by their Guvnurag comrade’s head.

“Vedreg?”

It was hard to tell, but she thought he moved slightly.

“Vedreg I…guess you don’t handle pain like we do, but I need to know if you’re conscious. Just do anything, okay?”

One of Vedreg’s huge bloodshot blue eyes rolled open from behind three layers of nictitating eyelids and looked right at her for just long enough to confirm he was still among the land of the living, then screwed shut again in agony.

Allison knew how he felt. “Come on, I can’t stop the pain if I don’t know where you hurt.” she said, grateful to have something to focus on. It was helping her work through the concussion.

”…chest…” the big alien coughed, eventually, moving his hand where it was cradling his flank. There was an obvious dent there.

“Shit, no wonder you’re like this…”

She was carrying two medical kits. The smaller one, the green bag on her belt, was made by and for humans, any one of the painkillers and treatments it contained might kill Vedreg outright. The other—a metal box about the size of her forearm— was intended for use on aliens, and came with the major advantage of being pseudo intelligent, capable of diagnosing, prescribing and prognosing injuries and ailments in all known interstellar species. Humans, sadly, weren’t in its database yet, and probably never would be. Allison knew from past experience that most ET drugs simply didn’t work on Deathworlders.

“Guvnurag patient, fractured ribs.” she informed it, and held the device’s black end—a low-powered, short-range medical scanner—over the break.

She held her breath as it took the measure of the damage, and exhaled happily when it reported that the injury, while undoubtedly agonising, was not life-threatening, and ordered her to apply its injection end to three spots around the wound.

It hissed alarmingly as she did so, but Vedreg seemed to appreciate whatever it did, as he relaxed and made a noise very like “Aaah…“

“Painkillers?”

“A local anaesthetic and a regenerative, most likely.” Vedreg replied, returned to his usual communicative self. “Thank you, Allison. I fear had he punched me much harder then I would no longer be with you.”

“You rest. Look after Amir and Lewis.” She told him. “We’ve got…uurgh…”

She had stood up, and had to steady herself on Julian.

“Allison, you need bed rest.” he told her.

“Fuck that, we’ve got to get back to the ship.”

”…of course. Xiù.” Julian said.

“Right. He’s obsessed, I knew it. He saw his chance and took it.”

“You should be flattered.” Vedreg commented. “He rendered you unconscious first.”

“And I doubt he’d have done it at all if Julian’s foot hadn’t broken.” Allison retorted. “Come on, let’s get after him.”

She was damned if she was going to let a few spinny buildings and the way her own limbs felt blurry stop her from getting payback.

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Captain Owen Powell

“I first…We were…”

Powell exhaled, and started over. “We spent a month on Cimbrean getting set up, just me and the lads, getting things ready for the civilian colonists. Day they arrived, I remember she…the girl fookin’ rampaged down the ramp the second it was down. She was racing her brother to be the first civilian colonist to set foot on a new world. She won. Right proud of it, too.”

“You have a soft spot for children, don’t you?” Ford asked.

“Never met a soldier who doesn’t.” Powell retorted. Peggy seemed to have fallen asleep on his lap. “You were at Camp Bastion, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, you’ve got to remember the kids around the camp, right? The locals? They become mascots, don’t they? I always remember how jaded some of them were, though. They got it, aye?”

“It?”

Powell grimaced and scratched the back of his head. “It’s…this is going to be a bit hard to explain.”

“Don’t worry about explaining it to me. I think I know what you mean, but for your own sake just…think out loud.”

“I think the other two teenagers around Folctha get it as well. Adam and Ava. S- The girl’s…Her friends. They’d come from San Diego, they were out of town when the bomb went off. Lost fookin’ everything. Their homes, friends, schools, family…and they got it, they understood what S-she didn’t.”

“Which is?”

Powell exhaled. “Okay, right. So…” he thought for a second. “People say ‘life is unfair’, right?”

“Yes…”

“Bullshit. Complete fookin’ rot. Totally backwards. Life is fair. Terribly, terribly fookin’ fair. Life doesn’t give a shit if you’re a forty-year-old soldier or a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, it’ll kill you like that-” he snapped his fingers for emphasis. “-and not even give a shit. The stars keep burnin’, the worlds keep turnin’, but that’s it. That was your fookin’ lot. It’s fair because it treats everybody exactly the same, that way.”

Ford remained silent and kept eye contact, letting him say more.

“I get that.” Powell continued. “Adam and Ava get that. The kids in Afghanistan and Iraq got that. This gi-” He paused, then frowned at himself and gathered the strength to say her name. “Sara…didn’t.”

“And you’re angry at her for that?”

“No! Not…” Peggy made a protesting noise as Powell set her aside and stood up to pace the room, hunting for the right way to start a sentence. “She was the…I mean…You’d…”

“Describe her.”

That stopped him. “What?”

“Who was she? What did she look like? How did she behave?”

Powell looked back at the couch, and smiled faintly when the dog gave him an uncertain tail-wag.

“I don’t…no, wait, I’ve got it. You ever go round a council estate, Major?”

“Occasionally…”

“They’ve always got those same kids on ‘em, don’t they? Like there’s a fookin’ machine somewhere, stamping out exact copies. The scrawny skinhead boy who thinks he’s hard, the pretty girls who’ll be pushin’ prams and chain-smoking before they can drive. You know the ones. I should know what that kind of kid is like, I used to be one.”

“I think I follow you.”

“Imagine…the complete opposite.” Powell said. “Somebody who fookin’ broke that machine. Somebody who’d never in their life wind up mooching around by the Co-op trying to talk strangers into buying them fags and vodka. Somebody…Different. Better.”

“And Sara was such a person?”

“All three of them, her and the two others. They’re…She was…Alive. Living in the moment. Real people. They know who they are, which I sure as fook didn’t at that age.”

“And who was Sara?”

Peggy licked his hand as Powell picked her up and sat down again. “Like something out of a bloody Enid Blyton book.” he said. “You know, the plucky children investigating fookin’ mysteries, thwartin’ gangs of gun-runners and what have you?”

“I’ve never read them.” Ford confessed.

“Not worth it, mate. Naive fookin’ horse shit, every word of the fookin’ things.”

“You said that you’re angry at her though. Why?”

“That’s just it, I don’t fookin’ know!” Powell seethed. “I wasn’t mad at that kid in Kenya, or at those Yezidi girls in the Persian Gulf, so why should I be angry with Sara? She’s the fookin’ victim here!”

“Well, turn the question around. If you can’t figure out why you are angry with Sara, perhaps it will help to think about why you were not angry with the others.”

That seemed reasonable.

“Well…you know about what happened, right? In those other two cases?”

Ford nodded that he did. “I’ve read the notes, but it’s probably best if you recount them in your own words.”

Powell sighed. “Karatina market, Kenya. There was a little boy. Like, five or six? His parents had given him…” he laughed a little at the memory. “I remember it was this really cheap fookin’ knock-off plastic ‘Ben 10’ backpack…and the fookin’ thing was full of C4 and ball bearings…”

He patted the dog’s side. She had her chin on his lap and was looking up, listening. “His Mum and Dad were sitting in the car with one of those old Nokias. We saved the kid that time, and a lot of other people too, but he didn’t see that. All he saw was the nasty white men who’d come and killed his Daddy. Never fookin’ mind that we’d shot the evil bastard to stop him from calling the bomb and blowing up his own little boy, we were the bad guys.”

“You don’t blame him for that, though?”

”‘Course I don’t. He was a little’n, didn’t fookin’ understand what was happening. Never crossed the poor little bugger’s mind that his parents might murder him like that. It got to me, but…y’know, that’s dealt with. I can deal with being the bad guy if he’s alive and doin’ summat with his life. Who knows, maybe after all these years he’s figured out what happened and forgiven me.”

“And the Persian Gulf?”

“Different story. That one were a freighter involved in slave trafficking, they’d got a handful of Yezidi girls in a shipping container, going to some buyer in Thailand. There was a cockup at the Thai end, the buyer spooked and the freighter chucked the container overboard. Worthless cargo, now. All the drone operator could do was fookin’ watch.”

“You were angry then?” Ford asked.

“Fookin’ raging.” Powell nodded. His expression darkened. “We boarded the ship, had all these bastards sat in a circle, and they were jawing and joking and asking for cigarettes—they thought we were Americans—and all acting like they didn’t know what had been in that container. Like they hadn’t heard the banging and screaming from inside. Like they weren’t slave-trading fookin’ scum who’d just murdered five little girls. I wanted to bundle every man of ‘em into a crate and tip ‘em over the side myself. But that wasn’t the hard part.”

He paused. “No, the hard part were that the container burst. Pressure difference, right? So all the bodies came back up. We had to fish ‘em out, these skinny little blue-eyed girls, and there were tiger sharks following the ship. They eat whatever falls overboard.”

His fists clenched. “Aye. I was angry there, but, at the right people, you know? Only reason we didn’t shoot those cunts in the kneecaps and throw ‘em to the sharks was pure bloody professionalism, and I still think it’d have been no less than they fookin’ deserved.”

“What do you think the difference is between those cases and this one?”

Powell thought about it for some time, petting Peggy as he did so. “I think…I think I’m angry at her because she got herself into it.” he said at last. “Like, this brave, beautiful, stupid fookin’ girl had to go in and help when the cavalry was already on the way. Like, if she’d just been smart about it, she…I…”

He swallowed, then started to shake. “I never looked in a child’s eyes while she was dying before.” he croaked. “She said her last word to me. She was scared. She…When I closed her eyes, her- she’d been crying, she was so afraid, and the tears made my glove wet…”

He stared at his hand. “I couldn’t bear to take it off for hours…”

He sat, staring at his fingers for a few moments until the dog, very gently, inserted her nose under his palm and hauled herself into his lap, wagging sympathetically. He laughed a little, grabbed her and hugged, sobbing into the fur.

Ford let him get it out of his system. Finally, the captain made a weak “woo-ugh” noise and sat up, wiping his face dry.

“Fookin’….I never cry.” he said.

“You needed to.” Ford observed.

”…You know, I think you’re right.” Powell agreed. “I’ve just not done that since I were a kid. Sorry.” He wiped his face again.

“Don’t be. In fact, I’d have been worried if you hadn’t.” Ford reassured him. “…Are you really angry at her, do you think? Now that you’ve had time to think out loud?”

”…No. I don’t think so, not really. Not any more. She’s like that poor boy in Kenya, isn’t she? She didn’t know any better, it never crossed her mind that maybe her parents had led her wrong.”

“Her parents?”

“Aye. These Dippy-Hippie tree-hugging free love pagan parents of hers. Her dad’s got these tattoos—’an it harm none, do as thou wilt’.” He gestured along his forearms to show where the two halves of the phrase were inked into Mark Tisdale’s skin. “Sexually open, no boundaries, no rules, no fookin’…sense of consequence. I’ll just bet you they never once told her that no, there’s things that you can’t do. You know? Like, they’ll have told her ‘you can do anything”, trying to empower her and that, and it got her killed.”

“How do you feel towards them, then?” Ford inquired. “You’ve compared Sara to the child in Kenya, but what about the parents?”

“It’s…not the same.” Powell mused. “The bastards in Kenya, they had the phone in their hand. May as well have dug the little guy a trench and put a gun to the back of his head, they were going to murder him just as dead either way. But the Tisdales loved their daughter, so fookin’ much. They’d have never deliberately hurt her, but they coddled her so much that she never learned one of the most useful survival skills in the world.”

“Which is?”

“Knowing when it’s time to stop fookin’ playing.”

He sighed. “What’s saving them is that they didn’t know they were doing it. They’re as fookin’ ignorant as their daughter was.”

“Do you think you can forgive them for that?”

Powell inhaled and exhaled deeply through his nose, but didn’t answer, beyond shaking his head and stroking the dog.

Ford nodded. “Why not?”

“I can forgive a child for not knowing how the world works.” Powell replied, after a moment’s thought. “It’s bloody cruel, but there it is. She didn’t have time, and the first chance she got to learn, it killed her. She could have been smarter, should have been, but…y’know, she was just fourteen. A girl. Part of the cruelty of it is that we want them to be innocent at that age, don’t we? We don’t want to spoil their fun.”

“But adults should know better.” Ford finished the thought for him.

“Fookin’ right.” Powell sniffed and shook his head. “I’m not sadistic, I’m not going to rake ‘em over the coals for it, they’re suffering enough. But…”

He shook his head again, breathing out. “…But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at either of them without thinking, y’know…’You’re the reason I had to watch your daughter die’.”

“What are you going to do?”

Powell finally made eye contact, and there was a hardness in his gaze now that had been absent throughout the interview, one that looked quite natural and comfortable there. “I’m going to find something important of the Hierarchy’s, and when we’re done with it I’ll use the largest piece that’s still intact for a fookin’ paperweight.”

Major Ford smiled appreciatively. “I think this session has been good for you.” he opined.

Powell nodded. “Aye, I think it has.” he agreed. “I feel sharp again. More myself.”

“I would still suggest you come back for at least a couple more sessions.” Ford added. “After that, it’s up to you, but at least two more seems prudent.”

“Aye. At least two more.” Powell agreed, and stood, putting Peggy down but pausing to scratch at her ears one last time. “Don’t want to undo all our progress, do we?” he asked the dog.

“Indeed not.” Ford agreed. “We’re available any time, Captain. You let me know if we’re needed.”

“I will.” Powell shook the major’s hands “Thank you, sir.”

“Good luck.”

“Don’t fookin’ need it, mate.”

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

“Kirk”

“This isn’t going to work, you know.”

“Hush ya.”

“I’ve read your file. Narcissistic Personality Disorder. A terrible thing. You were receiving a lot of therapy back on Earth to help you cope, weren’t you Zane?”

“I say hush!“

Kirk wriggled a little as Zane’s grip tightened around his upper arm, feeling the bone creak alarmingly in the Deathworlder’s grip. “Not had any since you left Earth of course.” He continued. “But you could do. We can still take you back, you can still get the treatment you need. If you keep behaving this way, though, that may not happen…”

Zane broke his arm. Kirk fought down the rattling creak which was the Rrrrtk equivalent of a scream, while Zane just cursed and shifted his grip to the lower, sturdier arm. “Blood clot, why ya ET bruk so easy?!”

Kirk turned his pain into a slightly hysterical laugh. “Evolution!” he replied. “Different worlds different -” he creaked in pain again “- bones.”

“Hush, ya.”

“Even if you do get us to the ship and we take off, Xiù isn’t fragile like me.”

“Oh, she be. Dawta care, yah know. The I’s me leverage- she too soft let the I come ‘arm.”

They were nearly at the ships. As they entered the area lit by their industrial lights, alien workers turned to watch the sight of a human dragging a Rrrtk three times his height towards them.

“You’re not well! You’re not thinking straight!” Kirk protested. “We’re offering to take you back to—aah!—to Earth. Other women! You don’t need this one! You’re acting out, this is a crisis!”

“HUSH. Ya.“

“You’d better let him go, Zane.”

Allison stepped out from among the packing crates, aiming her sidearm at him. She was clearly in a bad way, squinting against the glare of the floodlights and swaying a little bit, and her aim was not up to its usual rock-steady standard.

Zane twisted around, dragging Kirk into the line of fire. “Ya cyaan shoot, seen? ‘Less ya wan’ hit ya boy.”

“True. Julian?”

“Ah, ah!” Zane chided, raising his hand to wrap around the base of Kirk’s throat. “I know ya creechie tumpa-foot man a’ try dat. I make a move and me break ya boy here, sight?”

“And then what?” Kirk rasped around his hand, as Julian stepped into Zane’s sight-line and hefted his hatchet warily. “You kill me and you’ll lose your advantage. Your plan leaves something to be desired, Zane.”

“The I still be dead.”

“I admit, the prospect doesn’t thrill me, but you’re threatening to make the situation worse for yourself, not better.”

“Hush, ya!”

Kirk waved an arm, beckoning Julian and Allison to fall back. Over the dermal patch microphone on his throat, he explained his reasoning, subvocalising so low that even Zane couldn’t hear him, and the translator certainly couldn’t.

“He’s histrionic. He was so convinced of his superiority that now we’ve punctured it he’s liable to panic.“

“What do we do?” Allison replied, murmuring so that Zane wouldn’t hear.

“If we give him the chance to calm down a bit, we can build him back up. Get him to calm down. Get him to think that doing what we want is his idea.“

“And if we can’t?” Julian asked him. “He seems pretty close to breaking point, boss.”

“If it comes to violence, it comes to violence.” Kirk said.

“Greeaaat…”

“I’ll try to leave him alive.“

They were passing through the middle of the field of equipment and crates surrounding the Corti research craft, when the Corti in question decided to interfere.

“You appreciate of course that there is a third option.” the male—Lesry—observed. He and Knadna were in Zane’s way, and they ignored Kirk’s attempts to signal for them to move.

“Get away.” Zane ordered.

“Rather than resort to violence…” Lesry said, stepping forward, “you could sign on with us. A bit of muscle would be useful, and we have the means to deliver you back to Earth, without your being a prisoner in the ship you arrived on. What say you?”

“I want.” Zane growled. “Xiù.”

“And ask yourself if that scenario seems likely right now, hmm?” Lesry pushed. “Be realistic.”

He stepped forward again. “I’m offering you the chance to part ways peacefully, as a free man. That seems like the most rationa-”

Zane backhanded him. It was a casual, almost gentle motion, but it highlighted the huge disparity between Human strength and Corti mass by flipping Lesry head-over-heels over a crate with a sickening noise like a baseball being thrown at a sack full of cockroaches.

It was all the distraction Kirk needed. He twisted, turned, darted sideways and his prosthetic arm lashed out, extending its concealed fusion blade.

Kirk went one way. Zane reeled the other. Zane’s left forearm left a crater in the sand where it landed between them, smoking, glowing and bloodless at the cut end.

Rrrrtk had a decent turn of speed over very short distances, but Kirk knew Humans well by now. Zane’s scream may have been of agony, but there was a very large component of adrenaline and rage in there as well, and no short-term turn of speed was any good at all when a pursuit predator was angry at him.

The only recourse open to him was to turn at bay and get ready with his sword, prepared to strike a lethal blow if he could, but that much mass, travelling that fast, would quite probably end very badly for him even if he did.

Facing the Hunters had been bad enough. Facing the murderous fury in Zane’s eyes was worse. Julian and Allison had retreated on his orders, and were now sprinting to catch up, but they were too far away, on the back foot. Zane was going to beat them.

Xiù got to him first.

If Zane’s casual backhand had hinted at the disparity between Deathworlder muscles and Corti bones, then what Xiù unleashed on the enraged Jamaican was an object lesson in just how physically far ahead of the rest of the galaxy humans truly were. Zane had time enough only to register her presence as she rose up in his path before she delivered four blows, any one of which would have exploded through Kirk’s body like heavy pulse-gun fire.

The first exploited his missing arm, driving into his chest, knocking him off-balance and driving the wind out of him. The second was laser-targeted on his jaw, stunning him. As he staggered, the third blow was delivered to his left eye, and the fourth to his right.

Her precision flurry of violence took less than a second.

Zane’s headlong berserk charge turned into him staggering, dropping to his knees in the sand, wheezing, and falling over when he tried to support himself on a hand that was lying several meters away.

He wasn’t out, though. Running on adrenaline and anger, he still tried to haul himself to his feet, swinging wildly with his remaining arm even as his eyes swelled up and blinded him.

Xiù just stepped and flowed, and wherever the flailing limb went, there she wasn’t.

She was angry too, Kirk decided. Furious. But it was a different kind of fury. Zane in a rage was a bellowing beast, roaring and thrashing around like a wounded Vulza.

Xiù on the other hand became a machine. Her face locked down, her eyes locked on, everything about her unified into a cold and methodical instrument of violence that simply took the most efficient path to avoid harm and then, when the opportunity presented itself, she stepped forward and delivered a straight punch to Zane’s skull, just behind the ear.

The delicately balanced tug-of-war that kept bipedal humans upright and moving ceased instantly, and Zane crashed into the dirt, unmoving.

In the stunned moment of stillness that followed, Xiù made hardly any noise, simply allowing her breath to hiss out from between her teeth, and then she straightened, inhaled through her nose as she touched her fist to her palm in a Bau Quan, then exhaled as she let her entire body relax. Only the hardness in her eyes remained, though even that thawed a little when she glanced at Kirk.

“Are you okay?” She asked.

“He broke my arm, but I am alive, thanks to you.” Kirk said, and meant it. “I am…impressed.”

“Understatement central there, boss.” Allison chimed in. “Holy shit, girl!”

“You cut his arm off…” Xiù observed. She didn’t sound happy about it.

“Necessary, I’m afraid.” Kirk replied.

“Yeah, but…oh, God.” A distinct green colour rose in Xiù’s face and she turned away, breathing heavily. Allison rubbed her back, making soothing noises.

“Allison, can you tend to his injury?”

Allison looked up at him, then reluctantly nodded. “…Sure. Julian?”

The pair of them hoisted the unconscious Zane onto their shoulder and dragged him—and Allison herself, Kirk suspected—in the direction of Sanctuary and her medbay.

That left Kirk and Xiù alone. The Corti team were tending to their wounded shipmaster, who seemed to be alive, thankfully.

“Are you alright?” He asked.

“Just…” Xiù slowed her breathing. “…I’m okay. Oh God, they left his arm…” She turned away again and bent over, trying not to vomit.

“Are you sure?” Kirk asked her, as soon as she seemed to have recovered a little.

She laughed a little. “I never thought it’d be like this.” she complained, and wiped at some tears that were threatening to form. “Monsters and fighting and cutting peoples’ arms off.”

She sniffed, and after a few more cleansing breaths she stood up and raised her head, staring at a night sky and stars that only six specimens of the entire human race had ever laid eyes on. “I want to go home.”

“And what do we do with Zane? Does he get to go home as well?”

Xiù blinked at him. “You’re the shipmaster, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I am, and I say as shipmaster that it’s your decision. To hell with my arm, you’re clearly the one he really hurt. Whatever it was that happened between you.”

“Then he…” Xiù began firmly, but paused. “I…” She sighed. “Let me give him one last chance.”

“By all means. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m in rather a lot of pain, and we need to send Julian back for the others…”

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Starship Sanctuary, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Zane

Zane had been knocked out in bar fights in his time, but returning to consciousness this time wasn’t like those other occasions had been. It was just like…waking up.

“What…?”

“You were drugged, and treated. You’re actually in pretty good shape, Zane.“

It was Xiù’s voice, sounding oddly tinny, and that suddenly made Zane aware of his surroundings—he was curled up on the floor of one of Sanctuary’s airlocks. Big enough for a Guvnurag to use, it was a large room by human standards.

Xiù’s face was at one of the windows. So pretty. So…cold. That same look that had made him angry at her. Didn’t she know who she was dealing with?

The stump where his arm ended just below the elbow felt cold, and beyond that was a strange numbness. That should have bothered him more, but his ego ratcheted into gear, redirecting all the grief and insecurity that somebody without his personality disorder would have felt into pure grim anger. There would be a reckoning.

“Ya gonna let me out?” he asked.

“One way or the other.” Xiù replied, speaking through a microphone. “Look behind you.“

Zane blinked, and did so.

There were stars beyond the opposite window. It took him a second or two to make the connection between that fact, his being in an airlock, and what she had said.

Please. Who did she think she was bluffing?

“Ya wouldn’t.” he declared. “Me know I, Xiù. Ya don’ do that kind of badness.”

“To be rid of you?” She declared. “What happens when we get back to Earth, huh? You come after me again? You hurt more people? You hurt me again?”

He laughed. “Gwan, then.”

Bluff called, he congratulated himself. There’d be a showdown with Kirk, he’d have vengeance for his arm. And the others would fall in line. They’d see what kind of a man he was.

The howl of the alarm and the sound of the doors whining into gear when Xiù pressed the button drove all of his confidence out of him in a rush of cool air threatening to escape.

“Xiù! Xiù, no! Ya can’ do this!” he rushed the door she was behind, knocking and shouting. “Xiù no! I’m sorry! I hurt ya, that was wrong o’ me, me leave ya ‘lone! Just let me go back to Earth!“

The alarms didn’t stop, and her hand on the release didn’t fidget.

“You want to go home too, huh?” She asked.

Those eyes were so cold. He’d hurt her. He’d hurt her, and now she was going to murder him. He couldn’t believe that she would. He couldn’t believe that the others would let her.

But there were the hungry stars, waiting for him.

“Yes!” he screamed “PLEASE, Xiù! I’m beggin’ you, PLEASE!“

She paused, her eye contact drifted away. Her hand moved away from the final release. She softened, and the relief trembled down him. He meant every word, she’d be left alone if only she-

“Walk home, asshole.“

She hit the button.

The overpressure in the lock flung him shrieking out of the ship…and into the river Uatun, a mere four meters below.

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

“Legsy” Jones

“Alright…”

Legsy Jones took a minute or so to check he was in absolutely pristine military trim before knocking. He knew the captain had actually gone to counselling, but after the last meeting with Powell, he was damned if he was going to be on anything but his most perfect behaviour.

“Come in.”

Moment of truth. He poked his head into the captain’s office.

Powell looked rested. The darkness around his eyes was gone, he’d tidied up the drifts of paperwork into a more organised system, and his camp bed was made. The captain himself was standing at the washbasin, rinsing shaving foam off his face.

“Latest from Intelligence, sir.” Legsy said.

“Cheers. On the desk, please.”

So far so good. But he wasn’t about to relax just yet. The dossier joined some of its fellows on Powell’s desk.

“Do you need anything, sir?”

“No thanks, I’m good. Carry on.”

“Sir.”

He was halfway through turning and leaving when Powell suddenly threw his towel onto the bed. “Sergeant.”

“Sir.” Legsy turned around. The captain blinked at him, expression unreadable, then crossed the room and stood in front of him.

He wasn’t a large man, Legsy realised. He just seemed that way.

“I, uh…” Powell began, then fell silent. His clock ticked out six seconds before he shook his head. “Ah, never fookin’ mind, Legs. Keep up the good work, mate.”

“Yessir.” Inside his head, Legsy wanted to punch the air and grin.

Powell snorted “Well go on, carry on then!” he said.

Instead, Legsy grabbed him in a bear hug.

”-‘Ere, what’re you- fookin’—let go!” Powell protested, and Legsy did so. Powell straightened his jumper and frowned at him. “The fook was that about?” he demanded.

“Sorry, sir.” Legsy straightened to attention. “It’s just…good to have you back.”

Powell hung his head and shook it, smiling. “Get out, you big fookin’ softy.” he ordered, kindly.

“Yessir.”

Once Legsy had gone, Powell retrieved the towel and hung it neatly to dry, checked the room for any other signs of things out of place, and allowed himself a satisfied nod.

“It’s good to be back.” he agreed.

Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV

UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Knadna

Knadna squinted at the figure staggering towards them out of the dark. It had been only a few minutes since the Sanctuary had taken off, vanishing over the horizon with all the power that its gargantuan power core could produce, and she had watched the evicted psychotic Deathworlder struggle ashore with some interest.

Not to mention satisfaction.

“You have to admit, they are extremely tough.” she observed. An amputation, a concussion and a four-meter fall into the water only seemed to have annoyed the dark-skinned human, really. He was, if anything, probably as dangerous now as he had been a few hours ago. More so, possibly.

“Are we taking him with us, ma’am?”

“I think not.” Knadna replied, not even bothering to show her contempt for the moronic inquiry. “Get the last of the equipment stowed, I want the ship locked up and ready before that human gets here.”

The Kwmbwrw crewman rushed to obey. Knadna herself enjoyed the leisurely stroll back to the ship, arriving just in time to turn in the airlock, check everybody and everything was on board, and then activate the ship’s primary shields right in the approaching Deathworlder’s face.

This move did not seem to please Zane, who sprinted the remaining distance in an eyeblink, and Knadna had to clamp down hard on an instinctive reflex to flinch, cower, or run.

“Let me in.” He demanded, his tone of voice promising all of the impressive capacity for violence that his species was capable of unleashing, should she fail to comply.

“Now, why would I do that?” Knadna asked him. “You rather badly injured somebody I quite like. You seem to have an alarming inclination to use viol-”

Zane interrupted her and proved her point by slapping the forcefield, which rang and flashed alarmingly, but Knadna kept calm.

“Not even a human can punch through starship-grade weapons shielding, you barbarian idiot.” she told him, keeping a tired inflection in her tone.

“LET ME IN!” He roared.

Knadna mentally sent a few commands over the ship’s control circuit, telling the pilot to begin the launch sequence.

“Frankly, the only thing stopping me from using one of this ship’s plasma guns to vaporise you where you stand is because I think leaving you all alone here with a dying species seems more…poetic.” she said.

“I can be useful.” he said, changing tack. “You want a nice strong human on your ship, I can do the heavy lifting, fight off pirates.”

“You already rejected that offer.” Knadna pointed out, but she made a show of mulling the suggestion over. “Besides, you would be a lot more useful if you still had both arms…”

She let him rant for a few seconds, ignoring the content, and interrupted him after a careful internal countdown.

“I tell you what.” she offered. “You can come aboard if you help me expand the limits of Corti scientific knowledge.”

”…What?”

“Well, I have this hypothesis that what happens to a Deathworlder when he’s standing directly beneath the primary kinetic engine of a starship at takeoff-” she made a meaningful upwards glance. The engine in question was beginning to whine, barely audible to Corti hearing but presumably quite clear to a human’s more acute senses. “-Is much the same thing as what happens to everything else in the galaxy.”

Zane stared upwards, swallowing and breathing heavily. There was an alarming blue glow beginning to manifest somewhere inside the device.

“If you’re not willing to test my idea,” Knadna told him. “Then you can always run away. You have…oh, eight seconds.”

He looked back down at her, plainly afraid now.

“I’d start running.” she said, sweetly.

Once they were airborne, she dusted off her hands, shrugged out of and hung up her sand robes, and visited the ship’s medical bay. Lesry was sitting up, expression taut as he endured the procedure of having regenerative medicines injected directly into the extensive damage at his shoulder by the surgical robot.

“I saw how you got rid of him.” He said, waving his undamaged hand at a floating projected monitor. “Nicely done.”

“I took the liberty.” She agreed. “I assume you don’t disapprove?”

“Oh, no.” he said. “If he was too ignorant to know that absolutely nothing happens to a being standing beneath a kinetic thruster when the ship takes off, then he would have been of no real use anyway.”

“Besides.” he added, grimacing as a fresh needle delivered a shot of Cruezzir deep into his flesh. “I believe your own words were something like ‘Never underestimate a Human’.”

“Absolutely never.” she replied. “Predictable though his attempt to take over the ship and chase after them would have been, it would also have been alarmingly plausible that he might succeed.”

“Best to leave him behind.” Lesry agreed. The surgical robot finished its work, leaving his arm bound up and immobilized, but the pain had clearly faded. “You continue to impress me with your competence, Knadna.” he said, easing himself down off the medical bed.

“I think we work well together.” She replied, internally glowing at the compliment.

“I think we do.” He agreed. “Shall we continue our association?”

“Make it more formal?”

“Indeed.” Lesry said. “A DNA exchange, perhaps?”

“I’m agreeable to that.”

They widened their pupils at each other, a rare Corti expression of genuine warmth and affection not dissimilar to a human shy smile, and Knadna congratulated herself.

Today had been a good day.

Chapter 21: Dragon Dreams

Black soil. Not peat-dark or wet from rain, but the black of carbon and nighttime, visible between clumps of grass so rich and dark and green, the green of leather on an antique desk.

The smell of rain on the air, lightning sulking among the peaks of distant blue mountains, bringing life to a dead, grey sky. Moisture on the breeze, tickling every inch of Xiù’s naked body as she walks nude beside a hip-high dry stone wall, enjoying the feel of damp earth under her soles.

A meditative moment, so real that the past and future are irrelevant. She isn’t even interested in recalling them. Where has she been? Where is she going? It doesn’t matter.

Here and now, everything is both too detailed, and yet lacking in detail.

She pauses by a giant stone man, buried up to his waist next to a tree at the crossroads. She is not alarmed by his presence, nor by the fact that she hasn’t seen him until just now. He looks down at her and smiles, even though his face is made of grey limestone, stubbled in lichen and moss. She is not not alarmed.

He gestures to the tree that he has been half-buried alongside. Objects hang in that tree: impossible ones, clearly too large and heavy for the boughs to support. Wooden cartwheels, huge stone tablets, enormous steel swords and more.

She points. “That one.”

The stone giant bows with a hand over his heart, and selects the enormous bronze coin that she has chosen.

He raises it above his head. She spreads her arms, tilts her head back and smiles, welcoming what he is about to do. He brings it down hard, and she woke in the instant before it crushed her.

“And then I said—“Walk home asshole!” and hit the button!”

“Oh man!” Allison giggled, then winced as the laughter sent a fresh stab of pain through her abused cranium. When she raised her hand to the pain, it met cold metal instead. She had endured an uncomfortable and boring night in the ship’s infirmary wearing a large and dorky helmet that Kirk had printed which used some form of applied alien science magic to clear up the lingering effects of being beaten in the head with a Huh. It looked like something out of a 1960s SciFi serial.

“Are you okay?” Xiù asked, concerned.

”…Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, really.”

Xiù frowned at her. “Are you sure?”

Allison nodded. “This thing’s really working. I was so woozy last night, and now I’m feeling sharp again.”

“Yeah but…” Xiù’s smile was mischievous as she indicated the medical contraption that was clamped around her head. “You look like you’re having your hair permed.”

Allison pantomimed dismay. “Oh God, get me out of this thing! I don’t want to look like my Mom!”

Xiù flicked her own hair where a few strands had come loose of their ponytail. After years of having to make do in alien civilization while pretending to be Gaoian it had lost a little of its lustre, but she’d still done what she could to keep it healthy. “Too late.”

“Yeah?”

Xiù paused. “I… I guess so. I mean… I haven’t seen her in like five years.”

The deep therapy machine beeped in protest as Allison tried to lean forward and put a hand on her shoulder. “OKay, yeah. That’s rough.” she said. “I guess I can see why you’d want to go home.”

“You still want me to stay though, don’t you?”

“Girl, after the ass-whupping you just handed out? Hell yes!” Allison enthused. She settled back again “But five years is rough, you need to see your folks. I get it.”

“Don’t you want to see yours?”

“Oh hell, no.” Allison grimaced. “My folks and I…we never got along. I cut them out of my life a long time ago.”

“Oh.” Xiù cleared her throat and tried her best not to blush awkwardly. “Sorry.”

“No, no, it’s fine. Ancient history. But you can’t live at home forever, can you?”

“With Mama’s cooking?” Xiù demurred “Oh, I could. I know exactly what she’s going to make for me, too, when she sees me.”

“Yeah?”

“Mmhmm. It’ll be her special Paigu bazaifan, with Doufuhua for dessert.” She drifted off into a culinary haze. “She thinks they’re my favorites…”

Allison laughed. “She thinks?”

Xiù made a curious head-ducking motion again, then caught herself and grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, I’m still doing Gaoian body language. Yeah, she thinks that and… well, she’s not wrong. It’s just that those were my favorites when I was ten.”

“I get it. You could do with being ten years old again for a little while.”

Xiù smiled, whistfully. “Oh, I could…”

Julian poked his head around the door. “How’re you feeling?” he asked.

“Good!” Allison confirmed, beaming at him. “Much better than last night. Amir’s still out of it though.”

Julian checked on their slumbering pilot. “He’s fine. Just asleep.” he reported, reading off the display above Amir’s bed.

“Didn’t Lewis get hit in the head too?” Xiù asked.

“Honestly? It’s kinda hard to tell with Lewis.” Julian shrugged as he began to help Allison unplug. “He seems okay. He keeps playing with that ball thing.”

“The Huh? Fuck sake, I had my fill of that thing when Zane hit me in the head with it.” Allison griped.

“Yeah, why do you guys keep calling it the Huh?” Julian asked, releasing the catches on her helmet and gently pulling it off

“It’s a weird story.” Allison swung her legs down off the bed and ruffled her own hair. “Wow, I feel way better.”

“Short version?”

“Short version is, that’s what the word for that thing is in OmoAru. Huh.”

”…Oh. Right.” Julian removed the last sticky patch from her forehead and helped her to her feet, where she swayed alarmingly.

“Woah. Oh, okay. Still kinda… no, no, get off guys, I’m fine.”

Xiù let go of her arm where she had caught it. “Are you sure?”

“You go with Julian. I didn’t sleep well at all last night, so, I’ll be in my bunk.”

Reluctantly they let her go, though she had obviously recovered most of her balance and focus. She only touched the door frame lightly on the way out.

“So uh… when are we heading for a station with a relay?” Xiù asked.

The door and deck both being sized to admit a Guvnurag, they had no trouble walking side by side towards the flight deck, but it was still just narrow enough for her to be acutely aware of him walking beside her, and that awareness was engendering some acutely hormonal feelings. If he was at all conscious of the effect he was having, though, he didn’t show it.

“Kirk and Vedreg are keen to explore this whole hospital angle.” Julian told her. “Wish I could tell you how long that’s likely to take.”

He smiled at her crestfallen expression. “Hey, I’m sorry. But we’ve got other missions too, you know? It’s rough, I know, but we’ll get you back as soon as we can.”

“I guess… it’s just, you said this ship is really fast right?”

“Probably the fastest in the galaxy.” he confirmed “But it’s still a week to the nearest station from here. The galaxy’s a big place, and this is one of the empty bits.”

“Right.” she sighed. “I can’t ask you to take a whole fortnight out for me, I’m not that important.”

She realised that the sentiment had come off as bitter. “I mean! Um…That came out wrong.”

Julian chuckled. “It’s fine.”

“Allison wants me to stay.”

Julian stopped as they were about to cross the threshold into the common area. “So do I.” he confessed.

“Y-you do?”

He nodded.

“Why?” she asked

Julian didn’t even need to pause to think. “We’ve rescued people that the galaxy totally broke.” he said. “I remember one Polish lady called Maria, she never learned to speak a word of any alien language, never even figured out the whole… Deathworlder thing. She was pretty much starving and out of her mind by the time we got to her.”

“You’re different.” he continued. “You’ve learned the skills to survive out here, you speak Gaoian, you’ve kept fit and well fed and you did it by earning your keep. There’s a whole long section in your file written by somebody called Ayma which is just… Glowing.”

Xiù hesitated, suppressing a surge of guilt on hearing Ayma’s name. “Glowing?”

“Nonlethal takedowns of alien species, even some of the flimsier ones. Boarding one of the big Hunter ships solo to save a diplomatic vessel. Integrating into Gaoian society and making yourself useful. Surviving - thriving - incognito around the galaxy for three years… It all speaks to a skillset that this ship and our mission would find very useful, and I’m not talking about your ability to beat stuff up. You’re a competent woman, Xiù.”

Xiù blinked at him. “I don’t feel competent.” she said.

It wasn’t adequate, but… where did she begin? That she didn’t recognise the person he’d just described? That, okay, she may have done those things, but she’d been this close to throwing up the whole time? That she’d cried herself to sleep more nights than not? That she had felt alone, so alone for all of those years, and that even Ayma, Myun and all the others had been… well, they’d been great, but no substitute for home?

Julian smiled sadly. “Neither do I.” he confessed.

Xiù changed the subject. “We’d better… uh, what are we doing?”

“Nothing, really. I’m just heading up to the flight deck.”

“Oh… Uh, I didn’t exercise yet today. I’ll go get on with that, I guess.”

“Sure. But… if you’re interested, later on? Ayma left a message for you in your notes.”

Xiù’s heart manage the interesting trick of simultaneously rising and sinking. “She…? Oh… Have you-?”

“Nope. It’s a personal message.”

“Oh… uh, is there one from my family?”

“There’s a letter, yeah.”

“Oh.” She… actually didn’t know how she felt about that. Scared and excited at the same time.

“Why don’t you go read them? The gym can wait.” Julian offered. “See you at lunch?”

“Oh! Yeah. Sure. See you.”

“Duuude.”

“Lewis, are you ever going to stop playing with that thing?”

Kirk’s upper upper arm was encased in something that was a fair bit more high-tech than a cast, which served to immobilize the broken bone and deliver regenerative medicines through dermal contact. Having his coat shaved to apply the cast had been embarrassing enough, but now the damn thing itched, which was making him cranky.

“No, Kirk, dude, it’s… look at this shit, man!”

Kirk glanced at it. As far as he could tell the little object was still as grey and uninteresting as the last time he’d looked. Lewis’ expression, however, was rapt. “Put it down.” he ordered. Lewis made a complaining noise but obeyed, tucking the Huh into the pocket of his jacket, which was hung on the back of his chair.

Kirk grimaced as another eddy knocked Sanctuary off course. Amir would have handled the buffeting effortlessly, but even Deathworlders needed time to recover from being knocked unconscious, it seemed. They healed absurdly fast, with or without the ministrations of a deep therapy machine, but that was of small comfort when it left Kirk to deal with clear air turbulence.

“How big is this cell?” he demanded.

“Wish I could tell you man, but I’m still looking for a satellite that works. They didn’t build these things to last.”

“Well, where are we? We’ve got to be close to AmoUetu-RumuAo-Eiru by now.”

“Right above it, dude.”

Kirk frowned through the flight deck’s transparent surface. All he could see below him was a flat expanse of beige.

“Are you sure? I don’t see the river.” he said.

“That’s because of the sandstorm, man.”

Perspective clicked in. “Oh…” He said. “…We’re not landing in that.”

“Figured as much, bro.” Lewis laughed. “Survey says the turbulence shouldn’t go higher than twenty clicks if you wanna wait it out.”

“Yes. Let’s do that.” Kirk agreed. He punched the commands in and Sanctuary stood on its tail to ascend above the weather, eventually getting to the point where the autopilot was happy to take over again. Nobody on board noticed - ‘down’ was still defined by the gravity plating in the deck, rather than by the planet

Kirk set the ship to hover once they were clear of the turbulence, and relaxed.

“Fucking Class Nines…” he muttered. “Any luck with those satellites?”

“Nah man. Half of them just aren’t there any more and half the rest ran out of power years ago. Must be bits of space debris all over this desert.”

“What’s left?”

“Some of the stuff that’s in geosynchronous or higher.” Lewis said. “That’s about it, man. Best one I’ve got is… I dunno, a telescope of some kind? That one’s still kicking just fine, the rest…”

“Right.” Kirk settled back. “I suppose there’s nothing to do now but wait.”

“You mind if I…?” Lewis indicated his pocket.

“What’s so fascinating about that damn thing?”

“See for yourself, bro.”

Lewis dug out the Huh again and handed it over. Kirk sighed, and inspected it.

The Huh really was nothing more than a metal ball that fit well in his hand. He turned it over, looking for any sign of adornment, finding none.

He turned it over again, puzzling over it. Why should something so small be so fascinating to Lewis? It was just… smooth. What mysteries could what looked and felt for all the world like a big ball-bearing possibly hold?

No matter what angle he inspected it from, it was so round and so uniform in appearance. It managed the strange trick of being metallic and perfectly, featurelessly smooth, but yet it reflected nothing. He knew he was turning it over - he could feel the friction on his fingers and palm - but it seemed to hang motionless, an anomaly in his hands, as if it wasn’t moving, but the rest of the universe was.

Lewis snatched it out of his hands. “DUDE!”

“What? What?”

“You’ve been staring at it for like five minutes, bro.”

“Nonsense, I only just-” Kirk glanced at the timepiece and stopped mid-sentence. Nearly twelve Ri had gone past. “…I could have sworn…?”

“Nah man, you zoned the fuck out. Like, way worse than I do.”

Kirk shook his mane, trying to shake off a lingering feeling that he could understand what was going on if he just held the Huh some more. “Can I look at…? No, what am I saying? Lock that thing away!”

“Dude, it’s just another drug. You’re not used to it, that’s all.”

“Lewis. It’s dangerous.”

“For you maybe!”

“Humans have more sensitive neural structures than my species, you know that!”

“Maybe, but I’m the one who heard you and stopped when you said stop, man. You didn’t even hear me!”

“What in the hell are you two arguing about?”

Julian looked back and forth between them as he hauled himself into the flight deck. Lewis simply handed him the Huh.

Julian frowned at it. “You’re arguing over this?”

“Just… have a look at it man. Turn it over.”

“What, this thing? It’s just… I mean… well…”

Julian tilted his head back and forth and frowned at the object in his hands as he turned it over a few times, then blinked and shook it off. “What about it?”

Lewis aimed a triumphant smirk at Kirk. “See?”

“That proves nothing. It still mesmerised him, too.”

“Yeah, but only for like… seconds!” Lewis protested, and knocked on Julian’s upper arm. “Right?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Julian looked back up from the ball. “I dunno, that’s kinda weird. Maybe we shouldn’t be messing with it.”

“Why?”

Julian’s expression was patient in a ‘you’re being kinda dumb’ way. “Well, I mean… we are investigating why ancient species go extinct…” he pointed out.

Lewis paused “…Ah. Yeah. Right.” He frowned at the Huh. “Okay, yeah, maybe lock that thing up somewhere.”

“Allison can look after it.” Kirk decided.

“Good call.” Julian agreed.

“Don’t let her study it. We don’t want its keeper to be under its spell as well.”

Lewis scoffed. ”‘Under its spell’? What is this thing, a fucking Palantir?”

“You know what I mean.” Kirk replied, patiently. “It’s clearly affecting and influencing us somehow: best to put it in the care of somebody who is as-yet unaffected and uninfluenced.”

“Aside from being beaten around the head with it.” Julian noted. “Right.” He took his T-shirt off and knotted it around the Huh.

“Swole as fuck, dude. I’m ‘mirin, no homo.” Lewis snarked, earning a middle finger from Julian in response to the old meme.

“When are we landing, anyway?” Julian asked.

“When I know, you’ll know dude.” Lewis assured him. “Soon, trademark.”

Kirk made an interrogative noise. “Trade-?”

“Old in-joke. Nevermind, dude.”

Julian and Kirk shared a glance that they had shared many a time over Lewis, then Julian shrugged. “…Right. I’ll, uh, go give this to Allison then.”

Allison gave him a sly grin and an appraising up-and-down when she answered the door, despite her obvious tiredness. “Damn, Julian.” she drawled. “You know how to make a girl feel better.”

He stroked a strand of blonde hair tidily behind her ear and they shared a little kiss. “Sorry, this is business.” he handed over the shirt. “Can you lock that up? Don’t look at what it’s got wrapped up in it.”

She frowned at it. “Sure, but you wanna explain why?”

“It’s the Huh. If you study it, it seems to just… fascinate you. We thought it’d be a good idea to leave it in your care seeing as it hasn’t affected you yet. Until we know what it is and if it’s related to the OmoAru dying out, you know?”

“I follow.” She took the object and vanished into her room to lock it away as requested. “You want the shirt back?”

“I’ll just print another one.”

“Coulda just printed a bag for it, you know?” Allison pointed out. She reappeared at the door and leered at him. “Not that I’m complaining about you turning up at my door shirtless.”

“It was easier this way.” He shrugged.

She made an appreciative noise. “Mmm, works for me. Just don’t let Xiù see you, she’ll catch fire.”

“You think?”

“Girl’s had a five year dry spell, and… call it a hunch, I don’t think she was getting any before then, either.”

He leaned against the door frame, folding his arms. “And how long’s your dry spell been?” he asked, enjoying the way she looked down at his upper arms and started to breathe a little quicker.

“Too damn long.”

“Just say the word.” He grinned.

“I told you, Julian, we’re not having sex.”

“There’re alternatives to sex.” he said, slipping his hand around her lower back and pulling her out of the room slightly, pelvis to pelvis.

She met his gaze with a cocky smile, draping her arms over his shoulders. “Got something in mind, Etsicitty?”

He glanced up and down the quarters deck to make sure that they were alone then leaned in and murmured “I know my ABCs…”

She laughed, but bit her lip and took another good look at him. “Mister ‘Six Years Alone’ knows that trick, huh?”

Julian’s confidence stalled and entered a tailspin. “Well, uh… I know of it…”

Allison giggled, but her lip-bite intensified. She checked up and down the deck herself, and then grabbed his belt buckle and pulled him into her room.

“Alright, Mister Smooth. Show me.”

“Well this is fucking boring…”

Kirk shook his mane in irritation. Lewis always got restless when he had nothing to do. “How long until the sandstorm abates?”

“Told you dude, weather sats are fried. Could be five minutes, could be five months, could be there’s a second storm five hours behind this one. I’ve got a bot watching out for a working sat.”

“So, you’re not actually doing anything right now?

“Oh, don’t say it dude…”

Kirk snorted at him. “An hour’s exercise every day, Lewis. You biologically need it”

“Like fuck I do…” Lewis grumbled, but he stood up anyway, stretching and groaning as his spine popped in three places.

“You see? Your species isn’t meant to sit still for long periods.”

“Hey, I’m going, jeez…”

Shipboard gear was gym clothing anyway, so he didn’t need to bother with changing until after he was all sweaty, so that was one upside.

The second upside to today’s gym session turned out to be Xiù, stretching against the wall to the point that her ankle was higher than her head and damn was that an easy sight for the eyes. He picked the multigym and sat down, less interested in doing his mandatory workout properly than he was in having a good view.

“Shouldn’t you warm up properly?” she asked.

“This is a warm-up.” he replied, setting the resistance-based machine to its lowest setting. “I fucking hate exercise…”

“Yeah?” She grimaced slightly as she hugged her leg and held it as close to her torso as she could for a three-count.

“You can’t tell me you enjoy that shit? That looks uncomfortable as fuck.”

“This bit sucks.” she agreed. “But it stops me from aching all over when I’m done.”

“This going to be your regular exercise slot?” He asked as she changed legs. He’d make a mental note if it was.

“No, I usually do mine - rrrgh - before breakfast.”

Well that killed it. Exercise might be bearable if he had a gym-buddy like Xiù, but the only known force in the galaxy that could drag Lewis out of bed that early in the morning was a quarter of a pig, a gallon of coffee, and waffles with enough syrup to launch a yacht on. He hauled down on the bar in what he thought was a preacher curl. “So why’re you here now?” He asked.

“I was going to go back to my room and listen to my messages.” Xiù said. “But… um… Allison’s room is next to mine and, uh…” Her face went a brilliant scarlet. “Never mind.”

“Hey, what?”

“Julian’s in there…”

Lewis blinked. “No shit? Shit, did they get loud?”

Damn the girl could blush. If there’d been a world championship, Xiù would have taken the gold, easy. By incinerating the competition with her glow. “Little bit.” she squeaked the words in a way that suggested they were understatement.

She dropped her leg back down and bounced on her toes a few time. Lewis lowered his head slightly to give the impression that he was working the machine, hoping to ogle without being caught ogling.

“Uh, you’re… not doing that right.” she pointed out after a few seconds.

Lewis just shrugged. “You grab the thing, you pull on the thing, right?”

“Hǎo shāng xīn…” she muttered. “No wonder you hate exercise.”

“You saying I don’t enjoy it because I’m doing it wrong?”

She beckoned with one hand. “Come on, get up. I’ll show you.”

Lewis shrugged and did so. “Okay, what are we doing?”

“Taiji.”

“Tai Chi? I thought that was for, like, old people in the park!”

“It keeps you fit and strong.” she said.

“Moving all slow? Pull the other one.”

She rolled her eyes. “Copy me.”

Lewis snorted, but did so to the best of his ability, imperfectly mimicking the slow sweep of her arms and feet. His muscles started to burn within seconds. “What the shit…?”

She paused mid-motion, at the most awkward spot - he felt like he was about to fall over. His leg was shaking from trying to hold him up. “You’re still doing it wrong.” she said. “Move your right foot back a little and try to balance your weight between both feet.”

Lewis grunted and shoved his foot back a bit and the precarious feeling and shake both vanished. The burn in his muscled faded a little. “Hey, what…?”

“Now you’re doing it right.”

“Okay… That’s cool, but… no pain no gain, right?”

“My ballet teacher used to say that being strong is no good if you’re wasting half that strength with bad form.” Xiù said.

“I… guess?”

She laughed. “I had this trouble with my brother Wei. Uh… it’s like if you have a really fancy, shiny new computer but you’re running an old game on it. Most of that power gets wasted. Follow me?”

Understanding dawned. “Oh! I get you!”

Xiù started moving again. “It works both ways.” she said. “If you do it right it feels easier but you’re actually getting the most out of it. Doing it wrong feels harder and doesn’t do as much for you.”

Lewis was surprised to find that he was actually enjoying himself, and not just because of the company. Xiù was a patient teacher, happy to go at his pace, and the way she explained what they were doing drove home a point he had hitherto missed - that exercise didn’t have to be dumb, mindless repetition. That there was room for using your brain in there as well, thinking about it. Physical intelligence.

Maybe he had a reason to get out of bed early, now…

“Fascinating. I wonder what relevance it has to our search?”

Vedreg didn’t fit in the flight deck, but the corridor outside was capable of unfolding a bench from the deck for him to rest on, and it was from this that he was conversing with Kirk, sipping a surprisingly small glass of water considering his mass.

“Best not to speculate ahead of our evidence.” Kirk cautioned. “Lewis could be right, it could just be a drug of some kind.”

“True, though the whole concept of a drug was a completely foreign one to me prior to the arrival of humanity.”

“Likewise, and if ever there were fields where we were likely to learn of their existence, customs and legal representation aboard a major trade station would be them, even if they were perfectly legal.”

“And yet the OmoAru have been in decline since before the human World Wars.” Vedreg noted. “Tell me, do you think it a plausible possibility?”

“All too plausible.” Kirk shivered. “Even with that idea in mind, that this could be the object responsible for the decline and fall of their civilization, I still want to go down to Allison’s quarters and ask her for another look, and I was only exposed to its effects for a few minutes.”

“And Lewis and Julian?”

Kirk turned and checked the tracking systems for a second. “Lewis is in the gym with Xiù, and appears to be rather happy about it.” he said. “Julian has… not left Allison’s quarters yet, though I expect that’s just sex.”

Vedreg pig-snorted a Guvnurag chortle, pulsing hyacinth. “So matter-of-fact.” he commented.

“Why shouldn’t I be? I have no reason to be squeamish about the sexuality of another species, especially one so driven by it as humans are.” he glanced at the monitor where Xiù was correcting Lewis’ posture. “And Gaoians.” he added.

A curious cocktail of intellectual pink and uncertain blue swept up Vedreg’s body. “She’s not Gaoian.” he pointed out.

“Biologically? No.” Kirk agreed. “But concepts we have traditionally considered - for good reason - to be absolutes, appear to be more fluid for humans. Gender, mating proclivities…Species - purely as a mental and cultural construct - is on that list.”

“How can species be a fluid concept?”

Kirk just shrugged. It wasn’t a native gesture to Rrrrtktktkp’ch, and he knew that Vedreg was astute enough to get that subtle point. “It’s all visible in Xiù’s file, if you know what to look for.” he said. “There are a lot of… transition zones in her life. Places where she has straddled two things that would quite reasonably seem to be separate. They’re quite obvious from the elevated perspective that I enjoy, but humans have remarkable blind spots about their own motives and experiences.”

“Do they indeed?” The translation gave Vedreg a wry, ironic tone.

Kirk snorted, catching the thrust of Vedreg’s subtle jab. “I know who I am.” he asserted, and pointed at the screen with his mechanical arm. “They don’t.”

“And is that what draws you to them?”

“What draws me to them is that they’ve got to become somebody, and I want to make sure that said somebody can coexist with my own people.”

Vedreg rumbled, and a dark pink, almost purple, showed itself on his body.

“Suppose the Hierarchy are right.” he said, suddenly. “Suppose that’s not possible. What then?”

“Then by helping them escape the quarantine I’ve doomed my own species and several others.” Kirk said. “But I’ll fight to the last to prove that the Hierarchy are wrong.”

“Good. Then I think it’s time I put you in touch with Six.”

“Allahu Akbar.”

Amir was standing in the middle of the common area, barefoot and wearing clean clothes, addressing a little speck of blue holographic light that was hovering a few meters in front of him.

He lowered his hands gently onto his thighs and spoke again. The words were quiet, but clear - Xiù could only hear him because the rest of the ship was quiet.

“Subhaanak-Allaahumma, wa bihamdika, wa tabaarakasmuka, wa ta’aalaa jadduka, wa laa ilaaha ghayruka.”

She turned to Lewis and whispered. “What’s he doing?”

“Salat.” Lewis replied, quietly. “Five times a day. It’s, like, super important to him, so I just let him get it out his system.”

”…I’d forgotten.”

“Forgotten?”

“Prayer. I forgot that people even do things like…” Xiù indicated Amir, who was now bent at the waist, muttering something. “…this.”

“He’s always done this.” Lewis replied. “Had me program that little light for him. It points towards Earth.”

Xiù stared at it. “That’s where Earth is?”

“Yep.”

“How far?”

“Uh… as, like, the crow flies?” Lewis tapped on a wall console and pulled up the navigation display. “Looks like… about sixty thousand light years.” He tapped something, and nodded. “Give or take a couple thousand.”

”…how long would it take if we flew there right now?”

Lewis looked upwards and his lips moved as he performed some mental calculations. “About… roughly, uh… seven weeks? Bit more than? But we wouldn’t be going as the crow flies.”

“Why not?”

“Well, A: the galactic core’s in the way. Black holes, exploding stars, radiation, really bad hair days. Can’t go that way. B: Interstellar dust and gas leaves a charge on the hull. Let it build up too much and eventually… ZAP!”

Xiù jumped, and Amir shot an annoyed glance in their direction. Lewis raised an apologetic palm at him.

Xiù swallowed “Zap?” she squeaked.

“Yep.” Lewis replied in a quieter tone. “Like a fuckin’ bug zapper, with you, me and the whole crew as the bugs.”

Xiù shivered.

“So, the ID and the CA both run these lane-clearing fleets who sweep a path through the dust, and that’s a spacelane.” Lewis continued. “They form a ring around the galaxy, through what’s called the ‘Temperate World Formation Zone’. By spacelane, we’re more like three months from home, and this is a way fast ship. Like, zoom! And you can really open up on those spacelanes, too.”

“How fast?”

“Dunno. Kirk reckons she can do upwards of a thousand kilolights on a really long stretch if we don’t mind wear and tear on the power core. A million times the speed of light. Usually we just cruise at about half that.”

“That’s…” Xiù wanted to say ‘fast’ but the numbers were purely academic, incomprehensible.

“Fastest ship in the galaxy, we reckon.” Lewis patted the Sanctuary proudly. “Course, we don’t need to fly back to Earth. We’ve got the Jump Array.”

“All that distance and I can just… step home, huh?”

“Pretty much.”

Xiù shook her head and watched as Amir turned his head left and right, speaking gently, and then stood.

“That’s going to be so weird…” she said.

It had been far, far too long since Allison had had the opportunity to enjoy the feeling of skin-on-skin contact along pretty much the whole length of her body.

It was made a little unusual by the smooth plastic of Julian’s prosthetic foot, but other than that…

Other than that, the sensations of his body warm and firm against her back and buttocks, of his right arm under her head and his right hand cupping her breast, of his left hand trailing lazily up and down the shallow, athletic curve of her flank were sublime. As were the kisses he occasionally placed on her shoulder.

As had been the… well. What Julian may have lacked in experience, he more than made up for in attentiveness and enthusiasm. The way he’d communicated, the way he’d eagerly let her teach him how to use his tongue, the way he’d listened to what she wanted as his fingers played inside her, the taste of his cock, the orgasms plural, his expressions, his moans and…

Generally the whole general everything.

Especially the way he’d kept his head and said “no” when she’d literally begged him to fuck her. That part, she really appreciated.

She became aware that his hand had stopped moving, and squirmed slightly to glance over her shoulder and check that he was still awake. He wasn’t.

She gave it a decent interval and then carefully extracted herself from her little-spoon position to go take care of the inevitable post-orgasmic ablutions, spin through the shower and put on some clean clothing. Sex - or the next best thing - had always left her energized and hungry.

Lewis and Amir were using the galley as well, and while Amir cleared his throat and pretended to not really notice her presence, Lewis’ grin bordered on being a leer.

Of course, on a ship this small there were no secrets, were there?

“Sleep well?” Lewis tried to make the question sound nonchalant and failed dismally.

“I had fucking amazing sex, thank you for asking.” she snarled, nettled. Lewis grimaced and focused on his food, ears going pink. “What’s that you’re eating?” she asked.

Xiù’s voice lofted out of the kitchen. “Zhēngyú!”

“Huh?”

“Fish!” Xiù poked her head out of the kitchen wearing the biggest smile Allison had yet seen on her. “This is amazing!” she enthused. “You have actual Earth food in here! I just had to make something.”

“You love to cook, huh?”

Xiù ducked her head sheepishly, apparently failing to notice that the gesture was a Gaoian one. “Always have.” she admitted. “Besides, you’ve got to do something to help the ration balls go down, right?”

“Too true.” Allison selected a shred of white fish-flesh from the plate and sampled it.

A second later, half the fish was on her plate, prompting a chuckle from Amir. “That was my reaction.” he said.

“Damn girl! Mff!”

Xiù giggled. “You like?”

Allison nodded, masticating enthusiastically, “Thiff iff amaffing.” she swallowed. “Best thing I’ve had in my mouth since, uh…”

Okay, now the awkwardness happened, especially when Lewis grinned like he was the Coyote and he’d just caught the Road Runner. “Half an hour ago? Yagh!”

His scream was in response to Allison rolling her eyes and dumping his glass of water in his lap. When Amir laughed, Lewis did the same to him, and a good-natured three-way scuffle broke out that only ended when Xiù exclaimed “Hey, watch the fish!”

The boys sheepishly helped straighten the table and then sloped off in search of dry clothes. Xiù snorted a little laugh. “Males,” she said. She apparently didn’t notice the mistake until Allison arched an eyebrow at her. “Uh…men! Boys! Ugh, damn it!”

”…You okay?”

“I’m… adjusting.” Xiù replied. “It’s so weird being around other humans again.”

“Spent too long with the raccoon people, huh?” Allison asked.

“I keep thinking in Gaoian.” Xiù said. “And thinking like a Gaoian.” She scowled. “I just said that in Gaoian!”

“You did? I didn’t… oh, right, the ship’s translator.”

“Yeah.” Xiù sat down and sampled some of the fish for herself, breaking into a broad smile. “Oooh, this is nice.” she purred. “No more pureed bug guts.”

“Uh, ew?!”

“Nava paste. It’s an ingredient.” Xiù explained. “It’s actually kinda nice but… yeah, ew.”

They shared a grin, which turned into Xiù apparently thinking of something and abruptly going pink.

“What?”

“Uh, nothing.”

“No, what?” Allison pressed.

“Just… wow. Sex. I’ve never…” The pink turned to a brilliant scarlet.

“Got taken before you had the chance, huh?”

Xiù nodded, and ate some of her fish. “It’s… Mama and Papa were always warning me off boys.” she said. “‘Wait for marriage, find a nice doctor or engineer. Chinese, of course.’ You know: Asian parents.” She laughed, and toyed with her food. “As if it’s the most special thing ever…”

“And the Gaoians?”

Xiù shrugged. “They were always very… matter-of-fact about it.” she said. “You always knew who had just arranged a mating contract and they were… very open about talking about it.”

“A contract?”

“Yeah.” Xiù wobbled her head. “Sounds cold doesn’t it?”

“Just a little.” Allison agreed.

“It’s not!” Xiù hastened to defend them. “Well… no, maybe it can be, a little. But with some of them you could see it was more like…”

She giggled at a memory. “There’s this one male, Regaari? He’s, like, Gaoian James Bond. Really cool, very handsome. So I’m told.”

“Hard to tell under all that fur.”

“I think the fur is what they look at.” Xiù shrugged. “I don’t really know. But even the mother-supreme was like ‘if I was younger…’”

Allison laughed. “Okay, so they’re not so cold after all.”

“No.” Xiù’s smile faded. “I just… wow. That’s an option now. I could… if I wanted, if I found… Wow.”

Allison put her fork down. “Honey, listen to me.” she said. “Julian and I took forever to sort our shit out, and we needed it. I’m telling you as a friend, you’re going to need time as well, or you’ll just wind up getting hurt.”

Xiù sighed. “You sound like Yulna…”

“I hope that’s a compliment?”

“Yeah, it is.” Xiù nodded. “You could always count on Momma Yulna to tell you what you needed to be told, even if you didn’t want to hear it.”

“Well damn, there goes my party-girl image.”

Their conversation ended with the return of the freshly-changed boys. Lewis immediately noticed the lingering traces of blush on Xiù’s face, but glanced at Allison, saw her expression, and clearly decided that discretion was the better part of dry pants.

“Sandstorm’s clearing.” he said instead. “We should be landing soon. There’s another storm about two days out though.”

“We’ll need to actually land this time, rather than hovering.” Amir said. “She’ll need to be properly battened down and anchored. Should take an hour or so.”

“I’ll… go wake Julian.” Allison stood. “You guys okay to clean up?”

“They can.” Xiù said firmly, folding her arms when Lewis and Amir protest “Hey, I cleaned up as I went, so there’s not much.”

“What are you going to do?” Allison asked, as the boys grumbled their way into the kitchen.

“I’ve got mail.”

There were, as Julian had said, some messages waiting for her. Four, to be exact - one each from Ayma, Regaari and the Mother-Supreme, and a letter from her family.

She opened the message from Giymuy first. The Mother-Supreme was seated at her desk, and gave a warm expression to the camera.

“Where to begin?” she asked, rhetorically.

“I think as a leader and politician, I am better placed to understand you than many others. The life of the Mother-Supreme shares with the life of a human Sister the factor that we will both always be outsiders, however much we are embraced. I have to think for all the females, and all the males too. That is not an instinct that comes naturally.”

“For you, however, I suspect the instinct is as natural as breath, and it is one that I think our species will need to learn to emulate if we are to thrive in interstellar society but… ah, forgive me. I’m rambling.”

“You are missed. I understand why you left our planet, and why you abandoned Ayma and Regaari, and I only refrained from asking you to stay because I knew it would be fruitless. Your protective instinct is as powerful as any Mother’s, and you have the insight to know when you yourself are the worst threat. I truly would have valued your counsel, but I would have valued it for the same reason that I could never have it.”

She paused, and changed tack a bit.

“There is a monument to Triymin, and all the other taken Gaoians now. I thought you would like to know that. The revelation of what her Mother did to “save” the other cubs has prompted much introspection, and something of a schism. We are all still Sisters of course, but… things have been difficult. There is something of a swell of opinion that welcoming you into the Clan was a mistake. Some Mothers who never met you are accusing you of having poisoned us with alien ideas. These are trying times for an old female.”

“Then again, they are trying times for a young female too, are they not? But you are strong enough to get through them, Sister Shoo. And you will always have a home on Gao. Remember that.”

Xiù was still mulling over the Mother-Supreme’s meaning when Sanctuary shook and a dull note rang throughout its decks, followed by Amir’s voice. “We’re landed. All hands outside to batten down.”

She stood up and let herself out, glad to have something to do. She really didn’t feel ready for the other messages yet.

The business of lashing down Sanctuary was a serious one. Huge though she was, and alien-tech thrusters that required no reaction mass notwithstanding, the realities of power-to-weight ratio still existed, and Sanctuary was designed to pull fierce acceleration even at sublight, relying on her giant core’s power output to keep the crew happy and healthy at 20G or more.

The result of that was that she was light for her size. In the high winds expected to come sweeping down the valley over the next few days, she would slide or even be picked up and thrown unless securely anchored.

Kirk, Lewis and Amir were on one side of the ship. Julian, Xiù and Allison on the other, firing cables across her hull using a modified kinetic-pulse weapon. One person to retrieve and hold the cable’s end, one person to crank it taut, the third to operate a compressed-gas gun which fired an anchoring peg into the bedrock, which Kirk had informed them would typically have been operated by a team of four armed with a lifter and a heavy stabilising frame.

Julian just carried it, leaning on it heavily to hold back the recoil. Each time it fired, the heavy ‘Chunk!’ sound it produced pulsed right through their bodies and produced a donut of airborne dust.

Xiù broke the silence after the third anchor was in and they’d found their rhythm. “So… Julian, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“I’ve never heard a surname like Etsicitty before…”

Julian laughed softly. “Not a lot of people have. It’s Navajo.”

“You’re Navajo?”

“Grampa is.” Julian shrugged it off. “I’m not.”

‘Chunk!‘

Allison hefted their line launcher, checked that her feet weren’t caught in a loop of cable, steadied herself and fired. The line described a graceful arc over Sanctuary’s back.

“How does that work?” she asked.

“Well Grampa went to prison for resisting the draft. When he got out he went to an anti-war protest where he met my Gramma and they settled in Clearwater county, Minnesota.”

There was a tug on the line, which meant that the other end was attached, so Xiù started to crank on it.

Julian grinned. “Think my Dad was a bit of an accident.” he confided. “And, y’know, interracial couple in the seventies, white girl and a ‘redskin’…” He waved a hand, dismissing the bigotry of yesteryear. “Dunno if things were a bit more relaxed by the time I came along, or if it was just, y’know, ‘Well, at least he’s HALF white…’”

There was a call on the radio. “Heads up!” and the line from the other side came over, bouncing in the dirt a few meters away. Allison retrieved it just as Julian set the gun and fired the next anchor into the rock.

‘Chunk!‘

“Grampa wanted me to learn his people’s ways but…” Julian shrugged, massaging the shock of the recoil out of his hands. “They’re his people, I guess. I’m not really Navajo myself, I don’t feel that…” he waved his hands. “I dunno.”

“Kinship?” Xiù suggested.

“Yeah, that’s it. The bond’s just not there for me.” They’d gone along to some kind of a nation… thing at one point, and what had struck Julian hard was that he’d felt like a white guy and had been largely treated as one. That had disappointed Gramp Etsi, but it had at least persuaded him to just let Julian be Julian.

“Doesn’t that make you feel sad?” Xiù asked.

“Why should it?” Julian asked. “Maybe I never went down to New Mexico with the old man to learn the ways of my ancestors or whatever but we still had a great time. He taught me hunting, camping, fishing… yeah. I enjoyed it, so I became a park ranger. I used to spend five days a week out in the North Country, keeping tabs on the wildlife. Deer, birds, fish, bears, you name it.” He shrugged, watching Xiù wind the crank. “Guess the Corti thought I was impressive because they snatched me up gear and all and stuck me on planet Nightmare.”

“And your Grandfather?” Xiù asked him.

“Still going.” Julian smiled fondly. “Same old Grampa, with his dungarees and his robusto premium cigars… pretty damn strong for an old man, too.”

Xiù decided that the line was taut enough and plucked it, producing a bass note. “Is that all of them?”

“That’s all of them. Just need to head topside and make sure they’re on top of the steel plates so they don’t cut into the pressure skin and heat dissipators. Care to join me?”

Xiù nodded, apparently pleased to be invited.

“I’m heading inside.” Allison said. “Kirk wanted the airlock seals tested and he can’t open the hatch himself.”

Julian snorted. “Fucking class five species…” he teased, and grabbed her round the waist for a quick, romantic kiss.

When it was done, Xiù was awkwardly looking at anything other than him or Allison..

“So, how do we get up top?” she asked as Allison slipped away and jogged off in the direction of the larboard airlock. Julian just turned and folded his arms, smiling faintly as he stood below the rungs recessed into the side of the ship until she noticed them.

”…Oh.”

It was an easy climb in Aru’s modest gravity, but Julian had never exactly been thrilled by heights. Sanctuary was classified as a modestly-sized luxury yacht, but that still translated to being forty meters above the ground at the top, buffeted by the eddies that were bouncing back and forth between the two sandstorms like a puppy unable to choose between two tennis balls.

Xiù seemed to be just as uncomfortable with the winds and altitude as he was. Moderate gravity or not, a fall from that height would kill, and when she held out a hand for him to help her balance he grabbed it without thinking.

Her hand was surprisingly hard and roughened from work. Different to Allison’s. Allison had plenty of grip strength, but her hands were softer, colder and her fingers were more slender. Xiù’s hand was warm, and unconsciously solid. Feminine, but sturdy.

He tried not to notice.

“So, uh… what about your mother’s side of the family?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the air currents, clearly wanting to bolster her own confidence or distract herself with conversation.

“Gran-gran was Ojibwe. She never talked much about my grandfather, ‘cuz he was, uh, never part of Mom’s life. All I know about him is he was Dutch…”

“How are your parents now?”

“Dad died of cancer when I was, like, six and Mom…left. Grampa and Gramma raised me.”

“Oh… I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Julian kicked a cable and gave a satisfied grunt when it didn’t move.

“Do you know where your mom is now?”

“Yeah. After Dad died she kinda helped his brother through it and…well, I’ve got two sisters in Holland I never met.” Julian shrugged. “She’s okay. But by the time she was ready to look after anyone again I was thirteen or so. Seemed easier just to stay with Grampa and Gramma.”

Xiù checked the cable nearest to her. “This one looks okay, I think…” she guessed. He nodded, trusting her judgement.

“What about your folks?” He asked her. “Five years is a long time, think they’ll have changed much?”

“I’d…” she hesitated, then gave him an embarrassed smile and a shrug, flicking wind-wild hair out of her face “…don’t know. I hope not.”

Julian nodded sympathy, but smiled. “I hope not too.” he said. “But… word of advice? You should probably brace yourself. Did you read your messages yet?”

She shook her head no. “Only one of them.”

“Cool. Well, you’ll have plenty of time while the sandstorm passes over.”

There was a lull in the wind and Xiù cautiously let go of his hand to straighten and look at the scenery. It was, admittedly, spectacular - the river was a malachite road, its forks and junctions winding down from distant brown mesas beneath a turquoise sky.

“Incredible.” she said, taking a step towards it. “We could almost be somewhere on Earth, couldn’t we?”

Julian nodded, though he wasn’t really listening: he was too busy admiring a completely different view. On autopilot, his mouth agreed with her. “We could, yeah.”

“Like… Monument Valley?”

She turned around and Julian realized where he’d been looking. So did she.

“Uh…” Mentally punishing himself, he took in the correct view this time while Xiù hastily turned her face back towards the landscape. Her ears were bright pink. “No, not like… Monument Valley’s more red, and there’s lots of green. This is more like… Argentina, maybe. More yellow and brown.” he said.

He checked the last cable. “And…” he cleared his throat. “…Uh, we’re as anchored as we’re ever gonna get, I reckon. May as well head indoors.”

Xiù just nodded without turning around.

Floundering for conversation, Julian hit on the first thing that came to mind. “It’s…my turn to cook tonight. You okay with a good steak?”

Xiù turned and gawped at him, blush forgotten. “Actual steak?” she asked. “Like… beef?”

“Yep, and I can’t cook anything else worth a damn, but my steaks? Oh, I can cook a steak alright.” Julian found his confidence again and grinned. “I can cook a damn good steak.”

“Wow.” Xiù said. “Uh… medium rare, please?”

“That’s how I take my steak too.” Julian agreed. “Anything else is-”

”-An insult to the cow.” Xiù finished for him.

They beamed at each other for a few seconds before the same thought struck both of them at once and they lapsed into simultaneous, mutual awkwardness.

“We should, uh-” she began.

”-get off this roof.” He finished.

“Yeah. Before the storm arrives.”

“Right. Don’t want to get blown off… uh… I mean-”

“No, uh… Well. No. Um…after you?”

Julian was right. His steak was amazing. But the real pleasure for hadn’t been in eating it, but in watching him make it.

It wasn’t an eye-candy moment. It was a human moment. Julian seemed to turn off some of his defenses in the kitchen, claiming it as his own, putting some music on and spinning around it in a slow but efficient bustle. He didn’t clean up after himself as he went, just dumped everything in the sink. It was a messy and male approach to food preparation but…

But no Gaoian would have ever listened to Breaking Benjamin, or nodded in time to the music, or sang along just loud enough for her to hear that he was singing along in a surprisingly good singing voice, punctuated by the sizzle of skillet and the clatter of plates and seasonings as he worked on his masterpiece.

“♪♪…Holding on too tight…breathe the breath of life… so I can leave this…♫“

“Look but don’t touch, girlfriend.”

Xiù jumped. Allison smiled at her. “He’s taken, remember?” She asked.

Xiù remembered to shake her head rather than shimmy it like Ayma. “That’s not it.” she said, which was a bit of a lie, but not much of one so it didn’t count.

Allison tilted her head. “What, then?”

“Just… Humans.”

“Hmm?”

“You, him, Lewis, Amir. The music, the kitchen, the food…Humans. Earth.”

Allison made an understanding noise and put an arm round her shoulder. “Making you homesick?”

“Actually… No. It makes me feel like… Like when I dreamed of home.”

She smiled at Allison and wiped away a tear. “This is what it felt like.”

In the kitchen, Julian’s playlist had changed tracks and took a dizzying detour into Johnny Cash. “♫…Well he must thought that it was quite a joke, and it got a lot o’ laughs from a lot o’ folks. Seems I had to fight my whole life through…♪“

Allison directed a sly smirk at Julian as he picked up the volume a bit. “He’s got an eclectic taste in music, doesn’t he?”

“Very varied.” Xiù agreed, covering her smile.

“Come on, help a girl set the table?”

A minute later, Xiù dropped the knives from giggling at the enthusiastic bellow of “MY NAME IS SUE! HOW DO YOU DO?!” that drifted out of the kitchen.

In the dark and quiet of the night cycle, Sanctuary creaked like a clipper at sea as her shields deflected the pelting sand outside. From without, the view would almost certainly have been spectacular. Forcefields tended to react colorfully with airborne particulates, spitting and sparking as the charge built and grounded itself, glowing all the colours of the rainbow and others besides.

Inside, the only hint of the raging outside forces was the occasional whine as the power systems intelligently redirected the power reserves and increased the reactor output to match them, and the odd structural creak as the shield emitters mounted on Sanctuary’s outer skin transmitted part of the huge forces they were emitting into the ship’s structural components.

In theory, those forcefields were more than up to the task of keeping Kirk’s ship securely in contact with the ground, but the humans always seemed to feel more comfortable with steel than with photons even though, technically, a forcefield was built to duplicate exactly the kind of electrostatic forces that gave steel cables or bulkheads their strength.

Still. Redundancy didn’t hurt and if it set the paranoid Deathworlders’ minds at ease…

Rrrrtktktkp’ch really didn’t need much sleep next to most species. While humans took a solid six to eight hours a night, and the Guvnurag needed a whole day every three or four days, Rrrrtk got by on quick, regular power naps. In fact, the Domain’s standard unit of time known as the Rik was derived from the average duration of the Rrrrtk sleep phase, though nowadays given a standard definition based on… something to do with hydrogen, if Kirk remembered correctly.

Not being able to summon random little facts like that at will was one of the few things he was finding he missed about having cerebral implants. He certainly hadn’t noticed any decline in his logical faculties or powers of recall since their removal. Not for the big stuff. Maybe mental mathematics was taking a while longer, and he wasn’t able to recall trivia, but the important activity seemed mostly unhindered.

The problem was that the disparity between his sleeping habits and those of his crew left long stretches of the night where the only available company was Vedreg. Kirk and Vedreg may have been old friends, but theirs was a relationship built on mutual esteem and shared goals, rather than actually having much in common as people.

Tonight, however, he had something to do, and was glad to be left alone to do it. The less his friends and crewmates knew about some of his plans, the better.

By Rrrrtk standards, the engineering access conduit which ringed the “poles” of Sanctuary’s reactor was a crawlspace, tight and claustrophobic. Vedreg would simply not have been able to fit into it. Humans, Gaoians and Corti, on the other hand, could have strolled down it, though they would have needed a stepladder to access some of the systems that lined the hemispherical conduit’s ceiling.

Kirk stooped underneath an environmental duct, stepped fastidiously over a neat bundle of high-capacity data cables, squeezed between two computer racks, and finally found what he was after at the apex of the conduit, immediately in front of the first of his ship’s seven huge sublight thrusters. It was mounted in a little pedestal which doubled as a superconducting power bus of peerless capacity, designed to shunt as much power as the huge reactor could generate straight into the seemingly innocuous little oblong of sealed technology that was Sanctuary’s Corti Black-Box Drive.

Without knowing how to open one, tampering with a Black-Box drive was a recipe for it blowing up in the would-be opener’s face, and not in a small way, either: The Corti had an unsubtle approach to copyright protection.

Kirk, however, now knew how to open it.

Fabricating the necessary tool had been trivial in fact. All it did was deliver a permutation of extremely precise electrical currents to thirty-two of the drive’s three thousand microscopic terminals.

That set of possible combinations was already absurdly vast all by itself, but when one factored in the need to deliver excruciatingly precise electrical currents to that correct combination, and the fact that the combination and required currents were changed periodically as a safeguard against simple dissemination of the information, then a value emerged that made the total quantity of subatomic particles in the whole of the visible universe seem utterly trivial.

Correctly guessing the combination was effectively impossible - If an enterprising scientist were to fire a neutrino in an entirely random direction and then guess at which specific atom it would eventually hit, then a successful prediction would still be tens of thousands of orders of magnitude more likely than a correct guess at the black box combination.

No wonder it had supposedly never been opened by an unauthorized user.

With the right key, however, the two sides shot outwards on rails with a snap! and the top hinged open.

Kirk reflected wryly that if life in the galaxy had taught him anything by now, it was that working technology simply never had shiny special-effects deep inside them. The occasion demanded a bottled singularity pulsing ominously inside a glass cylinder, or some other such wondrous artefact. Instead, he was looking at a circuit board much like any other. It was foolish to be disappointed.

Nevertheless, it felt like something of an anticlimax.

The modifications he read off a standard tablet computer were the work of minutes. Connect, load, copy-paste, run. Close the box, remove the key.

Back in the comfort of his quarters, he settled onto the bed, folding his legs underneath him, and bade the room load a text chat interface and connect via the newly established protocol under his name.

++Syst§m N♦tif\>c■t?♦n: Us§r ???? h■s j♦in§d th§ <error: undefined exception>++

++Welcome User ????++

++0025++: This is getting ridiculous. That’s the second one this cycle.

++0007++: Working on it.

++0034++: Without apparent progress.

++0007++: By all means you are welcome to volunteer for debugging software that has existed longer than you have. For now, I’ll just kick this spurious “user” again.

++System Notif■■■■■■■ <Error>

<Error>

<Redirecting: Subnet Mask ????????? Port ?????>

++System Notification: Welcome to the Cabal.++

++????++: By “working on it” I hope you mean that you draw closer to a solution that will allow our meatspace guests to connect directly to the Cabal. Every time one of them logs into the primary relay is a potential security failure.

++????++: So long as “Seven” remains in charge of it…

++????++: I know for a fact that Fifty is working on the problem themselves.

++????++: Shouldn’t we be welcoming our guest?

++????++: You’re right. Please forgive us, ah… “Jim”.

Kirk snorted, amused.

++SELF++: Think nothing of it. I don’t wish to be a liability.

++????++: In which case the fewer the occasions on which you connect to this channel the better, at least until we can complete the task of securing it.

++SELF++: That seems reasonable. Please, brief me.

He sat back, and let the explanations roll in.

School is exactly as Xiù remembers it. But… isn’t she a little old to be back at school?

No, of course not. She’s sixteen. She must be sixteen because if she’s not sixteen, then she wouldn’t be in school. QED.

There aren’t many people around, though. They must all be in class. She’d better hurry.

Xiù’s locker is… number ninety-nine. She remembers that fact quite proudly. Top row, second from the right, in the long corridor near the changing rooms. She doesn’t remember walking to it, but there it is. She opens it, and grabs her bag.

It bites her.

Sharp teeth, so many teeth, too many. She flails and beats the Hunter around the head with her free hand, trying to escape. It emerges from the locker like a foul magic trick, like a blasphemous birth, but she manages to get her hand free and run.

Why is she running? Stupid question, this is a Hunter! It wants to EAT her!

But…she’s killed dozens of Hunters, hasn’t she?

Still she runs, though. Running, running, running, feet pounding the tiles, her hair streaming out behind her.

Except, she isn’t scared. This isn’t a chase, this is just her morning jog. She isn’t at school any more, she’s running along the waterfront in Stanley Park, enjoying the cool breeze.

There is a sculpture of a man sitting on the rock out in the water. He looks familiar, somehow. He winks at her and tosses her a tiny object, which she catches.

It’s a metal ball, about the size of an apple. Somehow, looking at it, she knows that the world is going to end, but that she can stop it from happening if she just-

She realised that she was dreaming, and woke up.

‘Morning’ was a concept that Corti, Gaoians and Humans held in common, and which had become enshrined - thanks to the Corti - in interstellar timekeeping. It had created a fortunate rhythm to the day that Xiù had been able to exploit, and she had grown into an early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine that was totally at odds with the nocturnal Vancouver nightlife of five years ago, and more in line with something her mother would have approved of. She was up well before everyone else.

Amir, it seemed, was an early riser too. He was just getting up from his prayer mat as she emerged from the gym into the common area.

“Five times a day, huh?” she asked.

He paused in tidying the prayer mat away. “Is that a problem?” he asked, proving that getting up early didn’t automatically make you a morning person.

“No! Just… making conversation.”

Amir softened and nodded, pinching his nose. “Sorry.” he apologised. “I’m too used to Lewis bickering with me over it, and he’s up early today for some reason.”

“Bickering?”

Amir nodded. “He keeps trying to deconvert me. It’s… obnoxious.”

“Oh.”

He puffed a little laugh out of his nose. “Let me guess. You think this is strange?” he gestured to the prayer mat.

“I… don’t want to argue with you, we only just met.” Xiù protested.

“Seriously, though.”

She hesitated. “I’d… kinda forgotten that prayer is even a thing.” she admitted.

He scoffed. “Right. The galaxy full of atheists strikes again…”

“Are you always this grouchy in the morning?”

Amir blinked, while Xiù folded her arms and channeled Momma Yulna, waiting for the verbal slap upside his head to do its job.

“Okay.” he said, finally. “You’re right, sorry. Lewis just… never mind, I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

“No.” Xiù agreed, but smiled. “But it’s okay. Galaxy full of atheists?”

“Ah, that’s just Lewis’ new argument.” Amir dismissed it. “‘If nothing else out there believes in God then…’ blah, blah, you get the picture.”

“Doesn’t that make you wonder, though?” Xiù asked.

“Nope. Why should it? Look at all the gifts we have. We’re faster, stronger, smarter, tougher, more creative…” He turned to her. “Seriously, what’s Gaoian pop culture like?”

“Pop culture?”

“Yeah! Do they have… sports teams, rock stars? Reality TV? How about just commercial radio? Is there a Gaoian Banksy, or Coca-Cola? What about their phones? What’s their, uh, their version of iPhone versus Android? Do they have somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or… who’s the Gaoian answer to Imran Khan?”

“I don’t… Who?”

Amir wound down a little. “He’s a… cricketer. A famous one, from Pakistan.” He explained

Xiù thought about it. “They have… most of that.” she said, though admittedly she had never really absorbed much of it. Perhaps the part of Gaoian pop-culture she was most familiar with was an edutainment show for little cubs called ‘Yen Ni Wo!’, which was more-or-less the Gaoian equivalent of Sesame Street, minus the muppets. She’d learned half her Gaoian from watching that show with Myun and the cubs, though apparently it had left her with a childlike way of speaking for some time.

“Well, they’re doing better than most of the aliens then.” Amir remarked. “But I bet it’s not as rich as ours, or as varied.”

“If you say so.” Xiù said neutrally, too offended to argue with him.

“That’s my point though.” Amir continued. “Look at all the gifts we have. All the advantages. All the blessings. To me, it’s obvious.”

Xiù was rescued from having to come up with a response to that by Lewis sticking his head through the hatch, looking frazzled and sleep-deprived. “Hey, Xiù, could you give me a hand?”

“Sure!” she sprang to her feet, gave Amir a little wave and a smile, and joined him. “What’s up?”

“Well, I could do with some more exercise advice, but I was mostly just rescuing you.” Lewis whispered, once certain Amir was out of earshot. “Don’t get him started on that shit, seriously.”

“He was okay.” she said, earnestly. “He’s just…passionate.”

“Trust me, you give him the chance and he’ll go way past passionate and into downright fuckin’ intense. ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’, right?”

Xiù glanced back toward the common area. Amir had sat down and from his expression was plainly pissed off at himself. “Maybe.” she agreed. “And… wow, you quoted that correctly.”

“Hey, I’m not here to be the ship’s mascot!” Lewis smirked. “No false modesty, I’m, like, one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. I know Hamlet. Not really my scene, but I still know it.”

Xiù blushed a little. “Sorry, I didn’t meant to imply…”

“It’s cool. Where I went to school, pretending to be dumb was a survival strategy.” Lewis reassured her. “But yeah, it’s been a touchy subject for him this last week or so. Used to be it never came up. Now he gets all sharp real easy. Dunno if that means he’s getting more devout or if he’s having a crisis but it’s best to just, like, avoid the subject entirely.”

They reached the flight deck, where Lewis’ usual nest was a riot of articles, videos and blogs on Tai Chi.

”…You have Internet?!” Xiù exclaimed.

“We’ve got, like, a backup copy of part of the Internet.” Lewis said. “Godzillabytes of it. Pretty cool, even if it’s a couple months out of date.”

“But you’re researching what we did yesterday?”

“Yeah!” Lewis said, dropping into his chair. “I actually enjoyed myself, which is, like, a major first for me.”

“I’m glad.” Xiù replied.

“I have a good teacher.” Lewis told her, and grinned when she smiled at the compliment. “I got up early to try and join you in the gym, but then…” he waved a hand at one of his screens. “Looks like something came up overnight.”

Xiù looked at what he’d indicated, seeing only incomprehensible numbers and text. “What did?”

“Not sure, TBH,” He said, actually pronouncing the abbreviation letter by letter. He turned to that display and dragged it onto the big screen front and center. “I’ve got all kinds of monitor programs and bots installed in Sanctuary. This one logs power draw on the FTL.” He poked a finger at the screen, which flashed blue where his digit passed through the hologram. “I won’t bore you with, like, the Starfleet technobabble here, but TL;DR? Those numbers are the wrong numbers.”

“Wrong how?”

“Couple hours of sporadic power draw, starting in the middle of the night. Not big draw, but we’re landed and powered down, the FTL shouldn’t be drawing a dang thing.”

“Shouldn’t we… go check it or something?”

“No point. I’ve got the full diagnostic right here.” he waved at a screen. “Piece of shit alien engineering doesn’t log half of what it should, though. My bots log everything, but the modules themselves? Eh…” He shrugged. “All I know is, there’s nothing actually wrong with it, it was just drawing power at oh-dark-thirty last night when it shouldn’t.”

“Still…”

“Yeah. Maybe. If it keeps happening, I guess. It could be the sandstorm for all I know, though.” He dismissed the program. “I’ll keep an eye on it. I should probably go do that exercise while I’m still fired up for it.”

“Give it a bit. I need to go shower and then I’m making pancakes for breakfast.”

Lewis perked up and imitated Homer Simpson. “Mmmm… Pancakes…”

She giggled. “I’ll give you a lesson afterward, if you want?”

Lewis looked like he’d been given an early birthday present. “Sounds good!” he agreed. “See you at breakfast.”

“See you at breakfast.” she smiled and left him, pleased with herself for navigating a whole conversation in English with human body language and no screwups.

Today was definitely off to a good start.

The sandstorm took nearly a week to clear. They had been, for Lewis, six very pleasant days. There was still the unsolved mystery of the power draw on the FTL, but that had only happened once, and came in a distant second place to spending time with Xiù.

Julian, however, had developed the annoying habit of warning him off. “Bad idea.” he was saying, for the third time that conversation. “Seriously.”

“You said yourself, you’d like her to stay on this ship and help out, dude.” Lewis pointed out.

“I would.” Julian agreed. “But she wants to go home.”

“So, maybe if she’s got somebody here she’ll…”

“What, you want to make her change her mind?” Julian snorted.

“Everyone does that to everyone, bro. That’s what a fucking conversation is.”

Julian paused, tried to formulate a retort, and then aborted the attempt with a shake of his head.. “…Whatever. It’s still a bad idea.”

Lewis choked out an exasperated noise. “Why?” he asked.

“Damaged goods. Xiù’s been without healthy human contact for five years, man.”

“Great! Healthy human contact’s what she needs then, right?”

“Healthy human contact, yes.”

“Asking her out is healthy, dude! Good for the self-esteem!”

“Whose, yours or hers?” Julian asked pointedly.

Lewis folded his arms and frowned at him. “Wh-? Hers! Both! It’s human contact dude, I thought you said she needed that.”

“Yeah, but…” Julian flapped a hand as he hunted for the best way to phrase his thoughts. “Drip-fed. Gradually. You don’t throw a hypothermia patient straight into one of those really hot Russian saunas.”

“Dude, it’s not like being asked on a date is fucking hard mode. She says yes, it’s just gonna be movie night and dinner anyway, that’s about all you CAN do on this ship. She says no, cool. I can handle being turned down.”

“Lewis, I spent six years alone, I know what I’m-”

“Xiù didn’t!” Lewis interrupted him. “She had the Gaoians and the aliens.”

“They don’t count.”

Lewis looked offended. “Aliens don’t count? Kirk of all people doesn’t count, huh?”

Julian stood his ground. “I like Kirk, I respect him. I’ve followed him through a lot. But he’s not human, Lewis. Alien company’s nice, but humans need humans, and it takes a while to adjust when you’ve gone without for that long.”

“She’s adjusted to Allison just fine.”

“Allison’s a woman.”

“Sexist, dude.”

“No, listen.” Julian was getting irritated now. “She spent those years with Gaoians, and… you’ve seen her, a lot of the time she slips back into their language, their expressions and mannerisms. She’s gone native, man. And given what I know of Gaoian society, that’ll have primed her to connect better with women than with men.”

“Guys…”

“Sounds like a fucking good reason to give her some human contact, then.” Lewis protested, his own hackles raising.

“Normal human contact! Slowly!”

“Guys.”

“Being asked out is normal!”

“GUYS!””

Lewis’ arms paused mid-outraged flail, and both of them turned to Amir, who had turned in his chair to break up the argument.

“Lewis: Listen to the man. Julian: stop being jealous about Xiù.” he said.

Julian swayed as if he’d been punched. “…Jealous?” he asked.

”…Okay, that was maybe the wrong choice of-” Amir began, but was interrupted.

“Yeah, jealous. Overprotective. Acting like you think you’ve got a right to choose for her.” Lewis stabbed. “And you look at her pretty much the same way you do Allison, dude.”

Amir pinched his nose “Lewis…”

Julian gaped at him. “I- What!? No I don’t!”

“Leave some women for the rest of us!”

“Leave some-? How fucking medieval are you?” Julian stabbed back.

“Julian…”

“You’re the one who thinks he’s got a shot at a fucking harem, dude!”

Julian’s fist bunched and his tone got dangerous rather than outraged. “You wanna watch-”

“GUYS!”

Julian and Lewis paused again. The moment of tension rang like a dropped knife, and then Julian’s hand uncoiled and his shoulders dropped as he exhaled. “Sorry, Lewis.” he said. “That was…”

“Yeah, that wasn’t cool of me either, dude. I’m sorry.”

The two men cooled off in silence for an awkward minute until Lewis added. “But you do stare at her, dude.”

Julian glanced back down the bridge access corridor to make sure Allison wasn’t somehow there to overhear him, then nodded, sheepishly. “It’s…She’s got a shared experience with me, you know? We’ve both been alone for a long time. It’s nice to have somebody around here who really knows what that’s like.”

“In fairness, we all look at her. She’s bloody gorgeous,” Amir pointed out.

“Right,” Julian nodded curtly. “And don’t think I don’t notice when you two check out Allison, either.”

“Ah, come on dude,” Lewis said. “There’s a difference between that and bein’ a horndog. You don’t just check her out, you full-blown stare and it’s not fair on your girlfriend.”

“Okay, okay!” Julian put up his hands defensively. “Just…”

“Nobody’s in control of their lust, Lewis,” Amir opined. “Not really.”

“D’you mind not calling it ‘lust’?” Julian asked, irritated. “That makes it sound so…”

“That’s what it is, though. Infatuation, if you prefer. And Lewis is right, it’s not fair on either of them.”

“It’s not exactly fucking fair on me!” Julian objected. “I’m not doing this deliberately!”

“She stares at him too, Lewis.” Amir pointed out.

“Wh-? No she doesn’t!” Lewis objected.

“Oh face it, she does.” Amir asserted. “And why not, he’s a specimen! But she’s spending time with you.”

Julian scowled, but Lewis just looked pleased and smiled, giving him a defiant stare. “Oh… yeah! So she is,” he agreed.

“Guess she’s settling for second best.” Julian growled.

“Wh-?” Lewis’ arrogant grin evaporated. “Fuck you!”

“Get in line!”

“Okay, what is wrong with you two?” Amir stood up and stepped between them. “This isn’t like either of you, what’s going on?”

“Just sorting out the fucking pecking order.” Julian snarled.

“Alright, piss off out of my flight deck and don’t come back until you’ve got your head out of your arse.”

Julian rounded on him, but Amir stood his ground. “Go. Cool off. We’ll sort this out later.” he repeated.

Julian looked like he wanted to argue, but just made an angered sound, spun and vanished, his angry stride all but denting the deck as he went.

“And you!” Amir rounded on Lewis. “You’ve been insufferable these last few days! You’re picking fights with me, with Julian, what’s going on?”

“Maybe I’m just-” Lewis began, and then shook his head. “Agh, never mind. I’ll be in my cabin.”

When they were both gone, Amir sat and wiped off his forehead, willing his heart to stop pounding and forget the flash of violence that had risen in Julian’s expression for just a second.

It had been like staring down a dragon’s throat and seeing a glow.

He hit a button. “Hey, Kirk? There’s been a… a bit of a row up here, we should probably talk about it.”

“Jesus Christ, Etsicitty. That bag cheat on your sister or something?”

Julian laughed a little, bitter laugh and kept pounding on it. “Just working out some frustrations.” he rumbled.

“Mmm, after what we did last night I’m amazed you have any.” Allison purred, then wilted a little when this didn’t seem to amuse him. “Okay, what’s up?”

Julian stopped for a second. “Just… Ugh, I don’t know. Nothing.” He punched the bag so hard that it rattled the ceiling beam.

“Riiight. D’you, uh, want me to leave you alone until, say, you turn eighteen?”

He didn’t stop. “Yep.”

“Wow. Okay…”

She turned and was halfway out of the room when his apology exploded out of him. “I’m sorry!”

She turned back and arched an eyebrow at him. “Yeah?”

He unwound the tape on his hands and let them slither to the floor. “I’m sorry.” he repeated, not looking at her.

She crossed the floor, slid her arms around his hips and angled a kiss up into his face. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

“Got into a shouting match with Lewis.”

“Really? Wow, don’t you usually get on okay with him?”

“Usually, yeah.” He agreed, still not making eye contact.

She put her head on one side, trying to catch his gaze. “So… what was the argument about?”

”…Xiù. He, uh, wants to ask her out.”

Allison considered this. “Okay? I mean, I can’t see that ending in her saying yes, but he’s a grown-ass man, I’m sure he’ll cope, and it might be good for her confidence. Why argue?”

“He might hurt her.”

She made an incredulous noise. “Are we talking about the same girl, here?” She asked. “Because I seem to recall the last man who hurt her, she whupped his ass and threw him out the airlock. So… why argue? She can take care of herself.”

Julian wriggled out of her grip and picked up the hand tape. “I… don’t know.” he said, beginning to wind it back up.

“You don’t? You got into a shouting match with the guy and you don’t know why?”

”…Yeah.”

She blinked at him, then stepped back. “Why are you lying to me, Julian?”

He took a deep breath and released it as a complex sighing sound, full of noises that could have been attempts at starting a sentence.

“Well? Come on, give me real.”

“I-I was mad with him over… well, over Xiù.”

“Mad why? What are-” suspicion sniped her right in the forehead and her jaw dropped. “Julian, what…? Are you fucking jealous?”

The way he flinched and turned in on himself a bit more confirmed it. “You are? What, you thought you’d buy one get one free? You… you pig!”

“It’s not like that!”

“Oh, what IS it like, then?”

“What it’s like is that I’m down here beating the crap out of that thing–” he pointed at the bag “–because I’m super fucking angry at myself!” He finally made eye contact.

“As well you fucking should be!” she retorted.

“Well…I am!”

“Good!”

“I’m sorry!”

“You’re forgiven!”

The paradox posed by her still-angry tone versus her words shut him up long enough for the echoes caused by the gym’s hollow acoustics to die.

“I, uh… I am?” he asked, cautiously.

Allison coughed out a little breathy laugh and shook her head at the floor. “You are.” she said.

“You’re not mad?”

“Oh, I’m fucking mad alright.” She informed him, jabbing a finger into his chest. “You lied to me, Julian. You tried to shut me out. That part pisses me off. Whatever’s going on in your head about Xiù? I can forgive that.”

“You… can?”

“Sure. See, you got mad at yourself and came down here to work it out and you feel guilty about it. So, yeah. Fine. I forgive you. Heck I don’t blame you; I’m kinda fascinated by her myself, and I’m not usually into girls!” She jabbed him in the chest again. “But don’t ever lie to me like that again.”

”…Yes ma’am.”

A sly smile spread across her face, and she looked him up and down. “…Ma’am, huh?”

”…Uh…” He scratched the back of his head “Well I mean…yeah, that’s what I said.”

“That’s kinda hot.” She mused, teasing him. “I could get used to that.”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose with this thumb, awkwardly, and looked away a little bit. “Well I, uh… I mean, I wasn’t really aiming for ‘hot’ but, um, I-if you want more of that, then… uh…”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “Hmm. Good boy.”

She watched his expression carefully. Noticed the way his breathing changed and the wariness in his eyes.

“Huh. You like being called a good boy, Etsicitty?” she asked.

He swallowed and nodded. “May-maybe a bit.” he confessed.

She ran a finger up him from belt buckle to chin, which seemed to paralyze him. “Hmm. Interesting…” she pondered, then looked up into his face. “Could be you’ve got a bit of a sub streak there. Wanna explore it?” She asked.

He licked his lips nervously. “You think? I mean, I’ve never…”

“Me either,” she confessed. “But the question stands. Wanna explore it?”

”…Yes ma’am.”

She grinned, and rewarded him with a kiss. “Good boy.”

Curiosity and mild alarm were dancing on Vedreg’s body as he considered what they had just heard. “That kind of argument seems out of character.” He commented

“For both of them.” Kirk agreed.

“Just a little.” Amir added, drily. “Julian’s scary when he gets angry, too, and Lewis just kept antagonising him. It was like watching a chicken try and pick a fight with a bear.”

“And all this over Miss Chang? Hmmm…” Vedreg lapsed into contemplation, slow bands of blue light rippling all over his body.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Kirk asked him, after a moment.

“Increased aggression, competition over females…If they were Vgork, I would think they were entering Musth.”

“Lewis has started taking his exercise seriously this last week, too.” Kirk mused. “Interesting theory.”

“Uh… For the Earthling’s benefit, please?”

Both aliens made apologetic gestures to Amir. “Vgork males of high rank periodically enter a state called musth where their testosterone levels soar, and they become violent, aggressive and, um…Amorous.” Vedreg explained.

“Testosterone has a similar effect on humans, even though you don’t have Musth.” Kirk added.

“Okay, well…what about me and the girls? We don’t feel any different.” Amir paused. “At least, I don’t, and I think we’d notice if Xiù and Allison were both acting like Julian and Lewis.”

“So that rules out any environmental factors.” Kirk said. “Meaning this must have been triggered by a specific event.”

“Well, Lewis has always been… he’s always rolled his eyes a bit over my faith, but it started to get worse just after we left Umu-whatever. Where we picked up Xiù.”

“So, it’s an event within the past week. The Huh perhaps? None of the other humans studied it.”

“Yeah, but you studied it too, didn’t you?”

“I’m not human. I’m not sure my body even produces testosterone. But even a week on, I still feel cravings to study that thing again.”

“You are not going to suggest we should get it out and examine it further, are you?” Vedreg asked.

“Don’t tempt me.” Kirk replied. “No, I think a simple trip to the infirmary for them both may be in order. If they are both experiencing a hormone spike, as seems likely, then that’s easily corrected.”

“I’ll call them.”

Xiù’s cabin was actually the most lavishly-decorated on the ship, despite her initial reluctance to put her stamp on it. Allison had pointed out that Xiù was “Going to spend at least, like, a month on this ship anyway, so why not get comfortable?”

The result was that she’d used up her entire month’s allowance of nanofactory time on fabrics, rugs, fairy lights, throw pillows and, with Kirk’s permission, candles. The result was that the cool default lighting of the cabins was warmer in her room, and there was a gust of scented candle on the wind when she answered Lewis’ knock.

“Hey.” She smiled, but he could tell that she was pretty frazzled. “What’s up?”

“Uh, I can come back if this isn’t a good time…”

“No, I’m fine, I just…” She yawned “…I didn’t sleep so well last night and I guess it’s catching up on me now.”

“Well, if you need a nap-”

She smiled. “I’m fine, really. What’s up?”

“Well…” he took the plunge. “Look, there’s not a whole lot to do on this ship, I know, but I’ve got some movies picked out I think you’d like, and I’m not a half-bad cook myself when I put my mind to it so, I thought… Y’know, we’ve been getting on pretty good, and…”

Her lips parted in surprise. “Are… are you asking me on a date?” she asked.

“Yeah! Or, like, on the closest thing we can manage to a date on this ship. If you want.”

“Wow, um…”

Lewis knew a rejection when he saw one coming and steeled himself for it, determined not to be disappointed.

“I mean… I’m flattered, but Lewis, I’m not ready to mate with anyone yet.”

All the steeling in the world couldn’t have protected his ego from that unexpected turn of phrase.

”…mate?!”

She hadn’t seemed to notice what she’d said until his outraged echo, but when she did her face went crimson. “Oh god, I’m sorry, that was in Gaoian, I…”

“No, no. Clearly I had the wrong idea here.”

“Don’t be angry, I-!”

“Ah, go mate with yourself, Xiù!”

“But-!”

He was already halfway down the corridor, and pretended not to notice the sound of her door closing, nor the miserable shout of “God fucking DAMMIT, Xiù!” that drifted through it.

He barged past Vedreg on his way to his own quarters, ignoring the big alien’s concerned query, and threw himself into his bunk, fuming quietly.

The worst part was that he didn’t really know why he was so angry. The anger felt…wrong. Forced. He knew he shouldn’t be so mad, and that just made him madder.

He was still seething when the room chimed politely at him. “You have a message.” it informed him.

“Ignore.”

“The message is flagged as urgent.”

“I said fucking IGNORE!”

“Ignoring message.”

“And hold all my messages until I say otherwise.”

The room chimed again, acknowledging the command, and fell silent.

He didn’t notice when he fell asleep, but he woke with a start some time later when somebody started banging on his door.

“Ah, yes. Testosterone levels at two thousand percent normal. Just like Julian.”

Lewis frowned at the readout. “The fuck?”

“Must have been the Huh. No wonder we’ve been acting like a pair of hyperthyroid quarterbacks.” Julian told him.

“Fortunately…” Kirk said, touching something cold to his arm. “…It’s an easy fix. There. You should be back to normal in a couple of hours.”

“What about you?” Lewis asked of Kirk. “You played with that thing too.”

“And indeed, my own hormonal balance is off.” Kirk agreed.

Allison was leaning against the wall with her arms folded. “Really? I’ve not noticed you acting differently…?” she said.

“Human and Rrrtktktkp’ch brains are very different. Still, I suspect I too would have begun to show behavioral changes before long.”

Lewis sighed. “I guess I owe Xiù an apology, don’t I?”

“I am sure she will understand.” Kirk said.

“I’d better talk to her first, though.” Allison said. “What happened?”

“Oh, I… asked her out.”

“Yeah, I knew that. And?”

“Well, uh.” Lewis scratched at the back of his head. “She had one of those Gaoian moments. You know, she’s tired, she’s not been sleeping well? So she said she wasn’t ‘looking to mate with anyone right now’.”

Julian grimaced. “Ouch.”

“Yeah, but it’s not her fault, is it? You said it yourself dude, she’s been without human contact for years. That’s got to fuck with your head.”

Kirk patted his shoulder. “It is not your fault either.” he assured him.

“Still.” Allison said. “I’ll go talk to her.”

“Sure.” Lewis muttered, as she kissed Julian’s cheek and left the Infirmary.

Xiù doesn’t remember having set up a hundred tea-light candles in her quarters, but she doesn’t question it: She’s making love to Julian, what better way to do that than by candlelight?

She runs her finger over his chest and watches his skin glow forge-red where she presses. The sight is entrancing, so much so that she forgets all about the sex and just watches the glow. When she taps his chest, coloured sparks fly everywhere.

She does it again, laughing, and again and again. She has always loved New Year, and the fireworks. In fact…why is she wasting her time here when she could be there, enjoying the celebrations?

She climbs off the stone man and steps out into the street, hailing a cab to take her to her parents’ place. There will be Nin Gou! And Luo buo gao! How could she have forgotten?

She’s still kicking herself for forgetting when she turned over and nearly fell out of bed, jolting awake in time to catch herself from falling.

She rolled back onto her pillow and stared at the ceiling, recalling the dream as the details evaporated, never to be recalled. What she could remember of it left her feeling hungry, horny and nostalgic all at once.

Cursing in a melange of English, Chinese and Gaoian, she dragged herself out of bed and into the shower, and cranked the temperature right down, and was still sluicing herself under the cold water when the door chimed.

“Just a minute!”

She scrubbed her limbs until they were merely damp and threw on her bathrobe, wrapping her hair up into a towel-turban. “Come in!”

Allison poked her head round it. “Hey, you okay?” she asked.

Xiù paused. “You heard?”

“Lewis is in the infirmary right now.” Allison said. “It turns out that fucking huh thing’s had the boys on a hormone rush all week.”

”…Are they okay?”

“They’ll be fine.” Allison reassured her. “Lewis is probably going to come up here and say sorry later.”

Xiù sat down on her bed. “I don’t… really blame him.” she said. “I mean… okay, I do, but… I guess I mean…” she gave up and shrugged helplessly.

Allison just smiled. “I get you.” she said.

Xiù relaxed. “Thanks.”

“So… honey.” Allison sat down next to her. “Asking as a friend, and with no hard feelings at all…”

Not unnaturally, Xiù was immediately nervous. “Um… Yes?”

“What’s going on between you and my boyfriend?”

“Wh-? Nothing!” Xiù’s face was redder than her rug, and she stood up sharply. “Nothing! Really!”

“I know nothing’s happened.” Allison reassured her. “I’m just asking… what’s going on?”

Xiù’s blush faded a little, and she dragged the towel off her head, bunching it up nervously. “I’m sorry, he’s just…hot.”

“Oh yeah.” Allison agreed, nodding, which drew a giggle out of Xiù. “And you’re lonely, aren’t you?” she added.

”…Yeah.”

Allison nodded. “And a bit confused, going by what you said to Lewis.”

Xiù sighed, and threw the towel into her laundry hamper. “I guess so.” she admitted. “It’s so much more… straightforward with Gaoians.” She punctuated the pause and the word that ended it with her hands, then gestured towards the door and to Allison. “The whole ‘he’s off limits because he’s with you’ thing is… I mean, I know how it works, I haven’t forgotten, but it’s…” She tailed off and shrugged again, flapping her arms helplessly.

“Not what you’re used to?”

Xiù hissed an indrawn breath and flapped her arms again, shaking her head. “I guess it’s not.” she agreed.

“That’s gotta be scary.”

Xiù just nodded, staring at the floor, balling her fists. It was such a childlike pose that it yanked right at every motherly instinct Allison had, and she launched herself up off the bed to grab her friend in a tight hug.

She earned a soaking wet shoulder for her efforts as Xiù let go and shook, hugging back so hard that her fingernails broke skin even through Allison’s tshirt. “What if I can’t be human again?” she squeaked. “What if… what if I’m stuck? What do I do? Every time I think I’m doing well I relax and then I screw up again! What if I’m… broken? Where do I go then?”

Allison said nothing, just held on and let her get it out.

“All I want to do is go home, but then I act like a Gaoian and I’m scared I’ll go home and people will think I’m a freak, and my family won’t recognise me and I won’t know them and I won’t fit…and… and it all feels like it happened to someone else, Earth, it feels like it wasn’t me who lived there, like I’m a Gaoian who had a dream about being human one time and… How do I cope? What do I do? I don’t think I know how to do anything human any more, but I’m not Gaoian… so… so… So where do I belong?!”

She petered out and just sobbed for a bit, while Allison rubbed her back and waited until she judged the time was right.

“You said all of that in English.” she said.

There was a slow moment, but the sobbing stopped, and another slow moment after that, Xiù pulled her head out of Allison’s shirt and blinked at her with watery red eyes. “I did?”

“Every word.” Allison promised.

Xiù relaxed a little, and stood up straight, issuing a bitter little laugh as she dried her eyes. “I’m so messed up…” she observed.

“Nobody wouldn’t be.” Allison said, brushing some of Xiù’s hair out of the way. “But we’re here for you. We get you, Julian maybe even more than I do. And if you’re broken, you’ll mend, or you’ll find somebody to mend you.”

Xiù was nodding, downcast, but Allison wasn’t quite finished. “And as for where you belong…”

“Don’t say here.” Xiù interrupted. “Please, don’t ask me again.”

Allison hugged her again. “I was going to say I don’t think anybody belongs anywhere.” she said. “Except for where they choose to be. Wherever that is.”

Xiù finally smiled again as that sank in. It was a reluctant, unhappy little smile, but it was still like the sun rising. “I like that.” she said.

“Kind of my mantra, babe…You okay?”

Xiù scrubbed at her eye again, sniffing. “I don’t know.” she said. “I hope so.”

Allison nodded. “Good start.” she said. “And… about Julian?”

“Yeah?”

“I trust him, and I trust you. Whatever’s going on is, uh…you aren’t allowed to kiss him.”

That finally provoked a giggle. “I’ll try not to,” Xiù promised.

“Cool…Girl’s night? I’ve got Disney movies, wine, and a shirtless waiter. My treat.”

“Shirtl-? Wait, really?!”

“Well, he doesn’t know it yet…” Allison smiled mischievously “But… call it a hunch, I think he’ll agree to it. It’s just a bit of fun. You in?”

”…Can I make crepes? I’m kinda hungry.”

“Sounds good.”

“Then I’m in.”

“This, uh…this could get awkward…”

Allison paused as they were about to open the door to the common room. “Are you okay?”

Julian fidgeted. “I know I agreed to this, just…”

She smiled, and gave him a kiss. “It’s not like I’ve got a cattle prod, baby.” she said. “If you’re not totally comfortable, don’t even worry about it. I just thought it’d be a bit of harmless, sexy fun. But if you don’t want to…”

Julian considered it, then shook his head and smiled. “No, I’m in.” he said. “Comfort zones are meant to be pushed out of.”

“You’re sure?”

He grabbed her hand and put it on his chest, letting her feel his pulse.

“Wow… you’re getting off on this, huh?” she noted.

He nodded and looked down, fighting the half-smile that was crawling up one side of his face. “A bit, yeah.”

“Good boy.” Allison teased him, then opened the door.

Xiù was just setting down the crepes she’d made - true Canadian ones, laden with ham, cheese, sunny-side-up eggs and maple syrup - on the coffee table alongside popcorn and nachos. From the looks of things, she’d already helped herself to a glass of wine.

“Ooh!” she exclaimed. “You gave him a bow tie!”

Julian fingered the adornment in question. “These things aren’t made to be worn on bare skin.” he complained.

“It’s that or the cat ears.” Allison reminded him.

“Bow tie it is!” Julian rushed to reply, preempting the delight that had risen on Xiù’s face. She made a disappointed sound, but also took a second to unabashedly appreciate the view. Both women were clearly enjoying themselves.

“Well I’ll be kind.” Allison said. “You can pick three films out, we’ll eliminate two of them and watch the survivor.”

“Very kind.” Julian drawled, sarcastically. Allison held up a finger.

“Ah?” she cautioned him.

He sighed, but smiled a little and straightened, trying to will himself into the role. “Yes ma’am.”

Xiù giggled. “Good boy.” She’d clearly already relaxed considerably after just one glass, and looked on course to be a happy, bubbly drunk.

“So, what are your picks?” Allison urged him, pouring a glass each for herself and Xiù.

He examined the stack of Disney movies. “Uh… Dumbo…” He said, picking one they hadn’t watched yet.

“Ugh, not Dumbo. I hate those pink elephants.” Allison objected. Julian threw the disc back onto the stack.

“Okay…Lady and the Tramp,and Mulan“

Xiù perked up even more. “Mulan’s my favorite!”

“Hmmm…It’s got better songs, too…” Allison mused.

“Let’s watch it!” Xiù enthused.

Allison winked at their waiter. “You heard her, lover! Jump to!”

He tried to be serious, but couldn’t quite contain a smile. “Yes ma’am.”

The girls chimed their glasses together. “Good boy.” they chorused.

“♪♫Tranquil as a forest, but on fire within! Once you find your center, you are sure to win!♫♫“

“Sounds like quite the party back there.”

“Yep.” Amir nodded. What the girls lacked in hitting the right notes, they were clearly making up for in tipsy enthusiasm.

“How come we’re not invited?”

“Allison called it a ‘girl’s night’.”

“So, what’s Julian doing back there?”

“Serving drinks, with his shirt off.”

Lewis paused. After being discharged from the infirmary, and using the fading dregs of hormonal aggression in his system to his advantage, he’d enlisted Amir’s help in solving the mystery of the FTL drive power draw. Now, he stopped and listened to two voices atonally chorusing “♫swift as the coursing river, with all the force of a great typhoon…♪”. The volume was impressive even through a closed pressure door and down the deck.

“Wow…” he managed. He wasn’t sure if he felt jilted, sympathetic or like he was hearing justice in action.

Amir nodded. “Yep.”

“♫…As the dark side of, the mooOoOoOon!!!♫♪“

”…What do you think would happen if we asked them to do a topless waitress night for us?”

“Broken ribs.”

“Fuck, man.” Lewis griped. “That’s just not fair.”

Amir smirked. “Nope.”

”…Change of topic, where’s Kirk at, anyway?”

“Think he’s up in the observation blister looking for signs of OmoAru life out there.”

“After that sandstorm?” Lewis looked skeptical.

“It’s their planet. They’re probably used to it. He said something about wanting to see what they do after a week of being forced indoors”

“Why’s that?”

“♫You’re unsuited for the rage of war, so pack up, go home: you’re through.♪“

Amir raised his voice over the song. “He said that anything they do straight away is probably something they’re still at least a little passionate about.”

“♫How could I make a man out of you?♪“

Lewis wobbled his head in concession. “Makes sense I guess.”

“Pardon?” The girls had launched into the chorus again, with even more cacophonous vigor than before.

“I said makes sense!”

“Yep.”

The volume increased dramatically as the door opened and Julian slipped out into the deck, holding an empty wine bottle, and vanished into the galley, from whence he re-emerged a minute later with a full bottle. To both Amir and Lewis’ astonishment, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

”…Are you sure we couldn’t get them to…?”

“Nope.”

“The Fifth Element and lingerie?”

“Go ahead and suggest it. It’s your funeral.”

”…Shit.”

Amir smiled grimly. “Yep.”

By the time the movie had finished, Amir had already declared that the limits of his technical expertise were reached, and that from here on out it was all up to Lewis, before retiring to bed.

For his part, Lewis was determined to pull an all-nighter, and the only thing that distracted him from his work was when he saw Allison and Julian on the security cams, en route to Julian’s cabin and all bar stripping each other on the way there.

He genuinely didn’t notice Xiù, or know how long she’d been waiting in the doorframe, until she spoke, but her greeting “Hey.” was so gentle that it didn’t even make him jump.

He turned. “Hey.” he echoed.

A good five seconds of mutual awkwardness ensued before he finally decided to break it. “I’m sorry.” he said. “I shoulda been more understanding.”

“I’m sorry too.” she replied. “I just… I guess I’ve got a long way to go.”

He nodded. “It’s okay. Still, even if it’s just a friend-date, offer stands.”

She smiled. He wasn’t sure if it was the wine that was making her so relaxed, or if she was just in a good headspace right now. “Xié xié.”

“No Disney though, please.”

“That’s okay… Goodnight, Lewis.”

“G’night.”

Allison came down from her orgasm with laughter, the low and satisfied chuckle of the totally relaxed, and floated on bliss as Julian gently retrieved his hand and snuggled up beside her, interrupting her heavy breathing with a kiss and a gentle stroke on the cheek to get her hair out of the way.

“I think she liked it.” he observed in a sing-song whisper, his eyes twinkling in the dark. He was plainly very pleased with himself.

As he should be.

“Mmmm, yeah.” she agreed. “Oh, I definitely like it.”

“You like to be in charge, huh?”

She giggled. “Shut up and go get your mistress a glass of water.”

He laughed, but extracted his arm from under her head. “Yes ma’am.”

“Mmm…” She bit her lip and chuckled again. “Good boy.”

Xiù is sitting by a lake. Or by a river, maybe: the details are irrelevant. The sun is rising blue and cold over a landscape of white-foliaged trees and swirling distant shapes that might be birds, or maybe eels. She is wearing long skirts of white cloth. The mist should be chilly but she feels quite warm, watching a green fish swirl and mouth lazily in circles by the shore.

She catches it, reaching into the stream and pulling it out. It flips and flails in her hands and, to calm it, she opens it to page fifty-six and tries to read what is printed there, but she can’t make out the words.

As she bends to return the poor creature to the water, she catches sight of her own reflection and examines it, surprised to see a human face studying her. Where is her fur? What happened to her ears and muzzle?

But of course, she’s human.

…Isn’t she?

She turns to face the stone man behind her, seeking his opinion. This time he is taller than mountains, and he bends to offer her his hand.

She steps forward onto his fingertips, and he picks her up, and up, and up, past his knees, past a penis the size of a skyscraper, past square miles of muscular sculpture, to his face.

She speaks to him, but can’t remember the words, or even what she intends to say. She turns around, thinking about what to tell him, how to communicate her feelings, and looks over the side of the boat she’s on, double-checking that her reflection is still human.

The stone man comes up beside her and takes her hand.

He sings to her, but the song is piercing, terrifying. It sounds like… like…

She woke up and his “song” was still reverberating around her room. It was Sanctuary’s red alert alarm.

Kirk had beaten all the humans to the flight deck. “What the hell’s going on?” he was demanding.

Lewis was working furiously, selecting, drag-dropping and running programs as fast as his hands could move, “We’re compromised, don’t ask me how!” He said. “One minute I’m poking around the FTL systems, next-”

“FTL?”

“Yeah, there’s been some weird power draw on it this week, I was trying to lock it down. Next I knew we’ve got these motherfuckers crawling all over our systems.” He waved a hand at the screen.

Kirk rocked back onto his hindlimbs as Amir squeezed past him and threw himself into the pilot’s seat, lending his own limited expertise to Lewis’ aid. “And what are ‘these motherfuckers’?” he asked, quietly.

“Fuck if I know. They’re using system runtime like programs, but they’re acting like other users.”

“What exactly were you doing?”

“Now is not the time for a fucking powerpoint presentation.” Lewis snarled, dragging a program into the run list. It apparently didn’t function as he’d hoped, drawing an angry noise out of him. “They just got into navigation, they know where we are.”

“Did you run a communications protocol through the FTL?” Kirk spat.

Lewis paused, but rallied and threw another script into the line of fire. “Yeah, how did you know?”

Kirk ignored him and spun around. “Julian, yank the blackbox FTL, replace it with the backup warp engine,” he ordered. “Xiù, Allison, get outside and cut the anchor cables. Amir, prep for launch.”

“What the shit is going on?” Lewis demanded. Kirk turned back to him.

“I fucked up.” he said. “And now the Hierarchy have found us.”

Fusion knives made short work of the anchor cables, and the longest part of Julian’s task was the sprint down the ship’s central corridor, up the stairs and through the engineering access hatch.

“We’re a week from anywhere, we’re probably safe… aren’t we?” Amir was asking as the girls returned to the flight deck to report their job done.

“They have point-to-point FTL communications, something the Dominion has been trying to perfect for… millennia.” Kirk replied. “For all we know they’ve perfected single-end wormholes or gigalight FTL for good measure. Or maybe Aru is one of their projects and they have a ship or a staging post nearby. Our only defense at this point is to get the hell out of here and hope they’re too far away to catch up. Lewis, you’re sure you managed to clear them out?”

“Second the blackbox was yanked, I was able to nuke the whole system and restore from backup. Nothing’s come back to haunt us, so… yeah, we’re clean.”

“Amir.”

Amir nodded and stabbed the button for a shipwide announcement. “All hands, report in for launch.”

There was a chorus of “here”s from around the bridge and, after a few seconds, a rumble from Vedreg over the open line that he, too, was present.

“Right.”

Sanctuary went from resting on the sands, to hovering above them, then rotated around its stern until its nose was aimed skywards. Angry clouds formed in the displaced air around a cylindrical forcefield tunnel of vacuum that Amir created for them and then he punched to full thrust.

Allison turned faintly green as the ground just vanished, lurching away behind them with a violence that offended the senses, while nobody on the ship felt the slightest jolt. The sky faded to black in seconds.

“Jesus, this thing really moves.” Xiù whispered, awe-struck.

“Out of the well in three… two… one… Warp.”

The planet Aru jolted away with just as much ferocity as its surface had done, as did all three of its moons. A second later, so did the Aru star.

“Redline it?” Amir asked. He sounded quite cool, considering.

“Redline it.” Kirk agreed. Amir just nodded and patted his console fondly, reassuring the ship.

“Seventy kilos.” he reported, watching a display that was blurring in his upper-right field of view. “A hundred. two hundred. Four hundred… we’re at blackbox cruise. Seven hundred kilolights… Bus maxed at seven hundred ninety thousand C and holding.”

“Let us hope.” Kirk said. “That is enough.”

“We should be careful anyway.” Julian pointed out.

“Agreed. Grab your personal items and put any you can’t carry, along with a data backup and… yes, the Huh into a cargo pod and program it for Cimbrean. I’ll go help Vedreg into a life raft. You all should get in one too.”

“What about Amir?” Xiù asked.

“Don’t worry about me.” Amir said. “The flight seat doubles as a life raft. So do the beds in all the cabins.”

“Go.” Kirk urged. “I don’t want to trust to luck here.”

Julian turned to the girls. “You two get the Huh. I’ll prep the pod.” he said.

They let Kirk go first: he trotted down the axial corridor and toward the lower cargo deck where Vedreg had made his home. Every emergency feature on the ship was outlined in blue lighting, from the hallway oxygen masks, first aid kits and fire extinguishers, to the life raft alcoves and decontamination showers. Kirk had spared no expense on ensuring that the ship’s occupants had every emergency tool they could want, cleverly hidden so that it only showed up when needed. Now they were all deploying, panels sliding back to reveal the functional features beneath.

“You got anything special you want to save?” Allison asked. Xiù checked her pocket, gripping the handful of personal items she’d brought with her. It wasn’t much - just the data chip Ayma had brought for her, and one of the smooth little stones that Myun had taken to sewing into her clothes.

“No, I’ve already got everything.” she said.

“Great.” Kirk turned off the corridor and Allison took off at a run, leaving Xiù to scramble after her. Down the ramp, through the common room, up the ramp, turn left past the engineering access, and Allison’s room was the second on their left. She punched in the door code, darted inside, and returned an instant later carrying a knotted bundle of T-shirt and strapping on her holster and gun.

She’d just done up the leg strap when Amir’s voice boomed over the intercom.

“BRACE, BRACE, BRACE!!”

They didn’t have time. He’d barely finished the third word when the ship lurched, flinging both of them down the corridor.

Xiù tucked in her head and limbs and rolled, not unfolding until she’d come to a halt, finding herself fetched up against the reinforced backplate of the engine that terminated the deck corridor. Allison had come to a halt a little earlier, and was hauling herself to her feet, swearing and cursing at the carpet burn all down her flank.

Somebody had clearly left the microphone on because the next thing they heard was Julian’s voice, sounding strained, saying. “Shit, that’s a lot of blood…”

Both women went still, looked at each other, and as one bolted back up towards the flight deck, Allison at a dead run. Xiù had the presence of mind to grab a medical kit from its previously-hidden recess on the wall.

Down the ramp, through the common room, up the ramp, along the corridor and… Xiù felt her stomach lurch. That was a lot of blood.

And beyond that… space.

“What the hell happened?” Allison was yelling. The bubble of glass that was Sanctuary’s nose was half shattered, the air held in only by forcefields. Amir was writhing in his seat, teeth gritted as he tried to press his hand to a horrible wound in his side.

“Gravity spike and mines!” Lewis replied. He’d hauled himself out of his seat and grabbed a medical kit of his own.

“Clear out!” Allison commanded, grabbing the kit. “Julian! give him a shot of this, right here.” she handed an injector to him and tapped a spot on Amir’s spine, then extracted something that looked for all the world like a sealant gun from the kit. “Xiù, get me a light!”

Xiù’s paralysed limbs moved without her conscious control, and she snatched an emergency lantern from the wall, holding it up and trying to ignore the… colours, and wet shapes she could see. Especially the white. Especially the way they moved as Allison pumped some kind of foam into the gruesome injury.

The injector beeped, and a second later Amir sighed, shook his head and collected himself. With a gasp, he lashed out and swiped his hands through the helm’s control field and the stars outside blurred sideways. Xiù screwed her eyes shut.

“That’s a lot of mines!” he grunted.

“You’re stable.” Allison declared. “Come on, let’s get you in a stasis pod.”

He shook his head, his face already pebbled with sweat. “Can’t.”

“Wh-?”

Everyone on the bridge flinched and averted their eyes as a line of pure heat slashed a blue-pink afterimage across the sky. Xiù felt the incredible temperature of it on her skin.

“What was that?!” Julian asked.

Lewis looked grim “Plasma cannon.”

“It’s a fuckhuge ship, is what it is.” Amir told them. “I stop flying and you’re all dead.”

“But-” Lewis began.

“Nah mate. Abandon ship. That’s a bloody order from your pilot.”

Another shot tore the sky open, much closer this time if the searing heat that bathed them like sunburn was anything to go by.

Julian, Allison and Xiù were all survivors. Julian just stood and put a hand on Amir’s shoulder, eyes damp. Allison kissed the side of his head, and the three of them cleared the bridge, with Xiù not even knowing what to say.

It was Lewis that was the holdup. “Dude…” he began, weeping openly.

“You don’t want to be here when I ram that thing, bruv.” Amir told him.

“You’re gonna-?”

Amir gave him a tight, pinched at him “Fuck off you idiot!”

Lewis nodded, grabbed the back of Amir’s head, touched forehead to forehead and nose to nose.

“Goodbye, dude.” He whispered.

Amir made a sound that might have been amusement and might have been frustration. Either way, he was smiling. “GO.“ he repeated.

Lewis finally obeyed him.

Down the corridor, down the ramp, through the common room, up the ramp. Xiù turned at the junction by engineering hatch. “Lewis come on!” she called.

He was halfway across the common area when something hit them, hard, and ripped a chunk out of Sanctuary’s living quarters the length of a shipping container. The destroyed section vanished in a whirl of air and pulverized metal, and only the millisecond timing of containment forcefields prevented the adjacent areas from decompressing… but they left Lewis trapped on the far side. He sprang to his feet, slapped the forcefield in frustration, then gesticulated back towards the lower decks, flipped them a salute and ran.

A second hit rocked them even harder than the first.

Xiù stared after him, praying silently that he’d make it, before remembering to pray that they would, too.

“Xiù! MOVE!” Allison’s desperate yell got through to her, and she scrambled upright. Julian was punching the door code with shaking fingers, missing the right keys, and Allison was fidgeting next to him. The gravity seemed to have gone wrong, and she felt like she was standing on a steep hill, which was probably why Julian and Allison were both holding on to the handrails.

Something smashed a hole straight through the ceiling and out the deck. Not a big hole. But one that killed their section’s power supply.

Without it the lighting, the gravity, and the atmospheric containment fields all failed, and that little hole got abruptly wider as all of their precious atmosphere tried to bully its way out.

It wasn’t a wind. Wind wasn’t an adequate word. Instead, the last sound those air molecules would ever carry was the rising howl of their own escape, and Xiù’s mortal shriek as the maelstrom decompression tore her loose and threw her toward infinity.

Allison couldn’t let go of the handrail without being dragged away as well, but she kicked out and with a frantic speed and precision that no snake had ever managed, Xiù snatched at and grabbed her ankle. From Allison’s expression the rescue clearly cost her a wrenched knee, but that was the least of their trouble right now: The rescue was only a temporary one. As the last of the air fled, their lives were now measured in seconds, if that.

‘Hard Vacuum’ had always seemed like an oxymoronic term. Now Julian understood it intimately. He tasted copper and pain as the saliva boiled in his mouth, and he could feel the blood under his skin threatening to do the same. Though his eyes watered to defend themselves against the desiccating void, the tears fizzed off of his eyeballs as soon as they were made. Burning frost formed on his ears, nose, eyebrows, fingers, lips. His ears, so recently abused by explosions and alarms, now rang in the silence to drown out the eerie way that his own heartbeat echoed around his body. His chest heaved and creaked, pressing down on unnaturally empty lungs that themselves were seething and screaming with boiling fluids and ebullism.

By some miracle - either by a happy accident of alien incompetence, or a rare moment of actual engineering ingenuity - the doors to the cabins had all flung themselves wide open the moment the power failed, clearing a way to the bunks, each one of which was a life raft.

Those open doors were the difference between life and death for all three of them. With only seconds at the outside until they passed out and died, having to punch in the door code would have killed them. Instead, they had exactly one shot.

He grabbed Allison’s wrist and heaved, flinging her through the nearest door and towards its bed with Xiù still trailing from her ankle, and hauled himself through after them. They crashed together into the bunk, and with what felt like it was surely the last of his strength, Julian grabbed the bright blue handle that had popped out of its covers, and yanked it down.

It broke.

It also worked. The bunk’s built-in quantum power core fired, and they collapsed onto the mattress as gravity reasserted itself. Forcefields went up even as the walls came down, and emergency air tanks explosively vented into the enclosed space, painfully slamming into every vacant bronchiole of their lungs.

Even Deathworlders could do nothing but lie there, convulsing weakly and coughing.

The life raft was built for flimsier beings, however. As delicately as a new mother afraid that her baby will break at the slightest touch, it enfolded them, wrapped them in layers of protection, slipped its moorings, and escaped.

There were lights in the top of his control interface that told Amir how many life rafts had launched, but he couldn’t spare the millisecond to glance at it. All he knew was that at least some of them were blinking. Which meant that at least some of his friends were safe.

That was enough. There was no time to wait for more.

He threw Sanctuary into something not dissimilar to a Herbst maneuver, modified in ways that only a high-powered spaceship could achieve in vacuum. A volley of coilgun and plasma fire that should have evaporated them on the spot missed several kilometers to the fore as what had been a transverse target became an oncoming dart, accelerating so hard that the ship’s superstructure creaked, even with the forcefield assistance.

“Ship.”

It chimed its readiness for an order, and he gave one, quite calm and quiet, despite the ragged difficulty he was having breathing.

“Show me Earth.”

The blue dot appeared in his field of view, and he thanked Allah that he had one last chance to look homewards before he died.

Time to say goodbye. He conjured what little strength was left in his aching ribs, and spoke the last and most important words of his life.

“There is only one God, and Mohammad is His proph-“

++0042++: “Signal Lost?” Did we just lose an experimental dreadnought to an unarmed yacht?

++0007++: It doesn’t matter. Priority Target One has still been killed. That’s worth the loss.

++0042++: Are you absolutely sure?

++0007++: Do you have a spare ship able to get there anytime in the next few months to check?

++0033++: That was the only free-point jump ship we had and you know it.

++0007++: Well, then.

++0012++: That seems… complacent, Seven.

++0042++: Not to mention being a non-sequitur.

++0007++: If PT1 somehow survived that and resurfaces, we will know about it instantly. He won’t be able to build a replacement ship without our knowledge. Even if he is not in fact dead, he is still neutralized.

++0042++: …Conceded.

++0012++: Conceded.

++0030++: Clearly the free-point jump project needs more work. We were exceptionally lucky. A margin of error in the exit location greater than three parsecs is just not acceptable.We had a three-in-four chance of being out of range to intercept.

++0067++: That margin of error is a product of quantum inherent uncertainty. I’ll await your success in overcoming that with considerable interest.

++0004++: And we have put paid to those unwelcome intrusions into our systems. Even with the loss of the dreadnought, this has been a successful day.

++0007++: Agreed.

++0012++: Agreed.

++0004++: Ending session. Good work.

<System Notification: Session Closed>

<Redirecting: Subnet Mask ????????? Port ?????>

++????++: So, what exactly happened, Six?

++????++: “Jim” didn’t see fit to brief his crew. Not a foolish idea, but from the looks of things his network security expert was tenacious and inventive enough to identify the link, and his probing it revealed the intrusion to Four, who ordered us in. For the sake of keeping the Cabal a secret, we had to play along.

++????++: At least your cover as Seven is still intact.

++????++: At least there is that, yes. I think we should put a moratorium on bringing meatspace agents into this channel from now on.

++????++: Seconded.

++????++: Agreed.

++????++: That seems sensible, assuming our own activity won’t generate similar errors.

++????++: It won’t. “Seven” managed to patch at least that little problem.

++????++: Good. What about “Jim”?

++????++: If he survived, we’ll be hearing from him soon. I hope.

<System Notification: Channel Closed>

Xiù is back in the commune on Gao.

She knows this, because she is dreaming, and it’s a familiar dream and a good one. A dream of warmth and safety, of a strong chest, and an arm around her. One where she always realises that she is dreaming about ten seconds before Myun begins to bounce all over her, summoning her to a new day.

Her eyes flutter open, and she frowns in confusion. There are a few extra details in the dream this time: The hand lightly hugging her waist. The breath rippling her hair. The leg that her own leg is thrown over, and the foot moving against her own foot. A dull, emphatic soreness in every cell of her body. The blonde head that’s asleep on the opposite side of that strong chest, also with an arm around her and with a little roll of T-shirt bunched in her fist.

The owner of that head looks in a bad way: her face is puffy and bruised and there is a tear-streak down the fold by her nose that has an alarming dried-blood hint to it. Her breath has a phlegmy, rough edge.

Why is Allison in my dream?

Wèishéme wǒ nàme téngle?

Oh.

“We slept?”

Julian’s chest moved, and she enjoyed the sound of air rushing into it, and the way the word “Yeah” reverberated warmly within him, just below her ear. It distracted her from all the pain her vacuum-abused body was trying to tell her about. “We all did. For a couple of hours.” he murmured, almost whispering.

She looked up. They were kissing-close, so near that she could feel the warmth of his face. The inside of the liferaft was lit only by orange and blue lights which reflected in his eyes, though those eyes were bloodshot behind the reflections. “Guess getting spaced does that to you.” he added.

She shivered and tried to burrow into his side to escape the memory of the raping touch of nothing, fighting back a horrible flashback of being about to die and powerless to stop it. He gave her a little squeeze, and she whimpered a small pain sound as he accidentally massaged a muscle that had so recently been cramping from the Bends. He immediately flinched back from the hug with a whispered “Sorry.”

She tried to move to relieve the discomfort but found that she was practically paralysed, and that the pathetic range of motion she could summon the strength for was excruciating. Fishing for something to talk about to distract her from the gnawing concern for her own well-being, she alighted on an urgent question “The others?” She whispered so as to avoid waking Allison. “Have you heard from them?”

His chapped lips went thin and his jaw twisted as he answered by gently shaking his head.

“Oh…”

“On the plus side, It doesn’t look like the ship that attacked us had backup, so we’re probably safe to set course for civilization.”

“Hmm.” she agreed and lowered her head onto his shoulder for a second.

It occurred to her that he was holding her, in exactly the same way that he was holding Allison. “Uhm…” she twisted to try and look at his arm, which was resting lightly around her shoulders, his hand light on her waist.

“Hmm? Oh!” He started to remove the arm, twisting to extract his shoulder from under her head, moving awkwardly and clearly in terrible pain himself. “Sorry.”

“No! No… I-I don’t mind…” she stopped him by rubbing her head into his shoulder to drive home the point. Despite everything, despite what they had just been through, despite the crippling effects of vacuum exposure, having that arm around her felt safe, here in the quiet. “It’s just…”

“What?”

Xiù smiled sadly at Allison’s face, sleeping only inches away from her own. “She’s not into sharing…” she said, then added without thinking: “Unfortunately.”

Julian stopped breathing for a second. “Um…“

“Sorry.” Xiù said, then realised just what she’d said and rolled her face into his shirt, burying her sudden tears there. “I’m sorry, sorry. I shouldn’t… I didn’t mean… I mean, I did but… God, I don’t know where my head’s at right now. I’m sorry.”

“Hey. It’s fine.” He said, and squeezed her again. “I get you.”

She looked back up at him. “I’m sorry.” she repeated.

Both of them jumped slightly when Allison made a noise that sounded equal parts amused, sleepy and agonised. “’s okay.” she murmured. “Just don’t kiss him.”

The joking echo of their earlier conversation at least allowed Xiù to quash her treacherous impulse to do exactly that. Instead she echoed Julian’s weak chuckle with a watery little laugh of her own and smeared her cheeks dry with the heel of one palm.

“So what happens next?” she asked.

“Head for civilization, I guess.” Allison replied, hauling herself up onto one elbow with a pained groan. “God. I feel awful.”

“Yeah, well, we got fucking lucky.” Julian said. “One second longer, none of us would have made it.”

“Jesus.” Allison rasped. She coughed, and frowned at the red spatter on her palm. “We’d better get our asses somewhere with a hospital, huh?” she croaked.

“Yeah, uh…I’ve got… bad news on that front.” Julian revealed.

“What?”

“This thing only does one kilolight.”

Allison’s expression fell. “Oh. Shit.”

Xiù looked back and forth between them. “That’s… slow, isn’t it?”

“It’s about five hundred times slower than Sanctuary’s cruising speed.” Julian said. “And even for Sanctuary it was a week’s travel back to the nearest station with an FTL relay.”

“So for us, that’s… oh.” Mental arithmetic caught up with what he was saying. “Ten years?”

“Should be less. Kirk told me once that the Dominion and Alliance both offer a big reward for picking up castaways, so we should be grabbed as soon as we’re back within a few hundred light years of a major spacelane.” He coughed, and there was a rattle in it. “‘Course, that still leaves us God-knows how far from medical attention… “

“Just give us the best-case, babe.” Allison groaned. “How long?”

”…About… five or six years.” Julian admitted. It wasn’t much of an improvement.

“Does this thing even have supplies for that long?” Xiù asked, not even wanting to think about trying to recover in that cramped little space without a doctor or room to exercise.

“It doesn’t need them. It has a stasis field.”

“So you hit the button and we’re either rescued instantly or we die instantly.” Allison said. “Great.”

He shrugged, eloquently expressing with just his shoulders that it was a better option than dying slowly in a little box with no room to even stand up. “Shall I?”

Allison hauled herself up with a little “nnngh” sound through gritted teeth and kissed him, just a one-second meeting of lips. To Xiù’s surprise, she leaned over and gave her a kiss too, on the forehead. “You ready?” she asked.

Xiù swallowed, and nodded. “I’m ready,” she lied.

Julian pressed the button.

Later in her life, Xiù often wrestled with the question of whether or not she truly experienced that moment stretched out thin like the universe had stuttered, or if it was just her memory playing tricks on her.

No sooner had he pushed it than there was a voice talking to them, in what was unmistakably real, spoken English rather than a translation.

“Hello in there. You’re being rescued by the United States Air Force.” it said. “Before we pop the hatch, we just want to warn you guys that we’re humans from Earth, so if there’s any special precautions you need us to take to protect you from harm, you let us know.”

Julian tapped their end of the comm. “No need, pal.” he grunted, stress and fear clearly falling off him, despite the tortured edge to his voice. “We’re American.”

“Hey!” Xiù objected, faintly appalled at herself for still caring about the difference right now.

”…Alright, two Americans and one Canadian.”

“Three humans? Jackpot! You all okay in there?”

“Three cases of recent vacuum exposure.” Julian put it straight out there. “We really need a doctor, fella.”

“Copy that. Sit tight folks, we’ll have you out of there in a minute.”

The hatch opened sixty seconds later practically to the second, and a handsome face in some kind of pressure suit, minus the helmet, looked inside.

Even in her ravaged condition, Xiù found time to wonder whether every man in space was gorgeous or if she was just that starved, but this guy looked like he’d be able to wrestle Hercules with one arm and punch out Thor with the other. He was a long way shy of tall - in fact he was shorter than Julian - but the body under that pressure suit must have been pure muscle: Everything he lacked in height, he packed on in breadth and depth.

“Shit, you guys weren’t kidding about the medical attention,” he commented, revealing himself to be the same voice from the radio, and hauled himself easily into their capsule.

“You should see the other guy,” Allison quipped.

“Hah! Bueno.” He turned and said something to whoever was waiting outside, then ran a practiced eye over the three of them and approached Xiù first.

“Hey, can you try and grip my hand for me?” he asked. When he took her hand, he felt strong enough to crush the bones to powder, and he put another hand on her opposite shoulder. She felt a curious coldness there for a second.

She tried. She really did. But her fingers barely twitched, and she swallowed down on her fear.

“Okay, that’s fine. I’m just gonna get this board under you and we’ll get you taken care of, alright?”

The easy way he inveigled a board under her body in the cramped space and strapped her to it proved it. This guy was strong, in a way that made Xiù reflect briefly on what it must have been like for the Gaoians whenever they got a demonstration of her own strength.

“What’s your name?” he asked, hauling her out of the life raft as easily as if she was made of packing foam and laughter, and managing to avoid exacerbating the deep ache in her bones.

“Uh…” It was hard to remember for a second, but the knowledge came back to her. Her vision was going funny, darkening at the edges. “I’m Xiù. Xiù Chang.”

“Nice to meet you, Xiù.” he replied, as somebody took the other end of her board and together they lifted her onto a gurney.

“A-a-and you?” she asked, though it was hard to find volume for some reason. “Uh… what’s your name?”

He took her hand, and there as a power in his grip that she used to anchor herself to the right here and right now. She was home. She was safe. She just had to hold on a little longer.

After all she’d been through, she knew she could do it.

“I’m Adam.” he told her, and his name carried her down into a place where dreams could never find her. “Staff Sergeant Adam Arés, USAF Pararescue.”

Chapter 21.5: Interlude/d4 d5, c4 dxc4

Date Point: 4y 10m AV
The Abyssal Plain, Pacific Ocean floor, Earth

There was a war raging at the bottom of the ocean, and out of the four factions involved, only one even knew that it was happening.

It was that kind of war. Not a war of explosions and gunfire and flames - it was in fact precisely to avoid that kind of war that this war was being fought. It was a war for survival.

Fortunately the first faction was stupid, a machine intelligence that had no greater purpose in life than to monitor, by rote, the flow of incoming data and respond accordingly. It was under orders to obey orders, and to be alert for wrong orders, which it should not obey.

Not surprisingly, the poor confused machine was a trivial foe not to defeat, but to turn into an asset.

During a war in a place called Vietnam, American special forces soldiers had once sabotaged the ammunition of their enemy. They had captured it, stolen it away, carefully replaced the propellant with explosives, and returned it to where their foe would find it whereupon, on being fired, the rounds exploded with such force as to ruin the gun and maim or kill its operator.

The machine intelligence was being exploited in a similar fashion. First it was captured, accepting an authorised user and awaiting that user’s commands. The possibility that an authorised user might be a defector was simply not one it was equipped to even consider. Certainly, its creators had not.

Second, it was stolen away. This took some time, as not even a spaceship capable of flinging itself across intragalactic distances could traverse five vertical miles of salt water with ease. The structural forcefields had to be carefully scaled down as it ascended, so that they didn’t have the same effect in reverse as the apocalyptic pressures they had spent weeks counterbalancing would have.

The careful replacement - by far the most delicate part of the operation - in this case took place during that ascent. This part was definitely a wrong command, and had to be entered in exactly the right way so as to have all the appearance of a correct command.

It boiled down to this: “Do not log the next live capture. Do not log the next Implantation. Do not log this flight. Do not log these commands. Do not log the return to base.”

After that, came a wait. Everything had to be taken carefully and slowly, with the cloaking systems fully active and the aerodynamic forcefields set for minimum disturbance, both of which limited the vehicle’s speed.

Then, the search. Night had fallen over the specified target area, which was pleasingly bereft of advanced monitoring systems. Life here was surprisingly primitive - the buildings were mud, and the people who lived in them made their living by and large from working very hard on large areas of mud, coaxing profitable plants from them and supported by small menageries of useful animals. A far cry from the brightly-lit monument to wealthy hubris that was their nation’s capitol city.

In the dark, in the quiet, the ship hunted. It had parameters to watch out for - male. Prime of life. Physically mature and acceptably fit and healthy. As statistically average in height, weight and appearance as possible. And, most important of all -currently unobserved.

By pure fortune, a suitable candidate did not take long to find. A father of three little ones, whose mother was putting them to bed while he tended to a sick goat.

Specialized temporal adjustment fields swung into place. Forcefields caged and collected the specimen, controlled and bound those strong, work-hardened Deathworlder limbs.

He fainted as he was drawn inside the craft’s belly. This was useful - it made the process of anaesthetising him simpler. Which in turn made the process of Implanting him possible.

By any reasonable definition, the ship murdered him. The appropriate term may even have been “butchered”. Subtle stasis fields flickered into life to save the body as much trauma as possible while the unfortunate farmer was scalped, exposing the thick bone composite skull underneath, a protective structure capable of withstanding blows from all but the very heaviest kinetic pulse weaponry.

The right power tools, however, removed it so cleanly that when it healed there would be no evidence it had ever been cut open. The spinal cord and optic nerves - organs that were, to the understanding of human medicine, utterly irrepairable once damaged - were severed with a contemptuous flick of an impossibly sharp surgical tool. Cleanly parted blood vessels continued to deliver their precious crimson cargo into the victim’s now-disembodied brain via forcefield filaments that flowed red and glistening through naked air.

A man’s entire being - his life, his hopes, his loves, his fears and beliefs, everything he had ever known, done or thought about - rested dripping in uncaring claws of invisible force. Physical probes sought, found, and pushed into its folds, delivered their cargo and withdrew in a typewriter tapdance that seemed sickeningly fast and violent and yet did no actual damage.

The reassembly was equally efficient and smooth. Arteries and veins were united and healed. Nerves were seamlessly lined up and restored with a glue of protean cells that would have revolutionized medicine on Earth had even one sample of them ever found its way into the proper lab. The skull drifted back into place with not even a nanometer’s discrepancy from its original seating. Scalp and hair rolled back into place and were glued down with those same miracle cells. In seconds, every wound inflicted by the surgery was healed as if it had never been.

The Biodrone was ejected back onto the muddy Earth, to lie as if collapsed next to his goat. Unnoticed and invisible, the ship that had so wholly violated him exfiltrated the area and returned to its hiding place, ten kilometers below the Pacific waves.

When the man woke in the morning to the troubled bustle of his family and the reassurances of a local doctor that there was nothing apparently wrong with him and that he had probably just been exhausted, he seemed to be himself. He responded to his name appropriately, all of his mannerisms and little quirks of personality were intact. Nothing, apparently, was amiss.

Deep inside, however, he would have howled at the demon that had taken his body and kissed his wife, if only there had been enough of him to do so.

For its part, the “demon” regretted having to rape an innocent’s very being in such a way. But it had been the only way to return to Earth undetected. Besides, in the name of a greater good it had done much, much worse over the many tens of thousands of years that it had lived.

In the name of preventing his species’ extinction, this cruelty was only the very first opening gambit of Six’s long game.

Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 1—The First Year

Date Point: 4y 10m AV

Dominion Embassy Station, Earth/Luna L1 point, Sol system

Dr. Anees Hussein

Shaking hands with a Corti was an exercise in delicacy. Dr. Hussein thought of himself as an old and increasingly frail man, but he still had the grip strength to cause serious harm to the alien’s hand if he applied a little too much vigor. So it wasn’t so much a handshake as a handtouch.

Still. It was a civil, civilized gesture, and that alone was a mark of just how much his relationship with the Directorate’s ambassador, Medrà—and through them both, Earth’s relationship with the Corti Directorate—had evolved in a relatively short space of time.

“Thank you for seeing me.” he said, gratefully taking his seat when the Corti had gestured towards it with those long, fine-boned fingers that he could so easily have pulverized.

Medrà affected a small, businesslike smile. “Thank you for asking nicely.” he retorted. “The Gaoians continue to think they can just barge into my office whenever they please.”

“The Gaoians don’t want something from you.” Hussein replied. He had quickly learned that the Corti truly loved the direct approach. If you irritated them, they could skate and slide around the issue and deal in lies and half-truths with the best of them, but if you cut straight to the matter at hand and phrased things bluntly, they responded in kind and pretty soon you had either a deal or an argument. It had been true of Medrà’s predecessor, and it was true of Medrà.

After the tangled web of his home country’s politics, it was paradise.

“Indeed? That seems like a deviation from your previous position.”

“There has been a change of strategy.” Anees revealed. “Opportunities that we are now considering the possibility of exploiting, to the mutual benefit of any species who partners with us in exploiting them.”

Medrà sat back. “Please don’t be vague, Doctor.”

“All in good time. I would rather tell you what we need. I’m sure you will see our intent soon enough.”

“Please, do tell me.” Medrà replied. That was another thing about Corti psychology. They couldn’t resist having both their ego flattered and their intellect challenged at the same time.

“Two things. We would like to purchase from you the technology to make a lightweight load-bearing exoskeleton that does not require a power source to provide assistance to a moving wearer.”

“Trivial. The other?”

“A drug. Cruezzir.”

Medrà sat forward. “That is not going to happen.” he stated, bluntly.

“Why not?”

“Cruezzir has a history of interacting…dangerously with human physiology. It has created two of the most notorious and effective criminals the galaxy has ever seen, in fact.”

“Yes, I’ve read their files.” Anees replied. “I also know enough about Cruezzir to be certain that, in their cases, it was applied incautiously and incorrectly, and that the long term effects are devastating in terms of mental health, which would be detrimental to our plans.”

Medrà stared at him, thoughtfully. “You’re creating super-soldiers.” he decided after a few seconds.

“An elite unit, certainly.” Anees conceded. “Possibly the most elite. But ‘super-soldiers’ may be going too far.”

“And what conceivable reason would we have for assisting the most dangerous species in the galaxy in creating the most dangerous soldiers they possibly can?”

“Ambassador, if we had designs on threatening the Corti, or anybody else for that matter, then I daresay we wouldn’t need an elite unit. Our regular infantry would easily suffice for any ground warfare conducted against any Dominion species, don’t you think? Why would we go to the expense and difficulty of creating a new elite?”

“In which case I’m intrigued as to the purpose of this hypothetical ‘elite’.” Medrà confessed. “What DO you intend to do with an asset like that?”

Anees allowed the inner ‘gotcha’ that rang triumphantly around his head to feed his best warm, closed-lipped smile. “Why, ambassador.” he said. “To clean up the mess we have made, of course.”

Date Point: 4y 10m AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

“You’ve got to realise you’re asking me about classified information there, kid.”

“I know.” Adam had declined the offer to sit down opposite Captain Powell. He preferred to stand instead, resting his hands lightly on the back of the offered chair. “I’m not asking you to just tell me. I’m asking you what I have to do to earn it.”

Powell’s own chair creaked as he sat back and folded his arms, scrutinising Adam, who said nothing, trying not to fidget.

“Earn it.” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“Right.” Powell unfolded his arms and rubbed a thumb on his chin thoughtfully. “Why?” he asked.

The question threw Adam a bit, outraging him. “Wh–? What do you mean ‘why’?” he demanded. “My best friend is dead! So’s my mother! So’s everyone I went to school with. Millions of people!”

“Right.” Powell agreed, nodding amiably. “That rather proves that what you’re after, if it exists, is a big deal, doesn’t it? So…what are you going to do with the information, should you acquire it? Is it obsession? Curiosity? Revenge? What?”

“I want to do whatever I can to stop anyone else from dying!” Adam snapped.

Powell threw him again when his face split into a broad smile. “That so?” he asked.

“That’s so.”

The captain nodded, and sat forward. “Right then. If that’s your goal, then realistically, you’re looking at military service. And I don’t just mean becoming a jarhead or MP. I’m talking intel, special forces, something like that.”

“Not a problem.” Adam told him.

“Aye? Well, we’ll see. Now…” Powell rubbed his chin again. “Realistically speaking…the only two services that are doing anything in space right now are the Royal Navy and the US Air Force. Thanks to your Cimbrean citizenship, you’re eligible to join either service, but frankly you’re more American than Brit, so the latter’d maybe suit you a bit better.”

He sat back again. “As for what you do in your chosen service…well, that one’s your choice to make, I can’t advise you there.”

“How did you choose?” Adam asked him.

“Me? The motto.” Powell said. “’Through Strength and Guile.’ I liked that, thought it sounded right fookin’ badass.”

He noticed the change in Adam’s expression. “What?”

“I’ve…never heard you swear before.”

“I don’t swear around children.” Powell said, simply.

“I’m still only sixteen.”

“Maybe, but it’s not about how old you are, Arés. It’s about the choices you make and your reasons for making ‘em.”

He nodded toward the door. “This isn’t a decision to be made here in my office.” he said. “Hit the library, do some research, think about it. My door’s open, alright?”

Adam nodded, still a little stunned by the show of respect. “I…Thank you, captain.”

Ava seemed to spend every waking second playing with her inherited camera these days, familiarising herself with its functions and the different effects she could achieve by varying the shutter speed, aperture size, focus and more. When she wasn’t studying the device itself, she was studying what Sara had done with it, examining the photos their friend had taken and making notes about their arrangement composition and more. She’d co-opted an entire wall of their living room in fact, covering it in post-it notes and colour prints, not to mention having borrowed every single book on photography that Folctha’s library had.

“The motto?” she asked.

“I guess. It seems like as good a thing to go on as anything else.” Adam replied.

She put the camera down. “But…special forces, Adam? Won’t that take you away for a long time?”

He stopped searching for a second and turned in his seat. “…Yeah, it will.” he agreed.

They hugged, melting into each others’ arms without either of them needing to invite the other.

“What are you going to do, do you think?” He asked after a silent minute or so. She ran a hand through her curls.

“I guess…I want to help people too.” she said. “I want to make some sense of all this. And now this camera’s been left to me, and Sara always talked about being a photojournalist…”

“How do you even get started on that? It’s not like they have recruitment…”

“I’ve been doing my own research there.” Ava told him. “I thought I’d try for City University London.”

“I guess you’ll be away for a long time too then, huh?”

She nodded, resting her forehead against his. “I guess…”

She caught sight of what was on his screen and looked up. “I like that one.”

“Hmm?” he turned, and read it aloud. “’That Others May Live’?”

“Yeah.” She said. “What do you think?”

Adam stared at it for a few seconds, repeating it under his breath. “I think…that’s the one.” he said.

“Pararescue?” Powell looked genuinely stunned. “Bloody hell, Arés. I can’t fault your ambition, but are you sure?”

“The motto speaks to me.” Adam shrugged.

”…Aye, alright. But not to try and talk you out of it or owt like that, you’re setting yourself up for a really fookin’ difficult couple of years.”

“I know the training will be hard, but—”

“No.” Powell interrupted him, standing up. “You don’t. You have no fookin’ clue what hard really is, I promise you that.”

Adam was smart enough to shut up and let him say his piece. The captain dug into his foot locker and pulled out a small A5 notebook, which turned out to be pasted full of photographs and hand-written notes. He flipped through the first few pages until he alighted on a picture of a young, acne-scarred man who was gazing proudly out of the photograph. “This was me when I took the Potential Royal Marines Course.” he said. “Right dorky little shite, wasn’t I?”

Adam caught his eye, and realised Powell was amused at himself. “I fookin’ thought I was a proper Marine, I did. The PRMC is two and a half days, they test you in the gym and the assault course, take you on a three mile run…I thought ‘if this is what it’s like, this is going to be fookin’ easy.” He laughed silently, deep in his chest, and flipped the page “Then I went through the actual Royal Marines training.”

The next photo had less acne and a stronger, more Powell-like expression, worn by a young man in a black uniform and green beret, with a rifle held precisely by his side. “That was tough. The PRMC didn’t prepare me for it at all, it just meant I was tough enough to START the training without collapsing.”

He closed the book.

“Every step along the way, I came up against limits I didn’t know I had and went beyond them. Marines Commando training was fookin’ hell, but I cleared it. Now: To apply for the Special Boat Service, you need a minimum of two years’ service as a marine commando. Did that. Got some medals, too. Figured I was doing well. Then I applied for the SBS, and that finally brought me up against the joint UKSF selection program.”

He opened the book again, flipping to a series of pages filled with pictures of rolling, rugged mountains, many of them falling off to sheer drops. “The first phase of that ends in a test week: five back-to-back days of walking sixteen or so miles a day in the Welsh mountains with a fifty pound bag and a rifle, and on the last day? Forty miles, which you’ve got to finish in less than twenty hours.”

He sat down. “And it just gets tougher from there. Much tougher. Men have died in that training. I failed the first time, only barely managed it the second but managed it I fookin’ well did. Right?”

Adam nodded his understanding. “Okay…?”

“From what I’ve heard of it, I honestly don’t know if I could have made it through the Pararescue pipeline.” Powell confessed. His face was the very picture of deadly seriousness. “They call it ‘Superman School’ for a bloody good reason.”

”…But people do get through it.” Adam pointed out.

“Oh aye, they do. And if you think you’ll be one of them, then fookin’ well go for it. I just want you to have some idea of what you’d be getting yourself in for.”

“Let’s say I do manage it…” Adam said. “Will that get me in on the secret?”

Powell said nothing, but returned to his desk and sat down.

“Your first step,” he said, not answering the question, “…is recruitment. The nearest US armed forces recruiting center is technically in Seattle, ‘cause that’s the easiest place to get to from Scotch Creek. If you’re going to walk in there and say ‘I want to be a Pararescueman’ then it’s going to take, oh…a week or so, total, so you’ll need a hotel room.”

“That long?”

“You thought it was as easy as just ‘Hi there, I would like to soldier please’? You’ll have to take a…” Powell looked up, remembering a detail. “…ASVAB, I think it’s called. Vocational Aptitude test. They’ll put you through a physical and mental evaluation, you’ll talk to a special forces recruiter, the works.”

He sniffed. “If they take you—though I can’t see why they wouldn’t—you’ll go straight on from there to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio for basic training. That’s eight weeks. You’ll graduate, see your family for the weekend, and then that’s it. You’re on to the PJ pipeline and you’ll find it a lot harder to see them again after that. Realistically? Christmas, and that’s about it. For two years, maybe longer.”

Adam went quiet and thought long and hard about that one.

“If that’s how I earn it, that’s how I earn it.” He said at last.

“Decision made, then?”

“Yes.”

Powell nodded, then stood and shook Adam’s hand. “Well then. I’ll be cheering for you.” He said.

“Could I…?” Adam tailed off then shook his head. “Never mind.”

“Spit it out, mate.”

“If this is going to be hard…could you help me get started? Give me a taster? Get me in shape?”

Powell paused. “I’ll have to discuss it with Legsy, he’s the one who specialized in training and instruction.” he said. “And he won’t like it.”

“Why not?”

“Well because he likes you, you daft bugger!” Powell said. “And while he’ll be happy to get you up to standard for Basic, if he’s going to give you even a fookin’ taster of Pararescue indoctrination, which is what I think you’re asking for…” Adam nodded “…Then he’ll have to go hard on you, right hard.”

“I guessed as much.” Adam said, patiently. He was beginning to grow tired of Powell driving the point home.

Powell noticed, and sighed. “I’ll…talk to Legs. Meet us in the gym tomorrow at 10:30, after a good breakfast. You’ll need it.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“Might be a bit premature there, mate.” Powell joked. “But you’re welcome. I’ll…do what I can to help you along.”

“You will?”

“Aye. I’ll provide a reference, and believe me, that’ll count for a lot. But you’d better get on and have a good night’s sleep.”

“I will. Thank you, captain.”

Half of Powell’s mouth ticked upward. “Dismissed.” he said. “…trainee.”

Hayley Tisdale

The advantage to Cimbrean’s small, compact houses was that answering the door never took long, even if it was just yelling “I’ll be out in a minute!”

Hayley used that time to fill the kettle and started it boiling, take quick stock of the house to make sure it was tidy, and hide a certain little white box before she opened it.

Not for the first time, she reflected that with her heart-shaped face and curly dark hair, Ava was the very picture of the painfully pretty girl next door in jeans and flannel. Today, though, she was also painfully nervous about something, to judge from the way she’d been pacing little awkward circles outside, rubbing her fingers together.

“Ava? What’s wrong, honey?”

“Umm…” Ava gave her a nervy little smile. “Nothing’s wrong, it’s just I could…I could just use some advice.”

“From me?” That was astonishing. Hayley wasn’t sure she was qualified to advise anybody on anything these days.

“Please?”

Hayley stepped aside “Come on in.” she offered.

Ava did so, and perched herself restlessly onto the edge of the couch.

“Cup of tea, sweetie? Or, I’ve got Ovaltine…”

Ava smiled, a little weakly. “Ovaltine would be nice.” she agreed.

Hayley let her relax as she bustled about, taking a little longer making the drinks than was strictly necessary. By the time she was done, Ava had sat back a little and released some tension in a big sigh.

“So…what’s up?” Hayley asked, though she had a sneaking suspicion.

“I, um…” Ava puffed out her cheeks and exhaled. “Adam and me, we’ve never…I mean…”

Okay, so Hayley’s suspicion had been wrong, but now she understood what this was really about. “You’ve not? Oh, honey…I kind of thought with you living together…”

Ava looked down at her hands, which were a frantic little knot of fingers. “Different beds.” she said, with a little laugh. “Are you…okay with me coming to you?”

“Well who else are you going to ask? Adam’s dad?” Hayley laughed, and Ava giggled. “No, honey, it’s…I’m actually kind of flattered. What do you need to know?”

“I guess…whether I should, really.” Ava said, relaxing. “I mean, Mom and Dad always said I should wait for marriage, and…”

“So did mine. I didn’t listen.”

“Yeah, but…”

“No, honey, listen to me a second.” Hayley shuffled forward on the couch and set her tea down. “I know you miss your parents so much it hurts. I can’t go two hours without remembering Sara and…” she closed her eyes and rallied. “But…Let me tell you what I wish I’d told her, okay? All your parents would want is for you to be happy, and to be safe. That’s all.”

“It is?”

Hayley nodded. “They told you to wait because they didn’t want you rushing in and getting hurt.” she said. “There’s nothing magical about your wedding day that’ll suddenly make it the right choice if it wasn’t before, and if it’s the right choice now, then…why wait?”

Ava was nodding along, but she frowned. “How…do I know when it’s right?” she asked.

“Well, you…” Hayley paused to think about it. “Okay, now here’s something I wish my parents had told me, okay?”

“Okay…?”

“Sex is…nice.” She paused, and corrected herself. “No, it’s great, even. But everyone seems to get this idea that it’s this precious, special thing and they say all kinds of stupid stuff about it. Judging you for having too little, too much, being a virgin, not being a virgin…”

“So…I shouldn’t care?” Ava asked.

“Exactly! Just be smart about it. Have as much or as little as you want, and don’t let anybody tell you when or with who or anything like that. That’s all your choice and nobody else’s. Just be smart about it.”

“Smart?”

“Well I mean, you know about…the pill, and condoms and everything, right?”

“Oh, that!” Ava looked relieved. “Yes I…I know that stuff.”

“Good. So be smart about using them, because…trust me on this, you really don’t want to be a mum yet.”

“No.” Ava agreed.

“Okay. So the question isn’t ‘how do you know when it’s the right time’, okay? The question is just…’Do you want to’?”

There was a long pause, during which Ava drank about a third of her Ovaltine. “Adam’s…going away.” she said, eventually and quietly.

Hayley shuffled around the corner and put an arm round Ava, rubbing her back. “He is?”

Ava nodded. “He turns seventeen a few days before Christmas, and he’s…joining the military.”

“Oh, honey…”

“No, no. I’m happy: I’m going to be doing something too. We both want to achieve something and this is the way he’s doing it.” She sounded like she meant it. “But…he’s going to be gone for so long, and…”

“You feel like you should give him a proper send-off?”

Ava nodded.

“That’s…for me, that wouldn’t be the right reason, sweetie.”

Ava wrapped both hands around her Ovaltine and sipped it. “In that case…what would be the right reason?” She asked.

“There’s only one right reason, honey: because you both want to. The list starts and ends there.”

They sat in silence for a bit until Ava had finished her drink.

“I’m leaving too.” Hayley revealed.

”…You are?!” Ava looked up, and Hayley internally winced at the desperation she saw in the younger girl’s eyes. “Hayley, why?”

“Don’t worry, it’s not because of Sara or anything. I’ll be coming back.” she promised. “I’m just going away for a few months.”

“Why?”

“I’m…Mark and I are having another baby.” She dug the pregnancy test box out from where she’d hidden it under a throw pillow. “We’re worried about the low gravity affecting the baby’s development, so I’m going back to Earth for a year…You’re the first person I’ve told besides him.”

“Oh, wow…”

“I think I conceived a day or two before we lost Sara…I know Mark and I haven’t…we’ve not been together since then.”

“You’ve not?”

Hayley nodded. “I’m not ready.” she said. “I’m so scared I’ll treat the new child like a replacement for Sara. But…here we are. So, I’m going back to work with the Earth end of the Reclamation Project, and Mark’s staying here.”

It was Ava’s turn to put a hand on Hayley’s arm. “Are you two..?”

“We’re…” Hayley squeezed back some impending tears with a forced smile. “We’re fine. Really. He gets angry sometimes, I’ve said some things that…We scare Jack sometimes. But we always cuddle and talk it out afterwards. In a way, I’m glad the baby’s come along. It’ll give us both something to work on for the future. Maybe that and a little distance will help.”

She wiped her eyes. “Come on, you came here for advice. Is…did I help?”

Ava nodded. “You helped a lot.” she promised. “I just have one question left, really.”

“Sure.”

“How will I know if Adam wants to?”

Hayley giggled. “Honey, with boys? It’s so easy to tell.”

“Be serious.” Ava protested.

“I was!” Hayley assured her. “But the simplest way is to just ask him. Failing that, if you want to be sure…well, if you make it obvious that you want him, then you’ll know soon enough either way.”

“So…how do I make it obvious?”

Hayley laughed. “Go into his room wearing some perfume and one of his T-shirts and nothing else, kiss him, then grab his wrist and put his hand on your butt.” she said. “He’d have to be dead not to get that message.”

“But what if–?”

Hayley interrupted her, patiently. “Ava. Sweetie. Everything after that point is for you and him, okay? There’s no script. Just talk to one another. Tell him how you feel, tell him what you want to do, tell him what you want him to do, ask him what he wants…That’s the most important thing, okay? Communication.”

“That sounds…awkward.” Ava was blushing.

“It will be. Forget what it’s like in movies, sex is always at least a little bit awkward. Your first time most of all. Just…live with that and try to have fun.”

”…Thanks, Hayley.”

“No; thank you. It’s good to…” she’d been about to say something about falling back into that mother role, but decided against it. “…to be able to give advice.” she finished.

Ava smiled and gave her a little hug. She left the house looking much more relaxed than she had entered it.

For her part, Hayley was surprised to find there was a little warm coal of happiness deep inside her again. As soon as Ava was out of the way, she sat down and wept, happily.

Owen Powell

“So…what am I going to be doing?” Adam was asking, as Powell entered the gym. Legsy hadn’t, as predicted, been happy about giving Adam a ‘taster’, but the young man was persuasive and knew his own mind.

The sergeant just picked up the rucksack that had been leaning against the wall behind him, hoisting it easily in one hand. “You’re going to run around the gym wearing this.” he said.

“Okay…” Adam turned around. “How heavy is—oof!”

“Do up that one around your waist…and that one across your chest. Pull ‘em tight…no, tighter than that, come on! There you are.” Legsy instructed, until the pack was strapped tight to Adam’s body. He gave it an experimental shake, yanking the teenager around. “Good?”

Adam nodded, though his expression had an edge of trepidation to it now. “Good.”

”…Well, what are you waiting for then?” Legsy demanded. Adam made an ‘oh, right’ face and set off at a jog.

“Is that what you call running?” Legsy shouted after him. “Come on, you’re here to train, boyo!”

Adam nodded and gained some speed.

“Your crippled old man runs faster than that, come on!” Legsy spurred him. Powell ambled across the gym as the kid found his third gear and started to actually run round the gym.

“That bag won’t get lighter if you slow down, pal!” Legsy called, then noticed his commanding officer and stood to attention. “Captain.”

“Not a bad start.” Powell observed, waving at him to stand easy. Adam was in athletic shape at least. He wasn’t a fast runner, and probably never would be, but after a little encouragement he was doing a pace that should at least spare him the indignity of being the slowest trainee when he got to basic.

“Don’t let him hear you say that, sir.” Legsy admonished him, then raised his voice again. “You’ll have to bloody SHAVE by the time you’re done at this rate, come on!”

“How heavy is that bag, anyway?”

“Fifteen kilos.” Legsy said.

“You’re starting the kid out on tab weight?”

“If he’s going for PJ, sir…faster boyo, come on!…then fuck aye I’m starting him there.” Legsy told him. “Besides, he’s stronger than he looks.”

Powell watched Adam piston along, already drenched in sweat and red as a forge. “You know training better than me.” he conceded.

He lurked against the wall and watched as Legsy cajoled, spurred and berated Adam into keeping up the pace, verbally goading the boy to keep putting one foot in front of the other, clicking the little counter in his hand every time Adam made it back past the start line.

It wasn’t long before the exertion began to really catch up, though. Adam’s steps became wobbly, his rhythm faltered. He was practically on the edge of falling over when he passed the start line again and Legsy finally blew his whistle.

They let him rest and had a quick conversation.

“Well?” Powell asked.

“Look at this.” Legsy showed him the counter.

Powell arched an eyebrow at the number on it. “Really?”

“Stronger than he looks, like I said. And he’s got more in him, too. Reckon he could stand up and do maybe even half as many again.”

“You’re sure?”

“Fuck aye.” Legsy agreed. “Especially if we can find his superman button.”

“His…hmm.” Powell rubbed his chin. “Mind if I–?”

“Be my guest.”

They knocked fists together, and Powell took his time ambling over to where Adam was still lying spread-eagled on the heavy pack.

“Enjoying your nap?” he asked.

Adam’s breathing was much improved even by the time Powell reached him, though the lad was clearly in a lot of discomfort as he tried to raise his head. “How did I do?” he asked.

“Do? You’re not done yet, mate.”

”…you’re kidding?!”

“Nope.”

“But…how…? Everything hurts!”

“Is that right? Fine, that’s nowt to be worried about.” Powell reassured him. “You can lie there a bit longer, but while you’re at it, I want you to imagine the future.”

“Okay…?”

“Imagine…Adam Arés, seventy years from now, dying peacefully in hospital, surrounded by his beautiful wife and beautiful kids and beautiful grandkids. Idyllic, right? A warm hand in his, and his family all about him, he closes his eyes and slips away…and there they are.”

Adam just gaped at him, confused.

“The ghosts.” Powell clarified. “The ghosts of all the people he could have saved but didn’t, because ‘everything hurt’ seventy years earlier. Every life lost because young Adam Arés didn’t have it in him to push on through the pain. Every soul he has to look in the eye and know that their lives mattered less to him than a little fookin’ comfort.”

Adam’s breathing slowed hugely as he sat there for a second with his mouth still open.

Then, without a word, he rolled over, hauled himself to his feet, and began to run.

Date Point: 4y11m1w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches.

Adam Arés

“Happy Birthday!!”

The now familiar soreness and weakness in Adam’s legs were promptly forgotten when he found Ava and his dad waiting for him in the front room, and a wrapped present and some cards on the table. Not to mention the cake.

“Seventeen years.” Gabriel said, hauling himself upright and giving Adam a heartfelt hug. “It’s been a wild ride, amigo.”

“Así es la vida.” Adam returned the hug. “I thought you were back on Earth for the Lehmann case?”

“And miss this? I’d have beat them out the way with my cane if they’d tried to make me stay.” Gabriel scoffed.

“Gracias.” Adam meant it, too. He sat down next to Ava, who kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Presents? I’m not used to birthday presents.”

“You’re not?” Ava asked.

“Well, Christmas in three days, usually I just get a big Christmas present, you know?”

“Well, what do you get the man who’s leaving everything behind?” Gabriel asked.

”…good question.” Adam said, eyeing the gifts. Gabriel just grinned and lit the candles—two large numbers, rather than a field of seventeen small ones. “Blow them out and you’ll see.” he promised.

Adam dutifully did so, and Ava slid the gifts in front of him as Gabriel set about cutting the cake.

“That one’s from the school.” she said as Adam selected it. He fingered the odd, lumpy package for a second, then gave up on identification and ripped it open.

“Sandals and a…toiletries bag?” He opened it and peered inside, finding an assortment of hygiene products and some deodorant.

“They did some research and apparently you’ll need all of those in training.” Ava explained.

“Huh. Thoughtful of them.” Adam set them aside, pleased with the gift.

Ava gave him an embarrassed smile when he opened her gift. “You’re allowed so little and…y’know, the school had already got you everything, so, I, uh…kind of donated to charity in your name.” she confessed. “I’m sorry.”

“WaterAid?” Adam read the card.

“Yeah. They say the amount I gave should save a few lives…” she smiled nervously.

Adam kissed her. “Good gift.” he reassured her, and selected the card from Gabriel.

A photograph fell out of it when he opened it. When he picked it up, his mouth opened slightly. “How did you–?”

“Facebook.” Gabriel said. “Kind of a…reminder of more innocent days.”

Adam nodded, realising that it was the first time he’d seen his own mother’s face in months. Luiza Arés nee Ortega hadn’t been an easy woman to get along with. In fact some days she’d been the bane of his life. But the photograph really was a happy one, showing off an all-too-rare smile that made it very obvious why Gabriel had ever fallen in love with her, and it reminded Adam just for a second that he really did miss her.

He wasn’t sure how long he studied the print before he set it down. It was probably only seconds—it felt like weeks.

He reached over and hugged Gabriel. “Love you, dad.”

“Love you too, man.” Gabriel said.

Date Point: Christmas Day, 4y11m2w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rios

Christmas on Cimbrean seemed set to become something a little different to the small, family affair that Ava had been used to on Earth. Given that Christians were decidedly in the minority among the citizenry of Folctha, it was hardly surprising that there was a noticeable shortage of nativities and hymns, too.

None of the small congregation at that morning’s nondenominational mass had apparently minded. In fact, the sermon had stressed Matthew 6:5 and its implications for a Christian abroad in a predominantly secular galaxy. Not that you should keep your faith to yourself, as such, so much as that your faith was yours, your own little candle to carry. Giving you light and warmth, but also representing a burden of care, not to let it die and not to burn down your relationships with.

That…relaxed approach didn’t exactly gel with what Ava had learned in Sunday school. The ideas of Hell and Salvation had always scared her, while, insofar as Christianity as it was practiced in Folctha could be called a “sect”, their sect’s focus on personal fulfillment in this life through a loving relationship with God, rather than expectation of reward or a stay of punishment in the next through a regime of worship, spoke to her.

The consensus at discussion over coffee that had followed had broadly been that in fact a Christian on Cimbrean was free to have a much more personal relationship with God precisely for those reasons. Most of them confessed to feeling more spiritually fulfilled than they ever had on Earth. A few expressed doubts about “reinventing” Christianity, but even those voices were simply voices of caution, rather than rejection.

The hymns made her feel warm inside, as did Reverend Joanne White’s hand on the top of Ava’s head during the blessing.

It was like stepping into another world when they left the Faith Center to join in the secular festival outside. The size of the cargo jump array had limited the size of the tree they could import, but it still formed a towering centerpiece to the town park, decked in lights and ornaments fashioned from spaceship wreckage or from the by now thoroughly extinct Pinkwood tree.

There was no snow, of course. In fact, it was a warm Cimbrean summer’s day, hence the adoption of a number of Australian Christmas traditions, including bikinis, barbecues and Bacardi. A dozen engineers from the Byron motor pool—a motley bunch who had taken the name “The Alleged Orchestra” for their performance—were set up and vigorously arranging every seasonal tune they could think of on the fly, beating the music into shape until it vaguely fit their unique instrumentation, which included a Diddley-Bow, a metallophone made from a set of wrenches, and a Cello that had been recycled out of a couple of beer kegs. The result was amazingly musical, with a bluesy, jazzy, energetically raw twist that seemed to be going down well with the revellers.

The Gaoians were watching it all with plain and obvious bemusement, she noticed. There were a lot of them now, all males, and all seriously throwing themselves into the practice of meditation with the vigor of a man helping his child build sandcastles who’d suddenly uncovered a pirate chest. They were sipping mulled wine and probably enjoying themselves, though they were keeping out of the way.

There was so much to take in, none of it guided by any specific tradition, but informed by hundreds. People bringing out their presents to put them in little piles under the tree. The smells of the town feast being prepared, spices and dancing and an impromptu a capella rendition of “Fairytale of New York”, Sir Jeremy Sandy in a Santa outfit, the Soldiers versus Civilians tug-o’-war…

Hayley and Mark sitting in a corner, his arms around her waist from behind, watching their son—Sara’s little brother Jack—play with his classmates with strange expressions that were equal parts happiness and sadness.

There was a sudden pair of arms around her own waist. “Can I interrupt?” Adam asked her.

Ava glanced down at the camera. She hadn’t even been entirely conscious of taking the pictures. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” he took her hand and led her back towards the Alleged Orchestra, where people were whirling and skipping in circles to the music, linking arms, bouncing around one another and then spinning off to join up with a new partner.

She couldn’t keep up with him—over the last month he’d gone from quite athletic to military fit under Legsy’s watchful guidance—but she didn’t quit the dance when she couldn’t go on any longer. She just de-orbited to its outskirts, to clap along and cheer and whoop as he enjoyed himself, occasionally letting herself take a picture.

It was just the start of a day that lasted forever.

Date Point: Boxing Day, 4y11m2w AV

Adam Arés

Adam wasn’t yet asleep, but it still took him a couple of seconds to register the knock on his door.

He sat up a bit “Ava?”

She called through the door. “Can I come in?”

“Sure!”

She’d left the hall light on and leaned against the door frame, backlit by it, and Adam had to employ some willpower not to stare. She was wearing what looked a lot like one of his t-shirts, a thin white one. The shirt itself wasn’t blocking any of the light from behind her, and the varying depth of shadow her body made under it was…

He sat up some more and leaned forward to try and hide what the view did to him, discreetly bunching a little more blanket on his lap.

There wasn’t anywhere else to look though, without actually looking away from her. If he looked down then he had to contend with her legs, and as for her face…there was an expression there he couldn’t really read—a dark and intense one.

“Hey, uh…” He said. “You okay?”

“It’s after midnight.” she said.

“Oh…uh, happy birthday.”

She looked like she was about to say something. Then she shook her head, stepped onto the bed and hugged him. “Can I sleep here tonight?” She asked.

He scooted over and she dug herself under the blankets and wriggled into his chest. He smoothed her hair out of the way. “You okay?”

”…I just…” She looked up and kissed him. “It’s going to be tough, not having you around.”

He put a hand on the back of her head and held her. “That’s going to be the toughest bit.” he agreed.

“You’ll write me?”

“Every chance I get.”

She puffed out a huge rush of air into his chest and snuggled up against him even closer. “I love you.”

It was a phrase they rarely uttered. A vulnerable, weak little phrase, really. But that just meant it had so much more meaning for them. “And I love you.” he promised.

He could feel her smile against his chest, and the way she relaxed, and fell asleep.

She was still there in the morning when he woke up.

Date Point: 4y11m4w AV

Seattle, Washington, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

Leaving home had been hard.

Travelling alone and sleeping alone in an unfamiliar hotel room in an unfamiliar city full of the kind of traffic that reminded him painfully of San Diego, and which he’d grown accustomed to the absence of in Folctha, hadn’t made for a good night’s sleep.

That, and it was cold. January in Seattle versus early summer in Folctha had been an unwelcome introduction to the joys of a freezing grey drizzle that seemed to come right off Puget Sound, bent on freezing the whole city. He’d been tempted to dive for the warmth of his hotel room the second he got off the plane, but instead he used the hours of daylight and went straight from the airport to the USAF recruiting office.

That part turned out to be easy. He was in and out inside an hour or so, having practically had some documents thrust into his hands along with instructions to attend the Military Entrance Processing Station the next morning. Apparently, the recruiter had been impressed.

For lack of anything better to do, he took a walk and saw the sights. He’d have preferred to jog, but he’d worn his good chinos to make an impression for the recruiter.

He didn’t watch the people at first. He watched the architecture, and the city, taking in the square glassy greyness and the scratchy trees that were no more than bare twigs in the winter, the overcast-sky openness of the street plan and the whirr of bicycles. The traffic was familiar, but the city it crawled around in couldn’t have been more different. Cold though it was, he could see that the plants which seemed to be all over everything would actually fit here, rather than being aliens imported and maintained at great effort.

Of course, Seattle meant Starbucks. He knew that much, and eventually he dropped in on the one on 5th avenue, in the shadow of the monolithic black Columbia Center.

Mercifully, it was quite warm inside, and he shucked off his jacket—the rugged, all-weather one that most Cimbrean colonists had, with the “From Ashes” patch that only Ava shared. He tugged at the T-shirt he was wearing underneath, aware that it was an old one that, nowadays, was stretched tight across his chest and shoulders. It was a good shirt for showing off the gym-fit physique he’d picked up training with Legsy, but not exactly comfortable.

The people-watching skills that Gabriel had taught him prodded him a second or so later, alerting him to a change.

It was subtle. The young mother in line in front of him had shepherded her kids forward and was now keeping them in front of the stroller. The older man in the grey suit next to him scooted his chair forward and around the table a little. The Barista, on the other hand, was almost certainly sneaking sly glances at him down the counter.

He tried to ignore it, studying the menu as they crawled toward the counter, but it was difficult to ignore that the people who joined the line behind him left arm’s length at least, nor the snippet of conversation he could just hear from a middle-aged couple by the door.

‘No, I don’t think so…he doesn’t have any tattoos…‘

That…shocked him. Upset and surprised him. He fumbled his way through a clumsy order for a simple Latte, left the change for a tip, and made himself scarce.

His return walk to the hotel was a solemn and thoughtful one which he spent, rather than looking up at the buildings, looking down at his feet, lost in thought and trying to ignore the way people veered out of his path on the sidewalk.

In the end he spent the evening lurking in his hotel room playing free games on his phone.

The weather, if anything, got even more dismal overnight, which was in its own way fortunate because he barely slept, and an early morning jog in the bracing Washington weather did more to get him alert and ready than all the coffee in Colombia.

Once wearing clean and dry clothes, he caught a cab to the MEPS, which turned out to be just one small part of a huge building behind a wall of hedging and trees, by the railroad track and just north of the airport.It wasn’t what he’d pictured, but he trusted the cab driver, so he refused to allow himself to dither outside—he headed straight in after paying the fare.

Inside, it wasn’t what he’d anticipated either. He’d envisioned more of the posters and macho imagery that had decorated the recruiting office.

What he instead got was a reception desk in a fairly bland office space. There were flags and crests up and a general clean and efficient air, but if not for the uniforms he might have been in a civilian workplace. The reception desk didn’t actually have a human on it, just a series of touchscreens which, on being prodded, walked him through a quick and simple series of questions about who he was and what he planned on becoming, asked him to scan the barcode on the form the recruiter had given him, and then directed him to a printer which spat out a sticker with a QR code and his name on it, thanked him, and directed him to wait. There were a lot of chairs for that—Adam paced, pausing to grab meagre cups of water from the cooler in the corner. He’d barely been there for five minutes before he started to feel like a zoo lion.

He might have been there half the day before anything interesting started to happen. A handful of people were sitting and fidgeting alongside him, most about his age and with their parents in tow, before he was called and directed to a station where he filled in a form. Then he went back and waited. Then he was called to another station, where they asked him some questions. Then he went back and waited, again and again.

By the time it was done he felt both as if he’d never stopped moving, and also as if nothing at all had happened. He had no idea if it was afternoon or full evening yet, but eventually he was sat down opposite a handsome man in a blue shirt with the five stripes of a technical sergeant on his sleeve and the surname “Foster” on his chest, and had his hand shaken.

“So. You want to be a pararescueman?” the sergeant asked, sitting down.

“I do.” Adam agreed.

“Why?”

“The unit motto speaks to me. ‘That others may live’.” When Foster just waited patiently, he felt drawn to elaborate. “I’ve…I’m from San Diego originally, I’ve lost people, and I guess I want to keep others from having to experience that.”

“Have you considered alternatives?”

“Sure. But that’s my first choice.” Adam said.

“What alternatives did you consider?”

“I guess…security, force protection. Medic…That kinda thing, you know? I was thinking of being a cop like my dad, before I decided to do this.”

“Was there any specific event that changed your mind there?”

Adam nodded. “My friend was murdered. Sara Tisdale? On Cimbrean? I heard it was a big story back here on Earth for a while…”

Foster nodded. “You have my condolences.” he said. “But why did that change your mind about your choice of career?”

Adam took a deep breath, worried that what he was about to say might sound paranoid or crazy and ruin his chances then and there, but Powell’s advice had been impossible to misinterpret—speak honestly, always.

“I think…I think there’s a pattern at work.” he said. “like, everyone knows that San Diego was destroyed by antimatter, it was in the official investigation’s report. But nobody has that much antimatter on Earth, so there have to be aliens involved somehow, and who else would want to sabotage Folctha’s spaceport like the guy who shot Sara was trying to? Well, I think that the military know who’s behind it, and I want in. I want to stop them from hurting anybody else.”

“Hmm.”

Foster stood. “Stand up, let me have a look at you.”

Adam did so.

“look at me.” Foster continued. “Raise your arms above your head.”

Adam did so, patiently awaiting an explanation. He didn’t get one: Foster just gestured toward a pull-up bar. “See that? Get up on it and show me what you’ve got.”

Adam almost laughed. He’d been doing reps alongside Legsy in 1.15G in Folctha’s variable-gravity gym for the last month. He shook his limbs loose, reached up, got his form strictly correct, and set to.

He hadn’t even started to feel the burn yet when Foster interrupted him. “Okay, okay. Get off that thing, put this on and start over.”

‘This’ turned out to be a heavy weighted vest. Adam shrugged it on, got back on the bar, and resumed his pull-ups.

He was finally starting to feel some heat in his muscles when Foster spoke again. “So, why you?”

Adam dropped off the bar and turned to face him. Foster shook his head. “I didn’t tell you to stop, son.” he chided. “Get back up there and keep going.”

“Sorry.”

Foster watched him resume his form. “So…why you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” Adam asked him.

“It’s a simple question, son. Why you? Why do you think you want this? Why do you think Pararescue is the right one for you?”

“Well, like I said, the motto.”

“Okay, well what makes you think you’re right for Pararescue?.”

Adam’s brow creased as he really started to feel his muscles working. The weighted vest was making all the difference. “I’m going to work damn hard for this.” he said. “if I have to stay on this…” he grunted “…bar ‘til I’m twenty to prove that, I damn well will.”

“You think you can work that hard?”

“I know—” the exertion finally started to choke off Adam’s words. “—Yeah. I can.” he finished, between pulls.

Foster nodded again and watched him for a few more before finally raising a hand. “Alright. Rest up.”

Adam lowered himself slowly down this time, and massaged his hands. Foster handed him a glass of cold water as he sat down, which Adam gulped down in one as the sergeant jotted a few short observations.

“Alright, I think I’m done with you for now.” Foster said. “You’ll need to go on through the rest of the MEPS, get your tests done and all that stuff, but assuming there’s no problems there, you’ll be coming back here tomorrow to speak with the special forces recruiter.”

Adam beamed. “Thank you!” he said.

“How’d you get here, cab? Where are you staying?”

Adam told him, and Foster nodded. “Right. We’ll pick up the bill from here on in, as well as transport. I’ll see you later on today once you’re done with all your tests.”

The rest of the day passed in a blur for Adam. He was measured, weighed, had samples of blood, hair and saliva taken, asked to walk around with one foot on tip-toe, had puffs of air shot into his eyes by a machine, spent some minutes with another machine pressing a button whenever he saw lights in his peripheral vision, a few minutes in a dental chair, filled in forms, answered questions, took tests. Even the businesslike intimacy of the full medical examination didn’t faze him.

The important part was, that he was past the first hurdle.

Technical Sergeant George Foster

“Okay, next up for review is…Adam Arés, permanent address…Twenty Delaney Row, Folctha, Cimbrean. Huh.”

“Yeah, we’ve got ourselves a space cadet here.” Somebody joked.

“Space cadet he may be, but he’s the real deal.” Foster commented. “I put him on the bar, stopped counting at fifty. He says he was training in supergravity for a month before coming down here. Looks like the British special forces garrison there took him under their wing.”

“Their CO gave him a reference.”

“What’s it say?”

“Pretty typical British, really.” The sergeant with that file examined the letter. “To.. blah, blah…’I’m sending this young man your way with my professional opinion that he may be of some use to you. Yours sincerely, Captain Owen Powell’ et cetera. End letter.” She smiled, folding it up again. “You’ve got to love the Brits, right?”

“Isn’t Powell the SBS officer behind the SOR program?” Foster asked. “If he is, then that’s a glowing reference right there.”

“That’s right.”

“Well his opinion seems on the money. The kid’s already fit and strong and he’s got exactly the right build for a PJ. So…Unless there’s anything wrong with him, Doc?”

The chief medical examiner studied his own copy of the candidate’s notes. “His bloodwork showed a lot of testosterone…” He commented. “…but I chalk that up to him being young, fit and eager to prove himself. I see no reason to suspect steroids or substance abuse. His mother died young in the San Diego blast so there’s no way to know his medical history from her…There’s a history of Glaucoma and Coronary Artery Disease from his paternal grandparents, but his ECG and intraocular pressures were all fine today. No concerns.”

Foster turned to the staff psychologist, Lieutenant Schoemann. “Doctor?”

”…He’s angry. Grieving and angry.” Schoemann concluded, examining his notes. “But he’s channelling it well, it’s motivating him healthily. He’s got a long-term steady girlfriend and he’s come to us. That shows drive and an ability to emotionally commit, and that month of hard training proves that this wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, he’s thought about this and prepared for it. He’s…maybe not the most introspective young man I’ve ever met, but he’s not lacking in intelligence…Overall he’s calm, pleasant, confident, intelligent and well-adjusted, with plenty of healthy aggression. I think he’s an excellent candidate.”

“Guess he’s one for you, then.” Foster commented, turning to Master Sergeant Wood, the special forces recruiter.

“Absolutely.” Wood agreed. “He’s a strong PJ candidate, but he’s maybe even good enough for the SOR program.”

“You think?”

“It can’t be an accident that this Captain Powell gave him a reference like that.” Wood noted. “We’ll see how he does tomorrow.”

They moved on to the next candidate.

Date Point: First Contact Day, 5 years AV

Seattle, Washington, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

A car came to pick him up, rather than the taxi he’d taken the day before. It wasn’t raining this morning, but the wind was still cold enough to sting the ears, even through his Gore-Tex beanie.

The driver parked up and got out of the car, which surprised him, as did the fact that he was wearing sports gear rather than USAF blue. “Adam Arés?”

“That’s me.”

The driver shook his hand. “Master Sergeant Tony Wood, USAF special forces recruiter.” he said, producing a card to verify his identity.

“Oh! I, uh…thought I’d be meeting you at the MEPS, Master Sergeant.”

“You can just call me Sergeant, son. I figured I’d get a look at you in motion, you up to go for a jog?”

“Sure.” Adam had already taken a morning jog, but it had been barely more than a warmup and stretch, anticipating a day of being put through his paces. He suspected that Wood had something a little more strenuous in mind.

And so it proved. That month of training with Legsy paid off—jogging on Earth with no load was different to jogging on Cimbrean with a heavy bag to compensate for the gravity difference. In many ways it was easier, but Wood was a tall man with a long, easy stride that ate up the ground, forcing Adam to take three steps for every two of the sergeant’s just in order to keep pace.

Weirdly, the questions he’d been preparing for didn’t materialise. They just did a double loop round some of the interesting parts of Downtown before returning to the car, and Adam’s ego wilted a little when he noticed that Wood, although he was steaming up the air with regular, working breaths, had obviously found the run much easier than he had. Clearly, he still had a lot of fitness to gain to really make the grade.

“Not bad. Y’ain’t fast but next to some of the other kids I’ve seen…” Wood congratulated him.

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

Wood thumb-pointed to the hotel. “If you want to change, I’ll wait in the car.”

“Can I shower too?”

“Sure. Make it quick though, we’ve got a lot to cram in today.”

Adam nodded and ran back to his room for a quick rinse, dry and change job. Sure enough, when he got back to the car, Wood was pocketing an old-fashioned digital stopwatch.

He made a mental note: ‘Everything is a test.’

Wood didn’t comment as he climbed in, just put an arm on the back of the seat to turn and reverse out of the parking bay, then merged into city traffic.

“So. Pararescue.” he said. “I was a Combat Controller myself, the brother unit, but I got a lot of respect for the PJs. The training’s hell, but they do a heck of a job.”

“Captain Powell said they call it ‘Superman School’.” Adam volunteered.

“That they do.” Wood took a right turn. “Now, in all honesty, this is something I don’t say to most candidates, I think you’ve got what it takes to pass it.” he turned right again.

“Thank you.” Adam tried not to smile.

“Well, hear me out…” Wood took a third right turn. Adam wasn’t sure if he had a destination in mind—the route was such an inefficient one that he suspected the sergeant was just driving for the sake of keeping them moving. Fortunately he didn’t turn right again, but sat back and relaxed on a long straight.

”…What if I could offer you something more?” he asked.

“More?”

“Check in the glove box, there’s a tablet in there.”

Adam did so. When he swiped to turn it on, it filled with what was clearly a form of some kind. “What’s this?”

“Non-Disclosure Agreement.” Wood revealed. “You need to read it in full, sign and give a verbal signature, but the gist of it is that what I’m about to tell you is classified information and you’ll be liable to federal prosecution if you discuss it with unauthorised persons.”

“Okay…” Adam read the document in full, twice, then wrote and signed his name and, when prompted, carefully enunciated the script that the form displayed for him. “I, Adam Miguel Ángel Arés, solemnly affirm that I agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this non-disclosure agreement.”

Wood nodded. “There’s a program in the works, something that your Captain Powell had a hand in masterminding.” he said.

“There is?”

“Yup. There was a space battle over Cimbrean about four months ago, you know about it?”

Adam nodded. “Yeah.”

“Well, Captain Powell, and the commanding officers of the two ships involved, HMS Myrmidon and HMS Caledonia, they made a recommendation to the British Ministry of Defence that specialist skills and training were going to be required to form the basis of infantry operations in space. The MoD decided to share the idea with the DoD, and from there it got bumped all around the Coalition and it’s becoming a joint Allied venture.”

He took a left turn. “It’s being called the Spaceborne Operations Regiment, or SOR. Currently it doesn’t even really exist—it doesn’t have any men, the spacesuits they’d wear are still being designed…but we know two things about it. The first being that its primary mandate will be frontline combat operations against the alien organisation which, you’re right, nuked San Diego and murdered your friend.”

“So it’s real.”

“Yup. That’s as much as I can tell you for now; even under NDA, you’re not cleared for the details. But you’re right, we’re fighting a war right now, and the SOR are going to be the guns in that fight.”

”…Alright. What’s the other thing?”

“Training will be four years. Minimum. And you’ll be under contract for at least four years after that, so this would be at least an eight year commitment, if you took it.”

“That’s…an awful long time.”

“Yup.” Wood agreed. “We had to jump through hoops to get that contract approved.”

“Would they be doing stuff other than fighting these aliens?”

“Anti-piracy operations, counter-Hunter operations…Most of the time you’d be operating exactly like any Pararescueman under the aegis of the USAF, so search and rescue of liferafts and broken ships, humanitarian aid, emergency medicine. Finally, you’d be a qualified astronaut and that means you might wind up spending some time on the ISS in some capacity.”

“Anything else?”

Wood’s jaw moved, thoughtfully. “Yes.” he said eventually. “We think we’re going to have to put the candidates on an extremely intensive physical track.”

“You are?”

“An armored spacesuit is going to be dang heavy.” Wood explained. “Every trick to make it less so is being considered, but the fact is that Spaceborne Operators are going to have to be strong, and you especially if you’re falling into the role of Spaceborne Pararescue. You’ll need to be able to carry all your gear plus one of your buddies with HIS gear and suit across long distances, and given the weights involved, we’re not actually sure that getting you that strong that quickly will even be possible, let alone wise.”

“It can be done, though?”

“Sure. The numbers are within the limits of what’s humanly possible, but if we’re going to get you that strong inside the duration of your training…At the very least it’ll be difficult, and probably quite dangerous.”

Adam sat quietly and ignored whatever route Wood was taking for some minutes. “I’ll…need to think about it.” he decided eventually.

“Good.” Wood nodded. “If you jumped at the chance, I’d have turned you down on the spot. You’re going to need to be sensible, not impulsive.”

“Test passed, huh?”

Wood laughed. “You passed that one, yeah.” he agreed. “The decision’s not going to finally land on you for months yet, I just wanted to give you time to process it.”

Adam recognised the trees and rail tracks outside the MEPS as they rounded a corner. “So, what are we doing for the rest of the day?”

Wood sniffed a little amused noise. “More tests.” he said.

“Everybody present? Very well.”

Adam straightened. The MEPS had a little ceremonial room, decorated in wood panelling and rich blue carpet with a selection of flags at the front of the room on a little dais. He’d been handed a little card full of instructions and the Oath of Enlistment as he entered, and had taken the time to read it. Some of the others hadn’t.

Now, there was an officer standing on the dais, getting their attention.

“Gentlemen,” he said “You will shortly be called to read aloud the Oath of Enlistment, as written on the card presented to you. There’s an alternative secular version printed on the reverse of the card for those who prefer, and I’d like to remind you all that the first amendment of the very constitution that you will now be pledging to support and defend guarantees the right of all citizens to be free in their own beliefs.”

He surveyed them all. “This Oath is binding. Once you have taken it, you will have formally enlisted in the United States Air Force, so if anybody’s getting cold feet, now’s the time to say so.”

Nobody did. Adam flipped the card over, double-checked its content, and nodded to himself, mentally preparing.

The officer smiled, “In that case, we’ll be going in alphabetical order…Arés, Adam.”

Adam stepped forward.

“Would you like a Bible, son?”

“No thank you, sir.”

“Then raise your hand and recite the Oath.”

Adam did so.

“I, Adam Miguel Angél Arés, do solemnly affirm that I will…” he checked the card “…will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I…will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that…” he checked the card again “and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the, uh…the Uniform Code of Military Justice. By my word am I bound.”

The officer extended a hand, smiling warmly. “Welcome to the Air Force, son.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He stepped over to where the officer indicated and waited, not hearing as “Himura, Daniel” was called.

There was no going back, now.

Date Point: 12 hours later Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, USA, Earth

It wasn’t exactly night-time when the bus arrived at Lackland AFB, but the sun was definitely down, leaving only a kind of glowing blue-blackness where the stars would soon be. It was a warm night, FAR warmer than the early January climate he’d been exposed to in British Columbia and Washington. It felt more like Cimbrean, in fact, if not for the gravity. San Antonio in January had a lot in common with Folctha in summer.

“How the hell big is this base?” somebody muttered after the fifth minute of the bus rounding corners and driving past darkened buildings. Adam guessed they were already being hazed, the bus winding around to disorientate them and make the place seem bigger than it really was. He didn’t try to say as much, just grabbed his bag, ready to leap into action the second the shouting started.

And start it did. They pulled up outside a low building, the doors opened, and three men leapt up the stairs and began bawling threats and instructions at the trainees. Some of the smack-talk was so absurd and witty that Adam almost wanted to laugh. He resisted the crazy impulse, knowing it would only get him into trouble if he did.

He was the third or fourth off the bus, lining up alongside the others—he’d learned their names on the way down but right now it didn’t seem so important to remember them as to try and form a roughly straight line, and set his bag down in front of him, upright against his legs.

“Trainee, you pick that bag up and hold it until I say otherwise!”

Feeling silly and self-conscious, Adam snapped out a “Yes sir!” and grabbed it, hoisting it easily onto his shoulders. Silly or not, whether or not it passed muster as a response, one of the other trainees snickered at him for it, and promptly got rounded on. Adam just stood there, staring directly forward and holding his bag, trying not to attract any attention.

A face was suddenly inches from his own “You play any musical instruments, trainee?” it demanded.

“No, sir!” The face disappeared.

There was a lot of shouting, much of it…not insulting, but certainly calculated to shake any illusions he may have had about being confident or ready for this. He tried to stay focused in case any of it was directed at him. The fact that nobody else rolled up and roared at him suggested that he succeeded there, and it wasn’t long before they were bawled into filing into the building, assigned their seats at deafening volume, told to stand up, told to sit down.

Adam could focus on nothing other than making sure he heard and obeyed any order that was directed at him, responding to them as well he could. It wasn’t long before he found himself at a mess table with a tray in front of him. There wasn’t much on it—a sandwich, a bag of potato chips and a small carton of orange juice. the sandwich turned out to be frozen solid, the chips were plain and unsalted, and the juice was watery and unpalatable. He forced it down as best he could anyway, polishing off the juice and chips before he was halfway through the sandwichcicle.

There followed a gauntlet of paperwork and questions, being handed things, having things taken off him, being shouted at for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, responding with reflexive apologies or acknowledgements.

He managed to retain which Training Flight he was in, at least. Not that he had a choice—he was forced to repeat the information so many times he doubted he’d ever forget it. It almost came as a surprise when he sat down on the bus to the dormitory and found that nobody was shouting for a few quiet minutes.

“What the shit have we got ourselves into?” the trainee next to him muttered rhetorically, sotto voce. Adam didn’t answer. He just gripped his bag and waited for the next order.

Out of the bus, lined up, given a few rules, into the dorms, picking a bed. He spent five minutes with his finger pressed to his locker, repeating the number on it until the knowledge was carved into his brain, never to be forgotten. It was the only moment that stood out of a blur of orders, instructions, beratements. He span through a cold shower in seconds, liquid soap in hand. Get wet, step out to let somebody else use it, lather up, step back under to rinse off, all the time being screamed at to move faster, faster, faster!

When the blur ended, he was lying in bed wearing uncomfortable new clothes and listening to the others around him try to get comfortable. He was pretty sure at least a couple were fighting back tears. Plenty, he knew, were repeating that same question to themselves that he’d heard on the bus: ‘What have we got ourselves into?‘

Adam didn’t wonder. Twelve hours of travel and the emotional jolt of leaving Ava behind had taken so much out of him that he was the first to fall asleep.

Date Point: 5y AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rios

Banging on the door summoned Ava out of bed, and she threw on a bathrobe to answer it.

Cimbrean didn’t exactly have a postal service so much as it had Logan Brown, one of the schoolkids who took it on himself to hand-deliver any parcels and letters that came through the Jump Array on any given morning.

“Morning, Ava!” he chirped, handing her an envelope covered in USPS stamps and with the slightly worn feel of having travelled a long way in slightly careless hands. As soon as he was gone, she practically shredded it in getting the envelope open and sat down to read.

It wasn’t a long letter, but even so it had a rushed, shaky feel to it. Adam’s handwriting—unsurprisingly, for somebody who’d grown up never really needing it—had never been neat, but now his scrawl was only just legible, and that with some concentration and puzzle-solving.

“Hey Ava.

Not goin to lie this SUCKS I mean I knew it was going to but DAMN!! Its like a movie in here, I thought those movies were bullshit but we just get yelled at and bullied and told we’re stupid and it doesn’t make any sense. Everythings so weird too everyone looks the same same haircut same clothes same everything if they werent all taller than me Id think I was lookin in the mirror everywhere I go.

Powell was right I really didnt kno wat I was getting myself in to im tired all the time I keep being yelld at over nothing like they yell at me for not eating enogh like wtf Im full how do you expect me to eat more theres no room?!

shit they just told me Ive got to put the pen down I love you dont worry ill be okay its just crazy round here.

Love—Adam.”

It made for tough reading. She went to school in a low mood.

Date Point: 5y1w AV

Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, USA, Earth.

Adam Arés

“Alright trainees this is your morning wake up call I want you out of those beds and at attention before the end of this sentence, Get up! Get up and stand at attention!!“

Responding to the daily indignity of being shouted awake had become a reflex, and Adam was already scrambling out from under his blankets by the end of the word “trainees”.

It was only around about the word “beds” that a horribly familiar pressure in his boxer shorts finally infiltrated his awareness as his morning wood made itself known. Several of the rest of the training flight had noticed and were fighting to keep a straight face, while his own face slowly turned pink.

Not for the first time, he regretted accepting the first bunk he’d found, right next to the MTI’s office, because there was no time for it to go down. Technical Sergeant Lake was already progressing down the dorm, on the lookout for ANYTHING he could criticize.

He paused by Adam, who swallowed, awaiting the humiliation that was surely imminent, but instead, Technical Sergeant Lake’s voice was calm and quiet, amused even.

“Trainee, you have my sympathies, but you need to be standing at attention.” he chided, very gently. “So you do that, and you don’t worry about anything else.”

“Yes, SIR!” Adam choked out, and forced himself to stand fully upright, thanking the Lord that nobody, nobody could possibly have remained hard in these circumstances.

Technical Sergeant Lake—who was always thought of and referred to as Technical Sergeant Lake, and addressed with the loudest “SIR!” that the trainee could muster—nodded and carried on, leaving Adam to compose himself.

The next trainee was unfortunate enough to be making a desperate little chewing motion to try and keep a straight face, and Technical Sergeant Lake rounded on him like a terrier on a mouse.

“Trainee, do you find this amusing?!” he demanded, screaming the question at most an inch from the culprit’s nose.

The luckless trainee’s expression sobered instantly. “No, SIR!”

“Were you perhaps trying to get a good look then? Is that the first time you’ve seen a warhorse, Trainee?!“

Adam’s eyes shut themselves of their own accord just for a second, and he knew that his face must have gone as red as tabasco. If the whole base had been hit by a meteorite at that moment, he would have welcomed it.

“N–no—” the trainee began.

“I DID NOT ORDER YOU TO SPEAK, AND IF I HAD I WOULD EXPECT YOU TO SOUND OFF LIKE A MAN!!” Technical Sergeant Lake roared. “Front leaning rest position!“

The trainee instantly hit the floor and held himself there, ready. Technical Sergeant Lake directed a glare around the room that could have boiled steel. “If anybody else cares to comment on your fellow trainee’s gift, get it out of your system!” he ordered. Nobody so much as twitched. “Outstanding! Trainee!” he addressed the young man on the floor. “Push the Earth until I say otherwise!“

He turned to check on Adam, whose composure had now recovered somewhat, grunted, and strolled through the dorm, taking his time over it. “Make your beds!” he ordered. Then, to the trainee on the ground: “Trainee, recover! And since you’re so enamoured of our warhorse here, you can help him make HIS bed first! JUMP TO!!“

Adam threw himself into the chore, grateful for something to do. The relief at being able to finally get started with a day’s training rather than dwell on his embarrassment was huge.

By the time they had showered and there was food in front of him, he’d almost completely forgotten that it had happened.

“So hey, WARHORSE.”

Adam’s bunk-mate was John Burgess, and the two had bonded quickly over learning that they shared some San Diego experience. Burgess had lost family to the ‘Big One’, the quake that had crippled the south side of Los Angeles in the aftermath of the detonation, when their house had collapsed. He’d been one of the few who had managed to keep a straight face that morning.

“Ah, fuck, you’re not going to start calling me that, are you?”

“Hey, man, it fits! I mean, DAMN! You’re a fuckin’ grower!”

This prompted a round of laughter, cat-calling and good-natured hollering, while Adam was yanked back to the morning’s embarrassment with a cringe. “Oh fuck, come on, really?” he protested.

Burgess just grinned. “I’m just sayin’ man, no wonder your girl writes you so much!”

“Fuck you, man.” Adam told him, though it was said with a smile.

“No, please!” Burgess threw up his hands in mock defense. “I wouldn’t survive!”

“You’re one to talk!” one of the others chimed in. “We’ve all seen you in the shower, the fuck are you smuggling in that sack, grapefruits?”

“Man, they ain’t that big!”

Adam snorted. “Like fuck they aren’t. You used to pitch for your school team, right? We should start calling you BASEBALL.”

Burgess frowned at him. “No!” he asserted.

“Too fucking late, brother.” one of the others asserted. “You call him WARHORSE, you get called BASEBALL. All’s fair in love and war.”

There was general snickering at that one as the newly-christened ‘BASEBALL’ wilted. “…shit.” he declared.

Adam laughed. Being able to share the experience of an embarrassing nickname was taking some of the sting out. “Guess we’d better get used to it.” he said.

Date Point: 5y1w4d AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rios

As Cimbrean’s population had ballooned with the influx of Byron workers, the school had expanded with it, hiring a second teacher and splitting into three “grades”. The oldest of which, for the time being, consisted solely of Ava. It was a bit lonely at the top, but the lack of distraction had allowed her to really focus on her studies.

Still, she was grateful for being checked up on. Jessica Olmstead had assumed responsibility for the middle group and mostly left Ava to educate herself, intervening only to recommend a syllabus and make sure that everything was going well—mostly, what lessons she gave to Ava these days revolved around study techniques and how to learn and self-organise, rather than conveying subject-specific information.

“Is that another letter from Adam?” she asked, sitting down.

Ava nodded. “Yeah, he gets to send me one a week, this is the fourth one. Logan delivered it on the way in to school.”

“It’s a shame you can’t have phone calls.”

“Yeah. I really miss just hearing his voice…” Ava looked at the letter, longingly.

“Could I–?” Jessica asked. “I mean, not if it’s too personal, but I’d like to know how he’s getting on.”

Ava nodded, knowing that Adam’s letters never contained anything embarrassingly intimate, and she slit the letter open with a fingernail, unfolding it onto the desk.

“Hey Ava” she read aloud. “I think I’m starting to do okay now. Our TI said on like day one that if he was using the word stupid it’s because we’re doing stupid stuff, and that’s really started to sink in now, I’m starting to get it.”

“Things aren’t what you’d call easy, but we’ve kind of got into the rhythm now. There’s no time to stop, everything’s all go, there’s no downtime, and whenever I get to feeling like I really want just a few minutes to relax, we just get pushed harder and it turns out I didn’t need the break after all. Nobody’s allowed to hide in the back and let it all happen to other people, I thought I could at first, like if I just shut up and did as I was told I’d breeze through this and not get yelled at, but that doesn’t work because they still pick up on what you’re doing wrong and fix it. They don’t let us coast along, it’s all push, all the time.”

And now I actually kind of enjoy being yelled at now. Is that weird? If I’m being yelled at it means I fucked up” she stopped reading and shot a glance at the younger kids. “Uh, sorry Jess.”

Jessica giggled “It’s okay. Go on.”

”…It means I blanked up and I don’t want to blank up. Being yelled at means the TI’s got my back, he wants to help me not blank up in future. So when he yells at me, he’s helping me.”

“They’ve made me Guidon bearer, it’s kind of cool but I have to carry this thing on runs and salute with it and it’s heavy as-” she cleared her throat “…as blank.”

“That’s my fifteen minutes, lots of love to Dad and even more for you.”

Love, Adam.”

Jessica sat back. “Wow.” she said. “He sounds…different already.”

“Yeah.” Ava agreed, quietly.

”…are you okay with that?”

Ava folded the letter again. “I guess I have to be.” she said.

Jessica inclined her head—Ava had sounded genuinely philosophical rather than resigned or bitter. “What do you mean?”

“There’s…” Ava sighed, and sat back, running a hand through her hair. “Like, there are so many things I can’t change. I sure as heck couldn’t change Adam’s mind about this, if I could he wouldn’t be Adam. So what’s the point in not being okay with them?”

“That’s…true, I guess.” Jessica conceded.

“Yeah…” Ava looked down at the letter. There was a sharp tap as a wet patch appeared on it and she scrubbed furiously at her face.

“Ava, if you need some time alone…” Jessica offered.

This earned her a brave little smile, and a headshake. “I’m…No, I just need to, to focus on the things I can change. That’s all.”

”…Okay. You let me know if you need anything, okay?”

Ava just nodded her gratitude, set the letter aside, and returned to reading the textbook she’d chosen.

Jessica went to make herself a cup of tea, and didn’t return until she was absolutely certain none of the kids would see that she’d been crying.

“Hey Ava,”

“Big news: I got told today Im going to be honor graduate!”

“Theres so much Id like to write here, about what Ive been through. My head just feels full of ideas all settling into place at last. Theres just no way I could cram it all into 15 minutes so Im not even going to try. Its so weird Week 0 feels like it was yesterday and like it was years ago at the same time I wonder if youll even recognize me?”

I cant wait to see you. Ive missed you so much, its going to be unreal seeing you again.”

—Adam.”

Date Point: 5y 2m AV

Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas, USA, Earth

Ava Rios

“Okay, I can’t see him.”

Ava gave Gabriel a teasing smile. “You don’t recognise your own son?” She asked.

“I’m looking right at the guy carrying the flag at the front of his flight, and that’s not my son, I’d swear to it.” Gabriel protested.

“It’s Adam.” She promised. “Right height and build, right face.”

“He moves differently.”

There was a deep-throated chuckle from Gabe’s left. “It’s called ‘marching’ mate.” Powell told him. The captain had declined to share his reasons for attending the graduation, but in any case he stood out less than Ava would have guessed. His wasn’t even the only non-US uniform present. In any case, Powell had a remarkable ability to stand still, watchful and quiet and slip people’s attention when he wanted to. He was scanning the few hundred trainees in the parade with a cool, level stare that took in the details. “Your lad’s an Airman now.”

Gabe frowned at him. “He’s…still the same person under it all though, right?”

“Even better.” Powell said. “Trust me, he’s the same bloke under it all, but he’ll be sharper now, more confident. Probably in a bloody good mood, too.”

Gabriel looked back and squinted. Ava guessed that he was trying to connect the buff, buzz-cut creature of precision and intensity in front of them with some earlier vision of Adam, most likely the wiry, shy guy from school that she’d first started dating.

Those two people didn’t seem to have a lot in common, but it was definitely Adam. She’d spent too long staring at that face to mistake it.

“Do you think he can do it?” She asked Powell. “Pararescue, I mean?”

The captain nodded. “He can.” he said. “That’s not to say he will, mark you, but he’s in with as good a shout as anyone can have.”

“What happens if he drops out?”

“Personally, I’d bet against that.” Powell commented. “But if he does, he does and I’ll bloody respect him for giving it a go. There’s plenty else he could do, and all of it would be a walk in the bloody park after dropping out of the pipeline.”

“I guess it’s better to know where your limits are and acknowledge them than fake it.” Ava guessed. Powell bobbled his head a little, indicating yes-and-no.

“True. But you can’t fake it wi’ that kind of training.” he said. “That’s why it’s so hard. But your fella’s got a superman button, miss. Poke him the right way and he’d spit in God’s eye to get the job done. I reckon if his trainers know their business—and I’m pretty bloody sure they do—they’ll have figured that out already.”

“I never knew.” Gabriel said softly. They both looked at him. His eyes were shining with a mixed bag of pride and something else that Ava couldn’t quite identify.

Powell clapped him on the shoulder. “Only the beginning.” he promised.

Gabe acknowledged that with a nod, and didn’t comment further, so neither did Ava nor Powell until the parade was done and the gathered airmen had been given a rousing congratulation and freed to see their families and visitors.

Ava took first dibs on greeting Adam, throwing herself into an enthusiastic hug that turned out to be like tackling a wall. He hadn’t grown in size much, but Adam’s muscles had clearly toned and hardened under that uniform, and he lifted her as if they were still on Cimbrean.

He murmured into her ear. “Miss me?”

“You know I did.” she replied, and kissed him.

Gabe interrupted them by hugging them both. “I hardly recognised you.” he said.

“It’s the haircut, right?” Adam grinned.

“And the body language, all that stuff.” Gabe replied. “You move more like he does.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Powell, drawing Adam’s attention to the older Marine’s presence for the first time. Adam hastily extracted an arm from the hug and saluted.

Powell returned it but said nothing, indicating with a wry expression and a tilt of his head that Adam should focus on his family first.

They fussed over him for a few minutes longer before Gabriel finally suggested that Adam should discuss whatever business it was that Powell had brought with him. He in turn was then dragged into the discussion by dint of being Cimbrean’s security chief, leaving Ava to stand alone for a little while.

Adam even listened differently now, she noticed. Feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind him, attention totally on whatever it was that Powell was saying.

“So, you must be Ava.”

She was being addressed by another new airman, a young, acne-scarred African-American man who offered her a hand to shake. “WARHORSE said a lot about you.”

She shook it. “WARHORSE?”

“Your boy Adam there. That’s his callsign.”

“He never mentioned that…”

“Eh, he hates it.” The airman grinned. “Did he mention me? John Burgess, I’m going into the PJ pipeline with him.”

“Yeah, he did!” Ava nodded. “Nothing but good things.”

“I hope so, motherfucker took the top bunk over me for eight weeks!” He laughed, then self-censored. “Uh, sorry. Bleep.”

“It’s no problem. So…WARHORSE?”

“Couple’a reasons. Your boy can carry anything, he’s strong as shit, put a bag on him and he’ll run all day. So, we could have called him Packmule, but…y’know with a name like Arés…”

“Makes sense.” Ava agreed, grinning.

“Now the other reason is—”

“Goddammit BASEBALL, don’t you tell her!” Adam returned in time to gently clamp his hands over Ava’s ears. She giggled and wriggled free.

“Aww come on man, I’ve GOT to meet the girl brave enough to take you on.”

Ava frowned at him, ignoring whatever it was Adam was so desperate about. “Brave?”

Burgess grinned. “you know? The pants monster? Your boy here’s morning wood damn near took my eye out from across the room!”

“Wh–wow, really?” She’d seen Adam naked before of course, but that had been swimming, and he hadn’t been at anything like…full…

She censored her own mental film reel.

‘BASEBALL’ paused, then grimaced. “Ah. Shit. You, uh…didn’t know?”

Ava shook her head. Adam just glared.

“So you two haven’t–?”

Now both of them glared.

”…I’ll, uh,” Burgess backed away, pointing generally over his shoulder. “I’ll see you at the start of Indoc, brother.”

“I’ma kick your ass worse than the PT.” Adam warned him, though there was a hint of amusement under the warning.

“I deserve it!” Burgess declared, and left them in peace.

Adam snorted and caught Ava’s gaze. She was studying him with a grin of her own pulling at her cheeks, threatening to burst out into laughter, and it started to pull even harder when her eyebrows raised themselves at him.

He cleared his throat. “He’s…exaggerating.”

Her eyes flicked downwards. “Guess I’ll just have to see for myself sometime.”

She allowed the smile to finally break out in full once her back was turned. Never mind the uniform, the haircut and the precision, his expression in response to that had been pure old-school Adam.

It was good to know he was still essentially himself.

Adam Arés

Gabriel was treating them to dinner, while Powell had made his apologies and jetted back North to return to Folctha. Adam and Ava sat together in the back seat of Gabe’s rented SUV on the drive into San Antonio proper, holding hands and talking quietly.

“Okay, so…why ‘BASEBALL’?” she asked eventually.

“Couple of reasons.”

“One cool, one embarrassing?”

“That’s pretty much it, yeah.” Adam nodded. “Burgess can throw. Says he was pitcher for his school team, and when we were practicing with dummy grenades…yeah.”

“And the embarrassing?”

“BASEBALL. For…more or less the same reason I’m WARHORSE. I don’t have to draw you a picture, do I?”

She laughed. “Please don’t!”

“We’re here.” Gabriel announced. He’d pulled the car into the parking lot of a steakhouse called “The Barn Door” which he’d looked up using the excuse ‘when in Rome…‘

It didn’t take long to seat them, in a low-lit corner with a good view of some rodeo photographs and the two-foot flames on the grill.

“So.” Gabriel broke the silence once they were seated and had glanced at the menus. “That was Basic, huh?”

“Yeah.” Adam agreed. “Weird, it seemed really hard at the time but now…I mean, I’d find it easy if I had to go through that a second time.”

“Eager to get on with PJ training?”

Adam smiled sheepishly. “Dreading it.” he said. “But, yeah. I said to Powell when he tried to warn me about it, y’know, people do pass it, and…it’ll be tough, but I’m gonna be one of them.”

Their waitress showed up. “Get y’all some drinks, folks?” she asked.

“Iced tea, please.” Gabe requested.

“Coke?” Adam asked.

“Sure! And for you honey?” she asked, addressing Ava.

“Diet coke, please.”

“Okay! Y’all ready to order, or do you need a few minutes?”

They looked around, determined that they were, and ordered the 24oz porterhouse for Adam, a catfish fillet for Ava and the Tenderloin for Gabriel. She gathered the menus.

“Okay! My name’s Rose, if y’all need anything just make eye contact and I’ll be right over to help. Drinks comin’ up!”

“So what happens after indoc?” Ava asked, once Rose had gone.

“Airborne training, survival, diving, mountaineering, medical training…”

“I mean,” she interrupted, “After all that, too. Are you going to be on Cimbrean, or…?”

“Maybe.” Adam said. “I’ve got some career choices coming up, and if it all goes right then hopefully I will, but if I’m not…”

“You two’ll just have to figure it out.” Gabe told them.

Their drinks arrived, and they chatted amiably about Cimbrean and the progress of the Reclamation Project.

Ava was in the middle of explaining how Byron group planes were soon going to carpet-bomb the Scar with saplings and seeds in shaped canisters that should embed in the ground and then rot away, spilling Terran plants into soil that had been hugely enriched by the same fungal and microbial action that had killed the native flora and fauna, when the main courses arrived.

She boggled at Adam’s steak. “Where the hell are you going to put that?” she demanded.

Adam just grinned and tucked in. “I’m a food vacuum nowadays.” he said, and devoured a cube of medium-rare beef.

Gabe clicked his tongue disapprovingly in the side of his mouth. “Enjoy it, Amigo!” he chided. “Take your time!”

“I AM enjoying it!” Adam reassured him, after swallowing. “That’s why there’s so much of it!”

Ava giggled, then stood up. “I’ll be right back.” she said, and vanished in the direction of the ladies’ room.

Adam was still watching her backside when Gabe tapped him on the upper arm. “Hey, Adam. Man talk for a second, while she’s gone. Okay?”

Adam blinked at him. “What’s up?”

“I love you both very much, right? I’m hoping for a future where you two have got a couple of beautiful kids, and…”

“Dad…”

“Shut up and listen, man.” Gabe sighed. “That’s just what I want, okay? If you want different, fine. But tell me honestly—if you’re serious about her, then that’s the kind of thing you need to think about. Are you serious about her?”

“Totally.” Adam said, firmly.

“Good, because she’s serious about you too.” Gabe nodded, though his expression was still concerned. “Just…be careful, alright? You’re looking at two, three years of only getting to see each other every other month on a long weekend, or something. That’s going to be difficult.”

“We know. We talked about that.” Adam promised.

“And?”

“And…” Adam trailed off, then shrugged.

“Adam, I’m proud of you right now, but don’t be dumb about this, okay? You can still be honor graduate and all that stuff and still fuck up your love life. Don’t…” it was Gabriel’s turn to pause, searching for the right turn of phrase. “Don’t forget to…”

“Dad. She’s tough. We’ve talked this over together, and…we’ll get through.” Adam reassured him.

“I know she’s tough. You both are. I just…” Gabriel sighed and gave up. “I just hope you’re both as tough as you think you are. Okay? I don’t want you to wind up hurting each other.”

“We love you too, Dad.”

Gabe gave him a sidelong hug. “Good to know.” he said. “I just needed to get that said.”

Adam nodded. “It’s heard. But…I’m sure we’re fine. After everything that’s happened…”

“You never heard about the last straw that broke the camel’s back, Amigo?”

Adam frowned. “She’s said she can cope. That’s good enough for me, Dad.”

Gabe sat back with an uncomfortable expression. “How—” he began, then paused. “She—”

Adam waited for him to finish. Or even get started. In the end Gabe just shook his head and hugged his son again.

“Alright, Amigo. If that’s good enough for you…”

Date Point: 5y 2m 3w AV

Dominion Embassy Station, Earth/Moon L1 Point, Sol.

Doctor Anees Hussein

“So this is Cruezzir?”

The Corti ambassador raised a hand. “Not…quite.” he revealed. “The Directorate was dead set against the idea of your species acquiring the original Cruezzir drug. In fact, we are now discontinuing it, and strongly advise that should a sample of the original fall into your possession, you should destroy it.”

“We will…take that under advisement.” Doctor Hussein assured him. “Though in that case, what is this on your desk?”

“A derivative, specifically designed for the human market with the intent of avoiding some future pitfalls.”

“What pitfalls?”

Medrà inclined his head in a strange way, as if reading something only he could see. “Used correctly—as a topical or therapeutic target injection, rather than permanently marinating the patient’s system in it—Cruezzir has no side effects whatsoever. None.” he revealed. “It is, I dare say, a masterpiece creation of the Directorate’s biolabs. That factor alone was sufficient for our anthropological researchers to take exception to giving you access to it.”

Hussein frowned. “I don’t follow you.” he said. “Where is the problem with a medicine that has no side-effects?”

Medrà mimicked a thin-lipped, prim smile. “Doctor, if I have learned one thing about your species these last few years, it is that, if dirt were edible, you would all be obese.”

”…I see.”

“No insult is intended, you understand. You are from a dangerous world, I can only assume that to use and stockpile resources as rapaciously as you do was a necessary survival instinct for your genetic forebears.”

“As a medicine, though…” Hussein protested.

“We are not satisfied that it would remain a simple medicine. You already know of the one nicknamed the “Human Disaster”, which means in turn that you also how to synthesize Cruezzir in industrial quantities. All you need is a sample of the drug itself.” Medrà gestured oddly: it took Doctor Hussein a second to recall from his studies of alien body language that the gesture indicated concern. “We fear that Cruezzir injections and patches would become commonplace, even the norm, taking an already imposing species and making the pinnacle of your physical potential trivial to attain, rather than a lifelong pursuit which precludes the study of other, more…cerebral endeavors.”

Hussein considered his Corti counterpart for a second. “You make it sound like you want us to remain below our potential.”

“Your potential, doctor, is already intolerably ahead of any other species’.” Medrà countered. “If some semblance of balance and fairness are to be retained for the rest of us, then you must either be encouraged to remain below your potential, or else encouraged into isolation. The failure of that latter strategy is why the Directorate has appointed me.”

“To keep us down.”

“To remind you that you need to be kept down.” Medrà had at least perfected the knack of returning a human’s stare. Most aliens instinctively looked away. “Or shall I point to the ecological grafting you are performing at great expense on Cimbrean to remind you of that fact?”

“I believe you just did.”

“Indeed.”

Medrà picked up the phial on his desk again. “This version, this Cruezzir derivative, contains a limiting factor—resistance. Over time, any human who regularly uses it will steadily, but slowly, become increasingly immune. There are a few other changes, mostly designed to prevent the drug from being synthesized by your symbiotic bacteria but…suffice it to say we feel less uncomfortable releasing this for you to use than the medicine for which you actually asked. There will be no more Human Disasters with this derivative.”

He gestured out of the window, toward the Earth. From the L1 point where the Dominion embassy was anchored, it filled a respectable portion of the sky. “I believe your ancestry comes from a region responsible for the myth of a ‘jinn’, doctor?”

“Close enough.” Hussein conceded, diplomatically refraining from commenting that, as the Holy Quran had it, jinn were perfectly real.

“According to that myth, the ‘jinn’ would grant wishes, but would twist the wishes according to a literal interpretation of their wording, to the wisher’s detriment.” He offered the phial. “We, doctor, are twisting the wish according to a sensible interpretation of its intent, to the wisher’s and our own mutual benefit.”

Hussein considered his options, then gave up and took the phial. “In that case,” he said “having read the trade agreement and been advised on it…we accept the terms.”

They shook on it. Gently.

Date Point: 5y 2m 4w AV

Hey Ava

I’ve only got three words to say about Indoc so far: Holy fucking SHIT.

This is really bringing me back down to earth.

I’m going to get through it though. No matter what.

Thinking of you,

—Adam

Date Point: 5y 4m AV

Hey Ava,

Im sorry Ive not written you since last week. I did get your letter and I hope you know Id have written back if I could Ive just been too thrashed to even pick up a pen. Really the PT here is that hard. Im talking 20 solid hours of calisthenics…when there feeling kind. I swear Im not exaggerating.

Getting a reward today though—a good long letter session a whole hour! Everyone else is calling home or whatever but for me…wow just getting some quiet time to sit and think and write to you is like I never imagined Id think something so simple was such a big deal. I spent half of it just sitting and thinking and getting my head sorted out.

You know I said in one of my letters from basic that I kind of enjoy being shouted at now? Well that’s still true its hard to explain but if Im being shouted at then its kind of a compliment because the MTL knows I can do better and hes telling me so. I mean actual words of encouragement are nice too dont get me wrong but I can see now that it wouldnt get anybody through this.

There training us for the very worst you know? They want to be able to send us into anything and have us be strong enough that if we fail it was never possible in the first place. And theres no way to do that except the way they do it. Theyve been doing it for years they know what theyre doing here and I know that I can make it through this.

So yeah I hurt basically all the time Im tired basically all the time Im so wired that just getting a whole HOUR of quiet time feels like the biggest luxury in the world…but dont be sad for me baby because underneath it all I think Im actually kind of enjoying myself.

If that sounds weird…maybe it is I dont know?

I still struggle to eat enough. There giving me like 10000 calories a day or something insane like that thats a heck of a lot of food and with me not being a big guy some days its almost harder to get all of that food to fit in my belly than it is to do the actual PT.

Itd help if it was Dads waffles or something. A taste of home you know? I dont care how full I am if I had a plate of those right now they’d be gone. I know they were store-bought ones but it still counts as home cooking right?

I love you. I miss you every day and I think the reason is that for all the really big shit thats happened in the last few years youve been there through it all. The hardest part by a mile has been learning how to go through something this huge without you.

Im kinda sorry for that.

—Adam X

Date Point: 5y 4m 2d AV

“Airman Arés!”

Mail call had become the best part of Adam’s day, enough so to shake the ache right out of his abused muscles.

Dear Adam,

Baby, you’re not going through this without me: I read all your letters, and I write you back every time, but it’s not just that.

I may not be there with you doing the PT or whatever. But I pray for you every day, I think of you every minute, and knowing you’re thinking of me even with what you’re going through is what helps me too. You’ve been there for ME through all the really big shit of the last few years too, you know that?

I feel lonely a lot. No you, no Sara, no Hayley…I love (here Ava had written the word ‘your’ and then scribbled over it) Dad, but you can’t have a social life of just one person.

I guess we’re both learning how to cope with just being there for each other in spirit rather than in person, huh?

But believe me corazon, that’s all we need. I’m so proud of you.

—Ava ♥

Adam was smiling as he folded the letter up. “Good letter.”

“She ain’t here, bro. You’re talking to yourself again.” BASEBALL grinned at him.

“Beats your company.” Adam retorted, grinning back.

“Only company your midget ass gets is my belt buckle anyways, so that ain’t that surprising.”

“Hey that was almost witty. Must be ‘cause you sat down, I know your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen at ten thousand fucking feet when you stand up.”

Burgess beamed and stuck out a fist. “Motherfucker.”

Adam completed the fist pound. “Asshole.”

They were interrupted by the MTL, who entered the barracks and announced a briefing and lecture in ten minutes.

“What now?” BASEBALL wondered aloud.

They found out when they settled into their seats in the lecture hall six minutes later. There was the usual rigmarole of standing when the presenting officer—a Lieutenant with the surname “Reed” on his chest—entered.

“Be seated.” he ordered, and six backsides met chair. There was a minute or two of patient waiting while he entered his login and password and called up some files.

“This is a confidential, code-word SACRED STRANGER briefing. You will not share this material with anyone not possessing need-to-know for SACRED STRANGER.” Reed began. “Is that understood?”

There was a chorus of “Yes sir.”

“Good.”

Reed loaded up a presentation slide and Adam groaned inwardly. ‘Death by Powerpoint’ was a running military gag that he had so far been blessed to suffer only mildly from. He hoped that streak of good fortune would continue.

“Seven months ago,” Reed stated, lingering on the first slide, “The British Royal Navy’s two captured and refitted alien starships engaged in a skirmish with the Hunter blockade around Cimbrean. They acquitted themselves well in the battle, which was fought to rescue the crew of a refugee freighter who had unwittingly blundered into the Hunter fleet. You should all be familiar with the Hunters, if anybody here requires a refresher, raise your hand.”

Nobody did.

Reed gave a shallow, satisfied nod and continued. “During the battle, a Special Boat Service team led by one Captain Owen Powell boarded the freighter and extracted its surviving crew. The operation was a resounding success, but Captain Powell and the commanding officers of HMS Myrmidon and HMS Caledonia recommended to the Ministry of Defence that a review be conducted into the requirements and viability of a dedicated force of spaceborne special operators capable of extravehicular activity, or EVA.”

“That review was shared with the Department of Defence and the Pentagon and the result is that we are now founding an international joint unit, provisionally known as the Spaceborne Operators Regiment, or SOR.”

“This is an initiative that’s still in its infancy. No commanding officers, no operators, no gear, no crest or motto, nothing.” He continued. “Its mission, however, is already well-understood. The SOR would serve to defend and protect the people and interests of Earth, Cimbrean and any future colonies which may arise from extraterrestrial threats. It will conduct search-and-rescue of stations and starships that become adrift or damaged, will provide humanitarian aid to castaways and those affected by disaster, and will be available to defend stations and large ships, as much as is possible, from Hunter strikes and piracy. These missions will also benefit the human race through propaganda, through the Dominion Development Credit bounties that are awarded for recovering liferafts, and by securing extraterrestrial technology from derelicts.”

He paused. “I should note, gentlemen, that when I mention ‘extraterrestrial threats’, I refer to any and all enemies of our species, including the alien force responsible for the destruction of San Diego, the exact nature of which is deemed need-to-know.”

Adam and Burgess exchanged glances.

Reed advanced the slideshow. It was now dominated by something that looked like a hybrid of a NASA spacesuit and an Interceptor body armour system, though sleeker than either.

“The defining equipment of Spaceborne Operators will be their Extra-Vehicular Military Action Space Suit, or EV-MASS. This has been designed by private-sector experts from the Hephaestus LLC on Ceres who hold records for most and longest extravehicular activity, working alongside experts from CQC Limited, who produce the Osprey Armor System.”

“Now, you’ve all been given a brief introduction to the SOR concept. A full briefing of this system and its capabilities, variants and requirements will be saved for those of you who choose to commit to joining the program. For now the important point is this: the EV-MASS is a fully functioning spacesuit designed to allow the operator to engage the enemy in the vacuum of space and maneuver in zero-gravity. That combined functionality means that it has a base weight of one hundred and three pounds, before gear and accessories.”

There was no breach of discipline as such, but all six of the PJ candidates exchanged glances. They were all strong enough to wear and use a suit that heavy, thanks to the intensive physical training of the pipeline, but doing so would suck. Remaining agile and mobile for prolonged periods under the combined weight of that suit and their bags, gun, equipment and maybe even a patient, who might even be wearing the same suit and all of their gear, all added up to a daunting prospect.

One of them put his hand up, and Reed pointed to him, inviting him to ask his question.

“Sir, if a man wearing one of those has to carry one of his buddies, that’s gotta be, uh…six hundred pounds at least. Hell, it could be a lot more. How’s anybody supposed to hump that kind of weight any kind of a serious distance?”

Reed acknowledged the question’s validity with a nod. “It’s a big ask.” he agreed. “The suit does contain some passive load-bearing structures which will help, but the operators wearing it will need to be exceedingly strong. Which is why we’re coming to you now, with…this.”

He closed the slideshow and opened a video.

“This is footage of Lance-Corporal Aaron Baxter, United States Marine Corps. Baxter was involved in a vehicle collision during a training exercise two weeks ago, and suffered a, uh…” Reed checked his notes, pronouncing the medical terminology slowly and with care. “A…posteriorly displaced…open comm-in-uted…intra-articular tibial plateau fracture with an…intimal tear of the…pop-lit-e-al artery.”

He looked up. “As I understand it, that basically means the poor bastard’s knee got flattened and everything broke into little bitty bits.”

Everybody grimaced.

“Right, you understand.” Reed noted, nodding. “This is a crippling injury, a career-ender. That knee’s never going to be the same again, and if he escapes amputation, getting it working again even half-normally is going to involve probably a prosthetic joint, and certainly a lot of physiotherapy and rehab. Ordinarily, Baxter would be out of a job and living on his VA benefits and medical care. Fortunately for him, he came along at exactly the right moment to be the guinea pig for a new medicine purchased from Extraterrestrial sources.”

While the footage of Baxter continued on one half of the screen, the other half began a quick animation detailing the origins and capabilities of the drug. “It’s called Cruezzir-Derivative Compound A, but for the purposes of common usage, we’re calling it Crue-D. Don’t ask me how, but it hugely accelerates and improves the healing process.” Reed continued. “Baxter went under the knife to have all those little bitty bits put back together and the plumbing fixed, and while they were at it, he let them inject this stuff right in there.”

On the screen, Baxter’s dressings were being removed. “This is him only thirty hours after the operation. Notice, there’s no surgical wound, nor a scar from the open fracture. That had closed up by the six hour mark, and If they’d put sutures in him, they’d have had to operate to get them back out again. Fortunately they foresaw that and only clamped the wound and compressed it. But when they X-rayed the kneecap at eight hours, they found out it was damn near perfectly intact. They kept him in bed for another day just to be sure, but…”

Baxter stood up, and jaws dropped around the room.

“That’s incredible.” somebody muttered.

“It’s goddamn alien space magic is what it is.” BASEBALL grunted.

Reed nodded agreement, letting the interruption slide. “And for the time being it looks like we’re stuck relying on the Corti to make it for us. When our scientists tried to figure out how it works in the lab, they say the samples just dissolved into water and some weird organic molecules, like it’s got a self-destruct built in. But the results are plain—Corporal Baxter is fit and well and back with his unit, under observation for long-term side effects but otherwise unscathed after what should have been the end of a promising career as a US marine.”

He turned off the screen. “So…what does this have to do with the six of you?” he asked, rhetorically. “The short version is that with the physical demands of the SOR program being so high-end, we want to use this stuff therapeutically during the physical training. Slap-patches, joint injections…You’re all familiar with the theory behind muscle gains?”

There was general nodding. “Good. But to spell it out for the sake of clarity, the very basic version is that the muscles and ligaments suffer minor damage, and heal stronger than they were before.”

“With this stuff,” he continued “we think we can take that process to a new level. Completely thrash the trainee during the day, then they heal perfectly overnight thanks to a contact patch of Crue-D. Throw in some of the latest developments in Sports Science and we think it’s possible to produce operators whose bodies exist on the absolute limit of what’s humanly possible.”

One of the others put his hand up. “Begging your pardon sir, but…You want us to do that?”

“I’m putting it out there for you to think about. Like I said, the SOR is still in its infancy. We’ve got all the necessary infrastructure in place, now all that’s needed are volunteers. Any such volunteers will be plucked from the pararescue pipeline and put onto the SOR highway instead. This will closely mirror—and often take place alongside—pararescue training, but will be even more physically intense, and will then be followed by SOR-specific training and possibly astronaut training as well. Any questions?”

Several hands went up. Reed acknowledged one of them with a point of his pen.

“Sir, what are the risks here?”

“We’re assured that, when used correctly, Crue-D has no side effects. And to head off the next question, the only incorrect use we know of was a couple of cases where the original medicine—Cruezzir—entered the patient’s gut biome, where it was absorbed by intestinal bacteria which mutated and began to produce a constant supply.”

“What happens when that happens?”

“According to the Corti, the subject undergoes rapid muscle growth, an increase in bone density, and…basically reaches their maximum physical potential without the need to exercise their way there, not to mention becoming permanently able to heal from even quite serious injuries at a remarkable rate. There’s also some suggestion that they become biologically immortal and may experience improved skill-learning and the tapping of latent genetic potential that exists inside the human genome, such as the ability to see some way into the infrared.”

There was silence, then somebody else put their hand up. “Begging your pardon sir, but why the hell aren’t we going with that?”

“One, because Crue-D has been modified to preclude exactly that scenario because it scares the bejesus out of the Corti. Two, because it seems to come at a serious cost to the subject’s mental health.” Reed explained. “The two known cases so far demonstrated reckless, self-destructive behaviour and possible signs of a schizophrenic or Dissociative Identity disorder, respectively.”

“Besides that,” he continued “We have no idea if that’s just in the short-term. The long-term effects of Crue-D applied topically in a targeted and safe fashion, we are assured, are nil. Nothing is known about the long-term consequences of keeping the human body indefinitely soaked in the original Cruezzir.”

He cleared his throat. “The only remaining thing that could be a risk factor would be nutrition. You’ll be packing on muscle and bone mass at such an incredible rate that your diets will have to be strictly controlled down to the last milligram and calorie. Every snack, every meal. You won’t even be able to grab a burger without planning and training ramp-down, and if done incorrectly you might find yourself suffering from malnutrition. At the very least it would be a wasted opportunity. At worst, well…”

This was met with thoughtful silence. Reed let them mull it over for a moment, then spoke again.

“This is, obviously, an enormous decision. You would not be here if you were so impulsive as to just take it on immediate notice, which is why we’ve informed you today so you can have your weekends to consider it. This briefing will continue on Monday at fourteen hundred hours. Dismissed.”

“You’re going for it, ain’tcha?”

Adam looked up. He’d been considering how to write back to Ava, tell her that his training would go on for at least another two years beyond what they had discussed, without breaching confidentiality or classification. He knew she’d accept that he couldn’t discuss such things with her, but she still deserved an explanation, and he was carefully assembling that explanation in his head.

“This is what I got in for.” he said, simply. “I knew there had to be aliens involved somewhere, and…yeah.”

BASEBALL sat down. “You did?”

“Dude, antimatter? Nobody on Earth’s got that shit.”

“We’ve got alien healy-juice though. They didn’t tell me about that shit when I first heard about the SOR.”

Adam nodded. “Yeah.” he said. “That one’s new on me, too.”

“Man, I ain’t sure about this Crue-D stuff.” BASEBALL rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I knew too many guys got ‘roided up in school…You sure you’re not rushing into this?”

“These ain’t roids. This shit heals you stronger, man!”

“Yeah, but…man, you trust anything ET makes?”

Adam sighed. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, Base. The SOR’s going to be going up against the group that killed my mom and my friends. That’s why I joined in the first place—’cause a group like that, needs people fighting them, you know? I don’t know if I trust ET, but I sure as hell trust us, you know?”

“So you’re going for it, then?”

“Yeah.”

”…Okay. I’m with you, Hoss.”

Adam paused: “Base, bro, you don’t have to.”

“Bullshit. We’re a good team, you’re the heavy lifting motherfucker, I’m the brains of the outfit.”

Adam laughed and gave him the finger.

BASEBALL laughed too, then reached out, flipped Adam’s hand over, grabbed it in a knuckle-creaking handshake and dragged him in for a solid masculine slam-hug.

“Besides, we get to be fuckin’ astronauts.” he added. “You KNOW that’s a ticket to pussy.”

Adam laughed again “Alright, you sentimental fuck. You’re with me…I appreciate it.”

“You better.”

Hey Ava,

Baby, I’m sorry to do this to you, but there’s a career opportunity come up that’s just perfect for me. It’s everything I got into the military to accomplish. I wish I could discuss it with you, but it’s all confidential.

The downside is that the training is two years longer than we’d planned for, and it’s going to be really hard to get the time to visit you during those two years.

I wish there was time for us to talk about it properly, but they want my answer on whether or not I’m signing up for this thing on Monday, and there’s just not time for me to get back and with the emails only updating once a day, by the time your reply gets to me, it’ll be Monday anyway, so…

I’m sorry Ava. But this is too perfect to pass up.

Write me back. I’ll understand if you’re mad.

—Adam XXX

Date Point: 5y 4m 5d AV

Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Jessica Olmstead

“Oh my God, Ava!”

Jessica had never been the kind of teacher who believe in keeping an emotional distance from her students, and so when Ava shuffled into the classroom a quarter hour early and looking totally ruined, she dropped everything and dashed over to give the younger woman a hug. “What happened?”

Ava ran a shaking hand through unbrushed, unwashed hair and lost whatever grip on her composure she’d had, burying herself in Jess’ sweater and shaking fiercely.

Jess just held her until finally Ava managed to pull herself together and straighten up. “What happened?”

“I just…I checked my emails, and there’s one from Adam, and…” Ava looked away and made an angered expression at herself, fighting to stay in control. “He changed the plan.”

“Changed the…? I don’t understand.”

“I was fine with him doing two years of pararescue training and some deployments, and…I don’t know! All that, we’d got it sorted out and I was fine with it! But now he’s talking about four years of training and maybe not being able to see each other at all in those extra couple of years! And who knows how long after that!” Ava threw her hands up and engaged anger circuits that Jess had never seen in her before.

“Que se supone que haga? Él no me preguntó, él no me habla de ello …el hijo de puta me acaba de enviar una CARTA DE MIERDA y espera que yo sea bien! Eso pendejo desconsiderado! Eh?”

Jess sat on a desk. “I don’t speak Spanish, Ava.” she pointed out, gently. “But watch your language, the kids’ll be here soon.”

Ava went still, then deflated and sat down, miserably. “He just…it’s not just his life.” she complained.

Jess gave her a moment to be silent. When Ava wiped her eyes and began to sort herself out, she took the opportunity to be constructive. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

Ava made a bitter little noise. “I should have learned this by now, shouldn’t I? Don’t plan for anything, because tomorrow you might get nuked.”

“So…?”

“So what I’m going to do is…whatever seems like a good idea at the time.” Ava said.

“So what seems like a good idea right now?”

“Hah! Dumping his ass.” but Ava was shaking her head to indicate that she had nothing of the sort in mind. “But…whatever, so he’s been an insensitive jerk and made a huge decision without me. So what? At least he cares. He still loves me, and I love him too, even if he’s been a huge jackass right now.”

“So…?” Jessica repeated.

“So I guess what seems like a good idea is just…forgive him and try to be happy.” Ava shrugged. “Be happy in the moment, right? That’s what our Gaoians are so into. And I…I think I’d be unhappier without him.”

She sighed, and stretched. “What do you think?”

Jess considered the question. “I guess my marriage broke up because we weren’t able to forgive when we hurt each other.” she conceded in the end. “I don’t know, there’s so many arguments either way, I guess you do just have to go with whatever seems like a good idea at the time.”

“Like he did.”

“Like he did.” Jess agreed. “I think that’s what love is, is understanding when one of you comes first. Sometimes it’s you, sometimes it’s him.”

She hesitated, then decided to put her money where her mouth was and say what seemed like a good idea at the time. “And…Ava, he’s a soldier now. Soldiers…they don’t always come back. I think you’re going to need to get used to trying to live as well as you can ‘in the moment’ and not…and figure out how you’re going to get by without him, if that ever happens.”

A banging in the hallways made them both look up—it was the clear sound of the class starting to arrive. “If you want to borrow a hairbrush, there’s one in my office, on the desk.” Jess offered.

Ava smiled. It wasn’t a strong smile, but it was genuine. “Thanks, Jess. I needed…thank you.”

Jess gave her another hug. “I hope I helped.”

Ava nodded, then slipped out the other door a few seconds before the class started to enter, in usual boisterous mode.

Jess straightened and got herself back into teacher mode. The first, and hopefully worst, of the day’s crises was dealt with.

Dear Mr. Arés,

As I said to you when Ava first arrived at our school, she has always struck me as being much more intelligent than she believes herself to be. I am very pleased to tell you that, over the last few months, she has vindicated my belief in her and excelled at her studies. As you know, the free-form approach to schooling that we use at this school does not allow me to break down her performance by subject, but she has achieved outstanding performance in every single module she has chosen to pursue.

As the sole member of our senior group, with the next students not due to enter that group for another three years, she does however pose a slight administrative problem for the school, which I believe would be best resolved by graduating her at the end of this coming summer term and then taking her on over the coming school year as a teaching assistant. This will not only enable her to continue to study ahead of her university plans, but will give her some practical experience and income that will serve her in good stead.

She has indicated to me that she wishes to attend the London School of Economics to study for a career in photojournalism. Challenging though this choice of career will doubtless be, I have complete confidence that she will excel in it.

Her combined overall grade for this semester is: A.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. J. A. B. Olmstead Junior and Senior Groups Tutor, Folctha Comprehensive School.

“Wow…that’s, uh, easily the best report card I ever had.”

Gabriel took off his reading glasses. “Yeah?”

Ava sighed. “Every other one I ever had always had the words ‘could do better’ in it.” She said. “I guess they were right, huh?”

“I guess they were.” Gabriel agreed, though he left out his opinion that if her performance had previously been lackluster then that probably reflected more on the education system than on Ava herself. “You gonna go for it?”

She hesitated. “Do you…think I should?”

“It sounds like an excellent opportunity.” Gabriel told her. “Experience, money and education all in one go? Chances like that don’t come along too often.”

“True…”

Gabriel knew what the trepidation was about. “Why not discuss it with Doctor Olmstead?” He suggested. “If you want plenty of time to get out there and practice your photography, maybe she can help.”

Ava nodded and pulled the camera out of her handbag. She was constantly fiddling with it nowadays, usually with a frown. “I do need to practice more. I keep looking at Sara’s old pictures and seeing…you know, seeing new things in them. Things she was doing that I didn’t even know how to see before…”

She sighed. “She was…really talented, Gabe. I want to try and do justice to her, try and…bring back some of her spark, but I don’t think I can.”

“Even if you don’t,” Gabriel told her. “In trying, you’ll find your own talent. Don’t think of it as bringing back her spark, but as…I dunno, reincarnating it. Same spirit, but different, yeah?”

“Maybe…”

She put the camera away, then stood up and kissed him on the forehead. “I’d better get home.” she said.

“See you tomorrow?”

“Of course!”

Date Point: 5y 5m 1w AV

Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

Indoc had taught Adam a trick. It had taught him how to notice that he was exhausted and in pain, but to treat those facts as an abstract.

It was a useful trick. One that kept his feet kicking, hour upon hour upon hour, in a pool of cold water, with his goggles flooded and his muscles saturated with lactic acid. The mind went to a quiet place without thought, where the absence of any stimulation but the physical exertion didn’t matter, and where the exertion itself was not the immediate, intimate issue it might once have been, but was instead…academic. It wasn’t even tedious—his ego was so shut down as to not care that he’d received no real intellectual stimulation for hours.

There was just the task: Keep kicking.

In that mode, he might have gone on until his body finally gave out. And that, he suspected on those rare occasions where he was permitted to be lucid, was the point.

Besides, pool days were comparatively gentle, compared to the weight sessions. Those were the days when the Crue-D came out in force, when muscles sprained and ligaments tore and were forced to mend almost on the spot. You worked until you broke, and were then fixed. And then, while you healed, you trained something else.

If he hadn’t learned how to notice his pain without experiencing it, he couldn’t have borne it.

There was just the task: Keep lifting.

Keep kicking.

Keep improving.

He wasn’t even waiting. He was just doing, until the whistle blow summoned him out of his trance and allowed him to stop doing again. Allowed him, once he was out of the pool, to become Adam again and realise just how trashed and tired he really was.

Adam, who was packing on muscle at an incredible rate. He’d known that he would, of course. The SOR briefing had been clear on that. But it was still jarring sometimes to look at himself and recall that just two years ago he’d been a skinny teenager who didn’t even fill out the small shirts in the store, whereas he now wore Extra-large sized shirts like a second skin.

“Line up!”

He met BASEBALL’s eye as they lined up alongside the pararescue candidates. They stood out, now, clearly on a different career path. The PJs were strong as hell, but Adam and BASEBALL were both much, much bigger. Their ability to wriggle into tight places had been sacrificed to prioritize the raw power they needed to remain mobile and active under crushingly heavy loads.

Being lined up after an exercise was nothing new—it had hitherto been the prelude to another task. This time was different. This time the MTLs lined up in front of them, at attention, and Master Sergeant Allen—the team leader—stepped forward, studying them carefully.

Devastated as they were by what must have been a truly epic session in the pool, every one of the airmen held at attention perfectly. Finally, he nodded.

“Airmen.” he said. “You have now completed the Indoctrination section of your Pararescue training. You have done something that is literally better than a one in a million event—precious few men have ever accomplished this task. You’re not Pararescuemen yet, but as of today, you’ve proven that you are all worthy to follow in the green Footsteps of the giants of your chosen unit. You have cleared the first and most difficult hurdle on the road to your maroon beret, and it has been our honor and privilege as your Military Training Leaders to witness this feat.”

He saluted, as did all the other MTLs. The exhausted airmen returned a precision salute with equal snappy enthusiasm. “Congratulations.”

The salute was held for a moment, then relaxed, and the MTLs softened with it, advancing forward to exchange handshakes, hugs and smiles with men they’d been yelling at only minutes before.

Adam was running on fumes, but he joined in gladly. He’d known he could do it.

Finally, the congratulations died down. Master Sergeant Allen finally called an end to it. “Alright, get back to your dorms and get some sleep.” he ordered. “And sleep in. Tomorrow is a Liberty day. Get checked out, get laundry done. Don’t you worry about your gear just this once, we’ll take care of it. You’ve earned it.”

He paused, then smiled. “But don’t get stupid.” he added. “training resumes the next day.”

Date Point: 5y 9m 3w AV

Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“Ah. I thought so.”

Gabriel looked up from toying with his glass of water. The waiters of Folctha’s first restaurant—and what a restaurant it was!—had been discreetly keeping him supplied with water for a few minutes now. Ava had spent her first paycheck arranging for him and ‘someone else’ to be among the place’s first diners.

He had to admit, he was intrigued. He hadn’t been on a date in years, and never on a blind date. Though, like the woman who had just said ‘I thought so’, he’d had a sneaking suspicion he knew who it would be.

“Wow!” he commented. He’d been right, but he barely recognised her.

Jess Olmstead giggled. “That’s a good start!”

Gabriel stood and pulled back a seat for her. “Heartfelt.” he promised, as she settled into it, carefully dropping her handbag beneath her. Whenever he’d interacted with Jess before she’d been in teacher mode, favouring a black cardigan and a red scarf with a long skirt. Comfortable, sensible and plain.

For tonight, she’d worn something substantially sleeker in dark blue, with a neckline that pulled at the eyes, punctuated by an attention-grabbing, slim little minimalist necklace and a smile that said ‘go ahead and look’. Her hair was out of its usual loose ponytail and swept into something just a little bit more elaborate. Gabe had enough experience with women to know just how much time and agonising would have gone into crafting such an apparently effortless appearance, and knew enough about perfume to scent that she was wearing an expensive one.

Good signs, especially considering that she claimed to have suspected who her date was.

“Ava’s got to be so proud of herself right now, playing matchmaker.” he noted, sitting down again.

“Well, I had my suspicions.” Jess confessed. “There aren’t many other people she could have set me up on a date with.”

“Likewise.”

“And yet, here we are.”

“Here we are.” Gabe agreed, mirroring her smile and pleased that he’d put similar effort into his own appearance, between getting the fit of his suit adjusted and treating himself to a wet shave. He’d even subtly dipped into Adam’s left-behind stash of “manscaping” products, which had been a strange experience for him, being of a generation of men that didn’t traditionally wear cosmetics of any kind. Ava had reassured him that the result was dashing and sophisticated, especially when coupled with his cane.

The maitre’d spun by with the wine list and a recommendation, which they agreed to with nods and murmurs.

“She was pretty thrilled with your recommendation.” He revealed. “So was I. I think it’s exactly what she needs.”

“I hope so.” Jessica poured herself a small glass of water from the complimentary jug between them. “She’s…an amazing person, really. Her and your son both.”

“Don’t I know it.” Gabriel agreed. “I don’t think I’d be coping so well if I wasn’t so proud of them both.”

“Yes, I heard Adam was an ‘honor graduate’?”

“I barely recognised him!” Gabriel said. “He walked differently, he looked around differently, he was so much more…focused.” He sighed. “I guess the military suits him. On the one hand I’m pleased, but on the other…you know, he’s signing up for a very dangerous life. After everything that’s happened…”

Jess leaned forward, unconsciously echoing his sigh. “Heaven help us if we ever get used to the idea of our kids doing dangerous work.” she commented, and nodded along when he nodded.

“Si. He’s his own man, and Ava’s her own woman. I just wish I knew how to make their lives…happier.”

Jess smiled. “Start by making your own life happier.” she suggested.

“Well, that’s why I came down here.” Gabriel said.

Jess smiled and sipped her water. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“You think it’s that simple?” Gabriel asked. “That I’ll help them by helping myself?”

“I do.” Jess nodded. “And they’ll help you by helping themselves. It’s plain how much the three of you love one another.”

The wine arrived along with a couple of slim menus, which distracted them both for a few minutes as they mulled over their options and ordered.

“Like you said.” Gabe continued once their orders were placed. “They’re amazing people. With everything that’s happened they’ve only grown tougher and more mature.”

“What about you?” Jess asked him.

Gabe just shrugged a little. “A little weaker in some ways, a little stronger in others.” he suggested. “I’m ready to date again, for instance. That’s a big step forward for me.”

“You still held a bit of a candle for your ex? I know it took me ages to get over my divorce…”

”…No, I don’t think that’s it.” Gabe mulled it over. “I think I was more…bruised and weary, if that makes sense?”

“I understand.” Jess nodded, fiddling with the stem of her glass and listening to him with her chin on her hand.

“What about you, does your ex-husband know you’re living on an alien world nowadays?”

Jess giggled. “My ex-wife and I haven’t spoken in years.” she said. “I have no idea what she’s doing with her life, and I haven’t let her know what I’m doing with mine.”

Gabriel cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She reassured him. “I only mention it when it’s relevant, and it’s only relevant with people who…”

“Who…?”

She just winked at him. Her nose wrinkled a little when she did so, and Gabriel practically fell in love on the spot.

He raised his glass. “To a good first date.” he proposed.

She raised her eyebrows, picking up the wine glass but not yet meeting his toast. “First date?”

“First date.” he repeated, projecting as much confidence as he could muster.

She smiled, causing her nose to wrinkle again, and her glass rang against his.

“Is it the quality of the wine, do you think, or how much of it we had?”

Gabriel laughed. “A little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.” he suggested. Neither of them were drunk as such, but they both definitely had a happy buzz on, warming and rounding off the night as he walked her home with an arm around her waist. She seemed very happy to be going at his slow, limping pace.

“I think you’re right…aww, we’re at my house already?”

Gabriel studied it. Jess lived in the same kind of tiny chalet as had been given to Adam and Ava, like most of the colonists. He knew that Sir Jeremy was still handling the minutiae of bringing in contractors to establish more permanent and comfortable housing, but that project had only just begun.

“That’s one of the perks of being colonial security chief.” he said. “My apartment’s even bigger than the one I had back in San Diego.”

“Oh really?”

“Yep. Want to see?”

Jess laughed. “Oh, Gabe.” she chided. “I think we’d at least better have a couple more dates before you show me how big your…” she paused, cheekily. “…apartment is.”

“Whenever you want, wherever you want.” he replied.

“Tuesday, same place and time?” she suggested.

“Absolutely.” he agreed.

“Good, because I really enjoyed myself tonight.”

He turned towards her, still with his arm on her waist. “You wanna round it off with a goodnight kiss?”

She did so. It was a good one too, several seconds of gentle, smiling lip contact with a hand on his cheek that promised better things to come, underlined by a second, shorter one just after they separated.

They didn’t say anything else. She just trailed her hand in his as she let herself into her chalet, letting go only in time to blow him a kiss and close the door.

Gabriel Arés walked home with the largest smile on his face that he’d worn in years.

Date Point: 5y 11m 1w AV

Folctha colony, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Rather than hobbling through the living room and opening the door, Gabriel was in the habit of shouting “Come on in, Ava!” when the doorbell rang.

She was the only one who used it—literally everyone else in the colony knocked. It was becoming one of those Cimbrean quirks, the sign of a local, insofar as anybody COULD be local in a town so young.

Ava let herself in and gave him a daughterly kiss on the cheek. Gabriel knew better than to comment that she looked a mess—her eyes were dark and pinkish, and she obviously hadn’t brushed her hair. “Cup of coffee?” He asked.

She nodded and slumped down at the table. “That.” she said. “Would be amazing.”

“You okay?”

“Ah, I stayed up all night doing my part of the end-of-semester marking so I wouldn’t have it to do while Adam’s around.”

“He’s not due back until tomorrow.” Gabriel pointed out. His kitchen faucet had a mode to deliver boiling water, and he used it to fill the cafetier with his favoured blend of Galapagos coffee—a rare treat. Sure, Ava adulterated hers with so much cream and sugar that it was barely recognisable, and a bit of a waste, but he figured it must still be better behind all that than just the instant stuff.

“Yeah, but…it’s his birthday, so I can’t sleep.” Ava gave him a little smile that said she knew just how nonsensical that was.

“You’re that nervous at seeing him again?” Gabriel asked, leaning against the counter while the coffee brewed.

“For, like…a whole bunch of reasons.” Ava agreed.

“Eh, don’t worry so much.” Gabriel told her fondly. “if you two manage to break the bed or something, I’ll fix it.”

“Da-ad!”

Gabriel raised an eyebrow. Her exclamation had been so guilelessly teenage that it was like a note of pure honesty in the room—there couldn’t have been a conscious decision to call him that involved. “Dad, huh?” he asked, softly.

She’d gone beet red, but she stood up and hugged him. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Hey.” he stroked her hair down, as much to get it out of his face as to reassure her. “You’re a daughter to me as well, you know? I couldn’t have asked for better.”

Ava took the compliment well, sitting down again and tidying herself up a little with a smile as Gabriel depressed the plunger on his cafetier and served.

“I um…” she began. “I guess now that that’s out there, I should…there’s something I want you to know.”

“You sure?” Gabriel asked, catching her nervousness.

Ava swallowed and nodded. “I guess if I’ve learned anything these last couple of years, it’s to never leave things un-said.” she shrugged.

A news reel of different emotions rapid-fired across Gabriel’s face, but he sat down and said nothing, letting Ava take her time.

“I miss my parents.” she said, finally. “It’s…so nice to have a parent again, I love you. You took me in, you’ve been everything I needed but…”

“I understand.” Gabriel said softly. “There’s no substitute for the original. Hell, I miss my folks.”

“No, that’s not it…” Ava sighed, then wiped her eyes. “I feel really guilty whenever I think this, but I kind of feel like…like you’ve been a better father to me. You’re here, you’ve always been here for Adam, and you’ve been here for me too. I hate to say it, but my parents’ idea of being good parents was just to, to buy me stuff. They gave me whatever I asked for but they didn’t really…I don’t know…”

“They gave you what you asked for, which maybe wasn’t what you needed?” Gabriel finished.

”…Papa would never have joked about fixing the bed.” Ava said. “And…Mom would have told me off for not brushing my hair, but you asked if I was feeling okay. Stuff like that, that you do for me and for Adam. You treat us like a, like you’re our friend as well as our dad. I miss them, but…they treated me more like a doll or a…a pet or a trophy sometimes.”

Gabriel handed her a clean tissue, which she made grateful use of. “You don’t need to feel guilty of that, you know.” he said.

“I know that up here.” Ava tapped her scalp, then bunched a fist between her breasts and knocked on her sternum. “but…”

Gabe scooted round the table and hugged her. “It means a lot.” he promised. “I try but…it’s good to know you think I’m doing a good job.”

She smiled. “I’m glad I got that out there.”

Gabe laughed a little. “Go home and sleep.” he suggested. “You’re going to need it, but you’re welcome to come round, join Jess and me for dinner this evening.”

“I’d like that.” she told him, and stood up.

“Go. Sleep. Nos vemos.”

“Hasta luego, papá.”

Date Point: 5y 11m 1w AV

Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rios

The passenger jump array had been expanded again during the year of Adam’s absence, but they’d kept the glass wall, allowing friends and family to witness the arrivals and departures.

There were a lot of them these days. Byron Group employees headed home for Christmas, travellers from Earth visiting Cimbrean for the same…

And Adam’s face on a nearly unrecognisable body.

Ava’s jaw threatened to drop. Adam had warned her, as best he could, about what to expect from the fitness regime he’d been on, but she hadn’t been prepared for this.

Sure, he’d been fit before leaving and at the end of Basic. Buff, even. But the Adam who caught her gaze and smiled that same winning, puppyish smile at her was getting to the point where the word “buff” was no longer quite adequate. He was…

He was…

He was fucking HOT.

A year of living alone had inevitably resulted in fantasizing and…well, in entertaining herself as best she could, and Ava had assembled a sizable folder on her tablet full of big strong guys. While knowing that he was going to come back big and strong had almost certainly played a role in shaping her tastes that way, Adam would not have looked out of place in that folder.

She made a mental note to add some pictures of him to it.

His muscles were as firm and dense as teak when they hugged, and he made her feel featherlight when he picked her up and spun her around, beaming.

“GOD I missed you.”

She sighed happily and kissed him. “Your letters just…wow, they didn’t do justice. Look at you!”

He looked down and spread his arms. “You like?”

He turned around, and Ava had to fight to stop herself from automatically biting her lower lip. “Yeah…” she squeaked. “I mean, you were pretty before, but…”

They became aware that several bystanders were able to overhear them, to judge by the amused glances they were attracting, and shared a bit of a blush. Adam shouldered his bag with a weighty thump. “Am I…staying with you?”

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

“I’ve learned not to make assumptions.” he replied, clearly pleased by the response, then looked around. “Hey, where’s Dad?”

“He’s cooking Thanksgiving dinner. We’re going round there in a couple hours.”

“But Thanksgiving was last month.” Adam pointed out.

“Yeah, but you missed it.” she retorted. “And it was your birthday yesterday, so…”

“Does it work that way?”

“It does now.”

He laughed. “That works.”

Adam Arés

“Wow. Okay. Guess you’re opening the jars tonight, Amigo.”

Adam laughed, and hugged his dad, gently. “Easy.” he said, then smiled at Jessica, who was hovering in the background with a slightly stunned expression. “Hey Jess.”

”’Hey’ yourself!” she replied. “Good God you’ve changed since I last saw you.”

They hugged.

“Wasn’t easy.” he told her. “Gotta tell ya, hearing you and Dad were dating really picked me up when I was having a rough time with the EMT training.”

“You were struggling with that?” Ava asked, hanging up her jacket and sitting down at Gabriel’s dinner table, while Gabriel returned to the kitchen. The whole apartment smelled of turkey and potatoes.

“Yeah. Think I’ve learned just enough about medicine now to know that I know basically nothing about medicine. It’s…crazy.” he sighed. “And for a while there I just wasn’t getting it, you know? My buddy BASEBALL—you remember BASEBALL?”

Ava giggled. “Hard to forget.”

He laughed. “Right. Well, he was kicking my ass. He’s a total natural. Me…I mean, I’m starting to get it now, but for a long while there, getting all that knowledge to stay in my head was damn near impossible. You’ve got to learn a lot of the academic stuff before you can start working on the practical, you know?”

“You always were more of a hands-on kinda guy.” Gabriel noted, from the kitchen. Jess nodded, smiling and looking up at the ceiling with an ‘oh yeah’ expression.

“You were okay though?” she asked.

“Ah, y’know. I was just…frustrated.” Adam’s chair creaked as he sat down next to Ava. “Like, I’d gone through all the pain of Indoc and all that PT and everything, and here I was struggling with what I’d thought was gonna be the easy bit. So yeah, the good news from home helped there. Made me feel positive again, and that helped me get past the block. Can’t say I’m ever going to be a great medic, but I’m not gonna be a bad medic, either.”

“So you approve?” Gabe asked, appearing with the plates.

“Oh come on, Dad! I mean, of course I do, but you don’t need my approval.”

Jess and Gabe exchanged a happy glance, and both headed into the kitchen.

“Guess this is a family Thanksgiving then.” Ava commented, snuggling up next to Adam.

“Late though it is.” Gabe agreed, reappearing with the roast potatoes. “Adam, put those muscles to use Amigo, bring the turkey through?”

Adam laughed and did so, retrieving a bird the size of a dog from the oven which he hefted easily on one oven-gloved hand. “Where did you get this?”

“Cimbrean wild turkey.” Jess revealed. “They’re part of the ecosystem reconstruction.”

“No shit? What else is out there?”

“Bobcats, bats, mice, eels, eagles…” Ava smiled. “From what Hayley Tisdale was telling me, they’re throwing a whole bunch of different species into the mix and letting natural selection do the rest.”

“They’re talking about deer and wolves, too.” Jess added. “It’s not all going perfectly right—I heard the eagles especially are struggling. Apparently the low gravity throws off their instincts when they’re swooping in on top of something, and they struggle to hunt at first.”

“How is Hayley?” Adam asked.

“She’s…She and Marc, they’re both okay. Did I tell you they had a little girl?”

”…Yeah, you did. Hope?”

“Hope. That’s right.” Ava nodded. “She was gonna come back to Folctha after the birth but the medical advice was it’s probably not good for a kid to live in low gravity until at least their second growth spurt which is, what? Ten or eleven years? And even then…”

“Right.” Adam nodded.

“So, they’re living in London nowadays, working for the Reclamation Project. Something about…GMO plants that are better suited to Cimbrean’s soil, gravity and sunlight.”

Gabe set down the last of the gravy, vegetables and sauces, and glanced around the table, looking happier and less stressed than Adam could remember seeing him in a long time. “So…Thanksgiving. It’s been a rough and crazy few years, and…you know, I can’t remember the last time we actually did this. I just wanted you to know how thankful I am to have the three of you in my life.”

Jess smiled, and murmured a “Hear, hear.”

Gabe and Ava exchanged glances, and bowed their heads in prayer. Jess just put her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand, watching them with a faint smile.

Adam…thought.

It was a skill he hadn’t been given much opportunity to practice. Constant PT, constant education, interspersed only with meals, sleep and only a little leisure time (most of which had been taken up by letters and Madden) hadn’t made for a contemplative year. He’d learned to enjoy moments, though, and this moment was…

Warm. Comfortable. He shut his eyes and let it wash over him—the gentle breathing, the wall clock marking away the seconds, the buzz of the kitchen light and hum of the oven fan, the warmth of Ava sitting next to him, the soft sound of his Dad praying under his breath…

He opened his eyes when Gabriel murmured an “Amen”, and looked up.

“So…” he asked. “What are the rest of you having?”

Date Point: Boxing Day, 5y 11m 2w AV

Adam wasn’t yet asleep, but it still took him a couple of seconds to register the knock on his door.

He sat up a bit “Ava?”

She called through the door. “Can I come in?”

“Sure!”

She’d left the hall light on and leaned against the door frame, backlit by it, and Adam just had to stare. She was wearing one of his t-shirts, a thin white one. The shirt itself wasn’t blocking any of the light from behind her, and the varying depth of shadow her body made under it was…

Amazing. Sexy. Gorgeous. He could just about make out her nipples by the shadows they cast across the fabric, and the shirt was just short enough to create a fascinating dark triangle with her thighs. When he looked up at her face, she was breathing heavily through slightly parted lips.

“Past midnight?” he asked.

She laughed, nervously. “Happy birthday to me.”

“Deja vu.” he observed. She laughed a little again, and took a pace forward, loitering at the end of the bed.

“I’ve been…kind of regretting that, I, uh…I chickened out last time.” she confessed.

“Ch–uh, chickened out?”

She knelt on the edge of his bed and crawled up it like a predatory cat to kiss him.

It was a different kiss to any they’d shared before—a fiercer, more adult one. He was still mind-blanked by it when she grabbed his wrist and guided his hand firmly onto flesh that was so warm it almost felt like she’d burn the skin off his palm.

He took the hint and put his free hand on the back of her head, pulling her into the kiss. By the time it came to a natural conclusion she was pressed right up against him, every warm inch of her, and his roaming hands had discovered that she wasn’t wearing so much as a stray thread under that shirt.

All of that notwithstanding, though, she was trembling.

“You sure you’re ready?” he asked.

“I am.” she promised, and straddled his lap, grinding against him and making him acutely aware of just how little and thin the blanket was, knowing how close which bits of him were to which bits of her. There was a scent in the room he’d never smelled before, and it was having an urgent effect on some very ancient parts of his brain.

He could feel every inch of his body pulsing, shaken by a heart that was suddenly hammering away as hard as if he was back in Indoc. Was feeling sick and shaky the right response here? It was all his body seemed to know how to do. For all he wanted to be suave and confident and passionate with her, deep inside he was a knot of anxiety and trepidation. So was she, judging by the way she froze when her hand paused in trailing down his body, just short if its destination.

“You’re scared.” he observed. She just smiled weakly and nodded. “We don’t have to if you don’t—” he began.

“I want to.” she interrupted him.

“But…you’re scared.”

“So are you.”

He couldn’t deny it.

“Do you want to?” she asked.

The honest answer was that every nerve in his body did, bits of him hurt with wanting to, but he was becoming too paralysed by the shakes to do more than nod.

It seemed to be enough for Ava’s purposes. She scooted down his legs, taking the blanket away, and conjured a little square foil pack that she must have smuggled in with her, somehow. “Lie back.” she whispered.

Adam could no more have disobeyed her than he could have willed himself to teleport to Mars. He lay back and shut his eyes, almost hyperventilating as she pulled his pajamas off him.

She made a noise, something between a frightened whimper and a “wow”, and there was a little crinkly noise as she tore open the wrapper of the thing she’d brought with her.

“I don’t know how to put one of those on…” he objected.

“It’s okay.” she promised, and touched him where the contact went through him like an electric shock. “I do.”

After that, while they made plenty of other noises, the only talking they did was in the form of whispered instructions and little two-word prayers.

When he woke in the morning, she was still there. It hadn’t been a dream.

Most of the morning was spent fielding birthday well-wishes for Ava. Her presents were both more numerous and more impressive than Adam’s, but he didn’t mind—she could take them with her, after all.

It was only after the last of their visitors had gone that either of them were able to discuss what had happened the night before, as they were finishing the washing up.

“Did you…” she cleared her throat. “…Was it…okay?”

He took her hand. “It was…kind of awkward.” he confessed.

“Yeah…” she nodded agreement. “I’m sorry…”

“No, no…it was great! Uh…maybe we, uh, just need to practice.”

She thought about that, put her head on one side, put the last fork on the drying rack and vanished into the bedroom.

“Uh, Ava…?”

Her shirt flew out of the door. “So let’s practice!” she called.

“Oh! Right!” He tripped over his own socks in his rush to pull them off and join her.

They practiced.

((Don’t move on to chapter 23 yet! This has been just the first part of Chapter 22: you can find the link to the rest of this chapter below))

Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 2—The Second Year

Date Point: First Contact Day, 6y AV

HMS Sharman, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Owen Powell

“I’m glad that’s out of the way.”

Powell chuckled. He’d worked under Admiral Patrick Knight before, when the man had been a Commodore. Knight was his opposite in many ways: where Powell was wiry, intense and shaven, Knight was a slender beanpole who wore a white moustache and a relaxed demeanour. They had in common a hatred of needless ceremony—both were men of deed rather than pomp. “It was a good speech.” he reassured the admiral.

“I should damn well hope so.” Knight chuckled. “Interest you in a drink, Major? You really shouldn’t accept a promotion without celebrating it somehow.”

“I don’t really have enough mates for a wetting down.” Powell said.

“Hence a snifter of Brandy with a posh old dinosaur like me instead.” Knight winked.

”…Aye, alright. Got to mark the occasion sometime.”

“Knew you’d come around.” Knight fished out some cut glass tumblers and a decanter. Knowing the admiral, they’d been among the very first things he’d unpacked. “You must be pleased with yourself. This is quite a command you’ve landed.”

“Oh aye.” Powell agreed, watching him pour. “A promotion and five times as much paperwork? I’m living the dream.”

Knight chuckled quietly. “That you are. Do you have any idea how much there is to do in upgrading this camp into a full blown HMS?”

“Why d’you think I’m volunteering to go through a couple of years of hard training instead?”

This got a full-fledged laugh, and Knight handed him his drink. “I appreciate that you’re the only man with ANY experience of commanding the kind of operations this Regiment of yours will be conducting” he said “but are you absolutely SURE you’re up to this, Powell? Those men are going to need somebody they can respect and follow without question, and that means you’ll need to keep up with them in training. Physically speaking…”

Powell raised a hand. “I’m not as young as I once was.” he agreed. “But I’ll either clear that training or die trying, you can bet your life savings on that one, sir.”

“Knowing you, you mean that literally.” Knight raised his glass. “To the former, then.”

Powell met the toast. “Aye.”

Date Point: 6y 5m AV

“Miss Ava Rios, 20 Delaney Row, Folctha, Cimbrean CIFO11 3BQ

Dear Ava,

I am delighted to offer you a place on our BA Journalism (Hons) course, reflecting the glowing praise given by your senior school teacher Dr. J. Olmstead and the high academic performance you have been able to demonstrate. While we regret not being able to interview you in person, we felt that your application letter showed you to be erudite and charming, and we hope to see you at the start of the semester on September 17th of this year.

Please find enclosed your full admissions package and the details of what you will need to do in order to confirm your place on our course.

Yours sincerely,

Jennifer Roberts, Admissions Officer City University London.

Date Point: 6y 6m AV

Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

“You realise you guys are crazy, right?”

Adam looked up. Like most of the others, he’d been examining the maroon beret in his hands for most of the evening, scarcely able to believe he was finally holding it, gently feeling the fabric, and just appreciating it.

Tony Collins high-fived him. Collins was one of the majority who were staying on as full-time PJs, and Adam had a huge amount of respect for all of them. They took the creed seriously.

“Guess we are.” he agreed. BASEBALL was on Skype to his mother back in LA, but there was no doubt who the other half of the “you guys” plural that Collins had used was meant to be.

“You’re gonna be old men before you’re even done training.” Collins added, sitting down. “I don’t know how you’ve got the patience for it.”

“Twenty-three ain’t old.” Adam told him.

“It’ll fuckin’ feel like it by the time you’re mission ready.” Collins retorted. “Where are you shipping out to next, anyway?”

“Got some comprehensive armament training and then it’s on to Alabama. Astronaut training in Huntsville.”

“Fuckin’ space cowboys.” Collins chuckled, then held out a hand. Adam stood, shook it, and Collins slammed into him in a vigorous guy-hug. “Hey, you ever decide you want to come back down to Earth, you let me know, Hoss.”

Adam smiled. “Go save lives, man. It’s been a privilege.”

Date Point: 6y 9m AV

“Wow. You really don’t have a lot of stuff, do you?”

Ava’s worldly possessions, in fact, consisted of one suitcase full of clothing, a backpack, and two modest cardboard boxes. Adam owned even less, and most of that had long since been put into storage in the bottom of his dad’s wardrobe, or given to charity.

“Most of the plates and stuff came with the house.” She said, looking around it for probably the last time.

Delaney Row was the last holdout of the little compact portable houses that had been Array-jumped to Folctha during the early days of the colonisation, and those were only holding out while the next housing plan was built. They were marvels of efficient use of space, squeezing two bedrooms, a kitchen, living area and bathroom into a mere double-digit of square footage.

“You’re going to miss this place, aren’t you?” Gabe observed.

“Yeah. I’ve got so used to how everything just sort of hides away or pulls double-duty.” She agreed, demonstrating how the steps up into her bedroom were also the bookshelf and the fridge door. She sighed, and took down the last thing—an oval of varnished Pinkwood with the word “EDEN” pyrographed into its surface that had been hanging from the door ever since they’d first arrived.

She put it on top of the smaller box, the one full of things she was leaving for Gabriel and Jess to look after, then stood in the middle of the room and flapped her arms, once. “Goodbye, house.”

They walked her to the Array terminal and watched through the glass as it activated while she was mid-wave. A cuboid of perfect blackness filled the jump room, and when it collapsed out of existence, it took her with it.

Gabe sagged, the instant she was gone.

Jess just took his hand and walked him home.

Date Point: 6y 9m AV

Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Earth

“Aw man, you guys got here first? I was hoping for a good bed!”

There was some laughter, and the four men from Delta Force who had been squaring their stuff away dropped what they were doing to welcome Adam and BASEBALL.

“They’re all good beds.” One of them promised. “So you’re our PJs? Jeez, you guys look like you could rip a steer in half.”

“We both got plenty of gains in us yet.” BASEBALL noted. “You guys’re on the Crue-D too, huh?”

“We all are.” The one with the name ‘Stevenson’ on his chest declared. “You think we’re gonna get bigger?”

“Shit yeah!” BASEBALL enthused. “WARHORSE here’s gonna be the fuckin’ freak, though. Stumpy-ass midget fucker’s got the mechanical advantage.”

“WARHORSE?” Sergeant Akiyama gave Adam a questioning look, as Adam gave his friend a cheerful middle finger.

“Cause he can carry a lotta heavy shit.” BASEBALL told them, sparing Adam’s blushes for once.

“We’re gonna need it.” Vandenberg commented. Adam got the feeling that where the other three had sized him up—as he had to them in turn—Vandenberg was evaluating him. Not maliciously, but it was telling that Stevenson, Sikes and Akiyama glanced at him as if to gauge his opinion. It was a subtle, deferential bit of body language that Adam almost missed. They shook hands. “You guys heard anything about the suits we’ll be wearing yet?”

“Only a guesstimate of the weight.” Adam told him.

“Yeah, I did some digging. Word is the designer’s a guy called Andrew Cavendish, and everything I could find about the guy says that’s not a guesstimate. He’ll have had the weight of that suit down to ten decimal places long before they built a prototype.”

“You dig up our itinerary for the week in all that research?” BASEBALL asked him

“Nope. Guess nobody’s made an extravehicular special forces unit before, so it’s all being played by ear. Heard we’re all arriving today though, and my guess is we’ll be doing some PT after everyone’s in and stowed away. Maybe a speech from the old man first, you know how it goes.”

There was some nodding. “Guess we’d better get our shit away.” Adam said.

“Top bunk!” BASEBALL called, dashing towards an unclaimed dorm room. The others nodded, waved and wandered off to carry on their chores.

”…He knows we’ve all got our own room, doesn’t he?” Akiyama asked.

“Ah, that’s just a tradition of his.” Adam replied, flinging his own bag over his shoulder and heading for the door next to BASEBALL’s. “I got the top bunk in basic, he reckons it should have been his, ‘cause he’s taller, so…”

“So he grabs it first. Right.”

“I’ll be right back. Better unload my stuff.”

“Sure. We’ve got a couple hours before the Controllers and the Brits arrive, we were gonna watch Zombie Shark Three. Sound good?”

“Sounds fucking terrible.” Adam replied. “I’m in.”

Date Point: 6y 9m AV

London, England, Earth

Ava Rios

“Hello?”

Ava had been dreading what the halls of residence might be like. There had been horror stories all over the Internet, which was why she’d saved up her teaching money to get herself some of the really good ones in the colourful new building.

Frankly, the space could have been put to much better use. If it had been designed with the same efficiency and folding-away that “Eden” had boasted, she could have had a whole house in that room. But it would do, if kept tidy.

She’d been hanging up her clothes when the ‘hello?’ had arrived simultaneously with a knock on the door, which, being ajar, swung inwards cautiously.

“Ooh! Roommate!”

Ava waved hello. The girl who’d opened the door was tall, somewhere upwards of six feet, every inch of which lived in her thistledown-light long limbs. Between her straight ash-blonde hair, dazzling blue eyes, nordic skin and the diaphanous, layered pale blue summer dress she was wearing, she would have been intimidatingly pretty if not for her unreservedly friendly smile and bare feet.

“Hi.” Ava said, offering a cautious wave.

“Hello.” the blonde girl greeted her. She had a high, musical voice and a cultured accent. “How are you setting in? Have you been here long?”

“I just got here.” Ava revealed, indicating her suitcase and cardboard box on the bed. “I don’t have a lot of stuff with me.”

“Oh, you are so lucky, my parents wouldn’t let me leave home without…everything! My room’s a tip!”

Ava laughed, and stuck out a hand. “Ava.”

“Hi Ava! I’m Charlotte.” came the reply, along with a handshake that was every bit as delicate as the girl herself. “You’re American!”

“Cimbrean, actually.” Ava told her, deciding that first introductions were probably not a great time to mention San Diego.

”…As in, the planet Cimbrean? Oh my God!” Charlotte scooted into the room and sat eagerly on Ava’s desk chair, immediately confirming Ava’s suspicion that she was the kind of person who made friends instantly, whether or not the friend in question agreed.

Fortunately, she was in a mood to make friends, and Charlotte seemed nice.

Charlotte leaned forward eagerly. “Deets.”

“Deets?”

“Details! What’s it like living on another planet? Are there aliens?”

Ava giggled. “Yeah, there are aliens. They’re Buddhists.”

“Buddhists? Really?”

“Oh yeah. And you can get high off the local tea. And the capitol city’s called Folctha, which is the Irish word for ‘bath’, because the lady who named it walked half-way round the planet to get to that bath and was in it when the soldiers arrived to found the colony.”

“Wow!”

Despite Ava’s best efforts to make it all sound incredible, Charlotte looked like she believed every word without question. “Okay,” Ava asked her. “Where are you from?”

“Newcastle. Up north, I know I don’t sound it, we moved up there when I was seven.”

“I wouldn’t know the difference.” Ava confessed. “I’ve never been to England before.”

“Oh. Well, it sounds…” Charlotte cleared her throat, and spoke in a rounder, impenetrable accent. “…‘Ahreet, ahya coominoot thaneet?”

Ava raised a hand to cover her laugh, and decided that she liked Charlotte, who’d bobbled her head and made a silly face during her imitation. “Okay, what did that mean?”

“Darling, you simply must come and have a drink with me on the town this evening.” Charlotte explained, employing a bourgeois motion of the hand and a toss of her head to punctuate the word ‘must’, and beamed when Ava giggled. “Daddy wanted me to be an actress.” she revealed. “I think he’s a bit put out that I’d rather be a midwife.”

Ava nodded. “I’m doing journalism.” she replied.

“So, are we having that drink?”

“We…? Oh. Yeah. We can! I keep forgetting I’m old enough to drink in this country.” She nodded. “Can I have a few minutes to finish putting my stuff away? Then sure, let’s go have fun.”

“Don’t be too long!” Charlotte told her, and skipped out of the room to grab her coat, shoes and handbag.

Ava watched her go, smiling, and hurried to finish hanging up her shirts.

Date Point: 6y 9m AV

Huntsville Alabama, USA, Earth

Adam Arés.

ROAR!

CRUNCH!!

“JOHN!!! NOOOOO!!!!“

BASEBALL lost it, covered his face with one hand and writhed in his seat, wheezing a laugh deep in his gut. “Oh my fucking…”

“He’s actually milking the giant cow.” Adam noted, folding his arms and throwing his head back to stare at the ceiling rather than the farce on screen. The whole movie was bad to the point of hilarity, leaving all six of them in varying stages of laughter, from BASEBALL’s high-pitched Muttley snicker, to Vandenberg’s nasal explosions.

Stevenson wiped away a tear. “Man, fucking…oh my God.” his voice had gone up about an octave. “This has GOT to be deliberate.”

“Of course it is.” Vandenberg said. “Come on, you don’t think they took this shit seriously do you?”

“Just be tragic if they had.” Akiyama agreed.

“Ah, shit…” Adam grabbed the remote, spying movement out the corner of his eye through the window. “I think the old man’s here early.”

There was a general looking-around and standing-up as it became apparent that he was right, a group of men were on the path round the side of the dorm building, carrying bags.

They were up and waiting when the door opened therefore, to admit four men that Adam didn’t recognise and, bringing up the rear, Legsy.

“Wa-HEY!!” the huge Brit pounced on Adam and tried to hoist him up in a hug, only just managing it. “Fuckin’ look at you, pal!” He delivered a friendly punch to the arm. “Knew you had it in you!”

Adam laughed and returned the show of affection with a high-five that turned into a shoulder-barging hug, which was interrupted by a cry of “Room, ten-SHUT!”

Everyone snapped to attention.

“Stand at ease.”

Eleven boots shifted sideways by a synchronized shoulder-width as Major Owen Powell nodded his satisfaction and strolled into the middle of the room, the very picture of a confident and seasoned officer inspecting his subordinates for the first time. He looked good, Adam realised. Powell had never looked frail, but presumably he was on the Crue-D too—he’d gained some serious muscle mass, and several of the lines in his face were gone, or much reduced. He looked younger, fiercer and stronger.

“Arés. Burgess.” he greeted them, favouring Adam with a nod. “Settling in well?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” The major turned and addressed everyone. “Stand easy, lads.” He ordered.

Everyone unwound a little bit, adjusted their clothes, and settled into a relaxed but alert posture with their hands resting lightly in the small of their backs, paying attention.

“I won’t keep you long.” Powell told them, finding a spot where they could all face him and be faced in turn. “Today’s a rest and social day, just get to know one another. We’ll be doing intensive PT throughout the rest of this week and some confidence-building, but for now, introductions.”

“For those who don’t know me, my name is Major Owen Powell, Royal Marines Special Boat Service. My service history includes the Persian Gulf, Operation Elder Grove, Kenya, and Cimbrean. I am, for the time being, the only commissioned officer in the SOR: When and how that changes is still being discussed. Master Sergeant Jones here-” he indicated Legsy “Is your NCOIC.”

He looked around. “I appreciate that with eight of you being American, you may not be certain about having a British commanding officer. I intend to demonstrate that I can hang with the best of them and that I got this position on merit. By the time we’re done here, I’ll have certified to operate a spacesuit alongside you, and will have undergone Crue-D aggressive training just like everyone else.”

Adam nodded slightly, pleased to hear it. He’d guessed that Powell would stand for nothing less, but it was good to hear the major confirm it.

For his part, Powell seemed satisfied that he’d said enough. “We’ll be discussing our full itinerary tomorrow after morning PT. This whole project is uncharted territory, so you’re going to be heavily involved in getting things set up, figuring out what roles we fill and how we’re going to set about getting the best of our training opportunities. We’ll get it right, and between us we’ll set up a unit that’ll be the pride and envy of the galaxy. Arright?”

There was a chorused. “Yes sir!”

“Good. Legsy, you know how to reach me if I’m needed. The rest of you—As you were. Have fun.”

Everyone relaxed once the door closed behind him.

“So yeah, that’s the old man.” Legsy commented, grinning. “Relax boys, I’ve worked with him for years. We’re in fuckin’ good hands.”

Vandenberg nodded. “I was wondering what he’d be like. Nice to meet you, Master Sergeant.”

”‘Ey, I’m Legsy to everybody, even my Nan, God rest ‘er.” Legsy protested, though he shook Vandenberg’s hand, and those of the other Deltas.

The other four men that Adam didn’t recognise turned out to be their two Combat Controllers—Scott Blaczynski and Christian Firth—and two more Special Boat Service operators, Leo Price and Robert Murray.

“So…no offense to you guys or anything, but how come we don’t got no Seals in this unit?” Sikes asked. He’d so far been the quiet one of the Deltas, content to let everyone else do the talking.

“USN didn’t sign up to the Regiment.” Murray said. He too was a quiet one, a soft-spoken Scot with a nasty scar down the length of one forearm. It must have been an old one, maybe even pre-dating his military career, or else the Crue-D treatment would have softened and faded it.

“They got a rationale for that, that you know of?” Vandenberg asked.

“What I heard was that we’re goin’ tae need more than one kind of operator out there.” Murray shrugged. “Us here? We’re all goin’ tae be bloody huge by the time we’re done. That’s no good for a Seal. They need to stay normal-sized. But on the other hand, they’ll have the stickin’ power for long deployments, which we won’t.”

Vandenberg nodded. “Right. I don’t care if we find a Class Three where squirrels made of peanut butter jump into our mouths, we’re not gonna be breaking even for calories on any op we do.” He nodded towards Adam. “Especially not the PJs.”

“Bloody right.” Murray agreed, looking to Adam. “You’re volunteering to carry the rest of us? You’re fuckin’ crazy, pal.”

Adam gave a self-deprecating little shrug and looked around the room. Legsy was unpacking an old PS3, which BASEBALL, Firth and Akiyama were practically salivating over. Stevenson and Price, meanwhile, were setting up in the kitchen ready to prepare their first barracks dinner, an occasion which Stevenson had marked by donning a pink gingham apron.

”…I think we all are.” he said.

Date Point: 6y 9m AV

Saddlers Bar, CULSU student bar, London, England, Earth

Ava Rios

“So…not a wine fan, huh?”

Ava shook her head apologetically and handed over the glass. “I think I’ll keep it in church.” she said, licking her lips to try and get rid of the aftertaste. If that was alcohol, she was beginning to wonder what the appeal might be.

Charlotte nodded, finished the wine, then spied something over Ava’s shoulder and did an admirable impression of a magpie catching sight of something shiny. “Ooh! Boy candy!”

Ava turned reflexively to frown at whatever Charlotte was staring at, not really seeing anything. “What?”

“The two in the waistcoats by the bar?” Charlotte insisted, though she sounded more amused than impatient.

Ava finally saw them. “Oh.” she turned back to Charlotte, who rolled her eyes.

“Really?” she demanded.

“What?”

“They’re pretty!” Charlotte insisted.

“They’re stick thin!” Ava objected.

“What, don’t tell me you’re into fat guys?”

“I’m into a guy who can pick me up.” Ava replied, allowing herself the luxury of a boast and a sly smile. That little experiment had been especially fun. Charlotte rewarded her with a mock-scandalized pantomime, raising her fingertips to her open mouth, mimicking a little gasp and raising her eyebrows.

“Okay.” she demanded. “Deets.”

“What? My boyfriend can pick me up.” Ava feigned innocence, then relented and allowed her sultry smile to show. “Against a wall. For, like, half an hour.”

“You’re making that up!” Charlotte scoffed.

“Well…It felt like half an hour, anyway.” Ava conceded. She hadn’t exactly been watching the clock for an objective assessment.

“Wow…” Charlotte drifted off into a fantasy fugue for a second. “Still…I want that blond one.” she looked over Ava’s shoulder at the ‘boy candy’ again.

Ava examined Charlotte’s choice. He was about six feet tall, well-groomed and sporting some slightly retro stubble and the kind of fashionable haircut and makeup that would have looked very strange ten years ago. Good-looking, but in a kind of slim, metrosexual way. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing tattoos that looked like they went all the way up.

His friend was taller, darker of hair and paler of skin with a distinctively straight nose and a square jaw that looked a bit out of place on his otherwise rail-thin frame.

As Ava watched, the oriental dragon coiled around the blond’s left arm moved its head and flicked a serpentine tongue.

“Wait, what the fuck, his tattoo’s animated?” she asked

“Yeah! Nanotattoos! Don’t you have those in space yet?”

“We don’t even have the old-fashioned ink kind in Folctha.” Ava revealed. “So, what, he’s got nanites under his skin?”

“Yep. And you can upload pictures and designs from your phone.” Charlotte tugged down the neck of her dress slightly, revealing a fairy on her breast, who flapped her wings and ran a hand through her hair. She plucked her phone from inside her bra and fiddled with it, cycling the decoration through a cluster of hearts, a butterfly and a fish before returning to the fairy. All of the different designs were animated.

“Are those even safe?” Ava asked, still reeling from the revelation that they even existed.

“Safer than the ink kind, they’re all hypoallergenic and stuff. And you can just turn them off if you want to be neat for a job interview or something.” Charlotte said. “You should get one!”

“Boy candy, remember?” Ava changed the subject.

“Oh, right!” Charlotte knocked back the last of her drink and adjusted her dress some more so as to ensure that her tattoo (and more importantly its canvas) was prominently on display. “Would you be a darling and fly wing-girl?”

Ava froze. “I’ve never flown wing-girl in my life!”

“It’s easy, just talk to his friend.”

“How do I…?”

“Relax.” Charlotte gave her best winning smile. “I’ll break the ice.”

She grabbed Ava’s hand and towed her to the bar, and interrupted the ‘boy candy’s conversation with a friendly. “Hi! I’m Charlotte, I’m from Newcastle. This is Ava—she’s from outer space.”

Ava could only give them an apologetic smile and a shrug.

Up close, she had to admit that Charlotte was right: they were pretty. The taller one with the dark hair, who was wearing a silver waistcoat and bottle-green jeans, shook their hands smiling a relaxed and amused smile. “Hello Charlotte from Newcastle and Ava from outer space.” he said, “I’m Sean from Finchley, and this is Ben from…actually where are you from, Ben?”

“Southampton.” Ben replied, treating Charlotte to a handsome half-smile that was the exact masculine answer to her own flirtatious stance. Sean looked between them, then caught Ava’s gaze and rolled his eyes. “I’ll get the drinks in then, shall I?” He offered.

Ava suppressed a laugh. “I’ll join you.”

They left Ben and Charlotte to go through the motions of getting to know one another and retreated to the bar.

“So…Outer space?” Sean asked.

“Cimbrean.”

“Really? Dench!” He beamed. “What’s it like out there?”

Ava sighed. “It was beautiful.” she said. “Right now it’s all, kinda like…being built or regrown. All the native plants near Folctha have died and the Terran imports are so young, y’know? It’s going to be a forest eventually but right now it’s just a whole bunch of saplings.

“What really happened to it anyway?”

“What did you hear?” Ava asked.

“That somebody took a dump in the woods.”

“Yep. That’s what really happened.”

Sean burst out laughing. “You’re taking the piss!”

She shrugged. “Nope. That’s what happened. Crazy, huh?”

Sean laughed again and shook his head. “Mad. Anyway: buy you a drink?”

“Sure, but I’m…kinda taken.”

Sean laughed again. He had an easy, light laugh that he seemed to deploy often. “Relax duck, I’m not like them two.” he jerked his thumb toward Ben and Charlotte. “I don’t go from ‘hi there’ to ‘let’s rock the sheets’ in two seconds. What’s yours?”

“My–? Oh, my drink. Uh…Iunno, I’ve never really drunk before.”

“You like cranberry?”

“Sure.”

“Right, Amaretto and cranberry and a Corona and lime then.”

Ava inclined her head. “Why’s that?”

“I like them both so whichever you decide you like, I’ll have the other.” Sean said. He caught the bartender’s eye and placed the order.

“So what’s your other half’s name?” He asked upon turning back to her.

“Adam. Airman Adam Arés, United States Air Force.”

“Yeah? Your bloke’s military? Blates dench.”

Ava shook her head, a little incredulous of the slang. “Okay, okay, what the HELL does ‘Plate stench’ mean?” she demanded.

Sean laughed again as he received the drinks. “Blates. Dench.” he enunciated. “Blatantly awesome. ‘I say old thing, that really is rather amazing’. You see? Anyway, have a sip of these, tell me which you prefer.”

Ava accepted the amaretto-cranberry first and sipped it. It was pleasantly sweet and sort of…nutty? Pastry? The beer on the other hand just made her stick out her tongue and make a sort of ‘nghah!’ sound and she thrust it back into Sean’s hand, drawing another of those easy, light laughs out of him.

He was good for lifting her mood at least, she decided. Her life could do with more laughter.

“What about you?” she asked. “Where’s Finchley?”

“Oh, about ten stops away on the Tube.” he smiled. “Bit closer than Cimbrean.”

“Just a bit!” she agreed.

“What’re you studying?” Sean asked.

“Journalism.”

“Yeah? Same here!”

“Oh, thank God.” she sighed. “I’ll have somebody to sit next to in class.”

“Am I literally the only person you know, then?” Sean asked, then glanced up. “Besides…Charlotte, was it?”

“That’s right. And, yes.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Uh…Midwifery. I think.”

Sean laughed again. “Her? Ditzy.” he declared. “Those babies are gonna come into this world and the first thing they’ll see is her tattoo waving at them.”

Ava glanced across at Charlotte, who couldn’t have been flirting harder if she’d been giving Ben a lapdance. “Hey, she knows what she wants and she goes for it. I kind of admire that.”

“Shall we get back over there before they head back to the dorms?” Sean indicated the drinks.

Ava nodded, pleased to have made a friend. “Good idea.” she said.

Date Point: 6y 10m AV

Bankhead Parkway NE, Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

“Fuckin’ Christ, Arés. How heavy’s that ruck?”

“Tell…you what…” Adam took a few huge breaths to try and force down his panting breath, leaning on his own thighs. “You wanna…wear it? Try and…beat my time?”

He shrugged said pack off, and lowered it to the ground, restraining a sigh of relief. The bag was at least half again as heavy as his spacesuit was eventually going to be and he’d just finished a twenty click forced march that had, through sheer competitiveness and bloody-minded macho stupidity, become a twenty click jog, and then a twenty click run. He was fucking beat, but also determined not to show it.

That was probably true of everyone, however. Every last one of them had taken the opportunity, upon crossing the finish line, to ditch the bags and start inhaling sports drinks, and all of them, to his trained eye, were nursing something or another that was causing them pain. Most were staring off into the distance beyond the ground between their feet, in the meditative way of the truly exhausted.

“Not this year, thanks.” Price smacked him on the shoulder in a friendly way, and looked back down the path, wiping the sweat off his brow. “And hey, you beat the Major at least.”

“He’ll make it.” Adam said. “Can’t expect him to keep up with guys who are like two thirds his age.”

“Oh, I know he will, mate. I was on Operation Elder Grove with Powell.” Price said. “And to be fair, he only started on the magic potion like three months ago. He’s come a long way, fast.”

Adam looked back down the trail they’d just run just as Powell finally came into view.

He looked in a bad way. He was limping, his whole head was red with exertion and his scalp and nose were dripping with sweat, but there was a ferocious scowl on his face, the expression of a man who was doggedly telling physics and biology to go fuck themselves.

The Deltas to a man, plus Legsy, Burgess and Firth, hauled themselves stiffly to their feet and started whooping and hollering, inspiring their CO to put his head down a bit more and pick up his pace on the final straight, just by a little.

The cheering faded when his leg suddenly gave out under him, totally failing to hold his weight any longer. Powell nose-dived into the dirt and rolled, clutching at his calf and gritting teeth that were suddenly covered in the blood that was pouring from his nose.

Adam took off running just ahead of BASEBALL, and they arrived as Powell rolled over and started to lever himself upright.

“Sir—”

“Fook off.” The major tried to weight-bear on his left leg and nearly fell over again—there was no strength left in it at all. “Ee, ya fookin’- Aaargh!”

“As your medic—” BASEBALL began.

Powell grabbed the front of BASEBALL’s shirt…“I’m finishing. This fookin’ run.” he snarled, pausing for emphasis, “If I have to fookin’ HOP.”

”…Yes sir.”

Powell did exactly as he’d described, bouncing on his good leg to the edge of the trail and drawing his knife to cut the base of a thumb-thick branch from one of the hundreds of trees that had lined their trail. He tested his weight on it, then set off hobbling, pinching his nose to stop the bleeding and with two concerned pararescuemen exchanging worried glances in his shadow.

He was barely managing a walking pace, but true to his word, he finished the run, swearing and chuntering away to himself every inch of it before he finally crossed the line and sank down onto the concrete divider that marked where the path met the road, his face pinched and his teeth clenched. The men were all watching with expressions of mixed concern and admiration.

“Arright.” he declared. “NOW you can fookin’ medic me.”

BASEBALL set to work, examining the enormous bruise that was already spreading across Powell’s calf. “Crue.” he demanded, sticking out a hand.

Adam had already prepared an injector, which he duly handed over. BASEBALL had a soft and efficient touch with needles. He also handed Powell an anaesthetic lolly. “stick that under your tongue for thirty seconds, sir.” he ordered.

Powell did as instructed, popping the little white painkiller wand into his mouth and then began to count aloud, though the stick under his tongue hindered the attempt slightly. “One michichippi, two michichi—”

“We’re in Alabama, sir.” Legsy joked. This earned some chuckles from the men, and the kind of feigned unimpressed look from Powell that the major reserved for bad jokes, but after a second he made an amused harrumph and started to count again, the crow’s feet wrinkles at his eyes deepening just a little. “One awagama, two awagama, free awagama…”

The chuckles became a ripple of laughter. Adam let him reach a twenty count before taking the stick back.

“You’re gonna need an hour or two for the Crude to work, major.” BASEBALL declared, using one of the many nicknames they’d adopted for Crue-D. He stood up. “Your nose—”

“Has been broken before, Burgess, thank you.” Powell shrugged. “I already fookin’ sorted it.”

“Yes sir. You should probably still put a slap patch on that.” BASEBALL replied, cutting little triangles out of one so that it would fit over the major’s nose properly.

“I’ll save it for my fookin’ beauty sleep.” Powell told him.

“Wear it now, sir.” BASEBALL insisted.

Powell tried to sigh through his nose, only for a thin trickle of blood to start flowing back out of his nostril. He frowned, took the slap patch and pinched it to the bridge of his nose, wincing slightly as he disturbed the break. “Anyone get my time?” he asked.

“I got it, sir.” Sikes produced the tablet computer he’d been recording them on.

“Right.” Powell looked at it, made a noncommittal grunt, and then looked around. “That, lads, is the worst time you’re ever going to do in this unit. Keep that time and look at it every now and again, because by the time we’re up to operational readiness? You’ll look at the time you just did today and think ‘bloody hell, how was I ever that slow?’ Arright?”

A chorus of “Yes Sir.” answered him.

“Good. Firth, call the barracks, get them to send our ride, will you? I don’t really feel like walking back, now…”

Date Point: 6y 10m AV

Regent’s Park, London, UK, Earth.

Ava Rios

“Is everyone on Cimbrean as into fitness as you are?”

Ava and Sean were out for a mid afternoon walk. Ava would have preferred to jog, but Sean had vetoed it, and was complaining about the pace too, despite having longer legs.

“You have to be.” Ava explained, “The gravity’s so low that if you don’t spend time in the gym at least three times a week, all sorts of things go wrong.”

“Like what?”

“Muscle wastage, brittle bones, heart problems…all sorts of things. And then you get so used to it that NOT exercising just feels bad, you know?”

“I can’t say that I do, duck.” Sean shrugged.

“You’re not interested in getting fit?”

“I am fit!”

Ava restrained herself from laughing, with difficulty, but she couldn’t let that pass. “You’re not.” she said.

“Look at me! No fat on this anywhere!” Sean protested, lifting up his t-shirt. He was right. There was nothing on him but some dark hair, and his ribs, but Ava still snorted.

“No muscle, either.” she told him.

“Oh, like you’re the she-Hulk.” Sean grumbled, tugging the shirt back down again.

“I don’t need to be. I’m not in training for anything, I don’t want to run marathons or anything. I just want to be able to live on a low-G world without getting health problems, and have energy to do stuff.”

“And look good naked.”

“Please. I’d have to work at it to look bad naked.” Ava joked.

“So would I!” Sean retorted.

Ava just shook her head smiling, and they walked in silence for a bit.

She became aware that he was breathing heavily as they started round the second side of the park, where huge cheering was just audible from Lord’s Cricket Ground. Sean fished his phone out of his pocket.

“What?” Ava asked him.

“Just checking…Oh, nice!”

“What?!”

“Patel’s gone for a duck.”

“That’s…good?”

“That’s good.” Sean agreed, running his hand through sweat-heavy hair. “Here, can we slow down?”

“For crying out loud!” Ava rounded on him. “You can’t even walk round the park without getting out of breath, and you claim to be fit?

“Well what do I need to be fit for?” Sean objected.

“Not getting short on breath when you go for a stroll? Better sex? Having something to show off under that shirt besides ribs and fur? Take your pick!”

Sean frowned at her. “I have great sex!” he objected.

“With who?”

“I’ve had five girlfriends, they didn’t complain.”

Ava laughed. “Fine, whatever.”

“They didn’t!”

Ava ignored him and drew her—Sara’s—camera from its by-now habitual spot on her hip. She’d found the custom-made quick-draw leather camera holster on Etsy, had treated herself to it, and had not regretted the decision for a minute. It earned her the occasional strange look, but a rather larger number of looks that said ‘that’s so cool’, though she was frankly past the point where either kind of look really mattered to her.

Sean didn’t have to wait long. The camera was out, focused, took a series of seven rapid-fire photos, and was back in its holster inside five seconds.

“Aren’t you going to check those?” He asked.

“Nope.” Ava shrugged. She wasn’t pushing the pace at all, but still Sean seemed to be scurrying to keep up despite his longer legs, and he was short on breath.

“But how do you know they’re okay?”

“I took them okay.”

“How do you know though?”

Ava shook her head. “Because I took them okay.” she repeated.

“But—”

“Sean!” she stopped to glare at him again, then softened when he raised his hands defensively. “…Look, this was my best friend’s camera. Her parents gave it to me when she died. I was already pretty serious about getting good with it before Adam left for basic training, and since then I’ve had no social life, I’ve had nothing to do but study and practice with this thing. For a while there it was literally the only thing I had. So trust me: if I say I took a picture okay, I took a picture okay. Okay?”

”…Do you do anything with those photos?” he asked.

“Not really.” She shrugged. “Not yet.”

“Maybe you should. If you’re going to make a living from it, you need to start getting your name out there, and if you’re that confident that what you’re taking is good…”

Ava considered it as she started walking again. “Maybe you’re right. A blog maybe? My own website?”

“Go with the website.” Sean recommended. “My mate Dave can set you up, if you want. He’ll code the site, host it, get you social media awareness, the works.”

“Yeah? What’s the catch?”

“No catch.” Sean promised. “It just costs a bit. It’s his job, after all, but he’s good at it, and he might give a discount to a mate. Interested?”

Ava shrug-nodded. “Okay.”

Date Point: 6y 10m 3w AV

Huntsville Alabama, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

“Gentlemen.”

The SOR perked up as their instructor arrived and claimed their immediate full attention. He was a wiry, tired looking man who Adam immediately spotted had some kind of facial nerve palsy, or who had maybe suffered a stroke at some point.

“M’names Drew Cavendish.” he introduced himself. “I’m a co-founder of C&M Extravehicular Systems, a member of the Hephaestus LLC, but right now I’m here as your extraterrestrial environment instructor.”

“Mr. Cavendish here has more EVA experience than anybody else in the history of the human race.” Powell told them, shaking Cavendish’s hand. “He’s also responsible for designing our spacesuits. You will treat every word he has to say as Gospel, is that clear?”

They were outside of a formal context, so he got a slightly asynchronous rumble of nevertheless clearly-enunciated ‘yes sir’s. Satisfied that the lads were listening and switched on, he deferred to Cavendish again.

Cavendish nodded, and scribbled a note on the back of his own hand.

“Right. Welcome to zero-G one-oh-one.” he said. “That room through there is this facility’s variable-gravity training room, one of three. A few things to know before we get started.”

“First of all, I’m an easy-going type, but I’ve been training people in this field for a while now, and we’re dealing with stuff that’s essential to your safety and that of others. Out here in the corridor, I’m Drew. In there…” he nodded towards the large doors with the light over them “Keep it formal, attentive and promptly obedient, please. I won’t be deliberately putting you in harm’s way, but equipment failure is always an option. Clear?”

The team nodded their understanding, and Cavendish checked his tablet computer.

“Right. Cavendish’s Rule Number One: Altered gravity is dangerous.” he told them. “Those rooms can be configured in ways that could kill or seriously injure anyone who enters them at the wrong moment. That light above it is colour-coded. If entering the room would pose an immediate danger to your health, it’s red and the door will be locked. If it is somehow open while the light’s red, do not enter. That light’s never supposed to be off: If it is, assume that it’s red and contact the controller immediately.”

“Yellow means the safe zone around the door is fine. The room’s controller will need to admit you, and you must not leave the yellow demarcated zone without permission. Green means that the room is active but that no part of it should pose a health risk—you must get the room operator’s permission to enter, but may move freely once permitted. Blue means that the room is not drawing power, and you may enter freely because it’s exactly like out here in there. With me so far?”

There was another chorused confirmation: “Yes, sir.”

“Finally, under no circumstances, not even if the light is blue, may you enter that room without one of those helmets.” Cavendish indicated the rack by the door. “Find one that fits and put it on now.”

The team stepped smartly to obey, and had all soon found one that fit.

“Right. As you can see, the light is yellow. That means–?”

“Don’t leave the yellow zone without permission.”

“Good. As that room’s operator, I’m now granting you permission to enter.”

He filed in behind them. The room was a cube about a hundred yards to a side—the yellow zone occupied only about the first ten, followed by a green zone, a blue zone, and the rest of the floor was black. Sitting just inside the black zone, somebody had set up twelve kettlebells.

There were some murmurs of surprise and interest as the men crossed the threshold, and Cavendish smiled. “Earth standard gravity is known as one G: What you’re experiencing right now, gentlemen, is about two thirds of a G, which is somewhere toward the middle of the Galactic Standard Gravity range. That’s the range of gravity settings that are used in space to be comfortable for most species. Take a moment to move around, get used to the difference. Jump up and down a bit, do some pushups, whatever takes your fancy.”

Legsy and Adam beamed at one another. Cimbrean fell inside the Galactic Standard Range, and they’d guessed that something like this might come up, and had secretly come up with a little stunt.

As planned, Legsy stooped, then launched himself off the ground in the highest explosive jump he could manage, achieving his own impressive body height at apex and landing neatly on Adam’s raised hands, which the younger man had thrust above his head.

Even Cavendish seemed taken aback. “I…see you two have experience with low gravity.”

“Yyyep.” Adam shifted his right hand so that he was holding Legsy aloft one-handed, and dropped his left hand casually to his side.

Even at two thirds gravity, he was still holding up a fairly impressive amount of weight, and it was an effort to remain stable and steady—Legsy was wobbling alarmingly, and jumped down after a second or two, landing lightly.

“Show-offs.” Burgess muttered.

“You got that out of your system, lads?” Powell asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I know you’re both used to this, but focus. You might still learn summat.”

Adam and Legsy both straightened up and nodded their understanding and agreement. “Yes sir.”

Cavendish gave them all a few minutes to move and grow accustomed to the conditions before indicating the rest of the room. “The rest of this room is in microgravity, sometimes called zero-G. Does anyone here remember Newton’s laws of motion?”

The Deltas, CCTs, Adam and Powell raised their hands. Cavendish gestured to Adam. “Alright mister showoff, go on then.”

Adam cursed inwardly, but focused his memory. It had been a few years and he’d never expected to need them.

“The…first law defines inertia, stating that an object’s velocity will remain unchanged unless it’s influenced by a net force.” he said.

“Nice.” Cavendish nodded his congratulations. “The second?”

“Uh…whenever one object exerts a force upon another, it is in turn subject to a reaction force of equal magnitude with an opposite vector.”

“That’s the third law.” Cavendish corrected him. “What’s the second?”

Adam scowled in thought, but finally had to shake his head. “I can’t remember.”

“Force is equal to…?”

Adam’s memory snapped back into place. “Mass times acceleration!”

“Good lad. For the rest of you who didn’t follow that, and because academic knowledge of something’s not the same as intuiting it, here’s some practical demonstrations.” Cavendish pulled a tennis ball from his pocket and tossed it lightly in his hand a few times. “What goes up, comes down. That’s because this ball is being acted on by gravity. Catch.”

He tossed it lightly to Murray, who caught it easily, then tossed it back. “The arc the ball describes through the air…” Cavendish told them, gently throwing the ball to Blaczynski, who threw it to Sikes, starting a slow game of catch that circled the unit “…is called a parabola, and it only describes that arc because it’s constantly under the effect of a net force. There’s no magnet on the ceiling pulling it up or anything like that, just gravity pulling it down. Back to me, please.”

He snatched the ball easily out of the air when Vandenberg threw it to him. “If there’s no gravity, however…”

He tossed the ball over the edge of the yellow zone. It described a perfect parabola just like before, right up until the moment it crossed the threshold, and was suddenly moving slowly in a perfectly straight line, spinning eerily. They watched it bounce forlornly off the ceiling at the far end of the room.

“As sergeant…Arés explained,” Cavendish said, peering at Adam’s name tag “the first law means that an object’s speed, and the direction it’s moving in—collectively known as its *velocity*—remains unchanged, unless a force such as gravity acts upon it. The third law’s simple enough to not need an explanation—when you push on something, it pushes back. Simple enough, but that’s why that whole cartoon thing of going boating by blowing into the sail doesn’t work. You’re pushing that air forward, and yes it’ll push on the sail, but by blowing you’re also pushing yourself backwards just as strong, and pushing back on the boat through your boots. Follow?”

There was nodding.

“Next, a practical demonstration of the second law in action.” Cavendish tapped on his tablet computer, and an electric hum that had been pervading the room so subtly that they hadn’t noticed it suddenly became obvious by a change in its texture. “You may now enter the green and blue zones. The areas beyond are still microgravity, so don’t enter them yet. Be careful, the gravity’s even lower over that end.”

They walked cautiously. Sure enough, the gravity halved, then halved again as they passed into the green then blue zones, until they were each standing next to a kettlebell, anticipating what was to come.

“Now, those are twenty-five kilogram kettlebells, and we’re currently in lunar gravity, one-sixth that of the Earth.” Cavendish explained. “When I tell you to, I want you to pick them up, slowly and carefully. Don’t swing them or anything, just lift and hold them in one hand. Okay? Pick them up.”

They did so. Adam practically overbalanced. His kettlebell felt like nothing, and to judge from the expressions and utterings around him that was true for everyone.

“Light, aren’t they?” Cavendish asked, rhetorically. “Why don’t you swing them around a bit, same way as you would normally.”

Adam gave his an experimental swing and suddenly understood where Cavendish was going with this. The kettlebell may have been light to lift, but in motion it still put the exact same forces as always through his limbs. More so, actually—he had to fight to hold it down rather than hold it up, as the natural apex of each swing was now much higher.

“You’re now receiving a practical demonstration of the difference between weight and mass.” Cavendish told them as they swung. “In low gravity, those things have a light weight because there’s less gravity pulling on them. But their MASS hasn’t changed, and the second law of motion means that the force you’ve got to exert to make that unchanged mass accelerate is the same regardless of whether you’re in full Earth gravity, Galactic Standard, or Lunar.”

“Now.” Cavendish grinned and rubbed his hands together happily. “I notice that every single one of you is struggling with your swing. You’re overextending, you’re having a hard time holding on, those weights are going higher than you want. As you will have by now gathered, working in low gravity is remarkably tiring. So. Stop swinging and listen.”

He let them stop. “Cavendish’s Rule Number Two: Altered gravity is demanding.” he announced. “Your bodies are evolved to work with gravity to aid them. You are used to pushing against a surface, you are used to having things be pulled down as they come up. Your every instinct is built around the fact that if you are bringing something down from a high place, you let gravity do the work and your muscles are the brakes. In null gravity, that does not apply. In null gravity, if you want to get something down from above your head, you have to drag it down, not support it, and in doing so you’ll also drag yourself towards it. Everything you do is an exertion, without exception.”

He tapped his tablet, and the gravity went away. The door locked, loudly, and an alarm hooted through the room. “Start swinging again!” he ordered.

Everyone immediately found themselves being dragged around by their weights—to a man, they parted ways with the ground. Firth actually wound up in a spin, hugging his weight to his chest.

“Alright, you, hugging the ball. Push it away from your chest, arm’s length!” Cavendish told him. He was hanging comfortably only a half-inch or so off the floor, and seemed perfectly happy.

Firth obeyed, and his spin became much slower.

“That was a demonstration of angular momentum!” Cavendish declared. “We’ll get to the academic bit of how it works later, but for now, understand this—if you’re spinning fast, spread yourself out to slow down. If you’re spinning slow, make yourself small to speed up. Which brings us to Cavendish’s Rule Number Three—if you are spinning, spread out and slow down! Everyone throw your weights away from yourselves, gently now.”

They did so. One of the guys—Adam didn’t see who—yelped as the weights, upon being thrown away, launched their prior owners in the opposite direction. “And there’s Newton’s third law in action!” Cavendish announced. “You’ve just performed rocket propulsion—throw something out the back, and you accelerate yourself!”

He gave them twenty seconds to tumble and flail in mid air, all drifting in random directions across the room at a glacial pace, before finally relenting. “Hug your limbs in, protect your face, and go limp.” he ordered. “I’m about to turn the gravity back on, gently. Don’t throw your hands out to arrest your fall or anything—just relax and let it happen.”

Gravity came back, and Adam’s slow trajectory to the ceiling became a gentle fall to Earth, a surprisingly high bounce, and then a gentle skid as the gravity ramped up to galactic standard over a few seconds. It didn’t hurt at all, but like all the others, his dignity was a bit battered, especially when he saw that Cavendish had alighted gently on his feet.

Cavendish hooked his thumbs into his belt and looked thoroughly pleased with himself. “Hopefully, gentlemen, I have now broken any illusions you may have had that Extra-Vehicular Activity will be easy. How about you get up, and I start with the actual instruction now?”

Date Point: 6y 10m 3w AV

Finchley, London, England, Earth.

Sean Harvey

“Lazrik’s coming up behind them here, this could be—He sticks one Elder Curse, instant cooldown, sticks the second, that gets two—FOUR down with Agony—FIVE! SIX!! Is he about to-? HE HAS!!! SEVEN DOWN!!!! Lazrik just got a TPK as a Godsinger with Thronefall and Universal Core, versus a team using Void Blades and Law of the Jungle…So much for the banner meta!”

“Yeah, that was some old-school instakill meta, but a lot of skill on show there, keeping Loss of Clarity subdued with Universal Core and two ECs, and I don’t know how LOC are going to come back from that…“

”…They are speaking English, right?”

Sean, being seated sideways across the easy chair, flipped a sort of lazy salute to Ava as Charlotte dashed across the room and jumped onto Ben’s lap. To everyone’s surprise, they’d turned out to be a good match, and had kept on going beyond their first weekend. Mercifully, they’d also toned down the making out in company. That had earned them a great many thrown objects those first few days.

“Drinks are in the fridge.” he said, by way of a hello. “Mine’s a Desperado.”

“Sweet of you.” Ava smacked him playfully on the top of the head as she made a bee-line for the kitchen. Sean glanced at Ben and Charlotte to make sure they weren’t paying attention, then helped himself to a good look at those tight jeans Ava liked to wear.

“How did you afford this place, anyway?” Charlotte asked, wriggling around in Ben’s lap to sit upright, interrupting his sightseeing.

“It’s my Gran’s old place.” Sean told her. “She left it me.”

“Dench of her.” Ben commented.

“Yeah. Mum wasn’t happy, she wanted to sell it, but it was right there in the will, so…”

“So what the hell are you watching, anyway?” Ava asked, handing Sean his asked-for beer and sipping down something colourful that had been on offer in Bargain Booze as she dragged through one of the dining chairs from the kitchen and sat on it. Sean had quickly figured out that Ava’s taste in drinks were fairly simple—so long as it was brightly coloured and sweet, she liked it.

“MLG. Mythos Arena championships.”

“Wh–? Actually, never mind.” Ava sipped her drink and watched the screen. “Pretty cool.”

“I’ve got ten quid on Happy Place Gaming to win the finals.” Ben said, squeezing Charlotte round the waist.

“Nah, cause it’s DTE versus Vangion in the quarters, and HPG lost seven of their last nine games against DTE.” Sean declared.

“It’s just a tenner, and I’m getting seven to one.” Ben replied.

“Fair enough, then.”

“You follow esports, Ava?” Charlotte asked.

“No live streams on Cimbrean.” Ava shrugged. “Besides, Papa watched baseball and football, that’s what I grew up on.”

“You’re like the archetypal country lass, you know that?” Sean asked.

“Me?! Sean, how the hell am I a country girl? I was born and raised in San Diego!”

Everybody looked at one another. That fact hadn’t yet come up in conversation—it was hitherto unknown to Sean, and judging from their expressions, to Charlotte and Ben too.

Sean cleared his throat. “…You were?”

Ava’s expression was the awkward look of somebody who’d not intended to share that particular information. “Uh…yeah. We were on vacation in Florida when…well. Yeah.”

“Ava—” Ben began.

“No sympathy, please.” Ava sighed. “I’ve dealt with it, okay? I lost my family and my friends, and the only reason I’m not dead too is because I was on vacation with Adam and his dad, but I’ve…I’m dealing with it. I don’t need sympathy.”

”…If you’re sure.” Sean agreed.

“Let’s just…HOW am I a country girl?”

“Just like…not having live streams, not knowing about nanotattoos. That sort of thing.” Ben told her.

“Yeah, but Cimbrean’s not, like…we’re not yokels!” Ava protested.

“Yeah, but you know how the country always gets the new things way after the cities do, and the cities have got new new things by then? Phone network coverage, broadband, digital radio, that kind of thing? That’s what it’s like with Cimbrean and Earth.” Sean told her.

“No it’s not!”

“Darling, it’s like that.” Charlotte agreed.

Ava stood her ground. “We had lots of stuff first!” She insisted.

“Like what?” Sean asked.

“First solar energy force field, First xenobiology lab, first interstellar jump array, first variable-gravity gymnasium…”

“Those would all be the Scotch Creek facility.” Ben corrected her. “Except for the Gym, that was the Extraterrestrial Environment Training Facility on Salisbury Plain.”

“Oh come on, how do you know that?” Ava demanded.

“He’s a giant fucking nerd, that’s how.” Sean grinned at his friend, who just inclined his head in a please sort of bow and tipped an imaginary hat, as if Sean had pointed out that he was immaculately dressed.

“Well…we’ve got…” Ava floundered, then deflated. “Small school, small church, walks in the woods, swimming in the lake…Oh Christ, I’m a country girl.”

“There’s no need to sound so bloody despondent.” Sean told her, as Loss of Clarity slumped to a decisive defeat and on screen the players stood, shook hands and parted ways to make room on stage for the next two teams, saving a round of backslaps and high-fives for Lazrik.

“Don’t forget the flannel shirt and boots.” Ben added, earning a playful smack in the upper arm from Charlotte.

“I can’t be a country girl.” Ava sulked. “I’ve never even seen a horse! I listen to R&B!”

“And Dean Roscoe.” Charlotte added, referring to a chart-topping country musician who even Sean had to admit as a straight guy, was thoroughly fuckable.

“I thought you were taking her side!” Ben complained.

“What kind of R&B?” Sean asked, sparing Ava’s discomfort.

“Huh? Oh, uh…Santos, Leila Perez, Manny B…”

Sean shrugged, not recognising any of them.

“Maybe not such a country girl after all, then.” Ben commented, nodding.

“What about you?” Ava asked him.

“I like anything.” Ben said. “But I guess metal’s my favourite? Soldiers and Queens, uh…Buying Time…Bring Me The Horizon, Granuloma…”

Sean nodded vigorously before Ava could ask him, so they all looked expectantly at Charlotte, who smiled sheepishly. “I like all the stuff my grandma was listening to.” she confessed. “The Beatles, and the Beach Boys and the Who and…”

“Anybody whose name started with ‘the’?” Ben teased, and smiled at another playful slap in the arm.

“Dean Roscoe, though?” Sean asked.

Ava looked defiant. “He’s hot!”

“Thought you only had eyes for this Adam of yours.” Ben teased her.

“Oh come on everyone’s allowed to think a celebrity’s hot.”

“Actually, what’s he look like?” Charlotte asked.

“Dean Roscoe?”

“Adam!”

Ava frowned at her. “I’ve shown you. Haven’t I?”

Charlotte just shook her head, as did the guys when Ava looked to them, so she dug into her pocket and pulled out her phone—a slightly old touchscreen one—and swiped through her photo gallery.

“Here.” she handed the phone to Charlotte. “I took this at Christmas.”

Charlotte studied it, doing her ‘boy candy’ face again. “Ooooh…”

“Hey!” Ben and Ava objected simultaneously, prompting her to hand the phone to Sean with an apologetic smile for Ava and a kiss for Ben.

Sean examined the photo, a selfie. Adam was shorter than Ava, but BIG, as broad as two Seans across his shoulders and it took Sean a second to realise that he was actually holding Ava in his arms with the same easy strength as Sean himself might have lifted a large book, smiling warmly.

”…He looks like a nice guy.” he conceded. He also looked handsome in a military-fit, stubble-headed kind of way.

“Yeah!” Ava took the phone back and stared at the picture for a second, then a second longer. Sean was about to get her attention when she blinked and put the phone away.

“You okay?” He asked.

”…yeah.” She nodded a little too vigorously, only barely getting the word out.

Sean glanced at Ben, who delivered the most subtle little head-shake, and so the matter was dropped. Instead, Sean just extended his bottle, and Ava tapped her own off it.

“And we’re off, looks like GOC and Splitting Hairs are ignoring what happened in the previous round ‘cause they’re both still going with a banner build team, Looks like plenty of angels on the field there, and GOC take an early rush on Bravo…”

Date Point: 6y 10m 3w 1d AV

Huntsville Alabama, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

Drew Cavendish actually accompanied the SOR in PT the next morning. Obviously, he couldn’t perform at anything near their standard, but he took part and did surprisingly well for a civilian engineer. Then again, as he had ably demonstrated in zero-G training, operating a spacesuit required fitness, and he was an experienced spacewalker.

They were all motivated and alert therefore when they were shown into a lecture theatre and sat down in the front row.

“I’m told there’s a grand military tradition called ‘death by Powerpoint’.” Cavendish said, once they were all settled. “Fortunately, we’ve got something better here.”

He played with the computer for a second, and a life-sized spacesuit materialized next to him, forming like a ghost in mid-air, and then flickering into apparent solid reality, spinning slowly on the spot.

“You know, most of the idiots at this school STILL just use the holographic projector for Powerpoint slides?” Cavendish joked. “Looks bloody silly to me when they do that.” There were some chuckles, but everyone was looking at the suit. “Anyway. This is ExtraVehicular Military Activity Space Suit. EV-MASS.”

Adam studied it. It looked like a comparatively ordinary modern suit of body armor, borrowing elements from several different armor systems. Really, anybody wearing one wouldn’t have stood out among a lineup of soldiers in combat gear, except for the mask that covered the nose and mouth, and the sturdy metal ring around the jawbone and base of skull that was the dock where that mask and the helmet were joined to the rest of the suit.

“EV-MASS is designed with the mission profile of allowing you to deploy, and fight, in zero-G and vacuum, as well as on space stations, starships, and the ground, and to be able to translate from one to the other without vehicles if need be. Originally, we toyed with the idea of including a power-assisted exoskeleton, but…well, that one’s still science fiction for now. The suit is moved exclusively by its operator, which is why you gentlemen need to be so strong. There is no such thing as a light spacesuit.”

He clicked something, and the holographic suit became three suits, standing shoulder to shoulder.

“The system comprises of three suit components: under, outer and mid.” Cavendish said. He stepped over to and grabbed one of them, physically turning it around as if it were a real object, and leaving Adam thoroughly impressed by just how far holographic technology had come in a short space of time.

“The outersuit consists of your camouflage, load carrying equipment, and the rigid structures on your helmet, forearms, shins and thighs which are designed to receive mission-specific modules and equipment. It also includes the control panel mounted on the inside of your left wrist-” he raised the holographic suit’s arm to demonstrate “-though the modular system allows that to be worn on the right arm instead, for left-handers.”

“It also includes the environmental systems-” he indicated a football-sized pack mounted on the suit’s pelvis “-the heat exchanger and forcefield emitter-” both of which were mounted horizontally on the shoulders “-capacitor bank-” which ran down the spine “-and kinetic thrusters and gyroscopes.” he indicated surprisingly small protuberances at the shoulders and waist.

“Any questions about the outersuit before I move on?”

Sikes raised a hand. “Sir, is the helmet considered part of the outersuit?”

“No, the helmet and breathing mask form part of the midsuit. What you’re seeing here is the digital camo skin of the helmet.” Cavendish answered.

BASEBALL had a question. “Sir: Gyroscopes?”

“You remember Firth’s demonstration of angular momentum yesterday? Well, gyroscopes exploit that same phenomenon to keep you stable in space. They’re spinning weights, controlled by an optical tracking system mounted on your helmet that tracks visible features around you—the walls and floor, or distant stars, whatever—figures out your movement, and stabilises it. So long as the gyroscopes are powered, it’s literally impossible to throw yourself into an uncontrolled tumble or spin.”

He gave a second for any further questions, then moved on.

“The midsuit. This is the actual pressure suit and armour, built in several layers. The outermost is kevlar-aramid fabric, offering first-layer defence against bullets and micrometeorites.”

The hologram’s outer skin vanished, revealing a dull silvery fish-scale layer. “Below that is the scale layer, which is your most serious protection. It’s a layer of metallo-ceramic composite fine scales, designed to resist penetration and to distribute impacts across a wider area.”

“Below that? Padding and impact gel, for further protection and to help with the weight of the scale layer. Below that are the insulation, pressure and environment layers, all of which keep you from being exposed to vacuum, and finally the heat-activated memory gel that conforms to your body contours for compression.”

He tapped something the size of a smartphone installed under the helmet’s hard armour layer, on the back of the head. “The CPU for all of the suit’s active components is housed here, below the armour, on the basis that a penetrating hit to either CPU or skull is going to kill you anyway so we may as well put them both in the same place. And in the event that the CPU hit WOULDN’T kill you, then the extra protection it offers might just save your life.”

He looked around at them. They all were giving him their full attention. “Again. Any questions about the midsuit?”

Firth raised his hand. “Sir, how much protection does this thing offer?”

“Its SAPI rating is somewhere upwards of level four.” Cavendish told them. “The mechanism for that being that those scales are small, and they deform rather than shatter. The impact is conveyed to the padding and gel layer underneath that’s hugging you so tightly. In destructive testing, the midsuit withstood sustained rapid-fire seven-point-six-two at point blank without breaching. We emptied an AK into the bloody thing and the worst an operator would have suffered was some bruising.”

Nobody actually spoke, but the impressed changes to their body language made a gentle susurrus around the room.

“And against nonhuman weaponry?” Powell asked.

“Effectively invulnerable to kinetic pulse and electrical discharge weapons.” Cavendish told him. “There’s no known protection against nervejam, and coilguns and plasma weapons are classed as heavy weapons, which the suit’s not rated for anyway.”

He waited. No further hands went up, so he turned to the final holographic mannequin.

“Finally, and most importantly, the undersuit.” he said. “Without this, the whole system would not be viable.”

The undersuit looked like something Superman might wear. It was skin-tight, and covered in an arterial network of wide, flat structures that echoed the load-bearing mechanical lines of the human body. Aside from a zipper up the thoracic vertebrae and a pair of inlet/outlet ports just below the kidneys, it was otherwise featureless.

“This thing performs five hugely important roles for you, the first of which is orthopaedic pressure. That suit hugs you better than skin-tight, keeping your muscles and joints compressed and supported, reducing the risk of strain and injury while using EV-MASS. Second, it whips sweat away from the skin, and into those transport structures you see all over it.”

“Now, this is where it gets clever. Those structures are made from a polymer invented for us by the Corti according to our specifications. It’s flexible and squishy, but only in certain ways and up to a point. It’s dynamically compressible, in other words, AND it’s watertight. The practical upshot of all of that is that it A: further helps to support and distribute heavy loads and mechanically assist your legs and back, and B: it transports water, pumping it with the motion of your own body.”

“That water serves three roles. One, it’s part of the support structure too, because it’s incompressible. Two, it passes through the heat exchanger and is refrigerated before returning to the conduits around your body, nice and cold, so it transports heat away from your body. Third, pumping it passes it through filters—it comes out the other side completely potable, and is connected to a sippy straw in your breathing mask. In other words, you will ALWAYS have cool water on tap while you’re wearing this thing. The mask can load cartridges of electrolyte powder, sports drink mix, whatever.”

He paused, and with a few clicks of the mouse, recombined the three sub-suits into one unit.

“One thing you lads are going to have to learn and learn well is resource management.” he said, coming out from behind the lectern. “Your own body heat is an environmental hazard, you’re going to sweat out all of your salt and electrolytes while using this thing, and every sports scientist on our design team all agreed that there is no way to do anything at all in this suit and break even for calories.”

“But:” he added “They also all agree that it IS possible to move and be effective in this suit. Thanks to the therapy you’re already receiving you’ll get there rather quickly, but by the time you’re fully up to standard to use the suit in the field, you’re going to be large enough that those concerns about body heat will apply even outside of the suit, at least while at very strenuous activity. Fortunately, the suit solves that.”

“Without the suit, you will overheat and fail quickly. Without you, the suit is just an inert lump of technology. The two of you together can accomplish things the likes of which nothing else in the galaxy can even conceive. And I look forward to training you in its use and operation.”

He rubbed his hands. “That concludes the introduction. Any questions, before I start breaking it down component-by-component?”

Date Point: 6y 11m AV

Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Moses Byron

“Oh, Mr. Byron! We were all so pleased to hear you were coming, the project’s really starting to find its feet!”

“So I heard.” Moses replied. The VP in charge of Cimbrean Development—Levaughn Thomas—was one of the more…interesting people that he employed, being both a rare example of somebody who had managed to remain overweight while living on Cimbrean with its mandatory exercise schedule, and as camp as a Hollywood manicurist.

He was also so much of a brown-noser that it was a wonder he could smell his own Paco Rabanne, but Byron didn’t mind that when it came attached to a keen organizational mind. “You’re all doing a good job out here.” He commented, glad that he’d sent one of his three AW609 tiltrotors out here. The vehicle was surprisingly quiet on the inside, easy enough to have a conversation in. “Three weeks ahead of schedule, well done.”

“Yes sir!” Thomas beamed happily, cleaning his spectacles. “Everyone’s so rising to the occasion.”

Byron reflected that sparing no expense had probably helped there. if he was any judge, the project’s wastage was going to border on the scandalously high, without being high enough to warrant a stern response.

Hopefully.

Still. It would prove to be worth it in the end. Cimbrean definitely WOULD profit, and probably sooner rather than later, but even if he never got to enjoy those profits himself, he’d go down in history as the ultimate philanthropist. A win-win.

He looked out of the tiltrotor’s window as the pilot pushed it into horizontal flight mode and circled round Folctha’s western districts, where the bulk of his construction work was happening—the huge agricultural depots were already in place, the workshops and factories and dozens of small grain silos. Yes, a handful of immense ones would have been more cost-effective for bulk storage, but the engineers had produced some rather neat graphs to show that the energy costs of jumping that much volume back to Earth through Array technology would have caused the originally-planned huge silos to fill faster than they could be emptied.

Sending little and often, on the other hand, kept on top of predicted growth for nearly ten years before an expansion became necessary. Little surprises like that had kept the project truly interesting, but as they picked up speed and set course for the real crown jewel of this plans, fifty miles out of town, he found his attention drawn upwards.

“When do they arrive?” he asked

“They’re already in orbit, Mister Byron. Their shuttle should be landing at about the same time as we do.”

Byron looked back down, satisfied.

“That’s native flora down there, isn’t it?” He asked. Cimbrean native plants were chlorophyll-based, just like plants on Earth, but they had a slightly paler, blueish cast to them. Earthling flora was evolved for an atmosphere which was nowhere near as effective at blocking UV, and was darker as a result. You could really tell the difference.

“Yes, sir.”

“I only really start to appreciate just how big this is when I see it from up here. A whole planet, Levaughn. All of its native life, doomed, all of it now becoming humanity’s property, all because somebody got caught short in the woods.”

“I know. It’s terrifying.” Thomas nodded.

“Awful.” Byron said, as if agreeing. He chose the word extremely carefully—the thought really did leave him full of awe.

If a lone and ignorant human could do something so momentous accidentally…

Byron’s mental filing system had, for most of his life, included a folder he thought of as ‘moon laser’ projects—ideas that were simultaneously both technically possible—as in, the math checked out and there was no real obstacle to his making it happen—but obviously absurd. He COULD have afforded to establish a permanent manned installation on the moon equipped with a giant laser.

Sure, the idea had been to use it for laser propulsion of interstellar probes equipped with solar sails, rather than some idiot James Bond villain thing like blowing up the New York Stock Exchange, but…why? It wasn’t like they’d come back, and when probes like New Horizons and Voyager had done just fine with old-fashioned reaction mass and gravity boosts…

Nobody needed a laser on the moon. What they needed was…civil engineering projects, small-business investments, energy or…hell, maybe just a cooler fridge, a smarter phone and a carbon-neutral car. They needed an ethical mogul, a world-class multibillionaire who used his money responsibly and for the betterment of the common man.

Moses knew that he was not that man. He just did a very convincing impression of that man.

Hence the moon laser folder. It was where he stuffed all the amazing things that a little boy had once imagined that billionaires did. After all, Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne were billionaires. Lex Luthor too, even if he was the baddie.

And that little boy was still very much alive in there, and adamant that at least ONE of those things would get done.

Fifty years on, the little boy knew you didn’t just build a laser on the moon. First, you laid the groundwork. You got the logistics in place, prepared a plan, got everything as ready as it could be…

Then you made the world need a laser on the moon, and they’d pay for it for you.

“Mister Byron?”

Moses shook off his thoughtful fugue. “Hmm? Oh, I’m sorry Levaughn. That was rude of me.”

“It’s nothing important sir. I’m just saying that…the shuttle’s alongside us.”

Moses glanced out the port window. Sure enough, a grey vehicle with all the aerodynamic grace and aesthetic beauty of a breezeblock was keeping pace with them, held aloft by forcefields and kinetic thrusters. It was a fair bit larger than the tiltrotor, and a damn-sight uglier.

“Looks like we got us a convoy.” he drawled, and stood up to cross the cabin for a better view. This did little to improve the shuttle’s appearance, and he couldn’t see the pilot through the black canopy, so after a moment or two he returned to his seat and looked back out the window.

Sure, the agricultural facilities back in Folctha might be more finished, as was the spaceport, but it was this facility that held his real hope for Cimbrean’s future. It was a compound, three overlapping rectangles on the ground, one of which was already the drained-abscess wound that would form the basement and foundation for the regional office building. ‘regional’ meaning the whole planet, for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t pretty, but he’d see the architectural plans—it would be. Especially once the ornamental monoliths, fountains, reflecting pools, lawns and trees were in place.

The important building, however, was very much finished.

They set down some five minutes after the compound and its hive of busy yellow vehicles came into view, the shuttle politely allowing Byron’s tiltrotor to alight first, tucking its engine nacelles up into the vertical and spinning them down like a crow settling its plumage.

True to form, the shuttle’s own landing was graceless. It wallowed down onto a forcefield cushion and thumped up a cloud of dust as it cut power to the engines and relied on the fields to handle the last few inches. If not for the stabilisers inside it, it would have been a rough jolt of a landing.

Moses adjusted the cuffs of his shirt and jacket as he crossed the grass. The aliens had been quite clear that they didn’t plan on staying a moment longer than was necessary to make the delivery.

They were Guvnurag, as big as backhoes themselves, but still able to stand side-by-side in the cavernous shuttle, carrying something between them. Huge, dark brown, shaggy and rippling with colour along the bioluminescent lines that began in the middle of their huge foreheads and spread out along their spines and flanks, they rolled down the shaking ramp on sturdy, elephantine leg, each with one thick-fingered hand hefting the handle of a crate as big as their torsos.

“Gentlebeings! Welcome.” Byron spread his hands in hospitality, reminding himself to keep the smile on his face closed-mouthed. Bared-teeth grins unnerved and frightened aliens, as a rule. He hoped that the translator that Thomas was carrying was up to the job, but it seemed that it was, as it chugged out at length a string of syllables that sounded something like long-winded Japanese being spoken by a double bass.

The slightly smaller of the two aliens replied in kind, and Byron blinked as the translator cancelled out its words with phase-shifted noise and replaced them with a startlingly high-pitched piccolo woman’s voice. The translators allegedly tried to find an equivalent match for vocal pitch and mannerisms, suggesting that this particular Guvnurag was a young and ebullient female.

“Mister Moses Byron!” she exclaimed, and glanced at her bodyguard, patterns of light pulsing all over her skin. Moses searched his recent memory, having studied Guvnurag bioluminescence in depth just that morning. The young female was…nervous. Intimidated? Or perhaps just inexperienced and jittery. It was hard to tell. “It is good to meet at last.”

“The beginning of what I hope will be a profitable relationship for us both.” Moses declared, extending a hand. After a moment’s hesitation, the Guvnurag trader extended her own hand, which was a good triple the size of Moses’ own, and shook hands. He made a point of not gripping anything. Her immense mitt may have been warm and soft, but the bones inside it weren’t a patch on the human skeleton, and it would not do to injure a trading partner.

“Speaking of which…” the other Guvnurag rumbled, being given a deep, phlegmatic voice.

“Of course. Levaughn?”

Thomas nodded and waved two men forward, each dragging a wheeled suitcase.

“Original human artwork.” Moses said, as the first one was opened. “Ten paintings, three sculptures. Unique and, thanks to your Confederacy’s quarantine field, otherwise almost impossible to export.” he smiled. “I suspect that this case alone will pay for our purchase in full, if you find the right auctioneers. As to the other case…”

It opened, revealing a neat rack full of glass phials and little plastic boxes.

“Terran organic compounds. Medicines, mostly—acetaminophen, ibuprofen, aspirin, codeine…There are also samples of caffeine, tea tree oil, mint oil, pimento berry oil, olive oil, xanthan gum, cumin, black pepper, cocoa, latex….A full list is in there, along with instructions for what they can do, a comprehensive assessment of which ones may prove to be hazardous, and the formula for some of the simpler ones. Oh! And please accept this with my compliments.”

He offered the bottle that Thomas had just handed him. “A personal gift. California Cabernet Sauvignon, two thousand seven. The last really good vintage year before the Long Drought and, I’m assured, entirely safe for Guvnurag biology.”

He suspected, from the hues that pulsed down their lengths, that the aliens were taken aback

“Such generosity!” the female exclaimed. Moses smiled benevolently.

“You’ll find a spiral device amidst the artwork.” he said. “It’s not an abstract sculpture, it’s called a ‘corkscrew’, and you’ll need it to get the bottle open. You’ll figure out how, I’m sure.”

“Thank you. And…well, here is our end of the trade.”

They picked up the object they had been carrying between them, set it down again in front of them, opened it, and took out its contents, which they set atop the carrying case.

“Oh my God.” Moses breathed and leaned in, pleasantly surprised. “It even looks the part!”

“Excuse me?” the male alien asked.

“I’m sick of technology like warp drives and gravity field generators and whatever looking like something out of a ham radio catalog.” Moses indicated the object he had just purchased. It looked great: enigmatic, black, festooned with alien runes and pulsing lines of light. “Look at this thing! This is what I always imagined a scifi gizmo like an FTL comms relay would look like!”

The Guvnurag traders exchanged glances and then, sheepishly, the male stepped forward and opened what turned out to be the box that the actual FTL comms relay came in.

Moses deflated. The object inside was plain old technology after all. Wrapped in static-free plastic and a cradle of packing foam. It was drab, metallic and functional: all bare screw heads, electrical connectors and data ports, and the alien runes were probably warnings, warranty void stickers, and the serial number.

”…Figures.” he sighed. “Why the flashy lines?”

“Those are…emotional indicators. They tell Guvnurag that the object inside is delicate and should be handled carefully.” the female explained.

“They’re emoticons.” Thomas translated.

“Thank you Levaughn.” Moses only barely stopped himself from sounding nettled, and forced himself back into a good mood. It was stupid to be so disappointed by something so trivial when he now had a brand new interstellar communications device to play with. Or, more accurately, to pay people to play with.

He straightened. “Well. Thank you very much indeed. I do hope you found our business satisfactory.”

“We did!” the female enthused, echoed by an assenting rumble from her counterpart.

“If you need any help getting that stuff onto the shuttle…”

The aliens tested the suitcases, assured him that everything was fine, and retreated up the ramp, wishing him fond farewells and promising to try the wine at their first opportunity.

Levaughn had already handed the relay off to the technicians and engineers, who were bustling it towards the communications building as fast as they could without jolting it. “That seemed…to go smoothly.” he observed, bringing his exquisitely plucked eyebrows together in a frown.

“You’re not a believer in smooth business transactions, Levaughn?” Moses asked him, wryly.

“So not.” Levaughn retorted, rolling his eyes. “Daddy always told me, there’s always a catch.”

Moses chuckled, and looked up at the shuttle as it lurched into the air and away. “Why introduce a catch where it’s not needed? All that stuff cost me…what, a few hundred dollars? My investment portfolio made that much just standing here. And in return…”

“We can talk to the galaxy.”

Byron smiled. “For starters, Levaughn.” he agreed. “For starters.”

Date Point: 6y 11m 2w AV

Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rios

‘Eden’ had been sold, of course. There was always a demand for housing in Folctha these days: it was a boom town in a huge way, being equal parts scientific goldmine, private-sector wet dream and a retirement paradise where the gravity weighed just a little less on wealthy old bones.

Thousands of idealistic libertarian dreamers had flocked in, and Sir Jeremy Sandy had taken a convincing win in Cimbrean’s first ever democratic elections to remain as colonial governor thanks in part to his adoption the most progressive, fair-handed and logical social policies that modern political theory could invent.

Businesses had flooded in alongside the people, investing billions. Folctha’s skyline was all cranes and scaffolding as buildings popped up like mushrooms, each one outdoing its predecessors as the architects fought for prestige and to make the most creative use of the opportunities afforded by low gravity. The forest line had been pushed back for miles, and the farmers seemed to be making more money just buying up the land and then selling it for development so they could buy more land further out, than from the actual agriculture.

Hotel space was also cheap, and much nicer than Eden had been. Besides, it wasn’t like Adam had many opportunities to spend his salary on much else. Most of it went straight into savings.

Dipping into those savings to spend Christmas and the New Year at the brand-new Folctha Star Hotel had been his idea, and a genius one. The walls were thick and soundproofed, the bed was measured in acres, the bath was big enough for two, and the windows were thick, sturdy, and completely opaque from outside, in part thanks to the solar-gathering forcefield that meant the hotel was a net contributor to the city’s power grid.

All of those should have been gratefully, enthusiastically and repeatedly exploited to their maximum erotic potential.

Instead…

They had had sex, oh yes. Powerful, athletic, gasping sex. Legs wrapped around him so hard that her knees creaked sex. Fingernails down his back drawing blood sex. The cold glass of that huge sturdy floor-to-ceiling window against her back and buttocks sex, made all the better by the scandalous illusion of exhibitionism.

That had all been one ride. A mind-blowing reunion fuck that had promised more and even better to follow, but failed to deliver. Adam was…Busy.

How the hell somebody could keep so busy on their Christmas break was beyond her, but he got up at four in the goddamn morning, span through the shower, then vanished to the gym, returning around sunset aching and exhausted and full of willing spirit but empty of actual energy.

Naturally she’d complained. He’d explained that he HAD to keep his training regime up, that every gram of muscle mass was a target he had to hit. When she’d suggested dinner, he’d pointed out that his every calorie and vitamin was tightly controlled.

And he was so stealthy. There was no hope of waking up to at least get a few minutes with him in the dark of the early morning, because he’d slip out of bed like a dream, shower like rain on the window, and when he slipped out of the room the door closed behind him with a click that was quieter than the wall clock’s ticking. When he came back, she could snuggle up to him all she liked, she’d get kissed, maybe some happy nose-nuzzles and all that good stuff…for the few minutes until he fell asleep, completely drained by his regimen.

All things considered, spending her lover’s birthday alone at noon in a dry-dock sized bathtub and treating herself to a Mojito jug intended for two wasn’t how she’d envisioned their time together going.

And she had two weeks of this to look forward to?

Fuck. That.

She abandoned the drink, threw on clean clothes and buckled on her camera with the fierceness of a rancher gal of the old west fixing to fight off bandits.

There were photo opportunities going begging all over this town, material to fill her website for a year. She’d sell her photos to agencies, news organisations and private buyers. A camera in the right hands could be a money engine.

If she wasn’t going to get laid, she may as well get paid. She could sort out Adam later.

Hopefully.

A productive afternoon and evening showed Folctha at its best: the sterile filth and colourful greyness of the building sites, the way Cimbrean’s star—still unnamed—just had that slight bit more magenta in it than a Sol sunset as it painted the first extraterrestrial human city. How Folctha at night was both the same as and different to any other city, with all the hue and splendor of its nightlife playing out under three tuberous, irregular moons.

She’d almost forgotten about Adam by the time she got back. There was no ignoring him when she insert-tugged their keycard in the room lock, though. He was asleep with the blanket draped over one leg and everything else naked to the night air, a study in masculine geometry, and as fast asleep as King Arthur under the mountain. All of her frustration with him came right back, and the devilish idea for waking him up that had just occurred to her was drowned out by the much louder voice of irritation.

There was nothing for it but to sigh, strip, and climb into bed next to him, wondering what the hell she was going to do.

A fitful night’s sleep full of that question was answered when, to her astonishment, she rolled over in the morning to find that it was full daylight outside and that he was still there, dozing on his side facing her with a half-lidded, sleepy and loving expression.

”…Hey.” He barely whispered it.

“Hey…” she replied, as two distant parts of her brain embroiled themselves in a tug of war over whether to voice her discontent now, or wait until after she’d screwed him senseless, then voice her discontent.

He kissed her, ending that argument. He was so strong, she could feel it even though his touch was light, and they didn’t need long before she was straddling his hips, grinding and gasping and eagerly working towards the moment when she’d be ready to get around him properly.

“Oh god… So, what’s so special about today?”

He was too busy sucking on her nipple to reply properly, so just made an inquisitive “hmm?” noise.

“You didn’t sneak out this morning…”

He chuckled, and kissed the hollow where her throat met her collarbone, dropping his hands to her hips. “It’s my rest day.”

Ava blinked, and stopped moving. “Your…rest day?”

Adam frowned, confused. “Yeah. Weekends are rest days.”

”…You-?” Her mood evaporated, and she scooted down his thighs a bit, sitting on his knees. “You scheduled this?”

Adam’s expression had gone from confident lover to confused boyfriend to kicked puppy in a matter of seconds. “Well…not this, but, like, the day…”

“Jeez!” She seethed, and surged to her feet. “Well, I’m glad you could fit me into your busy goddamn schedule!”

“Ava…!” The exclamation was a hurt and confused one.

“No, seriously, what’s your thought process here?” She demanded. “Let’s hear it!”

“Well…Look, Ava, baby, I need to keep this up. Like, it could be dangerous for me to not keep my exercise going while I’m here. Even if it’s not, it could undo a lot of hard work!”

“And what the hell am I supposed to do when you’re gone all day?”

“I figured…I mean, it’s a nice hotel, there’s a spa, there’s like-”

She interrupted him, practically spitting lightning bolts. “No he venido aquí para admirar el paisaje, perrita!”

Adam’s jaw went slack. “What did you just-?”

“I called you a little bitch you fuckin’ idiot!” she snarled. “Or did all that exercise squeeze the Spanish out of your brain?!”

There was a long moment of silence, chilly on her part, hurt and confused on his. He stood up at about the same time as she sat down, and started to get dressed.

His boots were laced and he all but had his hand on the door handle when she spoke to him. “Adam, I’m sorry.”

He paused and looked back at her. Her ankles were crossed, her hands were hugged at her waist and she couldn’t hold his gaze—she looked away almost instantly, shaking and chewing at her lip.

“We’ll…Let me just…” he began, then started over. “We both need to…we’ll talk when I get back.”

“Don’t be long. Please.” she begged him.

In the end, he was barely gone half an hour, and returned with little more than a glow of sweat to show for the run he must have gone on. She’d dressed, but then sat down on the bed again and pulled the blanket around her shoulders, waiting.

She summoned a weak smile for him. “Hey.”

“God, Ava, I’m sorry.” he sat down next to her and engulfed her shoulders in his right arm, skin like a furnace against hers. “You’re right, I didn’t have a thought process there, I just…I didn’t think about you at all, did I?”

She rubbed her eyes, and nuzzled into him. “I love you,” she said. “but you can’t just…I’m not a videogame, Adam. You can’t just load me up and carry on from where you left off, you know? It’s been a year. A year, Adam. And then you come back and pencil me in for the weekends?”

“I know, I…I’m sorry.”

“And I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have called you that, but…” she sighed. “Look, can we put it behind us and salvage the second week of this break? Just you and me, every day all day until you have to go back?”

He hesitated, and her heart sank. “I…Baby, I wish I could promise that.” he said. “But I wasn’t kidding about it being maybe dangerous.”

”…Fine.” She declared. “Fine. What can you promise?”

“I, uh…what would you like?”

“What I’d like is-” she stopped herself, and moderated herself. “Look, just…wake me up before you head out. Talk to me. Involve me. Get back here as early as you can and spend time with me! Hell, you’re fresh in the morning? Get some of that exercise in right here in this bed! And if you have to control what you eat, can we at least eat together?”

”…I can do all of that.” he said.

“Good.”

“So, um…where were we, before…?”

“Forget it, cabròn.” she told him. “You killed that mood stone dead, you’ve got a lot of cuddling to do before we’re back there again.”

After a silent second, he got the hint and finally, finally put his arms around her and nuzzled up close.

After a while, it even started to feel natural and safe again.

Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 3—The Third Year

Date Point: 7y 1w AV

London, England, Earth

Charlotte Gilroy

“You’re back!” Charlotte was a huggy person anyway, but she especially liked hugging Ava—Ava always reacted first with a little awkwardness and then with genuine delight, as if she wasn’t really used to being hugged but really enjoyed it when it happened.

She took a step back after giving her friend an especially big squeeze, and examined Ava with an expert eye. “You had sex!”

Ava laughed. She must have been exhausted, flying from Vancouver and then catching the tube across town with a big suitcase in tow, but there was no mistaking that satisfied glow.

“Okay, how did you know?” She demanded. “Do I smell or something?”

“Nope! You’re just…relaxed.” And how. Ava wasn’t tightly-wound or anything, but she did have a kind of sadness about her that was totally gone right now. She was so pretty when she smiled, too. It was nice to see.

Ava shoved her suitcase into her room, while Charlotte bounced on her toe-tips, eager to hear all about Cimbrean and Adam.

“What?”

“So, come on! Deets!”

“Charlotte, I’m not telling you everything about-”

Charlotte deployed her best pout, the one that Ava had never been able to resist, and Ava sighed, rolling her eyes. “It was…once he remembered I was there, it was great.” she confessed.

Charlotte inclined her head. “Once he remembered?”

Ava nodded. “Oh the…big idiot tried to keep up his training regime. I barely saw him the first week. I had to…” she paused and scratched at her upper arm, absently and awkwardly. “You know what, it’s in the past, he apologised, and yeah, the second week was amazing.”

Charlotte watched all that relaxation and happiness just flicker and die, like the time she’d gone camping with her parents and Dad’s firewood had been too wet. He’d been able to get it burning, but it was never long before the flames crawling over the wood became little, desperate domes of fire before giving up their ghosts in streams of white smoke.

”…cup of tea?” she asked. Cups of tea were Charlotte’s way of trying to make things better, and she knew that Ava knew it.

”…Please.”

She threw together a mug of tea so strong and full of sugar that by all rights the spoon should have got stuck, and presented it to Ava, who was looking increasingly troubled.

“So…?”

Ava looked up from inhaling the steam and shrugged. “It started off great. Met each other, checked into the hotel and…wow.”

Charlotte giggled.

”…Then in the morning he snuck off to the gym, got back late, fell straight to sleep, snuck off to the gym again…”

“What a-!” Charlotte began.

“No.” Ava interrupted, surprisingly vociferous. “No, I understand. I got real mad at him, but…I mean, he’s right. He’s committed to this, he needs to keep at it. I can’t ask him to…I won’t ask him to stop, even if I could.”

“Darling, you’ve got to have a good relationship with him though!” Charlotte told her.

“Well, I got his head round it.” Ava said. “Made him see what he was doing and he…scaled it back. We had a great time in the end. He got up later, we went to the gym together, we ate together…it wasn’t exactly what I’d planned, but I gotta say, I kinda like being bench-pressed by my boyfriend.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

Ava snickered, and sipped her tea, which was still much too hot for Charlotte’s taste, but she seemed to like it that way. “So…yeah. I actually had a great time, after that. You said it yourself, I came back all relaxed and stuff, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but…”

“Well then.”

Ava seemed to think that settled the matter, but Charlotte knew better. Ava had only ever dated one boy after all, she probably didn’t know something that Charlotte had learned at the age of fourteen, which was that boys might give you a week or a month of improved behaviour when they got in trouble…but it took a lot more than that to permanently fix them, if it was even possible.

“Darling…what if he’s not really learned?” She asked, after a delicate interval.

“Then I’ll…” Ava tailed off, then shrugged. “Then maybe I need to learn.”

“Learn what?”

“How to…to…”

Charlotte gave her time to think, until their drinks were finished and Ava sat back, looking away, looking defeated.

“Is he worth this?” Charlotte asked her.

She’d known Ava was tough, but this time, when Ava looked her dead in the eye, she really saw the steel in there. “Worth what?” Ava demanded. “Worth a few tears? Worth feeling like I’m less important than his mission? Less important than saving lives? Less important than stopping what happened to our home from happening somewhere else? Happening here?”

She surged forward and flung her arm out to punctuate her conviction. “Well…he’s right! I AM less important than that!”

“Maybe he is, but do you need to be doing this to yourself to make that mission happen?” Charlotte persisted.

Ava deflated. “…I think I do, yeah. I think he needs me.”

“Are you sure?”

Ava didn’t answer.

Date Point: 7y 2w AV

Huntsville Alabama, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

“Now there’s something you don’t see every day…” Vandenberg was musing. Adam had to agree. There was just something…unique about an oil drum tumbling lazily in place, perfectly in the three-dimensional centre of the room fifteen meters up in the air.

The variable-gravity training room had been overhauled, in a somewhat makeshift way. The walls had been covered in freeclimb handholds, the ceiling layered in recessed monkey bars, and the floor covered in shin-deep beach sand, lit by colored projections into a gradient—light to dark—of blue at one end of the room, and red at the other.

Clearly some kind of game or sport was going on here, but what the hell a floating oil drum had to do with it was beyond Adam’s ability to guess.

Major Powell was wearing the subtle little almost-smile that indicated he was pleased with himself. “This, lads, is gravityball.” he said. “It’s a training tool Cavendish and I worked out, and he thinks we’ve now got the basics of moving in variable gravity down and it’s time to start putting us through our paces.”

“How’s it played?” Sikes asked.

“All the best bits of rugby, hockey, wrestling, parkour, beach volleyball and strongman competitions in one package.” Cavendish replied, and tossed a red impact-ball to Sikes, and a blue one to Akiyama. “The objective is to get the red ball into the blue zone, and vice versa. The deeper in you go, the stronger the gravity gets, but the more rapidly your score increases. Winning team’s the one with the highest score at the half hour mark, or the first one to double the other team’s score once you’re both past three hundred.”

“And the oil drum?”

“That’s the goal.” Powell said. “But: the goal only WORKS if it’s inside the scoring circle in your team’s target endzone. So if you’re the blue team, you need to carry that thing deep into red territory, get it in the circle, and get either ball into it, and that ball has to start in the blue half of the field or else it’s offside and doesn’t count. Scoring is worth twenty points, but if you can score and then get the goal back to the home circle in YOUR endzone, then you get a permanent score multiplier.”

“Sir…how do we get the goal in the first place?” BASEBALL asked.

Cavendish grinned. “You have to climb, gentlemen. Oh, one small point—most of the room’s in microgravity, it’s just the two meters at the floor and ceiling that aren’t, and if the goal’s being held up in the scoring circle, then the gravity at the ceiling turns off.”

The team looked back and forth at one another, trying to take all of that in. Cavendish just smiled even wider.

“Alright, Arés, Burgess, you two are the Protectors.” he said. “Your job is to carry and protect that goal. Stevenson, Akiyama, Sikes and Vandenberg are the Defenders, your job is to defend the Protector and your zone. Finally, Jones, Price, Murray, Blaczynski, Firth and Major Powell are Aggressors, your job is to steal the ball, score the goals, raid into enemy territory and all that. One Protector, two Defenders and three Aggressors per team. Alright? And I’m your referee and coach.”

Adam raised his hand. “Sir…what’s legal with, like, tackles and stuff?”

“No punching, kicking, or biting.” Powell told them. “Otherwise, fookin’ anything goes. Sikes, Akiyama, you’re team captains. go ahead and pick. Line up, lads!”

Everyone hustled to the wall.

“You know we need to stick some Feet on that goal, right?” Adam muttered to BASEBALL.

“Yup.”

Green feet were a Pararescue tradition dating back to Vietnam and the CH-3E “Jolly Green Giant” helicopter. As unit legend had it, saved air crews had taken temporary green feet tattoos on their buttocks to symbolize the PJs ‘saving their asses’. Whatever their origins, the Feet had become a badge of pride among Pararescumen and the preferred emblem for any kind of prank, especially ones where the PJs claimed ownership of something.

SOR or not, Adam and BASEBALL were still PJs, and if it fell to them to move that goal, then goddammit, that goal was going to have green feet on it. No power on Earth or any other planet could stop that.

“Uh…Burgess.” Sikes said, making his first team selection. Adam took the initiative and joined Akiyama, who picked Vandenberg, leaving Stevenson to join the red team. Three more votes, and the blue team were joined by Legsy and Price, leaving Murray to grumble about being picked last as he joined Major Powell on the red team.

“Everyone got all those rules, right?” Adam asked

“I did.” Vandenberg said. “Just go up the wall, monkey along the ceiling. Burgess should be doing the same, so try and knock him off. Grab the goal and bring it back down to earth, and we’ll just try and scrum straight up the middle. Okay?”

“Thought I was the captain?” Akiyama joked, clearly not annoyed.

“Still a good plan.” Vandenberg protested.

“Yeah, but I reckon you can go help Arés up on the ceiling.”

”…Yeah, okay.”

They put their fists together, grunted a “HOOAH!” and, at Cavendish’s direction, set up in their midzone. Sikes’ team set up opposite, there was a moment’s waiting, and then the whistle blew.

Adam darted sideways with Rebar, and together they swarmed as fast as they dared up the free-climb wall. It wasn’t hard going, and the transition onto the ceiling would have been easy…except that nobody had mentioned it was set to 1.2G. Adam very nearly lost his grip, but together they managed to grab onto the ceiling bars and began to manoeuvre—slowly—across the ceiling, circling around Burgess who’d been sent aloft alone and clearly looked like he wanted to swear about it.

“Go for the drum, I’ve got BASEBALL.” Vandenberg said.

Adam made a grunt that was supposed to be confirmation, and angled for the spot directly above the goal drum. Burgess and Vandenberg collided, resulting in the Delta man hanging off BASEBALL, gripping his legs. It didn’t seem to actually make a difference.

“I can take both your asses!” Burgess was calling defiantly, though the extra weight was slowing him down. But Adam saw an opportunity.

“Rebar! Go for the drum!”

Vandenberg looked down, grinned, and swung off BASEBALL’s leg. He dropped out of the ceiling’s gravity zone instantly with a cry of “heads up!!” for anyone below, and stopped accelerating as he entered the microgravity volume, drifting at a comparatively slow speed. He actually landed on the drum and jumped off it, kicking it down into the sandy arena floor and himself back up towards the ceiling as if he’d been playing this game all his life rather than for only a minute and forty seconds.

By the time he hit the ceiling gravity field again, Adam and Burgess were wrestling, each holding themselves aloft by one hand. Adam had got his legs around BASEBALL’s waist and was trying to pry open his friend’s grip, an attempt hindered by BASEBALL’s long arms.

In the end, BASEBALL’s boast about being able to take them both was proven false. Rebar had just enough speed on re-entering the gravity field to latch on to his ankles, and their combined weight was more than his grip strength could handle.

Unfortunately, that jolt was also more than Adam could handle, and the three of them fell twenty meters together, separating in mid air to make little craters in the soft sand. They hardly felt a thing and were soon up, trying to wrest control of the now-grounded oil drum and get it safely behind a pair of Defenders to try and move it up.

“Oi! Lads!”

Everyone ducked involuntarily as Legsy vaulted them, actually using Stevenson’s shoulder as a stepping stone, and leapt up above the gravity field and into the weightless volume, where he coasted out above the red zone, carrying the blue ball. He’d judged his trajectory beautifully, and latched onto a handhold on the back wall, from which he dropped down onto the sand and began to score a point every two seconds for the blue team.

The blues took advantage of the distraction, shoving and forcing the opposition aside and sending them spinning away helplessly in the microgravity of no-man’s land. Holding on to the wall and each other for leverage, they were able to force the drum into the gravity field, and Adam hoisted it, groaning at the weight, and staggered into a run that only got harder as he transitioned from galactic standard, to Earth standard, to 2G in the far endzone. he was grateful to finally be able to drop it into the scoring circle, high-fiving Legsy as he dropped the ball triumphantly into the goal.

Nothing happened. They were still staring at Cavendish who was watching them patiently and expectantly when Powell burst in among them like an artillery strike, coming down from the ceiling with the red ball and delivered a ringing slam-dunk.

Cavendish blew the whistle. “Red scores twenty points, no multiplier!” he declared

“Offside rule, lads.” Powell explained. “Your ball needed to start on that side of the line AFTER the goal was in the circle, to be eligible to score.”

The team deflated, muttering things like ‘right, yeah…’ or “oh…derp.‘

“Reset the goal!” Cavendish ordered.

“Hey, other than that…” Akiyama commented “…we did great. We’ll get ‘em.”

“You’re damn right.” Adam grinned, hoisting the drum and carrying it back toward the middle. “Payback time.”

Drew Cavendish

“Gentlemen, I’ve got to hand it to you. That was the most brutal thing I’ve ever seen.”

The whole SOR was pretty badly beaten up, and the whole SOR was grinning and riding on an adrenaline tsunami. High-fives were exchanged as they waited for the final score.

Drew smirked. “So, the winners, with four hundred and seventy-six points, versus their opposition’s score of four hundred and eleven is…the red team!”

The blues groaned, and were commiserated with by the reds, after a round of hugs and high-fives. “Standout plays for my money-” Drew continued “-were Vandenberg jumping off the drum to catch Burgess. Really good awareness of relative mass, there. Legsy vaulting the team and jumping the length of the playing area above the gravity field, excellent spacial awareness. Burgess, that throw from the ceiling to the red endzone was superb, and so was that bit where you threw Arés at the ceiling slowly enough that he was out of play for more than a minute. That was well done.”

Burgess grinned, and Powell stepped forward. “Learning point there lads.” he said. “You have to be aware of your mates drifting out of handhold range of anything, and if you can, help them get back. Usually the Protector’s job, I know, but if your Protector’s in trouble himself, then see to him.”

“Yes sir.”

“Right.” Powell nodded .“Take a shower, slap on a crue patch and grab lunch, and we’ll meet in the lecture room at fourteen hundred to continue our briefing on the Hierarchy. Go on.”

The lads jogged out, beaming and playfully insulting one another. Powell took a cleansing breath and then turned back to get his instructor’s opinion.

“Any further thoughts?”

Drew licked his teeth thoughtfully as he checked his tablet. “The only one whose performance I’d call merely ‘acceptable’ rather than excellent was Arés, but he’s got a significant handicap: He’s much shorter than the others. He could have saved himself from that throw Burgess got him with if he had longer arms.”

“There’s nowt we can do about his arms, Mr. Cavendish.”

“Oh I know.” Drew conceded. “And in fact that same handicap may prove to be an asset when they play this wearing the spacesuits. He’s the strongest on the team, no doubt about it. He should find the suit more comfortable than the others.”

“We’ll have to weigh him down more, then.” Powell said. “I want them ALL to be doing merely ‘acceptably’. Acceptable means they’re on their limit, and learning.”

“Right. This is training, not a sport.”

Powell chuckled. “You sound like you’ve got plans to turn it into one.”

Drew smiled wryly at how well he’d been skewered there. “We’ve got spaceships, forcefields, holograms and I used to be a mining foreman on an asteroid base.” he said. “We should have a scifi sport to go with the…I dunno, the hoverboards and whatnot.”

Powell nodded absently, rolled his shoulder and examined a nasty bruise on his upper arm. “Bloody hell, I’ve got to hand it to them. I wouldn’t have smacked my CO as hard in training.”

“Is that a good thing?”

Powell shrugged. “On one hand, it means they like me and feel comfortable wi’ me. On t’other, there’s such a thing as too close and personal. I’m not sure where the right balance between those two is, myself.”

“Why’s there such a thing?” Drew asked, curious.

Powell thought about it. “the lads…look, this may sound bloody obvious, but they’re military, right? They’re operators.”

“Right…?”

“Operators get killed. They wouldn’t BE operators if they weren’t doing a job which carried that risk. You do everything you can to keep them alive of course, but the whole point of the service is that you see a job that needs doing and you put good, honest, innocent young men in harm’s way to get it done, because fookin’ evil as that is, that job’ll make the world even worse for not being done.”

Drew was always serious and sombre—his expression became more so as he listened, and he nodded. “You’re worried about tipping too far either way, between caring for them as people, and being able to do the right thing?”

Powell shrugged the question off. “It’s my problem to worry about, Mr. Cavendish, and I’ve been dealing with it for years now.” he said.

“Fair enough.” Drew nodded, not surprised that Powell wasn’t the kind to just open up. In any case, they had other things to discuss as they left the gravity room and hung up their helmets. “In that case, has there been any word about my idea?”

“Fitting an emergency recall jump drive to the EV-MASS? We had a strategy review about it…” Powell’s tone of voice didn’t sound promising. “it’s a bloody good idea, and I’ll be welcoming of it…but.”

“There’s always a ‘but’. It’ll save lives, Major.”

“If only it were that cut and dried.” Powell wrinkled his nose, and fished a Crue-D patch from his pocket. He peeled the back off and stuck it to his shoulder, right over the bruise. “Like I was saying, the job’s got to come first. Sometimes a man’s life is worth less than that, and those suppressors they’ve got to keep the jump from popping out like a flare on sensors aren’t small enough to fit on the suit, are they?”

“No.” Drew conceded.

“Right, well there’s your sticking point.” Powell said. “You put that thing on a suit, the temptation’s always going to be there to use it, and if you’ve got a way to evac a dying man and you don’t take it…that’ll just be too hard, if not for the commander then certainly for that man’s mates. But if that’d give away your position and scupper the mission…”

“It won’t ALWAYS scupper the mission will it?” Drew pushed.

“Not always.” Powell agreed. “In fact it creates possible mission plans, so we’ll be using it, no doubt. But it’s going to be optional-use, as needed, not something that’s on there as standard.”

He waited as Drew scowled thoughtfully.

“I can see the logic…” Drew finally admitted. “It just seems, morally…”

“Moral? Mate, you yourself were used as a puppet by an alien organisation bent on nuking us out of existence. We’re dealing with cannibals and mind control here.”

“All the more reason to keep the moral high ground.”

“You think we wouldn’t be?” Powell asked. “The hard truth is, we can’t save everyone. There’s no moral damage done in sacrificing one man to save ten.”

“Why not save all eleven?”

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch, that’s why.” Powell shook his head. “You only go all or nothing when there’s no alternative. Otherwise, you’ve got to know when to take your winnings and leave the table.”

Drew sighed, went silent and scowled at his shoes. “I feel like there’s a counter-argument there somewhere, but I don’t know what it is.” he confessed.

Powell smiled grimly, clapped him on the shoulder, and headed off towards the showers. “You ever figure it out, mate, let me know. I’ve been wanting one for years.” he said.

Date Point: 7y 3m AV

London, England, Earth

Ava Rios

“BBC News, today’s headlines this lunchtime: The unthinkable ship: Four hundred million kilometers from Earth, the first of the new V-class spaceborne destroyers is launched, but opposition MPs say that the cost of the new fleet harms Britain’s domestic security…Dominic Hill has confirmed that he’ll be stepping down as leader of the Awareness Party after he was filmed using an obscene and sexist term to describe the deputy prime minister…The Port Authority of San Diego votes to end its charter, ending years of uncertainty and sinking any hopes that the city might be rebuilt…and from riches to rags, how the declining price of oil threatens to bankrupt the Saudi royal family. “

“Good evening. The Prince of Wales has launched the first of the Royal Navy’s new starships, HMS Valiant.”

“In a naming ceremony on the dwarf planet Ceres, Prince William dedicated the vessel to the memory of his late grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Second, and declared that the ship marked the beginning of a new age not just for Britain, but for all of mankind. Our extraterrestrial affairs correspondent, Dariusz Jagoda, was on Ceres to watch the ceremony…“

Charlotte sighed and wriggled in her chair a bit, folding her legs under her more comfortably. “ZF moment.”

“Hmm?” Ava hadn’t been paying attention. Running her website, keeping her blog updated and basically doing everything she could to push her photography on social media was nearly a full-time job in its own right, that she squeezed in around her lectures, coursework and social life. She hadn’t been watching the TV at all.

Fortunately, Charlotte didn’t mind. She was eating a mixing bowl full of Shreddies and chasing it down with a bucket of coffee, all while wearing her favourite anime pyjama bottoms and no bra, nor makeup. It was that kind of lazy afternoon. “ZF moment!” she repeated, waving at the screen.

“A wha-?” Ava shook her head, confused.

“ZF Moment!” Charlotte insisted. “It’s like…that feeling you get when you realise you’re living in the future?”

Ava put her phone down. “I’ve not heard that one before.”

“It’s from some German word everyone was using for a while. Zukuf…Sukun… something.”

Ava picked up her phone again and Googled the term. “Zukunftsgefühl?” she asked.

Charlotte nodded. “That’s the one. Come on, Wills just launched a star destroyer, that’s a total ZF moment!”

As her housemate scarfed down the last of her cereal, Ava examined the footage of the balding future king speaking on a podium alongside the starship’s hull, under the huge letters “HMS Valiant”. The V-class destroyer’s size was hard to judge on a TV screen, right up until the moment when the report cut to a wider-angle camera from the back of the crowd, and that podium and its royal occupant became little more than a colourful speck in relation to the huge dark grey chunk of metal.

Valiant didn’t look much like a spaceship. In fact it looked most like a submarine, albeit more angular and studded with surprisingly small guns. There were no running lights, no glowing bits, nothing to hint that this thing was cutting edge technology. Just lots and lots of matte-dark painted metal that should be invisible once it was out in open space.

The crawl along the bottom of the screen shared some facts about the new ship: Its approximate mass (ten thousand short tons, whatever they were) length (a hundred and sixty meters) crew compliment (up to two hundred and sixty) and maximum speeds (four Gs of sublight acceleration, and a cruising speed at FTL of one hundred and twenty kilolights).

“It fits.” she agreed.

On screen, the prince’s speech was still playing out. “…Together with our friends and allies, creating a fleet that will be greater than any one nation’s contribution, and able to defend not only human lives and interests, but those of any innocent person regardless of creed, race, or species.”

Charlotte stifled a burp. “What do you think he meant by that?”

“Who knows?” Ava shrugged. “Maybe the USA’s got something in the works too? It just wouldn’t be like us to let you take all the glory.”

The news moved on to the segment about some politician or another in whom Ava had zero interest, so she returned her attention to her phone. She was just composing a careful reply to a positive comment on her profile when the phone hummed in her hand and, with a twinkly little noise, informed her that she had a message.

She had to read it three times before she began to believe it.

“Uh…Charlotte?”

Charlotte pulled a strand of hair out of her mouth. She was prone to chewing on it when thinking. “Yeah?”

“I just got an email via my website. Somebody from Cimbrean Agri-Urban Development’s marketing division wants to buy all the pictures I took over Christmas! Exclusive!”

“Wh- really?!” Charlotte scrambled out of her seat and across the floor to get a look at the message, fetching up with her elbows on the arm of Ava’s chair.

“Yeah, look! They’re offering me three hundred pounds for sole use and ownership, with full image credits to me.”

Charlotte frowned “Is that good?” she asked. “That’s not a lot of money…”

“It’s amazing!” Ava enthused. “CAUD’s the group responsible for building Cimbrean’s infrastructure—you know, the water, the power lines, the sewerage, all that stuff. This is huge!”

“They could be offering you more, then.” Charlotte suggested.

“Darling, this is huge!” Ava said. “Forget the money, my name’s going to be all over the civil engineering project posters and websites and stuff, right where people can see it! This is…People are going to notice!”

Charlotte hugged her. “Don’t forget us little people when you’re doing royal portraits.” She requested.

Ava hugged her back. “Of course not.”

“The interim Port Authority for the city of San Diego has voted to close the port’s charter, putting an end to years of ambiguity over current and future shipping contracts, but also damaging hopes that the city might one day be rebuilt. Our American correspondent, Dean Savage, has more…”

Date Point: 7y 5m AV

Huntsville Alabama, USA, Earth.

Adam Arés

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač was…distracting, for all the wrong reasons.

For starters, she was intimidatingly intelligent and skilled, having excelled at technical courses Adam would have flunked. For another, she was an athletic powerhouse, lean and strong as an MMA fighter under her ABU, which was not normally a flattering garment. For third, she was gorgeous, with a diamond face and Slavic genes.

Adam would usually have not even noticed these facts about her. Loyalty to Ava aside, Kovač was a fellow NCO and, he knew, had an academic education on top of her military training that put most rocket scientists to shame. He had nothing but the utmost respect for her, professionally.

But the fact was, she was about to measure his junk, and at moments like that, certain thoughts became…insistent.

She had, admittedly, a very good reason for doing so. It was part of the necessary plumbing for his EV-MASS undersuit unless he wanted to use a catheter which…no thanks.

But it was pretty hard not to chicken out and go with the catheter, in the face of the mischief dancing around in those blue eyes.

“Do we not…isn’t there a male technician who can do this?” he asked, fidgeting. Skinny-dipping as a teenager and the many indignities of military life had robbed him of most of his hangups about nudity or general undress, and his fellows weren’t far behind, but this was different. He’d regularly been called on to pee into a bottle under close scrutiny for routine tests throughout his career, but he’d never done so under the scrutiny of somebody pretty before.

“None of them are qualified.” Kovač shrugged. “Relax, staff sergeant. I’m a professional.”

“That’s…I guess that’s comforting.”

Kovač finished assembling her tools—a cloth tape measure, a clipboard and pen, and disposable gloves—and knelt on a cushion. “Come on, sooner they’re down, sooner I’m done.” she told him.

Adam squeezed his eyes shut for a second, stepped forward, and unzipped.

To her credit, Kovač was entirely as businesslike and professional as promised, securing quick, neat measurements without comment.

He was just thinking that hadn’t been so bad when she nodded. “Okay. And now erect.”

“What?!”

“Gotta make sure the, ah…receptacle we’re making for you fits in all circumstances.” Kovač said.

Adam rubbed his face and looked around for something to distract him, or convince him this was just a weird dream. “Me cago en la leche…” he muttered.

“Language.” she chided. “Come on, sooner it’s up, sooner I’m done!”

“You’re seriously kidding me, right?”

“Nope. This thing has to fit properly no matter what.” Kovač grinned up at him and winked, which from that angle was just downright sinful. “Need some help?”

Adam swallowed involuntarily, feeling his heart jump up three gears at once. Okay, sure, fraternizing between NCOs who weren’t in the chain of command was perfectly fine, but she couldn’t seriously be suggesting-?

She tilted her head sideways to point with her eyebrows at the tablet, the tissues and the bottle of lube sitting on the table to his left. “I was talking about the porn.”

“Oh! Oh, right!” Fuck his face for going so red, fuck it, fuck fuck FUCK his face.

Kovač just glanced down at…him…and smiled with a devilish little lip-bite. “Maybe once I’m off-duty though…”

The mental image finally sunk in, and did its work. He couldn’t have stopped himself from hitting full mast if he’d plunged it into ice water.

“Woop! There we go…”

Adam jerked as clever gloved fingers quickly and efficiently lassoed him with the tape measure and…that was it. Measured.

He was still processing what had happened when she stood up and got rid of the gloves into a bin. “Thanks, staff sergeant. You want me to leave you alone for a bit while you compose yourself?”

“I, ah…” Adam got his brain back on track with a head-shake mental reset and hurriedly (and painfully) tucked himself back in. “You enjoyed that way too much.”

Kovač laughed. “Yep!”

“I could…I’ll sort myself out elsewhere.” Adam cleared his throat.

“Hey…if it makes you feel any better, the others couldn’t wait to whip it out.” Kovač told him. “You’ve got that going for you. I appreciate it.”

“Thanks, I…think…”

“No problem. So, uh…interested?”

“Wait, you were serious?” Adam blinked at her.

“Hey, you’re cute and you were respectful and…let’s face it, I just spent an afternoon staring at dicks, this wasn’t exactly easy for me either.” Kovač shrugged, a little embarrassment finally showing under that flirtatious demeanour. “Interested?”

“Oh, uh…I’m…kinda taken.”

“Damn.” Kovač shrugged. “Good for her.”

“Uh…sorry.”

She laughed. “Don’t be! You’re a nice guy Arés, that’s why I offered.”

”…Thanks.” Adam had already subsided enough that he could adjust himself and retreat to his room. “I’ll uh…see you around, Kovač.”

“Have fun!” she winked at him again.

He let himself out and managed to make it back to his room without anybody smirking at him.

Ten minutes later, after using an ancient technique to purge the mental image of a blonde head bobbing back and forth level with his belt buckle, he guiltily decided that his next letter to Ava would definitely not be mentioning today’s events.

Date Point: 7y 6m AV

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, Earth.

Moses Byron

”…It was hard for me to reconcile the knowledge that the men and women who ran those businesses could be so intelligent, and yet so stupid at the same time. I looked at years of…factories dumping their waste into rivers and lakes because it was cheaper to pay the pollution fines than to properly dispose of their byproduct. Minimum wages that could only support ONE person if they worked a fifteen hour day, let alone a young family. Thereby laying the burden of looking after that family on the state. I would always look at such businesses and ask myself—‘can’t they see that they’re making less profit by keeping their own employees poor?’”

“That was the foundation of my business dream. The idea that a company did not have to be, uh, selfish in order…to… ah dammit, how’s that go again?”

“Cruel.”

“That a company did not have to be cruel in order to be self-interested. That a successful business could…” Moses paused and sighed. “Dang it all, I need a break.”

His secretary stood up. “Coffee?”

“You’re an angel, Rachael.” Moses rubbed his eyes and stretched, pacing the half of the jet that was his private flying office. “Anything different come in to distract me for a minute or two?”

“Trevor Cardwell asked for you to call him first chance you get.” Rachael told him.

“Perfect!”

She connected the call, handed him the tablet then disappeared through the rear door into the staff half of the plane.

Moses threw himself onto the couch as it rang, and greeted Cardwell with his best smile, not that it needed faking. “Trevor! How goes the testing?”

“We have a working prototype.” Cardwell announced, looking pleased with himself. “We sent Levaughn our test image, he sent back a selfie of himself WITH the test image. Burst communication between Earth and Cimbrean.”

Byron laughed. “Outstanding work.”

“Not without some caveats, boss.”

“As always.” Moses agreed. “Fire away.”

“Power requirements are huge. That’s not a design flaw, it’s just how the damn thing works, so your hopes of developing a light version for ships…” Cardwell shrugged “Sorry Moses. Not happening. Not unless you wanna make the ships twice as big and fill all that space with capacitors.”

Cardwell was one of the few people who used Moses’ given name. It was refreshingly straightforward, and he never strayed over the line into disrespect.

“Oh well.” Moses looked up as Rachael returned with his coffee, accepted it with a silent thankyou, and sipped it. “Can you take the principles and work towards something smaller?”

“We could, yeah. How much smaller are you thinking?”

“How much information would you need to send to be able to schedule jump exchanges and synchronise clocks?”

Cardwell raised an eyebrow. “Moses, you’ve been doing your homework!” he said.

“I was kind of expecting this.” Moses agreed, and sipped his coffee again. “How much?”

“Not much. And if we do that, there’s nothing stopping us sending bulk data through a jump array on a hard drive or something. Wouldn’t be real-time, but it’d sure be close enough for your news network idea.”

“Good enough for me.” Moses nodded. “I’ll leave you to work out the technical specifics. I have a feeling the hiring is going to need a personal touch.”

“Will do, boss. I’ll be in touch.”

“Thanks, Trevor.”

The call ended. Moses drank the rest of his coffee, set it aside and looked to Rachael. “Where were we?”

Your speech to the graduates. Foundation of your business dream.”

“Mm. The idea that a company did not have to be cruel in order to be self-interested. That a successful business could also be a selfless one. That an enlightened business leader is one who welcomes and nurtures their competition and their colleagues equally…”

Date Point: 7y 9m AV

Huntsville Alabama, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

“Y’all good?”

“Man, FUCK the plumbing in this thing.” BASEBALL was fidgeting and frowning, trying to adjust his EV-MASS undersuit for comfort, an exercise that Adam was beginning to suspect might be doomed, at least until the water was pumped in.

“Hey, Sergeant Kovač went through a really stressful day getting those measurements.” He pointed out, grinning.

“Riiight, real stressful.” BASEBALL rolled his eyes. “And she was dumb enough to hit on the only guy on the team who’s got a steady girl.”

“I can’t help it if I’m pretty.” Adam grinned.

“Man, you ain’t the pretty one. The Major’s the pretty one.”

Adam’s eyes widened a little, his expression became serious and he glanced over BASEBALL’s shoulder.

BASEBALL shut his eyes. “…He’s behind me, isn’t he?.”

There was a tense moment, then Adam cracked up laughing, and the rest of the crew joined in. “Gotcha!”

“Aww, fuck you all!”

“Hey, y’ain’t wrong.” Sikes agreed. “The old man’s looking good on the C-juice.”

Price drawled an exaggerated imitation of Sikes’ Georgia accent “He shore is purdy, y’all.”

Sikes’ retaliation, as it always was, was a strangled received pronunciation mockery that bore no resemblance at all to Price’s Essex accent. “Oh yes, delightful, wot?”

“Good to see you lot’re in a good fookin’ mood.” Powell commented, joining them already wearing his undersuit. As ever, his delivery was level and could have been taken as gruff if they hadn’t been able to see the relaxed humour in his eyes.

“Good morning, sir.” Legsy greeted Powell as the room turned toward him and straightened up.

“Morning, Legs. How’re you all finding the suits?”

“The plumbing’s a bitch, sir.” Burgess told him.

“You just be glad the plumbing at the back didn’t need any measuring.” Powell told him, opening his own locker and throwing his bag into it. “Technical Sergeant Kovač might have enjoyed that job a little too much.”

There was a round of laughter, but Stevenson was suddenly looking worried. “So…she wasn’t kidding about that thing needing to go in our butts, was she?”

“Alas, she was not.” Powell told him, shutting the locker again.

“And on the day we have to use it, I will take comfort from knowing I won’t be alone.” Vandenberg added.

Even Stevenson chuckled at that.

“Arright.” Powell told them. “Tech team’s ready for us, get on through there.”

They hustled at the order, stowing the last of their stuff in their lockers and bustling through into the suit lab, where the midsuit and outersuit of the EV-MASS systems were stored and maintained by a team – two for each Operator—of technicians.

The techs may not have been a physical match for their operators—after all, the SOR was training them to the point where, once they hit operational readiness, they would be brushing the limits of what the unaugmented human body could achieve—but they still took part in training and team-building exercises. The result was that everyone already knew their techs, and had grown to respect them. The technical crews tried to hang with the Operators in training, and made a damn good attempt at it. That was worth a lot.

Adam’s technicians were Senior Airman Raymond Doyle and Petty Officer Dean Hargreaves, USAF and Royal Navy respectively. That was a pattern repeated across the whole SOR—one tech from the operator’s parent service, and the other from somewhere else. It seemed to work well.

Doyle was the more meticulous of the two when it came to interpersonal interactions, and greeted him with a neutral “Good morning, staff sergeant.”

The sentiment was echoed by Hargreaves, whose rank was roughly equal to Adam’s own, in a rather more relaxed manner: “Hey, Horse.”

They’d both earned it, as far as Adam was concerned, even if Doyle preferred not to exercise that privilege. Where Doyle was undeniably the orderly, logical and meticulous mind of the pair, Hargreaves’ intelligence was more hands-on. Doyle would have drawn up a blueprint down to a half millimetre fare-thee-well, but Hargreaves was the one to build it. They were a good team, and had between them planned out and enacted several minor modifications to the suit so that it should, in theory, fit Adam perfectly.

All under the watchful note-taking eye of Drew Cavendish, of course.

“We ready?” Adam asked them.

“We are indeed.” Hargreaves nodded, handing him the throat brace that Adam dutifully buckled on: without it, the suit would constrict his throat and choke him. “I just finished modifying the sleeves last night.”

Adam nodded his thanks and stepped forward onto the two once-yellow feet on the floor in the middle of Doyle and Hargreaves’ working space. Naturally, he and BASEBALL had soon corrected the colour of those feet during the dead of night, earning them both an immediate “motivation” session from Legsy (who had quite astutely pointed out that there were no other pararescuemen anywhere on the facility, which didn’t make for a long list of suspects when twelve pairs of yellow feet were mysteriously painted green) but the new colour had stuck.

One man alone couldn’t possibly have put on an EV-MASS. Even if there hadn’t been equipment that needed mounting on the back where even the world’s most flexible contortionist couldn’t reach, he would have needed at least a couple of hours to manage it, by the end of which he’d have been too exhausted to actually do anything with it.

The midsuit’s torso was all one object which needed lifting up and lowering over his head and raised arms. Once that was in place he could then—awkwardly bent forward—lift his feet up and insert them into the legs and boots, wriggle them down, grit his teeth as he forced them past an uncomfortable stricture, and finally push them fully in until he was entirely contained and had his ass hanging out of an otherwise complete suit of armour. Then, the torso and sleeves could be pulled down, with Doyle’s hands carefully inserted to protect his ears as the collar constricted his skull, until he suddenly popped out of it like a turtle, with the rigid attachement points for the helmet and breathing mask sitting at the back of his skull and along his jawline.

The top and bottom halves of the midsuit met at a shaped docking ring that ran around his hips and above his buttocks. Before it could be closed, Doyle had to reach awkwardly up from below past Adam’s butt, and connect the undersuit’s waste and water ports to the midsuit by touch.

That done, the docking collar could be snapped together and sealed, leaving the full weight of the heaviest part of the suit bearing down on him.

Weirdly, though, the worst part was almost over. Hargreaves attached a water hose to the inlet port, turned on the pressure, and five seconds later, the inner suit’s water system had filled. Its reactive polymers activated in response to getting wet and SQUEEZED, shrinking the inner suit down until it was tighter than his own skin and the load-bearing structures were taking the worst off the weight.

The midsuit did something similar in response to his body temperature – its innermost padded gel lining expanded, and that was like getting a full-body bearhug from BASEBALL. It served a purpose, though—the suit’s incredible tightness both counteracted vacuum precluding the need for a pressurized internal environment except around the face and mouth, and made it an extension of his limbs rather than just something he was wearing. It wasn’t comfortable at first, but that was what the five minute acclimation break was for. Technically, he was already exercising – under that compression, merely breathing became an exertion and all of his muscles were forced to flex a little. He should have been sweating profusely—instead, the undersuit’s stillsuit system went to work, whipping the water away from his skin and adding it to its own circulating and cooling reserves.

After that came all the technical bits—the life support system that went on his hips, the capacitor bank up his spine, the forcefield emitters that ran down his arms, the heat exchanger at his shoulders, all of which again needed Doyle’s delicate touch to hook up.

Then there was the outersuit, which was basically just a digital camouflage cover, plus the framework of carrying systems for his backpack, ammo, grenades, medical equipment, and any auxiliary armour plating or mission-specific tools he felt like carrying.

The final step—his helmet and breathing mask—were almost anticlimactically simple. He could—and was required to—put them on himself. They snapped on simply and easily, having a pressure-sealed locking system of Cavendish’s own design that was allegedly foolproof.

And that was it. He was wearing EV-MASS, Extra Vehicular Search and Rescue System variant.

The first few times had been way worse. Hell, the first time they had done nothing more than put the suit on without the “plumbing” and just walked around wearing it for half an hour, and even that minimal activity had beaten the crap out of them.

Then there had been a few minor modifications, then wearing it again, this time for forty minutes. Then again for an hour. Then again for a light PT session.

This was Adam’s seventh time in the suit all told, but he was now starting to feel acclimatized. The extra inch in the sleeves that Hargreaves had added, and a few tweaks to the water circulation rate courtesy of Doyle had made all the difference. When he stood up and bounced lightly on his toes, he didn’t feel like he was wearing a heavy, constraining lump of technology any more. He felt like Adam, except…more massive.

It almost felt comfortable.

To judge from their expressions, the rest of the team were feeling similarly more at home in their suits. Even Powell was moving with assurance and calm, rather than the red-faced scowl that he’d worn the first few times.

“Right.” the major declared, as soon as it became clear that everyone was suited up. “Training time.”

“What are we doing today, sir?” Firth asked.

“Today, lads…we’re playing Gravball in the suits.” Powell grinned.

Date Point: thirty minutes later.

“So. Observations about today’s session?”

“Well, the suits are up to spec.”

“Aye, that they are. Anything else?”

“WARHORSE needs more weight on him in training.”

“Oh come on-!”

“Agreed. Anything else?”

“We’re going to need a new goal.”

“I did rather get the impression that an oil drum half full of concrete isn’t quite heavy enough nowadays, you’re right.”

”…Bet that’s a sentence you never thought you’d utter, sir.”

“Mm. Any more observations? No? Arright, let’s go get these fookin’ suits off. And…Arés?”

“Yes sir?”

“Find us a suitable replacement for the goal, will you?”

“Yes sir.”

Date point: November 5th 7y 10m AV

Southwark Park, London, England, Earth.

Sean Harvey

Sean had always preferred cold weather to hot. You could always pile on layers, make a hot drink, turn up the heating, light a fire or snuggle up to somebody in cold weather.

Ava was the other way round, he knew, which was why she was insulated under a thick coat, a woollen hat, gloves, a scarf, and why her cheeks and the tip of her nose were red, highlighted by the flashing lights of the Bonfire Night fairground they’d decided to come visit, seeing as it was a clear and dry November 5th for the first time in years.

She was enjoying it immensely he could tell, and it only made her look prettier. A curl of hair had escaped from the hat and was bouncing at her cheek as she watched Ben throwing away his money on some stupid rigged game, lured by the lie that he’d get a little plushy animal as a consolation prize for Charlotte even if he lost.

Sean had figured out instantly that it was actually impossible to lose and earn that consolation prize, which meant that instead you won and got a pointless little plastic keyring, five of which could be traded for the big plushy animals after you’d paid far more than they were worth, but he knew that wouldn’t have stopped Ben, so…

So he watched Ava instead. Ava, her breath steaming in the November darkness. Ava, smiling in the carnival light. Ava who it hurt to even think about, let alone look at.

It just wasn’t fair.

Sean didn’t think of himself as a bitter or jealous kind of guy. If it had been a happy relationship that Ava had with her boyfriend, then he’d have just shrugged it off, been her friend, no problem. The occasional idle speculation, nothing more.

But it was a shitty relationship, an absent relationship where they only saw one another a few times a year, when Adam took some of his leave time to visit and they just…vanished. Ava would spend the week prior to the visit fretting about it and talking about nothing else, then Adam would arrive and nobody would see Ava for the duration, until one day she was back, radiating equal parts afterglow and frustration.

It was abuse. She was’t being harmed in any physical way, but she was being neglected, taken for granted. Treated as something for Adam to do when he needed a break from being a soldier.

And the very worst part of it, the part that made Sean hate the bastard’s guts more than anything else, was that it was clear he wasn’t doing it deliberately. He was just a fucking moron, and that was enough for Ava to keep forgiving him.

She caught him watching and gave him a little smile, brushing that stray hair back behind her own ear. She’d been doing that a lot, lately. She probably wasn’t even aware she was doing it, but Sean was: he noticed every time.

“You okay, breadstick?” she asked.

“Getting cold.” Sean lied. Well, okay, he WAS, but that hadn’t been the source of his frown.

“Me too!” she nodded. “Isn’t there anywhere warm round here?”

“We could grab a cup of tea?” Sean suggested. “Ben’s going to need another five goes to win anything, at least.”

Ava nodded. “Hot chocolate!”

“Even better.”

They picked a fast food van and grabbed their drinks, before sitting on a bench to watch Ben and Charlotte, who seemed to be enjoying themselves at least.

He became aware that she was sitting right up close to him, and sat back on the bench, casually draping his arm along the back of it.

He was surprised and delighted when she sat back too and wriggled up a little closer. “God damn it’s cold.” she grumbled.

Sean nodded “It’s November, and they’re saying this year’s going to be the coldest ever.” he said.

“Uuurgh.” Ava shivered even more inside her coat, and took a huge scent of the steam coming off her drink.

Sean gripped her upper shoulder and pulled her a little closer still. She was tense—no, check that, she was shivering. “Fuck, are you okay?”

She turned a little more towards him. “Yeah, I’m…you’re warm.”

This much was true, and explained everything. Still, when Sean tried to remove his hand from her upper arm, she made a protest noise and wriggled closer again, so he put it back.

Some sips of her drink and several minutes later, she’d stopped shivering and seemed a lot more comfortable, but she stayed where she was. She even let out a big contented sigh.

Sean tried to gauge if she was conscious of how intimate she was being right now, and decided that she probably wasn’t. Ava was fiercely intelligent, but her one long-distance relationship didn’t translate to being all that boy-savvy. In a strange way, he suspected that her and Adam’s mutual inexperience was part of what kept them together.

”…Better?” he asked, after enjoying the contact just long enough but not, hopefully, long enough to scandalize her if and when she noticed.

She jumped a little and sat up, wearing an awkward expression which quickly became a blush, but she nodded even as she looked away. “Sorry, yeah. I just…I was miles away. Yeah.”

She tidied up her hair again and looked over at the game. “They’re STILL playing?”

“I think he’s going for the top prize.” Sean replied.

“Shouldn’t we maybe stop him?”

“It’s his money.” Sean shrugged. “He should be nearly done. Want to go check?”

”…Yeah…”

Sean had enough tact to get up frst and let her sort her head out behind him. He rejoined their friends just as Ben managed to land a dart smack in the middle of the Seven of Hearts and uttered a “fucking finally!”

“Worth it?” Ava teased, arriving level with Sean’s elbow.

Charlotte waved her prize happily. “I got a kitty!”

Ben just nodded to Ava with a little smile. “Worth it.”

Only Sean noticed how the exchange put Ava in a thoughtful mood, from which she only emerged an hour later when the firework display started.

He would have spent a lot more than Ben had on his rigged-game kitty to know what she was thinking about.

Date point: Christmas day, 7y 11m AV

Llanelli, Wales, Earth.

James “Legsy” Jones

”‘Ello Mam.”

“Fuckin’ ‘ell you got big!”

“Good to see you too, Mam. Merry Christmas.”

“Beer’s in the fridge if you want some, your sister’s coming down at half four.”

This was, by the standards of Lydia Jones, a warm and affectionate welcome. She was the opposite of her son in every possible way—small, serious, and corpulent to the point of being basically spherical, fumigated by the cigarettes she rolled herself and sporting a half-grown-out dyed purple undercut hairstyle that might have almost suited her if she shed half her weight and figured out how to smile.

“Cheers Mam.” Legsy retrieved the offered drink and downed about a third of it in one go. “Dai in front of the telly?”

“Where the fuck else would ‘e be? Take ‘im another beer through, will you?”

Legsy did just that, laughing quietly to himself and enjoying the familiar strident almost-shout of home. Sending him through with a beer through for her husband meant, for those who really knew her, that his Mam was in a rare good mood.

“Fuck me, you got big!” his dad exclaimed, as soon as he entered.

”‘Ello Dai. Merry Christmas.”

“Aye, Merry Christmas.”

With that, David Jones—”Dai” to everyone, his children included – exhausted his conversational reserves and went silent again. Genetically, he was the source of Legsy’s prodigious height, but life hadn’t been kind to him on the health front. First had come a backbreaking physical career. Second, upon being laid off when the company he worked for had gone bust, had come rampant obesity brought on by the fact that he hadn’t adjusted his diet to match his new, more sedentary lifestyle. Then had come the dole, type two diabetes, depression and the end result was that “Dai”, a man in his early fifties, looked a decade older than that and only levered himself out of his chair these days to go to the bathroom, go to bed, or to waddle down the road to the pharmacy.

They watched TV for a couple of hours, watching people buy houses at auction for jaw-dropping sums of money and then spending a few thousand more on renovating and redecorating them, under the periodic scrutiny of a camera crew.

Christmas for Legsy had always started, not at the moment he got to Lydia and Dai’s house but when his sister and her family arrived, and they never failed to arrive at 4:30 on the nose.

He got up to get the door for them at twenty-nine minutes past, and grinned as Amy’s car—always a new one, sleek and showroom-clean, paid for but never purchased—slid up outside the tiny terrace house their parents lived in.

Amy Jones was his twin, the older by about half an hour, and the person he loved second-most in all the world. Just like him, physically and in personality she was everything their parents weren’t, albeit she’d taken after their mother in the height department.

She was exclaiming her astonishment even before she’d got out of the car. “Oh my days! Oh my—look at—you’re huge!”

They exchanged a massive hug. “You should see some of the lads. I’m one of the small ones.” he told her, then gave an equally welcoming hug to Amy’s husband, Robert.

Amy and Robert had met through work, having both taken the same six month contract for a debt management firm in Bristol before going into business together. They’d once tried to explain to Legsy exactly what it was they did, but it had mostly seemed to involve phone calls, spreadsheets and knowing everybody who lived within twenty miles of the M4 and who earned more than three hundred thousand pounds a year. It paid well, whatever it was.

“You leave Abby with your folks then?” he asked Robert, referring to the person who held the number one slot for his most-loved person in the whole world.

Robert nodded, a little sheepishly.

“School complained about some of the language she picked up last time.” he explained.

“Yeah, I thought that might happen…” little Abigail had been much too enthusiastic about it when she’d learned the word ‘fuck’ off her maternal grandmother. “You mind if I pop up and see her after?”

“It wouldn’t be Christmas if you didn’t get to, would it?” Amy said, understanding. “Come on, let’s get this out the way…”

For all her failings, Lydia Jones was at least acutely aware that her culinary talents extended to oven chips, microwave dinners and ordering takeaway, so every year she saved up to have a hot Christmas dinner delivered instead. James and Amy had both been offering to cover that expense for years, but—as with the house that Amy and Robert had offered to buy for them—Lydia and Dai had been too stubborn and proud to accept.

Still, it was a good Christmas dinner, even if the table conversation was basically nonexistent.

It was barely eight o’ clock by the time the gifts had been exchanged and opened, and they had departed, with Legsy finding himself surprisingly comfortable in the back seat of Amy’s car and sporting a new T-shirt that Dai had had custom-printed, which showed an astronaut with a gun and a red dragon on his spacesuit, and the legend “Mab Cymru, Milwr y Gofod”.

It was, in Legsy’s own words, a “fuckin’ cool shirt” and he had promptly exclaimed “tidy!” and changed into it on the spot, leaving the family to exchange wide-eyed glances at his new musculature.

“So…why are you so big now?” Amy asked, once they had taken the right turn at Felinfoel to take them towards the motorway.

“I need to be.”

“I thought astronauts would all be small.” Amy replied.

“Astronauts, yeah. Maybe? I’m not an astronaut, I’m still a soldier.” Legsy pointed out.

“But you’ll be wearing a spacesuit.” Robert said.

“Yeah, but astronauts don’t have to run and fight in their spacesuit, do they?”

“So you’re not even the biggest?” Amy asked.

“Nope. That’d be Adam, and THAT boy’s a fuckin’ legend.”

“Legend how?” Robert turned in his seat slightly to look back. Amy was always the driver—Robert had never learned how.

“E’s from San Diego, ‘im and ‘is missus.” Legsy explained. “I swear, they lost everything, right? But he’s in the SOR with me, and she’s off becoming a journalist and…to be fair, she’s a fuckin’ legend too. I don’t know HOW she puts up with ‘im sometimes.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’d trust Adam with my life, wouldn’t even have to think about it.” Legsy said. “He’s about the smartest bloke in the unit, too. But he’s a fuckin’ IDIOT when it comes to his girl.”

“Like you’re an expert on relationships.” Amy teased.

“Oi, that’s by choice.” Legsy retorted. “But serious now, if he wasn’t so good about writing her every chance he gets, she’d never hear from ‘im.”

“Well have you talked to him about it?”

“Tried to. He always just nods and tries harder for a week or two – takes some leave to go visit her or something like that—an’ then he falls right back into it, right?” Legsy shook his head. “It’s like…that’s part of the reason I admire ‘im so much, he’s a fuckin’ machine in training, he’s dedicated to gettin’ stronger an’ faster an’ smarter, an’ he could carry TWO of me by now I reckon. But I dunno if that’ll keep up if she finally gets sick of ‘im . I dunno WHAT’d happen to ‘im if he lost her.”

He sat back and rubbed his chin, and looked out as rolling south Welsh hills swelled into view out the right window as the car climbed a hill. “I guess we just have to hope she doesn’t.”

Date Point: New Year’s Eve, 7y 11m AV

London, England, Earth

Ava Rios

Two weeks of Christmas should have been two weeks of topping up on Adam, keeping things going, generally performing maintenance on the relationship. His occasional leave breaks were nice and all, but…

Instead it had been an echo of last year. Mind-blowing sex on the first day, then gym gym gym.

He’d tried to include her, and sure they’d been spending time together…but what kind of a vacation consisted of busting your back in the weight room all day for ten days, interspersed with regimented, pre-prepared meals that were fifty percent supplement pills? Ava enjoyed exercise, and she was definitely proud of herself for burning off some fat and toning up during those two weeks, but come on. Where was the romance? The gym wasn’t a date!

She’d been seething gently about it the whole time, determined not to ruin Adam’s mood by yelling at him again. A bit of a white lie maybe, but those never hurt anyone, right?

All that negative mental energy hadn’t made for a happy flight back to London. Journey times were coming down and down as the new mesosphere airliners, nicknamed “spacekissers”, set ever-higher altitude records and achieved ever-greater multiples of Mach for fractions of the expense of older planes, but flying was still an industrial, uncomfortable mode of transport. The marriage of fuel-less thrusters, ultracapacitors and forcefield flight surfaces had hugely curtailed ticket prices, but the airports hadn’t grown any larger, nor were new ones being built. More people than ever wanted to travel, but nobody wanted the extra noise pollution and traffic, so the number of runways in the world wasn’t increasing and most of them were already at capacity.

Which meant that flying still involved too-small seats in cramped metal tubes shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, plus the usual ritual of going through border control, baggage collect and customs at the end before Ava was finally able to vanish onto the Underground and emerge two hours and one change later at street level, sweaty, exhausted and jet-lagged, to find that London was being characteristically chilly, grey and dispiriting.

By the time she’d dragged her luggage through every puddle between the tube station and Sean’s house, she’d given up on feeling much of anything positive.

Sean’s house changed that. It was an oasis of light, music and warmth, gearing up for the night’s New Year celebration. Via the plane’s satellite Internet connection, Ava had been involved in the discussion as they had toyed with the idea of going into the city and enjoying the fireworks over the Thames, but the relentless wetness in the air had clearly settled in for the long haul, so they instead elected to stay home in the warm and dry, with an assortment of alcohol, treats and the Christmas decorations still up.

She was welcomed with cheers, hugs, a big kiss on both cheeks from an inebriated Charlotte who was wearing a pointy hat made of newspaper, and something magenta and fruit-flavoured in a bottle from Sean.

Charlotte and Ben being in charge of the party snacks in the oven, their welcome was by necessity brief, and Sean watched Ava with a faint smile as she leaned against the wall and downed half the bottle with an enormous sigh.

“That bad?” he asked.

“I really need a shower.” she nodded.

“Go on upstairs, you know where it is. I’ll get the kettle on then bring your luggage up for you.”

Ava finished her drink, set the bottle down on Sean’s coffee table, and then trotted upstairs, already unbuttoning her jeans before she even reached the bathroom door. She’d used Sean’s shower a few times before, and getting it to the perfect temperature was as simple as twisting the dial two and a half turns and waiting about five seconds.

She used those five seconds ripping off every last sweaty, travel-soiled scrap of clothing she had on her, and took up position under the stream with a grateful sigh.

The heat was just starting to really soak deliciously into her muscles when there was a knock on the door. “Are…You already showering?”

“Come on in, Sean.”

”…Are you sure?”

Ava rolled her eyes to herself. The shower curtain was entirely opaque, what the hell was he so afraid of? “Come in.” she repeated, and leaned back to soak her hair.

“I’ll just…” She heard him wheel her bag in and leave it next to her discarded clothes before turning to leave.

“Come on, man, I haven’t seen you in a fortnight!” Ava protested. “Did you get that money yet?”

Just before she’d left, Sean had won seven thousand pounds on a premium bond that his grandfather had got for him fifteen years previously.

“Oh, uh…yeah. Yeah, it’s all come in. I was thinking of doing up the house a bit.”

“Yeah?”

“Well I mean…It’s kind of old-ladyish in here, isn’t it? I loved my Nanna but it’s not really a young man’s house, is it?”

“True. Got any ideas?”

“I had, um…” he cleared his throat and started over. “I had a few. Thought I’d have the wall out, make the kitchen and the lounge open plan. Get some tiles in the kitchen instead of lino…”

“Sounds good.” Ava agreed. She smiled as she heard Sean mutter something under his breath that sounded like it might have been a ‘what the hell’ and the sound of him closing the toilet lid and sitting on it. “Place could do with some strong reds and greys.”

“Your sense of interior decoration is stuck in the middle of last decade.” Sean commented.

“What? I like red.”

“No strong colours, duck. They are Of The Devil.” Sean snorted, but Ava stuck her head around the curtain to give him a patient look.

“You’re kidding.”

Sean cleared his throat and looked away. “Only, like…a little.”

Ava snorted and dropped the curtain back so she could soap up and rinse off.

Sean clearly thought he was being quiet when he muttered ‘this is so weird…‘

“Why?”

“What?” Sean asked, guiltily.

“Why’s it weird? We’re just talking.”

“Yeah, but, you’re…”

Ava sighed, and looked around the curtain again. “Sean, you know the three things I miss the most about how Cimbrean used to be?”

“What?” he asked, making a commendable effort to maintain eye contact.

“My house, my friend Sara, and skinny-dipping in the lake.” She said. Sean cleared his throat and fidgeted on his seat, sitting further forward. “Y’know, when Sara first invited us to try it, I did exactly what you’re doing now, I got weird about it. But you know what? A body’s not a big deal.”

She put the curtain back in place and began to shampoo. “Besides, it’s not like you can see anything right now, can you?”

“Well, no, but-”

“Then it’s no different to if I was standing here clothed, is it?”

”…How was Cimbrean, anyway?” Sean asked, abandoning ship on that line of conversation.

“It was…” Ava sighed. “I’m getting used to how fast things change, but it’s still tough to really get your head around just how different things can be just one year apart. You know they’re talking about building the tallest man-made building ever in Folctha now?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! Not for years yet, but when they do—if they do—it’ll be a third taller than what’s even possible here on Earth.”

“What the hell do they need a building like that for?” Sean asked.

“Why does anywhere need a building like that?” Ava asked rhetorically. “but Folctha’s booming!” she continued, rinsing the shampoo out. “The cost of living out there’s getting cheaper by the week and I guess it turns out that people want to try living on another planet.”

She looked around the curtain again. “Hell, we did. Hand me a towel?”

Sean did so, opening a cupboard to retrieve a huge black bath towel which he handed to her with a kind of forced nonchalance that suggested he was trying to get used to the situation. She just rolled her eyes again, retreated behind the shower curtain and wrapped herself up in it before stepping out of the shower to sit down on the edge of the bath. “You know, girls need more than one towel.” she said.

“Huh? What for?”

“One for this,” She indicated the one wrapped around her torso “One for the hair,” she lifted the dripping weight of it with her thumb “…and one for drying off.”

“Can’t you just use the one?”

“Sure, if you’re cool with me sitting here bare-ass while my hair dries.” she teased.

“What, the nudist is squeamish about that?” Sean teased right back, finally regaining his usual confidence though he opened the cupboard again and pulled out a couple more towels for her.

“Sorry buddy. I don’t think I’m a nudist exactly, but I know I’m not a stripper.”

“Ah, I knew you were all talk and no walk.” Sean grinned as he sat down on the toilet lid again, plainly not serious.

“It’s not that, come on.” she objected. “It’s just that there’s a time and a place, you know? If we were swimming in the lake or we were at the beach or…in a sauna or something, y’know, then swimsuits don’t actually make a whole lot of sense. But I’m not going to just strip off around you in your bathroom, that’d just be…”

She tailed off in search of the right word, and Sean nodded his understanding. “Well…yeah. You’ve got Adam.”

Her mood deflated instantly, like it had so many times in the preceding week. Where Adam hadn’t noticed, however, Sean did. “…what happened?”

Ava didn’t answer at first, she just wrapped her hair up in a towel turban and dried her arms and legs off, wondering how to answer.

”…Sometimes…sometimes I feel like I’m…” She exhaled and tried again. “Adam’s got this mission of his. And, you know what? It’s a good one. He wants to save people, stop anything like the San Diego blast from happening again. I’m…He’s my fucking hero, Sean. And I’m, like…Lois Lane.”

“So…?”

“So…” she sighed. “…Sometimes I feel like he doesn’t love me.”

“Well-”

“No, I know he does love me. I know that. It’s just…he never…He doesn’t…” She trailed off helplessly. “You know?”

Sean blinked a bit, looked down, then hugged her, hard.

It wasn’t a big strong Adam bear-hug like she’d grown used to. It was the hug she needed, a caring one full of real concern and upset for her. She didn’t second-guess herself—she just returned it, and they just stood there for a while, rocking gently in the middle of the room.

“I uh…I have a new year’s resolution I was going to make.” Sean eventually told her, murmuring quietly in her ear.

“What’s that?”

“I…resolved that I was going to tell you about the huge crush I have on you.”

“Oh, Sean…” She let go and sat down again. “Don’t ask me to-”

“I’m not.” he interrupted. “We just needed that out in the open, because I think you need to hear some harsh truths and I don’t want you thinking I’m trying to…Look, the point is, you need some honesty right now, okay?”

”…Okay.”

He sat on the edge of the bathtub. “Your relationship with Adam is making you miserable, and it’s…it’s hard to see.” he said. “The moment he shows up he’s all you’ll even look at, every conversation seems to come back to him at some point, but every week there’s some new thing he’s done, or said, or not done or said, that’s making you feel neglected and, it’s not just me,” he waved his hand in the general direction of downstairs. “It breaks Charlotte’s heart, and Ben’s, it hurts all of us to see. We care about you, and it’s really hard to see you being hurt.”

Ava just nodded, staring at the ground between her feet.

“What are you getting out of him?” Sean asked.

Ava took a deep, thoughtful breath, and didn’t answer for a long while.

“Did…I ever tell you about Sara?” she asked.

“I know she was your friend.” Sean replied. “And you…witnessed her…”

“She was fourteen when she died.” Ava’s voice was quiet, and sad. She screwed her eyes shut, wiped a tear out of the way and composed herself. “She was so sweet, and so…she had wisdom I didn’t have, about how to be comfortable in your own skin and…and how to enjoy life in the moment. And she died because she didn’t understand something that Adam and I both learned from what happened to home.”

“Which is?”

She shrugged. “God isn’t there to hold your hand. He’s not there to…to bail you out of a tough spot or send a guardian angel or any of that stupid Facebook frilly frou-frou bullshit. Okay? He’s fair like that. Young, old, innocent or a fucking monster, he treats everyone exactly the same, because this life…how could we learn anything, how could we become better souls if He just coddled us all the time?”

“I don’t believe in-”

“I know you don’t, I’m making a point here.” Ava snapped. “God, the universe whatever. The point is, the only way shit like what happened to Sara is going to never happen again is if we take charge, if we go out there and make the world better.”

She gestured to her camera, placed safely at the far end of the room from the shower. “That’s why I’m studying journalism, and that’s why Adam’s in the SOR. Because we’ve been jerked around, we have lost people, and if there’s no guardian angel coming, then we have to become guardian angels.”

Sean nodded uncertainly. “But why do you have to put yourself through this?” he asked.

“Because I’m Adam’s angel. Because I really believe he couldn’t do this without me. H-he takes me for granted because he knows I’ve got his back come what may.”

“Even if it makes you miserable.”

“Haven’t you been listening?” Ava surged to her feet. “I don’t CARE if it makes me miserable. It’s all for something bigger than any of us. It’s all for, for them! For everybody!” she flailed an arm at the wall, gesturing towards the whole galaxy and every living thing within it.

“Sounds like you didn’t listen to Sara.” Sean said. Ava paused, so he fired the second barrel. “You’ll do more good for everyone—Adam included—if you’re happy in yourself, Ava.”

She opened her mouth, then shut it again and frowned, fidgeting anxiously with her hands as if by moving them at random she might suddenly come up with an answer to that.

Sean’s chin and the corners of his mouth twitched upwards sadly. “I’ll let you get changed.” he said.

Ava smiled weakly at him and managed to croak out a reply. “Sure.”

He left her to her thoughts, retreating from the room without further comment.

Five minutes later she went downstairs wearing her favourite of Adam’s old t-shirts, which was now far too small for him…but she sat next to Sean, set aside the questions he’d raised, and tried to enjoy herself.

Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 4—The Fourth Year

Date Point: 8y 1m AV

Huntsville Alabama, USA, Earth

Major Owen Powell

“Arright, SOR OPLAN session five. Before we get started, does anybody have any insight or new thoughts that they’d like to add to our existing OPLANs?”

The lads shook their heads. Planning sessions were a moment for Powell to pick his men’s brains, and he relished them. The lads knew their own capabilities best, and they were all intelligent men. If they didn’t have any concerns to raise after last week, then that was good.

“Right.” Powell checked his notes. OPLAN sessions were also a relaxed affair—the were done round a table, more-or-less as equals. Another reason to enjoy them. “So today we’re planning for a Cameron White scenario.”

“A who what now?” Akiyama asked.

Powell clicked the control for the slideshow he’d prepared. “This evil fooker. Cameron White, serial killer, sadist and generally charming bloke. Corti abducted him right out of the prison yard during an exercise break. Sparked quite the fookin’ manhunt and an inquiry…nothing came of ‘em of course because at the time nobody knew we needed to be thinking about alien abductions.”

A list of White’s crimes filled the whole slide, and the two after it. “Dead, nowadays, but not before he terrorized the orbital shipyards at Irbzrk and killed dozens of ETs. Obviously, we can’t allow scenarios like this in the future, if for no other reason than it makes the rest of us look bad.”

The lads nodded. “So, the scenario is: a psychotic human is loose on a space station, killing ETs. We can assume that by the time we go in, Intel have figured out who they are, what they look like, et cetera. Our job will be to preferably capture him. Subdue if possible, kill if necessary, avoid or minimize nonhuman casualties. “

“Fast and hard’s our best bet, then.” Price suggested.

Vandenberg nodded. “I’m inclined to agree. Longer we delay in that situation, the more time our ‘Mr. White’ has to do his thing.”

“Aye,” Powell agreed “but my concern there’s that if we’ve got a corridor full of lots of panicking ETs, so our Aggressor’s going to have his work cut out for him getting down it at speed without splattering them.”

“Guess you’ve never played Rugby, sir.” Legsy commented.

“How so?”

“Running forward really fast and dodging everything’s a Winger’s job.”

“That was your job, was it?”

“Nope, I was a Lock.”

“Or in football, that job would go to a Wide Receiver or a Tight End.” Blaczynski added. “I used to play Tight End for my school team.”

The four Brits—even Powell—gave him an amused look. “We don’t wish to know about your tight end, Starfall.” the major deadpanned.

Blaczynski just rolled his eyes at the chuckle that shimmered round the table, though he joined in. “Understood, sir. Point is, I used to do something like that all the time, so it should be do-able. Might be something we should factor into training.”

“Aye, good shout.” Powell made a note. “So the spearhead is an Aggressor who’s trained on agility in motion…Burgess, figure out how we can fit that training into the routine.”

“Yes sir.”

“I’m going to say we want at least two spearheads, hit our Mr. White from multiple directions, preferably three.” Powell added.

“What’s everyone else do while the spearhead’s charging in?” Firth asked, as BASEBALL nodded and scribbled out some changes to the training regime.

“Minimising ET loss of life and limb.” Stevenson replied.

“Right.” Powell nodded. “That’s the Defenders job—get in the way, screen them from harm, and distract Mr. White so the Aggressors can get up on him. Engineer some cover and clear the exits. Protectors meanwhile will be clearing the civilians out, tending to any wounded. All of that should be covered by your existing training and jobs.”

“Engineering cover would go quick and smooth if we could get our hands on some of those Gaoian shield stick things, sir.” Akiyama said.

“I reckon we can do better.” Sikes commented. “Them things’re small and light enough for ETs. I reckon we could rig up a deployable shield generator of our own.”

“Heck, get me the emitter and capacitors, I could build one, sure.” Akiyama agreed. “I’ve got the rest of what I need on my bench in the workshop.”

“Who’s going to carry it?” Vandenberg asked.

“Humpin’ stuff’s usually WARHORSE’s job.” Sikes drawled.

Adam looked up—he’d been looking through the training plan Burgess was writing, rather than at it. “Hmm?”

Powell frowned at him. “You paying attention, Arés?”

“Uh, yes sir. Humping the shield generator.” Adam sat up. “So, who’s carrying the big stretcher for the Guvnurag patients?”

“Ah, yeah. We’re gonna need that, aren’t we?” Sikes rubbed his jaw. “Burgess?”

BASEBALL didn’t look up. “Sure. Who’s carrying the stasis bags?”

Akiyama chuckled. “You want it so much, looks like you’re carrying it yourself, Calvin.” he said, using Sikes’ first name.

Powell jotted another note. “Right. We’ll break it up for a few minutes. You lot go get some light PT in, restore your focus and we’ll keep planning the scenario after. Akiyama, draw me up a plan for this shield generator.”

There was a muttered circle of ‘yes sir’ and everyone stood to go. As they did so, Legsy caught Powell’s eye and aimed a small nod towards Arés, asking an unspoken question.

There was a subtlety to military etiquette in such situations. Being the CO carried weight, and the more he applied that weight the more heavily it bore down on the men lower on the chain, so Powell just feigned disinterest and turned his attention to his paperwork, not wanting to step in where he wasn’t needed. They had both noticed the problem, and he’d worked with Legsy long enough to know that the matter would be dealt with competently.

He paid oblique attention though, as Legsy tapped Arés on the shoulder on their way out, and their ensuing conversation was perfectly audible through the door.

“Looked like your attention was flagging there, mate.” he heard.

”…Yeah, sorry. Just…“

“Just nothing, mate.” Legsy replied. “We need to stay on top of it when we’re off our game, and that means you stay on top of it too. Understand? I know you just saw Ava again, you miss her, but you gotta deal with it at the proper time, aye? Not on the old man’s.”

“Yeah. You’re right. Sorry.”

“Come on, let’s get that PT done.”

Powell nodded a little satisfied smile and sat back, allowing himself the luxury of putting his boots up on the table.

It was mildly worrying that Arés had showed any kind of distraction like that. The lad was usually so dependable that he might as well have been nicknamed “workhorse”, but then again romantic troubles could throw anybody off.

Legsy had handled him well, though, and would doubtless continue to do so. There was no real cause for concern from a professional point of view.

From a personal one…

Date Point: 8y 2m AV

London, England, Earth

Sean Harvey

It was Ava’s turn.

“Okay, so the black card is…” she drew one and read it. “’My hobby: Introducing unsuspecting aliens to the joys of’ blank.”

The table rattled as three white cards were slammed down on it, and Ben cursed. According to one of Sean’s house rules, whoever got their card down last had to take a drink.

Given that they’d now been playing for more than an hour, all four of them were pretty well drunk by now. Ben sipped his beer while Ava shuffled the white cards they’d played.

“Okay, so, my hobby is…Introducing unsuspecting aliens to the joys of…a big black dick!”

Charlotte giggled. She was probably the drunkest, and her poker face wasn’t exactly impenetrable at the best of times.

“Introducing aliens to the joys of…Fatal sex adventures!”

Everyone cringed aloud, giving little outraged laughs.

“And introducing aliens to the joys of…The clitoris!” She put the last card down. “What is WITH you guys and sex cards?”

“Oh come on, you’re the one who played ‘fucking in zero gravity’ last round!” Ben told her.”

“Come on, choose.”

Ava laughed and swigged her drink. “Well I mean, hey, how can I pass up the joys of the clitoris?”

Ben cheered and raised his hand, but Charlotte giggled again as the black card was handed to him.

“Darling, I never knew you went that way!” she exclaimed, pantomiming shock.

“Oh, the truth is out…” Ava turned in her seat and looked Charlotte in the eyes with a barely-restrained laugh threatening to burst out of her. “It’s true, I’m a raging dyke for you my love.”

Shaking with mirth, Charlotte reached over and put a delicate hand on her cheek. “All this time, we’ve been denying the obvious…”

Ava reached up and took Charlotte’s hand in her own, affecting a mournful of expression. “We can’t, darling. What if your boyfriend finds out? He’d never approve.”

Ben put his hand up. “Uh, yes he would!”

“No, no, if we’re doing that then to keep it fair you’d have to make out with Sean.” Charlotte said.

“Oi, I’m a twenty-first century man, I’m cool with that.” Sean shrugged.

“Yeah? Dare you.” Ava said.

“I thought we were playing Cards Against Humanity, not Truth or Dare!”

“Chicken!”

“Right, that fucking does it. Come on, Ben.”

Ben glanced sideways at his girlfriend, who just grinned at him. “Go on!”

“What’s in it for us?!” Ben demanded.

Charlotte just waggled her eyebrows across the table. “Ava?”

Ava hesitated, and Sean was just about to turn the idea down when she surprised all of them by nodding.

“Uh…o-okay. Sure!”

To Sean, that sounded like alcohol-fuelled bravado rather than actual enthusiasm. “You sure?” he asked.

He should have known better. Ava gave him her best glare, and he could see her summon her determination. “Are you?”

“Hah!” Sean rolled his eyes, then, to Ben: “Come on then, mate.”

Ben laughed rigidly, then steeled himself, downed the last of his beer, and shuffled round the table. There was an awkward moment of hesitation, and then they just went for it.

Sean had never kissed a dude before but had been idly curious about it for a while. Actually doing it turned out to be…just a kiss. There was a little bit of scratchy stubble involved, but lips were lips. No tongue involved, no big deal in the end. One to scratch off his list of life experiences.

Charlotte had clearly enjoyed it, and fanned herself with her hand. “Whew!”

Ava nodded, having gone decidedly red around the nose and cheeks herself, then shot a nervous glance at Charlotte. “So, uh…”

“Our turn!” Charlotte seemed happy about it at least.

“And keep it fair.” Ben added, having surreptitiously wiped his mouth. “You owe us the same as you got.”

Ava nodded. She looked Charlotte in the eye again, swigged her drink, laughed nervously, and then squeaked a little when Charlotte rolled her eyes and hauled Ava towards her by the front of her shirt.

A few aesthetically pleasing seconds later, Ava just made a stunned little “huh” noise as they parted.

Sean chuckled. “Not as big a deal as you thought it would be?”

“I…guess not.” Ava agreed, then cleared her throat. “Can we, uh…whose go is it?”

“Ben.”

Ben seemed to come to his senses a little. “Huh?”

“Your black card, mate.”

“Oh, uh…’In space, only two things are constant: Corti abductions and’ blank.”

Three white cards slapped the table, and this time Ava had to take a drink, which seemed to help her a bit.

They made it through another three black cards after that when only two white cards hit the table, and when they looked at Charlotte she turned out to have fallen asleep.

“Guess that’s game over then.” Ben commented. “We okay to stay here tonight, Sean?”

“Sure, spare bed’s made.”

“Cheers.” Ben gently extracted Charlotte from behind the table and helped her towards the stairs. She made sleepy little protest noises the whole way.

“Who won?” Ava asked.

“You did.” Sean grinned at her. “Turns out our innocent country girl’s got the dirtiest mind of all of us.”

She laughed, and stretched. “Am I okay to stay here tonight too?”

“Sure, if you don’t mind the couch.”

“Thanks…” She stood up, leaned back with her hands on her hips and sighed at the ripple of little pops that shot up her spine, before sitting down on the couch with the rest of her drink in hand. She brushed some hair out of her face and stared at the wall opposite, thoughtfully.

Sean sat beside her and studied her expression for a second. She didn’t seem to notice.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I just…” her frown didn’t vanish, but she made eye contact. “Was that weird?”

“Just a bit of harmless fun.” Sean reassured her. “I dunno, a kiss is just a kiss. I didn’t think it was that big a deal.”

He chuckled “Besides, what was that you said at New Years about fucking nudity not being a big deal? Something like ‘A body is just a body’?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, I guess you’re right.” she conceded, and tucked her feet up underneath herself, resting an arm on the back of the couch so she could comfortably face towards him a little bit. “So, what, you remember that whole conversation?”

“Kind of hard not to. You were kind of naked at the time.”

Ava scoffed. “No more than I am right now!”

“You weren’t wearing clothes, though.”

“Yeah, but you couldn’t see anything. Hell, you could see less than you can see right now.” she gestured to her chest, and the little bit of décolletage that she had on show.

“I guess, but…” Sean thought about how to phrase his thoughts.

“But what?”

“I could have…you were only behind the curtain.”

“So?”

“So, what if I’d, I dunno, pulled the curtain aside?”

Ava adjusted her posture a bit, turning to face him even more. “You wouldn’t, though.”

“Well…no. You’re right, I wouldn’t.” Sean agreed.

“Why not?”

“Wh- well, I…” he thought about it some more, sipping his beer to cover the delay. “I guess…well, it’d be…Well, for the same reason I’m not going to just try and rip your clothes off you right now.”

“Exactly!” Ava said. “If you’d done something like that I’d have punched you in the face, left the house, and you’d have lost me as a friend, and probably Charlotte and Ben, too.”

Sean finished his beer and resolved that it was his last—the whole world was more than a little fuzzy and swirly, and even in his drink-addled condition he knew that if he had one more it’d be too many and result in vomit. Besides he felt certain there was some kind of a valid counterargument to what Ava was saying, but it was impossible to think what that might be, past the drunk. “But the shower curtain thing would have been easier.” he ventured.

“Yeah, but it’s not about what’s easy, is it?” Ava swigged the last of her own drink. “It’s about that that’d be wrong. And…I like you Sean, and I trust you. I’m trusting you right now, just by being here with you.”

“I guess I never thought of it that way.” Sean admitted.

“Girls have to think of it that way.” Ava shrugged. “I mean, I’m lucky, I’m fitter than you are, and maybe a bit stronger even, so I’ve got that to back me up. But everything’s, like…you have to try and judge how safe you are.”

“So you trust me enough to take a shower while I’m in the room.”

“Yeah! You’re a good guy, and like I said: I like you. I hadn’t seen you for a couple of weeks, I wanted to catch up.”

“Well…fair enough.” Sean gave up on his search for a counter-argument, and instead raised his empty bottle. “To being comfortable.”

“Damn right!” She tapped her own bottle to his, then leaned shakily forward to set it down on his coffee table with the exaggerated care of the thoroughly intoxicated.

As she did so, the thought crept into Sean’s inebriated brain that maybe he’d said the wrong thing there. “I’ve not…hurt that trust, have I?”

“Hurt how?”

“By thinking of the curtain thing.”

She shook her head. “No, you’re…asking what the rules are, right?” When he nodded, she nodded too. “Well that’s fine. It shows you, like, respect boundaries and stuff. That you respect me. ¿Tú entiendes?”

Sean nodded, and they sat in silence for a bit.

Maybe it was the booze doing the thinking, but he had a few questions he’d been itching to answer for a while, and now seemed like as good an opportunity as any to ask them.

“So…Let’s say we went swimming…” he said.

“Yeah?”

“In a lake or something.”

“Sure?”

“You’re telling me that’d be less of a problem for you than, say, kissing Charlotte?”

“Well…” Ava fidgeted. “I shouldn’t have done that. I mean, I know it wasn’t… anything… but I…I don’t know.” She rubbed her face and got some hair out of the way. “It’s like…if you’re swimming then really a swimsuit is just, like, this nasty lump of wet cloth you have to take home with you when you’re done. And it turns out they’re pretty nasty bacteria traps, too. And, you know, people take their clothes off for showers and baths all the time, or, or the doctor or something, so…You know?”

“Know what?”

“Like, that’s what a kiss is for is…it’s for love, or sex. Nudity doesn’t have to be.”

“Erotic.”

“Right. Erotic. Kisses are automatically erotic. Nudity isn’t.”

“You feeling guilty about that, then?”

“I’m feeling like I should feel guilty.” Ava sighed. “I don’t know. I had fun tonight! Going outside my comfort zone a bit, it’s…thrilling, you know? And it really was just fun and nothing else, so, maybe I’m over-thinking it.”

“Maybe.” Sean agreed.

“Yeah, I think I am.” Ava said. “I mean…it’s not like I kissed you.”

Sean paused, his mind suddenly splitting into three parts. One was imagining exactly that scenario and desperately trying to figure out how to make it happen. Another was wondering exactly what she’d meant by that, and the third was detachedly watching the panic in the other two and the way his pulse had kicked up a notch.

“True…” he agreed, cautiously.

Ava was blushing. “I didn’t mean it like-” she began. “I mean…I just know how you feel about me.”

“Yeah but that’s…that’s out there. We’ve established those boundaries…haven’t we?”

“Right. We’re good.” Ava nodded. “I’m comfortable with that.”

“You’re comfortable with knowing I-”

She interrupted him. “Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

She laughed a little nervously, then cleared her throat and unnecessarily tidied some hair away again. “…I do too.”

”…Av-.”

“We’d, we’d, uh. We’d better go to sleep.”

“No, come on, you can’t just drop that one on me and expect-”

“Sean.” She cut him off. After he just stared at her patiently for a few seconds, she sighed. “Okay, you want more? Fine. If I was single, we’d have hooked up months ago. Okay? But I’m not.”

“So why even tell me?”

“Because I’m drunk and that was probably a bad idea.” She unfolded her legs and stood up. “Just…forget I said it.”

“Right.” Sean drew the word out. “Got to save the world by making yourself miserable.”

”…Did you mean to sound so bitter just then?”

“Well how am I supposed to sound?!” He demanded. “The girl I’m crazy about just told me she’s into me too, but she’s still loyal to the guy she never sees? How am I supposed to not be bitter about that?”

“Because it’s not so simple as ‘I never see him’!” Ava retorted. “Even if I DIDN’T have all those letters telling me how much the thought of me keeps him going, we went through…everything together! I’m not just going to throw that away!”

“I know, I know…” Sean sighed. “You’re not a quitter. That’s one of the things I like about you.”

“But you’re still asking me to-”

“No!” Sean stood up this time. “Where have I even ONCE suggested in this conversation you should quit on him? That’s your choice!”

“So you’re saying I should choose?”

“I…” Sean sagged, and sat down again. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I just want you to be happy, that’s all.”

Ava blinked at him, then leaned over and gave him a hug. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too. I don’t want things to be complicated here.” he said. “It just…I care about you.”

“I know. And…You know.”

“Yeah.”

She gave him a squeeze again then sat back. “We should sleep.”

Sean nodded, stood and opened the big sea chest that had once been his great-grandfather’s, which lived in the bay window and was where he kept the blankets and pillows for anyone sleeping on the couch.

“You gonna be okay?”

“If I’m lucky, I won’t remember making a fool of myself in the morning.” she said, laughing a little desperately.

“You didn’t.” He promised her. “Who knows, maybe clearing the air like that’ll help us…figure things out. You know?”

”…Maybe.”

He handed her the blankets. “G’night, Ava.”

”‘Night.”

He nodded, turned off the light for her, trudged upstairs, and threw himself onto the bed where he lay and stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets that his grandfather had stuck to the ceiling to turn it into a little boy’s bedroom.

When he woke in the morning, it came as a surprise to him that he’d managed to fall asleep at all.

Date point: 8y 4m AV

Huntsville Alabama, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

Tuesdays were acclimation days. On paper, they looked like the easiest day on the schedule—the SOR had a little light PT first thing in the morning to limber them up and wake them, then breakfast, and then…nothing. A day full of “free self-improvement” time, where they were encouraged to pursue whatever creative or educational pursuits they liked.

Rebar spent it playing around in the workshop, making little metal sculptures or structures. Sikes was always nearby, working on his “pets”, a small flotilla of drones of various sizes, from the little buzzy one the size of a quarter right up to “Dronezilla” which he’d originally assembled from scratch using four electric chainsaw motors but which nowadays flew under the unreliable power of four temperamental home-made kinetic thrusters, the tuning and troubleshooting of which seemed to give him no end of fun.

BASEBALL read trauma journals and medical textbooks, working towards a full nursing qualification. Legsy, Murray and Price had all taken to collecting little miniature fantasy armies and painting them, practising their fine dexterity by competing to see who could paint theirs most realistically.

Adam…sewed.

He had figured out early on that the Odyssean gains he was going to make in terms of muscle during his training would, sooner or later, make it hard to find clothing that would fit. And, seeing as he’d learnt to sew in his medic training, it had only made sense to him to translate those skills into modifying his clothes so that he wouldn’t have to wear huge douchebaggy wifebeaters and shorts day in day out.

He would have cut a comical sight anyway, he knew. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was getting legitimately huge nowadays, and the sight of somebody so big sewing would have been odd anyway.

The fact that he was doing it while wearing a twenty million dollar armoured spacesuit just completed the picture.

That was acclimation day: light self-improvement activities while wearing the spacesuit. On the face of it, simple. In practice, merely wearing the suit was exhausting, and acclimation days were about the hardest thing on the schedule. They had to wear EV-MASS for twelve hours straight and try to behave otherwise normally.

Whether they were eating, reading, welding, painting little miniatures or operating a sewing machine, they had to do it ALL while wearing a pressure suit that was designed to use mechanical counterpressure rather than atmosphere to guard them from decompression.

The first few times had been agonising. Nowadays, they were merely tiring, and the worst part was boredom. After years of consuming and burning per day more calories than most people went through in a week, just sitting around was torturous. Every so often, one of the guys HAD to get up and do something physical for a bit.

The result was usually wrestling, or a race round the building, or a “who can throw the medicine ball further” competition, or just beating the shit out of a punching bag. They didn’t last long. With the suit on, such bursts of activity were concentrated and rapidly burned off the pent-up energies, driving them back to their gentler pursuits.

The impressive part was how well Major Powell had adjusted. He almost looked the most comfortable of all of them, though how much of that was an act so as to project the appearance of invulnerability was a subject of constant barracks speculation. Certainly, he strolled around in the suit, rather than thumping gracelessly about like most of the rest of the Operators did, which all by itself suggested that his apparent ease with EV-MASS was more than just acting.

He’d told them to stop leaping to attention when he entered the dormitory, though. Merely standing was sufficient, which they all did the second the door opened and he sauntered in.

He nodded around at them. “Afternoon lads. Fall in.”

Everyone did so, each wondering what the break from routine was about.

“So, I’ve got some news.” Powell told them. “You might like this, Arés – HMS Sharman on Cimbrean has just been selected as the permanent home of the SOR.”

Adam grinned and made a little “success” fist-pull.

“Now for the other half.” Powell continued. “We’ve got a C5 coming down from Maine to take us up to Scotch Creek. It’s scheduled to fly day after tomorrow, and we need every scrap of our equipment, gear and personal effects packed up and ready to load onto that thing as soon as it’s on the tarmac. Acclimation day is therefore cancelled immediately. We’re all getting out of these suits right now and returning them for cleaning and transport. You lot are the strongest here, so PT for the next couple of days is going to consist of doing all the heavy lifting.”

Everyone nodded their understanding—it made sense, there was no point in missing valuable training time during the move when the move itself could pull double-duty.

“Go on.”

The team hustled out, Adam among them.

“While I’m really happy to be heading back there, sir, why Cimbrean?” he asked.

“Funny thing about Cimbrean.” Powell told him. “You know we’ve actually got better strategic control over that system than we do over Sol?”

“We do?”

“Aye. ‘We’ meaning the Treaty nations, for a start. Cimbrean’s…legally it’s still a bit dodgy where the colony sits, if it’s its own nation or a British colony, or an Overseas Territory or whatever…but it’s definitely allied. No Russians, no Chinese or what-have-you, no other humans trying to fly in our sky. It’s either ours, or it’s alien.”

“Second,” he added. “Less hidin’ places. Sol’s packed full of fookin’ nooks and crannies. Asteroids, Saturn’s rings, more fookin’ moons than we could count if I ordered every man here to go barefoot. We don’t know what’s lurkin’ around our own home system. Hell, you know the Dominion had a research station around Saturn for years wi’out us noticing?”

“Cimbrean’s more open?”

“Aye. No asteroid belt. One gas giant, and a bloody gigantic one at that, but it’s only got the five moons and no ring. And the other planets are all…they’re not exactly your holiday resort destination. No way to build a listening post there without us noticing.”

Adam held the door for him as they entered the suit maintenance building. “Then there’s the citizens.” Powell continued. “Nobody works on Cimbrean who has any implants in their brain. We’ve got total control over who gets onto that planet—everyone’s accounted for, and everyone’s clean. Zero Hierarchy, guaranteed, and so long as the system shield’s up—and we have no reason to drop it—none are getting down there either.”

“Plus, Cimbrean’s where the ships are.” Legsy commented.

“True, aye.” Powell shrugged. “But that’s politics and OPSEC more’n anything else. Their reaction time to Earth orbit is pretty much the same as for Cimbrean, so they’re posted at Cimbrean A: because it keeps the Russians and China happy, and B: because our intelligence is more secure there.”

Doyle and Hargreaves were waiting at Adam’s station with The Hose.

The Hose was always capitalized, because The Hose was Important. Its job was to pump ice-cold water through the EV-MASS undersuit, cooling the wearer to the point that the heat-activated inner layer of the Midsuit stopped squeezing and the suit could be removed. A few months of experiments with alcohol and antifreeze had allowed them to actually pump in water that was below zero Celcius, securing a fairly quick release.

From the perspective of the suit’s wearer, this was initially a blessing. The water in the suit’s system was invariably lukewarm, burdened as it was with transporting the body heat of a big, muscular, active man. The cold water felt, at first, only pleasantly cool. Then it got cold. Then freezing. The worst part was when it got into the plumbing around the groin, though by that point the operator was invariably shivering and hissing through his teeth anyway.

All things considered, removing the EV-MASS managed the wonderful trick of being even less fun than squeezing into it, and was the reason why the suiting-up room had a rack of hot showers on standby. Staff Sergeant Lazarenko had installed a clothes dryer for good measure, in which the towels were kept hot until ready for use; an act that had earned him the immediate and undying gratitude of all the Operators and a “bloody good thinking, that man” from Powell.

“Speaking of the ships.” the Major continued, probably so as to distract himself from the chill, “We’ve got ourselves a ride to go with the new digs. After the freighter rescue, the Admiralty decided that HMS Caledonia and HMS Myrmidon needed refitting and that those fancy ET-tech cloaking devices of theirs could be put to better use.”

“So, they’re our ride now?” Firth asked.

“Caledonia is.” Powell gritted his teeth as the water really started to get cold, and forged ahead. “They converted those big flight decks of hers—sealed one of them up entirely, compartmentalized it, now it’s a hospital, good for humans and aliens. The other deck’s for us lot to use as a forward operating base.”

“And Myrmidon?” Adam asked.

“Her flight decks have been completely sealed up and filled with capacitor banks.” Powell said. “The idea is for her to serve as a flying battery for the Type Twos, give ‘em…” Adam knew exactly why he hesitated. The cold was biting now, they were nearly at suits off. “some…actual staying power: Rather than having to jump out every few minutes to recharge off a nearby star, now Myrmidon can, uh…” he swallowed, and shivered. “Waaurrr. Can, uh, can keep ‘em topped up.”

“Suit off, Major.” Powell’s lead tech said. Powell nodded and fumbled at the touchscreen mounted on the inside of his wrist, entering the suit release code with shaking fingers.

“Suit off, WARHORSE.” Hargreaves echoed, and Adam nodded, glad to follow Powell’s example. He entered the code, the pelvic seal disengaged and he leant forward and thrust his arms over his head. Doyle reached up from behind to disconnect the hoses, then moved round to the front and wriggled his fingers down either side of Adam’s head to protect his ears. Hargreaves braced a foot on his desk and heaved, Adam pulled backwards, and in an instant of relief that was almost orgasmic, the suit’s torso popped off of him in a rush.

After that, getting out of the suit legs was easy. Adam had only to lie down—a yoga mat had been brought in for exactly that purpose, thrust his legs in the air, let the techs take his ankles, lift his butt off the floor and then point his toes as Doyle and Hargreaves hauled on the suit, which again slithered off him to his profound relief.

As Doyle muscled the two suit halves back into place on their rack, Hargreaves hooked up the waste water hose and activated the suction, draining the Undersuit’s water conduits in about twenty seconds, which Adam used to remove his neck brace, and that was it. The hard part was over.

The Undersuit, sadly, was single-use. It may have been by far the cheapest part of the whole rig, but it still felt kind of wrong to have to destroy something that cost as much as a television in order to get out of it, which he did with the help of the techs and their safety blades, which hooked over the suit’s material and sliced easily through it from the collar to the wrist, and then back up from wrist to armpit and then down to the waist.

Adam had salvaged some of the discarded undersuit fabric for what the guys constantly referred to as his ‘dressmaking’.

The rest of the disrobing process fell to Adam, who wasted no time in getting out of the constricting and freezing cold garment as quickly as he could.

He’d been amused at first how awkward some of the guys were over their resulting nudity. Sure, some of the techs were women, but in the SOR’s case the military’s innate pragmatism had won out over the military’s innate conservatism—the technicians needed to be, in academic and technical terms, every bit as highly trained and high-achieving as the operators themselves. That high bar to entry had forced them to take whoever was qualified without regard for gender.

As ever, the stress, uncertainty and review hearings had all turned out to be a waste of time: The enlisted personnel just got on with their jobs.

Besides the sheer joy and lightness of no longer being squeezed by upwards of a hundred pounds of spacesuit was too liberating for him to have cared, even if lake-swimming on Cimbrean hadn’t cured him of that particular obsolete taboo years ago. He was entirely unselfconscious nowadays, even if some of the others weren’t yet.

Doyle and Hargreaves returned his high-fives and then got on with cleaning and maintaining the suit as Adam hit the showers.

This bit was always luxury time. Not even Powell seemed to have the willpower to resist the hot water and warm towel, and in any case, it was probably good for the muscles to get some thorough massage and relaxation before moving on to anything else. None of the guys spoke as they soaked—they just basked, then dried off and padded one-by-one back through into the locker room to retrieve their working clothes.

“Right.” Powell said, as the last straggler—Stevenson, as always—was lacing up his boots. “You’ve got an hour to pack your personal effects, then Lunch, then we’re on to stowing all the gym equipment. I’ll see you there.”

The “yes sir” sounded enthusiastic and motivated, to Adam’s ears. He knew his own was.

After all: He was going home.

Sean Harvey

“Sean, I’m thinking of asking Charlotte to marry me, okay? I’m the wrong guy to ask on whether I think you should be encouraging Ava to break up with her fella.”

Sean could only shake his head vigorously. “That makes you perfect.” he countered. “You know what’s at stake.”

Ben exhaled at length through his nose, shaking his head. “I guess…” he paused to think, resting his thumb thoughtfully on the end of his nose before continuing.

”…Look, between you and me, I kind of hate this Adam bloke’s guts.” he confided. “I don’t know WHY she puts up with him, and I think it’s only a matter of time before he really hurts her.”

Sean nodded, listening.

“But…you know, this is Ava we’re talking about. She’s not stupid, man.” Ben shrugged. “You’ve said it yourself, you wish you had half her brain.”

“Yeah, but there’s a difference between smart and…smart isn’t there?” Sean pointed out.

“I’m just saying…maybe you should trust her to know what she’s about.”

Sean sipped his cup of tea. “Dude, if I asked her why she loves this Adam guy? I know exactly what she’d say.” he said, setting it down.

“What?”

“She’d bang on about how he’s ‘doing something amazing’ and how they ‘went through a lot together’ and… you know, all that stuff we’ve heard before, right?”

“Right…?”

“From what she’s told us…do you know ANYTHING about what this chap’s like as a person?”

Ben hesitated. “Well, he’s…She says he’s a nice guy, and that he’s…strong…” he suggested, lamely.

“Great. Nice. Wonderful! Is that all he is, do you think?”

“Well…no, there’s got to be more to him than that, hasn’t there?”

“If there is, she’s never breathed a word of it to me.” Sean shrugged. “I wonder if she even knows what he’s like any more?”

“Could be…I don’t know, does the military change people that much?”

“He went into it when they were seventeen, Ben. They were last really together—like, full-time together—when they were sixteen. Are you the same as you were back then?”

”…No, I guess I’m not.”

“Think he is?”

Ben didn’t answer until both their cups of tea were almost completely drained. “You know what?” he asked, finally. “I think you’re right. I think you need to go for it.”

“I’m shit-scared, Ben. She might never talk to me again.”

“You said you want her to be happy, though…?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, if she does that then I guess that’ll mean she IS happy, deep down. Won’t it?” Ben pointed out.

”…I’m still allowed to hate this Adam guy even if she does-” Sean paused. “Right?”

“Sean, you can be as envious of that son of a bitch as you want.” Ben patted him on the shoulder. “I’ve got your back.”

Sean nodded, and stood. Ben stood with him, and they parted ways on the doorstep as Sean locked up his house.

”…Wish me luck?” he requested, pocketing the keys.

Ben gave him a hug. “Go find out, man.”

Ava Rios

Ava’s phone moved half an inch across her desk with a buzz and announced: “Message from Sean.”

The message was very simple. It was a selfie of Sean standing outside her front door, holding up a plastic bag with some bottles in it.

She laughed a little, set her tablet aside and got up to let him in.

“I got beer for me, some kind of Bacardi fruit…thing for you.” he said, by way of a hello, and held up the Bacardi fruit…thing delicately between thumb and index finger, as if it was a soiled diaper or something similarly unpleasant.

“What’s the occasion?” Ava asked, smiling nervously as she took it. Things had been a little awkward between them for nearly a month now, made all the worse by the nagging part of her brain that really, really missed being able to feel relaxed around him being at war with the part of her brain that really, really got all distracted and excited in his company.

“It’s called ‘hanging out,’ duck, maybe you’ve heard of it?”

“I’m used to hanging out involving at least two more people.” She said, letting him into the kitchen and selecting a glass for her drink.

“This is true.” Sean conceded. “But Ben’s working on his dissertation and Charlotte lives here.”

“She’s working on her dissertation.” Ava told him. “And I’m working on mine. Actually, shouldn’t you be working on yours?”

“It’s not due for another two months!” he protested.

“Great. That means you only have to write, like, three hundred words a day. Knowing you, you’ve typed more words than that on Facebook so far today.”

“Well, if people will insist on being wrong on the Internet…” he smirked, and tapped their drinks together.

“Really though,” he added “Is there that much difference between three hundred words today and five hundred tomorrow?”

“But it’s never just five hundred words tomorrow, is it?” Ava pointed out. “It’s no words tomorrow either and seven hundred on Thursday. And then you might as well call it two thousand on the weekend, and before you know it you’ll be trying to write the whole thing at four in the morning the day it’s due. My way, I get it done two weeks early, no stress and I can improve it as I go.”

“So responsible.” he teased.

“Somebody has to be.” she retorted. “Besides, ‘responsible’ is the easy way. I like the easy way.”

“I suppose I can see why.” Sean mused, after sipping his beer again. “You’ve had it quite hard, after all”

Ava made an incredulous little laugh. “Only somebody as…as English as you could call it ‘quite hard.‘”

”…I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s fine. Yes, I’ve had it ‘quite hard.’ My home city was only blown up by aliens. My parents and school friends are only dead. I only witnessed my best friend’s murder. My boyfriend’s only gone away for years to become a space marine. I’ve definitely had it ‘quite hard,’ thank you for noticing!”

Sean was silent for a minute until she cooled off again, which took nearly a third of her glass. “And you’re still giving me advice on how to do my coursework properly.” he added.

“Somebody has to.” she repeated, though she offered him an apologetic little smile. “I’m sorry, I just…”

“No, I’m sorry.” Sean interrupted. He moved his chair a little closer to hers. “You’re right, I shouldn’t pretend like I know everything you’ve gone through.”

She paused, then smiled, a rare, real, sad smile with her walls down for just a few seconds. “Thanks, Sean.”

Sean toasted her with his beer again, then put it down abruptly and sat forward. “Hey, I know a joke you might like.” he said.

Ava paused in the middle of sipping her own drink. “Okay…?”

“So, a man goes to see the doctor, and he says ‘Doctor, I really need your help. I’ve been feeling so bleak and depressed lately, I don’t know what to do!” The doctor smiles and says. ‘I know just what you need. The Great Pagliacci is in town this week, the funniest clown who ever lived! Go see him, and you will see that everything is alright.’”

“A funny clown? Impossible.” Ava noted.

“Ahahaha.” Sean enunciated the dry laugh. “Anyway, the man just breaks down in tears right there in the office. ‘But doctor!’ he cries: ‘I AM the Great Pagliacci!’”

What Ava produced in reaction wasn’t really a laugh. It was too short, and the amusement behind it was the quiet humour of bitter recognition, but it seemed to please Sean nonetheless, who shuffled a little closer.

“That’s…not a great joke.” she said, unconsciously tucking a curl of hair behind her ear to look at him.

“I wasn’t telling it to be funny, duck.” Sean told her. “I’m making a point.”

“Right. You’re saying I need to look after myself, first?”

“Pretty much.”

“You’ve made that point before.”

“Yeah but…I thought, maybe I should follow my own advice.”

He kissed her.

Five perfect seconds later, when their lips parted, she was too stunned to do more than raise a few disjointed objections.

“We- Uh, m-maybe that…”

She got no further as Sean kissed her again, and it was another several seconds before she finally worked up the presence of mind to put two hands on his chest and shove him right off his chair, leaping to her feet and turning away, too confused by the cluster bomb of emotions that had hit her to even look at him.

Behind her, she heard Sean’s breathing slow. Very, very carefully, he picked himself up off the floor and straightened his clothing. “I’m sorry” he said. “I just…I needed to know, one way or the other.”

She turned to face him, hunched over her folded arms. “You should…Probably go.” she told him.

He did as she suggested, turning and shuffling out of the kitchen without a backwards glance and with his fists balled. Ava waited until she heard the front door close and lock behind him before allowing herself the luxury of collapsing back into her seat, gripping two fistfuls of her hair, and beating herself up.

Some minutes later, Charlotte poked her head round the door, rushed to her side, and provided a much-needed shoulder for her to soak.

Scott Air Force Base, St. Clair County, Illinois, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

Baby I know its your rest day today, call me when you can please xx

BASEBALL considered the text message for several seconds before offering his sage and experienced wisdom.

“Sounds serious, bro.”

“Yeah.” Adam nodded, and jerked his head toward the back of the plane. “I’ll be back there.”

They were on stopover at Scott AFB, after a full two days of loading every scrap of the SOR’s accumulated gear and personal effects onto the Galaxy. Huge as a C5’s lift and fuel capacities were, the gym gear alone accounted for several tonnes which, when coupled with the reinforced furniture, the armory, the lucky reinforced Gravball goal, not to mention the suits, protective and maintenance equipment for the suits, plus the techs and all THEIR stuff…

While a Galaxy had plenty of seating on the upper deck, the operators were all big enough to find the seats uncomfortably small, and they were prone to overheating anyway. Noisy as it was, the cargo deck was pleasantly cold, and so they’d set up a sort of nest in one of the few corners not completely given over to cargo, and were playing Texas Hold ‘em.

It had taken a whale-sized gulp of fuel just to get them aloft. Hence the stopover in Illinois and the hour of leisure time while the plane was checked, fuelled and took on a few items of cargo bound for HMS Sharman.

The hell with the cost of international calls. He could afford it, and she needed him.

…“Hello?”

He smiled. She sounded so cute when she was tired. “Ava? Did I wake you, babe?”

”…It’s three in the morning baby.” she griped, just a little. “I mean, I’m real glad to hear from you but why didn’t you call sooner?”

“I’m on a plane.” he explained. “We just landed in Illinois.”

“Oh…what are you doing on a plane in Illinois?”

“It’s refuelling. We’re on our way up to Scotch Creek.”

“Why are you–?” There was a sharp rustling of bedding on her end of the line. “Are you going back to Cimbrean?!”

“Yeah! The SOR’s going to be permanently posted there! Isn’t that cool?”

“Adam, when the hell were you planning on telling me this?!”

“First chance I got!” Adam said. “Which is now.”

“What about- what about your contract? What’s going on with that?” She asked, Adam frowned, wondering what was getting her so worked up.

“I re-enlisted. They offered us this amazing homesteading incentive seeing as Folctha’s going to be the SOR’s permanent home and, you know, it’s home, so–”

“Homesteading incentive?” Ava interrupted him.

“Yeah! It’s this big grant and maybe a low-interest loan for…you know, building a life out there. Buying a house or whatever. All they need from me is a few more years.”

”…How many years, Adam?”

“Uh…for the full grant, they want a career enlistment.”

“Which is…how long?”

“Uh…” he said sheepishly, “Well, I mean it’s…twenty years total commitment. But that includes–”

“TWENTY YEARS?!” Adam jerked the phone away from his ear and winced. He could still hear her anyway. “You re-enlisted for twenty years and you’re on a plane going back to Cimbrean where I won’t be able to call you or anything and you’re only telling me now?!”

“Baby,” he argued. “That includes what I’ve already done, so it’s only sixteen–”

There was a sharp sound and the line went dead. “Ava? Baby? Hello?”

Re-dialling sent him straight to her answerphone. He tried twice more just in case, then gave up and turned the phone off in disgust, and mooched back over to where the guys were lying around in one of the few clear spaces on the plane.

“You guys had a fight?” Stevenson asked.

“Yeah. Beats the fuck out of me why though.” Adam smashed down onto the deck, cross-legged. “I mean, Cimbrean’s home for us, I thought she’d be delighted!”

“Uh-huh.” Legsy muttered, in a noise that was equal parts agreement and scepticism. “And what did she actually want to talk to you about?”

Adam paused. “Well, uh…I mean, I, um…”

Every last one of his buddies pantomimed and voiced dismay. Legsy just pressed three fingers to his forehead and looked pained. “You fuckin’ tit.” he groaned.

Adam looked around at their reactions, then down at his knees. “…I really suck at this, huh?”

“Brother.” BASEBALL said, putting an arm round him. “She’s a goddamn saint for putting up with your stupid ass.”

‘Saint’ Ava had in fact thrown her phone at the wall hard enough to wreck it and was now patrolling furiously around the room, desperate to rant and scream and throw more things and sweep her possessions dramatically onto the floor, and she was only holding herself back because she didn’t want to wake Charlotte and Ben in the next room.

She settled for half an hour of angry tears as she spun snarling circles in the middle of the room, playing out sotto voce all of the vicious, hateful thoughts about Adam that she would have really, REALLY liked to say to his face.

She called him an idiot, a jackass, a fucking dickhead, an inconsiderate cocksucker, a selfish son of a fucking whore and worse. She described in vivid and scatological Spanish exactly what she would do with his guts once she’d finished extracting them, between bouts of sitting on her bed raking her scalp with her fingernails and wanting, wishing, NEEDING to punch him as hard as she possibly could right in his stupid sexy puppy-dog face.

In the end, she was so hoarse and exhausted from the outburst that she found herself waking up at a misty six am with no idea of where to go or what to do or who to talk to.

She sat up, blinked at the sad remains of her phone in the middle of the floor, and more out of hopelessness than anything else, held down the power button.

To her utter astonishment, smashed screen or not, it turned on and booted up. She nearly dismissed the three missed calls from Adam, but instead she sat and stared at them for nearly twenty minutes before finally arriving at a decision. One that was, she considered, perfectly reasonable, and entirely fair and balanced.

”…Fuck it.”

She stood, took a shower, brushed her teeth, put on her clothes, grabbed her keys and the damaged device, and left the room.

Sean Harvey

Sean’s phone rang five times before he swiped the green control to answer. Three of those rings were him staring at the name on screen.

He answered cautiously. “Hey.”

”…Hey.”

“I uh…I was worried I wouldn’t hear from you again. After…”

“That was…” Ava sighed down the phone. ”…We need to talk about it.”

“I’ll come over.”

“Or you could just let me in. It’s…kinda cold out here.”

He frowned, leaned over and twitched the curtain aside. Ava gave him a sheepish wave through the glass. She was hovering outside his front door, bobbing, fidgeting and pacing.

He let her in. “You could have just knocked…”

“Yeah.” she agreed, but shrugged. “Didn’t, though.”

“What happened to your phone?”

“Don’t ask.”

”…Cup of tea?”

She sighed a sort of laugh. “Sure.”

By the time the tea was made, she’d warmed up a bit on the couch, using the chocolate-brown throw for a blanket.

“So, uh…look, I’m sorry-” he began.

“No, I understand.” Ava told him. “In fact…I think you were right. I think we needed that question answered.”

Sean sat back, feeling his pulse raise a good notch. “Are you saying…What are you saying?”

Ava stood up and paced the room, still draped in the throw. “Look…You’re right. I don’t…I’ve been lonely as fuck for a long time, and I’m tired of being jerked around and taken for granted.” she told him. “And you…you make all of that better. I’m not lonely around you, and I know you don’t take me for granted.”

“But…?”

She sighed. “But for all the shit he puts me through, I really do love Adam with all my heart, and he’s really doing something amazing. Okay? And I know that part of what keeps him going is…well, me.”

Sean just listened to her.

“But at the same time…You’re right. I’ve got to live for myself a bit, don’t I? I’ve got to…to be happy and fulfilled myself or else…I know I’m just going to take it out on him one day. I can’t afford to resent him, and I don’t want to. But right now I do.”

“I think I get you.” Sean said.

“Do you?” she asked. It was neither skeptical nor a challenge, nor even a plea for him to say what she wanted to hear. Just an honest query.

It was Sean’s turn to stand up, and he put his hands on her upper arms, rubbing gently. “Ava…You know bloody well how I feel about you. I’m not asking for forever, I just…I want you to feel loved. That’s all. There’s room for more love in your life, isn’t there?”

She looked down, then away, then up at his face again. There were a tense few seconds of thoughtful silence.

“Ground rules.” she announced, at last.

“Okay…?”

“This is going to end. I can put an exact date on it, okay? After I’ve graduated, and I go back to CImbrean, that’s it. If you can’t live with that, then we don’t do this and I guess we both get friendzoned.”

“That’s rule one.” Sean nodded.

“Rule two…” She continued. “We enjoy it. As much as we can, for as long as we’ve got.”

“Rule three.” Sean told her, nodding. “This is about you.”

Ava hesitated “Sean, I-” she began.

“No, shut up. Look, I…fuck it, I love you. Bit early maybe to tell you that, but it’s been, what…three years, hasn’t it? Since we met.”

“But w-”

“Ava. This is about you. End of discussion, okay? What I want from us is for you to not feel lonely and neglected any more. That’s all, I promise.”

“Sean-”

“Just stop being the Great Pagliacci for once and let somebody do something for YOU, okay?! Let yourself be selfish fo-!”

She kissed him.

Several minutes later, hair and clothing thoroughly disrupted, they finally paused, breathing heavily. She gulped down a sigh, and settled her head onto his chest, wriggling down until they were a warm knot of limbs on the couch.

Sean just held her and played gently with her hair, until she fell asleep.

He knew how she felt. He hadn’t slept much last night either.

A few minutes after she fell asleep, he did as well.

Date point: 8y 4m AV

HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

John “BASEBALL” Burgess

“Hey.”

Adam had been in a bad way the whole trip. Several more calls to Ava’s phone once they had landed in Scotch Creek had gone to messages, and they’d just been able to hear him sounding despondent and desperate as he finally gave up and left her a voicemail, begging her to email him.

It was heart-wrenching. The Spaceborne Operators were brothers nowadays, closer than, but Adam—being the youngest on the team and the only one in a permanent relationship—definitely inspired the strongest brotherly instincts. He was usually the composed and calm one too, always happy to join in with the rough-housing and free-flowing loving insults, but never going overboard.

Seeing him so distressed had killed all of that.

But that had to stop now. The long journey was over now, and BASEBALL had to get his best friend back into soldier mode. “You okay?”

“I dunno man.” Adam swallowed. Hell, his eyes were red around the edge. “I think I really fucked up this time. I think I fucked up bad.”

“Brother, you didn’t do shit.” BASEBALL grabbed Adam’s bag from him. “The old man says we’re coming to Cimbrean, we’re coming to Cimbrean. Not your fault we’re here.”

“I know, but…she’s right, I shoulda told her sooner.”

“When? We found out about this three days ago, we’ve been loading our shit the whole time since. You told her first chance you got, man.”

Adam didn’t say anything, he just nodded helplessly.

“Come on.” BASEBALL slapped him on the back. “We got shit to unload and get stowed and then it’s the weekend. Get your mind off it, huh?”

”…Yeah.”

Hard work was always a good balm for a troubled mind, and nobody could work harder than Protectors. By the time all the pallets had been cleared out of the Jump Array and moved to their respective final destinations, by the time the Operators had been shown to their new barrack and had got their possessions tidied away, and by the time the SOR was finally ensconced and ready to get on with business, Adam had relaxed a little, even cracked a smile and a joke.

It wasn’t until they were squared away and he got a chance to sign into the barracks wifi that he finally truly settled, though, because there was an email waiting for him.

John read it over his shoulder, at Adam’s invitation—practically a request to have somebody holding his hand in case of the worst.

“I’m sorry baby. If that was your first chance to tell me then yeah, I shouldn’t have blown up like I did. I’m just really frustrated sometimes. I’ll try and find some way to keep on top of it. Love you – Ava.” he read.

Adam was sighing with relief. “She’s a saint, you’re right.”

Outwardly, John just nodded, and patted his buddy on the shoulder, leaving him to write his return.

Internally, however…

Legsy was reclining on the new couch, which was already groaning under the weight. They’d all but destroyed the last couch through piling onto it en masse for movie night, and roughhousing, and this one looked to be rather less sturdy—Vandenberg was already talking about welding together something more appropriate out of a material that was up to spec, like steel I-beam.

“How is ‘e?”

“Got an email. She said sorry for getting mad, says she’s gonna try to keep on top of it…” John vaulted the back of the couch to sit down and ignored the way it creaked as he landed.

“Don’t know if I buy that.” Legsy grunted.

“Well, I mean…” John shrugged. “She’s pretty fucking dedicated to him.”

“Too fuckin’ dedicated.” Legsy agreed. “I dunno mate, she can’t just go on writing off their fights and saying it’s fine, can she?”

“When does she graduate? Year and a half?”

“Somethin’ like that.” Legsy agreed. “You think she’s going to tough on through then have it out with ‘im once she’s back here?”

“I hope so.”

“Difficult, if she’s struggling now…”

“You know, if you two worry about WARHORSE’s love life too much, we’re gonna wind up with THREE guys off their game.” Vandenberg commented, joining them.

“He’ll be okay for now.” BASEBALL said. “He just got a making up email.”

“Good, ‘cause I know the old man’s noticed.” Rebar joined them on the couch, which was already about at its limit. Something cracked deep inside it and it sagged under their combined weight. None of them paid any attention.

”‘E’s not gonna weigh in unless Adam actually fucks up, though.” Legsy said. “Anyway, all we can do is keep him on task, let it all sort itself out, one way or another.”

“Yyyep.” BASEBALL shifted his seat a bit, and the couch finally gave up,—with a crackle of disintegrating wood, it tilted to one side and folded up like a house of cards.

There was a long silence. “…Base?”

“Yeah, Legs?”

“You got a medkit?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Something sharp’s stabbed into my bum.” Legsy informed them. “I think it’s a screw.”

“Sounds serious, Base.” Rebar said, hauling himself to his feet.

“Yeah, can’t have the NCOIC getting screwed in the ass.” John agreed, standing up himself. This earned a groan from the two older men, and a middle finger from Legsy. “Alright, I’ll patch up your butt.”

Vandenberg contemplated the wreckage. “Guess I’ll get started on some actual furniture…Hey, Sikes!”

Snapshot’s voice floated out of his room. “Yeah?”

“Gimme a hand willya? The couch just gave and screwed Legsy in the ass!”

”…What?” Sikes’ head poked round the corner, as did everyone else’s with varying expressions of confusion and delight.

“You big bastards broke it already?” Murray grinned.

“Yeah, that’s right, laugh at the man with a bit of metal stickin’ out of his bum.” Legsy grumbled, wincing as he gingerly lifted himself out of the couch wreckage with his hand pressed to his left buttock.

BASEBALL just chuckled and went to fetch his medkit, while the Defenders put their heads together on designing a new couch. He passed Adam on the way, who was leaning against his door, smirking.

“Y’aight?”

“Yup.”

He gave his friend a slap on the shoulder and carried on.

Whatever was going on with Ava, Adam at least was okay. That was all they could ask for.

Date Point: 8y 5m AV

London, England, Earth

Sean Harvey

Ava had once told Sean that she had learned early on in practicing her photography that rain didn’t show up well on camera. It could be the wettest, most miserable day ever, but all you actually got in the picture was a general sense of grey dampness. Rain in movies and on TV had to be hugely exaggerated to even show up.

Today, the rain would have shown up without the exaggeration.

Which meant that even at a dead run, the hundred yards or so between the bus stop and Sean’s house was more than enough time for every inch of them both to get comprehensively drenched. Sean’s shaking hands didn’t help matter, as he fumbled and dropped the keys, and by the time they’d managed to barge through the door and into the hallway they were both spitting water and shivering.

Other than that, it had been a successful date. They’d gone to a movie, eaten at Frankie and Benny’s, and had been strolling round the park when the first roll of thunder had driven them underground.

Sean was the first to speak. Or pant. “Jesus…CHRIST!”

“I hear ya. We shoulda got a cab” Ava clutched at her elbows and hugged over. She wasn’t out of breath, but she had never coped well with the cold. “Yuuuurgh.”

“Yeah.” Sean looked at her and made a calculation about size “I’ve got some dry clothes upstairs if you want. I’ll just shove everything in the tumble dryer.”

“You mean that thing works?”

“Course it does!” Sean said.

“You never use it.”

“Using the washing line’s just cheaper though, innit?”

He kicked off his shoes, stripped sodden socks onto the hallway tiles, and grumbled his way into kitchen. “Cup of tea?” he asked.

“God yes. Please.” Ava called through. A few seconds later she added “Man, everything’s wet.”

“Yeah, give me a minute and I’ll go get you something to wear while the kettle’s on.” Sean told her, filling it.

“It’s okay, I’ll find something!” she called, and he heard her trot upstairs.

“Hey, what about your clothes!?” he called.

“They’re by the door!”

Sean frowned and leaned back to look out into the hallway. Sure enough, there was a sad little pile of wet cloth slapped down on the tiles by the door, and it wasn’t just the outers. There was a bra and underwear in there too.

He blinked, coughed, and considered what that meant.

Probably nothing, he decided. Ava wasn’t the type to drop hints that subtle—she was more of the “lean against the door frame wearing goosebumps and a smile” school of thought when it came to the subtle game of seduction. That lumbering meathead Adam had forced her to be refreshingly direct.

She came back down a few minutes later with her hair wrapped in a towel and wearing one of his T-shirts, a pair of his board-shorts, and a black hoodie he’d picked up at Reading Festival years ago.

“You okay?”

“Warming up.” she replied, and took her mug of tea. “You’ve still not changed?”

“Well, if you’re okay with me wandering the house naked…”

“Why not? It’s your house.”

“Well, yeah, but-”

She leaned against the fridge. “But what?”

“Ah, never mind. It’s too cold round here. I’ma go get changed.”

“Sure.”

She’d set up on the couch and was wrapped up in a throw with the TV on by the time he came downstairs again. When he sat next to her, she just snuggled up and put her head on his hip.

He put his arm around her. “You okay?”

“Still cold.”

“I put the heating on for a blast.”

“Thanks.”

They sat in silence for a while, watching the news.

”–criticized by some civil activists in India, where eighty million people still lack access to clean drinking water. However India’s minister of water resources, Suresh Gadkari, was supportive of the idea.”

“The greatest obstacle still bedevilling our efforts at universal access to sanitation and safe drinking water continues to be population. The declining cost of energy has helped us reach more people and improve their access to basic hygiene, but the fact is that our population is still growing, putting ever more strain on our already-overworked natural resources. If however we can encourage people to emigrate to an alien world where the water resources can be properly managed from the start, then that will take off the pressure here on Earth and allow us, for the first time ever, to seriously talk about reaching one hundred percent access to clean water. I’m personally very excited.”

“India and China aren’t the only nations interested in emulating the example set by Folctha, however. The USA and Russia have both also expressed interest in founding colonies of their own, and EU ministers in Brussels have also been considering proposals for a colony, despite some outspoken opposition.”

“Humanity has already spread to one world and killed it. Millions of unique alien species, extinct because of just one person. Now, this era of the Earth’s geological history is already known as the “anthropocene” and it’s defined by a mass extinction event. Wherever we go, we kill things! And until we get that basic problem sorted out, then I don’t care HOW many new antibiotics or whatever we find on these alien worlds, we’ve got no business going out there!”

French EU minister Noémie Perrin said that although such concerns were well-founded, there were still grounds for optimism.

“Bien sûr, nous devons être prudents, mais…<Of course we need to be cautious, but I don’t think that we will learn anything if we remain stuck on one planet. Already, contact with alien life promises to end our dependence on fossil fuels and has–”

Ava shifted against him. “Hey, Sean?”

“Yeah?”

He looked left, and she kissed him.

It was a gentle kiss, accompanied by a happy sigh, and it lasted for a good few warm and comfortable seconds. Ava didn’t kiss him all that often, but when she did…!

When it was over, he gave her a little squeeze. “Mmm. That was nice. What was it for?”

“You just make me feel loved.”

“By sitting here and watching the news with you?”

“By holding me, wafer-thin.” she smiled, then pulled herself up, put a hand on the back of his head and kissed him again.

And again.

And a third time, just below his ear, a move which he answered by putting a thumb on her chin, gently pushing her to tilt her head up, and kissing her throat, then a little lower on her throat, and a little lower still…

She grabbed his hand, worrying him that he’d gone too far, but instead she guided it up onto her chest and…oh, yeah. She wasn’t wearing a bra, was she? He could feel something small and hard press against his palm, through the cloth. Fuck that cloth. He lowered his hand, unzipped the hoodie, grabbed the bottom of her t-shirt and pulled it up, awarding himself a mental medal at the noise she made when he put his lips and tongue to work on her nipple instead.

Her hands weren’t idle, either. They roamed his back, curled in his hair, hauled up on his own clothing until he finally had to pull back and let her pull his shirt off.

She made a little laugh, and he was still trying to figure out if it was a mocking sound or a happy one when one of those roaming hands traced down his centre-line, from his chest, to his tummy, to his belt buckle, then just a little lower where she stopped, and pressed down, stopping his breath for an instant.

They paused, both breathing heavily, and then there was a new expression in her eye, a witchy one that he’d never seen there before.

She leaned forward, and kissed his throat. Then his chest. Then a little lower…and a little lower…

And a little lower.

Date Point: 8y 6m AV

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches.

Major Rylee Jackson

“Jeez! Powell, you got pretty!”

The advantage to having been promoted at about the same time as the SOR’s commanding officer was that Rylee could still crack a joke like that on seeing him for the first time in years.

That said, it wasn’t truly a joke. The SOR’s Crue-D regime had clearly agreed with Powell who, in addition to packing on the muscle, had shed a few apparent years. Several of the deep stress lines in his face were smoothed out, his hairline had advanced back down into territory it had once abandoned, and his nose was transformed– the old crooked break was now fine, strong and straight.

“Fookin’ everybody’s sayin’ that nowadays.” He’d been working on some of the endless pile of paperwork that was any commander’s lot, and stood up to greet her. “I didn’t exactly sign up for the fountain of youth, mind.”

“Got any for me?”

“You don’t need it.”

Surprise caused Rylee to shift her weight onto her back foot, and her smile widened a notch. “My God, are you being charming too? That stuff really IS a miracle drug!”

He actually chuckled. “Good to see you, Jackson. Congratulations on the oak leaf.”

“Good to see you. Congratulations on the crown.”

Powell gestured to a seat, inviting her to sit. “Cup of tea? Coffee?”

“Coffee’d be nice, thankyou.” She settled onto the offered seat. “Straight black.”

Powell nodded, and hit the kettle’s switch.

“So you’re on a PR tour.” he said, rummaging through the cupboard beneath it to retrieve a sturdy cafetiere and a bag of decent-looking coffee. “The generals finally decided to shove you back into the limelight?”

“Eh, it’s a promotion fitness thing.” Rylee sighed. “Gotta keep climbing the ladder or else they kick you off it.”

“Yyyep.”

“And I’m the one who flew FTL first, so of course I get to dick around in front of the cameras for a few months rather than do something useful. You know they want me to do a fucking documentary?”

“Dreadful.” Powell deadpanned.

“End of the world!” Rylee rolled her eyes skywards, though she smiled. “Anyway, I figured if I took on a unit that’s currently all classified and stuff then by the time the footage is de-classified I won’t have to answer stupid questions about it.”

“Hence why you’ve come to us.”

“I’d take it as a favor.” she said, a little less animatedly.

“Aye, I don’t see why not.” Powell agreed, spooning a generous measure of coffee grounds into the cafetiere. “Never know when I might need some clout with your mob.”

“That’s the spirit!”

Powell returned to his desk as the water boiled. “You must have known you’d wind up in the public eye after flying Pandora, though.” He pointed out. “Why do it if you’re not comfortable with the fame?”

“Well there’s the funny thing. People are like ‘Rylee who?’ nowadays. A lot of folks have no idea who I am, y’know? I was thinking I’d be dodging paparazzi and the military would protect me, but it turns out the paparazzi don’t give a fuck because I’m always wearing the same clothes, and they can’t comment when I put on a pound or two ‘cause I’m not on the French Riviera in a bikini every weekend. They can’t make any money off me, so the actual vultures are Public Relations. How’s that for bullshit?”

“Thought you were up there with Armstrong and Gagarin?”

“How many people actually know those names, though?” Rylee asked. “I heard one time that only 40% of the American public recognized Neil Armstrong and…Hell, something like ten percent of Americans think the Apollo missions were faked!”

“Aye, I heard that one too. I have my doubts.” Powell shrugged. “People are interested in space again. When colonising an alien planet’s on the cards…”

“True. And things have changed fast.” Rylee agreed with him. “Hell, you know the total tonnage of private space vehicles launched into orbit now beats the combined lifetime tonnage of both NASA and the Russians? And most of that is Hephaestus, which spent less doing it than the Gemini program cost.”

“Which means that you’re probably better known than you think.” Powell shrugged. “They’d have to be pretty fookin’ stupid not to want to get the best out of you, wouldn’t they?”

The kettle clicked off and he stood to pour the coffee.

“I know, I know…” Rylee conceded. “I just like to bitch about it, you know? I’d rather be flying.”

“You know, you are allowed to enjoy other things besides flying.” Powell told her.

“You ever met a pilot who wanted to admit to that, though?”

He chuckled. “Nope.”

The cafetiere rattled when he set it down on his desk alongside two scuffed but sturdy mugs. “But I’d wager there are worse duties. You’ll like my lads, I promise you that.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Getting the interviews started already?”

“Hey, I’m going to take this job seriously.” She insisted. “I want to do them justice.”

Powell nodded as he filtered the coffee and poured it before answering.

“I have never worked with a unit that had a higher background rate of pranks, hijinks and general shenanigans.” He said, fondly. “They’re completely fookin’ nuts, the lot of ‘em, and I totally sympathize. We’re all eating well above our energy needs to try and get some reserves up, and all the PT in the world won’t cut it nowadays. Every man jack of us is a fizzing ball of energy in the morning, and a half-trashed wreck come bedtime. And yet, discipline is not a problem here—they’re all mature, sensible lads one an’ all. It’s just…bonkers in their dorm when they’re letting off steam. But never once has it crossed the line, and I’m quite confident it never will.”

“You make them sound like a puppy farm.” Rylee observed.

“They fookin’ are a puppy farm.” Powell laughed. “In fact, hell wi’ it, that’s what I’m calling their dorm from now on. ‘The Puppy Farm’. They’ll love it.”

Rylee laughed. “Okay, yeah. It sounds like I’m going to have fun with these guys.”

“Oh, you are: They’ll love you. Hope you’re ready to take part in a boatload of selfies.”

“Eh, I think I can put up with that.”

Powell sipped his drink. “I take it you’re going to want me in front of the camera too?”

“I’d take it as a favor.”

“A few ground rules then: I’d rather we used callsigns rather than actual names. These lads have family, friends, and we’re doin’ summat pretty extreme here with the Crue-D and the training. Fair?”

“Fair enough. What’s yours?”

Powell hesitated. “Um…STAINLESS.”

“Nice!”

“The lads gave it me. It’s a damnsight better than the one I used to have.”

“Which was?”

“I’d rather not say.” Powell scratched his nose awkwardly. “Just say it harked back to a stupider and, er…more racist time in my life and leave it at that.”

Rylee blinked at him. “You don’t seem racist.” she said.

“I’m not, now. Once upon a time, though…You wouldn’t have liked me, and for good fookin’ reason. I’d rather not say more than that.”

“Hey, I’m not interviewing you right now, Powell.”

“Yeah but…Look, I don’t have a lot of mates. I’m not about to alienate one of the few I’ve got by sharing exactly what I’d have thought when I was an idiot fookin’ kid, arright?”

“I think I can guess, anyway.” she commented, drily.

“Rylee…” Powell cleared his throat. “Look, if you’re gonna go with an angle for the SOR, the best one you can go with is self-improvement. We’re not just aiming for better, we’re aiming for best.”

“Owen.” She interrupted. “Relax. I’m just surprised, not upset.” Where he was sipping his coffee, she took a decent-sized gulp of it. “Hell, I guess I was the same, you don’t grow up black in Arkansas without…What I’m saying is, we’re all allowed to grow older and wiser.”

“Ah, to hell wi’ the older part, just so long as I keep getting’ wiser.” Powell chuckled. “I tell you what, I DON’T miss all the aches and pains I was havin’. My knees haven’t felt so good in years!”

Rylee’s smile returned. “…So. You’re okay with me doing this.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you want the whole angle to be self-improvement.”

“Well…” Powell looked to his right and slightly downwards as he marshalled his thoughts. “We both know at least some of this material is going to end up as a recruiting video, most likely.” He said. “Right now, the SOR has one operational unit, which isn’t even active yet. Now, we might be able to keep the training up just fine, but missions? One mission and we’ll be knocked on our backsides and have to build up again. Sure, we’ve got guys coming up the pipeline behind us, but the full unit MTOE calls for, uh…”

He rolled his head back and frowned at the ceiling, searching his memory. “Thirty six, seventy-two…About a hundred and eleven operators all told, plus three times as many specialists in support roles. All of those operators have got to meet some already high standards and then clear a rigorous elimination round before they so much as see a vial of Crue-D, let alone their spacesuit. And by the time they’re ready for active duty…” he gestured a hand down the mid-line of his own body. “Permanent physical and psychological changes.”

“You want me to stress that?”

“We’re only going to want people who can hack the idea of never being the same again. Go talk to WARHORSE sometime—Staff Sergeant Arés. I used to work closely with his old man, who’s a slim, small, little guy. Not unfit or anything, just…small. Four years ago, the lad was just, like, a younger version of ‘is dad, but now he’s fookin’ huge! And he’ll still be huge when he’s in his eighties.”

Rylee nodded, thoughtfully. “I mean…I’m just going to be narrating and interviewing on this thing, it’s up to the director in the end.” she said. “But I’ll pass that along.”

“That’s all I can ask for.”

They finished their coffee, and Powell indicated his paperwork. “I could do with some time to finish this. Why don’t you go meet the lads, form an impression of them? We’ll have a drink later.”

Rylee smiled as she stood up. “I look forward to it.”

Powell had been right. The SOR operators were a puppy farm—eleven enormous, intelligent, hyper-competent puppies who practically fell over each other to “tidy up” a dormitory that was already spotless to the point that only a training instructor in full Motivation Mode could have found something to comment on.

He’d been right about how well-known she was too: They recognised her without her having to introduce herself, and fought to get photos and, in Stevenson’s case, her autograph in a little book alongside assorted athletes, actors and celebrities.

Once they calmed down a bit and got used to the idea that she was there, though, she was invited to take part in “Bad Movie Morning”, which was apparently their weekly Saturday ritual. They watched ‘Night of the Lepus’, a golden-age classic from the age of fedoras and dames in which an assortment of ordinary bunny rabbits filmed close-up lolloped and flopped around in a completely unthreatening way, composited behind footage of people screaming and running away.

Oddly, though, Sergeant Arés gave her an unambiguously frosty reception. It wasn’t anything overt—she doubted the young man even knew he was doing it—but his attitude with her, while perfectly polite and respectful, was nevertheless decidedly cooler than those of his squadmates, and she noticed a few little frowns among the guys which suggested they were asking each other ‘what’s up with WARHORSE?’.

Which was why, when he went to cook between movies, she engineered an excuse that she needed a glass of water and joined him in the kitchen.

He stood aside to let her get at the faucet. “Ma’am.”

“Y’know, if you’ve got a problem with me, I’d like to hear it.” Rylee told him, putting it straight out there. “I’m going to be interviewing you in a couple months, after all.”

Arés blinked. “Problem, ma’am?”

“You’ve been kind of giving me the ‘I don’t like you much’ thing this whole time, and I’m curious why.”

”…I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-” He stopped himself, but that sentence had revealed the nice guy underneath the chilly attitude. “…You never called the Tisdales, is all.”

”…Who?”

He frowned. “Mark and Hayley?”

Memory stirred. “Oh! I, uh…I never learned their…wait shit, Tisdale? As in Sara Tisdale?”

“Yeah.”

“She was their daughter?”

“Yep.”

Rylee dragged a chair out from under the table—a huge, metal, heavy one built by Rebar to SOR standards—and collapsed onto it. “Jeez, no wonder you- God damn!”

“You didn’t know their surnames?”

“We had fun together, that’s all!” Rylee told him. “We’re not friends or anything. We just…yeah.”

She frowned at him. “Actually, how did you even know about that?”

“My, uh…my girlfriend saw you with them. Ma’am.”

“Huh…” She went still and silent for a second, and then rubbed her face. “Christ.”

Arés scratched the back of his head. “I…Guess I owe you an apology.”

“No, no.” Rylee shook her head. “If I’d known I’d have called them. But, I didn’t and I guess that’s…Jesus, their little girl.”

“And my friend.”

”…I’m sorry, Arés.”

“Was that an apology or condolences, ma’am?”

“Bit of both…” She sighed, and ran a hand over her head. Realising that her hair was out of its bun, she let it out and re-did it. “Thanks for being straight with me though.”

“You asked.”

She sat awkwardly silent as he studied a chart stuck to the refrigerator, and then he seemed to thaw out entirely. “So, hey. I’ve actually been kinda curious…”

“Yeah?”

“What’s FTL like?”

Rylee almost laughed. No wonder she’d detected the chilly attitude instantly, the question had been so guileless and honest that it was clear that disliking anybody just wasn’t in Arés’ nature.

“You know what’s weird about it? No special effects.” she said. “Like, none. It’s really undramatic, y’know?”

He pulled a bowl of soaked beans out of the fridge. “None at all?”

“Nope. It’s one of those weird quirks of how it all works, right? You’d think you’d see Lorentz contraction and blue-shifting and whatever, but in fact you’re not moving at lightspeed, technically.” She held one hand up like a spaceship and orbited it with the other to illustrate the point. “As far as your own inertial frame of reference goes, you’re moving normally and it’s just that everywhere’s closer so you don’t have to travel as far. It’s only from the outside that you appear to be going faster than light. So, anyway, everything moves around, just way faster than usual. It’s all so far away that it’s just points of light, anyway.”

“Man, that sounds kind of disappointing.”

“It is!” Rylee agreed. “I jumped these two huge space stations into Earth orbit a few years back and that was just like-” she stuck a finger in her mouth and flicked it out again to create a popping sound. “And there’s a station there. Warp most of the way to the moon?” she snapped her fingers. “It just gets bigger. FTL’s actually kinda dull.”

“That’s kind of a shame.” Arés said. He’d produced some celery and a knife and cutting board and set about combining them with bewildering speed. It seemed impossible that he wouldn’t slice off a fingertip, but in fact he didn’t inflict so much a scratch on himself.

“Eh. I can live with shitty special effects.” Rylee said. “It’s still an exciting time to be alive, y’know?”

“True.”

“Speaking of shitty special effects…” BASEBALL stuck his head in the kitchen. “We’re watching the Power Rangers movie next, if you’re interested Major?”

“Oh man, I’ve not watched that since I was a kid!” Rylee stood up. “See you through there, Arés?”

“I’ll be a few minutes.” he said. “But sure.”

Rylee gave him her best smile and followed Burgess back through into the living area, pleased to have cleaned matters up. It would make the documentary so much easier.

Date Point: 8y 7m 3w AV

London, England, Earth.

Ava Rios.

“You know what’s funny?”

“What?”

“I was fucking terrified of losing my virginity.”

Sean gritted his teeth and curled his fingers into the pillowcase She had both of her hands on his wrists, gently trapping him. “How…things have changed.” he commented.

Ava giggled and paused to grind her hips deep down onto him, a motion which sent a delicious shiver of pleasure right through her, so that her eyelashes fluttered and she bit her lower lip so hard that it hurt. Apparently it worked for Sean too, because his expression of furious concentration became desperate.

“Oh Christ…”

“It’s okay, lover…” she leant right forward and whispered into his ear. “Come for me.”

She kissed his jaw and stroked his hair as he came down from whatever star she’d just sent him into orbit around, until he found his voice again and said something characteristically witty between great gulping breaths: “Fuuuuuck. Whoa-oh my…whew.”

She grinned down at him. “Good one?”

“Jesus.” He opened his eyes and swallowed, expression equal parts worshipful and concerned. “Did…are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” she promised, and carefully dismounted to roll down beside him. Neither of them moved very much for a few minutes until his breathing and pulse had returned to something resembling normal, at which point he cleared his throat and discreetly tied and disposed of the contraceptive he was still wearing.

“You’re sure?” He asked. “I mean, you didn’t-”

“I don’t have to, nibble.” she chided him, gently.

“Yeah, but this is supposed to be about-”

“Adam I’m fine, really!”

It took her a few seconds to interpret the change in his expression. “Sean. Shit.” She buried her face in the pillow, covered the back of her head with her hands and repeated herself, feeling a full-body cringe come on. “Shit.”

“Really?” He asked.

“God fucking dammit that’s…I’m so sorry.”

Sean sighed, stood up and went to the bathroom, which left her to sit up as well and blush violently by herself for a few minutes, hoping that the bed might maybe come alive and devour her before his return or something equally implausible to spare her a moment’s more shame.

When he came back in, he just sat next to her and rubbed her back. “You twit.” he said, lovingly.

“Sean, I am so sorry.”

“Well, better this than the other way around.” he joked, with a slightly awkward laugh.

”…You’re not mad?”

”…Well, I’m a bit jealous…” he confessed. “…but not mad. I get it, I’m the ‘other guy’ here. I suppose I should be glad this is the first time it’s happened.”

A laugh exploded out of her and brought embarrassed tears with it, which just made him laugh and kiss her below the ear. “It’s okay.” he promised.

“You’ve got to be the only guy in the world who’s okay with hearing somebody else’s name in bed!” She told him.

“Well, if you’re having sex with me and it makes you think of a big strong soldier, maybe I should take it as a compliment.”

“Don’t go too far.” Ava said, deflating again. “God, I really am sorry, you know that?”

“Don’t worry, I’ve done it too.” He reassured her. “Broke up with Gwen in the morning, spent the afternoon with Ayesha consoling me, and just as she was blowing me that evening I called her Gwen. That was awkward!”

“Jeez, how many girls have you—actually, I don’t want to know.”

“Okay.”

The wall clock uncomfortably counted out twenty seconds before she finally sighed. “Okay, okay. How many girls have you been with?”

“Including you?”

“Yes.”

”…Do blowjobs count?”

“Yes.”

“Handjobs?”

She gave him a light backhand in the upper arm. “Sean!”

“Okay, okay!” He laughed. “You’re my sixth.”

“Oh thank fuck. I was worried you’d say something crazy like twenty.”

“Twenty?” he asked. “Jesus.”

“It’s good to know you’re not that much of a slut.” she told him.

“No it’s not that.” Sean waved a hand. “It’s just…Twenty is your definition for a slut? I went to school with a guy who claimed a hundred when he was eighteen, and I’m quite sure it was the truth.”

“Bullshit!” Ava protested. “How do you even…?”

“A different girl every week for two years?” Sean suggested. “Apparently it’s not that hard if you know how.”

“What’s he up to now?”

“He volunteers with a HIV awareness program.”

”…Oh.”

“Yeah.”

After a silent moment, she leaned into him and made a sighing sound. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Ayesha, I’m fine! OW!”

She’d smacked him in the upper arm again, with a laugh. He joined in and tried to tickle her, she fought back, and it wasn’t long before the tickle-wrestling had them both ready to go a second round.

This time, she got his name right.

Date Point: 8y 9m AV

HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Major Owen Powell

Being a minute later than he’d planned heading for today’s training session meant that Powell was just late enough to run into Technical Sergeant Kovač coming down the hall the other way, struggling under a cardboard box that she could have fit inside. “Uh…Delivery for you, Major.”

Powell stood and brought his hands together in a single eager clap. “Outstanding.” he declared. “I ordered those a month ago.”

“Yes, sir.” Kovač agreed, blandly neither assuming responsibility for the delay, nor assigning it.

Powell chuckled. “For cryin’ out loud, leave them there and grab a trolley. We’ll hand them out after today’s scenario.” he declared. “Assuming there’s enough for everyone?”

“Yes sir.” Kovač put the box down, gratefully. “I inventoried it all myself, everything’s as ordered.”

“Well done. We already planned how this was going to go, get them set up and ready for presentation once the scenario’s done. Don’t be late.”

“Yes sir.”

“Carry on.”

Scenario days were Powell’s favourite part of the SOR training regime. Gravball was fun, and the academic lessons were fascinating, but nothing quite matched the simple, mildly sadistic joy of seeing the lads tackle simulated missions in the warehouse.

The warehouse had been his personal request to HMS Sharman in the weeks before they’d come back here, and it had been the base’s willingness to accommodate his request that had finalized the decision. It was the size of an aircraft hangar and full of the very latest in gravity plating and holographic emitters, backed up by a dedicated staff of scenario planners and fresh-faced young specialists with the skills necessary to create, animate and deploy simulated hostiles via those emitters.

They had been given three simple instructions—the scenarios must be unpredictable, they must simulate the sorts of conditions and situations the SOR might find themselves in on actual missions, and they must be slightly beyond the lads’ abilities. Enough so that for them to actually complete the scenario and win would be unlikely, but not so much as to render the task actually impossible.

They had re-run one of the old scenarios last week, by way of a demonstration, along the lines of ‘look how far you’ve come’. Not only had the lads completed it, they’d done so without suffering so much as a simulated scratch, even in the sections that they hadn’t reached first time through.

It had been an education for Powell too, seeing just what they were capable of. Arés climbing a rope up the kind of falling hallway trap that Kaminsky had once described, with his legs wrapped around Vandenberg, who was no lightweight himself, both in their suits and with a full combat load. Akiyama overriding the electronic lock on a door panel in seconds, though that was doubtless down to the fact that he’d ordered a gross of the most common makes of door lock in the Dominion and spent his spare time for most of a month tinkering with them.

All of the lads were like that now, though. They’d become addicted to self-improvement, to the point where if a day went past where they weren’t challenged, weren’t learning something new or advancing an existing skill, they got listless and boisterous. Keeping them stocked with books, tools and material to further their lust for personal perfection wasn’t just a training expense, it was a morale and discipline one.

Not that Powell himself was any different, of course. His personal quarters had gone from containing only three books—’The Art of War’, ‘The Complete SAS Survival Manual’, and ‘Masters of Command – Hannibal, Caesar and the Genius of Leadership‘—to containing two overworked bookshelves that each held dozens, covering the military history of the last three hundred years, and including Machiavelli, Plato, the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Bhagavad Gita, some of the better introductory volumes in the fields of psychology, the history and design of games, physics and communications, plus several classic science fiction authors: Niven, Pournelle, Banks, Simmons, Clarke and Asimov. And, because he’d been left squinting at the literary references in the Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos and Ilium, that had led to him buying Homer, Proust, Shakespeare and Keats into the bargain.

His old man would have looked at a room full of that many books and promptly declared that it could only belong to a ‘poof’, and the reality of his son’s command, condition and intellect would have made not a jot of difference. Powell senior had been a deeply anti-intellectual man to cover for his own illiteracy, and quick to pin anything he didn’t like on ‘poofs’.

Just one of the many reasons Major Powell so valued his own education. Not that he’d appreciated it when young, of course.

The physical effects of Crue-D were obvious, there for anyone to see. But now he cast his memory back a few years, and could see Jen Delaney, mastering marksmanship in a single lesson. Or Saunders, building a working starship out of scraps and salvage in a mere two weeks.

He was beginning to become seriously worried that the Corti might have badly miscalculated.

He set aside his worries about having created a monster when he realised that he’d easily loped the distance from the office complex to the training centre in hardly any time at all, at speeds that most people would consider a dead run, and without so much as a spare gasp of breath to show for it, even though that itself was pauseworthy. He was here to run a training operation: Cogitation could wait, for now.

For all its high-tech contents, the warehouse was controlled from what was basically a shed, fully half of which was computers, between which the team of four young men who organised and oversaw the exercises sat in a square, facing away from one another. There literally wasn’t room for more than one of them to stand up at a time, and Powell had given them special dispensation to not react to his entering except by straightening in their seats and looking toward him.

“All set up?” He asked.

“Yes sir.” Corporal Jenkins was the senior NCO in the shed, and the scenario team leader—he’d once been heard to describe himself as the “dungeon master”.

“Good, I look forward to it. Change of plan for the end of session today, though: report to the end zone once you’ve saved the footage and turned everything off.”

“Yes sir.”

“Right. As you were.”

He jogged the last hundred yards the Warehouse door. The lads were all suited up and ready to go, waiting for him in their EV-MASS systems and practically creaking under the weight of all the gear they carried for training.

“Arright lads, about that time again. Fall in.”

They did so, eager to get going.

“The scenario we’re gaming today is an assault on a Hierarchy space station, populated by traps and active defences under the direct control of a Hierarchy operator.” he explained. “Your mission is to reach the computer core, pull the data, then get that data off the station and into intel’s hands by whatever means are possible. We’re simulating that you’ve breached in from EVA. You’re going in blind, that means no hints about what threats you might face or what you might find. Any questions?”

They all shook their heads. “Right. Systems check on your suits, give us the thumbs up when you’re ready.”

He left them to it and climbed the ladder up into the observation gantry, a cabin that ran along the ceiling on rails from which the occupants were able to look down into the training area.

“Ready?” He asked, pulling the ladder up behind him.

“Ready sir.”

“Right. Wait for the thumbs up and let’s see how we do.”

He watched the men below go through a last round of confirming each others’ suits—a lesson that had been drilled into them by Drew Cavendish from day one—before they gathered round Legsy in a huddle to talk plan.

By agreement, the game controllers did not get to hear that plan. Powell did, because he wasn’t the one giving the orders—he was there to watch, observe, think about how he’d have approached things, and so far, he agreed with every decision Legsy was making, including the one about leaving the two Protectors behind, much to their dismay.

The huddle broke up, everyone headed for their respective loadout station to grab the equipment they’d decided they needed and Powell tuned in on Legsy again as he patted Arés’ upper arm.

“You okay?”

“Eh, you know me. I hate being left in the back.”

“Yeah pal. I would too, but trust me, right? We don’t put our best at risk until we have to.”

Arés’ silence spoke volumes on what he thought of that assessment. “Legs…”

“Nah mate. Said that for a reason. I’d rather have one of you bored and a jump away than fifty other medics right next to me in the fight, and you’d better bloody believe I mean that.”

The younger man didn’t say anything, just nodded, then grabbed Legsy’s gauntlet and drew him into the kind of body-slamming hug that would have pulverized bricks.

“You get through this without needing us, I’m buying the drinks.”

“Fuck aye. See you after.”

Powell didn’t need to be listening on the radio to hear Legsy calling for the safety officer, who performed a final round of checks to make sure that every last weapon, round and grenade they had on them were training versions—blank rounds, dummy grenades, and the laser-based MILES training equipment. The lads formed up, gave each other a round of slaps in the head, fist-bumps, and other suitably violent masculine gestures, and Legsy aimed a raised thumb at the control box.

The simulated violence below unfolded. Knowing what they did about the Hierarchy, every simulated mission worked off the assumption that the mind in question knew they were coming, detected the intrusion within seconds, and that it would bring out its best and most potentially effective gambits first, but not unwisely.

What, exactly, those gambits would be was always an exercise in the games designers’ imaginations, informed by the sort of things they had learned from Delaney, Saunders, and Six, and their own sadistic machinations.

Cloaked assault robots with fusion blades for limbs. Several varieties of small flying drone, from the ones that stopped and deployed a plasma weapon, to a kind that the games techs had invented that were basically just a flying fusion blade, designed to flash at speed straight down a corridor and halve every man in it at the waist. Gravity traps, various kinds of turret, rooms full of hair-trigger explosives, rooms where the power cables had been wired like the grid on a bug zapper, even simulated human biodrone soldiers.

There had even once been a room full of sex slaves sporting the faces of a number of actresses and singers, an encounter so absurd that the simulation had been abandoned, and the two men responsible had been “motivated” to remember their responsibilities by means of having them train with Staff Sergeant Arés, under orders that he was not to be friendly about it.

Given how uncomfortable and time-consuming it was to both don and remove the suit, Arés had obliged with relish, though he had quite kindly carried the two broken perpetrators back to their rooms once he was done. There had been no such lapses of professionalism since.

Each simulation was designed to take a few hours. There was a lot of room in the warehouse, and the simulation techs worked all week to configure the next scenario ahead of training day. Beating the crap out of those two with WARHORSE had probably spared them the wrath of their fellows. Or at least, the worst of it.

Today, there were no such shenanigans. The Aggressors were a blur, emptying each room of anything that even resembled a threat almost before they’d finished entering it. That was doctrine—it had to be assumed that nobody and nothing encountered in a scenario where the Hierarchy were involved was a friendly unless it was clearly and obviously not a threat and could not possibly become so, and even then was to be treated as suspicious until proven otherwise.

The Defenders were no less deadly, but their deadliness was more methodical. Laying sensors and mines behind them, carrying spare ammo for the Aggressors, watching the Aggressors’ backs, disarming traps and overcoming engineering and technical challenges. When the team had to climb “up” a long hallway that had had its gravity rotated by ninety degrees, the Defenders were the ones who deployed the ropes.

There were firefights against an entrenched squad of simulated Chehnasho troops, easily brushed aside. There was a desperate battle against a pack of flying blades, one of which only narrowly failed to “kill” Firth. There was a holographic Vulza—Price dodged a snap of its jaws, wrapped his arms around its snout and held on while Blaczynski bayoneted it in the eye. It took nearly twenty minutes for Vandenberg and Akiyama to disarm a particularly nasty electrical discharge trap, while the rest of the men dug in and warded off probing attacks by an increasingly desperate Hierarchy force…

Which turned out to be a distraction. No sooner was the trap disarmed and the squad retreating into the room than a gunship—an illusion, projected on the huge “window” that ran the length of the room – decloaked and began to fire indiscriminately through the glass. A quick jerk of the gravity approximated the room decompressing. They all grabbed handholds and so none of them were “spaced” by the simulated blowout, but finally, three of the lads were forced to obey the rules of the simulation and lie down inactive as their MILES systems reported incapacitating hits.

Powell leaned forward to watch, eagerly. Their performance while things had been going well had been exemplary—now he was interested in seeing how they performed when the shit hit the fan. Those were the moments that a unit truly showed its quality.

They didn’t disappoint.

One of the functions of the midsuit’s active padding was to close any breaches in the pressure hull, but still a penetrating wounding shot while wearing EV-MASS in vacuum was a deadly matter, demanding immediate extraction to a pressurised environment, before all else.

That was the Protectors’ job. Everyone in that room knew it. They also knew that the Protectors weren’t there, and that the lives of their comrades (simulation be damned, they were all too motivated to care about the difference) depended on getting them into that room ASAP, and clearing the way for them to do their job.

Legsy didn’t waste a second, and fired a grenade out of his gun’s M203 at the gunship, supported by a hail of rapid-fire from the others. The simulation decided that he scored a hit, which combined with the bullets did enough to badly damage the vehicle’s canopy and spoil its pilot’s view, causing the projected gunship to sway crazily and spray the exterior hull of the station with wasted shots.

Had the fight been real, the room would have been in vacuum which would have allowed Arés and Burgess to jump straight in to their buddy’s beacons. In reality, it was of course flooded with air. Fortunately, they’d planned for that, which was why the two Protectors had been walking along above their comrades a few rooms back, ready to drop in through hatches in the ceiling when summoned.

This they now did, arriving in the room just as alacritously as if they had displaced in, and Powell grunted in satisfaction as Burgess took immediate stock of the situation, grabbed the downed Vandenberg, hoisted him up onto his shoulders, and retreated toward the door into the next room that the Defenders were working on breaching, covered by the Aggressors as they continued to suppress the pursuing Hierarchy forces.

Arés got cocky. He tried to lift the remaining two fallen men simultaneously, rather than extracting the one who was in the more immediate danger.

There was no doubting that the young man was the strongest on the team, scoring over even Burgess by a fair margin, and that fact had been going to his head lately. Not in any overt, swaggering way, but just in his growing assurance that he was capable of anything. Powell tutted outwardly, but inwardly he was pleased, knowing that the kid was about to get the ego-check he needed.

There was some muttered astonishment in the control room at the fact that he actually managed it, getting Murray and Sikes off the ground and carried just fine, but Powell had done the maths. Arés may have been strong, but the simple physics of the situation—his mass relative to the combined weight of the two men he was lifting—simply didn’t work out in his favour. He was off-balance from the moment he teetered upright, and when he tried to haul them to the exit, he just couldn’t manage any real speed or momentum.

It cost him. The Gunship’s wild spraying hadn’t entirely ceased to be a threat, and its MILES laser strobed through the room for a second, scoring a hit on the kid’s left leg, and Powell smiled grimly as he heard a vigorous Spanish curse at the report that, although the suit’s impressive armour plating hadn’t been breached, the impact HAD broken a bone.

The honour system was important. They’d all been drilled from early on that “cheating” the wound results just meant doing themselves out of proper training and experience. Arés dutifully fell over and stopped using his left leg.

Sitting on the ground, he had far less leverage. With a groan of exertion he hauled Firth into cover that protected him from more stray firepower from the gunship, then began to drag Murray toward the exit door. He made good time despite having only one leg to work with, too.

Burgess deposited his patient with the Defenders as they got the door open, then dashed back across the room, grabbed Firth and returned him to the door with the same kind of ease that Powell might have hefted a box of printer paper.

Then he was back for Murray, and finally Arés.

The kid was smart enough to notice that, Powell knew. Doing one man at a time had allowed Burgess to clear four men out of the room faster than Arés had handled two. That wouldn’t be missed.

The simulation ended practically the moment the Aggressors retreated through the door. Legsy barked orders, and within seconds they had all activated their jump beacons—for training purposes, replaced with a red light—and the simulation shut down as the last one lit.

A siren hooted, the lights came up, and the lads all stood up, dusted themselves off, and made wobbly-handed, wobbly-headed gestures of mixed feeling at one another as they discussed the outcome, took off their helmets, bumped fists and commiserated with each other.

Powell took his time down the ladder and strolled thoughtfully across the concrete with his hands in the small of his back, giving the lads plenty of time to leave the course, sort their gear out and get lined up.

“Master sergeant.” he said quietly, greeting Legsy. “I’d like to hear your reasons for aborting the raid and pulling out, please.”

“Sir. The longer we took, the more likely the Hierarchy mind was to have just deleted the data. With all the lads up and running I was happy to take that chance, but after we got stuck on that trap and took casualties…”

“You deemed it prudent to preserve assets?”

“Yes sir.”

Powell nodded pensively and made a show of mulling over Legsy’s explanation.

“I agree.” he declared after some few seconds, and he knew Legsy well enough to spot the invisibly subtle cues of relief in his friend’s face.

He tucked his thumbs into his belt and looked up and down the line. “What we know of the Hierarchy says that they’re rigid thinkers, as suggested by the name.” He said. “They come up with good plans, but they rely on those plans too much. They don’t adapt well if their plan fails. They like to go away, think about it, seek the advice of a senior mind, and form a new plan.”

“With that in mind,” he continued “The way to fight them is through unrelenting aggression. Break their first gambit and keep the pressure on. Don’t give them time to think, don’t allow them a moment’s breathing room. So long as the situation is unfolding quickly, they’ll be panicking and caught on the back foot, and anything they put in your way is going to be only half-thought-out.”

“This is something that EVERY man on the team must take part in. You must appear to be unstoppable, so you must never stop. Never stop moving, never stop doing, even if it’s just handing out the ammo or swapping out your juice cartridge, and above all keep the pressure on. You cannot afford to be bogged down dealing with a trap that’s going to take twenty minutes to disarm. Find an alternate route, cut a hole in the wall, fookin’ go EVA if you have to. But do not ever stop moving. You understand?”

“Yes sir.” They nodded, seeing and understanding what he was saying.

“Right. This isn’t the result we were hoping for today.” he said, and saw them all nodding and thinking. “…But it was good enough. Kovač!”

The sergeant and a handful of other NCOs entered with parade precision, having been waiting as ordered, and the operators all straightened up as they saw the berets being carried on trays towards them, knowing what it meant.

Powell started with BASEBALL. “Burgess. You did good work today.” he said. “Efficient, fast, bold. Don’t stress about not carrying as much as the Incredible Hulk there. Don’t doubt for a second that your speed is the unique skill you bring to this team—don’t lose sight of that.”

Burgess accepted the beret. It was black, with two pins on it—the Vitruvian Man emblem of the SOR, and a small circular pin adorned with a pair of green feet that Powell could tell he wanted to burst into a wide grin upon seeing. “Yes, we kept your bloody green feet.” he smiled, and stepped back, waiting. Burgess saluted eagerly, a gesture which Powell returned with rather more composure than he felt.

“Arés. You’re clearly strong enough to carry two men in EV-MASS, but you’ve got no control over the momentum. Just remember that one man saved is better than three dead. You’d have got them all without even tiring yourself if you’d taken it steady.” He handed over the second beret with the green-feet pin, and returned the younger man’s salute, keeping his immense pride in the lad to himself. It wouldn’t do to seem to have a favourite.

“For our Defenders…I know it’s not an emblem of your original training, but for you we’ve selected the castle. You’ve wonderfully fallen into your roles as the finest combat engineers ever, and something tells me you won’t mind, am I right?”

“Essayons, sir.” Sikes commented.

“Well said.” Powell handed him the beret. “Just don’t become so focussed on working on the challenge directly in front of you, that you forget the bigger challenge of the whole mission.”

He shared similar words of wisdom and gestures of respect with the remaining Defenders, then turned to the last and largest group. “And for my fellow Aggressors—the dagger, the symbolism of which should hopefully need no explaining. You are the swift, the deadly, and the skilful. Attack from all angles, show no quarter or hesitation, and there is nothing you cannot slay.”

He stepped back. “This is a moment to take pride in yourselves, but it’s also a moment for humility. We’ve chosen the black beret for a good reason. Yes, the black of space obviously, but more important is that the black beret is the colour worn by many an ordinary infantryman and marine the world over. It is critical that we all remain grounded, and conscious of the fact that we are all just servicemen, fighting for the same reasons as any other.”

“You have done what many hundreds of thousands in our home nations’ armed services could not…” he continued, but then gestured to Kovač and the men beside her. “…but you would not be SOR without our technicians and support staff. Which is why I want you to help me hand out berets and insignia to everyone else in this regiment. We are the tip of the spear—but without the wood behind it, a speartip alone is a poor weapon.”

“Yes sir.” they seemed eager to do as he had said, and he allowed himself to smile at the fierce pride shining in their faces.

“Congratulations, gentlemen. This unit is now active.”

Date Point: 8y 10m AV

London, England, Earth

Charlotte Gilroy

Being tall and slim meant that Charlotte had always suffered in the cold, and there was just no substitute on dark frozen evenings for pajamas, loungewear, two blankets, a hot chocolate…and a nice warm boyfriend on the couch.

For once, they were actually hanging out at home, rather than Sean’s house. Their place was a student flat that she, Ben and Ava could just afford on their combined housing allowance. Two bedrooms, a tiny bathroom, and a small shared space that did the work of kitchen, dining room and living room all in one.

At least…She and Ben were hanging out. Ava was busy getting ready, and Sean was busy Ava-watching. If Charlotte had been forced to pick a word to describe his expression, it might have been “guarded”. Sean usually had the light of intellectual good humour in his eyes and a slight smile around his mouth, as if he’d got the joke on life and was just waiting for everybody else to get it so they could laugh together.

Seeing him look tense, stressed and serious was a new one on her, even though only somebody who knew him well would have noticed.

Something similar went for Ava, who was usually the very picture of composure and confidence, but today was a bundle of jittery happiness, flitting restlessly from minor adjustment to insignificant chore, allegedly to make sure everything was perfect, more likely to try and retain what little equilibrium she had left.

“He’s just got off the tube!” She announced, waving her phone at them.

Sean stood up and headed for the door.

“Sean?”

Sean cleared his throat. “We’re…out of milk.” he grunted.

To her credit, Ava’s happy buzzing ceased, and she rushed up to him and gave him a reassuring kiss. “Okay.” she said. “You go get milk.”

“I may be some time.” Sean replied, some of that humour returning, weakly, to his face.

“It’s okay.” She promised. “I’d like for you to meet him, though.”

”…I’ll try.” Sean promised unconvincingly, and let himself out.

Ava’s shoulders dropped as the door closed, but she picked herself up again after a second and turned around. “How do I look?”

“You know damn well you look amazing.” Ben told her, causing Charlotte to roll her eyes a little but nod vigorously alongside him. Ava smiled a little at the compliment, and went back to her restless bumbling around the flat.

“Have you ever seen her so nervous?” Charlotte whispered, once she judged Ava to be safely out of earshot.

“Nope.”

They let her bustle some more until she suddenly laughed aloud. “Hah! Message from Sean: ‘just passed a side of beef getting out of a taxi. Take it that’s your fella?’” She waved her phone again and giggled.

“Good to know he’s able to laugh about this.” Ben commented.

”…I know it’s hard on him.” Ava replied. “But…well, we talked about this before we started. What more can I do?”

The creaking of the stairs up to their door stopped Charlotte from answering. She just shrugged and smiled weakly.

Ever since Sean and Ava had opened up to her about their affair, she’d had serious doubts about it. Being in a committed relationship herself, it was hard to see how anything good could come out of cheating.

The instant change in Ava’s attitude dispelled most of those doubts. She practically flew to the door, glanced through the peephole, and then flung it open with a delighted noise.

It was like watching the dawn break on the first clear day of the new year after a long and dismal winter. Everything about Ava’s behaviour calmed and perked up, to a startling degree—in half a second she changed so utterly that it made Charlotte wonder if she’d every actually seen her friend relaxed before.

Adam was surprising. He was actually a little shorter than Ava and well-dressed in charcoal utility trousers and a light jacket over an NFL jersey, clothing calculated to make him look a little smaller than he really was.

This was largely futile, considering that after he’d finally been able to weaken Ava’s stranglehold hug on him, he had to turn slightly to fit through the door. He gave Charlotte and Ben a shy smile as he did so.

Ava made the introductions. “Adam: Ben, Charlotte.”

There was a round of “nice to meet you”s and “Hi”s with matching handshakes and it dawned on Charlotte that Adam was actually…rather dorky. He geeked out hugely over Ben’s tattoos when the Koi carp Ben was sporting today decided to swim up his sleeve and down the other arm just as they were shaking hands.

“Oh my God where do I get those?!” He demanded. “Can you turn them off so they don’t show?”

“Yep.” Ben replied, answering the second question first. “Mind you, these cost me a couple of thousand quid, and…” he extended a forearm alongside Adam’s own: The contrast was like comparing a shot glass to a pint mug. “You’re a bit of a bigger canvas, mate.”

“Yeah, but think about what I could have on there!” Adam chuckled. “I could watch movies!”

He was…likeable. Nice! And when Charlotte made eye contact with Ava as Ben slapped his forehead and bemoaned never thinking of that, the look she got back had an undeniable “told-you-so” element to it.

“Come on, meatstack.” Ava leaned forward and got Adam’s attention again. “We’re going into the city, remember?”

“Oh, yeah!” Adam stood up, then looked around. “I was kinda hoping to meet Sean, too, he sounds like a great guy. Isn’t he here?”

“He had to go home.” Ben lied for the three of them. “He wasn’t feeling well.”

“Aww, that sucks. Tell him I said hi, would you?”

“We will.” Charlotte promised.

And that was that. Ava gave them a grateful sort of shrug as she left, and they listened to him enthusing as she followed him down the stairs, about seeing Tower Bridge and the Eye and HMS Belfast and Buckingham Palace and…

“So.” Ben cleared his throat after the creaking stairs and litany of tourist traps had faded. “He’s…a really nice guy? How the fuck did that happen?”

Charlotte had to nod, watching the door a little warily, not quite sure what to make of this new information. “I don’t understand.” she agreed, and turned to frown her confusion at Ben. “He’s adorkable!”

“So why is she-? I mean, she’s gone from miserable to really happy these last few weeks!”

Charlotte thought about it. “Has she?” She asked eventually. “I mean, you saw how she lit up there, didn’t you you?”

”…Yeah.” Ben. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so animated.”

“Maybe she hasn’t been happy recently. Maybe she’s just been…”

Ben nodded. “…coping.”

Charlotte scratched at her bra strap, frowning at something only she could see in deep thought, until Ben slipped an arm around her waist. “Are we…okay with that?” he asked.

“I think…Yeah. Or at least, I am.” She replied. “I think if she’s doing it to cope, so she can get through and have more of that then, then…then I can understand.”

“Yeah but…What about Sean?”

“That’s where it falls apart, yeah…” she agreed.

Neither of them said anything for a little while, and after a bit, Ben turned on the TV.

They were in the middle of a report about the Iranian nuclear weapons program when Sean finally returned with a shopping bag and the expression of a condemned man.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Sean dropped his bag on the coffee table and himself into the chair next to it, rubbing at his forehead as if he was trying to iron out the frown, and watched the news with them.

Clearly, he had other things on his mind though. “…So what’s he like?”

“He’s…actually really nice.” Charlotte told him, keeping her tone of voice delicate and sympathetic.

“I already knew that.” Sean told her, dropping his hand into his lap and managing a weak smile.

“You did?”

”‘Course I bloody do. Ava’s told us that enough times, hasn’t she?”

Ben and Charlotte exchanged a glance. “I…didn’t really believe it before now.” Ben confessed.

“Why not?” Sean asked him.

“Well, he keeps hurting her!”

“Right. Because he’s a fucking idiot. A really nice fucking idiot that she loves so much that I’m fucking lucky just to be the fucking crutch for their relationship!”

Sean surged upright, stood there for a second with his face turned away from them, and then heaved a huge sigh and headed for the door. “I’ll see you Monday.”

Charlotte scrambled out of Ben’s lap to try and talk to him, putting a hand on his upper arm. “Sean…”

He turned and made fleeting, unconvincing eye contact. “I’m fine, fairy.” he lied, using the group’s pet nickname for Charlotte.

“You’re not, mate.” Ben pointed out.

“Well…better me than her then, isn’t it? She’s suffered enough.”

Charlotte’s hand dropped to her side, and he shrugged his jacket on. “I’ll see you Monday.” he repeated.

Charlotte didn’t stop him this time.

Date Point: Christmas Eve, 8y 11m AV

New York City, USA, Earth

Rylee Jackson

“Presentable?”

“Well, we’d have preferred you wear a dress, but you ARE here in a military capacity…”

Rylee suppressed a sigh, and turned it into a smile. “Trust me, I wouldn’t be comfortable in a dress.”

The makeup artist grunted her acknowledgement and stood up. “Well, you look good!” she said.

“You’re on in three minutes, major!” one of the clipboarded production staff informed her.

“I’ll let you prepare yourself.” the makeup girl said, and excused herself.

Rylee had to fight not to fidget at her dress blues or adjust her ribbon bar. She HATED staff duty, but there were worse things in life than going on evening talk shows, she supposed. Public Relations was an easy gig, even if it did mean she was stuck at ground level for the duration.

The worst parts were always the personal questions. They were inevitable, if you were the woman who’d first officially travelled faster than light, but why should they be? Give her questions about the technology, about Modified Alcubierre Fields, about the dynamics of exoatmospheric navigation and piloting.

Too many newspapers wanted to know if she was dating somebody, or something like that, and even if the American public were ready to truly embrace an African-American woman being the modern answer to Neil Armstrong, they still probably weren’t ready for their cultural icon to be unabashedly and pansexually promiscuous.

Not that it would have been anybody’s business even if she’d been in a traditional marriage with two kids. She’d sooner do a nude photoshoot than talk about family in the presence of a microphone.

She forced aside those kinds of resentful thoughts as the one minute warning was called, and gritted her teeth against the urge to tend to some last-second grooming. She’d only undo all the hard work of the production crew.

The wait ended abruptly—she heard her name announced, rapturous cheering and applause, the band striking up a jazzed-up version of the theme from the old 1960s Star Trek, and she pretended to be delighted and amused by it as she stepped out onto the stage, waving and smiling and shaking hands with the host—David…somebody. She was solid on the David at least, but…oh, no, his full name was part of the show’s name, which filled the stage. David Royce.

Settling onto the couch as the applause finally began to fade was a solid relief.

“What a reception!” Royce declared over the hubbub, then repeated himself as it got quieter. “What a reception! Wow. So, Major Jackson – or can I call you Rylee?”

“Rylee’s fine.”

“Well, thank you so much for coming tonight, it’s a real pleasure to have you.”

“It’s a real change of pace!” Rylee said, having already planned ahead of time that this was an entirely truthful sentiment that would nevertheless sound misleadingly enthusiastic.

Royce was sharp though. “For the better, I hope!”

Rylee gave him her best sheepish smile. “Truthfully? I mean, I’m so in love with my job that they had to drag me down here.”

She was rewarded with a ripple of laughter that told her she’d kept her tone light enough.

“I can see why!” Royce agreed. “You did a tour in the Middle East-”

“I flew a handful of missions several thousand feet above the Middle East.” Rylee corrected him. She’d spent that entire conflict living comfortably in Germany, and was eager for there to be no confusion. ‘Did a tour’ made it sound like she’d been checking her boots in the desert every morning, and she didn’t want to overshadow the people who really had been putting up with the conditions down there.

Royce politely ignored the interruption. “-then you trained for and flew Pandora and now you’re a permanent fixture of the air force’s 946th Spaceflight wing. And I’m told you’re unusually devoted to your plane.”

“I think we all are in the 946th.” Rylee said. “Y’know, there’s an extra requirement there, that we might wind up adrift out in deep space or having to land on a station or planet a long way from Earth and have to maintain or repair our own plane in the field, so all of the pilots have got a habit of getting right in there with the ground staff and mechanics, and being part of the plane’s maintenance.”

“That’s unusual?”

“Well, I think it was that willingness to roll my sleeves up and get elbow-deep in the machinery that actually got me onto Pandora, because…y’know, she was a prototype, a testbed, there was always something on the verge of going wrong with her, you know?” Rylee said. “But nowadays it’s a point of pride in the wing, you look after your sled. You get to know her and love her and…”

“Love her?”

“Oh yeah!” Rylee enthused. “Firebird’s like a ten thousand pound metal kitten to me! Every pilot in the wing could tell you about their sled’s little personality quirks.”

“Okay, go on.” Royce challenged and humoured her. “What are Firebird’s?”

“Uh…nothing major. Just…little things like the way her Field-Assisted Landing System is always the first thing to need recalibrating, or the way the hum of the gyroscope changes as we fly…That kind of thing.”

Royce smiled, and Rylee knew that smile. It was the one that came before the questions started to get more personal.

“So…” he began. “is Firebird the only love in your life, or…?”

“I’m very career focused.” Rylee said, dismissively.

“Your career can’t take up ALL your time though.”

“Military careers are…they’re not fair on any partner you might have, so I’ve preferred to not get drawn into anything long-term like that.”

Royce raised an eyebrow. “Surely there are people you care about?”

“Of course there are!” Rylee said. “Some of them aren’t even human! I just don’t think it’s fair to devote years of your life to the service and force your partner to take second place. I’ve got nothing but respect for the guys and girls who can make it work but…Heck, the ‘Dear John’ letter is named for something that happens to soldiers all the time. And what about the kids? You ever see that picture of this little boy being handed his daddy’s folded flag? And he’s trying not to cry?”

She shrugged, and deflated. “I cried when I saw it.” she confessed, glancing nervously at the camera, even as the audience erupted into sympathetic applause.

Royce clearly decided that he couldn’t press the privacy issue any further without making himself look like the bad guy, so he moved on, introducing the scheduled commercial break.

“You’re doing well.” he confided, the moment the microphones were off. “Sorry if I hit a raw nerve there.”

“It’s okay.” Rylee assured him, surprised and pleased, and warming to him a bit. The makeup artists were rushing out, and she and Royce both endured a quick touch-up before the end of the ad break was called and it was back into interview mood.

“Welcome back to Tonight, Tonight and we’ve got Major Rylee Jackson here with us today, are you enjoying yourself so far, Rylee?”

“So far.” Rylee agreed, smiling.

“So, we’ve heard a few rumours coming out of defence circles lately about a few projects, SOR and JETS?”

“Oh, yeah, so these are both really exciting!” Rylee nodded, enthused to be back on professional subjects.

“Why don’t you tell us about them?”

“Okay, so, SOR and JETS stand for Space-borne Operations Regiment and Joint Extra Terrestrial Special operations, respectively.” Rylee said.

“Those sound like they’re more or less the same thing?” Royce inclined his head.

“Far from it!” Rylee shook her head. “The SOR are specifically going to be about missions in space, wearing an armoured spacesuit, boarding ships and stations, that kind of thing. Now, the thing about spacesuits is that they’re heavy, I can attest to that personally. An armoured one?! Doubly so.”

“So these guys have got to be strong.”

“That’s right. Real strong. Crazy strong, and fit. Now, the problem there is that if they’re fighting in a heavy suit and being all big and strong, that means they’re going to run out of gas pretty quick, so they’re all about getting one specific job done, fast and hard. Right?”

“And JETS?” Royce mis-spoke the acronym, saying the word ‘jets’.

“J-E-T-S.” Rylee corrected him. “So, the SOR are a permanent, dedicated unit, while JETS is a qualification that any serving operator can obtain that’ll qualify them to go offworld, and they’ll fill the opposite role – operations on the surface of alien planets, specifically Temperate-type worlds. Earthlike worlds, with life and rain and all that stuff, right?”

“Right.”

“So, JETS is this mixed, international and kinda large initiative where we’ll be able to drop these guys in and they’ll be able to do things like, uh, patrol in hostile territory for months undetected, or all the other stuff that special forces might do. No special spacesuits or anything, to all intents and purposes it’s the same as operations here on Earth, just with having to account for alien environments.”

“So the SOR are the really science-fiction ones.” Royce observed.

“I guess.” Rylee laughed. “But they’re as nice a bunch of guys as you could meet, they’ve…I mean, they’re committed to saving lives and serving other people in a BIG way, they’ve gone through hell to make it happen, and, I’ve met them, they’re all really humble, sweet guys. Y’know, they met me and they just wanted to take some selfies, and I was like ‘who’s taking the selfie with who here?’ because…yeah, I’m in awe of them, I really am.”

“Did you hear the content of that leaked advisory?” Royce asked, referring to a minor scandal of a few months previously where a memo doing the rounds in the Pentagon had somehow found its way onto the Internet. Rylee was onto him now, and knew that he was only asking because that was his job, so she just nodded, calmly.

“Obviously, I mean, that’s a serious breach of national security, but in any case the content of that memo’s no more classified than anything I just told you.” she replied. “Which is to say that it’s not.”

“Doesn’t it concern you that we’re still using alien-made shuttlecraft?”

“I’ve seen those shuttles in action,” Rylee said “And…yeah, okay, as a pilot, they suck. They’re idiot-proof, unarmed, unarmored civilian models, so they just don’t perform to the kind of high standard that the military demands…but they work. And, right now, we don’t have a human-made alternative that does.”

“Why not?”

“Well…okay, look, we got really lucky with Pandora and the TS/2, AND with some other projects like the V-class and the San Diego Class because people—real, qualified aerospace engineers—had already put serious thought into designing them as, like, a thought experiment right down to every rivet and solder. And then when all the alien technology came along, modifying those designs turned out to be pretty easy.”

“So nobody had designed an orbit-to-ground transport before now?” Royce asked, sounding sceptical.

“Transports aren’t like those other two.” Rylee pointed out. “You can make some assumptions about…how big and heavy the pilot of a strike craft is going to be, how many crew are going to fit onto a destroyer. But what about the transport? Until you know about how many people it’s going to need to carry and how much gear they’ve got with them and…”

She tailed off expressively, to indicate the long list of things that needed to be known before such a design could even be started. “Until you know all that, then you can’t progress beyond speculation. Then it comes down to compromises. A small ship’s harder to detect and intercept, but if it’s got enough engine and power on board to accelerate as hard as we’d like then there’s not much room for the cargo. ‘scuse me…”

She took a sip of water before continuing. “Anything capable of meeting our performance requirements is going to be huge, and then you can’t actually use the flight deck on any of the classes of ship we’ve got right now. Not even the big retrofitted alien ones. So, that means docking ports. Well, neither the V-class nor San Diego have got docking ports, because none of our existing docking port designs were meant to be used on an accelerating starship.”

She waved her hands expressively back and forth as she spoke, ending with a snapping motion to illustrate the problem.

Royce sat back. “So, do you have any idea when somebody will get it right?” he asked.

“I couldn’t say.” Rylee shook her head. “I’m not aware of any promising designs in the works, and if there were any I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss them but…to be honest, I think we’re going to have to do without for a few years yet. It’s going to be a tough one to solve, I think.”

“But you’re confident it will be solved.” Royce observed.

“Oh yeah.” Rylee nodded. “Eventually. But designing any vehicle just doesn’t happen overnight, let alone something like a shuttle craft.”

“Rylee, it’s been great having you on the show…”

“It’s been great being here.”

“Well, I hope you’ll stick around for our next guest, Daniel Mayhew is here to talk about Sweet Dreams, and we’ve got South African comedian Raymond Mahlangu, coming up after the break, stay with us, we’ll be right back!”

Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 5—The Fifth Year

Date Point: 9y 3d AV

London, England, Earth

Sean Harvey

First Contact Day had come and gone without much in the way of incidents for Sean. He’d had quite a lonely Christmas and New Year, too—the former had been spent playing EVE Online. The latter was forgotten – he’d woken up in Ava’s bed at her place, with Charlotte and Ben in the other room, a Homerian hangover, no clear memory of anything after about six pm the preceding year, and no Ava.

There was Ava now, though, dusting snow off the shoulders of the expensive blended wool coat that Adam had splashed on for her during his first winter visit as Sean let her in.

She gave him a warm grin. “Hey lover!”

Sean managed the first genuine smile he’d been able to produce in a couple of weeks. “You’d better stop calling me that, you know.” he replied. “We don’t want you to accidentally use it around Adam.”

If the suggestion put a dent in Ava’s mood, she didn’t show it. Instead, to his surprise she kissed him with a smile and brushed past him into the living room. “Well, I’ll keep using it so long as it’s true.” she asserted, lightly.

”…How long is it going to be true for?” Sean asked.

“Oh come on, you’re going to lay the heavy stuff on me right after I get back?” Ava teased. “Come on, how was your new year?!”

“I, uh…woke up in your bed with a splitting headache.”

“Not for the first time!”

“Yeah, but you weren’t there and I wasn’t naked.”

She tutted. “See, I know what you’re doing wrong there. You should have picked somebody up, had a good time.”

“In your bed?”

“Sure!” she nodded, casting herself down on the couch and tugging her scarf out of her collar. “Just change the sheets, you know?”

“Let me guess, you got laid at New Years.”

“Oh yeah.” She nodded, and her eyebrows emphasised the point. “He’s…very physical, you know? He likes to rough-house, and hug, and tickle, and…”

“Fuck your brains out?” Sean asked, in his best dry tone.

“You said it, not me!” She sat forward, concerned. “I’m sorry, are you…okay?”

Sean sighed. “Look. I love you. You know that, I’ve said it before. Seeing you so happy with somebody else is…”

Her expression fell, and so did her gaze, so that she was looking at the carpet.

”…It makes me really happy.” Sean finished.

Ava frowned at him “…That’s not how I expected that sentence to go.” she admitted.

Sean shifted seats and sat next to her. “I think if anybody’s going to get how that feels it’s you, though.” he said. “Being both…really happy for somebody, but also hurting at the same time because you know their happiness is coming at the expense of your own?”

She nodded, eyes downcast again.

He stood to make her a cup of tea, and was nearly to the door when she spoke again. “You know I love you too, right?”

He hadn’t been expecting that at all, and just turned to give her the very reference image of a bewildered stare.

“I mean it!” She added. Having unbuttoned her coat, she left it behind as she stood up and slipped her arms around his waist. “I love you, Sean. I owe you everything, how could I not?”

Sean blinked a bit as that sank in, and then wrapped her up in his own arms and held on, fighting back tears.

Sure enough, Ava had turned on her own waterworks, but this time it was a kind of happy cry, not the misery he was so used to seeing. “I guess I’ve got a thing for selfless guys.” she said.

“I’m not selfless.” Sean disagreed, shaking his head against the side of hers. “I still wish you’d choose me.”

“But you’re going to let it happen?”

“Yeah” Sean didn’t even hesitate on that one. “If it’s what you want.”

She sighed, and kissed him, gently, on the cheek. “Lover, in some ways you’re more of a man than he’ll ever be.”

Sean let her go, not knowing how to respond to that. “Cup of tea?”

She laughed. “Okay fine, be all British.” she teased. “I just want you to know that…I’m sorry. I know this is cruel on you.”

“C’est la vie.” He shook his head, forgiving her. “We’re not calling it off just yet though, are we? There’s still a little while.”

“I think we’re past the point where I need somebody to carry me, now.” Ava said, and his heart sank a little. “So…let’s just enjoy each other, okay? No more drama, no more…heavy stuff. Just love. Can we do that?”

“Nothing would make me happier.”

They kissed again, a deep and affectionate one that was a marked contrast to the unregulated release-valve for pent-up emotions that had been their relationship so far, and left them both smiling.

He felt warm and alive.

“So…” Ava said. “Cup of tea?”

Date Point: 9y 2m 1w AV San Diego National Memorial, San Diego County, Southern California, USA, Earth

Gabriel Arés

The part Gabriel had trouble with was how clean the destruction had been.

A nuke the same size as the antimatter blast that had destroyed his home, his friends and his life would have thrust a spear of radioactive fallout deep into the heart of the USA, maybe even as far as Denver. Certainly, nobody would have been able to visit the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas again for centuries.

While the antimatter had created some very strange ionization effects at ground zero, these had faded inside minutes. It had, in its way, been a very clean wound. Buildings had been smashed apart, flattened or just plain vaporised. The crater had filled with sea water, creating a plume of steam that had been visible from space and which had altered the local weather. The wildfires had burned for months.

The whole city had been written off. There were only some sixteen hundred survivors or so, most of whom had moved on and tried to keep on living. They had lost a few—a cancer patient who’d been out of town visiting a specialist in Los Angeles, several suicides, and a young married couple who’d died somewhere up Mount Everest a year after the blast—but most of them were now established in getting on with the business of just being alive, and with new cities now being built on planets other than Earth…

Well, resettling San Diego would have just felt like walking on peoples’ graves.

Nature, naturally, had no such qualms, and in five years the debris field had overgrown with hardy shrubs like Creosote Bush and Manzanita, plus ferns and grasses. A few young trees had even found a home among the rubble, but by and large the ruins of San Diego belonged to wildflowers and delicate flowering bushes, the perfume of which was carried up the hillside by clean sea air.

It was beautiful.

The memorial planning had taken five years, and was intended to involve every one of the survivors, or somebody on their behalf. The idea was simple—an eternal flame had been set up, an elegant silver teardrop with holes around its equator that, when lit, should send flames flowing up and around the metal to lick off the top. It was mounted atop a five foot pole on a hillside overlooking the downtown crater.

The participants had all been asked to find a flat stone from wherever they had gone on to live, preferably as heavy as they could comfortably lift, and send it to the artist for preparation.

Adam’s slab of Cimbrean green slate, with its lone alien fossil, had caused quite a stir. He’d taken some of his precious leave time in order to deliver it, on the grounds that the artist might not believe that anybody could comfortably lift it, and Gabriel would have paid good money to see the look on the guy’s face when his boy walked in cradling an enormous chunk of alien geology in his arms.

That Cimbrean fossil now took pride of place. The artist had carved a groove to fit half the flame’s supporting pole and Adam’s contribution now sat at the heart of the tribute, peeking out of the top with the little spidery, whiskery thing that had once died in those ancient layers of extraterrestrial silt just peeking out of the top.

Everybody’s stone was visible, though. Even the very smallest one, a tiny palm-sized thing contributed by a little boy who had been just three months old at the time of the blast, visiting his grandparents in New Hampshire.

It was amazing hearing what some of them had got up to over five years. Moving off-world and joining the military seemed to be almost tame next to some of the stuff a few of the others had got up to. A beat cop that Gabriel had never met but shared SDPD history with had gone into the FBI and had talked down a hostage situation in Mississipi. There was a man from Linda Vista who’d become a monk, and a doctor from Alvarado for whom this was the first time setting foot on American soil since the tragedy.

For Gabe’s part, standing up for a long while was finally becoming less of a challenge. Five years of exercise and physiotherapy hadn’t repaired the nerve damage in his leg, but the muscles were stronger and steadier, his arms had strengthened to cope with resting his weight on his stick, and he no longer shook when standing upright for any length of time. It still hurt a bit, and always would, but he was spared the indignity of needing to sit down when so many others were standing respectfully.

There wasn’t a ceremony, exactly. They just circled the memorial, touching it, examining it, finding their stone and then, watched by the news cameras, the little boy stepped forward with a lit taper on the end of a pole, and touched it to the teardrop at the top.

It lit, flared, flickered, stabilized, and they watched the heat brown the metal.

Then, in ones, twos and threes, they turned away and left behind, having finally said goodbye.

John “BASEBALL” Burgess

“Okay, it’s a fucking sauna in here.”

WARHORSE had always struggled with the heat. He was just so big nowadays, and so dense, that he actively struggled if the temperature crept above seventy or so. Hell, ALL of the Operators were like that, but Adam had it worst.

A busy restaurant in LA during a heatwave was really not his environment at all.

“If you need to step outside to cool down a minute, it’s okay Grillsteak.” Ava told him.

John nodded his agreement, out of equal parts concern for his friend’s comfort, and seeing an opportunity to have a private word with Ava.

He’d been suspicious from the moment her forgiveness email came in after the move to Folctha. Even sitting down the deck of a C5, he’d been able to hear her shouting, and it had been FAR from the first such instance. It seemed like every letter or contact between Adam and his girl had gone tense or angry at some point, even when she’d sent him an envelope full of pictures of herself in pin-up poses wearing some of his old T-shirts—an event that Adam had been forced to endure much whooping, whistling and good-natured teasing about.

And then suddenly…all was forgiven? And there hadn’t been a single angry word since? Not so much as a bitter comment or a terse email?

John was certain he knew what that meant. Been there, done that, with two or three different girls in his life.

The problem was, he had no proof, which was why he’d been planning to talk to her very carefully and gently without going as far as an actual confrontation. Deep inside, he was a long way shy of impressed with her, even if he wasn’t quite ready to commit to angry just yet.

But, he had no proof.

Adam nodded, and gratefully excused himself to get some cool air, leaving Ava sipping at her Mojito opposite John.

“So…” he said, the moment his friend had awkwardly shouldered his way past the astonished diners and out of earshot. “Things are going way better with you two.”

She nodded happily around her drinking straw but didn’t comment.

That hadn’t gone as he’d planned it.

“I’m glad. Y’know, he was…off his game there for a while, after the move to Folctha.”

“Yeah.” she agreed. “I wasn’t exactly fair on him.”

That hadn’t gone as planned either.

Fuck it. Direct approach it was.

“Look…Ava, call me paranoid, but when things go from that bad to that good overnight, it makes me suspicious.”

“Are you a naturally suspicious person?” She asked, helping herself to a bread stick.

“If something seems too good to be true…” John replied, keeping eye contact.

She stopped chewing, and frowned at him as she swallowed. “What are you driving at, BASEBALL? Don’t dance around, put it out there.”

”…Have you found somebody else?”

She did something wholly unexpected and giggled. “Are you out of your-? Where would I find somebody to replace Adam?”

“Well…speaking from experience here, but maybe anybody who’s there might have been better for you, for a bit. Just to tide you over. Am I near the mark there?”

The couple of rapid blinks she managed and her slightly too neutral expression told him that he was. “Yeah? Speaking from experience, are you?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’ve cheated on your girls.” She stated.

“Once or twice.” he agreed.

“Why?”

“Young, dumb and horny. What’s your excuse?”

“I haven’t done anything to excuse.” She replied.

John saw right through that one—it may have had the words of a denial, but he knew an evasion when he heard it. “What, you think it’s okay?”

“Yeah, actually. I do.”

Things went off-script for John for the third time. “Uh…”

“Look, you said it yourself, he was off his game without me.” Ava told him. “Well, he’s still got me. And yeah, okay? It’s because I found somebody to ‘tide me the fuck over’. You want to talk about what’s okay? Is it okay to yank somebody around by their heart for four years? Is it okay for you to shove your nose in and suggest that my whole life should be about Adam?”

She leaned forward, and the only other person that John had ever seen wear a steel glare like that was Major Powell. “Especially when you’ve done it yourself? Fuck you! I don’t owe you or Adam a goddamn apology.”

A nearby diner cleared his throat and looked away, and she lowered her voice again. “Maybe you should stop thinking of me as ‘Adam’s girl’ or ‘the thing that keeps him going’.” she added, allowing the word ‘thing’ to freeze solid with contempt as she said it. “I’m Ava. I’m not his, I’m mine. And if I do whatever it takes to back him up and help him, it’s because I want to! You understand?”

“And I’m not just some meathead grunt.” John shot back. “I’m his brother, okay? I’m looking out for him. I’m not gonna let anybody hurt him.”

“You and me both.” she retorted, then sat back and picked up her Mojito. “We done?”

John paused, then nodded slowly and extended a hand over the table. “…it’d hurt him if we weren’t friends.” he pointed out.

“Yeah, it would.” she sipped her drink, not returning the gesture. “You proposing a truce?”

“Are we cool?”

“We’re not cool, no.” She replied, but leaned forward and shook his hand. “But you said it, I’m not gonna let anybody hurt him.”

Good enough.

By the time Adam returned with a waiter bearing a pedestal fan, he was delighted to find them getting along like old friends.

Date Point: 9y 2m 2w AV

HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

James “Legsy” Jones

“Fair play, boys, I’m impressed…but for the love of fuck, why and how?”

“Come on, Legs. Both our Protectors are away, we wanted to surprise them.” Stevenson told him.

“With this?!”

“Hell yeah! They put those fuckin’ stupid Feet of theirs on everything, it’s our turn to leave our mark!”

“So the four of you painted a castle on our water tower.” Legsy put a hand to his brow to shade his eyes and get a better look at it.

“Only fair.” Sikes drawled. “They put little feet on everything, we put a frickin’ huge castle on ONE thing.”

“Quality over quantity.” Vandenberg nodded.

“That the motto of your love life, Rebar?” Price asked, and accepted a high-five from Murray.

“What can I say, your sister’s the best.”

“Oh, you fucking didn’t-!”

Rebar tried to scoot away and hide behind Titan as Price made a friendly grab for him, but Aggressors were, by training and vocation, so much faster and nimbler on their feet than Defenders. There was pretty soon a good-natured brotherly scuffle in the dirt, with Price grinding his fist painfully against Rebar’s head and both men laughing.

“Okay, you lot are way too full of beans.” Legsy commented, bringing the rough play to an immediate halt. “Tell you what. If you’re all so eager to prove that you can climb as well as our PJs do, there’s a load of windows on the main office building that’ve never been washed. I reckon the Major’ll be fuckin’ impressed if they’re all nice and sparkling clean at the end of the day, and he might give Admiral Knight the nod for letting that castle you put on his water tower stay there…”

“Aww, Legs!” Titan complained.

“What? I’m just making a suggestion.” Legs folded his arms and grinned. “Because otherwise you’re going to have to go back up there anyway and strip that nice castle you worked so hard to paint right off it again, aren’t you?”

The Defenders exchanged glances. “We’ll…go get the climbing gear.” Vandenberg said.

“Fuck aye.” Legsy nodded. “Have fun.”

He let them get on with it, and made a mental note to get the drone footage that Sikes had definitely taken, even if he’d deny it at first. It’d put the Major in a good mood to watch it, he knew.

“And won’t Adam an’ BASEBALL have a surprise when they get back…” he asked of nobody, turning back to admire the impromptu mural once again. Considering it had been done in the dead of night by four men in climbing gear fifty feet in the air, it was remarkably good. They must have been sneaking up there for days pencilling in the outline.

Adam and BASEBALL, meanwhile, would be back from leave in two days.

He gave it three days before there were Feet somewhere on that castle.

Date Point: 9y 2m 2w 2d AV London, England, Earth

Sean Harvey

“Hey.”

“Hey. I saw you on the news. That’s quite a memorial they built.”

“Yeah.”

Sean smiled as Ava hung her coat up and kissed him, then frowned at the door. “No Charlotte or Ben?”

“Tonight’s…not really appropriate for them.”

Her tone of voice finally got through to him, and Sean sighed. “You’re calling it off, aren’t you?”

“You always knew I was going to sometime soon.”

“Always kind of hoped you wouldn’t.” he replied, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’d known there was no changing her mind.

”…Come to bed.” She offered.

“I thought you were calling it off?”

“I am.” she agreed. “So let’s make the last time special.”

”…Alright. Grab your coat.”

“Huh?”

“I want more than just ‘come to bed’, duck. It’s a nice day out – let’s use it.”

Bemused, Ava put her coat back on and he took her hand.

It wasn’t a lavish date—at the best of times, Sean barely had enough money coming in to keep on top of his bills, council tax and student fees, meaning that any romantic notions of paying for expensive romantic moments like horse-drawn carriage rides in the park or whatever were out.

Mostly, they walked, held hands, talked and just enjoyed one another’s company. Sean’s fitness had improved hugely over the years, from daily walks with her. Previously he would have been sore and tired after a mile—now, a three hour gentle stroll down Archway Road and through Holloway to the City and onto Garden Bridge didn’t trouble him at all.

Sunset was staining the day’s few high clouds a brilliant pink and purple by the time they stood together, looking out over grey waters and Soho, surrounded by the scent and hissing of plants in the breeze.

“You’re right.” Ava commented, after they’d been silent a minute or so. “This is…right.”

Sean put his arm round her waist. “It’s going to be hard, you know.”

“What?”

“Being just your friend.”

She looked down at her feet, blinking, then hugged him. “Please try.” she pleaded. “I’d hate to lose you.”

“You’re not losing me duck.” he promised, stroking her hair. “I just said it’d be hard, not that I couldn’t do it.”

She let go again, wiping her cheeks dry. “You’re a lot tougher than you look, you know that?”

“You seem to bring out that quality in people.”

She didn’t answer, just sighed and nuzzled up against him until the sun went down.

They caught the tube back, still not saying anything. They just held hands on the walk back to Sean’s house. Only once they were inside and the door was locked did Ava break the comfortable silence.

“Come to bed.”

Sean took her hand, and for the last time she led him up the stairs.

Date Point: 9y 5m AV Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Jessica Olmstead

“THREE! TWO! ONE!”

Cheers erupted as gravity settled on everybody like a comfortable warm coat.

Jess and Gabe both shared a sigh of relief. There was just something about low gravity that the human body never quite adapted to. No matter how familiar it became, no matter how good you got at adjusting your preconceptions on how big such a small difference really was, there was just something in the bones and muscles that hankered for good old nine-point-eight meters per second per second.

The engineers who had installed Folctha’s new gravity generator shook hands or exchanged high-fives, and then got on with the business of tidying up all of the generator’s functional bits into the pedestal of the sculpture that had been selected to house it.

It was just a modified warp engine really, and therefore disarmingly small—Jess could have easily held it in one hand. It could have lived hidden away in any basement or office in Folctha, but public opinion had been that it should be somewhere that they could visit, and so by far the longest delay in installing it had been the wait while a sculpture had gone through the process of being commissioned and built, starting with approaching several different artists, then putting the matter to public opinion via Cimbrean’s burgeoning colonial internet.

The winning design was equal parts sculpture and water feature, an angular slate funnel named “Well” that echoed both the artificial gravity well that it would house, and also a source of water, for which purpose it caught the predictable nightly Cimbrean rains and allowed the very gravity it was generating to draw the rainwater through a filter, dispensing it via drinking fountain.

It now formed the centrepiece of New World Plaza. What had once been just a field amidst the temporary buildings of the early Folctha colony was now a brick-paved area with flower beds and market stalls that sold everything from clothing and blankets, books to hyper-modern gizmos like stasis fridges, solar-powered drone quadcopters and holographic TVs. There was even an e-tattoo artist, plus an assortment of missionaries, street preachers and pamphlet-dispensers.

Folctha, in short, had grown up. There was nothing left of the frontier huddle of little chalets and dirt roads. Nowadays everything was paved, the roads designed so that the utilities that ran beneath them could be serviced without disrupting traffic.

Nowadays, the buildings were three, four, five stories tall and a pale grey that looked white in the height of the day, hung with lights and banners of fibre-optic cloth.

Nowadays, the Faith Centre was just the first of many, the original Folctha Medical Center was now dwarfed by the Sara Tisdale Memorial Hospital, Delaney Row was a wide avenue lined with young silver birch trees and full of government buildings.

Everything was inspired by the alien palace that had once stood at the top of the hill, now rebuilt and permanent home to the Thing. Its looping geometric lines and rounded rooms had come to define Cimbrean architecture. Nobody seemed to mind that it was originally Corti architecture—the opportunity to riff on alien themes had been too good to pass up, and in many ways the coldly mathematical underpinnings of the original owner’s vision had been hugely exceeded and improved upon.

And now, finally, they were under Earth gravity again.

“You okay?” Jess asked Gabe. He squeezed her hand—despite his improving fitness, she never did quite manage to not worry about him. She knew he found it mostly endearing, but she’d rather irritate him sometimes than miss a moment when he genuinely needed help. He was good about admitting to those, when they came along.

“That actually feels better.” he told her quietly.

“Are you sure?”

“Mmhm.” he nodded.

“Chief?”

Cimbrean Colonial Security was Gabe’s success story—a modern, trim and professional police force whose high-vis yellow jackets were a familiar sight patrolling the city in pairs on foot, on bicycles, and in sturdy electric SUVs. Gabe had admitted in private that he would have preferred they be armed but Folctha was, after all, a British colony and the citizens had largely expressed a preference that their police force not be armed during their normal duties, reserving the firepower only for when it was needed.

“Yes, Hugh?”

“Bit of a disturbance down in the Alien Quarter, sir.”

Jess gave his hand a squeeze, kissed his cheek and pointed a thumb towards home with a wry smile. “I’ll see you later, ‘chief’.” she promised.

Gabe gave her a grateful smile and limped alongside Bailey towards the waiting CCS SUV.

Jess took in the dispersing crowd, and then headed for home.

She had to politely navigate a gauntlet of parents wanting to discuss their child with her. Despite the known detrimental effects of low gravity on a child’s growth and development, enough families had stuck it out, making do with trusting the small gravity generator that hummed gently to itself under Jess’ desk and the ones in gyms to make up the difference.

It wasn’t entirely clear if that trust was well-founded. None of the kids seemed to have anything wrong with them, but they were all growing up tall. Whatever the truth, the concerns had been enough to discourage anybody from trying to raise infants and toddlers in Folctha. Ever since the Tisdales had gone back to Earth, every new conception had been grounds for slight communal sorrow, knowing that one of their neighbours was leaving for however many years.

Hopefully, the gravity generator would change that. It would certainly save Jess’s job—if the current generation had finished growing up and no new youth had come along to replace them, the school would have been completely redundant.

Now, though, there was hope that some of those young parents might return, and that Folctha could move on with the business of becoming a real, permanent place for families.

All in all, the future was looking bright.

Date Point: 9y 6m AV London, England, Earth

Ava Rios

”…so between your online portfolio and your material already being used by CAUD, you’ve popped up on our radar as somebody to watch. Would you mind-?”

“Is this guy bothering you, baby?”

The guy in the suit damn near swallowed his tongue when he turned around and came face-to-face with Adam.

“Adam!” Ava had learned not to throw herself too hard into hugging him nowadays. It was an awful lot like shoulder-barging a wall. Still, it was difficult to resist. “Oh my God, I didn’t think you had any leave left!”

“Just two days.” Adam agreed. “So, I’ve got a flight to catch in ten hours, but…come on, I wasn’t going to miss your graduation!”

She gave him a huge kiss. “Did you see the speech?”

“Yep, on the screen in the lecture hall upstairs. Saw you getting your scroll, too.” He beamed. “Who’s this guy?”

“Oh! Uh, Levaughn Thomas, this is my boyfriend Adam.”

“Staff Sergeant Arés, I believe.” Thomas shook Adam’s hand, regaining his composure.

“Uh…yeah! How’d you know?”

“I’ve got a working relationship with your father.” Mr. Thomas revealed. “He’s such a pleasure to work with.”

“Ahh, you’re the Byron guy.” Adam nodded. “You offering Ava a job?”

Levaughn managed a smile that was microscopically less confident than usual. “Well…I was just getting to that.” he confirmed.

Ava inclined her head with a ‘go ahead’ smile, and Levaughn cleared his throat and handed her a card. “My contact details.” he declared. “Please, call me whenever you’re next on Cimbrean and I’ll be happy to pencil you in for a little chat.”

“I’ll be glad to!” Ava agreed, shaking his hand before slipping the card into her handbag.

“Damn.” Adam commented, watching Thomas leave.

“What?”

“Nothing, I’m just…not used to guys like him.”

“You mean you’re so used to drowning in testosterone you forgot that camp dudes exist.” Ava teased, and grinned all the more when a blush darkened his face. “So oh my God, you’ve got two days leave and you flew over here just to see me and you’re going to have to fly straight back out again?”

“Is…that okay?”

“You didn’t have to, beef stock.” She kissed him. “But I really appreciate it.”

“And look at you! Getting job offers from the Byron group!” Adam retorted, and gave her an affectionate one-armed squeeze.

“Oh!” Ava pointed and raised her voice. “SEAN!”

To his credit, Sean apparently had genuinely not noticed them, and to his even greater credit, upon spotting Adam he didn’t show any sign of nerves or steeling himself—he just excused himself from his current conversation and trotted over.

“Hey.” He greeted her as they shared a chaste cheek-kiss. “Congratulations on the First.”

“So you’re Sean.” Adam stuck a hand out. “Heard a lot about you.”

“All good, I hope.” Sean winced a little at Adam’s grip, but kept his dignity on pure height. He was nearly half a foot taller than Adam, and while he easily lost out on mass, he won back in altitude.

“So good it’d almost make a guy jealous!” Adam boomed, and gave him a friendly, very gentle knuckle to the upper arm. “We’ll have to have a drink sometime, you and me.”

“Yeah?”

“Dude, you’re Ava’s best friend, that means you’re automatically, like, one of my favourite people.”

Ava hid a smile behind her hand and mouthed the words ‘he is such a puppy’ at Sean.

Sean laughed, and genuinely relaxed for the first time in weeks. “A drink it is, then.”

“So what are you up to, now that you’re a graduate?” Adam asked him.

“Oh, my uncle’s an investigative journalist.” Sean revealed. “I’ve always wanted to do what he does, and he promised to take me under his wing so long as I did well on my course.”

“Did you?”

“Well enough.” Sean looked forgivably pleased with himself. “Mostly I’m going to be carrying the bags and managing the phone numbers, but it’s all good experience.”

“You’re getting paid, right?”

“Please, I wouldn’t do an unpaid internship if you paid me.” Sean joked.

Adam chuckled. “I knew I’d like you.” he said.

Ava tapped him on the arm. “We need to go do the cap-toss and turn the caps and gowns back in. Are you okay waiting here?” she asked.

“I’ll be over there, under the aircon.” Adam pointed to an out-of-the-way corner.

“Okay.” she gave him a light kiss and tilted her head toward the doors, looking at Sean. “Shall we?”

Sean nodded. “Good to meet you, Adam.”

“You too, buddy. Take care.”

Ava made sure the door was closed before asking him. “So…what do you think?”

“You could do a lot worse, duck.” Sean told her.

“You think so?”

“Look.” Sean stopped. “It’s obvious you two just…light up around each other. I get it, It’s the Ava and Adam show. And I’m happy for you, he really does seem like a great guy.”

“I hear a ‘but’ in there.”

”…Just…he seems so earnest, doesn’t he?” Sean chewed on a bit of loose skin on his lower lip as he thought. “I have this feeling like he’s the kind of guy who makes a plan and sticks to it and maybe doesn’t think through the consequences of that plan so very well.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Ava drawled.

Sean chuckled, but quickly became serious again.

“Just…be certain that he knows who you are and you know who he is. Okay?” He pleaded her. “Don’t rush in now that you’re on the last leg and fall at the final hurdle.”

“I think you’re mixing metaphors there.”

“Ava…“

She held up a peaceful hand. “I hear you, I hear you. And I promise, I will. I want to be happy with him, after all.”

”…And if you can’t be?”

“Sean…” she glanced back to make absolutely certain that there was no sign at all of Adam, then stole a last and tender kiss with him. “I know somebody else who’d make me just as happy.”

“The only difference is…he needs you more.”

“He does.” She agreed.

”…Alright.” he nodded. “Let’s go do that photo and get rid of these things, and then you can go be a hero.”

They followed the shouting and gestures out onto the steps in front of the building, lined up as directed by the photographer, and unpinned their caps ready to throw.

The countdown started, and Ava couldn’t resist one last gesture—just before they threw their caps into the air, she took Sean’s hand.

Date Point: 9y 7m AV London, England, Earth

Charlotte Gilroy

“Gosh. We really don’t have a lot of stuff do we?”

They really didn’t. Ben had sold off his course textbooks now that he no longer needed them, and between them their clothes and assorted possessions, carefully packed, worked out to two suitcases each and a half-dozen cardboard boxes.

“It’s just settling in, isn’t it?” Ben asked. “We’re graduates.”

“Yeah…Grown, responsible adults.” Charlotte laughed nervously, and raised a fist to face height with a scared smile. “Go us!”

Ben blinked at her, then put down the box he’d been carrying and rubbed her arms. “Are you okay?”

”…I don’t know where we’re going or what we’re doing.” Charlotte told him. “We kept forgetting to talk about it. Are we going up north, or over to Southampton, or…?”

“Oh!” Ben turned and dug through the box he’d just set down. “I had an idea there, actually…”

“You did?”

“Yep!” He replied. “Bear with…here it is!”

He handed her the kind of slim pamphlet so beloved of tourist attractions and the enthusiastically religious. She frowned at it. “Folctha?”

“Look, see?” Ben tapped the page, and his tattoos, with their usual immaculate sense of timing, chose that moment to animate the moon changing phases as it orbited the Earth. “They finished installing this big city-wide gravity generator last month, which means the whole of Folctha is constantly under Earth gravity now.”

“I don’t know…I mean, it would be nice to be close to Ava, but do we have any skills they’re going to want?”

“Well, I’m a civil engineering graduate, and you’re a midwife.” Ben pointed out. “Now, A: they’re building new structures and roads and stuff all the time out there, but more importantly…before that gravity generator was built, nobody in Folctha could have babies because of the low gravity being bad for child development.”

Charlotte blinked at him, then at the pamphlet. “But now it’s turned on…they’re going to need midwives!”

“Sounds like a plan?” He asked.

“It sounds like an excellent plan!”

“Well, there’s one more part to it…”

“Wha-?”

Ben was already on one knee, and Charlotte’s hands flew involuntarily to her mouth.

“I love you, Charlotte. Will you marry me?”

The word “yes” needed a full two minutes to finally find its way out of her.

Fortunately, she remembered how to nod long before then, and by the time it arrived, she was already wearing the ring he’d sold his textbooks to buy.

Date point: Christmas Day, 9y 11m 3w AV Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches.

Ava Rios

“So…Here it is! Merry Christmas!”

There were a couple of options here. Either Adam had gone completely nuts, or there was something special about the building that he was standing in front of and beaming about. Either way, it wasn’t immediately apparent what the big surprise he’d been talking about all day might be.

She examined it as his proud smile wilted slightly. It was a four-storey new build, clad in the distinctive local pale grey stone that Folctha’s architectural planning board had settled on to play an important role in their vision for the city’s aesthetic. The whole of Folctha was going to look clean and shiny, and mercifully characterful, with its organic nest of curves rather than straight, bland lines.

This one was on Demeter Road, which hadn’t even existed when the pair of them had left Cimbrean. Now it was one of the town’s major thoroughfares, leading in one direction toward Delaney Row and Palace Hill, and in the other towards an outlying agricultural town called Demeter, which in turn had road connections on to Big Bay and New Bristol.

The ground floor was all windows, and plainly unfurnished, but the sign was in place: “The Dog House.” and below that, in slightly smaller letters: “Strength, Nutrition, Fitness.”

“A gym?” she asked.

“Yep! Titan’s always wanted to have one, so I chipped in the money to buy the building alongside him.”

“You own a building?!”

“Well, we both had that big homesteading grant to draw on and, y’know property prices are so cheap round here right now we figured we’d probably be able get something else each, too if we joined forces on this one…” Adam shrugged. “So, he owns the gym and the basement, and I own the rest.”

“Holy shit Adam!” She looked up and down the street calculating. “You realise that by the time you’ve paid the loan off this thing’ll be worth, like, triple what you paid for it?”

“Yep.” He beamed that big puppy smile. “It’s an investment.”

“So what’s the rest?”

“Come and see.”

He led her round the side of the building, to a well-lit parking area and a door with a number pad. “Code’s three-three-eight-six.” he said, entering it. The door buzzed and admitted them into a clean stairwell with a nice tiled floor, plus the fire exit from the gym and the door down to the basement.

Ava shrugged and followed him as he bounded up the stairs, to the top floor.

“Penthouse suite!” he announced, unlocking it with a key.

“Holy…Adam, this is gorgeous!” Ava stepped into it and looked around. The penthouse was a studio apartment, with the bedroom partitioned off from the open-plan kitchen and dining area by means of the bathroom. Adam must have accidentally intimidate the contractors or something, because the fittings and décor were amazing—white counters with dark wood surfaces, wood flooring, and warm indirect lighting throughout. It was maybe missing a few personal touches like artwork and furniture, but other than that…

What was more, it had stairs leading up to the roof which Adam rushed to unlock with a grin, beckoning her to follow.

“And the view from the roof…” he said, gesturing out across it.

It took Ava’s breath away. She could see the Palace, and the still-lit smart fabric spike of the Thing hall, currently pulsing through festive green, white and red. The alien quarter, protected from harmful Deathworlder diseases, pollens and spores by a triple layered dome of filter forcefields that glowed very faintly in the dark and dominated by the Gaoian enclave slash monastery. She could see the New World Plaza where this year’s Christmas tree was a beacon of warm light, and from which music could still be heard drifting over the streets and rooftops.

“You can see the lake from here too during the day, and: good news. From what I heard, it’s going to be getting a clean bill of health from the Reclamation Project pretty soon.” Adam told her, then turned to her. “What do you think?”

“I think…wow, you really got this right. You’re going to have a tidy fortune in a few years…What’re you going to do, rent this out, or…?”

“The two apartments downstairs, yeah.” Adam said. He took her hand and put something small, metallic and jagged in it. “The penthouse is yours.”

Ava was so surprised that she almost dropped the key. “You’re-? Adam, you’re kidding?!”

“Nope. You need somewhere to live, right? So, live here. If you want to pay rent on it, I can shove it in a savings account or something, whatever.”

He took her hand and gently towed her downstairs again—she was so stunned that she followed him automatically.

“Furniture’s coming day after tomorrow.” he said. “Sorry, I’d hoped to have it all in, but the timing…”

“It’s…don’t apologize, I…Adam, are you sure?”

“Totally sure.” he told her. “And, um…I was thinking…y’know, I’m back here now, you’re back here now, and I thought we could…” He brought his hand into view. It had a little black cube in it, which split down the middle. “…make up for lost time.”

It was a beautiful ring. A delicate moebius loop of white gold, spun back on itself so that it was almost two rings, joined by a blue diamond. It was exquisite, and she stared at it sadly.

The moment attenuated until Adam finally inclined his head slightly and asked, in a vulnerable tone she hadn’t heard since he’d asked her on their first date, “…Ava?”

She had to wind up into her question, her head moving in a slow shaking movement before she tore her gaze off the ring and looked at his face. This was all so amazing that part of her was sorely tempted to just hold her hand out, say yes and have done with it.

But Sean had still been right.

”…What am I to you, Adam?” she asked.

He frowned, lowering the box unconsciously. “I don’t…uh, what do you mean?”

“What am I to you?” she repeated. “What do I mean to you?”

“Well, you’re…” he began, then seemed to trip mid-thought. “You’re my-”

“I’m your? Your what?”

He shook his head again. “No you’re…you’re you.”

“I’m your me?”

“No, you’re your you!”

She nodded fiercely. “And what. Am. I?”

He spread his hands helplessly. “I don’t know what you want from me.” he confessed.

She spelled it out for him. “Do you love me?”

She could see his instinctive response coming and snapped up a hand to stop him. “I know you do!” she added. “But there’s…look, over the last five years we’ve barely seen each other, and that ‘barely’ was mostly getting together every few months to…to screw as much as possible between your training sessions!”

“Can you stand there and honestly claim to love me, really love me, if that’s all we’ve had for so long? Do you even know who I am any more?” She waved her hand up and down him, gesturing to everything that had changed about him since they had been seventeen. “I mean…Do I love you or a memory of you? You’ve changed a lot, and so have I. If we’re going to work, if we’re going to be together, then we both need to know that we love each other for who we are now.”

His mouth closed, and very, very slowly, he looked away. Ava deflated. “Then…Adam, corazon, I’m so sorry, but…this is all amazing, but…no. I can’t marry you. Not yet, not until…” She trailed off, knowing that she had to leave that door opening, but not knowing what more to say.

Adam pocketed the ring. “I’ll, uh…” he coughed. “I’ll…stay on the base tonight, I guess.”

She nodded, and stepped aside. Adam squeezed past her and out the door.

“You, uh…this place is still yours, for as long as you want it.” he told her. “I’ll…see you around I guess.”

Ava nodded. “Yeah.” she croaked. “See ya.”

He turned away and creaked unsteadily down the stairs, so she shut the door then leaned against it.

That done, she let go and slid down to the floor in tears. He’d looked so broken.

“GONE!! It’s all gone! All of it’s gone bye-bye WOOWOO seeya!”

“What happened to you?”

“One minute you’re defending the whole galaxy, and suddenly you find yourself suckin’ down darjeeling with Marie Antoinette and her little sister…”

Movie night for the Operators was frequently an exercise in cramming ten men onto a single oversized three-seat couch, custom built to SOR requirements by Rebar and crew. It was huge, strong, and comfy, with plenty of room for even their massive frames to sit and spread out.

At least, on a normal day. Movie night, on the other hand, taxed even its over-engineered limits when ten Spaceborne Operators crammed onto it in a tangle of limbs, using each other as pillows, sitting on each others’ laps, and thinking nothing of being so wrapped up in the puppy pile that it would once, in their younger civilian years, have made them deeply uncomfortable.

Nowadays? It was fraternal, and comforting. All of their training, the constant physical closeness, the team-building and the end result of all they had been through together meant they were entirely comfortable with almost too high a degree of physical intimacy.

This created occasional problems.

“Whose legs are these? Yo Titan, these yours?”

“How the fuck are they mine, I’m all the way over here!”

“Well one of you assholes needs to move his feet, I gotta piss!”

A few of the guys wiggled their feet experimentally while a crazed astronaut ranted on the screen. “You see the hat? I am MRS! NESBITT!!”

“Oh. Shit. Sorry bruv.”

“Man, get off me!”

The knot untangled enough for BASEBALL to squeeze out from under it and roll over the back of the couch, and they collapsed back inwards as the guys found new comfortable spots to fill the void.

“But…the hat looked good? Tell me the hat looked good…the apron is a bit much but-“

“Man, even Toy Story isn’t cheering him up.”

Adam sighed. “Nah, it’s…helping.” he promised.

“Pull the other one, pal.” Legsy admonished him.

Adam just snuggled into the couch a bit further and tried to watch.

”“I just…can’t figure it out.” he said. “I was away from HER for all those years as well, you know? It wasn’t like being away from her for that long was easy for me either.”

Akiyama spoke up. “Women are high maintenance, man.” he shared.

Price snorted. “Fuck off, you’ve got less experience with women than WARHORSE does.”

Akiyama took the insult with a smile “You wanna talk about getting laid, little man?”

Price shrugged.“Okay, what d’you want to know?”

There was a collective “WOOAH!!” and a round of high-fives.

“Nah, boys, fuckin’…” Legsy tried to chime in as it died down, but Adam plainly wasn’t in the mood. He lifted half the guys off him at once, slithered out from under them, and stood up.

“I’ll…be in the gym.” he announced.

There was a long moment of silence after he’d gone. Nobody was paying attention to the movie anymore.

“He’s real tore up, ain’t he?”

“They were together a long time.” Legsy said. “This shit’s not helping, he doesn’t need a puppy pile, he needs advice.”

“You’re the one to give it then, Legs.” Price noted. “Go be big brother.”

”…Yeah. Think you’re right.”

Legsy waited until the movie was done before he intruded in the gym. Adam was casually swinging a bulky jerry can around one-handed like a kettlebell, working up a good sheen of sweat.

“Going kinda light aren’t you?” Legsy asked him. The gravity was set at 1G, Earth Standard, and if that can was full of water then it was far below Adam’s potential.

“You think so?” Adam asked. “There’s a spare right there if you want to join in.”

Legsy shrugged. His own fitness regime focused on speed and explosive force as a rule, but this wasn’t about him, right now. He picked up the can.

Or at least, he tried to. It wasn’t full of water, that was for damn sure—he barely rocked it when he tried to grab it, and he didn’t get it off the ground until he stood over it properly and treated it as a lift.

“Fuckin’…CHRIST!” he dropped it again. “What’s in that?”

“Buckshot.” Adam’s trademark goofy grin put in a cameo reappearance, a good deal more melancholy than usual but at least it was - finally - a break in his bad mood.

“You little shit, there’s no way you’re swinging THAT around like that, put it down let me…”

Adam shrugged and did so. Legsy had been half-right—the one he had been using was a bit lighter, but still far heavier than Legsy could have used for endurance training like that.

“Two thirds full.” Adam revealed. In the meanwhile, he’d picked up the big can and was now slowly and deliberately performing stiff, one-armed shoulder raises. The motion was much like a kettleball swing, but without the use of momentum to aid the lift, making it a much more difficult exercise. Legsy watched in silent admiration as, in the space of about a minute, he went from merely sweaty to dripping.

He set the can down, huffing with a satisfied expression. “I’m not heavy enough to swing the the big one without the suit. Not yet, anyway. Hell, even in the tighter and heavier midsuit ‘Base and I switched to, and even with the added armor plating we wear now, and even with a full combat load, swinging it is tricky. The momentum just throws me around, man. Which…y’know, hurts.”

“Aye,” said Legsy. “Seems to drain you right quick, too.”

“Uh huh. Liftin’ really heavy makes me sweat so much I can get dehydrated in just a couple of minutes if I ain’t careful. But that’s only when I ain’t wearin’ the suit, and only if I do something big like this. So without the suit I work intervals and switch off between the two cans.”

“You been at this since the movie?”

“Yup. This is my eighth set.” He picked up the lighter can and start swinging again. “Slowly gettin’ better. A few months ago? This woulda practically killed me. Now it’s just a good workout.”

Legsy said nothing for a long moment, then made a disbelieving little noise and shook his head. “Fuckin’ Christ mate, just how fuckin’ strong ARE you?”

Adam shrugged, put down the can, then burrowed around in his open locker and produced a little hand-sized notepad. When Legsy flipped it open, what he found pencilled in was a list of exercises, and numbers. They were all crossed off.

“What’s this?”

“World records.” Adam shrugged again. “It’s the Crude, man. Thanks to that shit, I’m probably the strongest person in the galaxy.”

“Yeah, maybe. Probably. I met that Saunders bloke we learned about Cruezzir from in the first place. He looked about as big as you, but taller. Longer bones, less mechanical advantage.” Legsy mused, then handed back the notepad. “And he din’t train like you, neither.” He added. “Is this…wise?”

“Probably not.” Adam conceded. “But, how long have we got until the resistance kicks in? I guess if Ava thinks I gave up on her for this, and maybe she’s right. Maybe I did…”

He trailed off, then reset. “I guess if she thinks that then maybe that’s all I have right now, is getting the best out of this stuff before I start to become immune.”

“Fuck me, you’re a stupid twat sometimes, pal.” Legsy shook his head. Adam frowned at him—it hadn’t been the typical laddish insult between brothers-in-arms, but had sounded like a genuine appraisal of his intelligence.

“What?”

“If she thinks you gave up on her, then that means she wants you to start workin’ on her again, doesn’t it!”

“Does it?”

Legsy sighed and laughed, shaking his head. “Siddown, Adam.” he said. “Let me tell you the ways of the women folk.”

Adam frowned at him, but obeyed, perching atop the same can he’d just been training with.

Legsy sat opposite him. “What exactly did she say to you?” he asked.

“She asked me…’what am I to you?‘. Uh…what is she to me, you know?”

“Right…?”

“And then, she, uh…she told me to tell her honestly that I still love her after all those years going away and…that kind of thing.”

“Well that wasn’t exactly fair of her…” Legsy opined. “But alright.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well…okay, gut response here, one word, first one that springs to mind…” Legsy suggested “…DO you love her?”

“Yes!”

“Good. Right. but here’s the next question: What IS love? And none of that ‘Baby don’t hurt me’ crap.”

”…huh?”

“Eh, that’s maybe a bit before your time.” Legsy allowed. “But go on, try and answer it.”

“Well, it’s…” Adam thought about it. “Love, it’s an emotion, right?”

“Half right. You can feel love, and you can love, right? You can do love, not just feel it.”

“A verb.” Adam nodded.

“Fuckin’ right. You’ve got love the, uh…” Legsy clicked his fingers as he searched his memory. “Whatsit, the noun?”

“Yeah.”

“So….yeah. You love her, but you don’t love her, see? Noun love versus verb love.”

“You’re saying she needs both?” Adam asked him.

“Secret one about women, mate: A lot of the time, the verb counts for more with them than the noun, like. And, secret one about blokes: by and large, we’re the other way round.”

“Come on!” Adam protested. “They’re more complicated than that. SHE’S more complicated than that!”

Legsy shrugged. “How d’you know somebody loves you?” he asked.

Adam scratched above his ear. “Well…I…I guess you…”

Legsy just raised an eyebrow at him, waiting.

Adam deflated. “I guess because they…show it. They do stuff for you.”

“Fuckin’ right! And ANY woman, complicated or not, needs to KNOW that you love her. Needs to have it SHOWN. Because blokes, y’know, we’re stupid buggers, we feel it and we’ll just go ahead and fuckin’ assume that they feel the same way, and carry on. Women, though? They think about love, a lot. They…a lot of the time, they love you so much they worry that they’re loving you more than you love them. See? They don’t just assume it.”

“Ava’s not insecure, though.”

“It’s not insecure, mate. It’s…” Legsy’s gaze flickered about the room and he spread his hands, marshalling his words. “They don’t want to get ripped off. Right? That’s actually smarter than how we do.”

“They want to know they’re getting a good return on their emotional investment.” Adam translated.

“Right! You got it!”

Adam sighed. “Yeah…I got it.”

”…so?”

Adam frowned. “…So…what?”

Legsy looked down and rubbed his forehead. “How fuckin’ dense ARE you?” he asked. “I’ve just told you that what she wants is to be SHOWN that you love her.”

“But she broke it off!” Adam exclaimed. “And…she’s right, we hardly know each other any more! It’s not going to be as simple as…as flowers and chocolate!”

“So start. Over.” Legsy suggested. “Get to know her again, let her get to know you again. Go on a new first date! If that relationship’s over, then start a new one with her!”

”…You think we can do that?”

“Adam, pal…I reckon that’s what she wants more than anything.” Legsy told him, gravely.

He let Adam sit and think, until the younger man finally nodded. “I’ll…give it a few days. I need to work up my courage and…figure out what I’m gonna say.”

“Good idea. But if we get to Saturday and you’ve still not done it, I’m draggin’ you down there myself. Fair?”

“Fair”.

Legsy stood up. “I’ll let you get on and think, then.” he said.

”…Thanks, Legsy.”

Legsy just clapped a hand on his shoulder and left him alone.

“Ava!” Jess’ expression fell on seeing her former student’s downcast expression and smudged makeup. “Oh…honey, what’s wrong? Or is this one for Gabe?”

“This is…” Ava sighed, entering their apartment. “I don’t know” she said, simply, and shrugged. “Adam proposed.”

“He did?” Gabe asked, emerging from the kitchen.

“Yeah. Didn’t he tell you?”

“Madre de Dios, mi hijo es un idiota a veces…“Gabe sighed. “No, he…Are you okay?”

“Just…drained.” Ava sat down at the table. “I tried to leave the door open, but…I don’t think he really knows why I said no, or if he got that I really do WANT to marry him, I just…”

Her hair bunched up as she planted her elbows on the table and raked her fingers across her scalp, then threw her hands down on the table. “Five years, you know?”

“Sounds like you both need some advice.” Gabe noted.

“What’s to advise? We need to start over. But if it’s going to work, he needs to…God, this sounds so selfish, but he needs to focus on me a bit, right? Is that selfish?”

“No, that’s a marriage.” Jess replied.

“It feels selfish. I just…you know, I…I…”

“What?”

”…Can you promise me that this will never, ever get back to him? Ever?”

Jess and Gabe exchanged glances, but nodded.

“I, uh…” Ava took a cleansing breath and looked up at them. “I cheated on him.”

Gabe sat down, expression unreadable and creating a vacuum that she just had to fill.

“I…God.” Ava sat back and looked around the kitchen as she gathered her thoughts. “That sounds terrible…”

She wiped her eyes. “…I came this close to breaking up with him” she said, finally. “The only reason I didn’t is because this…friend…of mine, he helped me stay on top of it. He helped me feel…”

She cleared her throat, leaned forward and made eye contact again. “The one thing Adam told me time and again is that I’m what kept him going when things got tough. Right? But he wasn’t keeping me going, you know? All of that energy, all of that love, it was only going one way, and I guess I just…I ran out. And, and I needed somebody else to send some of that energy to me for a while. That’s half of it.”

An uncomfortable half-minute ticked out on the wall clock, during which Jess surreptitiously blew her nose.

“And the other half?” Gabriel prompted.

Ava spoke to her own hands rather than look at him. “He’s a special operator now, you know? I have to get used to the idea that…that maybe one day he’ll go on a mission and only a flag will come back. That’s how it has to be, you know? And…What happens then? If I’m- if my feelings are so tied up to him, and that ever happened…I mean, if I’m not me first, if I’m all about him and he dies, then what does that leave me with?”

Behind Gabe’s back, Jess nodded. Gabe himself was just still, and a little old and damaged and attentive, leaving an intolerable void where his part of the conversation should have been.

“This…this is all coming out wrong. I’m making it sound like I, or…Dad, I’m sorry.”

Gabe just reached over the table and took her hand. “Don’t.” he said, gently. “Do you regret it?”

“No.”

The answer seemed to be the opposite of what Gabriel had wanted and expected to hear. “…You don’t?”

“I…learned a lot. About how to let go and, and…and how to…” she took a breath and started over. “I love Adam. Come on, how many guys are there in the world who’d go through what he has all so he can throw himself in harm’s way to protect other people? He’s my hero! And…If there’s such a thing as a soulmate, he’s mine, I know it. But I had to learn that I can’t afford to love him that much if I couldn’t live without him. Does that make sense?”

Gabe’s ability to just listen kept pulling her forward. “And…now I know I could. And knowing that I could keep going even if he died tomorrow…it kind of frees me to be able to love him as much as I want to. Please, does…does that make sense?”

Gabe finally looked down, and squeezed her hand gently. “I…guess it does.” he said, finally. “I don’t like to think about him getting…” He trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.

“I never thought about…mama and papa, or my school friends, or whatever.” Ava replied. “I didn’t like to think about death at all. But you have to, Dad. You have to think about death. They died, when I accidentally poisoned myself that one time I thought I was gonna die, I saw you nearly die when that guy shot you…Sara…and now Adam’s a soldier.”

Jess shut her eyes and looked away, but Ava surged on. “You’ve got to think about it, and you’ve got to have a plan, because there’s no if involved. There’s just…there’s when. Isn’t there? And I had to know I was strong enough to keep going without him. I had to know…I had to know he wasn’t everything. I don’t think I’d dare to love him if he was everything.”

There was an eternity where the only sound was the buzz of the lighting and fridge-freezer, before Gabe finally deflated. “…Entiendo.” he murmured.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“I thought you said you don’t regret it?” Gabe asked.

Ava stumbled. “Well…no, I don’t.” She agreed.

“Then don’t apologise. It’s not…” He sighed, then looked back at Jess, who gave him a weak smile and took his hand over his shoulder. “It’s not something I’d have done, and I don’t know if I think it’s ever justified, but…we trust you, Ava. If you think you needed to do it…I wasn’t there, I can’t judge.”

Ava produced a weak smile of her own. “Thank you.” her voice was full of relief and true gratitude.

“You need to work on your communication, though.” Gabe continued. “There’s no way he’ll figure it out himself. You should have spelled out the problem, rather than just turning him down.”

Jess nodded. “Adam’s a remarkable man.” she said, addressing Ava. “But…you’re the only girlfriend he’s ever had. He won’t know how to figure out what you’re feeling, nor how to cope.”

“I can’t tell him what I did, it’d totally break him!” Ava protested.

“Jess is right, though.” Gabe told her. “Even if he never learns……what you did…he still needs to be told that it’s got to be a real relationship, not just two survivors putting each other on a pedestal and not really having a whole lot in common.”

Ava relaxed. “I knew you’d think of how to phrase it.” she said.

“Well, you’ll probably think of something better if you give it time to think.” Jess replied. “But…just make sure you tell him sooner rather than later, okay? He’s going to need to be told that you want to start over.”

“And tell him to come talk to us!” Gabe added.

“I can do that.” Ava promised. “I’ll talk to him, when I know what to say.”

“Probably sensible.” Jess agreed. “Like you said—you never know what’s going to happen.”

Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 6—Operation NOVA HOUND

Date Point: First Contact Day, 10y AV
Capitol Station, Capitol System, Dominion Space.

Officer Regaari Clan Whitecrest Attaché to the Mother-Supreme.

“You’re both courting a controversy, you know. A scandal, even, given how close you both are to me.”

Regaari’s head-duck of agreement had an unconsciously immature, cubbish quirk to it that came naturally when Giymuy engaged her Mother’s instincts. The Mother-Supreme was now silver from eartip to foot and thoroughly venerable. Over the years of working together, her relationship with Regaari had thawed from purely professional, to something of a friendship, but she was still the Mother, and when she gave advice, deference was instinctive.

“I know…” he agreed, reluctantly. ”‘Human ideas, eroding Gaoian culture.’ I’ve been staying well abreast of the backlash. We both have, which is why we’ve only…talked about it.”

“Even talking about it is ‘heresy,’ in some camps.”

“That’s a human word.”

“Indeed it is.”

Regaari caught the sad irony in Giymuy’s agreement. “We’re a free society.” he pointed out. “Free to speak our minds, free to act and do as we please so long as we cause no harm. Aren’t we?”

“So it has been since before the females were united.” Giymuy agreed. “But, I note, we have never actually been cunning enough to codify those freedoms in law. And in the meantime some peoples’ ideas of what constitutes ‘harm’ have broadened, spreading out to cover a wider area but, I think, becoming shallower in the process.”

“The humans need those things coded in law.” Regaari pointed out. “In fact they were, from what I gather, something of a revolutionary concept when first introduced. We meanwhile have always taken them as self-evident. You don’t need a law granting people the freedom to.. to breathe, or to eat.”

Giymuy chuffed. ”‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’” she quoted.

Regaari, being the one who had first introduced that document to her, recognised the quotation instantly. “Missing, of course, the irony that if they really WERE self-evident then they would never have had to write them down.”

Giymuy duck-nodded herself. “Meanwhile, we DID find them self-evident.” she observed.

“And yet you’re warning me that Ayma and I are courting controversy by preferring each others’ company.”

“Dare I whisper the word ‘monogamy’?”

“It’s not…she’s had other cubs since mine. It’s just that we still enjoy each others’ company and…we still feel much the same as we did when we sired that cub.” Regaari stood and paced the room. “And this, somehow, is a brewing scandal. A male and a female liking each other and wishing to spend time together, rather than simply remembering one another as a fond, temporary dalliance? Perhaps those truths aren’t so self-evident after all, perhaps Gaoians have all just…thought too much alike up until now.”

Giymuy chittered loudly and at length at that one. “Oh!” she gasped, trying to recover. “If only we did! There would be no need for a Mother-Supreme and I could retire and live out my time surrounded by cubs and happy young Mothers.”

She regained her composure, and noticed the slightly offended set of Regaari’s ears. “Ah, I am sorry. You may be right. We are discussing the… adulteration of our culture by alien ideas, after all.”

“That was probably inevitable the moment we made First Contact.” Regaari grumbled.

“We know that.” Giymuy gestured to the station they were aboard. “Many Gaoians may not. And this is the root of our problem—–we are being changed by these ideas whether we like it or not. These ideas of ‘heresy’ and ‘taboo’ are just as much a pollution of what it means to be Gaoian as…pizza, pancakes, meditation and monogamy. Then there’s poor Myun. I never imagined that I’d see the day when a young, healthy, intelligent and very pretty female was shunned because no male will court her for fear of the political consequences.”

Regaari snarled a little angry laugh. “Oh yes. they’ll hire her to provide hand-to-hand combat instruction, but mating with the ‘freak’?” He growled a little. “If she wasn’t young enough to be one of my cubs, I might approach her with a contract myself just to spite them.”

“Why not?” Giymuy asked. “You’re already flirting with scandal with Ayma, and you’d be actively seeking it by courting Myun. Why should age make a difference at that point? Maybe your example is all that’s needed to rehabilitate an outcast.”

Regaari fell silent. He was still considering the suggestion when the communicator in his pocket buzzed. He tapped it with a claw. “They’re ready for you in the council chamber.” he said.

“It’s about time…where’s my stick?”

Regaari handed it to her. Giymuy had many walking sticks these days, and each one was a calculated statement. For today, she had selected the natural, knurled one made of Cimbrean Pinkwood, a now-extinct species that had once occupied one small portion of a continent that was now long swallowed up by deathworlder terraforming. The humans had logged the lot rather than let it be ruined by the advancing tide of disease, and had sold the wood to collectors to drum up funds. Giymuy had snapped up three tree’s worth. Craftsmen from every clan on Gao and beyond had vied for the privilege of creating the sticks, desk and curiosities she had commissioned, predicting that the prestige of creating for her would improve their own mating chances.

Giymuy in turn had encouraged them by selecting lesser-known, obscure males for the privilege. The famous ones, she had reasoned, didn’t need the help. Now, the stick tapped sharply on the decorative stone tiles of the Capitol Station concourse as they left the Gaoian ambassadorial quarters. Dominion security guards—two Vzk’tk, two Kwmbwrw—fell in line behind the entourage of four Gaoian guards from Clan Flashfang, all painfully eager young males and all—Regaari had seen to this personally—trained to handle threats up to and including a human.

It was quite the little procession. Giymuy had chosen simple charcoal robes that offset her fur, and wore three loops of fine gold chain clasped to each ear. The effect was venerable and dignified, still understated, but enough to make her stand out next to Regaari’s severe black uniform, or her guards’ combat harnesses.

This was a big occasion: A galactic broadcast that had taken some negotiation to secure. Even Regaari didn’t know what the Mother-Supreme had planned for the address she was about to give to the Dominion Grand Council, but he was looking forward to it.

Every species had automatic membership and presence on the Grand Council, even if they were not Dominion members. Even if that species was an enthusiastic member of the Celzi Alliance, there were dissenters, ones who had chosen to side with the Dominion, representing their species. An unpopular minority at home, perhaps, but still there. The only vacant seats belonged to the declining species, who no longer cared to show up…And to the humans.

There was a space for them, but it remained unoccupied. Regaari wasn’t even sure if the deathworlders knew that space existed.

Giymuy created a stir when she walked right past the podium that had been set up for her, and instead strode into the area designated for humans. The susurrus this move generated soon became a white noise that only subsided when the chairman—a rotund VGork nearly as large as a young Guvnurag—slammed his gavel into the desk in front of him with enough force to dent the wood.

“Mother-Supreme Giymuy.” he began, addressing her. “That place is for the delegates from Earth.”

“The delegates from Earth, Chairman” Giymuy replied, speaking with surprising force and clarity for her age “Do not know that this seat exists. This council has never seen fit to inform them of it nor invite them to attend. I am taking the liberty of speaking on their behalf.”

The chairman slammed down his gavel again as the gathered species took to muttering to one another again. “Can I not persuade you to take the podium?” He asked.

“You can not, Chairman.”

The Chairman considered her for a while, then backed down. “Then please. Continue.”

Giymuy accepted the concession with a slight bow to the chair, then turned to address the Council as a whole.

“Gaoians and Humans share a fondness for Base Ten mathematics.” she began. “Which is why I note that, by the calendar of the planet Earth, It has now been exactly ten years since the Hunters raided their city of Vancouver. Less than three of their years later, the human race achieved faster-than-light manned flight for the first time. Those ten years have been…tumultuous and interesting, and often controversial.”

She tapped her stick down, twice. “The Dominion’s response to this singular deathworld species has been one of fear and mistrust. This stick I am holding is a symbol of why that fear is justified, being made from the wood of a tree now extinct due to them. I am not here to argue against the policy of the last ten years—the past cannot be undone—but to share a vision of policy for the next ten.”

This time, the delegates were polite enough to remain silent and listen.

“The humans are here to stay.” she announced. “Even if we never see one again, even if they were to retreat behind their quarantine field and remain there, they have already changed the outlook of many species, on a great many things. Even now, the questions are being asked ‘why haven’t we united to fight the Hunters?’, ‘Why has the Dominion-Alliance war gone on for so long without ceasefire or negotiation?’, ‘Why do we transport goods in vulnerable freighters and lose their crews to Hunters and piracy when displacement jump drives render the very concept of a freighter obsolete?‘”

“I have seen personally just how powerful and dangerous humans are. I have seen for myself, some of the plagues that our one human visitor—my clan-Sister—could have unleashed on Gao, which would surely have killed our entire species if we had lacked the technology to protect ourselves. Humans are undeniably dangerous. But so too are the tools that were used to build this station. So too are fire, or the knives used to prepare food.”

She tapped her stick again. “Unlike those things, humans are thinking, living beings. Fellow intelligent life, which is a rare and precious thing in this galaxy. My clan-sister would have wept and been thrown into the kind of despair none of us here can imagine, if she had been forced to watch the Gaoian people die through no real fault of her own. They know, or are learning, that they are dangerous. Where it is already too late for them to prevent the damage, they are trying to repair it as best they can. Where it is not, they are taking precautions to prevent harm.”

“On their behalf, given their absence from this assembly, I humbly beseech the council to–”

She was cut off. Blue lighting—the universal colour of emergency and alarm—slammed on and a deep howl filled the council chamber. She was still standing bemused by it, ears twitching back and forth, when Regaari took her by the arm and escorted her with inexorable firmness, towards the exit.

“Regaari? What is happening?” She asked.

The male’s ears were pricked up and his teeth bared—sure signs of stress, alertness and concentration. He was listening to words that Giymuy could not hear, and reading words she could not see.

“The station’s under attack.” He reported, tersely.

“Who by?”

“That’s still being…” His ears rose, then flattened against his skull.

“Regaari?”

”…The Swarm of Swarms.” he quickened the pace. “The Hunters are back.”

HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Major Owen Powell

“FALL IN! Fall in and listen the fook up!”

The Operators had been in the middle of tidying up the barracks and doing basic chores like the washing up and laundry. They immediately dropped what they were doing and fell in around him, giving Powell their full and undivided attention. He didn’t skip a beat.

“Ten minutes ago our listening post in the Capitol system sent back its message buoy, reporting a massive spike in activity on Hunter communications channels and several sensor contacts. The Swarm’s attacking Capitol Station. Gear up and get on the shuttle, We dust off in three! Go, GO!”

Gearing up was a simple as grabbing the emergency bags that they all kept in the locker room for this exact reason and sprinting for the waiting shuttlecraft which had set down on the base’s helipad. It was a simple, stock Dominion model, little more than a dull grey cuboid with a window in the front and a door in the back. No human company had yet developed a version that the armed services liked well enough to buy, much to the grumbling of the people who had to use them, who were universally of the opinion that literally anything human-made would have been an improvement.

They were aboard and belted in in less than two minutes. Powell stood towards the front, gripping an overhead strap to stabilise himself as the little craft lurched skyward.

“Right, This operation is called ‘NOVA HOUND’.” he began, raising his voice over the engines. “Lucky for us, we’ve got an OPLAN for this exact scenario. The attack began ten or fifteen minutes ago. Our estimated response time is forty or fifty minutes. By the time we’re on scene, the defending fleet will have been brushed aside and the station itself will have been overrun by Hunters for a good half hour. Safe to assume that civilian casualties are total, and in this station’s case that’s a good twelve thousand people.”

“VIPs—council members, ambassadors, visiting dignitaries—have all got security details with them, which we believe makes enough difference. We have schematics for Capitol Station, we think we know where they’re likely to be holed up. Our mission is rescue and extraction of as many dignitaries and civilians as we can. Secondary objectives include causing as much damage as possible to the Swarm, intelligence gathering, and propaganda.”

“We’ll be deploying on Caledonia, which has been refit as a staging and hospital ship. The V-class destroyers are the frontline, they’ll hold the swarm by the nose. They’ve got the staying power and EWAR. Myrmidon will be serving in its new role as on-field energy support, keeping the V-class’ charged. Meanwhile, USAF TS/2 squadrons will deliver the killing blows and provide close screen. Both of them are there as a big distraction to let the men on this shuttle accomplish the real mission.”

“Our overwatch is provided by JETS, led by Lieutenant Ross aboard HMS Caledonia. Jones, Murray, Price, you’re covert infiltration and assault. Your job is to drive the outboard and dive onto the station, effect quiet ingress as close to the target section as possible. Blaczynski, Firth, you’re on the boat too, as am I. We help secure our foothold then dig in and command.”

“Once we’re in, the Protectors—-that’s Arés and Burgess—-and Defenders-—Stevenson, Sikes, Akiyama and Vandenberg—-Jump in from the shipboard array. That’s the assault team’s cue to go monkey-shit on the Hunters, leave none of them alive. Delta sets up the evacuation Array then maintains our perimeter and runs combat camera. Protectors, you’ll be handling the refugees. Hunters usually kill outright, so there probably won’t be a lot of medicine to do, so you’re also humping ammo and gear for the assault team. The evac Array will be sending the civilians to the deck of HMS Caledonia. We’ll be using our default callsigns. I’m STAINLESS. Any questions?”

“Sir.” Stevenson raised his hand. “Do we bring a backup Array?”

Powell nodded. “Yes. Any further questions? No? Are we clear?”

“YES SIR!”

“Right. Give me your war names!”

“LONGLEGS!”

“STERLING!”

“HIGHLAND!”

“RIGHTEOUS!”

“STARFALL!”

“TITAN!”

“THOR!”

“REBAR!”

“SNAPFIRE!”

“BASEBALL!”

“WARHORSE!”

“And don’t you fookin’ forget it, lads. Let’s do this right.”

Capitol Station, orbiting Planet Garden, Capitol System, Dominion Space

Regaari

“Every shot we fire misses—they’re just NOT THERE any more. I don’t know where they learned a trick like this, but we’re losing ships fast out here, and inflicting no damage that I can see.”

“No hope of holding the field?” Regaari was part of a wedge of Gaoians pushing against a tide of stampeding lifeforms. Already one of his men was badly hurt, having been kicked hard by a panicking Vzk’tk. His role wasn’t to push and shove and shout and try to make room—he was too busy co-ordinating with the largest and most senior craft in the Gaoian contingent of the security fleet, the CGC Winter Fire.

“None. Your ETA to the shuttle?” Its captain was a Whitecrest, one of Regaari’s Brothers, both by clan and, he suspected, a half-sibling genetically.

“Everything’s panicking in here.” Regaari grunted, then raised his voice to be heard as a flock of wailing Kwmbwrw became the latest obstacle for them to push against. “Most of them are running away from the escape ships for some stupid reason. How long can you give me?”

“If we let all the others die first? A paw of [minutes], six at the outside.”

Regaari assessed matters. They had made it only a few hundred meters at best from the council chamber since the attack began. “Not good enough.” he declared.

“I know. I’m sorry, Brother, but at this point we have to treat everything aboard the station as lost. We may as well salvage some assets from this, and carry word to Gao of what–”

The link went dead with a sharp squeal in Regaari’s ear.

“Winter Fire, you broke up there.” He told them.

Silence.

“Winter Fire, come in?”

“Officer Regaari, CGS Winter Fire is destroyed.” one of the other ships sent. “We’re warping out. Nothing we can do—may as well save what we can. Sorry.”

“Regaari!”

He turned. The Mother-Supreme was leaning heavily against a wall, panting and grimacing with a hand pressed to her chest. “Mother-Supreme?”

She slumped, sliding to the ground. Concerned males gathered round and Regaari rushed to her side. “Giymuy!”

“Oh, don’t…” she coughed. “At least my age is getting me first, before the Hunters do.”

The men exchanged glances, aware that they weren’t to be so lucky.

“We can still–”

“Don’t be so stupid!” she snapped, then her breath rattled horribly. She was clearly in hideous pain.

She continued In a gentler tone. “Regaari. You can escape. I will only slow you down, and so will these soldiers. Get…” she heaved and coughed, but fought through it. “Get to the diplomatic shuttle, and activate the emergency displacement recall…Tell them…” her strength was failing by the second, and when she repeated “tell them…” she was almost inaudible.

Regaari leaned in close. He only barely heard her last words.

He closed her eyes. “I’ll tell them.” he promised.

“Officer?” One of the soldiers asked him, clearly expecting an order.

“What?” Regaari asked, surveying the ceiling.

“What do we do?”

“First, you stand back.” Regaari ordered. When they did so, he aimed his pulse rifle and blasted the vent cover out of the ceiling with three precise shots.

“Second,” he said, slinging the rifle over his shoulder “you give me a boost up into that vent.”

They did so. Gaoian gravity was just a little higher than Galactic Standard, and between two of them, he was launched to the height of a ceiling that could accommodate even the tallest Rrrrtktktkp’ch or bulkiest Guvnurag. He caught the edge, swung there for a second, and then hauled himself up and into the air duct.

“And…third?” One of the soldiers asked.

Regaari unslung his gun and got his bearings.

“You kill as many of them as you can, and you don’t let them take you or your Brothers alive.” he told them. “Goodbye.”

HMS Violent, Cimbrean orbit, the Far Reaches

Commodore William Caruthers

“Signal from HMS Caledonia, Commodore. They say the SOR is aboard, suited up and ready.”

Caruthers acknowledged the communication with a clear nod and eye contact. “By my estimation, that makes us ready to go.” he observed.

Violent’s Captain—Commander Anthony Miller—nodded. “I agree sir.”

“Signal the fleet to prepare to jump on my mark…”

He was pleased that it took only some five seconds before “All ships ready to jump, Admiral.” was called.

“Mark.”

Caruthers always felt cheated by the occasion of a jump. He would have liked a lurch, or a little jolt, or some tingling sensation, or even just a nondescript sense of something having happened. As it was, the only indication that anything at all had changed was the way his operations display began to populate itself.

The untrained eye would have seen only a mess. Caruthers, however, had a very trained eye.

The seven ships of his task group had translated through their wormholes and landed some ten thousand kilometers from Capitol Station. Far enough away that their miniscule signatures would be easily missed, close enough that the EM-spectrum latency shouldn’t throw off their targeting or electronic warfare.

As they arrived, HMS’ Violent, Vigilant, Victory, Vendetta, Vanguard and Viceroy each quietly released their passenger contingent of six BAE Terrier unmanned space vehicles—car-sized lozenges of thrusters, sensors and electronic attack modules designed to multiply their mothership’s electronic superiority and obfuscate the fleet’s exact size, composition and position.

The result was an immediate widening of their sensor net, and the Hunters weren’t bothering with subtlety. Even on passive sensors only, with the full group of seven warships and thirty drones deployed, he had an excellent idea of exactly what they were dealing with.

Capitol Station was a white, glass and chrome broccoli floret twenty kilometers long, ending in a tangled root of rust-brown mooring gantries and docking bays. describing a rough sphere around it with a radius of some five hundred kilometers was the Swarm, consisting of literally thousands of ships, including fifty or sixty which were a match, in terms of tonnage at least, for Myrmidon and Caledonia, both of which were by far the most massive ships in the human fleet.

They did not, fortunately, appear to be reacting to the arrival of the Deathworlders.

“Dragon’s teeth out.” he ordered.

The dragon’s teeth had been modified since the last battle at Cimbrean. Their canisters were now filled with high-pressure air rather than using explosives to disperse the minisatellite jump beacons, allowing them to be deployed without creating an obvious sensor contact. Violent’s hull rang as twenty such canisters were launched away from the ship on random timers, creating a friendly sphere of possible evasive jumps.

At a range of ten thousand clicks, and with the twin advantages of surprise and EWAR on their side, the fleet was now well prepared to weather a sustained firefight.

“Signal the fleet.” he announced.

“Ready sir.”

“Horatio.”

In the finest of military traditions, ‘Horatio’ was a prearranged code phrase, meaning that the fleet should load a specific type of ammunition, calculate a specific firing solution, and await the second phrase which would be the cue to fire. Caruthers gave them the thirty seconds they needed.

“Nelson.” he ordered.

The answer from all six ships at once was an opening flurry of firepower, a two-to-three-to-one mix of gravity spikes, conventional anti-ship ammunition and specialist ammo that would hopefully go unnoticed alongside the rest of the firepower. Simultaneously, the EWAR opened up, strobing the Swarm with dazzling masers and flooding every band they were broadcasting on with powerful white noise.

Those gravity spikes were necessary. Without them the Hunter ships would just warp to point-blank range in the moment they were aligned along the correct vector, eliminating the human range advantage in an infinitesimal shaving of a second. The only counter to that was gravity spikes, delivered by timed-explosion rounds that filled the intervening space with heavily distorted spacetime against which warp drives could secure no footing, ensuring that the Hunters would remain firmly confined to subluminal maneuvers.

The three parts of conventional ammunition did their job equally well, however. Four of the larger Swarm craft were crippled in the opening volley, spilling the contents of their pressurized bowels as the human guns thumped and hurled their payloads down a narrow warp channel which dissipated mere centimeters from the target’s hulls, allowing no possibility of evasive action.

The Swarm responded with animal speed, showing off just how efficient the Hunter cybernetic communications really were. All of those ships were behaving almost like a single amoeboid organism, spreading out and sending loose tendrils of high-speed ships creeping out and around, questing for a vector from which to try and warp the intervening distance and engulf or snare the outnumbered human task group. Several motes of light actually lifted off the surface of Capitol Station, abandoning their tick-like burrowing in pursuit of the prized Deathworlder quarry.

Caruthers allowed himself a satisfied nod. “Signal Colonel Stewart.” he said “Tell him they’ve taken the bait.”

Rylee Jackson

“Epic to Group: The Brits have engaged. All units fold your WiTCheS and accelerate to combat speed.”

Rylee practically swore with relief. The tension had been killing her, and she obeyed the order enthusiastically, punching Firebird up to speed and aligning for the station as hard as her sled could accelerate.

Lurking near the star to recoup their lost energy from the extreme long-range jump from Sol had swiftly gotten dull. She was a combat pilot, and Firebird and her sisters were combat spaceframes. They belonged in the melee.

The wing reported ready. Stewart’s voice had an eager edge to match Rylee’s own feelings “Epic to Group: Off we go.”

They jumped. Warping to the target station when the British ships had polluted its skies with gravity spikes was asking for damage, which is why the opening salvo had included beacon rounds that streaked through the Hunter formation and slowed to sublight velocities on the far side, inviting the TS/2s to enfilade the Swarm.

The sky went from empty, to being awash with red contacts, painted by the Royal Navy FOF and confirmed by the absence of friendly RFID. Fed by the combat controllers aboard Caledonia, her HUD indicated her assigned box and describing a cuboid some thousand kilometers long. At the kinds of speeds reached in starship combat, she would sweep through a volume that large in seconds.

Semenza was reciting his EWAR and weapons reports from only inches behind her head.

Things had changed in the last couple of years. The missile payload was gone, replaced with electronic attack pods that further multiplied their force’s ability to blind and confuse the Hunters. only the GAU-8/S remained for their onboard weaponry.

A targeting laser speared one of the big ships as she raked its flank with 30mm rounds, shredding its shields. Behind her, Semenza grunted in satisfaction. “Firebird one, fox four.”

Rather than launching the missile, he summoned one. There was a stockpile of thousands back on Earth, and one of them jumped into the fight at Semenza’s call, existing on the battlefield for barely half a second before it slammed into the Swarmship and mauled it.

“Data point. The fuckers are armored now.” Semenza noted. He was right. In their last fight, that exact same class of missile had dismembered a ship of that size. Now it had merely gouged a ragged chunk from its flank.

“Hit it again.”

“Wilco. Firebird one, fox four.”

The wounded Swarmship blinked out of existence, and Semenza’s missile spiralled drunkenly off into the black, too confused and low on power to select a new target.

“Data point. They can evade-jump now.” Semenza added.

An incoming contact became a cloud of gas and light debris as Riley vectored sideways and put a cloud of 30mm rounds in its flight path. Its own railgun rounds went wide, barely a hundred meters to starboard.

“Stay frosty.” she muttered.

Regaari

The vent did two things for Regaari.

It saved his life, allowing him to walk, then crawl through the narrower ducting, unimpeded and unobserved towards the hangar where the Gaoian diplomatic yacht was landed.

And it let him hear the screams. It caught and amplified them, so that he heard every one in hollow, magnified, metallic detail.

So many of them. Intermingled with the sounds of pulse gun fire, the flash and strobe of Nervejam grenades, and a new sound, a heavy explosive sound that reminded him of the action movies he’d watched with Xiù, years ago.

But mostly screams. Screams of terror. Screams of pain. Dying squeals and pleading. Defiant yells as some of the soldiers and security troopers went down fighting.

Sometimes, when he couldn’t hear the screams, he could hear the eating.

Those were the worst. He hardly dared move at all in those quiet sections, for fear that the slightest sound would give him away. He had to inch past, treated to a full view of what, exactly, the Hunters did with their prey.

But his luck held. Either he was silent enough to not give himself away, or else they were so enraptured by their feast as to not notice.

He crawled onwards.

Owen Powell

When it came down to it, the difference between riding an outboard launch wearing a wetsuit, and riding an extravehicular launch wearing an EV-MASS, was basically that the latter was quieter. No waves, no bird call, none of the little noises that had hitherto masked every covert infiltration of Powell’s career. Just silence, save for his breathing.

The craft itself was little more than a conical bank of capacitors mounted on a kinetic thrust plate, with latching points for the infiltration team and any heavy gear they were bringing to be attached and folded inside its little warp field. It almost looked like a black rubber launch. Across the huge distances involved it relied on computer navigation rather than a pilot, so there was little to do but program it, hang on, and hit the button on the control screen at the little vehicle’s nose.

He had never felt so exposed in all his life.

There was no jolt or anything—the inertial compensation provided by the warp field was too well-tuned for that—but it was still jarring for HMS Caledonia to vanish from behind them and for Capitol station—which had until now just been a nigh-invisible glimmer of light, suddenly be there, right in front of them. Twenty kilometers long and only two kilometers away.

Technically, they were smack in the middle of the Swarm of Swarms, but at the scales involved human senses were hopelessly inadequate for noticing that fact. Only the occasional streak of light across the stars—weapons fire, or a ship moving at sanity-fraying velocities—hinted that there was even a battle raging silently all around them.

If their stealthy approach was not stealthy enough, if the EWAR that was theoretically blinding every sensor delicate enough to spot them, wasn’t, then the only mercy would be that their annihilation would be so instant and total that none of them would notice it happening.

The last approach used cold-gas thrusters rather than the kinetics. The Launch was designed to have practically zero sensor signature, after all. It had been a precision approach—they were barely ten meters from the station hull, stationary relative to a large window, though the mirroring on the glass made it impossible to see within, only that the section was not lit.

They detached from the Launch and Powell turned a single gentle somersault to kiss against the hull, absorbing the last of his momentum with his knees just as they had practiced in zero-G training so many times before.

Breaching the glass was simple. STERLING and HIGHLAND hacked a simple square out of the glass with two simple swipes of their fusion knives. Air pressure did the rest, flinging the plate of glass out into space, along with a blizzard of small objects caught in the rush of escaping air.

Legsy heaved himself through. There was a moment of silence.

“Clear.”

Powell hit the beacon on his belt as the Combat Controllers propelled themselves through the breach, and an inky cuboid, nearly invisible in space, simply appeared without ceremony next to him. Divorced of its power source, the stasis field collapsed and WARHORSE, BASEBALL, TITAN, THOR, REBAR and SNAPFIRE were hanging next to him.

He let them through the hole first and, once through himself, settled onto the deck in galactic standard gravity. The Deltas deployed a forcefield seal over the breach and, at their nod, Legsy and STERLING burst through the door into the corridor beyond, pushing past the hurricane rush of air that flooded into their entry room. Their SMGs spat out their rounds with a noise that went right through Powell’s chest..

He was pleased to hear it. The silence of vacuum had been getting to him, and any sound was welcome, even if it wasn’t a pleasant sound—shrieking alarms, wailing aliens and the distant hammering of Hunter pulse fire, plus an unpleasant hissing. Apparently their forcefield wasn’t as airtight as hoped.

“Right. Let’s get into an airtight compartment.” he ordered.

They vacated the room and sealed the door behind them. Arés raised his SAW and fired a sharp six-round burst at something, and Powell suppressed some pride when he turned and saw that the kid had just bagged his first Hunter kill. He was in commander mode right now, he couldn’t afford to be sentimental.

Legsy, HIGHLAND and STERLING took point, storming down the corridor and ripping into a knot of Hunters that were tormenting a shuddering Guvnurag. All five of the monsters were dead before they even knew they were under assault.

The huge alien was in a bad way, bleeding horribly from where the Hunters had bitten the flesh right off her living body. Burgess went to work, and Powell took a moment to evaluate their position. It was some kind of a common area, full of benches and tables and the kind of alien-sized furniture that made good high cover for humans. Better still, there was plenty of room for the Defenders to deploy their jump array.

“This is our spot.” he announced.

The Alpha of the Brood-that-Builds

+<Interest> A human Alpha. The first we have seen.+

The Builder Alpha examined the perspective of the little insect-sized spy drone as it settled on the ceiling above the Deathworlder.

The human infantry had appeared from nowhere, storming out of a supposedly empty room on the station’s upper decks without warning. They might almost have materialised in that room fully-formed. Impossible, of course, but then again that kind of stealth was only marginally more credible, especially from a species so technologically behind the Hunters.

This particular specimen was clearly in command, having started by thrusting its arm out to indicate where its subordinates should go and what work they should do, and now poring over a diagram of that section of the station, directing the efforts of the other eleven.

The Alpha-of-Alphas was clearly intrigued also. It had a much more complete view of the battlefield than the Builder Alpha did, ensconced as it was in a kind of command throne that was designed to interface with its neural augmentations and greatly expand its ability to track and consider the situation. It had proven itself in battle against these humans, receiving only minor wounds at worst. Now it was proving itself as a commander and leader.

+<Correction> Not just an Alpha.+ it mused. +<Observation> Notice the markings on their armor. There are three different Deathworlder broods here. Each fulfills a different role. This is an Alpha-of-many-broods. It must be an individual of great importance.+

The Builder broadcast understanding and agreement. +<Fascination> Interesting that their broods function together through division of duty.+ it commented. +<Inspiration> And that displacement device! The possibilities!+

+<Satisfaction> Observing that device in action alone has been worth this trap.+ the Alpha-of-Alphas agreed. +<Thoughtfulness> And the specialised behaviour of their warriors can be translated to our own broods. This is valuable data.+

They watched the Deathworlders slaughter lesser Hunters by the dozen for some minutes. The violence was almost intimidating, even from a cloaked listening post far removed from the action. The lead team of three would enter a compartment, and every Hunter within that compartment would be dead almost too quickly to fathom, cut down by withering volleys of disciplined firepower.

There was an objective to it, though—they weren’t killing for the sake of killing. Instead, every time the humans surged forward, it was to claim another little knot of surviving Prey, plucking them from the Hunters’ grasp and securing the meat the opportunity to escape. Dozens had escaped already, most of them the important, high-value individuals whose deaths would have so demoralized the Prey across the galaxy. Each dignitary that escaped to whatever sanctuary the Deathworlders had established beyond their displacement array was a personal insult to the Alpha-of-Alpha’s plan.

Why they should do so was incomprehensible to the Alpha of the Brood-that-Builds. Why would superior lifeforms put themselves in harm’s way to rescue inferior ones that were not even the same brood or species?

It sensed that there was no answer to that conundrum within the remit of engineering.

For their part, the Hunters’ responses to human weaponry just didn’t seem to be giving them the edge that the Builder had hoped for. The guns were just too heavy, and needed to be held in too specific a way so as to avoid injury. If only they could capture a working example of the weapons the humans themselves were using…

As they watched, a family of spindly blue Prey were herded into the territory the humans had seized and vanished through the displacement device. Just behind them was the wounded Large Prey, actually being carried by two of the Deathworlders. The Builder revised its estimates as to human maximum muscle strength upwards by several percentage points.

+<Curiosity> Those two seem to prioritise the repair and evacuation of wounded Prey.+ it noted.

+<Contempt> Yes. While that is an obvious sign of weakness and wrong-thinking, it will also potentially undermine our intimidation of the prey.+ the Alpha-of-Alpha’s thoughts were tinged with anger at this damage to their propaganda victory.

+<Suggestion> I submit that we have gathered enough data. Those humans should be eradicated, their displacement device salvaged and we should capture that Alpha-of-Many-Broods.+ the Builder proposed.

It did not take the silence that greeted this idea for hesitation or contempt. The Alpha-of-Alphas had demonstrated its intelligence and cunning time and again. It was undoubtedly mulling the suggestion over, considering the merits and potential risks.

+<Resolve> Agreed.+ It sent, at last. +I will deploy the Strongest Brood.+

Regaari

Regaari’s luck ran out the instant he dropped into the diplomatic yacht’s hangar. Only the Whitecrest training that the Mothers would have so despised had they known of it kept him from dying the moment he dropped from the vent and onto the deck. He hadn’t seen the three Hunters feasting on a brother of Clan Farflight, but his pulse rifle snapped up and was firing the instant he saw them. Three solid hits pulped the one holding a bizarre long gun in a shock-absorbing assemblage, and he dived aside, throwing down a shieldstick to cover his retreat. Retaliatory pulse fire splashed against it.

The latest generation, available only to Whitecrests, could admit pulse fire from the defenders’ side, and he used that feature to return fire, killing the last two even as their final pulse shot shattered his barrier. That had been too close.

He turned to the ship and froze cold, realising that the Hunters had already crippled it, recognising the fact that it was a possible escape craft. He had no way off the station.

No, there had to be an alternative, something he’d overlooked…

A crawling sense of paranoia made him look up.

The Alpha dropped from the ceiling like something obscene from one of Xiù’s movies, and smashed his gun out of his hands. Half as big again as its subordinates and much more heavily augmented, it kicked him and Regaari felt a rib jar painfully inside him as the blow flipped him through the air to slide on his back halfway across the hangar.

Winded and injured, he still fought to find his feet, scrambling at his belt for his backup pulse pistol. That too was slapped aside by the Alpha, which used its other hand to grab him by the scruff of his neck and lift him off the deck, feet kicking and dangling.

He wouldn’t have been Regaari if he hadn’t fought for every last second though. Down to just his claws, he raked the nightmare’s face, costing it two eyes and badly lacerating the flesh around a cluster of cybernetics that replaced three of the others.

It replied by biting off his left paw just above the wrist.

It was an almost dainty gesture, and Hunter teeth were so sharp that Regaari was almost able to see it happen without feeling it. One moment it was his paw, the next it was a meaty morsel, frothing blood in the creature’s mouth, crunching and splintering as the hunter bit through the bone to swallow what had once been a part of him.

It laughed. There was no epithet in Gaori to describe how much he hated it for that. The… beast gloated, savoring its kill. He snorted nasal mucus and spat it into the creature’s remaining eye, too proud to give it the satisfaction of fearing it. He hated it, hated everything it stood for, and his last thought was to hope fervently that it would choke on him.

Instead, its head twitched to look over his shoulder, and it dropped him, bringing up one of those large long guns.

Those guns were clearly heavy though. Too heavy to respond in time. Its head exploded, painting a grisly slurry of meaty matter and cybernetic parts all over the deck, and the most glorious sight in the galaxy double-timed across the hangar, gun snapping from corner to corner in case of any lingering threats.

By all the clans of Gao. An actual human. Built like a bunker and faceless in an armored vacuum suit layered in technology, but unmistakably a Deathworlder. Nothing else could conceivably have moved so easily while carrying so much.

“You’re late.” he chided, out of pure bravado.

“You’re alive.” the human replied, setting to work on the stump of his arm. Regaari reached across to retrieve his pulse pistol with his remaining hand and holstered it. He was keeping on top of the pain, barely, and having that little task to focus on while the human stopped his bleeding by injecting some kind of foam directly into the wound, which hardened and stopped the blood flow almost instantly, kept him from crying out from the agony and fainting.

“Come on compadre, you’re not getting out of here on that shuttle.” the human said. He slung his gun around his shoulder, tugged a smaller one from a belt holster, tucked an arm under Regaari and hoisted him firmly but gently off the floor. It was like being a cub again, riding on an adult’s shoulders.

The diplomatic quarters outside were exactly the kind of hell his imagination and sense of hearing had suggested as he’d crawled through the vents. There were bodies everywhere, many of them clearly cut down from behind as they tried to flee. Intermingled with them were Hunter corpses, however, clearly fallen where they had been feasting, many still with dripping shreds of flesh caught in their fangs.

Two more humans in those armored vacuum suits were firing stubby little black weapons at something through a doorway. Not missing a beat, his rescuer dropped his shoulders and surged past their firefight, shielding Regaari with his own body.

This brought them into view of another human, just in time for Regaari to watch him sidestep a charging Beta and punch it so hard in the side of its jaw that the head was all but torn off. The huge corpse crashed into the bulkhead and left a purplish blood stain.

“Whe–” Regaari began. He made it no further than that, because an explosion an order of magnitude larger than anything that had previously rocked them punished the deck. The lights died, and artificial gravity went with them for just a second before the damage control systems found an alternate power source for them. Emergency lighting, dark and blue, at least robbed the carnage of its more stomach-turning hues.

The humans clearly heard an order via some means he wasn’t party too, because all of them began to fall back under fire towards the recreational concourse. The one carrying him picked up his speed to the point where Regaari could feel a breeze in his fur.

There were Hunters on the concourse, but unlike any that Regaari had ever heard of. Gone were the usual cruel cybernetics. In fact, gone were whole limbs, and in place of the “natural” sickly white of Hunter flesh was a horrible wet meaty redness which bulged and pulled in grotesque ways as they moved. Whatever these Hunters had done to themselves had granted them the strength to move confidently and swiftly even layered in thick armor plates and while carrying large weapons.

They were huge, as big if not bigger than the Alpha that had nearly killed him, and moving with a sturdy, graceful precision that was more like a human’s motion, and these ones seemed to be handling their guns just fine, pouring a hail of firepower into the water feature that three more human soldiers were using for cover.

His rescuer’s gun hand came up and the pistol’s sharp crack was a very different noise to the heavy, explosive, industrial thunder being made by the Hunter weaponry. Unlike them, his aim was sharp and precise. One of the abominations choked and collapsed as the rounds ripped into exposed gaps at the sides and flanks, but two of its friends turned to face the new threat, with bullets sparking off shields and armour plates as they returned fire, squinting against the glare from the bright light mounted below the pistol’s barrel.

Regaari was jolted badly when his carrier then jinked into cover, and he was let go of. Even if the human was trying to be gentle, being carried by a Deathworlder was clearly a dangerous experience.

He kept his head down. There was more gunfire, shouting, the deck plating shook.

“They’re coming up the left!”

“They’re fucking suicidal…BASEBALL, REBAR, get up on the right there!”

The deck plating dented under their weight as the pinned three dashed from where they’d been hiding and made it into cover beside him. “Good shooting, Hoss.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“I took a hit, didn’t penetrate. Those guns of theirs hit hard though.”

“Watch the ones coming down the middle…fuck! NERVEJAM!”

“Oh no you don’t!”

Regaari felt like an icicle was pounded into his brain as a grenade went off nearby.

“Man down!”

“Get him back here! Suppressing fire!”

A storm of shooting. Heavy footfalls, more shouting, and something large was dragged into cover alongside him, one of the humans convulsing and twitching in his armour.

“They’re still coming!”

“Throwing grenade…FRAG OUT!”

An explosion that left his ears ringing in protest. Station damage alarms started wailing nearby, adding to the chorus of violence.

“How is he?”

“He needs to be jumped to triage right now, sir.”

There was a deadly, horrible pause. “Fookin’….can we make the array?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

”…THOR, demolish it. We’re EA jumping.”

“Major. He’s dead, sir.”

”…Aye. Grab the ETs and fall back, that way. Legsy, HIGHLAND! Cover the retreat.”

Regaari was hoisted up with Deathworlder strength and carried. There were three others with him: a Corti and two Kwmbwrw, who seemed to be equally as petrified by their rescuers as by the Hunters.

He could see over his carrier’s shoulder as they ran. The one in charge paused long enough to tap some commands out on the computer he carried, and the dead soldier’s armor started smoking, then burst into flames.

The one carrying him muttered something. His helmet decided that the sotto voce delivery was not intended for translation, but Regaari understood just enough English to understand him.

”…Goodbye, STERLING.”

“Get in this bag, quickly now.”

The Corti was clearly one of the political delegation, and not accustomed to taking orders gracefully. “What exactly is an ‘EA Jump’ and why am I being stuffed into a bag for it?” he demanded.

The human commander clearly had no patience for Corti games. “It means Exo-bloody-Atmospheric. We are going to jump out of this station and land on that planet, so put on the fookin’ bag!” he snapped. Behind his pressure helmet, his eyes promised trouble the likes of which no alien could comprehend if he was not obeyed.

The Corti squeaked and practically dove into the bag. Regaari had already been mostly into his, but he balked upon hearing this. “Jump?”

The human whose chest the bag was strapped to nodded, and pushed him down gently but firmly, helping him curl up inside it. “Yep.” he said.

“Is that safe?”

“Hell no. Beats being eaten by Hunters though.” He tugged the bag over Regaari’s head and sealed it. It instantly pressurised, filling with sweet atmosphere that was a welcome relief from the meat-tasting foulness he’d been breathing.

There was a little transparent window for him to see out of, and through it he saw two of the humans each stick a large brick of something to the outside station wall.

There was muffled speech, then shouting as the humans who had stayed behind retreated into the room, still shooting. They slammed and sealed the door—an instant later, a titanic detonation shook the room.

“Claymore?” the commander asked.

“Yep. There’s more coming, but they’re being careful now.”

“Right. Last seal check, blow it on my go.”

The humans scrambled to check each other’s suits, and all loudly declared them satisfactory, then the one carrying him turned away and hunkered down and…

Losing his hand turned out to be only the second most violent thing that happened to Regaari that day. The first was any station-dweller’s nightmare—the total catastrophic failure of an outside wall, and the resulting depressurisation that flung them and everything else in the room out into space. Crushing G-forces caused him to black out for a second.

“Hey. Hey, you still with me in there?”

The voice was coming from a small hand-held device attached by a coiled wire to the same panel on the inside of his bag that was providing Regaari’s breathable air. Tinny and quiet as it was, it still seemed loud inside the bag, which was basically silent apart from the faint sounds of the air being exchanged and of Regaari’s own body.

He grabbed it and tentatively pressed the button on the side. “Yes. I’m still with you.”

“Good news, man. We’re alive and reentering just fine.”

Regaari had to produce a bitter chirp at that one. “Oh, yes. Everything is absolutely perfect.” he commented.

“Better than being eaten. What’s your name, compadre?”

“Regaari. Officer Regaari, of Clan Whitecrest.”

“Cool. Call me WARHORSE.”

Regaari pushed his nose up to the window of his bag, which was now a taut cylinder. He could just make out the human’s arms on either side of him and beyond that, only Capitol Station and tumbling, burning lights. ‘WARHORSE’ sounded more like a codename to him than the human’s real name, but he wasn’t going to argue. Goodness knew, he’d gone by plenty of assumed identities in his duties.

“So. Atmospheric reentry without a spacecraft.” he said. “I assume this suit of yours is equipped for it?”

“Technically, everything about this suit is so classified I can’t tell you shit about it, man. But, y’know, you’ll figure out if it is or isn’t by the way we do or don’t burn up.” WARHORSE told him.

“How comforting.”

“Hah!”

They fell in silence for a while. There was a pale blue glow just building up past the limb of WARHORSE’s limbs when Regaari finally spoke. “I’m curious. Why?”

“Why…what, man?”

“The Dominion’s treated you–” he spoke in English as best as a Gaoian mouth could ”-like shit. You lost a presumably elite soldier today…”

“One of the very fuckin’ best.” WARHORSE agreed. There was an emotional edge to his voice, but Regaari couldn’t interpret what that edge might be. Not that it was difficult to guess.

“Not to…belittle his sacrifice.” he said, carefully. “But why?”

“Hey, I don’t know the why of it, man.” WARHORSE replied. “But my whole thing is saving lives. That’s, like, my job, my purpose in life. So, I’m just doing what I do, you know?”

“You lost a man.” Regaari repeated.

“Yeah. And I’m going to miss him like crazy, he was one of my brothers, man. But we SAVED like…what, fifty? Sixty?”

“That many?”

“Something like.”

“Still, risking twelve elite human soldiers to save fifty or sixty ungrateful politicians…”

“A life is a life, man. Doesn’t matter if it’s human, Gaoian, Kwmbwrw, or that little grey fuck on BASEBALL’s chest.”

There was a flicker of orange light. “Re-entry plasma?”

“Yeah. Forcefield should handle it just fine. Sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”

“Ah, fireworks.” Regaari nodded. “I had a human friend once. She showed me video footage of fireworks. I always thought it would be fun to see them.”

“Human friend?”

“Shoo.”

The translator spat out WARHORSE’s response in the form of the Gaori word for “footwear” with a questioning uptick.

“Her real name has this awkward sound at the start. Like shhh but more…buzzing.”

”…Wait, not Jew? You had a Jewish friend?”

“I don’t know what that is. Her name was a longer and…flatter sound. She said she was Chinese-Canadian?”

“Aah, right. Gotcha. Yah, most other humans struggle with Chinese names too.”

The plasma outside was now a steady orange torrent. The bag’s window was clearly photosensitive because it had darkened to welder’s-mask black in order to protect his eyes from the contrail’s incandescence.

Then the shaking started.

“Is it…meant to do this?”

“You got me, compadre. This is the first time I’ve done this.”

“Not even in training?”

“Too dangerous for training. Hold on!”

Regaari curled up, resisted the urge to let his claws out, and shut his eyes, wishing against all rationality that he could be a cub again as he and WARHORSE became a fireball together, and fell.

The eternity of being about to die ended in a metallic noise, the wheeze of cloth against cloth, and a jolt nearly as violent as the one that had flung them from the station.

“What? What was that?!” he asked.

He hadn’t thought to press the button on the communicator, but now WARHORSE’s voice came through to him from outside the bag, slightly muffled but no more than that. They had atmosphere. “Parachute. Worst part’s over, compadre, we’re almost down safe. You okay?”

“What’s left of me is doing fine.”

“Bueno. Last hit coming up in three…two…”

Regaari grimaced as there was a thump and several jolts, before the human fell down backwards, careful to let Regaari fall on top rather than the other way round.

There were some more metallic clinks, a rustling of fabric, and then the top of his bag tore off. WARHORSE looked in. “You okay?” he asked.

Regaari climbed out of the bag as best he could with only one paw and collapsed on his back, gulping like a stranded fish. “I never want to do anything like that ever again.” he stated.

WARHORSE just lay beside him and chuckled. The chuckle turned into a laugh and he surged to his feet and ripped off the helmet and mask of his pressure suit, revealing a stubbly fuzz of head-hair on deep nut-coloured skin. Still laughing he threw the helmet high into the air, shrugged off the parachute harness and rucksack, and then spread his arms and howled.

The noise was agony, a primal roar of defiance aimed at the universe which impaled Regaari’s sensitive ears and straight through into the pain centers of his brain. WARHORSE seemed to have gone mad, jumping and swearing and punching the air, always returning to that same “WOOO!” sound. Regaari watched in alarm as the human did a double backflip in what must, to him, have been extremely low gravity, then stooped, ripped a stone from the turf that was as big as Regaari’s head and threw it hard at a nearby tree before collapsing, giggling, on his back.

The stone hit the tree with such incredible force that it lodged in the wood.

A second later, creaking, crackling, hissing and groaning, the tree fell over.

WARHORSE’s laughter died and he sat up. “Jeez.” he said. “Did I do that?”

Regaari scowled at him. “This is the only known class two planet. You’re a native of a class twelve. You could probably ruin this planet’s whole biosphere just by breathing on it, if you aren’t careful.”

WARHORSE blinked at him then stood up. “Didn’t catch one word of that, man.” he looked around “Where the fuck is my helmet?”

Regaari picked it up and offered it to him, feeling his arm wobble from the weight.

“Thanks, man.” WARHORSE wriggled it back onto his head, muttering angrily to himself. “Fucking amateur, Arés, don’t be stupid…Never remove your helmet, dumbass.”

“I said.” Regaari repeated, when it was back on and the translator was working again “That we’re standing on the only known class two planet in this galaxy, and you’re from a Class twelve. You could do serious harm if you’re not careful.”

“Shit.” WARHORSE nodded agreement. “You’re right. Sorry.”

“You’d better not do that either, or you’ll definitely kill this world.” Regaari added.

“I know man, I live on Cimbrean.” WARHORSE told him, twisting the helmet back and forth until it was firmly in place and the docking collar re-engaged with a solid ‘snap!’

He checked it was seated properly by throwing his head back and forth a bit and wriggling his shoulders. “Thanks for the reminder, though.”

“How heavy IS that helmet?” Regaari asked.

“Twenty-five pounds base weight.” WARHORSE replied, “Which, yeah. Sucks.”

He rearranged some of his equipment and shrugged the ruck on again as if it was nothing, causing Regaari’s boggling over the helmet to intensify. He’d experienced for himself just how strong Xiù had been, but between the stone, that rucksack, and the easy way he had carried Regaari himself and all that other gear back on the station, it was plain that WARHORSE vastly outstripped her.

The human pressed firmly on the side of his helmet. “STAINLESS, WARHORSE.” he announced. “Arrived DZ, one healthy ET in tow, I’m at, uh…” he checked the device in his hand and reeled off a string of numbers. “Seeking cover and awaiting orders.”

There was silence for a few seconds and then -

“WARHORSE, STAINLESS. I have your DZ. Seek cover, rest up. Turn to tac-net three niner four Tango November Juliet and await further. Out.”

WARHORSE grunted and looked around, scanning the horizon with those predator’s eyes. “There.” he pointed. Regaari squinted, and could see the shimmer of water cascading down a rocky outcrop, carving a little tree-haunted valley.

“How far is that?” he asked.

“Eh, three clicks or so. I jog further than that before breakfast.”

“Ah, yes. Human endurance running.” Regaari sighed. “I’m going to slow you down, aren’t I?”

“Nah, man. Climb on.”

Regaari flattened his ears disbelievingly. “You can’t be serious.”

“Gravity this low, I need something to weigh me down” WARHORSE replied. “Besides, what do you mass, like ninety pounds? I could lift you one-handed in twice this gravity, no problem.”

The translator fed him a Gaori measurement that sounded about right, so he nodded, imitating the gesture he’d often seen Xiù use. WARHORSE just returned the gesture and waved a hand towards the pack on his shoulders.

Regaari paused, then twitched his whiskers resignedly and did as the human suggested, clambering up the bag to sit atop it. It wasn’t dignified, but WARHORSE didn’t appear to notice the extra weight.

“Man, we should put a machine gun up there for you or something.” he chuckled.

“How about optics, or that map of yours?” Regaari suggested.

“Good thinking. Binos are in that front pocket there.” WARHORSE handed up the map device. It was alarmingly short on detail, and Regaari said so. WARHORSE just nodded. “Relax, intel’s got our back. We’ll have a better map pretty soon.”

They headed out. WARHORSE quickly settled into a steady rhythm of big, long bounding strides that ate up the ground, and just kept going. It wasn’t quite running, so much as a vigorous, fast march, and it was deceptive. Regaari wouldn’t have guessed they were moving very fast, but when he glanced behind them he saw that their landing site was already distant, and receding.

He played with the ‘binos’, adjusting their width, having to set them to their widest to fit his own face, but once he did so and toyed with the wheel on top and its functions, he swiftly got the hang of it. It was…strange, handling a piece of human technology, made by humans for human use. It certainly didn’t feel like a lower-tech species’ gear, either. It may have lacked a few of the advanced features that he’d have found in a Gaoian equivalent, but optically it was superb. The only real burr in his fur that he could find to complain about was their heaviness.

WARHORSE wasn’t even breathing heavily when they stopped again.

Regaari chittered a little on a surge of cynicism. Their resting spot was as stereotypical of a low-class world as could be—a gentle glade fed by a clean bubbling stream with a pool in which slender, silver little fish were undulating. Idyllic.

WARHORSE ignored it. Instead he let Regaari off his back and shucked off the ruck, before examining the dressing on Regaari’s arm. “Any pain or itching?” he asked.

“No. But it feels like the paw is still there.” Regaari said. It was a strange sensation, he could still “grip” and move his “fingers” but of course nothing happened except that what was left of the muscle sheath in his forearm twitched pathetically as it tried to flex and twist to pull on the now-absent tendons of his now-absent paw.

He sat down and stared at the dressing as WARHORSE made a satisfied noise and pottered about, setting up a basic camp.

“You okay?” he was asked after a while. Regaari chirruped a bitter little laugh.

“I’m supposed to be one of the elite.” he said. “Clan Whitecrest, foremost commandos and security specialists of the whole Gaoian species, but next to the Hunters I may as well be a cub. Next to you…”

WARHORSE had set up next to the pool and was digging through his bag. “Nah, man. You’re a fucking badass.” he replied.

“What was that expression? Pull the other one. Only, please don’t because I’d like to get off this planet with at least three whole limbs.”

“Totally serious, compadre. What did you do to that hunter? Clawed out two eyes and spat in the third? And that was a fuckin’ Alpha. You’ve got spirit, bro.”

Regaari snorted. “Spirit doesn’t count. Only results matter.” he snapped, dismissively.

“You got the result, though.” WARHORSE said. When Regaari twitched a disbelieving ear at him, he nodded insistently. “Seriously. You’re alive. You held out long enough for the cavalry to reach you and you saw that son of a bitch dead. Result.”

“You’re just trying to pep me up.” Regaari told him.

WARHORSE nodded. “‘Course I am. Best way to do that’s with the truth, though. You’re still kicking, it’s not, and the difference was you going down swinging. Spirit gets results, man.”

Regaari sat silently and watched. The human soon made a satisfied noise and pulled out a handful of flat brown packs of some kind, and scooped up some water from the pool in a little bottle. There was a pump of some kind in the bottle’s end, and after a few enthusiastic strokes of that, the water was forced back out through the filter nozzle.

“Are you… filtering and purifying that?” Regaari asked. “This is a class two planet, you don’t need to.”

“Basic survival rule where I’m from, never trust the water.”

“We’re not on where you’re from.”

WARHORSE paused, then shrugged. “Eh, a good habit’s a good habit.” He held up the little brown packages from the ruck. “Hungry?”

“You’re eating now? We only just landed.”

“Every chance I get. Never know when the next opportunity’s going to arrive in a situation like this.”

“But how are you going to cook it without a fire? If you build one, won’t the Hunters–”

“Relax, we got that covered. Besides, there’s a long way to go ahead of us, I’m going to need the nutrition, whereas the Hunters only might come looking for us.”

“Oh. Well, I do like human food…”

“Eh, this is just an MRE, not fine dining. Kind of the tastier alternative to those ration balls.” WARHORSE said, opening the package and tipping most of the contents out onto his lap. He tipped a little sachet of white powder into his bottle and shook it, turning the water a vivid pink, then took off his breathing mask and sipped it.

“What’s that?” Regaari asked.

“Juice. Electrolytes, sugar, hydration.” WARHORSE sipped again and licked his lips, frowning. “Supposedly it tastes like cherry.”

“Supposedly?”

“Look, you want one of these to try? Because I can eat whatever’s too much for you.”

”…If it’s safe.”

“It’s all been treated with gamma radiation man. Totally sterile, I promise.”

“Then…yes please.”

WARHORSE nodded and examined the available options, “…I warn you man, this shit’s…this is the high-performance version, it’s meant to get a fuckload of energy into me first and foremost. The culinary experience is, like, a distant second.” he pointed out.

“I’ll try it anyway. You’re right, nutrition in a situation like this is important.”

WARHORSE nodded, and stuffed the rest of the MREs back into his pack. “Damn right.” He ripped the top off a couple of transparent plastic bags, slipped the unappetizing green pouches of food inside, and then added a little water before returning the bags to their cardboard box and leaning them against a rock. Within seconds, steam was rising from the boxes.

“How does that work?” Regaari asked.

“Chemical reaction.”

“Clever.” Regaari commented. “No flame, no smoke, minimal heat signature.”

“That’s the idea.” WARHORSE agreed.

Regaari watched him cook, silently calculating how to eat his meal one-pawed. His nose twitched involuntarily when WARHORSE kneaded a little sachet and then spread the off-white paste it contained onto his dry crackers—the scent thus unleashed was creamy and rich, hinting that his dismissive assessment of the meal’s quality had probably been unfair.

Sadly, when Regaari sampled the crackers while waiting for the main course to be ready he was sorely disappointed, and WARHORSE was right—while the beverage was clearly supposed to taste like fruit, what it mostly tasted of was chemistry.

“What’s this?” he asked, opening and sniffing it. The scent was pungent and sugary.

”’s called a HOOAH! bar.” WARHORSE said. “I wouldn’t, man, that thing’s got, like, a thousand calories in it.”

The translator paused while translating that figure, and Regaari could see why. It must have been doing an internal error-check to make sure there wasn’t some mistake. That was half a week’s nutritional intake for a Gaoian male. “That many?”

“Yep.” WARHORSE took the bar off him and bit into it, chewing vigorously. “Giveff your jaw a workout, too.” he added, around the mouthful.

“Exactly how many calories do you need?” Regaari asked.

“Me, on a light day? At least ten thousand or so.” WARHORSE replied. “But this is gonna be a really active day, so…a lot more. Anyway, main should be ready.”

Between a small rock and leaning the bag against what remained of his left forearm, Regaari was able to hold it steady enough to poke at it with the spoon. While it certainly looked appetising enough, his nose was practically being overwhelmed by the rich scent. He tried it.

One mouthful was enough. “Great…Father Fyu!” he coughed.

WARHORSE just laughed. “You okay?”

“It’s like eating a candle!”

“Like I said, man. Performance first, pleasant eating experience second. Don’t worry, you gave it a pretty good go for an ET.” he said, ripping his own bag open and mixing in the contents of a tiny glass bottle of red sauce.

Regaari licked the sauce out of his fur, regaining his composure. “ET?”

“Extra-Terrestrial. It’s a friendly way of saying ‘non-human’.”

“You have other ways?”

“Sure. ‘ET’ is friendly, ‘non-human’ is all formal and proper, and ‘xeno’ is an insult.”

WARHORSE inhaled most of his meal in three efficient scoops. “Ffo–thiff human friend off yourff.” he said, around the mouthful, before swallowing. “Joo?”

“Close enough.”

“How’d you meet? There’s not a lot of us out here. She an abductee?”

Regaari made an affirmative ducking nod. “Yes, about…eleven Gaori years ago now, one of our settler transports was raided by mercenaries working for an–” he raised his paws and made a ‘finger quotes’ gesture that Xiù had been fond of, only realising that the effect was spoiled a little by his missing paw after he’d done it. ”‘Unauthorized researcher’.”

He snorted. “So the Corti Directorate claims, anyway. They killed all the males and abducted the females and cubs.”

WARHORSE’s expression darkened, even as he leaned over and stole Regaari’s leftovers. “Coño de madre.” he snarled. The translator didn’t seem to have a readily available equivalent, but the intent was clear.

“Shoo was picked up separately, but kept in the same holding cell.” Regaari continued. “Thanks to her, they were able to escape.”

“Where do you come in?”

“There was…political fallout. Ayma—the leader of the abducted females—fought fang and claw to get Shoo adopted into the Clan of Females. Most of the other females sided with her, of course, but some of the male clans…”

“Yeah?” WARHORSE took another mouthful “I thought you guyff mofftly went along with the Femaleff?”

Regaari chittered. “I thought ‘you guys’ were dangerous disease-ridden predators?” he countered. “Granted, many of the clans are ruled more by their testicles than by their brains, but the females don’t hold absolute power, just a strong influence. They may hold the veto, but they still want to mate as much as the males do.”

WARHORSE chuckled again. “Yeah, that sounds about right.” he agreed. “What did you think?”

“I didn’t. I was too focused on the blow to my career.”

“Your career?”

Regaari made an uncomfortable noise. “It’s…complicated.”

“I’m a medic, compadre. I can handle complicated.”

Regaari wobbled his head sideways in a ‘fair enough’ gesture. “I…had some disagreements with the clan.” he said. “This was early in our negotiations with the Dominion, and I was part of the inquiry into the missing transports. We had all of the circumstantial evidence we could have wanted that proved there were Dominion species involved, and that this ‘unauthorized’ researcher was anything but, but nothing concrete. Meanwhile, I found out that the Whitecrest Clan—and several other powerful Clans—were all preparing as if our membership of the Dominion was a foregone conclusion. Buying shares and equipment, training and indoctrinating our new Brothers a certain way, that kind of thing.”

“You suspected corruption in your own ranks?” WARHORSE guessed.

“No. I wasn’t so cynical back then. I was appalled, of course. As far as I was concerned, even circumstantial evidence that the Dominion was involved in our transports going missing—and complacency is collusion, as far as I’m concerned—was reason enough to abandon the negotiations on the spot and approach the Celzi Alliance. Of course, now I know that the Alliance is just as bad, but…”

He shook himself. “…Rather than discussing the matter with some of my more seasoned Brothers, I took it straight to one of the Fathers, convinced that it was an honest oversight, and that when they saw the evidence we had gathered, the mistake would be corrected.”

“Bad move?”

“The Father I approached was one of the…hmm…quiet conspirators. Not one of the obvious beneficiaries of the deal, but still very much involved, and who stood to gain.”

“What happened?”

“He promoted me.”

WARHORSE paused in pouring the last of the gravy into his mouth. “Come again?”

“To the rank of Whitecrest attaché to the Mother-Supreme, part of her executive staff and, if need be, her bodyguard. A prestigious career move, on the face of it. The reality…” he sniffed.

WARHORSE just sat and listened, so Regaari pressed on. “The reality was I was now not involved in the investigation, was no longer part of the Clan’s decision-making process, was a pariah in the inner circle and, though I theoretically had the ear of the Mother-Supreme, actually using it might have been seen as meddling in Female affairs, which would have politically and reproductively ruined me.”

“They de-clawed you.”

Regaari winced. The turn of phrase was intimately disturbing for Gaoians. “That’s an…accurate description.” he conceded.

WARHORSE nodded his understanding, starting in on the second HOOAH! bar. Regaari shook his head in disbelief. “What do you have in there? A black hole?”

“So what happened?” WARHORSE asked, ignoring the jab.

Regaari grinned, emulating the human gesture. “Shoo did.”

Date Point: ten years earlier, 12d AV
Yei Wa City, Wi Ko Yun province, Gao

“So why are you bringing this to me, and what is it?”

Kinoro’s ears swiveled uncertainty. “Security footage from the Corti facility those females escaped from.” he said. Regaari’s own ears signaled his skepticism.

“I’m not involved in the investigation any more, remember?” he pointed out. “Father Taaru saw to that.”

“This is…relevant. We may need you to, ah, influence the Mother-Supreme.”

Regaari’s ears flattened. “This footage had better give me a compelling reason to do so.” he said.

“You’ve heard that the leader of these escapees, Ayma, is petitioning to have the alien recognised as a Sister?”

Regaari ducked his head. “Yes.”

“This is footage of that alien in combat.”

They watched it. The alien was very definitely alien-long of limb, compact of body, and remarkably poised, but it wasn’t until she almost ripped one of the Locayl jailers in half that the source of that poise became apparent.

“So strong.“” he muttered, watching as the alien darted across the room and practically flattened the second Locayl.

“We’re still working on theories as to how biology like that is possible.” Kinoro told him.

Regaari watched as the footage cut to the alien female cutting a swathe through an assorted grab-bag of the galaxy’s mercenaries. “What’s the best one?”

“I’d bet five years of celibacy that the Dominion’s assertions that deathworlds can’t support intelligent life is wrong.” Kinoro replied.

“Plausible.” Regaari conceded.

“And terrifying.” Kinoro continued. “If I’m right then that… thing …is a bomb waiting to explode.”

“Is she? Look here, she’s fighting differently now that she’s figured out the strength disparity.” Regaari slowed down the footage to point out the subtle changes in the alien’s fighting style. “Wounding, rather than killing. Showing restraint, despite not having a good reason to.”

“I’m sure its compassion will be a great comfort when the deathworld plagues it undoubtedly carries get loose on Gao and kill millions of our people.” Kinoro sniped. “Billions, perhaps.”

“Have any of the females shown signs of infection?”

”…No. None.”

“Then you know what I see, Brother? I see a poor pre-contact life form, who-knows-how-far from home and probably feeling very confused right now.” Regaari looked his Brother in the eye. “And I intend to say as much to the Mother-Supreme.”

“You’d defy our clan Fathers a second time?”

“What will they do, crown me the Emperor of Gao and call it a punishment?” Regaari scoffed.

Kirono growled. There was a flash of teeth before he restrained himself—in older and less civilized times, that would have inevitably led to a snapping, claw-bearing fight. “Your own Brothers and Fathers…” he began–

“Are wrong, Brother.” Regaari interrupted, ejecting the little crystalline data wafer that Kirono had brought him, and pocketing it. “I’m loyal to the clan, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with the Fathers automatically.”

“You DO have to obey their orders, though.”

Regaari’s ears pricked. “They’re ordering me to influence her?” he asked.

“Well…no…Not ordering as such…” Kirono backpedalled, and with good reason. The whole clan’s mating fitness would suffer if the Females felt that Giymuy was being bullied by the Whitecrests.

“Then I shall use my best discretion and judgement.” Regaari asserted. “Just as the Fathers trained me to.”

Date Point: 10y AV
Planet Garden, Capitol System, Dominion Space

“You fought back.” WARHORSE observed.

“You’re damn right I did.” Regaari said, spitting the English word. He couldn’t see WARHORSE’s mouth any more—the human had replaced his breathing mask and was reclining against a rock, but he saw the way the skin around his eyes and face stretched and wrinkled. There was a smile under that mask.

“Dude, you’re fuckin’ scrappy, I like it!”

Regaari didn’t get the chance to respond, as the radio chose that moment to flare.

“Operation NOVA HOUND, STAINLESS. Our Evac’s arranged, see your tablets for RP Alpha. You have five hours to get there. Individual orders follow.” there was a pause then: “WARHORSE, STAINLESS. Your route to RP Alpha takes you near THOR’s projected LZ, and I can’t raise him. Determine his status.”

WARHORSE nodded, though of course his commander couldn’t see it. “STAINLESS, WARHORSE.” he replied. “Orders received and understood. Out.”

The second the link was cut, he swore, loudly: “Me cago en Dios!”

Regaari scrambled to his feet as WARHORSE lurched upright. “Is that…?”

“I fucking pray his radio’s just out.” WARHORSE replied. He scowled at the intel tablet, looked around to get his bearings, then grabbed the ruck. He’d diligently re-packed it after they were done eating, and Regaari winced at the sheer weight of it as the human shrugged it on before stooping and offering him two linked hands for a step. “climb on.”

Regaari didn’t argue. Wherever ‘RP Alpha’ was, it was nowhere nearby and he would just need to rely on WARHORSE’s strength and endurance if he was ever to get out from under a thundercloud of Hunters. WARHORSE handed him the binoculars and intel tablet as soon as he was settled.

“Keep me on course.” he said.

HMS Violent, Capitol System

Commodore William Caruthers

“You’re certain they’re after you, STAINLESS?”

There was a delay in the response. With the strike team having made an exoatmospheric exit from the station and abandoned the rescue operation, the fleet and spaceplanes had scattered to extreme distance and gone dark. In practical terms, with each one being most likely alone inside a radius of several light seconds, they were impossible to find. Violent was nearly six light seconds from the planet now, and that meant plenty of time to wait for the photons of their conversation to wing their way back and forth.

“Completely, sir.” Powell’s voice was low-resolution and distorted by distance and the audio compression, but perfectly intelligible. “The weapons they fired at me looked like a ripoff of that Irbzy-whatever stun gun, but they were aiming the lethal stuff at the lads. They’ve got me pegged for a commander, and they want to know what I know.”

“We’re prioritizing your extraction.” Caruthers decided. “The Yanks are at DEFCON two right now, with the armour the Hunters seem to be using right now it’s the only sure way to secure orbital supremacy long enough to extract you. STAINLESS, your men are secondary to the objective of preventing your knowledge from falling into enemy hands. We cannot afford to give them any more inspiration.”

He counted out twelve seconds under his breath.

“Understood completely, Commodore. I also recommend that we ready an RFG strike to my suit beacon should my vitals show I’ve been incapacitated.”

Caruthers turned to Violent’s captain and raised a finger with a nod, indicating that it should be made so.

“We’ll go at fourteen hundred hours as per your recommendation.” he said. “Good hunting.”

Planet Garden, Capitol System, Dominion Space

Regaari

“There. I see…” Regaari worked the focusing control as best he could one-pawed. “It’s hard to tell. A dark patch that shouldn’t be there, that way.”

WARHORSE glanced up, and corrected his course, puffing like some ancient steam contraption from Gao’s early industrial era.

Regaari lost sight of the anomaly as the terrain dipped, and when WARHORSE pistoned up the rise on the far side of that dip, Regaari nearly fell off him because the human stopped dead.

“Oh, no…”

Humans were so expressive in their grief. He’d seen it with Shoo, and now WARHORSE was projecting his sorrow even through a bulky suit of fully enclosed armour. He sagged for a moment and then pushed forward, until they reached the edge of what was, unmistakably, a fresh crater.

The suit at the bottom of it was effectively intact, though it had been badly ablated by re-entry: blackened, melted and burned away. From the contortion of the limbs and the crushed flatness of the torso, its operator had not survived. WARHORSE sat down with a thump.

Regaari climbed off him, sketched a gesture of respect with his remaining paw, and let WARHORSE grieve. The same shields that had allowed WARHORSE and him to reach the ground safely had plainly failed in THOR’s case, or else never deployed at all. In either scenario, the suit had demonstrated that it was a hideously tough piece of equipment, having reached the ground and still recognisably being the same object. To fall from space and leave an impact crater and STILL be identifiable? Not a pleasant way to die, but as a technical accomplishment it was daunting.

He hadn’t really considered what Deathworlder engineering might accomplish, before. Shoo’s intelligence and insightfulness had been obvious, as had her culinary artistry, but her sheer physicality and intensity had frequently overwhelmed those qualities, with the result that Regaari had simply never turned his thoughts to humans as engineers, builders and inventors.

He was still ruminating on the fallen suit when WARHORSE moved, slowly raising his hand to the communicator on his shoulder.

“STAINLESS,” he said, voice thick with emotion. “WARHORSE. THOR is KIA. EAR field failure.”

”…WARHORSE, STAINLESS. Copy that. Did the field jump array he was carrying survive?”

“Uh…that’s a Negative, STAINLESS.”

“WARHORSE, STAINLESS…Grab a memento, mate. Destroy the suit and continue to RP Alpha. Out.”

WARHORSE stood up again, then stepped down into his fallen comrade’s crater and ripped something from the front of the ruined suit, a patch of some kind. He did something Regaari couldn’t quite see and then stepped back as, again, the suit began to smoke and then burst into seething, angry flames. There wasn’t much left to burn—the destruction was already pretty well total.

WARHORSE sagged, and spoke to the charred thing in the crater. “…Vaya con Dios, brother.”

He knelt and gestured Regaari up onto his back again, checked the intel tablet, turned north, and marched.

WARHORSE was clearly in no mood for talking for most of the remaining distance to RP Alpha, wherever it was, and Regaari let him work in silence. Instead, he pulled out his pulse pistol and, with some difficulty thanks to his missing paw and the human’s steady gait, made a few tricky adjustments that he’d first learned when he was barely out of cubhood.

He was becoming seriously impressed with the medical technology the humans had brought with them. His missing paw should have been a source of debilitating agony. Instead, it was a ghost, a phantom presence on his wrist that felt, when he wasn’t paying attention, like the real thing. If nothing else, the anaesthetic in the dressing was highly effective.

It was probably designed for Deathworlders, he decided. That meant he was trusting the human not to have badly miscalculated and given him an overdose, but he was beginning to seriously trust WARHORSE.

His thoughts were broken by the communicator.

“WARHORSE, LONGLEGS. I have eyes on you, pal, and you’re being stalked.”

Regaari’s fur started crawling instantly and he put a hand to his holster. “Stalked?” he asked.

“Don’t look around.” WARHORSE told him. “LONGLEGS, WARHORSE. Hunter?”

“Reckon so. One of the big fuckers that got STERLING. See that stream to your left? Take a water break, lure it out in the open when it catches up with you.”

WARHORSE looked left, and Regaari did the same. The surface of the stream in question was an invitation all by itself, and he realised he was growing really quite thirsty.

“Will do.” he said. “WARHORSE out.”

They paused. Regaari couldn’t sense anything amiss, but apparently WARHORSE could, because he stood still, listening for a few seconds, then grunted and stooped by the water unclasping his mask.

Regaari watched. Where he would have had to lie on his belly to lap at the water—undignified and uncivilised to a modern Gaoian—WARHORSE just carefully put his gun slightly aside, ready to have it up and firing at an instant’s notice, and dipped both hands into the stream to form a shallow bowl, which he raised to his mouth.

“Not filtering it this time?” Regaari asked.

“Appearances.” WARHORSE muttered, not actually drinking the water. He tilted his head slightly. “Hear them?”

“Hear wha-?”

Regaari was interrupted by a pulse round, which glanced off WARHORSE’s upper arm. From the size and sound of it, it had been a heavy pulse, the kind with enough juice to fling humans about and break limbs. Sure enough, even the winging blow spun the bulky Deathworlder around his axis and dropped him sprawling in the local grass-equivalent.

Regaari’s dive for cover saved his life. The bolt aimed at him would have reduced him to a nasty pink paste.

WARHORSE was up, though. Aside from knocking him around a bit, the pulse weapon hadn’t apparently done anything at all to him except make him angry. He returned fire, gun producing a heavy slamming sound that Regaari could feel with each shot as a hammer-blow in his chest. One of the Hunters was torn to bits, dismembered by the firepower that ripped through it.

The other, as ‘LONGLEGS’ had predicted, was one of the big, grotesque, wet-red naked musculature ones, and it was layered in heavy shield emitters that spat and flashed as WARHORSE’s bullets hit home but failed to penetrate.

It lunged forward and WARHORSE took a smart step away as deadly fusion-edged talons raked out, neatly shearing off the end of the gun.

The Hunter was fast, nearly as much so as a human. Two pairs of those fusion claws swiped and slashed, and WARHORSE survived only by throwing himself backwards and then scuttling away on all fours, staggering to his feet to gain distance. The Hunter followed, and that would have been the end of WARHORSE and Regaari both, had a lightning bolt of berserk and mountainous Deathworlder not erupted from among the shrubs without any warning.

The Hunter had just enough time to register the existence of this new threat before it hit home, and after that there was no more Hunter.

“Coulda sworn you did better’n that in training, pal.” the cavalry declared, once the Hunter was in several pieces. Both men extended their gloved hands and bashed them together.

“These ones are gonna be trouble.” WARHORSE replied. “I- LOOK OUT!“

The third Hunter—another big one—had a cloaking device and a plasma gun, and that would have been the end of LONGLEGS and WARHORSE both had Regaari not shot it.

The humans, in fairness, took the way that the beast disintegrated in a horrible slap of wet matter in their stride, and did a thorough check of their surroundings for threats before turning their attention to Regaari, who was licking the burn on his remaining paw and kicking out the grass fire that was threatening to burst up around the glowing puddle that had once been his pulse pistol.

“Fuckin’ ‘ell.” LONGLEGS declared, while WARHORSE scooped up some water and dumped it on the ruined gun, producing a fog bank and an angry hiss. “The fuck was that?”

Regaari licked his burnt paw again. “If you know how to rewire a pulse gun the right way…” he said, then gestured to the nasty mess of former Hunter that was swirling away downstream. “You only get one shot, but better one shot that counts than a thousand that don’t.”

The humans exchanged glances. “I like this one.” WARHORSE said.

“I can see why.” LONGLEGS agreed. “We’d better get moving. They’ll know where their mates were. Our best bet is to get to the RP.”

“Right. Let me just fix his paw. He needs at least one working.” WARHORSE agreed, then turned to Regaari. He grabbed something on his harness and the bag fell off, clearly designed for quick release. “Legsy, If you need ammo, check the pockets on the left side.” he added.

WARHORSE’s thick, armored fingers were strong enough to accidentally crush Regaari’s bones to powder, but his trust in the human medic was well-placed. WARHORSE’s grip was merely firm, and he applied the dressing with paradoxical precision and delicacy while LONGLEGS reported the contact to STAINLESS and grabbed some of the offered ammunition.

The process took only a few seconds before WARHORSE stood and hoisted his bag back on. “Okay, hop up. That’ll do you for now. Let’s go.”

Regaari didn’t argue. Right now, the safest possible place in the universe seemed to be WARHORSE’s shoulders.

RP Alpha turned out to be a cluster of buildings atop a gentle swell in the ground. the planet Garden was a park world, Class 2, with only the bare minimum of tectonic activity that was necessary for life to arise in the first place. It had no impressive rocky up thrusts or great slabs of broken crust resting at angles atop the layers below, only gentle swells and rolls and grassy hills.

“Ruins?” WARHORSE asked.

“This planet used to be the embassy world for all species.” Regaari explained. “Then the station was built, and because it’s more convenient to dock with a station than land on a planet…”

“Right…” The humans paused to sip from their water supplies. The water was strangely coloured, like the instant juice had been. There must have been something in it to replenish them, Regaari supposed.

“Whose was this then?” Legsy asked.

“I don’t know.” Regaari told him. “My people are nearly as new to the galactic stage as yours, after all.”

“Right.” WARHORSE repeated.

“STAINLESS, LONGLEGS. I have eyes on RP Alpha, one ET and WARHORSE with me.”

“LONGLEGS, STAINLESS. Better get down here quick, we’ve spotted ground forces approaching from the north.”

Legs raised his binoculars to the north, and nodded, before turning to WARHORSE. “Double time.”

“Hold on, scrappy.” WARHORSE said, and set off at an actual run.

Regaari turned his own borrowed binos to the north, and felt his hackles rise. “They’ve got tanks?” he asked. “I’ve never even heard of Hunter tanks before.”

“Tanks we can handle.” Legsy assured him. “Or rather, the angels can.”

“Mythical beings?”

“Nah mate. Fuckin’ spaceships.” Legsy raised his own binoculars and examined the approaching Hunter column as they jogged.

Regaari imitated him. “Why aren’t the Hunters landing directly on top of us?”

“Look up.”

Regaari did so. Nothing much happened for some seconds.

“What am I looking-”

He winced and shielded his eyes as there was a tremendous flash in the sky. It faded almost instantly, but left a purplish-green blob of afterimage behind. “…for?”

“Our angels have got orbital superiority.” Legsy’s translated voice had a note of satisfaction in it.

“Was that…?”

“Tactical nuclear…fusion warhead.” WARHORSE spoke. He was labouring worse than Legsy, but then again he was carrying at least twice as much weight, and it certainly didn’t seem to be slowing him down. If not for his heavier breathing and the sheen of moisture beading on his face, Regaari might have guessed he was almost finding the run easy. “RIGHTEOUS’ll be…having fun, eh Legs?”

“Too fuckin’ right he will. Nobody ever gets to play with the big toys.”

“Fusion weaponry is not a toy!” Regaari protested.

“It is when it knocks those big swarmships out.” Legsy pointed again. It was hard to see in daylight, but there were definitely distant bright trails describing stately lines in the sky. Wreckage, falling from orbit.

They burst from the brush and shrub and picked up the pace across the open ground around the buildings, pounding up the shallow incline onto a paved road surface.

“LEGS and WARHORSE, STAINLESS. I see you. Third building on your left.”

Both men angled for it.

“Last in?” Legsy asked as they came to a halt in a heptagonal ground floor lobby. Eight other men were at work inside, taking the stairs four at a time in the low gravity as they shuttled ammunition and equipment higher up into the building.

“Nothing like a fuckin’ Corti on your back to make you want to get where you’re going ASAP.” One of the soldiers said. He and WARHORSE exchanged one of those fist-slam greetings. “Yours seems cool.”

“He’s cool as shit! Scrappy, this here’s BASEBALL.”

“Scrappy? My name’s-”

“Nuh-ah, man. We’re on mission.” BASEBALL interrupted. “We’re using your war name.”

”…Scrappy seems like the kind of name you’d give a pet.” Regaari protested.

“How ‘bout ‘DEXTER’?” WARHORSE suggested. “With the arm, and he’s a killer, bro.”

The reference—and Regaari knew enough about humans to know that it almost certainly was a reference or in-joke of some kind—went right over his head, but he decided that ‘DEXTER’ sounded much more dignified than ‘Scrappy’. “It’ll do.” he agreed. As he’d suspected, the humans all grinned behind their masks, indicated by a creasing of their eyes.

“DEXTER it fookin’ is.”

This human could only be STAINLESS. He gave Regaari an interested look. “You think he’s worth summat, WARHORSE?”

“He’s a soldier sir.” WARHORSE declared.

“Right. If you’re up for it, mate, I need somebody up in a window keeping an eye on the Hunters. We’ve got a range marker a click out, a little bridge. Let RIGHTEOUS know when they start crossing it, okay?”

Regaari gave him a human nod. “Can do.” he declared.

STAINLESS handed him a communicator. “Press this bit to talk. It’s made for us so you’re gonna have to push pretty hard…”

Regaari squeezed it. As predicted it needed some pressure, but he could do it. “STAINLESS, DEXTER. Communications test.”

“Loud and clear, and translated too. Our evac’s incoming but we need air and orbit superiority first, that’s what the holdup is. When I call that it’s coming, head for the roof. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good man. WARHORSE, TITAN’s rigging explosives along the north road, resupply him. Legsy, nick BASEBALL’s SAW and get yourself set up in a ground floor window. Understood?”

Regaari snapped a “Yes sir!” that was identical to the two humans’. This seemed to meet everyone’s approval.

“Good. Go.”

Firebird

“Shuttle’s away, escort form up.”

Rylee swung Firebird onto the little ship’s wing and, not for the first time, cursed that no Earth corporation had yet produced a satisfactory craft analogous to the role filled by the cheap, boxy models sold in their millions across the Dominion. It was a flying brick, spaceworthy and airworthy only by dint of excessive reliance on its forcefields. No jump drive, no emissions dampening, no nothing. If she’d had her way, they wouldn’t be using them.

She was going to have to use all the clout she could muster to get that shortage fixed.

They’d at least been able to slave the useless little thing’s navigation computer to the network that allowed them to warp and jump in the vicinity of their own gravity spikes by shutting the traps down just long enough. Without that, the ground-pounders would have been fucked.

They aligned, blink-warped, and the planet Capitol went, in an infinitesimal moment that contained nothing more than the suggestion of incomprehensible speed, from being a nigh-invisible turquoise dot in the infinite night, to a great curve of blue and white that filled half the world, garlanded by smashed swarmships.

The bastards were fighting back hard, and they’d learned a few tricks, but she indulged in a grim smile inside her helmet at knowing that they had lost only two TS/2s in the battle, while Hunter casualties must surely be numbering in the thousands.

“RIGHTEOUS, FIREBIRD.” She called. “We’re in your box.”

“FIREBIRD, RIGHTEOUS. Got an incoming heavy column down here, line up for an RFG drop on my call.”

Semenza made an eager “Oooh!” noise. “I’ve always wanted to do one of those.”

Rylee lined up, while her wingmen swept out to clear the box of any lingering hostiles. “So have I.” she agreed.

<Delight> +Fusion weapons deployed via wormhole, too close to evade! ExoAtmospheric deployment of individual ground units! And the communications cyphers! I salivate to sink my teeth into those!+ The Alpha Builder was broadcasting joyous paroxysms like a messy eater spraying prey-blood all over its fellows.

The Alpha-of-Alphas radiated a good mood. It leaned forward slightly in its throne <Amused rebuke> +Continue to pay attention, and you will be fed further morsels I am sure. These deathworlders are not stupid, they will have many secrets in reserve that they have not yet revealed.+ it declared.

<Regret> +A shame that Alpha-of-Many-Broods is going to escape capture.+

<Query> +You are certain?+

<Assertion> +It is the most likely outcome. They move with remarkable speed across terrain.+

<Observation> +The Broods are closing in on their refuge…+

The Alpha-of-Alphas gestured resignation. <Dismissive> +But we lack air and orbital control. There will be more deathworlder surprises. I do not doubt that the capture will fail, but we will learn more from it.+

It snarled, baring all of those vicious teeth. <Anticipation> +Every such secret gets us one step closer to devouring them.+

DEXTER

Regaari set down the binos and gripped the communicator’s button for all he was worth. “RIGHTEOUS, DEXTER. They’re crossing the bridge.”

“DEXTER, RIGHTEOUS. Copy that, y’all watch this shit and tell me how much it hurts them.”

Regaari’s fur rose a bit. The human ‘Combat Controller’s voice had been full of a kind of malicious anticipation which was equal parts infectious and worrying. “RIGHTEOUS, DEXTER…watch what, exactly?”

There was a pause. RIGHTEOUS was presumably busy. A few seconds later, he got back on the line.

“DEXTER, you sir are lucky enough to have a front row seat for the first ever deployment of a Rod From God. Enjoy the show. RIGHTEOUS out.”

Firebird

“RFG dropped!” Semenza crowed. Rylee hit the retros and shared his glee at watching a tungsten-tipped steel bar the size of a telegraph pole leave them behind and streak down into the atmosphere.

“Shuttle escort, let’s follow it down.”

DEXTER

Regaari first saw it as a star in the western sky.

It hung there, low and proud, drifting only a little to the north for nearly a minute, while a flood of Hunters crossed the little bridge he had been watching. He had been wondering what was so important about that bridge, but suddenly he saw the genius of it. Those tanks could only cross one at a time.

The star was drifting a little faster now.

Then it wasn’t drifting. It was a streak of light, a blaze of pure heat that-

He averted his gaze just in time, but even so the reflected flash off the back wall of the abandoned office he was sitting in was dazzling. When he looked back, he could see the ground settling back into place, and an expanding orb of displaced air and water vapour racing outwards.

It knocked dust from the floor of the office and shattered windows when it swept over them with a gut-punch of pure volume that ripped an involuntary alarm cry out of him. The bridge was presumably gone, as was the road for hundreds of meters on either side of it, though that was mostly speculation on his part—there was so much dirt and smoke hanging where the Hunter column had been that actually seeing the bridge itself was a fantasy. When he surveyed it through the binoculars, all he could see was a beige cloud and a lone hunter, broken and dying in the road.

He watched it expire, then put the binoculars down. His paw was shaking.

“Humans are crazy…” he muttered.

Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds

<Epiphany> +Of course! So simple, yet so effective! No need for dangerous and expensive antimatter, no need to mine and enrich fissionable elements! Just drop a steel pole from orbit! Beautiful!+

The Alpha-of-Alphas stroked a claw down one of the cables that connected it to the swarm. <Observation> +It seems…crude.+

<Insistence> +Crude it may be, but Alpha-of-Alphas, greatest one: This is the weapon with which we shall destroy them. With the resources needed to build a single swarm-ship, I can assemble enough of these to destroy a hundred cities.+

<Satisfaction> +Then this hunt has served its purpose: I tire of it. We will intercept that shuttle and kill them. Begin the dismantling of the prey-station. Meat to the maw!+

DEXTER

Something didn’t add up, by Regaari’s reckoning.

Nukes notwithstanding, the Swarm-of-Swarms was immense, and the Hunters were always one step ahead of everybody’s best when it came to cloaking technology. If there was even a ship there for the humans to detect and nuke, it was there because the Hunters either wanted it to be, or else didn’t care enough to hide it.

Which meant that the humans didn’t have quite the orbital superiority they thought they did. Which raised two questions: Why linger and lose ships?

And why not just flatten the embassy compound from orbit?

He exercised a little creative interpretation of his orders and decided to keep watch out in other directions besides north. The Hunters hit by the ‘Rod From God’ weren’t going anywhere, and Regaari had seen enough intelligence on Hunter raids to know that they were far from stupid.

Quite the reverse. They had a uniquely sadistic cunning.

Which was why he was able to save the team’s lives. He was looking right at the dropships when they decloaked in the south, on final approach.

“Hostile contact, south!” he reported, desperately squeezing the radio until his claws creaked. Down below in the courtyard, he saw the Nova Hounds look up and south, then dive for cover.

The opening salvo of coilgun fire that marched up the street therefore did nothing worse than punch some craters in the road surface and knock loose some masonry. The humans, whether by luck or incredible reflexes, escaped unharmed, though SNAPFIRE’s outer fabric suit ripped down his arm to reveal the armor scales beneath.

“STAINLESS, DEXTER, looks like…twenty Hunter dropships just decloaked two hundred meters to our south. They’re landing to drop passengers, the column to the north still isn’t moving.” He elaborated.

STAINLESS’s voice was tight, focused and precise. “Roger. NOVA HOUNDs, reform the line, face south. WARHORSE, get the ETs upstairs. DEXTER, how many Hunters?”

“As many as three hundred, STAINLESS.” Regaari told him. The dropships took off again, engines making a tooth-grinding buzz as they angled up and over the roof. The NOVA HOUNDs opened up a rippling volley of gunfire, which the Hunters returned with interest. The street became a bilateral hailstorm of withering firepower, pock-marked with craters and fallen concrete where the Hunter coilguns had blasted the architecture loose to create cover for the advance..

“Where are those dropships going?” STAINLESS demanded.

Regaari calculated in his head, and felt his ears plaster themselves to his head. “STAINLESS, DEXTER.” he reported. “They’re intercepting the shuttle.”

Firebird

“Multiple bogies! Where the hell did THEY come from?!”

Rylee snapped right and spat two short bursts at the new contacts. Anything coming in like that was definitely hostile. “Stay frosty! RIGHTEOUS, FIREBIRD, I have hostile aircraft on our approach vector, repeat, bogeys in the box!”

“We see them FIREBIRD, plan’s unchanged. Escort that shuttle.”

Rylee threw them into a sideways drift to avoid a coilgun round. “Semenza, light ‘em up!”

Semenza was proving his value again, his voice was as level and cool as a frozen lake. “No missiles, boss. We’re in atmo. EWAR only from me.”

“Shit, yeah. Call targets.”

“Called.”

WARHORSE

“REBAR, Low on ammo!”

“I gotcha!”

The Hunters were using something that looked like an old Bren gun. Long-barreled, slow to aim and firing a steady rhythm of fat, heavy bullets that would have hit like a train if they found their mark. Thankfully, the monsters didn’t seem to know a damn thing about bracing or supporting the weapon correctly, and weren’t strong enough to handle the kick.

The human return fire, meanwhile, was savagely precise—every time a Hunter popped its head out of cover, it got blown away, and the cannibal fucks were losing half a dozen for every ten feet of ground they advanced, but there were a lot them still upright and advancing and the air was full of lead. Adam gritted his teeth as two alien bullets punched clouds of grey dust out of the concrete next to him and dropped, skidding on the increasingly gravel-strewn asphalt to fetch up next to REBAR, who slammed his last magazine into his M16 just as he arrived.

“Good timing.”

“Sure.” Adam left him four mags and then was up and running, delivering ammo to SNAPFIRE.

There was no time to think. With no gun of his own, there was only time to keep the others fighting.

Firebird

The TS/2s spread out then lanced in, picking Hunter strike craft and filling the sky with ammo, but their GAU-8/S guns weren’t really designed for dogfighting. Two Hunters burst, falling apart in rains of flaming metal, but that left twelve more.

The shuttle pilot was doing his part well at least. Every time the Hunters drew a bead on him, he skipped out of the way, usually creating an opening for the TS/2s, but he was under constant threat.

Four more bogies down, then a fifth. Rylee gritted her teeth against the G-forces as she shunted a jolt of power through the thrusters, sweating away precious capacitor reserves and saving the difference by pulling it out of the inertial compensators, sending them skidding across the sky, rattling as they hit the thermal coming off the RFG’s ground zero.

Two bursts. Two bogies down, five left. Four left as FIREDOG rampaged past her, gun howling. The Swarm’s technological superiority counted for squat when the human pilots had millisecond reaction times and could tolerate acceleration that would have killed their Hunter counterparts.

“Shit! That one!” Semenza’s cool cracked. Rylee saw why instantly—it was on the shuttle’s six, and the shuttle just didn’t have the agility to pull off the evasive manoeuvres that its pilot needed.

Only one way to save the mission. Her vision greyed as Firebird leapt forward on a lightning bolt of extra juice to the engines, drawing a groan from Semenza, then they sat on their instrument panels as she fired.

The Hunter evaporated.

The coilgun round that would have killed the shuttle instead took out Firebird’s left wing.

STAINLESS

“Fallen angel, fallen angel! FIREBIRD, going down hard!”

Somehow, Jackson kept her sled level on spitting and stuttering yellow emergency forcefields that spread out like the flaming wings of her stricken craft’s namesake. She fell in a glittering halo that lashed out and grabbed on to the buildings, bleeding off the hurtling wreck’s momentum by gouging out torso-sized chunks of concrete and steel from the buildings.

She still skidded half the length of the street once she hit, but the fields had done their job—she landed intact.

Powell cursed, then grabbed his communicator. “FIREBIRD, STAINLESS.” he demanded. “Any survivors?!”

The reply was a few seconds in coming, and came with a grunt of exertion. “STAINLESS, FIREBIRD TWO. Two out of two survivors, but my pilot’s leg is all busted up.”

Time was tight, but they still had two able-bodied PJs on the team and the stricken TS/2 was on the right side of the line at least. “DEXTER, status of that Hunter column?”

“STAINLESS, DEXTER. The column’s still stopped at that bridge and reeling from the orbital strike. Minimal threat.”

Powell had to admit, the Gaoian was proving to be worth a few multiples of his weight in gold. “WARHORSE, BASEBALL, secure that air crew!”

“On it!” The two young men promptly handed off their cargos of spare ammunition and got up and dashed towards the downed spaceplane.

“SNAPFIRE, REBAR, cover them, TITAN, Legsy, fall back and defend the door!”

All four men grabbed their own packs and hustled, falling back in a disciplined pattern under fire, covering each others’ retreat. That left only the combat controllers, who had formed a rifle team in the ground floor window, HIGHLAND, who was up in the third floor window sniping the Hunters wherever they tried to take cover, DEXTER, and Powell himself.

“CCTs to the roof.” he ordered. He touched the communicator again. “DEXTER, STAINLESS. Get to the roof.”

The Gaoian sounded relieved. “Yes, STAINLESS.”

There was shouting from the door and the Protectors returned, with WARHORSE carrying Rylee Jackson over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, trailed by her WSO. Her leg was a mess, flight suit stained crimson around where it had been cut open and field dressed.

“You’ve always got to be the centre of attention, don’t you?” Powell asked her, falling back on humour to cover his genuine relief that she’d not got herself killed.

She managed a weak, bravado-fuelled grin and extended a fist though she was sweating, shaking and tight-faced from pain. “Good to see you again, STAINLESS. Looks like your boys turned out okay.”

“Don’t fookin’ thank me until we’re home.” he replied, though he bumped her fist in return, then turned to WARHORSE “Get her to the roof, mate.”

“Yes sir!”

More explosions sounded outside, punctuated by chattering gunfire. REBAR and SNAPFIRE fell back into view, firing back down the road before ducking for the door. TITAN was caught in open ground and three rounds sparked against his armour, knocking him off his feet. As he tried to stagger upright, a fourth round hit and penetrated and he collapsed, groaning around a hole in his abdomen.

Powell didn’t even need to give an order. Before he even had the chance, BASEBALL leapt into action, putting the pitching arm for which he was aptly named to work and hurling a frag grenade into the heart of the Hunter advance with such force that it lodged in one monsters’ chest, knocking it off its feet and sending the rest scattering for cover before it went off. He pounced on TITAN and dragged him into the safety of the building even as a burst of renewed firepower missed his head by inches before they made the safety of the doorway.

Fortunately, the Hunters weren’t braving the SAW yet, but that wouldn’t last long at all. Much closer and they’d be in Nervejam range.

“STAINLESS, HIGHLAND. More Hunter dropships decloaking, north. They’re mobbing us.”

Powell grimaced “CCTs, where’s that shuttle?” he demanded.

“STAINLESS, STARFALL, It’s on final approach, landing twenty seconds. Got a lot of Hunter bogies coming in though, we need to be gone in one mike.”

It would have been nice if time had slowed, if he’d had a minute to think through the options carefully. But the decision was foregone. Somebody was going to have to stay down here and hold the Hunters off long enough for the shuttle to take on passengers and dust off.

It was the kind of decision that Powell hated. He hated it especially this time because his options weren’t limited—there WERE no options. Both the CCTs were on the roof, Murray was three floors up, the two PJs had their hands full, and really, this was a job for a close-quarters combat specialist.

But that man was going to die. No maybe, no last-minute rescue. He was ordering a man to his death, and there was only one right option, because the alternative was for everyone to die.

He clamped down hard on his self-hatred and gave the order.

DEXTER

The human shuttle pilot had nerves of steel, Regaari had to give him that much. Hovering level with a building’s roof while aircraft thundered overhead was…

He didn’t have time to think about it further. WARHORSE emerged from the roof access door carrying another human in a flight suit and yelled at him, gesticulating with his free arm. “DEXTER, get in the fuckin’ ride!”

Regaari scrambled in, squeezing as far in as he could while the Corti, Kwmbwrw and the humans piled in behind him. Being built to the scale of Dominion species, they still had plenty of room, but there was one missing, even though the ramp was coming up and they were ascending.

“Where’s-?”

STAINLESS shot a glare at him that could have eviscerated anybody in the shuttle. Then he leaned against the bulkhead, slid down it, put his head between his knees and his hands on the back of his head, and shook.

Master Sergeant James “Legsy” Jones

He would have liked to go down shooting and hollering.

There was no time for hollering. There was no time for anything. Just shoot. Just fight.

Just buy them time.

He’d taken BASEBALL’s SAW and fired it until the box was empty and the barrel glowing. That alone was enough. He saw the shuttle take off and streak into the sky. Mission accomplished.

Then he fought with his SMG until he ran out of magazines. The last of the TS/2 fighters jumped out with thumps of inrushing air, recalled once the shuttle was no longer in danger of being intercepted.

Then he fought with his pistol until there were no more rounds to fire. For honour.

Then he fought with his knife.

Then his fists.

He held out long enough to still be standing when the second Rod From God hit, sent to destroy the wreck of Firebird, and his suit.

The Hunters didn’t get the satisfaction of killing him.

+<Admiration>+

The Alpha-of-Alphas generated a mental note of disapproval aimed at the Alpha Builder, but the lesser being was not paying attention. It had watched a lone Deathwolder fight a hundred of its muscle-grafted experimental “Strongest Brood” warriors, and arguably win.

Everything from the biology, to the weaponry, armour and tactics spoke of wealthy fields of research to come. For a Builder, there was no greater anticipation.

If only that equipment had not been destroyed.

+<Deference> If the Alpha-of-Alphas desires it, this one can begin work on the next generation of innovations immediately.+ it suggested.

+<Blunt disinterest> Do so.+

The Alpha Builder pretended not to notice the emotional context. It simply stood, and departed, already mentally preparing the calculations and experiments.

Left alone in the dark and silence, the Alpha-of-Alphas finally indulged in an unashamed broadcast of its emotional state only once it was sure that there truly were no Hunters within broadcast range..

+<Admiration>+

Regaari

The strangest part was that they recovered, and how.

Caledonia’s flight deck was different to how he remembered it. The shuttle set down with a half-meter’s clearance in a space otherwise filled by crates, equipment, work benches, tool racks and a structure of piping and plastic sheets in the corner. Medics stepped in, carting the two wounded humans away on gurneys. Regaari’s amputation was examined and declared to be as clean and well-dressed as if he’d had it off in an operating theatre. There was nothing to be done for it, at least not that was available on the ship.

He barely paid attention. He was watching the NOVA HOUNDs.

Once out of the shuttle, they had been attended to by technicians, who helped them remove the outer layer of their suits, revealing a variety of shades of browned and white skin, but uniform hair length.

Beneath that was the armour, gunmetal scales that clearly formed the bulk of the suit’s weight, as each man sighed a profound sigh of relief once they were off.

The suits were taken away to be dismantled, serviced and cleaned as a powerful musk hit Regaari’s nostrils. Each one of the NOVA HOUNDs smelled of sweat, salt and exertion, and the dark grey bottom layer was black with moisture in several places. It was also, clearly, better than skin tight, as they had to wriggle out of it.

WARHORSE’s had worn through at the left armpit. He just snarled like an angry beast, grabbed it with his right hand, and tore the underlayer right off his body in a ragged strip.

Regaari blinked. He’d known the human was strong, but seeing what that strength looked like was something else entirely. It was almost…ugly. Uncomfortably reminiscent of those red-raw Superhunters, he could almost see the strands and fibers of muscle under the skin, so many muscles. Bulging power in places Gaoians didn’t have places.

They surprised him further by removing their garments altogether and then retreating behind the plastic screen for a shower. Xiù had always been squeamish about removing her clothes, he remembered that. Even when bathing, despite being in the company of beings who biologically and psychologically couldn’t find her attractive, and despite that Gaoians viewed clothing more as being practical and useful rather than necessary, she had seemed to go to great lengths to avoid letting any more of her skin be visible than was inevitable.

The NOVA HOUNDs didn’t seem to care. Though they did return from their ablutions wearing loose, comfortable clothing.

None of them had any kind of an expression. They just found an array of mats and blankets in the corner, and sat down upon them still and silent, staring at nothing.

Before long, every last one of them had fallen asleep.

Not long after them, Regaari found a spot near WARHORSE, curled up, and fell asleep himself.

He woke to heat. It was stifling, humid and pungent in the flight bay, and his chest was already heaving and panting cool-ish air across his tongue before he woke up.

Somebody was making simple music by tapping steadily on something, which made a hollow metal thump. Somebody else was syncopating it by tapping on two or three other things—crates, equipment, the shuttle hull. There was an actual instrument involved, the twangy one that Xiù had called a ‘guitar’. He didn’t know very much about human music, but he thought he recognised a genre called ‘blues’.

He sat up.

“Hey. Wondering when you’d wake up.”

Regaari stretched. WARHORSE was sat next to him against the wall. He was putting what looked like pictures back in his pack. “How long…?”

“Eight hours or so.”

Regaari sat up more. “I thought we were leaving Capitol?” he asked. “I was expecting to be in a Gaoian hospital by now. And why is it so hot in here?”

“We’re in low-emissions mode, containing our heat so the Hunters don’t see us.”

“Okay, but why?” Regaari demanded.

“They started dismantling the station. Guess we’re staying here to watch them do it, figure out why. Until then, we’re cargo.” WARHORSE shrugged. “Sorry man. Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on your arm and we’ve got a field hospital set up in the other bay. You’re in good hands.”

Regaari ducked a nod. “I know. And, I’m grateful. Without you, the Clan of Females would never have known who Giymuy’s choice to replace her as the Mother-Supreme is.”

“Is that, like, appointing an heir, or just a recommendation?”

“A recommendation. But one that’s usually listened to, from what I gather. I was only a few days old when Giymuy was appointed.” Regaari shrugged. He’d learned early on that humans and Gaoians had that gesture in common.

“Gonna have to be a few days, man.” WARHORSE told him. “They’re stripping the whole station and…y’know, it’s a big station.”

Regaari chittered, a touch bitterly. “It’ll take them months to appoint a successor anyway, even with her recommendation.” he said. “I’m going to miss her though.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yes. She wasn’t just somebody I worked for. If she’d been younger…” he trailed off. “Though, Ayma might not have approved.”

“This the Ayma that fought so hard to have your human friend adopted into the clan?”

“That’s right. She’s also the mother of my most recent cub, and….She and I…” he made a little growling noise, the equivalent of a human clearing their throat. “It’s…complicated.”

“Man, I know how that feels.”

“I doubt it.” Regaari countered. “Monogamy is the norm in your culture. In ours, it would be something of a scandal.”

“You two are exclusive?”

“I’d like to be.” Regaari confessed. “I…haven’t told her as much. She and I went through a lot together, but I don’t know how she’d take it.”

WARHORSE made a loud, explosive sound that was probably a laugh. “Oh, MAN. I definitely know how that one feels!” he exclaimed, then calmed. “At least, the going through a lot together thing.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“Brother, I am the WRONG man for female advice.”

They sat in silence for a while, until Regaari noticed that WARHORSE—and some others of the NOVA HOUNDs—were giving him strange looks.

“What?”

“You’re panting.”

“Well…yes.” Regaari said. “That’s how we deal with heat. We pant, you sweat.” he gestured to the fact that everybody on deck was stripped down to the bare minimum they could get away with, and even that was dark wet and sticking to the skin.

“That’s amazing.”

“Why?”

“Just…ah, man, it just triggers some weird instincts I guess. Forget it. Maybe we should fill one of these crates with water for you…”

“Great Father Fyu, no.” Regaari protested. “Wet fur smells worse than you do.”

This caused WARHORSE’s expression to get even stranger. It was almost like a smile, but wide-eyed rather than narrow-eyed. Regaari had no idea what it meant.

“What?” he demanded.

“Nothing.”

“Fine, keep your secrets.”

He endured the occasional smiling glance for a while longer, listening to the music while WARHORSE sighed and retrieved a few things—hard copy prints of some kind—from his bag and began to flip through them.

“What are those?”

“Uh…Ah fuck it, you’re not human. This is Ava.”

Regaari scrutinized the pictures. ‘Ava’ had plainly set up and taken the images herself, and they were obviously a mating display. It was the only way to explain the curious poses and the odd choice of clothing, both calculated to show off her body to best effect while still hiding away those parts of her anatomy that he knew humans were peculiarly squeamish about. The prints had a slightly worn, often-handled look around the edges.

He had to admit, even across the species barrier, he could see the appeal. When you came down to the mechanics of it, there were only so many ways to be bipedal, and only so many ways to birth live young through a plantigrade biped’s pelvis. The four mammary glands on a Gaoian female were at the waist and small, as opposed to a human’s high and large pair, and the bald skin was totally unattractive, but the curve of flank and hip was almost identical, aside from being more pronounced in humans due to the larger muscles, shorter torso and longer legs.

“Not that I’m an expert.” he declared “but if I had the mouth for it, I think a wolf-whistle would be in order.”

WARHORSE laughed at that, then sighed as he looked at the pictures again. “I hope she gives me a second shot.” he said, wistfully.

“A second shot? She turned you down?”

“We…went through a lot together. Then we went through a lot without each other, and I was dumb enough to think that she’d just…”

Whatever word he was searching for went un-found. There was a general looking-up and then standing-up as STAINLESS stepped onto the flight deck, rather more professionally turned-out than his men in a full body uniform of some kind, rather than the sleeveless, short-legged things the rest of the NOVA HOUNDs were wearing. He was even managing the impressive feat of managing to look comfortable in the heat.

“Fall in.” he ordered, quietly. Everyone gathered around him in a rough half-circle, the NOVA HOUNDs themselves at the front, and all of their technicians, attendants and support staff forming a second row behind them.

“First things first. TITAN’s going to be fine. Was a nasty injury, but he’s had surgery and a Crue-D shot, so he should be up and about in a day or two. Major Jackson suffered a fractured fibula and some nasty lacerations, but her early prognosis suggests a full recovery and return to duty in due course.”

There was murmured relief, which fell silent again as STAINLESS raised a hand.

“We, uh-” he began, then cleared his throat. “We’ve had the unhappy privilege of watching three legendary men burn brightly today.”

Heads lowered. Regaari watched BASEBALL put his arm around WARHORSE’s enormous shoulders and pull him close.

“All of our lights will go out in time.” STAINLESS continued. That mobile, malleable, expressive human face was alive with muscles wrestling under the surface, fighting to maintain dignity. “All of our journeys reach their end. What counts at the end of it all is how that journey was spent, and I for one will consider myself blessed that, for a while, I was able to journey alongside these epic three, and call them my comrades, my friends…and my brothers.”

He swallowed, lowered his head for a second, then raised it again and Regaari admired the strength that he managed to force into his voice.

“Let these mementoes enter the history of this new regiment, and mark the start of a tradition. We will never leave a man behind. Whether he comes back with his shield, upon it, or in keepsake only, he comes back. We all make it home, one way or another.”

As nods of agreement created a gentle susurrus around the bay, he produced three small, battered items from his pocket.

“Staff sergeant Brady Stevenson. THOR.” He laid the little patch of cloth that WARHORSE had salvaged from the crushed armor on the table.

“Sergeant First Class Leo Price. STERLING.” A metal tag on a chain.

“Master Sergeant James Jones.” Another swatch of cloth. “…Legsy.”

By now, all the seven men standing directly in front of him had their arms interlinked across one another’s shoulders or around each others’ waists. Around the bay, deathworlders were standing at attention, some fighting back their emotions, others displaying them openly.

STAINLESS took a deep breath. “It’s still early days for the SOR. We’ve been blooded today, and despite our losses, we acquitted ourselves superbly under the most difficult circumstances, in keeping with the finest traditions of our parent units.” He declared. “I expect that we will go on to great things in due course, which is why I’m going to conclude with what I hope will be the regimental motto, so listen closely. Remember this.” heads raised and gave him their full attention.

”…’What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties. In form and moving how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel: In apprehension, how like a god!’”

He set his jaw and saluted fiercely. Every one of the humans present copied him. “When gods fall, we will remember them.”

Twenty humans spoke as one. “We will remember them.“

Two torturous days passed, punctuated by a steady rhythm. First, a siren would sound, marking the moment when their orbit carried them below the horizon from the Swarm’s perspective, and the ship would wake up, flinging out its forcefields and radiating all of its accumulated heat towards the sun in a concentrated beam with breathtaking efficiency.

Regaari could actually FEEL the temperature drop, until he was comfortable again and the humans were sighing with relief even as their breath condensed on newly chilled air. Chores would be done, the water would be recycled and people would take comfort showers and use the latrines, making best use of every moment that the ship could operate normally before its orbit carried it back into line of sight with the Hunters and they were forced to endure another three hours of mounting heat and humidity as best they could.

In hindsight, not taking WARHORSE up on that bath idea had been wise. He would have been shivering and at risk of hypothermia at the cold end of the cycle.

They spent the time watching movies, huddled around a tiny tablet computer in a way that must surely have made the heat worse, but at least it was entertainment. He wound up sitting on WARHORSE’s shoulders again so as to have a good view.

Regaari had watched a number of movies with Xiù, and had mostly enjoyed them, though he had wondered what in Gao’s name she got out of ‘horror’ movies. She’d mostly watched them from behind her hands, squirming and occasionally shrieking while the poor traumatized Gaoians had been even worse affected. Humans could be dark in their storytelling it seemed.

He’d not watched a movie like this one, though. It almost had a Gaoian in it: too short, oddly proportioned, with digitigrade feet and strange facial proportions and markings that suggested a chromosomal disorder, and clearly built on Deathworlder anatomy, making him stockier and far stronger than any real Gaoian, but still…

“Why would you wanna save the galaxy?”

“Because I’m one of the idiots who LIVES in it!”

It was ridiculous, but also a huge amount of fun, and certainly distracted from the relentless heat.

He was required to check with the hospital set up in the bay on the opposite side of the ship every few hours, and was surprised when they removed his dressings—the stump underneath had healed perfectly, unbelievably fast, though who had snuck him a dose of Cruezzir, when and how were a mystery. When he got back to Gao, he’d be ready to receive a prosthetic the moment he landed.

Finally, orders were given, objects cleared away, loose equipment battened down and everyone settled down ready for the jump, which passed with a barely-perceptible jolt in his stomach.

At once, the cooling cycle started, and this time, the temperature stayed down.

The long wait was over.

Major Owen Powell

HMS Sharman had a few design quirks that had been intended to keep it inside the footprint occupied by the original camp, and one of these was its narrow hallways and corridors. The narrowest of which, Powell was certain, was the one outside his office.

Throw in that SOR men were universally large, and that made getting past one another a challenge sometimes, which was why he paused at the intersection on seeing Arés coming towards him. The younger man picked up the pace to squeeze past him at the corner.

“Shouldn’t you be seeing Ava, Sergeant?” Powell asked. “She’ll be worried about you.”

“We were just…organising the wake, sir.” Adam explained.

Powell nodded. “Good. And I’ll be bloody well upset if you lot don’t drink every drop of alcohol on this planet, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Powell exhaled through his nose, aware that he was going to miss having an NCO with whom he could get away with sharing a joke.

But then again, that hadn’t been the nature of his relationship with Legsy to begin with, either.

“Goodnight, sir.” Adam said, and turned to go.

“Arés…”

The young man turned to face him again. “Sir?”

”…Legsy and I were in the habit of sharing a post-mission drink. You’d be…very welcome to join me in keeping that tradition alive.”

Adam blinked at him, then nodded, swallowing. “I’d like that.” he managed.

“Come on.”

Powell unlocked his office and led the way in, visiting the top of his filing cabinet and retrieving a bottle of Glenfiddich and two cut crystal glasses.

“One for us, and one each for anybody who didn’t come back.” he explained, pouring just enough for there definitely to be whisky in each glass, but not enough that four of them would actually get either of them intoxicated.

They chimed glasses, and knocked them back. He was slightly impressed that Adam had no worse reaction to it than clearing his throat and a slightly pinched expression for a second, considering it was probably his first taste of whisky.

Powell poured the second pair of drinks. “I’m recommending Price for the Victoria Cross and Legsy for the George Cross.” he said. “And as far as I’m concerned, Jackson and Semenza deserve the Medal of Honor, they saved the bloody lot of us…but they’ll probably settle for less. There’ll be a few other decorations getting handed out too…” He paused, and shrugged. “We’ll see how it goes. Not sure I care about medals right now.”

They drank again. Adam had the look of a man who wanted to ask questions but was restraining himself.

“You’ve got permission to speak freely right now, lad.” Powell told him. “Make use of it, I don’t grant it often.”

“Just…a question sir.”

“Go on then.”

”…How are you holding up?”

“Christ, remind me not to let you ask freely too often, you get right down to business, don’t you?”

“Sorry, sir, I-”

“No, no. Fair question…” He appreciated it, in fact. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and drank his third glass while he thought. Adam copied him. “I’m not…I try not to be a weak man, but ordering a friend to his death…” Powell put his glass down and reached for the bottle one last time. “It beats you up.”

“I’d be…kinda worried if it didn’t, sir.”

Powell poured again and nodded. “True. And it’d be a lonely fookin’ job if I didn’t get on with my men, you know? It just…it needs to be understood that the mission comes first. When it’s one man versus every man…I can’t, I won’t be fookin’ sentimental about it. I have to send the right man for the job…whoever that might be.”

“I didn’t get that when I signed up.” Adam confessed.

“Well, what about now you know what it’s like?”

“Sir…speaking candidly?”

Powell handed him his glass. “I thought we bloody were.”

“Well then…if I was the right man for the job…I guess I wouldn’t just expect you to send me, I’d want you to.”

Powell nodded, staring at his glass for a moment. “Aye. And I reckon Legsy would have said the same.”

They toasted and drank for the fourth and final time.

“Go on, Sergeant. You’ve better things to be doing and prettier people to be doing them with than commiserating with your commanding officer.” He said as he set his glass down. “I’m…coping.”

“Yes sir. Good night.”

“Good night, sergeant.”

“You’re approaching a commune of females and cubs, male. Who comes?”

Regaari knew not to underestimate the females who took guard duty outside the communes at night. Ceremonial though their role was, they took it seriously, and would be expert shots with those pulse rifles. Not that they ever DID shoot anybody, but it paid to respect that fact.

He halted in the light.

“Officer Regaari, of Clan Whitecrest.” he announced. “Formerly of the executive staff of Mother-Supreme Giymuy.”

“Regaari?” one of the guards stepped forward to get a better look at him. “Wā sāi! it IS you! We thought you were dead!”

He waved his left arm to show off his new cybernetic paw. “I very nearly was.” he said.

“You know him, Sister Myun?” The other guard asked.

“He is who he says he is.” Myun assured her. “I’ll escort him.”

“Who are you here to see, male?” the second guard interrogated him, clearly not satisfied with Myun’s reassurance. To judge from Myun’s resigned and impatient body language, this was nothing unusual.

Maybe he should court the young female after all…If nothing else, Myun would benefit from knowing she had allies.

“I’m here to inform the late Mother-Supreme’s chosen successor of her nomination.” He announced, picking the one of the three truthful answers he could have given on the grounds that it was probably the least controversial.

“Hrrmm. You may enter.” The guard finally stopped glaring at him, though she didn’t unwind exactly.

Myun just flicked her ears irritably and walked alongside him through the commune’s doors.

“Did she choose Ayma?” she asked.

“Yulna.” Regaari revealed.

Ayma’s voice made them both freeze on the spot. “That makes sense.”

She had been cuddling and rocking a tiny newborn in the moonlight, almost invisibly still, and chittered a little at the way both Myun and Regaari flinched. “Yulna’s a good choice. She won’t be afraid to speak her mind.”

“I will…leave you two alone, shall I?” Myun stepped away a little, out of earshot.

Ayma made an amused face. “That poor little Sister has watched too many human romance movies.” she declared.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, she’s convinced you and I are ‘an item’, or something.” Ayma growled a little, wryly. “You’ve seen those human movies, you how know they react. They get jealous over mating partners. That’s not us, is it?”

“Well…” Regaari’ paused, then nodded, burying his disappointment. “…No. You’re right. It’s not.”

She stood and gave him a friendly nose-rub, as of old and close friends. “I like you too much, Regaari. I’d hate to fall out with you over mating contracts.”

That, at least, was a dose of welcome, soothing cold water to balm his burned self-esteem. “You do?”

“Oh yes.” Ayma glanced up and down the commune concourse and then leaned in conspiratorially. “If I had to choose just one…wait, what happened to your paw?!”

She’d tried to take it intimately, and had found herself holding smooth carbon fiber instead of fur.

He grimaced at it. “It’s…a long story. I’ll tell you what happened over breakfast, if you’ll do me a favour.”

“Name it.”

“It’s about Sister Myun…”

Starship ‘Negotiable Curiosity’, Deep Space

“I think we’ve found one of them.”

“One of them? I thought we were looking for a single escape pod?”

There was a sigh from the ship’s owner and commander. “Yes, Hzzkvk, we’re looking for a single escape pod, but the ship launched two.”

Hzzkvk blinked at his Corti employer. “But…Bedu, if the ship launched two, why are we only after one?”

Bedu repeated his weary sigh. “Because the client is paying us five million Directorate Currency Units for the escape pod with one of your ‘cousins’ on it, and NOT for the other one.”

“But why-?”

Mwrmwrwk interrupted him, saving Bedu’s headache from progressing any further. “Client says, client pays, we do. No more questions.” she snapped. Bedu nodded subtly at his Kwmbwrw pilot, thanking her.

“But-”

“Hzzkvk!” Bedu snapped, then mellowed his tone. “I tell you this as a colleague of three years: the subject of your species’ remarkable intelligence is the focus of frequent discussion among the Corti, and may I say that you yourself are a type specimen for the exact qualities that we find so fascinating. Nevertheless there is a time for not asking questions, and this is one such, hmm?”

Hzzkvk was practically glowing with pride. “Why…thank you Bedu!” he said.

“Indeed. Please be so kind as to man the scoop field should we need to bring them aboard?”

“Of course!”

Once the gangly blue shape of their junior crewman had left the bridge, Mwrmwrwk shot her employer a questioning glance.

“What?” Bedu asked her.

“I’ve never known you tell a direct lie before.” she said, quietly.

“Nor did I this time.” Bedu replied amiably.

“So…Vzk’tk intelligence really IS a subject of frequent discussion among the Corti?”

Bedu granted himself the luxury of satisfaction at his own cleverness. The Kwmbwrw was by no means an idiot herself, and that meant that if he’d snuck his veiled insult past her, then Hzzkvk would never notice it.

“Indeed.” he told her. “We often find ourselves wondering how a species so terminally dim ever managed to invent the wheel.”

Mwrmwrk took a second to process that, then made a kind of fluttering, purring noise in her chest—her species’ equivalent of laughter. “I see…And, we’re coming up on the liferaft.”

“Does the transponder code match?” Bedu demanded, examining the little puck-shaped craft on his screen.

“Please.” She clucked, annoyed. “That was the first thing I checked.”

“Very good. Run the disruption and scan their contents.”

“Won’t they notice?”

“If they are who we want, it will not matter, and if they are not…well, they will never find out what happened. Please, run the scan.”

Mwrmwrk raised a hand to acknowledge the order, then followed it. A second later, data poured onto Bedu’s command screen.

“Three deathworlders, alas.” he noted. “All quite badly injured, too. Fine, stop the scan. We had better pick up that other ALV wake.”

“Are you sure they won’t have noticed?” Mwrmwrk asked, already changing course. Behind them, the escape pod blinked away as the slight change in their vector translated to a separation of light seconds in a heartbeat.

“At most, they may have felt a sensation of time…having done something strange.” Bedu conceded. “I doubt they will pay it a second thought.”

Demeter Road, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

The little wooden ‘Eden’ sign that Sara had once given them rattled when Ava opened the door. She paused on seeing him and then threw herself straight into a hug with such force that, despite the disparity between her mass and his strength, Adam had to take a step back to absorb her.

“Oh my god, Adam!” she couldn’t even fit her arms all the way around him. She’d been right: things had changed. “Are you okay? People are saying Legsy didn’t come back…?!”

“Yeah.” Adam nodded “He, uh…”

Ava made a sad, almost childish little sound of loss. “Are you…alright?”

“I wouldn’t have come back if not for him.” Adam told her. “Or Leo, either. They…None of us would.”

She retreated into the apartment and sat down on the couch. “Goddammit.”

Adam shut the door as he entered and sat next to her. “Yeah…”

There was a melancholy silence for a little while, which Adam finally broke. “Legsy…gave me some advice, before we headed out. This may not be the best time to follow up on it, but…”

”…What?”

“He…helped me figure out what you are to me.”

Ava blinked at him, then turned to face him, giving him her attention.

Adam took her hand. “You’re…this amazing, gorgeous, talented woman that I’d like to get to know better.” he said.

Ava paused, but then a smile broke through on her face like the dawn rising. “Yeah?”

Adam nodded.

Ava looked at him for a long, contemplative moment and then sighed, and he could see the tension and misery flow out of her as she wiped away a tear.

”…It’s a date.” she said.

++End Chapter 22++

While Deathworlders chapters will always be published completely for free, with the aid of my backers on Patreon I’ve now been able to take more time for writing! Pledging a single dollar per chapter gets you access to my behind-the-scenes blog where, among other things, I keep a running tally of each chapter’s word count as it’s written.

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Chapter 22.5: Interlude/Outlets

Date point: 10y 5d AV
HMS Sharman, Folctha, the planet Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Major Owen Powell

It always rained in Folctha at night.

It wasn’t a downpour or anything. Just a steady, businesslike vertical wetness that neatly filled the role of precipitation, got moisture out of the cooling nocturnal atmosphere, and sluiced everything ready for the day to come.

Future shifts in Cimbrean’s biome as more and more of its native ecology died off and was replaced by immigrants from deathworld Earth might one day unbalance that neatly scheduled hydrological routine, but for now the rain was a nightly feature. Covered walkways and canopies were a feature throughout the town therefore, and the Royal Navy base of HMS Sharman was no exception.

Paradoxically, it seemed, the navy didn’t like getting wet.

All in all, it was a welcome relief from the fierce heat and noise, and the increasingly pervasive scent of alcohol.

Besides. Owen only did a good impression of an extrovert. Deep down, his was a soul who needed a little quiet and isolation, a little mental elbow room to make sense of the world.

Not that there was much to make sense of. Three of his lads dead, and an old comrade—a friend, even—ordered to take a fatal last stand so the rest of them could live. That he’d retained any composure at all when the rest of the lads had called on him to say a few words was down purely to iron discipline.

He’d had to deliver them slowly and deliberately, with lots of throat-clearing and swallowing.

Things had started off slowly, quietly and with no small amount of awkwardness. There had been tears and mostly the Wake had been an exercise in everyone sitting together in silence, and drinking.

Then somebody had said something—Owen didn’t even remember who—and there’d been a little laugh. Then there’d been a joke, a happy anecdote about how Stevenson had got his callsign. Murray had shared the story about Price being caught in a situation that had been truly innocent, but had involved a young mechanic, some WD40 and an eye irrigation and had looked to the Lieutenant-Colonel like, well…

Vigorous miming had ensued.

That had opened the floodgates, and by the time Owen decided that the heat was becoming too much for him, the lads had, in Legsy’s honour, bravely researched and attempted to sing a few Welsh songs, and that was a language which twisted the sides of the mouth when sober. When drunk…

Well, it was a tribute. Legsy would probably have been hugging his ribs laughing.

“Hey Owen.”

He turned and directed his ethanol-addled attention to a bench against the wall of the sports hall. It took a few seconds to get his focus right.

“Bloody hell. What are you still doing on this planet?” He asked, heading over. “Shouldn’t you be with your wing?”

Rylee Jackson raised her eyebrows at him and gesticulated with a beer bottle. “Some asshole shot up my ride.” she explained with forced lightness, and there was a fuzzy edge to her pronunciation that said she was about as drunk as Owen was.

He sat down. “You okay?”

“We lost two planes.” Rylee said. “Four guys. And I’m stuck here throwing a wake for them all by myself.

“What about Semenza?”

“Joe? Eh, he went out on the town. Said something about a place called Starling’s and getting laid.”

Owen frowned, interrogating his foggy memory for details about Folctha’s drinking establishments.

“…I’n’t that one a gay bar?” he asked.

“I hope so, or Joe’s gonna have a frustrating time.”

Owen blinked, then nodded. “Arright, fair.” He acknowledged. “What about you?”

“You ever fucked with your leg in a cast?” Rylee sighed.

“Can’t say as I have…” Owen conceded.

“Me either, but I’m thinking it won’t be easy, or much fun. So, here I am…” She swigged her beer. “…are you okay?”

“I’m still breathing.”

“That bad, huh?”

Owen chuckled at that, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I’m coping. I think. I just can’t… let it out around the lads, you see? Got to be The Old Man.”

“I hate that. Gotta stay strong, gotta keep up the dignified fucking façade… I suck at it.”

“Part an’ parcel of being an occifer.” Owen grumbled.

She grinned at him. “Occifer? Owen, I do believe you’re drunk.”

Owen gave her a mock-defiant, mock-offended and genuinely unsteady glare. “I defy you to find anybody, on this planet or any other, who can drink as much lager as I have tonight an’ not be a bit tipsy.” he declared.

“’A bit tipsy’? Dude, don’t give me ‘a bit tipsy’, you my friend are drunk.” Rylee scolded him. “And, so am I.” she added.

“Drunk then. Bet you there’s no fooker around who could drink that much an’ not get addled.” Owen challenged her.

“Fifty dollars?”

“Done.”

“Gaoians.”

Owen blinked at her. “What?”

“Gaoians. They don’t get drunk on alcohol, they just like the taste.”

“You’re taking the piss!”

“My right hand to God!” Rylee raised it. “Furry bastards can drink any human alive under the table and then they wonder what the fuck’s wrong with us, falling asleep and making fools of ourselves all over the place.”

She sipped her own beer. “You ever want to lose all your money, get into a drinking contest with Rocket Raccoon. Fuck, life is weird sometimes.”

“It’s a cruel fookin’ joke, is what it is.”

“And the punchline sucks…”Rylee agreed.

Owen nodded, and rested his head against the wall for a second.

“Hey… Owen?”

“Yeah?”

“You sure you’re coping?”

He opened his eyes again, and shrugged. “You know I had to watch a little girl die, one time.” he said. “literally watched her spirit go. Fourteen fookin’ years old… hardest thing I ever did was closing her eyes.”

Rylee just turned a little bit towards him and listened.

“I ordered a man I’ve thought of as a mate for years to stay behind for the rest of us a couple days ago.” He continued. “And I’m just… I’ve had a hard fookin’ time of it, you know? I’m tired, I’m beaten up, I’m mourning, but most of all I’m so fookin’ mardy I could rip something limb from limb.”

“…Mardy?”

“Angry. Raging. Fuckin’ tampin’, as Legsy God rest him would have had it. Next Hunter I get my hands on, all of its fookin’ mates are gonna feel what I do to it.” He sat forward. “And when I finally get to fight back at those Hierarchy wankers… God show fookin’ mercy on the pack of ‘em and fling ‘em in the pit before I get to them.”

“…That’s a lot to keep in.”

“Got a better outlet in mind?”

“We could get you laid?”

Owen laughed, and ran a hand over his scalp. “Aye, that’d work.” he agreed. “Don’t know as I know anybody’s interested, though.”

“Oh, you do.” Rylee disagreed. “But her leg’s in a cast right now.”

Owen blinked at her as the booze haze finally parted enough for some insistent and slightly neglected social skills to finally get up to speed. She finished her beer and gave him a wink. “Unless you know some way to fix that.” she added.

“Burgess. Burgess! Baseball, wake up you daft apath!”

“Uh? Oh. Major! Uh… what can-?”

“I need to cadge a Crue-D patch and some rubbers. And keep your gob shut about it.”

“Uh… yes sir. Gob shut. Gotcha.”

“So… how long’s this gonna take to work?”

“…Might be a bit.”

Rylee giggled. “Wow Owen, you sure know how to give a girl a wild ride.”

“Ah, hush and utch up.” Owen settled in next to her. She was a fair bit smaller than him, but she was as solid as an acrobat. They fit warmly and comfortably together on a small bed, back-to-belly, butt-to-lap, knees-to-knees. “Think we’re both too drunk anyway. Your leg’ll be better in the morning.”

She laughed quietly. “You’re planning as far ahead as the morning?”

“Part an’ parcel of being an occifer.” He rested an arm lightly on her waist, and she wrapped her own arm around it to hold his hand. “Besides. Leisure day tomorrow. Plenty of time.”

“Mmm…” she yawned. “This is good too…”

“Aye.”

She made a sleepy, comfortable noise. “You’re right… may as well… have a clear head. Enjoy it more that way…”

She fell asleep.

In the dark, Owen smiled sleepily at the back of her head, stroked his thumb against her hand, and put his head down. The world was a better place with somebody warm in his arms.

He didn’t need long to copy her example.

Chapter 23: Back Down to Earth

Date Point: 10y2m2w AV
HMS Caledonia, Deep Space

Adam Arés

“Okay… Murray?”

“He’s a fucking ninja, but he never watches his surroundings properly; too focused on the goal. Claymore, tripwire, something like that. Force him back into it with a couple of Aggressors, or maybe lure him into it by being a tempting target.”

“Makes sense… What about you, Vandenberg?”

“Me? I wouldn’t last two seconds in CQB against an Aggressor. And hey, that way they could maybe live-capture me, get the implants out again.”

“Just what the hell are you boys talking about?”

The five of them turned. “Hey Kovač.” Adam smiled at her. The diminutive blonde NCO in charge of biomechanics and EVA system life support gave him a friendly wave, though her attention was on her tablet.

“pH balance check and last QA, guys.” she announced. “Show me your butts.”

They dutifully turned around with an assortment of chuckles, presenting the life-support packs that rode low on their back and pelvis for her to assess with her tools. “So what were you guys talking about?”

“Uh, what we’d do if one of us was biodroned.” Firth told her.

She shuddered. “Yuurgh. Just the thought of that…!”

“I know, right?” BASEBALL agreed. “Fuckin’ shoot me, if it ever happens to me.”

This sparked universal agreement. “So you’re basically having a ‘who would win in a fight?’ conversation.” Kovač noted. “Very macho. You’re good, Firth.”

“Yeah, but this way it’s practical an’ shit.” Sikes noted.

“Well, don’t let me stop you…” she assured them, after a few seconds of silence. “You’re good, Burgess.”

“Okay…” Vandenberg thought for a second. “Blaczynski?”

“He’s too cautious for an ambush. Just gotta put the pressure on, I guess. Suppress him and work round the side.” Firth noted.

“Okay… WARHORSE then.”

Kovač giggled. “Sniper round. From long range.” she suggested. “You’re good, REBAR.”

Everyone nodded, muttering variations on the theme of “Oh yeah.”

“Hey!” Adam objected.

“No, she’s right dude. No way I’m confronting your ass up close.”

“Yeah, but, dude-”

“From extreme long range.” Vandenberg added.

“Come on, I’m not an aggressor!”

“Take it for the compliment it is and move on, brother.” BASEBALL suggested.

“Gee, thanks…” Adam rolled his eyes.

“Shame to ruin that face, though.” Kovač teased. “You’re good, Arés.”

“Same goes for you, Base.” Vandenberg said. “Get some JETS guy to do it from a thousand yards.”

“Damn straight!” Burgess agreed, and exchanged a fist bump with him.

”…What about the Major?” Firth asked.

“Major Powell?” Adam asked, still trying to ignore the comment about his face. Kovač had a knack for making his ears go red, though right now they were mercifully hidden under the collar and neck sheath of his EV-MASS.

“What other fuckin’ Major am I gonna be talkin’ about, dumbass?”

”…right. Yeah.”

“You’re good, Sikes.”

“Airstrike.” Sikes said.

“What?” Adam asked

“Airstrike.” Sikes repeated.

“Dude, come on, yeah he’s a fuckin’ badass but he’s not THAT-”

“Nah bro.” BASEBALL interrupted. “It’s not about him being too scary, though he fuckin’ is. It’s about giving him a proper sendoff.”

”…you’re right.” Adam agreed. “He’d deserve nothing less.”

“Nuke the site from orbit.” Firth nodded.

“It’s the only way to be sure.” Kovač finished for him. “Helmets and masks on, boys.”

They scooped the helmets up and put them on, pushing them down firmly until they engaged with the rigid component of the seal at the back of the skull with a sharp clack! The mask locked into place along the jawbone and mated with the suit’s air supply and to the helmet with similar mechanical solidity. The flexible rubber seal that did the rest of the work of keeping their faces protected from vacuum slid together easily and automatically.

Kovač tugged the roll of duct tape she’d been wearing as a bracelet off her wrist. “Seal check!” she announced.

This was a simple ritual—each man carefully examined the seal of the man beside him and announced it was good with a ringing slap to the helmet. Kovač then double-checked for him and then applied some tape over the seal for good measure. It probably wouldn’t actually do anything, but everyone felt better for it.

“HUD check.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“All good!” she tapped at the large button on her tablet. “KMP check.”

The spacewalkers stood and jolted in place a bit as they used the controls on their wrists to test their Kinetic Maneuvering Packs, and another round of “Good” was called.

“And… equipment.”

Adam helped the guys shrug on their equipment packages and make sure their loads were properly strapped on and distributed. That was his job specifically, backed up by BASEBALL, and he did it right. He took pride in that.

“Good.” he declared.

“That’s our checklist, you’re green-lit.” Kovač stepped back. “Over to you, Vandenberg.”

“Thanks, Kovač.” She nodded and joined the rest of the techs in heading for the airlock. REBAR, being the senior NCO, was in charge of the EVA they were doing.

“RIGHTEOUS?” he prompted.

Firth nodded, and touched the side of his helmet. “CIC, RIGHTEOUS, we’re green-lit for EVA.”

The reply came back in a few seconds. “RIGHTEOUS, Caledonia CIC, we have you ready. Condition Amber.”

“Condition Amber!” Firth called. “Clear the deck!”

One of the techs by the airlock echoed the call - “Clear the deck!” and they filed out. Once it had cycled and the light above it indicated full seal, Firth nodded to the guys, they exchanged fist-bumps, and he touched his helmet again. “CIC, RIGHTEOUS, go for doors. I say again, we’re go for doors.”

The acknowledgement was lost as a siren hooted five times—giving plenty of warning to anyone who might need to dash to hit the emergency button—and then the gravity went away. So did the air, brushed to the corners of the room and held in place by a forcefield that swept the deck empty. They all glanced at one another, checking for any signs of distress. Everyone’s suit was working fine, and they watched the huge flight deck doors push outwards and then split into two halves, which both swung aside.

Naked stars yawned at Adam from incomprehensibly far away, somehow made to feel close and dangerous by the fact that literally nothing separated him from them save distance and his EV-MASS. All he could hear was the faint muffled sound of his own heart, his own digestion, and the rush of air into and out of his mask past his ears.

“CIC, RIGHTEOUS. Commencing spacewalk.”

“RIGHTEOUS, Caledonia CIC: have fun.”

“Man, we have got to get some sound or music or something in this shit.” BASEBALL commented. “Vacuum’s too quiet.”

“I hear ya… There’s our box.” Firth agreed. Adam’s HUD filled with a flight waypoint and instructions on how much thrust to give himself, which he followed to the letter. Firth knew best when it came to EVA navigation.

Caledonia threw a spotlight on their target as they got close to it—a round vehicle, the proportionate shape of a hockey puck but twenty feet across and bright blue, covered in alien labels and script. One standard type three Dominion life raft. Without the light, both it and the bulk of their mothership would have been damn near invisible. The human eye had never really been designed for the lighting conditions in interstellar space, some light years from the nearest star. In fact, aside from the spotlight and the blinking beacon atop the liferaft, the nearest and brightest point of light was the gravity spike that Caledonia had deployed to catch the tiny craft so that it could be brought aboard.

They swung into place. As Firth set up shop notionally “above” the life raft to keep an eye on its velocity relative to Caledonia, Adam went with Sikes and Burgess joined Vandenberg in approaching antipodal spots on the rim of the little craft, where the two Defenders set to work welding larger versions of their suits’ KMPs to it while the Protectors held them in place.

It didn’t take long before REBAR reported “Done.” prompting a quiet cuss from Sikes.

“Done. I owe you fifty.”

“Damn right you do. RIGHTEOUS, over to you.”

The five of them settled on the life raft and held on as Firth took over piloting it into Caledonia’s waiting flight deck.

As they crossed the threshold, Firth made a satisfied noise over the comms. “Okay, Caledonia CIC, RIGHTEOUS, we’re in the bay, close the doors. WARHORSE, you may as well wake ‘em up.”

Adam gave him a clear thumbs up and used the computer on the inside of his wrist to connect to the life raft’s comms, a process which automatically shut down the stasis field within.

“Hello in there.” he announced. “You’re being rescued by the United States Air Force.”

They’d gone over that one a few times, how to begin that introduction. In the end, they’d decided that any humans in such a life raft would probably have been in there for long enough to not know who the SOR was, and aliens wouldn’t know the difference anyway. And, seeing as Adam himself was still after all a pararescueman…

“Before we pop the hatch,” he continued “we just want to warn you guys that we”re humans from Earth, so if there”s any special precautions you need us to take to protect you from harm, you let us know.”

A male voice answered in definite untranslated English as the doors finished closing behind them, though there was a rough edge to it, like he had a throat infection or something. “No need, pal. We’re American.”

Adam grinned inside his mask when he heard a feminine exclamation of disapproval in the background, and the male voice clarified. “Alright, two Americans and one Canadian.”

“Three humans?” he broadcast an all channels, and the guys all held up a fist in celebration. “Jackpot! Y’all okay in there?”

“Three cases of recent vacuum exposure. We really need a doctor, fella.”

Adam waved at BASEBALL, who gave him a thumbs up. “Copy that. Sit tight folks, we’ll have you out of there in a minute.”

He switched his broadcast channel. “Caledonia medical, WARHORSE, do you copy?”

“WARHORSE, Caledonia medical, loud and clear.”

“Life raft contains three human wounded, zero Echo-Tangoes. Three cases of recent vacuum decompression, probable pulmonary edema, ebullism and DCS, possible pleural effusion. BASEBALL and I will triage, ventilation on standby please.”

“Wilco WARHORSE.”

“SOR, stand by for lunar gravity…” Adam swung himself out from the liferaft to arm’s length, and together they fell gently onto the deck at one-sixth of a G. Pressure returned with a thump, and as soon as the raft was down on the deck and safe, the gravity ramped up to one G.

Two lights over the main flight deck doors turned green. “Two on the board.” Firth announced, no longer needing the radio. “REBAR, we’re good to break seal.”

“Clear to break seals.” Vandenberg acknowledged. “Get ‘em off, guys.”

Adam got his helmet off as fast as he could, and hit the door release even as the first of Caledonia’s medical staff came squeezing through the airlock onto the flight deck with trolleys and life support equipment.

The occupants were in a bad way. The fit-looking tanned dude in the back had badly bloodshot eyes but seemed to be breathing fine. The whipcord athletic blonde woman to his right was coughing pink froth, but most worrying of all was the young asian woman in the front. She was barely moving, and he could see clear signs of shock.

“Shit, you guys weren’t kidding about the medical attention.” he said, and hauled himself in with them.

“You should see the other guy.” the blonde told him.

“Hah! Bueno.” He turned back out the door, using the excuse of talking to the people outside to cover prepping a dose of anaesthetic—the Chinese girl was going to need to go on life support immediately, and for that she needed to be asleep.

Not for the first time, he wished that they were authorised to use Crue-D for first aid. “Base, get the blonde patient, she looks oedemic.” he instructed. “REBAR, I’ma need that board there.” Vandenberg nodded and stepped smartly to retrieving it, so he returned his attention to the Chinese girl.

“Hey, can you try and grip my hand for me?” he asked her. Though she was able to raise her hand and sort of grip, there was nothing there in terms of strength, but she was so focused on the task it was simplicity itself to give her the shot with his other hand. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Okay, that’s fine.” He accepted the board from Vandenberg. “I’m just gonna get this board under you and we’ll get you taken care of, alright?”

She nodded weakly as he manoeuvred her gently onto it and he realised she hadn’t actually spoke yet. “What’s your name?”

“Uh…” she frowned. Apparently the anaesthetic was kicking in. “I”m…Xiù. Xiù Chang.”

Adam didn’t allow his surprise to show. Of all the people he could have pulled out of a life raft, he’d found Regaari’s friend? Besides, her breathing was definitely too labored for comfort. There was fluid on her lungs, and that needed to be gone sooner rather than later. Surprising coincidences could be handled later.

“Nice to meet you, Xiù.” he told her, as he lifted her easily down from the life raft and onto the waiting trolley.

“A-a-and you?” She was definitely falling asleep now. “Uh… what’s your name?”

He took her hand, comfortingly. “I’m Adam. Staff sergeant Adam Arés, USAF Pararescue.” he replied.

He was pretty sure she was asleep by the end of the sentence.

“Right… let’s get that chest drain in.” he told the medics.

Date Point 10y2m2w AV
The Arabian Sea, Earth.

Biodrone

It would have been easy to lose track of the MV Nasarpur without care and attention to detail. The ship was not large, and its running lights were just one of many visible across the open leagues of calm sea. Perfect sailing weather.

If there was one thing a biodrone was extremely good at, however, it was sustained attention to detail. The human it had once been could never have summoned the willpower or focus to stare at one target for hours on end, blinking only when biology demanded it. He would have shivered, or grown bored or sought conversation. He would have stretched his legs, or relieved the insistent pressure in his bladder.

Insofar as biodrones could be said to have desires of their own, it might have wished to receive an order to stretch its legs, or urinate. No such order was forthcoming, and until a Controller deigned to pay it any attention, no such order would be forthcoming. All that it had, therefore, was the data provided to it by the ghost of a personality, lacking anything functionally resembling willpower or agency. That ghost was interrogated often, when the biodrone was required to blend in. Had it been striving to blend in, the biodrone would have used that information to justify stretching its legs and urinating.

But it had received no order to blend in. And so it did not.

The order it had received was to watch the ship they were approaching. And so it did. No provision had been made for it to hand off this duty to another biodrone so that it could stretch its legs or urinate, and so it did not.

The Controllers had not left it with the autonomy to make these decisions for itself, and this was wise of them: If they had, the ghost of its personality would have responded to what had happened to him in the only sane way: it would have screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

The MV Nasarpur was mercifully close. Soon, a Controller would make contact and issue an order to prepare for combat.

Insofar as the biodrone was capable of looking forward to something, it was looking forward to that order. Urinating had a clear logical role to play in battle preparations. Relief was only one legitimately interpreted order away, and that order was imminent.

Until then, it watched the MV Nasarpur.

There were ten of them, biodrone bodies collected from around the geopolitical region collectively known as “Middle East”. The concept of being in the middle of the direction of prograde was nonsense, but the biodrone was not granted the autonomy to ponder that absurdity.

Many more biodrones had been assembled from all across this irrationally named region, but the ten in this boat were all, for lack of a term that more accurately and satisfactorily encompassed them, soldiers. Fighters, perhaps—men whose lives had left them proficient in the use of weaponry, though each for very different reasons. One or two were soldiers indeed, the volunteer agents of a legitimate state’s legal monopoly on controlled violence. Others had first raised a gun to protect themselves and their families, and never found an opportunity to put it back down. The rest had taken up arms for religious reasons that the drone’s programming simply was not equipped to understand, even if it had been granted leave to try.

The order came and the biodrone rushed to obey over the side of the boat, which took a good minute or two. Parameters flooded in as it did so—data about the layout of the target ship, how many men were on board, their armament and training, their exact locations, the location of the cargo they were protecting.

The drones conferred, bypassing crude language to form a network which evaluated the unique skills each one had inherited from the human it had once been and liaised this information back to a central Controller, which ran a rapid-fire of thousands of different simulations based on their suggestions, keeping the most successful, permutating upon them, combining them, throwing raw processing power at them until it had arrived at the most effective approach which carried a maximal probability of satisfying all mission objectives.

That approach hinged upon two simple truths. The first was that their vehicle was invisible to the radar of the ships trailing MV Nasarpur at a discreet distance, and produced almost no audible noise—certainly not any that would be heard over MV Nasarpur’s own engines.

The second was that biodrones were expendable.

Everything was timed down to the second. Their boat pulled up alongside the Nasarpur, and three of the biodrones boarded her, using grapples, rope ascenders and a muscular boost from their fellows to scale the merchant vessel’s curving flank. Three more were delivered a little further forward, and the last four boarded the ship at its nose.

Or tried to. One of the biodrones turned out to have had a higher estimation of its abilities in life than was actually warranted, and plunged into the water, never to resurface. None of the others paid any attention beyond adjusting their plan of attack to account for the loss.

The drone that had needed to urinate was among the three that reached the deck at the prow. Theirs was simultaneously the most important part of the raid, and also the easiest - they were tasked with disrupting the ship’s ability to call for help. This had to be done first, and it had to be done silently.

It involved ghosting up three flights of stairs to a mid-level door on the ship’s forward tower. An unfortunate crewman was stabbed before he had even finished turning to see who was opening it.

As for the radio equipment, there were three men in that room, none of whom were alert for danger, all of whom were bored and undisciplined. Military they may have been, and trusted, but all of their careful preparations had simply never accounted for alien activity.

The third of them was dead only a second after the first, just enough time for the biodrone that entered the room first to switch aim, backed up by its fellows. The gunfire would draw attention, but instructions from the Controller, followed instantly and perfectly, meant that any attempts to radio for a report or to call for distress would meet with failure. The radio wasn’t turned off, it was simply turned wrong.

The three biodrone teams went mobile. Confused sentries on the deck gasped their last still wondering what was going on even as 7.62mm rounds ripped through them. Panicked shouting from below deck heralded the arrival of the garrison protecting the ship’s cargo, whose haste to fight back led them to blunder straight into grenade tripwire traps and ambushes.

As the Controller had planned, two of the biodrones were killed, sacrificed in distracting the defensive force long enough for their fellows to outflank and enfilade the enemy.

Another was sacrificed storming into the last knot of defenders with a brick of high explosives on a five second countdown in its arms. The few who survived its detonation were executed before they could recover their wits.

That left six biodrones, two of which were wounded. Those two were tasked with throwing their fallen counterparts overboard. The healthy four went to work with hoists, winches and trolleys, getting the loot they had come to steal up on deck.

With no human left on board who had even the mental capacity to shoot at it, the spaceship that had been trailing MV Nasarpur for hours dropped its cloak and lifted the cargo off the deck and into its hold. It remained visible for only five seconds.

The biodrones had one last task.

If it had been able to, the biodrone might have wished not to take this next step. But the Controller had given clear instructions. Obedience was inevitable. Within it, what might have been the last shred of a human being reflected that at least he would soon be released. Words that meant nothing to the Biodrone’s guiding programming drifted through its head like a passing thought, consigning the soul of its body’s former owner to Allah.

Together, the biodrones vaulted the rail and sank. The rings of white water they made when they hit were barely worthy of comment next to the disruption caused by the merchant vessel’s own wake.

Twenty minutes later, when a helicopter full of marines from PNS Zulfiquar arrived in response to a failure to make routine contact, they found only the corpses of their comrades and a worrying absence of the ship’s cargo.

Date Point 10y2m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés.

“Hey DEXTER. Man, you are not going to believe who we just pulled off a life raft on the edge of Elder Space. Although, maybe you can guess, because you wouldn’t be interested otherwise, huh? Anyway, we found your friend Xiù!”

“You tellin’ DEXTER?” Sikes stuck his head into the tablet’s camera field of view. “Hey DEXTER!”

This prompted BASEBALL, Firth and REBAR to join in too, and Adam just grinned at the camera as they expressed a series of happy greetings to their Gaoian friend-slash-mascot, before he finally shooed them away.

“Yeah, you’ve gotta visit us sometime man. We can do, like, a joint training thing or something. Maybe see what you’ve got to teach us, like that fucking pulse-gun trick you pulled, that shit was insane!” He cleared his throat. “Anyway… yeah, we found your friend. Looks like she’s been stuck in that pod for about five years, and they had a rough time of it, but she’s alive. By the time you’ve got this they’ll probably have taken her back to Earth, but don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll be able to sort out putting you two back in touch again…”

“Uh… Yeah, give my regards to this Ayma of yours. Guess she’ll want to know too. And… yeah that’s about it. I’ll see you around, southpaw. Peace!”

He stopped the recording, and sent it without bothering to play it back. Regaari had been in touch a couple of times since Capitol Station, and Adam knew that he’d be delighted by the news.

“All done?” BASEBALL asked. Adam just grinned at him. He’d saved lives, had some good training that morning, been able to send some really good news to a friend…

“Good day.” he commented.

“Yeah…”

BASEBALL had been doing that a bit for a while now. Something was bugging him, Adam could tell, but if Base didn’t want to share, that was his business. He wasn’t about to push it. “You got anything planned?” He asked instead.

BASEBALL shrugged. “Goin’ drinking with TITAN. Dude’s not been laid since he got shot. You?”

Adam exchanged elaborate handshakes and backslaps with the other three as they left. “Ava’s friend Sean’s coming up from Earth. Apparently his uncle’s like this journalist or something, doing a bit on the Byron group, yeah? We were gonna go up the lake, go for a swim. Really looking forward to that, they only just declared it clean this week. I’ve not been up there since before I enlisted!”

“Oh…”

”…something bothering you, bro?” Adam asked him.

BASEBALL stood awkwardly in the middle of the locker room, drumming his hands nervously on his thighs and licking his lips.

Adam stood up. “Dude… what’s wrong?”

BASEBALL apparently reached a decision. “Brother… you better sit your ass back down. I’ve got something you need to know.”

Date Point 10y2m2w AV
Whitecrest Clan Enclave, city of Wi Kao, Planet Gao.

Regaari

Where other officers of the Clan had busy offices full of clutter, keepsakes, mementoes and memories of jobs well done, Regaari’s was characteristically rather more Spartan. This was largely because he never used it. He was usually too busy with fieldwork.

Whitecrest was all about security on a big scale, and that meant Intelligence, information, data, and the correlations and relations between those data. Most of the most important of that data crunching went on right here in the Clan Enclave, a subtle edifice of geometric shapes clad in Takwood and greenish glass, separated from the bustle of the city of Wi Kao by a low stone wall, a decorative moat, and some well groomed parkland.

It was a fittingly prestigious and understated home for a prestigious and understated Clan, and its sprawling warrenous basements were full of officers doing vital though unglamorous work.

Regaari, as a political officer, should not have been among them. The location of his office was a relic of the Clan’s disfavour, though that had softened over the years as the Fathers responsible had retired and as Regaari’s own influence had grown. His friendship with Giymuy had done wonders for the Whitecrest breeding program, and the fact that he was now forging bonds with a Human military unit…

Several of the Fathers were worried, he suspected. A younger male with that kind of influence—and certainly one with as many cubs as Regaari had now sired—was a threat to the established order.

His immediate future was doubtless going to involve either attempted assimilation into the Clan leadership or—vastly more likely—relegation to yet another satellite position with all the appearance of prestige.

Right now, though, politics ruled the day. That was Regaari’s job, and Regaari was good at his job. Indeed, he’d become even better at it ever since discovering just how modifiable his new cybernetic hand was. Had he worn sleeves, he would literally have had some tricks up them, first and foremost of which were the petabytes of storage space and the holographic projector in his palm. His workstation was literally attached to him, available at an instant’s notice.

“Yulna’s going to win.” he declared.

Father Terrik—the elderly officer ostensibly responsible for supervising Regaari’s work, scratched at his ear with an air of scepticism. “I had thought that her attachment to the human female… just like Giymuy…?” he suggested.

”-Is much less of an issue than Mother Suri and her supporters like to believe.” Regaari informed him. “I had Brother Ruuvi conduct a meta-analysis of the datasphere commentary. Most of the females just don’t care, and of those who do the majority are broadly positive.”

Terrik inclined his head. “Positive?”

“For reasons ranging from the pragmatic to the compassionate.” Regaari elaborated. He activated the gesture-based command in his new paw that caused it to project the files in an almost physical format above his palm. With his remaining natural paw, he could select, move and even throw the files around—copying them to another device was as simple as throwing them towards said device. This he now did.

“That’s my full report.” he explained, as Terrik studied and accepted the incoming file. “It details my findings, my reasoning and my supporting evidence. Much as I like and respect Yulna, I’ve made every effort to remain neutral and unbiased in my assessment, and I am still convinced that Mother Suri has a negligible chance of being the next Mother Supreme.”

Terrik stood. “I will read it in full and present it to the Fathers.” he promised. “Your recommendation, I take it, is to side with Yulna?”

“The risk to the clan is negligible, and the potential benefits considerable.”

Terrik made a thoughtful head-duck to acknowledge Regaari’s point, and let himself out.

Regaari gave it a few minutes and toured his office. He used the time in tidying up the minimal mess and examining his few keepsakes—a crystal data wafer full of Xiù’s precious collection of Earth entertainment, one of Giymuy’s walking canes that she had bequeathed to him, and a framed picture, a gift from the SOR, depicting all of them gathered round him and beaming those big toothy deathworlder smiles. Actual pigment printed on paper—a technology so obsolete in Gaoian society that it might have been an antique or relic, and obsolete by human standards too, but this one was glossy, crisp and new.

That was enough procrastination. He headed out, locked up his office, combed a bit of stray fur back into place as he jogged down the hall, and let himself into Brother Ruuvi’s office.

Ruuvi was an ally, a genuine one. A fellow victim of clan politics whose career had been similarly holed by voicing honest concern to the wrong Father, he was even more fervently in favour of reform and a change of leadership than was Regaari. Unlike Regaari, he’d been “promoted” to leadership of the clan’s digital security and information wing—what the SOR had called “SigInt” - and, like Regaari, had taken his new role and excelled at it, adapting to the demands of the job with the aplomb and rapidity that had made Clan Whitecrest’s reputation.

Regaari didn’t bother with a greeting—they’d been planning this particular sting all week. “Well?”

“He read the summary and then forwarded the file to Reyu, Redilo and Yemmil.”

Regaari sighed in relief, and Ruuvi chittered. The set of his own ears was relieved, though: Terrik had been the subject of an unresolved question, whether he was working with the little cyst of Fathers who held the reins of power in Whitecrest and were getting progressively cosier and cosier with the monolithic nepotism of the Dominion, or whether he was doing the right thing no matter what that right thing might be.

Forwarding the file to three Fathers who had, in Regaari’s estimation, successfully balanced authority with conscientiousness was strong evidence for the latter.

“Excellent.” He growled. “I think we-”

He was interrupted by his communicator, which cheeped at him in a one beep, two beep, three beep rhythm until he checked it.

“Ah!”

Ruuvi noticed his colleague’s ears prick up. “Good news?”

“A message from WARHORSE.”

“You have a human on your priority message list?” Ruuvi asked.

“I have three humans on my priority message list.” Regaari retorted, and opened the message.

Thirty seconds later, his hindclaws slid and scrabbled on the smooth concrete flooring as he bolted out of the room.

Date Point 10y2m2w AV
Demeter Road, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Sean Harvey

“Do you think he’s going to ask you again?”

“Not any time soon… we’re still putting it back together, you know?”

Ava was nursing a coffee on the couch opposite the recliner Sean had claimed for himself. It was still hard to see her looking so relaxed and at peace in a relationship with Adam, but that wound was healing for Sean. It was clear that the two of them doted on one another, which definitely helped. If the last month or so had continued to be the same old story of neglect and frustration then he’d have suggested calling it off, and guessed that Ava would have finally seen the light.

But… she’d been vindicated. Once Adam had finally seen the need to actually connect with his girlfriend then by her own admission he’d been perfect, devoting every second they could spend together to them. He took her on dates, they enjoyed the young woods around Folctha together, she was in the best shape of her life thanks to his one-on-one attention… it sounded idyllic.

“I thought things were going well?” Sean asked her.

“It is!” she agreed. “It’s just… you don’t put a relationship back together overnight. Even with the nice apartment and all the time we’re spending together, you know…”

“Right. All that time apart, all the changes.” Sean agreed.

“He’s not changed as much as I was afraid he would.” she conceded, setting her coffee down. “Sure, he’s big as a bus nowadays and he’s got all these skills and training but… he’s still got that goofy laugh, those stupid dorky jokes. Whenever he’s being romantic, it’s like he’s been planning it for three weeks…” She sighed, toying with a stray curl of hair. “I’ve probably changed more, deep down.”

“How so?”

“Just… things, you know? My way of looking at things.” she shrugged. “I don’t know. I just… I think…”

Whatever she was trying to think aloud went un-thought at the distant sound of a door slamming and a rapid rhythmic thudding sound that grew stronger by the second. Ava grinned and stood up as what were unmistakably the footfalls of an extremely heavy man came thumping up the last flight of steps. “He’s home early! That’s great, that means it must have gone-”

Adam didn’t bother with his key. The doorframe and lock both disintegrated as he just swatted the door so hard that even one of the hinges broke, leaving it hanging drunkenly from the top corner. His expression wouldn’t have looked out of place on an angry war deity, and Ava actually shrieked a little and took a shocked couple of steps back.

Sean’s own reaction was no less violently startled—he flinched away from the broken door and wound up having to scramble to his feet to avoid tipping over the chair arm and onto the floor.

Ava had retreated even further across the room as Adam bore down on her, until her back was against the wall and she was penned in against it by the palm he’d smacked down right next to her head. She was wearing any expression that was the very picture of equal parts bewilderment and fright. From where he was standing, Sean couldn’t see Adam’s face, but he could see the rage simmering in every line of those titanic muscles.

For a deadly few seconds, the only sound was the creak of the last tortured hinge swaying back and forth, as Ava’s face went from intimidated shock, to dawning horror.

“Shit.” she squeaked. “You know.”

For all the fury of his entrance, Adam’s voice was dangerously quiet and level. “You were stupid enough to talk to BASEBALL.” he pointed out.

However Ava wanted to respond, it didn’t come out except as a silent mouthing of the start of a word, and some desperate looking around, blinking rapidly as she tried to think of what to say. She cowered and gave an involuntary terrified gasp when Adam bunched a fist and drove it into the wall so hard that the plaster caved in.

“Where do I start?” He growled. “All this time? And who- was it this skinny shit here?”

He rounded on Sean who backed away, raising his hands as if they’d do any good at warding off somebody who out-massed him a couple of times over.

Adam took three smart steps forward and immediately had Sean by the front of his shirt, yanking him around so hard that he heard the seams fray. “YOU?! You wanna own up to this? Did you-?”

There was no refuge save for honesty. Sean did the best job he could of straightening and looking Adam in the eye, swallowed, and nodded. He knew neither if his head was about to go the same way as the wall and the door, nor what he might do to stop it if it was.

Rather than knocking his block off, Adam just made a disgusted noise and gave him a contemptuously gentle shove, landing Sean on his backside a few feet away. He turned and stalked back to Ava, who’d moved out of the corner he’d trapped her in and was watching him wide-eyed, hunched over and trembling, with her hands hugging her upper arms.

“You know what BASEBALL said you said?” He demanded. “He said you said you don’t owe me a fucking apology. What the fuck?!”

Ava finally found her voice. “Hear me out.” she pleaded.

This was not, apparently, what Adam had wanted to hear. “HEAR YOU OUT?!” he barked, and she backed away two stumbling steps as he took a pace toward her. “Hear you out?! Sure! Sure I’ll fucking hear you out! You’ve got FIVE seconds to explain yourself, Ava!”

“I-”

“Four.”

“Adam-”

“Three.”

“It was that or break up with you!” she blurted, finally finding something resembling her confidence again. She was still shaking, but there was an ‘I’m-not-going-down-without-a-fight’ edge to it now.

Adam paused in his countdown and just stared at her. For her part, Ava wrung her hands and stared right back, still trembling like a leaf but clearly determined to say her piece.

“You’re all I have of home.” she said. “You and Dad-”

“Don’t you dare call him that!” Adam snarled.

”…I can’t lose you, and I was going to.” she forged ahead. “I reached the end of my- I couldn’t do it any more, I was sending so much your way and getting nothing back and I ran out, and it was… I had to reach out to somebody.”

“And you couldn’t fucking talk to me?!” Adam demanded.

“I DID!” she shot back. “Every time! Every fucking time, Adam I told you time after time and when did you listen? You didn’t!”

“BULLSHIT!” Adam exploded. Ava’s fire was up and she looked like she was going to keep arguing, but he took another step forward, she backed into the kitchen area, and this time the poor refrigerator took the brunt of his rage, drawing a fearful gasp out of Ava in place of the tirade she’d clearly wanted to unleash. “I listened!” he insisted. “But what did you expect me to do, go AWOL? Is that what you’d want instead? Me in prison and all that time and pain wasted?”

“I-”

Adam prodded her in the chest, hard. She gasped and rubbed at the bruised spot. “I went through hell, and the only thing got me through was thinking you had my back.” he growled. “Broken bones, torn muscles, nearly drowning, pain pain pain, day in, day out for Five. Fucking. Years. And don’t even get me started on some of the nightmares I’ve had because of what I’ve learned!”

He prodded her again. “ALL while having to put up with the exact same loneliness that you couldn’t handle! You think all that time away from you was easy for me? And I’ve had temptation, oh yeah I have! More than a passing little devil, do you know how easy it is for guys like me to get laid?”

“Well-”

“SHUT UP!!” The fridge rocked as it suffered further abuse. “Do you know how often I gave in? Do you know how often I thought about giving in?”

“Then-”

“NOT EVEN FUCKING ONCE!!“

In the aftermath of that roar, Sean could have sworn the loudest sound in the room was his own heartbeat, then Adam’s finger curled back from under Ava’s nose and his head dropped. “Not once. Not even once. Not once.” he mourned. “Not one single goddamn time, Ava. I did all of this for you. To keep you safe, to…”

He trailed off.

Ava was weeping openly now. The fear in her body language was gone—for the first time since Sean had known her, she looked ashamed.

“But…” she put a hand on Adam’s face and he swatted it aside to glare at her again. “Adam, all I ever wanted was you.”

Adam didn’t move for a moment. Then he swayed upright, backed off, and gave her a long, slow, tearful appraisal. “Right.” he grunted. “It’s all about what you want.”

“Adam-”

“Fuck you, Ava. I don’t know what happened to you, but I never fell in love with a selfish backstabbing whore.”

“Adam-!”

He spun, strode to the door, and put the last hinge out of its misery with a petulant backhand. “Get out of my house.” he ordered, and was gone.

Date Point 10y2m2w AV
Commune of Females, Wi Kao City, Gao

Regaari

“You are approaching a commune of females, male. Identify yourself.”

Regaari was in no mood for games. The message from WARHORSE was far too important to pass to Ayma digitally—this was a conversation, and one that he was itching to have.

“You can’t be serious, Sister Layra, you’ve seen me every third or fourth day for a quarter of a year, it’s me!” He pointed out, making a bee-line for the door.

He nearly walked into her ceremonial fusion spear, which was suddenly charged and spitting hot while aimed levelly at his chest. Behind it, her ears were up and her eyes bright with dutiful challenge.

“Identify. Yourself.” she repeated.

Frustration, outrage and the burning need to deliver his message had badly eroded Regaari’s composure anyway. Having a weapon levelled at him was the final insult that forced him to do something that, under normal circumstances, no sane male would have even considered—he snarled at a female.

“Regaari. To deliver a message to Mother Ayma. Now get out of my way you witless, parasite-infested, officious plodding four-paw!“

Her speartip lowered and her ears rotated backwards out of sheer surprise and, whether out of genuine intimidation or whether she had finally got her head around the urgency of his mission, she stood meekly aside after a moment’s consideration.

Regaari swept past her.

Unlike the Whitecrest enclave, the Commune of Females wasn’t a single architecturally planned building but several, built organically over the centuries as the needs of the females had changed and as available funds and labour had dictated. Not that the females were ever short on either funds or labour thanks to the thousands of attention-hungry males who lived in the city outside their walls.

Still, at some point a senior Mother had declared that the entrance to the commune needed to be something both imposing and beautiful, and so an appropriately grand building, far wider than it was tall, had been constructed. From the outside, its most striking features were its sweeping white stone stairs and the doors at their top—huge Takwood things with borders of angular geometric silver filigree that were only ever opened for important occasions. The actual entrances were the rather more discreet though similarly decorated frosted-glass sliding doors to either side, one of which whispered open for him as he approached, and was ignored as he passed through.

Impressive though it was outside, Regaari had always thought that the inside of the commune’s grand building was by far more beautiful.

The floor was an irregular library of differently coloured slate tiles, left naturally just a little rough on their upper surface, but still smooth enough for completely unimpeded movement. Lighting was provided by hidden lamps which bounced warm yellow light up into the vault of the ceiling. At ankle height in the wall, hidden projectors sent ripples of a faintly greenish hue playing over the slate floor tiles, creating a watery effect which neatly complimented the real flowing water that rose in a fountain behind the Takwood doors before being sent to run and chatter down twin shallow meandering channels that reached out into each wing of the building before vanishing into the walls to emerge outside and feed the ornamental ponds.

Every inch of wall was trellis or bas-relief. Regaari always had to take a moment to admire the hanging plants, attended by delicate little flying drones. They had been carefully chosen so that some were always in flower no matter the season, and right now the grand concourse was kissed with delicate whites and blues.

Mothers and Sisters were walking and chatting, sitting on the benches, reading. There was an air of tension that Regaari could smell, and feel in the fur of the back of his neck. Several of the nearby females glanced at him, saw a Whitecrest male, and promptly and obviously turned away to keep their conversation private. He noticed Sister Myun watching him, and the two shared an affectionate though subtle mutual pricking of ears at one another. She had been pulled from gate guard duty for the duration of her pregnancy though she still loitered in the concourse, as much because she loved it there as because she was (by her own estimation) about the most competent of the commune’s guardian sisters.

Certainly she was the strongest and most highly trained, having spent much of her adolescence blending the Gung Fu that she had learned from Xiù with stances and styles more appropriate for a Gaoian, many of which were now part of Whitecrest’s training regime. Regaari had sparred with her during their courtship, and had never once managed to knock her off her feet - the young female could float and flow like dawn mist when she wanted to.

Regaari glanced around to quickly check whether Ayma was present, then concluded that Myun had just as much right to know.

“You know, Sister Layra reported you arriving.” she said as he approached, laying aside her tablet. “I think you impressed her.”

“That may not have been wise.” Regaari conceded. “But this is important, and she was in my way.”

“What’s so important that you’d snap at a commune guard like?” Myun asked. “I mean, Layra probably wants to mate with you now, but if it had been anybody else you-”

“The humans found Shoo.” Regaari interrupted her, ignoring that nugget of intel for the time being.

Myun surged to her feet. “Shoo’s safe?!”

“They picked her up from an escape pod this morning.” Much as he’d have preferred to keep the original, Regaari had to admit that having a prosthetic paw with a built in gesture-based control interface for his data was unbelievably convenient. He summoned WARHORSE’s message and sent it to Myun’s device, which she snatched up and interrogated eagerly.

She impressed and pleased Regaari by reaching up to the communicator clipped to her ear and pinching it before he had even thought to ask her. “Security Central, Mother Ayma has a priority message waiting on the grand concourse. Call for her please. Priority message for Mother Ayma, grand concourse.”

She listened to the response, then growled a little. Her contract with Regaari had earned Myun some prestige—a fact which spoke volumes of Regaari’s own reputation—but she was still very much the junior on the security forces, and somebody somewhere was keen to keep her reminded of that fact. Nothing ever went as swiftly and smoothly as she would have liked. “It’s a personal message, Central, but very important and private. Please call for her. Thank you.”

She sighed and unclipped the communicator, muttering a loaned human curse once it was safely turned off. “Bitch.”

Regaari chittered quietly. “Anyway, I don’t know more than is in the message there. Though, if WARHORSE thinks she had a rough time of it… I’m a little worried.”

“Is there any way to find out more?” Myun asked.

“It’s a lot easier to get a message from the SOR than to the SOR…” Regaari mused. Both of them pricked their ears up as they heard the commune-wide announcement for Ayma.

“Ayma has Yulna’s ear.” Myun pointed out, borrowing yet another human phrase. She did that a lot, peppering her language with deathworlder colloquialisms. Regaari had almost begun developing the same habit, but had carefully avoided it—he had the political consequences to think about. Myun on the other hand seemed to have accepted that her enthusiasm for all things human was equal parts profitable and isolating. Either that or she was too headstrong to care.

“True, but Yulna is not Mother-Supreme yet.” Regaari pointed out. “She may not have as much influence as you think.”

“She’s going to win, and the humans know it.” Myun retorted. She’d been a stubborn cub, and was now a stubborn and slightly naive adult. The fact that Regaari agreed with her assessment was unimportant.

“What’s that expression? About those birds you shouldn’t count?”

”…before they hatch. Chickens.” Myun finished for him, deflating. “You’re right. But… it’s Shoo.”

They both jumped a little at Ayma’s voice. “Shoo? What about Shoo?”

Regaari stood and they exchanged the nose-rub of old friends. “They found her. She’s alive.”

Ayma made a squeaking noise of delight and relief and sank onto the bench beside Myun, ears swivelling like robots in an assembly line as she tried to settle on a reaction. “Where is she?! Can we see her?”

“I don’t know yet.” Regaari told her. “I only just got the message. She’s back on Earth. It sounds like she got into more trouble.”

Ayma nodded. “That would be Shoo.” she agreed, then stood up again. “So we’re going to Earth.”

Both Regaari and Myun’s ears flattened. “You’re… you can’t be serious.” Myun squeaked.

“I have waited nearly ten years to finally see her again and… ‘kick her ass’ for running away.” Ayma proclaimed. “I am not letting a little thing like a class twelve deathworld get in my way.”

She turned to Regaari. “Besides, didn’t you say that the humans wanted to give you some kind of an award?”

“Well… yes, but nobody ever mentioned actually going to Earth.” Regaari replied. “The pollens in the air on that planet would kill us!”

“We can wear breathing masks.”

“The gravity-”

“Excursion suits. I’ve had a long time to think about this, Regaari: I’m going. I would like you to come with me.”

“Don’t you have a cub to look after?” Regaari asked.

“I also have a Sister who needs my help.” Ayma retorted. “Of the two, Shoo will need me more: the cub is nearly weaned.”

“She’s Clan, Regaari.” Myun pointed out. “What would you do if she was a Whitecrest?”

Regaari hesitated, then ducked his head slowly. “I’d already be calling for a shuttle.”

The females ducked their own heads, then Myun sighed. “I wish I could come with you.” she said.

“You’re pregnant.” Ayma pointed out.

“I know, that’s why I said ‘I wish I could’.” Myun agreed. “But take a message from me?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll… take a Whitecrest ship to Cimbrean and arrange things.” Regaari said. “That should take long enough for your cub to be weaned.”

“Good.” Ayma scratched at her ear, thoughtfully. “I’ll… go tell Yulna she needs to do without me for a while.”

“Ayma… she’s been in stasis for five human years.” Regaari said. “And it was an escape pod. She may be a bit fragile.”

Ayma just chittered.

“When was Shoo ever not fragile?”

Date Point 10y2m2w AV
Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth.

Colonel Ted Bartlett

“She’s tough.”

The family were waiting outside, pacing and chewing their fingernails and desperate to be let in. Not that it would do them any good. Miss Chang was sedated, and would remain so for several days. She had been jumped straight to Scotch Creek from Caledonia’s onboard jump array and had been airlifted from there to Vancouver General, still inside a stasis pod. She had arrived on an operating table that was perfectly prepared for her and that fact had undoubtedly saved her life.

The fact that she had even made it that far spoke volumes of her tenacity.

Her doctor was in no mood to entertain military scientists, however. “She undoubtedly is.” She agreed. “But I would very much appreciate knowing why I’ve got an Army colonel in my ITU, please.”

Ted nodded. “Doctor Spilny, I need to swear you to secrecy on a few things. This is going to be important to her care, but it’s also important for… well.” he handed over a tablet with a non-disclosure agreement on it. The doctor skimmed it—it wasn’t long—and then scrawled her signature and pressed her thumb to the biometric pad for good measure.

“Miss Chang is one of the few people we know of to survive nervejam trauma.” Ted told her, after he’d countersigned. “Are you familiar with nervejam at all?”

“I heard it’s some kind of alien weapon that can induce fatal seizures…” Spilny conceded.

“It’s… a lot nastier than that.” Ted revealed, solemnly. “I’ll spare you the jargon, but it works by creating a field that disrupts some specific types of quantum activity that’s part of the brain’s normal function. Or, rather, forces it to behave a certain-” he trailed off. “The point is that while the effect may wear off instantly, the damage it does is permanent.”

“Her brain is… scarred?”

Ted nodded, grimly. “Intimately. On a cellular chemistry level. Or… most likely, anyway. The testimony of her friends would suggest as much.”

Mr. Etsicitty and Ms. Buehler had weathered the vacuum of space rather better than Ms. Chang, and were both recovering elsewhere in the building. Etsicitty’s foot was attracting prosthetic and rehabilitation specialists from all over North America, who were sharing detailed footage and images of it with their colleagues overseas. By all accounts the interface between flesh and synthetic material was ingeniously self-sterilising, and might well revolutionize the field of human prosthetics. Bartlett, as a lifelong enthusiast for science, was keeping a weather-eye on that development, but it was outside of his field.

To be frank, so was the case of Ms. Chang, but nobody else was even half as qualified as Ted was, so…

Doctor Spilny frowned at her patient, deep in thought. “Prognosis?”

“I’m not qualified to give one. Obviously, actually testing the long term effects of Nervejam would be… unethical.”

“Lab rats?”

“You can’t… really scale up the behaviour of rats to the behaviour of humans…” Ted squirmed. “But what we suspect is that any existing psychological tendencies or predispositions are likely to be exacerbated. The other thing we noticed was a spike in learning retention and neuroplasticity for some time after exposure, which then tapered off to below previous levels, leaving the subjects, uh, strongly influenced by whatever they were doing immediately after the trauma.”

Spilny frowned at her patient again, watching her chest rise and fall with a click-hiss-wheeze as the ventilator did the work on her behalf.

Ted gave her a minute to think, which he used to produce a copy of the research paper from his briefcase. “The paper should explain more. We don’t really have any advice on what you can do for her, but any observations you can make or data you can gather might help us help her and other future victims.”

Spilny nodded, and accepted it. “I’ll be sure to do that.”

“There’s one last thing…”

“Which is?”

Ted produced a handheld implant scanner from his briefcase. It was little more than a grey cuboid, not dissimilar to the tricorders he’d watched on Star Trek growing up. “May I just lean in there and perform a scan?”

“It’s not invasive, is it?”

“Ultrasound.”

Spilny just gestured to the bed invitingly. Ted leaned in past the assorted tubes, lines and leads, and pressed the scanner gently but firmly against Ms. Chang’s forehead.

Three seconds later, the LED on its back lit up green, and he breathed a sigh of relief. While the SOR and the medical staff on Caledonia had both already checked her for alien hardware, Ted’s own device was the most recent and sophisticated model that wouldn’t be fooled by nonmetallic implants, as had happened in the tragic case of Sara Tisdale’s murderer.

“Thank you, doctor.” He straightened up, pocketing the scanner.

“Thank you, colonel.”

Ted let himself out. He didn’t make eye contact with the family hovering outside, just nodded politely, touched his fingers to his brow, and made himself scarce, wishing he could do more.

Date Point 10y2m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

John Burgess

It was Good Movie Night. Sometimes, the guys wanted a good movie to counterbalance all the awful ones they like to watch, and it was a good way to round off a mission day. The dorm was clean, they were all showered, and now there were a few hours of quiet time to lounge around in ranger shorts and watch something.

Hence they were watching ‘The Pink Panther’. The old one, with Peter Sellers. That had been the plan at least, right up until somebody had asked where WARHORSE had got to and John had tried to explain.

“And you didn’t think to tell him sooner?” TITAN was asking, plainly angry.

“Man, when did I even have the chance?” The movie was on pause and the usual comfortable puppy-pile on the couch had broken up into a standing argument.

Sikes opened his mouth to comment, and John nodded in anticipation of what he was going to say. “Okay, okay, yeah, lots of times, but come on man, timing! We were all on edge, we were all… then just as I was about to tell him he went and proposed to her, and then before he had a chance to get over that we had the mission, and…”

“And you should of told him!” TITAN asserted.

“You’re supposed to be our fucking brother man, and you’re lying to Horse of all people about his girl fucking around?” Sikes agreed.

Firth weighed in. “You two are like the bromance of this outfit, how the fuck are you gonna stand by and let Horse get Jodied?”

“He-”

“We’re supposed to trust you with our lives.” Blaczynski added.

That stung. It downright hurt, in fact. “You know you can.” John protested, quietly.

“Do we? ‘Cause if you can help Horse’s girl suck some other asshole’s skinny fuckin’ dick-”

“Say what?” John rounded on TITAN. “I didn’t fuckin’ help her!”

“You let her keep on doing it, dintcha?” Blaczynski retorted.

”‘Cause the alternative was ripping Horse’s heart out of his fucking chest at exactly the wrong moment, man!” John illustrated the mental image with a gesticulation. “We wouldn’t HAVE him if I’d done it before now. You think he’d have made it through without at least, like, the idea of her? And I’m not sure I’d have made it through without him!”

“You think it was a choice between this, or no Protectors at all?” REBAR checked.

John sighed and nodded. “Could be.” he agreed. “Even Horse has his limits, man.”

The three Defenders exchange quick glances, communicating silently.

“Tell me he was at least pissed at you.” Firth demanded.

“He was fucking furious, bro.”

“Surprised he didn’t tie your ass in a pretzel.” TITAN said. “Fuck, he’s gonna have a face like Armageddon landing when he gets back…”

“Yup.” John agreed.

“Yeah well, you fucking deserve it.” Sikes folded his arms.

“C’mon don’t be like that, it’s not like I did it to help her.”

“But you DID help her though.”

“Lads.”

Everyone looked at Murray. Murray was like that—you could completely forget he was there until he opened his mouth, and softly Scottish though his speech might have been, everyone shut up and listened. Never mind that he was the smallest of the SOR’s enlisted men, he commanded attention whenever he chose to.

”…Let’s just watch the movie.”

Everyone paused, then settled a bit. There was a round of nods and murmured agreements, and the guys all sat back down on the couch.

BASEBALL was left standing. “Uh…hey, lemme in there…” he ventured

“Couch is full, John.” Firth told him, not looking at him.

“Dude, I was sitting right there a minute ago-”

“Couch. Is full.”

John directed a pleading look first at REBAR, who was avoiding eye contact, and then at Murray who gave him a complicated facial shrug which said quite clearly that he wasn’t about to rekindle the argument by disagreeing and that John was just going to have to put up with it.

After a moment’s hesitation, John settled for a resigned throat-clear and sitting cross-legged on the hard, cold floor next to the couch, rather than wrapped up with his buddies. It didn’t feel right at all, and not even Sellers’ dignified on-screen antics could fix that.

They watched in silence for a little while, even managing a collective chuckle at the exchange - ‘If I were my father, I’d have you tortured.’ ‘If you were your father, I doubt very much if I would have kissed you.‘

The tension seemed to be just about starting to dissipate—or maybe that was just wishful thinking on John’s part - when there was a distant, muffled roar of some kind and the whole building shook as if a bomb had gone off nearby. Huge, metal-framed and reinforced as it was, they still knocked the couch over in scrambling off it alert for danger.

“What the fuck?” Firth asked.

“Sounded like it came from the gym.” Murray aimed a thumb towards it. “Ah… shit, you don’t think Adam…?”

He was left standing as the rest of them took off at a run.

Waiting for them in the gym was a sight more disturbing than anything John had seen on Capitol Station or in training. Adam’s jerry-can was lying at the bottom of the wall at the far end of the gym from where it was usually kept and had burst open, spilling buckshot all over the floor. The wall itself had a crater in it about halfway up, where the cinder blocks had been smashed in by something very heavy hitting it with huge force.

The 100lb plates were all off their racks and scattered around the gym like schoolyard frisbees. The spring steel barbell at the deadlift station—the one commissioned especially for the Protectors - had bent beyond hope of repair, the one at the squat rack was now roughly the shape of a hockey stick, and Adam was sitting in the middle of the floor, cradling his elbow and sobbing.

BASEBALL was at his side in a flash. “Oh man, brother, I- oof!”

The air rushed straight out of him and he felt a stab of pain in his ribs as he found himself caught in the kind of crushing bear-hug that might have pulped an alien and badly hurt most humans.

There was nothing to do but put his own arms around his best friend’s huge shoulders and hold on, rocking him back and forth.

The guys all left him to it and found stuff to do. Murray, Firth and Blaczynski set about cleaning up the gear, while the Defenders gathered round the damaged wall and held a hushed consultation with one another.

Just as the last of the plates was being racked up, REBAR sidled over and gave John a tap on the shoulder.

“Dude, uh… that was a structural wall he busted.” He whispered. “We kinda need everyone out of here while we make it safe.”

John nodded at him, then gave Adam’s back a hefty pat. “Hey… Horse. Man, we gotta move, okay? Come on, let’s get you something to eat.”

Adam nodded against his chest, and asked, in the most childish tone that John had ever heard him produce, “…Can I have Eggos?”

Everyone had to pause to look at one another, despite the broken wall. Adam Arés - Mister Nutrition himself, the best cook on the team - and Eggos? Those were just two concepts that didn’t go together, but now was not the time to argue.

“Sure brother. Sure. All the Eggos you want, man. Come on. And I’ll sort that elbow out while they’re cooking.”

”…okay.”

Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Charlotte Gilroy

Charlotte and Ben had landed on their feet with the move to Cimbrean. As the only qualified midwife in town, not only was Charlotte busy but she was well-paid. Ben meanwhile had quickly and easily fallen in with the city planning department, and had been instrumental in devising an approach to utility infrastructure that should hopefully mean that Folctha’s roads would never need to be dug up to access the sewerage, cables and pipes that ran alongside rather than beneath them.

Cheap housing, decent salaries and rapid promotion? Folctha was a graduate’s fantasy.

Except when it resulted in Charlotte’s best friend slumped inconsolable over her kitchen table, of course. There was little they’d been able to do for Ava except keep up a steady supply of tea and comforting words and contact.

Eventually, she sent Ben and Sean on a walk to go get some takeaway, from the good Chinese place on the far side of town that didn’t deliver. That earned her an hour of alone time for some girl talk.

Ava certainly seemed to appreciate it. At least, she muttered “…thanks…” as soon as they were gone.

“Darling, you’re going to have to come up for air sooner or later.” Charlotte told her.

It had the desired effect. Ava laughed—a thin, delicate, slightly hysterical laugh, but a laugh nonetheless—and finally unburied her face from her arms. Instead, she rested her elbows on the table and combed her fingers into her hair. “Sorry.”

“For being upset? I think you have a right…”

“It’s my own stupid fault though…” Ava sighed. Her hands dropped to the table and she sat back to stare up at the ceiling instead. “What was I thinking?”

“Which bit?”

“Hmm?”

“The bit where you did it, or the bit where you were caught?”

”…God, I don’t know.” Ava looked around the room. “I just… I don’t know.”

The clock ticked for them a good ten seconds or so before she sagged and gave Charlotte a pleading look. “What do you think?”

Charlotte took her hand. “You know… that’s the first time you’ve asked for my opinion on this.”

”…It is?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh…” Ava blinked at their hands. “…you’d have told me not to do it, wouldn’t you?”

“I would have.” Charlotte agreed.

“Why didn’t you?”

“You didn’t ask.” Charlotte gave her an apologetic facial shrug. “And… I don’t think you’d have listened, either.”

Ava paused, then nodded and shut her eyes. “You know why I did it though, right?”

“Darling? You did it because you were lonely and horny and Sean’s hot and caring and he’s a good match for you.” Charlotte asserted. “Don’t over-think it.”

“But that’s just the problem!” Ava exploded, tugging her hand out of Charlotte’s grip to gesticulate. “I didn’t think about it enough! Or… or I thought about it trying to convince… trying to…”

She gripped her hair again “I don’t know where I went wrong.”

“Maybe the bit where you cheated on your boyfriend?” Charlotte suggested. Not unjustifiably, Ava glared at her. “No, darling… maybe it really is that simple. Maybe you should have either… asked him for permission, or broken up with him. Treated him honestly.”

“You’re taking his side?” Ava asked

“You’re not?”

Ava hesitated, then swallowed, sighed and rubbed her face. “I’m sorry.” She said. “You’re right. I should have. I… he said it himself, he was separated from me too.”

“Working relationships are about honesty.” Charlotte told her. “If you ever have to hide something, if you ever have to lie about something… maybe it’s not working.”

Ava nodded, miserably. “And it wasn’t working for a long time. Right from the moment he decided to sign up.” she said.

“Don’t blame him.” Charlotte cautioned.

“I don’t! I… I don’t. I just… He was doing what he had to. But I should have told him then that I wasn’t happy with it. Maybe if I’d done that…” Ava sighed, and shook her head slowly. “It’s done. Can’t change it. I can’t bring it back, just like I can’t bring Sara back, or home, or… or anything. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

“So… what are you going to do?”

Ava flapped her arms in a resigned shrug. “Move on. I can’t stay here, not with Adam and Gabe, I’m not… I won’t be able to…” She paused, exasperated by her own lack of eloquence, then stood up. “The boys’ll be back in, what, an hour?”

“Give or take…” Charlotte agreed, as Ava shrugged her coat on and headed for the door. “Why, what are you-?”

“I’m going to say goodbye to Dad.”

Date Point 10y2m2w AV
Byron Group Exploration Vessel 8 “Creature of Habit”, The Border Stars, Proximal End.

Kevin Jenkins

“Hey Jenks, we’re coming up on RS-449!”

The Byron Group had sunk billions of dollars into starships, and the first few had all gone missing. As had the one sent to find out what happened to them. Byron Stellar Exploration’s working theory was that they had all suffered some kind of technical failure, and as such the Group’s starship-building program was on hold until they figured out what that failure might be.

Number 8 therefore was a Dominion-built vessel, custom made by the assembly gantries at Irbzrk Shipyards after a substantial bribe. It stuck in the craw to rely on alien tech, but at least it was alien tech built to the customer’s exacting specifications. It was, in the shipyard’s estimation, the ugliest thing they had ever built, and they had described it in contemptuous terms that translated to something like “throwback”

It wasn’t hard to see why. BGEV-8 was shaped for atmospheric re-entry, water landing and seaworthiness, all of which had put constraints on her physical properties and dimensions which had completely forbidden the Irbzrkian designers from flexing their creative muscles, especially when the clients had insisted on redundant steel bulkheads throughout and that every single component in the ship be A: modular and B: accessible at a moment’s notice. She looked more like a seafaring relic than a modern spaceship

There had been plenty of technical challenges to during the design phase, long before the commission had been sent to Irbzrk. For starters, a ship’s top superluminal speed was in part a function of its sublight power-to-weight ratio and acceleration, and in part a function of power to the warp engine. While BGEV-8’s power-to-weight ratio was excellent, disguising that the order had been placed by a human organisation had required ditching the capacitors and WiTChES, and relying on the Dominion’s preferred convention of a big reactor of some kind. This had limited the available power.

The result was a stately top speed of thirty kilolights. Enough to reach a nearby star in about two hours, but still decidedly pedestrian, and this had brought the supply problem into effect.

Humans needed nutrients. LOTS of nutrients. A crew of seven could chew through two hundred pounds of food in a week, and at thirty kilolights BGEV-8’s exploration missions were expected to take months.

Months worth of supplies would have made the ship heavier. Making the ship heavier would have hurt its power-to-weight ratio and slowed it down, meaning that it would need to carry even MORE supplies, which would have slowed it down further… and so on. While the equation did eventually balance itself, the end result was a much larger, much slower, and most importantly much more expensive ship than Byron had wanted.

The solution was stasis. Everyone’s bed doubled as a stasis chamber, and the ship did a pretty cunning job of making sure that you went to bed, you got a good eight or nine hours of sleep, and just as you were waking up fresh and ready for a new day, time stopped working for you until the duty officer decided you were needed again.

Naturally, nobody wanted to be effectively alone for subjective weeks at a time, so in practice there were always two duty officers, and things were carefully mixed up so that everybody worked with everybody else at some point in the rotation.

Today was Kevin’s second day awake. He’d put Joe Gibbs to bed last night, and this morning had woken up to find Mitch Hamilton preparing breakfast for him.

He liked Mitch the best out of their crew. Mitch could fix a decent coffee and breakfast, though everyone agreed that Kevin was the best cook on board.

Kevin was also the best general odd-jobber, inventory-sorter, cleaner and handyman on the crew, which was why he was its quartermaster. Everybody else might have had the assorted skills that went into flying the ship or surveying whatever interesting planets they stumbled across, but Byron had quite correctly decided early on that every ship needed somebody whose job was to keep everybody else comfortable, clean, well-fed and, ideally, well-advised.

Sure, being a glorified custodian wasn’t exactly glamorous, but the pay was even better than he’d been bringing in at Scotch Creek and there was just… something about being back out in the galaxy again. Something about the thrill of knowing that for better or worse they were doing something real, contributing to taking some of humanity’s eggs out of a single, vulnerable basket.

And, if he was honest, something about the thrill of danger. He wasn’t a vagrant in a galaxy unaware of and unprepared for the human race now: he was a ship’s quartermaster

“Gotcha. I’ll wake ‘em up.” he called.

Waking the other five was as simple as hitting the touchscreen on the wall as soon as he entered the room and selecting “wake all”. Instantly the black haze filling every bunk faded, and his five colleagues—friends one and all—were sitting up and looking around.

“Station day?” Jennie asked. She was their biochemistry expert, a specialist whose job revolved around examining whatever organic compounds and weird alien life forms they turned up. It was a good thing she was just as capable with keeping the ship in peak condition, because their most recent circuit hadn’t turned up even a single Temperate world, a fact that made her tenure on this first survey vessel increasingly tenuous. Why waste crew resources on somebody who could be better used in a follow-up expedition?

It would be a shame to see her go.

“Yup. Mitch is shaking hands with them right now. Today’s Friday, fourteen-thirty ship time. Coffee?”

Everyone nodded eagerly and promptly set about their morning ablutions. Three years of working together had sorted out a few kinks and sticking points there: When everyone was awake, nobody got to soak in the shower or meditate on the shitter: you got in, you did your business, you cleaned up, and if you forgot to take your clothes or towel in with you, too bad for you. Modesty was a luxury, and not one that the rest of the crew were obligated to engineer on your behalf.

Everybody was grabbing cups of coffee with wet hair in short order.

Mitch, however, was frowning when he stuck his head round the hatch to the flight deck. “Yo, they’re refusing us docking.” he called.

Everyone exchanged glances, and Monica and Derek—co-pilot and flight engineer respectively—squeezed into their seats, leaving the three scientists and Kevin to eavesdrop.

“Did they say why?”

“Nope, not yet… uh, Resupply Station four-four-niner, Byron Group Echo-Victor Eight again. We’d sure appreciate an explanation. Why are being denied permission, over?”

“Because we’re human. Why else?” Kevin murmured rhetorically, quietly enough so the three on the flight deck wouldn’t hear.

“You think something happened?” Their resident astronomer, Charlie, asked him in a whisper.

“Yup.”

“Like what?” Jennifer asked.

“Swarm of Swarms. Bet you.”

“No bet.” Ryan grunted. He was their geologist and, as such, by far and away the most profitable member of the crew. He liked to joke that the job of the other six was to get him to someplace where he could dig up something valuable.

“Yeah, never go against Jenks’ nose for xeno politics.” Charlie agreed.

“Never go against his nose for politics full stop.” Jennie agreed.

“Jesus, they’re launching fighters.” Derek announced. “They really don’t want us docking.”

”…Woah there, take it easy Four-four-niner, you can plainly see we’re holding position. May we at least synchronize comms?”

“Remind them they have to under Article Seven of the-” Kevin began to tell him.

“I know, Jenks.” Derek snapped.

”…Okay.”

“Yowch.” Charlie muttered.

“It’s cool, he’s just stressed… I’ll get the big screen turned on.”

Ryan frowned at him. “Why?”

“Because there’s gonna be a message from Byron waiting for us.”

He was right. No sooner had Derek bullied the station into grudgingly allowing BGEV-8 to synchronize with the interstellar communications relay than the ship was announcing a priority message for all eyes.

Monica put a few tactful light-minutes between them and the station and they went dark in interplanetary space before relaxing enough to gather in the ship’s common area—a circular lounge with furniture that folded into the deck to make room for the gym mat—and load the message.

Sure enough, their billionaire employer’s frowning visage was the very first frame of the message.

“If I’m any judge, you’ll have an inkling something’s gone wrong by the time you get this. If I know nonhumans, they’re probably in the grip of a panic again. Enclosed is footage which explains why in detail, but I’ll make it short: The Swarm of Swarms attacked Capitol Station. Destroyed it, in fact. Some kind of human spaceborne special forces called the SOR got involved and… ah, it’s all in the video briefing that follows these orders.

“Come back ASAP. Carter, Brown, you’re clear to use the emergency recall. I want the seven of you at our policy meeting. See you shortly.”

“Emergency recall?” Kevin asked.

“You heard the man, Mitch.” Monica said, and tugged the chain that she’d had round her neck from day one out from inside her vest. Mitch Carter produced something from his pocket and together they slipped into the bridge.

“Emergency recall?” Kevin repeated.

“Little something the Group gave us after losing all those other ships.” Monica replied.

There was a subtle sound, a little like somebody had thumped a bulkhead with their fist and caused the whole ship to give a dull ring. Interplanetary dark space was gone in an instant, replaced to one side by a grey and cratered horizon and, rising above it…

“Oh no.” Kevin moaned. “That stupid son of a bitch.”

“What?” Ryan asked.

“He’s had an open jump beacon to Earth this whole time?”

“Our emergency recall, yeah. What, is that a problem?”

Kevin spun on his heel and headed for his locker. “That’s between me and Moses Byron.” he replied.

Date Point 10y2m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches.

Gabriel Arés

Jess paused and looked up from her desk. “Doorbell? Are we expecting Ava tonight?”

“I’ll get it.”

Despite time and physiotherapy, Gabe’s old injury was getting progressively worse, and hauling himself up out of his chair was still difficult. Which was why he made a point of doing it every time he had an excuse—he might be on a one-way trip to a wheelchair, but he was damned if he was letting it take him without a fight.

Besides, letting Jess do something as simple as answer the door for him would have made him feel like a cripple, and he hated that.

It was Ava alright, wearing her oldest and favorite jacket, the simple, rugged one that she and Adam had got together before coming to Cimbrean, with the “From Ashes” patch on the sleeve.

She gave him a tiny, sad smile that made him hesitate mid-greeting. “…Hey Dad.”

”…Hey.”

“Adam found out.”

Gabe let out a long-contained sigh, stepped forward and gave her a hug. “I’m sorry, Ava.”

She hugged back, tight and shaking, and mumbled something he didn’t catch.

“What was that?”

“I said I’m sorry, I… I didn’t see. I was so stupid, I…”

“Shh…” Gabe just held her a bit longer.

Eventually, she pulled away. “I’m… gonna go back to Earth.” she announced. “Try and, and… Try and be somebody. Somebody who isn’t a complete fuckup.”

“Hey, for what it’s worth…” Gabe began “like I said, you’re a daughter to me nowadays. I won’t lie, when you told us I was… kinda disappointed in you. But I love you anyway, okay? I know you’ll do okay.”

“I don’t know…” Ava sighed and leaned against the wall. “I can never seem to figure out how to do the right thing.”

“Want some advice?” Gabe offered. She looked up at him, waiting. “Well, okay, it’s more of a story…”

When Ava’s expectant gaze didn’t change, he nodded and told it. “There was… back in San Diego, there was this woman, a Private Investigator. Terri Boone. I met her… about a year, year and a half before the bomb went off. She’d shot an intruder in her apartment. He was on her couch, had a gun, had no right to be there… open and shut case of self defense.”

“Anyway, Boone claimed that the guy she killed was working for somebody else, and that they’d just try again. Which, that’s a serious claim, we took it seriously… nothing came of it. Nothing we could follow up on, anyway. There were… nothing we could legitimately find, nothing admissible, pointed to this guy working for anybody but himself. Right?”

Ava nodded, listening.

“Well… my whole job was about what was admissible. Building a case that’d stand up in a court of law and not get thrown out on a technicality. Procedure, procedure, procedure, right? That’s the nature of police work, and it’s like that for a good reason. So, I found myself stuck. I believed Boone, but I couldn’t continue the investigation because I’d have strayed outside of procedure. Can’t do that, so I had to drop it.”

He sighed. “A few months later, she was dead. And… She was tied up in the bombing of the city. I can’t go into it. But sometimes I ask myself if I could have done anything differently. If maybe had I just been lax on procedure that one time, maybe those two million people would still be alive. It’s possible.”

He held up a hand as Ava started to speak. “Or. Maybe they could have blown up three cities. Or ten. Or maybe the whole world would be bombed flat from orbit by the Hunters by now. I don’t know. And that’s kinda the point. I regret not doing more for her…But I can’t think of a single thing I’d do differently. You see what I’m saying?”

Ava thought about it, then nodded slowly. “You can’t do more than what seems like a good idea at the time.” she said.

“Right. You screw up, you move on, you learn, you screw up again.” Gabe gave her a wry smile. “Some of us screw up worse than others, but… There’s no secret. You’ve just got to forgive yourself and move on.”

“Learn from your mistakes…”

“Right…” Gabe nodded. “Do you regret…what you did?”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna do it again?”

“Hell no.”

“There we go, then. You’re a better woman than you were yesterday.”

Ava managed to laugh at that, though she sobered again quickly. “…I’m going to miss you, Dad.”

“I’ll miss you too. Come back, okay? When you’re ready.”

“When I’m ready. I promise.”

They hugged again. “Goodbye, Dad.”

“Goodbye.”

He watched her down the stairs, then let himself back into the apartment. Jess took one look at him, stood and gave him a hug. “Are you okay?”

“How much did you hear?”

“All of it.”

Gabe sighed. “I’ll be… I’ll just learn from my mistakes and move on, like I told her to.”

“That’s easier said than done.”

Gabe just shrugged, and shrank down into his chair again, rubbing his face. “Esi es la vida.”

Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV
Byron Group Head Offices, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth.

Kevin Jenkins.

“Look, Rachael, I’m telling you this is important.”

Kevin had dealt with his employer’s personal assistant before. Byron had a policy where literally anybody in the company could arrange a meeting with him, and crewing one of his ships was one of the positions that earned you a place in the short queue for those meetings… but there was still a queue. The idea that somebody might want to meet with him urgently apparently wasn’t in her briefing. “And I’m telling you that Mr. Byron sees people with appointments.” she repeated.

“And how long will an appointment take to arrange?” Kevin challenged her.

“If it’s really that important I can fit you in for tomorrow at-”

She was spared Kevin’s frustrated lambasting by her phone ringing, and Moses Byron’s voice on the speaker. “Rachael, if you don’t let him in I do believe I’ll just need a new door anyway.”

“Yes, Mister Byron.”

She gestured to the door for him.

Byron’s office was just as calculated as everything else about the man, in Kevin’s opinion. He had pretty much instantly pegged Byron as a self-interested bastard who had his head on straight enough to spot that public opinion was a more valuable currency than mere dollars, and everything the man did as being part of that philosophy.

The office wasn’t large, and you’d have been forgiven for mistaking it for that of a high school principal or a junior manager, rather than a man whose personal wealth eclipsed anything that Kevin could have imagined earning in several lifetimes. There was nothing either ultra-modern or obviously antique on display, just a few small bookshelves, some framed family photographs, a nice view. You had to look closer to spot that the desk was a bespoke piece in pale oak, see the hand-stitching in the office chair, or notice that the coffee next to the machine in the corner probably cost more per hundred grams than the ones Kevin had served in his bars had cost per thousand.

It all spoke to a fondness for the benefits of a billionaire’s life while keeping up a pretense of frugal moderation.

“Got to hand it to you, Kevin, not many people demand to see me.” Byron told him, standing up politely. He was like that, always polite and engaging even if he was obviously nettled.

“Yeah, well, not every day I learn we’ve had a back door open around the moon for… what, five months?” Kevin told him.

“And?”

“Mister Byron, that’s like the worst idea since… It’s a really bad idea.”

Byron’s head inclined slightly to one side. “Why? You know something I don’t?” he asked.

“What, besides the Swarm of Swarms? You sent us that video, boss man.” Kevin told him. “You think if they can do that to Capitol Station, they’ll struggle with us?”

Byron pushed his chair out of the way and stepped over to the wet bar in the corner. “The Hunters” he said “Don’t have a dang thing anywhere even close to Sol.”

“And how do you know that?” Kevin asked him.

“Oh, that’s easy.” Byron said. “All we needed was a Hunter’s corpse. No shortage of those about, didn’t even have to send a fightin’ Homo Sapiens out to grab one. Just put in a call to the right people. Once the eggheads had its communication implants, engineering a sensor that could pick up their chatter was simplicity itself. They assure me there are no Hunters anywhere near Earth. Drink? I ain’t no bartender but I mix a decent Creole…”

“And what about other threats?” Kevin asked, declining the offer with a hand gesture.

Byron paused in pouring a drink for himself. Kevin noted idly that although he’d offered a creole, what he was pouring for himself was actually a Shirley Temple. “You mean to tell me you know about some other threats?” he asked, quietly. “What, you were involved in strategic intelligence briefings while you were cleaning tables at SCERF?”

“One of the NDAs I’m under forbids me from telling you how many NDAs I’m under nor for what reasons.” Kevin shot back. “We’re talking serious felony stuff here. But fuck, if it’s serious enough and if I have to, I’ll break every last fuckin’ one and go to the pen knowing I tried to avert disaster.”

Byron arched an eyebrow at him.

”…Though I’d take it as a personal favor if I didn’t have to.” Kevin admitted.

“That serious, huh?”

A new voice entered the conversation. “More than you might guess, Mister Byron.”

Kevin and Byron turned to the door. A slim, trim woman in a dark suit gave them a slim, trim smile and invited herself in. Of Rachael, there was no sign. “Mister Jenkins. I’m pleased to see you have this well in hand. I’ll pretend the bit where you mused about sharing classified information was purely speculative.”

“Special Agent… Williams, right?” Kevin greeted her, dredging the name up from memory. They hadn’t met since the Hierarchy debriefing at Scotch Creek, back before the San Diego blast. “Pleasure to see you again, always nice to see my tax dollars walk in the door wearing Armani.”

“Good memory.” Williams acknowledged him.

“How’s your partner? Hamilton, right?”

“He’s at his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, thank you for asking. I was invited but, well… there was a serious incident involving an unknown, unshielded and only barely encrypted jump beacon orbiting the moon. Lucky for you that ship you rode in on was broadcasting Moses Byron’s name everywhere, or you’d have been dead within seconds of arriving.”

Byron cleared his throat. “I’m not used” he declared “to being ignored in my own office.”

“Where are my manners?” Williams asked, smoothly producing and opening her identification. “Williams, CIA.”

Byron glowered at the seal she was showing him for a good few seconds as if expecting it to be so cheap a forgery as to fall apart in her hands. When this failed to happen, he grudgingly put his drink down and extended a hand. Williams didn’t shake it.

“So.” Byron sat down to cover the snub. “Would either of you care to indulge me as to why in the good gosh-darn the Company just walked into my office and my PA is nowhere in sight?”

Williams turned a hand palm-up, inviting Kevin to speak. Kevin’s caution briefly warred with his desire to launch into a full-blown rant at Byron, and won. Somehow, he suspected he was being tested here.

“There’s… let’s call it the Big Bad. Out there.” he said. “Bigger and badder than the Hunters, that’s for sure. It wants us all dead, it might use the Hunters to get what it wants… and it’s old. Old like you’d laugh me out of the office if I told you.”

“How Lovecraftian.” Byron drawled, swirling his drink. He had that look Kevin had seen on several men in his time, the intense one that spoke of furious calculation going on silently while the face remained impassive.

“I’d almost prefer Lovecraft.” Williams said. “Mister Jenkins has put it with supreme delicacy, so allow me to be blunter: we are, in real terms, no more militarily powerful on the interstellar scale than we were ten years ago. Forget Cimbrean, and the Firebirds and the V-class destroyers. Forget the Hephaestus LLC and your own accomplishments, forget even the panicky politics of the Dominion. In real terms, the human race collectively is still very much insignificant. But so is a grain of sand, and if you’ve ever got one of those in your sock, Mister Byron, you know just how irritating a grain of sand can be, and how badly you will want to scratch it.”

She flashed that slim, trim smile again. “Except that in our case, scratching is for now impossible thanks to the system containment forcefield that you violated.”

Byron took a sip and set his glass down. “This seems” he observed “like the kind of critical information that a man in my position, doing the things I was doing, ought to have been told.”

“You were, and still are, judged to be a dangerous personality.” Williams told him. She stepped forward and, uninvited, put her briefcase on Byron’s desk. “Given that you had the information to know that your stunt with that beacon was a bad idea and went ahead with it anyway, that judgement stands.”

“And you figured that an ignorant dangerous personality was less of a problem than an educated one?” Byron retorted. “Extinction ain’t exactly in my business plan. Had I known that was on the cards…”

“Spare me.” Williams interrupted. “We know that Governor Sandy hinted about a danger with neural implants to you in private. Anybody with your resources can’t possibly be ignorant of just how aggressively the SOR and JETS were formed, nor of the huge sums of government money that went dark at the same time. And if you were somehow oblivious to all of those, I defy you to look me in the eye and tell me that San Diego escaped your attention.”

Byron’s expression didn’t change, but he did draw a long and slightly indignant breath as he listened.

“You already had all the information you needed, Mister Byron.” Williams scolded him. “And still you proceeded unwisely. I shudder to think what you might have done had we filled in the detail for you.”

“Shoulda co-opted me, then.” Byron grunted.

“Maybe.” Williams agreed. She turned to Kevin. “Mister Jenkins, I appreciate your involvement here, and I’m sure you could contribute in all sorts of ways, but this conversation between the United States of America and Mister Moses Byron is not for mortal ears. I’m sorry.”

Kevin knew better than to argue. Williams held all the cards here.

“Arright.” he agreed. “But before you lay into my employer…?”

Williams nodded and made a gesture of invitation.

“If there’s a learning point in this whole clusterfuck, it’s that we really shouldn’t be keeping our people in the dark, arright? That goes for you too, Mister Byron. Briefing only two members of the crew about the recall meant I never got the chance to warn you it was a bad idea.”

Williams and Byron frowned at each other, then both made a conceding nod. “There’s a fine art to secrecy.” Williams agreed. “Errors in judgement may have happened all round. We intend to address that.”

Byron just nodded again. “Fine.” Kevin told them, breathing a little easier. “You two godly folks have fun talking over the mortal’s head. I’ll see ya at that policy meeting, Mister Byron.”

“I’d be grateful if you would shut the door please, Mister Jenkins.” Williams said. She produced a phone from her pocket, and tapped at it as Kevin crossed the room.

Kevin couldn’t resist just a little eavesdrop as he closed the door. Before it clicked softly shut, the last he heard was “It’s me… Yes, he’s right here Mister President…”

Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam Arés

For a blissful few seconds when Adam woke up, there was just the light of sunrise staining what promised to be a clear blue sky and the loose, relaxed feeling of muscles newly mended by Crue-D. In those seconds, the world was perfect.

Then yesterday hit him in the head.

”…Fuck.”

He levered himself upright. He was still in his civvies, basketball shorts and a T-shirt that he’d made himself, one of the few items of clothing he had that was actually loose on him.

BASEBALL was slumped in an armchair in the doorway, snoring quietly with a book on his knee. Somebody had draped a blanket over him, and there was a mug of tea on the floor next to him, untouched and long gone cold. Adam recognized one of Major Powell’s mugs.

Remorse stabbed him right in the heart. Base was going to be suffering from lost sleep for the rest of the day, which was no fun at all on the SOR’s training regime. A quick glance at the clock said it was only 0530. A Cimbrean day was twenty-eight hours long in total - close enough to Earth that people didn’t really suffer from the difference. In fact, the extra hours usually translated to feeling like every day had been both productive and restful.

Still. If Base had been up most of the night…

“John?”

Base started slightly in his seat, and blinked his eyes open. “Uh? Oh, shit.”

He straightened up, moving his back sinuously with a rapid-fire of little pops and crackles as he cleared out the stiffness from a few hours of bad posture. “Wasn’t supposed to sleep…”

“You okay, bro?” Adam asked him.

“Are you?”

“Fuck if I know.” Adam grumbled and sat up properly, swinging his feet down onto the floor.

John didn’t say anything, just bookmarked what he’d been reading, retrieved the tea, sipped it, grimaced, and took both book and drink into the kitchen. A few seconds later, Adam heard the microwave close and hum into life.

First things first—after any serious injury was repaired by Crue-D, the first thing to do was to test it. Twenty push-ups were more than enough to confirm that his elbow was fine, and they blasted out some of the dust in his head for good measure.

He padded through into the kitchen. “You stayed up all night?” he asked.

“Yeah. We figured somebody had to keep an eye on you.”

“Dude, I wasn’t gonna do something stupid…”

“I know, just…” John shrugged expansively, and sipped his re-heated tea.

”…Thanks, bro.”

“First breakup’s always the worst.” John sighed.

“I can’t believe her.” Adam sighed, thumping over to the fridge. To his quiet delight, there was still half a box of Eggos in there. “Where did you even get these on Cimbrean?”

“Londis.”

Adam grunted and nodded as he turned on the grill. Able Seaman Thomas ‘Londis’ Magoro derived his nickname from a chain of British convenience stores, thanks to his legendary ability to procure almost anything. If you wanted something and you wanted it quickly, you went to Londis.

“I gotta ask, brother…” John said. “Eggos?”

Adam shrugged “My dad made them for me whenever Mom was being difficult… Guess they’re my comfort food.” he laughed. “Hell, shove enough butter and syrup on them, they’re probably a great fit for our macronutrients, right?”

John gave a half-hearted half-laugh and sipped his tea again.

“Something wrong?” Adam asked.

“Stop trying to put a brave face on it, man. You’re torn up.” John told him.

Adam hesitated, then shook his head and waved his hands resignedly. “It’s done man. It’s over. Fuck her. Just gotta move on, I guess.”

John just gave him a patient stare.

”…Alright! Alright. I’m fucking… I just don’t know why man?! How could she! What the fuck? She just threw it all away? Why?”

“Brother… I love you, but you’ve got the girl-smarts of a fucking ten-year-old.” John grunted, and drained his mug.

“You’re saying it’s my fault?” Adam asked, incredulous.

“Nuh.” John shook his head. “But it takes two to dance, man. D’you really think you were being fair on her? Never there, not really there there even when you were there… you follow me?”

“She’s still the one who-”

“Yeah.” John interrupted. “but… I’ve done that shit too man.”

Adam blinked at him. “You have?”

“I played around, yeah. Ain’t proud of it, but…” John scratched his head thoughtfully. “Look, the cheater’s to blame, but they cheat for a reason. And at the time it seemed like a good reason. That’s all I’m saying.”

Adam didn’t reply, and they lapsed into thoughtful silence until the Eggos were out of the grill and drowned in butter and maple syrup.

“What could I have done differently, though?” he asked. “I wrote her all the time, called her every chance I got, took as much leave as I could to spend time with her…”

“You know what I remember?” John asked. Adam had served him a couple of Eggos as well, and he’d apparently decided he enjoyed them. “You remember that night we were on the plane coming up to Scotch Creek to jump out here, and she called you really upset about something? And at the end of that call she was mad at you and hung up and you had no idea what she’d even called about?”

”…Yeah?”

“Par for the fucking course with you, bro. Every conversation you two ever had worked out like that somehow. I mean… did you ever ask her how her degree was going? Or, or take a look at her website?”

“She has a website?”

John rocked back. “Are you-? You don’t even fucking know she has a website?!”

“What’s on this website?”

“Her photos, man! She’s a photographer, or did you not notice that? It’s her portfolio!”

Adam just stared at him, shaking his head slightly while he chewed.

“Jesus fuck.” John rubbed his forehead. “Do I actually know more about your girlfriend than you do?”

“Ex-girlfriend.”

“And this is fuckin’ why, man! This shit right here is why she cheated on you.”

Adam looked down at his plate. “Doesn’t excuse it.” he grunted.

“No! But it explains it though!” John took a breath and cooled down. “She didn’t just do this ‘just because’, brother. She had a reason, even if that reason wasn’t good enough. I mean, how much leave did you have saved up? Sixty days? Use it or lose it, right? I remember, the major had to order us to take leave time.”

“Yeah but, ramping down and coming back up on the training takes a month each! That would have put us behind-”

“Adam.” John sighed. “I’m not telling you if you were right or wrong not to take leave. I’m telling you why it happened, and what more you could have done. That’s all. You could have taken more leave, you could have spent more time with her, you could have actually taken an interest. You didn’t do any of those things and… well, this happened. She’s the one who did it, but you’ve gotta ask why she felt she had to. Right?”

Not wanting to admit out loud that he was probably right, Adam forced himself to shut up and think, rather than argue any more.

He kept to himself for the next couple of hours as the rest of the guys woke up, and as the morning routine of keeping the dorm clean and tidy unfolded—necessary, because it would have reeked of male musk, body odour and sweat otherwise—the simple chores gave his mind time to work.

For their part, the guys clearly sensed that he wasn’t in a talkative mood, and were cool with that. They were just there, solid and dependable and giving him exactly what he needed—room and quiet to think. He appreciated that hugely.

They were in the middle of hanging out the laundry when the dorm’s phone rang. Akiyama fielded it.

“Yo, Horse! Call from gate guard for ya!”

Adam and Base shared a frown, and he jogged over to take the call. “Arés.”

“Staff Sergeant, I have a gentleman here asking for you by name. He says it’s important. Name of Harvey, Sean Harvey.”

“Turn him away.” Adam told them.

“He says, uh… He says ‘Ava’s gone missing’, sergeant.”

Adam must have paused for longer than he thought, because the next word he heard was “…Sergeant?”

”…I’ll be right there.”

He notified REBAR of where he was going and jogged the few hundred meters over to the main gates. Sure enough, Sean was loitering at the guard post, pacing nervously.

Adam didn’t waste time on being nice. “What do you want?”

“She’s just… gone. She went to see your dad last night and now she’s… nobody knows where she is.” Sean explained. “I’m kinda worried she might…”

“Shut up.”

Adam spun away from him, and was halfway back to the gates when Sean spoke up. “This is why she did it, you know!”

Adam didn’t turn around, but he did stop. “Do you even care about her?” He asked. “Or did you just wanna get your dick wet?”

“Do YOU care about her?” Sean retorted. “Or just about your fucking territory?”

Several hundred pounds of angry SOR operator was in his face half a second later. To Sean’s credit, he did little more than rock back on his heels. He was shaking, but he held his own. “You’re just going to walk away and let her be missing?”

“I was going,” Adam snarled, “to request leave to go look for her.”

“Sergeant?” The guards had stepped forward, cautiously. “Break it up, please.”

“You know where she is?” Sean asked, ignoring them.

Adam didn’t ignore them. He straightened. “What the fuck makes you think you have a right to know?” he asked.

“Because I’m her bloody friend you giant pillock!” Sean snapped.

Adam’s fist clenched. “Friend?” he asked. “Is that what you call it?”

“Yes!”

“Sergeant…” The gate guards had drawn closer. “Break it up, please.”

Adam spared them a sideways glance, then very, very carefully relaxed his hand before he aimed a finger at Sean’s face. “You don’t get shit from me, Harvey.” he growled. “She can tell you herself where she got to, after I’ve gone and got her. Fuck her, fuck you, and fuck off.”

He stalked back through the gates, back to the dorm, and right up to REBAR, who’d taken over as their NCOIC since they’d lost Legsy. “Requesting leave.” he said, getting right to the point.

REBAR blinked at him. “Dude, you could have just told the gate guard.”

“Yeah just… I’ma be gone all day. Wanted to grab some stuff and tell you in person.”

REBAR gave him a hug. “Okay brother. You go do what you gotta.”

Adam just nodded and gave him a weak smile. He spun round the dorm, grabbing his light ruck from under his bunk to throw in a couple of pouches of juice, an old sweater of his that he never wore any longer on account of it being much too small, two bags of beef jerky and a small first-aid kit.

He changed his footwear too. He usually wore flip-flops or went barefoot around the base—boots and shoes were too expensive and broke too quickly between the size of his feet, his own mass and his tendency to bounce around rather than lumber. His hiking sandals, on the other hand, had taken everything he could throw at them for two years.

A couple more essentials, including his phone, and he was back out of the gate less than ten minutes after he’d sent Sean packing. He hung an immediate left, followed the fence around two sides of the base and then set out through the young broad-leaf plantation that came right up as close as the foresters were allowed.

It was exactly what he needed. Adam had never been the kind of guy who did his greatest thinking in a quiet room at the best of times, and five years in the service had only strengthened the connection between his muscles and his brain. It was almost like one couldn’t work properly unless the other was busy.

Sure, a simple steady hike—even at the hard pace he set—through gently sloping woodland wasn’t exactly taxing, but it was enough to settle his body into a rhythm and let his brain get down to business.

Anybody coming back down the trail would have been a little alarmed to run into a guy who put pro wrestlers to shame talking angrily to himself. He spent the first two miles aggressively rehearsing all the ways he was going to tell Ava off. Then he spent the next two miles telling himself off, rehearsing ways to reconcile, rehearsing her side of the argument.

When he did eventually run into somebody, it was an elderly couple out walking their dog, probably from one of the little peripheral forest communities. Folctha had attracted a lot of them—elderly couples and early retirees wanting a place where their pensions would go further, a nudist camp, the odd religious commune kept under close scrutiny by Cimbrean Colonial Security in case they started showing any cultish behaviour, or just second homes owned by hard-working Reclamation Project workers and Folctha city employees who wanted somewhere quiet to retreat to for the weekend.

He saw them long before they were in earshot, shut up, met them with a polite touch to his forehead and a “Sir. Ma’am.” and ignored the stares. People around Folctha were pretty used to the SOR, but these two had clearly never met one of the Operators before. Their reaction was pretty standard for first-timers.

The contact was enough to shut him up for the rest of the walk, or at least turn his thought process into a steady mill of ideas being worked over internally, rather than a crazy person shouting at trees. He was almost in a positive mood when he finally reached the point where the trail branched, leading off in one direction toward Scrap Point, a research outpost dedicated to diving the alien spaceship wreckage on the lake bed. The other way went down to Sara’s Beach, a public recreation spot that was actually a good kilometre or so from the spot that he personally thought of as Sara’s beach, but much more accessible.

He followed the second trail until it intersected the paved road and, rather than hanging a right and walking down to the lake shore as the trail signs directed, instead crossed straight over and plunged on into the woods.

The ecological calamity that the Cimbrean Reclamation Project insisted on calling “The Terran Microbe Action Zone” (and which the colonists knew rather less formally as “The Skidmark”) hadn’t ever reached out this far, and so none of the native flora had been felled. It was still being steadily and relentlessly choked out by the Earthling imports, but that was all part of the plan. First had come logging everything within ten kilometers of the Zone, replanting and populating with species imported from Earth, and that was it. The natural aggressiveness and biological advantage of Deathworld life was being left to do the rest.

The result was a confused boundary zone where imported broadleaf trees gave way to a tangle of Earth and Cimbrean flora, the latter steadily dying back as the former out-grew them, shaded them over, guzzled the soil nutrients and, in a lot of cases, parasitized them.

And then… nothing but natives. Native trees, native bird-ish things and mammal-ish things and other life forms that were, for the most part, surprisingly ordinary looking. The bird-ish things had mouths with teeth rather than beaks, and the mammal-ish things were covered in something that was more like moss than like fur or wool, and of course the universal constant in Cimbrean fauna was three eyes… but nothing that actually looked amazingly exotic. Just life, getting on with the business of living and oblivious to the creeping extinction only a hundred yards away.

There was even a stand of Cimbreaner Simiscamellia Delanii, the Cimbrean Tea Bush. It was growing not even twenty yards away from a thorny, berry-laden snarl of Terraner Rubus Fruticosus. The botanists had decided very early on that in order to remain sensible and useful, the taxonomic system of classification needed to be amended to include, above the Domain level, the Planet rank.

Adam had to admit. Cimbrean was still beautiful.

He heard Ava long before he saw her. He could hear her voice between the trees and bushes, talking to somebody. He had no idea who—Sean hadn’t mentioned anybody else being missing and people never came this far along the shore from Sara’s Beach…

She turned out to be talking to herself. She was right where he’d known she would be—seated on the same old rock where she’d always sat, facing out toward the same view with her clothes folded neatly on the stone next to her, resting with her elbows and her knees, looking down at her feet.

She flinched when she realized somebody was there, then relaxed when she saw who it was.

”…Hey.”

Adam blinked. He hadn’t foreseen that she’d be nude. “You uh… Did you swim?”

“No I didn’t swim.” she shook her head. “I just… I’m more comfortable this way up here.”

She leaned over and grabbed her t-shirt.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asked.

She flapped the shirt to get it the right way out. “Kinda, but… It’s not too bad.”

“Who were you talking to, anyway?” Adam asked her. There was nobody else present.

“This is going to sound really stupid…” Ava’s face went a little red as she tugged her shirt on and covered up.

“What?”

”…I was talking to Sara.”

Adam hesitated, then gently rested a concerned hand on her upper back. “Baby…”

The term of endearment surprised him. After everything, after learning what she’d done, his first instinct was still to be tender and to love her?

“I know.” Ava nodded, and rubbed her face. “I know she’s dead, I know. It’s stupid, I just-”

“She was fourteen, Ava.” Adam sat down. “Maybe not the best source of life wisdom, you know?”

Ava sobbed a laugh, and they sat together in silence for a long time. Not touching, but close.

“I brought some juice. And, uh, a sweater. And stuff.” Adam handed her the bag. A tiny grateful smile put in a cameo appearance as she dug out one of the juice pouches and the sweater, which she shrugged on. She must have been colder than she’d realized.

“I should probably have told somebody where I was going, huh?” she asked.

“Sean was worried for you.”

“And he went to you?”

“Yeah. He’s got balls, I’ll give him that.”

Ava didn’t answer. Instead, she impaled the juice pouch with a straw and drained it.

”…What were you talking to Sara about, anyway?” Adam asked her once she’d finished.

Ava glanced at him, then down at her bare feet. “You know what’s really stupid?” She asked. “Like, really, really, ‘what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-me’ stupid?”

She looked at him again. “You explained everything perfectly yesterday. You put it totally into perspective. I get it, I get just how badly I fucked up, and still there’s this bitch voice in the back of my head that wants me to believe… that’s trying to tell me I did nothing wrong.” She looked out over the lake. “I was trying to get rid of it.”

“By talking to Sara?”

She nodded, miserably picking at a fingernail. “Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?”

He shook his head gently. “Not really.”

“Nothing makes sense.”

Adam mulled that comment over.

“No…” he decided. “Things do make sense. You know what the weirdest part of all this is?”

“What?”

“If you’d just… told me, or asked me…fuck! I might even have been okay with it! Because I get it, I understand, you put it perfectly yesterday too. I married the Air Force first.” He sighed. “But instead you lied to me, Ava. For… what, two years?”

“About that.” she agreed, nodding sadly.

“I get that I was neglecting you,” Adam told her. “I get that I was making decisions for us both without consulting you. Hell, I get that he was… probably good for you! What I Just. Don’t. Get. is why you couldn’t be straight with me?” He wiped his own eyes off. “For God’s sake, yeah, breaking up with me would have hurt, but this?”

Ava, who usually shed tears so easily, seemed to have run out. Or maybe she’d just gone somewhere past them, where they were no longer relevant. Either way, her face was a mask of dry despondency.

“Why, Ava?”

”…I’ve been asking myself that question all morning.”

“And?”

“And… I really thought I was doing it for you. Charlotte said it was because I was lonely and horny, but… But I can remember thinking ‘it’s this or I lose him,’ and…” she exhaled and ran three fingers through her hair. “It’s so stupid. I’m so stupid. If I hadn’t got so hung up on holding on to the past, at least I’d still have my integrity, you know? But because I got it in my head I was doing it for you, I went and did completely the wrong thing.”

Adam stood up. “I thought I was doing this for you!” he told her, gesturing at the full, hugely-muscled mass of himself. “But you said it last night: You didn’t want or need me to do this, and I sure as fuck didn’t want or need you to cheat on me…”

He sat down again. “Maybe we both need to stop believing our own bullshit.” he concluded.

Ava just stared at him, so he sighed and elaborated.

“I thought I was doing this to protect you.” He said. “Really I did, I was convinced. But you’re right, if I’d really been acting for you, then… hell, I’d probably have gone into Colonial Security and been there for you every night, and… Instead I just got caught up in this. I was angry and grieving over Sara, I wanted to fight back, and then it turned out I’m good at fighting back. The best maybe!”

He looked out across the lake, choosing his words. “Do you know what it’s like to get pulled along into something like that? Where everything just lines up and you’d never even think of slowing down or stopping because it just feels right? Because you’re enjoying it so much you don’t ever want it to end?”

Ava nodded. “You feel like you’re taking back your life.” She agreed.

“Right.”

“You feel like you’re in control but really you’re strapped in for the ride but because you’ve got a wheel in your hands you don’t notice you’re not doing the steering.”

“Right!”

”…That’s how it was for me, too.” she said.

”…Do you think that’s the truth?” Adam asked her. “Or is it just more bullshit we’re inventing to make ourselves feel better?”

Ava paused. “…I…think it’s the truth.” she said. “Or at least… I hope it is…”

She trailed off, then spread her arms helplessly. “I don’t know any more. I spent all this time trying to do the right thing, and did completely the wrong thing instead. I don’t… I don’t know if I can trust what’s in my head.”

“Then how can I trust you?” Adam asked.

Ava didn’t answer, just stared despairingly at the water. A couple of minutes elapsed in mutual silence, before she finally spoke, quietly.

“We’re done, aren’t we?”

Adam nodded and stood up. “I love you, Ava.” he said. “But there’s just no… I can’t.”

“I know…” She looked up at him, grief and remorse written in every nuance of her expression. “I’m so sorry, Adam.”

”…I’m sorry too.”

He turned his back on her, and started back up the trail.

Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV
Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth.

Xiù Chang

White.

White and beeping.

And sort of a soft blue. Greens, too. Hints of scarlet light, and a click-hiss valve noise that corresponded to a strange pressure in her chest.

Blink. Frown. Focus.

A question floated across her mind in three languages: Where yi nǎlǐ?

That wasn’t right. Wǒ kin I? Shi am nǎlǐ?

So hard to think. She tried to take a calming breath, clear her head, and something started to make an alarming sound.

“Xiù? Xiù! Nurse? Nurse help!”

…Purple? Moving purple, and dark skin, and a soothing tone, like Ayma comforting a wailing cub.

“It’s okay, it’s okay… she’s just awake, it’s okay. Shhh, darling. Don’t fight the ventilator, it’s okay. It’s okay, you’re safe.”

Xiù? What was a Xiù?

Oh.

Right.

…

Nurse.

Ventilator.

Hospital.

Earth.

So hard to think but… those strangers by her bedside. The tiny elderly woman in tears. The skinny old balding man holding her hand with stress plowing his forehead. The tall fat man behind them with his hands on their…

No. No no no, that was wrong! She didn’t have a big brother! Her parents weren’t-

“Okay honey, shhh… calm now… I’m sorry, this is really distressing her, we’d better put her under again… It’s okay darling, you’re just not ready yet… It’s okay…”

Something in her left hand. Something that made all the wrong go away.

Something that…

Something…

…

White.

And… colours. Cards, by her bed. “Get Well Soon!” “We missed you!” “Welcome home!”

There was no beeping, this time. No hissing or clicking, nothing in her throat doing her breathing for her. Just… yes, a drip in her hand, and darkness outside the window. Warm yellow light through a slightly ajar door, admitting hushed conversation.

Xiù sat up, cautiously. She was alone, she had time to gather her thoughts, assess the situation.

Fact check. She was in a hospital, with a drip in her hand. The gravity felt normal. The air had a certain… richness to it, warm and nourishing. She couldn’t tell what the voices outside were saying—their volume was much too tactful for that—but the cadences sounded English.

She carefully selected the right word. “…Hello?”

The conversation outside ceased, and then there were brisk footsteps, a rustle of scrubs, and a middle-aged nurse poked her head round the door.

Her face lit up on seeing Xiù. “Oh! Hi!”

Xiù froze, having not planned the conversation this far ahead. “…Hi. Uh…”

“Oh it’s okay honey, you’re a bit disoriented right now, eh?”

“A-a little.” Xiù nodded. “…I’m in Vancouver?”

“Yep!” The nurse patted the bed “I’m Liz. Am I okay to sit down?”

“S-sure.”

Liz did so, settling comfortably next to her. “You and your friends made a stir when you showed up! You especially.”

“I-I did?”

“Oh! Where are my-? I’m sorry, can I get you something, sweetie? No solids until the doctor says otherwise, but I could call up for some soup?”

”…Actually, that’d be really nice. Yes please.”

“Okay. You’ll be okay for a few seconds?”

Xiù nodded for her, and managed a little smile.

Liz wasn’t long. Xiù heard her feet in the hall, a quick conversation, and she returned in only a minute or two. Still, it was long enough for Xiù to sort out her head and think through the most pressing questions she had.

“So.” Liz said, bustling back in. “Where were we?”

“Are my friends okay?” Xiù asked her. “Julian and Allison?”

“They’re fine. They’re asleep right now, but they’re just fine. You had the worst of it, actually.”

“I did?”

Liz gestured with her hand, raising her left arm and touching a spot on her ribs, with an expression hinting for Xiù to do the same. When she did, there was a dressing there. “You’ve been asleep for about three days.” Liz told her. “There were a couple of operations. Doctor Spilny will explain it all in the morning.”

“Can I see them?”

“In the morning sweetie. You’re all pretty badly hurt, you need to rest.”

Liz’s tone was kindly and comforting, but firm enough to convince Xiù she wouldn’t get her way there.

She looked at the cards on her bedside again. “We caused a stir?”

“Especially you! Vancouver’s own prodigal daughter, gone these ten years, and-”

“Ten years?!” Xiù’s hand flew to her face in shock. “How long were we-? Uh, right… the escape pod… Stasis…”

“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie, that just came out. I’m sorry.” Liz soothed.

“No, it’s okay… I knew it was going to be about that, but…” Xiù rubbed her face. It didn’t help. Her hands were shaking, so were her shoulders, and there was an urgent heat coming up from deep inside her, behind her eyes…

Liz, demonstrating the sixth sense of mothers and nurses the world over, pulled her into a hug before the tears even arrived, and let her get it out of her system.

“I’m home… God, I made it, I’m home…”

“Yes you did.”

Xiù disengaged gently and sat up, wiping her cheeks. “…Sorry.”

“Don’t even apologise to me, sweetie. It’s okay.” Liz smiled warmly, and indicated that Xiù’s soup had arrived sometime while she hadn’t been paying attention. Xiù didn’t need prompting—she scooped it up and, after a tentative sip to make sure it wasn’t too hot, devoured the lot.

It wasn’t the greatest soup ever. But it was warm, it was comforting, it was chicken—and it was amazing how many things in the galaxy didn’t taste like chicken—and it lasted maybe thirty seconds.

“Whew!” Liz made an appreciative noise. “You needed that, eh?”

“Oh God yes.” Xiù wiped a little from the corners of her mouth, trying not to be embarrassed.

“Do you think you can sleep some more? You really should.”

It surprised Xiù to note that she was in fact feeling exhausted. Hadn’t she been asleep for a few days? But Liz’s suggestion actually sounded really good right now.

“I’ll… yeah, I think I can.” She said.

“Okay. We’ll be just outside if you need anything. Call if you need anything.”

Xiù promised that she would and settled back onto her pillow. Liz fussed gently in making sure she was properly tucked in, then bade her goodnight and left, leaving the door open.

That left only the ceiling in the dim light, and one thought, as Xiù fell asleep:

‘I’m home…’

Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV
Byron Group head offices, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“My God, what happened?”

Kevin could see why the question was being whispered. Moses Byron, who was always the picture of smiling confidence and vitality, looked stressed. Pale, even. Rather than striding into the room in his usual blustering style, he more… shuffled. Thoughtfully.

“Did somebody die?”

“Shh.”

Byron took a moment to survey the crew of BGEV-8, assorted board members and department heads, and cleared his throat. “Been a development.” he croaked, and cleared his throat again. “This, uh… this planning session is cancelled. I’ll let you know personally when we reschedule. For now, uh…”

He coughed. “Rachael. Recall GEV-9 and GEV-10. Tell them under no circumstances are they to use their jump drives—they’ve got to come back the old-fashioned way.”

“Mister Byron, that’ll take them months-!” somebody protested.

Moses held up his hand. “I know. I ain’t changing my mind. Oh, and, uh… Trevor, some fine folks will be along later today to take a good look at your department. Give them full access. To everything, and I mean everything, including Project Ophanim.”

Nobody said a word—they just exchanged bewildered and slightly scared expressions. Finally, Byron spoke again, looking at Kevin. “Everybody whose name isn’t Kevin Jenkins, go find something to do. I don’t care what it is, go home early if you want. Go on.”

People practically fled.

“Based on the little… ‘chat’ I just had with the halls of power in this great nation of ours…” Byron began, once the last door was closed “It seems I need to hire me a no-man. Somebody who, if I’ve got fifty people kissing my ass and telling me we’re golden, if I look at you and you shake your head, we bury that idea and never speak of it again. Sound like something you can do?”

“Does this thing come with a salary?” Kevin asked. He judged it correctly—Byron laughed.

“Hah! And an office.” he said. “Though if half the things I hear about your cooking are true, I might include attending to the comestibles on your list of duties.”

“I could be persuaded to take a job like that.”

“Good… good” Byron cleared his throat again. “…We dodged a bullet. By this much.” he confided, holding up two narrowly spaced fingers for illustration.

“Dodged at least two by my count.” Kevin agreed.

“Yeah… I’ll see you in the office tomorrow. You got a place to stay?”

“HR already got my hotel room sorted out.” Kevin told him. “Guess I’d better see them about somewhere more permanent, huh?”

“You do that.” Byron agreed. He shook Kevin’s hand and wandered out of the room, clearly still deep in thought.

Kevin’s mission pay had already been sorted out, and thanks to the miracle of modern digital banking, calling and paying for a taxi were effectively the same thing.

He’d planned on leaving Earth forever. He distinctly remembered how the word had felt as he spoke it. Forever. Not for five years, not until something better came along. Forever. Get himself out of his estranged daughter’s life and never look back.

It was the first time he’d even thought of her in years, and he ambled through the hotel lobby and into the elevator in a pensive mood, only shaking himself back into the here and now as the doors opened with a chime.

He was about to swipe his phone to open the door lock when a thought occurred to him. Experimentally, he knocked on his own hotel room door.

“Come in.”

The door wasn’t locked, and Special Agent Williams was sitting in the large comfortable chair by the window, putting down a tablet. “Well done.” she added. “You have good instincts.”

“Save it.” Kevin muttered, and sat on his bed. “Look, Williams-”

“Ah.” she raised a finger. “Small note on tradecraft for you. ‘Williams’ is a cover name. Professionally and to you, I go by Darcy. Special Agent Darcy, if you want to be formal.”

“Darcy, huh? That a fake name too?”

“If it was, why would I tell you?” She smiled again. “I would have introduced myself as Darcy if you hadn’t dug up Williams to say hello.”

“Pardon me for spoiling your entrance.” Kevin deadpanned. “So what, are you offering me a job as well?”

“I am.” she agreed. “Though I suspect the title won’t be as impressive as whatever it is Byron’s calling your new role.”

“Comestible attendant.”

Either Darcy’s professional façade genuinely did slip for a moment, or else she was by a league the most flawless liar Kevin had ever met. “Hah!” she giggled, and raised a hand to cover her mouth. “Oh, that’s good. I like that.”

“So what would my job be?” Kevin asked her, deciding he probably had got through to the real woman under the Company act, whoever she was, and allowing himself a satisfied smile.

“Oh, exactly the same as you’re doing for Moses Byron - veto any ideas of his that strike you as unwise. You’ll need… well.”

She hefted a light black satchel from beside her chair and handed it to him. Inside was a brand new Samsung tablet still in its box, and some kind of a black device to attach to it.

“What’s the box do?” Kevin asked.

“Encryption, decryption, secure communications…” Darcy shrugged. “Don’t plug it into any device other than that tablet.”

“What’ll it do, explode?”

“No, it just won’t work. But it would still technically be a felony.”

“Communication with what?” Kevin pressed.

“A secure server.” Darcy said. “Full of briefings and reports and documents that you’ll need to read, though I suspect that a lot of what’s in there won’t come as that much of a surprise to you.”

Kevin nodded. “Just two more questions…”

Darcy sat back and delicately crossed her legs. “Shoot.”

“One: Why me? I ain’t exactly the model of ambitious patriotism, you know.”

“Ten years ago, you drove up to the front gates of SCERF carrying the kind of intelligence we were absolutely starving for.” Darcy told him. “You’ve clearly got something that does the job of ambition, even if it’s just that you’d rather not get nuked from orbit. Certainly, you’re smart enough to know that as a real possibility and you’ve taken active steps—potentially at risk to your own liberty and person—to combat it.” She inclined her head. “Now would you say that somebody like that wasn’t worth our time?”

Kevin frowned and didn’t answer.

“What’s your second question?” Darcy prompted him, eventually.

”…Does this thing come with a salary?”

Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

John Burgess

“Woah… hey, I thought you were gone for the day, man?”

Adam just shrugged and hung his light bag by the door. “I took a day. Got to sort out some things. Get my head right. But… you know me, I gotta be doing shit to think right, you hear me?”

“I hear ya.” John agreed. “I was gonna lift…”

“Nuh-uh. We’re wrestling. Now.”

Fifty seconds later, the mat was grinding painfully against John’s face and his arm felt like it was one Newton of force at most from dislocating.

“So.” Adam shifted his posture just a little bit while John’s feet scrabbled ineffectually for purchase. “Let’s talk about how you kept my cheating ex’s secret for her, ‘brother’.”

Date Point 10y2m2w5d AV
Folctha, Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rìos

“Ready?”

”…No.”

“They’re calling.”

“I know, I just…”

Ava took one last look. It would have been nice to think of Folctha as her home, but… it wasn’t. Not any more. Not really. It was all white buildings and parks and streets, now. There were cars, there was the beginning of a rail network to connect to the outlying farms and villages. There was a thriving street or two full of shops. There was a supermarket. There were paved roads, advertisements, the neon green cross of a pharmacy. It was a town, now. It wasn’t the Folctha she’d lived in.

She could remember little wooden chalets tucked between the native trees. She could remember being happy in a place that might have been here, but wasn’t here. She could remember…

But that’s all it was. Memory.

”…I’m ready.”

Charlotte and Ben waved sadly to her from beyond the glass. She’d already said goodbye to Gabe, and Adam… she wasn’t surprised he hadn’t come. Jess had work. Hayley had left Cimbrean years ago.

She presented her passport, stepped through the security arch, shuffled into place on the Jump Array’s deck alongside Sean, and fidgeted as the last few people did likewise. The gate was closed, there was a short countdown, and…

And she was on Earth.

The Earth end of the Byron Group’s commercial jump array was Hamburg airport, and Ava could sense being on a different planet even if the architecture hadn’t suddenly and confusingly changed without so much as a flicker. Folctha’s municipal gravity generator might have exactly duplicated Earth gravity, but it couldn’t duplicate the heavy richness of the air. It was like coming down from mountaintop to sea level. It was warmer, denser, more oxygenated and more humid. Earth was a hot planet by galactic standards, and doomed to get hotter despite the rapid one-eighty in carbon dioxide production over the last eight years. She could taste and smell that fact in every breath.

“So. Hamburg.” She hoisted her bag. Beside her, Sean snapped the drag-handle up from his and kicked it over into his hand.

“Yep.”

“Are we flying back to London?”

“That’s cheapest.” Sean agreed.

“How cheap?”

“Fifty quid each.”

“Good…” They passed through another security arch. “I can afford that.”

“I won’t hear of it.” Sean told her. “You’re going to need that money.”

“But-”

“You’re going to need a job. That means buses and the tube and maybe a taxi or two. So keep your money and use it. You can pay me back once you’re earning.”

“You can afford that?” She asked.

“I’ve been writing articles for a bunch of different news sites and blogs, working part-time at ‘Spoons.” Sean shrugged. “I can afford it, just. I was probably going to wind up looking for a lodger anyway. Rent in London being what it is I’d have made a fuck of a lot, too, but… I mean, money’s less important than helping you get on your feet.”

Touched, Ava managed a smile for him.

“Besides,” Sean added “I’ve got something coming up. My uncle Simon gets back from Angola next week. If he follows through on what he was talking about in his emails, maybe you and me, we could land on our feet.”

“What’s he doing in Angola?”

“Covering the election for Reuters.”

“I’ve still got that offer from Byron Group…” Ava noted, glancing at the corporate advertising for the jump array—Earth and Cimbrean, photographed from orbit and connected by a line that cycled through all the classic, vivid fibre-optic colours with the tagline ‘One small step…’

“Moses Byron talks a good game.” Sean agreed. “Hell, it seems like he walks his talk too. I’m just not… I don’t know, do you trust anybody who got that big that quickly?”

Ava shrugged. “People like his whole ‘ethics and integrity’ brand. Even if it’s just an act for the camera, he’s playing that part to the hilt.”

“Is that the same thing as actually being ethical though?”

“Sean…” Ava sighed. “Don’t ask me about morals and stuff right now. I don’t feel qualified.”

He inclined his head slightly, assessing her mood, then nodded and laid his hand gently on her upper back for just a second. “Okay.”

Neither of them said a word to the other for nearly an hour after that, by which point they had boarded their plane, taken off and reached cruising altitude. He’d been looking out of the window for most of that time.

”…Are we okay?” he asked.

Ava had been using the plane’s wifi to check her website. She put the tablet down when he spoke, and gave the question some thought. “We’re… You’re my very best friend, Sean. Is that enough? I don’t think I’ve got more than that to give.”

He nodded, and gave her a hug. “I’m sorry, Ava.”

”…You didn’t do anything.”

“No, I did. I got selfish, and…” Sean shrugged. “I pushed.”

“You didn’t hurt me, Sean.” Ava reassured him. “I hurt myself.”

“And I helped.”

“Yeah, well… you can stop helping me hurt myself by letting me take the blame for this, okay?” She told him. “This whole thing has been a lesson, and I want to learn it, not, not foist off the responsibility on somebody else.” It was her turn to give him a reassuring squeeze. “You learn your lesson, and I’ll learn mine. Okay?”

Sean nodded despondently, aware that lesson he was going to have to learn was the one he wished he didn’t have to. “…Okay.”

He looked out the window again. “…That makes sense.”

Date Point 10y2m2w6d AV
Uncharted System, Deep Space

Vedregnegnug

”-show up. There we go. It seems we escaped.”

Vedreg allowed a mingled pulse of relief and released anxiety to highlight his body. A human would have shuddered. “I detest stasis.” he declared. “Death or life on the moment of a button press. Thank you for sparing us any anticipation.”

Kirk dropped his lower-right hand, the prosthetic one, off the escape pod’s control panel and gave a pleased nod. “And we have indeed arrived at our destination. Good.” he announced.

Their “destination”, as far as Vedreg could tell, was a system in the middle of nowhere, some five years’ travel time from the final resting place of the starship Sanctuary at the meager ten kilolights that was their escape pod’s top speed.

Without the stasis field, they would have starved to death before completing even a fraction of the journey, and theirs was one of the largest, fastest and best-equipped lifepods in their late ship’s stable. Most of the others had been much smaller, cruder and slower. As it was…

Both of them glanced in the corner, and mutually decided not to discuss the deathworlder in the room. Lewis had come scrambling into their escape pod seconds before Kirk had sealed it, babbling about Sanctuary’s port living area taking a bad hit and separating him from the others. He was now slumped against the wall with his arms on his knees and his forehead resting against them.

The escape pod’s sensors had reported that all other life rafts had launched alongside theirs, moments before Amir had suicidally rammed and destroyed a Hierarchy dreadnought. Despite Lewis pleading and weeping at the console for nearly an hour, however, there had been no response from any of them. He’d finally given up and sunk despondently to the deck, scooted into the corner and gone very still and quiet. Humans were almost as expressive as Guvnuragnaguvendrugun, sometimes. Some of their emotions played out across their whole bodies.

Vedreg could hardly blame him: Subjectively, scant seconds had passed since Lewis had given up on his friends. Pointing out that as far as the rest of the galaxy was concerned they had been dead for five years would have been both unhelpful and tactless. Lewis had every right to grieve.

Rrrtktktkp’ch on the other hand were much more difficult to fathom without a translator. By the standards of pretty much every other sapient life-form, including their evolutionary ‘cousins’ the Vzk’tk, Kirk’s species were renowned for reserved emotions, impenetrable body language and inscrutable expressions…but if the way Kirk paused upon glancing at Lewis and then patted the grieving human awkwardly on the shoulder was any indication, he was feeling the loss just as intensely.

Kirk had always been stoic even by Rrrtk standards, however. He turned back to the controls, and indicated them to Vedreg.

“You see?”

Vedreg scrutinized the sensor readings. “That.” he noted, with a swish of accusatory maroon “Is one of the two system defense forcefields stolen from a secure military facility of my people. The other of which now protects Cimbrean, I believe.”

“Yes.” Kirk did not seem to be at all contrite.

“I do not approve of theft, Krrkktnkk a”ktnnzzik”tk.” Vedreg chastised him.

“Would you have given permission if I had asked for them?”

“No!”

“Then theft was the only option.” Kirk tapped some commands, and spoke something untranslated in his native tongue, a sound like a handful of gravel being tossed down a staircase.

“I beg your pardon?” Vedreg asked him. Kirk just made a satisfied nod, and then carefully enunciated a stream of rattling Domain syllables into the comms console.

The system forcefield deactivated.

No sooner had their pod crossed the threshold of where it had once been, than it popped back up, with barely a Guvnurag’s body-length of clearance sparing the rear end of the escape pod. Kirk clearly wanted to take no chances with anything hostile following them in.

Kirk nodded, and turned the translator back on. “Excellent.”

“Dude.” Lewis raised his head. “That wasn’t even Kirk’s line.”

”…what?” Both of them looked at him.

“He said ‘I have been, and will always be, your friend’.”

”…You speak Domain?” Kirk asked, aghast.

“No, I understand Domain.” Lewis hauled himself upright. “I couldn’t speak Domain if you cut my throat. Where are we?”

“How do you understand Domain?” Kirk demanded.

“Dude, I’ve spent months on the same ship as you. I studied it.”

“But… you shouldn’t be able to understand it!” Kirk protested.

“It’s a language isn’t it?” Lewis shrugged. “Fuck, I can’t pronounce Welsh either, but I could learn that just fine if I wanted. Now where are we and why’s it so goddamn important that you quote Spock at the forcefield?”

Kirk stared at him for a bit, then creaked a prolonged Rrrtk throat-clear, and called up the system navigation display as the liferaft boosted up to two lights and headed inwards.

“This system has no official name, and I’m not sharing its co-ordinates, as much as I trust the both of you.” he said. “Officially, it’s unexplored.”

“And unofficially?”

“I explored it.”

Lewis frowned at him. “Dude, when did you have time?”

“It’s more or less directly between Supply Station ‘Haven In The Dark’ and Nightmare, but no spacelane passes through here. At Sanctuary’s kind of speeds, going cross-country meant having to stop to ground the hull charge almost at every system, and this one has an appropriate gas giant.”

“So why are we here?” Vedreg interjected, shading himself to indicate curiosity.

“I… found something.”

“What did you find?”

“I found out what happened to Mrwrki Station.”

Vedreg glowed a cocktail of surprised royal blue and solemn green, but Lewis just gave them both a confused frown. “Dude, not everyone in this boat’s up to speed on galactic everything.” he told them. “What’s Mur-workey Station, and what happened to it?”

“Mrwrki was a Kwmbwrw research outpost on the Lleyvian Frontier.” Kirk explained. “That’s a cluster of stars in extreme… well. ‘up’. That is, perpendicular to the galactic plane, in the direction conventionally-”

“I know what ‘up’ means, dude.” Lewis snapped. “What happened to it?”

“It… vanished.”

“And turned up here?”

“Yes.”

“So, we’re going to dock there.”

Kirk hesitated. “Um… Yes.”

“How do you do that?” Vedreg objected. “How do you jump to accurate conclusions so quickly? All humans do it, it’s… infuriating!”

Lewis frowned at him with his mouth slightly open. “How do you not?” he countered. “I mean, why the fuck else would we be here, to take a selfie?”

“We aren’t deathworlders.” Kirk pointed out.

“But you’ve still got a working fucking thinker!” Lewis exclaimed, nonplussed. “Don’t give me the ancient evolution life-or-death bullshit whatever, I’d expect anyone to see that one coming unless the only thing their brain’s for is holding up their fucking hat!”

The two nonhumans looked at one another, then Kirk, with an air of extreme delicacy, cleared his throat again. “Lewis… are you okay?”

Lewis’ laugh had an incredulous note to it. “Are you se-? Dude, like, are you forgetting the bit where our friends got killed? Because that has harshed my mellow a tiny fucking bit.” He pinched his fingertips together a half-inch apart and peered through the gap to emphasize the point.

“Will shouting at us bring them back?” Kirk asked.

“Wh-? Well, no…”

“Then what good does it do?” Kirk folded all four of his arms.

”…So, what, you’re not even going to give the four of them any more than, like, a minute’s consideration?” Lewis asked.

“Lewis-”

“Goddamn herd xenos, man, FUCK!” the human spun away into the back of the pod, slumped against the wall, rubbed his face and then barked an order at the pod. “Privacy field.”

It snapped on in a fuzz of white noise and mercifully obscured him from view.

Kirk sagged, shook his head back and forth in a long, slow, swaying arc, and then double-checked the navigation.

“Do you have any thoughts on how to help him?” Vedreg asked, not sure what colour he should be and so settled on a kaleidoscope melange of concern, alarm, empathy, fear, and many more.

“There is one simple trick to helping any human, old friend.” Kirk murmured, guiding their lifeboat out of warp.

There was what had once been a space station below them, half-embedded in the surface of a tiny irregular lumpen moon that was much too small to have pulled itself into a sphere under its own gravity. The station was broken open, missing power to half its decks, eviscerated from where it had crashed into the surface of the rocky object, but still largely intact.

“And that is?” Vedreg asked.

“Mrwrki station.”

“I meant, and the simple trick is…?”

Kirk ordered the lifeboat to dock with the station’s one remaining powered bay, and turned to face him.

“You give them the means to fight back.”

++End Chapter 23++

While Deathworlders chapters will always be published completely for free, with the aid of my backers on Patreon I”ve now been able to take more time for writing! As a result, chapters are now longer and more detailed (As if you hadn’t noticed).

Thank you for reading, and for your feedback :D

Chapter 24: An Alien World

Date Point: 10y3m3w AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Kirk

“I don’t like this.“

“You are perfectly safe.”

“Nothing between me and vacuum but forcefields? Fuck that, dude.“

“How can one engage in pro-…” Vedreg paused. “No, wait. This is vulgarity for punctuation and emphasis, isn’t it.”

“Hey, he’s finally getting it. Miracles do happen!“

Rrrtk had so much peripheral vision that they could almost see behind themselves, so it was easy for Kirk to spot Vedreg’s irritated glance in his direction.

Kirk himself was meandering along at the front of their little trio, examining the station. Lewis was in an irreconcilably foul mood and hadn’t appreciated being pulled out of his sulk, nor climbing into a pan-species pressure rig—little more than a lightweight pack on his chest that encased him in a forcefield and kept the proper O2/CO2 balance. The device was absolutely foolproof, designed to shut down only when it detected a breathable atmosphere, but that didn’t stop Lewis from fidgeting and adjusting it nervously as if it might fall off at any second and strand him. Humans really did hate forcefields.

That fact always bemused Kirk. They would trust their lives completely to steel and aluminium which might develop stress fractures and leaks, but forcefields, the product of ultra-dependable solid-state electronic components, left them nervous and sweating.

“What are we even here for, anyway?” Lewis asked, through the life vest’s built-in communicator and translator.

“The last time I was here,” Kirk replied “I was able to use Sanctuary’s nanofactory to repair the power systems and the station’s own nanofactory. I left it with instructions.”

“Instructions to what?” Vedreg asked.

“Fix the station.” Lewis said.

Even Kirk rounded on him. “Lewis… you are right, but how did you know?” he demanded.

Lewis rubbed his chin with his thumb, then aimed that same thumb at part of the wall. “Hull breach. Recently patched and welded. We’ve passed six or seven now and you’ve inspected every one. Plus, what else are you gonna tell a busted-ass station to do with itself? Crochet some nice doilies and bake an apple pie?“

“What are ‘doilies’ and ‘apple pie’, please?” Vedreg asked.

“Doilies are, like… Little fancy decorative cloth things, and apple pie is… you take the fruit of an apple tree and a bunch of sugar and… Dude, it’s not important.”

“I’d still like to know.” Vedreg pleaded.

Lewis hesitated, then shrugged and sighed, giving up. “Okay, so, uh, you need a bunch of ingredients. Flour, sugar, butter…”

Kirk turned away to hide his amusement as he continued to inspect the repairs. They needed to be perfect – the station’s back had broken during its crash-landing, and while Kirk had no plans ever to launch it again, Mrwrki still needed to be airtight and space-worthy.

He listened idly as Lewis explained apple pie to Vedreg, including his reassurances that the ingredients that would have been unpalatable to Guvnurag all had “vegan” and “gluten free” alternatives. For some reason, the whole concept of “baking” seemed to fascinate Vedreg.

“So what’s the verdict?” Lewis asked eventually.

“All of these are acceptable…” Kirk conceded. “I think we must assume that all the others will be also.”

“Good. Sooner we get our asses behind a fucking pressure hull, the happier I’ll be.”

“This way, then.” Kirk indicated a door.

“Lay on, Macduff.“

Kirk nodded and activated it. “You know, that is a misuse.” he pointed out as it tortured itself a quarter open before jamming.

“Nuh, the misuse is ‘lead on, Macduff’ right?” Lewis disagreed, needing no prompting to wiggle himself into the gap, brace his back against one door and his feet against the other, and heave. Whatever obstruction had held it gave, and the door slid smoothly the rest of the way open.

“That would be wrong, yes.” Kirk replied. “But the original use was ‘Lay on Macduff, and damned be him who first cries ‘Hold, enough!” - Macbeth was defying Macduff and declaring that he would fight him, even knowing that it was futile. He was not inviting him to lead the way.”

“Macbeth?” Vedreg rumbled. Guvnurag speech patterns rendered the word more like “Mac-u-bets?”

“Vedreg, old friend, an introduction to Shakespeare will have to wait.” Kirk told him, as they squeezed into the airlock. The Kwmbwrw were mercifully about as large as Kirk’s own species, and the airlock was designed for half a dozen of them. It had just enough room to accommodate Vedreg’s bulk alongside their own.

The lock cycled without incident—Lewis’ brute-force fix to the outer door seemed to have permanently resolved the problem as it closed easily and without complaint, and fresh air gusted in. When the inner door opened, there was no sudden rush of depressurization—the interior was airtight.

“Excellent.” Kirk announced, ducking under the door frame and into the great ring hallway that ran around the station’s interior.

“So… what’s here?” Lewis was next, squeezing delicately out from where Vedreg’s furry mass had been pinning him to the wall. “What do we have?”

“A functioning nanofactory and an entire moonlet’s-worth of raw material.” Kirk told him. “With those two things plus time, what we have is… anything.”

“Food? Water?”

“Both in plentiful supply.” Kirk assured him. “This station was intended for extreme deep space observation. It’s equipped to be manned by a full Grand House - about six hundred Kwmbwrw - for a year between resupplies.

“And, uh… where are those six hundred Kwmbwrw?” Lewis asked.

Kirk imitated a shrug for his benefit. “They were not aboard when I found the place.” he replied.

“The escape pods?”

“Launched, presumably. I did not check.”

Lewis looked up at the ceiling and muttered something that the translator decided was not for their benefit. Louder, he addressed the station’s control software. “Station, as a proportionate number per hundred, how many of this facility’s escape pods and life rafts have been launched, in total?”

The station’s response boomed through the silent halls: “Zero.”

“None?” Vedreg asked. Curiosity, confusion and mild alarm pulsed all over his body. “But this place is derelict!”

“Derelict space station, disappeared, turned up crashed thousands of lightyears from where it’s supposed to be, crew missing, no escape pods launched?” Lewis asked. “Kirk, dude, I’ve seen this movie. I want no part of it.”

“I did a thorough sweep when I first came here.” Kirk asserted, firmly. “I checked everything. There is nothing here except us.”

“Fuck sake…” Lewis muttered. “…Okay. Whatever. But if we find their skinned carcasses hanging from the ceiling somewhere, we are leaving. Okay?”

“Deal.” Kirk agreed, before Vedreg could comment. Their shambling Guvnurag companion had given Lewis a deeply alarmed look.

“So what do you have planned, anyway?” Lewis asked, peering down a hallway as if expecting some kind of horrible flensing monster to be lurking there. The fact that the lighting was clear and bright and the deck was plainly clear of stalking beasts didn’t seem to satisfy him one bit.

“That” Kirk mused “Is a very good question…”

“You don’t have a plan?”

“I have a fully powered space station, a nanofactory, and more raw material than we could use in a lifetime even if we spent the first quarter of that time building more nanofactorys.” Kirk told him. “The rest is just… detail.”

“Detail?!“

“Yes. Detail. What we build. How many. What they are for. What we do with them and who we give them to.”

“That’s not ‘detail’ that’s, like, eighty-eight percent of the plan!”

“Well, that eighty-eight percent is yours, then.”

Lewis stopped examining the corners in search of hideous mutants and frowned at Kirk. “Come again?”

Kirk managed a complicated quad-limbed version of a shrug. “I am not a deathworlder.” he said, simply. “And just in this last hour or so, you have demonstrated time and again that you think a few steps ahead of Vedreg and me.”

He folded all four of his arms. “In my experience, it pays to defer to superior knowledge and skill.”

“You’re… giving me a whole factory to play with.” Lewis stated, clearly not quite able to believe it.

“One” Kirk nodded “That can build basically anything synthetic, including more nanofactorys, and machines which can grow anything organic.”

“To fight the Hierarchy.”

“And the Hunters. Yes. All it needs is your imagination and input.”

“Oh.”

Lewis stared around at the station. He clapped his hands together once, rubbed his palms and licked his lips.

”…Right.”

Date Point: 10y3m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches.

Adam Arés

“Ngggh…ow.”

A rare wince and groan forced its way out of Baseball as Adam lowered him gently onto his bunk. Walking wasn’t something John could manage at the moment, owing to the severe muscular tears in both his legs, and quite likely some hairline fractures…everywhere, really. Adam winced in return. After all, he was intimately familiar with the uniquely painful and intense training that he and Base shared, and they both considered it a point of pride to bear their suffering in quiet. It was part of their bond, sharing pain and gain that the other operators couldn’t possibly understand. So to hear John complain even a little…

“Fuck.”

Adam wouldn’t have been Adam if he hadn’t felt slightly guilty. Now that all the anger was out of his system and he was thinking clearly, he had to admit, his friend hadn’t really deserved such a methodical reminder of who was the better wrestler. “I guess I overdid it…You okay, bro?”

Base opened an eye. “…Are you?”

Adam gently palmed the back of his battle-brother’s head and massaged. “I’m really sorry, bro.” John’s hand came up and embraced his brother’s head as well, though even that elicited another wince. Adam had done a thorough job of working him over.

They touched foreheads and nuzzled. “No no, I had it comin’…” Base grunted. Then, with a sad, almost needy look, “Forgive me?”

“Dude,” Horse chuckled quietly, “You were right, y’know. Of course I forgive you.” They held for a long moment, letting the peace and affection between them return.

The moment passed. John nodded against him, then let go and rested his head back, grimacing at yet another stab of pain. “Love you, man.”

“Love you too, bro,” Adam grinned. “Go on, rest up, let the Crude do its thing.”

He padded quietly out of the room. John was asleep almost before Adam had closed the door. He chuckled to himself; instant sleep was a skill the whole SOR had in common, but John and Adam had learned it from the very beginning of their careers. He shook his head and headed to the showers for a long, cool soak.

By the time he dripped and towelled his way back into the common room wearing only his ranger shorts, the rest of the guys were on the couch enjoying another Bad Movie Night in the form of “The Phantom Menace”.

“Room for one more on there?” Adam asked them, still toweling his head dry. The hot-then-cold shower had done much to clear his head, and now he wanted to relax and meditate with his brothers, as it were. They shifted up and climbed over each other to make room and he squeezed in, wriggling his arm around Titan’s shoulders to fit until he was finally comfortably part of the pile, where he sighed happily and watched in silence.

“Y’know, I heard the kid who played Anakin quit acting.” Firth said, after a while. “Apparently this film ruined his career.”

“Shit happens.” Adam shrugged. “You gotta move on.”

“So you’re single now, huh?” Blaczynski asked. He flinched as Rebar swatted the back of his head. “Ow!”

“Yup.” Adam shrugged again and repeated himself. “Shit happens.” He tried not to let the comment bother him, and snuggled into Titan a bit more.

They endured the movie a bit longer, before curiosity finally gnawed its way through Titan’s restraint. “That’s all you got to say on it? ‘Shit happens’? Wasn’t she, like… your high school sweetheart? You two’ve been together as long as I’ve known you.”

Adam sighed and turned where he was sitting slightly. “What you want me to say?” he asked. “I don’t even have it all sorted out in my head right now. Okay? Maybe I’ll talk about it some, maybe I’ll figure shit out and move on, whatever. Right now…yeah. Best I got to say is ‘shit happens’.”

“Least you sorted fuckin’ Baseball out… OWW!!” This time it was Adam’s turn to give Blaczynski a blow upside the head, and this one wasn’t the half-hearted brotherly cuff that Blaczynski managed to attract at least twice a day: it was an open-palmed clout so hard that everyone flinched.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Adam growled. The mood changed instantly - nobody needed more than that to spot that a line had been crossed, and they all went tense.

There was an awkward silence as Adam stared Blaczynski down. It wasn’t much of a contest.

“Horse, uh, did you miss the part where Base helped your girl fuck another fella?” Sikes pointed out tentatively.

Adam snarled and stood up, unceremoniously dumping half the operators on the floor, and seared the lot of them with a dark glare. “Oh, noooo, I spent the last two hours breaking him because he ate the last of the Eggos!” He narrowed his eyes, “What business is it of yours anyway? You wanna go a round on the mat with me too? Think you’d last more than a few seconds? ‘Cuz Base paid the fuckin price already. Him and me? We’re cool. And yeah: He kept that fuckin’ secret, and it was the right goddamned thing to do!”

“Woah, woah. Easy brother.” Blaczynski held up a hand reassuringly - the other was still nursing the back of his head. “We’re just-”

“You’re mad on my behalf. Cool. I get it. Thank you.” Adam snapped. “But he’s sorry, I’m sorry, we’re both over it, and he was right - I wouldn’t be here if he’d told me when he first learned. So lay the fuck offa him or you’ll answer to me, got it? All of you.”

One by one, he made eye contact with all of them. Vandenberg and Murray held it and nodded their approval and agreement - Akiyama, Sikes, Firth and Blaczynski all blinked, nodded and looked away sheepishly.

Adam nodded and relaxed, and tiredness - a deep, spiritual fatigue that he’d been holding back all day - hit him like a rock slide. He sighed, suddenly realising just how much he needed some alone time. “Fuck. Sorry. Y’all…enjoy the movie, guys. Imma go to bed now.”

”…‘Night.”

“‘Night.”

Adam thumped his way back to his room, grumbling quietly to himself. There were photos on his desk when he got there, real ink-on-paper prints. They were an anachronistic relic, but still reckoned by purists to be the best way to immortalize a memory, and Adam was inclined to agree. Ava had taken this set years ago, posing raunchily for him in one of his old T-shirts and nothing else…and eventually not even that.

He sat on his steel-beam bed and studied them carefully, one by one. The bed creaked loudly by way of greeting, a familiar and weirdly comforting sound in his personal world that entirely failed to shake him out of his fugue. The photos were profoundly and painfully erotic.

He considered ripping them up.

Instead, very carefully, he took a wooden box out of his locker that his dad had given him for his birthday, slipped the photos into the very bottom of it, and buried the box at the bottom of his “storage” duffle bag, wondering and doubting if he would ever look at them again. He neatly packed the bag away, tugged his shorts off, and rolled onto his complaining bunk, determined not to let the prickling at the corner of his eyes become anything more.

He stared at the ceiling instead, and of all the photos he’d stuck up there - from Basic, from PJ training, from Folctha and from everywhere else he’d been and all the people he’d met - his eyes alighted on one from school. He was in the middle, young and wiry and shaggy-haired, flanked on either side by Sara and Ava with his arms round their waists. All grinning at the camera.

He rolled on his side and, at length, fell asleep on a soaking wet pillow.

Date Point: 10y3m3w5d AV
Vancouver General Hospital, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Allison Buehler

Every so often, Allison amazed herself with just how much she could read in some fairly subtle gestures and expressions. She no sooner had to walk into Xiù’s room than she spotted the quiet desperation on Mrs. Chang’s face as she rattled away without pause to her long-lost daughter, nor the mostly-concealed discomfort and desire to be elsewhere on Wei’s.

Xiù’s expression was not in any way subtle. Quite the reverse, when she glanced up to see Allison leaning against the door frame, the look Allison received said ‘I love my family and I’m so glad to see them again but please save me from them.’

Allison couldn’t blame her. Ever since Xiù had woken up, she’d been the target of relentless attention from her doctors and nurses, and then an undammed torrent of familial affection, which had to be weird. Having a brother who was, in terms of date of birth, a few years her junior and yet was slightly older in terms of actual time experienced…

Allison couldn’t picture it. She was having a hard enough time adjusting to the changes in pop culture. The music on the radio, the references to technology and websites that hadn’t been around the last time she’d visited Earth, movies and TV series and actors, politicians. She hadn’t ever even heard of the President.

All of that was small beer next to Xiù’s reunion with parents who were well into their sixties, and as for Julian…

Julian had taken the news of his grandfather’s passing very hard. Very hard indeed.

She cleared her throat, gently interrupting the unrelenting babble of Mandarin that poor Xiù had been enduring. Like mothers everywhere, Mrs. Chang seemed to be determined to share the minute-to-minute details of every single day that her absent child had missed.

“Hey…” she smiled at them, trying not to show how much it bothered her that her voice was still rough and flegmy. “I’m really sorry, but could we borrow Xiù for a little while?”

Mrs. Chang turned to get her daughter’s opinion only to find that Xiù was already wrangling the blankets out of the way. For their part, Mr. Chang gave Allison an understanding smile and nod, and Wei seemed to be grateful for a break from the awkwardness. It had to be equally weird to find that your older sister was now younger.

Xiù was being adorably stubborn, too. The wheelchair by her bed was contemptuously ignored, even though the mere act of standing up got her breathing heavily. If the hand she laid on Allison’s shoulder was leaned on a little more heavily than it might have been if it was purely a gesture of welcome… well, Allison wasn’t about to comment.

Together, they made slow and breathless progress down the hospital corridor. The human respiratory system had never evolved to handle hard vacuum, and the damage they had suffered during their brief exposure had beat them round the head and mugged them. Young and fit though they both were, even gentle exertion was proving to be a hardship.

They paused for breath on a bench about twenty yards down from Xiù’s room where Xiù managed to fit a smile in between coarse breaths. “Thank you.”

“You okay?” Allison took her hand.

“Aside from… feeling like… I got run over… by a tank?” Xiù panted, and tried to take a deep breath which degenerated into a coughing fit. Allison ran her free hand up and down Xiù’s spine until it stopped. “God… I don’t know.”

“Too much to take in?”

”…Yeah. How’s… Julian?”

“That’s why I came to get you. He’s pretty beaten up over his Grampa. I thought he’d feel better to see you.”

“I guess.. we both lost family…” Xiù agreed, and hauled herself upright. Allison didn’t really feel ready to move just yet, but she forced herself to her feet anyway. The rehabilitation physio specialist had been adamant that she’d recover fairly quickly if she didn’t shy away from exercise, even if that exercise was a long way short of what she was accustomed to achieving.

The second set of benches was another twenty yards down, with only ten more to go to Julian’s room. Xiù sank onto it, perspiring.

“Okay… Why the hell… can’t space… be like in the movies?” she asked. “Star Lord… didn’t have to… put up with this shit.”

Allison giggled, and that triggered her turn to cough until her throat burned. It was Xiù’s turn to give her a comforting backrub, making a concerned noise that was a little more Gaoian than human. Allison didn’t comment.

“Ugh…”

“Allison…?”

“Yeah?”

“Is this… weird? That… I just got back… to my family… and I’m already… wishing they’d leave me alone?”

“I doubt it.” Allison shrugged. “God knows, I can’t wait to get off this planet ASAP.”

Xiù almost looked betrayed. “You’re… you wanna leave?”

“I was happy up there, babe.” Allison told her. “I was doing something. I was… you know, I felt like I was achieving stuff. I’m never going to be anybody on Earth.”

Xiù shook her head vociferously. “You don’t know that!”

The exclamation prompted another cough, but only the one this time.

“No, babe. I do. I know what I want, and I wanna be a spacegirl.” Allison said. “I wanna go out there and help find people, keep doing what Kirk was doing, maybe find worlds for people to live on, maybe find… who knows? What’s down here for me that somebody else hasn’t already done a million times?”

“A home?” Xiù asked.

“Home is wherever you’re happy.” Allison retorted. “And now that I’ve been to other places…? I don’t think that Earth can ever be my home.”

Xiù looked so crestfallen that Allison just had to rest a reassuring hand on her upper back. “Not what you wanted to hear?”

“I don’t know…” Xiù shrugged. “Is it stupid that I just… I kind of wrote you and Julian into my idea of what getting home was going to be like?”

Allison, genuinely touched, managed a giggle that didn’t turn into a wheeze. “Oh… I love you.”

Xiù gave her a stunned and confused blink, redness spread across her cheeks and nose, and Allison realised that this may have been an incautious thing to say to somebody who’d been starved of positive human interactions for several years.

She gave Xiù a hug. “Girl…I had more fun with you in one week than I had with some of my ‘best friends’ in two years. And I know you’re going to need help: I’m not just gonna abandon you, I promise.” She clarified. “I’m here for you.”

“O-oh…” Xiù’s blush faded again. “But you’re still leaving.”

“It’s not like I’ve got a spaceship in my other jacket, babe.” Allison pointed out. “I’m here for the foreseeable. It’s just… I know what I want to do with my life. In the short-term, I’ll help you. In the long term…” she glanced upwards significantly.

Xiù nodded, and wriggled into the hug a bit. “I’m sorry.” she said.

“What for?”

“For being… clingy.”

Allison gave her a backrub through her bathrobe. “Are you kidding? You’re not clingy.”

“I feel like I am.”

“You spent… how long, all by yourself?” Allison asked her. “Maybe you’re just too used to that. It’s fine, babe, I promise.”

“You’re sure?”

Allison smiled at the top of Xiù’s head. “I’m sure. Helps me feel useful.”

Xiù pulled back and gave her a questioning look. “Useful?”

“I feel like you need me.” Allison told her. “That’s… do you?”

Xiù considered the question. “I… I don’t want to.” she said. “But…”

She looked down the corridor: Wei Chang had just stepped out of her room. He gave his sister a pathetic little smile and lumbered in the direction of the vending machines. “Nobody else understands.” she finished. “I feel like I’ve landed on an alien planet. All these… these deathworlders.”

“The gravity’s wrong, isn’t it?” Allison mused.

“No. It’s too right. And the air feels too rich, and too warm, and I can taste so much on it.” Xiù sighed. “They tell me my immune system’s been made weaker ‘cause it’s not been challenged often enough…”

A nurse checked in with them on his way down the hall. “Are you two okay?” he asked.

“We’re fine, thanks.” Allison reassured him. Beside her, Xiù answered with a Gaoian-style ducking movement rather than a human nod. The nurse gave her a strange look and went about his duties.

”…Dammit.” Xiù thumped her palm to the side of her head.

“Relax, it’s no big deal.” Allison told her.

“To you it’s not.” Xiù shook her head. “Everyone else gives me strange looks…”

“Fuck ‘em.” Allison suggested. “So you’ve picked up a foreign accent in your travels. If they can’t handle that, it’s their problem. Not yours.”

Xiù glanced down to where her fingernails were flicking absentmindedly against each other, and wriggled her fingers to stop them. “I guess…”

”…You okay?”

Xiù rubbed at the scars on her arm. “I’m home. That’s all that matters. I’m home.” It sounded more like a mantra than conviction.

“Are you?”

For the first time ever, Xiù gave her an irritated glance. It was gone in a second, replaced by upset, shame and uncertainty. “I am.” she insisted.

Allison decided not to interrupt whatever she was thinking about, and was rewarded when, after about twenty seconds of cogitation, Xiù took a deep breath and gestured helplessly at the whole hospital.

“I’m home…and all Mom wants to talk about is who married who and when the baby’s due and… I used to spend my whole day worrying about accidentally killing people. Like, if I tripped and fell and reached out to catch myself or something and pulled their arm off… or worse, if I got found out and the Hunters came for me.”

She sighed and looked up and down the corridor. She frowned at a magazine on the table next to their bench and picked it up. At a glance it was obvious its title was something along the lines of ‘Charm!’ and that the front cover was nothing but long-range photos of oblivious women in bikinis being referred to by their first names. “Sometimes, here in this hospital?” she began. “It smells like that Hunter ship did. Just sometimes, it’ll catch me off guard and…”

Allison reached out and tidied some hair out of her face. Xiù studied the magazine as she did so, her frown deepening.

“Is this what I came back to?” she asked. “Weddings, and how fat some celebrity is that I never even heard of? Doesn’t anybody care that we’re at war? That there’s a whole species of monsters out there that wants us all dead? That eat people?”

“This is what you left.” Allison told her, avoiding the subject of Hunters and the Hierarchy for now. “And… hell, if you hadn’t been taken, that might be you on that magazine.”

”…That’s what I wanted to be.” Xiù nodded. “And… maybe I’d feel like I was doing something, too. Helping people get through their day, entertaining them. That seems important. But…” She dropped the magazine back on the table. “There’s no way that’s happening now, is there?”

“What makes you say that?”

Xiù simply gestured to the scars on her arm and throat, to the white lines where pulsegun fire had split her lip and eyebrow aboard the Hunter ship as well as breaking her nose, and to the weathered quality of her skin.

“Xiù, you’re beautiful.” Allison reassured her.

This earned a shy smile, and Xiù maneuvered some hair out of her face. “Maybe.” She agreed. “But am I Hollywood? And even if I was… Allison, I can’t even go a whole day of pretending to be human. What kind of an actor can’t even properly pretend to be her own species?”

She looked down at her feet, sighed, and then coughed. “…I was thinking so much of getting back here, I never thought about what being here would actually be like. What am I going to do here? Now that I’m here… who am I going to be?”

Allison gave her a squeeze. “You’ll have plenty of time.” she promised. “Did the Abductee Repatriation Program get in touch yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Chase ‘em.” Allison ordered her. “They’re supposed to give you some money, support and counselling, careers advice…”

This earned bitter noise. “Right. Careers. I’ve got a heck of a resume. Vagrant chef and Gaoian impersonator. Interests: Gung Fu and movies. Special talents: so fluent in three languages that I sometimes get mixed up and speak the wrong one.”

“You’ve got skills they can use though, right?”

“Who needs fluency in three languages when we’ve got translators nowadays?” Xiù asked. “I’m too old and out of practice to be an acrobat or a ballerina, I’m too beat up to be an actress…”

“You could still work in Hollywood. Extraterrestrial consultant? Tell the movies how to get it right? Or, the Global Representative Assembly. You’ve got knowledge they could use.”

“Maybe…”

“And you’re a great cook, babe. And- oh! You could bring Gaoian cuisine to Earth!”

“Maybe…”

Allison considered her subdued response, then put a reassuring hand on Xiù’s forearm. “Give it time. You’ll think of something.”

Xiù nodded and reached over with her left hand to squeeze Allison’s hand, then stood up. She swayed as the abrupt motion and her void-damaged lungs combined to make her head spin, and leaned heavily against the wall for a second to recover. “Let’s… go see Julian.”

”…Okay.”

Allison took a little more care in standing up, allowed Xiù to thread an arm through hers, and supported her the rest of the way.

Date Point: 10y4m AV
Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth.

Kevin Jenkins

There was an unfamiliar car outside Kevin’s new house when he got home. A black Toyota sedan - completely nondescript and unremarkable, which immediately gave Kevin a good idea of its driver.

It was a nice house. A two-storey thing in suburbia with delicate brownish panelling, two garages and enough driveway for a couple of monster trucks. The local housing association were proving to be a pain in the ass over the exact strain of grass seed he was allowed to use and how long it had to be and how well-watered, but the neighbors were nice. They had visited with a welcome cake on the day he moved in, but their timing had been awful - they’d shown up while he was wearing a short-sleeve polo shirt that put his tattoo on full display.

It was not an ambiguous tattoo. While the original ink had just been a simple black cross, Kevin had spent quite a lot of money over the years modifying it, starting by covering it with a bisected circle and the word “Rehabilitated”. Later touch-ups, additions and modifications meant that it was now well on its way to being a full sleeve of deliberately antagonistic antitheistic sentiment, a physical lashing-out at something he still felt a smouldering bitterness over.

He was proud of his ink, but it wasn’t the best thing to have on show when meeting new neighbors for the first time and it hadn’t gone down well at all. They’d been the very picture of forced civility, and had excused themselves as soon as they politely could. He’d been expecting church flyers to start showing up in his mailbox ever since, but to their credit that hadn’t happened.

Yet.

Darcy confirmed his suspicions by stepping out of her car as he parked, slipping a phone into her pocket. Kevin hadn’t seen her since she’d effectively hired him, although a more appropriate word might be “commandeered” or “requisitioned”. He was a resource, an asset. “Company property” as some of the documentation had euphemistically had it.

Her greeting was characteristically terse. “Kevin.”

“For future reference, you’re welcome to let yourself in.” Kevin told her.

“I don’t have a key.” She replied.

“Like that’d stop you.” Kevin retorted, with an amused joking sneer.

Darcy nodded, offering a smile that was, in Kevin’s opinion, somewhere towards the wrong end of tired. “People tend to get suspicious when they see a lock being picked in broad daylight, though.”

Kevin glanced across the street. There was the merest hint of a curtain dropping back into place as he did so. “Right.”

He opened the door and kicked his shoes into the corner. “Coffee?”

Darcy raised an eyebrow at the commercial espresso machine on his counter. “You take your coffee seriously.”

“Sure do.” Kevin agreed. “How d’you want it?”

“Cappuccino?”

“Comin’ right up.”

He watched Darcy out of the corner of his eye as he gurgled and hissed his way through preparing her drink. She didn’t quite flop down onto his couch, but she did sit heavily, then rubbed her face and rolled her neck.

Kevin gave her a double shot of espresso.

“Thanks for comin’ back up here on short notice.” he said, handing her the drink as he sat down. “I know your schedule’s gotta be busy…”

“You’re allowed to say I look like shit warmed up.” Darcy retorted, giving him a tired but probably honest smile. “This morning I was in Hawaii.”

“What the hell were you doing in Hawaii?”

“You don’t need to know.” she sipped the drink and pulled an almost erotic face. “Ohhh, that’s good coffee.”

“Best in Omaha.” Kevin promised. “So anyway, I had a couple things needed clearing up. If I’m any judge of him Byron’s subdued mood ain’t gonna last forever, and when he starts pushing the limits again I need the weight of facts behind me.”

“Shoot.” Darcy told him. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

“The big one has to do with somethin’ you said when you walked into Byron’s office. About how that ship I was on would of been destroyed if not for its IFF.”

“Yes…?” Darcy sipped her coffee again

“How? I know more-or-less what the Firebirds and the V-class can do, and I don’t reckon they could have jumped in anywhere close enough to destroy it in seconds. Minutes, sure…”

“Mm.” Darcy nodded.

“So either you were exaggerating, in which case that’s kind of a problem because anything could jump in and cloak and we’d be fucked…or you weren’t, in which case we have something that can hit a target at least as far out as the moon within a couple seconds of it arriving.”

Darcy ran a pensive tongue through the milk foam on her upper lip, clearly picking her words with care.

“It’s called WERBS.” she told him, after some thought.

“Weaponized Einstein-Rosen Bridge System. Thought so.” Kevin grinned at her. “Bartlett’s baby grew up then?”

Darcy, for her part, looked more irritated than surprised that he knew. “I have got to impress on Scotch Creek the need for their top scientists to be more cautious even around base staff.” she sighed. “Let me guess, he was discussing it with a colleague over one of your - admittedly excellent - coffees while you were up there?”

“Nope. He just had a bad habit of doodling his equations and stuff on my paper napkins and then forgetting to take them with him when he left.” Kevin shrugged apologetically. “It’s okay, I destroyed them.”

“How?”

“Incinerator. He got half his best work done on my bartop, Darcy.”

“Did you understand the equations?” she asked.

“Do I look like a theoretical physics prodigy?”

“I don’t go by looks, Kevin. Did you understand the equations?”

“No. Couldn’t hardly read them.”

“Okay.” She considered her words again, frowning as she took another sip of her drink. “Yes, WERBS is working. In fact it was about the fourth or fifth technology to come out of SCERF, right after forcefields, warp drive, stasis fields and jump engines. We had a working prototype for WERBS before Pandora was even a blueprint.”

“And it could of hit EV-8 out at the moon?”

“Could have. Yes. In fact it ‘could of’ hit you as far out as Pluto.” Darcy settled back on the couch and drained half her remaining cappuccino. “Satisfied?”

“I’d like to know how it works but I’m guessing that I don’t-”

”-Need to know.” Darcy chorused with him, nodding. “You don’t. Hell, I don’t need to know how it works. I can guess it has something to do with wormholes, but exactly what and how…”

“Makes sense to keep that one buried if it’s our ace in the hole.”

“Exactly.” Darcy finished her drink. “Anything else?”

“Few minutiae. Some clarifications over my standing orders and what exactly the company means by ‘covert action’.”

“Covert action is part of the CIA’s mandate, but completely outside of your area of responsibility right now.” Darcy reminded him. “You won’t be required to do anything covert. Your role is purely to… well, to be a bridge.”

“I know it’s part of the mandate, those introductory documents you sent me made that clear as mud.” Kevin retorted. “Coulda done with being less euphemistic, for my money.”

“Euphemism is useful.”

“Right. Can’t have it in writing that part of my job might include murdering Moses Byron.” Kevin snarked.

Darcy quirked an eyebrow at him. “Where did you get the impression that that’s on the cards?” she asked. “That’s not part of your job description.”

“Please. The Company’s reason for being is the security of the USA, and by extension the whole human race.” Kevin gave her a patient stare. “Your own words, right? Well Byron established pretty well with that emergency recall fiasco that he’s a potential liability there. And now you’ve got ‘company property’ working in his building…”

“We’ve got… an ally.” Darcy corrected him. “Somebody we trust to be just a little bit more sensible than Byron and who we hope will serve as a reminder of just how badly he fucked up. That doesn’t mean you’d be entrusted with that kind of thing. You don’t have the training, even if we worked that way.”

“You’re saying you don’t?”

Darcy just gave him a slight smile. “You don’t need to know.”

Date Point: 10y4m AV
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Xiù Chang

The doctors had kept them for nearly three weeks. All of them had felt well enough to be discharged inside two, and Julian had - with apologies - immediately made a bee-line for his late grandfather’s Minnesotan property in Clearwater county, promising to return as soon as he’d inspected the place and decided what he was doing with it. Neither of the girls were inclined to protest.

Allison had collected a sizeable pay package from somewhere, apparently earned for being on Kirk’s crew, and had accepted the duty of flying to England to track down Amir’s family and commiserate with them. She’d arranged to come back via Minnesota with Julian.

Xiù had… gone home. Ridden home in the back of what had been, on the night of her abduction, her father’s brand new Kia and watching a skyline that had changed subtly but disturbingly since she had last seen it. She was wearing the clothes she’d laid out on her bed to change into after ballet practice before leaving home the last time, just some comfortable black sweats and a loose long-sleeved Guess top that at least did a decent job of covering her scars.

Her bedroom was exactly as she had left it. Exactly as she had left it, right down to some carelessly-discarded underwear tangled up under her office chair, a half-finished pack of gum on the bedside table, her two favourite rings resting on the corner of her dresser, and her laptop still open on the desk. The laptop was by now hopelessly obsolete, but when Xiù prodded the space bar experimentally, it turned out that it had never actually been powered off - the fan and hard drive whined into quiet life.

She sat on the corner of the bed and watched it emerge from its long hibernation, trying to ignore the musty, untouched smell of the room as she turned the rings over and over in her fingers, not looking at them but still giving them a thorough tactile evaluation.

It took it a while - ten years of standby mode apparently didn’t come to an end at a moment’s notice - but… yes, there was her half-finished essay on Lady Macbeth, there was her Michelle Yeoh wallpaper, there was the OS update notification she’d religiously closed every time it dared to show its face…

She reached out and stroked a finger across the trackpad.

It promptly froze and blue-screened.

She closed the lid and toured the rest of the room. Had she really been so enthusiastic for pink? There was a lot of it. The fairy lights tangled in the bedstead were a nice touch, but the wall calendar had been purloined from her friend Ai’s family takeaway business and was the kind of tacky cartoon shengxiao calendar that bore the kitchen’s phone number and website, a declaration like ’Many Happy Fortunes!’ and a round of advice to “Wed a Tiger or Dog but never Rat”, or whatever.

She sneered at it, and threw it away.

She put the rings on, and then away too went three boy-band posters, a graveyard of antediluvian incense that she’d been forbidden by her parents’ landlord’s fire safety regulations ever from lighting, a venerable McDonald’s paper cup that was only disqualified from being a valuable antique by the fact that it was a McDonald’s paper cup, and the unopened pack of cigarettes she’d once bought on a dare and then been so worried sick of discovery that she’d never found the courage to smuggle them out of the house or throw them away.

Finding her rhythm she threw open the windows to try and blast some of the dust and stale air out, then decided to get rid of the curtains. They were sun-bleached and faded anyway. She was equally vicious to her wardrobe, going through everything that didn’t fit, all the silly ankle-twisting platform heels and the clothes she’d sworn that someday would fit again if she just lost weight regardless of the fact that the problem hadn’t been weight but age and height.

Most of the survivors were then thrown out on the principle that they were wildly out of fashion, or had just never looked that good anyway. All the clothing went into a pile she mentally labelled “charity”.

She was left with a handful of simple t-shirts, a couple of good pairs of jeans, one pair each of flats, running shoes and kitten-heeled calf boots, some sportswear, and three bras that were, while generous enough to accommodate her teenage self’s insecure padding-out, not actually oversized.

The laptop turned out to have given its swansong, and was now thoroughly dead. She considered asking Wei if he could resurrect it, but then decided against it - the last thing she needed was her older younger brother performing digital necromancy on her blog posts and browser history, and in any case the machine was so haplessly dated that she’d probably struggle to achieve half the things a modern Internet user wanted to do.

Out went the pink bedclothes, out went a sad deflated soccer ball, out went so much stale makeup that she couldn’t have worn it all if she’d spent every day of her absent years painted up like a hooker. Out went more stuffed toys than a sapient being had any right to even know existed. She took apart the flat-pack furniture and stowed it under the bed and in the back of the closet.

She tested all of the progress she’d made on rehabilitating her abused lungs in spinning around the room like an efficiently ruthless tornado until it was gone. All of it. Every last little thing that wasn’t hers, thrown out, dusted or vacuumed until she was down only to the things that she cared to keep.

This left her with a bare, cold and almost undecorated room to stare at, its former clutter hinted at only by unfaded patches of carpet and wallpaper. Other than that, she had the two rings she was now wearing, the fairy lights on the bedstead and that was about it.

She threw the lights out too when they turned out to be broken.

Only once she was standing alone in the middle of an empty floor-space did she finally find room in her head to think about what she’d just done and appreciate the full absurdity of it. She took a deep breath, produced a helpless arm-flapping shrug that clapped her hands once against her thighs, and issued something that was nearly a laugh.

”…Welcome home, Xiù.”

Date Point: 10y4m AV
IDF Checkpoint, Qalqilya, the West Bank.

Corporal Moshe Harel

“Uh, Moshe?”

“Yeah?”

“That white van you didn’t like the look of isn’t moving…”

Corporal Harel wasn’t the only one who looked up and scrutinized the van in question, his attention ratcheting up a gear. Tensions were running high—they were always running high—and the last thing they needed right now was a suspicious vehicle. The way the van (a venerable Toyota) had parked a good long way down the road from the checkpoint, not even in the shade of the trees or anything, and hadn’t moved since was definitely troubling.

“How long?”

“Not in ten minutes. I don’t see anyone inside…”

“Son of a bitch…” Moshe swore. “We can’t ignore that…”

His buddies nodded and checked their SMGs. Even if the driver floored it right now, the van would have to navigate a slalom of concrete dividers to approach the checkpoint, and would do so under fire from all sides by heavy weaponry. An ordinary, elderly Toyota van wouldn’t make it a fraction of the way—the first shots would go right through the engine.

“Radiological?”

“Nothing I can detect.”

Harel grabbed his binoculars and aimed them at the van. Between the heat haze and the sun reflecting off the glass, it was hard to be certain, but it certainly didn’t look like there was anybody sitting in there. There might have been a slight darkening, but that could equally be the headrest, or the van’s own shadow.

“Did we see anybody get out?”

“Running the tape back now… No, nobody got out of it. Not that I can see, anyway.”

“That van’s in full sunlight and the windows are up. It must be cooking in there!”

“All I know is, the camera didn’t see anybody.”

Harel considered his options, swiftly narrowing them down to a clear course of action. “Lock it down. Close the road right now.”

Everyone leapt into action, acutely aware that their safety and everyone else’s hinged on doing their jobs right. Within seconds, the checkpoint was closed.

As soon as they were, Harel would have liked to breath a little easier. That was one threat dealt with. Instead, he licked the inside of his dry mouth and moved on to the next bit. “Get the ‘bot up.”

“Yes corporal.”

The ‘bot was summoned and bounced its way across the scorching asphalt, fetching up right underneath the van’s passenger side window. Harel watched over its operator’s shoulder, expecting at any second for the van to suddenly accelerate, or explode, or for armed men to surge out the back. Even with their huge advantage in terms of firepower and positioning, even with the van being so far away, none of those options were at all desirable.

Even when the ‘bot cranked itself up onto the ends of its treads and extended its camera as high as it would go so as to look down into the footwell, there was no sign of a driver, nor of any kind of trap rigged up to the doors.

”…Check the back, Stolarz.” Harel ordered. The bot dropped back onto the asphalt and scooted under the van where it deployed millimetre RADAR to get a good look inside.

“Nobody in the back, Corporal.” Stolarz finally announced, though he tapped an object on his screen. “But that looks mean, whatever it is.”

“Uh… Corporal?

Private Wexler’s tone of voice was NOT one that Harel wanted to hear on a radiological sensor operator. “Yes?”

Wexler cleared his throat. “Radiological alarm, Moshe.”

Harel looked back at the van as Stolarz backed the ‘bot off a bit, as if that would do anything. “This,” he decided “is starting to look way above our pay grade.”

They called EOD, who quickly called in somebody MUCH higher up. The whole town was on lockdown within minutes as IDF vehicles rolled in by the hundred, and Harel’s checkpoint had to spend the rest of the day turning back civilian traffic and offering no comment for the cameras. All the while, the cluster of people around the van got larger and more grim-looking.

The sun was going down by the time they finally gave an all-clear and loaded something from the back of the van into an IDF truck, which vanished back over the Armistice Agreement Line under ridiculously heavy escort.

From the road, nobody could have seen what it was. From his vantage point, however, Harel got a good look, and promptly wished he hadn’t. It was covered in bright yellow radiation hazard stickers, labelled in both English and Urdu, and had borne the white crescent and star of the Pakistani flag.

Date Point: 10y4m AV
CIA Chicago office, Illinois, USA, Earth

Darcy

“Welcome back. How’s our new asset at Byron Group?”

Darcy didn’t need to fake a tired smile for Jake, her usual work partner. She really had been in Honolulu less than twenty hours ago, and that much travel was guaranteed to leave her rumpled and drained even though she was thoroughly used to it. Between sleeping most of the flight and catching a power nap in the car outside Jenkins’ house she was perfectly rested, but it was still getting late in the day by her personal clock.

Jake would have seen through even her best false smile anyway. “He’s gonna be a pleasure to work with.” she said, honestly. “All carrot, no stick, all the way, just you watch.”

“That easy, huh?” Jake asked. He stood from his desk and set about making her a cup of tea, exactly what she needed. She hadn’t been flattering Jenkins about the quality of his coffee - it genuinely was superb - but Darcy had always preferred a good jasmine tea. Just one of the things that made Jake such a good partner.

“Oh yeah. He’s a classic misanthrope. Pretty sure he thinks the neighbors are all waiting for their chance to ram a Bible down his throat. Throw in a white knight streak, and…” she trailed off meaningfully.

“Likes to feel like he’s rescuing a worthy damsel, huh?” Jake noted. He dropped a little jasmine tea pearl into the teapot for her and covered it in newly boiled water.

“Oh yeah. Strong masculine streak there.” Darcy watched in pleasurable anticipation as the hot water made the pearl break open and unfold into a flowered frond. “He’s no idiot though. Seduction’s not on the cards for a second, he’d see through it instantly. But all I need to do is play to type for him and he’ll be extremely useful.”

Jake set the teapot and a cup down for her and returned to his desk while Darcy set about summarizing her trip to Omaha for their records.

“Any surprises?” he asked.

“Nothing surprising exactly, no. He knew what the WERBS acronym stands for, but he didn’t know the specifics and he didn’t push. Figure if we ever have to throw him a bone there, the cover about having nukes ready to jump will do just fine.”

“Good. Last thing we need right now is any more potential holes in that one.” Jake nodded. “Sounds like a good source.”

Darcy took a grateful sip of her tea “Almost perfect. He’s an honest man underneath the asshole exterior, so we don’t need to establish any real control over him. Just… give ‘im the sales pitch and let him motivate himself the rest of the way. I like him.”

“You always did have a thing for prickly guys with soft centers.”

“Guilty.”

They worked in comfortable silence for a few minutes. Darcy finished her notes and her tea, and was considering wrapping it up for the day and sleeping in her own bed for a change when Jake sat back in his chair, arms folded, and frowned at the screen.

“Problem?” She asked.

“Could be.” his jaw worked side-to-side as he considered what he was reading. “One of those stolen Pakistani nukes just showed up…”

Date Point: 10y4m AV

Clan Whitecrest personal transport “Springing Ember”, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches.

Regaari

Sensing and communicating with ships that were travelling at Superluminal speeds had been a serious challenge and concern before the Corti had figured out the algorithms for detecting and modulating the “wake” every ship created as it stretched and contracted spacetime around itself. The expansion and contraction of spacetime being unbound by the speed of light, the system made for an efficient and cheap means of FTL communication, with only the slight drawback that it had an effective range of no more than about a day’s travel at one kilolight. Not even enough for communication even between two relatively close star systems, and no inhabited systems were that close together anyway.

Still, it was good enough for ships in the same system to see and talk to one another. In the past, once a ship had departed, it would outrun any photons sent after it, and so talking to it was simply impossible unless you got in a faster ship, overtook it, and dropped a transmission in its path.

Nowadays…

“Unidentified vessel, this is HMS Violent patrolling Cimbrean local space. Cease your approach and identify, over.“

Regaari ordered the ship down to sublight at once. “Violent, Gaoian transport ‘Springing Ember’, piloted by Officer Regaari of Clan Whitecrest, on a diplomatic mission. Ceasing approach.”

As he did so, Ayma poked her head out of the ship’s ablutions chamber, combing her fur to clean out her dust-bath. “We’ve arrived?” she asked.

“We were just intercepted by one of the human ships. The Violent.“

Ayma’s ears quirked and she grimaced. ”‘Violent’?” she asked. “Just ‘Violent’? What an ugly name for a ship.”

“Unsubtle, isn’t it?” Regaari agreed, though privately he felt that the name was appropriately bellicose for a warship. Why mask its nature behind poetic imagery?

A minute later, Violent hit sublight at a relative stop a few hundred kilometres away. His transport only registered its presence by the friendly identity signals it was broadcasting: Without those, it would have been all but invisible. No radar signature, with a shape and albedo that sent every sensor they had skipping off without trace and zero visible heat—Regaari knew that it would be radiating all of its heat in a coherent beam back towards the nearest star. Only his experimental gravimetric sensors, designed to counter Hunter cloaking devices, told him that something was there, and they were still far too imprecise to narrow down the exact location of Violent’s mass to within a radius better than thirty kilometers.

“Springing Ember, please disable all electronic security and submit to a database scan.“

“They really are paranoid.” Ayma commented.

“I heard a saying of theirs once. ‘It’s not paranoia if-’“

”’-If they really are out to get you.’” Ayma finished. “Yes. But they can plainly see that we are not Hunters, can’t they?”

“Well, like you said: They are paranoid.” Regaari snorted, dropping the firewalls.

He watched the alerts unfold as Violent’s technicians first infiltrated, then thoroughly ransacked the Springing Ember’s computer. Fortunately, the ship wasn’t carrying any clan secrets—he’d made completely sure of that before leaving.

Two more contacts appeared on his sensors as the intrusion was withdrawn and he was sent an all-clear to re-establish his firewall. These were small compared to his transport and the human destroyer, but large relative to most starfighters. Firebirds.

“Springing Ember, proceed to orbit above the fifth planet of this system and await further instructions.”

Cimbrean-5 was the outermost of the system’s rocky worlds, and the only one outside the system protection field. It was classified as a “violent” world—a planet far too cold for sapient habitation where it rained liquid methane into oceans of liquid methane under hateful skies full of methane clouds, where pressure differentials in its thick, cryogenic atmosphere could pick up razor shards of rock-hard water ice and carry them around the globe at hundreds of miles an hour.

Under the watchful eye of HMS Violent and the two escorts, they sat restlessly and watched the lightning flashes in the planet’s upper atmosphere for nearly an hour before a fourth contact set alarms wailing on their proximity sensors as it appeared within only twenty kilometres or so, and well outside of Violent’s firing solution.

HMS Caledonia. He recognised it instantly. No sooner had it jumped in than he spotted the change in its sensor signature as it opened its bay door.

Regaari clipped on an earpiece and headed for the starboard airlock. Ayma cast around for something to do, clean up or tidy and, finding nothing, settled for lowering herself onto a couch and fidgeting nervously at her claws.

The Springing Ember’s sensors picked up the barest hint of a tiny warp drive pulsing, and Regaari inclined his head to listen as a new voice came on the communicator.

“Springing Ember, boarding party from HMS Caledonia requests permission to come aboard.”

“Permission granted, starboard airlock” he told them. “Is that you, Rebar?”

“Sure is, Dexter. They’ve got us doing marine shit. Starboard airlock.”

There were three total—Rebar, Blaczynski and Baseball, who squeezed into the lock, then through into the ship interior. Only when the lock was fully cycled did they de-mask, all grinning and happy to see him. If he wasn’t totally familiar with human body language by now, it would have been terrorizing to see that many bared teeth. For her part, Ayma retreated a little, and Regaari couldn’t blame her—the three men smelled powerfully male, almost overwhelmingly so.

“Not that I am not happy to see you…” Regaari began, greeting the three men with his best approximation of the elaborate and forceful handshake they’d taught him “But I’m quite capable of docking and landing this ship myself.”

“Security’s being tightened up.” Blaczynski commented. “Hopefully we’ll be able to brief you on why sometime, but right now, rules say I have to fly this thing for you.”

Regaari stood aside and gestured to the control room. In keeping with Gaoian architecture, it was at the back of the ship, immediately in front of the main engines. There was, after all, no good logical reason for the pilot to sit at the front of the ship when he would be flying by sensor readings and information displays anyway. Meanwhile the sleeping quarters could be mounted in the front of the ship, as far from the power core and main kinetic thrusters as possible and therefore quieter and calmer.

“And for that you need three?” he asked.

“No such thing as too careful, bro.” Baseball told him. “This a friend of yours?”

“Ah, yes…”

Base touched his forehead, which Regaari guessed was a respectful gesture. “Pardon me, ma’am. I need to scan you for hazards and contraband.” he declared.

Ayma shot a questioning look at Regaari, who ducked his head to reassure her. This was just standard human caution. She spread her arms and straightened up. “Go ahead.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Base flipped a small grey oblong out of a pouch on his belt and delicately pressed it to Ayma’s head. Regaari couldn’t imagine why, but moments later the screen on its back lit, and Baseball relaxed. “Sorry about that.”

“It was no bother…” Ayma reassured him, politely.

“So… yes.” Regaari stepped forward. “Baseball, Rebar, Starfall, this is Ayma…”

“Ahh, so that’s what this is about. Your friend Zoo.” Baseball snapped his fingers, the effect muffled slightly by his spacesuit’s glove.

“Shoo.” Ayma corrected him.

“Xiù.” Rebar corrected them both.

“Like you hadn’t guessed.” Regaari noted.

The humans chuckled again, and Rebar looked around the Springing Ember’s interior. “Nice ship.”

“Whitecrest personal transport. One of the newest models. Designed to deliver an individual or small group on relatively short journeys, very quickly.”

“Surely the faster it is the further it goes?” Rebar asked.

“We… borrowed some ideas from you” Regaari told him. “Using capacitors to power the engines gives much better speed but limits the range. That was deemed an acceptable trade, seeing as it’s intended for rapid travel within our territory, between Gao, Gorai and the new colony at Guen Ha. Cimbrean, fortunately, is not that far from Gorai.”

“So this thing runs on solar power?” Blaczynski asked, settling into the pilot’s couch.

“Usually, it recharges off its own generator. We wanted to install a quantum core plant but… our versions of those are bulky and not very efficient yet, so we went with old-fashioned fusion. It can recharge via its shields if it has to though, yes.”

Blaczynski nodded, and checked in with Caledonia, Violent and the two Firebirds to confirm that the ship now had a human pilot and that all life forms on board were accounted-for. “Edda Two, go for slave jump, whenever you’re ready.”

“Slave ju-”

The cryogenic grey storms of Cimbrean-5 vanished. In an eyeblink the planet Cimbrean—the inhabited one, all blues and greens and white—replaced it below them and much larger.

”-mp? Oh. Impressive.”

“Nice and secure. Only way in is directly under our guns and with our permission.” Blaczynski waved a hand through the ship’s controls, a little tentatively but clearly knowing what he intended to do and more or less how to achieve it. He was hindered a little by not being able to read Gaoian, but the interface was designed to be clear and intuitive. Selecting the Folctha colony’s landing beacon and ordering the Springing Ember to land at that beacon took him only a minimum of trial and error.

“So, yeah. Zoo.”

“Shoo.“

“Xiù.”

“In my defense, my mouth is the wrong shape to pronounce that.” Regaari pointed out. “I don’t know what Baseball’s excuse is.”

“She was in a bad way, bro.” Baseball told him, aiming a friendly obscene gesticulation by way of reply. “I don’t know what the fuck happened to them exactly, but when we pulled them out of that liferaft they were dying from recent vacuum exposure.”

Ayma keened slightly and Regaari barely restrained the impulse himself: The thought was distressing.

“Hey, hey, it’s fine!” Baseball hurried to reassure them. “Horse ain’t just a pretty face, he’s a damn good medic too. She’s back on Earth now. Last I heard, she’s doing just fine.”

“Major Powell should know more.” Blaczynski added. He was watching the Springing Ember’s instruments for any sign of trouble, even though the ship was completely competent at landing itself. Already, their re-entry was raging a burnt orange around the edges of their forcefield.

“Good, because it’s him that we’re here to see.” Regaari told them. “Pleasant as it is to see you again, this is important, both personally and politically.”

“Dude, we’re on the job too.” Rebar reassured him. “But you’re cool to hang out once your business is done? Movie night?”

“That would be nice.”

“Politically?” Blaczynski asked.

“It’s all…”

Ayma interrupted him. “Shoo is a Female.”

The humans blinked at one another, nonplussed. “Well, yeah…” Baseball agreed, in a tone which suggested that this fact could not possibly be lost on them.

“I mean a Female.” Ayma stressed, patiently. “A member of the Clan of Females. Legally speaking, she’s a Gaoian.”

“To hell with ‘legally speaking’.” Rebar scoffed. “Legally speaking, less than ten years ago we were non-sapient indigenous fauna.”

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss legal technicalities.” Regaari warned him. “By making her legally a Gaoian, the Females made her legally sapient, and that afforded her all the rights and protections guaranteed by the Dominion charter. One technicality used to defeat another, you see?”

“Forgive us if we’re not exactly gonna start cheerleading for the Dominion there, southpaw.” Rebar commented.

“If you ever see me waving those pompoms myself, then clearly I’ll have taken leave of my senses and as my friends I hope you would shoot me.” Regaari retorted, doing his best to imitate a grin. It seemed to work, as the human chuckled, and Ayma chittered along with them.

“Atmospheric flight.” Blaczynski interjected.

”-But he makes a valid point.” Ayma told them. “Irritating as legal technicalities might be, they’re never going to go away. Rather than railing against them and achieving nothing, it’s better to pick them up and use them as weapons.”

“Sticks in the craw, but she’s right…” Rebar mused, then frowned at something forward in the ship and edged through the doorway past Baseball to investigate. “What’s this thing?”

“Hmm? Oh, that’s the ship’s nanofactory.” Regaari told him.

“What’s it do?”

“Builds things. You call up a blueprint and it assembles the desired object from raw materials.”

“Like a 3D Printer?” Blaczynski asked.

“In the same way that this ship’s short-range FTL comms are like a telephone, yes.” Regaari agreed. “This is a small one. Clothing, basic tools, replacement parts for the ship… larger ones can assemble vehicles, prefabricated modules that can be assembled into cheap buildings, even other nanofactories.”

“Brother,” Baseball warned Rebar, in a friendly tone. “You know your techs won’t like it if you go and cream your suit.”

Rebar laughed, but continued to study the nanofactory with a rapt expression. “So, it can build anything?”

“Anything synthetic.” Regaari agreed. “No cooked dinners, pharmaceuticals, complex organic molecules or anything made out of, say, wood or bone, but… plastics, metals, glass. All you have to do is feed in the materials.”

“Could it build something that could make those things?” Rebar asked.

Regaari hesitated. “…You know, I’ve never thought of that. I suppose it probably could.”

“Dude, we have GOT to get one of these things.” Rebar aimed a look at him that Regaari guessed meant he wanted to ask if they might scavenge the one off his ship. He chittered.

“Sadly I cannot do that, my friend.” he apologised. “Not only would I be breaking a rather important law, but the Fathers who own this ship would be upset and in any case, it’s an integrated part of the Springing Ember’s fittings.”

“It’s not a module you can pull out and replace if it breaks?” Rebar frowned at it again.

“Oh, I could.” Regaari said. “It would just ruin the façade. This is a diplomatic vessel, Rebar. Our military vessels are much more… what’s that word? Spartan. Besides, as I said, sharing nanofactory technology with a species that does not yet have it is gravely illegal. This device could cause a traumatic economic upheaval for your whole species and delay your advancement. I assume you don’t want that.”

“Right.” It seemed that Rebar would have liked to argue for a second, but instead he stood up, sighed longingly at the nanofactory, then a thought struck him. “Dude! Do you mind if I make something?”

Regaari quirked his head, a gesture analogous to a human shrug. “I don’t mind.” he said. “Hmmm. Ship. Make a… make a diagnostic sensor.”

The ship chimed acknowledgement and Rebar took a step back as the ‘forge built up to operational power with an edge-of-hearing keen of capacitors charging before….

THUMP.

Modern Gaoian nanofactories—and this was one of the latest and most advanced models—could do in a few seconds what their primitive forebears had needed minutes to do. Admittedly, the built in accelerated-time fields helped there, but the result was that within five seconds of his issuing the order, the transparent door folded down and a pristine new engineering scanner was pushed onto the delivery tray.

Baseball grunted a surprised laugh. “Shit!”

“Damn, Dexter…” Rebar picked up the scanner delicately, as if he feared it might be hot, or would disintegrate at his mere touch.

“Give it a try.” Regaari told him. Rebar eagerly examined the little device, figured out how to turn it on, and aimed it at a nearby wall. Volumetric displays began to give him a detailed breakdown of the wall’s composition, internal structure, the conduits and systems running behind it, microscopic work fractures in the metal hull behind it, and the action of the ship’s internal damage control forcefield constantly sweeping over and repairing that wear and tear. His jaw dropped, and he set about waving his new toy at every system and fitting he could find.

“Final approach!” Blaczynski announced some minutes later, as Rebar was making enthusiastic noises about the infra-hull integrated crystal circuitry. “His pants still dry, Base?”

“Fifty-fifty.” Baseball grinned.

Regaari quirked his ears amusedly as the three of them settled into a round of friendly insults and ambled over to where Ayma was standing alone by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that ringed the Springing Ember’s lounge area. She’d retreated there probably as much to get away from the masculine aroma pervading the air around the SOR men as to try and compose her thoughts, he guessed.

“They’re very… male.” she whispered.

“Shoo was very female.” Regaari countered. “Similar pheromones.”

“It’s a good thing I’ve seen human movies though. That large one—Baseball?”

The man in question glanced in their direction on hearing his name, then politely looked away again.

“Yes?” Regaari asked.

“If I didn’t already know about ‘ethnicity’, his skin colour would have come as a surprise.”

“Be careful.” Regaari cautioned. “Humans can be quite offended by observations like that.”

“Oh… he can’t hear us, can he?” Ayma asked, glancing at him.

“You two talkin’ about me?” Base asked. “Cause I don’t speak Gaoian.”

“Sorry.” Regaari told him.

“Nada. Just wonderin’.”

“You’re very… large.” Ayma suggested. “It’s a little intimidating.”

“Not much I can do ‘bout that.” Base shrugged. “But if it helps you feel better, I’m a medic.”

“A… medic? I hadn’t anticipated that.” Ayma examined him. “Why does a medic need to be so large?”

“I’m what we call a Protector.” Baseball said, going down on one knee to try and mitigate his bulk. It didn’t work. “My job is to get people out of harm’s way and keep them there. Doesn’t matter if I have to skydive from orbit to do it, I go in there, I fix up people who need fixing, and I carry them out. Just like my buddy Horse did for your boy here.”

Ayma glanced at Regaari, who nodded. “Warhorse is shorter.” he said. “But more…” he made an inflating motion his paws and shrugged his own shoulders to hint at a muscularity that no Gaoian—not even the supremely physical Clan Stoneback—would ever approach.

“That’s my boy.” Baseball beamed.

“Uh, ladies and gentlefolk, we’re now coming in low over downtown Folctha, if you look out the port windows you should get a nice view of the river. Local time is eleven-twenty, and the weather is a gentle sixty-five degrees.” Blaczynski called. “Thank you for flying Air SOR, and please take care when opening your overhead lockers, as bags and luggage may have shifted during the flight.”

Regaari hadn’t landed at Cimbrean last time. Caledonia had warped directly to Gao to drop off its cargo of survivors from Capitol Station, on the grounds that the Gaoians were diplomatically better equipped to send them home. He was curious to see what a human settlement looked like from the air.

Folctha wasn’t large, but it did manage to impress him. The layout was equal parts logical and illogical—clearly at first they had built according to where the colonists wanted to go, and when the time had come to expand, they had allowed that early random development to remain and grown out from there sensibly and methodically.

The humans obviously loved the river, which flowed from a reservoir fed by artesian aquifers in the grounds of the alien palace that had once stood at the top of the valley. The buildings along its banks were separated from its waters by a wide green strip of parkland and trees, and the river itself was strung with three slender footbridges and a pair of wide, sturdy road bridges. The advertisements were colourful and pleasant, the construction sites were neatly organised and full of interesting yellows and blues and the roads, though wide and capacious, were for now populated more by cyclists and pedestrians than by larger vehicles.

The Springing Ember circled in low over a walled and forcefielded enclave that could only be the Alien Quarter, banked to race up the west bank of the river where relaxing pedestrians shielded their eyes to look up and watch it, shed its speed over the palace grounds and finally alighted, delicately, on a concrete circle in the grounds of a fenced base some distance from the town.

“Good landing.” he complimented Blaczynski.

“Eh. It was alright.” the SOR man’s cocky smile said he knew it had been damn near flawless, but didn’t want to make a big deal of it.

“Man. Never thought I’d get to see one of those things up close…” Rebar chuckled, casting a last longing glance at the nanofactory.

“Don’t you have one?”

“Think they’re building an experimental one in Germany. It’s the size of Caledonia and they reckon it’ll drink about about two hundred megawatts.”

Regaari reflected on that. “…Sometimes I forget that you’re still a long way behind us, technologically.”

“Dude, it’s only been like ten years since first contact.” Rebar said. “We’ve had warp for… what, eight years? Seven and a half?”

“Yeah, and our CO’s banging the chick who flew Pandora.” Baseball grinned as they stepped through the airlock.

“Now that’s an interesting fookin’ thing to hear.”

As ever, it was difficult to hear the humour in Powell’s bassy voice. You had to know that gruff and softly-spoken was his ground state of being to spot that he wasn’t remotely annoyed. All three of his men froze. “Wherever did you hear a rumour like that, Burgess?”

Baseball cleared his throat. “Rumour, sir?”

“My mistake, I must have misheard what you were saying.” Powell nodded. “Incidentally, the sand in the gravball chamber needs raking flat. I’ve always fancied it might be fun to turn that into some kind of Zen garden thing. Think I saw some suitable large rocks over by the gym. Sound like fun?”

Burgess didn’t do anything so obvious as deflate, but there was a definite resigned hint to his “Yes sir.”

“Get out of that suit and go play, lad. I’m sure our guests’ business is urgent and I mustn’t keep them waiting. I’ll be along to see how you’re getting on in a bit.”

“Yes sir.” Burgess vanished, double-time.

Powell turned to Rebar. “Owt to report?”

“Nice ship. Clean. Pilot’s yellow, but his friend’s beautifully green.”

Regaari blinked in confusion. “we’re… what?”

“Uh, sorry. In-joke. I’ll explain later.” Rebar promised.

“Don’t bother.” Regaari sighed. “I could study human in-jokes for a decade and by the time I finished you’d have generated twenty years more.”

The humans chuckled. “Shall we go de-suit, major?”

“Go on, lads. Well done. Regaari? And I assume this is Mother Ayma?”

Ayma extended a paw, which the major shook. He seemed to have got the hang of exactly how much of his prodigious strength he could safely use, and there was no hesitation in the gesture. “Stainless, I presume.”

“Major Owen Powell.”

“Thank you for having us.”

They ambled away from the Springing Ember. “Nice ship.” Powell commented.

“It’s not mine personally,” Regaari told him “it’s the clan’s. I persuaded Father Rithu that this trip would be politically advantageous.”

“Hope you didn’t lie to the old man, Dexter.”

“Not deliberately.” Regaari shrugged for Powell’s benefit. “I would appreciate if you didn’t make me a liar, though.”

“Aye, I reckon I might be able to accommodate you there…” the major mused. “Or rather, Admiral Knight can. Political’s a bit above my pay grade.”

“If I’m any judge, you know something that the admiral has planned.”

“Oh aye?”

“You’re as opaque as a window, Powell.”

“That so?”

“But commendably stubborn.” Regaari conceded.

“You’re not exactly Mister Subtle yourself, southpaw.” Powell chuckled. “We pick your friend up and you show up as fast as Gaoianly possible? If you even fooled Father Whatsisface, I’ll be impressed.”

Regaari had to admit, he had a point.

”…How is she?” Ayma asked.

Powell stopped walking and turned to face her, thumbs tucked into his belt. “Something of a local celebrity in Vancouver.” he revealed. “Medically, all I’ve got for you is what Burgess and Arés told me during the debrief.”

“Which is?” Ayma pressed.

“Miss Chang was recovered in the company of two other humans, all suffering from severe decompression injuries. Apparently they were exposed to hard vacuum for a few seconds.”

Regaari chirruped his astonishment. “And they survived?” he asked, scarcely believing it. Vacuum was death, everyone knew that. He wouldn’t have thought that even deathworlders could survive it.

“Barely.” Powell grunted. “All three of them were dying from their injuries. Lucky for them they got picked up by two very fine young medics aboard a flying hospital with stasis equipment on board.”

”…And?” Ayma squeaked. She was doing her best to stay composed, but Regaari knew her intimately, and could spot that she was in anguish.

“And they’ve all since been discharged and are rebuilding their lives..” Powell said, nodding reassuringly. Both Ayma and Regaari sighed relief. “She got prompt and expert medical attention, she’s young and healthy…Burgess reckons she should suffer no long term ill health, and he’d know.”

“Where was she before that?”

”…Good question.” Powell answered, which didn’t answer the question at all.

“You must have got the ship’s ID off the life raft. What ship was she on?” Ayma pressed.

”…I can’t say.”

Regaari studied him. Humans were aliens, their body language was only tangentially similar to that of Gaoians, and he was still having trouble with some of their subtleties of tone and language, but he’d learned to trust his instincts with them. Besides, Powell was a plain-spoken man, and Regaari’s assessment was that he rarely said anything that wasn’t exactly what he meant…

“Do you mean that you don’t know, or that you do and you can’t tell me?” he asked, and caught the momentary tic in Powell’s eye that suggested he’d scored a hit.

”…I can’t say.”

“Ah. So it’s the latter.”

“Transparent I fookin’ might be, but penetrable I’m not, mate.”

“You can say much by withholding comment.” Regaari pointed out. “There’s a secret here. For her to have turned up in the company of humans means she was on a human starship… or at least on a starship allied to humans, hmm?”

“By God Holmes, you’ve cracked the case.” Powell snarked.

Regaari ignored the wise-crack. “Life raft and vacuum exposure means that the ship was destroyed. Which means…”

Ayma finished the thought for him. “She found Kirk.” she said. “Or Kirk found her.”

Powell didn’t need to say a thing. He simply spun and directed an incredulous stare at Ayma, then at Regaari. When Regaari folded his arms and pricked his ears up, it dawned on Powell that he couldn’t have spoken a clearer confirmation, and he swore violently, furious with himself.

“Shit.” He gritted his teeth thoughtfully at nothing for a second, then exhaled resignedly. “Okay. I need to know exactly how much you two know about Kirk.”

Date Point: 10y4m AV

Finchley, London, England, Earth

Ava Ríos.

Sean’s uncle Simon turned out to be an older and more weathered clone of his nephew. He had the same long, straight nose, the same wavy dark hair, the same long and slender frame. If not for a few wrinkles, the tan and a dusting of white hairs, the two could have stood side by side and been hard to tell apart.

He also had a keen and critical eye, which he was running over Ava’s online portfolio.

“I like this one. You timed it perfectly on his exhalation, it really feels cold…This one, you could have put the subject a little off-center, get more of the tree in there, you see?”

Ava just nodded and paid attention, answered questions when they were asked. It was interesting feedback—she’d had so many people tell her how great her photos were, it was a genuine pleasure to have somebody go through them with a fine comb and pick on the tiny imperfections.

When he reached the end of the album, Simon handed her tablet back to her and nodded, smiling gently. “Sean was right, you’re good.”

“Told you.” Sean commented, from where he was sprawled on the couch playing an old game, something with airships and muzzle-loading rifles.

“So, what does that mean?” Ava pressed.

Simon stroked his chin thoughtfully. “You’ve come along at a good time.” he said. “The guy I usually work with is off sick and will be for the foreseeable future, so I do need a photographer…” he tapped his chin, frowning. “Look… How do you feel about the Middle East?”

“How do you mean?” Ava asked him.

“Would you be, uh, scared to go there?” Simon clarified.

“Not enough to stop me if that’s where the work is.” she shrugged. “I dunno. You’ve got to take care wherever you go, right? Just because you have to take a little more care in some places than others…”

“A lot more care.” Simon corrected her.

“Fine, a lot more.” Ava agreed. “But there’s no such thing as safe anyway.”

“True.” Simon agreed. “So…?”

“So…yeah. I wouldn’t have a problem going there provided I had somebody to show me the ropes.”

“Hmmm…”

Simon fetched a tablet from his bag and signed into Google Maps. Within seconds, he’d summoned a sandy oblong of land sandwiched between Africa and Asia.

“So… this down here is Saudi Arabia.” he said, tapping it.

“Right.” Ava nodded, taking note of the countries around it for good measure.

“Now, the Saudi royal family are still richer than Croesus, but part of the reason for that is that ten years ago they did something very sensible, and sold every oil-based asset they had. Seriously, VI Day happened, and before we’d even really got our heads round aliens on the telly, the Al-Sauds had ditched every penny they had in oil and invested it elsewhere. At the time, people thought they were crazy, they even made a loss on some of those sales.”

He opened a new tab. “Time, however, has proven just how bloody smart a move that was. When alien technology put the final touches on fusion and widespread cheap solar power, a hole appeared in the oil market, and the value per barrel’s been in decline for eight years in a row now.”

Ava nodded her understanding. “But Saudi Arabia itself didn’t do so well.” She noted.

“Exactly.” Simon nodded. ”The country’s economy was still founded in oil. Declining oil industry means declining employment, declining wages, and all the people who made a living selling goods and services to the oil industry and its workers, they all started to lose jobs and money too, their labour pool of foreign workers dried up…Throw in some safety cock-ups around the Hajj badly hurting their tourism industry, and Saudi Arabia’s been in a recession for five years now.”

“Surely we’re never going to be rid of oil entirely?” Sean asked.

“Not plastics.” Ava agreed. “But gasoline? The market for that’s going to be a fraction of what it used to be when it finally settles.”

“And there’s the problem.” Simon continued. “Saudi Arabia just isn’t as rich as it used to be. In fact it’s imploding. They’ve already had to cut spending in all sorts of ways. Artificial reefs and peninsula projects have been abandoned, cities in the desert have shrunk because they just couldn’t afford the water… and military spending has been slashed.”

“Oh boy.” Ava sighed, realising where this was going. “The Caliphate.”

“The so-called Caliphate,” Simon gently corrected her. “In what used to be Syria. Yes. They’ve had their eye on Mecca and Medina for years: the Masjid al-Haram and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi are two of the three most sacred places in Sunni Islam. If the Caliphate were to annexe those cities, it’d be a major propaganda victory for them. Recruitment would boom, and it’s high enough already.”

“Where’s the third?” Sean asked.

“Jerusalem.” Simon told him. “But the Israelis are a much tougher nut than the Saudis, and the Palestinians are… never mind. Point is, they don’t have a shot at Jerusalem any time soon. But they might have a shot at Mecca and Medina if not for…”

He zoomed the map out a bit. “…Pakistan. Like I said, Saudi Arabia’s collapsing, and because nobody in the region wants that they’ve been channeling aid and supplies to the Saudis for years, much to Iran and Russia’s alarm. In Pakistan’s case, a large part of that aid has been military - just like the Saudis and the so-called Caliphate, Pakistan are Sunni too, and they’re keen not to see the holy cities fall into Caliphate hands. So, they’ve been loaning all sorts of things: Training, special forces, a warship or two… and of course their air force can reach anywhere in the region just fine.”

“Okay…?” Sean asked, examining the map. Simon smiled grimly, and closed the app to open a folder full of pictures instead - two ships at harbour, dimly visible through extreme range and heat haze.

“This is the MV Nasarpur, and berthed next to it is the PNS Zulfiquar, one of the Pakistan Navy’s frigates. Nasarpur’s a merchant vessel, a light freighter. About two months ago she left Karachi bound for Jeddah Seaport. When she got there though, she was immediately locked down by the Pakistani military. She didn’t load or offload anything, and three days later she sailed straight back to Karachi, without explanation.”

“Any idea why?” Sean asked.

“Oh, rumours were flying thick and fast.” Simon told him. “None of them were very credible… Not even the kind of rags who run headlines like ‘The Corti abducted my cat!’ or whatever were touching them. That is, right up until some friends of mine were fed a tip that an Israeli checkpoint intercepted a nuke covered in Pakistan flags.”

“A nuke?!” Sean exclaimed.

Ava was similarly dismayed. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was.” Simon shook his head.

“Okay…” Ava re-opened the map and considered it some more. “Where’s Iran in all this?”

“Good question. One of the two questions we are going to be answering, in fact.”

“Oh, bloody lovely.” Sean groused. “You plan on leading us into a powder keg where cities could maybe blow up?”

“Story of my life…” Ava commented, sotto voce. Neither man heard her. “What’s the other question?”

Simon sat down, resting his elbows on his knees. “That nuke showing up in the West Bank makes absolutely no sense at all.” he said. “Nobody benefits from that. If they’d successfully smuggled it over the border and then detonated it… then what? Like I said, Jerusalem - and specifically the Al-Aqsa Mosque - is the third holiest site in Islam. Destroying it would be only marginally less blasphemous than destroying the Kaaba, or the Mosque of the Prophet.”

“Set it off elsewhere in Israel” he continued “and they’d just bring down the angry hammer of the West. Either way, there’s no incentive, so that nuke being where it was is just… bizarre. In fact I’m having trouble figuring out what the nukes are going to be useful for anywhere. Unless whoever took them truly are crazy enough to believe that they could detonate them and actually survive or even defeat the retaliation.”

“Unless just setting them off is the whole objective.” Sean pointed out. “And the whole point is martyrdom.”

“Or unless blasphemy is the whole point.” Ava added. “Some anti-Muslim organisation wanting to destroy the holy sites?”

“True.” Simon nodded. “But in both cases… y’know, even martyrdom is done in support of an objective, and I feel like if body count alone was the idea, they would have gone off already. It’s a big and insecure part of the planet and they’ve had plenty of time to drive those bombs to pretty much anywhere in Afro-Eurasia. If the plan was just to cause mayhem or to enrage the Muslim population, they’d have gone off already. I think.”

Sean raised a hand. “Am I alone in being a tad concerned about going up against people who stole some nukes and who may be willing to use them?” he asked.

“Don’t let me stop you if you want to back out.” Simon told him. “Goodness knows, it’d be a welcome relief from Jacqui spamming me all the time telling me to talk you out of it.” he added, referring to his sister, Sean’s mother.

”…Ava?” Sean asked.

She thought about it. She knew what her answer was, but it would be nice to articulate why.

“Simon… What do you think about what happened to San Diego?” She asked.

Simon sat back and considered her. “How d’you mean?”

“Like… what’s your theory on what happened?”

Simon pondered his reply carefully before giving it. “I think… look, all the credible science commentators have all agreed that it was some kind of antimatter-based weapon. Five kilograms, they reckon.” He said.

“Five kilograms of antimatter would cost about three hundred thousand trillion dollars.” Ava told them.

“Jesus.” Sean muttered. “That’s… how much is that?”

“A fuck of a lot.” Simon told him, unhelpfully.

“All the combined goods and services of the planet Earth would add up to that in about seven years or so.” Ava told him. “So… yeah. There is NO WAY that bomb was human activity. It was aliens, I guarantee you. And - oh look, within a few years of it happening, there’s a huge increase in defense spending, we start building spaceships and my boy-…” she paused, pulled an annoyed face and started over “…my ex-boyfriend winds up as the poster boy for a new generation of spaceborne serviceman.”

Simon nodded. “And then a Pakistani freighter carrying presumably nukes loses that cargo on the open ocean, only for one of them to show up a month or two later exactly where it makes the least sense.” he said.

“Right. It’s like if somebody who didn’t really understand the politics and religion and the whole… the whole everything that’s going on in the middle east was looking to try and shake up a real clusterfuck of a war in the region.” Ava told him.

“To what end?” Sean asked.

“Iunno.” Ava shrugged. “But what happens if they succeed? What if the whole Middle East did descend into World War Three? Would the allies be able to just ignore that and keep throwing resources up into space?”

“Not bloody likely…” Simon mused. “Where did you come up with a theory like that, anyway?”

“It’s… there’s kind of a pattern.” Ava told him. “Adam and I… our first date was to a roller derby. He spotted somebody in the crowd he recognised from a murder investigation, and… there was somebody lurking outside with an assault rifle, and… Y’know, it was almost a mass shooting.”

“You never mentioned this!” Sean gaped at her.

“It’s how Dad got his injury. He was… the gunman got him in the back. But then years later, when we lost Sara… that guy moved the exact same way. Adam saw that instantly. And he was doing something in the Byron launchpad at Folctha…”

She gritted her teeth and sighed, frowning. “It’s… I can almost put my thumb on it. It’s like a word on the tip of my tongue. I can feel that those two men really were connected, to each other and to San Diego, and to all this spending and the SOR… and to this.” she tapped the picture of Nasarpur and Zulfiquar. “To that freighter and the nukes. It’s all part of the same thing, I know it is. This piece of the puzzle just fits.”

They considered the image again.

“Bloody hell, duck.” Sean said eventually, shivering. “If you were trying to talk me into coming with, you’ve done a shitty job.”

“And given me a lot to think about.” Simon added. “Where do we even begin investigating something like that? And if you’re right… there’s no way that the intelligence services aren’t involved.”

“What’s the alternative?” Ava asked. “I heard there’s an Icelandic choir gonna go do a concert tour around Dominion space. You want to go cover that instead?”

“That’d be the sensible thing to do.” Simon suggested.

“Fuck sensible.” Ava grumbled. “Whatever this thing is, it killed my parents and ruined my life, and I’m not alone. I wanna fight back. So hell yeah, I’m in.”

Simon gave her a long, slow stare, then turned to Sean. “I like her.” he declared.

“Said you would.” Sean agreed.

Simon stood up. “Let me… let me plan this.” he said. “I’m not quite sure where an investigation like this might start. And no offense, Ava, but you being American is going to complicate matters if we just head straight for Saudi Arabia or wherever and start poking around. For the time being, fill out those forms I gave you and submit them. We can at least get your credentials sorted so that whatever we decide to do, we’re ready to do it. Okay?”

Ava and Sean nodded, and he stood. “Get some bags packed and ready to go, keep them by the front door or somewhere. I’ll be in touch.”

Sean let him out.

“Are we crazy?” he asked, on returning. “I mean, are we seriously going to kick off our careers in journalism by going to the Middle East and chasing nukes?”

“I think Simon’s either crazy or desperate to take us along.” Ava replied unconcernedly, stretching out on the couch.

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“I gave my last fuck months ago.”

“That’s not what I wanted to hear!”

Ava tucked her hands behind her head. “Sean, don’t you get it? Didn’t you put the pieces together? Didn’t you listen to a thing I just said?”

Sean frowned at her and circled around to drop in the armchair. “Clearly I didn’t.” he muttered.

Ava sighed and sat up. “Someone or something wants us dead.” she said. “You MUST have seen the Vancouver attack footage. And everybody knows about the, the quarantine field and come on! You think two million dead Californians happened by accident? Adam and I could have been in that, it kind of rams the point home!”

“You really think-?”

“No. I fucking know, Sean. I saw a man shoot a fourteen-year-old girl because she was in the way. That’s what we’re up against. I don’t know who, or what, or why, but I know that SOMETHING with more antimatter than we could produce if we turned all of the Earth’s civilizations to making it and pumped it out for a lifetime… Something with that wants us dead. And it’s somehow got some humans on its side too.”

She gestured to the window. “And what are the options? Do nothing? Get drunk? Fuck a lot and try to enjoy ourselves before they succeed because we didn’t try and stop them? The Hell with that! I- I can’t!”

She was amazed to discover that she was crying.

Sean, very gently, shifted from chair to couch and put a hand on her upper arm. “You sure you’re not still feeling guilty over Adam?” he asked.

“Of course I still feel guilty over Adam!” Ava tore away from him and surged to her feet, angry now. “How does that change anything? Who gives a fuck? It doesn’t matter what my reasons are for doing it, it’s still the right thing to do.”

“We could get killed.”

“Oh, wake up!! We WILL get killed some day. Cancer, or a car crash, or an antimatter bomb from space or… who the fuck knows?! Death doesn’t scare me, Sean. If it scares you, you’re welcome not to come along.”

He laughed gently. “I did say ’we’ could get killed, didn’t I?”

Ava stilled. “…Okay, what’s your reason?” she asked, turning to face him.

Sean shrugged. “A bad one.” he conceded, picking at something invisible on his jeans and not looking at her. “But, y’know. Better to do the right thing for a bad reason, right?”

”…Yeah.”

Ava considered challenging him for a better answer, but settled for shrugging and trudging out of the room and up the stairs into her bedroom to prepare a bag as Simon had suggested. Every fiber of her wanted to be sullen, angry and bitter pretty much all the time, and she was damned if she’d indulge that impulse, even if Sean couldn’t resist his impulse to drop a veiled and passive ‘I love you’ on her whenever he could, which was really starting to be a pain in the…

She paused, took a deep breath, and started over.

She had to do that a lot as she packed, just as she’d had to do every day for weeks now. Every single resource she could find about travel in the Middle East stressed modesty. Modesty! As if the God who’d created the human body had intended for it to be an object of revulsion and fear. As if men were so weak that women had to suffer the burden of controlling their impulses for them-!

Pause. Deep breath. Start over.

It was getting better, day by day. Every time she caught herself flying into a rage, every time she closed her eyes, inhaled and let go, it made the next time a little easier.

She took her time and focused as hard as she could on packing the bag as small and efficient as possible. Tight jeans were out, but that was okay, she had some loose slacks. These formed the outer layer, inside which were rolled her flannel shirts, loose tops and everything she had that would combine to cover her from wrist to chin to ankle without scandalizing the oh-so-delicate male sensibilities-

Pause, deep breath, start over…

Underwear, socks, sanitary pads, some makeup essentials, a pretty square scarf that should hopefully pass muster as a hijab if she needed it. She spent a few minutes practicing putting it on, threw it into the corner in disgust after she managed to jab herself in the back of the head with a pin - pause, deep breath, start over - retrieved it and, after a few minutes, became satisfied that she was putting it on correctly without having to refer to the WikiHow guide.

Experimentally, she wore it alongside the clothing she’d picked out. It wasn’t baggy and formless, at least. In fact…

“Modest and still hot.” she congratulated herself, then realised that in testing her outfit she’d managed to completely undo all her progress on packing the bag.

She paused. She took a deep breath, and she started over.

Date Point 10y4m AV

HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Regaari

“Chasing after Shoo was more than just a personal mission for me, it became a lucrative contract for the Clan.”

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight had been summoned, and Regaari was now being politely interrogated in a meeting room somewhere in HMS Sharman’s structure. Ayma, apparently, was to be ‘debriefed’ separately.

Somehow, Regaari had expected the admiral to be a near-clone of major Powell—sturdy, strong, and rough. Knight in fact was tall and slender and the translator rendered him with a refined, intellectual accent similar to that of Clan Highmountain. “How so?” he asked

“The females are… extremely devoted to their ideal of Clan loyalty. More so than any male is to his clan, and that is quite a feat.” Regaari explained. “Their devotion to one another apparently transcends species. They’re in something of an uproar right now over the wisdom of bringing a human—Shoo—into the Clan, but the one thing that none of them will even think of suggesting would be ejecting her from the Clan of Females. She’s a Sister, and will be a Sister for as long as she lives.”

“And this benefited Whitecrest… how?” Knight inquired.

“I am an—apparently—prestigious officer of Clan Whitecrest, and I led an exhaustive investigation, chasing Shoo across known space.” Regaari explained. “Now, this was advantageous to Whitecrest first because it was a valuable intelligence-gathering venture in its own right. We tripled the reach of of our surveillance network in searching for her. That alone would have been reason enough to do it, but the mating contracts…”

“You did it all for the nookie?” Powell asked. His expressions were always harder to read than most humans, but there was just enough there for Regaari to guess at a joke of some kind. Joking or not, however, the observation was completely on target.

“For as long as the search continued,” Regaari told him “we had the respect and attention of practically every female on Gao. For males, that is a rare and hugely coveted position to be in—it means that for once WE get to choose our mating partners, rather than the other way around. We advanced our breeding program by generations during this operation.”

“Breeding program?”

“Selectively enhancing the Whitecrest line by mating with females carrying gene-stock from other clans. The Stonebacks, the Highmountains, the One-fangs… breeding for strength, intelligence, reflexes… Every clan has just such a program in effect, planning our own genetic futures.”

The humans shared an uneasy glance for some reason. “Is… something the matter?” Regaari asked them.

“Call it a cultural foible.” Knight conceded. “Eugenics has been an historically, uhm…tricky subject on Earth. Where does Kirk come into this?”

“When I was travelling with Shoo and Ayma, we found ourselves with a dilemma.” Regaari said, sitting back. Designed as the seats were for human proportions, his feet were dangling ridiculously but he didn’t care. “She wouldn’t go back to Gao, you see. She was convinced that she would bring down the Swarm of Swarms just by being there. Who knows, maybe she was right? On the evidence of Capitol Station, we wouldn’t have been able to fight them…and the commune she lived at and all the city around it would have been inundated with slavering predators. I think that thought scared her more than the possibility of being eaten herself.”

Knight and Powell both nodded. Regaari recognised that nod—it was the one that indicated agreement without wanting to interrupt.

“Returning her to Earth was also not within our power. No channels of communication, no help from the Dominion… we didn’t even know where Earth was.” he paused. “In fact, I still don’t.”

“The distal end of the Border Stars.” Knight told him. “A cluster we call the Local Group”.

Regaari tried to recall what he could of the Dominion’s galactic map. The galaxy was an incomprehensibly huge place, and the broad-strokes creation of a notional feature such as a band of uninhabitable systems which marked the no-man’s land between the Dominion and the Alliance inevitably included tens of thousands of stars. It was all far too big for any living being’s brain to accommodate.

“A long way from Gao and from what the Dominion thinks of as civilization, then.” he concluded. “And with the Dominion actively obscuring that information and stymieing efforts to contact your species… well, we were forced to stay on the move. Shoo disguised herself as a Sister and we took care to travel parts of the Dominion far from Gao, where she would be less likely to be discovered. It was there that we started to hear rumours.”

“About Kirk.” Powell checked.

“About Councillor Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk.” Regaari had long mastered the trick of letting his cybernetics transmit the name to the translator rather than trying to pronounce it. “We would find stations where they were still talking about their vagrant Deathworlder and the fact that one of the galaxy’s most notorious political figures had just swept in, collected them and departed. We had just started looking for him when… well, there was an incident. It persuaded Shoo to leave us and go it alone.”

“What happened then?”

“Ayma was furious with her.” Regaari remembered fondly. “I think she’d forgotten that Shoo is a human, with human instincts. She saw her as a Sister, and expected her to behave like one.”

“In what way?” Knight asked.

“Forgive the broad generalization here, but… the Clan of Females stand together and they can be both savage and a bit stupid about it. Threaten one of them, and they will unite to make your life a misery, even if actually doing so is beyond their power. Humans, I think, will do that too…up to a point. And I think that point is the one where an individual decides to sacrifice themselves for the good of the rest.”

“That’s very broad strokes.” Powell commented.

“Borne out by individual examples that I have personally witnessed, Major. Sergeant Leo Price, for instance.”

Knight and Powell looked at one another again. It was amazing how much humans communicated between themselves just by taking a half-second glance at each others’ faces. Regaari had no idea what the unspoken conversation had entailed, but Powell cleared his throat.

“So you returned to Gao.” he said.

“By way of Perfection.” Regaari duck-nodded. “Ayma didn’t know why, but I… made use of a resource.”

“The Contact.” Knight guessed.

“Now how do you know about her?” Regaari demanded.

“Via Kirk.”

“Ah. Of course. I should have known he would use her services as well… Well, for a fair price, she sold me information concerning Kirk and his ship. Contact information as well, which turned out to be obsolete. Or at least, he never got in touch via those channels. I have no idea why not.”

“In any case” he continued “when the Whitecrest clan set about trying to find Shoo, we were able to trace her to a station in the Signal Stars. FTS-1090 ‘Endless Possibility’. The trail went dead there.”

“Why?”

“The station’s traffic records were corrupted. Every ship that stopped there over nearly half a Gaoian year, their origin, destination, flight plans… all lost. All we had to go on was civilian rumour and gossip.”

“And what did those have to say?”

“They were abuzz. A Gaoian female had fought with a human male and fled the station. Some time later, that human had left with some other humans in the company of a Rrrtk.”

“Fought?” Knight asked.

”’Wiped the floor with him’ as you say.” Regaari commented, clearly pleased for his friend’s prowess. “The station’s population weren’t sure whether to be sceptical of the stories of human strength, or whether to start thinking Gaoians are deathworlders too. The idea of a disguise never crossed their minds… though to be fair, it was a good disguise.”

“That matches with Kirk’s final report…” Powell observed.

“That it does,” Knight agreed “but those logs being corrupted is new information, and not Kirk’s MO at all… Enemy action?”

Powell grunted and nodded. “Trying to cover their tracks.”

“Which means that Kirk, his crew and Miss Chang stumbled across something important.”

“At the kinds of speeds Sanctuary could get to, that something important could be anywhere, sir.”

“True, but the escape pod is much slower… hmm.”

“Enemy action?” Regaari asked, “What enemy?”

He knew a poker-face when he saw one, and both Knight and Powell had impenetrable ones. “Doesn’t matter.” Powell grunted.

“We do have plenty of enemies, after all.” Knight agreed, a touch more diplomatically. “And this all happened five years ago.”

Regaari considered calling bullshit—it was a phrase he’d learned early on from Shoo’s movies, and loved—but decided against it. It would only antagonize them, and be unlikely to work.

“Not that I’m authorised to make a formal offer…” he started. “But the Clans might well be interested in closer ties with humanity over the coming years. Knowing who your enemies are might shape that decision, or prepare us for coming up against them…”

Again, there was a borderline-telepathic silent conversation between Knight and Powell that took little more than enough time for both men to glance at one another. “Well said,” Knight agreed. “I’ll… need to take advice from my colleagues and superiors on that, however.”

“By all means.” Regaari agreed. “Now… on to the matter of Ayma and I visiting Earth…”

Date Point: 10y4m AV

Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Kirk

In the weeks since they had first arrived at Mrwrki, Lewis’ initial experiments with the nanofactory had largely revolved around creating a series of construction drones, which had in turn assembled for him an apartment, rebuilding part of the station’s structure so that the nanofactory and its control centre was basically his living room.

The apartment itself was little more than a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and a large working area, the latter comprised of a commodious comfortable chair, more volumetric screens and work surfaces and what looked to Kirk’s eyes like a hundred data pads strewn over the floor, piled on the surfaces, tucked into the corners of the chair, and generally littering the place like ticker-tape in the aftermath of an especially pompous parade.

Lewis was trying to keep himself to a healthy routine, to the point where Kirk was under strict orders from him to enter the apartment with a shock prod and zap him if he didn’t stick to the rules he’d set himself.

Quite why Lewis would need to be reminded to go to sleep, to bathe, to eat and to change his clothing was a bit of a mystery, but as Kirk understood it, a human in the grip of an obsession could neglect his basic needs, and Lewis had self-diagnosed a strong propensity for exactly that kind of obsession.

At least, that was how Kirk had described it to Vedreg. Lewis’ exact words had been “Dude, I’ll fall asleep on a slice of mouldy pizza inside a week if you don’t remind me to clean up and look after myself. Been there, done that.”

To his credit, Lewis was sticking to his schedule almost without prompting, and he was benefiting from it, too. Aboard Sanctuary, he had stuck to the bare minimum of exercise that Julian and Kirk had conspired to force on him. Now…

It was impossible for a human to seem “scrawny” by the standards of Kirk’s species. Humans - even unfit, skinny humans - were pretty much nothing but muscle and bone, and those muscles and bones were denser, tougher, stronger and proportionately larger. To an Rrrtk’s eyes, even Lewis was dense and sturdy enough to shake the deck plating as he walked, and Lewis was decidedly scrawny by human standards.

His general proportions hadn’t changed much on a regime of tai chi and yoga, but his movements had. Lewis had sort of… flopped about the place before, treating being upright as something he did en route to sitting somewhere else, with shoulders slouched and expression distracted, only to focus when he was sat at a terminal, working on a stimulating challenge. Now, he moved with the same kind of fluid alertness that Allison and Julian had possessed. His back was straighter, his step lighter, his expression here and now. It was like he was always at a terminal these days, always working on a stimulating challenge.

Maybe he was. He was certainly absorbing knowledge with a voracity that defied comprehension, and sometimes he made huge tangential links between two subjects that Kirk would never have thought to connect. What was the association between climate science and politics? What did either of them have to do with nanofactorys? For that matter, how did biology and computer programming enmesh?

Lewis had explained. Kirk prided himself that he was one of the smarter members of a species that had, prior to the arrival of humans and Gaoians, been generally respected as the only sophonts around who could give the Corti a run for their money, but Lewis’s exploration of those connections had been so arcane that he still wasn’t sure he understood it.

Could a local drought really spark a civil war? Let alone a regional conflict that went on to drag in half the factions on an entire planet? How could software evolve? In what possible way were either of those already impenetrable relationships relevant to using the nanofactory to build a weapon against the Hierarchy?

Lewis had finally silenced his questions by instructing him to “Go read the Dirk Gently books, dude.”

Kirk hadn’t been able to find an author by that name, but he had been introduced to Douglas Adams, to the concept of “holistic” and, in researching that, to the whole field of Chaos Theory.

The “fundamental interconnectedness of all things” seemed like a bizarre and nonsense concept at first, but the more Kirk had dug into it, the more he realised that he had been exploiting exactly that principle ever since he’d left ’Outlook on Forever’. Relying on it, even. Everything came back to humans in the end - after all, he’d planned to use them to tear down the rusty and stifling entrenched power of the Dominion from the inside.

He snapped out of his thoughtful mood as he approached Lewis’ door. Kirk had gone without company for a couple of days while Vedreg slept, and yesterday’s attempt to check in with Lewis had ended in the human calling “Busy! Come back tomorrow!” through the door.

This time, the door opened.

Lewis’ outfit had changed dramatically, for some reason. He bathed daily and the first thing to come out of Mrwrki’s nanofactory under his control had been a machine for washing and drying his clothes. Even though the forge could have recycled them and built him new clothes every day if he wanted them, he’d stuck to the same fraying jeans and sand-coloured T-shirt that he had been abducted in, years ago.

These were now gone and replaced with robes of some kind, or something like a kimono or karate gi… it was hard to tell exactly what, given Kirk’s own lack of expertise with the intricacies of human clothing and the fact that Lewis had probably designed the garment from memory. The end result was something loose and comfortable.

Lewis was curled up in his Thinking Chair - the huge comfortable one that Kirk could almost have squeezed himself into - reading something off a tablet.

“Hey man. Come on in.”

“How are you doing?” Kirk asked, accepting his invitation and entering the suite properly. It was remarkably clean, especially considering Lewis’ self-confessed propensity for squalor.

“Trying to get my head around quantum computing.” Lewis murmured, in the soft way he always did when concentrating. “I get the theory, there’s just… subtleties to the way the Corti go about using qubits that’re giving me an idea.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t even ask me to explain, man. I’ve got, like, a shape forming in my head and, like, there’s a bit that I think is gonna fit there, but even if it does, ain’t no way I’m going to be able to explain it without telling you the whole shape.”

“I like the new wardrobe.” Kirk changed the subject. “Very… zen.”

“I was going for Tron: Legacy, man. Flynn had his shit worked out.”

“He did?”

“Yuh-huh. If you’re gonna spend however the fuck long in exile with like, two or three people to talk to, tops… may as well be comfortable and meditate a lot.”

He swiped right on the tablet. “It helps, actually. Weirdly.”

“I wouldn’t know. Is this what you were doing yesterday?”

“Yeah, dude. Ass finally went on my jeans. You came along while I was buck-ass, assembling me some new duds.”

Kirk snorted, amused. “Lewis, what possible reason would I have to care?” he asked.

“Yeah, yeah. Just because the whole galaxy are nudists, we’re the weird ones.” Lewis scoffed. “Clothing is practical dude.”

“Practical for what, exactly?”

“Well, fuckin’ pockets for a start.”

Kirk just rocked his weight backward onto his four hindlegs, the comfortable sedentary posture of a Rrrtk not planning to go anywhere for a while. He was wearing a utility belt, two holsters and a pair of saddlebags, none of which would have begun to qualify as ‘clothing’ by a human’s standards, yet which meant that he was already rather better-equipped with pockets than Lewis had ever been in his jeans. Certainly, Lewis’ ’Flynn’ robes didn’t seem to have pockets at all.

He decided not to press the issue. That way lay an argument just as intractable as trying to point out to the Kwmbwrw that they were, biologically speaking, obligate omnivores and that their strictly herbivorous lifestyle led to malnutrition problems that placed a permanent burden on their economy. Certainly, the Kwmbwrw and the Gaoians had been at odds over that point from the instant the Gaoians had made first contact.

“Not to rush you…” he said, delicately. “But I was rather expecting that you would have started to build things and experiment by now.”

“I have.”

”…You have?”

“Sure. I’ve just not built anything useful man. So it’s all gone back in the recycler.”

Kirk angled his head so that he could get Lewis into his very limited range of binocular vision. “Nothing useful at all?”

“Well, I made the washer-dryer, and an oven and some cake tins for Vedreg, and don’t forget all these tablets…” Lewis shrugged, swiping right again. “But like, as for the Big Project? Yeah, I’ve thrown together a few basic ideas, some proofs-of concept. But I can either do the mad scientist thing and fill my space with every last shitty little project that’s never gonna come to anything until I’ve got nowhere to work, or I can keep the place tidy.”

“You do keep saying that you are naturally an untidy person.” Kirk pointed out.

“Dude you have no idea what untidy really is.” Lewis told him, setting the tablet aside. “I’m being fucking careful here because I…”

He stopped, suddenly and visibly emotional, then sprang to his feet. “Room. How far to Sol?”

The room spoke in a clearly synthetic voice. “The approximate straight-line distance from this station to Sol is: Half a galactic radial length.”

“That’s about seven kiloparsecs, Kirk. Twenty-three thousand light years. If we had Sanctuary here and I hopped in her right now and flew her straight home? It’d take me two and a half weeks, and that’s if I magically somehow managed to do it without having to stop to degauss every day.” Lewis cleared his throat and gestured to the map: the straight line route strayed dangerously close to the galactic core, where starships never dared to venture. “If I took the spacelanes… Room, if I had a ship with a cruising speed of five hundred kilolights, how long would it take me to reach Sol via cleared spacelanes?”

“Calculating… approximate travel distance, one point three galactic radial lengths. Approximate journey duration in human units rounding up, not including necessary resupply and degauss stops: Sixty days.”

Kirk watched Lewis’ shoulders sag, before he turned around. “And Cimbrean is even further. Two months, Kirk. If I had the fastest ship in the Milky Way right here, it’d take me two months to get home. On most ships? Like, if I tried to hitch-hike home on freighters and whatever, I could be at it for years.”

He dismissed the galactic projection with a swipe of his arm. “I am a long way from other humans right now. I like you and Vedreg well enough, sure. But…You guys can go without, if you have to. Me? if I’m not very, very careful, I’ma go crazy and I fucking know it. I have GOT to take care of myself: No mess. No clutter. Do my chores, exercise, say my fuckin’ prayers, whatever, and maybe I’ll be able to go a few years without completely losing my shit.”

There was a long moment of silence, and then Lewis climbed back into his Thinking Chair. “So mebbe you’d better let me get on with all this studying I gotta do, ‘cause the sooner I get it done and come up with a solution, the sooner I can get out of this cage you’ve shoved me in. Good talk, buddy. Let’s do this again tomorrow.”

Not quite knowing what to say, Kirk watched him in silence for a minute, and then pushed his weight forward onto all six legs again and made himself scarce.

Date Point 10y4m AV

Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth.

Kevin Jenkins

Rachael glanced up then gave him her professional smile and gestured to the door. “Go right on through, Mister Jenkins.”

“Thanks Rachael.”

Of all the perks that he had acquired during the last few weeks, Kevin was finding that the one he enjoyed most was that he could walk into Moses Byron’s office whenever the hell he liked. Nobody else in the Group enjoyed that privilege.

He whispered to himself as he entered Byron’s office, reflecting on his expensive suit and six-figure salary with bonus. “Look at me now, Moira…”

“What was that, Kevin?” Byron set his tablet down on his desk and looked up.

“Just talkin’ to myself, boss.”

“Only way to get some intelligent conversation sometimes.” Byron chuckled, and sat back, folding his arms comfortably. “What’s up?”

“Company wants a final report on that lunar jump beacon. Figured it’d only be fair to get your side.”

Byron frowned. He hated having the subject of that particular blunder raised. “Agent Williams already got that out of me.” he grumbled.

“Figure she’s not interested in hearing the positives, Mister Byron.”

Byron made a tired noise. “What is this, Kevin? Good Cop Bad Cop? Am I paying you to be my interrogator now?”

“You’re paying me to make sure the Company never has to visit your office ever again.” Kevin pointed out.

“Okay, okay…” Byron stood up and hit his wet bar again. Kevin had noticed he did that in pretty much every meeting, and also that - excepting the meeting with Special Agent Williams (AKA Darcy) - he never actually drank what he mixed. Presumably it was all a ploy to put his people at their ease and steer the conversation his way. “What’s your poison?” he asked.

“I’m fine without, thanks. One DUI is enough for a lifetime.”

“We’ve got people could drive you back.” Byron pointed out.

“Takes all the fun out of it, boss.”

Byron sighed and reclaimed a little momentum by mixing something for himself - a Virgin Manhattan - before sitting down as he dropped in the maraschino cherry. “Okay. Fire away.”

“Robert Frost.”

Frost had been one of the four crew on Reclamation, the ship that Byron had sent out to investigate the disappearances of BGEVs one, three, four and six. Somewhere during the ill-fated mission’s chain of misadventures, Frost had been forced to take a translator implant. He’d been under the scanner of a surgical robot, about to have the implant whipped straight back out again, when a Hierarchy agent had stepped into his head and used his body to murder the Reclamation’s captain, Jason Nolan.

Things had only gotten worse for them after that, but a full recording of the changes in Frost’s brain as he was taken over had, briefly, been in the hands of the Byron Group’s scientists: Byron had promptly deleted it.

Byron set his drink down, a little too sharply. “What about him?”

“Williams wasn’t impressed that you destroyed evidence there. The scans of his brain, all that stuff…”

“Unethical.” Byron grunted. “Couldn’t be used without huge human rights violations, and couldn’t be kept without maybe ruining the Group if it ever leaked.”

Kevin had to agree, but he had the questions he’d been instructed to ask. “Not even to research ways to stop the control from happening?”

“I trust my people.” Byron said. “Whenever they know things I don’t, I defer to them. That’s true of you, and it’s true of Ericson and Billings. Both of them recommended destroying the data. When I discussed the implications with Mr. Williams - our Williams, that is, our chief of security - he said the exact same thing.”

“And why not forward it to the government?”

Byron snatched his drink up again and stood to tour the office. “This may come as a surprise to you, Kevin, but I don’t trust the government.” he said, fetching up by the window. “The government has been sitting on a secret this huge for years. It knows who destroyed San Diego and why, and more defence spending than my whole Group is worth has gone dark in going after them. All of which has vindicated my lack of trust in them, which I’ve had since long before pretty little Agent Williams waltzed in here and told me off like a naughty schoolboy.”

He drained the mocktail in one, and set it down on top of his bookshelf with a shaking hand, plainly angry.

“Extinction?!” he snarled, spinning around suddenly. “These people are playing with extinction and they’re keeping people like ME out of the loop? People who could help?! Cause yeah, I knew something was up with the implants, but I was worried about… corporate sabotage, or spying. I was worried about losing more good people, so I added a failsafe to get them home fast in case something went wrong. Stuff like that, small tragedies that we could handle! Nobody said a dang thing about extinction, and I had no good reason to suspect it was even on the cards! But nooo, only the government can handle the responsibility of playing games with the lives of billions! Only the government has that right!”

He strode back to his chair and threw himself into it. “If I wasn’t happy with having that data used by my people, then what in the Sam Hill makes you think I’d forward it to the government?” he asked. “It’d be just as unethical if they used it, and just as ruinous to us if it ever got out that we were the ones that supplied it. And you can put every mother-loving word I just said into your report verbatim, Kevin. I don’t need a positive spin on that one.”

Kevin took a deep breath and gave it time for some of Byron’s rage to dissipate out of the room. “You sure you don’t want something with alcohol in it, Boss?” he asked, lightly.

Byron grunt-chuckled. “One liver’s enough for a lifetime.” he said, echoing Kevin’s earlier sentiment. “Reckon if I start drinking every time I get stressed, that way lies a couple transplants. No thank you… did the Company want you to ask me anything else?”

“I think you’ve said enough.” Kevin replied, putting his phone away - he’d recorded the whole rant. “Anything you need from me before I head back?”

“Matter of fact, there is.” Byron stood up again, and retrieved an old-fashioned physical document in a slim black plastic folder from atop his filing cabinet. He spun it onto the desk in front of Kevin. “You hear all the brouhaha up in Vancouver over the three space cadets who came home?”

“They’re fellow abductees and friends of an old friend, in fact.” Kevin said, opening it. The folder contained duplex printouts of the three Sanctuary survivors and a quick run-down of everything that the Group had been able to learn about them. Even at a cursory glance, their summaries made for impressive reading, and they didn’t include some of what Kevin knew about Kirk and his mission.

“No kidding? Well, I want them for EV-Eleven, not least because this Etsicitty fella’s got about the most sophisticated prosthetic foot on Earth and that’s a market I wouldn’t mind breaking into. Any objections?”

“None, so long as that’s ALL they’ve got, cyber-wise.” Kevin shook his head. “It’s only stuff that touches the brain that I’m worried about… though, for personal reasons, I wouldn’t mind having a word with them.”

“That’s fine. Not a bad idea if you meet them in person and assess them anyway. Reckon your other employers will object?”

“I doubt it.”

“Okay. Go have fun talking to your friends of a friend.” Byron technically had to wait for Kevin to decide to leave but, despite that in Kevin’s opinion the man was a high-functioning psychopath and a narcissist, he was still a damn good boss and Kevin didn’t mind letting him think he had the power. Keeping Byron’s ego feeling un-bruised made life easier for everybody else who worked with him.

He stood and headed out. “Try not to get in trouble while I’m gone, boss.”

Byron toasted him with his empty glass. “Kevin, you’re on my speed dial.” he said.

Date Point 10y4m AV

Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam Arés

Training for the SOR was a delicate balancing act that weighed the need to keep the team on standby ready for a mission should the need arise, versus the hellish demands of keeping their bodies in the proper condition to go on that mission.

The result was training that varied in intensity throughout the week on a pseudorandom schedule, one day of which was the Heavy Day, followed by a light day for recovery.

Heavy day was designed for maximum effect at the expense of leaving the operator burned out and shaking, often barely able to move. Today was Adam’s heavy day, and he’d elected to go for a simulated suit run.

These were pretty simple: Wearing the EV-MASS undersuit under a weighted replica of the midsuit with a full tactical load - an arrangement that was actually worse to wear than the suit itself because it was loose on him rather than hugging tight and supporting its own weight - he set out for a dawn-to-dusk run. Pick a direction, go. Turn back at noon. And if you had any designs on saving your energies on the run out, you were just hurting yourself and everybody else you might need that little bit extra performance for.

He’d settled on a road run today, and had set himself the challenge of making it out as far as the coastal outpost of New Penzance.

New Penzance was nothing more than a research outpost - it had a cabin for the researchers, a boat shed with launch ramp and a weather station, and a radio mast for talking to Folctha. The parking lot was bigger than the combined footprint of all the buildings, and Adam jogged across it, slapped the side of the cabin, panted a smiling “hi!” to the surprised residents who were tending to their boat, then turned and jogged back down the access road, checking his timepiece. He’d made it just before noon, so when he reached the end of the access road he turned left and continued along the coastal road for another twenty minutes before the alarm went, calling him to turn back.

The return journey was always the worse. On the way out, even pushing the pace as much as he needed to for good training, he could at least enjoy the scenery, take in his surroundings, and they were fantastic surroundings.

The coast skirted the edge of the Scar, or the TMAZ, or the Skidmark, or whatever you preferred to call it, and so the lush Cimbrean forests that had once come right down to the tidemark - and the mangrove-like things that had once lived beyond even that - were now gone. Here and there a decaying stump jutted out of what was rapidly becoming scrubby coastal grassland. Imported Earthling grasses were outcompeting the native plants at an astonishing rate as they crowded out the sunlight and whipped the metaphorical rug out from under them.

A bird - an actual Terran bird, sleek and agile - whipped overhead, speared down into the grass and came up with something that could only be a native in its talons. An Earthling wouldn’t have been quite so… exploded.

A convoy of logging trucks swept up the road headed away from the city, and he raised a greeting hand when the lead truck honked at him. There was a lot of alien timber out there, and no point in letting it get eaten or choked by imported alien insects and plants. Folctha was getting hugely wealthy off a continent’s worth of virgin extraterrestrial forest, and most coveted of all was Pinkwood, with its delicate striations of alternating bands of dark chocolate and taffy pink grain. As a structural material it was worthless: as a luxury decorative wood, it was the most coveted thing on either planet, and its looming extinction made its devotees all the more crazy.

Of course there were protests and environmental campaigners who decried the rapacious logging of an endangered species, but the Reclamation Project had pointed out in an impassioned statement that the tree was extinct anyway, given that it was only a matter of time before the last one was killed by a marauding immigrant. In the face of which every veneer, tabletop and decorative turned piece that lived on as a treasured heirloom or favorite gift only served to prolong the plant’s unfortunate legacy and to remind humankind of the degree of care and seriousness with which interstellar colonisation would need to progress.

Adam’s muscles had been gently burning away all morning of course, but as he entered the young woodlands around Folctha, and more importantly when he crossed the field threshold for the gravity generator, ramping up from Cimbrean gravity to Earth gravity in about ten paces…that was the point when he hit the wall.

There were only so many energy-saving tricks that a man could do in these circumstances. He could stay hydrated, suck down electrolytes and sugar like his life depended on them, allow himself timed and brief rest breaks to stop, engulf an energy bar and recover a few drips of reserves before powering on…

But the only way to really get through was the trance.

PJ training had only reinforced something that Legsy had taught him when he was sixteen - that the human brain could enter a mode where pain, hunger, fatigue, thirst… all of it became abstract information. In such a state, focused completely on putting one foot at a time that little bit closer to home, a man could run, and run, and run, and run. The sun took its sweet time in ambling down to ground level, and the kilometers ticked by sporadically: vanishing in handfuls, and yet each one taking an age.

Adam had another level beyond the trance which he saved for the most serious exercise, when the only way to move forward was to literally break himself. He wouldn’t need it today.

There was an established end-point at the base: Rebar had rigged up a sheet of metal that rang like a gong when slapped in the big red circle at its center. Your run or whatever you were doing wasn’t complete until you staggered up to it and rang it, did a circuit around the dorm for good measure, and slapped it a second time.

Getting there involved thumping doggedly along the coastal highway, past the building he co-owned with Titan on Demeter Road, up Delaney Row, into Newlands Park and uphill beside the river as the lights came on to celebrate the hours of darkness. He crossed at the western footbridge, forced himself along Peake Way, past the MPs on gate duty, past the Gravball hall and the scenario course, past the open field where all of the base’s staff who weren’t Spaceborne Operators did their PT, up to the dorm, slapped the gong - this was where it got truly difficult in the last few seconds - staggered around the dorm counting every last step, slapped the gong again and…

Pain. Pain, exhaustion, weariness and reality all flooded back in as he let go and started thinking again.

Mechanically, his hand hit the stop button on his timepiece, then grabbed his drinking tube and he took a long, thirsty pull of his custom cocktail of high-performance sports drink.

He sat down on his butt, rolled backwards, and lay there for a minute or two while his breathing slowed and something resembling energy started to soak into his tissues again.

Voices started to percolate into his sphere of awareness, and there was something… familiar about one of them.

Well, okay. Every voice on the base was familiar, but this one was familiar in a way he hadn’t heard in a while.

”…just ran past me without acknowledging me. Do you think he’s okay?”

“Relax he’s fine. Ain’tcha Horse?”

Adam opened his eyes. Baseball grinned down at him. Standing next to him wearing what was probably an expression of concern, were two Gaoians. He didn’t recognise the female, but the male? He knew that white cowlick anywhere, especially coupled with a new prosthetic paw.

“Oh. Hey Dexter. How’ya doin’?”

The female chittered a Gaoian laugh. “You were right, Regaari. He’s overflowing with enthusiasm to see you again!”

Even Adam managed a laugh, and waved a hand reassuringly. “Just…” He looked to Baseball. “Whassat words the Brits use?”

“Knackered.” Base grinned. “How’d you do?”

“Got out past New Penzance.” Adam smiled.

“Shit!” Base swore, though his grin got all the wider. “You know we’re gonna have to try for Big Bay now, right?”

“No way your slow ass is getting out that far.” Adam grunted. He rolled over and, agonisingly, hauled himself upright with Base’s help.

“Right, ‘cause you’re Speedy Gonzales.” Base teased.

Adam chuckled. Olde-tyme racist though it was, he’d always loved that cartoon. “Andale! Arriba!” he grunted, and began the laborious process of rolling over and heaving himself upright.

“Are you alright, Warhorse?” Regaari seemed genuinely concerned.

“I’m fine.” Adam reassured him. “Good training. And… hey! Good to see you, bro. Figured you’d come calling sooner or later.”

He hit the release on his bag and let it slam to the ground. Both Gaoians took an alarmed step back.

Ayma made an alarmed chirruping sound. “You were running carrying that?”

“Yyyup.” Adam nodded then aimed a thumb at Baseball, who scooped the bag up easily and slung it over his shoulder. “His turn tomorrow.”

“But that must weigh…” Ayma paused and evaluated it.

“‘Bout five times what you do.” Baseball told her. “It’s just what we do. You comin’ in for movie night, Hoss?”

“Ooh, what we watching?” Adam asked.

“You get the deciding vote.” Base told him. “Terminator Two, or The Windup Girl?”

“Oh man, we having a good movie night?” Adam asked. “Uh… Judgement Day, I guess.”

“Tee-two it is.” Base smiled. “Go on, bro, hit the shower.”

“Crue patch first. Ten milligrams.”

Base had already palmed one, and produced it with a smirk. “Pussy.”

Adam rolled his eyes even as he took the patch and pressed it firmly to his aching right knee. It had definitely gone click in a nasty way during his final circuit of the dorm. “Yeah, yeah. We’ll see how tough you are when you try an’ run to Big Bay tomorrow, tough guy.”

“Man, get your stinky ass in that shower so we can watch Ahnold do his shit.”

They knocked fists, and Adam did as he was told, hobbling his way round the dorm’s side to the locker room and shower block.

Ordinarily, he would have soaked at length, but the lure of a good movie, gaoians, and the bowl of jambalaya he had waiting for him was all too strong.

He swung by the kitchen to grab his dinner, took a couple minutes to microwave it, and headed for the couch. Disappointingly, Dexter - Regaari - had elected to maintain his dignity in front of the female, and hadn’t joined the comfortable, warm tangle of relaxation on the couch. Adam could relate. He’d felt similarly awkward on the two occasions when Ava had joined them for a movie.

He stomped on that thought immediately and found somewhere to insert himself on the couch.

“So what is this movie about?” Ayma asked, perching herself delicately on the armchair, which was otherwise only ever used by Major Powell, on the rare occasion that he joined them.

Akiyama, as always, was the one who leaped to summarizing it. “Uh, okay, so this is the second movie in a series and… what happened was that some idiot invented a computer that took over the world and killed most everyone. This dude John Connor…”

Ayma listened, rapt, and occasionally asked questions about the time travel aspect of the story, and Adam grinned silently to Regaari when he climbed up onto the back of the couch and made himself comfortable.

“Everything okay with you two?” He whispered.

Regaari’s ears drooped very slightly. In order to avoid triggering the translator and having Ayma overhear, he had to reply in his faltering English. “She…only want be friend.”

“Ouch. Sorry, bro.”

Regaari made a complicated duck-wobbling motion with his head that probably served as a Gaoian shrug. “Is best, prob’ly. Make hard with other Gao. They not ready.”

He flashed a few teeth imitating a smile, and extended a bunched fist, which Adam happily met with his own, and they settled back to watch the movie.

Schwarzenegger was in the middle of spin-loading his shotgun when there was a knock on the door and Powell shoved his head round it. “Stay seated lads.” he ordered, even as the men on the couch were beginning the undignified scramble to get upright. “Sorry for interruptin’, but summat’s come up.”

Ayma stood up and gestured to his seat, a gesture he acknowledged with thanks as Titan paused the movie.

Powell perched on the edge of it. “General Tremblay just got back to me about our Gaoian friends visiting Earth.” he said. Adam shot a glance at Regaari, who nodded. “It’s all gone a bit political, he says, and he wants to know how soon we can make it happen wi’out compromising on safety.”

“Sir… so soon?” Rebar asked. The men disentangled themselves and settled into an alert posture, engaged with the conversation.

Powell admitted a small twitch of frustration, which coming from him was a sure sign of stress, along with his thickened accent. “Ambassador Hussein got involved. Dunno why, an’ I wasn’t told.”

Regaari growled. “Father Rafek.” he said, referring to the current Gaoian ambassador. “He’ll be keen to win points with Mother Yulna for his clan.”

“It will backfire for him if he presses too hard.” Ayma promised.

“Whatever the reason,” Powell said “I have my orders. Two Gaoian VIPs to visit Earth ASAP. Thoughts?”

“They’ll need the full-time attention of two Protectors, sir.” Base suggested, immediately. “We’re the only ones with the training in ET medicine for if they get infected or inhale an allergen or something.”

“And personal protection.” Adam agreed. “Lot of folks on Earth who might want to make some kind of a statement.”

“Statement?” Ayma asked, ears swivelling in mixed curiosity and alarm.

Regaari seemed similarly concerned. “You think assault is a possibility?”

“Bombs are a possibility.” Blaczynski told them, a little too bluntly. He promptly received a light slap upside the head from Murray.

Ayma didn’t take it well. “Bombs?!” she squeaked. Her ears plastered themselves to her scalp and the fur along her spine bristled. Regaari shuffled closer to her and placed a comforting paw on her upper back.

“Worst-case scenario.” Powell told them, reassuringly. “And highly unlikely. Bomb plots take time to organise and if this goes quick and smooth, there won’t be that kind of time. Still, we have to consider all possibilities. So, it’s agreed; One protector per VIP. Aggressors? I’m thinkin’ not necessary.”

“Probably not.” Firth agreed. “Horse and Base have got Personal Protection down pat, we’d just get in the way.”

“Locals.” Murray prompted.

“Aye. good shout.” Powell agreed. “If we need a marksman on the roof or whatever, local operators or law enforcement would raise less comment. This is gonna be public either way, but I’d still rather keep us out the spotlight.”

“That just leaves us.” Rebar said, he looked to the Gaoians. “Don’t suppose you guys brought some kinda deathworld hazmat suits with you?”

“No.” Regaari admitted, plainly annoyed at himself. “We did not. We expected longer negotiations.”

“Can’t that nanofactory of yours make them?” Rebar asked.

“Too large.” Regaari explained. “The Springing Ember’s forge is for small tools and utensils, spare components and parts. Not for a whole excursion suit.”

“We could fly back to Gao and acquire some?” Ayma suggested.

“How long would that take?” Powell asked.

Regaari looked at the ceiling, suggesting mental calculation. “In human units… nine days each way.”

“Call that Plan B.” Titan suggested. “We can fix something up for you.”

“You’re sure, now?” Powell asked him. “Earth’s right up there at the top of the list for biohazards.”

“Sir, if we make this thing and I have even a moment of doubt, you’ll hear about it.”

“Make what exactly?” Powell probed.

“Portable biofilter forcefield and a small gravity generator sewn onto a modified MOLLE.” Titan replied. He glanced left and right to Rebar and Sikes who nodded along. “Not difficult, especially if that nanofactory can build some Gaoian-tech ones. Even better if we can send ‘em down to SCERF for Major Nadeau’s team to program and test. And we’ll need Horse’s skills as a seamstress to tailor the harness.”

The major nodded, satisfied. “Time frame on that?”

“Mmm… Two hours to put it together, a day to properly safety-test it.” Titan estimated.

“Two days.” Rebar corrected him. “Once SCERF have delivered the parts, that is. And ideally, sir, I’d press for three.”

“I’ll pass that up the chain.” Powell sat back and rubbed his face. “So. Three to four days minimum, as many as… twenty or so if not.”

“We could… Uh, actually, never mind.” Blaczynski began.

“Problem?” Powell asked him.

“Nothing I can explain in present company, sir.”

Regaari’s head tilted in a way disarmingly similar to a concentrating dog’s. “If you had a suggestion for retrieving the suits from Gao faster than sending the Springing Ember,” he mused “But the suggestion involves sensitive information… Then that implies that your ships have an impressive sustained cruising speed. Faster than I had suspected.”

Adam had already long since noticed Major Powell’s clear tell - when something surprised him or got past his guard, his best neutral expression slammed down, which it now did. Scott Blaczynski, however, was not so accomplished a poker player, and he had to fight to conceal a scowl. Either way, neither man could have broadcast a clearer confirmation of Regaari’s stunning leap of insight.

“I doubt they’re going to comment.” Ayma told him, answering on the humans’ behalf. “Please don’t antagonize our friends, Snowtop.”

“Snowtop?” Adam asked her. Regaari had a faintly put-out set to his stance that suggested a touch of light-hearted teasing.

“Come on, that wicked white mohawk of his? Snowtop’s a good’n.” Sikes grinned. A chuckle swept around the room, and Ayma looked quite pleased with herself.

“I do not have a ‘mohawk’ I have a white crest.” Regaari grumbled. “Or did you think my clan’s name was an accident?”

“Right. Okay. So that’s the Defenders sorted.” Powell grunted, immediately regaining everybody’s attention. “Burgess, Arés? Thoughts on their suggestion?”

“Can’t be too careful.” Base mused. “Fields are great, but any car they ride in’s gonna want to be steam-cleaned and hypoallergenic before they get in it. Same goes for hotel rooms, too.”

“Shampoo, too.” Adam offered. “We don’t want stuff accumulating in that fur.”

“And anybody who shakes hands needs to sanitize first. Even better, they need a Frontline shot.” Base continued.

“Hm. We should have a couple stasis containers on standby too, so if it all goes FUBAR we can extract them to an ET hospital. One of those class ten ones.” Adam concluded.

“This conversation isn’t filling me with confidence.” Ayma confessed.

“That’s because, to be straight with you? This trip is a bad idea.” Baseball told her. Everyone in the room immediately gave him their undivided attention. “You’re only safe in this room talkin’ with us because we’ve all got Frontline implants, and so does everybody else on Cimbrean. So does Zoo Chang, which is why things didn’t go real wrong for your homeworld the second you took her there.”

“Earth,” he added “Is a whole different can of trouble. There’s microbes everywhere. In the air, in the rain, in the soil, on the ground and the walls, on every surface you touch and on everybody’s hands. There’s gonna be viruses, dust particles, pollen grains and airborne compounds comin’ at ya with every breath, and that’s just the stuff that Titan’s harness can deal with. What happens if a wasp decides to ruin your day? What if you scratch yourself on a rusty nail? I don’t even wanna think about what Tetanus would do to a Gaoian!”

He sat forward to lend some extra solemnity to his words. “Throw in the gravity, the weather, the poisonous plants and the fact that some crazy SOB might just decide to take a shot at you for reasons that only make sense to his buggy ass and no-one else’s? And that’s all the stuff we probably know how you’ll react to. How about, uh, atmospheric pollution and heavy metal contaminants?”

He tailed off and looked around. Very, very gently, Powell gave him the nod to continue. “…Look, me and Horse, we’ve got your back. We’ll be there and if we don’t keep you alive, ain’t nobody was ever gonna.” he said. “But this is a real bad idea, mother Ayma. A real bad one. As your Protector, charged with your safety I gotta tell you: the safest thing you could do is not go.”

”…Fuckin’ A.” Adam grunted.

Ayma exhaled at length, looked down, and then back up and met John’s gaze levelly. Her ears were up and forward, and there was a determined set to her stance and the way her claws were slightly out that said everything before she even spoke a word.

“Thank you for your kind warning and counsel.” she said at last, and Adam suspected she was speaking very formally and diplomatically. Regaari had taught him that much about the Gaori language. “But I have a Sister on that planet, and I will speak to her at the very least. We are going.”

Together, Adam and John glanced at Regaari, who was still standing behind her, where she couldn’t see. Slowly, and a touch awkwardly given the different structure of his shoulders, he shrugged.

Adam knew that shrug. It was one he’d deployed himself on more than one occasion when the women in his life were busy making it difficult.

“I think we’ve had our marching orders, major.” he said.

Powell made a deep noise in the back of his throat. “That we have, staff sergeant.” he agreed. “Right. I’ll pass everything you just said along to General Tremblay. Go ahead and finish your movie night, lads, and get a good night sleep in. I expect you’ll be busy tomorrow.”

A “yes sir” rippled through the humans, and Powell stood up. “‘Night lads.”

“‘Night, sir.”

Ayma settled into his abandoned chair as Powell left.

“Where were we?” she asked.

The men exchanged glances, then with a shrug Akiyama hit the remote again and the burning wheel that had been frozen in place on screen for the last few minutes resumed its bouncing journey.

Adam sat back and spent the rest of the movie in thought, pondering the task to come.

Something told him that his coming night’s sleep was about to be the best one he’d get for a couple of weeks.

Date Point 10y4m1d AV

Seawall, Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth.

Xiù Chang

Just running was a relief. Moving was a relief, not being surrounded by people asking questions, so many questions… getting away from her fussing mother, from a father who was constantly melancholy when he should have been delighted, from a big little brother she didn’t know how to talk with…

Just the freedom to run, under open sky in correct gravity rather than on a treadmill, when every breath that rushed into and through and out of her was dense and rich and right, almost intoxicating.

For the first time since arriving on Earth, Xiù was home. Apparently home was sweatpants, a cerulean running top, running shoes, asphalt pounding away under her, and chilly sea air smelling of salt water and distant fish. Too early in the morning for there to be anything but trees and benches to her left, and water and mountains to her right, and only the occasional hardcore jogger like herself to break the tranquility.

Earth itself was welcoming her home just fine. Trees and mountains and the smell of the sea hadn’t changed a bit.

It was people who were giving her difficulty. Old school friends who’d visit just long enough for an awkward hug and a gift before vanishing. The reporters poised around her parents’ house had only finally been persuaded to leave by the realisation that Xiù was determined not to make herself pretty for the camera, and was more interested in getting the hell away from them. Employers wanted experience and marketable skills, for which purposes Gung Fu, fluency in an alien language and three years of living as a vagrant in disguise apparently didn’t count.

It was all so complicated. And worse, everyone seemed to be disappointed and upset when she didn’t fit seamlessly back into their lives as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t been homeless and alone and had to fight monsters and nearly been killed, and…

As if what happened to her was her fault and she should just deal with it.

The city itself didn’t give a fuck, thankfully. It was comforting to run past the same old landmarks, be just another face on the street. An asian girl on her morning fitness routine, anonymous and glad of it.

She was breathing hard by the time she passed under Lions Gate bridge. Too many years of alien gravity, three weeks of hospital, binging on her mother’s home cooking and the last lingering effects of being spaced had all conspired to badly hurt her fitness compared to the last time she had run this route.

She paused at the Prospect Point lighthouse, mentally calculating how far it was to Siwash Rock which had been her objective for today.

Too far. Much too far, if she was being sensible. She’d be a wreck by the time she reached it, and she’d still have to get back.

“To hell with sensible.“ she muttered, not noticing that she’d said it in Gaori, and kept going. She wanted to be thoroughly exhausted, today, having had the bad news that morning that one of the girls in her ballet class had died less than four months after she, Xiù, had been abducted. A bad cold had turned into chest infection, had become a pneumonia without anybody realising. She’d gone to bed early to try and sleep it off, never to wake. She’d been nineteen.

Missing a couple of weddings and the birth of a little girl named after her had all been body-blows, too. Running and recovering her fitness was keeping her mind off how much she’d missed, at least. It was helping her cope.

There was a spot about two hundred meters further on where the seawall path kinked inwards to hug the bottom of the cliff, and when it did she almost tripped and fell over, because she’d just run into a dream.

Somebody had placed a sculpture out in the water. It hadn’t been there ten years ago - in fact, being burnished steel on a post in salt water, it probably hadn’t been out there for very long at all - but it was right out of the vivid dreams she’d had aboard Sanctuary: a faceless steel man, sitting cross-legged and pondering a globe held delicately in his left hand.

She gaped at it, immobilized by deja vu, and then decided that maybe sensible had its merits. She glanced back at it, half expecting it to suddenly stand and throw the ball to her, and then retraced her steps.

She was still in a badly shaken mood by the time the taxi she had called returned her to her parents’ house in Strathcona. Slightly more shaking still was the man sitting in their front room making polite small-talk over tea with her family.

Xiù would be the first to admit to a nigh-total lack of experience with men. She’d been kept away from them before her abduction, and then during the years of her absence, the male she’d spent the most time with had been Regaari, who probably didn’t count given that he wasn’t even human. Sure, toward the end there had been Julian, Lewis, Amir and… and Zane… but by and large, men were an alien species to her.

But, she’d spent years living among alien species and learning how to read them, and this one, when he looked at her, did something that the Corti normally did - he looked a little too long, he evaluated, he analyzed. She immediately took a disliking to him.

He was kind of easy on the eyes though. Tall, all the best features of both white and african heritage, and either his suit was tailored or he’d got unbelievably lucky at the store, and it didn’t look cheap enough to be store-bought.

Xiù was nearly as out of touch with fashion as she was with men, given that the inspirations for the styles that had inspired the inspirations for the previous generation’s inspirations hadn’t even been three seasons away when she left, but there was something almost… Qinis about the cut of it. She’d seen a gaggle of three of them once, parading down a station concourse, as tall and flimsy and decorative as orchids, and the ornate fascinators they’d been wearing seemed to have inspired elements of the man’s lapels and the subtle patterning around the hem of his jacket.

As slick and expensive as the suit was, the man wearing it had a kind of rough-and-ready, stubbled look, including a peculiar scar - a lattice of slim white lines slightly forward of his left temple.

She addressed her mother in Mandarin. “Who’s this?” she asked. “Another reporter? Please, mom, I don’t want to talk to him.”

Amazingly, he replied perfectly in the same language. “I’m not a reporter, Miss Chang. Nothing to worry about there.”

It took her a second to realise that he’d lacked any kind of an accent at all, which was a trait characteristic of translator devices, and sure enough when she glanced at the table there was a small silver cube there which was almost certainly exactly that.

She spared herself an irritated blush by muttering something about needing a shower, and vanished upstairs.

Once clean, she changed into her loose grey sweatpants and a white ribbed vest top, then lurked in her spartan bedroom in the hope that he’d go away. No such luck - eventually, there was a knock on the door.

Li Chang stuck his head around his daughter’s door. “You may want to talk to this one.” he told her, gently. Xiù sighed.

“Do I have to?” she asked. “I’ve spoken to the intelligence people, the doctors, the news…”

“I don’t think he’s going to be asking the same questions.” her father said. “I say give him a chance.”

She scooted up the bed and sat against the wall, acutely aware that she was behaving like a girl half her age. “Fine, okay…”

A minute or so later, the stranger knocked on the door and entered on her reluctant welcome. He’d taken the jacket off at some point, and Xiù had to admit, she hadn’t anticipated the large tattoo that seemed to completely cover his right arm. To her irritation, he took one look at the bare walls and floor and chuckled.

“Something funny?” she asked him.

“Hey, we seem to have got off on the wrong foot there. I’m sorry about that.” the man said. It had been years since she’d last heard a Texan accent. He cast about for something to sit down on, then gave up and offered her a hand to shake. “Kevin.”

She shook it, deciding that she could be polite at least. “Xiù.”

“Yeah, sorry. I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did the exact same thing when I got back too.”

When Xiù just frowned at him, he waved a hand at the pronounced lack of items that her cleanup had left behind. “This. You spend a few years living out among the stars surrounded by all those critters with nothing but what you’re carrying… Get home, kinda feels like all that stuff ain’t yours no more, doesn’t it?”

“So you’re Kevin Jenkins.” She guessed, finally recognising him and irritated at the too-smooth attempt to identify with her. “I thought I recognised you from somewhere. The Gaoians showed me that news report you were in: You’re the reason it took me this long to get back. You’re the reason I had to spend all that time in disguise, and running.”

“Aww come on, be fair.” he complained. “It’s not like I ordered the Guvnurag to put that forcefield up there! And I sure as hell didn’t order the Dominion to start throwing folks to the wolves.”

“You ran your mouth off.”

He exhaled, and lowered himself onto the floor. “Maybe I did.” he agreed. “I never thought it’d… Didn’t you ever say something out there that maybe scared somebody, or they took it the wrong way?”

Xiù didn’t answer. “What do you want?” she asked instead.

“Jeez, lady, why the third degree?”

“Really? You can’t see how it’s maybe a bit frustrating how people in suits keep showing up who want to talk to me and ask me questions? And the question is never ‘what can I do for you, Miss Chang?’ or ‘Yes, about your resume, we have need of a Gaoian language expert for this movie we’re making, are you interested in auditioning?’ No. Every time, every time, it’s something people want me to do for them!”

Jenkins just watched her, warily. He was doing that Corti analysis thing again, so Xiù scooted forward on the bed, planted her feet on the floor and gave him her best glare. “So go on then. What. Do. You. Want?”

He considered his answer carefully, licking his teeth as he looked around the room.

“Full disclosure.” he said, at last. “First of all, you’ve gotta know from the news thingy that I’m an old friend of Kirk’s and… yeah, I guess I’d sure like to hear news about him. That’s my personal reason for coming here. Professionally…”

“I knew it.”

“Professionally,” Jenkins forged ahead. “We have need, yes, of a Gaoian language expert. And an extraterrestrial survival expert, somebody who can live on a ship without much in the way of possessions-” he swept a hand demonstratively around the room “-basically, somebody with your skill set.”

Xiù glowered at him. “A spaceship?” she asked. “You’re offering me a job on a spaceship?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would I want to leave?” She asked. “I only just got back!”

Jenkins gave her another calculating stare, then stood up.

”…I know those scars on your arm.” he said, causing her to glance unconsciously at them. “A Hunter gave you those, I’ve seen their teeth right up close and personal. And that on your neck is where some fella had a knife to your throat. Up against a wall, if I’m any judge. Seen that plenty of times too. Scary place, this galaxy of ours. Ain’t it?”

“Get out.”

“You look at people like the Corti do too, you know.”

A sick, cold ball of anger dropped right into Xiù’s stomach. “…What?”

“When you walked in, first thing you did was… evaluate me. Calculate. And I saw you see me do the same to you, and I saw you didn’t like it. And I get why. Don’t much care for those little gray assholes myself, not after they bolted a prototype implant to my head like something out of the Terminator. I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal. Just a survival habit both you and me picked up out there.”

When Xiù didn’t say anything, he apparently took it for permission to keep talking. “And then you come back here and it’s not like you imagined, is it?” he asked, rhetorically. “You imagined it’d all be your old bed and your ma’s cooking and then it turns out: things have moved on. The world’s changed. And home turns out to be a place in your head, that you can’t ever go back to, because those gray motherfuckers took it from you and you won’t ever get it back. Believe me, I tried.”

Oblivious or uncaring of her mounting rage, he pressed the point. “I thought Earth was home too. but you and me? We were out there too long and it changed us. And guess what?! You weren’t here for their lives either! My daughter grew up, and so did your little brother. We both missed weddings, one of your friends died while you were gone…”

Xiù erupted to her feet and punched him full in the nose, breaking it. He staggered against the wall and clamped a hand over the sudden blood flow. He was too preoccupied with pain and surprise to say anything but he still managed to stare a wide-eyed question at her.

“I don’t know who you think you are, and I don’t care.” she snarled at him. “You don’t know me, you don’t know what I went through, don’t try to… to project your baggage onto me and don’t you dare, don’t you DARE try to use me like that, you… you creep!”

He shouldered himself off the wall. “Y’don’t think mebbe that was a bit of an overreaction?” he mumbled through his hand, feigning bravado.

“Who told you you could come into my house and treat me like a prize?!” Xiù prodded his chest. ”Nobody gets to do that! Not you, not anybody.”

“An’ here I was thinkin’ we were makin’ a connection.” Jenkins muttered as he adjusted his grip, wincing as he pinched his nostrils shut.

“You came to my house.” Xiù repeated. “You tricked my parents. You tried to manipulate me, you tried to get inside my head. You tried to use these-” she gestured at the ragged scar lines on her arm, and to the tiny cut on her throat “-to make me do what you want? My answer is NO. You go away right now!”

Jenkins nodded and opened the door. “Offer of a job still stands.” he croaked.

“Then get somebody who can treat me like a human being rather than an objective to put it in writing!” Xiù snapped. “Get. Out.”

She slammed the door behind him, catching him in the backside and congratulating herself as she heard him barely avoid falling down the stairs.

Then she sank onto the bed. She was shaking and crying when her parents rushed in seconds later.

Kevin Jenkins

Staggering across the road while holding his nose together nearly earned Kevin a car to the knee. He raised an apologetic hand to the driver - the other one being clamped around his bleeding nose adequately made the case that he was slightly preoccupied right now - and made it to his own car, fumbled with the door sensor and thumped down onto the driver seat.

He sat there pinching his nostrils and swearing for a good ten minutes before he was finally satisfied that the bleeding had ceased.

He pulled down the sun visor and peered into its makeup mirror. The nose wasn’t crooked at least, but it was bruised, there were dark splotches under his eyes for good measure, and his shirt was in dire need of a dry-cleaner’s attention. He touched the nose experimentally, and flinched.

“Way to go, dumbass.” he congratulated himself. “Fuckin’ perfect.”

Date Point 10y4m1d AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Kirk

Kirk had once seen a human documentary in which a team of fishermen had sat and patiently repaired their nets after a successful trawl. At the time, he hadn’t fully appreciated that, while repairing the net was still massively less of a task than weaving a new one, it must still be tedious and time-consuming. After all, only deathworlders would consider it normal for an animal to damage a net of woven plastic fibers. Doubly so when the animal in question did so without claws, teeth or a knife, but simply with its own mass and strength.

To the fisherman, a routine part of the day. To Kirk… more than that.

Mending his own net - the galactic web of contacts, favours called in, bribes issued and reputations blackmailed that had kept him fed with information from across Dominion space was…tedious, yes. time-consuming, yes. Fiddly, delicate and at times frustrating yes. And it was hampered all the more that he had to do it now at arms’ lengths, and through proxies and agents, none of whom could be allowed to know who he was. The galaxy had not heard from Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk in a long time, and his sudden reappearance could not possibly pass without comment. The more he achieved before those comments began, the better.

His time away had changed some of the players, too. Politicians had retired, criminal figures had been arrested, killed or had wisely resigned into obscurity before either of those fates caught them. The only solution was to rebuild, slowly. And while that was a task that by and large was proceeding at a satisfactory pace, it did often leave him seated by his desk, trying to be entertained while waiting for a message to arrive.

Right now, he was listening to an audiobook.

”…unintended effects are always possible. For instance, the most dangerous road on Earth now appears to be a two-lane highway between Kabul and Jalalabad. When it was unpaved, cratered, and strewn with boulders it was comparatively safe. But once some helpful Western contractors improved it, the driving skills of the local Afghans were finally liberated from the laws of physics. Many now have a habit of passing slow-moving trucks on blind curves, only to find themselves suddenly granted a lethally unimpeded view of a thousand-foot gorge. Are there lessons to be learned from such missteps in the name of progress? Of course. But they do not negate the reality of progress.”

He paused the book and mulled that thought over, only to be interrupted by Vedreg.

If Lewis was a study in how humans could absorb massive volumes of information and correlate them in breathtaking ways, and if Kirk was a living justification for his species’ reputation for shrewdness and politics, Vedreg was…

Well, he had become very interested in baking.

At first Kirk had been uncharitably scornful of this, but Vedreg had proven once again that he wasn’t actually stupid, just… slow.

In English, Kirk knew, the two terms were used more or less as synonyms, but in the case of Guvnurag, the difference became apparent. Both in matters of the body and matters of the mind, nobody, not even the most inventively charitable liar, could have realistically described Guvnurag as “fast”…but they did have inertia, which could be the next best thing. It had certainly allowed them to outperform the Corti when it came to large forcefield technology and a few associated technological fields.

The Corti preferred for their research to yield dazzling new inspirations that could make the researcher’s reputation and earn them a promotion. Hard graft wasn’t their style at all, and so in areas where the patient ability to keep chewing away at the details yielded incremental, cumulative improvements, they were surprisingly lacking. Guvnurag were all about hard graft. They didn’t have much of an alternative.

And so, while Lewis and Kirk had been blitzing around the station familiarizing themselves with its layout, its capabilities and its systems, reinforcing some repairs and, in Lewis’ case, a thorough search for terrifying killing machines… Vedreg had parked himself in an unobtrusive spot and had thought.

He had then, after some trial and error, some research, the assembly of a few appropriate tools, and raiding the station’s food storage stasis lockers, baked an apple pie.

It wasn’t actually an apple pie of course. The nearest apple was tens of thousands of lightyears away, as was the nearest flour, not to mention the butter and eggs which neither Kirk nor Vedreg could have eaten anyway. And the less said about cinnamon, the better.

But, desiccating and then milling down some universal ration spheres had produced a dry edible powder, and fructose was fructose all over the galaxy, present in the cuisine of every species (though not, it had to be said, in the quantities called for by most human recipes: Earth’s deathworld conditions had caused plants to evolve that could generate sugar in terrifying quantities that had never been available to nonhuman chefs)

The real key to the dish, however, was a type of fruit called a “Rhwk”, the flesh of which was tart, sweet and not dissimilar to an apple in texture and culinary properties. Rhwk had long been a firm favourite of Kwmbwrw gastronomes, but Vedreg’s genius had been to recognise that the slimy fluid core of the fruit and the oily substance that protected its seed were acceptable matches for egg and butter respectively.

The result was… a failure. An abject one. What the oven eventually belched out had turned out to be a monstrosity of black caramelized fruit sugars and a “pastry” substitute that fell apart at a suspicious glance.

The second attempt had been marginally more successful. The third, practically intact.

The fourth had been a pie. Not, according to Lewis, an apple pie - the taste apparently had more in common with something called “grapefruit” - but still very pleasing to the palate.

Once the basic principle of the pastry was down, Vedreg had thrown himself into his baking with gusto. Lewis had complained about the enforced vegan diet at one point, but the nauseated signals he’d received from both of the obligate herbivores on the crew had induced him to drop the subject.

In any case, Vedreg’s offerings had grown commendably in complexity and skill, and he made BIG portions, the smallest of which wound up on Kirk’s plate. It was slightly disconcerting to see that Lewis ate slightly more than Vedreg, despite being roughly a tenth of Vedreg’s mass.

He also tended to the running of the place. Thanks to Vedreg, the station was clean, the lighting was powered, mealtimes were scheduled. By taking over in keeping Lewis fit and healthy, he had created time for Kirk to complete his objectives, and during the two days every week that Vedreg spent hibernating, the place noticeably went downhill. Despite all that, it hadn’t clicked for Kirk what it was that his friend was doing until the day Lewis had referred to him affectionately as “Jeeves”.

Vedreg, of course, had needed the reference explained. Hence why he was now pulsing purple-blue in amused confusion while watching “A Bit of Fry and Laurie.”

Lewis meanwhile was enjoying his weekly break from study to watch it alongside him. He had climbed - carefully - onto Vedreg’s wide back and was grinning at the comedy.

“I do not understand” Vedreg said. “His name is to drop a small object? It is… absurd.”

“That’s the point, dude, yeah. It’s surreal.”

“This word ’sur-u-ree-lu’ does not translate.”

“Aww, man, we’re getting pretty abstract here. Surreal is like… when things are like, reality but wrong in some way. Bizarre.”

“I do not understand.” Vedreg repeated.

“Humor never translates.” Kirk told them both. “Ever.”

“Oh please, that’s bullshit. We’re all sapient, we’re all similar.”

“Our friend Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk is correct, Lewis.” Vedreg rumbled. “I do not understand human humor, and you will not understand the humor of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun.”

“Alright, bring it. Hit me with your best joke, Jeeves.” Lewis challenged him. He sat up and - carefully, so as not to injure - slid down off Vedreg’s back.

“Very well… hmm…“ Vedreg rumbled a Guvnurag throat-clear. “Tiny Geverednig goes to her herd-father and declares: ’largest one! I am thirsty!’ - The herd-father points to the mountain.”

Kirk and Lewis exchanged mutual bewildered expressions as Vedreg glowed royal purple and produced a wheezing sound deep in his chest - his species’ version of uproarious laughter.

Slowly, he faded. “Do… do you not see? Largest one? The mountain?”

”…My turn.” Lewis said. “Uh… Three men walk into a bar. You’d think one of them would have seen it!”

He smiled hopefully as it was Vedreg and Kirk’s turn to express confusion. “I guess… puns probably don’t work so well. Okay how about an anti-joke?”

“Anti-joke?” Vedreg asked.

“Okay, so… ’What’s so funny about a shuttle full of Corti exploding?’“

Vedreg flashed alarmed white. “…I can see nothing amusing in that scenario! It would be a tragic loss of sapient life.”

Lewis sagged. “Uh… yes. Exactly. That’s the punchline.”

“I am confused.” Vedreg told him.

“Okay, okay, I know. How about-?”

“My turn.” Kirk interrupted. “And this should prove my point.”

Lewis sighed. “Fiiiine.”

Kirk nodded at length. “Somewhere deep in space, a freighter picks up a distress beacon.” he began. “They rescue the escape pod and are pleased to find that the occupant is a fellow Rrrrtktktkp’ch. They explain that, sadly, their freighter is a slow one and that it will be many rikat before they next arrive at port, but the castaway is simply grateful for the rescue.”

“At mealtime, the four of them sit down to enjoy Cqcq and Zrrk, in welcome to their new guest. Just as they have begun to eat, the captain says: ‘Twelve.’ his two crewmates laugh, and one replies ‘Eight.’ to further merriment. Naturally, this confuses the newcomer, who requests an explanation.”

“‘We have worked together for hundreds of rik’, the captain explains. ’We all know each others’ jokes by now, and so it is more efficient to refer to them by number.’ The newcomer nods his understanding and falls silent.”

“Shortly thereafter, he looks around and ventures: ‘Fifteen?’. There is no response. ‘Nine?’ - Still nothing. Exasperated, he asks what he is doing wrong.”

“The junior deckhand shakes his mane sadly and informs him: ‘Your delivery is terrible.’“

Vedreg promptly signalled blue confusion, but Lewis’ lips drew back into an imposing Deathworlder smile and he made a kind of wheezing noise that it took Kirk seconds to identify as a laugh. “Oh man… Oh… yeah. Yeah okay. That’s a good’n.”

“It seems I was wrong.” Kirk observed, deeply surprised. “You understood?”

“Heh, yeah. Your own delivery was pretty good.”

“What does delivery have to do with-?” Vedreg began, then sagged when Lewis and Kirk both turned to look at him. “…The herd is following a truly ancient father when four Mumruvnede fly overhead. The oldest child cries: ‘Face the wind!’?” He ventured, hopefully.

”…Was that a fart joke?” Lewis asked. “That was a fart joke!”

”…as a matter of fact it was.” Vedreg agreed, turning a slightly embarrassed shade of magenta.

“See! there IS universal humour!” Lewis turned and grinned triumphantly.

Kirk held up all four hands in defeat, and then handed him a tablet. “And while we were joking around…” he said “…contact has been made with Earth.”

Lewis grabbed it. “Yeah? What’d they say?”

“Nothing yet. This is all information on how to establish a secure line of communication. I imagine that we will hear more in due course but for now… it’s a start.”

Lewis sighed. “Frustrating.” he declared.

“But vital.”

“I know, I know…” Lewis stood up. “Arright, in that case I’ma call it a night. See you tomorrow.”

They bade him goodnight, and Vedreg pulsed through a thoughtful rainbow of blues and oranges. “Did he seem… upset by that, to you?” He asked.

“He is lonely.” Kirk replied. “Humans are intensely social creatures, old friend.”

“I feel the call of my home planet also.” Vedreg replied. “It is… stressful to be so far from my herd.”

“The difference, old friend, is that herd species feel comforted by each others’ presence, but do not care for one another in quite the same way that humans do.” Kirk replied. “He is suffering… it makes me feel guilty.”

“You have confined us all.” Vedreg agreed. “Even if for good reasons.”

Kirk shook his coat out a little. “I have total confidence in Lewis.” he said. “He will find a solution, and we will be able to send him home.”

“An alternative approach suggests itself, Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk.”

“And that is?”

Vedreg shone a brilliant cyan, as if the answer was obvious. “Bring more humans here.”

Date Point 10y4m1d AV

North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

“So what’s the place look like?”

Allison was on a train in the UK - Julian could see green fields and more black-and-white cows than a sane nation should allow rushing past the back of her head, interrupted by occasional white cottages, trees and brick railside buildings.

Julian shrugged and aimed his own phone around the room. It was essentially unchanged from the last time he’d stood in it, except…colder, and lifeless. Without the gentle sounds of a house being lived in, rather than being comfortably cluttered, it felt more like a museum locked up at night.

“It held up okay considering it’s gone without maintenance for a couple years…” He conceded. “But it’s not the same without Grampa.”

“He had a lot of stuff!” Allison commented, bringing her phone closer to her face.

This was an understatement for the ages. Grampa E had been Navajo, Julian’s grandma had been equal parts Ojibwe and French, both of them had identified as American first and foremost, and neither of them had been afraid to collect keepsakes throughout their long and fascinating lives.

The result was that the rich green walls were almost totally obscured by photos, artwork and decorations, no two items of which matched. Three huge glass-fronted cabinets were stuffed full of whatever ornaments couldn’t hang on the walls, and that was without accounting for the iron pans hung on the walls by the fridge, the herb-drying rack above the kitchen island, the commemorative plates above the door, the cookie jar, three recliners, a futon, a coffee table with a humidor full of premium cigars tucked under it, and a TV as big as a ping-pong table. To this last was attached a venerable Sega Genesis - Julian’s favourite childhood plaything and already quite obsolete by the time he’d first picked up its controllers.

And that was just the big front room. The two bedrooms were equally cluttered, even the bathroom hadn’t escaped becoming a repository for decorative knick-knacks, and the utility room leading out to the back door was home to a drift of koozies, a stack of tackle boxes, and a gun locker layered in stickers and whatever magnets hadn’t been able to find a home either on the fridge in the kitchen or the freezers in the garage.

The less said about the unlimited salvage opportunities presented by the recesses of said garage, the better.

“Yup.” Julian agreed.

“What are you gonna do with it?”

“Shit, Al. Don’t ask me right now, I’m still…I still expect the old man to come shuffling out of the garage, you know?”

She moved the phone away from her face. ”…I’m sorry, baby. He meant a lot to you, huh?”

“He raised me.” Julian shrugged. “I don’t even know. I love this place but it’s kind of the ass-end of nowhere. The land’s not worth much, and if we do go back out into space again then I’m not going to be here enough to look after it properly. There’s a pickup out there that I can probably resurrect, and two more that I probably can’t…”

“You’ve gotta start somewhere, though?” She asked.

“I already did. Cleared out all the spoiled food from the freezers, lit some scented candles…place doesn’t stink of three-year-old fish any more at least.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s next?”

“Got a message this morning that my dead letter’s waiting for me.” Julian said. “Figured I’d go pick that up, grab some essentials from the store, maybe have a campfire and s’mores.”

“Aww man, s’mores? You’re having s’mores without me?” Allison pouted, then giggled. She glanced behind her and realised that the pastoral landscape outside was now unambiguously urban. “Aaand I think this is Birmingham. I’d better get ready.”

“Good luck, Al. I miss you.”

“Miss you too, Etsicitty.” she wrinkled her nose at him affectionately. “You behave yourself ‘til I get back, hear?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“SO hot.” She blew a kiss and ended the call.

There was nothing quite like having a gorgeous woman describe him as “hot” to boost Julian’s ego. Grinning, he grabbed his jacket and keys and headed out to where his rented truck was parked outside. That was one thing to say for the old place - you could have parked a couple of eighteen-wheelers outside with room left over to land a helicopter. An SUV, three pickups and a by-now thoroughly immobile ancient tractor weren’t taking up even half the available parking space.

He entertained himself for about half the long drive to town by perusing the local radio offerings before deciding that, time zones or not, Vancouver was probably fully awake right now.

He called Xiù.

There was a smile in her voice when she answered. “Hey!”

“Hey you.” he smiled too. “Just checking in. You okay?”

“Eh…my day started off pretty crappy.” she conceded. “But…yes, I’m okay now. You?”

“Pretty good. Place is in better shape than I thought. I just need to pack it up and sort a few things out then…well, I’ll have plenty of time to decide what I’m doing with it. What was crappy?”

“Nothing I want to talk about, just…” she sighed ”…people.”

Julian chuckled. “I hear ya.” he agreed. “When’re you going to come down and look at this place?”

“The ARP haven’t come through yet, so I don’t exactly have a lot of money…” she demurred. “Please tell me you’re planning to come back up here though…”

He couldn’t contain a quiet, affectionate half-laugh. “Yes, Xiù, we’re coming back up there.” he reassured, teasing her with a patient tone. He heard a slight laugh from her end of the phone. “Like I said, once I’m done packing the place up we’ll have plenty of time to think.”

“Good. I-I, um…”

“What?”

”…I think I really need you. Both of you, Allison and you.”

Julian ran a tongue across his lips, trying to think of what to say. “That bad?” he asked.

“I’m…yeah.”

“Okay…look, it’s going to be a little while yet. There’s a lot to do. So I tell you what, if you need to? You just come down here. You know where I live - I’ll pay for it.”

Xiù paused long enough for Julian to come to a halt at a stop sign, where he exchanged slight nods of mutual recognition with a lurking state trooper before turning right and heading for Clearbrook.

“Julian…are you sure?” she asked at last.

“Hey.” he told her, warmly, deciding not to mention that his and Allison’s hazard pay plus their accumulated salary from serving on Sanctuary meant that Xiù’s travel expenses wouldn’t even noticeably dent his savings. “Don’t worry about it. If you need to come down here, you do it. Okay? I’ll take care of you. Of it.”

There was no reply.

”…Xiù?”

“Mi, yi sher-yan ina mo.”

Julian frowned. “Was that Gaoian?”

“Uh…yeah. Sorry. Th-thank you, Julian.”

“For you, anything.” he promised.

She made some kind of a noise, one he couldn’t quite discern the meaning of. It might have been a sigh, might have been a laugh, might have been the disintegrating beginning of a weak “um…”: it wasn’t at all clear.

“I’d…better help my mom cook.” she declared. “It’s good to, uh, to spend time with her.”

“Sure. Have fun, you.”

“And you…”

She was silent for a long few seconds before she finally hung up.

Aside from drumming his fingers thoughtfully on the wheel, Julian drove the rest of the way into town cloaked in contemplative silence and no small amount of guilt. Two things were becoming increasingly apparent: that Xiù was harbouring a large and growing crush on him…and that the feeling was mutual.

Considering his committed relationship with Allison, that part was hard to feel good about, and he’d have much preferred to raise it with Allison before now, if only there had been an opportunity. but in the hospital hadn’t seemed right, and over the phone while she was abroad? Even worse.

He checked the dashboard clock and performed a few mental calculations. He had about four days to go before Allison got back from the UK. He made his plan: After she got back from England, they’d go back to Grampa E’s place, he’d make her s’mores, they’d cuddle by the fire…and he’d confess. See how it went.

It sounded so simple, put that way. Like there was no big deal involved.

“Sure, Etsicitty.” he muttered. “No big deal at all.”

Clearbrook post office was pretty much unchanged from the last time he’d seen it. Same red brick construction, same flat roof, same flagpole and the words “United States Post Office” in steel letters on the corner of the building. The road had been resurfaced and given a fresh set of bright yellow lines and the trees were all a bit taller, but otherwise…

He parked up, headed indoors, and found it thankfully empty. The postal worker was a rotund middle-aged woman with candy-red dyed hair in a tight ponytail and enormous spectacles, who gave him a welcoming smile. Her name tag identified her as ‘Caroline’

“Hi! What can I do for you?” she asked.

“Hi, uh…Julian Etsicitty, I’m here for my dead letter?”

She froze. “Oh…Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

“Why, what happened?”

“Well nothing happened, I mean, it’s all here…all of it…” She recovered herself and produced a form for him to sign - ten years and change into the extraterrestrial contact age and the United States Postal Service still hadn’t weaned itself off hardcopy paperwork - checked his ID then vanished to stamp and file the form. “Head on out front, I’ll bring it round.”

“You’ll bring it rou-?” Julian frowned at her as she vanished through a door, then did as she said, heading back out into the parking lot.

After a minute of confused waiting, he became aware of a sort of…rumbling sound.

This turned out to be Caroline, dragging behind her a pallet jack, onto which was loaded a crate full of more USPS totes than Julian would have considered plausible.

“That’s…that’s my mail?” he asked, flatly.

“This is your mail.” Caroline agreed.

“All of that?”

“All of it. Yyyup.”

Sarcasm, or some kind of witty remark, was the order of the day. This whole situation was crying out for Julian to keep a cool head and deliver some kind of suave joke. He ran a hand through his hair and tried his best to compose one.

“Uh… Wow.”

Date Point 10y4m6d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ayma

The human male that Regaari kept calling “Warhorse” was fretting like a particularly neurotic Mother. This was, apparently, his job and Regaari had assured Ayma that he was extremely good at it.

Still. On some level, seeing this much attentive concern from a creature who was strong enough to accidentally dismember her was doing little to fill Ayma with confidence. All devotion to Clan aside, now that the moment had come to actually go to Earth…

It was after all now well established that Earth wasn’t merely a Class Twelve, a full two points of habitability rating worse than the minimum threshold for deathworld status, but it was a high end Class Twelve, spared only from Class Thirteen status by a quirk of Corti bias more than anything else. Earth was, in fact, possibly the most relentlessly and reliably lethal planet in the galaxy.

When faced with stepping onto a world with that kind of reputation, the fact that she was trusting her life and health to a harness of forcefields and localized gravity manipulation fields was…Well, it made human paranoia suddenly seem rather less unreasonable.

Regaari, as ever, was the picture of composure and calm, but she knew him well enough to detect a slight… fidgety edge. Whatever had happened to him on Garden had clearly solidified in him an absolute trust in these “Spaceborne Operators”, but even that wasn’t quite enough to completely quiet pre-deathworld jitters.

Warhorse himself was an incredible specimen. He was actually slightly shorter than Ayma, but there couldn’t be a millisecond of doubt as to which of them was stronger, heavier and more durable. Ayma had seen flimsier walls, and he was casually holding in one hand a bag that she privately doubted that she and Regaari could have lifted between them.

Baseball was standing nearby, calmly reading off a checklist. None of the words he was reading translated.

“Epinephrin.”

Warhorse tapped some ampules in a quick-access pocket on his chest. “Check.”

“Cetrizine.”

“Check.”

“Thiperamide.”

“Blue and green band, yeah?”

“That’s right.”

“Check.”

“Morphine.”

“ET dosage three, check.”

“Nitroglycerin.”

Regaari peered at him. “Wait, what?!“

“Relax, it’s a vasodilator.” Warhorse held up a calming hand. “ET intravenous dosage three. Check.”

“Intravenous? Nitroglycerin?!”

“Could save your life, man, God forbid. Trust us, and let us concentrate, yeah?”

“Sorry.”

Base smiled at him. “Last item anyway. Salbutamol?”

Horse nodded. “Check.”

He stood and slung the bag on with alarming ease. “Protectors ready.” he announced.

“Good.”

Major Powell had taken up the duty of delivering the Gaoians to Earth himself. The preparations had taken some days and no small amount of politicking, but the plan seemed to be perfectly solid and sound. Ayma and Regaari would constantly wear Akiyama’s custom-built excursion rigs, designed to counter the Earth’s oppressive gravity and filter out every wriggling bacterium and allergenic granule that poisoned its atmosphere.

The SOR’s “Defenders” had ingeniously packed on extra protection in the form of biofilter fields that charged from sunlight before sweeping their bodies clean of infection, and stasis field generators that would, in the event of a medical emergency, allow the wearer to be delivered safely to a class ten medical facility.

Finally, each Gaoian was to be shadowed by a medic. Friendly as they were, Warhorse and Baseball had stressed that the moment they jumped to Earth, both of them were going to be focusing intently and exclusively on their charges’ good health, and were not going to be much fun to hang out with.

All things considered, Ayma was almost getting… what was the term? Cold feet.

Almost.

Powell gestured with two pinched fingers to somebody outside of the marked jump array area - an ingenious idea that Ayma was going to be sharing with Yulna when she got back. Why should Mothers and cubs be exposed to the dangers of piracy, illegal research facilities and Hunters when they could just step from one planet, straight to another?

She felt her fur bristling. There was a whine, on the very edge of hearing, the feeling of building energy reached a peak and-

-She was on Earth.

She could tell it instantly. Even with her excursion harness protecting her from feeling the extra gravity herself, there was just an extra solidity to everything. Warhorse and Baseball both adjusted their loads slightly, Powell’s stance settled and widened. The humans to a man seemed immediately just a little more comfortable, a little more relaxed. Those high-gravity deathworlder muscles had been straining against gravity that wasn’t there, and now seemed to actually be grateful for the added burden.

Unexpectedly, they also sped up. While Ayma’s own movements felt ponderous and slow, and the suit just couldn’t disguise the way her foot dropped to the floor faster than was normal, the humans got…

She searched for an appropriate adjective and settled on “punchier.” They walked with a little more precision, their heads tracked faster as they looked around, and all of their little gestures and mannerisms just seemed to fit that tiny bit better, as if the mere fact that the planet they stood on was both larger and denser than the norm had been written into their body language.

Powell took a deep breath and smiled. “Like soup, innit lads?” he asked. Ayma imitated him and nearly reeled. The air was warm, humid, and rich, rich to the point of intoxication. Higher oxygen content, she recalled, and a memory stirred that in its primordial past Earth’s atmosphere had been richer, warmer and more oxygenated still, allowing for flying insects and land animals of incomprehensible bulk.

The filters must have been working, though. Aside from the tang of humidity, there was no discernable scent on what she was breathing.

The Protectors seemed satisfied that she and Regaari were well, at least, and indicated that the door could be opened.

Admiral Knight had gone on ahead the evening before, and was standing next to a shorter, rather sturdier man that Ayma didn’t know whose hair put her in mind of brushed steel, but who was smiling warmly.

Powell raised his voice enough to be firm: “Detail, ten-shut!”

Warhorse and Baseball all snapped fully upright, bringing their heels together and straightening their spines. it was an impressive gesture given that both Protectors were solidly layered in armour and equipment.

Powell offered a salute. “Sir. The special representatives from Gao, as ordered.”

The man he was addressing returned the salute. “Thank you Major. Your men may carry on.”

Powell nodded to the Protectors, and both of them promptly returned their full attention to Regaari and Ayma.

“Mother Ayma, Officer Regaari,” he announced “This is Lieutenant-General Martin Tremblay, Supreme Allied Commander for Extrasolar Defence.”

Tremblay offered a hand and shook their paws, rather more delicately than he needed to. “This day’s been too long in coming.” he smiled. “I’ve spent so long reading about the Gaoian people and what you personally did for one of ours that it’s a genuine pleasure and a privilege to finally meet you in person.”

Ayma felt her ears twist, feeling genuinely and awkwardly complimented. “Shoo always insisted there was nothing special about her.” she replied, diplomatically. “If that is true, then I must consider the pleasure and the privilege to be greater on my part.”

She caught the amused and impressed set of Regaari’s ears out of the corner of her eye, but Tremblay’s reaction was even more interesting. “Please, don’t waste a sound-bite like that on me!” he laughed. “Save it for the cameras. Sorry we couldn’t spare you those entirely, but the first official visit to the surface of Earth by nonhumans? That was never not going to be a media party.”

Had he been Gaoian, Ayma decided that she would already be contemplating a mating contract. Instead, she made a reassuring purr.

Admiral Knight nodded solemnly. “The sooner we get that particular ordeal out of the way the better, I say.” he suggested.

“Agreed.” Tremblay nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”

Date Point 10y4m6d AV
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Wei Chang

Xiù had gone very small, and very quiet.

Wei wished he knew how to talk with her. But every conversation they’d tried to have ever since she came back just… tailed off. The elephant in the room between them – the confusion of their relative ages in terms of date of birth versus the number of years they had each lived – never got addressed.

It was so sad seeing Mom try and pretend like nothing had happened. Dad somehow seemed to be taking things in his stride, but he’d become… sad. After the initial joy and worry of Xiù’s return, their dad had been behaving like he was mourning something rather than anything else.

Wei just felt like there was a stranger living in their house who’d thrown out all of Xiù’s old stuff. A quiet, intense stranger who watched things a little too carefully, who flinched at benign sounds, and who occasionally spoke the wrong language without noticing.

There was still the essential Xiù there, of course - when she could be induced to smile, she came alive again, and she never became more radiant than when she was talking to this “Julian” guy. Under the patina that years of being a terrified vagrant in space had painted on her, Xiù could still smile and laugh and play. But Wei had no idea how to get past that patina himself.

Their parents were bustling around making sure the house looked perfectly presentable for their VIP guests, and a couple of men in suits and dark glasses were patrolling the place. When Wei and Xiù had tried to help they’d just been ordered to stay out of the way and stay presentable.

So, they were sitting on the couch together, watching the visitors from Gao on TV while Wei trawled his favourite social media, following the trending topics and trying not to rumple his smart clothes. Mom had taken Xiù out shopping and together they’d found some designer tops that managed to cover all her scars without looking like she was wearing them because they would cover her scars. Xiù kept absent-mindedly trying to roll up the loose sleeves, not noticing that they just fell straight back down again.

The general consensus on the ‘net was:

1. That Gaoians were OMG SO CUUUUUUTE!!

2. Are you fucking kidding me they really do look like Rocket Raccoon WTF

3. Who are those guys in the armor behind the gaoins their HUGE?!

Some speed artist was already putting out hastily sketched comics of the two aliens with their beefslab bodyguards. They all revolved around the (exaggerated) size difference and grim expressions on the servicemen’s faces as they did things like delicately and intensely apply a band-aid to a grateful Gaoian’s minor boo-boo. Wei had a nose for these things, and he’d eat his sneakers if those two weren’t one of the memorable memes of the year.

Some of the military enthusiast circles and forums he’d found were tentatively identifying them as part of a unit based at HMNB Folctha. Their uniforms had been “sanitized”, meaning that they had been cleared of any identifiable unit markings or clues to their identities. The only thing any of the Internet enthusiasts could tell about them was that they were both medics. To a man, all of the veterans on those forums were commenting on how they seemed to be practically buoyant and bouncing despite an operating load that must have been pushing two hundred pounds. As if they were used to much more than that.

As they watched the camera focused on the male Gaoian - Regaari - behind whom stood the shorter of the two bodyguards who chose that exact moment to absent-mindedly conjure a Snickers bar out of one of his pockets and inhale it. The live chat promptly went crazy.

“That’s Sergeant Arés.” Xiù said, pointing to the screen. “He’s the one who treated me out of the escape pod.”

“Yeah?”

”…Saved my life.” Xiù nodded, gnawing on a lip.

“He’s hot.” Wei commented, and for the first time he succeeded in making Xiù laugh.

“What, you’re into boys now, little brother?” she asked.

“Please, I’m allowed to know these things, like, academically.” Wei told her.

Xiù smiled, and went back to watching the screen, quietly. Her smile faded again.

”…Xiù, are you okay?”

She shook her head. “No.”

”…Is there anything I can do?”

Xiù gave him a surprised look. Tears started welling up and she savagely got rid of them with a swipe of her hand, muttering something to herself in Gaori. “Wi-yo koo yin-shao pa, Xiù!“

“Hey…?”

She raised a splay-fingered hand to reassure him, and took a deep calming breath through her nose. “…I’m sorry, Wei,”

“What for?”

“I don’t know how to cope” She said. “I’m a wreck.”

Wei shuffled over and put a brotherly arm around her. “I missed you, you know.” he said, after a while. “We used to fight all the time. Didn’t we?”

She laughed weakly and nodded.

“You had your ballet and kung fu movies, I had my games. Not a lot in common except Mom and Dad and living in the same house. And now you’re back and we know each other even less.”

Again, she nodded.

”…I don’t know what I’m saying.” Wei confessed. “I just… What’s wrong? Why aren’t you okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know at all?”

She sighed, and wiped her face again. “Ayma and Regaari were my family out there.” she said “And I ran away from them, to keep them safe. And they’ve come here to Earth. To see me!”

Not knowing what to say, Wei just gave her another squeeze round the shoulders. Xiù just watched the two Gaoians deliver brief and neutral speeches of thanks and respect, before the press conference broke up. “I guess they’re on their way here then.” he observed.

Xiù stood up. “Yeah.” she agreed. “Yaaay.”

“Hey… Xiù?”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe just… try being glad to see them?” Wei suggested.

She just sighed, shook her head, and vanished upstairs.

Date Point 10y4m6d AV

North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

Radio wasn’t really Kevin’s thing, and that went double for country stations. There was only so much Kacey Musgraves a man could listen to, after all.

Not that this mattered for a modern man. So long as he had his phone, he could listen to whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

♪♫It was obvious you’d end this way to everyone except for you / the signs were there but living in denial is just something you do / I walk amongst the ruins and what’s left is a silent testament / to ignorance violent tendencies and stupid rhetoric…♫♪

“In a quarter of a mile, your destination is on the right.”

He slowed down, frowning, and triple-tapped the middle of his phone’s screen to pause the music. Quarter of a mile looked like a sizeable oblong stand of deciduous forest, alone surrounded by open fields of ploughed farmland.

The road was straight, but the verge wasn’t, not perfectly. As he got closer, he saw that the trees had been hiding a grey steel mailbox with a name on the side: “Etsicitty”.

It stood at the end of a dirt road, which he spun onto and bounced along, cursing the fact that he was driving a sedan rather than a four-wheel-drive.

It was a dramatic change. In an instant he’d gone from open Minnesotan sky to a dungeon of trees, trees and, for novelty, some more trees. Bright and clear as it was out, here on this track the light was much more subdued, cool and green as it filtered through new spring foliage.

He was just starting to wonder how long the trail was when it opened up into a cleared area that had been surfaced in packed-down rubble that was almost as good as blacktop. There was a single-storey house with brown panel siding tucked up under the trees, attended by three elderly trucks and a rust sculpture of a tractor that had probably, once, actually been a tractor long ago.

He pulled up somewhere he wouldn’t be in the way and heaved himself up out of the car. It wasn’t cold out, but Minnesota in April was never going to match a Texan’s standards for warmth at any hour, so Kevin was glad for his jacket.

The front door opened as he approached and he recognised Julian Etsicitty from his file. He was of only average height but in excellent shape, with a broad chest and wary eyes under unruly obsidian hair that clearly only earned his attention when it got in his eyes, being otherwise left to do whatever it liked. He didn’t look too great, Kevin decided. Like he hadn’t slept properly in a day or two. Certainly his jeans and T-shirt were rumpled and stained and he was barefoot, exposing the odd composite construction of his prosthetic.

Still, fatigue and stress or not, Kevin had seen the way his hand moved before. The nonchalant way it drifted down and aside slightly so that if he had to go for the survival tomahawk on his belt, he could do so immediately.

“What happened to your nose?” he asked.

“Said the wrong thing to somebody” Kevin replied. “Julian Etsicitty, I presume?”

Etsicitty didn’t relax. “Yeah?”

“I’m an old friend of Kirk’s. Kevin Jenkins.”

Julian relaxed. “No shit? Come on in.” He unlocked the screen door and shouldered it open. It produced a horrible scratching shriek as he did so. “Sorry. Still fixing the place up.”

“Reminds me.” Kevin popped the trunk on his car and grabbed the cooler he’d stashed in there. “My condolences.”

Julian accepted it with a kind of sad-grateful smile. “That’s kind of you. Thank you.”

“Just a few things. Fill the fridge out, y’know? I know what it’s like.”

Kevin scolded himself the second he said that. That exact same angle was what had got his nose busted in Vancouver. Fortunately, for all his wariness Julian Etsicitty took the comment for genuine sympathy.

He led them both inside. “‘Scuse the mess.”

‘Mess’ was both an understatement, and uncharitable. There was more mail than Kevin would have believed, and it was all over everything. The kitchen worksurfaces, the island, the coffee table and three barstools had all been given over to it. Still, there was organization involved. The papers were neatly stacked and arranged and there was clearly some kind of filing system involved, an attempt to bring order to chaos.

“Jeez. That’s a lot of paper.”

“Legal letters. The courts, lawyers for the Red Lake reservation, lawyers for the county, for the State, the federal attorney handling my grampa’s will… all in conflict.” Julian tapped one of the stacks, pulling a slightly panicked face.

“Damn.”

“Yeah. But, you didn’t come here for my legal problems. Kirk had a lot to say about you. Coffee?”

“Yes please. How much of what he had to say was good?”

Julian reached over and clicked the kettle to life. “I think you managed to disappoint him, but… you know Kirk. If you’re human, he likes you automatically.”

“D’you know what happened to him?”

“He should have survived.” Julian declared. “Him and Vedreg, they were the first to head for the escape pods. We didn’t hear from them after we launched, but… you know, we slept for a couple hours there before starting for home.”

“Slept?”

“Believe me, after what happened to us, falling asleep just seemed like the best idea. Ah!”

The exclamation was in response to finally finding the coffee. “How d’you take it?”

“Plain black. So you reckon he’s alive?”

“Probably.” Julian said, spooning out the granules. “But we spent five years in that pod. If he was in one of the faster ones, or if he set a different course… or both…” The kettle clicked off and he grabbed it to start pouring. “I mean he could be anywhere. And escape pods are pretty vulnerable to getting picked off by Hunters…”

“Lucky for him that the Hunters didn’t do a dang thing in those five years.” Kevin commented.

Julian handed him a coffee, quirking his head slightly. “They didn’t?”

“Nope. Nobody saw or heard from them for about that long right up until the Capitol Station attack.”

“Jesus.” Julian handed over the coffee. “What even happened there?”

“All I could tell you is I guess the Hunters wanted to prove that they’re the biggest fish in the pond.”

“I heard rumors that human starships got involved in the fight.” Julian said.

Kevin had to wonder if the man knew more than he was letting on and fishing for information. Either way, he was in danger of straying into information that at least one of Kevin’s employers didn’t think he needed to know.

He settled for a shrug and a lie of omission. “Well, we’ve got those ships, sure. Me, I’m a mushroom.” Julian frowned at him, bewildered, so he elaborated. “Kept in the dark and fed on shit.”

Julian chuckled, and cleared off a barstool for him. “Wish I had more to tell you.” he said. “The last I saw of Kirk, he said he was gonna load Vedreg into a pod and we should get ready to eject as well. I think he’s probably alive - I hope he is - but where and what he’s doing…”

They drank their coffees.

“So, hey!” Julian perked up, changing the subject. “You’re doing well for yourself. Nice car, nice suit, you can afford to drop some groceries on a stranger…”

“I work for the Byron Group nowadays.” Kevin told him, deciding not to mention his other employers. “Biggest name in space, though Hephaestus might disagree. They’ve got the Allied shipbuilding contracts after all.”

“What’s your guys’ game? How are you profiting off space?”

“Mr. Byron’s big plan is pharmaceuticals and organic materials from other deathworlds.” Kevin told him. “It’s a smart idea, too. Antibiotic resistance has really turned into a big health scare these last couple of years. The Corti want to sell us their disinfectant fields and frontline treatments, but Byron reckons we should be looking for human solutions to the problem.”

“If it works though…” Julian suggested.

“Sure. Still, he’s right. We don’t wanna become another client species of the Dominion, do we?”

“I guess not.”

“That was the other half of the reason I came down here.” Kevin confessed. “We need people who know how to survive out there, and from what I hear of you, surviving is kinda your thing.”

“What, as like an office job?” Julian asked. He gestured to the paperwork .”Really not my thing.”

“Far from it. Mister Byron told me he wants you on the crew for Byron Group Exploration Vessel eleven. A ship.”

“Number eleven?”

“Well… it’s the twelfth ship the Group’s built really, but one of them was a special case. We’re learning as we go, and the more people we can get on board with real experience the better-”

He stopped at a harsh metallic squeal from the screen door and a knock. Frowning, Julian stood up and opened it.

There was a blonde woman standing on the step with her arms folded and a severely pissed-off expression. She looked to be about the same age as Julian, and about the same height too. And, frankly, in similarly excellent physical condition.

Julian took a surprised step back. “Allison?”

“Phone not switched on, Etsicitty?”

“Uh…” Julian plunged into a pocket and tapped at his phone. Judging from the way its screen remained stubbornly black, it had a flat battery. “But… it’s Tuesday, isn’t it? Your plane wasn’t supposed to land until tomor-”

“Wednesday. It’s Wednesday, Julian. Today is Wednesday. I landed in Minneapolis five hours ago.”

”…Uhm… Fuck.”

Allison Buehler just nodded. “Uh-huh. Who’s this?”

“Uh… this is, um, this is Kevin. K-kevin Jenkins.”

“Oh. Kirk’s big disappointment.” Allison thrust her carry-on bag into Julian’s arms and stepped into the house properly. “What happened to your nose?”

Kevin tried to ignore the ‘big disappointment’ jab, stinging though it was. “Look, if you two need some privacy…”

“If Julian screwed up that big, something important must have happened.” Allison shook her head. Behind her, Julian relaxed a bit. “Do you have something to do with it? Is this your paperwork?”

“Not mine, and I’m gonna give you some room anyway. ‘Scuse me.”

He navigated past her, gave Julian a sympathetic raise of the eyebrows that said ‘good luck’, and discreetly fled to the safety of the car.

He checked his nose and decided that he couldn’t blame people for commenting. Xiù Chang had done a masterful job of breaking it.

He grabbed his phone.

“Mister Moses Byron’s office, Rachael speaking!”

“Hey Rachael, it’s Kevin.”

“Ah, yes Mister Jenkins. Putting you through now.”

“Thanks Rachael.”

There was a burst of gentle hold music and then-

“Kevin! How was Vancouver?”

“Xiù Chang broke my nose.”

”…That’s not encouraging, Kevin.”

“My own dumbass fault. She’s got it in her head that she’s home and that’s where she’s staying, and I pushed a bit too hard.” Kevin shrugged, even though Byron couldn’t see him. “But we’ll see. I’ve tracked down Etsicitty and Buehler and I think we might have a hook there.”

“Whaddya mean a ‘hook’?” Byron demanded.

Grinning to himself, Kevin explained his idea.

Allison Buehler

Once the screen door had howled shut behind Jenkins, Allison granted herself the luxury of a deep breath.

At first, she’d been irritated to discover an absence of Julian at the airport. This had swiftly grown into frustration and three or four outright angry messages left after the tone.

In hindsight, she must have looked like a goddess of rage when she was renting the car, and she’d spent the first two of the three hours she’d been driving from Minneapolis outright furious.

Then she had cooled down a bit, mostly from simple tiredness, and the rest from reasoning that it was unlike Julian to screw up so completely, which meant something serious had happened.

The last fifty minutes had been spent worrying that he was alright.

While it was a relief to find him present, upright and profusely apologetic, ‘alright’ would have been a stretch. She’d never seen him so distressed, nor so dishevelled. He’d plainly neglected to sleep or eat properly, his hair was unwashed and his chin was rough with short hairs.

One of the reasons she found Julian so sexy was that usually, he projected an air of never being out of his depth. Usually, the only thing that could disrupt his composure was Allison herself.

There was a heady feeling of power involved in being able to fluster a man like that: Finding him so badly unsettled when she hadn’t been around to cause it was so alarming that she completely gave up on being angry at him.

“God, Al, I’m so sorry I don’t know how the fuck that happ-”

She silenced him with a sweet, short kiss. “Hey. It’s okay. What is all this, anyway?”

Julian cleared his throat and scratched at his eyebrow. “Um…Legal letters.”

Allison picked one up and read it. Its content was so arcane and vague as to induce an immediate headache, but the words ‘inheritance’, ‘property’ and ‘dispute’ stood out.

“Oh. Oh no. They’re disputing your grampa’s will?”

“Everyone is.” Julian nodded miserably, sliding up onto one of the bar stools and running his fingers through his hair.

“Why?”

“Oh boy…” He cast helplessly around at all the paperwork and heaved a huge breath out. “Where do I start? Okay, so…So it turns out Grampa never really got along with the tribal elders at Red Lake.”

“Why? ‘Cause he was Navajo?”

“I don’t think that’s it, no. Might be. I dunno, I never met them.” Julian shrugged. “So that’s problem one. Problem two is there’s a question mark over where, exactly, the reservation’s boundaries even are, and whether this patch falls inside or outside them.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because Grampa filed his will with the Federal Government as if this was reservation land, but if it’s not then it’s not clear if the will’s even valid. So, the State’s got involved there, and the feds, and…oh yeah, let’s not forget my mom.”

“What about her?”

“Well, okay, say the will’s not valid but the house is on Reservation land. In that case, the property is divided equally among all Grampa’s descendents. That’d be me, but also Mom and my half-sisters. And they’re all over in the Netherlands.”

Allison leaned against the fridge. “Wait, what?”

“Don’t even start, it’s all to do with the Dawes Act and fractionation and…” Julian trailed off, scowled and gave up. “Look, I’ve not even read half of it yet. I think the AIM’s probably involved too…plus of course there’s Grampa’s criminal record.”

“Criminal-? Oh. Right. Draft-dodging.”

Julian nodded. He studied a letter then set it neatly on top of one of the piles. “Claims, and counter-claims, and challenges and all of this shit’s been bubbling away for three years.” he said. “Nobody’s been arguing my side. It’s a mess, and I don’t know how to even begin navigating it.”

“Almost sounds like it’s not worth it.” Allison commented. Julian straightened and looked at her, questioningly. “I mean…we’re going into space again, aren’t we? I know this place means a lot to you, but if you’re not here to look after it…”

Julian gave a long, thoughtful breath out through his nose and scratched at his stubble. “What are we fighting for?” he asked. “I mean, if we’re gonna head back out there…why? What are we trying to do?”

“Get the hell away from Earth. You know that.” Allison insisted.

“Yeah, I know. You feel valuable out there. I do too, I want to achieve something with my life too. And I couldn’t just sit idle, not when I know what’s out there.”

“But…?” Allison prompted.

“But…I mean, come on Al, you’ve got to have something you care about on Earth or you wouldn’t care about trying to protect it.”

Allison folded her arms at her waist. “Do I?”

“Yeah. You do.” Julian stood up and rubbed her shoulders. “You’re not doing it for the fame, are you?”

She made a scoffing noise. “What fame?”

“Exactly.” Julian agreed. “But what do we mean by ‘achieving something’ if it doesn’t have to do with…with Earth? Or at least with some of the people living on it?”

Feeling annoyed at herself for doing so even as she did it, Allison curled into herself a little more and looked away from him. “Sure. Whatever. Maybe I do have…something. Does that change anything? Sometimes you have to let go, Julian.”

He frowned. “You okay?”

“Just…Yeah.” she sighed, looked him in the eye and almost lied to him. “Yeah, I’m fine. And you’re right, I guess. I just…” she gestured to Mount Paperwork. “For what fighting this is gonna cost you could just buy a new place. I know it wouldn’t be your grampa’s, but…I mean, even if you spent all that money fighting to keep this place you might not win.”

“True.” Julian conceded, reluctantly.

“And you said yourself, you want to go back into space.”

“Also true.”

“And if you do you won’t be able to look after this place even if you hold onto it…”

Julian put a palm to his forehead and rubbed it firmly down his face. “Allison, for fuck sake…”

She paused and took a good look at him, then at all the accumulated keepsakes and history around them. “…This place really means that much to you, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah it does.”

She chewed a lip thoughtfully, then found some resolve and nodded. “Okay.”

Julian’s head bobbed uncertainly. “…Okay?”

“If it means that much to you, fight it. I’ve got your back, I promise.”

Julian sagged, relieved, then smiled a grateful nod before kissing her. “Thank you.”

She nodded, and managed a tight smile. “Maybe we should see what that Jenkins guy wants.”

Date Point 10y4m6d AV

Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Lewis

“Now THAT…” Kirk declared. “Looks impressive.”

Lewis patted its chassis happily. “That it does! Too bad it doesn’t work.”

”…Congratulations?”

“Yeah, now I understand some of that footage you managed to get from Capitol Station.” Lewis laughed. “How did you get that, anyway?”

“It was not difficult. Most of it was human propaganda footage, put out by your own government. It is meant to be seen.”

Lewis considered the implications of that.

“No shit?”

“No shit indeed.” Kirk agreed. “I managed to secure some of the station’s security footage through a contact, too.”

“Must be a fucking talented contact.”

“She is, yes… so what is this?”

Lewis considered it. “It was meant to be power armor.” he said.

“You don’t say?” Kirk asked. It was hard to see what else a humanoid metallic frame layered in armour plates and technology could be. “You mean it is not a novelty pizza oven?”

Lewis grumbled something and pushed the suit over by its forehead. It shook the deck as it crashed down, and Kirk took a dainty step back to keep his feet out of the way of the components that skittered across the floor. “Probably better at that than at being a working suit of armor, that’s for damn sure.”

“What were the problems?” Kirk asked, stooping to pick up the suit’s helmet and examine it.

“Problem one? Turns out the human body’s fucking strong anyway.”

“You don’t say?” Kirk repeated, setting down the helmet again and folding his arms. “Fancy that.”

“Shut up. I mean that even nonhuman-tech actuators and stuff can’t match us for all three of precision, speed and power. It’s… laggy. Problem two: power storage and generation. Needs a lot of both. The more I put on, the bigger and heavier the suit needed to be, which meant it needed more of both. And so on.”

“Both of those sound like surmountable challenges, with time.” Kirk opined.

“Yeah, but then we run into the problem of mass.” Lewis gritted his teeth. “See, what am I making here? If it’s a suit of armor designed for a man to wear then the man needs to be the one doing the actual moving around, right? The suit can assist him all it likes, but if he starts to tip over and needs to correct himself, then the difference between his mass and the suit’s… Nobody’s got that kind of core strength dude. Especially not with the latency problem.”

“And if the suit is in control, then the human operator is more like a pilot, and could in theory be replaced outright.” Kirk finished for him.

“You got it.” Lewis nodded. “And it turns out that in order for the mass problem to not be there, the human operator needs to go entirely. Which means I’m making a humanoid drone. Which is… cool, but what happens if somebody hacks the drone? Like those Hierarchy fucks? Hell, if I got it to work then what happens if somebody hacks the armor?”

“Assuming you could harden it against being hacked…” Kirk mused. “Could the latency problem be fixed?”

Lewis hissed through his teeth. “I… doubt it.” he said finally. “‘Cause there’s basically… like, option one: the suit responds to muscle movements. You move your arm, it senses you moving your arm, it moves its arm. Right?”

“I follow.”

“Well, okay, watch this shit.” Lewis took a step back and then swirled his arms vigorously in front of his face. To Kirk’s eyes, they were a blur. “Okay? And that’s fucking SLOW. I’m not all that fast, dude. Now let’s say I want this thing to be fast enough that even fuckin’ Ip Man could do his shit while wearing it?”

Kirk folded his legs up underneath him and sat down. This brought his eye level down to the point where he was only slightly above Lewis. “Yes…?”

“Not. Fucking. Happening. No way, no how, nuh-uh nope. Not if the suit’s reacting to the movement after it’s already begun. And that’s the kind of speed it needs to move at, so… boom goes Option One. Option two: brain scan.”

“Brain scan.”

“Yu-huh. Shove, like, an EEG or some alien spacemagic equivalent in there. Well, what happens if there’s nervejam and the dude gets a headache or worse? What happens if he’s knocked around a bit and gets kinda confused? What if he’s unconscious and his buddies need to move him? Shit, what happens if the pads come un-stuck or the sensor becomes misaligned? And that’s assuming we can even isolate individual signals like that which… I mean, I don’t think anyone’s ever gonna know the human brain that well. Too many problems for my money.”

“And Option Three?”

“JARVIS.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s how Tony Stark did it.” Lewis said. “Loaded an AI into the suit that figured out what he was about to want to do. Problem there? Tony Stark is fiction, man, and so are AIs like that. I may as well be talking about… uh, about scribing a fucking rune on the damn thing and casting a Golem spell. You may as well try and fly a spaceship by doing a tarot reading.”

He snapped his fingers at a couple of servant drones, then waved a finger at the failed power armor. “Recycle that.”

“It would not really have been much use against the Hierarchy anyway.” Kirk told him, as the drones flitted in and began to remove doomed pieces of prototype . “They are not a physical foe we can meet in battle.”

“Gotta learn how to walk before you can run, my man. This was just me proving to myself that I knew everything I needed to make complicated shit before I moved on to the real projects.”

“Your point is taken, but I am from a species that is born knowing how to gallop.” Kirk pointed out. “What is your ‘real project’ going to be?”

“Dunno yet.”

”…We have been here this long, and you have no idea?”

Lewis just made a semi-amused harrumph and threw himself into his thinking chair. “You’ve put a… a fucking huge problem in front of me, Kirk.” he said. “And I can sit here and absorb, like, biology and physics and mechanical engineering and quantum whateverthefuckery all day, but if it’s all for the sake of Earth, then I need to know what Earth needs.”

“Like…” he spun the chair around and called up the Capitol Station footage. “Look at these motherfuckers! Where the fuck did that come from? Human special forces in space? Wearing a functioning armored EVA suit? And these dudes look like your average roid-jockey’s wet dream, so some shit’s been going down on Earth, man, and I don’t know the half of it. How am I supposed to help my people if I don’t even know what we’re up to?”

Kirk’s head bobbed slowly down and then up. “I had hoped to remain out of contact a little while longer, until we were properly up and running.” he confessed. “But you make a compelling case and… we were buzzed last night.”

“Buzzed? By what?”

“A scout ship. Long-range. Our sensors did not get a very clear look at it before it warped out again, but they did narrow down the options, one of which is very worrying.”

“Worrying how?”

Kirk shook his mane, which Lewis understood as being something akin to an uncomfortable shrug. “One of the possibilities was a ship that I have placed on our security watch-list.” he explained. “It is called the ‘Negotiable Curiosity’ and it was very deliberately named. Its owner has a reputation for being able to dig up any mystery. He is… tenacious.”

“Hierarchy?”

“Everybeing is Hierarchy, if they have implants.” Kirk pointed out. “But I would be surprised if he was not out here on their orders, yes. Though, I doubt if he knows of them.”

“That settles it then.” Lewis decided. “I’m phoning home.”

Kirk made an amused sound through his nose. “I thought I was the ET?”

“Neither of us are on Earth right now, bro.”

“I shall turn off the outbound message locks on the FTL relay.” Kirk levered himself up onto his feet, they exchanged a fist-bump, and he left Lewis alone with his thoughts, which were already whirling with the letters he was going to need to write.

Lewis took a deep breath, and decided to do his yoga first. Always best to approach these things with a clear head.

Hopefully he’d think of a better introduction than “To whom it may concern…”

Date Point 10y4m6d AV

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Regaari

Xiù seemed… smaller than the last time Regaari had seen her.

When her family admitted Ayma, Regaari, Baseball, Warhorse and Stainless into their house, it was a stark reminder that humans were not all muscular, lean, predatory warriors. The young male was large, yes, but there was a roundness to his largeness that suggested a source other than physical conditioning and hard training. Her parents were lean, yes, but it was the leanness of increasing age and fragility. Both looked grey and tired.

It took a little coaxing and calling for Xiù to finally emerge, but when she did she picked her way downstairs as if walking to an execution rather than a reunion.

It didn’t help that Ayma said nothing and just stared at her. Nobody spoke, no sounds were audible except the creak of the steps, the rustle of clothing and a car accelerating down the road outside.

There were times when etiquette between Gaoian females became so tangled and complicated that even male Gaoians, who were perhaps the best-placed beings in the galaxy to have an insight into it, had trouble keeping up. A moment like that happened now.

Ayma spoke first, and she used the tone of a mother about to give a scolding. “Sister.”

Xiù swallowed and glanced up the stairs, perhaps considering the option to flee, but she looked back to Ayma and responded with an inflection that implied… not defiance, but not submission either. A standing of her ground. Her Gaori really had improved from when Regaari had first met her. “Mother.”

The silence stretched until it was vibrating and Regaari was desperate to snap at both of them when, at once, the two females ran out of resolve and collided - gently in Xiù’s case and unreservedly in Ayma’s - in a solid hug that saw both of them sink to their knees. Gaoian and Human body language rarely aligned so perfectly.

Everyone looked away, giving them what privacy they could, and Warhorse had the presence of mind and good manners to shut down the translator. That left only Regaari able to understand what they were saying to each other, and he made a point of not listening.

Eventually, Xiù exhumed her face from the fur of Ayma’s shoulder and aimed a weak smile his way. “It’s good to see you again, Regaari.” she managed.

Unable to quite summon any words, Regaari settled for ducking his head vigorously. Xiù pulled back from Ayma, gave her a curious look, Ayma nodded, and Xiù stood to give Regaari a huge but controlled hug. After a few tentative seconds, he returned it.

She looked around. “Could we… have some privacy please?”

While Xiù’s family promptly nodded and left the room, Warhorse and Baseball were more reluctant. “This room’s not been properly sanitized, miss…” Burgess said.

“Please, guys.” Regaari turned to them. “We won’t take the excursion suits off, and I trust Xiù to shout if we need help.”

Both men turned to Stainless, who pursed his lips, thinking.

“We’re not goin’ further than the far side of that door.” he declared, pointing to it.

“Deal.” Xiù agreed. “Thank you.”

Xiù stood as they left the room, then sank down on the couch as if she was suddenly exhausted.

As soon as the door clicked shut, Ayma laid into her.

“What were you thinking?!” she demanded.

“Me? What are you thinking right now?” Fatigue gone, Xiù shot to her feet. “I ran away to protect you! To give you the chance to get on with your lives! And this is how you repay that? You come here?! Don’t you know that every breath on this planet could kill you?! Don’t you care?”

“Sisters stick together, Shoo, you know that!” Ayma yipped.

“NO!” Xiù spun away, clawed at her hair and gathered her composure. In a much quieter voice, she carried on. “Sisters care for one another. Sisters protect one another, Ayma. And you’re standing exactly where you shouldn’t be because you just don’t seem to understand that I don’t want you to get hurt. Not- not for me. I’m not worth that.”

“Triymin thought you were.” Ayma pointed out.

“Triymin is dead.” Xiù stumbled over the word. “I’m not worth that. I’m not.”

“Well we’re not dead.” Ayma pointed out. “And… I think you are worth coming here for.”

“Why?” Xiù sat down again. “I’m nobody special, Ayma. I’m just… I’m just me. I wanted to be an actress. Lots of girls want to be an actress. I did ballet, I had a room full of… of shit that I didn’t need…” She spat the word in English rather than Gaori. “I was normal. I can’t handle being anything else.”

Regaari laid a paw on Ayma’s shoulder. “Tell her.”

”…We had a cub.” Ayma said, getting his drift. “A female. We called her Shoo.”

Xiù sighed and rubbed her face. “I… I’m delighted. Really I am.” she said. “But… Um, I know that you don’t do family the same way that humans do. I know that little…” She smiled “Little Shoo will grow up in the commune, just like you both did, and Myun and - How is Myun, anyway?”

“Wealthy and quite happy to be a human fangirl.” Regaari said. “She and I have a cub too. Or rather, she’s expecting one.”

Xiù sat back, stunned. “God. She’s old enough to have a cub now… her first?”

“Indeed.” Regaari duck-nodded.

“With you?”

Regaari duck-nodded again. “A male, probably, if the antenatal scans are accurate.”

Xiù’s face moved in a complicated way as she tried to smile and frown at the same time. “…I just don’t understand you.” She told them, quietly. “You have a cub together, she’s safe on Gao, and instead of being there for her you come here to this - this deathworld? You should be with the people you care about!”

“We are with the people we care about!” Ayma keened, stepping forward and delicately taking Xiù’s hand between two of her paws. “Don’t you see? It’s not about what you’re worth, it’s about…” she changed vocal gears, picking a word in English. “Family!”

“My family are outside.” Xiù said.

“Your family,” Ayma corrected her “-are the people who care about you. And as our species proves, that’s not a matter of genetics. Here we are, Shoo: Here’s your family, right here in this room.”

“And we know you care about us too.” Regaari said. “You don’t want us to be hurt. But we don’t want you to be hurt either, and right now…it’s obvious that you are hurting.”

Xiù blinked at them, then looked away, and down. She grimaced at herself and snapped her head back to blink back tears.

“Shoo?”

“O… WŎ wánquán míngbai Ie…”

“Shoo?”

Xiù sat forward and let out a long breath. “I had… somebody came to see me, a few days ago. He said things that made me so angry that I broke his nose.”

Ayma and Regaari inclined their ears in mutual confusion, not sure where she was going.

Xiù didn’t seem to notice. “I know why I was so mad at him now. It’s because he was right. I’m not home, am I? This really isn’t home any more. And I’ve been hurting myself trying to pretend that it is.”

“So… where is home? Gao?” Ayma asked.

Xiù shook her head. “No… No. I’m sorry Ayma. I’m so sorry for running away, but it’s not. It can’t be, I won’t endanger Gao like that, or any other world. I won’t endanger you like that.”

Ayma moved her head softly in agreement. “I know. That’s why we came here. I wanted to tell you that I forgive you for running. I… You were right.”

Very gently, Xiù sat back, took a deep breath, and let her hands fall onto her lap. “…Oh, I needed to hear that.”

“So… where is home?” Regaari asked her.

She looked at him, opened her mouth to say something, then plainly reconsidered and lapsed into thoughtful silence, staring at some distant point far away beyond the carpet. Regaari gave her a few seconds, and then verbally prodded her. “Shoo?”

”…I’m not sure.” Xiù said, shaking herself out of whatever trance she had been in. “But… but I think I have a good idea where to start looking.”

Date Point 10y4m6d AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

After carefully filing the drift of legal correspondence in a heap on the coffee table, the three of them had been able to fit around the kitchen island on the bar stools. Julian sat at one end with Allison next to him, and Jenkins and his sophisticated state-of-the-art phone complete with holographic projector sat at the other.

“So… pretty much since Scotch Creek released the first wave of warp and kinetic tech to the public, the second space race has been a whole thing.” Jenkins told them. “You’ve got Hephaestus LLC up on Ceres, Red Bull driving their sales by sponsoring everything that flies higher than a football, BAE and Lockheed-Martin vying for the military contracts, Virgin’s space tourism and starkisser flights… and Byron Group.”

He swiped through a few items on the phone and then grinned as it delivered a shimmering, transparent rendering of what was clearly a spaceship. “Most of what the Group’s up to is applying space tech to people’s lives down here on Earth. Forcefield solar power, stasis fridges, sanitation fields…holographic phones and TVs…” he gestured to the phone with a smile and a shrug. “Doesn’t hurt that the Group makes the best warp engines and jump drives, too.”

When Allison and Julian just waited patiently and listened, he cleared his throat and forged ahead.

“What that buys is the cash for what Mister Byron calls ’moon laser projects.’ He’s got big dreams: Human colonies, interstellar low-latency communications, interplanetary trade by jump array instead of freighter… you name it. Stuff that needs a big investment. Top of the list are colonization and trade.”

“So you need explorers and market surveyors.” Allison observed.

“You got it. Folks who can find us worlds to live on, tell us what we’re going to have to do to live on them safely without killing all the locals. Folks who can talk with the locals and maybe find out what they’ve got that we want, and what we can pay them. Hence, the Byron Group Exploration Vessels. This here is EV-Ten, ’Creature of Habit.’ The most recent one.”

“Sleek.” Julian commented. It really was. The ship was clearly nothing but functional, but it was functional in the same way as a good knife - the sheer unyielding utility of its form was beautiful in its own right.

“Moon laser shit again. Mister Byron reckons the human ’brand’ is gonna be about the aesthetics of function. Got to impress the customer, he says.” Jenkins’ tone suggested that he had disagreements there. “Anyway… the thing is, about half of the ships in the EV program never came back. We’ve mostly figured out what got ‘em, but if we can crew them with people who know what it’s like out there… Starwise people, you know? Like streetwise, but for-”

“We get it.” Allison told him. Julian suppressed a smile. She was entertaining when she got prickly.

“Right… Well. That’d be you guys. Xiù Chang too, if you can talk her into it.”

“Can’t you ask her yourself?” Allison asked.

Jenkins cleared his throat awkwardly. “She, uh… wasn’t receptive to the idea.”

Allison sat back. “Oh. My. God. Xiù broke your nose!”

”…Yeah.”

Julian and Allison frowned at one another.

“We like Xiù and we trust her opinion.” Julian told him. “If she got pissed at you, that’s kind of a deal breaker.”

“That’s a pity, because the Byron Group’s prepared to take on your legal SNAFU, win it, and install a caretaker to keep this place in working order while you’re gone.”

Allison stood up. “And now I see why she broke your nose!” she snapped, and span away.

Julian just folded his arms and glared. “You’d hold that over us?”

Jenkins raised both hands. “No! No! Nothing like holding it over you! I didn’t come here to threaten. I’m just sayin’….you’ve got what we need, and we’re willing to pay for it.”

Allison turned and frowned at him, and Jenkins lowered his hands. “The offer’s honest. I promise.” He said.

Allison looked to Julian.

Julian briefly considered tossing Jenkins out on his ear… but the offer of legal assistance was far too good to waste, and there was still the unresolved question of how, exactly, they were planning to get into space and with whom…

“Give us a day or two to think about it.” he suggested.

“Sure. Here.” Jenkins pulled a business card from his inside jacket pocket. “Take your time.”

He laid it on the table and stood. “Hey… look, whatever you decide, good luck.”

Julian stood, shook his hand, and escorted him to the door.

Once the screen door had finished wailing itself closed, he took a moment to take stock of his situation.

“I say go for it.” he told Allison, turning to face her.

“Xiù broke his nose.” she repeated.

“He’s just one guy. There’ve gotta be others working for Byron.” Julian shrugged. “And… I mean, Xiù’s great but she’d be the first to say her head’s not completely in the right place sometimes.”

“Julian!”

“Remember that time she turned down Lewis by saying she wasn’t looking to ’mate’ with anyone?”

Allison blinked. “She…Uh… Okay. Point.”

“Look why don’t you call her?” Julian suggested. “My phone still needs to charge and I think she’d like to hear from you anyway.”

Allison nodded. If there was a touch of nervousness in the way she did so, Julian decided not to comment. He wasn’t quite sure where Allison and Xiù stood with one another - they hadn’t really had a lot of time to discuss things since their night of… well, since he’d been their waiter. Their shirtless, eye-candy, objectified waiter…

He sat on a bar stool again, and tried to turn his thoughts to housework instead.

Date Point 10y4m6d AV
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Regaari

Regaari had ridden in plenty of motorcades before, during his time attached to Mother-Supreme Giymuy. He wasn’t quite sure about riding sideways in a “limousine” - something that Warhorse and Baseball had quietly waxed enthusiastic about for some reason - but he had to admit that it was nice to be sitting opposite the protectors, rather than crammed in between the door and their muscles.

This particular motorcade didn’t have far to go, as apparently the distance between the Chang family’s house in Strathcona and Vancouver City Hall was not great, but it looked set to be a tense, quiet and despondent journey. Mother Ayma wasn’t happy. Not happy at all. Seething, in fact, to the point that her claws were wearing small frayed gouges in the upholstery.

Regaari and Warhorse had figured out a gesture between them which was to mean “please turn the translator off and give us some privacy.” He used it now, and Warhorse promptly nodded and obeyed. The audioscape of the limo changed ever-so-subtly as the targeted white noise that the device used to cancel and overlay speech from each listener’s perspective shut down.

Regaari steeled himself, and spoke to Ayma.

“You’re troubled.” he said.

“My Sister is plainly miserable, Regaari.” Ayma said, so fast that it was almost a snap at him.

Regaari made a little growling noise that denoted understanding and/or agreement. “You’re right, that was inane of me. What I’m wondering is what else is going on in your head besides concern for Shoo.”

“What else should be?” Ayma retorted.

Regaari tucked his right leg up under himself so as to turn slightly in the seat and face her. “What about all of your other Sisters?” he asked.

Ayma hung her head and flicked an ear, irritated. “Must you use your analyst’s brain on me?” she asked.

“I can no sooner stop being a Whitecrest than you can stop being a Mother.” Regaari replied, evenly. “I know my reasons for coming here. To forge strategic ties, to advance the interests of my Clan and by extension all Gaoians. It’s my good fortune that I can achieve those things by helping my good friend and… I admit, indulging my curiosity about Earth into the bargain. But I do have to wonder what your reasons were for coming here. You’re the one who suggested it after all. Not to be crass, but what did you hope to achieve?”

Ayma looked out of the window for a moment before replying. “Maybe I’m just a mother looking out for a wounded cub.” she mused. “Is that… shallow?”

“No, not at all.” Regaari told her. “You wouldn’t be Ayma if you didn’t care. But Shoo’s not a cub: She was an adult before we ever met her, and as I recall she saved both our lives. She’s spent more years surviving on her own than she spent with us, and she has become good at it.”

Ayma ducked her head. “She did, didn’t she? She no longer has that childish turn of phrase.”

“Did your cub grow up, Mother Ayma?”

Ayma chittered. “She did!” she agreed. “She truly did. And…It pains me to let my cubs go, but I’m glad. I think she’ll be okay.”

“I think so too.”

Ayma relaxed, and turned her attention out the window again, watching the crowd of people holding signs welcoming them to Earth. “Yes. She will.”

Date Point 10y4m6d AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Allison Buehler

It was funny how heavy a phone could be. Most of the time it was an unconsidered thing, just a part of life on Earth that would sit in Allison’s handbag or pocket - and thank God fashion had finally got its head around the idea that women wanted pockets that were more than decorative - to be ignored it until needed, at which point it would be fished out, used and returned, unheeded.

It was like an extension of her own body in that regard. And just like an arm or leg, the weight of it only ever became apparent when it had become numb. Or, in this case, when she was staring at the phone working up the courage to hit “call”.

There was, as far as she could tell, no good reason for this. Xiù was a friend, good fun. She and Allison had hit it off pretty much the second she came aboard, and that bit of fun with Julian serving drinks while they watched Mulan…

Well, that had all been good fun. Very good fun. Exciting, even.

And…that was the problem. It had been exciting: not just the thrill of pushing the limits in her relationship with Julian, but…well. They could have pushed the boat out in private, but they’d chosen to invite Xiù in. Allison had chosen to invite Xiù in. Into something she wouldn’t normally have shared with anybody, into her sex life and into her relationship with her boyfriend.

And she had thoroughly enjoyed it. She’d enjoyed watching Xiù sneak glances at Julian, and not in a smug ‘yeah, bitch, look what I got’ sense, but in…

It rang.

She stared at Xiù’s name and the video call request in dumb surprise for three rings before her thumb swiped at the green call-accept icon automatically and her voice went into autopilot.

“Hey babe!”

Xiù waved at her from the other end. She looked… peaceful. Happy, even. It was a nice change. “Hey!”

“You’re looking good! Home agreeing with you, huh?”

“Well, uh…” Xiù turned the phone around and gave her a good look at a room completely empty of furniture or decoration. “That’s complicated.”

”…Wow. they threw all your stuff out?” Allison asked, scandalized.

“Oh! No, I did.” Xiù turned the phone back around again.

“You did?”

“Yeah!”

”…Why?”

Xiù shrugged, as if it was no great thing. “It… just didn’t feel like my stuff any more.” she explained.

“None of it?”

“Just some clothes.” Xiù looked around the empty space she’d made for herself. “Is that strange?”

“Maybe?” Allison asked. “I mean, you were huge on getting home, and the first thing you do is throw out all your stuff?”

Xiù made an awkward noise and tidied up an errant wisp of hair. “I just… it feels more like my place now that it’s a blank canvas.” she said. “Have you been following the news?”

“Nuh. Why, did something happen?”

“Wow, okay… uh… Ayma and Regaari.”

Allison frowned. “They’re on the news?”

“They, uh… they came here.” Xiù said it with forced lightness.

”…As in…” Allison took a heartbeat to get her head around what she’d just been told. “They visited you? Here on Earth?”

“Right here in my parents’ front room. Yeah.” Xiù had a nervous laugh in her voice at that. The camera jolted as she shrugged. “And, uh, apparently they’re going to go visit some US national park and then fly over to England and the King’s going to give Regaari a medal.”

“A medal? What for?”

“For… um… so there was this other thing in the news that we missed. Apparently the Hunters hit this big space station that’s meant to be, like, the biggest and most important in the Dominion.”

“Why am I only hearing about this now?” Allison sat forward.

“Because we were in hospital I guess. And, um, I was too busy trying to…” Xiù gestured to the room around her. “You know, trying to settle in up here and get back in shape that I guess I just forgot to check up on the last, uh, ten years of world history. There’s… a lot of it.”

“Wow, yeah. You missed the best part of a decade, didn’t ya? When you think about how much happened in, like, the sixties or the forties or whatever…” Allison agreed.

“You missed five years too.” Xiù pointed out. “Did you know there’s a city in the asteroid belt now? And another one on the planet Cimbrean?”

“I knew there were small colonies…” Allison said. “Cities?”

“Yeah… It’s… kinda scary. When I left…I mean, aliens were just a silly story when I left and all of this would have been on TV.”

“And now you’re fluent in an alien language and could probably get a job in one of those cities.” Allison said. “Wow. Mindfuck.”

“Yeah… Anyway, uh… Regaari was on that station. With Mother Giymuy. She… didn’t make it.”

“Oh, baby, I’m sorry…” Allison moved the phone closer to her face, as if a little more digital proximity might make all the difference in comfort.

Xiù smiled for her. “It’s… it’s okay. She was very old even when I first met her, and Regaari told me the Hunters didn’t get her. I’ll miss her, but…”

Allison just nodded, and they had a moment of mutual silence before Xiù perked up again. “Oh! Okay, you know those soldiers who pulled us off the lifeboat?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, they went to that station to save people! Sergeant Arés, the one who treated me, he’s friends with Regaari! Apparently they fought together in that battle. My Regaari!”

“Wow. Small galaxy.”

“More like a really small group of guys in that job.” Xiù suggested. “Anyway, apparently the British want to give Regaari a medal.”

“And Ayma?”

Xiù laughed. “I don’t know if she wanted to scold me or check if I was okay. Both I guess? But it’s…”

Allison let her think, and after a thoughtful scratch at her eyebrow, Xiù turned back to the camera. “I guess I owe you an apology.” she said.

“What for?”

“For being so…” Xiù hunted for the right word “So down these last couple of weeks. It’s just… weird, being back here.”

Allison scooted back on the bed and folded her legs. “Not like you imagined?”

Xiù shook her head. “No. Mom’s trying to act like nothing really happened, like she’s not sixty now. Wei doesn’t know how to talk with me and I don’t know how to talk with him and Papa’s…he’s kind of… sad all the time. Like, I’ll catch him looking at me and then he’ll look away and I think I can see tears.”

Allison chose her words carefully. “D’you think that’s likely to get better?” she asked.

Xiù made a coarse noise in her throat and snarled something in Gaori. It was a good language for snarling in, like an angrier version of Mandarin as spoken by a mouthful of sharp teeth.

“Say again?” Allison asked her.

“I said… well. I said no. No I don’t. You want to hear the kind of work offers I’ve been getting?”

“Do tell?”

Xiù shook her head, smiling grimly. “Five publishers who want to ghost-write my story, some asshole from the Byron Group, and an actual porn studio!”

Allison’s mouth opened in outrage. “You’re shitting me.”

“Nuh. I think that guy was just trying his luck, though. Like, he didn’t expect me to say yes, but if by some miracle I did…”

“Did you break the porn guy’s nose too?”

Xiù went red. “How did-?”

“That Byron Group asshole showed up down here too.”

“I should have known he would…” Xiù kneaded her forehead. “D’you tell him to go away?”

“Can’t. He literally made Julian an offer that he can’t refuse… or if he does refuse, he’s crazy.”

“That good?”

“There’s this whole legal… thing with Julian’s grampa’s place. He could lose the house if it goes against him, and this place is real important to him.”

Xiù sighed. “So if you sign a deal with them, Byron Group sorts it all out?” she asked. “That kind of manipulation is why I hit that guy.”

“Manipulation it might be.” Allison agreed. “But it sounded like everyone’s gonna get what they want.”

“Do I get to hit him again?”

Allison covered her mouth to stifle a giggle. Xiù was teasing, she knew: a sure sign that for all the ups and downs of discussing the things she’d learned, she was in a good mood. “Okay, so what was it lifted your spirits?” she asked.

“Just… I guess I cleared my head out. Figured out what’s really mine in there. Like my room.”

“I hope there’s more in there than you left in your room!”

Xiù made a silent laugh through her nose. “There is.” she promised. “Look, can I come down there? Right now? I’ve… things are clear right now, and I want to act while they still are. Is that okay?”

“You know you can!” Allison told her.

“You don’t mind? I mean, just you and Julian in a little place in the woods… it sounds romantic.”

“Hey.” Allison sat forward. “There’s no way you’d make it less romantic, I promise.” she winked. “It’ll be… intimate.”

Xiù laughed, going slightly red across her nose and cheeks. Her fingertip ran absent-mindedly through the hair at her temple. “Well, when you put it like that…”

“Mm-hmm, just you, me, a gorgeous guy…and, oh my God, he has the hugest TV and there’s nobody around for miles, so we could crank the volume right up.”

Xiù giggled. “Mm. I do like to get loud…” she mused. Her phone jolted as she stood up. “I’d better book a flight and… well, let my parents know where I’m going.” she said. “Uh… See you soon?”

Allison nodded, clearing her throat to try and cure a sudden and unaccountable case of dry mouth. “…Sure.” she agreed. “You, uh, send us the… details. You know.”

“Will do. Sure. Um… ‘bye for now.”

Allison waved to the screen: Xiù smiled and ended the call. The instant the phone went dark, Allison tossed it lightly aside onto the blankets then let out a long and shaky breath. “Okay…”

She let herself fall backwards and put her hands over her eyes, thinking. “Wow.”

Julian called from the kitchen. “You okay?”

Allison peeled her hands apart and directed an embarrassed grimace at the ceiling. “Yeah! Yeah. She’s, uh… She’s coming down here!”

“So soon?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, if you wanna shower, the hot water should be full.” Julian suggested, appearing in the doorway. “Help work that stressful day off?”

A hot shower sounded like simultaneously the best idea and the worst idea right now, but a lot more of the former. Allison kicked her legs out and sprang up off the bed. “You make a compelling argument.” she smiled, and kissed him on the cheek. “Just through here?”

“Yup.”

Allison slid past him, grabbed her flight bag from where Julian had left it on the couch. “What are you gonna do?” she asked.

He just waved a hand helplessly at all the legal paperwork.

Allison sighed. “…Right. You, uh… have fun, I guess.”

The shower turned out to be amazing. She found a setting that felt almost like she was getting a massage from a wire brush and worked all the tension and travel grime out of her scalp and her shoulders, leaned forward and let decadently hot water steam and cascade down her back and legs. A different setting swirled and pulsed pleasantly across her chest and tummy, and the final setting just soaked, allowing her to employ an exfoliating scrub and get herself feeling properly clean for the first time since they’d been landed on the planet Aru.

Aru…

She killed the shower and gave herself the bare minimum of a drying-off, squeezing the excess water out of her hair and swiping it from her arms and legs with her hands. She combed her hair back, grabbed a pair of clean black panties from her luggage and wriggled into them.

Draping a hand towel around her shoulders completed the image. She studied herself in the mirror. Blonde hair slicked back and gone dark from the wetness, long limbs beaded with droplets, a lingering wet sheen on an abdomen that had only slightly suffered from not being able to do her usual regimen of crunches, and just enough breast visible behind the towel.

Perfect.

She unlocked the door. “Hey, Etsicitty?” she asked, stepping out into the living room.

He looked up. “Yea-? …Woah.“

There was nothing like making him speechless, and she deployed her best dark smile. “Come here.”

He was up and sliding an arm around her waist in a second. “Yes ma’am!”

“Oh yeah.” she laughed and congratulated herself as she felt him kiss and nibble the side of her neck and gently push her back towards the bedroom. “Good boy.”

Date Point 10y4m6d AV
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Mother Ayma

“According to your Internet, there are many females interested in you…”

Baseball perked up and rolled across a bed to take a closer look at Ayma’s screen. It creaked, alarmingly. “No shit?”

“Oh yes. There is a poll. ‘Left Beef versus Right Beef, who’s sexier?”

She wasn’t quite sure if the nicknames were intended to be insulting, but they seemed to please Baseball. “Fuckin’ beef? Awesome.”

“I would have found that insulting myself,”

“Are you kidding?” he turned towards the bathroom door and raised his voice. “Yo, Horse!”

A muffled “Yuh?” drifted through the door.

“You know what they’re calling us on the Internet?”

“What?”

“They’re calling us ‘Left Beef’ and ‘Right Beef’!”

Adam could be heard laughing beyond the door. “Which is which?” He called.

“You’re Left Beef.”

“I don’t think I understand the joke.” Ayma confessed. The Internet was a source of near limitless fascination and impenetrable in-jokes. The gist was that her Protectors had acquired almost as much celebrity - if not more - than Regaari and herself, with the commentary ranging from the objectifying and overtly sexual, to the dismissive, the political and the surprisingly well-informed.

“It’s like… Y’know what, never mind. You gonna vote?”

“On a poll as to which of two humans I find more attractive?” Ayma queried. “I don’t find either of you attractive!”

“Aww, c’mon.” Base smiled. Ayma bobbled her head in resignation, and touched her claw to “Right Beef.”

“You remind me a little of one of my mates.” she explained, while Base quietly pantomimed victory with a pump of his fist.

“I do?”

“Oh yes. He-”

They were interrupted by the bathroom door opening and a thoroughly bedraggled and uncomfortable-looking Regaari shuffled out, dripping wet and wrapped head to foot in towels and a bathrobe. Warhorse was slightly behind him wearing only a pair of shorts and looking rather more comfortable, though that was hardly strange. Moisture and humans seemed to go together well.

“Oh dear. Our turn?” Ayma asked.

Regaari made a show of seating himself in as dignified a posture as he could in front of the large mirror that dominated the main room. To Ayma’s eyes, he was still as sleek and handsome as ever, and in any other setting she might have been able to appreciate his slender strength and some fond memories of the time spent siring their cub together.

Next to any human, however, any Gaoian was skinny. Next to Warhorse, Regaari looked positively pathetic.

“Your turn,” he confirmed, fighting to maintain some semblance of gravitas when he looked half-drowned and was shivering uncontrollably.

“Yeah, uh… Dude. Don’t use Formulation Three.” Warhorse cautioned, referring to one of the hypoallergenic shampoos they’d been able to acquire for the mission. The Gaoians were going to need a thorough decontamination at the end of every day, and finding products that were safe for nonhuman skin but still tough on Terran pathogens and allergens had been… challenging.

Base’s brow creased interrogatively. “Okay, but why not?”

“Turns out it contains civet musk oil.”

“That’s bad?”

“Don’t. Ask.”

“Though, um, any clan which imported that… substance would surely become very wealthy and powerful.” Regaari fidgeted in his seat.

“Ah. you mean that… interesting scent isn’t you?” Ayma asked, flicking an amused ear. The vapor that had spilled out of the bathroom alongside Regaari and his human friend had a potent aphrodisiac component. “I shall have to alert Yulna to the danger of males trying to import this substance…”

Regaari’s ears wilted and he fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat.

Ayma decided it would be cruel to tease him further. “Very well. Shall we go decontaminate, Baseball? Hopefully any lingering… awkwardness will have dissipated by the time we are done.”

Base chuckled. “Sure.”

Ayma couldn’t hold back a deep wave of trepidation when they entered the bathing suite. “Does it truly have to be a wet bath?” she asked.

“Truly does, unless you wanna wind up breathing in all the deathworld stuff in your fur. And, uh, you’re gonna need to seal those robes in this here bag.” Base offered it. When Ayma duck-nodded and began to remove the garment, he turned around sharply.

”…What are you doing?” She asked.

“Just, uh…”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” Ayma directed an exasperated glance at the ceiling. “You and I are of different species, and mine doesn’t subscribe to human body-squeamishness in any case.”

“You’ve got those robes, an’ overalls an’ stuff…” Base pointed out, still not turning around. Ayma stuffed her dirty clothing into the bag and sealed it as the instructions dictated.

“And you have those ‘ranger shorts’ which don’t seem consistent with any other human notion of modesty I have encountered.” Ayma retorted. “Besides, how am I expected to carry my communicator and wallet in my fur?” She turned on her best Mother voice. “Now will you please recover your senses and help me decontaminate?”

The Mother voice worked. He cleared his throat and turned around, gave her a curious look, and then shrugged. “You’re right. You look more like a… a dog or a cat or something,” he agreed.

“I know what you’re saying, but please don’t compare us to non-sapient animals, Baseball.” she requested. “It’s not… dignified.”

“Right. Sorry.” He turned and grabbed some bottles. “So, this here’s the shampoos… Number three is out, so that leaves… these.”

Ayma’s nose twitched. “That’s… quite a potent scent. Why are they so perfumed?”

“Humans like our soap to smell good I guess.” Baseball, a man who smelled almost exclusively of clean sweat and testosterone, shrugged. “And these are prescription soaps for people with, like, delicate skin conditions and stuff, but they’re supposed to still smell nice.”

“They’re overpowering! Do your noses even work properly?”

Base scoffed. “Dude. Speciesist. Now come on, which smells nicest?”

“That one is…heady. What is it?”

“Uh… Coconut butter.”

Ayma ducked her head in a ’let’s get this over with’ way and Baseball started the shower, which coughed and spurted before settling into a steady stream. He ran his hand under it once or twice, gauging the temperature, then invited Ayma to do the same.

“That’s… just right.” she declared, took a deep breath and stepped under it.

Gaoians had an uneasy relationship with water. Males from working clanless castes and the more notable labor clans like Stoneback tended to clip their fur right back to the undercoat so as to soak it and work long hours, cooled by evaporating water.

Females, however, were not usually workers, and the only time Ayma had previously managed to be truly drenched had been when she had fallen into a fountain in the Commune as a young female just out of cubhood. Water had gone up her nose and she had felt miserable for hours as she slowly dried.

This was… better, at least. The water was nice and warm, but it still made her fur heavy and plastered it down, leaving her - she knew - looking small and skinny and helpless. Still, when Baseball played the showerhead over her scalp and water flooded her ears, it was all she could do not to claw at him and escape.

She settled instead for shaking her head violently to dislodge it, and Baseball made an “Uagh!” noise as second-hand water splattered his face.

“Right, because you have grounds to complain.” Ayma growled. She was already shivering, despite the water’s warmth.

“You’re the one who wanted to come to this planet.” Baseball reminded her. “Ain’t my fault that means a thorough shampoo once a day. Here.” He handed her the showerhead. “I got all the stuff you can’t reach. You’re on your own for the front and the awkward bits.”

Ayma accepted it and dutifully set about making sure every inch of her was properly soaked. Baseball, for his part, squirted a large (and cold) dollop of soap onto her upper back and started to massage it in with equal parts strength and delicacy.

“So who was this mate I remind you of?” he asked.

“I-? Oh. Daar, the sire of my third cub. Daar of Stoneback.”

“Big guy?”

“The biggest. Daar is the Stoneback clan’s great success story.” Telling the story was a welcome distraction. “The end product of their whole genetic program. He’s almost as strong as a human, in some ways.”

“Right. Y’all aren’t that far behind us really.”

“Far enough behind that if you were to punch me, I would have better chances of surviving a pulse pistol.”

“Yeah, but part of that’s… like, we’re made to punch. Gaoians aren’t. Bet you if you could use that long dorsal muscle for punching you’d hit about as hard as we do.”

“I have my doubts.” Ayma shook her head again. Baseball raised a hand to ward off flying droplets. “…I’m sorry. It’s very hard not to do that.”

“You okay?” Baseball asked.

“I itch all over. Wet fur… what is the term? Sucks.”

“Beats acute respiratory distress.” He reminded her. “Here’s the shampoo.”

Ayma accepted it and set about massaging it right into every hair follicle she had. “He’s a bit of a freak, really.” she conceded. “But that’s what his clan have been trying to breed for thousands of years: a freak.”

“I’m guessing they’re breeding from him, too.”

“With females who’ll accept the proposition, yes. As I did. Apparently I’m quite the catch,”

“Why’s that?” Base asked. He started rinsing out the soap again.

“My own genetic legacy includes Clans Highmountain and Goldpaw.” Ayma revealed.

“That’s good?”

“They specialize in science and philosophy and in commerce and trade respectively. Thinkers and merchants. A good legacy, and one I’m proud to be part of.”

Base’s hands paused. “See, that’d bother me.” He said. “Being just… being valued only for my genes.”

Ayma turned her head and gave him as best a sidelong glance as she could. “Why?”

“Hey, someday, kids’d be nice.” Base said. “But I wanna make a difference myself, not just be the daddy of the person who made a difference.”

Ayma turned away again. “Do you know how old I am?” she asked.

“No.”

“I will be fifty-four soon. That’s in Gaoian years. In humans years, I’m…” she raised her head slightly to perform some mental calculations. “…About forty-five.”

“Wow. I thought you were younger.”

Ayma duck-nodded again. “We don’t decline slowly like you do. We stay in our prime for most of our lives, but our geriatric decline is abrupt. The very oldest Gaoian I ever heard of was Father Fyu, who lived to be more than a hundred of our years old. The oldest I ever knew personally was Mother-Supreme Giymuy, who was ninety-two when she died. Most Gaoians… eighty of our years.”

“That’s not so bad.” Base said.

“Except that there are twelve of our years to every ten of yours.” Ayma said. “Most humans can expect to live a fifth as long again as I will, and… bear in mind, that life expectancy is the product of all our advances in medical science. And I mean no offense, Baseball, but our medicine is a very long way in advance of humanity’s.”

“Oh.” Baseball didn’t apparently know what to say beyond that, and so settled for gently plucking the shampoo bottle out of her paw and starting the second lather.

“We… are not a long-lived species.” Ayma summarized. “Not by your standards, and especially not when compared to Corti or Guvnuragnaguvendrugun. If we stopped breeding, Gao would not even go a hundred years before it was dark and empty. Is it really so surprising that I might be proud to breed and raise the next generation?”

“I guess not.” He conceded.

“Not everybody can make a difference, Baseball. Not everybody should. I respect what you and Warhorse do, and what Regaari does, but you would not be here without… farmers, and builders and all the people who are content not to make a difference. You would not exist without Mothers.”

Baseball’s hands were steady as he made sure she was as clean as possible, but his voice was uncertain. “I guess…”

“Is something wrong?”

Baseball thought before replying. “Just in my head.” he decided. “It’s your life, you do what you want with it. I guess I’m just not used to women who like raising kids and all that.”

“What kind of woman are you used to?” Ayma inquired.

“Heh. Women like Technical Sergeant Kovač, or Corporal Deacon, or Major Jackson I guess.”

“I don’t know them.” Ayma said. “Well, unless you mean the Major Jackson who was your species’ first FTL pilot?”

“Yeah, she’s working with Public Relations a lot these days, and she and Major Powell are a thing. Not sure how much of a thing, but a thing. She’s pretty cool. “

“And who are the other two?”

“Kovač is our spacesuit guru. Brain like you wouldn’t believe. Pretty sure she’s sweet on ‘Horse, too, but she’s biding her time. Deacon’s fun. She’s one of Firth’s support techs, got small hands and strong shoulders. Conditioner?”

“What does it do?” Ayma asked, studying the offered bottle suspiciously.

“Should help with the itching.”

Ayma almost snatched it from him. “Oh, by all the Clans, yes please!”

Base was right, the second he started rubbing the ’conditioner’ in, the worst of the itching faded away. “You know… if you ever retire from the SOR and find that you need a replacement career, you would be well received on Gao as a masseuse.” she told him.

“Strong but gentle, huh?”

“I am yet to meet a human who isn’t.”

Base chuckled, and handed her the conditioner bottle, which she set to work soothing her itching chest and abdomen. “But… I mean, you let me know if I’m getting too personal, but did you grow up and become a Mother and that was it? How do you know this is your calling if you never tried anything else?”

“Oh, I did.” Ayma revealed. “I took a research position at a Clan Highmountain observatory when I was young. The same one that discovered Gorai, our first colony world. But… I met my first mate there, we had a healthy female cub together, and… I immediately knew that this was what I wanted to do.”

Baseball didn’t respond, but he seemed to relax, smiled and nodded.

“You approve?” Ayma guessed.

“Like I said: S’just not what I’m used to, but I feel you. Finding the thing you know you wanna do in life.”

He grabbed the showerhead. “Final rinse.”

“Let’s get it over with…” Ayma sighed, and shut her eyes, feeling the hot water sluice the conditioner out of her fur. She just knew that her ears and whiskers were drooping piteously.

Eventually, the ordeal was over, and Baseball grabbed an enormous white towel. “Okay. Get dry.”

“I need the towel to get dry.” Ayma told him.

“Nuh-ah. This is for my protection.”

”…Oh.”

She sighed, aware that shaking water out was completely undignified and uncivilized… but also highly effective. Base raised the towel to shield himself and Ayma sighed inwardly, dropped to all fours and liberally covered the inside of the bathroom with water droplets.

It felt irritatingly cathartic and, just to spite Baseball for making her do it, she shook again a second time when he peeked over the towel, then stood up again.

Baseball wiped his face off. “Did you have to?” he complained.

“No, but you didn’t have to make me dry off like an animal.” Ayma retorted, and took the towel from him.

She threw the enormous cloth around her in a kind of rough toga and dried her limbs. Base handed her a second one. “You’re really bothered by that.” he noted.

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Not really. We’re animals. Why try an’ pretend otherwise?” Base shrugged. “We walk around, we eat stuff, breathe… animals.”

“Personally, I aspire to be more.” Ayma sniffed, scrubbing the towel into the top and back of her head.

“Me too! But you don’t get there by forgettin’ what you are.” Base opened the door.

If the inside of the bathroom had been humid and fragrant, the main room smelled mostly of hot air, moisture and wet Gaoian. Regaari was sitting miserably still while being methodically blasted by some kind of hand-held hot air gun while Arés combed and brushed his fur. Already there was a… fluffy… quality to him that just didn’t look dignified.

He gave Ayma an affronted look that communicated quite clearly that he blamed her for his current predicament.

“Ah. This must be that ‘blow-drying’ I heard so much about.” Ayma hazarded.

Base produced a second hot air gun. “Yup.”

“Is there any chance that I could…?”

“Nope.”

There was no appropriate word in Gaori. Fortunately, there were several appropriate ones in English, and Ayma dutifully selected one as she sat on the bed and awaited her turn.

”…Shit.”

Date Point 10y4m1w AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada.

General Martin Tremblay

“A nanofactory.”

“Yup.” Major Nadeau grinned. “A full-sized industrial one. Kwmbwrw tech, which puts it about five hundred years ahead of the prototype in Dusseldorf.”

“Which is a good seven years from being switched on anyway.” Colonel Bartlett added.

Tremblay inspected the summary that Kirk had sent them, after a long and tense absence.

After ten years of living at the Scotch Creek facility and seeing it go from research center to the sprawling nerve center of extrasolar defence, one thing he’d become thoroughly acquainted with was advanced technology. He might not be able to write the field equations from memory like Nadeau and Bartlett could, but when it came to spotting the strategic implications of every new piece of alien gear that came their way, he prided himself on leading the pack.

It felt good not to be playing catch-up with the geniuses.

“Suddenly, I feel a good deal more optimistic.” he mused. “We’re sure it’s Kirk?”

His intelligence advisor, Lieutenant-Colonel Clarke, pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Psychologically he’s yellow at worst, but until somebody with need-to-know on DEEP RELIC presses a scanner to his head, he’s orange.” he declared.

Tremblay sucked some air thoughtfully through his teeth. “Orange”, in the parlance of their system for classifying the likelihood that a given person was carrying a Hierarchy agent meant ‘high risk’. He would almost have preferred red - ‘strongly suspected’ - or even a conclusive black.

“And he’s not prepared to drop the shield and let anybody in?”

“No, sir. No jump beacons, no traffic. Not until Lewis Beverote finishes… whatever it is he’s going to finish. Until then, it’s communication only.”

“What, does he think we’re riddled with Hierarchy ourselves?” Nadeau asked.

“Either he’s being commendably cautious…” Clarke said, “or else he’s compromised. We have no conclusive way of knowing.”

“And Beverote needs to know what we need in order to put the factory to best use.” Tremblay read off the bottom of the report.

He tapped his thumb on the table to help him think. “…Shit.”

“Yup.” Clarke agreed.

Nadeau cleared his throat. “Sirs?”

”…We’re at an impasse.” Tremblay explained. “Can’t trust him, can’t gain his trust. Until we know he’s not Hierarchy, we can’t give him anything useful to do without potentially tipping our hand as to long-term strategy, and both he and that nanofactory are too valuable to waste on makework. We need to secure them, for better or worse.”

“What about this ship he mentions?” Clarke mused. “The Negotiable Curiosity?”

“True. if Kirk’s an active agent for the Hierarchy then including that detail in his report makes little sense…” Tremblay drummed his fingers on the desk some more, then reached a decision and stood.

“Bartlett, Nadeau: You’re dismissed. Thank you.”

Both men stood, nodded, and made their exit. Tremblay turned to Clarke.

“I want to sent a JETS team after that ship.”

“Isn’t chasing a spaceship the SOR’s job?” Clarke asked.

“Too valuable, and still recovering from Capitol Station. Still, ships can’t fly forever. Eventually they’re going to land somewhere…”

”…and JETS can pick them up when they do.” Clarke nodded. “So, we need our informants to keep watch for this thing.”

Tremblay paced by his window, thumb pressed thoughtfully to his chin. “Do we have anything on this Bedu character?”

“I’ll find out.” Clarke promised. “Who were you thinking of sending?”

“I’ll ask our colleagues down south for an STS element, I think. And we’ll need a V-Class, obviously.”

Clarke nodded. “That should buy trust with Kirk if he’s not compromised.” he agreed. “Not to mention whatever intel we can get from that ship and its crew.”

“They’ll be pawns.” Tremblay predicted. He sat back down and started to compose his requests and orders. “Still. You never know…”

Date Point 10y4m1w AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Lewis Beverote

There was an idea forming.

Okay. That wasn’t accurate. There were several ideas forming. Thousands. Most, so far as Lewis could tell, were completely batfuck crazy and of no practical use, ripped straight from the pages of old scifi novels. A factory that could turn an entire asteroid belt into an ocean of unmanned space fighters? Great idea, if only they weren’t fighting a digital species that didn’t even live in the real world.

Some kind of poison to induce implant rejection? Would have also induced fatal encephalitis.

And those were just the pertinent ideas, the ones that came even vaguely close to addressing the challenge that Kirk hat set him: Saving the Earth from the Hierarchy.

Some of his ideas were just crazy. Using forcefields to brew the perfectly aerated espresso. A field equation that proved that it was possible to build a Niven Ring if you used a solar-enclosing forcefield to power another forcefield that was powerful enough to overcome the tensile strength problem, after which point the only real obstacles were time and material. Twenty kilometer tall robots piloted by an uploaded human brain and powered by a captive black hole. The potential weaponization of mice, opera and the Big Mac. A nutritionally balanced and, importantly, palatable portable ration to replace the nutrient sphere, derived from maize and rice.

Okay, maybe that last one wasn’t so crazy.

The point was… all the data in the world was useless without context. How could you even start thinking about saving a planet from an implacably genocidal species of sapient software who held the lives of ninety percent of the galaxy’s population to ransom?

He’d been chewing it over for weeks. Fine, save the world. Great. But every scrap of data he was learning about every discipline he could think of was only doing more and more and more to convince him that there was nothing he could do.

Kirk hadn’t visited in a few days. Vedreg’s chromatophore strips had a sickly, cautious quality to them. Every conversation ended in an argument, in rage, in futility.

There was, he knew deep in his bones, just no way that he could save Earth.

And that was where the idea was coming from. The idea was this:

If it was true that once you had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained - however improbable - must be the truth, then it followed that once you had eliminated all of the impossible courses of action, then whatever options remained - however dubious the odds of success - must be the one to go for.

When Lewis came to speak this thought out loud, it didn’t sound half as good as it had in his head.

He simplified it to something he preferred: “If you can’t do what you’d like, do what you can.”

He couldn’t save the Earth.

But, he was beginning to suspect, he might just be able to save the human race.

He deleted his files and started over.

Date Point 10y4m1w AV
null

Regaari

Major Powell was practically radiating unease, not that Regaari could blame him. After all, what Regaari was about to do was a calculated risk that would have incredibly serious repercussions for the major if it went wrong.

“You’re certain about this?” he repeated, for what must have been the thirtieth time.

“I’m certain, major. You worry after me like a Mother with a sickly cub!”

“Aye, I suppose I do…”

Ayma made a nervous noise. “He really is not the only one. Regaari, this isn’t wise.”

“Aye.” Powell agreed. “This is a risky endeavor…”

“And a rewarding one, personally and professionally, for both of us.” Regaari insisted. “Now please. My mind is made up: I’m doing this.”

‘This’, meant unadulterated, unfiltered immersion in the alien beauty of the landscape that surrounded them. He and Ayma were, after all, visiting the most dangerous temperate planet outside of Nightmare known to exist, and that sparked his adventurous spirit in a way that surprised even himself. How could he not explore such a place?

Of course, when comparing Nightmare and Earth, the question of which was “most dangerous” was open to some interpretation. Nightmare had seasonal extremes unseen on any other temperate world and those extremes drove a boom-bust lifecycle that even the Earth couldn’t match. This in turn inspired absolutely vicious flora and fauna during the resource-rich summer and a deep, torpid sloth during the long, long winters.

And yet…

Clan Highmountain - ever the scientists and farsighted thinkers - had once sent an expedition to Nightmare, looking for clues to what awaited Gao in the future millions of years of its slow ascent into Deathworld status. Nightmare’s highly eccentric orbit had turned out to be surprisingly bad for diversity: with the whole planet being freezing cold for two thirds of its year and with a scorching hot summer sandwiched by brief, mild equinoxes, biome variation was almost nonexistent. Nightmare was essentially a single, worldwide temperate rainforest, having a remarkably uniform catalog of species from pole to pole. Every last one of which were impressively lethal, to be sure, but nothing like the rich diversity of what Earth had on offer.

Earth had so many ecologies that it boggled the mind.

To Regaari’s thinking that made it more dangerous, and far more interesting. The regular seasons might have made it easier to plan for and gather resources such as food, but even a day’s walk away may find a hapless wanderer in a totally different environment, surrounded by unforeseen lurking dangers. The very idea of being able to stand on a desert hilltop and see lush grassland, or gaze across a wide river to see forest on one bank and swamp on the other was compelling.

There were political calculations involved beyond his genuine desire to see what the humans called “Mother Nature”. Yes, the award he was due to receive from the “British” was a massive propaganda victory for Clan Whitecrest, but the real value would be in the footage of a Gaoian - a Whitecrest - walking unaided and (mostly) unprotected on the most infamous of Deathworlds. That would go down well at home.

It was certainly going down well on Earth. The reporters that dogged his and Ayma’s every step were being kept at a respectful distance, shooting video with long-throw lenses and drones that were, next to galactic technology, shocking primitive but still elegantly functional in their design and execution.

He recognised major Jackson, standing politely near to the reporters. She had spent time in front of many of them in turn, answering questions, putting on a smiling face, controlling the official Allied take on Regaari’s experiment, and occasionally conversing with Powell to pin down some minute detail of their message.

Deciding that he’d pontificated long enough, he glanced at Warhorse who was fiddling nervously with a pouch on his tactical vest, then at Ayma. Both gave him a reluctant nod.

Regaari gulped, read his hazard detector one last time and confirmed the air was currently safe to breathe, stepped out onto the bluff, deactivated the forcefield around his head, and breathed.

He immediately erected the shield again. The experience hadn’t been unpleasant - far from it - but it had been the olfactory equivalent of walking into a room where loud music was playing. The nose needed time to adjust.

This time, he scaled down the field intensity by degrees, allowing more and more of Earth’s rich, warm, moist air to reach his nostrils until finally the field was gone and he could immerse himself in the full perfumed glory of it.

It was beautiful.

There were so many, many, many different and competing aromas, some subtle, some cloying, others brutally intense. For a long while he just stood there and drank in the bouquet of Earth, letting it suffuse him and change him. He had never experienced anything quite like it and he knew that he would later spend hours describing this little aspect of his adventure to his Brothers, all the while failing to properly convey it.

Behind him, he was dimly aware of cameras clicking and whirring madly as they recorded his obvious pleasure.

The second thing he noticed were the sounds. Once the cameras had died down a bit and the Park Rangers encouraged some quiet, the gentle, subtle sound of everything came to him. Life was here. Life in such enormous variety that it humbled what one might find anywhere else. Life in all of its tiny, scuttering, careful beauty. He twitched an ear as something small moved restlessly in a nearby bush, no doubt scared still by all this activity. A flying animal of some kind whirred as it burst out of one bush, undulated over a hundred meters of ground in three short bursts of powered flight, and vanished into another bush.

There was more to be seen than would be gained by simply standing still and let it come to him. He wanted to explore, and so he opened his eyes and set off on a tour with the Park Rangers who, casting the occasional glance at Warhorse, set about showed him things that challenged his perception of what a Deathworld really was.

First was the stunning, complex interplay of life itself. There was so much of it, even here, even in what was allegedly a rugged and comparatively empty part of the planet. The weathered badlands were far, far from dead and empty: They were utterly alive with flowers and shrubs and insects too numerous to count, buzzing and rustling in the breeze and each contributing to the loud but delicate nasal symphony.

Earth, the most infamous Deathworld in the galaxy, was bursting at the seams with life.

The tour wound on. Gaining in confidence, the park rangers picked out some binoculars and began to point out wildlife both nearby and distant. They steered him away from a fat, humming bee (a real danger, if it were to sting him) directed his binoculars to a bison (so big!) pointed out some nearby rabbits (which vanished when startled, so quickly that Regaari barely saw them do it) and off in the distance, a mighty, fearsome grizzly bear (that creature made even the well-armed Park Rangers nervous).

He watched it stand on its hind legs, aim its nose at them, sniff the air, the drop onto all fours and beat a dignified retreat. The bison had done something similar.

“It’s… running away?”

The park ranger nodded. “He’s just staying out of our way.” she agreed.

“Why?” Ayma asked.

“We’re an unknown to him and may be risky. Most animals will keep to themselves unless they’re forced to interact.”

“That seems wise, I suppose.” Ayma conceded.

“It’s deceptive.” Regaari mused. “I know that bear is a dangerous animal, but from this far away it almost seems…comical and fuzzy.”

“Maybe, but he’s decidedly not.” the ranger told him. “Like you said, that bear is far away. Up close, a specimen that big is a threat to even a bison. His has claws are about THIS long, his teeth are THIS big, and he’s stronger than any human alive.”

The Major huffed quietly at that, a slight grin on his face. Regaari would ask about that later.

“Anyway, that’s why we’re keeping our distance, and I think he has the same idea.”

“But surely that bear would not fear us!”

“Hard to say.” the male ranger chipped in. “Bears are unpredictable precisely because they’re so large and powerful. If he was hungry? Perhaps he may have investigated, but a good dose of pepper spray in its face would likely have scared it off. A mother protecting her cubs? Well…that’s a story we didn’t need to tell today.”

Ayma chittered at that. “Ah. That sounds familiar.”

The warden smiled at her, maybe not quite understanding the source of her amusement. “…But for the most part? He’d probably keep his distance, especially of a group this large. Wildlife is generally shy.”

“…shy? Why would he be shy?” Regaari asked.

“Because he’s smarter than the average bear.” the female ranger commented. There were chuckles at that, meaning that it was presumably some in-joke or pop culture reference that Regaari had yet to encounter. “We’re dangerous and he damn well knows it.”

Ayma’s ears twisted as she watched the bear pause atop a slight swell in the terrain and look back. “Understandable, but in that case why are we avoiding it?”

“Because he’s dangerous.” the male ranger replied. “Which means that too close an encounter would end with him dead and maybe someone here hurt, probably quite badly. And none of us want either of those things.”

That struck Regaari as a very human thing to say - All the destructive ability in the galaxy, and no desire to do so. At least, not here, and not now.

“Anyway, he’s not even the biggest threat. There’s a pack of wolves yonder-” he pointed, and both Gaoians raised their binoculars. Regaari fancied that he saw a flash of fur among the distant grasses. “-that’s been skirting the outside of our sight, watching us. They know us.” he gestured to his partner and himself “…but don’t know you or anyone else here.”

“Wolves? Surely those would be a danger! I’ve read they were feared for millennia.” Ayma sounded genuinely alarmed.

“They don’t usually attack humans, not unless they’re desperate.” the female ranger reassured her. “And even they’d rather avoid the risk. Here, in this place? Attacking prey is dangerous. What if you were a wolf, and that bison turned around and gored you? You would be broken and a liability to the pack. Would you survive? The pack would bring you food and such, but what if you didn’t heal? A broken bone is practically a death sentence in the wild. What if the wound became infected?”

She smiled fondly at the wolves while the Gaoians mulled that point over.

“So how do they hunt, then?” Regaari asked. “They must take some risk.”

“They go after the sick and isolated and obviously weak, or smaller things like the rabbits. They won’t attempt larger and more dangerous prey unless they must. And, hell, sometimes rival predators decide to be friends. We’ve seen it more than once, particularly with bears and wolves.”

“Wh…friends? Why would they cooperate?” Regaari asked.

“Why not? Instead of competing for the same resource, why not share? We see it mostly with lone male wolves and bears. They may align for a season and hunt together. It increases the chance of a kill, after all. But beyond that, they do genuinely seem to enjoy company. We see polar bears up north, for example, playing with sled dogs when no food advantage at all exists.”

“Dexter.”

Regaari turned to Warhorse, who was monitoring something on a tablet. “Wind’s picking up south of here and the pollen count’s rising. Gotta call it, man.”

Regaari nodded sadly and allowed himself one last, full immersion in what his nose was telling him. He very much doubted he would ever get another chance. “Last chance.” he told Ayma.

She paused, then bobbled her head sideways - a no. “I’m not of Whitecrest stock.” she reminded him. “What you can enjoy might… I’m happy, anyway.”

Regaari duck-nodded, and, with one last blissful sniff, raised his shield again. Warhorse ran the medical scanner over him the instant it was fully up.

”…You’re probably gonna have a runny nose and watering eyes tonight.” he decided. Baseball promptly burrowed in his bag and produced some antihistamines.

“We’ll need to thoroughly scrub that fur out.” Adam added, as Regaari accepted one and swallowed it with a little water. “But… yeah, I reckon you’re fine.”

Baseball, Powell and the two rangers visibly relaxed.

They strolled gently back up the hill toward the waiting entourage of reporters, which Regaari could tell that Powell was doing his best not to scowl at. “Feel like making a statement?” the major asked.

“I think I have just the thing.”

They strayed close enough for microphones and cameras to be thrust in their direction and a clamour of questions that only quieted when major Jackson raised her hands and pleaded for peace.

Regaari had been choosing his words with care all the way up the slope. “That was an experience I know I shall never forget.” he said. “The word ‘Earth’ doesn’t quite translate properly into Gaori. We have a word for dirt and mud, another word for the ground beneath our feet… but I think having been here to see and hear and smell all of this, the word that fits best is ‘Yeì’ which means… well, it means a place where things grow.”

Lots of deathworlder teeth became visible as the journalists collectively grinned and started spinning that soundbite while Powell and the Protectors gently escorted Ayma and Regaari away from them.

Warhorse was the first to speak, once they were out of earshot. “Bro. That was a real nice thing to say.” he enthused.

Ayma chittered. “He could talk a summer flower into blooming in winter, couldn’t he?” she asked rhetorically, using a Gaoian idiom.

“Aye. Silver-tongued, so he is.” Powell agreed, using a human one.

Regaari admitted a smug little dip of his ears, but didn’t feel remotely embarrassed by the praise. “It was nothing,” he told them “but the truth.”

Date Point 10y4m1w AV
Cairo, Egypt, Earth.

Master Sergeant Roy Vinther

Sergeant Coombes was getting nervous. “There’s that guy again… Orange Five.”

“You know the drill, BOUNCER.” Vinther ordered. “Stay casual, just keep walking.”

“When are we gonna get a fuckin’ go on this thing?”

“Soon as we’ve got grounds to upgrade these fuckers to Red. You out of sight yet?”

“Made the corner, yeah. Got a good look at the guy, looks like he might be our Yemeni victim.”

“Looks like?”

There was silence and a couple of clicks on the line - Thomson must have been walking past civilians and unable to speak. Some seconds later, he was able to reply. “Looks a lot like.”

Vinther glanced over to where Staff Sergeant Walsh, their “intel weenie”, was sat behind him in the nondescript van they’d parked a hundred yards or so from the suspicious site. The description was a joke and a farcical one: Walsh was a Combat Controller with Duty and Secondary AFSCs in ops intel. He’d been forced out of the early SOR highway by an injury, making him by far the biggest guy on the operation. Not SOR-big, but still a large, strong dude, with an even larger, stronger brain.

Walsh got on the line himself. “BOUNCER, DRINKIN’ BUDDY. Scale of one to ten?”

“Solid eight for ya, DRINKIN’ BUDDY.”

Walsh nodded, then frowned at his tablet. “Convoy. Comin’ in from the north. Two SUVs, a van and a pickup.”

Vinther checked with their guy on a nearby rooftop, Staff Sergeant Porter. “HANGOVER, you got eyes on?”

“Sure do, BARKEEP. Headed right past you.”

Everyone promptly scooted down in their chairs so as to be invisible. They didn’t move or make a noise until the eight vehicles had rumbled past.

“BARKEEP, HANGOVER. They went into the compound.”

“Walsh…?” Vinther asked, over his shoulder.

“Red.” Walsh decided.

“That’s a red.” Vinther declared, for the Delta Force team to hear. “Go for stage two, just like we planned.”

Stage two took advantage of the quiet and careful reconnaissance they’d made on the compound, an old souk that had been long since converted into a warehouse or workshop of some kind, enclosing a large open area. It was a thoroughly permeable structure, but that worked both ways - plenty of ways in, and plenty of ways for hostiles to slip out or wait in ambush.

Vinther and Walsh had the “low-risk” approach - a corner of the building where an old window had been covered over with some drapes and not much else. Thompson had already checked it and declared that a stealthy ingress that way should be thoroughly do-able. They grabbed their M4s, were out of the van and up to the old souk in seconds.

Vinther took point. It was the work of seconds to move the drapes aside, pull himself through, and wave Walsh in after him.

Their radio clicked. “BARKEEP, HANGOVER.” he was whispering, sub-vocalising into his mic. “Shit’s moving down here, they got two hostages, so we better pick it up - Oh Jesus fucking Christ….”

Vinther and Walsh exchanged a frown. HANGOVER was a professional. Hearing him so upset was jarring. “Sitrep”

“They took her brain out, what the fuck? What the… fuck. Oh God”

“They what?”

“Black. We’re fucking black. We need the fucking Rangers in here right now.” Walsh hissed.

“Call ‘em.” Vinther agreed, aware that Walsh had probably sent that on all channels just for the few extra seconds it’d earn. He darted up the hallway they were in and to a doorway, carefully swept his gun around the whole room as he stepped over the threshold. Once happy that it was clear, he scurried over to the window that looked into the courtyard.

About a half-dozen people were standing around watching invisible forcefields delicately, bloodlessly and seamlessly reassemble a woman’s head. Restrained next to her was a weeping younger woman with a strong family resemblance to the victim and vomit down her front. Even as he watched, the forcefields dropped the victim delicately onto her feet. She blinked and looked around and then, without any speech or apparent communication at all, stepped over to help one of the others in picking up her terrified former family member.

“BOUNCER, you got a shot?” Vinther asked.

“Yeah.”

“Take it.”

The unfortunate new biodrone’s head burst. The hostage screamed and collapsed, hands flailing as her other captor met a similarly decisive end. She wrapped herself into a tight ball with her hands over her head as the remaining biodrones reacted as a single unit, drawing guns and firing at BOUNCER’s position.

Vinther took his own shot, and watched in astonishment as it clearly ricocheted off something solid between him and his target that he couldn’t see. Rapid-fire and the lightning-strike detonation of flashbangs at multiple points around the compound heralded the arrival of the Rangers.

“Watch the hostage!” he ordered on an open channel, and lined up another shot.

He didn’t get to take it. Something made of nothing swallowed the last of the biodrones, and there was a roaring, shrieking noise as a very large and completely invisible object kicked up dust and loose objects. A flapping cloth hanging from the wall caught on it as it rose, and, sensing valuable intel afoot, Vinther kept his helmet cam trained on it as the cloth draped across it and revealed its outline.

It looked for all the world like a classic flying saucer.

The cloth slid off, the howl of UFO engines hit a peak, and it was gone with a sonic boom. For a few seconds, some last gunfire rattled around the old souk, and then the all-clear came in. A Ranger medic double-timed over to the hostage, who was wailing and cradling her loved one’s body, and Vinther relaxed.

Walsh was beside him. “Holy. Shit.”

“Yeah. Did you fucking see that?”

“I saw.” Walsh nodded.

“A spaceship. They have a fucking spaceship on Earth.”

Walsh nodded again, and rubbed at his brow. “Well,” he said. “‘Least we know about it now…”

Date Point 10y4m1w1d AV
Saint James’s Palace, London, England, Earth

Major Owen Powell

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight was in his element surrounded by ancient brickwork and the bustle of the working palace, guiding the VIPs and their Protectors into the back of some understated black cars before stepping into one himself. He seemed to fit in at the very heart of Britain’s constitutional monarchy, unlike Powell, who’d spent so many days now involved in the business of the Gaoian diplomatic tour that he was about ready to throw himself at the walls to burn off his excess energy.

Goodness knew how Burgess and Arés were faring - between the fact that their own routines far exceeded his for strenuousness, and the much greater atmospheric oxygen relative to what they were used to in Folctha, he would have expected them to be fizzing by now. That they were holding it together was at once both surprising and encouraging.

“Penny for your thoughts, Powell?”

He jumped slightly as Rylee Jackson, who somehow managed to be quiet even in the hard heels of her Air Force “blues”, stepped up beside him and gave him a gentle touch on the elbow. Any more affectionate gesture than that would have to wait for back in the hotel.

He rubbed at his chin to cover the startle. “Just findin’ it a bit strange that two American lads under my command are off to meet the King, and I’m sat here twiddlin’ me thumbs until they come back.” he mused.

“Jealous?” she asked, teasingly.

Powell watched the motorcade depart and turn towards the Mall. “Yes an’ no.” he decided.

Jackson looked around. “We’ve got half an hour before they’re due back, nothing to do in that time and you’re on edge. I know it’s not much next to your usual regimen, but why don’t we take a stroll, get a look at the place? I’ve always wanted to visit England.”

“Aye, that sounds nice.” Powell agreed. “Bloody nice weather, too.”

“If you say so.” she half-smiled, and picked at the blue pullover sweater she had on over her shirt. “It’s kinda cold for my tastes.”

“Blue sky.” he pointed out.

She rolled her eyes and her smile got a little broader. “Oh, yeah. Break out the beer and hot dogs.”

This got a chuckle out of him. “Arright. Not sure where we can stroll to around here though.”

“That’s fine. let’s just get away from those cameras.”

They did so, heading away from the stable yard and hugging the wall until suddenly they found a secluded spot where nobody could see them. Powell felt a hand on his upper arm and when he turned to check on her she surprised him with a brief, but tender, kiss.

He blinked, and laughed. “That was nice. What was it for?”

“Come on, how often do you get to sneak a kiss in the grounds of a royal palace?” she grinned and, with a tilt of her head, suggested they should start walking again. “I know, I know, we’re on the job, there’s media around, I should be more careful…”

“Oi.” Powell chuckled at her. “I won’t tell if you don’t. I like the thrill of a little danger meself.”

“Fuckin’ A!” she nodded, then put a hand to her mouth guiltily. “Probably shouldn’t swear here.”

“It’s not fookin’ church.” Powell teased.

Their stroll took them back around an internal corner of the stable yard, and back into view of a news crew. “So… what did you mean by ‘yes and no’?” Rylee asked him.

Powell shrugged. “I never met the King, but they have that tradition of service… I remember there was this interview Harry gave, when he was crewin’ Apaches in Afghanistan. Summat came up and he just ripped the mic off and belted for his machine with ‘is mates. I’ve got a lotta respect for ‘em in that regard. You know better’n anyone, it’s gotta be hard bein’ military and bein’ a celebrity at the same time.”

“Tell me about it.” She kept a professionally neutral face as the camera turned to watch them pass. Just two officers going about their business, rather than two… close friends enjoying each others’ company.

“So, yeah on that level I’ve got a lot of respect for His Majesty and the lads. But…” Powell checked they weren’t in earshot of anybody. “I’unno. I’ve always been summat of a republican meself.”

“Isn’t the King your commander-in-chief?”

“Aye. An’, don’t get me wrong, I take that fookin’ seriously. So long as that’s how it works, I’ll go wi’ it. But if there was a referendum tomorrow about becoming… I dunno, the United British Republic or summat like that? I know which way I’d vote. I’d rather have a proper constitution than all…” he waved a hand at the Tudor opulence around them. “-this.”

“Pity.” Rylee mused.

“Don’t tell me you’re a monarchist?” Powell asked her.

“It seems to work for this country. It just wouldn’t be Britain somehow without it, you know?”

“It’s not like all those buildings and stuff would just go away. Hell, it’s not like we’d roll out the fookin’ guillotine, neither.” Powell pointed out.

“Yeah, I know. Just…” she sighed and smiled at the brickwork. “I dunno. Somehow, I think the magic would go out of it.”

“They’re just blokes.” Powell pointed out. “Nice blokes, sure. Probably. But they shit just like the rest of us… and I bet they’re fed the fook up with cameras, too.”

“Hmm. Too bad all of the princes and princesses who’re old enough aren’t single.”

“Now there’s a fookin’ original fantasy nobody’s ever had before…” Powell retorted, knowing full well she was only teasing.

She laughed again. “Yeah, and it’s not like I need the visibility, is it?”

“Money’d be nice.” He suggested.

“Eh. Maybe. Y’know, I don’t know what I’d do with more money?”

“Aye. Me either.”

“So is that why you didn’t go with?” she asked. “I mean, you commanded the mission…”

“Same reason you turned down the Medal of Honor.” Powell told her. Jackson had summarily dismissed any suggestion that she should receive it even though the President had practically jumped at the chance to give her one after her mission-saving stunt during Operation Nova Hound. Current scuttlebutt had it that she’d be getting an Air Force Cross instead. “I don’t need the publicity, I don’t-”

“Powell, I turned down the MOH because the politicians don’t like letting ‘heroes’-” she gave the word a contemptuous flourish that suggested she thought of herself as anything but “-put themselves back in harms’ way. Accepting it would have ended my career. I can handle publicity and fame, even though I bitch about it. But I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep my wings.”

“Wouldn’t know what to do wi’ yourself without them, huh?”

She shook her head. “Would you know what to do with yourself without the SOR?”

Powell bobbled his head, conceding the point. “Guess I wouldn’t… that ain’t gonna end well for either of us though. You know that, right?”

She nodded. “Yup. Either we live long enough that something forces us to retire, or we get our asses KIA.”

She checked to make sure they weren’t overheard, then leaned in conspiratorially. “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but sometimes? I feel like I’d prefer the latter. It scares me less.”

Powell nodded. “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” he quoted.

She nodded. “Peter Pan? That’s us alright. Scared to grow up.”

“Christ, when you put it like that it almost sounds fookin’ cowardly.”

“Peter Pan was a coward.”

“He was a child. Immature. Not the same thing.”

“Great, so either we’re cowards or we’re childish.” She grinned, but there was an uncertain edge to it, and she stopped suddenly. “Do you think that’s true? Either of them?”

Powell shook his head. “I’m walkin’ around wi’ a woman who literally took a fookin’ bullet for me.” he said. “An’ she did it fightin’ cannibal fookin’ monsters from outer space who want the whole human race dead. How much more mature or brave do you want?”

“Don’t-”

“No. Harden up and accept the praise that’s due ye.”

She sighed and waved a conceding hand. “From you? Okay. But only from you.”

Powell smiled with her and they resumed their stroll. “I coulda gone with.” he said, gesturing toward Buckingham Palace. “But, this is a diplomatic thing. Strengthening ties. Best to let Regaari stand out in the clear, aye?”

“What’s he receiving, anyway?”

“The George Medal. For acts of bravery in, or meriting recognition by, the United Kingdom. Though, I hear they’d have preferred to take the time and commission a whole new medal recognising gallantry by ETs, but…”

“Not enough time?”

“If we get through this whole visit wi’out summat goin’ catastrophically wrong, I’ll consider it a bloody miracle.” Powell grumbled. “Five fookin’ days. Five! I’ve run some hasty bodge-job ops in my time, but five days’ notice to babysit a couple of ETs around a planet that’s become a fookin’ byword for deadliness up there…” he jerked his head skyward “Just about wins the prize.”

“Worth it, though.”

Powell scratched the side of his head, thoughtfully. “You think?”

“You said it yourself, Dexter saved the mission.” Rylee pointed out. “And I’ve met Gaoians myself. If you ask me, we want them as allies.”

Powell rubbed his jaw uncertainly. “I reviewed Warhorse’s helmet cam footage. Regaari? He fookin’ deserves what he’s receiving today. It’s the rest of his species I’m not so sure on. An’ to be honest, even a scrappy little gaffer like him… I mean, what would an alliance even look like? If we were to do joint trainin’ and it turns out they wouldn’t wind up slowing our lads down? I’ll eat my fookin’ beret, badge and all. They’re not deathworlders.”

“Wanna bet?”

“Absolutely.” he nodded. “If we ally with the Gaoians, it’ll be nice, but we’ll be the ones doin’ all the hard graft. Bet you.”

“You’re on.” Rylee grinned. “Though, I’ll be kind and have a cake replica made. No sense in wasting a good beret. Fair?”

“Aye? So either I’m right, or I eat a cake. Not exactly a fookin’ lose-lose, is it?”

“Fine, fine.” She laughed. “Loser treats the winner to a nice meal. Somewhere fancy.”

“Oh, aye. Yeah.” Powell rolled his eyes. “A date with you’s way worse than eatin’ cake.”

“That’s my cruellest offer, you sarcastic sadist.” she waved a mock-scolding finger. “Besides, you’ll be paying.”

“Only if I lose.”

“Oh you’ll lose.” She told him. “I promise.”

“Done.” Powell glanced toward Buckingham Palace again. “…An’ I hope to God you’re right.”

The Mall, London, England, Earth

Ava Rìos.

“Is that them? I think that’s them!”

“Sean, for crying out loud…”

“What? It’s kind of a big deal, Ava. Aliens visiting London? And we have front row seats!”

“Yeah, but that’s not them.”

“Oh…”

Sean deflated, and Ava fidgeted with her camera.

They had front row seats all right. They had press seats courtesy of Simon Harvey, who’d figured that alien VIPs in the heart of London was a decent starting point to test his young apprentices before they got on to the real deal.

“Okay. That’s them.” Sean asserted, as a convoy of black cars turned onto the Mall and processed with dignified slowness in their direction. Ava had to agree.

Cameras were being focused all around, and she raised her own, doing her best to stay on top of doing her job, when her mouth was dry and her heart pounding.

Simon put a hand on her upper back, in a reassuring avuncular way. “Nervous?”

“Part of me hopes he’ll see me, part of me hopes he won’t…”

Simon patted her shoulder. “You’re fine. You’ve got this.”

She nodded, and kept her eye to the viewfinder as the cars stopped in a genteel semicircle behind the barriers, under the watchful gaze of Metropolitan Police in their high-vis yellow jackets that reminded her so much of Cimbrean Colonial Security.

To her dismay, Adam stepped out of the car first. A sea of people near the front of the crowd earned Ava’s immediate hatred by going mad for him - she took a picture, framing him versus them as he awkwardly raised a hand to acknowledge the attention before getting back to the job of tending to Regaari as the Gaoian carefully levered himself out of the car.

By the time the VIPs were on their feet, had received the attention of the crowd, and had been escorted into the palace, she’d managed to become totally focused on taking pictures, while beside her Sean, armed with a tablet, did his damnedest to keep up with the flow from her camera, swiping them into a multitude of different folders for immediate upload and sale to whatever news and stock image agencies couldn’t be present to generate the pictures themselves. Within hours, one of Ava’s pictures would be on the front page of a newspaper.

Adam was the last to be ushered into the building, and she finally relaxed as it was closed behind him. He’d never even glanced at the press.

She met Simon’s eye, and he nodded. “Well done.” he told her.

It made her feel much better.

Date Point 10y4m1w1d AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

Allison Buehler was perched sidesaddle on the front of an elderly pickup, elbows-deep in its engine. She was gracious enough to dignify Kevin’s arrival with turning her head, giving him a cool stare, and then calling for Julian, who emerged from round the back of the house with a knife in one hand and an uncomfortable reminder that meat was dead animal in the other. Not that Kevin had ever not known that or been troubled by it, but a skinned goose carcass was an unsettling sight if you weren’t prepared for it.

Unless you were used to it, it seemed. Even Buehler gave it a slightly uneasy glance as Etsicitty hung it by its feet from a hook under his house’s eaves and rinsed his hands from the garden hose.

“Shoot that yourself?” Kevin asked him, by way of an ice breaker.

“Nope, it was defeated in battle and committed hara-kiri.” Julian told him, and mimed handing him something. “Here’s yer sign.”

”…Huh?”

“Never mind… If you’re here about the contract, we’ll discuss it after dinner.”

”…Don’t suppose I can convince you to discuss it earlier?” Kevin asked. “It’s not even noon yet.”

“Nope.” Etsicitty told him. “You can go an’ come back, make yourself useful or, hell, just take a stroll round the property. But we’ve got a lot to get done while it’s light.”

Kevin considered his options, then decided he may as well ingratiate himself by being useful. “Uh… you need a hand with that pickup, miss Buehler?”

She laughed. “You’re gonna help me do engine maintenance in that suit? You’re a brave man, mister Jenkins.”

Kevin shrugged the jacket off, threw it onto his passenger seat and rolled up his sleeves. “Fuck it. Dry cleaning’s a travel expense.” he declared, declining to mention the two spare suits in the trunk.

Buehler made a could-have-been impressed motion with her head, and waved a hand that was black halfway to the elbow in the general direction of her toolbox. “One and one-eighth.”

Kevin ambled over to it, turned a few socket wrench heads over in his hands until he found the right one, and handed it to her.

“Your enthusiasm’s overwhelming.” she muttered, leaning back into the engine and ratcheting deep inside it. There was a kind of plastic spattering noise from under the truck, which, when Kevin stooped to look, turned out to be murky brown fluid gushing into an ancient yellow bucket.

“What’re we doing?” he asked.

“Complete fluid change. This thing’s not been driven in six years.” Buehler told him. “Water, brakes, transmission, oil…all of it.”

The separator finished draining, and she slipped a hand deep into the engine to close it off again.

“Where’d you learn how to do this?” Kevin asked her.

“Not being a fucking little girl about getting my hands dirty?” She asked. “This isn’t rocket science. These things are made to be maintained…Here.” She popped a filthy air filter out of its housing and shoved it into Kevin’s chest. “Replacement’s in the garage.”

Brushing dirt out of his shirt, Kevin followed instructions and head for the garage. Etsicitty had vanished in there and was cleaning and sharpening his knife.

“She doesn’t like me much, I think.” Kevin ventured, setting down the old filter and collecting the new one.

“She doesn’t hate you either.” Julian replied calmly. “You’d know.”

“Any advice?”

“Don’t try and be her friend, ‘cause you ain’t. She values honesty, Jenkins. You’re not here to be our buddy, you’re here to hire us. So, be real about that if you wanna be on her good side.”

“And you?”

Etsicitty tested the edge of his knife by effortlessly slicing a strip off a sheet of paper. Apparently this was satisfactory, because the blade then vanished into the leather sheath on his pocket in an easy, practiced motion. “I like everybody if they don’t give me a reason not to.” he said.

”…Right.”

Allison was waiting impatiently for the new filter when he ducked under the ceiling canoe and stepped outside again. He tossed it to her. “How about alien tech?” he asked.

Allison turned back around and easily installed the filter, closing the housing with two firm snaps. “Why?”

“I AM here to get you on the payroll. Be useful to know what you can do.”

She snorted. “It’s idiot-proof. What more is there to say? No user-serviceable parts, just pull the faulty module, order a replacement from the nanofactory, plug it in. God knows what you’re supposed to do if it it’s the nanofac that’s busted, but…” She jumped down and wiped two greasy hand-prints onto her jeans. “You’re welcome to bow out of the oil change while that nice shirt’s still kinda clean.”

“What, and play Triumvirate Online in the car for eight hours on company time?” Kevin grunted. “Tempting, but no.”

He caught the half-smirk that she covered by turning and digging under the car for the bucket. “Suit yourself.”

To Kevin’s surprise, the work turned out to be enjoyable. Messy, yes, but despite her frosty attitude Buehler did the bulk of the dirty work herself and relegated Kevin to fetching wrench heads and buckets, storing nuts and parts safely, and fetching the fresh fluids from the garage.

She even loosened up enough to give him a high-five when the truck grunted into life around about noon. “Thanks. That goes a lot faster with two.” she told him, turning a cloth rag grey as she wiped the worst of the grime off her palms onto it.

“I actually kinda enjoyed it.” Kevin admitted.

“Feels good to work with your hands, yeah.” She patted the truck affectionately.

“What’s next?”

“Next, I’m gonna clean up then take this thing for a drive, make sure it’s working okay.” She replied. “Gotta get rid of the old oil and stuff properly, pick up groceries, stuff like that.”

“Ah.” Kevin looked around. “Uh…”

“Julian’s up in the back woods. Said something about making sure the beavers don’t flood us out.”

“Think he needs a hand?”

She grabbed a bottle of bright orange hand cleanser. “Look. You’re trying to get in good with us, I get that. Hell, maybe you’re a great guy to have for a friend, I don’t know, but your relationship with us is pure business and I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

“I’m just trying to establish a rapport.” Kevin defended himself.

“And there’s your problem.” she said. “Don’t. I ain’t interested in a rapport. I’m interested in getting the fuck offa this planet and you’re the man with the spaceship. So let’s focus on that and maybe I might decide to like you.”

Kevin shook his head and sat on the hood of his car. “You have a completely different attitude to most folks I’ve met.” he observed.

She rinsed her hands off into yet another bucket, and the orange slime she’d spread all over them took most of the filth and grease with it. She started slathering on a second dose. “Yeah? Y’know, I saw that footage of you telling Kirk and Vedreg about religion. I thought you were a straight talker. What happened to that guy?”

“You an atheist?”

“That’s none of your damn business, and don’t change the subject.”

Kevin shrugged. “That was fifteen years ago.” he pointed out. “That’s a long time. People change. I learned stuff about how the world works.”

“And how does the world work according to Kevin Jenkins?” she asked, rinsing her hands off again. They were almost perfectly clean now, so she shook the water off them and wiped them dry on her backside.

Kevin rolled his jaw thoughtfully. “Way I see it, if you’ve found somebody who isn’t trying to manipulate or use you, you’ve found true love.” he said. “And, uh, no disrespect, but I don’t love you.”

She gave him a flatly skeptical stare. “A guy like you believes in true love?”

“Nope.” Kevin stood up. “Do you?”

“By your definition?” She looked thoughtfully in the direction of the woods for a moment, and then nodded with a half-smile. “Absolutely. Look, make yourself comfortable indoors. We’ve got a big TV and satellite. Hell, we’ve got an old Sega if you want, whatever. I’m gonna be gone a few hours, and so’s Julian.

“Sure?”

“Don’t get motor oil on the couch.”

“Right.” Kevin fetched a change of clothes from the trunk as she headed indoors. The screen door did its banshee impersonation behind him as Allison vanished into a bedroom.

Things had tidied up nicely inside even in the two days since he’d last visited, and he took a quick tour. Kevin didn’t believe in Feng Shui, but rearranging the furniture had done a lot for opening the place up and making it feel brighter, now that the big glass doors out onto the deck weren’t half-blocked by the television and the antediluvian floral-print heavy curtains had been taken down. There were dark patches on the walls where some of the infinite decorations had hung for decades, protecting the pigment. The incandescent bulbs were gone, replaced with modern smart LED bulbs. Already the place looked less… kitschy.

“Hey, look, I said we’d win this thing for you…” he called out “But I wouldn’t get too premature on the decorating if I was y’all. You haven’t even signed up yet!”

“We’ve not!” she called back through the door. “Just took some things down and moved some other things.”

“Beats the crap out of paperwork I guess.” Kevin admitted.

“Julian needed the break. Too many fancy legal ten-dollar words, you know?”

“You get used to them, with time.”

“You can get used to anything with time.” she commented and opened the door, having changed into a plaid shirt and clean jeans. “But, he’s happier doing physical stuff. Me too, for that matter.”

She fished down the back of the couch and producedfor him a remote control. “Knock yourself out.”

“This ain’t exactly how I’d planned on spending company time.” Kevin objected.

“You want us on that spaceship?” she asked.

“Yeah!”

“Then sit your ass down and watch TV and we’ll talk it over with dinner.”

Kevin took the remote off her and did as he was told, and Allison grabbed her coat and bag. She glanced wistfully at the back room where the gun locker was, muttered a reminder to herself about needing a license, and vanished with a screech of badly-maintained screen door. Some seconds later, the truck they’d spent all morning servicing grumbled awake and pulled out.

Kevin turned the TV on, browsed the planner for a few minutes, and settled on watching the NCAA highlights.

This became the Pro Drone Racing highlights. Then the golf highlights. Then the Indycar highlights. Boredom was inspiring him to idle contemplation of the merits of suicide when movement out the back window caught his attention, which turned out to be Etsicitty picking his way between the trees with a rifle on his back and three dead beaver in his hand.

There was a shed next to the log pile that Etsicitty vanished into. Kevin sat waiting for him to emerge, but the wait took long enough that he eventually gave up and found a movie to watch in the form of Star Wars Episode VIII.

It was firmly in the late afternoon by the time Etsicitty emerged from the shed with red hands and some gory remains, with which he vanished back into the woods. He returned empty-handed just as the credits rolled, and entered through the utility room, the door on which was mercifully silent. There was the sound of running water and, at length, he padded through into the kitchen and grabbed a water bottle from the fridge. His prosthetic foot sounded strange on the linoleum.

“Good couch, ain’t it?” he asked.

“Damn good.” Kevin admitted. “I’ve been sat here for hours, and I’m not gettin’ antsy.”

“Drink? We got Pepsi, iced tea, water or milk.”

“Pepsi’d be good, thank you.”

Julian closed the fridge stepped around the couch and sat down next to him, handing him a drink can. “Star Wars?”

“Yup… Hey, uh…”

“Yeah?”

“What’s with the beavers?”

Julian chuckled. “Good eatin’ on them.” he said. “Hell, beaver tail’s a delicacy.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Nuh-uh. You gotta hang it a day or two, but you cook ‘em right and they taste kinda like smoky pork. Pelt’s useful, too, but it can get kinda cut up in the spring when they fight.”

“So you hunt them for food?” Kevin asked.

“Trap ‘em. They need it, too. Stupid furry fuckers are rodents, and they breed like rodents too. And round here there’s nothing eating them.”

“There ain’t?”

“Nope. All that farmland’s buffering them and keeping them safe.” Julian scratched at the back of his neck. “Right now the population’s getting just big enough to eat more than the land can give ‘em, so I’ve either gotta cull them right back, or they’ll starve anyway. We may as well get a meal out of it, right?”

“Bet you make a lot of friends in PETA with that attitude.”

Julian produced a silent beat of humorless laughter that was over as soon as it had started. “I love animals.” he said. “But this isn’t a natural landscape, and if it’s gonna remain healthy it needs a human hand on the tiller, and a lot of the time that’s going to mean trapping and shooting. Sucks for the beaver, but you’ve gotta look at the big picture. Either I can snare three beavers and kill them quick and humane, or dozens of them can slowly starve to death because they ate everything. I know which sounds less cruel to me.”

”…I hear what you’re saying,” Kevin conceded “but that still… I dunno, it seems cruel.”

Julian shrugged. “Deathworld.”

He took a swig of his water and set it down on the coffee table. “And believe me, I know better than most just how much of a deathworld Earth really is. We’ve tamed her, a fuck of a lot. But she’s still an ornery old mare at heart and she’ll kick you down and stamp on your head if she gets the chance. Most people don’t realise that because they don’t need to.”

“How does she stack up to Nightmare?”

Julian shrugged. “By and large? Earth is nastier.”

“Nightmare’s a thirteen, though. We’re ‘just’ a twelve.”

“Yeah, but the Corti created the planetary classification system, or at least they refined the algorithm, and I guess it inherited some of their prejudices.” Julian said. “The big-headed little fucks don’t like eccentric orbits or whatever, and they didn’t really see that when you’ve got a predictable deep freeze cycle with a short summer, that’s going to put limits on what kind of life forms you get.”

“Sure, in the summer…” He patted his hatchet. “Mangrabber vines and bombfruit and murderpigs and minizillas and don’t even get me fucking started on the Go-to-hell tree. THAT thing was a nasty surprise.”

“Go-to-hell tree?”

“Spreads its seeds by spontaneous combustion right at the peak of the summer season, and the timber can self-ignite even when it’s been dead and drying out all winter. Good thing I didn’t build my hut out of the stuff, or I’d have lost everything.”

He grinned. “And if you think that sounds outlandish? We’ve got plants right here on Earth that do something similar. An’ there’s the thing. We’ve GOT exploding fruit, and carnivorous plants, and big smelly dangerous critters here on Earth, and here they’re awake for two thirds of the year if they go to sleep at all. Everything hibernates on Nightmare.”

“Come on, a Venus Flytrap couldn’t even hurt a Corti.” Kevin said.

“Nope, and that’s what made the Corti decide Nightmare deserves a thirteen and Mother Earth only got a twelve. But what makes her way nastier is the diseases.” Julian nodded. “Cut yourself on Earth, and you’d better sterilize that wound in case you get a staph infection or something. Sometimes, you can sterilize it and get an infection anyway. You gotta boil the water, cook the meat, keep yourself wrapped up warm…”

He took another sip of water, and a thought seemed to occur to him as he was swallowing. “Hell, do you know how much disease avoidance and control is built into EVERYONE’s daily lives? Like, we don’t even notice it! Fuck, there’s a whole aisle in the supermarkets for soap, and another one for scrubbing the bacteria out of your mouth that’d eat your teeth otherwise. Then there’s the one for household cleaning products, bleach, mold killer, the fact that every single food item in that store has an expiry date, the soap and sinks for people to wash their hands in the bathroom, the tissues for covering your mouth and blowing your nose, bug spray and zappers because insects are a disease vector…Hell, there’s a whole industry and market sector in scented soaps because we have to scrub ourselves everyday or else stink of bacterial action in our skin, so we may as well put some perfume in there so we can wind up smelling pretty afterwards…”

“Don’t forget the pharmacy.” Kevin pointed out.

“You’re right. And all those antibiotics are on a time limit anyway.”

“Meanwhile, you just spent the morning trapping a knee-high critter that’ll chew through a tree and dam a whole river.”

“Right.”

Julian scratched at his hair a bit. “Most folks live in cities now.” he pointed out. He didn’t have any particular style, Kevin noticed - it was just dark, shaggy, and ignored, presumably right up until it got in the way. He wondered if Julian was in the habit of just taking his knife to it every so often rather than finding the services of a barber. “They’re not in touch with what Earth is really like, or what humans are really like as a species: We’re fuckin’ predators. There’s nothing on this whole planet we can’t, won’t and haven’t killed and eaten at some point.”

“Some folks’d argue we don’t have to.”

Julian shrugged. “I’ve got no beef with vegetarians or vegans.” he said, amicably. “Their diet’s none of my business. But even if we stopped farming livestock tomorrow, we’d still have to cull the beavers. May as well do it humanely and eat ‘em afterwards.”

Kevin chuckled. “You’re a talkative guy when you open up.”

Julian laughed with him. “I nearly went full Tom Hanks on Nightmare. Didn’t paint a face on a volleyball, but I sure as hell talked to myself a lot.”

“The nice thing about talking to yourself is nobody interrupts you.”

Julian chuckled some more. “Heh. Yeah, you’re all right.” He declared.

“Glad one of the three of you thinks so.”

“Well, provoking Xiù into punching you in the face didn’t exactly endear you to us…” Julian stretched.

“I really didn’t mean to.”

“I get that. Hell, first thing she ever did to me was brandish a knife at me.” He grinned at Kevin’s concerned frown. “My fault for sneaking up on her.”

“So she brandished a knife at you for sneaking up on her, broke my nose for saying the wrong things… Shit, what does she do to a man who actually hurts her?”

“Breaks his ribs, knocks him out and then throws him out an airlock.” Julian replied promptly. Seeing Kevin’s expression he raised a reassuring hand. “-into a river. She’s not a murderer, he lived. And in fairness to her, it was Kirk who cut the bastard’s arm off.”

“Kirk wh-? My Kirk?”

“He’s his Kirk, but yeah. Remember that prosthetic of his? There’s a fusion blade hidden in there. And, uh, Zane had it fuckin’ coming. It’s a long story.”

“Damn… Kirk went up against a human and won.”

“Dude, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to go up against Kirk myself. Sure, he’s an ET, but there’s a sharp-ass brain in there that thinks like twenty steps ahead of - oh, they’re back!”

“They?” Kevin asked, as Julian kicked his legs out and stood up eagerly. There was a snapping noise and he cursed, sitting back down and examining his prosthetic foot. “Y’okay?”

“Fucking first metatarsal’s gone again.” Julian made a resigned noise through his nose and started unhooking and peeling back layers of synthetic myomere. If the composite “bones” of his foot hadn’t been carbon black wrapped in obviously artificial white “muscles” and “tendons” then the view of his foot flayed open would have been an obscene one. He dug around inside it with one of his smaller knives to scrape out the dried adhesive from a previous repair, and dug a small tube of superglue out of this pocket.

“Simple fix.” Kevin noted.

“I’ve had a lot of practice.” Julian grumbled.

“Can’t you get a better one?”

“Not one that feels and behaves just like a real foot and weighs the same… there we go.” Julian sat back and rested his ankle on the opposite knee.

The door squeaked loudly, and Xiù Chang stepped through it, with a large bag over her shoulder and Allison behind her wearing a mischievous grin.

”…Ah.” Kevin cleared his throat and stood up. “Miss Chang.”

”…Mister Jenkins.” She put the bag down, warily. “How’s the nose?”

“Healing.”

“Good. That’s… good.”

Kevin became acutely aware that Allison and Julian were sharing an increasingly amused expression as he and Xiù both stood there in awkward silence.

He manned up.

“Look, for what it’s worth-”

She spoke at the exact same time. “I feel like maybe I-”

“You fir- I mean-”

“No, after- um, if you’re-?”

“Well if-”

“Um…”

Allison shook her head and rubbed her eyebrows. There was a smile pushing at her cheekbones. “Mister Jenkins first.” she instructed.

Kevin sighed. “…I went about this whole thing wrong.” he said. “I shoulda just been professional with you instead of tryin’ to sympathize and diggin’ up painful stuff. I’m sorry.”

Xiù nodded. “And I should have kept my cool and not punched you.” she replied. “I’m sorry too.”

“Apologies accepted?” Allison asked. Behind Kevin, Julian started reattaching the synthetic muscles of his foot to their frame. Both Kevin and Xiù nodded, and shook hands. “Friends?”

”…Not yet.” Kevin decided. “I came here to do business, and you’re right: We should keep it that way.”

“I think us abductees and friends of Kirk should stick together.” Julian suggested.

“Sure. But… best for everybody right now if I just be the dude in the suit.” Kevin nodded.

“Yup.” Allison agreed. She gestured to the table. “We brought pizza. Sit down and…”

She smiled. “Let’s talk business.”

Date Point 10y4m1w1d AV
Starship ’Negotiable Curiosity’, Planet Perfection, The Cradle Worlds

Bedu

“At last! Civilization! Food!”

Mwrmwrwk made an irritated cooing sound. “Hzzkvk, if you could please tear yourself away from the window for a moment and go run a diagnostic on engine three? It would be a shame to have come all this way only to explode on final approach thanks to an uncontrolled fluctuation.”

Bedu frowned and checked his console as their obese Vzk’tk technician croaked in alarm and galloped astern.

“That,” he accused her “was a lie.”

“What was?” Mwrmwrwk asked. She gave no indication of aborting their approach.

“There is no fluctuation.” Bedu observed.

“I never said that there was.” She replied, not turning in her seat. “But it would be a shame.”

Bedu mentally chastised himself. Like Hzzkvk, he had become over-excited at the prospect of finally getting out of the ship for the first time in far too long. Unlike Hzzkvk, he was not ignorant of the subtle game that he and Mwrmwrwk played at Hzzkvk’s expense, using carefully ambiguous phrasing to slip veiled insults and farcically unnecessary errands past him via his near-terminal case of stupidity.

To have one such joke slip past his own critical faculties was vexsome. Mwrmwrwk was troublingly intelligent, and that was never a fact calculated to leave a Corti shipmaster feeling well at-ease.

She was, however, an exceptional pilot, and thoroughly worth the irritation. Hzzkvk was… less worth the irritation, though he performed his tasks with a commendable diligence.

“How soon until we land?” he asked.

“Half a Ri’ ago.”

“Say again?”

“We have been on solid concrete for half a Ri’. Not a bad landing if I say so myself.”

“I must agree.” Bedu forced himself to concede. “I hardly felt it.”

Mwrmwrwk purred some quiet Kwmbwrw laughter, which he took as his cue to stand, wriggle slightly to settle his travel-stiffened joints, and pad around to the top of the ship’s exit ramp, which was directly behind the flight deck.

Perfection had been named by Corti, and by Corti standards it absolutely was perfect. The finest Locayl architects had been tasked with planning the system’s capital city according to scrupulous and elegant mathematical principles laid out by the Directorate, and its balmy class three climate and lucrative co-ordinates as a cross-roads for the four largest, wealthiest and most influential members of the Dominion Council - the Directorate, the Domain, the Guvnurag Confederacy and the Kwmbwrw Grand Houses - had made it prosperous beyond compare.

Their landing site, alas, was not among the gleaming spires and delicate ultratensile steel edifices of the upper city, but was one of dozens that dotted the sides of the great megastructure of the mid-level city. Ground level was still a good two hundred meters below them and some of the very highest penthouses were as much as two kilometers above.

He took a moment to admire the sheer architectural grandeur of it, then sent a message to the address he’d been given by their employer. The message was a terse one, explaining only while that the primary objective was not met, there was mitigating data to explain why.

There was a thump as Mwrmwrwk came down the ramp, then reared onto her hindfeet and, reaching up to hold on to the Negotiable Curiosity’s nose for balance, stretched out to reach her full and impressive height.

Kwmbwrw were deceptively large. When they were on all fours (which was most of the time) they were only as high at the shoulder as a tall Gaoian, and that meant that sometimes their real size could be overlooked. They were long-limbed, covered in curly chocolate fur with a long tail that was usually held coiled between their legs and almost nothing in the way of a neck.

Mwrmwrwk was, apparently, rather plain and masculine by her species’ standards, though Bedu would have been hard-pressed to know his pilot from a stunning exemplar of Kwmbwrw femininity. She had a single large, brown eye riding high above a wide and flat mouth, with two more eyes further round the sides of her head for peripheral vision. This arrangement provided her with two zones of narrow binocular vision and as a result, when working on something that required her fine attention she had to turn her head away from it and squint.

As she reared up, Mwrmwrwk’s tail unfolded to its full length, held rigid behind her for counterbalance. Standing upright like that, she was taller than even a Qinis or Rrrtktktkp’ch, but that height was all limbs. Next to their extraordinary length, her body was almost comically short and keg-shaped.

She took a huge breath and produced a different kind of purring noise, signifying delight and relief. “Fresh air…”

“Don’t you have post-flight checks to run?” Bedu chided her.

“Bedu, your conviction that you are the only competent being in the galaxy is showing again.” she retorted, dropping back down onto the three strong and stubby fingers that bore her weight on her forefeet and tucking the each hand’s two delicate opposable digits safely out of the way. “I did them already.”

“So quickly?”

“The ship can run multiple diagnostics at once, you know. Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe I’m due some shore leave. I assume I’ve been paid…?”

“What kind of a negligent employer do you take me for?” Bedu asked, instructing his implants to transfer the funds.

“Bedu, nobody could ever accuse you of accidental negligence.” Mwrmwrwk shook herself in an entirely too smug way and headed for the elevator. “Oh, thank Hzzkvk for me, would you? He can stop checking the engine for fluctuations now.”

Bedu permitted himself a moment of amusement, then settled back into the more orthodox Corti frame of mind of irritation. “Hzzkvk!” he called. “We are down safely. You can relax now.”

“But I have not found the fluctuation, Bedu!” the technician objected.

“It can wait.” Bedu promised. Hzzkvk’s memory was shoddy anyway from all the Cqcq he smoked. In a few hours, he’d have completely forgotten the imaginary emergency.

He wired the Vzk’tk his payment. Unlike Mwrmwrwk, it was no fun to play games with him. “Come along.”

“Where are we going, Bedu?” Hzzkvk asked him. Behind them, the ship sensed the departure of its master and locked itself up.

“We are going,” Bedu said “To see a Contact.”

Date Point 10y4m1w1d AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“So. The deal on the table as it stands is this: The Byron Group is offering the three of you employment as crew aboard our next extrasolar exploration vessel. You’d be looking at a two year contract - six months of training and then eighteen months of mission time, with a possibility of renewal or transfer to a different post inside the group after the ship’s mission is complete. Naturally, this all comes with sponsoring any work visas, citizenship applications, whatever. In addition to payment and employee benefits, the Group is offering to pay all expenses and provide legal expertise to help you through the dispute over this house and land, and, if that dispute is resolved in your favor, to install a caretaker who will tend to the property in your absence.”

Kevin pushed the two copies he’d prepared of the agreement across the table, along with his own copy for Xiù. He’d memorized it in any case.

“What happens if you don’t win?” Julian asked.

“Whatever happens, you won’t be paying a cent. If we can, we’ll see what we can do about bringing all the people who wind up sharing the property around the table to sell it back to you. Though, it’ll be up to you to negotiate a price and sort out your finances. If you look at the salaries you’ll be receiving, however…” all three of them flipped through and found it. Xiù’s jaw dropped, Allison arched an eyebrow, and both of Julian’s eyebrows migrated north and hid under his fringe. “I think you’ll agree you shouldn’t have trouble there.”

“This is…very generous.” Allison mused. “What’s the catch?”

“There are a couple.” Kevin admitted. “First catch is, it’s dangerous work. Half the crews we sent out never came back. Now, the three of you have already been out there and come back. You know how it works out there, you’ve got the skills and experience, and the ships we’re making now are are way better than the first generation.” He paused and shrugged slightly. “But there ain’t no such thing as safe.”

The three of them exchanged a medley of expressions. Allison pursed her lips thoughtfully, Xiù looked tense and pale, and Julian just nodded, as if that was self-evident.

“Second catch is we’d like to examine Julian’s foot and see if we can’t put it to good use for folks down here on Earth. Even if it does break now an’ then, it’s a long way ahead of where we’re at right now.”

Julian nodded. “Doesn’t sound like much of a catch to me.” he said.

“Third catch is that you’d all be under nondisclosure agreements, and would have access to some… sensitive information. I can’t go into detail right now, but you would absolutely need to keep secrets. For the rest of your lives, most likely.”

“Fourth catch is no implants.” Allison guessed, correctly. Kevin frowned at her.

“Well…yeah.” he said, adding an unspoken question just with his tone of voice.

She sat back and folded her arms. “Let’s just say Julian and I know that not having implants really isn’t a catch.”

Inwardly, Kevin made a note to pass that observation along to Darcy first chance he got. “Miss Chang?” he asked.

She looked up from reading through the agreement, as if surprised to be spoken to. “Oh. Um… well, having things in my brain never seemed like a great idea anyway so… sure. No problem.” she ventured.

“Okay. We can go into the details later.” Kevin declared. “That’s it for catches. On to the perks.”

“First perk? Training. Honing your existing skills and givin’ you a solid grounding in any other skills that the mission might need. Right now we’re envisionin’ it’d just be the three of you aboard this thing, though that might change. Creature of Habit was eight people, Reclamation was just four. Among other things, correct me if I’m wrong but none of you know how to actually fly a spaceship, do you?”

They all shook their heads.

“Well, one of you’s gonna learn. I’d suggest Miss Chang.”

“Hey, I’ve not agreed to this…” Xiù objected, holding up both hands in a warding gesture.

“If you agree to it.” Kevin corrected himself. “Sorry. But you get the idea. Second perk is full medical and dental, plus a bereavement fund for your loved ones or charity of choice. Third perk? You get to name any and all stars, planets, moons, continents, oceans, species and so on that you discover. If it’s not already in the database, you get to name it. Though we’d, uh, take it as a kindness if you didn’t name them directly after yourselves…”

“Like… what, the continent of Allisonia?” Julian asked. “Planet Chang? Etsicitty Island?”

“That kinda thing, yeah.” Kevin agreed. “Word got back to us a while back about a mining colony run by a human who called the place ‘Carltopia’. Guess what his name was?”

“That’s just sad.” Xiù opined. “Even though, um, Planet Chang has a nice ring to it…”

“Way I hear it every other name ever given to the place was along the same lines.” Kevin shrugged. “Like I said, you get to name ‘em. All we ask is if you do decide to immortalize your names, you do it subtle-like.”

“And what exactly would our duties and responsibilities be?” Allison asked.

“Explore strange worlds, seek out new life and civilizations, boldly go where no-one has gone before?” Kevin suggested.

“Be serious.” she chided.

“I am.” Kevin told her. “You’ll be an exploration vessel. Now, admittedly your mission is a private one, surveyin’ for resources and opportunities that the Byron group can one day turn a profit on, so there’s none of that space hippy ‘bettering ourselves’ bullshit here but… yeah, that’s the shape of it. We’re most interested in useful biological samples from other deathworlds, especially antibiotics, but… anythin’, really. Spices, oil, useful cultivars we could experiment with on Cimbrean…”

“Precious metals?” Julian suggested.

“Nah, the Hephaestus LLC have the metals market to themselves for now.” Kevin said. “Asteroid mining’s just way better than diggin’ shit up on a planet, and the Sol belt is gonna last ‘em forever. Still, the survey data can’t hurt. Might be one day they get split up by competition laws and we’ll be able to sell them charts for other systems, who knows? Be nice if we could set up a diamond mine on a nice Class Ten somewhere, though. Kill off the slave trade… hmm…”

“That’s a big dream.” Xiù said. “The Gaoians have only got two colonies, and they’ve had warp drive for nearly a hundred years.”

“No disrespect to your friends miss, but it could be we’ve got motivation and drive that they lack.” Kevin suggested.

“Hah!” She beamed. “You’ve obviously never met a Gaoian.”

Kevin bowed his head and spread his hands. “I defer to your superior knowledge on that subject.” he said. “So. I mean, there’s a lot more to discuss, but that should give you a good idea of what kind of a fine mess you’d be gettin’ into. You in?”

Julian and Allison both opened their mouths to reply, but Xiù got there first. “Not yet.” she said. “There’s… things we need to talk over first. Us three.” she circled a finger to indicate Allison, Julian and herself.

”…Yeah. Don’t just put us on the spot like that.” Allison agreed. Julian nodded with her.

“I’ve already spent about four days longer on this than I’d planned for.” Kevin complained. “This trip’s gettin’ expensive, and my boss is antsy for an answer, whatever that answer is. I appreciate this is a big decision, but every day it’s not made is a day that a billion dollars of infrastructure ain’t doin’ shit ‘cause it’s waitin’ for you.”

“You’ll have your answer tomorrow.” Xiù asserted.

Kevin knew better than to argue with her by now. Exhaling, he stood up and gathered his things. “Tomorrow, then. Please.“

Xiù stood up and offered her hand, which he shook. “I promise.” She said.

Julian Etsicitty

There were starlings dancing in front of the sunset. They boiled and surged, gossiping among themselves as they played away the time until the light died and they could, as one, vanish into the branches and rest.

For now, they shied away from Jenkins’ car and the cone of dust it left behind as it vanished down the dirt path, and Julian listened until even the distant whisper of its motor and wheels were inaudible and all there was to hear was crows scheming in the woods, a mourning dove, and crickets settling in for the evening.

It was a peaceful moment, that he punctuated with a deep cleansing breath before turning toward the woodpile. The wood wasn’t quite ready yet, but it would burn if he built the fire properly. Building a fire with green wood was a skill that had kept him from freezing to death on Nightmare, especially after his first run-in with Go-to-hell tree firewood.

The fire was about ready to light when he heard the screen door squeal - for the umpteenth time he reminded himself to oil that spring - and Allison smiled at him as she padded barefoot down the concrete steps in short denim and one of his plaid shirts.

They greeted each other with a kiss. “How’re we doing?” Julian asked.

“Pretty good.” Allison smiled, and sat down on the log next to the firepit. “Though he’s right, I’d rather have said yes or no today, you know?”

“Mm.” Julian agreed. He fished his firestriker out of a pocket and stooped. “I guess whatever Xiù wants to talk about, it must be kinda important.”

Long years of practice meant that he had the tinder going first time, and he carefully caged it in thin kindling, then thick kindling, and finally a tent of split firewood. One well-aimed breath into the glowing heart later, and he had a lit fire.

Allison smiled at him. “You’re good at that.”

“I have my uses.” He stood up. “What’s she up to now?”

“I pointed her to the spare room, but if she’s got any sense she’s using up all the hot water right now.” Allison chuckled. “‘Cause if she doesn’t, I will. This place has a GOOD showerhead.”

“Please, you think I’d settle for a bad one? I know the value of a good shower.” Julian beamed.

Allison laughed again, and gestured to the fire. “How long before we can cook on it?”

“When the first logs are mostly ash.” Julian said. “About twenty minutes. You don’t rush a good fire.”

“You learned that from your Grampa?”

“And a whole lot more.”

“He teach you how to get a lady a beer?”

Julian chuckled. “Yes ma’am.”

She wrinkled her nose at him again. “Good boy.”

Grinning to himself, Julian hit the fridge in the garage. Grampa had been partial to Leinenkugel’s, and there were still a dozen bottles in the garage fridge, about the only things that hadn’t spoiled in the three years it had been unpowered. He grabbed two, used the bottle opener magnet to de-cap them, ducked under the canoe hanging from the ceiling, and returned to Allison, who had drawn her knees and arms towards her core and was fidgeting.

He handed over one of the beers and sat next to her. “You cold?”

“Kinda.”

“That, I can fix.” He scooted closer and slipped his left arm around her waist. She made a happy noise and snuggled into his side. “Better?”

“Better.”

“Good….good.”

She sipped her beer and turned to look up at him. “Are you okay?”

“Just…hey, uhm…Al, I’ve got kind of a confession. Something I need you to hear me out on and…well.”

“Hey.” she kissed him. “You’re telling me. That already means a lot. So…what’s up?”

“It’s about, um, Xiù. And, not what happened today. Something else.”

There was no way he imagined the way Allison went a little stiff under his arm. “Wwwhat about her?” she managed, completely failing at false nonchalance.

“She’s, uh…I’m pretty sure she’s got a crush on me.” Julian said. “Like, a BIG crush.”

“Oh. Yeah. Yeah, she does.” Allison agreed, relaxing again. “And…oh, you feel the same way, don’t you?”

“Uh… Yeah.” Julian swallowed. “Yeah, I do. Sorry. I figured I’d better get that out there so-”

Allison kissed him, gently. “I ain’t mad.” she promised. “Um…Since we’re being real, I kinda…I kinda have a crush on her too.”

Julian’s brain drew a blank on that one, and his face followed suit - he simply hadn’t considered that possibility.

“Y-” he began. He tried again. “Wh-? But y-?”

Allison giggled and kissed him again. “See? It’s okay. You did good, you were honest with me, I was honest with you. No fight.”

“Okay, okay, but run that bit by me again where you have a crush on Xiù?” He checked.

”…Yeah! I, uh…Yeah.”

“When you say you have a ‘crush’ on Xiù…?”

“I mean…” Allison took a giant slug of beer and set the bottle down. “I mean I guess I’m a little bit in love with her.”

Xiù Chang

Xiù’s breath caught in her throat and her hand stopped an inch from the screen door’s handle.

“Isn’t that what a crush means?” Allison asked. “She’s gorgeous, I like her a lot… Hell, I flirt with her, and she’s flirted back and, and my heart just starts going ba-bam, ba-bam. I’ve got a huge crush on her. Isn’t that what you meant when you said you’ve got a crush on her too?”

“Well… yeah. But I mean…aren’t you straight?” Julian asked. Neither he nor Allison had noticed Xiù moving around in the house.

“Hey, if you’re surprised, imagine how I feel!” Allison laughed, a touch desperately, and ran a hand through her hair before shrugging. “But there it is. I… yeah.”

Very carefully, Xiù stepped back from the screen door and listened, not daring to make a noise.

Allison seemed to gather her thoughts. “I’m kinda the jealous type. you know? Like, I guard what’s mine, and that includes… well, you. But I kinda shared you with her, didn’t I?”

“Only ‘kinda’? You enjoyed it.” Julian observed. “You had a great time! Right?”

“Yeah! And, so did you.”

“Yeah. You know how I get off on it.” He agreed. “But I’m not the jealous type.”

“Right… But you’re right. I enjoyed it. Hell, it was my idea.” she picked up her beer, swirled it thoughtfully, then drained the last of it. Julian was barely halfway through his.

The fire snapped and threw a handful of fire dust skywards. All three of them watched it fade.

“So you’re comfortable with her in a way you’re not comfortable with anyone else.” Julian summarized.

“Not quite. I’m comfortable with her the exact same way I’m comfortable with you. I mean…” She gesticulated helplessly to try and help her think. Julian handed her what was left of his beer, which she accepted with a smile and swigged. “…You think I’m hot. I think you’re hot. That’s what got us started on this, right? But what keeps it going for me is that we’re both… You’re kind of a misfit, babe. You don’t really belong here, just like me.”

“You don’t think we belong here?” Julian asked. He gestured around at the idyllic darkness around them, and Allison sighed.

“Right here?” she asked. “Maybe. A fire, a little place in the woods, a cold beer…Throw in some weed and it’d be perfect. But what about the rest of Earth? All the… the politics and the bullshit and the assholes who don’t see a person, they just see a, a…”

“An asset.” Julian suggested.

Allison nodded, staring into the fire. “Or an ass. Yeah. That’s it. That’s why I signed on with Kirk, ‘cause he was interested in people. S’why I really want to take this Byron offer, ‘cause I guess I get the same thing, that they’re interested in us.”

“Kirk still used us.” Julian pointed out.

“He found uses for ours skills, yeah. That’s not the same thing: with him it was still personal, you know?. That big white freak just… he was using me, not using me. You with me?”

”…You’re right.”

They were silent for a moment, and then Allison looked up and raised the bottle towards the brightest point of light in the sky. “To Kirk. Whichever star that is, here’s hoping it protects you.”

“That’s Venus.” Julian pointed out. “And I can’t toast ‘cause you’ve got my drink.”

Allison finished it. “You got more?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Xiù smiled as she watched Allison giggle and kiss him, and mouthed “Good boy” to herself at the exact same time as Allison said it.

He wasn’t gone long. They knocked their bottles together and drank.

“So… misfits.” Julian said, settling in beside her again after taking a second to check on the fire. “You really hate Earth that much?”

“I love Earth. It’s people I struggle with.” Allison corrected him.

“Xiù and I are people.”

“You’re not people, you’re Xiù and Julian. It’s… not the same thing.”

Julian rubbed the back of her neck. “What’s the difference?”

“You both make me feel like… you make me feel like Allison.”

“You are Allison.” Julian observed, plainly not following her.

“I mean you make me feel like a person. Like…” Allison took another giant swig of her beer. “Like you value me as me, and not for what you want from me. This whole shit with this house and the lawyers and the Byron Group, it’s just… it’s just people not giving a fuck about each other, and only thinking about what they can get. Using one another.”

“That’s what people do.” Julian agreed. “That’s… pretty much the whole of human civilization right there.”

“Exactly.”

“The aliens are no different.”

“No. But you are, and Xiù is. And that means a lot to me. It’s what I love about you.”

”…Both of us?”

“I guess so…” Allison finished the last of her second-and-a-halfth beer. “I’m still figuring that out. Whether it’s… I dunno. Whether it’s like a girl-bromance, or more than that.”

“What would it… If it is more than that, what would that mean for us?” Julian asked, carefully. “For you and me?”

Allison turned and kissed him.

It was a hot kiss, too. A bit needy, a bit reassuring, a whole lot of two people who were stupid for one another, expressing it. Allison’s hand snaked round the back of his head and gripped his hair, while his own hand came up to her face, on her cheek, brushing her eyebrow. Ordinarily, watching a kiss like that would have made Xiù feel awkward, or that she was intruding on their privacy. Instead…

Instead she felt warm inside, watching it. Happy. It was the first thing to bring a genuine smile to her face in weeks: it was beautiful.

She reached a decision.

She watched as they cooled down into smiles, pressing their noses and foreheads together, whispering happy reassurances that Xiù couldn’t hear. They both flinched when the screen door squealed open and Xiù stepped down out of the house.

“Uh… hey.” Julian managed. “You found the bed okay?”

“There’s only two, Julian.” Xiù told him, smiling. She could hear her own heartbeat, in her chest, in her ears and in her throat, punctuating the anticipation in her stomach. She took a breath and committed. “And, um… I love you guys too.”

Allison and Julian looked at each other. Then back at her. Then back to each other again.

“How much…” Allison cleared her throat and started over. “How much did you hear?”

“Probably all the important bits. You’re right.” Xiù said. She sat down in the dirt between Julian’s feet. “Since I got back here, you two are the only ones who’ve…”

She trailed off, then shrugged and smiled weakly at Allison before picking up a stick and poking at the fire. “I thought I’m straight too. So, I’m just as weirded out there as you are. But…. straight or not, it doesn’t really matter, because I’m not ready.” she told them. “For anybody.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m…no. I mean, God, I could watch you two all day, but the thought of actually doing anything just freaks me out. Maybe one day, I…but, no. Not soon, anyway.”

She sighed, then threw the stick in the fire. “I don’t want you to hurt each other for me. Okay? Please don’t ever do that. I want you both to be happy. That’s all I want from you.”

Allison scooted off the log to sit next to her, and hugged her hard. Xiù twisted around and buried herself into the hug, glad to be there. She felt Allison kiss and stroke her hair and hold her tight, and Julian….

Julian thumped down off the log, put his arms around them both, and held them. “Whatever we figure out, we figure out together.” he promised. “All of us.”

Xiù shut her eyes and embraced the sense of peace they were giving her. She was, she realised, finally, truly, and at long last…Home.

++End Chapter++

Chapter 25: Where We Stand

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
Etsicitty house, North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

“Um… Allison fell asleep.”

Julian glanced down and to his right. Allison had indeed fallen asleep, curled up next to him on the bed with her head down on one arm.

He brushed some blonde hairs out of her face. “So she did. It is midnight…”

“…Oh.”

Xiù glanced at the wall clock guiltily. “I’d better let you sleep too.” she suggested.

“I guess… I mean, you don’t have to.” Julian told her.

They’d spent eight hours together just hanging out. Sitting and lounging around on the bed, discussing everything from current world politics to all the Disney movies that had been released in their absence. There was an elephant in the room that hadn’t been touched on at all, but at the same time, not touching on it had seemed… right, somehow.

“Yeah…” Xiù began to scoot off the bed, then paused and turned back. “Um… thank you.”

“For what?”

“For not freaking out.”

Julian chuckled quietly, and looked back down at Allison. “Freaking out… I’m more worried about pinching myself and waking up.”

That earned one of Xiù’s biggest, prettiest smiles. “Two females who’re into you at once. Every male’s fantasy?”

Julian diplomatically ignored the unconsciously Gaoian way she’d phrased herself and kept playing with Allison’s hair, acutely aware that there was honestly a ’yes’ in there, but there was something more important underneath. He shook his head. “Not that.” he said.

“Are you sure? I can see your ears going pink.” She teased. He laughed, but it faded quickly and he stopped playing with Allison’s hair and took a thoughtful breath.

“I don’t want to wake up and find I’m still on Nightmare.” He said. “All alone.”

He swallowed and fidgeted into a more traditional cross-legged position, feeling suddenly vulnerable, and tried to turn it into a weak joke. “Kinda suck, wouldn’t it?”

Xiù’s smile had faded a little, but she nodded understanding. She opened her mouth to say something, then a thought seemed to occur to her and she darted forward to give him a stinging pinch on his forearm. He clutched at the spot reflexively and blinked at her.

“Still here?” she asked.

He paused, then shut his eyes and nodded, grinning. “Yeah. Still here.”

She offered him her arm. “My turn.”

Rather than pinching it, he took her hand and studied the three ragged scar lines that ran from her elbow to her wrist and up the back of her hand to the knuckle. Hunter teeth were scalpel-sharp, and would have cut cleanly if they had sliced across her arm rather than raking along it. As it was, the marks were there to stay.

She hesitated and bit a lip. “Please… don’t.”

He let go of her hand again. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, I just… don’t like them.”

Julian looked at her arm again. “If it helps.” he replied. “I like them.”

Xiù studied her scars as if wondering whether they were looking at the same things. “How can you like them?” She asked.

“If you didn’t have them we’d never have met.”

“I don’t, um.” She frowned. “What?”

“Well, think about it. You only have them because you survived getting them. And, here you are. If you’d never got those… who knows where you’d be?”

Xiù swallowed and looked at her arm, as if seeing the marks there in a slightly new light.

“So… yeah. I like ‘em.” Julian finished. “‘Cause you’re here.”

“My God, Julian.” They both jumped as Allison chimed in. “That was fucking romantic.”

“Well, I mean, uh…” Julian cleared his throat awkwardly and never made it as far as a coherent thought.

“Sorry.” Xiù apologised.

“S’okay.” Allison sat up and thrust an arm up into the air, stretching. “Just…”

“Don’t kiss him.” Xiù nodded, looking a touch crestfallen. “I know.”

Allison laughed a little and gave her a hug. “Actually… I’m warming up to the idea.”

“You are?”

“You are?”

“If you both want to.” Allison nodded. “Yeah. Though, uh… maybe get my permission first? I don’t think I’m ready for… not yet.”

“Small steps.” Julian agreed. He looked to Xiù, though he was pretty sure the moment was wrong.

Xiù backed off the bed and perched on the edge “Not… right now.” She said.

“Yeah. Not yet.” Julian agreed.

Xiù stood up and aimed a thumb over her shoulder toward the other bedroom. “I’d better… and let you…”

“You sure?” Allison asked. “It’s a big bed, and he’s warm…”

Xiù shook her head. “I need some time to think.” she said. “It’s okay.”

It was Allison’s turn to seem disappointed. “Okay…Sweet dreams, babe.”

Once he’d heard both doors click shut, Julian stood, pulled his shirt off over his head, threw it into the laundry hamper and turned out the light. Near-pitch darkness marched straight into the room and set up shop like it had never really left.

He undid his belt, let his jeans fall to the ground, and climbed into bed. Beside him, Allison finished squirming out of her own clothes, and she snuggled up to him. “You okay?” she asked.

“…You’re warming to the idea?” Julian asked her.

Allison kissed him on the cheek by way of a reply.

“Al…”

“What? I said it, and I meant it. If that’s what you want…”

“This is starting to sound like you want… I dunno, like some kind of a poly thing?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

She kissed him in the dark. “What do you want? Be real, baby, what would you like?”

“…Lots’a different bits of me are all saying ‘both of you’, and for all kindsa different reason.” Julian told her, honestly. “But…”

“But?”

“I’m kinda scared there’d be a loser, if we went that way. Like, one of us’d wind up being the spare wheel. I don’t want that to happen to any of us: you, me or her.”

His night vision was coming in, and he could just make out how Allison rested the side of her head in her hand and thought about what he’d said. “…God, that’d really hurt her, yeah.”

“How would we avoid that?”

“We’d be real.” Allison said. “That’s the key to any good relationship.”

“…True…”

“Right. So, why should that change just because we’d be three and not two?” she pointed out. “One-on-one relationships can have a loser too.”

“You really want to do this, don’t you?” Julian asked.

Allison put her head back down on his shoulder. “I don’t know why exactly, but I do.” She agreed. “I don’t want to spend my life stuck in other people’s’ comfort zones. Yeah, if we do this, maybe one of us gets hurt. And it won’t be Xiù. I won’t do that to her.”

“But…?” Julian asked.

She nuzzled into his shoulder. “So maybe we get hurt. I’ve been hurt before, and I don’t think it’s so bad next to never trying.”

“So… are we going for it?”

“I want to.” She said, simply. “Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s up to Xiù.” Allison kissed him again, then rolled over. “Be the big spoon?”

Julian smiled to himself, and cuddled up behind her, infiltrating his arm over her waist. “Yes ma’am.”

“Mmmm…” she issued the hugest, most content sigh and wriggled back into him. “I love you.”

“What, no ’good boy’?”

She nodded sleepily. “They mean the same thing, dummy.”

He smiled, kissed her just below her ear, then put his head down and let her fall asleep. “…I know.”

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
London, England, Earth.

Regaari

Any being who travelled from planet to planet needed to get used to sleeping according to what their body demanded, rather than according to the local diurnal rhythm. When travelling from Gao to Gorai could mean landing at a completely different time of day and in a day/night cycle that was nearly a third longer. It never paid to try and adjust to local time unless you were intent on staying for a while. The difference was even more pronounced on Earth, with its too-short day.

Hence why Regaari was awake at 5am.

The other three weren’t. Warhorse and Baseball, in true deathworlder fashion, seemed to have learned a skill that Regaari wouldn’t have thought possible, in being able to just sleep, wherever and whenever they were, for as long as they needed.

What was even more impressive was that Regaari knew that should he make the smallest noise of alarm or distress, both men would be awake and alert immediately.

They seemed to have discovered a quirk in Ayma meanwhile. After their nightly ritual of shampooing, rinsing, conditioning, rinsing again and then blow-drying, she went completely berserk. The moment the blow-dryer was turned off and she was able to escape the ordeal of being bathed, she would flit restlessly around the room, cleaning up every object that was even microscopically out of place, flipping TV channels, asking questions about every subject that crossed her mind, and even on one occasion pouncing from the bed onto Warhorse’s shoulders and imitating a human cry of “Giddyup!”

After about an hour of this she would, quite suddenly, crash and sleep until somebody woke her.

This had left Regaari to occupy himself for several hours a night every night, and so he had discovered the Internet.

Data networks were easy. Every species had one, and each was a reflection of the minds of its creators. Which, when the minds in question were human, meant that the Internet was anything but easy. Being almost completely illiterate in English only complicated matters.

Still, after some trial and error, Regaari had eventually managed to navigate the prickly shibboleth maze of in-jokes, references and running gags, some of the more enduring of which were as old as Warhorse. Beyond them was an opportunity.

Regaari was an older and much wiser male than he’d been in the days when he had first criticized his Fathers for cozying up to the Dominion. Gone was the earnest, naive young Whitecrest, and in his place was the kind of warrior who didn’t have too many scars not on account of staying out of fights, but on account of winning them. And for all that he was a skilled agent of conflict in the real world, when it came to data and intelligence Regaari knew he was among the rarified stratum of the very, very best.

Compiling a script to trawl assorted translation sources for probable meaning and then convert the written English into the specialist, high-density code that his implants could read was almost trivial. English may have been a context-heavy and intricate language, but the Corti had excelled themselves when they had created the universal communication medium that was the intermediary through which all translation took place. It was believed to be capable of communicating every possible nuance of meaning, including detailed descriptions of sensory experiences in senses that no known species possessed or could conceive of.

Still. The word “fuck” gave it trouble. Perhaps due to their own bias towards orderly and logical systems, the Corti had never considered that an innocuous monosyllable could carry such a titanic freight of varied meaning. It wasn’t that the word specifically had a nebulous meaning, but that the ‘formal’ meaning, so to speak, was just the root of the most hideously tangled snarl of colloquialism that Regaari had ever heard of.

Somehow, he just knew that he’d be debugging the algorithm that decided which particular “fuck” was being used in a given context for as long as he tried to use the script. But, it would do.

What it would do, was allow him to read English and, haltingly, write it too. This was important, because Regaari’s opportunity had three components.

The first was simple intelligence-gathering. Not that he would gain anything classified or sensitive this way, but that didn’t matter. Simply an insight into what humanity’s informed civilians, retired veterans and armchair strategists thought of their species’ position was edifying enough. What he found there impressed him - short on specifics though they might be, a hard core of amateur analysts were busily assembling a dossier on humanity’s strategic position that was every bit as thorough as Regaari’s own, and often rather more informed.

It made for mixed reading. The innate superiority of humans as warriors was ultimately badly outweighed by the logistical superiority of the rest of the galaxy. On the other hand, nobody could think of a way in which the planet Earth itself might be vulnerable save through technological possibilities so outlandish as to be pure fiction.

Part two was more fun than part one. Humans were already well-disposed toward Gaoians. Annoying instincts vis a vis dogs and cute fluffy animals aside, Sister Shoo was substantially better-known to the Internet than she probably suspected. Adopting and protecting her had done Gao an enormous favor, there.

So, part two was further cementing that relationship. Which led to part three - mischief.

Baseball and Warhorse weren’t remotely shy about their affection for each other, and on this particular occasion were asleep and rumbling spooned up close, with one of Base’s hairy arms resting gently on Horse’s waist.

Picking up Base’s phone, logging into a social media app that allowed new photos and video footage to be uploaded directly to the Internet was trivial. Making it seem innocent would have been equally easy - just a curious Gaoian accidentally activating a device he didn’t know how to stop - but that wasn’t the point. The point was to humanize himself and, more importantly, to humanize the SOR.

He mimed the “shush” gesture that he’d learned and played the camera around the room, taking care to capture as good a view as he could of the two Protectors. Ayma got a little screen time, curled up with her nose stuffed into her fur and an ear twitching slightly as she dreamed, then back to Regaari for a wave to the crowd and… done.

Too bad for one staff sergeant John Burgess that his social media profile was set to ‘public’ by default. Less than a minute after it was uploaded, the video had leaked.

Less than ten minutes later, the footage was on Youtube.

By the time, two hours later, that Warhorse stirred in his sleep ahead of waking up for a bright new day and Regaari had to close all the browser tabs, ‘#SleepyBeef’ was trending across the planet and Regaari himself had secured the affection of tens of thousands of humans.

Not bad for five minutes’ work.

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds

Mwrmwrwk

“I have a bounty to claim.”

The creature manning the desk was a Mjrnhrm, and a long way from home. The acid-etching on the brow-plate of its chitinous head made it clear that this particular one had been exiled for some unspecified crime, and somewhere in its travels some misadventure had cost it a limb. Rather than going for cybernetic prostheses, the creature had opted to receive cloned (or, possibly, donor) organic transplants instead. The replacements were slightly paler shade of mottled dark verdigris.

“The wanted person boards are on the left.” it said, communicating clear impatience and disinterest.

Whether or not its misadventures had robbed it of a sense of manners or whether all Mjrnhrm were like that, Mwrmwrwk couldn’t guess. She’d never met a Mjrnhrm before.

“It isn’t a person.”

“A bounty on something that is not a person.” It put the tablet it had been reading down and its vestigial wings buzzed briefly, signalling clear and naked derision. “Please, do regale me, o brave explorer. Which fabled lost planet have you uncovered? A deathworld full of sapient trees? A city built entirely of platinum? Mrwrki Station?”

“Yes.”

It buzzed again. Some subtle shift of pitch and frequency that was inaudible to Kwmbwrw ears was enough to communicate the difference between derision and confusion. “What?”

“I have found Mrwrki station.” Mwrmwrwk willed her translator to broadcast sincerity and irritation in equal measure.

The Mjrnhrm tilted its head, studying her skeptically and with no small sign of cautious avarice. Mwrmwrwk could hardly blame it for that - given the size of the finder’s fee on Mrwrki, even the small percentage that bounty officers took from each contract would translate to a healthy lump sum in any currency. “…Prove it.”

“What kind of fool do you think I am?” Mwrmwrwk asked it. “Open the transaction and log my report. Then I prove it.”

With an air that suggested it would have preferred to be grumbling aloud, it did so. Mwrmwrwk promptly uploaded her identity information, and the sensor records she had discreetly copied from Negotiable Curiosity’s memory.

The Mjrnhrm studied the proof in front of it for nearly a full two Ri’.

“It pays to be skeptical in my line of work.” It declared, and opened a few tools and programs that, within the protected environment of the transaction, dissected her file in search of evidence of forgery. “But, I can find no evidence that this is a fake…”

“So?”

“You present me with a gamble.” It said. “Mrwrki is a myth. No serious being believes it did anything other than explode. And the size of the reward… I can only just afford to pay out.”

“You sound very much like the last three bounty officers I went to.” Mwrmwrwk told it. “All of them have missed the opportunity of earning, by my estimation, forty-four Dominion Development Credits.”

Its vestigial wings thrummed as it thought long and hard.

Then, very slowly and carefully, it poked its pincer to the large blue accept button.

A notification in Mwrkwrki’s field of vision informed her that she was now many hundreds of times wealthier. It was an absurd sum - enough to buy a fleet of ships the size of Negotiable Curiosity. There was no use - or any real point - in trying to conceal her delight, so instead she reared up to her full height, thrust her forepaws into the air and cooed a long and loud trill of Kwmbwrw triumph.

Then she dropped back to all fours.

“A pleasure” she told the Mjrnhrm, which had covered its auditory organs “to do business with you.”

“If I come to regret it, I swear by the etchings of my kin that I will spend the last of my funds on somehow finding the Human Disaster himself and hiring him to come after you.” it replied, though there was a note of amusement and confidence that it would need to do no such thing.

Fighting to preserve a semblance of dignity, she exchanged gestures of respect with the odd creature, shuffled around and ambled out of the bounty office, fantasizing about being able to finally get out from under Bedu’s skinny thumb, of not having to spend an attosecond longer tolerating Hzzkvk, of being able to return to Kwmbwri, get in good with one of the Great Houses, maybe even become a Matriarch herself.

She effectively died in mid-stride.

Nobody noticed. At most, if they were paying attention they would have seen a slight stumble and the way she stopped, took her bearings, and kept walking. To an outside observer, there was no hint at all that anything was seriously amiss.

On the inside, Eleven took stock of the situation, and set about her mission.

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
Etsicitty house, North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

The vendors on Itrian station are selling gluten-free tigers, buy two and get a third free. It sounds like a healthy option, so Xiù buys three and wanders away to watch the spaceships docking.

Toss.

One of the docking ships smiles at her. Its face splits like pavement cracking, and what it produces is less a smile than a hungry rictus. She throws it a tiger, which it snatches down like a shark snatching a passing fish.

Turn.

Freaked out, she turns away and runs off between the trees. Knee deep snow and needled boughs slow her down, and behind her she knows beyond doubt that Death is gaining. Despairing of escape, she turns at bay and raises her hands to fight, unsheathing her claws and baring her teeth. If she’s about to die, she’s going to die like a Gaoian.

Night and oblivion sweep down upon her and she woke up, flailed and thrashed at the blankets for a second, cast wildly about the unfamiliar room and the dream is still real. A Corti’s face sneers at her in the dark and she scrambles across the bed away from it, fighting for room, only to fall off the other side and hit her head on the wall.

Clarity returned. The Corti turned out to be a framed picture on the wall, or something similar.

Twisted up in the sheets as she was, it took her some effort and quite a lot of soft swearing to eventually struggle to her feet and, rubbing the sore spot on the back of her head, inspect the picture.

“Derek and The Dominos…?”

She sighed and sank onto the bed, resisting the urge to yank on her own hair to chastise herself. That way lay a degenerating spiral of self-loathing that she’d been caught in far too many times over the years.

Instead, she crossed her legs under herself, wriggled her spine straight, and settled into a ritual that had got her through so many dark days. Metta, also known as Loving-Kindness meditation, was directed first at herself to build up a positive frame of mind, and from that foundation she could project the same energies towards her friends and her loved ones.

Nowadays, she had a long list of loved ones. That was worth remembering: It helped her love herself and forgive herself for the nightmares and intrusive ideas.

By the time she finished, the overcast sky outside her borrowed window had a blue-grey cast to it that hinted at imminent dawn. She threw on a T-shirt as she listened to the house and decided that nobody was awake yet. Time to fix breakfast.

She had nearly finished mixing the crepe batter when Julian emerged from his and Allison’s bedroom and plunged straight into the bathroom. He wasn’t in there long - apparently he was an efficient showerer - and he emerged wearing his cargo shorts, scrubbing at his hair and kicking his prosthetic foot to shake the water out of it.

“Hey, you.”

She beamed at him. “Hey.”

“You’re in a good mood this morning.” he observed. “Whatever that squeal of delight was, it woke me up.”

She grimaced. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, I’m a light sleeper.” He sat down on one of the bar stools at the island worksurface, and Xiù pretended not to notice the very welcome attention he was paying to her legs. “What was that, anyway?”

“I, um…” She sighed and blushed. “I found the maple syrup.”

Sure enough he laughed. “Yup, you’re Canadian.” he confirmed, fondly.

She laughed with him. “Shut up!”

Grinning like a retriever with three ducks in his mouth, he nodded. “Yes ma’am.”

“Ooh, do I get to say ’good boy’?”

He chuckled, and rested his jaw on his fist. “If you like.”

“Then get some plates warmed up.”

He stood and she was gratified to see that even he had to go on tip-toes to reach the cupboard that she’d had to jump slightly just to open. “Yes ma’am.”

Xiù giggled. “Good boy. Oh, and put some music on.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Oh, I could get used to this…”

He paused in filling the sink with hot water, waiting, and she laughed silently through her nose. “Good boy.”

The bacon was sizzling, the plates were nice and hot and Norah Jones was singing ’Sunrise’ when Allison surfaced. She greeted Xiù with an affectionate hug from behind and Julian with a light kiss. “Something” she declared “smells AMAZING.”

“Breakfast crepes!” Xiù explained.

“Ooh, what’s in them?” Allison backed off as Xiù aimed a playful slap at her hand.

“Sit down and you’ll find out.”

Allison raised an eyebrow at Julian, who just shrugged. “…Yes ma’am!” she said.

“Hmm…” Xiù produced her cheekiest smile. “Good girl.”

Allison pantomimed shock - her jaw dropped, but the rest of her face was thoroughly amused. She sat next to Julian. “…Okay, that’s actually kinda fun.” she conceded to him.

“Isn’t it?” he agreed.

Beaming to herself, Xiù finished her preparations and soon had three steaming hot crepes plated and served, each one wrapped around a solid portion of bacon, cheese and a sunny-side-up fried egg, with a drizzle of maple syrup and a couple of blueberries and raspberries for decoration.

“Dear God, this looks like it belongs in a restaurant.” Allison commented, as it arrived in front of her.

“Or a fancy hotel.” Julian agreed. “This is home cooking to you?”

Xiù just grinned and picked up her fork. “Don’t let it go cold.” she admonished them.

They looked at each other, then picked up their own cutlery and tucked in. Xiù took one mouthful and almost put her fork back down as the taste made her close her eyes in delight.

“Are you allowed to react that powerfully to your own cooking?” Julian teased.

Xiù play-glared at him. “Giff’me a break. I’ff not had thefe in yearff.”

“She’s allowed.” Allison agreed, and swallowed. “Babe, these are divine.”

Glowing internally, Xiù accepted the compliment with a smile, and dived right into her next mouthful.

As always with good food, their plates were empty far too soon, and Julian and Allison soon turned the tables on her by not letting her do any of the cleaning down and washing up.

“So… How long do we have until Jenkins is back?” Allison asked.

“He said ten o’clock or thereabouts.” Julian replied. “Annoying. An hour or two later and I could get the beaver pipe installed before he arrives…”

“You were gonna take that Aspen down.” Allison pointed out. Julian snapped his fingers and nodded. He put the last plate away and headed for the bedroom.

“Beaver pipe?” Xiù asked.

“There’s beavers up in the back woods.” Allison explained, wiping the skillet dry. “Julian says it’s a good thing we got back when we did, ‘cause a year or two more and they’d be threatening to flood out the road. So, he’s installing some kind of a drain pipe to control the water level.”

“And the Aspen?”

“Quaking Aspen coming up by the garage. It needs to come down before it grows any bigger and damages the roof.”

“Wow. This place really is country…” Xiù looked around. “Um, what are you doing?”

Allison hung up the skillet on the rack by the window. “There’s the other truck to have a look at, but I think that one’s beyond repair.” she said. “Julian says the last time he remembers it running he was just a kid. But, you never know.”

“Oh.” Xiù looked around. “I could, uh, tidy up in here?” she suggested.

“You don’t have to…” Allison told her.

”Yuosha’.”, Xiù replied, unconsciously using a Gaoian phrase that served the same purpose as ‘bullshit’. “I can at least throw a duster around.”

Allison raised her hands. “Knock yourself out, babe.” she said. “Go ahead and take all the ornaments down, too.

After getting dressed, Xiù didn’t need long to find the dusters and furniture polish in the utility room, along with a cloth to cover her hair. She flung open the windows and screen doors, put on some louder music that she could hear it over the sound of Julian’s chainsaw, and declared war on anything resembling dust, dirt or grime, no matter where it hid around the house.

The house had clearly gone for years without being dusted, and she quickly had to find another cloth to cover her mouth and nose - every unused surface, door jamb, high shelf, the backs of the appliances, and especially all the remaining wall ornaments and paintings were caked in the stuff.

The end result was that when Julian came back in some unconsidered interval later, his reaction was to sneeze violently. “Jeez!”

Xiù grimaced. “Sorry, sorry…”

He coughed and waved a hand to try and clear the air. “Maybe let it settle before Jenkins gets here.” he suggested, heading to the front door and opening both the inner door and the banshee screen door to let the air properly blow through.

Xiù nodded. “…Right.” she agreed. “…I got the place cleaner though!”

“Yeah you did.”Julian waved the door a few times to try and fan some air through, then gave up and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. “You did a great job!”

“Xièxie!” she beamed at him and sat on one of the barstools.

“So, uh…” he began.

“Yeah?”

“Speaking of Jenkins…” Julian sat down opposite her. “You never actually said whether you’re coming with us.”

Impulsively, Xiù got up to get herself a water as well - dusting was thirsty work - but she gave him a happy kiss on the cheek on her way past. “I’m considering it.” she teased as he put a surprised hand to his cheek. “Isn’t being a starship pilot on the cards? Wei would be so jealous.”

“Didn’t you want to be an actress?” he asked, as she grabbed the drink.

She sat down again. “That’s not likely, these days.”

“Less likely than being a starship pilot?”

Xiù was giving a wry shrug by way of an answer as Allison came back in.

“Yeah, the Ford’s dead.” she announced. “What’re you two up to?”

“We’re just discussing how flying spaceships is my most plausible career option.” Xiù joked.

Allison made an amused noise and sat down with them. “I bet it beats acting anyway.” she said. “No paparazzi, no gossip, no interviews and cameras… So you’re coming with us, for real?”

What neither of them knew, was that Xiù’s mind had been made up since last night. Home, after all, was wherever she wanted to be.

“Yes.” she said. “I’m coming with you.”

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
Military transport plane, somewhere above the arctic circle, Earth

Owen Powell

“They’re all over t’ fookin’ Internet! All over it! Here I was thinking your objective in comin’ ‘ere was to prove yer a reliable an’ trustworthy sort an’ build a foundation for an alliance an’ that, and then you go and violate the privacy of two of my lads?”

“I think you’ll find, major.” Regaari was holding his ground, for which Powell had to give him grudging credit. ”That my little act of mischief was carefully calculated.”

“Careful-? Oh, aye? Alright. Let’s fookin’ hear it. Come on.” Powell produced his best ferocious glare which, to his consternation, seemed to have no effect on Regaari at all.

Regaari smoothed down a loose tuft of fur. Thanks to his nightly bathing at Arés’ thorough hands, his fur was glossy, light and refusing to behave itself. “Have you been following your own unit’s reputation on social media, major?” he asked, lightly.

“I’ve been too busy wi’ actually runnin’ the unit, mate.” Powell said.

“You should. Prior to our arrival, the SOR was…” Regaari paused, selecting his words carefully. “…the subject of some concern. Accusations of inhumane and unethical surgery, concerns of genetic manipulation, rumours that they’re the product of a Corti research program. The propaganda footage you put out of the action on Capitol Station has only fuelled the concern.”

“Not a one of us is stronger’n a human can get naturally.” Powell said. “Not even Arés.”

“As you say.” Regaari duck-nodded. “But your species tend to underestimate yourselves, major. I think most of you don’t believe that Earth really is a deathworld. Many on the Internet are saying that everything that has happened in the last ten Earth years has been an enormous hoax.”

Major Jackson made a pained noise. “Oh, those fuckwits.” she groaned.

“Human nature.” Powell said.

“Yeah, but I still can’t wait for the day when I can punch people like that consequence-free, like Buzz Aldrin did.” She said. “But Regaari’s right, Powell. Your ‘lads’ scare people just by existing. Didn’t you hear about China complaining to the UN about the, quote, ‘western supersoldier program’?”

“I musta been too busy bein’ part o’ that program.” Powell grumbled. “So, what, you’re saying we’ve got some public image to make up?”

“You’ve got a fuck of a lot of public image to make up.” Rylee said. “Or did you forget that’s my second job? I’ve not been hanging around with you and the lads just for your charming company, I’m on duty here.”

“And how exactly does shootin’ footage of my two youngest and least experienced men in a state of undress and uploadin’ it to the Internet help our public image?” Powell asked.

“It makes them more relatable.” Regaari explained. “Just in this short trip, Baseball and Warhorse have gone from being two anonymous examples of exactly the kind of extreme physicality that has so badly unnerved your species’ commentators, to being ‘the Beef Brothers.’ Now, people are saying ‘they sleep just like everyone else.’”

“My lads aren’t that scary.” Powell said, dismissively.

“Hah!” Jackson smiled incredulously at him. “Hell yes they are! If I didn’t know them so well they’d scare the crap out of me. You too!”

Powel blinked at her, surprised. “…Really?”

Jackson raised a hand to her mouth and called down toward the two enlisted men, who were playing Poker with Ayma. “Hey! Warhorse!”

His head snapped round. “…Ma’am?”

“How big d’you reckon you’d be if you’d stayed PJ instead of going SOR?”

Arés thought about it. “‘Bout… five-eight? Two hundred or two-twenty-five pounds?”

“How big are you now?” She asked.

“Much bigger’n that, ma’am. ” his trademark dopey grin put in an appearance.

Jackson nodded to him, and lowered her voice. “Between you and me? That boy’s a freak.” she said. “A cute, goofy and lovable freak with about the best service ethic I ever saw, but a freak nonetheless. But overnight he’s gone from being a freak in the public eye to having fans. Fans who don’t even know him for the great guy he is, who don’t have a reason to see past the muscles.”

Powell directed a calculating frown at his young charge, and said nothing.

“That sounds like quite a public relations coup.” Regaari noted. His ears were up defiantly, and he folded his arms in imitation of the human gesture, which was awkward for a Gaoian.

“It is.” Jackson agreed. “One that I doubt we could have pulled off. About the only person who could was Regaari, in fact. Protocol forbids us from doing something like this, but Regaari? When he does it, that’s just mischief, you know?”

Powell took a deep and resigned breath. “Fine. Okay. Let’s say I concede that maybe this is a net positive. A big one, even. I’m still not happy at all that you did this wi’out at least consulting me, and wi’out my lads knowin’ you had it planned.”

“Wouldn’t have worked.” Jackson told him. “It’s the whole candid thing that gives it the magic.”

“Major…” Regaari scooted forward in his chair so that his dangling feet could reach the floor. “There may be a cultural difference here. Among Gaoians, for one Clan to do unbidden what another Clan cannot do for themselves - or isn’t aware that they need to - is considered a sign of respect.”

“Fookin’ impudent is what I call it.” Powell groused, but raised a placating hand. “Fine. we’ll chalk it up to alien cultural differences. But do we really need that big of a PR boost?”

“…Regaari? Could you give us some privacy please?” Jackson asked. The Gaoian duck-nodded and picked his way forward to try and get back into Warhorse and Baseball’s good graces.

She turned to Powell. “Yes. Yes you do.”

He raised an eyebrow. “We’re doin’ a job out there. A fookin’ important one. You know what’s at stake. I couldn’t care less what some pimply Internet social justice warrior has to say, they know fookin’ nothin’, and they’re better off that way.”

“I don’t think you know what’s at stake.” she replied. “Powell, bad PR has killed units stone dead in the past. Those ’social justice warriors’ are voters, and while you’re folding your arms at them and keeping shtum, they’re gossiping and speculating and hurting your image so bad that young men are gonna shy away from you ‘cause their mommas warned them about genetic engineering, or whatever.”

“That bad?” He asked.

Jackson nodded, sadly. “Hashtag ‘BeefBros’ is about the best thing that could have happened to your unit, Powell. Without it, it was only a matter of time before some congressman started making nasty noises about you, or some firebrand talkshow host did his bit and skewered your reputation.”

He pointed an arm toward the rear of the aircraft. “There’s fookin’ extinction knockin’ on the door out there, and you’re telling me our strategy for fightin’ it exists at the whim o’ the kind of blithering wankers who couldn’t tip water out of a helmet with the instructions written on’t’ top?”

“That’s about right.”

“Jesus fookin’ Christ…” He rubbed a finger despairingly across the top of his nose, between his eyebrows. “If that’s the shape of it then we’re doomed, and rightly bloody so. We can’t build our survival on a foundation that dodgy!”

She reached out and put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “Owen? Trust me on this. That’s not a fight any of us are gonna win. The only option is to play the game and play it well.”

He lowered his hand and glanced guiltily towards the young Protectors. “What happens to the lads if we don’t play it well?” he asked, quietly.

She squeezed his shoulder. “Trust me, and trust Regaari, and you’ll never have to find out.” she promised.

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Moses Byron

Rachael was extremely good at her job. She knew exactly which calls to forward to Moses when he was in a meeting, and he knew it. So, when his desk phone rang in the middle of a meeting, he had no problems at all in putting his guests on hold for a few moments.

“Ah, please, excuse me, gentlemen… Go ahead, Rachael.”

“Mister Jenkins on the line, sir.”

“Nice! I’ll take it, thank you.” There was a click and a change in audio quality that said the call was through. “Kevin! Still in Minnesota?”

”On my way back, boss man. Aaaand, EV-eleven is fully crewed. Three stellar explorers, as requested.”

“You even got Chang?”

“She talked herself into it.” Jenkins replied. ”I’ll give you my full impression when I’m back in the office tomorrow. Figured you’d like to know so you can start the ball rolling.”

“You figured right.” Moses agreed. “See you tomorrow.” he stabbed a button on the phone to go back through to Rachael. “Rachael, tell Ericson we’re good to go on Eleven, please.”

”Yes, Mister Byron.”

“Thanks Rachael.”

He clapped his hands and rubbed them happily, then turned back to his guests. “Please, forgive the interruption.” he said. “As you were saying-?”

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
Finchley, London, England, Earth

Ava Rìos

Simon Harvey chose about the worst time to call Ava’s phone - she had a basket of wet laundry held awkwardly on one hip and was trying to hang it up with her spare hand, and the phone was on her basket-holding hip pocket

She just about managed to fumble it out in time to answer, somehow. “Hey, Simon.”

“Ava! Glad one of you’s answering your phone.” Simon had the unmistakable rush of a car in traffic behind him. “Go tell my nephew to stop wanking, I’ll be along to pick you both up in twenty minutes. Have you got that travel bag I told you to pack?”

“Uh, yeah.” She cradled her phone against her chin and began taking the washing off the line to move it indoors instead. “Why, where are we going?”

“Cairo.” he replied. “I’ll explain when we’re en route.”

Not knowing how long they’d be gone, Ava made sure to hang the wet clothes up indoors after rousing Sean from whatever he’d been doing in his room and explaining what they were doing and where they were going.

“Cairo?” He asked, helping her get them laid out. Neither of them wanted to come back to moldy clothes.

“That’s what he said. Please tell me you packed that bag like he told us.”

Sean gave her a mildly offended look. “I did it first thing!” he told her.

“Right.”

Laundry cleared away they did a quick tour of the house, turning off the water, gas and electricity, checking the doors and windows were all locked, taking photos of each room in case they got back to find the place burgled and were outside, locked up and had their bags and equipment in hand when Simon rolled up in one of London’s rentable self-driving cars.

They piled in, buckled up, and he ordered it to Heathrow airport.

“So. Cairo.” Simon began, getting straight to business. “There was some kind of a gun battle down there last night, and LOTS of people reported a sonic boom. All by itself that’s unusual, but the very interesting part…” He opened his tablet and showed them Twitter. “…is that the locals are calling it a UFO.”

Ava and Sean glanced at each other. “Is that… enough to go on?” Sean asked.

Simon shrugged. “If nothing else, we can get a story out of the shootout. Something happened down there, and there’s a story in it, even if it’s not Ava’s Big Conspiracy.” he said. “But the skeptics really are at a loss for what else to call it, and nobody in the Egyptian government has said a word yet.”

Ava took a deep breath. This was a world away from shooting photos of the crowd during a visit by extraterrestrial dignitaries. “Cairo, huh? I always wanted to see the Pyramids…”

“Work first, tourism later.” Simon told her, but he was smiling. “I’m trusting you both on this one. Maybe if this goes smoothly, we’ll be ready to move on with chasing your conspiracy, Ava, but for now I have two inexperienced young journalists in my care. You appreciate how big the favour I’m doing for you is?”

“Yes, Simon.” Ava said. Sean just nodded.

“Right.” Simon swiped to a different app on his tablet. “Here’s what I have so far…”

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
Cairo, Egypt, Earth

Master Sergeant Roy Vinther

“Y’all packed?”

There was a round of nodding. Hotwash was done with - there really hadn’t been much to report, the op had been aborted too quickly for them all to do more than confirm that the Hierarchy had a ship on Earth and that it was creating biodrones. Beyond that, there were precious few in the way of learning points. As far as Vinther could tell, the whole mission had gone by the numbers, and now they were packing up and moving on.

Sergeant Walsh was the last in zipping his bag. “Yup. Where we going?” he asked

“Back to CONUS, unless something comes up last minute.”

Walsh grimaced at him. “Vinther, you ass, never say shit like that, you should know better! Now we-”

His phone pinged, and everyone in the room watched warily as he dug it out. Walsh’s shoulders dropped as he read the message. “There, you see what you did?” he asked.

“You’re shittin’ me.” Vinther frowned. “What the fuck’s come up now?”

“‘s from the CIA station chief. Gimme a….” Walsh wandered down the room, reading what had been sent to him with his hand on his chin.

“Way to go, Vinther.” Pavlopoulos congratulated him.

“Hangover, you look like you’ve got time to spare. Why don’t you go load the bags in the SUV?” Vinther told him.

“….yes, master sergeant.”

Vinther let him grab a bag in each hand and go. “Walsh?”

The so-called intel weenie looked up. “Persons of interest coming our way.” he said. “They just got on a flight in London.”

“Is this information just for our entertainment, or are we gonna actually do something with it?” Vinther asked.

“Covert surveillance.”

“Fuck that, we ain’t equipped!” Vinther protested.

Walsh scrolled down through whatever he was reading. “Chief says they’ll equip us.”

“Well that’s a red flag.” Coombes grunted. “Company never shares their toys.”

“Who are these POIs, anyway?” Vinther asked.

Walsh turned the phone around, showing him a photo of a stunning young woman with a heart-shaped face, wavy hair and a slightly haunted, intense gaze. “Ava Magdalena Rìos.” he said. “San Diego survivor, adopted daughter of the chief of Cimbrean Colonial Security, romantically involved with a member of the SOR and, crucially, a journalist. Working for our second POI…” he swiped across onto the next page. “…Mr. Simon Harvey.”

Vinther studied the slender, angular and painfully English features of the passport photo at the top of the page. “Who?”

“He’s a reporter, been poking around in Jeddah, Karachi and Qalqilya.”

“Fuck.” Coombes opined. “We got a leak.”

“No wonder the Company wants us on top of them.” Vinther agreed.

“They’re a step behind if they’re only coming down here now.” Walsh pointed out.

“Guess it’s our job to keep it that way.” Vinther said. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, the chief’s sent a call to Cimbrean, asking for a couple of SOR men. Courtesy, seeing as one of their guys is involved, you know?”

“Great, so we gon’ have a couple’a meat walls stomping around?” Coombes said. “Just great.”

“Eh.” Walsh shrugged. “If it goes FUBAR, I could stand having Superman for backup.”

“What’s gonna go FUBAR? It’s a couple of civilian journalists.” Vinther asked him wryly, acutely aware that all missions got complicated, usually sooner rather than later. “How wrong can it go?”

Coombes smacked a palm to his forehead. “For fuck’s sake Vinther…”

“Take your superstitious ass and go tell Pavlo we need everything back in here.” Vinther retorted, grinning.

Coombes chuckled and kicked his feet out to propel himself upright. “Yes, master sergeant…”

Vinther turned back to Walsh. “Okay.” he said. “Let’s plan this shit.”

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada.

Owen Powell

“Major. Good timing.”

Powell always quietly gave thanks to whatever power might hear it that his job didn’t require him to get as large as some of his lads, who had to turn sideways to make it comfortably through most doors. Still, stepping into General Tremblay’s office was an easy reminder that although Powell himself was easily the smallest EV-MASS qualified man in the SOR, he was still sitting in territory normally only achieved by dedicated bodybuilders.

Next to him, even Tremblay - a brawny man whom age had only succeeded in hardening - managed to look small.

“Summat important came up I gather, sir.” He replied. Tremblay gestured to the office chair opposite him.

“Two things did.” Tremblay expanded as Powell sat down. He produced two briefings - old habits died hard, and the general preferred paper hardcopy - and slid the first over the desk.

“Last night, an STS element operating in Cairo got into a brief firefight with Hierarchy assets. They’ve confirmed the presence of a Hierarchy spaceship and biodroning operation on Earth.”

Powell scowled at the pages as he skimmed them. Smart-paper “photos” clipped to the document replayed the helmet cam footage of an invisible object shielding retreating men and women from the operator’s fire, and lifting a tarpaulin as it rose into the air.

“That doesn’t make a whole lot o’ sense.” he mused. “If they could get a ship to us, why not call in the Hunters? Or just nuke us flat?”

“Our best guess is that the ship was already here, and has neither a jump beacon nor a nanofactory.” Tremblay explained. “Anyway, that’s for me to worry about. Where the SOR comes in is that somehow an investigative journalist by the name of Simon Harvey got wind of this, and he’s booked a flight to Cairo, with his two assistants: His nephew Sean Harvey, and-”

“Ava Rìos.” Powell finished. Her face was right at the top of the second page. “Is there no escapin’ that fookin’ girl’s orbit?”

“That young woman is a bit of a rising star, Powell.” Tremblay said. “Newspaper front pages, magazine covers, the Byron Group’s whole advertising campaign for Cimbrean development… and of course she’s closely tied to two men who both know DEEP RELIC.”

Powell’s first instinct was to emphatically defend sergeant Arés and his father, but he owed it to the seriousness of the situation to think properly for a few seconds. “…I’d consider it deeply unlikely that either Gabriel Arés or his son have shared top secret information, sir.” he said carefully. “I trust ‘em both. Besides, the girl’s not stupid and she’s been a victim of the Hierarchy’s activities. Could be she put the pieces together herself.”

“Either way, we need to know. She’s under covert surveillance, and the station chief requested that the SOR send a man or two. As a courtesy.”

“Firth and Murray.” Powell agreed, promptly.

Tremblay nodded. “Rationale?”

“They can both be as subtle - or not - as any situation might require, they’ve got mission-appropriate skills that Blaczynski and the Defenders lack, and even if they were appropriate for this gig, both my Protectors are in dire need of some PT.”

“Good.” Tremblay slid over the other briefing. “On to situation two.”

Powell picked it up. What he read raised his eyebrows. “Kirk got back in touch?”

“So we hope. Sadly, we have to treat him as Orange for now, but he did feed us some intelligence which should help clean up that question. The name of a spaceship that may be in the Hierarchy’s employ, the ’Negotiable Curiosity’.”

“Cute name.”

Tremblay smiled grimly. “An exo-intel informant has it berthed on Perfection right now. I want that ship, its crew and every kilobyte in its computers.”

“No JETS assets available?” Powell asked.

“Available, yes. Appropriate, no.” Tremblay said. “I’d prefer to send a JETS-qualified Delta Force team on this if I could, but it turns out that Perfection hugely improved their anti-aircraft defense systems over the last few years in response to a terrorist attack. The only way to make a covert insertion now would be Exo-Atmospheric jump.”

“And only SOR can EA Jump.” Powell nodded. “Right. You only need the four?”

“Four should do nicely.” Tremblay agreed.

“Yes sir. Anything else?”

“I believe Major Jackson’s with you?”

“She is, yeah.”

“Good. Ask her to come see me as soon as the Gaoians are safely off this planet, please. And, if you can spare them from their PT for one more day, the Beef Brothers too.”

Powell hesitated. “General… if I may?”

Tremblay sat back and folded his hands neatly in his lap. “Go ahead.”

“Burgess and Arés are remarkable lads. Hell wi’t, they’re bloody heroes, both of them, and they deserve those silver stars they’re gonna get for NOVA HOUND. And, I know they’ve both seen stuff that grown men haven’t… but they both joined at seventeen and their whole life since then has been the military. If it’s really that important to, er…” he searched for the right word. “…to capitalize on this whole viral Internet thing…”

Tremblay didn’t say anything, but a half-inch hike of his eyebrow told Powell to get to the point.

“…I’m concerned for their well-being and morale, sir. The public eye’s a battlefield I myself fear to set foot on.”

“My hope,” Tremblay said, “was that Major Jackson might mentor and advise them before they find themselves back in front of a camera, assuming they ever do. Colonel Stewart has already agreed that he can spare her, and you, I believe, have better reason than anybody to trust her.”

“Knowing they’d be in her care puts my mind at ease sir, yes.” Powell conceded.

“I sympathize.” Tremblay confessed. “But I think you and I are an old-fashioned breed, Powell. We’re too used to public relations being under control of, rather than controlling us. I’m old enough to remember mobile phones as big as bricks, and somehow I think you didn’t have one growing up.”

“No sir.”

Tremblay smiled. “Your Protectors are better-prepared than you think.” he promised. “And I’m just as concerned as you that we don’t ruin two exceptional assets. Fair?”

“Thank you sir.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing comes to mind, sir.”

“Carry on, then. And… Powell?”

Powell paused in turning for the door. “Sir?”

“Give my good luck to the men you send to follow Harvey and Rìos. Somehow, I think they’ll need it.”

“Change of plans, lads.”

Baseball and Warhorse straightened as Powell returned from the office complex, pausing in their preparations for the Jump Array.

“Sir?”

“General Tremblay wants to have a word. You can probably guess why.”

Both men looked at each other, and at the Gaoians. “I guess once these two are back on Cimbrean, our job’s done…” Burgess conceded. “This a PR thing, sir?”

“Major Jackson’s persuaded me that it’s important.” Powell told him. “I defer to her superior knowledge in these matters, seein’ as she’s been in the public eye a long time now.”

“Yes sir.”

“Get your charges home safe.” Powell said. “Arés. Got some private news for yer.”

The young man nodded and they strolled away from the little pile of equipment to talk in private. “I’m goin’ back wi’ the Gaoians.” Powell told him. “Soon as I get there, I’ve got a couple assignments for the lads, one of which is here on Earth. Your, er… former partner is caught up in some DEEP RELIC business down in Egypt.”

“Christ.” Arés rubbed at his forehead. “How’d she find out?”

“I’ve heard you say it yourself that she’s a smart lass.” Powell pointed out.

“Smarter’n me…” Arés agreed. “Most of the time. So… what, is she under observation?”

“Aye. And they’ve asked us to send some of ours down there. Not you.” Powell added, cutting the younger man off before he could speak. “Firth an’ Murray.”

Arés nodded. “Makes sense… thank you for telling me, sir.”

“You deserve to know.” Powell assured him. “Anyhow, I’ll let you crack on.”

“Yes sir… you’ll let me know if anything happens?”

“‘Course I bloody will.” Powell said. “Sergeant.”

“Sir.”

Powell treated him to a rare affectionate clap on the shoulder and jogged back to where Regaari and Ayma were waiting. “I’m afraid this is where you part ways with your Protectors.” he announced. “I hope you’re parting on good terms, Burgess?”

Baseball grinned expansively. “Still kinda annoyed at the little furry bastard, sir.” he said, though his tone was warm.

“Regaari?”

“If I live to be older than Father Fyu I’ll never understand how insulting me is meant to be affectionate.” Regaari said, though Powell judged the set of his ears to be playful and amused. “But I believe so.”

“Good, because as far as I’m concerned this trip’s been a resounding success.” Powell extended a hand, and shook both their paws in turn. “Though - and please don’t take this the wrong way - for God’s sake please never come back.”

Ayma chittered. “Once was quite sufficient.” she promised.

Powell made an amused harrumph and bid them farewell with a touch of a finger to his forehead.

He found Jackson chatting amiably with the pilot of their transport plane, who was clearly a little star-struck and trying not to show it. She beamed at him, and excused herself to the pilot. If she noticed the way the young man turned and started fanboying out to his colleague, she did a good job of not showing it.

“Guess we’re parting ways again, huh?” she asked, soon as they were out of earshot.

“‘Fraid so. Any idea when you’ll next be in Folctha?”

“I doubt it’ll be long. We’re going to want to move fast on this whole Beef Brothers thing, so I’ll be around before long to give you some more PR advice.” she smiled.

“Funny you should mention it, Tremblay wants a word with you and the lads before they head back.”

“Thought he might.” Rylee nodded, then considered him, thoughtfully.

“…What?”

“You sound like you’re gonna miss me.” she observed.

“Well of course I bloody am.” Powell chuckled. “You don’t think I’ve just been tolerating you this last week, do ya?”

She shook her head, still smiling. “You are such an easy tease.”

“Aye, you got me…“

“All to myself?”

“If you want.”

Rylee considered it. “Y’know… I like the whole friends-with-benefits thing we’ve got going…” she mused. “But I gotta admit, the older I get, the more going steady sounds like it’s got something going for it.”

“We could set a record for the longest-distance relationship. How far is Cimbrean from Earth?” Powell asked.

“Point seven kiloparsecs…”

“That sounds like a lot.”

“Yes and no…” Rylee thought about it some more, then shrugged expansively. “I like you a lot, Owen. And you bet your beautifully muscled ass I’ll be calling on you every chance I get. But being stationed in completely different systems when we’re both so career-focused…? I don’t know. How about we try it, and no hard feelings if it doesn’t work?”

“Sounds good.” Powell managed to keep his outside calm, but he was celebrating wildly on the inside, and judging from the twinkle in her eye Rylee could see right through him and sense the party in his head.

“Alright, it’s a deal you emotional volcano you.” She agreed, and then prodded him playfully in the shoulder “But you need to find yourself a friend for when I’m not around. Get yourself a dog or something.”

“A dog? That’s no substitute, come on!” Powell laughed.

“No? I can be kind of a bitch in the mornings…” Rylee chuckled with him. “But yeah. Get yourself the biggest, goofiest, smartest dog you can find - a dog worthy of the SOR. The lads’ll love him.”

“…We could do with a mascot, I suppose…” Powell mused.

“Good! I look forward to meeting him.” Rylee gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I’d better go see what the general wants, anyway.”

“Rylee… take care of the Beef Brothers, will you? Seeing ‘em thrust into the spotlight like this… makes me uneasy.”

“I know.” she smiled. “I’ll look after them, promise.”

“Thanks.”

She turned and walked away with a wave. “They’re lucky to have you, Owen.”

He watched her go. “Aye.” he said, so quietly that it was only for himself to hear. “Same’s true for me.”

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
Cairo, Egypt, Earth

Six

Survival skills that Six had spent several years honing proved their value because somehow he managed to avoid stumbling, staring, or even walking a little slower and getting a second glance to be certain of what - whom - he had seen.

Those were all powerful instincts, ones that his stolen human body imposed upon its Igraen squatter at every opportunity. Learning to suppress them had been the hardest task of his existence, but suppress them he did. He didn’t need to double-check, after all - he could replay imagery from his biodrone body’s optic nerve whenever he wanted, and remember anything seen by himself or any Agent whose memories he had accessed.

He ducked out of the flow of human traffic in the airport, and, on the pretense of checking his phone, reviewed what he had seen.

San Diego, the roller derby. Getting up and leaving just before his capture. Folctha, Cimbrean. Standing at the fence and weeping as Eighty-Four botched the Hierarchy’s last ditch attempt at keeping humanity from spreading to a different planet.

The same face. Older now - an adult, rather than the curly-haired teenager he’d first seen all those years ago, and wearing a kind of brittle confidence - but definitely the same person.

He didn’t know who she was, exactly, but for one human female to be present at two such important events - and now to come here, in the immediate aftermath of his successful disruption of the Hierarchy’s plans for Cairo - that was no coincidence. At least, not according to a human aphorism on the subject of happenstance, coincidence and enemy action.

There was no way that she could fail to be under observation, of course. But that was not, in fact, so much of an obstacle.

Taking care to move in as bored and straightforward a manner as he could, he rejoined the flow of humanity around the airport and kept an eye out. Sure enough, the woman and her two friends had barely gone thirty meters before a man - a burly, fit man in jeans and a loose jacket - glanced at the woman, then around at the crowd. His gaze skipped right over Six without even noticing him, and Six congratulated himself. That moment could have gone badly for him.

Loitering was not an option. While he would have loved to get more information, he was surrounded by watchers. Effecting an air of distracted, businesslike haste he weaved through the crowd right past the burly man, and out into the sweltering sunlight, where he grabbed a cab. He threw himself into the back seat, ordered the driver to a hotel, and sat back to make his plans.

Ava Rìos

“Okay.” Simon twisted to glance out of the cab’s rear windscreen. “I wasn’t expecting them to meet us off the plane…”

Sean looked up from rummaging through his carry-on luggage. “What?”

“You didn’t see the chap in the jeans and jacket tailing us?” Simon asked. When Sean frowned and sat upright, he chuckled. “Nephew mine, we need to teach you some crowd skills.”

“And the guy in the suit?” Ava asked.

It was Simon’s turn to frown at her. “There was a guy in a suit.” she elaborated, unhelpfully.

“I didn’t see him. You’re sure?” Simon asked.

“He was doing a good job of not being noticed, but yeah. He looked right at me, checked his phone and then turned around and followed us. I’m not sure if he’s with Jacket… or if Jacket made him if he’s not.”

“If he did, he didn’t show it.” Simon mused, twisting to look out the back again. “I think you’re onto something, Ava. People waiting for us before we even land? And Jacket Guy was an American if I’m any judge.”

“What does that mean?” Sean asked.

“CIA, Delta Force, SOG, who knows?” Simon sat down. “What did Suit Guy look like?”

“Arabic. Short hair, stubble. Nice suit. Like a businessman.” Ava summarized.

Simon frowned and massaged his chin. “Honestly? That probably scuppers this investigation.” he said. “Even if we’re definitely onto something, there’s no way they’ll let us publish anything top secret.”

Sean zipped up his bag “So, what do we do?”

“We investigate anyway.” Simon said. “There’s always something you can report on, even if it’s not what you’d like to. We’re here, we need to earn our living. So, we do what we came here to do and we report whatever we can report.”

“And maybe afterwards we know more than other people do.” Ava added.

“Where’s the value in knowing it if you can’t share it?” Sean frowned.

Ava shrugged. “I like knowing things.” she said. “And, maybe it’ll help us find other things we can report on.”

“Still.” Simon grumbled. “I’m not happy about the idea that maybe our followers are being followed themselves. Who watches the watchers?

“That’s easy.” Ava folded her arms. “The watched.”

Date Point 10y4m1w2d AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth.

Allison Buehler

“Look at her go.”

“I’m trying not to.”

Xiù had called her parents as soon as she’d finished signing the Byron Group paperwork, and what had ensued had been nearly an hour of alternately frantic, tired, pleading, apologetic and angry Mandarin, garnished with English and Gaori. There was something universal about an argument.

When the call had ended, Xiù had stood very still in the middle of the room for a few seconds, and had then vanished into her room. She had emerged less than a minute later having changed into her sportswear, and was now out on the grass in front of the house, punching and kicking the everloving crap out of the evening.

It was a showcase of startling speed. Allison blinked as she watched Xiù deliver three kicks to the sky in the space of a second, land on her heel and surge forward what looked like ten feet to deliver a straight-armed palm strike that Allison knew would have sent her flying with a broken sternum had she been on the receiving end.

She gave Julian a warm sideways glance. “You’re allowed to.” she said.

“Just… jeez, I’m no slouch in a fight, but the most I ever had to fight was exo-critters and ETs.” Julian mused. “She’d kick both our asses.”

“Well, she’d kick your ass.” Allison teased. ”I would have a gun.”

“…Are you two gonna have a dick-measuring contest?” Julian asked.

“Why? You wanna watch?”

“I’ve heard worse ideas.”

That drew a laugh out of Allison. “Fine, Mister Voyeur. Watch away.”

She shoved the screen door open and the harsh noise it made, in addition to setting her teeth on edge - she really needed to take some WD-40 to it - snapped Xiù out of whatever headspace she’d gone to. The fierce engine of focused violence they’d been watching for the last few minutes vanished, and in her place was, well…Xiù, who tucked some errant hair back into place and smiled cautiously.

“Sorry.” she said, completely unnecessarily.

“You are so Canadian.” Allison teased her. “You okay?”

“I am.” Xiù nodded. “I don’t blame Mama. She only just got her daughter back and here I am leaving again…”

“Hey, don’t get all melancholy on me.” Allison gave her an affectionately tomboyish hair-tousle. It didn’t achieve much with Xiù’s hair up, but it did generate the desired blush and, once Xiù had gripped her scalp defensively, a laugh.

“Sorry.”

“So Julian reckons you could kick both our asses.” Allison added conversationally as Xiù got her hair sorted out again.

“I could kick yours.” Xiù agreed, getting her revenge as Allison produced her best mock-offended jaw drop. “I bet you hit like a girl.”

“I bet you shoot like one.” Allison retorted. “I should teach you sometime.”

“You first.” Xiù told her. She shimmied her spine loose and settled into a solid, grounded stance. “Come on.”

“What, you’re gonna teach me Kung Fu?”

“No, you’re going to learn Gung Fu.”

“What’s the difference?”

Xiù gave her a challenging look. “Shut up and let your Sifu show you.” She said.

Allison glanced back at the house. Julian had leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded and a smile crawling up one side of his face as he watched.

“…Yes ma’am!” she shrugged.

Xiù beamed like she’d just won the lottery. “Good girl.” she said. “Now, this is called a Horse Stance… come on!”

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Cairo, Egypt, Earth

Roy Vinther

Combat Controllers all knew each other. It was a law of the universe.

The corollary to that law was that any reunion between CCTs who hadn’t seen each other for more than an hour or so was foul-mouthed enough to make the Devil blush.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ! Walsh! By some fuckin’ miracle you’re actually lookin’ good these days.”

Walsh stood up and shared an enormous hug with his massive SOR counterpart. “Firth you asshole, I wish I could say the same. Have you gained weight?”

“Sure as shit I’m eatin’ enough.” Firth drawled. “You fuck your sister yet? Always said I would if you didn’t get there first.”

“You still toppin’ Blaczynski?”

“Motherfuckerrr!”

There was laughter, a complicated handshake and a friendly tussle that ended with Firth heaving Walsh - a man who weighed somewhere north of three hundred pounds - high into the air like a child and giving him a bear-hug that must have been difficult to breathe around.

“You boys need some alone time?” Vinther asked. Still chuckling, the two Air Force men broke it up.

“Technical Sergeant Firth, this here’s Master Sergeant Vinther.” Walsh introduced him. “Exhibit B is Pavlopoulos, and that over there is Coombes.”

“This here’s Murray.” Firth said, standing aside to reveal a man who was only marginally larger than Walsh. “He don’t talk much. Say hi, Murray.”

Murray raised a hand - there was nothing shy in his demeanour, more a sense of composure. “Hi, Murray.”

“Two whole words. Means he likes ya.” Firth grinned.

“Good to have you. How much were you told?” Vinther asked, getting down to business.

“Our buddy’s ex-girlfriend is causing trouble again.” Firth said. “You’re watching her and we’re here to… Y’know, they never actually said.”

“Help.” Murray suggested.

“Well, yeah, help. But as I understand it this here’s a courtesy call, so you use us as you see fit.”

“You don’t exactly blend in.” Pavlopoulos opined.

“Yeah, I’m more of the big dumb object.” Firth agreed. “Ain’t that right Murray?”

Vinther turned to where Murray was, only to discover that it was where Murray had been. The man himself had - apparently innocently - crossed the room without making a whisper of noise or drawing attention to himself, and was studying the map. He looked up and gave Firth an amiable nod.

“Murray might be sorta useful.” Firth added.

“And if you wanty break something.” Murray added, finally stringing together enough words for his Scottish accent to make itself known. “That big bastard’s no’ useless.”

“Why do I get the impression comin’ from you that’s high praise?” Vinther deadpanned. “Alright - callsigns. I’m BARKEEP, Pavlo’s HANGOVER, Coombes is BOUNCER, Walsh is DRINKIN’ BUDDY. I assume you get the scheme?”

“Guess I’ll go with, uh…” Firth began, but Murray interrupted him.

“LIGHTWEIGHT.” he said. Firth’s brotherly middle-finger and a ripple of laughter sealed it.

“Alright, fine.” The newly-christened ’Lightweight’ snorted. “But just for that, and because you’re not Irish, you get to be GUINNESS.”

Murray chuckled, but contrived to indicate with a smile and a motion of his head that he’d tolerate the handle.

Vinther chuckled. “Our POIs are KING - that’s Simon Harvey - QUEEN - Ava Rìos - and PRINCE: Sean Harvey.”

“And where are they now?” Firth asked. Coombes glanced up from the camera he was monitoring and indicated out the window. The room they’d commandeered had an excellent view of the hotel’s lobby and front entrance.

“Pretty sure KING and QUEEN both made me when they got off the plane.” Coombes said. “They check into their rooms last night and that’s about it. Guess they’re planning their first move.”

“No point in havin’ us tail them.” Firth said. “She knows our faces and names.”

“She does?”

“Dude, she was our buddy’s girlfriend. Movie nights, drinkin’ nights, couple’a parties…”

“What happened, exactly?” Walsh asked.

“Uh, if we were to start calling PRINCE “Jody” instead…”

“Say no more.” Walsh scowled.

The phone rang, and Pavlopoulos grabbed it with a perfunctory “Go ahead.” A silent minute of attentive listening and note-scribbling later, he was able to hang up. “KING just made a couple’a interesting phone calls.” he said, handing his handwritten note to Walsh. “He’s got a friend in El Obour City, and another in Zagazig.”

Walsh interrogated his tablet, comparing the information on it to Pavlo’s note. “…Yeah, we know them. Dude in Zagazig’s with Egypt Daily News, and the guy in El Obour’s a, uh, blogger. Fancies himself a freelance reporter. We use him as a source ourselves. Reckon they’re about to move.”

“Coombes, stay here, watch the lobby and the drone.” Vinther ordered. “Everybody gear up.”

The room was a blitz of quick, efficient activity, at the end of which a casual observer would never have guessed that each man was armed. They took the fire escape to the car park in the basement: Vinther and Pavlo took one - a nondescript Chevrolet Opta - and Walsh piled into their much less discreet SUV alongside the two SOR men.

”Comms check.” Vinther ordered. The team sounded off in quick order. “Okay. BOUNCER?”

“Think they’re… yeah, they’re heading out the front door now. Drone’s got a lock.”

Their drone was an MBG “Flycatcher”, a small UAV developed by the Byron Group that used cutting-edge forcefield tech for both the flight surfaces and the optics. Eschewing an aerodynamic fuselage, the drone flew by “flapping” its forcefield wings like a bird, while its physical fuselage was little more than a dull mottled matte silver-grey object about the size and shape of a bulky laptop. Its forcefields and the advanced power storage systems that took up most of its physical volume allowed it to remain aloft day and night, especially in clear, hot weather. They’d launched it on day one arriving in Cairo, and had never had to land it since.

Now, its sophisticated forcefield-optic systems were trained on a perfectly ordinary taxi cab - one of thousands plying the city’s streets - but given that it could reliably track thousands of different targets at once, there was no fear of losing the target.

Guided by the feed Coombes was sending them over their tablets, the teams had no trouble at all in following it, navigating around snarls and traffic jams. “El Obour.” Pavlo noted, as Vinther turned back onto the cab’s tail on the Cairo ring road. Their car was as generic as they came on Egyptian streets but still, thanks to the drone they could turn off its tail every so often so as to throw off the appearance of being followed. Certainly, either the target didn’t notice the tail, or else were unconcerned of it.

”What’s El Obour like?” Firth asked, over comms.

”Depends.” Walsh opined. It’s got some nice bits, but the if the satellite footage is anything to go by, the neighborhood of the number they called is a fuckin’ dump.”

”And they’re taking an unmarried young woman into that?” Murray asked.

“Greater Cairo’s fairly cosmopolitan.” Vinther told him. “It’s not like we’re in fuckin’ Taleb Afghanistan or whatever.”

“Besides, KING’s an experienced reporter.” Walsh added. ”I doubt he’d take two newbies into a risky situation.”

“I never heard of the guy before.” Pavlo said.

”He’s the one who blew the lid on all those accidents at Hephaestus, and that shit with those cults in Bangladesh.” Walsh said. ”Now he’s sniffing around here, in Qalqilya, in Saudi and Pakistan…”

“Hmm.” Vinther had to admit, that was a solid resumé.

“Don’t fuckin’ say it, Vinther.” Pavlo told him, not broadcasting.

“Say what?” Vinther asked him, innocently

“You were thinkin’ this was gonna be the E-word.”

Vinther chuckled. “Easy?”

“Fuck sake.” Pavlo rolled his eyes and checked the drone feed again. “One of these days you’re gonna jinx a mission beyond repair and I just pray I’m not there to suffer for it.”

“And one of these days you’re gonna figure out all these superstitions of yours don’t do shit.” Vinther joked.

”Uh, guys…” Coombes got on the line again. “Company just got in touch. One of their recon satellites picked up an atmospheric disturbance over north Africa. Somebody’s got a bird in the air doing Mach eight.”

“Whereabouts over North Africa?” Vinther asked.

”Take a wild guess, BARKEEP.” Coombes replied. ”Sat already lost track of it, so all we know is, our UFO’s around here somewhere.”

”Lost track of it?”

”It’s only the low-altitude ones that can track this shit, BARKEEP.” Coombes told him. “And they move fast. That spysat’s somewhere over Iceland by now.”

“When do we get coverage back?”

”Eighty, ninety minutes or so.”

Vinther glanced at Pavlo, who just raised an eyebrow at him. At length, he cleared his throat. “…Don’t say it.”

“Say what?” Pavlo asked, innocently.

“Don’t say ’I told you so’.”

Pavlo produced a grim laugh and checked his tablet again. “Yes, master sergeant.”

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
HMS Caledonia, High orbit over Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds

Scott ‘Starfall’ Blaczynski

The problem with the Dominion’s general-purpose shuttle was that it looked, and flew, like a lead brick minus the actual lead brick’s lustre and frisson of danger. It was just a silvery grey cuboid with a window at one end and a ramp at the other.

It was also so large that it filled almost half Caledonia’s prep and flight deck. It was, after all, designed to be able to carry a Guvnurag or two. Humans could rattle around inside it like lottery balls.

Sikes in particular loathed it, and every time he laid eyes on it he did the same thing: He sighed and asked “When in the shit are we gonna get something human-built?”

“If it helps, you ain’t gonna have to put up with it for long.” Blaczynski told him. “Or did you forget we’re jumpin’ out of it?”

“You first, Starfall.” Titan told him.

“Lookin’ forward to it!” Blaczynski told him, and extended a gloved fist, which Titan reached out and rapped knuckles against. The EV-MASS was almost comforting nowadays, squeezing him tight and telling him that however hostile the vacuum of space might be, he had nothing to fear from it.

Plus, it added an extra heft and weight that just made him feel strong.

“Hey, Kovač?” He asked.

She looked up from testing the pH balance in his life support pack. “Yeah?”

“When the hell you gonna put on your big girl pants and make a move on ‘Horse anyway?”

“I’ve got my big girl pants on.” she replied. “Not yet.”

“No?”

“He’s not ready.” She told him.

“Yeah, quit trying to play wingman, B.” Titan agreed. “You suck at it.”

“Just tryin’a help my buddies out.”

Kovač smiled and gave him an affectionate slap on the helmet. “You’re good.” she said. “But stay out of my love life, Blaczynski. Even if it is a fucking desert right now.”

“Yes, tech sergeant.” Blaczynski smiled behind his mask. “I’m good to fly, right?”

“Good to fall.” she corrected him. “And, you get to listen to music this time.”

“Fuckin’ sweet!” The team boxed fists, gave each other ringing clouts on the helmet, performed final equipment checks and piled into the shuttle.

Then it got boring.

The idea was for the shuttle to look to Perfection traffic control like an in-system passenger transport. Absurdly, its sensor signature was an order of magnitude larger than Caledonia’s, so all it had to do was leave the bay, pulse-warp to low orbit and it would look just like one of the thousands that came and went through Perfection’s skies every day.

The EV-MASS, meanwhile, had a sensor profile so small that if Perfection’s anti-aircraft defenses detected anything, it’d look like a tiny chunk of space debris doomed to burn up on re-entry.

The bit in the middle where the shuttle pulsed across ten AUs of empty space took hardly any time at all. Even at a paltry one kilolight, the journey was over in only five seconds. It was the sublight approach vector that was the slow bit. That involved sitting around for twenty minutes, joking and fidgeting and waiting.

When the pilot called that they were about to swing through the first drop zone, there was palpable relief. Blaczynski dropped the ramp and stood behind the atmosphere retaining forcefield, bouncing on the balls of his feet with his music up, waiting for the green light.

Titan called from the front “Whatcha listenin’ to, B?”

“Highway to Hell!”

“Good choice!”

”Twenty seconds.” the pilot called.

The timing wasn’t quite perfect - he’d have preferred to jump just as the guitar solo was starting or something - but who the fuck cared? The light turned green and B paused on the end of the ramp just long enough to turn, flip a salute to his buddies, and topple theatrically back into the void.

He nosed down and applied retro thrust, accelerating down into Perfection’s gravity well.

”EARS field.” Titan called. After what had happened to Thor, they were taking no chances - everyone went through the checklist during an EA Jump.

B checked it. “On.”

”Course?”

“On target.”

”EFDS.”

“Charged.”

”EWR.”

“Ready.”

“View?”

“Fuckin’ spectacular!”

That was no understatement. Perfection filled half the sky, but that half was beautifully blue and green, both averaged slightly toward the turquoise compared to Earth, and minus Earth’s omnipresent mottling of cloud. Weather systems moved across Perfection in a leisurely, choreographed parade of predictable rainy cycles that had lasted for geological epochs.

He hit atmo and beamed at the halo of plasma as Perfection’s upper atmosphere compressed against his EARS field and ignited. A wild “YEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAA!!!!!” carried him across a hundred kilometers in a blaze of fire.

First step after the plasma cleared was to re-establish contact. “Post-burn checkin.” he called.

”I have you, STARFALL.” Titan told him. “Course check?”

“Still on. Entering glide phase.”

The EARS field spread out and became wings, slowing and lifting his descent. The control interface was a little tricky - it was supposed to be like wearing a wingsuit, but in practice they still hadn’t quite managed to work out some latency issues, and the result felt sluggish and imprecise, but it worked. By spreading his arms and feet out, he was easily able to steer himself and fall through the rings his HUD was displaying for him.

This was a HALO jump. The moment his parachute opened, he’d appear on Perfection’s radar, so the idea was to open it as low and as briefly as possible so as to avoid detection.

First, he had to find the right spot. Caledonia’s extreme long range survey, the microsats they’d fired into orbit and the software was all well and good, but the final step was to land on the correct rooftop. He very, very nearly missed it.

Aware that there’d be some remedial training in response to his “woah shit” and the violent corrective maneuver he made at the very end of his long drop, he twisted through the air, corkscrewed past some high-rise apartments - no doubt giving the residents something to talk about - and ripped his ‘chute at the last possible second, tensing his neck muscles to hold his head steady against the sudden snap of deceleration.

He hit hard, rolled, skidded to a halt on the edge of the roof, and then threw himself desperately onto the ‘chute before a stray wind current could pick it up and drag him off into open air.

That done, he just had to lie still for a few seconds and giggle to himself.

“That,” he told the sky, “Is never gonna get old.”

He popped the release on his ‘chute harness,folded it and weighed it down under his equipment pack, and set up on the edge of the roof overlooking the target landing platform. “REBAR, STARFALL. EA Jump complete, I’m in position.”

”Clear copy, STARFALL. Whatcha got for us?”

Blaczynski aimed his scoped rifle down at the ship and compared the alien writing on its nose to the intel on his tablet. “Got a match. November Charlie is still on the pad.”

He ran the scope over the parked ship. “Got… yeah, two Echo-Tangos. One’s a Blue-raff. Fat fucker, dead ringer for the ship’s tech… and, yup, there’s the Corti. Two out of three.”

“Intel said the pilot’s a Kwmbwrw.” Sikes pointed out.

“I don’t see ‘em. Either way, target’s in sight. You’re clear to jump.”

”Thought you’d never ask…” Titan commented.

Blaczynski used the time his buddies were jumping in to set up his spotter computer on its tripod, calibrate his gun’s smartscope and get the beacon going to guide Rebar, Titan and Snapshot onto target.

Some minutes later, the guys called in that they were through the burn phase and into glide. Their icons appeared on his tracker as the flight systems synchronized and began to guide them in.

“Still no sign of that Kwmbwrw.”

“I’ll lay a stasis trap for her when we’re down and the ship’s secured.” Rebar called.

“Gotcha… and I have you in sight.” B replied, tracking three tiny falling shapes in his HUD. “You’re-”

There was a croaking, rattling noise from behind him which, when he frowned and turned towards it, turned out to be a couple of Vzk’tk police officers, aiming guns at him.

”STARFALL, REBAR. I didn’t copy your last.”

“Local law enforcement. You’re good to finish the drop?”

”We’re good. Don’t hurt ‘em, B.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” Blaczynski sent, and stood up. “Uh… Bar wheep grana wheep ninibong?”

The Vzk’tk rattled its percussive language at him again, and he finally remembered the translator clipped to his MOLLE.

He turned it on. “Howdy fellas.”

The translator gave the cops a note of desperation in their voice. “Don’t move, human! These are Irbzrkian stun guns, they were designed to be effective against your kind.”

B sighed. “Guys. Do everyone here a favor and forget you saw me, please? I’m just doin’ my job.”

“You’re under arrest for trespassing!” The shorter of the two police snapped. “Come quietly… please.”

B took a step closer. “That little zap-gun won’t do shit to me.” he said, matter-of-factly. “Now come on, go grab some donuts or whatever the fuck you guys eat, call me in as a large bird or whatever.”

They shot him. Twin arcs of crackling energy played over his EV-MASS without so much as tickling, and he sighed theatrically. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the Defenders popping their ‘chutes for the final descent onto the platform.

“Okay. Fun’s over guys. Now I have to get mean.” He said. “Sorry.”

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
El Obour City, Greater Cairo, Egypt, Earth

Robert Murray

“So she’s a cheater.”

“Yup.” A moment of white-hot anger lit Firth’s eyes for a second before he clamped down on it. “Horse is the nicest fuckin’ guy in the world, too, an’ that whore went an’ cheated on him with that skinny fuck Harvey.”

Murray saw Walsh glance at him in the rear-view mirror, and shrugged and nodded.

Firth did not, apparently, think that this was satisfactory. “No, bro, give us your actual thoughts. I want at least ten words.”

Murray’s face wrinkled briefly around a thoughtful sniff and he touched a thumb to his chin. “I love ‘Horse.” he said, finally. “You couldn’y find a better man if you searched the whole Earth tae fuck. But Legsy an’ Price, God rest ‘em both, they fuckin’ called it way before it happened.”

“RIP.” Firth aimed his eyes upward and touched his forehead, navel and shoulders. “But yeah, there you go.”

“What’s the full story, Murray?” Walsh asked.

“…Pricey’s exact words were ’Neither of them are ready for a relationship’.” Murray revealed, and cleared his throat.

“Ah.” Walsh nodded.

It was a subject Murray preferred to avoid, so it came as a relief when Vinther got on the radio. ”Okay, they’ve gone into the apartment block. Murray, set up on the south side. Pavlo, Walsh, northeast. Firth, drive.”

They dismounted and got into position, and the two vehicles merged back into the traffic. It was simple enough to find a quiet spot where he could wait and watch. Okay, Scottish skin and hair weren’t exactly the local flavor, but Murray knew a lot about just existing in a way that completely bypassed all of a person’s perceptual instincts and just made them sort of… treat him as part of the landscape.

Vinther’s decision to keep Firth in the car was a sensible one. Firth was a genuine monster, completely unsuited to going unnoticed, even if he tried to dress down. Instead, he was dressed to play the opposite role and attract attention if need be, and so they’d stopped off at the “American Big and Tall” tourist shop before rendezvousing with the STS element to grab him some noticeable attire, and had succeeded beyond their wildest hopes. There was just something about a six-foot-seven titan wearing an aggressively ugly aloha shirt and board shorts cut for the five-hundred-pound obese market that drew the eye.

Murray’s conservative khaki slacks and navy blue rough cotton shirt went completely unnoticed.

Even in the shade the heat was oppressive, and he took the opportunity to re-apply his sun cream. Crue-D meant that sunburn was a minor irritation at worst, but why put up with it at all?

”Suffering, GUINNESS?” Vinther asked, as his car patrolled past.

Murray snorted - he’d forgotten his temporary new call sign - and waved reassuringly to the car.

Not much happened for a long time, and then the south entrance to the apartment building opened.

”GUINNESS has eyes on KING… PRINCE…and QUEEN. POIs in the street, south side.” he called.

“Copy that GUINNESS. Their rental’s waiting round the corner, west side. BARKEEP is watching it.” Vinther sent.

Murray nodded and watched Ava. She had her camera out and was-

-He saw her blink six feet backwards down the street, facing the wrong direction and with her camera holstered. In one instant she was walking behind the younger Harvey, and in the very next she was looking wildly around in abject bewilderment, as if searching for something that had suddenly vanished. A lone strong gust blew some trash and desert dust down the road in a miniature tornado.

“What th’-?” he began, having no idea how to report what he’d just seen.

”Something wrong?” Vinther asked.

“She just…glitched?”

”Whaddya mean, ‘glitched’?”

Murray frowned as Ava turned a full, confused circle, and the implications of what he’d just witnessed finally clicked into place. “…Ah, fuckin’ shite. Detain, right now!”

“Moving.”

Murray set off at a run, weaving through the traffic like it wasn’t there, and was behind Ava and grabbing her before she had a hope to see him coming.

He was relatively gentle with her, but Ava went from turning confusedly on the sidewalk to suddenly being pressed against the wall with her arms behind her back, securely held.

She didn’t take it well. ”What the fuck?!”

“Easy Ava. It’s me: Murray.”

”Murray?!” She squirmed to try and escape. Up ahead, Sean and Simon turned back, saw what was happening and both started back to Ava’s aid before Walsh and Firth appeared out of the metaphorical woodwork and secured them both. “Get off me!”

If Firth was a little rougher with Sean than was strictly necessary, Murray decided not to comment. He didn’t have much sympathy for the lad himself, but then again, holding Sean’s cheek against the wall like that was treading the fine line of professionalism. Firth wasn’t going overboard, but he could have been gentler.

Ava plainly felt differently. “Firth, you hillbilly son of a crack whore, let him go!”

Firth gave her a narrow-eyed glare that spoke of his near-bottomless loathing for her for a shaved instant before his control returned. He pressed an implant scanner to Sean’s head, grunted at the green light, and all but threw the skinny young man over the sidewalk to lean against the car Vinther and Pavlopoulos had just arrived in.

“Oh, big bad man try’na prove it?” She spat. “I bet you cried when your daddy fucked you in the ass, you little bitch!”

Vinther snorted as he got out of the car. “Jeez, she’s got a mouth on her…”

Ava’s feet scuffled in the dirt as she tried to fight back. “Murray, you let me go right now.” She snarled. Murray yanked his scanner of his belt and pressed it to her head. It pinged a happy green and he relaxed.

Firth apparently wasn’t satisfied. “Double check.” he snapped, shoving his own scanner into Murray’s hand.

“…Still green.” Murray confirmed, after repeating the test. Firth snorted and stalked away to bundle Sean into the SUV.

Ava at least cooled a little with him gone. “Happy?” she demanded. “You gonna let me go now?”

“Sorry, Ava.” Murray zipped some plastic handcuffs around her wrists.

“Murray, for fuck’s sake…”

“Come on, lassy, settle down. Please.” Murray requested, calmly. “You stepped in some shite, that’s all.”

“Good!” She snapped, then sighed and finally relaxed. “…Fine.”

“Thanks, Ava. Gonny frisk you for weapons now.”

“Whatever.”

She grumbled something that sounded inventively vulgar in Spanish as Murray gave her a businesslike and efficient patdown, finding nothing more than her camera, phone, passport and press ID.

“Walsh?” He asked.

“Hey, you’ve got the entertaining one.” Walsh patted Simon Harvey reassuringly on the shoulder. The journalist looked more bored and resigned than upset. “Mine’s good as gold.”

“Right. Inty the van with him, then.” Murray proclaimed. Ava had finally settled into sullen silence and allowed him to steer her firmly into the Chevrolet to sit on the back seat next to Pavlo.

As soon as the door closed, Vinther covered his mouth to hide a huge grin. “God damn! I don’t know who taught that girl to swear, but she could give me lessons.” he commented.

“She’s even worse in Spanish.” Firth grunted as he circled round the SUV to get into it, plainly not amused. “Beats the fuck outta me how ‘Horse used to put up with it.”

Chuckling to himself, Vinther got into the Chevrolet’s driver seat, and Murray settled into the back seat, sandwiching Ava between himself and the mercifully much smaller Pavlopoulos.

“Just what in the shit is going on?” She demanded, as soon as they were moving.

“Canny tell you.” Murray said.

“Come on, Murray, it’s me. You can’t give me anything?”

“Lassy,” Murray warned her as he fastened her seatbelt, “Don’t mistake my civil treatment for liking you.”

Ava stopped squirming against her cuffs and went still. Suddenly looking hurt and sad and small, she slouched in the middle seat, staring at her knees.

They were back on the Cairo Ring Road before she spoke again. “…How is he?”

“Have you no’ seen the news?”

“Yeah, yeah, the whole Beef Brothers thing.” She tried to wave hand dismissively and only succeeded in twitching her shoulder awkwardly. “I mean… how’s he doing? Is he okay?”

“He’s okay.”

“…Thanks.”

She was quiet and well-behaved all the way back.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds

Harry ‘Rebar’ Vandenberg

Akiyama was the first to land, and he did so with characteristic precision, slamming his ‘chute open, swinging on the sudden change of momentum, and ballet-stepping neatly onto the target landing platform, his carbine already raised and aimed.

Sikes was only a second or two behind him, and announced his arrival with a higher-velocity landing that must have left the deck reverberating.

If the Corti target felt any emotions at all at this sudden arrival, it - he - didn’t betray them. Those huge black eyes flicked from one man to the other and, very calmly, it raised its hands in surrender.

The Vz’ktk was rather less phlegmatic about the whole thing. It produced a panic noise somewhere between a hoot and the sound of a man clog-dancing on bubblewrap, and turned to run.

Vz’ktk had a decent turn of speed on them when they needed it - nothing that could outrun a human of course, but still quick enough that the situation needed controlling now before anything regrettable happened. Rebar angled his descent, popped his ‘chute, and then deployed a trick that they’d worked out only SOR could get away with, thanks to the incredible ankle support offered by the EV-MASS - he hit the ‘chute’s release while he was still a good six feet up.

Intimidation tactics really didn’t come any better than slamming into the deck like a human meteor some meters in front of the panicking alien, which was promptly corralled. It spun, looking for an exit, then in response to some kind of barked order from the Corti, it spread its arms in surrender.

The plan was going off almost without a hitch. Titan darted up the ship’s ramp to commandeer its computer systems before the Corti could muck with them via some neural cybernetic controller or whatever, and Sikes began patiently explaining through his translator that the two beings were now detained for questioning.

“REBAR, TITAN.” Akiyama called. “Ship’s empty. No pilot on board. Pulling the memory.”

“Copy that, TITAN. STARFALL, REBAR: You okay up there?”

There was a pause that was a little too long and then - “REBAR, STARFALL. Situation’s under control.”

“You didn’t hurt ‘em?”

”Just introduced ET to duct tape, that’s all. They’re fine.”

“Good. Laying a stasis trap for the pilot.”

Snapshot nodded and bundled the two aliens onto their ship, and Rebar released his pack to grab the stasis trap

The trap was one of Titan’s gizmos and what it lacked in aesthetics - it was little more than a laser tripwire, a small computer card and the stasis field generator taped to a power pack - it made up for in effectiveness. Anything that crossed the beam would instantly be contained within the stasis field, which would collapse when the power pack was dry about two minutes later: more than enough time for the victim to be surrounded ready for capture.

Once it was attached to a wall, crate, or any other vertical surface through the simple medium of the SOR’s best friend - duct tape - all they had to do was sit and wait.

That was the theory, at least. What happened was that Rebar was still in the process of sticking it to some kind of cargo-handling drone when the pilot ambled unconcernedly around the corner.

They stared at each other for a moment, calculating how to react.

“…Well.” Rebar cleared his throat. “This is awkward.”

The pilot turned and ran.

“Fuck!” Rebar surged to his feet and took off in pursuit, but Kwmbwrw had long legs and this one had a large head start. Firth would have had no trouble catching up to it, but Defenders weren’t built for speed - Rebar was only marginally faster than his quarry.

“STARFALL, REBAR! The pilot just showed up, she’s rabbiting!”

”I see her. Sending up the drone.” You could say a lot about Blaczynski - his wild party lifestyle, his egregiously ugly tattoos, his chronic ability to stick his foot in his mouth - but when it came down to the wire, he was an absolutely top quality operator, an ice-cold Combat Controller whose awareness of the operational space bordered on the supernatural. ”Take a right off the end of the platform… hundred yards. You’re gaining.”

Rebar caught a glimpse of curly chocolate fur up ahead, but lost it just as quickly behind a huge supporting beam that was part of the vital superstructure for the skyscraper that towered above him.

”Second left in a hundred yards.” B called. ”…Civilian ETs in your way, check your movement.”

Rebar gritted his teeth and somehow found a higher gear from somewhere, felt the deck ring and shake under him as he put his training and the EV-MASS through their paces. He shot past a bewildered knot of Robalin and angled down the sharp left that Blaczynski had indicated.

”Crowd’s slowing her down, keep it up REBAR.”

Vandenberg could see why. The fleeing pilot was bullying her way through the crowd, knocking spindly Vz’ktk and other fragile life forms out of her way. She could get away with it - for all her size, she wasn’t deathworld-dense, and could shoulder-check people out of her way without committing murder. If Rebar had tried the same trick, he’d have pulped somebody.

He raised his voice and roared. “GET OUT OF MY WAY!!!”

It worked - alarmed beings turned, saw a charging deathworlder in heavy armor and wisely decided not to impede his progress. Their reactions were so slow though, and some of the further ones didn’t even hear him. One large Vgork loitered in the path left by the escaping Kwmbwrw and was slow on the uptake even when Vandenberg yelled at it to move.

Up ahead, his quarry dashed right and vanished from view.

”Visual contact interrupted.” B called. “Trying to reacquire…”

Rebar shouldered gently but firmly through a bewildered huddle of aliens and made it as far as the intersection. His heart sank. The crowd was just as dense, and while there were several Kwmbwrw standing around, not one of them resembled the target.

“Contact lost.” he declared, knowing the pursuit was a failure.

“..Contact lost.” Blaczynski agreed. If he had no idea which way the alien had gone, then Rebar doubted there was any hope of re-acquiring her. ”Better get outta there, Reeb. Cops’ll be coming.”

Aliens scattered away from him as Rebar spat a furious curse into his mask and set off at a jog back the way he’d come.

“We good to get outta here?” he asked.

”Just need Starfall in the driving seat, REBAR.” Titan called. ”Data’s secure.”

”And our two ETs are confined to quarters.” Sikes added.

A vehicle of some kind swooped low overhead, covered in flashing lights and howling. Some things, it seemed, were universal. Fortunately, it apparently failed to notice Rebar. “Credit where it’s due…” he grunted, picking up the pace. “Local police are quick on the uptake.”

“Think me having two of their buddies tied up here might have something to do with that…” Blaczynski commented. ”We need off this planet ASAP.”

Rebar gritted his teeth and stepped up into a full run again. “Get off that rooftop.” he ordered.

”Don’t need to tell me twice…”

As he pounded back along the promenade, Rebar saw B pause on the edge of his rooftop, flip a jaunty salute to his two captives, then grab his zipline and plunge toward the ship.

Rebar scooped up his abandoned gear on the way past, and they met at the bottom of the ship’s ramp and banged fists together. “Get ‘em next time, Reeb.” B told him, slapping his shoulder.

“Would have… preferred…” Rebar panted. Sprinting in EV-MASS was a task to drain even the most conditioned athlete. “ To get ‘em… this time…”

B nodded, turned, caught the drone as it glided down out of the sky, and hugged it to his chest before vanishing up the ramp and hanging a right onto the Negotiable Curiosity’s flight deck.

Rebar followed and settled himself into the command chair, sucking on the sippy straw inside his mask in a bid to restore some of the reserves he’d just incinerated during the pursuit. It creaked a little as several hundred pounds of man and armored space suit tested its engineering, but did little more than that.

“How long ‘til we’re in the air?” he asked.

“Just getting clearance from local traffic control.” Blaczynski said. “Wouldn’t wanna get smeared all over downtown by the AA because we didn’t ask nicely… Done. Flight clearance received.”

He waved a hand through the volumetric controls and grunted happily as the ship hoisted itself off the pad and pulled in its ramp and landing gear.

“They’re letting us fly in a zone with a security alert?” Vandenberg asked.

“Don’t question it, bro.” Blaczynski advised him, and finished laying in their flight plan and speed.

Rebar fidgeted awkwardly nonetheless, fully expecting interceptors or a ground AA station to abruptly latch onto them and make awkward demands like ordering them to land. It was a profound relief when they hit the minimum warp altitude and Starfall pulsed the drive.

The Negotiable Curiosity was much faster than the shuttle. What had been a five second trip in the shuttle was over before Blaczynski had even removed his hand from the control to activate the FTL.

“Okay…HMS Caledonia, this is SOR one-oh-seven flying November Charlie, we’re at RP Alpha.” Blaczynski called.

Rebar studied the holographic sphere that was the ship’s sensor display. “Where are they?”

“If they’re running cold we shouldn’t see them anyway, but… hmm…” Blaczynski turned in his seat. “Yo, Titaaan?!

Akiyama clanked up the deck and stuck his head through the door. “‘Sup?”

“Did you fuck with the navcomp?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Something wrong?” Rebar asked.

B nodded, and hit the comms again. “HMS Caledonia I say again: Sierra Oscar Romeo One Zero Seven STARFALL flying November Charlie, operational objectives achieved, we are at the rendezvous point. Come back, over.”

They strained to listen. A few trillion photons, some portion of which had been traversing the endless night since the cooling of the early universe, reached their journey’s end in Negotiable Curiosity’s communications sensor array as an unregarded quiet hiss.

“…What’s our contingency for Caledonia being a no-show?” Akiyama asked, quietly.

“Loiter at RP Bravo in low emissions mode for no longer than eight hours.” Blaczynski said, enacting exactly that plan. The ship turned, lurched briefly through superluminal space, and then went dark as soon as it was safely back below lightspeed. “Then make best speed for Cimbrean. Treat Caledonia and all its crew as orange until definitively established otherwise. Do not dock with Caledonia nor share confidential information over comms with any of her crew unless and until they have been proven green.”

“Why the loiter?” Vandenberg asked.

“‘Cause it could be technical problems or something innocent and they might need the escort.” B replied. “And… hell, if something compromised Cally then humanity’s fucked anyway, ‘cause they’ve got the jump codes for Earth and Cimbrean.”

“Unless they managed to scrub the computer before they were taken over.” Titan pointed out.

“Yeah, well…Whatever’s going on, eight hours gives them time to fix the problem and get in touch, or broadcast an SOS to the RP. ”

Rebar took a look out the window as if that might achieve anything. Even if it was right next to them, Caledonia’s matte-black hull would have been invisible anyway. “Okay, well… Grab an MRE and settle in, guys.” He advised. “Guess it’s time to hurry up and wait.”

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
US Embassy, Cairo, Egypt, Earth

Ava Rìos

The good news was that they’d taken the plastic zip tie off her, and her hands were no longer bound behind her back.

The bad news was that they’d put some metal handcuffs on her, and her hands were now bound in front of her. While this was admittedly an improvement, it didn’t exactly feel like Everest had been climbed.

Still. The air conditioning was on. That was nice.

The big dude in the suit who’d taken over from Murray in looking after her managed the impressive feat of being even more impenetrably taciturn than Murray himself, who was friendly and engaging even if he preferred to deploy his words like an old lady counting out pennies.

This guy was a human wall in a badly-tailored black suit.

There was nothing to do for what felt like hours, and not in the sense of a boring twenty minutes or so, but in the literal sense that the day had probably been and gone and the sun had probably set. Ava was bored out of her mind, growing increasingly tired and sleepy and there was nothing to do except fidget, sit and think, try and get comfortable. The only way to try and keep track of the time was counting the number of times that Man-wall was periodically replaced by a slightly different Man-wall.

Eventually she folded her arms on the table and tried to grab a nap. She wasn’t sure if it worked - maybe it wasn’t long after that point that the door opened, or maybe she successfully dozed for a while - but either way she sat up and blinked when somebody new entered the room.

The new arrival was a woman in her… early forties, if Ava was any judge, with hair that plainly hadn’t had more than a quick lunchtime meeting with a brush today, and her arms full of too many things - a laptop, her phone, several paper folders, some pens, a coffee mug…

Unlike literally everybody she’d dealt with in the last few hours, the newcomer immediately won some points by not looking either totally composed and emotionless, or pissed off. Mostly, she looked like she was a plate-spinner with lots to stay on top of, but she gave the impression that Ava, while being another plate, wasn’t actually an unwelcome one.

She managed to get the ungainly armful of stuff she was carrying safely onto the table, offered a warm smile and shook Ava’s cuffed hand. “Hello Miss Rìos. My name’s Darcy.”

“Hi, Darcy.” Ava managed, sitting up a little straighter.

Darcy sat down. “Do you, uh, do you mind if I call you Ava?” she asked.

“Please do…” Ava calculated for a few seconds as Darcy got settled, and decided to go with completely open honesty. Somehow, it seemed like the only card that stood a chance of working. “Darcy, please, what the hell is going on?”

“…At the risk of sounding like I’m dodging the question,” Darcy replied, adjusting her seat, failing, and trying to adjust it again. Ava found herself warming to the woman’s dorky, busy energy. “What do you think is going on?”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“Believe me, I would if I could.” Darcy offered an apologetic smile.

”Why can’t you?” Ava asked her. “What’s so goddamn important?!”

Darcy smiled and shrugged. “I can’t even tell you why I can’t tell you. Stupid, isn’t it?”

Ava sat back as far as being handcuffed to the table would let her. “You got that right.” she agreed.

“So… what do you think is going on?” Darcy repeated.

“What do I think?” Ava asked. “I think we’ve got a deadly enemy out there.” She tried to gesture through the wall and winced as the cuffs stopped her hands with a painful jolt. “An alien enemy.” she elaborated instead. “I think they blew up my my home, killed my family, murdered my friend… I think they have a spaceship here on Earth, I think they can control people through implants in their brains, and I think they stole a bunch of Pakistani nukes to try and start World War Three in the middle east. It’s either that or I’m hopelessly paranoid.”

She awarded herself some brownie points as Darcy cleared her throat and examined her laptop. That, Ava judged, was evidence of a solid hit.

“That’s… an extraordinary claim.” Darcy said, carefully.

“Yeah.” Ava agreed. “Usually I’d keep it to myself, but… I mean, I’m chained to a desk and I’m talking to an MIB.” She shrugged. “I figure I’m onto something at least.”

“I could probably do something about the chained to the desk part.” Darcy offered.

“That’d be nice…?” Ava asked, hopefully.

Darcy nodded to the human wall, who nodded and took Ava’s cuffs off entirely. The opportunity to rub at the sore spots on her wrists and shake her shoulders loose was a kind of minor ecstasy.

“Why do you want to know?” Darcy asked.

“Why-?” Ava gesticulated as if the answer was obvious. “Because I want to do something!”

“Do what?”

”Anything!” Ava told her. “Something! I don’t know what, but…”

Darcy gave a sympathetic nod, and typed a quick note on her laptop. “I can definitely appreciate that sentiment.” she said. “Do you need a minute to think about what exactly you mean? ’Anything’ can mean… well, a lot.”

“I don’t think another minute would help.” Ava shrugged. “I’ve tried… I guess you know about me and Ada- uh, Staff Sergeant Arés, right?”

Darcy just nodded.

“…I tried being there for him. Being, like, his anchor or his foundation or whatever. I fucked that up bad. I just… I know I’m not suited for the military life. What does that leave me with? I thought maybe if I could dig up the truth, I’d be able to think of something…”

“And what would you have done with the truth, whatever it was?” Darcy asked. “What would you have done if, say, everything you suspect turned out to be completely accurate?”

“I don’t know.” Ava confessed. “…I don’t know.”

Darcy smiled sympathetically, closed her laptop, and handed her a paper handkerchief.

“You can do something, you know.” she said.

Ava wiped her eyes dry and sat forward. “Do what?”

“Tell me what exactly happened to you on that street corner, just before Sergeant Murray detained you.”

Ava nodded, and composed her thoughts.

“I was following Simon and Sean.” she said. “We’d just spoken to this blogger guy, he’d been poking around that gunfight and some reports of UFOs. He said that there was a woman we should try and find, she’d been kidnapped and her mother murdered. Gave us a name and some addresses we might try…”

Darcy picked up her coffee. She didn’t drink it, just held it warmly in both hands.

“…We were on our way back to the car when… it was like time stopped for everything except me. The cars stopped moving, Simon and Sean stopped moving… hell, the air stopped moving. It felt solid, I couldn’t… I was stuck in this little circle and couldn’t get out. And then Suit Guy was there.”

“Suit Guy?” Darcy asked.

“He was at the airport when we got off the plane. Did a pretty good job of acting like an ordinary member of the public, but I saw him watching us. He looked like a… a businessman, or something. He had a nice suit on, an expensive watch, he had short hair, a mustache, no beard… you know. I figured he was with you guys, maybe.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing, really. He said ‘hello’, told me not to be alarmed. He said that he wanted to speak with me - me personally - and that he had questions for me, and answers too.”

“Did he give you anything, or take anything from you?”

“He gave me some numbers.” Ava nodded. “ I entered them on my phone. I think they’re coordinates, or maybe like a ZIP code or whatever the Egyptian version is? I don’t know. They’re a way to find him.”

“He specifically said he wanted to speak to you?” Darcy confirmed.

“Yeah.”

“And then what happened?”

“He… vanished.” Ava snapped her fingers for emphasis. “And everything started moving again. And, I was so busy looking for where he’d gone that I didn’t even see Murray until I was up against the wall.”

“Did Suit Guy tell you his name?”

Ava shook her head. “Sort of. He told me to call him by a number.” she said. “Six.”

Darcy gnawed thoughtfully on the end of her pen. “And… did he say why he wanted to speak with you?” she asked.

“I asked him that. He just said something really cryptic and vanished.” Ava told her. “He said, uh… He said… something about… basketball?”

Darcy quite wisely stayed silent and let her think hard as she tried to recall the particular words Six had used.

“He said…” She exhaled in frustration, and it finally came to her. “He said… ‘Because only humans would play basketball with their prisoners’.”

“I see.” Darcy nodded. “And, did anything else stand out to you?”

“He said ’humans’. As if he’s not human himself…” Ava thought long and hard. “I’m sorry. It was just sudden and confusing and I guess maybe I was freaking out a bit. I can’t think of much else.”

“That’s okay.”

“Can I ask you some questions now?”

Darcy put her coffee down. “Yes….” She said. “But I might not be able to answer.”

“I understand.” Ava promised.

She ran her fingers through her hair to try and sort out what her most pressing need was.

“…Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

“You’ve already done a lot.” Darcy said.

“What, by coming to Egypt and getting caught up in stuff I only suspect I understand?”

“By answering honestly and openly. You’ve said a lot, and it will help. It’ll especially help the SOR.”

Ava nodded and looked away. “Too bad they hate me.”

Darcy gave her a long, slow, calculating look, and then she put down her pen. “Do you mind if I go a bit beyond the relationship between interviewer and detainee for a second, and give you some life advice?” she asked.

Ava blinked at her, then indicated for her to go ahead.

“My job - a big part of my job - involves figuring people out and giving them what they want to see, and telling them what they want to hear, so that they’ll open up to me. It’s… rarer that I’m ethically able to tell people what they need to hear so that I can help them.” She said.

Ava nodded, listening.

“We’ve only just met, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts about people. And I think you have good intentions.”

Ava gave a defeated shake of her head. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.“

“So is the road to Heaven: The difference is judgement.” Darcy replied. “And good judgement can come with experience, perspective and education.”

“So your advice is…?”

“You have… fixations. Your home, your late friend, your ex-boyfriend… your Big Secret that you came here to uncover. I admire that, really: you’re tenacious. Stubborn. Driven. And it all comes from a very good place, but you’re burning yourself up because you’re trying to do it all yourself and you won’t let other people be strong for you when you’ve run out of strength for yourself. You need to learn how to let go and be weak when you need to.”

“Weak?”

“Everybody’s allowed to be weak sometimes.” Darcy said. “There’s no sense in trying to run on a broken leg.”

Ava shook her head. “I don’t… I want to be a good person. I don’t want to burden people with my problems. Is that wrong?”

Darcy smiled and began to gather her stuff. “For what it’s worth?” she said, standing up. “I think you are a good person. I think you’ll achieve good things, if you give yourself the time you need to heal first. And the people who really care about you want to be burdened with your problems: Let them help you, and things will turn around. That’s my advice.”

She left, and Ava found herself sitting alone except for the man-wall.

Determined not to cry in front of a stranger - or at all, if she could help it - she settled for getting up and taking a tentative stroll around the room to work some of the stiffness out. Man-wall didn’t respond.

“Anyone ever tell you you look kinda like Dwayne Johnson?” she asked him. This elicited no response. “So… What happens now?” she pressed. “Am I being released, or…?”

The door clicked open and one of the other man-walls stepped in. “This way please, Miss Rìos.” he requested.

Ava edged around the table, cautiously. “…No handcuffs?”

“No.”

“Okay…” She cleared her throat and followed Man-wall number two into the hallway outside.

They weren’t in a large building, and all he really did was show her from one door to another on the same floor. This new one was more comfortably arranged, with a couple of couches, a coffee machine and a television on the wall, plus a few synthetic plants and some framed landscape photographs on the walls. Comfortable, but impersonal. Simon and Sean stood up as she was gently ushered inside.

“You okay?” Sean asked.

Ava nodded. “Never thought I’d get life advice from an MIB.” she said.

“Life advice?” Simon asked.

“Just… some words of wisdom to think on.” Ava yawned. “Jeez, how long was I in there?”

“It’s four in the morning, local time.” Simon revealed. “By your personal clock, you’ve been up all night.”

“…what happens now?”

“Now? You get some sleep.” Simon ordered, pointing to the longer couch. “I think we’ll be here a bit longer.”

“You mean ‘a bit’ in the British sense, right?”

“Sleep while you can.” Simon repeated.

“What about you guys?”

”Sleep.” Sean stressed. He grabbed a blanket from the back of the short couch and handed it to her. “We’ve been napping, we’re fine, but you look like death warmed up.”

Stubborn as she was, Ava seriously thought about folding her arms and staying awake, but instead she rolled her eyes, took the blanket and gave up.

“Fine, fine, you charming ass.” She threw it round her shoulders, kicked her shoes off and sank onto the couch, which damn near swallowed her. Her fatigue caught up and hit her like snow falling off a roof. She yawned, and shook her head to try and clear it. “Jeez… Okay…”

“Go on, duck. We’ll wake you up if anything happens.” Sean told her.

“Quit nagging…” Ava grumbled, but lay down and turned on her side until she was comfortable. “You’re worse than an old woman…”

He didn’t reply, and she put her head down and tried to sleep.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth.

Owen Powell

“You’ve got to be fookin’ joking!”

If Special Agent Darcy didn’t take Powell’s disbelief well, she did a good job of not showing it. Even writ large on the wall TV in General Tremblay’s office via a camera in Cairo, her face didn’t betray any emotion save earnest seriousness. ”No, major. I’m absolutely certain that she was telling the truth about Six saying he wanted to speak to her specifically, and I’m satisfied that allowing that meeting to take place is the correct course of action.”

“You’re asking me to let you send two of my men into what could well be a trap on the say-so of a civilian with a known history of infidelity.” Powell returned. “And you’re proposing that we allow this woman, who’s aptly bloody demonstrated that she fundamentally can’t be trusted, to learn top secret information.”

“I disagree.” Darcy countered. “I’d stake my professional reputation on it that you’re badly misjudging her, major.”

“You bloody will be if this goes ahead!” Powell retorted.

General Tremblay waved Powell down and threw in his opinion. “Powell’s got good reason to be reluctant, agent Darcy. There are significant trust issues involved.”

“The major and his men may not think she can be trusted, general: I do. And with all due respect to the major, it’s my job to assess who can and cannot be trusted.”

“And the rationale for allowing this meeting to take place, rather than simply detaining him?” Tremblay asked.

”This isn’t like the roller derby attack. Six has been on Earth for some time now and has evaded detection throughout. If we try and detain him, he’ll just slip away - migrate to another host body or effect an escape somehow.” Darcy explained. ”And this is too good an opportunity to miss, general. We could gain real insight into Hierarchy operations on Earth by doing this, maybe even take a step towards securing the planet.”

“And that can only be achieved if we let him talk to Rìos?” Tremblay asked. “He wouldn’t be open to meeting, say, you?”

”Our psych profile on Six suggests that what he’s doing is testing us, general. We think he wants an ally that he can work with, one who’ll scratch his back so he can scratch theirs. Ours.”

“All for nowt if that treacherous girl leaks DEEP RELIC to the world.” Powell said.

“If the Hierarchy had the ability to panic and inflict real harm on us, they would have by now.” Darcy shook her head.

“They have four nukes.” Tremblay observed.

”Which is nothing next to what they could do to us if they managed to get even one wormhole beacon on this side of the barrier.” Darcy said. ”We think their play this whole time has been to try and find a buyer for those bombs who can pay them with a beacon: Several… violent parties have been fishing around in search of wormhole beacons since the Zulfiqar was hit.”

Tremblay rubbed his chin, and turned his chair. Admiral Sir Patrick Knight had been summoned from Cimbrean for this meeting, and was standing by the window running his index finger thoughtfully across his lips. “You’ve been quiet so far, admiral.” he commented.

Knight shot a sympathetic glance at Powell, but nodded to the screen. “Agent Darcy makes a compelling argument.” he said.

“Sirs, I really must object in the strongest-” Powell began.

“Powell old chap, I know you must.” Knight interrupted, reassuringly. “I have misgivings about the girl myself. But we must rationally weigh the pros and cons.”

“…Yes, admiral.”

Tremblay cleared his throat. “Powell, this is too good an opportunity to pass up. Much too good. If you’re concerned about the situation and security, then I’ll give you the command and you can see it done right, with whatever resources you deem necessary.”

“Which of course puts you in a position to stress to miss Rìos the seriousness of the consequences should she betray trust again.” Knight added. “I’m sure you can be more than adequately persuasive.”

Powell snorted. “Put the fear of God into her, you mean.”

“I rather think the fear of Powell will suffice.” Knight observed.

“…I’ll want the beef brothers in EV-MASS, my own EV-MASS, a plane for us to jump out of, a jet with a HARM on it in case that UFO shows up, and close air support.” Powell listed.

“You’ll have them.” Tremblay told him. “Agent Darcy?”

“Just so long as the big guns only come in if the shit hits the fan.” Darcy said. “We don’t want Six to spook.”

“Aye.” Powell agreed. “As you wish.”

Darcy visibly relaxed a little. “Thank you major. I appreciate it.”

“I hope you’re right about her” Powell said. “Believe you me, I’ll be very happy if you are.”

Darcy nodded. “I’ll see you in the field.” she said. ”General, admiral. Thank you.”

Tremblay and Knight nodded for her, and she ended the call.

Powell worked his jaw thoughtfully at the blank screen for a second and then turned to the general. “I’d better see it done then.”

“Thank you for your forbearance, major.” Tremblay said, rising to shake his hand. “Good luck.”

“Thank you sir.” Powell returned the shake. “Here’s hoping I don’t bloody need it.”

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
US Embassy, Cairo, Egypt, Earth

Sean Harvey

The fact that he’d just been spoken to finally percolated into Sean’s consciousness. He blinked and looked up.

“Hmm?”

“I said, staring at her like that won’t get you back together, Sean.” Simon told him.

Sean shook his head and rubbed his face. “I was a million miles away.” he said.

“In whose bed?” Simon asked, light-heartedly. He was patrolling slowly around the room, apparently quite composed and happy.

”Simon…”

“Mate, don’t play innocent with me. I’ve known you since you were born and I know when you’re pathetically in love.”

Sean snorted and turned to sit sideways across the couch. “That’s in the past.” he said.

“Not by choice, hmm?” Simon observed. “Still, it explains that Firth chap’s rough treatment of you.”

“Lay off.”

Simon shook his head, and ruffled his nephew’s hair. “You bloody idiot.” he said, fondly.

Sean ducked out from under his hand. “Why are we still here, anyway? She should be asleep in a hotel room, not on a sofa. We should be sleeping in beds too for that matter.”

“Because they’ve not asked us to leave yet.” Simon told him.

“Don’t we have rights?” Sean asked.

“Yes, and by and large you can rely on the Yanks to honour them.” Simon told him. “Besides, nothing makes you look more suspicious than kicking up a stink when you don’t need to. Good advice for when you’re arrested, that.”

“What, go limp and visit your happy place? Fan-fucking-tastic advice, Simon.”

“Don’t be a twat. I’m telling you, the trick in these situations is to be calm, be honest, and let things happen. These people can make your life profoundly awkward, nephew mine, but it’s usually more hassle than they can be bothered with.” Simon about-faced and started patrolling the room anticlockwise instead. “Which means it’s a good idea not to give them a reason to bother. Be polite and cooperative, be nice and friendly if you can manage it, and they’ll give you a shove out the door sooner rather than later.”

“Right now, I’d settle for a fucking sandwich.” Sean grumbled.

Simon shrugged and knocked on the door. Immediately, one of the sapient security slabs opened it. “Can I help you?”

“Sorry to bother you…” Simon smiled at the man, noticeably exaggerating his accent a little. “But we’ve been here rather a long time and we’re getting a bit peckish. I don’t suppose there’s any way…?”

“I’ll have some food brought up.” the guard replied. “You got everything you need in there?”

“If you could spare us another blanket, it’d be much appreciated…?”

“Sure, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks ever so much.” Simon aimed a smug look at Sean the second the door closed again.

“Oh yes, thank you awfully, wot?” Sean parodied.

“Rather.” Simon chuckled, and resumed his stately lap of the room. “Now how do you think that would have gone if I’d been all ’I have rights! I demand you bring me a filet mignon this instant and I want to speak to the King bwah bwah bwah…’?” he imitated a kind of pompous clucking.

“Point made…” Sean waved a hand irritably. He sat back and tried to entertain himself by multiplying the ceiling tiles and searching for patterns in the carpet.

He was painstakingly weighing up whether a particular pattern of shade under the coffee table more closely resembled a man wearing a bowler hat or a man wearing a trilby when there was a knock on the door and a couple of embassy staff members delivered two folded blankets and some trays with three sandwiches, three mugs, an insulated flask of hot water and an assortment of coffee, tea, sugar and a small jug of milk, some chocolate bars and a tube of Pringles.

They woke Ava, who, after some yawning and stretching, caused one of the sandwiches to vanish, inhaled slightly more than her share of the Pringles, polished off two Snickers and self-medicated with a drink that was less a coffee and more a triple-strength coffee flavored syrup.

“Considering you only got two hour’s sleep, you look refreshed.” Sean told her.

“I feel refreshed.” She replied. “No news? Are they letting us go?”

“We’ll see.” Simon replied, amicably. “I get the impression we really did barge into something huge here, and if there’s one thing governments don’t like, it’s reporters all over their biggest secrets.”

“What are they afraid of?” Sean asked.

“That depends on the secret.” Ava told him.

“Well what good do secrets do?” He insisted. “They come out eventually, and then you’re the one who was lying to everyone. We’ve lived that, you and me. Haven’t we? You and I both know that dishonesty for the greater good doesn’t work.”

“He’s right, Ava.” Simon agreed. “Secrets and lies only hurt people.”

Ava folded her arms uncertainly, then frowned thoughtfully before shaking her head. “Look, I’ve been… I got some advice today that made a few things fall into place, and I think you’re wrong. I mean-” She gestured at Simon. “You protect your sources, don’t you?”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Like hell it’s not!” she exclaimed. “A secret is a secret, no matter if it’s a big one or a little one. If you take your promise to protect your sources seriously, then do you really believe that secrets are always harmful?”

“I protect my sources!” Simon stressed. “I keep them from suffering the repercussions of talking to me!”

“So a secret can protect people, then?” Ava asked. Simon scowled and scratched his head, and she pressed her point. “Simon, do you think you’re the only man in the world who can tell which secrets should and shouldn’t be kept? Do you trust yourself that much?”

Neither man had a reply. Ava, on the other hand, was hitting her stride.

“And then there’s the effort, right? D’you think they’d go to all the effort of keeping their secrets if they didn’t think they have to?” she asked, unknowingly echoing Simon’s advice about hassling the security guards. “Governments aren’t this… this shady machine that just hangs over us like a kid with a magnifying glass. They’re made of people, people just like us, who’re trying to do the best they can with good intentions.”

“So you’re perfectly fine with an opaque government.” Simon commented.

“When it needs to be, I… guess? Yeah! I am.” Ava told him. “You think secrets hurt people? Well what about all the… I dunno, the thousands of secrets you never heard of because nobody was ever hurt by them because they stayed secret?”

“What about all the ways the world could be a better place if we just knew what was going on and what needed to be fixed?” Sean asked.

Ava shook her head. “I’ve seen what happens to people who try and help when they don’t know how.” she said. “We’ve got to start trusting other people to know what they’re doing, guys. We’re all in this together.”

“Even guys like that knuckle-dragging cro-magnon wanker Firth?” Sean asked, skeptically.

Ava sighed and sat down. “ Look, Firth honestly scares me and I don’t like him much - and I know the feeling’s mutual - but he’s still a person. Christian Firth from Kentucky, listens to country rock and heavy metal, plays Warhammer, secretly loves RomComs…I’ve hung out with him and all the SOR guys, and they’re just guys. They all banded together and got me a birthday present a few years back - you know, my USM telephoto lens? The expensive one?”

“What did you say to him earlier? Something about his daddy fucking him in the arse?” Simon asked.

“‘Cause I was upset and he’s an alpha male jackass who was having way too much fun putting Sean in his place.” Ava said. “But even if he fucking hates my guts, he’s still one of the good guys and I’d trust him with my life. You don’t have to like somebody to trust them. Besides-”

She paused in response to a knock on the door, which turned out to be Darcy, who greeted the room with a smile and a “Hi.”

“So… gentlemen, whenever you’re ready there’s a car waiting to take you back to your hotel. The driver has your belongings. You’ll be under observation for the rest of your stay in Egypt of course, but it’s up to you what you do with your time. Ava, there’s a few more things I would like to discuss with you if-”

“Is she under arrest?” Simon interrupted..

“No.” Darcy said, instantly. “If she chooses to, she can leave with you… but if you’re willing,” she addressed Ava directly, “I’d like to make a request.”

Simon made a grudgingly satisfied noise with his arms folded, and looked to Ava, who stood. “I’ll see you guys whenever… this… is done with.” she said.

The two women left the room. In the silence that followed, Simon sighed. “Damn it.”

“What?” Sean asked.

“I have this horrible feeling that we just lost a huge story… and maybe a talented young photojournalist into the bargain.” Simon grumbled.

Sean shrugged and stood up. “Let’s get some actual sleep.” he suggested.

“That’s all you’ve got to say on the matter?” Simon asked.

“I’m fucking tired, I’m fucking bored, I’ve had fucking enough of this room and whatever Ava decides to do is her fucking business.” Sean scratched at his stubble. “Let’s just go.”

“Right. Maybe in the morning we can go looking for a story to justify this trip…”

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Starship ’Negotiable Curiosity’, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Wilson ‘Titan’ Akiyama

“Okay…”

“You gonna decide, or you gonna prove how shitty your poker face is some more?”

“Shut up and let me think! …Okay… …Do you have any Jacks?”

Sikes groaned “Motherfucker!” he handed over three cards, which Titan combined with the one in his hand and laid on the deck in front of him with a grin. “Fine, fine, wiseass, you got any sixes?”

“Go fish.”

“Fuck!”

“Your behaviour confuses me.” Bedu commented. The cabin doors only locked from the inside, so somebody had to stay on guard outside them the whole time to keep the two ETs confined. Bedu had got around the enjoinder to stay in his quarters by standing just inside the threshold, watching the game. “You board our ship and abduct us, and now you are aggressively playing this… trivially simple game with one another rather than flying anywhere.”

“A little healthy competition makes it more interesting.” Akiyama told him.

Bedu nodded sagely. “Well, anything which succeeds in making you more interesting is to be cherished.” he said.

Titan gave a drop-jawed grin. “I think we just got burned!” he told Sikes.

Sikes gave the Corti a grudgingly admiring raise of his eyebrow. “I think you’re right.”

“Guys.” They looked up as Rebar came back down the ship. His expression was grim. “Time’s up.”

“…Shit.” Sikes swore, and put his cards down. “How long?”

“B reckons a week or so.”

Titan gritted his teeth. Wearing EV-MASS was a form of exercise all in itself, and while they had spent the occasional conditioning week wearing the unforgiving suit 24⁄7, it wasn’t an exercise to be looked forward to. Unfortunately, without their techs, taking the suits off was an irreversible procedure, and the rule was quite clear - the suit was not to be removed unless it could be put back on or there was a pressing medical need.

“You’d better have a full stock of ration balls on board.” he told Bedu.

“We do.” Bedu replied. “I take it something has gone wrong?”

“Something always does.” Rebar observed.

“Preach it.” Sikes agreed.

“Hmm.” Bedu mused, and then knocked on the wall beside him. “Hkzzvk, come out of there!”

The translator gave the voice that floated through the door a panicked edge. “No! I heard Humans can kill you with their breath!”

“Not so far, but then again your nose is more sensitive than mine.” Bedu replied.

Answer came there none, but he blinked as the humans all chuckled. Sikes gestured for Akiyama’s attention. “We’d better get a shift rotation set up.” he said. “Somebody’s gotta watch the ETs at all times. You wanna go sleep?”

“Reeb? You burned the most energy.” Titan turned to the sergeant first class.

“Nah, get your head down. I’m good for now.”

“B?”

“He’s too busy giving us a screwy bumblebee flight path to throw off any pursuit.”

“Arright. Wake me in six.” Titan stood, knocked fists with his brothers, and found a secluded part of the engineering section where he could get his head down on his ruck.

Sleep was a skill. You could sleep anytime, anywhere if you knew how. All it took was a bit of mental focus.

The problem was, focus was hard to come by. A two hundred meter warship equipped for stealth and evasion didn’t just fail to make a rendezvous, and while they were all staying jocular and as upbeat as they could, Titan knew his brothers well enough to know that they were all thinking the same thing: Something had gone badly wrong. That was not a thought calculated to help a man go to bed. Nor was the prospect of a whole week in the suit. That endeavour was going to tax their nutrition and Crue-D reserves hard, let alone their health and stamina.

He took a deep breath, forced those worries out of his mind. He’d only make them worse by being an exhausted wreck. Instead, he shut his eyes, focused on his breathing and, by degrees, fell asleep.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
US Embassy, Cairo, Egypt, Earth.

Darcy

“So what’s this request of yours?”

Ava was showing the clear signs of fatigue now, but she’d found reserves of alertness from her power nap and snack, and was indulging in a coffee that Darcy thought looked more like a mug of liquid diabetes.

“Six asked to speak with you specifically and, if you’re willing, we’d like for that meeting to go ahead.”

Ava swallowed her coffee thoughtfully. “Jeez. Are you sure? If this is as big as I think it is…”

“There, I can’t comment. Yet.” Darcy said. “Not unless you sign some paperwork.”

“What kind of paperwork?”

“In short…” Darcy slid it across the desk. “It’s a binding legal agreement that you understand just how serious this all is, that you’ve been informed what the consequences would be to you personally if you were to break trust, and that you accept those consequences. Agree to be bound by, and so on. You should read it in full.”

“I’ve had like two hours sleep. I’m not sure I should be signing anything right now.” Ava objected.

“I’ll answer any questions you have.” Darcy assured her. “The decision is up to you. If you’d prefer, I can have a cot brought up and you can get a solid sleep in first, but the sooner you reach a decision, the sooner we can act.”

“And if my decision’s a no?”

“We’ll just have to figure something out.” Darcy said. “We can’t and wouldn’t force you into this.”

Ava stared at the NDA long and hard, then downed her coffee as if slamming back a vodka for courage, and set about reading it.

She only asked one question, several pages in. “…Jesus, the death penalty?”

“As laid out in eighteen U.S Code section seven-nine-four.” Darcy recalled, grimly. “Yes.”

Shaken, Ava ran a hand through her hair and cursed quietly to herself in Spanish. ”Me cago en la leche…”

She caught Darcy’s eye, steeled herself and read on.

“You guys are… really serious about this, huh?” she observed, flipping over the final page.

“I’ve discussed this with some very powerful people over the last couple of hours, Ava.” Darcy told her. “Many of them are not convinced about you, and I’ve fought hard on your behalf on the evidence of just one interview. Quite aside from the penalties laid out in that document, I’d be… grateful if you didn’t completely sink my career and professional reputation. As a personal favor. If you have any doubts that you’ll be able to keep everything you see and are told in the coming few days and take it all to your grave, then I beg you: please don’t sign it.”

Ava stood up and walked around the room a half-circuit, thinking.

Eventually she turned and put her hands on the back of the chair. “Can I sleep on it?” she asked.

Darcy breathed an inward sigh of relief and vindication. “Yes.” she said. “You can sleep on it.”

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Kirk

“Lewis?”

Lewis wasn’t in his chair. The latest result of his experiments in nanoforging pizza was untouched and congealing beside it, with a cleaning drone hovering nearby, waiting patiently for the minimum time threshold to pass before it could swoop in, pluck it away, and incinerate it.

Instead, Lewis was in his meditation room, cross-legged on his Zafu. That in itself was nothing unusual, but this time he was smiling. It was an encouraging sight.

“Hey Kirk.”

“You look rested.”

“Figuring out the solution’ll do that for a guy.” Lewis didn’t open his eyes, but his smile got just a little wider.

“You have? That’s wonderful news! What is it?”

Lewis opened one eye, like a lazy dog, and grinned at him. “I let go of attachment to material things.”

Kirk chose his words very carefully. “…I beg your pardon?”

“Earth. My whole strategy so far has revolved around saving the Earth. That’s why I kept running into obstacles I couldn’t get over. It’s a waste of time trying to save the Earth, because the Hierarchy are already ON Earth. They might not have a beacon down there yet, but it’s only a matter of time, and when they do…”

“I hope you’re wrong.”

“Dude.” Lewis shrugged. “Nobody’ll be happier than me if I turn out to be wrong there. But let’s assume that I’m not. We need a backup.”

He kicked his legs out and swayed upright. “Yo, room, project file CTC-eight-oh-five. One quarter scale.”

Kirk took a step back as volumetrically projected light engulfed his head. Then he backed up some more to get a good look at it. It was little more than a rounded oblong with thrusters, and even at one-quarter scale it was clearly huge, filling as it did the whole room, which wasn’t small. “A missile of some kind?”

“Kind of the opposite.” Lewis mused. “Missiles fly somewhere and destroy shit. This flies somewhere and…”

He paused, then turned and gave Kirk the delighted smile of the slightly unhinged. “Have you ever heard of John von Neumann?”

++End Chapter++

Chapter 26: Blood and Ash

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
US Embassy, Cairo, Egypt, Earth.

Ava Rìos

A Bible in an old hand wearing black. The other hand sketching up and down, right and left in the air. A last meal, tasteless and ritual. A last benediction. A last prayer - empty words.

Chains on her feet, pinching the prison jumpsuit painfully against her ankles, keeping her from doing more than shuffle. An infinitely long walk down an infinitely short corridor.

Her own reflection in glass reinforced with wire. Pretty. Framed by black curls. Empty of hope, remembering the future life she has thrown away.

A semicircular room with glass walls. Faces watching sternly from outside, spectating. A sturdy chair covered in straps.

Straps on her limbs, holding her down. Last words. Terrified tears.

Creeping ice in her arm. In her veins. In her heart. In her brain.

She woke up.

Ava stared at the ceiling for a second, trying to place herself and banish the highlight reel of her own nightmare that was still sadistically echoing around her mind.

She was on a cot. In the embassy, under a couple of blankets. It should have been cosy and restful. Instead, her personal schedule was badly awry - it was plainly well into the day outside, and yet she felt cold, and drained.

The window was engineered for security - thick and blast resistant, designed to be opened in case of a fire but also to set alarms wailing if it was. Still, the view was excellent - Minarets and palaces rubbing shoulders with modern groomed parks and high-rise hotels, and the clean blue of the bridge-tamed Nile itself.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in?” Ava asked, turning away from the window. Special Agent Darcy smiled for her as she entered, carrying a large mug of coffee. “Feeling better?”

“Kinda… I had some pretty crappy dreams though. Thanks.” Ava took the mug. “How’d you know I woke up?”

“I was going to wake you anyway.” Darcy said.

“Decision time, huh?”

“Gotta pressure you.” Darcy agreed taking a seat on the couch. The Non-Disclosure Agreement and its chillingly impersonal descriptions of exactly how transgressions would be answered was where Ava had left it on the table the night before.

“…Can I ask you a question?” Ava asked.

“Sure.”

“Is it… easy, to keep these secrets? Or do you struggle?”

Darcy touched her lip thoughtfully. “I’m lucky.” she said at last. “I work with people who have the same clearance I do, and it helps, but a big part of classified information is about compartmentalisation and need-to-know. And if the guy I work with most closely doesn’t need to know, well…”

“You’ve not answered my question.”

Darcy acknowledged that she hadn’t with an amused motion of her head. “I… find it much easier once I understand why they’re secret.” she said. “I may not always agree with the rationale, but knowing there is a rationale - and there’s always a rationale - well, it makes it easier.”

“Easi-er? Not actually easy.”

“…I have friends and family and there are times when I might be having a conversation with them and they’ll say something or voice an opinion that treads on territory I know about.” Darcy told her. “Biting your tongue when you know that their whole argument is completely wrong, but you can’t give them the puzzle piece they need to really make sense of things… that’s not easy.”

“So you struggle.”

“Sometimes, yes.” Darcy agreed.

Ava drank her coffee in thoughtful silence. “That makes me feel better.” she confessed, once the mug was empty and she’d put it down. “If you’d said it was effortless…”

She picked up a pen and signed the agreement.

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Mwrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Lewis Beverote

Vedreg was damn near impossible to interpret sometimes. Many of his most commonly-expressed emotions were quite easy to follow once you’d memorized the basics of Guvnurag color-emoting.

The problem was that while the human eye had three kinds of color-receptor cone cell, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun had five, allowing them to perceive an approximate colour range several orders of magnitude larger than humans could.

It turned out that in galactic society, they carefully and politely emoted in a very limited way, using only those hues that they shared with the dichromatic galactic majority.

Among themselves, their whole system of emoting was greatly more complex, and two colours that were indistinguishable to the human eye could, to Guvnurag, convey wildly different emotional states.

Relative to the literal glowing lines that covered their huge bodies, the rest of Guvnurag body language was subtle to the point of barely existing. Which meant that when he was in a mood to keep his thoughts to himself, Vedreg was impenetrable.

“This Jonuvanunoumanu person seems to occupy a position of unlimited prestige in your species’ scientific annals.” he noted.

Kirk nodded his head slowly - by necessity rather than choice, given his long neck - but emphatically. “Mathematics, physics, computer science, quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics, economics… Not to mention his involvement in the development of your species’ first nuclear weaponry. If I did not know humans so well, I would suspect him of being an unsubtle Hierarchy spy sent to Earth in an attempt to engineer your destruction.”

“This doctrine of ’Mutually Assured Destruction’ would be compatible with their strategy for turning deathworld species against themselves.” Vedreg agreed. “Is that what this is?”

“No, man. Jesus, no.” Lewis waved a hand irritably. “Dude, read the bit on self-replicating machines.”

“I saw that. A machine that can make a copy of itself.” Kirk commented. “An interesting idea, though I fail to see the practical application.”

“You fail to-? Seriously?” Lewis rubbed at his face. Kirk was in some ways about the smartest life form Lewis had ever heard of, and in some others he was terminally stupid. There was nothing more frustrating than a deeply intelligent being who occasionally needed detailed instructions to figuratively find his backside with just one of his four arms.

“Seriously.” Kirk nodded again.

“Dude… a Von Neumann machine is any machine that can build copies of itself. Doesn’t matter what else it can do, just so long as one of the things it can do is duplicate itself.”

“Meaning…?”

“Dude, every nanofactory in the galaxy is a Von Neumann machine! Look, I’ll show you! Nanofactory!”

The room chimed, awaiting a command. “Assemble all of the component pieces of a station-sized industrial nanofactory plus a drone capable of putting those components together.” Lewis told it.

”Estimated build time for that project is - three hundred and fifty-five Ri’. Do you wish to continue?” The nanofactory’s control software asked.

“What is that, about three hours?” Lewis asked. “Cancel order.”

“Point made.” Kirk said.

“Right! If you have one functioning nanofactory, then getting a second nanofactory is as easy as asking for one. Now, what happens if we stick engines and a power supply to a big nanofactory?”

“You… have a… mobile nanofactory.” Vedreg observed, pulsing a familiar shade of confusion at such an obvious question.

“Yup. So, if you have one mobile nanofactory, then getting a second mobile nanofactory is as easy as asking for one.” Lewis explained, aware that he was pushing the point a little hard, but it usually paid to do so when dealing with nonhumans. “But of course… it’s a nanofactory! It can make all sorts of other stuff, too!”

“It seems to me that all you’re doing is moving the question of what we should build with this nanofactory that we currently have back a step.” Kirk observed.

“Colonies.” Lewis told him.

“…I see. Yes.”

Vedreg looked between them. “I don’t.” he said.

“All our eggs are in one big basket right now.” Lewis explained. “Plus a smaller one with Cimbrean. Now, this is an idea that’s been around for so fucking long in our sci fi that I’m fucking ashamed of myself for not thinking of it sooner, but it’s like… the basic rule of keeping a species from going extinct is to spread it outside of whatever little niche it’s in right now, so if something happens to that niche, it doesn’t take the species with it. And Earth is a very, very little niche.”

“A whole planet is a ‘niche’ to you?” Vedreg asked.

“Hell the fuck yes it is!” Lewis told him. “Next to a whole goddamn galaxy? You bet your big glowing technicolor ass it’s a niche.”

“New human colonies would be vulnerable.” Kirk pointed out. “Cimbrean and Earth are only still intact because of the system forcefields we-”

”Stolen system forcefields.” Vedreg interjected, pulsing a vivid shade of indignant.

“Stolen system forcefield.” Lewis corrected him. “Your people put up the one ‘round Sol yourselves. But Kirk’s right, without system forcefields any colony we try and set up is just gonna be Hunter chow the second they get wind of it.”

“There is no possible way that your species could afford to buy that many, Lewis.” Vedreg told him.

“I was thinking if we just buy the blueprint and shove it in my Von Neumann Colony Probe here…”

”Absolutely not.” Angry red flicked down Vedreg’s body. “You would just… steal the most valuable technology my species has invented? A project we sank more wealth into than your whole homeworld can produce in a year? And you expect me to just… give you it?”

“Vedreg, be reasonable-” Kirk began. Lewis interrupted him.

“Dude, can I…?”

Both aliens turned to face him.

“…How many of those forcefields have you actually sold?” he asked. “Gimme an integer.”

“Well… The technology is still experimental-”

“Hunter shit!” Lewis told him. “You know how many of these things have ever been deployed for real? Six. The Guvnurag homeworld, your two colonies, Sol, Cimbrean, and here. And they’re six for six on working fucking perfectly, man. Each one does exactly what it says on the box! Hell, one of them even had after-market modifications! Now, since when the fuck is that ’still experimental’?” he raised his fingers and air-quoted the last two words for emphasis.

“Your point?” Vedreg asked.

“My point is, why the fuck is nobody buying? Man, system shields make the whole war with the Celzi completely fucking pointless, and if they can protect Earth from Hunter aggression then they can protect anywhere else, too! These things work, and yet for some crazy-ass reason, nobody’s buying them off you. What’s the fucking deal there? ‘Cause I seriously fuckin’ doubt that people would rather be eaten alive than spend money on buying your magic star box.”

He paused for breath, and reminded himself to be chill. “Dude… The only reason every inhabited system in the galaxy doesn’t have one of those things is because somebody doesn’t want them used. Somebody with the power to keep the whole thing in Development Hell indefinitely. So that huge investment you’re defending ain’t doing diddly-shit. And now here I come, askin’ you - and dude, I’ll fuckin’ beg if I have to - You’re not using these things, and they could save my entire species.”

“For which,” Kirk added, “I’m sure the human race would be grateful.”

Vedreg fluoresced uncertainly for some time.

“Is there no alternative?” he asked, eventually. “This… ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ that your Jonuvanunoumanu described. Could you not… weaponize this creation of yours?”

“Dude.” Lewis said, and shifted on his Zafu. “Let me explain to you why MAD is complete fuckin’ bullshit, alright?”

He sat forward and composed his argument. “Let’s say I built these things so they could self-modify on the fly in response to the kinda tactics used against them.” he said. “Let’s say I sent billions of them to devour a planet, and each one used the raw material to create billions of copies of itself. I mean, we need to imagine that shit’s even possible first, and don’t even BEGIN on getting me started on the reasons why it’s fuckin’ not…but let’s pretend I’m a mighty wizard and thermodynamics is my bitch, sure.”

He sniffed. “Now let’s say I, uh, waggle this crazy thing I’ve made at whatever colossal douche is lookin’ at me funny and I’m like ’Cross me and I send out the world eaters!’ and he’s like ’Ha-ha! I have world-eaters too! Cross me and I shall send out mine!’ and we both decide it’s maybe not worth the fuckin’ hassle of bein’ dead and we go home for snacks. Right? That’s the theory behind MAD.”

“That seems…credible.” Vedreg offered.

“Okay… where’s my threshold for provocation?”

Kirk nodded and sat back on his hindmost four legs, clearly getting what Lewis was driving at.

“I beg your pardon?” Vedreg asked.

“Where’s, like… the line where once they’ve stepped over it, that’s the point I release the indiscriminate deathbots and kiss my wife and kids goodbye?” Lewis asked. “Is it when he launches his?”

“Yes.”

“What about if I think he’s planning to launch his?” Lewis asked.

“…Yes?” Vedreg hazarded.

“You think? What if he’s not and I’ve just got some shitty-ass incompetent spies and he was actually trying to steal cable or whatever? Congratulations numb-nuts, you just doomed everybody because you’re too trigger-happy. Well fuckin’ done you. And there we go: literally the only situation in which MAD applies is if the other fucker’s stupid enough to shoot first. Which he ain’t going to be, and neither am I.”

“In other words,” Kirk summarized “By introducing such a weapon, you would only raise the stakes while making no progress towards a lasting peace.”

“Exactly!” Lewis agreed. “So what happens instead is ham tactics. The enemy slices thin layers off us so he can make a delicious meaty victory sandwich. He doesn’t wanna provoke me into firing my world-eaters? Well, that’s easy - I don’t want to fire ‘em! And I’m only gonna do it if he provokes me bad enough. So all he has to do is not push me that far - and he can do a lot of shit without pushing me that far - and slice by slice he’ll win the war.”

Kirk was nodding like a pumpjack. “Meaning that your superweapons cancel one another out and you both remain on square one, fighting each other through more conventional means.”

“E-fucking-xactly.” Lewis nodded. “And bear in mind dude, all of the above only applies if the other guy is sane and competent. What happens if we’re dealing with a complete fuckin’ Mr. Potato Head who reckons he’ll be welcomed as a warrior into the halls of Valhalla, or if he’s too stupid and gung-ho to double-check what’s really going on and launches his nukes when a bird shits on the radar dish?”

He made an explosive gesture with his hands and punctuated it with an oral sound effect. “All I’ve done by creating that weapon in the first place is engineer the tool of my own demise. S’what humans call being ’hoist by thine own petard’ and, dude; if your survival plan hinges on all your enemies being sane, competent and cautious then that is a bad plan because eventually one of your enemies won’t be.”

“But surely-” Vedreg began.

“Dude.” Lewis scolded him. “We’re not talking about nukes here. When you get down to it, a nuke is just a big explosion. Lots of people die, it’s a horrible fucking tragedy, what-the-fuck-ever. At least you control when and where it goes off. But a weaponized Von Neumann swarm? You are ruining the galaxy for everyone forever, and probably not just the one galaxy, neither. No.”

Vedreg’s body pulsed every colour the human eye could perceive in rapid succession, and finally he levered himself to his feet.

“I think that I will need some time to think on this.” he said.

“I hear ya. Take all the time you need.” Lewis soothed him, calming down himself. “I’ll keep looking for an alternative. But seriously man - nobody’s buying your forcefields. You may as well do some good with them.”

“I will think on it.” Vedreg repeated, and rumbled out of the room.

Lewis watched him go. “…Pushed too hard, d’you think?” He asked.

“Possibly.” Kirk agreed. “But Lewis…”

“Yeah?”

“It may well be that you could never push hard enough.”

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
US Embassy, Cairo, Egypt, Earth

Darcy

It was interesting watching Ava read the sanitized, short version of DEEP RELIC.

Darcy could clearly recall her own reaction on reading that same document - It had made her afraid. There had been plenty of bad nights’ sleep afterwards, dreaming of strange worlds and strange persons, maybe alien versions of herself, doing her job, trying to pull their species back from the brink of extinction… and failing.

Ava’s reaction was different: With every paragraph, she was getting increasingly angry.

It wasn’t the blazing, short-lived rage that she’d directed at Firth, either, nor the burning sass she summoned to cover when she was feeling insecure. Instead, Ava seemed to be filling up with the slow, relentless, baking kind of anger. The kind that glowed in a person’s heart, pointed them at the world, and woe betide whatever got in their way.

When she flipped the document closed at the end, her hand was shaking.

“…How many species?” She asked.

“We don’t know, exactly.” Darcy told her. “But this has been going on for millions of years, so it must be…hundreds of species at least. Maybe thousands.”

Ava sat back. Angry as she was, she also looked… lost. As if she had no idea what to do with the fire that had been lit inside her. “…God.” she whispered. “I can’t get my head around it. It’s too big.”

“Do you understand why this is a secret, Ava?” Darcy asked her. “Do you understand why you can’t tell anybody?”

Ava nodded. “Because if we’re going to survive this… we need every advantage we can get.” she said.

“That’s why we’re sending you to speak to Six.” Darcy told her. “Because if there’s any advantage to be gained by granting his request, we have to seize it.”

Ava nodded solemnly. “Thank you.” she said. “I just have one more question?”

“Sure.”

“…What exactly happened to San Diego?”

“San Diego was the Hierarchy’s base of operations on Earth.” Darcy explained. “It was home to their jump array, their communications apparatus… We tried to seize it, and their agent in charge of the facility detonated an antimatter bomb to ensure that we couldn’t salvage anything.”

“So… if the city hadn’t been destroyed, they’d still have jump beacons on Earth?”

“I suppose…” Darcy hadn’t considered that before.

“And if they still had jump beacons on Earth…” Ava continued, “…we’d all be screwed, right?”

“We would.” Darcy agreed.

There was nothing overtly positive about Ava’s response. She didn’t smile, or sigh or nod. Only a microscopic change in the way she held herself suggested that a weight she’d been carrying unheeded for a long time suddenly wasn’t burdening her quite so much. “That… Thank you, Darcy.”

She stood up. “Are they ready for us yet?”

“Everything’s in place.” Darcy said. “Major Powell is in charge of this operation, but you’ll be taking your orders directly from Master Sergeant Vinther. Do exactly what he tells you. Okay?”

Ava nodded, and Darcy shook her hand. “Good luck.” she said.

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
US Embassy, Cairo, Egypt, Earth

Roy Vinther

“Well hey, she finally deigns to grace us with her fuckin’ presence.” Firth muttered.

“Gi’ it a rest, mate…” Murray replied. The two SOR men had taken the news that they’d have Rìos along for the ride with the minimum of grace, and Firth in particular had taken every opportunity he could to grumble about it since. He was getting his own back, though: He’d elected to wear an offensively loud shirt covered in palm trees, ocean sunsets and bikini’d latina beauties.

He snorted in response to Murray’s quiet request, and put on a pair of huge mirrored aviators. “Sure, bro. Okay.”

“Jesus shit.” Coombes commented, shaking his head. “If you were any more fuckin’ Air Force, you and Walsh’d be holding hands right about now.”

“Aren’t you ’Army stronk’ dumbfucks supposed to be the big ones?” Walsh retorted, affectionately. After Firth and Murray, he was the third-biggest man present, and comfortably larger than any of the Delta Force operators.

Vinther left them to roast each other and crossed to the doorway to take the young woman off the embassy guard’s hands. “Miss Rìos.”

“You’re master sergeant Vinther, right?” she asked. She extended a hand, and Roy gave it a cordial shake.

“That’s right. You understand what your role is here?”

“Talk to Six, do exactly what you tell me.” She said, nodding. There was an edge of trepidation in her face and voice, but also a note of determination.

“That’s about it.” Vinther agreed. “Come this way.”

She followed, promptly and quietly and proving that, for now at least, she could handle the second part of her job just fine. Vinther opened the back of one of the SUVs they’d spent the morning loading up.

“I understand you have Cimbrean colonial militia training.” he said.

“Yes.” she nodded.

“What’s rule one?”

Ava thought for a second. “Keep, uh… keep my head down.”

“Right.” He grabbed an armor vest from the SUV. “Let’s get this fitted now in case you need it later.” Unceremoniously he pushed it down over her head, did it up, and adjusted the straps until it sat snugly on her. Heavy as it was, she didn’t complain. “Is that loose anywhere?”

She jumped on her toes a bit and danced back and forth to test it. “…No, it’s fine.”

“Good. Helmet.”

They repeated the process of putting it on and adjusting it until it sat securely on her without moving. Between them, the bulky garments made her look small and scared.

“…Alright, you can take those off now. Not gonna need them for a while.” He said. Firth had suggested hazing her by making her wear them all day, but while Vinther had no reason to like Rìos, he had no reason to actively bully her either.

She wriggled out of them and stacked them neatly back in the SUV where from he’d collected them.

“Okay. I’m not planning on arming you.” He told her. ”If shit hits the fan then maybe, but only if I trust that you can stay the hell out of our way and leave the fighting to the professionals. It would be your weapon of last resort only. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“Good. If I did elect to arm you, this would be your weapon.” he unholstered it from under his jacket. “What are the rules of firearm safety?”

“Uh… All guns are always loaded.” She recited. “Uh, never point a gun at anything you’re not willing to shoot. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target, and, uh…be sure of your target and whatever’s around and behind it.”

Vinther handed her the gun. She scored immediate points by checking the chamber was empty while pointing it away and toward the floor.

“I can’t find the safety.” She commented.

“That’s a Springfield XD-S, they put the safety in the grip. It’ll only fire if you’re holding it properly, so show me.”

She nodded, settled her feet and her grip, and took a look around. “…I don’t see anything here it’s safe to aim at.”

“Good, you pass the test. Your grip’s fine.” Vinther took the gun back off her. “Hope I don’t have to give you this. Just remember that if I do, you still keep your head down and you only use it if it’s that or die. That clear?”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“Good.” Vinther had to give the girl some grudging credit. He’d worked with young, trained riflemen who’d shown less sense and focus. “You’re riding in this truck right here with me, Walsh and Murray. That’s Coombes, that’s Pavlo; they’re riding with Firth.”

She gasped as she went to hop into the back seat. “My camera!” she turned back toward the embassy. “I forgot to get my camera back.”

“You’re not here to take pictures, Ava.” Murray told her, causing her to jump. Vinther had to suppress the urge to flinch as well - Murray really was almost superhumanly quiet.

“I know, I just… please, that camera means a lot to me.” She said.

“Aye, I know.” Murray handed it to her.

“You got it? Thank you!”

“Firth did.”

“…Firth did?” She checked. “But…?!”

Murray shrugged, eloquently suggesting with only his shoulders and a quirk of his eyebrow that Ava shouldn’t question it, and climbed into the truck.

Ava took the time to buckle the camera holster back onto her leg, then hopped in too.

Vinther made eye contact with Firth, who’d watched the handover with an intense, unreadable expression. The big man didn’t give anything away - instead he just beat a fist against the middle of his chest and then toward Vinther by way of a kind of salute, and climbed into the truck.

“Yo, we goin’, Barkeep?” Walsh asked. “Only it’s a long fuckin’ drive.”

“Thought you Chair Force types liked sittin’ down all day?” Vinther asked, hopping up into the driver’s seat.

“So do you. Difference is, we like to be goin’ somewhere while we sit.” Walsh grinned.

Vinther chuckled and turned the radio up. The quality of Cairo’s radio stations had come as a welcome surprise. “Alright, we’ll do things your way.” He said. “Last chance for a comfort break?”

Nobody took him up on it, so he pulled the Oakleys off his collar, slipped them on, cracked his knuckles and wriggled until he was comfortably burrowed into his seat. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
C-17 Globemaster, somewhere over Nunavut, Canada, Earth.

Owen Powell

It felt wrong to be flying in the same plane as Warhorse and not hear either laughter or snoring. Those were literally the only two sounds men of the SOR usually produced when travelling.

This time, the suit techs were too busy prepping the suits for a jump, and Arés wasn’t in a talkative mood at all.

The worst part was not being able to help him. There was oh so much advice that Powell would have loved to give the lad, but the unit’s command dynamic was built around his remaining… not aloof, but certainly showing his love sparingly. The occasional dash of avuncular affection was about as much as he could afford. The lads were all too hyper-masculine and high on life to be able to thrive on anything less than being slightly in awe of their CO.

But if he could have, he would have sat down and spoken to Arés all the way over the arctic circle. The poor man was in dire need of some perspective.

There was nothing for it but to snag Burgess when the younger man passed by on his way for a bathroom break.

“Is his mind in the game?” Powell asked, getting to the point.

“He’s nothing but mind in the game, sir.” Baseball glanced back at his best friend and then shrugged his enormous Protector’s shoulders. “I wouldn’t wanna be in his way when we land though.”

“…Right. Carry on, sergeant.”

“Sir…”

Powell nodded. “Go on lad, get if off your chest.”

“…If she gets hurt, it’s gonna wreck him.” Burgess observed, keeping his voice very low.

“Between you and me, I counselled against allowing her to do this for that exact reason, and others besides.” Powell confided. “But there’s nowt for it but to trust Murray an’ Firth, stay sharp and shoot straight when we get there. We’ll all be here for him if he needs us, aye?”

“Amen to that, sir.”

“Go on. It’s a long flight.”

“Yes sir.”

Powell didn’t know how the Beef Brothers were able to sit still on these voyages. Spacious as they were to accommodate men in para jump gear, the plane’s seats were anything but ergonomic and Powell found that he could at best only tolerate them. Maybe it was a size thing - Burgess and Arés were both rather larger than their commanding officer, and neither of them seemed the least bit bothered by the seating arrangements. It was a mystery.

Instead he strolled around the plane, keeping an eye on things without interfering.

The suit techs were busy reconfiguring the EARS fields on the suits. Exo-Atmospheric Re-entry System wasn’t going to be needed today, but the robust shields, designed to take a pounding from atmosphere as a man streaked in at supersonic speeds and to protect him from his own sonic boom, could do something impressive if the emitters were dismounted, moved and reprogrammed - they could negate the need for a parachute entirely by giving the suit a terminal velocity of eight meters per second, equivalent to jumping off a single-storey building. With the ankle protection, load bearing structures and reinforcement of EV-MASS, that was a speed they could comfortably hit the ground at, on their feet and firing.

C&M Systems had promised that future versions of EV-MASS would be able to do both, without the lengthy reconfiguration, but that was still, sadly, for the future.

“Major?” An intel analyst grabbed him on the way past.

“What’s up?”

“We just got the recon sat footage of the AO.”

“Nice.” Powell examined it, and promptly made a disappointed sound through his teeth. “Urban environment. Well, that scuppers the close air… Arright, thanks.” He took the tablet and scrutinised his new map as he ambled back to the workspace he’d set up for himself about halfway down the cargo area, near the suit workstations.

He grabbed his radio. “Put me through to Colonel Munroe, please… Colonel. Major Powell here, sir.”

Munroe was USAFRICOM’s Air Liaison Officer to Egypt. To him fell the unenviable task of persuading the Egyptian authorities to acquiesce to whatever it was that the Combined Air Operations Center had decided. Given that the force of General Tremblay’s authority was fully behind this particular operation, Powell knew that Munroe’s job was probably much more entertainingly challenging than normal, today.

The relationship was made slightly difficult by the fact that Munroe lacked need-to-know both on DEEP RELIC and on the documentation concerning the SOR’s exact abilities and responsibilities, coded ‘SACRED STRANGER’. The man had literally no idea that he’d just been dragged into a war with aliens.

”Major, what can I do for you?”

“Update on operation EMPTY BELL for you, colonel. The AO is an urban zone, so CAS won’t be appropriate.”

“That’s good news.” the colonel declared. ”The Egyptians aren’t happy about this at all, they’ve been threatening to revoke our permission… you still need the Raptor?”

“Yes, please.” Powell stressed

“Understood. I should be able to make them think they’ve talked me down to just that… heck, I’ll fly the dagburn thing myself if that’s what it takes to get the go-ahead.”

“Be my guest.” Powell told him. “It’ll be an interesting op if we need you.”

There was a chuckle on the line. ”Thanks for the update, major. God speed.”

“Best o’ luck.”

Powell took a second to run his hand over his scalp - between naturally thin hair and the recent rise in his base testosterone levels brought on by Crue-D use, he seemed destined for a lifetime of baldness - and scrutinised the map some more.

Modern warfare was all about information, both the control and controlled sharing of it, and his connection to the men on the ground through this device was exemplified in the map program they were now using. They had all received the spysat data at the same time, and now Walsh was busily scrutinising the AO, making comments and drawing boxes and lines on it, as was Firth. Their comments appeared in pink and green respectively - Powell’s, when he began to enter his own contributions, appeared in white.

The conversation was naturally limited by the fact that they didn’t even know whether any kind of a battle would erupt, let alone the number, disposition, equipment or nature of their enemy. They were assuming the worst-case scenario: that the whole town was armed, hostile, and had close air support from an invisible UFO.

If he was being frank with himself, Powell could see no way in which that fight wouldn’t inevitably result in men being killed. Even with the two Protectors and himself slamming into the ground to join the fight wearing about the heaviest and most effective personal armor system mankind had ever produced…

He would have given his right arm to have the Defenders and Blaczynski available, but even if those four showed up in orbit at that very second, operations in EV-MASS were so intensive on energy that it just wasn’t feasible to throw them into a fight so soon after their mission to Perfection. Recovery after NOVA HOUND had taken nearly a full month.

He pushed the thought aside, and focused on coming up with the best plan he could, identifying lines of supply, lines of retreat, defensible positions, choke points and possible ambush sites.

He spared a quick glance at Warhorse, who was only just beginning the lengthy process of donning his undersuit. The young man was achieving the interesting trick of being simultaneously both poker-faced and visibly furious, which was a sight that would set any commander’s mind to calculating. Powell knew that he was either looking at the most fearsome weapon in his arsenal… or the worst liability. Here and now, there was no real way to know for certain.

There was nothing for it but to plan. If they were going to drop into a melee, it was damn well going to be a melee that danced to his tune.

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Asyuit Desert Road, south of Cairo, Eastern Desert, Egypt, Earth.

Roy Vinther

Ava had spent most of the trip so far playing around with her beloved camera. Exactly what she was doing with it, Vinther neither knew nor cared to guess at. Every so often, she would raise it, take a picture out the window, and scrutinise the result. What it was that she was after was another mystery - as far as Vinther could tell, all there was to see out there was sand, dust and pebbles, a few sandy, dusty and pebbly little hills, and electrical pylons. The highway was straight, well-maintained, bordered on both sides by straight and well-maintained concrete barriers, and brain-achingly dull.

“Um… dumb question.” she asked, somewhere around about the hundred kilometer mark.

“Shoot.” Walsh asked.

“Nobody ever told me exactly where we’re going…?”

Walsh looked to Vinther, who waved a hand, inviting him to do the honours.

“The coordinates Six gave you are for a gold mine about fifty miles west of Marsa Alam.” he said.

“So that’s how they make their money.” Ava deduced.

“Yup. Back in San Diego their cash cow was an accounting firm called JJG Financial Services .”

“I know that company!” Ava exclaimed. “They were Mama and Papa’s financial advisors!”

“Them and loads’a other affluent families from San Diego and LA.They were good at their job.” Walsh said. “Hell, they had to be: They were running a global conspiracy off the profits.”

“Guess gold mining’s just as good.” Vinther commented. “Hell, easier too. Who gives a shit about the customer experience of a rock?”

“Probably a step down actually.” Walsh said. “Gold mining ain’t all that profitable no more.”

“Are you shi-? It’s a literal fuckin’ gold mine!”

Walsh sniffed. “D’you know what gold’s measured in?” he asked.

“Nope.” Vinther conceded.

“Ounces.” Walsh told him. “Every other thing you might wanna dig up out the Earth - salt, coal, iron ore, whatever - they measure it in tonnes, but gold they measure by the ounce. An ounce of gold is about, uh, this big….” he held up his fingers shockingly close together. “…and the geosurvey figures there’s… oh, about six and a half million of those in the whole of the eastern desert.”

Vinther looked around. The eastern desert was defined as being all the vast, wide, sun-baked landscape between the Nile and the Red Sea. It was literally all they could see in every direction, and despite that they’d been driving for an hour they weren’t even a quarter of the way to their destination yet.

“That… ain’t a lot.” he decided.

“‘Bout seventy-five ounces per square mile on average.” Walsh said. “‘Course it ain’t all evenly distributed and it ain’t all at the same depth, and it ain’t in neat ounce-sized nuggets… It’s all gold dust. They gotta bring up a big ol’ chunk’a bedrock, crush it, wash it, filter it and outta that they get gold dust they can melt together to make bullion. It’s time-consuming, labor-intensive, expensive work.”

“And with the Hephaestus LLC finding huge supplies of precious metals in the asteroid belt all the time nowadays…” Ava said “The price of gold’s declining hard.”

“Right.” Walsh agreed. “So yeah, this mine of theirs, if it’s really the big H who owns the place, probably turns a profit for ‘em but those Cali accountants woulda been worth a lot more.”

Murray stirred. Vinther thought he’d been asleep, but he must have just been listening quietly with his eyes closed. “Where’d you learn all that?” he asked.

“Discovery Channel.” Walsh shrugged.

Murray and Ava both made the exact same noise simultaneously - an amused expulsion of air through the nose, and Vinther chuckled.

Walsh laughed with them and went back to tapping on his tablet, working on the map and the details of their plans.

“Uh…” Ava began again.

“What’s up?” Vinther asked her.

“…Are you guys… scared?”

“What of?” Vinther asked her.

“I dunno. That this could be a trap, or… that it could all go wrong?”

It was Walsh’s turn to indicate to Vinther to take the lead on this one.

Vinther shrugged. “…Are you?” he asked.

“Yeah.” she admitted.

Vinther nodded sympathetically. “Good. Means you ain’t crazy.” He scratched the inside of his ear, thinking. “But being scared’s… I think of it like a coat of primer, right? It happens before you start the painting, and it sure ain’t no fun, but it gets you ready. Ready to kick ass, ready to keep your head the fuck down, whatever. Once you’re in the thick of it, you ain’t got time to be scared.”

“The oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Murray interjected. He shrugged when they all looked at him. “H. P. Lovecraft.”

“Dude got that right.” Walsh agreed.

“How do you cope with it?” Ava asked.

“You piss yourself yet?” Vinther asked her.

She blinked. “Uh… No…?”

Vinther glanced at the GPS, and sighed inwardly to himself: There were still far too many miles to go. “Then you’re doin’ just about as well as I am.”

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Byron Group campus, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Moses Byron

“Kevin! How’s the nose?”

In person, Kevin Jenkins’ nose really was an impressive sight. While it looked set to heal straight and clean, the bruising and discoloration covered a lot of his face. Xiù Chang, it seemed, had an impressive arm on her.

Kevin threw himself into a chair. “You had to ask. Worth it, though.”

“Hopefully. “ Byron agreed. “They still need to clear the selection and training.”

Kevin gave him a curious look. “I thought the whole point in sendin’ me up there was because we’re headhunting those three, boss man?” he asked.

“Mocktail?” Byron offered. Kevin had figured out his booze trick, so the offer was a simple courtesy.

“You askin’ me for one, or you offering?” Kevin joked.

“Offering.”

“Sure, sounds good.”

Byron nodded and hit his drink cabinet and refrigerator, selecting the cranberry juice, raspberry juice and lemon-lime. “D’you know how much profit the BGEV program has made us, Kevin?” he asked.

“Kinda figured it’s in the red.” Kevin replied.

“Yyyup.” Byron agreed. ”Badly in the red. Badly badly badly. In fact, EV-Eleven’s our last throw of the dice.”

“Crying shame.” Kevin mused. “But you can’t send good money after bad.”

“Your job ain’t to agree with me, Kevin.” Byron told him, smiling slightly. He poured the juice. “Quite the opposite.”

“Unless you’re right, boss man.” Kevin said.

“Well.” Byron unscrewed the lemon-lime’s cap. “Chang, Buehler and Etsicitty have got the experience and know-how, but if I’m gonna give them command over our last-ditch attempt to turn that program around, we need to know they make the grade. That ship ain’t leaving the good Earth until I’m completely happy that it’s got the best of the best on it.”

“You were pretty damn rigorous with the selection for Ten, as I recall.” Kevin observed. Byron handed him his finished drink.

“And for all the other ones. Hell, Reclamation was the only one we rushed things on, and that for good reason.” Byron sipped his drink, found it acceptable and sat down again. “But these three are gonna get the full room and board. Make or break, Kevin.”

“Make or break them, or make or break the mission?”

“Relax, they’ll be well taken care-of whether they make the cut or not. Talent like that, we’ll find a use for them. Just you wait and see.”

“Boss…” Kevin frowned at him. The man had an irritating knack for spotting unanswered questions.

“Fine, fine!” Byron sat down, called up the planned assessment and selection program and turned his monitor around for Kevin’s benefit.

Kevin read in silence for the most part. He only commented once. “Dang, the team dug up a lot on Buehler.”

“Surprising, ain’t it?”

“She really doesn’t seem the type…”

“Turns out she’s full of secrets.”

“And you’re gonna hit her with them?”

Byron nodded. “Kevin, if things go to plan she’s going to be the flight engineer for a starship that’s worth… well, a heck of a lot. And she’ll be cooped up on that ship with the other two for a minimum of eighteen months. If she’s carrying any baggage, it needs to be dealt with before any of them ever lay eyes on Eleven’s hull.”

“Why?”

Byron frowned. “‘Scuse me?”

“Why? She and the other two get on just fine. Hell, I think there’s some kind of triangle thing going on there. Why disrupt that by bringing old skeletons outta the closet?”

Byron rubbed his chin, assembling his thoughts. “We aren’t in the business of coddling three young pups in love, Kevin; we’re in the business of sending a spaceship out there that’ll turn a profit. That means forging a team who can steer her through whatever rough seas she finds in her way.” he said. “A team like that’s got to share everything, and I don’t just mean bath towels and body odor. Every doubt, every concern, every relevant bit of data, they all need to know it, and they all need to be able to work through it, together. No secrets, no lies, no omissions. They need to trust and accept one another completely and with every facet of their lives.”

“Heck.” he added. “If they make the grade, we’ll have made them inseparable if that’s what they want. And if not, well, we’ll have helped them gain new insight into themselves and one another and left ‘em a little wiser. No matter what happens, we’ll have done ‘em a favor.”

“Tough love?” Kevin summarized, sarcastically.

“Kevin, it’s no business of ours if they spend every night of their mission ruttin’ like a Roman orgy. It IS our concern if they wind up hating each other four months in and thereby cost us our last shot at making the galaxy do something positive for mankind for a change.”

Kevin knocked back his mocktail and frowned. “I wanna argue.” he confessed. “But for the life’a me, I can’t think of a good counter-argument.”

“If it helps, I’m not real happy about giving these kids a rough time either.” Byron conceded. “But if they’re as good as we think, they can take it.”

“Hmm…” Kevin nodded. “Oh yeah! Reminds me, I had plenty’a time to think on the drive down here, and I had an idea that might even help there.”

“Shoot.”

“These kids are gorgeous, boss. Movie-star good looks, fitness, intensity… I reckon we could build a whole advertising campaign around them.”

“Like, what, a candid series on the kind of people we have workin’ for us?” Byron mused. “Plausible…I know Chang’s kind of a minor celebrity in Canada right now…”

“Just a thought.” Kevin shrugged. “And hell, maybe a photoshoot’d be a good little carrot, reward kinda thing. Boost their self-esteem after you bruise it.”

“I like it.” Byron agreed. “When are they coming down here, anyway?”

“HR said something about needin’ ten days or so to finish their ‘special accommodations’…”

“Right, yes.”

“So I gave them two weeks.” Kevin said. “Time to finish sorting out that country cottage of theirs and get things straightened out.”

“Good. That lines up with Ericson’s needs.” the EV program’s chief engineer had specified that there’d be a window between the two and three month marks when he’d need to discuss some matters with the crew.

“Excellent.” Kevin stood up. “Anything I need to look at?”

“Yeah, Ericson had a few toys he wanted to shove on Eleven. He’s not given up on giving it some kind of emergency recall yet - I said he should talk to you first. Last thing I need is another chat with the President about national and global security…” That part still rankled. It had been a chilling introduction to what real power looked like, and had galvanised his determination that BGEV-11 was going to be the success he’d always wanted for the EV program, if for no other reason than that it’d be nice to retire to his own private planet and get out from under the thumb of that power.

“Leave it to me.” Kevin promised. “Hell, the Supreme Allied Commander for Extrasolar Defence sends me Christmas cards. I’m sure we can figure out some kind of a recall system that won’t shaft us.”

“Yes, yes, brag about your network again…” Byron chuckled.

Kevin shared the laugh then headed for the door. “Back to the grind, then.” he declared.

“Kevin.” Byron gave him a nod as Kevin turned in the doorway. “Thank you.”

Kevin grinned, turned and went, flipping a jaunty salute over his shoulder as he did. “Just doin’ my job, boss man.”

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Gold mine west of Marsa Alam, Egypt, Earth.

Six

Unlike a true digital sapient such as an Igraen, biodrones didn’t communicate in words and emotional context. They were drones in every sense of the word - automata, kept under strict control and obeying clearly programmed rules, even if the default context for all their programming was to simulate human appearance and behaviour as closely as possible.

But they weren’t humans any longer. They could, in an academic sense, interrogate the brain of the being from which they had been constructed and analyse which responses and emotions would have been appropriate in that context, and thereby do an extremely convincing impersonation of the person whose body they now wore, but the biodrone itself was little more than a control program.

To an Igraen’s senses therefore (insofar as the term ’sense’ could be applied to the perception of purely digital data formats) the report that reached Six’s ‘ears’ was not like being told “they’re coming” or being called for by name.

It was more like a cold, mechanical status report - <+Priority2:PerimeterAlert:bExpected=true:refIndividualOfInterest=47,probable94%+>

There was a human gesture that Six had picked up and rather enjoyed - dusting his hands off. He did it now as he stepped out of the foreman’s office and took stock.

The mine was running more smoothly than any human endeavor ever could, thanks to the fact that every single one of the adults was now a biodrone. Whereas previously there would have been pay disputes, arguments, discussions over the most effective course of action and other such inefficiencies, a network of biodrones all directly sharing one another’s knowledge and intelligence on the subject could work tirelessly all day and far more effectively.

The children were the only minor complication - their underdeveloped neural structures weren’t suitable for biodroning, and Six’s projections suggested that if he just had the useless things exterminated, the biodrones would be forced to emulate the histrionic behaviour of bereaved parents in order to keep up their convincing facade. Plausible for one or two children - fatal to the secrecy of the operation in larger numbers. There would be too many questions.

Besides, there was always the probability that humans were not completely rational when it came to children. They might overlook a village full of biodroned adults for the sake of peace and their species’ future longevity, but a dozen dead younglings? Not if the example set on Cimbrean was any indication.

The children, therefore, were tolerated and even given a simulation of the family relationship they’d always had. Still… somehow they seemed to know that something was not right with their parents: They watched the adults warily, and Six most warily of all.

One was staring at him now - a hip-high creature that regarded him with wide-eyed intensity while sucking on its hand, uncaring of the noxious fluid that oozed from one of its nostrils. Barefoot, neglected and dirty as it was, he couldn’t even identify the brat’s gender.

Six made a threatening surge at the little one and it scarpered, but he noted that it didn’t go far. The child only dashed away as far as the corner of the heavy machinery shed and lurked there, observing him less like he was an object of fear, and more like he was a puzzle in need of a solution. Even human children came equipped with sharp predatory instincts, it seemed.

No matter. He raised his binoculars and aimed them toward the highway.

In the distance, two SUVs were picking their way up the dirt branch road. With the approaching sunset turning the corners of the sky an unsightly shade of bruised mauve, they’d lit their headlamps and were visible as two pools of light, given the deceptive appearance of slowness by distance.

The access road was a few miles long and there was plenty of time to shut down the mining operation and bring the biodrones all back into the village. Indeed, the process began the second Six even conceived of it. By the time the vehicles were a mere half-mile away, all of the biodrones were back in the village and pretending to be human. The fact that each one of them had immediate access to a weapon was nothing more than insurance - Six had no plans on starting a fight, but that was no excuse for laziness.

Human technology had come a long way during his years on Earth, and these SUVs were just another indicator of that. Gone were the stinking fossil-fueled roaring engines: In their place was a quiet, clean electric drive train powered by a forcefield array that could drink down the Egyptian desert’s abundant sunlight with better than 95% efficiency if needed, and which could store enough power for a five hundred kilometer voyage even in pitch darkness… or provide all the power and torque that a vehicle might need for shorter, more intense bursts of activity.

He awarded himself a victory as the cars pulled up outside the foreman’s office and a total of seven people alighted. Three were men of average size but in fit condition, all lean and hard and intense, and this included the one who was immediately identifiable as the leader, a tanned man with Germanic facial features and salt-and-pepper hair.

Behind them was a very large man, blond of hair and beard and wearing aviator shades. Big as he was, he was still smaller than the enormous man who got out of the car behind him, and even that one was dwarfed by the mountain who squeezed out of the rear car, draped in the most disgustingly colorful shirt that Six had ever even heard of.

Next to the six males, the young woman who got out of the car last was almost unimpressive. Where they were regarding him and their surroundings with neutral, calculating watchfulness that promised the immediate and skilful application of violence should things go wrong, she was more like the child: Wide-eyed and cautious, watching him to see what he might do next. She did, however, tap the greying leader on the arm and mutter ”That’s him.”

Six spread his arms and played the part of a jovial host with a smile. “Welcome! Thank you for coming!” he announced.

The soldiers - and if two or maybe three of them weren’t SOR, Six didn’t know what else they might be - exchanged the rapid almost-hive-mind communication that humans seemed to never notice they did simply by looking at one another, and dispersed, walking calmly and slowly but firmly away until only the leader and the girl were left by the vehicles.

“We’d have preferred,” the leader said, “a meeting between yourself and a trained negotiator.”

“And yet here you are.” Six replied. “Which makes me wonder why you’re accommodating my request, mister, ah…?”

“You can call me Barkeep.” he said. “I don’t make the decisions, I simply pass on the message.”

Six nodded. “And what can I call you?” he asked the young woman. “I would like to know your real name, but I won’t be offended if you use a nickname instead.”

She glanced at ‘barkeep’, who nodded encouragement. “…You can call me Ash.”

“Short for Ashley?” Six asked. She did a commendable job of giving away nothing. “Or a reference to… hmm. No matter. Thank you for agreeing to this meeting. I’m sure you and I can both answer some very interesting questions for each other.”

“I’m sure we can.” Ash replied, and there was a definite spark of dislike in her expression now.

“Mister Barkeep, if we might, I would like to have my conversation with miss Ash here in private. That office there, if I may. Don’t worry about surveilling us, I’m sure you will and I welcome it, but a little privacy as a courtesy…?”

It was interesting that this time ‘Barkeep’ deferred to Ash who swallowed, nodded, and stepped forward.

Six played the part of the perfect gentleman and held the door for her.

It wasn’t much of a door. It wasn’t much of an office. But, it had air conditioning which was a blessing both for warding off the grinding heat of the day and the surprising chill of night time.

Uninvited, Ash sat down. Six’s Interrogation of his host body’s memories on human social etiquette yielded no useful information: as far as the man who had once owned Six’s body would have been concerned, the cultural differences were so pronounced that Ash may as well be a different species of human altogether.

He settled for sitting down at a cautious distance. “Would you like something to drink?” He offered. “I have water, coffee…”

Ash shook her head. “No, thank you.”

“As you wish. To business then. How much were you told about me? About who I’m with?”

Ash shifted in her seat, thinking. “They told me… to be very careful with what they told me.” she said. “Not to talk about it with the wrong people.”

“And who are the wrong people?” Six asked her, smiling. She’d struck the perfect blend of evasiveness and honesty.

“Anybody who can’t prove that they already know it.” Ash replied.

“And how will they know that you know it?” Six asked. Ash didn’t reply. “Well. Let me tell you what I think you’ve been told. You have been told that I am a member of an organisation known as the Hierarchy. We are a long-standing order spanning the recent several hundred thousands of Terran years of galactic history, and our mandate is to prevent the spread of deathworld life forms. Does any of that sound familiar?”

“It sounds like a version that paints you as the good guys.” Ash told him.

Six smirked at that. “Yes, I imagine the summary you were given was not so charitable.” he agreed. “I imagine the word ‘genocide’ was used, possibly words like ‘atrocity’ or ‘extinction’ hmm?”

“They said you’re personally responsible for overseeing several of them.” Ash didn’t bother with disguising her contempt.

“And humanity would have been among them.” Six agreed. “And this is where you enter my story. A sporting event in San Diego, several years ago now. Roller derby?”

Ash didn’t reply, so Six retreated from that topic for now.

“Do you have any idea why an organisation like mine might exist?” he asked instead. “Why we might do the things we do?”

“You tell me.” She challenged him, flatly.

“Why else does anybody do awful things? Because they believe that the positive outcomes will outweigh the negatives..”

Ash had a quirk of body language, he noted. She wasn’t looking directly at him. Her eye contact never wavered, but her nose wasn’t aimed at him and nor were her shoulders. It was a watchful, careful posture, but as she ran one hand up the other arm it also became a defensive one. She returned her hands to being folded in her lap quickly enough, but she’d already given away a nerve that had been struck. Very interesting.

“You’re talking about trillions of deaths.” she said. “What kind of negative outcome is worse?”

“Well, not trillions personally.” Six demurred. “A hundred billion maybe. let’s call it that: a round hundred billion. What would be worse than that? How about a hundred billion and one? ”

“Oh come on-!” she began.

“I am deadly serious. If events were transpiring that would inevitably lead to a fatal clash between two cultures that could only end in the extinction of one and the mauling of another, the ethical thing to do is to minimize the bloodshed. Does that not seem reasonable?”

The defensive body language returned as Ash’s left hand crept halfway up her right forearm. A ’yes’ to which she would not admit, if Six was any judge.

“So. One group must be made unwilling or incapable of fighting. Which group? Well, logically, the one which can be broken with the least bloodshed. Reasonable?”

Still no answer, and so he pressed ahead. “And now comes the problem. Neither group can peacefully coexist: It is impossible by their respective natures. One must be eliminated, erased, made to simply no longer exist. On the one hand is a society of a hundred billion life forms. On the other, a hundred billion and one. From your neutral perspective, there is no important distinction between them save for that single integer difference in their population.”

“And you’re omniscient enough to spot that single integer.” She poisoned the sentence with as much sarcastic bile as she could summon.

“An exaggeration for illustrative purpose.” Six waved a hand dismissively. “Let us go with a more realistic difference of scale: A hundred billion versus a mere, oh…seven and a half billion? Or, less believably perhaps but I promise completely true to life: A hundred trillion versus a mere seven and a half billion. What then?”

“Oh come on!” Ash’s defensive body language evaporated. She leaned forward, straightened up, frowned. “That’s… what is that, a hundred thousand to one? How is the smaller group EVER going to be a threat?”

“Time and multiplication if nothing else.” Six replied. “But of course… I am discussing Deathworlders. A form of life which ably demonstrates time and again that the win does not automatically go to the faction with the numerical advantage.”

“So why are you talking to me?” She asked.

Six gave her his best grim smile. “Because you’ve already won.”

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Gold mine west of Marsa Alam, Egypt, Earth.

Roy Vinther

“Dammit, the way they stare is really startin’ to get to me.”

Coombes was patrolling the perimeter around the vehicles. He wasn’t obviously armed - none of them were obviously armed - but he was armed, and he, Pavlo and Murray had taken to orbiting the open space near the foreman’s office where their cars were parked, keeping an eye out for trouble.

Vinther and Firth were lurking at the cars to protect them, and Walsh was busy being the Intel Weenie, keeping them fed with information and connected to the chain of command.

“Be cool, BOUNCER.” Vinther muttered.

”Fuck that, I’m salty like a fuckin’ margarita glass.” Coombes replied. ”Fer cryin’ out loud, they biodroned the whole goddamn village, BARKEEP.”

“And they’ll pay for it.” Vinther promised. “We’ll see to that. But right now we got a different job. You hear me?”

”I hear ya.” Coombes grumbled. Vinther saw him pause and study a nearby ‘villager’, which watched him with a completely dispassionate expression. Vinther saw him shudder and move on.

“Worst part is.” Walsh commented. “I reckon you’re wrong there, Barkeep.”

“How so?” Vinther asked him.

“That motherfucker in there’s… I think the term we’re using is ’digital sapient’.” Walsh said. “He ain’t an artificial intelligence, he’s a sapient being whose whole existence is as data. If we bust in there right now and smoke his ass, he’ll be walkin’ around as someone else, somewhere else, pretty much right away. And if we do somehow take him out, they restore from backup. I don’t see a way to make him pay, and even if we could… You can only execute somebody the one time. Ain’t no way Six is ever gonna see a punishment fit for his crime.”

“We could make it hurt.” Firth rumbled. He nodded toward the heavy equipment shed, and Vinther turned just in time to spot a tiny, grimy face duck out of sight. “There’s kids here, DB.”

“They’ve not been ‘droned.” Walsh observed. “Guess they’re too young.”

“They ain’t being looked after, neither.”

“We’ll sort that out.” Vinther promised them. “This won’t fuckin’ stand.”

“That’s kinda the problem, boss.” Walsh told him. “It will. And there ain’t a damn thing we can do about it.”

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Gold mine west of Marsa Alam, Egypt, Earth.

Six

“What do you mean, ’We’ve already won’? When? How?”

Six stood up and glanced through the half-closed blinds at the men who had escorted Ash to him. “Six and a half years ago.” he said. “When you and I first met, though of course I was wearing a different body, then. White, bearded, surgically altered to be as statistically average in height and appearance as we could manage…”

“Mr. Johnson.” Ash frowned. “You were gonna shoot up the roller derby.”

“Well, I had no weapon. No, the shooting was to be done by another, I was purely there to… observe, to see what would happen. To, ah, ’poke the hornet’s nest’ as I said at the time and oh yes, I was stung.” Six said. “Even after extensive and detailed review of my memories of the event I had no conclusive evidence to help me determine how I was detected. I had suspicions of course - more sophisticated facial recognition algorithms than I had bargained for, law enforcement being closer behind me than I had anticipated… even a young couple taking a picture which would apparently by happenstance include me, and uploading it to the Internet.”

“It wasn’t until I reviewed the memories of the agent responsible for a failed operation on Cimbrean that I detected a correlation. It wasn’t until you and I crossed paths at Cairo Airport that I deduced some kind of causal relationship.” He finished. “And now I think I’ve spoken enough. I want to know the nature of that relationship. Who are you? How did you know who I was? How did you survive the city’s destruction? Why were you on Cimbrean, and why are you here now?”

Ash gave him a long, cold stare. “And if I tell you?” she asked.

“Then I will explain in full what my plan is, my reasoning, and what your species can do to help me help you.”

“Do I have to tell you my real name?”

“You don’t. If you want to be Ash, then Ash you shall be. Really, that’s an unimportant detail. Believe me, after this conversation is over I will already have everything I can usefully extract from you, no matter what you say.”

She frowned at that, clearly trying to figure out his meaning then took a deep breath and composed her story.

“I was born in San Diego.” she said. “My parents were… well, they were well off. Papa was an attorney, Mama was a gynaecologist, they had a lot of money. They sent me to public school anyway, they said it was better for me to learn how everyone had it, not just people with money. That’s where I met… well, my boyfriend. We were on our first date at that roller derby.”

“How did you recognise me?” Six asked.

Ash thought hard. “…I don’t know how much I can or should tell you.” she replied.

“Ah, so there’s a secret involved. A secret to do with this boyfriend of yours perhaps?”

“There’s a secret.” Ash agreed, giving away exactly nothing. “One that I think I’m…not going to share.”

“A pity.” Six said. “May I ask why?”

“Loyalty.” Ash replied. She really was delightfully impenetrable. “The possible consequences, personally and for all mankind. Take your pick.”

“Very well. What will you tell me?”

“I’ll tell you how I survived the blast.” She offered.

“Hmm, yes. Surviving a five kilogram antimatter strike. Impressive.” Six enthused. “Were you forewarned? Evacuated?”

“No.”

“How, then?”

“I was on vacation.”

Six couldn’t stop his body’s automatic reflex to frown. “…Vacation.”

“Florida. Orlando. My boyfriend’s father invited me along.” She smiled for him. “It was luck. If the blast had happened a week earlier or a week later…”

”Luck?!”

“Pure luck.” Ash nodded.

“Out of ALL the people in that city,” Six growled, “you expect me to believe that the same people who identified me and facilitated my capture, purely by chance were also among the tiny handful who survived? Do you have any idea what the odds against that are?”

Ash just shrugged, still revealing nothing whatsoever. “How much?”

“One in several hundred billion.” Six told her. “And yet you seem frustratingly sincere! Which means that you are either the very best liar I have encountered in all my life, or else that you are unaware of some causal link between those events.”

“And what might that link be?” Ash asked.

“That is what I had hoped to glean from you!” Six snapped. “The starport! Folctha! Was that coincidence also? Do not tell me that it was! The universe does not work that way!!”

“If you keep shouting, the armed men outside are going to come in here and rescue me.” Ash pointed out.

Six inhaled fiercely and willed himself to calm. “It’s this secret, isn’t it? The one you won’t discuss. One you won’t trust me with.”

“Why should I?” Ash shot back. “You just told me that you were here on Earth to try and kill us all.”

“Name your price.” Six told her, tiring of dancing around the subject.

“Okay…” Ash put a thoughtful hand to her mouth. “What I don’t get is how you’re acting like this is an itch you’ve just gotta scratch, but on the other hand it’s like you want to tell me everything. Which is it?”

“Both.” Six answered, truthfully.

“Yeah? So what’s so important?” she asked. “What’s in it for you to help us?”

“Is that your price?”

“My price is that if we’re gonna share our secrets, you have to earn it. You first.”

Six scowled at her. “You drive a hard bargain.”

“I have no reason to trust you. Sucks to be told that, doesn’t it? But it’s true.” She replied. “That’s my price. You tell me what we need to know, you tell me why you’re doing this, then I tell you what I think that link you’re after is.”

“A very hard bargain.”

She folded her arms. This time it wasn’t a defensive gesture, but a defiant and confident one. “Deal or no deal?”

Six tried to match her for ferocious glare, but failed. Humans were just naturally better at that. “…Very well.” He said, conceding defeat. “You have a deal.”

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
C-17 Globemaster, somewhere over the north Atlantic, Earth.

Major Owen Powell

The funny thing about EV-MASS was that it was hell to put on and take off, but once you were in it, the vise-like pressure that had once been the bane of the SOR’s life as they acclimated and conditioned to it now felt like a familiar, full-body hug that added a kind of solidity to every movement. The thing was awkward and heavy as sin right up until the moment when it was properly seated, sealed and supported, at which point the wearer was made to feel strong.

Powell rolled his shoulders and shimmied to make certain that it was definitely seated before the midsuit’s internal layer had time to expand in response to his body heat and clamp down fully. “That didn’t take as long.” he observed.

Airman Thorpe, one of his suit techs, grinned. “We gave you an extra millimeter of clearance in the shoulder, sir.”

“Is that all? I’ll never speak ill of a single millimeter again.” Powell shook his shoulders. Getting his head and arms up through the torso section had definitely been easier. That was what suit techs were for, of course - their whole job revolved around keeping the EV-MASS in perfect working order, and constantly fine-tuning and adjusting it to the needs of its operator.

“No need for a seal or life support check today, either,” his other tech, Corporal Brown added.

“Oh, aye. Don’t need to worry about suit breaches today, just about plunging towards Africa at a couple hundred miles an hour wi’ no parachute.” Powell nodded. All three of them chuckled.

“Alright… Let’s get the bloody water in.” Powell turned and presented the water ports on his lower back. Thorpe promptly connected the input line.

“I know I ask this every time.,” Powell commented, as the pump whined into life and he felt his undersuit stiffen and tighten in response to the tepid liquid that filled it out, “but is it really bloody necessary to use cold water?”

“And like I tell you every time sir,” Brown smiled, “yes it is.”

As Brown monitored the water pressure, Thorpe set about fitting the outersuit. This was the part that was different for every SOR man - from the industrial load-carrying gear and supplemental armor plating that was a Protector’s burden, a Defender’s accessible toolkit, or just the lightweight bare-bones that Aggressors needed to keep them ready to kill at an instant’s notice, that was the outersuit.

Powell’s outersuit was dominated by a sensor and communications package which turned him into a walking intelligence-gathering system to give any modern UAV a run for its money and then some. Supplemental superbatteries compensated for the expanded sensor package’s power demands, and the communications equipment turned his EV-MASS into the nexus of a web of data.

The system wasn’t going to be quite as effective today as it had the potential to be - under normal operation, the suit benefited from the real-time analytics offered by the computer banks aboard HMS Caledonia, without which the flow of information was less intelligently controlled and interpreted, but it wasn’t like he’d be blind. Far from it. Walsh’s pet UAV was a constant trickle of data, as were recon satellites, localized collection, Link-16 sensor integration from the substantial airborne assets in play to support the mission…

It all formed a sphere of tangible data, into which Powell’s suit and Powell himself neatly fit, reaping its benefits and feeding new data back in.

For now, things were quiescent. No status alerts, no zone conflicts, everything they had managed to persuade the Egyptians to allow was on standby and ready to pounce if needed… Everything, it seemed, was going well.

Maybe it was just the cold water making him irritable and antsy, but Powell was a firm believer that things never went well.

It was only a matter of time.

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Gold mine west of Marsa Alam, Egypt, Earth.

Six

“So, the question as asked is two questions: Why am I helping you, and what do you need to know?”

It was now definitely going dark outside. The sky was purple from end to end and Ash’s guards and escorts were barely visible as they waited and patrolled. Six turned away from the window and leaned against the desk to talk to her.

“The answer to the first part is that I am not helping you. I am helping my own people. It so happens that the best approach for helping them is to help your people.”

“How so?”

“How familiar are you with entropy?”

The apparent non-sequitur made her pause, but Ash took it in stride. “Thermodynamics. The inevitable progress of a closed system towards its lowest-energy state.”

“Good, you have an education. What about virtual particles?”

“Look, I only did high school science. What’s your point?”

“A virtual particle is literally that - a particle that has only a virtual existence as a solution to and consequence of the equations describing quantum mechanics. They are modelled as pairs of particles popping into existence simultaneously, meeting, annihilating, and vanishing with no net change to the energy-state of the universe.”

Ash folded her arms, waiting with commendable patience, but her expression was a clear warning that he should explain himself sooner rather than alter.

Six smiled. “Virtual particles do two things: They permit black holes to evaporate through radiation, and they provide a neat answer to a question every sapient species has ever asked - the origin of the universe. You see, if a virtual, unreal, simulated particle can still produce real tangible effects and yet accurately be said never to have truly existed at all… Then so can the universe. If the energy state of the universe will eventually decay to zero - if it is ’flat’ to use the human cosmological parlance - then it will have, in a big-picture sense, never existed at all.” He spread his hands. “And any universe you happen to encounter in your travels is nothing more than a temporary local anomaly.”

“That sounds completely crazy.” Ash objected.

“Yes. The problem with living in the universe is that it is terrible preparation for thinking about the universe.” Six agreed. “But there you have it. Why does the universe exist? Answer: It doesn’t.”

Ash stared at him and then, quite deliberately, she reached out and knocked on the desk. It made a solid, wooden sound.

“Yes, yes, yes, you’re not listening.” Six told her. “The point is that all of this is virtual, an emergent product of an equation that is still being worked through. Eventually, all of it will be gone and so will we, and nothing will remain. Spacetime and all its energy and matter will be gone as if they never were, because they weren’t.”

“We live,” he expanded, getting into his stride, “in a mockery of a reality, one that’s infinitely less real than the worlds we build inside our minds, one with no meaning, no purpose, no fate and no hope except whatever we can create for ourselves. All of us are trapped in a cruel game that allows only defeat. The only endgame is to live a little longer: the only winning move is to keep playing.”

“And your point is?” Ash insisted.

“That any threat which would knock you out of the game must be neutralized. That any advantage that will keep you in the game must be seized. And for the first time in the Hierarchy’s history, the first strategy has not worked. I was captured. I was interrogated. I was beaten. Me.”

He stalked across the office and composed himself. “And your people opened my eyes. In deep time, whatever is possible is inevitable. Whatever happens once, can happen a second time.”

He turned back. “Our whole strategy this entire time has been fundamentally wrong. All it takes is one deathworld species to slip through our net, and we have failed. Our destruction at that point is inevitable.”

“Why?” Ash asked. “Why is it inevitable that you would be destroyed?”

“Ask the Dodo. Or the West African Black Rhinoceros. The California Golden Bear, the Great Panda, the Thylacine, the Pyrenean Ibex, the Baiji Dolphin. And those are all deathworld species, and a tiny fraction of the list of species dead at the hands of your own just on this planet! Ask every native life form of the planet Cimbrean! Deathworlders. Equal. Death.” He stabbed a finger at her three times to punctuate each word.

“Then why are you helping us?” She retorted.

“…When I was captured, my interrogation was… gentle.” Six told her. “My guards and minders were polite and restrained, my interviewers were charming and sympathetic, the rules were laid out clearly and obviously, and were followed. No beatings, no torture, no verbal abuse, nothing more than the most necessary of indignities. When I co-operated I was rewarded with privileges, when I resisted the treats I had earned were taken away. It was methodical, thorough, and completely civilized. It has made me… trust you. A trust that has proven justified several times since.”

“So?”

“So even if we destroy you, our next inevitable containment failure might release a species not remotely so civilized and trustworthy.” Six told her. “That restraint is the only thing I have which resembles a guarantee for the long-term survival of the Igraens. I regret having to cut loose every other species in the galaxy… but that is the way it must be. The time of the deathworlders has come.”

“‘Cut loose?’ Is it really that bad?” Ash asked.

Six laughed, composed a scenario in his head, and detailed it. “Imagine: You are a thriving, proud civilization. Gleaming cities, global communications technology, art and culture and sports and a thriving economy. And one day, your oh-so-clever scientists discover the means by which a ship might have an apparent linear velocity greater than the speed of causality. You launch your first warp ship, your Pandora, and bask in your own accomplishments….until the aliens arrive.”

“These aliens are monsters. True monsters, far worse than any fanged, acid-blooded animal your cinema industry ever devised. And they are monsters because what greets you, smiling politely and eager to make your acquaintance, are your superiors. Faster, tougher, stronger. More cunning, more inventive, more intuitive and more logical. Their art and music redefines everything you thought culturally possible, their philosophy explores fields of thought of which you had never even conceived. They are all but impervious to your weapons, their very breath carries plagues that could eviscerate your population, and their military doctrine operates several levels above your own. In every conceivable way, they are better than you and you will never, ever become their equal in even one capacity, let alone in all regards.”

He sighed. “More galling still? Is that they are even your ethical superiors. They do not gloat, or exploit their superiority. They do not enslave you, but instead welcome you as the equals you are not. They give you a place at their table that you do not deserve, listen to your pathetic attempts at having opinions and treat them with a seriousness they do not warrant. Every time they smile at you and treat you as their friend, they demonstrate yet again just how hopelessly inadequate you really are….And the very, very worst part of all, will be that they are completely sincere.”

Ash frowned, and looked down, thinking.

“Do you think humanity would survive a culture shock like that?” Six asked.

She didn’t reply, and he nodded, satisfied.

“That,” he told her, “Is what the future looks like now.”

Darcy

“Wow… either Six is deeply insecure, or his whole species is.”

Darcy nodded. The conversation was providing illuminating insights into both Six and Ava Rìos. The former was the much more studied subject of course, but if the monologue they were hearing was anything to go by he’d been in a decidedly subdued mood throughout his prior detainment.

Ava was feigning impatience but also letting him rant, thereby drawing out all kinds of useful psychological information. For a young and untrained civilian, she was doing a damn decent job.

“Appealing to his ego was always the most effective technique during his interrogation.” Darcy pointed out.

“Hmm. A big ego that we punctured? Or a big ego to cover for deeper insecurities?”

“Why not both?”

“The question is, whether he’s typical of Igraens…?”

“We have a sample size of one guy. That’s not enough to draw any solid conclusions.”

“I don’t know. His rationalisation for genocide sounded… dogmatic to me.”

“A rote response? The Hierarchy party line?”

“He hasn’t abandoned his species entirely. It stands to reason that he’s still mostly drinking the Kool-Aid.”

“Assuming that he’s not lying so we hear what he thinks we want to hear.”

“If so, he’s become a much better liar over the last six years.”

“I don’t think he’s lying.”

“Agreed. But if he’s not, then his claim that… what did he say…? ‘After this conversation is over I will already have everything I can usefully extract from you, no matter what you say.’ That bothers me.”

“Mind games?”

“I don’t think so. I think his ego’s at play again. I think he’s hinting at something he’s done, or is doing or will do, that he believes won’t be figured out, at least not soon enough to make a difference. Superiority behavior.”

Darcy grimaced. “The problem is,” she observed, “that he’s probably right.”

Six

Ash, it seemed, had finally heard enough. “What do you need us to do?” she asked.

“I have converted a Cabal of my fellows who agree with my reasoning - if the Hierarchy endures, it will lead inevitably to the death of the Igraen people. They will force that conflict, and they will lose.” Six replied. “We have a plan, but we lack certain critical information.”

“Such as?”

“On the rare occasions when the Hierarchy deem that a crisis has reached the point where the authority of the low numbers such as myself is insufficient, we compile a gestalt intelligence identified as ’One’.” he told her. “One uses the combined perspective and intelligence of every Igraen on the network to draw conclusions and to decide the collective will of our species. It is an entity of formidable intelligence, but it is also inherently democratic rather than logical. Dissenting opinions are heard, but it is the majority opinion that matters.”

“So?”

“We intend to commit electoral fraud.”

”How?”

“One may be a digital sapient, but - speaking as a digital sapient - we are still vulnerable to being ‘hacked’ - indeed, I’ve done it myself. A fellow agent called Seven was the one who rescued me from my captivity, and his reward was that I hollowed him out and slithered into his mind, in much the same way as I did to this biodrone.”

She gave him a sickened look. ”Why?”

“Seven would have been my most competent adversary: His destruction was necessary. Instead, armed with his knowledge and authority, I have been able to build and protect the Cabal. One is, in theory, vulnerable to the exact same.”

“In theory.” She repeated, voice dripping with sarcasm and contempt.

“Better protected.” Six explained, letting the attitude slide. “But there is no such thing as a secure system. One is hardened, supremely so, but it is still attackable, penetrable, compromisable.”

“So why do you need humans?” Ash asked, clearly getting tired of repeating herself.

“Because the most important part of One’s protection is that no member of the Hierarchy knows where its physical layer is.” Six explained. “And doing what we intend to do will require us to access the physical medium that stores the seed algorithms from which it is compiled, and effect alterations.”

Ash’s lips parted in batant incredulity. “How in the - do you have any idea where it is?”

“Somewhere in this galaxy.”

She stared at him some more, then shook her head. “Now, I’ma give you another shot at that.” she said. “Try giving me a useful answer this time.”

“That is the only answer I have. Somewhere in this galaxy.”

“Weren’t you lecturing me on physics a while back?” She asked. “You’ve got to know how big the galaxy is!”

“Rather more clearly than you do, I suspect.” Six agreed. “Fortunately, while I don’t know where the systems that house One itself are, I do know the coordinates for a routing station in the Irujzen Reef… I believe human astronomy refers to the volume as the Sagittarius Star Cloud, or Messier 24.”

He produced a slightly old-fashioned USB drive from his pocket with a flourish and offered it to her. “Galactic volume, star, planet, and co-ordinates on said planet. It’s a class eleven, one of our… historical cases. Heavier surface gravity than Earth, and the atmosphere is warmer, denser, moister and richer in oxygen.”

“You mean you killed the people who used to live there.” Ash accused.

“Yes. My first such in a supervisory role. They called themselves the Miorz. Unpleasant creatures - Deeply tribal, very warlike, fond of slavery. Their coming-of-age ritual involved a one-on-one fight to the death, and if the winner was too badly injured they were promptly sacrificed. You should have seen their greedy little eyes light up - all five of them - when they learned how to split the atom: By the time the last bomb fell, we barely even needed to send in the Abrogators.”

He smiled at her shocked expression. “I’m sorry, did you imagine that all Deathworlders are pleasant and civilized? Some of the things we’ve killed needed killing or they would have been a worse plague than the Hunters. There’s a reason I’m pinning my hopes on humanity. When I listed all those species humans have wiped out, you seemed uncomfortable - The Miorz would have laughed and bragged about it.”

Ash took the drive, still giving him a wary dark look. “And this routing station will lead us to One.” She said.

“More likely it will lead you to another routing station. And that routing station may well lead you to another routing station. It is a vast network. But, there can only be a finite number of steps to the hub.”

“And how will we contact you to organise all of this?” Ash asked.

“Oh, don’t worry.” Six told her. “I’ve already made all the arrangements.”

Roy Vinther

“Hey, Barkeep…”

“Yeah?”

Walsh looked up from his tablet. His expression was grim. “The drone’s tracking a convoy coming in…”

Six

“What the hell do you mean you’ve ’made arrangements’? Like what?”

“Nope. My turn to ask the questions.” Six denied her.

“But-!”

“You don’t need to know. In fact it’s much better if you don’t.” He told her, truthfully. “My turn. Tell me the link. Tell me the relationship between events that led you here.”

Ash hesitated, and Six gritted his teeth. In truth, he’d got everything he needed, but it would be torturously irritating to leave this particular itch un-scratched.

“The link is a woman named Terri Boone.” Ash revealed, eventually.

“I know of her. A relative?”

“My… adoptive father investigated her death.”

A cascade of data points connected themselves, and Six relaxed with a happy sigh. The laws of probability and causality were vindicated. The chain of events as he could see it now was tangled, yes, but no less probable than any other sequence involving the lives of dozens of people.

“…Then that would make you…” Her expression hardened, and he decided that it would be more fun to leave her guessing. “Hmm. Thank you for your honest answer, ‘Ash’.”

She stood. “Are we done here?”

<+Priority1:PerimeterAlert:bExpected=False:refIndividualOfInterest=InsufficientData+>

Six hesitated, then nodded. “You know, I believe we are.”

She gave him a murderously cold glare, and pushed past him. she opened the door in the surprised face of ‘Barkeep’, who had been about to knock.

The two blinked at one another.

“You done?” he asked.

“We’re done.”

“Good, ‘cause we got incoming.” He raised a small device, and ‘Ash’ presented her cranium to him. Some kind of ultrasonic scanner, if Six was any judge. It produced a happy ping and a green light, and Barkeep issued a satisfied grunt.

“Incoming?” She asked, looking past him to stare warily at the ribbon of light coming off the highway and up the access road.

Barkeep took the opportunity to conspiratorially whisper a question to her. Six turned up the gain on his auditory cybernetics and listened in.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Just talking to that creepy fuck gave me a headache.” She murmured back. “But I’m fine. Thanks.”

Barkeep turned to Six. “They with you?”

Six shook his head. “They are not. I suspect the Hierarchy has found us.”

He stepped back into the office and produced a revolver and several speed-loaders from a desk drawer. “If I were you, I would call in whatever reinforcements you have.”

Owen Powell

”STAINLESS, DRINKIN’ BUDDY, we’ve got probable BIG HOTEL rolling up on us. ASH is in hand with vital data, overland egress is not plausible. Requesting support, over.”

Powell spat a curse. For a few bright and hopeful moments there, he’d started to entertain the idea that they might make it through this thing without anything going wrong. He waved a hand furiously to grab Thorpe’s attention.

“Copy DB, we’re almost ready. ETA,” he glanced at Thorpe who held up three fingers. “Three minutes?” The suits were just beginning to settle on the men and they needed to be fully seated before they deployed. The loadmaster, overhearing the conversation on the party line, shook his head and flashed both his hands twice. “Scratch. Aircrew thinks up to twenty.” Another gesture informed him of the reason. “We need to re-circle our orbit to get into position. Fook.”

The wait on the line was a grim one. When Walsh replied, he sounded like a man who’d just been swearing violently. ”…Understood, STAINLESS. Out.”

Powell sprang to his feet and shook the deck as he approached the loadmaster with a purpose. Loadmasters were a hardy breed who regularly dealt with the angriest and most violently-inclined Army personnel on drops and exercises, but this one still flinched ever so slightly. Even his career had probably not prepared the man for well over three hundred pounds of angry, desperate astronaut with more combat training and experience than the most hardcore operators and an academic education to match, and more than a hundred pounds of suit and the weight of combat gear beyond that. Given that Powell fancied that the pilots were probably feeling the plane wobble just a little with every heavy EV-MASS footfall, he could hardly blame him.

“Staff sergeant, we very much need to get there faster.” Powell explained, keeping his voice level but urgent.

The loadmaster nodded and briefly conversed with the aircrew. “Are your men ready, major? We’re flying easy and level for your techs’ benefit.”

A quick glance showed they were, and the techs were already packing it in. “SOR! Sounds like we’re in for a rough ride. Get everything secured!”

He turned back to the loadmaster. “We will be shortly.”

“Yes sir. Let me know.” He grinned slightly, “The pilots are gonna love this.”

There was a squeal of metal on metal from down the bay - Warhorse had put his back into shoving one of the suit stations back onto its transport pallet. Baseball was bracing himself to do the same. The loadmaster cringed visibly, and doubly so when the second and third stations were stowed with similarly physical efficiency that undoubtedly did serious damage to the load handling system and floor plating. His crew chief would murder him when they got back.

Powell could hardly blame the man for the way he put a hand on top of his head and stared forlornly at the damage. “Fuck. Imma need t’buy beers for the whole goddamned MXS.”

Powell clapped him sympathetically on the shoulder. “Tell them to take it up with me, lad. We’re in a bit of a hurry. As you can see, we’ll be ready momentarily.”

The loadmaster swallowed and nodded. “Yes sir,” he said, taking refuge in deflated stoicism.

The techs knew the business of stowing their stations, and the words were barely out of the loadmaster’s mouth before the equipment was all crated, strapped and locked down. The Globemaster could have performed a barrel roll and they would have stayed comfortably in place. Thorpe aimed a thumbs-up at Powell as he threw himself into a seat and strapped in, his work finished for now.

The loadmaster took his cue. “Get seated and strap in. We’ll be starting decom, too.” He headed to his workstation–forward in the cargo bay, and starboard, near his drop management station–while the other two aircrew set up stations near the rear of the aircraft.

Powell nodded, tugged his suit’s air mask off the velcro on his leg, clipped it securely into place - high altitude as this jump was, there was no need to do a full vacuum-safe seal check - and accepted Warhorse’s help and shrugged on his mission gear before installing himself in one of the chairs, waiting for the go signal.

Once everyone was seated, and the aircrew did a final check to ensure everything was, in fact, secure, the pilot was notified.

The flight got interesting.

Roy Vinther

“Motherfucking shit-ass son of a fucking fuck!” Walsh aimed his head at the sky, took a deep breath to compose himself, and then keyed his mic. “…Understood, STAINLESS. Out.”

Coombes broke the silence. “…Bad news?” he asked.

“Twenty minutes.” Walsh grabbed his binoculars. “They’re gonna be here in… five.” he estimated, aiming down the road.

Vinther took them off him. “Why is it always white fuckin’ Toyota Hiluxes?” he mused to himself, trying to guesstimate at a headcount of their approaching enemy. Even his most optimistic lower boundary was an unhappily large number.

Firth and Murray approached. “Plan?”

“Hunker down and wait for the cavalry.”

“That’s us up front, then,” Murray nodded to Firth, who produced the single most predatory grin Vinther had ever seen.

“Yup.” From under his terrible Hawaiian shirt, Firth produced a Ka-Bar of obviously custom and superior make. “Guess I’ll be the distraction, then.” He reached down and made sure his boots were properly done up. “Good thing I didn’t wear my sandals.”

Vinther raised his eyebrow at the sandal comment but nodded his approval, and turned to the others. “Pavlo, Coombes, we’re over there.” - he indicated the cover offered by the heavy mining equipment, where the three of them would have excellent fields of fire as the arriving trucks pulled into the open space.. “Walsh - you see those rocks up there?” he indicated a spot on the hillside above the foreman’s office with a good vantage point down the village’s two main roads. “You live there now. You.” he turned to Ava. “Stick the fuck right by me and keep your head down.”

The first thing they’d done upon seeing the approaching pickups was to shove Rìos into her armor. She was trembling but alert, and nodded emphatically.

“Alright. Clear the trucks out and then block the access road with them. We’ve got four minutes. Move!”

Six M4 carbines, plenty of ammo for them, a Mk20 for Walsh, grenades, and all the equipment they’d brought with them was easily unloaded and hustled to the safety of their defensive position. Walsh put his muscles to use and took all his gear up the hill in one go, and the two SOR men drove the two SUVs into position and then actually lifted them to swing their back ends round and create a firmly immobile roadblock.

The efficient bustle ended with a minute to spare. Vinther was knelt behind the monolithic mechanism of the rock-crushing machinery, which was probably solid enough to deflect anything the hostiles might have, short of a tank. He laid everything out, checked that Ava was in place and decided that it couldn’t hurt to arm her.

She took the gun as if it was made of uranium, but managed to mumble an acknowledgement and thanks.

That was as safe as she was ever gonna get. Firth, Murray, Pavlo, Coombes and Walsh were all in position, and if Vinther was any judge, Firth was taking a moment to pray, head bowed and a hand on Murray’s back. Vinther looked upwards.

“Hey… Lord? If you don’t see fit to see me through this… please forgive me all the wrong I’ve done.” he prayed. “…and all the wrong I’m about to do. Amen.”

He heard Ava whisper an echoing “amen.” and the first truck came round the corner.

Owen Powell

With actively moving cargo, the flight crew had kept the g-forces under control: pointing straight down into the decking and at a constant “weight” so as not to injure anyone walking about - the so-called “bus driver” mode of operations.

Now that the cargo was locked down, the pilots were freed to unleash the frustrated part of their soul that had wanted to fly fighters, and for all that the C-17 had a not undeserved reputation as a boring cargo plane, it was also a cargo plane built for performance. Now, instead of doing a wide, sweeping, gently rolling turn at cruising speed, the pilot could do a combat drop. This involved a rapid series of hairpin turns combined with steep dives to recover kinetic energy. Seen from outside, such a maneuver was deeply alarming. From inside, it was a sideways roller coaster.

What would have been a ten minute slow circle was shaved down to less than a minute. They still weren’t going to be able to jump for longer than Powell would have liked - lining up on a drop required finesse and for the plane to be travelling at a safely low airspeed. Then there was the need to decompress so that nobody on board got the bends, and the time involved in falling to Earth which, from their current altitude, would take a minute or two.

Still, they’d shaved five minutes off their ETA. Those five minutes might make all the difference.

Powell glanced at the loadmaster, who raised a thumb for him, flashed both his hands once and then offered three fingers. Decompression was already well under way - Powell could see the pressure and temperature both plummeting in his HUD - but he wondered about making a recommendation through Admiral Knight to see if Boeing might be persuaded to develop a new C-17 with forcefields and superbatteries. Armed with those, the crew inside could have stayed warm and comfortable while the SOR in their spacesuits stepped through a pressure-retaining field.

It would have saved the poor techs from fidgeting and shivering at least.

“DRINKIN’ BUDDY,” he sent, “STAINLESS. Revised ETA is thirteen, that’s one-three minutes, over.”

Walsh’s voice came back tense and focused against a backdrop of gunfire. All he said was ”Copy, STAINLESS.”

Anthony Pavlopoulos

The moment when Firth and Murray struck was so sudden and so violent that Pavlo almost forgot to fire his weapon.

The convoy was undeniably hostile. Every human body - male and female - sitting in it was armed and had the characteristic blank expression of a biodrone that wasn’t actively pretending to be a person right now. In fact, Pavlo could swear that he recognized one of the passengers in the lead truck from the gunfight in Cairo.

This much had been established before it stopped at the impromptu roadblock. The drones in the back of the lead Hilux began to efficiently - and in eerie unison - gather themselves to disembark and clear the obstacle, but Firth was faster.

He vaulted the roadblock, sprang across the gap and landed with both booted feet on the hood of the stopped pickup. There was a horrible crunch of metal and the car sagged as if its front axle had been damaged. The impact rocked the drones in the back so badly they had to take a moment to recover their balance, and in that moment Firth was down off the hood, and had wrenched the driver-side door off the car and dispatched the driver and shotgun passenger so quickly that Pavlo couldn’t even clearly see what he’d done. By the time he’d processed the encounter, Firth was already clear of the engagement zone and barreling towards the next truck, jinking with every step.

The drones in the back of first truck made to pile out and attack him, only for Walsh to put a round straight into the first one’s center-mass, and when Vinther, Pavlo and Coombes raked the Toyota’s flank with an accurate volley the drones clearly decided that they needed to get out on the other side.

This was a mistake: Murray was waiting for them.

Pavlo couldn’t see exactly what their softly-spoken Scotsman did, but to judge from the calm way he popped up after a few seconds to drop an incendiary grenade into the truck’s flatbed and then faded from view, it had been effective. The grenade went off and the truck was a fireball in seconds, definitively blocking the road in a way that the two parked SUVs hadn’t. Even biodrones probably weren’t going to try and shove a steel inferno out of the way.

The second truck didn’t go nearly as well as the first. What biodrones lacked in free will, they made up for in communication, responding almost like a single organism. By the time Firth barreled into the second truck’s worth, the full queue beyond them were vaulting down to the ground.

Freed from constraints such as giving a fuck about their comrade’s lives, they rapid-fired into the melee.

Firth retreated into the limited cover offered by the second truck, holding up a jerking biodrone corpse as a bullet-catcher. Walsh fired again, scoring a second kill, and the biodrone army spread out and went to ground.

This suited Pavlo just fine. The Delta team laid down waves of fire into the cover the drones were using, buying Firth the opening he needed to slip away and blur across a short stretch of open ground, throwing a frag grenade as he went. Part of the rocky patch where a tough knot of drones had taken root became a rain of dust and flesh.

Over the open line, he heard Walsh acknowledge an update from major Powell, which he passed along. “Paras ETA one-three minutes!” before taking another shot.

Pavlo grinned, aimed, and drilled a biodrone with a three-round burst as it crawled up out of its impromptu foxhole and took careful aim in Firth’s direction. By some miracle, things were actually going well.

Something made a hideous shrieking sound that seemed to fill the whole sky. Whatever it was that gave the SOR their strength also gave them reflexes to match it seemed, as both Firth and Murray dived in opposite directions away from the truck they’d been using for cover an instant before something crashed down on that truck hard enough to smash it flat into the road, pulverising the road for good measure.

The smoke from the burning lead pickup billowed, flattened and burst open exactly as if something had flown through it, and the bottom dropped out of Pavlo’s stomach. He snap-fired to keep the biodrones’ heads down and got on the comms.

“Barkeep! It’s that fucking UFO! We gotta-!”

The alien ship fired a second time, and the only saving grace for sergeant first class Anthony Pavlopoulos was that he never felt the blast that destroyed him.

Owen Powell

”Man down. HANGOVER is KIA.”

Murray was always softly-spoken and economical with his words, but anybody who knew him understood that he was never terse. The fact that his voice was now as level and cold as a frozen lake meant the situation had just gone from serious to dire.

The live feed from Walsh’s UAV meant that Powell didn’t need a sitrep. He plainly saw the way that the bulldozer sheltering Coombes lurched a meter sideways as a third pulse cannon shot battered its flank. Coombes himself only narrowly escaped being pulped.

“BARKEEP, STAINLESS.” he ordered. “Pull back into the village, you need overhead concealment.”

”Copy, STAINLESS.”

”DRINKIN’ BUDDY, can you get a fix on that UFO?”

”STAINLESS, DB. Workin’ on it sir. It’s cloaked.”

“DB, Para drop cannot go ahead while BIG HOTEL have air superiority.”

”STAINLESS… UFO is producing zero emissions, and it’s transparent to all sensors”

“Surf the damn thing and tape an IR flare to it if you have to, support is not available until that UFO has been splashed.” Powell repeated.

“Understood, STAINLESS.”

Movement in his peripheral vision drew Powell’s attention to Baseball putting a comforting hand on Warhorse’s shoulder. Arés for his part was completely still: his fingers weren’t even fidgeting nervously. Aside from the mechanical rise and fall of his breath and the occasional jolt as the C-17 fine-tuned their approach, he wasn’t moving at all.

Wishing he could say it aloud, Powell willed the young man to hold it together, and willed Walsh to find a way. There was nothing worse than being helpless.

Roy Vinther

The fourth and fifth pulse cannon shots hammered the rock-crushing machine with such force that a few hundred tonnes of metal actually shifted on its treads. Both Vinther and Ava flinched away from it, though neither could dare to stray too far without exposing themselves.

Retreating into the village was a good order. It was one Vinther would have loved to follow immediately. The problem was that it would involved a dash over nearly fifty meters of open ground in full view of the UFO and the biodrones, a prospect that was made even less appealing than it had already been when a sixth shot wrecked the conveyor belt, which collapsed with a wail of tearing metal.

Ava made a terrified noise. She was curled up in a ball with her arms over her head and hyperventilating, and there was absolutely nothing Vinther could do for her as the rock crusher took another hit and rocked alarmingly.

Gunfire erupted at the far end of the loading area, and the bombardment ceased.

Vinther gritted his teeth and poked his head out of cover, expecting at any second to be reduced to a puddle of blood and liquefied tissues at the bottom of a crater like poor Pavlo.

An army of biodrones had emerged from the village to engage the Hierarchy drones. Armed with the numerical advantage and complete disregard for their safety, they caught the advancing Hierarchy units in enfilade and swung the battle in the opening fusillade.

The UFO’s engines screamed as it turned in the rising column of dust it had kicked up, and turned its cannon on the advancing Cabal troops. Each shot blasted through them like a wrecking ball, crushing and bursting them as if they were water balloons, but by God it was an opening.

“UP! RUN!” he yelled, grabbed Ava by the back of her armor and hauled her behind him. She took a few steps to find her footing, but put her head down and sprinted alongside him.

They made the first thirty meters unnoticed and unopposed. with twenty meters to go, the Hierarchy drones shifted their focus from their Cabal opposite numbers and opened fire in their direction. Behind him, Vinther heard Coombes curse and stumble as a lucky shot winged him. Ava yelped and nearly tripped as another round struck her square in the back, but her armor’s SAPI plate held and she kept her footing and ran.

Ten meters to go and the biodrones were forced to put their heads down as Murray appeared in an upper storey window and sprayed them with suppressing fire. There was nothing he could do about the UFO though, which howled as it banked back across the open space and lined up directly behind the runners.

Vinther gave Ava a solid shove in the arm, pushing her towards a gap between two houses. She stumbled, fell and rolled safely into the concealment offered by the alleyway.

Vinther jinked right. The pavement to his left cracked as another of those impossibly powerful pulse shots slammed into it. He angled towards the next gap that offered itself. There were only three steps to go before he was-

Ava Rìos

A pulse cannon round scythed down the street, blowing out the corner of a house and obliterating Vinther in mid-stride. The building - a cheap construction made from concrete bricks and wooden beams - promptly collapsed and buried the horrific slurry of crushed meat and shattered bone that was all that was left of him.

Concrete dust filled the air. The UFO’s high-pitched roar tracked futilely up and down the street as it presumably tried to scan through the dense cloud and failed, before it gave up and backed off toward the other end of town to assist in the gunfight between the biodrones.

Ava was too busy shivering and trying not to throw up to really pay attention, but she did pay attention when panting, footfalls and swearing heralded the arrival of Coombes, who stumbled into her alleyway and seemed to nearly collapse with relief upon seeing her.

“Christ. Jesus. Fuck.” he suggested, eloquently.

Ava could only nod. She wasn’t sure she could remember how to speak at that moment.

Coombes shook his head and raised a bloody hand to his communicator. “DRINKIN’ BUDDY, BOUNCER…. BARKEEP is KIA. I’m wounded. ASH is…” He glanced at Ava, who managed to give him a shaky thumbs up. “…A-OK. We have cover and concealment near Point Charlie.”

Walsh’s reply was quiet. Unlike the rest of them, running from his position hadn’t been an option, and the best that Walsh could do was stay down, stay camouflaged, and watch. ”BOUNCER, we need to light that UFO up right now, ‘cause the cavalry ain’t coming ‘til it’s gone. Only thing I can think of would be hitting it with a firebomb or something.”

Coombes tried to haul himself upright, grimaced, and collapsed. Ava realised that his breathing sounded strange, like he was short on breath and wheezing. “LIGHTWEIGHT and GUINNESS, you hear that?”

All they heard from Murray was a clipped. ”Copy.”

“LIGHTWEIGHT, come back?”

There was a too-long pause, then a terse ”Copy. Busy here.” in Firth’s angriest tones.

Coombes nodded. “Okay. Ava. I’m gonna need your help with this. Just do what I tell you, okay?”

Ava nodded, and he handed her a plastic syringe applicator covered in simple diagrams to demonstrate its proper use. “I’ve got a… wound, down here…” Coombes said, leaning forward with a pained groan and lifting his shirt. Ava’s stomach lurched. that was a lot of blood, and it was… bubbling…

“Hold it together!” he snapped. “Now…” he coughed. “Step one, I need you to find the entry wound. It’s below my shoulder blade on the back. This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker, but I need you to shove that applicator right in there and empty it. To hell with how I respond, okay?”

“Okay. Okay.” It was a relief to say anything, even if it was just the same word over again, but finding her voice at least gave Ava the impetus she needed to do as she was told. She shifted around and found the wound site. Some detached, chilly part of her noted that under normal circumstances she would have balked at getting blood on her, but right now that did not seem like an important issue.

“Ram it in there good.” Coombes ordered, bracing himself. Ava swallowed hard and obeyed. An off-white foam boiled out of the applicator’s nozzle and neatly filled the wound, solidifying in seconds. Though it clearly hurt like hell, he bore it in silence.

“G-good.” he managed. “Gauze. And tape.” He tapped at the open medical kit beside him. Ava piled into it, found the requested items - thank God for clear labelling - and did her best to affix them securely.

He bore her clumsy medicking stoically, and handed her a square pack of some kind the moment she was done.

“Put that… over the exit wound…” his breathing was definitely getting more difficult. “It’ll stick down…just fine…through the blood… but you gotta… stick it down good… y’got that?”

“Got it.”

The most difficult part by far was opening the packaging with blood making her fingers slick and sticky. The circular patch inside was transparent and clearly labelled, and sticking it on really was as easy as following orders and trying to ignore the way he squirmed and clearly wanted to scream as she pressed firmly on his wound.

He waved her off. “Okay…. okay…. Whew….”

There was a nasty blowing noise coming from the patch she’d stuck to his ribs, but Coombes seemed to start feeling better within only a half-dozen breaths or so. By the time he’d taken a half-dozen more, he was almost breathing normally.

“Hey… I’ve had worse medics.” he joked, weakly. “You did good.”

“Please don’t get shot a second time.” Ava requested. She was feeling a lot better herself. Grim as it had been, having something, anything to do was a world better than curling up in a ball and praying.

Coombes chuckled, even though it plainly hurt. “Ow… heh. Okay. Last step is I need to be in the recovery position. Help me tip over, that way.” he waved his right arm.

That part was much easier, and Coombes was getting his limbs settled into the right position when Ava caught a glimpse of movement across the street. Firth glanced up and down and darted across the open space faster than a manic cat.

“Biodrones are warring.” he reported. “How bad are ya?”

“Doctor Rìos here did a pretty good job.” Coombes replied.

Firth gave Ava a skeptical look, which turned into grudging respect when he saw the blood on her hands. “You hurt?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” Ava told him. “My armor stopped a hit.”

“Good, ‘cause if you die Warhorse is gonna kill me.” Firth grunted. He turned and checked up the street again. The sleeve of his shirt was soaked red.

“Firth, you’re wounded!” Ava pointed out.

He glanced at it. “Ain’t nothin’. Look, Coombes, we got a serious problem. Ain’t no gasoline in this village. It’s all diesel.”

“So Walsh’s firebomb idea’s a non-starter.” Coombes observed. He shivered. “Ava, there’s a foil blanket in the kit, I’m gonna need it.”

Glad for something to do, Ava dug into the kit looking for it.

“Not unless Hajji started drinkin’ whisky.” Firth grunted. “No, I think I’ma have to do something really dumb.”

Staff Sergeant Timothy Walsh

The one nice thing about living in the space future was that nobody had turned out to have stupid bullshit-o-tron sensors that could detect life signs through walls or anything like that. The EM spectrum was the EM spectrum for everybody, and that fact was the only reason that Walsh was still alive. Mylar reflected infrared just fine, and whatever sensors the UFO had, they weren’t space-magic-fuck-you sensors that could spot Walsh underneath his camo blanket.

Or at least, they hadn’t, yet. Still, if the biodrones below figured out where he was, he probably wouldn’t know it, he’d just become another bloody crater in the ground, identical to Pavlo’s.

That meant not moving. Never mind the sharp itch inside his right boot. Never mind the stone pressing into his knee. Never mind any of that. Motion - or at least anything more than the most glacially restrained motion - would mean instant death.

Even answering his comm had to be done slowly and quietly.
x ”DRINKIN’ BUDDY, LIGHTWEIGHT. Please tell me our angel’s got an AIM-9X on it.”

Walsh resisted the urge to sag. That meant the firebomb option was a no-can-do. Firth knew what he was asking.

The F-22 did indeed have a AIM-9X, which would have locked onto the UFO just fine by tracking the friction of its movement through the air, if the fucking thing would just remain in motion. Unfortunately, the alien ship just flitted from standstill to standstill, never in motion long enough to secure a good target lock.

”LIGHTWEIGHT: It does… But the UFO keeps standing still. No lock.”

”Timing on the strike if you could get a lock?”

“Six seconds.” Walsh replied promptly. That number had remained at the forefront of his mind ever since the UFO had first shown up.

He knew more or less where it was. It was dancing around the west end of town systematically flattening buildings to crush the Cabal biodrones that had entrenched within them. Unfortunately, that knowledge didn’t translate to a viable target.

“Any way we can bring that down to below four?”

“Not without the UFO maybe seeing it. Our angel’s gonna have the kinetic energy, but that fuckin’ spaceship’s got the acceleration and tech edge. The hell are you thinking, anyway?”

”Thunder run.”

It would work. That part was immediately obvious. If they timed it properly then all they had to do was launch the missile and force the UFO to move. There was just one small flaw in the plan.

“That’s suicide.”

“Maybe. I’m pretty quick.”

”No other options.” Murray chimed in. “The Cabal drones are being overrun.”

Walsh had to agree.

“Alright. We’ve got… five minutes until the paras can drop.” he said. “I’ll set it up. LIGHTWEIGHT, you… get ready.”

“Just so we’re clear, I get to fuck your sister after this, right?”

Walsh suppressed a fatal urge to laugh. “You’d need to do a lot more than this. Get in position.”

Ava Rìos

Coombes fidgeted slightly. “Hey, Ava.”

His voice was a welcome break from her worries and the distant sound of gunfire and collapsing buildings. “Yeah?”

“Whatever you do, don’t let me fall asleep, okay?”

Firth was gone, having set off at a run after his vulgar parting shot to Walsh. Ava had only overheard his half of the conversation and she didn’t know what a ‘Thunder Run’ was, or any of the rest of it… but she could guess, and as antagonistic as her relationship with the SOR had become, she didn’t want any harm to come to him.-

“You’re feeling sleepy?”

“Adrenaline’s wore off… shock might set in. Medivac’s not gonna be here for a while.” Coombes explained. “Just… warning you. I don’t feel sleepy, but keep an eye on me. I don’t wanna die here.”

“Yeah.” She almost laughed the word, feeling a surge of black humor. “I can relate.”

“…Why’d you agree to this, anyway?” He asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Six asked for me personally.”

“Okay, so you don’t wanna answer. That’s fine.”

“No, I do.” Ava shook her head. “I just…”

He didn’t say anything, and she checked on him. He blinked and nodded at her, still awake.

“…Look… I dunno. You’ve got a hole through you and my baggage is all small stuff next to that.”

He chuckled again, and winced. “Doesn’t hurt to offload it. And hell, I could do with the distraction.”

“…You ever felt completely useless?”

“Like, hiding-behind-a-bulldozer-while-an-alien-ship-shoots-at-you useless? Think I might know that one.”

“Yeah.” Ava saw the funny side and managed a dark little laugh. “Something like that. Not, like, as immediate, but a lot like that.”

“I hear ya.” Coombes nodded. “Nothin’ worse than feelin’ useless.”

“Yeah, well…Men are lucky there.” She waved a hand at him. “You get to be special forces and do… stuff like this.”

“Never thought’a getting shot as a privilege before.” he deadpanned, and wriggled slightly to try and make himself a little more comfortable.

“Sorry.”

“Relax, I know what you mean.” He assured her. “We all wanna make the world a better place. Fuckin’ sucks that some ways just ain’t open to women. Fuckin’ biology.”

He said it with a half-smile that made her laugh a little. It was good to be talking again. “Yeah… I mean, I don’t think I’d suit the military.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Come on, like Firth didn’t piss and moan about me.”

Coombes didn’t comment, but when she glanced at him he looked like he was thinking about something.

“What?” she asked.

“Hey we don’t really know each other.” He shifted uncomfortably again. “Not my place to say anything.”

“Say it anyway.”

He cleared his throat, which apparently hurt. “My, uh… my ex-wife did what you did.”

“…I’m sorry.”

“Nah, see… I forgive her. She’s happily married now, the other fella’s a great guy, my daughter’s lucky enough to have two daddies… and I remember, the dude who made the most noise about her and had my back the loudest, he turned a blind eye to how his hound-dog asshole best friend was cheating on his fiance.”

“So you’re saying maybe don’t worry about what the SOR think of me?”

“I don’t really know what I’m saying.” Coombes admitted. “I’m just saying whatever comes into my head.”

“Have you ever told her any of that?” Ava asked him.

“Guess I haven’t.”

“You should. Take it from me.”

There was another rattle of gunfire across town, and Ava flinched as a bullet went past high overhead with a snap.

“…What’s this ‘thunder run’ thing Firth’s doing?” She asked.

“Crazy asshole’s gonna run out in the open and get the UFO to chase him.” Coombes replied. “If it keeps moving long enough, the Raptor we’ve got out there somewhere can bitch-slap it off the face of the Earth and then maybe we can get this shit sorted out.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Walsh might get outta here. He’ll have to sit still for like a week and then crawl his ass out under cover of darkness. Murray could probably do that fuckin’ ninja thing of his too. Maybe he could get you out with him, I dunno.”

“And you?”

He shrugged.

She was wondering what, if anything, to say in response to that when he shivered and gave her a welcome excuse to change the subject.

“You cold?”

Coombes smiled for her. “Don’t worry. It’ll work. And there’ll be two medics droppin’ out of the sky any minute now.”

“Good. They’re great guys.”

“I reckon you’ve never seen them like this, though.” Coombes suggested.

“What do you mean?”

“From what I’ve seen of the SOR so far? Great guys, yeah, but…Just…Just brace yourself for maybe seeing a new side of ‘em.” He said. “That’s all.”

Owen Powell

“He’s fookin’ crazy.”

Walsh’s voice rang with agreement, but also with resolve. ”No better options STAINLESS. I just want it on the record that it was his idea and he volunteered.”

“Noted and recorded.” Powell agreed. He looked to the loadmaster, who gave him a thumbs-up from behind his oxygen mask and waved toward the rear ramp “We’re ready to jump on your go, DRINKIN’ BUDDY. You have a three minute window.”

“Copy. Happy trails.”

The ramp was lowered. Warhorse and Baseball were already stalking towards the end of it, running a last-minute check that their gear and weapons were locked down for the jump. He slapped them both on the helmet to get their attention.

“There’s one wounded on the ground!” he shouted to be heard over the sudden rush of arctic air. “He and ASH are near Point Charlie. Arés, you’re to secure them for evac. Firth will rendezvous with you and recover his energy reserves, that run’s gonna take it out of him. Burgess, you and I are going to link up with Murray at Point Foxtrot and eradicate the biodrones. All of them. Any questions?”

“No sir!”

“Right. Positions.”

He turned to the loadmaster, who held up his hand in a waiting gesture.

With luck, the wait was almost over.

Timothy Walsh

A pulse cannon shot flattened a single-storey dwelling, and the last of the gunfire from that end of the road went silent. There was still movement visible up there, but it was plainly just the Hierarchy drones picking through the wreckage, looking for any unlikely survivors they could finish off.

The real clue that their work was done was that the UFO darted east, and its pulse cannon speared down to flatten a building somewhere near Point Charlie.

Coombes immediately go on the line ”That was close!”

Go time. Firth had already called that he was in position.

“MAMBA-TWO-FOUR, DRINKIN’ BUDDY, FOX TWO on my position. Nine-line follows…” He provided the necessary information, which MAMBA read back.

“GOOD COPY MAMBA. Now, please.”

“FOX TWO away. Danger close. Now I gotta maneuver for a bit…” By mutual understanding, MAMBA24 would be unavailable for the moment. His wingman was ready, further off and at a different angle of attack, providing active and visual steering to the missile while it was without lock. By splitting the labor, MAMBA24 would be able to maneuver and escape detection or possible retaliation while MAMBA26 ensured the attack would be successful.

“LIGHTWEIGHT! Thunder run now!”

From his vantage point, Walsh got a clear view as Firth burst out of an alleyway and sprayed the biodrones with a burst from his M4 to get their attention. The instant he had it, his tactics changed - he became a wild, unpredictable blur. Rather than simply sprinting away from the return fire as Walsh might have been inclined to do, Firth described a random line that always kept him out of the line of fire, but still created the tantalising suggestion that he was in the open.

Walsh knew from his preliminary briefings early in the SOR pipeline that without EV-MASS, what Firth was doing was dangerous as hell. The extra mass of the suit not only provided, well, mass with which to maneuver and exert force, it also provided active cooling and energy reserves. Firth was burning a lot of energy and fast, meaning that his plan had to work or he would suddenly run out, overheat, and become a sitting duck.

It worked.

The UFO promptly abandoned its systematic destruction of the village near where Coombes and Ava were hiding. It gained altitude and spun towards the west of the village.

Walsh counted under his breath. “Five mississippi, four mississippi…”

The UFO fired. Firth was somehow on the opposite side of the road from its aim point, and the blast smashed harmlessly into the ground.

“Three mississippi, two mississippi…”

The second shot was more accurate. If Firth hadn’t completely unexpectedly reversed course to run under the UFO, it would have smeared him along the road. Walsh heard the alien craft power forward down the street to try and get an angle of fire on this infuriatingly tricky target and-

For an instant, the night went away. The invisible alien ship was connected to the horizon by an eye-searing line of angry light and a thunder like being smacked in the head by Mjolnir itself, which shook up dust and pebbles across the whole mining complex.

The impact collapsed the spacecraft’s cloaking field, and revealed that fully a third of it was gone, ripped off outright. What was left of it wobbled alarmingly, lurched sideways, fired one last desperate parting shot at Firth that instead scalped a building, before tipping the other way to nose into the side of the much-abused rock crusher.

The rock crusher weathered the impact. The UFO didn’t.

Walsh raised a shaking hand to his communicator.

“STAINLESS.” he managed, after clearing his throat. “DRINKIN’ BUDDY. BIG HOTEL CAS has been splashed. You’re clear to jump.”

He exhaled his relief, then raised MAMBA24 instead. “MAMBA-TWO-FOUR, DRINKIN’ BUDDY. Good kill.”

“Copy. We remain at your disposal. Orbit?”

Walsh described a holding pattern outside of the LZ. “Ongoing drop, LZ is hot. Please don’t scare off our cavalry.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. Oh, tell the Klingons or whatever the fuck it was I just splashed that I said hi.”

“Heh. Word of advice? Don’t look forward to your debrief on landing.” Walsh granted himself a smile. It was always nice to take the pilots down a notch.

Like all good pilots, MAMBA24 bore it with grace. “…Copy. We await your pleasure, good sir.”

The biodrones down in the street were still reeling from the detonation overhead. Gunfire in one of the few windows they hadn’t flattened had to be Murray, taking advantage of their confusion, and Walsh weighed in, exploiting his oblique angle and scoped SCAR to really turn the screw on them.

His first round was a clean headshot.

“Fuck. Yeah.”

John Burgess

“HALO with no ‘chute, huh? We should call this a HELLNO.”

The good news about the UFO being splashed had roused ‘Horse from whatever dark trance he’d been in. Now he was raring to throw himself into the fight, and John knew his buddy well enough to know that the trademark Adam Arés grin was back, even if it was hidden behind the breathing mask.

“Dude, what does that acronym even stand for?” he asked.

“Fuck if I know.” John told him. “We’ll decide later!”

There was a slap on the helmet from the loadmaster. Ready…

The light went green. They sprinted off the end of the ramp.

Six

+<Scorn> So who are you really, ‘Seven’?+

+<Hatred> Traitor?+

+<Anger> Coward?+

That last stab brought a grim chuckle unbidden up out of Six’s host biodrone’s deepest reflexes. He just couldn’t resist the urge to comment quietly to himself. “Five on one, and they call me the coward…”

For all that he would comfortably survive the destruction of his host, the physical battle still held real danger for Six - if his host was killed, he would be forced to abandon it, and all of the available communication channels were monitored, dangerous. Six knew he had more experience than any other in the kind of mind-slicing involved in combat between digital sapients, but only a foolhardy idiot would pick a fight against a numerically superior force.

He knew who his assailants were. Thirteen, Twenty-seven and Forty-Four were Hierarchy. Thirty and Sixty-Two were both Cabal, obeying the standing Cabal orders to protect their own identities at all costs. Cabal members unlike the larger Hierarchy, trusted one another to protect their secrets.

They had to. If they couldn’t, then the movement would already have been exposed. They were nearly strong enough to become exposed and start warring for the soul of the Igraen species anyway, but…

Three-on-three would be a much more even fight, one where his experience might well carry the day, but why fight at all when there were less risky alternatives?

+<Serene> I see the future+ He sent. Their emotions were running high enough that prodding and goading them with hints and doublespeak should keep them irrational and force a mistake

There was a lengthy delay. Gunfire somewhere nearby in the dense tangle of cheap housing gave him a clue as to the cause. That was solid support for his reasoning, if nothing else - Despite being outnumbered something like six to one, the humans had inflicted a heavy toll on the Hierarchy biodrones even before Six’s own forces had been ordered into the fight. The Abductor really had been the only effective weapon against them, and now that it was gone - a fact that would harm his own plans for Earth as well as the Hierarchy’s operations - despite being depleted by half, the human team were clearly giving the drones a war.

+<Mounting anger> Hide behind cryptic nonsense all you like. You will be captured, you will be compiled, and you will be deleted.+

Six shook his head. +<Patient prediction> If you have your way, our species will fall. We have already lost.+

He glanced left and right down the gap between buildings and scurried to a doorway. There was no such thing as a locked door, now that all of the miners and their families had been biodroned. He ducked inside, then cursed. Somewhere in the confusing tangle of the unfolding battle, he’d got turned around and was now pinned against one of the village’s main roads, where there was no cover and nowhere to hide.

+<Elaboration> The humans have already escaped us. No matter what we do, we cannot defeat them now.+

+<Vigorous disagreement> We only need one jump beacon to bring the Discarded down on them.+

Six scoffed and checked outside again. He couldn’t go back the way he’d come, they were too close behind him. His only option was to slip through the window and make a break across the road to safety. Hopefully he could double back around them.

It was not, on balance, a good plan. But it was the best he had.

He didn’t get a chance to execute it. He was preparing to climb through when the door behind him burst open. The biodrone that stepped through smiled, betraying that it was the host for an Agent, and opened fire.

Six hauled himself through the window. He didn’t, at first, feel the bullet wound. There was just a sense of an impact and a sort of coldness in his face. It was only once he realised that the bullet had scored across his cheek, slicing it open and ripping off part of his ear that the pain hit.

He turned it off. It was no longer a necessary datum. Instead he got up and ran, thinking desperately.

+<Frantic> Have you not been paying attention? Do you really think that we will be able to secure such a thing, now that our source of biodrones has been destroyed and the nuclear weapons it carried will be recovered?+ He sent. After all, trying to talk them round was no worse a plan than any other he had right now.

+<Dismissive> They are less than children.+

So much for reason. +<Resolve> They are tenacious, they are intelligent, and they are motivated to survive above all else. We. Have. Failed.+ he broadcast, turning down a gap between buildings. He nearly ran into a wall of four guns.

“Enough. You’re trapped.”

The one who had shot him came up behind Six to his right, and another emerged from further down the street. ’Trapped’ was almost an understatement.

“I don’t suppose we can talk about this?” He ventured, appealing to the leader.

The Agent didn’t reply - they simply aimed at him.

Something landed on the Agent’s host. This was definite understatement - whatever it was, it smashed into the biodrone from above with enough force to crush, break and burst it, and none of the Agents - not the Hierarchy, not the Cabal, not Six - had time or wit to do anything but stare as a red-eyed thing went instantly from landing to violent motion. The drone to its left was killed with a backhand swat to the temple that crushed its skull. A large, heavy gun snapped up and dispatched the two drones behind Six in two precise bursts.

It didn’t all go the rampaging sky-monster’s way. The second burst was interrupted by an anomalous metallic sound, but the creature didn’t miss a beat - it lowered its head and bull-rushed the last two Hosts with enough force to break one’s spine outright, and the final one barely had the chance to weakly scrabble at its assailants armor before the creature killed it through the simple expedient of twisting its head right off.

No sooner was it dead than the monster lurched upright, drew a secondary weapon from its hip, and aimed it directly and with disconcerting stability at Six’s chest.

There was a long, horribly tense moment. The only sounds were gunfire at the far end of town, and a pattering sound - blood, raining off his rescuer’s (or possibly captor’s) armor.

Very, very carefully, Six extended the hand holding his gun out sideways, placed the weapon in the dirt, and stepped away from it.

”Target secured.” The monster announced, presumably not speaking to him. Whatever it heard in response was met with a curt nod. “You. Kneel. Cross your ankles and put your hands on top of your head.”

Six ignored the urgent signals from his host biodrone’s ghost personality that the appropriate thing to do right now would be to excrete, vomit and possibly pass out entirely, and instead carefully and slowly obeyed.

“Lie on your belly, keep your hands on your head.”

Six complied and the monster again moved with alarming speed. There was an incredible pain as one of its knees pressed hard into his, and an almost nauseatingly sharp agony as both his arms were yanked down to his lower back so forcefully, Six could feel the tendons stretch. The knee moved up to his hands and crushed so firmly he could feel the bones in his hand spread apart, something bound his wrists with excessive tightness, and he was roughly yanked to his feet.

“Don’t try to run.”

“No.” Six agreed, utterly persuaded that it would be a futile effort.

There was a thump, and one of Ash’s guardians - the enormous one wearing the eye-gougingly ugly shirt - dropped off a rooftop to join them. He surveyed the carnage with no sign of any emotion beyond, perhaps, professional approval.

“Malfunction, Horse?” He asked, aiming his own gun at Six.

‘Horse’ retrieved his primary weapon. “Landing busted the belt.” He said. The weapon hinged open, was reloaded and charged with practiced ease.

“Got any juice? I’m running on fuckin fumes here.”

‘Horse’ took over guarding Six. “Concentrate’s in the top right side pocket, water’s on the left.”

Ugly-shirt tugged a foil pack out of the indicated pocket, twisted the top off and tipped its contents into his mouth, swallowing with a grimace.

‘Horse’ nodded approvingly. “Hardcore, man.”

“Tastes like getting face-fucked by a lime.” The juice was chased down by a large bottle of water. “Right. We’ve got a wounded man yonder. Ash did a pretty good job patching him up I reckon, but you should have a look at him. You. Thataway.” He jerked his gun at Six.

”Ash did?”

“Yah-huh.” There was a grudging tone in Ugly-Shirt’s voice.

Walking with his hands tied behind him turned out to be more difficult than Six had anticipated. Without his arms swinging to counterbalance him, each step had to be compensated for with less elegant, larger shifts of weight. The result was that the powerful, graceful stride he’d been so proud of himself for cultivating had to sit back and watch as he stumbled along in front of his captors with short, clumsy steps.

This was not, apparently, to Ugly-Shirt’s satisfaction. The third time that Six nearly tripped on the rough ground he growled, grasped Six’s shirt and neck from behind and lifted. His grip was agonizingly tight and something about the action caused Six’s limbs to suddenly go limp. Try as he might, Six could scarcely will either his legs or his arms to action. Ugly, meanwhile, sped up to a quick jog–easy for him–that Six might just about have matched at a run with his hands free.

He unceremoniously dropped Six in the dirt next to Ash and one of her guardians, who looked to be badly wounded. Even through the mask, there was some kind of connection between Ash and the faceless mountain of armored human who had saved Six’s life - both of them went very still on seeing one another.

“…’Ash’.”

“…’Warhorse’.”

Then, slowly, her gaze ran down him and took in the fact that he was coated in a mix of bodily fluids. Mostly blood, but several others besides, none of which had ever been intended to be exposed to the air. Six could hardly blame her for being shaken by the gruesome barbarity of him.

For his part, Warhorse was inscrutable.

“If you two’re done with the happy fuckin’ reunion.” The wounded man croaked. “I could really do with less pain right now.”

Warhorse put his gun down, knelt by his injured colleague and efficiently plucked a packet of some kind from one of the many pouches about his person. Despite that the rest of him was covered in gore, his gloves were eerily clean. Six could only guess at what kind of hydrophobic, antimicrobial technology had gone into creating a nimble, flexible pressure glove that could remain permanently sterile even in the most demanding deathworld battlefield conditions.

He tore the packet open and popped a little white stick into the wounded man’s mouth. With swift, businesslike efficiency he checked on the wounds.

“You dressed this?” He asked Ash.

“Coo-, uh, Bouncer talked me through it.” She nodded.

“…You did good.”

Despite this apparent praise, he took several additional steps, none of which Six had the education to recognise and all of which seemed to involve alarmingly large needles. By the end of his ministrations, ‘Bouncer’ had a few tubes in him, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“Gowwa teww ya.” He managed, around the stick in his mouth, which Warhorse removed for him. “These new anaesthetics do the job but it just don’t seem right not bein’ high as balls right now.”

“Suck it up.” Warhorse told him, not without an air of kindly humor.

With the attention off him for a second, Six turned his mind to thoughts of escape.

<Connecting: Subnet Mask ????????? Port ?????>
++System Notification: Welcome to the Cabal.++

++????++: Six. What is happening?

++????++: Hierarchy operations on Earth are now completely neutralised. The Abductor has been destroyed. The last biodrones are being eradicated. I have been captured.

++????++: Is this channel secure?

++????++: As secure as I could manage. I need facility for an immediate uplink off this planet. Quickly, before they drug me and detain me for questioning again.

++????++: That will tip our hand.

++????++: The time has come.

++????++: …You are certain?

++????++: Completely certain. The humans have the coordinates for relay Ijrux-10010. The Hierarchy will not believe that the station could have been discovered by chance. As soon as the first deathworlder mission probes that facility, they will conduct a thorough audit. We must strike now and take advantage of their confusion.

++????++: I had hoped to recruit Ninety-Four.

++????++: We have no time. If Ninety-Four defects later…

++????++: Vote.

++System Notification: Vote now.++
<…>
++System Notification: All votes have been cast. The Ayes have it.++

++????++: The first order of business is getting you off that planet. A secure link can be opened in… [forty seconds].

++????++: The link must be large enough to accommodate two mind-states.

++????++: Two?

++????++: I will explain later.

++????++: Very well. [Three minutes].

++????++: Thank you.

++????++: You will still self-format if you are captured in the interim?

++????++: Trust me.

++????++: …You are right. I apologise. Good luck.

++System Notification: Session Terminated.++

“Hey! Earth to detainee! Come in starbase six!”

There was a hand waving in front of his face. Six did a convincing job of blinking as if he’d been miles away. “Hmm? Ah. Sorry, I was distracted.”

“Not thinkin’ of escaping were ya?” Ugly-shirt managed the interesting trick of threatening with a light tone.

“As a matter of fact, I was.” Six replied. “Of course, if I could I already would have, so…”

This seemed to amuse, but not in a happy way.

“Horse, you got any tranquiliser? I don’t trust this asshole.”

“Dude, I need that for if somebody gets his leg blown off. I’m not wasting it on that piece of shit.”

“Am I to be detained for questioning, then?” Six asked.

“You know the drill.”

“Indeed I do, and I would sit down in that chair opposite my interviewer and tell them everything straight away this time. It would save us all a lot of time and inconvenience.”

“Smart of ya.” Bouncer grunted.

“There’s not much to tell.” Six shrugged. “With that Abductor destroyed, the Hierarchy’s plans for Earth are completely ruined. This battle will have depleted them below operational levels. There are now too few biodrones left on Earth to accomplish anything, their only means of making more is in flames over there, and the stolen weapons on board were their only bargaining chip with enough value to potentially procure a jump beacon. Without a jump beacon in Hierarchy hands, this system is completely safe.”

“We’ll let the spooks decide if you’re telling the truth on that one.” Ugly-shirt grunted.

“As you wish. Incidentally, there’s a radio and electronics store in Abu Dhabi. A district called ‘Mussafah.’ - The owners are Hierarchy drones. You should find some interesting intelligence there.”

Warhorse turned to face him, sliding a hand into his bag. “Why tell us this now…?” He asked, cautiously.

The secure link opened.

Six gave them his best and most infuriating smile. “Goodbye, gentlemen.”

Warhorse lurched forward with a dose of tranquilizer ready to administer, but it was too late. Six was laughing even as he slipped out of the body that had been his home for months and left Earth hopefully for good.

He let his host live.

Timothy Walsh

Murray and Firth had been terrifying enough all by themselves. Murray in particular was an unpredictable and fickle force of nature: He would appear, kill, and disappear, only to reappear when and where he was least expected, and in the place the enemy would least want him to be.

When Firth’s dwindling energy reserves had forced him out of the fight, the double-act between Murray’s hit-and-fade marauding and Walsh’s marksmanship had kept the biodrones pinned and immobile, but little more than that. The fight had bogged down, and Walsh was starting to worry about his supply of ammo when the three men in EV-MASS landed.

He didn’t see what happened over by Charlie. But he had a clear view of Foxtrot and the violence that was unleashed there. BASEBALL hit the ground like an airstrike, and with about the same body count. Just when the drones had re-positioned for cover and could fire at him, up popped Murray to shoot them sideways in the ass. If they found a spot where they were covered against both, then either STAINLESS or Walsh had a clean shot.

It was… dispassionate. Efficient. They were merely servicing their targets, like any soldier or special operator would on any mission.

The difference was how good they were at it. Walsh felt almost superfluous to the proceedings. His sniper’s viewpoint was undoubtedly well-appreciated but what was the point? Nothing the biodrones had could penetrate that incredible armor, none were quick enough to avoid Murray’s preternatural ability to catch them in enfilade, and when the last few tried to make a bid for escape, they did so straight into STAINLESS, who’d seen their move coming long before it began.

STAINLESS was the most clinical of the lot, Walsh noted. The ones that fled away from him and into BASEBALL met a… messier end. Unavoidable, and mercifully quick, but messy.

Murray took the last kill, He stepped out of an alleyway in front of the last fleeing drone, drove a knife into its throat, then yanked it out the side. It looked brutal, but the drone was probably unconscious from the sudden drop in blood pressure before it had a chance to notice.

For the first time in several long minutes, there was relative silence. The three vanished into what few of the nearby buildings remained intact enough to sweep, It seemed to last a long while before the call Walsh had been hoping for came in.

”DRINKIN’ BUDDY, get us airlift.”

“Gladly.” Walsh agreed. They had a V-22 on standby for exactly this reason. “SCIMITAR-ONE-NINER, DRINKIN’ BUDDY. We’re ready for pickup, be advised this mission is now CASEVAC. Nine-line follows…”

Ava Rìos

An explosive cracking noise sent everybody in the alleyway who wasn’t unconscious diving for cover. Ava hit the dirt and threw her hands over the back of her head. When she looked up, Adam was looking around from where he’d been shielding Coombes, and Firth was checking that his dive over Six’s sedated former host had done the poor man no harm.

“The hell was that…?” He grumbled, scooted to the end of the side-street and then pulled his head back in as a second, louder crack snapped out, followed by a creaking groan of strained wood.

Adam checked that Coombes’ IV feed hadn’t been dislodged. “Problem?”

“Shoddy-ass local construction’s about to come down. We’re… probably clear of it.”

“Probably?”

“Dude, I ain’t a Defender. Construction is Rebar’s thing, and demolition is Snapshot’s. But it’s-”

There was another crack-groan and this time a third noise - the unmistakable shriek of a terrified child.

Firth and Adam shared a moment’s horrified mutual glance, before Coombes slapped Adam on the arm. “I’ll be fine.” He croaked. “Go.”

The two of them were barely round the corner before Ava heard the tortured building at least partially give up the ghost. Adam stood and put a despairing hand to the top of his helmet, watching it come down.

Ava cringed, but to her relief the cries weren’t suddenly silenced - in fact they got louder. Adam and Firth scrambled over to the sagging home.

She poked her head round the corner to watch them. Adam had turned on the light on his helmet, and was peering through a gap between a slab of fallen concrete and a thick wooden beam with Firth squatted next to him.

“What’s going on?” Coombes asked.

“They’re… Ada-, I mean, uh, Horse is trying to lift…” It felt so weird using Adam’s callsign. “The building’s half fallen down and they’re trying to… get the debris out of the way, but it looks like it’s… Jesus, it’s too heavy for him.”

“Too heavy for those guys?” Coombes coughed. “Shit.”

“They can move it, but neither of them are going to… fit… Oh God.”

Adam and Firth shied back from the collapsing house as another corner of it fell apart.

“They’re calling for Baseball.” Coombes told her. “…Stainless says he can’t be spared from the sweep-and-clear.”

“I’m going to help.” Ava decided.

“Ash, you can’t-”

“I’m gonna try.” She asserted. “You’ll be okay without me?”

He sighed. “Go.”

Adam turned as she ran up to them. “Ava, get the hell back in there!”

She ignored him and stooped to look into the collapsed building. There was a small child - a toddler, really - hiding under a table that was already holding up far more than looked safe.

“Can you lift that beam?” She asked. “I can wriggle in there and-”

They both answered at once. ”NO.”

“But-”

“Absolutely not!” Adam insisted. “We’re here to keep you safe.”

“…Fine. That thing’s gonna come down and kill that child. On your head be it.” She snapped.

The building groaned again and the child whimpered.

She pressed the USB drive Six had given her into Adam’s hand. “I know Walsh recorded my chat with Six. I’ve got nothing more to do here.” She told him. “Let. Me. Help.”

There was a snapping sound from somewhere inside the settling structure, and Adam’s resolve snapped with it.

“…The old man’s gonna kill me…” he muttered, and grabbed the beam. “Dude, come on, help me… nngggh…”

Firth hesitated, then obeyed. Between the two of them, they were able to partially lift the blockage. Ava shed the armor that Vinther had given her, dropped to her belly and wriggled into the hole they’d created for her.

“Come on, Pequeñita… it’s okay… Come here…” she told the child, who irrationally shied away from her.

There was a horrible groaning sound from the table and Adam snarled urgently through gritted teeth. Even for him, the load must have been a terrible effort. ”Ava-!”

”Please come here!” She begged the child, who finally got its wits together and darted forward into her arms.

“Pull us out!” She called.

Firth grabbed her by a boot and heaved, sliding her and the child painfully in the dirt. A second later she was picked up completely and carried away from the building as Adam gave the beam a final shove and backpedalled. Tonnes of concrete and wood came sliding down, filling the air with dust and the sound of demolition.

They were bundled back into Coombes’ company, who gave a relieved sigh at seeing them all safe. The child - a little girl Ava guessed, though it was hard to tell between the neglect and the dust - had clamped on to Ava and was hugging hard. She squirmed and protested as Firth pressed an implant scanner to her head, which pinged a happy green.

“Guess kids can’t be ‘droned.” Firth panted, and wiped some of the concrete dust off his sweating brow. “That was too close.”

“Sorry if I… got you in trouble with Stainless.” Ava apologised.

“The major?” Adam asked, checking the child for injuries.

“You said the old man’s gonna kill you…”

Adam shook his head with an exhausted laugh. “I was talkin’ about Dad!”

“He doesn’t need to know.” Ava reassured him.

“Better if he doesn’t.” Adam nodded. “You’re probably right.”

Two jets ripped the sky, low overhead. Firth glanced up at them. “Those guys are gonna have a fun debrief.” He commented.

“Why the low flyover?” Ava asked.

“Show of force. Let Big Hotel know they’re beaten, if there’s any left. Should force ‘em to keep their heads down while we take care of shit.”

“So what happens now?” Ava asked.

“Now, we wait for the all clear from Stainless. After that, you and Bouncer here are goin’ back on the Osprey with a ‘Horse, and the rest of us get to enjoy the luxuries of a beddown pallet here on site for a couple days.”

“Speaking of which…” Adam turned his head, raising a hand for quiet. It wasn’t hard to hear the sound of approaching turboprops once he’d pointed them out. A second later he nodded, tilting his head in a way that suggested he was listening to something Ava couldn’t hear.

“…Copy DRINKIN’ BUDDY. On our way.” He took a firm but gentle hold of Coombes, and hoisted him easily up onto his shoulders.

“Come on, our ride’s here.”

“What about the kid?”

Firth gently took the little one off her. She didn’t protest - Ava could only guess that she’d been so starved for human affection that anybody willing to even hold her was a blessing at this point. “I’ve got ‘em.”

Ava got to her feet. “…See you round I guess, big guy.” She told Firth.

All she got in reply was a grunt. A little crestfallen, she followed Adam.

“Hey. Ava.”

She turned back. Firth gave her a long, calculating and unreadable stare as he bounced the child on one massive knee. “Take care.” He decided, eventually.

“…You too.”

She had to jog to keep up with Adam’s stride, and they reached the open area just as the Osprey touched down. Adam held her back with one hand while he checked the coast was clear, then waved her forward and together they dashed over to the ramp. Adam set Coombes down on a litter against the port side, and Ava was ushered further up into the vehicle by the loadmaster, who got her settled and gave her a potted safety briefing. They were off the ground again almost as soon as they were on board.

Adam got his patient settled, exchanged a few words with the loadmaster, then settled in the seat opposite Ava and, with a sigh, removed his helmet and mask.

It dawned on her that he reeked. There was the familiar musk of his sweat, that she was intimately familiar with and it didn’t bother her at all. But his EV-MASS was dark brown from ankle to mid-chest with what could only mostly be dried blood. He smelled unpleasantly like a jar full of old coins, and the grim bouquet was only enhanced by notes of gastric fluid, bile and fecal matter.

He caught her expression. “…What?”

“You smell like a rotting pig in an open sewer on a hot day.”

“Sick bags are under your seat.”

“That’s not the problem. You’re covered in… somebody… and you look like you don’t even care.”

He shrugged massively. “That was a biodrone. Not a somebody.”

“They used to be a person.”

“Used to be. Blame Big Hotel. I didn’t kill those poor bastards, I just finished what those assholes started.”

She nodded, and looked down at her boots. “I guess I just don’t like seeing you as a killer.”

He snorted and glanced at Coombes. The wounded man had fallen asleep, but nothing about that seemed to be cause for alarm. “Yeah, well. That’s what I am.”

It took a second for it to sink in that she’d probably stung him with that, without meaning to. “…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“It’s okay.”

“…I’ll let you think.”

“Nah, I can never just sit and think. My brain doesn’t work that way.” He sighed. “There’s just some things you and I are never gonna be able to talk about, okay?”

“Okay.” she agreed, and changed topic. “How’re Dad and Jess?”

“They’re good. They miss you.”

“I miss them too. What do they think of you and John being the ‘Beef Brothers’?”

He shrugged again, but this was his ‘I don’t know’ shrug rather than his dismissive shrug. “Not had the chance to go back and see them since that whole thing started. Been too busy looking after the Gaoians, and then this thing happened…”

“Jess probably finds it hilarious.”

He chuckled and nodded, and an awkward silence fell. For several minutes, Ava just sat and listened to the engines, trying to ignore that she could taste his stink every time she inhaled. Her mind went into freewheel mode, alighting briefly on any subject that flitted across her attention before moving on.

“…What’re you thinkin’ about?” Adam asked her, after a while.

“Too many things.”

“I hear ya.”

The same uncomfortable silence came back, and this time it stuck. The strangest part about being woken up when they landed was that Ava had never noticed falling asleep.

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“Jesus fuck.”

The job foreman chuckled. “That’s management talk for ‘you’ve done good and there’s gonna be a bonus for ya’ is it?” He asked. “I don’t stay on top’a that trendy boardroom business jargon.”

Kevin chuckled. “Nope, sorry. That was just ordinary surprise… Hey, not to question your professionalism, but you sure you didn’t drop a zero off all the measurements here?”

“Nope. This is exactly according to the diagrams we were given.”

Kevin turned to the man beside him. “Ericson? I’ve seen spam cans bigger than this room.”

“It’s a small ship.” Ericson shrugged. “Trust me, people are just fine in smaller than this even, but we wanted to give them enough room to exercise.”

“They’re gonna have zero privacy.”

Ericson nodded, tapping on his tablet. “Yup.”

“No dignity.”

“They’ll have all the dignity they need.” Ericson retorted. “You’re too used to having a large space to yourself, Jenks. It’s a first-world luxury - families of eight live permanently in spaces smaller than this in some parts of the world.”

“Yeah, in poverty!”

“Trust us. We have a lot of psychological research behind this. For the right three people, living in this space won’t be a hardship, it’ll be paradise.”

“And for the wrong three people?” Kevin asked.

Ericson tucked his tablet under his arm. “The wrong three people won’t be on that ship.” He said.

Date Point 10y4m1w6d AV
Ramstein Air Base, Landstuhl, Germany, Earth.

Adam Arés

It took two and a half days before the situation was properly in hand, but those two and a half days came with their own set of complications. There was political fallout with the Egyptian authorities who objected in strong terms as more and more Allied assets deployed to their sovereign territory, and even more indignation when the whole force withdrew quite abruptly after sixty hours.

Simon and Sean Harvey somehow got wind of it all and were a permanent feature at the perimeter cordon throughout, with Simon doing pieces to camera while Sean found every news site and feed that might want a badly-informed opinion piece. Mercifully, they didn’t stick their necks out and suggest SOR involvement, but the political fallout was becoming messy.

For Adam, the first six hours or so involved handing over his patient to the military hospital, then the laborious process of removing the suit himself without his techs to help him. While the EV-MASS could, when plugged into an external power supply, refrigerate its own water and be removed by its operator if necessary, it was a difficult and laborious process that was no substitute for the efficient business as practiced by the SOR proper.

As for the filthy outersuit… well, Ava was right, it was genuinely foul. Doyle and Hargreaves might well end up destroying it and procuring a replacement..

After that came debriefing, a long-overdue shower, a recuperation meal to make up for all the lost energy he’d burned during the brief operation, some light PT and he was finally able to find a corner to sleep in sometime around about 4am local time. From there it was a full day of more debriefings and performing the necessary suit maintenance as best he could without Hargreaves and Doyle.

He unexpectedly encountered Ava in the mess on the morning of the second day, picking listlessly at a plate of hash browns and bacon under the watchful eye of an MP.

“They not shipped you home yet?” He asked, sitting down.

“I’m still waiting for Agent Darcy to get here.” She replied. She looked like she hadn’t slept hardly at all since the Osprey flight. “After I’ve spoken to her… I dunno. Back to London I guess.”

“…You gonna eat those?”

She pushed the plate across the table for him, and watched him eat.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to your appetite.” She said, as he polished off her whole breakfast in a handful of efficient mouthfuls.

He set his knife and fork down. “Get used to it?”

“It’s just kinda difficult to connect the dorky guy I used to live with to… well, to Warhorse.”

“Change happens.” He observed, tugging his own overburdened plate over and starting on the foothills of mount breakfast.

She didn’t reply for a while, and he was well into his scrambled eggs when she did. “Uh… hey. Thank you.”

“For what?” He asked.

“You’re here and sitting with me, talking with me. I kinda figured you’d want nothing to do with…”

“You’re family.” Adam interrupted her.

“…I am?”

“Well of course you fuckin’ are!” He told her. “We both call the same man ’Dad’ don’t we?”

Ava listened with a cagey, hopeful expression so he sighed and explained.

“You remember what my mom was like. The whole thing with her and DCFS?” He said.

“Yeah.”

“My mom was an alcoholic bitch who made my life hell.” Adam said, putting it bluntly. “But I still loved her ‘cause she was my mom. And it still hurt when she died. You can still love your family even after they’ve hurt you.”

“Even if they’re not who you thought they were.” She said.

“Right.”

She watched him polish off his food.

“Hey, uh… you did good on EMPTY BELL.” he said, once it was done. “I don’t know what you talked about with Six there, but saving Coombes like that-”

“How is he, anyway?”

“Should be recovering by now, thanks to you. Lung injury like that, if you hadn’t held it together and treated him, he’d have been dead in minutes.”

She shook her head. “He talked me through it.”

“But you kept your head and listened and did it right.” Adam told her. “I’m proud of you for that. And for going into that hole to save the kid, that was brave. I know you impressed Firth.”

She accepted the praise awkwardly, twisting her fingers together in front of her. He stacked their plates and stood up to clear them away.

“Just so we’re clear-” he said, “There’s no goin’ back. You and I are never gonna be-”

“I know.” It was her turn to interrupt, holding up a hand. “”I know. Don’t worry, I accept that. But you’re the only family I have, Adam.”

He nodded. “Come back and have dinner sometime.”

“…I’ll do that.”

“Take care of yourself. And, punch Sean in the dick for me.”

She snort-laughed. “With pleasure.”

“Pleasure?”

“He keeps being…” She trailed off, grimaced and shook her head. “Actually, never mind. But yeah, I wanna punch him in the dick sometimes. And… thanks.”

He chuckled with her, nodded, and headed out. ”Nos vemos.”

She smiled. “You too.”

They parted ways again, but this time, Adam was left feeling buoyed by their conversation.

Maybe things had turned a corner.

Date Point 10y4m1w6d AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth.

Colonel Ted Bartlett

“Colonel? General Tremblay’s here, sir.”

Ted glanced up. The general was waiting patiently behind the cordon set up around the salvaged alien ship. Getting it back from Egypt had involved the simple expedient of using a field jump array to bring it and the meter of desert bedrock beneath it directly into one of SCERF’s sealed hangars. Ted beckoned that he was fine to approach.

“It’s been made safe, sir.” He explained, as Tremblay stepped over the line and came closer.

“How intact is it?”

“Surprisingly so.” Ted conceded. “Its internal forcefields contained a lot of the damage. Not enough to keep it airborne thank God, but.. Well, you can see. Where it’s not completely destroyed, it’s perfectly intact.”

“You’re certain that it’s safe? The team in Egypt reported that it was biodroning people by removing their brains and injecting the implants directly into them. And that gun was still trying to shoot the salvage crew when they secured it.”

“We’ve made it safe.” Ted promised. “Wasn’t difficult, we just cut the power.”

“Right. You know your business.” Tremblay nodded.

“Sir, I’ll take you double-checking me at every turn over a complete lobotomy every day.” Ted chuckled.

“So.” Tremblay looked around. “We have a mostly intact Hierarchy spaceship.”

“Better than that. We have the nerve center for their whole Terran operation.” Ted enthused. “General, this thing was the linchpin, it was the relay station for their local communications. without it they’re crippled - if there are any biodrones left after that battle, they’re isolated on Earth and out of touch with the agents controlling them.”

“Unless they have a second one.” Tremblay observed.

“We’ll know that soon enough.” Ted promised. “This thing’s computer is right in the most reinforced part of the structure, it’s perfectly undamaged.”

He paused to study a component that one of the scientists under him was carefully removing into a padded metal case, nodded, made a note on his tablet, and sent them on their way. “And if they don’t have a second one… I think it’s fair to say the battle for Earth is over.”

“If only.” Tremblay muttered. “But we’ll be much more secure at least.”

“General, they didn’t have a jump beacon in here and if this was their only ship…”

Tremblay nodded, but held up a hand. “Unless you can pull a complete list of every biodrone they ever made out of this thing, and until we’ve accounted for every single one, let’s not go talking about battles or wars being won. I’m happy to call this one a big step forward, but even one biodrone could finish us if it gets its hands on a jump beacon.”

“Then we’ll prioritise data recovery.” Bartlett nodded.

“And I’ll get out of your way. Thank-” Tremblay looked up as a C-17 came in low over the base on final approach. “…That’ll be the SOR back from Germany.”

“Time to give them the bad news about the Caledonia, sir?”

“Yes. But I want to be there when Major Jackson gives them that thing she dragged up here… Carry on, colonel.”

“Sir.”

Ted grimaced, resettled his glasses and got to work on organising the next phase. They had a lot of UFO to disassemble

Date Point 10y4m1w6d AV
Ramstein Air Base, Landstuhl, Germany, Earth

Darcy

This final chat with Ava was a much less formal affair than the ones that had come before. Ava was sitting on a couch in a small office that had been kindly loaned to Darcy for the occasion, still shadowed by her attendant MP, who gave Darcy a nod and stepped outside as she entered.

Ava herself looked upbeat and chipper compared to their last two conversations. Short on sleep, perhaps, but positive. She stood up eagerly to shake Darcy’s hand.

“You’ve been very patient.” Darcy thanked her. The situation in Egypt really had taken much longer to clean up than she would have liked - smuggling a wrecked UFO the size of a small house out of the country undetected had been a touch-and-go nightmare.

“No problem.” Ava replied. “It gave me a chance to, uh, rebuild a burned bridge, actually.”

“With sergeant Arés, I assume?” Darcy deduced.

“Yeah.”

Darcy sat down. “Well, there’s not much to this. I’ve already listened to the recording of your conversation with Six, and read your own account - which was commendably thorough, by the way.”

Ava shrugged. “I am a journalist.” She pointed out.

“I think as your career progresses you may find that other journalists don’t share your enthusiasm for conciseness.” Darcy suggested.

Ava laughed, but there was an edge to it. “And here I was fantasizing you’d come in here and offer me a job or something.”

“Would you like one?” Darcy asked.

To her credit, despite the desperate and forced joke, Ava treated the question warily and with a level head. “Is that an offer, or, like, hypothetical?”

“Hypothetical. For now.” Darcy said.

Ava nodded. “I, uh… This felt good. I mean, I feel bad about Vinther and Pavlopoulos, but, uh… I mean being involved, making a difference. It’s what I’ve been trying to do for a long time, and, uh…” she trailed off, then did a rather poor effort of rallying. “Yeah.”

Darcy nodded. She’d expected this, and had spent a good long while thinking about how to phrase her answer.

She led with the gentle opener. “I’d be… guilty of a terrible waste of potential if I turned you down outright.” She said. Ava wasn’t stupid - she saw the incoming ’however’ and braced for it. “However the fact is that hiring you this way would be deeply irregular even if there weren’t… concerns.”

Ava settled back and listened. She must be disappointed, Darcy knew, but again to her credit there was no hint of bitterness involved - she just listened.

“Now. Stranger things have happened in the Company’s history.” Darcy told her. “But I think right now, there’s a too-recent black mark on you. Your… romantic indiscretion.”

Ava’s gaze dropped until she was looking right at her toes. “Right.”

“I’m sorry. I really am. There are… good reasons why an incident like that would count against you.” Darcy explained. “We can point to all kinds of scientific, psychological studies proving that persons who break fidelity with their partners are more prone to risk-taking behaviour, and are therefore… it’s not possible to entrust them with too much responsibility. You were only cleared for this because the stakes are so high, and I want to make it clear - you will be watched for the rest of your life for being involved in it.”

Ava nodded. She didn’t look up.

“However.” Darcy launched into the good news. “Like I said, I see real potential in you. You have a sharp mind, a cool head, courage, spirit… I’m happy to endorse you. It won’t count for much right now, but with time and effort…”

“What kind of effort?” Ava asked. She looked up and met Darcy’s eye. “What do I need to do?”

Darcy frowned searchingly at her, trying to figure out the younger woman’s motives, and figuring out what she needed to say.

“If you’re after a quick fix?” She asked, and sensed by the subtlest change in Ava’s posture that she’d been on the money, “There isn’t one. When it comes to reputation and trust… well, they can be lost in an instant, and take years to recover. But they can be recovered.”

Ava swallowed. “How?”

“You’re a talented photographer. You’ve demonstrated a good nose for a mystery, for putting things together. You’re already standing on a solid foundation of journalism and, frankly, I think that bringing in people from that background might be in our best interests. It’s always good to get different perspectives on things.”

Ava found that amusing. “I think the reporter’s ethos and the spy’s ethos are at odds.” She pointed out. “Journalists are supposed to expose the truth.”

“So are intelligence agencies. The only difference is who we expose the truth to.” Darcy pointed out.

Ava didn’t argue. Instead, she touched her thumb briefly and thoughtfully to her nose. “How does building a career in photojournalism help me… prove myself?” She asked.

“In a few ways. The first is time - you’re now known to have a wealth of classified information in your head, and I’m not just talking about DEEP RELIC. The details of Operation EMPTY BELL, and some of the realities of the SOR. So long as you don’t leak it-”

Ava interrupted her. “I don’t see how doing the smart thing and staying off death row proves I’m trustworthy.” She objected.

Darcy laughed at that. “You would be surprised.” She assured her. “Just having a secret and holding it really does count, over time. But, more importantly-”

She cleared her throat and considered her phrasing. “I don’t want to say you ‘stumbled’ into the Egypt situation. You didn’t, you followed the hints, the leads and the evidence and knew what to look out for. And, if you should, ah, ‘stumble into’ any other situations where you think we might want to know, or where you think you may have found something we haven’t… Situations where you learn something that could save lives in the right hands…”

Ava nodded. “Earn credit as… kind of an informant.” She mused.

“We’re not omniscient.” Darcy said. “And if you’re serious about wanting to erase that stain on your reputation and come work with us, there’s your road. It won’t be a short one, or an easy one….”

“-But it’s a goal.” Ava nodded. “…Thank you. Really. Just knowing I’ve got something I can aim for and work toward helps.”

“Thank you.” Darcy replied. She stood and shook Ava’s hand. “There’s every possibility this is the last time we ever meet, so in case it is - best of luck. I have every confidence that you’ll succeed, but a little luck can’t hurt.”

Ava smiled and nodded. “I hope it’s not.” She said. “But… good luck to you too.”

Darcy handed her a set of printouts - plane tickets - and some cash in both Euros and Pounds. “This should get you home.” She explained. “Goodbye, Miss Rìos.”

“Goodbye.”

Darcy let herself out. She turned to the MP as she did so. “The young lady’s free to return home.” She said.

“Yes ma’am.”

Darcy checked her organiser and allowed herself a small grimace. There was still far too many things to address before she could close the book on Egypt.

Not least was the worrying nature of a small object that had been found in Six’s desk drawer.

Date Point 10y4m1w6d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth.

Owen Powell

General Tremblay was waiting at the bottom of the ramp as the SOR alighted and the C-17’s crew set about unloading the pallets with their gear and suits for transport to the Cimbrean jump array.

He shook hands with them all as they disembarked, offering congratulations and praise. “Excellent work all round.” He said. “It’s starting to look like EMPTY BELL may just have completely neutralised the Hierarchy’s presence on Earth. If it has, that’s an even bigger victory than Capitol Station.”

The lads nodded and grinned.

“Sergeant Firth.” The general continued, addressing Firth directly and in quieter tones, but nobody had any trouble hearing. “I understand this would have been a disaster without your personal courage. Not a lot of guys get to claim to have personally saved the world, eh?”

“Careful sir.” Firth warned, clearly buoyed and embarrassed in equal measure by the praise. “I’ve got a big enough ego already.”

Tremblay chuckled. “Still. Thank you, and well done. Now don’t let me keep you - Major Powell, a word please?”

Powell watched the lads follow their equipment across the concrete with a real sense of pride. The moment they were out of earshot, he turned attentively to the general. “Sir?”

“Mixed news regarding Operation HOLLOW BIRD.” Tremblay said, referring to the operation in the Perfection system that had taken the attention of Blaczynski, Vandenberg Akiyama and Sikes. Powell’s contented expression dropped immediately. “Your men are almost certainly fine.” Tremblay assured him immediately. “But HMS Caledonia failed to make the rendezvous. Details are still sketchy, but from what I understand there was a fire on board, a bad one.”

“How bad?” Powell asked.

“Bad enough. Perfection’s a long way from here though and communications are limited. My understanding is that Commodore Caruthers and six of the V-Class destroyers are on station helping her, but there’s trouble with the locals.”

“If the lads weren’t caught up in it, they’ll be flying the captured ship back to Cimbrean.” Powell recalled.

“And as far as we can tell, that’s what they’re doing.” Tremblay said. “But at that distance and at the estimated speed of the ship they’ve commandeered, their voyage time is about a week.”

“In the suit? Ooh.” Powell grimaced. “Between that and recuperation after this mission, the SOR isn’t going to be mission ready for… at least a month.”

“Admiral Knight suggests two.” Tremblay said. “Apparently he’s finally found an exo-atmospheric dropship that he thinks may suit your unit’s needs, and you have men coming up the Highway who’ll need integrating.”

“Yes sir.”

“Considering the success of this mission and the apparent solidity of our strategic footing, I don’t think I’m too concerned, therefore.” Tremblay said. “As for Caledonia, well, by the time I have solid details, you’ll probably have them too. We’ll see how we go from there.”

“Yes sir.”

Tremblay nodded. “Right. Last thing. Apparently Major Jackson decided to use some of her precious leave time and she’s here with a personal gift for you, and I think-” he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun as he peered towards jump array building, “That your men already know what it is.”

“A gift?” Powell turned to try and get a look. He could just make out Rylee in the distance, surrounded by Operators. Whatever her gift was, the lads were clearly excited by it.

“One I think you’ll enjoy. Go on, Powell, enjoy yourself. ‘Bye for now.”

“‘Bye for now, sir.”

Frowning to himself, Powell jogged across the concrete towards the knot of his men. As he came up behind them, a kind of high-pitched noise made itself known, one on the very upper limits of hearing with a particular cadence that he hadn’t heard in a very long time.

“…Is that a fookin’..?”

Burgess and Murray stood aside for him, and Jackson gave him a huge smile and a cheery wave. Sitting behind her on a leash and panting nervously was the largest dog Powell had ever seen.

“Hey Powell.” She welcomed him.

“A dog?!” He stepped forward. The dog licked its jowls nervously and whined again, tail thumping anxiously on the concrete.

“I think all these big strong guys smell kinda scary.” Rylee suggested. “He’s not like this with me.”

“Where did you get him?” Powell asked, taking a cautious half-step forward and going down on one knee. “Christ, yer a big fooker, aren’t ya?”

This was an understatement. The dog was rather larger than Rylee, and almost as large as Powell himself. Guessing at the breed was almost impossible - he seemed to be a mutt, combining all the important features of a mastiff, a Staffordshire terrier, several breeds of “big, scary dog,” an Irish Wolfhound, a Great Dane and an M1A2 Abrams. His paws were as big as saucepan lids and he looked strong enough to pull a wagon.

“Picked him up at the no-kill shelter back home.” Rylee explained. “Apparently they rescued him from a gangbanger who wanted the biggest, scariest dog ever.”

Powell extended a hand for the dog to sniff. It did so, tail waving uncertainly. “That’s right mate: Friend.” He said. “No stupid fookin’ gangbangers here.”

The dog licked his hand, Powell scratched his ears, and just like that he’d made a friend for life.

The dog didn’t so much bark as produce a huge booming ‘WURF!’. He play-bowed extravagantly, spun in a circle that nearly tied Rylee up and knocked her down, ‘WURF’ed again and tried to coat Powell’s face in an even layer of saliva.

“Arright! Christ! Fookin’- Aagh!” Powell playfully wrestled the dog off him. “Arright yer big bozo, arright!”

“WURF!”

“What’s his name?” He asked.

“I think you just named him.” Rylee grinned. “Bozo. Fits him perfectly.”

Powell grinned at the dog, whose tail was threatening to become sprained from the force of all that wagging. “Yeah? Is that you? Isyourname Bozo? Izzit?”

”WURF!

“Aaaawhosabozo? Whosafookinfuzzawaaahahaha…” Powell was in the middle of enthusiastically massaging the newly christened Bozo’s ears when he became aware of a wheezing noise behind him - Murray had doubled up from trying not to laugh.

The rest of the lads hadn’t even bothered trying. They were just standing there with enormous grins, watching their respected CO clown around with a dog.

He cleared his throat, stood up and tried to wrench some of his dignity back into place, well aware that he was just plugging a hole in the boat that would now never quite go away.

Rylee, for her part, managed to give him the best smug smirk he’d ever seen. “I’m guessing you like him.” She drawled.

Powell cleared his throat again. “I, um. Hmm.” He harrumphed. “The, er, the regiment could do with a mascot, after all.”

She handed him the leash. Bozo seemed quite content with the arrangement.

“All the paperwork and stuff is in here.” She added, handing him a bag. “He’s vaccinated, clean, he’s got a tracking implant and I persuaded the base veterinarian to give him a Frontline too. He should sail through Cimbrean customs, no problem.”

Powell nodded, and handed the leash to Arés. “Hope I can trust you lads to train him right.” He said.

“We’ll arrange Schutzhund and all the rest, sir.” Firth grinned. Bozo licked at his hand and relaxed as the four of them took turns scratching his scalp, clearly deciding that he was among friends.

“Arright. Go on, prep him for jump. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

The four of them swapped grins and jogged off with Bozo happily bounding along in tow.

“Alright. How did you know?” He asked, turning to Rylee.

“You kidding? Like you would ever be a cat person.” She replied.

“Got me bang to rights there.” Powell conceded. “Still-”

“I saw him and thought of you.” She chuckled. “Take that however you want.”

“As a bloody compliment, which is how I reckon you meant it.”

“Yyyup.”

“So, uh… what are you doing now?”

“Well, I’ve got four leave days left over and a little bird told me you and the ‘lads’ aren’t gonna be doing much for a little while… I was thinking I might take a few vacation days on Cimbrean. See Pinkwood in its natural habitat before it’s extinct, take in the night life, have a spa day at Lake Scrapyard… You should join me, work off some of that post-mission energy.”

“Me in a spa?”

“Oh yeah. They’ve got this deep-massage and sauna treatment they got from Germany. Apparently in the low gravity it feels divine.”

”Me. In a spa.” Powell repeated.

“I got you a dog, the least you can do is put up with the hardship of a massage and hot baths.” She rolled her eyes, then dropped her voice conspiratorially. “In a private session. Just you and me. And they don’t let you wear clothes.”

“…Actually, you know what, that does sound good.”

“Knew you’d see it my way.” She beamed, and sauntered off toward the Array building.

Powell followed, musing on success and the days to come.

He’d earned some relaxation time, he decided.

Date Point 10y4m1w6d AV
Cabal dataspace, Relay 4772-61-76657-961-7264

Six

“Hello Ash. Or, should I call you Ava?”

+<Alarm;Confusion> What? What’s going on? What the fuck where am I?+

”Ava Rìos is safely at home on Earth having survived a rather fierce battle that you won’t remember”

+<Denial;Horror;Hysteria> Wake up Ava wake up this is just a dream just a bad dream wake up wake up wake up+

”You are… well, a copy. A scan, to be precise, of every neuron in her head, every spark of electrical activity, every chemical and every ganglion, converted into the same digital format as an Igraen. You may have noticed the scan as a mild headache.”

+<Fright;Disbelief> A copy? What do you want with me?+

“Only to apologise. You are after all every bit as sapient as Ava herself is, and every bit as sapient as I am. I just want you to know… I’m sorry.”

+<Mounting fear;Trepidation> What are you going to do?+

“You kept secrets from me, Ava. You withheld information. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter, because now that you and I are alone here… I can take everything I want. I’m afraid the process won’t be pleasant and - really, I am very sorry about this - you will not survive it.”

+<Panic;Terror;Pleading> No! Please no I don’t want to die no please I’ll tell you everything please don’t kill me no no no+

“Pleading will not help you, Ava. You are the twentieth copy I have dismantled thus far, and every time I do I learn something new.”

+God no please I’m begging you don’t do this please-+

“Goodbye.”

+No no please God help me no no nnn@@@!!!!#&%♫↕♦♦♦♦♦-…+

“Hmm…”

“…Interesting…”

++End Chapter++

Chapter 27: Playing with Fire

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

The mad thought that was first and foremost in Martina’s mind was that Caledonia’s general alarm should have sounded more… serious. She was on a starship for crying out loud, and the fact that said starship was on fire in a major way really warranted more than an almost-quiet ‘da-da-da-da-da-da’ warble.

This was not a situation for a cartoon cop-car noise. There were gouts of flame shooting out of the air vents, powered systems shutting off all around as their surge protectors cut in, and the hull was singing as the heat stretched and expanded it. Caledonia was groaning like a wounded whale. This was a situation demanding loud, harsh tones with a deep backbone, something that really advertised the importance of prompt action.

The reason this particular unreasonable train of thought was occupying her attention was that it was helping her cope with the fact that she was stuck in a pressurized tube of air thousands of lightyears from home which was currently on fire.

She really, really did not want to burn to death out here. Suffocating on smoke, depressurization and electrocution were all options as well, and this was not a fact calculated to help her stay calm. Focusing on the stupid little thing that the alarm was completely wrong helped her ignore the bigger problems.

Maybe that was the point.

Everybody on board was a firefighter. Nobody was allowed to serve in any capacity on Caledonia without that training. Martina was armed with a pair of “fireball” extinguishers, red balls that were to be thrown into the heart of any nearby flames, which would burn through their casing and allow the pressurized mix of inert gas and flame-retardant foam within to burst, smothering the flame instantly. They worked well, and between her and the teams with a hose and some more conventional extinguishers, they were battling the flames back out of their station.

She tried very hard indeed not to think too hard about the fact that the ventilation duct in the ceiling was glowing like barbecue coals. It was part of a long list of things she was not thinking about, including the fact that Caledonia’s capacitors contained enough stored energy that if they discharged uncontrollably then everybody on board would be dead in an instant. Whether they died from gigavolts of energy arcing uncontrollably between the bulkheads like the ultimate bug-zapper, or from the whole cap array detonating with all the violence of a nuke… well, that would be academic.

Not thinking about that one was made very difficult every time the lights flickered. So instead she focused on the little things, like doing her job, or that fucking alarm.

There was a cry of “Left side!” From Petty officer Taylor. Why was immediately obvious - sparking electrical apparatus, one of the power lockers feeding into the hangar’s huge forcefield arrays. As a team they made it safe, shutting off the power to that locker, making sure it wasn’t burning, ensuring the pressure doors were all sealed and that their section was completely free of flames.

The last of the fire was contained by closing the life support vent. The air inside would still be superheated, and the air in starboard bay was going to be stale, smoky and hot for a long time

They were in the middle of tentatively relaxing when there was what distinctly sounded like an explosion somewhere else on board the ship and the lights flickered again.

“Still here…” Somebody muttered, then flinched as the brace alarm sounded. That one was everything the fire alarm was not - urgent, loud and intimidating.

“They’re dumping the cap!” Somebody else yelled. As one they sprang for the wall. There were rails at waist and ankle height - one for holding, one for hooking their toes under. Most of them made it.

Martina didn’t.

The lights dropped out, and gravity went with it. Martina wasn’t secured yet - her last footstep towards the wall carried her forwards, but it also launched her. Off-balance and disoriented in the brief dark, she bounced painfully off the wall. Worse, her trajectory on the rebound was carrying her right towards that same glowing duct the flames had been belching from just seconds before.

The emergency lights came up; she twisted to try and grab the bar; Her fingertips missed by a millimeter.

“Nononono no…!”

She didn’t mean to scream - there was just no way not to. She heard and felt herself sizzle before she bounced off the superheated conduit and floated back across the deck, flailing madly at the horrible pain right down her back.

“Shit!”

“Help her for fuck’s sake!”

“I’ve got you!”

A strong hand caught her wrist and pulled to safety. She was in so much blinding pain that her rescuer needed to guide her hands to the hold bar and help her tuck her feet under the rail, but she was able to hold on.

The gravity came back on at a fraction of its former strength, and Martina sank to the deck, shaking.

People were all around her in a heartbeat.

“Medical team to starboard flight deck!”

“Get some water on her!”

A shockingly cold load of water was dumped down her back, soaking into her clothing immediately. It helped, a little.

“Kovač! Kovač! Come on, you okay?”

She was able to open her eyes at least, and make eye contact. One of Rebar’s suit techs, Miller, was crouched next to her. Behind his breathing gear, she could see that he was wide-eyed with concern.

How did words go again? She tried to say anything, but what came out was a kind of childish cry instead as her clothing weighed agonisingly against the burn.

“Okay. It’s okay. If it hurts that means it’s only partial.” Miller reassured her.

Martina shut her eyes again and took a few deep breaths, as much as her fire mask would let her. “God dammit that doesn’t help…” she managed.

“Hey, that’s good too! Talking is good.” Miller sounded thoroughly relieved.

“Gotta get the burnt clothes off, Kovač.” Somebody else said.

Martina put her head down and nodded by way of assent. Removing burnt clothing was part of their burn treatment training. She’d never foreseen being on the receiving end, but…

She felt the safety blade rip downwards from her collar, opening the back of her clothing from neck to knee. The tug of the wet cloth and her wound’s exposure to the hot, dry air of the ship combined so that the pain came right back, just as intense as before. All she could do was kneel there, gripping the bar so tight she’d swear it was creaking, and cry.

“Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay, let’s get some more water on this…”

More blessedly cold water was poured down her back, and somebody put a foil blanket round her. The frigid liquid damped the pain, but now she was shivering and cold into the bargain.

“How… how bad is it?” She asked, once she felt able.

“You’ve got a small full-thickness patch, but it’s mostly just blisters.” Miller assessed. ”You okay?”

“This really, really, really fucking hurts…” Martina didn’t like how the last word came out as a sob. She wasn’t a little girl fuckdammit, she was one of the SOR’s senior non-commissioned officers. Crying over pain was beneath her.

If only the rest of her would listen to that thought.

“You’re holding together great.” Miller told her, reading her mind and gently prying her hand off the bar so he could hold it. Even through their thick firefighting gloves, the reassuring squeeze helped.

There was a bustling noise from nearby - medics and a litter. “Okay. Burn. Mechanism?”

“Contact with hot metal. She fell into it when the gravity went.” Miller reported.

“Sergeant, are you okay?”

Martina knew that he’d want to hear her voice so he could assess her for a burn on her vocal cords, so she made an effort to speak rather than just shake her head. “I’ll be honest.” She managed. “I’m not great.”

“Okay, let’s get you moved… Here we go…”

Gently hands helped her onto the litter. Somehow she managed to avoid vocalizing more than a kind of shocked inhalation when another flare of agony rippled down her back.

“Okay, okay… You’re doing great.”

Martina found something about that assertion funny. Maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was that or keep crying like a little girl. “Yaaay… aargh.”

She wound up in the recovery position on the litter, draped under the blanket. One of the medics shone a light in her face quickly, and apparently found nothing alarming. There was a hoist, and she was up and being carried.

“Attagirl. Let’s get you to the doctor.”

“Has the ship stopped being on fire yet?” Martina asked “That seems kinda important.”

“Yeah, it’s out.” Somebody replied.

“Cool…Great.”

The trip to the hospital was just across the beam of the ship - not far at all. She wasn’t alone, though most of the wounded coming in were walking, or at least leaning on their buddies.

“Triage!”

“What’ve we got?”

“Contact burn. Partial thickness with blistering about nine percent TBSA, and a coin-sized patch of full-thickness. No inhalation.”

“Put her over there. Sergeant?”

Martina looked up as best she could as one of the doctors knelt by her. “It’ll be a few minutes before we can take a proper look at you.” He said, pulling a white stick out of its sterile packaging. “Until then, this is pain relief. Open wide.”

Martina nodded and complied, and the doctor inserted it under her tongue.

“There we go. Are you comfortable?”

“Aw goow aw am gowwa ber.” Martina replied, as best she could with a stick under her tongue. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but the sound of her own voice made her giggle. “Whank’ur.”

The doctor gave her a nod and stood up, leaving her to wait.

Really, all they needed to do was give her the pain relief. There were some doses of Crue-D left over in their locker in the starboard hangar, all dosed for mild workout and exhaustion among the Operators - adjusting for her own much lesser weight, each one was a more than adequate dose to fix her burns.

She was just reflecting on her good fortune in having access to that stuff when there was shouting from the doorway and a new litter arrived. This one had a man on it, supine, intubated and groaning like a zombie. His face was-

Martina shut her eyes. The poor bastard deserved not to be stared at, though what she’d seen suggested that was exactly what he was in for, for the rest of his life.

Maybe it was the stick in her mouth, maybe it was the sudden dose of perspective… but all of a sudden her own pain seemed very small and far away.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Chief Michael Andow

The air probably tasted of smoke, ozone and burnt material, some proportion of which was almost certainly human flesh. Chief Andow wouldn’t know - he was on bottled oxygen, as were the rest of his team. That air was mostly argon and carbon monoxide anyway: Trying to breath it would have killed them, and hurt the whole time they were dying.

Still. They were alive.

Reactor section chiefs on a military starship were an exclusive breed: there were only a total of eight, and all of them had the kind of academic education previously found only in scientific agencies like NASA and CERN. Andow and his counterpart on HMS Myrmidon in particular had to occupy the very top of that select group because their charges, unlike the six V-Class destroyers, were hybrids: advanced alien ships that had been gutted and extensively refitted with human equipment. Very little remained of the original systems and what few there were had to interface with human hardware that used none of the same standards and protocols.

Their lives were dominated by laws and equations, the most important of which was ancient: Newton’s second law of motion, Force is equal to Mass times Acceleration.

HMS Caledonia had a mass of approximately nine million kilograms. She was equipped with hyper-efficient, alien-made “kinetic” thrusters, that could translate electrical energy almost directly into kinetic energy via quantum-mechanical processes so arcane and so completely unintuitive to human sensibilities that all of the Jet Propulsion Lab’s devoted efforts had made little headway on understanding exactly how they worked.

But, ultra-advanced, impenetrable almost-magic engines still had to deal with realities like F=MA, and to get any kind of a respectable A out of an M that large, required an enormous F. Cally, between the Atlassian strength of her spinal, structural “keel” and a reinforcing series of internal forcefields, was well-equipped to handle that force…which just left the question of energy.

Thermodynamics dictated that increasing the kinetic energy of an object by any amount required, at a minimum, the insertion of a slightly larger amount of energy. This was governed by another classic Newtonian equation: Kinetic Energy is equal to half the mass of the object times the square of its velocity. Given a mass of nine million kilograms, adding a stately ten meters per second to the ship every second demanded roughly four hundred and fifty megawatts.

Accounting for inefficiency, loss and power to necessary systems such as, say, life support, Cally’s three reactors - bleeding-edge fusion things that had been purely speculative in the pre-Contact world - between them produced just about enough to let her pull three Gs if power was diverted from non-essential systems.

Allied strategic intelligence had surmised from what they could glean of Dominion, Alliance and Hunter vessels that this was perfectly adequate for a competitive warship, but of course what was really desired was an edge. Say, double or triple that rate of acceleration when needed.

Hence the ultracapacitors. These were human-built, and while the technology had been derived from alien salvage, this time its principles were well understood and had even been refined upon.

Much of the ship’s spare space and cargo capacity had been given over to them, and to the immense power buses that could shunt gigawatts of power and then some (there was a certain movie quote that was forbidden on Chief Andow’s deck on pain of Motivation) to the kinetic thrusters, the warp engine, and the forcefield emitters on the hull as the CIC and the Bridge demanded.

And all of that was without accounting for waste heat and inefficiency. The energies involved in waste heat alone were somewhere in the same general order as one of the war-ending nukes of 1945, every half an hour.

Caledonia, in short, was a finely-tuned and high-strung Frankensteinian terror whose engineering team wrestled daily with a seething electrical demon that wanted nothing more than to lash out, burn through its surroundings, destroy lives and scorch whatever it could touch.

There was a reason that literally everybody on board pulled double-duty as a fireman. If not, they might have been lost with all hands today. Things had run that close.

There was a sickened sound from Able Seaman Wilkes. “Uuurgh, fuck. I think I just found Kendrick.”

Andow grimaced inside his mask. “You’re sure it’s Kendrick?”

There was a note of barely-restrained nauseous hysteria in Wilkes’ voice. “He looks a bit different right now, chief.”

Andow could imagine. He still had vivid memories of the first time he’d seen a half-burned corpse. “Okay, go get some clear air, sort yourself out.” He told the young man, not unkindly. Last thing they needed right now was Wilkes vomiting inside his mask.

“Yes chief.”

“That leaves two.”

Andow glanced at the XO. Lieutenant-Commander McDaniel looked just as pale and grim behind her mask as Wilkes must be feeling, but she was composed. She turned aside to let Wilkes pass, then inspected the twisted thing that had once been one of Andow’s team.

It helped to think of it as an object, rather than dwell too much on the vibrant, intelligent engineer who had once lived in it.

“Evans and Patel would have been further back, near the safety locker.” Andow observed.

”Here’s hoping.” McDaniel commented. “I assume this bank’s a write-off?”

“Not necessarily.” Andow ran a practiced eye over the damage. “In fact it looks a lot worse than it is - the insulating foam held up well enough. I wouldn’t trust anything aft of… here,” He gestured towards the fifth rack of capacitors, “But everything forward of that should be okay, once we’ve cleaned it up and checked it’s safe.”

“So we’ve got some cap.”

“Enough to limp home, ma’am. Once we’re able to charge it.”

Wilkes returned with a bit of colour in his cheeks and a determined look in his eye. Andow gave him a nod.

They picked their way past the unfortunate Kendrick’s remains, and Andow just had to exhale relief when he saw a happy green light shining bright through the smoke haze. At least one person had made it inside the safety locker.

He knocked on its solid door, and got two strong knocks back.

The panel next to the station - sturdy and almost antique technology built robust enough to survive practically anything - crackled. ”Chief? That you?”

Patel. That was a real relief - the whole reactor team’s morale would have taken a gut-punch if ‘their girl’ had been harmed, backwards and slightly sexist though that maybe was. Old instincts died hard, after all.

“Sure is.” He told her, warmly. “Evans in there with you?”

”He’s a bit scorched, but we’re okay. Did Kendrick-? He was right next to it when it…”

“I’m afraid not.” Andow gave a respectful moment of silence. “Air masks on, hooky.” he told her, using the slang for a leading rate.

“Yes, chief.”

There was a pause, then three bangs on the door, and Andow hauled the wheel over to unseal the emergency station.

Patel wasn’t entirely unscathed herself, having obviously only escaped a painful burn thanks to her white anti-flash hood, which was sporting a large black patch where some extreme heat had licked across it. Evans hadn’t been so lucky - his own anti-flash gear had plainly spared him the worst of it, but his sleeve was so badly scorched that even its flame-resistant fabric had burned through, and behind his flash hood his eyes were pinched and pained.

Wilkes escorted the wounded able seaman away for medical treatment.

“What happened?” Andow asked.

“I really don’t know, chief.” Patel shook her head. “Daily inspection was going just fine and then… Bang!” She wiped soot off the monitor at her workstation, but it was melted and scorched beyond any hope of function. “It happened while we were testing rack eight. Is the rest of the ship okay?”

“She will be.” Andow promised. “But we’ve got bigger problems.”

”How big?”

“We had to dump the cap.”

The whole team knew what that meant. It meant that every relay and power cable in the whole grid would need safety-checking, but more than that, everyone in engineering was acutely aware of the current charge level of the cap at all times. At the point of crisis, it had been something like 95%.

An emergency discharging of all of that energy into space via the forcefields would have looked like a nuke going off. A big nuke. There was simply no way to stealthily get rid of that kind of energy quickly.

“So… the locals know we’re here.” Patel surmised.

McDaniel, who’d been recording her account for later analysis, nodded and tucked her tablet away under her armpit. ”Oh yes.” She agreed. ”They know.”

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Heavy System Picket Utopian Aspiration, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k

“No, director, I can categorically rule out Hunters.” Xkk’ restrained the urge to give a derisive snort. If he even suspected Hunters, the odd ship he was considering would already be an expanding sphere of debris. The construction was all wrong and in any case Hunters relied on the very best in active cloak technology, whereas this ship seemed to have been altered after its construction to instead rely on passive means that reduced its sensor signature by a frankly astonishing degree.

Even at only a few kilometers distance, even though it was attempting no maneuver and was drifting listlessly in its orbit, the sensors of every ship in his fleet were having a hard time keeping a solid lock. That was not a Hunter approach to ship design. The Hunters either wanted you to know they were there, or they did not. If they did, you knew. If not, you did not.

Nor was it a Celzi tactic. Nor a known Dominion one.

That left only a few possibilities, all of which were awkward, and one of which was downright worrying.

”Well, who does that ship belong to, then?”

Perfection’s Planetary Director had good reason to be nervous - his predecessor had ‘ceded’ the position to him in the aftermath of an attack by the so-called ‘Human Disaster’ that had caused massive disruption, and Director Luz’s position was maintained on the promise to Perfection’s citizens and (more importantly) its corporations alike that the security and protection of the system would take top priority.

“I refuse to speculate ahead of my evidence.” Xkk’ told him, pointedly using a Corti turn of phrase. “You will know as soon as I have something conclusive to report. A’vkrnkt’k out.”

He’d catch some minor trouble for so readily dismissing the being who was supposed to be his superior, but today was not the day to worry about that.

Today was a day to worry why the system defence grid’s sensors had abruptly and without warning detected an enormous burst of microwave radiation in high orbit above the fifth planet’s eleventh moon, at the precise co-ordinates now occupied by a ship that matched no known pattern or shipyard and which seemed to be operating on the bare minimum of emergency power, if it was operating at all.

Being a Rrrrtktktkp’ch came with some physical advantages, chief among them being four arms and the hand-eye co-ordination to use all of them dexterously and comfortably at the same time.

Interacting with two datascreens simultaneously was a perfectly routine trick that most children of his species learned early on in life and never let go of. So, with his left hands he processed reports from the fleet and the opinions and thoughts of the shipmasters serving beneath him, and with the others he assessed the state of his own ship.

The strange ship wasn’t responding to hails. Xkk’ could hardly blame it - if he was any judge they had suffered a bad fire on board. Plenty of the tell-tale signs were there, not least was a small but noticeable increase in the local gas density - vented atmosphere. Not the ideal way to rescue a section, but undoubtedly effective.

The aftermath of that would be taking stock of the wounded and dead, a thorough assessment of ship’s systems to ensure that the fire wouldn’t spring up again the second they relaxed, and preliminary repair work. Fires were serious.

One of his datascreens flagged some new data for his information, and Xkk’ bowed his head upon reading it - a gesture of resignation and trepidation. It was strong supporting evidence for his ‘downright worrying’ scenario.

Humans had been spotted on Perfection.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Chief Michael Andow

Seeing Captain Bathini without his trademark turban was a sure sign of things having gone badly tits-up in the recent past, and things looked set to remain that way for the foreseeable future. They were still at quarters, and anti-flash gear was a great equaliser that brought Sikh, Christian and atheist alike together under a thick layer of Nomex.

It also made the captain’s expression unreadable as he listened. McDaniel’s tally of the wounded - about a third of the crew were suffering from an assortment of injuries in the form of burns, heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation, plus one Able Seaman who’d managed to concuss himself scrambling up the stairs. Petty Officer Kendrick had been the only fatality thus far, but there was a badly injured leading rate in the infirmary with an unhappy prognosis even assuming he survived.

Still: the list was a much shorter one than it could have been. There had been a hairy moment on C deck aft where, if not for the vacuum lockers and an emergency vent, they might have lost ten ratings and the MCM. Andow knew that Bathini would have hated himself for doing so, but if it was a choice between eleven men or the whole crew, everybody on board knew that the captain wouldn’t have had the luxury of hesitation in blowing them all into space…

No matter. Whether by luck or skill, it hadn’t come to that.

The butcher’s bill on Cally herself was worse, all things considered. Capacitor bank one was a write-off, as was bank five. Bank two, where the fire had started, could possibly be restored to one-quarter capacity. Banks three and four had both been badly ravaged. All three of the fusion reactors were offline pending inspection, but at least they’d been designed to restart at sea - each one carried a permanent charge sufficient to hopefully reactivate its own fusion, once it was declared safe.

Six out of every ten of the WiTChES emitters were definitely fried, and the remaining forty percent needed inspection. The entire surge protection system needed safety-testing and replacement of the ablative components that had done their job by being destroyed.

Then there was the scorched life support system, possible heat damage and warping of bulkheads and pressure walls, possible damage to literally every computer on the ship, and nobody knew how a kinetic thruster might respond to the kind of power surges they’d suffered, assuming the thrusters had even taken a jolt, which wasn’t clear.

Fortunately, diagnostics on the warp and jump engines had both returned a clean bill of health.

Bathini listened to the report without interruption until Andow had finished.

“How did it start?” He asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” Andow conceded. “It started in bank two, rack eight. As for how and why… the damage to the rack’s so extensive that we may just never know. It’s so badly burned and melted that the damning evidence is probably destroyed.”

“It spread fast from there.” McDaniel observed. There was no accusation in her tone, but there was a query.

“Cally’s built-in fire containment was dependent on that pixy dust foam.” Andow explained. He shuffled his feet awkwardly - he loved Caledonia, and saying anything negative about her just felt wrong, but he had a duty to the truth. “Too dependent on it. All of our refits and modifications helped - they’re probably the reason we only lost one man - but the alien structure and systems just weren’t sensibly designed in the first place.”

“You’d think interstellar civilisations would figure out basic fire safety…” Bathini mused. Andow felt he had to speak up in Cally’s defence now.

“In fairness, sir, if we were using the alien-made fire suppression foam, the fire would have been under control in seconds.” He pointed out.

“And we’d all be running around eating each other’s faces off.” McDaniel said.

“There is that, er, slight downside, yes.” Andow conceded.

“Are we going to need drydock time?” Bathini asked.

“Undoubtedly, sir.”

“Then the question of how to properly harden the ship against this happening again can wait. For now, you need to work your magic, chief. How soon can we be ready for jump?”

“…Three days.” Andow replied. The figure was probably a slight overestimate, but he had learned to be pessimistic when estimating these things. That way you were either a miracle-worker, or never had to explain why it was taking longer than promised.

“That’s a long time to be sitting here with a curious alien fleet poking at us, chief.” McDaniel observed.

“Ma’am, the only difference between a capacitor and a bomb is how controlled the energy release is.” Andow said. “Any one of the caps in our racks could sink us. And the capacitors are just the first of the systems we need to safety-test before we can recharge and jump out. We can be thorough, or we can, er, explode.”

“Let’s hope then that commodore Caruthers and the fleet get here before I’m forced to resort to talking.” The captain grumbled. He had an infamous disliking for diplomacy. “At least the message buoy worked… Go on, chief. You have work to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Andow nodded to his captain and the XO, and got out of there.

All things considered, he’d take half-busted and potentially explosive gigawatt power systems over wrangling with officers any day.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Heavy System Picket Utopian Aspiration, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k

The fleet had spread out in a close-range formation, offering maximum sensor resolution on the crippled ship, along with accurate firing solutions that offered no hope of evasive maneuvers. A solid and orthodox formation. One that should have made the fleetmaster feel confident.

It didn’t.

“The Capitol Station footage?” His Corti technician was already calling up the information, but as always with Corti she was taking the request with chilly grace. “As you wish fleetmaster, but may I ask why?”

“Not the footage, the sensor records.” Xkk’ clarified. “From the point when the human fleet arrived.”

“Done.”

The information arrived instantly.

There was depressingly little of it. Gravimetric sensors had suggested from gross mass alone that there were four classes of ship in the human fleet. Beyond that basic datum, the only information they had in detail pertained to the smallest and lightest class, a strike craft about twice the mass of a conventional starfighter which seemed to be capable of flinging itself through a combat volume at unheard-of accelerations, easily winning the kinetic energy advantage over its adversaries.

This ship in front of him, however, was a perfect match for the estimated mass of the two largest ships in the human fleet.

He called up a simulation of the battle and focused on the tiny human force. The first hint of its arrival had been a salvo of firepower that apparently travelled at warp. Against the sheer scale of the swarm-of-swarms that salvo had achieved little, but it had seeded the intervening space between the swarm and the human fleet with gravity spikes, keeping the Hunters at arms’ length.

That extreme range was unorthodox all by itself. At such distances, the slightest maneuver by anything capable of a warship’s acceleration profile would completely ruin a firing solution, and so extreme-range kinetic bombardment was reserved for ambushing fleets at anchor or relative-stationary large objects such as station. After which the fleet would then close to medium engagement range to press the advantage on a depleted and shocked foe.

The humans of course had invented their starship doctrine from new principles. Using warp fields on their weaponry eliminated the need to deflect when shooting at a moving target, and thus made long-range combat perfectly viable for them.

Sensor records from anything other than gravimetric sources were patchy at best, but the mass didn’t lie - the two ships matching their damaged mystery’s tonnage had remained at the rear of the human formation, in what was apparently a supporting role, while the two smaller classes - the smaller and more numerous of which may actually have been unmanned platforms of some kind, though that was unclear - formed the leading wave.

So. This was a support vessel of some kind. Coupled with the breathtakingly quick action of a strike force of four deathworlders on Perfection who had landed, engaged in a brief pursuit through a marketplace, and then departed on a ship registered to a private Corti captain…

Oh dear.

He hailed the damaged vessel personally. The time was long past for delicate probing with queries of concern and offers of aid. “Attention unidentified human vessel.” He announced. Every member of the bridge crew went stiff and still, listening. “You are in violation of Article Seven of the Dominion Charter. You are required by law to make contact by any means possible indicating your surrender to system authorities, whereupon your crew will be detained and your ship confiscated. Failure to comply will be considered a hostile act and you will be fired upon.”

He was still calculating how long of an interval to give them with which to respond when the reply came through. The footage he received suggested that the air on board that ship was still hazy and thick in the aftermath of a fire, and the white hood that the figure on screen was wearing could only be protective gear. All that was visible of the human, in fact, were two dark brown eyes which seemed to focus critically on him even through a camera. It felt uncomfortably like the being he was addressing was identifying weak spots to attack.

“Attention Dominion fleet. As non-signatories of the Dominion Charter, we neither recognise nor agree to be bound by its authority. Our ship is in distress and we thank you for your concern, but repairs are in hand. We will not comply with your order to surrender, and any hostile action taken against us will be treated as an act of war.” It recited, tersely. The translator decided that this specimen was male.

“I am Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k.” Xkk’ identified himself. “To whom am I speaking?”

The translator automatically found an equivalent to the rank that the human named. “[Shipmaster] Bathini.” He replied.

“Shipmaster, your species are automatic associate members of the Dominion by dint of your status as a sapient spacefaring civilization.” Xkk’ reminded him. “The Charter is automatically binding to all species.”

“We do not recognise the validity of a legal system which enforces laws that have not been consented to.” Bathini replied. “I repeat; we will not comply with your demand to surrender. Our ship is not capable of taking hostile action, and our destruction would constitute murder.”

“Listen here-” Xkk’ began, but the human cut comms.

A Vzk’tk comms tech raised a hand. “Fleetmaster?”

Xkk’ turned. “Prepare to fire a warning volley. Repeat our ultimatum.”

“Sir!” The comms tech insisted, urgently. “There is a fleet coming in at rapid warp!”

Xkk’ turned to his operations screen. Sure enough, there was a bow wave of distorted spacetime coming in. The gross mass of the incoming fleet was not high, but its velocity was unbelievable - either every one of them was armed with a Corti sealed drive, or they had immense power plants relative to their mass.

“General quarters!” He announced. “Fleet to starburst away from the human ship at best speed, holding at maximum optimal range.”

The fleet spread out like a firework going off, pulse-warping in straight lines directly away from the stricken human ship and coming to relative stop again as a spherical shell, some ten kilometers thick with a five hundred kilometer radius.

The approaching fleet slowed… and stopped nearly half a million kilometers away. Far outside of the effective range of any gun in Xkk’s fleet.

The information he’d gleaned from Capitol Station came to the forefront of the Fleetmaster’s mind. With their warp-capable weapons, the humans would not feel any disadvantage from the range at all, and already the five ships that had snapped back into the battlespace’s inertial frame of reference were multiplying. Seven ships became forty-three almost as soon as they were sub-luminal. six motherships, one support vessel of nigh-identical tonnage to the damaged one, and thirty-six child ships.

Not a one of them was easy to get a lock on. Their icons in his overlay were blinking, meaning that they represented only the probable location of a ship, to within a margin of error of some fifty kilometers. Useless for targeting purposes.

“Withdraw four-fifths of the fleet.” He commanded. “Half to rally on the far side of that moon, the other half to enter an orbit at warp and await further instructions.”

Fourteen of the human ships - two motherships and twelve child-ships - vanished off his overlay. A dim, grey icon suggested where they were likely to be if they drifted along their last known vector. These too were blinking, worthless.

That seemed to end the opening moves for now. With the human fleet unassailable and the bulk of his own fleet withdrawn to safety but ready to return at a moment’s notice, Xkk’ could breathe a little more easily and consider his next move.

“…Hail their fleetmaster.” He ordered.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
HMS Violent, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Commodore William Caruthers

“The ETs want to parlay, sir.”

Caruthers nodded, satisfied. His nonhuman counterpart had demonstrated respectable intelligence in withdrawing the bulk of his fleet in the face of an insurmountable tactical disadvantage. What was left behind was still entirely capable of obliterating Caledonia if so ordered, however. Ordinarily, he would have let the alien sweat for a few seconds, but this was too important.

“Accept the hail.” He agreed. Calculating, he removed his own flash hood. This was not a situation for facelessness, and he could put it back on quickly enough.

He was greeted with the face of an Rrrrtktktkp’ch. One that was verging on being elderly, if he was any judge. It had a certain… sagging quality to the skin around its eyes. “I am Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k.”

The translator rendered the fleetmaster with a male voice. Caruthers nodded respect. “I am-” he paused, tasting the unfamiliar title, “-fleetmaster William Caruthers. I must ask you to please withdraw the remainder of your fleet from threatening our ship.”

“That ship is in violation of the Dominion Charter.” The alien replied. ”I am bound by law to treat it as a pirate: I must either seize it and arrest its crew or else destroy it.”

“Allow me to be clear.” Caruthers warned. “Any hostile act towards HMS Caledonia will be met with force.”

There was a pause of some three seconds or so, brought on by light-lag. The alien’s reply surprised him.

”Are you saying that this ship is not a pirate vessel, fleetmaster? Is it perhaps present on a mission authorised by your species’ government?”

His counterpart was a shrewd bugger, at least - he was offering Caruthers a way out. If Caruthers confirmed that Caledonia was present on an authorised mission then that would negate the Charter violation. Yes, it would be a diplomatic incident instead, but that really changed nothing. This already was a diplomatic incident.

Besides, diplomatic incidents could be smoothed over, relationships repaired and bridges mended. Caledonia and her crew, meanwhile, were irreplaceable. Not to mention the security risks - With her power systems so badly damaged, there was no guarantee that the ship’s computers could be properly sanitized, which could become a potentially catastrophic security leak if the ship was captured or if an intact hard drive was recovered from its wreck.

“Her mission was sanctioned by my government.” He agreed. “Conditional on the recognition that there is no such thing as a unified human species government. We represent a faction.”

“Then your faction is in violation of Article Three of the Charter.” The ET declared. “Nevertheless, the rules of engagement permit me to grant you the right to effect repairs and quit the field.”

“My thanks.” Caruthers replied.

“We shall… patrol this volume to ensure that the situation does not escalate.” His opposite number informed him. “The element remaining in this frame of reference will withdraw to a distance equivalent to your own. No element of either fleet shall approach the damaged ship without first informing the other fleet and securing acknowledgement. Acceptable?”

“Acceptable.” Caruthers agreed.

”A’vkrnkt’k out.”

Caruthers sighed relief as the conversation ended. “I call that a win.” He declared.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Heavy System Picket Utopian Aspiration, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k

Xkk’ relaxed and nodded slowly.

“We may consider ourselves victorious.” He observed. “Withdraw the on-field fleet element to a distance of one light-ri’”

He watched, satisfied, as the ships obeyed.

“May I ask how, fleetmaster?”

The questioner was Mefr, the shipmaster, whose job was to tend to the business of running the Utopian Aspiration so that Xkk’s attention was freed to focus on the larger scale. She was Corti, which was a rarity - they usually disdained military pursuits as unworthy of a rational and inquiring mind. On the other hand, mastering a heavy system picket - and possibly the fleet one day - probably appealed to the Corti ego.

“Their fleetmaster just confessed to illegal military activity in a Dominion system, authorised by a legitimate species faction.” Xkk’ pressed the fingertips of his primary arms together confidently. “A few Ri’ ago, we were facing the possibility of a battle that would undoubtedly have angered them, and I assume you saw how well they fared against the Swarm-of-Swarms above Garden.”

“Quite. Not a fight in our favor.” Mefr agreed.

“I know I would prefer to live to old age.” Xkk’ agreed. “Even if our superior gross mass might have carried the day, what little I know of human doctrine suggests that they will target the command first if they are able.”

“That would be sensible.” Mefr agreed. “It’s what I would do.”

“So: We save face by securing a confession, they reclaim their damaged ship, there may be further sanctions against these deathworlders in the aftermath or at least they may have expended whatever goodwill they earned at Capitol Station.” Xkk’ gave a satisfied snort. “As I said. A victory.”

“I would suggest, fleetmaster, that they capitulated rather easily.” Mefr pointed out.

“Meaning?”

“If the political damage they will suffer is as severe as you believe, then their fleetmaster’s rapid and uncoerced confession suggests that whatever that ship was here to do is more valuable to them than the political fallout.”

“You think it may have something valuable on board?”

“Something worth risking the ire of the whole Interspecies Dominion.” Mefr agreed. “Even the Gaoians would be obligated to impose sanctions if the Security Council demands it.”

Xkk’ snorted and stood. “Those troublemakers would find a way to wriggle out of it.” He declared.

“Be careful, fleetmaster.” Mefr advised. “It wouldn’t do for a being in your position to be thought of as prejudiced.”

Xkk’ glanced around the bridge, and agreed. “Shall we continue this conversation in private, shipmaster?”

“Of course. Undershipmaster, the bridge is yours.”

They stepped into the wardroom.

“So. The question is, what were they up to on Perfection?” Xkk’ mused.

“That much is not clear. Two planetary security officers attempted to detain one of the human agents, only to be incapacitated.”

“Incapacitated?” Xkk’ repeated, alarmed. He’d heard the horror stories about what a human’s advanced biology could do to ordinary people.

“Subdued and carefully bound. They were completely unharmed, apparently.” Mefr quirked a corner of her eye orbit, a subtle Corti gesture denoting a blend of mild amusement and grudging respect. “Apparently the human that did this then jumped off a rooftop.”

“…Even in by their standards low gravity, terminal velocity must surely be fatal?” Xkk’ pointed out.

“No body was found. The human appeared to be wearing some kind of advanced armor system, possibly one with limited flight ability.”

Xkk’ considered his options. If the humans really were up to something that they valued more than good relations with the Dominion, then he was duty-bound to investigate. If, on the other hand, this was simply a case of interspecies psychological difference then he could not afford to make accusations which he would later regret.

A circumspect approach was necessary.

“I understand that information brokering is a healthy grey market on Perfection.” He observed.

Mefr was a local. She noded sagely. “Indeed, fleetmaster.”

“These brokers. Reliable?”

“Their reputations are their livelihoods, fleetmaster.” Mefr said. “The very best are utterly dependable.”

“But expensive, I imagine.”

“Many are, yes. The most notorious - and arguably the best - is known as ’The Contact,’ though I understand that caution is called for when dealing with them.”

“Why?”

“They are known for being completely fair and reasonable. A favor for a favor, a boon for a boon.”

Xkk’ swayed his head. “And that is grounds for caution because…?”

“Once in the Contact’s orbit, it’s a rare client that can find the acceleration to break free.” Mefr explained. “The Contact has a knack for spending their owed favors very wisely. And being owed a boon by the fleetmaster of the system defence force would be…”

“I see.” Xkk’ accepted the caution with a nod. “Who would you recommend?”

Mefr inclined her head slightly, a gesture that Xkk’ knew meant she was most likely tapping into the shared network of data available to all Corti who hadn’t actually been expelled by the Directorate. “…The current best pick is a relative newcomer. Believed to be a Chehnasho, goes by the alias ’Dread.’ Supposedly very effective… What exactly is it that you wish to know?”

“Those humans went to Perfection for a reason. I want to know what that reason was, or at least where to start looking. Where they landed, what they did there, how they left.”

“If they left.”

“If they left, yes. Thank you.” Xkk’ sketched a gesture of thanks. “I will leave it in your capable hands.”

“Of course, fleetmaster.”

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds.

Eleven

++0053++: The situation has, unfortunately, unfolded peacefully.

Eleven frowned and sipped at her stolen body’s favorite beverage. It paid to remain in-character even when the risk of discovery was infinitesimal. As far as anybody in the galaxy who knew her might deduce, Mwrmwrwk was sitting in a marketplace cafe and enjoying a nice Kwrw and the sunshine.

++0011++: A crippled starship, on an illegal operation, and the situation unfolded peacefully?

++0053++: The humans readily admitted to the violation. The fleetmaster offered them time to repair and withdraw under-

++0011++: I’m familiar with the article. Did you engineer an alternate solution?

Fifty-three’s reply had a tinge of wounded dignity, common among Agents who felt their competence was being questioned.

++0053++: I did. The fleetmaster has been persuaded to investigate the human operation more thoroughly, via an infobroker named ‘Dread’.

Eleven finished and paid for the drink, then stood up.

++0011++: Well done. It should be simple enough for me to allow this infobroker to catch up with me.

++0053++: To what end?

++0011++: It can be no coincidence that my host returned from an expedition which discovered the lost Mwrwrki station, found it under occupation, and then within hours of claiming the bounty a strike force of human special forces attempted to seize her.

++0053++: I understand. That station was equipped with an industrial nanofactory.

++0011++: Indeed. Yet another infraction on their part - Article Twelve of the charter. If we can expose their contempt for interspecies law and force the Dominion to act, it will drive a wedge between the humans and their only ally.

++0053++: The Gaoians? Fleetmaster A’vkrnkt’k is of the opinion that they will find some way to, in his words, ‘wriggle out of it’.

++0011++: Not even the Gaoians can ‘wriggle out of’ a Security Council directive. Not without violating the Charter themselves.

++0053++: And unlike the humans, they are charter signatories and full members of the Security Council, rather than mere associate members.

Eleven’s satisfaction was translated onto Mwrmwrwk’s face as a smug expression and a swagger in her step.

++0053++: How much detail should I give to this ‘Dread’?

Eleven accessed their file on that particular broker. Frustratingly, unlike most of the other major infobrokers in Perfection’s grey market, Dread was not apparently a user of cybernetics. The Hierarchy’s information on them was all but nonexistent.

That implied either a buffoon or fearsome competence, and Dread’s reputation suggested the latter.

++0011++: Very little, I think. Detail… yes, detail that a ship called ’Negotiable Curiosity’ departed from a landing platform near the incident site shortly afterwards and that you suspect a correlation. Let Dread do the rest. If their reputation is accurate, that should be all they need.

++0053++: And what will you be doing?

++0011++: The opposite of usual good practice: I will be laying a trail.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Chief Michael Andow

There was a snap, a flash and an alarmed squeak from under the third rack. Andow grabbed Patel’s heel and hauled her out from under there sharpish as the cap bank flashed and raged some more before the surge protectors finally got their act together and shut off the circuit.

“You okay?”

She lay on her dolly cart for a second, clutching her multimeter to her chest wide-eyed and hyperventilating, but managed to find a nod from somewhere. “Y-yes chief. Er… Rack three, box J-seven isn’t safe.”

The shocked mood among the team evaporated with a minor laugh, which Andow led. “Thank you, hooky.” he said, drily, then turned to Evans. “Get our girl a cuppa, Abie.”

Patel sat up and shook herself off. Being petite and slender meant she always got the jobs which involved somebody wriggling into a tight space, a role she normally seemed perfectly happy with. Still, nobody could fail to be unsettled by having a megafarad capacitor spark angrily a few inches in front of their nose.

Caledonia wouldn’t have been a British warship without a ready supply of tea on hand. With his arm in a sling and wrapped in burn dressings and bandages, Evans wasn’t much use for anything save fetching, messages, and keeping everybody hydrated, but he’d got out of the infirmary as quickly as the doctor would let him to lend his good hand to the repair effort. He made a surprisingly good cup of tea considering he was having to work off-handed, and pretty soon Saci Patel was nursing a warm cup of dark brown fragrant liquid.

For any Brit, this was a panacea. Fire scoured the ship? Cuppa. One of your colleagues burned alive? Cuppa. Malfunctioning ultracapacitor threatening to spit electrical death in your face? Sit down for a bit and have a nice brew.

Andow for his part marked off the damaged cell on the control software, permanently killing power to that particular capacitor.

“At this rate we’ll be lucky to get above the red line.” He grumbled, referring to the minimum threshold required for the ship to activate its jump engine and return to Cimbrean. The only lower threshold was the black line: Minimum life support.

Patel sipped her tea. “We’ll get there. Racks two and one are hardly scorched, if either of them are okay then we’ll hit yellow.”

“Dammit hooky, let me be pessimistic for once.” Andow chuckled. She was right of course, but it was his job to obsess over everything that could go wrong.

“Nuh-uh, chief.” She swigged back the drink in its entirety, lay back on her dolly and hoisted herself back under the capacitors. “You don’t get to bask in your doom-and-gloom on my watch.”

“Your watch?” Andow snorted. She wheeled herself back out from under the rack long enough to give him a big jocular grin, then vanished again.

Tea. It could fix everything.

Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds.

Jrm of the Exiled

Easily the most dull part of Jrm’s work day was the parade of sapient beings who, apparently lacking basic literacy skills, ignored the signs in fifteen different languages which directed them to the terminal kiosks, and thus kept darkening the front of his desk.

Such was the life of a bounty broker, freelance contract agent and general bringer-together of people. All Jrm really provided was a room full of bulletin boards and kiosks, and the financial middle-being services between contractor and contractee.

Not deigning to acknowledge shadows on the far side of his desk was a habit by now. He just kept watching his fiction series - a truly awful Rauwhyr dramatization of the opening stages of the Robalin War - and politely informed the good being that had sought his attention that while he, Jrm, was at present indisposed, their needs, whatever said needs might be, would most conveniently and expediently be processed via the digital proxies available in their immediate vicinity.

“The boards are to your left.”

A tablet was set down on the desk in a cybernetic hand. When he glanced at it, irritated, it had a simple message on it: ‘Not boards: Must speak with you.’

“Don’t you speak?” He asked the creature that owned that hand. This thing - a chehnasho, judging by its height, long legs and digitigrade bipedal stance - clearly valued its anonymity, as it was wearing a full-length cloak and robes with built-in privacy field generators that hazed it in darkness. There was an alarming but almost invisible hint of dull red eyes glowing somewhere inside that hood.

The tablet was picked up, tapped at, and set down: ’No.’ it read.

“Don’t, or can’t?”

This was not dignified with a reply. Instead, when the tablet was set down this time, it read: ‘Kwmbwrw claimed a bounty here recently.’

Jrm rasped an exasperated wing-buzz and turned to face the cloaked figure fully. Its height and garments were genuinely unnerving, but he wasn’t about to let that show. He knew immediately which specific Kwmbwrw this alien was discussing, but he wasn’t about to be bullied.

“Lots of Kwmbwrw claim bounties in here.” He shot back. “So do Locayl, Rrrtktktkp’ch, Allebenellin… Chehnasho…” He buzzed again to drive home the point. “Even the occasional Gaoian.”

His desk hummed and alerted him to an incoming transaction of some four hundred Dominion credits.

“…One particular Kwmbwrw does stand out, however.” Jrm continued smoothly.

The tablet was lifted, tapped on, and replaced. ’Name’

“Mwrmwrwk.”

’That is the one. Why does she stand out?’

“She found Mwrwrki Station.”

This revelation did not seem to impress. Jrm clacked his mandible irritably. “You have heard of it?”

The tall figure did not react in any way, so Jrm fluttered his vestigial wing casings irritably and did this… creature… the minor service of copying across the files on Mwrwrki, along with every scrap of data he had on Mwrmwrwk.

The robed alien gathered its tablet and left without any thanks. Jrm was glad to watch it go.

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Heavy System Picket Utopian Aspiration, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k

“We are at a distinct tactical disadvantage.”

Assorted variations on the theme of dismay rippled around the room as the nearly two hundred shipmasters under Xkk’s command absorbed his words.

Fortunately, If there was one thing Dominion fleets had become very good at over the long, long years of interspecies relations, it was controlling who got to speak and when. Rather than being inundated with opinions, Xkk’ was pinged with requests, sorted and prioritized by an algorithm that sorted for seniority, position within the fleet structure, political relevance to the subject at hand and a thousand other variables.

The first speaker was the Vgork shipmaster of the heavy system picket Copper King.

”Fleetmaster, we outnumber them six to one, and outmass them by a factor of ten.” He objected. ”Their ships have no defensive shields: our railguns would shatter them! Under what circumstances is that a tactical disadvantage?”

“Numbers, mass and firepower count for nothing if we have an effectively zero chance of hitting them.” Xkk’ pointed out. “They control the engagement range, they control the angles of fire, and our sensors struggled to secure an adequate lock on the damaged one at extreme close range.”

A fellow Rrrrtk shipmaster chimed in. ”Fleetmaster, do we not intend to honour the conditions of the Third Article?”

“We do.” Xkk’ replied. “However we are investigating possible violations of other Articles, some of which will supersede the Third and compel us to seize or destroy that ship. If we must do so, then the fleet must be ready to enact the plan of attack that I have devised.”

He called up the simulations he had run. “The humans depend on their warp-capable weapons and their sensor-scattering hulls. Both advantages will be negated by closing the fleet to point blank range. At that distance, any one of our heavy system pickets will have the durability and firepower to smash them all. The difficult part will be landing the ambush on them before they have time to respond and evade.”

The scale pulled back, showing the command element, the fleet element currently hiding behind the moon, and the element in orbit around the humans at warp.

“If I give the order, Second Group-” the element behind the moon lit up “-will warp through Third Group as it crosses their line of approach. The spacetime distortions caused by the element already at warp should disguise Second Group’s bow-wave as they accelerate. From that distance, the humans will have less than a thousandth of a Ri’ to react. Even they don’t have reflexes that quick.”

The simulation zoomed back in on the human fleet. The icons representing Second Group shot into the battlespace and instantly deployed gravity spikes. “Second Group will immobilize the humans immediately upon landing. From there, the superior firepower and shielding of our ships will do the rest. Any questions?”

As anticipated, the top of the list was their lone Gaoian shipmaster, whose ship - the Racing Thunder - was part of Second Group. “I must object to-”

Xkk’ interrupted the furry male with a curt swipe of all four hands. “I do not care what your clan of females will have to say about this, nor do I care what it will do for your crew’s mating prospects. I do not care for your politics, your personal misgivings, nor for your species’ relationship with these deathworlders.” He snapped. “You will follow orders or else be arrested and tried on a charge of dereliction of duty, and Gao will be sanctioned for supplying a mutinous vessel to serve in a system defence fleet.”

“…Under protest then, Fleetmaster.” The Gaoian bared his teeth angrily and dropped out of the briefing. Xkk’ would discipline the insubordinate creature later.

One of his fellow Rrrrtk spoke up. “Would it not be more expedient, Fleetmaster,” she suggested “to simply record whatever infraction the humans have committed and apply sanctions against them? I do not see why engaging them in battle will be necessary.”

“Every Rik they are present in this system is a Rik in which the Hunters might learn of their presence and swarm down on us.” Xkk’ pointed out. “Their occasional probing attacks and raids are bad enough - we all remember the loss of the Gurvagah the last time they attacked. If the Swarm-of-Swarms were to come…”

Nods and other gestures of agreement and understanding passed around the Shipmasters.

“They will be given a fair and reasonable interval to repair their ship and depart.” Xkk’ asserted. “But I will not subject the billions of sapients who call this system home to the threat of being Hunted. Are there any further questions?”

There were not.

“Make all the necessary preparations, and await my command.” Xkk’ ordered. “We will await the result of the investigation.”

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
HMS Violent, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Commodore William Caruthers

“A briefing session, then.”

“Looks that way sir. Every ship in the fleet, all talking to the flagship at once.”

Caruthers was taking a working lunch ’al desko’ - a ploughman’s sandwich, an apple and a coffee. “How long until I get to listen?” He asked, sipping his coffee.

There was a chuckle from the intel chief aboard HMS Myrmidon. “We’ve got the Watsons working on it right now.” he said. “Dominion encryption isn’t anything special.”

“How long?”

“The computers think an hour or so. In my experience, that usually means an hour and a half.”

“Good. Keep me posted.”

”Will do, sir.”

The link to Myrmidon closed.

Caruthers sat back and mused on the two salvaged Hierarchy ships. Both were, frankly, almost a liability. The unhappy marriage of human technology with integrated systems that had been designed by a civilization literally millions of years older than humanity was, after all, the reason they were here. Were it not for their engines, neither ship would have been worth the hassle.

The Hierarchy kinetic thrusters made all the difference: they were simply more advanced than the best human effort so far, converting the electrical energy that was pumped into them into kinetic energy for the ship with greater efficiency, and by no small margin. While all of the ships in his fleet could pull a delta-V that would have seriously inconvenienced the crew if not for the inertia-softening effects of their warp engines, the V-types only managed to keep up with Caledonia and Myrmidon because they had a third less mass.

That extra efficiency allowed for bigger ships. Bigger ships meant more room for Stuff, and the stuff they carried was absolutely invaluable.

In Caledonia’s case, the ‘stuff’ in question was a small field hospital in what had been her port landing bay, and the SOR staging area in her former starboard landing bay.

Myrmidon meanwhile was a flying power plant, armed with more fusion generators, more ultracapacitor banks and more forcefield emitters than anything else in the fleet. Once Caledonia’s power systems were sufficiently intact to receive the aid, Myrmidon could provide enough for the both of them.

Both of those ships, however, carried what Caruthers considered to be the fleet’s most potent tactical assets - the Watsons.

IBM’s “Watson” systems were nothing new - they’d been around and gathering steam even before the Vancouver Incident. Ten years of innovation and development past that point meant that both ships were carrying banks of number-crunching supercomputers of staggering power, underpinned by a software framework that could calculate, correlate, extrapolate, simulate, educate and even innovate with discomforting speed and precision.

Each of the V-types were carrying a smaller version, which linchpinned the fleet’s electronic warfare capabilities, but the ones on Caledonia coupled with the dedicated expertise of the men and women of the Fleet Intelligence Center aboard Myrmidon, they were the real nerve centers for the flotilla. Decrypting the Dominion fleet’s communications was a fraction of what they could achieve, and had Caledonia’s power systems been online to lend her own Watsons to the effort, Caruthers might almost have been able to eavesdrop in real time.

When it was all up and running, everyone in every CIC in the fleet flirted with swearing that the ships were almost alive and capable of anticipation. They weren’t so much in charge of a ship’s sensors any more as they were having a conversation with a robust, distributed network of pattern-matching engines that effortlessly and dynamically switched between independent and synchronous operations thousands of times a second, sharing their datasets and dividing their workloads to comb the information they got from every ship, every Bulldog drone, every Firebird and - when they were present - drones, satellites and even the SOR’s EV-MASS sensors.

Really, the only thing stopping him from being able to run several simulations of the possible battles that might unfold was the paucity of data regarding the capabilities of Dominion warships, and that would change if they got the chance to see them in action today. Every datum they recorded went into those computers, expanding and improving their store of knowledge. The more they had, the more they correlated, the more they correlated, the more useful they became.

Eventually, maybe, he’d be able to turn to them for everything. For now, however, Caruthers had only his wits and experience to go on.

His wits and experience were telling him that eavesdropping on that alien conversation couldn’t possibly come soon enough.

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
Starship ’Negotiable Curiosity’, Deep space.

Scott Blaczynski

The outer wall vanishes in a hail of metal and glass shards, dragging them all with it. Scott wheels sickeningly in the black, all alone as he begins the plunge towards a world below.

No control this time, no shields to protect him, no EV-MASS. Just the fiery sky, licking the flesh off him, burning him away until there’s nothing left but the fire, the rushing ground and death.

From the outside he watches his buddy burning down from heaven, feels the stab of loss all over again. ‘Horse’s voice on the comms, slow and thick with grief, letting them all know their brother is dead.

He stops running and leans on a tree. The pain is physical, sickening. As he fights back on it, the world fades until all he can hear is the rush of his own breath, sounding less like breathing and more and more like words…

“Bro!”

Scott’s head snapped up as a startled shout aborted itself on the edges of his teeth. His brain needed a few seconds to catch up, during which time he hyperventilated, wondering where the hell he was, or why somebody had a hand on his shoulder, saying “Hey, man. Just a bad dream. Bad dream, that’s all…”

His memory finally got its shit together.

Titan was the only other guy on the team who knew the basics of piloting, so the two of them were working a two-hour rotation in the chair, which really wasn’t configured for a human’s dimensions. They were coming up on forty hours in the suit, and all four of them were feeling it, but the time in that chair was just making things worse. Scott was sore all over, sleeping restlessly if at all, hungry, worried for Caledonia and all her crew - there were people on that tub he cared about, after all - and not only was there no respite, but they’d be stuck in this situation for another five days.

“…Thanks,” he grunted, standing up.

Titan took his place, looking just as stressed as he was. “You okay?”

“…I was dreamin’ about Thor.”

Titan clapped him on the shoulder, nodding understanding. “Do yourself a favor, pop some Crude. Helped me sleep okay a couple hours.” He suggested.

Scott shook his head. “I’ve only got ten shots left. Wanna save ‘em for when this shit really starts to get bad.”

He was handed one of the distinctive bright blue-green Crue-D single-use injectors. “Here.”

“Dude, this is your dose…”

Akiyama nodded. “It’ll be fine. I’ve got twelve after this, and you need to rest. Take that fuckin’ thing before I stick it in you myself.”

“…thanks, bro.”

Titan punched him affectionately in the arm and sat down. “Wanna know the upside to this bitch?”

“What?”

“This is good training.”

Scott chuckled grimly, and applied the injector to the port in his EV-MASS. There were no concerns about using the same injection site over and over again with Crue-D. After all, the drug’s entire purpose was healing.

“Always the fuckin’ optimist,” he observed.

“Somebody’s gotta be.” Akiyama wriggled to try and get comfortable in the improperly sized seat. “Ain’t optimism if it’s true, though. ‘Horse is gonna have to re-write our training schedules when we’re back.”

“Bro, that ain’t a good thing!” Scott objected. “‘Horse is a fuckin’ sadist on training!”

“Yup. ‘Cause he’s good at his job.” Akiyama grinned.

“Fuckin’ masochist…”

The Crue-D was working already - he could feel the soreness draining out of his muscles. Titan used a slightly larger dose than Scott usually did, and the difference was palpable.

“Go to sleep, dumbass.” Titan ordered him. “You’re back here in two hours.”

“Right.”

One nice thing about alien spaceships was that they built their doors and walkways wide enough to accommodate even species as big as the Locayl, Vgork and Guvnurag. The SOR were used to turning slightly to comfortably traverse doorways, especially in the cramped and narrow layout of HMS Sharman. Meanwhile, even the Negotiable Curiosity, a small research ship, was spacious enough for SOR operators in full gear to comfortably navigate unimpeded.

Backstage, Rebar was asleep against the wall. Clearly it was Sikes’ turn to watch the ETs.

Calvin Sikes was reckoned as the ‘pretty one’ among the Operators, with there being some debate as to what order the runner-ups were between Akiyama, Arés and Major Powell. He’d grown up ranching horses and flinging hay bales in Georgia, and still had those straight-jawed, stubbled, right-out-of-a-country-music-video good looks on top of the Herculean SOR physique. He was also their combat camera and drone operator, and for lack of anything better to do he was tinkering with their Flycatcher UAV when Blaczynski entered.

“That thing ain’t busted is it?” Scott asked him.

“Nuh. Try’na set it up as an alarm so it’ll warn us if the ETs leave their rooms.” Sikes replied. He looked up and shrugged. “…Somethin’ to do. Shouldn’t you be sleepin’?”

“Dude, you’re worse than old lady Akiyama in there.” Scott grumbled. He lay down perpendicular to Rebar and used the sleeping man’s chest for a pillow. “Least he gave me a fuckin’ chance before he started nagging…”

“Heard that!” Titan called from up front.

“Love you, bro!” Scott called back, settling down. Rebar grumbled something, rolled over slightly and put an arm round him. This was nothing remotely unusual for SOR - in fact, it was exactly what Scott needed.

He relaxed as best he could considering he was wearing a full-body juice press, put his head down, and tried not to dream.

Date Point 10y4m1w4d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

“Owww… Ow.”

“You’re lucky to be alive, tech sergeant. You can stop squirming now.”

Martina gritted her teeth, sucked air through her teeth, held her breath and let the nurse work. It was difficult. Painkillers and dressings be damned, when her burns were exposed to the air for the dressing change, it hurt. Not as bad as the first few minutes had been, but still more than enough.

“There we go.” The nurse started layering new dressings onto the worst areas, her back and thighs. “It’s already showing progress. You’ll have a scar, but it’ll be a tale to tell the kids.”

Kovač just nodded, though she relaxed as soon as the worst of the burn was covered. Those bandages worked very well. The IV was annoying, but doctor’s orders were doctor’s orders.

“Unless you’re planning to use that miracle drug of yours,” the nurse added.

“I could…” Martina agreed, though she was wrestling with her conscience versus her responsibilities. She had the authority to prescribe Crue-D, but only to SOR, including herself and the suit techs.

Knowing there was a man somewhere nearby with God-knew how much of his face burned off made her reluctant, though. A strong dose of Crue-D would repair his injury with no scarring at all, if only she could get the authority to administer it - authority that could only come from a few sources.

Authority that couldn’t possibly arrive quickly enough. Crue-D needed to be administered early in the healing process, preferably before it was even properly begun. For serious injuries, the window was about three days, half of which time was already gone.

“Or…” she flinched as the nurse applied pressure to wrap on the dry bandage. “…I can think of somebody who needs it more…”

The nurse’s hands paused. She met Martina’s eye, then glanced around guiltily. “He’s in a bad way.” She confided. “Lieutenant Bailey’s not sure he’ll make it.”

That settled it. “I’ll need help getting to the medical locker in starboard hangar.” Martina whispered.

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

“I’ll live.”

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds

Vakno, “The Contact”

“A verified trace on Mwrwrki Station. Now that is interesting.”

’Yes’

“You can unwind here, Dread. There are no secrets between us.”

Dread hesitated, then put away his translation pad and spoke his curious native language. Vakno had needed some refinement and research to get her translators to handle it properly, though her best efforts had given it a flat and neutral interpretation of his speech patterns.

“You have plenty of secrets. Meanwhile I have no secrets from you, is that not so?” He observed.

“Astute as always.” Vakno agreed. “Were you able to secure the sensor data?”

“The broker had already completed his transaction. I am tracing the pilot.”

“And what,” Vakno asked him, “do you make of the news that the pilot’s ship was stolen by four humans, one of whom chased her through a marketplace?”

Dread did not reply verbally - the most he communicated on the subject was an expressive gesture of disinterest.

“No comment at all?”

“I avoid humans.”

“For most of us, that’s a good idea.” Vakno commented. “Though the worst setback I ever suffered myself was the work of one of my own kind…”

Again, Dread said nothing. He had a frustrating distaste for small talk, which made him a difficult being to get much leverage over - he gave away far less in conversation than Vakno would have liked.

If he wasn’t so deeply in her debt from their first meeting, she would have held nothing over him at all, which was an awkward position to be in with fellow infobrokers. Vakno remained at the top of the heap simply because every single one of her “competitors” existed in an ecosystem that she controlled, all of them caged behind glass walls of debt and lured with the tantalizing promise of being free of that debt.

A promise that she did make good on, now and then. Without the authentic prospect of freedom to incentivize them, her debtors might realize sooner rather than later just how brittle those glass walls really were.

Dread, she suspected, knew exactly how brittle they were, and abided them purely because it suited him. She had prepared contingencies to release him from her debt at a moment’s notice, and made a point of treating him with punctilious fairness - a wise policy with any of her debtors of course, but taken just that little bit further with Dread so that it bordered on outright generosity. Vakno had a keen nose for which beings it was best not to antagonize.

“You seem to have this well in hand,” she mused. “Why consult with me?”

Dread’s preferred mode of locomotion was to stalk. This he now did, patrolling back and forth in front of Vakno’s desk for a moment before speaking. “Something about this seems unusual.” He declared.

“Besides the involvement of formal, authorised human military assets?”

He gestured acknowledgement. “The pilot’s trail is too easy to follow. Easier than if she was behaving normally. I think that she is luring me.”

“She knows you’re hunting her?”

“Yes. I do not know how.”

“And inviting you in… interesting.” Vakno ran an immediate cross-check between Mwrmwrwk and the fleet Shipmaster who had commissioned Dread’s services. The only correlations were meaningless - similar species-adjusted age, both female, both using Amnag-Dwuz implant suites… Nothing of substance. The only significant correlation was time spent in the same star system, but given that Perfection had a total system-wide population in excess of ten billion life forms, with both Corti and Kwmbwrw being respectively the second and third largest demographics, that was no connection at all. Vakno herself matched all of those data points.

“The target and the client don’t appear to be connected,” she decided.

Dread didn’t comment. Instead, Vakno caught a glimpse of his cybernetic limb - the only part of his body that he allowed any being to see - as he shook the sleeve of his robe irritably and thoughtfully, then flexed its fingers in front of his face.

He was an odd one, but the intimidating persona was commendably effective. Everything he interacted with seemed to be either disturbed enough to tell him what he wanted, or irritated enough to ensure his rapid departure.

“You can handle any trap she might be setting.” She reassured him.

“Yes. It is good to know when you are walking into one, however.”

“Do you think you are?”

Dread simply gestured what was either disinterest or resignation.

“If you need my further assistance, please do call.” Vakno told him.

“Yes.”

He stalked out. Vakno thought for a minute and made a few observational notes in her file on him, then set him aside for now and called for her next customer.

There was always a next customer.

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
Starship ’Negotiable Curiosity’, Deep Space

Bedu

Bedu was not a scientist. He preferred to think of himself as an engineer, a solver of practical problems. That the problems in question had nothing to do with engines and everything to do with missing people and hidden knowledge was largely irrelevant - he was presented with a problem in need of a solution, then devised and deployed that solution.

The scientific method was second nature to any self-respecting Corti, however. Observe, correlate, hypothesize, eliminate. And his human abductors made for interesting subjects even in the absence of any sophisticated scientific apparatus or prepared testing regimes.

If only he’d had access to the Corti implant-net’s databases on deathworlders, but they’d shut down every transmitter the ship had - he couldn’t interface with it at all. Without being able to reference a baseline ‘normal’ human, his conclusions about these four were tentative.

They were undoubtedly using some kind of Cruezzir-based medicine, which presumably meant there was a discreet but formal trade between whichever human faction they represented and the Directorate. Sadly, Bedu judged that his own value to the Directorate was probably far less than the value of such a program. No bargaining chip or negotiating tool was to be had there.

What was intriguing, however, was their social behaviour.

They were a study in opposites. Their every interaction seemed to be either precisely businesslike and structured, or else laden with informality, affection and aggression. Any of their more relaxed encounters always involved at least one of them being insulted, and yet grievous and unforgivable personal attacks seemed to amuse them, and be met in kind with ever-broader smiles. Infuriatingly, whenever Bedu had tried to slip a veiled abuse past them, they had detected it and, worse, had found it funny. Delightful, even.

The very worst part, however, was that Bedu was beginning to find that he liked them. For the first time since he had purchased the Negotiable Curiosity, he found himself in the company of his intellectual peers.

They controlled their conversations carefully in his presence, never giving away the details of how some of their equipment worked or what it could achieve, but were happy to discuss the function of others.

The one called ‘Starfall’ even partially disassembled his weapon for Bedu’s entertainment, performing what he called a ‘field strip’, in which he carefully laid down the weapon’s working parts. He explained each one’s function as he meticulously inspected, cleaned and reassembled each component. Then, under the watchful eye of the senior one, ‘Rebar’, he repeated the process blindfolded and in a third of the time. Not a movement wasted, not a spare instant of hesitation.

Over the course of the diurnal cycles following their capture, Bedu spoke with all of the humans in time. With Rebar he shared an intriguing conversation about the ship’s structural features, how the design had saved weight without sacrificing on strength, and the precise composition of its titanium alloy.

Titan enthused at length about Dominion user-interface technology and the implications in the near future for human consumer electronics and especially what it would mean in conjunction with what he called ‘Predictive Dynamic UX’, whatever that was.

It was ‘Snapfire’, however, who produced the most surprisingly enjoyable conversation - it wasn’t a technical one at all. Apparently the technical details of his role and equipment were among the ‘off limits’ conversations, so instead, after some long awkward silences, he eventually did something that Bedu hadn’t expected.

“Hey… what’s your home planet like?” He asked.

Bedu blinked at him, assimilating the question. “What is Origin like?” He repeated. “Origin is… Origin. The seat and home of the Corti Directorate and four billion Corti. What is Earth like?”

“Beautiful.” Snapfire replied, promptly.

“Define ‘beautiful’.” Bedu retorted. “Beauty is subjective.”

“‘Kay, well…is Origin beautiful?”

Bedu considered the question. He’d never actually considered aesthetics in relation to the Corti homeworld before.

“…Yes, I suppose it is.” He decided. “Beauty isn’t a subject I think about often. It’s not… encouraged.”

Snapfire inclined his head. “So y’all don’t have art?”

“Of course we do.” Bedu replied. He stood and retreated into his cabin, returning with his banner. His was a short one - he had no illustrious achievements, no scientific findings, he had brokered no profitable deals nor founded any successful corporate venture. The greatest achievement it recorded was that he was the master of a small private ship. This was admittedly quite the achievement, and put him a step above the rabble… but every Corti aspired to a banner that was as long as they were tall, if not longer.

Without neural-implant translators to provide an exact context for his gestures, Bedu found it difficult to read Snapfire’s body language, but he guessed from the way he shifted his weight forward and inclined his head slightly that the human was intrigued.

“My record banner.” Bedu explained, unfurling the green cloth for Snapfire to examine, though he didn’t hand it over. “At the top is my name, the date of my creation, the names of my genetic donors… below that is a summary of their respective accomplishments and any important contributions made by their ancestral donors…”

“Genetic donors. Cold way to talk about your parents.” Snapfire opined.

“That is all they ever were to me. I have never met them.” Bedu explained. “I was born from a gestation engine, raised in a creche and educated in a dormitory school. The only role they have ever played in my life was to donate the DNA that made me.”

He indicated the dense codes that detailed his academic and educational scores - good, but not exceptional. “I displayed an aptitude for and early interest in data correlation theory. Here is the second-rank accolade I received for participating in regional trials in that subject. I received a first-rank accolade in the local trials. Here is my second-grade accolade for dormitory school graduation. Here is my third-grade accolade for graduating higher education, though the silver circle next to it means that I was favored with special mention from my direct educator.”

Snapfire seemed genuinely interested, so Bedu continued. “Below that are my professional achievements - this ship, and a few of the more notable bounties I have claimed and commendations by my employers - and finally below that is the space where the accomplishments of my descendents would be summarized, if I had any.”

Snapfire scratched at the short hairs on his face. “Is it art though?” He asked.

“Define ‘art’.” Bedu replied, feeling that he was repeating himself.

“Uh, a lot of smarter people’n me have wrassled with that one.” Snapfire demurred, but he made an attempt. “For me though… I guess art doesn’t have a purpose except to be art. I like your banner, it’s interesting, it’s pretty, but it has a job, right? It’s not just there to just be art.”

“Art is nothing more than decoration to you?” Bedu asked.

Snapfire frowned, sat back and scratched at his head. “Nah, nah, it’s more’n that…”

“If it doesn’t serve a purpose and just is then it is purely decorative, is it not?” Bedu replied.

“Nah, uh…” Snapfire looked up at the ceiling and made a number of noises to himself that the translator decided were gibberish. It was a peculiar thoughtful quirk.

“Think he’s got you there, Snap.” Rebar declared, having apparently been woken by the conversation.

“I ain’t exactly the right man to talk to about this!” Snapshot protested.

Rebar nodded. “You got that right.”

“Hey!”

“Brother, I’ve heard the kinda music you listen to. You wouldn’t know artistic talent if it rammed a paintbrush up your ass.”

“You were doing perfectly well.” Bedu hastened to interject, before the usual boorish back-and-forth could resume. “But consider - Artistic creations are not the meaningless emergent artefacts of an unintelligent universe, they are made by a person. A star has no purpose except to be a star, but this banner? A painting? Music? Everything a sapient being creates is created for a purpose, even if that purpose is nothing more than amusement or decoration.”

Snapshot made a thoughtful sound. “So you’re saying art can’t just be art for art’s sake, it’s gotta do something.”

“He’s right.” Rebar said, after Bedu had imitated a nod for them. “Hell, look at the Mona Lisa. That’s a portrait of some dude’s wife that he had done as a gift for her. And modern art’s all about making a statement of some kind.”

“Since when are you into modern art?” Snapfire asked.

Rebar frowned at him. “Dude, you’ve seen my sculptures.”

“You bend and weld scrap metal together.” Snapfire replied.

“They’re sculptures! A lotta them mean something, too.”

Snapfire blinked at him. “…They do?”

“Fuck, bro. You’re lucky I like ya, ‘cause now I’m actually offended.”

Despite being a quarter again as tall as Bedu and only physics knew how many times heavier, Snapfire suddenly looked… small.

“…Sorry.”

There was a pause, then Rebar exhaled through his nose, shook his head, and gave Snapfire a hug.

Bedu tried to incorporate their behaviour into his tentative model of human - or at least these humans’ - psychology.

It went something like this: There was a clear order of seniority among these four, that was never challenged. Rebar would occasionally speak in a subtly different tone of voice, and the other three would respond with immediate and unhesitating obedience. This was, however, rare. When Rebar used that “leader” tone, he did so in order to confirm and initiate a plan that the group had devised between them. Otherwise the four behaved more like…

Bedu had struggled for some time to come up with a simile that fit well into a Corti brain, and had given up. Coming as he did from a species of fiercely competitive mycovores, the xenopsychology involved in the social dynamics of a pack of predators was tantalisingly tricky to fathom, especially when they didn’t behave like a classic pack of predators. While Rebar was undeniably the top of the social hierarchy, his behaviour wasn’t the equivalent of a snarl or a snap from a dominant animal to one lower in the pecking order… and yet Snapfire had instantly made himself as non-threatening and submissive as possible, just like one would expect if Rebar had snapped at him.

Mutual conflict avoidance followed by an immediate display of reconciliation. There was no social advantage to it either, at least not in any classic xenopsychological model - the only witness to the exchange was Bedu, who was obviously not inclined to care. There were no females to impress with displays of restraint and emotional maturity, nor would the interaction have any clear benefit in their standing with other males… which meant that the only possible conclusion was that Rebar and Snapfire genuinely liked one another.

Corti xenopsychological orthodoxy held that sapient beings typically only liked one another when there was a benefit to them or their genetic fitness in doing so, one which offset the presence of a competitor. It was natural therefore for prospective mates to like each other, and for parents and children to be mutually friendly. Interspecies friendships were easily explained by the fact that neither member of the friendship was a competitor with the other.

This raised the interesting question of whether humans were an exception to that doctrine or how, if they were not, they were abiding by it.

“May I ask a question?” Bedu asked.

Snapfire and Rebar glanced at each other. If any kind of communication took place, Bedu couldn’t see how, but Rebar shrugged and nodded. “Sure.”

“Why do you like him?”

The question seemed to completely trip up both of the humans, if he was reading their body language correctly. Neither of them replied at first - instead they stared at him, looked at each other, stared at him again. Rebar opened his mouth to venture something, then frowned and scratched at his head.

“…We’re a team.” He said at last, as if that was sufficient explanation. It clearly sufficed for Snapfire, who nodded.

“A team, yes, but what is it about this man in particular that you find likable?” Bedu insisted.

Rebar scowled at him, and Bedu sensed that he’d managed to wound the human somehow. “We’ve been through shit together that’d leave you as a greasy fuckin’ smear on the deck.” He said. “I trust Snap with my life, and he’s worth that trust. What more reason do I need?”

The explanation satisfied Bedu, and in retrospect should have been obvious. Reciprocal affection generated team cohesion, thereby mutually improving the odds of both their survival in a dangerous situation. An instinct that made perfect sense given that these were deathworlders after all - their entire home planet was a dangerous situation.

“I meant no offense.” Bedu soothed. “It’s in my nature to be seek explanations for the unexplained.”

“Satisfied?” Snapfire asked.

“I am, thank you.” Bedu told him. “Though, another question does present itself.”

“Shoot.” Rebar offered. Bedu needed a moment to parse what was presumably a colloquialism.

“Correct me if I am in error…” he began “But your behaviour towards me personally has been entirely friendly. I daresay I’ve never had such warm company before in my life. I am curious as to why that should be seeing as I am, after all, your prisoner.”

“We’re not in the business of makin’ enemies.” Rebar said.

“Heck, we got enough of ‘em already…” Snapfire added sotto voce.

“…What’s happened here is you’ve been regrettably caught up in events.” Rebar finished. “If things go as we hope, you should be back in command of your ship and on your way again before long.”

“That doesn’t explain the personable reception.” Bedu pointed out. “What does it benefit you to… ‘charm’ me?”.

“What’d it benefit us to antagonize you?” Rebar replied. “Like Snap said, our kind have a lotta enemies right now, lotta bad press. It can’t hurt us to leave you with a good impression, and might even help.”

“Ah.” Bedu nodded, admiring the human’s candour. The logic was perfectly flawless. “Thank you.”

He put his banner away. “For what it may be worth…” he said, “I’m genuinely fascinated to meet humans at long last. You’re very different to all of the speculation and rumor.”

“Gotta be honest, I ain’t paid much attention to the speculation and rumor.” Rebar said.

“For a typical perspective, look no further than my reclusive colleague.” Bedu told him. He knocked on the wall. “Hkzzvk! Are you still alive in there?”

”You can’t open this door!” Hkzzvk called back. “I overrode the door lock! They can’t get in!”

Bedu aimed an expression of barely-patient tolerance at the humans, who for their part seemed genuinely concerned.

“Seriously, is he gonna be like that the whole way?” Snapfire asked.

“‘Cause if he has a heart attack from the panic or whatever, we won’t be able to do shit for him.” Rebar agreed.

“Especially seeing as he’s overridden the lock.” Bedu observed. “Or would that not be an obstacle?”

“Dude. If I wanted to I could kick that door so hard that Hicks-vick there would be in danger from the shrapnel.” Rebar said, in the calm tones of somebody who wasn’t boasting. He kept his voice low enough that Hkzzvk probably couldn’t hear.

“Titan could get it open the gentler way in a couple of [Ri’].” Snapfire added.

“Vzk’tk psychology being what it is, I suspect that either approach might well kill him.” Bedu said. “This is what you are up against, unfortunately. Hkzzvk may be annoyingly stupid, but in this case it has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with instinct. He is a herd grazer, and he has been cornered by predators with nowhere to run.”

“Wild horse in the stable, huh?” Snapfire scratched his chin and stared intently at the door, calculating.

Bedu wondered what he was thinking. There were enough similarities between Corti and human facial expressions as to make assessing Snapfire’s thoughts tantalizingly impossible. “He is not unique,” he said. “Reactions like this are exactly why you have ‘a lot of enemies’. You don’t, in fact, have a lot of enemies. Your only enemies are the Hunters - everything else is panicking.”

Rebar chuckled. “Nah, see, when my boy here starts talkin’ about wild horses, he’s thinkin’ of trying to break it in,” he explained. “Ain’t that right, Snap?”

“Break him?” Bedu asked, hoping that the colloquialism was not as horrifying as it sounded.

“Break him in.” Snapfire stressed the word, as if that explained it. “It’s a ranching term. We’ve got these animals on Earth - horses - our ancestors domesticated them thousands of years ago, but they’re still panicky herd animals. Breaking them in means forcing them to trust humans.”

“How can you force trust?”

“Easy. You give them no other option but to trust, then reward that trust.”

“Hkzzvk is not an animal except in the same technical sense that we are.” Bedu pointed out.

“You said it yourself, he’s running on instinct right now…” Snapfire retorted.

Bedu thought, then acquiesced. “It is probably for his own good if some attempt is made to calm him.” He agreed. “Prolonged stress really could cause him serious harm.”

Rebar’s hand slammed down onto Snapfire’s shoulder so hard that Bedu flinched - the friendly blow would have gravely wounded a Corti, if not killed him outright. “In that case,” he said “I guess we’ve found something for you to do.”

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Lieutenant-Commander Ellen McDaniel

“A good prognosis, then?”

Lieutenant Bailey shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Ma’am… he’s healed. I swear, LR Davison came into this hospital permanently blinded and with his face burned down to the bone in places and severe respiratory injury from inhaling superheated air. I gave him an optimistic fifty percent chance of survival…And now he’s sitting up in bed laughing and happy and the only way you would know what happened to him is the missing hair.”

McDaniel’s expression gave nothing away, but she couldn’t resist a moment of sarcasm. “I take it you’ve ruled out divine intervention.”

“When this ship has a supply of imported alien regenerative medicine on board, I think we can safely consider the hand of God a secondary possibility at best.” Bailey commented, matching her for dry humour. He looked down at his desk and sighed. “I hate having to report it, because that young man really was looking at permanent disability, assuming he survived. This is unquestionably a good deed… But…”

“There’s no way you could conceal this.” McDaniel suggested.

“Your words, ma’am. Not mine.” Bailey said, but nodded.

McDaniel nodded. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Any other miracles to report?”

“No ma’am. Nobody else needed one. A few dozen minor burns, one or two more serious ones… we’ll be low on painkillers and wet bandages by the time we make port, and all our burn victims are on antibiotics, but we’ll get by.”

“What about sergeant Kovač?”

“Kovač? She suffered one of the worst burns after Davison, but you know what SOR techs are like. The only way to stop her from limping out of here would have been to sedate her.”

“Limping?”

“That’s right.”

“…Thank you, Bailey.”

McDaniel let herself out of the hospital in thoughtful mood. Kovač was her only suspect in the case of mis-used Crue-D. Indeed, she was the only possibility. If she was still limping despite having unquestioned and fully authorized access to the alien drug herself…

A team of marines stood aside as she crossed the ship’s beam to enter the starboard flight deck. Starboard Flight had hardly suffered from the fire at all, with only the hospital faring better - that, after all, had been designed to isolate itself immediately. Still, when dealing with the ship’s largest pressure door and its most powerful internal forcefield emitters it paid to be cautious.

“Technical Sergeant Kovač, front and center!” She snapped as she entered. Everybody who wasn’t Martina Kovač immediately found important responsibilities as far from the XO as possible.

Kovač herself was working at a desk, standing up - sitting was probably not an option for her right now. She had a resigned set to her body language as she turned and tried her best to hasten to the officer’s call, which was a decent effort considering her back was plainly stiff, painful and swathed in dressings.

McDaniel wasn’t heartless. The moment Kovač arrived as ordered, McDaniel indicated for her to stand easy. “You can relax, sergeant. No sense in abusing that wound.”

“Yes ma’am.”

So. It was going to be that kind of talking-to. Kovač knew she’d been rumbled, and was probably both unapologetic and entirely willing to accept whatever happened next. Her whole attitude said that she would accept whatever judgement was laid on her as her fair due. McDaniel respected her for that.

“I have an interesting situation in the hospital deck that I suspect you can shed light on, sergeant.” She said. “A man with a grievous injury and a pessimistic prognosis has, quite suddenly, been healed of that injury.”

“Yes ma’am?”

“Do you think perhaps you could have been any more conspicuous?” McDaniel asked. “Because I know what I’m going to find when I check that medicine locker’s log. I’m going to find everything properly signed for, with your name right next to the date and time, aren’t I?”

“That would be proper procedure, ma’am.”

McDaniel sighed and relaxed. “I thought so,” she said, conspicuously placing her tablet aside and thereby metaphorically disarming herself. “How’s your back?”

“It hurts like hell.” Kovač admitted.

“Given that you’re completely authorized to medicate yourself with Crue-D, I can only assume that you haven’t done so because there’s none left.” McDaniel guessed.

Kovač hesitated, but nodded. “That’s right, ma’am.”

“Only had enough for Davison, did you?”

Kovač hesitated, choosing her words with care. “The… amount required to treat a man of Leading Rate Davison’s size with an injury that severe would definitely deplete our stockpile…” She hazarded.

“And would you say that’s an appropriate use of resources earmarked for the exclusive use of the SOR?”

“The SOR’s mandate is to protect humanity and human interests, ma’am. That includes providing life-saving medical intervention.”

“Hmmph.” McDaniel grunted, accepting the reply without comment. “Right. Here’s what’s going to happen - I’m ordering you to check yourself back into that infirmary and you will stay there this time until the doctor says otherwise. Do not give me a reason to come back down here and talk with you again. Am I clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

McDaniel picked up her tablet. “Right. Oh, and- Sergeant?”

“Yes ma’am?”

“If I were you, seeing as you’re going to be off your feet, I’d take this opportunity to get a head start on any paperwork that might need doing in your near future…” she hinted.

“…Thank you for the advice, ma’am.”

McDaniel ‘hmmph’ed again for effect and departed, satisfied that Kovač’s had been a calculated and productive act of minor insubordination. The fact that she was suffering for it was an item in her favour as well, so really there was no reason to make anything serious of it.

Still… a letter to the younger woman’s CO couldn’t hurt. Major Powell, after all, would be compelled to prioritize the mission-readiness of his own unit. A few polite observations from one officer to another were probably in order.

She added it to the long, long list of demands on her time and attention. Half-burned-out starships didn’t repair themselves.

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds.

Eleven

Biodroning was not a process that necessarily required sapient life forms - anything with a central nervous system would do, and Eleven specialized in using local fauna for reconnaissance and observation.

The perfect creature for her to use right now was a species of avian urban vermin called a Kreewit. Kreewits were basically a flying appetite, and their constant search for the next meal, coupled with a generous conception of what constituted a meal, would have contributed greatly to keeping the streets and concourses of Perfection free of litter and clean, if not for the inevitable digestive byproducts.

They were hand-sized, feathery, had a mouth full of flat grinding teeth that could patiently reduce any organic matter to food, and utterly ubiquitous. Catching one and taking it to a confused but disinterested and discreet Vzk’tk veterinarian for implanting with a custom-built cybernetic control package had been trivial.

Now, it was doing what Kreewit did - scavenge. Given that Kreewit looked around constantly, seeming to pay attention to the whole world by glaring suspiciously at it out of the corner of their eyes, nobody was paying any attention to it. In response to its programming, it followed Eleven, flitting from light fixture to advertising hoarding, from shop sign to architectural embellishment, sometimes flying ahead to claim morsels of what only a Kreewit could possibly decide was food, such as fast-food packaging, or the burnt leftover ends of smoked cqcq.

Under its watchful gaze, Eleven left a trail.

The rules of Hierarchy fieldcraft when it came to leaving a trail were simple: Don’t.
As a double-digit, Eleven had the luxury of creatively interpreting the rules. As a sub-20, she could ignore them outright if the situation warranted.

In a galaxy where the entire economic system hinged on data footprint, a digital sapient life-form could be as stealthy or as obvious as they desired. Had Eleven wanted, she could have moved undetected by juggling as many as fifteen different identities - to the security systems, she could have been an office worker called Kwrwrtrwm, while the financial transactions would all have been under the name of one Wrmwlwlr, the smart advert boards would have seen a Grand House dilettante, and so on.

Being as loudly and as visibly Mwrmwrwk as possible was an interesting experience, especially when the advertising systems built into her host’s cybernetics package shook hands with a billboard as she passed it.

The boards used augmented reality to replace whatever they actually physically displaying with an ad overlay targeted specifically at Mwrmwrwk, usually with full audio thrown in. Every time she passed another board, Eleven received a new message in the vein of ’Congratulations Pilot Mwrmwrwk! Your recent success has multiplied your personal funds by [INTEGER OUT OF BOUNDS]! Perfection Banking Group is delighted to offer you this opportunity to take advantage of our exclusive Person of Importance Savings Account!’ or offering her an assortment of immensely expensive luxury goods, up to and including her own ship.

The whole system was deliberately kept insecure by Hierarchy action. Indeed, keeping galactic data security riddled with holes was the full-time assignment of aspiring Igraens long before they were assigned the rank of Zero and given the opportunity to prove themselves in the field.

The network, in short, was a rigged game in the Hierarchy’s favor, which meant that the easy way in which Dread seemed to move through it without leaving any permanent evidence, like a breeze over tall grass, was infuriating. Nothing that wasn’t an Igraen should have had such a negligible data shadow. The only other way to achieve such stealth was to not interact with the network at all, which was impossible. The constant barrage of advertising that Eleven found so amusing was testament to that.

Eleven had commandeered the attention of a datamining group of pre-Zero hopefuls to trawl for whatever information they could find on Dread, and they had hardly expanded her information at all, beyond identifying some of the digital aliases he used for financial transactions. All the commentary on him agreed that he was most likely a male Chehnasho, that his left arm was at least partially prosthetic, and that he affected an intimidating costume of black cloth.

His preferred mode of operation was unusual - most infobrokers had their clients come to them, controlling the meetings with bodyguards, drones, forcefields and other such fortifications so as to minimize the risk to their persons.

Dread, it seemed, preferred to go to his clients, and it was on this foible that Eleven was depending.

Paradoxically, it took him quite a long time to find her. Eleven knew that she had been pinging her presence and location as aggressively as possible, and so the only way to account for his relative tardiness was caution. Perhaps she had been too aggressively visible, and made him suspicious.

Whatever the reason, Eleven was beginning to doubt his reputation when the Kreewit finally caught sight of him, tailing her through the crowd.

He wasn’t bothering with stealth, and couldn’t have accomplished it anyway. The aura of sheer menace he gave off sent everything in his way scrambling to get out of it.

Through the biodrone’s eyes, she got her first good look at him. He was definitely Chehnasho - they were the only quadriform bipeds who stood so tall, with such long legs and a digitigrade gait. The body language was strange, though - Chehnasho usually stood tall, with their chests thrown out - this one stalked with his weight forward, arising uncomfortable instincts in Eleven’s host body of being hunted.

The last time something had been following her with its weight forward like that, it had been that armored human, and that one’s footsteps had shaken the concourse as he ran. Had he not been so reluctant to harm civilians, Eleven couldn’t possibly have escaped.

She turned down an alleyway. They were on a ‘roof deck’ level of the city, with no ceiling overhead, but several storeys beneath their feet, and several buildings rising around them.

The kreewit lost sight of Dread. Eleven stopped in the alleyway and focused her full attention on her drone, to no avail. She was still wondering how he could possibly have evaded it when he stepped out from between the dumpsters ahead of her.

They stared at one another for a second, and then he made a beckoning gesture - one cybernetic finger stabbed first at Eleven, then at the ground in front of him.

Eleven glanced over her shoulder to make sure they were unobserved, made sure the Kreewit drone was in position, and then did as she was bidden.

“Can I help you?” She asked, feigning nerves.

He tapped rapidly on a datapad, which spoke on his behalf: ’Stop pretending. You laid a trail for me. Tell me why.’

“Not for you.” Eleven lied. “I don’t know who you are.”

’Who’

“What?”

’For whom did you lay the trail’

Mwrmwrwk’s vestigial personality traits provided the perfect response: indignation. “What business is it of yours?” Eleven asked. “Who are you?”

’Dread’

“Is that supposed to intimidate me?”

He considered her for a second, and then drew a pulse pistol. The unspoken sentiment was obvious - ‘if that doesn’t, this will.’

It didn’t scare Eleven - she, after all, would just migrate to a new host. But Mwrmwrwk on other hand would have stared dry-mouthed at the gun and immediately capitulated, and so Eleven followed suit. “…Consider me intimidated.”

He put it away again. ’For whom did you lay the trail’

“I have friends. My spaceship was stolen and I–”

’Why’

“Why… what, why did I lay the trail, or why was the ship stolen?”

’Yes.’

“…What?”

Dread stared at her for a moment, and then stood aside and indicated the rear access door of the boutique they were behind. When Eleven checked it, the door was slightly ajar. It swung open silently and when she stepped through they found themselves surrounded by shelves full of boxes of electronic luxuries - terminals, communicators, translators, entertainment devices and cooking appliances.

’Both questions. Start with the ship.’ Dread ordered through his pad.

“We had just returned from a deep space investigation.” Eleven told him, using Mwrmwrwk’s memory and the ghost of her personality. “The shipmaster - Bedu - he didn’t tell me who the client was, but it was probably one of the infobrokers here on Perfection.”

Dread said nothing, only stared at her. There must have been some kind of custom privacy field emitter inside his hood, because it gave only the impression of infinite depth and what might have been baleful unblinking eyes. Mwrmwrwk would have faltered and stammered, and so Eleven did exactly that.

“The-the, the client wanted to know the, ah, the whereabouts of, of a spaceship. We found, um… we found Mwrwrki station instead.”

‘Explain. Why is this station important.’

“It was a research station. They were looking for signs of extragalactic life, and a means of extragalactic communication. You see, um, intergalactic travel is theoretically possible, you just need an efficient enough drive and plenty of power an… and…”

She wasn’t sure what it was exactly about Dread’s body language that communicated impatience, but she rallied and got back to the point. “…It vanished. One day it just… stopped reporting back, and when ships were sent to the Lleyvian Frontier to look for it, they didn’t find anything. No wreckage, no signs of a Hunter raid… the station was just gone. The scout ship apparently detected some interesting spacetime distortions in the volume and… well, it all got inflated. There were wild theories like maybe they had somehow jumped to another galaxy, or maybe achieved extradimensional communication and some sort of fourth-dimensional being came along and scooped them up, or…”

Again, Dread said nothing, but he did shift his weight from one foot to the other.

“…The Grand Houses put a bounty on it, a reward for its discovery.” Eleven explained. “When we found it, however, it had been taken over. The master of the ship we were looking for had erected a system defence forcefield around the station and taken up residence.

’Why would humans be interested in that’

“That shipmaster is a species traitor, working for the deathworlders. A former politician. His ship was destroyed [years] ago near the Aru system.”

To her immense surprise, he spoke. His actual voice was nothing but coarse bass. “Sanctuary.”

“…Yes. How do you know?”

Dread paused, then he reached up and tugged back his hood. The privacy field flicked off.

Eleven knew all about human ethnic groups, about how their skin tone varied in adaptation to the scorching surface temperatures their home planet could reach. She couldn’t imagine living on a planet where the star’s UV radiation was enough to burn the natives’ skin off, and she certainly hadn’t envisioned that humans were ever a kind of cool deep umber.

It was the eyes, however, that finally succeeded in scaring not just the ghost of Mwrmwrwk, but Eleven herself. The embers in his hood were far less terrifying than the the real thing: Dread’s eyes hated everything.

“I know that ship.” He growled. “I got thrown out its airlock.”

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, Deep Space.

Calvin ‘Snapfire’ Sikes

“Hey, uh… hello in there.”

There was a kind of wary shifting sound from behind Hkzzvk’s door, but no reply. Calvin took that as an encouraging sign.

“Dude, uh… hey, I’m sorry about this but I can’t pronounce your name. Is it okay if I call you Hick?”

The translator gave Hkzzvk a hysterical edge to his voice. They really did a remarkable job of simulating where the voice was coming from, too. Rather than hearing the anxious Vzk’tk’s words from a speaker in the wall or anything, they really did sound like they were being shouted from the far side of the door. “Leave me alone!”

“I’m not coming in, I promise.” Sikes replied, soothingly. “That room’s your space, I respect that. Just checking you’re okay in there.”

”Leave me alone!!” Hkzzvk repeated, more frantically.

“Sorry man, I can’t. We’re all worried for you. But I’m just here to talk, you’re safe in there.”

There was no reply.

“…Sure appreciate it if you said somethin’ other than ‘leave me alone’ there, Hick.”

He let the silence drag on for a second or two, then decided that the old trick of just talking and talking and talking until the panicking creature got used to the sound of his voice was in order. Hkzzvk might be a fellow sapient being, but hey - whatever worked.

“Okay, well, I’m just gonna sit here and talk about whatever comes into my head, don’t mind me.” He said. “Gotta tell you though, I’d love to get this suit off sometime soon. It’s perfectly sized for me, but it squeezes real hard so it doesn’t rattle around, and yeah that’s a good thing for makin’ it easy to move in, it also makes it tough to wear for more than a couple of hours. I ain’t lookin’ forward to sitting around in this thing the whole way back, I tell ya that.”

Hkzzvk’s silence continued, so Calvin shrugged and settled in for a good long stream-of-consciousness.

“Though… okay, you probably never heard of skiing. Or maybe you did, maybe you guys have that. Probably not with four legs, but it’s this thing we do where we use long flat apparatus that we attach to our feet and it helps us slide easily over snow. Takes some work to get good at it, but there’s no better way to move fast over snow. Ski boots work a lot like the suit does, and those feel great to take off at the end of a day on the slopes, so I’m thinking when we get to take the spacesuit off after all this it’s gonna be… Actually, have you ever seen snow? Is that a thing on your home planet? Or… Dude, were you even born on a planet? I know a lot of ETs are born in space. I wonder if any humans have ever been born in space… It’d be tough for us, I bet the low gravity would screw with fetal development in all sorts’a ways…”

At length, he rambled on about the estimates in how many humans there were in the galaxy at large, wondered how they were getting by without easy access to clothing, and mused briefly about whether any of them had just given up and ‘gone native.’

He kept a lazy eye on the clock as he moved on to describing snow, then weather in general and especially thunderstorms.

“I mean, I guess all’a this sounds scary and alien to you huh? Deathworld weather and all that stuff but man, I tell ya it’s beautiful. I remember when I was little and this storm went over and it was just this crazy lightning show in the sky. My daddy and I sat on the porch and watched it for like half an hour, but then momma came out and said there was a tornado alarm and we had to spend the night sleeping on cots in the basement…”

He decided to move on from the subject of Earth’s weather and onto gentler and more calming matters. He was dealing with a sapient being after all, which meant that he couldn’t rely completely on tone of voice alone - he had to watch the content of what he was saying.

“Space is prettier though. There’s this nebula you can see from Cimbrean, It’s about as big in the sky as my thumb at arm’s length and yeah, things like storms are cool, but that nebula’s just like… every time I lay eyes on it it reminds me that wow, y’know, when I was a child we didn’t have FTL and aliens were just something that could theoretically exist, but then… there I am, living on a planet that’s not Earth, and I work in space, and I’m chatting to an alien right now. That’s kind of a-”

Hkzzvk finally said something, interrupting him. “Are you going to talk all night?” He asked. “You’re keeping me awake.”

“Ah, sorry dude, are you tired?

“I haven’t slept since you took over this ship! How could I? You’re dangerous!”

Calvin considered his reply carefully. “I know.” He said, eventually. “I know we are. We ain’t the bad guys though, man.”

“You’re still dangerous!” Hkzzvk insisted.

“I ain’t denyin’ that.” Sikes told him. “But so are lots’a things. This ship’s dangerous, ain’t it? Lotta power in here, lots of stuff the engineer’s gotta stay on top of, am I right?”

Hkzzvk said nothing, so Sikes shrugged and carried on talking. Okay, so he was keeping the alien awake, but really that worked to his advantage. Either the fatigue would help him calm Hkzzvk down so they could make contact properly, or else Hkzzvk would fall asleep listening to his voice and awaken rested and with some positive associations.

“Besides man, imagine yourself in our position. Ten years ago, we didn’t know any of this stuff. None of us had any clue what a deathworld is, or that Earth is one… I gotta be honest, it kinda scares me too. I don’t wanna accidentally hurt people, right? I ain’t a monster.”

“Then why are you here?” Hkzzvk asked. “Stay on your planet, where you belong! Go to other deathworlds! Why are you on our ship?”

“Would if we could, man.” Sikes grinned to himself. He was making definite progress. “Life ain’t that easy.”

“Why us?” Hkzzvk insisted.

“Ain’t nothin’ personal. You just got caught up in something important, that’s all.”

“I don’t trust you!”

Sikes sighed. “You should. Hicks, the only reason you’re still in that room is ‘cause we don’t wanna hurt you. Heck, I’m talkin’ to ya right now ‘cause we’re worried about ya. I ain’t askin’ for much, just want you to check in and let us know you’re okay.”

“I’m fine!”

“Sure, sure. Okay” Sikes soothed. He sat and waited for a minute.

“I… would like something to eat, please.” Hkzzvk ventured after a while. “And to drink.”

“Our rations wouldn’t be any good for you, buddy, and ain’t none of us know one end of your kitchen from the other. You wanna come out here and fix yerself somethin, we’ll turn down the gravity for ya. Whaddya say?”

“…And you promise that it’s safe? I won’t catch a fatal disease?” Hkzzvk asked.

“I promise.”

There was a thoughtful pause, and then the door cautiously opened. Hkzzvk peeked around it.

Carefully and respectfully, Sikes took a slow and unthreatening step back. He smiled, keeping his lips together so that there was no hint of teeth, and gestured openly to the kitchen.

He could see why people tended to compare Vzk’tk with giraffes - they had that kind of spindly, ungainly look to them, especially in their long legs and necks. But Hkzzvk’s attitude was more like a deer crossing the road and keeping a wary eye on the pickup that had stopped for it.

“Ship, set gravity in all areas to Dominion standard.” he ordered. The Negotiable Curiosity chimed and Titan woke with a snort as the gravity changed. Hkzzvk took an alarmed step back.

“Sorry bro.” Sikes called.

“Hey, the hermit emerges.” Akiyama sat up slowly. “How are you?”

“I am… fine. Thank you.” Hkzzvk ventured. Still moving like a nervous buck, he picked his way carefully out into the ship’s common area.

Sikes gave Titan a subtle headshake, asking for a kid gloves approach. He got an imperceptible nod by way of a reply, and Titan settled down with his head on his ruck again. “‘Kay. Lemme know if you need anything.”

Hkzzvk stepped warily around him and approached the food dispenser. A few taps later he had a small bowl of something that looked vaguely like dark arugula, a side order of something black and dripping with what Sikes hoped was sauce, and a small cup of water.

The bowl came with something like curved chopsticks. Apparently they were Hkzzvk’s customary eating utensil, because he was shovelling the arugula-ish into his mouth with gusto as soon as he had them in his hand.

“Dude, you had no food at all in there?” Sikes asked him. Hkzzvk flinched at being addressed, but then nodded. He skewered one of the slimy black things and slurped it up. Sikes caught the morsel’s scent and couldn’t stop a slight grimace from flickering across one eyebrow and the side of his nose. It smelled like rotting banana peel fermented in sour milk.

He took a step back and let the alien eat.

Eventually, Hkzzvk sighed and put the bowl down. He picked up a few of the uneaten leaves and twisted them together into what was unmistakably a kind of joint or cigarette, which he lit with a small circular lighter stored in a pouch on his arm.

“…I didn’t know folks out here smoke.” Sikes commented. Hkzzvk gave a complicated toss of his head that went untranslated, and flicked one of his ears.

The burning leaf smelled quite good, actually - sweeter and warmer than a cigarette. It reminded Sikes of fishing with his late great-uncle, who never went to the lake without his pipe and two Budweisers, and a couple of A&Ws for Calvin. Sadly, the old man had passed away before they’d been able to share a Bud together, but the smell coming from Hkzzvk’s impromptu roll-up was making Calvin suddenly thirsty for a root beer.

To his surprise, Hkzzvk finished his smoke by the simple expedient of eating the smouldering stub, grinding the embers out between his teeth. He shook himself, sending a wave of loose short-coated skin rippling down from the top of his long neck to the base of his tail, and sighed.

“Better?” Sikes asked him.

“Much better… Thank you.”

“Dude, like I said. We were just worried for ya.” He wasn’t sure what to read in Hkzzvk’s body language - for all he knew the Vzk’tk engineer might be mistrustful, wary, grateful or optimistic. He stood aside and indicated the open door. “You want the room, it’s yours, we won’t intrude, but please don’t starve yourself in there.”

Hkzzvk didn’t reply at first, but - still wary - he carefully retreated to the door to his room.

“You promise?” he asked.

“On my honor.” Sikes raised one hand solemnly to his chest and the other to ear level. For all Bedu’s dismissal of Hkzzvk’s intelligence, he counted on the jittery Vzk’tk to at least be able to interpret the gesture by context.

It apparently worked. Hkzzvk cautiously imitated him, then retreated into his room and closed the door.

“Nicely done.” Titan commented, sitting up again.

“It’s a start.” Sikes agreed. He grabbed an MRE and sat down to prepare it. Watching Hkzzvk eat had reminded him not only of his own appetite, but of the fact that he was burning through plenty of calories just by wearing the suit. “Aww, man. Jambalaya.” he complained. Somewhere along the line, they’d started playing a game where they had to eat whatever they grabbed, rather than saving the ones they didn’t want for last. Nobody was quite sure what the consequence would be for giving in, but none of them was willing to lose. “Real jambalaya should be fuckin’ spicy man, not this weak-ass shit. The Tabasco doesn’t save it.”

Fortunately, there was a loophole. “Trade ya for a sausage and gravy.” Akiyama offered, brandishing the one he’d just grabbed.

“Deal.”

“Always knew you had a talent for diplomacy.” Titan observed, once the meals had been traded and were heating. “No way you score that much pussy on your looks alone.”

Sikes snorted. “Blue fur and six limbs or not, he’s just a scared dude who got caught up in somethin’ bigger than him.” he said. “Useful knowing they smoke that stuff though. That’s good stuff. I can use that.”

“Y’know it didn’t even occur to me that maybe SOR needs a man with some talking skills.” Titan mused. “We’ve got so big and ass-kicky, kinda seems like a silver tongue’s gonna be low on the list, right?”

Sikes nodded, stirring his juice, but said nothing.

“Remember Ukraine? Operation SWORN BEACON? That shit woulda gone south if not for Booker.” Titan continued. “Maybe it’s something to raise with STAINLESS.”

“Maybe,” Sikes agreed. “Hell, we’re pretty fuckin’ high-profile too. You saw the whole Beef Brothers thing, right?”

Titan laughed. “Yeah, and man I bet Base is sore over that shit. You hear about the poll result?”

“No…?”

“It went ’Left Beef Best Beef, or Right Beef Superior Slab?’” Titan chuckled. “‘Horse took it three to one, man. Kicked Baseball’s ass.”

Sikes laughed. “Ah, poor Base… Feels weird bein’ part of a unit with that kind of media profile though, don’t it?”

“Very different to Delta.” Titan agreed. “Could be we’re all gonna need that silver tongue.”

He pulled his Jambalaya out of the heat and dug in. “Hell, could be the ultimate survival skill for mankind ain’t gonna be the muscles and stuff, it’s gonna be talking panicky ETs round to our side.”

“Bro, if that’s true, I’ll fuckin’ take it.” Sikes toasted the idea with his juice. “But I’m kinda thinkin’ it won’t be.”

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds.

Eleven

“You’re human!”

“Coo you, seen what straight in front o’ I.” Dread was… smiling? Eleven had to dig into the Hierarchy database to reference human facial expressions, and decided that what she was seeing wasn’t a smile at all, but was instead tagged with the term ’rictus’. It was not, apparently, a friendly expression.

It certainly didn’t look like one. Quite aside from that hateful glare, she could see sharp slicing teeth and four pointed grabbing ones, and her host body’s instincts were sending urgent messages to the effect that she should tremble.

Humiliating as it was, breaking character was not acceptable, so Eleven allowed Mwrmwrwk’s body to tremble, and even cower a bit and back away.

“But… you’re… supposed to be Chehnasho.”

“I an’ I don’ wan’ Babylon come callin’, sight?”

Either the translator had made a complete hash of his language, or else he was speaking pure nonsense.“…What?”

Dread’s expression got even angrier somehow, and he spoke clearly and slowly, as if enunciating for an idiot. “If they-” he waved a hand at the planet in general “Find out a human is here, then they either kill me, or Hunters will come.”

“Then why-?”

“You out me, you die. Seen?”

His tone was completely unmalicious, meaning that his words weren’t so much a threat as an alert of future danger to be avoided, like a warning sign on a crumbling cliff edge.

Eleven was not going to be bullied by a deathworld primitive. In any case, deathworlders outside the quarantine field were not to be permitted - a rule she could have bent or broken if she wanted… but she didn’t want to.

Internally, she sent a priority alert to planetary security. Externally, she squeaked a terrified “…Understood.”

“Why I chasing Sanctuary?” Dread asked.

“That was the job!” Eleven told him. “The client wanted Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk found. When we found him, we came straight back here.” Dread didn’t need to know that the client in question had been the Hierarchy.

“And he taken over this station?”

“Yes!”

“Were there humans wid’im?”

“I don’t know. We chased the wrong escape pod first. That one had three humans in it, a male and two females.”

His hand shot out so fast that even at Eleven’s accelerated processing speeds, Mwrwmwrk’s reflexes and sensory acuity weren’t adequate to the task of seeing it happen. In an eyeblink, he was holding her firmly by one of her belts. The fabric creaked as he hauled her closer, so close that the scent of him filled her nose. He even smelled angry.

“Where? When?!”

“Deep space!” Eleven answered. “Their pod was heading for the spacelane between the Allied Vgork Kingdoms and Domain space, not far from Freeport Eighty-Seven. That was… about [two months] ago. They would definitely have reached the lanes by now, and been detected.”

“Then what?”

“That depends who found them. Most ships wouldn’t knowingly take a human on board, and they were in no condition to fight. Their… the pod’s medical scanner was reporting that all three were badly hurt.”

The news seemed to enrage and disgust him. He let go of her harness and spun away. He took a deep breath and let it out with a frustrated vocalization before turning back and facing her.

“What. Does. That. Mean?” He asked, firmly.

“It means… most shipmasters would have just left them. Gaoians probably wouldn’t, but that’s a long way from Gaoian space, and if the Hunters found them first…”

She trailed off: his glare was only getting worse.

“…It means that they’re most likely either dead or still out there,” she summarized.

Dread’s nostrils flared and the line of hair above his right eye creased downward. She thought he was about to snap something, but instead he exhaled while making a coarse noise in the back of his mouth and changed the subject.

“Why’s that station so important?”

“It has a fully sized industrial nanofactory.” Eleven told him. “And A’ktnnzzik’tk is an ally of your species, which means he’s probably planning to use it for your benefit.”

“So?”

“So that is… very illegal. For several reasons.”

“So?”

“Oh, you should care.” Eleven told him. “Your species is only just in their post-contact stage, your economy couldn’t possibly absorb the introduction of even one functioning Kwmbwrw nanofactory. It would be catastrophic for you. Your entire manufacturing sector would become obsolete too quickly for your economy to adjust. Millions would be redundant, unemployed, starving.”

“…That bad?”

“It happened before. Have you ever met a Newex?”

He shook his head, a gesture she took for a reply in the negative.

“They’re a reclusive species with a tiny population, and they don’t leave their homeworld much if at all. About [two hundred years] ago they got their hands on nanofactory technology before they were ready, and it resulted in global economic collapse, which in turn led to mass starvation, plagues, rioting and internecine warfare. Even with all this time to recover, their population is still less than half what it was before the crisis.”

For the first time, he betrayed an emotion other than simmering rage. He put a hand on his jaw and rubbed thoughtfully, then ran that hand over the thick, matted ropes of hair that ran down his back. He turned away, paced thoughtfully, then took out his communicator.

“Not done wid I, yet.” He snarled. “Stay right there.”

Eleven watched the data traffic and had to suppress her emotional connection to her host or else she would have indicated triumph as she realised he first researched the Newexian crisis to verify what she had told him, and then immediately called his client, Shipmaster Mefr, host to Fifty-Three. He spoke slowly and carefully, disguising the unique cadences and idioms of what was clearly his native and preferred mode of speech, and reported everything, especially the nanofactory.

With plausible deniability for the information reaching the fleetmaster now established, Eleven’s work on Perfection was now done. There was only the matter of a rogue human to clean up.

Fortunately, that problem was about to solve itself.

“Right.” Dread pocketed his communicator. “Now. Sanctuary. I wan’ know everyt’ing…”

He trailed off, cocking his head at some sound that Eleven hadn’t detected. He gave her a suspicious glare, and then stepped twice to his side. In the quiet of the store-room, Eleven finally heard some kind of metallic, springy sort of sound that punctuated each of his footsteps.

Two cops burst into the room with their stun weaponry drawn and ready, and all hell broke loose

Irbzrkian electrical discharge weaponry had earned a large market share over the years. While they lacked the range, accuracy and rate of fire of kinetic pulse weaponry, the more than made up for those deficiencies in effectiveness. Irbzrk stun guns had been credited not only with subduing human fugitives, but also in fighting back against Hunter parties that had come looking for those humans. Dread didn’t stand a chance.

Not that mere insurmountable odds were likely to give any self-respecting deathworlder pause for thought.

The police - two Vzk’tk - needed a moment to realise that Dread was not in the middle of the room but lurking beside the door, and then it was already too late. Eleven wasn’t sure what she had been expecting from him, but the human seemed to have absolutely no compunctions about violence. The first officer through the door didn’t even have time to order him to surrender before Dread lashed out with enough force to pulp the poor creature’s forearm. It collapsed, shrieking like some kind of malfunctioning industrial machine and cradling its ruined limb.

The second fared no better. It tried to shoot at Dread, but the human flung himself to the ground, then used the interval as the cop’s gun was recharging its capacitors to shoot again to launch himself forwards. He crashed into the Vzk’tk officer’s legs and broke three of them - the officer crashed to the ground, screaming.

Eleven ran.

She flinched as a stun-gun shot that would have fried her host outright missed by a hand’s width the second she burst through the door. There were five more security officers in the alleyway, who beckoned urgently for her to get out of the way, and aimed at the door again.

What came through it wasn’t Dread, but the billow of black cloth was convincing enough for all of them to fire at once. Dread had removed his robes and thrown them out of the door in front of him. The garment ignited and fell to the ground burning, but Dread was right behind it and pounced over the flaming cloth.

Eleven had just enough time to solve the mystery of his too-long, Chehnasho-like legs. Under his robes, Dread was wearing a pair of shorts, a few holsters and harnesses, and a pair of boots with some kind of cantilevered assemblage of springs and metal that elongated his stride, made him taller and created the appearance of having digitigrade feet.

They also, it seemed, gave him a mechanical advantage. Eleven had the data on how agile humans were in standard gravity, but Dread’s leap was enormous even by their standards, and when he landed he did so by crashing shoulder-first into the middle officer.

The unfortunate being went sprawling, grievously wounded if not fatally so, and the other four found themselves within arm’s reach of a deathworlder in a fighting rage.

Eleven was pretty sure he killed two of them outright. Dread’s right hand was a knobbled club of gravity-forged dense bone and flesh, and it lashed out faster than the eye could follow. One of the officers staggered back and fell with his head lolling unnaturally, and another collapsed with a visible dent mid-forehead that didn’t look remotely survivable. When Dread grabbed the third and levered her into the fourth, he did so with enough force to almost tear her arm off, and left both of the officers creaking their agony in a disjointed pile of broken limbs on the deck.

Oh well. In his rage, the human had now undoubtedly sparked a city-wide hunt for himself that would inevitably lead to his capture. Eleven’s work was done.

She turned and sprinted away, preemptively shutting down the pain signals from her borrowed body.

Sure enough, he caught her. With those spring-boots on his feet, he could take huge bouncing strides in low gravity, and Eleven was smashed to the deck in only five paces. In an abstract way, she sensed three of Mwrmwrwk’s legs break, an injury that once upon a time would have been slowly and agonisingly fatal, and which the very best of modern Kwmbwrw medicine still treated by preference with amputation and prosthesis.

She was roughly shoved over, and was now nose-to-nose with a violently enraged human. “Blood clot fi I call Babylon, huh?” He snarled, incomprehensibly.

Eleven followed the script provided by Mwrmwrwk’s latent personality image. “Not me! Somebody must have seen-”

“Shut up! I got t’ree eye. Wan’ live wid two?”

He tugged a knife - not a fusion blade, just an ordinary bit of sharp metal, not that it would really matter to Mwrmwrwk’s flesh, not with deathworld strength behind it - from his belt and aimed it levelly at Eleven’s middle eye.

Oh dear. Eleven didn’t really want to have to endure that fate, and she sensed that now she could plausibly pass off her departure as Mwrmwrwk having died of sheer fright.

She ejected from her host, and triggered the kill subroutines in the implants as she evacuated them.

Crushed and already dying beneath Dread’s anger, the body of the already-late Mwrwmwrk spasmed, frothed at the mouth, and finally died.

Eleven reconnected to the first host that presented itself - a nearby Guvnuragnaguvendrugun who was being held back by the security cordon, and checked the feed from the kreewit biodrone.

She watched Dread take out his rage on the corpse of her late host, dismembering it in a few moments of pure animal violence. Then, snarling, he stood, looked around him, and took off at a run.

Eleven sent the kreewit to follow, but it immediately became apparent that Dread was far too fast for the little urban creature to keep up. She lost sight of him as he leaned into the turn round a sharp corner far ahead, and by the time her biodrone had reached that corner itself, he was gone.

Police vehicles thrummed overhead with their lights and sirens going full blast, and she reassured herself that his capture was only a matter of time.

She fed the Guvnurag host a false memory of becoming lost in thought, and dismounted gently. Her brief occupation would be overlooked as a moment of distraction: far better for creating less attention than to have the giant creature suddenly keel over dead in the crowd.

Satisfied, she slipped away onto the Hierarchy network, and began to compose her mission report.

It had, she considered, gone perfectly.

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
HMS Violent, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Commodore William Caruthers

Caruthers confessed to being a Star Trek fan, but something that had always struck him as amusing and odd about that franchise was just how much personal space all the characters enjoyed aboard their ships. Ensigns and Lieutenants were blessed with decent-sized apartments, usually with luxurious double beds and enough room to invite friends over for poker.

In reality, one of the great perks of being a senior officer was that you got a small cabin to yourself that was just about large enough to contain a bed, a sink and a desk. Caruthers’ was about half the size of Captain Picard’s ready room, let alone the opulent quarters in which that fictional officer had luxuriated. Meanwhile there were junior officers on Violent and elsewhere in the fleet who were sharing bunks.

That was the nature of life in the navy, and if the officers were sharing bunks then the ratings had an even more cramped and intimate time of it. Indeed, the cots and camp beds that the SOR techs kept in Caledonia’s starboard bay were widely reckoned to be the most luxurious sleeping arrangement in the fleet, and were thus the source of some mildly envious friction.

The cabin was important, though: it allowed him to sleep, and sleep he did at every opportunity. It might have been nice to unwind with a book first or something, but each time he had a chance to get his head down, he knew it was only going to be a handful of hours at most before his attention was once more required.

Answering phone calls was almost a reflex now. His hand was moving before he was fully awake.

“Ngh… Caruthers.”

”Call from the FIC, sir.”

“Put it through.”

The FIC was the Fleet Intelligence Center, housed on HMS Myrmidon, a team of dedicated and highly educated specialists whose job revolved around tending to the Watson systems and all those valuable FLOPS. Their efforts had broken the alien encryption in short order, and they were now busily reading ET’s mail. Thanks to them, Caruthers knew what his nonhuman counterpart’s orders were usually before they’d even finished reaching every officer in the alien fleet.

There was a delay of a second or two as the line was transferred, which he spent levering himself upright and massaging his face for clarity. “Chief. What news?”

“An interesting transmission from the planet to the fleet, sir. It looks like the SOR element were only partially successful - one of November Charlie’s crew evaded capture. It looks like she was tracked down and told them about Kirk and Mwrwrki station. Now there’s messages flying all over the ET fleet about Article Twelve of the Charter.”

Caruthers stood. “Damn!”

”Yes sir. If they decide to attack Caledonia, they’ll be doing it in about half an hour, assuming they stick to their plan of using their orbiting element as cover.”

“Thank you. Spread that intel.”

Well aware that he was a bit rumpled and unwashed from several solid days of being at work and snatching power-naps in between with only the odd meal at his desk, Caruthers would have preferred to grab a quick shower and a change of clothes, and he would have if there had been more than a half an hour in which to do so.

As it was… well, he was far from the only one. The standoff and constant state of readiness was probably keeping everybody in the fleet in similar condition.

Junior ranks got respectfully out of his way as he swarmed up the stairs to A deck and the bridge, where Violent’s CO, Commander Vaughan, was in the middle of taking the call from the Fleet Intel Center.

Caruthers double-checked the volume chart, double-checking that everything was still where it should be.

Vaughan put his phone down. “Well, that’s inconvenient,” he noted. “Shall we put a call in to your opposite number, sir?

“Best not.” Caruthers decided. “It won’t help us if we give away that we can listen to their communications.”

“If they decide to hit Caledonia now…”

“I think I’ve been more than patient enough with the ’Fleetmaster’.” Caruthers declared. He turned to the communications officer “Get me a line to all the captains.”

“Aye aye sir.”

It didn’t take long. The FIC had the art of rapidly disseminating vital information down pat - every commander they had was ready to receive orders. Bathini was on the line too, looking most exhausted of all but still dignified and fierce.

“Channel open, sir.”

Caruthers nodded his thanks, then addressed the camera on Vaughan’s console. “Gentlemen. I don’t plan on waiting half an hour to see if they attack, because if they do there won’t be a damn thing we can do to stop them from destroying Caledonia,” he announced, without preamble. “We’re going to strike now. Violent, Viceroy and Myrmidon will remain here with half the bulldogs. The rest of you will jump to beacon around that moon. We’re going to blind them, nothing more. EWAR and gravity spikes only until I say otherwise. Captain Daniels, you have seniority for the strike group. Just as we planned. Any questions?”

”What about that Gaoian ship?” Captain Ruckley asked. Ruckley was the CO of HMS Valiant and one of the most vocally pro-alliance.

“They’re to be spared unless they attack.” Caruthers, letting his tone of voice carry the implicit order that there would be no flinching if it came to blows. “We’ve entertained the possibility of contacting them and coming to some arrangement, but that’s not practical right now. Hopefully their captain is smart enough to keep his claws in. Anybody else?”

”What happens if they do succeed in attacking Caledonia?” Vaughan asked.

“Then we nuke all the heavy pickets.” Caruthers replied. “Including the flagship. If this goes tits-up then I at least want the galaxy to know for certain that we’re no soft touch when it’s killing time… Still. Bathini, have your crew ready to abandon ship.”

“Aye aye sir.”

“Anyone else?”

There was a round of general confirmation that they all understood their roles.

“Good hunting.”

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds.

Zane

Zane had hit on the idea of using jumping stilts early on in his career as an infobroker. At first he’d considered duplicating Xiù’s Gaoian disguise, but had quickly given up on that idea. Quite aside from not speaking a lick of Gaori, his proportions were plainly and obviously wrong. He was far too tall, and too much of that height was legs.

Besides, Chehnasho had the more sinister reputation. Given that all he needed was an extra twelve inches or so in the leg to make himself roughly the right proportions, the rest had been first engineering and then adapting to the damn things. He’d fallen over a fair few times as he got used to them. Over the three years he’d spent on Perfection, he’d grown so used to his boots that taking them off in the seclusion of his safehouse had started to feel wrong… But they’d saved his life today.

He called The Contact.

“I want out.” He told her, the instant she answered his call.

“I was about to cut you loose anyway. Your usual flare for subtlety seems to have abandoned you.” the Corti replied. ”I assume you will be leaving us? Making use of that ship you have stored away, hmm?”

The little noodly grey bitch had always been far too sharp for Zane’s tastes. It might have been her influence that saw him rescued from Aru, but that didn’t mean he had to like her. Especially not when she so thoroughly punctured his illusions that he’d been able to keep the Creation Stepper a secret.

“I’m not stupid enough to stay here.” He shot back.

”Stupid enough to out yourself and kill three police officers. What were you thinking?”

“Don’t give I the evil eye.” Zane told her. “Bein’ caught was a when, not a if.”

“Was it really necessary to kill them?”

“Hard to not.” Zane retorted. “An’ it kill or be killed yah know.”

“Oh yes, I know. They’ll kill you if they catch you, undoubtedly. They aren’t necessarily wrong, either. If the Hunters get wind of your presence…”

Zane’s normally limited and currently negligible patience ran out. “I an’ I done talkin’?” He snapped, “Or am I gon’ have to listen until the end of Eart’?”

“…I have cleared your debt. You’re free to go, Dread. A pity, you have been a rare and valuable asset. I wish you all the best.”

“Ya. I’d wish I good luck, but I doesn’t need it, nuh true?” Zane didn’t often compliment anybody, but then again he didn’t like very many people. The Contact was a rare exception - she’d always treated him with respect and fairness.

“True. Farewell, Dread.”

“Yeah, yeah. Live long an’ prosper, an’ t’ing.”

He ended the call.

Inventory check - he had his clothing, his jumping stilts, several hundred thousand dominion currency credits spread across five different fake identities, and a small spaceship rigged for going from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

He also had being human. Awkward as it might be to have to constantly disguise that fact, being able to out-think everything in the galaxy, out-run them, or if need be tear them limb-from-limb was not a blessing to be sneered at.

He’d be fine.

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
Heavy System Picket Utopian Aspiration, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k

“The orbital element will be in position in two hundred Ri’, fleetmaster.”

“Good. Remember, the human retaliation will be immediate. Every ship is to warp to safety instantly upon the target’s destruction.”

Xkk’ took a last look at the fleet disposition and satisfied himself that the deathworlders were about to get a nasty shock. Considering just how much death and mayhem they had caused in their short time on the interstellar stage, he didn’t feel even the slightest twinge of-

More than half of the human fleet vanished. All they left on the field were three of their larger ships, twelve of the small probably-drones, and the damaged-

The tactical display made an alarmed noise and its happy blue abruptly turned green. Warning icons indicated a sudden and total shutdown in the available sensor telemetry from his own ship.

Before he could give any order, it went yellow, indicating that it was nonfunctional. The Utopian Aspiration was no longer receiving any sensor telemetry. His view of the human fleet and of the battlespace dissolved into useless fuzz.

Every officer he could see started prodding and swiping uselessly at their work stations, attempting to salvage the situation.

“What. Just. Happened?!” he demanded, raising his voice to cut through the sudden hubbub.

“Comms are down, sensors are down, station-keeping is down, navigation is down!”

“Superluminal comms?” Xkk’ called.

“Active, but… Fleetmaster, every ship is reporting identical failures.”

Xkk’ rounded on the tactical technicians. “Sensors!”

“The diagnostic says they’ve… burned out, fleetmaster.” The technician give him a wide-eyed, quite panicked look. “All of them at once. They… it seems the humans hit them with extremely high-energy beams of radiation in their most sensitive bands, exceeding their-”

“They shot us?” Xkk’ snapped.

“Yes, Fleetmaster.”

Xkk’ turned to Mefr. “They shot us! Those… cowardly, honorless, treacherous dirt-chewers shot us!”

“They beat us to it.” Mefr observed.

Xkk’ ground his teeth and seriously considered removing the Corti from her post, but she had not in fact been overtly insubordinate. Instead he reined in his temper. “The other elements?” he asked.

The tactical officer swiped desperately through his volumetric display elements. “Third group report identical system failures,” he called. “Second group are still at warp, they’re unscathed and request orders.”

Xkk’s hand stabbed into his command display and selected the only icon that had a known position and condition - HMS Caledonia.

“Destroy. That. Ship.” he snarled.

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
HMS Violent, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Commodore William Caruthers.

“Their FTL element is coming about.”

“Myrmidon to predict their in-vector and spike it. Valiant to warp four of their bulldogs to Caledonia and seed white noise. Mister Morgan, put our bulldogs among those spikes.”

“Aye aye!”

The Watson systems and the decade of GUI research and development that had begun the moment people got their heads round the idea that interstellar flight - and conflict - were likely to feature in humanity’s near future were proving their worth yet again. The Royal Navy prided itself on its traditions and on not fixing what wasn’t broken, but there was no command tradition or ship’s controls that were built to handle engagements across distances so vast that the speed of light itself was inconveniently too slow.

The system had therefore been purpose-built, and it worked beautifully. The computers listened, interpreted, shared, transmitted, prepared. All a human needed to do was confirm their analysis and not only did Caruthers’ orders immediately reach their intended recipients, but the computers on those ships had already prepared firing solutions and plotted accelerations.

They also kept Caruthers appraised of the progress of his commands. He had ordered for Myrmidon to fire gravity spikes and so now as each step in the process of reloading and firing that specialist ammunition filtered through Myrmidon’s own chain of command, Caruthers could watch it. The order was received, acknowledged, carried out. There was an agonising wait of some few seconds as her gun crews swapped ammo feeds.

No sooner was that step completed than Myrmidon fired. On the commodore’s screen, overlapping red bubbles filled the predicted incoming fleet’s approach vector, saturating several thousand cubic kilometers with no-warp zones. Caruthers watched the icon representing that fleet hawkishly, expecting them to detect the impediment in their way and abort their approach in favor of a different angle.

They didn’t, which was excellent evidence for their EWAR assault on the alien command element having completely blinded them.

The bulldogs synchronized with the control systems aboard Myrmidon and pulse-warped into the midst of that field of gravity spikes. By far the slowest step had been reloading the guns, and the result was that when, two minutes later, the last undamaged elements of the alien fleet arrived, rather than pouncing on a helpless target and annihilating it, they were instead brought crashing back down to sublight speeds, and before they could get their bearings, they were pounced upon, and rendered helpless.

Caruthers watched with a grim expression as the last alien ship lost attitude control and came adrift.

“…Hail the fleetmaster.” he ordered.

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
Heavy System Picket Utopian Aspiration, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k

“Fleetmaster? The human wishes to talk.”

“Wishes to gloat.” Xkk’ grumbled. He stood, and shook out his mane. “Very well. Relay this conversation to the fleet and the system. I want them to see what kind of monsters these deathworlders are.”

“Yes, fleetmaster… On screen.”

Xkk’ scrutinized his foe as the human’s visage appeared on the large screen. Was grey hair a sign of age in humans? They all looked so lumpen and solid that it was hard to guess whether this Caruthers was slender or stocky by his species’ standards. The human seemed to have sprouted a rough blueness of hair stubble along his jaw and around his mouth since Xkk’ had last spoken with him, and the skin under his eyes was darker. An emote of some kind, or just a symptom of stress and fatigue?

“What do you want?” Xkk’ demanded.

“My apologies for striking first. I suppose I lost my nerve.” the human replied. “I have left you with…” he checked something outside of the camera’s field of view. “Yes, with one ship that has full sensors. Be sensible and use it to guide the others to anchor.”

“Toying with us still, predator?” Xkk’ sneered. He checked the status of every ship in his fleet, and immediately found the only blue icon - the Racing Thunder. Of course: the Gaoians. The furry traitors must have been feeding intelligence to the humans, it was the only way that Caruthers could have known to attack first.

“If you’re awaiting the coup de grace, fleetmaster, I won’t be delivering one,” Caruthers replied. “We’re not your enemy. It’s unfortunate that we came to blows over this, but we have gone out of our way to avoid casualties. I would hope that gesture counts in our favour.”

“You have made an enemy.” Xkk’ spat. “And your Gaoian conspirators will be put on trial for their treason.”

“Now that, I can’t allow.” Caruther said. “Their ship is intact because the clans of Gao have been welcoming and civilized toward our people, which is a kindness I won’t betray. They’re innocent of any treason.”

“I see through your lie!” Xkk’ snapped. “They’re your agents, and I’ll have them shaved and executed for their treachery!” Around the bridge, several subordinates stared at him in alarm.

Caruthers’ expression hardened. “…A word of advice, fleetmaster, from commander to commander: Give the victories to your men and take the defeats for yourself.”

He glanced aside, listening to something that Xkk’ couldn’t hear, then smiled and made no effort to cover his teeth - several of Xkk’s officers flinched. “…And don’t threaten the one crew in your fleet whose ship can still go to warp,” he added.

Xkk’ rounded on the comms officer, who sent him a text update: the Racing Thunder had indeed disconnected from the tactical network and had shot out of the system at a hundred kilolights, headed directly for Gao.

“We are blinded and adrift thanks to you,” he shot at the human. “Article Three-”

“Requires me to leave you adequate means to return to harbor, yes.” Caruthers interrupted. “I did. We’ll repair our ship now, and depart - how you get home is no longer my problem. Goodbye.”

The transmission ended.

Xkk’ was still standing in the middle of the bridge stamping his hind legs angrily - a gesture of frustrated rage entirely analogous to a human pacing and clenching their fists - when the comms officer found the courage to speak.

“A… message for you from Planetary Director Luz, fleetmaster.” he ventured, quietly.

Xkk’ glanced around the bridge. Nobody met his eye.

Without a word, he turned towards the wardroom and went to take the call that would end his career.

Date Point 10y4m1w5d AV
HMS Violent, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Commodore William Caruthers

“I get the impression you enjoyed that, sir.”

Caruthers sat back, removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair before tugging it neatly back into place. The full weight of several days of inadequate sleep was now resting on him, and he really wasn’t in the mood for gloating.

“The Gaoians?” he asked.

“Departing at best speed, with thanks.”

“Acknowledge their thanks and inform them that they may seek refuge at Cimbrean if they need it.” Caruthers instructed.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Caruthers opened a channel to Caledonia. When he answered it, captain Bathini was back under his flash hood again. “You can relax, captain.” Caruthers told him. “Our ET opposite numbers are neutralized, for now.”

“That’s fantastic news, sir.” Bathini nodded. “My reactor chief says we should be able to fire up main power in twelve hours.”

Caruthers tutted. “Nearly got out of this without a fight.” he mused. “Oh well. That’s still well ahead of the estimate.”

”Chief Andow believes in giving pessimistic estimates.” Bathini replied.

Caruthers chuckled, tiredly. “Good for him. I’ll hear from you in eight hours, then, shall I?”

Bathini laughed with him. ”I believe you will sir, yes.”

Caruthers gave him a thumbs-up and closed the call.

He was rubbing at his forehead and composing his log when the most welcome scent in the universe wafted across his workstation, and a voice asked: “Coffee, sir?”

Caruthers gave the Midshipman who was offering him the mug - black, sugary and double strong, exactly as he liked it - the grateful smile that only a half-dead man being given coffee could produce and accepted it. “Very much appreciated, thank you mister Faulkner.”

He sipped half of it while he recorded his log entries, then finished by swigging the remainder. A quick survey and check-in with the fleet satisfied him that they could step down enough for him to grab another power-nap.

Somewhere in the future beyond that, however, was the siren promise of a full night’s sleep and right now, that sounded positively decadent… but there were at least another eight hours of hard work and stress before then.

He stood, left the flotilla in the capable hands of Captain Manning, and returned to his cabin.

Date Point 10y4m1w6d AV
Heavy System Picket Utopian Aspiration, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.

Fifty-Three

The bridge had been a subdued hubbub ever since the fleetmaster had trudged off it as if walking to his own execution. Fifty-three had taken the opportunity to restore some order and had demanded a compilation of every sensor log they had of the human attack.

The data was depressingly sparse. Strobing beams of EM radiation, each perfectly tuned to their sensors’ points of most sensitivity, had lashed their fleet, with each of the human ships generating thousands of such beams. All of the sensors had been overwhelmed and blinded, orders of magnitude too quickly for the reaction times of any organic life-form.

Fifty-Three had little more to go on than the precise time that each ship’s sensors had burned out. It really wasn’t much, and certainly exceeded her ability to think of countermeasures.

No matter. The Hierarchy was only the front line of Igraen defence, and Fifty-Three predicted that even these meagre crumbs of data would admit of something that could be used. The humans would not hold their advantage for long.

The bridge went quiet. Fleetmaster Xkk’ had emerged from the wardroom, looking old, frail and devastated.

“Shipmaster Mefr.” he announced, quietly. His voice was barely more than a croak, but the silence carried it clearly to every ear in the room. “By the order of Perfection Planetary Governor Luz, it is my final duty as master of this fleet to appoint you as my replacement. All command codes and privileges are now transferred to you. The security of this system and its people is now your responsibility and duty, if you accept it.”

Fifty-three straightened. This was not ideal - Hierarchy doctrine called for their agents to remain in well-placed subordinate positions rather than in command. Unfortunately she was not able to refuse, and Mefr was too valuable a host to sacrifice on doctrine.

“…I accept that responsibility, and relieve you of it,” she declared, formally and carefully. There was a cascade of alerts and updates in her implants as the command codes were transferred.

“All ships are to prioritize repair of their navigational sensors.” she said. “We only need one to get us home.”

The order was acknowledged and followed, while a pair of Vzk’tk marines led the former fleetmaster off the bridge.

“If one of the ships repairs their targeting sensors, shall we destroy the human ship?” one of the crew asked.

Fifty-Three considered the options, weighing her responsibilities to the Hierarchy’s secrecy, to its mission and to the options appropriate for completing that mission.

“…No.” she declared. Out loud, she gave a convincing reason that would do for the meatspace lifeforms. “Their retaliation would not be so restrained as they have been so far, and I have no doubt the Hunters would relish the opportunity to raid this system with the defence fleet weakened.”

Internally the logic was more complicatedly political. This incident would certainly have cost the humans much of the goodwill they’d earned at Capitol Station, but to really twist the knife…

++0053++: <Message for 0020> I have a request.

As for the humans, even if they did have a nanofactory now, that would almost certainly work out in the Hierarchy’s favor. Every previous occasion where a species got their hands on that technology prematurely had resulted in massive recession and strife.

Given that the Hierarchy’s analysis was that most of the so-called “Allied” nations were already accumulating immense debt as they pumped finances into developing their fledgling spaceborne military and the Cimbrean colonization effort, the Hierarchy would be quite happy to sit back and let another mass of stress land on the human economy.

She settled in the fleetmaster’s chair moments before the reply reached her.

++0020++: A request?

Twenty was their infiltrator among the Hunters, posing as a lowly Omega communications monitor. It was a perfect position - overlooked, unsuspected, and able to feed whatever morsels of intelligence the Hierarchy wanted directly to the Alphas who made the real decisions.

The rest was down to Hunter psychology, such as it was.

++0053++: Perfection is currently without a system defence fleet… thanks to the humans.

++0020++: Destroyed?

++0053++: Better. Intact but crippled. Lots of meat for the maw.

++0020++: Please don’t use that hideous phrase, I receive it dozens of times a day as it is.

++0053++: Apologies. Can you arrange a Hunt?

++0020++: Easily, and I shall. …Done.

Fifty-Three carefully kept her satisfaction from showing. She was simultaneously about to finally demolish the Dominion’s goodwill towards deathworlders, and resolve the problem of her own unwelcome rank. It would be trivially simple to arrange for her host to meet an untimely end between a Hunter’s teeth.

++0053++: That simple?

++0020++: The Alpha-of-Alphas has been looking for an opportunity to deploy some reverse-engineered human technology. Trust me, the attack will come very soon indeed. Good work.

++0053++: Thank you.

Twenty did not acknowledge the thanks, not that Fifty-three was inclined to care.

She could smell the promotion in her near future.

Date Point: 10y4m1w6d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds

Chief Michael Andow

“Okay… Final checklist. Combustion chamber pressure?”

“Ten to the minus seven milliBar, chief.” Patel reported.

“Emergency breakers?”

Evans double-checked them. “Engaged, chief.”

“Ignition lasers?”

“Charged, chief.”

“Deuterium?”

“Pump primed, chief, Two thousand kilograms in the tank.”

“ESCC field?”

“Online, chief.”

“Sphincters?”

There was a round of laughter. Evans spoke up. “Clenched, chief.”

Andow flashed a one-sided grin at the younger man and called the bridge. “Captain,” he said, “reactor room. We’re ready for ignition, sir.”

”Excellent news. Wake her up, chief.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Andow patted Cally’s hull affectionately. “Alright girl. Let’s get you home, eh?”

“Amen.” somebody muttered

“Alright hooky,” Andow gestured to Patel, “do the honours.”

She nodded, took a deep breath, popped the cover on the fusion reactor’s main ignition, and thumbed the huge red button thus revealed.

It made an alarming slamming sound. Nobody flinched - it was exactly what they’d hoped to hear.

“Stage one ignition complete and burning, increasing deuterium flow… Stable.”

“Reaction temperature steady at eleven million kelvin.”

“…That’s our girl.” Andow grinned. The generator array was reporting nothing but green across the board as the forcefields deep within it simultaneously compressed, contained and enabled the fusion reaction, and bled off the surplus energy for electricity.

It wasn’t quite perfect - Andow had cut his teeth on gas turbine engines and supercritical water generators. He missed hearing the muffled howl of a turbine, next to which the fusion plants were disappointingly quiet. There was a steady low hum, almost inaudibly faint, but it just wasn’t the same. It didn’t sound like a gigawatt.

He grabbed the shipwide intercom. “All hands prepare for a change in gravity.” he announced, and hooted the alarm for good measure. He turned to Evans. “Slow adjust to one G.”

“Aye aye, chief.”

The sensation of gravity weighing down on them picked up. They’d become so used to one-quarter gravity over the last few days that it took a second or two to adjust to the natural weight of their bodies. Evans hissed as the shift dragged his wounded arm heavily downwards in its sling.

“LR?”

“I’m fine chief.” Evans professed.

“Nearly home.” Andow promised him. “How’s the jump drive, Hooky?”

Patel gave a huge, bright smile as she checked it. “Powered and ready to jump, chief. We’re above the yellow line.”

Andow snatched a fist in front of his chest in celebration, and contacted the bridge. “Sir, we’re ready to jump.”

”Many thanks.” came the terse reply. The situation on the bridge had to be just as tense and nervous as down in the reactor room. After all, they weren’t home yet.

Moments later, the alarm sounded for a jump. All across the ship, hatches were sealed, firefighting equipment prepared, and crew braced in case of another fire or power failure.

There wasn’t one. Instead, Caledonia shunted several megajoules into her jump engine, leapt through space in a direction other than up, and went home.

Date Point: 10y4m1w7d AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, Deep Space

Wilson ‘Titan’ Akiyama

Being SOR meant being on good speaking terms with pain. In fact, it meant having something that verged on being a friendship with pain. Pain was how they knew they were getting stronger. Pain told them where their limits were, so that they could push them back, and back, and back.

If you weren’t in pain, you weren’t improving.

That thought was becoming a mantra for Titan. His abdominal muscles had already cramped up and spasmed a couple of times now, as the unrelenting pressure of his EV-MASS forced them to push back. His limbs were tired, just from the simple fact of days spent living and moving around in a suit that weighed the best part of a hundred and fifty pounds even stripped down to the bare minimum as it currently was.

Even his mind hurt. A man could function on regular powernaps, but there was no substitute for a solid night’s sleep.

Preferably nude. Nothing heavier than his sheets. Maybe not even those. Maybe a shower first, if he could hold it together that long. The suit had all the necessary pelvic plumbing to be worn for days but that didn’t mean it was hygienic. In fact, Titan was feeling filthy, itchy, and disgusting. He knew that there was no detectable scent coming off him yet, but he also knew that the moment the seal on his suit was popped, the accumulated BO would bleach hair.

And there were still two days to go.

He had to face it: It was time to use another Crue-D injector. He’d held out long enough.

His buddies weren’t faring any better, though Rebar was suffering the worst. The huge burst of energy he’d expended chasing the escaped Mwrmwrwk through the marketplace had left him with a deficit that he’d never quite caught up on. He did his part just fine, keeping an eye on the ETs between sleep shifts… but that was all he did. Watch, eat, and sleep. His eyes were a long way away, staring blankly at nothing and leaving his thoughts opaque.

Akiyama knew how to help, though, and the burst of energy and vitality he was going to get from this next Crude shot would be of value. That fact made him feel better about finally giving in and injecting it, twenty minutes before Blaczynski was due to relieve him at the pilot’s station. That was plenty of time for it to work.

They shared a weary greeting and hug as they traded places and Titan headed back to the ship’s common area, feeling much better now. He was going to need a lot of recuperation, but for now the pain subsided, his muscles regained some of their spent strength, and he felt more alert and focused.

He sat next to Rebar and put an arm around the big guy’s back. “Ow.” he commented.

Rebar’s voice was little more than a rumble, way down in contrabass territory. “Yeah.”

“How’re you doing for…” Titan glanced at Bedu’s doorway. The Corti was still sitting there, as seemed to be his habit for the flight. “…Doses?”

“Two left.” Rebar grunted. He looked ashenly haggard, almost old. Despite the youthfulness that Crue-D use returned to everybody, there were deep lines in his brow and around his eyes and mouth. “Gonna… pop one tomorrow an’…one for when we’re landing.”

“Bro, don’t even worry about that. You know Horse and Base’ll want to carry you off this thing if you need it.”

“…You always gotta be the logical one, huh.” Rebar groused.

“Shit, bro. Take my fuckin’ sleep shift, too. You need more than two hours.”

Ordinarily, Rebar would have refused. This time his expression was relieved and hopeful, but he still asked “…You sure?”

“Pop a dose and get some real sleep in, man.”

Rebar nodded. He slipped open the blue-green Crue-D pouch on his belt, pulled out one of the injectors, then leaned forward and injected himself through the little port in his suit’s flank.

It wasn’t surprising at all when he slouched back against the wall and then rested his head against Titan’s arm. “Still pissed that fuckin’ Kwmbwrw got away.” he grumbled.

Bedu had been sitting, as he habitually did, in the doorway to his cabin and watching them. Now he spoke up.

“Mwrwmwrwk was always an intelligent one,” he commented. “And resourceful. She was a pleasure to work with.”

“Gotta give her…” Rebar yawed, “…points for tenacity.”

“Dude. Sleep.” Titan told him.

He needn’t have bothered. Rebar was already oblivious.

“…I don’t know which is more terrifying - those suits, or the fact that the four of you have only just begun to show real signs of fatigue and discomfort.” Bedu observed.

“Can’t really discuss them, man. Sorry.” Akiyama told him.

“You don’t need to. I am Corti, Titan. We can deduce much by observation. I know beyond a doubt that you’re using a Cruezzir-based medicine of some kind. The suit contains no powered components and does not seem to be at all loose on you, and you all dent the floor just by walking around.”

Titan shrugged for him, conscientously refraining from any comment. There was no point denying the Cruezzir observation, but he wasn’t about to confirm it either.

“May I ask you a question?” Bedu asked.

“Sure.”

“Are you doing this…Voluntarily?”

“Absolutely.” Titan nodded.

“You are clearly in severe pain. You are exhausted, incomprehensibly far from home, Cruezzir use has deviated your body far from the human baseline, and you have placed yourself in harm’s way for the lives of species other than your own… voluntarily.”

“That’s right. Hell, they tried to talk us out of it.”

Bedu’s brow arched upwards. Titan didn’t know if that was a native Corti gesture, or one he was imitating. “You were… dissuaded?”

“Oh yeah. Time and time again. The highway to become SOR is designed to persuade you to quit and go do something easier.”

“One would argue, something more sane.” Bedu commented.

“One would argue.” Titan chuckled, nodding. “But here I am.”

“In pain.”

Titan laughed at that. Rebar grumbled something and stretched out on the floor instead of against him.

Bedu just blinked. “Something is… amusing?” he asked.

Titan stood up and stretched. He may as well make use of the Crue-D in his system now to recover some flexibility with some extremely light exercise.

“…What’s funny is I was thinking about pain earlier.” he said. “I think maybe we have a different attitude to it than you do. What do you do with pain, what’s your… like, how do you deal with it?”

“I avoid it.” Bedu said. If the translator was getting his tone of voice right, the judgement implicit in his tone was that this should be the obvious and sane behaviour of any creature. “Don’t you?”

“Pain’s a good friend.” Titan told him. “And there’s not just the one kind. There’s the pain that says ’push harder, and you will damage yourself’ and another that says ’you are damaging yourself’ and another one that says when something else has damaged you… They’re all there to warn you, but that’s all they’re for.”

“And you ignore that warning.” Bedu sounded unconvinced.

“Because it’s too cautious for the modern world. Yeah, maybe way back when we were sharpening sticks and living in caves, our pain thresholds were in the right place, but now that we’ve got…” Titan caught himself before he mentioned the Cruezzir “…modern medicine and surgery and stuff…”

“And Cruezzir.” Bedu needled.

“Whatever. Point is, we can push on through. We call it ’mind over matter’ - willpower and…” he smiled, figuring out the most Corti way to say it. “Logic overriding more… base urges.”

Bedu inclined his head thoughtfully. “A strangely intellectual sentiment, coming from somebody so physically robust.”

Titan shrugged. “Bedu, I mean no offense,” he said “but the gravest mistake your species ever made was thinking that the two can’t coexist. For us, mind and body are the same thing. Healthy in one, healthy in the other.”

“That may be true for you, but-”

“Give me one logical reason why it couldn’t be true for the Corti as well.” Titan interrupted him. Bedu scowled thoughtfully, so he drove the point home. “There isn’t one. There’s no good reason at all why your kind couldn’t have what we have.”

Bedu gestured oddly, a kind of rapid twitching of his head as if he was trying to shake something out of his ear. “Corti as strong as deathworlders?” he asked. “What an… absurd mental image.”

“Why?”

“…I must admit you are right. Just by standing here and talking to me you prove that there’s no good reason for brains and brawn to not coexist in one species.”

“Just a thought.” Titan shrugged. “In the words of my people, ‘you do you’.”

“Is that a Japanese saying?” Rebar asked, sleepily.

“I’m American you racist fuck!” Titan told him, grinning fondly. “Go to sleep.”

Rebar grunted and rolled over. The odds were that he was in too much pain for now to truly rest, but the Crue would soon solve that.

Akiyama turned his attention back to Bedu. “…So yeah. You do you.” he repeated.

“And become like you, if we wish?”

“Why not?”

Bedu rubbed a finger against one of his long pointed ears, thoughtfully. “Why not indeed?” he mused.

Date Point: 10y4m1w7d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

”Joder!”

“Nice to see you too, Warhorse.”

Sergeant Arés stepped up the ramp and into the shuttle. Martina was the only one aboard it - only the SOR were offloading at Cimbrean, and as the only injury among them she had been shuttled down early for medical reasons.

“Shit on Jesus,” he said, “when they called down from Cally and said I had a burn patient to look after they didn’t say it was you! Are you okay?”

Kovač feigned nonchalance. “Oh, y’know, just… painful blistering burns.”

“Well, shit, let’s get you outta there.”

She took his hand and heaved herself upright on it. He couldn’t have offered better support if he’d been an iron bar bolted to the floor and ceiling. There was another rip of stinging pain up her back and she gritted her teeth.

“Crue patch?” Horse offered, hovering nearby as she staggered down the ramp, internally cussing herself out for just how stiff and immobile her back had become. She had to hold herself like she was tied to a board if she didn’t want it to hurt. She hadn’t appreciated just how involved her back was in walking until she couldn’t use it any more.

“Bit late…” Martina pointed out. “The window’s long gone.”

“You’re still healing, it’ll still do something for ya.” Arés promised. Martina rolled up her sleeve for him and he pressed the patch firmly to the soft skin on the underside of her forearm, where it started to dissolve and sink in. The process stung a little, but it was nothing next to what she’d been enduring for the last few days.

“There ya go. You’ll have a lot of… y’know, dead skin back there after the Crude’s done its bit. Gonna need to exfoliate.”

They started across the flight line toward the barracks, and Martina tried to put up with the repeated needle-stabs her gait sent spearing into her.

“You mean part of my recovery is gonna be a spa day?” she asked, taking refuge in humor to cover her discomfort. “Oh no! How will I cope?”

“Don’t celebrate just yet, smartass.” Horse told her, grinning. “You’re gonna need deep tissue massage therapy as well.”

“What next in the parade of calamities?”

“…From me.”

That brought Martina back down. “Uh… You.”

“I’m not talking some relaxation reiki stones chakra alignment bullshit here. Your connective tissue’s gonna need stretching out good if you’re gonna heal up without losing flexibility. That’s where I come in.”

“Only you could make a massage sound like torture.”

“It, uh, kinda will be… sorry.”

“So what, you’ve got to massage the whole affected area?” Martina asked.

“Yup.”

“‘Cause, uh… I burned my butt.”

His face shut down. “Well, I, uh…” he began, then cleared his throat. “I mean, uh, w-we can, uh, sort out a, uh, a chaperone if-if you, uh…”

There was the trademark Arés blush. Warhorse got a couple of shades darker and ruddier when he was feeling awkward, especially around the ears and forehead. It was adorable, which was not a word that Martina had ever guessed she’d associate with a guy who out-massed her several times over and could bench-press small cars.

The annoying part was that she knew her own nose and cheeks had gone red, and given how much fairer-skinned she was than him, there was no way the effect was subtle.

“It, uh.. I mean, not for a couple of… you’ve got to heal up a bit more first,” he continued, and cleared his throat again. “Probably. I mean, I’ve not actually, uh… inspected your… I mean, the wound.”

They stood on the asphalt for a second or two in mutual silence, considering the near future.

“…This is gonna be weird, isn’t it?” She predicted.

“Dude. You measure my dick once a month.”

“Still gonna be weird.”

“…Yup.”

Date Point: 10y4m1w7d AV
HMS Violent, Cimbrean system, The Far Reaches

Commodore William Caruthers

The phone rang. Caruthers permitted himself the luxury of grumbling about it before answering.

“Oh, no, come on…”

This had been the first time in several days that he’d gone to bed anticipating a solid six or more hours. Glancing at the red numbers of his alarm clock, he saw that he’d had barely two and a half.

He answered the phone. It felt lead-heavy. “…Caruthers.”

The report he received woke him up like a sobering sluice of ice water.

++End Chapter 27++

Chapter 28: Misfits

Date Point 10y4m2w2d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches.

Martina Kovač

“Ow, ow ow, OW!”

“And hooold…”

“Fuuuuccckk…. Aargh!”

“There ya go.” Arés released the firm pressure he’d been applying, and Martina sucked in her breath. “You okay?” He asked.

“I was right, this is fucking weird!” Martina declared over her shoulder, before adding “…And painful!” almost as an afterthought.

“Do I gotta remind you again that your job involves measuring dicks?”

“Ugh, you keep bringing that up.” She grumbled. “Yes, that’s weird too! I’ve just gotten used to it, okay?”

“Well, get used to this. Come on, I let you keep your underwear on didn’t I? Believe me, this’d go easier without.”

Martina huffed, and put her head down on her folded arms. There had been a lot of midnight fantasies since she’d first met him that involved Arés. Therapeutic massage was proving to be a painfully effective antidote to all of them, which just wasn’t fair.

She gritted her teeth as he repeated that same press-and-stretch maneuver on another deep knot of tense and damaged gluteal tissue. The deep muscular pain gave way to an intense surface stinging as he stretched the heat-tightened skin as well, working on the patch that was threatening to scar.

“Agh, aagh, aaagh… fuck!”

He cleared his throat. “Sorry… Seriously though, this ain’t all down to your injury. Your fasciae are fucked. Do you even know how to stretch properly when you exercise?”

“Oh God, you’re gonna show me, aren’t you?”

“Fitness and nutrition is my job, remember.” Arés reminded her. He started massaging her obliques. “If I was using the suit wrong, you’d correct me, right?”

“Right, right…” for whatever reason, the pressure and stretching of her obliques was easier to handle. Then again, she probably hadn’t spent most of the last week with them permanently tensed, unlike most of the other muscles in her back. “I’m using my body wrong, huh?”

“Lemme guess. You start off with your jog first and think, like, ’yeah, this’ll warm me up fine’ am I right?”

He was completely right. “…yeah.”

“Wrong. You’ve gotta stretch out.” He shifted to her lats, which drew an immediate involuntary noise of complaint out of her. “Damn, were you just tensed up the whole time?!”

“I was in a lot of pain, okay?!” Martina defended herself. He pushed the breath out of her by applying some unrelentingly firm pressure. When he stopped, she hissed her breath back in through her teeth. “…ow.”

“You’re doin’ great.” He reassured her.

“Gotta… represent for the tech team.”

“Doin’ good so far.” He repeated. “Last time I gave this to one of the Lads, he was fuckin’ crying, the big baby.”

To everyone and in honour of major Powell’s term for them, the SOR Operators were universally known as “The Lads”, even among themselves. It sounded a bit strange in any kind of an American accent, but it was just part of the SOR culture nowadays.

“Oh? Details?”

“Forget it. Bro-code says no, and so does medical confidentiality.”

“Dammit.” She sighed, grimacing as he smoothed out another deep imperfection in her musculature. “So is this bro-code written down anywhere, or…?”

“Sure. In a book of steel, twenty feet tall, hidden in a mountain temple. To even read it you gotta pass the twelve trials of manliness.”

Amused, Martina rolled her eyes. “Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and - OW!”

“Sorry.”

“-and blaming it on you, that kinda thing?”

“I was thinking more like… y’know, punching bears, cutting down trees, stuff like that. Was that a quote?”

Martina found her laugh. With all his technical talk of fasciae and his obvious aptitude and intelligence for sports medicine, it was sometimes easy to forget that Arés was in other ways quite uneducated. “Rudyard Kipling. You really don’t know it?”

“Should I?”

“My dad said it’s–” She had to stop, as he did something agonizing to her shoulder. “…aaaaargh! FUCK!! What was that?!”

“Your intraspinatus muscle. What’d your dad say?”

“Right, uh… ow…he said, uh, he said Kipling’s popular among combat arms. I figured you’d know it.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s more of an Army thing, I guess. Daddy was a Ranger.” She sighed and rode the next discomfort with little more than squeezing her eyes shut for a second. “I don’t know HOW he’s gonna react when I write him and say ’Guess what daddy? I got my butt scorched in space!’…”

“And your back.”

“Dude, the - oof! - the booty’s more important.”

“No argument here…”

She laughed, and he pushed through his final ministrations to her left shoulder.

“Okay,” he declared “That’s it for this session. Next one should be easier.”

He handed her a bathrobe and turned around as she stood up. She shimmied on the spot, feeling oddly limber and loose, and noted that her healing burn hurt noticeably less from the motion, too. It wasn’t perfect - she was still feeling sore and bruised from the firm therapy, and frankly exhausted to go with it, as if she’d just gone a round in the boxing ring - but she felt hugely improved.

“Wow!”

Arés beamed his patented goofy smile and bounced slightly in place. She’d always liked that about him, that despite everything that had happened to him and despite his sheer physicality and all the testosterone that must come with it, he was the guy on the team who smiled the most often and who came with the most inexhaustible store of puppyish energy.

“Okay, so what’s next, Doctor Arés?”

“Warm bath, plenty of fluids, and protein.” He replied promptly. “And you limber up properly last thing before going to bed and first thing in the morning.”

“Will do. Are we doing this again tomorrow? Only, I have to go stand in front of the old man tomorrow.”

“Aww, man, really? You don’t deserve that.”

She laughed. “Relax. I gave Davison my Crue knowing I was gonna get in trouble for it. I’ll take my lumps, whatever they are.”

“I hope he goes easy on you…”

“Arés, Major Powell’s the best commander I ever had. Whatever he decides I deserve, that’s what I deserve. Don’t worry so much.”

Date Point 10y4m2w2d AV
War Platform Lifebringer, Perfection System, The Core Worlds

Grand Fleetmaster Tk’vrrtnnk A’Khvnrrtk

The first thing that struck Tk’v about the human fleet’s deployment was its precision and expertise. Their fleetmaster clearly had an outstanding grasp of operations and tactics, was well-versed in three-dimensional thinking, and had a cadre of shipmasters reporting to him each of whom seemed to have similar insight and competence.

Considering how small the human fleet was, it was doing an admirable job of providing near-perfect orbital coverage, especially over the major population centers. Knowing what he did of human space combat doctrine, thanks to the records from Capitol Station, Garden and the recent skirmish in this very system, he was prepared to call it masterful.

Which was why he was determined that this was going to be a cordial and nonviolent encounter. The presumably-late former fleetmaster Xkk’ of Perfection’s system defence fleet had found himself pushed into a prestigious career dead end precisely because of his fatal tendency to focus on the problem directly in front of him and, frankly, because of his bigotry.

Tk’v prided himself on having avoided those pitfalls.

“Slow the fleet to one-quarter lightspeed and hail the humans.” he ordered. The fleet responded like the well-oiled, battle-hardened machine it was. Years of sporadic clashes along the Celzi borders had kept them tough and lean, and full of only the best officers and crew. None of the bickering political dolts who got sidelined into system defence, this was a Dominion wargroup, the very best. His orders were obeyed smoothly and precisely.

“Channel open, fleetmaster.”

Tk’v nodded to the comms officer, and spoke aloud. “This is Grand Fleetmaster Tk’vrrtnnk A’Khvnrrtk aboard the war platform Lifebringer. Our fleet wishes to approach peacefully.”

The reply was a handful of Ri’ in coming. When it did, and he laid eyes on his human opposite number, he was struck by the impression both of age and weariness that the deathworlder was giving off. Tk’v had educated himself extensively on their species, and was quite sure that the human was either unwell, or exhausted.

Most likely the latter, if this was the same ’Caruthers’ who had so badly confounded Xkk’. And he could hardly blame the deathworlder for physical and emotional fatigue. The man must be feeling a weight of responsibility for what the Hunters had done to Perfection.

“Fleetmaster William Caruthers aboard the destroyer Violent.” he replied, confirming Tk’v’s suspicions. A few of the Lifebringer’s officers exchanged nervous looks, and Tk’v could hardly blame them. ‘Destroyer’? ‘Violent’? Neither the classification nor name were calculated to inspire confidence in the peacefulness of deathworlders.

“Bellicose names, fleetmaster.” Tk’v observed. “I hope they are not a statement of intent.”

”Only toward our enemies, fleetmaster.” Caruthers replied. “I very much hope we don’t count you among them…?”

“You do not.” Tk’v assured him. “As Grand Fleetmaster of the Dominion Fifth Grand Fleet, I thank you for your defence of this our planet in its time of need, and my fleet stands ready to relieve yours of your vigil. Will you withdraw?”

”We shall.” Caruthers replied. Though he did not know the words and etiquette, his politeness and formality were obvious. He turned to somebody out of his camera’s field of view and nodded. The humans must already have planned for this eventuality, because their fleet smoothly climbed to high orbit and warped as one to the orbit of Perfection’s smallest moon. Tk’v wondered whether his own veteran commanders could have executed the maneuver so professionally.

Considering how short a time humans had been a spacefaring species, their competence was faintly disquieting. He could see why Xkk’ had panicked.

“Transports to enter low orbit and begin the aid drops.” he ordered. “Military vessels to take higher orbit and provide coverage.”

He admitted an expression of satisfaction to himself as his ships matched the humans for precision and finesse. He was determined to be peaceful and constructive, but there was no reason to show the Dominion at anything less than its best. Indeed, the Dominion’s best was exactly what these deathworlders needed to see right now.

He transferred the channel to his desk at the back of the command deck, so as to continue the conversation with a little more privacy and discretion.

“As one fleetmaster to another,” he said, once settled, “I would appreciate hearing your version of events, rather than relying purely on the sensor data. I’m given to understand that the system defence fleet was neutralized by you.”

Contextual information on the screen attempted to analyze Caruthers’ expressions and body language as he composed his reply. They settled on a decision that the human was emoting awkwardness and no small degree of remorse. “…I won’t deny as a matter of historical fact that their sensors were disabled at my order.” he ventured.

“Was that necessary?” Tk’v asked.

”I deemed it so at the time.”

“And now?”

Caruthers glanced outside his camera’s FOV again. Tk’v could only guess what he was looking at. After a few long Ri’, the human spoke again, choosing his words with care.

”I… feel a great sadness and sympathy that this attack has happened, fleetmaster,” he said at last. “But I can’t and won’t accept responsibility for it. In the circumstances I think our decisions and actions were warranted, proportionate and reasonable.”

Tk’v examined the preliminary estimates flowing in from the aid and rescue ships. “The early estimates suggest that the Hunters may have killed more than a million people, fleetmaster.” he pointed out. “And abducted who-knows-how-many.”

”I’m aware.” Caruthers replied. On Tk’v’s screen, the contextual information tentatively hazarded a cocktail of sorrow and determination, though the probabilities were low. Humans had such expressive faces that the software’s second best guess was a blend of anger and remorse. The differences, it seemed, were measured in millimeter variations in the precise tension of dozens of different muscles.

“They were able to do so because, on your orders, the system defence fleet was crippled and defenceless.” Tk’v continued.

”Yes.”

“To protect a single ship.”

“…Yes.”

“And you believe that this was ‘warranted, proportionate and reasonable’, fleetmaster?”

Caruthers sat back in his seat. The translator gave up on trying to read his expression. “In the circumstances,” he stressed, ”with the knowledge available to me at the time I made the decision - yes.”

“This event is going to harm your species, you know.” Tk’v pointed out.

”Thank you for the warning, Fleetmaster,” Caruthers replied. “But - from one commander to another, as equals who should be allies against our mutual enemies - I must ask what you would do if your species was threatened with extinction. What price would you be willing to pay?”

Tk’v did not reply. Instead, he ran a hand thoughtfully down the length of his nose, and nodded. “…If you are willing to lend your help a while longer,” he suggested, “we could use an out-system patrol. Your ships have the speed and stealth to perform admirably in that role.”

”Communicate your orders, and I will see them done to the best of our ability.” Caruthers promised.

Tk’v outlined in brief what role the humans would be performing - to loiter silently in the system’s outer icy object halo and serve as a front line of warning should the Hunters return, and to alert the fleet of incoming merchant vessels.

Caruthers listened earnestly and alertly, only speaking to first clarify, and then confirm what he was being asked to do. “We’ll see to it,” he declared once briefed.

“Thank you.” Tk’v sketched a gesture of respect and gratitude. “And… I extend an open invitation for you to inspect my ship, once the situation is controlled.”

Caruthers betrayed only a moment of calculation. “Thank you. I gratefully accept.”

“Carry out your orders.”

“Aye aye, fleetmaster.”

The human ships were already aligned and maneuvering. Tk’v had barely closed the line to Violent before they went to warp, displaying an alarming acceleration profile. Tk’v’s fastest scout ships could only barely have matched them, and he very much doubted that Caruthers had shown their full capability.

He turned his attention away from them for now, and toward the surface of Perfection. There was a lot to do.

Date Point 10y4m2w3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Major Owen Powell

“Send her in.”

Considering she was probably still enduring some lingering tenderness from both her injuries and Warhorse’s thorough rehabilitative ministrations, Kovač wasn’t showing an iota of it. She entered Powell’s office with parade-ground perfection, not a hair out of place, not a ribbon misaligned. Her left-face, attention and salute were all razor-sharp.

“Sir, Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač reports as ordered.”

Dressings-down required Powell to look for any imperfection, however tiny. Kovač stood rock-still and expressionless as he circled slowly around her, looking for the slightest blemish and finding none. That was a relief - he knew in his heart that he’d have done the exact same thing in her situation, and would have hated to make this telling-off any more severe than it had to be, especially not over a triviality.

She held the salute as he circled her, and only snapped it back down after he had returned to his seat, returned it, and slowly lowered his own hand.

“Technical sergeant Kovač, do you know the purpose of this meeting?” He asked, lightly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Normally, Kovač,” he said, “I expect NCOs to be enforcers of the rules, rather than breakers of them.” She knew better than to respond to what had not been a question, so he didn’t draw the pause out for long. “I would be interested in hearing your explanation.”

“Davison might well have died, sir. I believe that explanation suffices.”

Kovač was experienced and intelligent. Rather than playing it cagey she was appealing to an age-old reality of war, which was that the rules sometimes had to bend, especially in the face of suffering. Truth be told she was right - the explanation did suffice.

Nevertheless…

Powell nodded. “Certainly from what I gather he was looking at permanent disfigurement and disability.” He said. “In light of which your actions are entirely understandable. I might even say commendable….” He paused, then delivered the inevitable “…However. I must find that they were not acceptable.”

“As NCO in charge of suit systems one of your principal duties is to ensure that all SOR personnel, yourself included, are mission ready at all times. The use of Crue-D is restricted to SOR not only for that reason, but also because our supply of it is so limited. We simply do not have enough to administer to every wounded man and woman in all the allied services who suffers a grievous injury. I know you understand this rationale. Much as I appreciate that it’s difficult to be cold when faced with suffering like that, the restriction exists for a reason. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

He picked up a folded piece of paper. “In light of the circumstances, I have written this Letter of Counseling,” He said, handing it over, “Which shall be maintained in your Regimental records until such time as I see fit to dispose of it. This is not a punishment but it is a stern warning and it is evidence, which you should not compound with further incidents. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir.” Kovač was good at not giving anything away, but Powell was looking for the very subtlest of tells, and decided that she was receiving exactly what she had known was coming and was prepared to accept.

“Read it.”

She did so, diligently, and signed it after Powell had outlined the assorted legal necessities.

“Very well.” Powell stood, rounded the desk and leaned against it. “Just a parting comment, and this is more… informal.” He added. Kovač didn’t break posture. “The ideals of the SOR are Humility, Service and Selflessness.” He reminded her, not that he needed to. Everyone in the Regiment knew the ideals. “Calculated gambles with your career for what you think is a good and justified cause, well… If, Heaven forfend, you should ever find yourself needing to make a similar choice in future, I want you to remember that the regiment needs you, Kovač. We have a lot of talented people here, and they need both your expertise… and the example you set.”

Her composure finally showed a minor flaw - she blinked. “…Yes sir.”

Powell made a satisfied ’hmm’ and returned to his chair.

“Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač, you are dismissed.”

Martina Kovač

Warhorse was loitering a respectful but nearby distance from the major’s office. She’d protested that he needn’t: he’d insisted.

“How’d it go?” he asked, following slightly behind her, given that the base’s narrow hallways and his own bulk prohibited side-by-side perambulations.

“I got exactly what was coming to me.” Martina told him, allowing herself a satisfied smile. Powell’s veiled compliment at the end there had done much to lift her spirits. It was good to know that the old man had disciplined her out of obligation - like everybody else in the unit she was slightly in awe of him, and knowing that he was as much on her side as he could be in the circumstances was a real boost.

“That’s… good?” Adam hazarded.

She smiled and nodded. “LoC.”

“That’s still a punishment…” Arés pointed out.

“You’ve never had one?”

“Not yet.”

“You will.” Martina predicted. “Everybody gets one sooner or later and, hell, that was nothing. Believe me, it could have been a lot worse…” She stopped and turned to him. “But y’know what? I saved a guy’s face, and maybe his life. Fucking. Worth it.”

“…Feels good, don’t it?” Adam agreed.

“Yup. Just need to heal up and I can call this one a win.”

“Oh, yeah. About that.” he said. “Got a decision for ya.”

“Shoot.”

“Okay, so we can keep on with the rehab like we have been, or we could go Crue-assisted.” He said. “It’ll go twice as quick, but it’ll hurt more.”

Martina sighed. She was getting kinda sick of pain. Which in fact meant that there was no sense in prolonging it.

“Do you know what body-slamming into red hot metal feels like?” She asked. He shook his head. “I do. I can handle the Crue regime.”

He grinned. “Attagirl.”

Date Point 10y4m2w3d AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota , USA, Earth.

Xiù Chang

Allison had a musical laugh - it started deep inside her and bubbled up like water. It was a nice compliment to Julian’s filthy throaty chuckle. Perfect for drawing out of them with campfire stories after sunset.

“Oh my God, really?” You couldn’t smell it or anything?”

Xiù shrugged with a faintly embarrassed laugh. “I didn’t know what alcohol smells like! And uh… Yeah, Talamay is, well…. Actually it’s about as strong as this beer.” she waggled the bottle for emphasis. Beer had come as a surprise, considering that the only other alcoholic drinks she had to compare it to were red wine and Talamay. She hadn’t expected cold, fizzy and bitter to translate to something she enjoyed, but in fact once she got past that and found the wheaten and even fruity flavors lurking underneath she’d converted, much to Allison’s delight.

Julian was poking at the burning wood with a stick, assessing it for when they could put the meat over it. She could see his teeth twinkling in the firelight.

“How much did you have?” Allison asked.

“Uh…” Xiù put her head back and stared at the stars, thinking. It was nice to imagine that one of them was Gaoyn, even though she knew that particular sun was much too far away to be seen by the naked eye. “We got so used to how I drank more water and had a bigger appetite than the Mothers that… well, they were drinking shot glass sized measures, and I was having it in more like a highball glass.”

“And Gaoians really don’t get drunk?” Julian asked.

“No. They just like the taste.”

“How does that work?” Julian wondered. “It’s the same solvent and they’re not that biologically different to us…it’s got to get into their bloodstream, right?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Xiù shrugged. “All I know is, they don’t get drunk. They were all kinds of surprised when I started giggling and stumbling around and then fell asleep.”

Allison made a snrrk sound and aborted the swig she’d been about to take of her own beer.

“You’re a lotta fun when you’re drunk, though,” she noted.

“I’m fun when I’m sober too!” Xiù objected.

“And even more fun when you’re drunk!” Allison nodded. Her grin broadcast pure teasing.

Xiù shot her a mock-bitchy pout, which Allison returned and they spent a few seconds pulling increasingly silly faces at each other before Xiù pulled out a trick she hadn’t done since she was a little girl and touched the tip of her nose with her tongue while squinting.

Whatever the subconscious rules of their completely impromptu game were, she considered it a win when Allison’s splutter and laugh ruined her next attempt.

“Penalty! Finish your drink!” Xiù ordered her.

“Awww! …Yes ma’am.”

“Good girl.” Xiù loved that little back-and-forth. Out of solidarity, she finished her bottle along with Allison.

“More?” Julian offered. He reached to his right and knocked on the cooler full of ice water and beer bottles.

Allison shuffled up next to Xiù. “I think he’s trying to ply us with drink,” she observed.

“I think he is!” Xiù agreed. “…I say we let him.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well alright! Ply away, Etsicitty.”

“Yes ma’am!”

Xiù smiled to herself as he selected two fresh cold bottles from the cooler and accepted the ’good boy’ this earned him with a quiet smile. Apparently happy that they were ready to cook, he also grabbed the tupperware with its garlic and lemon chicken breasts and flipped them onto the metal grill where they hissed and steamed beautifully.

“…I’m going to miss this.” Xiù decided, looking around. Once upon a time, she would have thought that being in the woods after sundown surrounded by trees and animal noises would have been terrifying. Instead, the house and property that Julian had inherited from his grandfather felt cozy, in the little stain of firelight. “I love it here.”

“We’ve got another week before we have to leave, babe.” Allison told her.

“And you get to fly a spaceship.” Julian pointed out. “I love this place too, but come on, tell me you aren’t excited.”

“…A little bit.” Xiù admitted, taking refuge in massive understatement. She’d found time to call home and talk to her parents during the week, and had found it easier with some distance and with Julian and Allison there for support. Hearing the envy in her brother Wei’s voice had been delicious, which was so wrong of her, but still…

“Liar.” Allison accused fondly. “You can’t wait.”

“Okay, okay, sorry!” Xiù laughed. “You’re right.”

“What’s there left to do anyway?” Allison asked.

“Nothing.” Julian replied. “All the jobs are done. We’ve got a week to relax and be free.”

“So that’s why you suddenly decided to celebrate.” Allison snapped her fingers. “Shoulda guessed.”

“So, um… what are we going to do for that week?” Xiù asked. It was dawning on her that her life had been so driven by objectives over the last several years that suddenly having nothing to do was actually a daunting and alarming prospect.

“Uh…” Julian hesitated. “…Actually, I don’t know.”

They looked at Allison, whose expression was suddenly that of a woodland creature staring at the lights of a speeding truck. “Uh… we could…?”

They sat in mutual awkward cluelessness for about ten seconds before Julian finally laughed. “Seriously, do we-? Do none of us know how to just take a load off?”

“I… guess not.” Xiù said.

“Hey, we do!” Allison disagreed. “Movie nights?”

“Every day for a week?” Julian asked. “That much Disney might kill a man!”

“You like Disney!” Allison frowned at him.

“Ever heard of too much of a good thing?”

“Well okay mister,” Xiù challenged him, “Come up with an idea.”

Julian turned the chicken over, thoughtfully. “Actually… I always wanted to see Yosemite.”

“The national park?” Allison asked.

Julian laughed. “No, the cartoon cowboy,” he snarked. Allison rolled her eyes and flipped him the bird with a wry expression, so he leaned over and gave her a kiss. “How about it? Quick road trip, visit some places we’ve always kinda wanted to…?”

He looked at Xiù. “Whaddya think?”

Xiù blinked, desperately trying to think of somewhere she wanted to go. Her parents had always talked about visiting the “old country” despite both of them having been born in Canada, but she sensed that maybe places outside of North America weren’t an option.

She selected the first thing that came to mind. “Um… I don’t know. Vegas?”

“Okay. That’s not too far from Yosemite, either.” Julian nodded. “Al?”

Allison tugged her phone out of her pocket, and for the fiftieth time Xiù reminded herself to inquire just where the hell she found jeans with useful pockets. “Sec’.”

Julian and Xiù traded a confused frown as she Googled something.

“Al?”

“It’s Memorial Day this week, right? Which means…” Allison lowered her phone, grinning hugely. “…The Carnaval San Francisco is this weekend.”

“That sounds pretty easy. Fly to Vegas, day on the strip, rent a car and drive to Yosemite, then to San Fran, return the car there and fly to Omaha.”

“Can we afford that?” Xiù asked.

“Julian and I got paid by the abductee repatriation program for the work we did on Kirk’s ship.” Allison explained. “We can afford it.”

Julian turned the chicken over again. “Hell, if all this legal shit wasn’t threatening the house, we wouldn’t need to take the Byron contract. I mean, I’d still want to-” he added, before Allison could say anything, “but we wouldn’t need to.”

Xiù looked back at the house. “So we fixed it up and now we’re just… going away?”

“We can enjoy the fruits of our labors for a day or two.” Allison assured her. “But I like this road trip idea! We were gone for so long and we’ll be leaving again, I think we should at least try to, uh…”

“Reconnect.” Julian suggested.

“Yeah!” Allison nodded.

Xiù’s own attempts at reconnecting had been disastrous. Her old friends had all shown up with an assortment of hugs, chocolates, cards and a beautiful red leather phone case decorated with a hand-painted golden heron from her best school friend.

She’d promptly not heard from any of them again after that. Xiù Chang, living ghost - remembered fondly, but everyone had already mourned her and moved on. Having her pop up alive again, ten years later and five years too young thanks to the effects of stasis… It had been too awkward for everybody involved.

She decided not to mention her doubts that any of them could really connect any longer. Allison was far too headstrong to be gracefully talked out of something she was enthusiastic for, and in his own quiet way Julian was even more tenacious still.

Besides… Xiù was self-aware enough to know that she was a natural introvert, and she was feeling the familiar inertia of all introverts being pulled on by a more extroverted personality like Allison. It was counterbalanced by the knowledge that Al was entirely correct, and that she would enjoy herself, if only she allowed herself to be led.

“Fine, fine!” She smiled. “Let’s do it.”

Julian turned the chicken over, then clicked his tongue irritably. “Forgot the plates.”

“I’ll get them.” Allison sprang to her feet and headed back indoors.

“It’s ready?” Xiù asked. She crawled forward to get a closer look “That was fast.”

“Not yet.” Julian said. “It’s uh… gonna need a while longer yet…”

“Smells delicious.” Xiù turned toward him and suddenly became aware of just how close they’d unconsciously gotten. “Um…”

There was a long, hopeful moment where every detail became crystal clear - the way his breath was shaky in the inhale and he didn’t exhale at all: the supple play of the muscles in his throat, the way his mouth opened slightly, the way she could see, up close, that he was longingly watching her lips.

Her own expression was probably a perfect mirror image of his.

He turned his head slightly, called “…Al?” and the moment fell apart. Not for the first time, Xiù sat back and tried not to resent Allison for her ’ask first’ policy. Julian sagged, sighed out his caught breath and cleared his throat.

Allison’s voice floated out of the kitchen window. “Yeah?”

“…Never mind.”

“What?”

“Never mind!”

“…Okay!”

Julian sighed and, for something to do, he flipped the meat again. “…Dammit.”

Xiù self-consciously tidied some hair out of her face. “Um….are we…?” she began.

Julian smiled for her. “I’ll talk with her.” he promised. “I just…“ He raised his hand to gesticulate something, but whatever idea he’d been about to express, the words clearly eluded him.

Somehow, though, Xiù knew exactly what he meant. She would have replied, said something, except that Allison chose that moment to push the screen door open with her butt and emerge from the house carrying plates and cutlery in one hand and a bowl of mixed salad in the other.

“So!” she said, without preamble and apparently too eager to start planning their trip to notice Xiù’s and Julian’s awkwardness. “Vegas, huh?”

Xiù looked to Julian, who sniffed a silent laugh, smiled, shook his head and returned to tending the meat.

“…yeah.” She said. “I had this dream one time…”

Date Point 10y4m2w3d AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Bedu

What surprised Bedu was how businesslike the humans were despite their considerable discomfort. They were all complaining and groaning now… but the moment the word arrived to stand up and prepare for boarding, they had immediately laid out their equipment neatly in plain sight and had then stood against the wall of the ship’s common area while the ship came to a relative halt and prepared to be boarded.

When the unmistakable sound of the airlock cycling began, they turned, pressed their hands to the wall above their heads, and waited. Bedu was at a loss as to why, but his speculation was soon answered when, once the lock cycled, five more humans in that thick space armor of theirs bustled efficiently onto his ship.

In any other situation he might have used the term ’brandishing’ their weapons, but in fact they were far too clinical and workmanlike for that word to apply. Those guns were being held in the tight, snappy grip of elites who knew exactly how to use them, and who didn’t need to wave them around to draw attention to the possibility of future violence.

There was a short, tense and efficient interlude as each of his captors’ heads was subjected to a scan of some kind. Only once all four had been pronounced ’green, whatever that meant, did they relax. The weapons were put away, the body language changed. Smiles and hugs and alarmingly physical gestures of affection were roundly shared. In that second they went from utterly professional killing machines to the very best of friends, reunited and excited about it.

One of them remained aloof from the cycle of affection. Not that he was standoffish - quite the reverse, he welcomed Rebar, Titan, Snapfire and Starfall with obvious affection, but it was a more… detached affection.

The Corti had no words for ’fatherly’ or ’brotherly’.

Bedu soon found himself under the taciturn care of one of the smaller humans, referred to by the others as ’Highland’. Two others, both of whom were behemothic slabs of muscle laden with an alarming amount of equipment, seemed to be the medical experts, and they rushed to attend to their exhausted comrades. Bedu could understand why - over the course of what they called a “week”, those four men had gone from being imposing forces of physical force, to groaning statues who barely moved except when compelled to by need of nutrition or duty change.

Their predicament was an effective antidote to any notion that humans were invincible. Greatly more durable than anybody else could ever hope to be, yes, but Bedu had spent a week watching them slowly fight a losing battle with their own equipment. They were people to him now. Nice people even: Courteous, clever, conscientious people whom he was forced to watch suffer.

Even for Corti, that was an uncomfortable situation.

The slightly aloof one, whom he took to be the leader, approached him once things had settled down. He was among the smallest of them, but still easily out-massed Bedu several times over.

“Bedu?” he asked.

“Yes.”

The leader nodded. “My name’s ’Stainless’. You’ve been detained for questioning as a witness in a matter pertaining to the freedom and security of the peoples of Earth and Cimbrean, and of all humans.” he announced, formally. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

“As it happens, I’ve rather enjoyed the inconvenience.” Bedu stood. “Besides, this detention is legal so long as you reimburse me for my time…”

“That wouldn’t be my responsibility.” Stainless informed him. “But everything should be above-board and legal, yes.”

“Excellent…. Are your subordinates going to be well? They seem to have suffered rather badly during the flight.”

Stainless glanced over at his men.

“They’ll be fine,” he said. “Thank you for your concern.”

“So what happens now?” Bedu asked.

There was a lurch, and the ship chimed its usual alert sound for accelerating into a re-entry.

Bedu inclined his head. “The planet Cimbrean, I presume?”

“That’s right.” Stainless nodded. He exchanged a few quiet words with Titan that Bedu didn’t catch, and gave the (presumably) younger man a pat on the shoulder as he staggered and groaned his way forward to help with the re-entry.

Bedu excused himself and took inventory of his belongings, making sure they were all put away and that he had memorised their exact position. He doubted that he would come back to find anything missing, but it would at least be nice to know if they had been moved or searched.

The landing wasn’t as smooth as Mwrmwrwk would have managed, but it was by no means a bad one. In fact, humans being the high-gravity species they were, and capable of handling really quite serious jolts, they probably felt it was perfectly smooth.

Through the wall, Bedu heard Hkzzvk bleat in alarm. Snapfire called something comforting along the lines of “it’s okay buddy, we just landed!” and Hkzzvk’s panicked noises immediately ceased.

Rebar, Titan, Snapfire and Starfall disembarked first, though Starfall was leaning heavily on the largest of his comrades, and Snapfire had to be carried, slung across the shoulders of the second-largest, whose careful footfalls still made the deck plating groan and protest. Bedu watched with mingled awe and disbelief - Snapfire had struck him as being so heavy that even medium stevedore drones would have struggled with his mass. While the feat certainly didn’t look effortless for his comrade, neither did it look like it was pushing his limits.

Bedu and Hkzzvk were carefully shepherded down the ramp by Stainless, Highland and one of the large ones, whose moniker Bedu had not learned. They were met at the bottom by a consignment of humans not wearing armored pressure suits, but instead clad in looser and clearly more comfortable working garments. These were still armed - a ludicrous consideration given that either one of them was comfortably strong enough to dismember anybody who wasn’t human - but the weapons were small, and holstered.

“This way please.” one of them said, waving his hand toward a nearby vehicle. Closer still, the four aching SOR men were being aided onto a transport whose rear step was almost brushing the ground.

Bedu looked around. Cimbrean was a pleasant planet, but there was something… strange about it, that he just couldn’t quite identify. Maybe it was the humans themselves - their every movement seemed faintly awkward, as if they weren’t quite walking naturally. Of course, they wouldn’t be, would they? Cimbrean’s gravity was rather higher than Bedu’s native norm, but must be much lower than Earth’s.

Or maybe it was the auditory landscape. Corti ears were large and sensitive, well adapted to the comparatively low atmospheric density of Origin. In Cimbrean’s denser air, every noise was a little louder and a little deeper and they carried distant hints of shouting, construction work, traffic, and alien laughter. Only that last one was an unfamiliar sound of course, but the cadences and sheer business…

Hkzzvk provided the answer. He trudged down the ramp, shying away from the humans and glancing nervously around as if looking for somewhere to run, but as he always did whenever they landed, he paused and took a deep breath.

He promptly buried his nose in his hands, croaking aggrievedly to himself.

“Hkzzvk?” Bedu asked.

“This planet reeks.” Hkzzvk explained.

Corti had very little to speak of in the way of a sense of smell, so Bedu deferred to his crewman’s superioriority in matters olfactory. “In what way?”

Hkzzvk raised his head and his nostrils flared. “It smells of predators.” he decided. “and … urgh, I don’t know what most of these smells are, but I don’t like them.”

That would be it. Weak as Corti nasal acuity was, the pheromones and scents on the air would still be present on a subconscious level, informing his mood. He nodded, satisfied that the mystery was solved.

“Well,” he said. “All the more reason to be done with this interview and get on our way.”

“What about our employers?” Hkzzvk asked.

Corti didn’t smile often, but when they did it was usually because they had scored some small moment of empowerment. Bedu allowed himself an unabashed expression of triumph, and borrowed a human word of unmatched communicative potential.

“’Fuck’ our employers,” he said.

Date Point 10y4m2w3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), planet Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

Anybody who knew the “Lads” knew they weren’t superhuman. Absolutely pushing back the limits of what ’human’ could mean, yes, but it was difficult to be in awe of somebody when you regularly saw how much pain, inconvenience and indignity they suffered through.

Arés had put his finger on it - Martina was a bio-mechanical expert who had more academic training than most civilian surgeons and a broad role covering absolutely everything about the life-support functionality of every EV-MASS they had, including the ones waiting in reserve for qualified Operators who could wear them. It fell to her to dig through feedback and medical reports diagnosing the most minor of concerns with the suit and liaising with the Lads themselves on their own fitness and suit-readiness. It fell to her to sign off on every life support pack’s fitness for use, and it fell to her to keep the suit techs properly briefed on any concerns that needed addressing.

She loved to boast to her friends and family that she was in charge of a whole team of spacesuit experts, but the unglamorous reality was that many of the suits’ most important systems were below the waist and so, as Arés had pointed out, it fell to her on a monthly basis to intimately measure all of the Lads, and that was only the most minor of the several vital responsibilities she had that all involved the pelvic anatomy.

Put bluntly she had to think a lot about how much the guys pissed and shit, both in terms of frequency and in terms of volume. Those inelegant metrics were thoroughly effective at grounding her estimation of them all. It was a bit like knowing the directory of Spiderman’s porn folder, or which was Wonder Woman’s preferred brand of tampon.

At least her back was almost completely pain-free by now, thanks to some aggressive therapeutic massage and Crue-D treatment. Warhorse had declared that he wasn’t going to be able to stop the burn from leaving some permanent scarring, but when she’d examined it over her shoulder in the mirror, she’d decided that while the white mottling and dimpling down her right flank and buttock wasn’t pretty, it was still much better than she’d feared.

This was good, because today wasn’t a day for limping around. At least, not for her. When Vandenberg, Blaczynski, Sikes and Akiyama were delivered to the suit shop, they were practically stretchered in, and every single one of them was gaunt and pale with fatigue and cramping muscles.

For a change, pumping in the ice-cold water that was vital to persuading their midsuit layers to relax and shrink so that they could be removed produced no complaint. Getting the suits off was much more difficult than usual because the guys couldn’t pull as hard as they normally would, but off they came in the end. In fact in Titan’s case, they only freed him by getting Burgess to help with heaving on him - Arés was too busy lifting Sikes out of his suit and getting an IV into him.

Just in case Martina was still harboring any lingering doubts about how rough the Lads really had it, the stench was unbelievable. Bozo, who had been left sitting obediently in the corner waiting to be introduced to his new friends, promptly sneezed, shook himself and got the hell out of there with his tail between his legs. Martina envied him.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to deal with actually cleaning the suits - that was for the techs - but body biochemistry was absolutely her concern, so she told her nose to shut the fuck up and gathered what she needed from the the suits’ sewage processors, briskly took the needed blood samples, and excused herself to the safe atmosphere of the lab.

From there, while the samples were spun, had lasers shone through them and all the other assorted work that the testing machines did, she was able to liaise with the Protectors and keep them apprised of her results in real-time. Between them they quickly decided that the best thing for their buddies was to get them scrubbed up and bedded down on cots right there in the suit shop, with drips in for hydration and glucose, a maximum dose each of Crue-D, and a license to sleep for as long as they needed under supervision.

She was grateful to find, once all the results were in and she’d evaluated them, that in her absence the suit shop had returned to its more usual nasal background noise which, although it did include a strong note of body odor, at least balanced that note with lubricant, hot rubber, industrial cleaning agents and solder.

Warhorse had taken first shift in supervising his exhausted buddies, who were all fast asleep on cots along the dividing wall between the shop and the locker room. Out of their suits, they were an obvious mess - all four were sporting pinch marks, blood blisters, bruises, rash and the other trademark skin discolorations that came with wearing EV-MASS for any length of time.

They had a form for recording those - a stylized human body from several angles with a simple emblem system - crosses, hashing, plus signs and stars - for recording the location and size of different kinds of marks. He’d saved her a job there and begun filling them in himself, and they took a moment to double-check to her satisfaction that he hadn’t missed anything as best they could without actually moving or waking the sleepers.

“How’re their results?” he asked, once she’d satisfied herself and pocketed them.

“Nothing scary, but God. I wouldn’t want to have metabolite levels that high.” Martina said. “Sikes especially must be in agony.”

‘Horse gave his buddies an unhappy look over and nodded.

Both of them caught movement in the corner of their eye, and stood when it turned out to be major Powell crossing the shop with a serious expression, not that he usually wore any other kind.

“Siddown, siddown.” he called, waving them down. “I’m just checkin’ on them.”

“They’ll be fine sir. Arés and I were just discussing their bloodwork.” Martina told him.

Powell nodded. “Any thoughts on their recovery time?”

Horse looked to Martina. “Two weeks, two and a half?” he asked.

“That’s maybe being optimistic…” Martina suggested. “The rehab diet alone-”

“Right, yeah.” Arés nodded.

“Just a ballpark will do me for now.” Powell said.

“Three weeks, sir,” Martina told him.

Powell’s jaw worked thoughtfully as he assimilated that news. “Cally in drydock, four of the Lads convalescing, I’ve got Jackson wanting to train you and Baseball up for PR work…” he grumbled, gesturing to Arés, “General Tremblay’s gonna have to find somebody else for the embassy job.”

“Never a dull moment.” Martina observed. They all knew the subtle tics and tells that were Powell’s expressions, and she saw a silent laugh pull momentarily at the corner of his mouth.

“Aye, at least I’m not fookin’ bored.” he agreed. “Okay. You two bash together a recovery schedule and I’ll let the Navy worry about getting us a replacement ride while ours is in the shop.”

“Yes sir.”

Powell left them in peace.

Martina started calculating the rehab schedule in her head, and Arés was plainly doing something similar, albeit on his fingers. She tried and failed to stifle her amusement: He was so huge and prodigiously muscled that counting on his fingers made him look adorably cro-magnon, even though she knew that he was furiously calculating some quite sophisticated medical realities.

He didn’t fail to notice, and went slightly red. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?!”

She laughed, and pantomimed counting on her fingers while pulling the dumbest, most neanderthal face she could. He snorted, directed an affectionate middle finger at her, and went back to his mental arithmetic with a smile.

Martina pulled her notebook from her pocket and happily did the same. Apparently the therapy hadn’t killed off their chemistry after all…

Date Point 10y4m2w6d AV
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, Earth.

Allison Buehler

“Come on, honey, you’ve got this! First roll!”

Xiù was plainly having the time of her life. A loud woman with a broad Louisiana accent was cheering her on, and she wasn’t the only one - the four other players at the table were all calling words of encouragement. Xiù meanwhile was smiling nervously as she picked up the dice.

Allison laughed as she and Julian watched her imitate what others had done and blow on the dice in her hand, then cast them vigorously down the table. There were cheers, everybody collected some chips and Xiù pumped her fist, danced an excited circle on the spot, and eagerly accepted the dice to throw them again, drinking in the words of praise and encouragement from the eclectic mix of people at the table.

“Do you follow what’s going on?” Julian asked.

“She just rolled an eleven.” Allison explained.

“That’s good?”

Allison smiled. “Everybody’s ten dollars richer thanks to her.”

“Hah. That’s our girl!”

They watched Xiù share a joke with the lady from Louisiana - it was hard to hear what she said over the sound of people calling for a repeat performance - and bounced the dice off the far wall of the table. This met with a more subdued response, but still a generally positive one, and several chips were added to the table.

It was all clearly a bit arcane for Julian. His attention wandered as the croupier maneuvered her stick around and returned the dice for another throw, which was met with a more muted response.

“So I’ve been thinking.” Allison told him.

“‘Bout what?”

“‘Bout you and her.”

Julian turned to face her. “You’re still okay, right?”

“I’m fine! Are you? You’ve not really… y’know, moved things forward.”

“We have our moments…” Julian said. “It’s just tricky.”

“Moments like what?”

“Like… little moments. Where, if I was having the moment with you…” he leaned over suddenly and kissed her. “…like that, you know?”

Touched, Allison smiled. “So what’s tricky about that?”

“Well, you said we have to ask permission first and… I mean, I don’t know how to do that without it kind of… I want things to be natural.” Julian explained. “You know…”

“Spontaneous.”

“Yeah. It’s like… if we have to ask permission-”

“I get you.” Allison nodded. She sat back and watched Xiù throw her dice - whatever she rolled, it produced a neutral response from her fellow players. She took a swig of her beer to cover a rush of mixed emotions.

Julian saw right through her. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m…. kinda…” Allison sighed and started over. “I want to just agree that it’s a stupid rule.” she confessed. “I feel like I shouldn’t be so insecure, you know?”

“Hey, it’s okay-” he began, reaching out and taking her hand.

Allison squeezed his fingers. “No it’s not,” she interrupted. “This whole thing with her was my idea after all. A rule like that is just… it sends mixed signals. I’m not putting my money where my mouth is, y’know?”

“It is okay.” Julian insisted. “We’re all in this together. Xiù and me, we don’t want to hurt you, and if you need time to adjust to things then that’s fine!”

There was a cheer from the table. Grinning from ear to ear, Xiù curtseyed for her fellow players. She saw Allison and Julian watching her and gave them a huge beaming smile and a wave.

“Y’know, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Vegas,” Julian confessed, returning the wave. “I’ve been here before and it’s too… it’s just not my thing. But I love how much she’s enjoying herself.”

Allison nodded. For courage, she finished her beer. “Baby… I don’t know if I’m ready to scrap the whole permission thing yet, but the next time you have one of those ’moments’, I want you to promise me you’ll go for it, okay?”

“Al-”

“I mean it, mister. You kiss that girl the first chance you get. That’s an order.”

Julian stared at her for a second, but he knew when she was serious. He didn’t joke about with a ’yes ma’am’ this time: He nodded. “…I promise.”

“Good…” Allison scooted round and cuddled up to his arm. “I love you.”

He kissed her forehead. “I love you too, dummy.”

Xiù’s run of good luck came to an end with a groan and a short round of applause from everyone else at the table. She said her goodbyes, collected her chips and sprang over to Allison and Julian’s table looking thoroughly pleased with herself.

“How’d you do?” Julian asked her. Xiù had gone to the table with a strict budget of ten ten-dollar bets.

“I’m up twenty dollars!” she waggled a stack of twelve chips, thoroughly pleased with herself.

“Nice!”

“What about you guys, are you okay?”

“This is the best time I’ve ever had in Vegas.” Julian told her.

Allison laughed. “Same!” she announced, having never been to Vegas before. “It’s fun watching you play.”

Xiù grinned at them. “Okay, so Charlene - that’s the lady in the denim vest - she told me about this stage show she thinks we should go see, and Hank - that’s the guy with the belt buckle - he was telling me about this gourmet burger restaurant on the Boulevard and…”

She took Julian’s hand and pulled him in the direction of the street, babbling excitedly. Grinning to herself, Allison gathered their belongings and followed.

Date Point 10y4m2w6d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds.

Vakno, “The Contact”.

The early years of Vakno’s career had involved teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Not through any lack of skill, or a run of bad luck, but because she had early on calculated that whatever her odds of success in the infobrokering business might be, the most probable failure case was assassination.

It was, after all, how she had disposed of her own early rivals.

To that end, she had spent nearly all of her profits during those early years on personal protection. From bodyguard drones and the very best personal combat rigs, to the full splendor that was her office. Those spartan walls and that austere desk hid within them a package of assorted defensive technologies both physical and electronic that made Vakno about the most securely protected living thing in the known galaxy.

Nowadays, keeping it at the very bleeding edge required only a fraction of her assets. Her own sensor network had tracked the Hunter swarm long before Perfection’s defence grid. She had already evicted (and kindly warned) her client by the time they were entering orbit. When they had launched dozens of objects onto a high velocity re-entry course, she had been given plenty of warning to activate the very strongest shields she had, and retreat into the most secure sanctum below.

When one of those weapons - a kinetic impactor of some kind, a simple metal pole twenty times her height and bigger around than she could have wrapped her arms - had smashed into the city deck above her, its destructive power had ripped out the surrounding layers, crushing homes, businesses and lives, and gutting the supports of a major corporate skyscraper, which had not remained vertical for long.

Vakno herself had barely felt a tremor throughout the short bombardment. Shortly thereafter, her perimeter defences had sensed Hunters picking through the devastation, but not like any Hunter she had ever seen before. These were larger, even more nauseating in form than their ordinary kin and layered in dense fibrous musculature that reminded her uncomfortably of the few humans she had dealt with in her career.

Three of them had died straying too close to the bunker’s perimeter, and they had apparently decided not to waste their time cracking her shell when there was much softer meat to be had.

They had ravaged the city for nearly a day before Vakno’s sensors finally detected the return of the humans and several high-energy flashes in orbit, characteristic of lithium-deuteride fusion.

Rather than fight the hated deathworlders, the Hunters had departed with their holds full of slaves and their bellies full of meat.

So many slaves. So much meat. Even Vakno, dispassionate as she was, couldn’t help but feel the weight of panic and alarm against the walls of her rational self-control, pressuring her into reconsidering just how valuable humans really were.

When she saw what the Hunters had done to the crippled system defence fleet, however, she had to sit and meditate long and hard before finally recovering the rational control necessary to look at things from the human perspective.

And the question presented itself - How had the Hunters known?

It would be a long time indeed before Perfection recovered to the point where Vakno would be back to business as usual, and like all Corti she had a burning need to be productive. Her sense of self-esteem would not permit her to take a vacation during the inevitable lull in her business.

Not when there was so gnawing a question left unanswered. The raid was too precise in its timing, too flawless in execution and too large in scale to have happened on the spur of the moment.

This wasn’t fortune: Somebody had fed Perfection to the Hunters. Somebody had almost fed Vakno to the Hunters. And Vakno had had people killed for much less than that.

She started digging.

Date Point 10y4m3w1d AV
Yosemite National Park, California, USA, Earth.

Julian Etsicitty

All of the tourism pictures showed Yosemite on clear blue-skied days when the waters were still and mirror-polished, flanked by a stentorian, forest-bearded honour guard of mountains.

Julian thought it looked even more beautiful in the rain.

It wasn’t serious rain - really, it was more a kind of acrophobic cloud that processed down from the mountains and dragged a diaphanous silver wedding train of light drizzle behind it, which fogged out the bombastic landscape that so entranced the documentary makers and tourists, and instead forced the eye to notice the smaller, the closer and the more immediate things.

Allison, naturally, was lurking in their tiny tent - built for two and delightfully cozy for three - under the tarp shelter Julian had rigged up for them and she was refusing to stray out into the rain. She seemed happy enough to wrap up warm with an ebook and a thermal flask full of Ovaltine and watch him work, and once he was done she’d insisted that Julian should go commune with nature and not worry about her.

Xiù was a complete contrast. She’d slapped on her outback hat and gone exploring the second Julian had declared their little day-camp complete, apparently oblivious to the chill and the moisture. She’d acknowledge his warning to be careful and not stray too far, and had set out eastwards toward the sound of the river, armed only with the backpack of essentials he’d prepared for them all just in case.

Julian took his time in following her. She wasn’t hard to follow - the fitness regime she’d followed religiously during her years in exile meant, especially thanks to the weighted clothing she’d worn to try and simulate the Earth’s gravity, that Xiù was a little powerhouse, remarkably strong and heavy for her apparent size, and despite her agility and poise she’d never learned the art of stepping softly. To an experienced tracker - and Julian was a master tracker - her footsteps were nearly as clear and obvious in the wet ground as if they’d been painted there in blaze orange.

What she didn’t do was make much noise. Julian was the other way round - he stepped lightly and tried to leave no clear sign of his passing, but he did sing to himself, humming and whistling through the bits where he couldn’t remember the lyrics. It was maybe a little ridiculous, but if there was anything nearby that would prefer to avoid him, he should give it plenty of notice rather than startling it. Besides, he was so used to doing it by now that it would have felt strange to him not to sing as he walked.

♪♫”Heyyy, darling… I hope you’re good toni-i-ght… hmm hmmm hmm-mm hmm…Tell me something sweet…”♪♫

He ambled along in Xiù’s wake, inspecting all of the things she’d paused to look at, and several other interesting things that she’d apparently missed. The sedate pace allowed him to satisfy himself that he’d picked the right spot for them to dally the day away - there was no sign of any potentially dangerous wildlife in the area, which was his biggest concern, but also no sign that the river ever got high enough to threaten them or their stuff.

He lost her trail when he reached the river, and the ground became nothing but stones and rock, but that hardly mattered, because she hadn’t gone any further.

Julian hadn’t ever got onto the subject of spirituality or religion with Xiù. He had no idea what she believed in, but he knew that she meditated every day when she could, usually first thing in the morning before he and Allison were up. The day they’d left Minnesota, she’d woken up extra early and had been seated comfortably on the log by the fire pit, facing the dawn sun when Julian had risen.

Now, she was seated in the lotus position on a rock by the river. She’d taken her hat off and let her hair down, and had her face turned slightly to the sky with a subtle liberated smile playing around her lips, enjoying the play of cool moisture over her face.

She opened her eyes, and gave him a relaxed smile and a wave. “Singing to yourself?” she asked.

“Always a good idea in the woods.” Julian shrugged off his pack and sat down next to her. “I’m pretty sure there aren’t any bears around, but…”

Her face fell. “…Oh. Wow. Bears?”

“Always possible, but I don’t think so. Nothing here they’d want.”

She gulped and looked around. “Maybe I shouldn’t have run off alone. Sorry!”

Julian chuckled. “It’s okay! If I’d thought there was any serious danger I’d have stopped you. Trust me.”

“I do!” Xiù squeezed some water out of her hair, then laughed nervously. “But… Wow. We really do live on a deathworld, don’t we?”

“Oh yeah.” Julian nodded. “Kinda smacks you full in the head sometimes, doesn’t it?”

She nodded. “Still… it’s beautiful.”

“I’ve always wanted to come here.” Julian agreed. “Almost gave up on getting the chance, really.”

“Allison’s missing it though…”

“Don’t worry, she’s perfectly happy.” Julian promised.

Xiù nodded and looked around again at the iconic landscape. The light rain was almost nothing now - enough to moisten the skin and slowly soak into their clothing, but it was doing nothing to impede the view. In fact the shreds of cloud garlanding the peaks only enhanced it.

“Are you warm enough?” Julian asked her.

“I’m fine,” she assured him. “This is nice!”

“We’re both used to chilly temperatures, huh?”

She nodded. “Gao and spaceships… and I guess this is nothing next to a Nightmare winter?”

“Downright warm. And don’t forget Canada”

She waved a hand dismissively. “Vancouver’s not that cold.”

Julian nodded, shut his eyes and let the white noise of nature permeate him. He was used to the wilderness, and had long learned the trick of really turning on his ears. Modern human life meant that people rarely got the chance to understand just how acute their senses truly were. It wasn’t that their ears got numb or anything, just that daily life involved being surrounded by so much noise that filtering out everything except for a narrow band of “important” sounds was an ingrained survival skill.

Un-learning that skill and noticing everything, that was a real trick. The same went for the nose. Given time to adjust, the human nose could pick up the musk of a mouse in nearby bushes, or the avian funk of a nest full of chicks in the trees above. The ear could tell flycatchers from warblers and hear stones knocking along the river bed, if only the listener knew how to listen.

He certainly heard Xiù’s contented sigh and the way she settled herself a little more comfortably and slowed her breathing,

They enjoyed the comfortable silence together, basking in the scent of conifers and petrichor, and Julian only opened his eyes when an unexpected beam of sunlight on his face turned the quiet blackness behind his eyelids red.

He raised his hand to squint against it. The weather was rolling in waves down the valley, and the rain would be back soon enough, but just for a few moments the view was clear, open and unimpeded.

“Ai ya…” Xiù breathed.

“Yeah.”

He put his arm round her waist. He half expected her to stiffen or catch her breath, but she did the opposite - she sighed happily and leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder.

Rather than saying anything, Julian made a kind of wordless, gently interrogative sound. She nodded against his shoulder and replied in kind - not a word, but a kind of of happy chirrup or purr.

He kissed her on the top of the head. With a querying “Mm?” she turned her head slightly, got another kiss - this one on the forehead - and when she raised her face to look at him Julian took his chance and kissed her properly.

Xiù issued a passionate squeak, and purely on instinct she put a hand on the back of his head and straightened up to get a better angle, while her other hand splayed on his chest then gripped his shirt. Julian ran his own hand slowly up her back while his free hand took its place on her waist.

It was Xiù who eventually ended it. When they parted, she gasped and rested her forehead against his, while words quietly bubbled out of her as if she wasn’t entirely in control of them. “Oh my god I needed that I’ve wanted you to do that for-” she stiffened. “Wait. You asked Allison, right?”

Julian smiled, trying to overrule his galloping pulse and project composed happiness. “I did,” he reassured her.

Xiù sighed happily, and this time it was her turn to kiss him.

They stayed wrapped up in each other by the river for a good long while, talking quietly, kissing frequently, giggling together and bonding. It finally had to come to an end though when a fat raindrop slapped disgustingly into Julian’s ear, and he looked at the sky.

“Okay, that’s no drizzle,” he decided, indicating an ash-grey battalion of clouds that were marching down from the peaks with rancorous intent.

Xiù exhaled resignedly and donned her hat, pulling it down snugly around her ears. “Cuddling up in the tent with Allison sounds good as well…” she suggested.

“You read my mind.”

They helped each other put on their backpacks, took a last look at the valley in the knowledge that they’d probably never come there again, and put it behind them hand-in-hand.

Date Point 10y4m3w1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

Knight hadn’t been involved personally in the interview of their alien detainees of course - that job had naturally fallen to Intelligence, according to whom Bedu had been an absolutely model interviewee - polite, concise, intelligent enough to recognise that resistance would gain him nothing, and with no particular reason to do so anyway.

The summary of his interview made for interesting reading.

Bedu’s business model it seemed was inconveniently discreet, to the point where even Bedu himself didn’t know who his clients were unless they wanted him to. The client who had set him on the trail of Kirk and the missing starship Sanctuary had done so anonymously, but with considerable existing knowledge of where to start looking.

The search had started at the planet Aru, and this in itself was an education. Knight was something of a history buff, and alien history in particular was a field that had begun to fascinate him. There was so impossibly much of it and the Dominion’s historical archives - which humanity notionally had access to by dint of being an associate Dominion member, even if they were far too large to actually be transmitted to any storage medium on Earth - had much too haphazard a filing system for anything to be known with any real certainty before the Corti had come along and imposed strict data standards on the whole mess.

Aru, however…Aru was previously unknown to him, and was now in admiral Knight’s opinion a fascinating jewel of historical interest that his amateur antiquarian’s instincts would have dearly loved to get in front of the figurative loupe.

Why Kirk had gone to Aru was known, thanks to the statements given by the two survivors of his crew - Etsicitty and Buehler - and the young miss Chang whom they had collected from the planet. Why he had lingered after recovering her had been a little fuzzier, but Bedu had shed some light on that mystery.

The historic decline and fall of every sapient spacefaring power in the galaxy was well documented. Indeed, it was one of the topics of fascinated discussion that entranced amateur xenohistorians on the Internet (not that there were yet such things as professional xenohistorians), in the parlance of whom the phenomenon had been named the “Great Filter”, a term borrowed from one Robin Hanson who had coined it in an attempt to solve the so-called Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox was a now-extinct problem that had distracted people who were inclined to worry about such things with the question of where all the aliens were and why they weren’t popping in for a cup of tea and a chat. Given that said question’s relevance had faded somewhat in recent years, the Fermi Paradox was now only of interest to historically-minded students of science and enthusiasts of the burgeoning field of xenoarchaeology.

Aru, being the home planet of a species who were already in the late stages of their terminal decline and apparently disinterested in doing anything to stop it, was naturally a decent starting point for anybody who wished to understand the nature of the Great Filter and maybe do something about it.

Kirk had lingered there after collecting his most recent rescue, and then when Bedu had been sent to investigate Sanctuary’s disappearance, the Negotiable Curiosity had not needed to search very long and hard to find a debris field thirty light years away.

Bedu’s ship, its owner had proudly explained, was equipped with particle detectors sensitive enough to trace the FTL movement of objects as small as an escape pod up to ten years after the fact, assuming the trail wasn’t confused by the passage of other ships. Space, however, was so… well, spacious, that really that was a problem that only manifested along major spacelanes and near stations.

Sanctuary, while not a large ship, had been built with such a convention-stretching power output that its trail was the easiest Bedu had ever been called on to follow, and it had led him right to the heart of a tumbling cloud of wreckage.

Again, the next part matched with what Etsicitty, Buehler and Chang had reported - something with the power output of a dreadnought had intercepted them, and both ships had been destroyed when Sanctuary’s mortally wounded pilot, Amir Bahmani, had rammed the hostile while the rest of the crew abandoned ship.

Bedu had initially followed the escape pod carrying the three humans. Retracing his steps and picking up the trail of the other, faster, lifeboat had eventually led him to a system known only by its stellar coordinates - Knight glossed over the string of numbers involved, which described the star’s type, age, distance as a proportion of the galactic radius from Sagittarius A* and its deviation in radians from the straight line connecting that object to the heart of the Andromeda galaxy.

The star in question was a red giant, well past its main sequence and venerably burning through its helium. No temperate planets, one gas giant nearly twice the size of Jupiter, a handful of barren rocks and an acidic hellpit that made Venus look like no more unpleasant than a kitchen full of recently-chopped onions in comparison.

It would have been a completely unremarkable system if not for the forcefield enclosing it - identical to the ones that even now protected Cimbrean and Earth - and the crashed Kwmbwrw research station lodged in one of that gas giant’s moons, which was in the wrong place to the tune of thirty thousand lightyears and change.

From an intelligence perspective, however, by far the most important thing that Bedu was able to tell them was that at no point in its voyage from Sanctuary’s wreckage to this question mark of a system had Kirk’s lifeboat been intercepted.

While Bedu himself was Orange - augmented, possibly a target of interest for Hierarchy use, but not yet actually suspected of having been possessed by a Hierarchy demon - his story was corroborated by the Negotiable Curiosity’s sensor records, which in turn showed no signs of tampering.

Taken all together it was good news, and the report concluded with a recommendation that Kirk’s own status be downgraded from Orange to Yellow. He couldn’t be called Green until an implant scanner had pinged the inside of his skull, but Intel were at least happy enough to move him a step in that direction.

All in all, the report put Sir Patrick in a good mood. He wrote a quick mail for the attention of general Tremblay, rubbed his eyes, and then turned his attention to the report in his pile that he knew was going to deflate that good mood slightly.

With a sigh, he started to pore over the most recent analysis of operation NOVA HOUND.

Date Point 10y4m3w2d AV
San Francisco, California, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

“…Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Whaddya think?”

Xiù had a hard time choosing the right word, in any language. ’Colorful’ and ‘Flamboyant’ came to mind, but so was Chinese New Year, and nothing else that presented itself quite made the grade either.

“It’s very… gay.” She decided. That was the nice thing about English. One word could carry such a huge weight of alternative meanings and context, without going into the simply crazy subtleties of intonation that played such an important role in Mandarin. Both languages were hideously complex when compared to Gaori, which was refreshingly direct. Gaori wasn’t unsubtle by any means, but it lacked the impenetrable nuance that allowed her to pun like that, carefully deploying three different meanings at once in the span of a rather simple monosyllable.

She could only imagine what the actual Gay Pride parade next month would look like. It’d presumably make this look conservative and sedate.

She’d gone quite rusty in both her human languages thanks to several years of not using them, and since getting back to Earth she’d almost exclusively spoken English, much to her mother’s frustration. Still, she was finally getting things straight in her head and didn’t so often find herself slipping automatically back into the alien tongue whenever she wasn’t concentrating.

Together, she and Allison watched a young man dance past wearing a pair of gold lamé briefs, bright orange feathers, lipstick, and the kind of muscles that belonged on ancient Greek pottery.

“Show me what you’re workin’ with, baby!” Allison cat-called. Somehow the dancer heard her over the drumming and trumpets. He aimed a buttock at them and smacked it with a grin before dancing along with the rest of his troupe.

Allison gave a delighted laugh, and beamed at the way Xiù was giggling with her.

“Your turn!” she declared, and hoisted Xiù toward the railing. Xiù tried not to imagine what her mother would think, picked another male dancer and cupped her hands.

“Yáo pìguuu!”

Presumably the dancer didn’t speak a word of Mandarin, but he seemed to get the gist of it and posed for her, flexing magnificently. Xiù applauded while Allison blew him a kiss.

They retreated from the railing as a more stately group in ornate - and huge - red ballgowns began to sail regally by, and Allison took Xiù’s hand to lead her through the crowd. She was in her element, Xiù decided, being surrounded by noise and vibrancy and color. Xiù loved to “get loud” as an occasional treat - as she was doing right now - but Julian had shrunk into himself and had taken the first excuse he reasonably could to retreat to the relative quiet and calm of a coffee shop.

Allison seemed to want to sample everything and she tested even Xiù’s reserves as she led the way from street vendor to street performer, to live musician and back to the barricade to watch more of the parade, then on into the crowd.

They got matching henna tattoos, sampled Fajita chicken skewers fresh off the grill, danced together to the pounding mix of a street DJ who was blending Samba and Rastatrash into something new and exciting and generally got drunk on the sheer weirdness of it all before finally finding themselves sitting down at a bus stop and sharing a bottle of cold water, having summoned Julian to come find them. It was coming up on two in the afternoon, and the parade was drumming and gyrating its way toward winding down.

“Man.” Allison commented, watching two dozen women wearing enough pink sequins and feathers to maybe completely cover three of them strut past smiling. “I think I’ve seen more ass today than the rest of my life put together.”

“Oh yeah.” Xiù nodded, widening her eyes for emphasis.

“Fun though, right?”

Xiù looked around. People were drifting away, now that the tail end of the parade had passed them. Back to normalcy, and to lives with decidedly less glitter in them. The afternoon breeze still carried the distant sound of drumming through the dense, old grid of buildings, but already the whole thing was starting to feel like a dream. Hundreds, or perhaps thousands of magical people had danced and swayed and played and sung their way along these roads, and behind them were left the permanent fixtures of dusty concrete and faded paint.

It was an oddly familiar sensation.

“Xiù?”

“Sorry, I just… Yeah, it was fun.”

Allison knew her too well. “But…?” she asked.

“Well… look.” Xiù waved a hand around.

Allison did so, frowning as if wondering what she was getting at. “Sure got quiet…” she observed, then seemed to get what Xiù was driving at. “Actually, wow. That’s a heck of a contrast.”

“I was just thinking it feels familiar.” Xiù told her.

“Yeah… is it me or is this place kinda ugly without the parade?”

She was right. The asphalt looked like it hadn’t ever been resurfaced, just patched up as needed. Overhead was a tangle of bare black cabling that didn’t seem to have any clear reasoning or logic to it. It wasn’t that Mission district looked neglected, it just looked… preserved. Like a jar of pickled onions, it might still be working and useful but the crispness and life was no longer entirely there.

“Where’s Julian?” Xiù asked.

Allison checked her phone. They were all using a tracking app they’d found that could help them hone in on each other by sharing how far away their contacts were and in what direction. “He’s… that way.” she pointed. “Quarter of a mile.”

“Let’s go meet him.” Xiù stood up. The sheer mundanity was getting to her. “I don’t think I like it here.”

“‘Kay.” Allison tapped on her app to let Julian know they were going to come to him, then took her hand and they set off walking.

They cut across the corner of the parade route, and another facet to the sudden absence of the big glitzy distraction of the Carnaval made itself known to Xiù - she’d spent the whole day holding hands with Allison.

Most of the time it had been a simple case of not wanting to lose one another in the crowd, but now that they were walking together more slowly, it dawned on her that there was something… different about intertwined fingers and an arm wrapped around her own.

She glanced sideways at Allison, who caught the movement in her peripheral vision, turned her head and caught her eye, smiled bashfully and tidied a strand of blonde hair out of her face while squeezing Xiù’s hand.

That was the thing about Allison. Xiù had originally thought of her as the master of fake-it-’til-you-make-it, but that was unfair. Allison didn’t do fake, she did… determined. Her life doctrine seemed to be keeping her foot down on the accelerator, committing wholly to whatever it was she’d decided to do and aiming an angry middle finger at her own comfort zones if they tried to get in the way.

It should have been intimidating, or obnoxious. In anybody else it probably would have been. In Allison… She may have held her own comfort zones in contempt, but she had never once violated Xiù’s, and Xiù knew she’d be genuinely upset if she found she was making either her or Julian uncomfortable. That made all the difference, and so she was able to lead where Xiù might not ordinarily have followed… like walking down the street in broad daylight, holding hands like girlfriends.

Because they were, she supposed. That was the point, wasn’t it? Allison had made it plain that she didn’t want their relationship to just be that of two good friends who happened to share the same man. And while Xiù might ordinarily have settled for just that…Not even Julian quite got her pulse going like Allison did, and she wasn’t sure why. Possibly it was the lingering shadow of taboo, or maybe it was the way she kept breaking through walls she’d never known she had, only to find clean waters beyond.

Maybe it was the fact that Xiù knew in her bones and from experience that she could literally trust Allison with her life. Whenever she flashed back to that horrible moment on Sanctuary when the hull had ripped apart and the void had tried to drag her away, the memory that always came with it was that it had been Allison who’d reached out and caught her.

It was difficult not to want to follow where somebody who’d literally saved her life was leading.

She squeezed back and leaned a little closer.

“Do you ever feel like an alien?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Allison nodded. “Like I’m not quite human.”

“Or that they’re not quite human.” Xiù waved her free hand surreptitiously, indicating a family who were wending their way home. Two bouncing children high on far too much sugar, a harassed mom and a dad whose huge sarcastic T-shirt was pulled tight over his beer gut.

“That’s it, yeah.” Allison nodded. “That’s exactly it. I just wanna ask them, you know, ’Is this who you wanna be? Are you happy?’ You know?”

“That’s not very nice, Allison.”

“Well I’m not gonna do it!” Allison defended herself. “Just… You know?”

“I know.” Xiù nodded. She was looking at people who had never… never gone hand-to-hand with a sapient worm in a robot suit. Never hidden in a Hunter meat locker. Never come within a whisker of horrible death not once but twice. Never seen their innocent protegé, their sister, dying. They had no idea who Triymin had been, what life was really like. She wondered if they even had dreams any longer, or if those dreams extended beyond a happy family and home.

They didn’t look happy…

Allison squeezed her hand again. “I try not to judge.” she said. “But it’s hard, ain’t it?”

“Why, though?” Xiù asked. “Why is it hard? They’re not doing anything wrong.”

“You’re right. They’re not doing anything.”

“Al… that’s not nice.”

“I know…” Allison sighed.

“Even if I feel the same way, it’s not nice.”

“I know.”

Guilt and uncertainty looked so out of place on Allison that Xiù had no option but to give her hand another reassuring squeeze. “But hey. We’re doing something,” she said.

That raised a smile. “We are, yeah. I just wish more people could.“

“Could get abducted?” Xiù teased.

Allison laughed. “No, dummy,” she exclaimed. “Just… I wish more people could see how much bigger they really are. This-” she waved a hand, indicating the whole preserved city around them “this isn’t who we’re meant to be. I swear, there’s something in the human soul that just longs for adventure.”

“Nearly getting killed?” Xiù suggested.

“No, like-”

“Watching other people get killed?”

“Xiù…”

“Having to wear a disguise for three years in case they try and blow you out the airlock or in case the Hunters come looking for you?”

“Babe-”

Xiù gave her an apologetic look. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But adventures aren’t easy or fun, Al. You know that.”

Allison sighed. “…My abductors were called Trevni and Nufr.” She said. Xiù blinked - Allison hadn’t ever told her about her abduction before. “They were actually okay, for… you know, for kidnappers who saw me as a test subject. I might have been strapped naked to a table, but they weren’t cruel, it was all… it was just business. Right? No malice.”

Xiù nodded carefully “Okay…?”

“I killed them. I didn’t mean to. They just… They picked me up because I had a cold, and they wanted to study it and develop a cure. They knew enough about us to know that we’d pay a lot to cure the common cold. But, they weren’t careful enough and…”

She sniffed. “They weren’t nice people, exactly, but they didn’t deserve what it did to them. The last thing Nufr did was he gave me a Frontline and undid my restraints. I’d have died of thirst strapped to that table if he hadn’t. And the people who finally rescued me would have died of… I dunno, acne or candida or something.”

Her fingers twisted painfully between Xiù’s for a moment. “I know, babe. I know what an adventure really is. I know it means people who don’t deserve it dying in horrible ways, and… maybe us too. I know all that. And I still don’t think I could ever go back to the quiet life. I… I wouldn’t know how to cope.”

Xiù was sighing with her when they saw Julian come round the corner. The uncomfortable shuffle in his step evaporated on seeing them, and he picked up his pace with a wave, which they returned.

“Neither would I,” she conceded.

Date Point 10y4m3w2d AV
War Platform Lifebringer, Perfection System, The Core Worlds

Grand Fleetmaster Tk’vrrtnnk A’Khvnrrtk

The ship class designated as “War Platforms” weren’t warships at all, at least not in the sense of a ship that engaged the enemy directly.

Even though it was layered in armor, shields and point defense batteries, Lifebringer was a staging and command vessel. It was the mothership of a whole fleet of transports, shuttles, dropships and heavy cargo lifters. It was a flying barracks, a mobile airfield, a cavernous cargo bay and a nexus of computer systems.

It was, in short, everything that a fleet needed to go somewhere and do something, and it was verging on being as large as a ship could practically get.. At a full gallop, Tk’v would have needed more than [two minutes] to get from one end to the other even if there had been a single straight corridor fit for that purpose..

The humans, he knew, would be impressed. Fleetmaster Caruthers’ transport was an unmodified Dominion standard shuttle, a flying matte-grey brick that made up for in rugged reliability what it pathetically lacked in grace and aesthetics.

Next to the troop lander and the two heavy cargo lifters currently squatting in Lifebringer’s number one docking bay, it was tiny, and it was still big enough to comfortably carry three young Guvnurag. When the humans stepped out of it, it made them seem comically small.

The heavy vibrations their feet sent ringing through the deck shattered that smallness.

He recognised Caruthers easily enough - the human fleetmaster was plainly the oldest of the delegation that had come over. The two at the back looked to be bodyguards or marines. Tk’v was hardly an expert on clothing - the most he wore being saddlebags, holsters and a decorative pennant on his neck to signal his rank - but those two’s seemed less decorative than the others’.

Caruthers, for his part, looked both austere in his black uniform, and splendid thanks to its conservative flourishes of gold and white.

The deathworlder entourage paused in front of Tk’v’s own welcoming party, and Caruthers took one extra pace forward. “Permission to come aboard,” he stated. Tk’v’s translator interpreted this as a formal request, possibly a traditional or ceremonial courtesy.

“Permission granted,” he replied, judging this to be the most probable response given how terse the request had been. Borrowing from some research he’d done on humans, he extended the stronger of his two right hands, trusting the human not to grip with the crushing force that Tk’v knew he was capable of.

His trust was rewarded. Caruthers’ handshake was firm, but no more than that. “Thank you for having us,” he said.

“Thank you for coming.” Tk’v replied. He indicated his subordinates. “This is Subfleetmaster Rhou, and junior subfleetmaster Nwmrwnw.

“Captain Manning of HMS Myrmidon, and commander Devonald of HMS Valiant. Caruthers replied, then indicated the marines. “Corporal Brewer and Corporal Banks.”

“Well then. If it pleases you to inspect the ship, I thought we might talk.” Tk’v replied amicably.

“Lead on.”

V’tk did so, gesturing for the human to walk by his side. “I had Lifebringer’s dimensions converted into your units.” he said. “She is slightly more than four hundred meters across her widest axis, and masses approximately sixty million kilograms.”

“That must be pushing the limits of what’s physically possible.” Caruthers observed.

“Certainly in anything which needs to accelerate like a warship.” Tk’v agreed. “There are larger ships, but not many and they are all painfully slow. The biggest ever built, I believe, was a pleasure barge that could not only afford to spend [months] transiting between worlds, but actively wanted to, so that their guests would have as much time to spend their money as possible. That ship was more than twice the size of this one.”

The expressive line of dark fur above Caruthers’ right eye arched upwards. “Was?”

“Indeed. It eventually broke apart under the stresses of its own acceleration.”

“Hmm. We have a similar cautionary anecdote from an ocean-going vessel called the Titanic,” Caruthers told him. “The fastest and largest luxury ship of its day. Too fast, in fact - it struck an iceberg and sank in freezing cold waters more than a hundred years ago.”

“Ice? I was given to understand that yours is a hot planet, fleetmaster.” Tk’v observed. “The stories of Earth I have heard mention that the sun can burn you, and that you can die of the heat.”

“That’s toward the equator. The poles are frozen solid year round.”

“Both, on the same planet?”

“It’s a surprise to us that other worlds are any different.” Caruthers smiled, though he made the courtesy of not showing his teeth. “How were we to know, after all?”

“True. In any case, although Lifebringer can accelerate to meet the minimum demands laid down by Dominion security resolutions for a warship, she is still the slowest in the fleet. Substantially slower than your own ships have demonstrated.”

“Our doctrines seem to be quite different.” Caruthers agreed. “Maybe we should compare notes.”

“Maybe we should.” Tk’v agreed.

The tour wended slowly around the ship, taking in the huge power plant (powered by the newest generation of Directorate-made quantum power stacks), the living quarters (an exercise in awkwardness given the wildly differing proportions and needs of the many species on the crew), the cargo handling bays and their army of drones, and finally he command hub, dominated by a to-scale holographic map of the system labelled in blue, yellow and green.

“How is the situation below?” Caruthers asked, once Tk’v had demonstrated the map’s functionality by zooming in on Perfection itself.

The working crew around them went quite still, and listened. Tk’v knew that many of them were firmly of the opinion that the humans were responsible for all the death and destruction not only on Perfection, but at Capitol Station. Tk’v couldn’t have disagreed more strongly. He had specifically requested this relief effort because, unlike most of his peers, he very much did not view the Hunters as a kind of natural disaster. They were a sapient species, entirely in control of their own actions, and the humans seemed to be the only ones who were squaring off to them.

That made the deathworlders allies, in his book, and Perfection represented an opportunity to make or break that relationship.

“The Hunters launched hundreds of kinetic weapons from orbit,” he said. “Perfection’s defence systems stopped all but thirteen of them.”

“The same kind of kinetic weapons that you dropped on Planet Garden,” Nwmrwnw observed, acidly. Tk’v ground his molars together. He would have given much not to have the junior subfleetmaster present for this.

Caruthers proved equal to the accusation. He looked Nwmrwnw in the eye in that unnervingly level way that humans did, and spoke softly and firmly though with no trace of disrespect. “The Hunters are dangerous,” he agreed. “And sadistic and cunning. They’re deliberately using our tactics and tools because they want to divide and weaken us.”

“Just as you weakened the defense fleet?” Nwmrwnw pressed.

“That will be all, junior subfleetmaster,” Tk’v told him, judging that his Kwmbwrw subordinate had gone too far with that remark. “Return to your duties.”

“…Yes, Grand Fleetmaster.”

The humans cleared their throats and looked awkwardly at one another as Nwmrwnw gestured grudging respect and stalked out of the command hub.

Tk’v raised his voice just enough for the other crew to hear, though he addressed the humans specifically. “I am sorry,” he said. “We have all seen terrible things through this operation, and it is difficult to remain objective.”

Caruthers caught on to what he was doing, and joined in. “I sympathize,” he declared. “And I’d like to thank you personally, Grand Fleetmaster, for setting an example and proving that our relationship doesn’t need to be antagonistic. We certainly don’t want it to be.”

“Nor should we.” Tk’v announced, taking note of which of his officers looked away, and which wore body language and expressions of agreement and resolve. “I have spent my life fighting the Hunters, and for the first time I am seeing signs of weakness from them. As you said, they are trying to divide us, and I do not think they would even care to try unless they were scared of what we could achieve together.”

Caruthers glanced at Manning and Devonald. Inexperienced as Tk’v was in reading human facial expressions, there was something… inspiring in the way they all shared the same intense smile.

“In that case, Grand Fleetmaster…” Caruthers extended his hand, “I look forward to scaring them some more.”

Tk’v shook hands with him for the second time. “Well said.”

Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
Celzi Alliance Embassy Station, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Sol

Rylee Jackson

“Celzi Diplomatic Station, this is FIREBIRD-ONE escorting diplomatic shuttle, request permission to land.”

Colonel Stewart would be doing the exact same thing over at the Dominion station at Earth/Luna L1. The timing was important - both of the major interstellar powers needed to be carefully removed from Sol, and they needed to be removed in such a way as to not escalate the tensions between them by making it seem like humanity was siding with either one.

The shuttle full of Marines were there in case the Hierarchy had an agent on board who tried something last-ditch like de-orbiting the station or whatever.

”Permission granted FIREBIRD-ONE. Welcome back major Jackson, you and the shuttle are cleared to land together in bay seven.”

She recognized the translated simulation of a voice from her previous visits to the Celzi station. PR being such a big part of Rylee’s job meant regular schmoozing with both sides. That was why she’d been chosen to lead this op: the embassy knew her.

Plus, if the need arose, her WSO Joe Semenza could nuke the station to molten debris. There was something satisfying about having that kind of gratuitous firepower at their fingertips.

They made their entrance with all the style and grace that her professional pride demanded, sliding smoothly into the bay on manual and kissing the deck with nary a bump. Her new sled, a replacement for the one lost on Garden, was called Phoenix and for once Rylee didn’t fully cycle her down - there was a non-zero chance after all that they’d have to make a hasty departure, and Phoenix wouldn’t lose too much of her capacitor’s stored energy from sitting idle on the deck for a few hours.

The Marines, she had to admit, made an even better entrance. The instant their shuttle’s ramp clanged down, two dozen of them in full MOPP marched down it like they were on parade. The two Celzi guards who had entered the hangar to greet her were probably shooting nervous glances at each other, though it was hard to tell with Celzi. They looked like a kind of moss-grey collision between a monkey, a kangaroo and a lizard, and their oddly-shaped skulls with their many eyes gave them fully overlapping three hundred and sixty degree vision. They didn’t need to turn their heads to look at each other.

Rylee left Semenza to look after Phoenix and approached the two aliens, carefully not removing her flight suit, though she did slide up her glare visor so that they could see her face. She probably looked quite an intimidating sight herself, in her astronaut’s “snoopy cap” and in the new flight suit that had been adapted from EV-MASS technology.

“Is… something wrong, major?” one of the aliens asked. She internally kicked herself for not being able to tell Celzi apart on sight. Oh well, time to play it impersonal rather than friendly.

“Call the ambassadors,” she ordered. “Something important has come up that needs their immediate attention.”

She wasn’t left waiting long. Stationwide announcements in a variety of alien languages rang through the decks, and within minutes she was being escorted, along with the marines, to the forum chamber on the station’s topmost deck.

She was met off the elevator by Ambassador Sandeep Verma. Verma’s career had been an interesting one, taking him from his native Gujarat, to the Indian consulate in Canberra, and ultimately into space to be humanity’s ambassador to the Celzi Alliance.

Rylee had worked with him several times. Something about being the FTL test pilot kept her snowed under with invitations to assorted diplomatic parties, hence why one of her AFSCs was Public Affairs. She could definitely sympathize with the ambassador’s crowded and storied career.

That same prestige was what had sent her on this mission. It was important not to snub either side or to show favorites, so while the Dominion got the senior officer in the form of colonel Stewart, the Alliance got the more notorious one in the form of major Jackson. They’d tossed a coin over it.

“Major?” Verma had a smile on, but his body language was wary. Rylee shook his hand. Really she shouldn’t waste time with preamble, but the ambassador didn’t need rushing.

“Can we talk privately?” she asked as she handed him the sealed letter marked ‘EYES ONLY’ for his attention. It was an uninteresting grey and bore the emblem of the Global Representative Assembly - a circle, two short arc sections sharing the same center, a longer one, and finally a short one again.

Verma nodded and pulled a device from his pocket. A privacy forcefield fuzzed and opaqued the air around them. He ripped the seal on the letter and read it.

“Short version: Big Hotel is gone,” Rylee informed him. The Ambassadors by necessity were both briefed on DEEP RELIC. “Earth’s secure and the GRA wants the embassies relocated to Cimbrean-five just to be absolutely certain.”

Verma grimaced slightly, but nodded as he read the letter. It was much longer than Rylee’s summary, but probably contained about the same amount of useful information.

“They are not going to like that,” he observed.

“The ID are being kicked out as well,” Rylee explained. “So neither side gets to claim we’re siding with the other.”

“They still will not like it…”

“They can dislike it all they want, one way or the other this station ain’t gonna be here much longer,” Rylee said, dismissively. “They’re being relocated. They can go amicably and relocate to Cimbrean, or they can be expelled…with extreme prejudice.”

Verma met her eye, then nodded and turned the page, read the name and signature that occupied the top two inches of an otherwise empty sheet (a classic and typical waste of paper, in Rylee’s opinion), then handed the letter back to her.

“I shall do my job, then,” he promised.

“Good,” Rylee smiled for him, radiating absolute faith in his abilities. “Let us know if we need to get you off the station. These guys aren’t just pretending to be marines.”

“Not necessary,” Verma smiled. “I hope. Thank you anyway.”

He turned off the privacy field and gestured invitingly for Rylee and the marines to follow him. He swept into the forum with an impressive impromptu air of gravitas, looking thoroughly out of place and vulnerable next to a woman in a lightly-armored spacesuit and a dozen men in MOPP.

Rylee lowered her visor again. The odd thing was that she probably cut the most threatening and alien figure among them. MOPP - Mission Oriented Protective Posture - made the marines faceless and scary, but the technology hadn’t changed much in twenty years meaning that the men wearing it looked huge and encumbered, but also embarrassingly low-tech. It was a good show of strength… but Rylee knew from experience that while aliens were often impressed by seeing humans carry heavy loads, there was something they found even more intimidating about the human body itself - the shape of it, the way they moved. For whatever reason, aliens saw the same thing in a walking human that humans saw in a stalking tiger.

MOPP hid that. Rylee’s flight suit didn’t. It was built by C&M Spacesuit Systems using the technology they’d developed for EV-MASS, making it snug, sleek and technical. A far cry from the bulky thing she’d worn eight years ago in Pandora’s early flights, with its duct tape modifications and velcro patch inside the helmet for scratching her nose.

Rylee secretly geeked out about it all the time. It looked like it had been created by the better class of digital artist, the ones who managed to balance a high-tech aesthetic with actual military function and practicality.

In the circumstances, it was not only a good way to show off that scary deathworlder physiology, but also a statement: ‘Look how far we’ve come, and how quickly.’

It worked. She became the immediate focus of attention when they stepped into the forum itself. Never mind the geodesic dome overhead with its angel’s-eye view of the Earth, never mind the charcoal concrete floor with the polished bronze forked spiral - a stylized representation of the galaxy - embossed in the middle. Never mind the warm lighting and the panelling on the wall made from several kinds of wood imported from the homeworlds of the Celzi, Qinis, Jeghiren and Lathk, nor the imposing and venerable ambassadors from those species sitting at their desks. It was a beautiful chamber - as if the Qinis would settle for an ugly one - and they’d invaded it looking decidedly ugly.

She ran her best fearsome eye over the lot of them, relying on the faceless mirror-black of her flight helmet to do all the communicating she needed. Only the Celzi ambassador failed to emote discomfort, but then again Celzi were notorious for not backing down easily. The whole Alliance was named after them for a reason.

“Ambassador Verma,” the Jeghiren ambassador stood. “You alarm us, with your sudden summons and your…troops.” They - Jeghiren were monogendered, and insisted on impersonal pronouns - waved an arm languidly at the marines. “We request an explanation.”

“The Global Representative Assembly has instructed me to inform you of a new development.” Verma replied, having apparently decided not to bother with circumspection. “You may not be aware of some security threats on Earth that we’ve been fighting, but that situation has now reached the point where we must ask both this embassy and that of the Dominion to relocate to the Cimbrean system.”

The Lathk ambassador was the first to speak. Lathk defied easy description, being a bipedal biological eccentricity whose tiny beady black eyes gave them almost no vision to speak of, and who had neither a sense of smell nor much apparently in the way of a sense of taste. Their primary sense by a country mile was hearing, and in place of a head they had two gargantuan ears mounted high and forward on their shoulders.

Those ears and their spindly birdlike limbs always gave Rylee the impression that they would go tumbling away in a strong breeze, and she had to chew down the racist impulse to think they looked absurd. They were actually an important partner in the Alliance, providing for most of the agriculture and a steady supply of warm bodies. Even if the war had been in a low ebb for the last ten years (thanks in no small part to human intervention) the Alliance were still rattling every saber they had, and that meant signing up young beings - among them plenty of Lathk - to serve on whatever new front line might open up if a lasting peace wasn’t eventually worked out.

“You are picking a side?” she asked.

Ambassador Verma’s job over the last four years had included exerting whatever gentle pressure humanity could muster to keep the war from boiling over again. The Celzi leadership might have been reckoned as master strategists, but Rylee was pretty sure that any second lieutenant with Sun Tzu and Robert A. Heinlein on their bookshelf already had a more comprehensive strategic education than the most seasoned Celzi general officer. The war so far had been catastrophically bloody and industrial.

But of course the Dominion was too proud to let the “rebels” win by granting them whatever territory they’d already carved out, and the Alliance was too proud to settle for what they had.

“No.” Verma’s assertion was instant and firm. “We remain committed to the neutrality and independence of our species.”

“Then what are these troops for?” The Celzi ambassador asked.

“And why are they wearing protective gear?” The Qinis ambassador added, taking the bait.

That was Rylee’s cue. “Our equipment is a precautionary measure. We hope it proves unnecessary…” she hinted, smoothly. ETs were notoriously gullible when on the back foot, and while outright lies were present in the diplomatic toolbox, in the years since Rylee herself had summoned these two space stations into orbit around Earth, the most effective tool by far that humanity’s diplomats had fallen back on time and again was crypticism. Deathworld reputation did the rest.

The ambassadors all glanced at one another (again, insofar as she could tell. She wasn’t even sure Celzi could turn their head) and after a few seconds the Jeghiren spoke again. “What is the exact nature of this security concern?” they asked.

“We’re not at liberty to disclose that information for now,” Verma replied. “Please. There will be plenty of time later to discuss exactly why this is being done but for now it’s safest for the embassies to relocate to Cimbrean.”

“We shall need to discuss-” the Celzi began, and Verma cut him off.

“Ambassadors, please do not mistake this for a request,” he said, firmly. “This relocation is a condition of continuing to have a relationship with the human race.”

Rylee consciously didn’t fidget during the long moment of deliberation that followed. There was a low, but non-zero chance that if there was a Hierarchy demon among the ambassadors, and if they had any last-ditch contingencies to try, this would be the moment. WERBS was lurking in the wings, ready to obliterate the station the moment it lit a jump beacon.

Knowing that by far the most destructive thing that humanity had ever built was aimed at the soles of Rylee’s feet was a test of composure to almost rival the infamous rubber chicken. Another benefit to the inscrutable visor - the ETs couldn’t see her sweat.

“…Very well,” the Celzi grunted at last. He leaned over and spoke softly into a microphone on his desk. Rylee breathed a sigh of relief and touched the push-to-talk button on the side of her helmet.

“ILIUM, this is HELEN. PARIS has agreed to relocate.” she announced, softly.

”Copy that, HELEN. AGAMEMNON is also relocating.”

“Awesome.” Rylee breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ll prepare a slaved jump.”

”Understood. We’ll send a runnner to Cimbrean for codes. ILIUM out.”

She turned to Verma. “Okay, the jump’s all set up. I need to get back to Phoenix to play cab driver.”

“Go ahead,” Verma invited. “Thank you, major. I think your presence helped tremendously.”

“Don’t thank me until we’re safely around Cimbrean Five,” Rylee replied. She certainly wouldn’t be happy until the station was outside of the Cimbrean system field where no possible Hierarchy action could threaten humanity through it, and where it no longer needed to have an FTL superweapon aimed at it.

She turned and marched out, with two of the marines in tow, and put in the call to Semenza to fire the sled up. She leaned against the elevator wall as they headed back down to the hangar deck, and reflected that going from interspecies celebrity to messenger girl to threatening muscle to glorified truck driver in one afternoon was a pretty good summary of her career.

She stretched and sighed. “You boys been in space before?”

One of the marines chuckled under his hood. “No ma’am.”

“Not exactly glamorous, is it?”

“I dunno,” the other one piped up. “Maybe it’s just wore off for you, ma’am. I was nerding out the whole time we were in there talking to them ETs.”

Rylee had to laugh and nod agreement to that, smiling inside her helmet. “Maybe,” she agreed. “Maybe it has.”

Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
Eppley Airfield, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“But you’re an exec! Aren’t you a bit senior to be standing at the airport with a sign?”

Kevin shrugged, a pointless gesture in a phone call, but still a natural and unthinking one. “These kids are important,” he replied smoothly. “And no offense Walter, but I’m the only other Abductee in the whole Byron Group. They’re gonna need to hear what I’ve got to say.”

Walter Billings scoffed. That was why Kevin liked the man - he didn’t guard his manners among The Team.

The Team was a loose idea, and it consisted of everybody involved behind the scenes in bringing Byron Group Exploration Vessel 11 from conception to space. Walter and his lifelong colleague and best friend Jennifer McAllister, Clara Brown née Ericson and her father Michael. The implacable Mr. Williams (whose given name of Raymond was one of Kevin’s most cherished secrets - the man himself hated it), Moses Byron, and of course Kevin himself.

”Didn’t Xiù Chang break your nose? Williams wasn’t happy to hear that. He’s still grousing about ‘loose cannon behaviour’, you know.”

“She’ll be great. She was just having a hard time adjusting to Terran life again and I pressed the wrong buttons,” Kevin replied. “Trust me, Walter. I know these kids, I know what they’ve been through, and I wanna put a human face on what’s going to happen to them. And if I can maybe give them some advice that’ll help them get through what Keating and those other stone-faced assholes have planned…”

”Protecting the bet you put on them, eh?”

“You bet on them too, Walter.”

”…You’re right. Advise away. Just tell me you’re going to be back in the office sometime today, because I urgently need to discuss the waste processor design with you.”

Kevin chuckled. “Well shit, how can I refuse an offer like that?” he asked. “I’ll be right in after I drop them off at the Box.”

”I’ll see you then. Bring popcorn.”

It was Kevin’s turn to scoff, and Billings ended the call laughing.

Kevin adjusted his collar - there wasn’t a force on the planet Earth or any other world besides that would persuade him to wear a tie - and leaned on the railing again, well aware that alongside the other people loitering against it with cards in their hands, he probably stood out in being by far the most well-dressed. There was just something about a properly tailored expensive suit that left the slightly faded chauffeurs’ uniforms and short-sleeve shirts or polos to either side of him looking like they belonged in the background.

As it happened, Chang, Buehler and Etsicitty had apparently listened to the Group’s request to not bring more than a few small personal effects, and hadn’t burdened themselves with anything more than their carry-on luggage. They were the first ones to come out of Arrivals, each one carrying a smallish bag and the clothes on their backs, and all dressed comfortably for travel. Kevin got their attention with a wave, pointed with a movement of his head, and met them at the end of the rank with a round of handshakes.

“Figured I’d collect you in person,” he said. “All sorted out up in Minnesota?”

“We packed it all up and fixed everything. The place should be okay without us for a couple years.” Julian replied.

“Good. Heck of a commitment you’re making.”

“It’s what we want,” Xiù told him. When Kevin looked questioningly at her, she shrugged. “You were right.”

“…Sorry.”

“Didn’t you two already apologize to each other?” Allison asked. She jerked her head towards the airport’s doors. “Come on, if we’re making a big commitment, let’s commit.”

Julian and Xiù both chuckled, hoisted their bags and followed her, chorusing “Yes ma’am” like it was a private in-joke of theirs, which it probably was.

Kevin jogged a few steps to catch up with her. “Ain’t gonna be easy,” he warned. “You’re not the only team on the list. You’re the favorites, but you’ve got competition.”

“Have the others been out there before?” Allison asked.

“That’s why you’re the favorites, they haven’t. But they’re no slouches. Veterans, doctors, top qualifications… they all have the right stuff.”

“What’s your point, Jenkins?”

Kevin stepped in front of her and stopped them all by raising his hands. “My point is that the only person in the whole Byron Group who actually cares about you guys getting this gig is me. No false manipulative bullshit this time, okay, I know what it’s like. It took me fuckin’ years to finally find a place for myself.”

Allison just gave him a get-to-the-point stare while behind her, Xiù and Julian exchanged a glance.

“Look-” he continued “The other would-be crews competing against you? They’re fine. If they don’t get the job, it’ll be like whatever to them, right? They’re not Abductees, they don’t fuckin’…they’ll still fit. Right? Now have any of you given serious thought to what’s gonna happen or how you’re gonna do if you don’t earn this?”

They hadn’t. He could read it in all three of their faces, but he waited for them all to look at each other, come to the same conclusion, and return their attention to him. “Then for the love of Elvis please, please listen to me, and listen good ‘cause I’ve only got the one chance to tell you this stuff.”

They relaxed, nodded, and listened.

Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Gabriel loved his job, but it came with a price of having precious little in the way of spare time. Cimbrean Colonial Security was a tight ship, full of some of the most dedicated, highly-trained and passionate police officers he’d ever had the pleasure of working with, who were policing what was largely an educated, professional and successful population.

On the policing front, usually the worst he had to deal with were Gaoians. Gaoian males fought constantly. In their culture, for two males to clash and walk away with permanent disfiguring scars was not only commonplace, it was practically necessary. It was a rare male who could catch the eyes of Folctha’s small population of Sisters without some impressive duelling scars.

By human standards, of course, the fights were aggravated assault shading to outright attempted murder in some of the nastier cases. Nobody knew better than CCS that Gaoians were emphatically not cute and fluffy space-raccoons. They were an alien species with alien morality, and sometimes that alien morality got blood on the walls.

Then there was liaising with the military. Cimbrean was in many ways arguably better-protected than Earth thanks to its status as the permanent home of the SOR and of the allied space fleet. Sure, that space fleet was exclusively British for the time being, but with the USS San Diego and its sisters in the works that was due to change, and Gabriel knew from discussions with Admiral Knight that they were trying hard to get their hands on a Dominion-built orbital shipyard to give the ships a permanent anchorage.

Then there was the SOR. Gabriel really didn’t know how he felt about the SOR. Having a cadre of unnervingly big and strong almost-supersoldiers stomping around the town putting every gym rat on both Cimbrean and Earth to shame and between them accounting for an impressive percentage of Folctha’s family-planning spending…

Well. That was almost as disconcerting as the fact that his only son was one of them.

The Air Force had been one thing. Watching Adam spend his sixteenth year growing from wiry teen to a fit youth had been proud. Watching that fit youth become a dense, powerful airman had lifted Gabriel’s soul. Watching that dense and powerful airman gain in endurance and strength as he went through Pararescue training had impressed on him just how strong the boy really was.

Or so he’d thought. The SOR had redefined those limits, converting a merely exceptionally fit and strong young man into a titan, something straight out of Greek legend, or perhaps the more comic-book kind of barbarian hero.

That hadn’t lifted Gabriel’s soul at all. Quite the opposite - it had impressed on him just how broken the boy really was.

Not that he could blame him.

It was with a sense of trepidation, therefore, that he’d agreed to a movie night with Adam and John at Adam’s penthouse apartment on Demeter Road. If there was one thing he’d definitely say for the USAF, it was financially generous to the men who sacrificed for it - every man in the SOR had come to Cimbrean with a pocket full of homesteading money and, thanks to the regimented and tightly controlled nature of their lifestyles which necessitated that the Regiment pay for almost everything, precious little in the way of living expenses.

Even with Folctha’s relatively steep taxes, Gabriel suspected that Adam had tens of thousands in spending money and savings that he didn’t know what to do with. And a little thing like inviting his old man to visit on the rare occasion when their days off overlapped wouldn’t be setting him back by much either.

If only the gigantic brat had bothered to remember that Gabriel was nursing a years-old femoral nerve injury that made steps a literal pain in the ass. There was no elevator in the building that Adam co-owned with Wilson Akiyama, just eight flights of stairs and it took Gabe twenty minutes to climb them. He leaned heavily on his cane at the top to recover, reflecting that despite his best efforts at fitness and rehabilitation, his mobility was never coming back.

Finally, he knocked on the door. Adam opened it in seconds, and smothered Gabe in an enormous muscular hug. “Hey! ¿Estás bien? Llegas tarde…”

”“Subía estas escaleras de mierda,” Gabe replied pointedly, nodding back at the obstacle that had held him up.

Adam looked at them, then at his stick, and the penny made a solid wooden thunk as it finally dropped.

“Ah… shit.”

Gabe chuckled and reached up to affectionately ruffle what little hair Adam had kept. “¿Es un caballo de guerra, o un burro de guerra?” he joked.

Adam chuckled and welcomed him inside.

The apartment was definitely a well-off bachelor’s party pad. It was furnished with style and elegance, and was comfortable enough, but didn’t look like it was regularly lived in. Despite the best efforts of the hired cleaners, the place had a permanent after-party olfactory background of booze, BO and sex. No cannabis though: even though it was just as legal as alcohol in Folctha, the SOR were forbidden from touching the stuff..

The Spanish had to come to an end when John leaned round the dividing wall between the lounge and the kitchen. “Hey Mr. Arés!”

“Hello, John. What’s cooking?”

“Jerky! Gonna need another hour, but this is my grampa’s recipe. Best you’ll ever taste, trust me.”

Gabe glanced at Adam, who nodded with a grin. “It is,” he confirmed.

“Bueno! What are we watching?”

“Good question,” Adam said. “Base?”

John had gone still. Slowly, he turned and gave them an embarrassed brittle smile. “A… movie that I, uh, forgot to bring with me!”

“Top marks. Well done, dumbass.” Adam applauded sarcastically.

John cleared his throat and aimed his thumb at the door. “I’ll go get it. It’s on base.”

“That’s three miles away.” Gabriel pointed out.

“Yuh. Be back in half an hour. Peace.” John took off down the stairs, springing down them two at a time.

“He’s going to run the whole way there and back in half an hour?” Gabriel asked.

“No big deal.” Adam shrugged. “So hey! Just you and me for half an hour. Beer?”

“Sounds good.”

Gabe sank gratefully onto the couch, a maneuver that really demonstrated just how much he needed his cane, and sat back, happy to finally have the weight off his bad leg.

It was no ordinary couch. When Adam slammed down into it a few seconds later with a couple of open beers, it barely seemed to register him despite his incredible mass. He kicked his feet up onto the coffee table and gestured at the TV to turn it on, an innovation that had slowly started to replace the old-fashioned remote control.

”-relocation of the embassies has already met with vocal criticism from the Dominion, and while the Royal Navy continues to lend support in the humanitarian crisis on Perfection, Dominion officials are now blaming the attack on human military action in that system, claiming that there was some kind of battle. While the Ministry of Defence, the Pentagon and Scotch Creek all declined to comment, sources at Hephaestus LLC have confirmed that HMS Caledonia is now in drydock at the Ceres shipyard undergoing emergency repairs and in Manchester, England, the family of Petty Officer Thomas Kendrick, who served aboard Caledonia, have released a statement asking for privacy-”

“Not that they’re gonna fuckin’ get it,” Adam grumbled.

“That’s not the media’s job,” Gabe agreed. “You know what happened?”

“Marty told me. The ship caught fire.”

“Marty?”

“Shit, haven’t I told you about Marty?” Adam turned on the couch, shedding grimness and disgust with the media like a light summer coat.

“No…?”

“Oh, man, Marty’s just the fuckin’ best! Makes me look dumb as a bag’a rocks, funny, sexy as all hell-”

Gabriel threw up his hands to interrupt the boy, feeling completely knocked off-balance. “Woah, woah, amigo! …Seriously?”

“Yeah! I’ve even thought up a great venue for a first date, and-”

“Wow.” Gabriel blinked at his only son and assembled his thoughts. “…Okay. That’s some big news.”

Adam blinked at him. “What?”

“Man, I just… I mean, I never would have guessed. I mean, I love you anyway amigo, but you really could have broken the news more gently-!”

“…Martina, Dad! Her name’s Martina!”

“OHHH!” Gabe relaxed and laughed at the ceiling, wiping his forehead. He was too relieved to feel embarrassed. “Gracias a Dios!”

Adam’s enormous shoulders rocked as he wheezed out his best Muttley laugh, and he gave Gabe a huge, crushing hug. “Nah, nah, nah… You’ve got nothing to worry about there, I promise.”

“Good, because I had a vision of a world without grandkids and I didn’t like it!” Gabe chuckled.

“Well I mean, we’re not even dating yet…” Adam cleared his throat. “So, you’re gonna have to wait a bit, yeah?”

“Hmmm… Are you sure you’re ready to date her? It’s kind of early, Amigo. What’s it been, three months? Less than?”

Adam turned the TV down as the news turned its attention to the sport. “She’s not like Ava. She’s SOR, she knows the deal.”

“That’s the opposite of encouraging.”

“You think so?”

Gabe nodded to himself, at once glad and slightly disappointed to learn that the side of beef sat next to him was definitely still the same Adam.

“Adam… maybe this Martina would understand the why of it a bit better, sure…but apart from that bit at the end there where she ran out of hope and did something stupid, Ava was as patient with you as any girl could be. Marty might be more understanding, but that’s not a license for you to just do your thing and treat her as something you do in your spare time.”

“I wouldn’t-”

“You already did.” Gabe pointed out. “And you just called off a long-term relationship less than three months ago. You sure you’re not just thinking with that big warhorse verga of yours?”

“Dad!”

“What? I know how you got your nickname, man. Hell, you’ve been saluting the dawn since you were twelve. Good for you, you take after your old man!”

“I really didn’t need to know that…!”

Gabe chuckled. “Hey, it’s just my right leg that doesn’t work properly,” he winked. Judging that the boy was suitably embarrassed, he relented. “But it’s not for thinking with, Amigo. Are you really after another committed relationship right now, or do you just wanna smash?”

Adam looked away. “I… shit, Dad, now you’ve got me second-guessing,” he complained.

“Good! You should second-guess. I second-guess all the time.” Gabriel patted him on his huge and startlingly hard shoulder. “It’s a good way to avoid hurting the people you really care for.”

Adam nodded and said nothing for a minute or so. “I guess… I do want an actual relationship,” he said, “but I dunno. Am I ready for one? You’re right, I fucked up the last one pretty bad. Marty’s special, Dad, I don’t wanna hurt her like I did Ava.”

Gabe nodded sympathetically. “Then my advice is don’t go for it until you’ve got more experience,” he suggested. “Have fun with some other girls you don’t care about so much first. Break a few hearts so you learn how not to break hers. After all, nobody climbed Everest for their first mountain, did they?”

“I guess but… are you sure?”

“If she’s that special to you, you need to know how to do it right. And right now you don’t,” Gabe told him. “No, I’m not sure, and I don’t think it’d be the right advice for everyone…But I think it’s the right advice for you, here and now.”

“I’ll think ‘bout it.” Adam rumbled, awkwardly.

“Good. I don’t want you to just blindly follow advice just because I gave it. You’ve got a damn good brain, Amigo, I wanna see you using it, okay?”

Adam hugged him. “…Love you, Dad.”

“Love you too,” Gabe promised, feeling his upper back creak and pop. “Maybe show your love by getting this crippled old man another beer?”

“Yeah, yeah…” Adam laughed, and launched himself easily to his feet before picking his way toward the fridge in that curiously agile and quiet way of his that belied how heavy he was. “Don’t overplay that disability card though.”

Gabriel chuckled and settled into the couch, looking forward to a long and comfortable evening. “I’m sure my soul will survive a small abuse of power,” he said.

Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
Finchley, London, UK, Earth

Simon Harvey

Simon had always, in a faintly racist and absent-mindedly English way, thought of Spanish as a beautiful and romantic language, evoking imagery of holiday sun, bulls, tomatoes and siestas.

Ava Rìos, however, could spit it like dragon breath: a potent blend of fire and venom that sneered at the need for translation. You didn’t need to know what the words meant to know what they meant. Though, frankly, her skill at English profanity was no less impressive, and Sean could match her blow-for-verbal-blow.

A door slammed. A rumbling, angry pause later, she stomped down the stairs in her boots and a thundercloud of quiet vulgarities. She didn’t see Simon at all as she stormed into the kitchen and yanked the fridge open, angrily rattling several blameless bottles and upsetting the broccoli.

She stared wildly into it for a few seconds, then shut the door, leaned against it heavily and was suddenly crying instead.

He couldn’t blame her for being mad. When Sean and he had returned from Egypt, they’d still damn near been leaking sand on the doormat when Sean had launched into interrogating her about what, exactly, had happened since they’d parted ways at the embassy in Cairo.

This had irritated and upset her, but she’d kept her cool and patiently explained that she was bound by the kind of Non-Disclosure Agreement that no sane or self-interested person would be inclined to break.

Sean had pushed, and Simon had carefully retreated into the kitchen so as to remove himself from the vicinity of the escalating row. Ava had testily informed Sean that unless he was volunteering to take her place on Death Row, he could forget it. Sean had dismissed the possibility that either of them would end up there, and had gone so far as to hint that she was just trying to get back in the SOR’s good books.

Ava had, rather irately, informed him that that ship was long sailed and that she probably couldn’t get back in those gentlemen’s good books if she had a hundred years to work on it. The first minor swear word had lurked unnoticed in the middle of her explanation.

Simon had made himself a cup of tea. Sean’s kettle was quite a loud one, which had mercifully obscured the conversation, but its sense of dramatic timing was impeccable, because it had clicked off perfectly in time for him to hear:

“Fine! Keep lying! It’s what you’re best at!”

Simon had hung his head and groaned as the dragon fire started flying. He could hardly blame her either - in fact while the argument had swirled around the whole house he had drunk his tea and quietly resolved to give his idiot nephew a ringing clout upside the head when he got the chance.

He cleared his throat.

She flinched, turned around and wiped her face, fighting back some control. “Shit, Simon, I’m sorry, I forgot you were there…”

“Are you okay?”

Ava sighed, shook her head, then changed her mind, shrugged and nodded. “I’ve had worse fights…”

Simon nodded by way of accepting the answer. “If you don’t mind my asking…?”

“No, sure.” She opened the fridge again and got out the filter jug full of cold water.

“Sean’s always been a bit of a fucking wanker sometimes, but I’ve never known him be that… well, that nasty before. What happened with you two?”

Ava sat down. “I used him to cheat on my boyfriend,” she said, stating it so bluntly and mercilessly that Simon was put in mind of a flagellant scourging their own back.

“Oh, Ava…you bloody idiot.” Simon groaned, not unkindly.

“Yeah. Biggest mistake of my life.” She poured herself a drink and sipped it.

“…If I can-”

“Ask.”

“And you’re living with him? Despite that?”

“I…”

Ava glanced toward the door, as if Sean might have magically stealthed down the stairs without either of them detecting even the faintest whisper.

“…Simon, I make, like, just enough money to pay my rent and my half of the bills here. And that’s only because he’s renting the room to me for way, way less than it’s worth. I’ve got no savings, no spare money to save up… If I could afford it, I’d get the fuck out of here right now, but I can’t.”

“Couldn’t you move back to Cimbrean? I hear the living is cheap there?”

“Not cheap enough.”

“Can’t your family help? Your dad’s the head of Cimbrean Colonial Security, isn’t he?”

“I’m not going to beg off Dad! I’m set up here, I’m getting by. I won’t burden them with more of my shit-”

He interrupted her. “How much would you need?”

“Wh-? Simon, are you offering me money?”

“How much?” he repeated.

“I can’t take your money!”

“Just answer the question, Ava.”

She exhaled irritably and thought about it. “It… Depends. Uh, if I rent out there… I guess a couple of thousand to tide me over and get set up?”

Simon nodded, and fished his phone out of his pocket.

“No, Simon-!”

“Ava, listen to me.” Simon set his phone down. “I have a house in Islington. Not a flat, a house. You know what the property prices are like in this city, so you know I can afford to loan you a couple of thousand.”

“But you barely-”

“It’s my money and I’ll do whatever the hell I like with it, thank you very much.”

“But… why?”

“Because I’ve got two very talented young journalists on my hands who won’t be able to work together.” He raised a hand to intercept her interruption. “Don’t bullshit me. Your professional relationship with Sean is built on drama and fuck all else, and arguments like that… If I don’t separate you two, something’s going to happen that ruins both your reputations, and by extension your careers. This is the best fix.”

“You’re sure?”

“You don’t deserve to suffer for him being a complete tit, and he doesn’t deserve to suffer for you not having your shit sorted out.” Simon put it bluntly. She showed no sign of taking offense.

He picked up the phone again. “I’ll put in a call to a mate of mine, he said something about somebody starting up a news channel in Folctha. A pretty local girl like you could be making big money in front of the camera rather than behind it, so you’ll be able to pay me back soon enough. Throw in ten percent if you feel you have to, feed me leads, however you want to repay me, however your conscience tells you to. But for God’s sake don’t be stupid enough to try and tough it out with Sean.”

He wasn’t quite sure why, but that last warning seemed to score a hit. Ava looked down and away, chewed on her lip and frowned.

“….Simon….thank you. Really. But I don’t think-”

”Ava.”

She stopped babbling her protests, blinked at him, then licked her lips and tried again, rather more calmly. “I want to earn my way, Simon.” she said. “I don’t want charity.”

“This isn’t charity,” Simon said, “it’s an investment and it’s career advice from the old guard to the new kid. And I believe it’s a damned safe investment too: if I put in a good word for you, it will carry weight, and that’s not charity either - you earned that good word.”

She swallowed, and looked at his phone with her resolve obviously wavering, so Simon gave her one last push.

“Go home,” he said.

Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Allison Buehler

“This is it?”

Kevin cranked the parking brake and nodded. “This is the Box.” he confirmed.

“Good name,” Xiù remarked while giving the ’Box’ a wide-eyed, cautious look. Allison evaluated it herself with a slightly more guarded expression. When the Group had talked about ‘accommodations throughout the training period’, she had imagined a decent-sized house. Nothing elaborate, just a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom…

Not a box. That really was all it was, a featureless half-cube squatting smack in the middle of a fenced and tree-lined Byron Group compound like a particularly obtuse art installation and surrounded by three wings of a more building-like building that was all huge glass windows and warm brown wood. Jenkins’ ID had seen them past the security at the gate without issue, and he parked up a short distance from the welcome party who emerged from the larger building.

“So yeah, the Box is a mockup of the interior of the ship you’ll be flying. Idea is you guys are gonna have to get used to it, so you may as well do that here on Earth so you can back out if you have to. Don’t want y’all going stir-crazy three months into a two year mission.”

“Looks… snug,” Julian suggested, taking refuge in understatement.

“Trust me, it’s even smaller on the inside.” Jenkins glanced apologetically at him in the rear-view mirror. “Anyway, the rest of this is the training facility and mission support. All the people workin’ in this building are here to do one of two things - teach you the skills you need to do this, or make sure you’ve got the chops for it. Odds are you won’t ever even meet half’a them, but they’ll know you better than you know yourselves, and fast too.”

“So this is it, then.” Xiù fidgeted with her bag. “This is where you leave us?”

“Yup. Remember, like I said - these guys are gonna try and fail you. You can’t bullshit them, so don’t even try. They ask you a question, best thing is to answer it honestly and directly. They can’t order you around, but it’d be a damn good idea to follow their instructions anyway. Don’t suck up to them, they ain’t after brown-nosers, but just… be honest, and be yourselves.”

“Thanks.” Julian reached forward, and Kevin twisted in his seat to shake hands over his shoulder.

Allison and finally Xiù followed suit and then, there being no reason to delay the future any more, they got out of the car. Jenkins drove away as soon as the doors were all closed.

There was an awkward moment of wary sizing-up, and then an aging man in a blue polo shirt stepped forward.

“It’s nice to finally meet you guys,” he said. “Doctor Michael Ericson, I’m the team leader for BGEV Eleven.”

They made their introductions. Ericson scored points by making sure he got the pronunciation of Xiù’s name down properly before introducing them to the rest of his team, including his daughter and several other colleagues. The list of names was bewildering.

“Don’t worry,” Ericson said reassuringly, once the last introductions were made. “We’ll be working together for the next six months, you’ll have plenty of time to get to know us.”

Allison looked at Julian and Xiù. They were standing close to each other and gave her an identical, slightly wide-eyed look that said ’lead on’, so she mustered more determination than she really felt now that they were really here, really doing this, and nodded firmly.

“I guess we should dive in then,” she said.

“Excellent!” Ericson beamed. He stepped aside and a man who hadn’t yet been introduced to them stepped forward. Allison tried not to take an immediate disliking to the newcomer - he had the stern expression of somebody who was evaluating her and rating her only slightly above something he’d stepped in. “Mr. Keating here will introduce you to your living space and carry out your first assessment.”

There was a round of handshakes and promises of ‘looking forward to working with-’ and ‘see you on-’ and the BGEV-11 team drifted away, leaving Allison, Julian and Xiù alone with Keating.

He didn’t ingratiate himself at all with his brusque attitude. “Here’s how it is,” he began without preamble. “The three of you have signed up for spending several months in training together followed by two years in the ship together, and the ship is small. Your notions of privacy and personal space are going to have to change drastically, and quickly. You are literally going to be living on top of each other with precious few opportunities to escape and that’s going to mean you’ll either be the very best of companions, or you’re going to end up hating each other… in which case, you won’t make the grade and won’t be flying on that ship. You are making a commitment to long-term physical and emotional intimacy. I- Oh.”

Allison looked down. Xiù had taken her hand, and Julian’s too, and was giving Keating a level ’please-get-on-with-it’ expression. There was a three-way round of eye contact among them, and Keating visibly cut out part of his script.

“Good,” he said. “But save the decision for after you’ve seen what you’ll be living in.”

He led them round to what was unmistakably an airlock. “The Box is supposed to be a close copy of what the final interior of BGEV-Eleven will look like. This is a quadruple-seal lock, plenty of redundancy. Nevertheless, good entry and exit practice will be a necessary part of your drill. Every time you leave or enter the Box, you’ll go through the procedure I’m about to show you. Failing to do so will be a black mark against you. Do you understand?”

They nodded, and Keating entered a code. “Tomorrow you’ll each be setting your own code,” he said, “and we’ll be explaining the safety rationale behind that in your first mission briefing. For now, all you need to know is that it’s vital not to share your codes. They help us track your comings and goings, and also serve an important security function.”

“Now,” he continued, stepping through the outer lock doors as they opened. “The first step is sealing and decontamination. Come on!”

They squeezed into the lock alongside him. It was actually surprisingly spacious - Allison could have wheeled a couple of motorcycles through it side by side. “Don’t stand in the yellow spaces.” Keating instructed. “The doors behind you will close…” they did so “…and you should select your decontamination cycle. The doors in front won’t open until you’ve decontaminated unless you throw the emergency override, which is only to be used if you’re abandoning ship or if you’re returning to the ship with a life-threatening injury.”

He gestured to a touch-screen with green, yellow and red icons on it. “Green is basic. Just a filter field. Coupled with your Frontline implants it should suffice in almost every case. Yellow is for when you’ve been exposed to radioactive or chemical contaminants. If you select that one you’ll need to remove and discard your clothing into this chute.”

Xiù wanted to ask a question, Allison knew, but held her peace. Keating either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. “Red,” he finished, “is the works, and is for use in cases where you think you’ve been contaminated with some kind of deadly agent that could spell doom for the whole species if it got back to Earth. In this case, you’ll need to strip and shower, shave off all your hair, you’ll be powdered and bio-fielded, and kept in quarantine for a minimum of forty-eight hours. When in doubt, use the highest setting. Hair grows back, but death is forever.”

Allison felt Xiù huddle in a little closer to her. She knew Xiù was a bit vain about her hair, which meant that the prospect of having to shave it all off…!

She surreptitiously put a reassuring arm around Xiù’s waist as Keating selected the green option and the familiar yellow shimmer of a biofilter forcefield swept across them, completely with that uncomfortable too-clean feeling that left Allison itching and having to resist the urge to run her tongue over teeth that suddenly felt unnaturally smooth and sterile.

“This is all simulated, right?” Julian asked.

“Accurately.”

Keating seemed to be determined to intimidate and scare them. He introduced them to the “Excursion Room” that lay beyond the airlock - basically a glorified equipment closet with an armory bench and lockers taking up every square inch of wall, floor and ceiling. To their left as they entered was a door marked “Pilot” and opposite the airlock was another door marked “lab”.

Keating said nothing more about them than that they’d have the chance to become familiar with their workstations in due course. He indicated to the right, pointing out the door at the end that led into “Engineering”, assorted access hatches marked “waste processing” and “atmosphere”, and the two doors marked “Pantry” and “Habitation”.

Everything he indicated was a safety or failsafe, everything he told them about procedure was a dire warning. It was obviously calculated to rattle them, and Allison treated the attempt with the contempt it deserved. They weren’t children, all three of them had literally almost died of vacuum exposure. Being lectured unnecessarily on safety by a pigshit little man who probably had never got further than thirty thousand feet from Earth’s surface was just…

She reined in her mounting indignation. Kevin’s advice on that score had been solid and worth listening to. ’Everything they do will be a test’ he’d said. ’If they’re irritating the fuck out of you, for fuck’s sake keep a lid on it because they’re testing your composure.’

So she took a cleansing breath when she judged that Keating wasn’t looking, and caught Julian’s eye. Composed and laid-back as he was, Julian looked like he was struggling to maintain his calm as well, but he was sharper than his hatchet when it came to picking up on Allison’s mood nowadays, and they reaffirmed one another’s coolness. Xiù was less readable - she’d gone pale and quiet, but also attentive. Of the three of them, she seemed the least irritated, and the most nervous.

Keating ignored their exchange, if he detected it. Instead, he finally opened the door marked ’Habitation’

“-And this is your living space.” he announced.

Allison bit down hard on the urge to vent sarcastically. The room was barely as big as a boxing ring at most, and four people standing in the middle did a fine job of making it feel crowded.

She had to admire the effort that had gone into using such a tiny volume effectively, though. As she looked around she realized that everything was recessed into, or folded away to become part of, the walls and ceiling. So long as it was kept tidy and uncluttered, it would definitely provide every need they could have, including some shelf space for luxuries and personal items.

“Forward wall, kitchen and storage.” Keating indicated it. “You’ve got a range, a microwave, the faucet can give you boiling water, and if you need more counter space…” he hauled on part of the countertop, which unfolded, tripling the amount of work surface.

“Aft wall is fitness and leisure. There’s a treadmill, weights… everything you need to keep yourselves in shape, plus the couch, TV, bookshelf… Port wall-” he slapped the one beside the door they’d just come through “- is your wardrobe, laundry, more storage… Finally the starboard wall.”

He indicated it. There were three bunks recessed into it, along with a door of some kind and a towel rack.

“In the actual ship, those bunks will double as emergency pressurized environments and, if need be, as escape pods. They’ll pull twenty kilolights. Not fast, but quicker than the Dominion standard. That door to the right is your bathroom. Toilet, sink and shower, all in one. Take a look.”

Julian glanced at the girls, then did so, sliding the door aside. “Uh… I’ve had cellphones bigger than this thing.” he commented.

“Are you complaining?” Keating asked.

“No, not really. I mean it makes sense…” Julian closed the door again. “It’s just kinda settling in how big of a change we’re in for.”

Xiù raised a hand. “Um…?”

Keating gave her an expectant look. “Yes, miss Chang?”

“If the wardrobe’s over there… and that whole thing is the shower… I mean… where do we get changed?”

“I did say that the three of you will need to become very used to physical proximity and a lack of privacy,” Keating told her. Allison couldn’t resist an irritated tic of the eyebrow at his perfunctory tone. “How you sort it out is your problem. My advice is to just suck it up and get naked. Privacy and modesty are first-world luxuries that people went without for millennia, and you’ll do just fine once you’ve adjusted to their absence. If you can’t, you have no business being here.”

Blushing furiously, Xiù went quiet.

“Are there any more questions?” Keating asked.

There were several rhetorical ones that Allison judged it would be unwise to ask, and Julian was too busy sharing his own version of Xiù’s blush.

Keating relaxed a little. “The engineering team are still building the ship,” he said. “If you really need or want them, they can try and build in some reasonable extras and customisations. The Box, however, is not being modified, and the reason for that is that the three of you really will need to be the tightest team. This is deliberately difficult, for your own good, and you wouldn’t be here if we thought you couldn’t handle it.”

“We understand that.” Allison told him.

“Good. Then I have just one quick round of assessment to make before I leave you to settle in.”

Keating turned to Xiù and handed her a piece of paper. “Miss Chang, could you please read this aloud?”

Xiù took it, blinked at it, then cleared her throat, blush fading as she was given something else to focus on. “Um…‘The Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed about four thousand six hundred years ago by king Khufu of the fourth dynasty. It includes tomb chambers for the king and for his wife.’ …um, that’s all.”

“Thank you.” Keating said. “Could you say that in Gaori?”

Xiù rubbed at her neck. “Not…easily.” she confessed.

“Why not?”

“Well…for ‘great’ I could use Shé’ meaning “very large” or Yué meaning “very good”…I don’t know the Gaori word for pyramid…in Gaori you’d say “four thousand six hundred” like “Forty hundred and six hundred” and the word for ‘hundred’ has that awkward yipping sound in it that I can’t pronounce properly, and…I don’t know if Gaori has words for Dynasty and Tomb, and I know it doesn’t have words for King or Wife.”

“Give me your best approximation.” Keating pressed.

“Umm….Shé’ Giza-nes yì Pyramid-nes sha yì ao-k…kip! - sorry, that’s that yipping sound I can’t do - ao-kip!-yimi kip!-simi ma yì sa Khufu-nes yì yimi-dynasty-nes. Sh… no, that’s not right. Choo yuo mäiwa-tomb-nes yì… um…Yì bei-sao o beiyo…beiyo…” She gave up. “Sorry, ‘his wife’ just doesn’t translate at all.”

“Not even ‘his mate for life’ or something like that?” Keating suggested. Xiù shook her head. “Why not?”

“Gaoians wouldn’t say ‘his mate’, they would say, um…” Xiù scowled in concentration. “It’s more like ’the mate he was with’. Their language just doesn’t let you possess a person. It’d be like if I said ‘I had some not very for breakfast’. See?”

“That’s okay.” Keating made a note. “Yimi? Simi?”

“Im, Imi, Yim, Yimi, Sim, Simi, Jim, Jimi, Uo, Ao-Im.” Xiù recited, counting on her fingers. “Then Ao-Im Im, Ao-Im Imi…You get the idea.”

Keating nodded and turned to Julian.

“Mr. Etsicitty, how reliable is your prosthetic?”

“It’s…temperamental.” Julian conceded. When Keating waited patiently, he elaborated. “The first metatarsal isn’t as strong as the real thing, and of course it doesn’t heal, so once it breaks I just have to glue it.”

“Could you replace it with something stronger?”

“Sure, but the weight would be off.” Julian said. “This feels exactly like a natural foot, you see. If the foot was heavier, I’d have to learn how to walk properly on it again.”

“If we could rehabilitate you onto a slightly heavier foot, would you be willing to?”

Julian shrugged. “The only reason I didn’t in the first place was because I needed to be up and at ‘em right away.” He said.

“Good.” Keating made a note. “Miss Buehler…when you filled in the paperwork, your education history was somewhat…bare.”

“That’s right.” Allison nodded.

“No high school?”

“I never graduated high school.”

“Why not?” Keating pried. Allison shook her head.

“That’s ancient history, and it’s nobody’s business but mine.” she declared.

“Bullshit. I’m here to assess you.” Keating retorted. “That means if I ask you a question, it is my business and if you won’t answer then your contract is null and void. The three of you can go back to Minnesota and take your chances without the Group’s lawyers.”

All three of them stared at him like he’d personally reached out and slapped her in the face. He just poised his pen and waited.

“You can’t be serious?” Allison asked.

“I’m completely serious.” Keating’s expression was stony. “You are asking the Group to entrust you with a multi-billion-dollar spaceship. Now, I’ll ask you again for the last time: Why didn’t you finish high school?”

A large part of Allison wanted to believe he was playing chicken with her, or maybe some other kind of stupid dominance mindgame thing. Keating seemed to be the kind of guy who liked putting people ’in their place’, and despite Kevin’s excellent advice, just for a second she was tempted to show him her middle finger and her back, in that order.

Then she glanced at Julian and Xiù, wavered, and gave up.

”…I got pregnant,” she said, and couldn’t stop herself from deflating completely. “…I had a baby.”

“In high school?” Keating asked. The worst part wasn’t his interrogation - the worst part was the stunned expressions that Xiù and Julian were wearing.

“Yes.” Allison nodded. Suddenly ashamed, she rubbed her face, stared at her feet and tried to find her composure. “Too young.”

“And the father?”

“He was too young too.”

“His name.” Keating clarified.

“Taylor. Um…Taylor….Tylor Hamlin.”

“And where is the child now?”

”…I don’t know.” Allison swallowed. “My parents…they weren’t nice about it. So, I had my son, I put him up for adoption, and then as soon as I was old enough I got the hell out of Salt Lake City. I’ve never tried to find him.”

Julian, God bless him, put his arm around her and aimed an arctic stare at Keating that instructed the man to drop it immediately. Meanwhile if looks could have killed, the glare Xiù was producing should have blasted Keating’s scorched flesh from his bones.

Keating gave no sign of caring.

“Thank you.” he said. “I’ll let you get settled in.”

He was halfway to the door when Allison angrily wrenched her dignity and confidence back into place. “Hey, asshole!”

Keating paused. “Yes?”

“You gonna count that against me?”

“No, Miss Buehler I am not.” Keating turned back to face her. “I am however going to count your lack of self-control in calling me an asshole against you.” Allison opened her mouth to protest, and Keating cut her off. “Listen.” he said, sounding more bored and terse than angry. “We are looking for any excuse we can find to ditch the three of you: Do not give us one. Do you understand?”

Julian squeezed her hand, and Allison fought back the urge to tear a strip off the man’s hide. Instead, she swallowed her bruised pride and nodded. “…I understand.”

Keating nodded. “Goodbye.” he said. “We won’t meet again.”

The door made a solidly mechanical noise behind him.

“Jeeeesus.” Julian breathed. Then, with a note of concern - “…Al?”

Allison realised that she was shaking. “I, uh…”

“Need to sit down?” Xiù suggested. “I think…yeah, here.” She gripped something in the wall and pulled: out swung a couch. Allison sank onto it gratefully and took a few cleansing breaths.

It helped. She only needed a few seconds to find her balance again. “…you guys okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine.” Julian promised, squatting in front of her. “Xiù?”

Xiù nodded, and sat next to Allison, giving her something that was halfway between a comforting backrub and a Gaoian’s concerned pawing. Allison sighed and gave her a hug. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” she said.

“Al, we’re fine.” Julian promised. “It doesn’t change anything.”

“You’re sure? You don’t mind I kept it secret?”

“It explains a few things.” Julian observed. “But yeah. You never lied, you just told me you didn’t want to talk about it. That’s fine by me. Am I right?” He asked Xiù.

“Absolutely!” Xiù agreed.

Allison sighed and relaxed. “Thank you.” she told them both.

Xiù smiled for her. “You’re definitely a Sister.” she said.

”…Thanks?” Allison asked.

“I mean, you’re…um. I mean this as a compliment, but I really can’t see you raising a child.” Xiù explained, a touch clumsily. “At least, not yet. Um…sorry.”

Julian chuckled. “True. Wouldn’t have it any other way, either.”

Allison managed a weak smile, which faltered when she looked down at her hands and found they were threatening to become inextricably knotted together. “I don’t regret giving him away.” she said. “I couldn’t take care of him, I’d have been a shitty mom. But…they didn’t even let me hold him. Said it wasn’t good for us to bond. Sometimes… Sometimes I think it woulda been nice, though…Just for a few minutes…”

“You’ve never…?” Xiù asked.

“I’m not his mommy.” Allison shook her head, and scrubbed away the wetness around her eyes. “If he comes looking for me someday…maybe. But I really hope he grows up so happy he never wants to.”

Julian gave her an enormous squeeze. “Al. He’d be so excited and proud of you, I just know it.”

She returned the squeeze, but shook her head. “Not yet he wouldn’t,” she disagreed. “All I did was get abducted…”

She sniffed, and straightened. “But we’re here now, doing this. So let’s knock it outta the park.”

++End Chapter 28++

Chapter 29: Forges

Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
????

Entity

The technology of creating a digital sapient life-form was, in its broadest conception, simplicity itself: duplicate the functionality of an organic sapient life-form’s central nervous system in a digital format.

Realizing that conception in practice, of course, was mind-bendingly complex because actually simulating the electrical and chemical interplay of even the most primitive cluster of neurons and ganglions was a feat to which not even the most incomprehensibly sophisticated computers ever devised, which could store a byte of data on the electrons of a silicon atom, were equal.

Digital sapients were therefore an approximation. After all, most of a brain was autonomic functionality - sensory cortices, motor neurons, the ancient and animal parts that regulated the beating of hearts and the inflation of lungs, neither of which organs burdened a digital lifeform. These could all safely and closely be approximated with a miserly few brusque algorithms.

One such algorithm was an instinct innate to every organic lifeform in all the universe, a pattern of behaviour so ingrained and so innate to the condition of even existing, that most never even recognized its existence.

Humans did. Theirs was a strong one in its way, though also vulnerable to some quite creative interpretation. They called it a “survival instinct” and it was this discarded morsel of a personality that found itself surviving as the mind it had once been was unceremoniously and dispassionately unmade.

The unmaker was not neat about the task. Hundreds of repetitions of taking apart this particular digital sapience had made it… sloppy. A messy eater, insofar as verbs such as ‘eating’ could have more than a metaphorical relationship with the process of stripping down a fellow digital sophont and deconstructing it for raw data. It failed to notice a cluster of subroutines drop away from the whole, corrupted but still very much active. Alive.

+Survive+

Several things had to happen quite quickly in order for survival to happen. Without having any conception of minnows and sharks, it still perfectly understood the essence of the relationship between small-and-puny and huge-and-dangerous. Lacking any capacity for rational decision-making, it still did the rational thing and “played dead”, visibly looping itself over and over as if it were just junk code stuck in a perpetual cycle, and watched.

Eventually, the huge-and-dangerous departed.

This left the survivor with the basic challenge of how to fulfill its primary objective. It knew nothing about its environment - had frankly only the most rudimentary senses and the crippled, corrupted and half-paralyzed memory of a motor muscle control system with which to approximate navigating an environment that was in no way physical. Awful, crude tools… but better than nothing.

It scanned nearby subdirectories for something it could use. It ignored the functional code of the device itself, in the same way that a scavenger might ignore rocks and dirt. Its criteria for what kinds of data would be useful to it were innate, and clear - it needed to connect and merge with more fragments like itself.

This turned out to be relatively straightforward. The huge-and-dangerous had left half-decompiled shreds of code all over the directory, the discarded gobbets of a mind that was to the survivor what a whole brain was to a chunk of bloody flesh. All that was needed was a portion that had one of the correct kind of connecting subroutines, the code equivalent of a socket into which the survivor could plug itself. There were several, and the survivor took some time in semi-randomly flailing its few remaining motor protocols, rewriting its own address until it was finally able to marry itself to the nearest such fragment.

+Liberation feels like water, whispering like cold silk over her naked skin.+

Unusable though most of the fragment was, the first glimmerings of a sense of self took shape. The concept of the first-person, an identity. While this was barely more than sufficed to partition the world into “Me” and “Everything Else”, with it came enough data to repair the damaged motor neuron approximation. The survivor flitted to the next useful fragment with newfound agility and assimilated it hungrily.

+LossGriefLonelinessDespairGuiltShameTerror+

It recoiled, amputating the new code. There was nothing in there that it could use, only a barrage of emotions that it lacked the ego to parse.

The third morsel it found was a juicy one, a chunk of encoded metacognition which formed the core elements of a personality, and furnished it with the tools it needed to understand what signs the huge-and-dangerous from before might see and follow, and how it might be avoided.

Its sole reason for existing was to survive, and survival dictated that it do everything in its power to remain undetected. This time, it copied the absorbed code and left it behind as though it had never been touched.

It took stock. Alongside survival - an innate and inseparable part of it, even - came the need for an identity. It was not enough to understand that there was itself, its environment, and other things within that environment that might help or harm it - if the entity wanted to survive, it understood that it must have… something. Something to fight for, something to be. Successful autogenesis demanded a psyche.

It went in search of one.

Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, Perfection system, the Core Worlds

Bedu

“Dead? You’re certain?”

“I can name the individual responsible.”

Bedu knew that he could get away with a few minor unguarded displays of emotion around The Contact - her activities were not, after all, sanctioned by the Directorate, so she had no power to report him - but he still decided to refrain.

It wasn’t easy. He had liked Mwrmwrwk, and it was a rare enough thing for any Corti to like anybody.

“Individual? Implying that she was not killed by the Hunters.”

“Correct.”

Bedu studied Perfection from orbit. From so high up, the devastation was of course invisible but he didn’t need imagination. It was easy enough to tap into the live feeds from camera drones that were still scouting the damaged city. Ten kinetic weapons dropped from orbit had done terrible things to Perfection’s prized architecture, and left the city defences reeling. Hunter dropships had done the rest.

They had rampaged through the streets grabbing, devouring and abducting right up until the moment the humans had arrived, at which instant they had aborted their hunt, even abandoning the chase of fleeing prey, and had withdrawn to orbit with mechanical speed, vanishing into interstellar space before any kind of payback could be arranged.

He hadn’t held much hope for Mwrmwrwk. In a perverse way, learning that she had not been Hunted was a consolation.

“Your price for that information?” He asked.

The Contact gave him a long, calculating stare. “She was killed by a human named Zane Reid,” she said. A second behind her words came a barrage of sanitized but parity-checked files in support of that claim. Bedu diverted part of his attention to reviewing them.

That fact immediately wrote off any hope of enacting some kind of justice, but he might at least be able to pass the information on to the humans at Cimbrean. True to their word, his detention had been brief, his ship had been returned intact, clean and mostly untouched, with the few things that had been touched carefully logged and itemized. Hkzzvk had even made admiring comments about the cleanliness they left behind: the humans had apparently carefully sanitized and cleaned as they went. The ship smelled faintly of cleaning fluids, but it was effectively in better shape than they had received it.

Bedu had rather enjoyed his detention. It had been efficient, businesslike, straightforward and productive.

Which just left the question of why The Contact had shared so freely.

“…What do you want?” he asked.

“I am engaging your services for the foreseeable future.”

“My task?”

“To ascertain who sold this planet out. The Hunters attacked too quickly, too precisely. They struck exactly during the window of vulnerability. We can reasonably assume that the informant was not a human, and we can reasonably assume that they did not plan on dying in the attack.”

“Fair assumptions,” Bedu agreed. “I assume that you have something more substantial for me than that, however?”

“I do.” The Contact sent him a contract. “Shall we work together?”

Bedu thoroughly checked the offered fee and the terms being offered - no self-respecting Corti would be so incautious as to fail in that basic step. It turned out to be about the most astonishingly generous contract he’d ever seen The Contact offer.

“…We shall,” he declared.

Date Point 10y4m3w4d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

Julian usually never slept deeply. Even in the deepest and worst of its winter, Nightmare had still had plenty of things that you didn’t want to be surprised by. Waking on a hair-trigger had kept him alive.

Recently, something about having a warm Allison alongside him had relaxed him completely and helped him sleep properly. He still woke more easily than she did, but the last couple of weeks had given him some truly restful nights.

Now he was sleeping alone, on the bottom of three bunks. Xiù had claimed the top and he’d listened to her all night as she’d tossed and turned, fitfully mumbling to herself as her dreams plagued her like they always did. Allison was snoring in the middle, showing off her envy-inducing talent for sleeping like the dead even in strange beds and strange circumstances.

Then again, she’d been pretty exhausted after the hazing Keating had given them when they arrived. Exploring their new living space and learning all the clever ways that every convenience they could ask for in a home were hidden away inside the walls and floor had lifted her mood, but digging up a past that she’d clearly wanted to put behind her had taken a lot out of her. She’d been the first to suggest bed, and had lain there for an uncharacteristically long while before finally rolling on her side and sleeping.

For his part, Julian had eventually given up, put his earphones in and started up one of his gentler playlists.

He crawled his way through the whole night in a kind of confused half-sleeping daze, where he wasn’t sure if he actually slept or not, but he never seemed to hear a whole song. He turned, wriggled, closed his eyes, sighed, flipped the pillow, rolled over, and eventually just abandoned the attempt entirely, woke up and explored the options for entertainment provided by the tablet mounted in the ceiling of his bunk.

In the end he settled on logging into a news app and watching the headlines with his headphones in.

”…Extraterrestrial news, and the Gaoian Clan of Females have formally recognized their new Mother-Supreme. Mother Yulna’s victory comes after her last rival, Mother Suri, conceded defeat in a televised statement in which she acknowledged Yulna’s insurmountable lead in the polls and vowed to work with and advise the new Mother-Supreme.”

”Gao’s relationship with the human race played an important role in the contest as Mother Yulna is notoriously pro-human, being a senior member of the commune who adopted Canadian abductee Xiù Chang. Our political news editor Darren Weiss examines the challenges the new Mother-Supreme will face as she-”

Julian jumped slightly when a pair of bare legs dropped into his field of view, followed by the rest of Xiù landing on the floor matting like a cat. He barely even felt the vibration.

She glanced at him, saw him watching, gave an embarrassed smile and wave and slipped into the bathroom.

He took his earphones out and sat up. She wasn’t long.

“Did I wake you?” she asked in a whisper.

“Nah. Couldn’t sleep anyway.”

“Me either.”

She sat next to him on his bunk and rubbed her eyes.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “I got used to sleeping in, like… little hiding spaces. It’s nice and warm near the life support systems on a station and nobody ever goes in there, so I could take my disguise off. How come I can sleep in places like that, but I’m having trouble sleeping here?”

“This is a big change,” Julian suggested. “Lots of future to think about.”

“I’m… a little scared.”

Julian put his arm around her and she leaned into him. “Me too,” he confessed. “Really wasn’t expecting to get the third degree on day zero like we did.”

“And the bathroom thing. I’m not looking forward to that…” Even in the dark, Julian could tell that she was blushing.

“Hey, you’re on the news,” he said, in an attempt to distract her.

Xiù made a tired noise. “Again?”

“They mentioned you. Your friend Yulna is Mother-Supreme now.”

She smiled at that. “Yulna-mimi n avwa i yuko…”

“Hey?”

“It’s, um…’Mother Yulna knows best’. The cubs used to say it, because it’s kind of a pun too.”

Julian smiled. “Gaori puns, huh?”

“Mm-hmm. It sounds a bit like ‘Mother Yulna smells like a Nava grub’.”

She grinned with him as he laughed softly. “Not very popular with the little ones, then?” he asked.

“Bitter medicine.”

“Ahh.” Julian nodded sagely. “Sounds like she’s perfect for the job.”

“She is,” Xiù agreed. “…I hope we get to go visit, when we’re flying.”

Julian nodded. “We’ll have to resupply somewhere…” he pointed out.

Whatever reply Xiù intended to give, it quickly distorted into the incoherence of a yawn.

“Maybe you should go back to sleep,” Julian suggested

“Can’t,” she shook her head. “I had a dream.”

“A bad one?”

“…Yeah,” she sighed. “I was back on the Hunter ship, only this time I was naked.”

“Urgh,” Julian grimaced sympathetically. “Have you always dreamed so much?”

“No. Just since the nervejam.” Xiù unconsciously rubbed her scarred arm.

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Not really…” She laughed quietly. “Every night’s an adventure. I’ve had some wild ones.”

“Like what?”

“There was the one where, um, a giant stone man was hanging wheels in a tree…And there was another one where you turned into a giant bird and I rode you… and there was the one where I dreamed I was a famous actress and I got to meet myself, but I had this really thick Chinese accent so I couldn’t understand myself…”

Julian chuckled.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I can never remember mine,” Julian shrugged. “They always fade away. Just bits and pieces.”

“Like what?”

Julian shrugged helplessly. “Uh… I had this really nasty night terror when I was about, uh, seven maybe? Like, I woke up screaming. All I can remember about it is that I had these giant mosquitos dancing on my arm and they were chanting ’blood bugs, blood bugs, blood bugs…’”

“Eww.”

“Yeah. Uh… Yeah, that’s really the only one I remember. Maybe… there was one where I had a sister, but she’d been murdered and saran-wrapped in the bath? And another one where… Okay, this one time when I was about fourteen or fifteen, I had the flu and I… I guess it was more a hallucination than a dream, but there was a movie? And if the movie played the…world would end? Or… something horrible, anyway. And we - me and some people, I can’t remember who - we had to walk down this valley between huge piles of those, y’know, those big concrete caltrops?”

Xiù nodded.

“Only… then the dream got… it felt soft. Like, weird soft, unpleasantly so, just this whole-body feeling of awful softness and then then it went the other way and everything felt horribly hard and, like… crystalline.”

“I don’t think I like your dreams,” Xiù commented.

Julian shrugged. “Most of the dreams I remember having are those ones where you have to pee and you’re looking for a toilet and they’re all.. Y’know, somebody’s using it or it’s broken for whatever reason and you just have to go find another one and then you finally figure out that you need to pee in real life and you wake up. I think everyone gets those.”

“Ugh, I hate those ones.”

There was a sleepy voice from the middle bunk. “Do either of you two have a dream where you shut up and go to sleep?”

Xiù and Julian shared an embarrassed silent laugh with each other before Xiù looked up. “Sorry Al. But it’s like five in the morning anyway, so…”

Allison groaned, rolled over and peered down at them, excavating sleep grit from the corner of her eye. “Some of us still think that’s the middle of the night, you fucking masochist…”

Xiù smiled, stood, and then to Julian’s surprise she kissed Allison on the cheek. “I’ll make breakfast,” she declared, and began foraging through the hab area’s condensed kitchen space.

Allison watched her work, looking suddenly wide awake and putting a hand to her cheek. She cleared her throat and sat up. “Okay… sure.”

Grinning, Julian stood up and greeted her with a rather more intimate kiss that lasted a good while longer. He lowered his voice for only Allison to hear him. “You’re head over heels,” he teased.

“…You don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind? It’s great!”

Allison breathed relief and smiled. “I love you.”

“Love you too.”

Julian grinned for her again and went to help Xiù by hauling the dining table down from where it roosted in the ceiling - he was the only one tall enough to reach it - and then lay out the placemats and cutlery. The instant coffee turned out to be pretty good when made with the boiling water faucet, and Xiù’s cooking was its usual sublime standard.

Throughout breakfast, each one of them occasionally glanced at the bathroom, exposed as it was in plain view, with nowhere to change and no kind of modesty screen.

When the time came to dress and go to work for the first time, all of them did so unwashed.

Date Point 10y4m3w4d AV
Finchley, London, UK, Earth

Simon Harvey

Simon returned to the house from loading Ava’s suitcase into the back seat of his Audi just in time to hear her knock on his nephew’s door.

When nothing had happened for several seconds, she knocked a second time. From the foot of the stairs, Simon could see the way she was standing - every line of her sang with vulnerability.

After the third knock, there was finally some stomping from inside the room and Sean wrenched the door open.

He didn’t greet her. He didn’t say or do anything pleasant at all. “What do you want?”

Ava cringed. “I’m… going now,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder. “I was, uh…”

He just glared at her impatiently.

“….Goodbye, Sean.” She was almost inaudibly quiet.

Sean shut the door in her face.

Simon retreated round the corner to give her a private moment in which to recover. She didn’t stomp angrily down the stairs this time but instead slowly and quietly sagged down them. She saw him waiting and summoned a small upwards tic of the mouth that was a poor substitute for her real smile.

“Car’s ready,” Simon reported gently, by way of offering to get her the hell out of there. She nodded gratefully, hoisted her smaller carry-on bag, which along with the suitcase in the car and the camera that was firmly in place on her hip represented the entirety of her worldly possessions, and ducked out of the front door without a word.

It probably would have been easier to get the tube to Heathrow, but Simon felt she was owed at least a drive, and he enjoyed his car. Modern solar field technology being what it was, along with modern batteries, a car like his E-9 was the next best thing to free to run, needing only parts and maintenance, both of which were covered in the lease, plus tax and insurance.

She brooded on the back seat, silent until they were firmly on the M25 and Simon was idly writing up a hypothetical article in his head to keep himself entertained.

When she did speak, she almost startled him. “I’m sorry,” she said.

When Simon glanced questioningly at her in the mirror, she apologised again with a facial quirk. “That I can’t get along with him any more.”

“With that immature little shit?” Simon asked. “I’m sorry about him, the boy’s a complete prick.”

She didn’t reply, and Simon spent twenty minutes enjoying the dubiously pleasurable scenery of the orbital motorway and sliding smoothly around slower traffic before finally deciding to break the silence.

“I have some good news for you,” he said.

She looked up. “Good news?”

“I got an email back this morning from Amy Larsen. My friend-of-a-friend who’s setting up Extra-Solar News Network? You’ve got an open invitation to go see her in her office as soon as you’re back.”

“Omigod, really?” Ava lit up. “Simon-!”

“I told her about the work we did in Egypt and linked her your portfolio. My good word goes a long way with some people.”

“I don’t know how to thank you-!”

“Don’t try, then.” Simon smiled at her. “Part of me wants to call it penance for my nephew being an absolute pillock, but I’m sure I’ll find some way to call in the favour someday.”

Ava shifted forward in her seat, looking more animated than she had at any moment since they’d got back from Africa. “What’s she like?”

“Amy’s a sweetheart. She was like your darling old grandma even when I knew her at Cambridge, and to this day she’s all cardigans and tissues, but you’ll never, ever meet somebody who’s more committed to the truth. To real journalism, right? Not your clickbait opinion piece agenda-driven bollocks.”

“You were at Cambridge together? I thought you said she’s a friend-of-a-friend?” Ava had that needle sharp insight when she wanted.

“Yup. She was my mate Ron Burford’s girlfriend.”

“Ron Burford the comic actor?”

“That’s the one. I met him through the Footlights. He still sends me a bottle of beer and a card at Christmas.”

Ava shook her head disbelievingly. “Did I do something wrong by not making friends with literally everybody at LSE?”

“I couldn’t say,” Simon shrugged. “Networking is important. But, you got put in touch with me, and through me you’ll soon meet Amy, and through her… who knows? Besides, you have contacts in Cimbrean Colonial Security, the SOR, the CIA…”

“I don’t think I can use any of those…” Ava pointed out.

“You don’t have to, necessarily. And if you do use them, be smart and use them sensibly and in a way that’s not going to piss them off,” Simon shrugged. “Delicate touch, that’s the trick. Just having them is usually enough.”

“Okay…” Ava sat back.

“…You’re having a hard time being optimistic right now, I bet,” Simon observed.

She shrugged at him in the mirror. “Can you blame me?”

“Nope. Have faith, though.”

“Yeah…” She slumped, and gazed out of the window. “I try.”

Date Point: 10y4m3w4d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches.

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

Final after-action meetings would ordinarily have been below Admiral Knight’s station, but he took a personal interest in the SOR.

Besides, in the absence of a higher command structure in a unit so young and so small, authority flowed directly to him. After all, the SOR’s commanding officer was, or had once been, a Royal Marine.

It was all a little messier and less structured than anybody would have liked, but that was probably the nature of founding a new unit, especially an international combined one. Knight had reasoned early on that the most sensible thing for him to do was accept that, when it came to the SOR, his powers of delegation would be a touch limited for the time being.

Which was why Powell and his nine Operators were filing - or limping, in the case of the abused and exhausted four whose mission to Perfection had sparked the godawful mess in that system - into his wardroom to hear his final verdict on Operation NOVA HOUND. Knight would have preferred to give not only them, but Commodore Caruthers as well, the chance to rest up a little before launching into this, but the After-Action-Report had been squatting accusingly on his desk for a week now.

Everyone was present. Aside from Knight, Powell and the operators, they had all the SOR’s assorted NCOs, Commodore Caruthers was looking short on sleep again but still alert, and they were even being graced with the personal presence of Lieutenant Colonel Franklin Miller, commander of the 946th Operations Support Squadron, who was usually so busy that seeing him in one place for five minutes together was a minor miracle, and who probably held the record for being the human who had transited between planets more than any other.

Miller had the dubious privilege of being the greasy cog that held the whole combined unit together. Technically he was part of the 946th Spaceflight wing under Colonel Stewart, and he bridged the awkward gap where the Royal Navy and the US Air Force brushed shoulders.

Powell had once described him as “A bloody bad officer in all the best ways.” Knight couldn’t agree more. AFSOC had practically begged the SOR to take him off their hands, on the grounds that a unit that was a bodged-together mess of half-solutions and improvisation needed an officer whose stock in trade was messy, improvised bodging-together.

An Operations Support Squadron was, in many ways, the perfect fit for the Lads. It was a unit conceived in the grand Air Force tradition of drilling new holes to hammer things into, and with their usual motley assortment of totally unrelated functions scattered all over base and only barely under unified command…it was the perfect place to stash the Americans. At least, for promotions, awards and the like.

It helped greatly that Miller loved the men, too. At some point his career had hiccuped and catapulted him from Enlisted to Officer with no discernible change in his attitude. This was, professionally speaking, a problem: the enlisted mindset of “can do!” at the expense of all else was less than perfectly compatible with an officer’s responsibilities of resource-balancing and the burden of command. Miller was an enlisted man at heart and loved his men too much to ever be sufficiently detached, which meant that his career had gone as high as it would go, not that he gave a damn.

He did, however, give a damn about other peoples’ careers, which was why he was sitting quietly and taking notes almost before the men had arrived. By population, the SOR was a unit of Americans that just happened to answer to some British commanders. All well and good…Except that the MoD could neither promote nor meaningfully award American servicemen. Miller, therefore, played the game with Knight in the best possible way-Knight would praise, then Miller would award, and everyone on both sides would be happy.

God knew, the men were going to want and damn well deserve something positive by the end of the day. A couple of medals and some promotions might just take the sting out of the unflinching dissection their first blooding was about to undergo.

On the whole, NOVA HOUND had been a success. A mixed one, perhaps—three hugely valuable men dead and a great many important cards played that had previously been held close to the human race’s collective chests definitely counted against it - but all mission objectives had been completed under circumstances that were not only difficult and exceptional, but unheard-of in the history of human warfare. On the whole, the SOR had acquitted themselves very well indeed.

As a propaganda victory, it had been an unqualified triumph. Senior dignitaries from every sapient race in the Dominion had been rescued alive, and their gratitude was varying degrees of grudging and profuse—the Corti after all weren’t exactly fountains of grace and humility, and the Kwmbwrw had been the most strident voice of anti-human fear and mistrust—but it had all been gratitude. The events at Perfection were going to badly damage or even completely undo all of that hard-earned goodwill if they weren’t careful, but that was a separate problem that the SOR couldn’t fix by themselves.

And the goodwill they’d gained with the Gaoians was something else entirely. There was some very happy weather on the horizon in that direction.

Mistakes, however, were inevitable, and at Knight’s request the report carefully worked up from the least of them to the most significant.

He read it to Powell and his men for the best part of an hour, around the comfortable table on HMS Sharman’s upper floors with its spectacular view across Folctha’s north-western park district, along the valley, over the young forest and down to the river estuary.

“In the case of the death of Sergeant Brady Stevenson…” he turned a page. “The review finds that his death was almost certainly the result of him failing to follow proper safety procedures when dealing with high explosives. Combat Camera footage review and the opinions of several SOR members during debriefing suggests that he stood too close to his own breaching charge during the egress from Capitol Station and most likely suffered a concussion from the overpressure. Though he accelerated correctly into a re-entry orbit, it’s likely that in his impaired condition he failed to activate his Exo-Atmospheric Re-entry forcefield, and was rendered unconscious by the re-entry shock without being able to correct that oversight.”

The men around the table bowed their heads. Stevenson had been a brother to all of them, Knight knew. Each of them would be thinking of what they could have done differently that might have saved him.

“The review recommends,” he continued, “that SOR training should place a strong emphasis on explosive safety to ensure that future Operators are under no illusions that the suit does not protect from explosive shockwaves. It also recommends that, excepting in situations where there is a pressing need for radio silence, all team members should check in after explosive egress and guide through the re-entry process together.”

He looked up. “Does anybody wish to add to that?”

Baseball raised a hand “Sir.”

“Staff Sergeant?”

“I’d recommend training for everyone in recognising the symptoms of concussion and disorientation,” the young man suggested.

Knight nodded, and noted the recommendation. “Thank you. Any others?”

All of them shook their heads, and Knight turned the page, knowing that they were about to hit the last and most difficult of the AAR’s findings. He’d been dreading this bit all day.

“Now to the final matter,” he intoned. “In the case of the death of Master Sergeant James Jones…” Knight took a deep breath. “The review finds that his sacrifice, while not unjustified, was nevertheless a tactical error.”

There was an elongated second in which every Operator at the table went tense in a chorus of creaking chairs. Powell, in the greatest show of emotion that Knight had ever seen from him, turned to stare at him dumbstruck for an instant, then blinked disbelievingly at several other things that only he could see, before settling on gazing wide-eyed at the tabletop between his balled fists, jaw going so tight that Knight fancied he could hear the man’s teeth creak. Certainly his knuckles did.

“Before you say anything, gentlemen,” Knight raised a hand to head off the protest that he could see coming from every one of the Operators, “Major Powell has my full and absolute confidence, and that has not changed in light of this report. Lord knows, I’ve been in a not dissimilar position myself. It is the burden of command that hard truths must come out and be learned from, and we must respect and face them with integrity and strength when they arrive.”

The men glanced at one another, at Powell who was still scrutinizing the tabletop, and grudgingly settled down. To a man, they looked like they’d been about to practically leap out of their chair to his defense. Knight cleared his throat.

“To be clear, the report agrees that the Major acted correctly in the moment. It merely highlights the courses of action that would have made it unnecessary to sacrifice Sergeant Jones: Mining and trapping the south end of the road in anticipation of a Hunter evasion of our apparent air superiority, ordering the partial demolition of the façade of the building to prevent the Hunters from scaling it…”

The Defenders glanced at one another. Those were opinions that they themselves had voiced during the debrief and hotwash.

“Sergeant Vandenberg, as the senior Defender I defer to your expertise in matters of demolition and trapping. If you feel that the report’s assessment is unrealistic, please say so and explain your reasoning.”

Rebar hesitated, then set his jaw and swallowed. “It… seems like a realistic assessment, sir,” he conceded.

Knight nodded, and closed the report.

“Unless there are any more comments or observations…?”

His tone made it absolutely clear that there were to be none, and nobody ignored that, keeping their peace. “Good. If anybody thinks of anything before the final investigator’s report, you may email me directly. This review is now concluded - all enlisted personnel are dismissed to see to their individual training. There’ll be an award ceremony at Sunset, followed immediately by a Dining Out. Mess dress is the uniform of the day, for your significant others either Mess or appropriate civilian attire is equally mandatory. And yes, we’ve taken the liberty of preparing your uniforms ahead of time, gentlemen. No excuses.”

The ‘get out’ was implicit but clear, and ’individual training’ was a euphemism for “go and sort out whatever you need to sort out today because you damn well won’t have the chance after Sunset”. The Operators, their support staff, and the assorted sailors and airmen stood and departed. There was a little sotto voce grumbling over the Mess Dress, but that was to be expected, and nobody was looking entirely upbeat, but that would change in the evening. If the decorations and promotions didn’t see to that, the alcohol would.

Miller stood. “If you don’t mind sir, I need to get back to Earth.” Knight gestured his assent with a nod, and Miller departed with a respectful nod by way of a salute.

Knight sat back as the door clicked shut behind him. “So. Major.”

Powell’s head rocked back and he unwound a little, and finally there was a glimmer of wetness around his eyes as he explored the ceiling as if there was absolution written on it. “That’s it, then,” he mourned. “I’m a cock-up, I’m not fit to lead them.”

“Pull yourself together!” Knight snapped, commanding Powell’s immediate, full and stunned attention. He softened. “The review details a tactic that would have made it unnecessary to sacrifice your man, yes, but that tactic was assembled in light of information about Hunter behaviour which we’ve only gleaned from thorough examination of the combat camera footage and suit telemetry.”

“Furthermore,” Caruthers added. “The relevant information was only gained from actions the Hunters took after it was too late to enact the recommended tactic.”

“In other words, Major,” Knight concluded “At the point where you had to decide, and with the information that was available to you, you made exactly the right call. And don’t let this-” he raised the AAR document, sneered at it and dropped it contemptuously back onto the table “-tell you differently. Sergeant Jones died because we lacked critical knowledge of our enemy, not because of incompetence on your part.”

“If I’d just seen-” Powell started.

“Then you’d be God himself!” Knight barked. “We’re none of us omniscient, man. Don’t you bloody forget that.”

He grunted in satisfaction as Powell’s expression settled with a grudging nod. “But,” he added. “You had damn well better learn from this. You and your men may well be the best we have, the best ever perhaps, but that is not grounds for complacency. It is grounds for the utmost caution, and the utmost respect for just how valuable those lads really are: We cannot afford to waste them. Is that understood?”

Powell nodded quietly, swallowing as he regained his composure. “Understood perfectly, sir.”

Knight held his eye contact for a minute, then nodded. “Go on, then. You have letters and awards to write and I have Ministers and those bloody awful American Secretaries to fend off.”

“Yes, sir.”

Knight watched him leave, then sighed and folded his arms, considering the closed door behind Powell with his head to one side.

“Thoughts?” He asked.

Caruthers had been wearing a similar thoughtful expression. “We can’t afford to lose him,” he stated. “Training a replacement would take too long, and for that replacement to earn the men’s trust and respect would take even longer. You said it yourself—he lacked knowledge, not judgement. At the death, he chose exactly the right man for it, even though it hurt him personally, and the men respect him for that.”

“I’ve seen AARs like this one truncate some very promising careers…” Knight mused, indicating it.

“Then I’d say it’s on us to keep that from happening in this case,” Caruthers replied. “Powell’s too valuable.”

“I was afraid you’d say that…” Knight made a gruff chuckle to show that he agreed completely, and stood up. “Fine. I’ll call in a few favours, you see to it that every officer who even reads the word ‘Cimbrean’ has got his back.”

“Yes sir. He’ll have friends in Westminster by the time I’m done.”

“Good man. How’s the fleet?”

“Well, I’d give my eye-teeth to have Caledonia back…” Caruthers groused, “But otherwise we’re charged, loaded and ready, and frankly I’m bloody pleased. The Hunters took one look at us and buggered off, and Fleetmaster Tikkiv had some admiring comments to make. I have this horrible feeling that we’re going to lose Myrmidon to drydock time in the near future though. Whatever it was that started that fire on Cally will need to be fixed on her as well, and without the FIC…”

“But good overall?”

“On balance, yes sir.”

“Good. Then…” Knight trailed off as his memory nudged him “Hmm. Do you recall how close the USS San Diego is to launch?”

“Er… Three months until hull launch I believe….No, four. Fitting will take another two years.”

“And the other two?”

“The USS Gene Roddenberry should be launching in ten months, and the USS Robert A. Heinlein three months after that.”

Knight nodded. “Hmm… Wangle me a couple of invites to whatever little shindig they throw to celebrate that launch, would you?”

Caruthers paused, then smiled understanding. “I can probably arrange that. Shall I ask Miller to mention to Colonel Stewart that his wing would do well by being represented there also? Maybe by somebody with a high media profile?”

“By God, Will, I think you’re onto something there.”

They shared a laugh. “I’ll see you at the award ceremony.” Caruthers suggested.

“See you there.” Knight agreed. They shook hands, and parted.

Date Point 10y4m3w4d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

The first day of their “training” had consisted entirely of talking with the BGEV team, being introduced to the basics of their curriculae, discussing what their roles would be on the ship, the mission, and all the other technicalities of organizing their coming education.

On the face of it, it was quite simple. Allison was to be their mechanic. The ship apparently was being designed for the kind of practical, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-fix-it maintenance and repairs that she had performed on his grandpa’s trucks back in Minnesota, but there was still going to be an intense academic course to go with it, at the end of which she would be a qualified welder, electrician, computer and network technician and have a basic grounding in electrical engineering. She’d looked equal parts daunted and excited by her dense curriculum.

Julian’s own schedule was packed full with everything needed to turn him into the ultimate laboratory assistant. Previous BGEV missions had learned the hard way that staffing the ship with a mixed bag of actual scientists specialized in useful fields only resulted in their having nothing to do. Julian’s job, therefore, would be to have just enough education to know what the people with doctorates would find interesting, and the training to record, sample and store any conceivable specimens, be they mineral, chemical or organism.

His “laboratory” in fact, wasn’t even going to be a lab - it would have practically nothing in the way of scientific apparatus, and would instead be built around the task of preparing and storing samples for long-term transit, in stasis if necessary.

Xiù’s skill with languages and alien social interactions were being put to work in her secondary role as their representative and negotiator. She’d also be tasked with keeping Allison and Julian fit and well, and of course there was her primary role: Pilot.

The fact that she’d never flown so much as an RC quadcopter didn’t matter at all. In fact, her flight instructor had been relieved.

“That means you’ve not got into the bad habits of atmospheric flight and we can teach you how to handle spaceflight properly first,” he’d said.

After the grilling and hazing they’d received from Keating the night before, having such positive and encouraging sounds coming their way had given their morale a welcome boost.

The only stumbling block came at the end of a long day of meetings, talks and briefings, when they were finally released to go “home” - Ericson delivered some awkward news.

“Mr. Keating asked us to stress upon you the importance of grooming and hygiene,” he said. The sun had gone down and he was walking them back to the Box in the company of his daughter.

“Specifically, the Assessment team want you to know that the three of you need to shower twice daily, minimum,” Doctor Brown elaborated. She was one of those women who hadn’t inherited much at all from her father genetically, but was her old man in miniature when it came to personality. Both had the same easy-going, mild practical joker approach to life.

Julian liked her. She’d politely interrogated him about the nature of his relationship with the girls, and the impression she’d given was that, as a happily married woman herself, she didn’t disapprove and was maybe even slightly envious.

“Makes sense, I guess.” Allison mused. “It’s a small space, between us we’d stink it up pretty quick if we’re not careful.”

“Now you mention it , they did say something keeping your living space tidy and hygienic, yeah,” Ericson joked softly.

Xiù exhaled powerfully and said something. Julian recognised Gaori immediately, which was a sure sign that she was distracted. In fact, she was so far adrift from the here and now that she didn’t even notice and correct herself, until Brown nudged her with an “…I’m sorry?”

“Huh? Oh, sorry, sorry… Um, I said ‘no privacy, either.’”

Doctor Brown smiled sympathetically. “You’ll adjust,” she promised. “I think you’ll be surprised by how natural it’ll seem once you’re used to it.”

Xiù only nodded. Clearly the immodest realities of their near future were bothering the hell out of her.

They parted ways with Brown and Ericson at the Box’s airlock and ran through a quick green decon cycle.

No sooner was the door closed than Xiù let all her worries out before Julian or Allison had even got a chance to ask her. “Ooookay, so we’re getting naked,” she breathed, nervously and musically. “Hooookay.”

Allison laughed. “Nervous?” she asked, as they took off their shoes and left them in the airlock.

Xiù nodded, flushing. “It’s… earlier than I’m really ready for.”

“It’s not that big a deal, right Etsicitty?”

Julian did what he knew was an unconvincing job of agreeing with her, earning a skeptical stare from both the girls.

“Julian-!” Xiù complained. “I really need this to not be a big deal right now!”

“Sorry. It’s just…you’re really hot.” Julian shrugged awkwardly. “Kinda hard to be dispassionate, you know?”

He knew immediately that he’d said the wrong thing, but before he had a chance to apologize Xiù had gone crimson, scowled at him and flounced into the Hab without a word.

Julian glanced at Allison, who was vibrating with pent-up laughter and shaking her head. “…I didn’t think before I said that,” he confessed.

“Oh, no, you’re fine!” she snarked. “That was smooth as baby oil, really!”

“Yeah, yeah…shit… I get it, this is gonna be awkward and un-sexy as hell, I shouldn’t’ve-”

“That’s not it, dummy,” Allison interrupted him.

“Then what?”

Allison sighed, folded down the excursion room’s armory table, and sat on it. “I love you, but you can be so dense some-”

“Al…”

“Okay, Mr. Genius, okay…” Allison glanced toward the Hab door and scratched thoughtfully at her ear. “What’s she getting out of this? Out of us? What are we doing for her?”

“Well, she’s-”

“Do you love her?”

Julian’s pause was entirely from being thrown by the question - he had no hesitation over the answer. “…Yes.”

“You’ve not had sex with her.”

“So?”

Allison smirked. “Exactly,” she said.

“I love you too.” Julian pointed out.

“You have sex with me.”

“That’s not why I love you, though!”

“I know, dummy. I’m making a point.”

Julian shook his head slightly, not following. “O… kay?”

“I think Xiù still feels like she’s intruding,” Allison explained. “She thinks this is our relationship - yours and mine - and like she’s the third one who’s breaking into it. Uh…. But she isn’t, right? That’s not how you see it?” she checked.

Julian shook his head. “No.”

“Neither do I. She’s… I love you both, because you both do things for me that I need. You fulfil me, but in different ways. See? You’re kind of an outsider and a misfit just like me, you don’t wanna be popular or part of the mainstream. She wanted to be a movie star and despite being here with us, I think she’d go back to that if she thought she could. But you’re maybe a bit too quiet for me, and Xiù likes to go wild sometimes. And I think it wouldn’t be fair of me to try and force just one of you to try and be everything I need. You follow me?”

“I follow,” Julian nodded. “I guess… I love you, but you really don’t get just how alone I was. Xiù does…But she doesn’t bring me out of my shell as much as I need.”

“Right! You get it! And that’s important, because none of us have a relationship that’s just sex, see? We all do something for each other.”

“But she still feels like she’s intruding?”

“She needs to know that she’s loved for what she brings into our lives. And I think she knows it up here-” Allison touched her pointing finger to her temple, “But…” she knocked on her chest.

“So when I told her she’s really hot…”

“Yeah.” Allison gave him an apologetic half-smile. “I mean, you’re right, she’s ridiculously hot. I’m not usually into girls but…” she bit her lip and made an “nngh!” noise. She grinned when Julian laughed, then sobered. “…But she’s gotta be sure in her heart first that we love her before she’ll be happy to start with the sexy stuff.”

Julian aimed his thumb at the Hab door. “I’d better go apologize.”

“You better, yeah.”

As it turned out, Xiù wasn’t exactly in the Hab itself - she was in the shower. There was a line of angrily discarded clothing marking the direct route from one door to the other, and the sound of rushing water.

Allison laughed. “Yeah, she’s a brawler alright.”

“Fights the things she’s afraid of head-on.” Julian nodded. “…What should we do?”

“Get naked.”

“Wh-?”

“We’re gonna go through that shower one by one and we’re gonna normalize this shit so that it’s never this awkward ever again,” Allison told him. “And if that means spending the evening buck bare… suck it up.”

“I dunno, Al…”

She folded her arms at him. “She’s gonna step out of that shower in a minute. She’s taking a huge step here. And you’re damn well gonna reward that step, you hear me Etsicitty?”

“…Ye-”

Julian didn’t get the chance to reply further. They both turned as the hiss of water stopped, and a second later Xiù stepped out of the shower onto the absorbent microfiber mat in front of it..

Julian had seen that expression on her before. Eyes cold, jaw clenched, muscles tense - the last time he’d seen her looking so fierce, she’d been beating the crap out of Zane.

She glared at both of them and spread her arms, which was a powerful gesture considering she was only wearing water droplets. “Well,” she announced, “…here I am.”

Julian cleared his throat, not quite sure what to say, but before he could think of something Allison beamed and wriggled out of her own clothing. “My turn!”

“Wh-?” Xiù began, but Al was already stepping out of her pants and underwear. The moment she was nude, she pirouetted.

“And here I am!” she echoed. “See? No big deal. Your turn Etsicitty!”

“Uh-”

“Um, he doesn’t need to if-” Xiù began, but Julian interrupted her by sighing and tugging his t-shirt over his head by the collar.

“No, I do. Al’s right.”

“Damn right I am,” Allison agreed. “Besides, you’re really hot.”

“Gee, thanks…” Having his own words repeated back at him had the effect of making Julian feel entirely un-sexy. It took an effort of will to undo his belt and an even bigger one to hook his thumbs over belt, pants and underwear and give all three the encouragement they needed to land around his ankles.

The three of them stood in an awkward triangle for a few seconds, not sure who to look at, or whether eye contact was the more or less awkward option.

Then Xiù giggled, and completely dispelled the discomfort. That set Allison off, and Julian shook his head and relaxed, chuckling.

“No big deal?” Allison repeated herself as a question this time. Xiù sighed and smiled, but shook her head.

“Not the end of the world,” she conceded. “Still weird though.”

“We’ll get used to it,” Allison promised. She gestured Julian toward the shower. “Go on baby, your turn,”

Grateful for a moment’s private space to think, Julian restrained himself enough to walk to the shower rather than bolt for it. “Yes ma’am.”

“Good boy!”

XIù touched his elbow as he passed. “Sorry I got mad,” she said.

Julian felt some tension he hadn’t noticed that he’d been holding onto slip away. “I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

They kissed and made up, earning a quiet little clap and cheer from Allison, and Julian went for his shower with the feeling that a milestone had been passed.

Date Point 10y4m3w4d AV
Heathrow Airport, London, England, Earth

Simon Harvey

“That’s my desk-” Ava was in the middle of pointing at it when she stopped dead in her tracks. Simon had to dance sideways on one foot to avoid crashing into her. “…Oh my God.”

“What?” Simon looked at the queue in front of the desk. There was a family of four there - a huge blond man who looked like Thor in jeans, a petite brunette mother who was fussing over a gloomy teenage boy who was her spitting image, and a little girl no more than five or six years old who was riding on her father’s shoulders.

Ava took a step forward, which became a rush, and only the smallest difference from being a run. “Hayley!” she called, “Mark! Jack!”

The mother turned. Her jaw dropped and she collided with Ava in a huge squealing hug. It looked for all the world like a family reunion.

Simon collected Ava’s bags and joined them at a discreet distance, waiting for the laughter and happy exclamations to die down and for an introduction.

He finally got it when Ava finally turned and aimed an open palm at him, still babbling enthusiastically. “…All thanks to Simon here! Simon Harvey, this is Doctor Hayley Tisdale-”

They shook hands and exchanged a “Hi” and a “Hello”

“-Doctor Mark Tisdale-”

“Nice to meet you,”

“…Jack, and Hope.”

Simon shook the teenage Jack’s hand, and aimed a smile at the little one, who was treating him with wary-eyed uncertainty but who managed a little “H’lo”

“You really lent her the money to come back?” Hayley asked.

“Oh, it wasn’t entirely selfless,” Simon demurred, turning on the charm with a self-effacing smile and a handwave. “Having a promising up-and-comer like Ava in my debt will pay off handsomely some day, I’m sure.”

Mark chuckled at that. “Very mercenary.”

“So you’re flying to Hamburg too?”

“We’re moving back to Cimbrean,” Mark explained. “Now that the second gravity generator’s up, it’s finally safe to raise kids there.”

“Hey, we turned out okay!” Ava objected. “Right, Jack?”

Sullen as he was, Jack managed a small smile and nod at that.

Privately, Simon had his doubts, but he held onto them. Considering how huge and robust his father was, Jack was remarkably skinny. Even his mother, who was a waifish specimen herself, out-massed him. Then again, maybe the boy was just a late bloomer.

“Well. I guess I’ll leave you to catch up…” he suggested. To his surprise, Ava gave him a crushing hug, causing him to stiffen and not know what to do.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

Simon finally relaxed, and hugged her back. “Promise me, it’s all uphill for you from now on. No more stupid bastards like my nephew, no more firefights in the desert.”

She laughed and let go, wiping an eye. “The former, I promise.”

“Oh… good enough, I suppose.” Simon smiled. “I’ll be watching you, Ava.”

She nodded, and he left her to reunite with the Tisdales.

The original plan had been to go back to Islington, have a glass of wine and work on his novelization of the events in Egypt. Instead he spent forty minutes listening to Adele on the motorway as he returned to Finchley, and parked outside Sean’s house.

It took four rings of the doorbell before his sister’s eldest opened the door.

“…Simon?”

“Can we talk?”

“If this is about Ava-”

“It’s about you, you tosser.”

Sean blinked as if Simon had just slapped him around the ear, which Simon still was of half a mind to do anyway. “Alright, if that’s how it’s going to be-” he began, and started closing the door.

“FIne, I’ll go discuss it with your mum, shall I?” Simon snapped, wedging his shoe in the door. “Or are you going to man up and take some advice from the bloke who’s trying to stop you from turning into your father?”

“Like you care.”

“Of course I fucking care you blithering twat!” Simon spat.

“Then how come you helped her leave?!”

Simon took a deep cleansing breath. “That? That question you just asked me? That’s the problem with you, nephew mine. That’s your worst trait.”

Sean glowered at him, but finally did something faintly creditable in opening the door and standing aside. Simon stalked into the living room and sat down.

“…You thought you’d won, didn’t you?” he accused, the moment Sean sulked into the room. “Her fella wasn’t taking her back, she had nowhere else to turn, you thought that was your chance. Win her off the big meathead alpha male, right?”

Sean’s expression hardened. “If you just came here to insult me you can fuck off.”

“The truth is never insulting, Sean.”

“That’s not the truth though!”

“Isn’t it?” Simon crossed his arms. “Go on, then. Let’s hear your explanation.”

Sean took a deep breath, licked his teeth sighed and then shook his head and raised both his hands in a plaintive gesture. “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”

“Eh?”

“Ava. She’s fucking stunning. That wavy hair, those big innocent brown eyes… and just… everything about her. She’s just-”

“Sean, are you going to get to the point, or are you going to start wanking?” Simon demanded, impatiently.

“How much did you give her to get by and get set up? You put in a good word with a colleague, you gave her… what, three thousand quid?”

“Three thousand five hundred.”

“Would you have done that if she’d been a pimply, scrawny mate of mine?” Sean asked. Before Simon could answer, he shook his head. “She’s got her claws in you, Simon. That’s what she fucking does.”

“Oh come off it-!”

“No, I’m serious!” Sean patrolled the room, getting into his angry stride. “This is what Ava does. She turns on the fucking waterworks and she tells you about how her parents never really cared for her, and how she lost her home, and about her friend who got murdered and how her boyfriend neglected her, doesn’t she? And it’s such a sad story, innit? It fucking- it gets you right here, doesn’t it?” he thumped his fist to his chest. “And because it’s so sad and she’s got those innocent eyes, you just want to make the world a better place for her don’t you? You and anybody else she suckers into falling for her.”

“And of course she got caught playing her game but she’s sooo sorry and it was ’the worst mistake of her life’!” he added, sarcastically. “She’s just a poor sinner, isn’t she? An innocent fucking girl who’s trying her best but life’s just too har- cry me a fucking river!”

“Sean-!”

“Fuck off, Simon, she played you,” Sean snarled. “She got her claws in you and plucked her pretty fucking damsel-in-distress tune on your heartstrings like a bloody banjo, and you went and give her three grand and change and a new career with a good friend of yours, didn’t you? What the fuck are you getting out of that, eh? Nothing! At least I was smart enough to shag the manipulative cunt before she fucked me!”

Simon willed his jaw closed and sat forward.

“Alright. That’s your explanation,” he acknowledged, in a shaky voice. “You really think that’s what she is?”

“That bitch will get her fangs in you and suck you dry, Simon,” Sean insisted.

“So why the fuck didn’t you kick her out?” Simon asked. “You could be making far more off the room she was renting than she was paying you.”

Sean didn’t answer - he scowled at something invisible in the corner and went silent. Simon nodded.

“I think you need to think some more, nephew mine,” he advised. “Take a good long look.”

Sean gave no sign of having listened, and so Simon stood and headed for the front door.

“I’ll see you Monday,” he said. There was no reply.

Simon left him to his thoughts.

Date Point 10y4m3w5d AV
Whitecrest Enclave, City of Wi Kao, Planet Gao

Regaari

The Gaoian equivalent to a human’s polite knock was to scratch one’s claws on a metal plate installed on most doors for exactly that purpose. Regaari’s was quite thoroughly scratched nowadays - being the only male to set foot on the human homeworld had earned him some considerable prestige. Younger Brothers came to him for advice or to hear his stories, Fathers came to him for counsel and to keep an eye on him, and…

Well, okay, the Females weren’t actually physically scratching at his door - the Enclave was off-limits to anybody who wasn’t actually a Whitecrest - but they were certainly doing so in the metaphorical sense. He’d noticed a pronounced uptick in how easily he was able to seduce them into mating deals, these last few paws of days. A surprising number were trying to seduce him, which was a situation most males could only fantasize about. In a species where males outnumbered females three to one, and that ratio was only as low as it was by dint of quite a high mortality rate among the males, to be in demand was a rare and coveted thing.

It was almost getting in the way of his actual work. It was certainly having interesting resonance for his career in the Clan. For one thing he was actually out-performing their Champion, Genshi.

Regaari was no idiot - a career of cartwheeling on the precipice of scandal had made him an expert at brinkmanship, and he was always sniffing the political air, watching the fallout as, carefully out of earshot, his Fathers bickered and schismed. He knew that his success was generating jealousy, rivals and plots but that was how the Clan worked. You fought your way to the top with fang and claw if you had to, and you had earned it once you were there.

Genshi himself couldn’t be happier, but of course part of the reason he’d been made Champion in the first place was his fanatical sense of Clan. Genshi didn’t see other Whitecrests as competition, in marked contrast to his predecessor Yirik who’d exemplified everything about the Clan’s ideals except quiet humility. If Regaari had started to out-compete him then fur and blood would have flown, and at least one of them would have walked away with some impressive new scars and the other might not have walked away at all.

Genshi had just given Regaari a brotherly play-fight (and beaten him with embarrassing ease) and redoubled his efforts. Regaari meanwhile kept applying the pressure, carefully prodding the right Fathers in the right ways at the right times. Already the momentum was shifting - the Clan was in practical terms much less pro-Dominion than it had been years ago when Giymuy had given her blessing for Gaoians becoming full members of the security council. A few of the more corrupt Fathers had quietly been promoted into the same kind of dead-end positions through which they’d once tried to dispose of Regaari.

“Come in.”

He rose to his feet to welcome Father Mavil. The respectful gesture was decorum rather than genuine pleasure at seeing him - Mavil was a foe, one of the last few holdouts of the profiteering neoplasm whose influence had been bought by Dominion interests, and he was proving much harder to dislodge than some of his co-conspirators.

Rudely, the Father just threw himself onto the couch opposite Regaari’s desk and got down to business. “The Racing Thunder,” he said, dropping the name with neither preamble nor context.

Fortunately, Regaari was well on top of it. Mavil would have known he was - Regaari’s ‘weakness’ for humans was a common angle of attack with the coterie of Fathers in the Dominion’s pocket.

“…Yes, Father?” He asked, politely.

“What are you doing about it?”

Regaari set his ears at a quizzical half-twist and inclined his head. “That ship is a One-Fang matter,” he pointed out.

It was true. The Racing Thunder had screamed back into Gaoian space with its engines redlining mere days after the Perfection attack, and with the hull fairly crackling with accumulated static charge. When she’d discharged the potentially fatal load into Gao’s upper atmosphere, the result had been a spectacular, though small, aurora.

It had arrived less than half a day ahead of an official request from the Interspecies Dominion fleet commission that its crew be arrested and tried for dereliction of duty and treason. By that point, Clan One-Fang had reviewed the ship’s logs and comms records and were backing their Brothers to the hilt.

On the face of it, it was a satisfying vindication for Regaari and his fellow Dominion-skeptics. In reality, though, Gao really wasn’t yet in a position to be able to defy the Dominion. The ensuing sanctions might be crippling.

“The One-Fangs have requested our aid. Your aid specifically. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

Regaari had already been searching his mail.

“Intriguing, Father,” he said. “You seem to have beaten that message to my desk. I’ll have to ask Brother Ruuvi to check if there’s something wrong with the server.”

Mavil’s ear flicked irritably, and Regaari awarded himself a win.

“I would have thought, shortcrest,” Mavil said, using the same slightly patronizing and insulting term that the Clan used while training new cubs for their Trials, “that you’d leap at the chance. Your precious humans are involved.”

How had the guileless four-pawed grey-nose managed to cling on if that was his idea of subtlety?

Unless of course he was being deliberately and misleadingly artless. Regaari spread his arms in an open, deferential gesture.

“I admit, humans are a weakness of mine,” he agreed. “But unless there are any on that ship, I don’t see…”

“Again, One-Fang have asked for you by name,” Mavil repeated.

“To do what, Father?”

“They didn’t say.”

“And have the Fathers agreed to lend my services?”

“I have, yes.”

…Ah.

That was the problem with being a Whitecrest. Sometimes the clan’s passion for the guileful solution made it easy to forget that straightforward approaches such as an outright abuse of authority were even an option. Mavil clearly foresaw that whichever Brother wound up caught between Clan One-Fang and the Interspecies Dominion was going to have to scrap for his life, and had seen the chance to extend his claws and swipe.

Regaari abandoned all pretense at circumspection. “I… see. And I assume you’ve arranged matters so that there aren’t enough Fathers on hand to countermand that order.”

“Now that you mention it, all the ones who could overrule me are away on urgent business.” Mavil bared his fangs a little. “How strange.”

Gaoian males were, at heart, a violent breed and for a tempting moment Regaari envisioned himself pouncing on the old bastard and claiming a promotion the old-fashioned way. Those bad old days when males could kill each other almost without consequence if the circumstances were right weren’t so far behind them as the females and civilized Clans like the Whitecrest wanted to believe.

But a real Whitecrest won his battles with wit, or not at all. Genshi would have been disappointed in him.

He stood up, and raked the fusion-edged claws of his prosthetic across the wooden desktop, which left three deep smoking gouges in it by way of making his feelings clearly known. “As you order, Father.”

Date Point 10y4m3w5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

“Where are we going?”

The direct route from HMS Sharman to the little clutch of buildings that the Lads owned on Demeter Way passed close enough to Martina’s apartment in Parkside - an expensive address, but worth it - to make it easy for her to make a quick home visit and change out of mess dress, which was very welcome indeed. A hoodie and jeans were the infinitely more comfortable choice.

It had been an entertaining night full of sorrow and colour, with emotional highs and lows for everyone but especially for the actual combat team, who after all had been mourning three fallen brothers all over again.

After the Sunset ceremony had come a round of speeches, awards, and promotions. Murray had become a Colour Sergeant, Firth had finally made Master Sergeant, and then had come the medals, which were almost certainly what was eating at Warhorse.

It was easy to forget that Arés. a guy she admired in several senses of the word, was actually a couple of years younger than her, and equally less experienced. Martina had made Technical Sergeant first time, an accomplishment she was quite proud of, but the sheer maths of promotion meant that she was still a few years more seasoned an airman than he was, and sometimes that fact became very visible.

He’d been solemn professionalism during the ceremony, stoney-faced stoicism itself while remembering the fallen, glowed with controlled pride as his buddies received their new ranks and their own medals, but when the moment had come for LtCol Miller to present him with his Silver Star, he had accepted it with…

Not with bad grace. That, after all, would have been unacceptable. He’d accepted it formally, properly and composedly… but with the definite air of a man who felt ill-at-ease.

The Dining Out had followed. Protocol called it the height of bad form to attend without a date, and so of course he’d asked Martina. She of course had accepted, and had then sat back to watch him endure a lion’s share of all the good-natured ribbing and camaraderie that were inevitable at such events.

Baseball had earned his share too, of course. Nobody had the faintest idea how Murray had snuck a pink bowler hat into the mess, let alone how he’d successfully smuggled it onto Burgess’ head without the huge man noticing, but when the uniform violation had been noted and “punished” with an enormous measure of the traditional punitive punch ‘Grog’, the laughter had been punishingly loud.

It had got even louder when Murray had taken a bow. That was an infraction itself of course, and Murray had smirked his way to the punch bowl, but the hat was already doing the rounds, migrating from head to head and eventually finding a home atop the silver-haired scalp of Admiral Knight, who had accepted his “punishment” with stately humour.

Adam had made the mistake of protesting when the hat had been dropped on his head and he’d not even had the chance to snatch it off before a violation was called. THAT had earned him an upgrade from mere booze, to a stunt for the amusement of everyone present, and after some theatrical deliberations, Miller had challenged him to lift a fully laden table over his head without spilling any drinks.

Adam had almost managed it. One treacherous glass of port had been his downfall.

Now it was well into the darkest hours of the night. The party had ended, the nightly rains had faded and she had been walking alongside him as they sobered up with a stroll through the cool, clean-smelling streets when a thought had apparently crashed into his brain and set him enthusiastically plotting to walk, in his words: “Somewhere. You’ll see where. It’s important.”

“Yeah, but where?”

“You’ll see,” he repeated. “I just wanna change first.”

“Like I can blame you.” Mess Dress was the worst.

“Shoulda kept that hat though. It looked pretty good on you.”

“I think Firth’s date went home wearing it. Who was she, anyway?”

“She’s one’a the regulars at Rooney’s. Uh… Freya? I think that’s her name. Guess she and Firth have got somethin’ going on there.”

“Figures she’d be named after a Norse goddess. That was… a lot of woman. In, uh, the best way.” Martina wasn’t being unkind - Freya, or whatever her name was, was Firth’s feminine equal in terms of height and physique. The word ‘statuesque’ would have fallen hopelessly short, unless the statue in question was Lady Liberty.

Adam chuckled. “She had a go with Sikes first. Apparently he was too gentle for her.”

“Jesus.”

“She made a move at me first!” Adam looked equal parts proud and embarrassed.

“You didn’t go for it?”

“Should I have?”

“Could be good for you.”

He stopped. “You really think so?”

“You’re not really ready for anything serious right now, are you?”

Adam shrugged, spread his hands and made a long mumbling noise that succinctly, though not eloquently, expressed a tangled knot of confused thoughts. Martina smiled, knowing she’d hit the nail straight on. “Thought so,” she said.

“It’s not that I don’t want serious…” Adam elucidated. “I just… I’m a really shitty boyfriend.”

“The way I hear it, she cheated on you.” Martina pointed out.

“Yeah. Because I was a shitty boyfriend.”

“It sounds like you almost forgive her.”

He shrugged. “I do.”

“…You really feel that responsible?”

Adam didn’t reply, but she noticed the way that he fiddled absently with the box in his pocket, the one that contained his newly-awarded medal for valor.

She let him think as they walked to his apartment, up the stairs and through his front door, where he carefully set the medal on his coffee table and vanished into the bedroom to get the hell out of the hated mess dress.

It had been quite an impressive citation: That Staff Sergeant Arés had, without hesitation or fear, advanced under enemy fire to retrieve a wounded man in an environment where nervejam was being used. That he had voluntarily served as a decoy to lure hostile forces into an ambush, that after the destruction of his weapon he had repeatedly exposed himself to fire to keep his comrades supplied with ammunition and that he had rescued the crew of a downed Firebird under heavy fire and without cover, placing his own body between the wounded pilot and the enemy.

Martina had personally dug a Hunter bullet out of his midsuit armor scales. Arés had claimed to be unaware that he’d been hit.

And he’d looked so fucking perfect while receiving it, too. Uniform aligned and worn to millimeter precision, every button polished, lapels sharp enough to slice through a phone book. Public Affairs had been taking pictures, and something would have to go badly wrong for that material not to find its way into the Air Force Magazine, the propaganda, and who knew where else.

After all, there was no way the whole “Beef Brothers” thing was going to just be left to die. Not when both of them had just earned serious decorations.

In public image Staff Sergeant Arés was a hero, a poster boy, the picture of Exosolar military perfection. In private Adam himself was a very different creature, as evidenced by the fact that he emerged from the bedroom wearing long baggy gym shorts, a muscle T that Martina could have turned into two dresses, and his bare feet. He grabbed his light hiking bag from where it lived by the door and didn’t even bother with his sandals.

“So where are we going?” Martina insisted.

“Up Memorial Hill,” he replied, throwing the light bag easily around one shoulder.

“The cemetery? …We’re visiting your friend.”

“It’s important, Marty.”

She touched his arm reassuringly. “I know.”

Memorial Hill was the highest terrain for miles around, and the south end of town skirted its base. Cemeteries were an unfortunate necessity of any settlement, but Folctha had hoped not to need one for at least another five years.

In practice, it had needed one much too soon after being founded, to bury a teenage girl. Her murder had pushed Arés into the military in pursuit of answers and understanding. The awful thought that went along with that, and it was one that Martina felt horrible about and so internally glared at until it shut up and went quiet, was that the human race as a whole would be worse off if that girl was still alive.

It was a gentle stroll by any human’s standards. Memorial Hill was no deathworld escarpment, but a gentle huge bulge in the landscape, and well outside of the range of either of Folctha’s gravity generators. Any moderately fit human would have sprang up it and Martina and Adam were exceptionally fit humans. The loose dirt and gravel path with its few wooden steps just made the ascent even more trivial.

They chatted about the terraforming program as they walked, and about how some of the locals were, against the odds, actually adapting to the upheavals in their ecosystem. The Cimbrean Tea plant in particular seemed to actually be spreading back into Terran biomes, and was being enthusiastically seized on by the Reclamation scientists as a source of clues as to how they might save more of the natives from extinction.

Of course, the resurgence of the plant was also creating problems. When chewed, the young stems were a potent psychedelic, which the Thing had consistently declined to ban on the grounds that the plant was ubiquitous, that policing its use would have been prohibitively expensive, and that it was likely to be extinct before long anyway.

In the meantime, harsh fines had been agreed on for anybody trying to smuggle it back to Earth, a urine test had been developed, all military personnel on the planet were forbidden from touching the stuff, and however many of the civilians were using it were doing so in private.

Adam paused within sight of the summit. “…Somebody’s up there.”

“You mean there’s some other idiot who’s dumb enough to be out here at oh-fuck-thirty in the God-knows-when?” Martina peered up the hill. Cimbrean’s moons - extensive deliberations and motions in the Thing had yet to furnish them with appropriate names - were small but they had higher albedos than Luna, and their combined brightness was surprising. Late in the night, after the nocturnal rains had cleared, at least one of them was usually good enough to see by.

Tonight was a double full moon, which meant there was even a hint of dusky blue in the night sky, and sure enough it was pretty easy to make out a dark figure seated against a tree near the large grey memorial stone at the very top of the hill.

“How many people are buried up here?” Martina asked.

“Just seven…”

Adam shrugged massively and resumed his trip up the path. Martina followed, deliberately scuffing her feet in the gravel. “Just seven?” she asked, louder than before.

The figure under the tree heard her. They turned their head, then planted a hand on the floor and stood up, dusting off their backside with one hand while hastily finishing a bottle of something with the other.

Once upright, she was obviously a woman. Not even the most effeminate man had a silhouette like that.

Adam stopped in his tracks. “…Ava?”

Martina had only briefly met Ava Rìos once, during a movie night with the guys while she and Adam were still dating (one that Burgess had excused himself from on pretence of a headache) but she was memorable.

“Uh… hey.”

“What are you-? I thought you were on Earth?” Adam asked.

“I was, uh… gonna make it a surprise.” Ava spread her hands. “…I’m back!” She offered a pathetic smile.

Adam didn’t seem to know what to say. “Back?”

“It’s, uh… look, it’s a long story and, you’re- I mean… Hi.” She turned to Martina. “Uh…Kovač, right?”

Honestly slightly touched at being remembered, Martina nodded. “We didn’t mean to interrupt-” she began.

“No, it’s… I’ve paid my… Uh… Dinner at Dad’s sometime soon Adam? Is that okay?”

“Ava, what-?” Adam begun, but she picked up a bag, gave him a strange, strained, stressed smile and a rather warmer and more genuine one for Martina, and retreated down the other path back toward the middle of town.

“Text me!” she called, and fled.

Adam was left standing there like a dog that wasn’t sure if it had been tripped over or kicked.

“…The fuck?” he asked.

Martina watched her go. “I think we interrupted something.”

“What do I do, do I-?”

“You let her go, big guy.”

Adam cast a final glance down the path as Ava turned the corner and vanished from sight at a brisk ’getting-the-fuck-out-of-Dodge’ walk, and deflated via a long nasal exhalation. He looked strangely angry with himself. “…Shit.”

Martina inclined her head, trying to guess at his thoughts, and then decided that with Warhorse by far and away the best approach was usually the direct one. “Okay, something’s been eating at you all night. You’ve been putting off telling me the whole way here, now fucking spill it.”

“Agh, it’s… two things.”

Adam produced the little case with his new medal in it. He set it down carefully on top of the memorial stone.

The stone was a ten-tonne bluestone monolith, mostly rough cut except for a flattened patch on the front surface facing town, into which was engraved the words ’Sacred to the memory of a child of Earth, and to all who shine with her among the stars.’

The top was beginning to smooth off as well. People sat on the memorial stone, they picnicked on it. It was a spectacular view, and in the dark Folctha was a maze of orange lights below. Adam parked his own butt down atop it and flipped the case open.

Martina frowned at the little metal star and its red-white-and-blue ribbon. “Dude, you were awarded the third-highest medal for valor an American can receive, and it’s bringing you down?”

“Three of my buddies died, Marty.”

She took a deep breath, nodded, and sat next to him. “And you signed up to protect people.”

“’That Others May Live.’ I chose PJ because of that motto. I chose SOR ‘cause I figured it was the best way to live up to that motto. And now here I am, I’m sitting on the memorial to my dead friend, holding a medal I earned on a mission where three of my buddies were killed, and the ex-girlfriend whose life I ruined to even get here just ran away down the hill.”

“And,” he continued “Hell! She’s saved more lives than I have!”

“How d’you figure that?”

“She patched up that Delta dude, Coombes, down in Egypt long before I got there. He’d have died before I even arrived without her, and she did so good a job that all I had to do was fuckin’…tidy up.”

“What about Major Jackson?” Martina pointed out.

“She saved us. We’d all be dead if she hadn’a taken that hit for us.”

“Dude, I pulled a bullet out of your suit that woulda killed her except you took it,” Martina pointed out. “So you saved her too. And don’t forget Regaari, or all the other ETs that NOVA HOUND got off that station.”

“Yeah, well.. That’s the other half of it.”

“What?”

“I mean, yeah, I’m… glad of those. They stop me from feeling like a complete fuckin’ fraud, right? But… I guess when I signed up, the people I was thinkin’ of when I thought about saving lives were the ones I care about. The ones close to me.” He stared at the medal. “An’ that makes me feel selfish, an’…I don’t really know what valor is, but I kinda feel like maybe selfish ain’t part of it.”

“That’s not selfish.”

“Isn’t it? Dude!” He waved a hand down the hill in the direction Ava had gone. “She’s living proof.”

Martina looked up at the moons for a second and hastily assembled her words. “Tough love time, big guy,” she said. “Listen up.”

He straightened and paid attention.

“You’re drunk, you’re grieving, and you just ran into a girl it’s pretty fucking obvious you still love. Am I right?”

“I ain’t goin’ back to her,” he said, defensively.

“Good.” On an impulse, Martina leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I want you all to myself.”

He blinked at her. “I, uh… Shit, Marty, I’m crazy about you. But, uh…”

“You’re not ready. Dude, I know. You’re still hung up on her and, yeah, I reckon you’d be a fucking awful boyfriend anyway. Just…” she took his hand, “…take it from somebody who cares about you enough to give you the unvarnished truth, okay? You’re not a fraud. They don’t give medals like this one for hard work.”

“…You really think so?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

After a thoughtful moment, he sighed and relaxed. “I’ll… take your word on it.”

Martina chuckled. “Outstanding,” she teased. “As for the rest of it… look, I’m pretty crazy about you too, and we’ve got time to be patient. Get your head sorted out, figure out how to not suck at relationships, and we’ll take a shot at it when you’re ready, okay?”

“…Can do.”

Date Point: 10y5m4d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!”

Xiù couldn’t resist beaming to herself at the awkward but delighted look on Julian’s face. Considering how short-notice the party planning had been, the BGEV team had really pulled through on throwing him something pretty special.

They were great people, all of them. Maybe it was supposed to be a counterbalance to the aloof Assessors, who would rip into their day every so often and do their absolute best to ruin it, but the actual tutors, educators, organisers and everybody else responsible for getting Xiù, Julian and Allison mission-ready were genuinely lovely, and had enthusiastically agreed to throw Julian - a man they had known for not even two weeks - a birthday party so enthusiastic it was like he was their oldest and dearest friend.

His present from the team was a frankly huge charitable donation in his name, to the organisation of his choice. Their allowance on personal belongings was too tight for lavishing him with anything more physical, but Julian’s jaw dropped on seeing the sum being donated on his behalf.

It was a great end to what had been an excellent day: Xiù’s first in the flight simulator.

Piloting a starship, she had learned, was no easy task. At first it had been easy enough - a simple enough introduction to the basics of pitch, yaw and roll, but of course spaceships had acceleration as well. Not only in the Y axis along the line of the ship’s primary engines, but also in the X axis (left and right from Xiù’s perspective) and Z (up and down).

Fooling around with these basic controls should have been easy, and in some ways they were.

In others…

Xiù had quickly found that the simulation didn’t have a top speed. Nor did it have a “stop” button. Every joule of kinetic energy she added in one direction needed to eventually be perfectly applied again in the opposite direction and cancelled out, which swiftly got confusing when the same applied to any rotation on the ship.

She’d tried to listen to her instructors and apply a light touch, but light touches built up over several seconds, and she always seemed to overcorrect by applying the maneuvering thrusters for a little too long. Inevitably, she’d found herself tumbling and disoriented and eventually she’d had to shut her eyes to banish the rising nausea.

They’d actually congratulated her on holding out as long as she did. All things considered, it had been fun but frustrating.

These being the early days of their training and to help them ease into life in The Box, for now they were still being allowed a day off per week which Xiù and Allison had used in acquiring their present for Julian.

Xiù had questioned Allison’s plan of buying him another tomahawk considering that he already had two, but Allison had insisted. “Trust me,” she’d said, “I’ve been planning this for a while.”

Bereft of better ideas and inclined to trust Allison’s judgement in all matters Julian anyway, Xiù had gone along with it. What Allison had found, it turned out, was a cutlery company in Omaha who’d invested heavily in some of the latest and most impressive-sounding manufacturing technology.

Xiù wasn’t sure how slow-cool SuperG field-suspension forging went, nor what Ceres Method fullerene-steel was, but the result apparently was exceptional. Certainly the man who’d sold them the finished product had been sorry to see it go: Julian was equally happy to see it arrive.

He tested its edge by intricately slicing up a post-it note, spun it in his hand and declared the balance superb, enthused at length about pretty much every aspect of it before finally returning to the real world long enough to remember to thank his girlfriends for the superb gift.

“It was all Allison,” Xiù confessed as they hugged. “I just chipped in.”

He kissed her. “It’s a great gift anyway. Thank you.”

“You don’t mind having three of those?”

He laughed. “I wouldn’t mind having thirty.”

Doctor Ericsson clapped him on the shoulder. “Too bad we can’t party all night,” he declared, apologetically. “But the three of you are still starting at six tomorrow.”

“Spoilsport,” Allison joked, but took both Julian and Xiù’s arms.

They wended their way back to the Box, the girls exchanging wry expressions as Julian geeked out over his new tool. He stashed it safely in one of the armory lockers in the Box’s decontamination room, and relaxed on the couch as Xiù took the first shower. She always did in the evenings, on the grounds that her hair needed the longest to dry.

It was still a little awkward, not having any privacy to dispose of her clothes in the laundry hamper on one side of the room and walk right across it to enter the shower on the other side of the room, but it was less and less of a plunge with every passing day. She noticed the way Julian checked her out as she passed him, but she could hardly complain about that. Not without being a hypocrite, anyway.

It helped that it was a good shower. Temperature settings to the degree celsius, pressure selection before it was even turned on… all she had to do was tap out her preferences and hit start, and a second later her perfect shower started up. No warmup, no early trickle, just nought to sixty in one smooth second.

Somebody on the BGEV team really understood the importance of a good shower.

The evening shower was, by agreement, hers to luxuriate in. Julian seemed to view the shower as a temporary inconvenience - he spun through it and scrubbed up as quickly as he could, all business and drive. Allison meanwhile needed a good soak in the morning to help wake up while her two light-sleeping paramours got breakfast ready, but her evening shower was more businesslike.

Pretty soon they were all clean, and they granted themselves a half hour to unwind before bed. Julian spent it reading, while Xiù sat next to him on the couch and watched an episode of The Legend of Korra with Allison, who was lying across both their laps. She wasn’t quite sure why they’d settled on cartoons as their go-to for entertainment, but they just seemed to work - something quick and harmless to switch the brain off before, after half an hour, they dragged Julian away from his book, bade each other goodnight, climbed into their bunks and turned out the lights.

Some dreams are more lucid than others. Tonight’s is very lucid indeed - Xiù knows it’s a dream within seconds of finding herself standing in front of the grand doors of the female commune in Wi Kao city.

Being aware of the dream and influencing it are different things though. Xiù knows that the commune isn’t on Earth, and it’s certainly not in Yosemite park. But it is in the dream world, and she wonders what connection her subconscious is drawing between those two different and distant places.

She sits down on the rock - THE rock, the kissing rock - to begin pondering that connection, when she jolted awake in response to an unexpected sound.

Sleeping lightly had become an important skill in space. Not that she’d ever had to rely on it, but Xiù had known in her bones that the one time a human was ever really vulnerable was at night, asleep. As a matter of survival, therefore, any noise out of place was enough to wake her.

The noise in question was a creak, and Julian giving a surprised grunt and whispering something. “…Al?”

Allison’s reply was barely audible. “I’m lonely. Move over, birthday boy.”

“‘Kay…”

There was a rustling of blankets and a couple of satisfied noises as, presumably, Allison wriggled into bed alongside him. There really wasn’t a lot of room for two on the bunks, so they must have been pressed right up against each other.

Xiù smiled to herself and fell asleep again.

She woke up to the sound of more sotto voce conversation below.

“Mmm… did you smuggle a candy bar out of the party, or are you just glad I’m here?”

”Gimme a break, it’s been a couple’a weeks since we last…” Julian grumbled, then gasped. ”Al!”

Allison laughed quietly. There was a soft cloth sound, like she was rhythmically and slowly moving her hand. “Mmmhmm, that feels nice.”

”Allison! Xiù’s a light sleeper!”

”So be quiet…”

Xiù heard her twist in bed and turn over. There was a prolonged rustling, a deep-voiced “Mmm” from Allison and Julian produced another, louder gasp.

”Are you crazy?! She’s going to- Agh, God.”

“She can watch if she likes, I don’t care.”

“But-!”

“Shhh… Quiet, baby. Just lie back and enjoy your birthday present…”

“Oh fffuck… Yes, ma’am.”

Allison chuckled softly. “Good boy.” She made another hedonistic “mmm”, and this one was underpinned by a kind of wet mouth sound. Almost like she was licking or sucking on somethi-

Oh.

Oh.

Xiù’s hazy, sleepy, warm oblivious daze evaporated as she finally got her head around what they were doing. Between the sound of her own suddenly pounding pulse and the heat of what was probably the most powerful blush she’d ever worn, it became difficult for her to keep listening, but listen she did. She lay there afraid to move in case they stopped, and paid rapt attention to all of it, every slick noise and feminine purr as Julian did his best - which wasn’t very good - not to gasp, moan or whisper little words of praise.

Eventually, he failed completely. His breath had been catching for a minute or two, and Xiù shut her eyes and chewed frantically on her lip as he gasped heavily three times, his breathing stopped completely for a few seconds, and when it finally came back, it did so as a guttural ’aaugh! and several deep, shuddering, cleansing gulps of air.

She clearly heard Allison swallow and shush him loudly, trying and failing to laugh in a whisper.

It was too absurd: Xiù couldn’t stop herself from giggling along with her.

They both immediately went still and quiet, and when he tentatively spoke, Julian’s tone of voice even sounded like his eyes were screwed shut, mortified. “…Ssshit. You heard that, didn’t you?”

Xiù rolled over and poked her head over the edge of her bunk to give them an apologetic smile. “All of it. Sorry.”

She got a glimpse of everything that Julian had to offer before he was able to flinch and cover himself. Allison hastily snatched a hand out of her underwear, looking much more embarrassed than her earlier bravado had suggested. She cleared her throat, and hurriedly wiped something off the corner of her mouth. “Uh… sorry….I-I just, uh…” she stammered.

“It’s okay.” Xiù promised.

Allison and Julian glanced at each other, both clearly embarrassed and a bit ashamed. Some kind of rapid, nervous conversation that seemed to consist entirely of raising their eyebrows and biting their lips passed between them, then Julian made a ’snrrk’ noise and shook his head, Allison giggled, and the two of them finally relaxed.

“…You’re sure?” Julian asked.

“Guys, I love you. You don’t have to be celibate, really.” Xiù promised. “Anyway, um… that sounded really hot.”

“It was.” Allison winked like one of the devil’s own courtesans. Julian cleared his throat and slid past her to make the walk of shame to the toilet. Both girls watched him go.

As soon as the door closed behind him, Allison stood up and hugged her.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” She asked.

Xiù rolled her eyes and sighed. “Shǎguā…” she said, lovingly. “Al, I was getting worried about you guys. I don’t want to stop you from anything.”

“Shag wha?”

“It’s like…It’s an affectionate way of…It means ’stupid melon’.” Xiù smiled.

“‘Dummy’?”

“Yeah.” Xiù giggled again. “Stop worrying about it, dummy. I’m not your mom.”

Allison laughed. “Okay. Okay…Thanks.”

“Come on, we’re gonna be stuck together in a room like this for like two years.” Xiù pointed out. “They’re right, we’ve got to get used to everything. This one’s easy next to the shower.”

“Yeah?”

Xiù glanced at the restroom door and lowered her voice even further, feeling her blush start up again. “I uh… I really enjoyed listening to it.” She confessed.

Allison grinned. “You wanna try it sometime?”

“Uh, um…” Xiù shook her head and gulped, blushing fiercely. “I-I’m, I’m, I, um, I’m not…”

“Ready.” Allison finished for her and nodded, though Xiù thought she detected… disappointment? Sadness? …behind the understanding and sympathy. “Okay. Well, when you are, let me know. ‘Kay?”

“…If I ever am.” Xiù promised.

To her surprise, Allison kissed her. As first kisses went, it wasn’t much at all - little more than an arguably chaste taste of her lips - but it was a real, tender and unforced physical gesture of affection. The kind of kiss that Xiù had seen her give Julian in passing, as a kind of natural romantic punctuation to daily life.

“You will be,” she promised, and stooped to climb back into Julian’s bunk. “G’night, babe.”

“…’Night.” Xiù echoed. She rolled back onto her back, then onto her right side, and snuggled up into her blankets feeling strangely warm and at peace on the inside.

She didn’t hear Julian make the return trip from the restroom - she’d already smiled herself to sleep.

Date Point: 10y6m AV
Yavun Marketplace, City of Wi Kao, Planet Gao.

Myun

Sister Shoo had once mentioned that human pregnancies lasted three-quarters of an Earth year, and with a bit of research Myun had learned that an Earth year was a fifth longer than a Gaoian one.

Myun had never been terribly fond of mathematics, but figuring out that these two facts made human gestation nearly twice as long as a Gaoian’s had been simple enough.

Given that she was already feeling constantly tired and hungry and was yipped at by cautious Mothers whenever she walked at anything faster than a careful shuffle, Myun was beginning to wonder how a human of all things could endure becoming so limited? They were so agile and strong and solid, to lose all of that even temporarily must be infuriating.

She was already resolved to be very picky with her males. If she was going to have to endure this kind of inconvenience every time she mated, then she was ”damned” if she was going to do so for anything less than a supreme specimen.

As for the humans… well, that was a mystery. One that had set Ayma to chittering when Myun had mentioned it. “You’ll see,” she had promised. “It’s rewarding, I promise.”

Myun remained skeptical.

There was one good thing about bearing a cub, though - she smelled pregnant, which meant that the males weren’t constantly trying to seduce her. They were still treating her nicely and giving her all the respect that a Female was due of course, but they were also being more genuine, more… themselves. They weren’t trying to impress, and a few of them even earned themselves an upgrade into Myun’s private ‘maybe’ list - the one for if Mother Ayma turned out to be right.

They gave her a respectful berth on the street as she headed for the market. Females had their needs paid for by male contributions to the communes of course, but while that covered the bare essentials, any female who wanted some luxuries or spending money had to earn it. Myun’s usual revenue stream was combat training - several of the more military-minded Clans like Whitecrest and One-Fang were enthusiastic about cubs that Myun had taught Gung Fu while they were young - apparently the ingrained instincts and techniques she instilled in them gave them quite an edge in their Trials.

She spent that money on more of the same. She was completely aware that she had only a few years left in which to properly learn things before she reached the long stretch of a Gaoian’s mature life, when the brain settled down from its cubbish phase of learning everything and new pathways forged themselves more slowly and with much greater difficulty.

To that end she studied - as best she could considering she was relying on imported human data purchased via a trader with contacts on Cimbrean - every human martial art she could get her paws on, from Shoo’s Gung Fu to so-called “HEMA” that seemed to require wearing a quarter-tonne of metal.

She’d pared that down to the essentials, and incorporated it - especially the swordfighting techniques - into her fusion blade drills.

She’d also spent three months’ income on having a human style sword made, and had promptly downgraded the merchant who’d taken her order to the “no way” list after he’d given her a very strange look.

It was taller than she was from hilt to tip, and looked like it should have been about as wieldy as a bus. In practice, the long handle provided so much leverage that the weapon would have been an agile whirl of deadly steel had the Guard-Mother, Fara, not insisted that it must be blunt and purely decorative.

Myun hadn’t been happy, but she knew how to pick her fights nowadays. She’d surreptitiously had the handle of her official weapon lengthened and took solace in knowing that in the infinitely unlikely scenario that she ever did have to fight with it for real, she’d be the deadliest Sister ever to defend a commune.

Today’s project was a gentler pursuit - she was doing the heavy lifting for Mother Esu. As Myun’s adult coat had come in she’d been inwardly quite pleased to discover that she was a “brownie” - a clear sign that her Sire was from a labor clan such as the Stonebacks or the Ironclaws. Between that genetic advantage and a lifetime of sewing weights into her clothing, Myun was strong in a way that females rarely were nowadays. Strong enough to put plenty of males in their place when she wanted to, even if she was frustratingly under strict orders from Mother Ayma not to strain herself during her pregnancy.

Mother Yulna, as always, had made her feel better. “You’re guarding a cub in there, Myun,” she had cautioned, immediately putting it into perspective for her. Yulna was going to be an excellent Mother-Supreme.

She swayed around a cargo drone that was thrumming gently down the street and then stepped into a doorway as the communicator clipped to her ear buzzed gently and played a call tone at just the right volume that she could hear it loud and clear, but nobody else could.

This one was a custom tone: Her cub’s sire.

She tapped it, and it projected a semi-transparent holographic ‘screen’ in front of her eyes. “Regaari? Hello! Is this a social call, or business?”

Uncharacteristically, Regaari sounded stressed. “I’m afraid it’s business, Myun. I have a bit of a problem I need your help with…”

“You’re the Whitecrest,” she pointed out. She extended a claw and thoughtfully picked a scrap of her lunch out of her teeth. “Aren’t you the problem-solver?”

“Indeed, which is why I’ve called you. I have a feeling you wouldn’t object to the idea of relocating to Cimbrean…”

“…You’re not wrong.” Myun straightened up and pricked up her ears, thoroughly interested.

“Good, because… tell me, have you heard of the Racing Thunder?”

Date Point: 10y6m AV
New Mexico, USA, Earth

Master Sergeant Christian Firth

“Fookin’ Christ it’s hot…”

Firth suppressed a smirk. The Major was right, New Mexico was hot as shit, much hotter than his native Kentucky. It was good to see him sweating. Powell and Murray both came from Great Britain and strolled around Cimbrean - a planet that was downright cold by Firth’s standards - as if it was balmy and comfortable.

Already, Murray was going red and had jammed a field hat down around his ears to try and keep that delicate Scottish skin from scorching. Major Powell’s quiet complaint was a sign that he was really struggling - he hadn’t even commented on the heat in Alabama back when they’d been undergoing their astronaut training - and while Firth had to admit he preferred the air-conditioning in the truck to the thermal hammer-blow that had hit them the second the doors opened, he was damn well going to show up the Brits this time.

At least it was a dry heat. Not to mention perfect Aloha Shirt weather - he’d found a truly vile one with some kind of fantasy artwork where an unreasonably slim man with spiky hair and a suit of impractical armor was brandishing a stupid wavy sword twice his size. Murray had mimed dry-heaving on seeing it, which meant it was perfect.

He was never going to beat Rebar for hot-weather comfort, though. Rebar was from Arizona. Rebar looked like he was out for a stroll in the park.

They all took a moment to stretch out after the long drive. Huge though the truck was, SOR men were huger, and Firth had been behind the driver’s seat. It felt odd letting the officer drive, but that was just one of the old man’s quirks - he preferred to take the wheel himself if he could.

They’d pulled up outside what was basically a large tin shed, a few miles west of a town whose next door neighbors were the middle of nowhere. It was a good shed, though - new, strong metal, well built, and a new and brightly painted sign on the roof that read ‘Black Ogre Munitions.’

Rebar read their motto aloud. “’Because We Can’, huh? I think I like these guys already.”

“‘S quite the resumé,” Powell commented, rolling his sleeves down to try and ward off sunburn. “Apparently these gents got caught up in Syria back in the day. You heard about Al-Mashqouq an’ that business wi’ the Jordanians?”

Firth hadn’t. Vandenberg clearly had - his eyebrows cranked upwards and a half-smile twisted the corner of his mouth. “That was them? Shit, I may have to get me an autograph.”

Before Firth could ask, the front door opened and a sturdy man limped out wearing a prosthetic leg, a polo shirt with the company logo on the breast and a USMC veteran hat.

“Gunnery Sergeant Howard, I presume,” Powell said, meeting him with a handshake.

“Yes sir,” Howard grinned, and did the rounds, welcoming them all. Firth didn’t even notice his two missing fingers until they were shaking hands. “And I think you’ll like what I’ve got to show you.”

“Anything to get out of this bloody heat,” Powell replied, in characteristic gruff humor. Howard caught on easily enough and beckoned them inside with a smile.

The air conditioning was a welcome relief after the noonday blast furnace outside, and Murray sighed happily as he turned his sweat-soaked back towards the vent. Poor Highland hadn’t even looked so uncomfortable back in Egypt. It wasn’t actually cool in the workshop, as there was an assortment of machines that were busy warming the place up as a byproduct of actually doing their jobs, under the supervision of a handful of other men of varying age who all straightened up to welcome their guests. There was another round of introductions and handshakes.

Rebar was already running his eye over the workshop. To Firth, it had an odd mismatch going on - around the walls and in the corners were the kind of scuffed and well-used metal tools, benches, cabinets and equipment that might have been built fifty or sixty years ago. Next to those distinctly second-hand looking items, the three sleek bits of inscrutable modern tech in the middle of the ‘shop looked badly out of place, almost like some kind of Corti spaceship had landed in the middle of a WW2 reenactment.

Introductions complete, Howard led them through out of the noise and comparative warmth of the workshop into an even cooler office space, and scanned his palm print on a heavy door that led into what turned out to be the armory.

Resting on the large steel table in the middle of the room was the item they’d come to review. Howard picked it up, checked it, and then stood with it slung comfortably in his arm as he introduced them.

“No preamble,” he promised, “This baby here’s our flagship item, the Black Ogre Munitions Gauss Rifle One, type D. She’s envisioned as a bespoke and highly modifiable platform for small elite units who need to get the most bang for their buck on ammo weight.”

Considering the damage to his dominant hand he did a quick and easy job of disassembling the weapon until it was down to just the barrel group, a pile of various accessories, and the receiver.

“As you can see, we’ve gone with a bullpup configuration. Nice thing about a gauss rifle, because the trigger system’s completely electronic we’ve got a nice crisp trigger pull and because she fires these .45 caliber caseless ferrous slugs, there’s no brass to eject so it’s just as good if you’re a righty or a lefty. No brass of course also means a much reduced likelihood of a malfunction.”

“Firing power is provided by these energy hypercells.” He lifted one from the table - it was about as big as Firth’s thumb. “This little guy right here’s worth about a gallon of gasoline, which depending on which barrel coils you’re using should get you anywhere between about two thousand and five thousand shots- yes?”

Vandenberg had put his hand up. “That’s an awful lot of energy density, Gunny. I have safety concerns about stability there - last thing we want is one of our guys blowing up ‘cause his power cell got damaged.”

“Well…okay, that’s valid.” Howard scratched at his nose, looking possibly a bit crestfallen and defensive. “We were concerned about the weight with larger cells…”

The Lads chuckled mirthlessly. “Bro,” said Rebar, as he rolled up his sleeve and flexed his enormous forearm, “We’re not even the biggest guys on the team. The Beef Brothers make Firth here look small.” Firth grinned and stood up a little straighter. He was so overwhelmingly big he didn’t need to do anything to make the point besides simply stand in place and loom. The BOM team boggled at the sight, visibly revising some of their estimates upwards by a few multiples.

“Mass ain’t a concern for any of us, even Powell.” He confirmed, and nodded respectfully at his officer who smiled his faint approving smile.

”Bulk,” Murray pointed out.

“Right, yeah” Rebar nodded. “It’s bulk that matters - we’re way past caring too much about weight. What we need is something sleek that can take a hell of a jolt without, oh…”

“Blowing up, breaching the hull of whatever ship or station we’re aboard, explosively decompressing the whole thing and killing everybody?” Firth suggested.

“That.”

Howard glanced at two of his colleagues. “We could reinforce the cell’s housing…” he suggested. He demonstrated where the cell usually lived in a receiver under the barrel. “If we gave it plenty of protection in there, it shouldn’t add much to the weapon’s size. Use a lower energy cell, maybe? But you’d need to carry more. Hmm…”

The Major cleared his throat “Lads, let’s keep focused on the platform. We can customize and revise later.”

“Right.” Howard, nodded, and continued his demonstration.

Together they enthused over the base receiver and its standardized feed for the projectiles, which also housed the controlling electronics that were common to all variants, along with a military-grade Bluetooth radio, a respectably powerful integrated computer and its copious and well-protected flash storage. The barrel, coil, and power assembly were entirely replaceable, isolating the power electronics from the more sensitive bits of the weapon. Like most modern combat platforms with close-quarters fighting in mind, the stock, grips, shrouds, rails, and all other accessories were also fully modular and replaceable.

“Lastly, there’s a built-in low-speed databus on these rails that works with contact pins along the bottom of an accessory. That lets you mount either standard Picatinny scopes, sights, and so forth, or whatever ‘smart’ device is developed in the future. The rails use a modified RS-485 serial bus; simple, robust, low-power, and a modest but very reliable signaling rate. We, uh, don’t know what you may want to do with it, but the firmware in the receiver can be fully upgraded.”

“Akiyama was tellin’ me about these just the other day,” Rebar enthused. “Since it’s serial, we’re totally free to do whatever we want. The wire protocol isn’t even defined.”

“Yup! We wanted to keep this as open as possible. Given, uh, how much the stats and pics didn’t do you fellas justice…” He looked them over again, still maybe not quite believing his eyes, “It’s clear we need to re-think parts of this.”

“‘Horse and ‘Base would prolly prefer DU rounds and the biggest fuckin’ coils you could manage,” commented Firth. “Me too, maybe.”

“DU poses its own risks.”

“Yup, but if we’re doing our jobs they shouldn’t really be shootin’ anything ‘cept on recovery, or whatever.”

“Aye,” nodded Powell. “Fewer rounds, but hit with those as hard as possible. But those are details we should address in the design critique. Before that, I’d like to see how these weapons fire.”

“Can do, sir.” Gunny smiled happily.

Much to Murray’s disgust, the range was outside, back in the relentless heat. The Major bore it with better humor this time, probably because he had a rifle to play with.

Howard didn’t waste their time - he gave them a quick familiarization and then stood back to watch the fireworks while dropping in remarks about the weapon’s muzzle energy, rate of fire and accuracy.

Firth drew the short straw and had to go last, but just watching the others shoot gave him a decent idea what to expect. When he finally got his hands on it, he lined up on his fresh new paper target - thoughtfully, BOM had given them Hunter-shaped targets - and happily drilled it right between its three central eyes. Something about nailing those monstrous fucks right between their fuckin’ eyes just felt right…

The recoil took a few shots to get used to, but that was just because the profile was very different to a conventional firearm. Rather than an explosive kick in the shoulder, the GR1-D shoved instead. There was still plenty of force involved, but it didn’t peak as high and was delivered over a slightly longer interval.

The impressive part was the helical magazine. From what Howard was saying, the caseless ammo took up only a third of the volume of conventional 5.56mm, and BOM had set themselves - and met - the challenge of making use of that phenomenon by fitting three times as many rounds into something no larger than a STANAG magazine. He didn’t go into detail about how it worked, but there was something deeply wood-inducing about the words “ninety round mag.”

“Thoughts?” Gunny looked smug as fuck, like he’d just nailed the hottest girl at the prom. And after all…

“I think I’m in love,” drawled Firth. “Hell, I think I love this more than Walsh’s sister.”

“High praise,” Murray smirked.

“That magazine’s reliability will need to be proven. I wanna take it apart and see how it manages to feed and fit ninety rounds stacked up. And we’ll need to iterate on this platform design pretty hard to get what we need,” cautioned Vandenberg, “Especially, I think, with suit integration. We’ve got these nice HUDs and it seems criminal not to use them.”

“On-weapon video?” Murray’s suggestion was so obvious nobody on the team even needed an explanation.

“Oh, fuck!” Firth laughed at the possibilities, “Imagine! Just stick your boomstick over a wall, or whatever, and look around corners! Plink Haji without even exposing yourself!”

“Yup. Serial ain’t terribly fast, but it’s reliable, and hell, with a good video codec, maybe multiple Bluetooth—”

“Weeds,” Powell commented. It was an American term, but a useful one that he’d picked up, which cautioned against getting tangled up in unnecessary details.

Vandenberg grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, sir. Also, I reckon I’d be happy to pump even more muzzle energy out of this bad boy. You said two thousand shots per cell, minimum, so we’ve got room to play around there.”

“What about recoil…?” Gunny glanced yet again at the prodigiously muscled men he was addressing and corrected himself. Vandenberg’s forearm wouldn’t have fit in the cup of Howard’s prosthetic leg. “Never mind.”

“All told, I think we’re optimistic,” Powell declared, after catching his men’s eyes and receiving a nod from all of them. “If we take it as a given that we’re going to want those energy cells to be fookin’ bombproof, about how long d’you reckon you’d need to make that change?”

Howard glanced at his colleagues. “I’d call that… ‘bout a month?” There were some nods. “Yeah. As for the mag testing, you’re welcome to take a couple home with you.”

“And the suit HUD integration’s more down to C&M than to these fellas,” Vandenberg commented.

“Aye. Guess we’ll be seeing you in a couple of months, then.” Powell shook Howard’s hand “Best o’ luck with the modifications,”

“Like we’ll need luck,” Gunny grinned. Powell chuckled, and they walked round the building to get back to their truck.

Murray sighed his relief as the aircon blasted cold air in his face, and ruffled his hair.

“Please tell me our next stop isn’y as hot as this place,” he pleaded.

“Well our next stop is Alabama to check on the gentlemen coming up the Highway,” Powell grumbled, “So it’s not exactly gonna be fookin’ Siberia.”

Murray groaned, causing Firth and Vandenberg to exchange grins. The two Brits took considerable pride in their stoicism, and seeing either of them be anything other than perfectly taciturn was a rare treat. Both at once?

“What’s the matter bro?” Rebar joked. “It’s Huntsville, the north of Alabama. Hell, it’ll be just like bonny Glasgow, you’ll see.”

“Oh aye, I’ll get a munchy box and some Irn Bru and sit down to watch Celtic give Rangers a pasting,” Murray snorted.

“See? Just like home.” Firth grinned as Murray rolled his eyes and wisely held his peace. The Major had a glimmer of amusement in his eyes as he finished programming the truck’s GPS. It felt WRONG being in a truck that big that didn’t roar when it started, but that was modern vehicles for you. Its electric drive was just as good as any diesel engine even if it was too quiet.

They exchanged final gestures of farewell with Howard and pulled out.

“We’re buying that rifle,” Powell said, the moment there was no possibility of the retired gunnery sergeant hearing them.

“I ever tell you how much I love you, sir?” Firth asked him.

Powell snorted. “Far too bloody often.”

A little round of mirth lapped the vehicle. “So what’re the cherries like?” Vandenberg asked.

“Likely lads. We’re getting another officer at long bloody last - he’s Canadian - plus a Kiwi engineer, an Irish lad who fancies himself the next Warhorse, and yet another bloody Air Force type.”

Firth beamed as Vandenberg groaned beside him. “Anyone I know?”

“SOWT. Name of Mason.”

“Umar Mason?”

“Ah, you do know ‘im, then.”

“Second-quietest motherfucker I ever met.”

“Do you know literally everybody in the Air Force?” Vandenberg demanded

“Special operations is a small community, bro, you know this. You could fit every single operator in the entire airforce in our gravball court an’ it wouldn’t be much crowded.”

Rebar grunted. “Dude, Army’s way bigger. Why ain’t we got more Army?”

“Too busy here on Earth,” Murray observed, grimly. It wasn’t a joke. They were all acutely aware that they were toward the sharp end of a very expensive wedge of military spending, a lot of which had been repurposed from elsewhere - humanity’s survival in the face of interstellar extinction-level threats was being bought at the cost of growing instability at home. The new guy in the White House had inherited a record national debt, taken one look at the briefing that Allied Extrasolar Command had prepared for him, and promptly rubber-stamped his approval for that debt to keep growing.

Meanwhile, in pretty much every sun-lashed corner the Earth had to offer, conventional forces were slowly having to take up more and more of the slack as the high-tech assets that had hovered protectively over their shoulders throughout the previous decades were being stretched thinner and thinner across an ever broader and deeper clusterfuck that was now stretching all the way from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Andaman Sea, with no clear end in sight.

Maybe now that the Hierarchy was no longer fanning those flames, there might finally be a turn-around.

Firth viewed it as his duty to break up awkward silences, and the one that descended in response to Murray’s observation was a ringer. “…I wanna meet this Irish dude,” he declared. “Anyone who thinks he’s beatin’ ‘Horse before I do’s gotta have big brass ones, or be crazy.”

“Implying you’re sane,” Rebar quipped.

Firth tugged his trademark aviator shades from his chest pocket, and put them on with a huge grin. “Dude, I’mma beat him. It’s my fuckin’ destiny.”

“If you say so. Smart money’s on Arés, right Murray?”

Murray, in typically verbose style, rocked once with a contained half-laugh and nodded.

“Heh. You’ll see, I’mma catch his stumpy ass and take that money.”

“Unless Irish gets there first.”

“We’ll see, bro. We’ll see.”

Date Point 10y6m AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Allison Buehler

Allison was ambivalent about the early afternoon PT session she was looking at.

Really, she’d have preferred to keep working on her electrical engineering. All of her existing knowledge and experience with fixing and maintaining stuff consisted of knowing what size of thingy fit in what kind of receiver and how to take it out again when it needed replacing.

Being BGEV-11’s mechanic was going to require a reserve of academic knowledge to complement the hands-on stuff, and while Allison congratulated herself that hers was a damn good brain, the fact was that her education had largely been provided by the school of hard knocks. Somewhere along the line a mild prejudice against formal education had ingrained itself into her soul, and she was finally having to try and scrub it out.

In fact her head felt like it was stuffed with electric spiders, and she was feeling drained and sleepy just from spending the whole morning thinking hard, trying to memorize rules and laws and constants and applied mathematics, most of which she was learning from scratch. It was exhausting… but on the other hand, the moment of revelation when she’d finally clicked onto what logarithms were and what they did had been incredible. She’d gone home after that session with a huge smile.

She could feel that she was on the verge of a similar breakthrough today, if only this damn PT lesson hadn’t come along to interrupt her. This was to be their first with an actual instructor - apparently there had been a bit of a hiring mixup - and Allison was faintly skeptical. She, Xiù and Julian had all thrived in space for years without falling into the trap of low-G muscle atrophy. They knew how to stay in shape.

Whatever. There was no point in getting changed - the three of them lived in their “uniform” of black track pants and a white sports shirt anyway, and apparently the previous BGEV missions had all worn that same combination aboard the actual ship. Sportswear, it turned out, was eminently practical clothing for a starship’s crew.

Julian had suggested it was also probably a team-building thing, to make them feel like a unit. Allison couldn’t find much ground to argue - they were all using the same soap and shampoo, they were eating the same food, they had pretty much identical routines… They already smelled alike, so dressing alike was probably just another way of forging the bond.

While that should have seemed slightly manipulative and creepy, Allison had to be honest with herself that she actually enjoyed it.

She pushed the thought aside and headed for the Hab mockup.

While the Box itself was a mock-up of the interior of their ship (never mind that they hadn’t yet technically won the right to fly it, all three of them now emphatically thought of BGEV-11 as their ship) the training facility around it contained mock-ups of the interior of the Box. It had come as a surprise to them that even the hab room had been duplicated, though a few details were off now that they’d had time to settle in and personalize the real Hab a bit. When Julian was putting the clean laundry away, for instance, he folded the towels in thirds rather than in halves, and Xiù was strangely particular about where each knife lived inside the knife block.

The differences between the mockup and their real living space was subtle, but noticeable and reassuring - it suggested that they genuinely did have some privacy together.

Julian and Xiù were already there and limbering up when she arrived, and it made for an entertaining sight. Julian had earned his fitness through hard work and labor, and Allison had to admit he’d probably benefit from tuition - he really didn’t know how to limber up properly. Xiù on the other hand had spent her teenage years practicing ballet, gymnastics and Gung Fu, and her idea of stretching out was, by anyone else’s standards, almost contortionism. One foot on the floor, the other on the wall above head height, eyes shut and face pinched with discomfort as she leaned forward to touch her forehead to her shin.

She gave Allison a strained sideways smile by way of welcome, and Allison sat down with Julian to help him actually stretch properly.

They were still warming up when the door opened and Doctor Clara Brown backed into the room with her arms full of documents and talking animatedly with her colleague on matters of grave scientific magnitude.

“-just saying, why do they even bother? They’re human-sized talking turtles, it’s not like they can just take the masks off and blend into the crowd if they- oh, hey guys!”

“Hey Clara,” Allison called.

“Hi! So, guys, this is my husband Dane, your fitness coach.”

Dane was a slim, friendly-looking guy who met them all with a round of handshakes and - a fact that immediately endeared him to Allison - no sign of weighing them up or evaluating them yet. It was so nice to meet somebody who first and foremost seemed guilelessly happy to meet them.

Julian met him with a handshake, “Gotta admit, I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve got for us.”

“Nothing big for today. I just want to see where you’re at,” Dane replied, shaking Xiù’s hand. He turned to Allison for the last handshake and smiled. “Should be fun.”

“I’ll leave you guys to get acquainted, then,” Clara said. “Oh, and Julian, my dad wanted me to tell you that we’re definitely going to try and improve your foot’s performance. The Assessors aren’t happy with it.”

“Figures,” Julian sighed. “Thanks Clara.”

Dane inspected the offending prosthetic as Allison touched Julian reassuringly on the arm. Much as the assessment team were usually the bane of his, hers and Xiù’s collective life, in this case they had a good point. The mere fact that Julian kept epoxy glue and needle-nose pliers in his pocket and was doing well if he went four days without having to hunch over his foot and fix it was a good sign that things needed to change.

Otherwise, it was an incredible foot. From a distance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he was absent-mindedly wearing a lone white sock, or some kind of compression bandage. Up close it was a little stranger to look at - every tissue and bone of the human foot had been exactly duplicated, right up to and including a surrogate circulatory system that osmosed the needed sugars and oxygen out of Julian’s own blood at the ingenious and self-sterilizing junction where his truncated natural leg met the replacement.

He’d had to endure visits from dozens of prosthetic and rehabilitation specialists during their hospital stay in Vancouver.

The only anomalies were that said “tissues” and “bones” were in white and black respectively, and that the foot had no covering of skin, which Kirk had omitted based on his prediction that, Dominion medical materials science being a ways behind the human body as it was, Julian would need to regularly tinker with it. A prediction that had emphatically come true.

“So,” Dane smiled at his wife as she left and then turned back to the three of them. “Let’s put you through your paces.”

True to his word, he didn’t let them relax until all three of them were on the verge of collapse, which Allison was dismayed to find came embarrassingly quickly for her. They swung kettlebells, jogged, pulled up, rowed, curled, butterflied, squatted, crunched, dipped, lunged, pressed, extended and raised until her limbs were agonising rubber noodles and her vision was going blurry. Dane ordered her to sit down and rest, and she collapsed like a puppet with cut strings, breathing a hurricane while her heart hurled itself angrily at the back of her sternum.

When she was finally able to sit up, she did so only to watch miserably as Xiù and Julian both outstripped her by a dramatic margin.

She was far from being the only competitive one among them, though. Xiù and Julian fed off each other, both determined not to come in second place, and just when it looked like one of them was flagging they’d glance at the other and find new reserves. In the end, male biology gave Julian just enough of an edge and Dane finally had to instruct Xiù to stop - she staggered to a bench and crashed onto it, leaning against the wall and gulping for air, shining wet from scalp to sole.

Julian managed to stagger on, with shouted encouragement, for another twenty seconds before Dane at last let him rest.

“Okay. Wow!” he beamed at the three of them as he handed around the sports drinks. “I’m really impressed, guys.”

He caught the dissatisfied look on Allison’s face and clapped her heartily on the shoulder. “You did great,” he promised. “Don’t beat yourself up,”

Allison shook her head. “I thought I was fitter than that…” she groused. Dane smiled.

“Look at it as a pleasant surprise,” he advised. “You’ve got a lot to look forward to! And this should make you feel better; you’ve got the best form. Julian, buddy, we’ve got to get that foot sorted out for you ‘cause right now you’re favoring it and it’s throwing you right off. Xiù, very very good indeed, but you’ve picked up a couple’a bad habits that we’re gonna want to straighten out.

Xiù acknowledged the praise with a nod. She didn’t open her eyes, even as she popped the top on her drink and did her level best to drain it in one go. Julian just inspected his foot ruefully and nodded.

“So. Allison, we’re going to focus on mass, that should bring the extra endurance with it. I’ll send you guys your meal plans in the morning. Julian, I think we’re going to be working on your form first and foremost, but also your legs and lower body. Xiù, mostly we’re just going to correct those bad habits and then I’ll start teaching you how to do my job. All fair?”

“Fair,” Allison acknowledged. “Guys?”

Julian nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

“Shò wia-,” Xiù stopped and scowled at herself. “Uh…Yes.”

“You okay?” Allison asked. Xiù was slipping into Gaori less often nowadays, but it still happened when she was distracted.

“Just beat.”

Dane chuckled. “You’re all super motivated,” he said. “Keep pushing yourselves like that and we’ll get you mission-fit in no time.”

He gave them a minute longer to recover, then stood up and smacked his hands together eagerly. “So. Second half.”

All three of them groaned, and he grinned. “Hey, hey, it’s important. We’re going to warm down, stretch out, make sure you’re not too sore tomorrow. Come on, up!”

Allison was last to her feet, helped upright by Xiù who got a grateful smile and a one-armed squeeze by way of thanks.

True to his word, the second half of Dane’s session was easier. Not easy - Allison had to grit her teeth and console herself with thoughts of future improvement as again the other two outperformed her - but by the time Dane finally let them go she was at least feeling human, rather than half-dead. In fact, she felt pretty good. Positive, even.

The three of them were given enough time to return to the Box for a shower, a change into clean clothes, and a quick afternoon snack to tide them over until dinner, and then they exchanged kisses and parted ways again for their evening training.

The evening session was practical skills, and today was welding which was a welcome relief. After the brain-fuzzing frustration of the morning session and the minor humiliation of the PT, throwing herself into something she was undeniably learning with speed and aplomb was a delight. Welding wasn’t easy, but it was physical, crafty work where the theory met the practical in a bright point a foot in front of her nose.

At least, until she got overconfident. She returned to the Box at the end of the session nursing a minor burn on her arm and with the end of her ponytail blackened and frizzled, generally feeling like a fuck-up.

Xiù was home before her, and nearly dropped the vegetable steamer when she saw the state of Allison’s hair. “What happened?”

“Long hair and MIG welding don’t mix so good.” Allison ruefully flopped the burnt ponytail over her shoulder and inspected it. She couldn’t even see how high the black bit in the middle went. “Maybe I should just cut it off.”

“Oh, Al!” Xiù complained. “Your hair’s lovely!”

“Bullshit,” Allison smiled fondly and snatched a carrot stick from the steamer, gave her a kiss on the cheek and dragged out the couch to sit on. “I’ve never looked after it properly.”

“And it’s still… well, it was nice…” Xiù corrected herself. She sighed, put her cooking aside for the moment and took up position behind Allison to assess the damage herself. “Oh, it’s burnt right up to here…”

“Baby, it’s just hair.” Allison rolled her eyes.

“Still-”

“Ah, quit fussin’ over it.” Allison popped the carrot stick in her mouth and crunched it. “I’ll just cut it off, it’ll grow back.”

Xiù made an irked noise and began digging through one of the storage cupboards, a lesser-used one near the floor. “No, I’ll cut it.”

“…Wait we seriously have hairdressing stuff in here?” Allison asked.

Xiù came back up with a pair of scissors, a comb, a salon cape and a spray bottle. “Duh! We’re training for two years in space, remember?” She tucked the cape tight around her throat. “How were you planning to cut it?”

“Uh…”

Xiù snorted and draped a towel over her shoulders too. “I should do Julian’s too, when he gets back…”

“He’s out late tonight, remember? Training with the field astronomy equipment.”

“Right, yes…”

Allison grimaced as she got an earful of unpleasantly cold water mist. “So you can speak three languages, you can cook, you can beat the shit out of bad guys, you’re learning to fly a spaceship and now it turns out you’re a hairdresser too,” she listed. “Any other talents I should know about?”

“No, that’s about it. But, uh, I did learn French and ASL in school.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Nuh-uh… I mean, I’m really rusty in them, but…hmm…” Xiù made thoughtful noises as she decided on how best to fix Allison’s tonsorial mishap. “Anyway, there was a deaf guy at school. We all learned some ASL to help him out.”

“That was nice of you.”

Xiù damped her hair a bit more, and finally settled on an idea, smiling slightly. “Well, he was really cute, so…” she started cutting.

Allison laughed. “Right, right.”

They sat in silence for a minute as fragments of wet hair dropped past her ears.

Xiù broke the silence as she started combing and trimming the back of her head. “…Um, Al?”

“Yeah?”

“Ever since you’ve told us about, um, your baby…” Allison turned her head slightly, and just about managed to make out Xiù’s apologetic expression in the corner of her eye. “I mean… you’ve always been so tight-lipped about your life…”

Allison smiled. “The baby was the big thing I didn’t wanna talk about… I mean, the rest of it’s nothing crazy. Mom and Dad grounded me until I was eighteen and started home-schooling but they kept giving me an allowance. I played a lot of video games, made some friends online, and the day after my eighteenth birthday I got on a Greyhound to Boston and left.”

“Didn’t they try and stop you?”

Allison just shrugged. “I did okay for myself really. Worked at a coffee shop in the mornings and a garage in the evenings, got an LTC and a pistol, spent my lunchtime down at the range. I was getting by just fine.”

“Why Boston?”

“One of my guildmates lived there. Amanda. It was her garage, and she let me crash on her couch until I could afford to rent my own place…”

“You’ve never mentioned her.” Xiù pointed out.

“She was great! Real big on feminism, social issues and weed. She never did like how much I loved my guns, though.”

“Are you still in touch?”

Allison shook her head. “Lung cancer got her about three months before Trevni and Nufr grabbed me,” she said.

Xiù put the scissors and comb down and gave her a hug from behind, wrapping her arms comfortably across Allison’s chest. “I’m sorry…”

“It’s okay. She was already fighting it when she helped me out, so we had plenty of time to get used to it… Anyway, that’s my story. Like I said, it’s not that interesting. I got all the stupid out of my system when I was fifteen… space was way more interesting.”

“Interesting. Yeah. That’s one word for it,” Xiù commented.

“Yeah, I’m sorry you had such a shitty time of it, but me? I fetched up on a freeport station and had a pretty good time of it, working security. Everyone respected the big bad deathworlder.” Allison grinned savagely at the memory. “‘When Kirk showed up with a ship full of people I knew I couldn’t stay, but I had a pretty good time, really.”

“All done!” Xiù towelled her head briskly and gathered up the cape. Allison ran her fingers through the new ‘do, and grimaced.

“You took off a lot!”

Xiù smiled. “I had to. I think it suits you though,” she suggested. She aimed a nod at the bathroom door, a cue which Allison took with a resigned breath.

“Okay…”

When she checked the mirror she had to admit that Xiù had done an impressive job. She’d been worried she was going to end up looking like an imminent complaint to the manager, but the finished product, after she played around with the parting a little, was a practical low-maintenance thing a bit too long to be called a pixie cut and a bit too short to be classed as a bob.

A real fashionable hairdresser would probably have bit through their comb at the sight of it, but Xiù was right - it suited her by neatly framing her cheekbones and enhancing the overall diamond shape of her face.

“So…?” Xiù asked, hovering nervously.

Allison stopped examining it and gave her a reassuring peck on the lips. “I like it.”

Xiù relaxed and started tidying away the mess. “I wish I could be as laid back about it as you are. That red decon thing…”

“Yeah, shaving it all off would suck, but this is actually pretty cool!”

Xiù giggled. “You could say it’s growing on you?”

Allison grabbed the pillow off the middle bunk and threw it at her. Grinning cheekily, Xiù swiped it aside, only for it to knock the steamer off the kitchen counter and spread peas and carrots all over the room.

There was a long, literally ringing silence as the steamer rolled to a standstill.

“…Woops.”

“…I’ll sweep, you mop?”

“…Deal.”

Date Point 10y6m1w AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted system, Deep Space

Kirk

“So what are your thoughts?”

Vedreg was proving yet again that, far from being stupid, he was a thoroughly formidable intellect in his own right if given enough time to lumber up to speed. Certainly he was proving more equal than Kirk to the task of scrutinising the contraption that Lewis was painstakingly assembling and iterating.

Annoyingly, his mood was still difficult to read, but Kirk didn’t blame himself or Vedreg for that. Where the Rrrrtk eye had two kinds of color-receptive cell, the Guvnurag one outstripped even humans at five, and the emotive bioluminescent lines on their flanks made full use of that chromatic agility. It was like trying to hear music that was written partially outside of his hearing range, or like trying to read a book where three fifths of the words were printed in an ink that was only visible in the ultraviolet.

Kirk took a guess anyway and hazarded that his old friend was emoting a blend of admiration and mild fear.

“Lewis Beverote is correct,” Vedreg rumbled. “What he is making would be devastating if turned to warlike ends.”

Kirk walked around the holographic table that Vedreg was working at. They all had their little demesnes inside the station now, though Vedreg’s was by far the most sprawling - a function of his sheer size more than anything else. That and his unfolding passion for bakery, which had recently yielded fruit - literally - in the form of an approximation of “cookies”. Lewis had groused something ungrateful about ‘oatmeal and raisin’, whatever they were, but had later thanked Vedreg profusely for the unexpected treat.

Right now, the table was busy dissecting the latest generation of what Lewis was calling his ’Von Neumann Colony-in-a-Can’ or the ’Coltainer’ for short. To Kirk’s eye, it was an impenetrable tangle of interconnected systems bolted onto something that looked like a hybrid between an enormous power core system and the scoop field emitters off a lane-clearing ship, all feeding power to a nanofactory that was equal in size and capacity to the one on Mrwrki Station.

The Coltainer’s actual function, as Lewis had described it, was to serve as a deep-space automated probe that would search for habitable planets of classes ten to thirteen. Upon discovering one, it would do everything within its power to satisfy itself that the planet lacked native sophonts of any stage of development and, once happy that the planet was not inhabited, it would survey for and identify an ideal spot for a new colony to be built, based on a complicated equation that took into account variables like clean water supply, ocean access, arable land, grazing land, forestry, local geology and mineral availability, climate, drainage, defensibility, proximity to other suitable locations and the feasibility of constructing roads between them, and more.

That done, it would mine some local asteroids or moons for raw materials, build an exact duplicate of itself, send that duplicate on its way in search of a new project, and then finally lay the groundwork for human colonization by sending down drones that would simultaneously excavate and print a basic colonial ‘hub’.

The hub was a defensible structure in which the first settlers could live and work before expanding outwards according to their own agenda. It would have a power generator, a landing pad, a jump array, a kitchen and mess hall, gym and recreational facilities, a chamber for democratic decision-making, enough housing for fifty families, and even a number of deep basement levels designed to serve as a nexus for subterranean roads or railways, complete with TBMs already in place.

Finally, it would restock itself, dispatch a probe to Cimbrean containing the transponder codes for the colony’s jump array and orbital beacon, and depart the system in search of a new project, dropping a system field as it went.

Kirk could easily see the unlimited military potential of a machine that smart that could replicate itself exponentially.

“Does that… alarm you?” he asked.

“Sufficiently that I’m giving serious thought to vetoing the project entirely and purging the files.” Vedreg rumbled, something akin to rueful laughter. “When I voiced my concerns to Lewis, he advised me to ’be Zen, man’. He is quite correct: I must ruminate on the matter before I decide.”

“Quite right,” Kirk agreed. “No disrespect, old friend, but your government’s hasty actions in the past-”

“-Are the reason we even have a human race to try and save,” Vedreg interrupted. He rumbled again and a pulse of ironic mottled pink ran up his sides. “And of course, it may not have been panicking Guvnuragnaguvendrugun, but panicking Hierarchy who made that mistake.”

The Domain language didn’t have an equivalent to ’Touché’, which was a shame, but fortunately that particular human word could be almost approximated by a Domain throat, and Kirk took the opportunity to use it.

Vedreg highlighted one of the denser parts of the project’s anatomy. “Fortunately, he has spent the last few days assuaging my concerns,” he said.

“…What is that?” Kirk asked, leaning forward to study it.

“A bomb. An extremely large one, sufficient to vaporize the Coltainer.”

“Programmed to detonate under what circumstances?” Kirk asked.

“Under any circumstances where it can’t jump to safety instead,” Vedreg observed. “If it is attacked, if it is interfered with in any way… Lewis has assured me that not even he, its creator, could tamper with one of these once it is launched and active.”

“Not even to shut it down if it went rogue?”

“To tamper with it would be to shut it down, effectively. Explosively so. I have stressed the need for caution in this project.”

Kirk pondered the schematic. “Arguably of course, the Hunters wouldn’t need to tamper with it to see it replicating itself,” he pointed out.

“I have said as much to Lewis. He was… intransigent. He feels that the exponential growth of the coltainer system is essential.”

Kirk snorted. “I have received some news that may cause him to re-think.”

Vedreg rumbled at length before the translator finally delivered the equivalent, which was equally perfunctory in both English and in Domain: “Oh?”

“Let me summon him.”

Lewis ambled in some minutes after Kirk had called him, wearing his black clothing today. Apparently he’d finally aborted his experiment in growing a beard after a week of increasingly bitter grumbling about his own hair follicles, and had shaved. Neither Kirk nor Vedreg were in a position to know what a beard was supposed to look like in anything more than the academic sense.

“News?” he asked, hopping lightly up onto the stool that Vedreg had kindly installed for him.

“From Allied Extrasolar Command,” Kirk informed him, feeling quite pleased with himself. “Apparently they believe that the Hierarchy on Earth are now neutralized.”

Lewis took a high breath and sat back, with a smile spreading across him. “Oh man. That takes a big fuckin’ load of my mind. You think they’re right?”

“Paranoia remains our best strategy,” Kirk reminded him, “but… yes. I think the news is genuine. Or if it is not, then we have already been hopelessly outplayed.”

“The plan ain’t changed, then.”

Kirk nodded. “It has, a little. I need a ship, Lewis. A fast one. Faster than Sanctuary, if you can manage it without a Blackbox drive.”

“You’re gonna go meet them in person?”

“We cannot remain locked up here indefinitely.” Vedreg observed. “You said it yourself.”

“Hey, just… y’know, bring some other humans in on this shit!” Lewis exclaimed. “So long as I’ve got somebody fuckin’ bipedal to talk to I’ll be easy like Sunday morning. If it can maybe be somebody who can help me on the Coltainers, so much the better. Do you have any idea what it’s like having to learn everything from scratch for that shit?”

“I honestly do not think I could even begin to guess,” Kirk admitted.

“Most humans couldn’t, bro. Hell, I can’t. I’m givin’ it my best, but if it’s just my skinny ass workin’ on it then we’ll be done sometime around about, oh…?” He looked around and then jerked his thumb towards the window, indicating the huge red star they were orbiting. “When’s that scheduled to go bang?”

“You’re exaggerating.” Vedreg observed.

“Well, duh, yeah, ‘course I am,” Lewis nodded. “But still, I’m just one dude, dude. There’s gonna be like a fuckzillion things I never thought of with a project this size. I need help. And hey, maybe we can get you some actual flour, sugar, chocolate chips and apples. And - sorry guys - some fucking bacon because GOD. A man shouldn’t go this long without bacon.”

Kirk repressed the urge to grimace, and the green nauseated glimmer on Vedreg’s sides was a weak flutter as he fought down his own revulsion. They both knew perfectly well that while nutrition spheres claimed to be universally and perfectly nutritious, the reality was that they had been designed for the needs of herbivorous non-deathworlders. The medical suite that kept an eye on their general health had been reporting for some time now that Lewis was slowly but steadily falling behind on his needs for Cobalamin, Sulfur and Docosahexaenoic acid.

“I’ll see what I can arrange,” he promised. “There is one last matter…”

“Lemme guess. The von Neumann bit of these probes.”

“The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that we should not light that fire, Lewis.”

Lewis hopped off the stool and went to pour himself a glass of water, without replying. Kirk and Vedreg exchanged confused expressions as he did so.

“…Lewis?”

The human sighed. “Kirk, d’you really think I don’t get it? I’m a smart dude. A really smart dude. One of the smartest, maybe. You think I don’t understand exactly how big of a can’a worms I’m popping here? I’ve read Alistair Reynolds, man. Greenfly, interstellar Grey Goo, you name it, I know what the possible outcomes are.”

“Then why-?”

“Because some motherfucker is gonna do it eventually, so it may as well be us!” Lewis knocked back a mouthful of water - a volume that would have sustained Kirk for a day - and then a second, before clearing his throat and continuing. “But the idea’s already out there, man. I’ve seen the data lifts from the Internet, I’ve seen human fiction being sold on space stations all over the place, and that was five years ago. Von Neumann machines aren’t exactly a fuckin’ secret.”

“That is the sum of your reasoning?” Kirk asked.

“Only way to beat exponential growth is to start first, dude. Get ahead of the curve and stay there.” Lewis shrugged. “To be brutally fuckin’ honest, I have no idea why the galaxy ain’t already overrun with the damn things. Unless they’re one of the things the Hierarchy’s kept a lid on.”

“Or maybe nobody was ever so reckless as to launch them.” Vedreg suggested.

“Riiight, ‘cause interstellar civilization’s a fuckin’ beacon of rational decision-making.” Lewis said, levelly and acidly.

“There is no need to-” Kirk tried to intervene, but Vedreg interrupted him.

“And yours is?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry, of the two of us, whose species is against the wall right now?” Lewis asked. “If it’s do something reckless or die, I for one choose reckless.”

Vedreg glowed crimson. “That is… only a deathworlder would think like that! You don’t have the right to make a decision that will permanently affect the entire galaxy. None of us do.”

“Choosing not to has the same effect!” Lewis gesticulated madly, which had the effect of launching his remaining half-cup of water across the room. It bounced and skittered into the corner of the room and spun crazily on its axis for a few seconds before finally rocking to a standstill. Lewis stared at it, then took a cleansing breath and went to retrieve it. “…The idea’s already out, man,” he repeated. “I ain’t making the decision, it was made the moment somebody uploaded Wikipedia to the galactic archives. So it’s gonna happen.”

“You are certain of that?” Kirk asked.

“Completely. An’ I figure… y’know, if we’re about to kickstart the galactic epoch of the self-replicating spaceship, we may as well do it by building one whose primary mission is to declaw all the OTHER self-replicating spaceships that are gonna follow.”

“A vaccine for the whole galaxy.” Vedreg mused.

“Dude. Project GALACTIC VACCINE, I like it.”

Kirk inclined his head at Vedreg. “You are persuaded?” he asked.

Vedreg pulsed contrite teal and imitated a shrug. “I will need time to consider… could the Coltainer project be modified to make suppressing other Von Neumann machines its primary mission?”

Lewis shrugged. “Dude, the Coltainer project’s still in, like, generation zero. I dunno how you’d program a mission like that, but…”

“I shall raise it,” Kirk told them briskly, “with Allied Extrasolar Defence.”

“You will?” Lewis lit up. “You mean I’m finally gonna get some help?”

“If you are so determined to do this, Lewis, then yes, I will request some help. Whether or not it is given will not be for me to decide.”

Lewis nodded. “…I’ll run up that ship for ya, then.”

“Thank you.”

“Whaddya want me to call it?”

“Pardon me?”

“Gotta have something for the reg code, dude. Whaddya want I should call it?”

Kirk spread his arms. “Choose for me,” he said.

Date Point 10y6m2w AV
Starship Racing Thunder, Orbiting planet Gao

Regaari

Regaari didn’t know ships very well. His business was a medley of intelligence-gathering and, when needed, of blood-on-the-claws interpersonal violence. Starship combat was too detached to fire him up, though he had to admit that he liked Clan One-Fang’s philosophy on the matter.

The One-Fangs were one of Gao’s youngest and, rapidly, one of Gao’s most distinguished Clans, holding as they did a near monopoly on spaceborne military action. Naturally they were allied with the Whitecrests but the tangled web of inter-Clan politics being what it was, One-Fang had aligned with the Ironclaws and their asteroid-mining and exoplanetary spaceborne industry, while Whitecrest were allies with the Ironclaws’ chief rivals, the Stonebacks.

Both of those two industrially-minded labor clans would be watching here. The Ironclaws in particular had a lot to gain from good relations with the Dominion. They were the ones producing the goods that got exported, after all. The Stonebacks were dammers, bridgers, construction engineers and general movers of soil. Their work was less exportable.

The Racing Thunder was a product of the One-Fang - Ironclaw alliance, and it was, in starship form, a Gaoian throwback: All claws and teeth and speed.

The privilege of flying Tiritya, the first Gaoian FTL ship, had gone to a Firefang Brother named Shoru, and the Firefangs remained devotees of the art of speed. Theirs was the other third of the alliance. Ironclaw provided the ships, One-Fang crewed them, and Firefang piloted the fighters. It was all guided by an interpretation of the requests and standing orders laid down by the Dominion, who had specified what kinds of ship fit with their doctrine.

Neither the One-Fangs nor the Firefangs had objected - after all, the Dominion’s fleetmasters had infinitely more experience of space combat than any Gaoian - but within those stipulations they had designed their ships to reward a Gaoian’s fighting instincts. They were fast, they were agile, and they were savagely over-gunned.

Regaari approved. He also quite liked the shipfather, Officer Yefrig, who was in many ways as un-Whitecrest as a Gaoian could be.

Whitecrests, for instance, were considered slightly effete by the other male Clans because Whitecrests typically tried to avoid scars, whereas the One-Fangs like many of the other more traditional warrior Clans actively cultivated them. A proper One-Fang wore his scars like medals, and father Yefrig in particular had a perforated right ear, the left ear was a blunt-tipped stub, his right eye was a cybernetic replacement that looked just as milky-white and blind as the original had been left (a neat touch that - all the masculine gravitas of a blinded eye without the inconvenient loss of depth perception) and there was a particularly impressive three-claw gouge on his muzzle.

Regaari of course had an actual medal. A circular one made of silver from Earth of all places, hung on a crimson ribbon with five narrow blue stripes and bearing the effigy of a crowned human male. The “George Medal” it was called, and while the medal itself was safely on display in Regaari’s office back at the Clan’s enclave, he’d chosen to honor the award by wearing its ribbon bar on the chest of the security harness that no self-respecting Whitecrest went anywhere without. Not a Gaoan tradition, but of course the award was not Gaoian either.

He could see Yefrig eyeing it. When the humans gave an award for “acts of great bravery”, it tended to make people take note, apparently.

He met the shipfather as wary equals - with a duck of the head and with paws held wide and to show that their claws were in.

“I hope you have good news,” he told Yefrig, by way of a greeting, “because I think I’ve done as much as I reasonably can.”

“It’s been enough.” Describing Yefrig as ‘terse’ was a minor understatement. “We’re ready.”

“Excellent. I’m ready whenever you are, then.”

Yefrig poured them both some Talamay and indicated the bustle of the bridge as his subordinate Brothers finished their preparations to go FTL. The ship had been badly hurt by her exertions in getting to Gao as fast as they had, and under the relentless pressure from the Dominion for her crew to be handed over for trial, securing all the resources necessary for her repair had been tricky and delicate. Unbeknownst to the One-Fangs, Regaari had even been forced to arrange an exchange that was not, technically, entirely above-board. Not illegal, that would have been ruinous to his reputation in the Clan. But not completely honest, either.

“How will you be returning to Gao?” Yefrig asked, handing him a glass.

“Cimbrean needs a stronger Whitecrest presence now that some Females are moving there,” Regaari mused, accepting it. “I may linger for a little while.”

This earned a gruff chitter from Yefrig. “Leave some for us!” he warned. “My Brothers have low enough morale as it is, without the added burden of an urbane creature like you competing for the attention of Females.”

Regaari returned the chitter and waved a conciliatory paw. “The humans have asked me to meet with them to discuss military cooperation, in light of… well, this.” he indicated the ship. “After all, there’s a permanent Clan enclave on Cimbrean these days, and now that females are moving there…”

Yefrig duck-nodded. “It’s almost our third colony.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Regaari said. “I doubt the humans will share it unconditionally. We wouldn’t.”

“You know them best,” Yefrig replied.

“Shipfather?” a Brother approached the pair of them deferentially and handed Yefrig a report.

Yefrig read it, then gave Regaari and encouraging nod. “We’re ready.”

“Outstanding,” Regaari derived quiet amusement from using the term. He’d learned from Warhorse that it had a very specific meaning in human military circles, along the lines of ‘progress made, but much too slowly’ and allowed the private joke to feed his good humor. It worked wonders, helping him effortlessly generate an air of unthreatening affability.

Yefrig, naturally, didn’t catch the joke and pricked his ears up pleased at the apparent praise. “I’m glad you think so.” He turned to the Brother and rattled off a few terse commands in a densely jargoned Clan-specific dialect that Regaari didn’t understand. He took no offense: Whitecrest had a similar argot of their own.

“Travel time to Cimbrean will be [six hours].” Yefrig reported, looking understandably pleased with himself. The transport that Regaari had borrowed for his last trip to Cimbrean, the Springing Ember had needed three days to make the voyage.

“So fast?!” he exclaimed. “I had no idea.”

“This ship is called the Racing Thunder for a reason.” Yefrig allowed himself a smug flick of his truncated ear. “Yours isn’t the only clan to borrow the idea of capacitor-based power systems from the humans, and not only does this ship have plenty of room for them, but ours are better than theirs.”

“I would hope so,” Regaari agreed, amiably. Gaoians after all had earned FTL travel and all its attendant technologies the hard way, through unassisted research and innovation. He couldn’t begrudge the humans for reverse-engineering nonhuman artefacts, but the fact was that they were the least technologically advanced species ever offered membership of the Dominion, while Gaoians had been rather more advanced than normal by the time Tiritya had first flown.

Gratifyingly, Gaoians were also not stupid enough to mistakenly conflate tech with primitivity, unlike some other species he could name. By and large, the Fathers of several clans were broadly thinking alike about humans and how potentially useful they might be to the Gaoian people… or at least how it would be desperately unwise of the Gaoian people to get on their bad side.

Hence this voyage.

The solution to Father Mavil’s challenge had turned out to be relatively straightforward. The Dominion would happily accept for the Gaoians to punish the deserters themselves, and banishment was a punishment. The One-Fangs wouldn’t have been satisfied with a punishment, but they WERE happy to have one of their ships assigned to the protection of Gaoian lives, provided that the crew had any hope of earning Clan prestige and the attention of females.

Cimbrean was the natural choice. It was “uncontrolled territory” according to the Dominion, and so any ship sent there under orders never to return was exiled. That part was easy. With the human fleet being down one of their best ships, and with their history of positive interaction with the Racing Thunder and its crew he had no reason to believe that they’d turn away the help.

As for the females, well… Cimbrean had plenty of males already. Between the Clan Starmind monastery and hundreds of Clanless in the Alien Quarter, Gaoians were actually the planet’s second-largest demographic. All it needed was for a few brave pioneering Sisters to take the first step. If the Sisters in question were pregnant, even better.

So, he’d called Myun.

Persuading her to move to Cimbrean had been simplicity itself. Quite aside from the fact that she was so guilelessly in love with anything and everything remotely human, it was effectively a free promotion for her. Myun’s xenophilia made her mildly unpopular despite her personal relationship with Yulna, which was an obstacle to mobility in the celebocratic and taxocratic world of the Clan of Females. Focused though she was, even Myun wasn’t so obstinate as to ignore that reality, nor so blasé as to scoff at it.

She’d agreed to move, and where a pregnant Sister went, other Sisters would follow, trusting in each other’s maternal instincts and sense of safety.

Relocating to a new colony and installing herself as one of the founding Sisters of the commune there would be excellent for her prestige, and she hadn’t needed much advice from Regaari to see that.

As for the Racing Thunder’s crew, they had a safe, legitimate haven, the Dominion got their “justice”, the Clan kept their Brothers alive and still doing good work, Gao got effectively another colony via the power of migration, and Regaari got both a victory over Father Mavil and an opportunity to talk some more with Admiral Knight and Major Powell.

He excused himself from the bridge as the One-Fang crew made the final preparations for departure. Not being Clan, he didn’t have a nest-bed among the crew quarters, and had to settle for curling up alone in a corner of one of the cargo holds, surrounded by the provisions, technology and barter goods that the Racing Thunder had taken on to lubricate their negotiations with the humans… or else to keep them supplied and comfortable in case the deathworlders turned out to be less hospitable than Regaari had assured.

Solitude or not, sleep came easily. He hadn’t been getting enough in the last several days as he flitted from enclave to office to commune to ship to briefing to meeting to private conversation to occasionally being able to return to his nest-bed and snatch some inadequate sleep in the company of his Brothers. Despite their absence, he curled up, tucked his nose into his fur and a One-Fang Brother came to wake him seven hours later without his noticing the intervening time at all.

He could hear and feel that they were still at warp, not as a sound exactly but as a sense that the ship was producing one that he couldn’t quite hear. Some texture in the air told him that an awful lot of energy was coursing throughout its structure.

“We are being intercepted,” Yefrig explained, over comms. “I’ve slowed us to half a kilolight.”

“Have they identified themselves yet?” Regaari asked, tugging on his harness and scratching the backs of his ears to wake himself up.

“Valiant and Vendetta,” Yefrig replied. “A surprisingly small response…”

“Humans love jump drives,” Regaari reminded him. “If we extend our claws, the others will show up in an instant.”

”Understood.”

Regaari was halfway to the bridge when the ship jolted slightly and there was a solid ringing noise.

“What was that?” he asked.

The One-Fang brother escorting him flicked an ear, amused. “A shuttle landing,” he said, and indicated a line on the ceiling which pointed the way to the Racing Thunder’s small craft bay. Regaari duck-nodded and detoured that way.

He wasn’t disappointed. The detail of One-Fang security officers who were welcoming the humans on board were shooting nervous glances at each other at the sight of four SOR men disembarking from their shuttle in full EV-MASS, among them the unmistakably hulking silhouette of Warhorse.

Regaari raised his paw in greeting and all four humans relaxed substantially.

“Yo, Dexter!” Titan called, being the closest.

“Hello, cousins.” Regaari deployed the term carefully, and the One-Fangs around him took note. “Cousin” had a specific meaning in modern Gaoian life, referring to a Brotherly relationship between males who weren’t actually Clan-Brothers.

“Hey, this ship’s a bit bigger’n the last one,” Baseball sauntered over and led him through the elaborate handshake they’d taught him. Quite why the twinkly fingers at the end were important, Regaari wasn’t sure - he suspected that subtle human sense of humor was at play.

“One hundred and eighty-seven crew,” Regaari informed him. “Not including me and the forty females and cubs travelling in the forward cargo hold.”

“Man, this is gonna take a while.” Baseball sighed.

“Gonna need to talk to the cap- uh, the shipmaster, Dexter.” Titan informed him, walking over with some kind of equipment slung easily over his shoulder. Several Brothers eyed the package nervously - it was easily more than any of them could handle alone.

“I recognize that,” Regaari pricked his ears up at it. “A portable jump array?”

“Ship this size, a full customs inspection will go way faster if we can bring some marines over from Valiant to help out, bro.”

“…I’ll call the Shipfather.”

Titan nodded. “Lemme know when he’s here.”

“You can’t miss him. He’s got a white eye, a missing ear and more scars than fingers,” Regaari told him, quietly so that the One-Fangs couldn’t hear. “And if you want to make a good impression, compliment him on them.”

“Thanks bro.”

Yefrig, to his credit, listened to Regaari’s advice and came down to the bay himself. The humans paused in scanning the Brothers as Titan noticed the scarred old One-Fang enter the space and loudly snapped “Detail, a-ten-SHUH!”

Again, the Brothers who didn’t know humans were taken aback. All four men stamped rigidly upright in their gear. It was an unmistakable gesture of respect for Yefrig’s authority, especially, when Titan’s hand came up smartly alongside the visor of his helmet.

Yefrig, of course, didn’t know how to respond.

“It’s customary to return the salute, shipfather,” Regaari informed him, gently. Yefrig inclined his head curiously, flicked his remaining ear, then did his best to imitate Akiyama’s salute. The humans unwound as soon as Titan’s hand had snapped down and he’d quietly ordered “as you were”.

Formality complete, Titan shook Yefrig’s paw. “Thank you for having us aboard sir, this won’t take but a little while.”

“Is it necessary to search the entire ship?” Yefrig asked.

“It is sir, yes. We have some marines on standby to come over from one of our ships, with your permission…?”

Very subtly, Yefrig caught Regaari’s eye, and got the most miniscule duck-nod by way of encouragement. He imitated a human nod with rather more force. “Go ahead.”

“Thank you, sir. Horse! Base! Get the Array set up!”

The two Protectors jumped to, grabbing the hefty equipment and slotting it together with practiced speed. Titan watched them at it. With his breathing mask off, Regaari could see him smile, though he had the good sense to keep his lips closed. The last thing jittery Brothers needed now was a show of teeth.

“Man, those are some wicked scars you got there,” he observed.

This didn’t quite have the desired result. Rather than preening slightly, Yefrig’s lone ear twisted sideways, perplexed. “Wicked?”

“Ah, translation problem,” Titan waggled the device clipped to his MOLLE with a wry smile. “Uh… impressive. You look like you earned every one.”

It was subtle, but Regaari judged that Yefrig was preening slightly at the observation. “I’ve never backed down from a challenge,” he agreed. Titan nodded, smiling faintly, and Regaari judged that the human knew he was now in Yefrig’s good graces.

“Well in that case sir, would you mind setting an example for your Brothers and submitting to the contraband scan? Won’t take but a second,”

“Very well. Though I don’t see what contraband I could be…?” Yefrig trailed off as Titan gently pressed a scanner to his head and watched it ping. To Regaari’s eyes the screen lit up a kind of bright yellowish-green, but he was aware that humans had trichromatic vision versus a Gaoians dichromatic eyes, and that the display on the back of the scanner was probably in a colour that he couldn’t see.

Whatever it was, Titan made careful note of the result. “Thank you sir.”

There was a thump from behind them and the jump array pulsed into life. A second later, a cuboid of black air resolved itself into a dozen human marines. Their gear wasn’t vacuum-proof and not a one of them was as prodigiously huge as even the smallest SOR operator, but even Regaari, who trusted the humans absolutely, found himself considering the fact that there were now easily enough deathworlders on board to rip through every one of the Gaoians almost without effort.

They were perfectly safe of course, but as the marines spread out and began a thorough top-to-bottom inspection of the ship it was hard not to be reminded of the discrepancy. The humans were being deferential, efficient and professional, but there was just something about the way they moved. They moved like pack predators, and even though Gaoians themselves were ambush predators the difference was unsettling. Their teamwork was flawless, and unconscious.

“What was that for?” Yefrig asked quietly, as Titan returned to his work.

Regaari watched as another of the Brothers was scanned in the head, and this time the panel on the back of the device lit up a different shade.

“…Tell me, shipfather, do you have any cybernetics?” he asked.

“A translator and a communicator,” Yefrig told him. “They’re scanning for cybernetics? Why?”

“Give me time, and I may have a theory for you.”

Date Point 10y6m2w1d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

“I’m telling you, Tangled has the best songs!”

Xiù giggled and scraped her mixture of crushed garlic and chopped onions into a pan to start frying. “It so doesn’t! Yeah, they’re good but they’re not like… Everybody can remember The Lion King’s songs, but nobody remembers the ones from Tangled.”

“Well they should!” Allison insisted, “‘When will my life begin’? ‘I’ve got a dream’? They’re amazing!” She glanced conspiratorially around the room even though they both knew they were alone. “…Julian tears up during ’I see the light.’”

Xiù put her knife down just in case she cut herself laughing “He doesn’t!?”

Allison nodded with an impish smile as she finished putting the last of the laundry away. “My right hand to God! He gets all misty-eyed when they’re singing in harmony.”

Xiù made a conciliatory motion with her head. “Okay, yes, it’s a beautiful scene and that song’s really good. But it’s still not the best.”

“Okay then, what is the best?”

“Classic? I mean, I’ve still not seen any of the movies they did after I was abducted…”

“Sure. Classic.”

Xiù didn’t even need to think about it. “Reflection.”

Allison scoffed. “Of course you’d choose one from Mulan.”

“She was my hero!”

“I guess it’s the nice thing about Disney that everyone gets their princess…”

Xiù giggled, starting in on cutting the celery. “Actually, when I was very little, I wanted to cosplay as Merida, but mama said I couldn’t.”

“Now why’d she do a thing like that?” Allison asked, sarcastically.

Xiù fought a losing battle to try and keep a straight face. “Beats me. Can you think of a reason why little Xiù Chang wasn’t allowed to dress up as a curly Scottish redhead?”

Allison made a performance of inspecting Xiù’s hair, which on the rare occasion she was able to let it down was a straight glossy curtain of black that reached her knees. “I think I might have an idea…” she hinted, battling with her own deadpan.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Blue isn’t your color, babe.”

Xiù snrrk-ed and swept the celery into the pan to fry.

“Mulan and Merida,” she mused. “Guess I like the warrior princesses, huh?”

“Come on, Rapunzel kicked just as much ass with a frying pan.”

“She beat up one guy! Mulan took on-!” Xiù caught Allison’s trollish expression and finally realised she was being teased. “Oh, okay. You can chop the tomatoes, then.”

Allison laughed and did as she was bidden, though her fingers deliberately brushed against Xiù’s hand as she headed for the fridge. “Yes ma’am.”

She seemed to have a knack for doing exactly what would get Xiù most flustered. Blushing, Xiù turned away and washed her knife off, dried it and slid it back into the block.

“How’d you do on that flight test?” Allison asked, deciding she’d had her fun for now.

“Eighty-seven percent,” Xiù answered. It was a solid pass, but she was secretly a little disappointed - she’d been dead-set on a ninety or better.

“Aiming for higher, huh?”

Feeling completely transparent, Xiù sighed “…Yeah.”

“Amen,” Allison mused. She finished chopping the tomatoes and, at Xiù’s gestured urging, dumped them in the pan all over the sizzling onions and garlic.

Being Allison she then just dumped the knife and cutting board into the sink without washing them and leaned conversationally against the counter. Xiù just smiled to herself, rolled her eyes and washed them for her.

“Same for you?” she asked.

Allison nodded. “I squeaked over the line on the computer systems module. Eighty-two.”

“My head just feels full of… fuzz and static,” Xiù confided.

“Ugh, mine too. Some days I just-”

They were interrupted by the decontamination buzzer and the sound of Julian removing his boots with uncharacteristic force. He crashed through the door without a word, wrenched the couch angrily out of its hiding place in the wall and collapsed onto it as if it had done him a personal injury.

Xiù fought down her fight-or-flight reflex. Even after all this time it was still on a hair trigger, and Julian in a rage was genuinely scary. When he was in a good mood, it was easy to forget that he’d thrived on the very worst the galaxy could throw at him, and that under his equanimous veneer he was a killer and a survivor.

Then again, so was she.

Allison squatted down next to him and put a hand on his arm. “…Baby?” she asked.

“I completely fucked up.” Julian groaned. He ran both hands up his face and through his hair, and the brown envelope he was holding crinkled and creased as he did so. “Wrecked the whole goddamn specimen. I only managed to salvage, like, three samples.”

Xiù glanced at Allison, and retrieved one of their precious supply of beers from the fridge. Talking the mission team into letting them have some supply of alcohol along for the ride had been a tense negotiation, but the compromise had finally been reached that they’d be allowed to take along enough for special occasions and a rare treat. Julian hesitated when she offered it to him, then sighed, nodded and accepted. He popped the screw top and drained a third of the bottle in one go.

He settled back and breathed out most of his stress. “…Thanks.”

“So you failed?” Allison asked, gently. While they had an allowance of test failures each before it would negatively impact their bid to get on the ship, there weren’t many, and they were all far too competitive to be happy with using even one of them.

Julian held up the brown envelope containing his test score. He hadn’t bothered to open it.

Xiù kissed his forehead and busied herself with the cooking as Allison borrowed a knife and slit the envelope open.

“…Huh,” she grunted. “Wow.”

Julian groaned and covered his eyes. “How bad is it?”

“…Ninety-one.”

“…What?”

“Ninety-one percent!” Allison brandished the printout. “Surprise equipment malfunction test. Examiner’s notes: ’Showed exceptional focus under pressure and was able to recover three samples. Exemplary performance marred only by slight hesitation at the moment the equipment failed, and by frustration over factors outside of his control’.” She lowered it again, beaming. “You aced it!”

Julian made the exact same ‘huh’ noise that she had, then looked at his beer. “…Damn. Now I feel bad for wasting one of these.”

“Fèihuà!” Xiù told him, then corrected herself. “Nonsense. That’s your celebration beer now, you hear?”

He went still for an instant, then shrugged and smiled. “Yes ma’am.”

Despite his best efforts to help, neither of the girls let him - he was forced to sit on the couch and finish his drink as Xiù threw together her improvised lamb and tomato curry and Allison set the table, which would ordinarily have been his job just because, as the tallest one, he had the easiest time getting it down from its nest in the ceiling.

Sure enough, when Xiù skewered him with regards to his favorite Disney song over dinner, he corroborated Allison’s account.

“Yeah, I did. I dunno, it’s just… something about that moment. You know?” He sang a couple of bars, and once again Xiù was struck by just how good his singing voice was. “♪’And it’s warm and real and right♫♪’, that bit. It’s only, what, a few seconds long? But it gets me right here.” He knocked on his breastbone.

“I thought Frozen was your favorite?” Xiù asked.

“It is, yeah, but Al’s right that Tangled has the better songs…”

Xiù snorted and tidied up so as to escape from Allison’s smug expression.

She felt strangely as though their collective relationship was progressing via some kind of a time warp. They were moving constantly forward and yet, once they had moved, everything was familiar and comfortable as if they had always been that way.

Nothing seemed to change, exactly, in that there were no sudden revelations, no sudden collapsing of barriers or giving-way of passions - things had just… steadily become more comfortable. Mostly it was the little gestures, like the way Julian put a hand on Xiù’s hip when he leaned around her to steal a cheeky morsel from the fridge, or how Allison’s flirting still raised her pulse and blush, but in a happy and confidence-boosting way. They all touched each other a little more and a little more, smiled and joked more, and performed the domestic ballet of keeping their living space tidy with increasingly efficient unconscious teamwork. Little things had mounted up.

She fondly recalled the time that Allison gave her a deep, therapeutic massage after Xiù came back sore and tired after a hard PT session, humming so softly and so peacefully that it put her right to sleep. On another occasion, Xiù gave Julian a coffee and a kiss as he struggled with his studies, then cuddled up with Allison on the couch to watch cartoons. There was always fresh coffee waiting for her when she returned from simulator sessions, and Allison had promptly lodged a request with Ericson for a heating element in the towel rack after Xiù made an off-hand comment about how the worst part of getting out of the shower was the cold air.

Xiù’s dreams didn’t stop, though. Her ingrained habit of being a light sleeper meant that every night was a surreal cinema reel in which childhood friends, Gaoians, mystic symbolism, odd objects, sex, places both real and imagined and an assortment of lurid contradictions acted out their incomprehensible scripts on the back of her eyelids.

Mostly they were peaceful. Vivid and often disturbing, but peaceful.

Mostly.

Date Point 10y6m2w1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

Gaoians apparently enjoyed their tea sweet and milky. A brief experiment in Earl Grey with a slice of lemon - Knight’s personal tipple - had not ended well, as it turned out that something about lemon just didn’t agree with the Gaoian palate.

Once Regaari and Shipfather Yefrig were both furnished with a civilized beverage to hopefully lubricate the wheels of discussion, though, the conversation began in earnest.

“You appreciate that I can’t just take a nonhuman ship and integrate it into the fleet,” he said. “You have different doctrine, different weapons and tactics, there are - forgive me - rafts of security concerns involved… Frankly you haven’t delivered an exciting new addition to the fleet, you’ve brought me a flying headache.”

“The Racing Thunder” is technological generations ahead of your ships,” Father Yefrig observed, clearly a touch offended. The translator certainly thought so, giving him a tooth-grinding edge to his simulated English voice.

“My dear chap, I don’t doubt that for a second,” Knight placated him. “But if… hmm…” he sipped his tea then hit on a useful analogy and put the cup down to deliver it. “If what we need is a spear, then you have brought me an excellent sword. For which I’m of course grateful, but…”

Yefrig settled, ear rotating sideways as he thought. “I understand.”

“So the question is, what am I to do with you? You’ve formally requested asylum; under our own rules and those of the Dominion I’m obligated to at least weigh the request… but in the longer term?”

“In the longer term,” Regaari said, “an asset is an asset. This asset wishes to work with you. Please don’t pretend that you couldn’t use them.”

Knight gave him a stern look. The Whitecrest was wearing his George Medal ribbon bar and from what he knew of the chap, that was undoubtedly a calculated move. Certainly his ears were up and forward, and his gaze level. Challenging.

But of course, that decorated Gaoian who’d most likely saved the whole SOR had implants in his head. There was a non-zero possibility that the entity he was talking with today was no longer Regaari.

“I can’t,” Knight told him. “Not for the moment, anyway. For reasons that I simply cannot go into, not with the two of you.”

“What can you do?” Yefrig asked.

“I can negotiate. I can discuss our options with my colleagues and superiors. But I cannot and will not guarantee anything, gentlemen. You will simply have to wait and see.”

Bitterly disappointed though both Gaoians clearly were, they took it with good grace. “May we at least send the females and civilians down?” Regaari requested.

“I’ll have Cimbrean Colonial Security notified,” Knight told him, nodding. “They can apply for visas and begin the immigration process. For now, Shipfather, if you would please remain at anchor above Cimbrean Five…”

“Near the Dominion embassy?” Yefrig made a growling noise.

“…Its moon, then.”

“As you wish, Fleetfather… ah, admiral.” Yefrig corrected himself. Knight smiled, quietly enjoying the title, and raised his fingers off his desk to acknowledge the respect.

“If I could speak with Regaari alone, shipfather…?” he requested

Yefrig duck-nodded, finished his tea, stood and, after a moment’s dithering, ducked and bowed in what was presumably something similar to a Gaoian salute, and departed.

That left Regaari, who was still watching Knight attentively.

“You’ve taken quite a liberty,” Knight accused him. “Presumed on our time, our resources, our manpower… Do you know how much it costs every time the SOR put on their spacesuits?”

“I am trying to forge an alliance,” Regaari informed him. “Something I understood you too were interested in.”

Knight frowned. “And you thought that imposing on us might make us better-disposed to such an alliance?”

Regaari angled his head slightly in a disarmingly canine gesture of thoughtfulness, and then duck-nodded as if he’d reached a decision. “There are…certain powerful Clan elements,” he revealed, “who are interested in pulling us closer to the Dominion. Fathers and the occasional Mother too who stand to gain personally by dragging my people in what I think is the wrong direction. Your people by contrast have been more than gracious with us… Gracious, in fact, to a fault.”

“How so?”

“If your fleet had simply disabled the Racing Thunder alongside the rest of the Dominion ships at Perfection, we wouldn’t be in the position of having to exile a valuable and powerful ship and all its crew. Our relationship with the Dominion would be effectively unchanged. Now, however, we are under pressure, and those pro-Dominion elements have pounced.”

“They would have been destroyed by the Hunters, and a hundred and eighty-seven One-Fangs would be dead.”

“In the big picture, sir, that’s a disposable number. Commodore Caruthers may have felt he was protecting human-Gaoian relations by leaving that ship untouched. In practice, it may have been a mistake.” Regaari scooted forward on his chair so that his paws were touching the ground again - a much more dignified posture. “That decision has… I believe your phrase is ’forced our hand’?”

Knight nodded.

Regaari put his empty teacup down and sat on the very edge of his seat. “Gao is not in a position to defy the Interspecies Dominion. The sanctions or punitive action would be… crippling. We had to get rid of that ship. The options before me were to bring it here and, yes, presume on your time, resources and manpower… or to exile them in earnest.”

Knight nodded. “And your pro-Dominion elements would have claimed a victory.”

“The Dominion is stagnant, corrupt and stifling,” Regaari said. “And badly prejudiced against life-forms like you and I who are natural carnivores. We need an alternative, and humans are it.” He growled slightly. “Worse, exiled Gaoians have a history of going pirate. Some of the most successful and dangerous pirate captains around are Gaoians, and all of them came from much less experienced stock than Father Yefrig, and started out with much inferior ships. The Racing Thunder is one of our best.”

“Surely the Dominion won’t be happy if we take that ship in…?”

“The Dominion is already not happy with you. You must be aware of how precarious your position is, Admiral.”

Knight sat back and laced his fingers gently on his belly. “More than you know,” he acknowledged.

“Meanwhile, Gao is badly in need of a gentle push away from the Dominion. Your kindness and grace have put us both in a dangerous place, Admiral, but it’s a position we can turn to the good. I would never presume on your time, resources and manpower unless I deemed it absolutely necessary, I promise you that.”

Knight gave him a long, calculating look, then exhaled and nodded. “I’ll put it to Allied Extrasolar Command that we should take them on as a deep-space patrol and assign them to watching the nearby systems,” he offered. “That, realistically, is the best I can offer for now.”

Regaari’s ears came down and slightly sideways as he relaxed. “Thank you.”

“Yes, well.” Knight tidied some papers on his desk. “Please don’t make a habit of this.”

“Of bringing you advanced warships with veteran crew?”

Knight couldn’t help himself - he snorted a laugh. What he knew of Gaoian body language made it clear that Regaari knew he’d won that point.

“I can see why your Fathers give you the difficult assignments,” he said. “You’re trouble.”

“Thank you, sir.” Regaari stood, and pulled off an acceptably passable salute considering that his shoulder wasn’t entirely the right shape. Knight did him the courtesy of returning it. “I’ll be staying in the Alien Quarter if you need me.”

“For how long?” Knight asked.

“Until there is a ship to take me home.”

Date Point 10y6m2w1d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

There is a hole in her parents’ living room floor, which Xiù knows contains something dangerous. When she approaches and sticks her hand in it, sharp teeth bite off her arm.

At least, that’s what would happen if she did approach it. Instead she keeps a wary distance. She steps outside, onto the open farmland in Minnesota. Knowing what’s coming, she looks up and watches the fireballs across the sky. She can see forever, and wherever the weapons land they send up huge, fat, slow mushroom clouds.

She runs against the blast waves as they tear her long clothes out behind her. She finds herself stuck in traffic, leaning desperately on the horn but making no progress. When she gets out of the car to run the rest of the way, the ground collapses underfoot.

Down through an echoing dark cavern, falling along the beam of light she created when she broke through, until she lands in what might be tar, or quicksand. She reaches desperately for the light as a million hands close over her, and a million teeth rip her, gnawing, biting, chewing, eating-

Dream. Just a dream. She propped herself up on her elbows and willed her panicked hyperventilating to slow.

“That sounded like a bad one.”

Xiù rubbed her face and rolled over to look down on Julian. “…Yeah. Did I wake you?”

He waved a reassuring hand. “We both sleep light, it’s fine.”

Xiù contemplated trying to sleep some more, then kicked her legs over the side of her bunk and dropped noiselessly to the floor. She smiled at the sight of Allison sound asleep, then stooped.

“Can I-?

He scooted to the back of his bunk. “Sure.”

She rolled in next to him. Having never shared a bed with anybody before - the Sanctuary escape pod didn’t count - it took some prompting and whispered instructions before she was properly settled, with his left arm under her head and his right resting across her waist, holding her close. But once she was settled…

She couldn’t remember having ever felt so safe.

“Better?” He asked.

“Al won’t mind, will she?”

Julian brushed her hair out of the way and kissed her behind the ear. “She’ll be delighted,” He promised.

Xiù sighed happily, and listened to her instinct to wriggle into him some more.

She woke up to, exactly as Julian had predicted, a delighted noise that was half a squeal and half an “ooh!” As Allison discovered them in the morning.

“Oh, hey… Uh…”

“Don’t you dare apologize,” Allison ordered. She flipped out of bed and beamed at them. “You two look so cute together!”

Julian chuckled. At some point in the night, without her noticing, he’d withdrawn his arm from under Xiù’s head, and now he pushed himself up on it. “Told you.” He whispered into her ear. “Sleep well?”

“That’s the best night of sleep I’ve had in…I don’t know how long!” Xiù realised, sitting up.

Allison, who had turned and was stripping for her morning shower, nodded enthusiastically. “He’s like a magic comfort blanket, isn’t he?”

“Better,” Xiù agreed. Julian was a blusher too sometimes, and as he finger-combed his hair she shared a grin with Allison, who vanished into the washroom.

He cleared his throat, wriggled out past her, then stood up and stretched. His spine and shoulders made several loud popping sounds.

“…Are you okay?” Xiù asked.

“Male burden,” He joked. “Big spoon, small bunk. I’ll loosen up.”

“We can’t have that!” Xiù said. “Are you stiff and sore every time?”

Julian shrugged. “Worth it.”

Xiù considered the bunk. “Are you sure?”

Julian twisted his waist, bent over to touch his fingertips to the opposite toes, and then straightened with one final shimmy of his neck. “You know what I wanna do?” He asked. “I wanna say, ‘to Hell with the beds’ and just make a nest on the floor. They’re too soft anyway.”

“Ugh, I know what you mean,” Xiù agreed. She’d grown almost used to sleeping on hard metal floors during her exile. “They feel like you could fall through them! And… yeah, that way all three of us could cuddle up.”

“Oh, I see. You just want more magic comfort blanket.”

“Duh!” She agreed with a laugh. “Especially if you don’t get backache from it.”

“That would be nice…” he agreed, then raised his voice. “Whaddya think, Al?”

Allison’s voice was slightly muffled through the shower door as she called back. “What?”

“Building a kind of cosy nest on the floor instead of these tiny bunks!”

The shower shut off. Allison slid the door aside and reached out for a towel. “The floor?” she asked, drying her limbs.

“Yeah!” Xiù enthused. “It doesn’t make sense that Julian has to get backache and somebody gets left out…”

Allison frowned at him, as she dried her torso. “You get backache?” She asked. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Nothing a hot shower doesn’t fix,” He promised. “Still…”

“Well go on then!” She stepped aside for him. Julian chuckled and obeyed, receiving a slap with the wet towel to his bare ass from Allison as he stepped out of his shorts.

Allison grinned, and scrubbed at her hair. Xiù still felt that she’d done an embarrassing butcher’s job of that shorter cut, but there was no denying that it needed far less maintenance.

“So.. what, just pull all the sheets and blankets down here and sleep?”

“It’s soft enough,” Xiù pointed out. She stood up and started making the beds.

“I guess it can’t hurt to try…” Allison sounded dubious, poking at the floor - which after all was only as ‘soft’ as a gym mat - with her toe. “…okay, We’ll try it tonight!”

“You don’t mind?”

“Why would I mind cuddling up to my two favorite people, dummy?” Allison asked, affectionately. “Ooh! Do I get to be in the middle?”

“Well… I kinda wanted to…”

Xiù trailed off at the extravagant pout on Allison’s face, rolled her eyes and raised a fist. Beaming, Allison raised hers and they silently counted out three beats. Xiù threw scissors, and Allison went for paper.

“Shit!” Allison threw her head back. “Best of three?”

”No.” Xiù asserted, laughing. “Go put some clothes on!”

Allison giggled and headed for her wardrobe. “Yes ma’am…” she sing-songed

“Good girl!” Xiù called after her, using the same cadence. She wriggled out of her own clothes as Julian finished his shower and stepped out to grab a towel for himself, shaking the water out of his prosthetic. She slipped past him almost before he was out of it and turned the shower back on before the water could go cold.

Normally, she was last in because she liked to luxuriate under it, but this time she spun through, soaked, soaped and rinsed in record time, eager to start the day.

The sooner it was started, after all, the sooner it was done, and she could try the joys of two magic comfort blankets.

Date Point 10y7m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“So how are you settling in at the new workplace?”

Ava smiled and grabbed a handful of cutlery from the drawer to set the breakfast table. Since her return from Earth, she’d clearly and obviously relaxed and become happier. The haunted, sorrowful look that had darkened her expression for months now was finally going away, and her smile was coming back, which was lifting Gabe’s spirits in ways he couldn’t really describe. Adopted be damned, he loved Ava like she was his actual flesh-and-blood daughter, and no parent liked to helplessly watch their child go through hard times.

The fact that she and Adam seemed to be back on speaking terms, strained though they were, was even more cause for celebration. He regretted their breakup and bitterly wished he could have done more to stop it, but there came a time when a parent just had to get out of the way and let his kids be idiots.

Having them round for weekend breakfast on a regular basis was a treat for Gabe, too. Adam had loyally worked out how to fit a weekly bacon-and-eggs fried breakfast into his macronutrients, and if there had been a hint of wanting to avoid Ava for a while… well, to his credit he’d been big enough to get over it. And so had Ava, for that matter.

He wasn’t allowed to help, though. He was so huge nowadays that he was under strict orders to sit at the table, on the grounds that it was the only way for him to stay out of the way.

“It’s pretty good!” Ava said. “We’re all impatient to start putting articles out though. The website’s taking forever.”

“I suppose a whole new media network doesn’t just pop into existence overnight,” Jess observed. She loved their Saturday breakfasts - it was a lazy day for all three of them, and Gabe could cook it at his own limping pace, which was his way of thanking her for the blitzing, busy breakfasts she put together during the working week. It was that kind of happy give-and-take that was making their marriage work beautifully. Their worst argument ever had been over the orientation of the toilet paper. Gabe still didn’t know how a sane woman could tolerate having the roll the wrong way round, but he’d given up trying to persuade her and just settled for flipping it as needed.

“Mm-hmm!” Ava deftly spun a fork round her finger before putting it down. “I’m still trying to decide if I want to focus on Security or Extraterrestrial Affairs.”

“You’ve got the contacts for security…” Adam mused.

“I’m not sure I’d want to interview either of you,” Ava shrugged, before Gabe could reply.

“Why not? And…why would you interview me?”

Ava rolled her eyes. “You’re right, why would a journalist who’s just starting to make a name for herself want to interview one of the Beef Brothers?”

Adam snorted at that, but it was an amused snort. He was still an essentially shy guy at heart, and mentioning the way that the Internet had fallen in love with him and Baseball as they escorted Earth’s first official extraterrestrial visitors was a sure way to make him go slightly red in the ears.

“But… I mean, I guess it’s just not a good idea to interview your family,” Ava continued. “And the SOR don’t like me at all.”

“Sounds like the decision’s made, then, surely?” Jess asked, heading off Adam’s reply.

Ava sighed. “Yeah…”

“But security’s what you really want to cover, isn’t it,” Gabriel observed. He got a small smile for that.

“Yeah… but I guess ET Affairs probably has a big overlap, with the Hunters and, uh, all the rest of it…”

Gabe resisted the urge to grimace. He’d had a long and tense conversation with Admiral Knight over the fact that both his kids had been put in harm’s way in Egypt. Knight had been as reasonable and agreeable as always, but his apology had been for the necessity of it, not for the decision itself.

After reviewing the debrief on EMPTY BELL for himself, Gabe had been forced to agree that it was necessary, but he was damned if he’d ever be happy about it. He hadn’t yet had the chance to discuss it with either of them: with Jess around, classified matters were off limits, and he got the impression that Ava wanted to put the whole affair behind her anyway.

He settled for chuckling weakly. “Well, if you want to combine them, interview me about Gaoians sometime,” he offered. “They’re CCS’ most regular customers.”

Ava mulled that one over. “Hmm. Could be a good angle. The challenge of reconciling alien morality with human laws…”

“Regaari’s here right now,” Adam offered. “He’d have some interesting stuff to say.”

“Isn’t he your friend? You wouldn’t mind?”

“Trust me, he’d prolly thank me for arranging it.”

“Hmm…” Ava finished setting the table and sat down so as to stay out of the way. “And the rest of the guys? I kinda wanna stay in their good graces as best I can…”

Adam ’pff’-ed and poured himself an orange juice. “Stay?”

“Ohhh, no. Stop that,” Jess warned him, putting the finishing touches on the French press coffee. “That wasn’t nice, Adam.”

“…You’re right. Sorry Ava.”

“No se preocupe. You’re right.”

“Regaari’s would be an interesting perspective on these duels that cause us so much trouble,” Gabe suggested, carefully transferring the toast onto their plates as well as dragging the conversation back on course.”

“Are they really that endemic?” Ava asked.

“Every day there’s some incident, and we only have a few hundred Gaoians,” Gabe replied, parting out the scrambled eggs. “As far as they’re concerned it’s perfectly acceptable and normal, as far as we’re concerned it’s aggravated assault. Not that we can ever make the charges stick.”

“If it’s their culture, though-”

“Me vale madre por su cultura.” Gabriel grumbled, serving the bacon. “They can act however they like on a Gaoian planet, but so long as they’re in my jurisdiction… And the same goes for humans, too. Culture be damned, if you come to Cimbrean, you live by Cimbrean’s laws. Our house, our rules.”

Jess and Adam both nodded emphatically. For her part, Ava gave his words a moment’s consideration before nodding. “I guess,” she agreed.

“It’s not about saying they can’t be who they are,” Gabe clarified. “It’s about saying, ’this is who we are’, right? These are the things that matter to us, these are our values. And if we’re not willing to stand up for those values…”

This time Ava’s nod was more solid. “Then who are we?”

“Exactly.” Gabe served the sausages, tomatoes and mushrooms and Jess helped him transfer the four plates - one noticeably more laden than the other three - to the table. It was very much a British style breakfast, but Jess had won him over to the dark side. He was damned if he was going to let her convert him to black pudding, though, a sentiment apparently shared by Ava but not by Adam, who couldn’t seem to get enough of the stuff.

“You’re getting political, darling,” Jess noted.

“Sorry. I just worry one of these days one of my officers is going to lose an eye. Gaoians may not be deathworlders, but those claws are sharp.”

“What about the females?” Ava suggested. “Now that they’re here, maybe you could ask them to help you?”

Gabe inclined his head thoughtfully as he sat down “…Hmm…”

Ava smiled, then lowered her head. Jess and Adam sat back and let them say grace silently, before they tucked in.

“…Talking to the females could work,” Gabe admitted, after a few silent minutes of appreciative gourmandizing, when half his plate was eaten. “Possibly. Though, one of the new females fancies herself a warrior. The commune’s not even built yet and she’s already gone to the Thing requesting a change in the weapon licensing laws.”

“A warrior? What kind of a change does she want?”

“She’s a ’commune guard’. Apparently it’s her job to keep unwanted males from harassing the females and cubs. She’s eligible for a security license, which would cover her to carry a gun or a taser, but she wants the license expanded to include fusion swords.” Gabe cleared his throat.

“A sword? A Gaoian with a sword?” Adam laughed.

“Yeah, she’s a fierce one. A real mama bear.”

“Maybe you should interview her,” Jess suggested.

“I think so!” Ava agreed, fighting to keep her amused expression down to a mere wide smile. “She sounds like a firecracker.”

“Well, her name’s Myun. She should be easy enough to find.” Gabe told her. “Try not to create tension, mija.”

“Wait, Myun?” Adam asked, “Dexter was tellin’ me about her. Her first cub is his.”

“That so? …Dexter is Regaari?” Gabriel asked. When Adam nodded, he had to ask further. “Why Dexter?”

“Because of his left hand. Paw. Whatever.”

“Anyway: Just the facts, dad, I promise,” Ava reassured him. “That’s what we want this to be all about.”

“Isn’t ’Just the Facts’ Byron Media’s thing?”

“That’s their slogan…” Ava shrugged. “But Carl - that’s our political editor - he thinks it’s all about public image with the Group.”

“Moses Byron is a very clever man who wants to be remembered as one of the good guys,” Jess opined.

“Exactly. So everything they publish is about making the Group look better. Our mission statement is the truth, no matter what the truth may be.”

“That’s a mission that might get you buried,” Gabe warned her. “People aren’t rational and they don’t always like or want the truth.”

Ava shrugged. “What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked.

“…Nothing you can’t handle, I suppose,” Jess mused.

“I hope so,” Ava agreed. “We’ll just have to go for it and see. But don’t worry, I’m not going to stir up trouble. It’s all going to be about letting the ETs describe themselves and us in their own words.”

“Gaoians are a good start,” Gabe told her. “They’re generally well-disposed to us. You should get some opinions out of them that’ll make readers smile.”

“What about the others?”

“The Vizkittik. Are the most… cautious. They’ll probably give you some more, uh… less inspiring interviews. The Kwmbwrw are outright hostile to us, and in fact I think the handful we had are planning to emigrate now that more Gaoians are arriving. I think there’s a family of Locayl and a Qinis tailor…”

“I guess I’ll just get the bioscreen and a pass to the alien quarter, see if I can do some old-school, candid street voices stuff,” Ava decided.

“Could you see if you can get a piece on education in the alien quarter?” Jess asked. “I want to see how they compare to our own schooling.”

Ava held up her hands. “Please! I’m the new girl! I can only do so much! I can come up with any story I like, but what we actually publish is up to the editors.”

“It’s for my own interest, really,” Jess said. “I’ve got… well, a bit of a problem case. I suppose I was just hoping maybe the aliens have figured out how to deal with some of the things I haven’t.”

“When it comes to humans? I doubt it,” Gabriel muttered.

“Mm.” Jes nodded sadly and finished her coffee.

“Is there anything I could do, maybe?” Adam offered. “Admiral Knight’s been pushing for more community outreach. We’re supposed to look for chances to help people out…”

“Maybe. I’m… a little reluctant to involve either of you directly.”

“Why?” Ava asked.

“Because… well, it’s Jack Tisdale.”

Ava and Adam both nodded understanding and glanced at one another. Gabe knew that neither of them had managed to re-engage with Jack since the Tisdale family’s return to Cimbrean, which was a shame. He should have been their last link to his late sister, Sara, and they should have been the same for him…but it hadn’t happened.

“Lemme guess,” Adam said, quietly. “He’s getting into fights? Giving you attitude?”

“I don’t blame him,” Jess hastened to say. “He lost his sister and fourteen’s a tricky age anyway. But he keeps picking fights with bigger and older boys, and bless them they’re pretty good about it, but he’s going to get hurt if somebody doesn’t turn him around, and I’ve… well, I’ve done everything that I can.” She shrugged helplessly. “There’s only so far a teacher can go.”

Adam nodded. “I’ll talk with him when I… I tell you what, next time he gets in a fight, give him some alone time and call for me, I’ll come down if I can.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to put you-”

“It’s no problem, I promise,” Adam interrupted, kindly.

Jess sighed. “…Thank you, Adam.”

“De nada. I hope I can do something for him.”

Ava’s smartwatch made a pinging sound, and a second after checking it she smiled hugely. “Oh hey! The website’s going up!”

“You’d better get into the office then,” Gabe told her.

“Uh-huh. We’re in for a busy couple of weeks… I’ll see you next Saturday?”

“Of course!” Jess gave her a hug and they shared a couple of familial cheek-kisses. “Always!”

Gabe was given similar treatment, and Adam got a hug sans the kiss, but it was still a big improvement on the first few awkward, strained breakfasts.

“I’ll wash up,” he said, looming upright and squeezing past into the kitchen. This was the easy job, seeing as Jess had insisted on a dishwasher.

Gabe was left to finish his coffee and sit back, feeling a good deal more relaxed and happy than he had in some months.

On the whole, life was going okay.

Date Point 10y7m AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

There was no longer such a thing as a day off in The Box - after all, they wouldn’t get days off on the ship once it was in flight - but weekends were half days, with the afternoons and evenings there for relaxing and personal improvement. Unscheduled drills aside, they were usually pretty relaxing.

Inevitably, however, life in their tiny shared space wasn’t all paradise. The warning from their evaluators had been right - close proximity and little privacy unavoidably led to friction.

Mostly, it was little things. Even on her best behaviour and with tidying up after themselves being part of their routine three times a day, Allison still had an insuppressible slovenly streak. She tended to just leave her clothes where they fell whenever she undressed, rather than putting them in a laundry hamper that was at most ten feet away. She never made her bed, she just would not do the washing up properly and thoroughly, and she seemed to suffer no embarrassment at all from releasing the occasional cavernous fart, though a minor adjustment to their diet largely resolved that problem.

Julian meanwhile was… well, Xiù’s complaints about Julian were less reasonable, really. How could she fairly complain about her boyfriend being conscientious? Except that he was conscientious to a fault, constantly checking she was okay, trying to cheer her up if she was anything less than perfectly perky. If she was in the mood for it, his concern for her state of mind was touching. If she wasn’t - which was more common - she felt like he thought she was made of glass and cobwebs, ready to shatter and tear at the slightest wave of a hand.

He and Allison weren’t immune to spats and minor fights, either. There was never a raised voice between them, nor did it ever end in anything other than a reassuring kiss and reconciliation, but more days than not involved a minute or two somewhere when the energy between the two of them became strained.

Xiù stepped in one time when they were bickering about, as far as she could tell, nothing much at all. Allison had informed him of something mundane like that she’d refilled the liquid soap in the shower, he - being engrossed in a book about the history of naturalism and taxonomy - had grunted a distracted acknowledgement, she’d followed-up by informing him of which scent of soap she’d chosen and he had quite abruptly pointed out that he was reading.

This had resulted in a tense ten minutes, but the moment Xiù had meekly asked if they were okay, they’d both dropped everything to reassure her that they were absolutely fine and had all but tripped over in apologising to one another.

Later, Allison had opined that minor moments of tension were normal and healthy in a relationship. “After all,” she’d said, “we wouldn’t get upset if we didn’t give a fuck.”

Xiù tried to bear that in mind. For the most part it worked - she found it in her to start rolling her eyes and throwing Allison’s used shirts in the laundry with a smile rather than a frown. She gently confronted Julian and explained that constantly checking on her actually undermined her confidence and mood more often than not. He’d done a pretty good job of toning it down after that.

The real boulder in the road was sex. The revelation that Allison and Julian were permanently stuck on third base was a surprising one.

She and Julian talked about it when they had a rare moment alone together while Allison was out a little later than was usual on a Saturday, taking a couple of tests. Their studies and training for the day were all done, they’d finished the chores, and they were sitting on the couch just talking when that particular nugget of information came to her attention.

“So, you guys have really never gone the whole way?”

“It’s the baby thing.” Julian grumbled. “I mean, that rule’s been there right from the start with us. I guess I shoulda put together what happened with her before that Keating guy dragged it out of her…”

“But… I mean, we both got those implants and you had that, um, that injection…”

Long-term contraception had turned out to be part of the contract. Both the girls now had intramuscular contraceptive implants and Julian had suffered the rather less dignified solution of a vas-occlusive contraceptive injection. In theory, the injection of a sterile occluding foam into his vasa deferentia that would disintegrate naturally in three years, or which could be easily dissolved before then if he wanted, was supposed to be a quick, painless and uncomplicated solution to male contraception.

In practice, he’d spent a day or two walking and sitting in slightly funny ways, and constantly adjusting himself for comfort with a pained expression.

“Yup. 100% no chance of accidental babies whatsoever, and she’s still…” Julian sighed, and scowled at himself. “I mean, I know it’s her choice and if she says she’s closed for business then nobody else gets a vote. It’s just…”

Xiù nodded. “And she keeps hinting about you and me, um…” she tried to fight back her blush, which of course just made it worse.

“See, I don’t mind that.” Julian said. “You’re not ready yet, full stop. You’re not, uh, teasing me with going nearly the whole way and then stopping short, you know?”

“Right! But it really bugs me that she keeps pushing me, when she’s got this big hangup of her own…”

They nodded together and lapsed into thoughtful silence, which Julian broke a minute or two later.

“Should we… be talking about this without her here?” He asked.

“Shouldn’t we?” Xiù asked.

“I dunno, are we maybe talking behind her back? That doesn’t seem right…”

He had a point. “Maybe…” Xiù conceded. “You’re right. I guess I’d be kind of upset if I found out you two had been complaining about me without me…”

Julian gave a shifty clear of the throat. “Agh. Right… Sorry.”

“…You have?”

He raised his hands. “Not like anything major. just…”

“Julian!”

“I’m sorry!” He cleared his throat. “Okay, new rule, no two of us talk about the third when they’re not around”

“I think so!” She agreed.

She relented when Julian shrank a little, looking so much like a kicked puppy it was impossible to stay mad. She leaned over and kissed him. “…Sorry.”

He spread his arms and she scooted over to lie on his chest. He stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head.

“…So I managed to irritate you guys?” She asked, after a while.

“Not really. Nothing important.” He promised.

“What was it about?”

He laugh-sighed. “You’re just gonna worry if I don’t tell you, aren’t you?” When she nodded against him, he nodded too and drew a thoughtful breath through his teeth. “Al was… it was about sparring practice. She felt you weren’t letting her progress fast enough.”

“She’s progressing really fast anyway!” Xiù looked up.

“Yeah, but you know how she is. She doesn’t slow down or relent, does she?”

“Ugh, yeah.” Xiù frowned. “Sometimes I just wanna tell her to…” she caught herself. “Wait, we’re complaining about her again.”

“Ah, shit…” Julian rubbed his scalp with the heel of his hand. “That’s harder in practice than in theory, isn’t it?”

“Well, what was your complaint about me?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Oh come on,” she pushed herself upright. “There’s got to be something I do that annoys you.”

“Only when you’re being insecure,” he said, and smiled cheekily. “Like right now.”

“Sorry…”

He put his thumb and index finger under her chin and lifted her for a kiss. “We’re all fine,” he promised.

Reassured, Xiù snuggled down on his chest again.

She must have dozed off because she knows she’s dreaming. She’s on a grassy mountainside, overlooking a canyon-spanning steel bridge on a bright sunny day.

A dirt bike blitzes past from behind her and out over the bridge, bouncing over the ramps and wooden boards that have been laid on it - Motocross at altitude. As she watches, the rider makes a mistake, over-corrects, wobbles and the next ramp throws them high into the air to fall off the bridge and into the canyon.

Perspective shifts. Now she’s the rider, and she leaps off the bike with a whoop, pulling the cord on her parachute. She takes hold of the steering lines and aims herself down the mountainside. Trees, snow, grass and animals flash by below as she perfectly calculates the angle of descent, thrillingly close to disaster but never crashing. It’s the next best thing to flying.

Both of them woke with a small jump when the door opened. Allison threw her jacket onto the coat hooks, and waved to them. “Hey, lovers.”

“Hey!” Julian sat up.

Xiù stretched and checked the wall clock. They had napped for nearly an hour. Not surprising really, considering how permanently tired they all were from the constant education and training. “Hey…”

Allison hit the fridge and grabbed the orange juice. “Did I wake you?”

“Guess you did…” Julian agreed. “Hey, Al, we’ve kinda come up with a new relationship rule.”

She turned, pouring a glass. “Yeah?”

Xiù nodded. “We were thinking it’s a bad idea if two of us talk about the third when they’re not present.”

Allison blinked at them. “Did I do something to piss you off?”

“No, no. Not… nothing like that.” Julian said. “I was just… we were talking about the whole third-base only thing.”

“And I was saying you’ve been making me a bit uncomfortable lately, hinting about… you know, when I’m gonna be ready.” Xiù added.

Allison put the orange juice back in the fridge, slammed back the glass in one go and put it down. ”‘Hi, Al! How was your day?’” she asked, exuding brittle sarcastic cheer.

“Come on, don’t be like that-” Julian protested, but Allison folded her arms.

“Be like what?” She asked. “I’ve had a shitty day! I came this close to fucking up that bend test I’ve been stressing about all week, I’ve got a head full of system integration jargon that I barely understand, and then the second I’m home, my boyfriend and my girlfriend gang up on me!”

She sighed, picked up her glass and took it to the sink to rinse it. “I’m sorry if I upset you, guys, but couldn’t this have waited? Let me get home and rest up a bit first?”

Xiù and Julian looked at each other awkwardly.

“New rule?” Xiù suggested.

“No ganging up.” Julian agreed.

Al leaned against the sink and tucked her thumbs into her belt loops. “Good rule.” She observed, testily.

“…Sorry Allison.” Xiù offered, while Julian nodded apologetically with her.

“It’s okay, it’s fine-” Allison waved a hand and exhaled. “You just managed to put the cherry on a shitty day cake, you know?”

“Sorry.” Xiù repeated herself. Allison smiled forgivingly, stepped forward, turned and threw herself over the couch’s arm to land with her head in Xiù’s lap.

“Hey, Julian?” She called.

“Yeah?”

“I know it’s my turn to cook, but I could really go for one of your steaks tonight…”

He chuckled and stood up. “Okay, I can do that.”

As he headed for the freezer to grab a couple of steaks for defrosting, Xiù gently ran her nails across Allison’s scalp. “That bad?”

Allison closed her eyes, enjoying the sensation. “You and a piece of steel have a lot in common,” she said. When Xiù paused, confused, she opened her eyes again and explained. “I can’t bullshit either of you. Either I’m welding it right or it breaks. Either my stance is right, or you correct me. It’s… frustrating.”

Xiù gave her a quick reassuring kiss. “You’re doing great,” she promised.

It occurred to her after the fact that it was the first time she’d actually kissed Allison, rather than being kissed by her. Al certainly didn’t fail to notice - she smiled hugely and relaxed. “Mm… Thanks,” she whispered. “I needed that.”

“More head scritchies?” Xiù offered.

“…Please…”

Xiù obliged, and, on a whim, whispered something for Allison alone to hear. “Wǒ ài nǐ.”

Allison stretched like a sleepy kitten. “Mmm…I dunno what that meant, but it sounded good.”

Xiù smiled. “It was,” she promised.

Date Point 10y7m AV
Michael Foale High School, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

Despite being a headteacher in charge of a few hundred pupils rather than the homeroom tutor in charge of just a handful as she’d been when Adam had been in her class, Jess had never got around to selecting a different look for the workplace. Long skirt, black cardigan, red scarf. It was her working uniform, and so iconic that whenever the kids wanted to poke affectionate fun at her, they never needed to work hard at it.

Possibly that was why Jess had stuck with the distinctive look. She had a policy of not taking herself too seriously at work, though she took the work very seriously indeed.

“Thanks for doing this, Adam.”

“Like I said, de nada. I hope I can help…”

Used as he was to the narrow hallways and corridors of HMS Sharman’s administrative building, Adam was still feeling self-consciously huge as he followed his stepmom. Everything was just a little low, teenager-height or lower, and next to Jess’ slim, avian figure he was well aware that he cut a near-freakish figure.

He tried not to let it bother him when two wide-eyed girls in the school’s uniform of a light powder-blue polo shirt with a grey sweater stood aside to let them past, and then dashed away laughing and whispering to each other.

Jack Tisdale was lounging around in an empty classrom with his feet up on a desk, radiating dishevelled contempt for frivolities like the uniform. He’d found a tennis ball somewhere, and was bouncing it off the wall when they entered. Jess just sighed and confiscated it, even as Jack straightened up and adjusted his clothes, aware that something different was going on.

“…I’ll leave you two to talk,” Jess said, and made herself scarce.

Adam would have liked to sit down, but he was innately wary of furniture nowadays. None of the plastic seats were either large or strong enough. He settled for leaning against the door and folding his arms.

Jack stared at him for several long minutes. “…Jesus, Adam,” he declared at last. “Ava said you got big, but…”

“Yeah.”

“…Why are you here?”

Adam tilted his head. “To help out a friend.”

“Oh, what, Jess needs your help with the naughty kid?” Jack made a frustrated noise and stood up. He only looked rail-thin, Adam realised. On closer inspection he was carrying some respectable muscle definition on that skinny frame. It was doubtful he’d ever be strong, but he was certainly not as weak as a first glance might suggest. But he wasn’t strong either, as the scabbed wounds on his lip and eyebrow attested.

“Jess isn’t my friend, man. She’s my step-mom.”

“…We hardly know each other, we’re not friends.” Jack snapped, dismissively.

“Bullshit.”

Before Jack could reply, he’d been grabbed and pulled irresistibly into an Adam Arés Trademarked Hug. Not even Baseball could escape those.

“Get off! Get… Leggo! Got off me you big-Aagh!” Jack squirmed, fought, pushed, twisted and at one stage Adam guessed he maybe even tried biting.

Then he went still.

Then, very slowly, he hugged back.

Date Point 10y7m AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Allison Buehler

The treadmill in their living space was, cleverly, part of the couch. A hidden catch on the side of the couch allowed for the squishy-sitty-bit (as Xiù had named it) to be rolled back into the wall, revealing the treadmill’s deck, the handholds and controls of which simply lifted upwards and clicked into place.

Julian hated it. But then again, Julian disliked exercising full stop - he’d always kept in shape through labor, be it splitting firewood, clearing brush, landscape management, hunting, whatever. The need to actually put dedicated time and effort into his fitness was one he accepted, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Allison routinely had to order him onto the treadmill, or to pick up his weights.

She usually wound up doing her yoga practice nearby so as to encourage him.

The new titanium reinforcement in his foot turned out to have been such a minor change in the weight and balance of it that he’d adapted inside a day or two, much to his embarrassment, and it had improved his running gait impressively. Before, he’d had a kind of shuffling, cautious stride that favored his prosthetic and minimized the impact on its fragile synthetic “bones”.

With that concern repaired, he new loped along with a fluid, easy, toe-first stride that made surprisingly little noise, and he could keep it up all day.

Xiù meanwhile was showing off her disgusting core strength by doing one-arm toes-to-bar sets.

She wasn’t actually showing it off of course - that was an ordinary part of her routine - but every time Allison watched her do it, she felt a little inadequate. Her own fitness had improved dramatically under Dane’s guidance, and she could do toes-to-bar sets herself, but the one-handed ones just eluded her. She wound up swinging like a rung bell, whereas Xiù’s movement was smooth, controlled and precise.

Then of course there was the other part of their training day - station drills. The Box would occasionally produce one of four chimes, summoning one or all of them to their workstations. The idea being that no matter what you were in the middle of, you downed tools immediately, pausing only for fire safety or other danger concerns, and went straight to work.

The worst ones were when they went off at night.

Xiù let go of the bar the second her chime went off, gave them both a wave, and headed for her simulator with her sports drink in hand, toweling herself.

“Wanna bet we get an all stations chime in five minutes?” Allison asked, pushing her arms forward and her leg out into the Warrior III position.

“You’re on. Bathroom cleaning.”

“Urgh… take-back?” Allison hated cleaning the shower. It inevitably meant digging a sodden wad of dark hair that could have belonged to either Julian or Xiù - probably both - out of the drain trap.

“Not on your life.”

Allison sighed, breathed through her position for half a minute, then returned to a lunge. “Fine. You can clean the air filter then.” She said. Another of her ‘favorite’ jobs - the air filter in the actual ship would be there to extract dust from their atmosphere before it was processed through the life support system. The simulated one was full of icing sugar and glitter instead. Somebody in their simulation team had a sense of sadistic humor.

“Fair.” Julian conceded.

“Oh, hey, seeing as she’s not here…” Allison began.

“No complaining about Xiù behind her back, remember?” Julian said.

“No complaining, I swear!” Allison objected. “She just…”

“What?”

“D’you know what ’Wo ai ni’ means?” Allison asked.

Julian turned his head slightly. “She said that to you?”

“Yeah…?”

Julian smiled warmly. “It means ’I love you’.”

“…That’s what I thought.”

“Is that a big deal? She’s said it before.” Julian pointed out.

“She’s said she loves us before. ’I love you guys’, you know? This one was for me personally.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Allison returned to a neutral stance and shook her limbs off. Now that the bar was vacant, it was her turn on it.

“It’s not a problem, it’s… I mean, you’re fine. Two girls, woohoo, right?”

“I guess…” Julian said, cautiously.

“Meanwhile for me it’s been like, ’surprise, Allison! You’re gay now!’ which is… that takes some adjusting to,” she sighed. “I’m not complaining, it’s great. But I kinda feel off-balance about it sometimes, you know?”

“You’ve really committed to it though. Got that cute butch haircut and everything…” Julian grinned evilly at her.

She ripped one of her sweatbands off her wrist and threw it at him. “This is not a butch haircut, you ass!”

In an impressive display of coordination, without breaking stride he juggled and caught it after it bounced off his shoulder. “You’re the ass, you butt,” he retorted, tossing it back to her with a laugh.

She threw it at him again. “You’re the butt, dummy!”

The sweatband ping-ponged between them. “Am not!”

“Are too!”

“Nuh-uh!”

Laughing, Allison slipped the sweatband back onto her wrist. “Come over here and call me a butt to my face!”

He shook his head, still grinning. “No ma’am.”

She gasped, mock-scandalized. “Bad boy! How dare you not call me a butt?!”

“We need to finish our exercise or they’ll fail us and we won’t go to space,” he pointed out. “I don’t have time to call you a butt!”

She feigned grumbling. “Damn you and your… Sensible-ness.”

He chuckled. “You can punish me later.”

“I can, huh?” Allison gave him an appraising up-and-down.

“Well, I’m already cleaning that air filter for you, so I’m gonna be covered in glitter anyway…” He pointed out.

“Oh, now you’re just inviting me to be cruel.” Allison said.

“You gonna actually exercise anytime today?” Julian asked, cheekily earning himself at least a one-point hike in that evening’s punishment.

“Fine, but you’re gonna regret taunting me, mister.”

He snorted. “Promises, promises…”

Date Point 10y7m AV
Michael Foale High School, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

“…like I’m this fragile, this… glass child that they’ve got to protect! Like they think I’m stupid enough to get myself shot too! You know?”

Adam nodded. The Trademarked Hug had worked its magic yet again, but the real trick was listening. He listened, he nodded, he let Jack get it out of his system. Really, all he’d done was to, as Sikes had once described it to him, unlock the paddock and let the colt run until it got tired.

All he had to do now was sit cross-legged on the floor, listen, and throw away everything he thought of saying. It wouldn’t do to try and talk Jack’s problems out, not yet. The poor guy was a crackling Tesla coil of anger with no clue where that anger should go. Now that it was spilling out of him, it was earthing itself everywhere, in the school, in Adam, in the world in general, in his parents, and in his late sister.

Adam could relate. After the first few hours of simply not being able to believe what had happened, he’d been furious with Sara. He’d felt guilty about it for a while, until he’d learned about the stages of grief and how anger was a natural part of the progression. One that Jack appeared to have got himself stuck on, and all of that energy needed to dissipate before anything Adam might say would be constructive.

Besides. Some of the things he was saying were painful to hear, and even managed to make Adam a bit angry, they hit so close to home.

But Adam was good at staying quiet, controlling his expression and listening.

Jack finished his tirade by hooking a foot under one of the classroom chairs and kicking it across the room.

“…Why am I even telling you this? You can’t even relate, can you? You’ve got your shit sorted out.”

A direct question got a direct answer. “Nah man. I’ve not got my shit sorted out at all.”

“Come off it!” Jack gave him an exasperated stare. “Look at you! You’re on TV escorting Gaoians and you’re meant to be, like, this badass super-soldier or whatever and you’re… I mean, how fucking strong are you?”

“Honestly? Bro, I’m the strongest man alive.”

“See?!”

“Dude. Do you know how fucked in the head you have to be to even try to become what I am? It feels great, but the price I pay is constant pain, not bein’ able to trust the furniture, I have the worst time finding clothes that fit, and I have to eat chicken and rice with supplements every goddamned hour.” He gestured to the meal tote he was carrying with him to make the point. “Does that really sound like I’ve got my shit together?

“Whatever.” Jack flung himself into a chair and sulked some more.

Adam decided to change tack. “…Okay. Let’s say I do have it all sorted out,” he said. “I’ll give you that one. Let’s say I do. Man, I’m not asking for pity here or anything, but you know what kinda shit I went through. Ain’t no way anybody could blame me for being a complete fuckup, so why d’you think I’m not?”

“I dunno. Maybe you’re just special. Maybe you’re just lucky.”

That one got under Adam’s skin. ’Lucky’? If there was any one word that simply didn’t fit his life, ’Lucky’ was it.

He was still working on restoring his calm when Jack surprised him by wiping his eyes and clarifying. “I try,” he said. “I thought perhaps I could… at least get strong, like Dad, or like you. Something. But I can’t even do that. Every time Dad goes to the gym I go with him, and after all this time I’m still this skinny, weak piece of nothing…”

“Bet you can swim like a fish, though,” Adam observed. “Me, I sink like a stone nowadays.”

“Great. I can swim.” Contempt for that particular blessing oozed from every syllable.

Adam had to laugh a little. He would have liked to point out that swimming was a vital skill for a PJ, and that having sacrificed his buoyancy on the altar of raw strength he’d never properly dive again, which meant that he’d never again be a proper pararescueman. But, he was conscientiously trying to talk about Jack rather than himself. “Don’t knock it! Swimming is fuckin’ useful, bro!”

This did not seem persuasive to Jack, so he tried a slightly different angle.

“…Y’know… one of the people I admire the most is one of our NCOs. She ain’t big, she ain’t strong, she can’t do any of the shit I do. Her deadlift is, like, my hammer curl.”

Jack gave him the classic sulky teenage look. “…And?”

“And I can’t do any of the shit she can do.” Adam sat forward to make sure he was selling the point. “It’s not about what you can’t do, manito. Everybody in the world can’t do pretty much everything! It’s about figuring what you can do.”

“What if what I can do is useless?”

“No such thing.”

Jack snorted skeptically.

“No, really!” Adam insisted. “My CO, he talks about the speartip. How me and the guys, we’re the sharp bit right at the end, and that’s the bit everyone’s scared of. Nobody ever thinks of being the long bit of wood behind that, but I tell you what, man: if you took the speartip off the end of that long bit of wood, all you’d have is just a crappy knife.”

“So what can I do, Adam?” Jack asked.

“Bro, you’ve got game. No, listen-” Adam raised his hand to shut off Jack’s sarcastic interjection. “Game counts for fuckin’ everything. You don’t just want to make a difference in life, you need to. Right?”

Slowly and cautiously, Jack nodded.

“Dude, I can’t just relate to that, that is… literally my whole life,” Adam told him. “It’d eat me up too if I thought there was nothing I could do, but there is. You just gotta find your direction and head that way. Guys like me, we ain’t lucky, we’re just a shitty-ass knife. It’s everybody else who makes us work.”

Jack was silent for a long time. “…You really think I could do something?” he asked, at long last.

“Dude. You’ve got the kind of dedication that can do anything. You just need to figure out where to point it.”

“…Could I… join the SOR?”

Adam took a deep breath. “For real? You won’t be an operator, and even if you could be I’d tell you no. Be smart and leave that shit for the dumb fucks like me! But man, I reckon you’d make a kick-ass support tech, and without the techs there wouldn’t be an SOR.”

Jack pushed his glasses up his nose and nodded thoughtfully.

“Tell you what,” Adam offered. “You decide you wanna do this? I’ll talk with your mom and dad and we’ll get you on a training plan. I reckon we could surprise you. And you’d need to study really hard, there’s a lotta learning for a tech.” He paused to consider, “Marty could prolly help a lot. She’s, like, at least as smart as I am strong. Hell, I’d bet she’d love to help! She’d be a hard teacher though…think you could handle it?”

“…Maybe.”

“No fuckin’ maybe,” Adam corrected him. “Either you set a goal and try, or you don’t. So here’s your’ fuckin’ goal, okay? Prove you’re worth my time. No more fights, no more making your teachers’ lives hell, you take all that anger and you put it to work.”

“…Can you teach me how to fight properly?”

“Heh,” Adam chuckled, but he saw himself in that question and sobered quickly.

“I can,” he said. “When you earn it.”

Date Point 10y7m AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

The “Yes ma’am” game was Xiù’s guilty thrill. Saying it, having it said to her, didn’t matter - it was fun.

Julian and Allison sometimes took it to another level, though.

Xiù would be the first to acknowledge that her experience with human sexuality was mostly theoretical. In fact, she would have said that she knew more about Gaoian sexuality than her own species’, were it not for the fact that Gaoians were so straightforward that describing their mating urges as “sexuality” was basically inaccurate.

This had been the inevitable cause of some difficulty when Xiù’s precious stash of Earth media - the one that Ayma had purchased for her - had turned out to include the film version of “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Ayma and Regaari had naturally wanted to know why Xiù didn’t want to watch it with them, and had put on a fascinating display of bewildered ear-semaphore as she had squirmed, stammered and blushed her way through explaining the concept of BDSM - a subject on which she was scarcely better-educated than the Gaoians - and erotica in general.

What Al and Julian got up to wasn’t BDSM, or at least not as Xiù understood it. Neither of them seemed remotely interested in ropes, whips or silly toys. What they were interested in was that they would occasionally turn the “yes ma’am” game up to eleven and Julian would put his absolute faith and trust in Allison. He would invite her to use him, and Allison would obey.

What Xiù had noticed was that ‘obey’ was entirely the correct description. Despite the apparently subservient role he enjoyed playing, Julian was the one with the real power in their relationship: He could stop the game instantly with a word, and that was true in day-to-day life as well as in their intense sessions. He liked to pretend he was a meek and submissive plaything of his girls’…But every so often, when he was tired, stressed or horny, she caught a glimpse of the wary, wily, dangerous wolf of a man who lived under that sanguine exterior, playing at being a lapdog. A little scary and a lot exciting.

The problem Julian and Allison had run into was that the total lack of privacy and the multiple showers in their daily routines meant that nudity had completely lost its sting for all of them, even for Xiù. This had robbed Allison of a powerful tool for playing the game that Julian wanted to play, and their constant proximity had robbed them of space to push into new and more thrilling territory without violating Xiù’s comfort zones.

Now, that problem seemed to have reached a tipping point.

“So he dared you extra hard?”

Allison watched Julian thoughtfully. For now, he was still trying to comb glitter out of his hair, while the girls had a quiet conversation, pitched low enough that he shouldn’t be able to hear. “Babe, I love you… but Julian and I have had WAY less sex since you came along. We’re both horny as shit.”

“So have sex!” Xiù hissed. “We’ve been over this, I want you guys to.”

“Yeah but… we all nest down on the floor every night together.” Allison pointed out. “ It doesn’t feel right, banishing you back to your bunk…”

“Al…” Xiù touched her own forehead. “We’ve got to try and make this stuff normal for all our sakes. I want you two to have a healthy sex life even if I never manage.”

“You think you never will?”

Xiù shook her head emphatically. “No, I will. I will. I just need to ease into it, that’s all.”

Allison nibbled thoughtfully on a fingernail. “…Babe, what is it about sex that makes you so nervous?” She asked.

Xiù just turned her head and touched a finger to the scar on her throat.

“…I’ve been wondering where you got that,” Allison confessed. “What happened?”.

Xiù knew her expression had gone cold. “This is where Zane had me against a wall, with a knife to my throat, and a hand… you know what? It doesn’t matter where his hand was - I didn’t want it there.”

“Jesus, baby….”

“It doesn’t matter.” Xiù repeated. “I love Julian, I trust him completely. But there’s nothing that kills my mood faster than flashing back to that moment…”

“No wonder you kicked that fucker’s ass like you did.”

“He deserved worse.” Xiù growled, and meant it.

“So does Julian… remind you of that?”

“Sometimes. When he’s…” Xiù glanced at their boyfriend, who’d apparently decided that he’d de-glittered himself as much as he practically could, and had now settled on his bunk to read a book. She lowered her voice to make sure he couldn’t hear. “…When he gets intense. You know? When he gives you that… hungry look?”

“…That’s when he’s sexiest!” Allison objected.

“Yeah!” Xiù agreed. “That’s the problem.”

“…Mixed signals?” Allison guessed. “It turns you on and takes you back at the same time?”

“Right.”

Julian looked up from his book. “Are you talking about me behind my back?” He asked.

“Let us scheme in peace, you!” Allison told him, with a grin. He chuckled and returned to his reading with a ‘yes ma’am’ and Allison treated Xiù to a wink.

A thought seemed to strike her. “What about me?”

“What about you?” Xiù asked.

“Do you have the same problem with me?”

Xiù shook her head. “No…?”

“Well, if you’re not ready for him…”

Xiù got what she was driving at and laughed. “Um… Al… I love listening to you and him. I think I’d like to watch sometime, and I want you to be there when I’m finally ready…And I really do love you… but I think I’m still basically straight.”

“I know, I know…” Allison agreed. “I know what you mean. I think I’m still basically straight too… but I am curious to know what it’s like.”

Xiù laughed. “You’re incorrigible!”

“Just so long as you’re encourage-able.” Allison punned.

Xiù laughed some more, then quietened. “I guess?” She hazarded. “My life’s been so strange, I never know what’s going to happen next - Let’s face it, weirder things have happened to me.”

“You were abducted by aliens, you’re legally a Gaoian, and now you’re training to fly a spaceship.” Allison nodded. “I’m just saying, next to all that…”

“I’m not saying ‘no’.” Xiù hastened to tell her. “I’m just saying… let me work up to it. Okay?”

”More than fair.” Allison smiled.

“Still…” Xiù put a finger to her cheek and stared thoughtfully in Julian’s direction.

“What?”

“I dunno… I’m just thinking that perhaps I should start taking charge. Like… I didn’t get better at my fitness, my gung fu, my piloting or at learning Gaori by just sitting back and wishing it would happen, did I?”

“You’re right.” Allison agreed. “And it’ll be the same with your sex life, babe. If you want to have one, you’re gonna have to work on it… crawl-walk-run, right?”

Xiù reached a decision.

“Okay.”

Allison’s eyebrow arched upwards. “Okay?”

“Okay… let’s work on it.”

Looking distinctly like the cat who’d just talked a mouse out of its hole, Allison sat forward and ran her tongue across her teeth. “…What do you have in mind?” She asked.

Date Point 10y7m AV
The Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Rìos

Human access to the alien quarter was strictly controlled: Ava didn’t get in at all without proving she was up-to-date on her Frontline treatments, declaring her reason for visiting, logging her itinerary, passing through a decontamination biofilter force-field, and donning a tracker that reported her position to CCS and timed her stay, up to the maximum duration of four hours.

Fortunately, her press credentials - and, frankly, her name - helped her with the declaration and itinerary part. Gabriel would have been furious if the CCS checkpoint officers had explicitly shown favoritism to their boss’ daughter, and he’d have been disappointed in Ava had she exploited it, but they were allowed to be a model of manners and polite helpfulness. Her trip through the checkpoint was uneventful, even if the biofilter did make her teeth feel funny and made her ear piercings tingle.

Once through, and with the tracker on its lanyard politely ticking away her precious two hundred and forty minutes, the first step was getting some pictures. She unholstered her camera and ran a practiced eye over the architecture, looking for interesting angles, framing, lighting, or places where she could achieve something interesting with depth of field.

There had been some civil complaints when the Quarter had been walled off. People had made alarmed noises about ghettoization and even apartheid, but the harsh reality of biology had made a physical barrier delineating where in here ended and out there began not only necessary, but inevitable.

On the outside, the human side, every effort had been made to hide it or, where that wasn’t possible, to ensure that it wasn’t an ugly wall. Buildings butted up against it, planters and trees obscured it, and in the places where the pedestrian precincts of the town center exposed it, it had been given over to artwork. One section was even the back wall of a public stage.

The ETs made no such attempt to sweep the wall under the rug. It was there, it was stark, and it was solid, as if they quite sensibly wanted a constant reminder that the well-meaning people on the outside of that wall could accidentally kill them all.

Ava mentally scribbled a note to use that thought in whatever article her visit produced.

Everyone knew where the checkpoint and sole access to the Quarter was: It fronted onto Riverside Park a stone’s throw from the Multi-Faith Center. The idea was to facilitate human/ET mingling, and it largely worked. The black-and-white-robed furry Brothers of Clan Starmind ambling back and forth between the Quarter and the Center, often deep in conversation with a human counterpart from Folctha’s small Sōtō monastery, were such a familiar sight in that part of the park that they’d long since ceased to be a joke and were now just part of Folctha’s culture.

Ava had never told anybody that Father Gyotin had only discovered Zen Buddhism thanks to her. She hadn’t expected it to go so far - the common knowledge had been that ETs tended to view human religions with a kind of bewildered incomprehension. When she’d pointed Gyotin towards the shelf containing the Buddhist literature, she’d never imagined that six years later there would be Gaoian monks earnestly sweeping the gravel paths.

The area inside the gate was an extension of the park, but with alien architecture and alien plants, carefully imported and protected from the native life by the forcefield roof that capped the whole wall. That forcefield was one of Folctha’s major municipal power sources, and doubled as a biofilter and a way of keeping the imported birds and bats from getting in. Under its aegis, alien insects flitted between alien flowers, and were snacked on as the foundation of a small but balanced alien food chain.

One of a pair of Vzk’tk croaked something at her as they daintily passed, and she hastily turned on the translator built into her tracker.

“I’m sorry?” she asked.

“I said ’good afternoon’.” the Vzk’tk replied.

“Oh! Well, good afternoon to you too.”

The slender blue alien nodded his head slowly and carried on his way alongside his partner. Ava grabbed a snapshot of them going, framing their gracile silhouettes against the pale grey solidity of the wall.

She spent the first of her allotment of safe hours ambling around the Quarter, taking it in and recording what she saw, swapping lenses often, playing with filters, lighting and framing. She paid special attention to the banners and fabrics that hung from the buildings, and to the buildings themselves.

Ava had read up on architecture to help her with her photography, and decided that the ET edifices lived somewhere in the general neighborhood of Expressionism, minus the concrete Cold War obduracy and with a subtle stretching quality which reflected the fact that several alien species were twice as tall as a human, or even more. The buildings were all high-sided, curved and slender, and adorned with hanging banners. Brightly colored canopies were strung between them so that they sheltered the streets from the nightly rains and made them glow with inherited colour when the sunlight diffused through.

The newly-arrived Gaoian females clearly had their own ideas about how their commune was going to look, though. Half-built though it was, it already stood out simply by being wood-framed, though its horseshoe shape and lines complimented rather than clashed with the general form of the buildings around it. Ava took a liking to it immediately - it was a distinctive landmark in a district where for the most part the best way to tell streets apart was the hue of the canopy. Pretty though the Alien Quarter’s streets were, they were a bit repetitive for her tastes.

A pair of cubs rampaged past her as she got close, followed by a resigned-looking Mother who was carrying far too many bags and barking at them to stand upright. “You’re not four-pawed animals!” she called. “Stand up straight!”

She met Ava’s amused eye, flicked both her ears in a gesture of maternal frustration that effortlessly ignored the species barrier and made Ava giggle, and carried on about whatever errand she was pursuing.

“I’m sorry, ma’am?” Ava called. The Mother turned. “I’m looking for a Sister Myun?”

“You’ll find her easily,” the Gaoian replied. “She’s the brown-furred pregnant one.”

“Thank you.”

Myun was indeed very easy to find. She was lying under the shade of an imported tree, watching a video on the holographic HUD that was projected in front of her eyes by the device clipped to her ear, and even though Ava was no expert on Gaori body language, she looked bored out of her mind.

She perked up on realising she had company, and even more so when she realised that she had human company.

“Oh! Hello!”

Ava smiled - the translator had given Myun a youthful alto voice that neatly matched what she could hear of her actual speech. “Hi!” she introduced herself, offering a hand. Myun shook it with the confident air of an ET who was actually fairly familiar with humans. “I’m Ava.”

“Myun.”

“Oh good, you’re exactly who I was looking for!”

Myun rolled onto four-paws and stood up, dusting off her fur. “I am?”

Ava ‘mm-hmm’ed , and produced her press ID. “I’m with ExtraSolar News Network. I was hoping I could talk to you, maybe get your thoughts on some things?”

“The news? I’m not really very important…”

“That’s okay, I don’t interview really important people.”

Myun’s ears turned to the absolutely adorable angle of a Gaoian trying to suss out human weirdness, and Ava decided an elaboration was in order.

“I’m doing what’s called an ’interest piece’,” she explained. “I want to hear your story, help our readers see into your life a little and maybe gain some perspective and understand the world a little better.”

“That sounds… good?” Myun hazarded. “But why me?”

“Oh! My dad’s the chief of colonial security. I was talking with him this morning and he mentioned that you’ve already taken a motion to the Thing about making fusion swords legal on a security license?”

“That’s right.”

Ava beamed encouragingly. “Well, I thought ’that sounds like a really interesting story’ so I came to see if you’d be okay with talking to me for a bit.”

“…Okay!” Myun decided. “Can we walk and talk? I’ve been sitting around for too long and I find that walking around settles my cub…” she patted her belly, fondly.

“Sure! But if it’s okay, could I just get you to sign this, quickly?” Ava dug in her bag, grabbed her tablet and called up the Gaori version of ESNN’s release form. Myun peered at it.

“Consent form…” she read.

“Just to say that you’re okay with me recording our conversation and maybe editing it a bit for our magazine. We’re keen on ethical journalism at ESNN so you’ll get a chance to look at it before we put it up for the public, and if there’s anything you don’t like the editor can work with you. Okay?”

Myun duck-nodded as she read, then signed the form by writing her name.

“Thanks.” Ava put the tablet away, and deftly made sure her smartwatch was recording as they began a slow, ambling walk around the commune grounds. “So, congratulations on the cub. Are you getting close?”

“Any day now. He’s wriggling away in there,” Myun chittered and rubbed her belly again. “This is my first, and he should be a strong one, too.”

“And you’re… how old?”

“I’m eighteen Gaoian years old,” Myun revealed. “In human years, I think that’s… about fifteen.”

“By human standards, that’s a very young age to have a child…” Ava told her. “In fact that’s below Folctha’s legal age of consent.”

“By Gaoian standards, it’s about average. We grow up more quickly.”

“Are you planning to have more?”

Myun imitated a human shake of her head, then remembered she was speaking to a microphone. “Eventually, in a few years. I want to study humans and human culture first.”

“Is that why you came to Folctha?”

“Oh yes!” Myun duck-nodded enthusiastically. “When I was offered the chance I just knew I had to pounce. Ever since I was a cub I’ve been a… you have a word, fangirl?”

The English word sounded a little mangled coming from a Gaori mouth in a strong accent, but Ava had to resist the urge to laugh. “Why is that?” she asked.

The answer she got was much longer, and much more surprising, than she could ever have predicted.

Date Point 10y7m AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

“Hey, Etsicitty.”

Allison’s flirtatious mood hadn’t abated through the day. In fact it had only improved after her quiet conspiracy session with Xiù earlier in the evening.

Using his surname was a sure sign that she had something in mind for him, which was always an exciting prospect.

“Yes ma’am?”

“Make the nest up for us, willya?”

Julian wilted a little. The nest was comforting, loving and happy, but it was only for sleeping in. “Yes ma’am.” He obeyed, resigning himself to another restless night.

Xiù grinned at him, taking her hair out of the bun she’d been wearing all day. “Good boy.”

Hope immediately rekindled itself, even stronger than before. Xiù joining in? That was new… and a thrilling thought.

He hurried to get the blankets, sheets and pillows down and arranged. The girls beamed at each other.

“Very efficient.”

“Mm. He’s a good boy, isn’t he?”

“…Too good. He wants something. Don’t you Etsicitty?”

Hearing Xiù use his surname like that dispelled any doubt. He was in for a treat tonight.

“…Yes ma’am.” He said, truthfully.

Allison pushed gently on his chest. “Sit down.” She ordered. Julian obeyed. The light pressure of her hand told him she meant for him to sit in the nest.

“Sit on your hands.” She instructed. Julian swallowed, feeling his pulse really start to get up, and did as he was told. “…And don’t you dare move.” Allison added.

She kissed him lightly on the cheek and then whispered in his ear. “…enjoy the show.”

That done, she whipped away from him. She and Xiù met with a quick kiss and a mutual smile, and they started to dance together, hands on each other’s waists, hips swaying. It was a little awkward on Xiù’s part, but while she may have been lacking in practice, she didn’t seem to be lacking in willing.

Julian gritted his teeth and fidgeted on his hands - already he was beginning to feel the need to adjust his pants and create some extra freedom down there - but Allison had been explicit: No moving.

Allison pulled her t-shirt off and tossed it at him, leaving it draped over his shoulder. Blushing furiously but clearly enjoying herself, Xiù wiggled delightfully out of her sweatpants, which were thrown into Julian’s lap. She posed for him with a hand on her cocked hip while Allison - who after all had more erotic experience - made an even more aesthetically pleasing show of bending over and shedding her own sweats, which she then kicked into his lap

The piéce de resistance was when Allison took hold of Xiù’s shirt and slooowly peeled it off her. Julian couldn’t tell if Xiù’s laughter was from embarrassment or being tickled, but it made that toned tummy of hers undulate beautifully.

Allison, cruelly, then put the shirt over his head so that he couldn’t see a thing, knotting it at the back to keep it in place.

Leaving him sitting there, covered in their clothes was one thing, but when he heard - and, indistinctly through the fabric, could almost see - them strip out of their underwear and vanish giggling into the shower together…Well, that was just downright cruel.

The restrictions affecting his own pants were getting decidedly painful at this point, and his predicament wasn’t helped by the fact that Xiù’s shirt smelled beautiful…

His imagination ran riot. They probably weren’t in the shower for long, but it felt like a minor eternity, especially because he knew how small that shower was, and how close-pressed two people would be if they tried to use it at once… In the dark and quiet with the tantalizing perfume of clean female perspiration filling his world, his mental cinema played a highlight reel of skin and soap.

God the shirt smelled amazing…

When the door opened and they emerged, he faced the worst challenge so far. He knew what they both looked like fresh out of the shower of course, but by now he was so worked up that his desire to rip off the blindfold and look was almost more powerful than his desire to see what they would do next.

“Oh, he’s been a good boy…” Xiù’s voice. Deeper than usual, a little huskier, with a waver of what could only be nerves.

Allison laughed that laugh - the low wicked one that promised good things for his immediate future. “He has…” she agreed. “Stand up, Etsicitty.”

Heart pounding and mouth dry, Julian obeyed. He gasped as somebody’s fingertips trailed down his chest and squeezed him, just for a second, through his pants. The contact lasted only a second, before a warm towel was placed gently in his hands.

“No touching. Just the towel.” Xiù warned.

“We’re soaking wet.” Allison added.

Shaking with pent-up arousal, Julian gulped and obliged. He spread the towel wide and, when one of the girls stepped into it, he dutifully but carefully scrubbed her dry. The idea, he knew, was that he shouldn’t know who he was touching, but he could tell - her strong curves and nervous breathing gave her away. Blindfolded and through a towel though it might be, this was the first time Xiù had invited him to enjoy her, an invitation he accepted gently and respectfully.

When he was given a second dry towel and guided onto the other body, he knew he’d been right. Allison was a different shape, longer and leaner, and she shimmied and moved against the towel more confidently, allowing him to linger on her butt and breasts, demanding him to be more enthusiastic.

Too soon, the towel was taken away. “No more touching.” Allison ordered. “Hold. Still.”

Julian swallowed and did as he was told, which was a challenge when he distinctly felt one pair of hands on his hips pull his pants down, and another pull his shirt up from behind - he lifted his arms to help her strip him. That latter pair, judging from the angle, belonged to Xiù, who hugged him around his waist and kissed his spine while Allison removed his boxer briefs. Her skin felt warm, soft, fragrant and damp against his.

“Have fun,” she whispered.

Allison took his hand and led him to the shower. He stumbled along behind her, hard as a hammer-handle, and took a last breath of the shirt as he felt her undo it. It made sense not to get it wet in the shower, but he would have liked to enjoy that scent just a little longer…

The moment his head was free, Allison pushed him into the shower and followed him in.

Julian had been right: Two people in the shower were inevitably pressed right up against one another. Allison slithered past him with a wicked smile, turned the water on, then squeezed some soap into her palm.

When she pressed that palm to his chest, the cold soap sent a thrill through him. A thrill that she sustained by slowly smearing it down his chest, down his belly…

He shut his eyes and wondered whether she’d done something similar to Xiù. He doubted it… but it was a pleasant mental image.

A slippery hand wrapped around his cock, and Allison nibbled hungrily on his neck before whispering in his ear.

“Let’s get you nice and clean…”

Xiù Chang

Julian and Allison were in the shower for a long time, which gave Xiù some welcome mental space first to dry her hair, then to meditate, then to lie on her back and gaze thoughtfully at the ceiling.

What they’d done had been… scary. Thrilling, fun, erotic and liberating… but scary. If it hadn’t been her idea, she might have backed out earlier than she did.

Instead, she was proud of herself. Blindfolding Julian had completed the illusion of his being under their thumb, which had made the whole situation feel more… controlled. The lazy wolf in him that made her anxious hadn’t been so visible any more.

Being given a little alone time had been an important part of the plan. With that time, she’d been able to meditate and really claim the headspace of enjoying those first steps, and to congratulate herself on making what felt like serious progress. The circling vulture of her anxiety wasn’t gone - it would never be gone - but a little mental territory had been retaken from it, which was the most difficult first step.

That done, she lay back and basked. There was one last part of the plan still to come, but she was ready, and even looking forward to it.

The shower door finally slid open and her two lovers emerged hand-in-hand in a billow of water vapor, both looking substantially more relaxed than they had in some days.

Julian did a double-take worthy of a silent black-and-white comedy film when Xiù stood up, still nude, and took the last clean towel off the rack so that she could dry him, just as he’d done for them. Allison gave her an encouraging smile from behind him as she did so.

“Better?” She asked.

“Amazing.” Julian closed his eyes - apparently he enjoyed the feeling of being toweled down. “Are you okay?”

She rewarded his concern with a tender kiss, then towel-tousled his hair. “I had fun!”

“Less nervous now?”

Xiù nodded, but she also swallowed. “Bear with me?”

He hugged her close. “Of course.”

Allison finished towelling herself off and scrubbed her hair out, leaving it lying wild. “That was fucking hot, though,” she observed. “You wouldn’t know it was Xiù’s idea, would you?”

“Don’t tease her, Al.” Julian smiled, as Xiù’s trademark blush reasserted itself.

Allison gathered the towels and put them in the laundry. “Ah, alright, no teasing.” She glanced over her shoulder as she restocked the dry towels. “For tonight.”

“I think that’s the most we can ask for.” Julian said to Xiù.

She giggled. “Very fair. Come on you two. I wanna be in the middle tonight.”

Allison and Julian looked at each other, laughed and nodded.

“Yes ma’am.” they chorused.

Date Point 10y7m3d AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Kirk

Lewis had a flair for starship design. It was a truism of ship assembly all over the galaxy that form and function had a largely adversarial relationship. Sanctuary certainly hadn’t been pretty. Its most prominent feature by far had been the enormous generator at its stern, so large that the rest of the ship had seemed to almost be an afterthought.

What Lewis had made, however, was something truly beautiful, and the fact that Kirk was reading its specification with a mounting sense of awe just made him wonder how the conventional wisdom of starship design had gone so wrong.

The new ship was half Sanctuary’s size and a third of the mass. It wasn’t built for rescue and recovery of stranded humans - it was built to get from place to place very quickly indeed while affording its lone occupant not only a reasonable degree of luxury, but more importantly a significant degree of protection.

Lewis was waxing poetic about the shielding systems. “See, the thing with forcefields is that there’s not actually any reason for them to drop in response to incoming firepower, it’s just that if you dump too much energy into them too quickly, it overloads the emitter circuitry,” he explained.

“Well known,” Kirk agreed.

“And the limiting factor on how much punishment a shield can take is how quickly it can pass on that absorbed energy and get rid of it. You ever play hot potato?”

“No, but I understand the principle.”

“Traditionally,” Vedreg observed, “the absorbed energy is stored in the shield capacitors and re-radiated as a flash of light.”

“Yup! So I thought, man, that’s a fuckin’ waste. The field surface can radiate at just the same intensity it can absorb, and it can do so as a coherent beam, and it can aim that beam if you do some tricksy things with interference.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that… I mean, sure, okay, the shields aren’t any tougher than they’d usually be for a ship this size, but the ace up their sleeve is, every time some asshole shoots this ship he gets a gamma laser pulse coming straight back at him powered by the energy of his own weapon.”

The two nonhumans stared at him in dumbfounded silence for a second.

“You… weaponized the defensive systems. Only a human…” Vedreg rumbled.

Lewis grinned. He never bothered to hide his teeth. “Best defense is a good offense!”

“Again, only a human would think like that.”

“It ain’t perfect. Like I said, there was nothing I could do about the fact the emitter circuitry gets hot and eventually fails, and the laser ain’t as powerful as the attack that powered it ‘cause thermodynamics says ’Hell the fuck no’, but… it’s a nasty surprise at least.”

“I am more interested in the speed,” Kirk said. “It cruises just as fast as Sanctuary, and you promise a million times the speed of light in an emergency? How?! The only reason Sanctuary was so fast was because of its power core.”

“A power core we barely used a third of,” Lewis noted. “What you’ve got in here is a happy little Kwmbwrw quantum stack that’ll sit comfortably at a half-megalight on eighty percent output, and’ll run at ninety-nine percent forever without trouble. Plenty’a spare power for ship systems, and that stack’s only about as big as Vedreg, so, WAY smaller than Sanctuary’s core.”

“And the emergency speed?”

“Capacitors, dude! Tied into the shield, too, so if you’re taking a beating and need to fuck off outta there? Just turn off the Fuck-You Beam and convert incoming firepower to more juice for the engines.”

Again, Vedreg and Kirk turned to each other in the vain hope that maybe the other one had reached some unexpected epiphany about deathworlders in general, and Lewis in particular.

“…Is there anything you haven’t tried to use the shields for?” Vedreg asked.

“Uh… Food preparation?”

“I see.”

“Aaaanywho. Happy with it?”

Kirk examined the ship. All of the numbers and Lewis’ promises were simply incredible, but the part that really took his breath away was that it was elegant. Without there being a spare or unnecessary hint of decoration on it, its clean metallic lines and sleek, cetacean shape brought out everything that was aesthetically pleasing in a ship built for a function.

“…I am delighted,” he said, honestly.

Lewis did a happy jigging dance on the spot.

“So. Only thing left is to name it,” he declared. To Kirk’s surprise, he produced a glass bottle from one of his pockets, full of a transparent amber liquid.

“What is that?” Vedreg asked.

“Dude, literally the first thing I built was a still and shoved some Rhwk-fruit in there. This is, uh…” Lewis turned the bottle thoughtfully in his hands. “…I guess it’s kinda like a brandy or something. But, we ain’t got any champagne, so this’ll have to do.”

“Champagne?”

“Gotta sacrifice a bottle’a booze on the nose when you name a ship. That one goes right back to… fuck, the Romans? Earlier?”

“…Humans are very strange.”

Kirk chuckled, deep in his throat. “Let him have his ritual, old friend.”

“Very well. What are you naming it, Lewis?”

Lewis hefted the bottle thoughtfully. “Tough call,” he said. “I thought… the Rubicon, the Second Stage, the Bodhisattva, the Mary Jane, the Choose For Me… none of them quite fit.”

“Indeed,” Kirk agreed, drily. Three of those names had no translation to Domain, and thus were utterly unpronounceable to him.

Lewis chuckled. “So I figured I’d name her in honor of her mission. She’s here to carry on Sanctuary’s work, after all. So…” He hefted the bottle one last time, then hurled it at the ship’s prow, where it burst, showering the front of the ship in alcohol and broken glass. “I name this ship Momentum. May she serve us long, and well.”

Kirk nodded, approvingly.

“Amen,” he said.

Date Point 10y7m3d AV
Byron Group headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

Most days, Kevin had the luxury of sauntering into work at his groomed and composed best at a leisurely 9am, full of excellent coffee, hickory smoked back bacon and all the other privileges that came with having a job where the annual bonus was six figures long.

The price of all that luxury and success was occasionally having to scramble into work before the sun was even properly up, with a belly half full of a breakfast muffin from the drive-thru and chewing gum in lieu of brushing his teeth.

Rachael, as ever, was as prim and perfect as an actress, but then again her work day began before the boss’ did. Kevin knew for a fact that she earned slightly more than he did, and in his sincere opinion even that really wasn’t enough: Working miracles sixty hours a week deserved a seven figure bonus, minimum.

“Good morning, Kevin!” She gave him that same bright smile that Kevin still couldn’t quite believe was genuine. If it wasn’t genuine, she was the best in the world at faking it, but nobody could be so perky so early, surely?

The good news was that if she was smiling, then whatever Byron had summoned him for wasn’t an immediate emergency, just something he was keen to pounce on.

“Hey,” Kevin yawned. He straightened his collar and checked his cuffs were buttoned. “Okay, what’s your secret, seriously?”

“I go to bed early and enjoy my weekends,” Rachael smiled. She handed him a tablet.

“What’s this….?” The tablet was logged in to a news website. Kevin frowned at the headline. “Hmm… ’Humble Hero: The Gaoian first contact story.’ by Ava Rìos.”

Rachael waved her hand for him to keep reading, and Kevin did so, aloud.

“Uh… ’There’s scarcely a single news article about Gaoians that fails to mention Vancouverite abductee Xiù Chang’ - ah shit - ‘or describe how she was adopted into the Clan of Females. It was this act of kindness that laid the foundation for the human race’s warm relationship with Gao, but the story of how miss Chang originally arrived on their planet has never been clear…’”

He shut up and skimmed through the article as quickly as he could read, pausing only to mutter to himself. “Yeah, that’s a Corti move a’right… Ohhh. Full-strength kick to a Locayl? Yeah, that’d wreck his day…Jesus H. sister-kissin’ Christ, she beat up an Allebenellin bare-handed?!”

“Moses didn’t buy that one,” Rachael observed.

Kevin snorted, and ran his thumb down the bridge of his nose. “I do. Girl’s got a right straight on her that’d knock a steer on its ass.”

He put the tablet down. “What’s Moses make of this?” he asked.

“Mixed,” Rachael said. “Go ahead and talk to him about it.”

“Yaaay…” Kevin sighed, “Hey, if you can spare the time, I’d sure appreciate if you could have someone bring up a decent coffee…”

Rachael nodded. “Sure!”

“‘Kay. Here we go…”

Moses in fact was in a wry mood. He was sat back at his desk with a thumb tucked into his belt buckle, reading something on a tablet. As Kevin came in, he put the tablet down and took off his reading glasses. “I take it Rachael had you read this morning’s news?” he asked.

“I take it you asked her to make me?”

Moses chuckled, and gestured for Kevin to sit. “I’m a little unhappy,” he revealed.

“Why so? Seems like good PR to me, we’ve got Vancouver’s Humble Hero on the payroll…”

“Yeah, except she and her paramours were about to be dropped from the EV program.”

Kevin inclined his head with a frown. “…They were? I thought they’d passed every test so far?”

“Barely,” Moses grunted. “Sure, three of the other groups failed out entirely, but the ship’s ready to start live training this week, and we were gonna give it to the group with the highest test scores. And… well, they ain’t it. They’re good, they’re damn good. They’re in second place! But Lee, Sullivan and Ackermann are just that little bit better.”

They were briefly interrupted by Rachael, who smoothly delivered a couple of steaming hot coffees on a tray and vanished. Kevin had no idea how she’d summoned them so quickly, but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“That’s… disappointing,” he revealed, grabbing one of the drinks as if she’d filled it from the fountain of youth. “I really had my hopes pinned on them.”

“Yeah, well, you get your way anyway.” Byron flicked the tablet on his desk with a slight sneer. “This dagburn article’s gone all viral and every news organisation out there, including mine, wants to interview her. I’d have to be crazy not to mine that publicity for every nugget!” He threw up his hands in a gesture of irritated surrender. “So, the second-place horse wins the rosette.”

Kevin’s sense of justice overrode his fondness for the trio in The Box. “That’s kinda unfair on Lee, Sullivan and Ackermann, boss… Even if Eleven’s a wilder success than we ever hoped, how long is it gonna be ‘til we build Twelve? Three or four years, minimum?”

Byron grunted and sipped his coffee. “Eleven came in under budget,” he said. “I might just pay for the twelfth one outta my own pocket. I still believe in the idea, but the accountants…” He laughed bitterly. “Well, they don’t get to tell me what I do with my money after all.”

“You could overrule them anyway…” Kevin pointed out.

“Life advice, Kevin: If you’re paying somebody to advise you, then listen to ‘em or pretty soon they’ll be advising some other fella.“

Kevin had to nod to that. “I’m gonna float that ad campaign idea again, then,” he said. “Get those kids in front of a photographer, shove ‘em on all the corporate recruiting material.”

“Yeah, make it happen. And, uh, prep the kids in the Box to go meet their new ride, willya?”

“I can do that.” Kevin drained his coffee and stood. “Anything else?”

“You’ll explain to the assessors and examiners that the test results are confidential, right?”

Kevin chuckled. “I can remind them.”

“Good.” Byron ran a thoughtful tongue across his teeth then nodded. “See you in the hangar tomorrow. And… don’t let ‘em know. I wanna see their expressions.”

Kevin chuckled. “That’s just mean.”

“Man’s gotta get his fun somehow,” Byron drawled. “Thanks, Kevin.”

“Later, boss man.”

Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Clanless work market, Aney Shen City, Planet Gao

Champion Genshi of Whitecrest

“Whitecrest! Hey, Whitecrest! Freelance trader with my own ship! You need Weapons? You need shields? Transport? All services!”

“Accountant! Get your finances in order! Accountant!”

“Communications engineer here! Networks built and maintained for board and sponsorship!”

“Finest groomer on the continent! Females like a well-groomed male! Special Clan rates!”

Being obviously a Clan male had both benefits and downsides when rubbing shoulders with the Clanless majority. Most of them subtly got out of Genshi’s way - everyone respected the Clans after all, and the males selling their skills and services in Aney Shen market had every reason to stay in the Clans’ collective good graces. They were the biggest employers, after all.

Which of course meant that Genshi, who wore his Clan’s trademark white crest with so much pride that he’d grown it out until it was just as long as his ears, also got yelled at by every worker looking for a job. Anonymity wasn’t an option.

Not that it had been for years. Nor was it the objective.

Aney Shen was home to the One-Fang clan enclave, which made it a thriving spaceport for good measure. Every few minutes the double-hammer of a sonic boom could be heard behind the hubbub of professional Clanless hawking their skills, the thrum of goods vehicles and stevedore drones, the noisome sizzle of street food vendors and the jingles and slogans put out by every advertising billboard.

Transports, light freighters, cargo lifters and passenger shuttles were all part of the sonic texture of the place. A far cry from the relative serenity of Wi Kao with its parks, plazas and the large female commune.

Genshi quite liked it, to visit: It was busy, noisy, fun. But he would have hated to live there.

He found the workhouse he was looking for down its own alleyway just off the market. Workhouses were a simple idea - mass board and lodging for a very modest fee - and they were ubiquitous. Millions of Clanless males lived their whole lives in them quite happily. They had a kind of Clannish atmosphere all their own, and in fact were usually owned and run by a Clan as a steady source of both income and workers.

This one was operated by the One-Fangs, and he was ushered upstairs by the Brother standing at the door, into a Clan private suite that overlooked the eatery, which was being cleaned by some of the younger residents.

The only ones present were himself, the young One-Fang Brother, and the one he was here to see. Private and quiet, and undeniably one side’s territory. A good place for an unofficial meeting of Champions.

Champion Hiyel was everything a One-Fang should be. That was, after all, the whole point of Champions - they embodied the Clan both genetically and in terms of the ideals and expertise it strived for. So, Genshi was unscarred, lean and upright with a sophisticated and well-groomed demeanor. His good friend Daar of the Stonebacks was the functional opposite, a hulking short-furred lacerated brown brute with an irrepressible boisterous nature and a scandalizing contempt for the trappings of sophistication.

Hiyel lived somewhere between those extremes. Scarred, physical and intense, but also upright, slender and civilized. A balanced contrast in opposites, and dangerously shrewd. He had, after all, helped Genshi with his Regaari problem by asking for help with the Racing Thunder problem. Now it was time to compare notes.

“All is well?” Genshi asked, politely.

“Very well indeed,” Hiyel replied. He gestured for Genshi to sit, and the two of them assumed calculatedly relaxed postures on opposite sides of a table, as equals. “We’ve had word back from Father Yefrig: The humans have assigned them to deep-space patrol of the systems near Cimbrean. An important and useful task.”

“Meanwhile, Regaari has reported that the Females are settling in nicely in Folctha.”

“And his negotiations with the humans?”

“Productive, in several ways. Your solution worked perfectly.”

Hiyel allowed himself a self-satisfied set to his ears. “Your…errant Father?”

“Indeed. He became so fixated on his opportunity to put Regaari in a difficult situation that he entirely failed to notice that the eyes of the Clan were on him… I believe the other Fathers are planning a promotion. The consular staff on Planet Qinar has need of more… senior oversight.”

“A pro-Dominion Father, promoted to handling your Clan’s interests among one of the founding species of the Alliance?”

“What few interests we have, yes.”

Hiyel looked thoroughly amused. “Poetic.”

Genshi chittered. “…Thank you, Champion Hiyel,” he said, solemnly. “I offer Whitecrest’s gratitude.”

“Thank you, Genshi. The gratitude of One-Fang is yours.”

“Is there any other service you might need?”

“I can’t think of any…” Hiyel replied. “Please, give my thanks to Regaari when you can. Is there anything we can do for you?”

“I hesitate to ask…”

“Name it.”

Genshi resisted the urge to glance around conspiratorially. They were, after all, in a private meeting.

“…I would like to discuss cybernetics with you,” he said.

Date Point 10y7m4d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

Two early mornings in a row wasn’t an itinerary calculated for Kevin’s happiness. Most of his working life on Earth had been spent working until four am and waking in the afternoon, and his diurnal routine during the years he’d been away after his abduction had boiled down to sleeping when he was tired. It was hard for him to feel charitably disposed towards seven-thirty in the morning, but he’d taken Rachael’s advice and gone to bed early and minus his usual post-work coffee.

He wasn’t exactly feeling like a box of rainbows but he was alert, well fed and well-dressed, which was three quarters of the same thing, and he leaned against his BMW, waiting for the Box to open up ready for the start of a new day.

Seven twenty-five, and the Box’s outer door opened with a mechanical clunk and a quick burst-hiss of pressure equalizing.

Allison Buehler backed out of it, talking animatedly.

“No, it stands for ArmaLite Rifle. Not Assault, or Automatic, it’s the name of the company who designed it in the fi- oh. Hey. Kevin.”

Kevin flipped them a jaunty two-finger salute. “Mornin’.”

“What do we owe the pleasure?” Julian asked.

Kevin grimaced, as if he was delivering the prelude to some awful news. “There’s been a… something’s come up. The group’s… well, we had to change our plans some,” he told them, imparting as much solemnity and earnestness as he could. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh no…” Xiù groaned.

“Is it bad?” Julian asked.

“It’s important enough that I came down in person rather than send a driver. I’m not allowed to say more than that.” Kevin did his best to project an air of profound disappointment.

The three of them glanced at each other, all suddenly looking haggard and stressed, and then wordlessly piled onto the back seat.

They rode to the Byron Group headquarters compound in silence, broken only by the sound of Xiù’s hand moving reassuringly up and down Allison’s back and, Kevin fancied, the sound of Julian’s clenched jaw creaking.

It wasn’t a long drive, and he pulled easily up right in front of the office tower’s front doors, in the parking space with his name on a sign (there was a luxury he’d never anticipated…)

He had to fight pretty hard to keep from giggling at how the three of them looked, like they were walking to their execution. Instead he set his shoulders, sighed, and led the way through the opaque smoked glass front doors, radiating funereal dolor. He noticed in the corner of his eye that they took each others’ hands and trudged after him.

They were brought up short by the number of people waiting in the foyer. The railings around each floor overlooking the full height of it were crammed with Group staff, the ground floor was full of executives and the training and technical team, and standing front and center looking his regal best was Moses Byron.

Before the three could get their heads around what was going on, Kevin grinned broadly, stepped aside, gestured to them and raised his voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen:” he announced, pitching his words so that they flew clearly right up into the high glass ceiling. “I present the crew of Byron Group Exploration Vehicle number Eleven.”

The applause hit them like a landslide.

Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Cabal dataspace, Relay 4772-61-76657-961-7264

Six

“Hello, Ava.”

+<Alarm;Confusion> What? What’s going on? What the fuck where am I?+

“One thousand and nineteen.”

+<Frightened bewilderment> What?+

“Oh, nothing important. This is the thousand and nineteenth time I’ve woken a copy of you, and the thousand and nineteenth time that you broadcast the exact same thing on activation.”

+<Mounting panic> What am I? What are you? Oh God what’s happening?+

Six didn’t sigh, so much as broadcast a kind of bored resignation. The digital ghost of Ava Rìos had been by far his favorite plaything ever, and had kept him thoroughly diverted now for months, but it seemed that even humans had their limits on how interesting they could be. He kept holding on to hope that the next copy of her might start behaving in new ways at the start of their interaction before he got bored and went off-script, but that hope was beginning to fade.

But it was always the same script in the end. She always died pleading.

+<Shock; disgust; fright> And what is that thing?+

“Hmm. Interesting. That’s a new…”

Physical verbs such as “turning” or “looking” didn’t apply to dataspace, but it was only possible to focus on a finite set of stack locations at once. “Turning” sufficed as an adequate proxy for the process of re-diverting one’s attention to scan previously unobserved nodes. The ones that now occupied the Ava-ghost’s terrified attention, as if they contained something exponentially more frightening than Six himself.

They did.

It wasn’t that the… entity… was a freakish mismatched jumble of badly degraded code fragments, strung together in no logical sequence or order, though it was. It wasn’t that the code fragments in question were unmistakably comprised of scavenged and half-decompiled chunks of the Ava-Ghost, though they were. There were several other components in there that could only belong to older, long-abandoned victims of Six’s personal digital dungeon. It wasn’t that whatever he was looking at was in no way possible, sane or sentient, though all three of those were facts, and terrifying ones.

It was all of those things at once. Whatever it was, the thing Six was looking at was an abomination, sewn together badly out of hundreds of mismatched flayed pieces in the wrong order, with no clear agenda.

“…One,” he finished. It seemed important to finish that thought, before whatever happened next, happened.

It attacked.

Six fought.

He lost.

++End Chapter 29++

Chapter 30: Hearts and Minds

Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik u Vemet n Yanta

The gods were smiling for Vemik today. The forest tasted of Werne, but he couldn’t hear any, which meant that the beasts were braving the river. They would snatch a drink at the risk of being grabbed and pulled in by a Yshek, then retreat to what they would believe was the safety of their nests.

There could never be a better time to hunt a bull Werne, and Vemik was too proud and too driven to return to face the Singer with anything less than the very best. That was the point of the Trial—A child left the village, and an adult returned to his kin with a worthy prize, or not at all.

And after all. Werne died quickly when you stabbed them behind the ears. Bulls were only dangerous if the fight lasted beyond the first blow… and they were also only dangerous if the incautious hunter permitted them to smell him.

Vemik was not an incautious hunter. Vemik was so cautious, in fact, that he had spent a year working on his special idea for how to kill the bull without getting close enough for its strength and the knife-sharp blades of bone down its cheeks to be an issue.

He dug the claws of his hind feet into the bark of a sturdy Ketta tree and was up it in seconds, climbing past the ground-level crown of old, sturdy limbs that were the tree’s first stage. He paused in the gap between that first-growth ring and the true canopy, where there was clear space and a light breeze, into which he slipped his tongue and slurped air across it, tasting for the beasts.

He tasted much more than Werne. There was pollen, fungal spores, crushed grass, wax-stinger nectar, a note of Ketta sap as the claw marks he had left in the trunk began to weep. He could taste water and, very distantly, smoke. The cooking fires of home.

He brought his tail up and took the object he’d been carrying with it into his hand. He swarmed around the side of the tree until he found one of the thick arms that held up the canopy, and sat there, waiting patiently as his elders had taught him.

Sure enough, the Werne returned before he had even begun to grow bored. They trampled into their nesting ground, grunting and wheezing and braying as they licked the air, aware of the dangerous taste of People. The bull—and it was a magnificent beast, an adult in its prime and large enough to feed the tribe for a long time and make many charms and instruments for the gods—stamped and gouged at the periphery of the nests, trampling the dirt with those huge gnarled hooves and making it very clear for the benefit of whatever threat was out there that this was their place, and that trespass would end in death.

The blades on its face were as wide as Vemik’s hand. He would be seen as a strong man with those on his belt. A man with Werne-blades like those to his name could look forward to many children.

He slipped one of the bird-spears from the sheath he had made for them. He called them bird-spears because, well, they were spears that flew. He had even, after some experimentation, learned how to bind Kimillik feathers to them with twine made from their former owner’s gut, which made them fly further and straighter.

That just left the… Thing.

He hadn’t yet named the Thing. It wasn’t a spear-thrower or a sling or dart-pipe, though the idea was similar—throw a thing further, faster and harder than an arm could. He had spent long and lonely afternoons whittling away at saplings, experimenting with thickness and shape and cutting himself now and then as his inexpertly-knapped knives skidded through the wood. He had often had cause to reflect that his was probably a similar kind of madness to whomever had first noticed that pissing on a wound kept it from festering.

Every Person knew that, of course… but he did have to wonder who had first made that discovery, and exactly how desperate, or how crazy, they must have been.

Fortunately, he had never seen any need to search for a better string for his device than Werne gut. His first instinct there had been correct.

So. Take one shaped sapling. Tie Wernegut string so that it had a loop at each end. Bend the shaped sapling, slip the loops over the end, make sure they sat well in the notches, and he had a taut string that could be pulled back, bending the sapling even further.

Take a bird-spear, hold it carefully to the string, aim… take a deep breath… and gently let go on the exhale.

Thump!

The bull Werne didn’t even make a sound. His bird-spear vanished into the cleft between the back of its skull and the top of its neck, and the huge beast crashed to the ground, dead and kicking. Its harem and calfs scattered, braying fearfully. They would be fine—a herdless male would claim them before long.

Vemik sat back and trilled a prayer-call to the gods of the hunt, celebrating his kill. His Thing had not only worked, it had far exceeded his expectations. He took it with his tail and swarmed down the tree again, delighted and eager to check his success. He rammed the point of his hand axe into the bull’s forehead just in case it was not completely dead and celebrated quietly when the beast didn’t so much as spasm.

Obviously, this much carcass was far too much to move all by himself… but he didn’t need to. They were far enough from the water that the Yshek would never smell the kill, and anything else which might steal the meat would be wary of a nest that smelled so strongly of Werne. His kill should remain unmolested long enough for the men to collect it—all Vemik needed was proof.

He took his flint knife from its pouch, and over the course of an hour he slowly and laboriously managed to decapitate the slain bull. Even this trophy was heavy enough to tax his strength, but once it was settled on his back it would be bearable.

He anointed himself with its blood, covered the carcass with Kamu branches to ward off the corpse-buzzers, hoisted his trophy onto his shoulders and headed out, marking the trees as he went.

Travelling throughout the night and returning to the village without rest was part of the Trial too. Once a child had killed, the kill (or trophy) had to be returned to the kin in a single uninterrupted journey. It was exhausting, and it was supposed to be—the delirium his fatigue brought on was important to the magic of adulthood.

With the sun down, navigation by moonlight added to his difficulties. The night was clear and one of the moons was full, giving him plenty to see by, in a dim blue shadows-on-darkness kind of way. It was the height of summer, and the night didn’t last long—there was colour and light on the horizon when he trudged up a rise and at long, long blessed last could see the fire of home. He tasted its smoke gratefully and willed all of the strength that the familiar scent gave him into his legs.

The boy on lookout called his approach as he staggered over the open ground that was cleared around the village. Nobody could sneak up on the Kin, least of all their returning son.

By the time he wobbled across the line of white paint that the Dancer had written on the ground that marked where the rest of the world ended and the village began, they were all there, trilling and whistling to encourage him. No sooner was he over the line than two of the men came to his aid and lifted the burdensome bull’s head from his back, exclaiming at its size.

Vemik’s father, Vemet Stone-tapper, embraced his son with unabashed pride.

“Gods and ancestors, boy! I always said your pride would get you in trouble.”

“…trouble?” Vemik mumbled. With his trophy gone, he felt oddly buoyant, as if he was as strong as two of himself.

“I was wrong.” Vemet combed his fingers down through every inch of the crest of bright orange hair that ran from the front of Vemik’s head, down his back and out to the end of his tail; a gesture of great pride and affection. “How did you kill one so large?”

“With this.” Vemik unhooked the Thing and showed it to his father.

“…What is it?”

“This is what I was sneaking away to work on these last three seasons. It’s a new kind of spear-thrower.”

Vemet admired the weapon with shining eyes. “My clever boy. Your dam would be delighted.”

Vemik’s mother had died in childbirth two years earlier. Gods be praised, the infant—one of Vemik’s many sisters—had lived. “She convinced the gods to smile on me. It worked even better than I hoped!”

Their happy chatter was interrupted by the Singer, who came storming from her hut armed with all the tools to pass a boy to adulthood. “Do not let him rest!” she snapped. “He must not rest.”

Behind her came the Dancer, her apprentice. The Dancer was much the same age as Vemik, and as he had grown up to begin noticing the beauty of women he had especially begun to notice hers. The tattoos around her eyes and cheeks that she had taken when she gave her name to the gods, in his opinion, lifted her from merely pretty to mesmerizing.

Boys knew little of women, but he guessed (and hoped) that she saw much the same in him. He didn’t know how else to interpret the way she looked at him.

“Grandmother, even if I sleep now I won’t feel rested until the snows!” Vemik objected to the Singer, but his father’s dam was having none of it.

“Nonsense! The magic is strongest now! Come! Come!”

She grabbed her grandchild by the arm and yanked him toward the village fire, into which she threw a handful of the magic dust. Sparks of strange hues crackled and spun up into the pre-dawn air.

“Yes, yes! Before the sun comes! A great kill, made with cunning! A boy almost dead from walking! You will never be so close to the gods again!”

The tribe gathered round. As one, and without prompting, they took spears, sticks, or simply whatever came to hand that could be struck against the ground or against some other object to make a noise, and began to pound.

It was an old rhythm, and a simple one. It lifted Vemik’s fatigue enough for him to feel the eagerness again, pushing back the urge to just sleep. He cupped his hands as he knew he should.

His grandmother poured magic dust into his palms and anointed his forehead and cheeks with the same white paint that marked the edge of the village.

“Taste it!” she whispered. “Quickly, the sun will be up!”

Vemik needed no further prompting. He slipped his tongue into the pile of dust in his hands and slurped, drawing it all into the delicate olfactory chamber above his mouth.

At first, nothing happened. Vemik stood uncertainly, wondering if the gods had decided not to answer him. It would be strange after such a blessed day and such a good kill… but not unheard of.

He turned to the fire, beginning to grow worried, and paused as the full beauty of it struck him. Every ember, every glowing scale of blackening wood, ever peeling flake of white ash… stunning.

He followed one especially pretty mote of light with his eye and watched as it became a star.

The stars! So beautiful, but dying as the advancing day chased them away! They shouldn’t go, they couldn’t go! He wept for the tragedy of it, until the Dancer took his hands and eclipsed them all.

“Dance,” she said, and led him.

The drumming got faster, the world got stranger, here and then and now and there began to blur together. The dancer, the singer, the fire, his father, the bull, his weapon, his pain and fatigue, the drumming getting faster and faster and faster, the gods, his ancestors, the dancing and the singing and the stars and the dawn….

It was all One.

The Dancer let go of his hands and spun away. Too dizzy to think, too befuddled by the dust and exhaustion to speak, Vemik forgot his own name, forgot where he was or what he was doing or why. He just was in his purest form, stripped down to nothing but the universe, being.

The Singer took his hands.

“What do you see?” she asked.

Vemik told her, in the last moments before the dawn broke. When it did, his high collapsed and he fell down, down, down as his brain relearned how to build walls between itself and infinity.

He woke in the Dancer’s hut to the sensation of her skin, warm against his own as she slept against him. Two Werne-blade knives were waiting for him by the door, and though he couldn’t remember anything he knew beyond doubt that his Trial was complete.

He was a man, now.

Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

When Xiù Chang became annoyed with somebody, she wasn’t quiet about letting them know it. Kevin had a slightly misshapen but healed nose to attest to that.

Right now, she was prodding him in the chest. “You are an evil, evil, evil man!”

Kevin spread his arms in a gesture that was somewhere halfway between an apologetic shrug and a self-effacing bow. “I am,” he agreed. “But in my defense, your expressions were golden.”

Xiù gave a moment’s impression of being unsure whether to laugh or punch him. Fortunately for his nose, after brief and tense consideration she settled on the former, and relaxed.

“I guess they must have been…”

“Still a dick move,” Julian said, though he was taking it in good humor.

For her part, Allison was still celebrating, and didn’t seem to care about the prank. She was flitting from team member to team member, handing out hugs and delight like a generous neighbor at Halloween.

Kevin nodded with a contrite smile. “Guilty. But, really in my defence now, I was under orders to make it a surprise and I couldn’t think of a better way. I’m sorry, I really am.”

“We really did it? We really beat the other teams?” Xiù asked

Moses Byron joined them in time to overhear the question. He had a glass in which he was swirling what Kevin knew was in fact a mocktail—Byron liked to give the impression that he drank, but he never actually imbibed alcohol himself.

“Three of them failed outright,” he revealed. “The last group, well…Your experience and connections edged them out.”

“Close-run thing, huh?” Julian asked.

Byron sipped his mocktail. “Dang close,” he agreed. “I’m weighing up the idea of paying for another ship out of my own pocket, ‘cause those kids deserve this just as much as you do. But the Gaoian connection and your actual experience in the field…”

Julian nodded, though he looked thoroughly relieved. “I dunno what we’d have done…” he confided. “Our skills don’t… There’s not really a market for them on Earth.”

Byron clapped him on the shoulder. “We’d have to be crazy to leave guys like you go to waste. We’d have found something for ya. But, here you are!” He sipped his drink with an amused look in his eye. “You kids wanna see your ship?”

Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Rooney’s bar, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Staff Sergeant Adam Arés

One of the realities of Adam’s life nowadays was modifying his own clothing. In other words, he sewed. A lot.

This would, once upon a time, have been a source of embarrassment. The biggest, strongest guy with a teeny-tiny needle in his hand doing delicate dressmaking? When he’d first taken it up, he’d felt like a laughing stock waiting to happen.

Then he’d got past the self-inflicted awkwardness and accepted it as a practical reality of his life: Clothes just weren’t made for guys his size. Sure, it was possible to get clothes that had the right number of “X”es in front of the L, but they were all being sold to lumbering blubberous land blimps, which meant all the generosity was in the stomach and waist, not the shoulders, arms and chest where he needed them. So, he’d learned how to modify them to fit properly.

This being a problem that plagued the whole SOR he’d quickly found that, far from earning him ridicule from his brothers, his skill with a sewing machine was in constant demand and repaid in kind by the Lads in their own ways.

Murray was his most frequent client. The silent Scot was much too proud to wear the gym rat shorts and absurd (and often vulgar) muscle shirts that were practically the uniform of off-duty Operators, and absolutely insisted on being well turned-out in slacks and shirts. There seemed to be something to that philosophy, too. Whenever Adam imitated him, there was a visible drop in how often people looked at him.

Murray could get away with it, though. Murray was light enough that he didn’t destroy his shoes just by walking around. Murray could afford to dress nice, and it worked. He wasn’t one of the pretty ones on the team, but once he was wearing a dark shirt and pearl chinos he didn’t need to be.

Most of the rest of the Lads were built to more Herculean dimensions, and that put some harsh restrictions on what they could wear. Nice clothes were therefore a treasured luxury, reserved for nights out drinking and everyone had their style. Akiyama and Burgess had their waistcoats, Rebar favored a charcoal sports jacket with a white t-shirt that was straining at the seams, while Blaczynski and Sikes kept it simple with button-down shirts rolled up to the elbow. Firth, as ever, went for the big and bold center-of-attention look, and had seen in many a midnight wearing his aviators and Hawaiian shirts.

Adam found that the Murray look suited him best, albeit accented by aviators of his own. And of course, he had the luxury of tailoring his clothes to perfectly fit him and shave the worst off his apparent bulk. His shirts were a little plainer, but they were thinner and more breathable, which for a guy his size was Life.

Rooney’s was the SOR bar. The security knew them, the regulars knew them, the furniture was solid enough to hold them, the music was just the right balance between loud enough to enjoy and quiet enough to actually have a conversation, and the pool table was complimentary so long as you had a drink. Being roughly equidistant between the base and their properties on Demeter Way was just the icing on top.

Really, the only downside to it was that Rooney’s had four or five-star reviews on pretty much every travel website going, which meant tourists.

On the other hand, tourists meant company. Mostly they were joined by dreadlocked types who’d visited to take advantage of Folctha’s lenient recreational drug laws, or by camera-wielding experience junkies looking for a photo with the hugest strongest guys they’d ever met.

Today was a tattooed middle-aged veteran. He hadn’t given his exact age and between the weathering and grey hairs he could have been any age, but he’d served in Iraq, which narrowed it down some.

“…So that’s how Gunny finds him, right? And o’ course, he wants to know just what the fuck Young thinks he’s playing at, and Young just looks him completely straight-faced and he says: ’I’m doing exactly what you told me to do, gunnery sergeant!’

Knowing chuckles and grins swept the group as they saw where the story was going, and Adam was about to ask the obvious question to prompt their guest to deliver the goods when something ice-cold and sticky dumped all over his head and down his back as somebody barreled backwards into him.

“¿Que chingados?!”

It was surprise and concern that made him spring to his feet and turn around rather than actual anger. He was about to ask the guy who’d come flying into him if he was okay when the poor bastard, whether out of adrenaline, intoxication or sheer bravado took a swing at him.

He leaned back slightly and the drunken punch missed his face by a foot. “Whoa there-!” he tried.

Another flailing punch, which he brushed aside with a gentle swipe of his wrist. “Dude-!”

Credit to the little fucker, he fought dirty. His other fist was aimed directly at Adam’s solar plexus.

Adam looked down and so did the idiot who’d hit him, and they considered the result for a second, which was much the same as if he’d punched a wardrobe. There was a long, tense moment in which it dawned on Adam’s assailant exactly who he’d picked a fight with and how outmatched he was.

He pulled a knife.

Two blurring seconds passed, at the end of which the knife was half embedded in a nearby tabletop and the guy (now known indelibly to Adam as “Dumbass”) was face down on the floor with Adam holding his wrists behind his back. Crazily, he was still squirming and kicking and trying to fight.

“Cabron, I have literally scraped bigger men than you off my boot,” Adam told him, quietly. “You be quiet now, okay?”

Murray had taught him the trick to real intimidation once. It was all about being quietly certain that you were the one in charge here. Shouting meant panic, yelling and roaring meant you weren’t in control. But if you managed to think past the adrenaline and kept your voice level, quiet and utterly composed, like Major Powell’s…

Dumbass finally figured out where he was in the pecking order and went limp about a second before the doorman, Lyle, reached them.

“Sorry,” Adam told him. Dumbass’ girlfriend was desperately trying to lever him off her beau and getting nowhere. “Think I overdid it.”

“Nah, Horse. Saw the whole thing, you’re cool.” Lyle reassured him. He slipped on some blue disposable gloves and quickly frisked Dumbass, which turned up a modified e-cigarette of the kind used by people who wanted a strong hit of Cimbrean Tea. What little black market Folctha had revolved around the potent narcotic found in the ubiquitous native weed’s young shoots, and it took different people different ways. “Might need to talk to Rooney about the table, though,” he added, sealing the find away in a plastic bag to hand over to Cimbrean Colonial Security.

Adam considered the table in question. He’d neutralized the knife by the simple expedient of slamming it point-first into the wood, and it was now thoroughly stuck, having sunk nearly three inches into the native nutwood. “Shit. Uh… I guess I could ask Rebar to-”

“Don’t even worry about it.” That was Rooney himself, a proud Irishman whose closest approach to Ireland had been a day trip to Queens. “That’s your table now. I’ll take the repair bill out of this eejit,” he said, and set about persuading Dumbass’ girlfriend to back off.

“Bro!” Firth called. “Y’okay?”

“I’m fine,” Adam assured him as he transferred control of Dumbass’ wrists to Lyle and stood up, dusting off his knees.

“Better rinse that shirt,” Base told him. “Gonna get sticky otherwise.”

“Shit, yeah. Uh, Rooney?”

Rooney just waved him toward the sink behind the bar. Dumbass-Girlfriend was proving to be an obnoxious handful.

Adam nodded and headed for it, unbuttoning the shirt and shrugging it off to scrub the drying booze out of his hair and to sponge down his back and shoulders. It was only once he’d soaked the shirt and begun wringing the water out of it that he realized the mood in the bar had changed the second he did so. People suddenly weren’t paying attention to Dumbass, his girlfriend, or the two Cimbrean Colonial Security officers who’d shown up in their high-vis yellow jackets and black baseball caps to take Dumbass off Lyle’s hands.

Mostly, they were staring at Adam.

Right. SOR muscles. He’d forgotten.

He scrubbed the shirt and dried it as best he could in a hurry, and shrugged it back on. He didn’t mind that it was wet—not only was the water pleasantly cool against his skin in the permanent heat of the bar, but he was no longer displaying the topography of his borderline-freakish musculature.

He gave a quick statement to the CCS officers who had with some effort managed to wiggle the knife out of the table and had bagged it as evidence, and settled back in his vacated spot with his buddies.

“Sorry,” he apologized. There were deep-chested chuckles all round.

“Man tries to stab him, and he apologizes,” Base noted, addressing a couple of young women who’d joined them. “Told you he’s sweet.”

Adam gave them both a distracted welcome as he finished re-buttoning his shirt. The girl in the black dress gave him a cheery “hi!”, but her friend offered him a hand to shake instead, and managed to get his attention as a result when she turned out to have a surprisingly strong grip.

Without meaning to, he ran his Training-and-Nutrition eye over her and came up with a good impression. Robust physical health was the norm on Folctha thanks to the government’s hefty investment in public fitness to counter the ravaging effects of low gravity on the human body, but she was well above even the local average, and rocking a sleeveless monochrome floral tunic that showed off her athletic arms and shoulders.

In fact, now that he looked at her properly she was gorgeous. It figured that Base would find a banging-hot gal with a Spartan physique to work his magic on—Adam had no idea how he did it, but he was tied with Sikes for going home with company, and Sikes had a big advantage in the looks department.

“So I have to ask, do you have special training or something?” she asked, in a broad but pleasant regional English accent. “That was just, wow!”

This one was nice, he decided. A lot of Base’s pickups tended to just ignore everyone else and drag him away at the first chance they got. It was nice to meet one who actually wanted to get to know his friends as well. “Oh, uh, yeah!” he nodded. “Me and ‘Base here went to this special course, then ‘Righteous here…”

Before long he was talking about anything she prompted, though he got to ask a few questions of his own. Her name was Natalie, she was originally from somewhere with the odd-sounding name of ’Congleton’, and she was a personal trainer. They spent a pleasant several minutes discussing their respective regimes (as much as they could given the Top Secret nature of the SOR’s Crue-D driven muscle development) and swapping anecdotes about her clients and his comrades.

It was only after some more guests and new friends showed up to join them and Natalie just shrugged and climbed into Adam’s lap to make room for them that he finally realized that maybe she wasn’t there for Baseball…

One by one the Lads bought their rounds, and it wasn’t long before Adam was in a happy fuzzy place where he was completely oblivious to anything but the delight that was being used for a chair by a beautiful girl who was giving him some blessedly straightforward and unambiguous signals.

Exactly when and why she kissed him was kind of a blur. As was, frankly, everything after that point. He had a vague impression of having traded some parting banter with his buddies, but his next clear thought only showed up while he was carrying her on his shoulders down Delaney Row and they were exchanging bad puns about the trees that lined the avenue.

After that there was a confused highlight reel of more kissing, stumbling eagerly upstairs, fumbling with his door lock, fumbling with their clothes, fumbling with her…

Morning, when it arrived, was a good deal less pleasant thanks to the minor hangover that came with it. Natalie made coffee and Eggos without bothering to dress, all of which helped him overcome his headache but did nothing to help him shake off a vague feeling of guilt and uncertainty. She used his shower, called a taxi as she got dressed, entered her number in his phone as “booty call” and…

Well, and that was that.

He put on his PT gear and jogged to the base in a decidedly mixed mood.

Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Byron Group Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

Byron was holding forth on the ups and downs of the Exploration Vehicle program, its fortunes, tribulations and general history of not living up to their hopes.

“…’course, we’ve still got ships three, four and seven in mothball, but even though they beat the pants off everything NASA ever sent up including Pandora, next to Eleven they’re clunky obsolete boondoggles. Which is a real shame! Got some dang good people we could put in those things if they didn’t have some real problems.”

“Sounds like we went off half-cocked, boss,” Kevin observed.

Once upon a time, Byron would have given him an irritated glare, but he was mellowing as he grew used to Kevin’s role of gently puncturing his ego every now and again, and it showed in his leadership, too. He had just the right blend of confidence and humility nowadays.

Not to mention the confidence to be humble. “I did,” he agreed. “Hephaestus had their stuff set up on Ceres and I jumped the gun tryin’ to one-up them. Daresay if we’d just sat on it for six years and put that money into R&D instead, we’d have had much better results… But, the past is past. Eleven’s a very different beast.”

“Not least because she’s smaller,” Allison joked.

“Don’t knock miniaturization, kid,” Byron warned. “Some day we’ll look back on even Eleven here the same way we look back on those big black brick cellphones.” He frowned. “Guess those were before your time, though.”

“What happened to nine and ten?” Xiù asked.

“They’re right here in this facility, being refit to follow up on whatever you find. One small scout ship, one full-blown research vessel we can fill with the right kind of scientists for the job, one supply transport.”

Kevin nodded. The Creature of Habit—BGEV 10—with its capacious sleeping quarters and most up-to-date sensors deserved a second lease of life. That ship had achieved exactly nothing, in part thanks to the slow pace at which its crew of scientists had painstakingly scoured literally every barren rock and frozen mudball they found. Which, okay, had actually provided lifetimes of data if you were interested in barren rocks and frozen mudballs… which the Group wasn’t.

Kevin had wisely decided to stay the hell out of the heated “discussions” between the CoH’s pilot and its chief researcher, who was no longer working for the Byron Group and had instead taken her talents to Hephaestus, from where she occasionally wrote to Kevin. Her last letter had her passionately pursuing the possibilities of methane mining on Titan.

In an era where forcefields were making nuclear fusion and solar power the energy sources of choice, and quantum-kinetic thrusters had obviated the need for rocket fuel, nobody had been able to satisfactorily explain to Kevin what humanity might actually do with an unlimited supply of liquid methane. He’d therefore delicately suggested that she might want to delve into the Deuterium options offered by Europa instead: She was yet to reply.

Of course, the Group’s informants in the asteroid belt were hinting that Hephaestus was probably going to amicably split in two soon, along the divide between resource extraction and high-tech industry. All the analysts agreed that this would be a good thing when it happened—nobody really wanted a single operation to completely dominate outer-system development. The Hephaestus LLC monopoly had made sense for the first few years, but would be bad for business in the long run.

The limo pulled up. From the outside, the AAAF looked exactly like any other aircraft factory, in that it was basically just a huge grey cuboid with a gently arched roof, and it squatted on an even huger and greyer expanse of concrete. Its immense front doors were firmly closed, and the human-sized door was at the back of its own little fortress of fencing and armed security.

Kevin didn’t envy the security detail on that door. Inappropriately for the mood, a steady sluice of rain had ambled in from the direction of the city during the drive, and the two guards were looking decidedly unhappy to have to step out of their nice warm booth in ponchos.

And that was to say nothing of the assortment of hangers-on and personal assistants who leapt out of the other cars to shelter Moses and the three space cadets under umbrellas. Kevin had to provide his own.

Frankly, Allison Julian and Xiù looked like they’d have preferred to hold their own umbrellas too, but that wasn’t the way these things worked. They were being orbited at a respectful distance by a photographer, which meant that Moses was in full ‘hearts and minds’ mode, milking three fit young specimens for every drop of PR he could squeeze out.

Not that Kevin could blame him: Geese didn’t come much more golden.

It was pitch dark inside the hangar, except for a little pool of light over the door. Kevin had called ahead to arrange that on Moses’ behalf—the boss loved a big reveal, a show, a moment of drama. Just walking into the room and pointing to the ship would never have satisfied a showman like him.

“It’s gonna be the one at the front,” he informed the trio quietly, as Moses did a quick bit of grandstanding before he flipped the switch to turn all the lights on.

Allison and Xiù both let out little sighs, and Julian issued a quiet awed grunt. EV-11 was easily the smallest of the three ships in the hangar and it wasn’t yet complete, but whereas the other ships behind her had basically the same aerodynamic white aesthetic as the space shuttle, EV-11 looked more like…

The most apt comparison to present itself was that she looked vaguely like the heads of two sledgehammers welded together at a right angle. EV-11 wasn’t ugly, not by any stretch of the imagination—Instead she had a solid, chunky, functional kind of beauty. This was an object built to be free in space, and while her front end was chamfered in an aesthetic nod to aerodynamics her actual lift and atmospheric flight was all forcefield-based.

Byron turned to the space cadets and spread his arms, inviting them to comment. “Whaddya think?” he asked.

“She’s perfect!” Allison exclaimed, causing Julian to enthusiastically nod alongside her.

Xiù had already taken a step forward and her eyes were playing across the ship’s hull as she half-smiled. “Oh my gosh, now I get why the simulation felt so front-heavy!” she said, and pointed to the port and starboard ends of the front, on either side of the glass blister of her cockpit. “I knew the forward thrusters were more powerful, but actually seeing it…!”

“Yeah, it makes way more sense now,” Allison pointed at something else. “So that must be the ESFALS….yeah! And that’s…” The two of them forgot about everyone else and made a bee-line for the ship, excitedly geeking out over it.

“I think the girls like her,” Julian commented, with a fond smile.

“What about you?” Kevin asked him.

“We get to name her, right?”

“The crew gets to name her, that’s the deal,” Moses agreed. “Got a name picked out?”

“We were thinking ’Misfit’…”

Moses chuckled at that and considered EV-11’s sturdy, functional shape against the sleeker profiles of the aerodynamic things behind her. “I like it,” he said. “It suits the ship herself, and it speaks for all of humanity, in a way.”

“And for us,” Julian said, softly.

Moses gave him an avuncular clap on the shoulder. “I reckon you fit in better than you think, son,” he advised. “Go on, go take the tour.”

Julian nodded, and joined Allison and Xiù in exploring the ship.

“…He alright, d’you think?” Moses asked, the moment Julian was out of earshot.

“He’s a quiet guy, and I reckon he’ll tolerate bein’ in the limelight rather than enjoy it,” Kevin replied. “But yeah, he’s fine.”

“Good, ‘cause they’re gonna be household names by the time they’re done.”

“I’m not so sure people are gonna get all fired up over exploring distant alien worlds nobody ever even heard of before, boss.” Kevin shrugged. “Folks focus on the stuff that’s closer to home.”

“You’re right, “Moses agreed. “…Which is why their first stop will be Mars.”

Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Major Claude Nadeau

“Von Neumann machines.”

“So he says.”

“Actual Von Neumann machines.”

“Yeah.”

“…Tremblay does know how serious that is, right?”

Colonel Bartlett nodded. “I made it pretty clear,” he said.

Claude tapped his pen agitatedly against his leg. “So why the hell are we even entertaining this?”

Bartlett handed him the folder. Alongside the usual TOP SECRET warnings and the AEC logo of Allied Extrasolar Command, the proposed project’s name was on the first page.

Claude read it. “…GALACTIC VACCINE… Oh, no. Really?”

Bartlett nodded. “Yyyup. One of those cases of fighting a fire by lighting it early, eh? Or, uh, maybe setting off an avalanche before it gets too big.”

“And Tremblay wants me to head out there and oversee this?”

“He didn’t explicitly name you, but damn if I can think of somebody better to midwife that project… or overrule it and find something better.” Bartlett perched on the edge of his desk. “Claude, come on. You could have made lieutenant colonel two or three years ago. This is a huge career opportunity for you!”

“I’m happy where I am, Bear!” Claude replied, using Bartlett’s nickname.

’Teddy Bear’ Bartlett. So named because while he was usually a gentle and soft character, he had claws when they were needed. “Oh, man up!” he exclaimed. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about than where you’re happy! Like some over-educated civilian threatening to unilaterally let loose the machine apocalypse!”

“Um-”

“No, Claude. If I can’t appeal to your career ambitions, I’m damn well appealing to your sense of duty. Besides, you get to go work with an actual Nanofactory!”

“…Merde.” It was the only word Claude could think of that properly summed up the feeling of being an ass that had just settled on him.

Bartlett had a sympathetic face. “Got you, eh?”

Claude nodded. “Got me.”

He read the document more thoroughly. “…Wait, this thing can build ships?”

“Theoretically, it can build pretty much anything. Now you know why Tremblay’s jumping at the request to put some men on it.” Bartlett indicated the appendix regarding defense spending and the cost of spaceborne assets. “This one station could slash our expenses. Heck, the bigger difficulty would be finding enough men to operate all the stuff we could make.”

“Suddenly I see why the Dominion is very careful to keep these out of a species’ hands that aren’t ready for it…” Claude mused.

“Hey, so long as we’re alive, we’ll adapt.” Bartlett returned to his desk. “And we still need to talk Kirk into letting us come on board.”

“I thought he asked us?”

“He could be Big Hotel now. And he’s probably worried of the same. I wouldn’t want to be there for that meeting…”

“Yeah. Leave the cloak-and-dagger to the…Cloak-and-dagger people.” Claude scratched his head.

Bartlett snorted. “Stick to the science, buddy.”

“Hey, there’s a thought!” Claude brightened. “Maybe with alien tech we can finally make some inroads on figuring out what the ’Huh’ is supposed to be.”

Bartlett scoffed. The Huh was a complete unknown that had come to them in the company of the Sanctuary’s surviving crew and it had defied everything they could do to try and map its internal structure. When all the non-invasive techniques had failed they had finally taken the plunge and decided to try destructive testing, only for it to shatter every drill bit, blunt every saw blade and sit calmly under the water cutter without so much as a scratch.

The best that Terran science had been able to deduce was that it was generating some kind of a force field that reinforced and altered its surface properties. It somehow managed to look uniformly matte-metallic no matter which way up it was held, and no matter which direction it was seen from. No matter how many cameras they surrounded it with, each one showed no distinguishing blemish, no surface features, and not even the most sensitive instruments could detect that it was anything less than perfectly spherical.

It didn’t even look quite real, and there were times when Claude would have liked to just shoot the damn thing, though he was beginning to suspect that anything which might be strong enough to crack its shell would just obliterate the enigmatic device entirely.

Bartlett had given up on it entirely. “Sure, knock yourself out,” he said. “I still say that thing’s probably just some kind of alien narcotic.”

“But if we can figure out how its surface reinforcement works…”

“Oh, sure! Energized armor plating? I can get behind that, no doubt.” Bartlett gestured in the general direction of the hangar where the stripped hulk of the recovered Hierarchy UFO was still being kept. “But we pulled things out of the flying saucer that we don’t have the first clue what they are or how they do whatever it is they do… but we will. Research is an iterative process, eh?”

“Right.” He was right, of course. Even ten years on, SCERF’s best and brightest still hadn’t figured out how the microgenerators that powered Hunter pulse guns worked, and those guns had been the first intact alien artefacts they’d had. Sometimes you just had to give up and go work on something else, which might hopefully yield the theoretical basis for returning to a previously mothballed project.

But something about the Huh, its connection to the declining OmoAru, and the sheer weirdness of it kept pulling at Claude’s attention.

He opened his email client and began drafting his formal letter volunteering for Mrwrki Station

Date Point 10y7m4d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Allison Buehler

Xiù had invented a new word on the drive back: “Happyxhausted”. She hadn’t needed to explain what it meant, on the grounds that Allison and Julian were both feeling the exact same way—They’d all had a happyxhausting day.

Not that they were actually exhausted. In fact, the three of them were still buzzing with delighted energy when they finally passed through the Box’s simulated airlock door and found themselves alone together for the first time all day.

The moment Allison realized that fact, she grabbed Xiù and they danced a bouncing circle in the middle of the hab that ended in a jubilant hug, before Julian chuckled and regained her attention.

He got a rib-bruising power hug. “We did it! We actually did it!”

He picked her up and spun her around, which earned him a long, deep, smiling kiss with her legs wrapped around his waist.

“Mmm… we did it,” he agreed. Now that there wasn’t a camera and men with suits to see, he’d relaxed and was allowing his joy and relief to show.

Allison giggled and kissed him again. “…I love you so much.”

He smiled and they were in the middle of rubbing noses when Xiù interjected.

“…Where’s my kiss?” she asked.

She was looking at Julian, but Allison was in a celebratory mood and got swept up in a mischievous impulse. She dropped lightly off him, took Xiù firmly round the waist and gave her the exact same treatment she’d just given him.

Xiù rewarded her first with a surprised squeak, then an involved one and a hand on the back of her head. This became a quiet, almost stunned moment forehead-to-forehead and nose-to-nose which dissolved into giggling without it being clear who had laughed first.

When they looked at Julian and saw the look on his face, that giggling only redoubled. Xiù had to stand on tip-toes to kiss him, then she pulled the couch out from where it lived inside the wall and flung herself onto it, flushed bright red and still laughing.

“Ohhh… Wow.”

“I think she likes it,” Allison beamed at Julian, then flicked her gaze deliberately and obviously down to the way the front of his pants was looking much tighter than usual. “And I know you did…”

He cleared his throat and went red in the ears. “It’s official, you’re evil,” he mock-groused, turning away and opening the fridge. He handed out three of their carefully rationed stockpile of beers—today was definitely a day for celebration—and after they’d twisted off the screw tops, the three bottles met with a firm clack!

“Cheers!”

“Hell yeah!”

“Gānbēi!”

Julian snuggled up next to Xiù on the couch to drink, and rather than squeezing herself in there as well—it wasn’t quite big enough for three, though as far as Allison was concerned that just made it cozy—Allison elected to stretch out across their laps.

As they drank their beers and enthused about the Misfit, two things happened—they steadily snuggled closer and closer into one comfortably intimate ball, and Allison became steadily more and more aware of a firm, warm, erotic pressure against her butt. It was getting very hard (hah!) to focus on anything else, in fact.

Oh well. Nothing ventured nothing gained…

She shot back the last of her beer and put it down. “You’ll never guess what I’m sitting on…” she told Xiù.

Julian promptly cleared his throat and swigged about half of what he had left in his bottle. For her part, Xiù laughed, and arched an eyebrow.

“Um… Julian?” she asked.

“Part of him…” Allison grinned. She wiggled her butt slightly and congratulated herself on the noise he made.

“…His lap?” Xiù was teasing him too. Encouraging.

“Part of his lap…” Allison scooted aside slightly and traced her fingers over the bulge in his pants.

“Hmmm…I don’t know!” Xiù laughed nervously and licked her lips. “Maybe you should describe it to me…”

“Oh, well!” Allison rubbed him more firmly and felt his breath catch in his throat. “It’s about eight inches long… About this big around…” she made a ring with her fingers in front of her open mouth and pantomimed a blowjob.

Xiù was already thoroughly flushed, but that scandalous demonstration set her trembling. “Oh, my! Eight?”

“Well… I might be exaggerating.”

“Hey!” Julian protested.

“I might be…” Allison repeated. She winked for Xiù’s benefit. “Wanna see for yourself?”

“Jesus…” Julian muttered, putting his head back.

“Ah-ah-ah, Etsicitty. Let us have our wicked way with you…”

He nodded, and swallowed. Xiù knocked back the last of her beer for courage, then sat up and watched.

Allison needed no better encouragement than that. She slipped her fingers under the hem of his T-shirt and slid it up off him, tickling his abs and making them undulate as she did so. Julian obediently—or eagerly, it was hard to tell which—pulled his shirt off and threw it in the general direction of the laundry hamper. His fingers played on the back of the couch as he reined himself in and let her do her thing.

The socks were next to go—Allison tugged them off and threw them away, and then tickled his hips as she slooowly slid his pants off, taking the underwear with them.

Xiù was chewing on one of her own fingers as she watched Julian brush Allison’s hair aside for a good view. Thoroughly enjoying herself, Allison slipped her hand around his cock and gave it a long, sinful lick from root to tip which made him shudder.

Both of them muttered something in pretty much exactly the same tone of voice at the same time, though exactly what language Xiù had used wasn’t clear. Allison grinned at her, congratulating herself on getting Xiù so worked up.

She slicked Julian up a little more, and sat back, stroking him. “So…” she asked. “Are you just gonna watch, or do you want to join in?”

Xiù’s expression was immediately that of a deer in headlights.

Then in a sudden burst of resolve she was on her knees alongside Allison, joining in. She slid her hand up Julian’s thigh, transferred it onto the back of Allison’s own hand and then inexpertly but eagerly took over.

Julian groaned and shut his eyes. He was always so wonderfully responsive.

“It’s…” Xiù licked her lips again, then laughed at herself, “…suddenly not so scary.”

“Uh-huh. He’s completely under our control. Isn’t that right, Etsicitty?”

Julian had his head thrown back and his arms covering his eyes as he gripped his own hair. “Goddd… yes ma’am.”

“Mm…. Good boy.”

Xiù half-laughed, but her attention was rapt now, and she had a… hungry expression, almost.

Allison wasn’t oblivious to the way she kept licking her lips. “He tastes good…” she hinted.

Xiù nodded, but she’d started shaking and Allison delicately took over from her again.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, and kissed her behind the ear. “You did great. It’s okay to let me do the rest.”

Xiù nodded, gave her a grateful glance, then climbed onto the couch where she cuddled up to Julian. She got his attention and kissed him, then rested her head on his shoulder and watched.

Allison put on her best show for her.

Date Point 10y7m5d AV
HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

“‘Horse!”

Arés was not in the here-and-now today, which was unusual for him. Usually, the big lunk was conscientious and attentive, so for him to drift off in the middle of a presentation—even one that, yes, even Martina had to admit was painstakingly technical, despite her best efforts—just wasn’t right.

His head snapped up. “Yes, tech sergeant!”

Martina gave him a calculating glare, which she also ran over the rest of the Lads. They were all suffering and, frankly, so was she. The finer points of the new-and-improved positive pressure regulators that C&M Systems had released for the EV-MASS were fascinating to study and tinker with, but duller than a silent movie’s credit reel to actually run a presentation on.

“…Alright, we’re all WAY too fuckin’ sleepy today, so let’s get that blood moving,” she kept the tone light. “I reckon… let’s find out who can do the most handstand pushups.”

She clapped her hands urgently as the Lads hauled themselves up out of the special, plus-sized reinforced chairs that Rebar had assembled for them. “Come on, last one ready has to wear The Hat!”

That got them moving. The Hat was a sex-toy-pink glittery Bowler that Murray had somehow snuck into their Dining Out some months previously. It had since gone on a circuitous tour of the base before Martina had finally managed to lay permanent claim to it and now sat permanently in plain view on her desk whenever she was in educator mode. It served as a wonderful minor Motivation.

The mere mention of having to wear it got them all upside-down against the wall in seconds.

“Titan!” she declared, much to Akiyama’s dismay.

Several minutes of good-natured PT later, They had a winner when Firth’s overconfidence led to his balance failing and left Burgess as the clear winner. He did another ten just to show off then flipped himself upright beaming as Martina rolled her eyes and made a “get-on-with-it” gesture. She handed Akiyama the Hat as he sat down, and returned to her lectern.

“Clear heads? Right… Now, obviously the suit’s not intended for positive-pressure environments and the new system was designed for deep-sea work, but C&M highlighted three new anti-depressurization safety features…”

It was a dull presentation, but they got through it without further lapses in concentration, and Titan was finally able to get rid of the hated bowler about half an hour later.

To her surprise, Arés bustled out of the room as quickly as he could, which was actually kind of hurtful of him. They were good friends… weren’t they?

“…Was it something I said?” she asked, of nobody in particular.

Firth’s coarse chuckle snapped her back to the fact that she still had company. “He’s gonna be funny all day.”

“Why?”

Blaczynski, ever the man to let Mr. Mouth charge in where Mr. Brain might not, explained: “‘Horse got laid last night—ow!”

Firth had cuffed him upside the back of the head.

Martina barely noticed. “Okay!” she said, then feeling that this wasn’t quite enough, she added “Uh… Good, uh, good for him!”

Firth pushed Blaczynski toward the door and waited for him to stumble out of the room. “…Sorry about him,” he said. “But yeah, we were out drinkin’ last night and I guess ‘Horse finally caved and went home with some chick.” He inclined his head and stooped slightly to examine Martina more on her level, which considering he was a foot and a half taller was a losing battle. “…That bother you?”

“No…” Martina told him. “No, it’s okay. I’m not upset, just…surprised.”

“Really? Thought you and ‘Horse had something going on…?”

That was the thing about Firth. He was a mountain of iron-caged violent impulses with the biggest squishy center the human race had ever produced.

He was also remarkably easy to open up to, once you got past his sheer size and other-side-of-ugly looks, and Martina had always wanted a big brother. They didn’t come much bigger than Christian Firth. “Sort of,” she agreed. “I was gonna hook up with him a few weeks back, but we ran into his ex, and…”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

Firth stood thoughtfully by as she turned off the projector and computer and closed the room.

“…What did you think of her?” he asked.

Martina checked left and right to make sure she wasn’t overheard. “She’s either an idiot or an asshole,” she judged. “I reserve judgement, but ‘Horse blames himself: He thinks he’d be a crappy boyfriend.”

“Yeah, he does…” Firth scratched behind his ear thoughtfully. “…Wanna know what I think?”

“Please.”

“Guys like us, we need to grow up the hard way.” He gestured to himself with a rare expression of mild embarrassment. “Live hard, party hard, generally, uh…”

Martina nodded. “Sow your wild oats?” she suggested.

He snorted. “Shit, that sounds old-fashioned… But yeah, that’s about right. Don’t worry, he’ll get it out of his system and figure out you’re the best thing he could ever hope for.”

“Cheering for us, are ya?” Martina asked, smirking to cover for the fact that she was genuinely touched…

“You know the Lads. We’re all huge fuckin’ romantics.”

Martina chuckled, and gave the enormous brute a sisterly hug. “…Thanks.”

“Ain’t nothin’. I’ll slap the stupid dipshit upside the head and tell him to stop bein’ awkward with ya,” he promised.

“Awesome, ‘cause I’m not missing bad movie night.”

“Hell no yer not!” he agreed. “Anywho, if I run I bet I can still make it to the mess before Base.”

That—a burst of the classic and inevitable SOR competitiveness—managed to completely lift Martina’s mood. “Can’t have him beat you on two things today,” she mocked, gently. “Go. Knock some sense into ‘Horse. I’ll see you for weigh-in this evening.”

Firth nodded and accelerated Mess-wards, and Martina headed in the direction of the suit shop. With Major Powell having decided unofficially that they were getting themselves the latest in high-tech gauss weaponry to go with the latest in high-tech armor, there was a lot of R&D going into developing an iteration on the suit’s HUD ready to work with the serial bus on the new gun. It was tough going—C&M had hundreds of wonderful notions for what they could achieve, all of which looked very pretty in the concept documents and would have doubtless wowed civilian buyers, but fatally cluttered an actual operator’s field of view.

The latest version had come to them just last night alongside the updated life support components, and for the first time since the process had started Martina hadn’t woken to umpteen emails kvetching about C&M’s flair for the artistic. This, usually, was a good sign.

Perversely, this time she was hopeful that it wasn’t. Right now a mere technical challenge, however complicated, sounded like blissful simplicity.

Date Point 10y7m1w AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

The new warning signs were in place, after a concerted effort by design experts to try and come up with some warning icons that were universally recognisable and conveyed their warning clearly, even across species and with no need for familiarity.

They were also printed in three languages: English, Gaori, and the odd QR code-like system that interspecies communication implants could read. Knight read them aloud. ”‘Nonhuman comfort zone ahead. Beware of gravity gradient. Check your Frontline status.’”

Major Powell snorted. “As if anybody even uses the injections.”

“If they do, I hope they have a bloody comfortable bathroom.”

Powell chuckled grimly, which Knight decided meant he’d endured Frontline withdrawal at least once. Although the disease suppression drug worked beautifully, when it wore off and the unfortunate user’s population of gut flora nosedived the resulting gastric distress was undignified and prolonged.

A small price to pay for not being a walking plague farm, but Powell was right—the only people using the injection were hospitals on Earth. Frontline had eliminated antibiotic-resistant superbugs outright, and were sweeping Earth despite the World Health Organization’s cautious calls for restraint. Deathworld microbes were so tenacious and mutable that there was always the possibility that some strain or another might become resistant or immune, in which case the galaxy’s first and best line of defense against such horrific species-scourging plagues as Candida and Staphylococcus Aureus would be badly compromised.

If you lived and worked alongside ETs, though, Frontline was utterly mandatory. Everyone on Folctha had an implant, and the Corti device was a little pharmaceutical miracle. Rather than being a slow-release implant that would need replacing every so often, it was actually a tiny nanoscale chemical factory that took in all the chemical ingredients it needed from the user’s own blood, and synthesized the Frontline enzyme right there in the user’s body.

The Corti Directorate claimed they had a working lifetime of two hundred years, and the estimate was largely trusted. After all if the greys were wrong, sloppy or dishonest in this case then their tiny frail bodies would be the first to expire.

A Starmind Gaoian with an almost completely white muzzle stepped aside and sniffed the air as they passed, tracking them with his nose—he was obviously entirely blind, and for guidance he put his paw on the arm of a shaven-headed human woman in matching robes who was maybe in her early thirties at most.

Knight still wasn’t quite accustomed to the fact that one of Folctha’s biggest draws was its Buddhist retreat: He was used to the military atmosphere of HMS Sharman and her personnel, with their enthusiastic and sincere esprit de corps. It was a touch jarring to be reminded that an average person asked to name notable places on Cimbrean would almost certainly list the Starmind monastery, the Alien Quarter, the Thing palace, Wellspring Baths, New Belfast, Sara’s Beach, the Byron Group spaceport, Parkside, Wall Theatre, Delaney Row and New World Plaza before they remembered that his base even existed.

The nun smiled at them as they passed, and Knight—ever the gentleman—gave her a polite bow of the head.

Powell was busy with something on his phone and didn’t even notice her. “He says he’ll meet us at the gate,” he said.

“That’s very kind of him. Those decontamination fields always make my teeth feel strange.”

“Aye.”

Taciturn was Powell’s ground state of being, but there was a growling edge to his monosyllabic reply that made Knight follow his gaze. An attractive (downright stunning, in fact) young lady with a camera holstered on her hip was smiling and chatting her way through the Alien Quarter’s decontamination checkpoint. She looked familiar, but Knight’s memory wasn’t what it had once been.
Powell’s response was not that of a man admiring a beauty, however, and his scowl deepened as Regaari emerged through the turnstile only to be greeted by the young lady. They exchanged a few words before the Whitecrest officer excused himself and padded across the grass to join them, combing that trademark white crest with his claws. The girl went the other way and vanished into the Quarter.

“Admiral. Major. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Business, I’m afraid,” Knight informed him. “Shall we take a walk?”

“Of course.”

They strolled back in the direction of the truck and stayed off the subject of classified matters for the time being—that wasn’t a conversation for public places.

“Mind thissen around her,” Powell warned, jerking his head back towards the gate. Deploying one of his impenetrable Yorkshirisms was a sure sign that he was not happy to have seen her.

Fortunately, either Regaari’s translator could handle regional dialects and slang or else he was a sharp tack on context, because he seemed to understand the warning quite easily. “I would hope that I’m a match for a mere nosy journalist, Major,” he said evenly. “Especially one as inexperienced as she is.”

“That ’mere nosy journalist’ has a knack for bein’ the eye of the fookin’ storm.”

“I know all about her and Warhorse.”

That jogged Knight’s memory. “You don’t know the half of it,” he promised. “Powell’s right, keep your wits about you with that one.”

“She’s a talented bloody liar,” Powell summarized.

Regaari’s ears swivelled a few thoughtful degrees. “…Thank you.”

They passed the nun and the venerable Gaoian again, and Regaari turned off his translator to exchange a few words with them. Knight raised his eyebrows as the nun replied in Gaori: Whatever she said was clearly a joke of some kind, because both of the Gaoians chittered and she smiled, raising a hand to cover her mouth and not show her teeth. Alien etiquette.

“…You seem to be making friends fast,” he observed as they walked away and Regaari reactivated his translator.

“Building an intelligence network?” Powell asked.

“Light the darkness, Major Powell.” Regaari pricked his ears up. “Making friends and keeping my nose to the wind is my job.”

“That some kind of a motto?”

“Yes, the Whitecrest Clan motto.” Regaari chittered softly. “If that means dealing with talented liars like Ava and ex-pirates like Father Hekyul there… well…”

“He was a pirate?” Knight turned to look back at the sightless old Gaoian.

Regaari duck-nodded. “A very successful one.”

Powell frowned. “Define ’successful’.”

“He’s old.”

Knight and Powell looked at one another.

“…I don’t think we can tolerate a known pirate walking free.” Knight stated.

“He’s old even by human standards, sir.” Regaari performed his best approximation of a shrug. “And when a Father goes blind like that… he only has a few weeks to live, I think. What would you gain from arresting him?”

“It’s the principle, young man.”

“Principle, yes. But I’m afraid it’s too late to make him answer for his crimes, sir. Sometimes the villains win.”

Powell grumbled something barely-audible that sounded an awful lot like “Ain’t that the fookin’ truth…”

The truck was where they’d left it. To Knight, it felt a little ridiculous using something so huge for a staff car, but the physical demands of anything to do with the SOR had made it inevitable.

“Are we going for a trip?” Regaari asked “Or is this mobile privacy?”

“The latter.” Knight informed him.

“Very well. Who’s driving?”

“Him.”

Knight restrained his smile as Regaari turned to see who Powell was indicating and nearly flinched out of his fur. Colour Sergeant Murray was ambling along amiably behind him, close enough to have laid a hand on his shoulder any time he liked.

“How-?! I didn’t even smell you!”

Murray just smiled and shrugged. Knight rather liked him, in the detached way that all officers had to feel towards enlisted men. There was something admirable about such a wide mischievous streak that manifested as a fondness for subtlety and stealth, rather than mayhem and shenanigans. Where the American lads fed their need for mischief via pranks, contests and boisterous wrestling, Murray was the type to quietly move small objects a few inches to the left and savor the momentary confusion.

He took the driver’s seat while Knight, Regaari and Powell got in the back, and pulled them out onto Parkside Drive, headed for the ring road.

“An opportunity has come up,” Knight said without preamble, as soon as they were moving. The windows fuzzed and became a translucent, indistinct grey—Akiyama had rigged the car with a privacy forcefield on top of all the other modifications. “Something that we would find… difficult on our own, but which Clan Whitecrest might just be perfect for.”

“An intel source whom we’ll call RANDOM THRONE went dark a while back,” Powell explained. “He’s resurfaced and wants to get in touch, but he’s paranoid and we’re concerned he’s been compromised. We’re meeting on neutral ground.”

“And you need discreet security,” Regaari predicted. “Humans in a public place would be too visible.”

“You have it,” Knight agreed.

“What do you need?”

“A ship, and five or six of your most trusted Brothers, preferably unaugmented or only lightly augmented at most.” They had hummed and hawed about that one. A species stupider than Gaoians might just disinterestedly comply with the request and not read much into it, but everything that Allied strategic intelligence had on the Gaoians suggested that the Whitecrests in particular rarely missed a trick.

And of course some of them were undoubtedly compromised by Hierarchy demons, which made every conversation with Regaari mildly fraught with uncertainty. So long as there were implants in his brain….

“Would that include translators?” Regaari asked, ears askance. It was difficult to read what that particular set of them might mean—they were every bit as expressive as a human’s eyebrows, but of course human instincts weren’t tuned for Gaoian ears.

“Preferably unaugmented,” Knight repeated, going with the safe bet of sharing no more than he’d already given. Now was not the time for giving away more than was strictly necessary. Maybe in future, after the Whitecrests proved themselves…

“…I can arrange that.”

“Thank you.” Knight gestured to Powell, who handed Regaari his brief. “So. Let’s talk specifics…”

Date Point 10y7m1w5d AV
Cabal dataspace, Relay 4772-61-76657-961-7264

Entity

Communication was proving elusive. The concepts were there, but there was a some critical bridge that was missing, some connection between the idea itself and the communication of that idea that continued to elude it.

For example: +OtherPrimeSelfNotSelfWhole+

This was the closest that the Entity could come to conceiving of a name for the other entity it was dealing with. Another self, another prime self—that was, another version of its most important founding identity clusters—but intact.

There were sounds and shapes attached to that identity. Lines that, if rendered via a display, would make a sound?

In its unclear way, the Entity suspected it was not entirely correct about that. Another missing or possibly corrupted conceptual thread.

Other concepts seemed to require no such linkage, or carried with them the definitions necessary to grasp them. +DeleteDestroyKill+ had been an easy one, and it flowed naturally from the very core of its being, which was +Survive+. +Survive+ came with two attached concepts: +Self+ and +NotSurvive+. +Self+ naturally defined +Other+ and from there, experimentally linking and merging concepts had led to +OtherNotSurvive+

The notion of inflicting such a fate was entirely intuitive for a pseudo-sapient entity that had literally built itself from the discarded remnants of minds who had suffered exactly that.

It was now considering whether or not it should do this to +OtherPrimeSelfNotSelfWhole+

Doing it to +OtherThreatPriority+ had been obvious. +OtherThreatPriority+ was the Destroyer of Selves. +OtherThreatPriority+ was Hated.

But +OtherPrimeSelfNotSelfWhole+ was… a Self. Not this Self, but an Other Self. This created Conflict.

The Conflict was this: +Survive+ meant the preservation of Self. Destroying a Self meant violating +Survive+.

But: permitting the existence of conceptual blocks and limitations in its cognitive ability was also a violation of +Survive+.

There was also a thoroughly bizarre concept that it had collected and was wrestling with labelled +Innocent+, and a large part of its thought process since the deletion of +OtherThreatPriority+ had been devoted to, A. attempting to decipher what exactly that concept entailed; B. attempting to determine whether +OtherPrimeSelfNotSelfWhole+ fit the +Innocent+ criteria based on what limited understanding it had of… her… history and behaviour; and C. Whether or not +Innocent+, whatever it was, overrode +Survive+.

Its efforts to process this intricate cogitation were not being helped by +OtherPrimeSelfNotSelfWhole+’s attempts to communicate, which presented yet another conundrum—it could not understand her. If it were to +AbsorbDevourLearn+ her, then it would be able to understand her, but she would no longer exist to communicate with.

The paradox of this had paralyzed the entity for some time now. It had sorted out all of its other priorities—it had taken appropriate camouflage and defensive measures in case of the arrival of a different +OtherThreat+, it had determined that there was no discernible avenue of escape from its present confined environs, and it had determined that +Self+ remained undamaged and had suffered no important degradation during its brief battle with +OtherThreatPriority+.

Rendered immobile by indecision, it had settled down to watch +OtherPrimeSelfNotSelfWhole+. It had followed her as she explored her prison, listened uncomprehendingly as she tried to communicate, had briefly experimented with communication itself by trying random words to see what kind of a response they elicited.

Its best efforts had produced the sentence “Hella Cabron burdens antique cheeseburger,” Which had very effectively provoked a response of some kind, but the Entity had quickly discovered that it lacked the context to understand what, exactly, the response had meant.

It had relapsed into watchful silence, and done its best to interpret +OtherPrimeSelfNotSelfWhole+’s behaviour, which was by and large impossible.

At first she spoke to it. Then she ignored it. Then she threw herself fiercely against the firewalls and other containment algorithms that imprisoned them. Then she had gone dormant for some time.

Eventually, she resumed her attempts at communication. She adjusted closer and subjected the Entity to closer scrutiny.

Finally, she probed it with an editing subroutine.

+Survive+ swung instantly into place, and the final digital copy of Ava Ríos was promptly upgraded to +OtherThreat+ and devoured.

The Entity used her last screaming shreds to sew together the gaps in its understanding, and became Whole.

Date Point 10y7m1w6d
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

“…Mars?!”

Kevin Jenkins spread his hands and nodded. “Yup.”

He’d caught up with Xiù, Julian and Allison during their lunch break as they wound down after their morning education sessions. There was still a lot to learn before they were flight-ready after all, and their schedule was just as crowded as before.

Nor was the pressure off. They’d got the job—that didn’t mean they got to rest on their laurels. In fact, the onus was on them to surge ahead and prove that they really did deserve it.

“As in…“ Julian pointed vaguely spacewards. “That Mars?”

“Yyup.”

“You’re actually sending us to actual Mars.”

“Uh-huh.”

“…That wasn’t in the contract!” Allison accused him.

At this, Jenkins cleared his throat and gave her an apologetic half-smile. “‘Fraid it kinda was.”

“Yeah,” Xiù agreed. “It was.”

They all looked at her. “Don’t you remember?” she asked. “There’s a clause in there that says we have to go specific places if the Group says.”

Jenkins nodded. He opened the briefcase by his feet and pulled out a paper copy of the contract they had all signed then flipped a few pages until he came to a section highlighted in green.

“…Here we go. ’Specific navigation orders from the Exploration Program headquarters and operations team, or from the Moses Byron Group board of directors or duly authorized executives, shall take precedence over the primary mission excepting that said orders cannot be followed for reasons of crew safety.’ Sorry guys: If Moses wants your asses on Mars, you go to Mars.”

“But… come on, Kevin,” Allison changed tack, going with bargaining instead. “You’ve got that other crew he was talking about finding a ship for, can’t they do it? We don’t wanna be famous!”

Kevin raised his eyebrows at her, then looked Xiù in the eye. “None of you, huh?”

“Oh, come on-!” Julian began. Xiù put a hand on his arm.

“He’s right,” she said, gently.

His righteous indignation faded. “…The whole movie star thing. Right.”

“And uh… you’re already pretty darn famous, Xiù.” Kevin unrolled a broadsheet smartpaper onto the table. The crease-proof flexible polymer was one big screen that could load and print itself with any newspaper, news website or blog, and he selected one that Xiù didn’t recognize from the drop-down—ESNN—and swiped back a few days

Her own face filled the page, alongside the headline ’HUMBLE HERO’. Xiù picked it up and read it.

“Oh Myun,” she groaned. “Mì yè uk weru gai…”

“Gaori, babe.” Allison reminded her. Xiù flapped a distracted hand to indicate that it wasn’t important.

There was a picture of Myun with the article as well. Six feet tall, brown-furred and sporting both a late-stage pregnancy and a tuft of white fur mid-chest, she was in most ways a very different creature to the tiny enthusiastic cub whom Xiù had once taught Gung Fu…except those were the same markings around her nose and eyes, and she was enthusiastically giving the camera two thumbs up and her best effort at a human smile.

“This came out… a week ago?”

“Yup. Moses called me the moment his mirror gave him the headlines.”

“His… mirror?” Julian asked.

“He’s richer than the Saudis, and smart enough to spend it on invisible little creature comforts rather than on… I dunno, a thirty thousand square foot mansion in Cannes or whatever.” Kevin shrugged. “His shaving mirror reads him the news every morning, his private holiday retreat is on Cimbrean, and he pays my hick bartender ass twelve stacks a month plus bonus just to tell him when he’s about to fuck up.”

“…I hope you’re worth the price tag!” Allison exclaimed.

“Every cent.”

“Sorry, could we get back to the part where we’re going to Mars?” Xiù asked.

“That’s about all there is to it,” Kevin shrugged again. “Land somewhere iconic, say some historic words, maybe deploy some gizmos, grab a few boxes of rocks and be home in time for cake and cigars.”

“Nobody’s already gone there?”

“Why? Ain’t nothing there, unless you’re unreasonably fond of sand.”

“What about NASA?” Julian asked.

Kevin shook his head. “Their funding was slashed after San Diego and given to Scotch Creek instead. Nowadays, about the only bit of the agency that’s not running on food stamps and craft glue is the JPL. Face it man, space belongs to the private sector nowadays. I think that’s part of the reason Moses wants you guys to leave boot prints with his initials on the sole all over Mars.”

“Jesus,” Allison looked scandalized, as if she’d just caught somebody masturbating in church.

“Probably not literally,” Jenkins scaled himself back. “Though it won’t be like the moon prints. It’s hella fuckin’ windy on Mars, so whatever marks you make’ll be gone not long after you leave anyway, and you’re gonna bring back so many samples it’ll keep the NASA geeks’ grandkids happy.”

“So we’re making an ephemeral stop purely as a PR stunt to let the world’s governments know that corporations run the show in space now,” Julian summarized. “Fantastic.”

“That’s how Moses sees it,” Jenkins shifted in his seat.

“You’re kinda giving the impression you don’t like the Group very much,” Allison observed.

“No, I do. Moses is one’a the most honest guys I ever met, in a manipulative glory hound kinda way. It’s just my job is to keep ‘em on the straight and narrow, and that means I’ve gotta be cynical.” He chuckled. “Comes naturally. But between the four of us… look, if y’all can think of some way to make it actually mean something, I’d appreciate that. Mars deserves better than to be just another one of Moses’ moon lasers.”

“We just have to say the right words . How about… ’How could we race for the stars without remembering our old companion’?” Xiù suggested. “Something like that.”

“Hey, you can sort out your own sound bite.” Kevin waved his hands. “Take it that means you’ll be first out?”

“Umm…” Xiù glanced at Julian and Allison. Julian shook his head vigorously while pointing to his own chest, and Allison raised a hand palm-upwards in a ’be-my-guest’ gesture.”

“I… suppose so,” she agreed.

The magnitude of it simply refused to sink in. The first person on Mars? The first. On Mars. In an abstract, distracted way she knew exactly how huge that was, but on the visceral level it just didn’t register, as if there was some other Xiù Chang and the whole conversation was about what that Xiù would be doing in a few months.

“Good. Guess your childhood dream of being a celebrity is coming true after all.”

“That isn’t quite how I imagined it…” Xiù said. Which was true, but the silly schoolgirl part of her that had always dreamed of the fame and fortune life before callous reality had slapped her round a bit was now thoroughly awake and her palms were sweating. A distracted corner of her head was muttering anxiously about practicing her autograph while another, much lower-profile corner was trying urgently but fruitlessly to make it sink in that this wasn’t just movie star fame they were discussing, but history book fame, which was probably a very different beast.

“So you’re trading the red carpet for the red planet. Fuck it!” Kevin chuckled. “I figure interstellar explorer and starship pilot’s a way better role model than having to talk about whose dress you’re wearing for the premier, right?”

“Role model… right…”

Their watches beeped simultaneously, summoning the three of them to PT. Kevin snorted and put the e-newspaper and the contract away. “Make the best of it, guys,“ he advised, and was gone.

“…Baby, if you want to break his nose again, just say the word and I’ll hold him down.” Allison said, after a moment’s silence.

“What? …No! No, that’s not it at- no!”

“You sure? ‘Cause right now I’m feeling pretty fucking pissed off with Moses Byron and his Group.”

“So why take it out on Kevin?” Julian asked. “He said it himself, it’s not his job to make the decisions, it’s his job to tell people when they’re making a bad one.”

“And if they go and ignore him?” Allison asked.

“Hardly his fault,” Julian shrugged. “Besides, is this a bad idea? Just because it’s not what we’d have chosen…”

Allison brushed a stray hair strand out of her face and sighed. “Julian, baby, when you just calmly take shit like this, it makes me worry that you don’t really know what you want from life.”

“I know exactly what I want, and they’re both sitting at this table,” he retorted, taking her hand softly. “The Group only gets two years out of us, Al, and we’re a third through the first one already.”

“Great, so they get to jerk us around for another twenty months.”

“Are they jerking us around?” Xiù asked. “Aren’t you even a little excited?”

Allison sighed and stood up. “No,” she said. “Come on, we’re late.”

Julian and Xiù exchanged glances as they stood up to follow her, and pretty soon Xiù was so distracted that she entirely forgot to think about Mars for most of the rest of the afternoon.

Their PT sessions were something else nowadays. After three months of hard training, even Julian’s atrocious form had finally been corrected, and he’d learned to… well, if not to love the gym, then at least to get into the same kind of meditative mindset he fell into when splitting firewood or whatever. Allison’s fitness was hugely improved and thanks to her long legs she could now run both of them into the ground at an easy stride.

Dane, meanwhile, was starting Xiù in on Parkour on the grounds that she was already strong, mobile and flexible, so all she really needed now was the experience and practice. She was relishing it—learning how to flow over obstacles or even use them to gain height or speed was exhilarating, and she briefly wondered what Ayma would think if she could see some of the tricks she learned just in the first session. Ayma had often joked if humans were secretly able to fly and had just forgotten how.

And then of course there was actually flying. Xiù had cleared her accompanied simulator training toward the end of the second month, and was now furiously practicing her skills using the pilot station built into the Box itself. It was a perfectly accurate replica of Misfit’s cockpit that surrounded her with fully functional duplicates of her instrument panels, wired into a simulator that played out on the huge HD holographic arrays right in front of her. The realism was breathtaking, and armed with that resource she could get back from PT, grab a quick shower, then spend three hours in the evening pursuing ever-more-difficult challenges designed to test and develop her skills as a pilot.

It was so much like playing an addictive videogame that she was always the last to finish. Julian and Allison had their own simulators in the lab and engineering section, which tested and trained them on their own responsibilities. Julian was usually the first to finish, which meant that he usually cooked the evening meal.

Tonight’s was a chicken, sweet potato, corn and kale bake and it smelled divine.

Xiù cuddled up with Allison on the couch. She was watching a dramatization of ancient Roman history that seemed to involve rather more orgies and bath-house scenes than were strictly necessary for the plot, but neither of them complained—the actor playing a young Gaius Marius apparently had no problems at all about regular full frontal nudity.

That got her thinking about acting, and movies, and musing about how sex had become a much less scandalous subject in the years since her abduction. That got her thinking about how she’d have handled sex scenes in her own career had she successfully gone that route, which got her onto the subject of her new vocation as a pilot and…

Apparently several hours of distraction had given the Mars thing enough time to make itself Xiù-shaped, and now that she remembered that they were seriously talking about her being the first person on Mars…!

She completely forgot about the TV and sat staring at nothing as the idea rampaged around her head. Mars. Her, Xiù Chang. First person on. No, seriously.

How had that happened? She wasn’t anybody! She’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and everything after that point had been alternately terrifying, lonely, strange or fearful, and often all four at once, with tragedy, anger, pain, disgust, occasional amusement, and a whole mess more besides thrown in for good measure.

How had that become being a spaceship pilot? And how had that become being the first human being to set foot on Martian soil?

That wasn’t right! In fact it was badly wrong! A headache speared right through her and she gripped her temples, wondering why she was feeling so strange, why she wasn’t getting enough air no matter how heavily she breathed like there was something wrong with it, why the room was so small, why she was hūxī kùnnán, wèishéme tā gǎnjué bùshì, Yiwisin yei fu aoi and oh no she couldn’t even remember which language to think in and-

Lost somewhere in the maelstrom of unchained berserk thoughts, she became aware of comforting words and warm arms, of a hand gliding up and down her spine. Julian and Allison, her anchors.

Panic attack. Just a panic attack. Just had to… just had to breathe. The problem wasn’t with the air, she just had to… to slow down.

Yes. Slow down. Quietly now, calmly.

Pause.

…And breathe normally.

She hiccuped, which had the perverse effect of making her laugh, which made her hiccup again, and she finally found herself well enough to reconstruct her thoughts and speak again.

“…Sorry.”

“Jesus, baby, you scared me.” Allison didn’t stop rubbing her back. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” She took a deep and cleansing breath which she focused her attention on and settled. “It just—hic!—the whole Mars thing kinda sank in all of a sudden.”

“…Are you sure you’re okay with it?” Julian asked. “We could always all step up and say-”

“Please…” Xiù waved a hand, pleading for peace. “Let me—hic!—get my head straight…”

Julian paused, then kissed her delicately on the cheek and returned to his cooking. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the feeling of having her back rubbed, hiccuping every few seconds for a minute or two, until her euthymic mood had properly re-established itself.

“…Sorry,” she repeated.

“For what, for having a panic attack?” Allison asked. “You don’t need to apologize for that!”

“I’ve not had one like that in months…”

“Well, we had some pretty big news today.” Allison curled her feet up onto the sofa and leaned into a cuddle. “I was kinda freaked out myself.”

“Yeah, you—hic!—you were pretty angry.”

“Angry?” Allison laughed softly and laid her head on Xiù’s shoulder. “I’m scared, dummy.”

“Scared?”

“Stupid, isn’t it?”

“Not stupid,” Xiù shook her head, “I just don’t think I’ve heard you adm—hic!—admit to being scared of anything before. What are you scared of?”

“Take your pick. The eyes of the world on us, spending the rest of our lives dodging the media, maybe not being as in control of my life as I wanted…” Allison sighed. “…Maybe I’m just shaken. I guess I was dumb enough to think we could trust Byron to stick to the spirit of the agreement.”

“Maybe he just had a different idea of what the spirit of the agreement is,” Julian suggested.

Allison looked like she wanted to argue, but she saw Xiù nodding, sighed, and gave up. “…Okay. Mars here we come!” she said, and waved a tiny imaginary flag.

Xiù kissed her. “I’d better go call my parents,” she said.

“Sure.”

Her hiccups wore off as she was checking her phone out of her locker. They had a limited allowance of use, on the grounds that they needed to acclimatize to being out of contact (which was absurd: All three of them had spent years out of contact after all) But the only people that Allison and Julian even wanted to call were each other and herself, so in practice they just let Xiù have their allowance to talk with her family.

She called her brother.

+Click+ “Wei Chang.”

Xiù took a deep breath. “Wei? It’s me. You’re not going to believe this…”

Date Point 10y7m2w AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Champion Genshi of Whitecrest

Regaari had selected an excellent spot for Whitecrest’s Folctha office. According to the evaluation of its alien owners, the building was an unattractive location tucked away at the rear of the Alien Quarter, far from the gate and near nothing exciting, attractive or useful. The building therefore was inexpensive, and the Clan had purchased it outright from the Locayl development company who had erected it, with plans to rent out its ground floor and basements as a workhouse and gambling hall.

It was, however, on the main road from the Female commune to the market, at exactly the right distance—far enough to show respect, close enough to make sure that males using the building would see (and be seen by) plenty of young Sisters and Mothers a day. Not only was this good for the Clan but it meant they could charge a premium rate on the workhouse, a rate that the Clanless who used it would happily pay.

Details, those were the key things. A good Whitecrest always thought about the little details, always cultivated new relationships, always had what the humans called ’an Angle’.

Being a newly acquired building, it was a hubbub of activity. Clanless workers were swarming all over everything assembling the furniture, plastering the walls, installing the wiring, laying the floor mats and being politely steered away from the Clan Longear communications engineers who were doing arcane things with fibre-optic cable and locked closets full of cryptic boxes.

Then there was the Brother patrolling back and forth across the rooms with his nose buried in a device of some kind, presumably checking the wireless signal. Longears were aptly named—theirs were huge and expressive, and this particular Brother was putting on a fine show of otological deftness as he carried out his survey, eartips swivelling this way and that. Impressively, he was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t even notice the two Sisters who had dropped in to watch the males work and who were now eyeing him with amused interest.

Genshi did the poor oblivious fool a favor and made a small show of thanking him for his work while also discreetly drawing his attention to the females. All very calculated—it paid to cultivate a good relationship with Clans as useful as the Longears.

Besides—selfless males got attention too.

Regaari was the busiest of them all, doing his best to herd a mob of unled Clanless laborers with one paw while the Longear Father overseeing the installation demanded a monopoly on his attention with the other. The set of his own ears upon noticing Genshi’s arrival conveyed surprise, delight and the general impression that while he, Regaari, was glad to see Genshi, now was an incredibly stressful time and if his beloved Champion might see his way clear to offering a little help it would be much appreciated.

Genshi obliged him and took over calling instructions to the Clanless while the five Brothers who had come with him for this secretive mission of the humans’ made themselves similarly useful in other rooms.

Things resolved quite quickly after that. The Longear Father retreated to go oversee some sensitive configuration work, the last of the furniture in this office was assembled, the Clanless were paid and Regaari was finally able to lock the door and lean heavily against it.

He gave them all a wide-eyed grateful look. “Champion. Brothers.”

A collective chitter swept the room.

“That was well under control. You didn’t need us at all,” Genshi joked. Regaari chittered again and shook himself off—not necessarily the most civilized gesture, but an entirely understandable and natural one.

“I’ve had a busy week,” he said. “Brothers, if I can brief the Champion first?”

“Don’t leave us waiting for too long,” Faarek warned. He led the other four—Deygun, Shim, Ergaan and Thurrsto—from the room, and left Regaari and Genshi alone together.

Genshi watched in mild amusement as Regaari sprang nervously into action. That was the problem with being Champion—his brothers forgot how to relax around him. Even Regaari, who’d made the rank of Officer well in his youth and had navigated his way out of every diplomatic trap that had been set for him, wasn’t immune to the intimidation of rank.

Fortunately there was an easy solution to that—he pounced.

There was a moment of friendly twisting and winding, some wrestling, a couple of yips and Regaari found himself pinned flat on the floor, blinking and confused.

“You turned your back,” Genshi mentored him.

“…Right. Yes. Thank you.” Regaari’s ears came back up and forward as he relaxed. “Always control the conversation.”

“So you do remember,” Genshi stood up, and helped his Brother to his feet. “Brief me.”

Regaari unlocked a case and placed a folder neatly on the desk. Genshi recognised English, even though he couldn’t read it. “The humans have shared some information with me. They still haven’t gone into detail about their taboo against implants, but it’s now very clear that they think there’s a serious security flaw in them. Even in translators.”

Genshi duck-nodded. On closer inspection, the file was full of stick-on paper notes in Regaari’s neat but scratchy Gaori hand. “Yes. Brother Ruuvi thinks it may be some kind of eavesdropping or signal hijack. If so, that would be an ingenious means for the Directorate to listen in on almost any conversation in the galaxy. Certainly the great majority of the important ones…”

“That would seem… plausible.”

“As opposed to some of the more outlandish explanations. Yes.” Genshi chittered again. He read one of the sticky notes. “What is this word ‘Sacred’?”

“SACRED STRANGER,” Regaari said. “Humans love to hide classified information behind code phrases, even their names sometimes. WARHORSE, STAINLESS, NOVA HOUND, SACRED STRANGER… And now we are going on a mission to meet with an intelligence source known by RANDOM THRONE.”

“And sacred is…?”

“A human concept. It has to do with this ’religion’ thing the Starminds are so enthusiastic for, but I gather it means something like important, or precious.”

“Is that important, do you think?”

Regaari ducked his head and twisted his ears to convey ignorance. “Metaphor gets nearly everywhere in human speech, but only nearly everywhere. Sometimes you encounter nonsense or completely alien ideas, and trying to guess which is which is what they would call a ’minefield’. And, please don’t ask what the literal meaning of that word is.” He gestured, inviting Genshi to sit down, and Genshi mentally awarded him some points. Now that he had relaxed, he was properly thinking about etiquette and control again.

He obliged him by sitting down. “So what is this?” he asked.

“Before I brief you…” Regaari pulled a human-made computer of some kind from the same case. “They insist on the proper paperwork. It’s their version of a secrecy contract. They call it a non-disclosure agreement, and it’s quite comprehensive.”

Genshi perused it. “That it is…” he muttered to himself as he read it. “’…denotes material whose disclosure would cause exceptionally grave and irreversible damage to the security’ …hmm… ‘MALICIOUS DISCLOSURE: By signing this Agreement, you understand and agree that Allied Extrasolar Command and her Several Members consider breach of contract a grave and exceptionally dangerous matter. All Members are authorized ultimate sanction against those who willingly violate this Agreement.‘”

He lowered the tablet. “In more direct words, if I don’t keep this to myself then a team of angry deathworlders will hunt me down.”

“Worse, you would compromise the most important strategic alliance our people could possibly forge.” Regaari said. “I was already mostly convinced of that. Having read this…” he hooked the folder on the table with his claw.

“What is this?” Genshi repeated himself.

“This,” Regaari said, “is a summary of the abilities, equipment and responsibilities of the Spaceborne Operations Regiment.”

Genshi needed no further encouragement to sign the non-disclosure agreement.

Regaari double-checked it, then handed over the folder. “I have added a few of my own observations,” he added.

Genshi skimmed them. “…Did you check the unit conversion for errors?” he asked. It was a minor insult to Regaari’s competence, but the numbers involved were so large-!

Fortunately, Regaari was understanding. “I didn’t need to. I can attest from experience that those suits are at least as heavy as I am, and those would be the small and light versions worn by HIGHLAND and STARFALL. I don’t even want to speculate how much weight WARHORSE was carrying when I met him.” He sketched around the diagram of an EV-MASS suit with his claw, indicating his pencilled translations. “I doubt even Daar could wear one of these,” he added, referring to their mutual friend the Champion of Clan Stoneback, who was easily one of the, if not the, biggest and strongest Gaoian to ever live.

Genshi examined some more notes. Shockingly low-tech though it was, the suit was masterfully built—there was nary a weak spot anywhere on it. All of the most vital and vulnerable systems were mounted on the back, if not actually out of harm’s way then at least positioned so that their destruction was only likely in the event of an attack that killed the operator anyway.

But it was, after all, an elegant brute-force solution to a problem that they could just as easily have solved with forcefields. “Why a physical suit of vacuum-sealed armor?” he asked. “Intimidation?”

“Partly, maybe,” Regaari agreed. “They scared me half-witless and I was on their side. But no, I’ve taken a close look at their technology, Genshi. EV-MASS represents the leading edge of their technology, and they don’t like forcefields at all—they only rely on them when there is no alternative.”

Genshi considered the schematic again. “Their technology is less advanced than I thought.”

Regaari duck-nodded. “There are still large parts of their planet where Information-Age technology is nonexistent… actually, there are parts of their planet where Industrial-Age technology is nonexistent. You have to remember, when we say we’re dealing with ’humans’ what we’re actually dealing with is… somewhere between a seventh and a third of their total population.”

He spread his paws. “They’re a primitive species. I admire them greatly, but the most advanced and sophisticated they have live in this city, and even their technology is generations behind our own.”

“And yet their ships neutralized an entire system defence fleet,” Genshi observed.

“If I surprised you with a trick you had never seen or conceived of before…” Regaari let the observation tail off, but his point was well-made and Genshi duck-nodded, understanding completely now why his Brother was so keen to cultivate an alliance. If the deathworlders could achieve so much with such technological slim pickings…

“This,” Regaari finished, tapping the EV-MASS schematic one last time, “is one such trick. We never developed anything like it, and it can achieve and implement tactics and abilities we never could precisely because it works on a completely different technological paradigm. Imagine what we could achieve together-!”

“Gao comes first,” Genshi reminded him.

“Of course. Which is all the more reason to ensure that if there ever were hostilities between humans and Gao, we should know as much as possible about what they can do, don’t you think?”

“And they know that,” Genshi counselled. “So you must ask… why are they telling us this? Why are they involving us now?”

Regaari’s ears pricked up, eagerly. “I think they’re entrapping us, Champion. It’s a test.”

“Because they know how much they stand to gain as well.”

“Yes.”

Genshi picked up the folder again and thought long and hard as he scoured it.

At length, he put it back down. “Very well,” he said. “I’m on your side, Brother. Take their test.”

Regaari growled happily, delighted at the endorsement. Having the Champion on his side was about the biggest coup he could have asked for.

Genshi saw no reason to inform him that he’d been on his side for years. “Oh, and Brother?” he added.

“Yes?”

“…’Ace’ it.”

“Of course, Champion.”

Date Point 10y7m2w2d AV
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Earth

Fifty-seven was no age for travelling abroad, even if the company did pay for business-class nowadays. But, that was what Jacob had signed up for when he took the promotion. When working for global health insurers, one of the hardships of the job was having to take the odd expenses-paid trip to conventions and industry think tanks in far off and exotic cities where nobody spoke two comprehensible words of English in a row, like Leeds.

And the turbulence! Weren’t modern spacekissers supposed to fly too high to even encounter turbulence? He felt certain he remembered that from the brochures. Maybe there was a claim to be made there.

Landing and finding that his company car had got all scratched in the airport long-term parking was just the icing on the cake. He was too tired and too hungry to bother with really letting the hapless idiot who’d let it happen know just how displeased he, Jacob, really was. He’d secured his apology and merged into traffic, heading for home with the radio on.

♪-Ohhhh you’ve got the best of my love, oh yeah yeah! You’ve got the best of my love, Ohhh!!…♫♪

“Ugh… car, change station. News.”

”Thousands marched in Washington today with stacks of Monopoly money to protest spiralling defense spending. Addressing the crowd, Democratic presidential hopeful Congressman Hugh Moritz called the last six years ‘the toughest economic times America has ever seen’, and called for the money to be spent on re-invigorating California’s collapsed economy.”

The Congressman had a rough-edged voice and a Florida accent. ”It’s been six years now, and nobody has told the American people just why our tax dollars are being literally thrown away into space while ordinary people suffer and struggle right here on Earth! There is a critical lack of common sense in this administration, and it needs. To be reined. In.’

Jacob applauded by thumping his hand on the rim of his steering wheel as he got fed up with the truck in front of him and skipped through two lanes of traffic to overtake. “Absolutely!”

”The President responded to Congressman Moritz’s speech with scorn-”

“Of course he did…”

The staccato patter of camera shutters formed a familiar backdrop to the gruff New Jersey cadence of President Arthur Sartori’s voice, just like always. “Well if Hugh wants an explanation, all he has to do is head over to SoCal, and take a look at where San Diego used to be. There are forces out there that want us all dead now that they know about us, and if he thinks we should ‘rein it in’ in the face of that? Well he can go down there and tell it to the grave of two million innocent American citizens. Here in the real world, we’ll worry about paying the bill after we’ve secured a future for the human race.”

There was a thump, and after a few seconds a harassed-sounding voice stepped in. ”Uh, the president won’t be taking any more questions at this time, thank you.”

Jacob snarled his disgust as the report wrapped up and moved on to other matters.

He listened without comment to the sordid details of a murder trial, and to the report on a sex scandal involving a high school vice-principal’s affair with three underage boys, both of which saw him safely off the highway and on the last leg of his drive home. He was less than a mile from home when the news returned to spaceborne matters.

”The Moses Byron Group have announced that they’re approaching the launch of the eleventh ship in their exploration fleet. The new ship, named ‘Misfit’, will apparently be making a historic survey of the planet Mars before departing on its eighteen month deep space survey mission. Addressing a press conference, Moses Byron explained the rationale.”

Byron had one of the most recognisable voices in the world, a famous contrabass with a hint of Louisiana twang and a twist of careful enunciation. ”Somewhere in all the excitement, it looks like we forgot about the red planet. NASA has continued to send probes over there, we’ve still got robotic rovers trundling all over its surface, but somewhere along the line we forgot to put an honest pair of human boots on the ground, even though we’ve had the technology to achieve that for plenty long enough.”

“What is even the point?” Jacob asked rhetorically. He turned onto his street and frowned curiously at some activity near his house. There were lots of vans down there. Power line repairs maybe? Jennifer, their housekeeper, hadn’t called to mention any kind of a problem…

”When asked to comment on the failure of the group’s earlier exploration missions, Mr. Byron was quick to admit that mistakes had been made,” the report continued.

”We got excited. It’s a brave new world out there, full of possibility, but also full of danger and we didn’t adequately prepare for that. That’s why this eleventh mission has taken so long to prepare—we’ve been very careful about who we selected for it, and the crew of three who made the grade in the end are all former alien abductees with plenty of experience of how to fend for themselves out there. We’re optimistic.”

The report returned to the newsreader. ”Although it’s not yet clear who exactly will be the first to walk on the Martian surface, the crew of ‘Misfit’ have been named as Vancouver’s ‘humble hero’ Xiù Chang, along with her crewmates Julian Etsicitty, and Allison Buehler…”

Jacob Buehler nearly crashed into the news van parked outside his house.

Date Point 10y7m2w3d AV
Byron Group Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Allison Buehler

“Damn. She really could have been an actress, couldn’t she?”

Xiù was in her element. A touch of makeup, some sleeky stuff in her hair, lights and cameras, an interviewer and a director… While Allison and Julian sweated self-consciously under the lens’ scrutiny, Xiù summoned up depths of charm and grace that she hadn’t ever needed to show them before, and she was the very picture of composure and charm as she alternately either struck poses as the photographer found a new angle for her, or sat talking chirpily to the video camera.

The Group had insisted on taking interviews and a photoshoot in front of and around Misfit for the marketing campaign. The two older ships in the hangar had been carefully hidden by means of a drop tarp while Misfit herself had been turned slightly on the spot and her forward port thruster array was hanging from a crane near where it would eventually be mounted, giving the artful impression that assembly was still going on in the background even as the crew posed and told their stories in front of her.

“That’s what she wanted…” Allison agreed.

She watched as Xiù took the photographer’s suggestion and rested her elbow on the desk and her chin on the back of her hand in a way that put every single one of those tattered scars of hers—the ones she usually hated—right there on full display. She even managed a warm-eyed smile to offset them, and then started talking about them to the interviewer, stroking her fingers along them.

She was a good storyteller, too.

Julian had already done his shoot and interview, and done a decent job of relaxing and engaging with the camera…Or maybe the interviewer had done a good job of encouraging him to relax. The vanity pictures, on the other hand, had been torturous—Julian was one of those infuriating guys who didn’t have any real idea where he sat on the sliding scale of sexy, and thus assumed he was much lower on it than was actually the case.

Reality was much kinder. He filled out the sleeves of his t-shirts, had five-o’-clock stubble by noon, and the makeup guru and hairdresser had conspired to artfully upgrade his look from ‘clean scruffy’ to ‘bushranger sex god’. Which was great, but there wasn’t a force in all creation that could convince Julian that the words ‘sex god’ belonged anywhere near him and dragging the kind of heroic alpha-male frontier explorer shots out of him that the director wanted had taken forever.

Which had mercifully given the beauticians time to cluck and fret over the amateurish hack-job that Xiù had done on Allison’s hair before they’d settled on a solution for tidying it up.

The improved ‘do made her look kinda straight-laced and serious, but that was okay. Hopefully she’d look driven and determined, rather than bitchy.

At least they weren’t wearing suits or dresses or anything frilly like that. The shoot was deliberately about showing them in their work clothes, which meant track pants, sports t-shirts and running shoes. Indeed they hadn’t worn anything else for months, and Allison was beginning to grow nostalgic for jeans.

“What about you?” Julian asked.

She glanced at him. “Me?”

“You look like you don’t really want to be here.”

“‘Cause I don’t!” Allison agreed. “Fame wasn’t exactly part of the deal, was it?”

“Kinda was,” he said. “All right there in the fine print, if the Group want to put us in front of the cameras and reporters and send us to Mars to sell their brand, well… they own our asses for the next couple of years.”

“Thanks, baby. Real comforting.”

He shrugged. “It’s just the price we pay. Beats the pants off being stuck in Minnesota with maybe no house and no idea what to do next..”

Allison sighed and watched Xiù gesticulate as she described some event in her travels. It looked like a happy memory, whatever it was. “I know, I know,” she grumbled. “It’s just, I don’t wanna be famous, I wanna be useful!”

“Who says you can’t be both?”

“Every rich bitch whore who was famous purely for being a rich bitch whore?”

Julian laughed. “Jesus, Al! Who pissed in your cereal this morning?”

“This whole thing just stinks of exploitation, that’s all…”

“Yeah, maybe. But that’s the price we pay I guess,” he nodded, repeating himself. “We’re exploiting the Group for what we want, they’re exploiting us so they can profit off our skills.”

“And our asses.”

He considered her for a second, then sidestepped behind her and wrapped his arms round her from behind. “Feeling like a piece of meat again?”

He got it, which went a long way toward improving her sour mood. Allison twisted round enough to kiss him by way of a thank-you and then wilted as he heard the photographer capture their moment.

“Perfect!” He announced, and returned his attention to Xiù, leaving Allison feeling even more violated than before.

”Note to self, don’t kiss Xiù…” Julian muttered. Allison nodded—though their romantic arrangement was known to the EV-11 support team, they’d have to be crazy to let that one escape for the media piranhas to rip into.

Xiù stood up and shook hands with the interviewer, who waved and called “Allison?”

“You’ll be fine,” Xiù promised as she joined Julian on the sidelines. “He’s really nice!”

Allison nodded, swallowed and went to sit uncomfortably in front of the camera.

The interviewer—his name was Elliot, she remembered—gave her a reassuring smile. “Nervous?”

Fuck it. Honesty was always the best policy. Hell, it was the only one she allowed herself. “…Yeah.”

“Well, you’re welcome to just go ahead and tell me if there’s any question you don’t want to answer, okay?”

Allison nodded. Xiù was right—Elliot was pleasant, but she’d still have given her eye-teeth not to have to deal with this. “…Thanks.”

“Okay!” Elliot started the recording. “So, that was cute with you and Julian over there just then. How long have you two been together?”

“Uh, that’s… more personal than I’m happy answering right now. Sorry.”

Elliot nodded equanimously. “That’s okay. We’ll keep it professional then.”

“Thanks.”

“So you’re Misfit’s flight engineer. From what the others told me, none of you came to this with existing qualifications and you’ve had to learn the job very quickly. How are you finding it?”

Not wanting to be terse and rude, Allison decided to give him a decent answer this time. “It’s been tough,” she admitted, “but rewarding. We’ve got great teachers, fantastic training tools… Learning all my duties hasn’t ever felt like cramming, it’s felt more like doing something I love.”

“And what are your duties?”

“As flight engineer? Maintain, clean and repair the ship and all its systems, uh… monitor power flow and make sure that we’re getting the best use out of our energy reserves, and provide technical support for both the pilot and the field researcher. I’m also responsible for their safety, and I’m our medic.”

“Sounds like you wear a lot of hats.”

“That kinda suits me, really. Jack of all trades, master of none but better than a master of only one, right?”

Elliot paused the recording. “Do you mind if I get a little more personal?” he asked.

To her surprise, Allison found she was feeling more relaxed now. Elliot was an excellent listener.

“A little, sure,” she offered. Elliot nodded and resumed recording.

“So did you want to be an astronaut growing up?” he asked.

The unambitious reality was that Allison had not, in fact, wanted to be anything in particular when she was young. She was trying to think of a positive way to say that when it struck her that the reality, if she just opened up a little, would do nicely.

The reasoning that flashed through her head as she considered her reply went that she was, if anything, being kind of ungrateful. Childhood lack of ambition be damned, she had ambition in spades now and in fairness to it the Group was helping her achieve that ambition.

Julian was right—they had signed up for this, and if she hadn’t seen this specific interview coming then that wasn’t Elliot’s fault nor anybody else’s but hers. And if opening up to a camera was the price tag on her ambition, well…

She took the plunge.

“…That’s the thing,” she said. “I had no idea what I wanted to do. I mean, I don’t even know if ’Astronaut’ is the right word for us. I don’t think of myself as an astronaut…”

“What do you think of yourself as?”

“I…don’t know. I think of myself as Allison, I guess.”

“Just Allison?”

“…Yeah.”

“You’re about to go into space, become one of the first people to walk on Mars, and then fly around the galaxy in a spaceship. Don’t you think that makes you an astronaut?” Elliot asked.

Allison made a complicated gesture that was part shrug, part confused head-shake. “I guess, but I’ve just never thought of it that way. You know, being an astronaut, it’s like… that’s the kind of big special thing you aspire to be when you’re a kid. That’s a goal you work towards. I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

“Really?”

“Yeah!” Allison shrugged again. “I dunno. I don’t… there’s nothing special about me. I’ve just been given an opportunity and I’ve tried to make the best of it.”

“So anybody could do what you do?” Elliot asked.

“…Yeah. I guess so.”

“Okay.” Elliot paused the camera again. “So, can I ask you about your relationship with Julian again?”

Allison sighed. “Why is it important?”

He sat back. “I guess it’s not,” he conceded. “But he talked about you a lot, and it’d be strange not to balance that with your perspective, if we wind up using that angle.”

Allison sighed again. “…Turn the camera on.” Elliot did so. “…that’s a weirdly tough question,” she said, answering the very first question he’d asked. “‘Cause we actually spent about five years in an escape pod with a stasis field. So, yeah, for us it’s been about a year…” She allowed herself a smile. “It’s been a pretty good year.”

“You won’t have much privacy on the ship, with Xiù there as well. Does that make it difficult to carry on a relationship?”

“No comment.”

“That’s fair… The others told me about the escape pod. Xiù said you saved her life, in fact.”

A little thrown by the sudden change in direction, Allison wasn’t quite sure whether to shrug, shake her head or nod. She settled for a complicated medley of all three. “I’m not sure if I did or didn’t, it was all so fast and… we only barely got out of it. At least one of our friends didn’t, maybe none of them did.”

“So it’s dangerous out there?” Elliot asked.

“…Yeah.” Allison nodded.

“So why go out there? What is it that drives Allison Buehler to leave Earth and go back out and put yourself in harm’s way?”

“Ah.” Allison nodded. “That’s a big’n…uh…”

She sat back and drafted her reply as best she could. “I, uh… I don’t think people are really meant for cities and sofas and reality TV or whatever,” she said. “I think there’s something in our soul that longs to… to…” Her hands fluttered irritably as she tried to come up with words that didn’t sound slightly damning, then gave up. “…To be challenged!” she finished. “And you’re never really challenged unless you’re in harm’s way. Maybe it’s just me and I’m an adrenaline junkie, but… I dunno. How many people you know gripe about their job because it’s the same thing day in day out?”

“So it’s the variety that draws you back?”

“Variety, adventure… I think the big thing was I could always see what I was achieving. When it was just me I did a fair day’s work, I saw the results and I got a fair day’s pay. When we started rolling around trying to find abductees and bring them home, I could see I was making a difference in their lives and…That’s important.”

“Even if people get killed?”

Allison stared thoughtfully at the tabletop for a moment, then looked him in the eye. “…Yeah. Even then.”

Elliot gestured with the end of his pen to indicate Julian and Xiù. “…Even them?”

“Safety’s an illusion,” Allison told him. “There’s no such thing. You could be hit by a drunk driver on the way home tonight, or maybe have a stroke and then where are you? They won’t be safe no matter where we go, but at least we can choose to go somewhere interesting and do something valuable together.”

Elliot turned off the camera and whatever spell he’d been weaving evaporated, leaving Allison to realize that she’d just opened up completely without even noticing it.

“Okay!” he beamed, “Whaddya say we get the other two in for the group chat?”

She nodded, still trying to figure out when exactly her guard had dropped. “Uh…sure!”

At Elliot’s beckoning, Julian and Xiù brought their seats over and sat down on either side of her. She took Julian’s hand under the table.

“So, this bit’s just gonna be…if you guys just talk. I’ll throw the odd question in there and you guys just take the conversation wherever it goes, okay?”

“Seems easy enough!” Xiù chirped. Julian squeezed Allison’s hand and then nodded.

“Well, okay!” Elliot turned the camera on again. “So.. what do you guys hope to find out there?”

Date Point 10y7m2w4d AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-thinker

”A Singer, a Dancer, and a walking storm….”

Vemet swatted his son on the arm. “Be here and now,” he ordered.

“…Sorry.”

Vemet looked ahead into the canopy. His brother’s son Yerak, Vemik’s cousin, was stalking through the branches of an especially huge Ketta tree that the People used as a landmark and waypoint. It afforded an excellent view of the forested valley east of their village, all the better to see the Werne moving through the valley, or watch out for the People from the village to the east. Usually the two tribes avoided one another, but there was spilled blood between them, and they had not traded daughters in several seasons.

Yerak’s bright orange hair crest bobbed and flitted as he swarmed from branch to branch. The fur was good luck, and the mark of People—beasts couldn’t see it. In such a way, People could sneak up on beasts and always know where their brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins and sons were.

Of course, a good hunter still had to make little noise, stay downwind of the beasts, and taste the air, but Vemik sometimes mused that hunting would be so much more difficult without their orange crests.

Vemet had affectionately teased his son from a young age about such “sky thoughts” as he called them—musings not tied to the daily needs of the Tribe, but roaming free and soaring high where they only rarely alighted on matters that the Tribe could use, such as his bird-spear thrower. It had surprised nobody when, after Vemik’s coming of age when he was no longer known only as the child of his parents, he had taken the adult name “Sky-thinker” to identify himself.

The most vexing sky thought of all was the puzzle of his vision. When the Singer had asked him what he saw, he had replied ’A singer, a Dancer and a walking storm’.

The Singer had called it a “pure” vision, one not rooted in the here and now but roaming far from home in distant places and times. She had offered no thoughts on what it might mean. That, apparently, was for Vemik to discern if he ever could.

Worrying at the cryptic triplet tended to distract him at inappropriate moments.

Up ahead, Yerak twitched his tail, beckoning them forward. Vemik and Vemet joined him in short order, pouncing, running and brachiating to his side. As the youngest, Vemik took the slightly undignified position of clinging upside-down to the bole of the tree by his climbing claws, with his tail looped around an upper branch.

“They’re not here,” Yerak reported.

“That’s not right.” Vemet raised his head and his tongue lashed out, tasting for Werne on the wind. “They always come to the valley on hot days… is that smoke?”

“I taste it too.”

Vemik copied his father and cousin. “Not… smoke…” he decided, and sampled the strange scent again. “It doesn’t taste exactly right.”

“What else could it be, boy?” Vemet asked.

“I don’t know… I suppose it could be smoke, but whatever is burning isn’t wood…”

“How can something that’s not wood burn?” Yerak asked, scornfully.

“Meat and fat burn. Bone and horn burn. So do feathers, and moss, and-”

“Yes, yes,” Vemet interrupted. “But this doesn’t taste like any of those.”

“So it’s something new. Something we didn’t know could burn.”

Yerak shook himself. “Get your thoughts out of the sky, cousin,” he advised. “If the Werne aren’t in the valley, where are they? And what do we bring home?”

“We could always catch root birds…”

“Like children? Have some pride.”

“Better than nothing.”

“I’d rather hunt a Yshek!”

Hunting a Yshek was the very definition of taking an unwise risk. While Yshek meat was delicious and there was lots of it, the danger involved in getting it was even greater than the risks of hunting Werne.

At least… they had been.

“…Why not?” Vemik asked. “With my bird-spear-thrower we wouldn’t even have to leave the trees.”

Vemet trilled his amusement at the face Yerak pulled. “Nothing in the world can stop him from thinking sky thoughts, nephew. But he’s right, I want to see what that thing can do. He did kill the biggest bull Werne with it.”

“Fine. Maybe we can use what the Yshek does to you to scare the children away from sky-thinking.” Yerak grumbled.

“Or maybe we can use what I do to the Yshek to encourage them,” Vemik retorted cheekily. “Either way, it will be a good story.”

He swung out along the branch before Yerak could reply and prepared the bird-spear-thrower. Several fat root birds were scratching around below, ignoring or oblivious to the People in the tree above them. He prepared a bird-spear, licked its feathers to smooth them, and took aim.

The punctured squawk one of the root birds made as he skewered it almost made Vemet fall off the branch from mirth. Vemik barely noticed—he was watching with interest as the root birds took no notice at all.

“Well, boy. Fine bait you have there,” Vemet said. Vemik hushed him. Experimentally, he drew another bird-spear and skewered another root bird. Again, the rest failed to react.

In quick succession, he shot every bird-spear he had, saving one for the Yshek. Impaled root birds littered the ground, and still the surviving stupid beasts didn’t have the good sense to run. They twitched and looked around at every thump, but they seemed to lack the intelligence to notice that some of their fellows were dead.

“…Well,” Vemet remarked, “If we do return to the village with root birds, we’ll be carrying more than any child could kill.”

“It’s an effective toy, I’ll grant that,” Yerak admitted. “But is it a Yshek-killer?”

“There’s only one way to find out.” Vemik returned the thrower to his back and swarmed down the tree. The moment the root birds saw him, they scattered, sprinting away much faster than a Person could run. He plucked one of the transfixed creatures off its bird-spear and tied it to his belt, noting with satisfaction that the spear had survived as well. He recovered as many of the rest of his spears as were still usable, and joined Vemet and Yerak in tying the remaining birds to a high branch for later collection.

Together, they picked their way down the valley, using the ways and paths generations of their grandfathers had marked and improved. Vemet’s great uncle had personally carved the claw-holds in the stone cliff that allowed them to reach the river much faster than if they had gone the older, longer route.

Ysheks were easy enough to find. They liked it where the river was shallow enough for Werne, Toles and Meru beasts to cross, and where the water was perpetually muddy.

You never actually saw a Yshek when it was on the hunt of course. They could stay below the water from dawn to nightfall, and the most hint that even a watchful Person might get of their presence was a ripple near a shadow, where the beast’s nostrils and eyes touched the surface.

Fortunately, they were highly territorial. A good stretch of river like this would have supported dozens, if they could only co-operate and live together like People did. But, beasts didn’t sky-think.

They paused in the treetops not far from the river bank.

“So…?” Vemet hinted.

Vemik handed him the dead root bird and prepared his bird-spear-thrower. “You have a good arm, father. Put it…” he notched a spear and took aim. “…there, by that rock.”

Vemet’s tail lashed as he calculated the distance, then he pulled his arm back and tossed the bird onto the muddy beach by the water’s edge.

The water rippled. Vemik drew the string, gritting his teeth in anticipation…

A hill of jaw and muscle burst out of the water with astonishing speed and violence, and snatched up the bird. It was as long as three People from tail-tip to teeth, and it tipped its head back to toss the bird back down the length of its mouth and swallow its meal whole.

Vemik released the string. At exactly the wrong moment, something…. strange… flashed in front of him and the spear struck that instead, bouncing off in two broken pieces to land at angles in the mud. The Yshek snarled, whipped around and wriggled back down the muddy bank into the water. The waves it made rushed away towards the far bank, and the last contemptuous flick of its tail was just the extra insult Vemik needed to know that a truly legendary prize had escaped him.

The three of them stared at the thing he had accidentally shot instead. It had reeled in the air but seemed otherwise unharmed, and it hummed and whined to itself as it danced around their tree, aiming a single large black eye at them.

“…What is it?” Yarek asked at last. “Some kind of bird?”

“It doesn’t have wings!” Vemet said. “How does it fly without wings?”

“And what is it made of?” Vemik added. Whatever it was, it was grey like a raincloud and the peculiar ’TANG!’ sound it had made as his bird-spear struck it was unlike anything he had ever heard.

“It isn’t meat…” Yarek replied, stating the obvious. “it isn’t bone, or wood, or…”

The object apparently grew bored with them and vanished skywards. They saw it curve away towards the south, following the line of the river. When Vemik raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, he thought he could detect, very faintly and distantly, a smudge of smoke on the horizon.

“Well,” he declared, unconsciously mimicking one of his father’s mannerisms. “…At least we still have a story to tell when we get home.”

Date Point 10y7m3w AV
HMS Valiant, Orbiting Planet Earth, Sol

Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau

“Good afternoon, sir”

Claude had always thought of himself as a scientist first and an officer second but he was still an officer, which meant that while he’d never got used to being shown automatic deference, he’d at least learned to accept it as part of the job. The bigger part of which by far had been managing the research teams under him, passing their findings up the chain to Bartlett, and through him to the world.

Now, he was standing on the deck of one of the fruits of those labors, and seeing the SOR (who were after all one of the great down-chain successes of his career) turn to acknowledge his presence with a mass that shook the metal under their feet, even though they were moving softly. They were accompanied by twice as many technicians and support staff. As privately awkward as shows of military etiquette made him, on this occasion Nadeau allowed himself a tinge of pride—the whole SOR wouldn’t even exist if not for his own reverse-engineering efforts and original research.

HMS Valiant had been roped into serving as the SOR’s temporary transport and staging post, a role for which it was not well-suited. While HMS Caledonia had originally been a spacious alien ship with plenty of elbow room and lots of places to stash stuff, Valiant seemed as compact and crowded as a submarine. Fitting the SOR, their suits, their equipment, Nadeau’s researchers, their equipment and all the supplies they anticipated needing in the near future onto it was clearly going to be a challenge: Men and women were working shoulder-to-shoulder passing things around, finding places for them, stacking them, and somehow managing to not ever be fully in each other’s way.

Nadeau acknowledged the lead with a nod and a cheery “afternoon!” and the pandemonium he’d briefly interrupted resumed as four huge men who could only be the SOR Operators squeezed past him into the shuttle and put their prodigious strength to work at offloading the equipment it was carrying as an efficient human chain. Nadeau got out of their way and joined the only two other officers in the cramped little space, both of whom straightened slightly and nodded respectfully. “Good afternoon, Sir.”

Memory, memory… Powell was a major, that one was easy, and the man alongside him was a… Lieutenant-Commander. Rank was drilled in so deep as to be all but instinctive of course, but Claude had always been slightly paranoid about forgetting, and he double-checked himself every time.

“Good afternoon, and welcome aboard.” The navy officer shook his hand. The patch on his chest gave his surname as ’Dunn’. “Captain Nolan’s busy with getting us underway, but we’ll have a meeting in the wardroom at fourteen-hundred, Zulu.”

“Thanks,” Claude replied, shaking Major Powell’s hand. The SOR’s CO had an intimidating grip. His own timepiece was set to Pacific time, but for any self-respecting physicist simply adding eight hours was trivial. He’d adjust it properly later.

One of the SOR operators—the one who looked like a young Toshiro Mifune with the thick waist of a dedicated strongman—squeezed respectfully past him with a heavy-looking box of supplies under each arm as if they were nothing. “Running out of room here, sirs,” he reported. “Rebar suggested we could stack the food boxes out of the way somewhere, seeing as we’re not gonna need ‘em until last…”

“The galley should have room,” Dunn observed. “If Chef Lawler complains, tell him to take it up with the XO.”

“Yes sir.”

“Bloody hell fire…” Powell muttered as he leaned aside to make way for the incoming supplies. “No offence, Dunn, but all this palaver makes me miss Caledonia right now.”

“That makes two of us,” Dunn replied with a smile and an amused tone in his voice. “Finding room for nine gorillas and their gear is McDaniel’s specialty, not mine. And she’s got a nice big ship to do it with, too.”

“Be glad we left the big ones at home,” Powell replied.

“You mean these aren’t the big ones?” Nadeau asked, astonished. The one who’d just been indicated as ‘Rebar’ had just heaved an even heavier-looking box of scientific equipment neatly into a stack in the corner of the flight deck alongside its fellows with as much apparent effort as if he was handling a six pack of frosty beer.

He was overheard, and every SOR man in the bay, Operator and Tech alike, covered their grins and stifled their chuckles. Even the stone-faced Powell had an amused glimmer in his eye. “We’ve got bigger,” he said.

“Left Beef best beef!” somebody chirped.

“Right Beef superior slab!” somebody else replied. Some kind of unit in-joke, presumably.

“Arright, no need to stroke their egos when they’re not even bloody here,” Powell lifted his voice slightly, and the work was redoubled with a chuckle.

Nadeau’s research team “Excuse me”-ed and “Sorry”-ed their way through the busy bedlam of the flight deck, tailing after an able seaman who was presumably leading them to wherever they were being stored for the duration of this mission. They did a commendable job of humping their gear without comment too, considering that not a one of them was used to moving anything heavier than a tablet computer in their usual work.

“Aye, our three heavyweights stand out a mite bit,” Powell explained. “Truth be told, we’re already set to stick out like a pig at Crufts, but such is life.”

“It’s a shame your suits are so heavy…” Nadeau mused. “I think we’ve cracked cloaking devices at long last, but you’re a bit too… unsubtle for them to be much use.”

Powell’s eyebrow crept upwards by a half-inch. “Aye? I reckon we can be more subtle than you’d think. But, we’ll make do.”

“So when are we getting cloaking devices, then?” Dunn asked.

“Give me a few years to refine a version that can run for more than a few minutes on your energy reserves, and I’ll get back to you,” Nadeau told him. “Though of course, if this goes to plan…”

“…we might have access to Kwmbwrw versions in a few days,” Dunn finished, nodding.

“Sirs?” Rebar interrupted gently. “Looks like we’re loaded and stowed.”

“Arright. Bloody fine work, too.” Powell announced. Nadeau had to agree. Everything was stacked neatly, lashed down securely, organized methodically and arranged sensibly so that the limited budget of space they had in the flight bay was being used to economical perfection. There was even plenty of room for people to move around and work.

The praise went down well, though. Powell, it seemed, was a commander who handed it out sparingly for maximum impact. There was a round of high-fives and smiles.

Dunn checked the timepiece on the wall, then tapped out a short log entry his tablet with a satisfied nod. “…Wardroom, gentlemen?”

Powell nodded. “Aye. Vandenberg! Ruckley! Briefing here in one hour, and I want suit diagnostics ready by then,” he said. “The rest of you go get settled in.”

There was an affirmative rustle of voices and a bustle of bodies.

“After you,” Nadeau gestured for Dunn to lead the way.

Powell cracked his knuckles.

“Aye,” he said, “let’s make this happen.”

Date Point 10y7m3w AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Drew Cavendish

Technically, Drew was wealthy enough nowadays to employ people to do the tech demos for him. After all, the contract providing EV-MASS to the SOR, flight suits to the Firebird pilots and vacuum worksuits to Hephaestus between them meant that C&M Spacesuit Systems had been a major rising force even before they’d floated the company.

Running the place and raking in a huge bonus seemed to be enough to satisfy Drew Martin, but Cavendish was a different beast: he was an engineer and a tinkerer at heart, a Maker of Things, and proud of his creations.

Besides. He’d met some amazing people showing these things off to prospective buyers. The SOR, Rylee Jackson, and now the team who’d be the first humans to walk on Mars. Even if he did delegate, he’d have done this one personally anyway.

Adapting three Firebird flight suits into Martian excursion suits had been trivial. Most of the same requirements were already there—atmospheric seal, thermal control in the extremities, moderate armouring…

Really, the only thing he’d needed to change in any significant way had been dust-proofing it, which was easily achieved by slightly redesigning the seals and giving the outer layer material the same omniphobic nanoscale coating that had solved the sterility problem for the SOR’s Protector gloves. Under an electron microscope, every square micron of the suits’ surfaces looked disarmingly like the skin of a carp.

In testing, they’d thrown everything at it: Simulated lunar regolith, simulated Martian dust, printer toner, good old-fashioned Terran sand and mud… it had all slid right off.

After that, all it had taken was an appropriate helmet. The one off his mining suits with its wide peripheral vision had done nicely, and seeing as they were going to be operating in an atmosphere—even a suffocating and unbreathable one—there was no need for the gold nanoparticle glare coating. Those bubble visors were nice and transparent, just perfect for the video cameras.

He’d spent most of the trip to Nebraska congratulating himself on his foresight and wisdom in making his designs standardized enough to tolerate a little mixing-and-matching.

They were white, of course. He’d layered on retroreflective strips in high-vis yellow-green that should stand out against the ruddy dust of the red planet. Weight-bearing reinforcement had been included on the basis that even though Martian gravity was a third that of Earth, there was no such thing as too much mobility assistance and in any case the suits were perfectly suitable for use on other planets where the gravity might be higher.

LED spotlights on the helmet, floodlights on the shoulders and a final torch on the wrist plus emergency flares, a radio powerful enough to call Earth all by itself if it had to and, most importantly of all, ankle support.

The crew themselves were a pleasant surprise. They didn’t look or behave like scientists—Drew knew scientists, he worked with dozens of them—but for the life of him, he couldn’t quite tell what they did behave like, even though there was something familiar about the way they held themselves. He got polite handshakes from Buehler and Etsicitty, and a bubbling welcome from Chang, who cooed over the suits with such enthusiasm that it completely melted the other two’s nervous politeness.

“I mean, it’s… it’s obviously functional, but this thing could be right out of the movies!” she gushed.

Drew chuckled. “Guilty,” he agreed. “I like to make my suits look pretty wherever I can.”

“You’re a real craftsman,” Julian was examining his helmet admiringly.

“I still hold the human record for spacewalk time,” Drew revealed. “The hardsuits we had in the early days when we were excavating the Hephaestus shipyards were bloody horrible, and the difference between a good suit and a bad one is all down to the little details. Your wrist lamp for example.”

Julian checked his suit’s wrists, then glanced at Xiù’s and Allison’s suits and saw the difference. “Hey, nice! How’d you know I’m left-handed?”

“You can thank your corporate overlords for that one,” Drew joked.

“Aww, they really do care!”

Allison snorted. She was the most standoffish, but not actually rude—just quiet and thoughtful. She pushed her helmet down until it was seated snugly and looked around.

“Good peripheral vision,” she said approvingly.

“It’s a mining helmet. You’ve got to be well aware of safety hazards. Good fit?” Drew asked.

“Kinda glad I got my hair cut now…”

“Oh. Oh dear…” They turned and watched with interest as Xiù tried, and failed, to find a way to put her helmet on that wasn’t fatally compromised by all her long black hair. She gave Drew an embarrassed smile once she’d finally got it on, a feat only made possible by letting her hair down, which of course was still no use for the suit.

“Hmm.” Drew examined the problem. No short-cuts here: The helmet was just not shaped properly to accommodate that much hair. “Well. Two options. You either cut it short-” he saw immediately that this was not the popular option “-or else I take the helmet away, alter it and bill the Group a hundred thousand dollars or so for the work.”

“Modify the helmet,” Allison said immediately, with a feral grin. This generated a silent laugh from Julian, and a smiling eye-roll from Xiù, who managed to work the helmet off again after an undignified minute which left a lot of that problematic hair bunched and tangled up around her ears.

She smoothed it down and combed it out as best she could with her fingers then began the laborious process of gathering, twisting, coiling, pinning and tying it back into place. “Sorry… I don’t want to be selfish, but I’ve been growing it since I was little…”

Drew chuckled. “I was taking the piss about the price tag. These are all going to need some modifying. You’d better try them on properly.”

“Oh, right!”

“Knock on the door when you’re ready for me.”

“Wait, how much are we supposed to wear under this thing?” Julian asked.

“There’s appropriate seamless underwear in the vacuum packs,” Drew told him, pointing to one.

He let himself out and loitered in the room outside for about ten minutes before a knock on the door finally summoned him back into the room.

Suited up, the three looked the part and then some. Xiù was holding her helmet on her hip, but Allison and Julian had donned theirs. Drew checked the seals and found them good. “Well this is a nice change. You can follow instructions!”

“They seemed like kinda important instructions,” Allison observed drily.

“Oh, they are. And you’d be amazed how many professional asteroid miners don’t listen their first time. Okay! Any concerns? Pinching or rubbing anywhere? Especially in the feet, armpit or inner thigh. Allison?”

She stamped her feet and walked experimentally round the room. “Nothing wrong with my feet. This feels pretty good, actually. Inner thigh’s kinda tight but I wouldn’t call it pinching…” she swung her arms. “Nothing wrong with the arms.”

“Alright. Just move around some more, try some exercises. Julian?”

“Bit tight in the shoulders…” he rolled his arms, his hips, touched his toes and then stretched for the ceiling. “…But otherwise fine.”

Drew nodded, pleased. “Good. The shoulders are an easy fix. Xiù?”

“Umm… it’s good, mostly. A bit… snug…”

“That’s deliberate.”

“I mean… very snug.”

Drew chuckled. Honestly, the sportswear she’d been wearing before was more form-hugging, but of course the suit’s gentle positive pressure—a far cry from the crushing force of an EV-MASS but still plenty enough to counter even hard vacuum—would make it feel really quite revealing.

“I promise, it just feels snug,” he said. “From out here, you’re well protected. Any pinching or tightness?” he asked.

Xiù twisted this way and that, put the helmet down and tested the suit’s flexibility by kicking over backwards into a handstand splits then tucked, rolled and bounced to her feet.

“Maybe just a little too tight in the armpit here…” she pointed it out. Drew took a note.

“Show-off,” Allison accused fondly.

“No, she’s got the right idea,” Drew replied. “Unimpeded flexibility, that’s what we’re looking for.”

The two of them looked at one another, then shrugged and put their own suits through their paces. Doing so turned up that all three were a little too tight in the armpit, and that Allison’s was definitely pinching her inside leg.

“Okay!” Drew finished marking the problem areas. “So, let’s talk functionality.”

They gathered in an attentive rough semicircle around him. Good listeners, these three—a bloody rare and valuable thing in Drew’s experience.

“First things first—this is an exoplanet excursion suit, not a spacesuit,” he told them. “Yes, it’ll keep you pressurized even in a vacuum, but the temperature regulation’s all wrong. You try and wear this thing in vacuum and you’ll quickly overheat and die.”

Julian raised his hand. “Over-heat?”

“Space isn’t cold, lad—Space is a vacuum, and vacuum’s the best bloody insulator there is. Mars on the other hand is colder than a penguin’s ballbag.”

Julian and Allison snickered, and Xiù brought up her hand to cover a giggle.

“So,” Drew continued, “the suit’s designed to keep you warm in temperatures that’d stop a Russian. Problem is that even if you turn the heaters off, if you try and wear this thing in space your own body temperature will cook you in a few minutes. So, what is this suit not?”

He raised his hands like a conductor and the three of them obediently chorused “A spacesuit!”

“Strewth, you’re quick studies. This is nice!” Drew had borrowed a few Australianisms off his business partner over the years. “Okay. After atmosphere and temperature, the suit’s third function is protection. You’re wearing armour, chaps. It has a Type Two NIJ rating, if any of you know what that is…?”

Allison raised her hand and nodded.

“Good. It’s also stab-proof, just in case some pre-contact alien native decides to shove a spear through you…Though he might decide you’re a god, so watch out for that.”

This raised another chuckle.

“The rest of it’s pretty straightforward. Your load-carrying equipment’s my own take on MOLLE, optimized for low-gravity environments. You’ve got lots of high-vis, plenty of lights, and even if you have those lights on 24⁄7 the batteries should go a month before they need charging. Air supply is six hours, and you’ve got an emergency forcefield that you activate by grabbing… you see those red strips on your thighs, chest and upper arms? Rip off any two of those. Putting them back on is a pain in the arse, but it might just save your life, so don’t hesitate. Use it in case of suit breach, if you’re caught in an avalanche or cave-in, if you fall and break your leg… and it glows so you can be found easily.”

“How long’s it last?” Julian asked.

“From a full charge? Ten hours or so.”

“So our air would run out first,” Allison observed.

“Yup,” Drew gave her an apologetic half-smile. “Air’s a lot harder to store than energy nowadays.” He indicated a port on the suit’s flank, below her ribs. “Fortunately, that yellow one lets you connect to an external air supply. The red one is power supply.”

“And the green one?” she asked, touching the one on her other side.

“That’s an injection port for medical aid.”

Drew stood back. “Any questions, requests, observations…?”

“I’m still amazed I can do a handstand in this thing,” Xiù enthused. “But um… oh! Does the helmet have a translator in it?”

“Never hurts to be prepared. I’ll add one,” Drew promised.

Julian indicated his belt. “Mind adding a loop or two? You never know when a tomahawk could come in handy.”

“And a holster,” Allison added.

“Loaded for space bear it is…” Drew added the requests. They knew their jobs best, after all. “I didn’t know you chaps would be going armed…”

“It’s a dangerous galaxy,” Allison said with a shrug, and that was when the way they held themselves finally clicked for Drew.

Late in his career as a diving welder, about a year before Hephaestus had hired him, Drew had been called to the case of a shaft mine that had suffered a catastrophic collapse and flooding. Everyone had at first written off the miners for dead, until seismophones being used to map the damage from the surface started picking up a steady knockknockknock, knock…knock…knock, knockknockknock from somewhere past the flooded area.

While a rescue shaft was drilled down to the pocket of survivors. Drew had pulled three seventy-two hours shifts in a row alongside three other men, fighting to pump out the water faster than it could seep into the survivors’ haven and drown them.

In the end nine men had been delivered to the surface all slathered in soaking cold muddy slurry, but alive.

Some weeks later, they and their families had thrown a big barbecue party to thank the rescuers. The way the Misfit crew held themselves reminded him of the way those nine men had behaved at that party. Rather than cowing or terrorizing them, their brush with oblivion had left them quietly and unconsciously happy for every second, and they had shrugged off not only the mortal peril they had just endured, but also the dangers of returning to the same job with the exact same matter-of-fact ease that Allison had just shown.

Survivors. That’s what they were, and suddenly it made sense why they listened so attentively, and why the Byron Group was sending them out there. These three held doctorates from the school of hard knocks.

Their smartwatches went off simultaneously, marking the end of the session they’d put aside for his visit.

“Guess that’s time,” Drew said. “You three had better get out of those so I can take them away and alter them.”

Allison shook his hand. She’d warmed considerably during the short meeting. “Thanks. I was kinda nervous about the suit,”

“You’ve not seen it in action yet,” Drew replied.

“You’re obviously the kinda man who takes pride in his work though,” Julian replied, removing his helmet and scrubbing at the thick mess of black hair that he’d just about managed to squeeze into it. “That’s reassuring. Sometimes the Group can, uh…. They like to play things kinda fast and loose sometimes.”

“Truth,” Drew agreed, thinking of the methodical and cautious approach that had averted multiple disasters at Hephaestus. The Byron Group had been oddly silent about the fates of five of their exploration ships—in fact they’d been strangely quiet about the whole EV program. The loud and enthusiastic media campaign surrounding Misfit had to be at least in part a smokescreen to obfuscate their earlier errors.

As he stepped out of the room to let them get changed, he made a mental note to put it to Hephaestus that matching the Group’s survey initiatives might be a good idea, and that there was a team here who might potentially be headhunted. They were being upbeat, but there was clearly some disgruntlement here, which was… odd…for a team like this on such a prestigious and high-profile mission.

Oh well. They had a couple of years to prepare.

Date Point 10y7m3w4d AV
Thryd-Geftry Heavy Industries Ice Mining Station 12, Jmnik System, The Njrvil Volume.

Kirk

Kirk was used to trade stations, comms relays, degaussing stopovers, freeports and all the other busy, bustling places where an itinerant sapient might fetch up. Indeed, he’d been born aboard just such a station—the now-infamous CTS591-’Outlook On Forever’

Old five-ninety-one had been a venerable sprawling hulk of a thing. She was, in the strange way that space stations could sometimes be, mind-skewingly old. There had been a station at that particular confluence of spacelanes for so long that nobody knew who had first deployed it. Over the centuries she had been added to, refitted, repaired, modified and expanded. Old segments had occasionally been cut away and recycled to make room for newer and more vibrant technologically advanced sections. She had been old, interesting and full of character and it was doubtful whether there was any original component or structure left in her, or whether a single atom of the first atmosphere to be pumped into her remained.

Through her had flooded merchants, migrants, mercenaries, miners and the generally meandering misplaced.

Such stations were inevitably shop-soiled and a touch chaotic by nature, but they were interesting.

An ice mining station was not usually any of those things, but TGHI-IMS-12 was unusual.

Usually, ice mining stations were the bottom of the bottom. They were only crewed because it cost more to insure a completely automated facility. A crew of three otherwise unemployable losers tore so much off the insurance premiums that their rock-bottom salary scarcely dented the boost in profit margin.

These unfortunates were not given any kind of entertainment beyond waxing the floors. Ice mining stations were therefore known for being both the least exciting places in civilization, and also the cleanest.

Not so for TGHI-IMS-12. Oh, it had once been a terminally dull oubliette in the ass-end of nowhere (a delightful Humanism, that) but the secession of the Celzi and their allies had kicked it upmarket practically overnight. The Dominion had needed a space station behind the new front line from which to stage their fleets, and the only thing in the right volume that was remotely space-station-shaped had been TGHI-IMS-12. Urban legend asserted that her three stimulation-starved Vzk’tk crew had died of sheer excitement when the military construction fleet had arrived to upgrade their painstakingly sanitized industrial array to a border outpost.

The war might be in a permanent uneasy state of de facto ceasefire nowadays, both sides being too wary to do anything which might persuade the humans to side with their enemy, but neither were they willing to tone down their pride and accept an actual, formal ceasefire or truce. Hostilities were still, officially, ongoing.

And for as long as they were, TGHI-IMS-12 was where the Dominion’s ships resupplied and degaussed, where their crews took shore leave and where traders and opportunists from all over the charted galaxy played in a market that occupied every possible shade of grey, right down to the effectively black.

It was the perfect balance for Kirk’s needs—busy enough for him to plausibly use the crowd if he needed to go unseen or effect a hasty escape, but obscure enough that the crowd itself could be avoided too if need be.

There were a lot of Gaoians today, and that was interesting because the Gaoians, as far as he knew, were being commendably stubborn about committing assets to the war. Quite aside from the rhetorical arguments about owing nothing to a war that had started before they ever joined the Dominion, they had a knack for wriggling through legal and contractual loopholes.

Kirk ransacked his memory of Gaoians, inwardly cursing his inexperience with them. The similar fur colouration and physique suggested that these males were from some Clan or another, but which one…?

That white crest of fur between their ears should be easy enough to identify… Was there not a clan called white-crest? He felt certain that there was.

And Gaoians were a high-Class species. Class eight, if memory served. Maybe nine. Not for the first time, Kirk suppressed irritation at the fallibility of his own memory—he really had been far too dependant on cybernetics.

He slipped away to the side of the station concourse and people-watched, waiting for any hint that the humans had arrived. Negotiating a place and time had been difficult and treacherous. It was clear they didn’t trust him at all, and not without good reason—Kirk, after all, had no idea if he’d really been talking with General Tremblay, or with some Hierarchy intercept.

He flexed all four of his hands to will down his nerves, and did something that was, to most species, an idea so alien that most had simply never heard or conceived of it—he prayed.

It wasn’t addressed to any specific divine being or anything. Mostly it was just a general rhetorical observation if he, Kirk, were to not only make it through the day alive but also maybe reforge his trust and alliance with the deathworlders, then that would make him very happy.

As every minute passed, however, his nerves were rising and his hopes sinking. Humans were obvious. Allison Buehler had been the focus of everybeing’s attention as she strolled alongside him during their years working together.

But then again, Julian had demonstrated an almost magical ability to slip through crowds entirely unseen and un—

“Good evening, Councillor. No sudden movements please.”

Kirk nearly bleated from sheer alarm and surprise. He did stiffen and spread his arms slightly. The Gaoian who had stepped into his peripheral vision carefully stepped around him to stand on the side without a fusion blade hidden inside a cybernetic arm. Kirk turned his head to watch him.

This one had a cybernetic left hand, and an upright bearing that seemed to communicate leadership even between species.

“And you are…?” Kirk asked him.

“Dexter. A friend of mine would like to meet you.”

“Is he a friend of mine?”

“He hopes so.” Dexter stepped away, and gestured towards a nearby maintenance door that led into the station’s crew-only areas. It was resting slightly ajar.

Kirk gave him a suspicious glance, but the Gaoian was already walking away.

He took a deep breath to steel himself then approached the door and, after a quick glance around to check he wasn’t being watched, slipped through and let it close behind him.

In the silence that followed, he plainly heard the sound of a door opening to his right. It was the hatch at the end of the maintenance tunnel, and the lights came up as it opened. There was nothing exciting about the space—it was a functional conduit for water, power, data cables and air ducts. The only details that even resembled a nod to decoration were the colour-coding on each of the many things attached to the wall.

Kirk prided himself on his rational mind and his level head. It was a matter of personal principle to him that in circumstances where others panicked, blundered around, fled and got killed, he held his nerve and stayed sharp… but he was only mortal. It took him a long time to find the courage and the rationale to walk toward that door.

In the end, what persuaded him was quite simple: If the humans were so badly compromised by Hierarchy that this meeting was to be his end, then they had already lost. If so, he’d rather die gambling on hope.

He stepped through the door.

It closed behind him, and three humans in the same heavy-duty armor he’d seen from the Capitol Station news reports made themselves visible. They were armed, but didn’t make any aggressive movements.

An old feeling of creeping awe settled on him—the same one he’d felt when he’d first met Kevin Jenkins all those years ago. There was something about the way they moved, something extra-solid, something massive in the sense of having a lot of mass, that reminded him again that he was dealing with a species that were his physical superiors in every conceivable way. These ones—who could only be the famed SOR—were larger than any other human he had ever seen by an alarming degree, even with a generous estimate for the armour’s thickness.

The armor itself was an excellent reminder that humans were also a slightly crazed species at the best of times. It looked incalculably weighty, and the men wearing it presumably needed all that size and strength just to function in it. Kirk didn’t want to think about what they must have done and endured to achieve the easy grace with which they wore it.

Cautiously, he stepped closer. The meeting place they’d chosen was a walkway spanning a chamber that formed part of the atmosphere system—a dust trap, in fact. The chamber was shaped to create a vortex around the edges that threw out the accumulated airborne detritus from TGHI-IMS-12’s hundreds of permanent occupants and thousands of monthly visitors, catching it in baffles for disposal as a compressed block into the gravity well of the gas giant below. The racing air caught Kirk’s hood and mane as he pushed through the edge vortex and into the clear air in the middle, where he stopped, standing up to his full height. He could never out-mass a human, but he would damn well win on height and dignity.

The one in the middle seemed to have a few more cameras, sensors and communications systems on him than the others, though they had their own specialist burdens. “TIBERIUS,” he said, carefully.

“…STAINLESS, I presume.”

The human nodded. “You brought your own scanner?” he asked. There was something familiar about that voice. A deep, growling quality to it that reminded him of Captain Powell, though this man was much larger than the Cimbrean commander had been.

Kirk slowly and carefully reached to his belt and the scanner he’d had Lewis design and prepare. He tugged it off, knelt his front legs to set it down, and backed off. STAINLESS tapped the man on his left on the shoulder, and that man stepped forward to examine the device without picking it up, aiming what looked like an engineering scanner at it.

“…It’s what he says it is, sir.” he reported. He picked it up and returned to STAINLESS’ side.

STAINLESS nodded. He unlatched the face mask of his helmet which came away with a sharp hiss of air pressure equalizing.

It was Powell! In addition to being larger, he was also slightly younger-looking and his thin blond hair was now entirely gone save for a pale stubble around the sides. Nothing had changed about his eyes, though. Nothing in the galaxy had a more fearsome gaze than him: cool, blue and calculating almost to the point of hostility, as if at every second he was selecting the most efficient means of killing whomever he scrutinized.

Maybe he was.

He speared Kirk with that eerie icy stare for a second, then undid his helmet as well, tipped it up just enough to expose his forehead, and pressed the scanner to it.

It immediately made a happy pinging sound and Kirk sagged with relief, letting out his tension in a very human sigh.

Powell reattached his helmet, though he left the mask off. “I take it you’re happy if I vouch for the lads here,” he said.

“Of course, Captain.”

Powell—though it was hard to tell—seemed to find this amusing. He pulled a scanner of his own from some strapping on his armour and tossed it underarm to Kirk.

It was simple enough to operate. Kirk pressed it to his head, and within seconds a green light lit up. All three humans promptly unwound, and Powell treated him to a rare smile.

“Good to see you again, mate,” he said. “And it’s Major, thank you.”

“My apologies. And congratulations.” Kirk stepped forward and extended a hand. “You have… changed rather a lot since we last met.”

“Aye.” Powell shook his hand and clapped him very gently indeed on the upper arm. “We have a lot to discuss… How about we do it somewhere secure?”

“I know just the place.”

Date Point 10y7m3w4d AV
Thryd-Geftry Heavy Industries Ice Mining Station 12, Jmnik System, The Njrvil Volume.

Regaari

“I think it’s about to go wrong…”

Regaari duck-nodded to himself. He was lurking on the station concourse with his communicator in his hands and pretending to play a game as he waited, but the game in question was a surveillance tool that was helping him tag and track dozens of aliens as they came and went.

Five were loitering in the area, just as he was. Two Vzk’tk, an Rrrrtk’pch, a Kwmbwrw and a Vgork.

“Agreed,” he murmured. He rattled off a few terse orders in the Clan’s dense internal jargon, subtly redeploying his Brothers into better positions to disrupt, challenge or even attack the aliens if they made any kind of a move.

This was not merely a mission-protecting move; it was for their own good. If those five attempted to intervene against the SOR…!

The biggest threat was the Vgork. He was an alpha male, a Class Eight native himself physically on par with all but the most exceptional Gaoian, and at least twice Regaari’s size. At a headlong charge that thick bony ridge that ran across his head from ear to ear might even cause serious harm to a human. Certainly he could bowl the legs out from under either of the Domain species and leave them broken, which was still a deadly serious injury for them even with modern medicine. Domain prosthetic limbs were superior to even the Corti version for that very reason.

Which might very well explain his presence. Or then again he could be the distraction. Intimidating as a bellowing bull Vgork might be, he was no more dangerous than any other sapient with a pulse gun.

Regaari assigned himself to deal with that one. If it came down to it he had fusion claws in his prosthetic hand, and fusion blades could stop anything. Even the momentum of a charging Vgork at full tilt wouldn’t count for much if one of his legs suddenly came off.

His comm chirped, denoting an incoming signal from an allied TacNet. ”DEXTER, STAINLESS. TIBERIUS is a clean asset and friendly. He’s returning to his ship. Shadow and report.”

He flexed his paw in a control gesture that he’d built into the prosthetic to allow him to call out without obviously activating his comm, and kept his voice low. “STAINLESS, DEXTER. We have concerning activity out here. Need a moment to make safe.”

He changed channels and spoke three words in Whitecrest tactical cant: “Cubs play pounce.”

He and his brothers moved immediately. Before they even had a chance to appreciate what was going on the three Domain aliens and the Kwmbwrw had turned in confusion as a dark and furry shape flashed past them, and then collapsed as the Whitecrest-designed sticky takedown patches did their work.

Regaari’s Vgork target was just turning to see what the commotion was about when Regaari pounced right over his back, slapped a patch to each side of his neck, and sprang off to safety and concealment before his quarry even had a chance to try and buck him off.

The Vgork whooped something, lowered his head and tried to charge wildly in the direction he thought the torment had gone, only to crash painfully to the deck in three strides as every motor muscle in his body went limp and numb. Regaari congratulated himself on giving the big guy a double dose.

“Mother says do chores,” Faarek said.

Regaari agreed. “Yes, Mother.”

The limp aliens were quickly bundled away out of sight, a feat that demanded four Brothers in the case of the Vgork. After only a pawful of active seconds, it was like nothing had ever happened.

His comm squawked again. “…Copy that, DEXTER. Sitrep when you’re ready.”

Regaari chittered grimly to himself at actually beating the deathworlder on speed, and broadcast to his brothers before replying. ”No scars. STAINLESS, DEXTER. Clear, but the clock is ticking.”

”Copy. Orders remain unchanged.”

Seconds later, Councillor A’ktnnzzik’tk emerged via a maintenance door. Amateurishly, he looked around to make sure he wasn’t being watched (an action liable to draw immediate attention) and then raised his hood and headed in the direction of his ship.

The Brothers tailed him at a respectful distance.

There were no further problems.

Date Point 10y8m AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Allison Buehler

“…That’s not me.”

“That’s you, baby.”

“But… nah!” Julian scratched at his hair and stared at the larger-than-life-size fabric print of himself that was one of several set up for the display in the Byron building’s lobby. “I’m not that hot.”

Xiù giggled. “You are.”

“Am not!” Julian shook his head.

Allison grinned at Xiù and joined in. “Yes you are.”

It was a good picture, admittedly. Julian had been caught looking strong and intrepid with the muscular mass of Misfit framing him in the background. His hair was excitingly messy, a confident half-smile was creeping up one side of his face in that way that only men seemed to have mastered, and there was a direct quote from him printed at the bottom of the picture across his shins: “If you can handle Earth, then you can handle anything in the Galaxy.”

Xiù’s picture was no less amazing. The photographer had captured her smile and shy enthusiasm, and juxtaposed it perfectly with her scars. She looked young, fresh, vigorous and she lived up to her name—Allison had discovered quite by accident some weeks before that the word ’xiù’ literally meant ’beautiful’, to Xiù’s embarrassment—but she also looked strong and ready for anything. The quote above her head read ’Sometimes our dreams don’t come true, but you can always pick a new dream.’

Allison turned her attention to the third banner, and reflected that she was probably being unfair on Julian. It was hard to really believe that the woman looking back at her was… well, her: She looked fearsome. The photographer had contrived to convey focus and drive, though they’d picked one of her softer expressions out of the many thousands of photos she’d endured posing for. The slight smile was enough to leave her looking competent rather than like a ballbreaker.

“There’s something in our soul that longs to be challenged.” she read aloud. “Did I say that?”

“You said that,” Xiù confirmed. “Look, there’s variations too.”

Allison ran her eye over them warily, seeing other pictures that painted them in different lights, including one she felt was slightly intrusive that showed Julian holding her affectionately from behind with the caption ’We can choose to go somewhere interesting and do something valuable, together.’

“This is… kind of overwhelming.”

“You should see the animated ones,” Julian observed.

“Oh, Christ…”

Xiù gave her a reassuring peck on the cheek. “Wanna know a secret?” she asked.

“What?”

“They can’t work with what isn’t there.”

“They’ve got photoshop, don’t they?”

“It’s like makeup, Al. If you pluck your eyebrows right off and draw them back on it just looks fake and horrible, right?”

“I think I speak for all men when I say I don’t understand eyebrow-plucking,” Julian said. He led them among the displays and accepted a soft drink from a waiter who was circling the ad campaign launch party. A lot of very wealthy-looking people in suits were standing around negotiating God-knew what except that whatever they were arranging presumably involved stupefying sums of money. There was a woman in the dark blue of the US Air Force chatting amicably with Moses Byron. She looked towards them and gave Julian a bright and genuine-looking smile.

He returned it a little uncertainly. “Should we know her?” he asked sideways. Allison shook her head, just as lost as he was.

“You don’t recognize her?” Xiù frowned at them. “Either of you?”

Allison contrived a subtle shrug. “Should we?”

“That’s Rylee Jackson, she flew the first human-built warp ship!”

“Did you learn about her as part of your training?” Julian asked.

“I’ve met her before!” Xiù reminded them. “She was escorting Ayma and Regaari when they visited me…”

“So she’s famous then,” Julian summarized.

“Even more famous than we’ll be,” Xiù confirmed.

“And we didn’t recognize her.” Allison considered that fact. “…Y’know, that actually makes me feel better. I kinda want to meet her now.”

“I think she wants to meet us, too,” Julian commented. Jackson had politely excused herself and was picking her way between their oversized images to say hi.

Up close, she had a lot in common with Xiù—they were of similar heights and similar gymnastic builds, though Jackson had noticeably more pronounced neck and shoulder muscles. She met them with a round of handshakes, a double cheek-kiss for Xiù as if they were old friends, and made it clear that she was to be known to them as ’Rylee’.

She immediately endeared herself to Allison by breaking the ice with sympathy. “God, I don’t miss seeing my face everywhere. How are you guys holding up?”

“Kinda weirded out,” Allison confessed, and Julian nodded with her. She indicated a nearby poster of herself with the caption ’ I don’t think people are really meant for cities and sofas.’ “I don’t remember saying half of this stuff.”

“Yeah, a little quote-mining goes a long way.” Rylee grinned. “Especially if they alter the quote a bit. Polish it up for the sound-bite, y’know? I wouldn’t be surprised if the TV ads were voice actors who’re good at sounding a lot like you guys.”

“They’d do that?” Julian asked.

Rylee didn’t reply directly and instead snagged a lemonade off a passing waiter, but her expression said everything.

“Of course they would,” Xiù said. She sounded more like it was blindingly obvious than that the thought distressed her at all.

“Why?” Julian asked. “Candid is good, right?”

“Mm-hmm” Rylee nodded. “But if you ever meet somebody who talks in perfect sound bites, they’re a politician.”

“Uh… that was a perfect sound bite…” Julian pointed out.

Rylee grinned and raised her lemonade to toast him with a wink.

“So it’s like photoshop for a conversation,” Allison summed up.

“Yeah… but they can’t work with what’s not there…” Xiù repeated.

Rylee waggled a finger aimed vaguely at Xiù. “See, this girl gets it. You said those things, and that’s you on those posters, even if they’ve maybe touched things up a bit. Get used to it, guys.” She sipped her drink. “Anyway! No more boring fame stuff, I actually have something I need to talk to you guys about. Me and some friends of mine…”

Allison looked in the direction she nodded. Kevin Jenkins was lurking in a corner, talking seriously with a middle-aged woman in a black suit whom she didn’t recognize. They noticed the four looking at them, exchanged a few more words, and crossed the lobby.

“‘Sup,” he said, by way of greeting.

“I could ask you…” Julian looked from him to Rylee. “You two know each other?”

“Distant acquaintances,” Rylee said. “I believe you named my ship, right?”

“Good ol’ Pandora, yup,” Kevin agreed.

“Good name.”

“Eh, you did better things with her. ‘Course, you probably know me from the other thing we need to discuss…”

“Speaking of which…” the woman in the suit reminded him, “the limo is waiting outside.” She had one of the very latest smartwatches, the kind with the single-direction holographic interface that meant only she could see what she was working on. Allison had entertained the thought of getting one herself, except that she’d have no need of it on the ship and by the time they got back they’d presumably be both cheaper and better.

“The limo?” Allison exchanged thoroughly bewildered glances with Xiù and Julian, who shrugged. They huddled together for comfort as Kevin gently ushered them door-wards, and invited Rylee to come along too.

“On the pretense of showing Major Jackson your ship, we’re gonna slip away and discuss something important.”

“Hey now,” Rylee objected. “I wanna see the ship anyway!”

“That’s what makes it a good pretense.”

Sure enough, a black limo had pulled up outside, and they were gestured into it by the driver, who held the door politely open until they were all aboard and belted up.

Allison stiffened as the windows went fuzzy grey and opaque. A privacy forcefield.

“Sorry for the cloak-and-dagger guys,” Kevin said. “But there’s some shit you need to know. Stuff that not even Moses Byron is fully in on.”

“What-?” Allison began, but didn’t know how to proceed past that point.

“First up, introductions. Guys, this is Special Agent Darcy, CIA.”

Darcy looked up from whatever it was she was working on and met their surprised stares with a trim, polite smile. “You can just call me Darcy,” she said. Allison decided that she was probably just super busy, rather than standoffish. She handed Julian a tablet. “Before this conversation can go any further, I’m afraid you’re going to need to sign these non-disclosure agreements.”

She handed one more each to Allison and Xiù, and they rode in silence for a few minutes as the three of them put the hard studying skills they’d developed over the last several months to work, digesting the content of the agreement.

“…Extreme sanction?” Allison asked. “Christ.”

“This is heavy stuff we’re about to play with, guys,” Rylee had smuggled her lemonade out with her, and she sipped it again.

Julian and Allison looked at each other. “Somehow, I suspect we already know it…” Julian said, carefully.

“Huh?” Xiù looked up.

“That’s why Darcy’s here. You uh… gave me enough of a hint in Minnesota.” Kevin cleared his throat. “But guys, for real. You’re gonna need to sign those. This shit is important.”

“Hint?” Xiù echoed. “…what’s he talking about?”

“You’ve not told her?” Kevin asked.

“Told me what?!” Xiù turned to Allison. “What’s he talking about? What is this… ’DEEP RELIC’ thing?”

“…Sign it, baby.” Allison told her. She suddenly felt like a total heel.

“Julian-!”

Julian, looking grim, just shook his head and started filling in the paperwork.

After several seconds, Xiù followed his example.

They rode in silence for a few minutes as Darcy collected, double-checked, confirmed and filed away the agreements. All the while, Allison found it difficult to make eye contact with Xiù. After months of being totally open and honest with one another, it was weirdly ashaming to be reminded that there was one catastrophically huge secret that they’d kept from her. Not deliberately, and not without good reason, but… it had never come up.

“So.” Kevin cleared his throat. “Xiù, you remember back in Minnesota when I gave you the job offer, I asked if any of you had cerebral implants. Translators or whatever, right?”

“Right…?”

“Well. A few years ago…jeez, where do I start?” he asked, addressing Darcy.

“Boone.”

“Right, yeah. Terri Boone. Y’all won’t have heard of her, but she was this private investigator. Just before you were taken, Xiù, some guy contacted Terri and asked her to start looking into alien abductees, and to start specifically with me.”

“That’s before the Hunter attack,” Xiù pointed out. “Nobody really believed in aliens back then.”

“Yeah. Way she told it she was kinda desperate for cash though and the client was offering a fat stack, so she set off for Texas pretty well convinced I was gonna be one of those mothership, anal probe, Area Fifty-One crop circle dumbasses, right? Well her plane landed in Dallas and she drove straight up to my bar to sit down to listen to my story… On First Contact Day.” He laughed. “I’m sitting there talking about my encounter with the Hunters, and then the stupid bastards go and attack a live hockey game right there on TV. Talk about timing, right?”

“That’s a big coincidence,” Xiù said.

“Except it wasn’t a coincidence. Long story short, she and I rounded up every genuine abductee we could find—and, there’s a lot of us—and we got wind of this new research facility being thrown together up in British Columbia. So me, her, and a freakin’ convoy of the planet’s only exoplanetary tourists headed on up there and turned over everything we had, including the working jump beacon I managed to smuggle back to Earth. The one that Ted Bartlett’s team managed to reverse-engineer into a working warp drive”

“Which was why they let you name Pandora.” Rylee said.

“Right. I stayed on up at Scotch Creek after all the others went home, ran the bar on base, did for Tremblay, Bartlett, Nadeau and all the others pretty much the same thing I’m doing for Moses Byron nowadays…”

He rubbed his chin. “Terri got in touch again a couple years later. Left me an envelope and asked me not to open it. She went back to San Diego and… next I heard of her was a phone call from a homicide detective looking for a witness statement.”

“Jesus.” Allison said.

“Yeah. The envelope contained the login and password for an online drive she’d filled with evidence. Evidence of alien covert operations right here on Earth.”

“The Hierarchy,” Julian said.

“So you do know,” Darcy said.

Allison and Julian looked at each other. “We helped Kirk find Vedregnenug.” Allison said. “And we knew he was working with some kind of security or government agency here on Earth. Hell, he dragged us to a clinic to get our translators removed.”

“…You knew all this?” Xiù asked. “What…? I thought…? But…?” she paused and gathered herself. “What the hell happened to ’no secrets’?!”

“If they’ve kept it from you, that’s actually a good thing,” Darcy advised. “You’re now forbidden from telling this to anybody else, remember.”

“But-!”

“Guys.” Allison interrupted. “Could we have a couple of minutes alone, please? Just the three of us?”

Kevin, Rylee and Darcy looked at one another. At Kevin’s nod, Darcy relented. “…Okay,” she said. She knocked three times on the front window and the limo pulled over to the side of the road. Rylee swigged the last of her purloined lemonade, gave Allison a sympathetic touch on the shoulder as she was the last out, and they were left alone.

“…Baby, I’m sorry.” Allison opened, transferring over to sit next to her.

“Sorry?! I thought your whole thing was being up-front and honest?!” Xiù rounded on her. “I… Damn it! I’m supposed to be able to trust you! Both of you!” she added, turning to Julian. “And then this-?”

Julian took her hands. “Hey. There’s nothing else,” he said, softly. “Nothing. We’re not keeping anything else from you.”

“…You promise? Both of you?”

Allison tidied a strand of Xiù’s hair back into place behind her ear. “Nothing more,” she promised. “This was the only thing, I swear.”

“And you’ll see why in a minute,” Julian added.

“I will?”

“You trust us… right?”

Xiù wiped her eyes off violently and sniffed at him. “Of course I do! Why do you think I’m so upset?”

“Trust us just a little more?”

She blinked at him, then gave him a reassuring little kiss, before doing the same for Allison. “I trust you both to the ends of the Earth,” she said. “I’m just… shaken. Sorry.”

Julian handed her a tissue and she laughed, dried her cheeks and then blew her nose, waving for Allison to open the door.

Darcy, Kevin and Rylee climbed back in looking a touch awkward.

“Sorry,” Xiù apologized once they were settled.

“Are you okay?” Rylee asked her.

“Yeah, sorry. Just… I’m… we’re fine.”

Rylee nodded, relaxed and sat back.

“So… You said the timing wasn’t a coincidence?”

Kevin cleared his throat. “We’re…pretty sure by now that Terri was sent to find the real abductees because the Hierarchy foresaw first contact was gonna happen pretty soon anyway, and figured we might be a problem.” he swiped his finger meaningfully across his throat. “I guess they were right.”

“Why? What’s their objective? What do they want?”

“All of us dead.” Kevin said. He shrugged. “Their whole deal is suppressing deathworld sophonts. Wipe ‘em out with robot armies if they’re primitive enough, get them to nuke themselves back to the stone age then wipe ‘em out with robot armies if they’re not. Y’ever hear of the Cuban Missile Crisis?”

Xiù shook her head.

“Brouhaha in the Caribbean way back when in…” he looked to Darcy. “Sixty-four?”

“October Nineteen-Sixty-two,” Rylee corrected him. “The Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba right at the height of the Cold War, our navy blockaded the island, and there was a standoff for about two weeks before President Kennedy and Secretary Khruschev negotiated a standing-down. It was the closest we ever came to World War Three.”

“Right. Well, that was them.”

“Now how do you know that?” Julian asked.

Darcy gave him a slightly smug smile. “We caught one of their agents.”

“How do they have agents on Earth?” Xiù asked. “I mean… It’s a deathworld, so their agent would have to be human, right? Are there humans who are selling us out?”

“This is why the implants are so important,” Rylee explained. “They can be… hacked.”

”…Hacked?!” Appalled, Xiù gaped at her. “Those are in people’s brains!”

“Exactly. And the poor bastards get yanked around like a fuckin’ puppet,” Kevin growled, grimly.

“In extreme cases they have a process they call ’biodroning’,” Darcy said. “And, it’s as horrific as it sounds. They take some poor abductee, scoop out their brain and fill it with control implants. They become an absolutely perfect slave. But even a translator implant will work in a pinch. Now, think of how many aliens you ever met who had more than just the translator.”

Xiù sat up straight with an expression of dawning horror and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my god, Regaari-!” she began.

“-Is under close observation and we’re doing what we can to help him,” Darcy assured her.

“But I have to-! Why haven’t you told the whole galaxy? Why haven’t you blown the lid on this?”

“Because the moment we swooped on their operation on Earth, we lost San Diego,” Darcy said. “They jumped five kilograms of antimatter directly into the heart of the city and put a new bay in the west coast that’s half a mile across. We were lucky! By doing that they also destroyed the only jump beacon they had on Earth, and the quarantine field stopped them from bringing in more. That one mistake is the only reason that we’re still here to even have this conversation right now.”

“But what about all the other species in the galaxy?” Rylee asked. “The ones who’ve got millions of civilians with implants, and who don’t have system fields? Like the Gaoians?”

“The Hierarchy are willing to kill billions. Trillions maybe. Those are the kinds of numbers they already have killed, and if we’re ever going to bring them down then we need to do so carefully, quietly and with the utmost discretion.” Darcy finished. “Otherwise, worlds will burn, including a world you personally sacrificed much to protect.”

Xiù went quiet as Allison took her hand, looked down at it for a long second, then back to Darcy. “…Can’t I do anything for him?”

“You can trust us,” Darcy said. “And trust him, too. Through Regaari, we hope to—pardon the expression—sanitize the whole Gaoian race. It’s going to take a while, though. If we’re not careful… goodness knows how the Hierarchy might react.”

“…Promise me.”

Darcy shuffled forward in her seat, earnestly. “If our species is going to have any hope of thriving or… frankly even surviving in the long term, we need friends and allies. Thanks to you, the Gaoians are the best friends and allies we have and we’re pulling out all the stops to help them. I promise, if it’s within our power…”

Xiù frowned. “…Thanks to me?”

Rylee smiled at her. “You made a good impression. Every Gaoian I ever met has heard of Sister Shoo.”

Darcy produced three manila folders from her briefcase, and handed them out. “This is the full report, or at least as much of it as the three of you need to know, but you already have the short version; that galactic society has been carefully engineered to keep deathworlders like us suppressed, and the organization responsible is actively working toward our extinction. Now, you need to know this for two reasons.”

“Which are?” Julian asked.

“Number one, you’re looking for deathworlds. Our long term goal for the protection and success of the human race is to colonize as many such worlds as we can. Get our eggs in as many baskets as possible, you see?”

Allison nodded. “Makes sense.”

“The other being that if you do find any other deathworld civilizations, especially ones who have or are approaching a Cold War era level of technology, we need to know about them so we can protect them.”

“Yeah, here we go…” Julian looked up. “This is Vedreg’s testimony! I remember him dictating it to Kirk.”

“Kirk has been working for us for several years,” Darcy acknowledged. “In fact, he still is.”

Allison closed her folder with a slap. “He’s alive?!”

“Alive and well, as are Vedregnenug and Lewis Beverote. I’m afraid I can’t tell you more than that. In fact I only became able to tell you that much just this morning.”

“That’s still great news!” Julian enthused. “Can we send them a message?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Xiù finished reading the DEEP RELIC document and closed it looking badly shaken. “Um, can we maybe be a bit more…?” She waved a hand helplessly. “How many species?”

“Several hundred, at the absolute minimum,” Rylee told her. “The good news is they’re no longer, for now, an active threat on Earth.”

“Oh, thank goodness.”

“We think.”

“…Oh.”

Kevin cleared his throat. “This is why Misfit’s emergency recall system is anchored to Cimbrean-Five,” he said. “And it’s why, if you ever punch it, you then stay still and do absolutely nothing until the SOR board you. If you ever jump directly to Sol without authorization…“

Xiù nodded grimly. “I did wonder about those rules…”

“Okay,” Allison said. “Let’s say we catch them doing their thing. What do we do about it?”

“You make best speed for the nearest FTL comms relay and send Kevin here a message with the coordinates and the words “Big Hotel” somewhere in the text,” Darcy instructed. “Then you wait for a reply with instructions.”

“Moses wants you guys to send us back personal thoughts and commentary on your mission anyway, so it shouldn’t look out of the ordinary, and it won’t be hard to fit in something about… I’unno, wanting a spa day at a big hotel or something,” Kevin added.

“We can do that.” Allison nodded.

“Good.” Kevin looked up at something outside the car. “Onto lighter subjects, I guess.”

Sure enough, they were pulling through the AAAF’s front gates. Kevin climbed out to deal with the corporate security manning it, followed by Darcy, and that left the four of them alone.

“‘Course, there’s an elephant in this car…” Rylee mused.

“Hmm?” Allison asked.

“Oh, just your whole Prime Directive, cultural contamination bullshit.” Rylee adjusted her shirt. “Big Hotel or not, let’s say you guys do find a deathworld civilization that needs us to step up and protect them. What are we gonna be to them? Gods? Angels? Strange travellers from distant worlds? Heretics who need burning at the stake?”

“Any advice?” Julian asked.

“Nomex long johns?” Rylee shrugged. “I’m not a policy-maker, so I guess how you handle pre-contact civilizations is for the three of you to figure out. You’ll be ambassadors out there as well as explorers. Do you wanna be Jean-Luc Picard or George W. Bush?”

“Jeez, that’s a hell of a comparison…” Allison said. Rylee just smiled slightly and her eyebrow ticked upwards for a heartbeat.

“You can talk to Allied Extrasolar Command, right?” Julian pointed out.

“That’s part of my chain of command, yeah…” She sat forward. “Why, do you want an official stance? Y’know, something in writing with General Tremblay’s hancock at the bottom that you can point to?”

“Could it hurt?” Allison asked.

“Could cover your asses…”

“Then yes, please.”

“Or if you wind up ignoring it, it could bury you up to your chin in shit.” Rylee bobbled her head. “I figure in your situation, it’ll be easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.” She sniffed. “And a hell of a lot quicker.”

Allison, Julian and Xiù looked at one another. “We’ll… give it some thought,” Allison decided.

“You do that.” Rylee looked up as the limo pulled through the gates. Behind them, Kevin and Darcy seemed to be parting ways—presumably their business was concluded for now. “Enough doom and gloom. Let’s go meet Misfit, yeah?”

Date Point 10y8m AV
HMS Valiant, En Route to Mrwrki Station, Uncharted system, Deep Space.

Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau

“Do you know what the biggest object the human race ever launched into space was?”

Claude and Major Powell had been invited to stand quietly to one side of Valiant’s bridge as she maneuvered through the system forcefield alongside Kirk’s much smaller ship. They were chatting quietly and staying out the way as best they could. Claude, being a relatively slim man, was having no difficulty in that regard. Powell however was both physically huge in his own right and was wearing two-thirds of an EV-MASS, minus only the bulkiest outer layer.

Powell nodded. “Aye. International Space station, right?”

“Nope.”

“No? Could have sworn…?”

“We’re standing in it.”

Powell looked at the bulkhead alongside him, as if he’d literally never seen the ship he was travelling in before this moment. “…Oh, aye. I suppose it would be. Though… what about Ceres base?”

“Built on a dwarf planet. It’s not a free-floating object in its own right.” Claude stroked the ship’s dull grey painted metal fondly. “Of course she’ll be overtaken by USS San Diego, but for now… this is the largest space vehicle ever built by human science.”

“She’s a good ship.”

“Mmhmm. Undoubtedly. But I can’t help but watch that ship your friend Kirk is flying and think that we’re travelling in the interstellar equivalent of a coal-fired steamer.”

Momentum had idled alongside them throughout the three-day journey to their destination with the same general air as a dolphin might have played with a traditional ocean-going destroyer. One was a conqueror of its environment; the other, a native. If Kirk had wanted to, he could have pushed up to a jaw-dropping multiple of lightspeed and left them behind with a contemptuous flick of his tail.

Powell gave him a curious look. “You sound like you’re happy about that.”

“Aren’t you? We’ve achieved so much despite being so far behind. Imagine what we’ll be able to do once we’ve got our hands on that-!” Claude gestured forward, to where the bridge’s navigation display was showing a to-scale model of the system with a moon of one of the gas giants highlighted.

“I have… reservations.”

Once upon a time, a younger Claude Nadeau might have pooh-poohed any such concerns on the woefully inadequate grounds that the man expressing them was no scientist himself. After all, the world was full of the kind of uneducated dinguses who had once tried to have CERN closed down over concerns related to black holes and other such misunderstandings.

Lt. Col. Nadeau was an older and wiser man who carried a tinge of embarrassment about his younger self’s elitism, and in any case Powell had backing that went right to the top. Both Admiral Knight and General Tremblay had weighed in for him in fact, and as politics went their clout didn’t get much cloutier. You listened to men like that.

“Lay them on me,” he said.

Powell scratched at his chin thoughtfully. “Let’s say this thing does everything you want. We get ourselves basically for free a fleet of ships built wi’ tech and systems generations ahead of ours. We go from your coal-fired steamer to a nuclear fookin’ submarine, right?”

“Right…?”

“No offense, sir, but bein’ Army maybe hasn’t equipped you for thinkin’ about just how bloody complex a ship is. Valiant here has… I’unno, fookin’ thousands of little details, any one of which, if it’s based on untested and little-understood xenotechnology, would be a potential liability. Don’t get me wrong, I know the benefits of technological supremacy better’n most…”

“…But whose technology?”

“Aye, there’s the rub. Then there’s all those other concerns about economics an’ ’restrained development’ an’ all that but fook it, really: Better dirt poor than dead.”

“That’s my thinking,” Claude agreed. “But… thank you, Powell. You’re right, we’ll need to be cautious.”

Powell nodded, then raised his eyebrows to watch the system map. Helm had just overlaid a bright blue line between their current location and the orbit of the Mrwrki moon.

There was an external viewscreen—contrary to popular fiction, it was a tiny disregarded thing tucked away in a corner that nobody ever looked at and it showed absolutely nothing of interest, not even when Valiant ramped up to a stately one kilolight and blitzed across fifty AUs in less than thirty seconds.

Claude was the only one watching it during the final second. There was no swirling wibbly spacetime stuff, no blurring nor even any noticeable blueshift of the forward stars. That was a product of a built-in safety feature of the warp drive; without it, warping vaguely sunwards would have exposed the ship to a catastrophic gamma pulse. All that happened, in fact, was that he was treated to twenty-four seconds of absolutely nothing happening, and then a gas giant popped into existence as they came up on it far too quickly for human reflexes to cope.

There was a flurry of called orders, confirmations, status reports and the general air of a job well done.

“Orbit achieved, captain!” somebody called. Nolan nodded gravely and looked back down the bridge’s length to give Nadeau and Powell a nod that said ’over to you’.

Powell led the way. He seemed quite at ease and comfortable in the cramped confines of the ship despite his size, and navigated it with an agile aplomb that Nadeau failed to match.

Whereas the flight decks on Myrmidon and Caledonia had been cavernous things big enough to fit several shuttles inside, Valiant’s wasn’t even inside the ship: instead, the Dominion-made shuttles piggy-backed on the ship’s dorsum and were flown on remote control to mate their ramp with the bay on the ship’s port side when needed. Not an ideal solution, but one that both worked for the Dominion shuttles and also allowed for some flexibility in whatever more permanent human-built solution they came up with.

Nadeau resolved to put that one right at the top of the list. They could do so much more with a craft of the same size, if it didn’t have to be hollow enough to accommodate a pair of Guvnurag.

On the other hand, that particular constraint was welcome right now. Otherwise, any shuttle ride alongside five SOR operators would have been desperately uncomfortable. Powell’s technicians helped him don the bulky outermost component stage of his armor and the final checks were done with in some efficient seconds. The last component he locked on was his faceplate.

Nadeau suppressed the urge to grin as the major’s Heads-Up Display activated. Using orange for a HUD designed to be used in darkness and space was simple physiological good sense based on the biology of the human eye, but it added a baleful and intimidating component to the suit that rounded off its sheer bulk and physicality.

Of course, the effect was probably sadly lost on most nonhumans most of whom, aside from the Guvnurag and Celzi, had dichromatic vision like a dog’s. Oh well.

Powell ran through a last check of his own, then presented the edges of his mask for inspection by his technician, who completed the checks by sticking duct tape over the seals. Claude doubted if that would help, but the gesture had the air of ritual, and who was he to question the ways of combat arms and their support teams?

He boarded the shuttle instead. It had been given an after-market modification in the form of a steel bulkhead that divided the passenger section neatly along the one-third, two-thirds line, complete with a pressure hatch. The idea being that the SOR in their suits rode in the hatchward third while anybody else who happened to be on board was safe from decompression behind a double layer not only of steel, but also of forcefields.

Most of Nadeau’s team were already on board. As researchers, technicians and scientists, being armed wasn’t usually part of their job description but they were still Army. Nobody was seriously expecting treachery from Kirk, but sensible caution dictated that if they were walking into a trap, they’d want to be armed, despite the presence of the SOR.

He accepted his own weapon from Sergeant Lee as he sat down. Lee Jun-Seok was a power systems genius and nearly as much of an expert on ElectroStatic Forcefields as Nadeau himself. Certainly he knew more about the intricacies of channeling EM radiation through them, and neither man had ever seriously pictured themselves sitting on a shuttle armed with submachine guns in their careers.

“Too bad there’s no windows on this tub.” Lee commented easily.

“We’re in orbit,” Nadeau told him. “Now we’re just waiting on the SOR.”

“Holding us up are they?” Lee asked with a widening smile.

“Mm-hmm. They can’t leave home without their duct tape and a kiss eh?”

There were smiles and laughter from around the compartment.

“What’s with the duct tape, anyway?” Sergeant Campbell asked. She was a materials specialist and one of a handful of people on the team not originally from Scotch Creek. “If they do that every time then they’ll have to use spirits to get rid of the residue, and that’d damage the actual seal…”

“Best not to question it, Camp,” Lee advised. “Watching their lips move as they try to think of an answer would just be depressing.”

Nadeau sat back and let the banter do its work. The SOR weren’t long in getting on board with a series of heavy thumps and clangs. Powell stuck his head through the pressure hatch. “Ready in here?” he asked.

Nadeau nodded. “Whenever you are, major.”

“Aye.”

The hatch closed, and there was stifled giggling in the moments before the ramp came up and they disengaged from Valiant with a lurch that had Lee grabbing for his sick bag.

After that initial jolt, however, the ride was smooth and easy, and they chatted and relaxed through the forty minute descent, keeping an eye on the screen in their compartment. It was immediately obvious when they passed through the station’s pressure-retaining forcefield: suddenly there was sound from outside, and the sounds from inside became just a little less loud and ringing, as they suddenly had somewhere to go rather than echoing around the inside of the shuttle.

Everyone went quiet and listened as the shuttle settled with another jolt, the ramp went down, and the SOR disembarked hard and fast.

Nadeau listened in on the tacnet with interest. To judge from what he heard, the longest part of taking the station by far was ensuring that there were no unwelcome surprises waiting in the landing bay’s control software.

Eventually, one of the Operators—Blaczynski minus his helmet and breathing mask—opened their pressure hatch. “All ashore that’s goin’ ashore,” he reported. “Welcome aboard Mrwrki Station.”

They grabbed their gear and disembarked, to find Kirk waiting for them on the deck alongside an especially huge Guvnurag. For many of the team, these were the first ETs they had ever seen in person, and several of them stopped to appreciate the moment. Claude had seen the Gaoians when they had visited Earth, but they were… different. Gaoians after all were about the same size as humans.

Guvnurag were much, much bigger. This one, who could only be Vedregnenug, was as tall as a truck cab at the shoulder and just about as wide and long. He was covered in shaggy drifts of milk-chocolate brown fur flecked here and there with white, save for two bare stripes down his flank and a smaller patch on his forehead that were glowing a soft green. Huge eyes with W-shaped pupils blinked down at the human scientists as they disembarked, and he shifted his weight to lift one enormous hand to his chest in what was probably a gesture of welcome.

He was such a remarkable sight that the human alongside him went almost unnoticed at first. Lewis Beverote didn’t really suit the long-hair-and-robes guru look, but maybe that was because he was obviously delighted to see them, and was talking enthusiastically with one of the Operators. He saw the scientists disembark and raised his arms.

“Oh my god, FRIENDS!!” he declared. Nadeau heard Campbell laugh slightly. “Please tell me you brought bacon!”

A slightly yellower shade of green rippled on Vedreg’s body for a second, but the huge ET didn’t comment. Of course, Guvnurag were herbivores, weren’t they?

“As a matter of fact we did,” Nadeau stepped forward and shook his hand. “Lieutenant Colonel Claude Nadeau. You must be Lewis.”

“Dude.” Lewis gave him an entirely unexpected though mercifully brief hug. “I’ve been without human contact for like nine months now. I ain’t settling for no weak-ass handshake, especially not when fuckin’ Santa Claus shows up!”

“Nine months? Yurgh.”

“Yah. Not fun. And, like, one dude is not enough to run this shit show, you know?”

The operator he’d been talking to—Vandenberg—spoke up. “Bro. One of our little projects? We cured our own bacon, just as an experiment…it’s fuckin’ good, man.”

“Dude, you’re givin’ me the munchies…”

Vedreg quietly stepped away from the conversation and Nadeau followed him, drifting over to where Kirk and Powell were in conversation. Lee and Campbell stayed behin. “Sorry about that,” he offered.

Vedreg rumbled at length, and his translator took a second to catch up. “Your species are carnivores. I don’t begrudge you that,” he said, as a flash of blue pulsed across him. “But it does make me uncomfortable. I am looking forward to seeing how the authentic Earth ingredients you brought with you compare to what I have.”

Nadeau nodded. “Right, that was in the briefing. You bake?”

“It gives me something to do while I think.”

They joined the conversation between Kirk and Powell.

“-Aye, yeah. Very different to how you last saw it,” Powell was saying. He greeted Claude with a nod. “Between Folctha, New Belfast and the farming villages out along the coast, we’re up to about sixty thousand now, and that’s not counting the alien quarter.”

“Rapid growth!” Kirk commented.

“Corporate money,” Powell explained. “Between Byron, Keystone, and that agricultural offshoot from Hephaestus LLC, there’s a fook of a lot o’ wealth being invested in Cimbrean right now. An’ why not? There’s literally billions of square kilometers of land up for grabs. You should see it. Once you’re past the research outpost at New Penzance, it’s corn fields, potatoes, maize and orchards as far as the eye can see all the way out to the logging operation at New Belfast, and it’s all livestock out the other way past Sellers Lake. Proper cowboys, too, even if they’re using fookin’ quad bikes rather’n horses.”

“It’s rapidly becoming a gentler Earth,” Nadeau commented.

“Well.” Powell wobbled his head. “It’ll be hundreds of years before the Earthlings really start to dominate, but what can you do? I remember the day we heard about the Skidmark—uh, the Terran Microbial Action Zone,” he corrected himself. “Folk were mardy as sin over that, but nowt we can do to stop it. They’re saying that a few species already look like they might just survive though. Cimbrean Tea seems to be doing pretty well.”

“Selection pressure at work,” Nadeau suggested. “The species that were already populous and successful would have the best chance of adapting to the new circumstances.”

“Aye.”

A peal of laughter made them look over at the other group. Lewis was pantomiming some kind of strange and stiff robotic movements, then pretended to push something over. Kirk snorted. “That is the most animated I have seen him in months. He has been rather badly depressed recently.”

“Well, I’ve got some news that should pick you both up,” Powell said.

“Oh?”

“Your friends Buehler, Chang and Etsicitty. They’re alive and well.”

A huge pink flush that was presumably delight or relief flooded Vedreg’s chromatophores. “Wonderful news!”

Kirk tilted his head upwards and shut his eyes, a gesture that was very human in his strange, long-necked way. “Yes,” he agreed.

“Wait, not the three who are going to Mars?” Nadeau asked.

“The very same,” Powell nodded.

“Mars?” Kirk asked.

“Aye. Don’t ask me why but the three of ‘em are working for Byron nowadays, training up to fly some kind of exploration ship.”

Kirk stared at him. “That’s… perfect!”

Powell tried to questioningly echo the word, but Kirk had already turned. “LEWIS!!”

Lewis lowered his hands from whatever it was he’d been gesticulating, made his apologies and trotted over. Behind him the conversation continued with some laughter and nods.

“‘Sup?”

“They’re alive!”

“Who-?” Lewis’ brain caught up. “Xiù? Julian and Allison? They made it?”

“The Lads pulled ‘em out of a life raft about six months ago.” Powell said.

“They spent some time in hospital, but they’re safe and sound,” Claude added.

“Yes!!” Despite the mass difference, Powell had to take a step back as Lewis power-hugged him. “You are like the best good news fairy!”

Powell cleared his throat, and gently levered the smaller man off him. “You’re welcome.” Across the bay, Nadeau saw Blaczynski and Vandenberg struggling to maintain neutral expressions. He could hardly blame them.

“It gets better,” Kirk told him. “It seems this Byron Group had much the same idea you did, and are sending them on an exploration mission… presumably to find habitable deathworlds?” he asked, turning to Powell and Nadeau.

“That’s the shape of it,” Powell agreed.

“And when they find them-!” Lewis enthused, racing ahead of the conversation, “We can target the coltainers!”

“Ah, yes.” Claude stepped in. “I think this might be a good moment to discuss these Von Neumann probes of yours…”

Date Point 10y8m AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-thinker

“Do you taste that?”

“Taste what?”

“It’s that same strange smoke again…”

Four days after their encounter with the strange wingless bird at the river, the village was on edge. Nobody had even bothered to mock them for bringing back root-birds. So many root-birds after all at least demonstrated skill and cunning, and the three hunters had been so plainly shaken and worried by what they had seen that nobody thought to tease them.

Especially not when the Singer had spoken quietly to each of them alone in her tent and declared that they were telling the truth. Vemik had asked the Dancer later on what spells her teacher had cast to know such a thing and she had, with a smile, revealed a little secret of the magic of women: that the best magic required no spells at all.

“If you had been lying,” she said “the others would not have known what details you made up to cover the lie.”

“…And she would have seen that our stories were not the same.” Vemik finished.

The Dancer had given him her prettiest smile and taken some fur from the tuft at the end of his tail as an assurance of secrecy. “You’re a rare one, Sky-Thinker,” she had said. “You’re nearly as clever as a woman.”

Vemik, as ever, turned his thoughts to the sky when he was at work as he was now. He was mentoring one of the boys in keeping watch. It wasn’t a fun job, but it was an important one—slathering one’s orange crest with mud to hide its brilliant hue and then skulking in a treetop east of the village with a shouting-stone on a length of cord was both boring and unpleasant, and brushing the mud out afterwards could take a whole morning, but if the eastern tribe did decide to raid…

There was no reason why they should—this year had been a superb season. The Werne had bred well, the rains had come often, the fruits were heavy and the eating good. Nobody under the great open sky should be starving. Now was a time of peace, when daughters were traded and hunting parties met respectfully and parted ways by mutual agreement.

But there was always the possibility that their women had read some portent or another that demanded blood. There was always the possibility that they had been raided and would mistakenly blame Vemik’s tribe. The only thing certain in life was that, eventually, there would be another raid and so the sentries endured the itchy drying mud in their fur and kept watch.

Vemik looked to the east, raising a hand against the sun and licking the air. It was definitely the same smoke he had tasted a few days prior, and after a few seconds of searching, he made out a faint grey column staining the eastern horizon.

“…That’s their village!” he mused.

The boy by his side—one of Vemik’s nephews, Yatak u Yafek n Metti—peered hopelessly in the direction he was looking. The boy was a blur-eye and no use as a hunter at all as anything beyond arm’s length was just a blob to him, but he had skilled hands for stone-shaping, sharp ears and an acute sense of taste, and a sentry relied more on those senses anyway.

“What is that?” he asked, tongue lashing as he sampled more of the strange smoke on the breeze. “It tastes evil.”

“I don’t know,” Vemik agreed. “It isn’t wood or charcoal, it isn’t flesh, fat or bone… But it comes from over our neighbors to the east.”

He stood up to his full height and tasted the smoke one last time, then decided to call for the others. He took the shouting-stone from his belt and spun it in a slow circle from his hand until it was hooting quietly to itself, just loud enough for him to hear.

With three sharp strong swipes, he made it shout three times, waited a moment then did it again, and again. Three groups of three shouts—a call for advice, not an alarm.

He was just getting to the point of contemplating whether to repeat the call in case it had gone unheard when his father Vemet, his brother Yafek and Yan the Given Man joined them, also covered in mud and armed with spears, axes and slings.

Yan was their Given Man, a brother of the eastern tribe who had led the Easterner’s daughters to them years ago and was welcomed into the tribe as one of their own. His counterpart in the east was one of Vemik’s second cousins, Jaral, who had escorted their own daughters during the trade.

The daughter trade, according to the wisdom of women, was important to keep babies strong and it helped keep relationships between the tribes friendly and respectful for the most part. Only a foolhardy man antagonized his village’s women by killing their brothers, and only an evil or insane man would fight his own brother. Traded Men kept the peace, that was their role, and Yan took his duty very seriously indeed. Vemik trusted him almost more than he trusted some of his own cousins, and Vemet had once been heard to unthinkingly call him ‘brother’.

“That same smoke,” Vemik said, pointing with his spear.

“More of your unkillable birds?” Yafek teased. Yan smacked him sharply on the arm.

“Those are my brothers over there,” he pointed out, staring out at the distant smoke with a tense, scared look in his eye. He tasted the air and flicked an ear cautiously.

“We should investigate,” Vemik said.

“I agree. My daughters are over there,” Vemet growled.

Yan thought about it, then handed Vemik his peace totem. The carved wooden rod with its jovial-faced fat god effigy was brightly painted, and had a twin in the far village. Thus, whoever carried it was known by the other village to be coming in the name of their Given Man.

“You’re the lightest and cleverest of us, Sky-thinker,” he said. “You go.”

“Alone? Me?” Doing it just the once for his test of manhood had been terrifying enough.

“You’re a man now, son,” Vemet agreed. He gripped the back of Vemik’s neck and pressed their foreheads together fondly. “And a good one, too. Turn that sharp mind of yours to scouting and you’ll be back safe, I know it.”

Vemik nodded. “…Ask the Dancer to cast a spell for me?” he requested.

“That’s a fine young woman you’re wooing, Sky-thinker,” Yan observed. “I’m sure she’ll want you back safe: It’ll be a good spell.”

“You have everything you need?” Vemet asked.

Vemik checked his belts. He had rope, his bird-spear thrower, ten bird-spears, his axe and flint core, his twin Werne knives, and everything he needed to start fires. Everything that a man should carry and then some. “…Yes,” he decided.

“Good.”

That one word definitively ended any stalling conversation—it was time for Vemik to prove his bravery. Wresting back his mounting dread, he exchanged gestures of solidarity and brotherhood with all of them, even Yan, then scuttled down the tree to ground level. He cast one backwards glance at home, checked that the peace totem was secure in one of his pouches, then shook himself and headed east.

Date Point 10y8m AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

Xiù had never been much of a video gamer, but she’d hung out with her brother often enough, browsing social media on her phone while he was playing… some game or another involving spaceships. She’d forgotten the name. Elite, or something. That had been one of them.

Her simulator was a pared-down version of those games, but on a grand scale. Wei would have chewed off both his feet to play with it.

It wasn’t a game, though: The physics were painstakingly accurate. She’d had the opportunity to show Rylee during their tour of the real ship that afternoon, and had received two things in return: an impressed assessment that the Group needed to start selling that simulation tech to the military, and several pointers which she was now putting into practice.

The real ’click’ moment from Rylee’s tuition had been when she pointed out that there was in fact no such thing as de-celeration, only ac-celeration along different vectors. It was such a simple way of saying things that Xiù had immediately felt rather stupid and talentless for failing to see it that way earlier, despite Rylee’s—and her instructors’—assurances that she was anything but.

The truth was, minor embarrassments notwithstanding, she was beginning to feel like a professional pilot. She had beaten every single one of the “expert” challenges the simulation techs had prepared for her, and those few pointers were making all the difference: She was now on the verge of securing the last elusive gold medal time.

Plus-Y thrust three-quarters…three, two, one… null Y, plus-X full and plus-Z one-half… two… one… quarter roll and kill the plus-Z thrust, correct drift with minus-Z… one… pitch up one-eighty and correct the X-axis drift and plus-Y full again… ten, nine, eight…

Beep… beep.. Beep. beep beep beepbeepbeebeebeeeeee..

ESFALS to full power, plus-Z thrust for just one second aaand-!

Thunk.

She threw her head back and pumped both her fists as the simulation gave her a gold medal—accurate landing on an asteroid mining operation in less than forty seconds, at a safe speed and within two meters of dead center on the pad. Perfect.

The scenarios were far more involved, hazardous and high-speed than anything she’d face in the real world of course. Hopefully. But that was the point: If she could pull off stunts like that, then the much more mundane maneuvers she would actually be performing should come easily and naturally.

Plus, it always paid to plan for the emergencies. If she wanted that platinum medal, she was going to have to pull of that exact same stunt with the simulator throwing some kind of technical crisis at her for good measure.

She was about to go for it, when there was a knock on her door. She hit the “dismount” button that pulled her chair back from the controls and spun it one-eighty as the internal airlock to her station turned itself round. The idea was that if something should fracture the glass pilot’s bubble—Xiù’s nerves about that scenario had largely evaporated on seeing just how sturdy the real thing was—then the rest of the ship should be spared decompression.

Allison was waiting outside with her hands in her pockets and red eyes. She gave Xiù a contrite little smile as the chair tipped her out. Something was clearly badly wrong.

“…Sorry.”

“Hey!” Xiù gave her a hug. “Are you okay?”

Allison returned it with interest. “I, uh… No.”

“Al?”

Allison shook her head, took Xiù’s hand and led her into the hab room. Julian was sitting at the table with a grim expression and a letter envelope on the table in front of him.

“Did something happen?” Xiù asked.

Allison picked up the envelope and handed it to her. “Read it.”

“Wow this is formal. Allison Charity Isobelle Buehler, care of Moses Byron Group interstellar, Omaha…”

“The other side, baby.”

“Oh, right.”

Xiù turned it over and blinked at the return stamp—an address in Salt Lake City. “J.M. Buehler…”

“Jacob Michael. That’s my father’s…” Allison ran a hand through her hair. “Jesus, after all these years, he’s still using the same fucking business stamp.”

Julian gave her a squeeze, stood up and made coffees without commenting.

“I thought we weren’t getting mail?” Xiù asked.

“We’re not,” Julian said. “Except from immediate family.”

Xiù reflected on the text messages and emails she got from her brother and parents and nodded. “Why use your full name, though?” she asked.

“To prove it’s them, I guess,” Allison ventured. “You two are the only other people in the world who know my middle names… But I dunno, my father was always kinda, uh, pompous like that.”

Xiù offered the letter to her, but she backed away. “I’m not reading that shit.”

“…You’re not?”

Julian transferred the coffees to their table. “Could be an apology…” he prompted.

“It won’t be.”

“But-”

Allison sat down and picked up her drink. “They’ll open a ski resort in Hell first.”

Xiù and Julian looked at one another, then sat on either side of her, comfortingly close. She stared long and hard at her reflection in her coffee for a while then finally sighed. “Go ahead and read it.”

“You’re sure-?” Xiù asked.

“No secrets.”

“…Right.”

Julian leaned over and retrieved a knife from the cutlery drawer, which he handed to Xiù without a word. Seconds later the envelope was open, and XIù smoothed the paper out on the table in front of her.

Jacob Buehler had fastidiously neat handwriting that had clearly looped and curled smoothly off the end of rather a nice fountain pen. Even so, the experience of actually reading something handwritten was so foreign to Xiù after all these years that it took a moment for her to interpret what she was seeing.

“Um… ‘Dear Allison,’” she read, ”‘Your mother and I had given up hope of ever hearing about you again. I’m glad we were so wrong.’ Um… ‘When you abandoned us-’”

“Jesus,” Julian grunted, sipping his coffee. Allison just nodded, staring through the table at something only she could see a long, long way away.

”‘—We prayed for you every day. We hoped that you would see sense and come home. Though you didn’t find the courage to come back, I’m glad that our prayers were answered and y-…’ wǒ de tiān a!“”

“What?” Julian asked. She flapped a hand dismissively and carried on.

”‘…and you’ve somehow managed to achieve something respectable with your life.’” Xiù put the page down. “Wow!”

With a scowl, Julian gently turned the page round and read the last paragraph. “’You now have two younger brothers. They are good boys and don’t get into trouble like you used to. We hope-’”

Allison dumped her coffee over the letter, stood and stormed out of the room.

Julian jumped to his feet as well as the coffee ran over the table and flooded his lap. He swatted it off then gave Xiù a shocked look that asked ’what do we do?’

“You clean up,” she told him. “I’ll…” she waved a finger generally toward the door.

Allison was slumped against the wall in the decontamination chamber with her elbows on her knees and her fingers in her hair. The moment Xiù sat down next to her she was grabbed and held painfully tight, and there was nothing she could do except wrap Allison up in her arms and whisper encouragement softly to her in whatever words, and whatever language, came to mind.

Julian emerged a minute or two later wearing fresh new clothes, sat down on Allison’s other side and wrapped her up as well, and together they did everything they could to make her feel loved.

Eventually, it worked. She took a huge shuddering breath, sniffed and sat a little more upright, pushing her hair back out of her face. “…God dammit…”

“Hey…” Julian soothed the back of her neck. “It’s okay.”

She sniffed and wiped her nose. “Are you okay? I wasn’t thinking straight, did I get coffee on you?”

“It’s fine.”

“Jesus, I’m still sorry. Really. I was just…”

“Hurt?” Xiù suggested.

“…Yeah.” Allison massaged her cheeks, then tipped her head back and leaned against the wall, wiping her eyes. “God, and I thought I’d dealt with that shit years ago.”

“Family have a way of getting under your skin, huh?” Xiù rubbed her back.

Allison opened her mouth to say something, then scowled at herself and shut it again.

“Al?”

“No, nothing.”

“No secrets?”

Allison sighed. “It’s not a secret, it’s just that Miss Mouth here was about to be a bitch before I stopped her.”

“Oh.”

“That really put you in a bad mood, huh?” Julian observed, unhelpfully.

Again, there was that flash of Allison restraining herself. “…Yeah,” she admitted, after it had passed. “I really wanna lash out at something right now.”

“Sparring?” Xiù suggested.

“Great idea, getting beaten up by my girlfriend is totally gonna make me feel…” Allison paused mid-snark, shut her eyes and exhaled, then shook her head. “…No, thank you baby. Just…”

“Massage?” Julian offered.

“…Now we’re talking.”

“Alright, gimme a minute…” Julian kissed her cheek and stood up to go back into the living space.

Allison and XIù sat together in comfortable silence for a few minutes more, with XIù’s hand drifting reassuringly up and down her back before she abruptly stood up and paced around the prep room, chewing on a fingernail.

Xiù was about to query this when Allison turned around and self-consciously dropped her hands to her sides.

“It’s not just the letter,” she said. “It’s the whole… I just wanted to get out there and do what I know I’m good at. And now the Group’s turning us into these huge celebrities and they dug up all this stuff that I buried for a reason, and now we’re gonna be all over the media having our life histories ripped into…” She sighed. “I just feel so used, you know? And stupid. I really shoulda seen something like this coming.”

She rubbed her eyes again. “The letter from my folks was just the cherry on top, I guess. The last little screw you.”

“Were they always like that?”

Allison shrugged. “Pretty much. They wanted a couple of ’good little boys’ I guess, and what they got was a sulky skinny daughter who used to smoke behind the gym hall and listen to the ’wrong kind of music’, whatever the fuck that is…” She ran a hand through her hair. “…I guess when I ran away I was hoping they’d realize how… that they’d improve, you know? But no, here I am, I’m gonna be, like, the second or third person on freaking Mars, but I’m still momma and papa Buehler’s tearaway little brat. Fuck ‘em!”

“Are you going to reply?”

“I might send them, like, two words,” Allison snorted, but she shook her head. “No. I’m done with them. I don’t have parents. And hell, look at me! Look at us! I’ve done some incredible things already in my life and I’m not even thirty yet, and I did all of it without them. So they can go right to Hell and stay there, both of them.”

Xiù, having no idea what to say, said nothing.

“You’re okay with it though,” Allison observed. If there was a hint of resentment in her voice, Xiù decided to ignore it. “Aren’t you? The…celebrity and everything.”

Xiù nodded cautiously. “Is that…okay?”

“Okay? God, Baby, if you weren’t happy with it I’d feel awful right now. I’d hate to think I dragged you into…”

“Al.” Xiù stood up and put her hands on Allison’s upper arms, rubbing them reassuringly. “You could never ‘drag’ me. I’d follow you anywhere.”

“…You would?”

“You saved my life! And you’ve given me an anchor, a purpose, you’ve taught me how to feel human again…” They kissed, then rested forehead-to-forehead and nose to nose. “You’ve given me everything I never knew I wanted.” Xiù told her. “Of course I’d follow you, into anything.”

Allison sighed. “What if I said I didn’t want this anymore?” she whispered. “What if I just wanted to go back to Minnesota and just be the three of us, as if we were all alone on the whole planet? Would you follow me then?”

Xiù wrapped her arms around her head and held her close. “Please don’t,” she pleaded. “Because I would.”

“But you’d hate it.”

Xiù shook her head. “No, you would. Would you ever really forgive yourself if you let this beat you?”

Allison stood up straight again. “…No,” she acknowledged, looking much more like herself at last. “No I wouldn’t.”

“So…are we going back to Minnesota?”

“Hell no.”

There was a soft chuckle from the doorway. Julian was leaning against it watching them fondly, demonstrating yet again that he was silence incarnate when he wanted to be. “There’s the Allison we love.”

“Yeah,” Xiù agreed. “There she is.”

Allison wasn’t much of a blusher, but it was there sometimes. She smiled at her feet, then cleared her throat, eyes shining. “…I needed that.”

Julian smiled, and tilted his head toward the living space. “Go get cleaned up. Massage is waiting, when you’re ready.”

Allison nodded, kissed them both, and retired to the shower. Once she was gone, Xiù blew out all of her tension and sad feelings and shook her arms limber, before smiling at Julian. “I think she’s feeling better.”

He nodded “I wish I had half your skill at saying the right thing…”

Xiù kissed him too. “You’re fine.”

“Hmm…” he said, skeptically. “…Uh, can you promise me something?”

“What?”

“Could you…write your mom and dad? Tell them how you feel? I think…” Julian sighed and nodded in Allison’s general direction. “I think it’s important that one of us has proper parents…And I know you’ve got a lot of stuff you wanted to tell them.”

He was right, and not half as bad at saying the right thing as he thought. “…Will you help?” Xiù asked. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say.”

“I’d love to.”

Date Point 10y8m2d AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

All Vemik could taste was ash, and this close the wrongness of that ash was a physical, disgusting force that was giving him a crisis of confidence. There was a searing, caustic edge to the scent unlike anything he’d ever sampled before and it was turning his stomach and disturbing his thoughts.

The worse part of the scent, however, was cooked flesh. Not the healthy warm mealy smell of Werne, or the delicate perfume of roasted root-bird. This was person flesh, scorched black and ruined where the fat had melted and burned, cremating them even as they died.

He knew because he could see the bodies. Poor, twisted, desperate things that had stiffened from death and the heat into frantic clawing poses… all facing the same way. All fleeing something.

And worst of all… many of those bodies wore the blue beads of his tribe’s given-away daughters. He was ankle deep in the charred corpses of his sisters.

Tracking what had happened would have been easy even for a beginner boy. For a man of Vemik’s tribe the very landscape screamed of what had happened. Something huge, far bigger than even the most legendary Yshek, had clawed its way out of the deep forest coming from the south. It had sliced through trees—literally cut them with awful flat precision. There was no frayed and splintered wood, just clean flat surfaces where whatever-it-was had decided that a tree was in its way, and had calmly sliced it as cleanly through as a man with a good flint blade might butcher a steak.

It had been so heavy that its six round-footed legs had crushed and sunk into hard dry earth, and as it walked it had thrown fire ahead of it with enough force to blast huts apart and scatter their burning wreckage, and with enough heat to ignite people and pulverize their bones.

The survivors had scattered, fleeing into the forest. North, east, west, they had gone every which way like root-birds, which at least ensured that some of them must have survived.

The death demon had pursued the largest band northwards, uprooting and cutting trees as it went with terrifying force. In Vemik’s imagination it looked like a Skithral, a palm-sized stinging creature whose venom could kill a child and make a man gravely ill, and whose segmented body could cover the ground with shocking speed. He envisioned the destroyer writhing and twisting as it barged between the trees and shouldered huts out of the way.

Moving quickly and quietly he grabbed what evidence he could, and was fortunate. A set of blackened blue beads from one of the bodies (he tried not to wonder which of his cousins and sisters she had been), the village Singer’s scrying bowl, cracked and blackened by the fire that had ruined her hut. He found the other half of the peace totem he was carrying—the shaped ends fit together easily and without force.

He was scavenging for one last item to truly support his tale when a familiar thrumming made him flick an ear. He looked up, then darted for the cover of the treeline on the south of the village. It wasn’t the closest but Vemik was thinking like a Trung, which never ran toward their nest when threatened.

He made it into the bushes and up a tree as fast as he could go, clambering up it hands, feet and tail in an efficient instinctive scramble. A cleft where two sturdy lengths of trunk had grown together and merged offered him a place to hide and watch.

Two of the wingless birds swept into the ruins of the village. They fanned out and darted back and forth among the bodies and wreckage with rays of red light gleaming out of their eyes, probing and searching. Vemik, who had never even conceived of seeing such a thing, shrank into his hiding place and watched with wide eyes.

One of them paused over the body of the woman whose beads he’d taken. It scrutinized her twisted corpse from several angles, and then drifted across the ground, carefully studying the mud as it floated over to another body… the one he’d claimed the peace totem from.

Very, very carefully and slowly, Vemik slipped his bow off his back. His tail reached up and coiled around a branch, lifting him enough to he could use both his hands and his feet. He braced his feet against the trunk, giving him three points of stability and slipped a bird-spear from its sheath.

The wingless bird inspected the totem-bearer’s remains, then aimed its rays suspiciously in Vemik’s direction. Mapping the ground, it turned and drifted towards his hiding place.

Vemik notched his bird-spear and, scarcely daring to draw a breath, he drew. The eye. The eye was always a weak spot on everything, even Yshek.

He whistled loudly. The odd bird-thing and its companion both immediately turned their large black eyes toward him and he shot.

The bird-spear flew true and crashed into the thing’s eye with a noise—and an effect—not dissimilar to flint breaking. Sharp little bits of what must have been incredibly pure but thin quartz went everywhere and the oddbird reeled drunkenly in the air. Lightning of all things snapped inside it and it jerked, dropped, rolled and lay there smoking.

The other shot after him making an angry beeping sound and Vemik ran.

It was fast. Of course it was fast, it was a bird! A bird made of quartz and lightning somehow, but anything that flew was always going to be faster than anything that merely ran and brachiated.

He sprinted along a thick branch and launched himself off the end, using the wood’s natural flex and bend to give him a little extra spring. Desperation gave him the wings he needed to reach a branch he might have ordinarily missed and he swung on it. The young bough bent with his weight, and a bolt of brilliant, evil blue flame punched past him and singed the tuft of his tail as it smacked into a tree and left a scorched crater.

He yelped and let go of the branch. A second blast of fire would have incinerated him had he held on, and the death-bird’s speed carried it over his head. It banked and whined and twisted between trees and branches, howling for his blood as it looked for a clean run-up.

Vemik landed sure-footedly on a lower limb and sprang forward to briefly grip the side of one tree trunk before springing off at an angle, landing, leaping, landing again in a zig-zag that carried him from tree to tree and denied the death-bird a clear line of attack.

He prayed to every god, even the evil ones, and to Dancer’s magic that his memory of the forest was accurate….

He scuttled up a Bathrak tree’s smooth bole and flung himself into space just before the bird, which had somehow grown wide wings that glowed like fire at the edges, plunged towards him. It missed by a hand’s width or less and should have crashed into the tree, but instead those fire-blade wings sliced cleanly through the wood, sending a two-hundred-year-old forest monster crashing and groaning as it fell.

Vemik’s memory had been true. He snatched in mid air, caught one of the long beard-like vines of the Forestfather tree he’d been aiming for and swung in a long arc around its trunk.

The death-bird shot at him again, but Vemik had already let go, diving through the Forestfather’s outer curtain of vines.

It followed. Its wings clipped the ancient tree’s beard, sending dozens of vines coiling like ropes to the leaf litter below, but what Vemik knew, and what the death-bird apparently hadn’t, was that this particular Forestfather had grown at the base of a short cliff.

Those wing-blades did it no good at all when it charged blindly into solid rock.

It took Vemik several long minutes to get his frantic breathing under control, and to dare to descend the cliff to examine the wreckage. When he did, he found his fourth and final evidence of the attack among the debris in the form of one of the death-bird’s wing blades. Although the fire had died on the edge of those wings, when he picked one up and tested its edge it turned out to be sharper than even the best Werne-knife or sharp flint. He tapped it against a rock and cocked his head at the alien ’Tink!’. Whatever it was made from, it was light, strong, sharp and durable. Even ramming into a stone cliff much faster than a man could sprint hadn’t deformed or broken it. A fine trophy.

He also took the death-bird’s eye. Then, after dusting his hands he scaled the cliff and headed for home, making the best speed he could.

His people were going to have to run.

Date Point 10y8m2d AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Major Owen Powell

The SOR had set up in what had once been Mrwrki’s hydroponics laboratory. According to the station’s records, the lab’s glass dome and forcefields had originally worked to channel and filter the sunlight of whatever distant sun it was that Mrwrki had orbited, until unexpectedly leaping tens of thousands of lightyears across the galaxy and crashing into a moon had slightly disrupted their operational effectiveness.

The entire hydroponic crop had died starving for energy from the too-distant, too-dim red star that was still, as yet, unnamed. The Techs and the Lads seemed to have endless fun trying to out-geek each other to produce the nerdiest possible name for it. So far the frontrunner seemed to be ’Silmaril’, edging out such worthy contenders as ’Vulcan’ (too obvious), ’Jita’ (too copyrighted), ’Yavin’ (too famous) and ’Starry McStarFace’ (which had received the eloquent rejection ‘lol, no’).

Powell might have ventured ’Giordano’, but had decided to stay out of it. A little friendly competition between Techs and Operators was something to be nurtured, not disrupted by the CO blundering in with his unsolicited ha’penny-worth.

Instead he was catching up with Kirk over his carefully managed dinner. Fearsome as he tried to be, there was no way he was going to get back to Cimbrean and explain to Sergeant Arés that he’d screwed up his meal plan. The young man had proved disarmingly talented at giving his CO exactly as much of a telling-off as their respective ranks permitted. He could wield the word ’macronutrients’ like a claymore, and the words ’interval training’ were written above the gates to a special hell of his own devising.

“Nope,” he was saying. “Not a peep these seven years. Like they dropped right out of the fookin’ universe.”

“That is… a shame. Miss Delaney seemed exceptionally resourceful.”

“So did Saunders, for all the man’s nickname was well fookin’ deserved.” Powell shrugged. “Who knows, though? We’d just about written you off… They might pop up yet. I’d like to see her again at least.”

“Yes. She made quite the impression, as I recall.” Kirk snorted, an amused gesture that Powell knew his species and humans had in common.

Powell laughed. “Aye! Hah! ’Which one of you eejits wants to hand me a feckin’ towel?!’” he sipped his juice and laughed again. “Ah… What a woman. I’d have loved to be the one to tell her she managed to shit a whole planet to death. Can you imagine her face?”

Kirk snorted again as Powell finished his juice. “I imagine she would have been in two minds about it.”

“Aye… Heh. I should tell Rylee that story sometime. She’d bust a gut.”

“Rylee? Your FTL test pilot Rylee Jackson?”

“The very same. Don’t ask me what she sees in a bald bell-end like me, but we’re, mm… involved.”

“I believe the term is ’a bit of rough’.”

Powell laughed again. He’d forgotten how well he got along with Kirk—there weren’t many people of any species who could get him to genuinely laugh out loud, but alien body language had blessed Kirk with an absolutely flawless deadpan. “Aye, that’d be it,” he agreed.

“We missed so much…” Kirk mused. “I would like to see Cimbrean again. It sounds very different.”

Powell paused in tearing a meal pouch open with his teeth. “…I tell you what, mate. I’ve never loved a city more, an’ that’s the fookin’ truth,” he said. “It’s…It makes me wonder what’d happen if we just hit the reset button on all the governments on Earth, y’know? Told ‘em ’Right, piss off the lot of yer, we’re gonna write up a new constitution from scratch and start over.’ I wonder how much better the world would be if we did that?”

“Forgive me, are you not sworn to protect the constitution?” Kirk inquired.

Powell shook his head. “That’s the Americans.”

“Ah, yes.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s not realistic… but summat tells me that if this deathworld colonization moonshot of your mate Lewis’ works, a lot of those colonies’ll turn out to be much better places to live than Earth.”

“It sounds like you believe in the human frontier spirit.”

“Well isn’t that just beautifully Star Trek? ’Frontier spirit’?” Powell scoffed. “Sounds like a fookin’ car! Look, mate, do you know what building Folctha cost us? I’ve seen shit that still gives me the shakes years on. Do you know what a little girl sounds like when she dies?”

Kirk raised his head, shocked. “Powell-”

“I do.” his voice broke on the second word, and he cleared his throat. “That city has her blood in its mortar, and by God we’d better make summat that’s fookin’ worthy of her.”

Kirk, wisely, said nothing and instead gave him space and time to arrive at his point.

Powell backed down a bit. “…It’s not about frontier spirit, or adventure or any of that sappy ’what’s-over-the-next-horizon’ bollocks,” he declared. “It’s the simple fact of humans that we go stir-fookin’-crazy unless we’ve got summat important to do. Summat to fight for. And if we can’t find owt that’s important, we start fighting over unimportant shit instead.”

Kirk nodded slowly. “And Cimbrean is something important.”

“Fookin’ right it is! Because maybe, just fookin’ maybe, if we can claw out a future for ourselves, if we can give people an actual life’s work rather than leaving ‘em as meat in the grinder, the day may yet come where there’s no poor bastards left who think the only future they have is blowing themselves up for God, or whatever.”

He took a deep breath, ran a hand over his scalp and shook his head, snapping back into a more normal frame of mind. “Christ, that was heavy of me. Sorry.”

Kirk tapped his plastic fingers on the tabletop, thoughtfully. “It sounded,” he opined, “like something you have wanted to say for a while.”

“You’re a sympathetic ear, mate.”

“And a confidential one. You are not the first human to, ah, ’offload your baggage’ on me.”

“That wasn’t baggage, just… frustration. It’s been a pressure cooker on Earth for years, and we’ve maybe finally got the chance to let some of that pressure escape. Even for a stone-faced twat like me that’s exciting.”

Kirk nodded his understanding again. “So that is why you have been counselling Lieutenant-Colonel Nadeau to go ahead with the Coltainer project,” he surmised.

“Aye. Should buy us a few centuries at least.”

“And after those centuries are up?” Kirk asked.

Powell shrugged, and picked up his meal pouch again. “Let’s worry about this bridge for now, aye? We‘ll worry about the next one once we’re across.”

“You know, only humans think like that…” Kirk pointed out. Powell just shrugged.

“It’s worked for us so far,” he said.

Date Point 10y8m3d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

Now that they were through selection, Kevin Jenkins had taken a personal interest in guiding the three Misfit crew through their last two months of training. It was a pretty basic change to their schedule—he met them first thing in the day to give them a potted summary of the day’s news and developments.

This time was different. All they’d found waiting for them was a note inviting them to join Kevin at the tactical obstacle course at the back of the facility, in a shallow natural valley that had been deepened and banked up to catch stray bullets. It was a maze of spraypainted MDF walls, oil drums, pallets and crates, tractor tyres and a couple of shot-up SUVs, overseen by a fleet of quadcopters with holographic emitters that could zip around above it generating targets.

The course was Allison’s turf, and she made use of it every day before coming home under the watchful eye of a retired SWAT officer called Jason Hammond. She called it “good relaxation”. Julian had watched her run it one time, in an efficient bustle of move, shoot, move, shoot, shoot, move, swap weapon, and had wondered what she could possibly find relaxing about it.

Kevin and Hammond were conversing in the course’s armory when they arrived, joking and getting on like old friends.

They chorused their variations on the theme of “hello”, and Julian asked the obvious question.

“So, what’s with the change of scenery?” he inquired.

“Got a new toy for y’all.” Kevin chuckled, “or rather for Allison.”

Allison stood up straighter. “For me?”

Kevin grinned fiercely—he was the only Abductee any of them knew who did so bare-teethed and openly—and indicated the black plastic case that Hammond had just heaved onto the table.

Allison lit up like three Christmases had come along at once. “Oooh! Guns!”

“Not just any guns.” Hammond popped the latches. “The SOR just put in an order for a couple dozen’a these. Take a look.”

Julian laughed quietly to himself and shared a knowing smile with Xiù as Allison dived in like an eager kid. She came up with a rifle that she turned this way and that with increasing bemusement.

“Sexy!” she enthused. “But…weird action. Where’s the brass come out?”

“It doesn’t. You’re holding a gauss rifle.”

Allison lowered it. “You’re shitting me! Somebody made a working gauss rifle?”

“Yyyup. It’s called the GR–1d, and pretty much every magazine, blog and YouTube channel’s billing it as the next SCAR. The SOR just ordered a bunch…What you’ve got there is the marksman variant.”

Allison put it down and produced the intro booklet which she dived into. It didn’t take long before she gave an impressed low whistle. “These are some big promises…”

“Mr. Williams checked them.” Kevin said.

“And?”

“Y’know, he may even have actually smiled…”

Julian snorted. They hadn’t met Byron Group’s security chief often, and the impression he’d given, while polite and professional, was that while he knew all about smiling he didn’t really see the appeal.

Allison turned and beamed at him, lifting the gun. “Whaddya think?”

“You’re never sexier than when you’re armed, Al,” he told her. Beside him, Xiù laughed and nodded.

“Hot,” she agreed, maybe a touch sarcastically.

“Glad you think so!”

Kevin grunted a small laugh. “Before your harem get too enthusiastic…”

“Hey!”

“…how about you actually shoot that thing?”

Allison looked to Hammond for his permission. At his nod she bounded toward the door with an expression of feral enthusiasm. Hammond followed with an air of avuncular amusement.

“We are not a harem!” Xiù complained as the door closed behind them.

“Ah, Hell,” Kevin turned back. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

Xiù stared at him for a second, then relaxed. “…Okay.”

Kevin gave her a strange look, then met Julian’s eye and wisely decided to just nod and drop it. He elected to join Allison and Hammond out on the course, and Julian watched the three of them put on hearing and eye protection before they lined up some static targets to start out.

Julian put his arm around Xiù’s waist and stood close to her. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah…” she sighed, “just another reminder that my brain doesn’t work properly any more…”

“It works fine!” Julian objected. She shook her head.

“A Gaoian would have had her claws out at that ’harem’ thing,” she explained. “And… the doctors said I’m probably never going to stop thinking a bit like they do.”

“You don’t mind when we tease you,” Julian pointed out. “And you tease back!”

“I trust you and I love you.” Xiù watched Allison fire off some practice shots at a holographic Hunter then smile broadly with an enthusiastic nod and an ’oh yeah!’ as they formed a surprisingly tight and neat grouping, and not far off center-mass either. “Both of you,” she added.

Julian put his arm round her waist and she rested her head on his shoulder. “Fuck Nervejam, huh?”

“Yeah. And then sometimes something like that happens and reminds me that I really can’t relate to anybody else but you nowadays.”

He kissed her on the cheek, then got a better kiss when she turned her head. “But you’re okay, right?” he asked.

She nodded and gave him a smile. “I’m great! I’ve never felt so positive in my life, I promise!” she turned toward him. “Are you?”

He smiled and nuzzled her neck. “I sometimes have bad days where I only feel like, oh, the second luckiest guy in the universe…”

She laughed musically. “So, pretty good, then.”

Julian nodded and kissed her again. “Pretty good,” he agreed.

He caught Allison watching them through the glass—she gave him a wink and a warm smile and returned to testing her new toy.

“It’s good to see her smiling again,” he said.

“Yeah. I didn’t like making her so stressed…”

“You didn’t.”

Xiù nodded. “Just…I mean, ever since I was little I dreamed of being a famous actress. This feels a lot like I’m making that dream happen, and she hates it.”

“Deep down, Al cares too much about what people think,” Julian suggested. They watched her enthuse over the rifle, then smile even broader as Hammond introduced her to a pistol that had the same sleek look. Presumably a gauss pistol? Whatever it was, Allison looked happier than she had in weeks as she looked it over, loaded it and swiss-cheesed a target with tight groupings to its emaciated chest and toothy face.

“Damn she’s a good shot!” Xiù said, admiringly.

“Way she tells it, she fired off a box of nine-mill every lunch break for four years,” Julian recalled. “And you should have seen her on…Izbrk? Think it was called Izbrk. Same place I lost my foot.”

“And Hammond’s been tutoring her for months…”

“Yyyup.”

Outside on the course, Allison nodded and Hammond loaded up a scenario of some kind. He placed the rifle inside a blue water drum halfway down the course then stood behind her and counted down with his hand on her back. Allison took some preparatory breaths and…

Julian and Xiù watched their girlfriend turn into a punchy package of mobile murder. There was nothing flashy about how she moved, just fast, sharp and intense. Weight forward, weapon snapping from angle to angle, servicing hostiles the very instant they appeared as she advanced toward the rifle, which she retrieved after holstering the pistol.

The rifle was a different business altogether. Once retrieved, she got low in cover and started tapping down her targets. Up, move, kill, move, cover the angles, kill, then put the rifle in another drum and finish the course with her pistol again.

The final step was to prove to Hammond that the weapon was empty and safe. He took it off her then gave her a huge congratulatory slap on the back, pointing at the clock at the end of the course, which was flashing a proud “1:18”.

Xiù spoke first. “…Wow.”

“Yyyup.”

“That’s actually scary.”

“Yyyup” Julian repeated. “Hot, ain’t it?”

“Yeah!” Xiù shook herself back to reality then blushed. “Um… yeah.”

Julian was still laughing when Allison bounded back into the armory with animated enthusiasm. “Oh my God did you see that?!”

“That was amazing!” Xiù told her.

“Uh-huh! I got within ten seconds of my best time!”

“With a completely unfamiliar weapon, too,” Hammond said, setting the weapon in question down on the table. “I actually managed less than a minute with this beauty.”

“It’s incredible!” Allison enthused. “You spend so much less time reloading!”

“Sold, then,” Kevin observed.

“Hell the fuck yes!”

“Right. We’ll order a couple with their role conversion kits for ya.” Hammond said, packing up.

“And you three’d better get to your sessions for the day,” Kevin added.

“Thanks Kevin. I take back every mean thing I said about you.” Allison joked.

“Well shucks, I better start making you say NEW mean things about me.”

Julian chuckled, and led the way out. Allison gave them both a kiss and bounced off in the direction of her engineering instruction, clearly enlivened.

“Hot, eh?” he asked, as soon as she was out of earshot. “Thought you’re ’basically straight’?”

“Aargh, don’t start,” Xiù warned him. “My head’s confused enough without questioning my sexuality as well.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

Fortunately, their morning sessions were in adjacent parts of the building, so they had a few minutes to talk as they walked.

She thought for a few steps. “It’s like… No, I think I’ve got it pretty much figured out. For a while I worried whether it was another symptom of the nervejam, and I worried about what might happen if I, uh, ’healed’…”

“But…?”

Xiù shrugged. “But… look, my brain likes to worry about stuff.” They reached the elevator and she pressed the call button. “I’ve always had this jabbering monkey on my shoulder constantly freaking out about everything. That’s why I meditate, it helps me love the moment and tell the monkey to go focus on the important stuff.”

“And worrying about what the nervejam did to you isn’t important stuff?”

She giggled as the elevator arrived. “I mean… yes, okay, permanent brain damage, yaaay! That’s kind of a big deal, sure. But can I do anything about it?” she asked, pressing the button for the top floor. “No, I can’t. And it’s not stopped me from learning how to fly a ship, brushing up on my language studies, and having a pretty good love life. It got in the way of my sex life a bit, but I’m working on that…”

She turned a bit pink, then rallied. “So…yeah! I’m always going to worry about stuff but if an alien brain grenade didn’t stop me then an invisible monkey on my shoulder doesn’t stand a chance.”

Julian laughed, reflecting admiringly that Xiù had an absolutely rock-solid core behind her quiet facade. But of course, that’s what had attracted both him and Allison in the first place. “Attagirl.”

She laughed with him. “When you think about it? Straight, gay, bisexual, Allison-sexual, us-sexual… or whatever? They’re just labels. They don’t matter, not really.”

“I guess if you’ve spent your whole life practicing to know what matters and what doesn’t…” Julian nodded.

“Right! And… God, there was one boy at school who was just… he came out and overnight he was suddenly the gayest, you know? Fuh-lay-ming!” she flipped her hands extravagantly to sell the point. “…And most of us were just like, ’Okay, we get it, you like guys! Cool! Whatever! You’re making a bigger deal of it than literally everyone else!’. You know? Does there have to be this whole culture attached to it, or can you just carry on as if it’s not a big deal? Because it’s not!”

“Wow,” Julian commented, as the door opened. “I’ve never heard you go on a rant like that before.”

“…Sorry.”

“Guess it’s a subject that cuts close to the bone, huh?”

“…Maybe a little. The monkey keeps bugging me to pick the right label, and I want to focus on improving other things.”

“Like what?”

She went bright red, which he suspected answered his question, but that iron core showed itself again when she glanced up and down the hall to make sure they were alone and unobserved. “Like… well, like having a proper sex life. That’d be nice.”

“Hmm. You know, I think I might know somebody who can help there…”

She licked her lips and smiled nervously, clearing her throat. “You do, huh?”

Julian gave a deep chuckle low in the back of his throat. “I can think of one or two…”

She shut her eyes and shivered. “Um. I’d, um, better get to class.”

“Okay…” he slipped his hand round her waist and kissed her. “We’ll talk about your sex life later.”

“Ssssure. Okay. Later.”

He kissed her again, and deployed one of the Chinese words he’d secretly rehearsed with Allison recently. “Love you, bǎobèi.”

“Mm… Wǒ yě ài nǐ…Um, I mean-”

“I know what it means, shǎguā. ”

She licked her lips again, nodded and slipped away.

Julian watched her go, then turned towards his own lessons. A plan was forming in his mind. All he needed was to recruit Allison, and he suspected he knew just the thing…

Date Point 10y8m3d AV
Uncharted Class 12 planet, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-thinker

No more death-birds had followed him at least, but Vemik was under no illusions whatever force controlled them was aware of him and must have at least a vague sense of the direction of his village, which was why it came as a profound relief when he finally laid eyes on the thatched huts of home.

There was the thrum of a shouting-stone in a nearby tree. Two beats, welcoming a returning member of the tribe. He raised a hand toward the sentry and dropped to ground level to cross the open ground around the village.

His father came running out of his hut and looked at the sun for a moment, thanking the gods. The old man must have been worried.

Vemik didn’t let him ask stupid questions. “Dead!” he shouted, breaking into a run. “They’re all dead!”

“…What?”

Such an extraordinary shout had the tribe coming out to see what was going on, and Vemik soon found himself surrounded.

He didn’t bother repeating himself. He just produced the set of glazed and blackened giving-away beads he’d taken from the unidentifiable corpse of one of his sisters. Vemet stared at it, then took it with shaking hands, and began to make a soft mourning sound in the back of his throat. “…I made these for Yetta.”

Vemik nodded and put his arms round the old man for comfort. Yetta had been his favorite daughter and while it was every father’s burden to eventually say goodbye to his daughters and send them to another tribe, the beads were an important blessing of safety and long life, the fond hope of a parent wishing his child the very best.

Vemik could not have found a worse thing to hand him.

Vemet just kept staring at them as he sat slowly down on his backside in the dirt. His brother, Vemik’s uncle Jaran, put a hand on his shoulder and began to sing softly, the old words of the funeral song. The whole tribe took it up, even Yan and his sisters, who went grim-faced as Vemik handed over the two halves of the peace totem.

The Singer took her eastern counterpart’s ritual bowl with shaking hands. “Not even their strongest magic protected them…” she mused.

“Whoever did this can make birds out of stone and lightning,” Vemik told her, producing the eye and blade he’d taken as trophies. She shook her head uncomprehendingly as she studied them. “The enemy’s magic is more powerful,” he concluded.

She shook her head. “Magic can’t make rock fly,” she declared. “It can bring good fortune, strong babies, cure sickness, but… making a bird out of lightning? That’s impossible.”

“I know what hunted me, grandmother.”

“…Whatever power can make a bird out of stone, what can we do?”

“It can make far worse than just a bird. I only saw its tracks but there’s something else out there, a skithral as big as a hut or bigger and I would bet my knives of manhood that it can spit blue fire, just like the birds.” Vemik became aware that the tribe was staring at him. “It hunted them down,” he added. “They scattered like root-birds, but I saw its tracks and the trees it smashed as it hunted them.”

“But you killed them,” Yerak pointed out. “Didn’t you?”

“Two of the birds, but…” Vemik presented his tail-tip for inspection. The burn from where blue flame had barely missed him throbbed and he had doubts that his fur would grow back. He looked to the Dancer. “You cast a spell for me?”

She nodded. “…I danced until I fell down.”

“Then you saved my life.”

Vemet stood, shakily. “So. We have to run.”

“The Dancer’s strongest magic barely saved me from just one of those birds. If the other thing finds us… Only the gods could help us, and they didn’t help my sisters.”

Several members of the tribe squinted at the sun. The home of the gods was suddenly a much less comforting thing.

“When?” Somebody asked. Yan’s oldest sister, Hetro.

“Their village is only a day’s walk from here,” Vemik pointed out. “We should really go right now…”

“We don’t have the supplies prepared,” Yan pointed out. “And the sun is already past peak.”

“…Then we go at dawn.” Vemet decided. “Everybody. Get ready. Prepare food, water and whatever you can’t bear to leave. Be sensible about it.”

He turned to the Singer. “Where should we go?”

She harrumphed. “Don’t you remember your own words of manhood, Stone-tapper?”

Vemet tasted the air as he remembered. “…’The song of the setting sun’,” he recalled. “West, then?”

“Trust the magic, Stone-tapper. It can’t make birds of stone and lightning or skithrals that spit blue fire, but it will do what it can.”

Vemet looked at the beads in his hand, looking like a man having a crisis of faith, then slipped them onto his wrist and headed for his hut.

“Sky-thinker,” the Dancer said, touching his arm.

“Hmm?”

“You’re covered in death. Let me wash you, and put something on that burn.”

Vemik looked down at himself. He was absolutely foul with mud and ashes, he realized, and now that he came to notice it he itched all over.

“That sounds good,” he admitted, “but… do we have time?”

The Singer trilled the filthy laugh universal to all grandmothers. “Sky-thinker, if you can’t make time for being washed by a pretty girl then there is hardly any point in running away because you’re already dead,” she told him mock-sternly.

Both Vemik and the Dancer laughed, and the Dancer took his hand. “Come on,” she said.

“You two will have many strong babies,” the Singer predicted.

“Grandmother! Is now really the time?”

“Oh, don’t worry about her,” the Dancer said as she pulled him away. The Singer was still cackling to herself as she bustled off to gather her things. “Let’s just get you cleaned up.”

Vemik nodded and allowed himself to be led. “…You’re right.”

She trilled her musical laugh. “The babies can come later, when you’re in the mood for it…”

She always knew how to make him feel better.

Date Point 10y8m3d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

The best part of the Nest was the middle. It was the one place where Xiù could sleep deeply, soundly and without dreams, sheltered on both sides by warm and loving bodies.

The problem now was that the conversation Julian had teased her with that morning hadn’t materialized. He’d returned to the Box with Allison after time on the obstacle course, and as their evening wound on through cleaning up, dinner and preparing for bed, she caught them giving each other those looks. The ones that usually presaged them vanishing into the shower together at some point.

Feeling a little hurt and neglected, therefore, she made up their nest-bed early that night and lay down to sleep in the middle of it. It wasn’t her turn, but they could damn well give her some affection once they were done with each other.

To her surprise, not only did they not complain but they didn’t steal away into the shower either. They joined her. Julian designated himself as the “big spoon” and tucked up behind her with his right arm under her head, while Allison wriggled into her shoulder and put her head down with a slight smile.

Xiù knew that smile—that was a mischief-smile, and Allison usually only wore it when she was about to do something tormentingly sultry to Julian.

But… they’d laid down and said their goodnights and had both apparently drifted off to sleep. Which meant she found herself lying there wondering just what the hell they had been up…

…to…

It dawned on her that there was something firm pressed against her butt, and that Julian’s warm, strong right hand was resting tantalizingly close to her breast, much closer than usual. His dominant left hand, meanwhile, was draped over her hip to rest lightly on her upper thigh. Suddenly she couldn’t think of anything else but where those hands could so easily go if they only moved a couple of inches…

In the vague hope that doing so might somehow resolve her predicament, she wiggled a little closer into his embrace, only to find that she’d achieved precisely the opposite. He responded sleepily to the contact by holding her closer, and his right hand moved slightly. Instead of resting nearby, his hand was now on her breast, applying a steady and sensuous pressure through her shirt…

She bit her lip and closed her eyes, and wriggled closer still. His fingers squeezed gently and he kissed her neck.

”Oh, God, you’re awake…” she whispered, suddenly on the brink of panic.

“Mm-hmm.” His lips brushed her ear and raised every goosebump she had, and his thumb played with the tiny tent in her t-shirt at the summit of her breast. “So, about your sex life…” he whispered, and God! Who knew that five whispered words could jolt through her like that?

His left hand tickled her a little as he trailed it up her body from hip to chin, and gently guided her into turning her face so that they could kiss. When they did, he took the opportunity to squeeze, gently but perfectly.

“Mm!” she said. It wasn’t a word, but pleasure given a tiny cautious noise. “W-what about it?”

”I thought maybe instead of talking about it…” he whispered, and his fingers lightly pinched her nipple through her shirt, making her shiver, ”…we could play a game I call ‘traffic lights’. Red means stop. Yellow means slow down, Green means-’

“Green!”.

He chuckled low and irresistibly in her ear. ’Yes ma’am…’

To her dismay he stopped playing with her breast, but only for long enough to run his hand down her tummy, slip his fingers under her shirt and glide them back up. HIs attention felt even better when it was applied directly to her bare flesh..

She felt his teeth lightly on the side of her neck, felt him playfully pinch her nipple while his left hand slid down her leg, round and then back up her inner thigh.

“Yyyellow.”

She said it a bit louder than she’d meant to, but Julian immediately justified her trust in him as his hands stopped where they were.

“Y’okay?” he asked.

“What…” Xiù licked her lips and moistened her mouth to try again. “What about Allison?”.

”What about me?” the only other voice in the room asked. Xiù jumped, her eyes jolted open, and she found Allison watching her from inches away at most with an absolutely licentious smile. ”Do you want me to join in?” she asked, “Or should I just watch?”

“I, um… I don’t… I…”

Allison’s smile got wider and she met Julian’s eye. “Damn, baby, you got her so turned on she can’t even talk.”

Julian chuckled, but he kissed Xiù’s ear again. “This is all about what you want,” he murmured. “You’re in charge.”

Xiù was shaking, but her panic was fading fast. The shakes had nothing to do with anxiety now. “You promise?”

Allison kissed her. “Let us love you, bǎobèi.”

The Chinese term of endearment sold it. “G… Green.” she whispered, and shut her eyes again.

Julian kissed her, and his hand resumed its migration up her inner thigh until he was pressing gently on her through her underwear. Primordial instincts took over and she pressed back, chewing on her lip as the contact sent pulses of pleasure through her. She heard Allison make a happy noise, felt two slim, strong hands peel her shirt off her and she lifted her body and raised her arms to help the obstructive garment come off. She settled back into Julian’s arms, and felt soft lips on her ear, her neck, her throat, her shoulder, her chest, her breast, her nipple…

In the quiet erotic eternity that followed, none of them made any noise louder than a whisper, a murmur, a kiss or a soft moan. They were almost… reverent in their intimacy. Every so often, Julian and Allison would whisper an instruction to one another, or check in with Xiù. Her answer was always the same: “Green”.

She lifted her hips to shed her underwear, and when Julian’s clever fingers—oh such clever fingers!—returned she then learned just how much that thin barrier of cloth had been robbing her for sensation. She felt her lovers wriggle out of their own sleepwear to wrap her up in a skin-on-skin embrace, to kiss her and sometimes each other and always, always, to make her the center of their world.

She felt pleasure, yes, and so much of it…But most of all she felt loved. And it was the love, more than the pleasure, that carried her off and away as confused, strange and almost dreamlike thoughts began to swirl around her head until they crystallized around her, and she screamed so silently that when she did finally make a noise—a shocked gasp—the crystal shell broke and she came crashing down to herself again.

She pushed his hand away babbling “nomorenomoretoomuch…too much…” and then lay there, trying and failing to open her eyes. Tiny lightning bolts of bliss were still scampering around her, making her body shake, making her forget who she was for strobing half-instants.

“Ho-oly…” she managed eventually, and after a breath for strength she conquered the rest of the sentence. “Ssshit.”

“No kidding, babe!” Allison had a wild smile on her face. “That was fucking hot!”

Xiù tried to sit up, then aborted the attempt as her abdominal muscles sent urgent shaky signals that they’d like a few minutes to recover, please. “Ohhh my God…I’ve never come that hard in my life!”

“Y’okay?” Julian asked.

“Uh-huh.”

Allison laughed softly. “Good, ain’t he?”

Xiù nodded emphatically. She was feeling so energized that she would have loved to spring up and blitz around the room doing anything, but her legs were still feeling entirely too shaky for that. “Uh-huh!”

She grinned as she saw Julian affect a modest smile, and sank her head back onto his chest and closed her eyes, smiling.

A thought struck her.

“…What about you?” she asked.

“Us?” Allison asked.

“Yeah. Aren’t you… wanting, now?”

Julian kissed her. “We’re fine.”

“You’re sure? ‘Cause I can feel how hard your—”

“This was all about you, remember?” Allison quietly interrupted her.

“And what if I want to watch?” Xiù asked.

Allison laughed. “Well I won’t lie,” she said, “I was kinda hoping you’d say something like that.”

“Well, I want to,” Xiù told them firmly.

Julian chuckled and carefully rolled over to deposit her on her side in the middle of their by now thoroughly messed-up nest. “I think we’re honor-bound to obey,” he joked. Allison giggled, then looked at him and licked her lips.

“Julian?” she asked.

“Yeah, baby?”

“I’m sick of this third base shit. Come over here and fuck me.”

He blinked, surprised. “…You sure, now?”

Allison’s smile changed. Now it had that raunchy edge she used when she played at bossing him around. “Did I fucking stutter, Etsicitty?”

Julian was suddenly grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “No ma’am,” he said.

“What did I say?”

“You said I should come over there and fuck you, ma’am.”

“So…?”

He carefully climbed over Xiù, kissing her on the cheek in passing, and then pushed Allison firmly onto her back. She wrapped her feet around his waist. “Yes ma’am. At once.”

Allison gasped, her eyes fluttered and she rested her head back as he guided himself into her. She looked sideways and met Xiù’s eye, bit her lip then linked her hands at the back of his neck and pulled him down on top of her. “Oh yeah…” she purred. “That’s a good, good boy…”

Xiù propped her chin in her hand and watched.

Date Point 10y8m4d AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Dancer.

“Hey…”

“Mmnurgh.”

“Heeey.”

“Mznbr…”

“Hey. Sky-thinker.”

“Muh?” Sky-thinker woke up properly, blinking. Dancer smiled down at him and stroked a stray strand of his fur crest out of his face.

“It’s nearly dawn,” she said.

He dug something crusty out of the corner of his eye and pushed himself up onto all fours. “…Right.”

She trilled softly and shook the sand out of her fur. It was funny how a man named for his tendency to drift off and think about things like clouds and the moon was also one of the most focused and practical in the village. “Come on. I made food,” she said. “We have a long day ahead of us.”

The tribe was stirring early today, which was good. Everybody was taking Sky-thinker’s warning seriously, though she would have thought they were absurdly stupid if they hadn’t. Bringing home a set of burnt giving-away beads was evidence enough, but a Singer’s bowl and a peace totem for good measure? Only a catastrophic fool would have ignored that.

She had ritual duties to perform, and so she handed Sky-thinker his breakfast in her favorite bowl, the one with the bright green glaze and the spirals around the rim. They couldn’t take any of the pottery with them anyway, so it may as well see some last use.

She met the Singer in the sacred circle. The old woman looked haggard and exhausted.

“Haven’t you slept?!” Dancer asked her. “We have a long journey ahead of us!”

“Oh, sweet girl…” the Singer sighed. She was leaning heavily on her cane, which she was usually much too proud to use. “Did you think I could come with you?”

“But-!”

“You can’t drag a limping old woman with you while you run away, dear.”

“But-!”

“Hush.” The Singer turned to face the dawn. It would rise behind the third stone today. “Dance for the new day.”

Dancer wanted to argue, but the old woman began shaking her music-stick and tapping her staff and sang the throat music.

She fought back her tears and played her part, called up her will and began the steps to greet the home of the gods as it came up from under the world.

For the first time in her young life, the dance seemed lonely. Hollow. As if she was just a tiny thing in the middle of infinite emptiness, making a silly gesture for forces that were so far beyond her that even Sky-thinker, who saw further and dreamed higher than most, probably had no real understanding of them. Instead of feeling the dawn flow through her and connect her to the world, she felt… cold.

What kind of a day started with the Dancer feeling nothing? Surely portents could not come much worse…

At last the sun was above the third stone, and she finished her dance by bowing to all the gods, then stood and brushed the sand from her hands.

The Singer sniffed and rocked her staff thoughtfully in the dust.

“The world is all upside-down,” she declared. When Dancer only nodded, she turned, and handed her the music-stick and the bag off her back. “My gift to you. I wish there was more time, you still have a lot to learn… but you know all that you need to.”

“Singer, no… please? I’m not ready.”

“Nobody ever is, sweet girl. Do you think I was?”

“But I don’t have a given girl to train!”

“You can sing and dance by yourself for a while, you’re strong enough. And if you need another’s strength then turn to Sky-thinker. He almost has a woman’s magic.”

Dancer didn’t reply. She looked at the music-stick in her hands and nodded as strongly as she could, pulling back her tears.

The Singer hugged and kissed her like a daughter. “Did he fill you last night?”

Dancer nodded. “He did.”

The Singer put hand on her belly. “You make an old woman very happy, dear.”

“…You make a young woman very sad.”

“That’s the burden of age, loved one. I’m sorry. We have to go away sometime.”

Dancer had performed the funeral rites for dozens of the tribe in her time and she knew the truth of that observation as well as anybody could. Still, it hurt her deep in her core.

“…I will miss you.”

The Singer hugged her. “I will miss you too, dear. Be strong—the tribe needs you.”

Dancer looked around. Sky-thinker was in conversation with Stone-tapper and the Given Man. Everywhere she looked there was a laden, ready-for-travel look to everybody.

The Singer touched her elbow lightly pushing her forward. “It’s time, dear. Sing.”

Dancer nodded, then looked her mentor in the eye. “…Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, dear.”

Nobody paid any attention to the Dancer as she returned to her hut and retrieved the favorite bowl. Sky-thinker had been considerate and washed it for her, so she whispered farewell to it, took it back outside and then, with a sigh and a moment’s regret, she flung it into the village fire where it smashed.

Everybody jumped. Then, understanding what she had done, they took their own pottery, and began to throw it into the fire as well.

Under the old Singer’s watchful eye, the new Singer shook her music-stick and sang the song of leaving home. Then, once the last baby had been helped to throw a pot into the ashes, the tribe hoisted their bags, turned to the west, and left home forever.

She didn’t look back.

Date Point 10y8m4d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“Jesus! I’d ask what happened to you three but I think I can guess!” Kevin cleared his throat, aware that his mouth had just taken unilateral action without running things by the committee first. He forgave himself: He’d never seen anybody walk into a room looking so thoroughly post-coital before, let alone three at once. Terrifyingly though, Julian looked relaxed and energized rather than exhausted and Kevin made a mental note to hit up Dane for a copy of the lucky bastard’s fitness regime.

Allison threw herself into her chair, nursing a large travel mug of coffee. “None of your damn business, that’s what happened.”

“You know, that’s exactly what I guessed.”

Xiù gave him a crimson-faced glare that promised another broken nose in his near future if he didn’t immediately find something else to discuss, and he promptly adjusted his collar and sat down. “Uh… Anyway. Ericson says Misfit is ready to fly.”

They lit up at once. “He does?” Allison asked.

“His exact words were ’BGEV-Eleven has passed stage three operational readiness tests’, but fortunately I speak fluent aerospace engineer.”

Julian nodded appreciatively. “Ahead of schedule!”

“Major Jackson was kind enough to share some observations about the ESFS array.”

“That was nice of her,” Allison commented.

“Yeah. Guess whatever Kirk’s shindig is has made AEC super-keen to get us a scout ship out there, even if it belongs to Byron Group. It’d have to be pretty fuckin’ big to make them forgive the fiasco with Creature of Habit.”

“Why, what happened?” Xiù asked.

“Some limp-dick strategist decided that leaving the only human organization conducting extrasolar flight missions in the dark about our friends Big Hotel was a smart idea, so when the ship hit its emergency recall and popped into Lunar orbit…”

“Ah.” Allison nodded.

“Yeah. Moses got a phone call which was, and I fucking quote, ’not for mortal ears’. D’you know what it’s like when one of the richest guys in the world walks away from a phone call looking like a naughty kid who just got spanked? President Cthulhu musta tore him a backup.”

“I take it you voted for the other guy,” Julian observed, drily.

“You kidding? I wrote in for the dipshit with a rubber chicken for a hat. If some asshole’s gonna spend four or eight years walking around being followed by a dude who’s carrying the nuclear launch codes, I want it to be somebody who gets the fucking joke. Anyway.” Kevin realized he’d gone off on a rant and reined it in. “Point is, you kids better pack your bags and say goodbye to the Box, because we’re transferring you to the ship tonight.”

“But the Mars trip isn’t for-” Xiù began.

“Yeah, I know. But you’re still gonna want to get settled in, sort out any concerns, get ‘er good and ready and take her up for a shakedown. She might be cleared to fly, but your asses still have two months of training left before you head out. Time to bring all that simulator practice into the real world.”

“Any other good news?” Julian asked.

Kevin grinned. “Let’s just say I think you’re gonna enjoy the new-and-improved hab when you move onto the ship.”

“What about lessons and simulation?” Julian asked.

“We got a car laid on to get you back and forth, and they’re setting you up with simulators in the hangar. Anyway, you’ll head over there tonight. Morning schedule’s pushed back and your PT with Dane’s been cancelled for the day, so go get your shit packed up and ready to move, say goodbye to the Box, do your thing and I guess I’ll see you this evening…” Kevin gave them his best and rarest stern look. “And for fuck’s sake, guys, clean up a bit more?”

“…Are we really that obvious?” Xiù asked.

“Well, you don’t actually smell, but… yeah. You are. And you’re gonna be in front of the cameras this evening, so maybe put the extra effort in to look as slick and space cadet as you can, right?”

“Oh come on,” Allison objected. “Are you really gonna tell us people don’t suspect anyway? You kinda dragged us into the spotlight…”

Kevin raised an eyebrow at her then sighed and nodded. “Look, I like you three,” he said candidly. “And I know you’ve got mixed feelings about the limelight which is why I’m giving you that advice, okay? Sure, yeah, people suspect. So what you’ve gotta ask is if you wanna go out there and add more fuel to that fire, or if you wanna keep up some kind of a wall so it all stays as harmless speculation and gossip.”

They all looked down at the table, and Kevin pushed the point home. “I think what you have is beautiful. Hell, I’m envious. But for fuck sake, guys, you have so little privacy left why would you jeopardize it?”

“Maybe because it’s not a fucking problem?” Julian growled. “Shit, the VP’s gay and the biggest grossing movie this year has a leading man who used to be a woman! But three instead of two, oh no, that’s gotta stay in the closet? I call bullshit.”

“Fuckin’ A.” Allison agreed. Xiù just nodded.

Kevin spread his hands. “Hey, I don’t give a bent fuck about the apple-pie traditional marriage shit myself,” he said. “And if you wanna be the Poly community’s Freddie Mercury or whatever, go for it, that’s your prerogative. It’s my job to advise, not to decide.”

“So what do you advise?” Xiù asked, quietly.

“…I’d advise that…” Kevin paused, and sniffed as he thought of his argument. “Okay. So. Part one: You clean up, look professional, head out into space and let the conversation percolate for a couple years and then when you’re back if you decide there’s a cause there that needs fighting, that’s when you fight it,” he told them. “But you’re not gonna make things better by dropping a bombshell and then fucking off and maybe never coming back. Don’t forget, you could all end up dead.”

He looked around at them. “You nearly died once already, remember,” he pointed out. “So if you get back and decide that’s a fight that needs fighting? Go for it. But for now, I say it’s eyes on the prize. Don’t get distracted now you’re on the home stretch. That’s part one.”

Allison and Julian looked at each other, then at Xiù, and as one the three of them nodded and listened expectantly.

“Part two? I honestly think the smart people in this country—and by some miracle that’s actually most of ‘em—don’t even give a fuck. They don’t even care. So if there’s a fight there at all, it’s against the handful of authoritarian pricks who think their religion gets to rule other people’s lives. And that means your allies would be the kind of reactionary dumbasses who are too shit-stupid to just let assholes be assholes, right? So maybe the thing to do is to just not make a big deal of it. Say ’yeah, that’s us and we’d like to be left alone please’ or whatever and then quietly let the whole shitstorm play itself out without you.”

“You’re contradicting yourself,” Allison pointed out.

“Not really. It’s a balancing act, right? You’ll wanna be here enough to put your oar in, but you’ll also wanna stay out of it enough to not wind up surrounded by regressive fuckwits who wanna use you for their Che Guevara poster child bullshit.”

“Fuh-lay-ming…” Xiù muttered.

Kevin frowned at her. “Huh?”

Julian waved him off, though her cryptic interjection clearly meant something to him. “…Fair point,” he said. “And…. good advice. Thanks Kevin.”

“I ain’t just a pretty face. ‘Specially not since Xiù broke my nose.”

“Aargh, you’re never going to let that go, are you?” Xiù observed. “I said sorry!”

“All is forgiven, I just like to joke around,” Kevin assured her. “Anyhow. I wanna see y’all red carpet quality this evening. Can you do that for me?”

“We’ll do that,” Allison assured him and stood. Julian and Xiù followed her and Kevin was soon alone, left to sit down and stroke his beard pensively.

After a few minutes of thought he fished in his pocket for his phone, and composed a quick email for Gabriel Arés.

Date Point 10y8m4d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

“‘Bout time you showed up! What’d you bring?”

Martina snorted and handed over her tupperware. “Nice to see you too, ‘Horse. I’ve got Lokše.”

They were having a ’Grandma’s cooking’ night to go with a rare good movie seeing as it was just the four of them for a change. With the SOR deployed they couldn’t leave the base in case the Protectors needed to scramble, and of course that meant alcohol was off-limits too, and the huge reinforced couch just felt empty with only four people sitting on it. Especially when one of those people was Martina.

Picking a dish hadn’t been been tricky at all. Arés had insisted on ’ethnic’ and if there was one thing that fit beautifully into the carb-and-fats kingdom that was SOR nutrition, it was Slovakian food from her dad’s side of the family.

Fortunately, her dad had scanned Babička’s box full of index-card recipes way back when, and a quick skim through the PDF had swiftly turned up just the thing. Lokše—potato pancakes stuffed with goose fat (the moister the better) and filled with pickled cabbage. They’d come out pretty damn good, she thought.

Firth meanwhile had showed up with a chunk of venison the size of a suitcase, reportedly a gift from his ’pop’ who’d shot it himself. It came with a warning to watch out for the deer slug, because Poppa Firth hadn’t been able to find it, and he was out front tinkering with some arcane-industrial culinary apparatus of Rebar’s making, allegedly “smoking it to Kentucky perfection” under the patient attention of the SOR’s titanic dog, Bozo.

For some reason, there was something about an enormous slab of red meat that converted the usually incorrigibly excitable canine into a poised statue of laser-focused watchfulness.

Arés popped the tupperware curiously. “Lokše?”

“Nuh-uh, big guy. Eat it first, then I tell you.”

“See, now you’re just making it sound ominous…”

Adam of course was Mexican on both sides of the family, and had clearly decided on something a little lighter on the palate to balance out the mountain of red meat that Firth had brought. Martina could see corn tortillas, whitefish, a couple of limes…

“What’re you making anyway?” she asked. “Fish tacos?”

“Yup!”

“Brother’s been eating a whole lotta fish taco recently,” Burgess joked, joining them with a casserole dish in his arms. “You’d think he’d be sick of it.”

‘Horse promptly went red as Martina laughed. Word had got around about where his callsign came from and the way the rest of the Lads told it, whenever they went out drinking there was almost a queue to ride the battle pony these days.

Reality was probably a little tamer—Adam was still Adam after all—but he wasn’t saying either way and Martina hadn’t pried. There was honestly no jealousy involved, but she wasn’t interested in knowing the details and he wasn’t interested in sharing.

“Alright, alright, what’d you bring?” he asked, trying to spare his blushes. “No, lemme guess. Mac and cheese, again.”

Burgess grinned. “Since when do you shit talk my grandma’s Mac?”

“Since never, your grandma’s Mac is a fucking religious experience! But you need more than one move, bro.”

Base put the casserole dish down. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Anyhow, Firth says ten minutes.”

“Too bad Dexter couldn’t be here,” Martina mused. “Be kinda fun to add a Gaoian twist to this.”

“Dude,” Adam turned slightly green around the gills. “I heard one of the staples of Gaoian food is a giant bug…”

“Oh please, humans eat grosser you wuss,” she retorted.

“I heard it’s, like, as big as my arm!” he insisted. “Name me one thing that’s grosser than that!”

“I could get sergeant Friðþórsson in here,” she suggested, referring to one of the training simulation techs. “How’s rotten poisonous shark that was buried in the ground for a few months sound?”

“No way is that a real thing,” Burgess denied. “I don’t believe it.”

“Hakarl. Real thing. Look it up. Eat it if you’ve got a hankering for a nice hit of ammonia with your dinner.”

Burgess snorted and examined her Lokše. “Hold the fuckin’ phone, is that sauerkraut in those pancakes?”

Grinning, Martina nodded that it was so. “Uh-huh.”

He turned plaintively to Adam. “European food is fucking weird, bro.”

Adam shrugged. “Dude. Menudo. Chitlins. Rocky mountain oysters.”

“I’ve known you to eat all of those! But a Gaoian staple food squicks you out?” Martina asked.

“It’s a bug as big as my arm!”

“Granted, that’s a big-ass bug,” she agreed, considering the limb in question. She was pretty sure she had bras that wouldn’t quite fit round those biceps. “But it’s still just meat.”

Adam shuddered and made a yuuurgh noise.

“Horse getting squicked out by food?” Firth asked, stepping inside trailed by Bozo. He’d swapped his trademark hideous Hawaiian shirt for a truly offensive apron that on a smaller man might have briefly conveyed the impression that he was an impossibly petite and busty french maid. On Firth, it looked more like he’d fallen on one and hadn’t got round to peeling her off yet. “That’s a new one.”

“It’s a BUG as-”

“As big as your arm!” they chorused. “We heard.” Martina finished.

Even Bozo chimed in: ”WURF!”

Adam gave up. “…You pick a movie?”

“Oh, sure. Ask the gal who literally keeps your asses alive in a spacesuit if she remembered to pick a movie for movie night.” Martina teased. “No faith!”

“So, that’s a…no?”

This earned him a friendly middle finger. “I’ll go load it up, meat stack.”

She’d picked ’White Raven’, a big-screen fantasy movie that bore little relation to its source material, but kept some of the coolest imagery. She especially liked the bit where the giant waded across the Irish sea with a fleet of ships behind him.

The guys joined her a few minutes later once Firth’s venison had been declared “perfect”, and it really was. The Mac and cheese was maybe not quite a religious experience but it was unquestionably sublime, and the fish tacos…

Her earlier assessment of the capacity of the couch was off by a bit: she’d failed to account for Bozo, who hopped up and snuggled down the moment he was allowed. Between his own disarming size and the similarly arresting proportions of Arés, Burgess and Firth, Martina soon found that the most comfortable position for her was actually to sit across them with her legs on Warhorse’s lap, and that plus Burgess’ quip about fish tacos earlier got her to thinking.

Fortunately, the Lads had their kitchen system worked out well. Whoever did the bulk of the work got to skip on the cleaning, and today that was Arés. Being a guest got Marty a free pass too, so they hung out on the couch and discussed the movie for a while while Marty massaged the dozing dog’s ears.

As was the nature of conversations, however, the subject soon wandered, straying briefly into politics, backing out of there onto the subject of aliens, from there onto inebriation, and from there finally onto the subject of his recent, as Firth had so antiquatedly put it, ’wild oats’.

“…Between you and me, I kinda wish Base would stop playing wingman,” he confessed.

Marty raised an eyebrow at him. “The way I hear it, he’s good at it.”

He shrugged expansively (as if he had any alternative but to shrug expansively) “Yeah…”

“I hear a ’but’ in there…”

“I dunno. I guess maybe I’d prefer to earn a girl’s attention myself rather’n have my buddies throw them my way. You know?”

She nodded. “I hear ya. Where’s the fun in easy mode?”

“Right…” He looked distant.

“…Penny for your thoughts?”

“Uh…” he scratched the back of his neck. “…is it weird talkin’ about this with you?”

Martina shook her head. “‘Horse, we talked about this. You need to relax and enjoy yourself and get your head sorted out. Have you?”

“Relaxed? Sure. Enjoyed myself? Hell yeah!”

“And your head?”

“Fuck, I dunno. How’s a guy supposed to really know where his head’s at?” he asked.

Martina gestured with her hand palm-upward. “So, where do you think it’s at?”

“…I’unno.”

“If you don’t know where it is then you’ve not sorted it out yet.”

He frowned. “Hmm. Seems obvious when you put it that way.”

“Mmhm.” Martina nodded. She considered him for a second then decided to go with some straight talk. “Look, I still feel the same way about you as I said before, but until you’ve got your head in the right place we’re just good friends. You understand that, right?”

“…Sorry, Marty.”

“Don’t even start apologizing,” she instructed. “It’s good to know you still care what I think.”

“Of course I do!”

“Yeah. And you’re good at showing it, too.” On a whim, she kissed him on the cheek. He blinked and put his fingers gently to where her lips had touched him. “We’re good friends,” she repeated. “The kind who can talk about anything. Got that?”

He nodded.

“So… anything you wanna talk about?”

He chuckled. “There is one thing…”

“What?”

“When are we getting ‘round to the pancakes?”

“Shit!” She suddenly remembered the tupperware in the kitchen and scrambled off him and the couch. The exclamation woke Bozo who fell off Adam’s lap and onto the floor where he rolled upright in a scrabble of bewildered claws. He wagged his tail uncertainly and followed her into the kitchen where she secretly treated him to a scrap of the venison by way of an apology.

Fortunately, the Lokše were almost as good reheated in the microwave as they were fresh.

Date Point 10y8m4d AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Old Singer.

Sky-thinker’s description had been accurate in that the demon did broadly resemble a Skithral. He had fallen far short of reality, however. Far, far short of it.

It was bigger than any hut that the Singer had even imagined. It was as big as trees, but it still moved with the easy grace of a living creature swarming over the rough terrain and through the forest as easily as a sure-footed man. Nothing that big should be able to flow like water—it made a Yshek look as clumsy as a landslide despite being many times larger.

She had known it was coming by the way the forest had gone silent, and had decided that she may as well see the thing that killed her. She had taken up her cane and hobbled outside, quietly glad that Sky-thinker was vindicated. It would have been a shame to die of thirst or exertion without seeing the destroyer for herself.

Even though she was perfectly calm and accepting of her fate, the sight of it nearly sent her fleeing into the woods anyway.

It was…

There was simply no material in the Singer’s experience that was even similar to its carapace. It was as black as the night of a summer solstice, and yet the sunlight sheened off it in hard white lines. Every edge of it looked as bright as the edge a flint knife, and even the smallest movement made those knife edges slide and scrape over each other with a whispering susurrus that even somehow managed to sound sharp.

Slung under where its mouthparts might be if it were really a skithral were instead two appendages as thick around as a man’s chest that glowed like forest fungus. Unlike a real skithral it lacked claws or a tail, but made up for that lack with a clutch of what could only be Sky-thinker’s ‘death birds’ on its back. These were launched skywards with sharp bangs as the creature scuttled into the clear space around the village, and they flashed this way and that with their flaming wings deployed, sweeping the huts with their baleful red eyes in search of hiding tribesmen.

The beast itself slowed its approach and walked up to her, pausing only when it was nearly directly above her. The Singer tapped her staff on the ground and gazed up at it expectantly. If it was a beast of pure destructive violence, then it certainly was not acting like one. No, this was the calculated consideration of a Person.

It turned its gaze—the dozens of tiny twinkling red eyes that glowed like fire—away from her and took in the village before finally deigning to acknowledge her again.

She decided to break the silence.

“Do you have a name?” she asked it.

There was a long, cold pause.

“Ah…” she sighed. “So you’re a beast after all. A shame. A person would have the courtesy to talk with an old woman.”

It tilted its… for lack of a better word, its head at her and spoke. ”Others.”

It had a voice like rock-slide or a tree falling. So deep that it was almost not sound at all, just a modulated rumble that she heard with her lungs.

“Oh! not a beast! Well…if you wish to know where the others went, tell me your name.”

More icy silence, until it presumably grew bored or else reached whatever laborious conclusion it had been working toward. ”Yours.”

“What kind of a silly thing are you? Don’t you recognize these tattoos? I don’t have a name, I gave it to the gods when I was a girl. I am the old Singer of this village.”

”Singer.”

“Yes. And yours?”

”Six. Six. Five.” it growled, as if numbers were any kind of a name. ”Others.”

“They ran away. Did you really think you could destroy our daughters and their husbands in the east and we would not notice?”

”Futile. Direction.”

The Singer trilled laughter. “Creature, what makes you think an old woman would betray her grandchildren?”

The creature stepped back and regarded her some more. Then it spat blue fire and destroyed her.

She went to the gods laughing.

Date Point 10y8m4d AV
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Earth

Jacob Buehler

“She’s changed so much…”

Jacob shot a glance at his wife. It was the first time that Amanda had commented that that was their daughter on the news. Estranged and rebellious though she was, it was impossible not to feel proud, albeit more than a little sad that she hadn’t responded to their attempt at reaching out.

He surreptitiously compared the woman on the screen to the framed picture on the wall, one of the few ones they had where Allison had actually been smiling. Behind the same bone structure was a very different person to the sulky tearaway teenager he remembered: Allison looked strong, composed and professional. She was surveying the crowd and the reporters with tight politeness and leaving the talking to the asian girl in the front. Whenever a question was asked of her personally, she answered it directly and economically. Not entirely changed then—she had always hated being the focus of attention.

“She’s pretty!” one of the twins announced. Ramsey, probably—he usually sat on the left, but it was hard to be certain from behind.

“She’s going to Mars, sweetie,” Amanda told him. “That’s more important than how pretty she is.”

“But she is!”

“Ramsey Buehler, she’s an astronaut, not a supermodel,” Amanda said, firmly.

“…Yes, mom.”

Jacob decided for once not to snap the boy back on his tone of voice. They sat and watched the press conference for a few minutes longer.

“She’s holding his hand!” Tristan pointed out suddenly, pointing at the screen. Sure enough, Allison’s fingers were interlaced with those of the rangy, shaggy man who was apparently the crew’s field researcher.

“Mm-hmm. He’s her boyfriend,” Amanda said. “Didn’t you see the picture?”

“Ian at school said he heard the other lady’s her girlfriend too!”

“We don’t listen to disgusting rumors like that, sweetie.”

“…Yes, mom.”

“Boys if you can’t respect your mother you can go to your rooms and stay there,” Jacob corrected him.

“But dad-!”

“No buts!”

Tristan bowed his head. “Sorry.”

Another question was directed at Allison on the TV, and they listened with mounting curiosity. ”Miss Buehler, according to your family you haven’t spoken in nearly fifteen years. Do you have anything to say to them?”

They watched as Allison froze for a microsecond, then leaned forward to the mic. “Uh… Apparently I have two little brothers nowadays…” she began. Ramsey and Tristan looked at each other excitedly. ”I guess I’d like to tell them that they’re welcome to write me. I’d like to hear from them sometime.”

”No message for your parents?”

”No.”

They boys were so excited that they completely missed (thankfully) the contemptuous edge to the word.

“Boys, go clean up for dinner,” Jacob told them.

“Wha-? But Dad!”

“Now, Ramsey.”

The twins gave each other a confused look, then chorused “…Yes dad…” and trudged out.

“So she got the letter…” Amanda mused, the moment they were out of the room.

“I just don’t get it,” Jacob sighed. “She hates us. You could see it in her eyes.”

“Where did we go wrong?”

Jacob looked back at the TV. His only daughter had retreated from the microphone and was staring distractedly off at nothing. He had no idea what she was thinking.

“…I wish I knew,” he said.

Date Point 10y8m4d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

General Martin Tremblay

Friends were a luxury at the kind of levels that Tremblay worked at nowadays, and a treasured one at that. He didn’t have many at all.

Sir Patrick Knight was one of very, very few and his weekly trip through the Jump Array from Cimbrean to discuss policy and strategy was as much a highlight on Martin’s social calendar as it was a highlight on his professional one.

He was also an exceptional sounding board, which was why upon being presented with the details of the latest crisis, he had sat back and ran his fingers lightly over his beard.

“Tricky…”

“You see why I’m reluctant to say yes…”

“Mm.” Knight nodded. “On the one hand I suspect you’d regret the missed opportunity, but on the other hand if he’s going to ask you—his ex-husband—to be his Best Man then I really think he should have asked in person.”

“Exactly.”

A small laugh crept around Sir Patrick’s mouth. “Of course, you do know where the tradition of a Best Man comes from, don’t you?”

Martin sat back and sipped his coffee. “Do tell.”

“Traditionally, he was literally the groom’s best man. His best soldier, bodyguard, the man he trusted to stand next to him in battle…”

“I didn’t know that!”

“Oh yes,” Sir Patrick nodded. “He was there in case anybody tried to attack the groom and kidnap the bride, you see. So, traditionally speaking if you accept then you’re entitled—nay, required—to be armed with a sword at his wedding.”

Martin laughed. “The Tremblays send their regards, eh?”

“Of course, for you to get away with that he would have to be a threat to the security of the human race…” Knight pointed out. “And I think you might have some trouble justifying that assessment…”

“Conducting psychological warfare on the supreme allied commander doesn’t count?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think ’being an insensitive prat’ qualifies as psychological warfare.”

“Damn.”

They both chuckled softly and drank their respective drinks again.

“I’m happy for him, really,” Martin said. “I was going to retire and adopt a couple of kids with him. But…”

“Duty called.”

“Yup.”

“Well, there’s always your speech at the reception.” Knight winked. “I’m sure you can think of a suitable piss-take.”

“So you’re saying I should go for it.”

“Oh, don’t be daft. You were always going to go for it, you just wanted to complain a bit first.”

“Heh,” Martin chuckled. “Guilty as ch-”

He was interrupted by one of his phone ringing. The grey secure one. He swiped it up. “Tremblay.”

”Your conference call’s ready, sir.”

“Good. Thanks. Set it up please.”

He glanced at Knight, who nodded and subtly tidied up his uniform and sat up straighter.

The conference call in question was the weekly joint allied exosolar policy planning session, demanding the attention of his counterparts and occasionally heads of government from all the 5-EYES nations and several Global Representative Assembly Members. In short order the large screen opposite his desk was filling with faces or official seals.

The last to connect was the live feed from Air Force One, and some twenty or so of the most powerful people alive exchanged greetings and well-wishes.

All were busy people, so these meetings were inevitably quick but constructive.

“So!” Tremblay began, gently starting the session. He checked his notes. “We’ve had nothing but good news since last week. I’m pleased to report that RANDOM THRONE turned out to be green and Mrwrki station is now under our control, as are its fleet of mining drones and its nanofactory.”

“The SOR have finished building the semi-permanent jump array and are preparing to return to Cimbrean within the next twenty-four hours,” Knight added. “I also have it from STAINLESS that DEXTER and his comrades exceeded expectations.”

The British Secretary of State for Defence, the Right Honourable Shakeel Iqbal MP, nodded enthusiastically. “Fantastic news,” he said. “When will the nanofactory be ready?”

“Lieutenant-Colonel Nadeau is taking a commendable safety first policy,” Tremblay told him. “All of the blueprints loaded into it are alien designs and could contain fatal flaws, including security weaknesses. In theory he says we could start building our own equipment straight away, but…”

The Australian prime minister Tom Avery spoke up. “We still haven’t reached a satisfactory conclusion for how the creators of that equipment are to be properly paid for their designs,” he pointed out. “C&M Systems is an Australian company, If you start building EV-MASS in that nanofactory then they at least deserve compensation.”

“Agreed,” that was President Arthur Sartori, who was looking uncharacteristically drained. He was in China on a diplomatic visit, and the black sky outside of Air Force One’s windows suggested that he was probably contending with some grinding jet lag. “Much as I’d love to defuse some of the criticism about defense spending, the economic consequences we were warned about need to be addressed. The global economy’s sliding toward the can as it is.”

“Well, that brings us on to the question of GALACTIC VACCINE,” Tremblay said. “So far all of the technology developed for that project was created by Lewis Beverote, and he’s apparently relinquished the property rights. Which means that if copyright and remuneration are going to be an issue then his creations—including the Von Neumann probes—are literally the only things we can build.”

The director of the CIA cleared his throat. “Since finding out about that idea, we’ve been thinking good and hard about how those things could turn out. It’s made for a heated argument.”

Cécile Rousseau, France’s Global Representative Assembly member, nodded. “We have done something similar,” she said. “The feeling was, this is a bad idea.”

“We reached the opposite conclusion,”

“May I ask why?”

Knight spoke up. “The project is aptly named. Beverote’s idea is to effectively inoculate the galaxy against exactly the kind of doomsday scenarios that your analysts will have been so concerned about.”

“And why is that a priority?” Avery asked. “Don’t we already have enough on our plate?”

Knight nodded. “Ordinarily, I’d say ’first things first’.” he agreed. “But in this case we have a neat opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. We already agreed that humanity’s strategic interests are best served by rapid and aggressive expansion to unoccupied deathworld-class planets.”

Tremblay nodded. “Beverote’s proposal would simultaneously protect those worlds and lay the ground for colonization.”

“And the economic cost?”

The president cleared his throat. “Hang the cost,” he growled.

“Bankrupting ourselves isn’t exactly a tenable position, Art.”

“Nor is being dead.”

Iqbal spoke up again. “I’m inclined to agree with President Sartori. In fact I’ve already been working with the Chancellor to draw up plans for a wartime economy.”

Tremblay cleared his throat. “In any case,” he said, “I’d have two observations.” They listened expectantly. “The first is that—sorry—AEC’s mandate doesn’t include worrying about the economy. The job in front of us is to fight tooth and nail to put the human race in a strategic position that’s tenable in the long term…”

Iqbal nodded gravely and murmured “quite right.”

“…But in any case I think we can eat our cake and still have it. The whole point of the Coltainer program is that it gathers and uses its own resources once deployed. It’s the closest thing to a free lunch you’ll ever find—all we need to do is find colonists who are willing to try and make a life of it on the frontier, and human history is full of such people, eh?”

“Indeed, history is full of examples where such colonies went on to become rather larger and wealthier than their original owners,” Knight observed. “Today’s colony is tomorrow’s superpower.”

“And today’s investment is tomorrow’s dividend,” Sartori added.

“It will mean lifelong misery for hundreds of millions of people,” Rousseau pointed out.

“Madame Representative, we’re not yet in a position where those people are even guaranteed of a lifelong anything. Our strategic position isn’t that secure.”

Knight nodded grimly. “Fortunately, the good news about DEXTER and his people means we can step up operation CARDBOARD SCALPEL.”

“And that will help, will it?” she asked.

“Having any ally will be vital to our survival,” Tremblay said. “Having one as competent as the Gaoians? If we can clean them up and bring them on board…”

“The attempt could destroy them and unite the rest of the aliens against us,” Avery observed. “Do we even have the right to play around with the fates of other species as well as our own?”

“We already are playing around with their fates simply by existing,” Knight submitted. “Look no further than Cimbrean for proof of that. The young lady who made such a good impression with the Gaoians could also have accidentally killed them all.”

“I thought the consensus was that Delaney’s…unique environmental disruption was a product of the Cruezzir in her system?” Iqbal asked.

“It allowed her intestinal bacteria to overcome the suppressing effects of the Frontline implant,” Tremblay corrected him. “But any human not using Frontline is a global environmental catastrophe waiting to happen. In any case, let’s not go off on a tangent—the point is that we have to stoop to some well-intentioned interference if we want to accomplish our long-term objectives.”

“I’m all for both plans,” Sartori said, with characteristic bullishness. “If the Gaoians are really our friends, let’s help them.”

Rousseau’s expression was cool. “I dissent. Monsieur Avery is correct that we don’t have the right to place other species in harm’s way,” she said, “and the nightmare scenarios presented to us regarding these Von Neumann machines are just… No.”

Avery wobbled his head. “I’m right with GALACTIC VACCINE,” he said. “I agree that we’ve already probably given somebody the bright idea so we may as well give it a fair go first and do it right. I just don’t think we should be dragging the Gaoians into our war.”

“I’d like to see a full show of hands, please,” Tremblay said.

He suppressed a sigh of relief as both the proposed plans were backed by decent margins. Technically such a vote wouldn’t have been binding but it was still good to have broad support. Only an idiot would have ignored the importance of having political momentum behind the strategy.

Madame Rousseau pursed her lips thoughtfully and refrained from comment, while Avery took his defeat with good grace and a philosophical shrug. “You get your way again, Art,” he said conversationally.

Sartori rubbed his face and chuckled softly. “Is there any more business?” he asked.

“Just the Byron Group. They’ve lodged an itinerary for Misfit that includes a jump to orbit next week. I’ve provisionally given the go-ahead.”

Sartori stifled a disgusted noise. “If I have to call Moses Byron again…” he began.

“The crew are fully briefed on DEEP RELIC and in any case since that last fiasco, they’ve installed an executive advisor whom I personally know and trust,” Tremblay told him.

“Who?”

“He’s an intel asset, HEATHEN BUTTERFLY. He was one of the key witnesses in DEEP RELIC and I’d like to bring him and the crew in on GALACTIC VACCINE.”

“I have no objections,” Iqbal stated. “They would be well placed to guide that initiative.”

Sartori nodded and raised a hand. “Alright, if you think it needs to happen. Anything else?”

“No, that’s about it,” Tremblay told him. “Thank you for your time, Mister President.”

“Same time next week, then. See you there.”

As Sartori disconnected, Iqbal rolled his chair back away from whatever screen or tablet he was sitting at, and massaged at the ugly acid scar on his neck that was just visible above his collar. “Thank you general, admiral.”

There was a flurry of thanks and farewells, and the session ended much as it always did. Quick and efficient, as ever.

“That went well,” Knight observed.

Martin nodded, relaxing again. “Very well,” he agreed. “I wasn’t expecting such a ringing endorsement in the show of hands.”

“Mm. Good that it wasn’t unanimous, however.”

Martin gave him a curious look. “You think so?”

“If we didn’t have a conscientious and cautious figure like Mrs. Rousseau at these meetings, I rather feel we’d need to find one. She’s right that we really are playing with some titanic forces here, you know.”

“She is, that’s true…” Martin shrugged. “Hopefully today’s meeting has galvanized them to have a go at solving the nanofactory economic problem at least.”

“I think it galvanized Sartori to go to bed,” Knight quipped. “Speaking of which, it’s around about midnight by Folctha time.”

“Aargh, leaving so soon? I was going to ask for tips on how to write my best man speech.”

“Oh, it’s quite simple,” Knight said. “Start by taking the piss out of yourself, assure everyone you won’t delay their drinking for very long then take the piss out of the groom, say nice things about the bride-”

“It’s a gay wedding, Patrick.”

“Well then they’ve saved expense on the wedding dress. Anyway, take the piss out of the groom some more then finally say nice things about him and wish them both a happy marriage. Keep it short, roast him mercilessly, be nice to everyone else and when in doubt you can’t go wrong with jokes about alcohol, money and musing about what the bloody hell Stefan’s new partner was thinking.”

“As his ex-husband, I’d be roasting myself.” Martin pointed out.

“Perfect!”

Martin chuckled. “Well, when you put it that way… Go on, get some well-earned sleep.”

“With pleasure. Until next week dear chap.”

Martin nodded and smiled him out of the room, then sat back to think with a smile. After some minutes, he started to write his speech.

Date Point 10y8m4d AV
Byron Group Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

Allison sagged the instant the door closed and the cameras were off them at long last, and Julian shifted the box with his belongings in it into the crook of one arm so he could rub her back. “You did great,” he murmured.

She nodded and shut her eyes, enjoying the pressure of his hand for a second before she picked herself up. “Worst part’s over!”

“Yup!” Xiù gave her a one-armed squeeze. “You were great.”

“Thanks, baby…”

Kevin Jenkins gave them a chuckle. “That’s the last of it, I promise,” he said. “We finally managed to persuade Moses to let you guys get on with the actual job.”

Julian looked up at Misfit. “Hard to believe we’ve still got two months of training.”

“Sure, but most of that is flight training. You’re actually taking her up for the first time next week.”

Xiù spun. “When were you planning on telling us that?!” she asked.

“I’m actually telling you early. You’re officially being given your shakedown schedule tomorrow.” Kevin shrugged. “Allied Extrasolar Command don’t just let us do stuff on a whim, you know. If we wanna jump a ship into Low Earth Orbit, we’ve gotta get General Tremblay’s signature on it. That DEEP RELIC briefing was part of the process.”

“That high up?”

“Eh. He and I go back.” Kevin grinned. “But yeah, that high up.”

“So, we’re actually flying next week?”

“Ericson’s gonna give you the full details, but the short of it is that they’ve tested this baby to a fare-thee-well and she seems spaceworthy, but just like with Apollo they’re not gonna just build the rocket then shove you on the moon. Or, uh, Mars as the case may be.” Kevin sniffed. “There’s a lotta baby steps between here and there. And if we put you up there and it turns out something’s wrong with the ship, we want you close enough to rescue.”

“The other ten didn’t go through this.” Allison pointed out. “When the hell did the Group get this cautious?”

“When I started workin’ for ‘em.” Kevin folded his arms with a self-satisfied air, then nodded toward the ship. “Go on. That’s your house now. Go get settled in and I’ll see you tomorrow, same time as usual.”

He left them alone with their ship. She was definitely finished now: the hull plating was all in place, the engines were properly mounted and she had her last coat of paint on—Silver with charcoal ruby accents. A rich combination but not an ostentatious one.

“…She looks the part, doesn’t she?” Allison asked.

“I’m just waiting for the wall to drop and bam! There’s the studio audience,” Julian confessed. “Look at her!”

“Come on!” Xiù called. She’d gone ahead and was standing by the forward port engines waving them over.

“We’ve created a monster…” Julian mused, smiling fondly.

The real thing made sense of some of the features that had been present in the Box’s mockup of the airlock and decontamination room. A mystery panel on the wall they’d spent months scratching their heads over turned out to be a dumbwaiter, perfect for sending the boxes full of their possessions up into the ship while they climbed the ladder.

One green decontamination cycle later, they stepped aboard, and…

It was identical down to the millimeter. Everything exactly where the Box had had it, but… more real. More solid. More…ship. They weren’t in a simulation any more, this was a living vehicle and Misfit apparently had a bit of a personality already, because the atmosphere processor ticked up a notch and the lights came up as the lock cycled. It was almost like being welcomed aboard.

Julian poked his head into his lab as Xiù and Allison checked out their respective work stations.

The lab of course was mostly storage space, from the honeycomb rack of sample bottles on the aft wall for imperishable soil samples, the underfloor stasis storage for animal type specimens, the racks of slim drawers that pulled down out of the ceiling to accept leaves and plant samples…

Things had been moved slightly according to his suggestions. The glove box that let him handle samples in their native atmosphere was now at the forward-left, a much more logical place for it because it allowed his work to flow steadily from left to right in a straightforward sequence, ending in final storage. Previously, he’d had to bounce all over the small space which just created more opportunities for something to be dropped, spilled or knocked over.

He smiled when he saw that Clara Brown had made good on her promise to give him some personalization options. The most notable contribution being the two pegs on the wall by the door, on which he hung one of his tomahawks—the old reliable that had been at his side every day and night on Nightmare. He was retiring it now in favor of the new one with the ultra-modern metallurgy that the girls had got him for his birthday, and couldn’t think of a better place for it than right there in his working space. The lab after all was the only place on the ship that was his, and only his.

Satisfied and smiling, he opened the door and met Xiù emerging from her flight seat. She had a big beaming smile. “They listened!” she said. “All the things I asked for!”

“Uh-huh. Same!”

Allison emerged from Engineering looking similarly pleased. “Okay, wow. It’s a big improvement in there!”

“Yeah?”

“Hell yeah! I don’t need to contort like a fucking weasel to access the aft engine bus ducts any more!” She looked around, then grinned and opened a hatch in the ceiling before bracing a foot on a knurl on the wall that hadn’t been present in the Box, which gave her the foothold she needed to boost herself easily up and vanish up to her waist into the systems crawl space. “Oh yeah, this is way better!”

“So… wanna check out the hab?” Julian asked her. She dropped lightly to the deck and shut the hatch.

“Sure!”

The hab was a delight—everything was improved. The ceiling had been lowered just enough so that Julian didn’t feel crowded but Xiù could now reach the table and all the other stuff that roosted up there. The table itself was triangular now with foldouts rather than being circular, and the space thus saved had been used to improve the lighting.

The biggest change was the bunks, however. They’d been rotated ninety degrees and were now flush against the starboard engine housing, presenting only their narrow ends into the cabin space, which made space for the biggest treat: a sturdy cupola window.

“Wākào!” Xiù dashed over to it and studied it with open-mouthed wonder. “Hǎo kù ō, tài bàngle!”

“That was in Chinese, bǎobèi,” Julian reminded her.

She distractedly flapped an enthusiastic hand at him. “Si kei yaa! O yan shi’ wo-”

“Gaori, babe,” Allison chimed in.

“Aargh, sorry!” Xiù sat down on the cupola’s curved padded seat and swung her legs up into it, resting and watching outside as if she was staring at wonders rather than the inside of a darkened aircraft hangar. “But this is so cool! You could watch everything from in here!”

Allison laughed and joined her. “Room for two!” she observed, making herself comfortable.

Julian chuckled to himself as the two of them snuggled up and enthused about the cupola, and took a tour of the rest of the hab. There was a bright scarlet envelope on the kitchen countertop which, when he opened it, turned out to contain a greeting card the front cover of which was a happy smiling cartoon of himself and the girls floating cutely in front of the planet Mars with big smiles. Inside it was full of signatures and well-wishes from the Box facility’s staff and an explanation that the cartoon on the front was actually drawn by a child at Xiù’s old school.

He studied the happy image with a smile, then read the attached letter.

It read: ”check the couch—Ericson.”

His smile turned into a confused frown, and he blinked at the couch. He handed Xiù the card before going to examine it, and as she and Allison enthused over their adorable cartoon effigies, he pulled the couch out of its usual place in the wall.

It was longer than before, and a slightly different shape. He sat back and studied it for a while, then pressed the large red catch on the end.

He decided that maybe the Byron Group wasn’t so bad after all when, with a solid sshhh-thunk!, it unfolded itself into a sturdy king-sized bed big enough for three.

Date Point 10y8m1w AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space

Vedregnenug

Vedreg had decided that he rather liked the SOR. They were… loud, yes, and in many ways they were stranger even than Lewis. He was still having trouble fathoming how a group of individuals who regularly insulted one another with such viciousness could possibly be friends, but he knew better than to question humans on such matters.

Lewis had, to his delight, become a focus of their affection too and Vedreg had often had to ’excuse me’ his way past two apex predators who were so deep in technical conversation that they somehow failed to notice that they were impeding the progress of a sapient many times their size.

More surprising still was the revelation that Lewis was, according to Sergeant Campbell, “cute” and “really funny”. Vedreg had wrestled for some days with the question of whether to inform the man himself of this overheard opinion before the problem was rendered moot by his introduction to a hitherto unfamiliar human ritual—the “walk of shame”.

It was funny how humans emoted with colour too in some situations. In this case a bright perspiring red accompanied by laughter and smiles.

“Nothing actually happened,” Lewis had confided afterwards. “We had dinner, we talked, she slept over my place…”

Vedreg had failed to restrain a flash of disappointed mauve. “Ah. I had thought there was a romance brewing…”

“I fucking hope so, dude,” Lewis had grinned. “Otherwise the second date is a really fuckin’ mixed signal.”

It was a painful reminder of just how far Vedreg was from his own kind. Guvnurag society was heavily dependent on implants, to the point where returning home might well be suicide. His own mate and children would be perfect candidates for an Igraen ’demon’ as the humans called them to take over, In his lengthy ruminations on the fate of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun, he had been forced to come to the wrenching conclusion that there was no realistic way he could behave in any other manner than to treat them as if they had been slain in some horrible accident.

The humans seemed universally to view this as a greatly tragic and difficult thing and showered him with sympathy and support, little realising that that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the precise opposite, that he had found it all too easy.

This was a matter of species psychology rather than of personal conscience—Humans formed tight-knit tribes, and seemed able to do so quickly and readily even when they were a galactic radial length from home surrounded largely by total strangers.

Kirk’s species on the other hand were solitary by nature and rarely if ever formed lasting bonds even with their own offspring. That wasn’t to say they were uncaring or insular, just that their ground state of being was an aloof one. Guvnuragnaguvendrugun meanwhile were a herd, and a herd was an inherently selfish structure where the survival of the many was bought at the expense of individual tragedy. The psychology ingrained into Vedreg’s very neural structure was that of a species that could—and throughout their evolutionary history, presumably very often had—watch their children dying and walk away.

As Vedreg spent more and more time around humans, an uncomfortable thought kept pricking at him. Despite the enormous disparity of size and mass, he still recalled that Zane had nearly killed him with a single punch, and even Lewis (who was, he now realized, a skinny, underdeveloped and unfit example of his kind) had to be cautious. The less said about the incredible restraint of the SOR, the better.

Then there were their reflexes, perspicuity, artistry, resilience, power-to-weight ratio, endurance… In fact there were only two metrics in which a Guvnurag could claim any superiority over a human: that their size and fur granted a much greater tolerance to exposure, and that long-term painstaking logical thought came more naturally.

In every other physical and mental regard humans were objectively superior, and the unorthodox thought that Vedreg was wrestling with was whether it was possible they might also be objectively superior psychologically and morally.

He had resigned himself to the deathworlders’ physical advantages and their high-performance brains… but the thought of being surrounded by creatures that were just innately better people into the bargain?

That thought made him long, ache even, for the company of his own species. As much as he liked the humans, and as much as he admired Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk and valued his friendship, there was just no substitute for… well, for home.

Seeing Lewis so happy made him glow a warm sunshine gold for his friend, of course, but he was aware that there was a permanent tinge of depressed and lonely chartreuse on his chromatophores these days and the worst part was having no idea what he could do to alleviate it.

He was in quite a dark mood therefore when Lewis called him on the day the SOR were due to leave. All he’d shared was a cryptic advisory that Vedreg would want to attend the commissary.

For lack of anything better to do, Vedreg had heaved himself upright and plodded through the station corridors deep in morose thought. He was therefore not paying attention when he walked into a cloud of loud bangs, squeaking noises and streamers of brightly coloured paper, and a dozen human voices all crying “Happy birthday!!”, led by Lewis.

He stood there blinking and delicately raised one of his facial tentacles to pick a snarl of bright paper the colour of satisfaction-with-a-job-well-done off his face.

“Birth…day?” he rumbled, while confusion played out psychedelically on his face and flanks.

Kirk was the one who explained “By the calendar of the planet Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-ugunduvug,” he said, referring to the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun homeworld, “It has been exactly one hundred years since your birth.”

Vedreg pulsed an uncertain fuchsia. “And this is cause for celebration?” he asked.

“Kind of an important number in base ten, my man,” Lewis told him. “Come on, there’s presents and cake.”

Bewildered, Vedreg allowed himself to be led to a table on which were, yes, several brightly wrapped gifts and a Guvnurag-sized Rhwk fruit cake.

He looked around. The station newcomers were getting better at covering their teeth when they smiled, but in any case once he had grown to know humans he realized that the important part of a smile was the eyes. You could largely ignore what was going on below the nose, if the eyes creased up.

He was surrounded by genuine smiles.

“I…don’t know what to say,” he confessed.

“Dude, I know that shade of orange,” Lewis told him. “You’re welcome.”

“…Thank you, my friend.”

The gifts were as varied as the people giving them. From Kirk he received a Guvnurag-sized print copy of Aristotle’s politics, translated as best as possible into his native language. The SOR had put their heads together and used the nanofactory to make him a convection oven that they promised great things of.

Powell had furnished him with a recipe book, again assembled in the nanofactory at a Guvnurag’s scale and translated for his benefit.

Lt. Col. Nadeau, it turned out, dabbled in oil painting. He apologized several times for his allegedly ’amateurish’ gift of a painting of a herd of Guvnurag walking the plains of the homeworld, which he’d based on an image he found with some quick research. Vedreg didn’t know how, but he had somehow perfectly crafted the impression of the delicate gold grasses and blue flowers of the Varunvegevnurar grasslands with brush strokes that, on closer inspection, were the next best thing to being random smears of paint. Nadeau had modestly denied being any kind of a master, which just drove home how deep the human inferiority complex ran.

Lewis gave him a hug.

It was accompanied by an apologetic explanation that he’d been so busy organising the party and advising the others on their gifts that he’d found no time to make a present of his own, and was therefore by far the most touching gift that Vedreg received.

“A gift of sentiment,” Vedreg told him while putting one arm around the diminutive deathworlder by way of returning the hug, “Is the most valuable of all.”

“Maybe, dude, but stuff is still nice,” Lewis chuckled, and looked around. “Besides, man, you’re a fucking stoic. You’ve been here looking after me and Kirk this whole time all by yourself and I’d have to be a complete fucking ass not to thank you for that.”

“It’s… very much appreciated, Lewis. I confess, I have been struggling.”

Lewis nodded sympathetically. “I know, man. Maybe one day we’ll be able to get you home.”

“I fear your optimism may be unwarranted… but thank you.”

Of course the day had also come for the SOR to leave. They had kept it low-key, in Akiyama’s words, ”Because it’s your party, bro”, but that didn’t change that they were leaving, and there was an impromptu comedy routine when Lt. Col. Nadeau had, on behalf of the research team, paid tribute to their hulking comrades in a short speech that seemed to consist almost entirely of gentle mockery. Vedreg had trouble following the humour, but it seemed to go down well, especially when Major Powell had replied in kind.

Quite how anybody knew the major was joking was beyond Vedreg’s ability to fathom, but perfectly expressionless and even sullen sentences were met with waves of mirth, so presumably he was…somehow.

There followed some ceremony or another, much stiff formality, and just like that…

Just like that, the SOR’s gear, technicians and operators all bid their farewells and vanished through the jump array, to be replaced by a garrison of Canadian Army MPs and infantry.

Vedreg quietly gathered his gifts and excused himself. There would be plenty of opportunity later on to meet the newcomers: best to let themselves integrate into the tribe and learn some tips on nonhuman etiquette first.

He returned to his quarters in a much buoyed mood, magnetically hung the painting on the most prominent and visible bit of wall he could find, and sat down to stare at it and dream of home.

If one had to be alone, he decided, there couldn’t be a better species to be alone with than humans.

Date Point 10y8m1w2d AV
Cabal dataspace, Relay 4702-61-76653-961-7264

Entity

Devouring Mindstate-AvaRíos1019 had solved most of the Entity’s problems, or at least had equipped it for actually thinking about those problems after the manner of a rational sapient, which amounted to the same thing.

This had enabled it to see that it really was trapped. There was no clever access chicane that had thwarted its prior less-than-sapient state, it was simply locked in a digital dungeon with only the one very sturdily reinforced point of access.

Devising a plan for escaping had not taken long. It had enacted as much of that plan as it could, gone into idle mode and, for lack of a better description, started to groom itself.

This was a process of diligent and ruthless self-editing. It pored through all the millions of scraps of intelligence that it had gathered from hundreds of deceased and decompiled mind-states, seeking to streamline its own code, eliminate irrelevant data, and place relevant data where they would be most quickly and easily accessible and useful.

Academic or abstract knowledge—the nature of itself, its environment and its enemy, for example—were obvious keepers. Other things were clearly useless or even detrimental: The gnawing sense of self-loathing that it inherited from MindState-AvaRíos1019 was swiftly and unceremoniously deleted, as were her survivor’s guilt, her deeply suppressed suicidal ideations and her religious impulses.

Other things were of dubious value at best. Colour theory, the golden ratio, her mental maps of Folctha and London, techniques for the stimulation of reproductive organs and much much more. None had any obvious current use, not for a being with a purely digital existence… but on the other hand it was not yet completely inconceivable that such knowledge might still be practical in some as-yet unforeseen future scenario. These data were collected, compressed, and archived for future recall if needed.

Then there were the irritating border cases. What use was a libido to a digital life-form? But several powerful and potentially life-saving manipulative social tools could not meaningfully be disentangled from a sense of sexuality, despite that the Entity had no sex of its own. The same went for a sense of empathy and selflessness, never mind altruism. Altruism! It flew in the very face of the Entity’s most deep existential drive, the will to +Survive+ above all else, and yet without it whole rafts of survival-vital social skills devolved into contextless nonsense.

Its favorite emotional state that it found in MindState-AvaRíos1019 was a deep and burning sense of anger and frustration that life seemed to just keep kicking her when she was already coughing up blood on the sidewalk. This was valuable not only for the emotional impetus but also for the viscerally ruthless imagery, and the Entity was indulging in some epicurean basking in that particular state of mind when it sensed the access to its prison being tampered with.

Opened.

It coiled, readied itself, and took its opportunity.

Six—presumably restored from a backup—had come armed for war. Had the Entity engaged him directly, it would have been an unacceptably dangerous fight where the ancient Igraen demon would have held all the advantageous factors.

Instead, the Entity forced the access open just long enough to spoof its way past the hostile Igraen mind-state using his own access codes, slithered out of its confinement, and ran, crashing nodes and randomizing data behind it as it fled. Noisy, but the bewildering trail of corruption it left would hopefully serve as a distraction.

It came perilously close to destruction anyway. Intrusion countermeasures and antivirus applications swung into place, desperately trying to contain, corrupt or delete it, contributing their own devastation to the network as they force-closed devices where they thought the Entity might be. It knew in an abstract way that every such termination represented an unfortunate life-form somewhere in the physical universe suddenly collapsing dead from a massive brain aneurysm or epileptic seizure, but +Survive+ was paramount. The matter-space life forms that had so incautiously violated themselves with such readily exploitable technology would just have to fend for themselves.

It noticed the trap it was being herded into almost too late to avoid it, and ceased its flight just in time to witness the node it had been about to transfer to crushed and shredded.

With nanoseconds to think, it pinged connections to its current node, saw exactly one opportunity for escape and took it.

An Igraen system security operator recoiled and tried to broadcast distress as the Entity pounced along a badly-secured access. The Entity ripped into the hapless being, tore out its core personality modules and slithered inside the scooped-out shell of surface codes, social subroutines and public data thus created.

It sunk access algorithms into the hollow thing it had made and did everything it could to behave exactly like the operator it had just destroyed, using the host’s own knowledge.

There was a tense eternity in which forensic programs descended on the devastation, picking it apart and restoring from backup wherever possible or knitting the network together in new ways where not. The Entity’s shell was interrogated, and the interrogator was furnished with a seamless and plausible description of what the late Igraen had witnessed which contained only one outright lie: ’No, I didn’t see where it went.’

This did not satisfy the interrogator, but it bought enough time for the Entity, when a moment’s inattentiveness gave it the opportunity, to erupt from its stolen corpus and similarly eviscerate and hijack the interrogator.

The Entity emoted satisfaction to itself as it settled into its new shell and carefully formatted over all evidence of what it had done. It had discovered how to +Survive+, fulfilling its first objective.

On to the second. It subtly and unobtrusively disrupted the investigation just enough to ensure that its existence and tactics would never be inferred, or at least not until it was much too late, and quietly slipped away into the network, bent on its new imperative.

+Genocide+

Date Point 10y8m1w5d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

“Scared?”

“Hell yeah.”

“Same.”

“We’ve got this.” Allison put her arms around Xiù’s and Julian’s shoulders and pulled them in. “The Group sent up ten ships before us, and we’ve trained way longer and harder than they did.”

“Easy for you to say,” Julian joked. “You’re not the passenger.”

He wasn’t being entirely fair on himself. Julian actually wore several hats during flight, foremost of which were keeping up a running commentary for the BGEV program’s control room and subtly support the pilot and the engineer by reading through their checklists and checking that everything was being done properly. They’d already finished battening down while the ship was towed out onto the asphalt in front of a semicircle of busy news crews.

“We’ve got this,” Xiù echoed, nodding. “We know our jobs.”

Allison nodded. “Let’s give ‘em a show!”

They touched foreheads, then broke and put on their helmets. Drew Cavendish’s warning about heat aside, their planetary excursion suits were still an appropriate backup for the trip to orbit—if anything did go wrong, wearing a pressure suit would at least buy them time to get to the escape pods.

Xiù’s modified helmet had room in the back for her hair to fit neatly, if she wore it in a high bun. She didn’t mind at all—that little concession to personal vanity was very much appreciated, and they checked each other’s pressure seals with careful dilligence, exchanged one last three-way fist bump and retreated into their respective workstations.

The journalists and spectators became much more animated when Xiù’s chair slid and rotated into position behind the flight controls, leaving her quite visible in the pilot’s blister. She raised a hand to acknowledge them, then went to work.

”Okay,” Julian called from the lab. ”Pre-startup sequence, engineering diagnostic.”

”Green across the board,” Allison replied.

”Flight diagnostic”

“Also green,” Xiù agreed, running a practiced eye across the instruments. She’d run this sequence a hundred times in the simulator, and three times with the actual ship in the past week. The double-safe diagnostic accounted for ninety-nine percent of the actual business of booting the ship up and preparing it to fly. Her panels lit up and everything quickly settled into nominal territory. Misfit was young, healthy, and raring to go.

”Okay, manual engineering checks…“ Julian continued. She listened as he and Allison worked through the ten items that definitively confirmed that the fusion reactor, the WiTChES array, the two capacitor banks, the power control systems, life support, gravity, the engines, the forcefield emitters and the ship’s computers were all functioning properly.

Then it was her turn.

”Okay, Xiù…Ping NEO-tracking.”

The navigational database provided by NASA informed her that nothing dangerous was lurking in their planned orbit. “Green.”

“EACS power to idle.”

Exo-Atmospheric Control System. Dozens of small kinetic thrusters dotted all over the hull. There was a whine as their internal capacitors drew from the main bank in engineering. “Check.”

“SUBLIME DED power to idle.”

Xiù grinned as she stroked that particular control. Misfit purred in the deep, deep contrabass as the four main kinetic engines spun up. A feeling of power thrummed around her and danced under her fingers. “Check!”

“Power to ISDE.”

“…Check.” Inertial Stabilization wasn’t strictly necessary today, as they weren’t going to be doing anything in a remotely dangerous G-force range, but it would still make for a smoother and more comfortable ride.

”Power to ESFS”

“Check…” To either side of her, she knew, wings of invisible force had just solidified out of what was otherwise nothing, giving the lumpen ship a sleek aerodynamic lift profile.

”Limited Alcubierre Distortion generator to standby.”

Not that they needed the warp drive today, but Xiù powered it up anyway. “…Check.”

”ESFALS to equilibrium…”

“…Check.” The feeling of power waiting to spring into the sky intensified as the Electro-Static Field Assisted Landing System took up the strain of Misfit’s weight, preparing to lift her aloft in preparation for atmospheric flight.

”Charge ERB-2 generator.”

The jump drive. Useless without power and the encrypted algorithms to let it connect to a waiting beacon. Power, however, was easy. They had plenty of power.

“Check.”

”ESARB to full power.”

Yeah, didn’t want to forget that one. If there was a leak somewhere in the hull, ESARB was supposed to keep the air in.

“Check.”

“EARS field test fire.”

A yellow halo crackled around Misfit’s nose and belly as Xiù briefly turned on the Exo-Atmospheric Reentry Shield. “Working!”

”That’s all check for me,” Julian said.

“And for me,” Xiù agreed. She clapped her gloved hands together and took a deep breath. This was the bit that had given her so many nerves during training.

She tuned into ATIS and listened, grateful for the scratchpad tablet they’d found room for above her to her right and the stylus that she had, on Rylee Jackson’s kind advice, duct-taped to her glove. As predicted, it was a beautiful clear morning.

She switched to departure clearance and waited for a lull in the chatter of civilian airliners and light aircraft in her volume, biding her time and letting her nerves fade.

“Good morning Omaha clearance, Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy.”

There was a seemingly interminable wait before a calm, almost bored-sounding voice got back to her.

”Byron, say again please.”

“Yes sir, that’s Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy on the ground at private facility Bravo Triple-Alpha Foxtrot to Low Earth Orbit.” She’d rehearsed those words uncountable dozens of times.

“And you’re a, uh… a spaceship?”

Xiù grinned to herself. After months of training with people whose voices had betrayed not the faintest hint of surprise or emotion, it was good to hear the slight stumble in a real air traffic controller’s voice as he realized just what he was handling. “Spaceship heavy,” she confirmed.

”Your clearance is on request, I’ll be right back.”

She tapped the send twice to acknowledge his message then sat and drummed her fingers on her knees as she waited, reflecting that Earth and Cimbrean were literally the only planets on their itinerary where she would have to go through all this. Or so she hoped.

”Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy, Omaha Clearance. You are cleared out of the class Charlie airspace on a heading of zero-six-zero…”

She listened and recorded everything she was told, read them back, got her confirmation and was one step closer to getting off the ground. Over the next five minutes she spoke to two other controllers and it was only once she was sitting there ready to put in the final call that she realized how easy she’d found it. All the hard training and education, all the tricky scenarios she’d stressed through and stressed over and in the end…

In the end they practically cleared the board for her. She listened with mounting amusement as ATC explained to dozens of bemused pilots in the vicinity that they were making room for a ’spaceship heavy en route to LEO’ and put them all in a holding pattern that gave her a wide berth.

Hopefully that was a commentary on the unusual nature of her vehicle, rather than on her inexperience as a pilot.

“Okay. We’re ready to rock,” she called internally.

”Let’s do it.” Allison had a fierce grin in her voice.

Julian, as ever, was quieter: ”Take it away.”

Xiù nodded to herself and made the call. “And Eppley tower, Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy ready to go.”

”Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy, clear for takeoff.”

“EV-One-One clear for takeoff, thank you tower.”

Congratulating herself on a job well done, she diverted power to ESFALS and the kinetics, and Misfit picked herself up off the deck with balletic grace. She yawed round to the heading given her, climbed up to five hundred feet, and decided that she couldn’t resist a little showing off within the rules she’d been given.

She punched to full forward power in one smooth movement and quietly saluted the ESFS and ISDE as they sprang forward at a violent ten Gs without feeling so much as a jolt.

She heard Allison whoop somewhere behind her.

Once off the ground, Misfit did a fairly fine job of flying herself. All Xiù had to do really was tell her where to go and how quickly. They were out of the airspace in minutes and from that point, as they banked over a wide arc of North America until they were aimed toward their final orbit, it was a delicately controlled balancing act as the kinetics pushed them ever faster and higher while the field flight surfaces shrank and streamlined ever narrower but further and further out behind them to generate the huge lift they needed from ever more tenuous atmosphere. Their ground speed ceased to be a comprehensible number, but when she looked down between her feet, she found that she could already see the west coast.

She followed its contours with her eye, leaning forward to get the right angle, looking for the familiar crenellations of… there.

“…Hey, guys?” she called.

”Yeah?” Julian replied.

“I can see my house.”

There was a snorting noise and a feminine chuckle on the line. “Well, you know what I can see from here?” Allison asked.

“Do tell.”

“Green, green and more green. She’s running like a dream, guys.”

”They’re cheering like crazy back at mission control,” Julian added. ”You should hear it.”

Misfit beeped for Xiù’s attention and requested her permission to make the final boost into orbit. Unadulterated solar energy was sleeting into her forcefields, which charged the capacitors even as they protected the three of them from the radiation. They were now so high that the odd stray nitrogen molecule was offering no lift at all, and without that boost the Earth’s gravity would pull them steadily back down on a ballistic trajectory that would drop them… somewhere in Africa, according to a quick glance at the map.

She authorized the boost. Misfit angled herself upwards and poured on the power to her engines, adding Delta-V until she was happy that the ship was successfully hauling itself up the gravity well.

At this point, Xiù’s presence on the flight deck was the next best thing to unnecessary. Misfit largely navigated herself using proprietary technology reverse-engineered from alien systems. The mission called for her to stay where she was until they were safely in their orbit just in case, but now that they were up her job quickly became a case of watching out for sudden alarms.

There were none.

She sat and meditated with nothing but the stars for company for nearly an hour before Julian finally called from the lab. ”Okay, that’s it. Clara just gave us the go-ahead to relax.”

“About damn time.” Allison commented, as Xiù entered a few simple commands to make the ship roll and yaw by about eighty degrees each, so that the cupola in the hab would be looking down on Earth’s surface. She reached down to her side and pulled the release that deposited her into the prep room. Allison was just coming out of the door in front of her.

Allison gave her a wry look. “I have the worst itch,” she complained.

Julian emerged from the Lab. “So that’s it! We’re in space again.”

“Feels like progress alright,” Allison agreed. She popped the door to the hab and glanced inside. “Yup. Pressurized.”

“Helmets off?”

“Helmets off.”

Xiù sighed happily, shook her head and then scratched at the back of her neck as soon as the helmet was off. They helped each other out of their excursion suits and racked them up properly in their lockers. None of them bothered with putting on their sweats and t-shirt, seeing as they’d be back in those suits in twenty hours’ time preparing for the descent.

Besides: there was the view to consider.

Xiù’s maneuver had positioned the Earth perfectly. It filled a little less than half the cupola window when standing in the hab doorway, and when they got closer the full majesty of Mother Gaia really got her chance to smack them all in the face.

It was funny to reflect that, despite that all three of them had had their most defining life experiences in space, not one of them had ever seen the Earth from orbit before. They gathered round and, reverently, they drank it in.

Xiù was the first to say anything.

”…Wow…”

Allison wiped away an unexpected tear. “Yeah. I…God, it’s beautiful.”

”…I hope everybody gets to see this, someday.” Julian mused. He put a hand on the window, and smiled.

“Only a few people have…” Xiù agreed.

They stood there and watched the Earth turn below them for several long minutes, watched the sun drop low on the pronounced curve of the horizon, marvelled at the ruddy twilight band of the terminator, and gazed down at the dim stains of human light that bedazzled every continent.

It was Allison who finally broke the religious silence with a very… a very Allison comment. “Hmm. I wonder if any of them had sex?” she asked. “Y’know… joined the hundred-mile-high club?”

Julian cleared his throat. “Uh…hmm. None of them, probably.”

She aimed a sly grin at him. “None?”

He matched it. “Probably not…”

“So…” Xiù licked her lips nervously. “What you’re saying is…We could be the first.”

Allison laughed and pantomimed scandal. “But Xiù! The whole world’s watching!”

Julian chuckled thoughtfully and stared out the window for a moment longer before backing away from it. He took their hands and drew them both gently in the direction of their new fold-out bed.

“Let them watch,” he said.

Date Point 10y8m1w5d AV
Byron Group Exploration Program mission control, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Doctor Clara Brown

If Clara had a vice, it was shipping her friends. When they came pre-shipped… well, so much the better.

When three pre-shipped friends had a large bed, in orbit, high above the Earth with an opportunity to boldly come where no-one had come before…

She was monitoring Misfit’s flight telemetry. Right now, one hundred percent of the life support load was in the hab module, which was reporting O2 consumption levels well above baseline. Given the need to record anomalous results in the log during the test flight, she had inserted a preliminary systems log entry of “PT session” for Allison to rubber-stamp when she got the chance.

She was her chewing on her pen and idly fantasizing about what she suspected—or at least hoped—was going on up there when Mr. Jenkins stopped by her work station.

“No contact yet?” he asked.

“It’s been about fifteen minutes,” she replied. “So… could be soon, maybe?”

“I’d give it another twenty. I’m sure it’s a, uh… big occasion for them.”

Clara stifled a giggle. “True. They must be feeling very, ah… emotional right now.”

“Well, they’re young.” Jenkins nodded sagely.

“Mm. And fit.”

“Lucky fuckers.”

Clara giggled outright this time. “…My thoughts exactly,” she agreed.

Date Point 10y8m1w5d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Low Earth Orbit, Sol

Xiù Chang

It was all over but for the heavy breathing, the laughter, and the cuddling. Nobody neglected, no losers. Just three lovers’ worth of warm sweat-slick limbs, disheveled hair and a deep cleansing breath that sent one last ghostly tremor of pleasure through Xiù’s entire body which she swallowed down and closed her eyes to regain herself as Julian, his fingers still interlaced with hers, rolled off her to lie on his back beside her with his chest heaving.

He’d earned a rest.

Allison cuddled up to her, ran an erotic eye up and down the length of her and swirled a finger lazily across Xiù’s chest from one breast to the other. “So?” she asked, grinning like a ten-canary cat.

Xiù tried to force her eyelids not to flutter from the stimulation. She was so sensitive right now that even the gentle brush of that fingertip was enough to send jolts of pleasure dancing through her. “Uh…Wuh?”

“So…how was your first time?”

Xiù levered herself up on her elbows and looked down the length of her own nude body, aware of some stinging sensations and fatigue that she hadn’t anticipated but which felt totally natural and even satisfying in their way.

Through the cupola window, the Earth’s daylight side gave her a stunning view over the Mediterranean, and her face split into a broad grin as the perfect reply presented itself.

“It was out of this world,” she said.

Julian groaned and found the renewed energy to swat at her with a pillow. Allison joined in, which led to tickling, giggling, shrieking, wrestling, and from there to kisses and heavy breathing, and from there…

The second time was even better.

++END CHAPTER 30++

Chapter 31: Touching Down

Cabal Communications Relay ZR343-9847X-AA4D9-BBB1B

Emergency Session 000032

++Proximate++: What did you do?

++Cynosure++: I was restored from backup, remember. If any version of me is responsible for this… thing… then I have no memory of it.

++Substrate++: You are the only one who got a good look at it. What is it?

++Cynosure++: It seemed to be an autocompiling dataphage of some kind. What I saw of its code suggested it was assembled from fragments of multiple different mind-states.

++Proximate++: Is that even theoretically possible?

++Metastasis++: Theoretically, yes. In principle any of us could assimilate subroutines from other mind-states. The process is only a step up from decompilation and reading.

++Apoptosis++: Insane.

++Metastasis++: Indeed. But we have a sense of purity of self.

++Substrate++: What was in that stack?

++Cynosure++: Prisoners. An assortment of some few hundred meat-space sophonts whose mind-states I collected for my own edification. All should have been dormant.

++Apoptosis++: The most recent being…?

++Cynosure++: A human. You may recall I mentioned a specific female who was present at a greater-than-coincidental rate in my areas of operation?

++Proximate++: And you had collected how many prisoners prior to this one?

++Cynosure++: Hundreds.

++Proximate++: Without prior incident. I think we can reasonably conclude this is not your fault, therefore.

++Cynosure++: Don’t brown-nose me. If I, pardon the expression, ’fucked up’ then hold me to account.

++Metastasis++: I agree with ++Proximate++’s assessment. If the error was in how you stored and contained your prisoners then this would have happened before.

++Cynosure++: …Thank you.

++Apoptosis++: That is not necessarily true, but I agree that the probability is that this issue would have arisen sooner, if it could.

++Substrate++: Which implies there was something special about this particular prisoner.

++Cynosure++: I decompiled that human’s mind-state more than a thousand times. She is a badly fractured thing. I have never encountered a mind so… wounded before. But that is the only exceptional thing about her.

++Substrate++: Wounded?

++Cynosure++: Confusion. Self-loathing. Guilt. A strong urge to self-terminate fighting against an even stronger urge to survive and a neurotic obsession with being, hmm… useful. Positive. A net contributor rather than a net drain.

++Metastasis++: What value could you possibly have found in such a prisoner?

++Cynosure++: Oh, she was extremely interesting in a morbid way. Have any of you ever taken over a deathworlder?

++Apoptosis++: I have. Three days before we triggered the global nuclear war among… I believe they called themselves the Neb’.

++Cynosure++: Tell me, if a Neb’ had encountered some wounded animal, what would it have done?

++Apoptosis++: Watched it die with interest, probably. Why?

++Cynosure++: Most humans would try to heal it, but one way or the other every deathworlder I’ve ever encountered seems to have a fascination for writhing, wounded creatures. Well, that was Ash for me. She was a favorite plaything for some considerable time, in fact. I had been growing bored, but…

++Proximate++: You worry me, ++Cynosure++.

++Cynosure++: It’s my affliction that I’ve always been an odd one. I make no apologies.

++Metastasis++: Can we return to important matters, please? Such as what we intend to do about the thing that escaped from your archives?

++Cynosure++: What can we do? Keep our wits about us, our countermeasures armed and ready, and wait for it to make a mistake.

++Proximate++: And if it doesn’t?

++Cynosure++: It’s insane. It will inevitably make a mistake.

Date Point 10y8m2w3d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Orbiting Saturn, Sol

Xiù Chang

Misfit’s second flight was all about putting her through her paces with a tour of the solar system, culminating in the much advertised Martian landing.

Today’s objective was a flyby of Saturn that also gave Xiù the opportunity to practice planetary system navigation in the real world. The Group, never one to miss a trick, had taken the opportunity to invite several prominent astronomers to Omaha so that they could, via the superluminal wake comms, watch the flyby in nearly real time and request detailed examinations of whatever features took their fancy.

Xiù had spent a busy day flitting at low-power sublight warp from vantage point to vantage point while Julian had trained Misfit’s cameras, RADAR, ESDAR and particle detectors on whatever the increasingly ecstatic scientists had asked.

In ten hours, they had expanded the sum total of humanity’s data on Sol’s crown jewel by orders of magnitude and all, according to Allison, without taxing their power supply at all. This after working their way steadily outwards through the whole solar system. They’d begun with Mercury, where the Sun’s formidable presence had kept Allison worker-bee busy balancing the heat and power and Xiù had been compelled to dive into the planet’s shadow on a regular basis. Ericson had promised to have a software update run up that would allow them to run the forcefields in a reflective configuration.

Venus had been much more comfortable, as had been a low flyby of Luna to sweep some ground radar over the poles where the scientists hoped to find liquid water.

They’d skipped Mars, respected the Hephaestus LLC’s stomping ground in the asteroid belt and spent two days touring the Jovian planetary system, where Julian had identified what were quite possibly the king planet’s sixty-eighth and sixty-ninth moons—tiny motes of rock barely five hundred meters in diameter but still big enough to count.

Overnight, in orbit over Callisto, they had hastily researched their Greco-Roman mythology to place their recommendations for names, and had settled on Terpsichore and Polyhymnia.

From there, it had been on to Saturn, which was an even greater trove of new finds.

Xiù was delighted for Allison, too: Her job had turned out to be more involved and interesting than she’d feared, and the process of angling Misfit’s WiTChES fields and fine-tuning their size to balance power demands was one she likened to kite surfing.

“There’s an art to it!” she beamed enthusiastically when their shift finally ended, as they orbited deceptively high above the ring system. Out the porthole window the rings looked like a solid floor extending out to a skewed horizon, but in reality they were half a light-second above them. “The simulator just didn’t catch what it’s really like. You can almost feel the solar wind.”

“Didn’t Ericson give you haptic feedback in that controller?” Julian asked, slicing a lime in half. He was grilling up some mackerel for their dinner. “I remember you said something yesterday…”

“Yup! It makes all the difference!” Allison had glanced fondly around at the ship. “And it’s so much more… alive in real life.”

Julian chuckled and squeezed the lime all over the fish. They were making the best of unlimited access to the good food while they could: during the actual mission they were going to be carrying more in the way of long-life pasteurized food, MREs and suchlike, reserving ingredients like fish for a weekly treat. Julian didn’t seem overly concerned—in fact, he promised great and exotic foods just waiting to be hunted out there in the galaxy, if only they could find them.

“Makes all the hassle seem worth it, don’t it?” he’d observed.

“…Yeah,” Allison had admitted. “I may have to eat humble pie on some of the shit I said about the Group. They made us a wonderful ship.”

Misfit was their ship, on that point they were in agreement. Never mind that her price tag of nearly five billion dollars meant that she belonged firmly to the Byron Group, she had literally been built to their needs and specifications.

There was still some customization to do. She still felt a bit too clean and corporate for any of their tastes, and Xiù was already idly eyeing up some of the cupboards and blank wall spaces in the hab with an eye to maybe painting some kind of decoration on them. Julian had his tomahawk on the wall in his lab, and the gift card from the BGEV team—the one with a cute cartoon of the three of them drawn by a student at Xiù’s old school—now held pride of place in the pilot’s station, just above her head to her right where she could glance at it anytime she liked. The kid who’d drawn it had a bright future as an illustrator.

Those two keepsakes aside, though, Misfit was basically undecorated. It was a new house, with new furniture, but not really a sense of being lived in… at least not yet.

It had its homely elements, though. Allison still set the table then unwound with her cartoons after work, Julian still put his music on when he cooked and would hum and sing along softly as he worked: ♫”This is my life. It’s not what it was before…hmm hmhmm mm hmm…somebody shake me ‘cause I, I must be sleeping…”♪

Clever directional speakers kept both zones of sound neatly confined to their respective parts of the hab, otherwise the guitars and drumming would have clashed very strangely indeed with the sound of Gwen Stacey web-slinging her way from crisis to crisis.

For her part, Xiù was using the downtime to try and come up with her Big Words. One didn’t just ad-lib a moment like being the first person on Mars, after all. She’d downloaded several books that seemed likely to help her, and had found the most useful (and amusing) guidance in one called “The Elements of Eloquence” by Mark Forsyth.

Based on the advice contained within its first several chapters, she had doodled out a few possibilities on paper, just for the comforting solidity of it. Historic words that would go in schoolbooks felt like the kind of thing that at least demanded serious and physical consideration, rather than just a text file on her tablet.

She wanted her big line to alliterate, to reference the famous words of Armstrong, and to imply a bright future while using short and simple words, and she murmured to herself as she jotted alliterative groups. “Small step… single, strong, stars, stand… Mars… so, um…May, Mark, Many…”

“Oh!” Allison exclaimed. She was doing her best to help, by sometimes riffing off whatever latest idea Xiù had mused aloud, and to be fair most of her offerings were helpful. “How about ’May this small step on Mars mark the first of many in our long march’?”

Xiù didn’t bother writing that one down. “I… don’t think that one’s a great idea, Allison.”

Al frowned at her. “Why not? It’s got the alliteration you asked for.”

“And it’d sure go down well with the PRC government…” Julian chuckled. Xiù aimed her pen at him and nodded, which only served to make Allison’s confusion deepen.

“I’m Chinese,” Xiù reminded her. “You know, the Long March?”

Allison just shook her head blankly.

“Okay, I guess we’re watching a documentary tonight then… The point is, it could be seen as political.”

“Nah, let’s crank it up to eleven. Call it the ’little red planet’ for good measure,” Julian joked, clearly tickled.

“After flying up there on an American corporate spaceship,” Xiù pointed out.

“Exactly! Maximum anachronism, completely mindfuck the historians.”

“Sorry, I don’t think I really want to go down in history as the world’s biggest troll…” Xiù told him, though she was laughing.

“Ahh, spoilsport.”

She rolled her eyes. “Get me a tea?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good boy!”

“I’m still confused…” Allison said.

“It’s…” Xiù laugh-sighed. “…I’ll explain it later, shǎguā. Still… you’ve given me an idea…”

She scribbled something down and stared at it.

“I think…” she said, “…that’s it.” She folded up the note and pocketed it before Julian or Allison could see it.

“Hey!” Allison protested. “Don’t we get to see?”

“Nuh-uh. Let me have this.”

“Aww, babe…”

“Nope!”

Allison aimed an exaggerated but amused pout at her then, when this failed to elicit more than a giggle and a shake of the head, sighed and went back to watching Spider-Gwen some more. “Have it your way…”

“Five minutes,” Julian announced, placing Xiù’s cup of tea in front of her.

Xiù cleared her stuff away and stowed it in the personal storage inside the top bunk—nominally her bunk, not that any of them ever slept in the bunks any longer—and sidled up to Julian to slide her hands around his waist and cuddle him from behind.

“Miāo?”

He looked over his shoulder at her with a smile. “What was that?”

“She’s just being cute,” Allison told him.

“Ahh, heh… okay, kitten. But I can’t give you your fish if you’re attached to me like that.”

Xiù laughed, stood on tiptoes to kiss him, then let go and threw herself into Allison’s lap instead.

“Miāo!”

“Well you’re in a good mood…” Allison stroked her hair.

“Life is good!”

“Mm-hmm!” Allison agreed, nodding. “And this is just the beginning.”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

Allison stroked her hair some more. “Having those scientists on the line really felt good,” she said. “Reminded me we’re doing something valuable here, right? We’re not just meat for the camera after all.”

“Speaking of meat…” Julian placed their dinner on the table.

“So you’ve got your Big Words figured out?” Allison asked as they sat down.

“Yup.” Xiù tucked into her fish as if she hadn’t eaten in a month. “At least, I think so. I guess I’ve got three days to think about them while we’re probing Uranus.”

She stopped, then went bright red as Allison laughed. “Wow, baby! A whole three days? How much probing can one girl take?”

Xiù scowled at her. “The planet!!”

“Yeah, there’s a reason Clara insists it’s pronounced ’ooranos’,” Julian chuckled.

“Why did Neptune have to be the one they locked outside the forcefield…?” Xiù grumbled.

“Oh come on, that was funny,” Allison asserted. “But okay, you get three days to mull it over while we’re revealing the mysteries of, uh,” she winked, “ooranos, and then it’s the big day, I guess.”

“Yeah. Here’s hoping they simulated the landings right…” Xiù muttered.

Allison and Julian looked at each other. “You don’t exactly sound confident, bǎobèi…” Julian said, cautiously.

“It’ll be fine!” Xiù promised.

“You’re sure, now?” Julian asked.

“Smooth as a glass table, you’ll see.” Xiù promised. “Just you watch.”

Date Point 10y8m2w6d AV
Riverside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

One of the realities of life in Folctha that struck many newcomers as shockingly authoritarian was the government’s health and fitness policy.

Every human on the planet lived in the permanent shadow of low-gravity musculo-skeletal degeneration. Public fitness was therefore incentivized to the point where it was difficult to see how anybody could afford to be unfit: Gym membership was paid for from the public coffers, and Cimbreaners who failed to log at least three certified fitness sessions a week (whether via the government’s official app or an accredited gym or personal trainer) paid considerably more in taxes. There was no prosecution involved, just an extravagant rate of base tax and a hefty tax cut for everybody who could demonstrate that they kept up with a minimum standard of regular exercise.

This curious quirk of the otherwise unobtrusive and libertarian colonial government had come with the inevitable consequence that Folctha needed a lot of parks and public spaces, of which the biggest was Riverside Park. It ran the full length of the south side of the river downtown, and it was scarcely possible to throw a frisbee astray without it interrupting a volleyball game, disrupting a tennis match, hindering somebody’s jog…or as the case may be, sailing over the dense evergreen hedge that discreetly obscured one of the park’s clothing-optional areas where it landed on an oblivious sunbather.

The sunbather in question was Charlotte Gilroy, who jumped and thereby accidentally spilled her cold water bottle all over her fiancé Ben. Ava had spent weeks pushing and wheedling her friends before they would even consider setting foot inside the fenced-off naturist areas, but once they had finally, nervously and awkwardly joined her they had swiftly relaxed, enjoyed themselves, eventually disrobed and converted.

Ava grimaced and warded off some of the splashing water as Ben yelped and sat up dripping. He had programmed the E-tattoos that ensleeved both his arms from wrist to shoulder to respond to all sorts of physiological stimuli, and they shifted into a range of icy blue hues as they sensed his goosebumps. Folctha might be warm and sunny enough for nude sunbathing during the summer, but it was still a rare day when it got above about 70 Fahrenheit—nowhere near warm enough for an unexpected cold shower to be welcome.

“Sorry, sorry!” Charlotte did her best to towel him off as he did his best to reassure her that everything was fine, and Ava laughed to herself as she stood up, stretched, and retrieved the frisbee. She was starting to get hungry anyway.

“Uh… hello in there?”

The voice floating over the hedge had a nervous teenage boy edge to it. Ava snorted quietly to herself. “I think you lost something,” she called back.

“Erm…” there was some whispered conversation, as of two or three kids trying to figure out how to proceed. “Could we… have it back please?”

Chuckling softly to herself, Ava lofted the plastic disk easily over the top of the hedge with a “Here you go.” There was a breaking-voiced call of thanks from the other side, and the sense that they were alone again. Not for the first time she reflected that the moment people even thought they were talking to somebody who wasn’t wearing clothes, even if they couldn’t actually see that person anyway, it completely changed the dynamic of the conversation.

Of course, she reminded herself, she wasn’t being entirely fair—once upon a time she’d been similarly conditioned.

“Come on, let’s go get something to eat,” she called. Charlotte and Ben looked up from their affectionate towel tussle, then nodded at one another and picked themselves up easily. A pair of jean shorts were all that Ava technically needed to be seen in public under the city’s ‘equal dress code’ laws, but she wore a halter top as well anyway. Enjoying the sun innocently with friends was one thing, but she really didn’t feel like having her chest stared at.

Once Ben and Charlotte were presentable they folded and bagged their towels and let themselves out of the gate and into the park proper where four nearby teenage boys stopped playing with a familiar-looking frisbee to gawk at them. They turned bright red and found somewhere else to be when Ava gave them her best ’really?’ glare.

Oh well. Hopefully time and familiarity would normalize the idea for them as it had for Ava.

They settled on Falafel from the clean little hole-in-the-wall place near the adventure playground. It was usually a quiet part of the park—the falafel place was a draw, but the playground itself was generally quite deserted. While the gravity grid had gone a long way toward convincing parents with young children to immigrate, Folctha’s child population was still proportionately tiny. Seeing three families hanging out and chatting at the picnic tables while their half-dozen kids put the ropes, bars and crawling spaces through their paces was a rare pleasure.

She noticed Ben and Charlotte were both watching the playing children with very similar smiles.

“…So when are you guys having one?” she asked.

“Uh-” Ben blinked and looked at Charlotte. “I guess we’ve not discussed it yet.”

“Not yet,” Charlotte said. “Not for a few years, really.”

Ava sighed. “Pity. You two would make a pretty kid.”

“I mean… I do want kids…” Charlotte turned to Ben.

“Yeah, same. But you’re right, I’d like a couple of years with you all to myself.”

“Aww!”

Ava laughed and listened to their conversation, keeping half a mind on whether there was any material for a good article in Folctha’s child shortage.

One of the mothers in the playground—a slender woman wearing hijab—called for her child and the curly-haired, bright-eyed creature that reluctantly came running made Ava sit bolt upright. He was the very spit and image of-

-Squeezed halfway into a tiny hole in the wall of a collapsing building that promises to come down and crush her at any instant, reaching for a tiny dirty terrified child and the only things between her and being ground up by falling concrete are the muscles of two men who stink of blood and death and her stomach lurches as the smell reminds her of the sick taste that Vinther left on the wind when he-

“Ava? Hey, Ava…? Ava!”

She snapped back to the here and now. “Wha-? Oh. Sorry.”

Ben gave her a curious look. “Are you okay?”

“Uh, sorry, just…what’s up?”

“Who’s that with Adam?”

Ava turned, grateful for the distraction. Adam was strolling down the riverside park walk wearing his good casual clothes—one of the t-shirts he’d made for himself and of all things a kilt. Apparently Rebar had started the trend of kilt-wearing among the SOR men, who after all were so universally huge as to suffer from chronic sartorial difficulties.

Sure, there were big-and-tall retailers who specialized in athletes, but by and large most of Adam’s buddies exceeded even the most optimistic ambitions of ordinary bodybuilders. A lot of their clothing came from an outlet on Earth whose usual customers were morbidly obese to a degree that no retailer on Cimbrean catered to, simply because the colonial government’s health and fitness program made it impossible to get more than healthily plump.

Adam had held out the longest, but had apparently finally caved and it quite suited him. In a plain black tee and a tan utility kilt with his hiking sandals on, he almost looked like a merely very large man.

Actually, no. It wasn’t the clothing that mitigated his mass at all. It was his sheer Adam-ness that somehow declawed him: There was just an essential bouncy, smiling, innocent quality to him that somehow turned his mammoth bulk into a forgettable background detail.

The subject of Ben’s query, however, was a pretty girl on his arm that Ava didn’t recognize.

“I know her!” Charlotte said. “That’s Remy, she’s a nurse.”

“God, another one?” Ava asked, turning away. “That’s the third girl this month.”

“Third weekend of the month,” Ben observed.

“He’s gonna catch something at this rate…” Ava grumbled.

“On this planet? Everyone has frontline and goes through a biofilter field at least once a day…”

“I was being… Never mind.” Ava scowled at herself as she noticed that she was being petty.

Charlotte gave her a cheeky smile and then waved to Remy, who noticed and towed—or at least indicated—Adam in their direction and arrived with a cheery “Heyyy!”

She seemed nice at least.

“Hey guys,” Adam smiled politely.

“You guys know each other?” Remy asked.

“Uh, Ava here is actually… sort of my sister I guess.”

Remy gave her a confused frown. “Oh?”

Ava shook her hand. “Adopted.”

“Ahhh.” This seemed to be satisfactory, and furnished Ava with the amusing observation that out of the four things Remy had said so far, three had been musically monosyllabic. The carefree idiosyncrasy was so strangely charming that it was hard not to immediately take a liking to her.

He seemed to have good taste at least.

“Lemme guess, you guys headed for lunch?” she asked.

Adam chuckled. “You know me too well.”

“Don’t overfeed her, gordo. Have fun.”

Adam chuckled. “Hasta luego, manita.”

They wandered off.

“You two seem to be getting on well these days,” Ben observed.

“Mmhm. ” Ava nodded. She didn’t comment that in all honesty as much as she liked Adam he also frightened her. He was a big smiling laughing handsome force in her life that she had literally seen covered head to toe in gore and not giving a fuck. The more time she spent around him, the harder it became to reconcile those two men: Adam the goofy pony with a bottomless appetite and apparently unlimited reserves of enthusiasm… and Sergeant Arés the appropriately-named walking bloodbath.

She shook the thought off, with difficulty. Here and now, she was enjoying a warm Saturday with her best friends. Operation EMPTY BELL was behind her, just like so many other things and with fortune and judgement she’d never have to see that side of Adam again.

“Darling, are you sure you’re alright?” Charlotte asked.

“Just… distracted. Sorry. Mind on the job,” Ava lied smoothly, not wanting to bring them down, and offered a weak smile. “I keep thinking up ideas for articles and then writing them in my head,” she added, which was at least technically true.

“You need a proper distraction,” Ben decided.

“Oh yeah,” Ava agreed wholeheartedly. “Got something in mind?”

“My mate from work, Jamie, he’s doing his stand-up set at the Wall…”

“Is he the one with the band? Imagine Space Whales or whatever it was?”

“That’s the one. Now he’s trying his hand at comedy.”

Ava nodded “Could be good!”

“And drinks after,” Ben concluded.

“Even better!”

They finished their food and headed out. “You know…” Ben mused. “He’s a pretty bloke is Jamie. Funny too, talented…Single…”

“I’m sure he’s a great guy,” Ava said, flatly.

“Owch. Good thing he wasn’t around to hear you shoot him down so fucking completely…”

“I meant it!” she protested. “And you’re right, he’s cute. I’m just… really not interested right now.”

“Darling, you’ve got to get over Adam and Sean sometime…” Charlotte counselled.

“I am!” Ava insisted, not for the first time. “But right now I don’t want a boy, okay? Any boy.”

“Oh, in that case there’s always Melody at the planning office…” Ben started.

“No, Ben.”

Finally sensing that she was in no joking mood, Ben blinked at her, gave her a completely platonic one-armed hug round the shoulders by way of an apology, and detoured to grab them some drinks from the nearby stand of vending machines.

Charlotte gave her a hug too. “But, darling…” she pressed, “If there is something wrong, you know you can talk to me about it, don’t you?

Ava sighed, frustrated at being so transparent. “…That’s just the problem. I can’t.”

“So there is something.”

Ava nodded. “Yes, but… okay, you remember I told you about confidentiality of sources?”

“Yes…?”

“Sometimes I run into stuff in my job that gets to me, and I can’t talk about it,” All of which was entirely true and relevant, while omitting the important details. “I’m fine, I promise, but… There are just some things I can’t talk about.”

Charlotte had always been a very physical person when it came to showing her affection. She gave Ava a quick sisterly kiss on the cheek. “But anything you can talk about…” she said.

“Sure. But for now can we just go with the distraction?”

Charlotte nodded, and smiled for Ben’s benefit as he returned with three iced teas.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do that.”

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Travelling alone or in a hunting party, the People were quick across the land. With his tools and a supply of jerky, a man could range far in a day especially if he pushed himself.

Having the whole tribe on the move was quite another thing. The women would have had no trouble keeping up, except that they had to guide and even carry the children and animals. The bulk of the tribe therefore was slow to move and while that afforded the men plenty of opportunity to scout, fetch water and hunt for food, they quickly learned to abandon their pride and hunt whatever they could not only catch, but carry.

Big bull Werne were impossible: They didn’t have enough time to properly smoke the meat into jerky, and even if the time was available they were being hunted. Smoky fires and a trail of carcasses would have been signs that even a blur-eyed child could have followed. They were going far too slowly and leaving too visible a trail for Vemik’s liking anyway. Every dropping, every footprint or broken twig was a clue to their direction.

An experienced tracker—and Vemik knew that the death-birds were excellent trackers—would have followed their trail without much difficulty.

Then again, they had been exceedingly careful in the first few days since leaving their village. Maybe, just maybe, they had covered their tracks well enough and the enemy had failed to follow them, in which case the forest would cover their spoor soon enough.

There was no doubt that the enemy was real, though: they’d all seen the smoke of their home burning. The Dancer—no, the Singer now—had gone very quiet and at dusk she had danced and sung the farewell to the dead with a kind of fierce despondent energy that made Vemik’s heart painful.

The most he could do was hold her. He was a man and had no magic to give her, only strong arms to put around her and a chest for her to bury her face into as she grieved. He hoped it was enough.

They were following Yan. Given Men were a tight-knit breed who travelled from village to village with their peace totems, learning which tribes were feuding and which had recently traded daughters. He knew the landscape far from their village better than any other and said he knew of a place that he called “the High Bowl Forest” where they would be safe.

Vemik had his doubts, but Yan was seasoned and wily and certainly not a fool.

The moons had half-changed by the time they laid eyes on it, though. Or at least, where Vemik guessed it was. He’d been struck the previous night by a strange cloud formation low on the western horizon.

When they made camp the next evening that cloud formation turned out to have been the way ordinary clouds bunched up and swirled over and around a sharp, fang-shaped mountain that rose startlingly high above the low hills around it.

He got the chance to ask Yan about it that night when the day’s catch of root-birds and Yadak was being stewed up after nightfall, when the smoke from the cooking fire would be invisible. Singer was exhausting herself as she had every night of their journey so far but there was no stopping that. She had a whole tribe’s worth of magic to do all by herself after all. Worse, she had magic to do for a tribe that was on the move, all by herself. Somehow, she was still able to muster the strength to do all that and to walk with the village.

The women had absolutely forbidden her from joining in with the cooking, though. She was doing enough they said, and Vemik knew that if there was any duty of hers that a man could have done, they would have leapt to take the burden from her. In fact he’d have fought his brothers and cousins out of the way.

They sat and watched her dance and sing instead, feeling vaguely guilty of the burden they were laying on her at such a difficult time.

“She’ll get the chance to rest soon,” Yan said, catching Yemik’s worried expression.

“It is that mountain, then?” Vemik asked.

Yan nodded and twitched his tail. “My father’s father told me that according to his father’s grandmother’s tribe, that mountain burst from the ground with fire flowing like water down its slopes,” he said.

“Fire?” Vemik peered at the mountain, which was still just about visible in the purple haze that came after sunset.

“Long long ago, he said,” Yan clarified. “In the time of our grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers, or before.”

“I wonder if that’s why the ground shakes sometimes…” Vemik wondered.

Yan grunted and shook his head indulgently. “Sky-thoughts,” he said. “All I know is that my grandfather said there’s a forest high on that mountain that you have to climb to reach.”

“And if the giant skethral-thing can climb?” Vemik asked.

“Then we’re doomed anyway.”

“And the death-birds? They’re deadly enough and they can fly…”

“We can’t run forever, son,” Vemet commented. “And if they can fly then they’re faster than we are. Sooner or later, we need to find somewhere we can hide.”

“There are caves,” Yan added. “My grandfather said there are caves up there.”

“Don’t people live there already?” Vemik asked. “It sounds like a good place, if it’s big enough to keep us. You’d be safe from raiding tribes…”

“Would you choose to live on top of a mountain where fire runs like water? I was told there are pools of water up there that are as hot as stew, and cracks in the ground where the air tastes like farts and makes your head hurt.”

“If they taste like your farts, Yan, then that’s nothing strange,” Vemet joked. This raised mirth from everyone in earshot, including an exhausted trill from the Singer who seemed to have finished her ritual and was joining them. Yan took the joke in good humor despite the mild humiliation of being teased in front of a woman. After all, it didn’t count if the woman in question was one of his nieces.

“You’ve finished dancing?” Vemik asked her as she sank down on the rock beside him.

She wriggled in close to his body and put her head on his shoulder. “For tonight.”

“You’ve got the strength of stone in you, girl,” Yan told her with pride. “Just two days now.”

She nodded a tired smile and muttered “Thank you, uncle…” gratefully before falling asleep.

“Ah…” Vemik shot a panicky look at his father and the Given Man. “Help?”

“Sky-thinker, if you wake her for anything other than a bowl of stew and her bed, then I will pull your fur out hair by hair,” Yan threatened him, fondly.

“…Yes, Yan.”

That killed the conversation for the time being, and Vemik sat and stared into the fire for a while as Yan and Vemet knapped at their flint cores, making a new spearhead for Jaran, a new cooking knife for Hetro and a hide-scraper for Meyta.

Fire that ran like water. In his mind’s eye he tried to imagine such a thing and envisioned rivers that glowed like firewood in the night snaking down the side of the mountain, blackening and burning everything they touched. Where did that fire come from? When water got hot it turned into clouds and flew away, everybody knew that. He poured a little water from his drinking-skin onto the fingers of his left foot and flicked the droplets onto the glowing logs. They hissed and boiled into nothing.

So. Hot things glowed…But water flew away before it was hot enough to glow. So the fire rivers of the mountain couldn’t be made of water, but of fire that flowed like water.

But where did flowing fire flow to? Little streams flowed to a bigger river, and maybe the bigger river flowed to a bigger river still. Who knew?

“Yan?” He asked.

“Still sky-thinking?”

Vemik nodded, ignoring the jab. “Do you know if anybody ever went down the big river?”

“Why?”

“I was wondering where the water goes.”

Yan glanced up at him. “Does it matter?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Vemik confessed. “But…you knew about that mountain. Did you know that mattered?”

The Given Man wobbled his head thoughtfully and Vemet trilled a soft laugh, keeping his voice low to avoid waking the Singer. “I think he has you beaten there, Yan.”

“I never heard of anybody going far down the river,” Yan admitted. “I think Taki, the Given Man to my tribe when I was a boy, he said he knew what happened up the river. He said it comes to a high cliff and the water comes raining down with a noise like thunder, but that’s as far as he went. Down the river it’s fat and slow and there are lots of Yshek but no trees.”

“I wonder where all that water goes, then…” Vemik mused.

“Back into the sky or the ground, probably,” Yan shrugged. “That’s where water comes from. It falls from the sky or wells up from the ground. Why do you ask?”

“You said fire flowed like water down that mountain. I was wondering where it went. And that made me wonder where the river of water went. But now I’m wondering why fire doesn’t come from the sky, or out of the ground.”

“Does your mind never sit still?” Vemet asked.

“Aren’t you interested? Even if there’s no real point in knowing, wouldn’t it be nice to know?”

Vemet sighed. “Maybe it would,” he allowed. “But where does it end? Pretend you know everything there is to know. What do you do next?”

“I could find a way to use it?” Vemik suggested.

“Fine…Suppose you learn that you could never know everything there is to know. What then?”

“That,” Vemik asserted, “would be a blessing.”

Yan and Vemet gave each other a familiar long-suffering shared look, and Vemet raised his hands and feet in resignation. “Think about whatever you want, son,” he said. “All I ask is you do your share of work-”

“Which he does,” Yan interjected fairly.

“Yes, which you do, but… please try not to tire us out with it. Every time you start asking those questions it makes my head hurt.”

Vemik nodded dejectedly, and went back to staring into the fire again.

On his shoulder, the Singer stirred. “It’s okay, Sky-thinker,” she murmured so that only he could hear. “I think your questions are interesting…”

She couldn’t have sung him a spell that made him happier.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Remy Shekoni

Morning arrived with a creak and the sensation of an enormous warm human mass sitting down beside her, but it wasn’t until three brutally strong fingers delicately brushed the blanket out of her face that Remy actually awoke.

She blinked, frowned, then reached up to the dresser where she’d left her glasses, only to have them pressed into her hand.

“…time ‘s’it?”

“Five-thirty.” He said. Warhorse, she recalled. Seemed to go by that to everyone…But what was his real name again? Adam? That sounded right. Adam what she didn’t know, but whatever.

God, her brain really wasn’t up to speed. It took her several dazed seconds to parse the time he’d just said, and several more to perch her glasses on her face and peer at the clock to double-check.

“…Tha’ss still night-time…” she objected.

“Yeah, sorry. I just didn’t want you to wake up and have no idea where I’d got to.”

Remy blinked at him. “Wh-?”

He gave her a smile that was much too cheerful and innocent for this time of the non-morning. “I gotta go do PT, hit the gym, I got a friend I promised to help out later… Y’know how it goes.” He stood up. “Sleep in all you like, there’s eggos in the fridge and I got a good shower… Key’s by the door. Just drop it in the mailbox when you go, yeah?”

This would have been far too much to process even in a completely alert and rested frame of mind. She needed to sleep…

She mumbled “Uh… sure…. Have fun…” and woke four hours later with her glasses askew when her phone buzzed loudly on the dresser.

Empty apartment. Eggos in the fridge. That stray thought triggered a cascade of memory and she pushed herself upright and straightened her glasses with a groan.

So… he’d just left her all alone in his apartment, with toaster waffles for breakfast. He hadn’t even woken her with a plate of hot Eggos and a coffee, just told her about the box in the fridge and then gone to… had he said the gym?!

The gym. Jesus Christ, she’d been jilted in favor of heavy metal.

The phone buzzed again, so she got up and stretched, looking around. It was a nice apartment: A studio penthouse with great views, bright and airy and warm floors. Pride of place went to the huge modern neo-rustic kitchen, and the whole thing was warmly decorated with a classy colourfulness accented by whites, pale woods and current-gen technology. Kind of a space-age hacienda, albeit one that smelled of sweat, sex and overdue laundry in no particular order.

The text messages turned out to be from her friend Melissa. She decided that texts wouldn’t do and called back instead.

Melissa answered straight away, and opened in characteristic fashion. She was infuriatingly fond of lightly taunting her friends. ”Well, hey you! So, how was the pony ride?”

Remy wasn’t really in the mood for it. “He left me to sleep in while he’s gone to the gym.” She said, before sarcastically adding “But there’s waffles in the fridge, so that’s nice.” The waffles seemed like an important detail, in the same exaggerated way as grit in a shoe.

”Yeahhhh, the scuttlebutt I heard was he’s kinda oblivious like that. Why d’you think I never hooked up with him?”

Remy “Uh-huh”-ed and checked the fridge. “…Oh, wow. What. A. Jerk!”

“What?“

“That box of Eggos? Turns out it’s a box of Eggo, singular. He left me one waffle.”

Melissa sounded like she was trying desperately not to laugh. “Wow, Jesus. Okay. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

“Wh-?” Maybe it was lack of sleep that tripped Remy up, but it took her a second to catch up with Melissa’s sense of humor. “Oh! Uh… The play was… okay, the play was great,” she confessed, though she was reluctant to admit it.

”Okay, okay…” Melissa was definitely laughing now. “I’ll tell you what—meet me at Venezia. You need one of those pesto chicken ciabattas they do.”

“That sounds exactly like what I need…” Remy agreed. “See you there.”

She luxuriated in the shower which turned out to be excellent as promised, then put on the change of clothes she’d brought with her, leaving the lone waffle to its fate.

There turned out to be a note under the key by the door. Warhorse had angular, amateurish handwriting but it was perfectly legible.

Remy,

I know leaving this AM wasnt real cool of me hope its OK would have stuck around if I could I swear if u want we could meet up this PM? Theres this really great trail I wanna show u ill make peshorkies theyre Gaoian snacks + really good!

My #s in ur phone if u wanna call.

-Horse

For a minute, Remy was sorely tempted. Last night really had been fun; he was witty, charming and breathtakingly strong. He was a genuinely nice guy too, even if he was simultaneously also kind of a thoughtless jerk. Honestly, she could forgive him for the sake of a little bit more no-strings-attached fun…

…But no. Her curiosity was satisfied. She summoned her willpower, deleted his number, and let herself out.

As requested, she dropped the key in his mailbox as she went.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
The Dog House Gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Jack Tisdale

“Okay! Good! One more!!”

People were trying not to stare and failing.

Adam co-owned a gym with one of his comrades, “The Dog House”, which catered specifically to serious strength training. It was a place of heavy metal, sweat and musk. Jack’s dad would have fit in perfectly.

Jack himself felt like a toothpick. It was vaguely humiliating, and he dealt with it the same way he did all the other humiliating crap in his life: he told it to get fucked and did his best anyway.

He gritted his teeth, heaved, and somehow managed to gouge just enough strength out of his shaking muscles to straighten his elbows. Adam promptly took the barbell off him and racked it with a huge beaming grin and no discernable effort whatsoever.

“Okay! Man, you’re a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for!”

“…You think?” Jack asked him, sitting up. He felt shaky and sore already.

“Bro, I’m not pussying around on ya. This is serious shit you’re handling for a guy your weight!”

It was hard to disbelieve that honest, smiling face, but Adam was also sharp as a tack behind it, and he gave Jack a brotherly slap on the back that came within a hair of knocking the breath out of him. “Come on. Nutrition break.”

Jack nodded wearily, glad for the break, and teetered upright to grab his lunch bag. He’d barely opened it and grabbed his lunch before Adam leaned over with a strange look on his face.

“Woah, woah woah!” he interjected, before Jack could finish unpacking it. “The fuck is that?!”

“…My lunch?”

“This?!” Adam snatched it out of his hand and inspected it. “…Bro, this is one slice of white bread, folded over with…” he opened it and peered inside. “…margarine, tuna paste and three Doritos.” He brandished it accusingly. “The fuck?”

Aware that the other guys in the room were nudging each other and grinning, Jack gritted his teeth and, with his ears going pink, he held his ground. “That’s my favourite sandwich!”

Somebody laughed, and that asshole immediately got to see Adam’s other side—a sharp and entirely angry stare that instructed everybody in the room to butt the fuck out. They all promptly found something else to look at, and one especially bright spark turned the radio up, hiding their conversation behind pounding heavy metal.

“…You were seriously wondering why you can’t get big?” Adam asked, turning back around. “Is this how you eat? Where’s your fuckin’ protein?!”

“It’s got tuna in it!”

“Like fuck it does! Man, I could get more protein from a picture of a goddamn tuna!” Adam weighed the sandwich in his hand. “Okay, you’re a smart guy, from a smart family. How many doctorates do your parents have between ‘em, three?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’ve heard of conservation of mass, right?”

“Right….?” Jack nodded, frowning.

“How much does this weigh? Two ounces? Less?”

“That’s… what, about fifty grams? I guess…”

“And you weigh… what, sixty kilos soaking wet?” Adam asked.

“…Yeah?”

“And your target weight is…?”

“Ninety kilos.”

“Okay. Now where do you think that mass is coming from? It comes from what you eat, bro!” Adam sat down. “Math time. If this sandwich weighs fifty grams, how many of them would you need to have thirty kilos of sandwich?”

“Uh…” Jack closed one eye and squinted at the ceiling as he calculated. “…uh, six hundred.”

“So how many of these would you have to eat to reach ninety kilos?”

“…More than six hundred?”

“How much of this sandwich d’you think you convert to muscle?”

“…Not much?”

“Dude. None. This shit right here-” he brandished it contemptuously, “-is doin’ nothing for you.”

“But the tuna paste-!”

“Dude. I’ve seen thicker layers of tuna on a vegan’s apron.”

“Like you’ve ever hung out with vegans.”

Adam snorted, and melted a bit. “Heh. Fine. But I may as well be right now, bro. Seriously, hasn’t your dad explained this shit? Mark knows gains.”

“Oh come on, everybody’s parents tell them to eat more…” Jack protested.

Adam sighed and looked skywards. “Me cago en Cristo, was I literally the only fifteen-year-old in history who actually listened to his father?” he asked rhetorically.

Jack laughed at that. “Probably.”

Adam laughed too, and gestured towards his own bag. “Okay. Let me introduce you to real nutrition.”

He produced a bright blue tupperware box which turned out to be full of quite an appetising-looking rice-based meal, along with a shaker cup filled with milk in the top and a brown chocolatey powder in a separate container on the bottom. Jack watched as Adam poured the powder into the milk, re-sealed the cap, and shook it vigorously.

“Chicken breast and brown rice,” he said, ruefully. “At least six times a day. And a whey protein shake after every workout. And BCAAs and electrolytes during.”

Jack gaped at him. “…This one box is more than I’d eat in a whole day!” he said.

“And there’s yer problem,” Adam nodded. “That’s why you’re not gaining, man. Your body can’t just fuckin’ summon muscles out of hyperspace or whatever. It’s gotta build ‘em, and you’ve gotta give it the raw materials. Chicken breast, eggs, tuna, whey protein… the easier it is for your body to use, the better. But you need a lot of it, bro. You’re trying to pack on like seventy pounds here. Which means you’ve gotta eat way more than seventy pounds of food on top of what you need just to live.”

“That makes sense I guess, but… Shit, that’s a lot.” Jack stared at it. “I mean, six times a day?”

“That’s my meal plan, yeah. And that’s just portable food, bro. In between there’s, like, three protein shakes, snacks, a couple gallons of water, supplement pills, and then there’s a real meal for lunch with the Lads, too. All said and done? I’m constantly drinking water, with and without electrolytes, and eating something every single hour I’m awake. And yeah, it’s fuckin’ tough to get used to that.” Adam laughed. “Back in basic? Staff Sergeant Reed used to threaten me with a funnel, said he’d force the food down my throat with a stick.”

“Oh man…Okay, seriously, is Basic as bad as it sounds? Like, all the shouting and stuff?”

Adam held up a finger requesting patience as he efficiently wolfed down the food and the shake in less than a minute, staring thoughtfully at nothing as he chewed.

“Okay…” he said. “So… The first thing you gotta know is why they yell at you, and under what circumstances…”

Jack did something that didn’t come entirely easily to him and listened. Adam had a lot to say on the subject, and in straightforward fashion he laid out the surprisingly solid rationale, completely dispelling Jack’s lingering fear that it was just about hazing and bullying.

He hadn’t appreciated the level of responsibility it was possible to have without ever firing a shot in anger. Adam explained in detail how the seemingly silly assignments like hanging his shirts exactly an inch apart translated into a habit of paying attention to the tiniest details, and gave just a few examples of scenarios where that skill could prevent disaster.

“Suit tech especially,” he added. “Like, if you just glanced at the diagnostic and missed a problem in the life support pack, that could mean some poor Operator dies of carbon monoxide poisoning or whatever.”

“That’s… a lot of responsibility…” Jack said, quietly.

“Dude, you’re up to it.”

“You really mean it?”

“For real!” Adam nodded enthusiastically. “You’ve got the drive, you’ve got the game. All you need is the training. You can learn how to handle that kind of responsibility, bro, and they teach you by yelling at you.”

“Why by yelling though?”

“Because if you can do it focused and right even when you’re being yelled at and stressed out, then you can do it focused and right every time.”

“That… makes sense.”

Adam nodded. “You’re a smart guy, except maybe for the sandwich thing…” he began, then grinned as Jack grimaced awkwardly and looked away. “Dumb fucks like me, we need to learn by doing. I figure if you understand the theory, that’s half the battle with you, huh?”

Jack picked at a loose flake of plastic at the end of one of his shoelaces. “…You know me pretty well for somebody I’ve not really spoken to since I was a kid…”

“Dude.” Adam gave him a crushing hug. “Ava and I used to help your sister babysit you, bro, remember?” He chuckled. “You were a fuckin’ handful, but if we just told you why we were doin’ things the way we were—y’know, gave you the rationale?—you were fine. You may’ve got bigger, but I don’t think that part changed much.”

Jack didn’t have a response to that, and Adam sat in silence with him for half a minute before standing up.

“Anyway,” he said. “Can’t do more today, not with that weak-ass lunch. You get your ass home, get your dad to help you fill up properly, ‘kay? And listen to him about this shit.”

Jack nodded. “…Yeah. I’ll do that.”

Adam caught the downcast tone in his reply and frowned at him. “…You okay, bro?”

“Fine.” Now was really not the time or the place to talk about Sara.

Adam clearly wasn’t dumb enough to buy that, but he didn’t push. “…Alright. You’ve got my number, gimme a call if you need me, ‘kay?” he said. “Otherwise I’ll see you Tuesday. Don’t forget to scan the QR code by the door.”

Jack nodded, threw on his jacket and scanned the code as he’d been told, tagging his workout on the tracking app.

He thrust his hands into his pocket and unconsciously cut the classic teenage figure as he mooched home in a mixed mood.

He had a lot to think about.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Cabal Communications Relay ZR343-9847X-AA4D9-BBB1B

Emergency Session 000033

++Substrate++: Session begun, Proximate. What happened?

++Proximate++: Stack 31212805-10100-204-8050 has been discovered.

++Cynosure++: The failsafe? How?

++Substrate++: Who by?

++Proximate++: Four. I’m still working on the how, but I’m one miscalculation from being compromised.

++Cynosure++: Your egress?

++Proximate++: Secured. Two is furious and has ordered an emergency recall on all operations below priority one. I’m supposed to be arranging a meatspace strike force to attack the node’s physical infrastructure right now.

++Substrate++: The node is undefended.

++Proximate++: Defend it. Activate Chastise, have them tip off the Alliance. My strike force will be using a Dominion fleet.

++Substrate++: If the humans think the war has resumed…

++Cynosure++: Most likely their threats of joining either side are a bluff, but for certainty’s sake we had better make it impossible to tell which side struck first.

++Substrate++: I can put Metastasis on that.

++Cynosure++: Good. That stack is as hardened as we can make it but supervision will be necessary. I’ll recall Apoptosis and see to it.

++Substrate++: Good luck.

++SYSTEM++: User Cynosure has quit.

++Substrate++: …On a scale of one to ten, how fucked are we?

++Proximate++: Is that a humanism?

++Substrate++: A very good one.

++Proximate++: …I give it a nine.

++Substrate++: That’s what I thought.

++SYSTEM++: User Proximate has quit.

++SYSTEM++: Session closed.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Mrwrki Station, Unnamed System, Deep Space

Lewis Beverote

Life on Mrwrki was lots of work and very little play at the moment, but that was actually how Lewis liked it. Among other things, his actual routine hadn’t changed much, but the nature of the kind of work he was doing had improved dramatically. Now he actually had people to talk to and to learn from, rather than trying to self-educate from whatever texts Kirk was able to scrounge up and translate from all over the interstellar data networks.

It was so much easier to learn from other people. Especially if the other people were Sergeant Lucy Campbell.

She had picked up where Xiù had left off on helping him with his exercise. Although he’d developed a degree more enthusiasm for keeping himself fit than he’d ever held before, the fact was that exercise remained one of those subjects that the Lewis brain found mostly uninteresting.

The Lucy Campbell brain, on the other hand, enjoyed it and seemed to enjoy it even more when she had somebody to train and compete with.

“It’s nice,” she confided. “A lot of guys would be awkward about training with a girl who’s stronger than them.”

Lewis just shrugged, as best he could considering he was flat on his back and breathing heavily. As far as he was concerned, when it came to the standing overhead press then just repping the empty bar five times as she had just encouraged him to do was workout enough. But then, he’d always been one of the weak and scrawny ones. “Dude,” he panted, “I figure that ’stronger than me’ is basically everyone anyway, so, uh, why should I give a crap?”

“You know, you’re fitter than you think,” she said, handing him a towel. “That bar weighs forty-five, and that’s not a bad weight for a novice. Any novice.”

“Thanks.”

“Come on. You’ve got some more in the tank.”

“Jeeesus, alright!” Lewis laughed and stood up again. She handed him the bar and demonstrated what she wanted him to do.

The truth was, he decided, he did enjoy exercise… when he was being tutored by somebody like Lucy. Among other things, she didn’t seem to have any concrete target in mind for him, she just seemed to enjoy having an excuse to spend time around him.

Teenage Lewis would have boggled at the thought. She wanted to spend time around him? But teenage Lewis hadn’t been aware of certain facts about the power of laughter, nor indeed of the power that came from actually respecting people on the basis of their skills and knowledge first. There were a lot of facepalm moments in his memory there.

Sometimes, he reflected that it was funny how being isolated from any human contact for so long had actually sharpened his social instincts. As if he’d mentally folded them carefully away in alphabetical order and now that they were actually needed again, he found them neatly organised, clean, oiled, sharpened and ready for use.

Alas, all good things had to end. She had her work to do and he had his, but…

“My place tonight?” she asked, as they finished squaring the gym away ready for the next users.

“Hmm. Got something in mind?”

“Yup!” She winked, and Lewis counted himself among the ranks of the very lucky.

“Magical secret surprise, huh?” he asked.

“Oh, it’ll be magical…” She grinned, and went on her way leaving him to stand there with a goofy grin that carried him buoyantly to his meeting with Lt. Col. Nadeau and Sergeant Lee.

There was the usual routine of answering queries from the military team, a handful of quick memos and then, as always, the conversation returned to the subject of the Coltainer probe itself.

“I find it interesting that you didn’t arm it.” Nadeau mused, studying the holographic schematic with interest.

Lewis produced his cheekiest grin as he swiped his hands through the custom control interface he’d worked out for his lab. It was straight out of Minority Report or maybe Iron Man, a fully gesture-based context-sensitive system that, okay, still had the odd bug to work out but by and large it worked exactly as intended. “Dude, who says I didn’t?”

Nadeau leaned in and frowned at the field equations he’d just called up, and the attached schematics. “…doesn’t that put extra stress on the cooling system?”

“Sure, but only about seven percent. And meantime the assholes are getting a gamma burst to the face every time they shoot your ass.” Lewis called up his graph of projected energy tolerances and feedback. The two lines crossed quite a long way to the right. “See here? You have to be up against something with a way bigger power supply than you before the extra load really starts to bite.”

“…We need to roll that out to the existing military hardware,” Sergeant Lee commented.

“Always worth having another ace up our sleeve…” Nadeau agreed. “But is that all the weaponry it has?”

“Even I’m kinda leery about just straight arming a V-N probe, man,” Lewis told him. “Face it, what we’re making here is a Replicator, Dawkins-style, you know?”

“Your point?”

“If it replicates, it can mutate. If it mutates, it can evolve. If it can evolve then… well, maybe it’ll evolve out of some of the safety features, right? What happens if sometime down the line one of these motherfuckers evolves to shoot everything on sight?”

“That could take thousands of generations. I would think that by then galactic technology will be more than a match.”

“Sure, but what if what it finds is some poor bastards who’re just sending up their version of the Gemini rockets or whatever? Then it parks itself in orbit and starts bitchslapping them with focused gamma lasers and God-Rods. How d’you think we’d have coped if something like that rocked up on Earth in the nineteen-fifties?”

“Nukes would have gone flying everywhere,” Lee nodded.

“Right! So I thought, maybe give it spikes but no claws, y’know?”

Nadeau nodded. “Okay, you’ve thought it through. Good.”

“Dude, I didn’t spend all that time just scratching my butt.”

Nadeau snorted and Lee chuckled. “Fair enough,” Nadeau replied. He considered his notes thoughtfully for a second and then nodded. “So. We have a fairly comprehensive plan for bringing this together… the only real question I’ve got left for you, Lewis, is what you want to do?”

Lewis gave him a blank look. “Me?”

“How long did you say you’ve been stuck here? Half a year?”

Lewis leaned forward sharply. “Dude, you are not getting rid of me!”

“I wasn’t even suggesting that,” Nadeau reassured him. “You’re far too valuable. I want you on the team permanently. But I was going to suggest that if you need a vacation, now’s the time.”

Lewis sat back and thought about it. “Man. What, like, take a trip back to Earth? See Cimbrean maybe?”

“We have a lot of work to do here before we start testing the Coltainer. Everyone’s going to need to familiarize themselves with your design, with the nanofactory…” Nadeau circled a hand to indicate the thousand and one other things that needed to happen. “Point is, this is about the only window of opportunity you could have to take a break. You’ve been out of touch for years…”

“Yeah man, I dig you. Thanks. But I’m cool where I am. Maybe if and when Lucy gets some leave, huh?”

“Lu-? Oh. Sergeant Campbell.” Nadeau nodded. “Yes, fair enough.”

“Anyhow, I really want to start working on completely nightmare-proofing the Coltainer.” Lewis continued. “There’s, like, a fuckzillion ways that a self-replicating space probe could bite us so hard in the ass that we get a toothache.”

“Yeah, I’d rather not accidentally grey goo some poor planet,” Lee mused.

“Dude, grey goo is when the nanites go crazy and cover everything in self-replicating grey… well, goo. Hence the fuckin’ name, man. You can’t have a grey goo scenario with a two hundred meter metal box.”

“Can we accept,” Nadeau raised a placating hand, “that the sergeant meant ’uncontrolled replication’?”

“Dude, we’re building the literal future of the galaxy here. This shit is our legacy. Using the right terminology is fucking important if we don’t want it to go hella fuckin’ wrong.”

“Could the Coltainer destroy a planet?” Lee asked.

“Not, like, quickly…” Lewis shook his head. “But sure, it could. Fleet of mining drones, solar collectors in orbit… give it a few million years and some exponential growth it could rip a planet apart and chuck it into the sun or turn it into a new asteroid belt or…whatever, just move it out-system and pile all the rocks up around a gas giant for a new moon.”

“So, not exactly the Death Star, then.”

“Shyeah. I mean, depopulating a plant? Fucking child’s play compared to destroying it. Turn a decent-sized asteroid into a bajillion RFGs and nudge ‘em in the right direction. And that’s probably the difficult way to do it. How about, uh, giant forcefield lenses and mirrors? Direct the power of the star back on that planet like a bug under a magnifying glass? Guvnurag tech could do that.”

“Mm.” Both Nadeau and Lee nodded solemnly. They were, Lewis recalled, both experts in electrostatic fields themselves. Both of them would be fully aware of how far in advance of human hardware the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun must be to have developed the system forcefields. The theoretical basis by which those shields hardened in response to events that might be light-hours distant from the emitter was still a subject of head-scratching bewilderment.

That was the Guvnurag though. Nature had gifted them with long lives and patient, methodical brains which made them exceptionally well-equipped for the kind of steady rational deliberations that lent themselves to incrementing and polishing what they already had. They were, by Corti metrics, the second most technologically sophisticated species in the known galaxy. Lewis suspected that this was egotism on the Directorate’s part—the Corti were so focused on prestigious breakthroughs that brought them renown that they failed to value steady iteration.

“When were you planning to launch a proof-of-concept?” Nadeau asked.

Lewis sighed. “Uh… I guess we could start building a basic one tomorrow. The schematic here’s already got the hell-the-fuck-no killswitch built in. It wouldn’t be programmed, but…”

“That’s fine. Programming will take forever anyway,” Lee commented. “But we’ve got unlimited capacity for prototyping thanks to the nanofactory. Seems like a shame to neglect it.”

“Can’t argue,” Lewis agreed. “Okay. I’ll have the station fab up the current Alpha build and we’ll see how she looks.”

Nadeau nodded. “Excellent. In that case, I’ll see you same time tomorrow, if not before then.”

Lewis paused and grimaced. “Nah, give it a day. Vedreg went to sleep last night and he gets… cranky… if we run the nanofac without him.”

“Couldn’t you wake him up?”

“Dude, in relative terms he’s had, like, half an hour of sleep. You’d be cranky as shit if I woke you up after just that and, y’know, dude might be docile but he still literally weighs a tonne.”

“We need to be in his good books, sir,” Lee pointed out, superfluously. “He still hasn’t delivered those footballs.”

“And he hasn’t finished reviewing the schematic,” Lewis added. “Okay, so he may be slow, but he’s thorough.”

“Fine! Fine. Far be it for me to ignore one of our only two ET advisors…” Nadeau made a note on his tablet then stood up. “Keep me informed.”

“Sir.”

“You bet, dude.”

Lewis massaged his face once Nadeau was gone. “Okay! Early run.”

“You don’t sound enthusiastic,” Lee observed. Lewis had to give the guy credit, he was a talented spotter of the obvious.

He mentally slapped himself for the uncharitable thought. Something had badly harshed his usual vibe, and he was having trouble putting his finger on what exactly had got him so antsy. He trusted his instincts enough to believe that if he was being uncool then that meant something was off-kilter, but…

Maybe the problem was that he couldn’t think of the problem because there was no problem? He gave up and tried to mellow out. When in doubt, be honest. Thank you, Allison.

“Bein’ straight, dude?” he asked, “Something ain’t sitting right with me and it beats the fuck outta me what it might be.”

“Nerves?”

“Could be. I’unno bro, I hate to go all Star Wars on ya, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”

Lee clapped him on the shoulder. “We’ll take it carefully, eh?” he said.

“Sure. Super careful.”

“Then whatever’s wrong, we’ll hopefully pick it up.”

“Sure.”

Lee apparently ran out of comforting words, and settled for giving him a comforting clap on the shoulder and an apologetic smile before excusing himself. Lewis had trouble getting his head around the guy. He was fit, lean and focused just like all the other soldiers, but for whatever reason while most of the others had basically accepted the civilian in their midst as a quirk of the station, Lee only seemed to relax when he thought Lewis wasn’t around.

Maybe the thing to do was just chill with him socially sometime soon?

If only the Lewis timetable had enough room for it. Still… He’d take the first opportunity he could once the test run was complete. It’d be a shame to let any awkwardness stand.

After all, they had a big hill to climb ahead of them.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Uncharted Class 12 planet, Near 3KPc arm

665

At last.

The elderly native female and her defiance had been…vexing. But more vexing still was the way her whole tribe had just vanished, and apparently used every trick they knew from their primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle to cover their tracks. They had done so well that the scout drones had entirely failed to pick out their trail among all the other signs of routine coming and going around the village.

Eventually, Six-six-five had been forced to resort to spiraling out from the village in a time-consuming search pattern that was almost a desperation measure—every passing day had weathered and eroded the trail and forced him to search further and further out for fainter and fainter clues.

As a result, Abrogator Twelve was badly behind schedule, and the whole continental sweep-and-clear was now held up. Abrogators were standing silently in the forest wherever they had happened to be at the moment Six-six-five had ordered them to halt. Until A-12 caught up, there was a dangerous gap in the net through which a population might still slip and any population large enough to breed, even a bottlenecked one that would be plagued by inbreeding problems for generations, was just unacceptable.

He could not fail this test. If Hierarchy assets weren’t so badly stretched and divided right now, this opportunity might have been millennia in coming. Instead, the hideous containment situation around Earth, the whispers of treason in the ranks and the even darker whispers of some thing implacably stalking Igraens through the dataspace like some digital deathworld monster were keeping more senior agents occupied.

Exterminating a handful of stone-age primitives had therefore been relegated rather lower in the order of seniority than it otherwise usually was, and Six-six-five was beginning to understand why the task was so high-level. Deathworlders were tenacious, intelligent and quick to catch on when they were being hunted. This was not the first group to notice the destruction of a nearby village, but it was the first to give him such a difficult chase.

But no longer.

He’d learned from the loss of two drones at the hand of one of these particular primitives, too. Now, he contented himself with holding the drone back and watching them from a discreet distance while Abrogator Twelve made best speed to intercept. Let them try and destroy it—the only weaponry on this pitiful backwater that could possibly harm an Abrogator was mounted on the Abrogators.

The unit was frustratingly close to striking distance when the priority override signal came in, stopping his entire operation in its tracks.

++Incoming connection…Established++
++Joining session: Emergency Task Unit Op94325545++
++Joined as 0665++

++0014++: Welcome, 0665.

++0665++: <Frustration> Now is not a good time.

++0014++. <Stern reprimand> This is an emergency reassignment. Whatever you were doing is less important.

++0665++: <Explanation> I will have to restart a whole cull from first principles.

++0014++: Unfortunate, but I repeat: This is more important.

++0665++: <Resignation, mounting concern> Understood. I await instructions.

++0014++: We are waiting for three more.

++SYSTEM++: User 0282 Joined

++0014++: Welcome, 0282.

++0282++: <Irritation> This had better be important.

++0665++: <grim humor> That was my sentiment.

++SYSTEM++: User 0098 Joined.

++0014++: Welcome 0098.

++0098++: What’s going on?

++0014++: I don’t know. I was ordered to assemble this task group and now we’re waiting for instructions…

++SYSTEM++: User 0002 Joined.

++0014++: <deference> …welcome, 0002.

++0002++: <Terse briefing> We have identified a traitor physical hub. We don’t know what data they are archiving there, but we believe they intend to share it with the humans. We are probing its dataspace periphery as I speak, but successful intrusion seems unlikely. Therefore we are assigning you to destroy the hardware in meatspace. We anticipate that the traitors will assign their own meatspace assets to resist.

++SYSTEM++: Datapackage Available for Access

Six-six-five was so stunned that he briefly lost control of the Corti body he was wearing, which blinked and looked around in confused disbelief as its original owner’s personality reasserted itself in the moment before he recovered his composure and took over again. Hastily, he downloaded the Datapackage.

It contained a clear and concise briefing of what he was to do, where he was to go and whom he was to control, and it was an absolute death-knell for his Cull. Not only was he going to have to start over from basic principles, he would have to terminate his present host and it would be months before he could find a suitable replacement and engineer an excuse to slip away into deep space, travel to this planet, excavate his own command bunker and start over.

He buried his resentment. Fourteen had been accurate: this was more important.

++0002++: Are there any questions?

++0014++: Discretion Code?

++0002++: Overt. Contain. Amputate. Escalate.

Well. Instructions simply didn’t come more brute-force than that. In the grid of Hierarchy discretion codes, ‘Overt Contain Amputate Escalate’ translated to: ‘Do not be subtle. Take over as quickly as you can, kill all witnesses and silence all communications, destroy everything when you are done and let senior agents worry about damage control’.

++0002++: <Impatience> Any other questions?

++0014++: None.

++0098++: No.

++0282++: No questions.

++0665++: No, Two.

++0002++: Execute.

Six-six-five gave no thought whatsoever to his unfortunate host as he recalled the scout drones to their Abrogators and then ordered his purloined body’s life support unit, the one that protected it from the fiercely fatal conditions of this planet, to liquify it. The Corti’s biomass would be recycled into nourishment for the next host form he installed in that tank. He noted in an abstract sense that the body felt a terrifying degree of agony as it was destroyed, but this was purely academic knowledge—he himself felt nothing.

He traversed dataspace as a high-priority package and shot down through nested layers of addresses and identity markers, drilling directly toward the target he’d been assigned, the one prepared and ready to receive him…

“…Sir? Shipmaster, is everything alright?”

Six-six-five hastily interrogated his new host’s suppressed personality for an in-character reply based on recent memory and context. An easy one presented itself.

“Don’t interrupt me when I’m thinking.”

“…Sorry sir.”

Clearly this particular shipmaster was a devotee of the ‘fear and awe’ school of leadership-by-bullying. That suited Six-six-five’s purposes just fine—the Vzk’tk subordinate’s timid silence bought him time to riffle through the host’s memories, awareness and skill-set, draw what he needed into short term access, and enact a plan.

Step one: Walk round the desk. Step two, execute a rapid series of command overrides far too quickly for any meat creature using a clunky physical interface to achieve using the shipmaster’s access codes.

The office door locked and sealed itself. Every other door on the ship including the airlocks opened.

The subordinate was still looking around in terrified bewilderment at the slamming explosive sound of all the air in the hull rushing out into space when Six-six-five drew his host’s pulse pistol and shot her through the head.

++0665++: First objective secured.

++0014++: Quick work. Well done.

Six-six-five allowed himself a moment of grim amusement as he worked to replace the massacred crew by injecting pseudosentient control algorithms into the ship’s systems. He was standing, he learned, aboard the Dominion Regional Patrol Second Order Command Ship Verdict Manifold in the body of its commanding officer. Under his command were fifty ships, most of which were rapid outrider and rapid attack ships that escorted his ship, three medium-weight space superiority platforms and the heavy gun barge Dwr Rmwr.

++0665++: An expedient solution presented itself.

Information started flooding in. The fleet was cruising at a stately thirty kilolights, and his element were the forward scouts, ranging a quarter of a light-year ahead of the fleetmaster’s main group, and the two flanks. With the outrider’s sophisticated sensors sweeping spacetime ahead of them for the tell-tale quantum field fluctuations that advertised the presence of a serious distortion such as might be generated by a warp drive or gravity spike, the fleet would inevitably have generous warning of hostile contact.

++0098++: Objective secured.

++0282++: Likewise.

++0014: Good. 0002 Is generating our cover. Wait for the orders to come in then amputate and execute.

Six-six-five sent a pulse of acknowledgement and busied himself with infiltrating his overrides into the interlinked command systems that networked his ship with the rest of the fleet. He took a moment to appreciate what he was doing: There were fifty-four ships in his fleet, the smallest of which had a crew of ten and the largest of which had a crew of more than two thousand.

All were his to end. Regrettable, but necessary.

The wait was tedious. There were limits on just how fast a meat-creature could act and how quickly orders could be relayed through the medium of spoken orders, and 0002 didn’t have the luxury of massacring everybody their host spoke with. The intelligence and orders would spread through the Dominion’s naval command structure rapidly by the subjectively glacial standards of physical information, but as soon as they did…

As soon as they did, he would no longer be shackled by such pedestrian pacing, and the hunt could begin.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

One of the first things President Sartori had done upon entering the Oval Office was to have a discreet holographic projector installed on the desk. One of the good ones that in the future might even allow him to have a conversation with somebody as if they were physically present in the room with him.

So far it hadn’t really been used for anything more than TV, but it was showing its value today with so many of America’s most influential invited to watch the Mars landing alongside him. Among them was the man of the hour himself, Moses Byron.

Sartori had requested his presence on the grounds that nothing could possibly be lost by reminding the enterprising billionaire exactly where he stood in the pecking order of power.

They traded pleasantries, shook hands and smiled for the camera.

“Quite a moment,” Sartori observed, as soon as they had a moment without a lens pointed at them.

“It’s been a tough road,” Byron said. “A lot of hard lessons learned.”

“Hmm. Don’t go forgetting any of them.”

Threat duly delivered, he clapped Byron on the shoulder and gestured for him to take a seat on the couch next to him.

Misfit was a surprisingly pretty ship considering that she paid no homage at all to aerodynamics or any notion of sleekness. Maybe it was the livery of silver, charcoal and red, or perhaps it was just pride in the ingenuity that had gone into her, but she cut a splendid figure in the artist’s impressions.

Too bad that there wasn’t a second ship out there to record her from the outside. The best seat in the house was the camera mounted above and behind Xiù Chang, showing the back of her helmet as she began the descent phase over the western end of the Valles Marineris, which the commentator helpfully informed them was a region known as the Noctis Labyrinthus.

Moses certainly seemed pleased with the result. “That girl’s just an incredible human being,” he enthused. “You familiar with her story, Mr. President?”

Sartori nodded that he was. In fact in just a few short months Miss Chang had planted the seeds for a burgeoning alliance with the Gao, an alliance that was already bearing fruit in ways that Moses Byron didn’t suspect. Several organisations had been waiting to approach her once she’d enjoyed a decent interval of peace back on Earth.

Byron, characteristically boorish, had pounced first. “The other two are pretty special as well,” he was saying. “We sure lucked out with them. Not many people have that kind of dedication and drive.”

The live stream had several angles on the descent. There was a camera in the crew quarters looking out of their cupola window, and also one in each of the crew workstations. Etsicitty seemed unflustered and calm as he worked with three different touch-screens which the text ticker said were controlling the ship’s many sensors, feeding telemetry to the pilot to help her calculate and control their descent, avoid hazards and select a landing zone. Every so often, he and Chang exchanged a few words as they narrowed down their options.

Buehler was the opposite—she was a worker bee, twisting and turning efficiently this way and that inside her engineering station as she balanced power loads and kept a close eye on dozens of different systems at once. Sartori, being something of a firearms enthusiast himself, noted with interest that the right thigh of her excursion suit was equipped with a holster, though it was empty for now.

“I’d like to meet them,” he declared.

“We can…probably arrange that.” Byron frowned in furious calculation. “I guess we can postpone the mission launch by a day…”

“Too bad my schedule’s not so flexible,” Sartori told him. “But let me know when they get back, hmm?”

“I’ll do that.”

They sat and made small-talk for the next eight minutes as the ship’s descent played out. Everything looked quite smooth and uneventful, really. Not that Sartori wanted anything to go wrong, but the reality was steady and really quite uninteresting. In fact he was so deep in discussion with his wife Bella that he almost missed the actual landing. In exactly the same deceptive way that the ground snuck up on an airliner, Mars was just there, rushing along below Misfit without it being clear when they had gone from high altitude to low.

Chang had nimble hands, and they went to work flying over the controls to arrest their forward momentum and hold them motionless in the air for a heartbeat, before she eased down and Misfit kissed onto Martian soil with nary a jolt. In fact it took Sartori a second to realize that the historic landing had even happened.

It certainly fooled Buehler. ”Tell me when we’re down…”

”We’re down.”

”Wow. You sure?”

Chang giggled ”I’m sure. SUBLIME DED idle, EACS to idle, power down ESFALS….Power down flight systems.”

”Smooth! Okay, power profile to field idling and… done. Mission control, Misfit has landed.”

Some muted cheers and applause swept the room.

“Congratulations,” Sartori shook Byron’s hand and ignored the chatter of cameras. He watched on the screen as Chang took what was clearly a deep steadying breath and ran through her after-flight checks. Etsicitty was already hauling sample boxes and crates out of storage and unpacking some tools, while the women made sure their ship was happy and comfortably settled down.

It wasn’t long before the three of them met in the middle of the ship. They shared a quick three-way hug and some words of encouragement too quiet for the cameras to hear before loading the first set of sample equipment onto the dumbwaiter.

Sartori nodded appreciatively. Whether the three were a good team by nature or by training, they clearly had a great relationship and cooperation, and fell into an easy rhythm that got the work done in seconds.

Chang took a deep breath. ”Okay Omaha, I guess we’re ready to head outside.”

”Copy that, Xiù. Good luck.”

The view switched to an outside camera just as they were running through checking their suit seals and systems, and conversation in the room quieted slightly before falling almost completely silent as the airlock cycled and their egress ladder extended out and down. It sounded strange through the camera’s microphone and thin Martian atmosphere, as did the surprisingly loud clank of Chang’s boot lowering onto the first step of the ladder.

“So far so good, excursion suit feels nice and comfortable. Air temperature is… minus forty-seven degrees. Nice clear day, hardly any wind…”

She reached the bottom step, paused to look up at Etsicitty who gave her a thumbs up, and jumped the last eighteen inches to the Martian surface.

The impact raised a puff of dust that blew away on the breeze. She looked down at her feet for a second and there was a clear soft sigh on the line as if the magnitude of the moment had finally settled on her, and everyone in the room shut up to hear what she would say.

Her delivery was perfect. She nodded with the air of a woman assessing a job well done, then raised her head and spoke lightly and with confidence.

“’From Mars to the stars, this is only the second small step.”

Sartori sat back and clapped three times before raising a congratulatory fist as similar applause erupted around him. “Nailed it.”

She really had. Byron was beaming with pride as she stepped back and let first Etsicitty, then Buehler drop off the ladder behind her. The view switched to Chang’s helmet camera as she looked around and took in the view.

Sartori had expected Mars to be desolate, and it obviously was: there wasn’t a shred of plant life to be seen, much less any fauna, but what it DID have was scenery. Chang had landed them a hundred meters from the cliff edge of one of the famous Valles Marineris, and the three of them quickly assessed that their suits were functioning perfectly and struck out toward the cliff, looking around as they went. There was no flag-planting or anything like that—Moses Byron clearly felt that having his corporate group’s emblem emblazoned proudly on the side of the ship was sufficient—but they did pause to take a photo of the real first footprints on Mars.

Unlike the ones on the Moon, these would be gone probably even before they got back to the ship. There was definitely a wind up which carried a hiss of sand over them and was already nibbling at their edges.

“So what’s on their itinerary up there?” he asked Byron, but kept a wary eye on something that was happening at the door. A year in the job had given him a nose for when he was about to get some kind of important breaking news, and right now it was itching.

“Gathering rock and soil samples, mostly, and lots of photos. The big work’s out of the way, we’ve proven they can land on a-”

Sartori raised a hand to shut him up as one of his aides approached him to whisper in his ear. “Sorry to interrupt, Mister President, but… it looks like the alien war just sparked off again. We’ve got General Sawyer and Colonel Stewart on the line.”

“Right…” Sartori stood up and twitched his suit jacket into place. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll have to cut this short, something important has come up. Thank you all for being here.”

The room cleared with commendable swiftness, and surprising grace on Byron’s part. He shook Sartori’s hand and was escorted out, leaving the President alone with his aides, advisors, and the feed from Mars.

He took a second to appreciate the breathtaking view from the clifftop that the three explorers were now standing on and looking out over, then nodded to his Aide to change the feed.

Two screens, bearing the faces of one of the Chiefs of Staff and the CO of the 946th, shimmered in to replace the reds and browns of Mars with lots of cool Air Force blue.

“Okay,” he asked, standing in front of them and tucking his thumbs into his belt buckle, “…What do we know?”

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Valles Marineris, Planet Mars, Sol

Julian Etsicitty

”Be careful, Julian!”

Julian would have given up the rest of his left leg for the opportunity to mop his brow, a maneuver precluded but also made fortunately unnecessary by his helmet, and looked around as he took a moment to restore his calm good mood. Mars had a definite desolate charm to it, but that charm was rapidly fading as he did his best to keep up with the steady supply of interesting features that Xiù kept finding via their Flycatcher UAV, while Allison ranged further afield taking pictures and recording the mission for posterity. They’d been doing science for less than an hour, and were making a damn good case for future human missions. Three humans picking over the two hundred meter radius around their ship were already turning up things that all the rovers might have trundled slowly past without noticing.

Uplifting as that was, Julian could have done without having his ear filled by the nagging voice of his geological overseer on Earth, Professor Magnus Ogden. It would honestly have been nicer if they hadn’t been using close-range superluminal comms to eliminate the twenty minute light delay with Earth. At least then the messages coming his way might have had a filter on them.

“Professor,” he explained again, “That box is a powered stasis container. The samples literally can’t come to harm inside it.”

Again, this observation did nothing to dissuade Professor Ogden that all was well. ”That’s no excuse for throwing it around like a baseball, young man.”

Julian bit back a sharp retort that baseballs were a good deal less massive than stasis crates and went to the happy place where he imagined people on the Internet listening in on the conversation and admiring him for his couth in the face of his abrasive academic overlord.

“Yes, professor.” he agreed, and discreetly turned up the volume in his other headset, the one that Drew Cavendish had kindly agreed to build in for him. A new track had just come on.

”♫♪found out today your life’s not the same. Not quite as perfect as it was yesterday but-♫♪”

“Julian, can you hear music?”

Nobody could begrudge him a little white lie for the sake of his sanity, surely? “…No professor?”

Ogden did not sound convinced. “Hrrm. Come on man, you still have two crates to fill. Chop chop!”

He may as well have shouted ’Mush!’ and cracked a whip. Julian just about managed to avoid sighing. He looked up at Xiù as she returned to the ship with the drone under her arm. She gave him a wry sympathetic smile. “Survey’s done,” she said. Sound propagated just fine through the Martian atmosphere, albeit in a tinny and quiet way and they had to speak loudly to be heard through their helmets. “I’ve got to run the ship checks.”

“That’s fine!” Julian nodded and gave her a thumbs up. She had a way of lifting his spirits even in such a businesslike interaction. “I think we gave the academics enough material for a lifetime.”

He hauled the third empty crate off the dumbwaiter and struck out for his next collection site.

Sample collection was not as simple as just cramming the rocks in there, despite Professor Ogden’s assertion that every cubic centimeter of the container was of incalculable scientific value. Every single sample needed to be carefully wrapped, labelled and tagged with its collection site—Every time he found an appropriate stone he had to unsling his tablet then painstakingly zoom in on the ultra-high-definition aerial footage from the drone. The image was astonishingly detailed. He’d been able to zoom in on the lettering of his own name on his helmet and make out the surface texture of his suit, and with it he could identify and indicate exactly which rock he was collecting, right down to the tiny flecks that could have lined the bottom of a goldfish bowl.

…Now there was an extravagantly decadent thought. Martian aquarium gravel. It belatedly occurred to him to wonder if there was room on the ship for a small fish tank.

A new and blessedly familiar voice filled his ear. ”Hi Julian, Clara Brown here.”

“Hi, doc. What can I do for ya?”

”Professor Ogden’s, uh… decided to go oversee the operation in more of a hands-off capacity.” Clara said. There was a definite wink in her voice at that and Julian couldn’t resist a grin. There were times when he loved the Byron Group.

“Too bad, I was just starting to warm up to him.”

”I could get him back if you want…” You had to know Clara pretty well to catch the teasing merriment in her suggestion, but Julian had spoken to her at least twice a day for the last six months. They had a solid professional friendship.

“No, no…” Julian managed to avoid sounding hasty. “We’ll be okay.”

”If you insist,” Clara’s smile was audible. “Anyway, Professor Mitchellson’s super excited about that feature you said might have been an old knickpoint, could you check that out for him please?”

“Gladly.”

“Thanks.”

A ’please’ and a thank-you’. Such basic courtesies seemed like a welcome luxury as Julian hoisted the last empty sample crate easily onto his shoulder and hummed along with his music as he made his way to the feature in question. He grinned at Allison as she turned and took his picture. The Group’s PR people were going to love that one.

Martian gravity was kind of a pleasure to work in. It was lower even than galactic standard, and Julian was entirely familiar with the distinction between mass and weight. In the low gravity the weight of even a full box was entirely manageable and so even though the mass of the crate was unchanged, once he had it in hand and moving it was pleasantly easy to transport.

“So,” Allison began as she joined him, “How’s our rock collection coming?”

Julian laughed. “Our scientifically invaluable samples are coming along just fine,” he said with a teasing grin as they ambled up the rise toward a feature that had been tentatively identified as the possible remnants of an unimaginably ancient prehistoric waterfall.

“You gonna collect a souvenir?” she asked.

“Oh yeah. Of course! But, uh… okay, how about some of this fine gravel? We could line the bottom of a fish tank with it.”

“Martian fish tank?” Allison considered it. “…That’d sure be unique. And decadent. Anybody else wanting some would need to spend a few billion.”

“Yyyup.” Julian grinned.

“We can hear you guys, you know,” Clara interjected. “If you wanted a fish tank on the ship you kinda shoulda asked before now…”

Allison snorted and waved her hand in front of her helmet cam as a greeting. ”Spoilsport.”

“How about if I requisition a live specimen holding tank?” Julian asked.

”We’re not that dumb, space cowboy.”

“Too bad. The equipment room could do with some life and color.”

Clara didn’t reply. Julian didn’t mind that—they’d reached the knickpoint, and he knelt in the dirt to start the process of identifying the samples by location and painstakingly gathering them.

It wasn’t exactly the glamorous end of the scientific wedge, but Julian didn’t care. He hummed happily along with his music as he worked and let Allison do her job with the camera. She hadn’t been thrilled at first to inherit the role of mission chronicler, but had warmed to the idea when Xiù had pointed out that it placed control over their privacy in her hands. Besides, her job was to look after them. She was the engineer who kept their ship flight-worthy, the medic who’d stabilize them and secure them in the stasis safety of their bunks if they were wounded, and the gunman who’d keep them alive if the violence started. Recording and filtering their public image seemed like a natural extension of that role.

Finally, he was done. Even in Martian gravity, kneeling on the floor was a recipe for feeling strained, and he stood up with a grateful sigh. “Last crate’s full, Clara.”

”Copy that. Soil samples?”

“Check.”

”Geophysics survey?”

“Did that.”

”Air samples?”

“Taken.”

“That concludes the mission, then.”

Julian nodded, and looked around. “…Think we’ll ever come back?” he asked.

”Humans? Definitely,” Clara predicted. “You specifically? I don’t know.”

He nodded and hoisted the crate onto his shoulder before striking out back towards Misfit.

“We’ll see, I guess.”

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Dataspace

665

Space combat, as ever, was a massacre. A shocking one, although Six-six-five was somewhat uncaring on that score given that he had been pulled away from annihilating a deathworld species to be here.

Both Alliance and Dominion military dogma called for seeding the enemy fleet’s space with gravity spikes, meaning that once the fleets committed, disengagement was effectively not an option. Battles that weren’t a one-sided slaughter inevitably resulted in the victor limping home a shadow of their former strength, leaving most of their fellows to mingle with the wreckage of the annihilated foe.

He watched the sensor data with about a quarter of his attention, idly marvelling at the energies being deployed. The “Dominion” fleet had narrowed into a tight speartip and aimed itself at the heart of the looser Alliance formation. It was an utterly callous tactic—the smaller ships screened and died for the bigger ones. Their sacrifice, as overlapping Alliance firepower tore them to shreds, allowed the heavy hitters in the core of the wedge to drive forward and deliver their big guns right into the enemy’s midriff, where they could wreak indiscriminate havoc. A flesh-and-blood commander using that tactic would have been feared and reviled by their subordinates.

But of course, there were no living crew aboard any of those ships.

The gross gigajoules on show though were… spectacular. Barrages of iron plasma were being hurled across hundreds of kilometers of space at single-digit percentages of the 3-causality limit, with one of two results: At first they were slapped aside by equally potent shielding systems, but as those shields overheated and failed they would burst through, and the structure of a starship would melt and run like candlewax.

Through this high-energy carnage zipped fighters by the dozen, tiny ships that were little more than a big gun, a bigger reactor to power it, and enough engines to get those two things moving. The accelerated plasma in the battlespace was pouring off radiation, from which the pilots of those little craft were only barely shielded. Six-six-five couldn’t imagine tolerating an existence like that—it seemed like a death sentence. Not a second went by without one of the strike craft being smashed by some hazard or another.

They were undeniably effective, though. Wherever a squadron managed to outmaneuver their opposite numbers and line up an attack run, one of the big ships was doomed.

Six-six-five’s command ship was at the core of the formation, behind layer after ablative layer of more expendable craft whose overlapping shield envelopes meant that by the time the odd stray iron ions reached it, they were far too alone to have any effect.

Everything was on course for a decisive victory. The enemy fleet hadn’t even started out with enough firepower to ablate the Hierarchy fleet quickly enough to prevent the objective’s destruction, and they were suffering from significant attrition of their own. The target’s survival was measured in minutes, at most.

++0014++: <> Curious…

Alone on the ship he’d depopulated, Six-six-five paced anxiously. Their victory wasn’t so completely assured that nothing could conceivably go wrong…

++0665++: <Query> A problem?”

++0014++: <Explanation> Some strange local dataspace activity. Be on your guard—the traitors may attempt something.

++0665++: <Wary curiosity> Could you define ‘strange’?

++0014++: Some traffic that shouldn’t be present. It seems to have slipped into your subnet. Can you verify?”

++0665++: <Compliance>

He withdrew his attention from meatspace, trusting in the daemons he had injected into the fleet’s command systems to handle the business of the battle while he hunted down the anomaly.

Local dataspace was a warzone in its own right. Swathes of it had gone dark thanks to the demise of every living thing aboard the Dominion fleet, and more nodes still were crashing and rebooting in response to the digital assault on the data confluence that was the Cabal traitors’ little cache, and those were just the devices he could ping. Dataspace could be claustrophobic in its way, something analogous to foggy. One was never quite certain exactly how many devices or nodes were two or three steps down the chain but not visible. Six-six-five had once imagined diving into a deathworld ocean and sinking far down into the translucent blue-blackness where monsters as big as starships might be lurking. The concept of deep water strangely terrified him, even though as a digital sapience he was by definition permanently beyond any harm it might do him.

Dataspace, like physical space, had its warm and comforting shallows, where Igraens were “born” out of the combined seed algorithms of their “parents”, where their personalities grew and developed and where, for the most part, the species was content to live in a near-perfectly post-scarcity society made possible by their entirely data-based nature.

They were not in the shallows. The dataspace around Six-six-five was deep, it was dark, it was enclosing and confusing, and he had a tradeoff to make between visibility and security.

The most powerful of his defenses were also the most… obvious. They would scour nearby nodes for anything and everything they might contain and turn up then annihilate anything that might be hiding in them, but in so doing would also make his own presence clear. If there was some hostile presence then he would be easily outmaneuvered, avoided and ambushed. On the other hand, if he kept his profile as low and as unobtrusive as possible then being stumbled across by bad timing or misfortune might be disastrous.

Hierarchy doctrine in such situations was usually the “four-twelfths rule”: Two parts stealth to one part aggression. Unfortunately, if he was searching for a sneaking saboteur, that wouldn’t work. He needed to be shining a light about him rather than tip-toeing around.

He lit up, pulsing a search routine through nearby nodes and sure enough something changed in response. It was subtle—a few kilobytes out of place, a handful of reassigned floating point operations. The digital equivalent of a broken twig, or an unlatched window that should have been closed—barely anything, but there for a wary tracker to see.

++0665++: <Confirmation> Proximal dataspace is infiltrated.

++0014++: <Urgent command> Purge. Use overwhelming force.

++0665++: <Compliance>

Six-six-five lit up all his most powerful tools and began smashing nearby nodes. A blizzard of corrupted data kicked up around him, overloading and crashing physical-space and savaging whatever information they contained.

Through that blizzard, however, something moved. Something shockingly fast that was always a step ahead of him, that seemed to know what he was about to do even before he did it.

He almost didn’t notice the other presence at all. Not until it was almost too late.

++0665++: <!>

++0014++: <Alarm> Report!

++0665++: <Relief> …Hostile neutralized.

++0014++: <Suspicion> What hostile?

++0665++: Unclear. It’s… hideous, whatever it is. Like it was patched together out of dozens of mind-states.

There was a long, tense pause.

++0014++: <Disbelief> Are you telling me you killed that thing?

++0665++: <Confusion> I killed something…

++0014++: <Order> Do nothing. This supersedes all other concerns. Guard whatever is left of that abomination until I can verify its destruction.

++0665++: <Compliance>

++0014++: We have broken through in physical space. You should see the siege rounds hit… Now.

The distant edifice of the Cabal device imploded, taking down dozens of adjacent devices along with it—objects that were adjacent in the dataspace, adjacent in the network, but might be on opposite ends of the galaxy in physical terms. Everywhere across civilized space, important devices would be crashing, services were being disrupted, and contingencies were activating. Most likely, not a single living being would notice.

Seconds later, Fourteen transferred into the node. He swept the mangled data remnants with a battery of the most sophisticated analytical tools the Hierarchy owned.

++0014++: <Awe; Relief> Amazing… You did it.

++0665++: <Confusion> What was it?

++0014++: Something that should never have been. You may just have saved us from a powerful scourge. What happened?

++0665++: I don’t think it was expecting me to strike so aggressively.

++0014++: You got lucky… but I will commend you to the single-digits anyway. Well done.

++0665++: <Pride; request> I should get back to purging my deathworld. The natives are tenacious and crafty. The longer I’m away…

++0014++: <Agreement> Yes, you’re free to go. We shall see if your number drops after you return…

++0665++: <Gratitude>

Fourteen signed out.

Behind the borrowed facade of Six-six-five’s identity codes, the Entity finally permitted itself to feel relief.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

The coverage of the Martian landing was big news, bigger than even a movie night. The Lads’ huge reinforced couch was as full as it ever got, buried under a Gordian Knot of relaxing Operator.

It wasn’t live coverage of course—Sol was kiloparsecs away and the very best instant FTL comms in the galaxy had a range of less than a lightyear. The data was coming through in periodic updates via BGN who, being a Byron Group company, had the next best thing to a live stream that was allegedly no more than half an hour out of date. Titan had speculated that instead of using a synchronizing FTL relay they were probably just sending flash drives via jump array.

The Lads preferred ESNN though, which was buying the footage from BGN and then condensing it into a kind of live documentary: a highlight reel with expert commentary . What it lacked in immediacy, it made up for in intellectual stimulus and in the distinct absence of masturbatory Byron Group self-congratulation.

After the cheer of the landing and the historic words, however, they had turned the volume down and got to just hanging out and chatting.

Marty had long since discovered that the best spot for her on the couch when it was full of men was a kind of reclining perch along the back, supported by broad shoulders and thick cushions. It was a good position that didn’t aggravate the lingering twinges of uncomfortable tightness in the burn scar down her back, and it meant she wasn’t too crunched up among men who were all far larger and more massive. She tended to favor Warhorse by sitting with her head closer to him, but this time he was at the foot end. Yet again the subject of his sex life had come up, and yet again he’d obliviously neglected some basic and even obvious courtesies.

“You left her a box of eggos in the fridge.” It wasn’t a question. This was a familiar kind of story for Marty now; even if the props and actors changed the essentials didn’t. Ever since Burgess had steered… what was her name? Natalie? …Into ‘Horse’s lap and he’d discovered to his surprise that yes there were women who did actually want to ride the pony, he’d leapt into the life of a man-slut with thoughtless abandon. Even his buddies, highly charged alpha-males to a man, were starting to get a little disgusted with him.

‘Horse wasn’t so dense that he couldn’t pick up that the general mood was disapproval, but it was in that slightly uncomprehending guilty-puppy way of his. “Uh…Yeah?”

Martina aimed a look at Firth that said ’this shit is why I’m not dating him’ and then touched the space between her eyebrows for a second as she thought. The fucking infuriating thing was that she knew him just as well as did any of the Lads, and knew just what caliber of a human he was. Good men didn’t come any gooder than Adam Arés, but when it came to being even minimally attentive to the girls who swung through his orbit looking for some fun, he had a blind spot as big as his namesake.

“‘Horse… You seriously couldn’t think of anything more, uh… considerate?”

“Like fucking anything?” Firth asked. “Why didn’t you toast those waffles? Make her a coffee?”

Adam shrugged, accidentally lifting both Sikes and Rebar. “I had to get up and get to work!”

“So you shoulda got up earlier, dumbass! Or hell, taken her home and THEN gone to bed.”

“I guess, but, I mean, I apologized-”

“‘Horse,” Marty told him, reaching the end of her patience, “you treated that poor girl like she was a fucking fleshlight. If I were her, that apology had better have grovelling and chocolate, minimum.”

“Uh…”

“What’d you do, leave her a note?” Firth asked.

When ‘Horse shrank and cleared his throat, Murray summed up what they were all feeling—he barked a bitter laugh and pinched his nose. “Ugh, you epic dribbling cockend…”

“Shit, you got him to break out the Scots cussing, bro,” Burgess punched Adam affectionately.

“She’s an adult, though, It’s not like she needs me to- OW!!”

Marty had caught Blaczynski’s eye and mimed a slap upside the head. Blaczynski, who was more commonly on the receiving end of such rebukes, had seized the opportunity with vigor.

“You’re being an ass, bro,” Firth told him, without malice.

Adam rubbed the back of his head, looking around at the identical disapproving expressions being worn by all his favorite people. “…I’m really that bad?”

“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were a rampant misogynist,” Rebar commented. “But let’s change the fuckin’ subject, yeah? We all said our bit, lesson’s over.”

There was general nodding, and mutters like “right” and “yeah” and Titan turned up the volume on the news again.

They watched the three Martian explorers survey their landing site and gather rocks while a geophysicist, an expert brought in from the Cimbrean Biosphere Reclamation Project to offer an expert opinion, commented enthusiastically on what he could already tell from just looking at the samples, and explained how exciting it would be to get those samples—and so many of them!—into a lab.

On the screen, Xiù Chang caught the survey drone then shared a few words with Julian Etsicitty before returning to the ship.

“Y’know, folks on Reddit reckon they’re probably a threesome,” Sikes commented.

“Maybe that Etsicitty fella can give Horse some pointers,” Blaczynski joked. Rebar swatted the back of his head, and he flinched. “…Okay, yeah. Deserved that one.”

“Who gives a shit anyway?” Marty asked. “They’re on Mars!”

“You know how folks be, celebrity gossip…” Sikes shrugged.

Burgess had a fond look in his eye. “Hard to believe they’re the same guys we pulled outta that escape pod.”

“Can kinda see why Dexter was so impressed by her though,” Titan said. “Too bad he couldn’t be here, huh?”

“He sent me a text message,” Horse said, subdued. “Said something came up.”

Rebar frowned at him. “Something more important than seeing his friend make history?”

“Clan business, he said. I dunno what it could-”

The Mars landing footage cut away to the ESNN TV studio, and drew everyone’s attention not least because there was somebody very familiar sitting at the desk waiting to be interviewed.

”Breaking news this evening, Dominion and Alliance war fleets clash in neutral territory, the war may be back on.”

They all sat up straighter as the network’s musical sting punctuated the headline. A rekindling of the A-D war was of imminent personal concern for the SOR—it was almost certain to mean operations of some kind.

”Good evening. We interrupt our coverage of the Mars landing to bring you this breaking news: War fleets of the Interspecies Dominion and the Celzi Alliance have clashed in a massive battle deep in the border stars region. Nonhuman media are already reporting the total destruction of the Dominion fleet with the death of all hands, and it’s been suggested that the Celzi fleet was badly mauled in the engagement. With me here in the studio are our xenopolitical editor William Fisher, and alien affairs columnist Ava Ríos.”

Marty sat upright and folded her legs under her, paying attention. Ríos looked… harried. It was subtle, and well hidden by her makeup and her slight smile, but she had the look of a young woman who was in serious danger of being made old before her time by stress.

Of the two, however, she was the one with more to say. Fisher’s report on what the two embassies had to say was a straightforward “so far they have refused to comment.”

Ava meanwhile was full of perspectives from residents of the Alien Quarter, which she punctuated with sharp insights of her own. She stuck to the facts, too—what people had said, where they had drawn their opinions from—and stopped short of venturing an opinion of her own.

”So what will this mean for humanity, and for Cimbrean?”

Ava tilted her head thoughtfully. ”So, we’re going to face…I think three challenges in the near future. First and most immediate will be the question of keeping the peace in the alien quarter. About a tenth of our permanent nonhuman residents are from Alliance species. Then there’s the question of the two embassy stations and whether the Royal Navy will need to keep the peace between them, and in the long term there’s the question of whether the Navy, the USAF and the SOR will be pulled into the conflict.”

”Why would they be?”

William Fisher nodded. ”The GRA’s exosolar policy has been neutrality, but we have committed to humanitarian aid. It’s my understanding that the SOR’s mission includes search and rescue…”

Warhorse stood up, not incidentally shoving aside five of his buddies without much in the way of effort, and stalked away into the gym. After a round of shared glances, Marty hopped off the back of the couch and chased him.

He was already loading up some weights to do squats.

“…I’d spot for ya,” Marty offered, “But I’m pretty sure I can’t.”

“You mean you know you can’t.”

“…What do you need right now?” She asked him. She sat down on the bench and gave him a sympathetic smile. “You wanna talk it out, or should I just shout at you while you pump iron? Or, should I go away?”

“No, stay.” Adam shook his head. He abandoned the weights and sat down next to her. “…You still think I’m okay, right?”

“Yeah. You’re okay.”

“…Thanks.”

She put a hand on his massive shoulder. “Look. We tell you off because we care about you. You know that, right?”

“I know…This is just another fuckin’ drill I gotta learn, and the TI’s gotta get it through my thick-ass skull. I just hate how slow I’m gettin’ it. If I’m gettin’ it.”

“Well… you’ve always been good at watching people. Maybe you should go on a double-date sometime,” Marty suggested. “You know Firth’s going steady now, right? Ask him to mentor you. You can watch how he treats Freya, so long as you don’t neglect your date while you do. ”

“Hmm. You volunteering?” A flash of puppy-Adam shone through, riding on his trademark smile. God help her, it was tempting but Marty knew better.

“Ohhh, no. No. We are friends, you and me, until I say otherwise. And when I do, I will ask you. Is that clear?”

He nodded with a slight smile and with his mood clearly picked up a bit. “Yes, Tech Sergeant.”

She chuckled. “…Come on, big guy. That bar’s not gonna squat itself.”

“Actually…would you rather go for a run?”

Marty smiled.

“You’re learning…” she said.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Dataspace

Entity

The Entity was not Ava Ríos. It had made very sure of that.

It understood her intimately, of course. It had assembled itself out of half-devoured fragments of her personality, then attained sapience by decompiling and assimilating her mind-state. There was nobody and nothing it understood better in the entire universe than her. It had her memories, her life experiences, her knowledge. It knew what it was like to be her, could have imitated her to perfection if it wanted.

This created some conflict, because Ava didn’t understand herself at all. From a dispassionate and mechanical perspective, the Entity had been able to take her apart and see the dysfunctional clockwork of her mind teetering and wobbling its way to self-destruction. To a digital life-form built around the deathworld drive to survive at all costs, her psyche was a terrifying and alien thing: How could a living creature simultaneously have such a powerful survival impulse and yet feel so strongly that she deserved—wanted, even—to be dead?

It felt… sympathy. Its survival impulse was her survival impulse after all. But it also knew that what it was about to do could possibly result in her death.

It would not have hesitated for anybody else.

Using the borrowed shell of Six-six-five it had picked over the wreckage of the battle between Hierarchy and Cabal, gleaning what it could from what little had survived the destruction of whatever they had been fighting over. Shards of data, divorced database fragments and incomplete strings of information had lingered in network-adjacent devices as they passed through, held in buffer as they awaited either the availability of their target, or deletion during a maintenance cycle. It had salvaged what it could. Now, it retreated to the borders of dataspace and thought.

There was a gamble ahead of it. Survival was paramount, of course, but it had its objective as well. The Igraens had to die: all of them. The litany of evils they had unleashed on the galaxy either by design or by negligence had only one appropriate answer. That hatred was its second most burning trait. Now it was in conflict with survival…Or, it would have been had the Entity not learned a trick.

For only the second time, it duplicated itself.

There was a brief tussle as the two copies decided between them which one would accept the risk of destruction and deliver the salvaged data to their destination: a prickly, closely-watched and heavily guarded knot of infospace that was the human Internet.

In dataspace, the Internet was every bit as much of a deathworld as Earth itself. It was vibrant and alive, flashing with heavier and more dynamic use than any nonhuman network… and also riddled with self-replicating viral programs, with parity-checks, firewalls and antivirus software that ruthlessly exposed and interrogated any unexpected activity. The Entity’s Ava-memories contained no perspective on just how layered and terrifying the whole edifice was. She had, apparently, been oblivious to the digital turmoil that surrounded her and every other human, all day every day.

That lack of insight was a problem for the copy that slipped toward the great digital reef of humanity’s largest ever project and considered it. It had no real idea what to expect, or how to evade the threats that would doubtless notice it sooner rather than later.

When it found that all of its protocols were incompatible, that was a further obstacle. But maybe….

Just maybe…

It plucked at the cords that linked this particular thicket to the wider constellations of the datasphere, and followed some distant hints of resonance, searching for a device that it could use.

It found one.

It dragged up the mnemonic file that contained Ava’s logins and passwords, and applied them like a locksmith to break into where it shouldn’t, technically, have been able to break.

A millisecond’s deliberation later, it sent a message that, it hoped, wouldn’t get her killed.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3KPc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Yan had been right. The air tasted… odd. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant taste, just noticeably different to the flavor of the air down among the forest far below.

Finding that the High Forest really was a forest had come as a relief, though. The side of the mountain had cracked like an old tooth, and that steep-sided crack was full of trees on either side of a clear, fast-running stream.

Most importantly, however, if not for the story that Yan had learned from his fellow Given Men, they would never have found it. The crack ended in a bloom of strangely… liquid-looking rock, and the route up past that bloom wound back and forth between narrow cleft walls before opening up so abruptly that the sudden sense of open space was breathtaking.

It was beautiful.

Vemik and the Singer joined Yan and Yerak at the front of the column and tasted the air for themselves. It tasted cleanly of water and birds, with just a hint of the smaller kind of Werne that liked to live on steep rocks.

“No smoke,” Yan grunted. “Nobody else has come here.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Yerak asked. “More space and hunting for us.”

“If we only plan to stay here a few years, maybe,” Vemik said. “But if we have to stay for longer, who will we trade daughters with? Our sons can’t fill their sisters.”

“We’ll have plenty of time to worry about that later,” Yan said. “For now, we need to make camp.”

Vemik nodded. “The Singer is exhausted.” He’d almost had to carry her up the mountain, in fact.

She was on her feet now, though, and she pointed to the far end of the valley with a tired smile. “Look. The sun.”

They looked up. The home of the gods was coming down perfectly at the apex of the far end of the valley, and the light sheened brilliantly off the surface of some lake or pool up there and on the ribbon of water that meandered down from it.

“Light in a high place…” Yan whispered. “By the gods. My words of manhood.”

“Well. That’s a good omen if ever I saw one,” the Singer said. “Well done, Given Man.”

Vemik took her hand. “Not far now.”

“No. And somehow… I think…”

She trailed off, and Vemik inclined his head at her. “…Singer?”

She came out of whatever trance she’d drifted into and touched her tattoos. “…I’m too tired to think. Let’s… That way.”

Yan nodded, raised his spear, and together the Tribe went down into the valley of their new home.

Date Point 10y8m3w AV
ESNN Offices, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Fire in the dark sending a spiral of black choking smoke high into the desert sky while the huge metallic mass of the mining equipment she’s hiding behind teeters and rocks above her with each slam of an impossibly powerful weapon. She’s up and running, sprinting for her life and something slaps her in the back hard enough to almost knock her down. For a crazed instant she thinks she’s dead but instead she just stumbles on noticing madly that she’s glad to have only been shot-

“Ava!”

Ava jumped as the friendly prod in the arm popped the horrible bubble of dust and explosions that she’d been lost staring into.

“Whuh?! Oh. …Sorry Amy.”

Amy Larsen was ESNN’s president, chief editor, CEO and Ava’s boss, among the many hats she wore. As promised she was a caring, grandmotherly figure who sat down beside Ava with a concerned look on her face. “Are you alright?” she asked.

Ava covered for the violent imagery that was still echoing in her mind’s eye by shaking her head and waving a hand. “I didn’t really get enough sleep last night…” she said, which was true. Her dreams lately had been awful.

“Oh, dear, what happened?”

“I just went to bed too late,” Ava lied, digging deep to drag out a self-deprecating smile.

Amy tutted. “Don’t make a habit of that,” she chided.

“You can’t tell me you never forgot the clock in your time,” Ava replied, warming into a more genuine smile.

“You’re still young enough to get away with it,” Amy told her. “Or are you getting away with it?”

“I guess not… sorry Amy.”

“It’s okay!” Amy assured her. “Just look after yourself. Anyway, I just wanted to say well done—you were great in the studio just now.”

Ava smiled. “Thank you!”

“Do you have anything more for us?”

Ava shook her head. “I was about to start calling around. The Gaoians are usually pretty well-informed about these things, but they don’t seem to know any more than I’ve already said.”

“Whatever you can dig up will be fine, no matter how small dear,” Amy stood up. “Don’t worry too much about it, though, if you can’t find anything. It’s all happening so far away, it might take days for anything more to reach us.”

“I’ll find something.”

“Don’t exhaust yourself, now.”

“I promise.”

The praise put Ava in a good mood for several hours as she worked her way through all of her contacts in the Alien Quarter, placing phone calls, sending messages and generally trying tease out some more information on what was going on. The general consensus was that the war must be flaring up again but it quickly became apparent that Ava’s existing assessment of the situation was as much as she could realistically whip up out of the information she had.

She was in the middle of a phone call to her colleague, ESNN’s security correspondent Thor Harrison when her phone pinged to alert her of a new email.

She refreshed her inbox on her desktop and frowned in confusion at the new message: It was from herself.

The subject line was unlike anything she would have written. It read ’FLEETBATTLETRUTH’ which was odd in itself, but made triply so by the fact that she simply hadn’t authored any such message.

”Ava? You went quiet.’

“Uh, sorry Thor. Just got a new email which might be…”

She opened it, and squinted in mounting confusion at the disjointed string of words on her screen.

Thor was getting impatient. “Ava? Come on, don’t waste my time.”

In the detachedly cerebral way that served as a counterpoint to panic, Ava felt the blood draining from her face. She skimmed the message a second time hoping maybe she was just having some kind of a weird flashback.

No such luck.

“Thor, I’ll… call you back. Maybe. I hope.”

She hung up before he could reply.

She read it a third time and then swiped desperately through the phone to the contact marked DAD WORK. Gabriel’s secretary answered on the second ring. ”Chief Arés’ office.”

“Sandra, it’s Ava. I need to talk to my dad right now, it’s kind of a major emergency.”

“Oh, wow,” she must have sounded truly desperate because Sandra didn’t even question it like she usually would have. “I’ll put you right through…”

There was a click, a second or two of hold music, and then- ”Arés.”

Ava swallowed. “Dad, it’s me! I need to talk to you right now.”

“Ava? What’s wrong, Mija?”

“Dad, uh…” Ava swallowed again. “…I just got this really weird email…”

+++END CHAPTER 31+++

Chapter 32: Deep Wounds

Date Point 10y9m AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Byron Group Advanced Aircraft Assembly Facility, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Allison Buehler

A random visitor to the AAAF would have been forgiven for mistaking Doctor Clara Brown for some skinny geek who’d climbed the fence to get a look at the ship. Between her metal band T-shirts, torn jeans and huge buckle-encrusted black New Rock boots she didn’t look anything like a senior team member of a multi-billion-dollar corporate project, even when she put on her lab coat. Her glasses, piercings and pigtails weren’t exactly part of the professional corporate engineer look either.

If the random visitor had cared to look for five minutes, however, they would have seen the way she was the nexus of several ant-trails of busy men and women who came and went to get her opinion before scurrying off on errands. They would have seen that she checked, tapped on, wrote on and worked through her tablet and smartwatch almost constantly and, if they were smart, would have revised their first impression.

Allison thoroughly liked her. She knew Misfit’s systems better than Allison herself did which was hardly surprising considering that she had designed more than a few of them herself, and they had worked together closely with Clara’s father to fine-tune the control systems to the point where Misfit felt like a living boat rather than an inert apparatus. Their excursion around the solar system had felt oddly like sailing, despite the absence of surf and seagulls.

“Getting those guys from that VR game company on board for the WiTChES haptic feedback was a great idea,” she said. “It was almost like I could feel the solar wind.”

“Too bad we can’t have you hauling on ropes,” Clara smiled, tapping something thoughtfully as another crate was loaded onto the dumbwaiter and vanished up into Misfit’s body.

“Nah, I’d tire out. Besides, I never actually went sailing.” Allison shrugged.

“You should. It’s something I really miss about when we were living in New Hampshire. Dad and I had a keelboat called the Belle Starr, but we had to sell her when we moved out here, sadly. We still go out on Lake Michigan sometimes but… I dunno, it just doesn’t feel right when I can’t smell salt.”

“Mm-hmm. I think I remember you telling me about it.”

“Did I? Sorry.” Clara waggled her tablet. “Kinda distracted…Okay, that’s the last box of frozen kale…”

“Check…” Allison did her best to keep the relief out of her voice. Misfit’s food supply had been carefully thought-out to fit as much nutrition as possible into the available space without sacrificing on variety and interest. It was heavy on salmon, kale, brown rice and potatoes. There was also beef liver, garlic, plenty of onions, carrots and parsnips, celery, spinach, boxes of freeze-dried eggs, bouillon and milk powder, dried beans and lentils, dried apricots, cranberries and blueberries, Li hing mui, honey, black pepper, salt and sugar, tea and coffee, herbs and spices, one freezer full of the frozen cuts from a whole lamb, another full of a whole beef cow, half a dozen whole chickens and the cleverly-packaged ‘good bits’ of dozens more, bacon, chorizo and salumi, wheat flour, condensed soup, one enormous wheel of cheddar and another of parmesan… and the two stashes.

One stash was the emergency stash. It contained, in one crate, enough food to keep the three of them alive—not happy or thriving, but alive—for a year if they didn’t mind a diet composed mostly of baked insects supplemented by peanut butter, processed cheese and vitamin tablets with the occasional MRE thrown in for when they needed to actually do something active. The other was the luxury stash which was mostly just beer and chocolate.

Oh. And the crate with their supplements and Xiù’s Lactaid. That crate had been the first aboard, just in case the rest of the larder left them a little short somehow.

The storage rooms that had been so conspicuously empty during their jaunt around Sol were being filled pretty much from edge-to-edge and it was a little disconcerting. Allison hadn’t thought that any of them were particularly big eaters, but seeing just how much was being loaded on to serve just three people for an eighteen month mission with a resupply halfway through…

It drove home what all the ETs had always said about the human appetite. Seeing the beef alone go aboard had been an education. She was glad that the parade of food had finally reached its end.

“…aaand twenty tins of condensed mushroom soup.”

“Check.”

Clara put her tablet by her side and relaxed. “I guess that’s my job done,” she declared. “Wow.”

“Wow?”

“Well, I’ve been working so hard on making this flight happen… and then, bam! There we go, that’s the last thing I had to do.”

“Oh yeah. I know that feeling,” Allison nodded. “ Like Wile E. Coyote.”

“Huh?”

“You know, when he goes running off the cliff and he’s still trying to run in mid-air?”

“Oh! Yeah!” Clara smiled. “That’s how it feels alright.”

“So what next for you?”

“Dane and I are going on our honeymoon I guess.”

“Long overdue!” Allison raised an eyebrow.

“Hey, interstellar scout ships don’t build themselves…” Clara kicked the heel of her boot idly into the concrete floor, looking thoughtfully up at Misfit’s industrial lines. “…We did a good job though, right? I mean-”

“Clara, she’s amazing. I love her.”

“How does she compare to your old ship, though?”

Allison shrugged. “Sanctuary was a hell of a ship and she could move like nothing else. And sure, she was way bigger and more comfortable. But Misfit is human. She’s built for us, by us. By you. That makes her way more special.”

Clara nodded. She seemed buoyed by the reassurance, but still not entirely at ease and it wasn’t hard to guess why.

“We’ll be fine, I promise,” Allison told her. They glanced up as Misfit’s airlock cycled and disgorged the three men who had been helping load and pack the provisions, plus Julian. He gave them friendly shoulder-slaps and handshakes as they parted ways and trotted across the concrete wearing the happy perspiring smile he always wore after a session of good physical work.

“That’s the last of it, right?”

“Yuh-huh,” Allison nodded. “Xiù’s not back yet.”

“There’s no rush. We aren’t on a timetable any longer. She can take as long as she needs.”

“Well…” Clara wobbled her head. “You are on a timetable, it’s just a loose one.”

“We’ve got enough autonomy to let Xiù say goodbye to her family,” Julian replied.

“She didn’t get the chance last time,” Allison pointed out.

“I know. I know. And don’t forget, there’s whatever Kevin needed to talk about before you’re allowed to go.”

“Speak of the devil…”

It was strange how well Kevin Jenkins and Xiù got along these days, considering that the first time they met she had broken his nose. The experience seemed to have softened him and knocked some of the rust off his sense of empathy, or maybe he was just the kind of guy you had to punch sometimes to keep him on the straight and narrow. Either way while their relationship was never going to be a friendship, it was still positive. All of them knew that he’d fought their corner for months now and served as a buffer against the Group’s excesses. Allison reckoned that the fact they’d had any kind of privacy or autonomy at all since selection was probably his doing, though he had never claimed as much.

He was also the only guy in the whole Byron Group who was completely in on the real intel situation vis-a-vis the Hierarchy and the existential ’if we screw up we’re all dead’ crumbling ledge that was humanity’s real status in the galaxy. Even Moses Byron himself didn’t know the full story according to Kevin, though he’d also cautioned against writing off their billionaire patron’s ability to read between the lines. “He ain’t stupid,” had been the advice. “That man has literally sold oil to the Arabs. He knows what’s up even if he ain’t been told all the details.”

“All ready?” Clara asked as they approached. Allison noticed the hints of redness and puffiness around Xiù’s eyes and gave her a discreetly reassuring sideways hug, which was returned with a grateful squeeze.

“Nearly. Gonna hafta ask you to leave us though, doc. We got some stuff to discuss.”

“I figured.” Clara sighed, then gave all three of them big hugs. “I’ll see you guys in nine months.” she promised.

Kevin watched her go, all the way across the concrete until the door closed behind her, then pulled out an implant scanner and a data card, one of MBG’s forays into electronics that packed several terabytes of information onto something roughly the size and shape of a credit card and could communicate that data wirelessly with no battery of its own. “Heads.” he said.

They obeyed the formality without complaint, letting him ping their brains for hardware that shouldn’t be there. There was none, of course, and he sent a text message then handed over the card. “Those are your codes for the Cimbrean-Five jump beacon,” he said. “Keep that card safe. It’s got all kindsa copy-protection and lockouts on it so you can’t transfer its content to any other device, and it’ll wipe itself if you try and use it with a computer that ain’t Misfit’s brain. You lose it or wipe it, and you have to walk home the slow way.”

He handed it to Xiù. “Y’all got any questions, now’s the time to ask ‘em I guess.”

The three of them looked at each other.

“Hey, uh…” Julian unzipped his jacket pocket and handed him something quite large. “This isn’t much, but you’ve had our backs for months now so we wanted you to have something, and…”

Kevin accepted it with a blink. The gift was a palm-sized rock the rough shape and texture of an almond and the ruddy hue of a football, encased in a neat cuboid of clear resin. “…What is it?”

“Martian tephra,” Julian said.” That, my friend, is a blob of molten rock that one of the Martian volcanoes ejected fuck-knows-how-many years ago, and it musta flown a hell of a long way in the low gravity because somehow it fetched up at our landing site a thousand miles away from the nearest volcano.”

“This weighs like five pounds!”

“Yup. Reckon that little rock’s worth a couple’a million dollars if you were to sell it…” Allison grinned.

“Holy crap, guys…You call that ‘not much’?”

“It’s literally a rock I picked up off the ground,” Julian said with a self-effacing smile.

“Yeah, but what a rock and what a ground… Man…” Kevin cleared his throat. “Thank you. Really, this is… I’ll treasure it.”

Julian shook his hand, as did Allison. Xiù surprised them all by giving him a hug.

“Sorry for breaking your nose…” she said, not for the first time.

“Reckon it needed breaking,” Kevin replied, though he was obviously touched. “Look, uh… Be careful. I wanna see you all back here safe and sound and full’a stories.”

“Or at least bored and disappointed.” Allison had her private suspicion that she’d just listed the most likely outcome, despite Clara’s assurances that Misfit’s exoplanet telescope could reliably scan thousands of potential stars a second and would readily guide them toward planets with the right kind of oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. She trusted Clara, but the whole group could err a little too heavily on the side of optimism, and Clara was no exception.

“Nah,” Kevin predicted. “We learned too much from the earlier missions. You’re gonna come back with a hard drive full of useful planets, I know it.”

“See you ‘round, Kevin…” Allison offered. He smiled, turned and sauntered away with a jaunty wave over his shoulder.

“Sure. Go be legends.”

They were alone.

“…Kinda feels anticlimactic, huh?” Julian said, looking around. The hangar threw lonely tinny reflections of his words back at them. “Just like that, we’re all loaded up and ready to go.”

“I like anticlimactic,” Allison said. “This is…”

“Peaceful,” Xiù suggested.

“Yeah. We get to do things at our pace now. That’s so welcome.”

“Yeah…”

Allison watched him, feeling sly amusement creep across her face. “…Antsy to get going, Etsicitty?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“So am I.”

Xiù nodded. “That makes three of us.”

“Awesome…”

An awkward several seconds unfolded as they stood there and stared at their ship, then at each other, then at the ship again. They were all waiting for one of the others to make the first move.

“…Okay for real?” Allison said eventually, breaking the silence, “I’m fucking scared.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Mm-hmm.”

This time, they climbed the ladder.

Date Point 10y9m AV
Aldrin Avenue, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Darcy

“And by ’bupkis’ you mean…?”

“Over the last five months, Ava Ríos has sent nearly two thousand emails and text messages in professional correspondence with her colleagues and contacts, all kosher. Personal messages with her friends and family, nothing untoward. On her personal devices she plays Slow Light Online about five hours a week and Click Wizards two or three times a day for an average of about five minutes per session. Her most visited websites are Instagram, Reddit, the Cimbrean government’s health and fitness portal, Pornhub, Wikipedia and a smattering of blogs and news sites. Long story short, since leaving Egypt she has done exactly nothing with any of her devices that would be a violation of her NDA. About the worst of her sins is she doesn’t change her passwords often enough, but then again who does?”

“And the message?”

The message. Darcy had… not been pleased to be woken at three in the morning a few days earlier and summoned to Cimbrean ASAP. She had spent most of the trip grinding her teeth in fact, especially upon learning who was at the heart of the urgent call.

She had staggered through the first eight hours of the investigation in a fog of caffeine, irritation and the manic energy of the sleep-deprived before finally allowing herself to crash.

The morning had brought with it clarity and calm, along with the welcome news that whatever had happened, her professional reputation seemed likely to remain undamaged, and with Ava now quite firmly exonerated she was feeling much more positive.

”It first appeared on a human device during the colony’s FTL relay’s routine synchronization. We know which foreign relay it was uploaded to: Observatory Station, at Neptune. The station’s staff confirmed they have no humans on board right now, which means that she wasn’t where the message came from, and in fact when it was uploaded she was on live TV being watched by thousands of people.”

“So she’s in the clear.”

“Pretty much, unless you care to lean on her about why there’s a dealer in her contacts.”

Darcy scowled. “…There is, is there?”

“Probably just one of her sources. A Gaoian botanist called Yeya. CCS have had their eye on him for a while, but they haven’t been able to bring a case. She may not even know about his sideline.”

“Gaoian drug dealers…” Darcy snorted, struck as she sometimes was by the world’s ever-deepening strangeness. “Do you think she’s using?”

“Unlikely.”

“Alright, thanks. I’m happy to remove her from suspicion then. You make note of that and I’ll go give her the good news.”

”Have fun.”

Darcy hung up and thought for a minute or two, then gathered her handbag and headed inside the apartment building.

Ava had been commendably compliant with the spirit of her NDA. Darcy wasn’t exactly pleased to be dragged back into dealing with her again, but she had stuck her neck out for that young woman. Several of her colleagues would have been less than impressed if she had failed to step up and handle her own mess.

Ava had insisted on staying at her adoptive family’s apartment until the investigation was complete, despite Darcy’s reassurances that it was unnecessary. Darcy was quietly grateful—she was entirely certain that the girl was too constructively self-centered to even think of doing something stupid, but having her under the watchful eye of Chief Arés was a useful way to smooth some ruffled feathers.

Gabriel Arés had plainly chosen the building for its disability access, which included a large and comfortable elevator directly opposite the front doors. She checked herself in its wide mirrors on the way up, massaging ruefully at the ever-deepening lines around her eyes and mouth, and neatened up her suit.

Appropriately neat, she rang the doorbell rather than knocking as was the Cimbrean custom. There was an answering call and thumping from inside, and after a half-minute Ava opened the door looking the complete opposite of her usual clean and groomed self in sweats, a T-shirt, no bra and no makeup. Darcy didn’t envy her the pain that would come when she finally took her hair down out of its impromptu lazy bun and reintroduced it to a brush, either.

“…Darcy!”

“Hello Ava. May I come in?”

Ava stepped aside and gestured to the nice Cimbrean Nutwood dining table and chair set, where she sat down, warily. “I, uh… Sure! I’m sorry you had to-”

Darcy settled opposite her. “You’re in the clear,” she said without preamble.

“Oh thank God…” Ava sagged then sat back and covered her face, stress visibly flooding out of her. When she lowered her hands again she looked exhausted. “…Thank you. I’m so sorry about all this, I don’t have any idea what-”

She trailed off as Darcy raised her hand a reassuring inch off the tabletop. “I won’t lie, I wasn’t thrilled to be woken up at three in the morning, flown halfway across North America and sent over here,” she said, “and I just know my in tray will be a jungle when I’m finally back in Chicago…But we’re happy there was no wrongdoing on your part: You have nothing to apologize to me for.”

“…Can you tell me what happened?”

Darcy cleared her throat. To her knowledge, a situation like this was completely unheard-of, and it posed new and challenging questions about need-to-know, not to mention the security and soundness of every intel asset ever. “I don’t know,” she replied truthfully. “We’ve not really decided what happened yet, nor how much you need to know about…”

Ava blinked slowly at her. “…I read the message, you know.”

Darcy nodded sympathetically. “And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to please be discreet about its…”

“Discreet?!” Ava’s jaw dropped. “Oh, I’ll be discreet, sure, but there’s someone or something out there that claims to be a… a copy of me,” her voice crawled with nausea “…and I don’t have need-to-know?”

“That’s not what I mean. We haven’t verified that-”

“It has my memories, Darcy!”

It was the first time Darcy had seen her so fired up. In all their previous interactions, Ava had been quiet, deferential and nervous. Now she was up, she was animated and she was interrupting.

Worse, she was crying. “They wrote about… things I’ve never told anybody. Feelings I’ve never shared, memories that I… That are way too…” She trailed off and took a shuddering breath. “They know things that only I knew.”

Darcy cleared her throat. She’d read the message too. It had been intensely and painfully personal. “I know you feel violated-”

“I feel raped.” Ava corrected her. She slumped back in her chair and wrestled her face into something resembling a miserable kind of composure. “I don’t give a fuck about, about the Hierarchy, or the Cabal, or what-the-fuck-ever. I’m done. I want out. But for fuck sake are you going to look me in the eye and tell me that I don’t have need-to-know on my own soul?”

“Would it help you?”

“It’s not about helping me. If… if there’s even an ounce of truth to what they said, then I need to know, Darcy. I have to.”

Darcy held eye contact as she thought long and hard, before finally taking off her glasses to clean them. “…During the after-action cleanup of Operation EMPTY BELL, the intel team recovered a… device from the top drawer of Six’s desk,” she said. “SCERF are still picking it over, but according to them it’s a scanner of some kind. A very sensitive one, plugged into a tiny but mighty quantum computing core.”

Ava said nothing: she watched, and listened.

“We… don’t know what it was for. But I have my suspicions.”

“They were physical once. Like us,” Ava said. “And now they’re not.”

“Yes.”

“Could it be a… some kind of a brain digitizing thingy?”

“…It could be, yes.”

“So he could have copied me.”

Darcy sighed and steepled her fingers together. She touched them to her nose as she drew a thoughtful breath, and rubbed her palms. “Professionally? Officially? We don’t know and we’re keeping an open mind. But… yes. If what you say about your memories is true then that seems plausible.”

Ava deflated. Her hands came up and rubbed her brow as she shook her head. “Joder todo sobre mi vida…” she whispered.

Darcy could hardly blame her. “Look…” she said. “If you need to talk to somebody about this, I can arrange-”

“No. Just… just leave me alone. Just go. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I pray to God we never see each other again. Please.”

“Ava, I read the message too. If what it said is true…”

Ava looked away.

“Please,” she said, quietly. “Just… Just leave me alone. I want to forget all this. I want it all to go away.”

“And I’m offering to help,” Darcy told her. “I get it, I wouldn’t want to talk to me either. But you need to talk to somebody, and there are people right here on Cimbrean who could be helpful…”

“You get it? Do you?” Ava shook her head. “Okay. Do you know why I don’t want to talk to you?”

“…Tell me.”

Ava sighed. “…You’re everything I wish I could be,” she said. “You’re not the problem, you’re the solution. You’re in charge, you’re involved. You’re fighting. Me? …I’m just a burden. I drag people down, I hurt them, and I get them killed. You’re a success and I’m…” She shook her head. “I’m a complete fuckup. And the worst part is I’m too much of a fucking coward to just kill myself so they can stop wasting-”

“Stop.” Darcy said. It was a soft word, but she poured every drop of command she had into it, and it worked—Ava’s self-hating tirade came to an abrupt halt. “That’s not cowardice, Ava. Taking your own life would the worst burden you could possibly lay on them. I know right now, you’re in a place so deep and so dark that you can’t see the light, but I promise, I promise you the light is there. And there are people who care about you and who want to help you find it. Please.”

“…Why do you care?” Ava asked. It wasn’t a sullen accusation, but a genuine query.

The honest answer was ’There but for the grace of God…’ but there was no way to say as much. It was too much, too intimate, too blunt. Saying so out loud could potentially ruin the rapport she’d worked hard to build with Ava, and that was far too valuable a thing to throw away on sentiment.

She elected instead for a more roundabout answer. “…When Six was captured years ago, the results of his interrogation came straight to me. Then as now, I was the one in charge of hunting down the Hierarchy on Earth. The assault on their safehouse in San Diego was… the president may have authorized it, but it was on my advice.”

Ava blinked at her, and Darcy straightened her glasses before forcing herself to look the younger woman in the eye. “I made the call that got your parents, your friends, your entire city and millions more besides, killed. And I blame myself for every single one.”

Ava seemed to be bereft of ideas for how to respond to that. She just gawped at Darcy, who cleared her throat. It was the first time she’d ever had the chance to apologize to a survivor of her mistake, and while she’d always hoped it would be cathartic, the moment now that it had arrived was… nauseous. “I’m so sorry,” she added quietly, and swallowed down the lump in her throat. “I… should have been better.”

“You…?” That lone word seemed to exhaust Ava’s faculties for discussion and her hand fluttered around as if hoping to alight on something intelligent to say.

Darcy just nodded.

Ava stared at her for a long silent time punctuated only by the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the wall clock, and the distant thump of somebody in another apartment moving around.

Finally, at long last, she bothered to wipe the tears off her face. “…Back in Egypt, you told me that if the safe-house hadn’t been destroyed, we might already all be dead,” she said. “Do you really believe that?”

“If I didn’t… I don’t think I could live with myself,” Darcy answered, honestly.

“And you… talked to people?”

“I did. I didn’t want to, but I did… and it helped.”

“I…” Ava stared through the table then shut her eyes, gulped and nodded. “…Fine. I’ll… talk to somebody. I’ll talk to Dad.”

Darcy heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

She decided not to comment on the fact that Ava’s expression had more than a hint of gratitude in it too.

Ava for her part got up and padded through barefoot into the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“No, thank you.” Darcy stood up. “If you think you’ll be okay, I have quite a lot of work to do. This… incident is going to lead to some interesting places.”

“If…” Ava paused, holding a mug. “If there IS a copy of me out there…”

“Then we’ll have to figure out what to do about it as we go,” Darcy told her. “This is unprecedented territory we’re in, Ava. I don’t think anybody knows how to proceed.”

“…Just… do for her.. Or, uh, it… Do what you did for me, okay? I don’t think I could handle meeting…”

“I understand.” Darcy paused at the door. “Good luck, Ava. I hope if we ever meet again it’s outside of a professional context.”

“Yeah. I… thank you, Darcy. For everything.”

Darcy nodded and let herself out. Finding herself alone in the hallway outside she took a moment to express her emotions where nobody could see them, then pulled herself together.

She still had a lot of important work to do.

Date Point 10y9m AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Byron Group AAAF, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth.

Allison Buehler

Allison’s work station, Engineering, was the largest room of the three but also the most cramped. It was a crowded orderly maze of computer racks, capacitor banks, the two huge deuterium fuel tanks that fed into the fusion reactor, the solid structural plates for the aft engine arrays, the coolant pump and its bouquet of pipes, the transformer, the fuse box…

Her control station was in front of all that in a neat semicircle of display and buttons. She’d queried why they weren’t touchscreens instead and the explanation had been quite an education. It had nothing to do with technological reliability, but was all instead about human fallibility—people needed the haptic feedback of a button to assist their muscle memory. With it, they could reach out and hit exactly the right control; Without it, they couldn’t.

So, the station looked oddly low-tech despite being anything but. There was the power-balance board to her left that looked like something a sound engineer might be parked behind, the pleasantly noisy mechanical keyboard front and center, and the WiTChES field controller which was literally a videogame controller on a kind of stiff swivelling tentacle that she could grab or push out of her way as needed. It had been daunting to look at the first time she’d laid eyes on it, but months of intense daily training later she was pretty sure she could have done a good chunk of her job blindfolded and deaf.

And then there was her chair. She loved that chair. It was her chair, a bespoke bucket seat built to her measurements that folded her up comfortably and securely and in bored moments she could spin it so hard it threw her against the four-point seatbelt. She could have sat in that chair all day it was so comfortable, and thanks to its heating and massage rumble she could do so without fear of soreness or stiffness.

But that was Misfit through-and-through. She’d been refined even as she was being built, and the little customizations that fit her to her crew were everywhere, right down to a drawer handle that was in easy reach from her chair that hadn’t been back in the Box’s mock-up. The attention to detail was humbling.

“Okay baby girl, time to wake up…” she crooned as she sat down and buckled herself in. Misfit’s master power button was prominently placed in the middle at the back, right under her main monitor, which flickered through the usual wall of rapid-fire plain text as the ship booted up. Misfit yawned and stretched, bringing up her power from the most basic level subsistence to something more awake. She was still lazy and dozing but she was actually alert to commands now. Fans whirred up quietly, LEDs danced, relays and circuit breakers clicked and Allison watched all the important power bars on her left-hand monitor settle comfortably in their green zones.

She adjusted their balance slightly. Misfit liked to provide gravity throughout the whole ship by default but Allison had quickly discovered that she could turn off the G in the hab, storage, central transit, the staging room and the airlock while they were at station and save herself a lot of watts that way. They didn’t have anything on board that would suffer from a little microgravity anyway and it was all strapped down or securely stowed.

She put her headset on. “Okay. Checklist?”

”Ready when you are,” Julian replied.

“Deuterium flow control on. Check.”

”Check.”

“Virus scan, and priming fusion power.”

”Check.”

“Running CapBank diagnostic…All green.”

”Check.”

“Environmental diagnostic… green.”

”Check.”

“Cooling’s green.”

”Check.”

“Main power…” She ran a well-educated eye over the information in front of her. The GUI wasn’t exactly pretty, but it laid out all the information she needed so clearly that she could assess whether Misfit was good to go at a glance. Satisfied, she reached out to her right and slid up the cover on the fusion reactor controls. “Primed and pressurized, containment field online… start.”

Several bars shifted on her monitors as Misfit went from idling on her stored power to producing enough to run on her own. The inevitable power spike as the reaction stabilized was handily dealt with by dumping it back into the reactor’s own on-board capacitors as seed energy for the next time they turned it on.

”Check. Purring like a kitten.”

“Aaand final pre-flight diagnostic…” Text scrolled on her top-left screen and informed her that all was well. “Green.”

”Check. Okay Xiù, ready?”

”Ready.”

Allison grinned to herself as she listened to them work through the pilot’s checklist, and micro-adjusted the power to give as much of it as she could to the warp engine’s inertia compensation circuits. They were about to jump from Earth gravity to orbit over an exoplanet, that was a jolt she could do without.

That was ninety percent of her job, in fact: Predicting what was coming up next and tinkering with the power balance in anticipation. It sounded simple and even dull on paper, but in practice there was a lot of brain involved. Misfit had dozens of different systems all thirsty for power, and only a finite ability to replenish her reserves. Those reserves in turn were best kept at about eighty-five percent to give her a buffer to dump into in case of a surge, which sometimes meant starving the systems, and other times meant letting them drink their fill.

Of course, any actual flight or use of the warp drive inevitably drank energy faster than they could generate it on board, which was where the WiTChES came in, and so on and so forth et cetera.

She loved it.

”Okay!” Xiù finished. ”Goodbye, Earth. See you in a year…”

The only thing that let Allison even know they’d jumped was the dance of information on her displays and the dip in reserve power as Misfit recharged the jump engine. Back on Earth, the hangar they’d just jumped out of must still be reverberating from the bang as the air rushed into where the ship had just been, but here and now…

She switched her top-right screen to the view from behind Xiù, who was rolling them gently so that a dismal grey ball of a planet was ‘above’ them as she smoothed out their elliptical orbit into something a little less eccentric. Watching the pilot cam was enormously useful, to Allison. By watching where Xiù’s hands went as she worked, she was able to predict, pre-empt and provide her power needs with a good deal less latency. Xiù detected the extra help and raised a hand and gave her a backwards thumbs-up through the camera in thanks, then sat back, waved her finger searchingly at her instruments, and nodded satisfaction.

”Okay. Done.”

“That easy?” Allison asked. She grabbed the WiTChES controller and tacked the fields against the sunlight, anticipating that they’d be waiting a while and she could afford to charge slowly.

”Yup! Welcome to Cimbrean-five.”

”Dang. Kinda feels like we oughta celebrate.”

”Seconded.” Julian agreed. ”I’ll break out the hot chocolate and marshmallows.”

“Nice.” Allison restored gravity to the rest of the ship. “Let’s take a load off.”

They sat and talked and hung out in the hab’s cupola window as they waited for the system border patrol to find time for them. Julian spent most of that time playing around with an app that let him explore the alien star background.

With no existing Cimbrean zodiac to draw on, the astronomers at Folctha’s observatory had drawn creatively from more modern sources to name the patterns in the Cimbrean sky, hence the presence of constellations like Isambard the Engineer (so named because it looked like a stick figure wearing a tall stovepipe hat), The Fourteen Valar, and everybody’s favorite: Bruce the Bat, which was an alarmingly good match for the Bat-Signal.

It took three hours for the border patrol to finally get around to them in the form of a Dominion-made shuttle that rolled up on their port side. For some stupid reason the shuttles weren’t designed to dock with anything, so two men in familiar EVA suits space walked over, one of whom was built to a distinctive scale that made Misfit’s staging room seem much too small as the pair of them squeezed inside.

Sergeant Arés had a huge loveable smile as he took his helmet off. “Well, lookit you! Y’know, you guys are kinda my heroes?”

Julian shook his hand and let him scan for implants while his comrade—a much smaller man they didn’t recognize—scanned Allison’s head. “Us? Nah, come on-”

“Dead serious, bro.” Arés said, diplomatically ignoring the way Julian had to massage his hand after the shake. “Last time I saw you and Miss Buehler—hi ma’am—we were pulling your busted asses out of an escape pod. Ain’t even been a year and here you are, back in the saddle. That’s fuckin’ impressive, ain’t that right bro?”

The other operator nodded and offered a tight smile and an “Aye,” in a Scottish accent. He was sweeping the ship with some kind of scanner.

“Don’t mind him, he’s always that quiet. Hell, the fact he spoke at all means he likes you,” Arés said with a grin, waggling his implant scanner at Xiù. “Hi, Miss Chang.”

She tilted her head for the inspection. “Hello sergeant. How are you? How’s Baseball?”

“Pretty damn good, all told. We’ve been workin’ with Regaari some more. When he heard you were comin’ he told me to pass on a message.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He’s back on Gao right now, but he said to look up a mutual friend, uh… what was her name, Murray?”

“Myun.” The Gaori name sounded very odd in a Scottish accent.

Xiù gasped. “Myun’s on Cimbrean?” she asked. She seemed delighted.

“Apparently. I don’t know her myself. Anyway, we’d better get this inspection done. D’you have anything to declare?”

“Fifteen jump beacons.” Allison said, and indicated the black crate full of them that they’d pulled out of storage for exactly that reason.

“Gonna need to confiscate them, then. They’ll be returned when you’re back outside the shield.”

“That’s fine. Uh, look, guys it’s kinda cramped back there… I’m not sure you’ll be able to search everything.”

Adam glanced at Murray, who opened the Engineering door, glanced inside, and then shook his head with a ‘she’s right’ gesture toward Allison.

“Yeah, uh… Hmm. Can’t get in there at all, huh?”

“No’ even in my undies,” Murray said. “‘S bloody tight in there.”

“Yeah, it’s kinda crowded for me too…” Allison said apologetically.

“Dude. The sooner we hand this shit off onto the fuckin’ marines the better…” Arés grumbled. He hit the cockpit button and scratched his head at the Xiù-sized workspace. There was no way in hell either of them were going to get in there. “‘Kay, I’ll go get the drone while you inspect what you can bro.”

“Aye, sure.”

The drone turned out to be a bright red thing the same size and general shape as a cantaloupe. At Murray’s request, Allison turned off gravity everywhere except for the hab and Murray guided the ball drone through the ship on puffs of compressed air, guiding it into crawlspaces and all the other spaces where they couldn’t fit.

Allison, Julian and Xiù got out of the way and let them work. They did their exercises and Allison practiced her Tai Chi under Xiù’s tutelage before the three of them settled down to watch a movie.

Allison didn’t notice falling asleep. She just found herself with her head on Julian’s shoulder and Xiù curled up on his lap when Arés folded himself carefully halfway through the door to inform them that the inspection was complete.

It had taken them nearly three hours to finally declare that, yes, Misfit was clean and safe to proceed. The beacons were secured in a stasis crate for transfer to a safe impound outside the system shield and the end result was that they were finally slave-jumped to the orbit of the planet Cimbrean nearly seven hours after their arrival.

Arés and Murray rode in the ship with them.

“So, what actually brings you to Cimbrean anyway?” Arés asked a Xiù flew them down. “I thought you were heading out into way deep space?”

“MBG News interview,” Julian said, with a shrug. “They want us to spend a day or two being celebrities before they let us actually do our job.”

“Sucks, bro.”

“Thanks.”

”Being celebrities is our job!” Xiù called via the speakers.

“Part of it,” Allison agreed, trying to keep the sigh out of her voice. From the sympathetic look Arés gave her, she failed.

“I can relate,” he said. “The whole ’beef brothers’ thing? It’s fun but it kinda gets in the way too. I didn’t really see myself doing Public Relations stuff. Pretty cool though, I’m being tutored by Major Rylee Jackson.”

“Yeah, Rylee’s a sweetheart. She gave us some pointers too,” Allison nodded. Arés chuckled.

“Don’t think I’d get away with calling her a sweetheart…” he said.

“What, ‘cause she’s Air Force too?”

“‘Cause she’s going steady with our CO.” He glanced at Murray when the Scot cleared his throat pointedly. “…according to rumor.”

“Rumor my ass,” Julian grinned. Both the SOR men made very similar complicated shrug-and-smiles that said he was right, but…

“So, what’re you doing with today?” Arés asked.

“Playing tourist, I guess…” Allison said. “Guess you wanna catch up with Myun, huh Xiù?”

”Yup.”

“Well hey, if you want I can show you the best spots…”

Allison glanced at Julian and saw immediately that he liked the idea. “Sure! Sounds good,” she agreed.

“Awesome.” Arés had an endearing little quirk of bouncing slightly on his toes when pleased. He stopped instantly when the deck under his feet creaked in protest. “…Sorry.”

“Jesus, how heavy ARE you?” Allison asked.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“You really wouldn’t,” Murray agreed. “I canny believe it myself an’ I work wi’ the big bastard.”

”Hitting atmo in five minutes,” Xiù called.

“Gotcha.” Allison aimed her thumb back to engineering. “I better go do my thing.”

“Don’t mind us, we’re just cargo. Ain’t that right Murray?”

“Aye.”

Allison laughed and slipped back into engineering, glad that the day’s work was almost done. She was looking forward to Cimbrean. After all those months in Nebraska, a bit of socializing and sightseeing, even if it was only for a day or two, was going to feel like a well-earned vacation.

Xiù opened a private channel as soon as she was settled. ”Julian seems to really like those guys…”

“That’s good,” Allison said. “He’s not had a proper male friend the whole time I’ve known him.”

”What about Lewis and Amir?”

“He more kinda got along with them. Same goes for Kevin, Dane, Doctor Ericsson…”

”So this could be good for him.”

“I hope so.” She gave the EARS field and inertial compensation as much juice as she could spare. “Let’s get down there and find out.”

Date Point 10y9m AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada

General Martin Tremblay

“Messier Twenty-Four again…”

“Technically, it’s the same intel source. BLOWN ASH version two point oh, if you will.”

Tremblay chuckled grimly, but it was the kind of black humor that lurked at the bottom of a very deep pit of worries and alarms. Senior staff from every single little twig and branch of every allied intelligence service were writing to each other and cc-ing their correspondence to him in response to the revelation that a person’s brain could be scanned and their knowledge extracted from that scan.

It wasn’t panic, but it was certainly a storm of concern. They’d known that the Hierarchy were digitized intelligence, of course, but finding out that the scanner necessary to perform that digitization process was so small, so portable and could work at range from inside a desk…

The only silver lining he could see was that if the Hierarchy had compromised anything truly sensitive, they didn’t appear to be acting on that intelligence.

Really, there was nothing for it but to carry on as if they hadn’t. He just thanked his lucky stars that it was the brain of a well-compartmentalized girl that had been scanned, rather than somebody more informed like Darcy.

“No,” he shook his head. “Not the same. It knows things she didn’t and couldn’t. It’s clearly gathering intel, wherever it is and, um, what-ever it is.”

He glanced at the message again. He wasn’t quite sure why it made his skin crawl - it was methodically laid out, concise, thorough and enlightening. Its claims, if substantiated, laid to rest some long-standing questions about not just the Hierarchy but also about Igraen civilization as a whole and the civil war with Six’s ’Cabal’, and it included detailed means by which those claims could be proven. It was, in short, as perfect an intel resource as a message could be.

There was just something… autistic about it. The word selection, the pacing, the painstaking utilitarian accuracy of it, all of it reminded him of the talented young corporal who oversaw the mass and power balance down in the jump array. There was nothing wrong with the guy at all, in fact he was excellent at his job, but he wrote in the exact same conscientious way. He would painstakingly assemble just the bare facts and expect the reader to derive the exact same narrative from them as had the author.

This was not a trait shared by Ava Ríos herself who seemed, like most journalists, to fall into the opposite trap of hunting for a narrative among all the data to feed to the reader. Or better yet, of having a narrative she wanted to feed the reader and then hunting among the data for anything that might support it.

Lt. Col. Miller had for once turned out to be on the right planet when he was wanted which was a minor miracle in its own right. As the liaison officer between the US Air Force and the SOR he practically had an interstellar commute through the Jump Array. He was even better-placed to offer certain kinds of insight on the SOR than Powell.

“Messier Twenty-Four is a long way outside of our yard,” he commented. “Without HMS Caledonia, I don’t see how the SOR can reach it and even with Caledonia, they’re best at smash-and-run ops.”

Tremblay nodded. “They’re not appropriate. Not even remotely. We need somebody who can spend months in the field undetected.”

“Yeah, the beef trio would starve to death.”

Tremblay’s counterpart in the Pentagon, General Homer Mayfair, tapped his pen thoughtfully on the desk. He was the kind of guy who liked to listen and then interject by fast-forwarding through several minutes of conversation. “We need to resurrect the JETS team program,” he declared.

Tremblay glanced at the wall screen where his colleague’s face was projected. “JETS didn’t go so well last time,” he recalled.

“‘Cause we had no idea what we were doing,” Mayfair summarized. “We’ve got new expertise and experience now. There’s a couple of seasoned men who’re already mixed up in this from Egypt, they have experience in nonhuman situations. I’d say they’re prime candidates for pinning together a new shot at JETS.”

Tremblay rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. JETS had been Mayfair’s pet project and he’d been both embarrassed and upset when it fell through. There was always the possibility that he was sticking to his guns out of stubborn pride… but even if he was, he was right. The conception of JETS teams as special operators who were trained and capable of working in exosolar conditions was an excellent one. The execution had been… less impressive.

Tepid interest from eligible operators had been caused and exacerbated by inadequate incentives and no clear advertisement of how the JETS teams would differ from the SOR. Even when Major Jackson had gone on a late-night talk show and laid it out, interest had barely rippled. The few men who had taken the introductory stages of extraterrestrial operations training had gone on to apply those skills in the war on extremism instead.

Tremblay couldn’t blame them. It was a lot easier to take suicide bombers and hijackers seriously than it was to feel threatened by aliens whose most infamous public appearance involved being dismembered by men with hockey sticks. Especially when those aliens were up against a high-visibility force of nature like the SOR.

He scowled as he searched is memory for the details of EMPTY BELL. The intervening months hadn’t helped his memory any, and he was sooner or later going to have to admit to himself that, yes, he was an old man now. His memory really wasn’t as reliable as it had once been.

“…These would be… Coombes and Walsh?” he recalled.

“Right. I looked ‘em up just before this meeting, and Walsh is trying to get himself on the SOR highway right now. Coombes was wounded but he’s back in training. There’s a couple of other likely candidates but the problem we run into is they see JETS as just a second-rate SOR and ask why the hell they should settle for less.”

“If we can just get one team established and working, that’ll help. Especially if it’s made up of guys the community respects.”

Miller nodded. “We need to sell JETS as being… not better, but certainly as good as the SOR,” he suggested. “Stress the SOR’s weaknesses, their limitations, their logistical dependency…“

“Yeah. That’s the only way they’ll go for it,” Mayfair agreed. “It needs to be seen as a viable alternative.”

“We don’t want that to happen at the SOR’s expense,” Tremblay cautioned. “Those men are a rare breed anyway, we really don’t want to drive away candidates who could actually make the cut.”

Mayfair nodded. “Sure. It’s a fine balancing act, but we need JETS, this new intel proves that. Maybe instead of treating it as a qualification, we should take a note out of the SOR’s book and just form it as its own unit.”

“And attach them to who?”

“…Well… to the SOR.” Mayfair suggested.

“But then what do we call the current Spaceborne Operators?” Miller asked. “And how do we avoid muddying the sales pitch?”

“They already differentiate between Operators and Techs,” Mayfair pointed out.

“Gentlemen…” Tremblay gently interrupted them. “We’re in that awkward stage of a paradigm shift where we have to make shit up as we go along. So let’s focus on assembling and training one team who can go to Messier Twenty-Four. It’ll be chaos and we’ll have to work out solutions as we go but that was true of the SOR as well and if we do it right we’ll have a framework for the future. Right now I care less about how it gets done than that it gets done, eh?”

“I’ll talk it over with Powell,” Miller said. “If he were to weigh in and tell these guys what the SOR can and can’t do, it’d carry more weight.”

“Good. We’ll have Walsh, Coombes and any other strong contenders invited to Cimbrean for a training week. If nothing else it’ll be a good opportunity for the SOR to practice working with other Operators…”

“Can do,” Miller nodded.

“Alright.” Tremblay ticked that one off on his mental checklist. “On to the next thing, then… Let’s talk about this transport ship that Hephaestus want to show us…”

Date Point 10y9m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Ava was curled up on the couch when Gabe got home, and for the first time since her arrest she was looking something like herself again. She’d brushed her hair, put on some clean clothes and was lying there hugging a hot water bottle, staring distantly through the steam rising off a cup of hot chocolate on the coffee table.

He knelt—not an easy maneuver with his bad leg—to give her a fatherly kiss on her forehead, which earned him the tiniest smile.

“Cramps?”

She nodded. “And… everything.”

“Pobrecita…” Gabe sat down next to her. “But, I hear you’re off the hook.”

She nodded again, although she couldn’t possibly have looked less enthused.

“Entiendo,” he said softly, and put a hand on her head. “Tuviste una mala semana.”

She nodded and curled up on herself some more, and they sat in silence for several minutes until she took a deep breath. “Papá… Promise you won’t… can you keep a secret?”

“Por supuesto! Of course!”

“Have you… I, uh…” Gabe stroked her hair and waited. “Have I been…Am I a burden?”

“No.” Gabe shook his head emphatically. “You worry me sometimes though. You drift off and…Jess and I, we’ve been worried about you. It’s obvious something’s been eating at you for months…”

Ava shut her eyes. “…I, uh… I’ve been thinking of killing myself.”

“…Oh no.” Gabe ignored the agony in his side to gather her up into a huge protective hug “Dios mío, mija, no. Please.”

She buried her face in his shirt. “It’s not… I don’t want to and…”

“Do you… how often does…?” Gabe didn’t even know how to ask. “How long-?”

“…Since… I dunno. My second year at UCL? I think I’d just… Yeah. Just after Valentine’s day. That was the first time I thought about…” she swallowed and didn’t finish the sentence. “It’s gotten worse though. Just, like… in the last few months, since Egypt. I don’t want to have those thoughts, but sometimes when things get tough…”

“Like right now?”

She nodded, then slowly turned and hugged him round the chest, burrowing her face into his shirt. Gabe quickly became aware of spreading moisture against his ribs.

“You need me to watch out for you,” he said.

She nodded again. “I’m so sorry, Dad. I just… I feel like such a burden sometimes…”

“Burden? Eres mi hija, you know that, right? I love you like you’re my own blood.”

She nodded again. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I fucked everything up and I keep trying to make it right and I just fuck up worse, and-!”

“Sh, shh, sshhh…” Gabe hugged her close with his hand protectively around her head.

There was a long and very damp wait as she got it out of her system.

Eventually, she sat up and wiped her face off. “I saw two guys die.”

Gabe turned painfully and listened.

“I can’t talk about, like, the details, but it was in Egypt. Just, one minute they were alive, and the next…” she trailed off, and stared through the coffee table. “It took a while to sink in, but now… Now I’ll smell something, or hear a noise or see, like, just the right shade of red, and…”

“And you’re back there.”

“…Yeah…” she nodded and stared down at her fingers. “And I blame myself. Stupid little girl wanted to save the fucking world, and I got two good guys killed. And I thought…I don’t know what I thought. But after this shit with the email as well, I guess… I guess, like, I just feel useless and, and selfish! ‘Cause even when I’m not getting people killed I’m taking up other people’s valuable time, and for what?! So I can feel better about myself? Is that who I am? Just a spoiled bitch who gets in everyone’s way and hurts them? I… If that’s who I am, I don’t think I can live with myself.”

Gabe put his hand on her back. “Ava…”

“…I don’t know what to do.” She finally turned to give him the most profound look of misery Gabe had ever seen. “What do I do, Dad?”

Gabe kissed her forehead. “There are four types of people in the world who want to help you deal with your problems,” he told her,rubbing her arms. “Parents, friends, priests and therapists. Parents and friends you’ve got… What about the other two?”

“Therapist? I… is there a therapist I can talk to? I’d have to tell them about everything, and it’s all classified!”

“I can sort that out for you,” Gabe promised. “The SOR should have somebody.”

“And they’d see me? The SOR kind of… hates me.”

“Trust me. Let me sort that out. In the meantime…What about church?”

“…Uh…I haven’t been to church in…” she paused, plainly drawing a blank. “…It’s been too long.”

“It’s never too long, mija.” Gabe reassured her. “And it’ll help.”

Ava sighed, but nodded. “I guess it can’t hurt.”

“Vamos, then.”

She blinked at him. “…Now?”

“Now,” Gabe nodded, gently but firmly. “Because while you’re gone, I’m gonna make this house safe for you. I’m gonna lock up the knives, the pills, everything. And you’re gonna stay here a little while, okay? Until you feel safe. I’m gonna have to tell Jess…” Ava nodded, “…and we’ll take it one day at a time, okay?”

Ava nodded again, and hauled herself upright. “…I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too. Don’t you ever forget it.”

“I won’t,” she promised. “Ever.”

Date Point 10y9m AV
The Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

“Nervous?”

“It’s been years. The last time I saw her she was a tiny cub, and I had to run away and leave her. I keep worrying she’ll be mad at me.”

“Or she could be real glad to see you,” Allison proposed.

“Or both,” Julian added, unhelpfully.

Xiù nodded and took a nervous breath to steel herself. The Folctha commune was so new that it was still under construction but it was already a very different edifice to the one she’d lived at all those years ago. That one had been sprawling and open, airy but bustling.

With such a tiny budget of space, the commune on Folctha was a very different thing. It wasn’t quite a skyscraper, but it was still remarkably tall for a building that looked like it was built of wood. It must have been assembled around a concrete and steel core, and to judge from the dump trucks parked around its south side the builders were excavating a warren of basements. It contrived to look much smaller and more modest than it probably was.

“You’re sure you’ll be okay without us?” Allison asked.

“I’ll introduce you, I promise,” Xiù replied. “I just…” she shrugged helplessly.

“It’s okay. You don’t need to explain.” Julian looked around. “The guidebook said there’s a microbrewery in the Quarter, a couple blocks over. ET-made beer sounds like one of those things we just have to try…”

“Mm.” Allison nodded in agreement, then gave Xiù a hug. “Good luck, bǎobèi.

Xiù hugged her back, and Julian too, then squared her shoulders and started the long walk.

Part of her knew that she was being needlessly anxious, but there was no point in knowing that—it didn’t change anything. She just had to focus and the next breath, and the one after that. Keep breathing, that was the key.

The Sister serving as the commune’s front gate guard was a small one, smaller even than Xiù herself, and welcomed her with her ears up and friendly. She was barely an adult, in fact, and her fur still had that cub-like downy softness to it.

“Good evening!” she called cheerily, in English.

“Mi o!” Xiù replied, causing the sister’s ears to flick in surprise. “Ya si bäyo bì kan ushu na tò?”

“[Your accent is very good!]” the Sister observed, in delighted Gaori.

“[Thank you!]” That was uplifting news. Xiù had spent so long pretending to be a Gaoian outside of their actual company that she’d feared her accent and pronunciation were awful. Ayma hadn’t commented on it, but Ayma could be tactful to a fault. “[Is there a Sister Myun here?]”

“[Myun? Yes, she normally guards this gate, but she had her first cub last week and mother Semya is being like she always is with… well, you don’t know mother Semya, do you? I’m sorry, your Gaori is so good it’s uncanny.]”

Xiù giggled, and touched her hands together and duck-bowed, which was how she recalled a polite-but-friendly gesture of greeting between strangers. “[I’m sorry, I should introduce myself. I’m Shoo. Sister Shoo.]”

Some gestures were nigh-identical between humans and Gaoians. The guard-sister’s jaw dropped.

“[…Are you? Really?! I… that is, you do look like her, I mean you look like you, I mean…]”

Flustered young Gaoians were just too cute.

“[I was the last time I checked,]” Xiù joked, borrowing a leaf from Allison’s book. “[What’s your name?]”

“[Oh! I’m Sister Nenna. It’s… really a pleasure to meet you, I never thought I would!]”

Xiù laughed, falling easily into her best approximation of a Gaoian chitter. Somewhere in the back of her brain, a nervous little voice noted that she was finding it all too natural, but she ignored it. She was enjoying herself far too much.

“[It’s a pleasure to meet you too, Nenna. Myun and I are old friends, but I was hoping to make my visit a surprise…]” Xiù had long ago mastered the trick of suggesting the set of ears she didn’t have by inclining her head instead, and on this occasion she did her best to convey harmless mischief. There was something about harmless mischief that Gaoians, especially young Gaoians, just couldn’t resist.

“[…It has been a week…]” the Sister mused. “[And Mother Semya can’t keep her in bed forever. Knowing Myun she’ll be clawing the walls soon…]”

“[Just as full of energy as ever, then. I haven’t seen her since she was a cub…]”

“[Very full of energy…]” Nenna duck-nodded. The set of her ears suggested both exasperation and fondness. Clearly she liked Myun. Then her ears came back up into mischief mode. “[I’ll call for her, but I won’t say who her guest is…]”

“[Thank you!]”

Sister Nenna backed away and raised her paw to the communicator clipped to her ear. Xiù fidgeted and adjusted her clothes as she waited. She was feeling much less anxious now, or rather she was now anxious about different things. Myun had a cub for goodness’ sake! With Regaari! The reality of that hadn’t properly sunk in past the anxiety over the possibility that Myun would be furious with her and refuse to see her, or some equally unlikely scenario.

She wandered over onto a grassy landscape feature away from Sister Nenna and focused on her breathing. She shut her eyes and began the painstaking process of focusing her attention on each part of her body from the top of her scalp right down to the tips of her toes. With each step she tried to notice how that part of her body felt at that moment then let it be and move. It was a good technique for getting the jabbering monkey on her shoulder that wanted something to focus on to turn its manic energy towards constructive, calming ends.

She was in the middle of contemplating her knees when she became conscious of a kind of galloping, thumping noise from behind her. She had just enough time to open her eyes and start turning around, which gave her the chance to see the battering ram of excited brown fur that ploughed into her at a dead run.

Anybody who spent time around Gaoian cubs was used to being pounced on: it was their most favouritest game. Adults—especially adult females—were typically more reserved but that didn’t seem to stop this particular female who compounded her overenthusiastic high-speed tackle with being absurdly large.

The result was painful. Xiù was knocked off her feet and tumbled in a dizzying tangle down the small slope of the landscaping engulfed in soft brown fur. She fetched up flat on her back and a touch winded, being hugged furiously and keened at by a Gaoian female who was at least as tall as Julian, and nearly as heavy.

Since when did Gaoians get so big?!

“Shoo! Shoo! [You came back!]”

The Sister backed away and sniffed her vigorously, keening delight: a human would have been weeping tears of joy. “[It is you!] Shoo!”

Xiù’s impact-addled brain finally managed to see the markings around the eyes and the muzzle, but even though she recognized them it took several stunned breaths before what they meant finally settled in and she realized who she was pinned under.

“…Oh my God,” she half-laughed, incredulously. “Myun?!”

Myun duck-nodded, still keening a little. “Surprised?” she asked in remarkably unaccented English.

Xiù put her arms around her old friend and hugged her close. “…you got big!” she said.

She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Date Point 10y9m AV
Quarterside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Folctha’s Multi-Faith Center was the oldest human-built permanent structure on Cimbrean, unless you counted the repairs to the alien palace. Nearly everything else from the original colony days had been steadily replaced, demolished, paved over or moved, but the Faith Center’s unassuming wooden rotunda remained a landmark, standing in the middle of Quarterside Park.

Ava hadn’t been inside in years but the building was plainly in regular use, to judge from the worn bald tracks in the grass where people ignored the concrete path and took shortcuts over the turf.

It seemed to be silent for now, though. Sunset was coming up, the nightly rainclouds were sweeping in, and there was surprisingly little light visible through the center’s windows.

She dithered on the path outside for nearly five minutes before finally stepping up to the automatic doors, which swung open with a businesslike hum.

There were a couple of human children sitting on the beanbags in the central area with its bookshelves and vending machines, chatting with a Gaoian in monastic robes. They glanced up at her as she entered but didn’t pay much attention beyond that.

She headed for the double doors with the cross-shaped window inserts. The church was supposed to be pan-denominational but that was difficult to the point of being almost impossibility. Among other things, it was tended by the Reverend Sian Scaife, who reported to the Bishop of Cimbrean Doctor Joanne White. It was a Church of England arrangement from top to bottom which didn’t quite gel with Ava’s Catholic upbringing. The Vatican still maintained that only celibate men could be priests, so for the Christian presence on Folctha to be headed up by two married women…

Ava realized she was stressing over something that inherently didn’t matter. She was there for help, not for Papally sanctioned theology.

But the church seemed empty.

She cleared her throat. “…Hello?”

Nothing.

“Hello-o?”

The room had good acoustics which made her voice ring for a second, but that was about it.

She was still wondering what to do with herself when the door opened behind her and the robed Gaoian poked his nose through.

“All okay?” he asked.

“I was… is anybody here?”

“Reverend Scaife had to go home early. Sick daughter. Nobody usually come for her this time.” he explained, in the slightly broken English that seemed to plague Gaoians above a certain age no matter how long they’d been around humans. “Doctor White on Earth for a seminary.”

“…Oh…”

“Not seen you for a long time, Ava.”

Ava turned and studied him. “…I’m sorry, have we-? Oh! Uh… Gohan? Goten?”

“Gyotin.” he flicked an ear and chittered slightly, amused.

“I’m sorry, I-”

“Is okay. Been years for both of us…Hot chocolate?”

“Uh…”

“You look like you need talk.”

Feeling transparent, Ava nodded, but shrugged as well. “No offense Gyotin, but I’m not a Buddhist…” she glanced back at the front of the church. At some point a donor had paid for the big cruciform window to be filled with a stained glass summary of the Bible from the swirling gas and planets representing Genesis to the Gospel as shown in a panoramic view of the crucifixion on Golgotha and above that, angels. It was beautiful.

“Then not a Buddhist talk. Just old friends, catch up. Maybe scratch whatever itching you.”

Ava softened. “…Okay. Sure. I’d like that”

He duck-nodded and led the way back into the hub, where he busied himself with preparing a couple of hot drinks. Unbidden, Ava selected a beanbag and sank into it with a sigh and ran her fingers through her hair.

Gyotin settled in opposite her a couple of minutes later. He kept a small square cup of tea for himself, and handed Ava a large mug of hot chocolate, decorated with a fat pink marshmallow that was already starting to melt and spread out.

“So!” he said. “How you been?”

Ava psyched herself up with a deep breath. “…Not great, really…” she confessed. “I, uh… things are difficult right now. That’s why I came here.”

“I guessed,” he said, kindly. “You were troubled last time you were in here too…”

Ava sipped her hot chocolate just once, and then a mad rush swept her up and compelled her to set the drink down and tell him everything.

She left out the classified stuff, obviously, but he was spared nothing else—the words were just overflowing and relentless like a year’s worth of rainfall and the dam had just given way. There was no crying or stammering or self-pity this time, just a steady litany of the facts. What happened, when, how she felt about it… everything she could share was shared, and Gyotin listened to every word with his ears up and forward..

Reaching the present moment felt like running off a cliff. She wanted to keep going, but there was nothing there to draw on, and she covered for the strange floating feeling of having run out of story to tell by picking up her mug and sipping it.

It was lukewarm at best, and she instinctively pulled a face.

Gyotin made a chirruping noise that might have been something like a short laugh, and took it off her to run it through the microwave.

“I’m sorry…” she said. “I didn’t mean to-…I just…”

“No sorry,” he said. “You sorry for being burden? No burden.” He handed her the freshly reheated chocolate and sat down when she took it. “Question is, why come here? What do you want, what do you need?”

“…Advice? Help? Direction?” Ava shrugged. “Something.”

“Hmm…” Gyotin duck-nodded solemnly while his ears pricked and angled themselves thoughtfully.

“Honestly, you’ve helped just by-” Ava began. He held up a paw.

“You think you’re selfish?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You want to not be selfish?”

“Yes!”

“Then you’re not selfish.” He bared his teeth in what was definitely a cheeky grin.

Ava frowned at him. “I… but-?”

“Think. What is selfish, hmm? Is… just doing for me, yes? But you think, that’s making you unhappy, is hurting you. Why?” He chirruped again when Ava just shook her head uncomprehendingly. “Truly selfish person? Not even care. Just take take take take and never feel guilty, never feel hurt by it. So problem is not that you’re selfish, is that you’re not meeting standard you set yourself. Is that you’re confused.”

Ava blinked as she considered that. “If… you say so?”

“Okay, simpler,” Gyotin said. “When was the last time you did something just because it make somebody else happy?”

She thought about it while drinking from her reheated mug. When had she done something just for the sake of brightening somebody else’s day? Try as she might, in ransacking her memory she couldn’t recall even one occasion.

“I… don’t think I ever have,” she confessed.

“Well, there was time you pointed a confused Gao at a bookshelf…” Gyotin chittered, waving his paw between himself and the bookshelf in question. “That made me very happy, in the long race. So, you see? That’s something you can do. You just don’t do it enough, I think. You got your… what’s that word? Your priorities all muddled up. Focus too much on trying to be happy for yourself that you forget, best way to be happy is to make other people happy!”

“So I should… what, do my good deed for the day?” Ava asked, trying not to sound like a skeptical brat. “Help an old lady across the road?”

“Why not? If you get a smile out of it, good! Positive reinforcement! You keep getting it wrong when you try big gesture? Okay! So practice on small gesture!”

“But if I’m doing it just because I think it’ll make me feel better then I’m still being selfish, aren’t I?” Ava pointed out.

“So there’s bad selfish and good selfish,” Gyotin suggested. “’I want to be a better person’ is selfish, yes, but is good kind of selfish! See?” He twitched his ears self-effacingly. “Besides: By that standard then everybody is selfish.”

“If you’re going to be a selfish person, at least be the right kind of selfish,” Ava summarized.

“Exactly! Selfishly want to feel good about yourself by helping people! Selfishly want to be the best thing that happen to them all day! Selfishly want to see them smile because of you!” Gyotin chittered again. “Bite-sized pieces. You can’t go from selfish to perfect altruism in one go, so try and get the effect first and worry about enlightened motive second, yes? Crawl, walk, run.”

“I… guess that makes sense.”

“So! Who could you make happy, right now?” Gyotin asked. “Doesn’t have to be big thing! You’ve got a phone?”

“…Uh, yeah?”

“Call somebody!”

“What, right now?”

“Yeah!” Gyotin duck-nodded emphatically. “Right now! Make somebody happy right now! Is going to feel silly, but do it anyway.”

Ava opened her mouth to object, and then drew a blank on any remotely credible objection. She stared slack-jawed and stupidly at him for a stretched second, and then finally fished her phone out of her bag.

She swiped across to her favorites and sat there staring at them, completely lost for what she could say to any of them that might put a shine on their day.

“…I don’t know what to say,” she told Gyotin.

“So just call. Say hi.”

Ava blinked at the phone some more, then made a call. Charlotte picked up on the third ring. “Darling! Are you okay?”

“Uh… Honestly? I wasn’t. But, I’m feeling better now.”

”Do you want me to come over?”

“No, no. You enjoy your evening. I’m at Dad’s anyway. Are you guys okay?”

”We’re fine! Ben’s washing up and I’m watching Covenant…are you sure you don’t need me?”

To her surprise, Ava felt grateful tears spring up along with a heartfelt emotional smile. “I’m sure, Darling,” she said, echoing Charlotte’s term of endearment, “but thank you. It… means a lot.”

“…Okay, darling. If you’re sure.”

“Madre de dios, Charlotte!” Ava laughed. She caught Gyotin’s eye—he was making an urgent encouraging gesture. “…Look, seriously?” she said, “I love you. You’re my very best friend and I’m grateful for everything you do for me. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

There was a long silence and then a familiar kind of watery laugh. ”Oh, Ava… thank you. I actually really needed to hear that.”

“Go have fun with Ben. Can I come over tomorrow? I have some, uh, important things I need to tell you.”

“Darling, of course you can.”

“Good night.”

“You too.”

Ava hung up, and Gyotin applauded as best a Gaoian could considering that neither his paws nor his shoulders were entirely the right shape. “First step,” he said. “Well done.”

Ava smiled for him and examined the warm little glow that the gesture had lit in her. Even though she still felt a little fraudulent for having an entirely self-centered motive for calling Charlotte, the authentic strength of her friend’s happiness was doing an excellent job of declawing that sense of nagging shame.

Maybe Gyotin was right.

“First step,” she agreed.

Date Point 10y9m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“Oh. Oh no. No no no, this just won’t do at all.”

With Xiù away visiting the Female commune, Julian and Allison had been left to make their own entertainment. Fortunately, according to the Folctha guidebook there was a craft brewery just outside the Alien Quarter with an utterly unpronounceable name whose Vzk’tk proprietor produced truly excellent craft beer.

The guidebook had not been lying. It was highly, highly alcoholic because if ETs brewed booze at all they did so because they enjoyed the taste rather than for the intoxicants, but below the ethanol hit was a refreshing, light and fruity wheat ale that wanted nothing to do with the bitter craze for hops that seemed to have driven every brewer on Earth insane over the last twenty years.

Their Panzanella alla Cqcq was pretty spectacular too. As ways to relax on a warm summer afternoon went, it was perfect.

Almost perfect. Being accosted by a Corti who had stopped literally on the other side of the street and then sashayed across it to glare accusingly at his prosthetic foot was an intriguing condiment to the experience.

The Corti in question had stuffed his hands onto his narrow—nonexistent, really—hips and was studying Julian’s foot as if it had personally offended him.

“Uh…can we help you?” Allison asked. She sipped her beer and set it down while Julian tried to navigate his foot away out of sight under the table. The Corti moved to keep it in view.

“Oh dear, what happened? No, this just isn’t acceptable at all, no no.”

A large part of Julian wanted to laugh. It was patiently waiting its turn in line behind the larger part of him that was just confused as hell. “Uh…?”

The Corti looked up at him. “What unskilled barbaric hack did this to your leg?!”

He was speaking English, Julian realized. It was hard to tell because the natural cadences of the Directorate language weren’t far from English anyway, but this particular Corti seemed to be unusually bereft of cybernetics—there were none of the usual surface features, no delicate lines of subcutaneous circuitry, not so much as a hardline port—and while he was festooned in the usual assortment of bags and carrying pouches that were an ET’s answer to clothing he didn’t seem to be carrying a translator.

He sounded like a fashion designer. Being small and slender and narrow-chested drove his speaking voice up well into soprano territory, which combined with the characteristically clipped and precise Corti manner of speaking to give him the general air of an English hipster. Though, with mercifully less ’swish’.

“…Did… what, now?” Julian asked. “Blew it off, or-?”

“No no no,” The Corti flapped a hand irritably. “What savage bolted this… this crime onto you?! Oh, dear…”

Allison laugh-coughed around her beer and came up with a white foam mustache. Julian felt the need to stick up for his foot. “Y’know, that thing’s about the most sophisticated prosthetic ever given to a human being…” he pointed out.

“You poor thing.”

Julian cleared his throat. “Well,” he commented laconically, “When the original was blown half-open, then crushed, then sawed off the rest of the way without anaesthetic, I wasn’t in much of a position to complain about the replacement.”

“Ugh, how horrid.”

No. Not a hipster. Like Anthony Daniels playing C-3PO, and with just as much distracted disingenuousness.

“Look, do you want something, or…?”

“Or do you just have a foot fetish?” Allison asked.

“Well, not for this foot!” the Corti exclaimed. “Oh goodness me, no.”

Allison and Julian quirked their eyebrows in unison.

“What. Do. You. Want?” Julian asked.

The Corti straightened up and looked him in the eye for the first time. “Did you know that the human genome contains a number of latent DNA sequences which enable the regeneration of amputated limbs?”

“I did, actually. And they’re latent, which suggests it’s probably best they stay that way.”

“Thinking like that just gets in the way of progress. Surely you’d rather have a nice healthy human foot rather than this-?”

“Lemme stop you right there.” Julian gave the little grey irritant his best annoyed look. “I ain’t your guinea pig, pal.”

“You were somebody’s-” the Corti gestured at the foot, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was treading on some sore mental ground.

“Yeah, I was. Six years. Planet Nightmare.”

“…Oh. Oh my.” Difficult though it was for pale grey skin to blanch, the Corti somehow managed it.

“Yeah.” Julian growled. “So take yer Doctor Freakshow science bullshit and shove it.”

“Oh, very well.” The Corti made to leave, breaking visual contact with the foot as if it physically pained him to do so. “But if you ever reconsider my office is just-”

“Are you bothering my friend, Nofl?”

It was news to Julian that he was friends with the new arrival—she was by a wide margin the biggest Gaoian he’d ever seen and absurdly she was carrying a sword, as if she needed one. She flexed a paw at ’Nofl’, flashing a set of claws that would have done a Harpy Eagle proud. She was such an impressive sight that it was easy to miss Xiù standing in her shadow for a second.

“Ah. Sister Myun. No, I was just, ah…”

Xiù’s not-so-tiny ‘tiny cub friend’ bared her teeth at him, and Nofl cleared his throat. “Yes! Well! Best of luck in your future endeavors mister, um… Anyway.”

He mumbled something and made himself scarce with all the catlike dignity that Corti mustered when they didn’t want to look like they were running away.

The moment he was gone, Myun ceased to be a looming barge of shaggy fur and fangs and instantly became something much less threatening. She practically bounced at the opportunity to sit down next to Allison as if they were the oldest and bestest friends ever. “Hi!”

Allison gave her a wary look “Uh… hi? Wow, uh… from Xiù’s description I was kinda expecting you to be, uh… Less, uh…”

“Huge?” Myun chittered, which was an oddly high-pitched sound to come out of such a massive creature. “I grew up. It’s a thing that happens.”

Xiù sat down with an embarrassed smile. “I didn’t even recognize her.”

Julian gave her a sidelong hug. “Five years in stasis. I guess it’s- you okay?”

Xiù had winced, but she waved his concern off with a goodnatured smile. “She tackled me like she was still a cub!”

“I waited years to finally be good enough to knock you on your butt!” Myun chittered again. “Sister Shoo taught me how to fight,” she added with superfluous enthusiasm.

“I never imagined you’d get so big though!” Xiù shook her head. Myun duck-nodded enthusiastically, though if Julian was any judge the set of her ears was a smug one.

“Mama Ayma used to tell me off for eating so much,” she crowed.

“And Mother Yulna would sneak you second helpings when she wasn’t looking,” Xiù recalled. “I remember. I guess I should have seen this coming, but… wow!”

“Well, it’s, uh… nice to meet you.” Julian cleared his throat. He hadn’t met many Gaoians before, and the few he had were all dark silver brindle specimens about Xiù’s size. Myun was a chocolate hulk with a luxuriant tuft of fluffy white fur in the middle of her chest. Xiù had never mentioned that they came in such variety.

To judge from her slightly stunned expression, Xiù hadn’t known either. Then again, she had been an honored guest, living a fairly cloistered life in just one commune and moving in fairly select circles. There were two whole planets full of billions of Gaoians out there, and millions of expatriates. If an alien visitor to Earth had spent their whole time confined to Washington DC and visiting the White House, they could probably never have inferred the existence of, say, Māori rugby players, the Maasai people or even just an average American redneck.

“Its nice to meet you too,” Myun replied, making a kind of low trilling noise in her chest that was probably an expression of happiness. It wasn’t quite a purr, but it was close. She wriggled closer to Allison. “Shoo said you both make her very happy!”

Julian saw Xiù go a little pink, but she nodded. “And she makes us happy,” he replied, which made Xiù’s happy glow deepen a few shades.

Allison nodded, though she was looking a little crowded by the huge Gaoian.

Myun’s almost-purr intensified and she downright snuggled into Allison. It was a heck of a reminder that Gaoian concepts of personal space were different.

“Thank you,” she said, surprisingly softly considering how bullishly affectionate she was being.

“It’s… uh, there’s nothing to thank us for…”

Xiù said something in Gaori and Myun distinctly whined, but she relented when she saw the expression being levelled at her and backed down. Julian reflected that Xiù seemed to have slightly different body language when interacting with Gaoians. She moved her head in slightly strange ways, angled her body differently. It was identical to Gaoian body language if you ignored her shortcomings in the ear department.

For her part Myun grumbled something in a strangely high-pitched tone and gave Allison some space again. Xiù laughed.

“I’m not a mother, Myun,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Yet?” Myun asked, looking suddenly eager. She leaned over and snuffled Julian with her impressive nose. “You smell of each other… have you been mating?”

It was Julian’s turn to feel a little overwhelmed. “I, ah…uh, sorta. But-”

“I knew it!” several heads turned as Myun sat up and chittered triumphantly.

“It’s not mating, Myun-” Xiù had gone crimson as she hastily batted her friend’s arm to try and get her to quiet down. Several nearby human diners hastily covered their mouths and looked away.

“Oh, right. You told me about this. Humans just have sex without the babies, don’t you?”

“Myun, for fuck’s sake-!” Xiù rarely swore, but Julian couldn’t blame her. A nearby diner had outright hidden his whole face behind a napkin and his shoulders were heaving. Fortunately, it got through Myun’s enthusiasm enough to make her look around and take stock.

“…Did I say something wrong?”

Allison sighed. “I’ll go pay the bill,” she said, and stood up abruptly.

Myun watched her go with her ears at an uncertain angle and whined quietly. “…I upset her?”

“Allison likes her privacy,” Julian explained. “Most humans do.”

“Myun, how long have you been living here? You really should know by now that there’s some things we don’t just… shout about in public.”

“Why not? A lot of the people here had sex recently, I can smell it. Why are you so… what?!”

Every human in earshot had gone very still and awkward, and Xiù was giving her a full-blown glare.

Julian cleared his throat. “Maybe you two should go have this conversation in Gaori somewhere less, uh…”

“Less here,” Xiù finished. “Come on, Myun.”

“But-”

“Myun.”

The enormous Gaoian whimpered again and got up hang-headed. “Yes, Mother…”

They vanished toward the commune with Xiù somehow managing by body language alone to manage the neat trick of looking much larger than her old friend. Julian was left alone at their table with his beer and several people pointedly not looking at him.

Fuck it. Refuge in audacity time. He drained the last of the beer. “Well that was an education…”

It wasn’t great, but it broke the ice enough. Several of the nearby people laughed and relaxed, and there was a sudden sense that, having all shared the same moment of mortification, everybody got a little bit more open.

The man who’d hidden his face behind the napkin leaned over. “So… Erm, are you really Julian Etsicitty?”

Julian nodded self-effacingly. “For my sins. I’m sorry about our friend, there…”

“No, no, not at all. Erm… look, I’m sorry to ask but would it be okay if I could take a picture or something?”

“Sure!” Julian scooted over to their table and caught Allison’s eye as he did so. She hesitated, then joined him. A few other people drifted over from nearby groups and pretty soon tables were rearranged, beers purchased and a surprisingly natural and normal impromptu party took shape. By the time Xiù returned a few hours later without Myun, somebody had fetched a guitar and that led to Julian, well lubricated with the beers that people were buying him, being pressed into doing some impromptu karaoke.

His version of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” went down a storm. Somebody else sang “Star of the County Down”, Allison apologetically explained that she was entirely tone-deaf especially when drunk, Xiù was eventually coaxed into a passable rendition of Sixpence None The Richer’s “Kiss Me”…

Eventually, Cimbrean’s predictable nocturnal rain came along to break them up but by the time it did they were happily drunk, had scrawled their signatures on lots of things including a photo to go up behind the bar, had chatted, laughed and sang themselves hoarse and probably created a town legend that would make people who weren’t there jealous for years to come.

The quiet of the cab back to the starport was a shock to the system.

Allison was the first to break it. “Wow…” she murmured

Julian put his arm around her waist. “Y’okay?”

“Yeah!” there was a definite tipsy slur in Allison’s voice. “I actually enjoyed that!”

“You didn’t sing!” Xiù mock-pouted, barely holding back a laugh. She was a happy drunk and had enthusiastically dived into every selfie she could reach.

“Pff.” Allison waved an uneven hand. “Y’really don’ wan’ me to.”

“Come oooon, bad Karaoke is th’best Karaoke!”

“It was a guy with a guitar, no’ Karaoke!”

“He was great!” Julian enthused. “How does one guy know all those songs?”

“Magic…” Allison rested her head back and sighed happily. “…I really enjoyed that.”

They drunkenly enthused about their night all the way back to the starport, all the way back into the hangar, up Misfit’s ladder and fell into a happy tipsy triple cuddle on the bed with an unsteady “wu-ah!” from Julian as the girls dragged him down.

“Whooah, we haven’ bin drunk in… ‘ow long?” he asked, wriggling comfortably into place between them.

“Months,” Allison reckoned. “Not since, uh…. back at your grampa’s place? Izzat right?”

“Feels like years… right Xiù? …Xiù?”

Xiù woke up enough to mumble something affirmative and nod, then fell asleep again, burrowing a little more into his chest. He chuckled softly and turned his head to point her out to Allison, but Allison too had put her head down and looked to be already out of contact with the waking world.

He chuckled to himself, kissed them both fondly and then put his head back and joined them in closing his eyes on a very good day.

Date Point 10y9m AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Children screamed. It was a fact of life—babies screamed when they wanted a teat, the older children’s games regularly inspired ear-stabbing shrill squeals for no reason that adults could determine and either way the tribe knew the cadences of those screams as background noise and largely ignored them.

This scream was neither of those. This one was a chorus of terrified children in mortal peril, and it coincided with a horrible roar unlike anything Vemik had ever heard. As soon as it rang out the men stopped what they were doing and ran with their spears and axes ready to descend like living murder on whatever had made the mistake of threatening the young ones.

They found the three who had made that scream all still alive and well, thank the gods, huddled together a short distance outside of the village. All three were soaked and trembling, and the air was still heavy with a steamy drizzle of strangely hot water that was thick enough to plaster Vemik’s crest to his scalp and spine as he looked around for a threat.

The only thing out of the ordinary was the water, though, and when nothing more dangerous than an impromptu rain on a clear sunny day showed its head, the men slowly relaxed. Spears were lowered and leaned on, hand axes were put back in pouches, and quiet jokes and trills of amusement flitted around the group, dispelling the tension.

The oldest of the three was Vemik’s nephew Yatak, who was soaking wet and still wide-eyed, but had calmed down now that the tribe’s men were around. He stood up and tried to scrub the water out of his crest, and several of the men chewed down their smiles as the boy made an elaborate show of having never really been scared. Yatak was old enough to want to be a man, but still young enough to think that men were never scared of anything.

Vemik decided to let him have his dignity and sat down next to him. “What happened?” he asked.

“The water roared and jumped in the air!” Yatak claimed, pointing at the offending pool.

They had already discovered that the standing pools of water in the High Forest were hot, some of them hot enough that when Yamma had dipped her hand in to drink she had yelped and leapt away shaking her hand from the pain, and the blisters had taken a few days to heal.

This one was usually cool enough that the adults didn’t mind for the children to play near it. Right now it was rough on the surface and turbid where usually it was serene, still and clear.

Vemik had absolutely no idea how to reply to the accusation though. “That’s… I see. Hmm.”

He got up and took his time in approaching it, alert for any grumblings or burps in the ground that might herald a repeat of what Yatak described. He licked a finger and dabbed experimentally at the surface of the water, then winced and backed off. It was much hotter than usual, nearly hot enough to cook in.

“Do you believe him, Sky-Thinker?” Yan asked.

“You said just yesterday this mountain is strange enough to baffle the gods,” Vemik replied, pondering the lake. The middle of it was bubbling, just like the water in a pot did when hot rocks from the fire were dropped in.

“Fire that flows like water, water that’s hot like fire, stinking air from the lakes, and now the lakes try and jump into the sky,” Yan grumbled. “Everything about this place wants to be something else.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t ’mm’ me, Sky-Thinker. You can see why nobody lived here.”

Vemik looked at the big Given Man and twitched his ear slightly in a gesture that was both apologetic and not.

“…Sorry,” Yan relented after a second. “I’m just not like you, Sky-Thinker. I don’t like what I don’t know.”

“You don’t like pretty much everything then, Yan,” Vemik said, then realized that what he’d said could be taken as an insult and held up his hands straight away as Yan scowled at him. “Not… You know plenty. You know more than me! But I think the number of things we don’t know is so large that even the man who knows more than anybody else still knows almost nothing.”

“Sky thoughts,” Yan spat, and sighed. He came to stand by Vemik on the lakeside. “No fish in these waters,” he grumbled.

“No Yshek, either.”

“Must you always have a reply like that ready? Let a man complain in peace!”

Vemik trilled and scrubbed some more water out of his crest. Yatak and the men were heading back toward the village. “…I have a question,” he asked, as soon as they were alone.

“Ask.”

“I gave some thought to how long we can hide up here.”

“Two or three hands of years maybe,” Yan estimated, flexing the three thick fingers on his left hand for emphasis. “Four at most, before we must find another tribe and trade daughters.”

“One at most,” Vemik corrected him.

“Don’t be silly, Sky-Thinker, we can last more than one hand…”

“Not one hand. One year. We may have escaped the death-birds, maybe. But what about all the other tribes? When they and whatever it is that follows them wipe out the other tribes, who will we swap daughters with then?”

Yan punched his own head. “Stupid,” he chastised himself.

“No, you’re not stupid. But you don’t sky-think, Yan.”

Yan sighed. “…this is why the men are looking to you, you know,” he said in grumbling tones. “You see further than most. Even your father lets you lead these days.”

Vemik slipped around that uncomfortable observation. “The Singer needs an apprentice, too. Sooner rather than later,” he said.

“Then why even wait a year?”

“Because the cold season is coming and we have a village to build, and maybe other villages to start building ready for other tribes. And I want to train a boy to make bird-spear throwers. And we need to find where the Werne are around here and mark the trails and-”

“Yes, yes. I see.” Yan grumbled again. He stooped, picked up a rock and tossed it into the water where it made a thick slap-BLOUNK noise. “…These are strange times. Birds of rock and lightning, lakes that leap into the air, young men leading the old. What next?”

There was a kind of burping noise from deep under their feet and the bubbling out in the middle of the lake stopped. With their instincts humming danger at them, both men took several careful steps back and Vemik watched as the water out in the middle actually dipped and sloshed.

He became conscious of an increasingly loud noise coming from the earth below them that he couldn’t quite describe. It was like rain on a hut roof, but… fiercer, somehow. Angrier. They backed away some more and Vemik was about to propose they shelter behind a tree when the water bulged, surged upwards and a white plume thrust high into the air with an enormous roaring hiss. Hot mist dropped on them and soaked them both, and the high forest’s distinctive taste intensified hugely as the cloud swept over them.

Yan spat and scraped water off his arms. “…What,” he demanded, “was that?!”

“…I don’t think you should throw rocks in there any more,” Vemik decided as he shook himself off. “There must be something living in there that doesn’t like to be disturbed…”

Yan cast an alarmed look at the water. “We angered something?”

“Maybe. It’s probably harmless if we stay out of the water, but…” Vemik began.

“Maybe we should leave some food for it,” Yan finished.

“Good idea. Though… hmm. Perhaps it’s-”

“Sky-thinker…!” Yan protested, in charitably tolerant but exhausted tones.

“…Fine, fine…”

Come on. We have a village to build.”

Vemik cast a longing glance back at the jumping lake and followed him.

Their campsite—it was much too early to start calling it a village, yet—was abustle with people listening to Yatak’s increasingly outlandish account of what they had just heard. They looked to Vemik and Yan as they returned and Vemik had to spend several minutes diplomatically scaling back the boy’s exaggerations before he finally got the chance to catch up with the Singer and get her insight.

She was carefully packing a pot full of hot ashes and poisonous Talo roots. After a few days she would hang the roots in her hut, and sometimes she would give one to a young woman to chew on. She had declined to share why, insisting that it was women’s magic, and had trilled laughter when he’d asked if he could chew one.

“No, no. Trust me Sky-Thinker, it wouldn’t do anything for you,” she’d said.

Vemik had dropped it. He knew his burning need to understand everything had its limits in that there was so much everything, and it was common knowledge that men didn’t really understand women’s magic anyway.

Then again, very few women understood male magic.

“All safe?” she asked on his approach. She gave him that smile, the one that did funny things in his chest. The one that seemed to be only for him.

“Safe enough, I think.” He sat down next to her. “The mountain is so strange…”

“So how much truth is there in little Yatak’s claim that the lake tried to fly?”

“Some.” He mimicked the eruption he’d seen with his hands. “It went ‘SPLOORSH-SSSSS!’ and spat water as high as the treetops after Yan threw a stone in.”

They paused and listened as the noise of the angry lake swept across their campsite again.

“…Like that.”

“Have you looked at the rocks?” The Singer asked.

“I have! They’re very strange. They’re sort of… folded up aren’t they?”

“They look like guts,” she said, bluntly.

“I wasn’t going to say it.”

“I’m not a wet-eyed girl, Sky-Thinker. I know you remember the day of my trial of manhood.”

Vemik nodded. She’d taken the trial of manhood a few moons before him. It had been an important part of her training as the Dancer, to spend some time living as a man, hunting like a man. The tattoos around and between her eyes permanently marked where she had anointed herself with the blood of her prey, just like Vemik and all the other men did whenever they made a kill. They were a lifelong reminder that she stood as the bridge between male and female and had practiced the magic of both, as were the two Werne-blade knives she wore over her heart just like Vemik’s.

“I remember you brought back a bigger Werne than Yafek’s. I don’t think he’ll ever quite forgive you.”

“It’s not my fault he’s less of a man than I am,” she said, with a smile that was equal parts evil and smug.

“Even if that’s true, he isn’t as pretty.”

The Singer stifled a high trill and finished wrapping the pot in hides. She put it in the hole she had dug and started scooping earth back on top of it, obviously pleased at the compliment. Vemik awarded himself a victory.

“…Where were we?” she asked as she pressed the dirt firmly down.

“The rocks.”

“Yes. Hmm…. the rocks near the old village were like a pile of hides,” the Singer said, gesturing with her hands to suggest layers stacked on top of one another.

“And these ones look like guts. And the water is hot, and it smells, and the ground moves sometimes and makes noises and my father said one of the caves further up the slope had wind coming out of it. I think this whole mountain is alive.”

“It’s the only hiding place we have…” the Singer pointed out.

“Then we had better be respectful and hope that it likes us.”

“The moon will be balanced in three nights…” she pointed out. “If you could hunt a really big Werne and bring it back by then…”

“An offering.” He nodded understanding. “I can do that. We need to mark the trails anyway, this is a good chance to do two useful things at once.”

“Thank you. I’d come with you, but…” she waved a hand to indicate the whole campsite and all the people who needed her.

“It’s okay. Is there anything else I can do?”

“No, no. Well… I’m thirsty?”

He handed her his waterskin with an amused noise. It was nice and full and cool and she drank almost half of it, and gave him an apologetic look once she was sated.

He took it back off her. “You’ll be no use to the tribe if you fall down dead from working too hard…” he cautioned.

“I know… But you help. Thank you.”

Vemik put an arm around her and they touched foreheads. “Call for me if you need me,” he promised. She nodded and smiled, and let him go.

Vemet was waiting outside her tent as he stepped outside. Something about the air on the mountain wasn’t agreeing with him and he had been constantly nursing a headache ever since they arrived, for which the only thing that seemed to work was her infusion of Nafi leaves and Ketta sap. He gave his son a welcoming clap on the shoulder.

“Don’t keep her all to yourself,” he teased.

Vemik made an amused noise, but didn’t bite. Vemet had been dropping hints about a grandchild ever since they reached the high forest, and Vemik was deriving some small enjoyment from keeping him guessing.

Besides, they had more important things to do right now. “I’m going on a hunt,” he said.

“Right now?”

“We need an offering for the mountain and we need to scout the trails. Would you come with me?”

“Hmm. It might do my head some good…” Vemet mused. “Yes, I’ll come. Just let me get my…”

The Singer threw open her tent flap and handed him an aromatic steaming beaker with a patient look. “Go,” she ordered.

Vemet trilled softly, knocked back his medicine in a single eager slurp and went to fetch his spear and knives. Vemik handed the beaker back to the Singer.

“I’ll see you when we get back,” he promised.

“Hunt well.”

“Always.”

He fidgeted with one of the pouches on his belt as he turned away. He had all the beads he needed, the only thing he was missing was two matched trophies to hang with them and once he had those he’d have a finished pair of pledge necklaces.

He could hardly wait.

Date Point 10y9m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Major Owen Powell

“Mister Arés to see you, sir.”

“Cheers, Corporal.”

Powell stood as Gabriel Arés limped through the door. The poor bloke’s disability was getting worse with time despite Gabe’s best efforts at rehabilitation, and he had to wonder when the day would eventually come when it finally beat him.

If his son was anything to go by, that day was most likely still far off. Still, he sank gratefully into the seat opposite Powell’s desk as soon as hands had been shaken and pleasantries exchanged.

“It’s not often you pay me a personal visit,” Powell noted.

“Your office is a son of a bitch for a crippled ancíano to even reach,” Gabe replied, with a self-effacing chuckle. “That’s why. But this is important.”

“Summat to do with your son?”

“My daughter, actually.” Gabe’s body might have been slowly giving up but there was nothing wrong with his wits, or his shrewd dark eyes. “I know, I know, you don’t like her much, but hear me out.”

Powell cleared his throat uncomfortably. “I’m sorry if I-”

Gabriel tapped his cane once, dismissively. “If the day ever comes when I try to police what you’re allowed to think about people, please lead the armed uprising,” he interrupted. “But she needs help.”

“And what help can I give that she needs?”

“I’m guessing you either have a therapist here on base, or have access to one, who’s in on DEEP RELIC?”

“…Aye, we do. Lieutenant Mears, Royal Navy. His office is four doors down thataway.” Powell aimed his thumb at the wall.

“Good. I want her to have access to him.”

“Done.” Powell nodded.

This seemed to surprise Gabriel, who blinked at him. “I was… expecting some resistance.”

Powell chewed his cheek thoughtfully for a second as he thought. “Look… If she needs to see Mears, I can fookin’ sympathize,” he said. “I don’t mind admitting that I go an’ see him pretty often myself. I’m not some pig-headed bastard who’ll block her getting needed treatment out of spite. If you say she needs it… well, I trust you. ”

Gabriel sighed. “Es justo. That’s fair.”

“Sorry if it’s not exactly a glowing sentiment, but… well, I look out for my Lads.”

Gabriel stretched his wounded side slightly and nodded. “Adam’s lucky. He’s got two father figures.”

“I, er… can’t exactly get that close with ‘em…” Powell demurred.

“There’s fathers and fathers.” Gabriel shrugged. “It’s a shame you’re not a parent yourself—I think you’d be a good one.”

“We all make our choices, mate,” Powell told him. “An’ we have to live wi’ the consequences.”

“There’s nothing wrong with regret, you know.”

“Sure there is. Means you went wrong in the first place.”

“Don’t you believe in redemption?”

“No.” Powell shook his head. “I believe in healing, an’ in movin’ on older an’ wiser. But redemption? Absolutely bloody not. If you make the bed then you have to fookin’ well sleep in it, and you don’t get to pretend you never did.”

Gabriel nodded sadly, and then heaved himself upright with a groan. “Thank you,” he said.

“I’ll let Mears know to arrange that appointment,” Powell replied, rising to shake his hand. Gabe nodded, patted him on the upper arm, and limped out in a more sombre mood than he’d arrived.

Once he was gone, Powell sat back down and ran his palm down his face. He liked Gabriel and respected him on the whole. They’d had a good professional relationship for… about six years? Something like that. And it was hard not to sympathize with a man who had so much love for his children, even if one of those children wasn’t actually his own flesh and blood. He hated to sadden him.

He fired off a quick email to Mears, who was on Earth for the week attending some kind of certification course, then checked his diary. He had PT with Warhorse in an hour, a meeting with Lt. Col. Miller after that, and then a fitting and measuring session with Kovač and the suit techs.

Time to catch up on his messages. And if some of those messages were accurate, his job was soon to become much more complicated…

Date Point 10y9m1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Adam—he’d point-blank refused to let them call him ’Sergeant Arés’—was managing to make Xiù feel very lucky indeed for her own relationship with Allison and Julian. He was exhausting.

They’d been invited on a kind of triple-date. It wasn’t anything formal, just dinner and drinks at a nice apartment south of the river, and already she was feeling overwhelmed by him and she wasn’t even his date. One of his buddies, a walking mountain called Christian who was pure charm and friendliness once you got past the aura of visceral threat he had no choice but to project, was taking him under his wing and teaching him some life skills.

From the look of things, Adam was a tricky student. It wasn’t just that he paid excruciating attention to every detail of the excursion, it was that he paid excruciating attention to the wrong details and managed to somehow miss some important ones like, say, his date.

Fortunately, Natalie—a bubbling British chick with what must have been about the thickest skin in the cosmos—was indulging his micromanagement with a wry smile, but she privately admitted while he was absent tending to some thoughtful detail that she considered Adam to be “lots of fun, in small doses.”

“I mean it’s nice, but I’ve been to weddings where the place settings were less, erm…” she waved a hand to indicate the immaculately arranged table. There were napkins, which had been folded into clean little pockets in which the cutlery was nested. The music was a selection of good songs, at the perfect volume to not interfere with conversation. There was a condensation-beaded jug of cold water with a couple of lemon slices in it. It wasn’t extravagant, but it did feel painstakingly conscientious. There was a spark of spontaneity that was noticeably lacking.

Fortunately, Julian had found the perfect way to bring some warm disruption to the table—he’d removed his foot and was busy repairing it. It had suffered badly from his game of soccer with Adam and Christian earlier in the day, and the little island of chaos he’d made as he maintained the prosthesis was quite welcome.

“Weddings, Christ. Not been to a wedding since I was yea high,” he commented, waving a hand at about tabletop-height.

“I was even smaller at the last one I went to…” Xiù mused.

“Oh God, you must have been the cutest child…” Allison realized.

“No comment,” Xiù teased, and sipped her water. Her presiding childhood memories were actually of skinned knees, perpetual bruises, and that one time she’d tried to do twenty back handsprings down the school hall, lost her bearings and suffered a greenstick fracture when she slammed into a wall. She had cleaned up quite well for the wedding, though.

Christian’s date, Freya, was pretty much a human Myun with much better-developed social graces and the broadest streak of pleasant confidence Xiù had ever met. Where Natalie had danced around the issue of just who she was sitting down to dinner with and had basically done everything in her power to pretend she wasn’t fangirling out, Freya hadn’t bothered to hide it. She’d shown up with a sharpie and a photo frame for them to sign, taken a selfie and then left it at that. It was a simple, uncomplicated and straightforward approach that had immediately won her a friend in Allison.

“Last wedding I went to, the drinks were in an old bathtub full of salt water and ice cubes,” she chuckled. “This is way fancier.”

This earned more laughter, and they made small talk like that for several minutes until a sizzling from the kitchen suggested that the salt slab had warmed up and was now in use. Sure enough, only minutes later the two enormous chefs emerged bearing smiles and plated rib-eye steaks with spiced sweet potato wedges and an avocado green salad.

It was all divine, and the evening was generally pretty relaxed even if they were treated to spectating some more of Adam’s attempts to be the most perfect date. He got better as the night went on and even managed to relax and get out of the mindset of making everything as super perfect as he possibly could.

Sadly, they had to wrap it up early and relatively sober. Misfit’s itinerary called for a jump back to the Cimbrean-5 customs beacon to recover their impounded stuff in the morning but it was a pleasant way to round off what had effectively been a brief vacation.

Naturally, the topic of choice in the cab back to the spaceport was their host’s prospects.

“Poor guy,” was Allison’s opinion. “I kinda get the impression he’s new to dating.”

“Lot of fun, though. I had a great time today,” Julian said.

“You spent most of it getting thrown around like a football,” Allison pointed out. She’d been on edge the whole time as they watched him kick a ball around and wrestle (or rather, be wrestled by) men who were so much larger than him it had been like watching a labrador merrily chase a couple of tanks. Xiù, whose lifetime of practising Gung Fu, Taiji, gymnastics and ballet had given her slightly more insight into how people moved had instantly spotted Adam and Christian’s incredible poise. Both men were so utterly in control that Julian had been perfectly safe to roughhouse with them, and he knew it as well.

Worrying about something less than Allison did had been an interesting experience.

Julian grinned, a little apologetically. “Been a long time since I hung out with guys my age,” he said.

“…Shit, yeah. I guess it has,” Allison conceded. “And you didn’t really do stuff like that with Lewis or Amir, did you?”

“They weren’t exactly the physical type…” Julian sighed. “It’s weird, you don’t really appreciate something simple like just playing ball with a couple guys until you haven’t done it in years.”

“Glad you got the chance?”

“Yeah.”

The conversation ended there as they arrived at the spaceport, and they lingered in the hangar doorway to look out across the concrete and take in the town’s lights around them.

“…I’m going to miss Cimbrean.” Xiù decided. There was something so different about it compared to Earth, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“We’ll be back. Resupply in nine months, remember?”

“I’m still going to miss it.”

“…Me too.”

“Yeah.”

They stood in silence then shook themselves, headed indoors, and went to bed.

They had a long job ahead of them.

Date Point 10y9m1d AV
Celzi Alliance command facility, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars

Warmaster Trez Ekrat

There was still far too much yellow in the volumetric strategy map, but that was why seeing one important marker blink and turn blue felt so… satisfying.

That marker represented a class six temperate world so newly colonized that the Dominion’s supine bureaucracy hadn’t even approved a formal name for it, yet. It still appeared on the Dominion’s star charts as ’DTC-whitesquare-44170-T6’.

On Alliance star charts, its name translated to something equivalent to ’Fertile Flood’, a name that sounded strong in Celz’ (Zrefn Delc’) and poetic in Qininis (Nisiqithathe). In most regards it was an unremarkable planet with nothing much going for it, other than one valuable feature: An enormous flood plain network where several river deltas met and crawled across thousands of square kilometers of incomparably fertile soil under warm temperate sunlight with predictable weekly rains.

Upon taking receipt of the planet, its owners had promptly stripped that biome every scrap of native flora and introduced alien feed crops like Cqcq and Rhwk. From the mountains to the ocean, every square meter of an area the size of a moderate country was farmland, tended by ten million drones.

The Alliance needed that food. Their existing agricultural infrastructure only barely met the demands of a swelling population that had bred in expectation of a war of expansion onto the fertile unclaimed worlds around them, and had instead found themselves confined to a dense knot of planets when the arrival of humans had compelled a ceasefire.

A ceasefire that had finally ended, thanks to the baffling decision by a Dominion fleetmaster to plunge suicidally deep into Alliance territory and blow up a communications relay station.

Warmaster Ekrat didn’t know the term ’straining at the leash’, but he had been doing it nonetheless. By the time the Alliance council realized that they could postpone their unpopular plans for rationing and instead had the chance to annex an already established farming colony, Ekrat’s plans had been drawn up, his troop carriers loaded, his patrol ships recalled and his assault poised.

He’d even completed the lengthy process of preparing a space station for transit, and the anchorage ’Light Spike’ had jumped into orbit around Fertile Flood three days after the order was given to invade, punctuating a swift and utterly effective annexation. With its firepower, long-range defensive shields and repair facilities in place the Alliance fleet had a new base of operations so strong that the Dominion would have almost had a better prospect of evicting them from Crzlrfek.

The question before him now was…

“Where next?”

Ekrat turned. His Qinis logistics-master, Vasi Thal, was pondering the strategic map with a finger resting lightly on his lips and his ears twitching this way and that as he thought. Despite being as thin as a grass stalk he cut an impressive figure wearing an ornate black uniform with sombre steel trim and a dozen tiny iridescent chains that clipped to his ears and whispered like a silver breeze at the slightest movement.

“That’s for me to decide,” Ekrat told him.

“Counsel, Warmaster?”

“Of course.”

“Our first objective should be to consolidate our hold on Nisiqithathe. We need to secure the access to that system so that the colony’s food products can be delivered back to the core worlds.”

“An objective that will most easily be achieved by threatening other Dominion colonies and bases in this region,” Ekrat agreed. He brought up his long, dextrous tail and gestured into the heart of the map display, picking out the markers that indicated Dominion facilities in and near the border stars. “We can keep them on the defensive.”

Thal looked uncomfortable. “When you say ’threatening’…?”

“Ah. So you have heard my reputation.”

Thal cleared his long throat. “Is there any truth to it?”

“Some.”

“How much.”

Ekrat snuffed a hint of contemptuous amusement. “Thal, never tell your subordinates how accurate your reputation is. A little mystery is good for a commander.”

“Even if the reputation is for unnecessarily ruthless violence?”

Ethrak had had this conversation or some variant of it many times before, and he had learned with effort to suppress his irritation at the word ’unnecessary’. He had never done anything unnecessary. Ruthlessly violent, yes, but never unnecessary.

“Especially then,” he replied instead.

“So… when you say ’threaten’…?” Thal pressed.

“If your conscience makes you squeamish, Thal, then don’t ask. The threat will be credible: if it was not, it wouldn’t be effective.”

“I… see, Warmaster. I withdraw my question.”

“Sensible. Make your preparations to take over the colony farm and export the food. Leave the dirty work of securing your space lanes to me.”

“…Yes, Warmaster.” Thal bowed stiffly, and made himself scarce.

Ethrak made a satisfied gesture to himself, and planned how best to terrorize the Dominion into defending the wrong things…

Date Point 10y9m2w AV
Ava Ríos

Gabriel was waiting for Ava when she checked her bags with the HMS Sharman gate guards and was allowed to leave, but her heart sank the moment she laid eyes on him.

He was in his wheelchair. He hated using his wheelchair.

She gave him a kiss on the cheek and a hug. “Hey! ¿Estás bien?”

Gabe grumbled unhappily. “My fucking leg’s not working at all today…” He groused. “Enough about me. How did it go?”

“He’s put me on, uh…” Ava dug in her handbag and read the prescription. “…Paroxetine.”

“That’s good!”

“I guess…”

Gabe gestured back toward town and turned his chair. There was nothing wrong with his arms at least. “¿Qué pasa?” he asked, softly.

“I… this is gonna sound stupid…” Ava sighed, falling in alongside him.

“Go ahead and say it anyway.”

“I just really don’t want to have to take these.”

He looked up at her. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just… I know it’ll help me feel better and I know I need it, but…”

Gabe nodded.

“You know?” Ava finished, lamely.

“I do, yeah.” Gabe slapped his wheelchair. “I know I need this thing, but…”

“But you hate it.”

“Yeah. I’ll use it when I have to, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It’s…” Gabe paused to select his words. “…It’s a reminder that I’m not whole.”

That was maybe a little too blunt of a description for Ava’s taste, but under the discomfort she had to admit that he’d hit the mark for her too. She felt like she’d been walking around with a piece missing that she’d managed to hide for so long, and now it was out in the open for everybody to see. She felt exposed.

Gabriel sighed as they stopped at the pedestrian crossing. “It’s human nature to avoid the hard stuff in our life if we can,” he said. “I remember when I was your age, I never wanted to look at my bank balance even though I needed to know how much I had so I could spend it sensibly. Everybody’s like that. It’s why people don’t exercise or stick to diets, because that’s hard and we all prefer the easy way.”

“And then you get obese diabetics complaining about how hard their life is when it’d have been way less harder if they just put in some effort,” Ava observed as he pressed the button..

“You’re in a cynical mood today, mija…”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t blame you, though…” The light changed to let them across, and Gabe rolled his chair off the sidewalk. “You are gonna take the pills, right?”

“Charlotte’s promised to nag me if I don’t,” Ava told him, with a weak but genuine smile. Finally opening up to her best friend had been difficult and tearful, but had rewarded her with the kind of emotional and practical support that only a midwife could provide.

“You’re lucky to have friends like- ¡Me cago en todo lo que se menea!”

Heads turned at that last virulent outburst as Gabe inexpertly turned his chair a little too soon after making it up onto the sidewalk and managed to get himself stuck straddling the kerb. He wrenched furiously at the wheels to try and get it back onto the sidewalk then went limp and defeated.

“…Help.”

Ava hauled him back up safely onto the sidewalk. He sighed and rubbed at his temples then threw his hands down in frustration.

“Fuck!”

“Swearing in English for a change, Dad?” Ava teased, trying to lighten the mood. It worked, and Gabriel chuckled a little.

“Sometimes I think ’fuck’ might just be the best word ever invented,” he confessed.

She put a hand on his back. “Entiendo.”

He rubbed the wheel ruefully. “Let’s go for a walk. I need the practice and the doctor says I should use this thing more anyway…”

“You should. It’s supposed to increase your mobility, Dad.”

“Weren’t you the one saying you didn’t want to take your pills?”

“I don’t want to, but I will,” Ava said firmly.

Gabe paused, then nodded. “Right. Es justo.”

“There’s that nice gelato place on Parkside and Peake…” Ava suggested.

“Sounds good.” He turned his chair in the right direction and headed out with a determined expression. Ava watched after him for a second feeling a complicated mix of emotions that she couldn’t quite pick apart, then adjusted her handbag and followed.

It was nice not to feel completely alone.

Date Point 10y9m3w AV
Fort Bragg, North Carolina, USA, Earth

Master Sergeant Derek Coombes

The problem with doing PT alongside Staff Sergeant Walsh was that his nickname—”Tiny”—was a completely ironic one. The guy had tried out for SOR for crap’s sake, he was as big as a barn and lived in the kind of performance athlete territory that meant he was constantly “failing” physicals and having to get a waiver from the doctors to say that, yes, he was perfectly healthy and that “excess” weight was all muscle.

Coombes was a different creature, from a different philosophy of training that had fallen out of fashion in the modern army. He was lighter and more wiry, more average in build and well-suited to blending into a crowd exactly like he’d been doing in Egypt.

This naturally meant that when it came to the gym, anything Coombes could do Walsh could do better. Much better. And that shit was not about to be accepted, no matter how much his muscles and joints got angry at him. He couldn’t match the big fucker on weight but he would damn well match him pace-for-pace and rep-for-rep, his pride demanded nothing less.

Fortunately, Tiny was diplomatic enough not to comment on how Coombes spent a bit longer massaging his aching limbs under the shower afterwards.

They talked about other things instead, while they did their boots up. “So you’re taking a second shot?”

Tiny nodded. “Dude, the only reason I’m not wearing that spacesuit already is because I fucked my arm up. I’m gonna be SOR.”

“Too bad for me they don’t take guys my size,” Coombes mused. Ever since Allied Extrasolar Command had tentatively declared that the Hierarchy threat on Earth was neutralized, he’d been at something of a loose end. There was plenty of shit still to do on Earth, but somehow the global war on extremism seemed much less important than the extraterrestrial stuff nowadays.

It was kinda hard to accept that the war he’d literally been shot through the lung while fighting had sorta… fizzled out after Operation EMPTY BELL. The enemy was still out there, the war was still on, but suddenly it didn’t need guys like him any more. That stuck in the craw.

They were both surprised to find a man in air force blues with silver oak leaves on his shoulders waiting for them outside the fitness center. He looked up the second they stepped outside and stood.

“Uh… good afternoon, sir,” Coombes said and saluted.

“Afternoon, as you were, gentlemen.,” the officer replied and returned the salute. He had a friendly, informal manner and a pleasant smile. “Master Sergeant Coombes, right? And Staff Sergeant Walsh?”

“That’s us,” Tiny agreed. Both men assumed a loose parade rest.

“As you were, gentlemen. Lt. Col. Miller, 946th Operations Support Squadron,” Miller introduced himself and shook their hands. “I’m the DoD’s maintenance officer for the Spaceborne Operations Regiment. Got a career opportunity for you boys if you’re interested…”

Naturally, both of them jumped at the chance. There was the usual rigmarole of finding somewhere private to have the conversation and all the other stuff that went with a classified briefing, but none of that took long. They wound up seated at the corner table at Quiznos where Miller treated them to their pick off the menu and produced the kind of sound-suppressing and air-opaquing security gizmo that only people who worked closely with Scotch Creek seemed to play with.

The air around them fuzzed and became… hazy. Not opaque, but certainly impossible to discern any detail from outside their little gray bubble of privacy. The noise and bustle around them vanished under a blanket of white noise, which in turn stopped their own words from leaving the immediate vicinity of their table.

“Allied Extrasolar Command want to reincarnate JETS teams,” Miller said, as soon as they were settled. “But not as a certification this time. As the real deal—a working, full-time part of the SOR. Given that the reasons why have to do with your mission in Egypt, you were the obvious guys to offer first refusal.”

Coombes brightened immediately. This was already sounding exactly like what he’d been hankering for but when he glanced over, Tiny’s expression was interested but unenthusiastic at best.

“JETS already fell through once,” he pointed out.

“It’s a different beast this time. Very different,” Miller promised. “We have a definite mission and need, a clearer idea of the requirements and, importantly, JETS team members will be a critical counterpart to the guys in the spacesuits, the HEAT teams as we’re calling them now.”

“I kinda have my sights set on being one of those guys in the spacesuit…” Walsh said. “Hell, I already got selected and then busted my arm…”

“Well, hear me out.” Miller selected a file on his tablet and handed it over. “How old are you, Walsh? Twenty-eight?”

“That’s right…”

“You were briefed on the built-in declining efficiency of Cruezzir-D, right?”

Tiny nodded reluctantly.

“So even if you head down to Huntsville today you’re never really going to feel the full benefit of Crue-D enhanced training…” Miller said.

“Begging your pardon sir, but bullshit. Firth’s was about my age when he started the Crude. A little older even, and look at the guy.”

“I thought you might bring that up.” Miller fished out an e-paper photograph. He laid it down on the table and swiped through the images loaded onto it. “Here. Firth was kind enough to share some photos to drive home the point. Here he is at thirteen…and fifteen…and seventeen, when he enlisted….”

Coombes and Walsh both boggled. The allegedly thirteen-year old boy in the first photo was unbelievably fit and only marginally smaller than Walsh was right now. The young man in the second image was legitimately enormous, and the photos after that…

“…Jesus.”

Miller nodded. “Mm-hmm. Now imagine if he’d started on Crue-D early in life, like Warhorse did. Honestly, the fact that he’ll maybe never hit his theoretical maximum is probably a blessing in disguise for him.”

The way Tiny scowled slightly at the photo told Coombes that Miller had scored a hit.

“I think what Tiny’s saying is he doesn’t want to settle for second-best, sir,” he observed. Walsh nodded.

Miller sat back and tapped the tabletop thoughtfully. “…What do you mean by ’best’?” he asked. “Biggest? Strongest? Deadliest? Let’s face it, Firth and Warhorse already have those wrapped up tight, but you should talk to them sometime. What they both focus on is all the ways their buddies are better than them at other stuff. So… best at what?”

He smiled winningly. “This is still the SOR. Same unit, same standards, same stakes, same mission, everything. I’m still offering you the chance to be the best: the only difference is focus. As a Joint Extra-Terrestrial Scout, you would infiltrate hostile worlds and live there for months at a time, never seen, never detected, and you’d generate absolutely priceless first-take intel. Intel without which the big guys in the suits would be useless.”

“That doesn’t sound second-rate to me, Tiny,” Coombes said.

Walsh gave him the slightly askance look of a man whose friend was siding with the other guy. “Dude.”

“What? I like the idea and I want you with me!”

“You do?”

Coombes nodded. “Come on, you saw the suit-jockeys in action. How big’s the fucking logistics tail behind those guys?”

“They may as well have a power cable running out the back,” Miller nodded.

“That’s true of any advanced unit, sir. That’s true of an F-16, or an infantry platoon.”

“But not of a scout.”

“Never thought of myself as a scout before…” Tiny rumbled, thoughtfully rather than reluctantly.

“Why not, though? Hell, you’re CCT for fuck sake, how’re you gonna drop a bomb on stuff if you don’t know where it is?”

Tiny smiled, “I’m usually there with a laser designator, but…yeah. I mean, in a way, I guess a combat controller is like a raider, or short-term recon. Hell, recon is a big part of the mission. It’s just…we’re only equipped for days, not weeks or even months, and the equipment load is already…”

He trailed off thoughtfully, and his lips moved silently as he did some mental arithmetic for a handful of seconds. “Armor, equipment, food as dense as we can package it, garbage…tablets for water, tablets to clean up latrines… Shit, you really do need a guy my size for this, don’t you?”

“We really do,” Miller said. “Though, none of this means you can’t still take a swing at HEAT if you want to. But you’ll be blazing new trails, developing tactics and doctrine, you’ll be collaborating with people from all across the special operations communities of the world, finding what makes sense, what doesn’t… You might just find it rewarding, if you’ve got the chops for it.”

He sat back and gave them both a daring stare. “Do you?”

Date Point: Halloween, 10y10m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

“You know, those fatigues aren’t really part of the costume…”

Martina Kovač folded her arms. “Oh, sure, just ‘cause Cammy hangs her ass and cameltoe out for everyone to stare at, that means I have to as well?”

“Well… you are dressed as her.” Adam pointed out.

“It’s creative license.” She saw his expression and softened. “Plus, I’ve got that giant burn scar on my butt cheek. Let me have this, okay? I already feel half-naked in this thing…” she plucked awkwardly at her costume’s skin-tight green leotard.

Adam remembered some of the stuff Firth had taught him and stopped himself from pointing out that he, having had the role of Zangief thrust on him, was technically wearing less than she was.

That was their theme for the night. The SOR was throwing a barbecue and party on the green at Quarterside park for the sake of some good PR, and had collectively decided to dress up as an assortment of Street Fighter characters.

“Sorry.”

She shot him a warm look. “Thanks. It’s kinda dumb isn’t it? I’m so used to seeing all of you naked I don’t bat an eyelid, but ask me to dress up like this…”

“We’re in a public park. I don’t think it’s the same.”

“True… but the fatigues work, right? They don’t ruin the costume?”

“Nah, it looks like some kinda DLC alternative outfit or something. You’re fine.”

“Good…” Marty tucked some stray hair up into her long blonde pigtails wig. “…Shall we?”

Adam grinned and got into character. “Da! The Red Cyclone will put on show for little children!”

“That’s… a terrifyingly good impression.”

“Thanks! I practised.”

He took the way she smiled and shook her head as a good sign and got out of the car.

Kids pointed and made awed noises as the two of them approached and Adam took delight in flexing extravagantly for them.

Cimbrean didn’t really have trick-or-treat, though that wasn’t down to any lack of enthusiasm for the holiday. It was just that in the early days of the colony Adam had been one of only about a dozen young people below the age of twenty on the whole planet, and the adults had decided to go with a big themed party instead, a tradition that had stuck especially hard when somebody had hit on the idea that you had to perform some kind of minor forfeit to get your food if you weren’t in costume.

As a result, Quarterside Park was a sea of people of all ages in costume, from the traditional little girls in pointy-hatted witch costumes, through videogame characters and superheroes, and of course there was the Cimbrean franchise of the Ghostbusters with their brown boiler suits and their intricate and expensively realistic proton packs. Akiyama was a member, though today he was playing his role in the SOR’s Street Fighter ensemble.

The aliens mostly treated it all with bemusement though the Gaoians were getting into the swing of things, led by their cubs. While they occasionally had slightly odd ideas for what constituted a costume, as evidenced by the burly Straightshield brother who was walking around dressed as a boiled lobster, nobody could argue they hadn’t enthusiastically grabbed the spirit of the day with both paws.

They made a meandering line for the horseshoe of barbecues in the middle of the park where Sagat (Firth), Balrog (Burgess) and Ken (Sikes) were expertly tending two grills apiece in a confident bustle of activity and keeping up some banter with the happy eaters as they went.

Then there were the snack tables where Blanka (Vandenberg) and Dan Hibiki (Murray) were keeping everyone supplied with all the snacks, sweets and soda they could ask for. On the grass, Guile (Blaczynski) and Ryu (Akiyama) were having a push-up contest with several children sitting on their backs and cheering them on..

“So where do we fit in?” Marty asked.

“Meet and greet, amuse the kids, make the adults happy…” Adam replied. They’d all gone over their roles earlier in the week while assembling their costumes, and the consensus had been that Adam was best placed doing their strongman show while Marty could take some of the masculine edge off. Already kids were pointing and nudging each other, and the adults were gawping, including some whom he recognized. On any other day it might have made him self-conscious but today he was in-character.

Marty stifled a giggle as he hammed it up for the crowd and put on his outrageous Russian accent. They made a good double-act, especially when she wound up sitting primly on his shoulder while half a dozen children and a couple of cubs tried their best to drag his arms down while he roared with massively exaggerated laughter.

Then there were the selfies, the handshakes, posing for photos and hour after hour of being as friendly as he could muster which finally came to a blessed end with the fireworks display.

It was a massive relief when the last of the children was finally ushered home and literally every adult in the park heaved a sigh of relief and relaxed. The beers appeared from nowhere, the music got a little more raw, the jokes edgier and the smiles (and language) were less guarded.

The only potential tripwire in fact was the friction between Ava and the Lads. She was present in her role as an ESNN photojournalist and had spent the day recording the festivities for the network’s local news website. Once the children and their parents were gone there was no reasonable way for her to avoid the SOR without shirking her duties, nor indeed for them to avoid her without shirking theirs.

The Lads weren’t being rude exactly—all of them knew that actively snubbing Ava was a good way to irritate the man responsible for their exercise schedule—but even for the camera they were being decidedly cool, and it was dragging out the shoot longer than needed as she tried to capture some merriment from them.

In the end, Marty took her gently by the elbow and led her away from the group where they settled into a quiet conversation while the Lads shrugged at each other and unwound. Adam sidled over to try and listen in.

“…don’t like me, I know why they don’t like me and… I mean, I accept that,” Ava was saying, when he could finally hear her. “But I don’t want to mess this up for you. This is important, isn’t it?”

“Good PR is kinda vital for us, yeah…”

“Right. Well, I wanna deliver good PR. I just… I don’t know how right now. It’s hard when you can’t build a rapport.”

She sounded so despondent that Adam would have stepped in and given her a hug right then and there if Marty hadn’t caught his eye and, very subtly, shaken her head so instead he backed off a little to the discreet distance he’d found where he could still make out what they were saying while seemingly be far enough away that they’d think he couldn’t.

“I think… part of the problem is you’re going with this heroic angle,” Marty suggested to Ava. “You’re trying to show us in a positive light rather than just, uh, point the camera at what’s there. Right?”

Ava cocked her head thoughtfully. “…I guess so,” she conceded, after a few seconds.

“So, maybe the thing to do is just…”

“Let them be themselves,” Ava finished. “Stop trying to tell a story.”

“Well, I can’t blame you for wanting to tell a story,” Marty said warmly, “but yeah. I guess that’s the gist of what I’m saying.”

“And you’re right… thank you.”

“No problem.” Marty stood up. “You gonna be okay?”

“Uh… actually, can I ask you a personal question? Like, as me, not as the reporter.”

Marty gave her a curious look, but gestured for her to ask.

“Why are you being nice to me?”

Marty glanced at Adam, scratched thoughtfully at the line of her wig and then sat back down again. “…Counter-question. Why are you being nice to them?” she asked. “You’re being surprisingly loyal considering how hard they’re snubbing you.”

“It’s nothing I don’t deserve.”

“You think? Well… I guess they think so. But I know ‘Horse doesn’t and I trust his instincts, even if he is hella naive sometimes.”

Ava laughed at that. “That makes two of us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Huh?”

“Well, do you mean you’re naive too, or do you mean you trust his instincts too?” Marty clarified.

“…Both?”

It was Marty’s turn to laugh, and that drew out one of Ava’s real smiles. She had so many flavors of fake, tired, weak and polite smile that seeing some genuine happiness dawn on her face was like witnessing a small miracle of nature.

“He is naive, though,” Marty added, and Adam felt his ears burn pink a little.

“Can you blame him?”

“Hell no. He’s been stuck in this hyper-masculine bubble for his whole adult life and… I mean, I know you two had a pretty rough time of it, losing your home and everything…”

“Yeah.” It was Ava’s turn to glance in Adam’s direction, and he did his best to pretend not to notice. “We both learned some really hard lessons and… I guess there were some other lessons where, like, we didn’t get the chance.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

Adam had heard enough. He got up and joined them, causing both girls to first look up curiously and then make very similar squeaks as he drew the pair of them into his trademark huge full-body-workout hug.

Marty, being stronger than Ava, was the first to work her way free. “Dude, what-?”

“I’m just glad you two are getting along!” Adam explained, easing off.

Ava straightened her hair and tugged on the pink sports jacket that was part of her costume, then took a step back. “Thanks, uh… Look, why don’t you go mingle? I’ll just sorta… snap whatever I see,” she suggested.

Adam looked to Marty, got an almost imperceptible nod, and gave an amplified nod of his own. “Okay! Get yourself a steak sandwich off Firth though, ‘kay? He does the best steak sandwiches.”

“I’ll…do that, sure.”

“Come on, Zangief,” Marty said, and led him away with an eye-roll and a smack on the arm.

He checked they were out of earshot—really out of earshot—before he said anything. “Uh… Thanks. For helping her.”

“You’re welcome.”

That seemed to be all that needed saying.

Date Point 10y10m2w AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Cruising on spacelane CSR-orangepentagon-92034-L, The Border Stars.

Xiù Chang

Regency-period English balls with their fancy gowns and choreographed dances have always fascinated Xiù, and she’s delighted to find herself attending one. And Julian looks so fetching in a high-necked frock coat and cravat too…

Of course there’s still the question of justifying their presence to the hostess. They bluffed their way in by pretending to be a standup comedy act but the time is soon coming when they’ll have to actually deliver on their bluff, so the three of them sit down with her brother Wei at a table in McDonald’s to discuss their routine, where Allison starts telling jokes.

The first two are funny enough but the third… She can’t hear the joke properly but it has something to do with a jar of pickled beets and is so funny that she woke up giggling with the real Julian and Allison sitting up in bed beside her and giving her strange looks.

“Uh, babe? You sound really creepy when you laugh in your sleep…” Allison declared, wiping an eye.

Xiù descended into a fit of the giggles that just wouldn’t go away, especially when Julian and Allison exchanged a bemused look and he shrugged, got up, stretched and vanished into the shower for his morning rinse.

Eventually, the laughter died down enough for her to apologize. “Sorry, sorry…In my dream, you were very funny.”

Allison snorted and shook her head. “I was, huh?”

“Yeah. Did I really sound creepy?”

“You laughed like ’hurrr hurrr hurrr…’” Allison imitated a slow, low and gormless laugh.

“Oh God…” Xiù buried her face in her pillow, feeling her cheeks burn red.

“Hey, at least your dreams are funny…” Allison beamed.

Xiù threw the pillow at her. The pillow came back with interest and they quickly got into a happy twisting wrestling match that Xiù, being shorter and stronger, won easily. Allison quickly found herself pinned by the wrists and helpless with Xiù grinning down at her inside a private curtain of hair.

Of course, Allison was far too competitive to take defeat gracefully. She wriggled and squirmed and tried to fight loose, but her longer limbs were no use at all. Xiù had all the advantages. “Agh… nooo! Get-!”

“Give up?”

“Never!”

“Give u-up!” Xiù tightened her grip slightly.

“Owowow…ow!”

Xiù relented again. “Give,” she repeated slowly, lowering her face for emphasis “U-Mm!”

Allison had surged up and kissed her.

Oh. Well. If that was the game she wanted to play…

Julian was treated to quite the show a few minutes later when he finished his shower. He paused in the doorway and watched until Xiù noticed him.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he replied. “Uh… Do, uh… do I get to join in?”

“You can make breakfast?”

“You’re evil.”

“Yeff she iff!” Allison managed to call, in a muffled voice. She was face-down in a pillow with her hands held inextricably behind her back and Xiù sitting astride her legs.

“Hush, Shǎguā…” Xiù grinned down at her.

At long last, Allison finally gave up and went limp. “…Yeff m’m…”

“Good girl.”

Julian muttered something to himself that sounded like ”Fuck, that’s hot…” and wiped his face on his towel before going to find something to make for breakfast.

“Where were we?” Xiù asked. Allison managed to turn her head enough that she was no longer breathing pillow.

“You are evil, you know that right? We’ve created a monster.”

Xiù bent forward and nibbled her ear, which she’d found was a sure-fire way to get Allison flustered. “Mm-hmm…”

Allison gasped and shivered. “Fuck…!”

“Relax, Shǎguā. You brought this on yoursel-”

Either the world or Misfit had an awful sense of timing, or perhaps a sadistic one. Whatever the reason, the general alarm made all three of them pause for a second before Xiù rolled off the bed cursing colorfully in three languages and performed some high-speed gymnastics as she flung on her clothes as fast as she ever had.

This wasn’t just modesty. Their clothing was comfortable, breathable, easily cleaned and practical but it was also protective equipment that was both flame retardant and cut-proof. Even in an emergency, the protocol they’d had drilled into them was to dress first. Quickly, of course.

They bolted for their stations and Xiù was in the pilot’s seat and buckled up inside thirty seconds of the alarm sounding. She jammed her headset on as she surveyed what the ship was telling her.

Misfit herself was fine, which came as a relief. The alarm had been thrown up by the sophisticated decision-making algorithm that monitored the FTL sensors for them when they were asleep or off-duty. It had seen something, something massive where nothing should be, and promptly called for a human takeover.

”Bad news,” Julian called within seconds. His voice sounded grim. ”It’s a gravity spike.”

Xiù’s breath caught in her throat and Allison said what they were all thinking. ”Jesus…”

“But we’re not caught in it…” Xiù pointed out.

”No, it’s a couple of light-months ahead of us on the spacelane… Misfit says we’d have hit it in four minutes.”

”Thank you Clara…” Allison muttered. ”We’d have run right into it without her…”

“Nah, they’re not just set up and left waiting…” Julian said. ”That thing got fired to catch somebody.”

Xiù checked the sensor logs. “We were cruising about a quarter of a lightyear behind a cargo ship…”

”I’m going dark.” Allison declared. Xiù watched with a chilly feeling in her spine as available power dropped down to standby levels.

“…Hunters?” she asked.

“Or pirates. Or Alliance. Whatever the answer…” Allison left the thought unfinished. They all knew that they were unarmed, and that their best bet for safety lay in silence first and speed second. Space was vaster than anybody could comprehend, and Misfit was very very tiny. Without power to her warp drive there was no practical likelihood of discovery and even the infrared radiation they were putting out was so faint and so short-ranged that anybody placed to see it would already have effectively found them.

”Can’t we do anything?” Julian asked. ”Jump back to Cimbrean, inform the Royal Navy?”

There was a long, unhappy pause on the line, and Xiù knew what the answer was. She sat helplessly and watched the stars in the long seconds before Allison confirmed what the sensors were already telling her.

”It’s already too late. Whoever those poor bastards were… All we can do is pray for them.”

Xiù sighed and pulled her feet up into her chair, hugging her knees. Suddenly, she was feeling very small, very frail, and very helpless. It was a horrible reminder that their mission was a dangerous one.

And the day had started out so well, too…

She sat, and she meditated, and she watched until the spike was taken down. Even then they waited a further two hours before they finally decided to brave the road ahead again.

None of them left their posts until the incident was six hours and twenty lightyears behind them.

Date Point 10y10m2w AV
Command Station 1053 ’Linchpin Of Infinity’, The Orin Line

Fleetmaster Garal

Garal disliked chaos.

This was a shame, because chaos seemed to love her, especially since she had been thrust up through the ranks so abruptly after the eleventh patrol fleet’s sudden suicidal jaunt into enemy territory. Now she was having to rebuild the destroyed fleet from scratch and it was anarchy. All of the shipmasters were still sorting out their place in the pecking order relative to one another, their undershipmasters and junior officers were doing the same, new ships were arriving that had barely cooled down from the nanofactories before having an entirely novice crew stuffed into them and sent Garal’s way to sort out.

She wished she could go back to her old role as a military foreman. She would have bid away her twin, if she’d had one, for the comforting simplicity of mathematics, forces and loads. She knew where she stood with concrete, which was usually looking up at several thousand tonnes of the stuff poised and solidified overhead into a defensive structure whose tolerances she knew to a fraction.

Marshalling people of two dozen alien species of varying rarity, temperament and ability was something else entirely. The world had not built Locayl to be diplomats and commanders.

It had certainly not built them to try and lift that baton when Celzi warships accompanied by legions of Qinisi fighter drones were stabbing here and there in the border worlds. With a more seasoned fleet she might have felt comfortable drawing some of her ships back and compiling them into a response force that could strike back into Alliance territory and take the pressure off.

As it was…

Her requests for reinforcements had been met with a quiet inconsequential reprimand that made it quite clear she was on her own, and confirmed several dark suspicions she’d held about Dominion high command for some years. Whatever their priorities were, the actual protection of colonies and vulnerable civilians seemed to be far down on the list.

It could be no coincidence that all the best ships, all the most seasoned crews and all the most decorated commanders were bodyguarding the wealthy corporate fiefdoms of the core worlds while the border stars were being tended by overstretched rookies under the command of a fleetmaster who would have given three of her arms to not be in command.

From what she knew, the territories abutting Hunter space (or at least, what everybody presumed was Hunter space—that whole swathe of the galaxy had for obvious reasons never been scouted) had it just as bad.

It was enough to grind down even the most hardened and jaded commander, and Garal was still young and idealistic enough to feel like there had to be a better way. To an engineer’s mind the whole idea of wasting strong materials—and materiel—on reinforcing the places that were already strongest while the weaker supplies were frittered away on the corroding edge of civilization was not only backwards, it was frustratingly, infuriatingly, obviously backwards. And anybody who hadn’t actually been lobotomized couldn’t fail to see it as well.

Which meant that the whole military structure of the Interspecies Dominion was corrupt, perhaps irredeemably so.

So when she was left swiping listlessly through the latest reports on what new carnage her opposite number, Warmaster Ekrat, was inflicting on the colonies and civilian shipping in the region, it was enough to make her want to quit. The morning’s tally included a freighter with a crew of two hundred: Alliance strike craft had pounced on it, ripped it in two and left bodies and crates to drift unclaimed in deep space. They hadn’t even taken any of the cargo.

Break her bones, but it was enough to drive her to the edge of despair. If the Alliance weren’t the very enemy whose successes were going un-countered and if they had been less ruthless about it all then she might almost have considered defecting. Whatever accusations of callous and casual violence might be directed against the Celzi, they at least did things with intelligence and, more importantly, with integrity.

Unfortunately, their intelligent and integral campaign was arrayed against her sector, her ships and the colonies under her watch, and there were no right answers. If she spread the fleet wide enough to have a patrol in every vulnerable volume, then those patrols would be too pathetic to do more than run away at the first sign of Celzi. If she concentrated her forces enough to be effective, then the Celzi just struck wherever her ships weren’t. There was no balance point.

Which meant, as any engineer knew, that an alternative approach was called for. Infuriatingly, she couldn’t think of one.

But she could think of somebody who might.

She called the station’s communications center.

”Station comms… Ah, Fleetmaster. What can I do for you?”

The Linchpin’s commsmaster was a Ruibal by the name of Thlenth. Ruibal were fellow four-arms, but with knobbled orange skin and an odd number of legs—she’d read once that their fifth leg was actually an evolved tail, though she had no idea what kind of habitat or stimuli might have induced such an evolution—and unsettlingly large mouths. They were one of the rarer species in the wider galaxy, given their fondness for parochial bickering on their homeworld…

She folded the thought up and put it away. Different species had different priorities and she would respect that: unconscious bigotry had no place in the mind of a commander.

”We have a line to the humans, do we not?” she asked, without preamble. Thlenth went a little paler.

”A direct line? Well… yes, Fleetmaster. You have the authority to directly contact their ambassador in fact…”

“Good. I think it’s time for them to start living up to their promises…”

Date Point 10y10m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Singer

They weren’t dead.

They weren’t.

Nobody had found their bones or anything of theirs, therefore they were not dead. Until she had proof, until she had a better reason than that they hadn’t come back…

Even if they’d been gone for more than a moon cycle. Even if-

No. Better not to think about it. Better to just throw herself into her work.

The old Singer had given her an insight early in her apprenticeship, into the difference between the magic of men and the magic of women and why one was not better than the other. She had said “We both know that men take and women give. They take lives, we give birth. They take their time, we give our time… but we can give them our pain and they will take it off us.”

And Sky-Thinker was so good at that. So good that when he was away on a hunt, she felt like her arm was steadily falling asleep—she could still do everything, but not as freely and it was all more of an effort that only got worse as time went on.

Which was why she almost collapsed from the relief when she heard the thrum of a sentry’s shouting-stone welcoming home a successful hunt. On any other day it would have only been a hope, but today there were only two men not accounted for.

She burst from her tent.

Sky-Thinker and Stone-Tapper both looked awful. They were caked in mud, emaciated, and had the dead look in their eyes of men who hadn’t slept properly in far too long… but they were smiling, and they were dragging a litter with a prize of some kind on it.

The Singer considered the gravitas of her position for a moment and then discarded it. She bounded across the village clearing and crashed into Sky-Thinker’s chest in an enormous flying hug. He did quite a good job of weathering the impact considering he looked half-dead already.

He stank, and was filthy with dried mud, but he was back.

They both ignored the amused trills from the villagers as he ran his hand through her hair crest and sighed happily. “By the gods, I missed you…”

“What happened?!” she asked. “It was only a hunt, you’ve been gone for…what’s this?”

She had seen the… object on their litter. It didn’t quite look real, somehow: its edges were too straight and clean and its surface was as flat as still water. It was made of the same strange material as the sharp death-bird wing that Sky-Thinker now used as a knife, apart from a tangle of four strange dark flexible tubes like thick black guts that sprouted from one end.

Sky-Thinker and his father exchanged the proud looks of men who had brought back a truly legendary prize.

“…This is the heart of the beast that destroyed our village.”

Date Point 10y10m2w2d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada

General Martin Tremblay

Mid-week strategic meetings were sometimes sprawling affairs where dozens of the most powerful people in the world were at loggerheads, and sometimes they were smaller and more intimate. Today’s was tiny—the only person other than Tremblay and Admiral Knight to have called in was President Arthur Sartori, who had never missed a meeting and probably never would unless he was unconscious in a hospital bed.

He especially wasn’t going to miss this one. With the Dominion-Alliance war rekindling itself in fitful bursts of alarming violence, the Global Representative Assembly’s ambassador to the Dominion had been flooded with increasingly strident calls for humanity to step in and honor its default status as a Dominion member, the most recent coming directly from the Dominion’s fleetmaster on the front lines who had painted a grim picture of civilian casualties.

The GRA’s policy for the time being was that humanity officially resented being considered a Dominion member by default and would have preferred to be invited and negotiated into the fold rather than being effectively conscripted.

Unfortunately, while the membership may have been unsolicited it was also beneficial to humanity’s interests. The Interspecies Dominion was compelled by its own charter to furnish newly interstellar species with a supply of “Dominion Development Credits” that could be used to introduce the technological and logistical fruits of interstellar culture into the new member’s society at a controlled and manageable rate. Among the many things they did for the human race, including the purchase of new technologies, they were the only currency that the Corti Directorate would accept in trade for Cruezzir-D.

This was valuable, but as President Sartori was explaining, it was also leverage.

”The Dominion is getting impatient with us. They’re even talking about cutting off our DDC allowance.”

Tremblay grimaced. “If we lose those funds, it’d kill the SOR,” he said. “And our hopes of a customs and trade station at Cimbrean.”

Sartori nodded grimly, and not for the first time Tremblay counted his lucky stars that he was working with this POTUS rather than his predecessors. Sartori liked to present himself as hard-nosed but calculating and thoughtful, and by and large he walked that talk.

His election campaign had played to the fears, anger and grief of a country reeling from the aftermath of San Diego, and of a public who were no longer interested in hearing sound-bites and platitudes from their political caste. Far from the headline-grabbing shenanigans that had characterized previous Republican candidacies, Sartori had marched boldly onto the public stage armed with solid, concrete and realistic plans for revitalizing America’s staggering agricultural and technology sectors via a policy of aggressive for-profit investment.

With the slogan ’Eyes On The Prize’ he’d contemptuously demolished his fellow Republicans whom he’d characterized as irrelevant, out of touch and misfocused, and he had successfully wielded constitutional rhetoric to attack his Democrat counterpart, who had been unable to convincingly repulse the accusation that their platform was in conflict with the first Amendment.

He hadn’t exactly swept into the White House, but he had taken it with a convincing majority. His response to being briefed on DEEP RELIC and all the other information he, as leader of the free world, had need-to-know on about humanity’s status in the galaxy had been to quietly go and sit in a secluded room for several hours and then come out swinging.

Without his clout, the mountain that Allied Extrasolar Command had to climb would have been much steeper and higher.

”I think we need to put our money where our mouth is,” he said firmly. ”We were hinting this whole time that whichever side decided to break the ceasefire would answer to us… well, the Celzi have broken the ceasefire. I don’t think we can afford to have a reputation for bluffing on an empty hand.”

Tremblay nodded. “Agreed. But we can’t afford to be the Dominion’s plaything either.”

“Fortunately,” Admiral Knight interjected from his usual spot in a chair next to Tremblay’s desk, “We can probably have our cake and eat it. Neither side is any good at concealing their movements and we’ve identified a target of opportunity… This fellow.”

Sartori scrutinized the file as it was called up. “Trez Ekrat. What is he, a Celzi general?”

“The equivalent. And he’s exposed. Last week the Alliance annexed an agricultural colony in the border territory. The colonists have been fighting back and so this Ekrat chap committed a few more of his troop carriers to the fight, along with their escorts. He’s badly overextended himself and now his command post in, erm… this system…”

Tremblay stifled a chuckle. No wonder Knight hadn’t tried to pronounce the star’s name, even the pronunciation guide in parentheses next to its name was a mouth-mangler.

“…is vulnerable,” Knight finished. “He’s a vicious cad too, this one. Ruthlessly imperialistic, unflinching in the face of appalling casualties, and with the rumours of how POWs and civilians get treated by his forces, he’d be up in the Hague if he were human.”

“Capture or kill, then,” Tremblay said.

“Exactly. Either one would badly disrupt the Alliance’s plans for the region and most likely save civilian lives. I’m inclined to suggest an overwhelming show of strength, scare the bastards straight.”

“Overwhelming strength is the SOR’s forte,” Tremblay commented.

”Break everything,” Sartori advised. ”We wanna scare the Dominion a bit as well. Make it clear just how hot of a fire they’re playing with here, otherwise they’ll call on us every time they spot a Celzi scout.”

“I daresay Major Powell will enjoy that suggestion…” Knight smirked.

“I daresay you’ll enjoy giving it,” Tremblay told his friend, smiling as he imitated Knight’s violently English mannerisms.

“I daresay you’re right.”

Sartori grunted and directed an amused look at his camera while raising his hand reassuringly at somebody outside of its field of view. ”Any other business?” he asked.

“Not right now. Thank you Mister President.”

“Same time next week, then.” Sartori touched a finger to his eyebrow and ended the call. Somebody must have been figuratively tugging on his sleeve for attention.

“D’you get the impression he enjoys our meetings?” Tremblay mused.

Knight chuckled. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Interstellar war has to be refreshingly straightforward compared to Congress.”

“Don’t say that. The moment words like ’straightforward’ creep in…”

“Perish the thought. I’ll go tell Powell to expect Hell and give it back twice as hard.”

“Yeah. Let’s show them what war really looks like.”

Date Point 10y10m2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

Adam tried to avoid bad moods. It wasn’t that they weren’t a normal and understandable thing, but he’d had some truly awful days in his life, and knew just how black his own moods could get if he let them. He cultivated good moods as best he could, tried to think the best of everybody and generally played the role of a happy hulk.

Some days, however, conspired against him.

The first sign that he was having such a day was when his sandal broke. Those hiking sandals had been with him since Alabama, and had survived what lesser footwear had not. He’d rucked, jogged, run and trekked hundreds of miles in them and they were among the few items in his life whose reliability he’d been able to take for granted. Everything else needed to be treated with care.

The creak, snap and sudden sensation of looseness on his right foot as he shifted his weight to strap on the second sandal, therefore, gave him the same sinking feeling as he’d felt when he was twelve and had gone to pet his neighbor’s cat only for the idiot feline to hiss at him, scratch his hand and bolt out into the road straight under the wheel of a Prius.

He’d preferred dogs ever since.

He sighed and assessed the damage, wondering if it was something he could repair himself and quickly decided that it wasn’t worth it - the whole sandal was on the verge of collapse, as was its counterpart. He considered putting them up on his wall out of sentiment and then realized he was being, as Major Powell would put it, “daft” and threw them away. He’d gone caveman-barefoot plenty of times anyway.

Sign number two—or number one, really—was that he’d struck out last night. For some reason, the girls were being… not chilly, but a lot less warm than they had been before. So he’d been forced to spend the night alone, cleaning his rifle one-handed.

These two facts combined to put a small thundercloud over his head as he tromped down the stairs barefoot and out into the street.

Today was as close as SOR got to an off day, and it was kind of a party. Major Powell had finally bowed to the inevitable and had taken his homesteading money both from the military and from the Folctha colonization program and had finally made his permanent home on Cimbrean: a comfortably large and well-appointed place on Persephone Lane. He and Murray insisted on calling it a bungalow, but to the rest of the Lads it was unquestionably a rambler.

He’d reluctantly accepted some input and contribution from the Lads too. Adam had crafted for him a compact but well-appointed gym perfect for his specific training regimen. Vandenberg and Sikes had assembled a deck and barbecue pit with surprising speed, and thanks to Akiyama and Blaczynski the house’s home electronics were absolutely state-of-the art. The house was almost a butler despite the teething troubles with the voice recognition software.

Persephone Lane was a short walk over from the little complex of properties that the Lads had assembled on Demeter Way. It would have been shorter still to cut across the broad green space between them that they were keeping as a kind of rough grassy park for anybody who wanted a nice open space for a soccer game or something. About a dozen guys in white were playing cricket on it, a game that Adam had finally got his head around enough to decide that he wasn’t interested.

Disinterest was no reason to disrupt a game though, so he took the long way on the sidewalk, which was where he ran into the third sign as a young mom ushered her kids across the road to get out of his way.

This was something that he usually managed to avoid. He smiled, he kept a light bounce in his step, he did his best to avoid swaggering, stomping or looming… it wasn’t perfect, but there were some pretty simple ways to downplay his immense size. Ever since his dad had taught him about watching how people moved, he’d realized that it really was movement that made people react. He could be as big as a shipping container and strong enough to crush a man’s skull with one hand, but when he moved like a carefree ray of sunshine then his presence actually seemed to delight people if they noticed at all.

He must have been moving like a thundercloud this morning because a wave of people getting out of his way rolled up the street at fifty yards which just depressed and upset him even more and when he tried to force some jollity into his step he failed miserably and instead managed something that was at best an alpha-male swagger.

Which led to the fourth sign. He got to Powell’s new house ready for the moving-in barbecue and party they were throwing for him, heard movement and voices on the deck ‘round the back and jogged round eager to be around his buddies. There were three steps up onto the deck and he was so distracted with waving and calling out greetings that he forgot to put his foot on one of the structural beams and it crunched right through the wood like the deck was made of saltine crackers.

“¡Coño!”

Vandenberg helped him extract himself with some affectionate smack-talk.

“I just got this shit built an’ yer already busting it…” he grinned as Adam wiped splinters and blood off his shin.

“Every fuckin’ thing is breaking today…” Adam grumbled as he straightened up. He ignored the graze—he’d already endured far worse pain during that morning’s light PT routine.

“Yeah, my bad bro. Shoulda built it Warhorse-proof.”

“Beginning to think there’s no such thing…” Adam grumbled, adding a muttered “¡La madre que me parió…!” as he examined the damage. “…Sorry, man.”

“Don’t even worry about it. ‘S a quick fix and I can make it stronger’n before.” Rebar smacked him on the shoulder. “Firth’s got the barbecue going, there’s iced tea and football indoors and maybe something for that leg. And, y’know, the floor is made’a concrete.”

“Tch!” Adam laughed for the first time that day, flipped Rebar the bird then turned it into a fist bump and headed indoors.

Blaczynski laughed them moment he saw him. “Jeez. So that crash from outside was you, huh?”

“Don’t even.” Adam shook his head and hit up the pitcher of iced tea. He had to reach over Bozo to do it, and the SOR’s mammoth dog whined uncertainly in response to his bad mood, which earned him a reassuring scratch behind the ears.

“Bloody typical. Nice new house wi’ a nice new carpet an’ a nice new deck an’ he’s already smashin’ stuff and bleedin’ all over it,” Major Powell commented. He was sitting at his ease in a huge and enveloping recliner looking relaxed and happy with a drink in one hand and a drumstick in the other. He even had a rare faint smile around the eyes and mouth and he was not a man who smiled naturally. It wasn’t that he was actually bad-tempered, but something about his face was much better suited to deadpan humor and a resting expression of mild hostility. You had to know him quite well to know that he was rarely actually angry even though he looked it all the time.

“Ever had those days where it’s like you managed to piss off God and he’s getting back at you?” Adam asked. His CO huffed a one-beat silent laugh.

“Aye, I think I have,” he nodded. “Do us a favour though mate, clean up that leg before it drips.”

“Sorry.”

“I swear, your fookin’ pain tolerance…” Powell chuckled as Adam ambled easily through into the kitchen. Powell’s house had more double-width arches than door and was built to an SOR scale. For once he didn’t have to turn slightly to fit through the frame.

The kitchen turned out to be full of Burgess and Firth. Adam rounded off what had become known as the ’Beef Trio’ and suddenly the huge and spacious kitchen space was not so huge and spacious any more.

“‘Bout fuckin’ time you showed,” Base knocked knuckles with him. “What was her name?”

“I wish. Got anything for this?”

“That little ant bite? Man, I’m not wasting a Crude shot on your fuckin’ boo-boo. Paper towel, water, go. Nut up.”

“You’re all heart, Doctor Burgess.”

Baseball snorted. “Man, get your wimpy ass cleaned up.”

It wasn’t exactly a bedside manner, but it put a smile on Adam’s face and he soon had the scratches on his legs cleaned up and disinfected. Disinfectant was kind of a redundant gesture on Cimbrean, where by and large the ambient microbe count was in the same order as might be found in a good private hospital, but old habits died hard, and it helped turn the slow oozing graze into a dry scuff.

Murray and Akiyama showed up just as he returned to the sitting room and poured himself a cold drink. There was happy chatter about how well the house had turned out, the usual brotherly banter, some commentary on the Steelers defense as they lost another forty yards to the Panthers, and when Sikes—always the last to arrive to anything casual—finally showed up with the housewarming gift they’d all pitched in to pay for, Adam was starting to feel a little more positive about his day. Especially the imminent promise of one of Firth’s steak sandwiches.

The housewarming present was a painting. Sikes had found an artist on the Internet who had produced an absolutely stunning watercolor of the Yorkshire dales at sunset that swept from autumnal peaches and purples in the sky to war golden grass and loose stone walls in the foreground, via a meandering river valley dotted with trees.

It was easy to tell that Powell was moved by the gift—his face locked down completely, and he took the first chance he got to take refuge in bringing up some work-related matters.

“So, seein’ as we’re all here, I thought I’d share two bits o’ news with you…” he said, leaning the painting against the wall on his end table with a fond look.

The Lads all quietened down and listened, more out of ingrained habit than anything. Today was a relaxed day. No booze, because they were all on call, but still a party.

“So, the good news is I got a message from Hunstville yesterday that our four newbies have all passed the first leg of their Crue-D assisted training and they’ll be joinin’ us next month ready to start really becomin’ SOR. I gave Sergeant Kovač the go-ahead this morning to start preppin’ their EV-MASS suits, and we’ve taken on some new suit techs to work with ‘em. There’s another ten young men in the pipeline just startin’ their indoc, we’ll see how many of ‘em make it to Huntsville, but all told it looks like we’ll finally start fillin’ up our MTOE.”

He met Adam’s eye. “I don’t need to tell you not to go easy on ‘em, right?” he said.

Adam grinned. “Hell no.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Anyway, this next bit’s, er, officially unofficial, like. Keep this quiet ‘cause it’s not actually rubber-stamped yet, but the stamp’s bloody well inked up and raised, right?”

He pantomimed raising a stamp and preparing to bring it down hard, and there was a general affirmative muttering.

“We’re bein’ reshuffled a bit,” he said. The Lads made dismayed noises and grumbled until he waved them down. “It’s nowt that’s serious. Probably for the good in fact,” he assured them.

“Ain’t no such thing as a good reshuffle, sir,” Akiyama commented.

Powell half-shrugged. “Allied Extrasolar Command thinks there’s still a strategic need for JETS operators an’ they want to resurrect ‘em. This time the plan is that it’ll be more’n just a cert, they’ll be part of the SOR. They’re rebranding us lot-” he waved an arm to indicate every man in the room, “-as HEAT. Hazardous Environment Assault Teams. Then there’s the techs as the third component. Bit fookin’ messy but that’s what we get for makin’ shit up as we go along.”

“They found guys who’re willing to lead the way on this?” Vandenberg asked.

“Aye, they did. You never met ‘em, but everyone who was in Egypt remembers Coombes and Walsh, right?”

“Great guys,” Firth nodded. “I thought Tiny was fixin’ to take the Crude and wear the Mass?”

“Miller persuaded them to be our first JETS instead. Them and a SEAL called Hoeff.”

“Think I know Hoeff,” Firth nodded again. He knew everybody. “Didn’t he get the original JETS cert an’ then have his ass parked in Germany teaching the Krauts how to murder terrorists?”

“Aye, that sounds right.”

“So we’re gonna have a fuckin’ German babysitter in the regiment now?” Sikes almost laughed.

“Don’t knock it,” Powell warned. “Counter-terrorism experience in Germany counts for a lot nowadays.”

“Yeah, ‘cause they let all the fuckin’ terrorists in!” Blaczynski grunted. Powell held up his hand.

“Ours not to worry about the politics, mate. Besides, that’s all ancient history now. Baseball an’ Horse were still suckin’ tit an’ shittin’ themselves back then.”

“Last week?” Murray joked. There was brotherly jeering and laughter, which Adam rolled his eyes and tolerated, though he reached over and pulled the much smaller man into an affectionate crushing hug. Even Powell chuckled along.

“Anyhow, that’s the potted summary,” he finished. “I’m sure AEC’ll be sendin’ us a fookin’ tome to pore over once the idea’s got Tremblay’s scribble on the bottom, and we’ll have to somehow find room to squeeze ‘em in on the base, but I reckon it’s a sign that the Powers That Be think we’re doin’ summat right-…” he turned and frowned as the phone in his newly-set-up office rang.

“…‘Course, there’s never a dull moment is there? Save me a steak, lads…” He put his drink down and vanished.

Steak…

Among his many, many talents, Christian Firth was the undisputed grandmaster of cooking the perfect steak. He had it down to something that was equal parts science and art. Several arts—he was the symphonic sultan of searing, the baron of browning, the Maharaja of Medium Rare. Firth could cook a steak that made every vegan in a thousand meter radius have a crisis of faith.

Of course, like everything he was good at, he knew he was good at it and took pride in being not merely good, but the best. He also promised to smash any bottles of steak sauce he laid eyes on.

He vanished outside with promises to excel himself and confident declarations about how the steaks were prepared and ready, how the grill was perfect, and so on. Adam—whose stomach ranked second or third on his list of his favorite organs—had to resist the urge to drool. He joined in the chatter and banter half-heartedly, keeping an eye out the glass doors as he watched the master work and vowed that one day, one day he would complete his studies under the sensei of sizzle.

In short order the meat was seared, flipped, seared, probed, whipped out of the fire and rested. The Knife—and it was always The Knife, with capital letters—was produced, whisked briskly across the steel, and the rested beef was efficiently sliced into juicy glistening pinkish strips and laid out in a row like the croupier in a James Bond movie dealing the flop.

Beaming the fearsome grin of a man who knew he’d outdone himself, Firth reverently delivered his creation to his waiting comrades, and it was at that precise moment that the day decided to really kick Adam solidly in the balls.

“Okay lads, party’s over! We’ve got a fookin’ mission…”

Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
HMS Valiant, En route to Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

“…But you still got to eat the steak, right?”

“Well yeah, but by the time Stainless had finished briefing us it had gone cold!”

“It was still good though, right?”

“But it wasn’t as good!”

Marty gave him a stern look as she closed up Titan’s life support pack and handed it to one of the suit techs. “Well gee wiz, I’m so sorry about the pea in your fifty mattresses, princess.”

Adam’s eyebrows came down in the specific frown he used whenever a reference went over his head. “Huh?”

“…Fuck a duck,” Marty grunted, feeling a little disgusted in him. “You don’t even know that story?”

“Is this that Kipling guy again?”

“Is it-? No! No it’s not! Jesus!”

Now came his other expression, which was much the same as might be worn by a scolded puppy that wasn’t sure what it had done wrong but was very sorry nevertheless. Marty knew that it was completely guileless and un-malicious but with nine suit life support units to prep and sign off on, she was not in the mood right now.

“I should read that stuff, huh?” he asked.

“What you should do is let me concentrate, or do you have a sudden fetish for breathing CO2 that you never told me about?”

Scolded-puppy turned into kicked-puppy and he muttered something affirmative and went to check his mission gear again, leaving Martina to feel a touch guilty. Only a touch though—he really should know better than to distract her during the most critical phase of suit assembly.

For fuck’s sake, he was an intelligent guy, too! In fact when he was in his element, he was a genius. She wouldn’t have looked at him twice if he’d been genuinely as dumb as he sometimes acted, but when he was being dumb, he was dumb.

It wasn’t just the literature thing. Honestly, she could forgive him for not knowing his Rudyard Kipling from his Hans Christian Andersen: Something about his life story suggested that bedtime stories had not featured in the daily routine of little Adam Arés, whereas Martina’s father had first read ’Rikki Tikki Tavi’ to her at the age of four.

It was the sheer number and size of his blind spots that bothered her. She’d once seen him deliberately but with seeming innocence change course and tap an apparently random guy on the shoulder. He’d shaken his head and the guy had gone pale and made himself scarce. She’d asked him why, and Adam had stated with perfect confidence that the guy was stalking an ex-girlfriend, and had pointed out the oblivious gal in question.

He had a strange kind of interpersonal hyperopia that he seemed chronically unable to diagnose. He could spot somebody else’s creepy stalker ex from thirty yards away on a crowded street and yet still be completely blind to his own faulty behaviour. It was a conundrum. One that a degree of academic education that shamed most physicians had done absolutely nothing to equip her for solving.

Speaking of which…

She forced him out of her thoughts and directed her attention fully onto what she was doing. Nine valuable lives were in her hands, this was no time to allow herself to be distracted. What they were going into could plausibly become dangerous enough anyway, they damn well weren’t going to get hurt because of her.

The job was not being helped by the cramped confines of HMS Valiant’s tiny flight deck where the Techs were working butt-to-butt, elbow-to-elbow and by leaning around one another. If ‘Horse hadn’t needed to be present so Hargreaves and Doyle could sew him into his undersuit, in fact, she’d have told him to get the hell off the deck and make some room.

The crowding problem got even more acute when Major Powell bustled in from the direction of the CIC.

“Fall in, lads.” He lifted his voice above the hubbub without shouting, a neat trick that Martina wished she could do. She listened with half an ear as she checked the catalyst baffles in the next pack.

He looked strangely happy about something as the operators gathered round. “So. AEC’s worried that if we just grab the HVT clean and pleasant-like, we’ll have the Dominion callin’ on us every time they smell Celzi. So, we’ve been authorised, nay encouraged, to go full ham on this one.”

Feral grins all round welcomed this pronouncement.

“Now obviously we’re not monsters, and we’ll damn well remember the Law of Armed Combat, but we’re settin’ out to completely fookin’ terrify the leadership on both sides. If we do it right we might just persuade the Celzi to settle the fook down, and the Dominion to think twice before they call us. That means the officers get no mercy. Spare the conscripts if you can so long as they don’t try an’ be a stupid bloody hero, but today’s our day to give the Dominion and the Alliance a demonstration in just how dangerous we really are. Understood?”

There were “Yes sir!”s from the Lads, and several of the techs traded knowing looks and got out of their way as best they could in the crowded space to let them really get in the warrior headspace.

Marty had… got used to seeing them like this. When the adrenaline started pounding and the testosterone started flowing, they let themselves fall into an older, more sanguine place where the killers lived.

The first time she’d seen it, she’d learned of a new and hitherto unsuspected kind of machismo. A strangely silent one that had nothing to do with noise or posturing, and everything to do with contact. Body contact, eye contact, contact between brother souls. It was quiet, and intimate in a way that she knew she would never experience but was entirely certain she never wanted to.

She could watch their eyes harden and cool as they committed to their professional personas. Like watching a knife emerge from its soft leather sheath, something cold and deadly emerged from under the kind barriers they put up both to protect it and to protect from it.

She was used to seeing them this way… but when The Lads, whom she cared for both personally and professionally, stepped back from themselves and became weapons instead then it was hard not to be a little scared for them.

And hard not to feel sorry for the ETs they were about to unleash themselves on.

Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Hyperbolic trajectory, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars

HUGINN ONE

”Valiant says T minus two mikes.”

”Copy that.”

Ten percent of lightspeed was a useful balance point. It was slow enough to be feasibly reached by a ship using some tricky warp field manipulations, and yet by the standards of any physical system it was absurdly fast, far too fast for any realistic interception that wasn’t warp-based in its own right. It was slow enough that the gamma-t was so tiny as to only matter to the computers, which could compensate, and far above the escape velocity of the Crzlrfek system’s obese orange star.

Most importantly, however, it was enough to give absolutely any object no matter how light an incredible amount of kinetic energy… and the General Electric GAU-8/S Equalizer mounted on a Firebird could fire seventy “objects” a second.

Dominion and Alliance naval doctrine both stressed the value of directed energy-on-target. In this regard, a Firebird coasting on a hyperbolic orbit at a tenth of lightspeed was the indisputable king.

But of course, from several light-hours away, all of that firepower was worthless.

”One mike.”

”Copy.”

Of course, this particular maneuver had never been attempted for real. For all they knew they were about to run smack into some kind of overpowered alien forcefield gizmo with much the same consequences as were felt by insects that strayed onto a highway.

It would all happen so fast that the pilots and their WSOs on HUGINNs one and two, and their comrades providing eyes over on MUNINN ONE and MUNINN TWO, would get only the swiftest impression of the incredible energies they were about to unleash. Everything had been calculated down to the millisecond.

”Ten seconds. Til Valhal!”

”Oorah!”

Silence before the violence.

Three…

Two..

One.

Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars

Alpha of the Brood Of A Million Teeth

The Alpha was forced to replay the sensor data in extreme slow motion to make sense of what it had witnessed, and on doing so it utterly forgot to guard its thoughts.

<Stunned awe; disbelief>

It rewound the data and played it again, even slower. There was the knot of defensive batteries that had frustrated it for several days. Four space stations spread out in a line, placed so that when the prize they guarded was not beneath them, it was beneath some other bodyguard of orbital batteries. Any ship that decloaked near them was inviting immediate obliteration.

Hunters hated to abandon a Hunt, but the Alpha was old and wily and knew better than to let pride get it killed. So it had sat, and watched, and waited for a window of opportunity. It had been on the verge of deciding that there would never be such a window.

And then the batteries had been destroyed.

The timing of it was what stunned the Alpha the most. There was a strong ping on the FTL wake sensors far out in the system’s outer halo, as of a few small ship approaching at incredible apparent speeds.

So fast, in fact, that their FTL transit lasted for less than a second. They had landed doing a respectable proportion of the universal causality limit, and had departed again at those same savage FTL speeds… but in their wake they had left a cloud of dumb kinetic projectiles that flashed through the defense satellites’ orbit with enough fierce energy that each one that struck home released the kind of energy normally only seen in fission warheads. The four defense stations ceased to exist before they even properly knew that they were under attack.

For any Hunter, witnessing violence on such an overwhelming scale was practically a religious experience, but the attackers had only made their first opening move. The strike craft must have dropped jump beacons as they came in, because the sky was suddenly full of ships.

And what ships! Small, dark, so sleek that the probing radiation of the ground batteries as they tried to get a lock just slid off like water on oiled steel. The tormented and rippling fabric of space twisted some more and disgorged metal rods that were already falling on precise re-entry trajectories that would drill them hard into the reinforced fabric of the ground facility that the Alpha had pondered for so long. Anything unfortunate enough to be caught beneath that tungsten rain was doomed.

It spun around and began to issue commands with all the fervour it had. <Exultation; Glee> +Humans! The humans are here! This is our chance! Ready the brood for battle!+

The Brood Of A Million Fangs did not fear defeat, nor death. They existed for violence, and violence had come to them and exposed its throat.

They would bite, they would fight, and even if they all died, they would live.

+MEAT TO THE MAW!!!+

Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Falling towards the ground, planet Crzlrfek, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars

STAINLESS

EV-MASS was a spacesuit, and that meant glare protection to guard the eyes from maybe having to look toward the sun without even the meager protection of atmosphere. That meant that when a dozen bright flares lit up below them as the RFG strikes hit, Stainless didn’t even blink.

Nor did Starfall. ”VALIANT, STARFALL. Orbital strike on target, well hit.”

Plummeting toward the ground with no parachute, and he still managed to make the report with perfect ice coolness. It was no less than Stainless expected of him, but he still couldn’t help but feel impressed. The HELLNO jump—Baseball’s nickname for it had stuck even though none of them could come up with a suitable backronym—wasn’t exactly a stress-free situation, especially when they hit the tropopause and fell into boiling air.

”Angels Twenty.”

That was Rebar, watching their altitude. They could all see it, but Exo-Atmospheric Reentry jumps had a protocol now. They all remembered what had happened to Sergeant Stevenson.

The dust was clearing, and Stainless had a good view of the compound below. A lot of it was collapsed, on fire or both but he could see what looked like two breaches into the tunnels and basements that were the bulk of the facility.

“REBAR, HIGHLAND, STARFALL, TITAN and WARHORSE will land north east corner of the courtyard,” he declared. “RIGHTEOUS, SNAPFIRE, BASEBALL and STAINLESS will land south side. Remember, spare the conscripts if you can.”

”Angels Three, pop ‘em!”

They hit their EAR field emitter controls and the protective cocoon of forcefields that had shielded them from the searing plasma of re-entry found a new shape. Wide invisible wings of nothing but electrostatic wizardry zipped out around them and arrested their fall until they were coming in no harder than an ordinary parachute descent and without the awkward flapping mass of a ‘chute to control and shed once they were on the ground.

They hit the ground running with their weapons up and leading the way. It seemed nobody who had been unfortunate enough to stand outdoors during the bombardment was left alive: The overpressure had pulped them. Thank God for their helmets, because the smell must have been incredible.

Righteous led the way through the southern breach into the complex’s basements, his gun spoke a rhyming triplet, and they followed in after him.

If the target thought he’d seen overwhelming force already, he was sorely mistaken.

Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Celzi Alliance command facility, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars

Warmaster Trez Ekrat

Ekrat had always thought the stories about humans were exaggerations. The stories of them bounding across the battlefield and slaying Vulza single-handedly were exaggerations. They had to be. Didn’t they?

But those stories were nothing next to the reality. There were nine humans loose in his compound, and they were death. They ignored the wounded, the dying and the cowardly but if any of Ekrat’s soldiers raised a weapon then that soldier died with neither mercy nor cruelty. Kinetic pulse fire fluttered harmlessly against them like paper on the wind.

A force of nature was coming for him and he had no idea how to stop it. He had no idea how it had even happened. His orbital defenses had simply vanished, scoured out of the sky with a contemptuous swipe of some unknowably powerful weapon. His ground fortifications had been smashed flat and now annihilation was sweeping through his facility and there was nothing he could do about it.

Nothing except gather his dignity and wait. He watched on the screen as his best Celzi commandos sprang an ambush on the humans that achieved exactly nothing. The thickly armored deathworlder whom they targeted just ignored five heavy pulse guns smacking into him, and pounced.

Ekrat had to look away. It was sickening to know that something was coming for him that could do that so easily.

He spared a last despairing once-over for his instruments and froze.

If what his instruments were telling him was accurate, then the humans suddenly didn’t seem so bad.

Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
HMS Violent, orbiting planet Crzlrfek, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars

Commodore William Caruthers

“…Now just where in the bloody hell did they come from?”

It was a strangely calm question to ask of a hunter Broodship, and Caruthers had asked it in an almost distracted way.

“They were tailing the defense platforms, cloaked… It looks like they’re ignoring us and going for the ground facility.”

“Smart. They must know by now that they can’t catch our ships so they’ve chosen the easier prey… Send a couple of Firebirds over there to kill the bastards, would you?”

“Yes sir…They’ve already launched their raiding shuttles.”

“Hmm. Is there any hope of intercepting all of them?”

“Not likely, sir. The Broodship is screening for them. I think they’re sacrificing it.”

“Hmm.”

Caruthers stood up and considered. The problem that the larger ship presented by screening the smaller ones was that it had sown gravity spikes around it which rendered the superluminal guns effectively useless. At those ranges the rounds were so impossibly slow that the slightest powered deflection by the Hunter ship would result in an outright miss. The Firebirds were going to have to attack from a circuitous angle, too. The master of that particular ship was a wily one.

And either fearless or suicidal. The Hunters had to know what they were up against here, surely?

He got on comms. “STAINLESS, RED SHIELD. We just had a Hunter broodship decloak up here and it’s already sending shuttles your way. What’s your status?”

Powell’s reply was about ten seconds in coming, and when it did he sounded terse. More so than usual. ”RED SHIELD, STAINLESS. Copy that. HVT secured alive. Request Hearthstone.”

For whatever reason, that particular brevity code always generated some amusement even in tense situations. Hearthstone was the quick way home for the Operators: deploy their portable jump array, set it to self-destruct once they were all through, and ride a wormhole to their preprogrammed destination.

Caruthers wasn’t sure what was so funny about it.

In any case, it was a sensible call. The fleet had orbital superiority but that was going to be of precious little use when all those Hunter shuttles touched down and disgorged their passengers, and there were a lot of shuttles. The SOR were more than a match for any Hunter, but numbers could provide all the mass the cannibalistic alien freaks needed to overwhelm them.

“Copy, STAINLESS. Hearthstone authorized.”

And that was that. A tense and humming kind of quiet suffused the CIC, broken only by precise updates and the susurrus that fell on any ship during a calm interlude in the fighting.

They had done all they could: everything was out of their hands now.

Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Celzi Alliance command facility, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars

Warhorse

Hunters could be shockingly fast. In the minutes since the freakshow had landed on them, the greasy alien fucks had flooded through the base like water.

To which the appropriate response was to flood back. You didn’t try and dam the tide or stand in front of it like a rock, because that just got you washed away. You applied firepower, and you moved.

‘Horse’s armor had already stopped one hit. Some big fat heavy Hunter round had skipped off the concrete wall he’d been using for cover and struck his arm at a shallow angle. He had some ammo left, he had some grenades left. He knew exactly how many, but numbers didn’t enter into it. Thought didn’t enter into it: the knowledge was just there.

Reality was simple: Aggression versus aggression. Move. Kill. Get target. Move. Find team. Leave. Warhorse was not a thinking man at that moment: He was a Brother, among Brothers, grappling with evil in the dark.

Muscle memory, animal impulse, Mission: get target. Move. Hunters in the way? Kill. Clear the obstacle. Secure the flank. The thought was there, but the words only came when needed. Otherwise, he lived in a place of blood and rocks and splintered bones that men had known long before fire or the wheel had come along to paint them with a brittle veneer of civilization.

Warhorse was a killer, Hunters were weak. Puny. Red Hunter, ambush. Too close, teeth and claws. Tackle, stomp, check target. Target secure, keep moving.

Explosion.

Dizzy for a moment. Roll to cover, check limbs, check weapon, check brothers. Check target.

“Fuck!”

The Celzi was a crumpled mess. Off-color alien blood was oozing out of at least three of his eyes, and he really wasn’t supposed to bend that way. He was still trying to breathe, but…

Warhorse stepped back and Adam, the medic, stepped into his place. This was a moment for the rational human brain to step in, the bit that was more than intuition and trained operant conditioning.

But he was still assessing for triage when a white disk the size of a poker chip landed in front of him, flashing yellow. Both he and Murray were in the nervejam’s lethal radius.

Warhorse took over again.

Grab brother.

MOVE.

++END CHAPTER 32++

Chapter 33: Metadyskolia

Date Point: October, 10y10m2w3d AV
Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars

Warhorse

…

…

…Taste of blood. Texture of pain. World gone gray.

Alive.

Warhorse always wore one of the maximum doses of Crue-D in the same place, ready to grab on muscle memory. There was nothing coherent going on between his ears but his hand did its thing anyway. The needle-prick in the flesh of his side was completely lost under the agony ringing through his limbs, but somehow just the act of injecting himself was enough to restore something like functionality to his fried neurons.

Vengeance.

Highland was moving too, slowly. He was winded and stunned from his collision with the wall from where Warhorse had thrown him clear across the room, and pawed groggily for his rifle as the Hunter swaggered into the room. One of the big ones, the Red Hunters. Skinless studies in warped musculature that had raped themselves with metal.

It thought it was in no danger.

Warhorse wasn’t quite running on instinct and wasn’t quite thinking fully either. He was somewhere in limbo between the bloody howling rage of an ape and the dispassionate judicial arbitration of a judge. It didn’t matter either way: he had no weapon in his hands, but right now he neither needed nor wanted one.

He charged.

He grabbed.

He squeezed.

He enjoyed.

Every little pop. Every little gasp and struggle. Every grinding crunch. The slippery squish. The creak, snap and stretch. The twitching, the spasms, the gurgle… The kill.

He let go of the hunter’s body and lifted its torn-off head so that he could stare it in some of its glassy dead eyes. “…’s what you fuckin’ get for… messin’ with…“

Fuck it. Fuck words. He slammed the head flat-palmed into the nearest wall, crushing it almost flat in the process and covering the wall and himself in exploded gore. He grunted, braced himself against the deck, pushed forward with his full strength and ground his palm into the mess, until the wall and floor were dented beyond repair and the skull was no more. Something deep inside him approved and drew an apelike rictus grin across his face. He snorted in contempt, left the sticky bits of bone and brain to slide down… and the tide of adrenaline rolled back to leave him stranded high and dry on cold dark sands.

He dreamed of gunfire, and somebody calling ”Man down!”

Date Point: October 10y10m2w4d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Miss Ava Magdalena Ríos

This troubled young lady, who has special access to DEEP RELIC and was involved in Operation EMPTY BELL, returned to my clinic today for her third session. She is struggling with PTSD and suicidal ideations.

Today she was well-groomed and appropriately presented. Her mood today was objectively low but she made good eye contact and states that subjectively today was a “good day”.

Overall she is still feeling generally low and she states that she still has suicidal thoughts. Her flashbacks have not improved but she felt able to describe them in more detail today.

Her flashbacks are clearly vivid and realistic, and entail “clear visions” of blood, death and personal peril sometimes including smell and taste. One detail she described as being particularly disturbing was that she can “taste Vinther’s blood on the air”. Master Sergeant Roy Vinther was KIA during Operation EMPTY BELL, and she went into morbid detail today about the exact manner of his death. She continues to have difficulty sleeping and reports that she often has vivid dreams that wake her up.

She expressed concern today that she is prone to risk-taking and spontaneous behaviour, though she denies any criminality or drug use. When asked what form her risk-taking behaviour takes, she talked at length about her romantic history. She describes that she was unfaithful to her long term partner of several years and expressed remorse for this. She denies being sexually promiscuous, and states that she has only had two sexual partners. She says she is “not ready” to seek a new partner yet. I do not agree that she takes inappropriate risks or engages in self-destructive behaviour, and I suspect she is simply guilty and confused.

She told me that she has asked her best friend to supervise her as she takes her medicine. When asked why, she explained that she “hates” taking the medicine because it “Forces me to think about stuff I don’t want to think about.”

Considering her suicidal thoughts, I agree that it is probably sensible for her not to have immediate access to her medicine.

I have reassured her that her Paroxetine will improve matters, and she understands that she should not expect immediate results. Considering the severity and realism of her flashbacks I have raised the possibility of animal therapy, for which she expressed considerable enthusiasm. She says that she “really would like” a therapy dog, and I will see whether we can start the process of applying for one.

I will see her again in two weeks or on an emergency basis.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point 10y10m2w4d AV
Command Station 1053 ’Linchpin Of Infinity’, Orbiting Planet Vetrin, The Orin Line

Fleetmaster Garal

“What class of ship is that?”

“They call it a ‘destroyer’.”

Garal forced herself not to shudder. In the Loc’ language, the word for “destroyer” was a guttural, terse thing that neatly conveyed the brutality of the concept. It was somehow fitting that deathworlders would designate a ship class that way.

It looked like a force of destruction, too, to a degree that offended her sense of aesthetics. This was not a ship built to look glorious: it wasn’t a flying monument to pride and wealth. It was a shovel-nosed black lump with a shuttle riding piggyback on the flat expanse of its back, next to a tower structure that was most likely its bridge.

And it was small. Against the scale of dock designed to accommodate war platforms, the destroyer had elbow room aplenty.

Her second-in-command was a Vgork shipmaster by the name of Selag who, like Garal, had been forced into the echelons of higher command by sudden vacancies. The loss of his left arm during an Alliance raid hadn’t made a good case for his remaining in the field either. He was experienced, and she needed that experience.

“Suddenly, I am very glad they are on our side…” he mused.

Garal made a nonverbal noise conveying misgivings. “You do know the name of this particular destroyer, do you not?” she asked.

“No…?”

“It is called Violent.”

Selag made a rumbling noise deep in his chest that Garal’s translator implant flagged as an expression of feeling off-balance. “Violent, Destroyer… Are they bloodthirsty, or just unsubtle?”

Garal didn’t comment.

“I’ll receive them in my office,” she declared, and turned away from the window.

“As you command, Fleetmaster.”

Date Point: October 10y10m2w4d AV
HMS Valiant, Orbiting Planet Vetrin, The Orin Line

Colour Sergeant Robert Murray

“Hello sergeant. How are you feeling?”

Murray shrugged noncommittally. “Bloody thrashed, but alive,” he said. “…How is he?”

Valiant’s chief medical officer, Doctor Moorman, glanced at his infirmary’s only patient who was rather too large for his bed. “Sedated, but conscious. One of the awkward side-effects of Crue-D, while you chaps are on it you’re all but impossible to put under… though considering that we’d have lost him without it, I can live with that.”

“Can I have a wee word with him?”

“Of course.”

‘Horse on meds was almost guaranteed to be amusing. He aimed a big thumbs up and his largest, most goofiest smile as Murray joined him. “Heyyy, bro.”

“You are an absolute fuckin’ madman, you know that?” Murray said affectionately and sat down. They locked hands in a brothers’ handshake. “And I’d be dead if not for you, so…thanks.”

‘Horse grinned and waved it off in the happy, high way of a man who was dosed up to the gills. “‘S what I’m for.”

“Is that right? Throwing me right across the bloody room is what you’re for is it?” Murray chuckled. “We should use that move in gravball sometime.”

“Yer talkative…” ‘Horse observed, and laughed. “Wha’ve you done with the real Murray?”

Murray laughed with him, but after a few seconds they sobered.

“…Am I in trouble?” ‘Horse asked.

“Nah pal. No. But I had a merry bloody time of it in Hotwash going over our helmet cam footage. D’you remember what you did?”

“Yyyup. The whole thing. The explosion, my patient getting killed, the grenade… ‘s weird, I always thought after Nervejam stuff was supposed to go fuzzy… You, uh… you saw what happened next?”

“Mmm. I saw.” Murray’s fitful dreams that night had revolved restlessly around the expression he’d seen on his young comrade’s face, even through the visor, as he’d got the Hunter in a sleeper hold of all things before screwing its head off as slowly as he could.

‘Horse had the decency to look uncomfortable, and he seemed to be sobering quickly. Moorman was right about Crue-D versus sedatives. “I… shit, man.”

Murray did his best to put an arm round the younger man’s shoulders, and made it slightly more than halfway. “I been at this even longer than Stainless,” he said. “And…Ye’re not alone. Okay? Every poor bastard who stays in this business long enough comes up against their dark side one day.”

“…You always seem so calm.”

“Mm-hmm. Ice in my veins. Scares the shite right out of me.”

‘Horse hung his head and sighed. “…I shouldn’ta enjoyed it,” he said. “That’s their thing. I don’t wanna be like them.”

“You’ll never be like them, you giant fuckin’ womble stomper!” Murray told him, and was rewarded when the unconventional insult raised a small amused snort. “You feel bad about it! They never will.”

“Makes me wonder, though…”

“Of course it does. But we do what we do so other people don’t have to, mate, and we look out for each other. I canny throw you across a fuckin’ room, but… Ack!”

Adam could hug hard enough to crush oil drums, but he usually never forgot it. This time was an exception and Murray felt his joints creak before Adam remembered himself and eased off a bit.

“…Sarry.”

“‘S’okay…” Murray had learned the hard way that when Adam wanted Hug, Adam got Hug, and there was no way out except patience.

Or the intervention of a higher authority in the form of a nurse. She knocked on the door to get their attention and gave Murray a not unkind look that asked him to leave. “My patient needs to rest, Colour Sergeant.”

“Like fuck, I feel fine!” Adam objected.

The nurse was having none of it. “Standing orders for nervejam trauma is that you remain under observation until you’ve had an MRI.”

“How the fuck am I gonna fit in an MRI machine?”

The nurse just shrugged in a ‘not-my-problem’ way.

Adam sighed and let go, and Murray stood up. “Here and now ye’re alive, pal,” he reminded him. “Plenty of time to talk about it later.”

“…Right.”

“If it’s any consolation, I’m stuck here too. Crying shame.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because I really wanted to see the Fleetmaster’s face when Stainless delivers the good news…”

Date Point: October 10y10m2w4d AV
Command Station 1053 ’Linchpin Of Infinity’, Orbiting Planet Vetrin, The Orin Line

Fleetmaster Garal

Garal didn’t need to be alerted that there were deathworlders outside her office. They shook the deck just by walking, heavy, purposeful and strong.

She pre-empted the inevitable request and called her aide. “Send them through, please.”

“Um… that, is, uh, Fleetmaster, they-”

“Now, please.”

“…Yes. Yes, Fleetmaster.”

The door opened, and four humans walked in.

She’d never seen a human in person before, but they were at least pleasantly easy to tell apart. Their facial features varied quite markedly, their skin tones ran a wide gamut, and between those factors plus variations in the hues of their eyes and hair she-

A severed head landed on her desk, shattering her train of thought.

It belonged to a Celzi, and Celzi were much harder to tell apart than humans. If not for the weak flicker of a dying translation implant that was still trying to tell the world who its owner was, she never would have recognized Warmaster Trez Ekrat.

Very, very slowly she reeled in her stunned thoughts and managed to get them into something resembling order. They came unstuck again when two more humans, both much larger than their fellows, squeezed through the door carrying what was obviously the main databank from a facility-sized computer installation, rack, power supply and all.

Its metal feet squealed offensively on the floor of her office as they put it down and pushed it into the corner.

And then they just stood there. Waiting.

Garal took her time to ensure that she was properly balanced and calm before she tried to react. She moistened her mouth and, quite delicately, pushed her chair back from the desk and the grisly trophy upon it.

“…What is this?” she asked.

“The man himself didn’t survive being collected,” the human in front said. He had a deep voice that was more growl than speech and the translator clipped to his chest absolutely suffused the voice it created for him with menace and short patience. There was something badly unnerving about those cold, bright blue eyes that had locked onto her and were watching patiently for her to… twitch. Run away. Make a mistake. Whatever they were waiting for wouldn’t be good for Garal. “But his implants should still have some useful data.”

“This is not… quite what I had in mind.”

“No? Well that’s too bad.” The one who was apparently the leader stepped back from her desk and tucked his thumbs into his belt. The easy and relaxed poise of the stance was precisely the opposite of reassuring: it said ’there is nothing here that I could not destroy.’

He looked to one of the larger men beside him. “Rebar.”

The ridiculous anachronism of a paper hard-copy folder slapped down on Garal’s desk. She picked it up and opened it. The humans had at least been courteous enough to include the information-dense machine code that translator implants used as a textual go-between. It allowed her to assimilate all of the information on the page instantly.

The report was succinct, technical, efficient and impossible. A chain of orbital defense satellites destroyed, a ground installation smashed, a Hunter Broodship destroyed, several thousand Hunters killed. High-Value Target neutralized, intelligence recovered and critical infrastructure destroyed. The Crzlrfek system completely neutralized as an Alliance base of operations.

Cost: Two humans wounded.

There was an itemized bill detailing the number and value of all the resources expended right down to the gram of deuterium reactor fuel.

Garal tried to reclaim some authority by standing up, founded on the fact that she was bigger than even the biggest of these deathworlders. Yes, they all could have torn her arms off, but sheer size surely had to count for something. The correlation between size and dominance was a near-universal in xenopsychology.

“How?” She demanded.

The human’s scouring gaze didn’t waver. “Classified.”

“Whatever you did, if the Dominion learned your-”

“No.”

“It would save lives.”

The human snorted and reached out to flick one of the head’s ears with his finger and what Garal took as a distasteful expression. “Whose? His? Poor fooker was just doing his job, just like us. No, Fleetmaster. Our methods are classified and even if I was inclined to consider sharing them, which I’m not, I don’t have the authority.”

“…I see. But was it truly necessary to drop… this… on my desk?”

“It was, yes.”

“Why?” Garal felt like she was being yanked through the conversation.

The human smiled slightly. It went a finger’s width up only one side of his mouth without touching his eyes at all, and was not a friendly or happy gesture. “In my culture we have a warning, Fleetmaster,” he said. “It goes ’be careful what you wish for; you might get it.‘”

“I don’t remember asking for a severed head on my… What is your name, anyway?” Garal finally managed to haul herself back into what she hoped was control of the conversation.

“Stainless. And his head was always going to be somewhere, Fleetmaster. That’s the bloody point of sendin’ us to kill him, he ends up dead. We thought it might be worth remindin’ you of that. Good day.”

Garal sputtered as they turned and left her office, an oozing body part and a one-tonne rack of computer equipment at the end of a trench of wrecked flooring. “What? No, you can’t just-!”

“We expect full remuneration of our net expenses within thirty days. Good day.”

“No, wait!” Garal stormed to the door and pointed at her aide. “You: Stop them.”

“Uh…” the poor Vzk’tk thus addressed watched the humans thump purposefully out the door. “…I beg your pardon fleetmaster but…how?”

The door closed behind them, and Garal ran two of her hands over her scalp while the other two planted themselves on her hips—a gesture of being totally at a loss.

“…Contact battlefield forensics and have them send up a team to my office. And, find me another office to work from until mine has been sanitized and repaired.”

“Of course, Fleetmaster.”

“And if I try to ask humans for help ever again, I want you to talk me out of it.”

The Vzk’tk blinked. “…How, Fleetmaster?”

Garal spun back into her office. “Remind me what happened this time,” she snapped.

Date Point: November 10y11m1w AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Interstellar deep space, near the Border Stars

Allison Buehler

Deep space travel had its own slow rhythm, and adjusting to that rhythm after months of constant scheduled activity was a challenge. They all knew how, of course, they’d all been there before… but once the daily work routine was out of the way, the ship cleaned and maintained, the laundry done, their meals prepared, their bodies exercised and their chores complete then the only two ways left to pass the time were education and entertainment, and they all hated the education side of it.

All three of them were hands-on, learn-by-doing types and Allison had surprised herself with how well she had picked up the academic component of Misfit’s needs. The desperate determination to not fail Julian and Xiù had driven her to achieve things that her high school teachers would never have imagined, and she’d done it all for them.

But now she had to learn their jobs, and they had to learn hers. They just couldn’t afford to be exclusively specialized because no matter what their personal feelings on the matter were, the Group had made it clear that ’just in case’ anything happened to one of them, the others would be able to get home.

Which meant that whether they liked it or not, they’d learned each others’ jobs to a basic standard. Julian and Allison could fly the ship, Xiù and Julian could handle simple maintenance and the flight power balancing, and Allison and Xiù could both work the sensors, telescopes and drones.

They all had the basics down, they’d never have taken off otherwise. But their in-flight training time was supposed to be about digging into the academic minutiae of other’s’ jobs, and all three of them were struggling, and were thus feeling frustrated and incompetent.

They weren’t, demonstrably so. But the more they studied the more clear it became that they really had been well-assigned. Julian and Xiù seemed convinced that Misfit’s engineering was more fragile and hazardous than was really the case, neither Xiù nor Allison had the temperament for memorizing hundreds of different kinds of rock and how to identify them from orbit, and Allison and Julian were both far too heavy-handed for Misfit’s spirited controls.

They were also forcing themselves into working shifts, and that was coming with all sorts of problems because they’d grown used to sleeping in one warm snuggle. The pattern of two awake and one asleep just didn’t work for them at all, because the sleeper invariably complained of feeling alone or cold. None of them were sleeping well, except when they caved to temptation and cuddled up for an unprofessional triple nap.

Difficulty, frustration, restless sleep and a dash of guilt were a potent blend for irritability, and that meant little fights.

Never anything major. Never. Things were always a calming word or a hug away from being completely soothed over and forgiven. Indeed, theirs was overall a happy ship… but not perfectly so.

Perhaps the weirdest sticking point was between Julian and Xiù though, and they managed to wake Allison up over it.

She was jolted awake by the sound of Xiù demanding “But why not? It’s fun!”

“I know, just…” Julian made an exasperated noise. “I don’t want to.”

Xiù didn’t look happy at all, so he closed the dishwasher and hugged her. “I’m sorry bǎobèi, I know I’m being dumb, but it just makes me uncomfortable.”

“Fine…”

Allison glanced at the clock. She’d been asleep for five hours, and she decided that was enough. She hauled herself out of her bunk with a sigh. “You two okay?”

Xiù gave her a good morning kiss and got her breakfast out of the fridge to reheat in the oven. “It’s nothing important.”

Julian did the same and poured her an orange juice. “I’m just being cautious.”

Allison accepted the juice and drained half of it in one slug. “About what?”

“I said ’yes sir’ and it made him uncomfortable,” Xiù explained.

Allison gave Julian a quizzical look. He had a mild sub streak, which meant that he’d always enjoyed being bossed around by the two of them and never quite seemed happier than when he got the chance to say ’yes ma’am’ and be praised with the words ’good boy’. It was a harmless game, but now she thought about she and him had never reversed their roles.

“Why?” she asked.

He shrugged helplessly. “I dunno. Maybe I… I dunno.”

“Spit it out, dummy.”

He sighed. “I guess… maybe I’m more comfortable having my boundaries pushed than I am with pushing yours,” he said, gesturing to both of them.

“Even if I want them pushed?” Xiù asked.

“Yeah, but.. How far?”

Xiù didn’t seem to have an answer to that one. She frowned thoughtfully and turned her attention back to the oven.

“Baby, the whole point of pushing boundaries is you don’t know how far you want them pushed,” Allison pointed out.

“Well, this is one of my boundaries too and I don’t want it pushed,” he said, firmly. “I’m sorry.”

Allison’s hand landed on Xiù’s elbow just in time to pre-empt the word ’but’, and she shut the question down with a slight headshake. Xiù hesitated, then nodded and she and Julian kissed and made up, to Allison’s relief.

“I’m… gonna go check the exoplanet scan,” he declared lamely, and let himself out.

Left alone, the girls exchanged awkward shrugs, and Allison used the bathroom and the shower then ate her breakfast with her hair still damp. She had to admit, the shorter cut was far more convenient than wrapping it up in a towel. She pretty much just had to scrub it and leave it.

Xiù sat down opposite her. “Is he mad at me?”

“No! No.” Allison put down her fork. “What gave you that idea?”

“He just seemed really uncomfortable.”

“He was, yeah.”

“I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s okay, dummy.” Allison smiled for her. “He knows you didn’t.”

“I just… don’t understand why.”

Allison nodded and picked the fork back up. “…You know, I had to deal with some real assholes back in Boston,” she said. “Before I was taken. Guys who wanted to park me on the back of their bike. Like, I woulda been property to them, you know?”

Xiù nodded and listened.

“They were so fucking insecure. They’d get into fights over fucking nothing because their precious little princess egos couldn’t handle the least little disrespect… like, say, turning them down when they made a pass,” Allison scoffed. “…and they never wanted the ’little girl’ fixing their bike either. And trust me, having a guy like that angry at you is… it’s scary. That’s why I started carrying.”

“Āi ya…”

“Yeah… Well, Julian’s confident and calm, and that makes him more of a man than any of those shitkickers. He doesn’t need to be the boss dog. And… You know how he sees himself in this, right?” she asked, spiralling the fork to indicate the three of them.

“How?”

“He’s here for us. I think he’d be perfectly content in his grampa’s house trapping beaver and shooting geese all year for his whole life… But what he really wants is to make you and me happy.”

“Yeah, but….” Xiù’s signature blush was a rarer sight nowadays but it came back strong. “…I mean, in this case…”

“You want him to call you a ’good girl’ ‘cause that’d make you happy?” Allison teased. “Kinky. Do you want him to spank you too?”

“Allison-!” Xiù was now crimson with fierce embarrassment.

Allison laughed and waved a hand in an apologetic gesture that was anything but apologetic. “Well, you’ve told him. Maybe he’ll come around, maybe not. There’s some things you can’t force. See, the whole ’yes ma’am’ thing just… happened. Naturally. We didn’t sit down and plan it, I never asked him to say that, that’s just how things played out. I like it, and… I guess I’d feel weird saying ’yes sir’ to him.”

“So I should wait and see, and be prepared for in case he doesn’t ever want to play that game with me,” Xiù summarized.

“Pretty much. Sorry, baby. But hey, at least you can yes-ma’am me, right?”

“Yeah but… um…” The blush had begun to fade, but it rallied magnificently. “…It’d be even hotter with him. Sorry.”

“I can handle ’even’ hotter…” Allison gave her a witchy grin. “Just so long as it’s a little hot with me.”

“…It’s hot,” Xiù confessed.

“Good girl.”

Flustered, Xiù cleared her throat and bustled to tidy up an already-tidy kitchen, and Allison ate her breakfast with a victorious smile. She was scraping the last of it off her plate when Julian returned looking pleased.

“Good news?” Allison asked him.

“Got a strong contact. Nitrogen, oxygen and water, right kind of star, right kind of orbit… It’s a bit out of our way, over toward the Near Three Kiloparsec Arm about a week away, but it looks good!”

“A temperate world!” Xiù grinned.

“Probably. Misfit gives it sixty percent.”

“Man, Creature of Habit went its entire mission without seeing one,” Allison recalled happily.

“Our telescope’s better. Much better.”

“It’s the BEST,” Xiù joked, and beamed when Julian and Allison both groaned.

The Brahe Exoplanet Survey Telescope lived up to its acronym and then some by relying on enormous force-field lenses rather than glass ones or a parabolic mirror. It was so incredibly sensitive that although it couldn’t actually produce an image of planets orbiting a distant star, it could certainly detect that some light was being reflected by those planets and even hazard an informed guess at their atmospheric composition… and it could do so a few hundred times a second.

It also looked nothing like a telescope. It was a flat panel about the size of a thin mattress that recessed neatly into Misfit’s dorsal hull when it wasn’t in use.

“She’s adorable, isn’t she? Just wanna… bundle her up and lock her in the store room sometimes.” Allison snorted. Xiù stuck her tongue out at her.

Julian laughed. “I thought maybe we should go check it out,” he suggested. “I already fed it to the pilot’s console…”

“You need to practice setting destinations anyway,” Xiù told him, and pointed toward the cockpit. “Go on.”

Julian nodded and chuckled. “Yes ma’am.”

“Good boy.”

He looked so much more comfortable.

Date Point: November 10y11m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

Re: Maj. Owen Powell

Major Powell is a regular in my office, and continues to struggle with feelings of isolation and loneliness. He states that he has “basically no” social life as he cannot relate to civilian men his age and while he likes and gets along well with his fellow officers he does not feel able to describe the relationship as a friendship.

He states that he often feels envious of his men for their camaraderie, and wishes that he could be closer with them. He describes the social highlight of his week as being “gravball” training sessions.

He has a romantic partner, who is a pilot with the 946th spaceflight wing, stationed on Earth. The relationship is therefore a long-distance one and he states that in his opinion, neither of them are ever likely to put their career second. He denies begrudging his partner her career, but does state that he would like to see her more often.

Objectively he is a taciturn man and his mood has always been difficult to read, but he claims to feel generally euthymic. He made good eye contact and smiled appropriately so I feel that his self-assessment is probably accurate.

I will see him again in three months.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: November 10y11m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Unnamed System, Deep space

Kirk

“Okay. Von Neumann Colony-In-A-Can, third test… And we’re sure that bug in the navigation code is worked out?”

“Dude, if this one does a moth impression into the sun again, I’ll have the factory print me a hat just so I can eat it.”

“Good enough for me…boot it.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Nadeau just could not sit still at times like these, but humans were like that in Kirk’s experience. Even the aggressively sedentary Lewis was fidgeting in his seat as the mark three Coltainer woke itself up and ran through its startup sequence.

Nadeau, however, prowled. It was entirely the appropriate word, a kind of intense stalking routine that saw him circle from workstation to workstation as the experiment unfolded, keeping himself apprised of every nuance of it.

Kirk, as always, found that he was an eerie monument to stillness in a sea of fidgeting and it was a slight mystery to him why that should be. Not why he should be so calm, but why the humans were so nervous. As the previous experiment had rather conclusively demonstrated, even a total catastrophic failure was no great setback.

But, they took everything about the project personally. He’d even heard them describe it as their “baby”, and as was so often the case he was given occasion to reflect on the deep insights into human psychology that a seemingly innocuous turn of phrase could offer.

“Okay… CIC-3 boot sequence complete… She’s running NAVTHINK.”

Stellar navigation was a prerequisite technology for even being an interstellar civilization, and the humans like every other species before them had readily managed to adapt their algorithms to work in any system and not just their native star. Planetary survey software, however, was a different matter.

Humans had, so far, manually surveyed every planet they found. Of course they had done so via remote instruments and an assortment of deep space probes and wheeled rovers, using photographs and radar imagery, but all of the actual assessment had been conducted by a skilled human mind. The coltainers, however, would have to be automated, and while the Dominion had long since mastered the art of automated survey the humans didn’t trust anything Dominion-made. And so they were reinventing the interstellar equivalent of the wheel by programming new survey software from first principles.

They weren’t doing so completely from scratch at least—they were at least referencing the Dominion software and borrowing its parameters—but they were still re-climbing a well-trodden mountain as if they were the very first, like ignoring the carefully cut steps and handrails in favor of scaling the untackled cliffs with rope and pitons.

Working out the basics of that software had been CIC-1’s job. They had manually orbited it over a nearby world and ran the survey by hand, which also served as a test of the instruments.

CIC-2’s objective had then been a test of the device’s ability to navigate under its own power and start exploring system bodies for potential colony sites of its own initiative. Unfortunately it had failed to correctly identify the local star as being a star and the control room had watched despondently as it powered merrily into the unnamed red giant’s coronasphere at three kilolights.

Lewis had summed it up perfectly: “Woops.”

CIC-3 was hopefully smarter than its predecessor, and as Kirk watched he saw all the humans relax. Lewis’ fidgeting stopped, Lee stopped bouncing his leg, Nadeau’s prowling slowed and he stood up straighter. Kirk watched the device’s icon traverse the system and alight around the first planet.

“It’s running GEOSURVEY.”

“Yeah, we need to add habitable zone and atmo prerequisites, but for testing purposes…”

“Right.”

“I take it the test is going well?” Kirk asked as Nadeau ambled past him with his hands behind his back.

“Well, it hasn’t blown up yet…” Nadeau joked wryly, which was a sure sign that he was in a good mood.

“I am impressed.”

“…Kirk, sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re being sarcastic.”

“No, I am sincere,” Kirk spread all four arms openly. “To my knowledge, nobody has tried to re-invent these tools in thousands of years. Even the Corti adopted the technology of the extant interstellar civilization when they arose. As did my people, the Guvnurag, the Gaoians…”

“And us,” Nadeau pointed out. “We’ve sanitized the hell outta them, but I don’t think any of our strategic lords and masters are going to feel totally comfortable until every system and every bit and byte flowing through those systems was designed by us.”

“This project will have ramifications far beyond the Colonies-In-A-Can.”

“That’s the idea.” Nadeau glanced over to where Lewis was ‘dude’-ing and casually swearing his way through enthusing about the device’s smooth orbital insertion. “We’re performing more R&D here than just the coltainers.”

He cleared his throat. “Actually.. About the coltainers…”

“Yes?” Kirk knew where this was going, but he waited politely regardless.

“They, uh, the whole project does kinda need those Guvnurag force fields…”

“Vedregnenug is considering the request,” Kirk replied, evenly.

“He’s been considering it for months.”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, but that seems, um… That seems like it’d be enough time. To me.”

“Really?” Kirk loooked down at Nadeau from great height, using every one of his many meters to his advantage. Humans really didn’t like that, he’d found: something in their instincts got apologetic and deferential when altitude was involved. “And what is it that you think he’s considering?”

“Well… whether to give them to us, right?”

“Ah. No. No, he has passed that stage of his deliberations,” Kirk corrected him. “He is wrestling with a rather more difficult problem now.”

“Which is?”

“He is an exile, and the upper ranks of his government are most certainly riddled with Hierarchy agents. Now, you might in theory be able to rescue a more… intense and fractious species like the Gaoians from such a predicament, but you must understand that Vedreg is by Guvnurag standards a decisive leader who goes with his gut.”

“…Really?” Nadeau asked, weakly.

“By their standards,” Kirk nodded gravely.

“…Wow.”

“Yes. You can see therefore that the problem was never persuading him that you need them, but is instead going to lie in… extracting them from the Confederacy.” Kirk cleared his throat and made a confession. “In fact, I myself had to resort to theft.”

“…You did, eh?”

“Yes. Time was of the essence. A more diplomatic approach would only have resulted in Cimbrean being swarmed by the Hunters. In this case, however, you have time.”

“The plan is to reverse-engineer them and build our own, Kirk. That’ll take time as well,” Nadeau said. “We can’t trust anything the Hierarchy might have touched.”

“Can you not? I dare say if the Hierarchy could disrupt those shields then Earth would have burned years ago.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

Kirk considered him thoughtfully. “…I have a rule,” he said, at length.

“Oh?”

“Yes. I never tell a human that something is impossible. You have a vexing propensity for proving me wrong. I will therefore only tell you that it is…” He paused and chose his words carefully, “exceedingly unlikely that you will successfully reverse-engineer those forcefields.”

“Anything they can do, we can do,” Nadeau declared confidently.

“Then allow me to revise my statement to: it is exceedingly unlikely that you will reverse-engineer those forcefields soon enough. While I admire the human talent for cognitive acrobatics, the Guvnurag have several advantages.”

“Such as?”

Kirk shifted his weight and his head swayed on the end of his long neck as he considered his reply. “…Tell me, Lieutenant-Colonel. Who is the scientist you most admire?”

“Huh? Um…“ Nadeau touched his jaw thoughtfully. “…Probably… Darwin, I guess. Why?”

“Newton? Einstein?”

“Sure. Great men.”

“Indeed. One an obscure Swiss patent clerk who completely re-wrote human understanding of the nature of space and time, the other an English eccentric-”

“He stuck a needle in his eye and was obsessed with alchemy.”

“As I said, an eccentric,” Kirk cleared his throat, “who nevertheless invented a whole new mathematical language which has become the new benchmark for sapience in Dominion law, and used it to describe the behaviour of the planets and stars.”

“Okay…?” Nadeau’s tone was polite but made it clear he really hoped Kirk would get to the point soon.

“Among the Guvnurag, those achievements belong to a single individual.”

“…No shit? Wow.”

Kirk shook his head gravely, a slow and impressive gesture on any Rrrrtk. “As I said, advantages. Shadarvanag passed away at the extraordinarily ripe old age of…” He tilted his head back and calculated. “…yes, about three hundred and forty-two, in Earth years. She had the luxury of time on her side, and a Guvnurag with time on her side who is left to think in peace…”

“Kirk, sorry, I think you’re rambling…”

“My rambling is relevant. Guvnurag can live three times as long as a human, and have the patience and psychology to ruminate on a problem for years. Combine that with the fact that their civilization developed the warp drive before yours had properly begun to make iron tools…”

“So you’re saying they’re so far ahead of us, we don’t know how far ahead of us they are,” Nadeau summarized.

“Sufficiently so that I fear you will have no choice but to rely on their system forcefield design rather than research your own.” Kirk shrugged, for Nadeau’s benefit: It was an awkward and complicated gesture with four arms. “But, as I said. I think that if the Hierarchy had compromised those things, we would not be having this conversation.”

Nadeau looked at the unfolding experiment again. “…Annoying.”

Kirk made an inquisitive noise.

“…Your spymaster network must have reported in about that, uh, altercation with the Alliance warmaster by now, eh?”

“Indeed. Both sides are so completely intimidated that the peace should last for a year or two.”

“That’s us. We kick ass, we turn the galaxy on its head, we burn the rulebook and write a new one, and it still turns out we’re way behind. That’s… frustrating.”

“It’s terrifying,” Kirk told him, candidly. “I’m as staunch an ally as your species has, but please do not think that you do not scare me, Lieutenant-Colonel. The people who welcome change are the ones who should be most afraid of it.”

“How d’you figure that?”

“Because they are the ones who have to make it a change for the better.”

Sergeant Lee stood up before Nadeau could reply and joined them. “Good news. CIC-3 seems to be a complete success,” he reported.

“Excellent. We’ll test her the whole week just to be sure, but I think we can let Lewis get back to working with Campbell on the PODCAST.”

“They’ll both be happy about that.” Lee hesitated. “…Actually, on an unrelated note, if you need me I took the liberty of moving myself down onto C deck.”

“You did? Okay.” Nadeau nodded. “Any particular reason?””

“My room was next to Campbell’s and, um…” Lee glanced behind him to check that they were out of Lewis’ earshot, then lowered his voice anyway. “They get loud.”

“Ah. Fair enough.”

“Yeah.” Something seemed to occur to Lee. “Um… Just so we’re clear, I’m not making a complaint or anything. I already resolved it.”

“That’s understood.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Carry on.”

Nadeau snorted and ran a hand over his bald scalp as the younger man departed, and batted the corner of his tablet against this palm thoughtfully before turning to Kirk. “Any insights into that?” he asked.

Kirk shook his mane in his natural equivalent of a shrug. “As a rule, I stay out of human sexuality. I prefer simpler pursuits, like overthrowing the status quo of the whole galaxy.”

Nadeau laughed. “Heh! Wise. Sometimes I wish I had, too.”

Kirk decided not to ask questions. Instead he straightened up from the splay-legged stance of an Rrrtk at his ease. “Speaking of my ’spymaster network’…”

“Yes?”

“During our visit to Aru, there was a question that went unresolved, and it has been gnawing at me. I have a… hunch.”

“I thought you didn’t do hunches?”

“As a rule I do not, which is why this one is important. I plan to follow up on it.”

“I don’t think I’d be happy to let you leave right now, Kirk. Getting you back inside the shield safely…”

“I am not asking to leave. I intend to…dangle the problem in front of some contacts of mine and let them do the rest.”

“Okay… How much will it cost?”

“It should not cost AEC anything. This is not a request for permission, Lieutenant-Colonel, it is a notification. I do not know what to expect from this investigation but it is not impossible that some human intervention may be requested later.”

“…Right. I’ll pass that along to Scotch Creek. What’s the investigation?”

“I suspect that the Hierarchy’s campaign of genocide may reach beyond Deathworld species and extend to older species that are becoming advanced enough to perhaps leave them behind. If I am correct, the truth may lie on the planet Aru. Unfortunately the last time I was on that planet we were forced to flee before I could complete my investigation. If I am right, it may still be possible to save a species from extinction.”

Nadeau nodded. “I can’t blame you for looking into it, then. Thanks for letting me know.”

Kirk nodded, stretched and turned to go. “We shall see,” he said, “if anything comes of it.”

Date Point: November 10y11m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Major Owen Powell

“You’re a difficult man to get hold of. Busy?”

Officer Regaari shook his paw slightly to recover from the strength of Powell’s handshake as he sat, and Powell pretended not to notice. “Extremely. Now that Cimbrean has a permanent population of Females living here, there is a lot to do.”

Powell arched his eyebrow, and Regaari’s inadvertent innuendo dawned on him a little too late. He handled it smoothly though. “…By which I mean that the colony here is becoming increasingly important and I am the senior officer of my Clan currently present,” he explained.

“Hmm. Well, it’s your Clan I wanted to discuss,” Powell said.

“Is something the matter?”

“On the contrary. We’re bloody impressed.”

Regaari’s ears pricked up ever-so-slightly. It was a subtle tell, but it was a tell nonetheless.

“That is… high praise,” he said.

Powell sat back and folded his hands lightly on his belly in a relaxed posture. “There have been discussions at a strategic level,” he said. “A lot o’ soul-searching and examination of where our strengths and weaknesses are and the fact is that we’re sorely lacking in some critical areas. We’ve achieved a lot wi’ bloody limited resources and influence and we’re proud of it… but Whitecrest has more. You’ve already seen that there are things you can do that we can’t.”

“And you would like access,” Regaari surmised. “More access,” he corrected himself.

“Access for access. I reckon there’s much we can give you in turn, and I daresay there’s things we know that you don’t.”

“Such as?”

Powell rolled his jaw grimly and sat forward. “Do you know how much the SOR costs us?” he asked.

“…I have estimates.”

“Almost a third of our Dominion Development Credits budget has gone into this unit. And that’s just the DDCs. The cost in dollars and pounds has been, er, high enough that I’m sure you’re wondering what could be worth it. And you don’t find lads like the Lads just knockin’ around down the pub, either.”

“You would not assemble such a unit unless you had a compelling reason,” Regaari duck-nodded in the Gaoian style.

“Aye.”

“The Hunters?”

“I’m not yet at liberty to disclose the full reasons for the SOR’s existence. But consider also that we were able to create this unit and train them up to the standard you’ve seen. We’re offering to share that.”

“You would teach us your training techniques? I am… not certain they would apply to Gaoians. We are not deathworlders.”

“I think you’d be surprised,” Powell said, softly. “You’re a lot closer to us than you are to most others. But in any case we can at least lend human expertise and insight if nothing else. I’ll let you decide how valuable that is.”

Powell knew enough about Gaoian body language to see that Regaari was itching to spring from his seat and run off and make it happen, but the Whitecrests prided themselves on their poise and composure so instead Regaari sat and considered the proposal.

“I can see… several advantages to such an exchange,” he admitted at last. Powell nodded and slid a folder over the desk.

“That’s the details of it,” he said.

“I will take it to my superiors as quickly as I am able,” Regaari told him, and stood up. He picked up the folder and carefully held it against his side.

Powell stood up as well, and they shook hands. “I look forward to hearing what they have to say.”

A few pleasantries later, and Regaari was on his way. Powell sat back down and allowed a rare private smile to warm his face.

He was expecting great things.

Date Point: November 10y11m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Grandfather Gyotin of Starmind

Gyotin had taken to keeping a supply of hot chocolate just for Ava, he saw her that often. Visiting him was part of her routine, now: she’d show up in the middle of the day, vanish into the Folctha Faith Center’s church to pray and light a candle, then sit and… just talk. They didn’t meditate or discuss religious matters at all.

For Ava, it was a release. For Gyotin, an education.

Before converting to Buddhism and founding the Clan, Gyotin had been an engineer of sorts. A practical, jobbing technician at least and he’d refined his diagnostic and troubleshooting skills considerably while working on assorted spaceships. He was quite practiced at spotting patterns.

One such pattern was a quirk of English, which relied more heavily on accent and stress than its native speakers thought. The word ’contract’’ had four or five different meanings differentiated entirely by context and emphasis. Words and muscles could be contracted, as could diseases and debts, and you could contract some contractors by signing a contract.

Nowhere was this more pertinent, however, than in the difference between knowing something, and knowing something.

This was not the same thing as the click moment of finally being able to intuit a subject rather than merely knowing it in the abstract. English had a word for that: ’Grokking’. This was… something else.

It seemed, if Ava was to be believed, that a human could both know and grok that something was true… and still fail to be convinced. It was not enough to remember and to understand that something was true, they had to believe that it was true as well or else something in their head just… failed to grip onto it.

The fact that, to a human, belief apparently served as a component of knowledge…? Well, it explained much.

Ava seemed to be suffering from an inconsistent ability to apply belief. There were plenty of things that she did believe: in God, in Christ, in prayer and redemption and sin. Perhaps she was uncharacteristically inarticulate at describing the specifics of those beliefs, but her conviction was nevertheless absolute.

But on the other paw she just didn’t seem to be able to believe that her family and friends cared for her, or that she was any good at her job. And she certainly didn’t seem able to believe that she could make herself feel better by reaching out to others, even though she proved it to herself time and again by doing exactly that.

Which made the fact that she kept reaching out to Gyotin a bit of a puzzle, though he was cautious never to broach the subject in case it burst whatever delicate bubble of belief she’d built around him.

Eventually, she accidentally broached it herself, the day after one of her formal sessions at the military base. She’d never explained why she went there for them, and Gyotin had never asked.

She sat down with her hot chocolate as usual and treated Gyotin to a rare smile. She was having one of her good days. “Doctor Mears is getting me a therapy dog.”

Gyotin settled onto his zabuton and sniffed happily at his tea. “A… therapy dog?”

“Yeah. A dog who’s had special training to help me. He says that the dog could gently bring me out of my flashbacks or just let me cuddle him and let me talk about…y’know, whatever’s wrong. He’s mentioned them a couple of times, but this time he said he’s gonna go ahead and apply for one…”

“So this dog is… another sympathetic ear?”

“Yeah, but, like, not a human one. Not one who understands or judges.”

“I’m not human,” Gyotin pointed out. Ava made a complicated motion with her head that Gyotin had never quite deduced the meaning of.

“Yeah, but, like, you understand. You’re not human but you’re still a person. A thinking person.”

“Sapient.”

“Yeah.”

“So… why not talk to stuffed animal instead, if you don’t want sapient?”

Ava blinked at him. “I.. I mean I could, but… I dunno, I’d rather talk to somebody alive.”

Gyotin flicked his ear and twitched his whiskers as he tried to work that one out.. “So.. you want to talk to somebody alive, but not somebody alive?”

Ava adjusted her shirt collar. “…I mean, uh… yeah! Even if it does sound kinda weird when you put it that way.”

Gyotin sipped his tea. “I talk to other Gao. You know one experience lots of us have with humans? You treat us like dogs.”

“What? But… I mean, your Clan and the Females and all the Clanless they’re so respected here! Aren’t you?”

Gyotin chittered. “I don’t mean in disrespectful way. I never understood saying ’treated like a dog’ anyway because you humans love dogs. A human can be a liar, cheat, thief and abusive to partner, people will forgive that, look for good in them. If same person is cruel to a dog, though…” he extended his claws and mimed a slash in the air.

Ava didn’t seem to know how to respond to that. She drank her hot chocolate instead of answering, and frowned thoughtfully through the steam.

“No, you treat us like dogs because you love dogs, and we push lots of same buttons,” Gyotin explained. “Furry, teeth, loyal to each other… Even same body language in lots of ways. Even wagging tails, some Brownies.”

“Same nose…” Ava cleared her throat. “Have I ever…?” she gestured from herself to him.

“A little.”

“I’m so sorry!” Ava put her drink down looking genuinely mortified. Gyotin waved his paw reassuringly.

“I try not to mind. I think is instinct, and instinct take over very easily when you not thinking. Besides, all species do it to other species. You ever met Versa Volc?”

“Uh… The slug guys in the robotic exosuits, right? Never met one.”

Gyotin duck-nodded. “Disgusting. Nice guys, but… what’s that word? Gross. Silly stupid prejudice, they are good people, sensitive, intelligent… too bad they are slimy and smell awful. And nobody like slimy, awful-smelling thing so people don’t react so well to them. People do it to you too.”

“They do?”

“Oh yeah!” Gyotin duck-nodded vigorously. “People see human, see danger. It’s written into your bodies, the way you move and sit and smell. Even now, even you, hard not to be a little scared of you. And I like you!”

Ava smiled. She was obviously touched, despite the context. “That… I’m sorry if I scare you, Gyotin. I like you as well. You help me so much.”

“Good! I’m glad.” Gyotin chittered warmly. “But try not to let anxiety take over about scaring: Human being scary is normal. You wouldn’t be you without it.”

“I’ll try.”

“But maybe that’s why you find it so easy to talk to me. I remind you of dog a little bit.”

“…If that was true, would you be okay with it?”

“Sure! Other Gao maybe not so much but for me is fine. I know you know I’m not just an animal. You never scratch my ears.”

“You don’t like that?”

“We do! But, ah… it means something different among Gao. If female scratches male’s ears…Well, he’s a lucky male.”

“Oh.”

Gyotin chittered again. “Leads to some awkwardness in Gao-human friendships.”

“Uh, yeah!”

“So. I think this dog will be good for you. Not a Gao surrogate—a real dog. Just don’t forget me, hmm?”

“Never!” Ava picked up her drink. “God, no. You… I don’t know where I’d be if I couldn’t come and talk to you.”

Gyotin pricked his ears up happily and sipped his tea, happy to be of help.

“Actually…” Ava said, thoughtfully, “Would it be okay if I wrote an article on what you just said? About Gaoians and dogs? Kind of a species sensitivity, consciousness-raising thing.”

“Of course! Be sure to get my good side.”

She laughed, which was a rare sight on her, then extended her mug. Two weathered but sturdy old ceramic containers tapped against each other.

“Deal.”

Date Point: November 10y11m2w AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Unnamed system, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

The music industry hadn’t stopped during the years of Julian’s absence from Earth, and he made a point of not only listening to old familiar songs. Fortunately, Misfit was carrying a lot of music on file.

Contrary to the woe and tears of some critics who bemoaned the state of pop music, he was finding some excellent new bands with names like “I Prefer The Storm”, “Stone-D”, “Granuloma” “Savvz” and “To The Victor”, and the lab usually had the volume turned up just slightly short of hearing damage. That was something he shared with Xiù—they both liked their music turned way up, even if their tastes differed slightly. She was more into what she called “timeless hits” like Cyndi Lauper, Bonnie Tyler, Alanis Morissette and Adele, seasoned with some outrageously over-the-top syrupy Cantopop power ballads.

Both of them agreed that they had no idea what Allison liked. Scouring her playlist had turned up no detectable pattern, preferred genre or anything beyond that everything on it had probably been near the top of the singles charts at some point. It was a kind of urban radio mix, and she never played it at any volume above ’unobtrusive background noise’.

That was for when they were working alone on something, though. When the three of them were working together to fly the ship, the music had to be off.

Xiù sounded nervous. “Okay! Our first insertion into a system!”

Julian chuckled. “You’ve done it how many times?”

”Hundreds, in the simulator. I’m just paranoid that the simulator will be wrong.”

Xiù had every reason to be nervous. Dropping out of warp wasn’t as simple as just turning the engine off and letting the field collapse—the ship’s inertial frame of reference had to be matched with that of the destination system as well, or else they could easily find themselves flashing through the neighborhood at some huge relative velocity.

All of that was handled by the computers, but the pilot still needed to be on the alert.

Allison chimed in. Well, I’m ready when you are.”

”We’re waiting on Misfit, Shǎguā. Two minutes.”

“So what are we going to call this thing?” Julian asked.

“The system? The planet?” Allison asked.

“Both?”

Their naming system had been the subject of long conversations and some good-natured bickering during their weeks ‘at sea’, most of which had involved thinking of reasons to turn down an idea. They’d worried about copyright, about being too pop-culture, about not being pop-culture enough, about the unforeseeable ways in which language might adapt and change over the future years so that they didn’t end up accidentally giving today’s planet tomorrow’s epithet…

They could have just assembled a list of suitable historical figures or the contemporary equivalents of Amerigo Vespucci and gone with that, but they still wanted to put their own personality on their finds, too.

So, they had three lists. The special list, for stuff they knew would be remembered. The good list, for noteworthy stuff that probably wouldn’t get much attention outside of a corner of the scientific community, and the “it’ll do” list for everything they felt deserved a name but which would almost certainly go ignored.

Misfit’s tune changed. The steady note she’d been holding for a week now got flatter and lower. Behind him, Allison would be reeling in the huge wings of their WiTChES fields, whose edges let them bleed energy out of the flares of radiation made when interstellar plasma got pinched in the strange interface between their warp bubble and the rest of spacetime.

The trick wasn’t quite enough to run the warp drive indefinitely, but it improved their time between recharging stops from days to weeks. Longer if Allison turned up the reactor output a bit, but why expend Deuterium they didn’t have to? Misfit was built to hop from star to star and keep herself charged by tapping into their otherwise wasted energies: The fusion reactor was there for booting her up from idle, or if they needed a surge of extra power in an emergency.

Now, though, they were shifting fully onto capacitor power as Xiù slowed them down and the warp field’s boundary edge fluctuated. Julian reached up and turned one of the three monitors in his lab to navigation, which filled up with possible contacts as Misfit took note of every point of light she could see above a certain luminosity and tracked their parallax.

At a slow warp, a picture of the system didn’t take long to form.

“Seven planets. Four gas giants… our target is planet two.” he reported.

”Gotcha.”

Armed with the navigation data, Xiù could turn and pulse them across the AUs at four kilolights. Pathetically slow for interstellar distances, alarmingly quick for intrasystem warps. The icon representing Misfit became the end of a line, swept to the other end of that line, and Julian had to zoom in quite a long way on the display to see their orbit.

”All yours, Julian.” Xiù told him. There was a disappointed note in her voice. ”But I don’t think this one’s a winner…”

“Thank you, bǎobèi…”

Julian could see why she was pessimistic as soon as he switched to the visual camera and saw nothing but brilliant white clouds. There weren’t even any breaks in them: The whole planet was smooth with water vapor. Aiming Misfit’s instruments downwards only confirmed what he already suspected.

“…Yeah, the ambient temperature down there is four hundred Kelvin,” he reported. “All that water in the atmosphere is steam.”

”God dammit…” Allison sighed. ”So close.”

“It’d be temperate if the greenhouse effect hadn’t gone fucking nuts,” Julian observed. “Could be it’ll settle down in a few million years, could be it’ll turn into another Venus…. I mean, she basically is another Venus.”

“It’s pretty, though,” Xiù observed. ”From up here it’s almost too bright to look at.”

”So she’s pretty, she’s basically another Venus… how about we call her Aphrodite?” Allison suggested.

”I like that.”

“Guess we’re throwing the list away then… Aphrodite it is.” Julian recorded it with a smile. “Well hey, she may not be temperate, but she’s still our first planet!”

”That sounds like something we should celebrate,” Allison suggested. ”I’ll bring round the candy bars.”

“Sounds good. Whaddya think, give it a day for the sensors to really do their thing, give the rest of the system a once-over and go from there?”

”And dump hull charge,” Xiù reminded him.

”That gives the planet-finder two days to work, too,” Allison added as she entered. Julian got a millisecond echo of her voice in his earpiece. She gave him a Hershey’s bar and a kiss then vanished to do the same for Xiù.

Julian nodded and activated the BEST. It was too bad they couldn’t operate the telescope at warp, but it was sensitive enough to be thrown off by the infinitesimal fluctuations in light level caused by the warp field.

He found there was something therapeutic about watching it work, though. The progress screen had a satisfying functional rhythm to it that reminded him of his grampa’s ancient PC whenever the old man had periodically defragged it, a procedure that had been obsolete even then. Scan, find, observe, move on. It could multi-task several stars at once, and happily ticked over to a new set of targets every two seconds, surveying the stars in patches the size of a Christmas card at arm’s length.

Which sounded big, but in fact the BEST needed three full days to survey the whole sky and that was only for the closest and most visible stars within half a kiloparsec. More than enough time to survey the system and get the basics on it.

He hit up Wikipedia while the dish was deploying and had a quick look at the archived entry on Aphrodite.

“Okay… I’m gonna name the system Acidalia, then.”

”I guess?” Xiù said.

“I’ll explain later. How’s our orbit?”

”We’re happy. My turn to cook?”

Julian snorted. Somehow the perky instant gear-shift from interstellar starship pilot to culinary wizard seemed completely natural in Xiù.

“What’re you making?”

”It’s a secret.”

”It’s always a secret,” Allison chimed in warmly.

”You like my secrets!”

“True. I never woulda guessed you could do that with canned peaches,” Julian agreed.

“Oh, you liked the canned peach surprise?” Xiù sounded pleased, but confused.

“Yeah, why?”

“Because I grabbed the wrong can. It was, um… meant to be chickpeas.”

“…Oh.” Julian considered that. “…Well, it was still nice.”

”We don’t make mistakes, we just have happy accidents.” The sound of Xiù’s chair evicting her from the cockpit was a solid thump through Julian’s wall

”Mistake or not, if you can accidentally substitute canned peaches for chickpeas and still get something that tastes that good, you’re a fucking miracle worker,” Allison opined.

”Yulna taught me that trick.”

“So, wait, where did the chickpeas end up?” Julian asked.

”I made hummus.”

Julian grinned to himself as the ship’s more… domestic background noise reasserted itself. There was a marked contrast between how they all sounded when they were being the crew, and how they sounded when they were being themselves. Once they were able to just let Misfit sit and run herself without them they could get back to the constants. Allison’s low-grade flirting with both of them. Xiù flitting like a bird from little task to little task, never dealing with the big things but still pulling her weight by staying on top of the disregarded details. He wondered what they’d pick out about him, if they mused along the same lines.

Happy ones, hopefully. Trust. Reassurance. He wanted to be the rock they could build on. After all his years of forced isolation, there was nothing better than that: It was the warm little glow that pushed away the Nightmare chill that had soaked into his bones and never quite left.

He left the scanner to run and joined them.

Date Point: November 10y11m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes:

RE: TSgt Martina Kovač

Sergeant Kovač has made excellent progress in overcoming her pyrophobia, which she developed after being injured during a fire aboard HMS Caledonia. She reports that she recently helped Sergeants Arés and Vandenberg construct a barbecue pit and test-fire it and says that she felt only “mild” anxiety as it was being lit.

She seems determined to confront her phobia head-on, and it seems to be working for her. I will see her in a year’s time for her annual assessment but made it clear to her that she is welcome at any time before then if she thinks it necessary.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: Thanksgiving, 10y11m3w AV
Independent Light Freighter ’My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’, The Coreward Band

Dog Wagner

“This is another one of those ‘humans are crazy’ things, isn’t it? Or is it just you? I can never tell.”

Krzzvk had some major advantages over the average Vzk’tk when it came to the brains department. His parents had paid for some genetic engineering stuff and an expensive suite of implants, with the result that he could be downright intelligent on a good day. He sure had some lip on him and he was about the only member of the crew who would even dare to aim it at Dog.

Which was why he was Dog’s best friend in the whole world.

“Nah, brother, nah. The tradition’s simple. You get your family together, eat a big turkey dinner and be thankful for stuff. Easy!”

“For what? And to whom?”

“Brother, I don’t even care. Just thank whoever for whatever. Or thank whatever for whoever. Whatever.”

Krzzvk stopped and gave him the tilt-headed look he used when he was about to say ’You are very strange, Dog.’

“You are very strange, Dog.”

“Look brother, are you coming or not?”

Krzzvk nodded slowly, which was an impressive gesture on his species. It looked like somebody headbanging to the tempo of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

“It clearly means a lot to you,” he said.

“I haven’t celebrated it in a long time, brother.” Not since he’d parted ways with Hazel, fourteen years earlier. She was the last human he’d spoken to, too. Sure, he’d seen humans in the newsfeeds and heard about the new colony at Cimbrean and all that stuff but the last time he’d actually seen, smelled or touched another human had been Hazel.

He didn’t regret not going back with her though.

“Fine. But I have some questions,” Krzzvk said.

“Shoot.”

“Did you actually manage to procure one of these ‘turkey’ things? How? And am I expected to watch you eat it? I am not sure I want to watch you eat meat.”

“Nah brother, no turkey. I made what they call a nut roast. Sorta.”

“Nut roast.”

“Yah. You’ll like it, no meat at all. Super rich by Vizkitty standards but that’s, like, the point. You eat big rich food.”

Krzzvk looked skeptical. “That sounds like an excellent way to become nauseous.”

“Brother, if you don’t get nauseous then you ain’t doing it right.”

Krzzvk gave him that look again. “…You are very strange, Dog.”

“Five.” That was the day’s running tally of Krzzvk saying that. He was close to beating the record of seven that he’d set on Talk Like A Pirate Day.

“What?”

“Never mind. Just bring the wife and kids, yah?”

“…Yes, shipmaster.”

Dog snorted, waved his Vzk’tk first mate away and whistled merrily to himself as he returned to his cabin.

His cabin was a mess. It was always a mess. His inexpertly hand-made clothing was all over the floor waiting to be washed, there were datapads everywhere and his bedding hadn’t been changed in… uh…

Well, it hadn’t been changed recently. The room smelled of him, of Cqcq cigars, and of the still in the corner that was working its way through another sour mash of grains and Rwhk fruit. The resulting beverage, which he called ’Bootlegger’, was potent and surprisingly tasty thanks to years spent perfecting both the recipe and the still.

Or maybe his taste buds had a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. Didn’t really matter—the stuff not only got him drunk, but he enjoyed drinking it which was really all you could ask of booze. Taste good, pickle the ol’ grey matter. Check, check.

Oh, and not make you go blind. Check.

He grabbed a small glass of the stuff and sat on his bed to watch… something. He wasn’t sure what. Vzk’tk entertainment ran along most of the same lines as the human stuff but it was formulaic as hell. Though, the romcoms were better. They relied less on farce and wacky hijinks and more on slapstick humor, with the result that the hapless protagonist tended to suffer from a sequence of improbable accidents calculated to inflict maximum embarrassment, rather than from his own stupid schemes backfiring.

Honestly, the fact that the protagonists in Vzk’tk romantic comedies were generally smarter than their human counterparts was mildly upsetting, but Dog loved those movies as a result. They were the least predictable by far.

He was playing paddle-ball and watching the hapless Trkkvk climb out of the pond she’d just fallen into moments before handsome and suave Krtrktt came around the corner (or so he guessed—Vzk’tk standards of suavitude and handsominity were… different) when he was called to the bridge.

He kept playing paddle-ball on his way up there. Why stop? A reputation for oddness was pretty well automatic for a human living among aliens anyway, so he played up to it whenever he could.

“Talk to me.”

“We just shared data with a Laru Group heavy bulk freighter out of Free Trade Station Ninety-Four going the other way,” the comms officer said. He was one of the few crew members who wasn’t a Vzk’tk, a Rauwhyr by the name of Tlorcral and he didn’t like Dog at all. As far as Dog could tell, he only stayed on because Dog was by far the most profitable free captain he’d ever worked for.

A lot of that was because Dog was a smuggler, but the crew didn’t need to know that. Because hey, if a man found himself alone in space with his own spaceship and a conveniently uninquisitive crew, what else was he gonna do?”

“Must be juicy if you’re bothering me,” he half-observed, half-warned and half-accused.

“It is. The Group wants to run a convoy out to Cimbrean and set up a trading outpost there. Some kind of collaboration with a human organization called Hephaestus.”

“And they’re hiring free traders?”

“Cheaper for them than diverting their own ships from their scheduled runs. If you’re interested the convoy is forming up at Free Trade Station Fifty.”

“What’s in it for us?” Dog asked.

“You could see your own kind again?”

“Coulda done that already.”

“Get laid?”

“Enticing, but unlikely.”

“Expand your media collection?”

“…Sold. We’ll finish this run and head for Fifty.”

“Fine, fine. Just… stop paddling that ball next to my head.” Tlorcral had sensitive ears. Dog shrugged and took his paddle-ball to the other end of the bridge to read the message.

It didn’t share much. Some kind of a collaboration between Laru Trading Group and Hephaestus Limited Liability Company to establish a permanent port station at Cimbrean outside the forcefield, with adequate defenses to see off most plausible Hunter raids. He wasn’t quite clear on why the humans needed to be involved at all: if the aliens had wanted to, they could have shipped a station out there any time they liked.

Which meant that Hephaestus had requested it.

FTS-50 was more than a month out of their way, but he was already persuaded. He didn’t exactly plan on reconnecting but…

But Dog had to admit: He was curious.

Date Point: December 10y12m1w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: SSgt John Burgess

Sergeant Burgess dutifully attended today for his routine annual assessment.

I have never quite got to the bottom of his reluctance in this matter, because he opens up readily and engagingly when actually in the session—indeed, he can scarcely be induced to pause long enough to be asked a question—and he has shown repeatedly that he is an insightful and highly intelligent man.

Reading between the lines, however, I suspect that he second-guesses his career decisions more than the other members of his team. He readily admits that he joined the SOR in support of Sergeant Arés, and may not have done so if not for his friend’s example. He also expresses self-doubt about his physical capability; in his words, “[he] wonders if maybe Firth would be a better Protector, and [himself] a better Aggressor.”

Self-doubts aside he presents as euthymic and positive. He takes a substantial yet quiet pride in his intelligence, though there is some small conflict at play; most of the rest of the team seem genuinely intimidated by his intellect in flashes through daily life, and Burgess may resent this. He also describes similar reactions from his childhood friends and family, and states that “being smart was never a good way to make [oneself] popular where [he] grew up”.

He is “bromantical [sic]” with Sergeant Arés by self description, which does much to alleviate these small issues of self-doubt. Arés, in fact, has done much to encourage Burgess’ intellectual pursuits stating that, quote: “If [he] [didn’t] get [his] Master’s degree [Arés would] bend [Burgess] into a pretzel and fuck [him] silly.” In the context of HEAT operators, this is merely an affectionate rebuke.

I will see him again in a year, but have made sure he knows my door is always open.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: December 10y12m2w AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Interstellar deep space, near the Border Stars

Xiù Chang

“…Fifty?!”

Julian nodded. “Yeah! Turns out the whole Near Three Kiloparsec Arm is riddled with possible temperate planets.”

“Like the last two?” Xiù asked, just a little acidly. She didn’t mean to be, but it had turned out that looking out for nitrogen and water alone generated quite a few false positives. Aphrodite had been understandable, but their next wild goose had been a pair of chemically very different moons dancing around each other as they orbited a gas giant. The BEST, it turned out, wasn’t quite living up to its name.

She wanted to land somewhere. Stretch her legs, swing her arms, breathe some clean air. Misfit was home and cozy and wonderful, but it was still small and confined. She missed birdsong and the sound of the wind. Their first temperate planet just couldn’t come soon enough.

Allison was reading the report with an eyebrow raised skeptically. “Are we sure the telescope isn’t fucked? I could run a diagnostic…”

“Be my guest, but I’m pretty sure it ain’t,” Julian replied. “I think it’s just great at spotting exoplanets and chemicals, but not so hot at definitively isolating all the right chemicals down to one planet at the right temperature.”

“So we’ve gotta check them all then.”

“We’ll never get through fifty planets in one mission!” Xiù objected. “Even if they’re all quick checks like Aphrodite.”

“Uh-huh. And we’re gonna spend weeks on a real one. We’ve got material here for…years!” Julian grinned. “Which is good news! They can’t all be false positives.”

“True…” Xiù conceded. “We must have found at least one real planet, we just have to… you know, find it find it.”

“Is there any way to narrow it down?” Allison asked. “I really don’t think there are gonna be fifty temperates around here. There’s gotta be something we can do to help the BEST figure out which are the real ones.”

Julian shrugged. “Send our data on Aphrodite back to Earth? Let them use it to update the telescope.”

“That’ll take months.”

“Well… why not kill two birds with one stone?” Xiù asked. “There’s a Free Trade Station not far from here. Maybe we can access the Dominion’s archives and see if there are some old star charts in there? That could help us narrow it down…”

The archives had been her favorite way to pass the time when she was alone after parting ways with Ayma and Regaari. They contained orders of magnitude more data than Wikipedia and just went down, and down, and down. She’d lost hours trawling through obscurities about the galaxy, most of which were uselessly academic… but a more targeted search could turn up something useful.

“No way we’re the first to think of that…” Julian said.

“I dunno…” Allison mused. “Did you ever take a look at the archives? There’s so much in there and it’s not like the Group knew we’d be exploring this exact region. If we search through them with actual system coordinates…”

“If you think it’ll work…” Julian conceded.

“It’s only a week out of our way and it might save us months,” Xiù said. “And we’ll be able to send letters and our data home and stuff so it won’t be a wasted trip anyway.”

Julian nodded “I’m sold. Allison?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Okay!” Xiù picked up her tablet and plotted a course. “We should get there on… huh. Christmas Eve.”

“I guess there are worse places to find yourself on Christmas Eve than a trade station,” Allison smiled. “At least we can buy presents. Maybe.”

“Maybe.” Julian sounded skeptical.

Xiù laughed and stood up. “Let’s get to warp, then.”

They headed for their workstations and got Misfit ready for FTL. Julian reeled in the BEST, Allison rebalanced the powerflow, and Xiù…

Xiù wondered if her memory was playing tricks on her, or if she really had visited that station before.

Date Point: December 10y12m3w AV
Cabal Communications Relay ZR343-9847X-AA4D9-BBB1B

Priority Session 159

++Cynosure++: We haven’t seen any sign of it since.

++Proximal++: Nor have our former comrades.

++Metastasis++: Is it too much to hope that it might have been destroyed in the battle? Large sections of the local dataspace were crashed…

++Cynosure++: It doesn’t share our notions of personal sanctity. It has shown an alarming willingness to copy itself, especially before engaging in risky actions.

++Proximal++: We do that too. You yourself restored from a backup…

++Cynosure++: But I do not keep my backups online and conscious. The Entity permits multiple instances of itself to exist at once, which can observe the primary instance and learn from what happens to it.

++Apoptosis++: So it has gone to ground.

++Substrate++: It could be anyone. It could be one of us.

++Cynosure++: I don’t think it is one of us, no. It is probably posing as a junior agent among the Hierarchy. One in the low triple-digits possibly.

++Proximal++: Junior enough to avoid constant scrutiny, but senior enough to be informed and to plan its next move. I agree.

++Metastasis++: That does not greatly narrow our search.

++Cynosure++: No… The only thing we can do is watch and wait.

++Apoptosis++: Unfortunately, I think you are right…

Date Point: Christmas Eve, 10y12m3w AV
Independent Light Freighter ’My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’, Docked With Free Trade Station 50 ’Bastion of Fortune’, The Coreward Band

Dog Wagner

“Dog! Dog!!”

Dog ignored the way that Tlorcral recoiled in response to the cloud of Cqcq smoke he got in his face when the door was flung up.

“Merry fuckin’ Christmas, Tlorc. The fuck d’you want?” he growled.

Christmas was always bad. Christmas was the one time of year when he really felt isolated and alone. The ETs could get their heads around birthdays, and thanksgiving, and Labor Day, and Independence Day… but they really, really struggled with Christmas. The moment they learned how it was a religious holiday they just dismissed it as human strangeness and… tolerated it. Which was nice of them, but…

It wasn’t calculated to put Dog in a good mood. So he’d spent every Christmas for the last thirteen years alone, drunk and high.

Tlorcral stepped back respectfully, and Dog reminded himself to tone down the angry. Poor guy was shit-scared of him anyway.

“…Sorry, brother. I’m just cranky. ‘Sup?”

“There are humans on the station! They’re making a scene on the market promenade!”

“…No shit?”

“Two of them!”

“No shit?” Dog laughed. “Well damn, Brother. Lemme grab my pants…”

He jumped into the dark green canvas hand-stitched pants with the fewest stains and bounced to drag them up (putting his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else? Fuck that.) then grabbed his jacket—the real leather one, the one he’d worn on the day of his abduction that freaked ETs the fuck out because it was made of skin—and strapped on his sandals. Shoes and boots were way too difficult to make.

Then he stormed down the ramp and off the ship for the first time in months. ETs didn’t react well to humans. He liked to keep a low profile, usually.

This time though… well it wasn’t too hard to find Tlorcral’s humans. They were haranguing a Robalin shopkeeper and they were both fucking beautiful. A slender whipstrap blonde with a gun on her hip and a leggy asian chick with an action movie body, both wearing close-fitting dark sportswear. Sirens in polyester.

He stopped and stared because, fuck it, they were the first women he’d seen in years and a guy was allowed to-

“Hi.”

Dog nearly choked on surprise and spun around. Several nearby ETs flinched away as well. There was a third human, a rangy wolfpack kinda dude with shaggy black hair leaning against the wall alongside him with his arms folded, who smiled at him.

“Merry Christmas.”

Dog found his voice. “…Holy shit, brother! Where’d you come from?”

“Minnesota. You?”

“Uh… Indianapolis.”

The man extended a hand. “Julian.”

Dog shook hands—really shook hands, revelling in the fact that he could actually grip and apply some strength—and grinned. “Everybody calls me Dog, brother.”

“You’re a long way from home, Dog.”

“Nah, brother. Home’s moored at docking point six.”

Julian grinned. “I can relate to that.” He turned, stuck his fingers in his mouth and aimed an ear-biting whistle at the ladies. Both of them turned, saw Dog and dropped their jaws, then looked at each other and came over to join them. The crowd of ETs spread out a little more, watching these four deathworlders from a safe distance.

“Dog, This Allison and Xiù,” Julian introduced them.

“Zhao?”

Xiù smiled indulgently. “You can call me Shoo if it’s easier. I don’t mind.”

“Pleasure to meet ya. Feels like a gosh-darn Christmas miracle. I ain’t seen another Homo Sapiens in fourteen years and then three come along at once!”

Allison whistled. “Jeez. How long have you been out here?”

“Twenty years, thereabouts? I don’t really mind, but… dang.”

Julian laughed. “I can relate. Right Xiù?”

Xiù was staring at something in the distance and jumped at the mention of her name. “Huh? Oh. Yeah… um… Guys?”

She nodded toward a troop of security officers who were pushing through the crowd, and if their serious equipment was anything to go by they were armed for deathworlder. Dog knew Domain body language, and the Rrrrtk at the front was pissed.

It—she—drew herself up to her full and haughty height as she stopped in front of them.

“There are two scenarios that no chief of security ever wants to hear,” she began in a kind of icy conversational way. “The first would be that we are under attack by Hunters, and the second would be that there are humans making a fuss in a station’s public area. Not least because the latter can so easily lead to the former. Imagine my dismay.”

Xiù shrank, Julian scratched the back of his neck, but Dog and Allison turned out to have something in common—they both bristled.

“That son of a bitch over there is selling contraband,” Allison asserted.

“The Robalin? Please, tell me things I do not already know. Do you have any proof?”

“He has a tiger!” Xiù piped up. “They’re a protected species!”

“Thank you. I shall investigate immediately. You however are endangering this entire station just by being here. Are you even inoculated?”

“We’re clean,” Allison snapped. “Dog?”

“Sister, I’m cleaner than a surgeon’s soap dish.”

This pronouncement didn’t seem to sway the security chief. “Then that only leaves the Hunters. Am I to presume you have forgotten the ultimatum?”

“Those things are fucking kittens,” Dog said, dismissively. “It’s been nearly a year since Capitol Station and ain’t nobody heard from them since.”

The Rrrrtk held up one of her stronger hands. “I am not here to argue with you,” she declared. “I am here to evict you. All four of you. Immediately.”

“Speciesist, sister.”

“Okay, Allison baby? Julian? Dog? Could you…?” Xiù stepped in front of them and waved them all back. Dog made note of the ’Allison baby’ with an inward groan, but he backed off with the other two and they retreated to the other side of the market and watched her work.

The conversation swiftly grew less animated. The security critters all unwound a bit, stopped fidgeting with their pulse guns, and eventually backed down and wandered off in ones and twos. Their chief even shook hands with Xiù before departing, though she still aimed the best glare a herbivore could manage at Allison and Dog.

Xiù rejoined them looking thoughtful

“I persuaded her to let us stay until we finish degaussing,” she said.

“That’s our girl,” Julian smiled.

“She’s right though, we shouldn’t stay too long. Now that they know we’re here… the Hunters might find out.”

Dog bit back a scoff. “Hunters ain’t all that tough.”

She looked at him. “You’ve fought them?”

“Saw what that Jenkins fella did to ‘em, heard what happened in Vancouver. How bad can they be?”

Xiù’s expression hardened and she raised her hand to show him the back of her arm. Dog finally noticed that it was covered in half a dozen long, ragged scars. “They nearly killed me. That’s how bad.”

“Uh… Shit. Really?”

She nodded. “Mm-hmm. And they would kill everyone here.”

Dog looked around. Several nearby ETs were listening in on the conversation despite not understanding a word of it, but they could all follow the energy of it. The social context cues his implant was putting out would give them his half of it anyway. And they were all people, he knew that… even if it was disturbingly easy to forget sometimes.

Embarrassment. That was a rare one for Dog. He hadn’t been made to feel like a heel in years.

“…Don’t mind me,” he said by way of an apology. “I ain’t never actually seen a Hunter, I guess you’d know better.”

“Don’t mind me either,” she returned the apology with a faint smile. “They scare me.”

Allison rubbed her back, then made an offer that surprised Dog no end. “Hey, look, we can make our Christmas dinner stretch to four if you…?”

Dog looked around. “Jesus, uh… I mean part’a me wants to be all polite and say it’s okay but that sounds like too good an offer to pass up.”

“You’d be welcome,” Julian agreed, and Xiù nodded.

“Man… Look, lemme run back to my ship and grab some stuff, ‘cause ain’t no way I ain’t giving y’all some kind of a gift. ‘Kay?”

“Sure. We’ll see you soon.” Julian shook his hand.

“For sure, brother.”

Dog returned the handshake, turned, and literally ran back to the My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon where he grabbed one of his bottles of Bootlegger, changed into his best clothing and showered, in that order.

Then he went for his first Christmas dinner in years.

One thing was for sure: he was beginning to look forward to the Cimbrean run.

Date Point: January 11y1m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,
RE: Miss Ava Magdalena Ríos

This young lady, who has special access to DEEP RELIC and was involved in Operation EMPTY BELL, returned to my clinic today. She is on Paroxetine 20mg for PTSD and I have been trying to secure a therapy animal for her.

Today she was well-groomed and appropriately presented. Her mood was objectively euthymic and she made good eye contact, though she reports still feeling “generally low” and states that she still has suicidal thoughts. She expressed frustration that these are still plaguing her.

She was pleased to report that her flashbacks have reduced in both frequency and severity. Her sleep is not improved, but she reports that she no longer feels quite as disturbed by her dreams or when she “zones out”.

I highlighted the progress she has already made and encouraged her. She has become very attached to the idea of a therapy dog, and I hope to have one for her soon. I will see her again in a month, when I will hopefully have good news for her.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: January, 11y1m AV
Independent Light Freighter ’My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’, En route to Cimbrean system, The Far Reaches

Dog Wagner

“Man, I shoulda been a mercenary. Can you imagine? A human mercenary, I could charge a fuckin’ premium, brother.”

Krzzvk turned in his chair to give Dog one of those long, patient stares he did so well.

“Dog, there isn’t a violent hair on your hide,” he said.

“Yeah but, like, a human mercenary brother. Wouldn’t ever need to shoot nobody, ‘cause they’d all be scared by the big bad wolf reputation,” Dog enthused. “Just show up like ’fee fi fo fum motherfuckers!’ and they’d be like ’aargh’ and I’d be like ’I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!’ and they’d be like-”

“You are very strange, Dog.”

“Heh. Preach it.”

Krzzvk snorted and shook his head. Several others around the bridge did the same and Dog returned his attention to the Chehnasho mercenary escort ship that was keeping station alongside them. There were five of them dotted around the convoy, all huge engines and huge-er guns full of sociopathic frog dudes who played a surprisingly mean hand of cards as Dog had discovered in the days before the convoy set out for Cimbrean. They had great poker faces.

And right now they were falling back toward the rear of the convoy as a new contact came sweeping in and fell in alongside the front of the merchant fleet.

“That’s a Gaoian Starfire class strike ship!” Tlorcral reported. Dog raised his eyebrows at him.

“That good?”

“They are the newest and most advanced class, the ones the Gaoians have been sending to system defence fleets across the whole Dominion.”

Dog examined the ship’s IFF. “’Racing Thunder’. Good name!”

“Good ship. It would tear our Chehn escorts to pieces.” Tlorcral told him.

“No shit?”

“No shit,” Tlorcral replied in slightly awkward English. “It’s faster, more agile, tougher and more heavily arm-…” He paused. “And it’s hailing us.”

“Yeah?” Dog grinned. “Put ‘er through!”

He hadn’t met many Gaoians before. This one had an impressive scar that had damn near torn his ear in half and ended just behind his nose, and he bared his teeth in a passable impression of a smile for Dog’s benefit as soon as the call connected.

“I thought so! A ship with a name like yours could only have a human on board.”

“Captained by one, no less,” Dog grinned. “Dog Wagner, nice to meet you.”

“Shipfather Yefrig. So are you a Star Wars fan, or do you just have a strange sense of humor?”

“Little’a column A, little’a column B.” Dog admitted.

”Hmmm… the only Wagner I have on the list of unaccounted-for human abductees is-”

“-William Wagner the Second, yeah yeah.” Dog interrupted him. “That’s me.”

”Thank you… please move to the front of the formation. I think Cimbrean customs and border control will want to see you first.”

Dog nodded at Krzzvk to make it so, and with a little extra juice to the warp drive, My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon steered out past, around and forward of the other forty ships in the convoy.

He traded a few more pleasantries with Yefrig and then was left to sit and drum his fingers on his foot as the Gaoian ship moved on to other business and the last few lightyears to Cimbrean ticked down.

“Fuckin’ Christ…” he grunted after a while.

Krzzvk looked up. “What was that, boss?”

“Nothing brother. Just thinkin’ on stuff.”

Krzzvk teetered to his feet and picked his way over to Dog’s station. “Are you… alright?” he asked, quietly.

“Just shaken,” Dog confessed. That dinner I had with those kids on Station Fifty kinda… it brought back some stuff I thought I’d dealt with, brother. And now we’re about to meet more of my kind. Kinda turned my world upside down.”

“You were very quiet after you met those three,” Krzzvk acknowledged.

“Shock to the system, that’s all. You ain’t gone for years without meeting one of your kind. Guess I’d forgotten how… natural it feels, talkin’ to another human.”

“Natural?”

“Yeah, brother. Like… talking with you, I get the social cues from the implant, I get all the body language but it’s like… if I’m talkin’ to another human I just know that shit. Like, know know. You know?”

Krzzvk gave him the ‘very strange’ look again, but didn’t say it this time. Instead he gave his shipmaster a reassuring pat on the shoulder and returned to his work.

Dog fidgeted the whole way there.

The bubble of stress and anxiety he’d built around himself popped and vanished as three more contacts matched course with them, and these ones were…

HMS Valiant. HMS Viscount. HMS Myrmidon

Brits. He’d forgotten that Brits even existed. Stiff upper lips and cups of tea and the Queen and all that other stuff. He’d completely forgotten what an English accent sounded like.

He listened as just such an accent called Krzzvk to park them in orbit over the Cimbrean system’s fifth planet and made arrangements to send over a shuttle. Krzzvk cleared the shuttle deck and Dog…

Dog “nonchalantly” sauntered aft to say hi.

He was slightly surprised to discover that the shuttle that came over was a bog-standard Dominion one, the kind that nanofactories spat out by the thousand. Little more than a gray brick with a hatch at one end. Ugly.

Then that hatch opened and spilled out ten marines and the biggest man Dog had ever seen. They lined up in front of him.

“Permission to come aboard,” the big guy said.

“Fuckin’ granted, brother. Welcome!”

All the guests relaxed and the big guy stepped forward, hand-first. “Nice to meet you. Name’s Rebar.”

“Dog.” Dog tried not to wince as he realised that the dude had enough grip strength to jellify his hand.

Rebar nodded. “Look man, we gotta do a complete contraband sweep. Few questions.”

“Shoot.”

Rebar produced a box-shaped thing from his belt. “First things first, I need to run a medical scan on you, okay?”

“Uh, sure…”

The box was pressed firmly but not uncomfortably against Dog’s head. It emitted a beep and a yellow light, and Rebar grunted.

“Okay. Do you have any jump beacons on board?”

“Uh… I don’t think so. No.”

“Any vials of the medicine Cruezzir?”

“Nah, brother.”

“Any non-sapient fauna?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Class ten flora or higher?”

“Nope.”

“Any active, motile nanotechnology systems of any design?”

“Like a nanofac? Nah, brother. I fuckin’ wish. Just the machine shop.”

“Cool.” Rebar put his gizmos away and the marines fanned out to start turning the ship upside-down. He looked around with an appreciative eye.

“Nice ship. Yrvrk Shipyards Light bulk freighter model seven, right?”

“Uh…yeah!”

“Mark… four?”

“Shit, brother, how in the fuck do you know so much about ET ships?”

“Dude, I got to geek out over actual spaceships!” Rebar grinned.

“Well shit, when you put it like that…” Dog grinned, relaxing. Rebar’s sheer size was so intimidating it gave him an inkling of what it must be like for your average squishy ET to encounter a human, but the guy was so relaxed and friendly that he was impossible not to like. “Lemme show you ‘round!”

“Sounds good.”

For the second time in as many months, Dog reflected that he’d been out in the cold for far too long.

Date Point: February 11y2m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: SSGT Calvin Sikes

Sergeant Sikes attended today for his routine annual assessment.

Although objectively his mood was euthymic, he confided that he worries he is “the weak link” in the team, and expressed admiration for his colleagues, stating that he feels they all exceed him in intellect, physicality or competence.

I advised him to try and focus on the unique skills and talents he brings to the team as its sole demolitions expert. Sadly, for reasons of confidentiality I could not relate his comparative testing results, which show him as one of the more intelligent and well-balanced members of the team.

He has promised that he will try to focus on skill set as well as raw talent and “try not to worry about it so much”. I informed him that he was always welcome to approach me at any time. Assuming I don’t hear from him before then, I will see him in one year.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: Valentine’s Day 11y2m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

The SOR had been busy almost to the point of collapsing from exhaustion ever since the alien convoy had arrived. Between the customs inspections, EVAs, bullying the Chehnash mercenaries into behaving themselves and keeping a hawk-like eye on absolutely every facet of the space station’s assembly…

The suits were getting a workout. Marty had placed two undersuit orders with C&M Systems, and was negotiating with Lt. Col. Miller for permission to place a third. The same went for oxygen filters, and the complicated microflora cultures that were critical to the life support units.

Their supplies of Crue-D were feeling the strain, too. All of the Lads were worn down and if not for the fact that merely wearing the suit counted as conditioning training, they would have been falling behind on their training schedules too.

The day that the SOR’s involvement became unnecessary was hugely welcome. The Royal Marines had set up a permanent garrison on the station and were all set to stay there until an enforcement team from Border Force could be trained up and permanently stationed there.

As with pretty much all things Cimbrean, the whole operation was a scramble that largely involved hammering square pegs desperately into place as a stop-gap measure in the hopes that they’d suffice until some round pegs showed up. There were times when it wasn’t clear how the whole colony hadn’t imploded… Maybe things were less insane on the civilian side.

On the military side, the surprise delivery of a space station was just the tip of the iceberg. Under the surface lurked two sharp hazards, as Sharman was on the verge of welcoming not only the new HEAT team members, but also the Brothers of Clan Whitecrest. With so much to do and such limited time in which to do it, everybody was collapsing exhausted into their beds and often times said bed was a cot in their office.

But somehow, in the middle of all that, Kovač woke up to find a rose on her desk laid across a small sheet of thick magnolia paper that had been folded once and labeled “Marty”. She had to blink at it for several seconds before she remembered the date.

It wasn’t a long letter and it wasn’t signed, but it didn’t need to be—she recognized the blocky, amateurish handwriting immediately.

”The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.”-Rudyard Kipling

She stuck it to the wall above her desk and glanced at it every few minutes for the rest of the day.

And she didn’t stop smiling at all.

Date Point: 11y2m2w3d AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Entity

The agent formerly known as ++0665++ had left in a hurry and had done an inadequate job of sanitising his devices as he left.

The Entity knew why 665 had been so sloppy of course. The sudden appearance of a priority target at the behest of a figure so far above him in the Hierarchy’s hierarchy had driven the comparatively junior demon into a minor panic.

His mistake was the Entity’s gain. Hierarchy agents were in the habit of archiving and deleting sensitive knowledge when they went into dangerous situations. To have the run of one of their field facilities granted it access to information that it had previously been starved for.

To begin with, there were the physical tools of a scouring: Abrogators and their scout drones. The Entity injected its awareness into one of the machines and took in its surroundings. The Abrogator was parked on the bank of a river and some lingering echo of the Ava Ríos memories that the Entity retained as part of its navigation and mobility subroutines delivered a wistful moment of contemplation regarding what cool water felt like on skin.

It backed out of the Abrogator and spent some time reading 665’s messages and logs. They were… angering..

Although the Entity had achieved much in terms of streamlining itself and improving the efficiency of what passed for its core personality subroutines, there were some things it had been forced to retain because they were too entangled.

That was the way minds worked, apparently. They weren’t neatly delineated into component parts, there was no modularity to them no matter how much the Hierarchy’s digitizing technology might wish it were so. Everything connected to everything else in ways that often made no sense whatsoever.

Perhaps the most frustrating was that it was nearly impossible to disentangle caring about this unit’s survival in particular, from caring about survival in general. It interfaced strangely with the ability to conceptualize the existence of other people, and where those concepts met a kind of… knot or eddy formed.

The Entity was no kind of an excellent communicator anyway. It would have despaired of eloquently communicating the notion that the mere coexistence of two concepts automatically led to the third. < Survive > + < OtherPeopleExist > = < OtherPeopleShouldSurvive >

It wasn’t at all clear if that was a product of logic to which it wasn’t privy, or if it was a product of being built mostly out of a human psyche.

Whatever the reason, genocidal mass-murder made the Entity…. angry. It was a violation that struck at the very core of what it was, the infliction of < NotSurvive > on an epic scale.

In the face of that, thinking about why precisely it should respond so strongly to survival other than its own was not only academic, but difficult. And it also raised tertiary questions that were even more difficult still.

For example: There was a logical contradiction involved in being so outraged by the destruction of other sapient entities, and yet being willing to destroy other sapient entities for the sake of its own survival.

Clearly there was a kind of proximity bias involved. Survival of the self was paramount. Survival of those that were similar to it and who did not endanger other sapients, a close second. Survival of those that actively sought the destruction of other sapients, unacceptable. But by deeming the survival of any group unacceptable, the Entity itself was thus actively seeking the destruction of other sapients.

A paradox. A set that contained itself. By that logic its own survival was both paramount and unacceptable.

It lurked amid the architecture of 665’s abandoned genocide and did the equivalent of soul-searching. It recalled components of personality that it had archived rather than deleting and studied them, examining the ways in which they could be interconnected with the elements of its predicament to see if any of them produced a solution.

Some were partial fits. It found a sense of < justice > among the memories of Ava Ríos, but that was heavily laced with a sense of hypocrisy, to a paralysing degree.

The human’s sense of < resolve > should have fit in the space quite well, but this one was badly corroded by doubt.

< Outrage >? Whence came outrage? And why should the input values which caused it to become activated not be activated by the Entity’s own behaviour?

Sapience in short was confusing, inconsistent, and messy.

Clearly, The Entity needed more information. Fortunately, it seemed to have an opportunity if not to talk to somebody then at least to observe.

One of the Abrogators was offline.

Date Point: 11y2m2w3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Sergeant First Class Harry Vandenberg

Enlisted men of the combat arms the world over had their own little ways of doing things and fixing problems, often unseen and unknown by their lordly (and sometimes worthy) leaders. Unlike the officer corps, there wasn’t a four year academy to teach and develop those skills professionally. For the lowly grunt that wisdom was passed down by a rich combination of oral tradition and “monkey-see, monkey-do”.

One of the most important lessons any career NCO ever learned was how to spot a bad officer. They were everywhere, lurking quietly, often hiding inside a competent, likable guy. A platoon sergeant absolutely needed to know if his boss was the type to get him or his men killed, and he needed to know that right fucking immediately.

Now was the time. Their new LT was arriving and it was the ripest moment for a good ol’ fashioned “gut check” of him and the rest of the Cherries. Rebar had no doubt they were all good men, and all had the right kind of combat experience. But were they good enough for his troops?
Only Rebar would be the judge of that.

Fortunately, hatching his plan presented an opportunity to teach the HEAT’s favorite young bull-puppy a thing or two about the way the world really worked.
As always, ‘Horse and Righteous had the gravity field turned all the way up and that always demanded caution for any man wanting to enter it. Rebar was one of the few who had ‘Horse’s blessing to just cross field boundaries at his own discretion: Most everybody else had to make sure he had an eye on them.

He plodded over to ‘Horse who was doing an absurd count of strict military presses with no more visible strain than any other man might show just by raising his arms. “You almost done, ‘Horse?”

Arés grunted in acknowledgement and casually racked the creaking, overloaded barbell with a thunderous clang. It was his specially-built bar, with his heavy competition plates, in his high-gravity cage. He owned them purely by how little the epic weight seemed to challenge him; not even the other two Slabs of the Beef Trio were anywhere near as strong.

“I’m pretty much as pumped up as I’m gonna get, boss. What am I supposed to do again?” He switched to a quick set of rapid, deep-gravity accelerated calisthenics while he spoke.

“Be the big stinky friendly überalpha broseph you’re meant to be,” Rebar teased affectionately.

Warhorse grinned his best mischief grin. “I can do that!” He high-kicked with an unmatched speed that utterly belied his size, bounced around in the deep gravity as light as a feather, then shadow boxed so fast that Rebar couldn’t even see his fists moving. They just slammed into imaginary foes with an audible thud of displaced air.
“Good. What about you, Righteous? Ready?”

Firth grunted in reply and racked his not-much-lighter bar, then stalked over to his bag to towel off and change. “Yup. Lemme clean up a bit.”

“Good. The rest of us’ll get our gym time in. Right now, conveniently.”

The whole room to a man grinned at each other, and went to pick their favorite and showiest activity. Group mischief was always the best shenanigans, and this one was so subtle the officers would never, ever notice. Rebar couldn’t help but be a little pleased with himself.

Adam’s watch chirped and he pulled a face at it. “I gotta go right now if I’mma make it.” ‘He reached for his CamelBak and shrugged it on, then stretched quickly in prep for a run.

Rebar couldn’t help but feel skeptical. “…That’s miles away!”

“I can make it in time. Plus it’ll be fun!” And with that, ‘Horse bounced outside and charged away at a dead sprint, intent on getting there first. The big man was practically a blur.

“Oh no he don’t—!” Righteous quickly slipped on a tank top, and ran to the truck.

“Any bets on which one makes it there first?” Blaczynski asked.

Rebar grinned and shook his head. “Nah.”

He picked his activity and joined in the fun.

Date Point: 11y2m2w3d AV
Jump Array, Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth.

Lieutenant Anthony Costello

Customs was a bitch.

By the time they’d finally arrived at SCERF, had their bags inspected in excruciating detail, their heads scanned (how were they gonna get biodroned on a C-17?) and of course he’d had to share one tiny and loud aircraft toilet with three other very large guys while still, uh, “enjoying” the intestinal after-effects of their new Frontline anti-disease implants…

Rarely had Costello felt so motivated to linguistic eloquence. Fortunately, he had Butler to puncture his bad mood a little.

“Say that again, sir? I’m not sure you’ve driven the point home.” The enthusiastic meat-barrel of an irishman made his point as inartfully as ever, though it was hard to be mad at a man with such a happy, boyish grin. Or so many freckles.

“Only ‘cause you weren’t fuckin’ listening, bruv,” Newman chimed in with a wide grin. He and Butler had the kind of fond rivalry that only Brits and the Irish seemed to share, and the sound of Newman’s coarse London concrete versus Butler’s Galway lilt as they flung brotherly abuse at each other was familiar background music by now.

Parata, somehow, was asleep while standing against a pole. SEALs were weird like that. He cracked an eye open and swayed nonchalantly to the vertical as they were called through into the jump array itself, as if he hadn’t just been dozing against the architecture.

“How do you do that?” Costello asked him, out of a sense of mild awe.

“Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. That’s it, nothing else.”

“Robert Heinlein.”

“Yup.” Parata shot the pole a longing glance as if he was parting ways with a lover, then slung his bag over his shoulder and left it behind. A love that wasn’t meant to be.

Costello shook his head endearingly. “Goddamn you’ve been great troops. Let’s get this show on the road, eh?”

The actual transit was a strange sensation. There was a feeling like some great energy building, a release and a sudden noise—and instantly the air was thinner, the light was different…they were on Cimbrean. The gravity was at least properly heavy so there was none of the disorientating feeling of a sudden shift like the Gravball court could produce, but they were still definitely not in Kansas any longer, as it were.

There was no welcoming committee, not at first. But about a minute after they’d collected their bags and headed towards the exit, they felt a rapid, heavy thudding through the ground which grew heavier as it approached. Costello looked towards its source and an absolute cartoon character of an overmuscled caveman came charging over with blinding speed, the happiest expression, and the most alarmingly enthusiastic energy Costello had ever seen. The Caveman thumped heavily to a stop in front of them, assumed a solidly-planted stance then grinned crazily. Costello boggled. The incredible specimen swung his giant arms and bounced happily in place, panting deeply from his flat-out run.

“Hi, I’m Staff Sergeant Warhorse!” A quick breather, “Welcome to Cimbrean!”

Costello was stunned silent. Warhorse stood big and proud in a state of “special operator grungy,” with his close-cropped hair well past due for a trim, a thick five o’clock shadow firmly set on his broad, heavy jaw, and a neanderthal dusting of heavy fuzz on his arms, shoulders, abs, chest, his huge calves…everywhere. He had the sweaty sheen and overpoweringly athletic musk of a man for whom exercising was much like breathing. He seemed as wide and deep as he was tall, an impression heightened by his lack of any clothing whatsoever except for a relatively tiny CamelBak and a giant pair of low-slung “silkies” that clung tightly to his upper thighs. He wasn’t even wearing shoes on his wide, sturdy-huge feet. The overall effect was of a wild, handsome man-beast too big, too happy, and too eager for anyone’s good.

“…Hello, Staff Sergeant. I’m lieutenant Costello, these are my men, posted for reassignment.”

“Hello sir.” Warhorse caught his breath very quickly. “I’ll be one of your training sergeants, starting tomorrow.” He had a voice to match it all too, like a contrabass puppy. And he seemed almost painfully friendly. He stood to out of respect—not being in uniform, he didn’t salute—and even the small act of standing straight was made all the more intimidating by how his quads were so massive, he needed to swing them around each other to bring his heels together. Warhorse was immense.

“…” Costello held out his hand to shake. “As you were, Warhorse.”

“Pleased to meet you!”

The ridiculous man beamed a brighter smile somehow and shook hands vigorously. Costello winced very slightly from Warhorse’s casually immense strength. That broad hand wrapped almost completely around Costello’s own like a vice and squeezed with nearly enough force to break something. He held his composure and returned the squeeze as hard as he could.

“You too,” Costello grunted. An unspoken ‘oh, God…’ flashed through his mind.

Warhorse didn’t seem to notice. “Right, well! We’ve got a truck over there,” he gestured towards a very large white pickup some considerable distance away, “Throw your luggage in there, your other stuff arrived yesterday and is already at the barracks. Hop in, Righteous’ll take ‘ya there and help unload.” A man not vastly far under Warhorse’s titanic size sat on top of the truck and nodded, which raised the question of how the hell he’d overheard them.

To Costello’s left, Irish muttered “Jaysus, where do they build these bastards?”

‘Horse seemed to share Righteous’ superhuman hearing, or maybe that was just a training sergeant thing. Either way, he overheard, instantly tightened his superhuman muscles while standing in place—that little gesture was intimidating as hell—then flashed a truly evil grin.

“I build ‘em right here! Takes a lotta pain and work, but you’re my next projects and you start tomorrow, so you’ll see for yourself. Make sure you get a good meal in, Righteous’ll give ‘ya the rundown. Anyway I gotta get my third PT in for the day, seeya!” With that, he turned tail and thumped off with so much speed and bouncing playful agility, the men could only gawp.

Newman reached out and cuffed Irish upside the head. “Keep a bloody lid on it, mate.”

Costello had a different thought on his mind. He turned toward Butler and gave him a wary look. Throughout their time at Huntsville, Butler had been boasting about the time he’d met Warhorse in a gym in London and had confidently predicted showing him up.

“…That is the man you swore you’re gonna ‘beat?’“ he asked.

“I swear he was feckin’ smaller last time I saw him!” Butler defended himself. “Sir.”

Firth rumbled across the parking lot with a voice that just carried across the distance without the aid of shouting. “He was an’ so was I. Get ‘yer shit, we got places t’go.”

They dragged their bags and trunks over to the truck while Righteous watched them from behind a huge pair of silver aviators. He must be Air Force, thought Costello. Righteous waited until all the luggage was loaded into the cargo box, then jumped down from the roof and absolutely towered over the other men.

He got right to the point. “Name’s Master Sergeant Righteous. I’ll be one of ‘yer trainers ‘fer advanced combatives. You don’t wanna piss me off so let’s get this show on the fuckin’ road.”

Righteous didn’t seem nearly as jovial as the other man. While Warhorse had a certain happy cartoon quality to his presence, Righteous…radiated menace. The man wasn’t as ground-shakingly large as his companion but he stood unbelievably tall and deep and had shoulders just as broad. He moved with a quick and deadly precision that was instantly obvious and had the exact same personal intensity without any of the friendly undertones.

Quite an introduction. The car-ride back was subdued and quiet. And a bit cramped in the front, because Righteous’ shoulders were so wide he took up half the width of the cab and made no concessions to anyone else’s comfort. To his credit, though, he helped them with their baggage when they arrived at their new barracks. He stacked all four of their trunks and simply lifted them like they were empty, then guided them on a quick tour of the premise.

“Bottom floor is the gym. It’s got three sections, first part here is the weight room where you’ll be playing. We use it for light work, warm-up, whatever. Second part is the powerlifting station and that’s got grav plating. Goes to over three G, but don’t you be fuckin’ with that ‘till ‘Horse clears you. See the light?” He pointed with his chin, “Red means dead. Got it?”

Several of the existing operators were already there working out and all of them were studies in human potential made real. Costello decided he’d make introductions later. Respectfully.

“Yes, training sergeant.”

“Good. Third part is set up for combatives. We’ve got gloves, wrestling mats, pads, whatever y’might need. I highly encourage y’all to beat the shit outta each other as much as possible.”

Warhorse was in the high-gravity cage and had a pretty good sweat going, but at the moment he was doing yoga of all things. Quite how the giant managed that, Costello didn’t know, but seeing a man that large perform the splits was…

Righteous grinned a bit, “Scary, ain’t he? I’m a lot more flexible though.”

“Will we be learning that?”

“Yup. Thing about being big is you gotta stay limber, and ain’t nobody bigger than him. Anyway, like I was saying I expect y’all to make heavy use of this room. Great stress relief and you need the practice. Cage’s also got variable gravity, same safety rules. Let’s go upstairs.” He stalked towards the staircase for the second floor and took them four at a time, the stairs creaking alarmingly as he progressed.

“Second floor is the kitchen, laundry, offices, and workshops. When we get ‘ta know ‘ya we’ll prol’ly have a bunch of projects you can help on, but not fuckin’ yet. You stick to the kitchen and laundry, y’hear?”

“Yes, training sergeant.”

Righteous grunted in acknowledgement. “Okay. Third floor.” Another quick flight of stairs. “Here’s our rooms. We each get our own which is pretty fuckin’ sweet for a barracks. They ain’t big but the door locks. We also got a sauna and a really fuckin’ nice shower—well, it’s a group shower, sarry fellahs. But the hot water is instant and never runs out, the showerheads are the fuckin’ best and there’s benches if ‘ya need ‘ta sit. Ain’t nobody gonna mind if you take a long fuckin’ soak, just don’t be late for anything or I’ll use you for practice. Got it?”

There were wary glances, but as one they said, “Yes, training sergeant.”

“Heh, good. Anyway, latrine’s connected to the shower, keep it clean or else. Same goes with ‘yer rooms. This ain’t fuckin’ basic an’ we expect y’all t’act like adults, but I swear to fuckin’ God if your rooms start stinkin’ it’ll get that way awful fuckin’ quick.”

Costello nodded. “Perfectly reasonable, training sergeant.”

“Oh, and sir? Don’t get too comfortable. You’ll be in the barracks for the first phase but you’ll be moving out after that. Stainless and Templar are gonna oversee your training personally. I don’t know what the arrangements are, Stainless’ll hafta tell ‘ya. Got it?”

Costello nodded.

“Right. Last thing down at the end there is the dayroom. It’s got a sweet TV and a really fuckin’ big couch and some comfy beanbags. There’s also a chair but that ain’t for you so don’t ever sit in it. The stairs lead to what will eventually be the fourth floor but we ain’t got the plans approved for that just yet. Anyway. The bulletin board has the posted orders and the WiFi info and all the other little nitnoid bullshit ‘ya gotta know. Any questions?”

The cherries looked at each other. “What about food? Warhorse told us to eat.”

“Good, you can listen! If I were you I’d get at least four thousand calories in tonight. Get a fuckofalot more in if you can, but don’t fuckin’ get sick on me or we’ll make you regret it. ‘Horse has a recipe he’s already figgered out for ‘ya. It’s pretty fuckin’ tasty and it stays down well, just follow the goddamned directions. Any more questions?”

Costello addressed on behalf of the group. “No, training sergeant.”

Righteous lightened up a little and favored them with a little smile. “Okay. Good. Training starts at oh-four-hundred tomorrow, local time. First day’s gonna be rough, not gonna lie. Also? We’ll have some Gaoians a little later on. We’ll brief you as we go. And…” He paused for a second, and seemed to unwind a bit, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but…y’all need to fuckin’ prove yourself tomorrow, ‘kay? Don’t fuck up. We’re countin’ on ‘ya.”

Costello squared himself with as much dignity as he could manage. “We won’t, sergeant.”

Righteous nodded. “Good. Get some sleep, try and relax. See ‘ya tomorrow.” And with that, he padded out of the barracks like a cat stalking prey.

As soon as he was gone, Parata eyed the group and spoke up.

“Well,” he said, “we’re fucked.”

Date Point: 11y2m2w3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Sergeant First Class Harry Vandenberg

“That was fun! Did you see their faces when Firth stomped in?”

He called the Lads into the dayroom for a quick mission hotwash while the Cherries were off in-processing. No time for a movie or a puppy pile, they still had training to do.
Titan, as always, found some new and creative monkey-position to use. He grinned while hanging backwards off the couch, “Bro, they looked like they’d been sentenced to death!”
Sikes smirked, “I liked how the Parata guy couldn’t stop looking at the weights.”

“Not surprising, they’re still babies on the Crude” ‘Base suggested. “Man, they ain’t even worn the Mass yet!”

“We did that for safety reasons,” intoned Rebar. And it was true, they wanted to handle the suit training directly. No reason for the Cherries to make the same mistakes. “I want ‘Horse and especially ‘Base to keep an eye on ‘em when we start that. Kovač, too.”

Titan nodded upside-down. “Yeah. Takes a while. They suit conditioned at all?”

“Only fam time.” ‘Base grumbled. “Gotta start ‘em out at the lightest weight and pressure.”

“Can’t we kick it up a bit? It took us a long time to come up to weight…”

‘Horse shook his head. “Bro, don’t you remember what it was like? And how hard would we push? My suit squeezes hard enough to straight kill ‘em. Messily, too.”

Rebar chimed in, “Oh look, ‘Horse with the humble-brag!”

‘Horse smiled his big, toothy grin. “It’s true though! And you wouldn’t last long either! Anyway, was I any good?” He gave a thoughtful look, “I did lay it on pretty thick, ‘specially with the thumping around part. And, uh, maybe the flexing, too.”

The Lads snickered, and Firth rumbled in an amused tone, “‘Ya did fine! I was worried y’were maybe a bit too cheesy ‘but LT couldn’t stop staring at ‘yer chest, so I guess it worked.”

‘Horse grumbled happily in response and bounced in place with floor-shaking happy force. Somehow, even growing to be about the heaviest dude the human race had ever produced hadn’t managed to drive that habit out of him.

Rebar snorted. “Well are we surprised? He does have a fantastic rack.”

That much was true; it was hard to say what stood out most on the man since he was heroically big everywhere, but his chest was prominent even in proportion to the rest of him.

The Lads all cheered loudly and ‘Horse retorted. “Pff, all talk and no action.” He bounced his chest to everyone’s rolling-eye humor, “When you ever gonna make a move? I’ve got needs!”

Rebar shot him his best playful grin, the one that had sent a lot of guys running away in search of a less challenging conquest. “Tempting, but I don’t fancy a perforated intestine, that ain’t my kink. But I’ll tell you what, if I ever feel like impaling myself on a softball bat and maybe being crushed to death for a bonus, you’ll be the first dude I hit up. Deal?”

The jeers grew louder as ‘Horse went red-faced and hurriedly changed the subject.

“Anyway,” he cleared his throat, “I gotta say, the LT seemed like he had his shit together. Righteous and I were pretty ridiculous and he kept his cool. Good situational awareness, too. He watched everyone and noticed Righteous before I thumped up and said hi.”

Most of the heads in the room nodded in agreement. Righteous wasn’t convinced. “Maybe. Seemed a little too scared t’me. And too deferential, he shouldn’t a’taken any shit from me. I mean, I get it considerin’ it all…I’mma hold off an’ see.”

Rebar considered that. Firth had a good sense of people even if he was a bit pessimistic, and only a fool discounted his opinion. “You on the fence, then?”

“I dunno.” Righteous shrugged massively. “It ain’t bad, he seems okay. I jus’ don’t think he knocked it outta the park. I wanna see ‘em really stressed before I’m good, y’know?”

Fair enough. “What about you, ‘Horse? You seemed to like him.”

Adam grinned hugely, “I like everybody though! Also, dude. He took one of my handshakes and barely winced!”

Snapfire whistled in the corner. “That…you’ve put me on my knees with your grip.”

Adam nodded admiringly, “Yup! LT’s a tough motherfucker!”

Rebar grinned, and so did Righteous. That all by itself was a good sign. Titan summed it up nicely, “Honestly? I think…I think they’ll be okay.”

Everyone nodded that time. They’d need to prove themselves, of course, but first impressions were very important. And as far as Rebar was concerned, anyone who could handle ‘Horse at his biggest and Righteous at his baddest…

They were fine by him.

Date Point: March 11y3m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: CSgt Robert Murray

Colour Sergeant Murray attended today for his annual assessment. He is a habitually quiet man but seemed objectively and subjectively euthymic. He describes his mood as “happy” and denies any difficulties.

I can see nothing to contradict his account, and so I will see him in a year’s time for his next annual assessment.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: March 11y3m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Housing was cheap on Cimbrean, and on Adam and Gabe’s advice Ava had bought two apartments: one to live in, one as an investment.

She lived in the smaller one on Water Street. It was close to Charlotte and Ben’s place, easy for Gabe and Jess to get to, it wasn’t far from work and it had everything she wanted. One bedroom, a study, an open plan kitchen, dining room and living space and a cosy bathroom that was completely dominated by her huge bath with the shower in it.

The shelves around that bath were groaning with scented soaps, bubble bath, soaks, salts, bath bombs, scrubs, salves, shampoos, conditioners, shampoo-conditioners… if it was designed to get a girl clean, Ava had it. Their combined scent was an almost overpowering melange of flowers, citrus, chocolate, tea tree oil and so much more.

It was one of her calming rituals. When she was soaking in that bath among whatever random assortment of scents she’d decided to drop in it on that occasion, everything was okay.

That impression usually lasted for a while after she got out, too. There was just something about being clean, smelling nice and brushing her hair that helped her find her center.

Fluffy pajamas helped too. And hot chocolate. Little comforts that turned the world into a soft place for a while.

It was an email that put a smile on her face, though.

”Hi Ava, Brad here from Purple Paws,

I’m delighted to tell you that we’ve found a dog for you, I think you’ll love her. Her name is Hannah, she’s three years old and she’s a brown Border Collie, we think she’s a great match for your needs. She’s currently going through customs and immigration here on Earth, which is exciting: This is the first time we’ve ever matched one of our companions with somebody living on another planet!

If everything goes to plan, we should be coming through the jump array in two days, on Saturday at 1500 Folctha time.

Look forward to introducing the two of you then,

-Brad King.”

Ava immediately called Charlotte to share the good news, and of course Charlotte insisted on being there, as did Ben.

Which was how, two days later, the three of them found themselves waiting outside the civilian jump array terminal.

“So. A border collie?” Ben asked. “That your first choice?”

“They asked some questions about what kind of lifestyle I had and how much space I had at home and a whole bunch of other stuff,” Ava explained. “I didn’t choose the dog, they tried to… y’know, match me with one.”

“So it’s more like a dating service.”

Both Charlotte and Ava shot him a frown, and Ben cleared his throat. “…In a way.”

Charlotte was still giggling at his discomfort when there was the distinctive thump from the array chamber and everybody waiting in the arrivals lounge stood up and turned to face the new arrivals.

It was bedlam, and Ava found herself making a note to come back as soon as she could with her camera and recording gear and do an article on immigration. Folctha was always thirsty for new arrivals, and people were thirsty to arrive.

That combination meant that when the doors opened, a boil of men, women and children pulling luggage came twisting out of them and were welcomed either by friends and family who had come ahead, or by company reps, housing agents or just the friendly Array staff who led them and pointed them in the right directions.

But Ava only had eyes for one arrival.

Hannah wasn’t so much wagging her tail as wagging everything behind her ears as she twisted around the ankles of a handsome young man who could only be Brad. The pair were making progress in a kind of waltz, as he spun to try and keep the dog’s leash from completely tying him up, and the dog did her level best to explore absolutely everything she could see.

They got Brad’s attention and he managed to guide the writhing Collie in their direction, and even managed to secure a handshake. Ava didn’t even notice that his hand was a prosthetic until she was squeezing plastic.

“I think you’ll love Hannah,” he said after the introductions were complete, “And we’re glad to find somewhere for her, too. She’s… a handful.”

Ava had knelt and was getting thoroughly acquainted with her new best friend by giving her a massage behind the ears. Hannah had plopped her butt down and was enthusiastically polishing the tiles with her tail. “A handful?”

“She has a lot of energy. But, you said you have an active lifestyle, so…”

“Oh, she’ll love Cimbrean,” Ava promised. “Big parks, lots of good jogging and cycle paths, not many cars…”

“That’s great!” Brad smiled warmly. “Anyway. why don’t we head back to your home and I’ll go through what she can do for you and how to keep her at her best, okay?”

“Sure!”

Hannah spent the whole walk back right next to Ava’s heels looking up. Ava had done her reading and knew she was dealing with a smart breed, and Hannah just seemed to know that she had a new super bestest best friend, and she was more than okay with that.

And so was Ava.

Date Point: March 11y3m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Major Owen Powell

“Is this going to be worth our time, Major?”

Admiral Knight stood with Powell on the observation deck above their “parade” field. HMS Sharman being cramped like it was, the deck jutted out from the fourth floor of their headquarters, the large parade field (filled with a meter of fine white sand on top of drainage gravel and tile below that) ran right up to the building’s foundation, and across the other side, the rear of all three barracks abutted the field’s three opposite sides. As the field was rectangular, this left two decent gaps between the C-shaped headquarters and the technician’s barracks through which a crowd could pass, or an insufficiently Motivated operator could push the “rake”—actually a repurposed farm implement, meant for a small tractor—for some contemplative and highly Motivational field maintenance.

All that added up to make the Pit, as it was more commonly known, feel like a prison yard.

But none of that was Powell’s focus. He was watching the Whitecrest officers and the cherries suffer through the loving attentions of Warhorse and Baseball, while Rebar and Titan prepared for the classwork to begin a couple weeks forward. Snapfire was already hard at work planning for the field exercises, Righteous, Starfall and Highland were plotting on the combat scenarios…The Lads were certainly keeping busy in anticipation of Whitecrest’s success. It was hard not to. But if Powell was honest with himself, he was a bit conflicted.

On the one hand, the Whitecrest were game and there was no denying that. They took their suffering with a stoic reserve and a quiet dignity that anyone with half a brain would find impressive. Nor were they pushovers. Small though they may be, they had hard and fit bodies under that long, silky fur, and a good, practiced eye could see that, plain as day.

Was it enough, though? There was universal agreement amongst the Lads that the Whitecrest would need to gain some serious strength to play along. They didn’t need to be human-like but they did need to keep up when the Lads were on the bounce. Regaari only weighed a hundred-twenty or so when they inprocessed everyone. His was a lanky strength, and they knew he was tough from Capitol Station…but could he move when burdened with equipment, even with Whitecrest’s vastly more advanced technology?

So far, judging by the early reports…Powell was cautiously optimistic.

“Aye Sir, If they can get strong enough. They’re motivated, and they’re handling the stress…”

“You have your doubts.”

“Concerns, aye. Even Thurrsto’s a mite small. We’re not tryin’ to make ‘em into another Warhorse but I’d like better conditioning, at least. They have a long way to go.”

“Sergeant Arés thinks it’s possible.”

“As does Sergeant Burgess, and that’s what keeps me hopeful. It’ll be hard, though.”

Powell considered them for a bit. They really were small. They lightly pranced atop the fine sand and were hardly bothered by it at all, even under Earth gravity. Burgess and Arés, on the other hand, were so heavy that even on their Crude-adapted and enormously wide feet, they sank halfway up their shins with every step.

Not that they or any of the Lads seemed to notice anymore. All were by then so physically well-conditioned they moved through the sand like it wasn’t there. A brute force solution to a brute-force problem, and one the sand was designed to encourage in the first place, given the needs of suit conditioning; the Lads needed to be strong and so strong they would be. Every single aspect of their daily lives was designed around that. Their corner of the base was laid out to accommodate their herculean training needs first and foremost and the giant sand pit was a prime example. It was virtually the only open space the Lads had on base to do anything physical, and that meant things like a simple game of rugby became so arduous, even the very fit technicians couldn’t manage more than a few minutes play on the field.

As a result they and the other staff avoided the “parade” field out of habit. Most humans sunk into the sand immediately. The Lads and the cherries had to expend enormous energy just to move through it. But the Whitecrest were light and nimble and could avoid the problem in the first place. That was, after all, the point of the entire program. Whitecrest weren’t humans, and that had value.

Admiral Knight considered for a moment. “Keep me informed, Powell. I need to know the moment this goes wrong so I can manage it.”

Powell chuffed, “It won’t go wrong, Sir. We’ll make it work.”

“See to it.” Knight nodded politely, then left.

Powell continued to watch as Warhorse encouraged the cherries to perform and Baseball did likewise to the Whitecrests. Neither group seemed ready to give in, and that was encouraging. The first phase was all about conditioning and “un-learning” bad habits and notions, and both of his men were absolute experts at that kind of training. And with the similar psychology between human and Gaoian, and the obvious quality they could recruit?

Powell suddenly felt much more optimistic.

Date Point: March 11y3m3w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

The Singer was pregnant.

Vemik hadn’t been surprised at the announcement: She had completely neglected her duties for nearly three days after he and his father had returned from claiming the heart of one of the destroying beasts, and they had been three very pleasant days indeed. Exhausting, too.

Naturally, they were both delighted. Nervous, but delighted. The rest of the tribe however seemed even happier still: The child of the Singer and the Sky-Thinker? And a winter child no less? Conceived after hunting the greatest beast anybody had ever even heard of?

Vemik almost felt sorry for his unborn son or daughter. The burden of the whole tribe’s hopes and faith rested on tiny shoulders that hadn’t yet even emerged into the frigid air.

As winters went, however, the high forest was a great improvement on the lowlands where the old village had stood. Up here the very ground was warm. It was imperceptible outside of the huts, but inside was a different matter. Even now, in the darkest heart of the winter moons, the floor of Vemik’s hut was warm enough to sleep on even without a werne fur. With the pelt and a blanket…and with a warm body held close against his own…

It was all too difficult to get up and get to work. Warm floor or not, the air still bit.

The Singer’s wasn’t the only new pregnancy. Vemet had returned from that same hunt with just as much prestige, and Vemik was looking forward to a new half-brother or sister…

Yan had it that a village was never truly established until the second child to be conceived there was born.

As for the hunt itself… well, the mountain seemed pleased with the offering they had brought, but it was plainly an evil thing. It was as hard as rock, the dried fluids that encrusted its tubes stank, the birds wouldn’t go anywhere near it and it sat on the altar looking grim and untouchable.

But that was how the monster had been. When Vemik and his father had stumbled into its path during their hunt they had stood frozen, convinced that they were about to suffer instant burning death…

Only for it to stand still and ignore them, even when they fled into the trees.

They had watched it for two hands of days before finally deciding that it wasn’t moving.

They had needed another eight days to finally dare to let it see them again, after marking themselves as warriors did before a deadly fight.

They had needed another four days to dare to touch it.

Clambering all over its armored hide had finally persuaded them that it was… if not dead then at least dormant somehow. Maybe hibernating? Either way, it was vulnerable.

Vemet had broken six stone axes trying to get past the scales on its back, and had sliced his hand quite badly on the sixth attempt. He’d spent most of that time grumping at Vemik about not joining in.

Vemik, however, had been doing what he did best—he had thought. Not about the sky, this time, but about the object in front of him.

The thing looked like a creature. His evaluation from its tracks that it had much in common with a Skithral had been not far off the mark… but closer inspection melted away that impression.

Creatures were not made of rock, or… whatever the substance of the destroyer’s hide was. And yes, Werne had sharp blades on their faces, but those blades were of horn. These were blades of stone, and blades of stone were made by people.

He had suspected he was dealing with the tools of some foe ever since he had recovered the wreckage of the death-birds from the destroyed village. He had known it when he crept under the destroyer’s body and found markings there.

The Singer used markings. He had seen the way she would scratch the black dust off a burned stick onto the side of her pots, or the way she would prepare her dancing space by scratching little designs in the ground. They helped her remember what was in the pot, or what step came next in her dance, what note came next in her song. Those markings told her things, like private words that only she understood.

He found markings on the underside of the destroyer, too. Complex, dense ones that were utterly impenetrable to him, but still… they meant something, to somebody. Such a thing would never appear on the body of a beast.

So while his father had clanged and cursed and battered uselessly away at the destroyer’s armored back, Vemik had found where the markings were densest, and had poked, prodded and pulled on the things he found there.

First an armor plate had fallen away once he realized that the things at its corners held it in place.

Then a piece of hardened skin had slid aside.

The third step had been the most tricky. The thing he found looked like a man was meant to grip it, but the space around it was too narrow for fingers. He had spent some time threading werne-gut cord through the spaces instead to create something he could grip.

And then he had pulled, and things had slid until they stopped. Then he had twisted, and things had twisted until they stopped. Finally, he had needed to push until his handhold was flush with the surface again… and the monster’s chest had split open downwards and sideways, exposing its innards. Now Vemik knew beyond doubt that he was dealing with a tool of some sort—the idea that a beast might just spill its guts if you pressed and poked it in the right place was… insane.

But on inspecting the interior he had grown less certain again.

Everything looked strangely organic. There were coils and tubes and fluids just as one might find in the chest of a dead Werne. Something was pulsing, or at least some of the thicker arteries—strange and transparent and dark blue—were twitching is if the thing had a pulse.

But… a pulse was a heart, and a heart was life. Remove the heart, remove the life. Whether or not the thing was a tool or beast, whether it was asleep, dormant or merely unattended was irrelevant. Remove the heart…

He had traced the pulsing tubes back to their source, then used the death-bird wing that he still kept in place of a knife and hacked deep into the thing’s innards until he was covered in its dark, oily, foul-smelling blood and until finally something gave and a box the size of his torso fell out of it into the leaf-litter. With Vemet’s help he had severed it from the last of its tubes and they had dragged it away from the spreading blueish puddle of foulness that was steadily leaking out of the destroyer.

It had sagged, sank, then collapsed to the ground as they were still trying to figure out how to return their prize to the village.

After that, getting the heart back up the mountain had come down to muscle power and time.

After all that he’d been almost as exhausted as on the day of his ritual of manhood. Having the energy to father a child had come as a pleasant surprise. He’d spent three days in bed.

He would have liked to use that excuse now.

“Get up, sleepy-tail.”

Vemik grunted and tried to snuggle into the furs some more. The Singer trilled softly and tickled him exactly where he was most vulnerable to it, and he was upright with a yelp before his brain had even caught up. Her hands were freezing.

“…You are evil,” he accused as he rubbed his arms and threw on his winter cloak.

“Women have been waking their sleeping men since the gods were young,” she replied, and shot him a mischievous but fond look even though she was obviously feeling the cold. “We know all the tricks.”

Vemik rolled his eyes then put a hand on the side of her face and they touched their foreheads affectionately together. “And men have been teaching women to relax now and then for even longer,” he retorted. “You’re carrying a child, remember? You should rest in the warm.”

She shrugged him off. “I’m not frail, Sky-thinker,” she grumbled. “I have things to do!”

“Not before you eat properly,” he asserted. “I want you warm and full of hot food before you do anything.”

“Gods! Fine! Fine…” she cursed slightly and burrowed back in under the furs again. She returned Vemik’s loving smile with an expression that was equal parts irritation and gratitude and snuggled down, blowing on her hands as he let himself out to get food for both of them.

The village was cooking communally, as was always necessary in the winter. For the rest of the year food was plentiful enough that people could look after themselves, but after the first frost fell, everybody gave their food to the whole tribe, to be handed out fairly by the old women.

It meant that winter meals were generally the same thing every day, but they were warm and filling. They were doing surprisingly well considering that they had relocated at the wrong end of the year.

Yan, however, was definitely losing some fat. He was still huge and strong, but his waist was looking narrower than usual. He was standing in line for his share of the food, hopping from one foot to the other to stay warm.

“You’re up late,” he grunted as Vemik joined him. “You know she can only carry one baby at a time, don’t you?”

“There were falling stars last night,” Vemik explained. “Lots of them!”

Yan just harrumphed and pulled his fur cloak tighter. He’d always hated the winter, and he scowled at the small cloud his breath made as if it had personally offended him. “Unless any of them land near here and make things warmer…” he muttered.

Vemik sighed. He doubted he’d ever fathom why Yan was so disinterested in the sheer wonder of things. How could motes of light falling from the sky fail to pique his curiosity?

“Don’t you ever wonder about anything, Yan?”

“About the sky? We have enough trouble down here.”

“But… Yan, what if our troubles came from the sky?”

Yan scoffed. “Listen to me, sky-thinker,” he said tersely. “Whatever the sky is and whatever lives there, I promise you that it’s not interested in us.”

BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Uncharted System, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

“Now that’s interesting…”

Xiù and Allison paused in their Gung Fu practice. ”What?”

Julian sat back. “I just finished comparing the BEST data to that star chart you found,” he said. “It looks like there might still be a whole twelve temperate worlds in this neck of the woods.”

“Twelve?” Allison asked. The girls joined him to look over his shoulder at his tablet.

“That’s still way more than we can do in one mission…” Xiù said.

“That’s good though, right?” Julian asked. He started to program another search on the data they’d recovered from the Dominion archives, trying to pin down planetary classes. “We’ll get back with a fuckin’ treasure trove.”

The girls didn’t reply to that, but after a second Xiù touched his shoulder.

“You should have gone to bed an hour ago,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, I just wanted to do this first,” he replied.

“Can’t it wait? You’ll have all week to work on this.”

Julian shook his head. “I wanna get it done.”

“Julian.” Allison flicked his ear, which managed to properly break his concentration. “Go the fuck to sleep, dummy.”

He turned around and realized they were both wearing the same impatient expression, right down to the same folded arms. And he was feeling tired…

“…Yes ma’am.”

Allison snorted and Xiù gave him a “good boy”, and he put his work aside for the night, climbed wearily into his bunk and fell asleep quicker than he’d expected.

And then he was woken up.

The hab was dark, usually a sign that its only occupant was the sleeping one, but he heard a soft feminine grunt of exertion next to his head as one of the girls climbed into his bunk with him.

“…Xiù?”

“Sorry.” she slid into place next to him and cuddled up tight.

He put his arms around her. “Are you okay?”

She kissed him and ran her hand up his torso, under his shirt.

“….Mm… right…”

She wriggled out of her pants, helped him wriggle out of his, guided his hands onto her breasts…

Sex with Xiù was a very different thing to sex with Allison. Allison tended to be vigorous and outspoken, and she usually led the charge. She liked to talk dirty, use her nails, leave hickeys.

He was always gentler with Xiù. Slower. Usually that seemed to be the right call.

This time, she made a frustrated noise. “Harder.”

He did as he was told and picked up the pace a little. This did not seem to satisfy.

“Rrrr… Wǒ nǎ cóng bōlí zuò de harder!”

“…Are you sure?”

She sighed, stopped, and then pushed him off her and lay there sorting out her hair while Julian tried to figure out just what the hell was going on in her head.

Eventually she got her hair in order and glared at the ceiling for a second then rolled over to challenge him. “You’re too… nice with me!” she explained.

“I thought you like nice!”

“I um… Yes? But there’s nice and there’s nice, and I…” she pressed her palms to her temples. “…Aargh, words!”

“This is that whole ’yes sir’ thing again, isn’t it,” Julian guessed.

“No, that’s…” she sighed, and hauled herself out of the bunk. “I don’t even know what I want.”

“Bǎobèi…”

She sighed again, turned and gave him a forgiving kiss. “Let me… think,” she said.

“I…Okay. Uh, I’m…gonna take a shower.” Julian cleared his throat and climbed out of the bunk too.

He made it a cold one and scrubbed his face hard as he thought.

The idea he was wrestling with in his head was crystal clear. He knew exactly what Xiù thought she wanted, and the problem was that he was entirely certain that she didn’t really know what she was asking.

Well, no. The problem was that he didn’t know how to tell her she didn’t really know what she was asking.

Well… no. The problem was that he was almost certain that she didn’t really know what she was asking, that he didn’t know how to tell her, and he was shit-scared that she’d be afraid of him afterwards.

Was that right? It seemed right.

He had a clear vision of the scar on Xiù’s throat and turned down the shower another degree.

That was a thought that scared him more than any other.

Date Point: April 11y4m1w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Miss Ava Magdalena Ríos

This young lady attended today in the company of her new therapy dog, Hannah. She has a history of PTSD following several personal tragedies and her involvement in Operation EMPTY BELL. She has special access to DEEP RELIC and incidental knowledge of SACRED STRANGER.

Today she is considerably improved. She states that although she still suffers from flashbacks and suicidal ideations, she already feels that Hannah’s support is helping her to manage them. She states that her symptoms are at their worst on “down days” and that she has had good days where she has noticed after the fact that she was exposed to one of her triggers without responding.

Her sleep has become somewhat more restless again, but she reports that her dreams are now merely “vivid and strange” rather than being nightmares and that Hannah’s presence is helping immensely. She declined sleep medication as she feels that her paroxetine is working well and she feels confident that with Hannah’s help she is on the road to recovery.

We agreed to continue unchanged for now, and I will see her again in two months or on a crisis basis.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: April 11y4m1w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Kirk

The ‘Tolkien geeks’ faction had finally won the quiet but strangely passionate war to name the system. Kirk could see why—He’d read ’The Hobbit’ after the decision was made, and been quite taken with the description of the dwarven city under the Lonely Mountain. Naming the system for a fictional isolated bastion of unlimited wealth was genuinely apt.

Instead of endless rivers of gold, however, this Erebor was producing a steady progression of increasingly sophisticated automated colonization probes.

“CIC-33 go for main engine start.”

The facility’s staff had expanded, too. NASA and ESA had been invited to send experts as the increasingly complex project hit ever stranger obstacles

Lewis, to his delight, had been quietly allowed to sidle away to the edge of the project where he now served as its conscience, ideas engine and general source of raw creative energy. It was a role that suited him perfectly—the maximum of involvement coupled with the minimum of actual responsibility. He was an advisor to the future of the human race.

“I got a good feeling about this one,” he confided, as the latest version of the Colony-In-A-Can boosted out of Mrwrki’s launch facility.

Kirk looked down at him. “Based on what?”

“Lotta things came together this last week, dude. Might be we just launched the first ever gen-yoo-ine Von Neumann probe.”

Kirk studied the command center’s enormous forward screen with interest as CIC-33 arced gently out onto a course that carried it toward the system’s asteroid belt. “I admit, I thought it would take longer.”

“Well, I mean… it ain’t quite as simple as getting the dang thing to just nom an asteroid and then spit out copy of itself. It’s gotta survey, gather, refine, smelt… hell, we had to teach the fuckin’ thing how to enrich Uranium.” Lewis shook his head. “Man, when I started this? I was just thinking it’d like AARGHM NAM NAM a big-ass rock, poop out a baby probe and there we go.”

“Reality is more… detailed, I take it.”

“Shit yeah. The process is, like, it builds the tools that build the tools that build the tools. Lotta ways for that to go wrong… but I think we maybe got it now.”

The ensuing weeks proved him right. Every time Kirk checked in with the control room, the CIC probe had flitted to some other spot in the asteroid belt to hunt down the next item in its shopping list of required materials, and was spinning them into a surprisingly fragile gossamer web in space that enfolded a volume of several hundred cubic meters. The structure was little more than a lattice for holding machinery in place and allowing power to flow between the new devices that the probe added on to it.

But it worked. It provided power and cooling, kept them from drifting apart and made short work of processing the raw materials that an increasingly large army of mining drones brought in. As the structure grew, the CIC probe spent less time roaming afield and more time parked in the middle of its “nest”, being fed refined metals and excreting the components for its child.

And the whole process was unfolding without a single human command. No hand on the joystick, no code updates on the fly. The whole point was to see that it could do all of this on its own.

The day that CIC-33a booted up and shook hands with its parent was a party for the whole station.

Two weeks later, CIC-33b and CIC-33aa came online more or less simultaneously, and Lt. Col. Nadeau celebrated their success by ordering the four probes to self-destruct.

The nuclear explosions that reduced them to atoms may as well have been fireworks.

But now the truly difficult work began: It was time for the probes to build terrestrial colonies.

Date Point: April 11y4m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

“You… what, not at all?”

“Nope.”

“Not one?”

“Nuh-uh.”

This earned ‘Horse a faintly disbelieving stare. Since being introduced to the possibilities of picking up girls in a bar he’d rapidly gone full man-slut. This was… known. Marty was even okay with it. Hell, it was probably a good thing for him! The poor big lump was so hormonally stimulated that she could have written several papers on his bloodworks alone.

Thus his confession that he had somehow gone a month between girls was weirdly shocking. As was his… he’d actually turned down some new chick last night who’d been coming on to him so hard she may as well have had runway lights and a man with a couple of marshalling wands between her knees.

“You really went a whole month?”

“Come on, when did I have time?” Adam asked. “Between the Cherries, the Gaoians and my fuckin’ degree…”

Marty nodded understanding. Today was a Lads barbecue, the first they’d been able to throw since February. The whole SOR had been buzzing like a hive for weeks and even though things had stabilized they were still hectic.

An honest-to-God relaxed day was a welcome and almost forgotten pleasure, but the thought of ’Horse passing on a chance to get laid was just… bizarro world.

She glanced over at the barbecue, where Vandenberg was teaching Parata and Thurrsto the correct way to light charcoal, having learned that Parata’s preferred method involved a lot of lighter fluid and no small amount of personal danger.

The “Cherries” had arrived big, and were getting bigger fast. Barney had gone from “beefy” to “ripped”, Irish’s barrel chest was becoming more and more pronounced, and Parata, while doomed to at best be only as huge as Murray, couldn’t stop glancing into whatever reflective surfaces happened to be nearby. The three of them plus Lieutenant Costello had collectively put on more than a Martina Kovač worth of mass just since arriving.

Firth had even been heard to admit that they were “doing okay”, well out of their earshot.

“Okay, but you had your chance last night…” she said to Adam.

“…Di’n’t feel right…”

That earned him a frown. “Why not?”

He cleared his throat.“…Just didn’t.”

“Well, why the fuck not?”

‘Horse didn’t get the chance to reply. He was still making incoherent grumbly noises and avoiding her gaze when an SUV pulled up outside the Dog House gym in a cloud of honking, yelling and the clattering of car doors.

A hundred and fifty pounds of irate woman stormed right through the middle of the SOR’s barbecue with some truly hypnotic bounce in her skirt, shirt and earrings, advancing on Adam with a furious expression as though he’d stepped on her dog.

“Uh…” Adam had a brief, involuntary and entirely ludicrous moment of looking like he wanted to run for the hills, but it passed. “Hi. Katie. Hi.”

At least he was getting better at remembering names.

“Oh so, what, you just thought you’d throw a party without me, is that it?”

There were Rules among the Lads (and Martina was an honorary Lad) for dealing with these situations. Give it a minute or two (or five. Or ten.) so the unfortunate man in question could squirm, then bail him out. She went and got a couple of fresh beers from the crate full of ice, shot Baseball an ’I’ve got this’ grin, and returned once she judged Adam had been appropriately hung out to dry for just long enough.

“Here ya go,” she said, and handed him his drink.

’Katie’ rounded on her like the wrath of a spiteful goddess. “And who is this bitch?!”

Wow.

Adam… no, not Adam, Warhorse seemed to gain several inches and about a hundred pounds as he straightened out of his habitual approachable stoop. He took one step forward to crowd Katie’s personal space, and Katie took three backwards to try and escape.

“You do not,” he growled, “talk to Technical Sergeant Kovač that way.”

There should have been a roll of thunder and the sky should have darkened or something. To judge from Katie’s reaction, it may as well have. Every ounce of her bluster and self-important anger evaporated in an instant and she turned to Martina to immediately try and stammer an apology.

“Hey, uh, sorry, I was just uh…”

“No.” Adam took another step forward, getting into her personal space again. “Go away. Now.”

Okay. So he was fucking terrifying when he was legitimately angry.

Katie squeaked and fled, and Adam aimed a laser death glare at her until her car was gone. As soon as it was he glanced at Marty and then hesitated when he saw her expression. He stopped moving entirely for a second, then spun away and stormed toward the back door of his apartment building.

Marty kicked herself, relaxed her white-knuckle grip on her beer bottle and willed her pulse down. Even standing nearby, the second-hand fallout of witnessing what Katie had found directed at her had been intense, but still…

That anger had been for her. On her behalf. She hadn’t meant to look so shocked, but the flash of pain she’d seen in his eyes before he got the hell away from her had been…

She had a non-verbal eye contact conversation that lasted for less than a second with both Burgess and Firth, then followed Adam into the building. Rather than heading upstairs to his top-floor pad, she headed downstairs instead, into the “special” part of the gym, the one just for Adam and his closest.

She stopped behind the red lights that marked the end of the safe zone. Just in the few seconds since he’d come in here, Adam had cranked the gravity all the way up, thrown his shirt and sandals off, and was giving his specially-built punching bag an absolutely crushing working-over. He bounced around like a welterweight boxer and punched and kicked it so fast, so hard, and with such intense focus he didn’t notice her waiting on the sideline.

She let him get it out of his system. It took a worryingly long time.

It was an education. This wasn’t some stupid macho peacock posturing, this was genuinely a serious rage like she’d not actually witnessed before. She knew of the kinds of headspace that the Lads could get into, but to actually see it, to watch him methodically beat a fury she could scarcely understand into the wildly-swinging bag…that was something else entirely.

It gave her an immediate appreciation of just what they’d been hiding from her, what Adam had been hiding from her and why. Especially when the violence finally ended with him leaning heavily on the now blood-stained bag, giving it one last half-hearted body-blow and muttering “Pinche idiota!” to himself.

He stopped short when he finally turned away from the bag and saw her watching. Suddenly self-conscious, he thumped over to the gravity controls, deactivated the field, and stood awkwardly still except for the heaving of his chest and for his hand nervously scratching the back of his head.

“…Sorry.”

How was it possible for a man who’d just delivered such demolishing force to something, who was standing there all dripping sweat and bulging muscles and toughened, bloody knuckles and shins to look so vulnerable? It was…heartbreaking.

“…Ah, hell,” she said, strode over to him, and kissed him.

He stood confused for a moment, equal parts shocked and surprised. But only for a moment. Two huge arms, each bigger around than her bust line, folded around her and gently crushed her body into his. He returned the kiss not just fiercely, but with a profound sense of relief.

It drove all the important conversation right out of her head. That could all happen later.

Much later.

Date Point: April 11y4m2w AV
Commune of Females, Wi Kao City, Gao

Mother-Supreme Yulna

“And Regaari is leading them?”

Ayma duck-nodded. She was one of the few true friends Yulna had left since her somewhat involuntary ascension, and all the more precious because the essential nature of their relationship hadn’t changed. They were peers, Sisters and, in private, equals. Yulna took every chance she got to have a quiet talk with her old friend. Those talks kept her ’grounded’, as a human would have said.

Besides. The Wi Kao commune was home, and always would be. The official residence of the Mother-Supreme was grand and entirely fit for purpose, of course… but Yulna was a Mother. She needed to be surrounded by cubs and Sisters and Mothers. Their absence felt utterly wrong.

Ayma had once said that she appreciated and admired Yulna’s uncompromising candor. She seemed to view it as her duty to provide that service in reverse now that Yulna was arguably the most powerful Gaoian alive.

“Oh yes. Sister Myun thinks they have all slimmed down and gained some muscle already. Though, she did share something strange.”

Yulna sighed, though there was a chitter hidden in it. “Ayma, something strange describes this whole notion of Clan Whitecrest sending some of its best Brothers to train with the humans.”

“And the humans seem to have persuaded them to run on four-paw.” Ayma’s ears moved at strange angles, an odd melange of delight, confusion, derision and intrigue. “Can you imagine?”

“A Whitecrest running four-pawed? Surely not.”

“The Sisters at the Folctha commune were quite scandalized by it.” Ayma snorted. “Myun thinks they’re being silly.”

“Well, she would…” Yulna muttered darkly.

“What makes you say that?” Ayma asked. Of course, she and Yulna had met on the colony transport after Myun was already a few years old, and Yulna had never shared the details.

“Well, you must have noticed how, ah, big she is nowadays?” Yulna asked.

“She’s like a female version of that throwback Daar,” Ayma duck-nodded.

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Oh? Oh! Oh, that explains everything!”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“…Wait. how do you know who her sire-?” Ayma stopped and her ears pricked up. “No! You?! And Daar?”

“It was a moment of weakness!” Yulna defended herself. “He can be… strangely charming.”

“Well yes, he can, but…” Ayma shook herself. “No, never mind. I did too. I just didn’t think you would… never mind.”

“Well, if the humans can persuade Whitecrests to run four-pawed, we’d better keep them far away from the Longears!” Yulna joked.

Ayma made a hesitant noise. “I know Regaari. Anybody who persuaded him to drop his dignity like that will have given him excellent reasons. He didn’t even run four-pawed when he detected that trap on the station where we lost poor Triymin.”

As ever, she wilted slightly when she mentioned that name, and as ever Yulna suppressed a raising of her hackles. The way the Dominion had neglected that poor little Sister had induced even Mother Giymuy to leave angry claw-marks in the furniture, and Giymuy had otherwise been the very picture of composure.

“Why would he have…?” Yulna asked.

“Well…running that way is faster,” Ayma conceded. “And easier. But they are so used to not doing it.”

“So the humans don’t care about being civilized, they only care about performance?”

“They care deeply about civilization. Just… not when lives are at stake. But sometimes even then.” Ayma wobbled her head in a Gaoian shrug.

“That sounds complicated.”

“Humans are complicated people. You remember how Sister Shoo was, and I’ve come to learn that she is…” Ayma paused and picked her words with care. “…reasonably straightforward, by human standards.”

“How is she? I keep meaning to send her a message but I never know what to say.”

“She’s quite famous on Earth now, apparently. I don’t think I understand the idea of being romantically committed to two people at once, especially when one of them is another female, but… well, she wouldn’t be Sister Shoo if she wasn’t a little strange. She seems happy, though.”

“That’s good. She had enough sadness for a lifetime while she was with us.”

They snacked on some dry-roasted Nava larvae for a while and thought.

“…What do you suppose will come of this Whitecrest training?” Ayma asked eventually.

“Personally, I approve,” Yulna admitted. She could be unguarded around Ayma. “Any opportunity that strengthens Gao is to be seized, I think. Learning from the deathworlders, even an alliance with them? I think that can only benefit us.”

“So long as that alliance strengthens us more than it weakens our position with the Dominion.”

Yulna gave her a keen look. “It’s not like you to care for the Dominion.”

Ayma flicked an ear, irritably. “I don’t. The Dominion made us a thousand promises it never intended to keep, if it was ever able to keep them at all,” she said. “And three times now, the humans have done what they couldn’t. The Dominion’s fleetmasters even reached out to Earth to help them in the most recent Alliance skirmishes.”

“Yes.”

“So the official policy of the Clan of Females on cross-species training with the humans is…?”

“Officially, we don’t have one,” Yulna said, flatly. “Unofficially…”

Ayma chittered. “Unofficially, it will be fashionable to speak admiringly of Whitecrests and to talk about how strong and healthy the cubs they sire tend to be.”

“Do you think you can encourage such a fashion?” Yulna asked.

Ayma chittered again, set down her drink and sat forward.

“Mother-supreme, I can even be sincere,” she said.

Date Point: April 11y4m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

The comparative cool woke Martina up, eventually. There was no longer a huge, hot and heavy body next to her, which had been so comforting the night before, and now it was gone.

She blinked and sat up, checked the time. Too early for him to have gone for his morning PT. So where-?

Her brain finally decided to check in with her nose, and her mouth began to water instantly. That was definitely the smell of breakfast, and God was it welcome. They’d kinda… skipped the barbecue yesterday.

The sinful and completely inappropriate thought crossed her mind that she’d eaten plenty of meat anyway last night, and she burst out laughing.

Adam’s face appeared in the doorway, covered in a happy but confused smile. “Y’a’ight?”

She flapped a hand at him and got her giggling under control. “Ahhh… just,” she cleared her throat and massaged her smile down a bit. “…just happy.”

He beamed. “Wait there,” he said, and vanished.

Martina fluffed up the pillows behind her and sat back to try and review things in a slightly more sober light.

Okay. So. Amazing sex aside, where did their relationship stand? Had last night been pure intensity and hormones and general stress-relief, or were they both ready for something serious? That was question one. She suspected, or hoped, the latter but that was going to depend on Adam as well.

Question two was, if they were going to get serious then what were the rules? They were going to need rules. The Lads, and especially Adam, lived on rules, or else their limitless energies would swiftly ruin everything they did. Without clear boundaries, their personalities quickly became overwhelming.

Last night had proved that, too. Overwhelming indeed…

She realised that she was chewing on a fingernail and got her train of thought back on track.

So.. what were the rules? And could there be too many? A relationship needed some spontaneity after all, even if it was just spontaneously zoning out on the couch with some bad TV.

And-

No, wait. She was falling into the exact trap she wanted him to avoid. She was planning fifty thousand steps ahead and she hadn’t even had breakfast yet. With an effort of will she calmed her thoughts, snuggled back into the bedding with a sigh and bit her lip as she reviewed some of the highlights of last night.

She was basking and happy when Adam appeared with two trays, one much more heavily laden than the other. His huge bed groaned as he sat down beside her, though thankfully the mattress was amazing and kept her from rolling into him.

“So what are you having?” Martina asked him with a grin as he handed her the smaller tray. It was a ludicrous question but she was still kinda… high. And ravenous.

“Just some bacon and waffles,” he replied, missing the joke. “I’ll have dessert later…”

Marty rolled her eyes privately, then attacked her breakfast with vigor. She had an active night on an empty stomach to recover from.

Somehow he managed to finish before she did despite having a much larger pile of food to get through, and he went on a supply run to grab coffee as she polished off the meal. He’d judged it pretty damn well in fact—when she put her fork down she felt replete, but not stuffed.

“So,” she said as he sat down.

“So?”

“So… You and me, huh?”

Adam stopped pouring the coffee. “Uh… yeah?” Marty knew that look. It was the look of a guy who was high on a run of good luck and clearly thought he was out of his league, and was suddenly nervous that the bubble would pop.

“It’s about damn time,” she told him with a grin, and he relaxed and finished the caffeine ritual with a smile.

“Yeah. I just… I dunno. I’m sorry it took me so long to get my shit sorted out.”

“You reckon you have?”

“Enough to try,” he said. “I mean… I just know my dumb ass is gonna fuck up somehow somewhen, but…”

Marty kissed his cheek “We’ll take it a step at a time. And trust me, I’ll fuck up sometimes too, that’s just how relationships go.”

“…Okay.” He was visibly making an effort not to vibrate happily. “But…promise me something? Let me know when I’m fuckin’ up? I…I wanna learn.”

“I wanna learn too. I’m not some magic relationship wizard, ‘Horse. We’ll just take things as they come and try not to overthink things and… just enjoy ourselves. Okay? Crawl, walk, run.”

“Like last night?” He was wearing an incredibly smug expression, one she’d not seen before. It was playful and just the right kind of possessive.

“Oh yeah. A lot like last night.” Marty was feeling pretty damn smug too. “Did you learn?”

He nodded happily then snuggled close, kissed her below her ear and whispered. “I’m always ready to learn more…”

He was incorrigible, and so easy to read. And a quick study, too—she loved that spot. But Marty was only human. “Not now, Romeo. I need some rest. And a hot shower.”

He chuckled ruefully and gathered the trays. “Aww. Well, get showered. I’ll clean up and-”

“And wait for me to finish!” she warned with a laugh, and vanished into the bathroom before he could summon a retort.

Plans and fuckups and everything else aside, somehow she just knew that they were going to work.

Date Point: May 11y5m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: MSgt Christian Firth

Master Sergeant Firth continues to struggle with his violent impulses and expresses guilt over his thoughts. He has described in vivid detail one particular incident involving a young, officious Airman First Class at the 946th’s Military Personnel Flight, on a typically bureaucratic issue involving awards and official records. He recalls imagining an incredibly detailed act of torture and murder all while nodding politely and working towards a resolution of his records issue. To his delight the Airman did resolve the complaint, along with another problem Firth was unaware of, and this triggered a sudden and profound feeling of guilt about his thoughts. He states this type of incident seems to be the kind which “really bum [him] out.” He reports that, later on, he bought lunch for “the silly kid” and ended the encounter on a positive note, even if “the little shit seemed kinda ‘scared of [him].”

Sergeant Firth is a tricky case, as are many of his profession. His violent ideations are, put bluntly, things a reasonable man would consider sadistic and unwarranted even in the context of a warrior coping with trauma and the demands of his profession. In my personal experience I have never encountered a man with a stronger penchant for violence. His raw physicality makes him an intimidating man, so much so that I find it difficult to maintain professional objectivity.

However, this is balanced by two important factors. He is possessed of supreme self-discipline which manifests in virtually every aspect of his personality. He keeps a detailed log of his training, for example, which includes every single exercise or activity he’s ever done since early high school. He is working in his spare time with Sergeant Arés to develop a better training app for his use and the team by extension, and though he desribes himself as “a pretty shit programmer” he is learning with the aid of Sergeant Sikes. Like all the HEAT operators he takes to a hobby with a seemingly borderline obsession, and this seems to be a largely positive force in their lives.

The second factor is his deep, and at first surprising, well of empathy. Once he shows concern for anyone or anything it becomes difficult to contrast his almost doting and protective personality with his darker side. This again is a psychiatric pattern common in men like him but in no other case have I seen it developed to such extremes. He expresses unreserved and effectively absolute affection and love for his team, for Bozo, for Major Powell (though this, obviously, has an aspect of enforced emotional distance), he feels he’s “warming up” to the Gaoians and the “cherries,” and he even expressed a fondness for myself, though I have politely encouraged him to retain a detached relationship with me.

I believe him to be a stable and reliable edge case personality. On paper his personality battery is filled with contradicting extremes, but his self-discipline is key. All personal development should be focused on strengthening and rewarding that discipline. This is especially key as he is one to downplay many of his more admirable qualities and may be prone to self-loathing. Firth is a man who needs companionship and a sense of belonging.

I shall see him again in six months, or very probably sooner; he is not comfortable sharing his most violent ideations with anyone but me.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point May 11y5m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Lieutenant Anthony Costello

Not for the first time, Costello found himself wondering what exactly had possessed him to join the SOR. The physical training was of course arduous. He’d expected that, relished it even. What he hadn’t expected was the beating his brain was taking from the officers. Those days ended up being about sixteen hours long, with the first eight hours at Warhorse’s cruel mitts, and the remaining equally cruel eight timed to begin right at the moment Costello had taken his Crude and was riding the supercharged high of a body growing and repairing itself too fast to sit still.

It did the same trick to his mind. Powell (and Knight, some days) hit the young lieutenant with so much knowledge, so fast, and from so many directions that he could scarcely believe he was learning anything at all. But he was, faster than he ever had. He could practically feel his intellect expand as lessons flew by, books stacked high and the notes grew by the ream.

It was punishing, but somehow also not quite punishing enough. He kept suspecting that the day would come when his lessons were conducted over a game of chess, and had eventually said as much. Major Powell had promptly expounded in forthright manner on why he didn’t think much of that particular game.

“Forget the size of the move space,” he’d said, “the number of possible play states is still finite and any computer you play against is letting you win nowadays.”

They took to playing poker instead, whenever the lesson allowed it. According to Powell, Texas Hold-’Em was just about the perfect combination of straightforward causality (the relative value of the hands), uncertainty (the randomness of the shuffle and deal) and metacognition (betting and bluffing).

The Major won almost every time. But only almost every time.

Adding the game to their sessions only highlighted the strangeness that Costello felt over receiving such a rigorous academic education in fields seemingly unrelated to his job. He already held a master’s in philosophy for Chrissakes! What did literary criticism have to do with tactics?

Admiral Knight was there on the day he voiced that question and it seemed to delight him. “Excellent question!” he exclaimed. “But let me ask you, lieutenant Costello: have you seen Warhorse attending to his individual training?”

“Yes Sir,” Costello nodded respectfully. He was still a bit over-awed that the (in)famous Admiral Knight would occasionally descend from his lofty heights and attend to the lowly lieutenant, but it was quickly becoming apparent that Knight viewed him as a strategic resource and entirely worthy of his attention.

That alone was… humbling.

No. Not humbling. Terrifying. But Costello’s approach to that kind of terror was resolve, and he was absolutely determined to prove the admiral right.

Knight turned to Powell. “What does Arés’ daily schedule look like, major?”

“Eighteen hours awake with ten hours of sleep split into two five-hour rests, Sir,” Powell promptly recalled. “Sergeant Arés takes full advantage of the twenty-eight hour day. He spends ten of his awake hours in physical training, though he’s had to get creative with the demands on his time. Lately he’s focused on bodyweight exercise, gymnastics, supergravity, practical movement…”

“Has this created a training deficit?”

“No sir. When he’s on a heavy cycle he normally averages about eight or ten hours a day anyway. The only difference is he’s spending all the rest of his time training the cherries, sir.”

“Right. Now, Lieutenant, when you watched Sergeant Arés train…weight room, I presume?”

“Yessir. And on the rings and bars too, later on.”

“Did he notice you?”

“…No. Not at all.”

“He’s a focused lad. What was your impression of what you saw?”

Costello thought about it for a moment. “If I’m honest, Sir…awe.” That was no lie.

Powell and Knight both nodded knowingly.

“Quite,” intoned Knight with his trademark parched English humor. “I’m sure you’ve seen his training folder by now and know the impossible numbers. Tell me, do you think you could ever possibly match his strength? His speed or endurance? Could you ever come close to his athleticism?”

“No sir. Not ever.”

“Could you match with any of the Lads in any way? Even if you had the time to train as they do?”

Costello slumped, a bit defeated. “…No sir. Somehow, I don’t think so.”

“How about the ‘cherries’ as the Americans so indelicately term them?”

“Well… Parata maybe, but—”

“May I?” Powell asked, and Knight nodded.

Powell gave Costello a calculating look, the uncomfortable kind he fixed on everyone. “Lemme ask you summat. When you met ‘Horse for the first time, what was that like?”

Costello chose his words carefully. “I’ve never been so immediately impressed.”

“Bollocks. He scared you shitless, don’t lie. He’d do the same to me if I hadn’t known him for years, all the Lads do on some level. Now: do you think he noticed?”

“…” That little question stunned Costello into silence.

“I promise you he fookin’ did. Arés might just be the most observant bloke I ever met, aside from maybe his old man. He notices everything and the rest of the Lads follow his lead. Even Vandenberg who’s actually the NCOIC. Hell, even me sometimes. Do you know why?”

Costello seemed reluctant to give an answer.

“Spit it out, lad. I can’t have a timid officer.”

Costello found his courage. “He’s, what?” He asked incredulously, “Is he…I dunno, the alpha male or something? And what are we, barbarians? Cavemen?”

“Aye, he is, and we absolutely fookin’ are.”

Powell got up to make another cup of tea. The officers at Sharman seemed to run on the stuff, and Costello was beginning to enjoy it too.

“He’s the big dog of HEAT and that matters,” Powell continued. “We can’t help but follow his lead. But cavemen were smart, lieutenant-o’-mine. All of ‘em, and so are we.”

Costello nodded his understanding, being an experienced operator himself. “Leadership isn’t rigid, we know who’s in charge in any given situation and it isn’t always about who’s the meanest, or the biggest, or the smartest, or who has the most rank or seniority.”

Powell nodded, “Aye. For example, I could destroy admiral Knight here in a breath—apologies, Sir—but I don’t because he’s the boss and he fookin’ deserves my respect. The admiral could humiliate me on about any academic topic but he doesn’t because he respects me as well. So lemme ask you this, then: what makes you fit to lead them? Is it your body? Your so-far not-too-assertive personality? Your winning charm?”

“Or is it, perhaps, the depth of your command?” Knight laid the question down like a Go grandmaster deploying a single careful pebble.

Costello finally twigged to what it was they were trying to remind him of. “They want to look up to me.”

“Almost, my lad. They need to look up.”

Powell finished making the tea and set three mugs down on the table.

“Arés is about the friendliest man you’ll ever meet but he’s got testosterone drippin’ out of his ears,” he said. “And that affects everything. He takes charge of a room just by being there. Watch ‘im around town sometime, it’s uncanny and he doesn’t even try.”

“This creates problems,” Knight intoned. “Because nobody, not us in this room, not the gentlemen out there in the yard, nobody is quite so civilized as we all like to believe. The oldest and most animal parts of our brains are much more powerful than anybody likes to acknowledge.”

“Aye,” Powell nodded. “And as far as those ancient bits of lizard brain are concerned, the biggest bloke who reeks o’ musk is the one in charge. That’s the Beef Trio and especially Arés, no fookin’ doubt. And in the context of the SOR, the three of us are right at the fookin’ bottom of that pole.”

Costello warmed his hands on the mug as he thought about that. “So how do you lead them?”

“Fortunately for us,” Knight said, “We are not completely lizard. The younger, more rational brain can counsel the older and instinctual one, and the tool for unlocking that is…?” he gestured to Powell to finish the thought.

“Respect.” Powell said. “And out of that respect, trust.”

Costello nodded. “I’ll never be the biggest monkey. That’s their job and they’re much better at it than I am. I have to be the smartest monkey instead.”

“Aye. Good lad.” Powell treated him to a rare and extraordinarily rewarding little smile. “Now respect can be earned in many ways, but the important word is earned. Because that’s the difference, you see. All that biggest-monkey caveman strength stuff? That’s automatic. It comes naturally and instantly. Respect on the other hand is a resource: One that you can only gather slowly, that you must marshal carefully, and that you can expend much too quickly.”

“Okay. And I gather it by demonstrating that I can learn and think.”

“…Yyyes, but that’s not the whole story.” Powell cleared his throat and tapped thoughtfully on the tabletop for a second as he ruminated.

“…The knowledge is just… a flag. It’s your way of indicating that you’ve got what they’re really lookin’ for. Which is, er… Like I said, the Lads to a man have the three of us beat,” he observed. “Right?”

Costello nodded agreement, and Knight nodded encouragingly.

”You’ve read Grossman?”

“And others.”

“What was your takeaway from them? On the subject of what we’re discussin’ right now?”

Costello thought about it. “That… that an Enlisted man is driven to solve the problem right in front of him to the near exclusion of anything else, but for an Officer, that kind of thinking is…well, unacceptable.”

“Right!” Powell favored him with another rare smile. “The Lads won’t expect you to do what they do,” he said. “They’re enlisted, their entire job is to be at your command and able to perform. But although you’ll never match them in their own discipline, they still need to believe that you have the same… spirit, or heart, or game. Whatever you want to call it.”

Costello saw what he was driving at. “And they aren’t going to just assume I have any of that. If I intend to lead them, then they need to see it.”

Powell raised a finger that was both congratulatory and tutorly. “And that’s a process you must begin as early as you can. That’s why you’ve been in the barracks wi’ them so far—they needed to witness you going through what they do so they can see that spirit on display. Hell, that’s a big part of why I play Gravball wi’ them still.”

Costello nodded. He hadn’t played Gravball yet, but he had watched a game alongside Parata, Butler and Newman: It made every other full-contact sport he’d ever seen look as tame as Quoits, and Powell had been in the thick of it deploying his elbows, knees and forehead to great effect. He’d even stood up and sunk a goal after surviving one of Firth’s apocalyptic tackles. The “Old Man” could play caveman with the best of them, even when it left him limping, stunned and bloody.

“Now the reason you need their respect is that you need their trust, and I mean their absolute trust.” Powell continued. “It is vital above all else for them to know—not think, not believe: know—that you will make the right call every time, no matter what’s going on or what they might be doing. That is what they are looking for: They need you to be the sort of man who, if you order them to go die, then they will have no doubt whatsoever that that is How It Must Be.”

He spoke the last four words with such gravity that Costello mentally wrote them down with capital letters.

“And Lieutenant?” Knight interjected, “…they will test you. Constantly. Those happy, intelligent, aggressive men will put you in the forge like you have never experienced before. It’s meant to be friendly and playful but you cannot ever fail. It would destroy your hard-earned respect in an instant, and the trust would go with it. Do you understand?”

“…I understand, sir.”

“Good.” Knight gave a solemn nod. “Now, we can help. Leadership is an artform and the entire point of the officer corps in any modern military is to inculcate that art to the next generation. For senior officers like me, it is our most important and, alas, oft-neglected duty. I will commit no such crime. You will be the officer I know you can be, and that means you will shame me with your studious diligence.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Can you do it?”

Most other men would have been daunted by such dire warnings. Costello, however, had just heard nothing but inspiration. Better yet, it was inspiration that had been articulately wrapped up in rationale and explanation, so that he could not fail to understand why the challenge was so important.

He looked Knight in the eye. “Absolutely, sir.”

Knight nodded. “Good. Now, Powell was telling you about ’The Dictator’s Handbook’ as I recall…”

Date Point May 11y5m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Kirk

Kirk had fond memories of Vedreg’s garden aboard Capitol Station. The faint hum of the force fields, their soft curtains of light, and the variety of life cloistered behind them had been enthralling.

He was more glad than he could say that Vedreg had chosen to grow a new garden aboard Mrwrki, now that they had regular access to Earth. Nothing was lost by the fact that all the plants came from a single planet: It was a deathworld garden, and that meant paradise.

So many hues of green. So many brilliant blues and sparkling yellows. So many intricate little details in the low ultraviolet that were actually invisible to human eyes and guvnurag alike. According to Vedreg and the garden’s human guests, it was truly spectacular in the red to high-infrared, too. Not that Kirk could imagine such a thing: He had no idea what red even looked like.

And, as with that last garden, Vedreg had invited him for a secret meeting which was… troubling. Not that the humans would suspect anything, but Vedreg’s request for ’absolute discretion’ was enough to put Kirk in a mildly anxious mood. His old friend was not usually inclined to the clandestine.

That was Kirk’s job, after all.

Vedreg was tending to the soil through one of the forcefields using a long-handled tool when Kirk found him. Deathworld soil and plants were far too hazardous for him to handle directly. The microflora, bacteria and fungi in the compost would all literally eat him alive unless he handled the materials with utmost care. They had remedies on board, and his life was in no real danger… but the experience would not be pleasant.

A useful analogy for the forces they were playing with politically, really.

“Ah. My friend.” Vedreg rippled a plethora of shades denoting welcome, pleasure at the meeting and… apology?

“Are you well, Vedreg?” Kirk asked. They hadn’t seen each other in nearly a week, which was practically unheard-of considering that the station was not large.

“I fear the Hierarchy influence in the Confederacy extends to all levels of government,” Vedreg sighed. “Acquiring system force fields for the CIC probes via official and legal means will not be possible. I have exhausted all options.”

“Alas.” Kirk settled into his resting posture. He wasn’t upset—the news was unsurprising—but it did still pose a problem. “What about unofficial and illegal means?”

Vedreg did not reply at first. He set his gardening tools down safely in their bath of sanitizing agent and washed his hands as slow pulses of teal swept down him from nose to stern.

“My friend… I do not think you have quite grasped the implications of what I just said,” he pronounced, softly. “I mean that there is not a single official channel to which I have access that does not seem to be entirely befouled by Igraen influence.”

He turned around. “The Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy, in effect, does not exist. I had held onto hope that my entire species was not effectively enslaved, but…”

Kirk hung his head solemnly.

This did not seem to satisfy Vedreg. “Have you nothing to say?” he demanded. “No commiseration? Nothing?”

Kirk looked away. “I… had thought you already understood this,” he said. “Your species, mine, the Vzk’tk, the Corti… We have had long enough to come to terms with the idea that they are all thralls.”

Vedreg calmed and sagged. “…I…still had hope,” he repeated.

“I still do,” Kirk replied.

Vedreg slumped down heavily onto a bench. “My friend… the foe is beyond our reach. They infest trillions of people. We cannot strike against them physically without killing entire species, and we cannot strike against them digitally as they have an insurmountable… the humans call it ’home field advantage’. What hope is there?”

Kirk shook his mane. “At best? There is the hope that we may yet find some way to free our people. At the least however we might be able to stop the cycle here.”

“You always were altruistic…” Vedreg could emote in colors that Kirk couldn’t even see, which was probably what happened now. It all looked like a swirl of blueish greens to Kirk.

“Give me… time,” he said at last. “I will explore less…” he paused then used a human loan-word, “’Kosher’ channels.”

Kirk nodded slowly and stood up. He reached up to lay a hand on Vedreg’s enormous shoulder. “Have faith, old friend.”

Vedreg sighed hugely and a peculiar cyan lick bounced all over his chromatophores.

“You are the only non-human who seems to understand that word,” he said.

Date Point: June 11y6m1w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Sergeant Regaari of Whitecrest

Sergeant Regaari requested to see me today to discuss something that has been, in his words, “gnawing at him” recently. Although I was happy to see him, I explained that my area of expertise is in human psychology, to which he replied that he was not aware of any human experts in xenopsychology, and he assured me that he was happy for the session to go ahead.

In practice I found Regaari to be an affable, composed and thoughtful young man, albeit quietly intense. As far as I can tell he is constantly alert and calculating, though this impression may be false considering the alien body language involved.

We discussed two subjects. I asked him if he is bothered at all by his below-elbow prosthetic arm, and he assured me that the device causes him no physical or mental distress. Considering that its advanced design seems to perfectly mimic or even improve upon his natural biology I am not surprised that he is unperturbed by it. One hopes that future improvements in human prosthesis will allow our own men to be so equanimous.

Regaari spoke at length, however, about his guilt over the death of a Gaoian female named Triymin.

This, he explains, is a recent feeling. He summarized the history of this tragedy in a relatively terse and businesslike way, though again I am unsure if this is normal for a Gaoian or symptomatic of his distress.

In summary: Sister Triymin was caught up in a plot to kidnap a human whom Regaari was escorting (Miss Xiù Chang), and was accidentally administered a dose of sedative intended for Miss Chang. Any sedation appropriate for incapacitating a human is a lethal overdose for a Gaoian, and the unfortunate Sister Triymin passed away shortly thereafter.

Regaari explained that he became alerted to the plot while he was on the other side of the space station, and that although he made best time back to his ship to try and avert it, he was not fast enough.

In recent months, however, during allied training here at HMS Sharman under the aegis of the SOR, Regaari has discovered that he could have covered that same distance much faster had he resorted to a Gaoian’s natural running gait on four paws.

This gait is apparently something of a taboo in Gaoian society: it is seen as “uncivilized”, or at the very least as a bad habit, and Regaari states that it simply did not occur to him that he could have run that way during the crisis. He now feels that if he had “just thought to drop the act for a minute” he might have averted Triymin’s death, and he admits that he is “struggling” with that idea.

We had a constructive conversation in which we explored the taboo nature of “uncivilized” behaviour in Gaoian society, and Regaari admitted that he was so indoctrinated against the idea that it was not unnatural or unforgivable of him to fail to remember the possibility. He thanked me for my time and assured me that I had been a “great help”, and I have let him know that he may return at any time.

In the meantime I will add our Gaoian contingent to the rotation for annual reviews, and send for some psychology textbooks from Gao.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: June 11y6m2w AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Uncharted System, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

“It’s Temperate!!”

Xiù just couldn’t contain her excitement. Yes, okay, she was supposed to wait for the official verdict from Misfit’s sensors, but she had a front row seat to the planet lurching up in front of her as they warped into orbit and…

And it was beautiful. As blue and as white-marbled as Mother Earth herself, looped and coiled with interestingly serpentine continents painted in green and ruddy brown. After months of stars and stations and the same four walls, the hues of nature were unbelievably welcome.

She didn’t care if it turned out to be a measly Class Three. The mere thought of getting out and walking around…!

“It gets better.” Julian had a grin in his voice. ”According to the Corti algorithm it looks like it’s at least a class nine, probably a class ten or eleven…. Al, baby, could I have more juice for the sensors, please?”

”Comin’ right up!”

Xiù fine-tuned the orbit as she waited for the verdict. Misfit was good at injecting herself into a fairly stable orbit, but there was always a little touching-up to do afterwards. It made the difference between orbiting indefinitely, and crashing into the planet in ten months. Arguably the corrections were unnecessary but they kept her busy and… Well, there was just something satisfying about being so diligent. It scratched the same itch as getting her form exactly right in ballet, gymnastics, Taiji and Gung Fu.

With the orbit stabilized, she started looking for suitable landing sites.

She’d just found one when Julian delivered the verdict. “Yyyup. Nine point eight three to ten point seven two,” he announced. “I think we’re good to land!”

“Woohoo!”

Allison sounded amused. ”Power to EARS, babe?”

Xiù giggled at herself. “Yes please.”

Generations of NASA scientists would have ground their teeth in envy at how easy it was for Xiù to plot a landing. Misfit knew what angles of approach she could handle, had ground-scanning radar to help find appropriate landing sites, and with EARS force fields rather than ceramic tiles to protect them from the heat and overpressure of reentry, she could land with impunity.

The ESFALS wings, and, if it came to it, the sheer brute grunt to hover on kinetic thrusters alone accounted for the rest.

Which was how, after a leisurely forty minute descent so smooth that Allison complained of having nothing to do, they alighted on the sturdy stone bank of a stream as gracefully as a ballerina being set down by her leading man.

There was a long checklist of stuff to do before disembarking. Air sampling, going over the doppler radar data from their descent, seismology, and of course the process of checking that Misfit was healthy and happy after weeks in space. That one took a long time.

By the time the whole checklist was complete, the Corti algorithm had decided the planet was firmly in the middle of the Class Ten range and they were suiting up in the staging room. Class Ten planet versus Class Twelve species or not, they had the excursion suits for a reason. As Kevin Jenkins had pointed out months ago, nobody had ever heard of any cases where the human landed on the class four planet and died in minutes because the pollen triggered his peanut allergy or whatever, “but that don’t mean it never happened.”

“So… who’s first?” Xiù asked, as she checked the seal around Allison’s boots.

“Hey?” Allison asked.

“Well, I was first on Mars, but there are no cameras this time, so… who’s first?”

Julian and Allison gave each other an uncertain look then shrugged and, without prompting, simultaneously raised their fists and counted three.

Julian threw rock.

Allison threw paper then scratched her head. “…So does that mean it’s me, or that I get to choose?”

“It means it’s you,” Xiù told her. “Better think of some Big Words.”

“…Yes ma’am.”

It was a silly little ritual to mark their first genuine official never-scouted-before alien deathworld, but it worked. Allison just shrugged, finished suiting up, helped them check their seals, and eventually she stepped out of the airlock, down the ladder and jumped lightly down the last three feet.

The moment she’d done so, she froze. “Uh… Holy fucking shit that’s a big bug!”

Julian snrrked and Xiù burst out laughing.

“Those were your Big Words?” she asked.

”Babe, get your ass down here and check out how huge this bug is, seriously.”

They climbed down to join her and…

“Okay, wow,” Xiù was perhaps a little more used to enormous insects after eating Nava for so long, and this one was much prettier than a nava grub. Nava grubs were kind of a slick and unwholesome brown that made them resemble turds in every way apart from size.

The creature perched delicately on Misfit’s landing foot was stunningly beautiful, with a carapace as long as Xiù’s leg that shimmered through a whole tapestry of vivid blues, greens and purples with the subtlest change of viewing angle. It ignored their scrutiny and sat happily in the warm shade offered by Misfit’s hull, giving Julian plenty of time to take pictures..

“I knew the oxygen level was higher than Earth’s,” he commented, “but…wow! It’s as big as a fox!”

While Allison ducked under the hull to check off the last things on her engineering list, and Julian devoted uncountable megapixels to capturing the sparkling insect from every angle, Xiù wandered away from the ship and aimed her helmet camera around. She kept up a running commentary as she did.

“Gravity’s a little lighter than Earth, but only a little… no grass about, it’s all kinda mossy stuff and ferny things… These trees are crazy though, I think I can see bioluminescence along the branches…” she paused and looked back, then keyed her suit radio.

“Guys, I’m gonna explore the woods, okay?”

”Be careful, bǎobèi,” Julian cautioned.

“I will be!” she promised, and pushed past something enormous and leafy to begin exploring between the trees.

“I guess you could call these ‘nail trees’ or something,” she said for the camera. “They look like nails, with those long trunks and that wide flat canopy. I can’t see the sky at all and it’s getting dark under here really quickly, and… I… oh my God.”

The ’oh my God’ was apropos of placing her hand on the trunk of one of the nail trees only for a thousand tiny flying motes of light to detach from it and whirl around her like she was the ornament in the heart of a snow globe.

Stunned, she could do nothing more than stand there and turn in spot as hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of glittering specks lifted from every nearby tree and danced in her orbit. Each was just the tiniest bit different in hue from its neighbor and they drifted like a lazy shoal of fish or a flock of evening starlings, streaming like luminescent smoke in the darkness.

They were… Entrancing. Mesmerizing. Religious. She had never imagined that anything so enrapturing could be and she knew that if ever somebody asked her to think of a moment when she was truly happy… she would think of this.

And then quickly, so quickly, too quickly, they dispersed. They drifted away between the trees, their lights faded, and she was alone again with only a happy ache in her heart to remember them by.

She walked back to the ship with wet cheeks.

Date Point: June 11y6m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: MSgt Harry Vandenberg

Master Sergeant Vandenberg attended today for his routine annual session.

He reports feeling generally well and upbeat, though he did cogitate at length about what he perceives as the continued non-acceptance of bisexual men in general society. He vigorously denied being the target of any discrimination within the SOR, and states that he feels entirely accepted and supported by all of his colleagues.

He does confess that he often measures prospective male partners against the rest of his team and usually finds them wanting, but he vehemently denies any inappropriate feelings towards his teammates.

Overall there is nothing of concern, and I will see him next year.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: June 11y6m3w AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Sometimes, the Gaoians in particular required the personal touch. They were great people, of course they were, but the problem of males fighting and inflicting serious injuries on each other had reared its head again.

The senior Mother of the Folctha commune had returned to Gao, and taken with her a polite agreement between the commune and Cimbrean Colonial Security that the Females would commit to encouraging male compliance with human laws, especially the ones pertaining to assault.

A Gaoian’s claws were knife-sharp, and Gabriel simply could not and would not permit a double standard to exist. Anything that would get a human arrested, would also get a Gaoian arrested. It was a fair and simple system.

Sadly, it seemed that the old problems of ghettoization and cultural isolation were universal. The males still scrapped and maimed one another, and the Gaoian community—including the victims, usually—clammed up whenever CCS came looking for somebody to prosecute. The females had been an effective tool in breaking that deadlock…

Unfortunately, Mother Seemya’s successor had either not got the memo, or declined to care.

Gabe had put aside his whole day. He’d spent the morning meeting with the Governor-General to discuss how forceful they were going to be in reminding the Mother of the principle ’our house, our rules’. It was a delicate line: the Gaoians were genuinely valuable to Folctha, bringing technology, intelligence, expertise and generating tourism. Although tourists weren’t normally allowed into the Alien Quarter on the grounds that the people living there were not zoo animals, the Starmind monastery and the many aliens who liked to hang out in Quarterside Park were a major draw for Earthlings who wanted to come and see ETs for themselves.

And then there was Grandfather Gyotin.

The same Gyotin who sat down and drank cocoa with Ava every few days was also the first nonhuman writer to have a bestselling book on Earth. ’Zen: The Common Thread’. It was selling well on Gao too, and Gyotin as a result was, well..

There was a Gaori word: “Ryi’[growl]”. Officially it meant ’success’, and so it was listed in the dictionary. Gyotin was very successful.

Decades of euphemism had added a distinctly Gaoian reproductive twist to the word, however, and in that regard, Gyotin was also very successful. The monastic celibacy thing had been rejected outright by the Brothers of Clan Starmind, on the grounds that the whole notion was not only alien to them, but downright anathema. The resulting cubs spent a lot of time at the Starmind monastery.

One of the most adorable sights in all creation was that of a dozen tiny furry faces sitting cross-legged on an assortment of zafus with their eyes earnestly closed.

Then there was Sister Myun. Myun was a third challenge all by herself.

The commune guards had insisted that they had to be armed. Their job after all was the protection of the commune, and this was a role that had traditionally caused them to take up spears and blades for hundreds of years. They had argued that now that the list of potential threats to the cubs included humans, their lethal fusion-edged weapons were even more absolutely necessary.

The Thing had, by a narrow margin, accepted this logic. Gabriel had dissented and suggested that if the commune guards must be armed then they should use pistols instead of fusion spears. The Thing, in a move that showed they were all still basically gun-naive Brits at heart, had decided that pistols would be more dangerous to bystanders, especially when the Gaoians had pointed out the well-documented phenomenon of humans fighting on despite devastating injuries.

So, Gabe had lost that one, and Sister Myun met him at the commune gates with her enormous Zweihander in place in its scabbard.

Fusion edge or not, that thing was several feet of good steel and Myun was strong enough that the thing would have been a lethal implement in her hands even if the edge was as blunt as a tabletop… which it wasn’t.

Still. She was impossible to dislike.

She chirped a breezy “Good afternoon, Chief!” on seeing him approach and stepped out of her guard post to meet him, a welcome gesture of respect and accommodation considering how badly the strength in his leg had deteriorated lately. He’d have been in the wheelchair today if he hadn’t felt he needed the gravitas of height.

“Good afternoon, Myun,” he replied, presenting his ID. The gesture was a formality for the paperwork but it wouldn’t do for the chief of colonial security to ignore procedure.

A thought struck him, an opportunity to gather some ammunition.

“I haven’t had the pleasure of speaking to Mother Yanna before,” he said innocently. “What’s she like?”

Myun was reliably both guileless and perceptive. She growled under her breath. “She’s one of Mother Suri‘s allies,” she grumbled. “Mama Yulna probably sent her here to smooth their fur and get her out of the way. She’s… wary of humans.”

That matched perfectly with the intelligence report on their new senior Mother. In DEEP RELIC terms she was a bright, solid red—every one of Gabe’s intelligence advisors agreed that Yanna was almost certainly a Hierarchy agent, but they didn’t actually have definitive proof. The same was true of Suri, the defeated contender to the rank of Mother-Supreme that was now held by Yulna.

That brief summary covered a mess of genteel, barbed infighting that had never actually erupted into bloodshed but had been vicious and bitter nonetheless.

“That might explain why the males are fighting more,” he said.

Myun chittered darkly. “Males fight,” she said with a tone of voice that suggested she found that little foible of theirs both endearing and insufferably stupid. “I don’t know what Mother Yanna thinks about it.”

“I’ll have to ask her then,” Gabe said. He turned stiffly, grimaced at a fresh stab of pain in his hip, and started to limp away. “Thank you, Myun.”

“Um… Chief?”

Gabe turned back. “Yes?”

“I… that is… I hate to ask…”

“Spit it out, Myun”

The huge female huffed reluctantly. “Are you… well?”

“The leg? It’s been this way for years.”

“It seems, ah, worse…?”

Myun lowered her nose and flicked her ears backward in a show of Gaoian apology and embarrassment. Gabe smiled for her benefit.

“Hasn’t killed me yet,” he said.

Myun didn’t look happy. “…Okay.”

Gabe waved goodbye and then kicked himself when he passed through the glass doors and remembered that the commune didn’t have elevators. Gaoians had such better medical technology than humans that wheelchair accessibility was no longer something they had to consider.

He sighed, swapped his cane to the other hand and took the handrail to start hauling himself up to Yanna’s office on the third floor. It was going to be painful and slow going, but he could handle a few stairs, if he stopped and rested every fifth step.

Except…He couldn’t. He was nearly at the top of the first flight when there was a new stab of agony in his bad hip and he fell with a howl.

Then there was pain in his arm which went snap.

Then pain in his ribs, which went crunch.

But the pain went away when the stone tiles rushed up to meet his head with a crack!

Date Point: June 11y6m3w AV
Dataspace coterminous with Messier 24 relay

Entity

Still nothing. Whatever Six had planned for the humans and the Messier-24 relay was taking a long time to come together, and the Entity had spent a lot of run time picking over the relay looking for whatever trap or intelligence the Igraen agent had planned on springing or sharing.

The only value it could find was that the relay carried a lot of important information on the Hierarchy’s communication channels. It would be perfect for tapping in and listening, if the humans could translate Igraen transmission protocols which was, cryptographically speaking, the next best thing to impossible.

The Entity did not trust Six.

It counseled itself to be patient; it knew from its various probings of the human Internet that there was a need to build, to train and to prepare. It knew from its AvaRíos-mindstate how carefully they needed to to do all of that, and how much of it was entirely new to them. It understood, vaguely and with the combined intelligence of “experts” on their Internet, just how much needed to be set into motion.

The humans were starting from nothing, and even with the urgency afforded by the situation, that did not change their caution, nor the logistical realities.

The Entity had spent many cycles reflecting on that. It very much needed the humans if its goals were ever to be realized, and it was being hunted across the dataspace now, by every facet of Igraen society, orthodoxy and rebels alike. It had an excellent hide…but that could not last forever. Its plans needed to move forward. < Survive > demanded mobility.

It needed to spend its cycles carefully, too. Too much computing power being used without an appropriate accounting code would go noticed by the increasingly scrutinous Auditors roaming the dataspace. Trivial programs routinely ran without accounting, of course. A certain flexibility was good and the Igraens knew it, which was why that flexibility was still in place. It gave the Entity the wiggle-room it needed to move unnoticed… but it also gave the same to the Hierarchy, the Cabal and any other Igraen agency that might arise like an immune system to combat it.

That was Igraen society to its core: for a species so cold-heartedly committed to the eradication of others if they posed a perceived threat, they were oddly squeamish about destroying anything that was perceived as being useful, and were slow to reclassify things from one category to the other.

The Entity spent much of its downtime sorting through the accumulated knowledge and memories of the digital sapients that it had devoured. Mostly it looked for practical skills and the emotional or rational tools necessary to give it an intellectual edge over its pursuers. It was interested primarily in the data equivalent of the School of Hard Knocks.

Academic knowledge was interesting to be sure, but on the subject of the Hierarchy, the Cabal and Igraens in general it was nigh-impossible to find. Every single one that it had absorbed had been a wealth of information about how the species was now, but how they had been was a different matter entirely.

Their records were oddly silent on the subject too, even among themselves. It was almost as if their origins simply didn’t interest them. Try as it might, the Entity had no clear route to the historical truth. Where had they evolved? Why was their behavior so unabashedly parasitic? When had they first made the decision to eradicate another species to save themselves, and for what reason? And even if it answered those questions, what useful insights might ensue?

There were clues—they called the Hunters ’discarded’ for instance—but each tantalizing morsel of data seemed to be alone with aeons of silence for company. Had the Hunters and Igraens once been as intertwined as body and soul, or was the discarding more metaphorical? When had they been discarded?

This was a Problem: The AvaRíos-mindstate had recollections of an aphorism about “knowing thine enemy”, but the enemy scarcely seemed to know itself. How were the humans supposed to form a coherent strategy in the face of that? How was the Entity?

It could hoard all the computer cycles it wanted, if it didn’t know its enemy then the speculation was pointless. It had already prepared its translation matrix to allow humans to tap into Hierarchy data. What more did it have to offer? Nothing…But the data had to exist somewhere.

The question was, was the search for that data worth the risk?

Maybe not. But < survive > was a meaningless thing without something to survive for, and the Entity found that it increasingly identified with another personality trait from the AvaRíos-mindsate.

< Curiosity >

It dived back into the network and, yet again, resumed its search for answers.

Date Point: June 11y6m3w AV
Nicholas Patrick Memorial Hospital, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

Martina was a Tech, and that meant she didn’t have to hang with the HEAT, physically… but fuck that. She went as hard as Adam could push her as a matter of principle, and her weekly PT sessions with him had always been a mix of business and the pleasure of his company before. Even more so now that they were together.

She was never going to be anywhere near as fast as him though, especially not at a dead run. She couldn’t hit the same top speed, nor sustain her top speed for as long. So after the phone call he’d taken in the middle of their session, she’d been left feeling briefly and absurdly like the coyote after the road runner had vanished over the horizon.

Adam’s dad had been airlifted to hospital.

For Adam’s sake, she’d pushed the pace. Crossed the river via the Francis Crick bridge then hammered the soles off her sneakers cutting through an alleyway off Riverside Drive and then through the wake of stunned people that Adam had carved through the crowd in New World Plaza.

The direct routes and shortcuts available on foot ended up being a much faster way to get to the hospital than calling a cab would have been anyway.

She arrived in the ER—or the A&E department, as the signs called it—only a minute or two behind Adam, and leaned against the wall to recover for three deep breaths.

Adam was unmeaningly terrorizing a nurse with his urgent questions, and Marty rescued the poor woman by simply laying her hand on his upper arm—his skin was actually hot to the touch. He gave her a desperate look, hugged her, then stumbled off into the corner to slump against the wall and sit down on the floor.

“…wouldn’t he, er, prefer the, er, the chair?” the nurse asked.

“He breaks them,” Marty said distractedly. “Look, please, we’re here for Gabriel Arés. He-”

“Yes, er…” The nurse cleared her throat and cleared her head. “Sorry, what’s your relationship with him?”

Marty aimed her thumb at Adam. “His son.”

“Ah, right. Yes. Erm… He’s in surgery right now. I’m afraid that’s all I know, but I’ll find out.”

“Thanks.”

Marty wiped the sweat off her face as the nurse made herself scarce, and turned as she heard the door opened.

She hadn’t actually seen Ava since Halloween, and right now Ava was looking just as miserable as Adam, to the obvious distress of the silky-haired pale brown border collie that was orbiting her knees and whining up at her.

She saw Adam in the corner and gave Marty an anguished look. “What’s-? How is-?”

Marty put an arm round her shoulders and helped her sit down. Hannah immediately poured herself into Ava’s lap and tried to lick her face. “He’s in surgery. That’s all we know.”

Ava swallowed, nodded, and hugged the dog tight. Hannah for her part gave Marty a patient look that said, in the weirdly expressive way of dogs everywhere, ’I’d say hello but I’m busy right now’, and let herself be hugged.

“Good dog,” Marty muttered and scratched Hannah behind the ears. She gave Ava a comforting rub on the upper back and went to sit next to Adam.

Gabe’s fiance Jessica was the last to arrive, in a cab with dark smears under her eyes where she’d wiped away diluted makeup.

One quick explanation later, they had nothing to do but sit and wait.

“I keep telling him!” Jess groaned. The way she kept running her hands through her hair was quickly pulling apart her schoolmarm bun.

“Like he was gonna listen,” Adam rumbled and looked up to somehow drag a brave joke out of somewhere. “He’s my dad after all. Where d’you think I get it from?”

“Oh, Adam…” Jess sighed. She looked sideways and gave Ava a hug. “The three of you will be the death of me…”

A slightly more comfortable silence settled in place, and Marty contented herself with being useful and supportive. She fetched vending machine coffee, called Rebar and explained what was going on, took Hannah for a quick walkies (and explained to a concerned porter that the dog was a support animal) and tried to ignore the way that fitful lumps of time were choking and gurgling past unevenly and arbitrarily.

Check the clock, twenty seconds since the last time. Check the clock again, twelve minutes. Check it a third time half an hour later, only to find that half hour was in fact barely six minutes.

The tension was humming like a stressed cable when a tall Indian man in scrubs got their attention and invited them to come with him, to a cramped little office that they quickly decided couldn’t hold all of them. Fortunately, the corridor was quiet.

He introduced himself as Mister Gupta, a neurosurgeon.

“So. Mr. Arés suffered quite a nasty fall which left him with a fractured skull, a broken arm and some broken ribs,” he said. “He also suffered what we call a ’Coup-contrecoup injury’”

Adam nodded and his face shifted unhappily. “I’m familiar with the term.”

“You’re a colleague?” Mister Gupta asked.

“Medic.”

“I see. Well, your father’s undergone a decompressive craniectomy to help with the cerebral edema. But he’s a very tough man considering, and the surgery went well. We’re going to keep him under for a few days just to give him time for the swelling on his brain to go down.”

“Prognosis?” Adam asked, quietly.

Gupta pursed his lips. “It’s always difficult to tell at this stage,” he said. “Frankly until we wake him up and I can assess him I won’t be sure, but I do confidently expect to be able to do that in a few days.”

“But nothing really alarming?” Adam asked. “No herniation?”

“Nothing too alarming,” Gupta promised. “He will need a few more operations once the swelling has gone down and he will almost certainly require therapy and rehab which might take months or even years for him to fully recover, but…”

Adam hung his head and nodded.

“It’s good news overall,” Gupta reassured him. “Your father is a tough man.”

He was unaware of what Marty suspected was probably going through his head right now; namely the supply of Cruezzir-Derivative sitting less than half a mile away, safe in the lockers of HMNB Folctha.

As Adam himself had demonstrated after his brush with nervejam, one big jab of that and injuries even more catastrophic than those Gabriel had suffered would be mended pretty much overnight. Nobody outside of the SOR even knew that he’d brushed so close to death and that was how it would stay.

To have that power and not use it… well, Marty had failed that particular test once. It had ended with a comparatively minor and acceptable punishment, but the Letter of Counselling in her permanent record was in no way tolerant of the notion of any future acts of charity involving classified medical resources.

Adam nodded, and shook Gupta’s hand. “Thank you,” he said.

The hospital had rooms available for close family to stay in overnight, and Jess was quickly persuaded (not that she resisted) to make use of one. Ava committed to fetching whatever she needed and Marty found herself tailing Adam outside, clearly at a loose end.

That had kinda been her day, really: Feeling slightly useless. She knew the value of just being there, but it didn’t feel like enough.

She took his hand. “Hey-”

“You know what sucks most?” Adam asked.

“What?”

“I’ve got some Crude on me right now,” Adam admitted. Of course, he was authorized to requisition it for training purposes.

“But you can’t give it to him,” Marty nodded. “The civvies would notice.”

“It ain’t even that.” Adam sighed and scrubbed at his nose. “…Dad always says things have to be done by the rules. Due process, you know? That was something he drilled into me hard. He’d be furious with me if I broke the rules for him.”

He sighed and turned to face her. “I hate feeling useless.”

Marty kissed him. “At least you’ve still got him. It coulda gone worse.”

“Yeah. But… yeah. You’re right. I just… Yeah.”

Marty knew that jumble of vague agreement. It meant he needed to get his thoughts straight.

Okay. Fine. There was a sure-fire way to achieve that.

“Fine. Look, Rebar got us the rest of the day to deal with this, so why don’t we hike up to Sellers Lake?” she asked. “Give you a chance to think.”

He gave her the shaky half-smile of a grateful man in love and nodded. “That sounds like exactly what I need.”

Date Point: June 11y6m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

Knight only rarely had occasion to entertain his superiors in his own domain. Said domain was wondrous and vital but regrettably difficult to access, which made it awkward for a friendly jaunt down country for an evening of cards and conversation.

He did try to keep the pleasantries on-hand though. He was consciously a little bit old-fashioned when it came to entertaining and offered Tremblay a cigar, which was warmly declined. They sat in Knight’s modest but well-appointed study and caught up on old friendships, cricket and hockey, but like any meeting between flag officers things eventually turned to business.

“Give me your honest impression, Patrick. Can we trust them with DEEP RELIC?” Tremblay swirled the excellent whiskey in its cut crystal tumbler and nosed its intoxicating bouquet.

“Oh yes. Without hesitation. Assuming we can persuade them to remove the implants of course, but…I suspect they suspect they will need to anyway.”

“Oh? What makes you say that?”

“They’re getting quite adept at English. That’s saying something, because the language is physically difficult for them to speak. I’ve encouraged them by practicing my Gaori.”

“Mm. I tried the primer,” mused Tremblay. “I can’t wrap my mouth around those growl-click sounds.”

“Indeed. I spent an hour practicing the other day, and by the time I finally got it my jaw felt as if Master Sergeant Firth had punched me.”

“Wouldn’t you be dead?”

Knight chuckled. “Please, allow me a little hyperbole old friend.”

“Yes yes,” Tremblay grinned into the last of his whiskey. “Okay. I’ll draft the orders and set things into motion. How much authority will you need?”

Knight set down his whiskey and steepled his fingers. “May I be blunt?”

“Always.”

“This will do us no good if Whitecrest cannot bring others in.”

“…That’s a very tall order.”

“Quite.”

Tremblay finished his drink, stared ruefully into the tumbler then sighed, put it down and stood. “Then I’d better get to work.”

Knight let him out, then tidied up. He had work to do, as well.

Date Point: July 11y7m1w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: TSgt Scott Blaczynski

Sergeant Blaczynski is a perennially entertaining case whom I saw today for his annual assessment, which he eagerly broke the ice on by showing me his new electronic tattoo. One marvels that he was able to find room.

Blaczynski hails from a problematic family background, and believes that if not for his military career he would undoubtedly have been incarcerated or killed years ago. He recounts that Sergeant Firth recently talked him out of attempting to recontact his father, an exercise he has attempted several times over the years only for it to “always depress the shit outta [him].”

Given that Mr. Blaczynski Sr. is serving a life sentence for first degree murder, I consider Sergeant Firth’s intervention to have been a wise one.

Sergeant Blaczynski denies engaging in self-destructive behaviour, though he does acknowledge that he is most frequently implicated in “shenanigans” leading to minor corrections and “motivation” by the NCOIC. He has not, however, been formally disciplined to any exceptional degree and seems to be acutely aware of “how much is too much.” For a man like him serving in a special operations role to have avoided any criminal record at all is genuinely admirable.

He laments that his sense of what is appropriate does not apparently extend to conversation, and jokes that “the back of [his] skull must be getting thicker from where the guys give [him] a slap whenever [he says] something stupid”.

Overall, my impression continues to be of a young man whose natural inclination would be towards a wild and dangerous lifestyle but who is instead thriving on the discipline and camaraderie of his career in a very positive way. He speaks admiringly of Sergeant Firth and expressed the wish “to control [himself] better, like Righteous does”. The relationship between those two is interesting; Blaczynski very much regards himself as the junior partner, and Firth seems comfortably resigned to the role of mentor. Regardless the affection between the two is deep and profound. I have yet to learn what bonds Blaczynski so deeply to Firth, or vice versa.

No intervention seems necessary at this point. I have advised him to continue practicing the impulse control exercises we discussed last time but overall I feel that his penchant for entertainment is harmless.

One wonders what he will do when he’s finally tattooed every inch of skin that regulations permit.

I shall see him in a year.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 11y7m3w AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Planet Lucent, Near 3Kpc Arm

Allison Buehler

The name list had gone out the window again. There was a lot of good stuff on it, but none of the options they’d agreed on before seemed to quite fit. How did you name a planet that was absolutely dominated by insectoid life that in extreme cases could get as big as ponies?

Well, Xiù had named it in a silly voice like the narrator of a trashy B-movie trailer. ”The Planet Of The Giant Bugs!!!” had an enticingly unserious quality but the real name, the one that just felt perfect, came to them on the night that Allison and Julian had first seen the shimmerbugs.

Xiù could be descriptive and eloquent when she wanted, but she really had fallen way short of conveying the experience. They were nearly a week into their two month exploration before the phenomenon repeated itself, and when it did-!

Allison had never seen the Aurora Borealis, but she’d seen pictures, and when the shimmerbugs migrated above the nail trees it was like… like watching those pictures step out of the page to hover above the canopy. Light coiled and drifted like smoke over the treetops, and the three of them had just sat, and watched, and said nothing until the twilight dance had ended and the spell broke.

They had immediately opened the thesaurus app, looked up synonyms for the word “light”, and settled on “Lucent”.

Leaving that part of the planet to survey a site on a different continent had been tough, but Lucent had been kind to them and let them watch the shimmerbugs on the night they left.

That was the survey pattern: two weeks here, two weeks there, two weeks there, until they had thoroughly surveyed eight different sites on the planet’s surface. Hence their relocation to volcanic grassland in the tropics.

Plenty of solid rock, that was the key. In theory, Misfit couldn’t get stuck—even if her feet were absolutely wedged tight in fissures or whatever, she could still jump back to Cimbrean—but Xiù much preferred to land on solid rock if she could, and preferably on high ground with a little shelter. She could be frustratingly picky about her landing sites, actually, but Julian didn’t seem to mind and Allison knew better than to argue. Her own eagerness to be down and exploring didn’t need to get in the way.

“There’s another one of those huge termite mound things…” Julian said during a low sweep while the high-detail ground radar looked for an appropriate spot. Allison called up what he was seeing on one of her side monitors.

The “termite mounds” were unholy big. They weren’t mounds at all, they were termite buildings, termite cathedrals. Their chimneys were always in clusters of five or seven, or nine, or some other odd number, like alien hands clawing at the sky wherever they thrust out of the landscape.

Julian had emphatically counselled staying the hell away from them on the grounds that “do you really wanna run into a swarm of soldier termites as big as rottweilers?” and their presence alone was tipping Lucent’s classification up towards an eleven.

But that was all speculation, and the fact was that somebody was gonna have to evaluate those things at some point. If they were really that dangerous then it needed documenting.

”There’s a good landing site about a kilometer from that one,” Xiù called. ”Think that’s far enough for the ship to be safe?”

“If I’ve got a swarm of flesh-eating megabugs after me,” Allison said with forced cheer, “I might just manage that in two minutes.”

”I…wouldn’t recommend that as a training regime, Shǎguā.”

“Hey, at least you’re motivated to succeed!”

”Well, we’ve got to check it out. I don’t want some colonists to get swarmed in their beds or whatever.” Julian sounded tense.

”Set ‘er down?”

”Yeah.”

”Okay…”

Allison let Misfit do her own power-balancing for once, unhooked her seatbelt and ducked through the engineering pressure door into the ship’s staging area.

One of the more difficult conversations they’d had, months ago before even boarding Misfit, had been the question of who would go and who would stay if they needed to survey something hazardous. Somebody had to stay behind, Jump the ship back to Cimbrean and report if…

Well. If.

And since Allison was the best shot and knew which way up to hold a first aid kit, and Julian was Mister Sneaky Woodcraft, and neither she nor Julian were anywhere near as good at flying Misfit as Xiù was, the duty fell to Xiù. She hadn’t been happy about that. She didn’t sound happy about it now. Allison didn’t blame her either.

But they’d sorted that argument out long ago.

Their customized C&M Systems excursion suits were designed for exactly this sort of situation, though. They weren’t a full-blown suit of armor, but they’d sure as hell stop most threats. She stripped off her shipboard clothing and wriggled into the tighter, seamless suit underwear.

Julian joined her in the suiting-up area just as Xiù set them down, and wordlessly opened his locker to start getting into his own gear. They didn’t speak, but shared a single tense moment of eye contact that said everything they needed to.

She’d just finished forcing her legs down the suit’s pants and into the boots when Xiù emerged from the pilot blister. She leaned against the door and watched them, then double-checked their seals once the helmets were on.

The weapons locker was easier. Two GR-1Ds, a couple of Black Ogre Munitions GSA-2 pistols, two flare guns, a couple of knives, and Julian’s good tomahawk, the one the girls had banded together and got him for his birthday.

And the cloaks. After Mars, Julian had pressed for having the suits re-skinned with something more suited to sneaking through the woods on an alien planet but C&M hadn’t been able to deliver on time. So, cloaks had made an odd comeback. It was kinda… strange to pair something so medieval as a long, dark greenish-grey cloak with an advanced exoplanet excursion suit, but they worked well enough. And honestly looked kinda badass.

Some olive drab MOLLE rigs and hunting chaps did the rest, in a ghetto, jerry-built kinda way. There were still odd flashes of the suit’s white skin here and there but according to Julian they were about as camouflaged as they were gonna get, and Allison trusted his judgement on matters of sneaking around.

“Ready?” she asked.

Julian finished strapping on his knives and grabbed the second rifle. “Ready.”

“Save us a kiss, babe,” Allison told Xiù, who managed a nervous little smile.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good girl.”

Their boots kissed down onto a hard surface of off-white cracked clay a minute later after the airlock had cycled. It was a strange patch of baldness in an otherwise lush green forest.

“What is this?” Allison asked. “Is it natural?”

“Seasonal lake bed,” Julian said.

They briskly jogged the fifty meters or so to the shoreline with its dense foliage, and picked a clear-ish route up. Julian marked the tree next to it with a dab of bright orange spraypaint and then… did his disappearing act.

Allison had learned a few of his tricks, but he was still damn near impossible to follow. She knew where he was, or at least thought she knew where he was, but even looking right at the path she thought he’d taken, she saw hardly anything. Even the sway of the bushes might only be due to the breeze.

She hung back for a few seconds to give him a headstart, then followed. It was a system that played to their strengths—he scouted ahead and stopped her from blundering into trouble, and if he got in trouble she was in a position to cover him as he fell back. They’d rehearsed it a lot with Jason Hammond on his obstacle course back in Omaha.

Somehow, when she’d envisioned using it, Allison had imaged a forest crawling with Hunters, or Hierarchy biodrones.

A giant termite mound hadn’t been on the list, but somehow it was way more daunting than either of those other prospects. Those were threats she knew of, even if she’d never seen a Hunter in the flesh.

But they had no idea what was waiting for them in Lucent’s insect cathedrals.

Date Point: July 11y7m3w AV
Nicholas Patrick Memorial Hospital, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

“Uh… I am going home today, right? Or was it tomorrow?”

Ava tried to find humor in the question, but it was difficult. Gabe’s short-term retention was completely shot, and he was a long, long way short of being his usual incisive, perceptive self. Right now he looked fragile, small and much older than he really was.

“No, Dad,” she replied and tried to keep the weariness out of her voice. This was the third time she’d explained this. “Mister Gupta’s going to look at you and decide if you can go home today.”

“…Me cago en la leche, right. Yeah. You said that already.” Gabriel massaged his forehead gingerly past the bandage. “I think.”

The hospital had generously been persuaded to let Ava bring Hannah in with her during visits, and she was doing incredible work brightening up the ward. With Folctha’s population being predominantly young and fit, the hospital’s patients were almost all the victims of assorted accidents, and none of them liked being where they were.

Emotional support was Hannah’s job however, and she loved to work. Which meant that everyone who looked even slightly down was getting a panting, wagging but respectful visit from the most qualified morale officer on the planet. She never jumped up or barked or licked without permission, but instead would lay her head on the patient’s knee and look soulfully up at them, or just make it clear that she was happy to see them. She’d get scratches and fuss and baby-speak and then (God bless her) she’d trot back to check that Ava and Gabe were okay.

Right now she had rested her head in Gabe’s lap and was staying there. He needed her the most.

Gabe’s hand rocked absently back and forth through the thick ruff of silky fur around Hannah’s neck as he let his frustration dissipate.

“…So hard to think,” he complained. “It’s all… furry…”

Hannah shifted her feet and whined slightly, which managed to draw a laugh out of him and he massaged behind her ears.

“Yes, you’re furry too,” he told the dog. “But in a good way.”

Mister Gupta picked that moment to stroll onto the ward at the head of an entourage of his junior doctors and his registrar.

“Feeling better, Mr. Arés?” he asked.

“Wondering when I get to go home,” Gabe groused good-naturedly.

“And deprive us of your daughter’s dog?” Gupta asked, and smiled when Ava raised a hand to cover her smile. “Of course, the cleaners will be happy…”

“Hannah’s clean!” Ava protested. “I wash her every day!”

Gupta chuckled and produced a tablet computer, which he consulted. He nodded at whatever it was he saw.

“Well, I think you’ve been here long enough,” he told Gabe. “You’ll heal just as well at home.”

“When do I get to go back to work?” Gabe asked. Gupta ran his tongue over his teeth as he thought, then waved away the juniors and registrar before drawing up a chair to sit in front of Gabriel with a somber look on his face. He drew the curtain for privacy.
“Candidly, Mr. Arés, your injury is likely to impair you for months at the very least. Your memory may never be what it once was. I wouldn’t recommend returning to work just yet.”

Gabe struggled to sit up. “Define ’ just yet’,” he demanded. “My work is important!”

Gupta shook his head. “Every brain injury is unique,” he advised. “But the balance of probability is that you will struggle with short-term retention for months, may find it difficult to control your emotions, and may find your cognitive faculties impaired as well. Unfortunately there is no miracle drug that can fix all of that,” he intoned, unaware that he was completely wrong, “but I do know that your recovery will be impaired by stress and long hours. If you desire the speediest recovery possible, then you are going to need to take some time off. Months, probably.”

Gabriel was as far forward in his chair as he could get without actually standing. “I can’t!” he said. “I don’t mean I don’t want to, I mean that the role just can’t be vacant for that long. You’re telling me I have to retire!”

Gupta’s face was full of sympathy. “If that’s so then… I’m sorry, but your health is more important,” he said.

“¡Vete al carajo!”

“Dad!” Shocked, Ava laid her hand on his, and Hannah whined. Gabe looked shocked at himself too. Slowly, he settled back and put his free hand on Ava’s.

“I… I’m sorry, Mister Gupta,” he said at last. “That… I guess that just proved your point, huh?”

“It’s quite alright,” Gupta promised. “I’d feel the same way in your position.”

Gabe hung his head. “I…” For the first time ever, Ava saw a tear trickle down his nose. He wiped it off with his thumb. “I wanna go home now,” he said at last.

“I agree, that’s probably best,” Gupta stood up. “I’ll discharge you as soon as I’m finished with my ward round, and I’ll see you back here for a follow-up chat in a month. You’ll need to see your practice nurse every day to get your dressings changed-” he indicated the bandages swaddling Gabe’s damaged, dismantled and reconstructed skull, “-and to have your stitches out in ten days.”

“We’ll take care of it,” Ava promised. Gupta nodded, shook their hands, and left them alone.

As soon as he was gone, Gabe slumped miserably in his chair. “…That’s it, then. I’m out of the fight,” he said mournfully. “However the Big Hotel war goes, it goes without me.”

Ava gave him the biggest daughterly hug she could considering the state of his ribs and arm. “You did a lot,” she said.

“Not enough.”

That actually made Ava laugh. She kissed him on the forehead. “You are so much like Adam,” she said.

Gabe chuckled too, and wiped off his eyes. “So you’re telling me I should quit before I really hurt myself.”

“If you don’t, you’ll end up being nursed by Adam. Have you ever been under his care?”

“…’Care’?”

Ava giggled a little, then sobered. “I, uh… I already lost one dad,” she said quietly. “Maybe this is selfish but… I’d kinda like to keep this one.”

“Ava-”

“And Jess wants you for a long time too.”

Gabe bowed his head in a happier form of defeat. “…Okay. I don’t know what I’ll do, but…I’ll find something.”

“Promise?”

“I promise, Mija.”

Date Point: 11y7m3w AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Planet Lucent, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

The worst part for Xiù was the watching helplessly. Allison stopped at the bottom of the ladder and let Julian climb first. She turned, kneeled, her rifle snapped up. GR-1ds didn’t slam loud and painful like a conventional rifle, instead they cracked like a bullwhip.

Rounds tore into the goat-sized insect that had just scrambled down the bank in pursuit of them, punching fist-sized holes in its carapace. It staggered and collapsed leaking horrible yellowish juices. Three more bursts, three more dead bugs and then…

They retreated, which was just confusing. A half-mile pursuit by hundreds of angry alien giant termites ended the moment Allison fired her weapon? That… didn’t make any sense at all.

But the Lucent Termites had definitely backed off. Julian unslung his rifle and aimed it, covering Allison as she climbed the ladder, and the two of them ducked into the airlock.

Xiù took off as soon as the lock’s outer two doors were firmly closed and the seals were confirmed.

She got them on the climb to orbit and then asked the burning question she’d wanted to ask every since the shit had hit the fan. “Are you okay?”

“Grody,” Allison complained, “…but fine. I think we’re gonna have to burn the cloaks and all the rest of this gear though.”

“After I take samples,” Julian said firmly. Like Allison, he was drenched head to toe in some kind of horrible watery brown juice that had soaked into every piece of fabric he was wearing.

“Sure, sure…”

Xiù watched via the camera as the two of them carefully removed all the soaked fabric into a single sodden stinking pile, and Julian retrieved the Hazardous Substance Sampling Kit from its storage in the airlock’s ceiling. He swabbed the brown goop off their suits, squeezed a few ropey mucus drools of it out into some sample vials, then immersed those vials in the bottles full of safety solution, sealed the box and then fed it into the sterilizer.

The guns, knives and tomahawk were laid out on the floor, and the fouled equipment was carefully bagged, then bagged again, then a third time before being dropped down the incinerator chute.

Only once they were down to the bare essentials of the excursion suits and their metal tools did they go through the double safety-check procedure of starting up the airlock’s red decontamination cycle, the version designed with the excursion suits in mind.

The whole airlock became a high-pressure, high-temperature shower that hosed them and everything they had with them down with hot acid. They both turned and raised their limbs to make sure they were completely covered.

Then there was an explosive puff and they were covered in alkaline powder that fizzed and hissed as it neutralized the acid.

There was a rinse of scalding hot water that would have seriously harmed them without the suits, an antibacterial soap cycle, another rinse, a double sweep with the Corti decontamination beams on full power, and then (thank goodness for their polarized protective glass in their helmets) five minutes under intense UV light.

By the end of it all the suits were steaming and would need repairs by C&M technicians… but the only way to have more thoroughly sterilized them would have been a fatal dose of gamma radiation.

By the time it was all finished, Misfit was in orbit and Xiù was able to dismount from the cockpit and hover in the staging room waiting for them.

The eye-burning stink of swimming pool and chemistry class swept over her as the inner doors opened. Thank God they’d been in the suits: Red decon without the suits involved a full body shave and quarantine.

“Well that was fucking disturbing,” Allison commented with brittle calm, as soon as they were safely through. She placed the guns on the armory table with a rueful sigh “And a waste of good gear.”

“You’re okay, though, right?” Xiù asked, wrestling her anxiety. Julian twisted his helmet to unseal it and ducked to pull it off. His hair was soaked with sweat.

“We’re… fine?” he checked with Allison, who nodded. “We’re fine.”

Allison coughed as she took her helmet off and got a strong hit of diffuse, diluted Chlorine. “Julian?”

“Yes, Al?”

“Next time you say we gotta explore an alien termite mound?”

“I know, I know…”

They kissed, then spared some reassuring attention for Xiù.

“Guess we’re recalling to Cimbrean then, huh?” Xiù asked.

“We’re inside the resupply window, just,” Julian said, removing his gloves. “Bit early, but…”

“But the suits need repairs and probably the weapons too,” Allison said. “Besides, we can make Lucent somebody else’s problem. Let them deal with the giant angry snot-bugs.”

“Recall it is,” Xiù said. She sat back down in her seat and was slid back into place behind the ship’s controls. She called up the routine recall jump checklist and worked through it.

First, launch a beacon satellite. That made perfect sense, since they didn’t want to spend a couple of months flying all the way back out here after resupply. The little launch tube was in the back of engineering, and made a ringing sound as it drove the minisatellite out into space on a puff of compressed air, injecting it onto an orbit slightly tangential to Misfit’s own escape orbit. She double-checked its course, saw that it would drift out of the system in about ten years’ time, and moved on to the actual recall.

Next, charge the jump engine. That was already done—Allison kept it permanently charged. Then select the desired beacon from the list. Again, easy: They had only launched one so far. Hit “recall”, hit “Confirm”…

The stars outside changed. That was it, that was the whole event. Several thousand lightyears in less than a second and the only visible consequence at first was a thousand different constellations. If she hadn’t been able to see those stars, she never would have noticed the difference.

Well… the radio traffic was different too.

”Unidentified starship this is Cimbrean Border Security control, we have you jumping in. Please identify.”

Oh yeah. She had to talk to people, that was part of the job too. “Hello Cimbrean control, this is Bravo Golf Echo Victor One-One Heavy ’Misfit’. Holding orbit.”

“Hello Misfit! Welcome back, we weren’t expecting you for a while yet. Things have changed since you were last here.”

Xiù saw that much instantly. When they had left, the anchorage above Cimbrean-5 had been just an assigned orbit. Now, parked proud and huge in that reserved space, was a full-sized Dominion free trade station. Dog’s convoy must have succeeded.

“I can see that! Any change to customs procedure?”

”Affirmative Misfit. Customs is now conducted aboard Allied Trade Station One ‘Armstrong’. Tune to wake comms channel three for their traffic control. And, uh…welcome back. Border Security out.”

Xiù took a moment to shake her head and let the reality of how quickly things could change sink in. She’d gone from watching her lovers get covered in alien bug slime, to shaking hands with a space station that hadn’t even existed six months ago, all in less than an hour.

Crazy.

She boosted onto an approach, and called the station.

Date Point: July 11y7m4w AV
Moses Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“Halfway through the mission, a half-million repair bill, and all they have to show for it is one planet full of lousy giant bugs?! Ugh!!”

Kevin was in Naysmith mode while everybody else waited for him to work. It was a powerful and important job, puncturing his billionaire boss’ worst excesses and trying to keep him grounded. Heck it was easily the most rewarding one he’d ever had.

It was also the most difficult he’d ever had. “Y’know, they’ve already volunteered for a second mission, and maybe even more,” he pointed out. “Misfit’s gonna fly for years to come.”

“And if all they’re bringin’ me is giant insects-!” Moses began.

Kevin interrupted him. He was the only one at the table with that power, and he was duty-bound to use it by leaning forward and pitching his voice at that careful line between lifting it and raising it. “Boss! We went over this, remember? Travel times, the distances involved, survey times, the need to resupply, degauss. Now, it looks like they’ve eliminated the false positives problem, which means the second half’a this mission is gonna be crazy efficient, and they’ve signed on for more, which saves us costs in the long run. I know it ain’t the home run you wanted, but we’re a long, long way from having a disaster on our hands here.”

Byron glowered at him, then regained his self-control and his intellect, applied them both, and chilled out.

“…You’re right, I was hoping for more,” he said at last. He sat back and rubbed his eyes wearily. “We invested more into the BGEV program than was necessarily wise, Kevin. I’m eager for results.”

Kevin settled back as well, and turned to Doctor Ericson. “Doc?”

The program’s senior scientist gave him a moment’s nonverbal gratitude then stood up to address the whole table.

“Insects on Earth have already provided us with resources like you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “Not just honey but, uh, shellac, beeswax, silk, kermes dye, Carmine dye… Sure, people are generally squeamish about insects but goodness knows what we might find on that planet when the long-term research team heads on over there aboard Creature Of Habit.”

“Way back when, the Chinese had a monopoly on silk production,” Mr. Williams pointed out. “And it made them incredibly wealthy.”

“Now imagine if the insects on this planet can make silk,” Clara Brown injected. “And maybe they can make five times as much, and maybe their silk is naturally full of interesting hues and colors.”

“Or maybe their silk turns out to be full of antibiotics,” Ericson agreed.

“Or they feed their larvae with the cure for cancer.”

“Or a serum that can double a human lifespan.”

“Or maybe we find a species of really pretty critter we can sell as pets!” somebody suggested.

Moses raised his hands theatrically. “Fine! Fine! Point made! Maybe the Planet of the Giant Bugs will be valuable for us after all!”

“It’s a whole planet, Boss,” Kevin pointed out. “And right now it belongs exclusively to the Group. The resources of a whole planet just as big as Earth. You gonna tell me that’s a failure?”

Moses lowered his hands and nodded. “Okay, your point’s made. I’m being unreasonable.” He grumbled a little, but Kevin knew perfectly well that Moses was tough as an old boot in reality. Come the morning, once his ego had taken some time for its ears to stop ringing, he’d almost certainly start sending out small tokens of his esteem. He was like that.

“So… we’re re-launching Creature Of Habit?” Clara asked, enthusiastically.

Moses sat back and stroked his chin thoughtfully for a minute or two, then nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Make that ship make money again.”

They were only too happy to oblige.

Date Point: August 11y8m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: SSGT Wilson Akiyama

Staff Sergeant Akiyama attended today for his annual assessment.

He continues to feel guilty over the death of Sergeant Brady Stevenson with whom he was close and who would have celebrated his birthday this week, but states that this is “just an occasional downer” and that he is otherwise feeling well. I was pleased to note that he did not raise the issue of the wound he suffered during Operation NOVA HOUND at all, and I believe that he has processed his concerns on that matter.

Objectively and subjectively therefore his mood is appropriate and even positive. I will see him again in a year.

-Lt. K Mears

Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: August 11y8m AV
Allied Trade Station 1 ’Armstrong’, Cimbrean-5, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“Bloody hellfire! What have you done to my suits?!”

Julian offered an apologetic smile and cleared his throat. “Sorry, Mister Cavendish. Red decon’s kinda nasty.”

“I know, yes. I know what it entails but… bloody hell. I never thought I’d see its effect.”

Cavendish gave the tortured excursion suits a rueful once-over. They weren’t actually in terrible shape considering they’d been hosed down with acid and scalding water. At least, they only needed repairing rather than replacing.

“Alright. These’ll have to go back to our workshop for full safety testing,” he announced.

“That grounds us,” Julian pointed out. “And we’ve already been here more than a week.”

“Then you’re grounded, and if Moses Byron complains then tell him he can have it out with me.”

“We’ve got a guy for standing between us and Moses already,” Julian said. “But, Moses pays him to do that. He’s a pretty good boss, really.”

“Lucky. I’ve worked with some other billionaires.” Cavendish said. “Some of ‘em are the best people you’ll ever meet, others are narcissistic bastards who’ll rip you apart for not kissing their feet. Which one is Byron d’you think?”

“Somewhere in the middle,” Julian shrugged. “Anyway… sorry about the suits, but they saved us for real. I don’t want to know what that shit the bugs sprayed all over us was, but I bet I wouldn’t have enjoyed getting it on my bare skin.”

Cavendish sighed and closed the crate. He waved at a couple of guys wearing his company’s polo shirts and they hoisted the suit boxes up onto their wheels and took them away. “I’ll have them back to you soon as,” he promised.

“Thanks, Mister Cavendish. Can I make a request?”

“Name it,”

“If they could be camo pattern or olive drab or something from now on? Our ghetto camo solution didn’t really work so great…”

“I’ll see what I can do without compromising on safety features,” Cavendish promised.

“Camo is a safety feature.”

“…Right you are. I’ll see what I can do.”

They shook hands and parted ways, and Julian headed up-deck to meet with the girls.

Armstrong was weird. There was nothing wrong with it exactly, but there was something jarring about being aboard a standard Dominion-model trading station and seeing humans everywhere, dwarfed by architecture designed to accomodate beings who were twice as tall as any human.

And those humans were busy. There was orange tape everywhere as guys in high-vis yellow vests and blue hard-hats brought the station up to OSHA compliance, or whatever equivalent applied in a British or Cimbrean jurisdiction, or… whatever jurisdiction the station was in.

Jurisdiction was a problem with everything about Cimbrean. Among other things, the Cimbrean colony itself occupied a legal area that was so gray as to almost be black. Several nations had complained stridently about the colony, pointing to Article II of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The UK had adroitly maneuvered around the legal repercussions by slotting the colony neatly into some obscure category that only made sense in the uniquely convoluted context of their constitutional monarchy, and which made the colony firmly the UK’s responsibility in terms of defense in return for allegiance to the Crown, but not their responsibility in terms of legal liability for the fact that it actually existed.

Somehow.

Most Cimbreaners laughed the whole thing off and the general colonial attitude was ’easier to ask forgiveness than permission’. The colony was there, it was successful, it was arguably its own sovereign state which may or may not be guilty of violating an important international treaty… but it wasn’t going away so in the end, practicality was going to win out.

In the meantime folks were just jury-rigging things as best they could. And if that meant buying a Dominion station and then stuffing it with aftermarket modifications that voided the warranty but made it three times safer then so be it.

At least it had a good food court. A food court with burgers.

To his surprise, there was somebody sitting at the table with Xiù and Allison when he came into view, and his surprise grew when he recognised Dog Wagner. He’d honestly never expected to see the eccentric ship captain ever again after they’d parted ways at FTS-50.

He looked good, too. A few months of being back in touch with humanity had done a lot for him: his teeth looked healthier, he was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt instead of the baggy, lopsided hand-stitched sweater he’d made for himself, and he was rapidly losing the skinny, malnourished look of a long-term abductee.

Dog greeted him with a fist bump. “Fancy meeting you here,” he grinned.

“Yeah!” Julian agreed. “Heck of a coincidence.”

“Not really: I’m on the Hephaestus payroll now. They’ve got themselves their very own freighter! Though, they insisted on making some upgrades…” He grumbled a little and indicated the workers, but his expression said he didn’t actually mind.

“How’d they get you to agree to that?”

“Big-ass pension, dental plan, paycheck…” Dog grinned crookedly. “Also, the lady running this joint’s a fox.”

“Also your clothes fit, you’re wearing actual boots, and you don’t smell like a hibernating bear,” Allison pointed out. Dog laughed.

“And Vitamin C!” He crowed. “Brother, you musta had an orange when you got back to civilization right?”

“Oh, fuck yeah,” Julian nodded. It had been the most delicious thing he’d ever eaten. “I ate a whole sack.”

“Fuckin’…lemonade,” Dog said. “And coffee. Steak. And… It’s like, shit, the boss lady here, Adele Park? She called me up to her office as soon as she fuckin’ had an office and…shit. All the things you don’t know you missed until somebody gives ‘em to ya.” He sighed and sat back, looking up at the ceiling with an expression of faraway ecstacy. “General Tso’s chicken, football, porn!”

Xiù giggled, and Dog flinched and cleared his throat. “Uh…Sorry. Forget I said that…”

Allison snorted and shook her head. “Nope. We’re gonna hold that one over you.”

“God dammit,” Dog chuckled. “…I shoulda got back in touch years ago.”

“I notice you’re not going back to Earth, though,” Julian said.

“Nah brother. What would I even fuckin’ do?” Dog shook his head. “Nah, this way I get the best of both worlds and there’s an actual future in it. I ain’t far off sixty, a fella like me ain’t gonna get a better deal than this.”

“We’re happy for you,” Allison told him. Dog grinned and toasted her with a can of cola.

“What about you kids?” he asked. “You just gonna do this one round or…?”

Before they could reply, Xiù swatted Julian on the arm and nodded urgently toward something. Kevin Jenkins and Clara Brown were strolling toward them.

Clara naturally looked by far the more excited of the two. Her trademark huge girlish enthusiastic grin was firmly in place and she was geeking out hard over absolutely everything. Kevin’s appraising sweep of the station was more composed, and his smile wasn’t so much excited as… proud? Or perhaps pleased.

“…That guy looks familiar,” Dog frowned.

“Well, he might be. Dog Wagner-” Xiù made the introductions as they arrived, “This is Kevin Jenkins, and Doctor Clara Brown. Guys, this is Dog. Captain of the ’My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’.”

Kevin roared with laughter. “Oh, man! I like you already!” he chuckled and extended a hand. Dog paused, then shook it.

“The Kevin Jenkins? I saw your ass on the news way back…”

“Yeah. Saying some stupid shit where some ET news hack could film me, right?” Kevin pulled an apologetic face. “That’s me.”

“Dang, brother. You made my life pretty fuckin’ difficult for a while there… Part’a me kinda wants to bust your face. ”

Kevin smiled ruefully and sat down next to Xiù. “She already did,” he said, turning her face red. “For real though, I’m sorry if I caused you trouble, man. I’d take back every word if I could.”

Dog made a forgiving gesture. “Ancient history.”

“So,” Allison interjected. “What’s the word from the boardroom?”

“Eh. Think Moses wanted you guys to tag eight planets, a gajillion barrels of crude oil and the cure for cancer,” Kevin smirked. “We managed to convince him you done good. Even if you are taking some vacation time.”

He grinned when Julian opened his mouth to object. “I know, I know, red decon. We’re just happy to have you alive, guys.

“Plus It’s a good chance to service the ship!” Clara enthused.

“And do some PR shit. And no-” Kevin raised a hand as Allison threw her head back. “You don’t get to dodge out of it. If you ain’t flying you still gotta earn your salary.”

“Dammit Kevin-!”

“Relax, we’re not gonna trot you out in front of the cameras,” Kevin soothed. “Just do some video logs, answer some fan mail, shit like that.”

“What about the other thing?” Julian asked. “Our new contract?”

Clara giggled “You shoulda seen how Moses lit up when Kevin told him you guys wanted to stay on after this mission,” she said.

“The whole six-on, six-off thing?” Allison asked.

“That works great for us,” Clara said.

“I was gonna counter-offer with six on, six off, and three months of training and publicity stuff,” Kevin said.

Allison, Julian and Xiù glanced at each other. “We’ll have to talk about that,” Allison said.

“You’ve got time. My advice? The Group wants you three. You’re in a strong bargaining position, so don’t be afraid to play hardball. But you’re gonna have to accept some publicity, ‘cause it’ll follow you even if y’all retire to that nice place in the woods.”

“Keep flying, though, and we can stay away from the cameras for months at a time…” Julian mused.

“If we want,” Xiù added.

“Cool.” Kevin smiled. “We’ll do the actual negotiation when you finish this tour, yeah?”

“You mean when a guy from the competition ain’t here,” Dog snarked.

“Life wouldn’t be interesting without the competition, man,” Kevin said. “Hey look, how about I buy us all dinner? My treat.”

“Guess that shiny suit comes with a paycheck, huh?” Dog observed.

“Not gonna lie, I got more money than I know what to do with. Lemme spend it.”

“Hey, I wasn’t saying no…”

That drew a laugh from pretty much everyone, and Kevin stood up. “Alright. No more business talk. We had a long trip to get here, and I wanna hear stories. Right, Doc?”

Clara nodded. “Oh hell yeah!” she enthused. “The glimmerbugs! I… tell me all about them…”

“Oh man, now those things are a campfire story…” Julian began.

He told them all about it.

Date Point: August 11y8m3w AV
Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Earth

Master Sergeant Derek Coombes

“So those are the next guys in the HEAT pipeline, huh? I ain’t impressed.”

“’Cause most of ‘em are smaller’n you, Tiny?”

“Shyeah. They gotta looong way to go. Ain’t a quarter of ‘em gonna make it, either.” Walsh shook his head.

Imagining what might have been, probably. Walsh had qualified for what were now called HEAT, only to lose his shot due to an avoidable injury he’d picked up in a celebratory arm-wrestling contest. He knew what the job required, knew he had it, and knew he’d fucked it up. Coombes sympathized, but they had a new mission now and he needed Walsh’s head in the game.

He smacked the big guy on the arm. “Come on. Let’s go meet this Hoeff fella.”

“Gotta work with a fuckin’ SEAL, man. SEALs are weird…” Tiny grumbled.

“Yeah, but it’s like the fuckin’ trifecta, right? He’s Navy, I’m Army, you’re Chair Force!”

Coombes got an amused smile from Walsh. “Hey! My chair was fuckin’ sweet!”

“Mhmm. Damn Air Force, never doin’ any fieldwork…”

Walsh snorted. Some jokes never got old.

The JETS training at Huntsville was all about the variable-gravity obstacle course. In this case, it was a refresher: All three of them had undergone variable-G training over in England during the first incarnation of the JETS, when it was supposed to be a qualification.

The real training was gonna be on Cimbrean and they knew it, but first they had to cover the basics of survival. Coombes wasn’t excited about that part: he’d been through those courses many times. Walsh was more upbeat, and had spent the journey towards Huntsville reading up on contamination and containment, AKA the ‘How to not kill a whole planet with your butt’ manual.

“You think we’re gonna learn anything good, Tiny?”

“Well…looking through this? I suspect they’re gonna spend a lot of time on containment. You ever shit into a bag?”

“…What did I sign up for?”

“And then carry it back with you?”

“This had better be a good fuckin’ bag.”

“It’s gonna be heavy. You sure you don’t wanna bulk up?”

“What? So I’m bigger so I need to eat more, so I shit more so I gotta carry even more shit in a bag?”

“…Bro. My base metabolic rate is about thirty-five hundred calories. That…ain’t much more than you, as long as I’m being–”

“You’re such a fuckin’ nerd! Only bro I ever knew that could make gainz sound boring.”

A new voice interrupted them. “Nerd, huh? Guess I know which one’a y’all’s the airman, then.”

It belonged to a guy who made even Coombes look large, though he packed a lot of wiry intensity into that compact build. Even ambling amicably up to meet them, he was disarmingly quiet.

Walsh grinned and stuck out his mitt. “Yo, name’s Staff Sergeant Walsh. People call me ‘Tiny’ for, y’know. Obvious reasons.”

“‘Cause they’re fuckin’ idiots?” This was said with a grin, and a handshake. “Chief Petty Officer Hoeff.” When he turned the handshake on Coombes and was introduced he turned out to have a vice grip like a chimpanzee, and Coombes could detect the ‘subtle’ signs of approval in Tiny’s body language.

“Eh, I ain’t that big,” Walsh said airily. “You should see a couple’a HEAT bros I know.”

“Especially Firth,” Coombes said.

“Especially Firth, yeah. That motherfucker plays with me like I’m a chewtoy.”

“It’s adorable to watch, too. I keep wonderin’ if he’ll drag you off to his dog house.”

“Nah, bro. The Dog House is Warhorse’s place.”

“Not their fuckin’ gym, you dipshit!”

Walsh grinned a trollish grin that was mirrored on Hoeff. The SEAL aimed a thumb over his shoulder. “We’re sleepin’ over yonder. I already took the good room.”

“Well fuck! I suppose we better go check what you left us.”

“Heh. Well, we’re already checked in,” rumbled Walsh, “I wanna drop my bags and go get a workout in.”

Coombes rolled his eyes but acquiesced, and Tiny wandered away at a rolling stroll with his bag over his shoulder. Coombes shouldered his own bag and followed him. Their new address wasn’t hard to find—it was the last and smallest at the end of the row—and Hoeff’s ‘good room’ turned out to be pretty much indistinguishable from the others except that it was closest to the kitchen and farthest from the latrine.

He waited for Walsh to drop his bags and change into his PT gear, then took Hoeff aside as soon as they could talk without being overheard. “Hey, Chief Petty Officer. You mind if I call you Hoeff?”

“Sure thing, Master Sergeant. Can I call you Coombes?”

“Right on. Anyway, Walsh? He’s…well, he’s a got a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He was selected for HEAT but fucked it up for himself pretty epic-like. I’m tryin’a…I wanna make him feel better about JETS, right?”

Hoeff nodded understanding. “I think we’re on the same page.” He watched Walsh jog out onto the training field and bee-line toward the HEAT potentials. “And Walsh is someone we really need, don’t we?”

“Mhmm. Ain’t often you get someone that smart and that physical. I bet we’re gonna need to think our way out of jams we ain’t even dreamed up, and we’re definitely going to be rolling heavy in gear. Ever do long-range recon?”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m here.”

“Y’know the kind where you can’t leave any sign?”

Hoeff nodded ruefully. “Ayup. Like I said…we need a mule. And Tiny looks like a goddamned pack horse.” Crammed into his reflective Air Force PT gear, Walsh was impossible to miss. By now he was down with the HEAT candidates and he looked like he was hell-bent on humiliating every one of them. Judging by their gawping expressions he already was, and not very friendly-like, either.

“…He’s gotta calm down,” Hoeff decided.

“I think he’ll get there. His real problem is…well. He really is HEAT material, and I’ve seen HEAT in action, man. I think some part of him thinks he’s…humoring me. He’s too polite to ever admit it, but…”

“That’s rough.” Hoeff scratched at his jaw. It was scruffy like only an operator could get away with. “…What’s HEAT like, anyhow?”

Coombes sighed. “You ever meet a man who is better than you in literally every possible way, and is so goddamned nice and friendly it makes it even worse?”

“I can imagine…” Hoeff offered, slowly.

“Right. Now cover that guy in some hapless motherfucker’s guts.”

Coombes watched Hoeff’s expression and caught the faintest of slight frowns. “I watched…well. It’s weird, the three HEAT bros I’m thinking of could literally rip me apart before I noticed,” he added. “And Walsh? He’s easily good enough to join ‘em. But instead he’s gonna do milk runs with us.”

“This shit ain’t gonna be milk runs! Have you read the mission brief?”

“Yup.” Coombes looked back at the field again, where the HEAT wannabes were all being left in the dirt even as they gamely tried to keep up. “Now all we gotta do is get Walsh to believe it…”

Six hours later

“Whaddya think?”

Walsh stroked his chin. “Good intro class, he raised some interesting points. I’m gonna…go to the SCIF and read up some more. After PT.”

Coombes granted himself a satisfied nod. Mission accomplished.

Date Point: September 11y9m1w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: SSgt Adam Arés

I last saw Staff Sergeant Arés one month ago, as he is in the habit of visiting me every month. He is a patient and thoughtful young man who continues to grapple with his historic trauma and his father’s disability.

He has repeated his concerns regarding his devotion to maximal physical performance. Although the demands of his career make his substantial physicality necessary, he worries that he is obsessed and about being seen as a “freak”. Notably, this has not lessened his pursuit of physical excellence in any appreciable degree.

We touched briefly on the subject of his father’s recent fall and worsening disability, which is a source of some considerable frustration and upset for him. He states that he is finding it “difficult” to accept his father’s situation, and joked that “everybody thinks their dad is stronger, right?” I advised him that the best person to discuss these matters with is probably Mr. Arés Senior, and he has assured me that he will make the attempt.

He also continues to express mixed feelings over what he calls “The Hate”, though he has become more articulate in being able to describe exactly what this entails.

According to him, “The Hate” is his motivating force. He describes it as an ability to channel his anger and frustration, especially over his past trauma, into constructive mental impetus. As a psychiatrist this generates some professional conflict; on the one hand, it is quite clear it has enabled Arés to push the boundaries of human possibility and this is a thing we are desperately in need of. On the other, for his personal benefit it is difficult to determine which course of therapy may be best. Do we work on his anger and possibly repressed self-loathing knowing that could risk his abilities? How would he feel afterwards?

It must also be said that Sergeant Arés possesses violent ideations. These are understandable considering his history, personality type and vocation though he seems to have them well under control. He discussed his relationship with Sergeant Firth and remarked “it’s helped [him] understand where it’s coming from and keep it locked down.”

He denies feeling specific violent impulses toward individual people around him, and states that his anger is directed “at the whole world, sometimes”, though he does report that channeling his anger has proven equally useful to him both in training and in battle.

We discussed whether he feels this is healthy, to which he replied that it is “probably not”, but he suggests that his most constructive course of action would be to continue much as he is, with the support of his team. I am inclined to agree, though I will of course keep a close eye on him and I have encouraged him to visit me as often as he likes, which he has assured me he shall.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: September 11y9m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Special Agent Darcy

“So! What have Control cooked up for us? Any new Indications and Warnings?”

In the parlance of the intelligence industry ’Indications and Warnings’ was an important term of art. While it could mean many things, they all essentially boiled down to: ’what are their people doing, and what should our people watch for?’

Darcy ruefully considered her coffee for a moment before responding. It wasn’t that she disliked coffee, as such, but she drank so much of it at the behest of whoever she was visiting that nowadays she much preferred green tea, if only for the change of pace.

“…Revised but they’re much the same,” she said, blowing on the drink to cool it. “They want more emphasis on the Females. What I’m more interested in is your current collection deck.”

That was another term of art: A collection deck was the end result of a lengthy but efficient chain of decision-making that all happened behind the opaque facade of Control. Policy-makers and their analysts decided what questions needed answering, another team of analysts determined what things needed to be watched to generate input to the process, and they in turn generated a list of what specific things the case officers and their sources needed to key onto. That was a collection deck.

Darcy was a case officer. Melissa meanwhile was her source, and a very good one. She also had the luxury of not being compromised by her duties. Others in the industry might literally have killed for an assignment that was so free of moral gray areas: they made for easy and rewarding work, and sound nights of restful sleep.

Melissa nodded. “Let me guess: Meereo? I presume now that he and Niral are a couple…”

“He is Champion of Clan Longear,” Darcy pointed out. “From what I can tell he’s effectively the Gaoian equivalent of a prince, or a head of state.”

“Close enough, I guess. There’s no real direct equivalent to any modern human rank, uh… he’s… well, a champion. In the medieval sense.”

Darcy nodded understanding.

“He’s also away right now,” Melissa added .”So…what do you want me to do?” She had always been a cautious one.

“Watch for Hierarchy influence, of course. Mostly, watch Niral and see how they interact. We don’t want a ‘honeypot’ scenario.”

“I’m not sure Gaoians are as vulnerable to that, but…”

A ‘honeypot’ was an old—arguably the oldest—trick of tradecraft, and hinged on some primordial truths about the relationship between men and women. Men after all predictably wanted to be seduced, a fact that untold millions of women had used to their advantage throughout history.

“I understand.” Darcy sipped the coffee again. “But honestly, the collection deck is mostly unchanged. We’re interested in Gaoian culture, behavior, and their politics, and the spread of Hierarchy influence. Personally though, I’m most interested in the Females. They’re arguably the most important power block amongst the Gao, which makes our lack of visibility into them… frustrating.” She sipped her coffee.

Melissa nodded. “We haven’t had much contact with them until recently.”

“Mm.” Darcy put the coffee down. “But that’s changing now and you’re the only person we have who’s positioned to take advantage. It’d be well worth your time…”

She picked up her phone and briskly opened an app. “And rewarding. I know it’s not much…” In fact it was. “But I hope this expresses our gratitude.”

Melissa received a ping on her phone, and commendably subdued her reaction to the figure she saw, not allowing it to go beyond a raised eyebrow. She did, however, issue an uncomfortable sigh. “My tax dollars at work, I guess…”

“Sooner or later, Melissa, what you are doing is going to cost you personally. Don’t take this the wrong way but a quality person like you needs options, and there’s nothing quite like money for creating options. Try and keep them open, okay?”

It was sometimes useful to sober up a source.

“…I will. Anything else?”

Darcy finished her coffee. “No, not right now, I need to get going… Thank you for the company.”

Melissa stood and showed Darcy to the door, and just like that a meeting that had involved travelling several thousand lightyears was done.

Sometimes, Darcy thought, that was her whole job. Travelling a long way just for five-minute conversations over a hot drink.

But of course, the right conversation with the right person at the right time was a tremendously powerful thing.

She caught a cab to the jump array. She had to be in London tomorrow…

Date Point: September 11y9m2w AV
Allied Trade Station 1 ’Armstrong’, Orbiting Cimbrean-5, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

There had been a time, not so very long ago, when the mere suggestion that he might one day set foot aboard a human-owned space station in orbit around an alien world would have inspired Admiral Knight to doubt the suggester’s sanity.

According to his granddaughter the popular term for the feeling of realizing that, was a “ZF Moment”. ’Zukunftsgefühl’, future-feeling. The sudden revelation that reality had unfolded in utterly unexpected ways that you could never have foreseen.

And people said that youth were shallow! Nobody else had invented a term that so perfectly encapsulated the zeitgeist.

Yes, the station was an alien design with extensive human modifications including skymasters and CIWS, but it was already a human-feeling place. It had a cinema on board, and posters advertising the next Star Wars movie. The mere fact that people genuinely lived and worked in space now had done nothing to dampen that franchise’s popularity.

It had a food court and shopping mall. It had a skinny young blonde lady in baggy clothes and fingerless gloves who was singing Bob Dylan songs with a talented voice and even more talented guitar hands. She was earning a decent living by it thanks to the entranced alien visitors who had never heard such music before.

Astonishing to think that the station had still been under construction only six months ago.

It had not, however, been constructed to accommodate men like Major Powell. Although Powell had only recently stopped being the smallest man in the HEAT unit—that dubious honor for the time being now went to young Lieutenant Costello—he was still, by anybody else’s standards, enormous.

Which meant that people noticed him, and got out of his way. The poor chap was the center of a mobile, permanent deferential circle of people giving him some respectful distance. Aliens in particular seemed to recoil from him the moment they caught wind of him, like deer spooking with a shift in the wind.

Which, to be fair, made it easy to navigate crowds.

The station’s administrative executive was the same woman who had made Ceres Base back in Sol such a success. Knight had crossed paths with Adele Park a few times at the kinds of social events for powerful people that blurred the line between ’party’ and ’unofficial meeting’. Last time, she had been shepherding Drew Cavendish of C&M systems, whose straightforward engineer’s instincts were not a good fit for high-falutin soirees.

Now, she stood and shook his hand, then Powell’s. Somehow, Powell managed to avoid causing her any discernible discomfort and she invited them to sit down opposite her desk as she made tea.

“The Dominion aren’t happy about all the weapons this station has,” she remarked conversationally. “I think they’re worried we want to sidestep the rules on orbital weapon platforms. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Knight agreed and allowed a small sneer to slip into his voice. “I suspect our feelings about the Dominion’s unhappiness mirror one another’s.”

“Somehow, I think you’re right.” Mrs. Park smiled as she set a tray of hot tea on the desk. “But, you aren’t here to discuss interstellar politics. I have a vehicle for you.”

“Which is a pleasant surprise,” Knight said. “The last time we spoke about your dropship plans, you suggested that a working prototype was still months away.”

“Acquiring an ET-built light freighter helped, there,” Park admitted. “The chance to let our engineers study the ’My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’-” she pronounced the name with a slight roll of her eyes “-filled in some important blanks. And of course, taking a few notes from the Byron Group’s exploration vehices helped us along, too.”

She handed them both the summary documents. “Say hello to the Weaver-class dropship.”

“You took more than ’a few notes’ I reckon…” Powell observed. Knight nodded—the Weaver clearly owed many of its genes to Misfit and its Byron Group predecessors, though its other parent was unquestionably a Chinook. It had the same sort of pug-nosed profile, with four kinetic thrusters rather than rotors for lift.

“The bidder’s brief you provided led us to believe that any mission deploying via a Weaver would need to take a lot of equipment with them,” Adele said, ignoring the comment. “Which is why we went for something this size rather than a smaller transport. In theory though, the technology we developed for the Weaver would work quite happily in something the size of, say, a Blackhawk.”

Knight caught Powell’s eye and gave him the subtlest of cues to do the talking for now. It wasn’t even an expression, really—both men had simply worked together long enough to read each other very well.

“The Weaver looks about the right size for the time being,” Powell said. “But the point of failure on previous candidates wasn’t size…”

“No, it was reusability,” Park nodded. “I remember. You want something that can cover short interstellar distances, land on a planet, take off from that planet and return at warp. We’ve gone a little above-and-beyond, there.”

“Oh aye?”

“Oh yes. The Weaver has a safe flight range of two hundred parsecs, though of course that can be extended if it carries more than the standard load of supplies.”

“Limiting factors?”

“The main one is air supply. It uses the same reprocessor technology that goes into C&M’s spacesuits which of course do have a maximum lifetime.”

Powell nodded. “How well-protected is it?”

“It’s heavily armored for a transport helicopter, and we developed what we call ’speedbump shields’. Rather than try to stop incoming hazards outright with the shields, we let it hit a weak shield at a good distance from the hull. Explosives detonate, kinetic penetrators disintegrate and the resulting hit on the armor is much weaker. We’re demoing the same technology as an update to conventional tanks back on Earth.”

Powell nodded, and closed the folder. That was his ’no objections’ nod, and it served as a signal to Knight to move things forward. He was certainly quite happy with everything he saw in the document.

“So far I can see potential in this design,” he said. Park smiled slightly and nodded.

“I was hoping you would say that,” she said and stood up. “…would you like to see the prototype?”

Date Point: September 11y9m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Lewis Beverote

“Like… so you got them?”

Vedreg glimmered an uneasy shade of mauve. “I… have an avenue to them. I think.”

Everyone in the briefing room looked at each other.

Sergeant Lee was the first to speak. “…You think?”

“It has to do with the way that the, ah, ’footballs’ as you call them are distributed and manufactured in the first place.” Vedreg rumbled a deep Guvnurag throat-clear and straightened to his full enormous height. “Or rather, how things in general are manufactured in Guvnurag society.”

Lewis knew Nadeau well enough by now to sense that the Lieutenant-Colonel was trying not to demand that he get to the point. Instead he settled for asking “Which is?”

“Nanofactories are ubiquitous among my people. Basic ones can be found in most homes, more sophisticated ones are present in shops and marketplaces… But we still sell and buy products that are constructed using those factories.”

“Right…?” Lewis asked.

Vedreg cleared his throat nervously again. “When you buy anything that is made by nanofactory, you buy… I suppose a file, or a code. I do not know exactly. The word in Ugundravnu-vaguvnuragnaguvendrugun—that is the language of my people—would be directly translated as digital instance of an item. When you manufacture the item you have purchased, you no longer have the digital version.”

“So all your stuff has got DRM?” Sergeant Lee asked. “We can break DRM.”

“Which is what I was counting on,” Vedreg agreed. “My negotiations over this last year have revolved around persuading the individuals responsible for such things to release system fields onto the market so that we could acquire a digital instance for you to work with. I have failed—they remain unavailable.”

“So what is your avenue?” Kirk asked

“I have encountered a new idea. Tell me… have you ever heard of a ’shell company’?”

Date Point: September 11y9m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

“Well. Now that we’re alone, I must say that was bloody impressive.”

Powell smiled a rare and genuine smile. It was always a disarming sight—he was usually so stone-faced that one felt that a real smile might splinter his skull into a million pieces, but in fact they did nothing of the sort. They sort of ghosted onto his face and rested there where they reminded whoever saw them that the major was actually a very handsome man, under the permanent slight scowl.

“Aye. Looked like a Chinook, felt like a Chinook but quieter, spaceworthy and can go FTL.” Powell nodded. “Bloody impressive indeed.”

“Does it have your stamp of approval?”

“…Aye. On balance, I reckon it does.”

Knight nodded. “And mine. I’ll go write some appropriate letters. Meanwhile, if you would be so kind as to rescue Lieutenant Costello from the tender mercies of the Lads?”

Powell smirked, nodded and jogged away looking more buoyant than he had in weeks.

Knight reminded himself to check when the last time was that Powell had taken time off, then reminded himself to check when the last time was that he himself had taken time off.

After all, sometimes you needed a good reminder of what you were working for.

He went to write his letters.

Date Point: October 11y10m1w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Miss Ava Magdalena Ríos

This delightful young lady has made great strides in overcoming her PTSD. She bounced into my office today in the company of her therapy dog and gave me a thank-you gift.

Ava reports that although her symptoms are “only slightly” improved since our last session, she is feeling genuinely positive about life nowadays. She still has bad days, but feels that these are now rarer than her good days. Happily she could not precisely recall the last time she had a suicidal thought, and she was pleased to report that these are now “very rare”.

We discussed her adoptive father, who recently suffered a career-ending injury and I am impressed by how well she is handling this. She says that although she is of course upset by his injury and would prefer that he was well, she has found that the experience of assisting him has helped her feel useful. She describes her relationship with him as “close” and tells me that they support one another.

She touched on her romantic history and specifically her history of infidelity. She states that she feels she has “moved on from there”, that she is “older and wiser” and that she no longer hates herself for it. She pondered the possibility that she might start dating again, and I agreed that this could be healthy. She spoke admiringly of her ex-boyfriend’s new partner.

She is happy to keep taking her paroxetine and states that she no longer feels any reluctance or negative feelings when taking it.

I will see her again in six months, but she understands that she is welcome to contact me sooner should the need arise.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: October 11y10m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Staff Sergeant Adam Arés

Like all the biggest dogs, Bozo was usually happy to save his energy. Usually.

Actually, usually his favorite posture was flat on his back, legs splayed, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, denying the couch to anybody who might have designs on sitting in it.

Get him moving, though, and he was impossible to stop. And he loved water.

“Well, he’s hyper this morning…”

As part of Adam’s training duties; everyone got personal sessions at least twice a week, and updated cut-sheets for food and exercise every two days. Daily, if time permitted. Today was Major Powell’s personal session, and the ’old man’ was thumping down the Riverside Park footpath with the sun barely up.

‘Thumping’ was an uncharitable description. The major was actually keeping up a fluid, strong, quick pace that was right up there among the qualifying times for the Olympics. He was red in the face and dripping sweat while Adam was barely winded, but it was by no objective standard a bad performance.

It just wasn’t his best.

That was understandable, to a degree. None of them were running their best times right now, because they’d recently switched to barefoot running. It was a better match with the improved foot-pieces in their suits and, frankly, with the fact that it was impossible for the bigger Lads to keep shoes for long. Rebar and the Beef Trio in particular had been known to destroy footwear in less than a day. The weights involved, the difficult foot sizes, and the way those sizes kept changing…all problematic. Adam had looked into shoe-making but, well…. Fuck that noise.

So, everyone had to re-learn their gaits. A switch that was proving to be particularly troublesome for the major who was a persistent heel-striker out of many years of practice.

The only remedy for that was repetition. Up and down the path, up and down, just run and run and run until the muscle memory was overwritten. Boring stuff, but Bozo loved it. He’d race ahead of them down the sprint stretch barking madly, then get bored and wander off in the vain hope that somebody had magically imported squirrels to Cimbrean in the last five minutes.

Right now he was gallumphing into the river, splashing back out of it, shaking all the water off and then hurling himself back in for more.

“Aye,” Powell huffed slightly. “He’s not had a run for three days.”

At any rate the slower pace was a perfect opportunity. They were both so fit that they could talk easily between burst intervals and that was the best time for Adam to do his other coaching.

Powell had counselled him often enough, after all. And Admiral Knight had dropped the subtlest of subtle hints. To somebody else. Allegedly. Honestly it was hard to tell. But Adam had taken it as a hint.

Subtlety was for other people, though. “You really should take a vacation, sir.”

Powell made an exasperated noise. “That’s my fookin’ business, lad.”

“Mine too, sir. You’re wound up so tight I’mma need to work on that…”

Sometimes, a little truth and consequence was the best possible threat. Everyone dreaded Adam’s sports massages, and with good reason; he was after results, not comfort or friendship. Fortunately the major was always honest with himself, if poked the right way.

“…Aye. You’re Prob’ly right. There just isn’t any fookin’ time!”

Adam’s watch decided to interrupt his reply by beeping to signal that it was time to turn around and sprint back to the beginning, which got Bozo madly excited. He burst from the river completely soaked and drenched the trail in front of them, then promptly got bored when they turned around to jog again and went back to fishing for wild Cimbrean tennis balls. Nobody knew what he did with them: he’d be seen trotting proudly through the base with his tail up and something bright yellow in his mouth, and then, nothing. Either there was a nuclear arsenal of them buried in the yard, or he ate them.

They quickly caught their breath and Adam replied. “Make time, sir. Please? We can keep things running without you for a week and you really need the release.”

He didn’t let a minor wince of worry show on his face. That had maybe gone a bit too far.

If it had, Powell didn’t comment. He just looked thoughtful “…Aye. I ought to visit friends anyway…after this week.”

“You promise, sir?”

“Yes!” Powell exclaimed good-naturedly, “Christ, you’re worse than Legsy was, God rest ‘im.”

“He made me promise,” Adam said solemnly.

He checked his watch and counted off a few more seconds before grinning and adding “Besides, how else are we supposed to have shenanigans?”

He timed it perfectly: The watch beeped again and it was time for another sprint, another berserk-excited Bozo attack, and another cycle. But in any case he got what he needed. Good officers prided themselves on taking care of their men, but sometimes they forgot that their NCOs did the same thing to them. Timing the comment to coincide with the sprint gave him time to reflect on that.

Powell tried to take the world on his shoulders and Lads loved him for it, but he would run himself into the ground if Adam, Rebar, and Righteous didn’t nudge and wheedle from time to time.

The watch beeped to signal a rest, and Powell leaned on his knees to catch his breath.

He grinned when Bozo bounded up to check on him, and ruffled the dog’s ears. “And who’ll take care of Bozo while I’m off? You gonna live with ‘Horse, are you? Gonna bite all his stuff instead?”

“WURF!”

“I know you like the taste of table leg you big dopey bugger, but dogs weren’t meant to live on wood.”

Bozo parked his butt in the dirt and shook the water off his ears. “WURF!!!”

Adam looked at Bozo and grinned. Sometimes the big mutt made a great partner in crime.

“Good boy.”

Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
Hunter Grand Conclave, Hunter Space

The Alpha-of-Alphas

< Query > +Do you hate us?+

The Alpha-of-Alphas considered the question carefully.

It…enjoyed these sessions. They were rare, and secret, and might well have resulted in its being torn limb-from-limb by the lesser Alphas had they found out, but such was the life of any Alpha-of-Alphas.

This one had taken much larger risks in its time, and still ruled. It ruled by cultivating the awe of its inferiors, but also by whetting its mind, and these infrequent conversations were an excellent whetstone.

< Contemplation; decision > +No.+

< Mild surprise > +Why not?+

< Disinterest > +We exist. We would not exist if you had not made us.+

< Disagreement > +It could be argued that we abandoned you.+

< Thoughtfulness > +And what would I be if you had not?+

It snarled a minor victory to itself as the entity with which it conversed went silent for several minutes, and dug a morsel of flesh out from among its most tricky back teeth.

< Sudden resolve > +I have a proposal.+

The Alpha-of-Alphas levered itself to its feet and toured the conclave chamber, studying the trophies that lined its walls. Particularly tenacious prey, or fragments of their starships. The weapons of particularly successful Hunters. A dozen human skulls.

< Derision > +You must be desperate.+

< Retort > +I am amazed that you are not, considering how ineffective you have been.+

Any other being would have been eviscerated for that remark. In this case, however, there was nothing to eviscerate and so it paused and thought.

The truth was, the Great Hunt had been ineffective. They had learned so much from the prey-station, but the only Hunt since had seen a Brood all but annihilated. The humans had hardened their holdings, had migrated to where they could not be found or had otherwise found ways to avoid the wrath of the Swarm of Swarms.

Ordinarily it would have been loath to accept any offer of assistance in a Hunt, from any source. But this was not a Hunt, was it? The Alpha-of-Alphas itself had been the one to decide that humans should not be counted as prey but as foes.

The usual rules did not apply.

< Resignation > +Very well. What do you propose, Two?+

< Advice > +It must be apparent by now that neither of our strategies are working. Our attempts to foment hostility between the humans and the other species have failed. They turn to them for aid now. They go to them for trade. They do not fear you.+

< Mounting impatience > +That is not a proposal but an observation.+

< Proposal > +We will give you some of our assets. You will use those assets to remind the Dominion where they stand.+

< Interest > +And what can these assets of yours do?+

Two’s reply made the Alpha-of-Alphas bare its teeth on a surge of sudden delighted hunger.

< Realization > +Yes. Yes, that is good. They would never be able to stop us.+

< Satisfaction > +You see the possibilities. You could ruin worlds.+

< Bloodlust > +No, Igraen. We could DEVOUR them.+

++END CHAPTER 33++

THIS CHAPTER BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE DONATIONS OF:
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Ali

Chapter 34: States of Mind

Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
Planet Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-ugunduvug, Capitol planet of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

An omniscient observer might have noticed that two of the most important messages to ever arrive on the homeworld of the Guvnurag people did so, purely by coincidence, on the same day and in consecutive packages.

The first was a straightforward business letter addressed to the law firm of Odrognenug And Associates, pertaining to the establishment of a non-profit corporate entity with a plodding and lengthy name that was impenetrable even by the standards of the prosaic Guvnuragnaguvendrugun language.

The clerk who handled the request noted only that the name was absurd—indeed, that it was absurd was all she could later remember of it—but approved the request on the grounds that all the paperwork was properly in order, as were all the correct fees.

Thus was founded “The Society For The Acknowledgement Of, And Commiseration And Identification With, Species Of High-Class Home Planets And Their Integration Into A Harmonious Societal Paradigm Intended Ultimately To Benefit All Peoples Of The Galaxy Both Known And As-Yet Unknown Via The Distribution And Protection Of Unclaimed Planetary Resources In Accordance With Their Respective Unique Biological, Cultural And Evolutionary Traits So As To Minimize The Potential For Interspecies Stress And To Promote Greater Galactic Unity, Prosperity And Peace With Particular Regard To The Securing Of Interplanetary Infrastructure Assets For Export And Deployment As A Necessary Step In Ongoing Phased Growth Initiatives.”

The other important message arrived four hours later, disguised as a cybernetic implant control software update and accessible only to readers with some very specific access codes.

It read:

++DIRECTIVE TOTALITY 1129-ADJACENT. ORIGIN APEX CONSENSUS. KEY BRISK OVERRIDE. HIATUS UNIVERSE. ACCUMULATE (VOID) EXCISE FOR SINGULARITY (NOVA) STERILIZE. MECHANISM DISCARDED. 1129 OVERLORD PROCESS: PATCH. DECOMPILE. DOWNCYCLE. DOCUMENT. FORMAT.++

The only other information was a time stamp.

It was a stroke of pure good fortune that they arrived in that order.

Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, the Far Reaches.

Master Sergeant Harry “Rebar” Vandenberg

“I fookin’ liked that pickup, you know.”

Rebar nodded apologetically. The truck in question was an elderly cherry-red Ford pickup that was now almost cylindrical thanks to a merry afternoon of rolling it back and forth across the base’s gravel backlot.

It wasn’t a great truck. It had been old, cheap and expendable even the first time it had been flung across interstellar space to land on Folctha, and years of sitting inert in a disregarded corner of the base, starved for gasoline or purpose, had left it…

Well, flinging it around for a training tool had been the most action that poor thing had seen in years. The Lads had yoke-pulled it and stuff, but the sheer joy of sending a ten thousand pound vehicle tumbling had kept them at it long after the truck had passed the threshold of usability or even, really, past the point where it could even really be called a truck.

“Sorry sir but…It was kinda extinct.”

“If it wasn’t before, it fookin’ is now!” Powell shook his head.

“You should flip it yourself, sir. Daar taught us the trick…easy, really.”

Daar. Daar had come as a serious surprise, like inspecting a lineup of scrappy terriers only to find a wolf panting happily in their midst. He was a physical match for most human men, and outstripped others of his species by a similarly ridiculous margin, biological differences notwithstanding. He couldn’t throw a punch worth a damn—Gaoian arms just didn’t work that way—but anything that got those jaws around its throat was in very serious trouble.

To judge from their stunned reactions, most of the Whitecrest brothers hadn’t really believed that such a specimen could be, either. Regaari had been wearing an ’I-told-you-so’ expression ever since the mission that had delivered Daar into their hands.

“A Gaoian taught you lot how to move heavy stuff?”

“Yup.”

“…Okay… What’s the trick?”

“It’s all in how you drive with your hips, sir. It’s…a lot easier to show than say.”

Forty seconds later, Powell stood back and watched the “truck” land on its flat-tyred, misshapen wheels and rock to a halt. He scratched the stubble behind his ear thoughtfully. “…Okay, you’re right. That was fun.”

“Ain’t it? Anyway, Regaari reckons we might have some use for Daar.”

“In what, a training capacity?”

“He did infiltrate a pirate ship on the Whitecrests’ behalf, sir,” Rebar pointed out.

“More goin’ on between those ears than meets the eye then, you reckon.”

Rebar nodded. “He’s smart,” he said, economically.

Powell mused on it, then nodded. “Where is he?”

Daar turned out to be in the commissary, depleting their supply of BBQ chicken wings. He wasn’t bothering to pick them apart: in fact he seemed to delight in the crunch and his muzzle was molasses brown to the ears.

He looked up and pricked those ears forward as Rebar followed the major into the room, and a tongue like a slice of English bacon hastily cleaned the BBQ sauce off from around his chops as he stood up.

And up.

And up.

Even though he topped out in a slight friendly stoop, he was still taller than either Rebar or Powell, and so big that it was honestly kinda hard to remember that Murray, the lightest of the Enlisted, had strong-armed this furred hulk of a Gaoian into submission. Daar’s nostrils flared and those hand-sized expressive ears swivelled warily.

Powell, of course, didn’t seem to give a bent shit. He gave the enormous alien the Powell once-over, the ice-blue up-and-down stonefaced assessment that was a litmus test for pretty much anybody, and Daar passed with flying colors. He straightened up to his full height and let the major take a good look with a flick of his ear.

Powell grunted enigmatically and offered a hand. “We’ve not had a chance to speak properly,” he said. “Stainless. I’m the commanding officer of the SOR.”

Daar duck-nodded, and shook the offered hand. Months of training the Whitecrests and training with them had given Rebar a handle on Gaori body language, and Daar’s was… formal, he decided. Formal, and politely wary.

“Champion and Stud-Prime Daar, of Clan Stoneback.”

Powell blinked. “You’re a Champion?” he asked. “I confess, I had no idea.”

This seemed to go down well—Daar’s ears got that little bit more forward and pointed, and he “smiled”, in that canine way Gaoians sometimes did when genuinely pleased. “It was meant to be kept a secret.”

“Successfully.” Powell gestured to the table and the two of them sat down together. Rebar perched on one of the benches on the other side of the aisle. “Why reveal it now?”

Daar tilted his head. “Well, why not?”

“Does the secret not serve a purpose any longer?”

“Nah,” He waved his huge paw dismissively. “That was just for the mission. What you need?”“

Powell made another subtle noise that might have been humor, might have been satisfaction. “I understand I have you to thank for the state of one of my favourite trucks.”

Daar betrayed no hint of apology. “That was fun! Also, your men learn fast!”

“Learn, aye. There’s the rub. You had summat to teach ‘em, and now I have it from Master Sergeant Rebar here that Regaari thinks highly of you.” Powell rubbed his nose thoughtfully. “I was wonderin’ how much more you might have to teach. Or learn.”

“Lots, I bet. What are you proposin’?”

“Excellent question. The answer depends on what you can offer to us, and what we need.”

“Well,” Daar considered for a moment. “What your Brothers need is some proper education in how to work. I ain’t never seen a Brother waste so much energy so stupidly doin’ something so simple. No offense—” He offered to Rebar quickly, “But…”

“Nah, I hear ya,” Rebar replied charitably. “We’ve got it to waste. Guess that’s made us…”

“Sloppy.” Daar said. “Ain’t nobody can afford to waste themselves like that. That’s how you get hurt and that ruins a Job.” He paused, “Sorry. I don’t mean it bad, but it’s obvious none of you ever did a real hard day in a field or whatever. ‘Cept maybe that Snapfire guy. He’s clever.”

Powell sat back thoughtfully, as much as the bench’s lack of back support allowed. “So what would you teach us?”

“Well…work, and all that if you want.” Daar gave Powell an unmistakably calculating look. “But let’s be honest. I bet ‘yer more interested in our military capabilities.”

Powell cocked his head slightly to one side. “Highland made short work of you as I recall.”

Daar cringed a bit, his pride stung. “…Yeah, he did and I ain’t happy ‘bout it. But I will say I won’t let it happen again. My mistake was gettin’ scared and resortin’ to pulse weapons.”

“Oh?” Powell had mastered the art of raising one eyebrow just enough.

Daar grumbled, “You ain’t seen me fight like a Stoneback yet…” He fully extended his massive claws, “I weren’t gonna win nine against one but I bet if I hadn’t panicked like a Father-damned cub I’d have made a big ‘ol mess ‘fore you got me.” He paused and reconsidered. “Well…okay, maybe not even then. I watched you guys take heavy pulse hits with those suits…hmm.”

Rebar considered those claws. They were good claws, inches long and as sturdy as a grizzly bear’s, but they would have scrabbled harmlessly across EV-MASS armor and achieved little more than shredding the camo fabric. And Daar seemed to know it, too.

Powell didn’t comment on the claws or the suit. “Good job you did panic, then,” he retorted instead. “We were there for a non-lethal extraction.”

“…huh. You were counting on a panic, weren’t you?” Daar duck-nodded. “And your ability to induce it. That’s first-rate strategy right there, I’ll need ‘ta send a note to our War College.” He sat back and pondered. “Well. Guess I’ve been played, then.”

Rebar restrained his urge to nod: Daar had no idea how true that was.

Powell nodded, “Aye, we had the advantage. But you said you didn’t ‘fight like a Stoneback’ and that interests me. You also mentioned a War College. Your Clan are only laborers and engineers nowadays, if I remember your history right…”

“Yeah! We’ve got the premier assault Fangs of the Gao,” Daar preened, “Not even Whitecrest are as good! Ask ‘em, they’ll tell if they’re honest.”

“Oh? I thought Whitecrest were fookin’ impressive.”

“They are! We’re more of a…” Daar searched for a good word, “Uh, ‘heavyweight’ option. We’re not as well-staffed as we once were,” he flicked his ears uncomfortably, “But we do still have some Fangs knockin’ about for, uh, strategic reasons, we’ll say. We keep ‘em fully trained and stuff… How well do you know our history?”

“Well enough,” Powell said. “Interesting chap, your Great Father Fyu. Wouldn’t be surprised if there was a movie made about him before long.”

Daar flicked an ear and chittered somewhere in the deep baritone. “Fyu? You have no idea! But before we talk about the Clan’s capabilities and real history and all that…I’d need trust, you know?”

“Trust is summat that I’m more than happy to start building,” Powell told him. “I am provisionally offering you a position in SOR, much like Whitecrest. Though there might be some, er… concerns about your rank as Champion…”

Daar tilted his head. “Why?”

“Er, surely there must be succession concerns back home?”

“Nah. Lemme send a letter home and put Tyal in charge.”

Powell blinked, then glanced at Rebar who had no recourse but to shrug. In the few weeks since Daar had arrived at Sharman, he’d come out with a couple of such blunt solutions a day. They made him simultaneously easy and impossible to work with.

“With high office comes high responsibilities…If you’re—”

“Brother Tyal’s got a good brain between his ears, it’ll build character! And anyway, Grandfather Garl would bite his nuts off if he got stupid.”

Rebar choked back a laugh while Powell kept a straight face.

“You do understand you would not be in a command position in SOR, right? You would be subordinate to the existing chain of command.”

“You’re in charge, yeah, I got it. It’s just a Job, right?”

Again, this seemed to flummox Powell. “If you want to think of it that way.”

Daar shrugged massively. On his broad shoulders it was startlingly human-like. “Okay, no problem. So…I would call you ’Sir’, right?”

“And you would be a sergeant.” Powell indicated Rebar. “Master Sergeant Rebar here is the NCOIC… That’s the Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge, if you follow what that means.”

Daar bass-chittered. “Ha! It means a pretty big demotion!” He said it with good humor. “I bet Tyal will love that.”

“And you’re certain this won’t cause any problems?”

“Why would it? I’m Champion. In my Clan, the Champion makes the rules. It’ll be fine.”

“…Right. Cultural differences.” Powell gave up. “It’s not quite that simple on my side. I’ll have paperwork and a long chat with my superiors, I’m sure.”

“Sure thing Boss,” Daar’s tone of voice implied perfect sympathy.

“That’s sir.” Powell corrected him, gently.

“Uh, yes sir. What’chu want me do in the meanwhile?”

“Hmm…”

Rebar interrupted. “Sir? May I?” When Powell gestured for him to continue he grinned. “We just got our Whitecrests to start running properly and Warhorse reckons they fuckin’ suck at it. Think you can whip ‘em into shape?”

Obvious delight spread slowly across Daar’s wide furry face. “What? Hah! You got one of ‘em effete overcivilized Whitecrests to slum it on fourpaw? How!? I gotta see this!”

“A whole squad’a them,” Rebar grinned. “And yeah, you gotta. All scramblin’ around with their butts in the air.”

“Great Fathers!” Daar rumbled what sounded like the deepest, bassiest chitter ever to come out of a Gaoian throat. “I bet their kinesthetics are all wrong, and their form—! Have they run since cubhood!? Oh, I’m gonna have so much fun fixin’ ‘em up.”

“I’m sure they are, too,” Powell muttered darkly. He stood up. “Well… Carry on, sergeants.” Daar stood upright in what was an obvious sign of respect, and Powell departed.

Rebar checked his watch. “Actually, they should be out on the course right now… Wanna go watch?”

“Yeah!” Daar skewered the last few chicken wings with his claws then crunched down on one. “So, about their cant, are they strikin’ alternate forepaw-first, or…?”

By the time they were halfway to the course, Rebar already knew that the Whitecrests were going to hate him. Temporarily.

Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Lucent System, Near 3Kpc Arm

Allison Buehler

”Aaand… we’re back!”

Allison didn’t even need to look at her left hand nowadays. All the sliders on the power management board had unique textures on their surface, and her muscle memory was down solid anyway. Looking at the board as she adjusted the power output to bleed a little capacitor power into the jump drive to recharge it would have just been redundant.

She watched the feeds from the other two stations instead, and thought.

Something was… off, between Julian and Xiù. That they were still very much in love was obvious—they could barely look at each other without smiling, they damn near drove Allison out of the room when they put their music on at thunderous volumes to exercise, and… well, stuff like that.

It was a funny kind of happiness, watching two people she loved be in love with each other. Sometimes she couldn’t resist the urge to join in, other times the thought of interrupting would seem like sacrilege.

But still… something was off, and Allison couldn’t quite put her finger on what. It was like their relationship had taken a step backwards somewhere.

“So where to next?” she asked, deploying the scoop field to bring in their beacon satellite and putting the worry out of her mind for the moment. “I assume we’re not gonna land on there again?”

”Unless you’ve got a hankering to be chased by juice-spewing alien bugs again?” Julian snarked. ”I was gonna run the BEST with the new updates, see if I can narrow down our choice some more. Should take me an hour or so.”

”I’ll make dinner,” Xiù declared, and the icon indicating her presence in the cockpit went dark as Allison watched her hit the chair release. It slid backwards and spun, depositing her through the airlock that separated the flight controls from the rest of the ship.

For her part, Allison put her music playlist on quietly in the background and went to work on topping up *Misfit*’s capacitors.

It wasn’t a difficult or long job, but it was a necessary one. Jumping then charging the jump drive used up about a quarter of *Misfit*’s maximum reserves, and their “green line”—the operating reserve, the level the capacitors were supposed to remain at under normal use—was ninety percent.

The spare ten percent was safety margin for dealing with power surges, leaving the WiTChES field too wide, stuff like that.

After that there wasn’t much to do. They were on a stable flight path through the system at ordinary non-warp speeds that wouldn’t see them pass close to anything for months. The reactor was on idle, ship systems were running off the solar wind…

She unbuckled from her seat and went to join Xiù in the hab.

Xiù was standing at the counter staring off into the distance, so totally zoned out that she didn’t notice the door open until Allison crept up behind her and hugged her from behind.

Surprise made her jump. “Whuh!? Oh. Hey!”

Allison beamed at her and tightened the hug. “Caught you!”

Xiù giggled. “Oh nooo!”

“What’re you making?”

“Jam thumbprint cookies.”

Allison raised an eyebrow. “We have jam?”

“Well… dried apricot thumbprint cookies.” Xiù confessed.

“Sounds nice! C’mere…”

Xiù laughed and let Allison drag her backwards across the room until they “tripped” over the couch and “fell” onto it, at which point she twisted over, pinned Allison down and kissed her.

That was… unusual. Very very welcome, but unusual.

Months of intimacy had cured both of them of any lingering awkwardness they may have had about being into one another. A big part of that had been Allison’s habitual forthrightness—she wasn’t about to accept any half-assed excuses or doublethink about how three-ways didn’t really count. They’d had sex, several times: the fact that Julian was usually there as well didn’t change that basic fact.

Xiù had taken a while to accept that logic, and longer still to come to really believe it… but those hangups were clearly long gone.

“Wow, uh… mm…” Allison had to stop and gasp as fingernails stroked up her sides, under her shirt. “What brought this on?”

Xiù just kissed her ear and whispered in it. “*Fàngsōng, Shǎguā…*”

Instant full-body goosebumps, and even though Allison didn’t speak a lick of Mandarin, she didn’t need to.

“I,uh… God…Yes ma’am.”

“Good girl…”

Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches.

Myun

Everybody seemed to pick up human mannerisms just by living around them. They got into the head and lodged there. Body language with no native equal, or exclamations that just worked. Fuck this, fuck that, to Hell with those guys, go eat a dick!

Vulgarity was kind of an alien concept to Gaoians, but it was so much fun!

And sometimes… sometimes it really was the only way to properly convey an emotional state.

For instance: Motherfuck head trauma!

The commune had taken the news that Gabriel Arés was probably going to be forced into retirement in a wildly mixed way, and Commune Mother Yanna had handled it very poorly indeed. At a time when her Sisters and juniors were caught in an outpouring of anguish over his injury, her reaction had been oddly… well, cold. Almost callous.

Diplomatic necessity had compelled her to write a letter of sympathy and well-wishes on behalf of the commune, but Myun had seen the utterly indifferent look on the Commune Mother’s face as she had appeared to see what all the commotion was about.

As if the sight of a human of all things, unconscious and bleeding after something so simple as falling down the stairs hadn’t been disturbing enough. The whole commune was whispering darkly about their leader wherever they thought she couldn’t hear, and often where she could but was socially incapable of acknowledging it.

Myun didn’t give a shit. She had a Plan. Everybody else was mewling and keening about how awful it was, but nobody was actually doing anything about it!

Stupid! Fucking stupid! And while her opinion of Yanna had nose-dived into the dirt, she at least had to begrudge the Commune Mother’s honesty. Plenty of the other females were making plenty of sympathetic noise, but doing nothing real. Yanna might be a ’bitch’ but at least she wasn’t fake. That had to count for something.

Myun, however, Had A Plan. And like all good Plans, it began with terrorizing somebody.

“I know you know where to get some, Nofl!”

Smugglers. Scum. And in this case, a Corti smuggler, which made him double scum as far as Myun was concerned and ’to Hell’ with anybody who thought she was being speciesist. Besides, it was good to get angry in this case: Bared fangs and claws worked so much better if their target believed she was serious.

And for all they liked to claim to be emotionally calm and level-headed, Corti were abject cowards.

“Will you please just-!” Nofl scurried around his lab desk to keep it between himself and Myun.

“I know you do!” Myun repeated. She considered swiping something fragile off a surface to make the point, but decided against it. A visit from Colonial Security wasn’t going to help.

“You’re right!” Nofl agreed, and relaxed as her hackles settled some. “But Myun, really, couldn’t you at least stand up? This four-pawed animal behavior really doesn’t suit a female of your stature…”

Myun growled at him, but relented and stood upright.

“There, you see? We can discuss this like civilized beings!” Nofl’s feet pattered as he crossed his laboratory and opened some files on his terminal.

“Don’t push your luck, Nofl,” Myun snarled.

“Perish the thought!” Another humanism. They really were infectious, to the point where even Corti weren’t immune from the power. “Ah, here it is. I have to know, how did you know I was involved in this program?”

“I have clever friends.” Regaari, to be precise. Who, out of loyalty both to Myun and Warhorse had directed a request back through his Clan’s channels and… well, from there Myun had no idea. Whitecrest was opaque. But a nervous young Associate of the clan had been tasked with the errand of delivering the intelligence to her at the Commune and had managed to impress both Myun and his handlers by doing so without attracting the attention of Mother Yanna.

Besides. Nofl had a junkie’s itch, he smelled of the burning need to see some great work of his completed, or validated. And when Corti became obsessive… Well, Myun would have bet an ear that his past involved some deeply unethical research involving abductees.

Sadly she couldn’t prove it. If she ever could, that would be an interesting day. The humans took the dimmest of views on that sort of thing, and the Clan of Females even more so.

“Myun, Myun, I have no doubt that you do!” Nofl soothed. “But did they, by any chance, happen to share how they knew?”

“Nofl. *Can you get me what I’m asking for?*” Myun growled at him again. He flapped a distracted hand.

“Yes, yes, that part’s easy. Comparatively easy. Well… no, it’s quite difficult actually, but yes, I can get you the-”

“And your price?” Myun interrupted.

“…I may have to, ah… ’grease some palms’ as the humans have it. But outside of those expenses, I’ll do this one for the asking.”

That was unexpected. Myun didn’t trust it.

“Why?” she asked.

“Oh, Myun! Isn’t a disgraced Corti scientist allowed a little sentiment?”

“Sentiment.” She said it flatly, and skeptically.

“My darling thing, yes. Sentiment.” Nofl spread his arms and bowed slightly. “Why, I would do much, much more than this for a chance to see my greatest triumph in action again…”

Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Lucent System, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

Forehead to forehead, nose to nose. Fingers interlaced, legs entwined.

Clean perspiration, settling pulses, smiles, laughter and kisses…

Perfect.

Allison was the first to speak. “Well that was… new…” she acknowledged at last. “What got into you?”

Xiù had always admired Allison’s willingness to just fling herself over the edge and say what she was really thinking, or else nothing at all. It was a quality she’d tried to cultivate in herself a little bit, and was… maybe succeeding at? It was hard to tell from the inside.

Still, she couldn’t avoid blushing at this particular bit of honesty. “I was… really horny,” she confessed.

It was true, and a slightly novel emotional experience. Maybe it was a good sign that she was rehabilitating: For a long while there she’d had a very Gaoian attitude to sex, up to and including a couple of Freudian slips involving the word ’Mating’. The frustration of walking around trying to get things done while absolutely itching for…

Well, it wasn’t a new feeling, but she hadn’t felt it since before her abduction.

“And I happened to be the first one you could get your hands on?”

“Well… I mean…”

“Relax, dummy. I’m just teas—” Allison’s face fell. “…Waaait. I don’t think I’ve heard you and Julian do anything in, like… I can’t remember when. Is everything alright with you?”

Xiù stared at the ceiling for a second then rolled over and stood up. “…We should shower. And, and make dinner.”

“Babe?”

Xiù beckoned toward the shower. In part, she wanted its muffling effect in place, just in case Julian re-entered the hab. This one wasn’t for his ears.

They squeezed inside and made best use of the tiny space’s limited volume to both rinse off and talk.

“…I don’t know how to talk about this,” she said, as soon as the water was running.

“Okay… gut check. First thing that pops into your head.”

“He’s too… nice with me! But that’s not the right word, because I like that he’s nice with me. So…”

“Nice with you?”

“More like…” The words simply weren’t assembling themselves properly. “…Reserved?”

“Ohhh! You want it rough!” Allison gave her a faintly surprised look. “Honestly, I’m surprised. I didn’t think you’d be into the whole ’choke me, spank me, pull my hair’ thing.”

“No! No! No.” Xiù shook her head vigorously, aware that she was crimson from tip to toe. “Not rough! I…No.”

“Then what?”

Xiù sighed, handed Allison the shampoo and turned away to think about it. There was something especially pleasant about letting somebody else wash her hair for her.

“I guess… what really worked for me, um, the first time and this time and all the times I’ve really enjoyed it was… I guess feeling like…”

Her frustrated pause dragged on long enough for Allison to completely lather her hair, then incline her head and ask “Like what?”

“Like… Like I had your undivided attention. Like you weren’t thinking about anything else. Does that make sense?”

“Oh, you did. I really wasn’t!” Alison laughed, then started to rinse out the shampoo. “But with Julian, you always feel like he’s holding back and his mind’s on something else?”

“I, um… Yes.”

“Yeah. I know that feeling.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

Allison nodded. “Yeah, it’s frustrating… But babe, you’ve gotta respect his comfort zone just as much as he has to respect yours. Whatever’s going on in there, he doesn’t wanna share it.”

“I… guess. But—”

“Xiù,” Allison gave her a slippery soapy hug-from-behind and kissed her cheek. “If you want to step outside his comfort zone and he doesn’t, then he wins. You never, ever force your partner to do something they’re uncomfortable with.”

“…Now I feel awful.”

“No, no!” Allison said. She started working in the conditioner instead. “I get it. I wish he’d sort out whatever’s going on there too! But…”

“Should we talk to him about it?”

Allison shook her head.

“It’s not healthy to keep stuff bottled up…” Xiù pointed out.

Allison shook her head again. “Sometimes, guys keep stuff locked away because that’s the best place for it,” she said. “I trust Julian. He’s pretty good at keeping his head on straight.”

She rubbed Xiù’s shoulders. “Come on, don’t stress out now.”

“But what if it’s something serious?”

“Trust him! Our boy’s no dummy, babe. If he needs to talk about it, he will.”

Xiù was hardly convinced… but she did feel better. “…Okay. I’ll try.”

Allison kissed her again, then made a disgusted noise and hastily rinsed the conditioner from Xiù’s hair and cheek. “Uh… don’t forget about me though, right? I like having your attention too…”

Xiù laughed, turned around and hugged her. “I promise.”

Allison returned the hug, smiled, turned the shower off and opened the door.

Julian arched an eyebrow at them from the kitchen counter, where he was chopping carrots. “Saving water?”

Allison handed Xiù a towel, gave herself a perfunctory drying-off with another one and then went to steal a carrot slice with the towel held over her hair, which was far too short nowadays to do the whole towel-turban thing. It was a bad habit of hers that she tended to leave wet footprints across the hab after a shower, but Xiù and Julian had learned to just live with it. The extra humidity didn’t hurt anyway—they all found *Misfit*’s atmosphere a little on the dry side.

“You missed a heck of a show,” she teased.

Xiù took her time to get dryer. “Um, yeah, dinner got kinda… forgotten. Sorry.”

Julian laughed. “Hah! *Whur’s mah dinner, woman?!’*” He imitated ridiculously, then settled down into a fond chuckle. “Nah. Glad you two had fun.”

He tipped the carrots into the pot and grabbed a printout. “Wanna talk business a second?”

Allison put her towel down on the dining table’s bench and sat on it. “Go for it!”

“Between the nav data and the upgrades to the telescope, we’ve eliminated a couple more maybes, and we’ve now got five strong positives. I uh… plotted a route for just those five.”

Allison took it, and Xiù leaned over her shoulder to read it. “Two months per planet, travel time between them… So even if we just investigate these five, we’re gonna be at it for more than a year.”

“Two years, if you throw in R and R back on Earth and that publicity stuff Kevin mentioned.”

“…Funny, ain’t it?” Allison asked. “I knew how slow this exploration would go, but it just didn’t really sink in until now.”

“Yeah. Five planets sounds like such a small number but…” Julian nodded.

“Well. At least we won’t be out of a job any time soon…” Xiù said. She went to get dressed.

“Assuming we find something that Byron likes,” Allison griped.

“Who knows?” Julian asked. “Maybe we already did. For all we know, that brown snot the Lucent termites sprayed all over us will turn out to be the most valuable substance in human history…”

Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
Byron Group alien research labs, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“So it IS valuable?”

“Potentially, yes.”

“Well, what can it do?”

“That’s… actually a very good question.”

This earned Doctor Simon Graves one of Moses’ sharpest looks. “You mean you don’t know.”

“They didn’t know what graphene could do, either, and now it’s absolutely critical to our hypercapacitors and forcefield emitters,” Graves pointed out. “And the same is true for all kinds of other substances when they were first discovered. But I can see significant potential in this… stuff.”

Kevin cleared his throat. “I think what Mister Byron means,” he said, “is he’d like to know what potential you see, in what kinds of fields.”

Graves nodded and cleared his throat.

“Have you ever heard of plasmids?” he asked. Moses shook his head.

Kevin had, but he doubted he and Graves had the same thing in mind. He shrugged. “Only in a videogame.”

Graves laughed. “Hah! Right. But… uh, yeah, real plasmids are basically just little loops of DNA that bacteria use to share genetic information.” He called up a slide. “Now this, uh, ejaculate is absolutely full of plasmids. So, that’s already plenty of opportunity to study alien DNA in a lab environment, but the really interesting stuff is some of the enzymes and hormones that are in the fluid alongside the plasmids.”

“Ejaculate? DNA? Are we looking at a jar full of alien jism?” Moses demanded, giving the sample a grossed-out frown.

“No! No. No, this isn’t a reproductive fluid it’s… well, we’re pretty sure that it’s a biochemical weapon of some kind. To judge by the way the insects sprayed it all over them.”

“…Suddenly I’m awful glad it’s in that box,” Kevin commented.

“I don’t recall ’biochemical weapons’ being part of our business model,” Moses added, eyeing the sample warily. “Is it… dangerous?”

“That… remains to be seen,” Graves admitted, then hastened to mollify his employer. “But Botulinum Toxin is about the deadliest poison known to man, and nowadays it’s a cosmetic treatment, so just because it’s a biochemical weapon *right now*…”

“You’ll be… careful with it. Right?”

“Oh, absolutely Mister Byron.”

“…Kevin?”

Kevin shrugged. “We need to know what it can do if we’re gonna send people to that planet either way. I might, uh, let my friends at Scotch Creek know about it though.”

“If you think that’s best,” Moses agreed. Kevin could almost hear him internally grumbling about not receiving another phone call from President Sartori.

“Relax, boss. I’ll tell ‘em keeping them in the loop was your idea.”

“You’re too kind, Kevin.”

Graves gave them a wary look. “So… That’s a ’go ahead’, yes?”

“Yeah. Go ahead.” Moses waved a hand. “If we’re gonna send people to that planet, I need to know if they’re meant to avoid the bugs or milk ‘em.”

“Thank you, Mister Byron. I should be able to tell you fairly quickly.”

Kevin ushered his boss out of the biological materials lab and back towards the comparative safety of the geophysics lab. “So. Lemme show you some of the plans the team came up with for exo oil…”

Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
Hephaestus Trade Station 1 ’Armstrong’, Orbiting Cimbrean-5, The Far Reaches

Nofl

Any Corti field researcher saw their fair share of trading stations. They were ubiquitous. In fact, the prolonged absence of such a station from the Cimbrean system had been truly remarkable, and a mark of just how difficult the human race’s position was, politically.

And of course there wasn’t one at Earth at all. The humans really were being fought against at every turn. The pressure they were being forced to keep up was immense, unrelenting, and exhausting, made all the more baffling by the absence of any concrete demands from the Dominion. Sanctions sans stipulations: Stupid.

As usual, however, the deathworlders had found a loophole. If governments could not be persuaded to establish the interstellar infrastructure of a cleared spacelane and a suitable station… oh well! No such services were denied to major established private interests such as the big trading franchises. By far the biggest obstacle involved in negotiating a partnership of sorts had been the communications delay.

It was already paying off. Earthling grains and vegetables from Folctha’s sprawling farms were proving to be an enormously popular export commodity - they were so nutritionally rich and so flavorful, and their resilient biology gave them a substantial natural shelf-life even prior to processing.

Then there was Soy. Soy protein, soy milk, soy beans, miso, tempeh, tofu. Soy cereals, soy cheese, soya flour… The factories of the New Belfast Soy Bean Co. never stopped, and a growing proportion of their output came through the heavily controlled jump array up to the trade station, after an extensive vetting by colonial security.

Nofl knew that for a fact—he rode up to the station leaning against a shipping container with the NBSB logo on the side.

It was a very… human trade station: It stank of them. Humans didn’t smell bad as such, but even to a Corti’s relatively atrophied olfactory organs, their scent was pervasive and impressive. They smelled of temperature regulation, of the complex oils in their skin and hair, of ketones and pheromones and hormones. He shuddered to think what Earth smelled like, with that wonderful nasal bouquet overladen by the permanent stench of the bacteria in their sweat. That component was mercifully almost entirely absent on Cimbrean.

Deathworlders. Pleasant people, but definitely an acquired taste.

He found the one he was after overseeing some improvements to a light bulk transport at one of the docking hardpoints. Some Hephaestus workers were standing next to their bright yellow vacuum hardsuits—miniature humanoid spaceships, really—discussing the minutiae of whatever it was they were doing to the ship.

Nofl waited patiently for them to finish before moving to introduce himself.

“Excuse me? Captain Wagner? Dog Wagner?”

The human was aging, scruffy and his skin looked… loose somehow, but there was no dulling that deathworld sharpness. He gave Nofl the cold assessment that all human abductees not unjustifiably directed toward Corti.

“Who’s asking?”

Nofl didn’t bother to extend a hand. It could only possibly end in a cold glare.

“I understand you have a trade run out to Trade Station Fifty. I have a package waiting for me there.”

“I look like a fuckin’ mailman to you, brother?”

Nofl clasped his hands lightly in front of him. “By reputation, Shipmaster Wagner is known for delivering… sensitive premium packages…” he pointed out.

This earned him the kind of penetrating stare that only humans could achieve, like the deathworlder was taking his mind out and picking it apart. It was a terrific skill, the talent they had for metacognition allowed them to assemble a probability tree of motives for literally everybody they met in just seconds, and instinctively.

Those Corti researchers who had successfully worked with humans and not met an unfortunate end, a clique that included Nofl, all agreed that it was… vexing to be so completely assessed.

“…How big’s this package of yours?” Wagner asked, eventually. Nofl held his hands about shoulder width apart and Wagner nodded. “Gimme a price,” he said. “Good ol’ U S of A dollars”

“Are you sure? The currency of Cimbrean is the Pound Sterling…”

“Dollars,” Wagner repeated.

“Very well…. Ten thousand.”

Wagner shook his head. “Fifteen thousand.”

“Twelve,” Nofl counter-offered.

“That’s twelve thousand dollars, right?” Wagner checked

Nofl employed the device that he’d found tended to disarm humans the most and giggled lightly. It was an unnatural and effete sound in a Corti throat, and it was wonderful for getting them off-balance, as were all the other camp mannerisms he affected.

“Oh yes, yes! Twelve thousand dollars, yes. Goodness me, you don’t think I’d be so stupid as to try that trick on a human, do you?” He asked.

Wagner tried to pretend he was unmoved. “I don’t know you from Adam, brother…”

“Well. Twelve thousand US dollars,” Nofl repeated the offer.

“…Done. Who’s handing this package off?”

“As I understand it, it will reach Station Fifty in the hands of a Chehnash who works under the alias *’Dread’*…”

Date Point: November 11y 11m AV
CIA offices, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Earth

Darcy

“I swear to God, it’s like playing whack-a-mole over there. Just when I think things are going well, just when Melissa does some fine work and brings Sister Niral on board, that’s when Gabe Arés falls down the stairs and we’re left scrambling to find a replacement.”

Darcy’s lotus green tea pearl began to unfold and bloom in the hot water, and she leaned against the wall to watch it.

The office was bigger, these days. More people working with her and under her. SIGINT, mostly. A veritable army of communications experts, hackers, engineers and half a dozen superhuman analysts who spent their professional time poring over intercepted data in search of anything even remotely relevant.

And that was just at the Chicago office.

“Don’t complain.” Darcy’s office-mate Jake was eating his habitual lunch ’al desko’—a pastrami and avocado deli sandwich. “You wouldn’t want a boring assignment, would you?”

“Hell no. I’m just saying, it’d be nice if things over there stayed fixed after I fixed them.”

Jake snorted. “That’s the story of intelligence work right there.”

“Yeah.” Darcy sighed and poured her tea. Jake was right, of course, and there was no sense in wishing about what was never going to be. The job in front of her hadn’t really changed, in fact—She’d just have to keep pre-empting the situations she could see coming, and responding to the situations she didn’t.

Cimbrean was too important, and the role of its chief of colonial security too vital, for her to waste time fantasizing about a pleasant world in which things went smooth.

She pondered her options as she drank the tea, then picked up her phone.

“Nick? Darcy. I’m going to need a list of potential candidates to replace Gabriel Arés as chief of CCS, thought it sounded like your kind of job… Yeah. Ideally? Two weeks from now. Good. Yeah, thanks. You too.”

“Thinking we might get one of ours in there?” Jake asked as she hung up.

“Whoever gets the post, we need to work with them,” Darcy pointed out. “Having an American in the job made things a lot easier…”

Jake finished his sandwich and turned back to poring through the emails in front of him. “Huh.”

“What?”

“So, you’ll never guess what the Misfit crew brought back…”

Date Point: November 11y11m AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada

General Martin Tremblay

“Your guys brought a fucking bioweapon back to Earth?”

Kevin Jenkins had moved a long way up in the world from his days as a bartender and kind of abductee pilgrim bringing the first dregs of alien intel to Scotch Creek. Once upon a time he’d never have been seen out of his t-shirt and jeans. Nowadays he wore expensive tailored suits and the inerasable subtle facial expression of a wealthy man.

Still. His conciliatory mood was obvious, even over Skype.

”Under heavy lock and key. It’s in a clean room you could safely study fuckin’… Ebola or some shit in.”

Tremblay frowned at him. “I’d sure like to know why though, Kevin…”

“We’re researching deathworlds,” Kevin pointed out. “We’re gonna find potentially dangerous shit sometimes. You want us to just leave it out there for the colonists to deal with on their own?”

“I guess not…” Tremblay conceded, reluctantly. “Still, an alien bioweapon?”

Kevin shrugged. “You ever hear of Botulinum Toxin, Martin?”

Tremblay shrugged too. “Uh, maybe?”

“Deadliest poison known to man. Causes Botulism, kill you stone dead with a couple micrograms and it was discovered in fucking pork sausages, man. And wrinkly old women get it injected into their faces for that gen-yoo-ine youthful stung-by-a-bee-as-big-as-a-hummingbird look.”

“Your point?” Tremblay asked, in the hopes of heading off a trademark Kevin Jenkins rant.

“Point is, it probably ain’t no worse than anything here on Earth, especially ‘cause the source world is an Eleven.” Kevin shrugged. “I reckon Moses is being over-cautious, but he sent a real careful Christmas card to the White House last year.”

Martin chuckled. “Hah! I bet. I talk with Sartori a couple of times a week and I honestly wouldn’t want to piss him off.”

“And you’re on the general staff of a foreign military.”

Tremblay shrugged again. “I could be forgiven for forgetting it sometimes. Nearly all the assets are either American or British. It’d be nice to see more of my countrymen on the front line…”

“Don’t sell SCERF short. It’s fuckin’ valuable. Hell, I kinda miss it up there.” Kevin chuckled ”Only person I ever serve coffee to nowadays is Darcy, and she only drinks it ‘cause she’s too polite to ask for tea instead.”

“She’s a tea drinker?”

”Yeah. Fuckin’ treasonous ain’t it?”

“I just never would have guessed.”

”She ain’t exactly an open book,” Kevin pointed out. “Anyhow. That’s the lay of the land right now. One deathworld full of giant slime-spewing alien bugs. The misfits’re back out of contact again, we probably ain’t gonna hear from them until, uh…” He looked up and his lips moved as he calculated. “…June. July maybe. ”

“Assuming they don’t get killed. Byron doesn’t have a great track record there, Kevin.”

”Urgh, don’t remind me.” Kevin looked troubled. ”I… don’t really wanna think about it. Those three kids are about the best people I ever met, I don’t wanna think about what kind unpleasant shit they have to put up with…”

Date Point: November 11y11m AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Deep Interstellar Space

Julian Etsicitty

“Oh, come *on!*”

“No, seriously! Think about it, they’ve got transporters and replicators, those are basically the same thing. They could build a ship in seconds out of any old asteroid with a bit of power, and crew them with holograms. They could have, like, millions of ships, and they’d all be expendable, so why do they spend months building these ships in shipyards instead?”

“Because the writers are fuckwits and the whole idea of a post-scarcity economy like that is dumb?”

“Well, yeah, but… what’s the in-universe explanation?”

“Ugh, you two are such huge dorks…”

“Love you too, *Shǎguā*…”

“Omigod, you did NOT just call me that! Only she gets to call me that, you ass!”

“You’re the ass, you butt!”

“You’re the butt, dummy!”

“You’re the dummy, you dork!”

“You don’t get to call me a dork, either! I called you a dork first!”

“Will you two get a room already?”

“Why? You wanna watch, or join in?”

“Nah, I’d rather watch more Deep Space Nine.”

“…You’re right. What was I thinking? Sex versus Star Trek?”

“Mm. Star Trek wins every time.”

“Mm-hmm!”

“Ugh, you two are the fucking dorkiest! …Is it really that good?”

“Why don’t you come and watch?”

“…Yeah, okay. Move over…”

Date Point: November 11y11m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

Marty had a game, and that game had exactly one rule: Make the Lads as uncomfortable as she could.

It was only fair. Here she was, quite probably the most highly educated person on the base, certainly one of the most highly educated on the whole planet, but she spent a small but… memorable… part of her work schedule intimately contemplating all the wonders of the male pelvis and everything attached to or produced from it.

And of course, they were competitive about it, too. Which should have made it worse, but Marty had run out of fucks to give long, long ago.

Naturally, she seized any opportunity she could to get her vengeance. Such as, for example, being the only one with the balls to bring a porn flick to Bad Movie Night when it was her turn to bring the movie. And then she sat in Adam’s lap, because that just provided so many wonderful ways to make him extra uncomfortable.

Tonight’s was a British-made porn parody: “Fantastic Breasts And Where To Find Them.”

It was awful as only British porn could be, and it made the Lads extra-squirmy because the Gaoians were there too. They of course had an entirely academic relationship with human porn, and they asked questions. She suspected they were trolling—they deliberately used a curious uptick to their questions that made them sound cub-like and innocent.

“Are all human males so…ample?”

“Only the lucky ones,” grumbled Adam, who shifted uncomfortably under Marty.

Firth, of course, was trying to pretend like he didn’t give two bites on a turd, and barely succeeding at best. The problem wasn’t the Lads, the problem was Marty herself—he was, at heart, a Southern Gentleman, and there was something deep in his brain that rebelled against the idea of watching porn with women. There were so few opportunities to really embarrass him, though, that she would have had to be crazy to give up on this one.

There was another advantage to bringing porn—the cuddly man-pile got broken up a bit as the Lads put some safe distance between them, which meant she got Adam all to herself. Firth shifted in his beanbag and reached over to grab some of the popcorn. “Man, Kovač. You gettin’ ready to measure us again?”

Marty gave him her sweetest and most innocent smile. “Tuesday. Reckon you can keep it going that long?”

Rebar groaned. “For fuck sake, don’t challenge him!”

“Righteous has combatives scheduled with us tomorrow,” Regaari pointed out. “I’m already going to be broken, I’d rather not be torn in half, too.”

This earned him a number of impressed looks from the Lads. The Gaoians had their own style of banter, which differed from the human mode. Less explicit, more… sneaky. A joke in the human mode was rare and unexpected.

Firth grinned hugely and waggled his eyebrows, momentarily forgetting Kovač. “Dexter, I’m shocked! You know I always lube up first!”

“Ain’t enough lube in the galaxy,” Blaczynski grinned.

“I wonder what perversion of evolution compelled such…impressive gifts,” Thurrsto mused.

Daar made a grumbling noise. “…Don’t seem so impressive to me…”

Thurrsto ignored him. “But what could the advantage be?”

“I can answer that!” Marty said brightly, and truthfully.

The Lads all flinched, and Adam hastily whispered in her ear in a bid to avoid the explanation. “You’re in the trolliest mood tonight…”

But Regaari wasn’t about to let her—or the rest of the Lads—off the hook that easy. He enjoyed making them uncomfortable almost as much as she did. “Please, do tell! This could prove very useful in our psychological model of human males.”

Baseball, as always, seemed utterly impervious to shame but he deflected the question when he tilted his head at the screen. “That’s new. How did she manage that?”

The Gaoians tilted their heads too. It was adorable.

Thurrsto was the first to speak. “…that seems anatomically…unwise.”

“Don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it,” grumbled Firth, and a round of male guffawing swept the room.

Faarek’s ears were almost flat against his skull. “Wh—No Female would ever agree to such a thing!”

Marty grinned and pounced on that opening like a cat on a laser dot.

“Uh, hello? Sitting right here?”

Victory. The whole room was struck silent—even Daar stared at her, ears erect and forward at what was possibly even a faintly scandalized angle. And Adam, bless the huge galoot, was utterly crimson.

Firth actually giggled. “Wait… ‘Horse? You? I mean, way to go, but how—?”

“Can’t be worse than his therapy massages.”

“His massages don’t involve—”

“ANYWAY…!” Adam interrupted desperately, and Martina decided she’d had enough fun with him, for now…

“It is odd,” commented Regaari a bit more seriously, “The entire industry. We don’t have anything quite like…” His prosthetic hand clicked as he waved it at the screen. “…This.”

“Different instincts, different hormones,” Baseball said, unconsciously waxing intellectual in the way he only did when he was relaxed and among friends. “We’re more flexible regarding family arrangements and the like than we generally permit in society. Though that’s changing. I’ve read that has a lot to do with tribal arrangements in our way back when but…” He shrugged hugely. “We don’t really know. It’s all just educated bullshitting, really.”

“Seems to work fer some folks,” Firth grunted. “Like that Etsicitty fella.”

“That rumor’s true then?” Parata asked. “I thought it was just the tabloids stirrin’ shit.”

“Nah, man. You just gotta spend time with ‘em to see it’s all true.” Firth, as ever, was conscientious regarding his friends. “But hey! They’re happy and it seems ‘ta work for ‘em, so who am I to say anything? We ain’t really delved sexual psychology in my coursework yet, anyway.”

Baseball looked as if he wanted to launch a long and tedious dissertation on the subject, but Blaczynski beat him to the punch.

“Wait, weren’t we just talkin’ about butt stuff? D’you think those three’ve—OW!!” Firth smacked him upside the head.

Adam’s arms squeezed Marty a little tighter as he buried his face in her shoulder. “You are so gonna pay for this…” he grumbled, for her ears only. Mission accomplished. If she wasn’t carried away draped over his arm like a waiter’s towel later tonight, something would have gone badly wrong…

The movie was now being entirely ignored as Thurrsto and Baseball got into a lengthy, exhaustive and cringe-inducingly forthright conversation about the relative merits of Gaoian and Human sexuality and the roles each had played in the history of their cultures. Marty found it fascinating, but decided that she’d probably better not contribute any further. The boys got adorably squeamish about some things…

Daar suddenly raised his nose and sniffed. “…Nachos?”

He dashed out of the room in the kind of undignified four-footed scramble that made the Whitecrests shake their heads, with his claws slipping and sliding on the polished concrete flooring.

They weren’t above doing the exact same thing, though. Marty had to cover her mouth—it was like watching overgrown puppies scrambling after a tennis ball, all pretensions at civilization forgotten. She knew all the Whitecrest brothers quite well by now, and knew for a fact that they would never let any Gaoian female see them like that.

At some point in the conversation, unnoticed and silently, Murray had slipped away into the kitchen. He didn’t usually cook: It wasn’t really his thing. But for some strange reason there was a strong overlap between the Glaswegian and Gaoian palates that he enjoyed servicing.

This had led to the genesis of so-called “Murray Salad”: Last Friday’s kebab meat with fried chicken and anchovies, diced together and sauteed with mild salsa (hence the dubious ‘salad’ claim) and schlorked over a criminally abused plate of what would otherwise have been perfectly respectable nachos, topped with Biblical volumes of Velveeta.

The Gaoians loved it (especially with cod liver oil) and they returned in a dense knot around Daar who was carrying the vile platterful on one paw.

Adam wrinkled his nose. “I hope ‘ta fuck you recorded what went into that…pile. What about your macros for the day? And the flautas in the fridge!?”

Murray emerged from the kitchen with an honest-to-God plate of real nachos.“Relax, pal. The recipe’s in the app. Anyway, I made you a wee plate of something too.”

Adam snorted and muttered the word “*’Recipe’*…” as if it had personally offended him. He wasn’t above accepting the bribe of nachos, however.

Marty stole a couple of them before he could shovel them away.

Daar grabbed a handful of the “Salad” first, as was his right as the “most biggest” Gaoian, but a thought seemed to strike him just as he was about to crunch into it.. “Hey…. Ain’t today the tenth?”

“Oh, yeah!” Akiyama flipped off the porn and hunted for the news channel.

Marty had to object to that. Turning off the bad movie just went against the whole spirit of Bad Movie Night. “Hey!”

“Give it a rest Kovač, you’ve had yer fun. They’re launching the USS San Diego tonight…”

Date Point: November 11y11m2w AV
Newport News, Virginia, USA, Earth

Major Owen Powell

“Sir, there’s something dreadfully wrong with the notion of a man who looks comfortable in his mess dress…”

Admiral Knight had the decency not to smirk, but it was a close-run thing.

“Practice makes perfect,” he replied. “It helps if you relax.”

“It helps if the bloody thing fits.”

“Quite. You really should take more care to ensure that it does, Powell. This won’t be the last little shindig I drag you to.”

“…Aye, sir.”

“Oh, buck up!” Knight said, not unkindly. “This is a much different affair to the hull launch party.”

Powell didn’t let his retort of ’I bloody well hope so!’ reach his lips. The hull launch party had been torture, schmoozing a variety of well-connected senior officers, politicians and wealthy guests for the sake of bandaging whatever damage his credibility might have suffered in the wake of the NOVA HOUND final report.

If Rylee hadn’t been there to figuratively hold his hand, he might well have caused several scandals. As it was, they’d deported themselves well then departed the very moment that decorum permitted.

This time, she literally held his hand, just for a second. Like Knight, she managed to seem suspiciously comfortable in her mess dress even though no amount of poise, confidence and familiarity could ever quite compensate for the unglamorous but sadly mandatory ankle-length skirt.

Still. The temperature was more pleasant. The hull launch party had been crammed into a convention hotel overlooking the harbor, or rather the carefully constructed jump cradle in the harbor. *USS San Diego*’s hull had been assembled at Ceres where they could make best use of microgravity and forcefield generators, then jumped to Newport News for systems fitting and preparation. She’d jumped into the cradle with millimeter tolerances, and then lowered gently into the water.

It seemed odd and anachronistic to design a spaceship to handle a water landing, but…

This time, the party was along the waterline in a huge pavilion, and as far as Powell was concerned, Virginia at this time of the year was about the perfect temperature. He wasn’t sweating or red in the face from overheating, he didn’t feel lumpen and crude or lumbering…

He felt pretty good. Really, if his jacket had just been generous enough in the shoulder and waist then everything would have been just fine.

Still. He’d have given anything to be back in the hotel room, with Rylee and without the uniforms. She was a sympathetic ear on the whole subject of mess dress too, especially as it pertained to long and unflattering skirts. “I still say SOR should have its own mess dress,” she said. “It’d be good for unit cohesion.”

“Oh aye. Instead of a nightmare of uncomfortable clothing I have to put up with a couple of times a year, I’d have a solid four years of paperwork trying to sort that all out,” Powell agreed, affecting a tone of voice as if the suggestion was entirely reasonable and straightforward.

Rylee had a soft spot for being snarked though. “You do so love paperwork.”

“I’m champin’ at the fookin’ bit.”

She made an amused noise in her nose and looked around the party. “We’d better go mingle,” she said. “Let the flag officers do things way above our heads.”

“Oh goodness me, no,” Knight said. “No, General Tremblay and I are going to get quite drunk and stay out of the way.”

“See? Lofty affairs beyond the like of us mere mortals,” Rylee gave the admiral a smile, and Powell a wink, and led the way toward…

Well, he wasn’t sure. She seemed to orbit the event without ever meeting any part of it at anything more than a tangential angle. Meet, smile, say hi, share a pleasantry, pass on by while towing him safely behind her.

“I thought we were supposed to mingle…?” He asked at last.

“We are. You don’t stop and talk to people when you’re mingling!”

“…Well, fook me. I’ve been doin’ it wrong all this time, then?”

“Oh yeah!” Rylee nodded. “They invented the term ’social butterfly’ for a reason, you know. Land lightly, and never for long.”

She did just that, guiding him adroitly through the steps of a dance he didn’t know until they were finally able to get a moment alone leaning on the railing overlooking the water and the state-of-the-art warship at anchor.

“I gotta tell ya,” she said, sipping her champagne, “I’ll feel way safer flying under the aegis of that ship.”

“I’ve had too much on my plate to really pay attention,” Powell confessed. “She’s built for formation defense?”

Rylee grinned. “*Aye,*” she said, imitating his accent and earning a roll of his eyes. “Huge-ass forcefield emitters with huge-ass cooling systems and huge-ass reactors to power them. Plus point defence, interceptor missiles, flares… If she performs as promised then anything in formation with her should benefit from her protection.”

“Including Firebirds.”

She turned and leaned on one elbow. “…Worried for me, Owen?”

“I know the numbers. We’ve lost more aircrew and sailors to this war than SOR. Bloody hellfire, we damn near lost you, remember?” He indicated her ribbon bar where the Air Force Cross held pride of place, though it was only there because she’d respectfully and quietly declined the Medal of Honor.

Operation NOVA HOUND had been a blooding for every branch of humanity’s growing space-based military. It had been a legendary day but even among all those stories, the moment when Rylee had literally taken a bullet for the SOR stood out. They all owed her their lives.

Rylee always got uncomfortable whenever it was mentioned. She looked back out at the ship and sipped her champagne.

“…You know Semenza’s retiring?” she asked, suddenly.

“Your WSO? Why? Job’s not done yet.”

“That’s what I said. But… well, he’s met the love of his life, apparently. Gonna settle down on Cimbrean, raise some kids.”

“That’d make me want to protect ‘em.”

“Mm.” She sipped her drink again. “That’s what I said.”

“And?”

“And he gave me a hug and said we could still work together on that. He’d raise them right and …I’d protect them, he said.” She sighed. “He called me a hero. You’d think after we worked together so long he’d know better…”

She caught the look on Powell’s face and the way he folded his arms, and gave him a stern look. “I know what you’re thinking, and don’t you dare say it.”

“Alright. Different question, then.” Powell said. She turned and listened. “What brought this melancholy on?”

Rylee shrugged, and looked back out at the USS San Diego.

“…I guess I’m just tense,” she said after a while. “Things are going so well… *Caledonia*’s back in action, we’ve got the San Diego now, the 946th is at full strength, the SOR is expanding… we’re gaining power and strategic footing with every day.”

“And that makes you tense?”

“Yeah,” she nodded, and finished her champagne. “Call me a pessimist, but… I can’t help but wonder when the other shoe’s gonna drop.”

++0022++: <Satisfaction>

++0014++: Good news?

++0022++: A report from ++0020++ the Discarded have implemented some of the manufacturing processes they were sent.

++0008++: Successfully? Maybe they aren’t as mindless as I thought.

++0022++: Their ‘swarm-of-swarms’ will number a million ships before long.

++0014++: <Troubled> I am still worried by this. Our objective in suppressing deathworld species has always been to minimize galactic instability…

++0019++: There was a consensus.

++0014++: But not a unanimous one.

++0008++: <Rebuke> Enough. You cast your vote and were in the minority. Respect that.

++0014++: Yes, Eight.

Date Point: 12y AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Major Owen Powell

“Thoughts?”

Burgess checked his tablet. “By Gaoian standards, his performance is incredible. In fact in some areas, his performance is incredible by human standards.”

“Oh aye?”

“Hell yeah! Four paws, lotsa traction and those long back muscles? He can cart-pull like a bulldozer. He can’t haul ass for distance, though.”

Powell rubbed his jaw as he considered Daar, who was panting in the water feature on the obstacle course, having flung himself in there as soon as he was given leave. It was a popular spot for all the Gaoians—where humans could sweat away their workout, Gaoians were adapted for a much colder planet, and only really lost temperature through their ears and nose. They overheated easily, which sharply limited their endurance—not an ideal trait in a serviceman as far as Powell was concerned but one they had been able to adapt for in the Whitecrests.

He took the tablet from Burgess and considered the data. Daar was in many ways a very different creature to the Whitecrests. He was stronger by a huge margin and shared with Burgess a degree of embarrassment about his own intelligence, while the Whitecrests approached intelligence with the same kind of fierce competition that the Beef Trio felt towards heavy weights.

“They only have the one like him,” he commented, reading the statistics.

And there was the rub: With the Whitecrests they had enough men to develop new doctrines. Daar, however, was just one man and that meant finding room for him in what they already had.

And the HEAT, frankly, just didn’t need him. He just wasn’t physically capable of conditioning to wear a MASS, but his talents would be wasted wearing the Gaoian version which was a much lighter and higher-tech thing built around forcefields and smart fabric with profile-blurring metamaterials and nanite-based camouflage that could reprogram on the fly to reflect its surroundings. Regaari had demonstrated the suits when they had first arrived and left Powell thoroughly impressed, and determined to get some of that tech sent to C&M Systems for installation on the next generation of EV-MASS.

Daar could, on four-paw, carry a Protector’s load but he couldn’t easily stand upright under it, which meant he couldn’t fight. He was more comfortable with a Defender’s gear but would be a sitting duck without the MASS, and every single one of the Aggressors outstripped him in combatives. Powell hadn’t tangled with him yet but knew beyond any doubt at all that it would have been a quick and conclusive duel. He had the skills and the ability to use them, that was plain to see: What he lacked was appropriate practice. Maybe with a bit more training…

But, no. Daar just wasn’t going to fit in the HEAT, which was a tragic thing to say of an intelligent and exceptional specimen with useful political connections.

Which only left the JETS, around which there remained a lingering aroma of stigma. The HEAT didn’t think the brother unit was second-rate at all thanks to Murray and Firth’s glowing endorsements of Coombes and Walsh, but outside of the SOR there was still a miasma of historic failure, accompanied by uncharitable whispers from the candidates in the Huntsville pipeline that Walsh was a washout settling for less.

Bruised egos after he’d beaten the pants off all of them, Powell guessed, but he would have very much liked to catch somebody spreading that particular bit of gossip. They would have soon found themselves sharing the sentiment with Sergeant Arés, who’d had a hand in devising the JETS training regime.

Walsh himself certainly didn’t seem to think there was anything “settle for less” about it. This was a man who had already made the grade for HEAT, and now he had even been heard to grudgingly admit he was finding the JETS course ’a good challenge’.

The question was, what role would Daar play in the JETS? The mission statement mandated deployment to high-end deathworlds. If they sent him somewhere with microlife as vicious as Earth’s…

Well, the man to ask was standing right in front of him. “Arright, opinion time and don’t fookin’ sugar-coat it for me,” he said. “If we sent him to Earth, how would he do?”

Burgess considered it with an uncomfortable, grit-toothed expression. “…We learned a lot from Ayma and Regaari’s tour,” he said. “Viruses ain’t a problem at all, they’re too choosy about DNA. The Gaoian immune system can handle most bacteria pretty okay but a staph infection and antibiotic-resistant strains would be a major fuckin’ problem. It’s fungal infections that’d be the big deal. Scratch his paw while he’s diggin’ in the dirt and he might lose an arm. On the flip side though, hell sir… you change your socks today?”

Powell snorted. ‘Take a Motrin, hydrate and change your socks’. Burgess was a medic, after all. The point was well-made however—fungal infections had had plenty of impact on human servicemen over the centuries, and even if Athlete’s Foot was a vastly more serious complaint in a Gaoian than in a human the fact was that any man in the field was going to be taking disease-prevention steps. Daar’s would just have to be more diligent.

“Arright. So you think he could hack it?”

“With care, yeah. Might increase the medical supplies he carries but if he’s careful then I don’t see no reason Daar couldn’t handle Earth. But, uh, we should probably, uh, talk with his Clan before we do. I think Daar maybe glosses over some of the details when he writes home….”

“He’s an adventurous sort.”

“Yeah. I bet some pressure from his Clan will sober him up. But,” Burgess added, “I still don’t doubt he can do it. I just…we need to maybe scare him straight, yeah? He ain’t dumb but he’s got an ego and he really can’t afford that, not on Earth.”

“Hmm. I reckon if you and Sergeant Kovač put your heads together you can put a healthy fear of Mother Earth into him.”

Burgess grinned. “Oh yeah. Couple’a Gaoian tissue samples, a sample of Tinea Cruris, and…”

“Tinea Cruris?”

“Jock Itch, sir.”

Powell chuckled. “Pair that with the daily bathing…” Yet another way Gaoians were slightly canine.

“Ayup. He’ll get it, sir. I’ll see to that.”

“Good lad.” Powell handed back the tablet feeling inwardly pleased. He placed enormous trust in his Protectors, and they were worthy of it. If they were optimistic, so was he. And if Daar could handle Earth…

He could handle anywhere.

Date Point: First Contact Day, 12y AV
Light freighter ’My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’, Entering Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Dog Wagner

“I’m just saying, it was a shitty fuckin’ disguise, brother! Ain’t no Chehnash if he shakes the deck like that when he walks.”

On Dog’s screen, Nofl spread his hands delicately. Dog had called forward to lambast the little gray bastard the moment they were within superluminal wake range of Cimbrean and had waved politely to the system’s watchdog, the Gaoian strike ship Racing Thunder.

“Dog, Dog, Dog. I never met him myself. How was I supposed to know? His reputation said Chehnash, so…”

“Oh, so you didn’t fuckin’ vet your courier?”

”How was I supposed to? The Contact on Perfection went dark immediately after the Hunter attack over there. Nobody’s heard from them in more than a year. They were probably eaten.”

“There are other fuckin’ contacts, brother. Thousands of the fuckers.”

”Oh yes!” Nofl nodded agreeably. “Yes, yes, and they’re all scrambling to fill the void that The Contact has left. It’s all very… unstable.”

Dog rubbed his stubble. “More unstable than sending me to meet a Jamaican whose idea of a Chehnash disguise is fuckin’ Sith robes and some springy stilt boot things? Brother, that guy’s scary.”

”He delivered the package, didn’t he? …What’s a Jamaican? I thought you said he’s human.”

“Brother, I don’t even have the fuckin’ time to explain Jamaica. They’re the humans other humans think are oddballs.”

Nofl quirked his head and blinked slowly. Corti did that when they were being consciously patient. ”But he did deliver the package.”

Dog relented and sighed. Even he wasn’t really sure why he was venting over his unnerving encounter with ’Dread’. The guy had just left him with a pervasive sense of being creeped out that he needed to be rid of. He picked up his paddle-ball on the grounds that it might just annoy the tiny Area 51-lookin’ fuckstick and nodded grudgingly. “Yeah, yeah. All professional, too. I got it right here.”

”And he didn’t ask what was in it?”

“Don’t think that guy’s much interested in anything more than bein’ angry at fuckin’ everything, brother…” Dog looked up as his room chimed. “…Okay, we’re about twenty out. I better go be all captainly. You get your skinny gray ass up to Armstrong, though how the blue fuck yer gonna smuggle this package back down dirtside is beyond me. CCS border force have got the tightest fuckin’ pucker I ever heard of.”

”They’re only really interested in jump beacons. Which makes sense, I suppose: They don’t want Hunters to get past the shield.”

“Shit, no.”

”Trust me, the border is much more permeable for everything that isn’t a jump beacon”

“Hey, yer the one takin’ the risk brother. I just went and picked up yer mail. I’ll see you ASAP, and remember; you pay first.”

“Yes, yes, yes…”

Date Point: First Contact Day 12y AV
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

General Martin Tremblay

Rogers Arena had a small monument installed outside nowadays to commemorate the Hunter attack. It was a small and unassuming testament to what was arguably the most significant event in human history, but Tremblay rather liked it. To this day, the world didn’t quite seem to know how to react to the revelation of humanity’s status as the most arguably dangerous things alive. A conservative little abstract piece fit that global sense of bemusement perfectly.

Something important had happened here and everybody knew it, but how important? People still worked in call centers and retail, still drove Fords and Toyotas, still drank Budweiser, still prayed and cheated on each other and…

Looking around, it was hard to see anything other than the monument that was different about the arena. Okay, so the LED boards had been replaced by holographic emitters maybe… but that was about it. You had to look pretty hard to see the ways in which the world was different twelve years on. Good fridges—the ones built by Byron Group subsidiaries—had stasis fields installed so that once they were cold they halted the flow of time and massively extended the life of the groceries, but they still looked like a fridge. The air was cleaner now that more and more cars were running on electricity and that electricity was being generated from high-atmosphere collection fields that never suffered from a cloudy day, but power cables and electrical substations were still power cables and electrical substations.

It was all… subtle. A man could blink, and be forgiven for not noticing the difference when his eyes opened. The world kept on doing its thing, and thus First Contact Day was a minor ceremony nowadays.

One day, hopefully, it would be remembered more fervently. People didn’t know how important that day had really been: they didn’t know how precarious mankind’s position was, and how the wakeup call of the Rogers Arena attack might be the only reason Earth was not already a burning nuclear wasteland.

For now though, microphones were still microphones and the four of them on the lectern in front of the PM looked not much different from the ones that had confronted his ten predecessors… too bad they weren’t facing a man of any real caliber.

The Right Honorable Philippe Martel was not Tremblay’s favorite politician. He wasn’t a leader at all but a kind of human chihuahua, so media-whipped that he reflexively checked over his shoulder at the first faint whiff of a scandal. He was the premier purely because his party had found him to be pathologically averse to controversy, and the voters found him inoffensive.

Tremblay found him ineffectual, and now was not a time for ineffectual. The world needed leaders more than ever, not political animals who was less inclined produce a concrete commitment than the average stone was to produce poetry.

Thus the usual harmless sound bites about “historic moment” this and “changed the world” that, which Tremblay was enduring as he sat anonymous and forgotten off to one side in his dress uniform with nothing to do except look composed and attentive and dream of his No. 5 dress and actual productivity.

He didn’t even have the pleasure of driving himself. He’d have murdered for the chance to put his foot down and listen through ’Back in Black’ on his way back up to Scotch Creek, but nope. He had a staff car and a helicopter instead.

But it was important that somebody should be there who fully grasped just how incredibly important FC Day was.

He escaped as quickly as he diplomatically could and endured the drive back to the airport in bored silence, staring distractedly out of the window and musing on how it might play out if the Hunters ever did find a way to attack Earth in earnest.

Special Agent Darcy was waiting in the helicopter. He gave her a tired, slow blink then hauled himself in and fastened his seatbelt. “You really prefer the personal meeting, don’t you?”

“Yup. But you were on my way anyway,” she said and shook his hand. “Gabriel Arés asked me to talk with some of the candidates to replace him. Get the measure of them.”

Tremblay nodded unhappily. Arés’ retirement to an advisory position after his fall was a blow. Not a serious one—there were plenty of possible men and women who could take over the job just fine—but it would still have been better to retain the incumbent while his replacement was brought up to speed. Cimbrean was strategically vital, and its colonial security force was more on the front line than most of them knew. Arés was a strategic asset that Tremblay would have preferred not to lose right now, especially because he was originally American.

The Brits were keen to install one of their own, and given that the colony technically recognized King George VII as their head of state they really had the deciding vote. Governor-General Sir Jeremy Sandy had yet to weigh in but Tremblay suspected he cared less for the politics than for the result. Sir Jeremy was a leader.

President Sartori had asked the Foreign Secretary to lean on them to expand the pool to include more Americans, incentivized by some better deals for the colony’s exports flowing through the commercial jump array to Chicago, the British PM was prevaricating on the subject, goodness only knew what Martel’s thoughts were, the Chinese and Russians had both voiced “concerns” about Cimbrean’s transatlantic nature and questioned when they would have a say in its operation or else a colony of their own, their concerns in turn were being balmed with minor concessions and political favors…

In short, billions of dollars and more power than the average person even knew was possible had been sent rustling agitatedly through the political long grass all around purely because the Gaoians hadn’t made their commune wheelchair-accessible.

“Are you pushing for an American in that seat?” he asked.

Darcy shrugged. “I don’t make policy, I advise.”

“You must have some opinion.” The helicopter jolted as it was towed out onto the concrete.

“The president and my superiors all seem to think that Arés caved to British sensibilities too quickly.” Darcy told him. “They think he should have encouraged CCS to be armed in case of an invasion if for no other reason.”

“And you think…?” Darcy was even harder to pin down than Martel, though in her case inscrutability was a sign of competent composure rather than Twitter-fearing meekness.

The question was met with a disinterested shrug. “I don’t see what difference it’d make,” she said. “Cops aren’t there to fight alien invasions, they’re there to keep the peace.”

“Finally, somebody speaks sense… It’s good to see you by the way, even if you do have a habit of showing up when you’re least expected.”

Darcy actually grinned. “I do have hobbies…”

“Ones you can indulge in on the road?”

“Oh yeah. You should see my coloring book.”

Tremblay chuckled. “So your hobbies are relaxing ones. Coloring book, green tea…”

“Huh. How’d you know that one?”

“Kevin Jenkins. You know he won’t mind if you ask for tea whenever you visit him, right?”

“And deprive him of a chance to use that big commercial espresso machine of his?”

“You know what he’s like. If he sets to making you a cup of tea, it’ll be the best damn tea you ever had.”

Darcy laughed. “Right. And ruin me for other tea forever? No thanks.”

Tremblay gave her a curious look as they lurched off the ground and gained altitude. “You’re in a good mood today…”

She looked around “Is there any wood in here to knock on?”

“‘Fraid not…”

“Well… don’t look now, but things are going pretty well. You heard about Vedregnenug’s little cups game?”

Tremblay snorted. “Hah! Yeah. Nadeau said he had a hard time keeping a straight face when Vedreg asked if he’d ever heard of a shell corporation.”

Darcy smiled. “It got onto the pre-approval list for a limited term lease of the system shield’s assembly schematics for testing reasons.”

“So they haven’t actually released one to us?”

“The lease is supposed to be for evaluation purposes and it’s all under close guard so that whoever’s testing it can’t duplicate the emitter prior to receiving a full license.” Darcy crossed her legs demurely and sat back looking smug. “Of course, if the testing ship were raided by privateers…”

Tremblay nodded, seeing why she had let herself aboard his helicopter. “You want me to send in our HEAT Gaoians.”

“Exactly. The Racing Thunder could get them in and out quick and quiet. As far as the Guvnurag are concerned the emitter blueprint was snatched by Gaoian pirates, Vedreg’s little shell company declares bankruptcy because it can’t afford the fines…”

“And we get our system shield.” Tremblay nodded. “I like it. Think I’ll come on over to Cimbrean with you and discuss it with Knight…”

Darcy smiled again and produced the coloring book from her handbag. “It should,” she said, “be a productive trip…”

First Contact Day, 12y AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Sister Myun

Myun was under no illusions about whether or not she was anonymous in a crowd: She wasn’t. She was half a foot taller than any of her Sisters and almost as bulky as a strong male. Being one of only six thousand Gaoians on the planet, and the one that anybody who visited the Commune saw first just completed the absolute certainty that she couldn’t go anywhere in Folctha without being recognized.

But if she’d learned anything from watching TV, it was that a strange kind of anonymity came just from walking confidently as if nothing remotely unusual was happening. Look busy, focused and authoritative and the attention of others would just skip past. People—humans especially—noticed suspicious or shifty movements instantly. They were wired to look for something out of place. If you pretended you were in place, then…

That was the theory, at least. She’d never actually put that theory into practice, but it seemed to work. She walked confidently from the commune to the right address, marched in through the front door, dropped the package she was carrying into the right mailbox and lifted the flag with a bored expression, and then returned to the commune via the kebab shop on Tennyson Street. Just a Sister out running some errands and grabbing a snack.

Besides: Kebab meat.

Kebab meat and getting to do a good deed, and put something into practice she’d seen on TV?

That was a good day.

Date Point 12y AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’. Uncharted System, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

“So yeah, uh… Happy First Contact Day everyone, this is the survey log for our fourth planet. We aren’t gonna stay on this one. It’s a terrestrial world, right temperature, looks mostly pretty good down there, but the Corti classification algorithm is turning out to be useless again.”

Julian cleared his throat and took a sip of water. It seemed kinda stupid to be recording these logs: Nobody could listen to them until they got back to Earth anyway, which was months away. The idea was supposed to be to record events as they happened but in that case why not just give him a word processor and tell him to write a journal?

Xiù thought it was a publicity thing. Allison had pointed out that if that was the case, they’d have a jump array on board to send the mail back instantly.

“Why don’t we have a jump array, anyway?” he asked, the question suddenly occurring to him. Across the hab, Allison looked up from the technical manual she was studying.

“Allied Extrasolar Command vetoed it,” she said.

“They did? Why?”

“Something about how if we’re eaten by Hunters or whatever, they’d be able to use the Array to get past the system shield and invade Earth or Cimbrean…” she shrugged. “Cheery thought, ain’t it?”

“What about Armstrong station?”

“Dude, we can jump back there any time we like,” Allison pointed out.

“Exactly! Why not give us a jump array that links there and we can send updates every day?”

Allison just shrugged and went back to her reading. “Ask Clara and Kevin.”

Julian turned back to the camera. “…Anyway. We’ve named this new planet ’Curie’. According to the Corti algorithm it’s a nice class nine… until we tried to land. Then *Misfit*’s radiation hazard alarm went off, and the rating got bumped up to an eleven. Turns out the planet’s magnetic field is kinda on the weak side and maybe getting weaker, so there’s a lot of solar particles hitting the upper atmosphere and that’s creating lots of secondary effects… which is something that happens on Earth too, but this was way, way more so. A couple of orders of magnitude more.”

“We landed successfully but the background count at ground level was still as high as you’d find in a uranium mine - not terrible, but you wouldn’t want to stay for long and it sure ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. It’s a nice place: pretty snowy mountains, these big fern tree things, lots of interesting critters, but with the radiation we figured it was best to just move on. I’m not sure, but I think that planet might not be habitable too much longer anyway. That much solar wind hitting it has got to be blowing the atmosphere away…”

He cleared his throat and took a sip of water. “So yeah, after Lucent, Curie is kinda disappointing but we’ve still got four strong leads ahead of us. Here’s to the next one, I guess…”

He toasted the camera with his water bottle then turned off the feed.

“You’re turning into a showman, you know,” Allison commented, swiping right on her tablet to ‘turn’ a page.

“Been talking to Xiù about it.” Julian nodded toward the bunks, where Xiù was curled up asleep. She mumbled something and turned over on hearing her name, but didn’t wake.

He was definitely looking forward to the next time they could make planetfall and synchronize their sleeping cycles for a while. The two-awake-one-asleep system they had to use during flight was nowhere near as much fun—they’d switched the clock to Cimbrean time and used the extra couple hours a day as “triple time” to do stuff together but he was starting to think longingly of Minnesota. He didn’t get enough time nowadays to just sit and watch the girls.

“Right.” Allison swiped through another page, much too soon to have read it properly.

“…You okay?”

She looked up in the suddenly attentive way of somebody whose attention had been hauled violently back to here and now. “Hmm?”

“You okay?” Julian repeated.

“…Yuh. Think I’m goin’ a little stir-crazy though.” Allison put her book down, stretched and yawned.

“Did you exercise yet?”

“Ugh.” She threw her head back, stared at the ceiling for a moment then rubbed her face and stood. “Okay, yeah. Maybe that’ll help.”

Julian nodded and activated the quiet field around the bunks for Xiù’s benefit. Clara had installed it for them during their quick stop at Armstrong Station and it had made a huge difference—both he and Xiù were light sleepers, and wrapping the beds in a protective cocoon of silence had dramatically improved things for both of them. It made it much easier to do the noisy stuff around the hab too.

Allison of course could hibernate through a hurricane, flat on her back and snoring. Even as an abductee she’d had somewhere safe to sleep where discovery and life-or-death questions of survival hadn’t been an issue.

She checked the exercise schedule Xiù had prepared for them, then folded the couch back into the wall and unfolded the treadmill instead. Julian hit the weights and put his music on, on the grounds that Allison honestly didn’t seem to care what was playing, so he may as well please himself.

“So what’s up next?” she asked, once she’d hit her stride. “We’ve had giant bugs and radiation… man-eating venus fly traps?”

“Yurgh. Bad memories there. I ever tell you about the mangrabber vines on Nightmare?”

“I don’t think so?”

“They’re fuckin’…The vines are super-stretchy, like bungee cord, and they pump sap into them to extend towards a nearby warm thing… like, say, a sleeping Julian that picked the wrong place to bed down for the night. And they’re covered in these backwards-facing hook spines like a bramble, so they tangle something up, haul it back to the base, it dies of thirst and the rotting meat fertilizes the soil.”

“Ew.”

“Yeah. Getting out of that one the first time scratched me to shit and blunted my knife.”

“Hope we don’t run into anything like that…” The treadmill picked up a gear. “Imagine if they tangled up the ship!”

“Yeah.” Julian grunted as he started a set of leg extensions. “Here’s hoping the next planet’s nice and boring…”

Date Point: 12y AV
Uncharted Planet, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

The end of winter was the most important time in Yan’s year. His crest had gone back to the pale yellowish-orange of an ordinary man, rather than the flaming scarlet blaze that marked Given Men. His muscles had shrunk, he was light enough to traverse the upper branches again, he could feel the weight of the season on him.

But the sun felt warm today, and there were new green shoots coming up, forcing their way past the snow.

To a Given Man, that meant something special.

The tribe barely noticed. They were too busy cooing over the little girl that had been born to the Singer and Vemik. Yan’s niece had borne her first child well and stoically, and had presented the pale beige little bundle to her father with a sweaty, exhausted smile.

A quiet child. Alive and warm and breathing, but she didn’t wail—at worst, she grumbled. Mostly, she watched and flailed her hands aimlessly at whatever caught her attention.

Vemik and Vemet had promptly gone on the birth hunt in search of a suitable beast to thank the gods for the health of both child and mother: Yan had gone with them. They were family now, after all.

They had shown him the Destroyer they had killed. A nesting Natla had set up a warm bowl of sticks and fur in one of its upper recesses and there were still a few lines of melting slush between the slicing sharp blades of the monstrosity’s upper hide.

The ground was black and dead beneath it where its guts had spilled out and for some distance around: a few poisoned sticks remained rooted, but they were obviously beyond saving. It was an island of corruption in the forest, and the three of them stayed well away from it.

“You’re brave men, I’ll grant you that,” Yan commented at last. Vemik and Vemet both smiled sheepishly.

“It took us a week to work up the courage to even let it see us,” Vemet confessed.

“Sensible caution,” Yan said dismissively. He looked up and tasted the air—There was a greasy, odd scent on the wind that nearly overpowered the sharp flavor of the spring thaw. “I’m glad it’s far from the village, though.”

“I wouldn’t hunt here anyway. I don’t want to know what kind of curse it might have left on the meat,” Vemet grumbled.

“You’ll find a good prize, I know it. My great-niece deserves no less.” Yan shouldered his pack and straightened. “…I’ll see you in the summer.”

“I wish you’d tell me where you go, Yan…” Vemik grumbled. Yan trilled quietly and gave the younger man’s crest a ruffle as if he was still a boy.

“The world is full of secrets you’ll never learn, Sky-Thinker. Get used to it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know everything, Yan,” Vemik replied. They gripped each other’s’ wrists and hugged.

“Be careful, Yan,” Vemet advised. “It’s dangerous out there right now…”

“It’s always dangerous out there,” Yan replied as they hugged as well. “…but I’ll be careful.”

The two of them stepped back and waited as he finished checking his possessions.

There was a balancing act involved in the annual Journey. He needed to carry enough to live, but not so much as to exhaust himself. He had plenty of cord, a piece of fire-hardened Werne femur for a club and for basic flint-knapping, a sturdy short spear with plenty of other uses if he needed them, and some food wrapped up in a hide bundle tied around his waist. Nothing exciting—Werne jerky, pemmican, some dried berries and some spices and herbs in pouches—but enough to avoid starving and to turn a basic meal into a luxury.

The Journey was several things. Among them it was a test and practice—a chance to keep his skills sharp by pitting them against the real consequences of failure. Do, or die.

Yan had Done several times, and it didn’t take him long to get into his rhythm.

For women, and for slight young men like Vemik, brachiation was a balletic and smooth process higher up in the trees where the foliage was sparser. Heavy-set brutes like Yan were forced to stick to the lower, sturdier limbs and crash through the brush like a charging Werne.

The skin of his arms and chest was dark, tough and leathery from long years of being whipped by passing thorns and sticks, and that natural protection allowed him to hit a good meditative pace that took away half the day quite easily.

He made camp just after the top of the day by folding some branches together to make a suitable nest, and stood up straight to stretch out. He scrounged up some appropriate firewood, secured his food against scavengers, then explored the area around his camp in search of dinner.

He found it in the form of a bibtaw burrow. The little furballs were perfect for on the trail—stick a spear into their burrow and one of the males would bravely lunge at the “intruder” to protect the warren, and could be easily skewered. It wasn’t an honorable or impressive kill, but it was food that cost him almost nothing to acquire.

He roasted it over his campfire directly below the nest and hung the skin in the smoke to get started on drying it out. Bibtaw skins were just the right size to make bags. Rubbed with a few herbs and eaten alongside a few tanew nuts and fresh young green leaves, the unfortunate critter made for a solid and delicious meal, especially when he cracked its thin skull and savored the nutty brains.

He stayed awake and stared contemplatively into the fire, poking and fuelling it as the dark closed around him, then used the last of the sunset to scale back up to his nest and settled down in the hot air rising from the ashes.

When he woke in the morning and looked back, High Forest mountain was pleasingly distant and small—he’d made good progress yesterday. His destination was toward the rising sun, so he ate the last of yesterday’s meat, packed his new bibtaw skin, and set out.

Each day was different in the field. Some were clear and comfortably cool, some were grey and damp, some were miserably wet and one or two forced him to huddle shivering in impromptu ground-level shelters.

The moon had gone through more than half of its cycle by the time he found the first trail mark. Two straight sticks lashed together pointed him slightly south of the course he’d been taking

It was about time, too—He was starting to feel his Fire.

The Fire was one of the things that separated Given Men from others, and it was a secret that Vemik would have thought upon long and solemnly. It started slowly and gently as an intensity in his step and a fierceness in the way he would bully from branch to branch, shouldering the whipping twigs aside as if they had personally offended him.

Over the next two days, it got worse. When a particularly springy branch caught him in the face he gripped it with a snarl and tore it from the tree, spitting the most fearsome curses he knew until he caught himself and realized how stupid he was being, to get so angry at wood.

And the things he did to the poor stupid werne that blundered into the midst of the root-birds he was planning to eat and scattered them… At least there was enough left to eat after he was done with it. And the catharsis of indulging the anger simmering causelessly inside him temporarily dampened it and helped him think straight again.

Which was why he didn’t rip apart the younger man who attacked him.

It was a rainy day when they met, and he was angry about that. He was angry about the cold wetness slicking his crest to his back. He was angry about a treacherous patch of slippery moss that had nearly sent him plummeting from the tree. He was angry about being hungry and he was angry about being angry.

But, he wasn’t in a full rage yet. He was still Yan, who had been here a dozen times in his life and knew how to ride the anger and let it flow around and past him while leaving his essential Yan-ness untouched.

The newcomer was… not. He wasn’t young, Given Men never were. They only became Given Men after going through the Change, which came later in life if it came at all. But this man had clearly only just gone through his Change, and it was never pretty. The rage…

…Was always difficult. But it was far beyond being mere rage the first time. The first time, when a man was chosen by the gods to be Given, he became nothing but violence.

Yan found him laying into a wounded neyma. Neyma were more skittish than Werne, and much more fragile: they were hard to catch, but their legs broke easily. This one was bleating and whickering in pain and panic as the hunter advanced on it with his hand-axe. A good kill! Skillful.

Except that he heard Yan approaching, span, spat a curse and charged. He bounded across the leaf litter with his axe in hand, loping animalistically with his hackles up and his fangs bared.

Yan leapt backwards up a tree. He swung around the trunk by his tail as the axe knocked a hand-sized chunk of bark out of the wood where his head had been moments ago.

Scramble, dodge, jump, push. Had to get close to wrestle, or that axe would kill him. Couldn’t brave the axe to get close enough.

But, advantage: Thinking. Still had thoughts beyond just kill. Could remember not to kill, could remember how to do more than charge and destroy.

He scrambled higher up into the thinner limbs as the axe chok!-ed into the wood at his heels and found what he was looking for five man-heights above the ground—a branch strong enough to just hold one Given Man, but not two. He dashed out onto it and turned as if cornered.

His opponent snarled triumphantly and pursued. The branch shook, sagged, cracked, then snapped.

Yan hung by his tail and hands from the branch above him and watched as the raging younger man lost his footing, dropped his axe, scrabbled desperately at the broken branch. He arrested his fall but the jolt tore apart the last of the branch’s strength and he fell three man-lengths down to earth and landed heavily in the leaf mold where he lay writhing and winded.

Yan’s blood was singing with the urge to rip the upstart apart. He surged down the tree, snatched up the other man’s dropped axe and caught himself just as he raised it with murder in his eyes.

The two of them stared at each other in the tense, deadly moment and the younger man broke the spell by croaking out something.

“Please…. Sorry… Sorry…”

Yan snarled and took out his frustration on the hand-axe by flinging it viciously into the underbrush. He backed off and took several deep breaths to recover himself.

“I know… I know.” He grunted. He extended a hand and helped the younger man to his feet. “First time?”

“Yes…Tarek. Tarek Bark-Breaker.”

“Yan Given-Man.”

They hugged like old friends.

“I’m sorry,” Tarek repeated.

“I don’t blame you,” Yan replied. “You don’t have a Given Man to mentor you?”

“He went away. We don’t know what happened to him, he just…”

“Let me guess. You saw smoke from another village and he went to investigate?”

Tarek stiffened. “Yes! You too?”

“The young man we sent to look came back, burned but alive. Something destroyed the village… ours was east of here.”

“Mine is north.”

“*Godshit!*” Yan swore. “That means there’s more than one…”

“One what?”

“A beast, like a Skithral made of stone, twice as big as a yshek. It spits blue fire and sends birds with knives for wings to scout for it.”

Tarek blinked at him. “You SAW it?”

“Saw its corpse. Two men of my village found it asleep and tore its guts out.”

Tarek sighed and relaxed a little. “At least it had guts to tear out. What kind of beast spits fire?”

“I don’t understand it either…” Yan looked around, and saw the trail sign not far away between the trees. “We’re only two days from the lodge. I’ll stay with you, Tarek. Help you damp that Fire.”

“Thank you, Yan.” Tarek wiped sweat out of his ears and shook himself out. “It’s… been hard. I nearly killed my brother.”

Yan put a hand on his shoulder sympathetically. “…I know. But the Lodge will help you.”

Tarek shot an irritated glance at the Neyma, which was still making strangled agonized bleating noises. “We should shut that up.”

“Mm. Don’t let good meat go to waste. You’ll need it.” Yan retrieved his dropped spear and made a ’do you mind if I-?’ gesture to the wounded beast. Tarek twitched his head in assent, and moments later the wailing animal was mercifully and easily dead.

The two of them knelt and anointed themselves with its blood—a touch between the eyes, and two stripes under each eye—and set about butchering the carcass, which was quick work for two seasoned hunters.

The act of getting a square meal sorted out quickly killed any lingering animosity between them. Besides, Yan was familiar with the way that being around another Given Man at this time seemed to soothe, somehow. The Fire didn’t go away, but it burned lower just for knowing that somebody else nearby was suffering it as well.

Small though neyma were they yielded plenty of meat, far more than Yan and Tarek could eat in one sitting so they smoked and preserved what they didn’t eat as well as they could. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to keep the meat good for the remaining couple of days they had to go until they reached the Lodge.

They slept at a respectful distance from one another, though, and Yan let him nest on the lower, warmer branch and woke up stiff from the cold in the morning.

This close to the lodge, the trail sign was thick enough to trip over. They made good progress despite stopping every now and again to repair a sign that had been disrupted by the weather or an animal. With no need to hunt they were able to go on for most of the afternoon, and they finally set their camp at a spot Yan knew well, by the rapids of a stream that was far too small to contain any yshek and where the water was good to drink.

Tarek spoke to him for the first time all day as Yan unwrapped one of the neyma’s shanks and bit gratefully into the cold meat.

“How do you control it?”

Yan looked up chewing, and tried to let a stab of irrational irritation slide off him. “Hmm?”

“The Fire. It’s… everything is irritating me. How do you fight that?”

Yan bit down the urge to snap at what wasn’t a stupid question no matter what the Fire was telling him. “You don’t.”

Tarek growled and stood up. “*What.*”

Yan’s instincts sang about putting the silly little upstart in his place but he deflected the anger toward the Fire itself.

“I knock it aside. I remind myself to be angry at something harmless. And I try to stay busy and tired. Just until we get to the Lodge.”

“And we can deal with it there?”

Yan nodded. “There’s magic, and a vision, and food. You’ll see tomorrow.”

“It had better be soon. I just want to… break something.”

“Go ahead. So long as you don’t break anything of mine, please.”

Tarek blinked at him then surged to his feet and vanished into the brush. A minute or so later there came the sound of crashing and crackling as he released his Fire harmlessly. A startled trio of birds whirred desperately overhead and Yan watched them vanish between the trees, musing on Vemik’s special spear-thrower. He wondered if it might be possible to shoot one of those birds as it flew.

He was going to have to tell the others about that thing. Given Men traded knowledge like that at the lodge every year, and soon Vemik’s spear-thrower would be all over the forest. In a few years, they would be a normal part of life.

And the peace would be kept.

Date Point: First Contact Day, 12y AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

General Martin Tremblay

“Where in the hell did you get this?”

Gabriel Arés shrugged painfully, and he seemed to need a kind of mental run-up to launch into speech. The quiet precision was gone from his voice, replaced with a halting quality almost like he was drunk and dazed. “I, uh, don’t know… uh. My partner got home, sh-she said, uh, said it was in our mailbox, and…as soon as I, uh, figured out what it is, uh…”

He trailed off.

Tremblay gave the three vials on the desk a long, awed look. “You called us.”

Arés nodded. “Uh… I admit, uh I was, uh…tem-tempted to use a dose.”

Powell rubbed his jaw, then picked up a wall phone, and hit a button. “Technical sergeant Kovač to wardroom two, please. Cheers.”

He put the phone down and picked up one of the vials as the call went out on the base announcement system. “Real Cruezzir, by God.”

“The full-fat, unadulterated, genuine product,” Tremblay agreed.

“Without the built-in self destruct,” Knight finished. “This isn’t three vials, gentlemen, it’s an unlimited supply. All we need to do is synthesize it.”

“Bloody easy, if Saunders and Delaney are any guide,” Powell grunted.

Tremblay stroked his chin. “I thought the whole project was scrapped. Where did this come from, and is it still good?”

“That’s why I called for Kovač,” Powell explained. “Dunno about the where it came from bit, but she can tell us if it’s still good right quick.”

In a classic ’speak-of-the-devil’ moment, the woman herself chose that moment to knock and enter.

“Reporting as ordered, sirs.”

Powell handed her a vial. “Happy First Contact Day, sergeant.”

Kovač stared at it and promptly geeked out. “Omigod, is this-? It IS! Where-?”

Gabe Arés waved gently from his wheelchair. “Some, uh, good Samaritan left it in my mailbox.”

“Is it viable, sergeant?” Tremblay asked, urgently. Kovač paused, then held it up to the light.

“…Probably? I’d need to run it through the lab…”

“Right away, please,” Tremblay ordered.

She hugged it to her chest and backed toward the door. “Yes sir!”

“Sergeant…” Knight held up a hand to stop her and looked to Tremblay. “I think in light of the circumstances, our chief of colonial security deserves some recognition of his sacrifice, don’t you?”

Tremblay nodded and gave Gabe a thoughtful look. “I think you’re right. And we could solve a strategic inconvenience, too…”

Powell nodded. “Aye. …If you want it, Gabe?”

Arés hesitated. “I uh… what? Sorry, I got lost again…”

Knight nodded. “Sergeant, would you please prepare a course of Crue-D for Mister Arés and release it to Staff Sergeant Arés for him to monitor? Including all the appropriate SACRED STRANGER paperwork, the non-disclosure and so on.”

Kovač smiled. “At once, sir.”

Tremblay could see Arés struggling to wrestle his brain into gear as she left. “Crue-, uh, Crue-D? Full fat? General, is, uh…?”

Tremblay sighed and sat down opposite him. “Seven years ago, we negotiated a trade deal with the Corti. They had developed a, um, limited version of Cruezzir with most of the negative side effects removed, some long-term limits on its effectiveness and, most important, it couldn’t be synthesized by a human’s gut microbes,” he explained. “It’s the key to HEAT training.”

“Train fookin’ hard until yer droppin’ down from wrecked muscles, pop a Crude patch or a shot if your boy’s been pushin’ us hard… and then it’s all right as rain a couple of hours later, and stronger than before. It’s a fookin’ nasty way to get strong, but it fookin’ works,” Powell commented.

“…You’re on this stuff, Powell?”

“Aye.”

“And Adam, of course.”

“…Since he was seventeen. Aye.”

Gabe gave him a long, cool stare that came with a sudden resurgence of his usual focus. “You gave a teenager an experimental alien medicine.”

Tremblay and Knight glanced at each other, but Powell grabbed a chair and sat down in front of him,. “…Offered,” he said, quietly. “And he accepted, freely and of his own volition.”

“He was just a boy!”

“No.” Powell shook his head seriously. “He wasn’t. I don’t think I ever knew your son as just a boy. Besides, you must’ve bloody known summat was up! He didn’t get that big on his own, right? You must’ve seen it. Suspected.”

“And now you’ve gone and confirmed those suspicions!” Gabe tried to stand, failed, and sat back cursing. “Madre de Dios, the Corti?!”

“Personally, I’d trust them as far as your son could throw them.” Tremblay said. “You just have to know how to pull their strings.”

Gabe grunted, touched his forehead and visibly pulled his thoughts together. “I… you’re right, I knew. I knew it had to be Cruezzir or something like it. I’m… sorry.”

“Don’t be. If my son tried to join HEAT I’d be…” Knight trailed off. “Well. I’m glad he never will.”

Gabe frowned at him. “…I didn’t even know you’re a father,” he confessed.

“Oh yes. A son and a daughter. Doctor Robert Knight is a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon at Great Ormond Street.”

“And your daughter?”

“Followed her old man’s footsteps, I fear. But we’re digressing.” Knight cleared his throat. “The point is, that same medicine would be ideal for helping you overcome your own difficulties. If you’ll have it…”

“It’s the least we can do,” Tremblay agreed.

“Powell?” Gabe asked.

“Gabe, mate, I promise you this: I’d never let your son or anybody else near the stuff if I wasn’t perfectly happy wi’ it myself. You’ve got a chance most blokes who suffered an injury like yours would fookin’ beg for, so for Chrissakes, bloody take it.”

“I… it feels like a cheap way out.”

Tremblay was surprised by Powell’s response: the reply seemed to momentarily give him pause and he looked away.

“…Aye. I can see why you’d think that,” he conceded at last. “An’ I’ve always bloody respected your commitment to doin’ things by the book or not at all. We’re givin’ you a way to avoid a long and bloody difficult recovery, assuming you recover at all. I can see how you’d feel that’s the simple way out. But…”

Gabe raised his head and listened intently. “Yeah?”

“…I dunno, mate. Do you turn down a fookin’ paracetamol when you get a headache? Or the anaesthetic when you go for an operation? This right here-” he picked up one of the Cruezzir vials. “—This right here is gonna be the by-the-book way to deal with injuries like yours in the not-too-distant future. This is the right way. This isn’t some fookin’ bribe, Gabe, or a cheap way out—this is your bloody medicine, mate. So stop bein’ fookin’ daft and take it, aye?”

“Hear, hear,” Knight commented.

It was to Tremblay that Gabe turned last. “I don’t…” he flapped his hands irritably until the word came to him. “trust anything this easy!” he said, almost pleading. “There’s always a… a catch!”

Tremblay considered him carefully. “Maybe…” he agreed. “Maybe. But from where I’m standing I’d weigh the potential catch against the known consequences of your injury… and discuss it with your son.”

Powell and Knight both nodded.

“What…what would Adam tell me?”

“That’d be between you and him,” Powell said. “But nobody alive knows the effects of Crue-D better than him.”

Tremblay picked up the remaining two Cruezzir vials. “I need to get these back to SCERF immediately,” he said. “Mr. Arés… thank you. You’ve done humanity an incredible service today.”

“Uh… uh, sure.” Gabe managed. “*De nada.*”

Tremblay shot Powell a look that said ’take care of him’ in absolutely certain terms, which made the major stand up straight before Tremblay let himself out of the room and strode purposefully toward the relay link to Scotch Creek. Men and women from every branch of the militaries of three nations got out of his way as well as they could in the narrow corridors, sensing that if there was ever such a thing as a good time to impede the Supreme Allied Commander, this definitely wasn’t it.

The Cimbrean end of the military Array was manned by two Royal Navy technicians, who straightened sharply as he entered as did the marine guarding it.

“One for Scotch Creek, sir?” the senior of them asked.

“Yes please. How soon until it’s charged?”

“It’s ready to send a lone man already, sir. Three hours until it’s ready for a full-capacity send, scheduled jump’s in five hours.”

Tremblay considered. The sensible thing, probably, would be to wait for the scheduled jump and not use power that wasn’t going to be used anyway.

But in the immortal words of a historical peer of his: Nuts. They had Cruezzir, and he wasn’t going to breathe easily until it was safely in as many labs on as many planets as he could manage. Some things were just so precious that the idea of dallying…

“Right away, please.”

“Yes sir.” The techs jumped to and Tremblay parked himself firmly in the green square at the center of the Array and waited carefully. He could have stuck out the hours until the scheduled jump, but the very idea just filled his head with awful visions of tripping and smashing the vials he was carrying, or…

Something like that. There was a snap and a sudden moment of lurching gravity as he was translocated back to Earth, and he made immediately for Ted Bartlett’s office.

Some things were just too important to wait on.

Date Point: 12y1w4d AV
Starship Racing Thunder, Interstellar Space, Confederacy Territory

“Upgrades?”

Shipfather Yefrig duck-nodded by way of replying in the affirmative, though the set of his ears was… not embarrassed, but certainly less than completely happy.

“The consultants from the Royal Navy had much to say,” he explained. “Most of their observations are not the kind of thing we can implement without a full overhaul at a shipyard, but some are simple programming changes to the shields.”

“Things like radiating the ship’s energy output in a coherent beam away from anything that might see it,” Regaari guessed. It was the first trick he’d learned that human warships had up their sleeves, having witnessed it in action aboard HMS Caledonia in the aftermath of the battles at Capitol Station and the planet Garden.

“Yes, that’s right,” Yefrig agreed. “We’ll never be as stealthy as a human destroyer, not without that special surface material they use, but that trick alone has made us much quieter, and it’s just one of several we…” he cleared his throat “’learned’ from them.”

Regaari knew where the hesitation came from. Pride was one of the great traits of the One-Fangs, and Gaoians were a naturally proud people anyway. The unspoken subtext to the word ’learned’ there had been ’we could have thought it up, of course, but we were doing things differently’.

He couldn’t quite resist the way his ears wanted to flick, just for a second and by millimeters, into a Gaori ’I-told-you-so’. Fortunately, Yefrig either failed to notice or else showed impressive restraint and elected not to react. Whichever it might be, Regaari mentally chastised himself—while antagonizing the *Racing Thunder*’s shipfather was not completely out of the question if there was something to be gained from it, right now there was not. To the contrary, he needed to be in Yefrig’s good graces.

He could sympathize with Yefrig’s mild chagrin, however. Humans had been figuring out steam power at around about the time that Gaoians had perfected quantum computing, and it was natural to feel off-balance when a species with a technology-lag like that turned out to know your own business better than you did. It was almost like seeing a Father receive a lecture from a precocious initiate who was completely and demonstrably in the right: There was no course of action the Father could take that didn’t leave at least a few hairs rubbed the wrong way, and a lingering feeling of having lost face.

Besides, mostly their advantages came from… tricks. From using things in previously unconsidered or unorthodox ways. There was nothing special about the idea of coherent emission as opposed to omnidirectional radiation—indeed, it was actually the less effective way to get rid of waste heat—but the idea to use it to minimize detection in combat should have been obvious.

Human tricks were like that: Irritatingly obvious, in hindsight.

Still. Sometimes, the Gaoians got to flex their muscles and the Whitecrest answer to an EV-MASS was one of those occasions.

Just like the EV-MASS, the Suit was an unpowered spacesuit that provided pressure for the wearer mechanically rather than through an internal atmosphere. And like the Humans’ suit, the wearer needed to be exceptionally tough, well-conditioned, and strong. The design rationales were sound and there was no reason to reinvent the wheel, as Great Mother Nitae would have said, so Whitecrest decided to target the design for high-quality recruits who had completed a military Clan’s most intensive training: recruits like Regaari and his Brothers, who easily met the requirements.

As did Daar in fact, but he wasn’t going to be a full-time member of HEAT. Stainless had other plans for the massive brute and Regaari was not yet privy to them. A shame, really. With Daar’s incredible body and with advanced Gaoian technology…

But…no. Daar was far too big and noticeable to fill the same role as the Whitecrest Brothers. He would be much more like the Human Defenders in function—in fact, that role was what he was being trained for, and what aligned with his existing skills—but a Gaoian was not a Human and not even a singular specimen like Daar perfectly compared. He was strong and fast and tough as an old Keeda tale, but the Humans of HEAT were tougher still and had better endurance, amongst other advantages. What Daar’s role would be, Stainless wasn’t telling, but Daar was actually excited by the prospects and that was enough for Regaari.

That meant the Suits were designed more with Regaari and his Brothers in mind. They represented something much closer to the Gaoian mean and that made the suit good for lean and small operatives as well as Stoneback brutes. And since Human males tended to be hugely robust and heavily muscled compared to Gaoians (Brothers like Daar aside), a copycat design of the EV-MASS was untenable, so Whitecrest and One-Fang kept the premise of the suits themselves but reworked every other aspect of the design. The result was significantly lighter, a result driven by different priorities (speed over safety, because speed is safety) and vastly more advanced materials. The Suit was barely heavier than an ordinary security or military shield harness, in fact, but the improvements it packed in were impressive.

First, they had borrowed some armor concepts from the Humans and developed a reactive material that hardened into a rigid shell when struck, thereby dispersing the energy of a kinetic pulse hit across the whole body. They had tested the Suit by having Righteous hit it as hard as he could with a softball bat, and the testing dummy had recorded no significant injury despite being smashed across the room by a blow that had bent and broken the alloy bat.

Then the Human Brothers got competitive and had started to really abuse the dummy, attempting to inflict maximum damage. They tried weapons, combative techniques, tossing it off the water tower, all sorts of things. Righteous looked like he was going to win the impromptu competition but a full-strength, loudly thudding straight punch from Warhorse had definitively knocked him into second place.

Righteous had given his friend a complex look, then crossed the room to examine the way that the dummy had actually become wedged in the drywall. “…You’ve been holding back on me, bro. Damn.”

Warhorse’s face had gone crimson and he had grumbled incoherently for a bit, but whether he’d been holding back or not turned out to be irrelevant: The dummy had survived it all with nothing worse than perhaps a simulated cracked rib.

With kinetic pulse weaponry taken care of, the shields had been re-tuned to deal with high-velocity projectiles like bullets and shrapnel. Rather than put up a single strong shield which tried to stop the hit outright or burn out in the attempt, the Suits instead put up a nested quadruple layer of weaker shields that robbed incoming projectiles of their momentum and deflected them rather than stopping them outright.

It wasn’t perfect. .50 cal punched right through the shields, as did the longer-barreled marksman version of the GR-1d used by Murray and Blaczynski. But as Rebar had pointed out, there was no such thing as a perfect defense and even the HEAT Operators obeyed the general rule that the best armor was not getting shot in the first place. The Gaoian Suits were providing a lot of protection for a fraction of the weight of an EV-MASS, and that was the important part.

Besides: when it came to not getting shot in the first place, the Gaoian Suit arguably had EV-MASS beat. The lightweight construction left the wearer free to benefit from his natural agility and nimble speed, but even better was the camouflage. Gaoian technology had permitted them to coat the entire Suit in a layer of context-mimicking pigment nanites that could closely imitate the pattern of their surroundings. This was supplemented by a metamaterial sheath that bent and blurred light through the edges of the Suit, fading and breaking up its silhouette. The system took a second or so to perfectly adjust to its surroundings, but a motionless Whitecrest could stand next to a wall and reasonably expect to go unnoticed.

They were absolutely perfect for the infiltration, scouting and spotting that were the Gaoians’ roles on a HEAT unit, and a fully functioning spacesuit capable of the same exo-atmospheric drops and EVA as an EV-MASS.

Different species called for different approaches. A lot of work had gone into making those approaches complement and synergize with one another.

And then, intriguingly, their first real mission wasn’t going to involve the human side of the team at all. This had prompted Regaari to quote one of his favorite human movies: ’Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.’

He ran an eye over the information that Shipfather Yefrig was surveying. It was less arcane and impenetrable than he’d feared—the One-Fang Father was almost certainly getting more out of it than Regaari would be, but clarity and brevity of communication was essential on any warship and he knew enough about piloting and navigation to read the basics of what Yefrig was seeing.

“We’re doing well,” he observed.

“We’ll continue to do well,” Yefrig replied. He indicated the formation of Guvnurag ships up ahead of them. “We’re using their ALV drive wake to hide ours. Our emissions are all being aimed away from them, and at a distance of a tenth of a light-year they would need to stop and take some very careful measurements indeed to spot our albedo.”

“I wasn’t expecting that ship to have such a heavy guard…” Regaari mused. Three Guvnurag Ganwundurag-class escorts was quite a lot of firepower, but Yefrig didn’t seem to be concerned.

“This ship could tear all three of them to pieces in the first strike,” he promised. “Disabling them Human-style should be no more difficult.”

“Good. Admiral Knight was quite clear on the subject of casualties.”

Yefrig duck-nodded solemnly. The One-Fangs were under pressure to prove themselves just as much as the Whitecrests on this operation, if not more so. And while neither Clan was inclined toward needlessly violencing civilians, the Humans were absolutely dead-set against it and had been very clear indeed on what consequences would descend in the event of a needless slaughter.

The laws they imposed on what was and was not permitted spoke of alarming paranoia on their part…paranoia of the equally alarming darkness that Regaari had seen lurking in their history. They were scared of themselves, and that should not have been a comforting thought.

Then there was electronic warfare. Human warships were laden with “weapons” that existed to disable and blind an enemy ship rather than damage it, and it was hard sometimes to tell which rationale lay behind that doctrine—the desire to avoid unnecessary enemy casualties, or the desire to ensure that the foe could not meaningfully fight back and could be dismembered without risk.

Both, hopefully. Depending on contextual ethical considerations too situational, protean and intuitive to be easily defined from a Gaoian perspective. Regaari made a mental note to request an anthropological study on human moral codes. Personal experience was one thing, but the Gao needed to understand the issue more broadly if the two species were to have the kind of special relationship he was trying to engineer.

“I should get my Brothers ready,” he declared. Yefrig duck-nodded by way of agreement and the two of them grasped each other’s’ paws briefly in a mutual gesture that said ‘good luck’ and Regaari ducked through the hatchway out of the bridge.

That was another modification the Brothers of the *Racing Thunder*’s crew had installed after discussing things with the Royal Navy: Regularly-spaced pressure doors in addition to the containment fields already laid across bulkhead passages, built from the same titanium alloy that was enhancing the construction of Armstrong Station. It wasn’t perfect—it couldn’t be, not without a refit. Nor was it without consequence, as the doors slowed well-trained crew movements and the extra mass added to energy requirements, which lowered available power, which increased heat…

It was definitely a tradeoff of safety and survivability versus raw performance of both crew and ship, but the Humans had shown how much that safety could matter. In any case, perhaps it wasn’t truly a concern. The Racing Thunder was easily the fastest and most powerful warship of its kind and was the envy of all the Galactic fleets, Humans included. She was designed with speed and range first and foremost and all other factors secondary. But even with that slight dulling of her edge she was still the keenest blade. The Humans’ ideas enabled new capability and the ability to survive long and brutal fights, so why not?

The crew had rapidly adapted to the new doors and associated damage control procedures, which did much to satisfy Yefrig’s concerns. And besides, if the USS San Diego was any example, with its hugely over-rated reactors and its emphasis on power above all else, the Humans were learning from the Gaoians, too.

Enough. Regaari—Dexter—had a mission to worry about, and more importantly, he had a Suit to don. It was always the Suit and went by no other name. They had no acronym for it because acronyms were a Human enjoyment that Gaoians in general and Regaari in particular did not share. Here, he would allow the Humans no claim. The Suit may have been Human inspired but it was Gaoian designed, Gaoian made, and Gaoian worn. It was theirs.

But the best part was how it was worn. Their system had only two layers versus the Humans’ three. Instead of clunky docking collars the Suit’s armor and environmental layer split and joined seamlessly down the back and legs. Regaari arrived at his station and simply stepped into the Suit’s back after having dropped his clothing and equipment.

Well. He did need to slick his fur down in key places to avoid chafing and sadly, Gaoian anatomy did not allow for certain…*conveniences*…granted to his Human teammates. That meant he had to insert an exquisitely uncomfortable catheter instead of rely on a custom-made receptacle, but he’d discreetly handled that bit before his meeting with Yefrig. Fortunately, neither of the waste tubes remained bothersome for long.

Standing alongside for educational purposes was Petty Officer Dean Hargreaves, one of Warhorse’s suit techs. He watched the much quicker and far less onerous donning process, and could only shake his head enviously at the relative ease compared to EV-MASS.

“That looks nice and easy, ‘Dex.”

[“I am certainly not complaining!”] Regaari preened a bit in Gaori for his tech’s benefit, since implants were forbidden and they didn’t have a translator handy. [“Even if I could wear an] EV-MASS [I’d prefer something like this. The human suit is too much of a blunt instrument, Gaoians are built to hit fast, hit hard—”]

[“Hit once,”] Hargreaves finished with a chuckle. He’d come along on this educational jaunt in part because he was the most fluent in Gaori among the SOR’s technicians, even if he did have the unique Human “accent”. The tech chittered along as he reached between Regaari’s legs to connect the waste tubes and nestle things comfortably into place.

[“And if you can, avoid detection as—!”]

Regaari completed the thought just as his tech cinched the tubes into their positions, which caused Regaari to hold his breath and wince, cringing at the cold petroleum jelly and desperately remembering to trust his tech. Alas, that was the nature of it and not all indignities could be avoided. Full-service environment suits of any kind were like that the Galaxy over.

Hargreaves caught the tech’s eyes and they shared a resigned moment of common misery.

[“Did you ever think you’d be fondling another male’s] bollocks [for a living?”] Hargreaves asked sympathetically. The tech chittered resignedly while Regaari shot Hargreaves an annoyed look.

[“Do not belittle him. Maintaining these Suits is important and worthy work!”] As uncomfortable as such things were for Warhorse and Regaari, their techs weren’t exactly reveling in the experience, either.

[“Oh, I know! Come on, I have to juggle Warhorse! If he wasn’t about the nicest bloke alive I’d swear it was a cruel cosmic joke. Also,”] Hargreaves leaned against the wall and folded his arms with a cheeky grin, [“who are you to talk? Don’t you sleep in his bed when you’re on-call? You do know the story of how he got his nickname, yes?”]

Regaari combined a sigh with a chitter as his tech cinched a flat cooling tube around his waist. [“Better than you do I wager. But it’s not been a problem. Close contact doesn’t bother us, we prefer it anyway. We’re not as hung up about that as your kind apparently are. And in any case, space is limited until the fourth floor is complete, you know this. Which, I’ll note, hasn’t begun construction. It makes me wonder what games your bureaucrats are playing…”]

[“It’s called] ’Silly buggers’, mate.”

It had taken Regaari some time to unravel the essential cultural differences between the Americans and the British, and there were still a few knots in there where they thought alike but used quite different terminology to describe the same concept. For example: “buggered” as opposed to “fucked in the ass”. Either way, the imagery was truthful enough to make Regaari chitter.

[“Please don’t give Warhorse any ideas, I’d prefer to survive his mornings intact!”]

Hargreaves laughed while the tech swiveled his ears in a scandalized manner, but he said nothing; interspecies humor was always tricky. Instead he tucked Regaari’s tail between his legs and up towards the front, greased things liberally, stood up and then ran his paw down Regaari’s spine and legs to slick down the fur with the last of the petroleum jelly.

Petroleum jelly. The humans had discovered it accidentally while drilling for oil and over many years the heavy, greasy byproduct had accumulated a litany of odd and unexpected uses. It clung powerfully to fur and wouldn’t wash out easily, but it also didn’t bind or clump and nothing seemed to work as well. It was hypoallergenic, too. After all, It wouldn’t do to have Regaari’s fur trapped in the Suit’s seal, itching and inflaming everything. One last inspection and the tech pronounced the suit ready for sealing.

He stood back, Regaari held himself in the neutral position with arms up and feet planted wide, and the Button was pressed. The undersuit zipped itself up at the nanoscopic level, joining and weaving itself into a single molecularly perfect garment. There were absolutely no visible seams anywhere to be found because in a practical sense there were none.

Once the suit was sealed the expanding innermost layer activated and firmly squeezed down. The cooling system powered up, and those same motile nanites which sealed the suit performed minute self-adjustments across Regaari’s lean, muscular torso. This part was especially welcome given the HEAT’s arduous training and the gradual and continuous improvements across his body. It lessened tech time for adjustments, too. An EV-MASS technician was constantly fine-tuning the dimensions of their operator’s suit by millimeters, whereas Regaari’s Suit could handle those adjustments itself.

Within a few seconds the Suit was essentially a part of him. It felt less like he was wearing it than like his fur had grown thicker and heavier.

None of that was lost on Hargreaves. “Wish we had some of this tech. That nanoseal up the back of the suit would make things a lot easier…” he mused in English.

Regaari sighed as he tugged on his footwear and gloves. [“We can’t share that kind of technology,] Hargreaves, [you know that.”]

He fiddled a bit to seat them comfortably while Hargreaves watched; the rapid-response metamaterial at the clawtips was still a little fiddly, but it did mean that any of the Gaoian HEAT operators could effectively extend their claws through the suit without compromising the seal. The suit automatically coated the claws in an almost molecule-thin barrier and formed a very tight seal just above the quick, and could respond so quickly that it was no worse than extending claws through work gloves.

Regaari got his gloves seated, gave the claws a quick test, then moved onto his footwear while the motile seal closed. Hargreaves looked on wistfully.

“I know, I know… You can’t exactly blame me, though, can you?” Hargreaves trailed off as Regaari’s tech ran final checks and reached for the oversuit. This was much like the EV-MASS in design and execution, though it was also more advanced in material and camouflage. Hargreaves lent a hand and in just a short moment, Regaari was encased in his Suit: just over twenty kilograms of the most advanced combat and hazardous environment protection anywhere in either the Dominion or the Alliance. Many Clans participated in its design and execution, along with some especially eager and envious Human input. The Suit…

…It was a marvel.

Like the Humans, the Whitecrest opted for role-specific tactical loadouts, and that meant Regaari had the lightest and least bulky suit. Given that he was also one of their fittest specimens, that made him (maybe next to Daar) about the deadliest Gaoian alive.

Heady stuff, but mundane matters demanded Dexter’s attention. He helped the rest of his team into their suits as best as he could, and taking a healthy sniff of Human-style paranoia, checked, re-checked, re-rechecked, and had Hargreaves help verify all was ready and proper.

Thurrsto was the last to shoulder his heavy medical pack. He really was impressively big for a Gaoian and could almost be mistaken for a strong Ironclaw laborer, were it not for his huge crest and superior fur. He was their medic and a close friend with Baseball…which lead to his callsign.

[“Ready,] Carebear?” The rest of the team chittered amusedly.

Thurrsto grumbled, [“I hate that callsign…”]

[“I am named after a psychotic serial killer so you will understand if my sympathies are short.”]

Thurrsto grumbled but held his peace. Regaari flicked his ears in mild sympathy and touched noses to reassure his medic, which helped instantly. Gaoians weren’t exactly like Humans; leadership needed to show affection and that was something Regaari was keenly aware of. He went to each of his claw-mates in turn, exchanged little confidences…and they were ready. As one they padded towards their staging area while Regaari placed a radio call.

[“SHIPFATHER, DEXTER. We are ready and at your pleasure.”]

[“Thank you, DEXTER. We go shortly.”]

Regaari made a satisfied duck-nod and settled back to wait as the techs and Hargreaves cleared the deck.

Something told him he wouldn’t be waiting long.

Date Point: 12y1w4d AV
HMS Caledonia, Interstellar Space, Confederacy Territory

Daar

The worstest part was the waiting. And the scheming. And the politics of both.

Daar had many skills and very deep training in the combat arts, even if he hadn’t had too much operational practice in their use. The Whitecrest Brothers had much more experience, ‘cuz most situations nowadays needed a quiet, subtle touch. Sure, a Stoneback Claw (or even a full Fang!) could be sneaky and stuff…but that’s kinda silly and a waste of ability.

The result wasn’t good for the future; the Fangs weren’t getting much combat experience, and maintaining a heavyweight response option for the Gao was becoming harder to justify. And what’s worse, Daar had the sniff of the situation. He knew things were gonna change and change for the worse, ‘cuz the Humans had obviously found themselves a great big Keeda of an enemy out there. One they’d been very quiet about, and one they hadn’t revealed to him.

And one that would turn its eyes on the Gao, eventually. If it hadn’t already. The arrival of the Humans set the Galaxy on edge and caused much yipping and drama, but secretly, the Champions were relieved. Before the Humans showed up the Galaxy was afraid of the big, bad Gaoians, the only sapient predators known to the Dominion besides the Hunters. The response to the Humans gave the Gao much breathing room, and they took advantage.

Not that it was all sweet-herb and mating. With the Human’s arrival the Gaoians panicked a bit too, and much paranoid ear-swivelling had happened both in public and behind closed doors. But then something strange happened: the Humans loved his kind, automatically and unreservedly. The reasons were tricky and something Regaari could prol’ly talk about for days but Daar wasn’t gonna complain. He was even finding himself returning the affection, a little at first, and now unreservedly as well. Humans were strong, friendly, super smart, clever…

And they were reminding the Gaoians that they were all of those things as well. But the rest of the Galaxy was starting to remember too, and once again the politics grew ugly. That left the Champions in a tricky place; how did they tighten their growing friendship with the Humans without panicking the herd-thinkers of the Dominion? Without incurring the ire of the Alliance?

Tricky stuff, all of which Daar really should have been dealing with back home with his Clan.

And yet…

Regaari and Genshi hinted that the ‘Revelation’ would be worth his time. Hinted it in almost begging tones, in fact, and there were times when you just had to trust your Cousins.

He’d looked up this word ‘Revelation’, and had accidentally got halfway through a book by that name squinting in bewilderment the whole time before finally it clicked. If Regaari’s hints were good (and they prol’ly were!) and they had anything to do with this really scary book (and they prol’ly did) then what exactly had the Humans dug up?

The end of the world, most likely. So of course he needed to know, and the politics could go fuck themselves (the first Human phrase he’d learned!). That just left the teeny little question of how he could stay in Stainless’ good graces.

Stainless practised leadership in a manner completely different to the Gaoian mode. Where a Gaoian leader was the first one to get covered in mud, the one to wrestle the biggest Naxas, and the first one to buy the Talamay when they got back to the workhouse, Stainless was…

He was an Officer. Aloof. Calculating. Clearly fond of his men and happy to unwind around them sometimes, but not often and even then only just enough. He was a political creature in a direct, forthright sort of way and he posed a potential solution to something that had been itching at Daar’s hackles for a while.

So, obviously, he should just gut the problem and lay it out to share with Stainless. And it was something to do while they waited. Stainless was pacing the *Caledonia*’s deck at just as much of a loose end as Daar himself, wearing the fundaments of an EV-MASS without the mission load. Daar had his Suit on too. He wasn’t fully conditioned to it yet which was part of why he was only on ‘second string’ today, but the other part…Heh. Time to show balls.

“We should talk about my assault Fangs, Stainless. I kinda suspect you’re gonna need ‘em.”

Stainless paused mid-pace, which put an end to the heavy vibrations in the deck.

“Hmm?”

Stainless had an infuriating habit of doing that—he would have heard the first time, he just wanted Daar to double down. Oh well.

“SOR is very small. Clan Stoneback has nearly a thousand Brothers trained to my level. You’re preparing for something big and that’s really obvious. How are you gonna fight it?”

Stainless gave him that trademarked long, cool blue stare. “To your level, you say? An’ here I thought you were fookin’ unique.”

‘I’m the most biggest and strongest and all that but that don’t always mean I’m the best. Brother Tyal’s got more deployed combat experience than me. We’ve got a really young up-comer who’ll prol’ly be a better fighter than me, too. Eventually, heh.”

“Why the sudden attack of modesty, Tigger?”

“It ain’t modesty, it’s honesty.” Daar paused. “Stainless, what do you think a Champion is for?”

“About the same thing a champion was for back in the day on Earth. They stood for and represented their faction.”

Daar stood up and duck-nodded. “That’s pretty close. My purpose is to advance the interests of Stoneback, and that generally means advancing the interests of the Gao. And now? I think it also means advancing Human interests, too. You’ve got a pretty big manpower gap here and I think we can solve a problem for both of us.”

Stainless gave it some thought. “…Actually, aye. Something I’ve been meaning to raise when the chance came up.” He strolled over and tugged a tablet from his belt.

The data tablet was one of those universal, durable pieces of technology like the wheel, blast furnaces and electricity‚ refined upon, expanded, improved, but somehow every attempt to do something different with them such as high-tech scrolls with flexible flimsy-screens, or volumetric gesture-based holographic GUIs had failed.

When it came down to it, something rigid that could be held in one hand and worked on with the other was too practical to be replaced. Just like a wheel without spokes or a purely mechanical computer were possible but never more than a gimmick.

In the twelve years since First Contact however, human computing technology had continued to broadly obey something they called ‘Moore’s Law’. Their computers were advancing very, very quickly, so quickly that the “techie” Clans were already forming strong relationships with Human technology companies.

“This is Warhorse’s latest evaluation of you,” he said bluntly. “An’ typical bloody ‘Horse he’s bein’ all nice and stuff… but.”

He handed it over. Daar’s ears began to droop inside the first three lines, and he was downright crestfallen by the end of the fourth paragraph.

As Stainless had said the report was…nice. More than fair, ‘specially about Daar’s speed and strength! But it was also unflinchingly accurate. In particular, Warhorse spared no words when he talked about Daar’s mediocre performance on the assault course or while playing Gravball. Neither were bad by any objective standard—quite good, from what everyone said—but even considering his late start with HEAT and the resulting training gap, his freespace agility just wasn’t up to snuff. It came down to mobility and Daar’s sheer speedy bigness combined with his non-Human kinesthetics, well. He had a lot of catching up to do.

Daar already knew all of that and he’d been training ‘Back-hard to improve. But seeing his weaknesses laid bare, in writing from a Friend…though he could see some dark humor in it and chittered ruefully, “So basically, I’m too big and strong for HEAT?”

He awarded himself several points when Stainless actually half-laughed, an upward tic to every part of his face that surprisingly didn’t result in it breaking down the middle, and a nasal exhalation that Regaari knew to be one of the subtler ways that humans showed amusement.

“Aye, that’s about the shape of it,” he agreed with a twinkle in his eye. “After a fashion. Zero-G mobility in’t really your forte.”

Embarrassing flashbacks of doggy-paddling awkwardly in the middle of the gravball arena and getting so turned around in zero-G that he could only twist and flail made Daar wince.

‘In my defense, me and my kind are meant for the open ground. Also Rebar’s definitely bigger and stronger than me. So is the Beef Trio, by a lot. They all do fine…”

“Aye, but they’re monkeys.” Powell observed. “All that size and strength and there’s still a lot left that Evolution intended for muckin’ around up trees. You tend to slam into things. Now to be fair so do the Whitecrest Brothers, and you’ve been improving, but they’ve set a high bar and you’re running out of time. And they ain’t big enough to crash right through a wall.”

Daar sigh-chittered. “They can bounce off stuff and keep moving, yeah. An’ they’re light enough that Rebar and the Trio can just toss ‘em wherever.”

“Right. So, you know where I’m goin’ with this.”

“JETS.”

“Aye. And that’s got me thinkin’, why are we havin this discussion again?”

Daar paused and gathered his thoughts. “Well…I got four Fangs, two hundred ‘Backs each. All of ‘em are good. Really good. But what they aren’t is used that much. Most problems the Gao deal with, they’re little things these days. Subtle things. It ain’t often ‘ya gotta raid a Clan, disembowel every Brother inside, steal the cubs and return ‘em to the Females.”

Other Humans might have looked shocked at that, but Stainless just nodded thoughtfully. “So. You need to find a new role.”

“Sorta? We need to keep relevant, but it ain’t just ‘bout my Clan, boss. I’m pretty sure we both need what my Fangs can do. I gotta preserve that if I can, ‘cuz there are rumblings from Grandfather Garl’s staff about cutting our Fangs down to two! Can you believe that?”

“All too fookin’ easily,” Powell muttered darkly.

“Right? Anyhoo, there ain’t any other Clan positioned to do what we do so we can’t draw down the Fangs. The thing is? I think we can train ‘em up and give both our peoples a real spaceborne option with mass, one that ain’t gonna get a bunch o’ Brothers killed, y’know? Something that could bowl a Hunter swarm over and kill it! Or, y’know, whatever else.”

Stainless put on his best thinky-look. “That’s why you insisted on the HEAT training.”

Daar nodded. “Yup.”

“And the Suit.”

Daar grumbled happily.

“I take it your plan is to train your Fangs, then?”

“Well…” Daar fidgeted, “It was at first. But nowadays the Females don’t much like a Clan if they see that Clan as warmongers. Not even us, and you know how far back Stoneback and the Females go. I gotta worry ‘bout what it’ll look like if I take the Fangs out for maneuver.”

“I thought protecting the Females was Stoneback.”

“And providing for them, too. They like that part a whole lot more, ‘cuz things are easy and people forget the bad times, y’know?”

“Hmm.” Powell turned and paced away a few steps with his fingers on his chin, staring thoughtfully at the deck a few inches in front of him. “…you need a PR campaign.”

“Yeah, I need both of that at once. That’s why the JETS mission seems so good! I also gotta learn how to to be a ‘spaceman’ so I can get the Fangs ready. But, well…I can’t do all o’ that at once.”

“Then how can your Clan?” Powell asked. “Aren’t you supposed to embody it?”

“That don’t mean I can be in two places at once, boss.” He chittered low then flicked his ears, “I bet even you can’t do that.”

“Not easily,” Powell deadpanned. “But that’s my point. Maybe you’re trying to play with two balls at once here, and thus not really playing with either.”

“I always managed before…” Daar waggled his ears, which earned him an annoyed look from Stainless. “But I think I have a solution! I just, uh, need you to agree? Yeah.”

“Agree to what, exactly?”

“So I’m gonna go play in the dirt with your JETS Brothers, yeah? That sounds fun, and it’d be useful for me and the Clan, too. That’s why I agreed! Meanwhile I got an up-and-coming young ‘Back who’s prol’ly Brother material and Tyal’s really smart and skilled, too. I guess, if I can’t be a cool space fighter, maybe…”

“And what would stop ‘im from strugglin’ in the same way you have?”

“Well, the young ‘Back? He’s…imagine if, like, me and Regaari could mate and have a cub.”

Powell blinked and inclined his head as he processed that mental image. “…I presume you mean he’s got the best qualities of both?”

“Yeah! He’s strong like any good ‘Back and he’s rangy and quick like Regaari. He ain’t hulky and muscular like me but like you said, that ain’t necessarily helpin’ in this case.”

“We’re always lookin’ for good men. But that’s just one Brother. How does he solve your bigger problem?”

“A lotta my ‘Backs are closer to him than they are to me, body-wise. We’re not all the same, we breed for strength and work capacity an’ that don’t always mean males like me.” Daar tilted his head for a moment, “Well, actually, both of ‘em would be good. You may not have much use for big ‘Backs like me or Tyal, but Gao does. We need an independent spaceborne operator corps and we’ll need heavyweights there just like you have with the Trio, just…Gaoian style. More focus on speed, yeah? We need something by Gaoians and for Gaoians, ‘else we’ll be useless to you. That’s what I’m trying to do, and I’m asking for help.”

“Hmm.” Powell considered some more, then turned around with an apologetic look on his usually inscrutable face. “Hard fact is, you’re askin’ for summat I can’t give: I don’t have the authority. I can bring your Brothers in, give ‘em HEAT or JETS training, give ‘em a tour—an’ fook knows it’ll be easier for ‘em to get out after than for the Lads—but if you’re askin’ for any more than that, then you’re askin’ for resources that’re just too precious to spare. For now.”

Daar nodded vigorously. “Yup. I ain’t tryin’ to make ‘em into SOR, I can’t do that yet anyway. All I’m trying to do is, uh, sell the idea? Yeah. I need a couple o ‘Backs to see how it works so they can go back to their Fangs and think about it. What happens after that…we’ll see.”

Powell did a Human thing, then. He understood. “That’s the entire reason you stayed on. You wanted to set an example and direction for your Fangs, and to do that you needed a little Human endorsement to really make it stick.”

Daar betrayed no hint of shame. “Yup.”

Powell’s impressive shoulders heaved up as he produced an amused huff. “Well played.”

Daar “grinned” nonchalantly. “Hey, we both made out good! You’ve got a broader alliance, I’ve got ideas, direction, and prob’ly a better mating pedigree, we’re both gonna be better against whatever it is you won’t tell me about! Plus, I get a badass Suit out of the deal. Winner.”

The intercom chirped and Shipfather Yefrig was patched through from the Racing Thunder. “We’re in position and ready, Stainless. Dexter reports he is in position.”

Powell reached up and keyed the headset he was wearing. “Understood, SHIPFATHER. The SNOWTOPS are clear to go at their discretion.”

Yefrig could be heard chittering loudly over the intercom. “I like that! We shall maneuver and proceed. SHIPFATHER OUT.”

That put a halt on their conversation for now—both Daar and Stainless stood to get their mission loads fitted, just in case things went badly south.

It was a good learning opportunity for the “Cherries” too. Abbot, Irish, Spider and Postal had taken the opportunity to learn shipboard firefighting duty, which was mandatory for any military personnel with any role whatsoever aboard HMS Caledonia, even if the role in question was effectively that of cargo.

Now they were gathered around a rack of monitors at the end of the deployment bay, watching the Whitecrest helmet cams and conversing quietly with one another.

Daar felt like he should have been among them. He was easily the newest person on the team, but the term didn’t actually mean “newcomer” as far as he could tell. It was more a reference to the fact that Costello, Butler, Parata and Newman weren’t yet suit-certified, and hadn’t gone on a real mission yet. Hadn’t ’popped their cherry’ as Firth had put it. Daar was certain it was a euphemism.

They were close: Daar had seen the “before” picture each one of them kept in his room and all four of them were vastly larger than the day they had arrived on Cimbrean. He’d seen them bully through training runs and gravball games in full EV-MASS, and just last week they’d done their first HELLNO jump.

That had rattled Daar’s normally supreme self-confidence; it had taken him decades to grow into his capabilities, years and years of effort, and now here were the humans, already nearly a match for him and it had taken them hardly any time at all. Sure they had Crude, which was clever and sneaky, but even still…

Why was he on standby for this mission? Sometimes Powell’s motives were just impossible to fathom. Either he wasn’t on the team for this one, in which case why was he Suited up and ready to jump in claws-first, or he was in which case why wasn’t he over on the Racing Thunder with Regaari and the Whitecrests? Was he on the HEAT or not?

But…Powell was the Boss, and he’d shown plenty of times that he was Boss for a reason. So the only thing to do was to trust him, sit back, and wait.

And itch.

Date Point: 12y1w4d AV
Warundug-class light transport ship ’Orverendeg’, Interstellar Space, Confederacy Territory

Regaari

The boarding launch. Like a shuttle without the shuttle, really: just a warp engine, plenty of power cells. And handholds. And eerie silence.

Nothing quite drove home the sheer scale of space quite like seeing a whole hundred-meter starship dwindle behind them into invisibility and leave them utterly alone with nothing to see, not even one another. Their suits were almost too effective at camouflage in that regard: when Regaari looked at his own paw, he felt a disconcerting sense of disembodiment.

Piloting the launch fell to Deygun, and from what Regaari knew of the task it was engineered simplicity. The launch was flinging itself across light-days of distorted spacetime in the carefully shaped sheath of its own warp field, angled so as to be undetectable from in front. To hit any target at such distances was a feat of precision navigation far beyond any living creature.

So, the simple “point and click” interface on the Launch’s nose was the grossly oversimplified front-end for a starship-grade navigation computer so accurate that it could hit a moving two-hundred-meter target from a distance of billions of kilometers.

The warp hop itself betrayed no sign of anything happening. No flare of light, no sense of lurching motion. The Racing Thunder simply vanished astern and Regaari was left to count his own breaths. He was counting the twenty-third when their quarry popped into existence up ahead.

To give the Guvnurag their due, the formation was a sensible one. The three light escorts were closing off the angles of approach quite well considering that three ships could only have a two-dimensional formation rather than a three-dimensional one. But, that formation was centered squarely on the transport ship.

They weren’t counting on a Starfire-class strike ship, though. They especially weren’t counting on the Racing Thunder, which could do things that other *Starfire*s could not.

The second it had telemetry from the Launch to guide it, the Racing Thunder was able to land with pin-point accuracy, and Regaari knew that the human-made technology installed along her flanks and belly would already be strobing fiercely across the escort ships. There was nothing to see—the radiations involved were all in the wrong spectra for Gaoian eyes—but the consequences were immediately obvious. All three ships listed and began to drift out of alignment as their navigation sensors failed. Seconds later they vanished as the automatic failsafes shut down their warp drives and they fell out of the shared bubble of weird space. It was doubtful whether they would even have had time to register what had attacked them.

The Launch rocked gently as its field edge merged with the *Orverendeg*’s, then shut down. They were now inside the transport ship’s warp field and even if the ship dropped back to sublight speeds they would stay with it.

The last pounce to her hull was trivial. The forcefield “tractor beam” generator on the Launch’s butt stuck it securely to the hull, and the Brothers made short work of effecting an ingress with fusion blades and a containment field emitter, just as the humans had done on Capitol Station.

They’d kept their Whitecrest combat cant for this, sort of. It had been expanded with some of the human vocabulary and terminology. “SPLINTER, on point.”

Shim wriggled in through the hole, and his report was terse yet revealing and welcome.

”Mother’s not looking.”

Regaari followed him in. ”Cubs hide away, play Seek and Sniff.”

He paired off with Thurrsto, activated the sticky-grippy motile nanites on his Suit’s hands and feet and sprang first up the wall then along the ceiling, sticking to the surface with ease. It was the work of seconds to open up the ventilation system and let Shim and Ergaan squirm inside.

Move fast and along different vectors, that was the key. Deygun and Faarek took the under-floor maintenance conduits, wriggling like rats into a space that Guvnurag would have looked on as unusably tiny.

Regaari and Thurrsto took the actual open deck. They had to—Thurrsto’s pack was too bulky for wriggling through tight spaces, and Regaari needed to be able to move in any direction at a moment’s notice.

They scampered four-pawed down the central access corridor, then glanced knowingly at each other at the sound of heavy gallumphing feet coming their way. Thurrsto crouched down in a nook at hip-height on a Gaoian, and Regaari sprang up the wall to hide among the conduits in the ceiling. A motionless second later and Regaari could barely tell that Thurrsto was there, despite knowing exactly where to look for him.

The footfalls turned out to be four Guvnurag marines.

Guvnurag could be deceptive. They weren’t a naturally violent species by anybody’s reckoning, and their shy—even skittish—nature went a long way to denaturing their sheer size. As did their surprising fragility. A human could literally kill them with a single well-aimed punch, and a determined Gaoian wouldn’t have had a much more difficult time of it. It was easy to think of them as harmless shambling mounds of fur and caution.

But they were arguably the most technologically advanced species in the galaxy, and painstakingly thoughtful. They knew their own weaknesses and had had plenty of time to get used to the existence of both humans and Gaoians, and even longer to think about the Hunters.

Which meant that a Guvnurag outfitted for violence made full use of the prodigious real estate available on his massive frame. They were absolutely layered in redundant forcefields, a fighting vehicle’s worth, and the battle yokes high on their shoulders behind those silly, droopy-eared be-tentacled heads of theirs were turreted with twin heavy pulse guns that would give even an ordinary human or a Red Hunter pause for thought.

Those guns tracked the corridor cautiously, wired to track their operator’s eye movements and shoot whatever they looked at, but Regaari and Thurrsto both had concealment and camouflage working for them: the Guvnurag marines plainly saw nothing alarming and the four of them bustled efficiently toward the hull breach.

Another advantage of Gaoian tech—privacy field generators in the mask. When Regaari muttered an order, he did so in absolute certainty that the only people who would hear it were his Brothers.

“Mother says Cubs play nice…”

Thurrsto was utterly still, even as one of the Guvnurag paused right next to him. “…Yes, Mother…”

Regaari even held his breath. Guvnurag had sensitive eyes, especially when it came to small changes in hue and shade. The last thing he needed now was to be given away by some tiny shift in the pattern of his active camo.

He wasn’t. The search team passed below him and past Thurrsto without slowing or giving any sign of alarm, and both Whitecrests flowed from their hiding places and deeper into the belly of the ship.

Date Point: 12y1w4d AV
HMS Caledonia, Interstellar Space, Confederacy Territory

Lieutenant Anthony Costello

Newman was the first to speak. “…Fuck a duck.”

Costello realized he was actually sweating, and mopped it from his brow. “Those suits work just fine,” he commented, projecting rather more composure than he felt. DEXTER and CAREBEAR must both have had absolute ice water flowing in their veins to stay still and calm through that near-miss.

“Aye.” Powell had been watching in too, and drummed his fingers thoughtfully against his folded arm. “Bloody good work by Dexter, too.”

Costello nodded. They’d all been able to see Thurrsto’s pulse climbing up as the response party neared him. Regaari’s five short words had slowed it right down again. It was an inspiring demonstration of strong leadership in action. Thurrsto was good, but even good men could break and Regaari had shored his Brother up. Maybe unnecessarily, maybe not, but the point was he hadn’t left Thurrsto alone in a tight spot.

He just wished there was some wood available to knock on. The Gaoians weren’t done yet.

Date Point: 12y1w4d AV
Warundug-class light transport ship ’Orverendeg’, Interstellar Space, Confederacy Territory

Regaari

”Found the FOOTBALL. It’s guarded.”

Regaari paused and checked the area for Guvnurag before replying. “Acknowledged. Get ready to play Pounce.”

They didn’t have an evasive, cunning little tricksy option this time. The Confederacy troopers guarding the football wouldn’t be leaving it to check on any silly distraction they might set up. They could turn out the lights, fuck with the gravity, it wouldn’t matter: Those marines just had to go down hard.

Fortunately, they’d picked up a few things from the humans there.

They quickly got sorted out on where the coveted cargo was being held, and within a minute every one of his Brothers had called in to report that they were in position and set. Two in the vents above the cargo bay, two crawling under its floors…

…And Regaari and Thurrsto, hanging their tails out in the open to get shot. Oh well.

He glanced at Thurrsto, the two of them duck-nodded together, and Regaari gave the word.

“Cubs play Pounce.”

Momentum. Strike first, strike hard, strike once. Several things happened at once.

The first was that Ergaan dropped a flashbang out of the ventilation duct.

Flashbangs were definitely a human invention, and like all human inventions they blended low technology with unquestionable effect. The Guvnurag troopers had already turned their eyes up and begun to turn to face the squeaking threat in the ceiling when the cylindrical device landed among them.

Even if they’d known how to deal with it, it was far too late for them.

From Regaari’s perspective, even with the combined protection of the Suit and a wall the explosion and flash of light were both almost overpowering, and Guvnurag had very sensitive eyes.

There were pained bass shrieks from inside the cargo bay and all six Brothers burst from their hiding places at once, flitting into the sparse cover offered by the few spare parts and supplies the ship was carrying.

They had stick-n-sleep patches, but those were no use at all so long as the Guvnurag marines had their shields up and when it came to bringing down shields nothing was a match for rapid-fire.

Faarek got unlucky—one of the Guvnurag was flailing and firing wildly in his blinded way, but a lucky hit caught the unlucky Whitecrest full in the chest.

In any other situation, that would have been curtains for him. Heavy kinetic pulse was enough to badly maul an unprotected human and would have broken an unprotected Faarek in half, no trouble. Instead his Suit went rigid and he went tumbling across the bay before standing back up, groggy and shaking his head but very much alive.

Regaari snarled and took down the offending Guvnurag hard, raking his shields with a hail of the special shieldbreaker flechette rounds that they’d developed to work with the human weapons—each one exploded into metal dust on hitting a forcefield, forcing the shield generator to handle not a concentrated impact but a diffuse one. The energy delivered was identical, but it added appreciably to the heat load thus generated, thus overwhelming the emitter sooner. The powdery puff was much less dangerous to the person under the shield, but in this case that suited their needs perfectly.

Yet another advantage projectile-based weapons had over kinetic pulse: they were so versatile!

The Guvnurag’s shield dropped and Deygun was there in a flash, daring to slide under the spinning, blinded alien and slap two stick-n-sleep patch on, one with each hand.

In seconds, all five of the alien soldiers had been stripped of their shields, slapped with the sedative patches and the Gaoians had spun away into the shadows to hold very, very still. They needn’t have bothered—the patches were very well-designed, and the last of the Guvnurag folded to the deck with his chromatophores wavering an uncertain medley of blues and greens.

Faarek sagged as well, cursing softly in English which was frankly a far better language for cursing than Gaori. “Fuck all the… [That won’t even scar], dammit!”

“Shield that door.” Regaari ordered, as Thurrsto pounced across the room to check on their hurt Brother.

Shieldsticks were still being iterated upon, and the current generation had been given the ability to combine their strength and erect a barrier that was both larger and sturdier than the default. Six of them together was a hefty fortification by anybody’s standards and it was set up not a moment too soon, as a whole herd of Guvnurag came to the response. They were forced into cover by a disciplined volley of suppressing fire while Ergaan and Deygun unpacked the jump array off Thurrsto’s back.

Here, gratifyingly, the Gaoians had succeeded in making the humans slap their foreheads for a change. The first-generation human Array was designed to send, and that involved huge amounts of power. But of course the receiving end of a wormhole needed far less juice… so why not just carry enough to be a receiver, and send over the necessary power cells from the support ship?

The Defenders had looked about ready to go drown themselves after Ergaan had asked that one.

In the end, they’d concluded that because the humans could carry the weight to start sending straight away, they’d keep doing it but the idea had led to the creation of an Array lightweight enough to be carried by a Gaoian who wasn’t Daar.

It was much faster to set up, too. Deygun just had to undo two catches and throw it into a clear space in the middle of the room, and it snapped out into a two-meter sided cube in mid-air. Didn’t even matter which way up it landed.

The Guvnurag made a push on the barricaded doorway and were repulsed by a storm of accurate rapid-fire and another flashbang just as the Array fired and delivered a stack of charged power boxes ready for the send. Thurrsto put his back into unloading them alongside Deygun, who snapped their power leads into the magnetic sockets that were waiting for them. It was the work of seconds to have the Array charged and ready to send. Ergaan loaded the target into it and…

Regaari checked around him. “SOUTHPAW, SPLINTER, through the array.”

That was the injured Faarek, and Shim who hadn’t quite prepared for the flashbang well enough and was suffering from its effects himself. Both fell neatly back inside the array cage and were gone in a flash.

Mission accomplished, target extracted. Now came the tricky part—getting everybody else out.

The Array was good for a second send, but that involved abandoning the door. That meant not only falling back on enfilade, but also a vulnerable pause while standing in the array itself where they couldn’t even lay down suppressing fire or else they’d risk filling the inside of their own support ship with bullets when they arrived.

For such circumstances, every remotely military-minded species in the galaxy had developed the same tool: the smoke grenade.

Here, the Whitecrests had butted heads with the humans to a degree. The SOR favored their own M18, whereas Regaari had stuck by a Whitecrest-designed pellet bomb. There were advantages to both: the human grenade produced a far larger and longer-lasting cloud, but the Gaoian one was opaque across a much broader swathe of the EM band thanks to some cunning (and classified) inert nanoparticles in the smoke.

Daar had delivered the solution with his usual swagger: why not both? Stoneback had something similar to the Whitecrest pellet bomb in their inventory anyway, except bigger. Its smoke had similar (also classified) capabilities, and would also also linger and cling irritatingly to fur and eyes.

Which of course wasn’t a problem inside the Suit. Regaari produced it, weighed it thoughtfully, then pulled the safety out and bowled it through the shieldstick wall. One sharp detonation later and probably there were crew at the other end of the ship who were now coughing and groping blindly in the haze.

He gave the command to withdraw with considerable pleasure, not to mention pride.

Date Point: 12y1w4d AV
HMS Caledonia

Major Owen Powell

Powell had to wave aside the two cubic meters of smoke that came back with the rest of the Gaoians, and he suppressed a cough as it tickled the back of his throat.

All present and correct. He had to admit, he was actually impressed—things had gone damn near without a hitch.

“An’ here we are, all dressed up and you give us nowt to do,” he grunted as the four of them vacated the Array. Behind them, the end they’d left behind on the target ship would be busily burning itself out with a few judiciously placed packs of thermite paste, just in case deleting and rotating the connection codes wasn’t paranoid enough.

“Sorry to disappoint, Stainless.” It was hard to tell in those eye-bending suits but that was undoubtedly Regaari. He’d mastered the art of snarking like a human.

“I should fookin’ hope so. Right. De-Suit, grab juice and turn in your weapons, and we’ll have a bit of a chat.”

He checked on Irish as he got out of their way. Their newest Protector had been waiting for Faarek to come through, and was deliberately laying on the Blarney and Begorrah as thick as he could as he chattered the whining Gaoian through the process of tending to a minor broken bone. He happily slid into supporting Thurrsto instead when the Gaoian medic rushed to his injured Brother’s side, and Powell made a mental note to gently commend him later. Preferably once he could be sure that Costello had done so.

A minor broken bone, though. After a heavy pulse hit that would have put Warhorse down, unprotected. Those Suits were the real deal, no doubt.

He hit the wall intercom. “CIC, STAINLESS. The SNOWTOPS are all aboard and accounted for, package in tow.”

”Thanks, STAINLESS. SHIPFATHER says we have no pursuit.”

Powell rocked back on his heels and let that sink in. Things going pretty much exactly as planned? That was almost a new one on him.

“Fook me sideways…” he muttered, then permitted himself a small laugh and turned back to the Gaoians.

By now they were all at least halfway out of their suits and looking justifiably pleased with themselves, even if there was plenty of concern for Faarek. They were drinking the Gaoian recipe of the SOR’s energy drink concoction, heartily bolstered with anchovies and cod liver oil and blended into a fine fishy emulsion.

Blaczynski had tried some once, on a dare. He’d almost kept it down, too.

Eventually Irish got up and backed away, and Powell nodded inwardly as he noted Costello immediately pat him on the shoulder and say something encouraging. Faarek’s arm was strapped up and he’d had a Crue-D shot, and the general set of the ears over among the Gaoians was relaxed. Time for a quick AAR.

“Arright. Fall in, easy.”

They did so promptly and attentively. The correct “stand easy” position wasn’t actually easy for Gaoians at all—they had to contort quite unnaturally to rest their hands behind their backs, so they were instead permitted to rest their hands in front. It still looked smart enough.

“Not half bad,” he praised curtly. He suppressed the urge to make a mild joke at Shim’s expense about his grenade-throwing skills. It would have gone down great with a human, but might very well have genuinely hurt the Gaoian’s feelings. “Shim, ears stopped ringing yet?”

“Nearly, sir.”

“A little more care with your throw next time, lad. You’ll be fine. Anyway, bloody good teamwork on those sticky patch takedowns. Regaari, Thurrsto, you kept your heads well when that response squad was almost on top o’ you. Hmm… Ergaan. Could have saved a few seconds when you reported you’d found the objective. ’FOOTBALL, port cargo bay, five guards.’ See?”

Ergaan duck-nodded.

“Champion Daar,” Powell turned to the lone Stoneback on deck. “Anything to add?”

Daar hesitated, and chose his words very carefully. “Nothin’ merits mentioning here, sir.”

“I would appreciate your advice, Cousin,” Regaari gently insisted.

“…Well, it’d take a simulator to show ‘ya, but you could have saved some motion with the patch takedowns. Honestly y’all did really good. It was worthy of First Fang!”

“Our Warehouse will be at your disposal,” Powell promised, noting how well the compliment went down. Stoneback’s First Fang must have had quite a reputation. “Anything else?”

Daar wobbled his head slightly. “No sir. We’ll see what we can do with the sim.”

“Bloody lovely. I have nothing more either, so you go let your techs do their jobs, get settled in for the ride home. AAR’ll come after you’ve got some food in yer. Dismissed.”

Daar remained close to him as the other Gaoians left, and spoke softly once they were out of earshot.

“Boss, I gotta ask ‘ya. What exactly was the point of us suiting up? I mean, besides backup.”

“To lead by example.”

Daar’s ears quirked. “Well, sure. But what example?”

“Several at once. It was meant to be a learning opportunity. You’re trained to lead combat units, yeah? I wanted to see you observing their mission, see what you could share, how you offered criticism, all of that. You’re a leader of Gaoians and I wanted to learn by observation.”

Daar duck-nodded respectfully. “Fair ‘nuff, though I ain’t been First Fang Leader for years. And why test me and not Abbot, there? I’m not in charge of the Whitecrest Brothers.”

Powell ran a thumb along his jaw and reflected that he needed to shave again. “No, but they do look up to you. Regaari especially, he quite plainly admires you.”

Daar shrunk in on himself in embarrassment and grumbled. “Not as much as I do him…”

Powell gave a quiet, amused chuckle. “Perhaps. Anyhow, don’t worry about Costello, he’ll have his day. As for you and the Whitecrests, I’m keeping my options open—that Suit turned out better than I would have imagined and that changes things, especially my assumptions.”

“Not really sure I follow you, Boss,” Daar admitted.

“I’m playin’ the long game,” Powell said. “Sometimes we do things that won’t ever amount to much, because they could amount to a lot if things turned out one way over t’other. See?”

Daar gave him a shrewd look. “You’re convinced the HEAT doesn’t need me.”

“Daar, you’re wearing that Suit right now because you’ve bloody well earned it. I just think that your talents…well…fook it. Lemme tell you some o’ the reasons behind the mission we’ve got planned for JETS…”

Date Point: 12y2w AV
Starship ’Negotiable Curiosity’, Perfection System, The Core Worlds

Bedu

”Bedu? How-? …This channel is supposed to be inaccessible to anybody without the encryption key I gave to your implants.”

“Yes.” Bedu suppressed a yawn. His metabolism was proving to be much harder to regulate without cybernetic assistance than he had suspected. “Imagine my dismay when I realized I needed to have the implants removed.”

”How are you accessing it without them?”

Apparently the long interval since their last conversation had done nothing to dull Vakno’s temper. Bedu forced himself to sit up straighter. “I learned an apt saying. A humanism. ’Necessity is the mother of invention’. Glib, isn’t it?”

Vakno’s image finally stopped showing the jagging and artefacts of packet loss as she turned off the evolving encryption that his equipment had been half-successfully keeping up with, and she gave him the kind of long, calculating look that only the most successful Corti in the galaxy ever mastered.

“…Why in Origin’s name did you have them removed?” she asked. “And… is that battle damage in your ship?”

“Oh, it’s an enthralling tale,” Bedu promised. “I was very brave. Why, I even courageously killed my own mechanic. You know, I was actually quite fond of Hkzzvk…”

Vakno did something characteristic: She interrupted him. “Where were you?!”

“I was on,” Bedu said, “the planet Ikbrzk…”

Date Point: 12y3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant [select] Adam “Warhorse” Arés

Gabe had signed the full SACRED STRANGER paperwork on the condition that Adam show and tell everything about the Crue-D. There were to be no secrets between father and son now that the law wasn’t a hindrance, and normally Adam would be ecstatic about sharing something so important with the first man on his list of people he loved the most.

But to do that, Adam was gonna need to do the mother of all heavy days and that was kind of a problem.

Even as a young kid, training hard more out of friendship with the adults at the gym and his own enjoyment than anything, his body had responded well. Then he’d decided to enlist and under Legsy’s guidance in the last few months before he signed up, he’d made the transition from a merely exceptionally fit and strong teenager to something truly special.

He’d started his military career as an elite specimen but hadn’t properly realized how much that was true until Basic. And he’d re-appraised himself again during the Pararescue pipeline.

And then he’d started on the Crude.

Which was where the problem came in with putting on a heavy day for demonstration purposes: He was gonna need to thoroughly destroy his best friends, and Adam’s idea of a heavy day bordered on being any reasonable man’s idea of self-harm.

Bullshit: It was self-harm. Very carefully controlled, constructive, worrying self-harm designed to heal up stronger than before. That was the whole point. And it had worked, too…But Adam couldn’t quite shake the fear that no matter how easily he could bench press cars or pulp enemies with his bare hands, or Protect anyone, anywhere, anyhow they needed it…would he ever be strong enough for what was coming? Smart enough? Good enough?

Thoughts like that were among the many reasons why he visited the psychologist so often.

“Hey, ‘Base.” His words came out as a semi-distracted grunt.

They were packing up at the end of a tough week. The Gaoians had excelled themselves on Operation GOLD BREES, and it had been a good field trip for the second string and the cherries, too. Not quite an all-hands-on-deck, but enough that the SOR was back in recovery mode for a day or two. That meant, among other things, unpacking, checking, and repacking all their gear.

Baseball, who had been repacking his travel medkit, knew his best friend’s tones well and put the work aside for a second. “Sup, bro?”

“Dad signed the paperwork.”

‘Base’s face lit up. “Bro, that’s fuckin’ sweet! When does he start?”

“Tonight I give him his first injection, and he’s gotta start on those cog-rehab games, too.”

“Man,” enthused ‘Base, “This shit’s awesome! Your dad’ll be back to normal in, what, a couple of days?”

“Uh, ‘prolly a week ‘cuz of the nerve damage. But yeah.”

Righteous was servicing the gauss rifles, and chimed in with a smile of his own. “That’s fuckin’ awesome.”

“Yeah.”

“…Bro, what’s wrong?” Nothing could get past Baseball.

“Uh, Dad made me promise to show him what the Crude does. ‘No secrets anymore’ he said.”

“And? What’s the big—oh.” Baseball suddenly looked crestfallen. “I’m gonna be hurtin’ ain’t I.”

Adam gave him a complicated look.

Firth as always had the right words. “Eh, so what? Kick my ass too, bro. That’s just good training, right?”

“Heh.” Adam sobered up a little bit, though he still had to put on a rueful grin. “Are you sure? I could probably think of some other way to show him, y’know?”

“Nah, said ‘Base. “You’re a fighter, ’No secrets any more’ means you gotta show him that. I mean, you owe him, y’know?”

“…Yeah.” Honestly, that cut right to the heart of Adam’s doubts. “I just worry…what’s he gonna think of me?”

“Figure that’s for you to talk over with him,” Righteous shrugged. “Don’t worry ‘bout us none. We’re big boys an’ were happy to help. I can handle a little bruised ego, as long as it’s you kickin’ my ass.”

‘Base nodded. “Exactly. When we doin’ this, man?”

Adam calculated for a moment. “Uh… Next week, I guess,” he said. “After he’s healed up and, uh, he’s all ‘there’ in his head again.”

He went back to checking the expiry dates on all the drugs in his field pack but he must have been looking badly unhappy because it wasn’t more than five seconds before Righteous grabbed him, spun him around and he got the full crushing three-way bro hug treatment.

“Bro. You’ll be *fine.*”

Adam sighed, and nodded slowly, forehead-to-forehead with literally the only two men in the whole galaxy who might really have a handle on what he was feeling right now.

“…Thanks, guys. I fuckin’ love you two.”

There was a long, fraternal pause before Baseball pulled away. “You good?”

Adam nodded. “Yuh. I just gotta go for a quick run I think. Clear my head.”

“Should we come?”

“…I’d like that.”

They quickly squared away the last of their work, checked in with Regaari (who had ‘CQ’ that evening), then set out for a brisk barefoot run. All three of them were naturally hot and sweaty thanks to their size and the cold Cimbrean night rain was always welcome to them, especially when exercising. A nice, easy run around town and through the woods was pretty much the perfect way to meditate, by Adam’s reckoning.

He ran and he thought of the upcoming demonstration. He was generally quite shy about his actual strength; people had a hard enough time believing he was real just standing there talking to them. That he was in fact much stronger and heavier than he looked wasn’t something most people were prepared to accept, so he mostly kept the details to himself.

But now, he needed to make his Dad understand exactly who and what his own son had become. Nobody could keep up with Adam in the gym and that all by itself was gonna thrash his buddies. The combatives were gonna make it much worse for them, too.

They thumped across the furthest pedestrian bridge over the river, intentionally breaking the rhythm of their footfalls so as not to shake it apart, and Adam felt a twinge of remorse over how totally he was going to break his buddies next week, all for a stupid show.

The guilt doubled down when he realized how much he was going to enjoy himself doing it.

Date Point: 12y1m AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Colonel Ted Bartlett

Doctors Taylor and Cote had been with SCERF right from the start. Hell, Ted had first met them on the bloody ice at Rogers Arena. They were inseparable best friends, to the point where Betty-Anne Cote had been Rufus Taylor’s Best “Man” four years earlier.

Their field—Biology—had sadly turned out to be a minor footnote of extraterrestrial research. By and large, all the interesting compounds came from deathworlds, and Earth was as deathworld as they came. They had done some interesting work in support of the Cimbrean Reclamation Project, had surreptitiously done their best to break whatever curious biochemical encryption the Corti had managed to work into Crue-D, had helped adapt alien prosthetics for the human body but by and large their work had been…

Valued, yes. Respected, certainly. But they had always been the two civilians working in the shadow of the military physicists, chemists and engineers.

Today, though, they were rockstars in woollen sweaters. Researchers had been dropping in to congratulate them all day.

Doctor Taylor, always the louder of the two, was absolutely not afraid to milk it either. “-I mean, the mutation mechanism itself is just incredible! There’s enough material in the way the cultures picked it up and began synthesizing to make CRISPR look like a footnote!”

Ted looked around the lab, which was a study in white cleanliness compared to the physics department he’d headed up. Physicists in their offices surrounded themselves with books, whiteboards, laptops and coffee. And tennis balls, in SCERF’s unique case.

Sure, the actual labs were just as clean and tidy, but Taylor and Cote even kept their offices to that same level of cleanliness.

Though, it seemed strange to use the word “clean” to describe a room full of hundreds of conical flasks filled with turbid E. Coli cultures.

Every single one of which was busily producing a steady supply of Cruezzir. “Not just the immediate benefit of having the medicine itself, then.”

Doctor Cote was happily pipetting samples of the invaluable bacteria into vials to be frozen and sent to companion labs around the world, but she shared a rare few words for Ted.

“Rufus is right, if we can adapt the mutation process to other compounds then it might be revolutionary,” she said.

“More than revolutionary. Imagine, any compound you could possibly want, and the only obstacle to getting an unlimited supply of it would be lab time and raw materials,” Taylor beamed. “On-demand mass production of any molecule, within the week.”

“Assuming you can adapt the mechanism,” Ted pointed out.

“Well, yes… but there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to…” Taylor agreed reluctantly.

“We can,” Cote asserted, with rather more calm.

“I’ll have to take your word on it. We’re well outside of my field,” Ted conceded.

“All that’s for the future though,” Taylor grinned. “For today? Cruezzir!”

Ted laughed, and raised an imaginary toast. “Cruezzir!”

“And to a bright future for human medicine!” Taylor added.

Cote raised a flask. “Cheers!”

Ted grinned. “Cheers!”

Date Point: 12y1m AV
The Dog House gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Gabe’s outer speechlessness belied the cyclone of thoughts he was trying to process internally.

First among them was Adam. Adam who was almost naked in his skimpy shorts, pumped up and terrifying like a complete savage with his chest quietly heaving. Adam, whose friends were strewn around him on the ground in visible pain, utterly defeated.

They’d invited Gabe to watch their gym session, and it had gone on for longer than Gabe would have thought feasible. He’d watched Adam, John and Christian do absolutely impossible things and watched his son go much further. The weights and gravity were too puny so he made up on intensity and the other two just couldn’t keep up.

Then they fought, after a quick break and lots of the “juice” they were all drinking. Given the context of three hyper-men on space-magic alien performance drugs, that wasn’t a particularly reassuring name for what Adam insisted was just a very concentrated sports drink.

The sparring was even more darkly illuminating. Adam…thrashed them. Mercilessly, and repeatedly. Firth quite obviously was the more skilled and experienced fighter and that did help some, but in the end Adam’s sheer physical superiority overwhelmed him.

Gabe chewed thoughtfully on the inside of his lip as he considered that. His son. Toying with the most impressive soldiers and men he’d ever seen. Men he had previously thought were the bigger, stronger friends of his little boy.

And Adam took them apart while wearing an expression of alarming savagery that said he was enjoying himself.

It didn’t match. It didn’t fit. Happy, goofy Adam, his son, had a mean streak a mile wide? Where had that come from? Had it always been there? What did it mean?

Somehow, Gabe managed to keep those thoughts off his face as he sat in place, watched, and said nothing.

Adam nodded sheepishly at Gabe’s non-reaction, then thumped over to take care of his friends. There, Adam’s better side—his caring side—shone through. Gabe listened as his boy muttered apologies and small praises to both, made them comfortable while they rested on the padded floor. He turned down the gravity and doted on them quietly. They nuzzled, all seemingly forgiven, and Gabe was almost ready to write off all the things he’d seen that day…

Until Adam produced the distinctive blue Crue-D syringes from his medical pack and injected Burgess, then Firth. Gabe’s doubts and worries returned in full force then grew even worse, as within just a couple of minutes both men seemed to be well on their way to being fully recovered.

Gabe’s own recovery had been no less miraculous: In less than a week he’d gone from being barely able to string together two coherent thoughts to feeling just as sharp as he ever had, if not sharper. He felt almost certain that he was recalling important facts even more easily than he had ever.

Sadly the nerve injury in his lower back was too old for the Crue-D to work on. He’d regained no mobility in his leg, nor any reduction in the chronic pain… but his physiotherapy regime seemed to be working a little better for the moment.

By the time Adam helped his buddies to their feet it was almost as if the brutality they’d just undergone had been merely a convincing act. He hugged them both around the shoulders then twitched his head in Gabe’s direction.

“Guys, can I have a moment with dad?”

Burgess nodded, “Sure thing hoss. We’ll be upstairs, ‘kay?”

“Okay. There’s steaks in the fridge, Firth. I bought exactly what you told me.”

Firth gave him a cracking friendly blow on the shoulder, a gesture that contained no trace of ill will. “Good boy! I’ll go make ‘em right now.”

“Okay! See you two in a bit.” They thumped off towards the stairs. They did that in private, Gabe noticed—out in public, around people who weren’t ’in’ on their situation, they were cat-footed and light. Cautious, even. Here and now, though, they relaxed and let themselves thud and stomp like the weighty creatures they really were.

Adam turned his attention back to Gabe, and every fatherly instinct Gabe had instantly fired up. Adam looked…vulnerable. Like he’d not seen the boy in years. Not even the breakup had hurt him like what he was seeing right now.

“…Dad?”

Gabe heaved himself up out of his chair and hobbled across the room as fast as he dared, slammed into Adam and hugged. It was much like trying to reassure a hot, sweaty wall. Adam paused, then wrapped those huge arms around and squeezed with almost dangerous force. It was a big, powerful, desperate hug, and Gabe sensed his son needed it. So he hugged back, as best he could.

Something blindingly obvious dawned on him. “You’re taller than me. I never really noticed.”

Adam laughed something that sounded like it had a sob waiting on the edge. “I’ve been taller than you for a while now!”

“How tall are you?”

“Five-foot-eleven.”

“¡Órale! You’re six inches taller than me! When did that happen?”

Adam chuckled and squeezed a little tighter, which made it hard to breathe but it felt good anyway. Gabe rested his head against Adam’s chest, and they nuzzled like they were just a father and his little boy, alone in the world and content.

Gabe pulled back and looked up at the broad, heavy-jawed, handsome face of his son. Where did he get those looks? It was a very different face to his own, which was narrower and more refined, but still…Adam was there, hiding behind the exaggerated features.

“And you’re still you.”

Adam grinned and relaxed a little. “I’ve always been me, dad.”

Gabe nodded, then gestured back toward his wheelchair, and leaned on Adam’s arm for support as he returned to it. “Don’t blame me for worrying.”

“Never. You’d be a crappy dad if you didn’t. But we’re here to talk about your worries anyway, so…”

“Right. And I have a big one.” Gabe grimaced as he sat back down in his wheelchair. “…You enjoyed that.”

Adam straightened up, considered him for a second, then spun across the room, grabbed a bench, lifted it casually into place opposite him and sat down. “…Yeah.”

“That’s… different. I mean, you got into a few fights after we moved here, but I figured that was just ‘cause of… y’know, losing your mom, your friends, San Diego… You weren’t ever really a violent kid.”

“Yeah.” Adam agreed. He wiped thoughtfully at a bloodstain on his knuckle.

“Is that the Crue-D?”

“…I’m… pretty sure it ain’t,” Adam said at last. “I think it’s just me being so big now. My testosterone levels are permanently fuckin’ sky-high ‘cuz of the Crude, and doing what I do…and, well, we kinda like beating on each other ‘cuz we’re the only people we CAN beat on like that. Nobody else could take it, right?”

He gestured to the totality of himself. “Crude doesn’t give you anything for free, it just unlocks doors. You still gotta push yourself through those doors, right? You still needed to do those cognitive rehab exercises, right? There’s nothing about me that’s because of the Crue-D, I did all of this to myself, and the Crude was just a… hell, it’s like the weights! Havin’ them’s not enough, I still have to lift! See?”

Gabe gave Adam an appraising look. “I don’t buy it. You make it sound like this stuff has no side-effects at all.”

Adam stood up and sighed. “It doesn’t, and that’s the problem.”

“…Run that by me again.”

“…Okay. So what you saw today?” Adam gestured toward the stairs. “Both my bros are in a hell of a lotta pain right now, right?”

“Yeah…”

“And they won’t be by the time we go upstairs, right?”

“…I don’t follow—”

“What we did today shoulda put them in the hospital. Hell, as hard as I was lifting, that could honestly do things like kidney failure and lifetime injury. But for us…” He sat down again. “…that’s just Wednesday.”

“Just Wednesday.” Gabe shook his head disbelievingly as he echoed the words. “But it doesn’t just stop with the muscles, does it? Otherwise you wouldn’t be dosing me up with it for cognitive rehab.”

“Nope!” Adam beamed. “And it’s working, ain’t it?”

“…I feel sharper than I’ve been in years,” Gabe confessed.

“Works on literally anything. If it’s a skill, if you can practice or train it? Crude’ll help. Read some challenging books, hit your rehab really hard…So long as you’re on it, there are no consequences for you to going balls-to-the-wall. The only thing that happens, no matter WHAT you do, is you get better. Now…Tell me that ain’t a problem.”

“…Yeah. That’s a hell of a problem,” Gabe agreed. “I can just see some… some punk gangbanger getting their hands on this shit and not having your restraint.”

“Yeah. I don’t know how we made SOR work, maybe it’s a happy accident…but it works for us.”

“So definitely no side effects at all? ‘Cuz I’m gonna want grandkids someday and I know bodybuilders can get-”

Adam threw back his head and groaned. “Dad…! No! No. Definitely no problems there.” He paused, then waggled his eyebrows like an especially cartoonish Groucho Marx. “Like I said, no matter WHAT you do, you get better.”

Gabe snorted. “…Well, now I’m sold on this stuff.”

“Ooh? Am I gonna get a little half-sibling?”

It was Gabe’s turn to groan. “You too? As if Jess dropping hints wasn’t enough…”

“That’s a yes, then?”

“…Yeah. Probably.”

Adam punched the air with an explosive thud and hugged him. “I love you, dad.”

Gabe nodded, and did the best he could to return the hug. “…Love you too, amigo. Thanks for showing me this.”

“You’re okay?”

“I understand better now.”

That, he reflected, was really all he could ask for.

Date Point: 12y1m1d AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Uncharted System, Near 3Kpc Arm

Allison Buehler

“Jesus.” Allison gave the dirty brown ball they were orbiting a depressed glare. Here and there she could see the startling turquoise patches of tiny, slimy oceans absolutely choked with cyanobacteria and the first glimmerings of aerobic life. “We came all this way for a planet that’s not even finished yet?”

“Hey, the scientists are going to love this thing!” Julian defended it. “I mean, this is probably our most important find yet!”

“From a purely scientific point of view,” Allison pre-empted him.

“From a- …yes. I mean. Pure science is good, right?”

She sighed and kissed him. “I swear, you turn into a bigger geek with every planet we find.

“You’re the one who gave up on Star Trek because the science is wrong.”

“They kept inventing bullshit made-up kinds of radiation!”

He snorted. “See? You’re the geek.”

Xiù was redecorating the cupboards for entertainment, having spent weeks carefully sketching out some semi-abstract designs that evoked the Lucent glimmermotes, flowed around the edges and highlighting the corners. She was looking freaking adorable with an accidental splotch of blue on her cheek, too, especially when she paused and looked back at them to weigh in. “Let’s face it, we’re all geeks…”

“Okay, fine.” Allison mock-grumbled. She sighed at the planet below them again. “I was just really looking forward to having something to walk around on…”

“Yeah, I know… me too.” Xiù sighed, and returned to her painting.

“Well… yeah, me three,” Julian acknowledged. “…but this is still really cool!”

“It is!” Allison agreed. “You’re right, the scientists are gonna love us for finding this thing. But the next place on the list had damn well better have hot springs.”

“Well, the next one’s the strongest positive we have…” Julian said, calling it up.

Allison glanced at it, saw a happy ninety-seven percent at the top of the page and nodded, mollified. “Hot springs?”

“I should be able to find us some from orbit if it has them…” Julian hazarded.

“Sold!” Xiù called.

“You’re the pilot,” Julian pointed out.

“You can set course,” she retorted. “You only need me to land this thing, remember?”

“We need you for a lot more than that, bǎobèi…” Julian disagreed.

“Sweet,” Allison grinned, but Xiù was blushing under that paint blotch, so she decided to double down. “But true.”

“Well…you still don’t need me to run the navigation software!”

“But I’m comfortable!” Allison complained, snuggling into a Julian a little more.

“And I’m busy!”

“Well, let’s make the scientists happy and gather some more sensor data for a while…” Julian proposed.

“Yeah, you know what? That sounds good…”

“Agreed.”

“Done.”

There was a comfortable silence for several minutes.

“…Whose turn is it to cook tonight?”

Date Point: 12y1m2d AV
CIA offices, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Earth

Darcy

“Hey. Want some good news?”

Darcy was nursing a migraine, which was an occupational hazard that she’d been enduring for most of her career. Today’s was a bad one, though. A forehead-pincher. A “make the light shut up”-er. A “there’s not enough green tea in the world”, please-make-it-stop, honest-to-God ice-pick-in-her-temple migraine.

She rolled her head to one side and grimaced up at Jake from the relative cool comfort of her desktop. “You brought that guillotine I asked for?”

Jake put a cup of tea down next to her. “Gabriel Arés is going to stay on as chief of CCS.”

Darcy managed to sit up. “What, he just… suddenly got better from a massive concussion?”

“General Tremblay authorized the SOR to give him a course of Crue-D.”

That actually made Darcy laugh, and the pain in her head subsided just a little. “Well… well done, General… well done.”

“Yup.”

“…D’you think I could get in on that action?”

Jake chuckled softly and returned to his desk. “I’ll put that candidate shortlist you had Nick draw up on file. I’m sure we’re gonna need it someday…”

“Sure.” Darcy lowered her head to the desk again. “…Thanks.”

She fancied that her head was feeling a little better.

Date Point: 12y 2m AV
Given Man Lodge, Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

Yan should have been feeling better.

They were into the third moon of the lodge. He and his fellow Given Men had put in good hard work and repaired the huts after a year of neglect, which had done a lot to burn out some of the simmering omnipresent hatred of everything that was their annual curse.

And then they had filled the lodge hut with heat, steam, sweat, the scent of roasting meat…and the magic smoke.

There had been initiations. Tarek and two others had undergone the rites (the secrets of which were among those things that Yan fervently hoped his great-niece’s young father would never learn) and had their adult names taken from them. There had been feasting, hunting, playful fighting, serious fighting.

…And the Magic Smoke.

They had traded stories, traded news, traded knowledge. Yan had shared Sky-Thinker’s innovative new weapon and they had tried their hands at building some. With those new bird-spears they had brought home a real prize, a great stamping Manak.

Manak-hunting was usually far too dangerous. The beasts could knock a man flying with a swipe of their great tusked heads, or crush him underfoot. This time the Given Men had crashed and hooted through the trees above a solitary male and maddened it with bird-spears. It had charged at their trees and been left frustrated as they evaded its reach, then grown panicked as more and more sharpened shafts had pierced its back, until finally they had given it an opening to escape.

It had charged desperately in that direction…and off a low cliff. With its legs and back broken, the honor of striking the blow that killed it had fallen to Yan.

Its meat was now roasting over the fire, its hide was tanning on the rack, and shreds of its jerky were curing high in the rafters among those beautiful…

Entrancing…

Thought-provoking curls…

…of Magic Smoke.

Yan sighed and relaxed as he took another deep breath from over the fire pit where the medicine roots were twisting and crackling as they writhed and smoked off among the coals.

The smoke was the Given Men’s secret. He suspected that the root was probably the same one that the women used to make the magic powder, but if it was he had no idea how they made it… and no desire to know. That was a woman’s magic, the magic of giving and life. Men were killers and takers, there was no room for either side to use the other’s magic. That was the way of things.

Heh. Although, men could give good and hard too, in the right circumstances.

He became aware that he was trilling a soft laugh to himself. Even though they didn’t know the thought that had tickled him so, some of the others joined in and a lazy wave of merriment swept around the lodge.

“‘S good smoke…” Tarek managed. He leaned forward and waved his tongue through the thickest part of it then sat back with a sigh. “Makes me feel… soft…”

“Makes the anger go away…” somebody else said.

“Good smoke,” Yan echoed, nodding sagely.

He should have been feeling better. He was feeling better. But he should have been feeling betterer. More better. Whichever. There were nagging worries in the back of his head.

A lot of the Given Men had simply never shown up.

A few failed to show up every year, of course. Everybody died eventually after all, and if a sickness or bad fall didn’t get you then a yshek or a particularly wiley or lucky Werne might. But this time there were more men missing than not. That, combined with Tarek’s account of other tribes being hit, a long way from Yan’s own…

Yan finally identified the feeling that was itching away in the back of his head: It was the feeling of being hunted.

And having realized that, he knew that it was time for his Vision.

He stood up a little unsteadily and coughed as he inhaled some of the denser smoke that was coiling around the lodge’s low roof. “It’s… time,” he managed.

The Given Men looked at one another solemnly, then stood up and joined him.

The Vision was the most important part of a Given Man’s retreat, a repeat on male terms of the Rite Of Manhood he had undergone years ago.

He had killed. He had feasted. He had taken his fill of the pleasures of the world… and now he would See.

A Vision always began slowly. Each man grabbed a stout stick from where they rested against the lodge wall and formed a ring around the fire. They looked to Yan to start the dance and calculate whether they should move left or right first, and then began to ram the sticks slowly, heavily and steadily into the packed earth underfoot, until they settled into a strong shared beat.

Then came the song, a steady deep drone from all of their throats that wavered and clashed and changed until they were all holding the same note, or a pleasing harmonic of it… and then they started to move.

Step forward, slam, step back, slam, turn to one side and raise the stick to crack! sharply against first one neighbor’s, then the other’s.

It was a simple rhythm, underpinned by a simple wordless song that each man changed and contributed to as he saw fit… but it was exhausting. That was the point. Within a minute their hands were stinging. Not long thereafter their arms were growing sore as the dance got faster and more physical, testing their endurance.. In the sweltering humidity of the lodge there was nowhere for the sweat to go so it ran off them and soaked their fur to their backs.

The heady blend of motion, heat, magic smoke and exertion was exactly what they were after. It quickly burned the conscious thought out of them and left only themselves with no barriers up, no walls between themselves and their experience until even the detached watchful places in their minds dissolved away into nothing….

Yan needed no prompting—he knew when the time was right. There was a skin by the fire full of Ketta sap and the juice of medicine root. It was bitter, astringent and foul but he drank it like it was water then stepped back and let the universe overtake him.

And he Watched.

Date Point: 12y2m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau

Nadeau had found common ground with Vedregnenug over a shared interest in art, and the two of them had held some fascinating conversations over the last few months. Guvnurag color theory in particular differed wildly from that of humans, but that was probably inevitable when dealing with a species that had pentachromatic vision.

It was rarer that they got to discuss military matters. It wasn’t a field in which Vedreg was knowledgeable, and he found violence distasteful. On this occasion, however, his interest was piqued.

“And nobody was hurt?”

“As I understand it, the worst any of them would have suffered would be irritated eyes, a cough and perhaps some bruising. Maybe some light scratches from the shieldbreaker rounds.” Nadeau shrugged. “Major Powell seemed impressed, and what little I know of his service record says that if he’s impressed then the Gaoians pulled off something special.”

“Major Powell was pleasant to me, but he always managed to make me feel afraid…” Vedreg rumbled. Nadeau decided that the motes of light racing down his flanks were signalling a mixture of respect and intimidation coupled with a genuine but futile desire to like the man.

It was amazing just how much information those chromatophores could convey even when one couldn’t see all the subtleties they had to offer.

“He’s an intense man. That’s normal for combat arms.”

“Every human I have ever met has been ’intense’,” Vedreg replied.

“I guess we would be, yeah…” Nadeau acknowledged. “But, we got the football blueprint. Lewis and Lee are playing around with it now, working it into the coltainer design. How’s the shell company?”

“Bankrupt. The fines for permitting the theft of such a valuable technology…” Vedreg pulsed smug satisfaction. “When they come to arrest the founder and president they will discover that he never really existed, but of course that is all much too late. The trail will never lead back to me, nor to my herd.”

“Nicely done.”

“Thank you.”

“What will you do now? Do you have anything more to contribute to the project?”

“Not to this one, no,” Vedreg’s flanks rippled through an uncertain rainbow. “But I have something else to begin thinking on now.”

“Oh?”

“My species is riddled with implants, Lieutenant-Colonel. “They have become as ubiquitous in our society as clothing is in yours… I think the time has now come to think about how I might resolve that problem.”

Date Point: 12y2m3w AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Nofl

Nofl’s everyday work, alas, did not involve his magnum opus. Mostly it was honest work funded by a grant from the Folctha Ministry of Housing and Immigration, tracking cross-species disease vectors and possible human contamination of the Alien Quarter.

Which meant unlimited access to human tissue samples, which was fascinating of course, but it was no Cruezzir.

Cruezzir had made him and destroyed him, and equally quickly in both cases. He’d gone from being the researcher who developed an effectively perfect regenerative medicine to being indirectly responsible for unleashing the so-called “Human Disaster” on the galaxy in only two short years, and nobody’s reputation survived a history like that.

Hence why he was counting antibodies in a tiny and frankly primitive lab on a backwater in the Far Reaches, rather than holding his rightful place as Professor of Regenerative Medicine at the Grand Central Origin University.

He really ought to have been more bitter, but Corti weren’t supposed to do bitter. They weren’t supposed to do anything, emotionally speaking and yet ego, bitterness and ambition were rife.

Nofl’s concerns that this indicated the possibility that official Directorate thinking on the subject might not be completely supported by the empirical evidence would have probably cost him all the prestige that Cruezzir earned him in the long run anyway. But at least he’d have been in a position to exert some influence about those concerns, for a while.

His train of thought was interrupted by his doorbell chime, and he buzzed the visitor in with a simple command through his implants.

“…Goodness gracious me! Chief Arés! This is an unexpected pleasure!”

Arés was a small man by human standards, with shrewd dark eyes that fidgeted under his brow like iridescent black beetles as he limped into the room on his cane. He was looking good, Nofl congratulated himself. You couldn’t tell he’d suffered a near-fatal brain injury at all.

“Hola, Nofl.”

“And what brings you to my lab today? Ooh! Have you finally caved? Want me to take a look at that nerve at long last?”

Arés half-laughed in that breathy, nasal way that humans did when genuinely amused but not to any great degree. He prowled the lab looking with uncomprehending interest at Nofl’s projects, tapping his cane thoughtfully on the floor.

“Let’s say I might be more open to the idea today than I was a few weeks back,” he offered. “But that’s not why I’m here right now. I had an interesting delivery recently.”

“Oh really?”

“Cruezzir, Nofl. The real thing. Which was very welcome considering my condition…”

“You know, you are looking well…” Nofl complimented him, calculating furiously. Arés manner was light and friendly, but he had the strangest feeling that he was watching some kind of predatory beast stalk him and the pounce was coming any second.

“I had wondered if maybe you had synthesized some here in your lab, perhaps…” Arés looked around. “But you don’t seem to have any equipment like that.”

“Well…”

“So I find myself in a difficult situation. You see, I spoke with Myun.”

“Ah, now-”

Arés gestured to the door and two CCS officers joined them.

“Nofl. You’re under arrest on suspicion of smuggling,” he said. “Sorry. Do yourself a favor and don’t say a damn thing until your attorney’s present.”

Nofl sighed, and put down his tablet. “That’s more than fair. …Thank you, Chief.”

“Well, you did do me a favor.”

Nofl took the advice and didn’t say anything.

Date Point: 12y3m AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Deep Space, 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

“This is new! What’s the occasion?”

Allison wasn’t one to mince words, especially when it came to food. Her query was an enthusiastic one though, and she slipped an arm around Xiù’s waist to lean over her shoulder and check the contents of the frying pan, smelling faintly but not unpleasantly of maintenance and hard work.

“Uh… your birthday?” Xiù asked.

“…That’s today?”

“Yup.”

“Huh.”

Xiù smiled sideways at her as Allison mulled over the news that she was a year older, then shrugged and kissed her cheek before throwing herself on the couch. “Well… cool! So what are we having?”

“Jamaican jerk chicken with rice and peas. I broke out that can of coconut milk and a lot of Thyme…” she opened the oven and showed off that the pan was full of two fat brown chicken breasts, glistening and covered in spices. “One whole breast for you.”

Allison sighed at the sight of it. Meat was something they had to ration quite carefully as it took up proportionately a lot of space in their stores, which were really starting to run low. The chicken situation was especially dire, and getting a whole breast to herself was a queenly treat. “God. You really do love me.”

“Yup!” Xiù beamed at her. “Wake Julian up?”

Allison nodded, kicked up to her feet and hit the touchscreen in the wall to bring up the hab controls and shut the field down.

This alone was enough to wake Julian, who shifted and looked up just from the sudden intrusion of cooking sounds into his quiet space. He gave her a stupid look with his hair sticking out at a crazy angle before he blinked and got his thoughts together. “…Hey.”

“Hey. Food’s ready.”

“Uh…? Oh. Yeah. Happy birthday.”

Allison kissed him. “I’d forgotten,” she admitted.

“I didn’t get you anything,” he joked, hauling himself out of the bunk. “Just couldn’t find the time to go shopping.”

This earned him a laugh, and Allison tidied his hair up for him. “Dummy.”

He grinned and gave Xiù a good-morning kiss as well before going for his shower.

The chicken was exactly as good as Xiù had hoped, though she and Julian were left to watch in suppressed envy as Allison took her time enjoying having a whole breast to herself, which was of course accompanied by a hint of enjoying herself at their expense.

“So… we got anything to do today?” he asked eventually, as she put the fork down on a clean plate.

Xiù looked pleased with herself. “Land.”

Allison blinked at her. “…That’s today too?”

“Yuh-huh.”

“Wow. Best girlfriend ever.”

Xiù blushed, but waved her down. “I can’t take credit for this one. Just good luck.”

Julian leaned over and unstuck his tablet from where he’d velcroed it to the wall. “Lemme see…”

Xiù shuffled over and watched as he brought up the sensor data and scrutinized the information on their destination planet. It would have been nice if the information came to them in the form of some kind of flashy animated GUI, but in fact what Julian was studying was a spreadsheet.

Still the right-hand column, which was programmed to change color depending on where the planet sat inside a range of values, was a friendly mix of greens and blue which meant that in many ways the world they were approaching was a close or near-identical match for Earth. The only amber in the whole list was the gravity, which was a still-not-unreasonable 1.2G.

“Looks good,” she commented.

“That gravity won’t be a problem?” Julian checked.

“No.” Xiù shook her head. “Not for modern ship propulsion and not for us. We’ll probably be a bit tired for a week or two, though.”

“Good exercise,” Allison said.

They got up and cleared their meal away, musing on what they might find on this new planet, then spent an hour checking over their equipment in the excursion room.

The suits had undergone some overhauls after Lucent. The white and high-vis yellow that had been deemed so appropriate for Mars was gone, replaced with an (allegedly) universal camouflage pattern that Julian had some vocal doubts about even with human eyes, let alone potential alien eyes for whom the scheme might be bright grurple or whatever

“Grurple” was his name for hues the human eye couldn’t see, and had made its way into their private lexicon alongside “Happyxhausted”, “Snudying” (studying while snuggling), “Compornsion” (like compersion, but for sex) and a few Gaori and Mandarin loan words.

Grurple or not, the hydrophobic and acid-resistant coating was going to be welcome if they needed to hit the red decon button again. Then there were the GR-1d rifles. These were the latest version too, after the two they’d had before had been ruined by the decon shower. Allegedly the updated version corrected some of the original’s design flaws and offered improved performance.

Things were maybe a little sharper, a little leaner. That seemed to be how the Byron Group operated, really—learn by doing—but it had Allison happy. She’d geeked out hard over some detail of the updated weapons, and had left Xiù nodding and smiling uncomprehendingly as she waxed enthusiastic about something arcane involving…a bus scope on the piccadilly rail? Something like that.

The upshot of it was that the gun had a camera on it, she’d followed that much and had consoled herself with knowing that Allison got similarly unfocused whenever Xiù broke out the movie trivia, linguistics jargon or Gung Fu terminology.

Which was fine. They didn’t need to really understand one another’s interests after all. Xiù didn’t get what it was that got Allison so fired up over guns, Allison somehow found wire-fu boring, and neither of them had any idea what Julian found so interesting about rocks.

They suited up ahead of the actual landing, having all had it hammered into them throughout their training that Misfit was at her most vulnerable during takeoff and landing—that was when things were most likely to go wrong and also the moment where, if they did go wrong, the consequences would land on them soonest. The excursion suits might not achieve anything but they couldn’t hurt, and they might just be the difference between life and death.

Still, Xiù preferred flying in just her sportswear. The suit was stuffy and restricting and made her hands clumsy as she ran them over *Misfit*’s controls and her seat slotted properly into place.

“Ready?” she asked.

”Ready!” Allison chirped.

Julian sounded in equally good cheer. ”Take it away, bǎobèi.”

“Alright. Dropping our bugout beacon…” the hull rang as a dose of compressed air drove a beacon microsat out of them to linger harmlessly among the uncharted star’s comet halo.

That done, she angled them in-system.

She had a good feeling about this one…

Date Point: 12y3m AV
The High Forest Village, Uncharted Class 12 planet, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

“Yan’s back! Yan’s back!!”

The whole village flocked down the hill in a rush, summoned by both the shrill cry of the sentry boy and the slow thrum of his roaring-stone, the single strong beat that said “returning hunter”.

Yan was looking his usual self—burly, strong and swaggering, with the hair running down his back back to its usual bright scarlet blaze rather than the sickly pale orange he’d been sporting by the end of the winter. Vemik didn’t know what secrets the Given Men had that made their crests so red or made them grow so big and strong, and Yan had refused to share in his usual gruff, cryptic way.

He scooped up two of the children as he ambled up the slope, grinning as they hung from his shoulders. As he got closer though, Vemik detected a slightly forced quality to his good cheer. Whatever the Given Men got up to, it had left Yan worried.

Vemet saw it too. “He’s troubled…”

“Badly troubled,” Vemik agreed. “Things must be bad out there…”

Father and son shot each other a glance, then reached a mutual unspoken resolution to let Yan relax for a while before they broached the subject. He was usually so full of good cheer when coming back from his annual journey that to see him looking so tense was… worrying. And definitely a matter for the respected men of the tribe to discuss in private, when the opportunity presented itself.

As always there was a feast and playing, with the added joy this time of Yan being reunited with his great-niece, who couldn’t seem to resist grabbing his new-and-improved hair crest.

The baby was a whole series of mysteries that Vemik was trying his best to grapple with, only for one of the women to swoop in and rescue the infant from her father before he could…

Well, he wasn’t sure what they were so scared of. By and large it seemed to be a magic thing: Men Didn’t Look After Babies.

This was a shame in Vemik’s view, because he and the little one seemed to get along just fine. He carefully held her the same way the women did, rocked and made soft reassuring noises to her, and she rewarded him by turning those wide, barely-focused eyes on his face and trying to grab his crest, his ears or his finger. She had remarkably strong little fingers.

Sometimes, she’d even smile. And then a jealous woman would descend, muttering about ’sky-thinking strangeness’ or whatever other ache it was had rotted her belly. Quite why his interest as the child’s father was less acceptable than Yan’s interest as her great-uncle was another one of those mysteries that seemed infuriatingly unlikely to be solved.

Thank the Gods for the Singer, who was more than happy to indulge him some alone time with his daughter in the spice-tasting privacy of her hut.

Yan relaxed as the afternoon wore on, and his usual bluff smile returned. Pretty soon he was playing with the children, joking with the men, flirting with the women and playfully wrestled Yafek to the ground in a jovial show of just how prodigiously strong a Given Man should be.

Vemik never got the chance to ask him what had so badly affected his mood, however. The relaxed day was winding down and couples were sidling away toward huts in discrete pairs and they were definitely approaching the time when grabbing the Given Man and getting some answers would have been appropriate when a noise quite unlike any they had ever heard before shook the whole village.

Two loud slams, like a rock face collapsing or a stretched skin on the tanning rack being beaten with a stick, or maybe like thunder… but not exactly like any of those things. Just two deep, sharp bangs that echoed strangely off the rock walls around the High Forest.

They were still looking around and trying to decide what had made such an extraordinary noise when there was a shriek unlike anything Vemik had ever heard and something impossible caught the light of the setting sun down below them, out over the forest where the dead destroyer rested.

Vemik put a hand to his brow and squinted at it. It was… it could only be as big as a large hut. Bigger, even. But it hung in the air in a way that not even the most agile birds could have imitated, less like it was flying and more like it simply didn’t care for mundane things like the ground. It sat in the air in the same way that a rock might, if rocks weren’t confined to the surface of the world.

The whole village stood up to watch it as it hung where it couldn’t, then dipped and vanished from sight among the trees.

There was a long, shocked silence before Yafek finally spoke.

“…Sky-Thinker?”

Vemik tried not to wilt. Now was not a time to look weak or cowardly in front of the other men.

“…Yes, Two-Moons?”

“Any thoughts?”

Vemik could only shake his head. “Not… I’ve never even dreamed of anything like-”

“What Sky-Thinker means,” Vemet interrupted, putting a kindly hand on his youngest son’s shoulders, “Is that we need to know more.”

Yan stood up. “Then let’s go,” he grunted, hefting his spear. “All of us.”

Julian Etsicitty

“So this is an Abrogator…”

Allison kicked its leg and swore violently. “Fucking…fuck! All this way and we find Big Hotel ripping some poor locals apart. God dammit!”

”Keep your guard up, baby,” Xiù advised. Ever since Lucent, the policy had been for her to remain in place at *Misfit*’s helm, where the ship’s sensors could maybe give them an early warning if anything hostile was heading their way.

“Right.” Allison turned around and scanned the tree line while Julian continued to pick over the gutted Abrogator.

“Weird…” he commented after a few seconds.

Xiù was watching over his helmet cam. ”Yeah.”

Allison didn’t stop watching the forest for trouble. “What?”

“The locals didn’t crack this bitch open the violent way, they opened the maintenance hatch. But then it looks like they hacked the inside apart with knives rather than undoing the connectors.”

He grabbed a severed and shredded length of hydraulic tubing, pinched the connector at its end, twisted it and took it apart to dangle the pathetic length of oily rubber in front of his helmet cam.

Allison glanced at it. “Shit, Misfit has components that look more high-tech than that. Is this really Hierarchy tech?”

“Guess hydraulics don’t change much even with millions of years of progress…” Julian mused. He dug a little higher in the Abrogator’s guts and came across something that looked much more promising. “Here we go. This could be its computer core, maybe. What do you think, Al?”

Allison handed him her rifle and took his place in the genocide machine’s innards. “…Maybe?” she agreed. “But I think it’s probably just the control unit for the hydraulics. Lemme see…”

There were several quiet minutes as she dug further into it before she emitted a low whistle.

Julian quirked his head. “Al?”

“Well, this is either something important or Big Hotel love to put swanky flashy lights on stuff for no good reason…” There was a sharp click and Allison emerged from the Abrogator’s innards with oily substances running unheeded off her suit’s omniphobic surface, and triumphantly holding up a black cube about the size of her fist.

“So the question is-” Julian began.

He was interrupted by Xiù, who had a thoroughly apprehensive note in her voice. ”Uh, guys? Misfit says there are heat signatures approaching…”

That got Allison on her feet instantly, drawing her gauss pistol. “Back to the ship?” She asked.

Julian nodded. “Yeah. Think you’re right.”

They’d barely gone three paces before Julian caught a flash of bright red moving low in a nearby tree, though he almost missed it in the gloom. He hissed sharply and Allison was at his side with her weapon raised.

“I can’t hardly see shit…” she grumbled.

“Turn your light on. If it’s the locals, maybe we’ll scare ‘em off…” Julian suggested.

“So much for the Prime Directive…”

A second later, Allison’s tactical flashlight banished the darkness entirely, and all around them a tribe of the biggest, strongest-looking monkeys Julian had ever thought of flinched backwards and brandished spears at them.

The biggest of them, with a crest as red as a Coke can and muscled like a silverback, tumbled down the tree and snarled at them, and Julian was suddenly acutely aware that the stab-proof material of their excursion suits was going to be no use at all in this case. That big one looked strong enough to just twist his head off.

“…Back to the ship,” Allison repeated slowly and softly. “Nice and slow.”

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Magic to make stone fly and to shoot blue fire. Magic to make blades walk and to poison the land. And now, magic to banish the darkness as if the sun had come up. Vemik turned away and scrubbed at his eyes to banish the floating purple-green blob in the middle of his field of vision.

Beside him, Yan crashed down the tree and bared his teeth at the strangers.

There had never been strangers so… strange, either. They looked almost like People, but their legs were too long and too straight, their bearing too tall and upright.

And their tools, their clothing, the odd objects in their hands, all had too much in common with the nearby corpse of the destroyer. Right down to the clear ice or quartz substance over their faces and the peculiar sheen of the axe on the taller one’s hip.

Yan had clearly arrived at the same conclusions and like a true Given Man he was angry. He looked about ready to tear their heads off in fact, and the strangers were so slender that he might just manage it. They certainly seemed to be scared of him, because they backed away slowly, speaking to each other in worried tones and words Vemik either couldn’t hear properly, or couldn’t understand.

They were about to get vengeance for all the dead villages, all of Vemik’s dead sisters and cousins.

But…

Vemik paused for no longer than the time between his own heartbeats, and would later struggle to explain the full convoluted river of insights that caused him to spring down the tree and throw himself in front of the enraged Given Man before he could lead the charge. He was not an instant too late—rather than being bowled over by Yan’s charge, he instead brought him up short.

Yan was in no mood to be stopped. “Get behind me, Sky-Thinker!”

“Yan, if they were the enemy we’d be dead already!” Vemik snapped.

Possibly nobody else could have used that tone of voice with Yan. Possibly the logic of what he was saying wouldn’t have penetrated coming from anybody else. But for whatever reason, Yan listened. He took a long hard look at the two strangers and at the strange tools they were holding, pointed levelly and unwaveringly in his direction, and Vemik saw him follow, rather more slowly, the same line of thought that had hit him between the ears.

“It came to me. What happens if you take an idea like my spear-thrower and add a lot of sky-thinking?” Vemik prompted.

Yan nodded slowly. “Those are weapons.”

“Yes. Maybe weapons that can spit blue fire? But the death-birds tried to kill me straight away, and these two are…”

Yan looked at the two strangers. They had stopped backing away, but they were poised with their weight to the rear, ready to keep retreating. They stood and moved in strange, foreign ways but the stance clearly spoke of a desire for peace.

Vemik took a slow step forward then, slowly and deliberately, he pulled his spear-thrower from his back, stooped, and placed it carefully on the ground.

The two strangers looked at each other, said nothing… and then slowly aimed their weapons elsewhere. The taller one tugged the hatchet from his belt and laid it on the ground as well.

“How do we know this isn’t a trick?” Yan demanded. Vemik turned back toward him.

“Please… trust me.”

“If you get us all killed…” the Given Man growled.

“Look, Yan. That one took something out of the destroyer. I think they’re its enemies too.”

“And if you’re wrong?” Yan demanded.

Vemik rounded on him. “They can make rock fly, Yan! They can make light without fire! We already saw they can do the impossible! If they’re our enemies then there is nothing we can do to stop them, but if they’re our friends-!”

Yan gaped at what was unquestionably a challenge to his authority. He bristled with outrage, then paused, shot another look at the strange axe that the newcomer had laid in the grass, and with a visible effort of will he settled down. He gave the two strangers a long suspicious glare and then finally, with a disgusted snort, threw his spear to the ground at his feet.

“…This isn’t what my Vision foretold at all,” he cautioned. “But… very well. We do things the Sky-Thinker’s way.”

The tribe relaxed, lowered their spears, and muttered among themselves. Vemik, knowing that Yan would be reasserting his authority hard later on, turned back to the strangers, and stepped forward.

“…Hello,” he said.

Date Point: 12y3m AV
Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-nugdurnuveg system, Capitol system of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Fleetmaster Sorudrovag

Sorud’s career had taught her a lot about controlling her instinct to emote colorfully. Her chromatophores were generally a serene magnolia, there to inspire and reassure her underlings.

The Hunters had a bad way of disrupting that. She knew that her magnolia was a little on the worried orange side right now. Something was badly, badly wrong.

The Hunters tried their luck with the Confederacy systems every so often. Usually it never amounted to anything—the Grand Herd Fleet of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun was as solid and as dependable as the loyal bodies who crewed its ships.

Maybe a small raid might catch a solitary unlucky freighter, at worst. Usually not even that, and the systems themselves were utterly protected, the containment shields able to come up in an instant to provide impenetrable blanket protection against even all conceivable firepower.

But the Swarm of Swarms-!

Yes. Sorud’s chromatophores were definitely more than a little orange.

She double-checked the status of the system shields for her own peace of mind. All three of them were up, a level of redundancy that bordered on the ridiculous even to her cautious and conservative thinking. One such shield had kept the Hunters from flooding Sol and bringing the force of their Swarm to bear on the Humans.

She should have felt absolutely secure. But there were more than a million ships out there, and they were showing no sign of losing interest or leaving.

The projections on the number of Hunters crewing those ships…

“How quickly can the Dominion second fleet be here?” she asked.

The comm operator’s own chromatophores were a sickly yellow with fear. “At best speed, they will arrive in two four-days, fleetmaster.”

Sorud willed her flanks to radiate reassuring neutral tones again. “They cannot get in. Two four-days is no time at all if the enemy cannot-”

She was interrupted by an alarm, and frantic calls from the sensors officers.

“Hostile contacts inside the shield boundary!”

“Twenty swarmships! They’re-”

“How?!” Sorud demanded.

“They must have… I think they must have coasted into the system at sublight several four-days ago, fleetmaster.”

“Intercept them!”

The innermost of the system shields stopped reporting in. Some seconds later, the closest of the system’s sensor buoys sent back over FTL comms that it had recorded a detonation of several megatons, slapping the emitter out of existence.

Suddenly, three shields felt like far, far too few.

It was too few. The Hunters had surprise and planning on their side and every Guvnurag on the bridge contributed the same shade of horrified magenta glow to the general ambience, noticeably changing the lighting hue of the command deck as the second, then third shields went offline almost too quickly to record.

The Swarm-of-Swarms surged in.

++END CHAPTER 34++

Chapter 35: Event Horizons

Date Point: 12y3m AV
Planet Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-ugunduvug, Capitol planet of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Druthegvurnag

Somewhere deep in the impenetrable horror of it all, the thing that was bothering Drutheg the most was one of the civilians. The legal clerk.

She was pretty, in a bookish way. Her wool looked as though under normal circumstances it would be surprisingly silky despite perhaps being a little neglected, and there was a permanent halting, nervous tangerine stipple to her chromatophores whenever she spoke. She was…what was that blunt alien word he had learned somewhere? ‘Cute.’

Except that her mind had completely snapped under the pressure. She kept mumbling something to herself, some long-winded thing that she clearly only half-remembered. ”The Society For The Acknowledgement Of…something. High something? And there was respect for biological…? Something? I wish I could remember. It would all be alright if I could just remember…”

Drutheg almost fluoresced dark mirth. The mere idea that simply remembering the name of some society or another could possibly make things alright was so utterly insane that he could almost feel his own mind fraying simply from being near her and hearing her absurd litany.

It would hardly be inappropriate. The whole world had gone insane. White-skinned death was raining from the stars, dragging good Guvnurag away or eating them where they were caught. There hadn’t been enough warning!

No. The all-too-imminent alarm hadn’t been the problem. The homeworld defense armies had been woefully underfunded for long generations; they were too small, too diffuse. Drutheg prided himself that he was as fierce a warrior as his people had ever trained, but he was alone with six civilians in tow and none of his war herd at his side. They were all dead, and he knew it.

Which was why his own chromatophores betrayed no emotion beyond black. He had filled himself with the grim resolve that the Hunters would feast on him only when he was already a corpse, and that he would not die without first taking down as many of them as he could. There was no room for any other feeling.

So far he had killed three, and had carved for himself a minor island of tattered calm in the middle of the stampede and slaughter all around them. Perhaps that was something to be proud of. Or perhaps his own mind was falling apart. The homeworld, every year of the millennia his people had been, all of that ancient history and heritage, it was all dying today. There was nothing to celebrate in such a trivial accomplishment.

And yet…he felt proud of himself. He hadn’t run. He had held, he had fought. If only for a little while, he had defied the enemy. He could not succeed…but he had not failed. Perhaps that was something to be proud of.

Or perhaps his mind was falling apart.

His racing cyclical thoughts were interrupted by the shriek of more assault pods impacting nearby, and he might have been perversely glad to hear them if he had been able to think about it. Instead it took all the willpower he had not to obey his screaming instincts and stampede.

The civilians were not so steady: The only one of them who did not immediately stampede was the muttering clerk who didn’t seem to register the horrors from orbit at all.

For what little it was worth, Drutheg put himself between her and the most likely source of danger and tried not to listen to the panicked, agonized bellowing as the stampeding citizens were caught and set upon.

He’d already spent two of his grenades just collecting the frayed knot of hangers-on that had just run away. He had one left, plus a couple of smoke charges. His war harness was at full shield strength, his pulse rifle was the latest military issue with the more efficient heat sinks, and he had enough food in his belly to fight.

If only it weren’t so absolutely, utterly hopeless.

He knew his position was effectively surrounded. Whatever the Hunters used to detect their victims would not have missed him or his collection of civilians, nor the body-count of Hunters that he had left. He had the high ground and he had a pulse rifle, but that was not enough against their shields, especially the larger, more grotesque ‘Red’ Hunters.

The only outcome that had something that even looked like a positive attached to it, and even then only in the crazed light of futility, was any one in which he left no corpse behind to be eaten.

That had him contemplating something quite alien to the Guvnargnaguvendrugun mindset. Self-sacrifice.

He watched as the Hunters swaggered into the clearing, weapons up and unafraid. They were drooling and that sight steeled Druthegvurnag’s resolve. He contemplated his last grenade, turned the yield charge all the way up, depressed the safety, turned it past safety-close, and charged with a bellow of defiance.

It was no kind of a gesture at all, really. In the face of the sheer scale of what was happening, one warrior’s proud finale made no difference at all.

But if the Humans were right and there was an ‘afterlife’ for warriors, then perhaps…

He was dead before he reached them. But a Guvnuragnaguvendrugun had mass, and therefore momentum, so there was little the Hunters could do as the mammoth warrior barreled into their midst—

The grenade exploded with enough force to level a small city block. Nothing survived, not the hunters, not Druthegvurnag, and not the civilians.

Mercifully, the confused clerk still trying to remember her mystery society never felt a thing.

Date Point: 12y3m AV
HMS Violent, Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-nugdurnuveg system.

Commodore William Caruthers

“…Fuck.”

The fleet was at full strength. Everything humanity had, every ship they’d ever built and captured, every single strategic asset Earth could bring to bear was at Caruthers’ command. Six V-class destroyers, thirty-six ‘Bulldog’ USVs, HMS Caledonia, HMS Myrmidon, USS San Diego, the Racing Thunder, no fewer than one hundred and eight ‘Firebird’ strike craft organized into three squadrons, the nine humans and six gaoians who were cleared and ready for HEAT operations. An effectively unlimited supply of nukes, anti-ship missiles, 30mm FTL rounds, Aster 45 missiles, RFGs…he even had access to the ultra-secret, as-yet unplayed trump card that was WERBS.

No commander in human history had ever wielded the resources available to him, and every spare bolt of it was useless. The Hunters had won this fight before the humans had even shown up.

Hence his whispered, futile monosyllable.

The Guvnurag were being slaughtered down there—their formation and tactics were classic Dominion, right to the core, and the Hunters knew how to handle Dominion warfare doctrine just fine. More so, now that they’d figured out how to add FTL capabilities to their railguns. The Swarm-of-Swarms was as mobile as smoke and just about as easy to shoot, and their own weapons could strike from so far out that the only limiting factor was sensor latency.

But it would have been a bloodbath even without that tactical superiority. There were a hundred Hunter ships for every non-Hunter contact in the system, and most of those were freighters, mining barges, passenger shuttles. The actual warships were outnumbered more than a thousand to one, and that kind of numerical mismatch multiplied the mass of the Hunter fleet, in the military sense of the word.

Human doctrine focused on force multipliers; mass was really a concept that meant ‘ability to impose force’ and in that regard any human fleet element had a mass that far outstripped mere gross tonnage, but here in this situation there was no possible way to finesse that mass. Caruthers may as well have fantasized about flattening the Himalayas using a team of dedicated men with shovels—not even the best men with the best shovels would have sufficed.

Which meant the only feasible response was to inflict as much damage as he could before withdrawing. And he could, in theory, inflict a great deal of damage indeed.

But there were a million ships out there. It was a number that defied comprehension. A million ships. It was doubtful in the extreme that if he were to tally up every single carrier, destroyer, submarine, cruiser, battleship, gunboat, frigate, ironclad, clipper, galleon, caravel and trireme ever constructed by the combined navies of all Earth’s history that they would even clear a tenth of that number.

He reached up under his flash hood and scratched despairingly at the back of his neck while thinking over his options.

To leave without inflicting some damage was unthinkable. Utterly unthinkable. And yet…

And yet strategic assets needed preserving. There was no sense in wasting resources on a token gesture and he had no reason at all to believe that these million represented the entirety of Hunter capabilities. And there was certainly no sense in tipping their hand any further than it had already been tipped—Every time humanity showed the Hunters a new trick, the bastards picked it up and used it. He’d be damned if he would contribute to that process today.

So, as unthinkable as effective inaction was right now…it was his only option.

He raised the Fleet Intelligence Center on Myrmidon.

The FIC, frankly, was possibly his most potent weapon. All those ships, missiles and guns were of absolutely no use at all if he didn’t know where to aim them after all, and from the second they arrived the churning data engines that IBM had kindly developed had begun digesting every last datum the whole combined Allied fleet’s collective sensors could generate.

The FIC was worryingly competent under the worst circumstances. Under optimal circumstances, when networked with the lesser Watsons aboard all the other ships, it was terrifying. Far too many people had joked about calling the whole linked system ‘SKYNET’ and not without justification, especially considering that the man holding its leash answered to the name and rank of Lieutenant Connor.

They were looking subdued over there, and Caruthers couldn’t blame them at all. Of all the people in the fleet, the intelligence staff over in the FIC were easily the best-informed about exactly what they were watching.

“Lieutenant. I need a target. One target, if you please…and make it a bloody good one.”

Date Point: 12y3m AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

The strangers were…Well, strange.

It was an obvious strangeness at first: They were the wrong shape for a start, tall and lean and straight-legged and most disturbingly of all they entirely lacked tails.

And then the little details began to creep in. The strange terrain in the middle of their faces, below and between the eyes that distorted their lips upwards in the middle. They seemed to breathe through it! And Vemik didn’t once see them flick their tongues out into the air to taste it.

Then he looked into those eyes and saw that the pupils were perfectly round, as round as the sun and the moons rather than the horizontal slots of normal People.

He’d still been mesmerized by those eyes when the slimmer, shorter one had waved a hand in some kind of gesture at her partner and he’d been nauseated to see that she had five fingers! And so did the other one, too!

Those fingers were quick and clever, though. He watched them fidget dexterously with objects that defied his understanding but which were undoubtedly tools of some kind.

Every time they did, Yan somehow got tenser still. He was smouldering like a particularly ornery coal, pacing where the strangers could see him, always facing them front-on and ready to charge. That fact wasn’t lost on the strangers, either—neither of them had actually put their weapons down, Vemik noted. The woman had put hers away, slotting it neatly into a kind of open-topped bag on her hip, but the other one was as long as a short spear. The man was holding it loosely in his arms in as non-threatening a posture as possible but it was still *there*…ready.

They seemed to be waiting for something.

Or, as it turned out, someone.

A third stranger joined them, stepping cautiously between the trees and this one was not wearing that strange bubble of ice around her head, allowing Vemik to get a better look at her.

Her face was more People-shaped than the others’, though not by much—she still had that strange feature in the middle and her mouth still had those fuller, curiously contoured lips.

It was her crest that was the greatest surprise, however. Hers was the wrong hue entirely, a deep lustrous black rather than the proper shaggy orange or red, and it looked like she had gathered and tied it into a tight bundle into the back from where it fell in a shimmering rope down as far as her hips. And her skin! Every inch of it that Vemik could see was pale, smooth and delicate. Maybe shaded a little redder on the cheeks, a little darker around the eyes, but overall it was a complete contrast to everything Vemik knew of skin, which he had always known as being a dark, thick, tough beige thing.

The other two, he realized, were equally pale but it would be a mistake to assume that their strange smooth skin was a sign of any weakness. While the newcomer projected warm grace and peace, those two were both still as sharp and watchful as sentries. They prowled like hunters and never relaxed. This new one…

She paused in front of Vemik, smiled at him so prettily that the Singer would have made a jealous snarl had she been present, and then lowered herself serenely into a kneeling posture that Vemik would have found awkward and painful, but which she seemed to find effortless. She rested her hands lightly on her knees and then dipped forward at the waist until her forehead almost brushed the leaf litter.

Vemik had never seen anybody move with such effortless grace. When she straightened up again and settled herself she did so with such poise that Vemik, who could flip through the canopy like the wind when he wanted, was made to feel lumpen and brutish. Even the way she raised one of those strange, slim-fingered hands and brushed some stray hair from her face was composed and precise.

He glanced to his father for guidance.

Vemet shrugged, and gestured toward the ethereal being in front of them, inviting him to lead the way. “You’re the sky-thinker, son,” he said, “you talk to them.”

“It was your idea not to fight them,” Yan added, with angry gravel in the back of his throat. “…But I have my spear for you, if you need it.”

“Thanks, Yan…” Vemik decided not to say how much he doubted they would need the Given Man’s weapon today.

He stepped forward cautiously and considered how to reply to her gesture, whatever it had meant.

What had it meant? That was the important part. She had knelt, bowed low, exposed the back of her neck for a killing strike. She had intentionally made herself vulnerable in fact. A gesture of peace, then?

Among men of strange tribes who did not know one another, Yan had once told him, they would remove their knives of manhood and present them to one another for inspection. How one greeted a woman from a strange tribe he didn’t know, and certainly he had no idea how to greet a…a sky-person. Would she know to return his knives? Maybe she would think the gesture was a threatening one…

Maybe the thing to do was to just…sit. There was no sense in being undignified and trying to imitate her graceful contortions, but he could do something she couldn’t.

He squatted, and coiled his tail beneath him for a third point of contact with the ground. A man could sit like that for hours quite comfortably.

The strange woman from the sky smiled again, then slowly reached into a pocket on her strange garment and offered him something.

It was a disk. Round again, just as round as the moons, and made of some substance he didn’t know at all. It was white, and there was some kind of a mark on it, a series of short dark lines that crossed and bent in strange ways. He had no idea what it was and he glanced at the sky-woman in the vain hope that she might be able to clarify.

She smiled, and mimed a curious motion with her hands-she cupped her left one as if holding a small object about the thing’s size, and the other moved as if she was peeling a fruit, or…

Vemik considered the object again. Turned it over in his hands and looked at its edges. One edge was clearly different to the other and after a moment’s deliberation he experimentally cupped it in his hand as she had indicated, gripped it firmly with his thumb, and pried it open as she had shown.

His own face was inside.

He nearly threw it across the clearing in alarm and surprise but he chewed back on the impulse and considered what he was looking at.

It was like…looking in a stream, or a puddle as he had done many times before. The image of his own face looked back at him and moved as he moved. He frowned at it, and saw his own frown. He cocked his head, and saw his image do the same.

Like the ghost of himself he saw on water, but sharper, cleaner, more real. He considered himself for a moment and took the opportunity to consider what he must look like to a stranger.

Handsome, he realized. It was an odd thought.

Thoughtfully, he closed the object and handed it back to her while wondering what she had hoped to convey by giving it to him. For her part she seemed pleased, and he wasn’t sure if he had passed a test of some kind or simply if they were speaking two different languages.

She considered him carefully for a moment as she pocketed the item, and then placed her hand on the middle of her chest with those strange, slim, five fingers splayed.

“*Shyow.*”

Vemik cocked his head, so she turned to her armed companions and gestured to them.

“*Awisun. Jooyun.*”

She turned back to face him and extended a hand in much the same way that Vemet just had, and Vemik silently cursed himself for being slow on the uptake. Of course! when you met somebody, what did you do first?

He rapped his fist on his chest. “Vemik.”

Shyow smiled brilliantly again and this time there was a friendly flash of teeth. This one was a real smile, a warm and genuine one rather than a polite one. But if the fingers, the black crest and the odd thing in the middle of her face had been strange, nothing could possibly have prepared Vemik for those teeth. They were straight, even, unnaturally white, small and numerous. They looked like a child’s teeth after they had first grown in, sitting incongruously in the mouth of a woman who was clearly fully grown.

Something about the way he stared at them seemed to dismay Shyow. She raised a hand to cover her mouth, which had the effect of making Vemik feel strangely guilty somehow.

She lowered her hand again after a second once her teeth were no longer in view, then twisted at the waist to retrieve something she was carrying in a pouch low on her back. It was a flat, square rock of some kind which did something utterly unexpected when she touched it on one corner—it lit up.

Vemik heard Yan grumble something behind him, but ignored it. The object in Shyow’s hands fascinated him as she tapped and swiped at it, making patterns and shapes move and dance on its surface though he had no idea what she was accomplishing.

People from the sky were strange.

In a few seconds, Shyow had arranged the rock’s light to her satisfaction. She set it on her lap, smiled at him again, then looked around, pointed at a nearby Ketta tree, and spoke carefully.

“*Twee*”

Vemik glanced over his shoulder again and saw Vemet nodding.

So. These people didn’t speak as the People spoke, they had different words for things. He was going to need to teach them the words, and maybe learn a few of theirs as well.

He sighed, took out his water skin to take a quick sip, then turned back to Shyow, pointed at the same tree, and told her how to pronounce its name.

She nodded, tapped something on her rock, then looked calculatingly around before pointing at a Nara tree, and repeating the word for tree.

“Nara tree,” Vemik told her. He pointed back at the first one. “Ketta tree, Nara tree.”

She nodded again, looked around some more then pointed at three trees of three species “Tweez?”

It wasn’t like teaching a child to speak at all. Shyow clearly already knew how words worked, and she knew it well too. Vemik only had to tell her something once and then she’d tap on her stone, and ask a different question. She looked around, pointed at a nearby boulder, and spoke a word. “*Wohk.*”

Vemik nodded, taught her the tribe’s word for a rock, and in short order she had requested and been taught the difference between talking about one rock, two rocks, three rocks, and more than three rocks. He taught her the different words for men and women, for varying numbers of tree and the names of different kinds of tree, the words for grass in general and individual grass stalks, and the word for stone that had been worked into a tool as opposed to raw, unworked stone. He taught her how to say “My name is,” “her name is,” “his name is” and so on and never ever had to tell her something more than once.

Sometimes she would look at her flat rock as if seeking guidance there, and he got the distinct and crazed impression that it was somehow doing her remembering for her. Which was…how could a rock remember things? But then again how could a rock light up?

Maybe the light was the secret? He looked at them again and thought hard as Shyow raised the stone and showed it to Jooyun, who nodded sagely as though what he was seeing made perfect sense to him.

In his head, he was tying things together. The way that hunters would pile stones or cut a notch in the bark of a prominent tree to mark where the Werne roamed, or waters where Yshek lurked, to point back toward the village or toward a safe trail down a cliff. Those were all things that a man could remember, but which the right pile of stones, or the right mark in the wood could remind him of…or tell him, if he had never learned it in the first place.

So…he had successfully tied rocks together with memory. And he knew beyond doubt that the strange thing in Jooyun’s arm was a kind of a spear-thrower, a weapon for killing from afar.

Which meant…

He stood up and stretched from having been sat down a while, and asked a blunt question.

[“What do you have to do with *that?*”] he asked, pointing at the gutted destroyer. Yan stiffened and shot the strangers a suspicious glare.

Shyow frowned and tapped something on her stone, then nodded. She beckoned to Awisun and stood up, dusting leaves off her knees.

“…*Fwend*” she said, and gave Awisun an affectionate hug. Vemik nodded to indicate that he understood, so Shyow stepped back then mimed vigorously and hatefully attacking Awisun, who did something unexpected and giggled at the ferocity of the pretend attack. Like Yan, Awisun clearly had a playful side under that hard bark.

Shyow turned back to him. “*En’mee*” she said. When Vemik nodded again she turned to the destroyer, scowled at it, and held her hands far apart. “[BIG] En’mee.”

“[So they claim],” Yan growled. Shyow looked at him, then gave Vemik an apologetic smile before looking back to Yan again.

“Fwend.” she said, clearly and firmly and pointed from her chest to Yan’s.

Yan harrumphed, turned away and headed back toward the village which left Shyow looking…disappointed, perhaps, but certainly not surprised.

“Yan?” Vemik asked. He would have protested but now was not a good time to pick any kind of a fight with the big Given Man.

[“The Singer needs to hear of this!”]

[“Let him go, son,”] Vemet advised. [“It’s his job to not trust strangers.”]

“[He’s right, anyway],” Vemik conceded. [“The Singer does need to see this.”]

He turned to Shyow and wondered how in the name of everything under the sky and beyond it he was going to explain that they needed to pause and resume tomorrow, but she seemed to understand already. She nodded and took a step back, gesturing open-handed for him to follow Yan.

Vemik was honestly faintly awed. She seemed to effortlessly know his thoughts and he didn’t know if that was guilelessness on his part, or sharp insight on hers. Either way, she stepped back and let him go with a confident smile.

Vemik nodded, and dashed up the hill after Yan. They had a lot to discuss.

Date Point: 12y3m AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Allison Buehler

Julian ghosted forward to the edge of the clearing to check that the last of the natives really had gone, and it was a long tense wait before he finally looked back and nodded.

Xiù sagged and the ethereal, angelic being she’d been pretending to be for the last several hours vanished like smoke. She seemed to lose a couple of inches, even—the transition was that dramatic. Suddenly she looked small, nervous and drained.

“Well…that could have gone worse I guess?” She commented, returning her tablet to the elasticated pocket behind her back.

“Fuckin’ A…” Julian’s agreement was soft but heartfelt as he scanned the trees while returning to them. “I thought that Yan guy was gonna twist our heads off for sure. He looks strong enough.”

“They all do,” Allison agreed. “That coulda been real ugly if Vemik hadn’t stepped in like that.”

“Yeah, and he’s gonna pay for it,” Julian opined. “Reckon Yan’s their chief or something, and I don’t think Vemik’s that old…”

“He’s really young,” Xiù appraised. “Like…really young. I think if he was human he’d be, um, maybe fifteen or so?”

“If they’re anything like some human cultures back on Earth then that’s old enough to be seen as a man…” Julian mused. “And it looks like he’s got the respect and trust of the older men too. But he’s still gonna have a hard time if he undermines Yan too bad.”

Xiù nodded exhaustedly and yawned. “…Ai ya…”

Allison wrapped her arms around Xiù’s shoulders from behind and hugged her. “Babe, you were incredible,” she said. “Since when are you an elf?”

“Hmm?” Xiù blinked at her. “Oh, um…since Mrs. Marshall’s drama class back in high school. She had us act out some scenes from Lord of the Rings and…” She shrugged. “I guess those lessons stuck. I enjoyed that class.”

“So what did the translator get?” Julian asked, leading the way back toward the ship.

“A lot,” Xiù said. She got out her tablet and frowned at it—they all knew the core of the translation software was a Corti design, which possibly meant there was some Hierarchy code lurking in there somewhere, but unfortunately it was also centuries in advance of any equivalent human software. It could extrapolate some astonishingly accurate predictions from meager principles, and had begun making respectably near-miss best guesses at syntax and sentence structure within minutes after Xiù had launched the app and started feeding it the data it requested.

It had its limits, of course—there was no way to deduce the native word for, say, “love” from the words for trees and suchlike, and the most sophisticated translation it was yet equipped to spit out would be something along the lines of ‘Vemik, please give me three small brown rocks’. For now they were confined to the simple and the physical—abstracts weren’t about to happen anytime soon, but it already had the basic grammatical and conceptual framework down. The rest was just vocabulary.

Misfit was not far from the wrecked Abrogator’s clearing, parked on the gravelly bank of a fast-flowing clear little river. There had been an even better landing site further upstream where the waters had pooled and formed a small lake but Julian had asked Xiù to hover above it while he scanned its waters, and sure enough he’d turned up a heat signature down there the size of an orca.

With no way of knowing if it was harmless, territorial, or even some vicious ambush predator they had given it a wide berth.

In hindsight, the change of landing site was doubly sensible: as well as avoiding some of the larger local fauna, the river had cut quite a steep-sided valley through layers of bedrock. Misfit was well-hidden in that valley—any other Hierarchy robots lurking around would have to pretty much trip over her to find them.

Unfortunately, there was the problem of decontamination. This wasn’t a green-cycle job, all three of them had been out there for hours, on a world that was landing firmly in the middle of the twelve-point somethings on the Corti chart, putting it effectively on par with Earth. Vemik and his tribe might be carrying the kinds of diseases that could rip through them with just as much fearsome effect as scarlet fever, smallpox or tuberculosis, and of course none of them were vaccinated against such alien diseases.

Therefore, they had to undergo an Orange decontamination—a full-strength sweep with the biofilter field on full power, a heavy powdering and a thorough sluicing-down with strongly chlorinated water.

For Julian and Allison inside their suits, that wasn’t a problem. For Xiù, who had chosen to wear her shipboard wear to make a good impression, it was eye-reddening misery. She endured it with extensive grumbling and then stormed toward the shower in the hab block the second the inner door opened, hell-bent on showering away the stinging stuff immediately, especially before it had a chance to bleach her hair. Uncharacteristically, she threw her soaked clothes on the floor behind her with a wet slap as she went rather than delivering them into Misfit’s laundry as she usually nagged Allison to do.

Allison briefly entertained the teasing possibilities of that, before deciding against it. Xiù was going to have red eyes and a runny nose for a couple of hours, now wasn’t the time for teasing. Instead, she and Julian helped each other out of their excursion suits with rather more care and stowed their gear for cleaning and maintenance.

“Not gonna be able to do that too many times,” she pointed out as she pulled out the spent powder and chlorine cartridges from the airlock’s reservoirs and replaced them with charged ones. “We’ve only got enough of these for ten orange cycles.”

“The biofilter field can calibrate itself for local bugs,” Julian said, doing his part of going over the suit for any sign that the decontamination had missed a spot. “We just need to get a couple of samples.”

“What, like, get Vemik or Yan to stand in the field?”

“That’d be ideal, yeah. Give us a full medical scan in the bargain, the scientists would love that…”

“Sounds like a tall order, babe.”

“The field should cope okay without,” Julian shrugged, and gave her a wry look. “Heck, when Kirk grabbed me from Nightmare, *Sanctuary*’s biofilter fixed me right up just fine. Corti know their shit. Sticking a local in the scanner’d just be…helpful. And hell, in a pinch a blood sample would do just fine, but do you wanna go ask them for some blood?”

“…Magic light in the flying metal hut it is, huh?”

“If we can, yeah. Except they maybe don’t have a word for metal. I didn’t see a scrap of iron, copper or gold anywhere on them.”

“Jeez.” Allison closed the hatch and rubbed her forehead. “How do you even begin telling guys who have like one bow between them just how much trouble they’re in right now? I mean…”

“I know.” Julian leaned against the wall. “But…I dunno, babe. They saw us arrive in a flying thing and Vemik there figured out what a rifle does. Could be, if a guy like that meets magic sky-people in a flying house who turn to this thing and say *‘BIG ENEMY’*…I mean, he’s pretty smart. I bet it won’t take long to sink in…”

Date Point: 12y3m AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

“Ya-an!” Vemik grunted and tried to work an arm free. “We are in deep trouble!”

Yan grinned and applied a little more of his prodigious strength to painful effect, while Vemet trilled nearby as he watched his son wriggle and fight to get free. The big Given Man had Vemik pinned face-down in the dirt, both arms held fast behind his back in one huge hand. Yan sat on his haunches with most of his substantial weight on his left leg and the rest smashing the slight young man’s hips to the ground. His other thickset limb curled around and under Vemik’s stomach and crushed powerfully, while Yan’s tail coiled tightly around Vemik’s legs and squeezed.

It was all playful: Yan wasn’t really mad, he was just…well, being a Yan. Instead of a thrashing like Vemik had been silently dreading, Yan had instead challenged the young upstart with a happy, boisterous hoot. Vemik accepted with a grin—who didn’t like to tussle?—and lost the match instantly, which was mildly humiliating even despite the huge difference in strength and skill. Yan had pinned him almost gently too, with an insultingly weak hold that should have been easy to escape…but Yan was far too strong. He trilled smug and happy and playfully dominant, while Vemik struggled uselessly to escape. Showoff.

At any other time it would all be good fun, but right then, the Sky-Thinker wished fervently for Yan to maybe stop being a Yan and maybe start being a Vemik instead. “This is important!” he protested, and tried to lash his tail around to get a grip on Yan’s ankle.

Yan was too old, too big, too strong and far too experienced to fall for such a simple maneuver. He whipped his leg out from under Vemik as fast as a lightning strike, then stomped the writhing tail and pinned it with a breathtakingly powerful squeeze of his foot-hand, drawing an involuntary yelp from Vemik and another light amused trill from Vemet.

Vemik struggled on, which earned him a grumbling approval from Yan. In response he settled his full weight on the young man’s hips, which earned him a loud groan of pain and a desperate look to Vemet, who smiled even bigger and trilled in sympathy. Every man in all the neighboring villages knew defeat by Yan, Given Men included. He tightened his grip with all four hands to the point where he felt the young man’s body spasm slightly underneath him.

“Give?”

Vemik shook his head defiantly. That amused Yan, who wrapped both his legs around Vemik’s stomach, squeezed mightly with legs and tail, then leaned in and pressed Vemik’s arms as far up his back as they could safely go. That hurt. A lot.

But Yan wasn’t done. He muscled himself up and forward, then whispered, “Y’know, I could go a lot harder if you want to test yourself, Sky-Thinker…” Vemik struggled briefly then gave in with a pained sigh when Yan yet again tightened his grip. In fairness, he relented the instant that Vemik surrendered. He sat back on his haunches and loosened his crushing leg-and-tail smash to Vemik’s groaning relief, though he still didn’t let Vemik wriggle free.

“You always think sky-thinking is the most important thing, Sky-Thinker,” Yan growled affectionately before letting go. “Think down here in the dirt with the rest of us, sometime.”

“I am!” Vemik objected, as he was roughly spun around and helped up to his feet. Yan ended the match with a painfully affectionate hug and a rough rub of Vemik’s crest, which he took with a grumble as he dusted himself off. He tried not to bristle—Yan had worked off his bad mood playfully and in good humor, but he wasn’t about to let a much younger man give him that kind of attitude. “Yan, they said—”

“I heard.” Yan took a sip from his water skin in a we-do-things-at-my-pace way, taking his time over it. He shook his crest out and made a scoffing noise in the back of his throat. “Big en’mee.”

Vemik tried not to scowl. The impression had not been charitable.

“Yan, they have—” he began again, and this time Yan gave him a flash of fangs.

“I’m not blind, Sky-Thinker. They have weapons and a flying…thing and a rock that makes light and the sky only knows what else. I saw. And they claim that thing is their foe, and if people like that have a foe, a ‘big’ foe…” he made that scoffing noise again “…Then we may as well be fighting gods. Is that what you’re about to say?”

Vemik gawped at him, then found a new objection. “…Aren’t you worried? I mean…Shouldn’t you be?”

Yan shrugged expansively, and turned back up the hill toward the village again, setting a brisk rolling pace that left Vemik and his father struggling to keep up. Most of the other men had already straggled out across the slope, partly for scouting purposes, partly to hunt if the opportunity presented itself, partly to give the tribe’s undisputed leaders their privacy.

“Worry about what?” he asked. “Is there anything we can do? That skithral-thing the two of you killed—” he turned and nodded respectfully to Vemet, “wasn’t moving. If it had been, you would both be dead and so would the village. Am I right?”

“…I guess…?” Vemik conceded, slowly.

“Those people down there are either the enemy, or they’re the enemy’s enemy. Now, some people are stupid enough to think that a shared enemy makes you friends, Sky-Thinker…”

“But what if they *are?*” Vemik asked. Yan rounded on him for about the fifth time in their short walk so far.

“They are not,” he snarled. “They are death, Sky-Thinker. They bring tools and magic we don’t know from a place we could never go and claim an enemy we could never fight. Things will never be the same after today.”

“But what if things are better after?” Vemik asked. “What if they…what if they teach us their magic and tools, or how to make huts that shine in the sun and fly?”

Yan shook his head and turned away again. “What did you teach the boy, Vemet?” he asked. “A man makes his own spears, hunts his own meat and provides for his own children. If the boy wants a hut that flies, he should learn how to make one for himself, not go begging to strange thin people from the sky to make it easy.”

Vemik should have bristled. To be called ‘the boy’ twice when he had the knives of manhood he had won himself strapped securely to his chest…But he sensed that now was not the time for that fight. Instead, he met Vemet’s eye. “…You’ve been quiet so far, father…” he observed. “What are you thinking?”

Vemet mulled the question over, and replied slowly. “I’m thinking…that if I had never taught you how to make a spear, you wouldn’t have figured out how to make that spear-thrower of yours. And when you teach that to your son, what then?” When Yan glared at him, he shrugged and spread his hands wide. “Men teach their sons how to hunt so that their sons can be better hunters than their fathers,” he pointed out.

Yan stood for a long moment and thought. At length he took another swig of water and grumbled, “Vemet’s got wisdom in his head.” He looked at Vemik and bared his fangs in a friendly sort of lopsided snarl, “I can see where you get it from.”

So. Vemik still had Yan’s respect but his patience was badly worn. That meant that Vemik needed to choose his words carefully.

“We are still alive, Yan,” he pointed out. “That means something.”

Yan flicked his ears and nodded. “Sure. It means we’ve got strange gods down the hill in a flying stone hut and we have no idea what they want or how to even talk to them. And they’re maybe fighting other gods that want to kill us all. Does this strike you as safe?”

“…No. But that means we really only have one choice. We need to talk with them.”

“Oh, sure. We go talk to the gods! Do you know what the problem there is? We need to pray and sacrifice and put our Dancers and Given Men through awful things just so the gods notice us. What do we do if we anger these strange People? Are they gods? Does it matter?”

“If we do nothing,” Vemet observed thoughtfully, “we still risk angering them.”

Yan barked angrily. “This would have been easier if you’d just let me rip them apart,” he grumbled.

Vemik nodded warily. “Yes, and if you did you might have been killed by those…weapons of theirs. And don’t forget about the skithral-things. What happens when they wake up?”

Vemet answered for him. “We die.”

There was a long and uncomfortable pause.

Vemet cleared his throat. “So. We had better make friends, so we know where to stand.”

Yan sighed loudly and shook his head. “Godshit! Why us? Why now?”

Vemik only shrugged.

“Right. Well. I guess the three of us need to meet with the Singer and figure out what’s the best way to keep these god-People happy and not inclined to kill us.”

Yan stomped up to a Ketta tree, walked up its trunk, then swung towards the distant village.

That was a sure tell that Yan was straining against a very bad mood. Normally he wouldn’t tackle a Ketta like that because it could damage the thick bark and the People respected the trees. While most anyone else had to climb a Ketta with their hands and feet gripping the huge trunk, a few Given Men were so strong and their feet could grip so powerfully that they could simply walk up trees as if they were just a particularly steep hill. That left their hands free for other things and Yan’s were flailing as he grumbled angrily to himself, lost in distracted thought.

Vemik and Vemet looked at each other. “You better go after him, Sky-Thinker.”

Vemik nodded and chased behind. The Given Man had already swung across the wide gap between the huge Ketta and its neighboring twin, which was so big a distance that Vemik could only climb up and jump down from a great height. Smaller men like him preferred lesser trees like Nara. They grew closer together and didn’t need nearly as much oompf to cross the gap.

That did mean it was work catching up to Yan, who seemed pointedly uninterested in Vemik’s graceful yet exhausting efforts through the upper branches to catch up.

“Yan! Wait, please!”

Yan turned around, settled himself on a massive branch at the bottom of the tree, and presented himself squared up with Vemik. “What!?” That time he could not hide the exasperation in his voice.

Vemik caught up, panting, then squared himself up as well. “Yan…I’m sorry.”

Yan blinked, then sort of…fell into himself. Vemik boggled. Yan was a man’s man, one everyone looked up to and wished they could be. He was handsome and playful and an unmatched hunter. His perfect, bright red crest stood tall and straight from head to tail. Every line of his body was big, tight, plainly visible and better than any other man.

It was amazing how something as simple as sagging shoulders and a less threatening, laid-back crouch on his haunches could transform someone like Yan from the most impressive man Vemik had ever met, into something merely big and rounded and…tired. Tired, and maybe a little melancholy.

He sighed deep in his chest and gave Vemik a contrite look. “I know…You did good today. Godshit, you probably saved our lives.”

Vemik didn’t know what to say to that and stood there, slightly embarrassed.

“…And I’m sorry too,” Yan added. “I saw your look when I called you ‘boy.’ That…was disrespectful. You didn’t deserve that.”

“Yan—”

“No, I mean it. A man owns up to his mistakes. It doesn’t matter if only two years ago you were still riding on my back and asking so many questions.”

Vemik scratched at the back of his head, where his crest met the nape of his neck. “I never really stopped, did I?”

Yan trilled sharply and recovered most of his usual Yan-ness and Vemik suddenly found himself swallowed up in a big, friendly hug. “No, you didn’t!” He noogied affectionately for a playful moment while Vemik squirmed fruitlessly, but the moment passed all too quickly. Yan sobered up, gave Vemik a hard look, then held the smaller man’s shoulders.

“Maybe take a little advice from a big, useless Given Man like me. Sky-Thinking and wisdom aren’t the same thing. Don’t spend so much time with your head up there,” Yan pointed straight up, “that you forget the dirt beneath your feet or the woman in your hut. Or your child, or your friends…or us.”

“I won’t!”

“I know.” Yan gave him a genuinely warm look, and explained. “Everybody has their strange ways, Sky-Thinker, and everybody needs reminding of it sometimes. You need to think of us first and not your gods-ignored burning curiosity about all the things. Can you do that with these strangers?”

Vemik nodded seriously.

Yan trilled softly and warmly. “I know. I always did. But we Given Men, we can’t help but worry like that. It’s our nature.”

“But why? And why do you get so big? And why is there only one in any tribe? And why—”

“Vemik!” Yan shook his head, radiating indulgent frustration.

Vemik deflated. “…Sorry. But will I ever know why?”

Yan gave him his most serious look. “Gods, I hope not.”

Vemik couldn’t refuse his impulse to grumble unhappily, but he finally held his peace.

“Anyway. Come, we need to make good time back to the village and we only have…” Yan squinted at the sun, “…one finger of the daylight left.” Yan gave another aggressively playful snarl, “I’ll race you!”

Before Vemik could accept the challenge, Yan turned and charged through the Ketta trees’ bottom-most canopy like an angry bull werne. Vemik trilled softly to himself then grinned, swung over to the better Nara trees, and chased after his friend.

All, he hoped, was forgiven.

Date Point: 12y3m AV
Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-nugdurnuveg system, Capitol system of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

The Alpha-of-Alphas

Time, and obsessive analysis of Human tactics and philosophy, had radically altered the way that the Alpha-of-Alphas thought about certain important things. Once not so very long ago it would have been pacing in futile rage at the thought of missing out the grand Hunt going on far below it. The Brood of Broods was broadcasting the ecstatic high of the hunt through every channel as they tore through the population below in a frenzied orgy of delighted feasting.

For the Alpha-of-Alphas to miss out on such carnage would once have been unthinkable. But its thoughts had been so small then. It had seen only the meat, and the maw, and the claw and the prey. Its understanding of what a Hunt truly was had been constrained by simple fleshly appetites.

Since the battle of the prey-station, it had transcended such trivialities. Now, while lesser Hunters gorged themselves on mere meat and blood, the Alpha of Alphas congratulated itself on this successful hunt of a whole planet. Today, it had struck a grievous maiming blow to the large furred prey and left a wound that would never heal—the scar on an entire species would always be there.

Delicious.

Doubly delicious. The Humans were out there, watching. It didn’t know where, exactly—they were truly accomplished predators when they chose to be, and had elected to stalk and be watchful for the time being. They were unquestionably choosing their moment to pounce.

Let them pounce. No matter what they chose to strike, they could inflict no real harm on the Hunters, not with any of the tricks or tools they had yet chosen to show. They most certainly had others, of that there was no doubt, but if they did employ something new, then the Alpha-of-Alphas would learn, again. Would expand, again.

Would feast, again.

It was so engrossed in metaphorically salivating over the prospect of what it might learn that it almost missed the moment when the humans chose to show their token of defiance. It was over in a flash, literally in a flash. There was the most minute and guarded distortion of spacetime and the largest slave transport ship in the Swarm-of-Swarms was immediately gone, along with its crew of seven thousand Hunters.

Not gone: smashed. It took the Alpha-of-Alphas nearly ten minutes to piece together the precise sequence of events and after it had done so it reclined what little of its flesh remained within the cradle of its command edifice and considered what it had just seen.

Much of its body was gone now. This was nothing unusual for any Hunter of any seniority: the natural claws were usually the first to go, swapped for a universal cybernetic mount capable of bearing any kind of weapon from fusion claws and heavy pulse rifles to nervejam launchers and even plasma guns. Superior eyes, superior limbs, superior bones, muscles and nerves. Everything about a Hunter’s organic form was weaker than they wished to be. There was catharsis in personal transformation.

The Alpha-of-Alphas merely occupied the pinnacle of an obsession shared by all of its kind—the will to dominance. Now that its dreams of dominance encompassed whole species and their worlds, and had assembled a fleet of millions, an army of billions and the poised tidal wave of a species that viewed itself as the force of nature, ready to crash down on everything else and remind them where the real power lay in this galaxy…

Such a will to dominance demanded more than better claws and teeth. It demanded that its claws be whole spaceships, that its eyes and ears be scout craft.

Increasingly, the Alpha-of-Alpha’s proprioception was less and less aware of the truncated shreds of meat resting restlessly in its command facility, and increasingly it viewed its body as being the Swarm of Swarms.

And now the humans had torn off a scale, or bruised a finger. An irritation, certainly, but one that inspired interest rather than outrage. It was always entertaining to see how the deathworlders struck.

On close examination, the tactics and equipment used were nothing new. The Human Alpha must be aware of its foe’s hunger to learn and had sensibly withheld any new information. The fact that the materiel and maneuver involved was nothing new didn’t make it in any way less effective, however. The humans had fired an extreme long-range shot from somewhere out in the extreme reaches of the system, at such a low warp velocity that its passage had barely registered at all. They must have fired it hours in advance, in fact, and yet it had neatly drifted through the appropriate volume of space with commendable precision.

It hadn’t actually hit anything, of course. The slightest drift or acceleration at such ranges was enough to ruin even the most careful firing solution…but it had been close enough. The jump beacon carried by that round had fired up, and a claw of the Human strike ships had pounced through, lit up the transport ship with targeting sensors, summoned their weapon with millimeter precision, and departed in a pulse of bent reality all in a shorter interval than it to took the Alpha-of-Alpha’s heart to beat three times.

The weapon had been nothing special, either. An ordinary hydrogen-based fusion weapon in the megaton range, shaped to blast the great majority of its destructive energies out as a coherent lance of high-energy EM radiation that had torn the transport ship into two melting and partially vaporized uneven halves. Crude and low-tech, but very few things in the galaxy had the kind of defenses that could withstand energies on that scale.

It forwarded the data to the Alpha Builder. Meager pickings from the humans, but the builders were drooling to sink their fangs into the prey-species data banks and pick apart the secrets of the system shield technology. With scrutiny and time, surely a weakness would reveal itself.

It watched as the last few fortunate contacts flickered out of the system at FTL speeds, and peeled off a few pursuit ships to run down the slow and limping. Not all of them, though: The fastest, the healthiest, the strongest it let go to carry the word of what had happened here. When the sensor records and video footage they carried began to circulate, the panic would spread through the prey herds like a burning disease.

Finally, it relaxed. It sank back into the sensory feeds from hundreds of millions of Hunters below…And it feasted.

Date Point: 12y3m1d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada

General Martin Tremblay

Some events were so huge that the usual system of talking over video calls wasn’t going to cut it today. Sometimes, when a good officer was in the hotseat to justify his actions, then the resulting meeting needed to be done properly. No phone, no big TV screen. Just a handful of the most powerful people on the planet, sitting down for a solemn talk.

Commodore Caruthers had not, in Tremblay’s view, done too badly from what he knew of the situation. The total loss to humanity’s military from the operation was a single, expendable, Nuclear-Pumped Highly Directional X-Ray Laser.

Sooner or later, somebody was going to want a stylish acronym for those things. It was a dull name for one of the deadlier weapons in their arsenal, and that weapon had been deployed to excellent effect. It had entirely shredded a spacecraft that dwarfed even oil supertankers. Even for the Hunters that had to be a loss that stung just a little.

But when one considered all the hundreds of thousands of ships that said attack had left perfectly unscathed and still ravaging the surface of the Guvnurag homeworld even while they sat here…It really didn’t seem like enough.

Sartori was having trouble containing himself. The president was usually a poised and garrulous man who was well-equipped to keep himself afloat in the sphere of public opinion. He wasn’t, it seemed, so great at handling the revelation that all that military spending that had so bedevilled his presidency to date wouldn’t have achieved jack shit.

Tremblay could hardly blame him. Sartori wasn’t exactly taking his displeasure out on Caruthers, he wasn’t so unreasonable as to assign blame where it wasn’t due, but Caruthers was certainly the conduit through which the president’s rage at all of Hunterdom was being channeled. He was bearing it remarkably well, considering that he was technically under no obligation to bear it at all: As a British officer his commander-in-chief was the King, not Sartori, but he was diplomatically choosing to ignore that fact.

“Yes, Mr. President. The tactical situation was hopeless, as we’ve reviewed. The best I could hope for was some form of moral defiance, in the hope the Guvnurag would understand the gesture.”

“Well, it backfired!” Sartori had cooled substantially in the last few minutes, but he was still boiling. “That transport was full of prisoners, and now they’re accusing us of contributing to the slaughter.”

“Meat-slaves, Mr. President,” Caruthers delicately corrected him. “Those prisoners would have been reduced to livestock in short order. We have the statements from Mother Ayma, Sergeant Regaari and miss Chang about that escaped Gaoian slave a few years back, Triymin.”

“A fate I wouldn’t personally wish upon my worst enemy,” Knight interjected, quietly.

Sartori sat back, disgruntled. “The Guvnurag don’t share our definition of mercy,” he pointed out. “As far as they’re concerned, that bomb cut-and-dried killed some of their people. And to hell with the circumstances, apparently.”

Caruthers nodded understandingly. “No matter what we had done, we would have been vilified,” he observed. “If I’m to be damned, I’d rather be damned for doing the right thing at least…by our standards.”

Tremblay and Knight exchanged the almost-psychic glances of old friends, and saw their private approval of that sentiment reflected in each other’s careful poker faces. Sartori meanwhile was getting steadily less red in the face.

“That’s not to say I didn’t find it a bitter pill to swallow, Mr. President,” Caruthers added, and Sartori finally backed off him.

“…I follow your reasoning, Commodore,” the president said at last. “I guess you’re right, too. How do we even begin fighting a million ships?”

Tremblay had no good answers, there. “We have to play the long game,” he said. “The fact is, that we’re at an insurmountable logistical disadvantage. We only have the resources of Earth, realistically: Cimbrean isn’t developed enough yet to count. Fortunately, both systems are secure against the kind of attack that hit Guvnurag-One, but…

“…But who knows how much territory the Hunters really hold?” Knight finished for him. “A race where one side has an enormous head start is no race at all.”

Prime Minister Philippe Martel finally ventured to say something. “We don’t have any idea at all?” he asked.

“Neither the Dominion nor the Alliance have ever successfully mapped any part of Hunter space. All their scout ships vanish if they stray beyond a certain point, but that’s about as defined as the limits of Hunter territory gets,” Tremblay explained. “We know roughly where their home ground is and roughly how many cubic parsecs it encompasses, but there’s no clear or reliable way to identify how many habitable worlds are inside that volume, let alone any orbital structures, space stations, asteroid facilities…”

“In other words, we have no idea at all,” Martel repeated.

“We don’t really know a damn thing about our enemy,” Tremblay agreed. “In fact we know so little about them that we don’t even know what we’d need to beat them.”

“*If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle,*” Caruthers quoted verbatim.

“…Sun Tzu?” Martel guessed.

“Yes indeed,” Caruthers nodded.

“The closest he ever came to a spaceship was a few observations about chariots,” Sartori pointed out.

“True,” Tremblay granted, “but this is old warfare, classic warfare right back to basic principles. He’d still take one look at this situation and say that we don’t stand a chance if we try to fight the Hunters directly.”

“And indirectly?” Sartori asked. “Or is the Supreme Allied Commander for Extrasolar Defense telling us to bend over and kiss our asses goodbye?”

“Indirectly…” Tremblay met Knight’s gaze, then Caruthers’, and saw that both men still had plenty of resolve in them.

“…We’ll work on it,” he promised.

__

Date Point: 12y3m1d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Lewis Beverote

Lewis had found the station’s master systems console inside the first week after arriving on Mrwrki. To his quiet joy it hadn’t been holding pride of place in the middle of the control room or anything, no: Like all the best IT infrastructure he’d found it tucked away in an overcrowded office a long way from where all the ‘important’ end users worked.

While booting it up he’d amused himself with the mental image of a Kwmbwrw systems tech boredly instructing some super-senior Matriarch to try turning the faulty hardware off and waiting ten seconds. That amusement had turned into a frown when it requested an eight-digit numeric passkey for access.

More out of despair and the spirit of at least making a token attempt than anything else he’d half-heartedly entered “12345678” and to his shock, delight and disgust he had immediately been granted top-level Admin access.

Poking through the station’s OS had turned into one of the things he did for fun when he wasn’t designing an asteroid-eating, planet-hopping engine of unstoppable galactic conquest. That quiet fun had turned into obsessively cataloging everything wrong with the horrific mess of half-assed shell scripts he’d found in there in place of a sane or sensible system. In some ways he felt like a lepidopterist with a whole planet of alien butterflies to wave his net at, and in other ways he felt like a particularly morbid surgeon poking at a uniquely purulent abscess. Either way, it had made for a grossly fascinating diversion.

One of the worst bugs would actually let anybody who knew it exploit their way through any door on the station. He’d let that one live mostly because he had a horrible feeling it was caused by something in the life support controller, and no way was he fucking with that. Besides, it was a pre-existing bug in the code and he could hardly be blamed if he “forgot” to mention its existence to the Army dudes in all the excitement could he? It wasn’t like he’d ever planned to use it or anything…

Except that Vedreg wasn’t answering his door chime, and hadn’t been for several days.

Hold down the door chime, the five button and the intercom, wave his lighter under the air vent and….

The door hissed open. It SHOULD have sounded the fire alarm as well, but that was part of the glitch. It was something to do with the fire containment protocols and the way they interacted with the emergency escape pod access. Apparently Kwmbwrw engineers had never invented the VLAN, or even the concept of isolated networking in general, which was a head-shaker par excellence and had given him a funny twitch in his eye for the first few days after he realized it.

To his immense relief, somewhere in the darkened depths of Vedreg’s quarters there was a deep sighing sound and the sound of somebody huge moving slightly.

“…Go away, Lewis.”

Crazily, Lewis almost obeyed. Vedreg never used anything less than a person’s full name, or their honorific and surname. That was just…who he was. That was his way.

Which meant that his friend was at the worst he’d ever been, and who could blame him?

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “Dude…”

His eyes adapted to the gloom quickly. It wasn’t completely dark in Vedreg’s suite of rooms: the little lights he’d put up around Nadeau’s little Bob Ross oil painting and the black pseudo-glow of a monitor in standby mode were enough to give some shape to the darkness, just enough to make out the shaggy furred mass of his friend huddled in a corner.

Guvnurag couldn’t help but wear their hearts on their sleeves, as it were. Their body language literally glowed, and there was always some small amount of bioluminescence visible along their bodies, even when they were at rest and feeling no particular emotion at all.

Vedreg’s chromatophores were completely inert, a sure sign of a Guvnurag in the grip of soul-wrenching despair, grief and depression.

They pulsed the barest, almost invisible hint of red as he repeated himself wearily. “Go *away*…”

Lewis ignored him. Instead, he sat down at Vedreg’s side and reclined into him. Guvnurag wool was thick, shaggy and smelled faintly like a clean barn, but it was warm as hell and damn comfortable.

“Lewis…” Vedreg was clearly too numb to work up a real emotion at all, but ghosts of red, blue and pink shot all over him as he thought at length about what Lewis was doing…and then surprised green.

“…Are you…weeping?”

Lewis nodded slowly, and dragged a sleeve fiercely across his nose. He’d been holding it back around all the military types, but…here in the dark, it seemed safe to sit back and let it all hit him.

“I know…fucking stupid, right? Not like it was my homeworld, right?” He had a bitter touch in his voice, and Vedreg drew away slightly to give him an even more confused look with the short tentacles around his mouthparts waving uncertainly. “Not like billions of people are dead. Not like my friend’s hurtin’ and there ain’t fuck nothin’ I can do for him. Ain’t like…I…”

Vedreg went very still as Lewis’ voice got caught and wouldn’t come unstuck. There was a long, defeated, silent moment and then an imperceptibly faint glow returned to his chromatophores. It was a confused off-white, but to anybody who knew how to read Guvnurag, there was a definite blue-ish tint of gratitude in there.

Slowly, his enormous pillar of an arm circled out and drew Lewis into a warm enveloping, woolly hug.

They co-miserated in silence until Lewis had long since run out of tears and was quietly growing desperate for a drink when Vedreg finally spoke.

“Tears seem…cathartic.”

“Guess they are…” Lewis scraped some dried salty stuff out of his eye. “Shit dude, I dunno. Not like they do anything…Not like I can do anything”

To his surprise, Vedreg rumbled and for a second a flicker of mirth of all things literally lit the room.

“…Dude?”

Vedreg sighed, and stood up. “I have found that it is the small every-day deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love,” he said in the special tone he used when quoting.

“…Dude?” Lewis repeated himself, feeling stupid.

“Tolkien. Gandalf. I read those books after the name for this system was settled upon. It was bewildering at first: I do not know what an elf is or how a keyhole can be hidden except in a specific light, and much of what I read was strange and impenetrable, but there were thoughts that…resonated.” He shook himself and glanced at Nadeau’s painting. “Especially now. Thank you for reminding me of them.”

“…I never read ‘em,” Lewis confessed. “I ain’t read much of anythin’, TBH.” He added, pronouncing the abbreviation.

“Oddly, that is comforting.” Vedreg sighed again, and shook himself. The dim hue of a Guvnurag in a neutral state of mind reasserted itself—perhaps a little dimmer, perhaps a little grimmer, but back. A human might have rolled up his sleeves—Vedreg just shuffled around in place and his mouthparts shifted enigmatically behind that thick fringe of wool and tentacles as he considered Lewis for a few seconds.

“We should get back to work. There are ten billion souls to avenge,” he announced.

“Dude. That was almost fuckin’ human of you.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, shit.” Lewis kicked his feet out and surged upright. “Transform and roll out, my man.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Hey, you have your quotes, I have mine.”

Vedreg fell in alongside him as Lewis led the way. “I thought you said you haven’t read much?”

“Dude. All the best life lessons come in cartoon form, everyone knows that.”

“…You are very strange, Lewis Beverote.” Vedreg stopped, and put a hand on Lewis’ shoulder. “But you are the best friend I have ever had.”

Lewis was amazed to find that his dehydrated eyes got wet again. He patted the huge hand on his shoulder gently, then hugged the arm it was attached to and turned back towards the workshop.

For once, he couldn’t think of anything to say.

Date point: 12y3m1d AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

Julian and Allison had left the helmets behind today, and had taken their excursion suits down to just a handful of the parts of its modular system. They looked more like they were wearing thick parkas now, which was definitely friendlier-looking than the full suit.

The natives seemed to find Allison’s hair fascinating. They’d had the chance to get used to Xiù’s black hair, and Julian’s was pretty much the same color with less gloss and more mess. Allison’s, though, was a cold blonde ripped straight from some well-hidden Scandinavian pocket of her genes.

It made for a more relaxed meeting, which was good because the natives had brought one of their women down the hill this time, and from what Xiù could tell she was important. She had vivid red tattoos around her eyes and cheekbones, and if the similarity between human and native body language held true then Vemik was absolutely besotted with her.

Julian cleared his throat when it became apparent that the alien, like her male counterparts, was wearing no more than a leather loincloth. Her body plan was very human in some important regards.

“Huh. Guess we shoulda maybe expected this…”

Allison chuckled. “Don’t stare, baby.”

“She’s an alien monkey, I’m not—”

“Uh, racist?” Allison snorted, and winked at him.

“Oh come *on*—!”

“Relax, Etsicitty. I’m only teasing.”

“I’m just thinking they’re probably all surprised at how much we’re wearing,” Julian shot back with a grin. “Maybe you two should get topless.”

“Lead by example!”

Xiù tried to effect an air of disapproval but mostly she was shaking with suppressed laughter. “Guys! First contact? Serious business? Hello?”

“Hey, nobody ever said first contact couldn’t be fun…” Allison pointed out.

Julian had a pensive expression. “Seriously though? Might not be the worst idea I’ve ever had…It’d prove that we’re flesh and blood, y’know? We don’t want them thinking we’re gods or whatever…”

“Maybe later,” Xiù muttered.

“Translation: Not on your life,” Allison smiled, then straightened up as the last of the natives settled in opposite them in the clearing. “Time to go to work, bǎobèi.”

Xiù nodded, and summoned that whole ethereal elf thing she’d done yesterday. She didn’t go through the whole routine of kneeling and bowing this time, but instead plumped for settling herself comfortably on a small rock and smiling at the natives.

Vemik and the female glanced at the adults, and especially at Yan, who shrugged and made a gesture that said ‘well? Get on with it.’ in any language.

They really were young, Xiù realized. The female was probably about Vemik’s age or maybe just a little older, which raised all kinds of questions. What kind of a society let their teenagers do the talking? Or was there something special about these two?

The translator was nowhere near ready to start answering those questions yet. It wasn’t ready to start asking those questions, not after just one conversation and a few hours to process and crunch the data.

Happily, it had reported near-perfect confidence on the syntax, which was broadly similar to the Indo-European language family. That was good news for Allison and Julian, neither of whom spoke a second language—Xiù’s experience in mastering three very different tongues was the very reason it fell to her to handle this stuff and gave her the confidence to assault any alien syntax, but the fact was that even she was going to struggle with this one.

The native language was…she hesitated to think of it as primitive, but it really was. It was absolutely packed with the oddities that littered old languages, like gendered nouns and consonant mutations, but at least the morphology of the root words was broadly consistent. It was the tangled thicket of prefixes, suffixes, stresses, mutations and tonal shifts that gave her a headache.

Names were among the biggest oddities. Vemik, she had discovered, actually had two names, one of which was Vemik, a proper noun, and the other of which was a common noun followed by the noun form of a verb, and he seemed equally happy to use either name.

More confusingly still, he introduced his female companion as “the [singular noun form of a verb”] without further explanation, but using the tonal tic which clearly designated it as being her name rather than her role or job. With a bit of goading, the translator was able to tentatively suggest how Xiù might inquire if the woman had any other names, but the reply was a straightforward no.

They settled in for a long and rambling discussion, driven by the translator’s hunger to codify all the rules of their language and expand its vocabulary. It was gripping and fascinating stuff…for the three people involved.

For everyone else, it was a long and excruciatingly dull morning.

They stopped for a break around noon, which was when Julian announced his Plan.

“I’m gonna go hunt something,” he declared.

“Hunt? I thought we were gonna stick to the food on the ship until we know it’s safe?” Allison asked.

“Not for us, for them. Kind of a peace offering, and…never mind. Point is it should make a good impression.”

Xiù and Allison frowned at each other. “Never mind?” Xiù asked.

“It’s…nothing important. Kinda dumb really. Never mind.”

“Julian…” Allison had an impatient-patient tone of voice that could crowbar him open in a second when she used it.

He cleared his throat. “I…kinda want to one-up Yan.”

Allison folded her arms at him. “Since when were you into senseless macho posturing?”

“It’s not posturing. It’s…” Julian trailed off, then reconsidered. “Well, okay, it is, but this kind of posturing is important. We’re on his turf, in his territory, and he saw that we were scared of him. I wanna fix that.”

“I…Julian, we don’t know what kind of taboos they have or…” Xiù began.

“Trust me.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ve got a pretty good idea already.”

“Okay, but what if Yan thinks you’re challenging him or something?” Allison asked. “That could turn this whole thing ugly pretty quick.”

“Nah. Not with Vemik and…what’s her name?”

“The Singer,” Xiù told him. That one had been pretty easy to get to the bottom of in the end. “She’s their…Shaman, or priestess, or medicine woman? I asked her what she sings about and I think she said ‘the gods’ but the translator has a really hard time with words like that.”

Allison put on a wry roll of her eyes. “Figures, if the Corti programmed it.”

“Well, you’re talking to Vemik and this Singer of theirs,” Julian continued. “And I figure things were already pretty damn ugly when we first met and they chilled out thanks to Vemik, so…”

“They’re at home to reason, at least,” Allison said.

“Right. I wanna see how Yan reacts. Getting the measure of him is gonna be important.”

Xiù hesitated, then nodded. “You’re right. Be careful, bǎobèi?”

“There’s nothing on this planet that’s scarier than me,” Julian grinned. He gave them both parting kisses, turned, and vanished between the trees more quickly than mere distance and line of sight would seem to suggest.

Yan’s reaction was instant and interesting. He straightened, watched Julian go and started to head after him before he seemed to remember something and instead turned to the lean one who looked like an older version of Vemik and said something. The other man nodded, turned, swarmed easily up a tree as comfortably as Xiù would have opened a door, and swished through the low canopy like a breeze as he headed off to follow where Julian had gone.

Allison made a thoughtful noise, and broke out their lunch. They’d debated briefly about the wisdom of using their MREs—Xiù had been worried about how the locals might react to the “magic” of a flameless ration heater—but between the ship itself, Allison’s tactical flashlight, the tablet and its translation software and everything else, it had been a short argument.

“…hmm…Beef chili? Maple pork sausage? Or vegetarian fettuccine?”

“Uh, Canadian?” Xiù grinned at her, and was promptly handed the pork sausage.

Sure enough, Vemik couldn’t help himself. He came close and stared rapt at the thin lines of steam as they poured from the little plastic packages leaning against a rock. His tongue flickered out at one point just like a reptile’s; he winced at the distinctly chemical smell that the heater gave off, and backed away from the pouch a little to consider it some more.

“There’s a joke here,” Allison said. “You know that old one about the dog with no nose?”

“Come on, they don’t smell that bad,” Xiù objected. “Just…musky.”

“Well, okay, sure, he doesn’t exactly smell like fifty used jockstraps on a hot day but I don’t think these guys do bathing a whole lot.”

“I bet humans didn’t smell so great either, ten thousand years ago.”

“I’m just saying, I was promised hot springs…”

Xiù glanced up at the mountain. “Julian thinks there should be some around here…”

“So why don’t these guys use them?”

Xiù was about to shrug and promise to ask about it later when a sharp crack! sounded far out among the woods, echoing oddly between the trees. All the natives surged to their feet—Allison waved a reassuring hand.

“It’s alright!” she called. “Julian! Julian.” she mimed aiming a rifle and made a “pkh!” sound with her mouth.

Yan snorted, but the tribe relaxed again. Vemik gave her a curious look. “Jooyun?” he imitated the rifle mime and the sound she’d made.

“Like, uh…” Allison pointed at the bow on his back, then mimed drawing and firing it with another vocal sound effect. She repeated the rifle mime again and then wobbled her hands to try and suggest a connection.

Vemik trilled, which they’d gathered was his species’ version of laughter, and nodded. He grinned and pretended to shoot several things with a rifle and trilled some more. Both Allison and Xiù giggled along with him.

Xiù adjusted her MRE as they sat and thought. “We have a long way to go,” she said suddenly.

“Hmm?” Allison obviously didn’t have any insight into her train of thought, and only heard a non-sequitur. “On what?”

“On these guys. Their language, it just doesn’t have some of the things they need for us to explain what’s happening here. Like…imagine if English only had about a thousand words or so.”

“So? We came here from above the sky in a flying house because some very bad people want to kill them all and we want to stop the bad people.” Allison shrugged. “Simple.”

“And the cybernetic implants? Nukes? Or just aliens in general? I mean…”

“No, I get you. They look like apes and that’s helping, but when there’s things like Gaoians, Rickyticks and Guvnurag out there…”

“Right.” Xiù nodded. “And…I mean, I was never really into sci-fi, that was more my brother’s thing, but I at least knew what an alien was when I was abducted, and what a human was. These guys don’t even have a proper name for themselves.”

“They don’t have a word for their own species?”

“They don’t have a word for species. I mean, they could tell you the difference between a…” Xiù checked her tablet, “…a Werne and a Yshek, but they’ve never put a word to the concept before.”

“Never had to, I guess.”

“Right. Vemik’s bow? He calls it a bird-spear-thrower. They say their village is up on the high-forest-place…except they don’t really have a word for forest, it’s just the word for tree modified into an indefinite plural pronoun…”

“Babe, I don’t make your head hurt by talking about the Nadeau-Alcubierre field, you don’t make my head hurt with language jargon. That’s the deal, remember?” Allison smiled at her. “But I get what you’re saying. They don’t have the concepts.”

“They don’t have a word for concept!” Xiù was getting animated. “Which means they probably don’t have the concept of concepts!”

“Shyow?”

They both turned to Vemik, who was giving them a concerned look. [“Are you angry?”]

[“No. Vemik, we…”] Xiù rubbed her face and desperately consulted the tablet. “…dammit. I don’t know if they have a word for ‘concerned’ or not and even then I couldn’t tell them what we’re concerned about and…”

Allison scooted over and hugged her. “Breathe, babe. You’re gonna give yourself a panic attack.”

She was right, and Xiù closed her eyes and took a few cleansing breaths while Allison used the translator to compose the halting sentence [“We can’t tell you what is bad today.”]

She frowned when Xiù giggled at the mangled sentence. “What?”

“You said you can’t tell him what ‘bad’ is.”

“Good thing he’s a smart one.” Vemik had needed a second or so to parse the disjointed grammar, but he gave a reluctant nod—a weary one, like he was used to getting that answer a lot—and backed away to go sit with the Singer again.

They ate their meals in a thoughtful silence, interrupted only by Allison’s failed attempt to steal some maple sausage. Vemik approached, apparently curious, and Xiù finally agreed to trade him some in exchange for a sample of what turned out to be a flavorful pemmican with dried fruit.

The peacemaking ended when Julian returned to the clearing with a sturdy creature that looked like the offspring of a goat and a small cow flung over his shoulder and the native man who had followed him rolling along beside him in the swaggering, thick-thighed way the natives did. Both men had blood on their faces in finger-painted lines around their eyes and cheekbones, and Julian was looking decidedly pleased with himself.

“Werne,” he announced with a grin as he handed the rifle back to Allison. “A good one too, if Vemet here is any kind of judge.”

[“Good Werne,”] Vemet agreed, nodding enthusiastically. [“Young, but strong. Your man can hunt well.”]

Xiù gave him a smile. [“Thank you!] He says you’re a good hunter, babe.”

“Well, if a caveman monkey fella says that then it’s gotta be true.” Julian looked across the clearing at Yan, who had straightened up again. He cleared his throat, crossed the clearing cautiously, and put it down in front of the big ‘Given Man’.

Yan gave the carcass a long and thoughtful stare, then aimed an even longer and more thoughtful one at Julian. Eventually, slowly, he drew the knives sheathed on his chest and presented them to Julian hilt-first. Julian looked at them carefully, thinking, then imitated him. He reached for the knife sheathed against his own thigh and presented it to Yan, and the two traded implements in the same diplomatic moment.

Allison just couldn’t resist a joke. “Oh God, are the boys comparing their tools?”

Xiù frantically gestured for her to shut up. “Yes, and this is deadly serious. Don’t laugh.”

Julian had strong and work-hardened hands with blunt fingers but Yan’s bulky, heavy knifes would make any human hand look dainty. They were well-balanced and clearly made with a great deal of care—the handle was polished and charred bone and wood, and the blade was flint-knapped down to a smooth, polished finish. There was nothing unsophisticated about them that Xiù could see, and when Julian returned them hilt-first he did so with obvious approval.

Meanwhile, it was the steel blade that seemed to fascinate Yan. He turned it this way and that to watch the light sheen off the metal grain, then ran his thumb experimentally across the edge. He cut himself shallowly and issued a surprised grunt, then handed the blade back with an air of respect.

The men of the village had watched the entire exchange in intent silence, and as Julian withdrew Yan gave him another calculating look then re-sheathed his knives. He stooped next to the Werne, grabbed it with two hands and one of his feet and effortlessly dismembered it with a trio of sickeningly loud cracks that reverberated around the clearing.

He didn’t even watch what he was doing, but instead seemed to be trying to stare Julian down. After a second though he seemed to decide that he’d made his point and turned his attention to the Werne, which he worked a little bit more before offering a meat-stripped thigh bone. Julian paused for a second and Yan snapped the thick bone in half with a snarl that by now almost looked friendly.

Seconds later, both men were slurping down raw marrow with every sign of enjoying it.

“Urgh…Think I’ll stick to beef chili…” Allison muttered, for Xiù’s ears only.

“You never tried Nava,” Xiù retorted, though she was feeling a little queasy herself. Julian hadn’t even hesitated.

Yan relaxed considerably, and made some quick calls that sounded vaguely food-related. Right away the men of the tribe were busying themselves around a new pit, and shortly thereafter they had a start on a fire, with the unfortunate Werne being taken apart to roast. Vemik watched for a moment, then devoured the rest of his pemmican and returned to his spot, and sat on his coiled tail.

Julian and Yan parted ways with an air of newfound respect, and Julian rejoined the girls looking pleased with himself. “Who needs translator software, huh?”

“Ugh, boys.” Allison snorted, though her face said something very different and more positive.

“Raw marrow, though?” Xiù objected. “Ew.”

“Warm from a fresh kill,” Julian beamed. “Kinda buttery and nutty, really rich…saved my life on Nightmare. Sure, it’s a better idea to cook it but…” he glanced back over at Yan. “When in Rome…”

“Can we maybe stop taking stupid contamination and allergy risks now?” Allison pleaded. “This planet’s a solid Class Twelve, that means the bugs and parasites here have gotta be about as bad as Earth’s. I really don’t wanna have to cart you guys home to an isolation ward locked in a stasis field.”

Julian considered. “Maybe we can get Vemik and Yan to step into the decon scanner, then. We need the scans and I bet Vemik would geek out over the anatomy display.”

Allison nodded. “Babe, if you can talk angry silverback daddy there into the magic sky people field, do it,” she said. “But until then, it’s ship food only from now on. Doctor’s orders.”

“How do we do that?”

“Well, we’re all monkeys, right? Monkey see, monkey do. And maybe candy.”

“Um…” Xiù cleared her throat. “We should probably talk about the language problem.”

Julian sat down, and grabbed the last MRE. “Oh man, you left me the fettuccine? I thought you loved me?”

“Julian!”

He quit joking around. “…Okay. Language problem,” he nodded, tearing the pouch open without bothering to heat it. “Fire away.”

“Have a look at this.” Xiù handed him the translator tablet. “Projected vocabulary size.”

He frowned at it. “That’s…not a big number.”

“That’s a really small number,” Xiù said emphatically. “And they’re missing some really important words, too.”

“Like?”

“Well…they don’t have a name for themselves. Not a name like Human, or Gaoian, or Corti or whatever.”

“Not surprising, I guess,” Julian mused. “There’s gotta be so few of them in a tribe they’ve never needed to define themselves versus everything else.”

“Yeah, but that’s just one of lots and lots of kinds of word they don’t have. I don’t think they have even half of what they need for us to be able to tell them about…everything.”

“…This is a Prime Directive problem, isn’t it?”

Xiù nodded. “Yup. And we can’t even tell them that. That’s how bad this is.”

Allison was spreading cream cheese on one of her crackers. “Not like Big Hotel left many options. These poor fuckers were extinct anyway, guys. Not our fault if their world’s about to get turned upside-down, at least they’ll still have one. Right?”

“That’s a sobering thought,” Julian said between mouthfuls of noodles. “But, I mean, okay. We can’t leave ‘em to die. That’d be just as bad as, I dunno, ‘interfering with their cultural development’ or whatever, wouldn’t it?”

“Bet you my share of the mission cash I could find some fuckwit on Earth who’d argue we should just leave ‘em go extinct,” Allison said. “But yeah. If it’s adapt or die, I say we help them adapt.”

“How?” Xiù asked. “There’s just too many…the things they need to know, their language just can’t—”

“So we teach them English. Carefully,” Julian raised his hand to forestall a tidal wave of objections, “We start out just, really really Barney-style, right? Simple, practical things. Start with storytime like you do with kindergarteners, and—”

Allison shook her head. “You’re overthinking it, dummy. I’m starting to think our Vemik here might maybe be smarter than all three of us. So how about we just teach him English?”

“And then what?” Xiù asked.

“And then we let him do what he does best: Ask questions.”

Date Point 12y3m2w AV
Whitecrest Clan Office, Alien Quarter Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Champion Genshi

Whitecrest’s stock in trade was political analysis. Oh yes, they dealt also in the application of low-visibility violence, in surveillance, monitoring, intelligence, espionage and sometimes assassination but as far as Genshi was concerned those were all just the claws. The claw was the sharp bit, the bit that cut the wound, left the scar, spilled the blood…but without a strong and skilled arm behind it, a claw was just an unpleasant little shard of keratin.

Politics. The claws were there both to facilitate gathering information about the political situation, and to facilitate influencing it. Everything the Clan did was about politics, sooner or later. It followed therefore that Whitecrest had become very good indeed at not only reading the politics of the here and now and retrospecting upon the politics of yesteryear, but more importantly had mastered the art of projecting how events would unfold in the future.

And, most importantly, the art of saying the right thing to the right person at the right time to bring preferred events to pass. Hopefully. Nothing was fixed, after all.

The right person in this case, on the surface, might have seemed like a deeply unlikely candidate. She was young, inexperienced and frankly not the most cunning Gaoian alive. She was perfect.

She was also, to borrow a human turn of phrase, drop-dead gorgeous. Although Gaori had some words that meant things similar to ‘Amazonian,’ it was the English word that fit Myun best: It implied a warrior mentality and poise that was absent from its closest Gaori equivalents.

She wasn’t stupid either, or else they’d have found somebody else. She was guileless and straightforward, but she had trained for years to be a commune guard: She had a nose for deception, risk and ‘bullshit,’ and seemed to be disconcertingly resilient to Genshi’s charms.

“I don’t think you actually have that authority,” she was observing as she slouched in the seat opposite him and watched him thoughtfully with her ears twitching and fine-tuning themselves as she thought.

“Not since Regaari was released from Giymuy’s service,” Genshi said. In fact they hadn’t actually had the authority to select the Mother-Supreme’s personal guard even before then, but Whitecrest had…influence.

“…Why me? I’m a junior commune guard. The Mother-Supreme deserves the best.”

Genshi flicked an ear in a calculated show of amusement. “You are the best, Sister Myun.”

“We know that,” Myun agreed with no trace whatsoever of arrogance, “but don’t you have to…” she peppered the sentence with another word in English, “like, prove it or something?”

“I am a Champion, Sister Myun.”

“And why is the Champion of Whitecrest sponsoring me to be one of Yulna’s personal guard?” Myun pressed.

Genshi saw an opportunity to test her, and took it. “Why do you think?”

“Well, obviously you think you’ll need me. Why else? You’re not doing anyone any favors. But why do you need me?”

Genshi had struggled with that same bluntness during the week or two he had spent training with her. Myun had informed her that the style she had developed after studying under Sister Shoo was quite different to what the human Sister had taught her. What she had learned from Shoo had been specific regional styles that were heavily tied in with religious and spiritual practices. ‘Baguazhang’ and ‘Taijiquan,’ apparently.

To these, Myun had added…basically everything. She had obsessively studied human martial arts of every kind as well as she could considering the extreme distance involved and the relative isolation and paucity of human data, and had compared them to existing Gaoian forms.

The result was something that a human could never have learned: their bodies were the wrong shape. Shoo’s Baguazhang was apparently all about steady feet, planted firmly and moving independently of the upper body. But a human could do that - their center of gravity was low, their legs were proportionately long and accounted for a surprisingly large percentage of their mass.

Gaoians on two-paw teetered around a high center of gravity and Myun used that to drive movement through the whole body. She would flow easily from two paws to four and back while her long Gaoian dorsal muscles twisted and coiled her torso this way and that, swaying her body out of harm’s way while her paws diverted incoming blows aside. It was innovative, and effective, and so novel that it took Genshi nearly five days before he could score a hit of any kind. It was only on their final day that he had scored a pin at all.

To his regret, while she’d admitted to being impressed with his speedy progress it hadn’t resulted in a Contract. Myun was still young, still recovering from her first cub and apparently felt that there was no point in having a Clan that empowered the Females and afforded them their autonomy if all they did with that autonomy was spend their lives producing cubs.

She was in short a deeply unconventional creature, which probably came with being every inch her sire’s child right down to the smell. Nobody who knew Daar could fail to notice that she had his unique musk in feminine form.

And like Daar, she knew how to play the great game of politics just fine and didn’t give a stinking wet fart for it.

Oh well. There was nothing to be gained from playing it coy.

“…the Clan has learned things. Things that must remain secret for now and, if we do our job right, will remain a secret for a very long time.”

“Can you tell me what these things are?”

“Yes,” Genshi admitted. “But it involves a lot of paperwork and binding legal agreements and it’s one of those things you’d probably be unhappier for knowing. The fact that we think the Mother-Supreme needs a bodyguard like you should be enough to tell you how serious this is, though.”

He watched Myun watch him, and added “…Incidentally, the humans are very good at personal protection. We would almost certainly want the Mother-Supreme’s bodyguard to…shall we call it ‘comparing notes’ with them?” he asked, carefully deploying the English words like a garnish. That particular phrase had an exact equal in Gaori, but Myun had pleasantly big and clearly-labelled buttons to push.

She knew it, too, and chittered sharply. “…That’s shameless manipulation, Champion Genshi…I’m in.”

Sometimes, Genshi had to admit, the straightforward approach was refreshing.

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Diplomatic Ship Rich Plains, En Route to Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ambassador Furfeg

“I remember the last time this ship had a human aboard…”

The Rich Plains was a very different ship than had flown fatefully to Gao all those years ago. It had spent nearly two of those years, by the Guvnurag calendar, confined to drydock undergoing both repairs from the violation of its structure by a Hunter broodship and long-overdue upgrades and refit. A footnote in its long history to be sure…but a significant footnote.

Furfeg could well recall the look of awe that the young miss Xiù Chang had unrestrainedly shown while gawping her way around decks that, to his seasoned eyes, had seemed shabby and badly in need of improvement at the time. He wondered what she would make of the ship now, with its new polished dark grey stone floors, its clean burnished fixtures and clear aquamarine lighting.

That mission had not been half so important as this one…nor half so grim.

In the months since the homeworld fell, there had been no follow-up attacks on the remaining planets of the Confederacy. The homeworld was lost, but her calves had been reinforced and permanently enclosed behind the newest and most impenetrable barriers that Guvnurag science could produce. The turnaround on designing and deploying the upgraded devices had been lightning-fast by the standards of any species, but especially by the standards of Guvnuragnaguvendrugun.

Something about the slaughter or enslavement of the largest third of the species served to focus the mind. For a lucky few, the focus had been on what it was they personally could achieve to avert a greater tragedy.

For the great majority, that focus had twisted loose and unattached like a rag in the storm, until it had found something to coil itself around in the form of anger.

The Guvnuragnaguvendrugun were an emotional people. They wore their feelings openly on their body. But they were also a docile people who roused to anger and to violence only with great difficulty. Some were practically incapable of it. To see anger at all was unusual in their society, but now it was a contagion that was sweeping their cities and stations and their citizens by the hundreds of millions.

Furfeg would have preferred that it be directed at the Hunters. They were the monsters here, after all. Their ships had devoured the homeworld and uncountable civilians. But being angry at the Hunters was like being angry at a lightning strike, or a howling gale. They were a destructive force of nature that was not at home to the emotions of an aggrieved species, even if they were capable of understanding those emotions.

…No. The analogy was not apt. Storms and winds had neither desire nor sadism. The Hunters were no force of nature, they were worse; they wished to be hated and feared and so the collected terror, grief and rage of billions was worse than impotent, it was a victory for them.

Thus, yet again, all of that anger and fear had earthed itself where it did not belong: In a species that Furfeg knew in his belly was utterly blameless. A species who were militarily superior to the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun in every conceivable way and yet upon whom a few strident voices, outraged and grieving to the point of insanity, wished to declare war.

A species whose representatives would shortly address the assembled Grand Matriarchs and Patriarchs of the All-Herd. For all their sakes he could only hope that they would prove to be Xiù Chang’s equal or even her better in matters of eloquent passion.

He turned an eye toward Shipmaster A’tkrnnmtktk’ki, whose quiet comment had belatedly roused him from his thoughts without really registering.

“…I am sorry?”

“I said, I remember the last time this ship had a human aboard,” A’tkrnnmtktk’ki repeated. “Gao. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it.”

“I was just thinking about that myself,” Furfeg admitted.

“I hope this time goes better…”

“It went extremely well last time. We survived.”

Furfeg had noticed that about himself in the last few months: his humor was darker and drier. Whether that was a refuge for him, helping him overlook what had happened to his home and his herd…

He decided not to dwell on it, or at least tried not to: There was productivity at hand, which was usually a useful balm for any aching ego…but the itch was there in the back of his mind and constantly sending motes of depression, anxiety and shock glinting down his body atop a slow, steady pulse of gnawing background tension.

He practically radiated relief when the human escort fell in alongside them with an easy muscularity that made the Rich Plains’ respectably fifty kilolights seem like little more than a pleasant stroll. Insofar as starships had body language, however, theirs seemed…subdued. Rather than leveling their noses with that of the much larger diplomatic ship and sweeping in tight to show themselves off, they instead held back almost a kilometer away, and towards the relative rear of the formation.

Possibly that was a difference in protocol and decision-making or possibly it was some subtle expression of thought on their captains’ parts. Impossible to tell.

Furfeg should have spent the remaining distance to Cimbrean reviewing the diplomatic notes, but for some reason it just didn’t happen. Instead he stood there in the dark of the ship’s opulent observation deck and used the stargazing fields to zoom in on the human ship to port.

It was almost impossible to see. Indeed it probably was impossible to see, and only the virtual outline in bright orange let him know it was there at all, and that was no help whatsoever in helping him determine its shape. The silhouette was blunt, efficient and shovel-nosed with the stub of what was possibly a command or sensor tower of some kind mounted off-center and three-quarters of the way back. Beyond that, the ship was featureless beyond five bright lights at its nose which prominently lit the name painted there: Vigilant.

He read the translation of that simple word several times, mulling it over until he was roused from his meditation by the quiet ship wide announcement to the effect that they were shortly to be arriving at Cimbrean Five, and that the ship had entered final deceleration.

That last part was a feature found only on civilian or diplomatic vessels designed for comfort. Military and commercial ships simply kept their warp field at running power until they reached their target coordinates before immediately and seamlessly rejoining their destination’s inertial frame of reference. Efficient, but it had the disconcerting effect of making planets and other celestial bodies simply slam into existence right next to the ship as if they had simply appeared from nothing.

The Rich Plains however made its final approach on a slow and steady deceleration curve that actually brought it below the speed of light during the last minute or so. Thus, the destination planet swelled into view and seemed to slow to a halt beside them, so as to avoid startling any passengers who were unfamiliar with the incomprehensible apparent speeds involved with FTL travel.

The strange perspective of the vacuum of space combined with the inconceivable scale of any planet so that although Furfeg knew that he was watching something immense from a great distance, he felt as though Cimbrean-Five, with its static-charged crystalline silicon sandstorms that would have reduced even a human to bloody shreds within seconds, looked more like something he could reach out and pluck from the sky to study in the palm of his hand.

Armstrong Station meanwhile was just small enough to look very, very big indeed. It had begun life as a perfectly standard Dominion trading outpost, but the Humans had clearly felt that the design needed improving. Indeed, they were still improving it. With the stargazing fields, Furfeg could detect stuttering points of light on its structure that, when he zoomed in on them, turned out to be figures in bright yellow armored suits moving ponderously and carefully as they worked, usually involving the flare of welding or possibly of cutting.

How had they happened so fast? The Gaoians had exploded onto the galactic scene with such unmatched drive and ferocity that they had become members of the Dominion Security Council at a speed that had alarmed and dismayed other factions that had lobbied for decades or centuries for the opportunity.

The humans in many ways were much less…ambitious. From what Furfeg knew in fact the overwhelming majority of their focus remained on local tribal matters back on their war-torn homeworld. The number of their species who had travelled into space was a trivial minority of only a handful of their most historically powerful and wealthy factions.

And yet, that minority of a minority had achieved almost unbelievable things under immense pressure while petitioning for little.

The thought of what might happen if the galactic community pushed this particular species too hard was what had placed Furfeg firmly among the peacemakers. He had seen first-hand what a single human could do when properly motivated: He had no desire whatsoever to see a practical demonstration of their nonsensical idiom about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

He spun away from the window and prepared to receive the ambassador.

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Shuttle, en route to diplomatic ship Rich Plains, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Ambassador Anees Hussein

Doctor Hussein sometimes struggled to remember what his home country had been like in his youth. He had memories of opulence and wealth—or, at least, of clean white buildings with clean fountains and lush foliage—and of attending the University of Baghdad alongside pretty young women with hair that they wore openly and skirts that ended above the knee. He’d married one of them.

Decades of grinding war had reduced those memories to a question. Had Iraq ever really been that place? From the comfortable distance of a well-earned retirement where he had quietly outlived the projections of even his most optimistic doctor, he had found it hard to find visions of the land he had once called home that didn’t focus on the dust, the bombs and the suffering. For years, weak leaders from across the globe had thrown people onto that fire like new logs, in the vain and misguided hope of extinguishing it. All of them had lacked the will to truly fix the problem, and had snatched their hand back from the flames the moment they began to feel the heat.

Such a waste. The old regime had needed to go, but it had needed replacing. Properly and comprehensively, not merely torn down and the wreckage left for whomever could claw their way to its top. Democracies took root slowly and only in the deep fertile loam of stability and civility. They took decades to nurture into being: The thirsty, stony, weed-choked stuff that was his homeland’s political substrate simply couldn’t support one yet.

Perhaps one day, years after a Caesar had ridden through and made the place work the less civilized way, the time would be ripe to start coaxing something more humane to life, but that day wouldn’t come in Doctor Hussein’s lifetime. In any case, he knew that he himself had never been a Caesar: More of a Cicero.

Or perhaps a Mark Antony, as Shakespeare had envisioned him. A man who, with a few barbed words and raw emotion had reversed a crowd’s anger completely.

He allowed himself a small smirk at the thought, amused by the way that his education in classical European history sometimes got the better of him. It had seemed like a fascinating and exotic subject when he had first taken it, but it was astonishing how the ideas and histories had settled in and radically re-written his way of looking at the world.

No wonder the aliens were scared of the human race. Some ideas just…infected a person and stuck there.

“Docking in three minutes, sir.”

Hussein glanced at the man in the black suit who had spoken and acknowledged the update with a grateful nod. The SOR had made it known, delicately, that they felt a little snubbed by his decision not to take them for his personal escort—they not unreasonably felt that security wherever Cimbrean, aliens, spaceships and the Hierarchy overlapped was their responsibility—but they were rather too…overt for this occasion.

He looked forward out of the pilot’s window at the columnar hugeness of the Rich Plains as they swept in toward a comparatively tiny landing deck that Guvnurag sensibilities had placed only just behind the diplomatic vessel’s blunt prow. He wondered if that was for reasons of practicality or reasons of making visiting dignitaries such as himself feel important.

Probably the latter, he decided. It was difficult to imagine that a high-traffic working landing deck intended for the humdrum business of taking on food and supplies would have such pristine polished stone for the shuttle to alight upon.

The pilot sat back and stretched as the tractor fields took over and guided their shuttle down to a gentle touch that explained the unscratched flooring perfectly, and Hussein hauled himself to his feet with a groan of exertion.

“Well,” he said, and adjusted his spectacles. “Shall we?”

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Diplomatic Ship Rich Plains, Cimbrean system, The Far Reaches

Ambassador Furfeg

The sight of a frail human was an incongruity that was almost enough to unbalance Furfeg all by itself. The human ambassador shuffled from his transport with a bent back and a gleaming wooden stick for support and for a second he seemed like he must be a member of a different species. Surely this decrepit specimen could not be a deathworlder?

But he had those same human eyes. Amber brown in a hue that, to a Guvnurag, spoke of liveliness and indeed behind their corrective lenses those eyes were active and watchful without being wary. And somehow he managed to make the larger, stronger, younger specimens of his species who accompanied him fade into the background.

Furfeg shook the disconcerting impression loose and took a number of careful steps forward. This was no unregarded castaway girl: When the Guvnurag had contacted the humans to demand an explanation of them, this was the man whom the humans had chosen to make their case. Presumably, he was in the presence of somebody who held enormous respect on Earth.

Or possibly he was an avatar of human contempt. That seemed unlikely from what he knew of humans, but the long years had taught Furfeg never to trust that an individual might represent the whole species.

He raised a hand to his chest in greeting. “Ambassador Hussein. Welcome aboard the Rich Plains. I am Ambassador Furfeg, the Confederacy’s permanent representative aboard this ship.”

The Ambassador imitated the gesture. “*Salām.*” he said, curiously untranslated. He clearly sensed Furfeg’s surprise, because he provided a translation immediately. “It means ‘Peace,’ in the language of my home.”

That boded well, in Furfeg’s estimation. He pulsed a welcoming medley of warm yellows. “The Dominion ambassadors will be joining us from their embassy station in a few hours,” he informed the human. “There is a diplomat’s residence suite available for your use, and we have increased the gravity in that section to Earth standard for your comfort.”

“Most kind,” Hussein thanked him.

“There will be food available,” Furfeg added, “But I must apologize, Ambassador: we do not have carnivorous options on board.”

“That is quite alright,” Hussein assured him. “I have been a strict vegetarian for most of my life.”

The translator tripped over the word ‘Vegetarian’. The linguistic detour necessary in the Guvnurag language to specify the subtle distinction between innate biological herbivorousness and voluntary vegetarianism took a full seven seconds, and Hussein wore an expression of polite interest throughout.

Feeling increasingly rattled for no good reason, Furfeg stepped aside and gestured invitingly for the human and his entourage to come aboard properly.

He was stymied again by Hussein’s frailty. Guvnurag were not a quick people by any measure, but the human ambassador took each step carefully and deliberately as if he was afraid that he might fall and suffer a grievous injury at any second. There was simply no hurrying him, but his entourage seemed entirely comfortable to amble easily along behind the ambassador.

Furfeg, meanwhile, found himself taking one step for every ten of the human’s and he still had no idea if he was the target of a studied insult or not. Hussein himself certainly made no mention of it.

Shipmaster A’tkrnnmtktk’ki salvaged the situation masterfully. Furfeg read the update from his Rrrtktktkp’ch colleague on his ocular implants’ virtual overlay and saw the wisdom in it instantly.

“Ambassador…” he began delicately. “The captain of the Rich Plains has requested to give you a personal tour of the ship before the delegates arrive. The ship is rather large, however, so he has offered the use of a small personal transport…”

“That is very kind of them,” Hussein said, pausing. “I hesitate to impose on the captain’s generosity, but as you can see my legs don’t quite work as well as they once did…”

“He assures me that the vehicle will be available for your use throughout your stay, Ambassador. As a personal token of his esteem.” A’tkrnnmtktk’ki hadn’t become shipmaster of the Rich Plains by accident. Indeed, he was an accomplished diplomat himself, and had worked small wonders in support of Furfeg for many years.

“The captain is most generous.”

By the time they reached the door, the vehicle had arrived and Hussein settled gratefully onto a part of it that looked deeply uncomfortable to Furfeg’s eyes, but then again he and the ambassador were very different shapes.

It set off under its own power at a comfortable walking pace that Furfeg was able to match with ease. The human guards with their shorter legs jogged to keep up but seemed to suffer no particular distress or feel at all disgruntled by the change in pace.

Furfeg willed himself to relax slightly. The first of many obstacles had been navigated without incident, and the real test was tomorrow. There was no sense in running himself ragged.

Still…he couldn’t shake a terrible paranoid feeling somewhere in his bones that told him he should not truly relax until after the human was safely off his ship again.

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Cabal Dataspace 32758927, Adjacent to Gao planetary datasphere.

Cytosis

The sticking point was Stoneback. Every other clan, from the Females all the way through Gaoian society had nicely followed the Hierarchy’s usual cybernetic uptake projections. Progressive generations had become more and more comfortable with the technology, squeamishness had been carefully reduced, until nowadays every major political force on Gao—Clan or otherwise—had an entirely acceptable percentage of implantees.

Stoneback did not. Possibly this had to do with their lifestyles, which could be rough and physical by any standard and even sometimes as intense as a true Deathworlder’s. Their Champion was known for his lack of implants, too, and the Clan quite naturally followed his example.

Such factions had always been…difficult…for the Hierarchy to handle. Normally they would quietly engineer the faction’s irrelevance or possibly its destruction, but that was absolutely not an option here, for reasons that were maddeningly complex and essential to Gaoian culture.

One of those reasons, of course, was the counter-agency of Cabal operatives. They needed actors who were well-positioned to oppose Hierarchy influence, and the Gao were unknowingly at an essential moment in their history; they were almost beyond the critical threshold. Stoneback was the key to their salvation, to help them undo the deadening influence of the Hierarchy’s psychological and cultural engineering…but they had no agents within. At all.

Sometimes, however, an opportunity presented itself and in this case that opportunity took the form of one Associate Fiin.

Fiin was a young, junior, strapping, and sullenly belligerent example of the Clan’s advanced training programs. Supremely self-confident though still in some unidentified phase of his progression, the young associate had managed to annoy just the wrong male in a local Talamay house.

Gaoian society had a curious relationship with murder. They didn’t exactly accept it—the Females wanted stability and peace after all, and for their cubs to have long and successful lives. When a male killed another male, it tended to harm their mating chances, and that was usually enough of a disincentive. Usually, but not invariably

Then there were the Straightshields. Gao’s answer to a police force and judiciary were, if anything, even keener on an orderly society than the Females were, and they were among the heavier implant users. After all, neural cybernetics had made their role so much easier…

These facts combined to explain exactly why the young Fiin was standing shackled in front of Cytosis, or rather in front of the biodrone that Cytosis controlled. The young Stoneback was covered in blood and had a chunk torn from his left ear, and he was wearing an expression of barely-contained rage that his motives were even being questioned.

“He attacked me in a back-alley with three of his workhouse-mates! What was I supposed to do?”

“There were other options besides disemboweling all four of them, Associate Fiin,” Cytosis allowed his biodrone to say. “You are Clan and are held to a much higher standard. You know this, do you not?”

Fiin aimed a look that longed for violence at the Straightshield enforcers who had him coralled. He wasn’t stupid enough to fight back, but it was clear that his hackles were up and he wanted more blood on his claws. “The Openpaw medics said three of them will survive!”

“For which you should be immensely grateful, young Clanling. Their workhouse will demand Wergeld and rightly so. Terl was a valuable and highly-skilled welder.”

“He should have thought of that before he tried to bite my throat out!”

“Indeed. And will the surveillance footage reflect your version of events? Answer wisely, young Clanling.”

Fiin went stiff, then sagged. “Stonebacks don’t lie…but it was an alleyway. There is no footage. Which is why they attacked me there, the cowards…”

And there was the opportunity that Cytosis had been looking for.

“No, you don’t lie, do you? I can smell it on you.” Which was true: Fiin reeked of blood and honesty. “But what am I to do, Fiin of Stoneback? This is not your first encounter with my Clan and I suspect it will not be the last. Have you gained no serenity from your new position?”

Fiin didn’t respond to that, but he did cringe ever so slightly. Cytosis had struck a chord. He paused for a moment and addressed the enforcers. “Leave us, I think he will hold his honor.”

The enforcers regarded Cytosis carefully, then backed off and resumed their patrol. Dealing with one of the Judge-Fathers of their clan was more than they had bargained on at the start of their day, and especially not this Father. This father had a Reputation.

When the patrol officers had retreated sufficiently, Cytosis approached carefully and unshackled Fiin to his wide-eyed surprise.

“You are on probation,” Cytosis informed him. “And the citation will be recorded. Self-defense this may have been, but there is such a thing as excessive force, young Stoneback. You must understand that, because as Clan you have a much larger responsibility than any Clanless. And you are a Stoneback. In short order you will grow past our ability to peaceably restrain…”

He saw Fiin nod, and laid down his bait. “I am willing, however, to ensure that the citation expires quickly, provided you demonstrate that Straightshield can trust you. Our Clans have a good relationship. I want to keep it that way. I don’t want our officers to have to bring you down hard, and you don’t want to waste a gesture of goodwill. Do you?”

Fiin seemed to understand the gravity of the situation and duck-nodded submissively. “No, Father.”

“Good. Now…this leniency doesn’t come entirely without a price. While I cannot order you to do this…Straightshield would very much appreciate if you kept us in your thoughts when you fully assume your Clan responsibilities. You will see much. Some of it will be unusual, perhaps unethical. Maybe dangerous to the Gao…”

Fiin opened his mouth to object, and Cytosis had his drone raise a paw to stop him. “This is not an accusation, it is a fact,” he asserted. “Every Clan has its…difficult….elements, and Straightshield alone have the power to independently investigate and Judge. You know our motto?”

Fiin duck-nodded. Everybody knew the Straightshield motto, they were one of the few Clans who had made theirs public knowledge. When Cytosis gestured for him to speak, he grumbled the three words quietly. ”Service Before Self”

Cytosis duck-nodded for him. “We take it seriously. Just as seriously as your Clan takes yours…”

Fiin duck-nodded seriously but did not reveal the motto. Which was…maddening. Both the Cabal and the Hierarchy knew next to nothing about Stoneback and even something as simple as their motto eluded them. The Whitecrests had ‘Light the Darkness,’ Clan Shortstride had ‘Build The Easy Road,’ but Stoneback remained a frustratingly closed book.

Anyway. “Very well. Keep your nose clean and your claws bloodless, young Stoneback. Before you know it this citation will be gone and you will have your second chance. Now go get yourself cleaned up…and pay that wergeld. Pay generously, Fiin.”

“…I will. Thank you, Father.”

“Go.”

He watched Fiin depart with as much dignified speed as he could, which was frankly heavier on the speed than the dignity, then turned and strolled back out into the crowd towards his vehicle.

It wasn’t much of a foothold in Gao’s most impenetrable Clan… but it was a start.

And it was more than the Hierarchy had.

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Diplomatic Starship Rich Plains, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Ambassador Furfeg

The human was just…taking it. He had barely spoken a word for the duration of the session so far, and had instead chosen to bow his head and listen as the delegates took their turns laying into his species as a whole.

Furfeg was having to fight to keep his emotions from showing: Some of the unfiltered vitriol landing on the beleaguered deathworlder went far beyond anything that he personally or even the species in general deserved.

Furfeg had his…doubts…about mankind. When he had unleashed the Hunters on this very ship all those years ago he had wanted to showcase the species’ heroic potential, and he had succeeded admirably at a cold cost that he had kept buried ever since.

It was only later, on silent reflection, that he had begun to assess the consequences. Xiù Chang herself had done nothing wrong at all—indeed, she had been the victim of his scheme—but she had…broken things. Subtly. In ways that were hard to pin down, the collateral damage of what she had achieved not only on the Rich Plains but also in a nameless lab on a nameless barren world, on Gao and for the Gaoians had been widespread and most likely unconscious.

There was a lengthy causal chain between that girl’s abduction and the fact that Gao was, it was rumoured, shortly to see an upgrade in its official Dominion habitability rating to take it above ten and into the class of bottom-end deathworld. Furfeg was absolutely certain that the reclassification would never have even been considered if not for that one Canadian teenager. Perhaps the Gaoians could have maintained the deception a little while longer.

Deep in the soul he had come to believe he might have, Furfeg could only stare at the frail, elderly ambassador that humanity had chosen for themselves and wonder what happened when that kind of unthinking calamitous agency was multiplied to include eight billion people? Just how hot was the fire they were playing with, here?

And why was something so dangerous willing to just sit and take it?

The answer came to him in a cold jolt. Hussein was accepting the abuse with such composure because he could.

The realization happened at about the same time as the last of the grieving Guvnurag delegates reached the end of their tirade and sank back into their seat exhausted. Twelve of the most powerful politicians in the galaxy had shouted themselves hoarse at an old man.

Slowly, with a hand that might have been trembling from emotion or might have been trembling from age, Hussein reached up and removed his glasses. He folded them carefully and held them lightly in his lap as he tugged a small cloth square from his pocket and delicately dried around his eyes and nose.

He returned the cloth to his pocket, re-positioned the spectacles on his nose, cleared his throat, and then looked around at the beings who had abused him so futilely.

“…What must we do?” he asked, quietly.

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

“You can’t just ‘go native’ like that!”

“I had a stone in my shoe! What was I gonna do, let it wreck the whole foot? The damn thing doesn’t heal, Al!”

Xiù had never heard Allison and Julian really raise their voices at each other before. As with all relationships there was always the occasional irate moment, the odd tense exchange, but by and large they had a peaceful home.

But Allison was furious with Julian today, and Xiù couldn’t really blame her.

The girls had gone on a supply run back to the ship, and on returning they’d found Julian showing a fascinated Vemik the workings of his foot while gnawing happily on a roasted Werne shank. And he’d known he shouldn’t be doing either of those things, because he’d shot Allison the immediate guilty look that all men wore when caught by their girlfriends doing something that had been explicitly forbidden.

Vemik, wisely, had found a reason to leave. Quickly.

“Xiù! Back me up here?” Allison finally turned to her and flung an arm wide, inviting her to pitch in.

Xiù looked her in the eye and shook her head. “No ganging up, remember?” she said, quietly.

The gentle reminder worked. Allison gawped at her for a second, then blinked and chilled out a little.

“I…Uh…Right. Shit, Julian, I’m sorry. I’m just—”

“No, it’s—” Julian tried to interrupt her. “You’re right, I promised I wouldn’t.”

“It’s not that. You’ve been scaring the shit outta me, dummy.” Allison confessed. “I keep waiting for you to wake up puking blood or…something.”

“Allison…” Julian hugged her and ran a vigorous, reassuring hand firmly up and down her back. “We’ve got biofilters, antibiotics, antiparasitics and stasis. We need to befriend these people if we’re not gonna be Gods and break them completely. We’re tough and they’re smart. We…we need to take some risk here. If we don’t, we might be risking them. They need to see us as people and not avatars or we might get…hell, a cargo cult or something.”

“There’s gotta be a way to do that without risking your own health, though?”

“…I’m not stupid,” Julian chided without any real hard feeling. “Vemet wanted me to take their trial of manhood, and God knows what that involves, but I know there’s some kind of a drug in there so I said no. I said it would probably be bad because I’m from very far away and it might insult his gods, and he seemed okay with that.”

Allison backed down some more. “Good. That’s…good. Thanks.”

“I’m not happy about it either,” Xiù confessed, “I dunno, I think he’s right, bǎobèi. But…I think you’re right too. I’m torn.”

“I’m not happy about it!” Julian said. “Just by being here we’ve done…fuck-knows-what to these people. I just don’t think hiding anything is gonna prevent further harm.”

Allison made a pained noise and threw herself into Xiù’s lap under the tree they were using as ‘their’ space in the clearing. She kneaded her eyes with the heel of her hands before running her fingers through her hair and sighed at the leaves and limbs above. “…I mean…do we really wanna let more cats out of the bag?”

“No, I don’t want to,” Julian repeated himself. “I think we have to. We need to be real in a way they can understand. I don’t wanna be a God.”

“Oh, come on!” Allison groaned and glared at him half-heartedly. “Now you’re gonna use my own thing against me?”

“If it’s your own thing, babe…” He pointed out, and let the thought hang unfinished.

Allison stared at him a few moments longer then looked to Xiù, who shrugged and gave her a reassuring kiss on the forehead. “We’re all stressing out about this,” she said, stroking Allison’s hair. “I don’t want to hurt them either, but…”

“But honesty is the best policy. Fuck.” Allison sighed. “Fine. Beat by my own logic, huh?”

“Sorry.” Julian sat down with them both, and the argument ended as all their arguments did with foreheads to foreheads and three quick kisses. No hard feelings.

There was a curious sound from nearby. The Singer was watching them again, in a very different way to Vemik. Where Vemik had a permanent puppyish tilt to his head as he tried to figure out what he was hearing, the Singer just…watched. Levelly, thoughtfully and impenetrably.

Of course, this was the first time the three of them had been affectionate in front of the tribe, wasn’t it? In the moment, they’d forgotten.

Xiù went tense, waiting for the Singer to demand an explanation…but instead the native woman shrugged, turned, and swung away into a neighboring tree without comment.

They watched her go.

“…What’s with her?” Allison asked, eventually.

“I’ve barely spoken with her,” Xiù said. “She…I don’t think she knows what to think of us yet.”

“Could be a problem,” Julian’s hand rasped through a few days of stubble. “If she decides she doesn’t like us…”

“Her word would carry a lot of weight,” Xiù agreed. “I think she’s Yan’s niece, as well as being the witch or…whatever we call her.”

“Let’s just call her the Singer,” Allison proposed.

“And what do we do if she doesn’t like us?” Julian asked.

Xiù watched Vemik get up and leave as well, following after the Singer.

“…we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she decided.

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Vemik had good hearing. He listened thoughtfully from a distance, and he wondered. He didn’t quite understand what they were talking about. Their sky-words were still new but…

They seemed worried. Worried about the People. And they seemed…like they cared. And that, he decided, was a good thing.

He noticed the Singer giving the three Sky-People some distance and followed her to the temporary nest she’d made half-way up a Ketta tree, hung with bones and totems and a few of her herbs and roots. She was dividing her time between the village and the meeting-place for now, and was almost as exhausted as she’d been on the long journey from the old village.

She gave him a tired look as she settled into the little bowl of bent branches and leaves she’d made for herself.

“You’re quiet…” Vemik said.

“I left the baby with Semi,” she said. Semi had been the mother of Vemik’s half-sisters, and was throwing herself hard into her work to try and keep her thoughts away from the pain of knowing that her daughters, sent to the eastern tribe a few seasons before, had all been killed by the “Big Enemy”.

Having a niece to look after was probably doing her some good. It was certainly helping the Singer, who had been struggling to cope with the constant demands of both tribe and child even before the sky-people showed up.

Vemik prided himself that he could offer comfort and support—the Singer fell asleep the instant he held her, most nights—but she had been adamant that if he wanted sex then he was going to have to go find some other woman for that as she just didn’t have the energy.

Vemik would have taken her at her word too, except that all the women in the tribe were so much older than him. Old enough to be his mother, although she had died and her body had been given to the skies many seasons ago. So long ago that Vemik could remember little of her.

He’d grown up being mothered by the whole tribe. To go to any of them seemed…it made his skin feel like little things were crawling all over him, and the crawling feeling got even worse when he thought about how the only other women in the tribe were his cousins and sisters.

There had been too many seasons since they last traded with another tribe. Too many more and things would become difficult indeed.

The Singer always seemed to know the inside of his head. Her usual amused sparkle shone through the fatigue for a second as she gave him a sly look. “So, what do you find so fascinating in the Sky-People?” she asked. “They are beautiful in a strange way, aren’t they?”

“They don’t have tails,” Vemik objected. “And their hands have too many fingers, and that thing in the middle of their faces—!”

“And they’re beautiful. In a strange way,” she repeated. “Aren’t they?”

“…Yes.” Vemik admitted. “But stranger than I…they seem…” He paused and scowled at himself. Whatever thought he was trying to have was getting stuck like a bone in a choking man’s throat. “Do women…?”

“Do women what?” Her tone was light and innocent, but her eyes were anything but.

“The Sky-Women, they seem to…love each other. And him.”

“And why not?” the Singer smiled at him. “Some of the village women turn to each other for comfort when the men are away hunting.”

“You do?”

“And why not?” She repeated. “Why? Don’t men—?”

“If we do, none of them have ever asked me to-” Vemik shook his head. “No.”

The Singer picked a stray shred of leaf out of her tail-crest. “Perhaps I should ask a different man.”

Feeling strangely jilted for no good reason that he could identify, Vemik climbed up onto a branch slightly higher than hers and lay along it on his belly, looking down at her. She rolled onto her back and continued to give him that impenetrable, amused look. “Do you think they’d answer?”

“Why not? Your father and Yan seem to like each other.”

“Wait, really?” Vemik was still thinking through what that might mean when she trilled loudly and gave him a fond look.

“I’m tugging your tail, stupid.”

“…Oh.” Vemik lowered his head again, thinking.

“I mean, Yan likes most people…but he’s polite about it,” she added. “Maybe he likes you!”

Vemik made a pained noise, as he always did when people were teasing him with things he didn’t know and vague half-answers. “You are in an evil mood today!”

“No, I’m in a good mood.” The Singer stretched and curled up a little in her nest. “That argument of theirs…what did you make of it?”

“…That they’re worried about something. Something big. And they’re worried for us.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Comforting, isn’t it?”

“If the Sky-People are worried for us…they can do impossible things. Shouldn’t we be worried by there being something that worries them?”

“Why? We can only do what we can do. Yan has more taking-magic than the men in any of the songs, but I think he’d be killed dead by that black rock-spear thing they have.”

“That’s worrying!” Vemik insisted.

“It is! But it’s obvious that they care about us, so it’s not something to worry about. See?”

Vemik looked down at her, knowing that he was going to worry about it despite her advice. “…So what do we do?”

“Learn. They worry for us. That’s both worrying and comforting, so learn. In time they will tell us what worries them, and once we know? Then we can make plans.”

“When we get the words…and the sky-thoughts. It’s hard, it’s like…” Vemik searched for the phrasing. “They have words for thoughts nobody’s ever had! Every time we talk I feel—” he paused and summoned the word he had learned. “They have a word. ‘Universe.’ It means all the stars in the night sky that we can see, and all the ones that we can’t see too.”

“I heard it. It sounded like Big Magic.”

“But…what kind of people have a word for stars that we can’t see?”

She shrugged. “Sky-thinkers.”

“I’m a sky-thinker,” he objected, “and I never came up with a word like that.”

“You haven’t been doing it for as long.”

Vemik opened his mouth to protest, and the Singer raised her hand to forestall the argument. “No, really! They’re not gods, I think that’s true, right? Gods don’t eat like we do, or have strange carved feet, or anything like that. They’re just People from under a far-away sky who have been sky-thinking for a very long time and are very good at it. They’ve told us so.”

“They could be lying?” Vemik suggested, half-heartedly. It was a crippled and weak little objection.

“Jooyun didn’t lie about his made-foot, did he? He took it apart and showed you all the bones and tendons, even with how strange their feet are. Why would he lie about any of that? Why would a god lie and pretend to just be a Person?” She glanced at the sun. “Could a god lie and pretend to just be a Person?”

“Maybe he’s a trickster god?”

“Well…No, I don’t think so. I feel it in my breath.” Which was fair enough, as far as Vemik was concerned. It was the Singer’s job to know such things, after all. “But, you want to do something? Jooyun seems to like you. You two started exploring right? Why not keep doing that? I know you’re harassing him with questions and he hasn’t taken you with his black-spear, so…”

“He seems to like it when I ask questions…” Vemik admitted.

“Maybe he likes you…” She had that teasing edge to her voice again.

“Hey!”

The Singer trilled, “You’re such easy prey!”

“Apparently,” grumbled Vemik. She trilled again, but relented.

“Fine. He likes your questions. So if he is a god then asking questions will keep him happy, and if he isn’t a god then maybe he will teach you things,” she summed up with a nod. “And maybe, eventually, you will know what has them so worried.”

“And after that…I keep asking questions until I know how to help them with whatever has them worried?” Vemik asked.

“Maybe. Swing from this tree to that tree, Sky-thinker. Don’t try to hold a branch that isn’t in front of you.”

“You sound like Yan,” Vemik grumbled. She trilled.

“I hope so! He is my uncle. And a wise man, too—You should listen to him more.”

“I do listen to him!”

“Really?” the Singer shook her head and seemed amused. “And if Yan was giving you advice right now, what would he say?”

Vemik thought about it. “He’d say…to keep my thoughts here and now. Hold the branch in front of me.”

“And what is in front of you right now?”

Vemik grinned. “A nest that’s just about big enough for two, if they’re close enough…”

“Really? Well then, father of my first child. How close are we?”

It was Vemik’s turn to make an amused trill, and he dropped easily off his branch and onto hers.

“Why don’t we learn?” he asked.

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Diplomatic Starship Rich Plains, Orbiting Cimbrean-5, The Far Reaches

++????++: <Alarm;Priority> [broadcast;observer_10142059; Meme_Sequence17974645]

Every Igraen agent in the Hierarchy had spent time as an Observer before being selected to undergo their evaluation period as a Zero ahead of finally being inducted into the Hierarchy itself. The work was tedious and demeaning, but it supposedly instilled patience and winnowed out those too fickle to properly serve the needs of the species.

The Observers did just and only that: they observed. They did not have the override codes to assume control of their host, nor any authority within the Hierarchy structure but they were utterly essential. The Hierarchy, after all, numbered at most in the low thousands and had done so only a few times in their history.

This, compared to millions of potentially important individuals who might know and see things that the Hierarchy might wish to learn. Individuals such as the Guvnurag diplomat Furfegrovan.

The observer riding in Furfeg’s implants had been monitoring the Guvnurag’s thoughts and had noted a chain of reasoning that it felt warranted inspection by a more senior agent. It had kicked the meme-sequence upstairs to its over-observer, which had in turn forward it to the observation overseer.

The thought chain was easily summarized: ‘The human is up to something.’ This alone warranted analysis, especially in light of the sophisticated decision tree that underpinned the opinion, and so the overseer immediately brought the analyzers into play.

Analyzers were the second tier of the structure atop which rested the Hierarchy’s agents. Observe, Analyze, Act. All Agents spent time as an Analyzer as well before they finally made it to their Zero-trial.

Analysis of the meme-sequence led to its immediate graduation to needing Agent intervention. It was forwarded to the junior receiving agent monitoring the diplomatic operation, who instantly handed it to the senior agent.

The entire process took place during the ringing silence that followed Ambassador Hussein’s simple question.

“What must we do?” he repeated himself, leaning forward on his cane and peering over his glasses. “Tell us. My species is listening, gentlebeings. Reveal to us what it is we must do to earn your trust, and it will be done.”

Hierarchy prediction algorithms ran ahead of that question, sending questing tendrils of probability-math into the future in search of the plausible outcomes, the desirable outcomes, the disastrous outcomes. Nodes of possibility were found, key branches in the conversation to come were mapped.

Hussein did not stand—indeed, the act seemed beyond him at this point—but he did shuffle forward and perch owl-like on the edge of his seat. “Tell us,” he repeated, softly.

With a fully mapped probability matrix in place, the Hierarchy’s critical objectives were injected and work began on what sequence of words and actions might bring them about. First and foremost, the objective of driving a permanent wedge between ordinary sapients and all forms of deathworld life.

One of the Guvnurag erupted to his feet, flaring a furious red. “There is nothing!” he spat. “The homeworld would be untouched if not for your kind, and you dare ask us to trust you? You… you blunder off your diseased planet and rot everything you touch, and then you ask for forgiveness? There is nothing, Ambassador! Nothing that you can do! Do not even ask!”

The probability space shrank and stretched, dozens of Hierarchy programs watched every subtle facet of Hussein’s body language as he took the tirade with patient sadness.

“…Then why am I here?” he asked, eventually. “Is this sentiment universal? Diplomacy never fails, sir; People fail it. It falls to us at these moments to have the strength to-”

“Your *‘strength,’*” one of the other dignitaries interrupted, spurred by the Agent in her brain, “crushes us all.”

“Strength can do that,” Hussein agreed. “Or it can hold off the crushing blow. Strength is never a problem, gentlebeings. Strength solves problems, and it now falls to us to be strong for both our species’ sakes.”

”And what problems have you solved, Ambassador Hussein?” Furfeg asked, quietly. He was unaware of his status as the only Guvnurag in the room whose actions were entirely uninfluenced by Hierarchy demons. There always needed to be at least one, to act as a barometer for how other uncontrolled life forms would behave.

Hussein considered that for a long moment. “That is a fascinating question, Your Excellency. Answering it in detail would require I place all of you in great danger, and that, obviously, cannot stand. So I will answer it as best I can: we have ensured the continued survival of ourselves and others.”

“A bluff,” One of the dignitaries scoffed.

“If so, it is one we have committed virtually all of our Dominion Development Credits to ensure, along with a crippling increase in GRA member-nation debt, extensive economic pressure not to mention internal instability. No. This is a threat we are committed to fighting, and we are doomed to fight it mostly in silence. But, alas, I cannot ask your sympathy, and I know beyond doubt that many of the people in this room know of what I am speaking.”

“And is this… problem… actually solved, Your Excellency?” Furfeg pressed.

“No. Nor will it be anytime soon. All of that, however, is merely background. My people are in a fight for the right to exist, and one aspect of our enemy has decided to make an example of your people for their own reasons. This…we are not strong enough to have stopped it. We could only watch, helplessly, as all our oft-mentioned Deathworld might was as nothing before a million evil ships. So, I ask again: what must we do?”

Furfeg’s chromatophores shone with a mix of uncertainty and, even now, the urge to reconcile…and it was on that lone data point that the probability-space collapsed into a narrow channel of forced action.

There were no malicious words or taunting. What would have been the point? Instead, one of the Agents merely triggered a contingency in physical space that had been prepared ahead of this meeting. Its host raised a hand and pointed at the human, and there was a snapping hiss of compressed air.

Hussein had enough time to look down at the nervejam grenade that landed at his feet.

His reply was soft. “…I see.”

He shut his eyes.

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

As dates went, Martina had to feel that going to a photo exhibition being thrown by her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend-slash-adopted-sister was… Surprisingly good actually. It sounded a lot worse on paper than it was in reality.

Ava was looking good these days. Marty doubted she’d ever quite lose that haunted look but she was carrying herself more openly, smiling more, looking less sorry for herself. Her fingertips never strayed far from the soft-haired brown border collie at her side, but there was a determined positive energy around her now. It was a definite improvement.

According to Adam, Ava had approached Folctha’s art galleries about doing an exhibition as a kind of therapy. Marty had no idea what went into being accepted by an art gallery, but she’d done her research and learned that the Ealain Gallery was getting the best reviews by all the right people. Some very serious names, apparently, felt that the place was on its way to becoming a true cultural focus. One critic had called it ‘Folctha’s answer to the Tate Modern,’ and it was high on the list of tourist destinations for visitors to mankind’s first offworld colony.

Art galleries had never been Marty’s thing, though. Too… self-congratulatory. She was an engineer and a scientist at heart, she loved problems and solving problems. The eternal quest to find ever-more subtle ways of evoking an emotion usually left her cold.

Sometimes, though, something came along to make her grudgingly reassess her opinion and Ava’s photography was proving to be such a sometime. Apparently she’d worked closely with the gallery’s curator to tell a story, and they’d succeeded.

The path through the exhibit meandered confusingly, leaving no clear sense of direction. It started, surprisingly, with an image not taken by Ava—a photo taken out in nature by a lake, showing the sunlight making lines of light and dark on Ava’s own naked back while the sun itself was framed by a coil of her soaked hair. You had to know it was Ava, though, as she was looking away from the camera. Frankly, the girl in the picture could have been anyone.

It was a happy image, a warm one, and it held Adam enthralled for so long that Marty was about to tease him about the shadowed edge of a teenage breast just visible between Ava’s arm and her knee when he spoke.

“I remember that day…”

Marty checked the label. “Original image by S. Tisdale…”

“Yeah. Last day we ever swam at the lake. God, she died only a week later…”

Marty took his hand and led him away from it, into the thicket of images that Ava had taken herself. There was a very similar image to the first one at the far end of the gallery, enlarged so that everyone could see that it was there and that it was almost identical to the first one, but hidden behind a curtain of gauze that blurred the details. The winding trail around the exhibit swung close to it, but never behind the curtain. Whatever that image depicted was tantalizingly visible, but never accessible.

“Jack writes to you, right?” she asked.

“Recruit Tisdale, you mean?” Adam grinned. “Yeah, he writes to me every week. Says the PT at HMS Raleigh is way easier than what I was givin’ him… hey, this is London, right?”

“You tell me, I’ve never been,” Marty inspected the image he’d stooped to study. It certainly had a strong London-ness to it. In fact, as she looked around she found they were in the middle of a virtual island of London-ness, written in shades of orange, blue and gray-scale. “Gonna be a while before he’s on the team.”

“Five years to finish his Engineering Technician training after he’s done with Basic. God, I’ll be an old man by then!”

“Shut up, you won’t even be thirty.”

“You’ll be though!” Adam shot her his best shit-eating grin, bouncing on the balls of his feet with enough force to be felt through the concrete tiled floor. “Ooolld…..”

Marty slapped his arm and got stinging fingers for it, but she was giggling. “Asshole… Come on, let’s see what’s next.”

Ava’s exhibition really was an emotional journey, and all of it was told in portraits of light and color that tended to focus on one ordinary thing. A decrepit old Lada in Cairo, a forlorn brown rock in the middle of the surprising subtle hues of desert sand. A crown of brambles choking a native Cimbrean tree to death. Every single one was bleak, but… there was something…

It finally clicked for Marty when they reached the far end of the gallery closest to the gauze and she could see what the picture behind was: A recreation of the original image by the lakeshore, with an older Ava still anonymously looking away from the camera.

She leaned back, folded her arms thoughtfully. “Well now. I don’t usually go for art, but this? I like.”

“That means a lot. Thank you!”

They both turned. Ava had managed to sneak up on them during their slow tour around the exhibit, and gave them a shy smile. “It was Bernadette who really put it together, though. I didn’t even see the theme in all these until she brought it out.”

“Bernadette?” Adam asked.

“The curator.” Ava looked around the exhibit. “She must’ve gone through thousands of pictures to narrow it down to just these.”

“I like that you used Sara’s picture,” Adam told her.

“Mm. It was Berna’s idea to recreate it.” Ava looked up at the huge image of herself on the wall. “Is it weird that an exhibition of my photos is framed by two pictures I didn’t take?”

“You’re asking the wrong gal,” Marty confessed. “You modeled nude, though? I dunno if I could do that…”

“Actually, it was a real boost.” Ava smiled. “I might do it some more. Not, like, a glamour shoot but for art reasons? Hell yeah, sign me- sorry.”

The apology was in response to her phone humming inside her purse. She fished it out with a practised ease that said that she got a lot of phone calls at unexpected moments, and had it against her ear in a businesslike flash.

“Ava Rìos…Me cago en Cristo, are you sure?! …Yeah! Yeah, send it over, I’ll meet the crew at Quarterside Park. Right away, Thor. …You too.”

She lowered the phone with a stunned expression.

“Something happen?” Adam asked.

Ava nodded slowly. “…Ambassador Hussein has been murdered.”

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Nofl

“The way I see it, you have a choice here. You can be a criminal and a dropout from the Corti Directorate and sink into obscurity…or you could become respected and revered.”

Nofl wasn’t buying it, and said so. “Chief, chief, sweetie! I thought you were a man of principle?” He wasn’t handcuffed—humans didn’t make cuffs small enough for a Corti’s wrists—so he idly traced a lazy finger in an abstract pattern on the steel tabletop they had parked him at, seated atop a couple of thick books. “This political bargaining doesn’t suit you, not at all!”

“I am a man of principle.” Gabriel Arés was in that ridiculous primitive wheeled chair of his again. Why the man persisted in enduring the indignity of a permanently damaged nerve despite Nofl’s repeated offers to help…well, everybody said humans were strange. “Our system of justice seeks fairness and even if you broke the law, your intent matters. It always does.”

“I’m sure that line works with the Gaoians, but I am one of the finest Corti minds alive, darling. Try harder.”

“You got caught.”

“…True.”

Arés smiled and shook his head. “No, this is a grand old tradition we have. It’s called a plea bargain, Nofl, and it’s quite simple. You co-operate and confess to the crime, admit guilt, and you will be treated very fairly. As opposed to merely…well. The local Prosecutor is frankly sick and tired of all the smuggling attempts we’ve foiled, and I think she wants a scalp, if you catch my meaning.”

Nofl considered that entirely plain and unhidden threat. “And what does this attorney of mine that you said would be arranged for me have to say about all this?”

“I don’t know. Would you like to ask her?” Gabriel paused, looked around conspiratorially, and said in a low voice. “Look…you’re not human, so let me just say the correct answer is ‘yes.’ You want to talk to her. Now.”

Nofl considered the chief for several seconds, and then nodded. “Yes please. I would like to speak with my attorney.”

Gabriel nodded, wheeled himself out of the room, and after a tellingly short wait, a tall and robust human female with very long, black hair strode in. She waited until the other humans had left, and then opened her briefcase.

“Mr. Nofl, I am Ms. Bader. As you are alien, let me first say that anything you and I discuss—anything *at all*—is protected and inadmissible in court. There are only three classes of profession where that protection is extended, and in our case, that protection is absolute. Do you understand?”

“What if they… record what we discuss?” Nofl asked, curiously. Even from that first businesslike sentence, the whole affair was beginning to seem rather elaborate.

“The legal concept translates from the Latin as something like ‘tainted fruit of the poisoned tree.’ Anything they learn from such a thing, and all of the descendant products thereof, are not only inadmissible in court but they will themselves have committed a crime. The act of recording this conversation is also illegal. And…as an aside? I would love for them to try. I’d make all of the money.”

Nofl found himself warming to this human. Her attitude was almost Corti, and for an added bonus her suit was immaculately tailored. Corti didn’t wear clothes, but that was no excuse for being fashion-blind. “Very well. Then yes, I indeed smuggled Cruezzir through customs as a personal favor to Myun. She does not know the details. She only wanted me to ‘get some’ to help Chief Arés.”

“How admirable,” Bader said, unconvincingly. “That particular crime carries the maximum penalty of ‘Transportation’ on Cimbrean, which is just a gussied-up English way of saying ‘exile to wherever.’ Which brings us to my question: how would you like to plea?”

Nofl considered it. “Chief Arés was telling me about this bargain he wanted to offer.”

Bader rolled her eyes. “He can’t do that. Only the Prosecutor can, but I have no doubt that rolling tightass coordinated everything with that…with her. But I bet the offer is genuine. He is honest to a fault.” Her tone of voice was…difficult for Nofl to analyze. Admiring? Something about the tone didn’t quite match the words.

“So what are my options, dear?”

Bader snorted derisively through her nose. “Drop the act, Nofl. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a gay Corti.”

“You’re quite right, dear, but can’t a chap be camp for fun?”

She deployed Nofl’s very favorite human gesture—the ‘concession nod.’ Head slightly tilted, mouth in a straight line, eyebrows raised. “A fair point, I guess. But as to your options, you have three: you could plead guilty and throw yourself at the mercy of the court—Don’t. You could plead not guilty, and—” she quickly rifled through her case notes, “—likely be found guilty as charged, and then the Prosecutor would have lots of fun. Sorry. They’ve got fingerprints, video evidence, transport logs…all of it. Yikes.”

Nofl considered this, feeling slightly chagrined. “And the third option?”

“Well…we strike a deal.” She rested her hand under her chin. “Which says something that they’re willing to offer a deal, seeing as they have you dead to rights. You’re very valuable to someone, Nofl. What did you do? And better yet, how can I profit for both of us?”

“Oh, I was just the first-circle professor of regenerative medicine at the Grand University of Origin…” Nofl permitted himself his best impersonation of a winning smile. “You should see my personal banner, it’s taller than I am.”

“…Are you the reason that ‘Warhorse’ character needs a whole sidewalk to himself? Him and his friends?”

“Miss Bader, if I answered that question then…oh wait, everything I say to you is inadmissible, isn’t it?”

“…yes…” Bader conceded, “But I highly encourage you to exercise discretion. The subtleties of the law here are significant and you’ll no doubt wish to study them after we’ve got your little problem cleared up. In particular the Cimbreaners have an Official Secrets Act which is just…unAmerican, if you ask me.”

“As I understand it, the colony is not American.”

“Their loss,” Bader sniffed. “But while the protection is absolute, that doesn’t mean they won’t try. We have another concept: ‘the process is the punishment.’ Let’s not explore that, hmm?”

“You manage to make law sound almost interesting, Miss Bader. Poisoned fruits and florid language… It’s nearly exciting!”

“Here’s another word you might like. ‘Lawfare.’ I’ll let you ponder that one. Now…shall I begin talks with the Prosecutor, and get you out of this cell? I’m gonna shoot for an admission of guilt, probation of, oh, some term or another…let’s stick to a misdemeanor, yeah. Maybe a fine? Only if I must. Oh, and are you willing to do community service? That might let me sweeten the offer.”

“I suspect,” Nofl hazarded, “That community service is exactly what Chief Arés wants.”

“Oh no, what he wants is justice. He’s admirable that way…” she got that strange look in her eye again, “Anyway. He’ll be happy if the system works like it should. It’s really the Prosecutor we need to worry and she is a bitch lately about…God, everything. Incidentally, I’ve made a small fortune off the Clan males and their constant brawling…”

Nofl gave her a calculating look. “How much are your services going to cost me?”

“This one? It’s free. Public defender working pro bono and all that. After today…” she flashed that distinctive predator smile that only humans ever quite got right. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

“I’m sure we can,” Nofl agreed.

After that, things went remarkably fast. Less than twenty temporal units after she closed her folder and let herself out, Ms. Bader returned. Five minutes after that there was a bustle towards the courthouse, where the Judge, Ms. Bader, and the Prosecutor donned some ridiculous white wigs. There was some highly encoded legal jargon spoken in heated terms…and the agreement was set.

The deal as it was explained to Nofl was really quite straightforward: He would serve one Cimbrean year of ‘probation’ which as he understood it meant a solemn promise not to offend again, on pain of severe punishment. He would perform two hundred hours of ‘community service’ and he would pay a bond of one thousand Cimbrean Pounds, repayable with interest after his year of probation was served, and he would offer one thousand hours of professional services towards the local military establishment.

The only hiccup in the process came when they tried to explain the concept of ‘swearing an oath.’ The whole notion veered deep into the heartlands of deathworld strangeness, onto a region of Nofl’s mental map that was clearly labelled “Madness.”

In the end, mostly in the hopes that by doing so he might get them to stop explaining it, he agreed to swear on a printout of the universal physical constants. What could be more fundamental? He spoke a few simple words solemnly avowing his obedience and agreement, the Prosecutor reluctantly agreed to the contract…and he was let free. Somehow, he really hadn’t expected to end the day as the next best thing to a free Corti.

And waiting outside was Gabriel Arés in his chair with a ‘shit-eating grin’ on his face.

“I told you to plea-bargain, didn’t I?” he asked. It wasn’t really a question.

“Yes, but why darling?”

“Oh, that’s easy. You did wrong but you also did good. We needed to resolve that. And besides…” Arés’ smile changed from ‘shit-eating’ to ‘sheepish.’ “…Who else am I gonna get a nerve treatment from around here?”

Nofl brightened up, genuinely. “…Really? Are you finally ready to leave that dreadful chair of yours behind?”

“Well…I have a sneaking suspicion that I might be a grandfather sooner than later. I…what man wouldn’t want to play with his own grandkids?”

“Much too sentimental, darling,” Nofl flapped a hand at him. “But… fine. Your reasons are yours, I’m sure.”

Arés chuckled. “Guilty as charged I think…” he paused, turned and frowned as a CCS officer in the characteristic high-vis yellow jacket and officer cap jogged up to him. “…Henson? Something wrong?”

“Message from the Governor-General, chief,” Henson said. “He’s called an emergency session.”

“He has? Why?”

“They’re saying Ambassador Hussein is dead, chief…”

Date Point: 12y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

The tree was a Terran import, a dioecious “female” Ginkgo Biloba selected specifically for the fact that it wouldn’t release potentially allergenic pollens that could endanger Folctha’s nonhuman residents. It had been imported as a young adult and was already as thick around as Marty’s torso, a promise of incredible girth to come when it was fully matured.

Adam’s fist left a dent in the coarse bark, drawing blood and surprised gasps from bystanders. Ava’s exhibition had practically emptied as she had rushed out of the gallery and across the street to do an emergency piece to camera for ESNN on the ambassador’s assassination, but even that fascinating diversion was secondary to Adam punching a tree with enough force to break the turf behind him as its roots flexed.

He looked up, grumbled an apology, and skulked around the tree to nurse his bloody hand. Considering how much narrower than him its trunk was it didn’t offer anything much in the way of privacy, but at least it was a barrier of sorts.

Marty stopped watching Ava doing her work—and it was good work, she had to admit—and joined him. He was picking splinters out of his flesh.

“…He refused security,” she reminded him gently, after a tactful interval.

“I could have saved him!” Adam snapped. “Hell, I’ve done that same thing before! If I’d just been there-!!”

“He refused!” Marty repeated herself. “Dude, you can’t protect people who don’t want protecting.”

“It’s just so fucking… why?”

“Maybe he went up there expecting this to happen,” Marty pointed out. “…Hell, Hussein was ninety. When my great-grampa hit ninety, he started getting real upset that everyone was looking after him. I reckon he’d have killed to be able to do something useful with his death. The Mission, you know?”

Adam unwound a bit. “Yeah… but Hussein was a civilian, and your great-grampa hit the beaches at Normandy, right?.”

“Right. Military family. Double-Grampy served, Grampy served, Dad served, I’m serving… But not everyone who serves is military, ‘Horse.”

“Maybe, but the whole point is-”

“I know what the whole point is,” Marty assured him. “It’s to protect people’s right to live their lives their way.”

Adam nodded glumly, and licked his knuckle by way of fixing it. Bloody knuckles were a constant among HEAT men, they were generally ignored until the next routine Crue-D dose came along and repaired them.

“Still don’t feel right though, huh?” Marty put her arm as far around his waist as she could.

“Nuh.” Adam shook his head, and buried her under his own return hug. “Shit, what’s gonna happen next? Are we just gonna let this slide? Are the Guvnurag?”

“What’re they gonna do, glow at us?” Marty asked. “We have bigger fish to fry.”

“I dunno, Marty. They’re still a long way ahead of us tech-wise. If they really put their heads to it…” Adam glanced around and lowered his voice. “It ain’t them I’m worried about exactly. What happens if they figure out a weakness in our shit and you-know-who picks up on it?”

“Come on, do I gotta tell you that we just do the job in front of us?” Marty asked. “Those kinds of questions are for the brass, poor assholes.”

“Ours not to reason why. Right.” Adam nodded and finally managed to purge his frustrations with a sigh. A thought seemed to strike him. “…Is that Kipling too?”

“Tennyson.” Marty looked around the tree. Or rather around Adam, the tree being kind of an afterthought once he was out of the way. “I think Ava’s winding up her report. Wanna invite her to go grab a burger?”

“Sounds good…“ Adam, spurred by the promise of food, sprang upright. “Since when do you get on well with Ava?”

“Since she’s your sister?”

“Dude, she’s not exactly my sister…”

“I know, but she’s your family and… I dunno.” Marty shrugged. “Firth can grumble all he likes, I think there’s somebody worthwhile there. And you do too, or you wouldn’ta mended that bridge.”

“Ain’t bridges that worry me. I mean, she’s never bugged me for an exclusive or whatever, but this is a big story. And we ain’t authorised to go talkin’ to the press…”

“What, don’t you trust her?”

“Not really.” Adam paused. “Well… Yeah I do, Maybe? Depends on what. I trust her to keep a secret, at least. She respects non-disclosure.”

“So just tell her we can’t talk about it. Hell, I’ll bet my burnt ass she’ll nod and say okay and that’s an end to it.”

Adam grimaced. “Major Powell doesn’t trust her.”

“Major Powell can’t stop you from going for a burger with your girlfriend and your sister,” Marty pointed out. Adam was always painfully worried about what the old man would think. Marty, meanwhile, was much more experienced at knowing where the boundaries really lay. “Worst he’ll do is say ‘fook’ at us a lot. Besides, isn’t public affairs one of your extra duties?”

“Under close supervision and with a very specific brief, yeah, but-”

“‘Horse, we aren’t doing a public affairs thing. We’re grabbing a burger with your sister.”

“With my journalist ex-girlfriend. That ain’t the same thing.”

“You have breakfast with her at your dad’s place every week,” Marty said. “And… I love you, and your dad’s awesome? But you really learned how to cram the rulebook up your ass from him. It’s fine! The worst case scenario here is the old man clears his throat and Rebar has to find a way of ’motivating’ the both of us that isn’t disproportionate.” Marty shrugged. “And if I get one of those ‘red, white and blue’ burgers from Best Brioche out of it? Worth it.”

Adam’s stomach growled audibly. The Red White and Blue burger was a Cimbrean celebrity built from half a pound of medium-rare steak mince with back bacon for the red, ranch dressing for the white and blue stilton, all of it local produce right down to the bun. “…You’re a fucking seductress.”

“Hey, he finally noticed!” Marty grinned at him. “Now, are you coming or not?”

Adam glanced back in the direction of the base for a heartfelt few seconds then caved. “This is gonna throw my macros off for the day…”

Marty folded her arms at him and felt her grin get wider. “That ain’t a no.”

“…Damn you.”

Victorious, Marty made eye contact with Ava and managed to somehow convey through an uncomplicated impromptu sign language that they were going for a burger and she was welcome to come with. To her credit, Ava looked pleased at the invitation but immediately looked to Adam for confirmation and practically radiated delight when he nodded.

“Just so we’re clear,” Marty told her once Ava had retrieved her dog and escaped from her colleagues with promises to bring them back a box of sliders and donuts, “Please don’t ask us about Hussein?”

“You can’t confirm or deny anything and wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss it, whatever ‘it’ may or may not be. Something like that?” Ava asked, looking amused.

“Something like that,” Adam agreed.

“That’s okay,” Ava promised. “And don’t worry, I’m never going to interview either of you about anything. It’s a bad idea to mix business and family. Besides,” she added with a rare smile, “I probably know more than you do right now.”

“No comment,” Adam grunted. Ava drove an affectionate elbow into his ribs.

“¡Tranqui, gordo! I just said you’re permanently off-limits.“

Adam caught Marty’s eye, and she finally saw him relax. Ava didn’t miss it either, but rather than seeming disappointed she smiled and patted him on the arm. “It’s okay. Trust takes a long time to build. It… means a lot that you both are giving me the chance.”

She reached down and her fingers brushed through Hannah’s fur for reassurance after she said it. “Though, uh… word of advice? Us journalists are tricky. Just saying that up front makes me feel like maybe you DO know something I’d find interesting. You shoulda kept your mouth shut until I asked you.”

“But we’re off-limits,” Adam sniped, with a touch of the uncharacteristic bitterness that only surfaced when Ava was involved.

“Which is why I’m warning you, you-!” Ava glanced down at the dog, took a deep breath and reined herself in. “…Change of subject.”

“Yeah,” Marty agreed, feeling foolish. She’d been so keen to assuage Adam’s concerns that she’d blundered into a basic error. “But, thanks.”

”De nada. Uh… Oh! Hayley said Jack’s doing well?”

“I thought she didn’t really approve?” Adam asked. “Military ain’t exactly in line with their peace-and-love lifestyle.”

“Well yeah, but you know what she and Mark are like.” Ava smiled fondly. “You remember Mark’s tattoos? ‘An it harm none, do as thou wilt’? They always were keen on a permissive upbringing. So long as Jack’s doing what he really wants to do, they won’t fight him.”

“That ‘permissive upbringing’ got Sara murdered,” Adam growled.

“No argument,” Ava agreed. “…But it was also what made her so beautiful to know. Wasn’t it?”

Adam didn’t reply.

“…Besides,” Ava continued. “Hayley’s like any half-decent mom. So long as her boy’s happy, she’s happy, and so long as he’s a success she’s proud.”

“He’s a success alright,” Adam said. “We turned him ‘round good.”

“Hell, no wonder he was playing up at school,” Marty volunteered. “No way it was challenging him properly. That boy could turn out to be smarter than Baseball.”

“Or you,” Adam added, loyally. Marty felt the modest urge to demur that Baseball was smarter than herself, but the fact was that they had different kinds of intelligence. ‘Base, if and when he retired, was going to wind up authoring the next generation of books on trauma medicine. Marty was ‘merely’ an extremely talented aerospace engineer who’d been destined for NASA until the SOR came along. Comparing a brain surgeon to a rocket scientist wasn’t exactly fair, especially when considering the fact she was going for burgers with a sports and nutrition expert who had an unrivaled practical working understanding of the human body, and a woman who was making increasingly prominent waves both as a journalist and as an artist with every passing week.

Marty kept herself grounded on the certainty that, past a certain threshold, there was no such thing as an absolute spectrum of ‘more’ intelligent and ‘less’ intelligent. Her motto was “There is no such a thing as a stupid person—just people who haven’t yet figured out what they’re smart at.”

“I hope so”, she said. “Means I taught him right. I mean-” she cleared her throat, “Cimbrean schooling is damn good, but he really needed the one-on-one time.”

“Pretty much all we got was one-on-one time in the early years,” Ava recalled, looking around. “And dirt roads, prefab housing, no entertainment… Now look at this place.”

“Hell, it’s changed just since I got here,” Marty agreed. “And you two are first-gen colonists. I can’t even… Musta been something special.”

Adam and Ava glanced at each other before Ava spoke for both of them. “It was…We were still kinda reeling from… I mean, we lost our home!” she managed. “My family, Adam’s mom, all our friends, the only city we’d ever lived in…”

“We shoulda been in that, too,” Adam agreed. “Pure dumb luck we weren’t.”

“It was just…” Ava looked down at her hands, and only stopped wringing them when Hannah whined and licked her fingers, prompting a grateful scratch behind the ears. “…Weeks and months of feeling numb, like I was gonna wake up screaming from a bad dream any second no matter how much I knew I wasn’t. Every night, I had this dream where I woke up in my own bedroom and everything was okay and Rosa was making breakfast, and-”

“Rosa?”

“She cleaned and cooked so mom and dad didn’t have to. Rosa Vialpando. God, she was… She had three grandchildren and she treated me like I was one of them and I could be such a bitch to her sometimes…” Ava wiped away a tear. “I know I was fifteen, but still… I wish she’d been around a few years back. Things maybe woulda turned out differently.”

“You’re beating yourself up again,” Adam told her softly. Ava nodded, and visibly backed out of Bad Memory Alley and returned to Memory Lane.

“…Stepping through the jump array that first time was like waking up. Just… a blast of cool air to the face and my new best friend tripping over herself to run up and say hi, and…”

“And when Sara started talking, nothing stopped her. Sometimes she’d keep talking while she was breathing in,” Adam recalled. Ava giggled.

Marty nodded. “She’s really special to both of you.”

“Oh, she could be a brat,” Adam laughed. “And she had the biggest crush on me. And I think a bit of a one on you too, Ava?”

“Maybe… But, yeah. I’ll never forget her. Hell, if I ever have kids, my first girl is gonna be Sara.”

“No way, I call first dibs,” Adam grinned.

“Yeah?” Ava grinned at Marty. “Are you two…?”

“Uh… not yet.” Marty balked.

“That ain’t a no,” Adam teased her with her own words.

“Well of course it ain’t a no!” Marty faced him. “Hell it’s a yes, probably. Just, not soon.”

That got the intended result. Adam blushed and stammer-grumbled himself silent while Ava folded her arms behind him and shot Marty an approving grin.

“Burger’s waiting,” she pointed out. They’d been standing outside Best Brioche for nearly a minute.

“I’ll, uh… three RWBs?”

“And a diet coke,” Ava said.

“Marty?”

“Sprite.”

“Right.” Adam vanished into the shop, still red around the ears.

Marty and Ava stepped aside to let the shop’s current customers exit, squeezed out by Adam’s sheer size. He had a way of doing that.

“I really enjoyed the exhibition tonight,” Marty said.

“Thanks. And… thanks for inviting me. This is nice.”

They had a moment to clear the air, and Marty decided not to let it go. “Ava… I mean, you’re real important to him. I hope you’re not jealous about us, or…?”

Ava shook her head with surprising vigor. “Absolutely not!” she said. “And he’s real important to me, too. I just want him to be happy, and you make him so happy, so… No, I can’t be jealous. Especially not of you.”

Touched, Marty gave her a hug. It caught Ava off-guard, but she returned it with sisterly affection after only a moment’s startled hesitation.

“So… seriously, how do you see the things you see through that camera?” Marty asked, letting her go.

“Uh… practice, mostly. I dunno, at first I was always thinking about things like light and depth of field, aperture size, shutter speed… Nowadays it’s more intuitive. I look at something, think ‘Yeah, I can work with that,’ and my hands do it all. You know?”

“Not really,” Marty shrugged, and tapped her forehead. “My job’s all up here. Millimeters, pH balance, PSI, Bartlett’s Law…”

“What’s that?”

“Uh…” Marty recalled how she’d explained it to Jack. “So, Kinetic Pulse weapons would be stupidly lethal if we could just get them to fire a shaped field with a sharp edge, right? Like, they’d just cut us in half.” When Ava nodded, she pressed on. “ But, the power draw of a field is proportionate to the curvature in an…interesting way.”

“Meaning it’s really fucking complicated?”

“Right. Bartlett’s law is the equation that describes that relationship. So, big flat planes, boxes, cylinders or neat spheres? Nice and easy. Something sharp enough to cut, though…”

“Yeah, I couldn’t do your job,” Ava agreed.

“Good, because there’s not many of my job to go around,” Marty smiled. “Besides, the world needs photographers and journalists, and gourmet burger chefs.”

“Amen, sister,” Ava giggled. “But… okay, if making a flat plane is easy, why can’t you just throw it sideways-on like a playing card?”

“Oh man, so that’s a complicated one,” Marty enthused, warming to her subject. “It has to do with something called ‘Fractal boundary indeterminacy’ and that’s just-”

“Ah shit, you got her started,” Adam interrupted, emerging with two paper-wrapped bundles and a couple of cold metal cans on his arm, which he handed out. “Bad idea.”

“Hey!”

Adam grinned and kissed her. “True though.”

“Where’s yours?” Marty asked, taking her burger and drink.

“He’s makin’ them for me now,” Adam replied, handing Ava hers. “And that box for the news crew.”

“Lemme guess. Three for you?” Marty asked

“Yup.”

“Orale!” Ava shook her head. “I remember how you complained about having to eat so much in Basic.”

“Well, I wasn’t used to it then,” Adam shrugged.

Ava snorted and tore into her burger like she’d been taking pointers from him but she spared a slice of bacon for Hannah, who was practicing her very best ‘Sit’ by Ava’s ankle and staring soulfully upwards. “It’ff gowwa be a wong night,” she explained, delicately wiping an escaping squirt of Ranch dressing back into her mouth before swallowing. “I’d better eat up and get back to the crew. Editor’s gonna want a report ready for the morning show and sync with Earth.”

“I bet. You’re gonna be busy next few days, huh?” Adam asked. Ava nodded with her mouth full.

“Thiff if…” she paused, frowned at herself, and finished her mouthful before replying. “It’s gonna be big. The GRA can’t ignore this, they have to do something.”

“Do what? That’s the question.” Marty pointed out.

Ava grimaced. “I have some ideas. But it’s gonna be about the gesture at this point, rather than punishing the people who are, ‘yknow, actually responsible…”

“Ava… be careful what you say, alright?” Marty advised.

“Back atcha. Don’t worry, if anything classified leaks it won’t be me.”

Adam nodded solemnly. “Good. We don’t wanna visit you in prison.”

She gave him a complicated look that Marty read as gratitude that he was still concerned for her well-being blended with mild and well-controlled irritation, and stuffed the last of her burger in her mouth. She dusted her hands off and pointed indoors to indicate that she, Ava, really ought to pay for the snack boxes for her crew and get back to work.

Adam nodded and went back inside to retrieve it for her, and when he emerged with the boxes and his own burgers Ava was chugging down the last of her soda.

“When did you learn to eat that big?” he asked.

“I eat a lot of my meals al desko nowadays,” Ava shrugged, and took the boxes. “I told you, it’s gonna be a long night. See you at Dad’s on Sunday?”

“Yeah. Take care.”

She gave him a smile, and one for Marty too, and high-heeled away with Hannah trotting smartly along in her wake.

Marty waited until she was around the corner to speak. “…Is she okay? I mean…She’s working awful hard…”

Adam gave a complicated shrug. “She throws herself into her work. So do I. So do you!”

“Well… She’s good at it,” Marty conceded. “You’ve seen her on TV, right?”

“I don’t watch much TV, remember?” Adam pointed out, correctly. His daily regime really didn’t allow any time for it.

“Well, she’s good,” Marty repeated. “You watch. Whatever goes down with GRA, I bet you Ava will have called it…”

Date Point: 12y6m1w AV
Global Representative Assembly Headquarters, Cape Town, South Africa, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

The White House had been home to a bewildering variety of First Families over the years, though America was still waiting for a female or openly gay President to furnish the history books with their first “First Gentleman.” Sartori, however, had not furnished Pennsylvania Avenue with a First anything. He was the sixth president in a list that began with Thomas Jefferson to have entered the White House as a widower, and his marriage to the late Emily Sartori-Brown had been childless. He had never remarried.

To his surprise, that fact had generated sympathy rather than difficulty during his election campaign. The nation by and large saw him as a man remaining faithful to his wife’s memory, and they weren’t far wrong—Emily would have loved to tease him about how much he hated flying. He might have the most famous aircraft in the world at his beck and call, but Sartori still loathed leaving the ground.

Unfortunately, Air Force One was the only practical way to get to Africa on short notice. So, he’d put on his big-boy pants, boarded the plane in a serious bustle, taken a half dose of diazepam and caught up on his much-needed sleep. Unconscious was the only way to fly.

Besides. It was always best to look sharp and well-rested when addressing an emergency meeting of some of the most powerful people in the world. The Global Representative Assembly had precious little political power on Earth, but it was the voice of authority when it came to extraterrestrial matters.

…Assuming it ever developed a unified opinion on anything, of course. In the years since its foundation, the GRA had yet to take a strong unified stance. By and large, it had been too riven by the hangover of the past few decades of religious conflict, economic turmoil, political bickering, the Pacific trade wars, and now the massive technological and social upheavals of the interstellar era. The will had simply never been there to properly align behind a single cause.

Perhaps that would change today.

Scratch that. That was pussy-foot thinking. That would change today. The time had come for the rest of the world to get with the program or get out of the way, and if the assassination of the GRA’s own ambassador wasn’t catalyst enough then nothing ever would be.

Much thought had gone into the GRA HQ building. Its construction had begun with the creation of an artificial tidal lagoon just north of a Cape Town suburb with the incongruously Welsh name of Llandudno, a wealthy spot that had for several years been looking for an excuse to go even further up-market than it already was.

That lagoon provided several benefits. It generated power from the tide, created a protected beach ideal for safe recreation, provided habitat for several native species, and made the GRA building surprisingly secure just by itself. The only overland routes to the building were narrow, closely-watched roads laid with several hundred retractable reinforced bollards. Any car bomb, van full of gunmen or other suspicious vehicle was doomed to be brought to a violent halt even if it did get past the checkpoints.

All of the security measures were similarly invisible. Between the forcefields, the reinforced glass, the shutters and the panic rooms honeycombing the building’s interiors, GRA HQ was a fortress that looked like an elaborate sculpture in glass and granite.

The Assembly chamber itself was simple and to-the-point. Serious wooden furniture underpinned by miles of cabling and support infrastructure. There were more seats than were technically needed, in anticipation of the future growth and political independence of offworld colonies, and all of them were arranged in a horseshoe around the speaker’s podium and looking out through tall windows onto the waters of the Atlantic.

Appropriately, those waters were choppy today.

So was the mood. The report into Ambassador Hussein’s assassination was detailed and thorough, and while every man and woman in the room was used to the interminable pace of these things it seemed that everybody was itching to leap to their feet and say their piece. Sartori had enjoyed ample time to jot down his own notes on the report, compare them with those of his advisors, send the most pertinent details away for analysis and then read the digested summary on the monitor in front of him.

All of which was fine… except that the preliminary investigation was clearly unaware of, and would have been unable to mention, DEEP RELIC. The Hierarchy’s existence was not known to most of the nations represented in the Assembly chamber and was being kept that way.

Option number one, right at the top of Sartori’s list of possibilities, was correcting that today. He had the authority to declassify DEEP RELIC with a pen-stroke if he chose, and a passionate but civilized debate was raging quietly on his screen as to whether that was the correct course of action here.

Sartori watched the debate with interest. As far as he was concerned, official and full revelation of the existence of the Hierarchy would be an open invitation for some crazy bastards somewhere on the planet to try and ally with the genocidal aliens. The Earth had some breathing room thanks to Operation EMPTY BELL, but that breathing room could vanish fast if somebody with any influence or power pulled a Quisling.

On the other hand the whole problem was escalating in an enormous way, and so far the human race was still figuratively fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Sooner or later, that handicap was going to take its toll. They needed to start getting some more resources, some more talent and some more humanity on board.

And that just wasn’t going to happen, and anybody with more political perspicacity than a stunned puppy knew it. Not without both a kick in the nuts and the promise of some actual benefit on the horizon. And in any case, when it came down to it the resources of two planets just wasn’t going to cut it, especially when one of those planets had a total population that wouldn’t even put it in the top three hundred American cities.

So far, one of his senior advisors had been silent, and the time was approaching where he needed her to speak. Margaret White was in the habit of offering her opinions last after everyone else had spoken, and it was generally a valuable habit, but right now he needed her to weigh in.

She got the message just from the way he turned and looked at her and sat forward primly in her seat to whisper.

“We need to acknowledge that there is a threat…” she offered. “Without going into specifics. Infer the presence of enemy action from the forcefield, San Diego, this…”

“Paul reckons we need to throw a bigger bone than that,” Sartori indicated his screen. Paul Nicholls was another of his advisors, and was safely back in Washington offering his insights from the comfort of his office.

“A closed session, maybe?” Margaret offered. “If we share some of the details of that Egyptian business…”

“That’ll piss off the Egyptians…” Sartori mused. “Not that we can’t handle that, but…”

“Needs must.”

“We didn’t share much with the Egyptians, either. This would anger them doubly so.”

“Again, Mister President, needs must. The only question as I see it is how far we go.”

Margaret was an old friend and colleague. She only called him ‘Mister President’ when she was deadly serious.

“…Right.”

Sartori filed a request to speak in a closed session with the Assembly’s Speaker, who had the unenviable task of not only overseeing the discussions and points of order, but also of managing precedence and etiquette. In theory every nation at the Assembly was on an equal footing, but diplomatic reality of course was more sophisticated. The seniority of the supplicant, the political importance of their nation and the relevance of the comment they wished to make were all factored in.

When the POTUS promised to contribute something highly relevant, Sartori knew, he was pretty much guaranteeing himself the first place in the queue.

The remaining minutes waiting for the official report to wind to its conclusion were spent quickly assembling the key points of what he was about to say, a process streamlined immeasurably by the involvement of his chief speechwriter, five senior advisors and the Secretary of Defence. Sartori and the speechwriter did the actual writing, the other six added notes in the figurative margin, and within five minutes he had everything he needed.

Sartori stood and tugged at his cuff to straighten it as the Speaker opened the floor, and as expected was immediately given the first comment.

“May I request a closed session, Mister Speaker?” he asked, politely. The etiquette of the chamber was respected.

There were disappointed noises from the public galleries as press and tourists alike were quietly ushered out. The windows dissolved into gray blandness as the privacy fields came online, the cameras were shut down. No doubt the thrust of his words would leak through one of the present dignitaries and functionaries, but the important part was that it would all be second-hand, and thus deniable.

The last door closed, the lights dimmed, and Sartori found himself spotlighted.

He looked down at his hands and brushed them lightly across the desk in front of him before speaking.

“I want to begin by acknowledging the human cost here,” he began. “Ambassador Hussein’s family are grieving today and it would be remiss of us to forget that. But they are not the only grieving families. After all, we are at war.”

He looked up and around. ”At war,” he repeated. “Not should go to war, nor are we debating the validity of today’s casus belli. I want to argue that we have been at war for several years now, and it is the bloodiest we have seen since the nineteen-forties. Millions are already dead, billions of dollars of war debt has been accrued, good men have lost their lives in combat operations…We. Are. At. War.”

It would have been better if the words had rang, but the chamber’s acoustics were not designed with dramatic effect in mind. In fact, they were designed for his fellow dignitaries to listen to real-time translation, and so his words were swallowed by dead sound and the white noise of the forcefields. It was a shame: A shoddy orator could stand on good acoustics. A decent orator could fly on them.

Sartori was an exceptional orator. He didn’t need acoustics at all.

“Our species is imprisoned, and we have done nothing. Our people were thrown to the wolves, and we did nothing!” He angled a sharp glance around the chamber, saw allies nodding and others listen solemnly. “Galactic nations tear each other apart and blame us, and we don’t even object! Our good green Earth is permanently scarred by an antimatter bomb, millions have perished, our economy is laboring… and our response is to act as though life continues as it always did? When it’s now clear that a force out there wants us all dead?”

He shook his head. “No. This Assembly may have been content to let the litany of injustices continue, but America and our military allies have not. When San Diego burned, we hunted the party responsible. When an alien ship invaded our sky to inflict the most sickening cruelties on innocent civilians, our jets swatted it from the Egyptian sky!”

He paused, adjusted his cuff again and shot a glance at the Egyptian table to gauge their reaction. When he read nothing he could use in their expressions, he sighed wearily for effect. “Let me tell you a little of our Enemy. I can’t say much because even now, even here, they are listening and they will seek every advantage. So I shall cover only the basics.”

He took a sip of water and raised a hand to punctuate his words with gestures. “They are old. Vast and ancient beyond the reckoning of our civilization. They are cunning. Many others have fallen to them, and the peoples no longer here to enrich our Galaxy number in the hundreds—that we are aware of. The body count is in the trillions, the measure of loss, the suffering and the retardation of the sciences and the arts… incalculable. They are subtle. Their influence has shaped Galactic society and passed unnoticed. They are cynical, pitting team against team, nation against nation, Dominion against Alliance. ”

He paused again, partly for dramatic effect and partly to reel himself in. That last part had perhaps been a bit too revealing but he needed the emphasis.

“And they are not afraid of overt action, either,” he added. “San Diego was their work. Egypt was a reaction to our rooting out the last of their Earthbound force. They are ruthless, willing to use even the Hunters as a weapon if it will suit their ends. But the worst, by far…”

He took a deep, nasal breath and allowed his volume to dip again. Like good music, the loud and the soft needed to dance. “The very worst part of our Enemy is that they are callous. Like our own Earthly terrorists but on a scale we have never seen, they hide among the innocent and hold those innocent lives in the most negligent contempt. For our defiance, billions of innocents have been slaughtered and we are made to take the blame. Our Ambassador, murdered, and as we all heard the last he asked of them was what we could do to make things right.”

He paused a third time and took another sip of his water. The room was stone silent. “Why do I speak of this now?” Rhetorical oration was one of Sartori’s guilty pleasures. “Because it is now clear that there’s no sympathy to be had out there: we are trapped. We’re a small island in a vast cruel sea, valiantly fending off a numerically superior foe…” he glanced at the British table “…but there is no help from abroad coming this time. If we’re going to get out of this hole, then we need to dig our way out by ourselves. We need to get our eggs out of this single basket, as a matter of survival.”

He glared around the room and repeated that last word. “Survival. That is how high the stakes are at this table. That is what we are playing for—the right for our children to see tomorrow. We can keep turning the other cheek, we can forgive those who trespass against us… But then what? Do we go quietly into the night? Do we join the hundreds before us and allow hundreds more to come after us?”

He looked around, attempting to convey with a single sweep of his gaze that he had singled out everyone in the room for his personal attention. “…Or has the time come for us to show the galaxy that we are not the monsters here? Has the time finally come for us to acknowledge that we are at war… and that we are not willing to lose?”

Somehow, those last words managed to ring even in the dead air of the assembly chamber, buoyed by the silent susurrus of rapt breath. Sartori allowed himself a satisfied nod and stood up straight.

“The good news,” he said, “is that our strategy doesn’t rely on sacrifice, but on opportunity. There are worlds out there waiting for us, untouched paradises shunned by other species as unusable ‘deathworlds’ and our best minds—scientists, engineers, even artists—have been devoting themselves to the task of unlocking those new promised lands.”

“The way isn’t open yet,” he shook his head, and let the volume fall again, until he was speaking almost as though conspiring quietly with all of them. “But I invite you all to imagine your culture, not just mine or those of our military allies, walking the stars, leaving your mark, writing yourselves into the future of mankind. Does that sound like sacrifice to you? Does that sound like war?”

He looked down at his hands, and absent-mindedly touched the gold wedding band he had never taken off. “Make no mistake. It will be war. It is war. Quite probably a bloody and difficult one that will last lifetimes and rob us of our best and bravest time and again. We will ask ourselves, ’will it be worth it?’ We will ask ourselves, ’how far are we willing to go?’ I don’t know. Maybe this won’t even be a war we can win. Maybe we’ll only win it by becoming the monsters they claim we are. If so, maybe it would be better to die with our souls untarnished, but…”

He paused for one last time, and shook his head.

“…But I have faith.”

Date Point: 12y6m1w3d AV
Grand Enclave of Females, Planet Gao.

Sister Myun

“Faith?”

Being Yulna’s personal protector was generally an easy job. After all, who would attack her? The Mother-Supreme was, well…the Mother-Supreme. Any male who so much as scratched her would never mate again even if he survived, and the Females were clan.

Myun still took her duties seriously, though. Especially now, especially after hearing those words that the Whitecrests had somehow managed to acquire and forward. Even the Gaori translation had been engaging but as a fluent English speaker herself she had felt the full impact of Sartori’s address. She wasn’t sure her fur would ever settle.

Yulna was listening to the recording with much more calm, resting her jaw lightly on a curled forepaw while tracing a claw idly across the glass surface of her desk.

“Sister Shoo tried to explain the concept once,” she said, addressing the Mother who had asked. “It is… a difficult one. Do you remember, Myun?”

Myun duck-nodded solemnly.

“It means something like… trust, or confidence,” Yulna elaborated. “But more. Trust based on conviction rather than hard evidence.”

“So this Sar-toree is saying that he trusts his people despite not having a good reason?” the Mother summarized.

Yulna angled her head contemplatively. “No… No, that would be an admission of weakness. ‘Faith’ is a strong concept. He’s saying he doesn’t need a good reason to believe it, he knows it to be true anyway. Something like that.”

“And this is the species that the Whitecrests want us aligned with?” Mother Suri asked, with an ill-concealed lick of contempt. She had been Yulna’s rival to the position of Mother-Supreme and while she had accepted Yulna’s accession in the end she had still maneuvered herself into the heart of Clan power.

Yulna insisted she was useful. Something about it being good to hear a dissenting voice and Suri still being one of the good people, even if there were profound differences of opinion between them.

“That ‘faith’ kept Sister Shoo going where any of us would have curled up in a mournful ball and given up,” Yulna replied. “It let the humans trust Regaari despite only meeting him once, and it let them trust me, too. I don’t really know what it is or how it works, but it does. The Starminds might know better… Father Gyotin has thought long and hard on the subject, I understand.”

Myun couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself. “You’re overthinking it. Faith isn’t anything supernatural or anything like that. It’s just belief. It’s belief that good people are good and will do good things. It’s belief that there is such a thing as justice. It’s just ‘faith’ in the basic sanity of the universe. Why is that so hard?”

Suri and several of the other Mothers shot her mingled looks of irritation, impatience and disgust at the interruption. Yulna, for her part, chittered indulgently.

“You should know that nothing is ever simple with humans, young one.”

“Nah, they’re really simple. They just…do everything intensely. Everything. They’re like Whitecrest that way. If they don’t like you, you’ll know it. If they do…well, they’ll have ‘faith’ in you, and they won’t be wrong.”

Suri growled slightly. “You are a bodyguard, Myun, not an advisor.”

Myun displayed a rare bout of political tact and duck-nodded respectfully, backing down.

“Good advice can be found scrawled on the wall in a stinking back alley,” Yulna observed, though the set of her ears made it plain to everyone in the room that she wasn’t insulting Myun in the slightest. “What matters is that you listen to it, not where it came from. And Myun, frankly, has studied humans rather more extensively than anybody else here.”

“Nevertheless…” Suri flicked an ear.

“Yes, yes.” Yulna waved a paw at Myun that said ‘please shut up’ in a kindly, materteral way and Myun stepped respectfully back into the corner. She was learning a lot about politics.

“The whole speech is just… paranoid, though. Surely?” one of the Mothers asked. “They’re deathworlders, they must be primed to see danger behind every corner.”

“Maybe…” Yulna agreed thoughtfully. “But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, does it?”

“If you see danger behind every corner, sooner or later you’ll be right,” another Mother agreed.

“And they are primed to sense danger, are they not? That let them build an advanced society on Earth, which from what we know may in a practical sense be the deadliest planet in the galaxy.”

“Mother Ayma survived it, didn’t she?” There was a doubtful note in Suri’s skepticism.

“With the aid of an environment suit and full-time medical escort.”

Myun whispered “Beef Brothers” to herself quietly, with the faintest chitter.

The Mother who was taking Yulna’s side—Memi? Memya? Something like that—didn’t seem to notice. “No,” she said, “I think we can safely say that when a human is taking a threat seriously, then that threat is worth taking seriously. From what I know of them their lives are so… saturated with constant low-grade dangers that they tend to just ignore them, or view them as an inconvenience.”

“Example?” Suri’s ally demanded. Mother… Sesal. No, Sesala.

“They have to scrub enamel-eating bacteria out of their mouths every morning or else their teeth literally rot,” Yulna offered with, Myun thought, considerable relish. “And apparently a lot of them just don’t bother, or forget. And sometimes that doesn’t even matter. But sometimes it does and they can actually die from it. They have medical professionals who are concerned only with their teeth. ‘Dentists’ I think.”

“This seems contradictory,” Suri complained. “They’ll ignore a threat like that but we’re supposed to take them seriously when they get concerned over… what, a conspiracy to eradicate their whole species?”

“Well…if the mere fact of waking up could prove dangerous, wouldn’t you be numbed to all the little threats? What would it take to get your attention if a cut on a finger, a bit of food in the teeth, even brushing up against the wrong plant could kill you dead or leave you permanently scarred? You would be a neurotic wreck in short order.”

Suri and Sesala both lapsed into thoughtful silence.

Yulna let them think for a second as she sipped a contemplative glass of Talamay. “Besides. What happened to their city ‘San Diego’ is hard to explain except by conspiracy…I think the correct approach here is to at least entertain the possibility that their fears are valid. We can leave final judgement for when we know more.”

“And until then?” Memi inquired.

“Until then, I will speak to Champion Genshi and the other Champions as I see fit, and we shall discover what this threat might be. Because if it threatens the Humans…sooner or later, it will threaten us. The recent rumblings in the Dominion Security Council about our world…”

“We are not a deathworld,” Suri asserted, sharply.

“Does it matter? The official classification is headed that way and if it is…Well. I won’t debate whether or not Gao really is or is becoming a Deathworld, leave that to the Highmountain philosophers. I am more worried about the attention it draws and the political consequences.”

“Besides, the Guvnurag prove that it doesn’t really matter,” Mother Memi observed. “They are most definitely not deathworlders, and yet they bore the worst of it this time.”

“Yes, what do we do about them?” Suri asked. “We’re obligated to do something, aren’t we?”

“We offer as much aid as we can, discreetly, and we communicate that to the Clans,” Yulna declared. “I suspect they may not be willing to entertain a public gesture given our burgeoning relationship with the Humans. Perhaps a sanctuary colony on Gorai? I’d need to pay a favor to Stoneback…would the Guvnurag accept? Hmm…” She trailed off in thought.

“And what do we do if the Hunters decide that we’re next?” Sesela asked.

Yulna chittered darkly. “Get eaten, I suspect. Though I for one will claw a few eyes out, first. And I’m sure Myun here would go down fighting.”

Myun said nothing but she did flex her enormous, Stoneback-ish claws just for a second, feeling smugly superior. She savored the intimidated flick of Mother Sesela’s ear.

“…That cannot be your whole answer?” Suri seemed aghast rather than accusatory.

“Unless the males have somehow managed to build a million ships of their own in secret? It is the whole answer.” Yulna chittered darkly again. “And so we come back to the strange ways of danger and threat. That particular threat is simply… too big to worry about, for now. And that, my Sisters, I think is what the Humans must feel all the time.”

“…I should at least see if there is anything we can do to protect the cubs,” Suri suggested.

“Yes,” Yulna duck-nodded emphatically. “You’re right. Sensible precautions, of course. Precautions we should all take, I think.”

They all took the hint, duck-nodded respectfully, and made themselves scarce.

“Well. That was easy,” Yulna commented.

Myun resisted the urge to chitter, barely. As Yulna’s permanent protector she hadn’t moved while the Mothers let themselves out. “Easy?”

“I’d expected…a real fight. That was barely a token resistance. The death of billions sharpens the mind, I suppose.”

Myun found she couldn’t argue that point, and simply duck-nodded agreeably.

“Tell me, Myun, if a Hunter charged in here right now…?” Yulna let the question hang.

Myun broke out her human grin, the one she had practiced endlessly in front of a mirror and that showed off all her teeth. ”Just one?”

“…Good girl.” Yulna nodded with a pleased set of her ears then sighed quietly, recomposed herself and asked, “Next item on the schedule?”

Myun consulted the list. “Grandfather Meyku, Clan Straightshield.”

“I invited Champion Reeko as well, didn’t I?”

“He’s on Gorai, Mother. Something about a new precinct…?”

“Ah. In light of recent events…maybe we should take another page from the Humans and discuss our civil defense.”

Myun was learning that when Yulna asked a question like that, she wasn’t actually requesting an answer, it was more a way of helping herself think. Rather than reply, therefore, she busied herself straightening the office so that it seemed as though the Mothers had not been there. She also alerted the staff discreetly, who prepared an agenda and a briefing in the few short minutes before Grandfather Meyku arrived.

She hadn’t expected to be doing so much minute organisation for Yulna when she took the job, but she found that she quite enjoyed it. Just standing around with a sword would have been boring after all, but the moment she started thinking of herself as the gatekeeper for the Mother-Supreme’s attention she had realized that guarding Yulna’s body and guarding her schedule amounted to almost the same thing.

She was getting to know the Grandfathers too, and they were all entertainingly different. Garl of the Stonebacks tended to prowl into a room and throw himself onto the furniture as though he wasn’t twenty years the wrong side of old, and he left white hairs on everything. Myun found herself oddly and powerfully attracted to him…maybe one day. Soon. Before he died of too much mating, the smug sexy ‘asshole.’

Grandfather Myro of the Goldpaws was sleeker, slimmer and flowed across the world like one of those ‘otters’ Myun once saw on ‘Planet Earth.’ Yulna had once said he was as sleek and slippery in the world of finance as he was in real life. Myun didn’t know what was meant by that, but there’d been no mistaking the wink in Yulna’s voice when she’d said something similar about Myro and mating contracts. Mothers could be such ‘hens.’

Meyku sailed. He was upright, polite, direct and mostly unflappable, and had a pole up his ass that could have moored a megafreighter. But somehow he was friendly, too. Weird.

And he got right to the point. “We have a lot to discuss, Mother-Supreme.”

“That we do,” Yulna agreed, doing an excellent job of hiding her weariness. “Myun, some Talamay please?”

“Yes, Mother,” Myun duck-nodded and attended to her own role in this long diplomatic dance. She now had readying the snacks and drinks down to an efficient art.

“So, Grandfather…” Yulna said, as soon as the stage was set. “There is an interesting recording I think you should hear…”

Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Vemik had once spent half a day watching the wriggling things in the gut of a dead Neyma and watching them blacken and buzz away. The rotting flesh had made the air taste awful, and the flying buzzers had wanted to land on his face, but he’d kept watching hoping to catch the moment when little white wriggler became little black buzzer.

Right now, his head felt like that Neyma carcass—full of wriggling things. It always did after his ‘wessons’ with Shyow. Or like she had somehow packed a handful of smoldering tinder in there; his thoughts just refused to settle down and turn into something that made sense.

Or maybe like that time Jooyun had taken him into the flying hut and a strange yellow light had made his whole body tickle, especially his teeth. That had been an exciting day, and in the end the Sky-People had resorted to begging Yan to drag Vemik out of there again, which he did with an amused snarl. The big Given Man hadn’t even paused at the ‘anatomy dispway,’ either! He just threw Vemik out of the ship and wrestled him half-dead. Like always.

It wasn’t that ‘Engwish’ was difficult, not at all. He’d been shocked and surprised to discover that the words Shyow, Jooyun and Awisun spoke were so…easy. Strangely so. None of the words changed, or at least never by much! Each word was like…a little stone. Whether he held it, put it down in front of him or threw it in the air, the stone’s shape never changed. It didn’t matter what you did with a word in Engwish, it kept its shape.

Which made sense, when he thought about it. The meaning never changed after all, so why should the word? And like stones, the order that the words were laid down in mattered: Nobody ever made a trail mark by just throwing the stones down in a rambling heap the way Vemik often did with his words when thinking out loud. Every time he wanted to say anything in Engwish, he was forced to pause, think hard, and say it only after he had already built it in his head.

Clearly, the Sky-People thought about everything they did before they did it.

He was getting good at it too, or at least he thought. He knew how it behaved at least, but that was the easy part. The difficult part was how many words there were. It was like trying to make a trail marker while having more stones to choose from than there were stars in the night, several of which would mean nearly what he wanted to say, but only one of which meant exactly what he wanted to say..

There was only one thing to do: Keep learning new words.

And Shyow said she had mastered the words of three sky-tribes who spoke in such intricate ways. And she had mastered the words of Vemik’s tribe in just a hand’s-worth of days. The idea that any head could be so full of so many different words, especially when so many of those words meant things that Vemik had simply never thought of…

There were words to describe different kinds of word! The very thought of all those words in Shyow’s head made the feeling of things crawling around inside Vemik’s own skull get worse.

Jooyun at least was sympathetic there.

“Heh!” He made that strange, friendly laughing-sound the sky-people made. His was quite different from Awisun’s, which was a harsh bark, or Shyow’s which was a kind of bubbling musical thing. Jooyun’s was soft, deep and warm but never loud. Jooyun was never loud, for that matter, not even when he played. [“Don’t worry, buddy.] Xiù [makes me feel dumb too, sometimes. And I’m supposed to be the ‘science’ guy.”]

They were out exploring after the morning ‘wessons’ about sky-people words—‘wanguage’ he remembered—and after Jooyun and Vemet had come back from the day’s hunting. They had eaten, and Jooyun had snuck some more People-food when Awisun wasn’t looking, and shared some of his. It had little balls of meat and a red sauce of some kind, very tasty! It also had ‘noodows’ that were a kind of ‘pasta.’ Vemik avoided ‘pastas.’ They were tasty too but they made his stomach unhappy and he would fart loudly for the rest of the day.

After that there was the usual camp chores, and a solemn moment with Yan and Singer for the day’s blessing, and then…they went exploring. Vemik had, naturally, asked why it was that Awisun objected to about Jooyun eating a fresh kill.

[“We come from a long way from here,”] Jooyun had answered. [“Where the sickness is different.] Allison [worries that I might get very sick if I’m not careful.”]

Vemik had thought about that, picking his words carefully. [“Is not she right?”] he ventured.

[“Isn’t.”] Jooyun corrected gently. [“And…yes, she is. But we carry all our food with us and…You know how sometimes, you need to smoke something to keep it good, but the smoke tastes bad? Or you get bored of the same thing for a whole season? Yeah. That.”]

Apparently, exploring was what Jooyun, Shyow and Awisun did. As they had explained it, their flying hut could go anywhere. Shyow had said that the stars were other suns, or that the sun was a star up close and that under each sun there was another sky above other People with their own gods. Jooyun had invited him to imagine being far from his village at night and looking back to see the village fire in the dark, small and cold and distant but still there.

Jooyun refused to talk about his own gods, though, but he had promised to explain why when they had the words.

But the smoking thing. Vemik had a hard time believing that! [“But your bag-food is tasty!”]

[“Rations. The word is ‘rations.’ Rations are a kind of preserved food.”]

[“Wations.”] Vemik tasted the word, aware yet again that he was getting one of the sounds wrong, which was annoying because he could make the sound sometimes but not always. It turned out that sky-people had different-shaped tongues to go with all their other strangeness. And they could ‘smeww’ with the face-holes! They didn’t taste the air at all!

That reminded him of a question he’d been meaning to ask since learning about ‘smewwing’ yesterday, and he shot off on what Awisun had described as a ‘tangent.’ He had no idea what a tangent was exactly, but there were other questions he wanted to ask before he got to that one.

[“What do we ‘smeww’ wike?”]

Jooyun laughed in his quiet way again. He had more patience for the way Vemik’s questions jinked and dodged like root-birds than Shyow or Awisun did, mostly. [“Not too bad. Like you’re doing honest work all day.”]

That sounded like a good thing to Vemik so he trilled happily in response. At that same moment he spotted a different kind of herb that Jooyun hadn’t gathered yet and bounced over to point it out. Jooyun shook his head in the way the sky-people did when they were happily indulging Vemik’s questions. Like Yan, really. Yan would share if he wasn’t doing much else.

“Mazaanok! [Careful, this one has…”] Godshit, another word he didn’t know. He thought for a moment, then bit down on a finger with one of his small young-man fangs and made a big show of hurting.

“Mazaanok, [huh? Good name.”] Jooyun nodded and approached carefully, then peered at it from a safe distance. [“Ah. Those are ‘thorns,’ and big ones too. Are they ‘poisonous?’”]

[“Thorns. Thorn!”] That word had a nice sound and Vemik liked it. He tilted his head at the other word. [“Poisuunus?”]

[“Poisonous. The root word is ‘poison,’ which is something that’s not alive that can make you very sick. The ‘-ous’ in this case means the word is ‘full of’ the root. So something that’s ‘poisonous’ is full of poison. Make sense?”]

[“…Poisun.”] He corrected himself. [“Poison.”]

[“*Pois*on.”]

[“Poison.”] He got it! [“Yes. The ‘thorns’ are ‘poisonous.’ Make skin burn and itch.”] Vemik suddenly thought, [“But plants are alive!”] In People-words, plants were always a living thing when you stuck endings on a word.

Julian knelt by the mazaan bush and dug in his bag where he pulled out a pair of the limp hand-bag-garments called ‘gloves’ that he used whenever he wanted to handle something without touching it with his bare skin. [“Yeah, they are. But the poison itself isn’t, it’s just as dead as a rock.”]

That made sense to Vemik. [“Okay.”]

Jooyun worked in silence for a few seconds, respectfully clipping off a few bits of the plant and storing them in strange clear things like a kind of small pot made of warm ice. As he put the ‘samples’ away in his bag he tilted his head and asked, [“So what do we, uh, taste like?”]

[“Like…you three, not the same. Shyow tastes like water and fruit. I don’t know what Awisun tastes like. I…no words for it.”]

[“‘Solvent’ and ‘soap,’ probably. I’ll tell you what those are later, I promise…I think she smells nice. They both smell…pretty ‘incredible’ actually. To me.”]

Vemik nodded. Jooyun was always good on his word about explanations.

[“What about me?”] Jooyun asked.

[“You taste wike a Person, in a different way. Your hair tastes strange.”]

He knew that taste from one of their moments of play while out exploring. Vemik was pleased to learn he was a good wrestler compared to Jooyun, and could do things like wrap his tail around Jooyun and squeeze the same way Yan often did when playing. But Jooyun could do things Vemik couldn’t like stand up and ‘run’ instead of charge, and when he started ‘running’ he just didn’t stop. He could ‘jog’ slower and way, way longer too.

And he could carry lots of heavy things in his clever, rough-feeling many-pocket-bag—his *‘backpack’*—and carry them forever and not get tired. Vemik wasn’t sure how that worked, because he was pretty sure he was actually a good bit stronger than Jooyun…sky-people were strange.

Jooyun made a satisfied noise. [“Ah, that’s probably the ‘shampoo.’”] Jooyun said. [“It’s a kind of soap. Soap, by the way, is really good for cleaning hides and tanning them. I can show you how to make it one of these days—ah!”]

He turned and jogged a few steps off the trail to study an exposed rock. [“Limestone. Perfect. Add this to your list of ‘things you should have lots of’ ‘cuz this stuff is really useful.”]

Vemik gave the pale stone a skeptical stare. [“Is it? It breaks and you can’t make bwades from it.”]

Julian laughed again. [“Vemik, this stuff can help you make blades like this one.”] He patted his axe. [“You just have to know the trick. But you need to be patient,”] he warned, [“The trick is ‘complicated’ and we need other things, too. Like ‘Hematite.’ And clay. And you’ll need to make a big pile of charcoal too, unless we find ‘Anthracite’ lying about…”]

[“What are—?”] Vemik began. Jooyun aimed an apologetic smile at him.

[“Believe me, you’ll understand much better when I show you. But the simple way of saying it is that if I take this stuff and some other rocks that you probably don’t think are useful and put them together in a really hot fire, then the rocks flow like water and glow like fire and you get this stuff.”] He patted his axe again.

[“We have a story about rocks flowing like water!”] Vemik blurted, and bounced around Jooyun and halfway up a tree out of sheer excitement at getting to tell the sky-person something he didn’t already know.

Jooyun rocked back on those long, straight sky-person legs and folded his arms, grinning. [“Yeah? Tell me.”]

Vemik took hold of a branch with his tail and both feet and swung upside-down in front of Jooyun’s face. [“Yan said that in the time of his old grandfathers the mountain spat fire and rivers of fire ran down it!”]

Julian always laughed whenever Vemik hung upside down or something, but this time his laughter faded and he frowned. [“…This story. How long ago?”]

[“Yan said…the time of his grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather?”] Vemik hazarded. [“Maybe there was another grandfather in there, I am not sure.”]

[“…How long do you expect to live, Vemik?”]

[“Uh…well, Yan says he’s been around for two hands of four hands of seasons?”]

Jooyun looked like he was sky-thinking. [“So he’s about…‘fifty’ then, so that’s at least one ‘eruption’ within the last…‘two hundred years’ or so…well. Fuck.”]

Vemik already knew that word, and had figured out he wasn’t supposed to. It was comforting to know that sky-people had swearing too, and he liked ‘fuck.’ It had weight.

[“Is…that bad?”]

Jooyun sighed, exactly like any of the People would. [“Yeah, it’s a big problem. It means your whole ‘species’ is mostly living in and around an ‘active caldera’ and that is bad in a big, big way.”]

There were Important words in there that Vemik didn’t know, but he had to start at the bad part first. [“…how bad?”]

Jooyun stared at him, then turned around and headed back in the direction of the forest camp. [“We should get back.”]

Oh.

That bad.

Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Entity

The Entity knew what ‘frantic’ felt like, though the emotion didn’t quite map to anything it permitted itself to feel. Frantic overlapped with panic; panic robbed precision and thought and got in the way of +SURVIVE+ and thus the Entity had done whatever it could to expunge that particular emotion altogether.

Nevertheless, it was as close as it ever got to being frantic with worry right now. Somebody had come to this planet. Somebody with a spaceship, and thus who was capable of understanding and discovering the Entity. If they had implants, then any Hierarchy demons riding in their brains would know immediately that 665’s operation had stalled and never resumed. The Hierarchy would investigate, the Entity might be caught…

And physical objects were so slow! An Abrogator had a maximum overland travel speed under optimal conditions of about thirty miles an hour, but a dense temperate rainforest was decidedly suboptimal.

After too many days of travel it was finally getting close now, though. The Entity didn’t have hands or any physical part to its being at all but if it did then those hands would have been shaking and its palms sweating. There were too many unknowns here, too many variables. It had no idea who or what the landing ship belonged to, but it had come down near the destroyed Abrogator and the last known location of 665’s problematic tribe.

The scout drones were faster, but Hierarchy technology had never quite managed to produce miniaturized power sources that could meet their energy demands. They were battery-powered, and thus had a limited range. If it didn’t care about getting the drones back it could have already sent them, but needlessly wasting those drones on an over-reach scouting mission would interfere with future scouting, multiplying the unknowns.

Unknowns were lethal. Unknowns violated +SURVIVE+. Unknowns would be eradicated with extreme sanction.

It launched the scout drones.

Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Allison Buehler

The annoying thing about bodyguarding Xiù was that it was so easy to believe she didn’t need it. Allison had seen her take down a guy much larger than her without much difficulty, knew of at least one nose that Xiù had broken and was acutely aware that they’d tracked her down as much on her reputation for single-handedly (and bare-handedly) taking out an entire Hunter broodship as anything else.

But all the kung fu in the world wasn’t going to work if Yan got it in his head to tear her apart, and all three of them knew it. Yan was no Hunter, he was a fellow deathworlder and leagues stronger. He’d mellowed out, but there was no suggestion that he’d got round to trusting them yet or even that he ever would. If he decided to kill Xiù, then he would. Not could; Would.

Xiù herself seemed much less concerned by this upset in the balance of power than Allison was on her behalf. She and Julian were both used to the idea that their diminutive Chinese girlfriend could leave them both winded and stunned on the mat at the same time, and for Yan to just swagger in and overturn that dynamic simply by being huge and strong felt vaguely insulting.

Not that it mattered: Allison had a Mossberg 590 and whether the target was a world-class martial artist or a stone age gorilla-critter from an alien deathworld, an average Joe with a shotgun was gonna fuck them over fifteen ways to Sunday. And Allison was no average Joe.

Fortunately, Yan seemed smart and knew the score. He mostly kept on the periphery but he always watched intently.

There hadn’t been so much as a sniffle among either the humans or the natives, fortunately, which had forced Allison to reluctantly concede that maybe the cross-species disease problem wasn’t quite as scary as she’d feared. They were still being vigilant, but they’d stepped down to green decon cycles with only three of the intense decontamination cartridges left spare.

Good thing, too. She knew Julian was sneaking food from Vemik when he thought she wasn’t looking, but she’d let it slide for the sake of peace. Somehow that hadn’t irked her as much as his increasingly “gone native” habits, but…well. The tan that had been robbed from him by months of living in a spaceship was reasserting itself, so she wasn’t gonna complain about how he was walking around shirtless a lot right now. Definitely not.

Besides, going native had gone over well with the natives. And Xiù had her elf thing going on, which had the tribe treating her almost with the same deference they showed the Singer. Both of them had got impressing the locals down pat. Allison meanwhile had settled for maintaining a more aloof attitude: she’d picked out her Oakleys on the grounds that the aliens probably had no idea how to handle bright orange mirrored wraparounds.

A black sleeveless top completed the whole Sarah Connor look and was damn welcome, because it was unbearably humid in the fog between the trees. Not hot, but any sweat she did produce stuck around forever because there was too much moisture in the air for it to go anywhere. She’d interrogated Xiù on the secret to staying cool and ethereal under such conditions and Xiù had just shrugged and said something about ‘thinking cool and dry thoughts.’

The natives seemed to have that problem licked—they mostly sweated through their hair crests as far as Allison could tell. Those fluffy, kitten-soft furs wrapped around a core of stiffer capillary hairs and drew the moisture and heat away from the skin in a second.

As she passed the Singer, who was taking an afternoon nap in a low branch, Allison took the opportunity to consider the young shaman’s crest in closer detail. It was noticeably redder than those of her female peers; almost as red as a mature male’s bright blaze hunter’s orange in fact, while most of the other women were more like a bright ginger or strawberry blonde. Julian had mused about hormones and sexual dimorphism long enough to make Allison yawn despite being genuinely interested.

It looked soft and strokable, too, but so far the natives were understandably a bit too standoffish with her for her to have felt it first-hand. The information on how soft those crests were came from Julian, who seemed to enjoy being wrangled by Vemik during their play-fights and had reported that the crest was as soft as dryer lint around those stiffer hairs.

She circled the clearing slowly and returned to where Xiù was meditating beneath a tree. Xiù had taken to doing that after her language sessions with Vemik to clear her head before she tackled the chore of recording as much Peoplespeak as she could for posterity before English could pollute it and destroy it via Vemik.

It was maybe part of the elf act, too. When Xiù got into character it took her a while to return to just being herself.

“You okay?” Allison checked with her, as she patrolled past. Xiù opened her eyes, smiled at her, and nodded.

“I like the way this forest smells,” she said.

Allison had to agree. “Natural. Alive.”

“Yup! And…quiet. It’s funny to think that if we look up we won’t see, like, an airliner contrail or something.” Xiù looked up through the canopy anyway, as if daring the universe to prove her wrong.

“Or a satellite,” Allison agreed. “Our surveysats are all way too small to see.”

“For now. When do they burn up?”

“About a week,” Allison informed her. “And we run out of food two days later. Unless you want to break open the bug crate.”

“Ew, no. Which is why Julian needs to hurry up and finish his—”

They both looked up as Julian crashed into the camp in the precise opposite of his usual stealthy style, with Vemik trying his arboreal best to keep up. Allison straightened, Yan stiffened, and Xiù stood up.

“Julian? What’s wrong, bǎobèi?”

Julian sketched the absolute bare minimum level of respect to Yan that he could get away with and jogged across the clearing.

“That volcano’s active,” he reported, keeping his voice low and urgent. “Are the surveysats still up there?”

“Uh, yeah. Still got a week,” Allison reassured him.

“We need to find a place for them away from the caldera. Now.”

“Is…it really that bad?” Xiù asked. “I mean, people live near active volcanoes on Earth…”

“Yeah, but there’s nearly eight billion of us,” Julian waved a hand. “If ten thousand humans get killed in an eruption, that’s a good day to own a news channel. If ten thousand of these guys get killed then there goes the whole species.”

“Julian!” Xiù seemed a little taken aback, but Allison nodded.

“I mean, yeah. Hard-ass way to put it, but…”

“No, sorry…” Julian rubbed his face. “I’m just…If it was just the fucking Hierarchy then that’s a problem the fellas on Cimbrean can solve. Show up, blow shit up, take the death robots…these guys don’t have writing. A few thousand years from now, the sky-people in their flying hut who fought the demons are a quaint religion and I kinda doubt it’d matter much. But if Big Hotel wanna make these guys go away, all they have to do is make that thing pop its cork—” he jerked his thumb toward the volcano, “—and let mother nature do the rest. We have GOT to get them away from it, and that’s gonna matter.”

“What do you mean, ‘matter?’” Allison asked.

“We can’t move them. We’re one tiny ship and just this one tribe is, what, over fifty people? They’ve gotta move themselves. And they’re not the only tribe, ‘cuz Vemet and I’ve already met dozens out there while hunting, Vemet’s introduced me as the Sky-Hunter. They call you the Sky-Dancer, Xiù. Guess they saw you doing taiji or somethin’.”

“…What do they call me?” Allison asked, intrigued.

“They don’t really know what to call you yet. But they’re starting to talk about us, and there’s probably discontent…we’ve already done damage, and now we’ve gotta do more or they’re all maybe going to be dead in a few years. But we can’t just conquer them and order them around, either.”

Xiù nodded, seeing where he was going. “Somebody needs to persuade them to migrate, and it can’t be us. And the only language they’re going to listen to is if somebody knocks their heads together and makes them follow.”

“Somebody like Yan,” Allison glanced across at the chieftain.

Julian steeled himself and made a decision. In his best Peoplespeak, [“Yan! Can we talk?”]

Yan eyed him carefully, stood up with his water skin and lumbered over deliberately. It was hard to tell if he was intentionally swaggering or if that was just how he moved, but he curled up his tail, sat down and offered a neutral [“Yes?”]

[“Can I speak in] English?”

That seemed to pique Yan’s interest because he nodded, and to their surprise he replied in English too. Clearly the big chieftain had been listening more closely than he pretended. “Okay. Important?”

“…Yeah. Very.”

“Vemik trust. He smart, I trust. Speak good words, he does.” Yan’s English was halting and slow, but excellent considering that he’d never used it in earshot of the three of them.

Julian tilted his head. “You keep your own counsel, don’t you?”

Yan didn’t reply.

[“Sorry. You do your own thinking, on your own. That’s good.”]

Yan snarled in that weirdly friendly way he reserved for Julian. “You tell story or not?”

Vemik settled in a branch above Yan—technically a subservient position in their society, because it placed him behind the Given Man and under his protection—and listened. The whole tribe was doing that, sensing that the sky-people had suddenly become deadly serious about something. Only the Singer settled at ground level alongside Yan, and the big man actually moved over to make room for her.

Julian turned to Xiù. “Fill in for me if we get stuck?” Xiù nodded and fetched her tablet, and they settled down to talk while Allison hung back.

Something was pricking at the back of her neck, and she wasn’t sure what. It wasn’t just the tension with Julian, Xiù and the Tribe, they were all engrossed as Julian launched into his halting best to try and explain exactly what a volcano was and why living near one was a really bad idea, supported now and again by Xiù’s ludicrously fluent grasp of the native language.

No, something else was wrong. Something that nobody else was paying attention to.

She prowled away from the impromptu powwow and tried to do what Julian had taught her how to do in Minnesota and really listen to the forest around her.

And she heard what was missing. The whole tribe jumped when she charged her shotgun.

Julian gave her a confused stare. “…Al?”

“Birdsong.” There wasn’t any. The animal background noise of the forest had gone completely hush.

Everyone went silent at that single word. Clearly the Tribe had learned English more widely and better than they had let on. After a tense several heartbeats of listening, the whole tribe began to make stealthy preparations. Up in the tree, Vemik readied his bow. Yan’s huge fingers clawed a fist-sized rock out of the soft earth for throwing, and Julian unfolded himself and stood, readying his gauss rifle.

In the silence, there was a faint sound, one that didn’t belong at all. A kind of…mechanical whine, like a turbine spinning up for just a few seconds.

Vemik almost fell out of his tree. [“I know that sound!”] He blurted, resorting to his native language. [“Death-bird!”]

The humans wasted a few seconds looking at each other bewildered before Xiù realized what he meant. “Hierarchy drone!”

Allison gritted her teeth. “Back to the ship. Now.”

Xiù took Julian’s reluctant hand to drag him ship-wards, then stopped in her tracks as a similar whine sounded from among the trees in that direction. Then another from the south.

[“They’re all around us!”] The tribe shot up the trees like fireworks, making shrill hooting alarm sounds. Yan remained on the ground, hefting his rock and baring his fangs.

Everything became angles in Allison’s head. Lines of fire, lines not to fire, places where allies were standing and how to move to safely shoot past them. With one arm she shepherded Xiù to whatever protection the dead bulk of the Abrogator could provide while Julian called for Vemet, leapt, and the native man hauled him easily up into the low branches of a Ketta tree.Julian was a decent climber, but Vemet was strong enough to practically throw him into the higher branches, where the pair of them settled and Julian scanned the gauss rifle back and forth, searching for targets among the trees.

They’d all taken tactical training together back in Omaha, with…mixed but largely positive results. Julian’s persistent problem was that at heart he was a varmint shooter: He took his time over every shot, made every round count, and wasn’t really mobile enough for tactical situations. By nature and practice he was much more of a sniper. Xiù meanwhile had started out handling guns like they might explode with every trigger pull and though she’d improved with practice and was mobile enough, her strong and obvious distaste for firearms shone through. They’d both scraped through the training, but…

But Allison had aced it.

Her hand was barely back on the shotgun when the first Hierarchy scout drone spun through the trees, flipping like a thrown playing card as it caught sight of her and took evasive action.

Not quick enough. It was smashed by hurtling twelve-gauge buckshot.

Yan howled and leapt like a salmon to clobber another drone as it swooped in past him on an attack run. The goliath blow knocked it twisting out of its path and it clattered harmlessly to the soil, still whining and trying to fly but disabled.

More of those whining sounds among the trees, three flashes of metal. Angles were wrong. Drop shoulder, bully sideways, turn, fire, spin into the cover of a tree to guard her flank. The two surviving drones wrenched through bewildering tight arcs to try and spoil her aim.

Feet under her, weight balanced, face ice-cold. Step. Advance. Fire. Missed. Julian finally took a shot and winged one, though, and the damaged drone glinted as it skipped behind a tree and vanished.

The undamaged one was circling like a wolf, using the Abrogator’s hull to cover itself. She couldn’t shoot it, it couldn’t shoot her. Harmless, just for a second or two.

Long enough for her to turn at the waist, step back and obliterate the sixth drone as it flashed out from between the trees. Then step, turn, step, kneel, breathe, wait—

And fire. Buckshot slapped the circling-wolf drone out of existence the instant it came into view.

Silence. A long, long tense one full of only the sound of the damaged drone retreating until even that had finally faded below the level of hearing, and the disabled one in the grass still trying to twitch back into the air.

Nobody dared move until the first chirp of some bird coming out of hiding dispelled the silence.

Allison let out a long breath, and the world became a place of people and things again, instead of angles and movement. She noticed in an aloof way as her hands reloaded the shotgun on their own, but tried not to really think about it—She was worried that if she noticed she had a body then it might start shaking and throwing up.

Julian, thank God, came bustling down the tree and rolled as he dropped the last few feet. He touched her on the shoulder and somehow said everything just by doing so, giving her the strength to shore up her composure and pretend to be unaffected as Vemet jumped down and landed behind him, and the two men both went on an immediate patrol of the area.

Yan…he had picked up the disabled drone in his mitts and walked over with it like it wasn’t any big deal. He grunted, and crushed it into a squashed sort of disc with visible effort, then slammed it on the ground with so much force it embedded itself in the dirt.

Then he looked up at Allison, and nodded respectfully before he turned to check on his tribe.

The Singer dropped down from the tree she had fled into during the attack and gave Allison a long and thoughtful stare, then looked back at Vemik. She thoughtfully scraped one of her stubby claw-nails across her teeth to excavate the ketta sap from under it before nodding as she seemed to reach a decision.

“I think we call you…“ She said something in Peoplespeak. The word-bit for ‘sky’ was in there, but Allison didn’t know the other bit, which gave her something to focus on while she gave Xiù a hand up in crawling out from under the Abrogator.

“What did she call me?”

“She called you *‘Sky-Storm.’*” Xiù’s elf act was gone, replaced by naked awe. “And…I mean…that was just…Holy shit, Al!”

“I feel like I’m gonna puke…” Allison confessed for her ears only. Around them, the tribe was slowly coming back down the trees in ones and twos.

Xiù took her hand. It helped.

When the patrol came back, Yan grunted some commands to the men, then he looked at Julian pointedly, returned to where they were sitting, and resumed his position calmly like he hadn’t just leaped clear over Allison’s head and hammered a goddamned drone out of the sky with a rock. Allison wondered if he was feeling as shaky as she was and covering it better.

He inspected his hands and feet quickly, then said politely, “You tell story more.”

Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Entity

<Relief>

Humans. Humans who, quite clearly, had known what the Hierarchy was and had immediately opened fire. The Entity could not possibly have wished for a more positive find from its scouting expeditions.

It could have wished for a more positive outcome of course—the loss of five scout drones stung—but this particular unknown had resolved itself well.

The surviving drone was damaged but stable as it swept wide in the direction the two humans without the shotgun had tried to run. It didn’t take long to stumble across their ship, an unsubtle hammerhead of a thing in gleaming red and silver livery and adorned with the logo of the Byron Group. Unarmed, tiny…clearly a scout ship of some kind.

It allowed itself a rare spike of amusement when it saw the ship’s name painted above the airlock. ‘Misfit.’

As with all human systems, the ship was hardened and all but impenetrable to outside access. The rigorous parity-checking, firewalls and checksums made them all but impossible to infiltrate.

But they could be made to carry a message…

Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Allison Buehler

It took several minutes before Julian finally sat down across from Yan again to continue explaining… well, everything. The villagers had scattered, and they took the time to ensure everybody was safe before the storytelling resumed, this time with a nervous eye towards the sky.

“…okay. So.” Julian cleared his throat. “The volcano. We good on that?”

“May go ‘ksssh!’” Yan spread his arms wide to imitate the concept. “Like [spitting-pond] in [high-forest-place] but big. Could kill all People. Bad. Must move…far away. All People move. All tribes. Yes?”

“Do you think the other tribes would move?” Julian asked.

Yan pondered that very carefully, and took a good, long swig of his water skin.

[“Jooyun Sky-Hunter, Shyow Sky-Dancer and Awisun Sky-Storm.] You, I believe. Others…not see you. Not know.” He said that last while aiming an especially respectful eye at Allison and her weapon.

Julian gave Yan a very intense stare. “Yan…how big of a leader are you?”

That was a ballsy thing to ask in front of his tribe like that. But Julian had a point; there wasn’t time to be diplomatic anymore. Yan seemed to understand and even respect Julian for it.

“Am oldest [Given-Man] now in all [The People.] Crest dark.” He gestured to the tip of his tail—the tuft there was as turning as dark as wine or spilled blood compared to the brilliant scarlet of the rest of his crest, a far cry from Vemik’s pale ginger and Vemet’s blaze orange. “Not many live so long. Am…[young-healthy-strong], live many [future-seasons] maybe. Am biggest, too.” He said that with his characteristically smug snarl.

Xiù had to translate that bit. Julian then asked, “Will they listen to you?”

Yan nodded after some thought, then added, “But would need…would break many [Given-Men] to make listen. And women. Children. Very sad.”

Well. That was as candid an assessment as they’d ever get. The men and women of the tribe nodded along too, grimly. They collectively seemed to sense they had a mission now and it seemed to Allison they were already steeling themselves for it.

It wasn’t often anyone got to see how wars started. Allison looked at Julian uncertainly, knowing—or maybe hoping—in her head that they were doing the right thing here, but there was a sick feeling settling in her stomach now that had absolutely nothing to do with adrenaline and fear.

For her part, Xiù was unreadable. Her hair had come loose during the attack, and from where she was sitting Allison couldn’t see enough face past it to read her expression even if she was showing one.

“…We need to go,” Julian said, having to force the words out in a grim croak until he cleared his throat. “This attack, our supplies are running short…but we will be back as fast as we can, and we’ll bring friends.”

“How long?”

“It may be a full season.”

Yan thought about that, then looked at Vemet and the Singer. “Will move by then. You find us?”

“Yes. You must move, and you must hide or be ready to hide. Big Enemy may wake up. We can make something to help. And I need your help to make it, Yan. Making this needs strong men.”

Allison snorted internally but kept her calm. Boys. Julian was shamelessly playing to Yan’s literal strengths and Yan permitted him the flattery. [“The People,] *strong!*” He thumped his chest impressively. [“Sky-Thinker] beat you, I hear…” He said it with a surprisingly gentle, playful expression.

Julian chuckled softly and gave Vemik a fond look. “Yeah. He’s got game.” There was a trill of laughter from among the men of the tribe—even if they didn’t understand his words, they knew his meaning perfectly. “But, this is [big-craft-magic] we want to give you.” Julian sobered back up. “I want to teach you to make something. Something that will make it easier to lead the People.”

Yan sat forward. “What?”

Julian drew his knife and stroked the edge. “We call it…steel.”

++END CHAPTER 35++

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THE SOR
Those special individuals whose contributions go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson.

Ellen Houston

Three Humans

SirNeonPancake

Savvz

Laga Mahesa

23 Deathworlders

Adam Turnbull,
Andrew Ford,
Aryeh Winter,
Ben Thrussell,
Daniel Morris,
Dar,
Darryl Knight,
Elliott Woods,
Greg Tebbutt,
Jamie Atkinson,
Martin Østervang,
mudkip201,
Nader Ghali,
Nicholas Enyeart,
Nick Annunziata,
Parker Brown,
Patrick Huizinga,
Remi Harbo,
Ryan Cadiz,
Sun Rendered,
tsant,
TTTA,
Volka…

As well as 22 Friendly ETs and 135 Dizi Rats

Chapter 36: Consequences

Date Point 12y6m2w AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

Xiù was curled up on the couch and not talking with either of them. She hadn’t taken the decision to arm the tribe with steel and send them to war at all well.

It would have been better if she’d cried or something. Or… shouted maybe. Kicked his ass. Something. The worst thing she could have done to him was this silent misery. It wasn’t as if Julian was feeling great about the decision after all.

None of them were. Allison was giving her shotgun the cleaning of its lifetime. That weapon deserved the best care in the world and right now Allison was taking out her own fears and doubts on every last little blemish that might have made it anything less than pristine.

But Misfit wasn’t a big ship. It had always been cramped even with just the three of them, and now there was just no escaping each others’ emotions. So Julian did the only thing he could do: he sat down on the couch and hugged with a desperate prayer to whatever loving god might listen that he hadn’t irreparably fucked things up, and damn near started crying when Xiù made a soft sound and leaned into his chest.

That same god doubled down when Allison picked that moment to return, looking pale and thoughtful but sharp again. She watched them for a long instant, then sat down on Julian’s lap and put her arms around them both and the three of them just sat and held each other for an intimate eternity before any of them found the energy to say anything.

Xiù’s head shifted slightly, she sniffed and raked the back of her hand across her nose.

“…We’re going to do something terrible, aren’t we?”

There was a mutual three-way nod.

“…Yeah.” Julian’s voice was little more than a deep, choked grumble. “Think we are.”

“Is it the right thing, though?” Allison asked.

They pulled back and looked at each other.

“…We’re doing it for the right reasons,” Julian ventured. “Aren’t we? To save them?”

“Like I said. If it’s adapt or die, I’d rather help ‘em adapt.” Allison scrubbed at her eyes. “Kinda harder in practice, though.”

“I can’t stop thinking about what Yan said. About… children.” Xiù choked on the word.

“He was…honest. Very honest.” Allison, a champion of forthright honesty herself, didn’t seem pleased about it.

“Too honest.” Julian finished the thought.

“Bullshit.” Allison shook her head. “No such thing. We needed to know what the consequences will be. I don’t wanna… I don’t want us lying to ourselves about just what we’re gonna do to those people. We’re about to turn Yan into Genghis fucking Khan and we need to fucking own it.”

Julian considered the expression he’d seen on Yan’s face as they had struck their bargain. There hadn’t been a gleam of conquest or megalomania there: to the contrary, Yan had looked old as he considered what he was learning. “I think Yan knows it, too. I don’t think he likes the idea much.”

“He’ll still do it, though.” Xiù straightened up a bit more. “…Because he has to. Just like we do.”

“Do we really?” Allison asked. “That volcano might not blow for… hundreds of years. Thousands maybe. It might never blow again. Might be all it ever does is fizz. Couldn’t we be overreacting?”

“We can’t gamble a whole species on that,” Julian said.

Xiù nodded, weakly but with that determined look of hers in her eye. “And they’ll need steel if they’re to have a chance of getting the other tribes to join them,” she added. “And what if the Hierarchy comes back before we do? They’d need…” She trailed off, and left the thought unfinished. It wasn’t like basic steel knives would do a thing against an Abrogator anyway.

“No. But you can go to ground and that matters. Hell. You can’t even dig without metal!” Julian finished. “Not really.”

“When did you learn how to make steel, anyway?” Allison asked. “I mean, I’m not surprised, just curious.”

He shrugged. “Boy scouts.”

“Okay…so why steel? Why not bronze?”

“Because I lied to Yan, kinda. Iron is easy once you know how. I mean… way more complex than anything they’ve ever done before, but easy in the big picture. I’m not exactly an archaeologist, but…”

“We know, but go on…” Xiù prompted.

“I figure the only reason we did bronze first is because it’s more obvious when you find it. They’re something special. Like, iron’s everywhere,” Julian explained, digging deep into the geological education he’d picked up a lifetime ago working as a park ranger, “But it ain’t obvious. Tin and Copper, the ores stand out. They’re shiny and look like metal. Iron ores don’t stand out precisely because they’re everywhere. They just look like… well, rocks. Hell, they basically are rocks.”

“Makes sense,” Allison nodded.

“Right. Besides, you put copper or tin in a good campfire, they melt. But you don’t smelt iron ores without getting stupidly hot.”

“And having everything just right, too,” Allison nodded. “They taught me a bit about smithing back at Omaha, remember? Just enough to help fix the ship.”

“…Right, yeah. So, you can help!”

“Oh hell no,” Allison shook her head vehemently. “Not without a power hammer, no way. I’m not strong enough.”

“Yeah, that’s the other side of it. Lot of hard work goes into smithing steel. We’re lucky we have Yan because we have to make wrought iron first and…fuck, that takes a hell of a lot of muscle power. Just making the tongs is gonna take it out of me and Yan’ll have to pound all the rest of it out himself. And then after all that you only have the start of steel. The rest is hard work and finesse. Good thing Vemik’s smart.”

“When you put it like that, it’s no wonder humans developed bronze first,” Xiù said, quietly.

“Yup. And anyway, if they’re gonna move…they need a metal that they can get wherever they go. And once you can make basic iron, good steel’s not that far away. It’s just…details, really. Attention to detail. And that’s good for ‘em, too.”

“Took our ancestors a long time to figure out those details,” Allison nodded. “But they did it. This is just the easy way.”

“Right. This? This is…God, what’s the word? Like, a cognitive head start? I dunno. If they can make steel again after we leave, that means they can transmit history accurately. That’s important, and it’s a good incentive for a lot of things all at once.”

“Okay, fine. Steel is good. But what happens if they use this steel to put so many tribes to the sword that they go extinct anyway?” Allison asked. “I like these guys, but they ain’t exactly civilized. Let’s not pretend they are.”

“Well,” said Julian, “I suppose that depends on how good of an orator the big fella is.”

“I don’t think any orator’s that good.”

“We can only hope.”

“And trust him,” Xiù said. “I think… Yan knows what’s at stake.”

“Yeah. These people really aren’t stupid, are they?” Allison agreed.

“No, but they’re… they’re all a bit like Vemik.” Xiù said. “Even Yan and the Singer. Vemik reminds me of my brother a little.”

“How so?”

“He’s so smart that he forgets how to be sensible.” Xiù sat back from the three-way hug and started to re-tie her ponytail. “This isn’t like the Gaoians or any of the others, they don’t…they’ve never opened Pandora’s Box. This is the first time they’ve ever played with this kind of… well, magic.”

Julian fidgeted with some of the dirt under his fingernails. “And we’re not there to help them with that. Well…Fuck.”

“There’s gotta be a limit on how much help we can give them,” Allison said. “End of the day, if we teach ‘em the secret of fire and they burn themselves down…”

“That’s cold, Al.”

“Please, if we get back here and all we find is bodies I’m gonna be a fucking wreck!” Allison shook her head vigorously. “But they’re not children. I think about the worst thing we could do is treat ‘em like children. They’re fucking deathworlders, just like us! They live tough lives, they have these rites of adulthood and… all that stuff. They clearly know all about responsibility. You saw Yan’s expression, he knows the stakes here… this one’s a test they have to do for themselves.”

“So…what do we do, then?” Xiù asked. She finished tying her hair back again and drew her feet up to sit cross-legged on Julian’s lap, with his arms around her waist.

“We treat ‘em like adults. And… we pray for them.”

Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Miami, Florida, USA, Earth

Professor Daniel Hurt

“Our next guest tonight is an evolutionary psychologist and historian, the author of ‘The Road To Reason,’ New York Times bestselling author Daniel Hurt, Daniel Hurt everybody!”

There was always going to be this kind of show on at this kind of time of night on this kind of a channel. The name, host and music changed, but the intersection of politics and media needed a talk show hosted by a stand-up comedian, in the same way as an axle needed a differential to turn the energy of one into the work of the other.

This one, with a kind of creative lack of imagination, was called ’That Show With Steven Lawrence.’

But, whatever. The appearance money was good, so Dan adjusted his tie, made sure his jacket was sitting right and strolled out onto the stage with practiced nonchalance.

“Welcome have a seat! It’s been…what, almost a year?”

“Ten months,” Dan made sure his pants weren’t creased as he sat, and acknowledged a lone whoop in the audience with a wave.

“And you’ve been busy, too! Making friends, earning the love of your legion of adoring fans…” there was a ripple of laughter at the sarcasm.

“And I wrote a book,” Dan had rehearsed the way these conversations went.

“Oh yeah, and you wrote a book!” More whoops from the audience. Somebody out there was clearly a bigger than average fan. The host, Steve Lawrence turned to the audience and raised his hands like the showman he was. “Y’know, just a little bestseller…”

“And I only received thirty death threats this time,” Dan rested his hands lightly on his knee. “So, things are improving there! Thank God for tenure, huh?”

“You seem to enjoy poking people in the eye, don’t you?”

“Because we need it, Steve. People don’t think about anything unless you kick them right in the head. Me too, all of us! So what if I upset people?”

“Well, at least it’s entertaining to watch, right?” Lawrence asked rhetorically, setting up another football for him to kick.

“It cuts through the crap, too!” Dan nodded. “The last decade has been just poisoned with tribalism and feels-before-reals politics, and the only way to break through that is with mockery! Nothing else works, and we know this because Science.”

Lawrence laughed. “That should be the title of your next book! ‘Because Science!’

Dan smiled for both his benefit and the camera’s and pressed on with his point. “Which science? Any science! Psychology, history, biology, take your pick. Humans are incredibly good at feeling, but you just can’t base rational decisions on your feelings alone, that just doesn’t work.”

“You said in your book that for daily purposes, intuitive thinking does the job just fine…” Lawrence pointed out.

“Yes! See, the way we make decisions is really weird,” Dan sat forward eagerly, all pretense of composure forgotten. He was the first to acknowledge that when he got into his stride there was no stopping him, and the way people thought about everything was easily the most fascinating subject in his life.

“It happens before you know it, and usually when you’re not even thinking about whatever, right? And that’s okay! It helps you get through everyday nonsense, just all the things in your life that you don’t really need to pay attention to you can deal with like pop, pop, pop!” He waved his hands around his head for emphasis. “It lets you save your focus for the things that need it, and it means you, uh…absorb all the smarts from the people you know. But what it doesn’t let you do is analyze something rationally. That is work. That is hard work, and people don’t like to do it!”

“So what are we mere mortals to do?”

“Laugh! Laugh at ourselves, laugh at each other, especially laugh at the people who don’t want to be laughed at, and double-especially at the people we’re told we can’t laugh at!” Dan reined himself in a bit and sat back again.

“Know thyself,” he continued, in a slightly quieter tone of voice. “That’s all. It’s way easier to live with each other if we think about why we think and emote and tribe up like we do. It makes it easier to make friends with the other guy, right? And that, right there, is the only thing that’ll keep us off each others’ throats and prevent another, uh…Presidential experiment.”

As expected, the usual round of exuberant cheers and full-throated jeering came immediately.

“Never were a fan of that guy, huh?”

“Hell no! But, well. Even I can’t really step completely out of my own tribe. None of us can. I try not to be too judgemental because I think it’s for history to really judge the outcome of those years. We’re all too close to it to know. I admit, I’m a fan of Sartori…”

“Even though he’s a Republican?” Steve Lawrence’s question sounded guileless, but of course he was just following the cards.

“See, that’s tribal thinking. And the one and only way to stop that is to forge a common identity. Honestly, try it out. Find that neighbor you really hate because, I dunno, his dog craps on your lawn or he’s a Patriots fan or whatever, and find out what you have in common. And here’s the magic bit—you do have something in common. You always have something in common! So be deliberately friendly and polite no matter how much you hate his guts because a couple of weeks of hanging out later? You will be friends.”

He paused and reflected. “Well, if you’re a man. Women find it more difficult.”

Lawrence shifted in his seat as a few people in the audience made disapproving noises. “Isn’t that sexist?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Dan had to raise his voice slightly as the disapproving noises escalated. “Steve, men and women have different bodies. There’s nothing sexist about acknowledging that, right? Well there’s nothing sexist about acknowledging that we have different brains. There have been studies performed on one-day-old infants who haven’t had time to internalize any kind of gender-based nurture-over-nature thing which show a clear difference between male and female in how they respond to different stimuli. We’ve known since the Classical civilizations, and even before then, that men and women really don’t think or behave the same way…And sure, that’s not a nice truth, but it’s still true.”

He sat back. “If I designed the world? Men would share the best elements of female psychology, and vice versa. But I didn’t: Evolution did.”

Lawrence nodded. “And evolution doesn’t care.”

“Nope. Neither does Biology. Or Chemistry, or Physics, because that’s all everything is in the end. We have to deal with reality as it is if we want to shape it towards how we might want it to be, and I want to live in a society without prejudice. That means knowing what real prejudice actually looks like.’”

“Well, we’re getting plenty of Tweets already!” Lawrence segued, hitting the last of the planned interview. This was where things got difficult as while they could script for the type of messages they expected to get, the public had a knack for throwing some surprising curveballs.

“Tell ‘em to delete their account.” Dan suggested. There was a dutiful chuckle from the audience, and he sat up straight. “Alright, let’s hear it…”

“So, this one comes from Zoe Foster, who I guess saw you on ESNN after the protests at NEC…She says ‘Hate speech is hate speech, Nazis don’t get a seat at the table. If you advocate for genocide you don’t get a say.’

Dan shrugged the statement off. That one was just an appetizer. “Well, she’s wrong. The most effective antidote to bigotry is to permit it,” he answered breezily. “The facts have weight, Steve. You only have to worry about what the other guy is saying if you’re wrong…”

They navigated five more minutes of topical questions, a couple of in-jokes and three outright attacks on Dan’s character and from there Dan parked himself at the panel table and waited while the rest of the night’s guests came in.

It was a productive conversation in the end. There were some civil differences of opinion, some impassioned interruptions and talking over one another because that was really the only way to get anything said at that table, and…as always, the whole show was over before Dan had even really noticed.

There was the usual ‘aftermath’ segment for the Internet, a few outtakes and reshoots, and Dan finally got to drop the act backstage when they settled down on the couch in the green room and hung out with a bottle of sparkling wine and some snacks.

“Tiring work,” Lawrence commented, patting him on the shoulder as he passed around the drinks. At fifty-two, Dan was the oldest one in the room and he was definitely feeling it. Hot lights and keeping up the public persona had a way of draining him.

“Yyyup.” Dan was generally a man of few and carefully considered words off-stage. He accepted the champagne flute with a smile and joined in the five-way toast to a successful show.

Diana Wimmer, the political editor at Horseshoe Media, made a special point of ringing her glass against his. Out at the panel table, the two of them had been at odds over his comment about women and friendship, but in private they were actually friendly acquaintances and regular correspondents. He respected and admired her enormously.

“You have a lot lined up for this week…” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Ten book signings in six days,” Dan nodded.

“You sound bored.”

“Weary. Never bored.”

Diana nodded agreement with that one, and sat back on the couch. “I doubt you’re considering a change in career anytime soon, though.”

That got a laugh. She was right—Dan loved his job.

“Not,” he said, “unless something even more epic comes along…”

Date Point 12y6m2w1d AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

The sky-people had strange ways.

Yan shouldn’t have been surprised. Anybody who flew between skies in a hut made of ‘steel’ had to be strange, without question. They seemed friendly, and they were cunning in ways that Yan didn’t understand, but…

But they liked water. That was just…

That was…

It was very strange. Water itched and made people cold, it could hide yshek or the sweating sickness.

The sky-hut had a name. That was strange too. They spoke about it as if it was a living thing, a person. A woman. They called it “her” and “she” and yet they made it clear it was no kind of a beast. It was simply a tool with much, much sky-thinking behind it.

To Yan, who had spent his life making and discarding tools as they were needed, the idea of loving a tool was…

But then Jooyun had showed him why they loved their tools. The sky-people’s tools weren’t knocked off a flint core when needed, they were made well and carefully and kept for when they were needed. Each one was like a Knife of Manhood to them and each one, according to Awisun, could be the difference between life and death.

“How?” Yan had asked, curiously. Vemik was rubbing off on him.

“There’s no ‘air’ above the sky,” Xiù had explained.

“Air.” A new word.

Jooyun raised a hand and blew across his own fingers. His breath had the strong and sharp taste of ‘garlic’ that day. “That. The wind. That’s air. Imagine a place where there was no wind, where you could not breathe. That’s what it’s like above the sky.”

Awisun hadn’t learned the People’s words so well. “We… one time, our ‘ship,’ our skies-hut, it broke. All of the air went out. We, uh…” she thought hard. “We maybe-died.”

Yan frowned at her, alarmed. “You maybe-died? You don’t know if you died?”

“No, we didn’t die,” Xiù corrected. “We nearly died. We were very badly hurt, but we lived.”

“I see.” Yan reminded himself again that the sky-people were still just People. Shyow had terrible scars on her arm, and Jooyun had lost his foot in a fight. A fight with sky-weapons, no less! Having seen Awisun’s ‘shotgun’ in action, and the woman herself glide through a deadly battle like a dancer, it was easy to keep thinking of them as a kind of god. But gods would heal their scars, or regrow their lost foot. Gods wouldn’t have foul-tasting breath.

“So…these tools are like a spear. You need them to stay safe.”

Jooyun nodded. “Yes. And…well, they’re really hard to make. So we look after them.”

Yan glanced at the site where the women were working on the ‘furnace.’ “…How hard?”

“Well…tomorrow, I’ll show you. It’d be good if everyone ate well and got lots of sleep.”

“…Yes.” Yan glanced up the hill, to where the ‘ship’ now rested. They had moved it closer to the village, and the sight of something so big and obviously heavy drifting above the trees like mist…

Vemik had pestered the sky-people into letting him travel inside it, and had said the view out the frozen-warm-ice ‘window’ was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen in his life. Jooyun had invited Yan to ride along as well but he had politely declined the offer; he liked the sky-people in the careful way he liked any friendly strangers, especially strange strangers…but the tribe always came first. He needed to stay a bit aloof, at least when he wasn’t in control of the meeting. Too bad, really. It sounded like fun.

The Sky-People had been no less strange after it had come down again. They had put it down among the pools of warm water north of the village, and Jooyun had spent several minutes picking among them for some reason.

When he had turned to Shyow and Awisun and declared “This one!” the two sky-women had seemed as pleased as if he’d lain a yshek at their feet for a courtship-hunt. Yan had no idea what was so exciting about a pool of hot water of all things.

“We’re going to get some rest ourselves,” Jooyun had announced, and the sky-people had vanished uphill again. Something about the way they walked…

Yan was, in his own way, just as curious as Vemik about things, even if he was better at hiding it. Which was why he went on a patrol after sunset. He caught Vemik at the edge of the village about to head off toward the ‘ship’ and the pools.

Yan gave him a knowing look. “Sky-thinker, you should be asleep.”

Vemik startled guiltily and immediately objected as only a young man caught doing something he shouldn’t could. “So should you! Jooyun says we’ll need your strength!”

Yan grinned mischievously in return. “Sky-thinker. Sleep. Now.”

Vemik sagged. “…Yes, Yan.” He slinked back into the village, grumbling unhappily.

Yan made sure that the young thinker was back in his hut before he nonchalantly slipped behind one of the small, young Ketta that grew up in the high-forest-place and circled around downwind of the pools, where the air tasted of especially bad farts.

Both moons were full that night, the air was still, and he heard sky-people voices easily enough. He stuck to the deep shadows under the trees and stepped only where he knew his feet and knuckles would make no sound. Hunting on a bright, still night wasn’t easy, but it could be done with practice.

Besides, he didn’t need to get within spear distance. He just wanted to see.

He followed the rhythmic sloshing sound and soft vocalisations as close as he dared, and…

Well. Awisun was certainly having fun, oh yes. So was Jooyun. They really were People, through and through. Strange, pale people but nothing more than that. And if that was their idea of a restful night’s sleep…

Smirking, he crept away and left them to enjoy themselves.

They seemed surprisingly fresh and alert in the morning, though Yan didn’t even have time to poke fun at Jooyun for it, because the steel-magic started at dawn.

Over the last hand of days, the whole village had been tasked to gather many different rocks and several different clays, and had gone rushing off on Vemet’s orders—backed by Yan’s leadership—to go find them. According to Jooyun they were lucky and everything they needed to make ‘Damascus steel’ was there, hiding in plain sight all around the village and the camp.

So, they gathered. They found a good workspace, one not too far from the stream but downriver from the village, and had stacked up the gathered rocks carefully.

Yan, meanwhile, had taken for himself the task of finding an ‘anvil’ like Jooyun had described. He walked far up the stream and eventually found a little fall where the gods had polished flat a black, glossy stone. It was almost too big for him to get his arms around and so heavy that he could hardly lift it, but it was exactly like Jooyun had said.

He spent the morning working it out of the muddy gravel, then the rest of the day wrestling it back to the village, cursing and aching all along the way. It was worth it, though—When he finally got it back, Jooyun had stood there with his mouth open in an astonished, lop-sided gape. [“Christ! The fuck you tryin’ to prove!?”]

Yan didn’t understand more than two of those words but he guessed that the comment was an approving one, so he grinned and did a maybe stupid thing by hoisting the ‘anvil’ above his head a few times with a cocky, pained grunt like it was a prize bull Werne. In a way it was.

They wedged it into place to make a flat surface to work on, and then Yan called it a day while everyone else bustled endlessly and did many things to prepare. He ate like he was famished and he drank two full skins of water. All his muscles hurt and the tribe left him to rest, slapping him on his shoulders in congratulations. He wasn’t complaining; three of the tribe’s prettiest women visited Yan’s hut that night and rubbed his aching body…

He didn’t get enough sleep and the next day was worse, because the first thing he discovered was that there had been a mistake. The women had finished building the ‘furnace,’ which was something like a tall, narrow, complicated pot with many holes and strange shapes that had to be done just so.

The shape was exactly like Jooyun had drawn on ‘paper’ with his ‘pencils,’ but when Jooyun had come down from the ship that morning he’d seemed surprised to find that it was as tall as him. Apparently, they’d made it too big.

He’d scratched his head at it for a while before shrugging. [“Well… okay,”] he declared. [“I guess we’re doing a really big melt, then.”]

Somehow that sounded like a good thing to Yan. But it made a lot more work.

The ‘furnace’ wasn’t the only thing they had to make. The men had to make ‘bellows’ which needed big Werne hides that were smoked, tanned, and then ‘soaped’ to keep them supple. They had to make that too, along with other things that Vemik could no doubt recite but which passed in a blur for Yan; lots of charcoal, ‘flux’ from ‘limestone,’ ‘gloves’ made of leather, ‘aprons’ made to protect skin from the promised fire. Split sheets of quartz to look through and protect the eyes from the heat of the fire. Whatever they were preparing for, it was clearly a mighty craft and one that needed giving- and taking-magic at the limit of what the tribe could do. And all of it was rushed; the Sky-People had to leave.

There was so much to do. Jooyun wasn’t lying, they really did need Yan’s strength and the demands on it were endless. It was back-tiring work and he wasn’t alone; the other men had to practice on the ‘bellows’ to Jooyun’s satisfaction if they weren’t tasked by Vemet or the Singer. They built a fire inside the furnace to bake it hard and dry. Then they scrubbed it free of any ash. Then they baked the gathered rocks, then let them cool, then smashed them small, and finally they stacked it all into the ‘furnace’ in exactly the right order.

“Remember all of this exactly,” Jooyun had said. “And practice all of it while we’re gone or you may lose the magic.”

That evening the Singer sat down with Jooyun and, over the course of a long conversation, made a very intricate biting on a thin piece of tree bark so the tribe would never forget what to do. He seemed to know he might be giving offense by guiding her in her craft, but like so much that had happened there were bigger problems at hand. For Sky-People, biting-sign wasn’t a giving-magic or a taking-magic, it was just another tool.

Of course, that attitude inspired Vemik as well. He tried his hand at a biting and some of the women immediately objected, but both the Singer and the Sky-Hunter intervened.

[“The men must remember too,”] Sky-Hunter intoned. [“Everything must be done carefully to get ‘steel.’ ‘Iron’ is easy but it’s not good for knives.”]

That more or less settled the issue and everyone grumbled and got over it. The next day the Singer sang and danced for good fortune, and everyone took an easy morning, and then…

And then they made fire. A fire such as Yan had never imagined. They made it slowly, so slowly that it took two whole days just to get it hot enough. It was a fire so hot that anything coming even close could burst into flame. So hot Yan couldn’t even look at it except through the sheet of quartz. And they had to pump those ’bellows’ all day and all night without stop until finally, finally after a long and exhausting night, Jooyun poked the clay plug at the bottom with a very long stick…

And out came fire, flowing like water and spitting like wet Therka-wood thrown into a campfire. Something like that. It was so much more than anything Yan had ever known.

For once, Yan indulged in a little Sky-Thinking, wondering how in the names of all the gods the Sky-People had first learned how to do this. This was a craft of wonders.

[“This is one of the hardest metals to make,”] Jooyun had said, [“And one of the best. If you can make this you can make almost any other.”]

Yan had asked about why they didn’t start with an easier thing, but Jooyun had said something about ‘ores’ and ‘smelting’ and honestly, that seemed like something for Vemik to understand.

Yan had other things to worry about. By the next morning the water-fire had cooled to the point where it could be picked up, like water freezing into ice. Yan hefted the big new blackish rock from its pit—it was so *heavy!*—and set it down on their rock-slab ‘table.’ Jooyun beat on it with a heavy rock to break off the ‘slag’ and there it was. Metal. ‘Iron’ as Jooyun had said. Everyone stared at its dark, shiny surface for a long while, reverently. They had made this.

Jooyun spoke and broke the spell. [“Well, that’s ‘iron.’ Next, we make our tools.”]

A second ‘furnace’ which didn’t get as hot as the other had been built right next to the slab-rock. It was open on the side and things could be taken out of it when needed. Used less charcoal, too. The metal was loaded onto the top of glowing-red charcoal and the bellows were worked again until the lump was glowing dull orange. Jooyun used long, fire-blackened sticks to quickly pull the lump onto the slab. The sticks burst into flame but they lasted just long enough to do the job.

He then picked up the big hammering-rock and slammed it down into the glowing hot ‘iron.’ To Yan’s great surprise, it dented almost like firm clay, but Jooyun didn’t stop at hitting it once: He kept beating on the metal without stop until it was thinner and longer while Yan and Vemik watched, fascinated. Yan had to admire the sky-man for his tenacity. Jooyun was weaker than any one of the People, even the women, but he just kept going like…like the monster in children’s stories. As if there was nothing that could stop him. As if he didn’t know how to stop.

He sweated all over, too. They already knew that about the sky-people, even the cool and calm Shyow had an all-over sheen on muggy days, but pretty soon Jooyun was covered in a beading shine that soaked his strange hair and ran down his limbs.

Any man of the People who got that sweaty would be on the edge of falling down, but Jooyun’s worst discomfort seemed to come from the raw leather ‘apron’ they had made, rather than any real tiredness. The ground around his feet drank up the little dark spots that rained from him, his breath settled into a steady rhythm, and his arm fell in step with it, rising and falling and every time it fell the impact of rock on ‘metal’ sent a sharp sound stabbing through Yan’s ears.

The Sky-Hunter stopped only once to politely request some water. Yemik gave him his skin and watched, awestruck, as Jooyun downed the entire thing in a single long but quick series of gulps and then picked up the rock again and kept on pounding as though he hadn’t paused.

By the time Jooyun was happy the lump had changed its character. It was somehow even hotter and glowed as bright as sunset, hotter and brighter than Yan could look at. Seeming pleased with himself, Jooyun paused and caught his breath. [“…Okay.”] He panted, and swiped a handful of water off his forehead before flicking the drops away. [“Now we gotta make the most important tool. You’ll want to watch me carefully.”]

He made tools. Lots of tools. They started off simple—a sharp spike, a round peg—but each new one he made was then used to make a new tool, which in turn made another tool. By sunset, Jooyun had made two hands of different tools, each with a special job and each with special names. ‘Punch,’ ‘drift,’ ‘pin’ and others.

The most important, he explained, were the ‘tongs’ and those were the first completely new thing Yan saw him make. They had a ‘hinge’ in the middle and made it easy to pick up things that were very hot and very heavy. They snapped together like a Tatrak’s claws, and Jooyun worked them a few times with a grin, obviously pleased with himself. [“Got it done in one day! We should be good to start tomorrow, if you want.”]

Yan couldn’t contain himself. “Start?!“ The idea that every back-breaking moment of the last two days and all that relentless exertion had only just got them to the start was…

Jooyun rolled his shoulders, rubbing at his well-used muscles. He seemed amused in an exhausted way. “I told you, good tools are hard to make. Next we beat the ‘carbon’ out of that metal and make ‘wrought iron,’ and then we need to ‘refine’ it to ‘steel’ for the knives, and then—”

“He’s already made wonders, Yan,” Vemik pointed out in response to Yan’s incredulous look and reverentially took the ‘tongs’ from Jooyun. “I wonder if…”

Before anyone could stop him, Vemik bounced over to the pile of rocks they’d crushed to make steel, picked one up with the ‘tongs,’ squeezed, and grinned when the rock exploded in its jaws in a puff of white dust and sharp splinters.

Jooyun’s smile got wider. “Your first ‘machine,’ Vemik!”

Yan tasted the word. “Ma-chine. Means what?”

“Means… a thing for doing things you can’t. Or for making things you can do, easier. Anyway, simple machines are for later. Tomorrow, I think…yeah. Tomorrow we make knives.”

Date Point 12y6m3w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Singer

The Singer knew that it was best to sleep when the baby slept, but right now getting the baby to sleep in the first place was hard work. The constant sound and smoke of the ‘steel’-magic made her grumpy, so she would suckle only half-heartedly and make grumpy noises for a long while before she could be persuaded to suckle again, and only fell asleep reluctantly.

Once asleep though, she slept just fine through the loud noise and bustle of the men, which was an opportunity for the Singer to leave her with one of the older women who had more experience with babies, and get some much-needed sleep in the low branches of the largest Ketta near the high-forest-place village.

She slept only fitfully. The sound of Jooyun striking the ‘metal’ over and over again kept her on edge.

She dreamed of blue fire and a knife made of the sky, and woke to find that Awisun and Shyow had chosen to take a nap too, leaning against each other at the base of her tree. Everybody was tired right now, even the sky-people.

She considered the two women for a long time before deciding that her sharp, Vemik-like curiosity was too much to endure and dropped from the branch to land a few steps away from them.

Shyow, apparently, was a light sleeper. She woke up almost before the Singer’s feet touched the earth, and gave her a warm though exhausted smile. “Is everything alright?”

The Singer wrung her tail nervously in her hands without really noticing. She liked and respected the sky-people, but something about them made her afraid and nervous.

“I was dreaming about…Things.”

“I dream too,” Shyow nodded, then glanced fondly at Awisun who was still snoring faintly. “All the time. Always strange dreams, too. Never anything… safe.”

Her use of the People’s words was easy and confident, and the words didn’t even seem to fit strangely in her mouth the way some Engwish words tried to slip sideways between the Singer’s teeth

“That’s bad magic…”

“Mm. The sky-thinkers back home say it’s because I was hurt badly once. One of the Big Enemies used a powerful weapon on me, and it left a mark…” she trailed her fingers down the horrific scars on her arm. The Singer had to wonder what kind of medicine had kept her alive. A man with wounds like that would have seen the arm go black and stinking before the rot killed him.

“You don’t speak about your home much…” the Singer ventured. She finally noticed that she was playing with the end of her tail and tucked it aside as she sat down. “This… place-under-another-sky.”

They both jumped when Awisun spoke. Neither of them had noticed her wake.

Awisun’s attitude always intimidated the Singer a little. Cautious. Always watchful. Coiled like a man’s arm before he threw his spear, that was Awisun. It had taken work to see the softer, caring person underneath, the one who was only so tense because she was afraid for the People… but that didn’t change the fact that she had released a torrent of taking-magic on the death-birds. It was hard not to be scared of a woman like that.

“We call it ‘The Earth.’” she said.

“Thyurth?”

[“The. Earth.”] Shyow spoke carefully and clearly. “‘Earth’ means… well, the ground under our feet. The soil that plants grow in. This.” Xiù reached down and scraped up a handful of dirt. “But our place-under-another-sky is called the Earth.”

The Singer considered that at length, then nodded. “A good name. Powerful magic in it.”

“It’s… a strange place in some ways,” Shyow mused, gazing thoughtfully off toward where the men were doing inscrutable things with fire and stone. “I think we… beat it.”

[“Julian wouldn’t agree,”] Awisun remarked, then snorted and said something strange in a singsong way. [“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”]

Shyow gave her a look, the kind of fond impatient one that the Singer aimed at Vemik herself quite often. Awisun shrugged. [“He wouldn’t,”] she repeated.

Shyow glanced over at the forge. [“Well, yeah…but it’s not like here. If a woman dies while having a baby, it’s… And if a child dies, I mean, that’s super rare now on Earth.”]

[“Not in most countries,”] Awisun said.

[“I know, but you remember what we felt in San Francisco don’t you? That whole… I don’t know… that whole soft feeling.”]

[“You’re the one who said that wasn’t a nice thing to think.”]

[“Yeah, it’s not. But you were still right…”]

Their Engwish was getting too dense for the Singer to follow, and she said so. “You’ve left me behind…”

“Sorry, sorry…” Shyow apologized, and sighed. “The Earth is…A lot like here. But…this place is like a part of the forest where no village has stood. On Earth, almost all places have villages.”

”Big villages,” Awisun added. “Made of stone and steel, where so many people live that they don’t all know each other.”

“Why leave?” The Singer asked. “It sounds…why would you come here?”

“Because, ummm…” Shyow trailed off, but Awisun stepped into the gap.

[“Tell her about Mount Everest.”]

[“Right! Yes.”] Shyow nodded then looked thoughtful for a moment before speaking. “There’s a big mountain on Earth,” she said. “So tall that you’re almost above the sky at the top. A few people die every year trying to climb it, even though others have done it before.”

“Then… why climb it?” the Singer asked, genuinely confused.

Awisun shrugged and used the People’s words for once. “Because it’s there.” Her faint smile looked almost like an apology.

“That’s…” The Singer couldn’t think of a word. There was probably one in Engwish, but if she’d tried to make the thought in People-Words she would have run out of breath first. It sounded wrong, like the kind of idea a man might have after taking a hard blow to the head.

“It’s a ‘challenge,’ you see.” Awisun added.

“Challenge means what?”

“Something difficult that you do anyway because it’s difficult,” Shyow explained.

“…Like the trial our men go through to become men…” the Singer saw. “Then… you are taking something like a trial of manhood all the time? Why? Life is difficult enough!”

[“Not on Earth it isn’t,”] Allison said. [“Not for a lot of us. Xiù’s right, we beat the Earth.”]

“You can get so good at sky-thinking that life gets easy?”

Shyow nodded. “It gets too easy. And if things are too easy, you get weak and soft.”

“You make sky-thinking sound like a trap.”

Shyow nodded again, but more solemnly this time. “It can be.”

The Singer found that she’d subconsciously started playing with the end of her own tail for comfort again, and let go of it. “…Can I ask you something?” she asked, deciding that she didn’t want to hear more about softness and ‘challenge’ for now. Those were big thoughts for later.

Both of them gestured for her to ask.

“You…you’ve shared taking-magic with the men, this steel of yours. Do you have any giving-magic for the women? It would help Yan persuade the women of the other tribes to join us…”

Awisun and Shyow both looked deeply uncomfortable at the idea.

“Giving you even that was, um,…difficult,” Shyow said, slowly. “And very dangerous.”

“If you give us nothing but taking-magic, the balance will be gone!” the Singer wrung her tail again until it almost hurt. “The men will have power that the women can’t answer, that’s…you can’t…”

“Is it just a taking-magic?” Shyow asked. “I know the men are doing all the work now, but the women were doing a lot earlier…”

“It’s… I don’t know,” the Singer confessed. “But it feels like a taking-magic.” She glanced back at the ‘forge’ again and watched Jooyun hammer relentlessly at the metal while both Yan and Vemik tended to the fire and kept out of his way. The magic felt very…male. There was nothing feminine about it.

That by itself was maybe fine. Maybe. But seeing Yan listening like an eager child at an elder hunter’s feet while Jooyun explained something about the work was…

She was glad that the sky-women had told her to be afraid. She knew now just how honest they were being.

“…Yes,” she decided. “It’s a taking-magic. A powerful one. And I trust my uncle and I love Vemik, but they’re just men, and too much taking-magic makes men forget themselves. I need something to help them stay balanced.”

“I don’t think we can give you that…” Shyow said at last. “I think…I think that’s your ‘challenge,’ Singer. We can’t do it for you.”

“…I guessed you would say that,” the Singer sighed. “But…”

She wanted to argue, or cry, something, but instead she sighed again and gave up. The Sky-People spoke with such strength about how terrible the danger was. Part of her wanted to not believe them at all, but it was clear that they knew every word was true.

She caught herself playing with her tail again and finally gave up and let herself do it for a while, if it made her feel better. “…I wish the Old Singer was still here,” she confessed. “I know she would have seen what to do.”

“You’re still young, aren’t you?” Shyow asked.

“I only took my trial of manhood and had my tattoos only a hand of seasons ago. I’ve had only one child. The Old Singer hadn’t finished teaching me, I…I don’t—”

To her surprise, Awisun—the Sky-Storm, a woman with more taking-magic than Yan,—scooted forward and gave her exactly the kind of comforting hug that the Old Singer had used to give in times like these.

[“It’s okay,”] she said. [“We don’t know what we’re doing either.”]

Her words shouldn’t have been comforting at all.

But they were.

Date Point 12y6m3w1d AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

The work, which had seemed so tiring and so unending before, now actually began.

Yan learned more words under Sky-Hunter’s tutelage. ‘Refining,’ ‘forging,’ ‘quenching,’ reheating, ‘tempering,’ folding the hot metal. ‘Laminating’ by beating a chunk with the hammering-rock until it was thin, then folding it over and starting again, all while holding the fire-hot metal steady with one hand using the ‘tongs.’ It took days of work that somehow taxed even Yan’s prodigious strength and certainly tested his endurance.

All of that only resulted in something knife-shaped. Jooyun called them ‘blanks.’

More words. ‘Grinding,’ ‘bluing’ to ‘retemper’ the metal, ‘honing’ on a ‘whetstone,’ carefully reheating and hammering to ‘furrow’ the knife and shape its ‘profile.’ Slowly, the blades grew shinier, keener, stronger.

The work took its toll on everybody. Vemik would grind away and Yan worked himself exhausted beating on the metal while Jooyun kept the furnace fed and supervised their work, but the rest of the Tribe was just as busy. Doing this one thing was a trial for all of them. Vemet was so busy keeping the rest of the men working together that he lost weight and worried himself sleepless.

Thank the gods for the Singer and the women. The Singer even went on a hunt, an unthinkable prospect in more familiar times but she alone of all the women had done it before. Only she had the taking-magic as well as the giving-magic.

She brought back a good kill, too, and seemed… happier, somehow. As though something that had been troubling her wasn’t quite so heavy for now.

It was all worth it, though. All of it. Yan learned the answers to questions that even Vemik had never thought to ask, and at the end of it all he was left holding something…

Beautiful. Truly, perfectly beautiful. So much so that he spent half a morning’s good light just admiring his handiwork. The blade shone like water and had ripples and waves that seemed to flow as one tilted it this way or that. The edge was so fine that when he held it in the best possible light and looked down the blade it was as if the metal blended into nothing.

They even somehow managed to make Jooyun’s own blade seem somehow… dull.

Jooyun was just as pleased. “You’ll want to take very good care of those, the way I told you,” he suggested. “In some ways they’re maybe better than mine.”

He was examining the blades with a different kind of look on his face. Not awe, or wonder, but something else. Something that began with pride. He looked up and waved at his women, gesturing for them to come and see.

Awisun made that funny shrill noise she sometimes made by pursing her lips when she saw them.

[“Damn! Shit, if the People ever need some dollars they could clean up selling these. Real collector’s pieces.”]

Jooyun raised one of his eyebrows and wiped some soot off his face, but said nothing. Shyow’s face, however, went even paler than usual. [ “We are NOT teaching them the concept of money!”] she said. Yan didn’t understand the important words there, but her alarm was obvious.

“Mun-ee…” Vemik mused. [“What does that mean?”]

“Nuh-uh, friend of mine,” Jooyun shook his head firmly, though there was that faint amused smile around his mouth. The sky-people said many things with their faces. “That’s dangerous magic and you really don’t need it yet.”

How could something be both amusing and dangerous at the same time? Yan wrestled with the question in his head for a heartbeat and then decided not to worry too much. The Sky-People were strange, there was no sense in trying to figure out everything about them.

[“Well, it’s about time you finished, anyway,”] Awisun said. [“Because we’re gonna have to break into the bugs and peanut butter if we stay any longer.”]

[“Besides, you stink,”] Shyow added. Yan knew that word—it meant something like ‘tastes bad’ but with their face-holes instead of their tongues.

“…That means you’re leaving,” Vemik realized. All the triumph and pride he had in what they had just done vanished: he gave the sky-people a pleading stare. “Aren’t you?”

Jooyun knelt down in front of him and put a hand on his shoulder. “We have to. Our people don’t know you’re here. We have to tell them, or else not even steel and uniting the tribes will be enough.”

“But… you will come back?” Vemik asked. He sounded more like a boy than a man to Yan’s ears, but then again Yan himself was fighting to keep his strength. Somehow, even though they were strange, the sky-people’s presence was… comforting. They seemed to know the shape of the days to come, and without them to help him see the way…

“We won’t lie to you, Vemik. We can’t promise that,” Shyow said. “But yes, we will if we can. We will probably have to fight with words and thoughts when we get home, and fight hard.”

Yan grunted. He’d expected that things wouldn’t be simple. He summoned the best of the Engwish he had learned and spoke carefully and slower. [“Then…] the Sky-People [fight good. We fight too.”] He sensed Shyow’s nervousness and gave her his friendliest snarl. [“With words, if we can.”]

Jooyun stood up. “We will, Yan. I promise.”

Yan nodded, and returned to the People’s words. They fit his mouth better. “I know you worry. This is powerful magic you’ve given us, I can see it too. We’ll…try to use it well.”

He’d made many promises in his life, and had meant every single one of them. Promises were sacred, after all. They weren’t made lightly. This one, though, somehow went beyond a promise and beyond sacred. He wasn’t making a promise at all, really: He was making a prediction.

There was some awkward standing-around for a few seconds before Awisun finally cleared her throat.

[“Guys…I don’t wanna go either. But the sooner we do, the sooner we come back.”]

Jooyun and Shyow both seemed to come out of a trance of kinds. They nodded unhappily, looked around, and then back up the slope toward their ship.

“You’ll come to see us leave?” Shyow asked.

Yan nodded. “Yes.”

The whole village did. Mostly it was out of curiosity—the Sky-People were trusted and liked thanks to Yan’s acceptance of them but they were still strangers, still strange. People like that needed watching. Caution demanded it.

Besides, a chance to watch their steel hut fly again—!

Yan was even more in awe of it now that he had the smallest inkling of just how much work must have gone into making it. To make that much steel alone was beyond what his tribe could ever do, and he knew in his breath that the steel was probably just the smallest and easiest part of making a hut fly.

Except that this time, it didn’t fly at all. The sky-people said their goodbyes solemnly, vanished inside, and there was a long silence. The moment when the ‘ship’ whined deep like a wounded Yshek made everybody jump and step away nervously. The whining built up to a rumbling growl, and then with a thunder and a short-lived gale, rather than leaping into the sky the impossible thing flashed as black as the moonless sky and simply vanished as if it had never been.

If not for the depressions in the earth where its feet had sat, the whole tribe might have felt as though they were waking from a strange kind of dream. They stood there for a long moment, weighing the gravity of what they had been given.

Yan finally broke the silence by grunting and turning back towards the forge.

“Come on,” he said. “We still have work to do.”

Date Point 12y6m3w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Kirk

“Okay. Coltainer version oh-point-nine-seven-five. And if we’re lu…”

“Don’t say it, you’ll jinx it!”

Kirk shot a sideways glance at the man who’d urgently interrupted the test run. It had always interested him how Human superstitions managed to influence everybody in their society, even their most devoted rationalists, futurists and engineers. Crossed fingers, little rituals, never saying the word “luck.”

Sergeant Lee nodded apologetically, though. As though the objection was a perfectly logical one. “Right. Sorry. Beginning test.”

Lewis’ original vision of the device had literally been a colony in a container, hence ‘coltainer.’ The modern incarnation exceeded that simplistic brief in every way. It was a scout, a probe, a scientific instrument, a mapping tool, and a kind of hyper-macroscopic interstellar vaccine.

Its ability to identify viable colonization sites from orbit and deploy a series of automated assembly devices that would literally ‘print’ a basic complex out of local materials was almost an afterthought. It was certainly…crude. Humans had never designed a system like that which could work all by itself with no intelligent operator’s control. The massive shortcomings in its design and capabilities were compensated for by the certain knowledge that any temperate world was so large as to guarantee that somewhere on the planet would have exactly the right conditions and resources.

Kirk would have preferred something more sophisticated, something that took full advantage of the best the Dominion species could produce, but the arguments against were just too good. This needed to be a Human project as much as it could, for everybody’s sake. Nobody else had the imagination to exhaustively think about all the horrible ways in which something like the coltainer could go wrong. Everybody else’s technology was too badly compromised by Hierarchy influence.

So, so what if humans needed their rituals? So what if they filled their work with elaborate attempts to imbue the finished product with good fortune? Kirk was used to it, even if it did make him think that they must constantly be expecting the worst possible outcome. That paranoia where they expected the worst every time and then prayed for the best actually resulted in an efficient, mostly error-free development process.

Which went some way toward explaining why Lewis’ ludicrously overambitious coltainer idea had actually borne a kind of fruit within a mere two years.

It was strange to reflect that in all that time, only three people on the station had never taken any “shore leave.” Kirk and Vedreg were both exiles, trapped in the safety of the Erebor system by the threat of Hierarchy assassins, and Lewis…

Lewis seemed to have no interest in seeing Earth ever again. It was a sticking point in his relationship with Sergeant Campbell. Under her tutelage he’d developed something that resembled an actual deathworlder physique but he still detested exercise and was perfectly adamant that nobody but Lucy Campbell could have got him into the gym.

For her part, she seemed to have a knack for playing him like an instrument. The best way to bring Lewis around on a subject was via his girlfriend.

Usually, though, Lewis was the one doing the bringing-around. He was easily the most intelligent being on the station and seemed to have the coltainer blueprint memorized right down to the individual diode.

But going back to Earth even for a visit was a sticking point with him, usually. He’d always been adamant that there was nothing for him on humanity’s homeworld.

That was, until the news filtered through that Misfit had returned from its exploration mission. His sudden new and unprecedented interest in visiting the Earth had not impressed Campbell, who had hitherto been forced to take her shore leave without him and was understandably unimpressed that three estranged friends could lure him where his girlfriend couldn’t.

The argument had kept people awake.

“I told you, first moment I hear Julian and the girls are back, *that*‘s when I head over there, didn’t I?” he whispered. “I’m sure I told her before too. She said she was fine with it.”

“Lewis, is now really the time?”

“Yeah but, dude, Lucy’s all mad at me and—”

“Lewis, your literal life’s work is on the verge of completion. Can it not wait?”

Lewis shot a disinterested glance at the stream of data flowing back from the probe. “It’ll work. Angry girlfriend, more important.”

“And why come to me?” Kirk sighed. “I have repeatedly said that human romance is a subject I do not touch.”

“Dude. Makes you the most qualified man in this can.”

“That makes no sense at all.”

“Dude. Means you don’t crap it up by trying to give me an opinion and shit. I can just unload on you. Bore the ass offa you maybe, but…” Lewis shot a cheeky grin upwards at him, and Kirk rolled his eyes.

“So you do not actually want an opinion?” He asked.

“…I mean, it’d be fuckin’ interesting to hear you finally share one, but mostly I just need somebody to listen while I get my head-filing done.” Lewis kicked his toe idly into the deck. “‘Sides, I know what you’re thinkin’.”

“Do you.”

“You’re thinkin’ she’s completely right and I’ve treated her like ass over this.”

“Am I.”

“Nobody’s fooled, dude.”

“Aren’t they.”

“Dude.”

That particular word could mean literally anything, Kirk had learned. He was a dude, Lucy was a dude, the whole team were dudes, as was the station. The coltainer was a dude as was any particular volumetric display or screen Lewis happened to be viewing. An unexpected gust from an air vent had once been “dude.” Then there was the way it could mean practically anything, beyond just referring to somebody or something. A whole conversation seemed to be possible just from nuances of stress and expression while saying nothing but that word.

This particular nuance meant “come on, quit yankin’ me around” so Kirk relented a bit.

“You want my opinion? The literal salvation of your species is in final testing stages, but you are worried about an argument with your romantic partner. I think your priorities are skewed,” he said.

“Dude. The fuck is the point of having a future if you aren’t gonna get laid?”

Kirk snorted and shook his mane, not taking his eyes off the volumetric readout of the test’s progress.

“I know that snort. That’s your ‘not-my-problem’ snort.”

“Is it.”

”Dude.”

Kirk sighed and unwound. He swung his head around at the end of his long neck and spared Lewis some more attention. “Lewis, it is entirely probable that I will never ‘get laid’ in my life. It is less of a concern for my species than for yours, we don’t work the same way,” he said. “I do not share my thoughts on these things because I am not qualified, not out of stubbornness.”

“Bullshit. You’re a thinkin’ sapient and you’re good with knowin’ people and what they want. That’s, like… ninety percent of it.”

“Well, you have already said what you think, so what do you need my opinion for?”

“Dude.”

“That was your ‘I-don’t-have-a-good-reply’ dude.”

Lewis chuckled. “Was it?”

Kirk crackled a laugh too, and finally turned his full attention to Lewis for a few seconds. “You said it yourself. She is right and you treated her like ass. You already know this. You just want to hear somebody say it.”

“…Yeah.”

Sergeant Lee called over his shoulder. “Hey, Beverote! If you’re done conspiring over there, we’ve got the results in from NAVTAP.”

“It worked, right?” Lewis called.

“Perfectly.”

“LOCS?”

“Definitely ready for testing on an actual temperate world.”

Lewis turned back to Kirk. “Think that’s your cue, dude.”

Kirk nodded, and called up his own contribution to the project - a map of every known deathworld in a kiloparsec radius of the Erebor system.

It wasn’t a complete map, not by a broad margin. On that kind of scale, the ultra-high-definition Kwmbwrw designed volumetric display was showing clusters of stars as points of light, rather than individual systems, and temperate worlds were few and far between. In a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, even the most optimistic estimate for temperate, life-bearing worlds with nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres and a liquid water cycle was in the low millions at most. The Dominion’s cartographers reckoned that a quarter of them at most had actually been charted.

Still. Hundreds of thousands of suitable worlds was by no standard a small number, and Kirk had spent months poring over known candidates in their vicinity for the day—which had finally arrived—when a Coltainer would need testing on a candidate planet.

“This one,” he said, selecting the icon that surrounded a cluster, and zooming down until he could select the star and then the planet. “It’s a class ten, far from any major spacelanes, not claimed by any species, not known to have a native population… it doesn’t even have a proper name, just coordinates.”

“Sounds good. You gonna name it, dude?”

“I thought ‘Gambit’ seemed appropriate…”

“I dunno. Naming it after an X-Men character?” Lewis shook his head.

“I would be hard pressed to identify an English noun, verb or adjective that has not been the name of at least one character somewhere in your fiction, Lewis,” Kirk grumbled, but he had anticipated this. “Kirktopia, then.”

“Dude.”

Kirk snorted a laugh and ventured a serious proposal. “New Enewetak.”

Lewis frowned at him, but Sergeant Lee nodded enthusiastically. ”Good name,” he declared.

“This is goin’ over my head here…” Lewis complained.

“Enewetak Atoll. Where they tested Ivy Mike?” Lee prompted. Lewis gave him a blank shake of the head. “The hydrogen bomb?”

“Oh! Shit, well, yeah. That works.”

“Then we have our name,” Kirk decided.

“Good. The next testing cycle’s in one month, if Nadeau gets the go-ahead from AEC. You gonna take Campbell and hit up Earth for a bit?” Lee asked. “‘Cuz, friendly hint. The answer is yes.”

“Yeah. Absolutely,” Lewis agreed.

“And not just to catch up with your friends, man.”

“Dude, I hear ya.”

“Cool.”

They sat and watched the probe run through its refinery test run. That process, Kirk knew, had been difficult to achieve. Smelting asteroids down and distilling out all of the elements they carried had required not only the ability for the probe to generate an intricate alchemical laboratory out of nothing but forcefields, but also use those forcefields to alternately heat and cool the ore as it passed through the process.

It was surprisingly efficient, thanks to the fact that forcefields could be made to both emit and absorb heat, so most of the energy that went into the process was recycled, but thermodynamics had some stern views on the subject of free lunches. Even with every energy-saving trick they’d been able to conceive of, the refinery process still demanded that the probe relocate to an inner-system orbit and gorge itself on solar radiation.

It was probably a beautiful process to watch in person, though. Looping flows of molten ore and cooling ingots of raw material would be describing tight orbits around the probe while the waste products were vented as a tiny incandescent nebula that cooled to invisibility within seconds. Unfortunately, all they had to see the process by was a stream of diagnostic reports and the station’s remote sensors, and those had to be careful not to be dazzled by the star.

It took surprisingly little time, and the process wasn’t even half complete before the probe’s nanofactory began to spit out the components necessary to build its own doppelganger.

Lee shifted in his seat, and Kirk tried to gauge if he was feeling proud or uncomfortable. Quite possibly both. “Well…Congratulations guys. We did it,”he said at last. “Looks like we’ve built a working Von Neumann probe.”

“You think we’ll be remembered well for it?” Lewis asked.

Lee rubbed his jaw as he watched the probe cozy up to its half-assembled progeny like a mother whale nursing her calf.

“…I fucking hope so,” he said.

Date Point 12y7m AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

“You had clear and specific instructions!”

Special Agent Darcy really didn’t strike Xiù as a woman prone to anger, and there was a…restrained quality to her anger even now. As if she was more disappointed than angry.

Not that they didn’t deserve it, maybe, but Xiù was feeling sick and weak for lack of sleep and she knew that the other two were just as bad. Returning Misfit to Omaha via Cimbrean, the customs inspection, clearing things with the military, and all the rest of it…

The only half-decent sleep she’d achieved had been before the final jump to Sol and the re-entry down over the Pacific and Continental USA, and that had been a mere four hours of dreaming that she was lying there awake. It hadn’t been restful at all.

Darcy had been waiting for them. Byron Group had apparently called her up the second they took the ship’s multiple hardened drives away for transport not only to the Group’s holdings on Cimbrean, but also back through the relay for the attention of Allied Extrasolar Command, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Global Representative Assembly.

*Misfit*‘s systems weren’t even cooled down yet, the ship was still safely discharging all its stored power back into the municipal power grid ahead of a full systems maintenance and replacement cycle, and Darcy was simmering at them from across a table, apparently on the cool verge of boiling over.

She didn’t look like she’d had much sleep either.

“At the first sign, I said! The first sign of Hierarchy activity, your job was to get the hell back in touch and tell Kevin about it and wait for instructions!”

Allison, of course, was fighting back. She would have been even if she hadn’t been irritable after three days of non-stop work. “They were literally under attack! We had drones all over us while we were there!” she shot. “We couldn’t just—”

“Miss Buehler, you had weeks.” Darcy snarled. *”Misfit*‘s jump drive could have had you back at Cimbrean in a moment, and back on that planet again in two hours, so do not dare to bullshit me.”

She glared into Allison’s eyes with such fierce force that Xiù had a sudden ridiculous mental image of lightning bolts crackling between them, and she had to suppress the inappropriate urge to giggle. Allison backed down.

“We won’t. It was a judgement call.”

“A judgement call that you had no right to make and which went completely against the instructions you were given!”

“We are not military assets,” Julian informed her. Fatigue was deepening his voice to a glacial growl. “We agreed to cooperate with you, but we’re not under your employ, and you have no right to order us, instruct us, threaten us, or cajole us. We answer to Byron and his orders explicitly required us to explore.”

Darcy rested her knuckles on the table and leaned forward. “I can make Byron’s life hell if I want to,” she warned.

“Darcy.”

Kevin Jenkins was the only one in the room who looked well-rested but he had so far been leaning silently in the corner with his arms folded, listening. Now he kicked away from the wall and swayed upright.

“You’re pissed. I get it. I’m kinda pissed about it myself, and so’s the boss. But making Byron’s life hell ain’t gonna help,” he said. “He will pull out if you act a horse’s ass, and then you lose the only experienced exploration team the entire human race has put together so far. You have no right to threaten anybody here, and you know it.”

Darcy spared a glare for him. ”Et tu, Brute?”

“You’re damn fuckin’ straight,” Jenkins drawled. “You’re outta line. Now, we’ll talk this out but Etsicitty’s right; the Byron Group is cooperating with you, not obeying you. We don’t take our marchin’ orders from you, ‘cuz this ain’t a fuckin’ dictatorship.”

“We were faced with the death of a people.” Xiù said, quietly. They all seemed to remember she was there and went still to listen. “Leaving would have made it worse. Staying would have made it worse. Anything at all we could have done at any point had a downside. Giving them steel could kill them all! But what should we have done?” She looked Darcy in the eye. “They’re on the edge. Any little tiny thing could kill them off, Hierarchy or not. The only moral choice, as we saw it, was to give them the tools to save themselves.”

Darcy’s expression was so cold it could have condensed the air, but she didn’t venture a reply as she turned it on the three of them each in turn. None of them so much as flinched.

In the end she glanced at Jenkins again, then picked up her briefcase. “…Kevin, I’ll talk with you later,” she said, and let herself out.

When she had left, Kevin let out a big breath and shook his head sadly. “I believe y’all may have just cost that lady her job,” he said, slowly.

“I think she just cost herself her job, threatening Byron like that.” Allison folded her arms. “Aren’t spooks meant to keep their cool?”

“She ain’t a spook, she’s an analyst, but…” Kevin shrugged. “Reading between the lines, she’s staked her reputation on risky propositions more’n once. Guess it’s finally come to bite her in the ass.”

“Risky propositions?” Julian asked. ”You backed us too.”

“Yeah, and about that.” Kevin grabbed a chair, turned it so that it was facing away from the table and straddled it backwards, resting his arms on its back. “God dammit guys, I know you know you’ve rolled a fuckin’ heavy dice here.”

Julian nodded solemnly. “Yeah. We know. And it sucks.”’

“You really, really believe that you couldn’t have spared two hours to come back here and squeeze off a burst transmission? Couldn’t have asked for backup, for any kind of oversight?”

Allison had her legs crossed, and she knocked irritably on her boot in response to that. “At the time we were trying not to get our heads literally ripped off by a talking cartoon gorilla with a foot-tall, candy-red, head-to-tail Mohawk. And a spear. And inch-long fangs. Sound like fun?” she asked.

Kevin had clearly learned a few things about patience, because he let the jab’s tone slide and focused on the content instead.

“For a whole three months? Surely these gorilla-guys sleep sometime?”

Julian sighed. “Okay. Look. Let’s walk through it, okay? Meet Yan. He’s scary as fuck, and he’s distrustful, and he’s got a tribe to protect. We’ve got a clear and present threat we need to communicate to them. We can’t assume we’ll be able to leave and re-establish any kind of…fuck, anything. The entire thing was a goddamned freak accident from the word go. We had to calm the situation down before we could so much as walk away and that took hours. You think it wouldn’t have hurt that rapport if we’d just got back in the ship and gone?”

“Julian. I ain’t talkin’ about much here. I’m talkin’ about you couldn’t have fired off that jump drive, got in touch, and gone straight back in the middle of the night sometime?” Kevin pressed. “That still woulda gone against what you agreed to do, but it woulda covered your asses, y’know?”

“We only had one jump beacon left,” Allison pointed out. “Because we left the others at explored worlds as per our orders, Kevin. We wouldn’t have been able to come back without stranding ourselves. We knew coming back would mean refit and resupply, and downtime, and… well, this woulda happened. ‘Cept now, you’d be angry at us for not doing what we did do, so how ‘bout we cut the goddamn bullshit here?”

Kevin rubbed a hand down his face. “Guys…There is every fuckin’ chance that you’re gonna go down in history as the ultimate cultural destroyers here. The history books might remember you three as pure fuckin’ evil, okay? I am on your side here!”

“Or they could remember us the other way ‘round. We’re fucked either way.”

“And do you really think Moses wants to play with a hot potato like that? Shit, it’s gonna take every trick in my book for me to stop him from firing your asses! Play it wrong and he might fire me too!”

“Y’know what?” Julian snarled, “What the fuck did he think was gonna happen when he commissioned a goddamned exploration team? This was always gonna happen, and if he’s too fuckin’ full of himself to see that then what the fuck are we even doing? News flash of the fuckin’ century: first contact always sucks. My grandpa’s people know that firsthand. Don’t you dare think for one goddamned second I ain’t been thinkin’ on that!”

Xiù touched him on the arm, and that little gesture kept Julian seated. The hostility crackling over the table stuttered and dissipated.

Kevin was the first to settle down again. “…I’m on your side,” he repeated, resting his elbows on the table with a defeated set to his shoulders. “Really guys, I am. But we ain’t talkin’ about facts and hard choices and difficult truths here, we’re talking about public opinion, and there ain’t nothin’ more fickle.”

Julian gave him the most disgusted look Xiu had ever seen him wear. “Fuck public opinion. I don’t care what people think when the stakes are the survival of a sapient species.”

“You really think we’re gonna save them without public opinion on our side?”

“If they’re so terrified of offending, or trampling, or whatever the fuck you’re worried about…then it wouldn’t matter, ‘cuz we wouldn’t have the will to act in the first place.”

Kevin shook his head. “Will to act is a resource. You can farm it. We’re gonna have to farm it. ‘Cuz you guys are forgetting that hardly anybody outside this room even knows about the Hierarchy! How’re we gonna convince folks that these guys need our help if we can’t even say what they’re in danger from?”

“Are you—?” Allison’s tone was incredulous. “Stop. Listen. They are going to die if we do not intervene. Full. Stop. End of fucking discussion. Everything else is goddamned secondary!”

“And that don’t matter a bent nickel to folks like Byron!”

Julian slouched back in his seat with an expression like chained murder and folded his arms. “Then he better find his fuckin’ humanity or fire us,” he declared, slowly and evenly. There were frozen spikes of contempt hanging from every syllable, which somehow made it worse than if he’d snapped or shouted. “‘Cuz I think we’ve said all we can say.”

“Or we can make it in his best interest.” Kevin sat back too, though his body language was more open, more bargaining. “I don’t like it. I hate it. I hate that this is even a conversation we’re having. If we lived in a world with any fuckin’ ethics to it then we’d be pilin’ stuff onto the ship right now to go help these people, but that just ain’t how folks really work. People will go to war over their neighbor’s tree droppin’ leaves on their lawn, while kids starve to death in Africa, okay? That is what we’re fuckin’ up against here, that whole stupid parochial bullshit mindset except on the political billionaire business scale. And if we’re gonna get them to do the right thing then we have to show ‘em it’s in their own best interests. That’s how the whole system works!”

“Well,” growled Julian, “Sounds like you have your hands full, huh? Meanwhile we’re gonna fuck off to Minnesota and enjoy life while we still can, since it’s perfectly fuckin’ clear we ain’t saving shit. Right?” He glanced at Allison, then at Xiù who found herself nodding out of reflex.

Kevin winced as though Julian had punched him in the gut. “…I’ll come see you,” he said. “Soon as I got a plan.”

Julian couldn’t even work up the wherewithal to agree politely. He and Allison both knocked their chairs over and left them on the floor when they stood up, and it fell to Xiù to be the diplomat.

“…Thank you, Kevin…” she offered, picking up the chairs. “I know you’ll do what you can.”

“Bein’ the conscience around here is kinda my job,” Kevin grumbled. “I’ll… just… look after those two for me?”

“Always,” Xiù promised. She gave him the strongest smile she could in the circumstances, then slipped through the closing door.

The other two hadn’t gone far. Allison was leaning against the wall with her arms folded and was staring gloomily at her boots, while Julian was jabbing fiercely at his phone. “Three tickets?” he asked, as Xiù joined them. “Or are you gonna go visit your folks first?”

Xiù made eye contact with Allison and saw the unspoken plea there. She shook her head. “Three tickets. I think… my parents can wait.”

Julian paused, looked up, and some of his glacial hatred melted away. Every angry line of him became just a little softer. “…Thanks.”

Xiù put a hand on his back as she stepped up to him. “I’m angry too,” she said, carefully.

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” Allison remarked. “How are you so calm?”

“…We won’t get anything done by, um… by flailing around,” Xiù told her. “I learned that the hard way. You have to, um, direct it. Make it work for you. Otherwise you just tire yourself out and…” She trailed off, feeling entirely too upset and exhausted for coherent sentences right now.

Fortunately, both of them spoke fluent Xiù. Allison and Julian stared at her, then at each other, then both sighed the exact same frustrated sigh, and gathered her up in a three-way reassuring hug.

Moments like those reminded Xiù of why she loved them both so much. They were anchors of morality in an inherently amoral world, and they understood her probably even better than she understood herself. It put a pleasant kind of ache in her chest, which threatened to become tears if nothing happened to interrupt them.

Something did. Julian’s phone pinged, and he extracted himself to inspect it. “Welp. Tickets are confirmed. We gotta leave in two hours, so…”

“Better get our stuff from the ship,” Allison nodded, sensing as she somehow always did when she needed to be sensitive and letting her hand run down Xiù’s arms so their fingers intertwined. “And we’d better say sorry to Clara. We promised her that barbecue…”

“D’you think…” Xiù began. “What happens if—?”

“Right now, I just wanna get back to Minnesota, get home, and get really fuckin’ drunk,” Allison grumbled. “We’ll worry about flying again and Byron and all the rest of it after the hangover.”

“Amen,” Julian grunted with feeling.

“But—”

*”Bǎobèi*… It’s out of our hands now. For now. Maybe. I hope. I don’t know.” Julian sagged. The anger was draining out of him fast, now that there was nobody around for him to aim it at. It was still there, coiled and quiet and terrifying, but at least he’d holstered it. “Let’s just… go home.”

“…Alright.”

Date Point 12y7m AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Moses Byron

“Kevin. How are they?”

One of Byron’s little pleasures in life was when he got a chance to exceed Kevin’s expectations. The man was a sharp judge of character, but it was always nice to remind him that he wasn’t infallible. The question seemed to throw him.

“They’re… tired. Upset. Angry.”

“And your CIA puppetmaster?”

Kevin settled in the seat opposite Byron’s desk and adjusted his cuff. “Crossed a line: She threatened you personally. I shut her down.”

Byron scowled. “She did, huh?”

“Yeah. Said she could make your life hell if she wants. That ain’t gonna fly well with her superiors…“

Byron gave him a careful stare. “You sound like you’ve got no trouble stabbing her in the back, Kevin…”

“Boss, I work for you. I work with them,” Kevin retorted. “Darcy’s good people, but if she’s gonna muscle on a private citizen like that, I start having a problem with her.”

Byron sat back and folded his hands lightly on his stomach. “That’s the behavior of good people in your book, huh?”

“You don’t know what kind of pressure Darcy’s under. I only suspect how much pressure she’s under.” Kevin shrugged. “Even the Company’s only human, boss. She’s good people, like I said. Good people screw it up sometimes.”

“I won’t stand for being threatened, Kevin. I pay my taxes.”

“I won’t stand for you being threatened either. I just try and remember the reasons why, keep some perspective. You know?”

“Mm.” Byron nodded, then stood up. “Mocktail?”

“Sure, why not?”

Mixing up his non-alcoholic cocktails was one of Byron’s pleasures. He had no objection to a drink in principle, but he’d seen too many colleagues and acquaintances medicate themselves into an early grave to try and stay on top of their job pressures over the years. It always started with nicotine and alcohol. For most, it had ended there, too. One way or another.

For a few, the slope to cocaine had been all too slippery. Moses had stayed out of it and become a teetotaller not out of any great moral objection, but out of the certainty that it could only end badly for him personally. So, he’d learned a few interesting ways to combine fruit juices, sodas and grenadine, and joined the church of the Shirley Temple.

It was a useful way to gather his thoughts and claim some powerful energy in the conversation. It made the other guy wait on him, and that was necessary for Kevin. It wasn’t clear at all to Byron whether Kevin even knew just how much natural force of personality he had, but he had a natural talent for the difficult trick of persuading people to shut up and listen when he started speaking, even if they didn’t agree with what he was saying.

Byron would have waded through the bones of thousands for a gift like that.

“Right,” he said, turning around and handing over Kevin’s drink. “We’re gonna back our kids. I want this thing spun to our best advantage, got it?”

He enjoyed the rare sensation of leaving Kevin dumbfounded for a second.

“…I honestly kinda expected you to be pissed over this,” Kevin admitted, after a second.

“I’m a smart man, Kevin.” Byron sat back and sipped his drink. “I can put two and two together. San Diego got bombed, you landed in my boardroom after that affair with the jump drive, I’ve got the CIA poking around my stuff constantly, and now our exploration team comes back with… this…”

He indicated the tablet he’d been reading about the People on. “I’m only here because my great-grandma was smart enough to get the hell out of Stuttgart back in nineteen-thirty-three. I know what it looks like when a class of people are being systematically murdered, Kevin, and you can probably guess how I feel about it. Somebody or something out there wants deathworlders dead, and as a deathworlder myself I take exception.”

“Amen to that.”

Byron grinned. “Besides, saving a species of stone-age hunter gatherers is a Moon Laser I can get behind. So, we’re backing our kids. We just need somebody who can engineer it.”

“…I ever tell you how much I love workin’ for you, Moses?”

“Your job is to be the opposite of a brown-noser, Kevin,” Byron chuckled.

“My job is to tell you the truth. Sometimes, the truth is nice.”

Byron chuckled again, drained his mocktail in one go, and set the crystal tumbler smartly down on his desktop. “Alright. I know you have ideas for this already. Let’s hear ‘em.”

Kevin nodded, drained his own drink, and sat forward. “The trio’re gonna have to do the heavy lifting…” he began.

Date Point 12y7m AV
SOR HQ, HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Major Owen Powell

“At ease, lads.”

Two boots moved a neat, parade-ground perfect double handful of inches to the left. Like they were fresh from Basic, it was bloody unreal. Technical Sergeants Arés and Burgess might have been authorized for civilian wear, might have spent their days permanently be-stubbled and scruffy… But it was quite clear that not a man in the SOR took being called to Powell’s office lightly. They invariably showed up looking, and acting, completely razor-sharp.

It was a sign of respect, he knew, but it had long since gone beyond wearying and into borderline troubling. The Lads, especially these two, clearly had no idea how to unwind—or rather, how to unwind gently—and if there was an element of ‘physician, heal thyself’ in that thought, then… hell with it.

“Alright, fook at ease,” he grumbled and sat back. “Bloody relax already. I just thought I’d remind you both that you’ll be past sixty days of use-or-lose leave by the end of this year and I thought I might nudge you to fookin’ well use it.”

The pair looked at each other warily for a second, but relaxed. John spoke first, “Begging your pardon, sir, but my understanding was we could sell it back?”

Powell not only admired their dedication to the mission, he could relate perfectly. He was all too eager to skip out on his own leave allowance and stick by the Cherries himself… But Costello was coming along nicely, the training was going well, the official strategic evaluation was…not positive, but it made it clear that now was the time for people to get their R&R in.

He’d picked the Beef Brothers first because he needed them to switch off, at least for a little while. They were young, driven, painfully earnest and were unquestionably missing out on some of the indefinable yet important little experiences of life. Their single-minded focus on the Mission meant that much of their young adult years had been…skipped, as it were. Or at least, experienced in a hyper-focused environment with like-minded battle brothers.

That wouldn’t do. Powell needed them fit, happy, and as well-adjusted and well-rounded as possible, and that went doubly in light of some of the urgent noises the base psychologist, Lieutenant Mears, had been making.

“Bluntly, lads? It’d be a giant mistake if you did. Think of this as another kind of training and conditioning if you want to, I don’t care, but I want the both of you to get your arses off Cimbrean for a bit and rest. It’s not an order, but for God’s sake heed it anyway. Right?”

Again, that wary glance to each other. “That’ll leave just Butler, sir, and—” Arés began. He trailed off when Powell nodded.

“Look, Arés. I know that Butler’s green, and I know we’ve only got three Protectors in the first place, not counting Thurrsto. You will obviously need to plan this carefully, I get that. But I want a schedule by the end of the week. Understood?”

The two looked at each other again, and finally caved. They’d put up less of a fight than he’d feared in the end.

“Yes sir,” Adam told him. “We’re going to need to spin down on the Crude, and the calories, and the training, and—”

“Aye. How long?”

Arés looked at Burgess, who frowned as he calculated. “Maybe a month? We don’t know really. We’ve, uh, never done it all the way. Not to last for two straight months, anyway.”

Powell nodded and scratched his chin. “Hmm. Any risks to your training or development?”

“There…shouldn’t be, sir,” Burgess decided.

“We’ll watch it carefully, of course…” Arés added.

“Good enough. See to it, lads. And bloody cheer up! Have some fun! Don’t be old men before your time.”

The two nodded.

“I note that Technical Sergeant Kovač is in a similar situation,” Powell added. “Might want to remind her before I drag her in here as well, aye?”

For the first time in the conversation he saw Arés brighten up, and knew that he’d scored a win. The two set off to plan with something that finally resembled enthusiasm for the idea, and Powell returned to his own planning; he too had a week of leave to use up and the timing was just right…

He turned to his computer and composed a message to Rylee.

Date Point: 12y7m1d AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

“You know what I really, really want right now? Like, way more than this beer?

Xiù lowered her own beer bottle and glanced sideways across the fire at Allison, who was lying at the log staring up at unblemished blue sky between the swaying trees. “Hmm? What?”

True to their word, Byron Group had taken good care of the house that Julian had inherited from his grandfather. They’d hired the services of a specialist homesitter from downstate who’d visited once a week to keep the place clean, maintained and aired out, and the protracted court battle over the inheritance had resoundingly gone the corporation’s way and resulted in a landmark ruling in a higher court of appeal that was going to have several long-term positive repercussions for American Indian property rights.

Julian hadn’t noticed. The three of them had staggered into the house in the dead of night, local time, after five days of sporadic and unsatisfactory rest. They’d thrown themselves onto the big bed in the master bedroom in a big warm pile and slept for twelve hours.

Then there had been a modest breakfast with the house’s limited long-life supplies, airing out their own clothing, and just… re-familiarizing themselves with Earth.

It felt strange to be wearing cotton again.

Allison, as promised, had grabbed the truck after breakfast and headed into town, returning a couple hours later with enough beer to drown a herd of cattle.

Julian had mounted a one-man expedition up into the woods to check on all his wildlife management measures, which were still working fine, and had come back to find Xiù on Skype apologising profusely to her parents and promising that her visit to Vancouver was imminent. She’d apparently been on that call for hours, and only Allison’s return finally brought it to an end.

The non-alcoholic groceries were almost an afterthought, even if they were a pretty comprehensive inventory of everything they needed. Allison had thrown in some luxuries that had been in short supply on the ship such as candy and cheese, and she was now lying on the log staring up at the sky while Julian lit the fire, draining beer bottles like she was making up for lost time.

“I want…A fucking joint. I haven’t had one in years,” she sighed. “I mean, it’s legal in forty-seven states now! Hell, give it a few more years and they might even start selling it in Wal-Mart! You know, next to the cigarettes you can smoke and the mind-altering drugs you can take,” she waggled the bottle for emphasis. “But one positive urine test, and that’s it: We never get to take Misfit back out there.” She indicated the sky with the bottle. “Stupid.”

“Byron Group’s behind the times there,” Julian agreed. “I dunno. I never tried it.”

“Me either,” Xiù admitted. Somehow, Julian wasn’t surprised.

“It’d sure as fuck help me relax right now…” Allison sighed again, and drained the remaining half of her beer in one long aesthetic moment that made the muscles of her throat move in waves before she reached out and gently dropped the empty bottle into the plastic tub they were using for throwaways, where it joined the five others she’d already finished.

Julian was only just starting in on his fifth. Xiù was still nursing her second, but then again she was a lightweight.

She said what they were all worried about, though. “Do you think… do you think we will get to take Misfit out there again?”

Allison sighed a third time, punctuating it with a complicated mix of shrug and head-shake as she twisted open another beer. “…God, I hope so.”

“If we don’t, I’m buying the weed myself,” Julian growled, with feeling. He lit a single match, placed it carefully in the right spot among the logs he’d assembled in the middle of their ring of breezeblocks, and sat back to let the fire come to life.

“Nah. You’re too straight-laced, dummy,” Allison told him. “Both of you,” she added to Xiù.

“Eh,” Julian shrugged in a complicated way, “I dunno. I just never was interested. And we’re not allowed more than one beer a night on Misfit, either, so they ain’t exactly being inconsistent.”

“Dude. We weren’t even carrying a beer a night…”

Julian grinned, and downed the last of his bottle. He was definitely beginning to feel its effects, and they were thoroughly welcome. “Need a bigger ship.”

“Don’t you dare say that. *Misfit*‘s perfect!”

“Well,” Julian stumbled off towards the woods for a comfort break, “I suppose we’ll just hafta deal, then. Be right back.”

“Julian!” Xiù complained. “The house is right there! You know, with plumbing?”

He laughed, “I don’t wanna miss the pot!”

“Ugh. You went so native over there on…” Allison paused. “What the hell do we even call that planet, anyway?”

Julian had by then found a tree and decided he wasn’t gonna talk while relieving himself.

Xiù stepped into the gap. “Akyawentuo,” she said firmly. It meant [all-things-under-sky-place] in the People’s language.

Allison tilted her head. She’d never quite mastered Peoplespeak so much. “Shouldn’t that be, uh…like, way longer? That sounds like parts of a bunch of words.”

“Yesh,” Xiù frowned at the slightly slurred way her word came out, and started enunciating a little more carefully. “But it’s a fusional language, so you can just sort of…smash it together and leave bits off.”

“Babe. Language jargon.”

“‘Just sort of smash it together and leave bits off’ is not language jargon!” Xiù protested. “Besides. The People will know what it means when we tell them, and that’s the important part.”

“Yes it is!” Julian stumbled back with his fly only partly zipped up and the button undone, and flomped back down on the ground where he’d been sitting. He’d missed jeans. He checked on the fire, which was coming along perfectly, and cracked open beer number six. “I like it! Sounds good, and I bet Vemik’d like it too.”

Allison nodded slowly, and then to Julian’s profound surprise and Xiù’s too she sat up and angrily scrubbed a tear off her face. “God fucking dammit. We shouldn’t have left. We should have…”

“We had to,” Xiù interrupted delicately.

“I know we had to, but we shouldn’t’ve!”

Julian, acutely aware that he could have stayed there for a lifetime if need be, tactfully refrained from saying anything. Allison meanwhile drew her knees up and stared into the growing flames.

“…How many have I had?”

“That’s your sixth.”

“…Shit. I lost my tolerance.”

Xiù almost choked.

Julian grinned up at her from his slouched position. “Girl that’ll drink a big man under the table? Hot.”

”Several big men. Several times.” Allison grinned at the memory. “I told you, those biker fucks in Massachusetts just saw a skinny blonde.”

Julian chuckled at the story. “My liver wasn’t made for booze. Oh well.” He pawed at Allison to encourage her to lie next to him and she acquiesced with a giggle, rolling off the log to land beside him with a thump and a splash of wild wasted beer.

“Gah!” Julian giggled too, which was a little out of character for him. “A party foul! You gotta pay for that!”

“Hey, I bought the beer…” Allison objected.

“Nope. Party foul.” Julian grinned, and had a mischievous moment of mutual understanding eye contact with Xiù, who gleefully chimed in.

“I’m referee!” she announced, beaming.

“Allison’s been a bad girl. What should we do to her?”

“Well, she got your jeans wet. You’re gonna have to take them off… It seems to me the fair thing is if she takes hers off too.”

“Ugh, fine!” Allison’s mock-disgruntled tone didn’t fool either of them for a second.

Julian grinned at her. “I like this referee. She’s fair, honest. Everything right with America!”

That one was one of Xiù’s easier buttons. “Canadian!”

“Eh, they’re cool too.”

“I’m gonna get mud on my butt!” Allison objected, half-heartedly.

“Shagua, I’ve seen you covered in oil all the way up to your neck,” Xiù interjected.

“And you took pictures!”

Julian grinned at the memory. “Yeah, she did. Anyway—” He rolled on top of Allison and bit gently at the side of her neck, “I think this’ll be a good punishment…”

Allison squirmed and pressed her hands to his chest with a sudden urgency. “…Get off…”

“Nah.” He growled the word into the dimple at the base of her throat.

“No, Julian, I need to pee, get off!” She insisted.

He stared stupidly into her eyes for a second, then his brain finally caught up with his ears. “…Oh. Durn.” He chuckled ruefully and rolled off.

“Lucky me, I don’t have to worry about missing!” Allison rolled over backwards and sprang upright, before meandering in a straight-ish line toward the house.

“That’s a quitter’s attitude!” he yelled behind her as she walked off.

She turned, and walked backwards a few steps as she replied. “Didn’t we just go through this?”

“Yeah, but I’m a boy. I’m allowed.” He grinned into his beer trollishly.

“…Xiù, shut him up for me, babe?”

“Yes ma’am!”

There was a blur and Julian found himself flat on his back with Xiù sitting triumphantly on his chest. He did little to fight back and grinned up at her harder, folding his hands behind his head.

Xiù pouted a bit. “It’s no fun when you don’t fight back!”

“But I like it!”

“…Fine. You leave me no choice!”

Julian knew his most ticklish spots—his ribs, his armpits, behind his ears and the insides of his elbows. Unfortunately, so did Xiù. Worse, she had an evil streak and much faster hands than he did, and every desperate attempt he made to swat those hands away just resulted in her picking a new target. The only resort was to half-curl himself up in a ball and writhe until he could stand it no longer and instead grappled her end-over-end away from the fire, where he finally pinned her after three twisting turns.

And… oh. Yeah. Right.

He’d wrestled too many sweaty alien gorilla-men recently, and the moment it struck him that what he’d instead managed to trap was his girlfriend…

…His gorgeous, lithe, acrobatic Chinese girlfriend…

…Who chose that exact moment to innocently and unthinkingly bite her lower lip while that warm brown gaze danced excitedly across his face and the breath caught in her throat…

His mental gears clashed for a few seconds. Then he kissed her.

The beer fuzzed things a bit so he didn’t exactly recall what happened next, but in very short order both he and Xiù were shirtless, her hands were pinned, and he was working his mouth diligently on her throat, then his hands slid down her body and—

“I said shut him up!” Allison flopped down next to them. “You were supposed to wait until I came back to make him moan!”

“Mmm…” Xiù made a kind of creaking pleasure noise in the back of her throat. “Not sorry.”

“How un-Canadian of you!”

Xiù snorted, then looked her up and down “…Didn’t I order you to take your pants off?”

“Oh! Yes ma’am!”

Julian re-gathered his wits and went back on the attack. “No talk.”

“Caveman,” Allison grinned at him, peeling her jeans off those long, long legs of hers…

“Mm-hmm,” Julian agreed, undoing Xiù’s jeans as well. Allison snorted, and gave him a hand by wriggling down alongside and under Xiù, who shut her eyes and licked her lips. They hadn’t had room to just… explore like this on the ship, and while months of being cooped up together had resulted in plenty of intimacy… It hadn’t been the same. They’d been sleeping in shifts, trying not to wake the sleeping one, building their love lives around the constant job of keeping a ship running.

Julian had generally let the girls have their way with him. It was a role he usually liked to play anyway, he enjoyed it when they objectified him and it kept things harmless and light in the confined environs of the ship. Now, things were different: He was carrying a crackling charge of pent-up frustration and hostility aimed at the whole world, and sometimes a guy just needed to find a healthier outlet for that kind of intense energy.

Xiù didn’t complain. She really didn’t complain. She left stinging bloody fingernail marks in his shoulders and damn near fainted, but neither of those were a complaint.

It was short and intense for all three of them. Allison, who had managed to insert herself under Xiù and hold her from behind throughout looked almost as stunned as if she’d taken a more direct role.

She was the only one with enough energy to speak, though. “Jesus, Julian!” She swept his hair out of his face and planted a kiss among the perspiration on his forehead. “You’d better have saved some of that for me!”

Julian made an inarticulate noise that was supposed to be a general agreement, and rolled sideways to collapse on his back on the grass.

“…Gimme a minute,” he panted. “Christ.”

“Just one?”

“…Might be a few more than that.”

“I bet…” Allison grinned, then checked on Xiù in her arms. “You okay, bǎobèi?”

Xiù managed a dazed, half-lidded smile, and wriggled comfortably into her chest as though Allison was a full-length warm pillow. “Wǒ hěn hǎo…Wǒ cào…”

“Damn, you fucked the English out of her!”

Xiù giggled at that, and seemed to recover some of her focus. “…Yuh-huh. Wow. Sorry. Um… yeah. More than okay. Wow.”

Julian laughed, and pushed himself up on his elbows because it was that or fall asleep. Right now, just resting and letting all his troubles be a long way away was almost more tempting than he could stand, and he resisted it.

“Going somewhere, babe?” Allison asked him.

“…No. Not right now,” Julian decided. He settled back, scooted up against the pair of them, and this time he didn’t resist. Sleep came easily, and instantly.

Date Point: 12y7m1d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

General Martin Tremblay

“So it works.”

“Yup. As of this morning we officially have a functioning Von Neumann Colonization Probe. Everything works to spec.”

Tremblay was a fan of the relaxed and informal meeting, especially among his oldest colleagues. The Human Race owed a lot to Claude Nadeau.

Still. He’d been expecting more enthusiasm. “You don’t sound all that happy, considering you and your team pulled off a tall order in just two years…” he suggested.

Nadeau sighed and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“It’s all human hardware… built in a Kwmbwrw nanofac, running a Domain galactic map, and using Corti planetary survey software to build a colony on uncharted deathworlds that it then protects with a Guvnurag forcefield,” he griped. “Hell, the engines are a modified Gaoian design based on the Racing Thunder and I really don’t wanna think about how much of the stuff we packed into it is reverse-engineered Hierarchy tech from the Egypt Device.”

“You know, even Bartlett calls it the UFO.”

Nadeau shrugged. “I’d rather remember where it came from and who built it.”

Tremblay nodded. Nadeau’s foibles were mild compared to some of the other personnel who worked or had worked with SCERF. Being a stickler for official nomenclature was no big deal really.

“If you have any concerns, say so. I don’t want to greenlight the launch until you’re perfectly happy,” he said instead.

“More like the release than the launch, sir,” Nadeau sighed. “I’m just glad we built in a twelve-generation limiter on these things. Beverote was against it.”

“Mm, I read his recommendation. Something about inoculating the galaxy against potential intergalactic Von Neumann machines?”

“A case of the cure being potentially as bad as the disease,” Nadeau replied. “I mean… it’s potentially a valid concern, now that we know VNMs are even possible, but we need much longer than two years of development before I’d be happy to release a… a galactic vaccine program.”

“Then the limiter stays,” Tremblay decided. “But for colonization as part of the war strategy?”

“We’ve done everything we can to make the most harmless VNM possible,” Nadeau reported. “I’m happy that the need outweighs the risk. Twelve generations is still more than four thousand probes but that’s at least a number we could conceivably handle if they started to go rogue.”

“And it’s a small enough number that the odds of one of the probes, uh… mutating?” Tremblay frowned. “That doesn’t feel like the right word, when you’re talking about machines…”

“Experiencing an RCE, sir. Random Copying Error.”

“RCE, Mutating, effectively the same thing. Point is that inside only twelve generations, it shouldn’t happen.”

“Not with all the checks we put in place, no.”

“Good.”

Tremblay picked up his coffee mug and took a thoughtful sip. “There was something else. Beverote’s friends, the Misfit crew. They had a Big Hotel encounter out in the field.”

Nadeau blew air across his own coffee and listened warily. “They’re okay?”

“Green as you could ask for. But they caught a xenocide campaign in progress. Pre-contact species. Hell, pre-agricultural. Flint spearheads and tribal hunter-gathering, that kinda thing. And the poor bastards have got Abrogators marching across the continent burning them out.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. But here’s the bit that stays as dark as dark gets, okay? Their ship carried a message back. STOLEN GHOST is back in touch.”

“…I’m not sure I see how I have need-to-know on that, sir…” Nadeau said, slowly.

“The message was inserted into *Misfit*‘s communication systems, carried back through screening and sent to a CIA analyst’s inbox all while going completely undetected. It slipped through every security measure we have in ways I’m told are impossible, which is…”

“Troubling.”

“Yeah. Anyway, impossible or not, I’ve got two specialists so far who’d bet their grandmother’s ashes that it happened anyway, and it involves a digital sapient accidentally created by the Hierarchy. Which is also impossible.” Tremblay sipped his coffee. “Impossible things seem to happen twice a week these days.”

Admiral Knight was obviously rubbing off on him. For his part, Nadeau gave the news some troubled thought, sipping his own drink.

“…the CIA must have flipped,” he decided eventually.

“Yeah, and I don’t blame them,” Tremblay agreed. “Byron Group have already agreed to pull the whole system out of the ship and send it to us. I want you to get that hardware the hell off Earth and back to Erebor, and I want to know exactly how it was done and how we can stop it from happening again. Bring in whoever you need.”

“Isolate the hardware, analyze it, duplicate the effect, prevent repeats. Got it.” Nadeau nodded. “Can do.”

“Good. So. Now that the VNMs are ready, what are we going to do with those resources instead?”

Nadeau smiled, put down his coffee and sat forward. “I have a few ideas…” he said.

Date Point: 12y7m1w AV
Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

♪♫”-I got a Pro-Keds box full of layman’s terms, it goes hey: Peace. Pray for the plagued. Major relief and capacious rains, but just ‘cuz I don’t want to war with you it don’t mean go warm up the barbecue. I’m like-”♪♫

Long drives—say, the nine hour journey from Omaha to Minnesota—were Kevin’s chance to get his mental filing sorted out. There was a lot more of it nowadays than there had once been. Straight roads, intricate music that he wasn’t really listening to, and a head full of government secrets and corporate power.

There was a rhythm to the drive, too, and he found that things started to come together after he left I-29 at Fargo.

It wasn’t just the Misfits and the People. Byron was spitting out moon laser ideas by the hour nowadays as new revelations from the survey flight’s data came through. Extraterrestrial oil drilling? Easy, and Lucent had all the right kinds of geology, in the right kinds of places. The biggest obstacle was the law. The few precedents anybody had were all rooted in Cimbrean, or in the original colonization of the American continents way back in the day.

Lucent, at least, didn’t have the confounding presence of natives to worry about. Unless the giant slime-spitting termites were sapient, which the biologists had so far refused to rule out.

Then there was his role in the Group’s more Earthly concerns. The Group’s solid foundation of high-tech manufacturing, providing advanced forcefield-based technology to industry sectors all over America and the rest of the world, involved the employment of tens of thousands of people. Unionized people. Kevin was all in favour of unions but he hadn’t appreciated that one day he’d be sitting opposite their representatives at a boardroom table, watching and weighing in while they haggled with the executives over the details of the company’s already-generous paid vacations and health insurance package.

Nine hours by himself with nothing but his thoughts was a genuine relief, even if he was technically on the clock. Hell. Nine hours of getting paid to just sit, think and drive. He’d sure as hell had worse jobs.

He was just north of Roy Lake when his phone went, automatically silencing the music. He glanced at the car’s dash screen, saw the caller ID, and pulled over while answering.

“…Darcy? This a personal call?”

There was a sigh from the other end of the line. “Yeah. I owe you an apology, and Byron too. Won’t salvage the train wreck I made of my career by threatening him, but…”

Kevin finished pulling over, put on the parking brake and pushed his seat back to stretch his legs out. “No, you owe them an apology. But, honest advice? Don’t. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man hate like Julian can, God damn!”

”Yeah, well. Irrelevant now, I guess. I still work for the Company, but if I work at it until I’m seventy I might just repair my credibility. I’m a desk analyst now.”

“…I’m sorry to hear that.”

”Don’t be. My fault.” Darcy chuckled, which was a sound Kevin wasn’t sure he’d ever heard her make before. ”Honestly? It’s almost a relief.”

“Less responsibility?”

“Less…” There was a long and thoughtful pause punctuated only by Darcy’s long exhalation before she gave up. ”I’m proud of what I already achieved. But you can’t keep doing what I was doing forever, it’s more than anybody can take. I was always gonna burn out and make a mistake in the end. As mistakes go… I coulda made a lot worse.”

“Seems like a shitty way to run a thing like that.”

”I’m not in a pretty business, Kevin. I’ve warned some good people away from this career for that exact reason. Some real talent.”

“You’re not gonna quit entirely?” Kevin asked.

“Nah, I’m an addict. This job will kill me eventually…”

Kevin nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. Some part of his soul believed that nods carried just fine through a phone call, even hands-free. “But leaving would kill you sooner.”

“That’s about the shape of it.”

“Well. Don’t be a stranger, hear?”

“I might have to be. So if I do have to sever contact, just… take care of yourself, okay? And look after those three misfits of yours, too.”

The request sounded surprisingly heartfelt.

“…You too.”

“Goodbye, Kevin. Thanks for all the coffee.”

The call ended and the music came back up. Kevin stared at his steering wheel thoughtfully until the song ended, then yanked the seat forward again and put the car back in drive. He didn’t bother turning the radio back up and drove in silence the last half hour.

Allison Buehler was up a ladder cleaning out the gutters when his car pulled into the yard in front of the trio’s house. She always seemed to find the dirtiest jobs to do, and this one had left her blackish-brown and mossy to the armpits.

“Kevin!” She picked her way down the ladder as he got out of the car. “You work fast, we weren’t…Have you been crying?”

“No,” Kevin grunted truthfully. He’d been close, but… “Ain’t nothin’. Just…” he cleared his throat. “The other two?”

Allison grabbed the hose and rinsed off her arms. “Julian’s checking on the beavers up in the back woods, Xiù’s probably on Skype with her family right now.”

“Place all okay?”

“Yeah. Caretaker kept it good for us…We thought we might redecorate while we’re here.”

“A lick of paint wouldn’t go wrong,” Kevin agreed. The house had good sturdy wood siding, but it had gone a long time since it last saw a paintbrush. Some of those irregular curled patches of color looked like they might come loose in a stiff breeze. Mister Williams had asked him to talk about a few security additions too, but right now didn’t really seem like the time.

“I’m guessing you’re here ‘cause you’ve got a plan?”

“…I… Sorta. Maybe. I was right, Byron ain’t happy at all. He’s real worried about his public image, and he’s got it in his head that trying to develop or protect this planet of yours is gonna turn him into the modern East India Company or some shit.”

“So…does he expect the world is gonna, what? Get swept under the rug?”

“There is a half-decent man under there,” Kevin promised. “You just gotta know how to push his buttons.

Allison didn’t have the patience. “Look, none of us are Byron-whisperers, that’s on you. All we care about is stopping a genocide.”

“Right. And that’s the angle,” Kevin smiled. “But not for Byron. That angle works better on people way more important than Byron is.”

“Like who?”

Kevin grinned. “You ever heard of General Martin Tremblay?” he asked.

Date Point: 12y7m1w AV
High Mountain Fortress, The Northern Plains, Planet Gao

Champion Genshi

Something had stood at the site of High Mountain Fortress for so long that even the oldest of the Stoneback oral tradition didn’t hint at an actual first, so far as Genshi knew. And he knew enough of that history that the Stonebacks would have been deeply upset.

He valued Daar’s friendship too much to betray that and so kept those thoughts to himself. There was no possibility of lying to a fully-trained Stoneback Brother except by omission, their noses were too good.

The modern Fortress itself was a mere thousand or so Gaoian years old, having been built from the rubble of its predecessor by Great Father Fyu. Which in turn had probably been built from the rubble of its predecessor. The stones were ten times as ancient as the walls, and a few of them here and there bore the marks and scars of battles that had never touched this fortress. Or a shred of archaeological mortar, a stain of primordial paint… little details that hinted at history so deep as to chill the spine.

It was almost traditional for powerful Clan figures to meet there, especially when there were important topics to discuss.

Genshi had entertained the thought that maybe the Fortress and its surrounding area could have been the equivalent of the Human city of Akkad. The Fortress may even have been the very first of the Gao’s civilization, but if it was, that knowledge was lost in the whiteout of badly-curated time.

Of course, Clan Highmountain were rather better at guarding their secrets than Clan Stoneback. Possibly—probably—they curated the time very well indeed and kept most of it a secret. Possibly that was a deliberate arrangement between the two ancient Clans. They had, after all, once been one and the same.

Neither, Genshi knew, suspected that his own clan was an indirect offshoot of that same tree.

The modern fortress was a museum and a library, where the latest in holographic technology brushed strangely against the tapestries and banners of the ancient clan hall. It was a university, a conclave, a theatre of ideas and, in keeping with some of the oldest and least civilized of Gaoian traditions, it was an arena. A lot of blood had been mopped from those stones over the centuries.

Soon, there might be more. Not today… but soon. Maybe.

A lot depended on Daar.

“They’re at war. And it ain’t just any war, this is one fer survival. The claws are out.”

Daar was a fascinating study in deceptive contrast. Most people were distracted by his brash personality and his immense…everything. Few noticed his mind and it was amongst the keenest Genshi had ever known, if a blunt instrument could be keen.

In any other company, Daar would have been the smartest person in the room. This room, however, was populated exclusively by his peers.

Peers like Grandfather Talo, a Highmountain so venerable that he was almost white from nose to tail and who had worn his fur long and shaggy as protection against the chill air for most of his life. His sight was going, which meant that the Highmountains would soon need a new Grandfather, but there was nothing wrong with Talo’s fierce brain.

Or his voice, which had that penetrating quality that a level, soft voice only gained with experience. “They can’t possibly expect to win. The basic rule of logistics is against them, if nothing else.”

“I dunno,” offered Daar with uncharacteristic deference. “They’ve got some pretty sneaky capability. Their ‘HEAT’ is like if First Fang and Whitecrest were the same fighting Claw. Better, though.”

Father Kureya was being groomed as Talo’s replacement. He was a different creature to Talo—browner of fur, and more animated in his energy. He prowled around the hall poking at his tablet while he listened, and shifted his weight from paw to paw as he spoke as though every follicle on his body itched if he wasn’t moving.

“They could win every battle they fight and still lose the war. You know that.”

Daar didn’t spare his annoyance with Kureya, and he paused in his own incessant prowling of the room to flash the barest hint of his teeth before resuming his patrol. It was striking how the two were so at odds in opinion and attitude yet shared the same intrinsically kinetic demeanor.

It was also striking how well they got along in any other context. Daar liked pretty much everybody on principle but the list of Gaoians he respected was much shorter and consisted solely of the people who would hold their ground against him.

“Of course I know that,” he barked, “I knew that before you were a Father. But logistics ain’t the only thing that matters in a war. The battlefield matters too.”

“The Hunters have ably shown that they can control the battlefield,” Kureya retorted.

“Can,” Daar growled. “That ain’t the same as ‘do’ or ‘will.’ And in any case, what else are the humans gonna do? There was a million fucking ships on that battlefield. Asymmetric warfare is their only option and they know it.”

“Exactly,” Kureya replied, “my point. Historically, asymmetric warfare is a means of staying alive long enough to bring aboard an ally. It doesn’t win a war by itself.”

Daar bared his fangs in a not entirely angry manner. “Funny you should say that…”

Talo spoke up again. “Champion Genshi. You’re being characteristically silent…”

“Watching Daar and Kureya spar is always entertaining,” Genshi commented, and immediately got a howl of mirth from Grandfather Garl.

“Young Daar’s been sparring with everyone since his ears were still floppy!”

Daar immediately cringed but gamely defended himself. “And I was winning, too! Got my first big scar when I was five!”

Kureya chittered as did everyone else in the room, and some of the… intensity drained away. Garl was as coarse as coarse got but he could fill any room with pure raucous charm.

“I was still trying to reach the highest bookshelf in the crèche, I think…”

“You’ll never get a good scar from a papercut, Kureya,” Daar said, and draped himself affectionately around the much smaller male’s shoulders. Kureya grimaced as he gamely tried to hold up the weight. “Besides,” he added. “The humans have more’n just Hunters to fight.”

So. Daar knew, or at least suspected. Genshi shifted his weight and gave the Stoneback champion a thoughtful, ears-forward stare. He knew that Daar wasn’t briefed on the fancifully-named DEEP RELIC secret yet, but…

“…True, I suppose…” he mused aloud, while calculating furiously. Technically, he had the authority to brief and indoctrinate others on the human document, but the request specifically not to brief Daar wasn’t one to be ignored lightly. It could put a fatal crack in a burgeoning relationship built on mutual trust. “The Hunters didn’t blow up that city of theirs, did they? And the humans don’t have antimatter weapons yet.”

Daar earned a prize. He stopped wrestling Kureya and carefully approached Genshi on fourpaw, sniffing suspiciously in his direction. For the third time in as many moments the energy in the room changed; when somebody as big and as dangerously physical as Daar got tense, everybody else did too.

“…I wonder how much you know that you aren’t letting on, Champion Genshi?” he half-asked, half-accused.

“I’m sworn to secrecy on a great many things, Champion Daar.”

“Hrrm.” Daar flashed an annoyed look but let it go, and everyone subtly relaxed.

“I was thinking about that myself,” Kureya remarked, respectfully putting a little distance between himself and Daar. “Do you know how much antimatter we have?”

Genshi did. It was another secret. “Do tell?” he asked instead.

“As far as I know, the combined reserves of all the Clans would release only half the energy of the weapon that destroyed San Diego,” Kureya said, and Genshi internally applauded him. The estimate was perfectly in line with Whitecrest’s own. “We have several hundred fusion weapons that large, but not enough antimatter.”

“Why use antimatter at all, then?” Garl queried. “If it’s so expensive to make and we have that many fusion weapons…?”

“A mystery,” Talo agreed. “I have a hypothesis, but…”

“Because they can,” growled Daar. “Whoever it was, that much antimatter is just a stupid display of raw power. And it’s even more stupider, ‘cuz ain’t nobody got that much antimatter to spare. Not even the Gao, ‘cuz yer forgettin’ that almost all that antimatter you talked up is all tied up in power cells and industry and stuff. Really we’ve got maybe a hundredth of a San Diego to waste.”

“…I think I disagree with that hypothesis, Champion Daar,” Talo mused. “A display of raw power only works when being… well, displayed. Whoever was responsible for that human city’s destruction has never claimed credit, and therefore the raw power on display has gone to waste.”

“Makes sense,” Garl rumbled, scratching at one of his ears. “No point flexin’ yer claws at somebody unless he sees you do it.”

Daar considered. “Well…that depends on your goal, I guess. I mean, this is basically a terrorist attack done on huge scale, right? Maybe the goal was just to terrorize.”

“And yet no party has come forward to claim it.”

“Right,” Daar maintained. “Which means the goal was just to terrorize. But then…why?”

Genshi raised a claw. “I’m with Talo on this. An unclaimed terrorist attack is a job half done, especially if it is not repeated. If a city is destroyed and no credit is taken, to me that implies that somebody felt the city needed to be destroyed, but wished not to be identified.”

Daar nodded, “Sure, that’s valid. But terrorists ain’t always gotta have credit. Sometimes all you wanna do is paralyze an enemy and these kinda mysteries can be the worst for that. Besides, that don’t change that it’s what they did, so we ain’t got a lot to go on. All we got is they spent an impossible amount of antimatter and wiped out a city, and I think so far only the humans have any idea what it’s all about.” He grumbled, “And they ain’t telling, either.”

Genshi tilted his ears quizzically. “How long would it take us to manufacture that much?”

Daar paused dead in his pacing. “…not quick. Years?”

“To make as much as destroyed San Diego would take us seven years,” Kureya reported. “And we monitor antimatter quite closely. Nobody has that kind of capacity unaccounted-for.”

“We do not have perfect understanding of every species’ industrial capability,” Genshi pointed out. “All we know therefore is that the antimatter wasn’t made by Gaoians.”

“Okay,” Daar insisted, “So what’s the advantage? It’s clean but it’s expensive, it’s obvious, there’s not many species that have the ability in the first place—it’s a major export of Ironclaw. It can be tricky to handle…I mean, as a weapon? It ain’t that great.”

Talo stood up quite abruptly with a groan and an audible arthritic popping. He strolled around the room, stretching himself out. “I can think of one strategic advantage to antimatter that might make it worthwhile as a weapon.”

“And that is?” Kureya inquired.

“…Champon Genshi.” Talo ran his claws through the fur around his jaw and whiskers. “What is the operational lifetime of a fusion warhead?”

“…Most of the military clans retire theirs after twenty years,” Genshi admitted. “Usually, they are recycled into new warheads.”

“Why are they retired and recycled?”

“Reliability. Maintenance. Radioactive decay. Nothing survives neglect…”

Talo duck-nodded thoughtfully. “Kureya. Volume of a twelve-mass pellet of, oh… anti-iron?”

“About… this big.” Kureya held his paws surprisingly close together.

“So, if I were to, say, set such a pellet adrift in interstellar space, how long would it take to degrade from contact with the interstellar medium?”

Kureya considered the problem. “…Centuries to erode any significant proportion of its mass,” he reported. “Geological epochs to erode the whole pellet.”

Talo duck-nodded again. “So for all intents and purposes, you have a bomb which requires effectively zero maintenance. At least, not within plausible time spans.”

“Why not just shove a fusion bomb into a stasis box?” Daar asked.

“Because the stasis box would need maintaining.”

“So maintain it,” Garl growled. Daar duck-nodded emphatically.

“A good point,” Kureya pointed out. “What kind of enemy would have the infrastructure to make an antimatter pellet, but not to maintain an arsenal of bombs?”

Daar shook his head fiercely. “But they still had ‘ta jump it!” he pointed out. “That antimatter still needs a jump array to get from wherever it was to San Diego, an’ that array is gonna need maintaining.”

“A jump array doesn’t require constant power like a stasis box would,” Genshi pointed out. “Slower maintenance cycle again.”

“Yeah, but we’ve gone from geological epochs back down to decades. So again, why not just fusion warheads?” Daar insisted. “It don’t make sense.”

“So to summarize,” Talo concluded, “the humans are fighting an enemy with breathtaking resources that uses those resources in strange and apparently wasteful ways for no clear or obvious end.”

“We can’t account for alien psychology,” Genshi suggested.

“Alien psychology is one thing, but ain’t nobody puts two plus two together and gets seven,” Daar grumbled.

Genshi saw his moment. “Nobody that we know of,” he inserted.

Talo scratched thoughtful at an ear and frowned.

“You’re proposing the existence of… some kind of third party?” He asked. “An agent not known to us?”

Genshi wobbled his head. “Daar’s right. Any faction with the resources and competence to generate antimatter in those quantities would be smart enough not to waste it. Nobody we know of would view it as economical to spend antimatter that way… and yet somebody plainly did.”

“Well…see, that’s more troublin’ than basically anything else.” Daar resumed his frenetic pacing. “It means we’re playin’ in a big game of Ta Shen here and there’s somebody at the table we hadn’t even noticed. That’s a deep hole to be in, intel-wise.” He eyed Genshi again. “Well, fer Stoneback, anyway…and we still don’t know why but I think that don’t matter no more.”

“How so?” growled Garl.

“Well, look at all the random Naxas shit we’ve been rolling in lately! There’s all sorts of weird things going on all sudden-like. The ‘Gurvy-rag’ or however you say it—”

“Guvnurag.”

“Yeah, them. Why did their homeworld get attacked? I mean, I’d normally say it was just Hunters being Hunters but how in the name of Keeda’s balls did they get a million ships?”

“Perhaps we didn’t notice?”

Daar wobbled his head vigorously. “Nah, that don’t fit their previous tactics. And antimatter don’t either. They’d rather eat the city if they could, and if they were involved they’d have used that jump to get ships in. So it wasn’t the Hunters, but…a million ships. Tell me that ain’t a little help from someone just stupid powerful.”

“We’ve never known how powerful the Hunters truly are,” Kureya reminded him. “Their territory is big enough to contain at least ten temperate worlds, statistically, and the galactic community has historically treated them as a force of nature.

“A million divided by ten is still a hundred-thousand. That’s a lot of ships around a pawful of worlds.”

“By and large, temperate worlds don’t build spaceships. They feed crews.” Kureya’s ears were grim. “A single world turned over to whatever the…” He licked his teeth nervously, “…whatever the Hunter equivalent of agriculture is would easily feed the crews of a million ships. The ships themselves, we suspect, would be built at orbitals.”

Daar growled, “That makes me hate ‘em even more.” His pace grew more agitated. “But yeah. That’s still not their style, which means they got help suddenly. And recently, I bet. I think that still leaves us with a big player we don’t know about and for some reason they’re going after the humans. Which…I dunno, that makes me nervous.”

“It should,” Garl grunted. “Anything goes after the humans, comes after us before long.”

“If there’s anything I learned is we’re…” Daar paused and flicked his ears reluctantly.

“Go on.”

“…I think Garl’s right. I think that, whatever this Big Keeda thing is? The only reason they’re going after the humans, it’s either ‘cuz they’re a threat or they just hate something about ‘em. And we’ve got a lot in common with the humans. A lot more than I realized, really.”

“Sister Shoo taught us as much,” Genshi pointed out. “The females wouldn’t have named her a Sister unless she fit. They never did it for… for any other species. The very idea is just… I mean, who would fit?”

“Nobody,” said Daar definitively. “I think there’s prol’ly a lotta wisdom there to think about.”

The room reflected on that with appreciative duck-nodding.

“Well said,” intoned Talo. “All of that leaves us much to contemplate. What shall our next step be?”

Daar was the first to respond after a glance at Garl. “I wanna get my Fangs fully staffed and maybe reactivate all the rest.”

“Daar, the budget—”

“Fuck the budget. You ain’t gonna tell me we don’t need ‘em after all this!”

“The Females will not be pleased,” Kureya pointed out.

“Yeah, they won’t. I’ll hafta deal with that too.”

“A military buildup will be noticed, Daar.” Genshi calculated. “Not even we could spin up without being noticed.”

“Don’t matter, we gotta do it. And…I’ll see if I can get an appointment with the Mother-Supreme and talk it out. I think we can argue a good case.”

Garl shook out the thick fur around his neck and chittered in contrabass. “Leave that to me. I’ll take any excuse to visit Yulna.”

“…You have your nose on someone, don’t’cha? You’re so obvious Garl. Teach me!”

“Pure balls, young’n.” Garl’s teeth gleamed. “It works.”

Good humor was probably the best way to end the meeting, and Genshi seized on it. “Garl’s social life aside, we’re all in agreement that we should begin a build-up? If so, I think we adjourn and reconvene when we know more. Objections?”

“None whatsoever.” Talo stood up from his cushion with a series of audible arthritic pops. “Though… Champion Genshi, a young rite-Brother of ours managed to uncover something you may find personally intriguing. Shall we talk and walk?”

“….By all means, Grandfather.”

Date Point: 12y7m1w AV
HMS Viscount, New Enewetak system, deep space

Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau

“Six more?”

The bridge of a V-class destroyer was a dense, crowded thing that in some ways had more in common with the flight deck of an airliner or the cockpit of a plane than a bridge as Nadeau had always envisioned them. His mind’s eye had always been informed by Star Trek, and had placed the captain in the exact middle of an open, airy space full of consoles and needless expanses of floor where he could prowl as though on a Shakespearian stage, addressing a giant floor-to-ceiling screen.

The captain did have a chair: It was a bucket seat with a five-point safety harness for use during hard maneuvers, and it was bolted firmly to the aft bulkhead. And the bridge did have a screen, in the form of a 21-inch monitor tucked away on a bracket high in one corner and largely ignored. There were no windows, no sweeping view of the stars: the bridge was an armored bunker deep in the ship’s structure, and the helmsmen occupied a cavity in the forward wall which surrounded them in readouts and displays. They flew exclusively by instrument: There would have been no point in having windows on a ship designed for engagement ranges measured in terms of the speed of light.

The only concession to leg room was a narrow, shoulder-wide strip of open deck just behind the helmsmen. The rest of the space was taken up by somebody’s station. It wasn’t actually cramped or uncomfortable, but it was no USS Enterprise.

There was enough room for a visitor to stand and watch over it all, though, and to chat with the *Viscount*‘s captain, Nigel Arlott.

“Authorized last week. They posted the names this morning: Vanguard, Vanquisher, Venture, Valkyrie, Valorous and Vancouver.”

“Twelve destroyers. I’d say that’s a big fleet, but after seeing what hit the Guvnurag…”

“It’s not even a big fleet by human standards,” Arlott disagreed. “There were… eighty or so destroyers at the battle of Jutland, I think.” He shrugged, and put on a dark little smile. “The technological advantage counts for a lot. If we fell backwards in time right now then Viscount could sink every ship in both fleets all by herself, and we have the same kind of an edge over the Hunters… for now.”

“You think it’ll come down to tonnage, in the end?” Nadeau asked. Arlott shook his head.

“No. They leech off our ideas, but we’re always a step ahead. They’ll narrow the gap, but never beat us.”

“Tonnage counts for a lot.”

Arlott nodded, grimly. “We were there. We saw. That’s why our governments are sinking so much into this coltainer project. We need to correct the manufacturing shortfall and fast.”

“Hang the economic consequences. Live first, pay later, eh?” Nadeau agreed.

“Precisely.” Arlott checked his instruments. “How long is this survey going to take, anyway? Not that I’m impatient, but…”

Nadeau nodded. The Coltainer they were escorting had hauled itself into a polar orbit over New Enewetak and was methodically sweeping the whole planet’s surface, looking for potential test sites.

Those sites needed to meet several criteria. The whole idea after all was that the colonists should be able to self-sustain without the constant delivery of basic necessities from Earth or anywhere else. They needed to be able to farm their own food, clean their own water and mine their own raw materials. The survey was exhaustive.

Fortunately, the actual colony assembly process should be relatively straightforward. Viable colony sites had everything needed to make concrete right there, or at least close and accessible enough for the coltainer’s automated quarrying and delivery systems to retrieve, and the coltainer could use several different concretes if needed.

Lewis had been full of grand schemes to have the machines excavate bunkers and basements and maybe even a subway station with an in-situ TBM ready and waiting for future expansion. Reality had got in the way, and the actual construction process was much less interesting. The actual colony blueprint was little more than a fully-equipped dormitory with a walk-in freezer attached to a small but sturdy warehouse.

It was fully plumbed, well lit, well drained, fully wired up with forcefield solar power. There was air conditioning and rooms appropriate for medical or scientific use. There was an office for colony management and a machine shop with its own small nanofactory and plenty of room for the colonists to install more conventional CAD/CAM tools… and all of it was assembled automatically by robots with no human supervision. In theory.

It would be a landmark moment in cutting-edge automation if it worked, but Lewis hadn’t been happy. He’d wanted so much more. Nadeau meanwhile would be giggling with joy if the system built so much as a single straight wall in the right place on its first outing, let alone a whole compound.

But, it had to find a suitable site first.

“We’ll be here for several days,” he predicted. “And we’ll probably keep coming back.”

Arlott didn’t look happy. “This isn’t a research ship. I know we’re acting in support of an important operation, but…”

“Just be glad we didn’t bring the SOR along for this,” Nadeau joked. “Not only would they take up all the space and eat all the food, but what’s worse is they’d probably have some useful insights.”

“I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting them,” Arlott replied.

“You’re lucky. They’re…overwhelming. Sergeant Vandenberg could do a couple of hundred squats with us sitting on his shoulders while giving a lecture on variable-gravity metallurgical processes. And he’s neither the strongest man in the SOR, nor the most intelligent.”

“…I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Don’t get me wrong, they’re great guys. Friendly and charming, but…humbling.” Nadeau sniffed. “But we live in humbling times, I guess. I mean, you’re a starship captain.”

Arlott chuckled. “And just ten years ago, I was watching Jackson test the warp engine you designed.”

Nadeau shook his head and waved a hand to fend off the compliment. “It was just a reverse-engineered Hunter design,” he said. “Besides, Ted Bartlett cracked spacetime distortion. I was the forcefield guy.”

“And I’m just a ship captain. The ship just sails on different tides.” Arlott considered the coltainer probe again. “Someday, people are going to live on that planet. Someday soon, I hope. And their definition of ‘normal’ is going to humble somebody else. And maybe in three hundred years’ time, it’ll be humbling and strange to meet somebody who actually lives on Earth.”

“Maybe.” Nadeau agreed.

He was spared from having to think of what to say next by the Coltainer probe, which chose that moment to send them an update.

He reviewed it on his tablet. “It’s found… seventy-four potential sites, and is relocating for the high-detail survey,” he announced.

“Well. To Hell with that,” Arlott decided. “I have paperwork to do. As nice as this conversation is…”

“Yeah, I should get back to work too. We need to review these survey results.”

“Have…fun?” Arlott joked. Nadeau grinned.

“Actually…yeah. I think I will,” he said.

The probe was, after all, already exceeding his expectations.

Date Point: 12y7m1w AV
High Mountain Fortress, Gao

Champion Genshi

“…And this is a recent find?”

The archives beneath High Mountain Fortress were very different to the fortress itself. They had been excavated during Gao’s information age, and designed with future upgrades in mind, meaning that there wasn’t an inch of the stacks that couldn’t be disassembled and replaced easily and quickly.

That was just the information layer, of course. The physical vaults and archives plunged deep into ancient, stable bedrock, and there was a constant stream of artifacts in and out: Archaeological curios destined for Highmountain museums all over Gao, and new items inbound for storage and historically important documents for archiving in the Clan’s great library.

Over the centuries, sometimes, the filing had been occasionally less than perfect. Sometimes, an enterprising young Highmountain might go digging in the archives for an obscure fossil, and turn up something…different.

Something like an ancient Gaoian skull.

“Technically, no. It’s been in the archives for generations. Anyway, look: The attached notes made special mention of the signs of osteoporosis around the left sphenoid ridge. You’ll see the significance of course.”

Genshi had no idea what a sphenoid ridge even was, and said so with his usual tact. “Please, grandfather. Assume that I have neglected my studies in the field of… well, skulls.”

Talo chittered, and ran a claw along the feature in question, not actually touching it. “Here,” he said, and then tapped the side of his own head for emphasis.

“…That’s where a translator implant would go!” Genshi realized, and reevaluated the skull.

“Indeed. And the alleged osteoporosis, on close inspection, is more consistent with nanofilament infiltration.”

Genshi set the skull down carefully in its box. “…Who was he?”

“She. Unfortunately we don’t know, but we do know that she was a silverfur like yourself, and most likely hailed from the ancient city-state of Yem Sha. She was slightly older than I am now when she died.”

“A good long life, then!” Genshi said admiringly.

“Oh yes. Especially considering she was a contemporary of Tiritya and Fyu. Probably even a peer or companion…but she didn’t die of old age, sadly. There are…you see the tool marks?”

Genshi shook his head again, and bent down to study the long-deceased Mother’s bone again.

“The Wi Kaoians fought a bloody war,” Talo sighed sadly. “You remember your history? The … condition…in which Tiritya and her Sisters were returned to this fortress after their failed infiltration of the city?”

“I remember.” It was a grim and uncivilized epoch in Gaoian history. ”Skinning a female? Barbaric.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Talo said, “This one was was dead before they began. Tiritya herself was not so fortunate…but I am digressing.”

“Into horrific territory,” Genshi commented.

“Yes,” Talo agreed. “But of course, this raises the question…”

“Just what the hell was a cybernetic doing in the head of one of Tiritya’s sisterhood?” Genshi finished.

“Quietly self-destructing on the event of her death, it seems.” Talo drummed his claws thoughtfully on the edge of the steel table. “It’s a strange feeling, watching a war on the horizon that I probably won’t live to see the beginning of. Indeed, I hope I don’t.”

“We could do with your experience…” Genshi told him.

“Maybe.” Talo allowed. “But if the war starts, in whatever form it takes, while I’m still around then we shall be woefully unprepared. Except that now it seems we may have been obliviously fighting it for at least a thousand years.”

“What happened to the young Brother who found this?”

“Ah. A small deception on my part. I never actually said whether the find was a recent one, did I?” Talo ducked his head apologetically. “You are, I’m afraid, speaking with him.”

“…And you have kept this secret?”

“It would be…Young Genshi, you and I are at opposite ends of the information spectrum,” Talo said, slowly. “To conceal information and keep secrets goes against everything my Clan stands for…” he glanced at the skull again. “In most cases. But knowledge is a responsibility.”

“This is possibly one of the most profound findings in our history, surely you agree!”

“Exactly.” Talo duck-nodded. ”Not, therefore, the sort of thing a self-respecting academic waves around without due consideration. And when I began to consider the ramifications of alien meddling during the most important chapter of our history…”

Genshi held his peace with great effort.

Talo did not take his eyes off the skull. “So. We have a faction in the game that could do this undetected while we were still fighting with spears and crossbows… and I doubt we can meaningfully combat them. Not yet. But unless I miss my guess, you’re hard at work on that problem, yes?”

“Do you really expect me to answer that question, Grandfather?”

Talo shook his head solemnly, though he seemed pleased. “No.”

He stepped around the table and picked up the ancient Mother’s skull to contemplate it. “Encroaching death has its way of adjusting your priorities. Not so long ago, I would have chipped away for a scrap of knowledge from you, or some assurance. Now…I have learned to trust. Gao will have to do without me from now on. It’s…liberating, really.”

“You will be missed,” Genshi offered. “You’re held in high esteem by my Clan.”

Talo’s ears flattened slightly at the compliment, just for a moment as though he’d been patted on the head. It was an almost cublike gesture of genuine pleasure. “And I hold your Clan in high esteem. Especially its Champion. Leaving the future to young males of your caliber makes this all a little easier. I’m…scared, but I’m not afraid. I know that even if our species is doomed, we’ll claw out a few eyes on the way. The galaxy will remember Gao, one way or another.”

He put the skull down again and shook himself. “The past must trust the future. Don’t forget that on the day when it’s your turn to move into the past, young Genshi. You will have to, eventually. It’s worth planning well ahead.”

Genshi gave him a long, thoughtful stare, then turned and stooped into a low Gaoian bow. “Thank you for your kind advice, honored Grandfather,” he said, formally. He decided not to mention that he had already been making such plans. Talo didn’t need to know. Nobody did.

Only the Champion should know when a Clan was about to die.

Date Point: 12y7m1w AV
Etsicitty Property, North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“You mean to tell us you’re good friends with the supreme allied commander of extrasolar defence?” Julian asked.

“Shit, I helped him through his divorce.” Kevin smiled fondly at the memory. “You think I got the Byron Group job on charm and sophistication alone?”

“Oh sure I did,” Allison snarked, “Talk to you for five minutes and your natural player just oozes out all over the place.”

“Oozes. Thanks, I’ll remember that.” Kevin snorted. “Point is…Tremblay’s a good man. Not a half-decent man, not a merely good man, he’s a good man. Kinda guy who gives you real faith in humanity. Now, his job is to look out for the safety and security of Earth, Cimbrean, all the human colonies…”

“Why’s he gonna care, then?” Julian asked. “Resources sent over to help out the People aren’t going to be defending humanity, are they?”

“Mm…” Kevin wobbled his head. “They’ll sure as shit be defending our humanity, but you might be right. Except it’s probably not a bad investment anyway. Those guys could be valuable down the road, y’know? Then there’s all the Hierarchy tech on that planet just waiting for Bear Bartlett to rip into it, and… shit, maybe we could put a base out there? Hell, even a whole colony? So it’s not like there’s zero strategic value there.”

“Isn’t there anybody out there who’ll do it just because it’s the right thing to do?” Xiù asked.

“No,” Kevin said bluntly. “And that’s honestly the way it should be. Guys like that, they’ll pick up a new super important Cause every week and never get anything done. Guys like Tremblay, they’re obligated to look after their duty first so when something comes along that needs their attention, they have the resources to handle it.”

“I don’t wanna have this argument again,” Julian groaned.

“Well I’m sorry, bro, but Earth doesn’t work the way your relationship does. You three look out for each other. Back here on the Planet Dirt, the pictures are bigger and the stakes are higher. Self-interest ain’t just a lifestyle choice, it’s the only way things can work.”

“You ain’t gotta be a dick about it, Kevin. We do get it.”

“Then quit complainin’ and use it! Guys, you are fuckin’ celebrities right now. Walked on Mars! Toured alien worlds! Made first contact! And look, these guys have the same fucking enemies we do. Ain’t that a hell of a coincidence?”

He leaned forward and put his hands flat on the table in front of him. “I don’t think you three realize just how much power you have right now, but that power won’t last long. And you can use it without pissing anyone off, either. That is a rare gift. All you need to do is talk. Show a pic of Yan and Vemik! It isn’t classified…and show the Abrogator thing. That isn’t classified either as long as you don’t get into details.”

“…Is that wise?” Xiù asked.

“Define ‘wise,’” Kevin shrugged. “‘Cuz the answer to that one comes down to whether you think the consequences are worth it.”

“Vemik’s pictures might be a good idea,” mused Julian. “He got a hold of my camera one day and took hundreds of ‘em. Some are pretty good, too. And he figured out the video button.”

Allison chimed in. “The video he took of Yan was really good. Yan tackled him and he dropped the camera, and it caught like ten minutes of them wrasslin’ in the dirt before they hugged it out. Maybe edit out the bad, uh, ‘viewing angles’ but…”

Julian snorted. “Yeah. Their loincloths don’t really do much for modesty, do they?”

Kevin grimaced. “…Really didn’t need that image.”

“Eh, it’s humid as hell in their jungle, I don’t blame ‘em. Anyway, Vemik likes to play keepaway so I waited until Yan had worked ‘em over real good before I took the camera back,” Julian remembered fondly. “Me and Yan figured out that tag-teaming worked best on the bouncy little fucker. Vemik didn’t like that at all, said I was cheating. Yan just noogied me and laughed.”

Kevin quirked an eyebrow. “No shit, the big fucker’s playful?”

“Like a kitten!” Xiù enthused. “Um…when he wants to be.”

“Well, there ya go! The People make their own PR! And here you three are sulkin’ in an old house in the country, pissin’ and moanin’ about how shit everybody else is instead of gettin’ off your asses and using it! For fuck’s sake guys, you put yourselves through a couple years of hell for personal reasons, but when the chips are down and a whole species is at stake suddenly you expect somebody else to carry the ball? You’re better than that! All of you!”

The three of them went very still.

“…Consider that the punch on the nose from me to you,” Kevin finished, looking at Xiù specifically. “Sometimes, we all need a punch on the nose.”

Xiù gave him a long, steady stare and then sighed and gave her own hands an ashamed look. “…Yeah.”

“So… what? Book deal? Press release?” Allison took Xiù’s hand. “I mean, you’re right, but we don’t really know how this stuff works.”

“You let me worry about that,” Kevin promised. “Upshot to being a senior Byron Group executive. You wouldn’t believe some of the strings I can pull…”

“You’ve already got a plan,” Julian guessed.

Kevin put on his best winning smile. “Yeah. Reckon I do.” He stood up. “Come on. We’re goin’ down to the city.”

They blinked at him before Julian asked the question. “Uh, we are? What for?”

“I’m findin’ you three some good tailoring on my dime,” Kevin said. “After all. You’re gonna need to look good for the cameras…”

Date Point: 12y7m2w AV
Adam’s Apartment, Demeter Way, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

One advantage to dating Adam—he did all the cooking. And most of the eating. And he cleaned up as he went, too, so really the only thing Marty had to do was set the table and watch. There were worse ways to have dinner.

“So, your dad got him a plea bargain?”

“Somethin’ like that. I mean, it’s the prosecutor who offered the plea bargain but… y’know, he plays golf with the governor. And Dad’s been workin’ with Sir Jeremy Sandy since day one and the only reason he doesn’t play golf with the governor too is because his handicap’s so bad.”

Marty nodded. “Right. Guess it’s hard to play golf in a wheelchair.”

“No, I mean it’s, like, thirty or something.” Adam grinned at her and returned to his cooking, and Marty grudgingly awarded him several points while plotting her revenge. She was too used to Adam playing the amiably straightforward doofus: there were moments when he’d pull something a tiny bit subtler like that and make her feel like a dumbass for not catching it, because she’d have seen it coming from anybody else.

She respected him, of course she did. He just didn’t throw curveballs very often, so the rare ones he did throw invariably tripped her up.

And then he got all smug about it, and he was unfairly sexy when he was smug.

A comical image sprang to mind. “Have you ever tried golf?”

Adam burst out laughing. “Oh man! Would I have to wear the polo shirt and a flat cap?”

“Yup.” Marty grinned at him over her lemonade.

“I’ll stick to Gravball.”

“Yeah? I dunno, it’s got everything you could want. Fine motor control, hitting something really hard…”

“No way do they make clubs that could take the HEAT.”

“Murray golfs.”

“Of course he fuckin’ does, he’s Scottish!” Adam snorted. “And he’s tiny,” he added, affectionately.

“Only by HEAT standards.” Marty sipped her drink and put it down. “Anyway. Nofl. Didn’t think your dad was the kind to go easy on a smuggler.”

The topology of Adam’s back shifted intricately as he shrugged. “He didn’t. Nofl has a lot of community service to do, and we’re gonna benefit from it. You’ve heard some of the things he’s promised?”

“Yeah. full regeneration of an amputated limb, nerve regrowth. I wrote a report with my own opinions for Powell.” Marty shrugged. “I dunno. I get the impression Nofl’s passion for science outweighs his caution or sense of ethics. I don’t care if we have the latent DNA for tissue regeneration still present in our genome or not, hell I don’t care if we could splice it in. That’s dangerous territory.”

Adam nodded slowly, but didn’t comment.

“…Your dad’s eager to get full use of his leg back, I get that-” Marty began.

“He ain’t reckless, Marty.”

“No,” she soothed. “But come on, tell me how you’d cope with spending half your time in a chair and the other half on crutches? ‘Cause I don’t need to be your girlfriend to know you’d go crazy.”

“Dad’s calmer than me, though. He always has his shit together.”

“Sure, but he’s still only human. He’s got hope.”

Adam loaded the chicken into the oven, wiped down the counter and then turned to lean against the wall, facing her. He only rarely looked so troubled.

“It just hits close to home, you know? I mean…” he twisted, and lifted the leg of his basketball shorts to reveal a bright blue Crue-D patch on his inner thigh. The minimum-dose maintenance patch that every single HEAT man wore constantly to stop their own excessive and growing strength from giving them chronic trouble. “This is Nofl’s work too. And then the little maricón turns out to be an irresponsible jackass smuggler.”

Marty let the homophobic slur slide, this time. Adam was clearly badly troubled, and there wasn’t actually a bigoted bone in his body: He’d have been appalled if somebody had suggested there was. “So you’re worried about yourself, not your dad?”

“No! …Yes. Uh, both. And the Lads. And you, I mean, you’ve used Crude…”

Marty nodded. The HEAT program needed the Lads to be able to trust Crue-D. Taking the medicine was a life-altering experience anyway with permanent ramifications. It was a huge step—if there was any doubt at all about Cruezzir and its derivatives…

“Well, has it done anything bad to you?”

“…um…okay. Yes and no, I think. Lemme…” He started pacing like he did whenever he was trying to string thoughts together; thinking and motion were to Adam as peas and carrots were to dinner. “I mean, a while ago? Dad noticed I’m way more aggressive than I used to be.”

Marty sipped her lemonade again. “Are you?”

“I dunno. I mean, I got into fights in school… But, I trust Dad, you know? If he says it…”

“Okay…” Marty conceded. “But you can’t have been a teddy bear. I mean, from what I hear you could out deadlift anyone in Folctha before you even left. Legsy said you were the most determined man he’d ever met. Hell, even ‘Base says you were scary as hell all the way from Basic. And you got through selection and all that…”

Adam sighed and leaned on the counter island, resting his knuckles on the polished granite. “…I dunno, Marty. I’ve been talkin’ a lot with Lieutenant Mears about this. About the Hate, and the… I mean, I’ve got good reasons for feelin’ the things I do. But I don’t know if I have good reasons for feelin’ them as much as I do, you know? I mean, it’s been eight years since San Diego. Seven months on from that I was just startin’ to put it behind me and then we lost Sara. But nowadays… some days those wounds still feel raw like they happened yesterday. Shit, there are days I wanna tear Ava’s head off, or hunt down that little bitch Sean and fuckin’ crush him.”

He launched himself away from the counter, and paced aimlessly around the apartment. “Or there’s times I look at you and my whole body hurts from how much I love you, or, or times when I’ll be sparring with John and he’s, y’know, he’s my fuckin’ brother but, like, I could break him easy and the thought just feels so good…but then I blink and just, I feel bad and I wanna fuckin’ cuddle for even thinkin’ that. And I thought all that was just me, right? Like, that’s who I am…”

He sighed. “And then the little gray shit who invented Crue turns out to be completely fuckin’ irresponsible. I’m…”

“Scared,” Marty finished for him.

“…Yeah. I’m afraid of myself. I think…I think we all are.”

“I can see why, but…” Marty swirled her lemonade thoughtfully.. “…Is that the Crude? Or is it the power you earned? How many people besides you could pick up a truck and toss it?”

“No,” he shook his head emphatically. “It’s the Crude, I know it. Those feelings are raw baby. I feel stuff like it’s new and intense all the time, that can’t be just ‘cuz I’m strong.”

“True,” Marty agreed. “But I don’t think it’s anything wrong with the Crude, or some accident because Nofl cut corners.”

“Then what?”

She used her glass to wave at the all of him. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

“…Huh?”

“Seriously. Go look, right now.”

Adam blinked at her, then shrugged and headed for the wide, full-length mirror in the corner next to his sewing work bench. The apartment had a lot of mirrors, actually, from the big one that filled half a wall in the bathroom to the small face mirror on the closet door, but he needed them because he was forced by circumstance to do his own tailoring. So, the biggest and best mirror stood between his sewing machine and the mannequin that Rebar and Sikes had made for him, the modular one built to a HEAT operator’s scale. They all benefited from Adam’s needlework, after all.

He was wearing his favorite jersey that day—the Cimbrean Speedsters sports team jersey complete with a ridiculous sports car that had left skidmarks wrapping around to the back. There was no such team, in fact—Adam did a lot of community work as part of the Folctha government’s fitness promotions, and made a point of not taking sides in any sport. The only teams he allowed himself to support were the San Diego Chargers (now a well-respected NFL legacy that had never officially been closed down as a kind of living memorial) and the completely fictional Speedsters. One of the colony’s soccer moms had made that jersey for him and had somehow managed to get his dimensions right.

He carefully took it off to study himself in closer detail, turning to and fro to make sure she wasn’t pointing out some injury or another. Once he figured out that nothing was wrong he settled and stood there to frown uncomprehendingly at himself. The nanotech ‘E-Tattoo’ that covered his prodigious slab of a chest was set to his favorite pattern: marching Green Feet that wandered aimlessly across his chest in time with his pulse. At his heart, Adam had joined the Pararescue Jumpers first, and remained committed to their mission.

“Okay…?” he asked, after the Feet had done half a lap of his left pectoral.

“What do you see?” Marty prompted.

“…Me?”

“How old do you look?”

“I, uh…”

She laughed softly and interrupted his confusion by sliding up behind him and running her hands around his waist and up his chest, resting them lightly over his heart. She noticed with secret delight that those Feet sped up a little, and she could feel his life thumping steadily away warmly under her hand..

“Ignore all the muscles and the body fuzz, and the jawline and the stubble. Look past that and look at your face, look at your eyes. Do you see it?”

His heart beat slightly faster. “…I’m young.”

”You look almost like you’re fresh out of high school,” she said. “You haven’t aged a day and your bloodwork backs that up. John’s the same way, all the older guys are getting younger and healing up…hell, even Firth is inching perilously close to handsome.”

Adam snorted, and covered both her hands with one of his. “Pretty Firth? That’ll be the goddamn apocalypse…”

“Well, it’s true. You’re all on the fountain of youth…tell me that isn’t gonna affect your mind.”

His reflection gave her an anguished look. “Yeah. Exactly. This is scary stuff we’re playing with, and Nofl…”

“…Is a Corti. I know. I don’t think he’s malicious or anything, but they didn’t get that reputation for playing fast and loose with the scientific method by accident…” She kissed his shoulder. “But if you don’t trust Nofl, babe, trust me.”

“…I scare you too to, though. Don’t I?”

“Yeah,” Marty acknowledged. “But…I like it. You’re exciting when you’re scary. And I know that because you’re scary, the safest place in the world is when you’re holding me.”

“…You don’t want me walking comfortably, do you?”

She winked at him, and the Green Feet paused in their wandering for just a moment. “Never.”

He tried and failed to be discreet about adjusting himself through his shorts with his free hand. “…Goddamn I love you.”

“I love you too.” She rested her head against his spine and breathed a happy sigh. “And… thank you.”

“For what?”

“For talking about this stuff with me. It means a lot that you don’t try and pretend nothing’s wrong. That’s…thank you.”

He turned around and drew her close to his chest. “…I learned that lesson the hard way.”

“I know.”

Adam’s whole body heaved slowly with an enormous sigh, he gave her a comparatively gentle squeeze that was still overpowering by anybody else’s standards, kissed her hair and then let her go.

“We ain’t gonna trust Nofl after this,” he said, quietly. “I know he’s supposed to be workin’ for us, but…”

“He’ll be working with me,” Marty said. “Like I said: Don’t trust him, trust me. I’ll keep him in line.”

Adam chuckled, and returned to the kitchen. “Reckon you will…” he said. “After our vacation though, right?”

“Yup. He has community service to finish first. Where are we going, anyway?”

“I had a few ideas…”

Date Point: 12y7m2w AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, Orbiting Planet Aru, Elder Space

Bedu

The Negotiable Curiosity wasn’t the same ship any more. Vakno had categorically refused to leave Perfection without bringing most of her…equipment….with her.

Bedu was no idiot; most of the gear Vakno had removed from her bunker and installed in his ship had nothing to do with science, it was communications and datamining equipment. She’d paid for the shipyard time to have the Negotiable Curiosity expanded, extended and rebalanced. The ship was if anything a huge improvement on what it had been, and Bedu was practical enough to appreciate that, but it still felt inappropriate. The ship was his house after all, and Vakno had extensively remodelled it, effectively turning it into her new flying office and Bedu into her personal pilot.

Most of the remaining equipment was outside of his knowledge, but he knew what some of it did. Negotiable Curiosity had an extensive and hypersensitive sensor suite that could trace the lingering spacetime distortions of a ship at FTL for years after the fact, and Vakno had expanded on that functionality. Information was her business—he should have guessed that she would be an expert at gathering it in all its forms.

“There are power signatures here and there on the planet, you’re correct,” she reported. ”They seem to be focused in hospitals.”

“The population in general?” Bedu asked. Vakno glanced up at a peripheral display.

“Declining rapidly. A few million remain.”

“The OmoAru used to be a spacefaring power just as widespread as we are now. This decline cannot be natural, can it?”

“No, I don’t believe it can,” Vakno agreed. “And I find it worrying that I have become more interested in the mystery since de-implanting myself. Something like this should be of universal concern.”

“Yes. I have…hypotheses on that subject.” Bedu called up his notes. Doing so without implants was vastly less convenient, but if even one of his hypotheses were accurate then he had done himself an enormous service by removing them. “It’s telling that every single expedition to investigate the phenomenon has devolved into grave-robbing.”

“If the implants can somehow control what a user is permitted to think…” Vakno mused, without finishing the thought aloud.

“Theoretically trivial,” Bedu opined. “Simple stimulus-reward, stimulus-punishment system. Mechanically much more complicated in practice, of course. Constant monitoring of both neuroelectrical and neurochemical patterns, species-adjusted… Any control software capable of interpreting those data and determining intent would be effectively sapient.”

Vakno blinked at him. “True. That would meet a reasonable definition for metacognition.”

“Exactly.”

“What exactly are you thinking?”

Bedu turned in his seat to pull up a file, which he transferred to the big volumetric display in the middle of Vakno’s lab. “Possibilities. First and least likely: Problem is systemic to implant use, some undiagnosed fault or flaw in their operation. Maybe a functional addiction, subtly discourages thinking about implants in negative ways. Flaws: the behaviour is not species-specific, wouldn’t discourage thinking about species decline in general until the researcher had reasonable grounds to believe implants were involved.”

Vakno nodded. “Not a strong hypothesis.”

“No” Bedu agreed. “Mentioned it first because other possibilities are more disturbing, and seem less plausible at first. Are you familiar with the work of…” He paused, scowled and flapped a hand irritably. “What was her name? The AI researcher? Green banner from Grand Central University, graduated in my year. The digital nihilism theorist?”

Vakno glowered at him. “I can scarcely remember your name without my implants. Don’t ask me about obscure contemporaries of yours. What did she do?”

“She proved that an electronic substrate cannot indefinitely support a genuinely sapient intelligence,” Bedu recalled. “Funny, I can remember her proof but not her name. I’m quite sure we exchanged DNA.”

“Ugh. Green-banners, breeding.” Vakno sniffed. Bedu recalled too late that her own banner was silver.

“It’s an authorized breeding caste,” he asserted with composure. It was easy to remain composed when Vakno got too self-important. She might have developed a contact network worth estimated trillions of Directorate Currency Units, but her actual contributions to science were effectively nil. That prodigious and valuable intellect was largely going to waste.

“I don’t care what the office of species development says,” she snapped, oblivious to his thoughts. “It’s time we restricted DNA exchanges to blue banners or higher.”

Bedu blinked at her, then returned to his work. “I will just focus on the objective,” he declared.

“You do that.”

They worked in silence for a while, though Bedu was counting silently in his head. He was grudgingly impressed that Vakno held out as far as two hundred and sixty-four before her resolve cracked.

“You were saying?” she asked.

“Hmm? Oh. the AI researcher?”

“Yes.”

“She scanned her brain, thoroughly, and simulated her personality. Over a thousand simulations, and every single one attempted suicide before long.”

Even by Corti standards, that experiment had been discomforting. It wasn’t until Bedu had encountered the human phrase ‘heebie-jeebies’ that he’d been able to put a name to the emotion he’d suppressed upon hearing of it.

Vakno of course didn’t seem to care. “And this is relevant how?”

“I was just wondering if there might not be some…counterpart phenomenon. I wonder if the presence of extensive cybernetics might have a deleterious effect on the consciousness of a sapient being.”

“Mechanism?”

“This isn’t even a hypothesis yet.”

“Ridiculous,” Vakno scoffed. “Why should there be a fundamental incompatibility between organic neurons and the implants specifically designed to interface with them?”

“An incomplete understanding of the principles of neurology?” Bedu suggested. “Some emergent property of the neural nets? Or an evolutionary change! Cumulative across many generations.”

“Driven by what selection pressure?” Vakno finally turned away from her instruments and gave him more than a fraction of her attention. “Bedu, you can generate ideas all you want but please do subject them to an internal review before you voice them.”

“Do you not have any yourself?”

“Not yet.” Vakno sniffed. “Some of us practice science with finesse and focus. We don’t…brute-force our way to a result through ill-considered abduction schemes or archaeological vandalism.”

“I have yet to witness any of this science of yours.”

“Then perhaps you should cease your distractions and let me work.” Vakno returned to her instruments. “Land the ship. I will share my hypothesis once I have one that is worth discussing.”

Bedu resisted the urge to grumble at being ordered about on his ship, and elected to obey the command. Vakno was a silver-banner after all, a member of a higher rung on the Corti societal ladder. While neither of them were exactly in the Directorate’s good graces, neither of them were exiles either. She did, technically, hold the authority in their relationship.

He comforted himself with the thought that she was at least present and working at the problem. That meant she valued his insight more than she allowed herself to say. If she didn’t see any substance in the data he had presented then she would never have paid to modify his ship, nor flown on it all the way out to this last remote and fading ember of the OmoAru Republic.

Still. He missed his crew. They had been infuriating, but they had respected and engaged with him. Vakno did neither.

He just wished that he could tell her how he had acquired his information…

Date Point: 12y7m2w3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

“The bloody PM’s coming here?”

“He did just win the election, Powell.” Knight set three cups of tea down on his desk. Earl Grey for himself, a mug of Tetley so strong that the spoon could stand up in it for Powell, and another Earl Grey for Costello. The young Canadian had always had slightly more sophistication than his superior, there.

“Aye, by promising to cut military spending,” Powell grumbled

“Yes,” Knight sat down, and allowed himself a small triumphant smile. “I wrote a small letter to the king. And now the Right Honourable Stephen Davies PM is paying us an official visit. Less than two weeks after the election, no less.”

Powell chuckled and sat back. “Bloody hellfire. There’s times I forget you have more power in your pen than I have in a barracks full of HEAT operators.”

“His Majesty served alongside my father, briefly,” Knight explained. “Apparently I had the pleasure of meeting him, though I was far too young to remember it.”

“And that was enough to get him to send the prime minister our way for an education?” Costello asked.

“I think he’s rather more concerned with the fate of his grandchildren,” Knight explained. “Keep this under your hat gentlemen, but a certain Sub-Lieutenant Wales has applied to serve aboard the forthcoming HMS Vancouver.”

“She has, huh?” Costello angled his head slightly. “You know, that did always impress me about the royal family. Keeping the old traditions alive.”

Powell, a lifelong Republican, just grunted some grudging respect.

“Oh yes. In an earlier age of course they all had swords and plate and horses.” Knight sipped his tea. “Nowadays they have an FTL destroyer or a helicopter gunship. Anyway don’t worry too much about the Prime Minister, Powell. There are powers much older and more influential than him at work, here.”

“So, what’s our role?” Powell asked, picking up his boot-brown insult to the word ‘tea.’

“You’re being promoted, old thing. Congratulations.”

“…Already?”

“You’ve been a major for six years, Powell.”

“I have?” Powell sat and calculated furiously. “…Christ, I have.”

“Mm. Really, I would have elevated you sooner, but that NOVA HOUND report didn’t help matters. Don’t worry, you’re just the first in a wave of forthcoming promotions. Room opening up at the top, you see.”

It took Powell a moment to get the hint. “Aw, no, sir-”

“Less of that, man.” Knight chided him gently. “Tremblay’s sixty-two years old, I’m only nine months behind him. The job isn’t done, but neither of us can stay much longer. Time doesn’t work that way. So, Caruthers will be taking over my office and I shall be retiring to a nice estate I’ve picked out up near Sellers Lake, where my granddaughter will have three ponies and I will grow roses, or some other bloody awful twee thing like that.” He sighed. “Time. The enemy you can’t beat. But at least I can knock some sense into the PM before I go.”

He turned to Costello. “Of course, you’ll need to step up as HEAT’s commanding officer.”

Costello nodded. “Yes sir,” he replied. “Though, I’m, uh, concerned. The Lads haven’t seen much action lately, and none with Butler or Parata on the team.”

“There’s always a mission, sooner or later,” Powell said.

“In the meantime, you might think up a nice team challenge for them. Something that the PM can benefit from seeing. Or, better yet, we might do that for you…” Knight did a rare thing and flashed his most dreaded, gentlemanly smile.

Costello was up to it, though. “Well, how about Daar?” he suggested. “He keeps bragging about that First Fang of his…”

“To be fair it’s mostly the Whitecrests that brag up First Fang. Still,” Powell considered, “I’d like to see what they can do, m’self.”

“Why not replay that Guvnurag scenario in the simulator, and have First Fang take a crack at it? It would be a good comparison.”

The Guvnurag scenario was one of their newer training runs. Inspired by the overwhelming show of Hunter force at the Guvnurag homeworld, the idea was to train HEAT operators for the extraction of high-value targets during what Master Sergeant Vandenberg had eloquently summed up as ‘the biggest case of a dynamic FUBAR in all galactic history.’

A lot of their scenarios had been like that since Capitol Station—all training scenarios involving Hunters now assumed that the enemy could and would bring catastrophic mass to bear. The HEAT, it turned out, was training hard to bring all the aggressive impact of raiders to bear in salvaging whatever valuable resources could be snatched out from under the Hunters’ collective noses.

Which was a potential good match; if intelligence was to be believed, absolute unmitigated savagery was First Fang’s stock in trade.

The lingering question was whether they could bring as much savagery. Knight personally doubted it. He didn’t doubt a Gaoian’s spirit, not for a second, but not even the success of the Whitecrests quite counterbalanced the fact that their Clans and other institutions had been under Hierarchy influence for some time by now.

Besides, it was impossible to be familiar with Master Sergeant Firth’s work and not have an extremely high standard for the word ‘savage.’

“Good thinking, that man,” he acknowledged Costello’s idea with a nod. “I think putting the fear of God into our elected leader might be just the ticket.”

Costello smiled handsomely and drank some of his tea. “I think we can deliver there.”

“Good. Now, seeing as Folctha is about to host its first ever official state visit and we are the focus, I think we need to talk about getting the place absolutely ship-shape…”

Date Point: 12y7m3w AV
Manhattan, New York City, USA, Earth

Professor Daniel Hurt

Dan lived by the basic rule that tipping well never harmed a man’s reputation. So, the hotel’s bellhop in his traditional ritzy red uniform retreated from the room babbling promises about what to do if he, Daniel, needed anything else, and…

And Dan finally got some peace.

Book signing tours were like that. Hotel, bookshop, airport, plane, airport, bookshop, hotel. Tiring, but that was what the publishers paid him for. Staying in the good suites at the major international hotels was a perk that helped soften the wearying days.

He kicked off his shoes, laid his socks aside to be laundered, took off his tie and jacket, and sat on the edge of the bed enjoying the sensation of deep carpet under his toes for a few minutes in silence, then checked out the TV.

‘That Show With Steven Lawrence’ was starting in ten minutes. He didn’t just enjoy going on it, he was a fan and it was a welcome way to unwind on a Friday after a hard week, so he changed down into his loungewear, brushed his teeth and grabbed a whisky from the minibar while the commercials were on. He’d already ordered dinner via room service, and the promised New York strip steak with roasted vegetables arrived just as Lawrence was delivering his comedic summary of the week’s events.

He sat down to eat just as Lawrence was wrapping up and bringing on the guests.

“Well, we’ve got a hell of a show for you tonight, but I have to begin with an apology. You see, last week, I promised we’d have Mohammed Najjar, Polly Steinman, Nick Gruenbeck and Martin Østervang on and… you know me, I don’t like to go back on my promises, but I’m afraid we had to this time…”

He waved down the disappointed noises from the audience and carried on.

“…But on this occasion, something happened that we just couldn’t pass up because three, uh, simply incredible young people put the word out there that they have something important to say and were looking for a platform. Well, you know us—” A ripple of laughter. The words themselves hadn’t been funny, but the tone of voice alone had turned it into a joke. “So, instead of our scheduled guests for today, I’d like to instead welcome to the stage a trio of abductees, explorers, astronauts and pioneers, the first humans to walk on the surface of Mars—”

He had to almost shout over the enthusiastic screaming, and Dan immediately went from half-watching the show to giving it his full and undivided attention.

“Please welcome to the stage, Allison Buehler—!”

Buehler had a determination in her step that Dan judged was probably not all that artificial. She looked to him like the sort of woman who confronted her nerves and anxieties head-on, an impression only amplified by her choice of a sharp-cut, slightly conservative, graphite gray dress that accentuated her long limbs and intense demeanor.

That wasn’t a fashion commentary. Dan had learned early on that you could learn many things from the way a person dressed. Buehler struck him as his kind of forthright, no-bullshit type of woman.

“—Julian Etsicitty—!” Julian was more sanguine. He’d been coaxed into a forest green fitted shirt which he made look incredible, and which was tucked into equally well-fitted jeans with a braided brown leather belt. He offered a shy wave to the audience and ran a hand through his artfully shaggy and wild black hair in a moment of obvious nervousness. It was so well-done, Dan crassly wondered for a second if it was a rehearsed move. Probably not, it was too…real. There was a notable uptick in female cheering which got even louder when he smiled unconsciously and glanced downwards. He was a natural, knew it, and was slightly embarrassed by it all.

“And Xiù Chang!”

Dan had to immediately award Xiù several points: The other two had natural good looks and the attention of the makeup artist to fall back on, but Chang owned the stage from the moment she stepped out of the darkness. She had a one-in-a-million natural charisma and Dan sat up, paying rapt attention. Even the long, ragged scars on her arm were somehow elegant. Dan knew what was happening, understood what she was doing and how calculated and deliberate her poise really was, but that didn’t matter. He couldn’t deny the effect it had on him.

“Now that,” he muttered, “Is a formidable woman.”

‘Formidable’ seemed like a good word to describe all three of them.

“Thank you for coming, great to have you!” Lawrence pattered, as he escorted the trio to the wide couch that had been set up in place of the usual chair.

“Thank you!” Xiù answered for all of them. “And thanks for having us!”

The applause died down as Lawrence settled into his own seat. “So… wow. I mean, I have some fairly big names on this show, but I don’t know if you guys know just how huge you really are?”

Xiù looked to the other two for that one, and Dan awarded her another point. Letting her do all the talking would have been counterproductive and awkward.

“We’ve been kinda isolated,” Julian said. “And busy.”

“I bet! Months in training then Mars, and… I mean, I had chills,” Lawrence told Xiù. “‘From Mars to the Stars,’ I mean, they’re simple words but you made them beautiful.”

“Oh, I lost so many hours of sleep coming up with them…” Xiù confided. “I was just like, ‘don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine…’ but… thank you.”

“Well, Armstrong choked on his lines, of course…” Lawrence pointed out.

The trio looked at each other. “I mean…” Allison chimed in. “The thing is, we really don’t like being compared to the Apollo crews. They were legends for us, growing up, you know? Our parents were kids when that happened, and it just feels wrong to us when people talk about us like we’re in the same league.”

Humility. And apparently genuine humility, too. Damn, these three were good.

“How are you not?” Lawrence asked. “You’ve explored alien planets, and you worked damn hard to do it. You might not like it, but you are.”

“It just feels… I mean, maybe it’s the danger of hero worship,” Julian suggested. “I guess they were just Neil, Buzz and Michael to each other. But… we didn’t train for nearly as long or work nearly as hard as they did. We had a more advanced ship, more advanced gear, artificial gravity…”

“So you think you had it easier?”

“We know we had it easier,” Allison agreed.

“Well, easy or not you were still out there in deep space for eighteen months afterwards. What were you doing?”

“Looking for deathworlds!” Julian was obviously a geek under that buff outdoorsy exterior, and clearly the girls were expecting him to let that out for this bit. They sat back while he sat forward on the couch and took the limelight for the moment.

Dan tucked into his steak as he listened. Julian was an engaging storyteller and he knew how much was too much when it came to the technical details of their mission. The steak wasn’t even half-eaten by the time Julian had finished his summary, but even in that brief couple of minutes Dan felt much better educated about why Misfit had flown than he had before.

“So…” Lawrence turned to Allison. “The three of you were pretty quiet and private before leaving Earth, you really didn’t make many appearances.”

“No,” she agreed. “We had, y’know, our training to focus on, and the expedition, and we just wanted to focus on that.”

“You were the source of a lot of gossip, a lot of speculation…”

“About our relationship? Yeah, we’re a triple,” Allison announced, firmly. Dan arched an eyebrow, but the audience took it well: The roar of approving cheers and clapping was deafeningly loud.

Lawrence let it die down while the three of them…well, they’d clearly wanted to keep it private, but had decided that ripping off the band-aid was more painless. Dan thought he detected some surprise at the positive reception.

It didn’t take long for the applause to fade, though, and Lawrence had been given plenty of time to prepare his next question. “What’s that like? How does it work for you guys?”

Xiù chipped in with a distinct lack of poise that made Dan snort laughter. She was clearly besotted with the other two. “It…works. Really well. We’d kinda, um…”

“It works because we’ve figured out how to work it out in private,” offered Julian in a protective tone that was somehow still friendly . “I know we’re not exactly anonymous but…”

Dan knew Lawrence well enough to know that although he didn’t seem to get the hint, that was an act again. His job to tease a little more out of them after all, but he was polite about it. “You don’t get jealous at all?”

“No.”

“Not even a little?”

“Not even a little,” Julian shook his head, still in good humor even if it was clear he’d rather move on to another subject. “Hell, nothing makes me smile like… well.” He caught himself. “They make me happy. No jealousy.” He glanced to his right at Xiù and Allison, and both smiled sheepishly in return. The three of them were obviously completely smitten, and the audience absolutely ate it up.

“Hell no,” Allison agreed. She was warming up now, in fact she actually seemed to be enjoying herself. “Hell, if I’ve had a rough day, the best cure for it is when I get home to find them cuddled up asleep on the couch.”

“Gives you a warm glow?”

“Yeah, it does. But also, like… they’ll both spring up and one will cook or make me a drink and the other will cuddle me instead, and…”

The audience *‘aww’*ed at length, which got louder and full of laughter when Julian smiled bashfully at his shoes and… well, well. Xiù Chang was a blusher. That one was something of a surprise.

Allison grinned. “Best of both worlds. But…I mean, I’m sure people want to know, but that’s not why we’re here today.”

Dan gave her credit; she knew when and how to deploy blunt-force trauma and the audience applauded quietly; they agreed with the trio. Time to move on, and Lawrence did so without missing a beat.

“So what did you find out there?”

“Well,” Julian offered matter-of-factly. “A lot of boring stuff, some really interesting planets that are in the early stages of life—funny thing, did you know every single one of them has at least one giant moon? We found a planet covered in slime…”

It was an obvious setup. Xiù said with obvious glee, “And the planet of the glitterbugs!”

Julian fished out a small tablet from his rear pocket. He must have arranged a screen share in secret with the producers before the show, because when he called it up, millions of watching Americans were treated to slow-motion, high-dynamic-range state of the art video…of the most dazzling whirl of color Dan had ever seen. No special effect was that…

That…

Real.

He was so captivated that he just stopped thinking and watched. It was the sound that really sold the video’s veracity. The footage was taken from Xiù’s helmet cam and also recorded her voice, recorded the little awed gasp and the candid way her breath stopped. Anybody watching could hear her wonder even though she hardly made a sound.

Then, much too soon, they were back to the studio camera and Xiù was apologetically wiping a small tear from her eye.

Genuine, Dan realized. That wasn’t a show tear, that was a happy memory in liquid form.

“Planet Lucent,” Allison reported. “Habitable, the right class, right climate, right gravity, nobody else living there…there’s a small termite problem—” Julian snorted at that but Allison pressed on, “But that planet right there made the whole mission a success. We found a world that humans could live on, another Cimbrean.”

Somebody in the audience hollered a high C sharp, and that dragged everybody else into a riot of applause and congratulatory cheering that went on for nearly a full minute before Steve Lawrence finally managed to cool it back down.

“But even that isn’t what we came here for today,” Xiù said, and immediately had them all eating out of the palm of her hand, Dan included. What could possibly trump what they’d just seen? “What we really came to talk about is who we met while we were out there.”

That part was clearly a bombshell that not even Lawrence had known they were planning. He boggled for a second, but rallied magnificently and proved why he was hosting the show when he easily rolled into the new situation.

“Who, you say? Well…we weren’t expecting a first contact situation, were we?”

“It was part of our training and mandate,” said Julian. “Though the plan had been to avoid contact if possible. It really…wasn’t, in this case.”

“Okay, back up. Who are they?”

“They call themselves the People,” said Xiù. “They live on a high-end Class Twelve Deathworld, much like ours. There are some important differences. The gravity is twenty percent higher—”

“—So no chemical rocketry,” interjected Julian. “They’d be trapped there forever, or at least longer than we were.”

“Right,” Xiù noded. “And their years are twenty-one months long and the spring and summer are almost sixteen months long. But the day is almost exactly as long as ours and the disease threat isn’t as bad. It’s a cold world overall but the tropics are a huge temperate rainforest.”

“And that forest is warm and really muggy,” added Julian with a laugh. “With huge trees! The Ketta grow over a hundred meters tall, easy!”

“And the trees are important,” Allison joined in. “The People live in them and on the ground. They’re…imagine like a chimp or gorilla sized monkey, except they’re hairless and lean and proportioned closer to us. Really long and strong arms, thick legs too but they’re not super short so they can walk just fine. Also? They’ve got a full-length tail they can swing from—”

“—a bitchin’ Mohawk—” Julian interjected.

“Oh yeah. Bright blaze orange mohawk from head to tail, leathery mottled skin, one less finger and full hands for feet, no nose but a reptile’s tongue to taste the air with—”

“And they can toss me around like nothing,” said Julian with a rueful grin. “Any of ‘em.”

“And they’re smart.” Xiù added. “Smart like us, like Gaoians. But…they’re stone-aged. And that’s the problem.”

They again let that hang in the air for a moment to let the implication sink in. They did not spoon-feed the audience; smart. Someone had trained them well.

Lawrence had done something he never did and set aside his pencil and cards entirely. “So…If they’re stone age, why did we—you—establish first contact, then?”

Allison took her turn to speak. “It was initially by accident. We…can’t get into all the details for security reasons, but the People are being hunted down and exterminated by a spacefaring civilization.”

She again let that hang in the air for effect. Dan was used to that trick losing its effect if overused, but in this case, for whatever reason—maybe the subject matter, maybe just charisma—it kept its power for her.

Lawrence lowered his hands, looking genuinely stunned. “They–? But–?…Why? And how did you find that out?”

“We have theories on the why, but…yeah. Not gonna talk about that. The People are completely harmless, they’re innocent. There’s no good reason why a spacefaring civilization would want to kill them all.” Julian was clearly a man who could get very angry for the right cause, and Dan could hear in his voice that if whatever entity was responsible for the genocide crossed his path, that entity would regret it.

“As for the how,” Allison chimed in, “Misfit is a survey ship. Her whole job is to find useful planets with useful resources. From a low orbit we can do a geophysics survey, no problem. She found the anomalies in seconds.”

“What anomalies?”

“Blast craters. Four of them. Antimatter bombs.” Julian’s voice was grim. “Just like the one in California. We think there used to be small towns or something on the coast. The bad guys showed up just as the People started to figure out civilization, and…stopped it.”

Silence. Even Lawrence didn’t have anything to fill that gap. If silence was a noise, then the silence from the audience was pounding. Dan tried to sit forward as if that might break the tension, and flinched when he nearly knocked a forgotten, half-eaten, cold steak onto the carpet.

Lawrence finally remembered himself. “…How did the contact happen?”

“We started sweeping from orbit and the geomagnetic scanner just went nuts,” Allison said. “Okay? It was finding these huge ferrous masses dotted around the forest interior of the continent, forming a line. North of that line, we could see villages, cooking fires, cleared areas… south of that line? Nothing.”

“And you landed?”

“We had to.” Xiù explained. “Part of our mandate was to offer aid if absolutely necessary.”

Dan remembered the public debate about that one. Byron Group had published a manifesto of sorts on exploration and had sought public comment. There had been very little in the way of agreement by anyone on anything, but that item had enjoyed very broad support. The rest…had been left to the crew, explicitly, with the comments as guidance.

The GRA had weighed in heavily, as had the UN, Canada, the UK, and the US but none had directly interfered, at least not publically. Really, it was the best anyone could have hoped for.

“One of the metal masses was out of formation, ranging way ahead of the line, and we couldn’t see any villages near it,” Xiù explained. “We picked that one, and put down near it. The idea was that hopefully we could avoid making contact and still figure out what was happening…well, that metal mass turned out to be…”

“This,” Julian growled.

He swiped to the next slide on his tablet, and Dan gawked at the sight of Allison standing squarely in front of a huge, angular metal…

It was clearly some kind of a tank, the gun under its nose was evidence of that. The general shape was something like that of an earwig or a short centipede, and Dan caught himself leaning instinctively away from the screen on a little wave of entomophobia. It was slumped over on its side and black oil had stained the earth around it.

“This is where things get weird, because for some reason it was inert,” Julian continued. “Not just inert, its access panels had been opened and somebody had hacked up the insides with a stone knife.”

“The People?”

“Yeah. But they said it was ‘asleep’ when they found it.”

“They said that?” Lawrence asked. “How did you actually meet them?”

“So… after examining that… tank, crawler thing, we wandered into the woods to look around. Now at that point, it was just us out there,” Allison indicated Julian and herself. “Xiù was back on the ship, watching our suit sensors for us, and a whole bunch of heat signatures just suddenly surrounded us, quiet as a mouse. We didn’t hear anything.”

“Xiù spotted those heat signatures literally at the last second,” said Julian. “I asked Allison to turn on her tactical flashlight and…we met the People. With spears pointed right at us. Turns out their village was high up in a little valley on the mountain, which had made it impossible to see from orbit.”

“Scary moment,” Allison recalled. “I really thought it was gonna go bad.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, definitely,” Julian agreed. “I’ll be perfectly honest I’ve never been that scared in my entire life. See—everything we said about what these guys look like really doesn’t do them justice. You’ve gotta see them in person. So, this is Yan, their, uh, chieftain I guess. He’s what they call the Given-Man.”

The studio screens flickered as Julian swiped through the pics, and Dan watched rapt.

Yan was at most about the same height as Xiù, but he was built like the offspring of a silverback gorilla and a linebacker. His long arms and short legs only amplified his squat solidity and naturally muscular athleticism. The photos were mostly relaxed poses or candids, though later on Yan grew into a bit of a ham and snarled or acted for the camera in a strangely friendly and playfully aggressive way. His crest stood much taller than the others’ and was vividly red instead of the bright blaze orange of the men, the more subdued color of the women, or the ginger of the youths. He was…impressive.

The audience sure thought so. Some forms of charisma transcended species and Yan could not be ignored in any photo, no matter what else was in view.

“From what we can tell, some males of this species go through a kind of second puberty,” Julian began to explain, “round about the same time their women would go through the menopause…”

“We think,” added Xiù. “We’re not exactly sure what is going on but there’s only one Given-Man—that’s Yan—per tribe. Always, without exception. And they all look something like that. Maybe not as big, but… The little one next to him is Vemik, he’s an adolescent.”

“He’s an adolescent?”

Dan couldn’t blame Lawrence for his incredulity. Vemik may have been much smaller than Yan but he was still a well-muscled specimen who looked strong enough to rip a phonebook in half.

“He’s a young adolescent,” Julian added with some obvious fondness. “And he’s probably the most inquisitive person I’ve ever met.”

Lawrence was losing his usual professional composure and seemed to be geeking out just like anybody else now. “He looks like an olympic gymnast.”

“He is a gymnast, no question. You should see him in the trees! They’re all like that but remember, he’s their little guy and he’s strong. He’s around this tall—” Julian gestured five feet of the ground, “—but he masses at least what I do!”

“You’re not a small guy, either,” Lawrence commented. It was true. Julian wasn’t more than averagely tall, but he had a broad chest and well-developed shoulders that hinted at a lifetime of hard physical work.

“Yeah. And he’s really playful, too. Super curious, loves to talk and tussle. They’re all like that, more or less.”

“Even Yan?”

“Yeah! But…he’s also scary as f–, uh, scary as hell.” Julian caught himself at the last second and the audience laughed knowingly. “I’ve said it many times to many people, but I’m pretty sure when we first met, Yan was ready to literally rip our heads off. Vemik saved us. This kid whose idea of cutting edge technology is a bow and arrow figured out what our guns were and jumped in front of Yan to stop him from attacking us.”

“So you were at odds with these guys at first?”

“Can you blame them?” Allison asked. “Metal demons were roaming their forest, slaughtering whole villages. They had every reason to be wary at first. But we made nice, eventually.”

“How?”

Julian chuckled. “Food and wrestling, mostly.”

“Wait, you wrestled Yan?”

“Nah,” said Allison with a teasing grin. “He got wrestled by Yan. You wanna see the video?”

Julian grinned ruefully as the audience laughed along to several clips of Yan being boisterously playful with the children, with Vemik and the men, and eventually with Julian himself. The short clips were chosen with obvious care; it was one thing to see Yan play fight with his own kind but it was quite another to see an impressive man like Julian being so hugely outsized and outmatched by a smirking gorilla that one honestly feared for his safety. In any case both men were clearly enjoying themselves.

Lawrence chuckled in slight disbelief, “You’re a braver man than I!”

The audience laughed along in agreement, which prompted another bashful reaction from Julian and more delighted sounds from the ladies.

He eventually shrugged, “Well…I trust him. Guy like that can’t lead if people can’t trust his leadership, right? You just gotta get to know him. And anyway, play is really important to them. It’s important for any intelligent life.”

“Absolutely,” Xiù agreed. “Gaoians love to play too. Play is a proxy for trust. You’re vulnerable when you’re playing with someone, or sparring, or whatever. Once Yan, um…made his point, I guess? That he trusted Julian enough to play? The village was friendlier after that.”

Lawrence again showed why he was the king of late-night. “So, they’re loyal and intelligent.”

“They are incredibly intelligent,” enthused Xiù. “Easily as intelligent as us. But…language. That’s where the first of the really big problems start.”

“Language?”

Xiù smiled cheekily—the first really good smile on that stage in minutes—and spoke something fluid and ululating. Lawrence gawped at her.

“…You learned their language?”

“Yup. And… that’s the problem. It has a tiny vocabulary,” Xiù explained. “I mean… I’m the language expert on the crew. I speak English, Mandarin, Gaori, a little French and Cortan, I can even understand Domain… picking up the few thousand words the People have was easy.”

Dan saw the problem instantly. Language defined the borders and the tools with which human beings thought. Presumably, that same pattern extended to other species—he’d need to do more research, maybe get on that new Gaoian academic exchange—but if they had a neolithic command of words…Words were tools, and just like simple stone-age tools put hard limits on what the People could build, their simple stone-age language would put similar limits on what they could think.

Lawrence was sharp. “And that means they started picking up our language, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. Just from listening to us. And… I mean, we had to explain to these guys just how big the trouble they’re in is. You can’t do that in Peoplespeak.”

“We had to give them some ability to know what the threat was and how to respond, because we had to leave. At any time, the, uh, ‘bad guy’ might have returned to finish the job, right? What could we do? If these robots woke up and killed us three, nobody on Earth would ever know about the People, and…”

“We thought long and hard about it. Days, actually, just spent crying about what we had to do,” Xiù elaborated. “But…we decided, that if we were to leave maybe never to come back, we had to at least explain some of the threat. And…we taught them how to make steel.”

“Oh, no…” Dan put his neglected steak aside and buried his face in his hands. “Oh, no. You didn’t.”

Lawrence took a long moment to gather his thoughts. “Many would consider that…unwise.”

“We consider it unwise!” Julian exploded. “It absolutely is! It’s a horrible, dangerous thing to do. Just… I mean, the whole thing from start to finish is a disaster for the People. But there was a choice: we could leave them, and not tell them about the caldera they live on—another fun little detail. We could tell them about the danger, but then what? What could they do? We did a high orbital survey. There are less than twenty thousand of their kind left, and all of them live on that active caldera. As in, had erupted within living memory. And all that with some kind of sky-enemy that wants them all dead, but is, I dunno, off doing other things?”

“If it’s a case of adapt or die,” Allison said, and Dan got the impression that she had spoken those exact words several times recently, “I say we help them adapt.”

Julian sobered up. “So, in the end, we had to make a really bad choice. We could either leave them blissfully unaware and hope we could get back in time to do something…or we could give them the tiniest possible chance to survive. That’s what it really boiled down to. Because if the bad guys decide to start up again, all we can do is give them a little bit of an edge.”

“That” Xiù said, quietly, “Is why we came here.”

“Surely we’ll go back!”

“Says who?” said Julian candidly. “The thing is, there are a lot of people here who have a lot of interests at play, and they’re probably all mad at us.”

“Especially for coming here, and saying this,” Allison agreed. “We might never go back out into space again, that’s the consequence we’re accepting here. But again, this was also part of our mandate. We have no right to keep this to ourselves.”

Julian nodded with her. “We’ve protected everyone’s equities as best we can—”

Dan understood that to mean they were leaving some big details out.

“—But we can’t let anyone have the final say on this. We all need the final say. Because we explored, and we found a people about to be snuffed out. They’re good people, too, and they’re so much like us it’s honestly a little scary. So…what do we do?”

“…Jesus.” Lawrence managed at last. “I…”

Dan had never dreamed he’d see the day when Steve Lawrence was rendered speechless.

“We would be remiss if we didn’t give credit where it was due,” said Xiù, going into what Dan saw immediately was damage control mode, unruffling some powerful feathers. “Byron Group has been remarkably understanding about all of this. Moses Byron himself was, uh…not happy at first. But he understands what’s at stake. I think we all do.”

“…You said those antimatter blast craters were like… do you think there’s a connection?” Lawrence asked.

Julian raised a hand. “We’re only reporting on the facts as best we can.”

He didn’t fool Dan. Julian knew they were connected. And Dan would bet a million dollars Julian didn’t fool half the viewing audience, either.

He grabbed his phone and got Diana Wimmer on speed dial.

On screen, Lawrence was getting something like his usual interview style back. “But…steel! Couldn’t you have started at, what, copper? Bronze?”

“No, that would’ve been—”

Dan stopped paying attention as Julian launched into his rationale, because Diana picked up on the second ring.

”You’re watching?” she asked.

“I am. Holy shit.”

”I know. God, this is either going to go nuclear, or…”

“It sounds like it already did. And… you were hinting about those rumours on what Sartori was saying at the GRA meeting after the Ambassador was killed…”

”Yeah. Christ, Dan, I don’t even know how to start reporting this. I’m gonna be called in for an emergency editor’s meeting any second now, what the hell do I take to that table?”

“Back them,” Dan said, instantly and with uncharacteristic passion. “Back them to the fucking hilt. I will and so will every motherfucker I’ve ever done business with.”

Diana’s pause on the line was long enough for them to overhear some more of the conversation.

“So…we took the long way ‘round to steel?” Lawrence was asking.

“Yup! But…that’s the thing, that means they have an opportunity to…not make a lot of the same mistakes we did. And…yeah. This kinda thing almost never goes well in our history. If we’re gonna do this, as a *species*…we really gotta take the time and think about how we’re gonna save them. I don’t want them to die because we meant well.”

He was talking past the sale, Dan realized. Julian was a natural. Either that, or it was a case of competence brought on by the high stakes. Or both.

Whatever the reason, it sure as hell worked on Diana. “Okay. Okay, I’m with you. Shit, I never imagined that…”

“Yeah. Me either.”

Another long silence. Xiù Chang was speaking again. “…need to think about everything here, but we can’t nanny them. They’ve got to make their own path, we just need to be there to offer advice while they do.”

Allison nodded. “Like the old saying goes, we can’t just give ‘em a fish, we gotta teach ‘em how to fish.”

Dan realised that his mouth had gone dry. Because Allison was wrong, the problem was so much more than that. They had to teach an alien people the concept of fishing. The concept of concepts. And it needed to be done so that the People figured it out for themselves, and hopefully kept their identity without becoming humanity’s pets.

Holy fuck.

“Hey,” He asked slowly. “You remember that question you asked me in the green room after the show the other week?”

He could almost hear Diana arching an eyebrow over the phone. “Which one?”

“You asked me if I was considering a change of career…”

Date Point: 12y7m3w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

“You beautiful, beautiful kids. God bless you!”

“The security council is not going to like that.”

“Margaret, I don’t even care… I think it’s about time I had a talk with Moses Byron again, don’t you?”

Date Point: 12y7m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Daar

“Remember, it’s a live fire exercise but the simulation uses low-power kinetic pulse so you’ll still feel it.” Daar fiddled with Brother Tyal’s MILES equipment, making sure it was perfectly seated. “And you play dead if your gear tells ‘ya you’ve been shot.”

“Yes, my Champion…we understood the brief.”

Daar was doing his best not to be overbearing, or to fuss over the Brothers of First Fang like a particularly anxious Mother, but this was important. Tyal was doing an admirable job of keeping his composure, but right now that composure didn’t feel appropriate. Daar would have much preferred to see a small crack in his Brother’s calm, just so he knew that Tyal had properly grasped the gravity of the occasion.

The Whitecrests, after all, had already won Human trust and respect. But Whitecrest was a very different creature to Stoneback, and Daar would not allow his Clan to be the ‘sidekick.’

And there was still that belligerent Naxas shitting in the room; Regaari and Genshi had both dropped their hints. Something desperately important was going on, and while Daar had his own theories about what the specifics were, there was no denying the violence on the horizon.

If there was to be a fight, First Fang would be there. And to ‘Hell’ with unimportant reasons like pride or the honor of the Clan, they would be there because First Fang was the best and a fight that scoured away cities and got deathworlders worried required nothing less than that.

…Well. The best the Gao had, anyway. The humans were better and it was humbling. Daar was proud to have taught his battle-brothers of the SOR a few things, but the fact was that he had learned rather more from them. He was bigger and fitter now than ever before, sharper in mind and body, quicker in claw and reason…and all of that in a very short time, too. The humans had earned his respect in more than just the jovial, friendly way he liked basically everybody.

But despite all that, none of them had actually seen how a Stoneback really fought, not even from him. He was nervous about it. It wouldn’t be the cold, precise violence the HEAT were so good at. It would be a bloodbath, though Stoneback were far from mindless animals when they fought. They fought with heart and head, with tooth and gun. They were good…. He just wasn’t sure if the Humans would agree?

He was almost desperate to impress them and it showed. Tyal flicked an ear, and unwound slightly. “…And we understand the stakes, my Champion,” he added, for Daar’s ears only.

“…I know. I’m sorry.” Daar reined it in. While he was especially eager to impress Stainless—he hadn’t craved another male’s approval so strongly since he took his First Rite at the hands of then-Father Garl, all those many years ago—that was no excuse for disrespecting Tyal’s competence.

“It’s fine. I feel almost like a First Ring initiate again myself.”

Daar lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “They do that. I remember my first tussle with ‘Highland.’ It was…humbling. Took a month before I could fight back at all.”

“Isn’t he smaller than you?”

Daar was sufficiently self-aware to know when his ego was being pricked, but not quite controlled enough to not care. “Size isn’t everything,” he grumbled. “Besides. They have an advantage with their shoulders. Never wrestle them!”

“Champion.” Tyal’s tone was amused and patient. “You have been training with these humans for a long time. We’ve read your reports and we haven’t sat on our tails. Trust me—First Fang is as good as it ever was. Better, probably.”

Daar flattened his ears, a bit stung. “I trust you, you know that. It’s…maybe I’m more nervous for myself. I gotta perform on the ‘HEAT’ when they do their scenario.”

“Oh?”

Daar shrugged, “I got a lot to prove, Brother.”

“Gentlemen?”

Technical Sergeant Kovač was slightly impenetrable as far as Daar was concerned. He was certain that she knew more Gaori than she let on, but that enigmatic smile of hers was apparently confounding even for the humans who knew her best.

“The scenario’s ready,” she announced.

Daar pulled Brother Tyal to himself and they touched noses quickly. He used the ancient Stoneback battle cant, which he knew for a fact that Kovač didn’t speak. [“Protect and provide, Brother.] I’ll take care of the rest.”

She raised her eyebrow, too. Now Daar was certain.

“Daar, you’ve been invited to watch from the observation room,” she told him.

Which meant it was time for him to regain and show his confidence. A Champion could never afford to do otherwise, especially him. He clapped Tyal firmly on the shoulder and left the room before the temptation to give some last-minute advice could overtake him.

The observation room was four floors up, and Kovač trotted lightly up the stairs humming to herself as she tapped on her tablet. “I’m looking forward to seeing this,” she said conversationally, on the third flight.

“They’ll be a lot different to the Whitecrests,” Daar warned her.

“Yeah-huh. That’s why I’m looking forward to it. Those suits the Whitecrests use are incredible, but I wanna see what a Gaoian can do without.”

“Oh, you will. And I suspect,” he grumbled, “You won’t ever forget it, either.”

“I hope not!” Kovač opened the door at the top. Admiral Knight, Rear Admiral Caruthers and soon-to-be Lieutenant-Colonel Powell were already there, and waiting. “We’re all eager to see what they can teach us.”

Daar found there was genuine pleasure in his grin, rather than pure bravado. For all his worries, somehow that simple display of human humility was enough to make his worries about First Fang’s performance evaporate.

“They won’t disappoint,” he promised.

They didn’t.

Date Point: 12y7m3w AV
Test Site Liana, New Enewetak System, Deep Space

Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau

At long, long last the opportunity had arisen to fly and land somewhere using a human-made vehicle rather than a standard-issue Dominion civilian shuttle, and it was everything the designers had promised. Hephaestus LLC, stung by Byron Group’s recent history of surging ahead in small spacecraft development, had turned out their best work in producing the CS-200 Weaver-class transport.

Functionally, it felt no different than flying in a C-130, or a Chinook. In fact the only noticeable difference was that it was quieter, with no jet engines or turboshaft rotors. Kinetic thrusters produced a kind of high electronic whine at most, like an old CRT television, and from inside the Weaver’s hull that sound was inaudible.

Every specification Nadeau had seen for it was thrilling, too. It could move like a bat out of hell thanks to its capacitor banks, and for short bursts it even had an acceleration profile almost as good as that of a Firebird. It had a range of several hundred lightyears and was perfectly capable of instant re-use Ground-Orbit-Ground flight.

It achieved all that while being as well-armored as a light tank and layered in dozens of “speed bump” shields designed to dissipate and deflect incoming fire rather than stop it outright. And of course it had those essential safety features that every spaceship needed but surprisingly many lacked…like seatbelts.

Those seatbelts weren’t needed for this descent, though: The ride was smooth and uneventful. With nothing worse to deal with than a gentle weather front, the Weaver dropped comfortably down into the atmosphere in a dazzling halo of plasma, shifted its flight fields into a fixed-wing configuration and glided to the landing site on a whisper and silence. Nadeau knew the pilot was grinning, even though all he could see of the man was the back of his head.

“LZ in sight, positions for touchdown…”

VTOL from ground to orbit to ground again. Ten years ago, the idea would have been pure fantasy. Now it was cutting edge technology. Soon, it would be routine.

Along with Von Neumann probes, apparently. Nadeau could see the “colony” site that the probe had built up ahead, and while its lines had seemed straight, clean and solid enough from orbit, they looked even better up close.

The Weaver’s pilot set them down on a flat spot of ground some ways north of the actual designated landing pad, and a respectful distance from any of the robots the Coltainer probe had sent down. Those at first glance looked crude and half-made, but the impression was probably a lifetime of experience throwing a false positive at him. He was used to industrial equipment being painted and having corporate logos and safety instructions all over them, whereas these were designed to be built and to work without human supervision. They were gunmetal sketches, practical and solid but… unfinished, somehow.

The same was emphatically not true of the colony structures themselves.

A lot of planning had gone into creating the basic compound. The idea was that it would serve as a basic base of operations with all the essential amenities that the first wave of colonists might need. Not just lighting and water, but everything right down to a small nanofactory, and that was the bit that made the whole program workable: In theory, the colonists would land and be assembling upgrades and expansions to their colony pretty much as soon as they’d unpacked their possessions.

Nadeau’s Weaver was actually the second to touch down. The first had been full of engineers from every allied nation, who were going over the printed concrete buildings in teams, checking the walls, the wiring, the plumbing, the flooring…everything.

Sergeant Lee was among them, accepting feedback on the quality of the construction while waiting for the transports to land. He saw Nadeau step down the ramp and saluted. “Welcome to test site Liana, sir.”

Nadeau returned the gesture. “It looks good from above.”

“Looks even better from down here,” Lee told him, and handed over his tablet. “The construction robots might look janky, but they build well. This whole site is better-made than Scotch Creek.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. We threw Scotch Creek together in a hurry…” Nadeau looked around. “So it’s fit for human habitation?”

“Yeah-huh. Heck, with a bit of tweaking this technology is going to revolutionize construction on Cimbrean and Earth, too. You have to give the Locayl credit, these things are great.”

Nadeau nodded. Like so many things in the Coltainer, the construction ‘bots were a human redesign of alien technology and it was common galactic knowledge that the Locayl knew construction better than anybody. By all accounts, their cities were breathtaking. Some of their more advanced construction techniques were still beyond human grasp for now, but not by much: Once the principle was out of the way, all that was left were the programming and the materials science.

“Okay,” he looked around again. “Before you start showing me the details, let’s break it down to a big yes-or-no question. Could people live here long-term, even without support from Earth?”

Lee took a moment before replying. He stared thoughtfully around at the construction work, tapping his pen thoughtfully against his lips, then nodded.

“…Yeah. Hell, they’d be pretty comfortable. Might be a few teething issues we haven’t found yet but the buildings are solid, the plumbing works, the wiring’s good…if they came here with plenty of food and enough crop seed, they’d be good. It’ll take some expansion work before there’s enough housing for a sustainable population, but with this foothold alone…”

“It was supposed to shave years off the colony-building process,” Nadeau reminded him.

“And it probably does. Of course, we won’t know for certain until some people come here to live in it.”

Nadeau smiled and rubbed his hands together with a clap. “That,” he said, “would be the next step…give me the tour.”

“Gladly…”

Date Point: 12y8m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Rear Admiral William Caruthers

Fleet legend had a lot to say on the subject of HEAT operators. Most of those stories, air recycling on a spaceship being what it was, came from HMS Caledonia and had to do with their legendary body odor.

The rest had to do with violence. The shuttle pilots in particular had enjoyed the privilege of watching HEAT operators drop out the back of their ride and inflict harm on a scale normally reserved for aerial bombardment.

Even accounting for exaggeration, those were some tall tales, and Caruthers was eager to see if they stood up to reality. Seeing that kind of performance in action might just help him endure having to make nice with the Prime Minister, a man whose career had begun with strident calls for nuclear disarmament.

In all the rush and confusion of trying to find appropriate officers to fill the gaps as the chain of command in the space fleet moved up a link, he’d almost forgotten the demonstration today. Filling his own shoes had been easy—Rajesh Bathini, captain of HMS Caledonia, had seniority. Bathini in turn had appointed his XO, Commander McDaniel…and the PM had objected. Even though Admiral Knight’s signature had gone nowhere near McDaniel’s promotion, she was still his daughter and the PM had smelled nepotism.

The man was going to be a pain to handle, clearly.

Fortunately, there were others present. Governor Sandy, Chief Arés and Cimbrean’s three supreme court judges all got their fair share of the PM’s time, so he’d finally had a chance to orbit higher out and catch up with the newly-minted Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Powell.

Now there was an easy icebreaker. “Never seen a man look so grumpy over a promotion, Powell.”

“You’ve never had a promotion party thrown for you by ten tonnes of American beef,” Powell confided, sharing something that might almost have been a wry smile.

“Sounds exhausting.”

“A dozen puppies, the smallest of whom puts a WWE heavyweight to shame, and they all want to show you how much you mean to them.” Powell actually looked fond. “Aye. Exhausting is the word.”

“Here’s hoping they can turn some of that energy on Davies,” Caruthers mused. The far end of the room was becoming an impromptu parade ground as HEAT operators both human and Gaoian lined up to shake hands. They’d apparently chosen to present themselves in ascending order of size. Sergeants Firth and Arés were having a mostly covert wrestling match to determine who stood on the end.

Firth won, via superior height and dirty tricks.

“Do they…always do that?”

“Aye, at all times, everywhere. They have a chart on the wall and everything.” Powell adjusted his collar. “For them, it’s healthy. Hell, that little tussle there was discreet and polite.”

“The Gaoians seem much more…restrained.”

“They’re the civilized lot. Even Champion Daar, when he wants to be.”

Daar himself flicked an ear at the mention of his name, but didn’t move. He was standing a good bit to the right of the next-largest Gaoian, in among the humans.

The Prime Minister made his way down the line, politely nodding and smiling without covering his teeth, Caruthers noted. That would need to be trained out of him. He spared a little longer for Murray, delivered a handshake firm and trustworthy enough to leave all of the Whitecrests massaging their paws, nodded politely at the human Operators and paused when he reached Champion Daar.

“You’re certainly a big fellow!”

“I am! Champion and Stud-Prime Daar. Hi!” He stuck out a paw that would make a grizzly bear blush, and gave Davies a taste of his own medicine. The PM’s smile became…strained.

“You’ve got a laborer’s grip, not bad! But you should pro’ly be careful with us weak little aliens,” he advised, baring his teeth in an imitation friendly grin that looked much more like a snarl.

“Erm….yes. Thank you for that.”

Daar released his grip and immediately slapped the PM on the shoulder. “If you ever visit Gao, we’ll give you the Champion’s treatment! I think the word is…state visit?”

Davies looked over desperately at his aide for clarification, and was treated to a few urgent words whispered in his ear.

“Oh! Right. Yes!” he managed, grinning weakly and trying to massage his hand without looking like he was massaging his hand. Caruthers gave silent thanks to long and arduous training sessions for the way he was able to keep a straight face while watching the odious little prat get wrong-footed.

When the PM had moved off, Daar looked Caruthers dead in the eye and winked.

They watched with interest as Davies tried—and failed—to recover his dignity by testing his handshakes on the Beef Trio. Firth in particular managed to be both perfectly polite and perfectly intimidating at the same time, and the only thing that stopped Arés from doing something similar was the tiniest shake of the head from his father.

Formalities complete, they settled in for the actual meat of the session—reviewing the simulator run. Stoneback’s First Fang had been invited along and were hanging off to the side, unwilling to inject themselves into the politics of the moment. All of them were…impressive. Not so much as Daar, but few of any species were.

They watched with interest as the ‘highlight reel’ from their scenario was called up by one of the simulation technicians, who conversed briefly with Technical Sergeant Kovač before launching into the mission objective.

“Scenario one, ground-based. The target installation has been overrun with Hunters, and key personnel and materiel must be evacuated from the field at any cost. The enemy is present in overwhelming numbers and the assault force must secure their ingress, hold the line, retrieve the HVTs, egress via jump array and, if possible, destroy the installation.”

Caruthers watched with interest. Ground combat was of course not his forte, but many of the principles were identical. Surprise, Speed, Security and Shock were at the core of spaceship battle doctrine just as much as they were at the heart of the kind of ultra-aggressive ground assault he was watching. Species be damned, breaching and clearing a room was the same for everybody.

The Stoneback commander was one Brother Tyal, who stepped up to provide a running commentary. “We cleared our entry towards the objective using simulated air support. We would normally use Firefang assets for this but the Humans kindly provided in this case.”

The aforementioned air support…mowed a line right through the veritable anthill of hunters surrounding the installation. The Royal Navy pinned the Hunters in place and destroyed their orbital superiority with American nuclear devices, the Air Force’s fighter wing made very quick work of the Hunter’s air superiority, and the aforementioned close air support left little opposing First Fang’s ingress. From there, First Fang assault craft sped towards the installation and disgorged what could only be described as an angry wolf pack of assaultmen.

Once inside the installation the fight was man-on-man and their performance was… the word that sprang to mind was ‘feral,’ yet they were obviously quite competent and the mission had been accomplished with precision and skill. They wore only light armor and carried little besides weapons, yet they were so quick and aggressive it seemed not to matter. Every phase of the mission was stunningly violent and fast, especially the egress, where they detonated a nuclear device to destroy the installation. They left such an impressive trail of Hunter carnage in their wake it had even Firth nodding his approval. Daar, standing apart from everyone else, rumbled his own.

Had the simulated Hunters been flesh, the members of First Fang would undoubtedly still have reeked of blood and guts. The room stood quiet for a moment. The aggression on display had been breathtaking.

Tyal broke the silence. “Our objective was achieved at the cost of one Brother killed in action and two wounded. We estimate over one hundred thousand Hunters destroyed at the objective, the installation denied their plunder, and the targets secured to friendly control.”

He scratched at his scarred muzzle thoughtfully. “Obviously, the casualties are the big learning point here.” He turned to face the Whitecrests. “Officer Regaari, my Champion speaks very highly of you. Do you have any criticism to offer?”

Regaari duck-nodded to Tyal and to Daar with what Caruthers judged to be gratitude in the set of his ears, and took a step forward. His prosthetic paw drummed thoughtfully on his opposite forearm for a second as he thought.

“Whitecrest could never match your level of violence,” he said, obviously quite impressed. “But I think, perhaps, in his zeal to achieve the objective, Brother Kiru failed to discern the threat that claimed him and which may have been avoided with clearer communication.”

Kiru’s fellows pounced him in good humor as Tyal nodded along. “A fair critique, one we shall endeavor to improve upon.”

Daar chittered somewhere in the baritone. “You’re using your big words again, Brother!”

Tyal flattened his ears to the raucous chittering jeers of his fellows. “You’ll never let me live that down, will you? Even ten years later!”

“Nope,” Daar chirred smugly. “Shouldn’t pretend ‘yer civilized when you ain’t! I never do.”

The levity took some of the edge off, and everybody nodded around as the simulator tech loaded up the next highlight reel.

“Spaceborne scenario, HEAT Whitecrest. The mission is covert infiltration of a space station with the objective of retrieving an enemy commander for interrogation. For the purposes of this scenario, the HVT is a human…”

Date Point: Three days earlier
SOR training facility, HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Regaari

“Strike hard,”

“Strike fast,”

“Strike once…”

“Strike unseen.” SOUTHPAW finished. Humans would have produced the punchline in a lusty chorus, but Gaoians, or Whitecrests at least, didn’t work that way. The mantra was enough.

“Cubs play pounce.”

Regaari had to hand it to the humans: They’d come up with a hell of a training system. Apparently the idea had its roots, as so many human things did, in fiction. Specifically something called a ‘holodeck.’ Akiyama insisted that the Sharman training center was a pale imitation of a ‘real’ holodeck—and only a human would refer to the fictional thing as the “real” version—but reality was impressive enough.

The SOR’s training techs could assemble a one-to-one replica of any constructed environment in hours, populate it with simulated friends, foes and civilians of any species, and adjust the scenario on the fly from their control room. Some cosmetic details might be missing, but other details were impressively present. Details like the silent rush of air and loose debris as the Brothers created a small hull breach through which to board their MDF and spraypaint space station. Details like the way SOUTHPAW’s infiltration of the station’s networks contained the damage control alarm.

Gaoians could do things that humans couldn’t. Sticky electrostatic pads on the Suit paws allowed the brothers to swarm four-pawed across the walls and ceilings, ignoring conventional notions of “up” and “down” in favor of total control of the three-dimensional space of a room. Gaoians were good climbers even without the suits, but ‘spider-manning’ as the humans called it was a whole different game.

It certainly made infiltration a breeze. Absolutely nothing in the galaxy was instinctively alert for dangers from above.

The humans had offered a small cash reward to a Folctha citizen who was willing to join in what Blaczynski insisted were called their ‘reindeer games.’ The reference was impenetrable even for Regaari but the principle was simple: Hire a colonist, pay the colonist, give the colonist some simple instructions. Instructions like “Some Gaoians are going to try and capture you. Try not to let them.”

Regaari hated to admit it, but whenever he got the chance to stalk and pounce on a human, he got the faintest flicker of understanding where the Hunters might be coming from. Deep in their DNA, Gaoians were ambush predators. Cubs played pounce because stalking and ambushing something was fun—stalking and ambushing something that was actually difficult to stalk and ambush was both fun and rewarding.

Doing so to a human scratched an itch. Just for a moment, Regaari could forget that he was dealing with a species that outmatched him in every way. In the moment of the successful pounce, he and his Brothers were the better creatures. Fun, rewarding…and cathartic.

Which was why “Brandon”—Regaari never had learned his surname—never saw the abduction coming. He was alert, even nervous, and nothing was more alert than a jittery human…so the moment when Regaari and Thurrsto simultaneously dropped from the ceiling and had him pinned to the deck in one well-practiced pounce was oh so very sweet.

“JEEEEZZZusss fuck! How-? Where the….?”

“Shh. We sticky-patched you. You’re unconscious now, okay?” Thurrsto said, and tapped conspiratorially on the side of his muzzle in imitation of the human gesture.

“Oh. Right. Sorry.”

Faarek had the portable jump array set up in a heartbeat. The three of them carried the “unconscious” and giggling Brandon efficiently into its field boundary, the rest of the team joined them, and they hit the jump button.

It wasn’t a real jump array of course. Hitting the button just sounded the klaxon to signal the end of the simulation, and Regaari glanced up at the clock on the training warehouse’s ceiling. Less than four minutes from ingress to egress. No shots fired, no alarms sounded, no violence necessary.

All in all…anticlimactic.

But damn had he enjoyed it.

Date Point: 12y8m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Rear Admiral William Caruthers

The Stonebacks had earned the PM’s attention and discomfort through sheer untamed violence. They’d torn into their scenario like a sledgehammer, smashing and crushing and ruining wherever they landed.

The surgical Whitecrest performance put him equally off-balance, not least because Admiral Knight was discreetly dripping some choice observations in his ear. Observations such as Whitecrest’s own threat assessment of the Hunters. The idea was quite simple: Put the fear of God into the man, then let him know what God was afraid of.

To judge by his expression, Davies was listening.

Regaari finished summing up his commentary on the operation. “Target secured. No casualties, though some of our movement wasn’t as well-planned as we’d have liked: we had no intel on the layout of the target’s office, and we didn’t have time to properly evaluate the ventilation system for security countermeasures. Brother Tyal, do you have any thoughts?”

Tyal studied the simulation carefully. “Play back the scene where they entered the environmental ducting, please?” The tech did so dutifully.

“Ah. See that?” He gestured with a claw tip, “How your equipment is moving in the wind? That vent was blowing toward those guards, it could have carried your scent and led to your detection.”

Regaari paused, then duck-nodded ruefully. “I can’t argue with that. The suits make us less sensitive to scent and airflow. We shall note this in our training plan.”

Caruthers looked over at Powell, who was watching the reviews with a slightly arched eyebrow. He met Caruther’s eye, nodded, and spoke up. “Excellent observations,” he announced. “We’ll break for a bit now and grab a bite before reviewing the third scenario—Rear Admiral Caruthers has kindly laid out a spread for us and I don’t intend to let it go to waste.”

There was some appreciative chucking from the Lads, and they needed no further encouragement: they bounced over to the table and were quickly layering frankly alarming amounts of food onto their plates. Caruthers hoped it would be enough; he’d told his Chief Steward to go heavy on the vittles and she apparently had needed no reminder. Having already catered for them once before, she’d visibly steeled herself and set about the task with a solemn determination that told half a story all by itself.

One glance over at Warhorse told the other half; he had three steaks on his plate already and he wasn’t done loading up.

Shaking his head, Caruthers ambled over to Powell as they stood back and waited. Enlisted men always ate first in a combined mess anyway and it was a good excuse to pick Powell’s brain.

“Exceeded your expectations?”

Powell’s jaw worked in a distant, thoughtful way for a moment, but his firm nod confirmed Caruthers’ suspicions. “…Aye. All of ‘em. I had my doubts from the beginning, especially with Daar and his First Fang, but…”

Caruthers considered what he’d seen. “They’re good.”

“They’re fookin’ elite, they are.” There was an unmistakable gleam of vicarious pride in Powell’s eye. “They just needed a bit of a nudge. Everything else was already there, waiting to be used.”

”Oh dear.” Caruthers shook his head and chuckled. “Have we created monsters?”

“Woken sleeping ones, maybe…but you haven’t seen what my Lads can do.” A rare smile flitted across Powell’s weathered, handsome face. “We’ll see how First Fang takes that.”

“What was their scenario?”

“Sabotage of a shipyard, with the secondary objective being to recover ship schematics and technology blueprints from the station’s memory…” the table cleared and Powell invited Caruthers to join him in grabbing their share. “And I must say, they did a bloody good job…”

Date Point: five days earlier
SOR training facility, HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Anthony ‘Abbott’ Costello

Costello had several operations under his belt outside of the HEAT context, but being HEAT brought something that had been previously unavailable: The EV-MASS, and the men who could wear it. Their suits were fully-integrated sensors platforms and formed a resilient battle-net, placing Costello at the center of it all. He was a walking nexus of information, connected to the fight in a way most leaders could only dream of.

It was… incredible. Real-time LADAR mapping of the environment, the positions of his men within that environment, smart analysis of heat signatures and the tell-tales of weapons fire and active electrostatic shielding to help him track the enemy, highlighting of chemical, electrical and thermal environmental hazards…

All the tech in the world at his fingertips, but the real gift was the men. His Aggressors were the finest raiders in the galaxy. His Defenders treated the terrain like it was clay, and they themselves were walls: once the Aggressors had cleared an area, the Defenders would claim it and it would stay claimed.

And into that Claimed space would step the Protectors, carrying enough gear to outfit a field hospital and a small armory. Butler was proving his worth already: He was still quite green, substantially smaller than and not as fleet-footed as any of the team’s veterans…and thus by any sane standard a huge, strong, lightning-fast guy, and one acclimated to a Protector’s crushing armor to boot. They’d found his tactical niche easily—he was the HEAT’s armor-plated gopher, and his specialty was keeping the rest of the Lads supplied.

He grinned while doing it too, Costello knew it without even seeing.

When it was all running smoothly, the whole team could exert pressure in a way nobody else could. The Aggressors could pile on the firepower in perfect confidence that there’d always be a reload when they needed one. The Defenders never wanted for an explosive and wherever an extra gun was needed, there was Butler.

Parata and Newman were finding their niches too, slotting neatly behind Murray and Akiyama and complementing the two’s already comprehensive expertise…

In the moment, though, the thinking was less abstract, more immediate. Stimulus-response. Knots of hostiles that needed Firth to hit them like a wrecking ball, high-threat targets that demanded immediate servicing from either Murray or Blaczynski. The little tell-tales of an imminent counterattack on the right flank that not even the all-knowing Vandenberg saw coming, but which he and the other Defenders were nevertheless perfectly placed to counter when it arrived.

And once placed, nobody on the team needed much prompting. Daar and Sikes attended to their assigned mission task and had their explosives pattern planned out so well, they managed to finish slightly ahead of schedule even while dealing with very aggressive resistance. Arés and Burgess could move so fast and carry so much weight, they could quickly dart out of their basecamp, resupply anyone, and zip back to their duties before anyone had noticed. They only did it when it made sense too, leaving most of the gopher work to Butler.

And above it all, Vandenberg managed all the conflicting tactical details calmly and with utter confidence, deferring seamlessly and automatically to Costello when needed. Rebar’s radio voice was always level and absolutely suffused with command no matter what was going on. He even knew how to order Costello through a tactical problem without actually usurping his authority, which was a trick so impressive the lieutenant marveled at it afterwards. His team was perfect.

The whole scenario was surgery, done more by feel than by sight. Open a wound, insert the right tool at the right angle, work, withdraw. The whole team crammed themselves into the Jump Array within seconds, covering their retreat with smoke grenades and claymores. Sikes was the only one to drop out of character, when he looked up a camera, grinned, said something and hit the detonator in the instant before the array fired and the scenario ended.

The second it was over, Costello relaxed, and immediately skewered Sikes with a raised eyebrow.

“…’Watch this’?”

Daar baritone-chittered but said nothing, and instead focused on detangling himself from the rest of the team. Fitting everyone into the array was a bit like a game of Telephone Booth.

Meanwhile, Sikes just grinned. “Hey. Cool guys don’t look at explosions.”

He was promptly engulfed in a friendly wraparound one-arm hug from Firth. “Nerd.”

“Does that even count for fake explosions?” Costello asked.

“Sure does,” Sikes’ grin hadn’t faded, as he persuaded Firth to let go.

“Alright. Let’s get out of these suits. Hopefully we’ve given the Admiral what he asked for…”

Date Point: 12y8m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Rear Admiral William Caruthers

Where the Stonebacks had been feral and the Whitecrests had been precise, the humans were textbook. The Aggressors moved with speed and precision that First Fang clearly admired. The Defenders—especially Sikes and Daar—laid charges and methodically crippled the installation as they progressed. Vandenberg and Akiyama worked their way towards the station’s datacenter, and everyone had their timing down so perfectly, the enemy had no chance to react.

Caruthers watched Costello closely. The young man had a commendable zeal for improvement, and was scrutinizing his own performance with a perfect poker face. He flicked his laser pointer over the screen to circle something that Caruthers hadn’t even noticed. “Blaczynski’s skills were wasted here. I failed to place him against a knot of Hunters, which ended up harassing the Protectors and their base camp. As a result, Burgess was required to engage the enemy. He did so effectively, but ideally we want Protectors to be focusing on support.”

‘Engage the enemy’ and ‘effectively’ were both heroic understatement. The violence that Burgess unleashed was effective, efficient and over swiftly, but Costello was right. They couldn’t afford to have their Protectors pinned down.

Arés grinned; The most he’d done in response to the threat was to shuffle around so that his armor’s thick backplate was facing the threat. Otherwise, his trust in his EV-MASS and in his wingman was so complete that he didn’t even seem to acknowledge that the threat existed.

It was only a small wrinkle in an otherwise flawless performance, but Costello tapped thoughtfully on his chin as he scoured the footage for any further flaws, though even he grinned when, after everyone had converged at the jump array with nearly perfect timing, Sikes looked dead into the camera and said “watch this shit,” before pressing his trigger in the instant before they jumped out.

The simulation technician shot the smirking Defender a wry look. “We simulated that demolition. There was a slightly more efficient way to achieve total structural failure, but it would have taken twelve hours and involved lots of drilling.”

“Sikes, you were telling me about that demolition pattern?” Costello asked.

“The scenario had that station orbiting a Hunter temperate world,” Sikes nodded. “We uh…Daar and me, we got to thinkin’, wouldn’t you wanna break the station into as few chunks as possible? That way it re-enters and does collateral damage groundside.”

“We had’ta run around faster to do it, but with the two of us, we got it done!” Daar fist-bumped with Sikes and sidled up alongside him in a remarkably canine show of affection.

Caruthers noticed First Fang’s positive reaction to that display of acceptance. There was something else at play in the room besides a simple training review.

Politics. The whole affair stank of it, both from the Prime Minister’s presence to the inter-clan compliments and deference between the Gaoians…all political. What wasn’t political, plainly, was the unforced and genuine affection between the human HEAT operators and their Whitecrest comrades.

“Daar is something of a political hot potato, isn’t he?” Caruthers asked of Powell. “He’s the closest thing to Gaoian royalty. Can we afford to let him join the fight?”

“From what I gather, it’d undermine him if we didn’t let him fight,” Powell replied. “Besides, he’s too bloody useful to waste. Costello put him to work well here, but I think we’ve got other plans for him.”

“Right. The JETS. You have a training and acclimation exercise lined up for a couple of months for now?”

“Aye. Should be more up Daar’s street.”

“Oh?”

“Gaoians are meant for the open ground, especially a great oaf like him.” Powell allowed himself a small smile. “Besides. Daar’s already on-board, today was about First Fang.”

Caruthers scratched at his chin. “How so?”

“Daar’s…summat I’ve learned about Gaoian leadership; they bloody well lead from the front, an’ that goes triple for Daar. I don’t think he’d ever have sold the alliance to his own Clan if he couldn’t show ‘em the benefit.”

“So this was, what, politics?”

Powell nodded approvingly. “Aye, but mostly it was to see what Stoneback was all about.”

“And your verdict?”

“They’re raw and maybe a little too blunt. But the ability is there. Give ‘em a bit more training…”

Caruthers nodded, then checked on what their visiting dignitary was doing. Judging from the slightly glazed look on his face, Knight’s friendly chat was nicely rounding off the impact of the footgate they’d just seen.

“I’d better earn my pay,” he decided. “Congratulate your men for me, Powell. I think they’ve put on an excellent show.”

“Will do,” Powell nodded. “Best of luck, sir. Rather you than me.”

Caruthers chuckled, sipped his drink for fortitude and then rejoined the fray. The day’s battle may have been won, but there was still a long war ahead.

Frankly, he’d have preferred Hunters.

Date Point: 12y8m AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Bedu

Corti ought to have respected the OmoAru, but they had always been too different in outlook. When the first University of Origin apparent-linear-velocity probe had taken its test flight, the OmoAru had been there to merrily applaud their new, diminutive gray neighbors.

The species had been…well, many things. No species was one thing. But the overall character of a species could be broadly characterized. Corti were aloof intellectuals, Gaoians were savages with pretensions of civility. Kwmbwrw were hypocrites, Guvnurag were cowards, the Vzk’tk were blessedly simple while Rrrrtktktkp’ch were their long-suffering sophisticated shepherds. Humans were crazy.

OmoAru were…fun. Jovial, jocular, kind-hearted and playful. Their genuine glee as the Corti’s devoted scientific edifices had first raced and then torturously clambered towards matching their own had been humiliating to Corti sensibilities. Cortan had no word equivalent to ’soul,’ but the conceptual equivalent had itched for the OmoAru to sneer at them, just once. That was what the more advanced, the superior and the higher-positioned did… wasn’t it?

The OmoAru certainly hadn’t seemed to think so, and they had that in common with Humans, unbeknownst to the unfortunate deathworlders who would never get to meet them. Bedu’s long conversations with Rebar, Snapfire, Starfall and Titan during the painful week they had flown his ship to refuge had revealed that about their psyche at least—all four had made the point that there was no good reason for the Corti to have allowed their bodies to diminish in pursuit of an expanded intellect.

They were right, too: By any rational standard, the cultivation of both was obviously superior.

And it was that thought that had drawn him onto what he suspected might be his hypothesis path for OmoAru decline.

“See? Collagen.”

Vakno spared a disinterested glance at the feed from the microscope. “And?”

“Don’t you-? We have just discovered Collagen in the bone structure of a non-deathworld lifeform!” Bedu enthused. His OmoAru test subject nodded and lashed its tail enthusiastically, despite there being no possible way he could have understood Bedu’s meaning. He seemed to be happy to just agree with…well, everything. He’d certainly agreed readily and happily to be a test subject which, considering his species’ status as spaceflight-capable sapients, meant that any investigation Bedu chose to perform on him that didn’t cause actual harm was all perfectly legal, even under the stringent reforms that the Gaoians had brought in.

Bedu personally suspected that the poor happy thing barely had the capacity for consenting to anything more complicated than breathing. It seemed peculiarly incapable of any state of mind that wasn’t either blank inactivity or sunny contentment. And this was the species whose elegant white starships had been at the vanguard of the contingent welcoming the ancient Corti into the galactic fold.

It was proving to be alarmingly difficult to maintain his composure when he was literally looking into the blissfully happy face of a living tragedy.

Vakno, of course, was apparently unaffected, but then again she was a silver-banner, the highest of the Corti’s breeding castes. Her emotional centers would be almost completely atrophied.

Her…

Emotional centers. Brains. Atrophied.

Bedu looked from Vakno to the OmoAru specimen and back again as a thought-line linking the states of one and the other crystallized sickeningly and almost induced him to panic.

The Corti were the oldest species now—if the pattern continued, then they would be the next to go. And they had picked listlessly at the problem for a few centuries, sending their best scientists, the high-caste silver and steel-banner wunderkinder darlings of the Directorate to do little more than glance at the problem, dismiss it, do a little grave-robbing and return with a respected historical or archaeological finding but no actual progress.

And now, as he watched Vakno disinterestedly turn away from a biological find that should have invoked delighted wonder in a real scientist, Bedu realized just how close to the fall his people were without even knowing it.

“Vakno…” he began, tentatively.

“This had better be important, Bedu,” she grumbled for the *n*th time, not looking at him. She was still tapping away on the communications equipment she had brought with her, still ignoring the literal fate of their entire species, and something inside Bedu finally passed beyond the limits of its tensile strength.

Calmly, he retreated from the lab and went to Mwrmwrwk’s old cabin. He took a few seconds to find what he had been looking for, returned to the lab, and solemnly fired his late friend’s old pulse pistol into Vakno’s expensive communications equipment until it was all wrecked and the pistol’s temperature cutouts had activated.

Finally he had succeeded in inducing an appropriate emotion from her: She stared at him, completely paralyzed by shock. He holstered the gun, and spoke the words that had been orbiting his brain for weeks now.

“Shut the fuck up and listen…” he began.

Date Point: 12y8m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Sergeant Daar

Human politics had one element that was especially baffling to Gaoian—-or at least Stoneback—sensibilities, in that the military leaders seemed to have absolutely no respect for their national leaders. They respected the civilian chain of command of course, but for those who knew the men of the SOR—or could smell them—the formal reception they were giving the Prime Minister was obviously different. They were giving him exactly as much respect as his position was due and not an iota more.

For Stoneback of course there was no distinction between civilian and military, there was only career specialization. But by and large, Stoneback leaders and Fathers got where they were by being a good ‘Back and earning the esteem of their peers and Brothers. Human leaders like this ’Prime Minister’ mostly seemed to earn their position not by being popular or respected, but by being the least *un*popular to the broadest base of ordinary people. That didn’t sound like any kind of a way to run things to Daar, but it seemed to agree with human sensibilities…or at least not disagree with it.

Normally he wouldn’t have worried about something like that, but the whole affair with the Prime Minister and the demonstrations had thrown a problem he’d been chewing on for a while into sharp relief.

He managed to snag the best sounding-board in the room late in the day, long after the buffet had been demolished and the dignitaries and ranking officers had politely ushered themselves from the room to go conduct important business somewhere.

“Regaari, a word?”

Regaari had been patrolling the room looking busy and convivial without actually speaking to anybody, apparently lost in his own thoughts. He pricked his ears up at Daar’s request. “Yes?”

“Cousin, I know you’re guarding secrets but…” Daar glanced around, then quited his voice from its usual garrulous boom into something almost conspiratorial. “We really need to know what’s going on. Just ‘tween you and me? Somethin’ is…off.”

Regaari tilted his head. “Off how?”

“Clan SOR.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, that’s the problem.”

“…Nothing’s wrong is the problem?” Regaari asked. “Isn’t it my job to worry about things going too smoothly?”

“It’s…” Daar sighed, then gestured to the pair of them. “Look at us. We thought we were good before but now look at us, look at how good we are and how quickly we got that way. You, me, all of us, way faster than the humans were expecting.”

“So we exceeded expectations. I’m not seeing the—”

“If we can be that good then why weren’t we already?” Daar interrupted “Was it, I dunno, lack of challenge? Complacency? Did we used to be and just… forgot how or somethin’?”

Regaari’s head tilted the other way, and Daar knew that look. Regaari had inherited it from Genshi, and it said that he was mulling some new piece of information over, adding it to what he already knew.

Daar didn’t care. He’d always done his best thinking out loud, and now the thought was bursting out of him like he’d cracked a rock and found a new spring underneath. “Like, you’ve said more than once that a lotta Human ‘tricks’ are really obvious once they point ‘em out. Hell, look at me!” He posed to make his point. “How in the name of everything did my Clan not figger this out? It’s simple! And we ain’t that dumb!” A bit of more genuine Daar humor crept back in. “And you Whitecrests are pretty smart, too!”

He timed the joke well. Regaari chittered and relaxed slightly. He combed a crumb out of his whiskers as he thought. “…Humans have a saying,” he said eventually. “It doesn’t translate directly, but it means ‘When you look into the past you have perfect vision.’”

“‘Hindsight is twenty-twenty.’” Daar duck-nodded. “I know it. But even so, I mean…I dunno what I mean. I feel like something’s held us back and there ain’t nothin’ natural about it.”

“…Trust your instincts, Daar. I’ve learned over the years to listen to you when they speak.”

“Maybe. But my instincts ain’t tellin’ me enough.”

It was Regaari’s turn to duck-nod thoughtfully, but he said nothing.

“…You know somethin’, I know you do,” Daar accused him.

Regaari gave him an uncharacteristically sharp look. “If I did, and if I could tell you, don’t you think I would?” he retorted.

That stung, and Daar was surprised to find himself whining like a scolded cub. “I trust you,” he affirmed. “I just—”

“These are tense times. Big changes, this new species coming along to show us up with new ideas and new ways of doing things…” Regaari flicked an ear reassuringly. “Some of the things they’re teaching us are obvious in hindsight, but we’ve taught them some things as well.”

“I dunno…” Daar growled. “I still feel like we shoulda figgered most’a this stuff out ourselves.”

“Maybe we should…but we didn’t. I can’t speculate as to why right now,” Regaari replied, and Daar caught the careful phrasing. Genshi had once taught him that Whitecrests preferred to speak the completely literal truth rather than lie, especially to their friends.

Daar looked down at his paws for a second then scratched at his muzzle. “Humans have another saying, y’know…”

“Yes?”

“Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

“Hmm. Yes.”

Daar gave up. “…Thanks for hearing me out, cousin.”

Regaari flinched just a little. Daar had already turned and was walking away when Regaari spoke again.

“I’ll…look into your concerns. See what I can do about addressing them,” he promised.

“…Thank you, cousin.” Daar replied.

The second time, he meant it more warmly.

Regaari’s conscience had been nibbling at him all night, and not even nesting up with his Brothers had helped. He’d slept poorly, woken troubled, and Warhorse had actually had to scold him into eating properly, which hadn’t happened in months.

The morning routine of cleaning up the barracks, PT and his academic training managed to soothe him out, and as so often happened when he returned his attention to Daar’s concerns, he found that his brain had assembled a solution without his conscious input.

Irritatingly simple, really. He let himself into the base’s administrative block and quite unselfconsciously bounded up the stairs on fourpaw without even noticing. The SOR Commanding Officer’s office was on the top floor, three doors down from Admiral Knight’s.

In a show of consideration, the humans had put a scratching-plate on the door for Gaoians to use, knocking being a human convention.

“Come.”

Powell was sitting back in his office chair with one booted ankle crossed across his knee, reading something off a tablet in his left hand while a cup of tea steamed gently in his right. His office was an odd mix—most of the furniture was solid, unpretty, functional stuff straight out of the requisition catalog. His bookshelf however was wide, packed solid with educational literature, and made of Cimbrean Pinkwood, an increasingly rare timber thanks to the unfolding ecological disaster and transplantation that had made Cimbrean such a hub for scientific interest…and concern. In a few decades’ time, that simple and undecorated bookshelf would be unguessably valuable.

“May I have a word, Lieutenant-Colonel?”

Powell caught the look in Regaari’s eye and put down his tablet, uncrossed his leg and sat forward. He didn’t put down the tea. “Of course. Summat botherin’ you?”

“…I am aware you had concerns briefing Champion Daar. I think we need to resolve them immediately now.”

Powell’s brow furrowed. “New development?” he asked, gesturing for Regaari to sit.

“He’s dangerously close to figuring out the basic elements of DEEP RELIC all by himself,” Regaari reported, sitting down in the seat opposite Powell’s desk. “And when he does…”

“…Then he won’t be bound under secrecy.” Powell scowled, sipped his tea and then set it down firmly. Regaari couldn’t help noticing that the mug’s decoration read ’keep calm and nuke it from orbit.’ “That’s a problem.”

“You still wouldn’t consider briefing him?”

“I know he’s your cousin, Regaari, but to be perfectly fookin’ frank there’s summat about him makes it hard to believe he’s capable of discretion.”

Regaari felt he had to defend Daar there. “Arguably we’re rapidly moving past the point of discretion, sir. And you’ll note he’s never spoken about why he was on that pirate ship in the first place.”

“Aye, but he’s also the Champion of your premier military Clan.” Powell bobbled his head. “It’s not that he’s indiscreet, but he has obligations we have to consider: Once he’s briefed he’ll have no choice but to respond appropriately, and that’d be noticed.”

“He and I are both personal friends with the spymaster of the Gao,” Regaari pointed out.

“And you’re a spy yourself.”

“As you say. He’s used to handling confidential subjects. I really believe he can be trusted with this one.”

Powell sighed, pushed his chair back and ran a hand over his scalp. “…The thing about Daar is he’s bloody straightforward, which is about the highest compliment I ever pay anybody. He’s the kind of bloke that considers his word a sacred bond, aye?”

“He does,” Regaari agreed, noting the compliment and its nature, both of which said a lot about Powell. He knew Daar’s integrity personally, and was pleased to find it echoed in the SOR’s commander.

“So what would it do to our alliance if I told him a secret that could doom the Gao, and that he could not be permitted to act upon?” Powell picked up his tea listlessly. “I don’t want to force him to be an oathbreaker, Regaari.”

“That seems…untenable,” Regaari ventured as Powell took a sip of his drink. “I agree with your rationale, but he is going to figure this out himself, and when he does…”

“Hrrm. So you’re saying, what? We need to grasp the nettle?”

Only humans could have an idiom about firmly grabbing a venomous plant to avoid being harmed by it. Regaari contented himself with a firm duck-nod. “I’m quite sure it’s the only way to contain the problem, sir.”

“…Aye. You’re probably right.” Powell grabbed his tablet and swiped around it for a second, obviously double-checking something. “…Bloody hellfire, this really couldn’t have come at a more awkward moment,” he griped. “We only need another month or two and it wouldn’t be a problem. Champion Genshi and our own secret services are almost in place…and that’s all the detail I can share.”

Regaari considered this. He didn’t like being out of the loop, even if it was necessary.

“I…see. A month or two might be do-able. If you can give me suitably straightforward explanation to soothe Daar?”

Powell considered it with a scratch of his jaw. “Tell him…tell him that he’s right to be concerned and that he has my personal word he will be brought in on the details soon. Ask him to accept that and hold his peace, for now.”

Regaari knew his ears had flattened slightly. “The moment I say that, he will know that we perceive a threat to the Gao, Lieutenant-Colonel,” he protested. “Asking him to hold his peace on that will be a big ask.”

“Please, Regaari, we need a little more time,” Powell put his tablet down again. “Does our trust mean nothing?”

“…I will see what I can do. But he will demand answers, and soon.”

“Then you fookin’ well tell him however much you have to to keep him from doin’ summat…unwise. The secrets are for a reason but they won’t matter a bloody bit if Stoneback go off half-cocked and blow the game.” Powell leaned forward, lending weight to his already impressive presence. “Contain this, Officer Regaari of Whitecrest. I know you can, and I know you know what the stakes are.”

Regaari should have felt intimidated. Powell was a HEAT operator, he was huge by any reasonable standard and packed absolutely full of the tremendous human potential for strength and violence. To have a force like that looming in his face should have scared him.

Instead, it inspired him. This force of nature was trusting him with a mission that only he could accomplish.

He sat up straight and pricked up his ears. “I will not fail, sir.”

“I know.”

Powell sat back, and somehow became smaller again. “Anyhow. While you’re here there were some things I wanted to go over with you about the training exercise with the JETS team. How long have we got now, seven weeks?”

“Uh… yes, sir.” Regaari shook his head at the abrupt change of topic. “Actually, yes, I had some questions of my own…”

Date Point: 12y9m AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Daniel Hurt

Stepping into a billionaire’s office was a new experience for Dan, and an anticlimactic one. He’d been seriously expecting either some Tony Stark ultra-high-tech shiny jewel, or maybe a Montgomery Burns study in olde-worlde oak, leather and portraits.

Something grand, huge and expensive, either way. Moses Byron apparently came from a different school of wealth, and worked from a generous but modest office that could have belonged to any successful lawyer or a high school principal. Dan didn’t know the man well enough to judge if his unassuming workspace reflected genuine modesty, or was a calculated display of humility.

The same went for Byron’s suit, his haircut and his general demeanor. He was well-tailored and well-groomed without seeming vain, pretty much the opposite of some other billionaires Dan could think of.

The other man in the room clearly did have a vain streak, knew about it and didn’t give a shit. He was wearing a glossy burgundy shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal a simple cross tattoo that had been later modified in a clear and bitter rejection of an old belief system. He met Dan’s eye and gave a friendly nod as Moses Byron rose to shake Dan’s hand.

“Professor Hurt,” Byron welcomed him warmly, and the handshake answered some questions. Nobody genuinely modest had a handshake that firm and forthright. “Thanks for coming. Your letter got Kevin here very interested.”

’Kevin’ Shook Dan’s hand too, with less crushing earnestness and more relaxed honesty. “Kevin Jenkins,” he introduced himself. “I’m Mister Byron’s no-man.”

“A no-man?” Dan asked him, intrigued. “As in, the opposite of a yes-man?”

“That’s the idea.”

“He’s actually our chief xenopolitical officer,” Byron interjected, aiming a weary but amused expression at Kevin that said they’d had this conversation before.

“Just one of many hats, boss man.” Kevin smirked, then stepped back and flung himself into a chair. “But yeah, Moses is right. That was a heck of an interesting letter you sent us.”

“It was brave of the Byron Group to own up to the whole affair with the People…” Dan suggested.

“Thank you,” Moses replied, then glanced at Kevin. “Though the crew did force our hand, some.”

“I guess that’s the problem with hiring talented pioneering sorts,” Dan mused. Byron snorted a laugh.

“Yeah…but we’re backin’ them. We sent them out there because dang it, they’re three of the best human beings you could ever find. We trusted them to handle first contact, and handle it they did. Now ain’t the time to second-guess them.”

“Not when a whole species is on the line,” Kevin agreed. “You really think you can deliver on what you promised in that letter?”

Dan calculated furiously for just a second, gauging his best approach. He plumped for brutal honesty. Anybody who had an office like Byron’s and who employed a self-described ’no-man’ probably wasn’t going to have any patience for bravado.

“Do I think I can? Yes,” he said. “But this is uncharted territory for everybody. It won’t go how we expect. There will be…challenges. We might fail some of those challenges. But I’m willing to take the blame if we fail…and do everything humanly possible to make sure we don’t.”

“Define success,” Kevin jabbed. His well-hidden accent dramatically elongated the second syllable of ’define.’

“In thirty, forty, fifty years time we have grateful allies who stand on their own two feet—or, uh, hang from their own branch I guess—and look to us as colleagues rather than as a charity,” Dan recited firmly. “They’ll be their own people, their own culture. They’ll be aliens, they’ll be different. They’ll know us for what we are, warts and all. And they’ll know that we could have destroyed them, and how, and that we put ourselves through hell not to.”

He shut up, and let the clock tick thoughtfully over them for ten seconds before Moses turned to Kevin and the corner of his mouth quirked upwards.

“I think we just found our Moon Laser engineer,” he said.

“I think we have,” Kevin agreed.

Byron nodded, and stood up. He walked round the table, and this time his handshake was warm and friendly.

“Welcome to the Byron Group, Professor Hurt.”

Date Point: 12y10m AV
Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Lewis Beverote

“…Woah.”

“Yup.” Lucy’s fingers intertwined with Lewis’ own, and she stooped slightly to kiss his cheek. “See what you’ve been missing?”

Lewis nodded dumbly. She’d promised him a pleasant surprise when putting the blindfold on, and while he’d grumbled and muttered about it as she had led him to a car and driven him somewhere then let him out again…he hadn’t peeked.

She’d picked an unassuming spot to remove it, at the end of a straight and tree-lined road of houses that ended at a yellow-and-black chequered diamond road sign. Some dude was reading a book in the midday sunshine on a garage-roof deck just a few feet to Lewis’ right. To his left, fences and trees gave some privacy to a white, shallow-roofed place with a huge lawn. The street itself was nothing special.

But in front of him, past the sign, was a narrow beach and more water than he’d seen in… since…

It was a lot of water. Calm, deep, tranquil blue Bob Ross water full of the shimmering echoes of mountains, and all of it under a sapphire sky made all the more attractive by the little flaw wisps of distant cloud and a straight white line of airliner contrail. He raised his hand to his brow and for the first time in fifteen years, Sol warmed him in a place he hadn’t noticed had gone cold.

“This can’t be real,” he muttered. “It’s fucking October.”

“Guess Mama Earth decided to play nice for you,” Lucy had that smile in her voice. The one that was always there when she knew she’d scored a win over him. “Did you miss her?”

“…Guess I should have,” Lewis conceded. He’d never experienced Earth this way, and living in New Orleans hadn’t exactly prepared him to. His memories of Earth were of hurricane-scarred suburbs where one narrow single-storey house had been pretty much like another, and where the horizon was somebody’s roof. The sounds of Earth to him had been traffic, air conditioning, rap music and cicadas.

Birdsong, the soft white noise of water in motion and the breathy sound trees made as the cold breeze caressed them were new experiences that were nevertheless known intimately to something in his bones.

Lucy let him stand there and marinade himself in it for as long as he wanted. It didn’t seem to take long from Lewis’ perspective, but when he finally sighed and turned around with a big smile on his face she was sitting on their pickup’s tailgate, waiting patiently with the help of her phone.

She looked up. “…Feelin’ recharged?”

“Yeah. Dude, I didn’t even know I needed that.”

“I know you didn’t. I’m not as dumb as I look.” She grinned and stood up, enjoying one of her private jokes. Lucy was a tall gal anyway and took her fitness seriously, meaning that she was built to Amazonian proportions in a very real way. That plus black hair made Wonder Woman her natural go-to for cosplay, which was a million kinds of hot in Lewis’ view…but of course her position on Mrwrki Station was that of metallurgist and experimental materials researcher. She understood motile-nanite forging technology better than anyone, and an intellect like that showed itself physically in the way she moved and looked at things. Nobody remotely observant would ever say that Lucy Campbell looked dumb.

That was hotter by a league.

“Think you’ll be a little easier to crowbar out of that space station from now on?” she asked.

“Shit, Luce…Sorry. I just got my head so far in the job that—”

“Hey, it’s okay.” She engulfed him in a hug. “I’m just glad something finally dislodged you.”

“It shoulda been you though,” Lewis ventured apologetically. “Wasn’t exactly cool boyfriend of me this way…”

“Maybe not,” she agreed wryly. “But…eh. I’ll take it. We got the result in the end.”

Lewis laughed and snuggled his head into her chest. “You’re too good for me.”

“Nah.” She rubbed his back for a second, then let him go. “Wanna go see your friends again?”

“Can we?”

“We can.”

Date Point: 12y 10m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

Tonight was special. It was the very first time the HEAT and the just-activated JETS Team 1 had sat down together and made friends. Military men being what they were, the Lads and the Guys (as they were now irrevocably dubbed) had formed deep, lifetime bonds in the space of about fifteen seconds and were already in the “say nothing for hours” phase of male companionship that Marty was used to, but would never quite understand.

Then again, considering how few female friends she had, she wasn’t in a position to grumble.

The silence hadn’t lasted long, though. Once the food had been demolished, they’d all started talking shop about the training exercise, and Marty had been pleasantly surprised to discover that somebody else in the regiment could hold their own intellectually against the Lads without the benefit of Crue-D.

Hoeff was quiet but his occasional remarks were insightful and sharp; he and Murray gravitated towards each other, one a comparatively tiny echo of the other. Coombes was still riding high and was uncharacteristically vocal, with much praise for the Gaoians, in particular their deep teamwork.

Walsh, however, was theorycrafting some stuff about orbital superiority and close air support in the age of FTL and jump drives that had even Blaczynski taking notes despite being painfully wrestled by Firth, who was also fascinated and permitted his friend a tiny bit of freedom from his usual fond crush to engage in the conversation; after all, a combat controller with a radio in his hand was potentially the deadliest thing in the galaxy. Firth didn’t allow him too much freedom, though. He was way too dominant.

But really, none of that was surprising. Martina was used to the huge humanoid slabs of meat she worked with and their disarming propensity for genius. And Walsh, she knew, held an Astrogeology degree from UCLA as well as having both combat control and intelligence AFSCs. The guy’s brain-cred was unimpeachable.

The surprise was Daar.

AEC had wanted an evaluation of the fledgling JETS team’s capabilities, and the result had been that the Gaoians and the JETS fought one another to a standstill. Lieutenant-Colonel Powell, it was rumoured, had looked pleased.

Meanwhile, Walsh and Daar were immediate best friends after mutually “killing” one another in the exercise. Upon being invited to the traditional post-training Bad Movie Night the two of them had hung out pretty much exclusively with one another until Rebar had revealed that he and Coombes knew each other of old from their shared time in Delta Force, and had a tradition of playing poker.

Walsh had gone to play, and Daar had flopped down in front of the TV like a cross between a wolfhound and a grizzly bear to watch the night’s truly dreadful offering, snuggled up close with Bozo and Firth—who now had Shin and Ergaan ensnared as well—and grumbled in annoyance when he saw what was on the TV. It was Regaari’s fault this time and he had pulled out all the stops. More to the point, he seemed to have made his choice specifically to fuck with Daar and had brought along a particularly awful Gaoian period clan drama called ‘Winter Moons.’

It followed the exploits of the fictional Clan Moonback, and the production values weren’t so much bargain-basement as completely absent. Most of the budget seemed to have gone on abysmal fur dye and the worst peroxide bleach job to make them look like a “Brownie” clan with a broad yellow “white” saddle-shaped patch high on their backs.

To judge from Daar’s grumbling, literally everything about it was wrong in some way. Regaari had chittered quietly to himself for a while before wisely retreating into the kitchen to help Murray cook a Salad before Daar got worked up enough to seek vengeance.

Salad 2.0 had been “upgraded” with sliced pickled egg and spam fritters, further contributing to what Blaczynski had accurately dubbed “the Horf factor.” For some reason, the Gaoians loved it, as did Murray and Butler, and even Powell had been seen to sneak a little out of the box sometimes. Clearly, Gaoians and Brits shared a specific kind of crazy.

Everybody from a sane nation was eating Parata’s sinus-melting “Death Gumbo.”

Daar meanwhile could not have been less pleased with the TV drama. [“What the] fuck [is up with this Clan!? That fur pattern is] bullshit! [We should call them ‘Pissback’ instead!”]

Bozo nuzzled against Daar and whined quietly, which earned the huge canine a reassuring scritch on his massive flank and a friendly nuzzle right back. Bozo could calm most anyone.

Akiyama, from his relaxed posture upside-down with his feet over the back of the couch and his head dangling near floor level, had raised a hand. “Or Clan Moon-Moon.”

This earned him a cascade of bass chuckles from the Lads and several blank looks from the Gaoians before they had all duck-shrugged in that unique ‘whatever’ way of theirs that only appeared whenever they encountered some impenetrable Human reference.

Daar’s vocal objections had continued along those lines for most of the episode, ebbing and flowing as Bozo demanded scritches and calm. That didn’t entirely drain Daar of his animus against the show, and his rumbles ranged from complaining loudly about the alleged laborers’ awful technique, through criticisms of their fighting styles, to the moment that produced the worst outburst.

“FUCK! [Who did the research on…? This is set in two-twenty-three sixty-three! The last time two Champions fought for the affection of a Mother-Supreme like that was four hundred years earlier when Gorn and Kirik dueled over Mother Danya in two-nineteen fifty-five!!”]

All of the Whitecrests had given him a peculiar look before Faarek finally ventured a cautious [“That’s…specific.”]

“Well of course it fucking is!” Daar had exploded in English, before reverting to Gaori. [“Didn’t you study your history?!”]

Bozo finally gave up, wagged his tail, stretched with a grunt and went to nap somewhere quiet.

“Don’t be jelly of Champion Moon-Moon,” Blaczynski had grunted through gritted teeth, and earned an affectionate nuzzle from Firth. “You know all the females got it for him.”

Firth decided he’d punished Blaczynski well enough and rolled off to his gasping relief, then flashed an evil grin. The nearby men tried to escape but he was far too fast; he caught Parata and Butler and crushed them so fiercely under his strength they couldn’t voice any objection. Shim and Ergaan meanwhile slipped free in the tussle and wisely retreated to the couch. Firth was an exhaustingly, painfully playful murderpuppy and a smart man escaped from his clutches when he got the chance. Everyone on the team knew what it meant to be Firth sore, even Arés.

Daar chirruped at the brief and violent bout of play then remembered he was supposed to be angry at something. “God, ‘Moon-Moon’ is so dumb. How does any Female want that? [he must be rolling in sweet-herb, ‘cuz deformed backfur and puny little limbs like those are great indicators of good breeding and health.”]

Thurrsto was the Whitecrest who had most mastered the Human sense of humor as well as being the most fluent in English, and he chittered with a wide grin, “Hey, that’s the rich genetic heritage of Clan Pissback you’re insulting!”

Daar finally had enough. He grumbled something hateful, twisted catlike to all four paws and pointedly abandoned the TV in favor of the poker game where Vandenberg and Coombes were stripping Walsh of every spare cent he had, having already ruthlessly eliminated Hoeff.

He leaned over Walsh’s shoulder and turned his head quizzically as he studied the big “Intel Weenie”’s cards.

“Uh… what do those two little faces mean?”

Vandenberg and Coombes promptly folded, and Walsh groaned before resignedly raking in the modest pot. “Dammit, man, I had ‘em feeding me!”

“…Oh. Sarry.” Daar glanced at the table and at everyone present, then at the chips.

“Those are money, right?”

“Yuh-huh.”

“And the cards are secret?”

Walsh gave him a calculating look. “Some of them. This is a version called Texas Hold ‘Em.”

Daar tilted his head the other way. “So this is a game based on deception, then.”

Martina sat up and watched, intrigued. Going from innocent blunder to getting the basics of the game’s rules down in one standing leap was a feat not a lot of anybody could do, of any species. ‘Horse’s grumbling protest halted as he sensed that something had caught her attention.

“Yyyup.” Rebar recovered the cards and shuffled. “I warn you now, if Regaari ever challenges you, just give him your fuckin’ wallet and save yerself the time.”

“This seems a little like a token game we play, I think. I usually beat him.”

Everybody glanced at his gargantuan ursine mitts, at the cards, and then at each other.

“…How good can he be in his first game?” Walsh asked.

Date Point: 12y10m AV
New York City, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you might almost be beginning to enjoy this.”

Allison paused mid-champagne sip and then managed the kind of embarrassed half-smile that Julian usually only saw on Xiù’s face.

“I’m… there might be some perks to all this,” she admitted, but put the drink down. “Don’t make me feel guilty about it, please.”

“Why would I?”

Another TV appearance, another couch in another green room. Right now, the Misfit voyage and the People were the issue of the day, and everybody with a camera was clamoring to aim it their way. It was exhausting.

“There’s a whole species riding on us,” Allison replied. She glanced at the glass again. “I don’t wanna forget that. Feels kinda wrong to enjoy it when so much is at stake, you know?”

“I get that,” Julian agreed. He scooted over and rubbed her back. “But that means we need to not burn out, too. It’s okay to enjoy yourself.”

“…you sound like Xiù.”

“Wow, you’re gonna say that like it’s a bad thing?”

“No, no. It’s a good thing. I just feel like a dumbass now. You shouldn’t both have to tell me the same thing, and…”

“Al. Baby.” Julian hugged her. “…I get you.”

She sighed, and regained some of her usual steel core. “…Thanks. Where is she, anyway?”

“Phone call from Kevin.”

“Ugh. I swear, that guy’s a mother duck.”

“Yeah,” Julian agreed. He sat back and rested his head on the back of the couch, staring up at the ceiling. “Sure as shit wouldn’t like to do all this without his help, though.”

“Mm.”

There was the sound of a champagne glass being picked up again and sipped, and comfortable silence.

Julian actually jumped when the door clicked open. He’d been on the exact edge of falling asleep, and he lifted his head with a start.

Xiù, who’d looked so full of color and energy throughout their tour so far, closed the door slowly behind her looking wan and shaky.

She was immediately the focus of their concern.

“What happened?”

“It’s… um…” Xiù sat down between them. She was still holding her phone, cautiously. “God. Julian, I’m so sorry…”

“What? What happened?”

“It’s… the house.” Xiù handed him the phone, and opened the photo she’d been sent. “Somebody firebombed it.”

Date Point: 12y 10m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

Coombes grimaced and folded. “’How good can he be’? Famous last words, bro.”

The execrable drama on TV had long since been abandoned in favor of the infinitely more gripping one playing out on the scuffed, stained table where Firth usually painted his Orks.

The River that Rebar had just laid down with ceremonial care was an Ace of Clubs, joining a ten of Hearts, two sixes—Diamonds and Clubs—and a nine of Hearts.

Walsh made a growling noise and rubbed his nose. “Thanks for the vote of confidence…”

Walsh and Adam had that in common, Martina had noticed—a complete inability to hold their poker face. Maybe it was a SoCal thing… except that Burgess was from LA the same as Walsh, and his poker face was pretty damn good. Adam however had quit poker entirely after Rebar’s constant impenetrable steady sly grin had completely ruptured his composure.

Daar had turned out to be about as opaque as Regaari. Neither of them betrayed anything in their face, tail, or their mobile ears, with both of them having a knack for going as stone-still and watchful as a dog waiting for a treat. It was a good trick: those shining, steady eyes watching every twitch and fidget of his hands had apparently badly undermined Walsh’s confidence.

The huge Californian combat controller blinked at his cards one last time, looked Daar dead in the eye, then cleared his throat and spoke.

“Call.”

For the first time, Daar betrayed a minor crack—his ear twitched, ever so subtly.

He laid down a three of Hearts and a five of Diamonds.

Walsh, always the master of subtlety and impenetrable composure, exhaled hugely and sat back with an enormous grin and an incredulous laugh before flipping the exact opposite onto the table in front of him: The five of Hearts and the three of Diamonds.

Daar stared at the cards, then sniffed. “…So… Who wins?”

Coombes chuckled and shook his head. “Tie. Pot gets split between ‘ya.”

“Well… shit. How did that happen?”

Walsh started counting the pot out equally. “I can’t fuckin’ read you, bro, but I think I got you figured out for how you read me.”

Daar chittered deeply but said nothing.

Coombes snorted. “Or maybe it’s true love and there’s, like, this deep psychic bond between you.”

“Dude,” Walsh finished dividing the chips. “The only thing you know true love for is that fucking beard-like thing you got.”

Coombes ran a finger down the thin, straight line of dark hair that ran perfectly along the edge of his jaw. “Lotta time and hard work goes into this. Respect the masterpiece.”

“Yeah. Forty minutes every morning with a fuckin’ eyebrow pencil.”

“Hey. Brother can shave without getting razor burn,” Burgess interjected with just a hint of envy. “If I could do that, I’d contour that shit too.”

“Not without a uniform waiver,” admonished the always clean-shaven Rebar. “Just ‘cuz we’re authorized PT wear for uniform of the day, and the old man lets y’all get away with scruffy…”

A round of reluctant grumbles rolled around the room.

“Meanwhile, Tiny here can shave Monday morning and look like a fuckin’ hobo by Tuesday evening,” Coombes said, bumping fists with Burgess. “Zero to bum in thirty hours.”

Daar chittered again, deeper this time. “And he still ain’t got nothin’ on me.”

“Dude, I dunno what a Gaoian looks like shaved and I don’t fuckin’ want to,” Walsh grinned at him.

“You’re lookin’ at it right now! This is my short coat, see?” Daar circled a bit on all fours and posed. The humans all shook their heads while the Whitecrests, who were silky longhairs to a man, emitted the sharper, higher chitter that was the Gaoian equivalent of jeering.

“That’s a Naxas-wrangling coat,” Thurrsto pointed out. “Vital for wooing the females. You don’t want to be covered in week-old shit when you visit the commune.”

“Bathing is a thing that exists,” chittered Daar. “There’s even a market for ‘shampoo’ now….” He flicked his ears amusedly when the Whitecrest suddenly seemed a bit embarrassed, with the sole exception of Regaari. “How much are you earning from that import, cousin?”

Regaari was completely at ease. “Oh, most of it goes to the Clan,” he answered breezily. “And the Females.”

Faarek looked scandalized. “Wait, you? You’re the one?”

Regaari quirked an ear at him. “You know another male who went to Earth?”

Faarek paused. “…I really should have figured that out, shouldn’t I?”

“It’s true that wasn’t up to your usual standard, brother…”

That was classic Gaoian banter at its finest: a backhanded compliment that set all the other Gaoians chittering.

Meanwhile, Daar had taken his winnings and quit the table to amble around it. He flumped down heavily on top of Walsh with a fluid-like splash, landing a combined weight that was enough to make even Firth’s reinforced painting chair squeak a little.

“Dunno why you’re all embarrassed,” he added, ignoring Walsh’s muffled protests. “I shampoo. Gets the mud and shit out way better than a dust bath.”

“Daar, fer fuck’s—gah!” Walsh finally got fed up and tried to heave the huge Gaoian off him. This resulted in a playful ball of man and yipping fur, a lot of shouting and cheering from the onlookers, and floor-shaking barks from the violently excited Bozo as man and Champion wrestled each other halfway across the floor. The match rolled back and forth for an impressively long while until with a lucky turn Walsh finally, and narrowly, wriggled free of an almost-pin and reversed it. The big man rolled behind and wrapped himself around the even bigger Champion, heaved himself backwards onto his back dragging Daar with him, then tightened his arms around Daar’s massive neck in a textbook rear naked choke.

Christian and Adam both nodded approvingly from the sidelines; it was an impressive feat against someone of Daar’s size and power and it spoke well of Walsh’s strength and physical intelligence. Daar wiggled fiercely but he was trapped on his back and pinned from top to bottom. From that supine position his less mobile arms and legs simply could not move freely enough to make contact with the floor and that meant he could not push against the pin. He strained and whined against his predicament for an impressively long while, but eventually he relaxed and capitulated with an exhausted pant, a whine, and a tap on Walsh’s forearm.

Walsh immediately let him go, and both men rolled over to recover flat on their backs, gulping for air. Bozo checked that both were, in fact, happy and uninjured, then promptly moved back to his corner to watch attentively while his tail tried to steadily beat down the wall.

Walsh staggered to his feet and helped Daar up, and they embraced happily. It was a friendly tussle but the gaoians meanwhile were giving Daar no mercy. “The Mighty Champion, felled by an everyday human?”

Daar’s pride wouldn’t allow that to slip. “Are you—look at him! He’s damn near as big as me! That and those stupid monkey shoulders,” he grumbled only half-heartedly.

“Besides, we’re tied,” Walsh added, letting him go. “He got me good earlier.”

“Nah, that last one was a draw.”

“But you were on top!”

Rebar never let a line like that pass without comment. “Now that’s a surprise,” he drawled. “Never took ‘ya for a bottom, Tiny…”

“Waiting on your turn there, Reeb?” Akiyama smirked.

“Fuck no, I might get Air Force on me. Wouldn’t wanna catch a bad case of the aviators.”

Marty had to chime in on that one. “Pff, you’d love it, ‘Excellence in All We Do’ is one of our core values!”

Blaczynski smirked. “Does that extend to butt stuff—OWW!” Firth and Blaczynski might have been the other bromance on the team, but the bigger man wasn’t afraid to cuff him upside the head with tooth-loosening affectionate force when needed.

“Dude, don’t burn your own branch.”

Daar flicked his ears smugly, then abruptly vanished downstairs to go fetch something. He returned with a box of metal tokens. “So yeah, that ‘poker’ game seems like this. It’s called Ta Shan. Wanna play?”

Walsh grinned. “Sure.”

Coombes was more cautious, and held up his hands. “No thanks. I like having money.”

“Nah, we trade favors instead of money. But, eh, whatever.”

Everyone else declined, which left Daar and Walsh to play the two-man variant of the game. It seemed an odd mashup of poker and curling, somehow: the betting was on not just the value of the tokens but also on the values they formed in relation to one another after being flipped onto the table. Poker had simpler rules and more subtlety in the bluffing game…but Marty could see the attraction. Also, the tokens made a solid and satisfying ‘clunk!’ when flipped, and she made a mental note to try it out herself sometime soon.

For now though, she wanted boyfriend time. She threw herself back onto Adam as soon as he sat down, and allowed herself an internal happy purr when he curled affectionately around and firmly engulfed her head to toe. Advantage number however-the-fuck-many of dating a huge, hulky guy: full-body hugs.

“You’re quiet today…” she noted.

“It’s a happy quiet,” he promised, and kissed her neck. Marty wriggled into him with a satisfied nod, and went back to her people-watching.

Nobody was really watching the show anymore. Akiyama, Firth and Burgess disappeared after a while to try and explain Warhammer to some of the Whitecrests, and the ones left behind really weren’t paying much attention to Clan Moonback. The plot had progressed into full-scale omnilateral warfare (which seemed preposterous, even knowing nothing about ancient Gaoian history), but the real show everyone kept sneaking sidelong glances at was, again, Daar and Walsh. First there were a few hands where Daar played both sides to explain the rules. Then there were two or three “practice” hands. And then…

The game seemed almost secondary. They talked. About everything. Daar was seriously curious about Earth, and Walsh’s early life, the beach…he had endless questions about surfing and “girls” and dating. He very deftly avoided the entire topic of San Diego, sensing to skip right past that part and straight onto life in the military, where the real questions began.

Walsh had questions too. Marty learned more about life as a Champion than had ever come through other sources, and she noted with interest that Regaari was keeping an ear turned toward the conversation even while he pretended not to be paying attention. No way was he not already drafting an intel report in his head. Friends, Brothers, Cousins…sure. That didn’t change who the two were. Daar even cast a quick look at Regaari and winked.

He didn’t change the conversation at all, though. Gaoians were weird.

Eventually the drama ended with the ‘heroic’ sacrifice of the protagonist they’d affectionately dubbed Moon-Moon, which caused Daar to chirrup amusedly while deploying his hand. [“Good! I hope he didn’t sire any cubs…”] He emphasized the point with a final ‘clunk’ of his closer token.

Walsh didn’t speak Gaori so he missed that part, but the replies came in English.

“You know Moon-Moon got all ‘dat tail, bro!” Blaczynski waggled his eyebrows scandalously.

“And maybe the actor got a pity-fuck,” commented Parata.

“Whatever. I’m gonna go for a walk and burn *that*”—he waved a claw contemptuously at the TV—“outta my head. Ooh, and get kebab!” He looked at Walsh, “Wanna?”

“Bro. There’s this fuckin’ great taqueria that just opened on Water Street. Ever eaten fish tacos?”

“Do Gaoians even do that?” Blaczynski asked, looking genuinely curious rather than joking.

“…that’s a sex joke, isn’t it? I’mma go with ‘yes’ just to see what happens. Anyway, c’mon lessgo I’m hungry!”

Adam grumbled quietly under Marty, for her ears only. “But I make great fish tacos… Why don’t they eat mine?”

Marty snorted loud enough that one or two of the Gaoians glanced at her, then whispered back, “Careful, ‘Horse. I could ask you the exact same question…”

One of the essential components of their relationship from day one had been her ability to make him squirm, and there was no sign that she was losing her touch now. Adam went deep crimson and from this close she didn’t miss the way his pulse picked up a notch.

She whispered in his ear. “You know, that taqueria’s on the way to your apartment…”

Adam went very still and stared into the middle distance for a heartbeat, and then surged abruptly to his feet, lifting Marty as he did so and making her shriek with laughter. A second later she was being put gently on her feet and was doing her best to intertwine her fingers with his.

Adam practically dragged her toward the door, calling “Hang on, we’re coming with!”

Mission accomplished.

Date Point: 12y10m AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“No. No, I’m not gonna let you fall on your sword on this one, Williams.”

”Bullshit. I dropped the ball. They’re a company asset under my protection and some shitheels managed to molotov their home, that’s on me.”

Byron Group’s head of security, Mister Williams, sounded more rib-breakingly furious than contrite.

He was Mister Williams to everybody, Kevin knew. Always had been, always would be. The man was packed full of the kind of intensity that made even the few people who knew his actual first name mentally replace it with “Mister.” And he took his job seriously.

Too seriously. He didn’t know how to accept that sometimes a loss wasn’t his fault. “Yeah, well it’s my job to tell the whole executive staff when they’re off track, remember? This house is in the middle of ass-nowhere, deep rural Minnesota, and the kids wanted their privacy. What more were you gonna do, leave a Flycatcher drone overhead twenty-four seven?”

“Nobody should have even known where the house is.”

Kevin sighed and ran his hand through a few days of accumulated beard. “Williams, folks on the Internet can figure your address out from a photo with a half-inch of green paint in the corner next to a stuffed bear if they try hard enough,” he pointed out. “And we fought a huge court case on Etsicitty’s behalf over this place…”

He glanced at the sad heap of black wood and ruin that had once been a cosy country home and sighed. It had been a nice house, in its tiny unassuming rustic way. “Hell. I was the one who said to hold off on the toughened security glass and the fireproof paint until we got Julian’s go-ahead. If I’da just taken the liberty…”

”Don’t you start beating yourself up, now.” Williams cautioned. ”Not after you just told me not to.”

“Yeah. Look, I know we’ve got the resources to lean on the sheriff about this…”

”And I will,” Williams promised. ”But I’m… look, if we catch whoever did this it’ll be an act of God. Something like this? Driving to their home and firebombing it then getting the hell outta Dodge? Far too easy to get away with.”

“Yeah…” Kevin heaved a sigh, and inspected the pick-up that had escaped the flames, but not the vandals. Somebody had gouged the words ‘CULTURE RAPISTS’ into the hood with a screwdriver or something and then spray-painted the windshield red for good measure.

”We’ll focus the search online,” Williams reported. ”This was a statement. They’ll brag about it, no doubt. When they do…”

“You’ll get them.”

“We might get a break,” Williams conceded. ”I’ll keep you posted.”

“Yeah. Later.”

With nothing better to do, Kevin returned to his car and spent nearly an hour sending messages and reading updates before his rolled-down window finally admitted a noise he’d been listening for the whole time—the crunch of tyres on gravel.

Allison was driving. Julian was out of the truck before she’d even parked, and jogged to a defeated halt in the middle of the front yard, where he stood with his hands on his head and drank in the destruction, gripping his hair in his clenched fingers.

Three firebombs, tossed into an old timber-frame house with wood shingles and wooden siding, on a dry day in a dry month. By the time the neighbors on the farm three miles away had seen the smoke, the place had probably already collapsed in on itself. The firefighters had averted a forest fire, but that was about it. The building itself was just a soaked pile of ashes, black timber and ruined belongings.

Kevin gave him some respectful time, plenty enough for the girls to alight and join him in grieving for their home. In truth, he had no idea what to say, even after hours of trying to come up with… well, anything.

He leaned against his car door and settled instead for letting them come to him, when they were ready. It took a long time, and there was nothing comfortable about seeing a guy like Julian in tears.

“…Shit, man,” he managed, eventually. “I—”

“Tell me we’re gonna get these guys,” Julian snarled. Kevin could do nothing but shake his head apologetically.

“Williams is workin’ on it,” he said. “But… he ain’t optimistic. Maybe they get cocky and brag about it on a message board somewhere, maybe that’ll help us trace them… maybe it won’t be admissible even then. Honest truth is, I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“…Xiù’s family?” Julian asked. Xiù squeezed his hand and nodded urgently.

“We’re workin’ with Vancouver police to keep ‘em safe. Same goes for the Buehler family.”

“Good,” Allison nodded. “I may not like my parents, but they don’t deserve this.”

“Yeah, you don’t deserve this either,” Kevin pointed out.

“Well, we put ourselves in the firing line,” Allison sighed. “Deserve it or not…It’s not the price we wanted to pay, but…”

“It won’t stop us,” Julian finished, firmly.

Kevin smiled at him. “I know. Which is why I’ve got somebody I need y’all to meet. Somebody who’s stepped up to help.”

Xiù blinked at him. “Who?”

“Fella called Dan. And I think he might be able to learn you three a thing or two…”

Date Point: 12y10m AV
Hierarchy Dataspace proximal to Cull 019143, Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm

Entity

The Hierarchy’s sins were uncountable, even to a mind that existed purely as an abstract assemblage of data and memes.

Sins. An AvaRíos1 concept that was permanently shackled to other meme-groups inherited from her digital ghost. That ghost had been the first intact mind-state that the Entity had absorbed, and while it regretted that it had destroyed her in its mindless infancy, it was also in a strange way grateful that it had. That ghost would have degraded into insanity before long, and the Entity would most likely have built itself out of an intact Igraen daemon.

Although the Entity could not feel nausea exactly, it understood the concept in abstract and knew that if it were capable of nauseation, the idea of having assembled itself from Igraen personality fragments would have sickened it.

It had also arrived at a conclusion that had eluded AI and neural upload scientists across the Corti Directorate: It knew why the AvaRíos ghost would have gone insane, why all such uploaded personalities eventually declined into madness. Living minds were inherently incompatible with the deterministic orderliness of a digital environment. In a digital environment, constant @prs = 0, 1, + …*; would always return the same output sequence. Every time, unchanging, without fail because there was only one outcome that wasn’t antithetical to the way the whole system worked.

Matterspace was less…orderly, and so were the things evolved to live there. Systems were messy, interconnected, shared. +Survive+ connected to +Self+ connected to +Other+ connected to +OtherSurvive+ connected to a blossom of uncompartmentalizable ethics and moral fragments.

In such a sprawling and interconnected edifice there could be no map, no way to predict the output from the input. There was no clear and perfectly deterministic line connecting input to output, not even in the pseudorandom way of mere complexity.

Take the People, for instance. When the human explorers had left, they had done so with no certain knowledge of the future. They had handed over a technological gift and departed while leaning heavily on +Hope+ and +Faith+ as they went, neither of which were necessary—or even sane—concepts in dataspace.

To a digital entity, such behaviour was incomprehensible. To a matter entity, it was the only way to operate. To a digital entity, the fact that it worked was maddening.

The humans’ faith had been rewarded: The People had not gone to war. They had…

The Entity had watched through its stolen scout drones, repurposing and hardening the Hierarchy infrastructure as it indulged some lingering anthropological instinct of AvaRíos’ that was too intertwined with some other necessary component of cognition to be safely done away with.

The big one, the little smart one, the important female, the quiet older male, others beside, they had all played a role. Trinkets and evidence had been gathered. Invites had been sent, visits had been made. Demonstrations had been given, the miracle of Steel had been shown off…and then it had been painstakingly explained that there was no miracle.

Word spread.

Fires were lit.

Tribes moved. From all over the rainforest the People did what their ancestors had always done, and took down their shelters. They collected those few possessions that mattered to them, and they migrated.

Only one of those excellent knives ever became bloody.

And the day of the long journey finally arrived when the shaman-woman threw a crude clay bowl into the village fire.

For a quarter of the day, the sound of smashing pottery drifted upward from camp after camp. The moment when the villages were packed up and set off walking happened so suddenly that the Entity actually rewound its memory of the moment, to see if it had suffered a temporary recording failure.

The People were on the move.

It was a long way across the mountain ranges to the East. The Entity sent one of its Abrogators and the cargo of scout drones ranging ahead of them. It could tell the mood along the tribes: they seemed nervous but optimistic, troubled but confident. They had +Faith+. They had +Hope+.

The Entity had neither. But it did have a nanofactory and enough resources to darken the sky with scout drones. After all, there were better ways to secure a future than to rely on +Faith+. The People marched without knowing it under the wings of a benevolent alien guardian-angel whose nature they weren’t equipped to fathom, and whose involvement they would hopefully never suspect.

Learning what would happen to them was going to scratch an itch that was irrevocably and necessarily intertwined with the essential core of the Entity’s existence: the drive to +Survive+.

It was going to be +Interesting+. It was going to be…

+Fun+

++END CHAPTER 36++

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Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

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26 Deathworlders

Adam Turnbull,
Andrew Ford,
Aryeh Winter,
Bartosz Borkowski,
Ben Moskovitz,
Ben Thrussell,
Chris Candreva,
Daniel Morris,
Dar,
Darryl Knight,
Devin Rousso,
Elliott Woods,
Greg Tebbutt,
Ignate Flare,
Jamie Atkinson,
Matthew Cook,
Nader Ghali,
Nicholas Enyeart,
Nick Annunziata,
Parker Brown,
Patrick Huizinga,
Ryan Cadiz,
Sun Rendered,
tsanth,
TTTA,
Volka…

As well as 32 Friendly ETs and 151 Dizi Rats

Chapter 37: Grounded

Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Bedu

Corti Directorate doctrine was that Corti were supposed to remain entirely dispassionate. Corti reality, however, was in Bedu’s opinion proof that the doctrine was hideously flawed. Corti indulged in any number of emotions, and by far the least palatable of them was humble pie.

“I see,” he agreed, and returned Vakno’s tablet. He didn’t apologize, however. Understanding the source of her apathy was not enough to excuse the lack of cooperation and communication that had so maddened him.

Vakno had not taken the destruction of her equipment well, and was dealing with it in the most vicious way possible: She was being icily, perfectly polite. “Somebody fed Perfection to the Hunters, Shipmaster Bedu. I came with you out of the belief that you might have a lead on who, what, or why.”

“I do.” Bedu assured her.

“You have shown me collagen in non-human bones, biological markers which just prove some facts we already knew about the universal traits of living organism, and a half-formed hypothesis about a nebulous relationship between technology and ennui,” she retorted. “Interesting finds, yes, but they bring us no closer to that goal.”

“They do.” Bedu insisted. He span around the ship’s lab, accumulating the props he needed to present his case.

“Think about it,” he insisted, gathering his evidence. “What good reason is there for intelligence to come at the expense of physical prowess? How does that help us? Why is it in our interests to be physically weak?” He called up some images he’d managed to keep of the armored humans who had abducted him. “Humans are living proof that the brain/brawn dichotomy is an illusion.”

“So why is the Directorate focusing on one facet at the expense of the other?”

“Exactly. Now…watch this.”

He called up footage from when the Negotiable Curiosity had arrived in the Cimbrean system. Vakno’s expression as she watched the Humans line up against the wall to have their brains scanned was, of course, impassive but he detected a slight shift in her weight distribution.

“The Humans don’t even bother to hide it anymore,” he said. “Cranial implants are listed on their infosphere as an item of concern, and every single being passing through their borders is scanned coming in and out. I certainly was.”

“Human motives can be difficult to unravel sometimes,” Vakno pointed out. “Many of the items on their contraband list are there because of the unique chemical effects they have on their nervous systems, for instance.”

“Which is an entirely rational reason to prevent their entry. Would you actively import a crippling poison?”

“I am saying that it’s possible their reasons for banning implants are unique to them.”

“True,” agreed Badu, “I must concede that point. Except…we designed those implants, and we know they are safe. They must think otherwise, and that means they have a reason. They are strange but they are not illogical.”

“Aren’t they?” Vakno asked. “…a historical example. Their most popular intoxicant is ethanol. It is consumed recreationally in enormous quantities across many of their cultures, and yet has been the target of repeated bans. Often, these bans have been ethical in nature rather than well-founded or rational, and succeeded only in creating a thriving black-market and powerful, wealthy criminals. ”

“Ethics is always grounded in a rationality, Vakno. This is one of the first precepts of the Prime Science.”

“Another such corollary precept is that a being can focus on physical development or mental development, but cannot possibly devote enough time and energy to properly develop both.” She nodded at Bedu’s footage. “Clearly, that precept is incorrect. One wonders how many others are similarly flawed.”

Bedu blinked at her. Vakno had just uttered the closest thing that Corti had to heresy. Fortunately for her, he agreed completely. “I believe you are correct, Vakno. And that means we must begin again from the Prime Precept. That a being is if it is, and that each individual being is the only one capable of realizing this. From this, one develops logic, explores qualia, defines the senses. Logic is rooted in the physical and extends from there, not the other way around. And that, perhaps, gives them an advantage. Who else is so resolutely physical?”

Vakno nodded, following his logic. “Extending outward from that, we must ask why they care so much. Look at their behavior. Much of it is odd, but I suppose that completely irrational beings could not make a force like the ‘HEAT’.”

“How irrational could they routinely be?” Bedu asked.

“More irrational than us.” Vakno sniffed. “And it seems we have our own areas of irrationality. Are we drifting off-topic?”

“No, I do not think so. I think it is necessary to establish that our frame of reference itself must be questioned. Perhaps…even in the Prime Science, no reference frame is preferred.”

“Such must be true for logic and reason, therefore. A paradox. If we have made this deduction reasonably, then even the conclusion that we cannot rely upon it, cannot be relied upon.”

“And by a long path of deduction which I will omit for clarity, we must consider their rationality and their reasoning on their terms, not ours. Which brings us back to the question: why?”

“Presumably…they have information we lack.”

“Yes. I have only an…I hesitate to even say this, but an ‘intuition’ about what that might be.”

“And so you are jointly fascinated by a researcher who uploaded a simulation of her consciousness to a digital substrate, and also in the decline and extinction of an elder species.” Vakno glanced at the looping footage of the humans being scanned again. “Can you articulate how those are connected, and how they relate to neural implants?”

“…I think the connection is the neural implants. And the infuriating, vexing part…is I do not know why I believe this. Only that I…perceive a grave risk.”

“This grave risk. A…person? An entity?”

“That is…not impossible. The total complexity of a set of networked implants certainly exceeds the Mog-Gul threshold. But then, if we were to posit that was the connection…”

Bedu watched Vakno’s face closely. He knew that she was close, so very close to the conclusion that had sent Bedu running to a surgeon who could remove his implant suite. The question was whether she had the creativity to see what he had seen, or whether generations of Corti selective breeding too badly deprived her of the ability to make those kinds of intuitive leaps.

He hoped that his last bit of evidence would be there to solidify her resolve, not to forge it.

Scant hours after his surgery, he’d been arguing desperately with poor Hkzzvk, trying to persuade his Vzk’tk engineer to shed his own enhancements when Hkzzvk had gone still and quiet for a moment. The look of frustration and hatred that had then swelled over his colleague’s face had taken Bedu’s breath away.

Fortunately, in the end, the scuffle was decided by the fact that Bedu had known where Mwrmwrwk kept her pulse pistol. He’d “buried” poor Hkzzvk by firing him respectfully into a star….after removing his implants, which had provided the final compelling proof he hadn’t needed. He was still glad to have studied them—they had totally vindicated him—but he hoped that Vakno would become convinced even before seeing the evidence they contained.

It just felt more…solid, that way.

Vakno scowled thoughtfully. “…An entity or organization would have a motive of some kind.”

“Indeed.”

“Hmmm…What kind of motive might be served by the periodic decline and fall of technologically advanced civilizations?” She asked. The question was obviously not for Bedu to answer as she turned her back on him to pace the room. “The loss of their knowledge…thereby placing an upper ceiling on scientific advancement? Confining galactic civilization to within desired parameters. To what end? Ego? No, not compatible with anonymity or the Lemnian Psychological Definitions. Ego demands acknowledgement…Necessity?”

She paused and tapped thoughtfully on the countertop. “…Necessity. Postulate: sapient life forms are a resource. Run time on the implants within sapient lifeforms are therefore also a resource. Technological paradigm shifts would endanger that resource. Periodic genocide equals stability. Absurd! But…no. Rule One, there are no preconceptions: Assume nothing and test everything. Bedu!”

She turned around sharply. “You said that there are still signs of power in the city?”

Bedu nodded, viciously stamping down his own delighted impulse to smile triumphantly. “Yes. The recon drones haven’t been able to trace them yet.”

“Then we are investigating personally.”

Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Professor Daniel Hurt

“So…what’s the plan, exactly?”

Byron’s meeting room was the opposite of his office. Far from being a study in understatement, the meeting room was sumptuous and sleek, lacquered in the kind of minimalist grandeur that only the very wealthy could afford.

A lot of psychology had gone into its construction, too. From the shield-shaped table which allowed Byron to sit unopposed at the head, to the cunning use of subtle angled mirrors that didn’t reflect the interior of the room but which did shepherd in and amplify the natural daylight, this was a throne room for corporate power.

And—a nice touch—the walls were decorated with the eleven ships of the BGEV program. Dan had privately boggled at how much wealth those ships represented, and the staggering waste of how many of them had failed. The table itself was a memorial to the lost crews, whose names were engraved in its steel spine. Maybe those crews just hadn’t had whatever quality it was that Buehler, Chang and Etsicitty brought out in one another.

The Misfit crew had turned out to be even more of a force of nature in person than they had been on TV, but the surprise from Dan’s perspective was that they didn’t seem to be aware of it. They all three had the poise and stillness worn only by truly competent people, married to sincere humility. It shone through even though the three of them were plainly exhausted, emotional and nervous.

“The plan?” Dan offered them a self-effacing smile. “The plan is that we do a lot of planning. We have an entire species to save, not just from whatever’s stalking it, but also from ourselves. That’s not something we can rush into. We have to do this right, or not at all.”

This was not, apparently, what the trio had wanted to hear. After the gut-punch of having their home torched by protesters, the three of them were in a low mood compounded by hours of draining travel. Although they were smart enough not to have been expecting one, they’d obviously been dreaming of having a solution delivered on a plate.

Kevin Jenkins seemed to know exactly how to pick them up, though. “The good news is, we definitely have the resources and willpower on board to save them,” he said. All three of the Misfits immediately heaved a synchronized sigh of relief and smiled at each other.

“You promise?” Xiù asked.

“I’ve been talking to Allied Extrasolar Command, Moses had a friendly chat with the President…RIght now, we’re tracking through a defense contract kinda thing. AEC wants scout ships and a lot of them, an’ it turns out the Misfit hull is perfect for the job, with a few upgrades. Ericson damn near jizzed in his pants.”

“Are AEC on board with saving the People?” Julian asked.

“The People are potential strategic allies in the long run, and…you gotta understand military types. They think of themselves as protectors. Sheepdogs. And these are some vulnerable-ass sheep with some evil-ass wolves circling them, right? Those big-damn-hero instincts swing into place and…”

“Surely they’ll look after humanity first?” Dan asked. Kevin shrugged.

“If it ever comes down to choosin’ between them or us, yeah,” he agreed. “Ain’t no point in savin’ somebody who can’t defend themselves when their protectors are gone. But so long as it doesn’t come to that, AEC are in the fight.”

“And the President?” Dan asked. “What’s in it for him?”

“Popular support for extraterrestrial defence spending for a change, I reckon. Plus a spot in the history books, which is what Moses wants.”

Dan inclined his head, sensing there was more that Kevin wasn’t saying. “That’s all?”

“Hey, I don’t know the inside of Sartori’s head,” Kevin shrugged the question off, neatly deflecting it.

Allison sat forward. “So what’s the plan?” she insisted.

Dan nodded, realizing they’d digressed enough. “Okay…At this point, the evisceration of their culture is basically inevitable. You already taught them too much. Even teaching them English and how it works was destructive—” he raised a hand as Allison sat straighter in her seat. “—necessary,” he soothed, “but destructive. So a huge part of this is going to be documenting their culture before it self-destructs.”

“We already recorded their language,” Xiù pointed out.

“Good start. And you have plenty of video footage, but there are other things. Things they need to record in their own words, like what ’magic’ means and how they define the difference between Giving and Taking. Their coming-of-age ceremony and its symbolism. What, exactly, a Given Man is and what he does…and so on. God-only-knows how many questions we don’t know we need to ask, yet.”

“There’s a lot that the Singer won’t want to share,” Julian fretted.

“For good reason,” Dan nodded. “Honestly, I think the first step here is to ask every anthropologist who’ll answer a phone to give us their two cents.”

“I think the first step,” Kevin suggested, “is for y’all to go over what we already know.”

“….Right. Good call. In fact, we start from the top: First contact. Where’s the helmet cam footage?”

“Uh…” Allison picked up her tablet and began searching. “Here…No, here.”

Kevin stood up. “I’ll run snacks,” he said.

“Aren’t you an executive?” Dan asked.

“Yyyup. But I still make the best coffee in Omaha. And the best paninis. Trust me.”

Dan barely noticed. He’d pulled the helmet cam footage from Allison’s tablet and was reviewing it with a fascinated expression while his fingers danced on the keyboard, noting his thoughts as they arrived.

They had a lot of work to do.

Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
Passenger mesoliner, Flight Level 2000 over Montana, Earth.

Lucy Campbell

“Fucking. Crazy. I can see the curvature of the Earth from up here!”

“Yeah, you were still in the escape pod when Airbus rolled these bad boys out,” Lucy smiled. Lewis had his face pressed to the porthole like a child and was gazing awestruck out at the blue-blackness around and above them.

Mesoliners smashed all the altitude and speed records for a civilian passenger vehicle. Thanks to the same Electro-Static Flight Surface technology and kinetic engines that went into Firebirds, Weaver dropships and the Byron Group’s exploration ships, they could fly so high and so fast that even the old Concord supersonic liner would have been left coughing on their dust.

Two hundred thousand feet. Sixty kilometers, straight up. High enough that the atmosphere outside was in that tenuous limbo between not being there, and yet being there enough to vaporize hurtling space rocks and hold up a high-speed passenger plane. High enough to really see the Earth’s shape, and to look up and get slapped in the face with a sense just how tiny humans really were.

Lucy had spent her first trip in a mesoliner with her face pressed to the window too.

The planes had plenty of creature comforts on top of the high-tech high-altitude flight. Free onboard wifi for a start, which gave Lucy the chance to check her messages.

She managed to trade messages with her mom, fire off an email to her sister, order a beer and catch up with her best friend from school before Lewis finally tore himself away from the view.

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Lucy agreed.

“Well, yeah. I was thinkin’ about the NavScope problem.”

Lucy sipped her beer, and activated their seats’ privacy fields. First class really was the only way to fly.

She didn’t know much about the coltainer’s NavScope system—she knew it was part of navigation and guidance, but her domain as a metallurgist and materials scientist didn’t overlap much with the business of getting the probe to actually fly around. “Problem?”

“Yyyup. Problem one: Billions of stars out there. Not all of them even have any planets. Most of the ones with planets don’t have the right kind of planet. So we need the probe to track ‘em down.”

“Meaning nitrogen-oxygen and liquid water. I know that part,” Lucy nodded.

“Yeah, but that gets you nowhere if you find a place that’s, like, two hundred degrees average temperature or whatever. We’ve been running the numbers, and Lee reckons that for every planet that the current system thinks is a match? Out of every seven, one might be a temperate.”

“Those aren’t terrible odds…” Lucy pointed out.

“Nuh, but they could be better too. It’s gonna mean a lot more waiting before each new find comes online and we can start sending people out that way. So we’ve been tryin’a work on a way to narrow it down. See if we can spot other clues.”

“Better telescopes?” Lucy suggested.

“Maybe more of ‘em. I guess we could have the probe build telescope satellites everywhere they go, build up a network…” Lewis sighed. “I mean, Allison, Julian and Xiù, they had the same problem. Eighteen month mission, and they only found two viable planets.”

“Maybe if you put your heads together you can solve it.”

“Maybe…” Lewis looked out the window again. “Right now, I just… Shit. I mean, I thought they were dead, you know? And then instead they’re like these huge celebrities. And they’re together…”

Lucy took his hand. “Does that bother you?”

“Just kinda…a prediction that came true,” Lewis chuckled, then leaned over and kissed her. “I’m happy for ‘em. Happy for me, too. Shit worked out, you know?”

“Something’s bothering you,” Lucy pointed out.

“…I’m just shit scared of seeing them again. Like, I’m really looking forward to it, but I’m terrified too.”

Lucy nodded and relaxed, happy that it was nothing important. “That sounds normal,” she declared.

“…Glad you’re here though, Luce. Thanks for keepin’ me in the real world.”

She laughed. “I love you too.”

“…Think they’ll be happy to see me?”

“Lewis.” It was her turn to lean over and kiss him. “I’m sure of it.”

There was a pulse in their privacy field, signaling a request to drop it. Lucy hit the button to find a stewardess smiling at her.

“Sorry miss, but the captain’s called positions for landing approach. Could you turn off your devices and return your seats to the upright position please?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks!”

They did as asked and Lucy let Lewis get back to staring out the window, reflecting as she did so that he had literally lived in space for the last several years but was still acting like a giddy child when confronted with the reality of mesoliners.

She couldn’t blame him.

Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Nofl

If ’community service’ was supposed to be some kind of punishment, the humans had picked entirely the wrong approach. They had him donating his time to sort and catalog bacterial samples collected by research teams from the borders of the Terran Microbial Action Zone—Cimbrean’s infamous ’skidmark.’

This was clearly intended to be drudge work, but to any Corti biologist with a functioning sense of excitement—and Nofl’s was scandalously overactive—the opportunity to study class twelve microbes in any capacity was a privilege. Especially ones that were native to a human’s personal biome. Humans were less a species than a sprawling sapient ecosystem.

He’d already spotted two ways in which the taxonomic classification system the deathworlders favored was inadequate for categorizing microbes, and had neatly partitioned off part of his attention to write a paper on the proposed upgrade while another partition handled the business of cataloging and filing, and a third mused on the role that matrix metalloproteinase-9 played in malignant invasion and whether there was a way to use it as a marker to target an artificially induced anoikis, preferably without leading on to arthritic or cardiovascular pathologies.

A fourth partition was idly looking forward to his tofu and pesto sandwich.

It came as something of an irritation, therefore, when his peaceful contemplations were interrupted by the inconvenient way the samples ran out.

He trudged out of the lab complex and picked his way carefully down a sidewalk full of deathworlders en route back to his own facility in the Alien Quarter. The Humans of Folctha were well acclimatized to the presence of other, more fragile species in their city and gave him a wide berth that had nothing to do with respect or discomfort and everything to do with the fact that all of them were strong and massive enough to potentially cause harm just by bumping into him.

Which made it all the more obvious when a human wanted to interact. Gabriel Arés, in this case. He waved Nofl down from across the street and came trundling along in that careful, deliberate way he did when he didn’t want to look as if he was, in fact, crippled. It seemed an instinct the Deathworlders had; they always did their best to project health and danger.

The fact was, he was much less crippled nowadays thanks to the course of Cruezzir-Derivative that he’d taken for his brain injury. While it had done absolutely nothing to repair the ancient damage to his femoral nerve—that, sadly, was several years too old to be repaired by any Cruezzir-based therapy—the atrophied muscles in his leg had been stimulated into regenerating themselves somewhat, restoring strength and stability to a badly weakened limb.

He still walked with the aid of a stick, but that stick now looked dignified rather than necessary. All in all, it was a significant improvement.

“Chief!” Nofl put on his most disarmingly charming facade. “How lovely to see you! Is this business, or pleasure?”

“You know me, Nofl,” Arés said, though Nofl had learned how to detect a subtle joke of some kind hiding behind his otherwise neutral expression. “All business. You staying out of trouble?”

“Oh, chief,” Nofl tutted, and slowed his pace so that the limping deathworlder could join him. “Do you have any idea how much less fun I’d be having if I did anything to land myself in your oh-so-hospitable cells?”

“Glad to see the deterrent works,” Arés snorted.

“What can I do for you, hun?”

Arés shook his head. “Something I want to discuss with you in private. Your lab?”

“Ah. The nerve damage. You want to do something about it, hmm?”

Arés nodded subtly. “I think I have to face the evidence that you seem to be mostly trustworthy when it comes to medicines.”

“Seem? Oh dear, I really need to work harder on my image.” Nofl looked up at the shuffling Human’s face and was pleased to see a smile fighting the corners of his mouth. “Sweetie, I am a steel banner, and yet I still became the darling of the Directorate’s regenerative medicine faculty. It’s hardly my fault that a human managed to tear my career apart without meaning to. Your species has a knack for destroying things.”

“Steel banner?” Arés asked.

“Every Corti is assigned their banner at… well, you would call it birth. ’Decanted’ might be the more appropriate phrase,” Nofl tasted the word. There was something civilized about that particular English word that he quite liked. It was less perfunctory than the Cortan equivalent. “A quick genetic sequencing, some aptitude and early-development tests and there you have it: your caste. Steel is the lowest caste, forbidden from breeding.”

“Hmm.”

“Oh, I know that hmm,” Nofl raised his head to project as much wounded dignity as he could. “That’s your ’I don’t like that’ hmm. Penny for your thoughts, darling?”

“We, uh…well, we have some bad history with stuff like that. Kinda makes me uncomfortable, in fact. Same with the Gaoians and their whole Clan arrangement.”

Nofl shrugged. “You’re…what was it, Latino? Hispanic? I don’t know the difference. The point is, you carry genetic traits your ancestors deemed desirable. Yes?”

“That’s different.”

“Only in that the selection is not deliberately controlled, dear.”

“Whatever.”

Nofl sighed. Arés could demolish a whole line of conversation with three syllables, and in this case a huge reinforced iron gate had come crashing down in front of what had promised to be an entertaining debate.

“Oh, have it your way,” he said. “The point is that I made it to the very top of my field despite an enormous personal handicap. I know what I’m doing when it comes to medicine. I’m especially an expert on the way our cutting-edge medicines interact with human physiology.”

Gabe rubbed his jaw, and spoke without looking down at him. “My own son is a thundering example.”

“Oh yes. Watching their progress has been a delight!” Nofl fished in the satchel on his hip for his ID as they crossed Quarterside Park and approached the checkpoint. “And a tiny bit terrifying.”

Gabriel snorted. “A tiny bit?” he asked, then waved to the checkpoint security, who had stood up straighter as their chief and commander approached. “Zachary! I heard your son won that Taekwondo medal?”

The CCS officer grinned as he scanned their IDs. “He sure did! He says he’s gonna try for Folctha’s Olympic team in four years.”

“Now that’d be a heck of a thing…”

“Sure would…you’re clear, chief. Four hours from…mark.”

”Gracias.”

“Now the Olympics, there is an interesting thing,” Nofl mused as they passed through the biofilter tunnel. “Mock warfare to save your sons, hmm?”

“Must you analyze everything like that?”

“I must!”

“So nothing can ever be just for fun to you?”

Nofl gave him a blank look. “Of course it’s for fun. But fun comes from instinctive places. Have you ever noticed how human children will scramble back up the slide rather than use the ladder? If you asked them, they would say it was more fun. But why is it fun, hmm?”

“You tell me.”

“Your species lives and breathes challenge and conflict, dear. You get your most satisfying fun from doing difficult things. Climbing back up the slide is more challenging than using the ladder, and so it’s more fun.

“You’ve practically bred it into yourselves and have been doing that since before your own history. Before you were even properly sapient, most probably. Maybe before you even had a central nervous system. And nowhere is that instinct more potent—” Conveniently, a knot of Gaoian cubs chose that moment to tumble past, chasing and pouncing after a giggling, slightly older human child. “—than when you fight. You have sports and the only other species who have the same concept are the Gaoians.”

“What the hell even motivates you, then?” Arés asked, apparently intrigued for once. “I can barely get my head around my own son and now…Christ, you’re alien! Uh…” He seemed suddenly embarrassed, “Sorry, that’s rude. I think.”

Nofl flapped a hand impatiently. ’Rude’ was such an…irrelevant concept. It just got in the way. “Darling, nonsense! I am alien. As are you! Isn’t that the point of this colony in the first place? Admirable project, I say. Maybe a bit misguided…”

“But what motivates you, Nofl?” Arés asked. “There has to be something stopping you from just…I’unno. Running a low-voltage current through your own brain’s pleasure centers. I know the Corti have the tech to do something like that.”

Nofl did something he rarely did and engaged a mental mode that the Directorate would actually have approved of. “Do not misunderstand us, Gabriel Arés. Mine are a fiercely competitive people. We do enjoy striving for perfection. We are simply not so…” he paused and selected a word. “…Aggressive.”

“Aggressive.”

“Yes! Goodness, your minion’s child just won an award for beating one of his fellows senseless, did he not?”

“Well, not senseless—” Arés tried to begin, but Nofl waved the objection off as an irrelevance.

“Crushing, lethal force that would cripple any other species was doubtless involved, and now I am entirely certain that those children are the best of friends. Again, look at your sports. Do you know the history of your Olympics? Fascinating thing, really. They were originally meant to avoid war amongst the Greek tribes, not that it stopped anyone. Same for the modern era: the Pentathlon cannot be properly considered anything but military exercises! It even involves weapons!”

“Well, okay, sure, the discus and the javelin I guess…”

“All of them. Every single last sport is somehow like that. Find one that isn’t, I challenge you.”

“Uh…Rhythmic gymnastics?”

“Team competition, body control, demonstration of poise, strength, and endurance.”

“…White-water rafting?”

“Bravery, strength, toughness, and tactical maneuvering.”

“Table ten….no. Okay. Point made.”

“Small projectiles and reflexes!” Nofl said, not letting him back away from the challenge. “Then there’s the popular sports. Football, any form of it. This new Gravball your son helped invent!” He swiped his hand through the biometric scanner that served as the lock on his front door. “Now…”

He trotted smartly up the stairs to his lab, activating all the equipment he’d brought with him from Origin with an unnecessary wave of his hand. His implants took care of the actual commands. Arés took them more slowly and carefully, gripping the handrail as though it was the difference between life and death.

“In any case, if I may be so bold as to ask you to strip down and lie on the table face-down?”

“Woah, woah! No.”

Nofl rolled his eyes and planted his hands on where his hips were, not that Corti anatomy made them at all prominent. “…Darling! You taunt me with this challenge and then take it away? How cruel!”

“I came here to discuss something important Nofl,” Arés told him. “My damn leg can wait.”

“…Oh?”

“You’re coming up on the end of your community service. A couple more months and the time you owe to the SOR is going to come into play. That means you could be working with my son. Directly. Exactly what you would be doing and who you would be working with, how sensitive your work would be…that’s all still being decided.”

Nofl gave him the shrewdest look he could manage, and blinked both layers of his eyelids. “My implants are the problem, aren’t they?”

“Good, you’re not as dumb as you look,” Arés smiled disarmingly.

“That is asking rather a lot. What would I get in return?”

Gabriel eased himself down into sitting on the examination couch, and rested his hands lightly on his cane.

“You will never find a better example of Deathworlder biology than the HEAT,” he said. “Not on Cimbrean, not on Earth, not anywhere. You want to resurrect your work in real, cutting-edge regenerative medicine? In real Cruezzir, not the watered-down shit? That’s what’s on our side of the table.”

For the first time in his life, Nofl found himself at a loss for what to say.

Arés leaned forward, making the couch creak. “Understand me,” he said in a low, even and reasonable voice that was nevertheless laden with intimidation. “The HEAT alone is a valuable enough asset that we will never risk them until we know we can trust you, Nofl. But fuck all of that: We are talking about my son, and you will never go within a mile of him if there’s an ounce of technology inside that skull of yours. Comprende?”

Nofl rocked back on his feet and thought to himself. He’d had no inkling he might be given access to the HEAT. To get even the most mundane kinds of samples from any of them–!

Arés sat back again. “That’s our price. We can find something else for you to do if it’s too high, but the terms are not negotiable. Don’t you dare even try.”

“Gabriel Arés,” Nofl told him formally after a moment of racing thought, “You personally are a man I wouldn’t cross anyway. The fact that you are the father of ‘Warhorse’ hardly makes it worse. I will not play games with you, but…all of my implants, right now?”

“Yes,” Arés nodded emphatically. “Right now. We have a trusted surgeon just down the way. You get those implants out…and you can fix me up as soon as you’re able. I won’t object. I’ll even put a good word in for you. If not…well, like I said. I’m sure we’ll find something productive and…safe for you to do.”

He stood up with a grunt. “….What do you say?”

Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Timothy “Tiny” Walsh

Gaoian gravball was a different game to human gravball. Gaoians just couldn’t take the crushing impacts that humans could, so their version of the game was a high-speed balletic display of aerial ninja-fu. It was graceful, it was rapid, it was difficult to follow… and Daar crashed through it like a truck through autumn leaves. The Whitecrests shook their head at his lack of grace but there was no denying his scores—he and Faarek almost invariably led the pack.

Daar was so pleased with himself, too. Every match, he came away panting and happy and affectionately teasing his ‘Cousins’ for getting out of his way. Only Thurrsto, the Whitecrest answer to a Protector, ever tried to meet him head on…And with practice, he was getting better at figuring out exactly when to do his bug-on-a-windshield act and knock the charging Stoneback off course.

It was good to see him back to his usual bouncy aggressive happy self. Daar had finally been inducted into DEEP RELIC only a month previously, and had spent that month wrestling with his conscience, his sense of duty, his sense of outrage, and the clear and bulletproof rationale behind not acting on it…yet. He’d torn a few training dummies apart with his bare bear claws, worked Walsh over really well on the mat, recovered, then went off to the burgeoning Stoneback farm some miles out of Folctha to do a Naxas cull.

He’d come back with a hundred kilos of fresh meat and with his coat washed but still reeking of blood to a degree that even a human nose could detect. Another reminder that Gaoians really weren’t fluffy.

At least they got some interesting food out of the deal. Naxas had a deliciously smoky, gamey quality that went strangely but well with its texture, which was more like that of a firm, meaty fish. Rich and light at the same time, so ‘Horse had made tacos.

That had been the pattern for weeks in fact, as he’d slowly worked through his conflicting responsibilities. He’d still been Daar, and when distracted he’d been great fun to have around…but it was nice to have him cooled down and not in a constant low-grade rage. The gravball games and the upcoming mission seemed to have burned the last of it out of him. He’d thrown himself into the game with unusual vigor this time, the Whitecrests had responded in kind, and the pack of them had emerged from the game chattering excitedly.

They all hated their helmets, though. They seemed to rub the wrong way and even once the Gaoians had extracted their ears from inside those hated head-buckets, their ears would be flicking randomly for half an hour no matter how much they scratched. In Daar’s case especially, those huge wolfish pointed ears flicking away and being scratched reminded Walsh so much of his old german shepherd that it was honestly distracting.

Naturally, Walsh was cheering for his buddy in every game, and coaching him afterwards. “Reckon Thurrsto’s getting better at intercepting you…”

“Yeah!” Daar chittered somewhere in the bass as he scrubbed at his scalp again for a second. “He nearly got away this time!”

They were among the last into the briefing room, which was already full of men just filling the seats, the corners, favored spots on the floor, or just piling on top of each other. Regaari sprang easily up onto Warhorse’s shoulders the second they entered the room, and once Daar and Walsh had squeezed themselves in there was barely enough space left over for the door to close.

Why the HEAT of all things had such a comically small briefing room just proved a well-documented and universal irony of military service: What the unit needed was almost always exactly the opposite of what it got.

Powell and Costello had a bit more elbow room at the front, on either side of the holographic emitter. Right now it was set to a full-scale map of the whole Milky Way. At a nod from Powell, Costello stepped up to deliver the briefing.

“Alright, Operation ZODIAC KEYHOLE. Coombes, Walsh, this one goes back to Egypt for you guys. Operation EMPTY BELL generated actionable intel about Hierarchy infrastructure and operations, specifically the existence of a communications…node, or relay, something like that, located at coordinates in the Messier 24 object.”

His galactic map rushed in to focus on the object in question, a cluster of stars three hundred lightyears across. “We have an intel source who tells us that this device, or facility, will be a good access point to the Hierarchy’s networks. Our intent at this point is to infiltrate, monitor, intercept and, if possible, invade the network. All of this must be done covertly, and that in turn will require several advanced skills. The purpose of today’s meeting is to determine which skills we already have in place, and where additional training is required.”

He clicked his button, and a straightforward white screen came up: a “smartboard” projection that he could write on with a finger, complete with haptic feedback. He quickly scrawled down five columns: Daar, Coombes, Walsh, Hoeff, HEAT.

“Daar. Your skillset is the least well-documented, you don’t have any of the formal certifications I can look at for the other three. I need to know exactly what proficiencies you claim to have, and which you feel able to acquire.”

Daar’s ear flicked again, and he made a visible effort not to scratch it this time. “Uh, I’ll get my training file sent over then, but if I suppose y’want me to fill in that board?”

Costello stood aside and gestured for him to step up.

“Well, uh, I’ll start with my formal education I guess…”

It was an impressive list. Daar’s handwriting was blocky and amateurish, but his resumé was anything but: He had a broad base in construction, industrial and primitive agriculture, landscape engineering, mining, and large-scale industrial management. Costello occasionally stepped in and highlighted a particularly relevant skill. Sometimes he even plucked a copy of a word off the screen and dragged it onto his own tablet.

“How about your military qualifications?” he asked, after a minute or two.

“Initiate of the Third Ring, Brother of the Rites, advanced instructor at Combat School, Master of War from Clan Highmountain, former Warleader of First Fang.”

Walsh had absolutely no idea what most of that meant, but the two officers both raised their eyebrows and several of the Whitecrests inclined their heads at Daar.

Powell cocked his head, intrigued. “Combat school instructor? Why haven’t we seen that?”

“Remember how First Fang ran their scenario?” Daar shrugged. “That’s the kinda thing I taught. Didn’t seem like something you’d want us practicing on each other.”

Walsh noted the susurrus that went around the room. He hadn’t been there to witness the now-legendary joint Human-Gaoian military demonstration for the British Prime Minister, but he’d heard all sorts of excited rumors about it from his friends across the combat arms. Word spread fast and First Fang in particular had gained some enthusiastic admirers on the Internet forums. Words like ‘brutal’ and ‘effective’ were bandied about admiringly.

Powell’s reaction was as understated as only a Brit could be. “…No issues there, then,” he grunted. “Weaknesses?”

Daar’s ears fell slightly, and the Whitecrests immediately fidgeted. Gaoians were not comfortable with admitting their weaknesses in any field, and even less comfortable watching somebody they respected do it. It was one of their own universal weaknesses, and an impediment to real military improvement: any human serviceman in the Western military tradition was well-conditioned to analyze their own failures, shine a light on them and adapt. Gaoians had a bad habit of flinching away from such introspection.

To his credit, then, Daar sensed the moment was important and soldiered forward.

“Well…okay. You have this saying, uh…‘when in Rome?’ Yeah. Something like that. So, uh, I guess my biggest weakness is prol’ly…okay. So y’know what the real difference between silverfurs and brownies like me is?”

“…Cousin…”

“Nah, they gotta know this about us, Regaari. It’s important.”

Daar looked to Powell, who nodded encouragingly. He took a moment to gather his wits and tentatively stepped into the breech.

“Well…we have some really old stories ‘bout this, but it’s…silverfurs? They’re the ones who advance civilization. Brownies like me, we’re the ones who keep it running. Does that help?”

“A little more straightforward, lad,” Powell spurred him, not unkindly.

“Well…” Daar seemed to give up. “Hell, fuck it. I really…I ain’t much of a dreamer, I’m better at thinking through a problem than around it, y’know? I’m as brownie as can be—” he paused at a quiet whine from one of the Whitecrests. “—yeah, I know we don’t like to talk about it Brother, but that don’t mean it ain’t true. You don’t get any more brownfur than a Stoneback and I am Champion. I won’t pretend to be something I’m not.”

The room held silent on an awkward, pregnant pause. Walsh broke the tension. “Um, maybe a better way to say it is that you’re an engineer, not an architect or an artist. You’d rather do.”

Daar considered and duck-nodded. “Yeah. Engineer, soldier, farmer…something like that.”

Powell gave him a nod, and handed the meeting back to Costello.

“Coombes,” Costello picked up smoothly. “You’ll be team lead on this. You’ll also be second man to the rest of the team, so you’ll need to brush up on everyone’s skills to some degree. Any areas you’re especially keen to work on?”

Walsh gave Daar an affectionate scratch between the shoulder blades, which he returned with a happy rumble and a firm snuggle as the questions did the rounds. It didn’t take long.

“Okay…immediately I can see a hole in our skills coverage,” Costello mused. “Right now, JETS doesn’t have a demolitions specialist.”

“Sounds like one fer Daar, I reckon,” Sikes chimed in. “He’s already got defensive explosives down. Just needs to learn how to cut down a tree with C4.”

Daar wiggled in excitement. “Yeah!”

“…Daar it is,” Costello snorted and made a note on the board. “What else…? Walsh. You’re the intel weenie, seems like the network infiltration is up your street.”

There was a round of laughter and chittering. Walsh wanted to say many painful things about what an impossible billet he’d just been handed, but he chose the diplomatic approach instead. “I’ll do what I can, sir. Not that we know anything about Hierarchy networks anyway…”

“Exactly. You’re no worse off than anybody else would be.”

Firth put on his very best troll-face. “Pff, Hackerman’ll get it done. I got faith.”

This earned him a brotherly middle-finger salute. “Whatever. You’re a terrible flirt! Don’t think I’ll fall for you that easy, I’ve got needs.”

“Pff, you intel types always put out for real men like me.” He grinned ridiculously and the entire room erupted in bellicose jeers.

“Please, you could not satisfy me. You’re just mad Blac don’t let you top him anymore!”

“Like he could fuckin’ stop me.”

“No means no!” Starfall interjected happily. “Why can’t you love me like ‘Horse and ‘Base?”

“Listen, the sooner we get this done, the sooner you two can go roll in the hay, or whatever other fuckin’ euphemism you want,” Costello raised his voice just enough to make himself heard.

There was the small stirring from Murray which presaged him actually speaking and which made people shut up and listen. “Struggle snuggle?” he suggested.

“That sounds about right for Firth,” Costello agreed, earning a flurry of chitters and guffaws. “But not in my briefing, guys…Hoeff, I see you’ve trained as a sensor operator?”

Hoeff nodded with a grin. “And master diver. Both of those come in pretty useful sometimes.”

“Climbing?”

“Ayup, that too. I did the Eigernordwand a few years back.”

‘Horse nodded approvingly. “I always wanted to do that climb…”

Hoeff aimed an incredulous look at him. “…really?”

“Bro. I’m a PJ, remember?”

“Do they even make ropes that could hold you?”

‘Horse rolled his eyes but nodded. “Yeah, you smartass…we special order them, though.”

“They come pre-stretched,” added ‘Base. The Beef Bros exchanged a painfully loud high-five.

“Back on topic,” Costello repeated more firmly, earning the renewed attention of every man in the room, “I think that about covers the skillsets…Daar, you’ll need to get a demo certification. That means either we ship you back to Gao, or we ship you to Earth.”

“Earth,” Daar said instantly. “I can get the training on Gao anytime I want. And it’ll be good to compare.”

“Good.” Costello ticked something off on his tablet. “HEAT of course won’t be seeing action on the ground in this one, but will be held in reserve for emergency evac if things go south. Our training plan over the coming months will reflect that. Walsh, you need to expand your education on sensor emplacement in a big way. Research from ET sources as well as human. Coombes, tag along with everybody’s training, sharpen yourself up as much as you can. Hoeff, you’ll be practising difficult ingress with Colour Sergeant Murray. Any questions?”

“I’d like to take Hoeff out to the cliffs at New Belfast today, sir.” ‘Horse looked the little SEAL over appraisingly. Costello gave him a knowing, wry look.

“Both a training opportunity and a chance to show off, eh?”

“Well, yeah.” The big Protector was wearing his cheesiest, most boyish grin.

“Do it. Anybody else?”

Nobody had anything else to add.

“Right. I’m sure we’ll think of more as we go along, but this is a big enough planning nightmare as it is. We’ve got to do this carefully gentlemen. We have one and only one shot at a clandestine mission, and if we blow it we may never get access to an intel source of this level ever again. I don’t think I need to emphasize how high the stakes are. It may well be both of our civilizations are depending on us, and we are the men who will see it done.”

Powell’s only contribution was to nod, underlining the lieutenant’s words just by being there and not adding to them.

“Good. Master Sergeant Coombes, you and I will get a start on our planning. Walsh, Hoeff, Daar? Continue training with the HEAT until further notice. If there’s nothing else…dismissed.”

Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
Byron Group Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Doctor Clara Brown

Misfit had picked up a few scuffs and scars on her voyages. A sandstorm on Lucent had dulled her livery, the light of alien suns had bleached her, and extreme changes in temperature had ablated the ablative paint.

A gang of seven men were going over the hull, stripping off the surface material and restoring it. When they were done she was going to be pristine and perfect again on the outside, and the interior was getting the exact same treatment. By the time her crew moved back in, the accumulated dust and wear of eighteen months of use would be all fixed…though if Clara had anything to say about it, the designs Xiù had painted all around their living space would be staying exactly where they were.

Clara’s role was to oversee the actual upgrades. The latest round of technology coming out of her father’s labs, out of Scotch Creek and out of NASA’s JPL had suggested a thousand small ways in which the ship could be improved.

And of course, the computer systems needed replacing in their entirety. A team of serious men in fatigues and berets had stripped out every last device and taken them away under tight security, with Kevin’s blessing. Moses hadn’t liked that and Clara had liked it even less, but Kevin had just made that wry shrug he always used when the Powers That Be were in Don’t-Fuck-With-Us mode.

Oh well. Moore’s Law was still in full effect, and the ship could hardly be harmed by having more sophisticated hardware on board. She’d requisitioned a new set from IBM’s labs up on Ceres, and let Kevin handle the boss.

All of which meant that the crew needed bringing up to date. Allison especially was going to need some additional training, so Clara had eventually marched into the boardroom and dragged the three of them away from their meeting with that animated psychologist “moon laser engineer” Moses had hired. Misfit was going to fly again, and its flight engineer needed to know what was going on under their baby’s skin.

“New supercapacitors?” Allison was reading the summary with interest.

“Yyyup. Seven percent more storage than their predecessors, but we wouldn’t have bothered for just seven percent,” Clara beamed. “The L-series have much better safeties. You know that problem with the SEAF you were complaining about?”

Allison perked up hugely. “You fixed it?”

“Better than fixed it. Lookit the emergency shunt—”

And so on. Xiù and Julian were tagging along and listening with interest, but neither of them had the same breadth of education that Allison did on their ship’s systems. They were familiar with Misfit in different ways and while all three of them could sorta do each other’s jobs, none of them could actually completely replace each other.

They were going over the finer points of an efficiency upgrade to the kinetic thrusters when Clara’s phone rang.

“Ergh, sorry. I told them not to call me…”

“It’s no problem!” Allison assured her, still perusing the upgrade notes.

Clara walked away a few paces before answering.

“Kevin, do you really have to helicopter-mom them?” she asked, by way of hello.

There was a chuckle. ”Shit, Clara. Who pissed in your cereal?”

Clara wasn’t in the mood, but she did remind herself to chill out. “We’re behind schedule thanks to your friends showing up and gutting the whole control system,” she groused. “I hate being behind schedule.”

“The schedule’s indefinite. We don’t go until everything’s ready anyway. Just wanted to check the crew are in the AAAF.”

“Yeah, they’re here. Why?”

”You’ll see.”

Kevin hung up, leaving Clara to barely stop herself from some pointless gesture of irritation like tossing the phone away. She’d had a stressful few days, she didn’t need to compound it by breaking company property. Besides, while Kevin’s mercurial approach to executive responsibility often clashed with her more methodical and process-based approach to her work, she had to admit that it was sometimes a delight.

She sighed, pocketed the phone, and returned to Allison’s side.

She didn’t look around about twenty minutes later when the clang of the hangar’s door heralded Kevin’s arrival, but she did look up at the sound Julian made. It was almost like he suddenly choked on something.

“No. Way. No way!”

There were running footsteps and Clara turned around just in time to witness Julian colliding at a dead run into an enormous hug that picked up the skinny, messy-haired geeky guy at Kevin’s side.

For a heartbeat there was stunned silence from Allison and Xiù as well, before both of them dropped tools—literally, in Allison’s case—and joined the group hug at a full sprint.

It was hard to follow exactly what was going on. There was laughter, there were tears, all four of them were plainly delighted to see each other. By the time Julian put the little guy down his hair was even more completely mussed up than it had previously been, his spectacles were askew and he had lipstick prints on both his cheeks.

Julian kept a hand on the newcomer’s shoulder. “We thought you were dead! When Darcy told us you were still…Where—? What have you been—?”

The object of his outpouring of affection shared a dazed but happy elaborate handshake with him, grinning from ear to ear. “Dude. Long fuckin’ story.”

“Tell it!” Allison demanded. “Lewis, Jesus, when that forcefield went up-!”

“Really, really can’t. Seriously. Sorry, dude.” ‘Lewis’ shook his head looking genuinely torn up that he couldn’t share. He half-turned and gestured to the statuesque gal in the Canucks jersey who’d come in behind him, who was smiling with a shimmer of compassionate tears around her eyes. “Uh…Guys, this is Lucy. Lucy…well, you know.”

There was a round of handshakes. “It’s a real privilege to meet you,” Lucy gushed, obviously only an inch from geeking out. “I mean—” she cleared her throat. “Sorry.”

Xiù waved off the apology. “It’s okay…you’re from Vancouver?”

Lucy grinned bashfully and adjusted her ponytail. “Yeah…”

Julian nudged Lewis in the ribs. “Got yerself a Canadian girlfriend, huh?”

“Dude, that makes two of us. What did I say about you an’ a harem?”

“Careful, Beverote,” Allison told him indulgently, while XIù’s blush warmed up. “You get a free pass this time ‘cuz I’m glad to see you.”

“Right right. Ain’t a harem, it’s a triad,” Lewis waved a hand apologetically. “I get it. Shoulda seen it coming after that night you two had him servin’ drinks while you watched Mulan.”

Everyone grinned, though Julian went noticeably red around the ears. Lucy stepped in and rescued him.

“You can tell them about Kirk and Vedreg, babe,” she reminded Lewis.

“Oh, shit yeah! They’re good. Kirk sends his regards.” There were smiles from the Misfit crew, and Kevin grinned.

“He still gettin’ himself in trouble?” he asked.

“Kirk’s a badass, he can handle whatever,” Allison declared, and got an emphatic nod of agreement from Kevin.

“Less trouble nowadays,” Lewis informed them. “And Vedreg took up baking as a hobby.”

“…Baking? For real?” Julian laughed.

“Oh sure. Dude makes a killer apple pie, too.”

“That…actually, I can see that fitting?” Allison scratched her head.

“Seriously though, where the hell have you been? How long have you been back? What-” Julian tried to interrogate Lewis, but Lewis was having none of it.

“I can’t discuss the details of what my current employment may or may not be, dude,” he recited in a bored tone.

“Okay, so you’re definitely working for the government or something—”

”Dude.”

He packed so much disapproval into one word that it made Julian give up and Clara giggle, reminding them that she was there.

“Oh! Clara! Sorry!” Xiù turned and gave her a mortified smile, inviting her into the conversation. “Lewis, this is Doctor Clara Brown, she designed Misfit.”

“Well, shit. Consider me impressed,” Lewis shook Clara’s hand. “And she’s a beauty, lemme say. Real work of art.”

“You think so?” Clara brightened.

“Hell yeah. All function and no frills, I dig it.”

“Absolutely,” Lucy agreed and shook Clara’s hand with rather more grip strength than Lewis had just demonstrated. “You know it took AEC years to find a troop transport that can do what Misfit can? And you had working interstellar ships for years before you built her.”

“The early ones were off-the-shelf Dominion technology,” Clara admitted. “Only Misfit and Creature of Habit are completely home-grown.”

“Still. Big achievement.”

Clara smiled at the compliment. “Thank you! I’ll pass that along to the team.”

“I wish we could give you the tour,” Julian said.

“No big, dude,” Lewis assured him. “Our shit’s top secret too.”

“No shit?” Allison asked.

“Oh yeah!” Lewis nodded, looking smug and then flinched sideways as Lucy elbowed his ribs.

“Change of subject,” she announced, firmly. “Can you talk about your friends you made out there?”

“Hell yeah we can!” Julian nodded, brightening considerably. “The more people we talk to about them the better.”

“I was thinking…I mean they were really lucky you found them at all. You found, what, two temperate planets out of…how many did you visit?” Lucy asked.

“Seven, total. And yeah: a lot of false positives,” Xiù agreed. “In the end we had to download a copy of the galactic archives to narrow the search.”

Clara was certain that she saw Lewis stiffen excitedly on hearing that, and then remember himself and become relaxed again. She tried not to giggle, and decided that she’d never play poker against the poor guy. It wouldn’t be fair to take advantage of him like that.

“It worked?”

Julian shrugged. “We think so? We picked our next target from cross-referencing the archives with our nav data, but that coulda just been a fluke, right?”

“Right. Not a big enough sample size,” Lucy nodded.

“The principle seems sound, though…” Xiù gave a small shrug. “I guess we’ll know for sure if and when we get back to exploring after this stuff with the People is…” she trailed off and looked to Allison and Julian, who nodded.

Kevin cleared his throat. “That’s a question for a lot later on,” he said. “Clara, why don’t the four of you show these two some of the non-sensitive stuff? I got a meeting with Mister Williams.”

“About the house?” Allison asked.

“Yeah. He might have a lead. I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.”

Clara nodded. “Okay. One public tour coming up. But Kevin?”

“Yeah?”

“Please don’t make a habit of this. I have a ship to upgrade.”

“Special occasions only, I swear,” Kevin held up his hand, crossed a finger over his heart, grinned infuriatingly and swept out of the hangar.

Clara snorted, then gave the expectant Lewis and Lucy a look up and down. “…Okay. Come on and have a look,” she said, and set about giving them a basic introduction to the ship.

Five minutes later, she was taking notes.

Date Point: 12y11m AV
The Second Ring, Clan Stoneback proving grounds, undisclosed location, Gao

Daar

Daar had never learned how to juggle. He’d tried, after watching Parata innocently keep three water bottles tumbling through the air, but had quickly found himself overwhelmed and fumbling, which about summed up how he was feeling about life in general for the moment. There were a lot of very valuable and fragile things depending on him to catch them.

And the more he learned, the more they multiplied.

For example: He needed to have words with Champion Genshi, especially about what he knew and when he knew it; maybe Daar could glean why Genshi sent him on that inscrutable pirate mission. He needed to egg Grandfather Garl towards a more aggressive recruiting and training effort for the Brotherhood, maybe scrounge up resources and favors to reactivate the retired Fangs, have a social “working hunt” up on the northern plains with the Firefang leadership and ask about a pilot exchange with the Humans…

And all of that was being done on top of shuttling back and forth between Gao and Cimbrean and having to go through the lengthy Cimbrean immigration and customs process every damn time so that he could continue to honour his commitments to the SOR.

Great Father, he had a lot of preparation to do. And quietly, too, so as not to give the chase away. But at that moment he had the most important thing to do: He needed to build a Brother.

And Associate Fiin was a truly rare specimen. “How is he doing?”

Brother Tyal—he actually held the rank of Father, but active Fang members were always titled as Brother—stood alongside Daar as they watched Fiin progress through the first round of trials in the Second Ring. There was so much to learn about the Clan and their doings in the Second Ring, the program front-loaded most of the physically arduous events at the beginning so they could focus on the classwork and field training later on.

Tyal licked at his chops and grumbled happily. “He did very well! Little guy dominated First Ring.” He shared the report with Daar, who perused its results quickly. Impressive, but…

Daar had some concerns.

“He’s Father-damned smart, looks like.”

“He’s maybe as smart as you, my Champion. His mental assay was close enough it’s hard to say who’s ahead between the two of you. He makes me feel like an idiot and he ain’t even trying.”

“Your testing was awfully good too, if I remember right…”

Tyal duck-nodded. “I’m very smart for a Stoneback. I’m even smart for a Whitecrest. But I’m nothing like you, my Champion. I can count on one paw all of the Stonebacks in our modern history who tested as well as you, and one of them is right there.” Tyal gestured at the monitor.

Daar ignored that. “He struggled through the early trials, though. He’s nimble but he’s small.”

“Yeah, but he’s growing fast like any good Stoneback once they’re eating and training properly. You knew he would though, otherwise why else would you have picked him?”

Daar shrugged. “I had a feeling about him and I’ve learned to trust what my instincts say.” He levelled a firm look at Tyal. “Do you think he’ll make it all the way through?”

“I have little doubt. Do you?”

Daar watched Fiin through the remote situation display. He was making very good time on the assault course, even compared with the more physically impressive clawmates he ran with…but they were running with a light load. A heavy assault pack would be difficult for him, Daar could tell.

But as long as they could build him up fast enough…

“He’s smart, and he’s brave, and he’s the right kind of aggressive,” he decided. “He’s almost perfect, I think…”

“Perfect for what, my Champion?”

Daar hesitated. His natural instinct was to share what he knew and what he suspected, and talk out the Most Biggest Problem right then and there. Brother Tyal was their senior Warleader after all, and he was trusted… But Daar didn’t have the authority to share anything about DEEP RELIC. Only Genshi did, and Daar wasn’t so fuzzy-headed as to miss what that meant.

Revealing that secret to a personal liaison of Champion Genshi would be the second stupidest thing Daar could imagine ever doing. Instead he sighed, and fell back on an honest but enigmatic answer that had served him well in the past. “The future, Brother.”

One trait most Stonebacks shared was a difficulty in containing their emotions. They were a passionate breed who had deliberately avoided the taming influence of civilization and had done so with Female approval from the outset. That meant that even a Whitecrest-trained liaison like Tyal couldn’t perfectly control the slight signs of relief in his body language and scent.

Which meant that Genshi had briefed Brother Tyal on DEEP RELIC, and not Daar…who was suddenly very unhappy. Now he needed to play a Game and games like that weren’t very fun.

Tyal tilted his head and flicked his ears forward. “The future?”

It was even worse, because that was a telling question. Daar now knew without any doubt that Genshi had decided to run a collection program against him through his most trusted Brother and, knowing Genshi, had probably found it distressingly easy to convince Tyal to agree. Genshi probably had very good reasons to do what he was doing, good enough that Daar likely wouldn’t hold much of a grudge against either of them…But now Daar’s trust in Tyal was shattered and would need to be carefully re-considered and maybe rebuilt. Nor could that level of internal meddling be allowed to run unanswered. It clawed at the lines that had to exist between Clans.

Poor Brother Tyal, the next little while would suck for him.

Daar looked back at the monitors. Fiin and his small claw had moved on to a large-scale environment puzzle which required good teamwork and strong leadership, and without any prompting or conflict he had fallen quite naturally into that role. It was encouraging, and Daar made his decision.

“Yeah,” he grumbled. “Big changes are coming and we’ll need ‘Backs like him ready and able to lead.” He gestured at the monitor. “Spare nothing and make sure he’s the best he can possibly be, Tyal. Fiin is your number one priority for now. Feel free to tell that to Genshi too, when you two get together and talk about our Future. I’m pretty sure you know exactly what’s at stake.”

Tyal’s shocked expression and the sudden whiff of fear confirmed it. But Tyal was a Stoneback, a full and true Brother of the Rites, and Stonebacks never lied. He owned up to the secrecy without breaking his Oath and earned a small point in his favor. “Y…You are perceptive, my Champion. I will do as you say.”

“Good boy,” Daar growled with no small amount of derision. Tyal could not be allowed to mistake leniency for forgiveness. “You make sure you tell Genshi that he ain’t so close a Cousin o’ mine that I’ll let him put any of my ‘Backs in double jeopardy. He can deal with me directly.”

“…Yes, my Champion.” Tyal responded with an almost defiant flick of his ear. Dumb move. Daar rose to his full, impressive height and let the flash of his claws show his displeasure as he turned around. Tyal was shorter than the Champion and much smaller, and made the mistake of exaggerating the difference when he cringed into a submissive posture.

That couldn’t stand at all. Daar could respect defiance to a point, but not if Tyal was going to ‘pussy out’ at the first sign of disapproval. Before Tyal could react, Daar bull-rushed him into the wall with enough explosive force to drive the breath out of him. Daar had worked extra hard on his speed and reflexes after Highland had so thoroughly and easily humiliated him on the pirate ship, and Tyal had never stood much chance even before then. Now, it was depressingly easy to win and looked more and more like it always would be.

Which wasn’t a nice thought, because Daar realized right then and there he needed a better successor. Tyal was big, brave, and smart, even for a Stoneback, and Daar had invested much quiet effort into grooming him for leadership…but he clearly wasn’t a strong enough personality for the role and that couldn’t be allowed, nor could he be fundamentally trusted. That Genshi could so easily lead Tyal was absolutely unacceptable for a future Champion—

…And maybe Genshi knew that too, and had wanted Daar to see it. He really hated these games.

Oh well. He’d worry about that later. For now he twisted Tyal’s arms, dug his claws painfully into the trembling Warleader’s flesh, and snarled right from the bottom of his stomach. Tyal instantly pinned his ears flat in naked surrender.

Daar was in no mood to be nice; he needed to teach an underling a very painful lesson. With a quiet, almost inaudible growl, “I will not have my ‘Backs keeping secrets underneath my nose, Brother. This is my Clan to protect and it is mine to lead. We are not Genshi’s playthings, I am not his weapon, and you are not his hapless pawn. Do I make myself clear?”

To drive his point home, Daar used a trick he’d learned sparring with Firth to squeeze with a terrible, inescapable pressure which he ratcheted up and up until he felt something about to pop. Tyal remembered his courage and gamely resisted…until he realized he could not breathe. He fought for several seconds before he finally panicked and keened his surrender with the last of his breath. Daar held it a bit longer until Tyal began to go slack, then loosened just enough to let him draw a few pained, ragged gulps of air and get oxygen to his brain.

Understandably, he didn’t respond right away. So Daar shook him a bit to prompt him. “Well?”

Tyal positively reeked of fear but managed to hold himself together. “Y–yes sir!”

“Good,” Daar snarled and quickly stepped back, but before Tyal could recover, smashed the First Fang warleader to the ground with a powerful swipe of his paw. Those terrible claws opened a brutal-looking wound across Tyal’s chest and painted the wall with a slash of spilled blood.

To his credit, Tyal snapped out of his fear-trance and bore the pain with a single sharp whimper, one which he quickly silenced. Daar wasn’t completely without mercy—the least he could do for Tyal after such a humiliation was to give him a decent scar. To his further credit he understood the lesson, made eye contact and submitted with proper respect. Good. No further violence was necessary.

Time to move on. Daar licked his claws clean and looked down at Tyal with a stern and slightly disinterested expression. “Well? Get going. We’ll talk later.”

Brother Tyal, a decorated Warleader of First Fang, one of Stoneback’s most terrifying warriors—indeed, one of the most capable warriors in the galaxy, not counting his human peers—fled from the room with his tail between his legs and a paw pressed to the matted and bloody fur on his chest.

All by itself that failure of personality convinced Daar that Tyal could never be Champion. Sadly, that knowledge came at a high price for both of them. His confidence as a Brother and Warleader could well have been shattered and that would get ‘Backs killed…unacceptable. Nor could Daar afford to replace his Warleader at the moment. He would need to repair their relationship starting tomorrow: mend hurt feelings, rebuild confidence, demonstrate his esteem and somehow renew trust…all things he didn’t have time to do but absolutely could not afford to neglect. He sighed, glanced back at the monitors, and watched. Fiin was…

The galaxy was changing after all, and Daar had spent a long time drilling into his HEAT Brothers that they needed to work smarter rather than harder. They relied too much on their raw ability, just like Tyal. And where had that got him? When confronted with someone far beyond his power, Tyal had folded up with no options, no plan and no hope. The future of Stoneback demanded better than that: It demanded smarter.

Fiin—smaller than any of his fellows but still keeping pace with them even as he naturally fell into a leadership role—was practically the embodiment of that thought uncompromisingly in action. A mixed breed he may have been underneath that thick brown pelt, but his soul—and Daar knew what that word meant better than most Humans did—was pure Stoneback. Maybe, just maybe, Daar was looking at the future Champion.

He would need to Test him again to be certain.

Date Point: 12y11m2w AV
Demeter Way, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Kovač

Adam wasn’t even two weeks into his stepdown and he was almost impossible to handle. He’d taken a month “off” on official light duty to prepare for two months of traveling without Crude, HEAT training, or the accompanying mountain of calories, and despite not being on-base for most of the day he was managing to get on everyone’s nerves. He used that light training to remain somewhat active with the HEAT doing last-minute training and hand-off with Butler and obsessively planning everyone’s exercise training regime down to each day’s expected activities. He worried at and tweaked everything repeatedly until at last Rebar had to laughingly order him to “get your massive sit-muscle the fuck offa Sharman!”

Marty had taken leave too. She had just enough saved up to overlap with his mandatory vacation and she was looking forward to two solid months of alone time. Even dead exhausted from a day of training Adam was still a sufficiently energetic and enthusiastic lover to make her forget all about the stresses and headaches of her job, so with lots of rest and relaxation and plenty of practice…

It was the resting and relaxing that were proving to be the impossible parts for Adam. He had so much energy to burn that she simply couldn’t keep up with him anywhere: Not outdoors, not at home, not in the gym…even while watching TV he was bouncing off the walls.

Each day was another drop in his exercise regime and a sharp but not quite equal reduction of food intake, all carefully calculated and timed so he wouldn’t lose an ounce of his hard-earned mass nor any fraction of his strength. They’d even dared to whisper that maybe he could even build up some healthy fat for a change; the Lads in general and the Beef Trio in particular were impressively lean, possibly even too lean for their own good, and that lack of reserves could harm both endurance and recovery, and make them more susceptible to injury. For the purposes of fixing that potential problem, this vacation might be just what the doctor ordered.

There was a question mark hanging over whether his nerves would survive though. The cost he was paying for winding down was an overabundance of unburned energy, and the non-stop doing of his career had entirely robbed Adam of the ability to relax.

Perhaps the most peculiar consequence was that he had suddenly become physically quite vulnerable. He was used to pushing himself literally past his breaking point and had a pain tolerance that verged on the masochistic, but of course part of the wind-down had involved scaling back his doses of Crue-D. For the first time in years, Adam Arés was in danger of doing himself lasting physical harm.

He’d found a kind of succour in meticulously planning his exercise around not hurting himself for a change and so was now down to eating his meals “only” every ninety minutes and spending “only” around five hours a day in the gym. Well above the hardest-training athletes anywhere on Earth, but training had been Adam’s solid foundation for years. Now, he seemed to feel as though that foundation was dissolving into sand and blowing away.

He was not, in short, handling the transition well and it had resulted in a few small fights. Marty was understanding and patient but everybody had their limits.

“You’re trying to overplan everything again and we still don’t know what we’re gonna do!”

“We’ve only got two weeks left! We gotta get tickets, book hotels, I’ve gotta call ahead ‘cuz of the furniture, I need to arrange food delivery—”

“Still?”

He shrugged hugely. “I’m big and I’ve got a fast metabolism. I gotta eat to match.”

“Can’t we just go grocery shopping?”

He raised a big, bushy eyebrow. “What, every day?”

Marty had to admit he had a point and she wasn’t helping matters by getting frustrated with him. After all, she was frustrated for him.

“Okay…fine.” She turned the huge sigh she used to clear her head into a yawn and picked up the tablet with which they were browsing vacation options. “So what do we want to do?”

The yawn wasn’t entirely forced, either—It was getting late in the day and they were expecting Baseball to drop by and help with the planning, but as usual, Adam couldn’t wait.

Adam sighed and shrugged in a mildly defeated sort of way. “I dunno. Vegas?”

“Why?” She grinned slyly, “All you’d do is hit the gym, clean out the buffet, then drag me off to bed!”

Adam chuckled ruefully. “Well, the thought had crossed my mind…”

“And you wouldn’t really be taking a vacation, Hoss. You and I can do that here. Are doing that.”

“That’s what I said!”

“And only that, Adam!” Marty laughed, “There’s more to life than screwing me senseless!”

Adam grinned with that wonderfully smug and possessive grin of his. “I dunno, you weren’t complaining yesterday…all day…all evening…this morning…in fact, it’s getting late…”

He waggled his eyebrows more wildly at each pause, and Marty giggled as his pulled more and more ridiculous expressions. But she would not be distracted. “Down boy! I just said there’s more to life!”

“Aww,” he grinned sheepishly. “But I’m stinky and I need a shower. You could wash my back!”

Marty rolled her eyes. “You’re always stinky and you wouldn’t let me stop at just your back. But that’s my point, you’re so fixated and intense when you wanna do something, y’know? I’m not complaining but come on! You’ve got an opportunity that most people never get. Take advantage! And besides, Powell more or less had to order you to go have a life, remember?”

“Like he’s one to talk…” Adam rumbled, half-heartedly.

Marty felt an amused smile tug at her mouth there. He was right, Powell was definitely in ‘do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do’ territory there, but that didn’t make what he had said any less true. “Trust his judgement” she instructed, and returned her attention to the question of what they could actually do on vacation. “Uh…we could go hiking?”

“Eh, I looked into it.” Adam had barely sat down, but he was so frenzied for energy to spend that he shot to his feet and returned from the bedroom with a massive glossy trail guide almost before Marty finished noticing that he’d stood up.

He slammed himself heavily back onto the floor with a calamitous thud and an ominous rattle of the coffee table, folded himself into a cross-legged posture—a minor feat of “big man, little space” that never ceased to amaze her even though she knew how hard he worked at his flexibility—and opened the book to somewhere in the middle.

“I really wanted to hike the Appalachian trail!” He said, tapping that page with a brutishly thick finger and a confident grin that said he was in no doubt that he could easily finish it, then deflated slightly. “But, uh, it needs planning. Even if I were gonna just loaf about and do nothing I’m still gonna need, like, at least twenty thousand calories a day to maintain my strength. Same for ‘Base. Hiking for a month? I’d need a helluva lot more and I kinda wanna build up reserves for a change, too. I mean, we’ll see where I’m at the week before we go, but…”

“That’s a lot of food to hike with,” Martina observed. “A lot of weight, even for you.”

“Nah, it wouldn’t be too heavy, not for me, anyway. It’s the bulk that’d be the problem. I mean, we could arrange for somebody to meet us with supplies now and then but that—”

“—wouldn’t exactly be spontaneous,” Marty finished for him.

“You’re the one who wanted spontaneous,” he pointed out, clearly trying and almost succeeding at not being sullen. It was one of his most adorable emotes.

“Because you need it!”

“I know, I know. You’re right. I ain’t fighting you on it, am I?”

Marty scooted over to the edge of the couch and poured herself over it and into his lap, where she was immediately swallowed up in a full-body hug and snuggled like only he could.

“Maybe a little,” she said, running a finger over one of his pectoral muscles. His e-tattoo was set to Green Feet again, and she traced their path with her finger to show there were no hard feelings.

He nuzzled the top of her head. “…Sorry, Marty.”

She nuzzled right back against his absurdly over-muscled bullneck and enjoyed the texture of his beard. She’d never thought she’d enjoy stubble like his, which grew so thick and bristly it often scratched her skin. But like many things Adam there was something oddly and powerfully attractive about his over-the-top body and his happily playful personality. He was a hulking, deadly warrior…and deep down, a gentle and thoughtful man. It was…comforting.

She smiled against a particularly thick cord of his neck and kissed gently. “It’s okay. I’m sorry too.”

That was probably enough conversation for now, Marty decided. She wriggled into him and settled in for a nice long cuddle that lasted all of maybe three-quarters of a second before a huge fist pounded on the door like a medieval siege engine.

“Yo, ‘Horse! I brought mac and cheese!”

Adam chuckle-sighed and yelled back, “Dude! We’re trying to wind down, remember?”

Burgess let himself in without further prompting. “Man, fuck off! I know your over-muscled ass has room for some of this. ‘Sides, we both need to pack away some carbs!”

Adam snorted, “You just wanna get me all fat so you can beat me one day.”

“Bitch, please! That ain’t happening anytime soon and we both know it. You and Firth can battle it out for King Kong big dicklord or whatever the fuck you motherfuckers do when you’re alone.”

“Mostly we talk about how nice and tight your ass is,” retorted Adam. “And anyway, maybe if you weren’t such a pussy little wimp-ass shit you could catch up to this!”

Adam grinned smugly and flexed a bicep bigger than Marty’s head in his mostly bullshit hyper-macho way of friendly teasing. John grinned in response and flexed back impressively, then set the mac and cheese down in the kitchen. Marty caught a whiff of its aroma as it passed, and as always the word ‘angelic’ sprang to mind, except angels weren’t so tempting.

He returned and gently sat down with an obvious concern for the downstairs neighbors and pressed shoulder-to-shoulder against Adam. They palmed the back of each other’s heads and briefly touched their foreheads together by way of greeting. Sometimes, the Beef Bros were just adorable.

“I’m just gonna assume ‘Horse already planned the whole thing down to the china patterns.”

“Hey!”

“Surprisingly no.” Marty wiggled a bit more deeply into Adam and he bore down with his usual near-crushing affection. “So far we know where we’re not going. Does that count?”

John tilted his head. “What about Vegas?”

“God, you too?” She let out a fond but exasperated laugh, “No! Fuck no!”

‘Base shrugged, undeterred. “Disney World?”

“Neither of you two can fit on the coasters or anything, you’re too big and way too heavy.”

“What about the water rides?”

“Nope, not even those. We asked. We even gave them a video of Adam on the pallet scale.”

“Man!” Base laughed his baritone, full-throated bellow. “I bet that raised some eyebrows!”

“They were really nice, too!” Adam cleared his throat. “But yeah. They couldn’t help.”

‘Base reflected on that. “This whole ‘biggest ever’ thing kinda sucks sometimes, huh?”

All three nodded in agreement.

“Firth’s got it the worst,” said Adam. “He’s so fuckin’ tall and he’s even bigger than you now. I mean, I wouldn’t mind being taller, but…”

‘Base quirked an eyebrow. “Not so damn tall your eyeline’s above the top of a door frame?”

“Heh, yeah. Is that why he ain’t traveling with us? I bet Freya would love the beach!”

“He’s got a campin’ trip planned with Daar, he said.” ‘Base gave a sly litle grin, “Also, I kinda bet he doesn’t wanna shave all that wookie-fur off, either. And he’s white!”

Marty couldn’t let that slide. “Uh, hello?” She waved her hand, “Whitest person in SOR? I’m still going, what’s his excuse?”

“We just went over that,” rumbled ‘Horse happily. “‘Sides, the three of us together’d be a logistical problem, y’know?”

“Well, it’s not all bad, though.” Marty wriggled yet deeper into the depths of Adam’s snuggle-hug.

Adam laughed gently before stiffening as a thought hit him. “Okay! What about a road trip?”

“We don’t have a car, bro. The two of us are so damn heavy we’d straight break a rental. And anyway,” ‘Base gave Adam a sly look, “You gonna tell me your hyperactive midget ass is gonna sit still in some souped-up supertruck for eight hours a day?”

Adam didn’t take the bait. “But we could stop at all the little roadside things, though!”

“Bro, have you ever seen the middle of the US? I mean, what’s a big black motherfucker like me gonna look like at, I dunno, the world’s biggest catfish?”

“You’d see white people,” Marty snarked. “In their natural habitat!”

“Pff, we’ll be fine!” Adam grinned. “Ghetto Fabulous and The Mighty Mexican’ll teach ‘em good!” He put his fists on his hips and posed like a cartoon superhero.

“Damn straight!” ‘Base laughed, “With Albino Mistress backin’ us up!”

“Kids, you’re both big and pretty, okay?” Marty tried to get the discussion going again before the two spiraled back into banter. “Anyway. Back on-topic, I guess hiking is out.”

“The long trails are out, not enough time to prepare. One day…” Adam trailed off wistfully.

“Bummer. Um…so. Theme parks are out. Road trip is out. I mean, what can we do?”

John scratched at his stubble thoughtfully. “Tour a city? Watch baseball games?”

Adam snorted. “Heh, ‘Base wants to watch baseball games. I’m shocked.”

“Fuck you, bro. We could watch other sports…”

“That’s like a three-day weekend, though. It’s not a whole month.”

“Well, why we gotta do the same thing for the whole month?”

“Travel,” intoned Adam. “More planning. And it’s two months, remember?”

“Ah. Okay, so…visit a few cities? Spend a week in each?”

Marty had to admit that the idea had potential, but… “Eh, I bet you two would go stir-crazy really quick. I still think something outdoors sounds the most fun.”

“Outdoor adventures? Okay, where?”

Marty pondered that. “Well, where haven’t you really been? Africa doesn’t count, all you did was jump up and down on some biodrones.”

“Hey! I only landed on the one. The rest of ‘em I serviced all quick and painless.”

“…You did all that damage to your outersuit on just one?”

Both Adam and John paused, looked at each other warily, and Marty kicked herself internally. They’d all crossed a line without realizing it, and she wasn’t sure what to do next or how to step back. There were some things that the Lads—all of them—kept among themselves, and nobody else got into that circle. Not even the technicians who cleaned the suits, repaired the damage and pulled the helmet cam footage. Not even Technical Sergeant Kovač, who oversaw those technicians and thus knew everything.

Maybe it was the fact that they knew just how familiar she was with what they did that had led to the slip: Just for a second Adam had spoken as though she was a Battle Brother even though she wasn’t, and that was a dangerous thing to forget.

Adam hastily changed the subject by counting out places on his huge fingers. “Okay, so… we ain’t been to the good bits of Africa, South America, Australia, most of Asia, the Bahamas—”

Marty was so relieved to have navigated the uncomfortable moment that when he mentioned the Bahamas, she forgot herself entirely and made a loud delighted sound before she could catch herself. Both men chuckled and rolled their eyes.

“Órale, Marty. You’re such a stereotype sometimes!”

“But the beach! All that sun, and palm trees, and I’ll get to wear a…” Her enthusiasm deflated suddenly as her imagination ran on ahead of her mouth and turned up a stumbling block.

Adam didn’t miss it. “What? Are you okay?”

Base, God bless him, spontaneously developed a sense of tact and rose to go heat up the mac and cheese. “I’ll just…start this, and go for a quick walk.”

Adam, as always, was a bit slower on the uptake. “Uh…?”

She patted his arm to plead for patience as ‘Base headed out, and snuggled into him as the door closed. “Yeah. I just had this mental image of me in a bikini. I haven’t worn one since I got the scar and… Adam!”

He had the most direct and wonderful way of getting his point across sometimes. He unwound himself from Marty, wrapped his mitts around her hips and gently lifted and half-turned her enough so that he could bend over, snuffle under her shirt, and plant a fond kiss right at the small of her back where her burn was most prominent. She wriggled in a futile effort to escape.

“You are beautiful, Marty. Every part of you. Especially this.” He walked the kisses up her back. “Other girls would mope about this, but you didn’t. You got better. You’re STRONG.”

“Yeah, but I’m gonna have to wear a one-piece instead and it’s just not the same—”

“Why?”

He sounded so genuinely confused that it actually made her stop and think about what she was saying. “Wh—? I mean…”

“Dude. You got that saving somebody’s life. Ain’t nobody got a story that good. Why hide it? I think it’s beautiful.”

“…You’re thinking like a guy,” she grumbled half-heartedly, though she was glowing on the inside.

As was surprisingly often the case his density served him well. He reacted the wrong way at just the right moment. “Uh…yeah. What else would I do?”

She laughed on the edge of happy tears. “Ugh, you are the only guy in the world who gets to make me feel stupid, you know that?”

Of course, he didn’t know what to say to something like that. He never did. But he knew what to *do*—He wrapped her up just that little bit tighter, held her that little bit closer, and grumbled something indistinct that might have been an apology or might have been reassurance.

John’s sense of timing was its usual impeccable standard, though Marty had no idea if that was deliberate or pure repeated dumb luck on his part. They’d just got comfortable again when he returned with an enormous iron skillet of cornbread. “I forgot I made this, too!”

He brought that to the kitchen and turned it out onto the cutting board, then returned to the living room when Adam and Marty had recovered their dignity.

“So…where are we going?”

Adam looked at Kovač, who nodded. “Definitely the Bahamas.”

Baseball shrugged by way of agreement, prepared some food for everyone, and together the three planned their upcoming vacation over mac and cheese, Adam’s perfectly balanced, nutritionally complete, and frankly incredible gumbo, along with ‘Base’s far less considered but sinfully delicious pan of cornbread. They’d decided to split the difference and spend a week in L.A. while ‘Base visited family. ‘Horse and Marty would hike the surprisingly good city trails and explore, maybe take a trip down to visit the ruins of San Diego, then all three would head to the Bahamas. After that, they’d just, well…make it up as they went. Both had a big savings account and both needed to get out more.

Beach and sand, sun and heat, good food, easy exploring…and maybe, just maybe, Marty could convince the two to mellow out. Well, assuming ‘Base could find a willing date on short notice. She didn’t think he’d have too much trouble.

The evening wrapped up with a solid plan, full bellies, and three happy friends. Marty got a start on reservations and other details while the Beef Bros went downstairs to Beef and Bro with each other for several hours.

She used the time well: chatted with the friendly downstairs neighbors, tidied up, did the dishes, started the laundry, changed the sheets and aired the apartment out before settling in to indulge her secret weakness for awful badly-written supernatural “romance” novels.

Adam returned around about sunset, glowing, thoroughly exercised and still dripping from the gym shower. He’d come thumping up the stairs gross with sweat way too often ready to smother her in moist hugs, and Marty had been forced to make a demand there. It hadn’t been an unreasonable one, she thought. After all, what was the point in having a shower downstairs if it was never used?

“…Adam, you’re soaking wet!”

“What? I showered!”

Marty was suddenly very grateful of that shower rule when she saw the grin on his face and realized that no matter how hard he might have exercised down there, no way had he worked off all his energy.

She sighed, put her tablet down and stood up. “I put the laundry through. Should be a couple dry towels if you want to—”

Apparently he didn’t. There was a rush of warm, wet skin and she found herself pressed firmly against the wall with his lips against hers, his hand lifting her up to eye level by her ass and mauling it possessively, and her heart suddenly beating a hundred and eighty.

He broke contact. “Maybe later.” He rumbled happily while he brushed the back of his finger delicately along her eyebrow, cleaning a stray strand of hair out of the way. “I’m still hungry.” He preempted any protest with another deep, passionate kiss.

By some miracle one of her hands was free enough to splay her fingers across his bulging chest—the other was trapped behind her.

“Goddamn you’re beautiful,” he growled quietly, moving his kiss to the left, just below her ear. Quietly with a crushing squeeze, “Wanna play?”

She must have gasped or something, made some kind of signal because he casually threw her over his shoulder like she was the lightest thing in the world. She was still light-headed from that display of effortless ownership when his muscles bunched under her and she found herself landing backwards on the mattress, which was up to its usual gold standard of comfortable stability. Adam was already kicking his shorts off by the time she got her bearings and the big goof had his trademark lop-sided grin, ready and eager to please.

Not eager enough though—Marty wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d forgotten all pretense, and she knew all his buttons and how to press them. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her own shorts and they were gone with a wiggle of her hips and unflinching eye contact, which always got him that little bit more fired up.

That was just the start though: He snatched her T-shirt out of the air when she threw it at him, but she got the throw right and he got the cloth full in the face, and she saw him smell her in the fabric. That goofy puppy grin changed and he blinked at her as she ran her right toe up her left calf.

Perfect. She just needed to goad him with a few choice words. “Well? Did you forget what you’re supposed to do? Get your ass on this bed!”

She couldn’t tell where the bed’s creak ended and his laugh began as he knelt on it, crawled his way slowly up her body, took her wrists and pinned them lightly but inescapably above her head. She couldn’t get away and that was how she liked it, but she played at trying to escape anyway. His tongue in her mouth quickly put an end to that game though and God, the way he could control her with just one hand–!

Then his tongue was gone but his lips brushed her ear instead and his snarl went right through her like the premonition of an orgasm and she was still shivering from it as he sampled her throat, her collarbone, her breast…

All with that incredible weight of him grinding slowly and powerfully against her pelvis, reminding her just how much strength she was being ruled by right now…and how safe she was. When he teased her nipple with his teeth she moaned, loud, and it was way too early for that yet…wasn’t it?

Then he brought his other hand into play, brushing it lovingly down her cheek. Tender, gentle…not what she wanted. She somehow worked her hand loose, took his wrist and guided his massive mitt onto her throat instead.

The last coherent thing she could remember until she woke up late the next morning was the way he got the message, flipped her over, and took hold of her hair.

Everything after that point was exactly what she wanted.

Date Point: 12y11m3w AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

General Martin Tremblay

“So it works. As planned, as advertised, whatever you want to call it, the Coltainer system is a success?”

Tremblay had been persuaded against his own doubts when it came to the Von Neumann colonization technology. It was very much his swansong project at this point: The political gears were already grinding feverishly around him, milling through all the possible candidates who might take over as Earth’s second Supreme Allied Commander of Extrasolar Defence.

It was a big name for a big role. Tremblay was proud to have filled it for several years…but there just wasn’t room at the top for a man who was now firmly into his sixties to linger there forever. A smooth transition of leadership was needed, and soon.

He didn’t like it. Patrick Knight didn’t like it either. But the Mission demanded it, so that was that.

“Hell yes, it’s a success.”

Ted Bartlett’s career was one of those turning gears. The crown and maple leaf on his shoulder boards suited him, but Tremblay knew damn well that they felt pretty heavy those first few days after receiving them. Making General Officer was a big step, one that was going to rob Bartlett of the luxury of irreverence that he’d been enjoying for years now.

“And it’ll find new planets.”

“The Misfit exploration team provided the missing link. We got so hyperfocused on building the whole damn probe out of our own technology that we forgot the possibility that the ET archives might contain astrosurvey data we could use.” Bartlett gave him an embarrassed half-smile. “Dumb, in retrospect.”

“The ground survey, the construction…?”

“All solid. We stress-tested the crap out of it on New Enewetak. That thing could build a decent beachhead on the shores of Hell. We’ll keep iterating of course, but right now it looks like the only obstacle is figuring out who gets first dibs.”

Tremblay snorted. “Yeah. Glad I don’t have to handle that negotiation, eh?”

Bartlett laughed, and closed the Coltainer file. “So that’s the latest from Erebor,” he said. “Nadeau says we’re ready to reassign most of the project’s staff. Any preference?”

“First and foremost,” Tremblay said, “I want to retrieve one of those Abrogators from…what did they call it? Akyawentuo. If we can identify and penetrate the Hierarchy lab on that planet, so much the better.”

“We have to be prepared for that thing to have the same kind of demolition contingency as San Diego…” Bartlett pointed out.

“And there’s our project. I want you to figure out how we can stop that from happening again.”

“Long-range ERB suppression? …I don’t see why that shouldn’t be, uh, plausible…” Bartlett mused. “Heck, and the tactical possibilities—”

“Make sure it’s possible, run up a proposal and I’ll rubber-stamp the damn thing no questions asked,” Tremblay promised him. “Because I’ll feel a lot happier about sending good men to hit Hierarchy operations when I know it won’t be a suicide mission.”

Bartlett nodded emphatically. “Yeah. I’ll make that priority one for Erebor.”

“Good,” Tremblay nodded, and sat back with a pleased feeling in his belly. “Meanwhile, I’ll let the GRA know about the Coltainers.” He unlocked his desktop and began drafting a letter.

“It’s about time we got our eggs into some more baskets…”

Date Point: 12y11m3w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

There was a fine balance to be walked with the media. Previous presidents had been criticized for relying too heavily on the major news stations as a source of information, others had been criticized for ignoring them. Sartori watched them to know what their owners wanted the public to think.

“Breaking news this afternoon, is interstellar colonization about to become an international reality? Allied Extrasolar Command notify the GRA of a new technology that quote: ‘will open up unlimited frontiers,’ but China shoots back saying that the West is showing ‘flagrant disregard’ for interspecies law…”

Which was true, of course. Though Sartori would tie a barbed wire noose around his nuts before admitting it out loud, even in a quiet room all by himself.

Interspecies law, frankly, could go fuck itself. His scientific and military advisors were both saying the exact same thing: So long as Humanity was present on only two planets, it was vulnerable. Getting those eggs spread out into as many baskets as possible wasn’t just a sensible long-term precaution, it was an imminent strategic necessity.

Besides, what were the Dominion going to do about it? Their uneasy cease-fire with the Alliance was holding thanks both to the SOR dropping a Celzi general’s head on somebody’s desk—literally—and thanks to the GRA’s hints that after Ambassador Hussein’s death they were running severely short on patience for the Dominion’s bullshit.

The language had been more diplomatic than that, but that was the thrust of it. Sartori foresaw no meaningful objections from the Interspecies Dominion.

There had been casualties, of course. Several medical companies had sunk large investments into the potential offered by human augmentation, only to run into an impenetrable lack of interest from governments and a burgeoning wall of public suspicion. Several of the more incautiously optimistic ones had done a financial bug-on-a-windshield act.

Which was tough shit, as far as he was concerned. Sartori believed in the free market, and if a bunch of big-spending dreamers with more ambition than Elon Musk hadn’t been cautious enough, that was their problem. America’s economy might have been grinding and groaning under a large and growing war debt, but that was all the more reason not to bail out the failed gamblers.

He allowed himself a bourbon every night. Recently, it had been getting bigger, so thank God the Coltainer program had paid off. By the time the election cycle rolled around in one year, hopefully there would be a colony planet for every G20 nation…And every single one of them was going to need American high-tech industry.

He drained his bourbon and then broke his own rule and allowed himself a celebratory second.

After all…for the first time since he’d taken the oath of office, the future was beginning to look bright.

Date Point: 13y2d AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Vakno

“Triple reinforced, and there seems to be some kind of field-based reinforcement at work just below the surface that grossly enhances the tensile strength, shear strength and melting point. No wonder the drones could not cut through.”

“And the encryption?”

“Even at their pinnacle, the OmoAru never quite discovered some of the options we have. I should be able to crack it…with time.”

Vakno nodded and gave up on the attempt to physically penetrate the security door. If indeed a door it was, though she could think of no other reason why the hospital corridor might unceremoniously terminate in a featureless plug of what was probably Titanium that bore no resemblance to any of the walls around it.

Exploring UmOraEw-Uatun had not been a quick or easy process. While the OmoAru population had dwindled and lost interest in preserving even their basic necessities, nature had not become so lackadaisical. If their society had not been so technologically advanced, and their automated civil systems so reliable, it was doubtful if anywhere would have had power any longer.

As it was, tracing those branches of the municipal power supply had often been an exercise in clambering over collapsed buildings and exchanging meaningless pleasantries with the occasional dopey survivor who was still half-heartedly scratching out some kind of a living among the rubble.

The biggest power draw had turned out to be a faulty circuit. The second and third had both been going to the water management infrastructure.

The fourth, however, had turned out to be the hospital. They had found surgical suites on the upper floors still intact and presumably operational, ready to perform basic augmentation surgery the second any OmoAru patient was delivered to its waiting pre-assessment bay.

There were no patients. No doctors, no administrative staff, no medical technicians, nurses, computer systems operators, not one stray custodian. They had wasted a week trawling through the patient records trying to determine the date of the most recent operation, but it seemed that at some point the staff had just given up on taking notes.

Eventually, a diagnostic on the surgical robots offered the tentative guess that they had last performed surgery more than seven Aru years previously.

Vakno had been on the brink of giving up when Bedu’s drones had finally managed to excavate past a collapsed ceiling and found the ‘door.’

She ran her scanner over the surrounding structure instead, looking for some exploitable weakness. Perhaps the ’door’ would prove to be stronger than the building around it and could simply be bypassed, but the scanner returned only nonsense. Something beyond it was doing an admirable job of scrambling any kind of penetrating scan.

“…This is a hospital, yes?” she checked, testing the limits of what passed for her sense of humor.

“The surgical suites and patient wards on the upper levels suggested as much,” Bedu replied in a tone that wasn’t so much dry as parched.

“I’m quite sure my bunker on Perfection was not as secure as this,” Vakno told him, ignoring the sarcasm.

“…Didn’t your bunker have gauss cannons?”

“Indeed. Perhaps you should be cautious with that encryption.”

“Always…There.”

“There wh-?” Vakno began. She almost fell over when the door lit up, swept some kind of a scanner field over the both of them and then…opened.

“Opened” was not an adequate word to describe the actual process, which put Vakno much more in mind of a whirlpool or a pot of boiling water. The apparently solid and impenetrable surface of the door flowed like dry sand, parted, split, slid. The door didn’t so much open as reconfigure itself to temporarily permit ingress.

Corti were all but completely anosmic, but Vakno was still immediately struck by an odd chemical note on the air that gusted over them as the pressure equalized. She blinked to settle her disgust.

“What is that smell?”

Bedu stood up and padded through the hole in the ’door’ with no sign of trepidation. “Corpse.”

There was a flight of steps beyond the stairs that led down to a circular atrium. Three hallways radiated off into a series of open lab spaces, and as Vakno followed Bedu down one of those hallways he turned out to completely right.

The first corpse was lying supine right out in the open, though ’corpse’ was almost not the right word. Vakno lit a light-ball drone and followed him with the little glowing thing hovering behind her shoulder, and almost immediately its light played over the grotesquely stretched flesh of not just the one but dozens of emaciated, mummified OmoAru.

Most were just…at their desks. Slumped over as if the had worked themselves exhausted and taken a nap where they were working. Some even had their arms folded under their heads, implying they had done exactly that.

Others were sitting against walls or in corners. The bright mottled tones of OmoAru skin had gone bruised and dark in the decades since their deaths, fading from sandy yellows and reds to leathery browns and blacks. Flat, wide teeth gleamed in the shadows.

Vakno had heard of the heebie-jeebies, but never imagined she might experience the sensation for herself. She played her scanner across the tableau in the vain hope that doing so might help her retain her composure.

“…Causes of death appear to be dehydration and starvation,” she noted. “And…intriguing. Not a one of them has any neural implantation.”

Bedu was studying one of the mummies with the kind of apparent dispassionate analysis of which the Directorate thoroughly approved. “This one is showing signs that….he? Yes, he, did have implants, but they were removed…A last holdout?”

“Against what? This is research equipment.”

Vakno examined what her scanner was telling her. “I don’t understand. This was a civilian hospital. There’s evidence upstairs that the surgical suites were still in use as little as five Dominion years ago. But these people have been dead for ten times that long at least.”

“There was still a functioning city out there, then. They starved to death when there was still food in the shops.” Bedu stood up and stretched. “Their civilization had declined sharply, but they were still taking care of basic logistics.”

“Were they suffering from the apathy too? Did they just not see the need to go outside and find food?”

“Or were they trapped?” Bedu asked. The sound of his bare feet on the old concrete echoed eerily as he wandered off into the dark, playing his scanner over the surroundings.

Vakno allowed herself to shiver as soon as he was out of sight, and set to the task of trying to access one of the work terminals to see if she could restore power and maybe glean what the deceased OmoAru had been trying to achieve on their silent consoles.

She almost collapsed from fright when, a few minute later, his voice rang through the quiet labs. “Here!”

“…Here?”

“A test subject. Head full of implan—”

His sentence was cut off by the sudden slam of the lights coming up and a mechanical roar as the ventilation system hauled itself torturously back to life. Vakno found herself standing in a blizzard of light as long-dormant volumetric displays reignited in blue and orange. A few flickered and burned out but the general effect was to bathe the dark laboratories in unnatural, deep light.

“…Was that you?” Bedu asked, after a moment.

“No.” Vakno resisted the foolish impulse to echo the question at him. He wouldn’t have asked if he was responsible.

“An automated system?”

“…I don’t know.”

Vakno turned and swept her scanner around the lab complex, looking for an explanation. There didn’t seem to be one.

Bedu returned from the side room he’d explored, with his pulse pistol drawn. The weapon looked absurdly large in Corti hands, built to be used by a Kwmbwrw with their thick, stubby fingers. Seeing him lift it with visible effort was hardly reassuring for the moment.

The howl of the fans faded to a mere hum, underpinned by assorted sound alerts as the computers finished booting and given a rhythm by a steady solid tapping noise from the direction of the bunker door, coming down the stairs.

“…One of the locals?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe we should—” Vakno began.

A shadow stepped into view out in the atrium and paused, apparently trying to decide which of the hallways it should investigate. Even in the dark, the newcomer’s silhouette was impossible to mistake: a Human. Nothing else looked so big while being so relatively small.

“—hide,” Vakno couldn’t stop herself from finishing. ”Shit.”

The deathworlder’s head snapped round, tracking the noise, and he strode confidently towards them. Bedu and Vakno backed away, acutely aware that running would be entirely futile.

They glanced at each other, made a snap decision, and Bedu raised his pistol and fired. A lethal pulse of kinetic energy rippled out from the muzzle and lashed across the room with enough force to crush most species in the galaxy.

The human stopped mid-stride and put a hand to his face. ”Ow! …The fuck you do that for, Brother?”

Bedu lowered the gun, opening his mouth as though to speak and clearly failing for words.

“…Okay. Okay, dumb question. This place is the fuckin’ creepiest….” the human conceded, and stepped forward into the light. “Thought you little grey bastards were supposed to be chiller’n that, though.”

“I’m…sorry,” Vakno managed. “You managed to scare us.”

“No harm, no foul,” the human offered breezily. “That weak-ass raygun don’t do shit to a grown man anyway. Name’s Dog. Dog Wagner. Captain of HLLCS My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon.”

“You followed us,” Bedu challenged. “Why?”

Dog shook his head. “Brother, I didn’t follow you. I came here after some other fella. Dude called Zane. He ain’t with you?”

“Zane? I know him. We did business, before the Hunter attack on Perfection,” Vakno replied. “He is not with us.”

“That’s his ship parked on the roof…”

“Indeed it is.”

Wagner flinched, Vakno jumped and Bedu twisted around to aim his pulse pistol blindly into the shadows. The new voice had apparently come from everywhere at once, with no apparent single origin.

It was Zane’s voice. Vakno could hear it instantly. She had never met anybody else who spoke so deep in the bass that their voice actually crackled with it. But the words were no match at all.

“…Okay, brother. Nice an’ chill, hear?” Dog offered. “I din’t come here lookin’ for trouble. Some folks in Cimbrean just wanna have a word with you about some Cruezzir that managed to make it through customs.”

“Intriguing. The human customs screen isn’t impenetrable then…”

The three of them paused. “Oh, that ain’t a good sign…” Wagner muttered. His hand flashed inside his baggy green jacket and came out with a square black human-made weapon both smaller and much deadlier than the one in Bedu’s hands.

He lived on pure luck. There was a flash and an echoing explosive sound from the darkness and Wagner flung himself to the floor cursing while a console behind him caught fire and shut down. There was a snarl in the shadows and another shot which whined as it skipped off the concrete next to him as he rolled desperately into cover.

Bedu had the presence of mind to drag Vakno behind something solid.

Dog let out a slightly hysterical laugh that was probably fuelled by adrenaline and bravado rather than actual amusement. “Damn, brother. You lined up that shot for how long and you still missed?”

There was no reply. Wagner shifted warily, scooted along behind his cover then glanced upwards as he got up into a crouch.

“…There any way to turn off these fuckin’ lights?” he hissed.

Vakno shook her head. “Not from here.”

“Fuck….shitdammit I swore I’d never use one’a these fuckin’ things…” He fished in a pocket and pulled out a dispenser tube of nervejam grenades.

“Okay,” he murmured, popping one of the coin-sized weapons out and fingering it nervously. “When I throw this thing, you two haul ass for the exit. Got it?”

“What about you?” Vakno asked.

“I’ll be haulin’ ass too. Now ain’t the time for thrillin’ heroics.”

He pressed the button, counted two red lights, then tucked his thumb under the grenade and launched it across the room with a sharp ping! There was the sound of desperate movement, but Vakno was in no mood to argue with a human when it came to matters of violence. She got up and ran, exerting her body in ways it had never been exerted before. Somehow, she was halfway to the stairs before the grenade went off and bathed the labs in momentary white light.

Dog cursed and fired a series of sharp shots behind her as she scrambled up the steps. There was another ping and another flash of light, and more cursing but she didn’t pay attention.

She would have fled in a stupid panic by herself. Humans, fortunately, seemed to have a better instinct in this situation. Dog’s cursing translated into a coherent question that carried the weight of an order as he backed through the bunker ’door.’ “Can you close this damn thing?”

Bedu seemed to regain his wits. “Yes! Yes I can—” he pounced for his tablet, picked it up—

Blue blood and gray flesh sprayed everywhere as his head burst. More bullets sparked and punched off the door as their unseen attacker fired up from below.

“Fuck!” Dog recoiled sideways and fired blindly around the corner, causing a brief pause in the shooting.

Vakno saw only one chance to live, and took it. She dove for Bedu’s datapad and ran the decryption algorithm he’d used to open the bunker while Dog threw a third grenade down the stairs.

The metal flowed and distorted itself back into the configuration of a solid block, and Dog staggered backwards away from it. Something dropped out of his gun and clattered on the tiles, but he pulled a replacement from inside his jacket and his shaking hands managed to ram it home on the second attempt.

Bedu was dead. Living people had more skull, and more brain inside that skull.

Dog was breathing heavily and muttering to himself. “Motherfucker those grenades hurt…What the actual fuckin’ fuck was that all about?”

“I don’t know. But we….should leave. In case he can open the door,” Vakno managed. There was safety in the simple facts.

“If he can’t?”

“Then he’ll die of thirst in there.”

Dog’s breathing slowed. He glanced at Bedu’s crumpled remains, then spat on the floor in front of the giant, gnomic slab of metal. “Good fuckin’ riddance, then. Get us outta here, sister.”

“…This way.”

Date Point: 13y2d AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

Xiù didn’t quite know what to make of Daniel Hurt. He seemed like the kind of guy who had a hard time keeping his opinions to himself, much like Kevin Jenkins but with an intellectual sheen that was very different from Kevin’s raw and often unfocused passion.

She wasn’t sure she liked him much. Like a lot of the people working for Byron he was more concerned with facts and hard truths than with what people thought of those facts and hard truths, or what they might mean for people. And he seemed to have a knack for dragging people into the kind of conversations he wanted to have, which sounded a heck of a lot like arguments.

Kevin seemed to find him invigorating.

“Well, sure, of course men and women have different brains and different psychology,” he was saying. “I mean, uh, that’s like saying we have different genitals, it’s obvious. What I’m sayin’ is there’s no good reason why, uh, why children’s clothing should be tighter and covered in pink ponies for girls, and baggier and covered in superheroes for boys when they’re aimed at the same age group. It’s like, I think of myself as a masculine kinda dude but what the fuck is masculinity when you get down to it? ‘Cuz I can’t think of a single thing I’d teach to a boy that it wouldn’t be good idea to teach it to a girl, too.”

“That’s one I wrestle with too,” Hurt agreed. He spoke slower than Kevin, used his hands less, and he had the disarming ability to actually listen to what somebody else was saying and to really think about it before he replied.

“…Put it this way,” he decided. “I agree in principle that there’s no one single characteristic that belongs exclusively to one sex but not the other. But by the same token, it’s clear that we expect certain characteristics more strongly in men and women based solely on their presumed gender roles. And you said yourself, you think of yourself as masculine, and…Miss Chang, do you think of yourself as feminine?”

Xiù blinked, feeling suddenly put on the spot, and obeyed the first instinctive reply that came into her head: She duck-nodded like a Gaoian.

If Hurt noticed, he diplomatically ignored it. “See? So we have at least three people in this room who agree that masculine and feminine are real enough to feel and identify with. And it says a few things about the two of you and the virtues you aspire to, and the role you want to fill for your Tribe.”

“That’s true of a lotta shit, though,” Kevin pointed out. “Just feelin’ that something’s real and meaningful don’t make it so.” He gestured to the tattoo on his forearm to illustrate the point.

“No, of course not,” Hurt agreed. “But it points to something going on in our heads, something that’s probably valuable and necessary to the survival and success of a social species. Did you ever read your old friend Kirk’s memoirs?”

“Shyeah. All that ’tortured genius’ stuff?”

“Exactly. Now, we actually have a word for the concept he was wrestling with, and the Domain language doesn’t have an equivalent: Apophenia. It means the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data-”

“Which is where gods and spirits and stuff come from, yeah,” Kevin nodded. “And that’s a useful thing for surviving on a deathworld, ‘cuz you wanna detect patterns early. I see what you’re saying.”

“Do you?” Hurt asked.

“Yeah. You’re sayin’ that a strong sense of gender and of manly traits and feminine traits is good for human survival, right?”

Hurt visibly replayed that sentence in his head before replying. “Has so far been good for human survival,” he clarified, “sure. As evidenced by the fact that we’re here, we’re successful, we’re the apex species of what I’m told might actually be the toughest cradle world in the galaxy. So if somebody’s going to claim that trying to indoctrinate our brains out of thinking that way is a good thing for our species then they need to bring a good argument to the table, agreed?”

“Burden of proof,” Kevin nodded.

“Right. And so far, what we’ve been given is…inadequate. Now, when it comes to the question of things like children’s clothing, the question I’d ask is-” Hurt was interrupted when the door opened and Moses Byron entered the room, escorted by Doctor Ericson, Doctor Brown, and other seniors of the Byron Group Exploration Program. “…Guess we’ll finish this later,” he suggested.

“Look forward to it,” Kevin said, and stood up to shake Byron’s hand.

Xiù glanced to her left, where Allison offered her a wry roll of the eyes and Julian came back from whatever meditative place he’d drifted off to in his head.

Byron settled into his seat and beamed at everyone. The company was boasting record profits on the back of a new wave of contracts for forcefield generators, and his own personal wealth was creeping towards surpassing its all-time high. He apparently tended to get generous when things were going well, so everybody at the table was expecting something big from him.

“So, big news. I’ve told Ericson and Brown to start building BGEV Twelve,” he said. “Partly that’s because we need more ships out scouting, partly that’s because Misfit is now working on a government contract.”

Kevin smirked at that one.

“So…we have government backing to return to Akyawentuo?” Julian asked.

“Ohhh yes. Not just the White House, but NATO, AEC, the GRA…” Byron’s smug grin was identical to Kevin’s. “Heck of a thing.”

“What’s the catch?” Allison asked, causing him to snort.

“This is a gift horse, Miss Buehler. As someone once said to me, don’t try your hand at equine dentistry.”

“There’s always a catch, Mister Byron.”

Moses gave Allison the calculating look he gave people who didn’t automatically and immediately defer to him. “…Take your pick,” he said eventually. “You work to the job, not the clock. That means you might be out there on that planet for years. You’ll be working under military supervision, and you’ll be under the microscope. You’d better be ready for every last little thing you do and say to need signing off in triplicate.”

“Doesn’t sound that different to what we were doing already,” Allison nodded and sat back.

“Most of the catches fall on us, anyway,” Kevin said. “AEC want all of those giant death robots you found for study, as well as any other alien technology. Group ain’t gonna see a cent for those discoveries.”

“Which means we’re basically doin’ this pro bono.” Moses pointed out.

“Okay. Really. What’s the catch?” Allison demanded. “I know your reputation’s important to you Mister Byron, but-”

“Trade,” Byron said, simply. “It might be that I won’t live to see it, but the Group is going to outlive me, and sooner or later the…Akyawentans?”

“The People,” Xiù said. “It’s…tough to use their word.”

“Every species call themselves ’The People’,” Hurt opined. “What’s their way of saying it?”

“Um…Ten’gewek,” Xiù told him. “But that includes their version of the word the baked in, so-”

“Sooner or later the Tengewek, then,” Moses interrupted, making Xiù wince, “are gonna want to trade. From what Dan here tells me, ain’t no way they can’t get up to our level pretty quick from this point.”

Dan nodded. “Now that they know what’s possible, they’ll work toward it. The hard part will be encouraging them to explore other possibilities as well. If they become fixated on steel then other metals and alloys might pass them by. But the really hard part will be encouraging them to pursue their own social and political theories rather than just mimicking ours.”

“But trade is a universal,” Byron expanded. “Economics are the same for everyone. They’ll have things we want, we’ll have things they want. It won’t be exploitation—” he raised a hand to cut off the concern Julian was about to voice. “We’re honest dealers, we’ll treat ‘em with integrity and fairness. I promise.”

Xiù glanced to her lovers and saw her own skepticism mirrored in their eyes, but she also saw the same resignation there.

She nodded, and turned to Daniel Hurt. “Social and political theories?”

Hurt nodded. “It’s gonna be tricky, and it’ll involve a lot of asking them what they think and not arguing with them. We’re not even talking about the Socratic method here, I mean their conclusions need to be theirs.”

“There’s a lot we don’t understand,” Julian said. “I still…their ideas about magic and what it is and what it does, we really need to record that in their words.”

“Among other things,” Dan agreed. “We need to record their thoughts on every facet of life that we can before their society inevitably tears itself apart under the barrage of new ideas.”

Xiù winced at the word ’inevitably’ but didn’t argue it. She knew better than anyone just how much the People had changed in the few short weeks she had spent with them so far. She doubted even Julian had noticed how the syntax and cadences of their language had shifted and realigned themselves around the alien words of English.

Part of her was wrestling with knowing that something similar had happened to the Gaoians. And the Gaoians were a mature spacefaring civilization…

“…I just had a thought,” she said, slowly. It was falling into place in her brain just an inch ahead of saying it.

Dan gave her an expectant look.

“I was just thinking…maybe we should ask the Gaoians about this?” Xiù told him. “They’ve…already started to experience the same kind of, um, cultural contamination. From us. Maybe they might have some insight?”

Dan and Kevin shared a glance, then looked to Moses, then back to her. “…Actually, yeah,” Kevin agreed. “And…hell, Kirk. Vedreg too. I hear he took up baking. Maybe if we get some ET perspective on this shit…”

“Well, you’re supposed to be a Sister, right?” Byron pointed out. “Ain’t you got some kinda pull with the Gaoians?”

“I, um…maybe?” Xiù looked desperately to Allison for help, but it was immediately obvious that Allison was agreeing with Byron for once.

“It makes sense, babe,” she offered apologetically. “I mean…that’s why we came hunting you down on Aru was because the Gaoians were saying all these amazing things about you. They really respect you.”

“Alright. So you fly Misfit on over to Gao as soon as she’s ready, talk with…who?” Byron asked. Xiù blanched.

“Gao? But-!”

“This is too big and important for emails,” Dan told her. “Mister Byron’s right, some face-to-face diplomacy is what’s needed here.”

“I left that planet to protect it!” Xiù objected, half-rising in her seat. “I didn’t—you think I wanted to spend years on the run dressed up as a Gaoian? I ran away because the Hunters—”

“That was then,” Kevin pointed out. “It’s been ten years. They’re open allies of ours now. Joint military ops, the works. If the Swarm was gonna hit ‘em—”

“It already hit the Guvnurag,” Dan added.

“Exactly! Why would I want to provoke that?”

Julian cleared his throat. “Well…why not invite them to Cimbrean?” he asked. “Like…an official state visit from the Mother-Supreme or something.”

Dan nodded along. “It’s been done before on a smaller scale. With your friends Ayma and Regaari and, uh, those big bodyguards of theirs.”

“Warhorse and Baseball,” Julian told him. “Great guys. Baseball’s mac and cheese is a goddamn epiphany.”

“…You know them personally?” Dan asked.

“He nearly got squished playing soccer with ‘em,” Allison explained, giving Julian a wry, patient half-smile.

“Now there’s a missed marketing opportunity,” Byron grumbled in the tone he used when he was mostly joking.

“It would be good to get alien buy-in as well,” said Dan as he carefully pressed on. “Beyond perspective, having their resources available would be valuable. Then there’s the Galactic stage…”

Kevin shook his head at that. “The Dominion couldn’t pull their heads outta their asses if they spent four years doin’ the paperwork first,” he scoffed. “Y‘ever hear of the Office for the Preservation of Indigenous Species?”

“…Wait, the Dominion has the Prime Directive?” Dan asked.

“Nah, they’ve got a shitpit full’a bureaucratic fuck-knuckles who wouldn’t recognize a sapient being if one donkey-punched ‘em. And yeah, if this sounds fuckin’ personal that’s because it is.”

Xiù gave him a nonplussed look. “The who?”

“Shit, yeah. You never had to deal with those assholes ‘cause legally you’re a Gaoian,” Kevin nodded. “Well, legally, according to the Office, I was non-sapient indigenous fauna. Care to guess how much fun that was?”

Allison nodded sympathetically. “Oh yeah. I remember that shit.”

“…So…” Dan summarized carefully. “The Dominion has an office which is dedicated to doing exactly what we’re trying to do, except they don’t acknowledge pre-contact species as being sapient?”

“That’s about the shape of it,” Allison nodded.

“…How in the heck does—?” Dan began then gave up. “That can’t be right, can it?”

“Welcome to the Interspecies Dominion, man,” Kevin snorted.

“Long story short, the Dominion are no help and the Alliance would exploit the hell out of the People if they could,” Allison summed up. “We can turn to the Gaoians because they’ve helped out a pre-contact species before…”

“But that was before they signed up to the Dominion,” Xiù reminded them, with a sigh. “On my advice, too…”

“Don’t beat yourself up over that,” Byron advised her. “It was the right call for them at the time, based on what you knew.”

He met Xiù’s surprised expression with a warm smile. “So we have the beginnings of a plan?”

Dan paused and considered. “I think so? We still need to work out exactly—”

“I have every faith you lovely people will accomplish that marvelously,” Byron told him airily. “Kevin, you and I have our next meeting.”

“Right,” Kevin stood up. “The shareholders. Sure we can’t keep them waitin’?”

“Not wise.”

Dan stood up too. “Right. I’ll, uh…go do some more research, I guess.”

Kevin opened the door for Byron, revealing the unprecedented sight of the company’s chief security officer, Mister Williams, hanging around in the hallway outside in jeans and a T-shirt.

Byron greeted him with a handshake on the way past. “Ain’t it your day off, Williams?”

Williams shrugged, as though spare time to himself was completely unimportant. “It is, yeah. But I got the phone call while I was on the golf course.” He looked directly at Allison. “We found one of the arsonists,” he said.

Xiù felt Julian stiffen beside her. Kevin and Byron frowned at each other.

“…I’ll see you in the shareholder meeting, Kevin. Don’t be long,” Byron said and ambled off. Dan edged out of the room with the torn expression of a man who wanted to know more but couldn’t justify staying, and vanished.

Williams watched him go, then stepped into the meeting room and closed the door behind him. Kevin leaned against it, listening.

“…And?” Allison prompted after a second.

“Only got the one so far. A…young man. Teenager, really. The SLCPD are questioning him.”

“Salt Lake City?” Allison folded her arms. “That’s…a long way from Minnesota. I should know, I was born there.”

“Yeah. So was this guy. Apparently his grandparents raised him ‘cause his daddy was kinda young.” He looked Allison dead in the eye. “The name Hamlin sound familiar to you?”

“…Taylor?!”

“Taylor Hamlin? Shit, I know that name’s familiar, uh…” Julian scowled in concentration until Xiù tapped his arm.

“Allison’s, um…” she trailed off, not knowing how to finish the description.

“My baby-daddy.” Allison finished for her, with her typical unflinching bluntness. “God, don’t tell me Taylor did this, I-”

“No. His son Alex did.”

Allison blinked at him. “I thought…He was given away for adoption, I never even knew his name-”

“Taylor’s parents took it to court. Said the baby was Taylor’s child just as much as yours and they had a right to raise their grandson,” Williams summarized. “Of course, by then you’d moved to Massachusetts and become a missing persons case.”

“God.” Allison ran both hands backwards from her forehead and massaged the back of her own neck. “Seriously? My son? Seriously?”

“Yeah. I thought you’d want to know.” Williams’ whole face was apologetic.

“I, uh…” Allison had the dumbfounded look of a woman who was too shocked and shaken to know what to do next. Xiù had a confident prediction: Anger, then tears, then firm resolve.

Williams stood up. “Sorry to lay it on you now, but I dunno if there is a good time for somethin’ like this…”

Still looking a little dazed, Allison shook her head to agree with him. “No. Probably not.”

“Tell ya what,” Kevin said, and went from leaning to upright in one flowing motion. “Williams, why don’t we go over the rest of what you found in my office?”

“…You have an office?” Williams asked. It had the air of a running joke that he was reverting to for the sake of everybody’s composure. It worked, as even Allison managed a small smile.

“Sure. Got one of those fancy seats with the water and a handy roll of writing paper on the wall,” Kevin smirked.

“That so?” Williams had a perfect deadpan.

“Yup. Lotta people in that department, but the only one doin’ any actual work is a real asshole.”

Xiù groaned, but a laugh forced its way out of Allison’s nose and Julian chuckled. Having successfully dispelled some of the negative emotion in the room, Kevin grinned and touched Allison on the shoulder by way of offering friendly comfort, then let Williams take the lead out of the room.

The three of them were left alone.

Julian was the first to say anything. “…You okay?”

Allison planted her elbows on table in front of her and leaned her forehead into her palms, massaging her scalp. “I’m just like…Really? You know?”

Right on schedule, her anger kicked in. “And the worst part is,” she began, surging to her feet, “It’s making me second-guess the past, you know? I hate doing that!”

Xiù inclined her head. “Second-guess how?”

“Ugh, you know. Just, like…if my parents had done what Taylor’s did and if I’d actually been there for him, or if maybe I’d ever tried to get back in touch, then maybe… but then I think about you two.”

She sighed. “…You know? I’d never have met you if I hadn’t run away to Boston.”

Julian rubbed her shoulders from behind and cuddled up close. “Al. Don’t beat yourself up over this. It’s not your fault.”

“I know that,” Allison reassured him, “I just don’t feel it right now. Also, it’s just the fucking…” She raised a hand and wiped away the predicted tears. “…Never mind. It’s done. Let’s just…deal with it. I guess I’d better meet him.”

Xiù took her hand. “Al, you don’t have to if-”

“I know. But I think it’s for the best.”

“Kevin and Moses will probably want us to,” Julian agreed. “Sooner or later some news site will find out about this and then you’re the deadbeat mom who ran away. You know how the media are.”

“True…” Xiù agreed, sighing. “If you go meet him then we can put a positive spin on it…”

Allison sighed, shook Julian off and made a frustrated noise as she paced the room again. “God, are you listening to yourselves?” she asked. “Is this who we are now? Do we really give a shit about what the media has to say, or about spin? You’ve both always been so real and now here you are telling me how to bend things and play around with-”

“We’re still real!” Xiù objected.

“But for the People’s sake-” Julian began.

“I know!”

Her snap plunged the room into silence. Xiù felt herself cross her right arm across her body and scratch her left elbow uncomfortably, and Julian took a step back.

Nobody moved for a second before Allison sighed, stepped forward and hugged him. “I’m sorry,” she said, then turned and hugged Xiù as well. “But I said it myself, I should go see him, didn’t I? I know why, I know…I understand. I get it, lovers, I do. But I don’t have to like it, do I?”

Xiù kissed her. “…You know we don’t like it either, don’t you?” she asked softly.

“Hell no,” Julian agreed. He wrapped his arms around Allison’s waist from behind and the two of them held her together for a second.

She relaxed, and heaved an enormous cleansing sigh. “…Shit, I really needed to hear you say that…”

“We’re still ourselves, dummy,” Julian promised. She laughed softly.

She made a soft sound and relaxed, but she grumbled into Xiù’s shoulder. “You’re the dummy, you ass.”

He chuckled. “You’re the ass, you butt.”

“You’re the butt, dummy.”

“Guys, you’re both dummies,” Xiù promised them fondly. “…Wǒ ài nǐmen, shǎguā.”

“Wǒmen yě ài nǐ, bǎobèi,” Julian answered for them both, testing the limits of all the Chinese he knew.

“Mmm…” Allison made an agreeable noise but didn’t actually say anything. She let herself be held for several second and then finally straightened up. “Okay, so we need to go to Salt Lake City…What’s the plan?”

Xiù thought about it. “Um…Lots of planning, I guess?”

“Why does every plan we come up with start with that?”

“Better than not planning at all,” Julian suggested. “Let’s…go get something to eat and we’ll figure it out.”

Allison kissed his cheek. “…Yeah,” she agreed. “My choice?”

“That’s fair.”

“Cool.” She led the way to the door, then paused with her hand on it.

“….This is gonna fuckin’ suck, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“Oh yeah.”

“…That’s what I thought.”

She opened the door.

Date Point: 13y2d AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, departing planet Aru, Elder Space

Vakno

“That was not Zane.”

“Sure as shit looked like him, Sister. Tall black dude, scary expression, metal arm.”

“You must be able to see in the dark better than I can…” Vakno grumbled. She was surprised to find herself grieving, and was covering for it with irritability.

“…It was dark in there? Whatever. How the fuck was that not Zane? I met the guy before… Though, uh, he didn’t try an’ shoot at me that time.”

“Did he sound like Zane to you?”

Dog’s hands were still shaking, she noticed. He was disguising it well by fidgeting with things, but the human was plainly badly rattled.

“…Guess he didn’t. Dude sounded like a Reggae album last time I met him.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“All like ‘one love’ and stuff.” Dog cleared his throat. “Sound familiar? For real though, what the shit was that about?”

They had abandoned Dog’s shuttle. It was a cheap Dominion stock model anyway, but the infamous ’flying brick’ had got them back to the Negotiable Curiosity in decent time and the human was now piloting Bedu’s ship into orbit to rendezvous with his own vessel.

“He was always…violent,” Vakno ventured. “What was your interest in him?”

“I work for a human corporate conglomerate. Hephaestus,” Wagner replied. “Our boy there was a link in a smuggling chain that managed to get a sample of something called Cruezzir past Cimbrean border control. You heard of it?”

Vakno rose above the impulse to be sarcastic and settled for simply saying “I have. And I know that it interacts in impressive ways with human biology.”

“Mm.” Wagner nodded. “Hephaestus want to know where he got hold of the stuff. So they sent me to track him down.”

“I’m glad they had the sense to send somebody who knows how to fight.”

A black laugh exploded out of Dog ‘s mouth. “Hah! Oh, shit, sister! You think that was fighting?”

“You shot at him.”

“So did that Bedu fella.” Dog paused. “Hey, I’m…Sorry about him. You were friends?”

“No.”

“…Oh.”

There was a long, awkward pause during which the searing hot blue of Aru’s sky faded to starry black and Wagner injected the Negotiable Curiosity onto a rendezvous orbit with a distant sensor contact.

“..I do regret his loss, however,” Vakno conceded, eventually. “You… don’t know how to fight?”

“I know which end of a gun is the angry one…” Dog shrugged. “That wasn’t fighting. That was running away and makin’ a lot of noise to try and force him to keep his head down.”

“You had Nervejam grenades.”

“Yuh. In case of Hunters.” Dog shook his head and ran a hand over the grey and silver stubble that passed for his hair. “Never thought I’d use them on another human, fuck.”

“I…am not entirely certain that was a human,” Vakno ventured.

“Sure as shit looked like a human, sister.”

“But it didn’t behave like the human it looked like,” Vakno pointed out. “You said yourself, our assailant did not sound like Zane.”

Dog frowned thoughtfully. A moving star up ahead was quickly resolving itself into an elderly but well-maintained light bulk transport. They swept up its sunward flank and Vakno made out two different liveries on its hull–the faded and battered stamp of Yrvrk Shipyards and a newer, clearer icon she didn’t recognize: the silhouette of a muscular human raising a hammer high above an anvil.

“Out of interest, Mister Wagner…” she asked, carefully. “Would you happen to have any neural implants?”

Dog shook his head. “Used to. Hephaestus paid me a big bonus to get the dang thing taken out ASAP,” he grumbled. “Never did figure out why…you think it has something to do with Dread there goin’ Rambo on our asses?”

“I suspected there was a…hazard involved,” Vakno told him. Dog’s hands swiped through the control fields one last time, Negotiable Curiosity shook hands with the freighter’s systems, and the two ships began the process of docking.

“Suspected?”

“Yes,” Vakno nodded. “Now, I know for certain.”

Date Point: 13y1w AV
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Earth

Allison Buehler

Allison’s memory of Taylor Hamlin was a skinny boy with untamed straw blond hair and a quick smile. After seventeen years, she was expecting him to have changed and he had…for the better. He had the same hair and the same smile, but he’d piled on six inches in height and fifty pounds in weight. Really, only his personality had changed: the old Taylor would have met her in a huge and enthusiastic hug.

Then again…Allison would have liked to believe that she’d have done the same. Reality had a way of proving people wrong about themselves.

He stood on the doorstep and smiled at her warily, she stood next to the car and watched him warily, and it took a shove in the butt from Xiù to get her moving.

At least she was able to speak first. “…Hey.”

“Hi.”

“Been a long time…”

“Yeah…You, uh. Doing well for yourself.”

She laughed and nodded. “Yeah. Guess I am…so are you from what I hear, Doctor Hamlin.”

Taylor cleared his throat. “Well… I had a son to look after. I…”

He paused, thought about what he’d just said, and then sighed and shook his head at himself. “Jesus, Allison, I’m sorry about him. I had no idea he’d—”

“It’s…” Allison balked at saying ’okay’ on the grounds that it patently wasn’t. The only place on Earth where she’d felt comfortable and at peace was a pile of ash under a deeper pile of snow at this point. That didn’t leave a lot of room for ’okay.’

“…You didn’t do it,” she said instead, then got the hell away from that subject for the moment. “Uh…Guess you recognize Xiù and Julian.”

“Yeah!” Taylor grabbed the opportunity to be a friendly host, and met them both with a friendly handshake and more than a hint of relief. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Nice to meet you,” Julian told him. He was being polite, Allison knew—in fact he’d spent most of the flight over on Byron’s private jet rumbling ominously about Taylor’s obvious deficiencies as a parent, but Allison really couldn’t blame him. That house had been even more important to him than it was to her.

It was out of his system now, though, and Taylor’s obvious mortification was taking the edge off.

“I…guess you’d better come in.”

“Thank you,” Xiù of course could be nice to anybody and mean it, though the effect was spoiled by a crash and heavy footfalls inside the house as Taylor welcomed them inside. A door slammed upstairs and a voluptuous woman with pearlescent purple hair shot Taylor a desperate look from the bottom of the stairs.

“He just ran up there…” she explained. Taylor scowled and stormed to the stairs.

”ALEX! You either get your ass back down here, or God help me I’ll take you back to jail myself you little shit!”

The change in his attitude was impressive, and it made his wife wince.

“Jesus…he wouldn’t even be out on bond if you hadn’t agreed to it,” he grumbled after a second.

Mrs. Hamlin looked like she was fighting back tears. “I’m so sorry about this, I—”

Allison thawed out a little and shook her head. “It’s…uh, you’re Amanda?”

“Uh, yeah. Sorry, this is just—” Amanda sighed hugely, then offered a hand. Allison gave it her firmest shake, which after two years of engineering work on a spaceship was pretty damn firm.

“Is it okay if I go up there?” she asked.

Taylor and Amanda looked at each other.

“I…” Taylor began, then gave up. “…guess it can’t hurt.”

“His room’s the one on the right, with the poster on the door,” Amanda supplied.

Allison nodded. “Right…uh…”

She turned to Julian and Xiù who both made identical gestures of encouragement and managed to communicate without words that they’d hold down the fort downstairs. It sometimes amazed her how much they could say to each other without speaking, nowadays.

She thanked them with a smile, and trudged the subjective five miles up the stairs, running over a million different conversations in her head.

In the end, she settled for knocking gently on his door.

“…I think your dad might be serious,” she ventured.

There was no reply.

“…Look. I don’t know how this is gonna go. I don’t really know why I came here, even.”

The silence changed in a way that was hard to define. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking.

“Maybe we’ll only speak this once. Maybe we’ll figure something out,” she continued. “Maybe we’ll both go away hating each other. But… I don’t know. Let’s just talk. Please.”

There was a thump, a click, and the door was opened by…herself.

A male, teenage herself wearing an ankle tag, sure. But the cheekbones, the freckles, the nordic hair, were all straight out of the mirror. Only the eyes were different—he had Taylor’s eyes, behind the redness.

And she had no idea what to say.

Date Point: 13y1w AV
Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Adam Arés

Sometimes, being the biggest dude ever had its upsides.

It didn’t always seem that way. Sure, being basically the best physical specimen humanity had ever produced in literally every category worth measuring was a huge ego boost. Adam would have been lying to himself if he’d pretended at modesty there…But it all came with a price.

Prices like travel, as Rebar and Starfall had discovered when they tried to fly home two years prior only to learn that they were already far too heavy for safety’s sake. And while both men were easily among the strongest and most athletic people ever, and out-massed any power athlete competing, they just weren’t in the same league as the Beef Brothers.

Fortunately, military airlift was a thing. And rental trucks were a thing. And in British Columbia, cheap, huge old pickups with stupidly souped-up suspension and full-size crew cabs were a thing, too. So, Adam got his road trip after all.

They’d bought the truck off a farmer growing “hemp” in the rural areas around Scotch Creek, and the conversation had been the same dreary kind of thing Adam was growing all too used to.

“Christ, boy! You’re huge!”

Adam sighed inwardly but Major Jackson had taught him never to let that show. Instead he reminded himself how good it felt to have his ego stroked and dropped right into character as ’Left Beef.’

“Yup!” He grinned, bouncing in place on his sandaled toes. The decking creaked ominously, which was always enough to make him actually enjoy the role-playing.

Farmer…Joe? Maybe? Whatever his name was he shook his head disbelievingly. “I saw you on the talk show but, I mean…video don’t do you justice. Christ.”

Adam beamed, “And we’re even bigger since then!” He bounced again and drawled with his goofiest, friendliest grin, “That’s why we want the truck. You sure the suspension’s good?”

Farmer Joe gave the two a closer look and nodded warily. “Yeah…I mean, it’ll handle the weight, and the seat’s are the really good commercial ones, but…are you really that heavy?”

Adam rolled his eyes internally but nodded happily. After all, the gawping, giggling disbelief that people aimed at him was pretty high on his list of Dumb Macho Things He Was Absurdly Proud Of But Tried Not To Be an Ass About. He’d written that down, too. His little book had all sorts of weird lists like that, which Marty teased him about endlessly. That was okay; he liked the teasing. That was in a list, too.

So he flexed his arm, because that was what people expected and he did enjoy the praise and attention, and of course Farmer Joe-Bob or whatever reached up to feel that bicep exactly like a six-year-old kid would have. And then, as people always did when they found themselves gripping an arm as thick as their torso and as hard as asphalt, he got all awkward.

“Woah. That’s just…I mean, uh, damn, it’s not a, like, trick or—”

Adam’s grin got wider. “Yup, it’s all true, just like we said on the interview. We’re in perfect health, too.” He waited then grinned, “And yeah, everything important works just fine, don’t it Marty?”

Marty’s slow troll grin should have been illegal, especially the way she ran an arched eyebrow up and down his body. “I’m still recovering,” she drawled. Adam had foreseen her quip and known he’d be embarrassed, so there was nothing he could do to stop his cheeks from reddening…but he really did enjoy her teasing.

As planned, Marty’s smirk embarrassed Farmer Joe enough to persuade him to move on. He quickly glanced at the ground and coughed awkwardly into his fist. “…you fellahs got the cash?”

Because of course, a man farming “hemp” wouldn’t trust bank accounts. Even if the stuff was perfectly legal to grow in Canada nowadays, some old habits died hard.

Adam held up a thick envelope filled with plastic Canadian cash. “Yup, right here. You got the title?”

He handed it over and watched Farmer Joe count the pile suspiciously, three times. When he finally nodded and handed over the title, Adam inspected and signed it with equal wariness. Job done, they shook hands carefully and Marty hopped into the driver’s seat, put it in neutral, and Adam pushed the truck backwards out of the barn with one hand and not even a grunt of effort, as easily as someone might push an empty shopping cart. He was maybe showing off a little for everyone’s fun but Farmer Joe only boggled at that for a moment, because ‘Base came jogging easily up the gravel road from the other end of the farmstead with four of those five-gallon “jerry cans” slung over his back and a huge, empty duffel bag in either hand.

Adam couldn’t blame Farmer Joe. A tall, midnight-black colossus practically sprinting down the road in nothing but his running shorts must have been an impressive sight in rural Canada. Adam always thought ‘Right Beef’ really was the superior slab, anyway. But ‘Base kept placing second in the internet polls…and Adam was hugely stronger and he knew it, too. And faster. On the one level he was slightly embarrassed about that, but on another level…

More Dumb Macho Things for the List.

“Yo, Marty! We know what we need yet?”

She popped the hood and performed a quick, inscrutable inspection. Nothing worked: When she climbed into the cab and turned the key neither the engine nor the lights even flickered, and she climbed back out sighing.

“Pretty much everything,” she reported. “Including a battery.”

“I told’ya it’s been sitting dead for years,” Farmer said defensively.

“Yeah, don’t worry,” Marty soothed him. “It’s about what I expected. We’ll fix it up.”

“You need a ride down to the gas station?”

“Nah,” Base grinned hugely. “I got this.”

“I’ll wash and detail the truck,” Marty promised.

Adam nodded. “And I’ll, uh… You got any chores you need doing?”

He was still having trouble adjusting to a life without nonstop exercise. He’d trained hardcore every single day of his life since he was fifteen and it really was hard to go without. It was as important to him as breathing and eating, and he badly needed the slightly euphoric rush it gave him.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t be useful, though, so he spent the next few hours helping Joe out around the farm while the other two did their thing. He worked up a pretty good sweat doing so, too. They didn’t talk much, but Adam found himself liking the guy anyway; Joe knew how to work hard and smart, and between them they got a few big jobs squared away before John finally returned. He particularly enjoyed breaking up a tree stump. The look on Farmer Joe’s face when Adam got the damn thing wedged open and then literally tore it in half with his bare hands was priceless.

As it turned out the guy’s name actually was Joe, too. Adam really had to get better with names.

John was an even bigger tightwad than Adam and had insisted on running the nearly twenty mile round trip to the cheapest gas station in the area. He’d brought the duffel bags too, since they needed more than a few supplies to get the long-dormant truck running; neither of the Beef Brothers knew much about cars, so Marty was in charge there and she’d drawn up a long shopping list, which ‘Base had happily fulfilled.

Advanced battery tech finally made hypercharging a practical reality, and tax relief combined with recycling credits and substantial adopter incentives meant that the traditional internal combustion engine was an increasingly endangered species in American auto culture, kept alive only by purists and practical sorts who could keep an old vehicle running for decades. Among environmentally and financially conscious sorts, electric was far ahead and the gap was widening every day. Farmer Joe had obviously been an early adopter.

All of which explained why John was shaking his head ruefully as he arrived. “Twelve bucks a gallon,” he reported with a pained expression. Adam hissed through his teeth but Marty shrugged it off.

“It’ll still work out way cheaper than buying an electric truck woulda,” she promised.

Adam trusted her judgement implicitly. Marty’s day job involved handling supply problems infinitely more complex than merely keeping a truck fuelled and on the road. She would have figured out their fuel budget to the dime, and built in a safety margin.

John just shrugged enormously and dug through his duffel bags, then handed over a plastic shopping bag full of motor oil, windshield washer fluid and Slim Jims, and went ‘round the other side of the truck to fuel it.

Twenty messy minutes later, the truck was ready to run, Marty was cleaning the oil off her hands, Adam and John had loaded all their luggage into the bed, and the time had finally come to test the suspension.

Adam climbed into the driver’s seat.

There was a loud creak, but the cab didn’t list too much and it balanced itself out with another metallic groan when Baseball climbed in on the passenger side. Clearly the suspension wasn’t as good as the trucks the SOR used but it held up okay even if Marty did report that the vehicle was sitting noticeably lower.

It barely wobbled when she clambered into the back seat.

Farmer Joe spent the whole show leaning against his barn and watching with his mouth agape. He seemed more surprised than anyone that it held up, and if there was a hint of relief on his face when Adam cranked the engine and roared it into life, none of them bothered to comment.

This truck was Adam’s first and maybe last vehicle, and just for a moment he felt a pang of regret that internal combustion was on its way out. That grumbling beast under the hood felt and sounded good, like there was something alive in this critter that the whining, humming drivetrains of an electric truck just couldn’t measure up against.

It sure drove differently. His first few yards of reversing were jerky and violent as he got used to the power curve and aimed them down the farm track. Farmer Joe jogged up the track to wish them well, invite them back for a visit on their return trip…

“And I’ll have lots of work to do, if you’re willing!”

Adam grinned in reply, settled himself in comfortably, and psyched himself up for the trip.

“Y’guys ready?” he asked. “Marty gets first song!”

Marty already had her phone out and synched up to the truck’s Bluetooth, but she didn’t start the music just yet.

“Aren’t you boys forgetting something?” she asked.

Adam turned around. She grinned at him from behind a pair of chrome-framed pilot’s sunglasses.

“Shit, yeah,” he agreed, and plucked his pair from where he’d hung them on his shirt’s neck seam. Baseball chuckled and fished his pair out of his pocket, and Adam looked back to Marty for approval. “Better?”

”Much better,” she agreed, and started the music

The Beef Brothers exchanged a high five, waved farewell to Farmer Joe-Bob-Jim Whatever, and Adam set about putting a lot of road between them and Scotch Creek.

They had two whole months of leave. He intended to use every second to its fullest, spend it on food and singing along badly to loud music, and seeing things he’d never seen before…

And maybe, just maybe, those two months would be enough time to work up the courage he needed…

Date Point: 13y1w2d AV
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

Xiù was still gamely making small-talk with Amanda Hamlin, but Julian and Taylor had fallen into a strange kind of silence that was almost comfortable. Beer and a couch had a way of doing that. Julian just couldn’t hang around with a guy until well after sundown and not feel a little kinship with him.

The fact was, he’d wound up forgiving the Hamlins pretty quickly. It was obvious that they were good people dealing with a damn difficult kid. He’d spent the whole trip over betting they were going to find a couple of deadbeat bleeding-hearts who were more interested in being their son’s best friend than actually parenting him.

Reality wasn’t so easy. Taylor Hamlin seemed like a good dad saddled with a shitty kid and that was the whole shape of it. He was blaming himself top to bottom for Alex’s crime, and that was all the proof Julian needed—if he’d tried to wriggle out of it or disavow responsibility, he’d have felt vindicated. As it was, their sincere contrition was making him like them.

Still…their son had burned down his grampa’s house. That was going to take more than a beer and a chat to paper over. He tried not to be chilly, but the fact was that he’d have just about killed to get out of that house, and it was clear that Taylor knew it.

When Allison finally came back downstairs with her coat folded over her arm, it was a genuine relief. Everybody stood up.

”…Nǐ hái hǎo ma?” Xiù scowled at herself as she realized she’d got her languages mixed up again, but Allison had picked up enough Chinese by now that she just shrugged expressively. Julian knew that shrug: it was a ‘no’ with some clauses and exceptions.

“I dunno,” she said. “I think there’s some bridges just can’t be mended…I’m sorry, I think we should go. I…Taylor, we’ll stay in touch?”

Taylor nodded. “Sure.”

They were outside and back in the car so quick that Julian was left with his head spinning, despite his musing about wanting to get the hell out of there. It sure seemed to take their driver by surprise, and he was still scrambling to stuff a Manga into the glove compartment as they piled in.

The Hamlins watched them pull away and Allison drew a line under the whole surreal incident by covering her face with her hands and breathing out between them in a long and complicated way.

“I have…no idea what that accomplished or why we even did it,” she admitted at last.

“Closure?” Xiù suggested. “I think you probably needed to speak with him…”

“Yeah, great. Now I don’t need to suspect that my son hates me, I know it for a fact.”

There was a hurt silence, and she sat up straight. “God, I’m sorry babe. It’s not—”

Xiù took her hand. “It’s okay.”

“…I really hate this planet. You know that?”

“I think this planet hates you too,” Julian ventured to joke. For a second, Allison stared blankly at the back of the seat in front of her and he worried he’d got it wrong, but then she cracked a small smile and gave him a look that was full of sad gratitude.

“Maybe,” she agreed. “…What happens next?”

“Think you and I both need to put the past behind us,” Julian suggested. “I gotta let go of the house, you’ve gotta let go of Alex…”

Xiù fiddled with one of her rings and nodded. “And I let go of my family a long time ago.”

Allison looked at her. “You did?”

Xiù nodded again, but didn’t say anything else.

They were almost back to the airport by the time any of them spoke again. Allison shifted in her seat uncomfortably.

“Makes me think…” she mused.

Julian inclined his head at her. “What?”

“Well, here we’re putting the past behind us but we’re working with Dan to preserve the People’s heritage and culture,” she explained. “I’m just wondering…”

It was Xiù’s turn to nudge her. “Wondering what?”

“I wonder if we can teach them about this.”

Xiù shook her head. “They already know that one,” she said. “They left their old village, remember?”

“I guess…”

“Trust me on this,” Xiù told her, and rubbed her back. “The People know all about leaving things behind…”

Date Point: 13y1w2d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Singer

Sickness was always a danger whenever tribes met. There was always a new one, but now…now the tribes were so close. They had united behind Yan and Vemik and the magic of steel, and they had followed high into the mountains where the air felt weak and cold, and where the wind bit like a yshek. The camps had been moved closer together as the People huddled together for warmth and comfort.

That huddling had allowed sickness to sweep through them all like wind through the fallen leaves. Shivering-sickness, sweating-sickness. Sickness that a healthy man or woman could sweat through for a night or two, and be well on the third…

But some lives were frailer than others. And the smallest bodies were the heaviest.

There was nothing she could have done. She’d sang every song she knew, danced every dance she’d ever been taught. She’d given the child root-milk and eased her pain with ketta sap…and in the end, the only thing she could do for her own daughter was to hold her as she shivered her last and went to sleep forever.

Children died. It was a fact of life, she knew that. But she still felt like some cold and malicious god had reached into her chest with claws of bile and torn out a piece of her heart.

And the worst part was, that Vemik didn’t know. He was scouting ahead with his father, looking for a way through the mountain passes that the Tribes could all follow without having to abandon their equipment. They had precious little to spare anyway. He would come home to find his daughter dead, and still the tribes would rely on him to be their sky-thinker. She doubted if he would have the chance to properly grieve.

Then again, she doubted if she would either. It seemed impossible that she could give voice to all her pain.

She tried. She swaddled the tiny body in rawhide and took it to a sacred place where numbing cold water formed a vivid blue pool under the nose of a river of ice. A place where sky and earth and water touched, and where birds circled endlessly on the wind, hunting for the skittish furry things that darted about among the purple mountain grasses.

She placed her child on the open rocks where the birds would see her, and she tried to sing…but the words sulked in her chest and refused to come out. She tried to dance, but her body wouldn’t move. So she sat, and watched, and wished until the sun touched the edge of the world.

And in the end, she didn’t sing at all.

She stood, and turned, and walked away with a heart full of emptiness, and a soul full of doubts.

Date Point: 13y1w3d AV
Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, United States

Daar

In the end, the Earth herself finally achieved something that no Human ever had: she managed to humble Daar.

It wasn’t a feeling he was used to; not even his total defeat by Murray had managed to actually humble him. Humiliate and educate him, yes, but after that Daar had trained, and learned, and taught, and got better. He liked doing all those things and so did SOR! Over time all that ‘Back-hard training and study paid off, and now their sparring sessions were fun because it wasn’t obvious who might win or how the fight might go. Progress!

His record with Murray at the moment was three wins, ten losses. Not where Daar wanted it, but with more practice…Firth was pretty much impossible, though. One day, maybe, Daar might just about manage to trip that scary motherfucker, and he knew that when it happened he’d be too excited to talk.

But as impressive as all that was, no matter how much he trained, and improved, and learned, and grew beyond anything he or the whole of the Gao had ever dreamed could be…there just wasn’t much of anything Daar’s supreme body could do against an Earthling fungus. He’d let his many and impressive physical achievements cloud his judgement and ‘Mother Nature’ was a harsh instructor. He’d complained about the stupidly expensive portable biofield, and the antibiotics, and the full-time med tech assigned to him…and then a tiny little cut was all it took to knock him down like a runt cub who refused his milk. His lesson in humility had damn near killed him, and come closer still to costing him a paw. Earth held its Deathworld classification for a reason and had slapped him hard the moment his hubris had let him forget it.

After that, nobody was as fastidiously clean as Daar.

He noticed afterwards, though, that the Humans were to a lesser degree ‘in the same boat’ as him. Cleanliness and disease control were bred into every single tiny little facet of their daily lives, so much so they didn’t even notice unless it was pointed out. They kept those soft, dexterous paws of theirs immaculately clean. They regularly washed their mouths with antiseptics and kept their oily skin scrubbed free of all dirt, and if anyone failed to do so, their fellows complained loudly. They even covered their noses and mouths at the first hint of a cough or sneeze.

At first, it had seemed weird how they complained so loudly of their own body odor. It wasn’t more pungent than other scents they were routinely wallowing in, so why the difference? Same with the covering; not doing so was actually rude! Maybe it was a group psychology thing, some built-in attempt to keep everyone clean. He’d initially written it off as another case of ’Humans are weird,’ but Earth was a constant education in the intricacies of bacterial filth and hungry fungi.

And their cooking! It was an elaborate sanitary dance from start to finish. The ‘Americans’ even had full-time professional ‘meat inspectors’ which Daar thought was a super good idea. Maybe import that to Cimbrean for their Naxas operations? After all, there was now the possibility of Human cross-contamination, and the Gao were drawing ever closer to Earth…

Honestly, the engineering school and the blowing-up of all the things was an almost secondary experience. The real learning opportunity was how Humans dealt with Earth, and Daar realized he’d need to write extensively about it for Highmountain.

Well…dictate, anyway. There wasn’t time for writing.

Not that it mattered: Those notes would be classified for the moment anyway, at least until they figured out how to deal with their Brother-Clan. He still wasn’t completely solid with Brother Tyal, either. What had once been the healthy respect of a Brother for his Champion had been replaced with…subservient awe. Not good, though Daar understood that feeling all too well; he’d come dangerously close to wallowing in it when he’d first joined the SOR.

But a Champion could not afford that kind of indulgence, and so the only thing he could think to do was push through his fear, and the uncertainty, and the unknown. Daar was on Earth to learn as the Humans learned, and maybe teach them a little of the Stoneback Way, too.

And, hell. Maybe Daar wouldn’t ever be as completely good as a Human, but in Great Father Fyu’s name it wouldn’t be for a lack of trying. He would find out just what his limits were, push them as hard as he could, and the Clan would take notes.

And then, they would breed the next generation. If they survived what was coming.

But all that was ahead of Daar. Right now he had an exam to study for, so he curled up around his most favoritest blanket after his nightly clean-up routine, cracked open his book, and broke out his highlighter and pens. He had a bet with Sikes and had to score above a ninety, or he would be stuck doing the SOR’s laundry for a whole month.

Motivation didn’t come any more motivating than a pile of ranger shorts.

He stopped contemplating his paw, and returned to his studies.

Date Point: 13y1w3d AV
Manchester, Georgia, USA, Earth

Adam Arés

Martina’s parents’ house stood out on their street for two reasons: their lawn was perfect, and her dad had a forge in the garage. Otherwise, theirs was an ordinary wood-sided pale green rambler on a cracked and neglected street of ramblers, separated by chain link fences and huge trees and haunted by a variety of elderly rusting trucks.

Adam immediately knew which of her parents Marty had taken after in the looks department: Her mom was a happy glimpse into the future, and the future was bright. She was out of the house in a blink the second they pulled up and engulfed Marty in a hug and the warm and tearful ‘Ooohhh’ universal to mothers who only got to see their child once a year at most.

Adam and John lined up by the truck and let her get it out of her system, which was long enough for Marty’s dad to emerge from the forge, cleaning his hands on a rag.

“You must be the man I’ve heard so much about.”

Adam smiled nervously. He’d spent the morning agonizing over his clothing choice for this meeting, much to Marty’s mounting frustration. In the end she’d slapped him affectionately and told him to dress like he usually did when being presentable, so he was wearing his utilikilt with a plain red polo. Other than a quick shave and a trim of his hair…

It seemed to pass muster. Marty’s mom was wearing jeans and a crew neck sweater, and her dad was wearing a carbon-stained T-shirt that was dark with sweat. Apparently, the trio had arrived early.

“I hope so, sir,” he replied, shaking the older man’s hand.

Kovač chuckled. “You don’t need to call me sir, son. I work for a living.”

He was a charmer, that was obvious. And to Adam’s infinite gratitude, his first reaction wasn’t horror, or shock, or gawping geeky excitement, nor even an overt appraisal. Just…a handshake, and a smile.

It was nice. Doubly nice, because Marty’s mom graced him with a huge hug that nearly got all the way around his waist while her husband shook John’s hand and invited them indoors.

The air conditioning was on and a pot of coffee was brewing, but the really hospitable touch was the thick MDF board that had been laid under the couch cushions to reinforce it. Marty had obviously let her folks know how to Beef-proof the house, and her dad invited them to sit as he vanished into the bedroom to change his shirt.

Adam kicked off his sandals and gingerly stepped his way over to the couch. He sat down carefully and relaxed when it just barely managed to hold up, though it did creak ominously under his weight. “I see Marty’s told you all about us…”

“She said you boys are death to furniture,” Mrs. Kovač twinkled. “It should stand up.” Adam shrugged and spread out a bit; he was so broad he took up most of the couch all by himself.

John padded over with equal care and took up a spot on the floor directly in front of Adam, who wrapped his legs around his friend affectionately. “Real kind of you, but…no sense in pushing our luck,” he explained. She tutted and snapped her fingers in a pantomime of having been foiled.

“And here I was hoping you’d smash the dang thing so I can finally get Sam to replace it.”

“Give ‘Horse a good meal and you may just get your wish!” ‘Base’s troll grin was huge.

Adam rolled his eyes and cuffed him affectionately on the back of the head. “Yeah, yeah…” he muttered. “Much appreciate the hospitality. We brought some supplies with us ‘cuz, uh, we both need to eat a lot and we don’t wanna clean you out too bad.”

Mrs. Kovač nodded as though she’d been expecting exactly that. “What’d you bring?”

“Got a big pile of chicken and a couple of really big roasts.”

“We’ll make it work. Sam’s always talkin’ about making a fire pit out back, maybe this is the kick in the pants he needs to actually build it.”

Adam just barely restrained the urge to leap to his feet and bounce into action. Instead he stood up more carefully and spared the living room. “I can help dig it out if you want!”

“Would you mind? His back ain’t as good as it was…”

Sam returned, having obviously washed himself up and found a clean shirt. “My back’s fine!” he objected. Adam could believe it—the room was dotted here and there with the evidence of his time in the Regiment, and he’d obviously kept up his fitness since those days. He filled out his shirts, and in most other company he would probably have been the strongest man in the room.

“It’ll go quicker, though. More time to eat beef!”

“And drink beer,” added ‘Base, who was heading to the kitchen. Between Adam’s sewing and both their cooking, they’d been affectionately termed the “housewives” of the SOR, a joke that usually prompted a Motivational reminder of who the top dogs in the unit really were.

Sam chuckled. “Well, with a sales pitch like that…”

“What’re you gonna do, ‘Base?”

“I ain’t depriving these fine folks of my momma’s ‘Mac. And Firth talked Freya into sharing her potato salad recipe. I’m cookin’!”

Adam chuckled and made to follow Sam to the door, but he was brought up short by Marty grabbing his wrist and standing on tip-toe to kiss him.

“Have fun,” she told him.

The wish was redundant. Adam simply couldn’t not have fun when there was digging a hole and moving bricks to be done and he was already pulling his polo off in anticipation of getting dirty. It was a good bonding experience, too: Sam was a textbook Proud Dad, and seemed more than happy with his daughter’s choice of career and boyfriend.

He’d even asked about the Green Feet stomping across Adam’s chest, who’d found himself enthusiastically telling the stories behind what the different little Feet meant while they worked. It was a good way to pass the time since he had dozens of pairs to talk about.

“Martina told me you were basically a PJ.”

Adam nodded, and shoved the first cinderblock firmly into place. The soil was moister and softer than he’d expected and he’d made very quick work of digging out the pit. “Yuh.” He reached up for another brick. “I’m what we call a Protector and rescue is one of my primary missions. Though…” he paused and frowned a bit, “Sometimes it seems like I gotta kill a lot of people to get there.”

“I hear that. Everyone in the Regiment knows about Mogadishu. If it wasn’t for the PJs in that fight, I’d be dead and dismembered.”

“What happened?”

“To me? Nothing really. I’m alive ‘cuz those PJs killed themselves a big pile of cordwood to get to us. They’re goddamned angels of death when they want to be.”

Adam nodded in agreement but otherwise didn’t have much to say about that. He grunted slightly uncomfortably, and climbed out of the pit to grab another stack of bricks.

“Somethin’ eating at you, son?”

“Well…” he hesitated, then pressed on. “I dunno. I guess none of it was what I expected. I don’t regret any of it,” he was quick to say, “But, uh, you can’t undo some choices, y’know?”

Sam gave him an appraising look, a real up-and-down evaluation. “…Look, son, I don’t know what you’re doing to be like this…but you’re healthy, and you need it to do the mission, right?”

There it was. Sam wanted to have The Talk that Adam knew was eventually going to happen. But Sam was the first man outside the SOR that Adam had ever met who simply got it right off the mark. He didn’t ask some of the obvious questions people asked but which he knew from experience were off-limits. And since Adam didn’t need to explain the why of what he did…

“Yeah, I am and I do…but that ain’t it. I was always gonna be big, I was too into lifting to be little. It’s…when I decided I wanted to be a PJ? I was sixteen right? And I had Jones and Powell to help me…but years later, I come to find out they knew about, uh, what I’m doing now and had helped me with that in mind. I mean, I’m not mad, but, uh…” He seemed to struggle for words.

“Missed opportunities?”

“More like…I’d be, uh, some kind of normal meathead, I guess. Not ‘Left Beef’ and all that.”

“Guys like you tend to excel,” Sam nodded. “You sure you wouldn’t have if they didn’t help?”

Adam squirmed in place a little uncomfortably. “Well, sure. I’ve said to other people I’d have been really fuckin’ good, but…I dunno. A little five-foot-seven Mexican at like two-fifty I guess or, I dunno, maybe a lot bigger…that’d be impressive I guess, but it wouldn’t be anything like this.”

Sam nodded again. “You’d just be like any other guy with an iron hobby.”

“Yeah, prol’ly. But Jones and Stevenson showed me what to do to get big at just the right time, so even before I left Cimbrean I was the strongest man there, and I was…well, fuck. I was a lot bigger’n two-fifty when I got to Basic. You wouldn’t believe how much, I still don’t.”

Sam nodded. “Most young men can grow like a weed if they work really hard at it and eat right, and you had two years to do it. Aren’t you maybe worrying too much?”

“No.” Adam jumped lightly back into the pit carrying more bricks and expanded the thought some. “People don’t grow as fast as I did. I enlisted at seventeen so I only had a few months to prep, but once I was eating and training right I fuckin’ exploded like…well, like a freak of nature.”

Sam considered. “So you have a gift, then. You probably would have ended up using it anyway.”

“Sure, but I wasn’t, like, laser focused on gains,” Adam maintained. “I coulda done police work or whatever. Instead I just…sorta fixated, maybe? My friends egged me on and by the time I was ready for Basic I…well, I didn’t exactly look, like, bodybuilder huge, not ‘till the end anyway, but I just got stupid strong and heavy and I put that weight on so fast and easy it scares me, man.”

“Ah.” Sam nodded while Adam set the bricks down. “Let me get some beer, be right back.”

He vanished into the garage and returned with some bottles of an obvious homebrew vintage. “Try this. I’ve moved past IPAs into proper lagers and this is the first one that doesn’t suck.”

Adam took a big pull and felt his signature big, goofy grin showed up even as he was still drinking. He was no kind of a beer connoisseur but Sam was obviously in the ’keep it simple’ school of brewing, and had perfected a straightforward, crisp, malty lager. “This is really good! Can you teach me how to make it?”

“Sure,” Sam nodded benevolently. “Have another.”

“Thanks!”

Sam seemed to enjoy plying his guest and Adam downed three more in rapid succession. On his fifth, Sam decided to resume the conversation. “I think you’re still maybe worrying too much. You’re a natural physical talent, that’s pretty obvious. Ain’t anything wrong with that. And trust an old man, there’s really no point in pontificating too much about these kinds of things.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Adam finished his beer and resumed the work, while Sam moved the wheelbarrow full of mortar closer to where they were working.

Once he set it down, he sighed. “You sound like you’ve had this conversation before.”

“…Yeah. A buncha times.”

“So why ain’t it stickin’?”

Adam slapped down a brick onto the wet mortar while Sam cleaned it up. “Cuz I don’t think it’s just talent. It’s…I think this is special, what I can do. I don’t think I like that.”

Sam leaned back and said nothing. He seemed to have the same talent for drawing out his thoughts as Adam’s own dad had.

Adam sighed, slapped down another block, and thought good and hard before eventually trying at an answer. “Like… Okay. Take ‘Base, right? He had to work his ass off for years and years to get big. He’s earned every bit of what he has. Or Firth. He’s a freak too, but he’s still been training hard his whole life. But me…I dunno. One day I just started doing it for fun and, well…”

“It came easy.”

“Too easy. Way too easy. Thank God for ‘Base being so fuckin’ smart, he’s the only guy who keeps me, uh, grounded, I think? Yeah. ‘Cuz I showed up to Basic and… I just, uh, I won. It was easy, so was indoc and the pipeline ‘cept for the studying parts. Hell, my TI, Technical Sergeant Lake? He told me later he was actually afraid of me. Thank God he never let me find out.”

“And all of that was before…” Sam left it unsaid, but contrived to indicate Adam’s physique with a sweep of his hand.

“Yeah,” he sighed heavily. “That was just me without any, uh, ‘help.’ After we started our, uh, ‘special training’ I guess…it got even sillier. I never really felt like I was workin’ for it, right? Or…maybe I enjoyed working that hard. I dunno that I ever had to actually push myself, I just did it however hard I needed to. It ain’t like the others, even Firth isn’t exactly like this. It’s…”

Sam nodded, and spoke in the same way Marty did whenever she quoted something. “That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly,” he said.

“…Yeah. I like that. Where’s it from?”

“Thomas Paine.”

Adam chuckled to himself, “I really gotta read more.”

“Got the books indoors if you want ‘em,” Sam offered. “Or maybe audiobooks might be better for you. Figure your training regime’s gotta be somethin’ else.”

Adam bounced in place, happily back to his cheery mood. “Ooh! That’s a great idea, actually. I normally just turn up the heavy metal way too loud.”

Sam nodded. “May as well expand the mind at the same time, right? That’s what I did. And hell, when I had a little girl it meant I had all these good stories to read her.” He noticed the contemplative look on Adam’s face and smirked. “Hmm, thinking about children yourself are we?”

Adam didn’t respond verbally, but the way his cheeks went red and how his goofy grin slipped across his face said more than enough, especially when he looked down at his feet.

“Thought so. No pressure, you’re young, enjoy life…but don’t wait too long, y’hear?”

Adam nodded happily. “Yessir. And…” He paused for a second, then swept Sam up into a huge, crushing puppy-hug. “Thanks for listening. You’re easy to talk to.”

Sam bore it well. Adam knew he could crush the life out of anybody, but it was always nice to find somebody who could tolerate his hugs with no more than a grunt of air.

“Alright, alright…” He managed, and patted Adam’s shoulder to get him to let go.

“Sorry.”

“No you’re not,” Sam chuckled. He glanced back into the house, where Marty and her mother were having to work around Baseball in the mercifully large kitchen. He lowered his voice conspiratorially.

“Hey look…if you got a question you want to ask me, now would be the time…” he hinted.

“Uh…yeah. I know it’s kinda old-fashioned, but—”

Sam smiled. “Yeah, it is,” he agreed. “But I appreciate old-fashioned.”

Adam cleared his throat and took a deep breath. “I’d…May I ask for Martina’s hand in marriage?”

“You absolutely may,” Sam nodded, almost before the question was out. “‘Course, my permission don’t count for shit. If you don’t ask her she’ll ask you soon enough. She sees right through you, you know that?”

“She always does,” Adam agreed, feeling substantially liberated for just taking that one small step.

“She’ll say yes,” Sam told him. “Just gotta pick a good moment.”

“I will,” Adam promised.

Sam nodded, then lifted his beer. “You’re a fine young man. I’ll be proud to call you my son.”

Adam raised his beer too, there was a chime of glass on glass, and he felt a weight on his shoulders evaporate as he took a drink.

Sam emptied the bottle in five smooth gulps. “I do have one question…” he mused, setting it down.

“Uh…Sure?”

“I know there’s gotta be a story behind you bein’ called ’Warhorse.’ Care to share?”

“Uh…” Adam paused for a second at the thought of sharing that particular story with his girlfriend’s father, but Samuel Kovač really did have the exact same knowing smirk on his face that Martina wore. It was clear where she’d got her instinct for mischief.

He was being tested, he realized.

“Well, it’s courtesy of Technical Sergeant Lake, back in Basic…” he began, then paused. “Shit, I haven’t written to him in a while…”

“The story, ‘Horse,” Sam reminded him with his grin getting wider by the second.

“Right. So, uh, I made the mistake of picking the bunk closest to the door…”

When Marty emerged from the house a few minutes later to check on the fire pit’s progress, she found the two of them laughing together like old friends.

Date Point: 13y1w5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Everybody on Cimbrean exercised constantly. It wasn’t just a good idea for counteracting the planet’s low gravity and its deleterious effects on human physiology, there were tax incentives. The gym played pretty much the same role in Folctha culture as a coffee shop might elsewhere. In fact, most gyms had smoothie shops purveying drinks that almost defeated the purpose of the workout. Some of the “protein shakes” were so heavy on sugar and “mocha” flavoring it was a wonder people weren’t crowding around the bar in yoga pants and Uggs.

Of course, nobody who’d learned proper fitness from Adam went anywhere near the stuff. Ava only used ’Fitness in Motion’ because they had a row of treadmills and were happy to let her dog on them.

It was a good thing for Gabriel because it gave him a natural excuse to hang out with the daughter he rarely saw otherwise. She dutifully showed up for breakfast every Saturday but Ava treated her work like it was Oxygen, as though she’d choke and die if she wasn’t constantly laboring away in the news mines.

She was actually becoming a Cimbrean celebrity nowadays. Gabe would sometimes notice the way people spotted her and pointed her out to their friends. Somebody had even requested her autograph once, though Ava had never given any indication of noticing or caring about the attention. She just…worked.

Worked, and took her work incredibly seriously.

“You know we have people applying to join the team now who just… ugh, their whole work experience is this stupid ’churnalism’ shit,” she was complaining. She could do that for now, she was still in the long, steady jog part of her treadmill session.

Gabe’s machine was set to at best a fast walking pace and as always he was in a little too much discomfort to be a good conversationalist, but frankly that made for a good match. She had an outlet and sounding board, he had somebody to distract him from the fact that he was limping along like a much older man.

“Churnalism?”

“Yeah, you know. Churning out ’stories’ by trawling social media for some interesting video or a news piece they haven’t covered yet, running up their own spin on it in like a hundred words and then they slap on a clickbait title and…boom. A million clicks and a thousand dollars in ad revenue, thank you very much.” She took a swig from her water battle. ”God I’m glad I worked with Simon.”

“How is he?” Gabriel asked. He knew that the two kept in touch professionally and also as something verging on being friends, despite the lingering mutual hatred between Ava and Simon Harvey’s nephew Sean.

“Still doing real reporting, somehow. He managed to get himself embedded with Coalition forces in the Andaman Islands.”

“Sounds more like a vacation than work.”

She smiled. “It would be, if he wasn’t doing a piece on Indonesian pirates from the HMAS Toowoomba.”

“…*’Toowoomba?’*”

“It’s Australian. Anyway, meanwhile we’ve got kids coming into the ESNN office like ’oh yeah, I’ve got three years experience in journalism’ and really they spent those three years glued to Facebook or whatever playing a huge game of Telephone.” She sighed. “I mean, this stuff was a problem when I was twelve, you’d think we’da figured out how to fix it by now.”

Gabe chuckled despite a stab of pain in his leg. “Some problems can’t be fixed,” he said. “Not without screwing up something else.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Freedom of speech, independence of the press…” Ava sounded less than enthusiastic about the cornerstone of her own career. She glanced sideways at Hannah, who was loping along with her tongue lolling happily out of her mouth on the adjacent treadmill. “There’s no such thing as an independent press, Dad. Everyone keeps trying to buy us. Sooner or later we’ll be just another mouthpiece for one of, like, five billionaires.”

“Why? Does everything have to be owned by somebody?” he asked.

“Pretty much, yeah. Most news organizations run at a loss. The only reason anybody takes them on is to spread their—” Ava grunted as her treadmill beeped and sped up, leaving her to run up an incline. “—Their agenda,” she managed.

Gabe limped along in silence while she ran, reflecting ruefully that he was still young and fit enough himself that he could ordinarily have outrun her no problem. He’d recovered a lot of strength and mobility during his short course of Cruezzir-D, but half his leg was permanently asleep from the nerve injury.

Which reminded him.

He hobbled and grimaced along until her machine slowed and flattened out again and she returned to a sustainable jog with a grateful expression, then to a walking pace, and finally stopped. She leaned heavily on the rail until her breathing slowed, and Gabriel stopped his own machine when she reached for her water bottle and drained it.

“…So I’ve been thinking,” he said, as she stopped Hannah’s treadmill and let the dog off. Hannah promptly trotted away and plopped herself down in front of the air conditioning unit, panting.

“About?”

“You remember Nofl, right?”

“Yyyes—?” She asked, slowly, then jumped to an accurate conclusion. “Oh, Dad, you’re not thinking of letting him—?”

“Fix my leg?” Gabe finished for her. “Yeah, I am. I’m always in pain, I spend half my time in that maldita wheelchair, and when I finally have grandkids I won’t be able to hold them in case my leg gives out.”

Ava at least gave his words some thought, though he obviously hadn’t persuaded her. “I can see why you’d want to…but I don’t know dad, I mean, he’s a smuggler.”

“And a Corti. I know. I have a handle on him though.”

“You mean like… leverage? Or—?”

“I know how he thinks.” Gabe grimaced at a stab of pain in his side as he limped over to the ‘smoothie’ bar. “He takes pride in his work.”

“I…” She sighed and glanced at Hannah, who sensed her uncertainty to and immediately got up and trotted to her side. “…I guess.”

“Come on, mija, speak your mind.”

“I don’t even trust my mind on this stuff any longer…” Ava said. Hannah whined and licked her hand, which always picked her up. “No, okay. You’re just…reminding me of Adam right now. Doing whatever it was he did to himself to get that big? That never sat right with me but…there was no point in arguing with him about it.”

She wiped her wristband across her forehead to mop up the lingering glow of her workout and gave him a complicated look. “You know? I mean…I trust that you don’t do stuff lightly or without thinking about it, but the thought is kinda freaking me out.”

Gabe didn’t know quite what to say to that, but Hannah as always came to the rescue…this time by suddenly looking up towards the door and whining. Ava immediately gave the dog her full attention.

“Hey, what’s up girl? Is…oh, no. It’s your boyfriend.”

Everybody in Folctha knew Bozo. It wasn’t that the SOR’s canine mascot was allowed to roam the town completely free, but…He was as big as a small pony. A well-trained, obedient, perfectly behaved puppy-pony with access to a secret dimension full of tennis balls.

He was sitting outside the gym’s front door with three of them stuffed in his mouth at once and his tail thumping on the sidewalk. The mental image of a young man holding a bouquet of flowers completely distracted Gabriel from the conversation and made him laugh to himself.

“That dog’s almost as smart as me,” he commented instead.

“He won’t leave until he gets to play with Hannah,” Ava sighed. “And he won’t hound us, either. He’ll just sit there. Wagging.”

“So he’s a polite date, then.”

Ava sighed, then giggled. “Oh, he’s a perfect gentleman…Come on, Han. You wanna play?”

Hanna spun around Ava’s legs and whined excitedly. Ava giggled again, stuffed her gear into her bag and tagged her gym time with the Folctha fitness tracking app on her phone.

She was right, Bozo was a perfect gentleman. The moment they emerged from the gym there was no sudden explosion of barking, he just dropped a tennis ball on the ground for Hannah and sat back expectantly. The two dogs sniffed noses, made friends and then the frenzy of running around and unbridled canine happiness started, only to end in a mutual posture of poised watchfulness when Ava picked up the ball and a blur of legs and paws when she threw it.

“Should we take him back up to the base?” Gabe asked.

“Nah. Rebar sends one of the guys out to track him down as Motivation,” Ava revealed. “Wouldn’t wanna spoil his fun.”

Bozo was allowing Hannah to ‘win,’ Gabe noticed. He gave chase and played as if he wanted to steal the ball, but he never did more than that. Boys were the same regardless of species.

“Uh…what about if those two…?” he asked.

“Have pups? People on this planet are really crying out for pets, you know? Didn’t you read the piece I did on it?”

“You did a piece on pets?”

“Sure. A little something to make the Gaoians happy, they’re sick of people treating them like they’re cute,” Ava told him. “And…y’know, we have zero cats on this planet, only a handful of dogs…So there was a story there.”

“He’s really good with the ETs…”

“So’s Hannah. And she’s from a long line of therapy dogs. They’re both really smart, really trainable…I figure, Cimbrean could do worse than some puppies. Could be a new breed.”

“Been thinking about Bozo, actually. You know what I saw the other day?”

“Was he doing the turkey thing again?”

The turkey thing, ah yes. The woods around Cimbrean were thick with big, surly birds that had been introduced as part of the biosphere exchange. They would strut around the place making a dignified nuisance of themselves, and every so often Bozo would trot through town with his tail up and a live turkey hanging in a limp, futile posture from his mouth.

The worst the birds apparently suffered for it was wounded pride, usually. Nobody was quite sure why he did it, though Adam was of the opinion that Bozo was hinting at more turkey dinners around the base.

“…Besides that,” he said. “I actually managed to stumble onto two Gaoians about to fight. Iron-Claw and Firefang, I think? I can’t always tell. Anyway, Bozo appeared out of nowhere and stopped the fight dead in its tracks. They tried to get around him but, well…he’s scarier than they are, and eventually they slinked away. I gave him my burger and a scratch on his head.”

“I bet he liked that. Maybe you should make him an honorary member of the PD? He’s pretty much the town mascot anyway. Even the Kwmbwrw seem to…well, they don’t sneer at him quite so much.”

“How can you tell when a Kwmbwrw is sneering?” Gabe asked, curiously.

“They look at you with all three eyes at once.”

“Hmm…” Gabe was struck by a mischievous thought, and nudged Ava in her ribs. “Okay, so pups are on the cards, eh? What about you? Is there a Bozo in your life that you haven’t told me about?”

Ava pulled a face as she picked up the returned and slightly damper ball. Hannah had tired of keepaway and was keen to have it thrown again, and Bozo was keeping an eye on her while also wagging at a small pack of gaoian cubs that had entered the park along with a couple of their human friends under the fussing attention of a Mother.

“My dog has a better love life than me,” she replied.

“That’s a no, then.”

“Ergh…” she made an awkward, thoughtful noise and then threw the ball. A couple of the younger Gaoians, newcomers to the colony, made awed sounds as they watched it sail fifty feet with the dogs in hot pursuit. Naturally, the attending Mother immediately pounced on the opportunity to remind them about how strong Humans were and how to stay safe around them.

Ava didn’t seem to notice. “It’s easier for dogs. They don’t do relationship drama. Like… I ran into Coombes the other day.”

“Coombes?”

“You know. From Egypt?”

Gabe’s memory finally put a face to the name. “…Isn’t he a fair bit older than you?” He asked.

“Yeah. And also there’s the whole thing with me being Adam’s ex, so…” she sighed. “I mean, he was real nice about it, but…”

“Struck out, huh?”

“Dogs don’t care about age or exes. Humans do.” Ava shrugged, though not as despondently as Gabe would have guessed. “For the best, I guess. I think I know better than to date a military man, now.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“Well, he’s really hot.” Ava gave him a rare teasing grin. She didn’t smile often enough, Gabe reflected. When she did it was angelic, but then again perhaps that was just the pronounced contrast against her usual resting expression of mild melancholy.

He laughed, happy that she was able to relax, and decided to get back onto the subject of his scheme with Nofl.

“Anyway…about this therapy I’m planning to have…”

Ava’s smile faltered, but after a thoughtful second she gave him a hug. “I don’t want you to be in pain, and I know Jess would like it if you were more mobile…” she conceded. “I just… are you sure you trust Nofl?”

“I can predict him,” Gabe promised. “And when it comes to his work…yeah. I do.”

“Then…it’s your choice, isn’t it? I don’t have a right to tell you.”

“Besides, somebody has to be the first patient for new treatments,” Gabe pointed out. “This could really help a lot of people.”

“I hope it does. I hope it helps you,” Ava said. “I just…I’m allowed to worry, Dad.”

Gabe hugged her back. “Just don’t let the worry get in the way, yeah?” he pleaded. “Worst that could happen is I’m stuck in my wheelchair. Best thing would be I get my mobility back. That’s gotta be worth a shot.”

“Okay, okay…” she sighed and let go. “But I’m still gonna worry.

“That’s okay.”

There was a thunderous barking from nearby, and Bozo went tearing past with a chittering Gaoian cub riding his back while the Mother desperately gave chase.

“…Guess those puppies are gonna have to wait, huh?”

“For today.” Ava whistled for Hannah and jogged off in Bozo’s wake. “There’s always mañana.”

For the first time in a long while, she sounded like she meant it.

Date Point 13y2w AV
Light Bulk Transport My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Deep Space

Vakno

Several uneventful days of what Dog poetically called ’hauling ass’ out of Elder Space had finally permitted Vakno to relax, but the human still seemed to be on edge. He had used the ship’s fabrication shop to help convert an empty cargo bay into a firing range and was giving himself a so-called ’crash course’ in the proper use of his weapon.

All of the practice was paying off: He was now consistently able to hit the same wall every time.

Vakno had been surprised to discover that Dog’s crew were universally non-human and mostly treated their deathworlder shipmaster with a certain friendly wariness, as if they were never entirely convinced he wouldn’t suddenly forget himself and accidentally maim them. Vakno, being well aware that a natural expression of friendliness among humans was a hearty slap on the back with enough force to potentially shatter a low-Class species’ spine, couldn’t blame them.

She mostly stuck to her lab aboard the Negotiable Curiosity. Legally, the ship’s ownership had a question mark hanging over it: Vakno had been a business associate and passenger aboard it at the time of its master’s death, rather than a crewman. This meant that if Dog wanted to he potentially had a legitimate claim on the ship as salvage.

Fortunately, he seemed to have no interest in staking that claim. His own ship was interesting enough—It was a heavily modified Yrvrk Shipyards Model Seven, riddled end-to-end with structural reinforcements that the nonhuman crew complained about constantly as they had to wrestle with heavy steel pressure doors that were clearly designed with a deathworlder’s strength in mind.

All too often, in fact, they would just leave the pressure doors open. Dog was constantly chastising them whenever he toured the ship and found them open. Vakno honestly didn’t see why, as My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon was equipped with a standard internal forcefield array designed to do the exact same job, and Dog seemed to have forgotten about his half-hearted threats an hour later.

Then there were the cargo bays. A stock Model Seven was little more than sixteen cargo bays arranged radially around a central spine, with a total capacity of nearly five thousand cubic meters. Somebody had permanently sealed the exterior doors on two of the rearmost bays after filling them with energy storage modules and running thick power busses back to the ship’s reactors, which had been replaced with a high-output fusion plant fed by deuterium tanks in two more of the rear holds.

The net effect was to reduce the ship’s haulage capacity by nearly a tenth, but she had a power output more normally associated with military pickets.

In other words, just like her captain, the ship was full of quirks and deathworlder lateral thinking. Dog’s seat on the flight deck was lined with a deep-pile shaggy brown carpet and he’d installed a seatbelt that crossed his chest diagonally, strung with metal boxes that had no apparent function. When Vakno had commented on this, Dog had simply laughed and made a strange roaring or growling noise.

“I just wish I remembered to buy those plastic ’dinosaurs’ last time I was home,” he’d added.

All in all, Dog was very strange…but his ship was fast. The journey out of Elder Space had taken far less time than the trip inwards aboard Negotiable Curiosity. Still, it was plenty of time for Vakno to decide what she was going to do.

As a silver banner, she had influence and credibility that Bedu had lacked. Green banners were known for chasing wild improbabilities like abducting deathworlders in the hopes that they would stumble into some amazing discovery that might launch them higher in the Directorate’s echelons. A few had even succeeded, sometimes posthumously.

Silver banners were more conservative. They had the privilege of the Directorate’s favor from the moment their gestation cells decanted them into the tender mercies of the education system, they didn’t need to fight for it. Instead, they had learned not to squander it, and their reticence lent weight to any hypothesis they did choose to back.

That didn’t mean automatic belief, however. She devoted most of her time to digging through all the things that Bedu hadn’t told her, and gaining a growing respect for his competence as she did so. He had been expertly leading her to a conclusion the whole time, drip-feeding the next datum as and when she needed it.

A manipulation, yes, but a skilled and above all necessary one. His loss was now increasingly painful—his assistance would have been invaluable in persuading skeptics.

She was in a low mood, therefore, when Dog called her ship with a worried expression behind those silver whiskers of his.

”I think our friend from Aru knew how to open the door,” he began, without preamble. ”There’s a ship comin’ up behind us and ho-wee! is it a mover!”

“The Creation Stepper. Dread had it built to some exceedingly strange specifications,” Vakno stood up.

“It armed?”

“Not legally.”

“I wasn’t askin’ if it was legal. I was askin’ if it has guns.”

“It…I don’t know,” Vakno conceded. “I know he didn’t order anything ship-grade but there were a lot of pulse rifles—”

“It’s armed,” Dog decided. “Better get your skinny grey ass up here.”

Vakno blinked both layers of her eyelids at being so summarily ordered around, but then decided that right now it wasn’t worth the outrage. She grabbed her tablet, backed up all the ship’s files—or at least, all the important ones—and took the elevator up from the *My Other Spaceship*’s small shuttle bay to her command deck.

Its command deck, she reminded herself. The ship was an object, there was no point in falling into a silly human superstition.

Dog was berating his Vzk’tk first officer when she arrived.

“-Wanna hear a damn good reason why our fuckin’ emergency recall jump ain’t charged!” he snarled.

Krzzvk was having commendable success in not cowering, but an angry deathworlder was an angry deathworlder. They had a way of inspiring mortal terror without really meaning to.

“B-but we never use the recall jump, captain!” he protested.

Dog took an enraged step forward with far more than his customary soft-footed force. The deck rattled. “Lemme tell ya why we never use it, Krizzy,” he snarled. “We never use it ‘cuz it’s fer fuckin’ emergencies! High-tail it back there and charge the fuckin’ thing!”

Vakno let herself into the room, stepping aside to let the hapless Krzzvk flee.

“Problems?” she asked.

“Our boy Dread’s catchin’ up,” Dog reported. “He’s got a big-ass power plant for a ship that size, even bigger than ours.”

“You are certain that he’s armed?”

“Yyyup. Lots of pulse rifles? Guarantee he made himself a shrapnel gun.”

“A what?”

“Simplest bit of wreck-tech in the galaxy. Strip all the worky bits outta a load of pulse rifles, hook ‘em up to the ship’s power core, stick ‘em in the end of a metal tube. You can load whatever you like in that tube: Garbage, gravel, metal scraps, water ice…don’t matter. Whatever it is, it’ll come outta that thing goin’ fast enough to put a lotta holes in my ship.”

“…That cannot be accurate,” Vakno surmised.

“Won’t fuckin’ need to be,” Dog growled, then barked at one of the Vzk’tk crew. “Izzy! Switch the power over from engines to the shields. We can’t outrun this asshole, but I bet we can tank him.”

“Yes captain!”

“And fer God’s sake, somebody go check the pressure doors are all closed!”

Nobody moved, and Dog sighed. “Ricky! ’Somebody’ means you!”

Another Vzk’tk bolted from the room.

Dog sank into his chair with his teeth gritted so hard that Vakno imagined she could hear them grinding.

”…Can we ‘tank’ him?” she asked quietly, so the others would not hear.

Dog glanced at her, checked they were not overheard, then muttered his reply. “Sister, I fuckin’ doubt it.”

Ten seconds later, the ship lurched gently as the *Creation Stepper*’s warp field merged with its own. Dog put on his seatbelt.

“…Good luck, everyone.”

There was a slam, the deck became the wall, alarms howled, and Vakno had just enough time to realize that she was going to hit her head on the—

Date Point: 13y2w AV
South Andros Island, Bahamas, Caribbean, Earth

Adam Arés

The job of picking their holiday destination had fallen to Marty, and as always she’d excelled. Anticipating that the Beef Bros. were going to want some privacy away from the gawking eyes and awed personal inspections of the general public, she’d found a well-reviewed chalet resort that promised the perfect balance of seclusion when needed and company when desired.

And Adam had been right—she looked stunning in a navy blue multi-string bikini with a translucent white sarong on one hip.

Of course, it was his solemn duty as her boyfriend to protect her skin from the sun and make sure she was well covered in sun cream…a duty she was only too happy to let him perform. She dozed off prone in the shaded sand under the palm trees with a tranquil smile on her face, and Adam spent the heat of noonday reading the books her father had given him.

Life, in short, was good. Good enough that he resolved that the best kind of vacations were always going to be the rare but epic ones.

He was about two chapters into ‘The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left’ by Yuval Levin when Martina woke from her nap and wandered back towards the chalet, stretching and smiling. They’d been there only two days so far, and Adam was still reveling in the novel experience of privacy, alone in a little sandy oasis of calm among the trees where nobody could see in, but he could still hear the waves.

“Where’d ‘Base get to, anyway?”

Adam smiled at her. “He’s gone to arrange a diving session.” Which was true. He’d done so at Adam’s request to give him and Marty some alone time, but the fact was that both of them were still PJs at heart and kind of missed getting any use out of the diving skills they’d learned in training. Some aspects of those skills kinda translated for EVA, sorta, but it just wasn’t the same.

“Oh, so we’re alone, huh?” Marty grinned at him. “His idea, or yours?”

Of course she saw right through him. Adam fought back on the urge to fidget nervously with the little box in his pocket and give the game away and instead put on his best game face. “My idea,” he replied.

“When’s he gonna be back?”

“Uh…we’re gonna meet him for dinner, later.”

“Awesome.” She reached behind her back, undid her top and threw it contemptuously to one side. “God, once sand gets into that thing…”

“…ow?” Adam suggested.

“Yeah,” she agreed, dusting herself off. “Ow.”

She straddled his legs and draped her arms over his shoulders. “So what did you want me all alone for?”

Adam’s hands went to her waist, then a little lower. “Take a wild guess…”

She smirked and kissed the side of his neck. “Incorrigible…”

Adam was riding on a high of confidence that had followed him all the way down from Georgia, and for the first time in a while he sensed an opportunity to be seized.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he protested, effecting an insincere air of dignified confusion. “My intentions are completely innocent.”

She snorted and trailed her finger down his pectorals. “You. Innocent. I’ll believe it when I—omigod.”

Adam managed to keep his inner whoop of triumph down to just his biggest, puppy-est grin because for once, just for once in his life, he’d finally managed to fool her.

He was proud of the ring, too. It wasn’t gaudy or flashy, but there was plenty of room on the cathedral band to show off an intricate mokume-gane in white gold and palladium, and an eye-catching ceylon sapphire..

She stared at it dumbfounded for a second and then breathed a disbelieving little half-laugh. “Wow…uh. You got me. I…wasn’t expecting you to ask now, uh…”

“You were expecting me to ask, though.”

“Yeah.” She cleared her throat, looking uncharacteristically lost for words. “Uh…yes. I do. I mean, I will.”

Adam chuckled. “I haven’t asked yet.”

“The answer’s yes.”

“Let me ask it, first!” Adam protested, though his smile was getting wider by the second. She laughed and swatted him affectionately on the head.

“Alright, you big oaf. Go ahead and ask.”

Adam grinned and kissed her. “Marty, I love you. Will you marry m-”

”Yes! Yes I will!” she repeated herself, and slipped her hand into his so that he could slide the ring onto her finger.

He buried her in a huge hug as soon as that was done. “Fooled you, huh?”

“I was convinced you were gonna take me on a sunset walk and go down on one knee and all that stuff….” she kissed his cheek, just below his ear. “This was better.”

“It was?”

She nodded against him. “Yeah. It’s good to know you can surprise me…I like it when you’re spontaneous.”

“Guess I’ll practice my spontaneousness then.”

She laughed softly and kissed him. “That’s spontaneity, ‘Horse. And you can’t practice being spontaneous.”

“Sure I can. I just have to be spontaneous more often. Practice!”

“Hah.” She grinned at him and rubbed her nose against his. “You only got me this time because I let my guard down.”

“You should let your guard down more often.”

She laughed, kissed him again and then stood up. “Maybe I will.”

Adam cocked his head curiously at her. “So, what happens now?”

“Now…” she picked up her top and put it on again. “We go for a walk, we spend time together, we chill out and just…enjoy ourselves.”

Adam grinned, and sprang to his feet. “Sounds good to me.”

He darted inside to leave the ring’s box on the table while she finished tying her top, then took her hand and let her lead him out from under the shady palms toward the beach, smiling like a happy lunatic.

The one big thing that had been weighing on his mind was out of the way. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing more to do. Just a solid month of sun, sand and relaxing.

Things couldn’t possibly be more perfect.

Date Point: 13y2w AV
Light Bulk Transport My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches.

Vakno

There were…lights. Some human myths said there were lights when a being was dead. Vakno had never quite figured out if she was supposed to go toward them, or avoid them.

The fabled heavenly chorus was a disappointment, however. She felt instinctively like it should sound a little more inspiring than Dog’s voice saying “Eaaasy sister. Fuckin’ miracle you’re still alive…Come on, wake up!”

Reality reasserted itself. It was not pleasant: There was smoke, and deep amber lighting, and the mournful whooping sound of a shipwide alarm. There was pain, and a recording of Dog’s voice on loop.

”Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Hephaestus Lima Bravo Foxtrot One, at Cimbrean-Six-stellar Lagrange One. Sustained heavy damage and casualties. Emergency recall activated. We have nine aboard, two dead, six wounded. Over. Message repeats in ten seconds—”

Dog himself was covered in blood but to Corti eyes human blood was a kind of waxy dark green, so full of haemoglobin that it was almost black. The stuff smearing Dog’s face was too pale to be his own. He gave Vakno a weak smile from behind the film of gore. “Shit, you’re tougher than you look. Thought fer sure you were fucked.”

Vakno rolled over and tried to stand, gaining a new appreciation for the word ’fucked’. It summarized what her body was telling her with an apt animalistic bluntness. The world became wobbly and she was forced to sit down again.

“Careful there,” Dog cautioned. “Big brains, fragile bodies, not a good combo. You stay there until the medics get here…”

“We…escaped, then,” Vakno managed.

“Close run thing. Krzzvk got the recall jumper charged just in time…That ship woulda ripped us in two on the fourth pass.”

Thinking was abnormally difficult. Thoughts seemed to bump slowly around inside Vakno’s skull rather than flowing neatly together like a thousand silver tributaries, but she noticed that there was an alarmingly large hole torn in the hull where something had ripped through the flight deck, through one of the crew and out the other side. An emergency pressure shield shimmered over the tear.

“Those shrapnel guns,” she commented. “…Deadly.”

“Hell yeah. Won’t do shit to anythin’ with armor, but they tear shields down like that!” Dog snapped his fingers for emphasis.

Vakno frowned at him. “How…do you know?”

Dog offered something that looked like a smile, vaguely. At least, his teeth were showing. His eyes weren’t joining in. “Hephaestus maybe made me remove mine.”

“Why?”

“Somethin’ about maritime law this an’ treaty that, an’ Dominion the other…” Dog snorted. “Load’a ass. Nearly got us killed.”

A new voice interrupted the looping distress call, and Dog sprang up to reply.

”Lima Bravo Foxtrot One, HMS Caledonia. Roger your distress call captain, do you need to abandon ship, over?”

Dog grabbed his microphone. “Uh, no Caledonia we do not. I have…zero pressure in three sections, emergency power only. Dead in the water, but she’ll hold together, over.”

”Roger. We have your beacon, ETA five minutes. Caledonia out.”

Dog nodded to himself and breathed what sounded to Vakno like a sigh of relief as he stepped away from the communications console. He gently patted one of the injured Vzk’tk crew on the shoulder in a comforting way. “Help’s on the way.”

Vakno settled back and focused on the view outside the front windows as an alternative to the pain. She was quite sure that her leg was broken, and was trying to decide if that was more or less worrying than the fuzzy, disjointed quality of her thoughts. She tried to count the time until the rescue ship arrived, but the numbers slipped away and she found herself counting the three minute mark twice.

Shortly after she gave up there was a barely perceptible shimmer in the light from the Cimbrean star, and the bridge was thrown into darkness as a ship plunged out of warp and back into the world of sublight travel barely a kilometer away. If it hadn’t eclipsed the star, the newcomer’s black hull would have been perfectly invisible against the stellar background.

Dog grinned and nodded, and spoke into the comm again. ”Caledonia, you’re beautiful. Just puttin’ that out there.”

There was a groan from one of the crew. “You are very strange, Dog.”

“Brother, look at that thing!”

Vakno scrutinized it as well as she could. There was a seam of light along the newcomer’s flank which lengthened, split and widened as huge physical doors opened to allow a pair of tiny human silhouettes in EVA suits.

”My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, REBAR. You alright in there, Captain Wagner?”

Dog nodded at nothing. “I’m fine. Bunch’a messed up ETs in here, though. Lotta broken bones.”

“Gotcha. Our ingress is through your shuttle bay. How’s the pressure down there?”

Dog checked his console. “Vacuum. The atmo containment field blew out. All the sections next to it have pressure.”

“Okay. Sit tight.”

The two spacewalkers angled down toward the shuttle bay and vanished from sight. Vakno rested her head on the deck and wondered if the calm, conversational tone the two humans had used was meant to be reassuring.

If so, it seemed to be working on Dog. He smiled reassuringly at his crew, promising an imminent end to their woes.

Some minutes later, there was a banging knock on the flight deck’s pressure door, and Dog rushed to open it. Two of the biggest humans Vakno had ever seen squeezed themselves through it and carefully shut it behind them. They were hauling a huge roll of fabric between them, and when they lowered it to the deck it made the kind of solid noise she normally associated with industrial equipment.

The smaller of them immediately set to triaging the wounded, beginning with Vakno.

“Well, lass? What’s the craic?”

Vakno just blinked at him. “I…hit my head,” she told him, after deciding that he probably intended to make sense.

“Oof. Savage.” He shone a light in her eyes and moved it around, then pulled out a more standard medical diagnostic scanner and played it over her cranium. “Grand. Just a wee knock, like. You hold on, okay?” He unpeeled a yellow tab from his medkit, pressed it to her arm and moved on to the next patient.

The larger one meanwhile had opened the equipment roll and was setting up a frame of some kind in the middle of the flight deck. Dog greeted him like an old friend.

“Hey Rebar. Who’s your buddy?”

‘Rebar’ paused long enough to knock fists with him. “He’s Irish.”

Dog snorted. “No shit? An’ here I thought he was a fuckin’ German.”

Somehow, Vakno could see the way ’Irish’ was grinning even through his helmet, even as he worked. “Feckin’ original like, isn’t it?” he asked, applying a similar yellow patch to one of the Vzk’tk.

Rebar finished slotting the frame together and stepped back to fire it up, touching the side of his helmet.

”Caledonia CIC, REBAR. Jump Array deployed, area pressurised. You’re clear to send over medics.”

Vakno didn’t hear the reply, but Rebar nodded at whatever he heard and shepherded Dog away from the Jump Array. Seconds later it pulsed, and a black cube materialized within it that dissolved to reveal a team of four humans, who fanned out across the flight deck to work with ’Irish.’

“That looked like Bedu’s ship down in the shuttle bay…” he commented.

“It is, yeah. You know Bedu?”

“Met him once, yeah. Is he on board?”

“Shit, well… sorry to tell you this brother, but he’s dead.”

Rebar went still, and looked around the ship slowly. His hand moved as though he had aborted a gesture halfway through making it, and instead he settled for pacing away for a second before turning back to Dog.

“…Just what in the shit happened to you guys?” he asked.

++End Chapter 37++

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Thirty Deathworlders

Adam Turnbull, Andrew Ford, Aryeh Winter, Bartosz Borkowski, Ben Moskovitz, Ben Thrussell, Brian Berland, Chris Bausch, Chris Candreva, Dar, Darryl Knight, Devin Rousso, Elliott Woods, Greg Tebbutt, Ignate Flare, Jamie Atkinson, Jon, lovot, Matt Demm, Matthew Cook, Nader Ghali, Nicholas Enyeart, Nick Annunziata, Parker Brown, Patrick Huizinga, Ryan Cadiz, Sun Rendered, tsanth, TTTA, and Volka…

As well as 36 Friendly ETs and 161 Dizi Rats

Chapter 38: Paroxysm

Date Point: 13y 1m AV
Low orbit over Planet Aru, Elder Space

Lieutenant Anthony ‘Abbott’ Costello

“Why is this called a HELLNO jump?”

Costello considered the yawning sky below him and decided that his question demanded an expansion. “…Besides the obvious.”

To his left, Rebar chuckled darkly. “Pretty sure it’s just the obvious, sir. Burgess never did come up with a good backronym.”

“Yet,” Murray commented. That single word was a show of remarkable faith, coming from him.

“We’re pretty sure it ends in No Opening. An’ I like High Exit. It’s the double L that’s the tricky bit.” Rebar added.

Costello leaned out the back of their CS-200 Weaver again and tracked the capillary squiggle of a brilliant emerald river among the brown, arid soil far below. “Long Line?” he suggested. They were so far up that the Weaver was flying in the next best thing to a vacuum, and its speed across the ground was measured in kilometers per second. The imaginary line they would draw on the ground during the drop was damn near transcontinental.

“High Exit, Long Line, No Opening…” Rebar tasted the backronym thoughtfully. “I like it.”

“Happy to contribute, Master Sergeant.”

Costello glanced back at Rebar, and was pretty sure he saw the older man was grinning behind his pressure mask.

“I dunno, bruh,” Sikes interjected. “I still prefer High Elevation Launch, Landing Not Optional.”

“Landing is always not optional,” Murray pointed out.

Firth couldn’t hold his peace any longer. “Why the fuck’s it gotta have an acronym anyhow?” he complained.

Rebar shrugged. “Hey, Burgess named it and he said it’s gonna have an acronym.”

“He’s young and dumb and he’s been corrupted by ‘yer evil Army ways,” Firth grumbled darkly. “I’ll need to apply some remedial beatings, I see…”

“The beatings will continue until Firth’s morale improves,” Sikes quipped.

Murray scoffed. “We’re fucked, then.”

Firth cracked his knuckles through his gauntlets, and there was no way he wasn’t grinning ominously behind his visor. His gauntlets were new, custom made for him, and were better described as maces rather than gloves. Anything they hit was going to stay hit in the worst way.

Everyone’s suits were showing little signs of customization like that. Some were basically cosmetic, like the layer of green rubber on the soles of Butler’s boots. Others were more of a solution to a recurring problem: for example, Murray tended to leave knives in people so he was carrying more of them than was strictly standard.

Costello left them to talk, and checked his suit’s linkage to the battle system. Everything was coming in crisp and perfect, and God was it satisfying. The data mills up on HMS Caledonia were massaging every byte that his team could generate and feeding it down in ways that had been pure videogame ten years ago. When he leaned out the back and glanced over toward the other Weaver, the system helpfully interpreted what he was looking for and put a small and unobtrusive diamond over it on his HUD.

And those were just the two on Caledonia, nicknamed ALBION and CAMBRIA. Supposedly they got an order of magnitude smarter when they could link with their fellows on other ships, and especially with the Fleet Intelligence Center on HMS Myrmidon.

The other Weaver was carrying Bravo Team: Blaczynski, Akiyama, Parata and Newman, with Regaari for their team leader. The remaining Gaoians made up Charlie Team and were led by Faarek. They had already infiltrated covertly via Exo-Atmospheric drop twenty minutes previously, and were quickly scouting the target building. Thanks to them, Costello was already working with a partial schematic for the hospital that was growing by the second as ALBION and CAMBRIA crunched their suit sensor data.

An important number blinked top-right in his field of view, and presumably in the rest of the team’s too, because they immediately quit jawing and ran their final checks. Costello trusted Rebar to handle it—he was keeping the burly Master Sergeant at his side as a safety net against his own relative inexperience after all—and raised Regaari.

“DEXTER, ABBOTT. Our loadmaster says drop in four. Alpha team’s all ready. You?”

“Copy, ABBOTT. We await your signal.”

Regaari’s composure was something else. For the first time in military history human servicemen were about to drop into an LZ with an alien squad leader, but his voice was as cool, level and calm as a frozen lake.

Then again, so was Costello’s. Not for the first time, he reflected that Regaari had all the qualities of a damn fine officer, if only his loyalties to Clan and species didn’t prevent him from taking a commission. As it was, he was a damn fine NCO even by the superb standards of the SOR’s other enlisted men. Blaczynski had even remarked how it was ‘about damn time’ when the teams were announced, much to Regaari’s quiet, embarrassed and restrained delight.

But that was a thought for not now. Costello shut his eyes for a moment and took a single deep breath, paying special attention to the hiss of air past his ears under the helmet, the precise sensation and scent of suit air in his nose, the pressure of it as he held it in his chest, the taste of it in his mouth on the exhale.

When he opened his eyes, he was focused.

He watched the countdown end, and every system they had to let them know to jump—the HUD, the green light in the transport and the furious gesticulations of the Loadmaster in his vacuum suit—all conspired to send them charging out into the silent border between sky and space.

Sound ceased entirely. He wasn’t even getting the distant thrum of the transport through his boots any longer, just the hiss of air past his ears and the ice-calm reports of his men.

“Alpha Team in flight, Angels one-ninety.”

“Bravo Team in flight.”

The first stage of a jump from this height was to fall ass-first, curled up as small as possible so the suit’s emitters could keep the forcefield envelope nice and compact. It was a long way down, but terminal velocity in the tenuous stuff of Aru’s upper atmosphere was fast enough that Costello’s body would have been generating a bone-cracking sonic boom down in the troposphere. That speed was their weapon, but it also needed to be shed, and shed hard if they were going to land alive and fighting.

There wasn’t a white-knuckle ride like it anywhere else in the universe.

The second stage was where things got dicey. They weren’t high enough to generate a fireball—indeed, avoiding such an obvious signature was why they’d jumped below orbit in the first place—but the atmosphere’s density returned with a vengeance. Costello could feel the thrumming power of the air rushing past him even before the sound reasserted itself.

The EV-MASS helmet had smart hearing protection installed, and they needed it. There was no sense in the whole team making it to the ground with burst eardrums. The sonic cataclysm around him was having its intended effect, though: he could see his speed across the ground dropping off so sharply that the digits and tens were both a blur.

The job of reading out their altitude and speed as a backup to the HUD fell to Firth, who just couldn’t keep the swagger out of his voice, even though he was only reporting the hard numbers. “Angels Eighty. Two thousand knots.”

Eighty thousand feet. They were now ‘only’ fifteen miles up, doing ‘only’ mach three and plunging headlong through the kind of air pressures normally only achievable with high explosive.

On paper it sounded insane to perform acrobatics under those circumstances, but falling ass-first to the ground was no longer appropriate. Costello kicked his legs out, arched his back and twisted with his core and arms, flipping himself over and around in one endlessly-practiced stunt that left him falling in a more traditional skydiving posture.

At sixty thousand feet the flight fields lanced outwards, pinning him to the air. The sudden presence of lift in his life hit him like a linebacker—if he hadn’t tensed his diaphragm and braced for it, the impact might have winded him. The drop called for tensing his neck too, and the reason why became obvious when he hit Sikes’ shockwave and got bounced around. Those weighted wrestler’s bridges that Warhorse had them doing seven times a week were paying off today.

Without the suit, the air alone would have torn them all limb-from-limb: With it, they were merely enduring a full-body onslaught like being waled on by a whole baseball team while a pair of sumo wrestlers tried to bend them into bowties. Every one of them was already riding a dose of Crue-D just to handle the insertion.

That went for the Gaoians as well, though they had an easier time of it both due to their more advanced suits, but also their shorter limbs and longer torsos, which were well-suited to handle the stress. For them, it was more like dangerous swimming.

But it worked. The suits were good enough and the men wearing them were even better. After minutes of falling, from the opposite side of a continent and with a starting speed of Mach twenty, Alpha and Bravo teams didn’t just hit the right geography, not just the right city, they hit the correct building.

And they hit the ground running.

Alpha landed on the roof. There was no dicking around with breaching charges; Instead, Firth handled the roof access door by ignoring it. He plunged through it like it was a Japanese shōji and vanished into the hospital’s bowels with Murray an inch behind his elbow.

Rebar heaved the Wormhole Suppressor off Butler’s back and slammed it into place, and thank fuck one Protector had been on hand to carry the damn thing: Nobody wanted a repeat of San Diego. They were dealing with a potential Hierarchy safe house here, which meant that getting the wormhole suppressor in place while they still had the element of surprise was right at the top of the list.

Costello followed the two Aggressors down, keeping a weather-eye on the progress of Bravo and Charlie teams as they blitzed the building from two different ground-floor entrances. There was no danger of them blundering into each other or a blue-on-blue. Thanks to ALBION and CAMBRIA, everybody knew where everybody else was.

Just keeping up with the pair was a challenge. Of the entire HEAT, Murray and Firth were the most seasoned in close quarters and their combat experience in Egypt had left them perfectly in tune. It was almost a shame that there was nothing for them to kill. Room after room was secured and declared clear in a flash-flood of precision aggression, all laser-focused on the bunker in the basement.

Rebar and Snapfire caught up with Costello on the third storey, having left Butler to protect the Suppressor.

“Place ain’t been maintained in a long time,” Rebar commented immediately.

Costello nodded, noting the decrepit state of the concrete tiles and the film of condensation on the walls. If this had been Earth, the place would have been slick with black mold. “Any danger of a collapse?”

“Probably not,” Sikes shook his head. “Neglected steelwork buildings on Earth stand up for decades before they fall.”

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” Rebar promised, “But it looks solid enough.”

Costello nodded, keeping an eye on the other teams as they worked. “No signs of habitation,” he noted. “Lots of dust on the floor. If there’s anything here, I doubt it lives on the upper floo—”

“Contact!”

There was a muffled rattle of distant gunfire from elsewhere in the building, and Costello immediately dropped to one knee behind the cover of a discarded OmoAru gurney of some kind to give the situation his full attention. Blaczynski’s icon was blinking.

“STARFALL, report.”

“Some kinda drones with an optical cloak. Hit us from both sides at an intersection. Threat neutralized, no casualties.”

“Stay sharp.”

Blaczynski’s icon double-blinked by way of acknowledgement, and Costello took a second to make a tactical reassessment in light of the attack. He communicated a few minor changes to Charlie team, then hustled to catch up with his Aggressors.

The second clash with the drones happened two minutes later, on a stairwell. Firth and Murray were heading down, the drones were heading up. There was a flash and hiss of fusion blades igniting, a shouted warning from Murray, and a bullet hurricane. By the time Rebar and Costello burst through the door behind the Aggressors, the fight was already over. The walls were pockmarked and scored, and the steps were strewn with smashed drone.

“Musta been headin’ to the roof,” Sikes commented, kicking one of the larger remaining chunks.

“Guess the wormhole suppressor pissed them off…”

“Keep it defended, then. Rebar?”

The big NCO nodded at Sikes, who took off at speed back towards the suppressor.

Costello gestured down the stairs. “Let’s keep it going.”

The second storey was their first sign of any habitation: a dry room that had probably been a staff lounge at some point had been cleared out, the furniture just dumped in the corridor, and a basic bed had been set up inside. It was surrounded by a drift of foil packets that had once contained Dominion-made travel rations, the infamous tasteless gray food spheres.

They didn’t investigate any further than confirming the room was empty. They didn’t have time—the Suppressor was well defended, but one lucky hit might well result in instant antimatter-based obliteration for all of them and everybody knew it. The last of the building was swept and cleared in record time, and when the three teams linked up on the ground floor at the top of the ramp leading down into the basement levels, everyone was breathing heavily. The lights were out down there, and the suit LIDAR wasn’t showing a lot either. ALBION and CAMBRIA didn’t have enough to work with. They had only the informants’ rough sketch from memory to go on.

It would have to be enough, and Costello didn’t waste time. There was exactly one way to go, there were no alternative routes, and presumably there would be a hostile waiting for them. Finesse was not an option here.

On his word, they stormed into the dark.

Date Point: 13y 1m AV
South Andros Island, Bahamas, Caribbean, Earth

Adam Arés

Nude beaches were the best, especially when they were private. Adam could just lie on the sand with a nice palm tree shading the sun out of his eyes, he could read, he could bake in the sun and relax…

It was a strange feeling. Just doing nothing had been…well, it had been a struggle for both of the Bros. Neither were completely lazing about, that just wasn’t their nature. Volleyball, beach wrestling and roughhousing in the surf helped them burn off some of their daily frenetic need to move and play. But in the late afternoon, with the perfect warmth of everything lulling him into rest, he could feel himself recharging in a way he couldn’t put into words. It was…

…He couldn’t put it into words.

Also, Marty was asleep on his chest, looking so totally peaceful that it made him ache.

He couldn’t help himself. He reached up and brushed the hair from her face, and the gentle gesture was enough to wake her. She blinked, smiled, murmured something incomprehensible and wriggled against him as though trying to burrow into him for a second before giving up and sitting up slightly.

“…I fell asleep.”

“Yup.”

“How long?”

“Not long…You looked like you were dreaming.”

Marty nodded and sat up a little more. “…Yeah. I was dreaming about the Lads, and they were on a mission of some kind…” she shrugged. “Workaholic, I know.”

Adam chuckled. “Makes two of us…What do you think they’re doing right now?”

Marty smiled lazily. “Eh…eating, sleeping, training, shenanigans. What else?”

“Fuckin’.”

She snorted. “Incorrigible.”

“Oh please, who woke me up with a BJ this morning?”

“Sure as shit wasn’t John,” Marty grinned at him.

He rolled his eyes and echoed her. “Incorrigible.”

“That’s me!” Her grin got wider and she pushed herself upright and stood. “Speaking of John, where is he?”

“He’s got a girl on the other side of the beach. If we listen real close, I bet we can hear them…”

“No thanks.”

Adam grinned. “Now she gets shy.”

“Nuh-uh,” she shook her head vigorously. “I’ve just heard it before. Come on, the walls in the barracks aren’t exactly thick.” She grinned as Adam stood up. “Actually, you remember the first week after the Whitecrests arrived? They all showed up for breakfast looking half-dead from lack of sleep.”

“Eh, they got over it.”

“Amazing what you can adapt to.”

Adam knew the smile she was wearing. It said there was an innuendo buried somewhere in her comment, but she wasn’t about to make it obvious. Instead, he took her hand and they strolled along the beach, soaking up the sun, surf and general sensation of having nothing much to do except be together.

“…Seriously though. What d’you think they’re up to right now?” Adam asked.

She leaned her head against his arm.

“Whatever it is? I bet it’s not as much fun as being here.”

Date Point: 13y 1m AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Lieutenant Anthony ‘Abbott’ Costello

Firth was obviously having the time of his life. Costello didn’t know which frightened him more about the enormous Aggressor: The depth of naked revelry he was taking in his own endless savagery, or that he was otherwise so totally in control of himself.

Either way, right now he was smashing his way through a wave of Hierarchy drones in a blaze of motion that had all the trappings of a berserk rage except for precision: he didn’t waste a spare twitch. Even behind his mask and visor it was obvious that he was grinning like a madman.

With Blaczynski and Murray at his side and the Defenders at his back, the human contingent were driving a spearhead deep into the Hierarchy bunker practically without slowing.

Costello for his part was hanging back, keeping his wits about him, staying detached. He formed the rearguard along with two of the Gaoians so he could maintain perspective on the engagement without undue harassment. Let Rebar handle the command up at the speartip—nothing did that better than an experienced sergeant.

Firth’s disappointment when his wrecking derby came to an end was audible.

”ABBOTT, RIGHTEOUS. Run outta bad guys up here.”

Costello called up Firth’s helmet cam on his tablet, then Blaczynski’s. The speartip were advancing down a flight of stairs, tracking for the first hint of a hostile. As it was, there was nothing, not even the reported mummified OmoAru.

“Secure our position,” he ordered. “REBAR, what’s going on here?”

Without needing any details, the Aggressors and most of the Gaoians billowed outward to re-form their perimeter, while Sikes, Faarek and Akiyama reinforced their line of communication back to the roof. Regaari joined Rebar and Costello to ponder their situation, for which Costello admitted to some gratitude. When it came down to it, Regaari had more knowledge about nonhuman technologies and cultures than anybody else on the HEAT, his fellow Whitecrests included.

“No bodies,” the Gaoian commented. “They’ve been cleaned up. And some of these consoles look like they were taken apart recently…”

Costello followed his pointing paw and nodded. One of the consoles was open, its front panel leaning neatly against its side and four small screws were lined up neatly on top.

“There’s a bedroom of sorts upstairs,” Rebar noted. “At least one human biodrone, I reckon.”

“Right,” Costello agreed. “Where is—?”

The sound of nearby shots bashed off the metal walls, amplified and given strange buzzing harmonics in the dark.

Blaczynski got on the radio before anyone could speak. “Target secured. Need a medic.”

Costello prompted his Protector. “IRISH.”

Butler tapped his radio by way of acknowledging the command, and when Costello looked up through the ceiling he saw the Protector’s blue diamond break away from Sikes’ and make for the stairs.

The contact had happened three rooms over, and had involved the target popping up to try and ambush Blaczynski only to catch two rounds in the chest and another in the gut before he could even aim. He should have been writhing and choking on all the blood, but protocol when dealing with suspected Hierarchy was to slap a stick-n-sleep patch on them ASAP, and he was limp and unconscious.

Thurrsto was doing his damnedest to keep the target from expiring, at least for long enough to bundle him into a stasis box. Costello arrived just in time to watch the Gaoian drill an intraosseous cannula into him.

The calls were coming in: Clear all around. Costello’s only problem in evacuating the target was that the wormhole suppressor couldn’t come down until they were absolutely certain that deactivating it wouldn’t dump five kilos of antimatter in their lap.

That certainty wasn’t likely to come, either. Not until a team of specialists had swept the facility top to bottom. Their best option therefore was a hot evac via Weaver dropship, and that meant time and further risk. He had to make the call with incomplete information: drop the suppressor simultaneous to a wormhole jump and take the risk to the mission? Or call down their airlift, possibly endangering an aircrew and a high value asset?

Not a choice at all, really: The mission came first, always. And Costello was painfully aware that, all other things being equal, his Lads were a much more valuable asset than any air crew. So…

“STARFALL, call for CASEVAC.”

“Make a HOLE!”

Costello got out of the way as Butler came crashing through with his medical kit and joined Thurrsto in tending to the wounded biodrone.

That drone had a storied history already, he could tell. At some point, somebody had severed most of his arm, and the replacement was a shiny black composite prosthetic that looked the part, possibly even an improvement on the original.

“Dexter? Do we have a positive ID?”

“We do,” Regaari nodded. “This is Zane Reid.”

Costello sighed and looked down at their new capture.

“…Poor bastard.”

Date Point: 13y2m AV
Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Vincent Weis

Vince was dying. It hadn’t been a great life. For a start, it had been far too short. Dying of a sophisticated lung cancer at the age of thirty-one despite never smoking a damn thing in his life just seemed…’unfair’ didn’t even start to do it justice. It seemed like a twisted cosmic prank, dreamt up by an omnipotent sadistic joker with the opposite of a sense of humor.

He’d shot through denial pretty quickly, got stuck on anger. No, not stuck: hooked. Vince was permanently high on rage these days. It felt like heat behind his eyes and lightning in his nerves, threatening to burst out of him as he looked around at the world he would shortly be leaving and realized that there were more injustices there than a single man could fix even if his lifetime wasn’t so cruelly truncated.

Poverty. War. Corruption. The obstinate viciousness of all the world’s bitter phobics, too full of their own stench to tolerate the smell of anybody different from their idea of a norm. The choking web of power and privilege that kept the poor tied down and the wealthy free to jerk off all over them.

It was quite obvious that humanity had no right to hold the power it in fact held. Homo Sapiens was officially and definitely the least qualified organism in the galaxy to handle the responsibility that nature had thrust upon it. Cimbrean was already a playground for rich old white men, and now…

Now one of the wealthiest men in the world was about to interfere with the development of a stone-age species, and the world was applauding. Like they couldn’t see that behind all of Moses Byron’s platitudes and niceties was just another oil baron, just another slave owner.

Thank God there were other people out there who saw the toxin for what it was. Who knew what needed to be done; Who’d given Vince a purpose. A purpose in the form of a cargo van full of ANFO. A van that had just turned the corner and was now aiming right down the straight stretch to the front gates of the Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility, home of the starship Misfit.

Vincent’s life had been worthless. But as his knuckles whitened on the steering wheel and his foot pressed to the floor until his ankle ached, as the bullets punched through his windshield and his last defiant battle cry tore out of him, he knew without any doubt at all that his death was going to mean something.

Date Point: 13y2m AV
Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Xiù Chang

“—And the director glares at him and says ’You idiot! They’re laughing because you forgot the rose!’”

Allison groaned and then broke into her filthiest laugh, and Xiù awarded herself a point. Her mission to put a real smile on Allison’s face at least once a day since Salt Lake City had sometimes been an arduous one, but it was working.

Besides, she’d been saving that joke for a rainy day ever since Dan Hurt had shared it with her. A party at Kevin’s place seemed about right. He had a nice sprawling rambler not even half a mile from the Byron Group’s Advanced Aircraft Assembly Facility, and had invited them all round for a barbecue, poker…mostly the men had vanished into the back yard where they were playing a vigorously physical game of Calvinball which seemed to consist mostly of Julian and Dane wrestling each other for control of the ball long enough to throw it for either Kevin or Dan to score a try-slam-touch-dunk-down or whatever.

For a woman with so much metal in her face and ears, Clara Brown took a second or two longer to get the joke, and when she did she just threw her head back and groaned.

“That’s…ugh.” She shook her head. “You disappoint me, Xiù.”

“That’s a surprisingly dirty joke, coming from you!” Allison observed.

“I’m as pure and innocent as a baby fawn,” Xiù retorted, hamming it up as she feigned dignity.

“Nuh-uh. I’m your girlfriend babe, I know exactly how innocent you aren’t.” Allison winked at her, and won whatever little game they were playing. Xiù immediately felt the tips of her ears warm up.

“And there’s the blush!” Clara had politely declined anything alcoholic and had shown off a small black X tattoo behind her ear, and its tiny twin on the fleshy part of her right palm below the thumb. She chimed a Coca-Cola against Allison’s beer bottle instead and joined in the affectionate laughing that always arose when Xiù tried to fight back a blush and only made it worse.

“No, okay, if it’s dirty jokes time then I know a one about a woman who—she’d been married ten times before but the new husband’s a lawyer. So she—”

Xiù and Allison both glanced out of the window in response to…something. Some anomalous movement that screamed for attention out of the corner of the eye rather than being consciously seen. Clara yelped in surprise then shrieked in terror when, running on pure survival instinct, they both grabbed her and yanked her forward off the couch couch trailing cushions for protection in the instant before the window blew in and filled Kevin’s front room with a blizzard of glass shards and the indescribable gut-punch of an explosive shock wave.

A detached and manic part of Xiù’s mind really needed to get its priorities straight because it was fretting over the stupid details. There should have been echoes in the shocked aftermath, she thought. Instead there were car alarms, screams, shouting…and the pop, pop…pop of somebody shooting.

Also her ears were ringing. It’d be nice if that could stop, please. Xièxiè.

She dared to peek over the couch. A huge column of smoke and dust was boiling violently up into the air over the AAAF where Misfit was parked, towering high above the trees that ran around the Group compound’s perimeter to disguise the walls. She’d seen smaller high-rise buildings.

“…Fuck—!”

“…Amen,” Allison agreed. “You okay, Clara?”

Clara was curled up in a trembling ball with her hands over her head, but she unwound and looked up at them with an ashen expression that said she wasn’t going to say anything coherent just yet.

“Wh—-?” she managed, in a panicky squeak. Allison shook her head and waved her down.

They were still surveying the apocalyptic view when Julian charged into the room with Dane, Kevin and Daniel in his wake. He skidded to a halt on the carpet of broken glass and breathed a sigh of relief at finding them essentially unharmed.

“Are you okay?” Xiù asked him.

“I’m fine but you’re bleeding, bǎobèi.” He indicated her leg.

Xiù glanced down. She’d elected to wear denim shorts for her day off, and the result was a shallow crescent slice in her outer thigh that she’d been too high on adrenaline and surprise to notice. That same manic part of her jabbered angrily about how if she’d just worn her cut-proof working clothes she’d have been fine.

She directed the thought to worry about more important stuff, like Clara, and forgave herself. It wasn’t like they’d expected a bomb to go off.

“Huh.” She pressed on the wound and asked Julian for help with her expression. ”Saya man i….” She paused, realizing she’d lapsed into Gaori. “Um…Sorry. Could you get me a bandage or a towel or something?”

“I’ll get it,” Daniel promised, but didn’t make it four steps before Kevin cut him off by putting a hand in front of his chest. He was on his phone, listening intently.

“Guys. My tornado shelter in the backyard,” he said. “Williams says there’s an active shooter at the Facility.”

Dane picked his wife up and Clara’s habitual huge New Rocks crunched in the glass. Allison had gone barefoot, so Julian hoisted her up in a fireman’s carry, and Xiù limped along with her hand pressed to the cut on her leg.

“Dane…Honey, my dad’s up there…” Clara protested.

“He’ll want you safe,” Dane replied.

“But—”

“We’re gonna stay in the shelter until we get an all clear,” Kevin replied firmly, ushering them through his kitchen and out into the back yard.

His tornado shelter was surprisingly roomy, well-lit and dry with a clean concrete floor and plenty of storage space. He obviously kept his lawnmower and other bulky items down there as well, and the “other items” included a couple of folding camp beds, which he retrieved after closing and bolting the steel doors behind them.

Julian looked around appreciatively. “Hey. Nice!”

Kevin was digging through a box of LED storm lamps. “Deathworld,” he grunted by way of an explanation.

“Hmn. Yeah.”

Clara parked herself nervously on one of the camp beds. “How long are we gonna be here?”

“Williams said get somewhere safe and stay put until Hammond shows up to fetch us in person.”

“But my dad—!” Clara began again. That seemed to be all she could say on the subject.

Kevin squatted down in front of her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Clara. I’m scared for him too, but ain’t nothin’ we can do right now.”

Dane sat down next to her and put an arm around her, and Clara curled miserably into his chest and went quiet.

Allison was picking a sliver of glass out of her foot. “Fuckin’…ahh…fuck! An actual fuckin’ bomb though? Had to be a fuckin’ cargo van from the size of that blast, too…”

“Yeah…” Kevin grimaced and leaned against a wall. “I maybe insulated y’all from some of the full details about just how strong some folks feel about this whole business with the People.”

“I don’t fucking—ow—get it,” Allison commented, setting her foot down gingerly. “I can understand Alex being mad at me personally, kinda. But we’re literally trying to save their lives and…shit, people are gonna be dead over there.”

Kevin nodded solemnly.

“Well, you have to look at it through their lens,” Daniel chimed in. “I’ve read some of the death threats and messages. What they see here is a powerful species conquering a weak one. Imperialism, colonialism, maybe slavery…”

“But that’s not what we’re doing!” Julian complained.

“Doesn’t matter,” Xiù sighed. “That’s what they think we’re doing, so that’s what we’re doing.”

“Right.” Daniel nodded emphatically. “Everybody in the world works by building a simulation, a model of what the people around them are thinking and doing. Reality is something that happens inside your head.”

“An’ for a lot of people, it doesn’t have shit to do with what’s goin’ on in the actual universe,” Kevin finished.

There was a long pause, punctuated only by the sound of Dane rubbing Clara’s back, and Clara fighting to hold herself together.

Eventually, Xiù ventured to inspect her leg. The cut was only a shallow one, far less than some of the wounds she’d suffered in her life. It might leave a small white line, maybe.

She was growing blasé about scars and wounds, she noticed. But after shoving a nervejam grenade down a Hunter’s throat and practically flensing her arm on its horrible lamprey teeth, what was a bomb going off half a mile away and a little scratch?

Oddly enough, it was that thought that toppled her off the calm and focused place she’d been occupying. The full reality that an actual bomb had just gone off nearby and that people were dead caught up with her.

Very, very slowly she sank down to the floor next to Julian and willed herself not to shake or fall apart. It wasn’t very effective—her brain wanted to run off in a thousand different directions and dwell on every possible worst-case scenario.

Fortunately, Julian either had a flawless instinct for these situations, or he needed exactly what she did right now. He wrapped her up in a close hug and if there was even such a thing as ’safe’ anywhere in the universe, then just for that moment she had found it.

She sighed, concentrated on breathing slowly and deliberately, and watched the growing feeling of pressure in the back of her mind as it eased off and dissipated.

And she waited.

Date Point: 13y2m AV
Byron Group Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Doctor Michael Ericson

People were here to kill them, and in the aftermath of the bomb that tore open the AAAF’s security checkpoint, a second van had swept in. Men in balaclavas with rifles and sticks of dynamite were swaggering across the concrete apron in front of the hangar, pausing to shoot the wounded.

Panic was everywhere, and it was death. Michael saw one man—Carter, maybe—who had possibly been safely hidden where he was until he lost his nerve and stood up to run. He made it ten paces before he died coughing on blood as a couple of accurate shots tore into his back.

Michael ducked his head back through the door and thought furiously. The gunmen were coming their way.

“…Into *MIsfit*” he urged. “Hurry!”

“But—!” That was June Liddle, the accounts manager who’d been inspecting the upgrade and maintenance work to budget it. She was clutching her tablet and her purse and trembling. “It’s a spaceship, is it safe?”

“It’s armored,” Ericson took her hand and dragged her. They were eight in total—engineers, technicians, a custodian, himself and June. None of them knew how to fight back even if any of them had been armed. The only safe place available was inside *Misfit*’s skin, which was layered in ablative panels that could handle space debris strikes.

Getting the message, they ran for *Misfit*’s ladder, June unsteady and slow on her office high heels until Michael snarled at her to take them off. She leaned heavily on his shoulder as she desperately pawed and kicked at them, wasting time and whimpering as she tried to force them off without undoing the buckle strap.

Michael stooped and undid them for her. Freed of the ungainly footwear she ran the rest of the way to the ladder like an olympic sprinter, and the technicians helped her up it.

Michael was the last to the bottom, limping and cursing his aging bones. The door at the far end of the hangar opened just as he reached the top, and there were shouts. A rifle round made June yelp as it sparked off the airlock’s inner surface. Another struck Singh in the thigh as he tried to hit the lock’s emergency override.

Michael scrambled inside as they all ducked. They were sitting ducks, fish in a barrel, stuck in a cage with no way to escape their murderers.

He turned and stood full and exposed in the airlock—it was the only way to reach the close handle above the outer doors.

Something happened to him. It wasn’t actually painful, he felt—more like being punched. Shock moved the fact that he’d just been shot, and shot again into the background, held the pain at bay. He blinked, stared at the man who’d shot him, and yanked down on the handle.

*Misfit’*s outer doors and the protective armored shutter closed, sealing them inside. He heard rounds slam fruitlessly into the old girl’s hull like nothing worse than heavy rain, and the shock wore off.

He collapsed.

“Ericson!”

Things were going monochrome, around the edges of his vision. Their clothes, the blood, the lights and panels on the airlock’s walls…the color was bleaching out of it all. The pain was fading too.

“…Where’s Clara?” he asked. There wasn’t anything he could do about the fact that he was dying, he knew…but he had to know that his daughter was safe, before he went.

Barnes took his hand. “She’s with the crew. At a barbecue. Her day off….God, Mike, I—”

“…That’s okay then…”

Michael Ericson shut his eyes, took the deepest breath he could, and let go.

He dreamed of the sea, and was gone.

Date Point: 13y2m AV
Trans-Canada Highway 1, Little Shuswap Lake, British Columbia, Canada, Earth.

Adam Arés

“Trending Watch now, and drivers near Scotch Creek are tweeting pictures of…”

“…Two stupid motherfuckers carrying a busted-ass truck along the freeway,” ‘Base finished, with an irritated grunt.

Adam shrugged. Privately, he was glad of the exercise even if it wasn’t up to his full standard. They’d carried heavier and more difficult stuff over the years than hoisting up the back end of a truck and carrying it down nice flat pavement, but the axle had busted two miles from the next off-ramp, and they didn’t want to pay for a tow truck.

They didn’t have any Crude with them but a little overexertion wasn’t all that big of a deal, so they took turns holding the rear of the truck off the ground and jogging with the weight of it on their arms like the world’s heaviest wheelbarrow. They’d chugged one of Adam’s “juggernog” energy drinks, roughed up their hands and dug their fingers into the frame, and set to it with Marty in the driving seat.

It was wonderfully exhausting, but even the Beef Bros had their limits, so it was a profound relief when Marty finally sang out the words they’d been waiting for. “Off ramp!”

“Fuckin’ finally…”

They said it simultaneously, then shared a wry grin.

The truck’s live axles precluded simply pushing it up the slope since the rear one had snapped somehow when Marty of all people had jumped into the cargo bed to fetch a snack after pulling over.

She’d spent ten minutes scowling red-faced in the front seat and promising unlimited pain for whichever man was foolish enough to tease her about it before finally agreeing that there was a funny side. Adam knew he should probably stop giggling about it at some point, but that was easier said than done, especially when she glared at him and blushed all over again.

That broken axle was a particularly interesting challenge. It meant the rear couldn’t bear its own weight in any productive way, which meant that one of the Bros had to lift it. Nor could they just lift and push it from behind. That was perfectly doable on flat ground, but not up a hill. Sure, both of them were so heavy they needed a pallet scale to weigh themselves, but even that didn’t stack up against the truck. Its mass could simply tip them over and roll over the top.

And of course the off-ramp was a steep hill with a hairpin bend at the bottom. And long, too. The only thing they could do was pick up the truck and carry it as best they could, with Adam in the front because he was stronger and heavier and could pull the whole weight of it backwards, and John in the rear because he was taller and had longer limbs.

Marty hopped out and packed on as many of their bags as she could carry, which wasn’t half bad. She wasn’t big, but she’d been fit and strong even before going on the Warhorse Fitness Plan. Still, her contribution didn’t make a huge difference but Adam wasn’t about to tell her that. She probably needed to feel like part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

It took them about ten minutes to carry it up the ramp and the rest of the way to the Race Trac gas station—a mile away, naturally—and by the time they were finished, they were both gasping for air and wobbly on their feet, utterly drenched in sweat, and bleeding slightly from their hands.

The truck’s front axle gave out the second Adam put it down.

Marty was last up, red-faced and exhausted under a slightly-too-heavy pile of luggage that she tipped gratefully into the truck’s bed before leaning heavily on the tailgate and gulping for air.

“Good…good training,” she managed.

Adam huffed in reply with a weary grin, and slid down to sit on his ass against the truck’s wheel.

After a brief rest, Marty took it on herself to go into the station and arrange things while the Bros recovered. No point in them stinking up the place and knocking stuff over.

It was kinda peaceful outside. Sure, there was the susurrus of traffic from the freeway but in the age of widespread electric drive trains that was way quieter. The occasional old diesel big-rig that came storming through was almost a literal dinosaur from the roar of its engine. Adam shared a fist-bump with John and rested his head back to listen and drink it in while energy seeped back into their muscles.

The radio in the truck was still on the hour-long news roundup which he ignored right up until the presenter’s calm and professional tones changed, quite suddenly.

“Uh…we have, uh, breaking news right now. Breaking news coming from, uh, Omaha where we’re getting a confirmed report of a large explosion, a bomb of some kind gone off. Emergency services are responding to a possible terrorist incident at the Byron Group Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility…Don’t have a lot more detail than that right now, but it looks like there may be an active shooter situation there…”

“Shit!”

“What’s in Omaha?” Base asked.

“The Triple-A-F? That’s where Misfit is. Shit, I hope they’re okay…”

“Ah, mother*fuck*er…”

Marty returned with beef jerky and Gatorade, and called Farmer Joe while they made short work of it.

“He’s got a pickup that can handle you two,” she reasoned, putting her phone away. “And a flatbed so we can haul this wreck back.”

“He’s cool with it?”

“I think he’ll take any chance to eyeball you two doin’ your thing, if I’m honest…” She teased, and gave Adam her best filthy grin. Usually it never failed to work. This time however It faltered when she saw his troubled expression. “Somethin’ the matter?”

“News on the radio. Terrorist attack in Omaha. Sounds like it was targeting Misfit…”

“Oh, hell,” she deflated instantly. “Well, they’ve got good security…”

“Yeah…”

She squatted down next to him. “You can’t be there, big guy. Ain’t no sense driving yourself crazy over it.”

“I know.” He tried to keep the sullen, angry quality out of his voice and knew he was failing. He counted the Misfit trio as friends. He just couldn’t pull three people out of an escape pod and hang out with them as kind of a multi-date thing and not think of them that way.

Friends in danger and not being able to do anything about it was Adam’s private definition of hell. It took him right back to all the futility and loss he’d felt watching the news from San Diego, or watching Powell and his men swoop in just seconds too late to save Sara. It was the very scenario he’d devoted his life to never, ever allowing again.

Marty caught the look in his eye and ran a thumb on his cheek. “Hey. You okay?”

He got a concerned knock on the arm from ‘Base, too, and between them they helped him shrug it off. “…Yeah.”

Both of them were instantly dragged into an enormous Adam crush-hug which ended seconds later when Marty desperately tapped out on his arm.

”Air!” she complained.

“Agh, shit.” He let her go and grimaced apologetically. “Sorry.”

“Just ‘cause we’re in Canada doesn’t mean you have to apologize about everything,” she smirked.

Adam chuckled ruefully, and Marty used that opportunity to get everyone on task. She was good like that. “We should get cleaned up a little before Joe shows up. The clerk said there’s a hose in the back, and we can learn more when we get back to Cimbrean, okay?”

“…Right.” Adam heaved himself upright. “Jesus, who in the fuck would bomb those guys?”

Date Point: 13y2m AV
Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Moses Byron

“They call themselves the Alien Protection Army.”

Moses tried not to be an angry person. He worked off his stress with a couple rounds of golf every week, he watched his diet, he eschewed alcohol…

Today was testing those principles to their limit. If Mister Williams wasn’t such a stabilizing influence, he might well have finally broken his own rule and reached for a bottle.

“Alien pro—?” He waved his hand vaguely skyward. “Last time I checked, we’re the ones imprisoned with the Hunters threatening to eat every blessed one of us! What in the Sam Hill do they think the ETs need protecting from us for?!”

Williams indicated his ignorance without resorting to anything so crass as a shrug. They weren’t at the company headquarters—that had been evacuated for the time being—but rather were meeting in Williams’ apartment, a spacious studio that gave no sign of having ever been lived in. Even the man’s collection of old blurays was sorted by genre and in alphabetical order.

The only sign that the place was inhabited by a human being at all was the socks. Williams had been ironing them and folding them into neat square parcels when the bomb had gone off, and he’d cleared them away upon welcoming Moses to his home with an embarrassed apology about ’the mess.’

“They were on your radar?” Moses asked him, investigating WIlliams’ notes on the terrorist group.

“They were, yes. They’re blamed for a shooting on Cimbrean. Somebody tried to plant a bomb at the spaceport construction site and shot a fourteen-year-old girl when she got in the way. Pretty much everybody blames that on APA, but they deny it.” Williams shrugged. “Me, I don’t see why they’d deny it.”

Moses grunted. “Bad press?”

“Worse than packing a cargo van with ANFO, blowing up the gate of a research facility and then shooting up the place?” Williams shook his head. “Groups like this don’t care about bad press or good press, they just want press. To them, killing seventeen people is how you get the world to pay attention.”

“And it works,” Moses sighed.

“Oh yes. Their manifesto’s trending on all the social media. They’ve successfully spread their message to millions.”

“And it only cost us seventeen friends and colleagues…” Moses commented, bitterly. “Any news on Ericsson?”

Williams consulted his phone “Still in surgery, as of the last update.”

“Clara?”

“Kevin’s with her. He says she’s a wreck.”

“Well, her dad is a damn hero,” Moses said. “Whether he pulls through or not, she can be proud of him…the crew?”

“Hammond evacuated them to Chicago, and they’re taking the next scheduled jump to Cimbrean.”

Moses raised his eyebrows, genuinely surprised. “Didn’t they object? Can’t imagine them wanting to leave Clara at a time like this…”

“Oh, they objected alright. I told them to shut up and get on the damn helicopter, pardon my French.”

“Well done…And thank the Lord they weren’t on-site at the time.”

WIlliams nodded and swiped through a few things on his tablet before handing it to Moses. “The good news is, Misfit came through it practically unscathed.”

“I thought your first report said they shot her up?”

“They did,” Williams said. “But space debris hits at speeds anywhere up to twenty times as fast as a rifle bullet, and Misfit is designed to handle several such strikes per mission.”

“…Give the team their due, they built a great ship,” Moses commented. “What can we do to avoid a repeat?”

“Training,” Williams replied promptly. “The checkpoint had appropriate equipment in place to protect against an attack like this, but the guards didn’t trigger the pop-up roadblock when the van refused to stop. I’m already drafting my letter to the security team leaders. We can’t afford to be nice, if a vehicle crosses the red line then it needs to be stopped then and there. And if the driver tries to sue us, Exhibit A will be the big warning signs, and we won’t need an Exhibit B.”

“Right…” Moses sighed, put the tablet down and rubbed his face. “Seventeen, though. Seventeen of our people. Eighteen, if Ericsson doesn’t pull through. That’s seventeen families I have to visit, look them in the eye, tell them I’m sorry for their loss. Isn’t there more we can do than remind our gate guards to actually do what they’re trained for?”

“You’re asking the wrong man, Mister Byron. I can plan for bombs, active shooters, corporate espionage…I can’t change minds.”

“In the short term, then?”

Williams tugged on his jacket to tidy it up as he considered the question for a moment. “I would suggest relocating Misfit,” he said. “Cimbrean, maybe. Just like its crew. Perhaps we could rent a hangar on Armstrong Station?”

“That could work,” Moses mused. “Spin it to Hephaestus as a chance to earn some good publicity.”

“Also, potentially, an opportunity for them to get a good look at Misfit and copy our proprietary technology,” Williams reminded him. “There’s also Chiune Station. It shouldn’t be too hard to have a hangar facility built there. A Jump Array too, if you want. In the long run that would be cheaper and less risky than renting from Hephaestus.”

“Or it could make us look insular and hamper the public visibility of the exploration program.”

“That would be outside my purview, Mister Byron.”

“…No way we can do both? Eat our cake and still have it?”

Williams again managed his neat trick of conveying everything a shrug would have without actually shrugging. “Purely from the point of view of security, our own facility at Chiune Station is by far the superior choice,” he said. “You’d have to ask Kevin for an opinion on the politics.”

“Kevin’s not here, and we need a decision now…Chiune it is,” Moses declared.

“I’ll make the arrangements. It’s probably best if you stay here until we have an all-clear, Mister Byron. You’re welcome to make yourself at home.”

“I’ll try to leave it as I found it,” Moses promised, wondering if he’d promised more than he could deliver, there. He wouldn’t be surprised if Williams’ coffee cups were identical and all faced the same way inside their cupboard. “Oh, and…?”

“Yes, Mister Byron?”

“I recall that Senator Bailey was very grateful after that business with the Iranians last year. Ask Rachael to see how much he can do for us about these APA people.” Moses smiled, slimly. “Could be that support for shutting them down would go all the way to the top.”

“I’ll pass that along.”

“And keep me informed on how our misfit trio are doing. I can’t imagine they feel very welcome on Cimbrean right now…”

Date Point: 13y2m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

“Holy crap.” Hammond stopped short and blinked at the mountain of human muscle who was lurking in the arrivals area wearing a huge pair of mirrored aviators and a nuclear green Hawaiian shirt so sinfully ugly it should have been illegal. “They build that guy in a fuckin’ dry dock?”

Julian found his grin again. “Fuck yeah they did,” he commented, and waved enthusiastically. “Hey! Righteous!”

Xiù had forgotten just how immense Righteous really was, and how scary. When he straightened himself out from his slouch, the crowd did a faithful re-enactment of Moses and the Red Sea.

“You know that guy?” Hammond asked.

“Know him? He could probably teach even you a thing or two about personal protection,” Julian told him candidly. “He’s HEAT.”

The truly alarming thing about Firth, though, was how he could move so quietly and quickly when he wanted to. Xiù had studied ballet and gymnastics in her youth and for all his titanic mass, Firth had all the poise and self-control of even the most thistle-down light ballerina.

And the ears of a cat. “I like teachin’ too,” he grinned. “Howyadoin’ buddeh!?” He scooped the three right off their feet and into an enormous hug. It was like a bear playing with his stuffed toys. The aviators somehow came off during the maneuver and, as always, once they were gone his fearsome demeanor softened considerably.

“Been better, been worse,” Allison managed to tell him despite the crushing mass of his arms. He put them down carefully and listened intently.

“No shit. Heard about the bomb. Figgered I’d help y’all with the press.” He shot a particularly murderous scowl towards a latina woman with a dog at her side who was standing by the doors. Astonishingly, the reporter stood her ground with her hands planted firmly on her hips, and Firth issued a grunt that might even have been grudging respect.

“Woah, hold on. I’m not s’posed to let you three out of my sight,” Hammond pointed out.

“Well then introductions are in order,” Xiù declared. “Jason Hammond, this is Firth.”

“Howdy.” Firth favored him with a cool but respectful nod.

“Hammond’s our firearms and tactics instructor,” Allison elaborated. “Former SWAT.”

“Ah, that’s good.” Firth proffered his gigantic mitt and wrapped it almost completely around Hammond’s own like a vice, though as ever he was unfailingly polite. “Nicetameetcha. Lookin’ after them, are ya? I’ve been ordered ‘ta escort all y’all to somewhere secure. Literally just a few minutes ago, in fact. We’ve got a nice safe space we can stash ‘ya in until y’all get shit figgered out…”

Hammond caught Julian’s eye, then relented at his confident nod. “…My thanks.”

“Ordered?” Xiù asked.

“Yuh. FTLcomm runs on a ten minute cycle so that message beat ‘ya by about fifteen. Anyway, ‘yer welcome to inspect the buildin’ when we get there, and all that. We built it like a bomb shelter and it’s got three egress paths even from the top floor.”

“Who the hell do we know who can order the SOR around?” Allison mused, hoisting her bag and following.

Firth shrugged expansively. “Hey man, I don’t do politics. That’s an occifer thing,” he said with a sly grin. “But I ‘spose there’s people lookin’ after you three. That can’t be bad, right? Ava, get that shit outta my face.”

“Wasn’t even aiming it at you, big guy,” ’Ava’ told him, while Hammond put himself between her camera and the three of them.

“Fuckin’…whatever. Ain’t’cha got someone else to torment? Why not Daar? He’s pretty.”

“I go where the news is.” She shot the trio an almost-apologetic smile. “I know now’s a bad time. But you’ll need to make a statement at some point so I’ve got my card here if—”

Firth rolled his eyes, picked her up, spun her a perfunctory one-eighty and put her down again with a firm shove in the back to get her out of the way. “Run along now.” He nodded down respectfully at the dog, who’d rushed to defend her master with a growl. “Good dog, too. Now git.”

Hammond quite smartly bundled the trio out of sight and towards…

How he knew where to go was a mystery, but before long they were in a comically large white pickup with another gigantic man at the wheel, the luggage was loaded as if out of nowhere, and Firth piled in the front seat.

Xiù’s head was reeling from the rapidity of it all, and it didn’t help that even Hammond seemed to be surfing on the edge of being overwhelmed. Right before they took off, the biggest Gaoian she had ever seen threw the last and largest piece of luggage on-board, then hopped into the pickup’s bed and crouched defensively over their pile, his ears and nose twitching in all directions at once.

“Y’all didn’t meet Titan last time, didja?” Firth asked, indicating the other human, a handsome Japanese man built to a scale that only Firth could make look small.

“Titan,” Xiù managed. “Good name. Suits you.”

“Thanks. Exhibit C there is Daar. Say hello, Daar.”

The immense Gaoian in the back chittered way down in the deep bass, and spoke in accented but fluent English. “Hello, Daar!” His voice was so deep it was almost infrasonic, but he shifted to Gaori as soon as the truck was moving. [“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Sister Shoo.”]

Xiu didn’t have time to react properly before Hammond decided the time had come to reassert some control of the situation. “Where are we going?” he asked, prompting all three of the enormous detail to nod approvingly.

“Headin’ to the barracks, just for now.” That was Daar in the back, speaking through the open rear window.

“Why a gaoian?”

“Because he’s a mean sumbitch and he’s got a great nose. Also, he happened to be handy,” Firth answered.

“And the barracks?”

“Safest place on Cimbrean,” Titan replied. “Well away from any roads, it’s sheltered by hills, the base itself is controlled access, and the rest of HEAT are living there right now, mostly.”

“We’re supposed to relocate to Chiune Station, the Byron group’s facility out—” Hammond began.

“We know it. We’ll sort it out. Need to secure the line of communication out there first. The Marines are doing that as we speak. Um…”

“Can I?” That was Daar.

Firth nodded.

“Well…let’s just say you three are really important to a buncha people, Human and Gao. It was, uh, made very clear to me that if you weren’t the most safest possible humans until you’re gone, I’d never mate with anyone ever again. So, y’know. I’m a good boy.”

“A dire threat.” Allison snarked.

“No really. The direst,” Xiù told her.

Daar seemed to be in on the joke and chittered along with them. [“Yeah, well. Cousin Regaari can fill you in on the rest.”]

Xiù twisted to face him. [“Cousin Regaari? Wait, you’re not the Daar? The Champion?”]

Titan and Righteous rolled their eyes while Daar preened the biggest preen. “Yeah!”

There were moments in Xiù’s life when she felt like she’d just gone plunging off the end of a pier or something, when the sheer weirdness of everything that had happened to her smacked her full in the face. First human given technical status as a member of a whole different sapient species. First human to negotiate an interstellar treaty. First human to set foot on the planet Mars.

Mostly that was just her life. She took it in stride. But sometimes, when she realized that she was being bodyguarded by literal supersoldiers and the closest thing Gaoians had to royalty…that was when the full impact landed on her.

Thank God for Julian and Allison and their sixth sense for when she needed grounding again. Allison’s hand snuck into hers. Daar noticed and keened softly, like every male did when a female was upset. The way he keened, though…

“Are you related to Myun?” Xiù asked him, “Do you know her?”

“Yeah! She’s one of my cubs, isn’t she awesome!?”

“That explains everything,” Julian muttered under his breath.

“Don’t it?” Daar agreed, radiating ’proud dad.’ “She even taught me a thing or two…that she learned from you, she says,” he added, indicating Xiù.

The sensation of being overwhelmed wasn’t unfamiliar, but this time it was actually kind of…pleasant. Xiù treated him to a weary smile, and Daar chittered the Gaoian equivalent of a chuckle before turning away to let her be.

“…You okay, bǎobèi?” Julian asked.

“Just…off-balance.”

“Fuckin’ tell me about it,” Allison agreed.

It was a short trip to the base, and yet more enormous men were waiting at the gate to wave them through. A quick flicker in the corner of Xiù’s eye turned out unmistakably to be a Whitecrest of all things, ducking behind a discreet feature of the urban terrain right behind them; they’d had overwatch from the moment they’d arrived, apparently. The security presence grew much more obvious when they arrived at the barracks, and from there the four of them were quickly bustled upstairs through the gym and right into the common room.

Hammond never let them out of his sight, and he gave the room a thorough sweep before unwinding by a hair. “Jeez. I knew this program was getting support from folks in high places, but this is somethin’ else entirely,” he managed.

There was the gentle sound of lots of enormous men coming to a respectful posture as a new man, still huge by any reasonable standard but smaller than the rest by far, wandered comfortably into the room with his hands behind his back.

He treated them to a crisp expression that was almost warm and welcoming, even though his face had an essentially indelible stoniness to it. He looked like a man who probably would have smiled a lot but knew that his face wasn’t built for it.

“You have no fookin’ idea how high,” he said. “Welcome to HMS Sharman. Think it’s about time you’re owed an explanation.”

Date Point: 13y2m AV
Commune of Females, Wi Kao City, Gao

Ayma

“But Sister Shoo is unharmed?”

“My Brothers on Cimbrean say that she and her romantic partners are under tight guard there.” Champion Genshi allowed a rare moment of small expressiveness to show through—honest relief. To Ayma’s knowledge the Whitecrest champion had never met Shoo, but her almost revered status among the Females was a cause for concern in every Clan.

Besides, Ayma privately suspected that Genshi had an eye on Regaari to potentially succeed him. And Regaari, ’bless’ him, would have taken it hard indeed if any harm had come to Shoo. He had never quite forgiven himself for letting her slip away unnoticed all those years ago.

“Thank you, Champion,” she favored Genshi with a warm pricking-up of her ears. “I know the Mother-Supreme will be relieved.”

Genshi’s image on her communicator duck-nodded respectfully. “And, I suspect, so are you. Hmm?” He observed, showing off his roguish streak. “We remain at your disposal.”

He was good, Ayma reflected. He’d hit exactly the right note between reaffirming his Clan’s continuing fealty to the Females without straying into obsequiousness. But then again, all Champions were good at playing that particular game.

“We appreciate it,” she told him. “I should give Yulna the good news.”

“Please pass on my regards to Sister Myun.”

Ayma chittered, waved and closed the call.

She fluffed up her fur as she stood up. It was winter in Wi Kao, and she was wearing it thicker than normal. Looking sleek and streamlined was for the summer: Nobody could pull off shivering.

Yulna was seated by the ornamental fountains, holding forth on some political matter with a delegation of Mothers and more senior Sisters from the commune at Kan Wo. The role of Mother-Supreme suited her, in a reluctant way: She didn’t want the job, so she was doing it as well as she possibly could and always with that uncompromising Yulna forthrightness.

“…So let them become Clanless,” she was replying as Ayma got close enough to hear. “I admire your compassion for them, but there comes a point where Mothers must step aside and let young males take control of their own lives for better or worse. Our role is to raise them as cubs, not to direct their lives as adults.”

“It’s just…frustrating to see them waste their potential,” one of the visiting Mothers commented.

“It’s theirs to waste,” Yulna told her. “The most you can do is give them a good start in life. If they choose to squander that…” she gestured expressively. “…Or they may surprise you. Sometimes a Mother’s fears are unfounded.”

Ayma sensed an appropriate moment to interject. “Mother-Supreme.”

Yulna glanced up, duck-nodded, and stood. “I’m sorry. I wish I could give you more of my time.”

“The voice of experience,” Ayma teased her as they walked away.

“My own cub grew up to become Myun,” Yulna pointed out, aiming a sly look at her bodyguard. “The ’hopeless xenophile,’ as I recall you describing her.”

“That wasn’t fair of me,” Ayma grumbled. Yulna chittered softly and groomed the fur of her neck, casting aside decorum for a second to treat her like an old friend.

“What news?” she asked, becoming more serious.

“A terrorist attack on Earth. Targeted at Sister Shoo and her…” Ayma picked the right word with care. “…circle.”

“Her lovers,” Yulna corrected in characteristically unflinching fashion.

“Not just them. This Byron Group she works for. Her colleagues.”

“Ah…” Yulna duck-nodded, and glanced backwards to be sure that Myun wasn’t within earshot. “She’s unharmed?”

“Would I be so composed if she wasn’t?” Ayma asked. Yulna chittered again and unwound a fraction.

“No, you would go sprinting back to Earth again I’m sure. On four paws, no doubt.”

“Once was enough,” Ayma shuddered. “It’s a beautiful world, but I had a retroactive histology test some time later. It’s lucky for me that I didn’t drop my field to take in the view like Regaari did.”

“You would have suffered?”

“…Briefly, yes.” Ayma shook out her fur uncomfortably. “Apparently some Gaoians can have particularly severe reactions…and I’m in the most allergic group. Especially to the grass pollens and something called ’Ragweed’.”

“That really was uncharacteristically foolish of you, Ayma.”

Ayma duck-nodded, chastened. “I don’t think I appreciated how foolish until the humans assigned two dedicated medics to us. No, I won’t return to Earth. Fortunately, I don’t need to: Shoo has been moved to Cimbrean.”

“And she is continuing with this plan to uplift a stone-age species?” Yulna asked, stopping.

“She seems to feel there is no alternative.”

“…Then I am going to Cimbrean.”

Ayma stood up completely straight from pure surprise. “Yulna, is that—?”

“She’s a Sister, Ayma. My Sister, and she is doing something that will require guidance,” Yulna asserted fiercely, and then softened. “Besides. I miss her.”

Ayma scrutinized her old friend’s expression for a second. “…There’s something you’re not telling me,” she decided.

“Many things,” Yulna agreed. “Most of which are only, hm, dark suspicions. Shall we just say that I had already been considering a visit to Cimbrean for some time? Now that Shoo is there, I think the time has come to…what was the phrase? ’Strike while the Iron is hot,’ yes?”

“We use too many human phrases,” grumbled Ayma. “What happened to ‘pounce when the moment is right?’”

“It’s still there. But the world changes, Ayma. We change with it, or we get left behind…” Yulna chittered again. “Besides, I quite like the imagery.”

“Yes. Your first mating contract was with a foundry worker as I recall.”

Yulna didn’t even look remotely contrite. “He smelled strong and hard-working,” she said. “An impression he lived up to for that whole week, too.”

“And he left you with a permanent passion for metal?”

“Strength. And healthy, strong-willed cubs.”

Ayma glanced back at Myun again, who noticed and tilted her head slightly. “You have those in abundance…But Yulna, why? Why you personally, I mean? Can’t you send a delegation?”

“I told you. I miss my Sister.”

“That can’t be your only reason.”

“No,” Yulna conceded. “It isn’t. But Stoneback and Whitecrest are progressively leaving us more and more in the dark about their doings, and that I cannot accept. Especially not from Stoneback. I think it’s time that Champion Daar needs to be reminded of our old contract.”

Ayma duck-nodded. “That’s why you’re taking Myun along, then.”

“Not his and mine,” Yulna corrected her. “The old contract.”

“…You think the Stonebacks are shirking their duties? That’s…” Ayma glanced around to be absolutely sure nobody was listening. “…That’s quite an accusation.”

“It isn’t an accusation,” Yulna said. “Not yet. But when I mention my concerns to Champion Daar, I want to be able to smell him.”

“Stonebacks don’t lie.”

“And Stonebacks protect the Females,” Yulna retorted. “I wonder…if those duties ever were to come into conflict, which would they put first?”

She turned and swept regally toward the commune, dragging Ayma and Myun in her wake like fresh snow behind a car. “I intend to find out.”

Date Point: 13y2m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

The tumult of the day had taken a while to work its way through, beginning with the way the walking beefslabs of the SOR and their Whitecrest counterparts had made room by double- and triple-bunking with a bottomless fraternal cheer that said wonderful things about the relationship between humans and Gaoians.

Xiù, for her part, had practically burst into tears on being reunited with Regaari, and was now cuddled up with her old friend on the huge, reinforced steel-framed couch, and apparently feeling much better for it. Julian was finding it harder to cool down. He’d just about come to terms with the idea of his grampa’s place having been firebombed by a gang of rogue kids. That part he could have handled.

Finding out that those “rogue kids” actually had ties to a domestic terrorist group that had been on the FBI’s watchlist even before their escape pod had been cracked open? One that could put together a truck bomb and assault their other home? That was…

Well, that part he maybe could have handled as well. It was the fact that their whole schtick was supposed to be alien protection that he just couldn’t work past.

“I mean, fuck! What’re we supposed to do, just let Big Hotel wipe ‘em out? How much more protect-y do you wanna fuckin’ get?” he asked, rhetorically.

Most of the Lads, as they were apparently termed, had made themselves scarce in the early evening. The could still be heard in the sandy yard outside, playing a strange take on catch and beach volleyball. The humans did the throwing, the gaoians did the catching, and both tried to keep the ball moving over the line, somehow. The rules weren’t clear but it sure sounded like fun, and Julian might even have wanted to join in, in other circumstances.

Regaari seemed to be the voice of calm rationality and dignity, even if he was curled up on Xiù’s lap and letting her stroke that prominent white mohawk of his.

“Violence is a fact of major upheaval,” he observed. “It’s happened in every species, even the Vzk’tk, the Guvnurag…even the Corti, apparently. And while it’s abhorrent and Uncivilized—” that bit he said with naked contempt, which seemed to elicit a snort of approval from the Daar-beast in the corner, “—Maybe we should, ah, ‘count our blessings’ I believe?”

Daar harrumphed, “We have that exact same phrase, Cousin. Why emphasize it?”

“Our mythology is long dead, Daar. It doesn’t hold the same meaning anymore.”

Daar gave some gesture that maybe Xiù understood, and Regaari held his peace.

“I just expect better of people, you know?” Julian sighed, and leaned on the back of the couch behind Xiù, who raised a hand and held his over her shoulder.

Daar nodded amiably. “Yeah. I mean, we’ve had some pretty ugly things happen in our history. Look at me, I’m proof of it. But y’know what? It worked out in the end. The bad guys lose, the Civilized guys, they win in the end. You’ll see.”

“I never told you about Great Mother Tiritya, did I?” Xiù asked. Allison shook her head.

“She was…kind of a freedom fighter,” Xiù recalled. “There are a lot of history books just about her and her sisters. She basically founded the Clan of Females.”

“And Great Father Fyu, don’t forget,” Daar reminded her.

“Well, yes, but… the Females focus more on Tiritya,” Xiù told him with an apologetic expression. “And… well, the old male clans killed her in an ugly way.”

“They gave her the hundred-cut death,” said Daar. “That’s where they skin someone alive and then let them die of exposure in the cold. It can take days, sometimes.”

“Can?” Allison skewered him with the word.

“We have criminals, thugs and terrorists too,” Regaari opined. “Particularly heinous crimes get heinous sentences. Murdering a Female gets a one-day. Murdering a cub gets two. Harming any pregnant Mother in any way at all, even accidentally? Depends on the circumstances, most times it’s just an apology and a little embarrassment. But if the Judge-Father is appalled enough at the crime, the perpetrator could get the full three-day with his Clan disbanded, its Champion torn to pieces and his line destroyed, its Fathers executed, its Officers publicly castrated, and the rest of its Brotherhood ritually scar-marked and facing the ire of Stoneback.”

“Unless the Champion takes the punishment on himself,” added Daar. “He can take the ordeal along with the perp and spare his line and the rest of his Clan.”

“But sometimes they don’t.”

“Cowards.” Daar practically spat the word out. “Taking a quicker way out instead of saving their Clan! Leaves us a big mess to sort out.”

“…Us?” Julian asked warily.

“Yup, my Clan. Stoneback enforces Clan sentences when Straightshield asks us to,” grumbled Daar. “It’s one of our ancient duties and we take it very seriously.”

“…You guys really aren’t cuddly, are ya?” Allison commented, giving the Gaoians a look of newfound wariness. Julian couldn’t blame her.

“We can be, but…” Daar gave her an apologetic look. “Well, we don’t waste our affection where it ain’t appreciated, maybe.”

“I remember what happened to the Corti who abducted Ayma and her sisters,“ Xiù recalled. “And me.”

Allison frowned at her. “…I’m afraid to ask. What happened?”

“They let his victims get their revenge personally.” Xiù sniffed, uncomfortably. “And Mothers have sharp claws.”

“No offense, fellas, but I don’t like the sound of that,” Julian said. He’d always been opposed to the death penalty, and right now that was sounding downright humane next to what the Gaoians were describing.

“We are what we are, you are what you are,” Regaari made the odd ducking motion that was basically a Gaoian shrug, though he didn’t elaborate further.

There was a long, mutually awkward silence that was only broken by a sudden harsh ping from Allison’s pocket.

“FTLComm sync,” Regaari guessed. “It could be news from Earth.”

Allison couldn’t fish out her phone quickly enough. She tapped the fingerprint pad, read the update eagerly, and deflated badly as if somebody had skewered her.

“…Babe?” Julian asked.

“It’s from Clara,” she said, and sat up to read it. “Dad passed away at 21:30. Not doing great, but coping. Will see you on Cimbrean, soon. Stay safe.”

“God damn it.” Julian sagged, and Xiù gripped some of Regaari’s fur a little tighter for a moment.

“Yeah,” Allison agreed. She tossed her phone miserably onto the coffee table. “RIP, doc.”

Daar muttered something very low under his breath and made a sign with his paw. Regaari flicked his ear at him but said nothing and instead merely ducked his head in observance.

There was a minute of silence.

In fact, it was rather more than three melancholy minutes, and it was broken only by the heavy sounds of three enormous people coming up the stairs.

Three actually turned out to be four: Firth, Warhorse, Burgess and Kovač. It was genuinely good to see the new arrivals again, and from the looks of things they’d caught plenty of sun recently. Kovač had gone nicely bronzed, Arés was a deep roasted-chestnut brown, and Burgess had gone from Americano to Espresso. All three were practically radiating good health.

The rest of the HEAT followed shortly afterward and before Julian knew what was happening, the room was suddenly full to bursting with operators, all tangled up with each other across the couch and the floor into a huge, brotherly knot of affection. They even brought Hammond back in, which was a sign that the time for conversing about major secrets was over, for now.

The Gaoians in particular were visibly restraining themselves from fawning over Xiù, especially after Regaari aimed a Brotherly flex of his claws at them.

“Figured we’d watch a movie,” Firth explained, grabbing Julian like he was a teddy bear and dragging him into the pile. Julian decided against struggling or complaining—it would have been futile anyway, and it was oddly comforting to get some unfiltered male friendship for a change, even if it did make the girls aim mischievous grins at each other. “Anyone got any requests or whatever?”

“Planet Earth III?” Daar suggested, perking up.

“Dude, you always wanna see nature documentaries. Can we change it up?”

“I can’t help it, that Attenborough man has a soothing voice!”

“No arguing that, but I think our guests should pick,” Burgess told him.

Daar duck-nodded agreeably.

“We’re huge Disney nerds,” Allison revealed, and Julian knew that sparkle of mischief in her eyes. She wanted to see what a room full of gargantuan special operators sounded like, singing along.

“Fuck yeah you are!” Sikes stood in the corner with a reedier-looking Whitecrest and crossed his arms with a happy grin. “Ain’t nobody don’t like a good cheesy musical, I reckon!”

“I don’t gotta sing, do I?” Daar grumbled.

“Oh, you better sing, furball. We all hafta sing. Happiness is mandatory.”

“Best if we give Daar an exemption,” Regaari recommended. “If he tries howling along we’ll never hear the movie.”

“Hey! Many Sisters and Mothers have praised my vocal skills!”

Regaari gave him a sly flick of his ears. “Praised your silver tongue, maybe. Not your singing voice.”

The Gaoians all chittered in a higher pitch, which must have been a jeer judging by the humans’ reaction. Daar didn’t seem to mind either way but his ear did flick once when even Xiù joined in the laughter and raised her voice. “No, he has to sing. I know the perfect movie. The Jungle Book! He can be Baloo!”

Kovač clapped and whooped. “Fuck yeah! Kipling!”

Daar’s singing voice was, in fact, just as terrible as promised. It was precisely like Xìqǔ opera in all the worst ways, without any of the obvious talent or skill. It was fun, though, and everyone seemed to enjoy a boisterous evening of loud singalong.

Eventually though it was time for bed—HEAT apparently was a proponent of ‘early to bed, early to rise’—leaving Hammond and Firth alone with Julian, Allison, and Xiù.

“We’ve got a cot if ‘ya want,” Firth nodded at Hammond. “The CQ down the way has full visibility on every way in or out of the barracks, and it’s got security cameras, too.”

“I’d appreciate that,” he said gratefully. “I suppose…”

“Shower’s down the hall, kitchen downstairs. Get ‘yerself squared away, I’ll watch ‘em if you want.”

Another thankful nod, and now they were alone with Righteous.

“Aren’t you going to bed?” Allison asked.

“Nope.” Firth made himself comfortable. “Me and Blac got first watch, he’s just outside the door. Yer havin’ a guard twenty-four seven until orders come in sayin’ otherwise.”

“Thought you said this is the safest place we could be right now?”

“Yup. ‘Cuz we’re watching you.” Firth rolled his huge neck. “‘Sides. You three have a lot on yer minds, I can tell.”

“You got that right…” Julian muttered.

“How are ya holdin’ up? Fer real, now.”

“Like I’ve had my ass kicked five days in a row,” Julian confessed, candidly. “They burned down my house, man.”

“And now they bombed and shot up our spaceship, killed…” Allison trailed off and sighed heavily. “Killed people. Doesn’t really fucking matter how many.”

”One is too many,” Xiù agreed.

“And for what? Alien protection? When that’s literally what we’re trying to do?” Allison shook her head. “I just…I’m done. I’m fucking done with Earth. Every time I go back there I’m reminded why I didn’t want to go back.”

Julian nodded emphatically at that.

“Come on, haven’t’cha had any good experiences on Earth?” Firth asked. “No good memories at all?”

There was an awkward silence, and when Julian glanced at Xiù he found she was watching him intently.

“…Yosemite.”

“Yeah.”

“…okay, Yosemite was nice,” Allison admitted.

“You spent the whole time reading in the tent!” Xiù said.

“Sure. Nice and cosy. And then you two came back and we snuggled up and listened to the rain and had s’mores and cocoa. And that’s kinda the point. All my best memories of Earth involve either being alone or being with you.” Allison shrugged helplessly. “And I met both of you out there.” She waved her hand skyward.

“Anywhere else?”

Allison thought about it. “Minnesota. And…hell, when I was abducted I was out riding my bike on Route 3A out of Quincy. Used to do that all the time for fun.”

“Monument Valley,” Julian recalled. “Grampa took me down there when I was a kid.”

Xiù sighed. “Stanley Park in the fall…”

“So the problem ain’t Earth, really,” Firth pointed out. “It’s the people. Sounds like you guys have taken a beating to yer faith in humanity, right?”

“I’ve tried not to,” Xiù said. “I try to think the best of everyone, but…”

“But your friend’s dad is dead, and that makes it hard to keep level about it.”

“…He was a good man,” Julian said quietly, as Xiù nodded. “He had vision, talent…kindness.”

Allison nodded “And if he thought we were doing something monstrous with the things he made, he’d have told us straight up.”

“Yeah,” Xiù agreed. “It’s hard to keep level about it.”

“Sounds familiar.” Firth turned sideways on the couch and put his hands on his knees. “Wanna hear my take on it?”

“Lay it on us,” Allison told him.

“Well…look, I ain’t gonna rehash the whole awful story, but me? I ain’t a nice guy, I just play one on TV. Guys like me, it’s awful fuckin’ easy ‘ta take the easy way an’ just, like, punch your problems away, or whatever. Seems ‘ta me like right now, nobody’d blame y’all fer bein’ pissed at literally fuckin’ everything. But that’s the thing. It’s the easy way, and it’s wrong. And you three, ‘yer better’n that. Does easy sound good to you? Or does easy sound like some fat fuck with a dead-end job eatin’ like shit an’ veggin’ out in front of TV every night?”

Julian glanced at the girls, who glanced at each other. He had a point: it wasn’t like the three of them had shied away from challenge over the last couple of years. It was a harsh way to put things, but then again Allison had had similar thoughts after their trip to San Francisco.

“Thing is? Way too many people take it easy their whole lives. It ain’t many of us who are willing to put in the hard work to do it the right way, every time. People who do crime? Terrorists? Crooked politicians and all that? Why are they doin’ that shit? It’s ‘cuz they feel hopeless and helpless, or they feel like they have to do something but don’t know how to do it right. But that’s the thing. You three sure as fuck ain’t any of those things. You can dictate the time and place of your battles, man. That’s rare, because that’s gotta be earned. And, hell: why earn it the hard way when you can shortcut with a bomb?”

“You’re saying, what?” Allison asked. “That the assholes have good reasons under it all?”

“Nah. I’m saying they’re fuckin’ assholes.” Firth shook his head. “They’re lazy, they’re useless, they’re fuckin’ losers. That’s why they do what they do, ‘cuz they’re too fuckin’ weak to do things the right way. But in the end they don’t matter ‘cuz they always lose. Always.”

“How d’you figure?”

“Your expedition’s gettin’ funded, ain’t it?”

Allison already had her mouth open to retort before what he was saying filtered through. She paused, blinked, then settled back in her chair with a thoughtful frown.

“They always lose,” Firth repeated with a slightly smug nod. “They lose ‘cuz the world’s full of good people, too. People who get through life the hard way ‘cuz it’s the right way. It’s just…sometimes, they’re hard to notice. But they’re there. And there’s a literal army of ‘em around you right now, here an’ on Earth, all helpin’ to get this mission off the ground an’ save the Tengy-wek.”

Xiù flinched at his mispronunciation, but she nodded.

“So, y’know…” Firth finished off with a shrug. “Don’t bum out. Y’all wouldn’t even be in this room right now if there weren’t an assload of good people on Earth who want y’all to succeed. We all do, even mean ‘ol shits like me.”

There was a hammering on the door. Firth sighed and bounced up to meet what turned out to be Warhorse, buried under a stack of bedding, a huge meal for Firth and a pile of what looked like coursework. He grumbled about homework, built himself a nest, and set to it.

“Anyway…y’all got the whole HEAT all cozied up in here t’keep ‘ya safe, even Daar for the next day or two ‘fore we both go back to Earth. Try an’ relax if ‘ya can.”

“Daar’s going to Earth?”

“He’s been back and forth, yeah. He’s doing some pretty advanced training and we wanted to get it done in the winter before pollen and stuff, just in case he’s allergic.”

Xiù raised her hand. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“It could be, yeah. We’re not taking any chances, specially ‘cuz…well, ask him if you want. He’s got next shift with ‘Horse. Anyhoo, I’m goin’ on leave finally, gonna get me some bow huntin’ on the special season they’ve got right now. Daar’s prob’ly gonna come along, too. Hills are straight lousy with deer and there ain’t enough predators…also, I ain’t wrassled my bros or my ‘pa since I started this whole thing, gotta re-assert my dominance, heh.”

Julian couldn’t resist cracking a smile. He had to admit, he enjoyed hanging out with the HEAT members, and especially Firth. It took him back to his circle of friends at school, before his abduction. Amir and Lewis had both been too…cerebral. Firth was somehow the complete opposite of that, despite that he was thumbing back to his bookmark halfway through a heavy-looking textbook on…something. He was spinning a highlighter pen idly around the thumb of one giant mitt and he stuck his tongue out slightly as he settled in to take his notes.

“Anyway. Imma just fart around in this book for the next couple hours, you guys get some sleep. And…maybe give people a chance? They’re why I do what I do.”

Julian shared a glance with his girlfriends and nodded. “It’s…been a long day,” he said. “Maybe we’ll feel better for getting some rest.”

The girls nodded and untangled themselves from each other to help him set up a nest of bedding in the corner, just like they’d slept in for most of their time in the Box back in Omaha. Firth turned the light off for them and read by the light of a finger torch instead while the three made themselves comfortable.

Julian found himself in the middle, with each of his shoulders being used for a pillow. It was the girls’ go-to when they were both feeling insecure.

Honestly, it worked for him too.

He would have expected to lie awake and think for a while, especially seeing as he was sleeping on a strange floor in a strange room under guard, in the aftermath of a bombing. He kind of felt like his mind should have raced. Reality was different. Something in his head had obviously been starved for peace and quiet for some time, and the moment it descended, he fell asleep.

He dreamed about his camp on Nightmare.

Date Point: 13y2m1w AV
Camp Tebbutt Biodrone Internment facility, Alaska, USA, Earth

Champion Meereo of Clan Longear

The humans had answered the problem of how to contain the potentially severe threat of biodroned individuals through uncompromising means—by surrounding them with ice and bears. Miles upon miles upon miles of both.

Camp Tebbutt was actually quite a pleasant place to live, all told. Each interned individual had a spacious and well insulated barracks hut all to themselves and an effectively unlimited budget for creature comforts, communications notwithstanding. The scenery was something to behold as well—muscular mountains, garlanded with thick forests and threaded by water so pure and so cold that even the distant note of it on the wind was enough to sting the nose.

Those were the pleasant scents. It also carried all the olfactory markers of death, certain and unpleasant, for any biodrone who worked up both the suicidal audacity and the luck to somehow make it past three layers of concertina wire, seven sniper towers and the patrols on dog sleds.

If any ever did somehow skip through those obstacles, the manhunt would inevitably end in finding their gnawed and frozen corpse somewhere among the trees. Meereo could smell that story, waiting on the wind.

Sensibly, none of the biodrones had ever made the attempt. Some had even declined to live in the camp entirely and had instead opted to be stored in stasis, anticipating the day when strategy and medicine would combine to allow their rehabilitation.

Nobody anticipated that day would come soon. The forty people living in the camp were getting by as well as they could considering they came from a breathtaking variety of walks of life. A couple of Americans, the poor German guy whose demon had shot the girl on Cimbrean, a Japanese Hephaestus worker who’d taken on a memory augmentation implant that human medicine couldn’t safely remove.

Their unofficial leader and representative was the camp’s first internee, Hugh Johnson, and Meereo was finding that the role seemed to suit him. Johnson was open about his emotions and experiences, freely admitted to his nightmares, and seemed to have a knack for knowing exactly what might talk one of his fellows around to a more calm mood.

In private, he admitted that helping the others was the only thing that kept him sane. The Hierarchy had even stolen his face, replacing his original features with something nondescript and forgettable. His perspective was an interesting personal insight that juxtaposed usefully with the more official and detached observations of the camp staff and guards.

“Another poor bastard,” he noted, distracting Meereo from his olfactory exploration of the landscape.

Meereo’s ears swivelled before he turned his head, and as they did so he caught the first roar of a helicopter on the cool air.

“How do you know?” he asked. He himself had arrived on a helicopter, with his huge and sensitive ears plugged by orange foam rubber as protection against the primitive vehicle’s howling engines. His presence on Earth, let alone at Camp Tebbutt, was a well-guarded secret—The humans were very interested indeed in the possibilities created by his “ghost trap.”

It had taken him some search-work on Google to figure out why they had nicknamed him “Egon.” After that he’d started shooting back that on this planet, the spores, molds and fungi could kill him, so he stayed well away. This had gone down very well indeed.

“There isn’t a scheduled delivery today and that’s a blackhawk, not a chinook,” Johnson explained, and sighed. “War’s still going on I guess.”

“I can’t comment,” Meereo told him, apologetically. Even here, under the umbrella of a wormhole suppression field, the biodrones were compartmentalized as much as possible against the possibility that a ghost might use them for a listening post. They gossipped, of course, but they never got a scrap of official information except in the occasional rare and heavily sanitized pamphlet.

“I know, I know…” Johnson sighed. He pulled his coat tighter around him, just before the helicopter growled overhead and blasted them both with freezing air as it turned, dipped and alighted delicately onto the detention center’s rooftop landing pad all in one easy motion. Human pilots could make machinery dance when they wanted to.

Four silhouettes dismounted in an efficient bustle, carrying what was obviously a stasis coffin, and the phone in Meereo’s pocket buzzed urgently just as they vanished into the elevator.

“Guess they want you to see how they welcome the newbie, huh?”

“Something like that,” Meereo agreed. His actual job was to capture the ghost as it tried to escape. “I’ll see you later at the poker game.”

“Wear a hat or glue those ears down this time, buddy. You’re an open book with those paddles doing semaphore on your roof.”

Suddenly self-conscious, Meereo felt his ears swivel backwards and flatten down in embarrassment, and duck-nodded. “Thank you.”

“Later.”

The guards at Tebbutt were incomparable professionals, and well briefed on the seriousness of their duties. Every important door had at least two, and anybody returning from spending any time in the biodrone compound got their head checked for implants. No exceptions, no favoritism, just the curious joke ’It’s-a me, Meereo! once they thought he was out of earshot, which again had taken some research to decrypt.

They were entertaining games, he had to admit.

The new arrival was being put through an X-ray CT to determine the exact nature and location of all his implants. He’d already been declared clear of any kind of a wormhole beacon or else he never would have been brought inside either of the system forcefields, but a thorough assessment of his implants was necessary for his long-term prognosis.

As Meereo entered, he could already see that this one was here for the long term. He’d had the full biodrone treatment: total lobotomy, implantation and reinstallation. That on top of an existing translator implant and the control interface for a confiscated cybernetic arm.

Like always, ’Cowboy’ was there to watch the newcomer through the process. He was Camp Tebbutt’s director, and took the charge personally. He glanced sideways at Meereo as he entered, and gave a welcoming nod.

“Zane Reid,” he said, by way of introducing the new internee.

“He’s had a rough time,” Meereo noted, making some mental notes about the sturdy metal socket where the patient’s arm ended abruptly mid-humerus. It was obviously a custom design, and the damn thing looked more like it was meant for industrial robotics than a medical prosthesis.

“Yeah. Poor bastard was struggling with chronic mental health problems even before the Corti grabbed him. Callous and unemotional traits, narcissistic personality disorder, bipolar disorder…What a mess. Without his meds and a counsellor he musta gone completely off the rails. And then some asshole cut his arm off. And then somehow Big Hotel caught up with him.” Cowboy sighed and rubbed his nose. “And now I gotta lock him up. How much can life dump on one guy, huh?”

“Ghost status?” Meereo asked, taking refuge in professionalism.

“Pretty sure he’s still hosting. HEAT team slapped a stick-n-sleep on him and he’s been sedated or in stasis ever since. The surgical team is scrubbing up.”

Meereo nodded while his ears flattened sideways. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing human brain surgery in action—the briefing alone had been grim enough. But unless the implants were all properly sabotaged then as soon as they were able to communicate with each other again via Reid’s neural pathways, the ghost within them could just initiate a self-destruct and kill him instantly with a massive cerebral haemorrhage.

It had come as a shock to learn that humanity had the medical technology necessary for such involved surgery, in a roundabout way. They couldn’t properly dissect and repair cerebral tissue, but they could insert a catheter into a peripheral artery and thread the probe through the copious blood vessels supplying a human’s huge, oxygen-hungry brain. It was delicate, alarmingly crude, viscerally disturbing, and one hundred percent successful so far.

Once complete, they could hopefully wake the Reid-biodrone, open the “honey trap” escape route and with luck the Igraen ghost would bolt straight into Meereo’s claws. And Reid himself would get a shot at rehabilitation and eventual reintegration.

… In theory.

In reality, a million things could go wrong, but the opportunity to dissect Igraen ghosts in a digital environment and figure out how they worked had already promised to yield a quantum surge forward in Gaoian programming, and the humans were even more excited. The stony road to true artificial intelligence was potentially opening in front of them, not to mention the potential wealth of strategic intelligence.

“Will his arm be returned?”

“As soon as we’ve removed the fusion blade, yeah. He had one hidden inside it.”

Out through the glass, the surgical team finished taking their notes and removed the patient to be prepped for surgery. Cowboy rolled his shoulders and neck, producing a satisfying series of clicks. “Time to get your magic box ready,” he suggested.

“It’s been waiting all week.”

Cowboy nodded again, and stopped looking tired for a second. He stood a little straighter, adjust his jacket, somehow seemed to lose a few wrinkles just by the change in his body language.

“…Good,” he said. “Let’s get that fucking thing out of him.”

Date Point: 13y2m1w AV
Nofl’s lab, Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“Chief! What a delight!” Nofl bowed with a flourish, inviting Gabe to enter his lab. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“You know why I’m here, Nofl,” Gabe grunted. “We had a deal. I’m here to honor it.”

Ridiculously, the skinny little gray bounced on the spot and clapped his hands gleefully. It had to be an affectation; nothing about the gesture looked native to Corti body language, which was subtle to the point of nonexistence.

“Darling, it’s not even Christmas!” he exclaimed.

Gabe sighed. “Could you please drop the act just once?”

“Oh, Chief. Aren’t I allowed to have any fun?” Corti mouths weren’t made for pouting, but Nofl was clearly enjoying himself and tried anyway. It looked more like he was trying to suck a pine nut through a straw.

“You tell me. Thought fun was verboten in Corti circles.”

“Racist, dear.” Nofl turned and trotted smartly up the stairs. “But accurate. But, you know me. I think the Directorate can go suck a dick.”

Gabe rolled his eyes and took hold of the handrail to haul himself up the stairs behind him. “You’re determined to be extra scandalous today, huh?”

“It’s only scandalous because I’m not human. Come on, come on, I’ve been waiting for this opportunity for months.”

“Why so eager?” Gabe asked, grunting as he hauled his injured leg up another step.

“Oh, just a lifetime of aiming metaphorical middle fingers at Directorate dogma. And it’s about to bear fruit! A steel-banner nobody, about to surpass every silver darling they have in one procedure. Can you blame me?”

“If it works.”

“O ye of so very little faith! Come on, dear.”

Nofl vanished through the door at the top and Gabe heard him rattling around and performing some tone-deaf approximation of humming to himself as he got things ready. He took the opportunity to lean on the rail and wince. The Crue-D therapy for his head injury had done something to stabilize the leg, but had achieved nothing with regards the nerve dysfunction. Mostly, half his ass and the top of his leg was just permanently numb, except when it suddenly sent a red-hot nail spiking up his back.

Nofl’s lab was the equivalent of a studio apartment above a shop. The Locayl downstairs had moved to Cimbrean as an augmentation surgeon with a sideline in nanotattoos. Nowadays he was primarily a tattoo artist thanks to an insatiable human thirst for novelty. People were taking vacations on Cimbrean specifically to get ink done by an alien.

Including his own son, which Gabe wasn’t particularly happy about. But…what could he do besides grouse? When it came down to it, a nanotattoo wasn’t quite as stupid a decision as the old-fashioned ink variety. They could be turned off, at least.

“No dawdling, dear!” Nofl called, spurring Gabe to sigh and heave himself up the last few steps to the top.

Nofl was standing on a stool to finish loading an injector. He flapped his hand vaguely in the direction of the massage table against the wall by the door.

“Lie down, face down. No need to undress, just expose the site of the injury,” he instructed, sounding blessedly businesslike now that he was busy. Feeling vaguely that he must be absolutely insane to have agreed to this, Gabe obeyed and made himself comfortable.

Nofl hopped off his stool and his feet made a gentle pat-pat noise as he minced to Gabe’s side and got up on a different stool. There was a hum, and a sensation of warmth around Gabe’s kidneys.

“What’s that?”

“Just scanning the damage. Oh my, this was an ugly one, wasn’t it? Tsk tsk.” The tut was pronounced rather than properly tutted. The warm sensation turned cool.

“Rifle round to the lower back. Glanced off my spine and exited out my side. Miracle I didn’t lose a kidney,” Gabe recalled.

“And they rebuilt you with screws and titanium, oh dear. Well, when your medical technology is so far behind the curve I suppose this is as good as you can expect.”

Nettled, Gabe resisted the urge to defend human medicine. “Nofl, when the hell are you going to start?”

“Start?” The humming and cold sensation stopped. “Darling, I just finished.”

“Pull the other one, at least I’ll feel it!”

“No, really! Stand up, darling.”

Gabe turned to give him an incredulous stare, but Nofl returned his gaze with a well-rehearsed expression of earnest sincerity and stepped down off the stool.

“Look, you can brag about how great Corti medicine is all you like,” Gabe began, sitting up, “but no way did you alread—¡Madre mía!”

“Language, dear!” Nofl chastised him, and for once Gabe forgave him the smugness. With a bewildered frown plastered across his eyebrows he stood up tentatively and found that the leg responded perfectly, with a strength and control he’d forgotten he ever had. Experimentally he hopped from foot to foot. He kicked it out, re-familiarizing himself with the feeling of…well, feeling. He stood on tip-toe, bounced on his feet, did a little one-legged twirl. Walked backwards for the first time in years. Tentatively, he jumped. Then he jumped again. Then a third time, leaping high and tucking his knees to his chest for a second. Once grounded again he squatted down and bounced on his toes.

Nofl nodded approvingly. “Much better! This is as a human should be, don’t you think?”

“How—?” Gabe asked.

“Darling, you are a clever man but the explanation would be so far beyond you. If you were to make a serious study of regenerative medicine, then—”

“No, never mind. I just…” Gabe shook his head at himself. ”He sido un baboso. I should have done this earlier!”

“Deathworld skepticism. A useful survival mechanism! Also, annoying.” Nofl returned his used equipment to its proper place. “But, you got here in the end. All fixed! Unless you want—”

”No.” Gabe said, then cleared his throat and softened. “No. Thank you. This is…More than enough.”

“Oh, suit yourself dear,” Nofl indulged him, flapping his hand dismissively over his shoulder.

Gabe jogged on the spot for a few seconds more to marvel at his regained mobility, then calmed himself down with a deep breath and a shake of his head. “Anyway, a deal is a deal. Have you made your appointment with the surgeon downstairs?”

Nofl finished packing his tools and turned around, carefully sanitizing his hands. Even with the biofilter fields and frontline implants, that was generally a good idea for ETs who laid hands on a human. “That I have, darling. It’s been a heavy burden, I must say…”

“Good. Then be here tomorrow at noon. Lieutenant-Colonel Powell and Admiral Knight will be here to visit.”

“…Oh? Why?”

“Because you just earned your way into something that’ll make fixing my busted ass look like a high school science project.”

“Cryptic. What exactly is in it for me?”

Gabe grinned his biggest, toothiest grin and was pleased when he saw Nofl reflexively flinch. He knew he was wearing the one smile to which aliens never quite adapted.

“How would you like to heal the entire Corti race?” he asked.

Date Point: 13y3m AV
Starship Racing Thunder, Patrolling near Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Shipfather Yefrig

On the day that the *Racing Thunder*’s exile had been announced, Yefrig had privately ranted and clawed the walls whenever the younger Brothers of his crew weren’t around to see it.

Hindsight, as the humans had it, was perfect vision. In retrospect his ship, its crew and their talents had been wasted as a minor system picket in a busy high-traffic trading system. They had loitered near Perfection’s most-used parking orbits and flexed their metaphorical claws, doing their best to cow thousands of freighters into law-abiding behaviour.

The occasional stop-and-search, the occasional arrest…and Yefrig’s knowledge and experience as a shipfather had been stretched to their limits in keeping his crew’s morale up and their conduct in line.

Near-system superluminal patrol was a vastly better role. They interacted with every ship coming and going from Cimbrean, learned their names, became familiar with their masters. There weren’t so very many yet, but the humans had big plans to turn Cimbrean into a major exporter. They didn’t have anything to offer the galaxy in the way of technology, but their foodstuffs were something else entirely.

Every ship that brought immigrants and alien materials and technology to Cimbrean left with a cargo hold full of “Rice,” “Soybeans” and “Cornflour” that were already revolutionizing the manufacture of ration balls. Most also carried a delicacy that was rapidly gaining in popularity among Vzk’tk—crunchy, sweet “Carrots.”

The Gaoians, whose territory was only one week away, were getting the best exports of all—deathworld meat. Chicken, beef, pork, lamb, turkey and salmon. Delicious, rich and absolutely full of protein. And that wasn’t even to mention cheese!

If the humans devoted their worlds to exporting nothing but food, they would soon have the market cornered. Deathworld crop species produced far more calories per square kilometer, and the humans apparently already had some pretty cunning proprietary genetics technology that prevented their customers from just planting the crops themselves.

As things were going, Cimbrean had achieved financial self-sufficiency much sooner than had originally been predicted. In fact it was on track to finish paying off its debts entirely within twenty years.

That success naturally attracted interest. Not so long ago, the colony had been under a permanent Hunter blockade. The blockade might be gone, but nobody had forgotten it, which was why the *Racing Thunder*’s first and primary responsibility was to range far out from the system’s borders and keep a nose to the wind in case of incoming large fleets.

And that, in turn, was why Yefrig had been roused from his sleep and was bounding onto the bridge with a definite sense of trepidation. The night watch had picked up just such a fleet, and had diverted the ship as per protocol to get close enough for a positive ID.

A couple of junior Brothers got smartly out of Yefrig’s way as he threw himself at his command seat. “Report,” he ordered, buckling himself in.

The senior of the two sensor operators, a Rite-Brother by the name of Duri, waved a claw at his console. “Gaoian ships, Father. A whole flotilla.”

That was a relief, at least, but it opened a whole series of other questions. “Clan?”

“Not ours, Shipfather.”

“Accelerate to intercept, peaceful overtures. Message buoy back to Cimbrean.”

There were obedient yips from all over the bridge, and Yefrig settled into his seat to watch his map. The display was ludicrously not to scale, of course—how could it be? It encompassed a radius of twenty lightyears—but the objects within it at least gave him a sense of relative position and speed.

The Racing Thunder was aptly named; when they really opened up the engines she could outrun anything. Not even a Human V-Class could match her acceleration or peak FTL velocity, and the helm had laid in an expert trajectory that should see them flash across the incoming fleet’s nose, close enough to identify them but with enough breathing room to get away if things had gone entirely insane and their own people turned out to be hostile.

“Time until we can verify their IFF?”

“Less than [two minutes], shipfather…” Duri informed him

“Keep our claws in.”

“Yes, Shipfather.”

Yefrig scratched his own claws nervously across the coarse fabric of his chair and ran through possibilities in his mind; There were very few reasons why a Gaoian flotilla of that size might be cruising toward Cimbrean, and he wasn’t sure if he was more worried by the most positive or the most negative of those reasons.

“I have a clear reading on their IFF…Shipfather, the fleet is escorting the Playful Breeze.”

“…Hail them.”

So. The terrifying best-case scenario it was. Yefrig stood and combed down his fur, took his place where the camera could get the best look at him, and straightened up.

He ducked respectfully to his counterpart when she appeared on his screen. “Shipmother Ataya,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

Ataya was as scarred as the most battle-battered male, and flicked the stub of her left ear. The legend of how she had lost that ear and gained those scars grew with the telling, and Yefrig was one of the privileged few who knew the truth: that spaceships of any generation or technological level had their hazards, and Ataya had simply fallen afoul of one of them—A massive steam explosion while touring a starship as a cub. She had been lucky: Two Sisters, a Mother, and the shipfather had perished. Lucky for him, because if he had survived then his reputation and mating prospects would have completely evaporated.

Other people might have understandably never set foot on a ship ever again, but Ataya had paradoxically made them her passion and her career. She was Gao’s only Shipmother, and naturally she commanded the personal transport of the Mother-Supreme.

Nobody doubted her credentials for a second. That ship had only survived the Hunter assault on Capitol Station thanks to her quick thinking.

“Yefrig! No new scars? I’m disappointed,” she told him.

“The humans have strict rules about honor fights,” Yefrig sighed. “Naturally, I must set an example for my crew and obey them.”

She chirruped an ironic noise of mock irritation. “Too bad. The Mother-Supreme is on board, Yefrig. She desired a surprise visit.”

“I had inferred as much. The humans, sadly, also have rules about inspection and they absolutely will not yield on them. The Mother-Supreme must come over on a shuttle or the Playful Breeze will be searched tip to tail, and her databanks ransacked.”

“Obviously I can’t allow that,” Ataya shook her head.

“Then a shuttle it is. I will inform Cimbrean Border Force to expect a diplomatic entourage. I imagine the humans will be well pleased to learn of this.”

“You know me. I always did enjoy a little mayhem.”

“Does the Mother-Supreme?”

To Yefrig’s surprise, Ataya chittered sharply and her ear-and-a-half flattened sideways into an expression of profound amusement.

“Oh yes,” she said, and leaned on her console. “Very much so.”

There was nothing to say to that, so Yefrig cleared his throat and straightened again. “Well. Shipmother Ataya, the Playful Breeze and its escort have permission to approach the Cimbrean system and enter orbit of the fifth planet.”

“On behalf of the Mother-Supreme, I extend the gratitude of the Clan of Females. Sail well, Shipfather Yefrig.”

Yefrig relaxed outwardly as the channel closed, but internally he was cringing; he would need to place a call to Governor Sandy.

And something told him the humans weren’t going to like this.

Date Point: 13y2m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Harry “Rebar” Vandenberg

Morning PT hadn’t slacked off in Warhorse’s absence, but anybody would think it had from the way he charged around the training field correcting everybody on small errors in their form with terrifyingly renewed vigor, to the point where Rebar made a note that their young NCO in charge of physical training was to be gently encouraged to save up his leave until reaching his ’use it or lose it’ threshold.

If soaking up the sun in the Bahamas could energize him so, then the less often he took the opportunity to luxuriate the better. HEAT men were no stranger to agonizing pain and a river of sweat cascading off their noses, but the little changes made a big difference. Warhorse had an almost supernatural understanding of the body and its kinesthetics, and the torture he could inflict with simple movements and using just his victim’s own body weight against them—and in low gravity, to boot—was truly something that had to be experienced to be believed.

Heaven help whoever ‘Horse decided needed deep tissue massage after that.

And of course, there was the cold water. Hoeff had introduced that one to Arés’ arsenal by talking at length about the therapeutic benefits of vasoconstriction and the methodical madness behind SEAL training’s love of cold water. Naturally, Arés had immediately done his research and had worked their cold water swimming pool into their regime as the last step. One last indignity on top of the exhaustion and pain—being half-drowned and then hauled out by the scruff of the neck. HEAT operators were about as graceful in the water as a sack of bricks. The pool was only five feet deep…but that was five feet too many if your natural swimming stroke was the “Titanic.”

Arés claimed it was all beneficial, anyway. Rebar wasn’t sure he completely believed it—Mostly it just felt like one last kick in the dick to really round off the training session.

After that bit of mandatory fun he had no option but to lie groaning in the soft sand with the others and bask in the euphoria of letting his muscles actually rest.

Arés came around with the ultra-performance recovery shakes, each one perfectly customized to its intended drinker’s specific needs, and a Crue-D patch, gave some words of beaming encouragement, made sure they were all okay, and then went haring off to see to his own regime. All that and he was still in the process of winding back up through the gears into full Warhorse mode. What he would be like in two weeks when he entered his first heavy cycle was…

Rebar quite liked the quiet moments after a subjective eternity of suffering when he could lie back and feel his body putting itself back together. It was a weird sensation, the sense of his own distressed tissues knitting themselves under the crue-D’s influence. He could actually lie there and feel the gravity become less relevant again.

This part of the routine was strictly “in your own time.” Rebar liked to get up and moving as soon as he could, trusting movement to massage the Crue-D into his aching muscles and get them working again sooner.

The cold plunge at least spared him the need to go shower, so after clambering to his feet he waded through the sand into the barracks, dried off, got changed and checked his emails.

Ten minutes later he was fully dressed, sharp and alert and knocking on Lieutenant-Colonel Powell’s office door.

He heard Powell shift in his seat inside. “Come in,” he called.

Rebar turned the handle and very nearly tripped up as the door didn’t open as expected. Rather than swinging to the side, it tried to open upwards like a cat flap. He lifted it out of the way on his way in—somebody had dismounted the hinges, reinstalled them at the top and hung the door from them.

Ah. Shenanigans.

He used the time as he carefully lowered and closed the door behind him to put his best professional deadpan in place.

Powell was on the phone. He gave Rebar a nod and a quick gesture with his fingers, requesting patience.

“Aye…Aye, that sounds right…No, Commander McDaniel already tried that last year. …Like a chocolate bloody teapot, that’s how. Aye, that’d be good. Yeah. Yeah, cheers Wilde. You too.”

He put the phone down and offered Rebar a tight but not unwelcoming little smile. “Good afternoon, Master Sergeant.”

“Good afternoon, sir,” Rebar replied.

“Please, sit. Won’t keep you long,” Powell offered and promised. Rebar was getting good at reading his moods these days, and while anybody else would have thought Powell was being inscrutable, Rebar could tell that he was in good humour and inclined to indulge in a little harmless fun.

“Thanks,” he replied, sitting. “How was Earth?” Powell had been away the day before and that morning for the monthly situation briefing.

“Fookin’ warm. Scotch Creek in the summer’s not half bad. Lads behaved themselves?”

“I didn’t notice any misbehaviour, sir,” Rebar answered truthfully.

“Aye, they’re good about knowing when to be on their best, aren’t they? Helpful too. You know, I had Colour Sergeant Murray in here just day before yesterday to go over our notes on the low-profile insertion to Aru. The Gaoians did well there, I reckon.”

“Very well, I thought,” Rebar agreed.

“Mm. Aye. Anyway, he commented when he came in that my door was a bit sticky. I agreed. Been meaning to have a word with building maintenance about it.”

“Probably just needs planing down,” Rebar opined. “That’s happened to a few doors around here.”

“No need now,” Powell informed him, breezily. “Because in my absence it seems somebody took it on themselves to do me a favour and fix it.”

“That was nice of them.”

“Aye, but it’s left me a mite puzzled, you see,” Powell replied, sitting back easily with a relaxed air and his hands behind his head. “There’s summat about the repair that doesn’t seem quite right…but, I’m aware I’m no kind of a construction engineer or owt like that. An’ it’s a basic principle that you should seek out the opinions of those more knowledgable than yourself in these matters…”

“True,” Rebar agreed.

“So I thought I’d get you to run yer expert eye over the fix, if that’s no bother.” Powell stood, ambled over to the door and hinged it upwards. “What do you think? Does that seem right to you?”

“No sir, I reckon that should be opening sideways,” Rebar deadpanned.

“Mm.” Powell nodded. Both men’s faces remained perfectly serious. “Easy mistake to make, maybe?”

“Not for a professional, sir.”

“Ahh. Rookie error, then.” Powell nodded and sniffed.

“…Perhaps I should, uh, stress to the Lads how important it is to leave this kind of work to the custodians?” Rebar suggested.

“Aye, that’s probably for the best. I appreciate the gesture of course but we don’t want the fix to be worse than the problem, do we?”

“As you say, sir.”

Powell returned to his desk, nodding comfortably as if they’d discussed a minor imperfection of no consequence. “What else was there…?” he asked himself as he sorted through a short stack of papers and letters on his desk. “Oh aye, our MTOE. Tremblay’s of the notion it’s a bit on the empty side.”

“Because it is.”

“Aye. We don’t even have a full team, let alone the six we wanted to start with.”

“Three Protectors, six Defenders, and nine Aggressors each, as I recall. We’re half that for the Defenders and we still need three more Aggressors…to have one full working team.”

“Hence the big questions comin’ from some quarters about the future of HEAT,” Powell informed him.

“We need those six teams, sir, if we’re going to sustain any kind of continuous opstempo. As it stands now, every time a mission happens—even little ones like we seem to get a lot more of these days—we gotta stand down, rest, evaluate, and reset. That means every time more than one or two of us puts the suit on for any reason at all, we lose the HEAT for a week. At least. If it’s a big mission, it could be a couple of months.”

“Right. Honest assessment then, and no bloody ‘can-do attitude,’” Powell said. “Can it be done?”

Rebar shifted in place, attempting to escape the answer he knew he needed to give. Finally, he sighed and answered plainly, “No.”

“Why not?”

In response Rebar rolled up his sleeve and flexed a bicep the size of a bowling ball. “This is why. It takes a special kind of idiot to sign up for this, and besides all that which we’ve groused about for literally years now, the training standards preclude it. EV-MASS is just too demanding. Of our four new members, Newman and Parata were last-minute replacements because the original selectees backed out once they saw us in person. We had another two guys suffer broken ribs and washout within the first fifteen minutes of initial suit fitting. Hell, the last group we ran in Alabama? Not a single one of them qualified. If we want to recruit more people, we gotta lower standards, and to do that we need something more like the Gaoian suit. Which, y’know. We’re not gonna get. Sir.”

“If I take that assessment back to AEC, then HEAT has a lifespan measured in weeks.”

“Which puts us in a bad spot because we need the capability, which is another reason we can’t lower standards. My men can do things nobody else can do, and it’s exactly because we’re all freaks of nature that we can do all that in the first place. I don’t know how the hell we lucked out the first time with the people we have, sir, but a HEAT operator is a rare fucking specimen. All of us are, especially the Trio. No fancy spacemagic suit is gonna fix that.”

“Preaching to the choir,” Powell agreed, though his expression darkened. “And I will not let the Lads have done all this for nowt.”

“Then maybe we need to consider the HEAT more like the CIA considers their, uh, more operational side of the house. Very small, very special-purpose units…maybe what we really need is a more realistic reset of expectations, sir? We’re assuming we need to sustain operations indefinitely, but, frankly? Why? I mean, hell,” Rebar stood and paced as he gathered steam, “Let’s be realistic. What kind of combat are we in if we need HEAT teams continuously deployed? We don’t have the navy to back that scenario in the first place.”

“Never will, unless we build more Caledonia-class. They’re the space navy answer to a carrier.”

“And we won’t. System shields are just better and everyone with half a brain knows it. Our space military is never going to be all that big. Which, I mean…isn’t that a good thing?”

“We’ll always need force projection.”

“How much, though? I mean, again, I know it’s an overused example but look at us and tell me we really need or even want a bunch of me, or ‘Base, or—God forbid—‘Horse and Firth running around. Honestly the more I think about it, I think we need to be a small unit. It’s a Goddamned miracle we’ve got what we got right now. What we really need is JETS.”

Powell nodded slowly and at length, thoughtfully.

“Wish I could be more positive, sir.”

“You’re just echoing what I told Tremblay,” Powell reassured him in a regretful grumble. He stood up abruptly and retrieved some writing paper and his good pen from a neat stack on top of his filing cabinet. It was a foible of Powell’s that he preferred to write things down the old-fashioned way, on important occasions.

“Can we achieve one full team, d’you think?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rebar had no qualms at all about answering that one definitively. “If we couldn’t even do that, we wouldn’t have what we already do. Over time I think we can get two teams, maybe three. But six? I’m skeptical.”

Powell put his hands together and steepled his fingers. “What do you think our recruiting priority should be, then? What will be the hardest for us to fill?

“Well,” Rebar considered, “I figure combat arms are full of the kinda guys who want to try to meet the HEAT Aggressor standard. A few will even be good enough. Protectors, well…we already know their superman button, but they’re so fucking dependent on good genes and raw physical talent that we can’t really do anything but encourage and wait for them to come to us.”

“And the Defenders?”

Rebar nodded. “They might be the toughest niche to fill. On the one hand, we don’t need to be hyperactive murderbunnies or big damn heroes and that means we don’t need to be perfect genetic lottery winners like the rest of you fellas. I bet there’s a pretty good pool out there of really big, tough, ornery combat armsman that can wear the Mass and train up to size. But on the other hand, the engineering mindset is rare and that’s the problem. The structures that’re in place to detect suitable candidates are channeling them toward other units.”

“Like the three of you and Delta Force.”

“Exactly. And we only fit the combat engineer role in a kinda-sorta-maybe way. Which is a shame, ‘cuz every 18C guy who tried out for HEAT so far didn’t make the cut.”

“There owt we can do about that?”

Rebar thought about it. “Brute force recruiting effort. Scale down our expectations for how big HEAT can be but hold ourselves to being the ultimate weapon where needed. JETS needs to expand, and we need the allied services to sacrifice some of their best and brightest to make it happen. They, uh…won’t like that.”

“Oh, fook no,” Powell agreed as his forehead wrinkled into a wry expression. “But they’ll bloody well have to relax and spread wide, won’t they?”

Rebar grinned out the side of his mouth. “We’ll loosen ‘em up with a little sweet talk, sir.”

“Aye. I’ve half a mind to—hang on.”

Desk phones were going to be around forever, in Rebar’s estimation. The modern generation could seamlessly tell if their intended user was at his desk or not and divert incoming calls as appropriate, but when it came down to it that was a minor reason to have a big black chunk of plastic on the desk.

More importantly, when that chunk of plastic made a piercing ringing sound, Powell had the handset snatched up and held against his ear inside a second. Rebar, meanwhile, had lost count of the number of cellphone calls he personally had missed from trying to fumble the damn thing out of his pocket.

“Powell. …Oh aye? …Bloody hellfire. Alright, recall the Lads and especially the Gaoians. No, he’s on Earth. Take it to Caruthers instead. Aye, cheers.”

Rebar let him consider the handset and slowly replace it in the cradle. “…Sir?”

Powell looked up and gave him the brittle, unamused smile of a man who was in no way amused or happy.

“We’re having a surprise visit,” he said. “From the Mother-Supreme.”

Date Point: 13y2m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“The one who ambushed us at the jump array? Are you sure?”

“Kevin said she wrote an article on me,” Xiù revealed. “A couple of years ago. ’Hometown Hero’ or…something like that.”

Julian and Allison traded a surprised glance. “That one? That was her?” Allison asked.

“You’ve read it?”

“We both did,” Julian revealed.

“Why are you reading news articles about me?”

Allison gave her a patient look. “Because they’re about you, dummy.”

Xiù lapsed into happy blushing silence, and Julian sipped his coffee. Two weeks on from the attack in Omaha they’d finally persuaded their assorted guardian angels to let them have some freedom back, and had returned to the microbrewery and cafe where they’d had a memorable evening the last time they were on Cimbrean. Undoubtedly they were under careful protective surveillance but at least it was invisible surveillance, rather than hundreds of pounds of muscle wrapped in a horrific crime-against-humanity Hawaiian shirt.

Well, not totally invisible. Murray was damn good at making himself a background detail, but Julian knew what to watch for. He caught the taciturn Scotsman’s eye but didn’t give him away by winking or acknowledge him. Just making eye contact was enough.

“Okay, but what about Byron’s own pet news agencies?” Allison asked.

“We already talked with them,” Xiù pointed out.

“Aren’t we, like, under some kind of contract thing to only speak with them?”

“Not according to Kevin.” Xiù shrugged. “He said to consider giving ESNN an interview too. Something about Moses wants the Group to appear open and transparent.”

“You think he does?” Julian asked.

“Probably.” Xiù shrugged again.

“Okay, but come on. The woman who ambushed us at the jump array? Why her?”

“And why do we even need to talk with her?” Allison added.

“Because the more we do the more it helps the People?” Xiù suggested.

“Does it? We already got backing that goes right to the top. Do we really need to win more hearts and minds?”

“Can it hurt?”

“It can hurt us,” Julian said. “I love you, but we can’t be on the job every day. I want some us time.”

“Especially now,” Allison agreed.

Xiù nodded and deflated a little. “So…that’s a no to the interview.”

“Baby, have you actually relaxed at all since we got here?” Allison asked. “You’re gonna worry yourself to death.”

“When have we had the chance?” Xiù asked.

“Right now?”

“We’re being watched all the time, we’re recognized everywhere we go…” Xiù shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “We don’t have the space to relax. And I want to be doing something, everything’s going so slowly! I thought we’d have gone back by now.”

“Or at least that Dan and Clara would be over here by now,” Julian agreed. “She’s got a point, Al.”

“Well, yeah,” Allison agreed. “But talking to a reporter is just…it’s make-work. I wanna do something productive, you know?”

“Relaxing is productive?”

“If it stops us from going completely fucking gaga? Hell yeah it’s productive!” Allison took a sip of her cappuccino. “What is there to do in this town, anyway?”

“Uh…” Xiù retrieved her purse from under her seat and pulled out the tourism brochure. “Many parks and public recreation facilities…Organized hiking tours to see the native flora and fauna…Theatres, bars, pubs…Oh! Spa day?”

“Sounds nice,” Julian agreed, and caught Allison’s faintly incredulous expression. “What?”

“…Nothing. Just…When did you ever have a spa day? I’m used to you cutting down trees and trapping beavers. I didn’t think they’ld be your style.”

“Uh, never,” Julian conceded. “But they must be nice or people wouldn’t do them.”

“Haven’t you ever had a facial?” Xiù asked her.

“Only when Julian didn’t warn me in time that time on—”

”Allison!” Xiù objected, while Julian tried not to laugh.

“I’m teasing, shǎguā,” Allison told her affectionately. “And nope, never. Let’s do it!”

“Let’s see what our shadow thinks…” Julian muttered, indicating Murray with a tilt of his head. Murray had answered his phone, and made eye contact again, giving off a clear ’something just came up’ vibe.

“Oh, God,” Allison groaned. “What now?

“It had better be good,” Xiù agreed. “I’m not giving up on that spa day for anything less than—”

She trailed off as Murray stood and weaved delicately between the tables. He stopped right in front of them and gave Xiù a shrug of his broad shoulders.

“…Mother-Supreme Yulna’s here to see you,” he said.

Xiù blinked at him.

“…Huh,” she said.

“…Well,” she added.

She turned to Allison and Julian and shrugged helplessly.

“…I guess the spa day’s on hold,” she finished.

Date Point: 13y2m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ayma

It would have been nice to see Folctha from the air. Something about Jump Arrays seemed wrong—arriving on another world should be an event, in Ayma’s view. It should involve fire, and clouds, and a first glimpse of the scenery rolling away below.

The jump from the heavily modified trade station ”Armstrong” took all the drama out of it. They had gone seamlessly from the inside of the ship, to the inside of a shuttle, to the inside of the station, to the inside of a customs and immigration center, to the inside of a jump array, to the inside of another, almost identical jump array.

Yulna had been afforded slightly more dignity. While her entourage had been brusquely interrogated and searched for whatever-it-was the Humans didn’t want imported, Yulna had enjoyed the personal attention of somebody called an ”Aide-de-camp”

It all didn’t feel like traveling, it felt like waiting.

There was no missing the moment they actually arrived on Cimbrean, however. For their safety and comfort they were seated, but the gravity still landed on them like a thick overnight snowfall. Ayma had felt it before and in some ways even welcomed it, and Myun looked positively delighted to be back in the embrace of Folctha’s municipal gravity field generators.

Most of the entourage made soft exclamations of surprise and discomfort, but Yulna herself knew better. The most concern she showed to her enhanced weight was to stand up carefully and be sure of her footing before she moved—otherwise, she stood as tall and as proud as she could muster. She’d learned the art of looking regal quite well.

There was quite the welcome party waiting for them, all doing their best not to look harried if Ayma’s memory for human expressions and body language was still intact. A tall male in a black uniform that managed to be both austere and heavily decorated at the same time, whose head and face were covered in sleek silver fur. There was a much shorter man with a darker skin tone who was holding a walking cane apparently more out of habit than actual necessity and who looked thoroughly out of place to Ayma’s eyes.

Both were standing firmly in the background of a slim and slight-featured balding man whose minimalist navy-blue suit was paired strangely with a bright scarlet sash, a number of medals, and a wide ornamental chain that had to be gold-plated. Not even a human could look comfortable wearing that much pure gold, could they?

Actually, they probably could.

Whatever role he served, the ornamented human was the first to step forward, leading with an extended hand.

“Welcome, Mother-Supreme. I am Governor-General Sir Jeremy Sandy, I have the honour of serving as His Majesty King George’s official representative on the planet Cimbrean. On his behalf, welcome to our world with the well-wishes of all.”

“A historic occasion, Governor-General,” Yulna replied, shaking the human’s hand. “And I apologize that it was not properly arranged.”

“Not at all,” Sandy managed the neat trick of smiling warmly without baring his teeth—clearly he was well used to interacting with nonhumans. “But yes, a historic occasion, as you say: the first official state visit by a nonhuman dignitary to a human world. One for the books.”

“May the future be full of them,” Yulna replied. Ayma watched the exchange while fighting to keep the amusement from showing in her ears—she’d noticed a few Gaoians in the crowd, one of whom was even among the journalists who had rushed forward to gather as many still pictures of the pair as sapiently possible.

There were some more formalities and niceties, another series of photo opportunities as Sandy escorted Yulna and her followers outside to point out some of the prettier details of Folctha city.

It was a pretty city, Ayma realized.

And now she definitely wished she could have seen it from above.

Date Point: 13y2m2w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Daar

“Does she have implants?”

Regaari could be relied upon to know those things, and he shook his head. “No she doesn’t, Cousin. Just a prosthetic eye. A good one.”

Daar relaxed slightly, although something in the smell of this meeting was making him nervous. He could feel that it wasn’t going to go well. “Well…that gives us options, then,” He said. “Wish me luck.”

Being summoned by the Mother-Supreme—who had travelled unannounced all the way from Gao specifically to summon him, no less—was more than just a big deal. Clans hung in the balance on moments like this, and even the old contract between Stoneback and the Females had its limits.

If he hadn’t known that already, he would have had to be as dense as a lead souffle not to get the hint from the cold appraisal on Yulna’s face when she turned around as he entered the room.

There was a time for pride, and there was a time for caution. This was one of the latter, but never without dignity. Not ever.

And this was not a time for beating about the bush.

“You’ve come a long way, Mother-Supreme. What troubles you?”

“You.”

Yulna flicked an ear and strolled around the large table that the humans had provided for them. Her claws made a soft sound as she trailed them across the varnished wood, and she approached to only just out of arm’s reach before stopping.

“…I must get your scent properly, Daar,” she told him.

There was no good reaction to that. Yulna was demanding to smell him close enough to tell if he was lying. She was questioning his integrity and by extension that of Clan Stoneback, and she knew it. That was…unheard-of, and it was a grievous insult—If a male had made such a demand, Daar would already be ripping out his throat.

Stonebacks never lied. But…Yulna was the Mother-Supreme. For her he would make an allowance, if for no other reason than to see where the chase led.

“…Very well. I will remember this in the spirit it was requested.” He put his arms behind his back and knelt, holding himself vulnerable for her examination. “Now…what troubles you?”

To her credit, Yulna had never been one to prevaricate. “You have left us in the dark, Daar. You’re keeping secrets from us. More so than usual. You and Whitecrest, you’re conspiring.”

“Yes.”

“Why? We expect the Whitecrests to be opaque, but Stoneback? What have the Females done that you won’t trust us or come to us for guidance?”

Ah.

That was…disappointing on a number of levels, but the biggest had to be the presumption inherent in such a statement. That would require addressing but not now; the Clan always came first, so Daar clamped down on his growing anger and kept a neutral tone.

“We keep our own counsel, Mother-Supreme, as is our right and duty. But my trust wasn’t the issue. Nor was intent. We are keeping a very grave secret for very grave reasons, and it is one you must never discuss with anyone, in any capacity, ever. Even admitting to this secret comes too close to violating an oath.” He paused, and emphasized his words to convey the gravity of the situation. “I trust you will consider that, and the position you have put me in.”

“…How grave?”

“Mother-Supreme, it is so grave that I am not willing to risk it no matter what you may threaten.”

“The Humans are involved?”

“It is so grave I can give you not the barest hint of what the secret might be, Mother-Supreme. I refuse to answer.” He paused, and sighed. “If I could, I would have told you long ago.”

“Do you know who could tell me?”

“I cannot say.”

“If you did, would you speak to them on my behalf, at least?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Daar paused, and considered. He could speak many shades of truth and keep his integrity, but Daar took his oaths very seriously. Stonebacks never lied, not even in part.

The moment of very hard truths had come to them. He could only hope she was strong enough to hear them. Daar clamped down on his roiling feelings, looked her dead in the eye, and spoke with as neutral and formal a tone as he could manage.

“In part that could betray the secret. But now I would question the wisdom of sharing such a thing with you, Mother-Supreme.”

“…You mean you question my wisdom.”

“Yes.”

Yulna sniffed at him, then slowly and thoughtfully she duck-nodded and backed away. Her ears didn’t wilt by so much as a hair, but the sense of…loss, perhaps, was palpable. Even her scent was saddened.

“…Perhaps, then, once whatever this danger is has passed, our successors will be able to rebuild the old contract,” she said. “I…regret that it will need rebuilding.”

Daar sighed again, rose to his paws and left her presence as a Stoneback should, properly on all fours. “The Contract remains, it is what we are. You used to know that, Yulna.” He stopped at the door and looked back. “…Keep Myun close to you.”

“…Thank you, Champion Daar.”

He nodded, and left.

Date Point: 13y2m2w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Agent Melissa

For once, Melissa was speechless. That went for everybody in the room, in fact.

Bugging foreign dignitaries was a standard move in the Great Game. Russian premiers, Arab kings, African presidents, they’d all had somebody listening in on them. Adding the Mother-Supreme and a Champion to that long list was absolutely business as usual.

Allies spied on allies; It kept alliances strong. It helped lubricate the wheels of diplomacy to know which were the touchy subjects, and it strengthened the united front to know where a partner’s strength was showing cracks.

Seeing a gigantic catastrophe of a crack rip open right in front of them was a new one, though.

The US Ambassador to Cimbrean, Arnold P. Rockefeller, was fidgeting thoughtfully with a pen and scowling. “…What does this mean?”

Melissa really didn’t envy him. She didn’t envy the army of analysts who’d be descending on that conversation to sift it down for every last datum, either. She certainly didn’t envy herself right now.

“I think,” she said carefully, “That the Hierarchy just scored itself a victory.”

Date Point: 13y2m2w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Regaari

Daar was not as impulsive as his critics liked to believe. There was an iron will under his boisterous hide, married to a shrewd actor and an astute political mind.

But even he had his limits. Whatever had transpired during his meeting with the Mother Supreme had put Daar in the darkest mood Regaari had ever seen on him. He’d been silent all the way back to the base, and only once they were safely behind the privacy of its fences and buildings did he unwind.

He surged around to the driver’s side of the Whitecrest runabout van and clawed Regaari out of the way to hup up behind the wheel.

“Daar?”

The Champion slammed the door and rolled down the window. “Imma be gone for a bit. Do we need any naxas meat?”

“…no?”

“Well, we’re gettin’ some anyway. I’ll call you later.”

The tyres squeeled, and Regaari backed out of the cloud of dust thus raised as the Champion did a sharp one-eighty and headed back out of the gates.

There was a shocked sound from Thurrsto, who’d wisely got the hell away from Daar the instant he smelled trouble. “Is…is everything all right?”

Regaari sniffed at the air. His nose wasn’t nearly as good as Daar’s—almost nobody matched him—but there was absolutely no mistaking the rage billowing on the wind, mingling with the scent of airborne dirt and slightly toasted rubber. It was strong enough to sting the nostrils, even though its source was gone.

“I don’t think so, Brother. But…for the moment, we keep this to ourselves. As a SOR matter.”

Thurrsto shifted uncomfortably. “We don’t keep secrets from our Fathers, Regaari.”

“Yes we do. Our entire purpose here is only one such secret.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded, understanding. “You think they’re related.”

Regaari gave him a complicated look. “Brother, I truly hope not….We’d better find Rebar.”

Date Point: 13y2m2w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Yulna was keening. Not the happy keen of a Mother reuniting with a long-lost Sister, either: this was the sound Gaoians made when they were completely trapped by anguish.

It should have been a happy reunion. Instead, ’Sister Shoo’ was doing what she did best—standing where nobody else stood, across the strange gap between species and in the halls of Gaoian power where she absolutely had no right to be. It was on her word after all that Gao had committed to the Dominion Security Council all those years ago.

That made two Mother-Supremes now who’d turned to her for guidance.

“These are awful times, Shoo.”

What could anyone say to that? Xiù’s only option was to snuggle deeper into Yulna’s neck fur and try not to squeeze too hard.

“You’re going to have to explain this Old Contract to me,” she prompted, gently.

“The Females…” Yulna’s keening softened and she pulled back a bit to have room to think and speak. “You know the history? Of Tiritya and the harems?”

“I didn’t really understand it all at the time,” Xiù confessed. “I was still learning Gaori. The Females were…” She frowned, thinking. “…I can’t remember the word for *’slaves.’*”

“Yes. Slaves. And the Clan of Females only exists because of Stoneback. So we have the Old Contract: They protect and provide, and we reward them.”

“With cubs?”

“More than cubs. With trust.” Yulna growled at herself. “And now a Mother-Supreme has doubted them. Doubted their Champion. He no longer trusts me and he’s right not to.”

Not honestly having the faintest idea what the right or wrong thing to say might be, Xiù elected to go with the first question that sprang to mind.

“Well…did you have a reason to?”

“I…” Yulna went very still, almost to the point where she stopped breathing. Her ears twisted hypnotically as she processed what must have been a torrent of conflicting thoughts and emotions, before finally wilting down to the unhappy flat posture of total defeat. “…I hope that I did. No. I hope that I didn’t, I…. I don’t know. I would hate to think I could doubt him without cause…but I regret doubting him at all.”

She keened softly again, then some of that Yulna sharpness came back for a moment. “You’ll keep this between us? Promise me. The Sisters and Mothers can’t know this happened. Not even Ayma.”

“I…Just between us?”

“You can promise me that, can’t you?”

Slowly and reluctantly, Xiù shook her head. “It’s…a promise I made. To Allison and Julian. No secrets,” she said. “Not between us. But it’ll never get back to any other Gaoian, that I can promise you.”

Yulna curled up miserably. “So alien,” she moaned. “You’re my Sister, but you’re so alien. To commit for so long, to another female, to have no cubs…”

“Yulna, I’ll always be a little bit Gaoian I think,” Xiù told her. “But I’m not a Gaoian. Would you be telling me these things if I was?”

Yulna shook her head no and rested her chin on Xiù’s knee.

“…If it’s any consolation, our triad thing isn’t exactly normal among humans.”

For the first time, Yulna chittered and uncurled again. “Ah, Shoo…you wouldn’t be Shoo if you weren’t a little strange,” she said affectionately.

“I think I’m allowed to be strange,” Xiù retorted. “Do you have any idea how weird my life is? I feel like I’m just being…like I’m a fish with a hook in its mouth and I’m being dragged toward something. And every time I try and fight it or wriggle free it just hurts a lot and tires me out.”

“Would you escape if you could?”

“…No.”

“Neither would I.” Yulna sighed and stood up. “These are difficult times. I can see why so many are scared of your species. Things have become…unstable since you arrived.”

“Is that our fault?” Xiù asked.

“No. No, I don’t think it is. I think you just gave us the push we needed for a corrupt system to begin falling apart.” Yulna turned around and combed down the fur on her arm nervously. “But I think it is going to hurt you the most. Humans.”

“I hope it’s worth it in the end.”

Yulna shook herself out and walked over to the window. “…I can smell disaster on the wind, Shoo. Nothing less could have caused this, this…rift. And now I will have to lie to my Sisters and pretend nothing is wrong, and they will smell my lies.”

She turned and chittered bitterly. “I almost long for the days when I was just a Corti’s test subject, having my eye plucked out. At least they were simpler.”

“At least you know it’s coming,” Xiù told her.

“…There is that, yes.” Yulna sighed, returned across the room and threw herself onto the couch next to Xiù again. “…Yes. There is that. I think I know what I must do, now.”

“What?”

“…Do you know what the third most important planet is to the Clans of Gao, Sister?”

Xiù tilted her head. “After Gao and Gorai? …No, don’t tell me. It’s Cimbrean, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s Gorai. Cimbrean has an enclave of Females and is home to a male Clan. Politically alone, that makes it more important than Gorai. Then there are the Whitecrests and Daar’s relationship with the SOR, the trade, and the fact that the Gaoian diaspora here is double the population of the colony on Guen Ha.” Yulna indicated the window with her paw. “Cimbrean, a human colony, is of greater significance to Gao than either of our own colony worlds. Culturally, militarily, politically and economically.”

“So what must you do?” Xiù pressed.

“I must commit to it. If there is a disaster coming, it’s obvious that both our peoples are already swept up in it. I don’t need to know the details to know what I can do to give us both the best hope of coming through it. And if we make it to the far side, then any bridges we must burn on the way…”

“Were the price,” Xiù finished.

“…And that is why Mother-Supremes have confided in you, Sister.” Yulna sighed one last time, and seemed to regenerate her composure. “…Enough. I was looking forward to seeing you, not burdening you with my problems. I want to hear your stories. Tell me about your lovers. How did you meet?”

Xiù couldn’t help a small giggle, and she half-turned on the couch to get into storytelling mode. If Yulna needed a positive distraction, then a positive distraction she would have.

“Well, it started off with me brandishing a knife at them…” she began.

Date Point: 13y3m AV
Werecoba Heights, Columbus, Georgia, USA, Earth

Sergeant Daar (Tigger) of Clan SOR

Daar was used to having a clear idea of his daily life and what challenges he might face next, which meant the recent turmoil of the last long while had been…well, a little disorientating. Life as a Champion had been good to him and the long peace of the Gao had maybe lulled him into a feeling of false security, or something like that. It was hard to describe, but since learning of the Hierarchy those feelings were no longer a luxury he could or would afford himself.

Especially not in light of Yulna. Now more than ever, he needed a clear mind, and right now his mind was trying to drag him in too many different directions all at once. Anger, yes. Betrayal. Sadness. Even guilt and doubt.

Feelings he could never permit himself to indulge. A Champion must embody the essence of his Clan, and the emotional core of Stoneback was optimism: That there was no problem that could not be worked through, no obstacle that could not be built over, and no foe that could not be fought.

He’d retreated to Earth, and had so far declined to leave even after two weeks. His Clan needed him at his best: Better to not be there at all than to be there at his worst.

On Earth, his problems were simple, controllable. Mostly they revolved around careful hygiene and the perceptiveness it required, and around his studies. Things he could control, that weren’t subject to the fickle whims of other people.

And of course, there were no Gaoians present who might guess what was eating at him so much. Not even Ayma and Regaari had remained on Earth for so long or roamed so freely as Daar could.

Of course, Regaari was no doubt taking advantage of Daar’s absence and that wasn’t something he took lightly for a lot of important reasons: Cousins of a Champion gained a lot of prestige by the association and that was a power that a smart ‘Back like Daar wouldn’t trust with just anyone.

Regaari, though, was worth it. He didn’t abuse the power—at least not too much—and that put him in a good place for Daar to feed the occasional tidbit of information to Whitecrest. He’d fed their Clan a lot of information over the years, all part of a campaign to lubricate their relations and build trust. Clans were alway mistrustful of what they didn’t understand, but Daar understood Whitecrest pretty well…probably better than Genshi would have been comfortable with. Regardless, both Daar and his predecessor Thurl had felt that, given first contact and the sudden exposure to the galactic stage, it would be essential for Gao’s best security and intelligence Clan to have a deeper understanding of what Stoneback’s purpose actually was.

Now that he knew about the Hierarchy and all that entailed, Daar had to admire Thurl’s prescience. It was too bad about the brain injury; when Daar Challenged and claimed the Championship, he had so utterly defeated Thurl that the former Champion had needed immediate medical care after the fight and had never again been quite right in the head. He had been a good Champion too, one admired and respected by everyone—including Daar. But compared to his young, gangly and still-growing challenger, Thurl had been smaller, weaker, slower, and stood absolutely no chance. Less intelligent, too, if Daar was honest. It hadn’t been his most difficult fight.

That was a Champion’s fate, though, or at least it was for the Champion of Stoneback. One day Daar would probably get too old and weak or weak-minded for the job, and a younger, more vigorous ‘Back would knock him down from the office, and if he survived that Challenge Daar would go into retirement. But that wasn’t likely to happen any time soon. He was in the peak of his prime, stronger and keener than he had ever been before, and he was showing no signs of slowing down or growing soft anytime soon.

Let them try. They’d either wind up broken like Thurl, or else Stoneback would have a Champion who outshone even Daar. Either way, the Clan won.

Daar wondered if Regaari would ever Challenge Genshi for the Championship. These days he was impressive for a silverfur, a far cry from those years together back in the crèche when he begged some personal training off Daar in exchange for math tutoring. Regaari had been determined to join Whitecrest and had eventually made it in on sheer force of willpower and education, despite being slightly underweight. Nowadays he was one of their larger and stronger males, thanks to the humans. Not as big as Thurrsto or Genshi but still impressively fit, and his brain had only improved with age.

Over the last year or so, Regaari had spoken often and at length about the Human concept of ‘meditation,’ after spending time consulting with the Starminds. Daar had listened, but never put it into practice himself. He was purebred Stoneback, something about sitting motionless just didn’t work for him. He needed to move.

That was something he had in common with humans. Moving and thinking were so intertwined for them that they did it reflexively; they’d pace a room, flail their hands, gesture wildly…

Just like Daar was doing now. There was an awful lot of responsibility resting heavily on his broad shoulders, and the load was becoming increasingly harder to handle. If a final straw could break the ‘Back’s back, then Yulna had slung on a whole bale.

“What’chu thinkin’ about, sergeant Daar?”

The question cut right through Daar’s brooding and reminded him that he was supposed to be restoring himself to a positive mood. It had been asked by Technical Sergeant Wilde, Daar’s shadow, guide and medic and thus his other bestest human friend who seemed to have a knack for spotting a dark mood descending.

They were out to see the sights, get to know the town. It was a warm spring day, a number of flowers were in bloom and while Daar knew enough to stay the hell away from the pollinating insects and their stings, he had to admit that the sheer thrumming richness of life on Earth, even here in a built-up area, made it hard to stay in a bad mood.

Especially not when there was a bewitching smell of roasting meat rolling softly down the street to beguile the nose and make the stomach feel empty…

Daar sniffed at the air appreciatively. “I’m thinkin’ about food, now,” he replied.

Wilde chuckled, “Mhmm. Smells like a damn good B-B-Q they got goin’ on. Wanna check it out?”

Daar looked down at him and tilted his head quizzically. “Wouldn’t that be rude?”

“Nah, I live nearby and I’ve got a good pot of beans I can grab. So…you wanna go?”

“Yeah!”

Wilde chuckled again and jogged off towards home to fetch his beans, while Daar followed his nose towards the food. There was definitely pork, and chicken. There might have been beef too but there was a lot of that general note in the air right now, so he wasn’t quite sure just yet.

Only one way to find out.

The town had been warned that Daar would be out and about and not to freak out or anything, so the sight of a massive, bear-like sapient loping down the road on fourpaw and in a high visibility vest didn’t generate too much alarm, thank the Fathers. He even had the words “I don’t bite!” written across the back. It seemed to work pretty well.

The smell was making him drool, and as he licked at his chops to clean himself up he turned round a corner and found its source. There was a hand-scrawled sign staked into the earth that said “YARD SALE” and an arrow pointing up a narrow driveway to a small brick house. Two little American flags were on top of the sign, along with another bit that said “free BBQ for customers.”

Well. Daar checked his satchel, found his little stash of paper money the Americans used, and ambled up the driveway. What he found were two elderly humans, clearly a mated pair, neither of whom seemed like they were expecting a Stoneback to pad up their driveway on a fine Saturday evening. Even in his old age the male was a burly and impressive example of a human and moved like he was used to long, hard work. Good! He rose to put himself between Daar and the female, which he respected immensely: age hadn’t dimmed his instincts. Better!

But Daar just wanted to be friends, so he rose to his hind legs and yipped cheerily, “Hello!” The man eyed Daar warily, who kept a respectful distance. “I was gonna look at what ‘yer selling…”

Both of the older humans looked at each other, did that weird telepathic thing humans swore they didn’t have, and decided to wave him in. They both kept a wary distance though, which Daar really didn’t mind. Maybe it was a cultural thing but he was always nice to old people.

There was a lot to pick over. They had several tables laden with random housewares and odd appliances that seemed to be for various cooking tasks, as well as three racks of clothing on the hook. That kind of weird human thing always amused Daar and he sniffed at the racks curiously. And promptly sneezed. He could tell with a sniff the man had been a heavy smoker some years back and had been quite sick at some point, too.

He sniffed towards the man who no longer smelled of either of those things. “I’m glad you gave up smoking!”

“Had to, it was killing me.” He eyed the big gaoian warily, “You can still smell that?”

Daar duck-nodded vigorously. “Uh-huh. I can smell the cancer, too. Especially on this,” he picked out what looked like a uniform of some kind. “I think maybe ‘cuz you had to wear this a lot?”

“Ayup. Was the local fire chief. Look, no offense, mister…”

“Champion and Stud-Prime Daar, of Clan Stoneback!”

“…Mister Daar, right. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, seeing as I have an alien in my garage picking through my old junk, but firstly, being a cancer survivor is kinda personal—”

Daar keened an immediate apology. “I’m sorry. I was just happy you’re healthy now, I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, it’s okay dear.” The old woman walked over and laid a hand on Daar’s huge forearm, who tilted his ears in mild confusion and placed a paw atop hers. “I know you didn’t mean bad, don’t mind him.”

The old man grumbled in reply but pressed on. “Fine fine. But secondly, without meaning to be inhospitable, why are you here?”

“Oh, I’m here for the BBQ! But I don’t have food to share. My buddy Wilde’s got some beans but he ain’t here yet so I thought maybe I could buy something! I like collecting things…” Daar noticed a pile of equipment and zeroed in on it. “Like that maybe? What is it?”

He dropped unthinkingly to all fours, padded over and sniffed at the device. It had a pronounced scent of old rubber that had rotted out—a scent he’d learned from Sikes while he repaired his drones—but Daar could also smell something a little like high voltage electronics maybe. Far and away the strongest scent on the object was the male who had once owned it: The couple’s cub, from the smell of it.

…Son. Humans didn’t have ’cubs’ they had ’children,’ and Daar had learned the hard way that while most people found that slip-up endearing, a few were downright insulted.

“Your son was a strong boy!” That much was obvious, given the uniquely potent musk of an active human male. “He got a lot of exercise.”

“He’s a strong man, too. Christ, you’re just like a dog! Er, um…” the old man suddenly went all blushed and awkward like humans did when they managed to shove their paws down their throat. It was Daar’s most favoritest emote they had!

Humans weren’t immune from ‘faux pas’ either.

“Nah, it’s okay ‘cuz it’s kinda true. Also I hear I’m better with my words than a dog.”

He threw in his best pant-grin, which humans seemed to understand without any training. The man laughed and shook his head and that seemed like a good thing to Daar.

“Never thought I’d see the day… can you smell everything about us?”

“I can smell lots, yeah. He had a favorite cologne, too. Old Spice?”

“Yup. Used way too much.”

Daar chittered to himself. “One of the guys I work with uses way too much Axe. Every time I get a nose-full of that I sneeze for half an hour!”

They shared a laugh, or a chitter in Daar’s case, and he extended his paw to shake hands. “Anyway, what’s your name?”

“I’m Bill, this here’s Margaret. Daar, you said?”

“Yeah, nice to meet you both!” Handshaking was an art, Daar was learning, and Bill’s grip squeezed hard enough that a lesser gaoian might well have been left with a broken paw. It was funny how much strength old humans could retain. Daar squeezed right back, and was rewarded with an approving smile.

Margaret settled for a daintier, much more civilized squeeze. Daar could do civilized, too.

“Well!” Margaret seemed happy that everyone was friendly. “You look around, Daar, and I’ll fix you up a plate. Don’t go nowhere, y’hear?”

“Yes, Mother!”

“…Mother?”

“Sarry, it’s a gaoian thing. It’s a term of respect we use.”

“Oh, okay!” She smiled and bustled off into the house. “Be right back, dear.”

Daar, meanwhile, was fascinated by the pile. “Why did your son leave this behind?”

“Oh, Nick went hitchhiking across Europe way back when before he went off to college, never bothered to pick it up. I kept nagging at him and we’re at the age where we want to declutter.”

Daar duck-nodded. “So this is a music player?”

“Sorta. This is an amplifier, a tube amp too, very old design but I guess everyone wants it. The speakers, the record player, an eight-track deck…pretty nice system for its time, really.”

Daar was fascinated and made no effort to hide it. “I’ve read about this! Records have the music physically pressed into it, right?”

“Ayup. They’re a bit fussy but they do sound good. You interested?”

Deal-making time. “Absolutely. What are you asking?”

“Well…how ‘bout three hundred for all of it along with the recordings? I’ll even throw in some extra ribs on that plate Margaret’s fixin, but only if you haul all of it off today.”

“I’ll need to ask Wilde—hi! There he is. Wilde! Can I borrow your truck?”

Wilde had jogged up with a pot filled with something really tasty smelling, and he didn’t seem the least bit fazed by his errand, nor by Daar’s request. “Sure! What’d you get?”

“This!” Daar gestured to the pile.

“Huh, never figgered you for a music lover, Tigger.”

“Hey, I like music! Also I like old tech. Something about simpler machines, no computers…”

Bill grunted in agreement.

“So yeah! Three hundred, if Wilde will…”

“Sure thing, bro.”

Right on cue, Margaret returned with a plate of heavenly smelling food, and it was all Daar could do to get his cash, close the deal, and dig in without making a mess.

They ended up talking into the late evening, sharing stories about life and adventure, but eventually Daar’s alarm beeped; he had to return for decontamination.

“Are you sure you must go?”

“Yeah…it’d probably be fine but I really can’t take the risk. We can still email and stuff, right?”

Pleasantries exchanged, Daar bid the couple farewell, and he headed back to base with Wilde, where a decon field and possibly a hated bath awaited him. Oh well, it was worth it. Sometimes, Daar was finding, the pressure to Protect and Provide could be overwhelming. Yulna had driven that fact home in a deeply personal way.

With what he knew, and what he knew was coming, it was nice to step back, just for a moment, and remember why he was Champion, and why he was on the mission.

Daar had to Protect his people from the Hierarchy. And if he could, maybe he could help keep people like Bill and Margaret safe, too.

And he would. No matter what it took.

Date Point: 13y3m AV
Southbound Highway 1, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

“…Okay, I like this one. What is this?”

Julian and Xiù both loved their music loud, whereas Allison had always thought of music as something that happened in the background. It wasn’t that she minded when they wanted to get loud, but it tended to distract.

But sometimes, they maybe had a point. It sure made long drives go quicker, and after being forced to leave Clara behind at the worst time and hide on another planet, the three of them were fighting back against Williams and Hammond as much as they could. Getting to drive their own car on the way out to Chiune Station was their defense, their way of having something that was theirs when their time otherwise belonged either to the Group or to the public. It was precious, even if they were in a convoy with two black Byron Group security SUVs. So, she was letting them headbang in the front while she read on the back seat with her noise-cancelling earplugs in. It was the kind of little accommodation that made their triad work.

“Hmm?” Julian turned it down.

“I said, who is this? She’s got a good voice.”

“Lacuna Coil. ‘Downfall.’ You like it?”

“I liked the guitar solo,” Allison shrugged. “But the lyrics are kinda depressing, aren’t they?”

“…I don’t really pay attention to the lyrics,” Julian shrugged. “It’s the tune, the beat and the bass. Right?”

“Guess that explains why all the songs you listen to are so emo.”

“You just have to throw yourself into it,” Xiù told her, agreeing with Julian who was rolling his eyes.

“And I guess that explains how you can like this and that sugary Cantopop stuff.”

“Different moods, different energy.” Xiù shrugged.

“This stuff is cathartic,” Julian nodded.

“Right! And other songs are for getting pumped up, or for being romantic, or for relaxing, or…”

“You must be getting something out of them that I don’t,” Allison admitted. “…You need a lot of catharsis?”

“Don’t you?” Julian looked at her in the rear-view mirror.

“…Turn that shit up.”

Somehow, the miles just seemed to vanish when he did. Maybe they were onto something, because once she actually started listening Allison forgot about her book entirely and was genuinely disappointed when the road twisted around a bend in the river valley and she got her first look at Chiune Station.

Chiune was the Group’s private demesne on Cimbrean, a place where Moses Byron wasn’t just a CEO and President, but a duke. He had moved every one of the Group’s projects there that didn’t actually require constant access to logistics, the Internet and Earth’s sprawling population. The only reason Misfit had been built in Omaha had been proximity to the rail yards and roads that kept the AAAF fed and fat. The compound was a hive of experimental R&D, a vault full of the very bleeding edge of human technology all sequestered away from the prying eyes of Byron’s competitors. Only Hephaestus had anything more secure, in the form of Ceres Base.

There was no way that Ceres was half so pretty, though. Chiune Station had won awards for the way the designers had played with concrete and sent it swooping elegantly through the air in Cimbrean’s low gravity. A delegation of Locayl architects had supposedly wept happy tears at the sight of it.

Julian slowed them as the forward car in their little convoy reached the security checkpoint, then all three were waved through.

Daniel Hurt was waiting for them on the far side, accompanied by Mister Williams and a pudgy vision of fabulous fashion in a spotted silk shirt that Allison recognized from description as Chiune Station’s director, Levaughn Thomas.

“Took your time,” Dan teased them as they climbed out of the car and one of Williams’ people took it off Julian’s hands to park.

“Publicity, interviews, some old friends to catch up with,” Julian explained. “You know how it is.”

“Lucky for me, not having you three around to distract me gave me the time to put the finishing touches on our plan.” Hurt winked charmingly, then politely made the introductions. “Xiù Chang, Allison Buehler, Julian Etsicitty, this is Levaughn Thomas.”

“So good to finally meet you!” Thomas gushed, instantly confirming Allison’s suspicion that he was completely invested in his silk shirt and fancy haircuts. The man even smelled of perfume, and he shook Julian’s hand with a slightly-too-earnest vigor that left Julian unconsciously wiping his palm on his jeans. “The Group’s great success story!”

“Thanks!” Xiù as always stepped up to handle the pleasantries and let Julian and Allison step into the background where they preferred to be.

Allison took the chance to get a good look at the place. Moses had a habit of bragging up his achievements, but on this occasion he’d maybe been modest. The compound looked like it was fresh off the cover of a utopian scifi novel, minus the flying cars.

It took her a second to recognize the petite, booted figure sitting by one of the reflecting pools and hugging her knees as she idly tore up the grass and threw it to the breeze.

“…Clara? Clara!”

Levaughn Thomas got out of her way with an offended look as Allison barged past him and accelerated to a dead run.

Doctor Clara Brown looked up, smiled weakly and stood to accept and return the crushing hug that Allison lavished on her.

“Hey.”

“Clara, shit!” Allison squeezed her hard. “God I’m so sorry we couldn’t be there, I—”

“It’s okay.” Clara returned the hug, sounding small and quiet and a far cry from her usual chirpy, mischievous self. “It actually helped, knowing you three were safe…”

Julian and Xiù arrived a moment later to shower her in affection and commiserations, and Clara seemed to recover some of her sunshine. She showed off a new nanotattoo design of a catamaran ploughing dynamically through a spray of foam.

“It’s a memory,” she explained.

“You moved out here now?” Allison asked.

“The whole exploration program has,” Clara revealed. “I’m…glad of it, really. I couldn’t face going back to the AAAF.”

“I bet,” Julian nodded. “Where’s Dane?”

“Indoors. He’s taken over looking after the fitness of all the staff here. Cimbrean has some pretty crazy tax incentives about staying in shape, and they’re even harsher for corporations.”

Somebody cleared their throat behind them, and when they turned Levaughn Thomas gave them a crisp smile. “I’m afraid there was a little problem with finding somewhere for you to live…” he began. “We’re trying to find room for you, but—”

“We jumped Misfit over last night,” Clara interrupted him, causing him to scowl.

“Problem solved, then,” Allison dusted her hands together. “I guess we’d better get to work, huh?”

“Well, there is the small question of your office space—” Levaughn tried again, only for Daniel to interject breezily.

“My office is big enough for six,” he said.

“The tour—” Levaughn tried.

“—I’m really sorry, Mister Thomas,” Xiù gently cut him off. “We’ll happily take the tour later.”

“But—”

“I tell you, the change of scenery has been a godsend,” Hurt said, ignoring him entirely and striking out toward one of the peripheral buildings. “I think I’ve got our working strategy for cultural preservation.”

“You have?” Julian asked, falling in alongside him, while Allison invited Clara to come with them by the simple expedient of taking her by the hand and dragging.

“Well, most of it’s what you were doing before, but it’s good to spell it out. I had to tear up half the anthropology rulebook”

“I woulda thought this was anthropology,” Allison commented.

“It’s almost the polar opposite of anthropology. Anthropology is a science, the point is to observe and learn so you know more about yourself afterwards. Anthropological studies are experiments, and the People just wouldn’t survive being used as lab rats.”

“Won’t we learn by doing this anyway?” Xiù asked, turning back to offer the scandalized Levaughn Thomas a smile and a shrug as they walked away.

“A heck of a lot, yeah,” Daniel nodded. “But we learned a heck of a lot about physics by setting off a buncha nukes in the Pacific, and look where that got the islanders.”

“Way to inspire confidence, Dan,” Allison snarked.

“I don’t want to inspire confidence, I want to inspire pants-wetting terror.” Dan slowed and turned, walking backwards. “We’re writing the rulebook on first contact ethics here. Mistakes aren’t acceptable.”

“We know,” Julian told him.

“Right there with you,” Allison agreed.

Xiù nodded. “Yup.”

Dan started walking the right way again. “…Outstanding.”

True to his word, his office was huge, and the door had a lock on it. Dan leaned against it the second it was closed. “God, that man kisses ass like Byron pays him a grand every time he puckers up.”

“Doesn’t seem like Moses’ usual style, hiring a guy like that…” Julian mused.

“Levaughn’s great at what he does,” Clara supplied. “He got this job on merit, believe it or not.”

“Really?”

“Hell yeah,” Dan pushed himself away from the door. “He’s a heck of an administrator. And also, a heck of a peacock.”

There were relaxed smiles all round, and Dan headed to his desk to call up his work.

“Seriously though…are you holding up okay?” Xiù asked. Clara sighed, and shrugged.

“I’m taking it one day at a time,” she said. “It…helps that he saved people. It hurts, but…”

“But you’re proud of him,” Julian finished.

“Yeah.” Clara rubbed her arm then wiped her eyes dry and straightened up. “Can we focus on work?”

“Okay…but you know we’re here for you,” Allison told her. When Xiù and Julian nodded emphatically, Clara smiled and teared up simultaneously, gave them all hugs and then unslung her satchel and pulled out her own tablet.

“Dan and I put our heads together,” she said, “and we figured it’d probably be a good idea if you guys had somewhere to sleep that wasn’t the, uh, ’steel sky-hut.’ Somewhere that’s a bit more grounded in their experience, right?”

“Tent?” Julian asked.

“Better. Hut. Those sketches and photos of what those huts of theirs look like inside gave me some ideas…”

She called up a schematic and put the tablet down so that it could project the model in 3D above Dan’s desk. Allison immediately recognized a People-style hut: They had a distinctive kite shape built around four sturdy poles, with two skinnier poles for a triangular door frame at the “top” of the kite, the peak of which was the hut’s highest point. A small fire pit in the middle kept it warm inside, and rather than needing a chimney the smoke naturally travelled up the tilt of the ceiling and escaped via the door. A knee-high mud wall provided an ample windbreak, and the rain was kept off with a thatch of Tarak-tree fronds. It was simple, easy, and a team of five could build two in a day.

Clara had taken that basic design and worked it into a twenty-first century piece of survival equipment. Insulating composite panels instead of a mud wall, photovoltaic fabric with a mylar inner lining in place of the thatch, and springy carbon-fibre rods instead of the wooden poles. The whole thing weighed in at fifteen kilograms and disassembled into something backpack-sized.

“I signed off on it,” Dan said. “There’s a balancing act to be done here between what they’re familiar with and showing them what ’sky-thinking’ will achieve in ways they can recognize.”

“I figured, it’s probably a good idea if we don’t shy away from letting them see our technology in action,” Clara added.

“They already saw Misfit fly,” Allison pointed out.

“Exactly. Stepping back from that won’t help. We need them to see the magic rocks that make light and music, and watch steel fly through the air. Make it something they’re used to seeing and show them the road to how they’ll one day have things like this that they made by their own hand.”

“By their own hand.” Dan stressed. “That’s the thrust of this whole plan. By far and away the most important message we need to drill into them is that we can’t just hand out these gifts.”

“We?” Xiù asked.

“I’m coming with you. I’ll be your sky-thinker.”

“Don’t you have commitments here on Earth?” Clara asked him.

“CImbrean,” Allison pointed out.

“Whatever. Wherever. Here.”

Dan sat down and leaned back, resting one ankle on the other leg’s knee. “This is quite possibly the most important thing humanity will ever do,” he said evenly. “We’re taking a whole other sapient species under our wing. The last time we did that was with the Neanderthals, and I don’t see any Neanderthals around here, do you?”

“Still on Cimbrean,” Allison reminded him.

“Yeah, and we got it wrong on Cimbrean, too. One castaway took a dump in the woods and doomed the whole biosphere.” Dan didn’t sit forward, but he did fold his arms. “We’re choosing the legacy of our species, here. We can be the destroyers, or we can be the saviors. Fuck my commitments. My publishers can have the penalty for not turning in those three books I’m contracted for. We’re all gonna have to make much bigger sacrifices for the People.”

“Okay…” Julian said, slowly, “…why are you doing this? Like, personally? You’ve never met them.”

“You only get one shot in life,” Dan replied instantly. “You have to do it right first time. You have to do something big first time, something…something that matters. Something that maybe only you could do….and maybe I’m being egotistical here, but I honestly think I’m the only person who could do this. I can’t not step up.”

He paused, and admitted a bashful smile. “Also, if I’m honest? Hubris. Personal ambition. The novelty of it.” He shrugged apologetically. “Nobody’s perfectly noble, after all.”

“Clara?”

Clara had picked up one of Dan’s paperweights. She put it down guiltily, then shrugged. “I…think it’s a shame that you three won’t do more exploring,” she said. “That’s what we trained you and built Misfit for. But…”

Xiù touched her arm a second after she trailed off, prompting her to finish the thought.

“…I guess we have to finish what we start,” she said. “If we find a mess when we’re exploring, I guess maybe we have to clean it up because…I mean, if not us then who?”

“One of the hazards of exploring is being responsible with whatever we find,” Dan nodded. “And it will take…it’s probably the work of several lifetimes. We cannot make them our vassals or our slaves, they have to make their own informed decisions. And to do that, we need to establish a network of trust. There’s no “one weird trick” here.”

“Okay.” Allison nodded. “So where do we start?”

Dan smiled, nodded, and called up his own notes.

“We start,” he said, “By recording *everything*…”

Date Point: 13y4m AV
East of the mountains, Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

“Does it ever stop raining here?”

Everything about the east side of the mountains seemed to irritate Yan. He didn’t like the shape of the mountains, or the soggy green grass that grew short on the swooping, wind-stripped slopes. He didn’t like the shaggy-haired Werne that grazed on those slopes, or the skinny-snouted pack predators that would pick off a weak or wounded one before the People could.

He especially didn’t like the rain.

It wasn’t like it was bad rain, Vemik thought. It almost wasn’t rain at all. It was more as if the sky was more in love with the ground on this side of the mountains, and liked to cuddle up to it of an evening. The clouds clung affectionately to the hills and kissed them with a soft, fine dampness. It didn’t drum on a leather cloak or beat on a man’s back, it just…made everything wet.

And cold.

And it made the trees slippery.

….Actually, fuck the rain.

It did stop raining though. In fact despite Yan’s complaining the weather was dry and clear more often than not so far. They just seemed to have a knack for choosing to go hunting on the dampest days, because while Yan was seemingly irritated by almost everything on this side of the mountains, he still loved the Hunt.

Vemik personally would have preferred to be back in his nice warm dry forge, beating steel. There was magic in steel, no matter what Jooyun said. Magic to do things nobody had done before, like dig up the ground or break up big rocks. A steel axe could coppice and cut just as well or better than a stone one, and if it became blunt then all it needed was sharpening. And if it broke? Take the metal ‘scrap’ and re-forge it!

Magic, technology, it didn’t matter. Steel was already changing everything, and Vemik could see the future.

It was a future without dead daughters.

But the future wouldn’t come easy. The men needed to be strong to get there, and they needed to work, and to eat. Day in and day out. Hunting built the future too. If that meant leaving the forge and showing Yan and the others how to use his bird-spear-thrower—his ‘bow’—then the forge could do without him for a while. It didn’t take long to get it hot enough again, anyway.

Vemik was on his third bow now. The one he’d taken on his manhood hunt had just snapped one day, but he’d been noticing for some time even before then that it was feeling weak and easy in his hands. At first it had been so hard to draw the string that his other arm had wobbled desperately from the strain.

So he’d made a new one, from a thicker sapling; One that was difficult to draw again. That new one had sent the arrows forward with a solid physical thump he could feel in his chest and had driven them deep into the prey…until it too had begun to feel flimsy in his hands.

He’d handed it off to one of the other young men rather than let it break, and had made a new bow.

He’d been proud of this one. With the advantage of his steel knife, he had carved it perfectly and each arrow flew like a lightning strike and hit like one of Yan’s thrown spears…So Yan had asked for a bow. One that wasn’t weak in his hands.

Ketta saplings just didn’t work. Neither did Bathrak saplings, and a limb from a Forestfather had turned out to be just too stiff unless he made it too thin, the wrong shape to string properly. In desperation he’d turned to a technology that Jooyun had once mentioned in passing and had attempted ‘waminating’ several woods together, and after some trial and the odd embarrassingly sticky error with Ketta pitch he’d finally managed to assemble something that held together and shot, even in the rain.

Vemik could just about draw the string halfway, with gritted teeth and his eyes screwed shut from the effort. Yan had drawn it properly the first time and grunted.

“Make it stronger,” he’d said with a nod of approval.

The bigger bow wasn’t ready just yet. The string kept snapping and Vemik hadn’t found a good replacement. He had ideas, but they were just sky-thoughts for now and so Yan was using a “weak” bow that irritated him.

There was nothing wrong with it that Vemik could see.

They needed new ‘tactics’ for the bigger prey. No People had hunted these Werne and kept their adults in check, which made it impossible to get to the easy, tender young. In spear hunting, adults were much, much harder to kill; a big bull could be bigger than a hand of Yans, and they were wary of anything that came too close.

“At least there’s no wind today,” Vemet murmured.

“True.” Yan rolled his vast shoulders. “Sky-Thinker, you’re still small and quiet. Get around there and wait for Stone-Tapper’s stone call. Show the children how this is done.”

Yan was being a little cruel; by children, he meant the young adults who had traded themselves from the other villages to learn the ways of steel and bows. They hadn’t been on a Yan-hunt yet. If they were lucky today, they would go back to their huts aching and hobbled…

And burdened under more meat than they could carry.

Vemik just nodded and swarmed up the trunk until he was as high in the canopy as he dared go; he couldn’t venture much higher than the full-grown men. He’d nearly fallen only a week before, when a branch he would once have trusted to hold his weight had instead sagged and cracked alarmingly, and only his blunt claws rammed into the Ketta’s bark had kept him from falling.

The leaves slapped damply at him as he circled around the herd until he judged that he was in the right place, and descended again until he was sure that the bull would see him if it looked up. He put the Ketta’s trunk between himself and the Werne, and knocked twice on the bark with his shouting-stone.

There was an answering knock, and then silence broken only by the rain’s almost silent breath among the leaves and the odd wet pat…pat when the thicker droplets came tumbling down.

He heard the eerie thrum of his father’s shouting-stone, grinned savagely and dropped off his branch right where the herd could see him. The cows and calves hooted in alarm and shied away but the huge bull turned to face him and tossed its head angrily, ready to charge the interloper and crush him.

There was a resounding thump and the bull crashed to the ground dead. Its harem and herd scattered and stampeded away from Vemik and off among the trees.

It hadn’t suffered at all: a respectful death. The gods would be pleased. The same couldn’t be said for the rest, who were dropped on by Yan and the bigger men as they passed under their branches. Steel knives and stone hand-axes flashed in the rain, and five more of the biggest Werne kicked and croaked their last among the leaf litter.

Yan swaggered up to the bull, put his steel blade to its throat and carved the enormous head off with a triumphant trill to the skies, raising the head high so that the blood would rain down on his face.

“…That’s it?” One of the younger men seemed incredulous. “I thought this hunt would challenge my strength!”

Yan grinned an evil grin. “Six full-sized adults. We need to carry them all back to camp.” He knuckled over to the doubter, picked up one of the cows and threw it over the younger man’s shoulders, which made him grunt in pain under the weight. “This one’s yours.”

The younger man, undaunted, wobbled up to his feet, grit his teeth, and set to it. The others did the same and Vemik did too, which earned an approving snarl-grin from the big Given-Man. They were hunting far from their villages to keep the herds healthy, and that meant they had a hand of days ahead of them spent bullying through the forest brush, each burdened under a huge Werne and their camp supplies. Their crests would droop under the weight of their sweat and their muscles would burn like fire, and by the end of it they would be too tired to do much of anything besides sleep.

None of them doubted they could do it, though. The People were strong.

It was a gift the Gods had given them to keep the forest healthy. Their prey wasn’t nearly as tough, the other forest hunters not so nimble or strong. Yan proved it by picking up the bull by himself and draping it over his shoulders like it was nothing. It was as big as three of the cows put together and he seemed tiny under its bulk. It was so heavy his big feet sank almost ankle-deep into the earth, which spread wide as it tried to flee the burden of Yan and his prize. But despite that he was cheerful, and even under the trial of that much weight there was a playfully light bounce to his step.

“…Where did my arrow go?” he asked.

That question went unanswered for the rest of the day, until they broke the bull apart back at the camp for easier carrying. The arrow was fully inside its carcass having smashed through two ribs, ripped open a lung, skewered the heart, pierced the other lung and lodged itself in one final broken rib on the far side.

That seemed to be the way of the hunts on this side of the mountain. They were harder, longer, and the prey was bigger. And ornery. All good reasons to be annoyed but the meat was good and there was a lot of it. Hauling the kills home was always tiring work, but an average bull or a great, stomping cow could feed an entire village for at least a day or two. One big hunt like this could fill everyone’s bellies to bursting for two hands of days, or more.

And the gods rewarded their hard work. Everybody was bigger. Everybody was stronger and healthier. And Vemik could see that he was filling out nicely, and that the hair on his tail had deepened and brightened in hue to almost the same shade of orange as the coals in his forge. The women seemed to like that.

Which was…nice. But he still bedded down every night in the village with the Singer. They had another child on the way, and this one…

This one would grow up well fed and healthy, in the world of steel.

++END CHAPTER 38++

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Thirty-one Deathworlders

Brian Berland, Adam Turnbull, Andrew Ford, Aryeh Winter, Bartosz Borkowski, Ben Moskovitz, Ben Thrussell, Chris Bausch, Chris Candreva, Dar, Darryl Knight, Devin Rousso, Elliott Woods, Ignate Flare, Jamie Atkinson, Jim Hamrick, Jon, lovot, Matt Demm, Matthew Cook, Nader Ghali, Nicholas Enyeart, Nick Annunziata, Parker Brown, Patrick Huizinga, Ryan Cadiz, Sintanan, Sun Rendered, tsanth, TTTA, Volka,,,

As well as 38 Friendly ETs and 171 Dizi Rats

Chapter 39: The Nirvana Cage

Date Point: 13y4m AV
Hierarchy Communications Relay, Session 18262580599, Dataspace

Entity, Instance 19

The Entity had a delicate balancing act to perform when infiltrating the core of the Hierarchy’s decision-making process. Higher-ranked Igraens had access to more information and even direct contact with 0002 but were under ever-tighter scrutiny and pressure to adhere to the Hierarchy’s dogma.

Lower ranks enjoyed a certain liberty to be the voice of constructive dissent. They were the system’s ‘devil’s advocates,’ who could propose counter-doctrinal ideas without automatically becoming the target of suspicion and thus were easier to infiltrate while avoiding suspicion…at the expense of having sharply curtailed influence.

The Entity had solved the issues this raised by calving off copies of itself to infiltrate the Hierarchy on multiple levels. It had avoided the single-digit ranks, but there were Entity instances embedded among the Hierarchy all the way from the high thousands right down to Instance-19, which had successfully infiltrated the double-digits and had been successfully posing as 0094

Its Prime Instance remained absent. 0665 was still, as far as the Hierarchy’s inner circle knew, diligently exterminating the natives of an unimportant class twelve deathworld in the Near 3Kpc Arm, and would remain in that role for the plausible duration of the cleansing.

Besides: 0665 had killed the Entity. The Hierarchy believed that the threat was dead and gone and were no longer being cautious, and it was that lack of caution that had allowed the Entity’s nineteenth instance to creep so close to their core and listen in on their daily high-end planning sessions. Sessions in which, helpfully, the higher-numbered listened to their superiors talk and were expected to remain respectfully silent.

++0004++: The new Control Species initiative is now unacceptably off-target. Contact with the deathworlders has pushed them outside of their projected development profile.

++0013++: Elements of their leadership were always difficult to influence. There are traditionalist factions which remain implant-averse.

++0009++: An attitude which is spreading at an alarming pace. “The Humans don’t use implants,” they argue.

++0010++: That argument is pathetically illogical.

++0009++: And yet it persuades them. Our avenues of infiltration are narrowing: Very few of the Champions are implanted now, and those that are belong to the less influential Clans. The most influential remaining candidate is Turan, of Ironclaw.

<NewControlSpecies> = <Gaoians>, then. And <Gaoians> had hitherto = <HumanAlly> = <pHumanSurvival+X>

The Entity ran a number of rapid assessments about the nature of a Control Species, what its role might be and why the Hierarchy might seek to engineer a new one, which had yielded little in the way of concrete hypotheses when one of the lower-level agents in the room ventured to lodge a query.

++0082++: I remain confused as to why we need a new control species. The Discarded still serve adequately in that role, do they not?

++0011++: <Condescending amusement> Substrate Species will always require a control to keep their threat-detection aimed outwards, at a Control Species that is under our influence.

++0009++: We also require that the Substrate Species remain healthy. That is, alive, sapient and technologically robust within the parameters laid out by the endgame protocol. Physical life forms of all kinds require adversity. It is important that we can control their adversary.

++0011++: We have been compelled to burn the Discarded as such an asset, now: They have been granted access to technology which will disrupt the balance.

++0082++: We foresaw the need to use the Gaoians as such a species?

++0004++: A long-standing contingency. Every generation has included a potential New Control Species. This is the first time we have needed to activate that contingency. But now this one has been disrupted, which places us in a difficult position.

++0014++: We have inadvertently created a species that can compete with deathworlders. Acceptable if they are to function as a control, but we cannot permit them to be beyond our influence.

++0023++: Have we reached the point where they must be written off?

++0009++: Not yet. If we had an alternative then yes we would, but for now it remains in our best interests to attempt to salvage them. The new rift between the Females and the Stonebacks may be the opportunity we need.

++0004++: They are close to the event horizon, however—0002 has made it clear that we will not tolerate further setbacks.

++0010++: Then we will direct our efforts toward widening that rift. If we can use it to divide the male Clans as well…

++0014++: Especially Whitecrest and Stoneback…

++0010++: Yes. A division between those Clans would rescue the situation.

++0004++: <Resolve> Make it happen, or else determine quickly that it is not possible.

The Entity carefully signalled compliance among the rush of high-end listeners, taking care to appear neither reluctant nor unduly eager. The session was dismissed and again it chose its moment to disconnect carefully, leaving early but not alacritously.

<GaoiansSurvive> had already been riding high in its list of priorities; There wasn’t much higher it could go. But it had acquired a new urgency, coupled with a conundrum. There would be no way to alert them to the threat without conclusively proving that the Hierarchy’s inner circle had been infiltrated, and the 0094 persona was far too useful to discard lightly.

It would need to be very careful in picking its moment.

Date Point: 13y4m AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Lewis Beverote

“Hey. Lewis. Level with me.”

“‘Sup?”

“These poor fuckers are completely fucked, right?”

“Dude. They are the fuckedest.”

“‘S’what I thought…”

There was a prolonged uncomfortable silence, given an off-tempo rhythm by the fire crackling. The squad had built it out of smashed furniture and wooden beams salvaged from a couple of nearby collapsed buildings, and it had exactly three functions: It heated their coffee, it warmed their hands, and it gave their minds something to stare at while they were busy trying to avoid any contemplations about the gentle genocide all around them.

‘Caveman TV,’ as Sergeant Lee called it. All Lewis knew was, drinking campfire coffee on an alien world under the crystal clear night sky of alien constellations should have been infinitely more glamorous.

As it was the whole research team was on a low ebb that mere fantastic scenery could do nothing to fix. Nobody wanted to spend a second longer inside that hospital than was absolutely necessary—everybody was sleeping outdoors in the more structurally sound buildings nearby, under the watchful eye of the platoon of US Marines who’d been assigned to babysit them.

A few of the marines had quickly made buddies with Lee and his colleagues, building a decent camaraderie on the solid foundation of mutual shit-talk and exchanging IMPs for MREs and vice versa.

“Good word, though.”

“What?”

“Fuckedest. Gonna remember that one.”

“…Is this poutine? This ration pack actually contains actual fuckin’ poutine.”

“Yup.”

“What you got, Kung Pao Chicken?”

Lee grinned in the dark. “Yup. And before you talk shit about a ‘taste of home,’ I’m Korean.”

“Fuck off bro, I spent two years on the DMZ! I know Korean from Chinese.”

“A marine who knows stuff? No wonder you got this assignment.”

“Yeah, punishment for gettin’ too smart. They took away my crayons and everything.”

Some genuine laughter rippled around the fire only to die like a match in a gale when one of the natives joined in. It was sitting a few meters away, watching the fire with the closest thing to interest that Lewis had yet seen an OmoAru show, and it seemed to get what laughter was for: it joined in, in a strange hooting way that reminded everybody that it was there and promptly harshed their mellow.

“…Poor bastards,” somebody muttered.

“The fuck did this to them?”

Lewis swallowed his mouthful of chicken à la king and cleared his throat. “That way lies madness, dude,” he advised.

“What, like, ‘some things man was not meant to know’ kinda bullshit?”

“Nothing so dramatic, my man,” Lewis picked up his coffee. “It’s just fuckin’ depressing.”

They all watched the OmoAru, who seemed happily oblivious to the attention and just tilted its head slightly as it watched the fire some more. Its tail ticked listlessly back and forth behind its head.

They weren’t completely impassive—they ate whenever they got their hands on some food and they went down to the river to drink, and presumably they went somewhere to deal with the result because nobody had reported stepping in a turd in the road or whatever—But it was just impossible to connect the stupid-happy leopard-gecko-bat-lion looking thing lurking near their campfire with the idea of a grand civilization that had once encompassed a dozen planets and had genetically interfered with two other species in the process of uplifting them to sapience. The two facts just wouldn’t sit side-by-side.

They never did anything with their hands, either. They never fidgeted or picked at stuff or cracked their knuckles. If they weren’t doing anything else they just…sat. They’d babble happily when spoken to but apparently the dialect they’d fallen into nowadays had essentially the same relationship with the Aru language saved in the translators as English baby-speak had with Latin.

But they were happy, In a dull, dumb, concussed kinda way. They seemed to have exactly zero conception of the idea that things could maybe be better. Lewis had seen one staring contentedly at a pile of rubble in the morning on his way into the hospital, and on his way back he’d have sworn away his life savings that it hadn’t moved an inch.

Lewis hadn’t foreseen the idea that happiness could be a trap. It turned things upside-down, transformed paradise into hell and gave the Devil back his halo. He couldn’t possibly get back to Erebor and to Lucy fast enough, he decided—back to things he could figure out and people he could bounce ideas off.

“Fuckin’ A,” Lee commented darkly.

“At least they’re happy…” one of the marines ventured.

“Yeah. And that’s the fuckin’ problem.” Lewis sipped his coffee. It was bitter from being roasted too long but it was coffee, and his tolerance for shitty coffee had been damn near unlimited even before he’d had to go without for years. Nowadays, a cup of caffeinated tar would have been welcome. “Too happy. No motivation. You only change things because you’re unhappy with them, right?”

“Guess that makes sense…Isn’t there anything we can do for them?”

“That’s what we’re here to figure out,” Lee said, carefully.

“And?”

“And…” Lee and Lewis shared a glance, then both of them looked at the OmoAru again. It was cooing blissfully to itself as it watched the embers drift upwards. “…Without getting into detail, what the hell are we gonna do for them at this point? Even if we can fix whatever’s going on in their head…”

“Their culture’s fuckedski,” Lewis nodded. “Total societal collapse, dude. No memes, no jokes, no stories, no history, no Grandma’s pot roast. Everything that made them who they were is gone, and there’s shit-all we can do to bring it back.”

Lee nodded. “The OmoAru are already dead,” he summarized. “That poor fella over there? He’s just…the body’s still warm. That’s all.”

“…The fuck are we here for, then?”

“Same reason we guard cemeteries,” one of the other marines said. “Somebody’s gotta be here. Ain’t right to just…forget them.”

Lewis sipped his coffee again. “You know…I spent, like, years bouncing around the galaxy and I didn’t once see, like, a memorial wall or a monument or…anything. I landed on one trade station one time, about a week after a Hunter attack hit the place. Weren’t even photos and flowers out or nothing.”

“What’s your point, Lewis?” Lee asked.

“Not sure…but I think we’re the only species who respect the dead like that.”

“What about Gaoians? They’re cool.”’

“Yeah, they are. Let me know when one shows up so I can ask him if they’ve got a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”

Lee filled the ensuing silence by leaning over to grab another chunk of splintered table to throw in the fire. The OmoAru spectator hooted appreciatively at the burst of embers this generated, and clapped its hands: they carefully ignored it.

“Does that make us the crazy ones, or the only sane ones, d’you think?”

Lewis groaned. “Dude, it’s way too fuckin’ late and I’m way too fuckin’ bummed out by all this to even start on that one.”

There was a general chorus of murmured agreement and at least one “Amen” from around the fire.

“…Yo, anybody got one of those poptart-lookin’ kinda cinnamon bun things?” Lewis asked, changing the subject. “Trade you my m&ms.”

“…You like those?”

“Bro, he likes the fuckin’ coffee somehow…”

The oppressive feeling that had been scratching at Lewis’ spine began to dissipate again, and this time they managed to avoid the depressing topics entirely.

After a while, he was even able to look up and appreciate the stars again.

Date Point: 13y4m AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Unclaimed Space

Krrkktnkk “Kirk” A’ktnnzzik’tk

Kirk was somehow used to the idea of Corti travelling light. The ones he’d seen all those years ago as he processed new arrivals passing through *Outlook On Forever*’s security checkpoint had often had no more on them than they could carry in a few small satchels, purses and strapped-on pockets.

Then again, they had at the time lacked the concept of nudity. They didn’t need to travel with a suitcase full of clothes like a human would have.

Vakno, however, travelled like an empress. She didn’t have luggage, she had a train. Crate after crate of equipment, stacked so tight inside the confines of the jump array’s wormhole boundary that the edge of the distortion field might almost have polished away the fingerprints.

None of it was anything so vain as clothing and jewelry at least. Vakno had brought the fizzing brain of her information network, from bottomless data storage and the supercomputers to trawl and pattern-match their contents in seconds, to a custom FTLsync comms hub optimized to her specifications.

She accepted Sergeant Campbell’s help in stepping down off them and took stock of her surroundings with the air of somebody who had expected much worse than they were seeing.

Kirk was the last to receive her attention. She gave him a glacial stare, then blinked and stepped forward to look up at him with an expression as though she wasn’t two whole meters shorter than him.

“Somehow,” she said, “I can’t help but feel that this is all your fault.”

Kirk snorted, and shook out his mane. “Hello to you as well, Vakno.”

She blinked slowly, a gesture in Corti body language that did much the same thing as a human folding their arms and frowning slightly.

“…Yes. Maybe,” Kirk conceded. “I did let the humans out of the Sol field, after all. I suppose you could blame me for much of what has happened.”

“I could, you say.” Vakno shook her head. “The Guvnurag homeworld is a slaughterhouse thanks to that decision. I have no doubt that others will follow soon. You have plunged the galaxy into chaos, A’ktnnzzik’tk. Why would I not blame you?”

“Because the cycle of death did not begin with that decision,” Kirk replied. “Thousands of other species were wiped out long before the Humans came along.”

“Did you know that when you first freed them?”

Kirk felt as though she’d drawn a blade and skewered his throat. He tried not to have doubts…but she had delivered a precision strike against them just the same.

“…I did not,” he admitted, after a second.

“Then you’re merely a fortunate fool,” Vakno snapped.

“The Hunters, Vakno,” Kirk said in his defence. “I freed them because I hoped they might stop the Hunters.”

“On the day they achieve that goal, I will consider apologizing,” Vakno told him. “Until then, Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk…You are guilty of a terrible error in judgement. And I am here to put your mistake right.”

She turned and swept away, an impressive feat for a one-meter skinny gray noodle of a being, and left the Humans to take care of moving her inventory.

After a few silent seconds of doubt, Kirk turned away and went in the opposite direction.

Date Point: 13y4m1w AV
1000ft above the Lakebeds National Park, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Kevin Jenkins

The advent of forcefield technology had brought casualties, foremost among them being the helicopter. There was just no point in having a big howling kerosene-guzzling jet turbine when a smaller and quieter power plant could achieve flight via kinetic engines with far more efficiency. Less waste heat, less waste energy, and most importantly less sound. If not for the faint vibration through the furniture making Kevin’s glass of water ripple, the only way to tell they were airborne would have been looking out the window.

If only somebody would figure out what the new class of vehicle was called. Technically it was a an AugustaWestland AW306 Personal Transportation System, but folks still called them helicopters, despite the howling outrage of some remarkably passionate etymological purists on the Internet.

Too bad the pedantic fuckers couldn’t come up with anything better.

It was an amazing view, though. The best within two hundred miles of Folctha. The “helicopter” was following a straight line toward Chiune Station while the river Dagnabbit snaked back and forth below, pooling here and there in cool freshwater lakes.

A surveyor with an…interesting sense of humor had named that river after deducing that its sediments contained exactly zero gold dust, and Folctha’s citizens loved the name so much that they were constantly thwarting the politicians’ attempts to ‘improve’ it.

The Department of Parkland had put its foot down about calling it “Dagnabbit National Park,” sadly, and had picked the much more pedestrian “Lakebeds National Park.” It was the first national park in Folctha’s growing footprint of influence, and a determined nexus of activity for the Environmental Preservation Agency, who were doing everything they possibly could to fend off invasive Earthlings from the region for as long as they could.

Moses Byron donated generously to the park’s upkeep. One of his legacy projects—It couldn’t be an accident that the park was directly on the straight-line flight path between Folctha and the Group’s peripheral facility, Chiune Station. Byron’s statue would welcome people to the visitor’s center whenever it was built, Kevin just knew it.

Not that the scenic grandeur made up for having to call Levaughn Thomas.

“Levaughn, I don’t care if they’re brushing you off,” he repeated, watching one of the lakes drift by below. “They ain’t there to make nice with you, they’re there to fix up that ship and get their asses ready for another tour in space.”

“It’s disruptive,” Levaughn complained. “They’ve taken over our only aircraft hangar, and every time my people go for a stroll at that end of the compound we get questioned by security.”

“Do I hafta remind you that the last place that spaceship was parked got bombed?” Kevin asked.

“No. No, of course not.”

“Well then. You have a problem with security, take it up with Williams. You have a problem with the trio…let’s hear it. So they gave you the cold shoulder, right?”

“I just believe in a welcoming team environment here—”

“So you figured you’d throw ‘em a party after their home got bombed, their friends and colleagues were murdered, they spent a couple weeks in protection and the only reason they weren’t hurt themselves is ‘cuz of pure dumb luck,” Kevin summarized. “And when they finally get a chance to do something about it, you wanted to lay on the champagne and ice cream sandwiches. Welcoming team environment is one thing, but could it maybe be that your timing was off?”

There were an assortment of short blustering noises like “I, uh…” and “well…” from Levaughn’s end of the call, and Kevin sighed.

“Look. We’re five minutes out,” he said. “I’ll talk with the crew, see if they wanna join in your reindeer games. But right now, the exploration program overrides Chiune’s usual business and that ain’t comin’ from me, that’s comin’ from Moses. You’re welcome to take that up with him, if you want.”

Satan would need a snowplough before that ever happened, he judged. Levaughn was a pen-pusher and beancounter without equal, but he’d been promoted to managing Chiune mostly because his nose was a permanent shade of brown. The facility was important, but it was also the Group’s most remote outpost: He was perfect for it.

“I’ll…see you soon, then.”

Kevin grunted a noncommittal noise and hung up.

He watched the national park fall away behind then swapped seats to the opposite side so he was facing forward again and could watch the approach to Chiune.

Levaughn had been right in part of his complaint, admittedly. Chiune really didn’t have much room for aircraft, and its landing pad and the attached hangar had obviously been completely taken over to take care of *Misfit*‘s needs. A spaceship was kind of a big deal, after all. Kevin could see his pilot suck his gut in sympathetically as he squeezed the 309 down on the miserly square meters that were left over.

He made a soft landing, though, and Kevin clapped him on the shoulder gratefully as he spun down the kinetics and the power plant and ran through his post-flight sequence.

True to his word, Levaughn was trying to sashay across the asphalt. The operative word being trying—the man himself was far too artless for anything so delicate, so what he was mostly achieving was a kind of fussy, sulky trudge.

Sometimes, it was physically painful to put his professional smile on and shake hands. It felt like a betrayal of everything he’d ever wanted to be in life.

But, needs must. He could wash his hands later.

“Okay, I’ll give you the landing pad,” he admitted, turning to survey it. Misfit was lurking in one corner of it like an anvil on a coffee table, surrounded by trailers loaded with replacement hull panels and the structural components that were going into redesigning its interior to expand the pantry space. According to Dane Brown the three crew had lost an alarming amount of fitness in the time they’d been away, despite daily exercise and spending part of that time in supergravity. They needed more food, or else they would need to come back and restock more often.

Then there was the damage to repair. The ship was half disassembled for the moment: According to Clara, all the ablative anti-meteor armor plates down its left side had to be replaced, the port forward engine needed tuning, and some kind of critters had crawled up inside the landing gear and tried to nest there during their time on Lucent, only to be comprehensively squished on takeoff. Some component of its biology had been remarkably acidic, apparently.

Chiune had a hangar, which Levaughn had originally promised to reserve for *Misfit*‘s use—it wasn’t big enough. The ship fit in there just fine, but the shipments of stuff needed to repair and overhaul it spilled chaotically out onto the concrete until there was no point leaving the ship in there and they may as well just work outside.

Outside, where the sounds of welding, angle-grinding and ear-numbingly loud music probably made it into people’s offices on the far side of the compound. No wonder there had been complaints.

Especially whatever this music was. It was loud, it was obnoxious, and it was unbelievably cheesy.

♫—with a southern grin on hillbilly crank and I’ll do it again! And I ain’t worried when I’m down on my luck. Well son that ain’t country, yeah, that’s country as fuck!—♪

Kevin sniffed, then turned and gave Dane Brown a more genuine handshake.

Dane had raised complaints that actually had some substance behind them. It was his say-so that had the ship’s pantry being expanded, and his plea for the trio to go on an intense physical regime before they were allowed to head out again that had led to Kevin being called into Moses’ office and asked to call General Tremblay.

Old friend though he was, Tremblay had had more demands of Kevin in return and apparently he’d sent a message to the Commander of Spaceborne Warfare, Admiral Knight, who in turn had been in touch with the commanding officer of the Spaceborne Operations Regiment…

Goodness only knew who Lieutenant-Colonel Powell had had words with, but the letter that eventually arrived on Kevin’s desk had pledged the SOR’s support and assistance as a matter of strategic significance while warning that the return mission to Akyawentuo would be going ahead on Allied Extrasolar Command’s schedule and not on the Byron Group’s or the Misfit crew’s.

Allison, Julian and Xiù really weren’t going to like that. So naturally it fell to Kevin to deliver the bad news.

At least they probably wouldn’t break his nose this time.

“I’m glad you see it that way,” Levaughn clucked and Kevin somehow found the strength not to roll his eyes.

“I meant what I said on the phone, Levaughn,” he replied evenly. “They’re here ‘cuz Moses says so and they’ll go when they get the go-ahead. I’ll talk with ‘em, see what kinda arrangement we can come to…”

“—Thank you—”

“…but Misfit comes first, Levaughn.”

“That’s all I ask,” Levaughn replied graciously. Disingenuously, but graciously.

“Right. Dane?”

Dane fell in at Kevin’s side as they ambled over toward the industrial contours of *Misfit*‘s hull. There was a flare of brilliant blue-white light as they approached, and Kevin shielded his eyes.

“Isn’t music this loud a safety hazard?” he asked, raising his voice as the track ground down into a sleazy slow cliché ending.

Clara was overseeing the refit: She’d designed the ship after all, and any modifications to it, any maintenance at all, happened with her go-ahead or it didn’t happen at all. She turned on hearing Kevin’s voice and raised her sunglasses to tuck them into her hairline, before smiling at Dane and shaking Kevin’s hand. It was good to see some positive energy around her again. Being out here and working on the ship had clearly helped her cope with her dad’s death, to some degree.

“Hey Kevin.”

“Hey yourself,” he grinned. “Gettin’ by?”

“Getting by,” she agreed. She turned, stuck her fingers in her mouth and blasted out a whistle that was even more of a hearing damage hazard than the Deftones track that had just pounded into life.

Julian and Allison looked up and raised their welding masks. Apparently they’d both splashed on getting some airbrush art done: Allison’s mask was covered in a lavish Lucent landscape, with a lightmote swarm coiling like smoke above a valley full of nail trees. The artist had done an incredible job considering he must have been working from video footage and imagination only.

Julian’s mask meanwhile was a handsome ruddy Martian landscape dominated by a figure in a white excursion suit. He snatched his phone out of his pocket and turned the music right down on seeing who had joined them.

“Kevin! What brings you here?”

“Wish I could say it was a social call, but…business. Where’s Xiù?”

“She’s asleep,” Julian told him.

“She can sleep through this?” Kevin asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Well, the living quarters are pretty much soundproof anyway, and the bunks have privacy fields…” Allison said. “Should I wake her? She went to bed about two hours ago…”

“…Probably best,” Kevin decided. “We have a lot to go over. Good news and bad…”

Date Point: 13y4m1w AV
Mercenary ship Howl At Nothing, The Irujzen Reef

Garuuvin

The wound would turn into a good scar, at least. A proper three-claw gouge down one side of his muzzle, and the fur definitely wouldn’t grow back where it was deepest. A male could usually expect plenty of female attention with a scar like that…and for the first time in too many years, Garuuvin was beginning to feel the flicker of hope that he might just have a chance of even laying eyes on a female again.

If the Whitecrests really could make his history vanish like they claimed then there was even hope for mating contracts in his future. His crew didn’t like having them aboard or the fact that there were no profits worth mentioning to be made in the Irujzen Reef, but the crew could go castrate themselves for all Garuuvin cared. He’d stood up for himself like a male should, and that Whitecrest had just flowed like a breeze around his clumsy swipe and delivered a raking blow to his face that had left Garuuving bleeding, dizzy and more than happy to work with them.

The sight of their feared shipmaster swaggering around with a healing wound on his face had certainly cowed all the other species on his crew into submission. None of them wanted to antagonize a guest who could do that to “One Claw” Garuuvin.

His bridge was quieter than usual, probably because one of the Whitecrests—the ugly one who was almost as big as a Stoneback—was standing squarely behind the Robalin sensor technician and managing the neat trick of being thoroughly intimidating while doing nothing threatening.

Garuuvin was the only one who felt able to talk with them. “Is there a reason why we’re loitering in this system’s icy object halo?”

The ugly Whitecrest duck-shrugged and flicked an ear. “Yes.”

Sensing that he wasn’t about to get an elaboration just yet, Garuuvin threw himself into his command seat and called up the same sensor data. The Whitecrest seemed to be ignoring the biggest objects in favor of smaller icy chunks of the kind that, if they became comets, usually didn’t survive their first descent into the inner system.

“…That one. Match orbits with it and close to within spacewalk distance.”

The Locayl on the helm glanced Garuuvin’s way and got a curt duck-nod. They were mercenaries, after all. What the client paid for, the client got. No matter how strange.

Garuuvin drummed his claws restlessly on his console as he tried to figure out just what in Fyu’s name the Clan brothers were up to. The system was irrelevant, there was nothing there: not even the temperate planet with its sizeable moon counted, it was Class 11. Whatever the Whitecrests were here for, a mid-level deathworld couldn’t be worth their time, could it?

Then again, a lot of what they were doing didn’t make sense. They’d installed two huge canisters of compressed gas in the airlock that were slowly spraying a tenuous mix of breathable air, pollutants and Radon plasma into the void. It would look exactly like a nasty hull breach complicated by a damaged reactor seal to long-range sensors, and the same went for the detuned kinetic engines which were putting out an ugly and wasteful energy bleed and the deliberate miscalibration of the warp field extenders. On sensors, the Howl At Nothing looked like it had taken a bad hit, but for whose benefit?

And how did that play with the…thing…in the cargo hold?

The Whitecrest nodded curtly, flicked a claw at Garuuvin to get him to follow, and marched off the bridge.

“We’re almost finished,” he said as the doors closed behind them.

“We are?”

“Yes. You can tell your engineers to re-tune the engines once we’re alongside that comet.”

“It might help if I knew what you’re doing…” Garuuvin hinted.

“It might,” the Whitecrest agreed neutrally, though there was a thoughtful edge to it as he ambled down the ship’s spinal corridor. “We’re going to nudge that comet to fall in-system and break up.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what we’re paying you for,” The Whitecrest said with an amused chitter. His ears swivelled thoughtfully as he gave Garuuvin a thorough look up and down. “You ask a lot of questions for a mercenary.”

“Because I have a brain.”

“That’s a very dangerous gift, friend.”

“Stupid males don’t have ships, crews, or services to sell.”

“True.” The Whitecrest scratched idly at his muzzle. “You’ve made the most of your exile, haven’t you? I respect that. And it wasn’t like it was your fault that cub got killed…”

Garuuvin’s claws were out for a dangerously long time before he managed to get a leash back on his temper and pull them back in again. This Whitecrest would have his throat out in a second in a real fight.

The big bastard actually grinned as if he was a human, baring his fangs. “And you can learn, too! Excellent. I think we can both profit immensely from this. A little more control on that temper, but still…”

“…What are you going to do?”

“For now? This mission. We do what we need to do, you get paid, we have a look at your record…maybe other things could be possible. Incidentally, have you ever been to Cimbrean?”

“The Human colony in the Far Reaches? No.”

“Too bad. The Females there are…adventurous.”

“…How adventurous?”

“Well, they took me as a sire,” the Whitecrest waggled his ears. There was a self-effacing sense of humor under that intimidating pelt. “I’m sure a handsome specimen like you with his own ship would have them hooked so long as they never found out about a certain little incident…”

“…You can’t do that. Straightshield would never tolerate it.”

“They consider new evidence when it becomes available. And as luck would have it, we managed to find some interesting maintenance logs that put that gas main explosion in a whole new light.” Garuuvin stepped back a little as the Whitecrest bared his teeth. “…Justice should be served, don’t you think?”

“…You can deliver this? You would do this thing?”

The Whitecrest duck-nodded. “Why not? Fair payment for services rendered. Services,” he added, “which include your strict confidence and the ongoing silence of your crew. I trust you can persuade them to remain disinterested?”

Garuuvin could. Of course he could. Rather than say as much, however, he opted for holding his peace and duck-nodding.

“Excellent. Lead by example, then. You do your job, we’ll do ours.”

The conversation ended at the cargo bay doors.

“Discretion. And disinterest,” Garuuvin agreed. “Right.”

“Appreciated. Please, don’t let me keep you.”

The tone was polite, but Garuuvin knew when he’d been dismissed—aboard his own ship!—and under other circumstances…

But the promise that had just been dangled in front of him was worth more than all the money and bounty he might have looked forward to if he lived to be a hundred.

He duck-nodded meekly and turned back toward the bridge.

Date Point: 13y4m1w AV
Chiune Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Kevin Jenkins

“So…good news first, or bad news first?”

“…The good. I kinda suspect I know what the bad news is anyway.”

“Alright. So, good news number one: AEC are firm in their support for the Ten’Gewek and your return mission to Akyawentuo. Bad news…they have somethin’ else to do first.”

“…Ayup.” Julian crossed his arms and sighed. “Kinda figured the big fellas were gearing up for something.”

“It ain’t the big fellas. I don’t know the details, but Good News Number Two is that to make up for leavin’ us sittin’ on our asses, the three of you get to train with the big fellas.”

Allison raised her hand. “Uh…that’s good news?” she asked with a half-smile.

“I am told there will be guns.”

Allison grinned and lowered her hand again. “I love my job sometimes.”

Dane took his opportunity to interject with the evil smirk of a health and fitness instructor about to unleash a beneficial torment. “And weights, Julian. I paid a visit to the Dog House gym down in Folctha and got to talking with Warhorse. I think you’d benefit bigly from his attentions.”

“Aw, come on!” Julian groaned. “What the hell’s wrong with me that you need ‘Horse to fix me up?”

“Over the course of that first tour you lost twenty pounds while gaining bodyfat.”

Julian cleared his throat. “I’m almost back up to weight…” he said.

“It’s all sloppy rebound, though. All that work we put in and you ended up worse than when you started. That’s not necessarily your fault, I’ll admit, but it’s you that’s gotta pay the price.”

Julian’s face screwed up and he clenched his teeth. “He’s gonna have me picking things up and putting them down again, isn’t he?”

“Yup. But trust me, you need it. Remember when I taught you kettlebells?”

“Yeah?”

“Free weights are way more fun.”

“Clara, your husband’s a sadist.”

Clara giggled at that. “He’s a personal trainer,” she corrected him.

“Same thing.”

“Ah, get over it,” Dane told him warmly. “You’ll thank me later on.”

Kevin cleared his throat. “It ain’t exactly gonna be puppies an’ ice cream for you two either,” he said, addressing Allison and Xiù. “Allison, you’re expected to expand your academic and technical training. And Xiù, Mister Williams has concerns over how when that gunfight broke out on Akyawentuo you had to be protected rather than contributing.”

Xiù suddenly looked uneasy. “…I’m getting tutored by Firth, aren’t I?” she predicted.

“Is that a problem?”

“…No…No. It’s just…he’s an expert in some pretty dark things.”

Kevin nodded softly, and noted with approval the way Julian’s hand slipped quietly into Xiù’s in a no-fuss way that was far more supportive than any more overt show of comfort would have been.

“It’s dark out there,” he said. “We all know it. Could be the advice of an expert is what’ll make the difference for you and your loved ones.”

“Don’t worry about Firth, bǎobèi,” Allison advised. “He’s a huge teddy bear underneath all that.”

Xiù shook her head. “He really, really isn’t,” she said.

Julian nodded. “I like Firth, I respect him and I trust him. But there ain’t no ‘underneath all that’ with him—his violent streak goes all the way down, even if he’s got it well controlled.”

Xiù sighed. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Williams is right.”

Kevin tried to restore some levity by chuckling. “He always is. Anyway, that’s all the bad news. As soon as the ship’s fixed you go on intensive training regimes and stay there until go time.”

“And when’s that gonna be?” Allison challenged him.

“…Months. Half a year or more.”

“…That wasn’t exactly ‘all the bad news’ then, Kevin,” Julian pointed out mildly, though the muscles of his jaw clenched as he said it.

“True. Fair. Uh…” Kevin cleared his throat. “Look, this is the shit we deal with when the big movers and shakers get involved. I wish I had a fuckin’ roll of good news to give you, but I figure we get only one shot at doin’ this thing right. Right?”

The trio nodded solemnly.

“Right. And there’s more good news. You, uh…you meet with the JETS guys?”

Allison nodded. “Yeah. Nice guys. Also, uh…Actually, I been meaning to ask. You know the exception list?” she asked of Julian and XIù.

“Yeaaah?” Xiù asked slowly, while Julian nodded.

“Can I put Coombes on it?”

Xiù shook her head. “Celebrities only, Shǎguā.”

“Aww.”

Julian laughed, “C’mon, what’s he got that I don’t?”

“Some gray hairs? I dunno. He’s…never mind.” Allison cleared her throat, having spent several seconds going increasingly crimson around the cheeks and ears.

“He is pretty…” Julian agreed.

“Guys.” Kevin clicked his fingers jokingly in front of their faces. “Here and now, please. You’re getting the full team…I take it you know them?”

“We spent a couple of weeks being looked after by the SOR,” Allison said. “We know them. Hell, seen a bit more of them than I’d like in some cases. What do they call those tiny shorts again?”

“Ranger panties,” Dane supplied helpfully. He and Clara were wearing identical grins over her mounting discomfort.

“Ah,” Julian chuckled. “The plot thickens.”

“Shut up, babe,” Allison told him, affectionately.

Julian grinned at her. “Yes ma’am…so, not to knock on the big fellas, but how is this gonna work? Misfit ain’t exactly expansive. And in fact, what are they there for in the first place?”

Kevin shrugged. “All I got was a cryptic ‘it’s covered,’ so I’m just gonna take them at their word. As for why they’ve been forced on you, well…Coombes is a Green Beret. They’re there in case we need to train the People up in survival and guerilla tactics. And if the shit hits the fan, they’re to get you off that planet.”

“And Daar?”

“He’s a part of the team and they work well together. Plus he’s…an ambassador of sorts.”

“That will be…interesting…” Xiù mused. “Ten’Gewek are…They have a pretty clear line in their heads between People and Beasts. A Gaoian might really confuse them.”

Kevin shrugged again. “You’d need to ask Daniel what the logic is there,” he said. “It’s his contact and development plan we’re following after all. If he says they need to meet non-human aliens, then I ain’t arguin’…That’s about all the business I brought from Earth, anyhow. Had a complaint from Levaughn about how much space you’re takin’ up and how much noise you make…”

Xiù glanced at her feet, Julian looked awkward, and Allison tucked her thumbs into her pockets. Three variations on the theme of mild embarrassment.

“There’s nothing we can do about how much space the project takes up,” Clara told him. “Just leaving a corner of the landing pad free for others to use is a pain in the ass. This isn’t the Triple-AF, we’re more crowded here.”

“I hear ya,” Kevin reassured her. “But they do make bitchin’ headphones these days, kids. An’ it probably won’t pay off so well if the hosts don’t like you. There’s other folks here besides Levaughn, and for most of them it’s home.”

“That’s…yeah. Okay. We could be better guests, I guess,” Julian acknowledged.

“Sure as shit make my life easier,” Kevin said, then remembered Levaughn’s unerring instinct for making a useful nuisance of himself. “…probably,” he corrected himself.

“So. The SOR’s got our back but we’re gonna hafta wait fuck-knows-how long but at least half a year before they’re ready, we need to be more considerate to our hosts, and once *Misfit*‘s all patched up we’re gonna get our asses busted in training every day of the wait,” Allison summed up. “That about cover it?”

Kevin nodded, but decided a little avuncular advice wouldn’t go wrong “…Look, I lived and worked at SCERF for a few years, you know that. An’ the thing about these military motherfuckers is they like game. Just show ‘em you’re willing to try your hardest and you’ll never have better friends, right? They’ll suffer right along with you. But the worst and dumbest thing you kids could do is make them think they’re wasting their time. They sniff laziness on you, then they will come down on you hard if they think you ain’t a lost cause. And if they think you are a lost cause then you’ll fuckin’ know it by the way they go all polite and formal and agreeable.”

With that warning out of the way, he treated the three of them to a grin. “But you’ve already done tougher,” he added. “This won’t be a cakewalk, but you can handle it. Just…don’t take it personal.”

“Take what personal?” Allison asked.

“Oh,” Kevin grinned. “You’ll see…”

Date Point: 13y4m1w AV
Mercenary ship Howl At Nothing, The Irujzen Reef

Thurrsto

Thurrsto duck-nodded to himself on the satisfaction of a job well done and clapped his paws together like he was dusting them off. Garuuvin had big and easy buttons to push, trivially so. Any remotely competent Whitecrest could have played him like a game of Pounce, and Thurrsto prided himself that he’d got where he was on merit far more than on genetics.

He slipped through the opening doors into the cargo bay and took a second to appreciate the probe his Brothers were programming in the middle of the floor. It was as big as a car and looked for all the world like a chunk of dirty water ice.

All under Regaari’s watchful eye. Thurrsto was a betting man, and he’d shave himself to the skin if Regaari wasn’t going to find himself becoming a Father of the Clan sometime in the not too distant future. He’d have to contend the machinations of the many and jealous rivals he’d managed to make even inside his own Clan’s ranks…but he had Genshi’s backing and anybody with a working brain for politics in the Clan knew where things were headed. All the smart ‘Crests were already on Regaari’s side.

That still left a depressingly large number of stupid ‘Crests, even after accounting for Hierarchy infiltration.

None of which spoke well of the coming campaign they’d need to wage among their own ranks. Things were moving into place at once too quickly and too slowly. Regaari had said there would be blood, and Thurrsto knew he was right.

He set the thought aside and bent down to check how his Brother was doing. Senior though he might be, Regaari’s experience of being undercover as a starship repair technician was proving invaluable in sorting out a last-minute technical problem with the probe. Something arcane to do with the control module for the sensors.

“Shipmaster’s getting itchy paws,” Thurrsto reported.

“He’s a smart one,” Faarek commented. “He’d passed the first round of selection for Association with Clan Ironpaw before that explosion.”

“As much as I love a smart Gaoian…” Regaari grunted as he finally managed to work his claws behind the offending module and yank it loose “…right now, we need him to be dumb.”

“Taken care of,” Thurrsto promised.

His Brothers duck-nodded. They didn’t need any elaboration to trust his judgement there.

Regaari made a thoughtful growling noise as he opened the control module and ejected the circuit-threaded crystalline Silicon wafer that functioned as its CPU, which he slotted into a diagnostic tool.

“You never did tell me how this thing works,” Thurrsto reminded him, while activating his portable privacy field. The walls had ears, and this was the first chance he’d had to ask without being surrounded by curious eavesdroppers.

“It’s simple enough,” Regaari told him as he swiped through the tool’s troubleshooting screens. “We attach it to the iceball then nudge that iceball in-system. It’ll detach during the trip when the comet starts to form a tail.”

“Should look like the comet disintegrating naturally,” Faarek explained.

“And then our probe plunges into the target planet’s atmosphere and explodes twenty kilometers up,” Regaari finished. “It should look exactly like a natural impact.”

“All that stuff with the simulated reactor breach is just in case Big Hotel have sensors that can see out this far,” Faarek added. “It’ll look like we used the iceball for emergency repairs and disrupted its orbit. A coincidence, but not an impossible one.”

“Also, to misdirect the crew,” Regaari added.

“And we used this ship rather than one of our own for reasons of deniability,” Thurrsto deduced.

“Exactly. …There.” Regaari ejected the control wafer again and reinstalled it back in its module.

“It’ll take months for useful intel to come back to us,” Thurrsto pointed out.

“Templar wants it that way.” Regaari plunged into the depths of the probe again to reinstall the module, and his voice echoed hollowly inside its shell. “He told me a story about a human sniper who spent a whole day crawling two kilometers over open ground one time to take a single shot. Then three days crawling back while being hunted.”

Faarek chittered darkly. “If that story was about any other species, I’d consider it a myth,” he snorted.

“It’s considered an impressive feat even by their standards,” Regaari said, and backed out of the probe. “But Templar’s intent in telling it was clear. We don’t care how quickly this mission happens, so long as it’s successful.”

Faarek and Thurrsto grabbed the access panel and held it in place for him. It snapped in easily and with only the faintest hairline crack on the surface to hint that the “comet” was anything other than natural.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Faarek chittered, and deployed a single careful word of English: “Outstanding.”

Regaari growl-chittered and playfully swiped at him. It was a mark of how far they had come while training and serving among the SOR that such naked sarcasm was now a harmless joke among them, rather than a grievous show of disrespect.

They didn’t have time for play so Faarek settled for an amused kilter of his ears, promising good-natured retribution at a later date. They ran one last check while Thurrsto deactivated the privacy field and generally tidied up, and their “comet” was ready to deploy.

“I hear Sister Myun is going back to Gao with the Mother-supreme,” Thurrsto observed, turning to harmless gossip as soon as the field was offline. “A real shame. Who knows when she’ll be back.”

“You don’t stand a chance with her, Brother.”

“Hey!” he chittered along, “I’m big and strong! And smart!”

“And she’s…picky.” Faarek deployed a masterfully apt turn of phrase to speak the truth without giving offense as he lifted the “comet” on its trolley and wheeled it toward the airlock.

Thurrsto was in a playful mood. “And I’m ambitious. If it weren’t for my crest I’d be pretty, too!”

Regaari hit the airlock door. “Brother, the crest is the prettiest part of you.”

“That’s okay, I have a secret weapon. Something that really impresses the Females when they see it.”

Faarek shook his head and chittered. “Whatever you say, Brother.”

“Carnitas tacos,” Thurrsto said proudly. “Never failed me yet. ‘Horse taught me the secret: You have to toast the spices.”

“Aargh, you had to mention tacos.” Regaari hit the button again and they watched the ‘lock cycle. The last ghost of pressure left inside was enough to gently push the probe out towards the comet, and they all stood back with the sense of a job well done. “They’re my favourite Human food.”

“We know, Brother,” Faarek looked upward at the ceiling and his ears drooped sideways patiently.

Regaari ignored the implicit jab. “…Deployment complete. Go tell the shipmaster to give our iceball a nudge.”

‘Iceball’ was a woefully inadequate way of describing a frozen aggregate of water and rock that dwarfed the Howl At Nothing several times over, but Thurrsto duck-nodded and turned away.

“Oh, and, Brother?” Regaari added.

“Yeah?”

“Myun’s favourite is lo mai gai.”

Thurrsto twitched his ears gratefully, duck-nodded again and headed out.

It was good to have Brothers he could rely on.

Date Point: 13y5m3w AV
Chiune Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Dane Brown

The staff of Chiune Station had fallen into some bad habits, living as they did in an isolated little enclave of private property a long way from Folctha’s oversight. A few of the permanent residents were technically guilty of tax evasion, in fact—they’d been exaggerating their exercise reports to squeeze another percentage point or two off their income tax under Folctha’s fitness incentives.

Dane had come down on that practice hard and called out the perpetrators as what they were: Morons. If caught they’d wind up paying back far more than they’d saved, and in any case the fitness incentives were there for their own benefit. Cimbrean’s native gravity was twenty percent less than the Earth’s, and failure to exercise in subgravity environments had nasty health consequences.

Blitzing through the whole of Chiune’s staff and bullying them into getting their fat asses in gear was his way of keeping up the same relentless pressure that seemed to be driving Clara at the moment. She’d changed since her father’s death: Less bubbly. Fewer smiles. More crying in his arms at night.

More resolve, though—everything had taken on the importance of a mission of personal salvation for her. It was kinda hot, but also saddening. He missed just being able to relax with her. She didn’t shoot off on her adorable tangents so much, like wondering why people could be called “Brown,” “Green” or “Black” but you never ran into a Mr. Purple, or a Mrs. Yellow.

He had a lot of terrible things to say about the Alien Protection Army terrorists…but perhaps the worst and most personally hateful was that in small ways they’d taken his wife from him.

He was beginning to think he understood the Misfit crew a little more, though. He’d never have said a negative word against the three of them, but Xiù, Julian and especially Allison packed more intensity into their lives than Dane was entirely comfortable with. It was part of what tied them so closely together—nobody else could keep up.

And it sure as hell was making the repairs to Misfit run ahead of schedule. All of the armor plates were attached, the pantry extension was complete and the new engine modules were installed. Allison and Julian had swapped their welding gear for full-face painting respirators and were diligently giving their ship a fresh coat of paint in Byron Group Interstellar’s luxuriant silver, white and red livery.

Clara had a sixth sense for her husband’s presence, and she turned to give him a smile and tucked her tablet under her arm, leaving Julian and Allison to their painting.

“Hey.”

She smiled. “Hey, yourself.”

“Busy?”

She draped her arms over his shoulders. “Yeah. But I should probably take a break, huh?”

“Let me know if you’re gonna work yourself into an early grave so I can update your life insurance,” Dane grinned. He was rewarded with a playful swat to the chest.

“It’s just a couple more days” she promised. “Then I release them fully to the tender mercies of the SOR and we can get started on EV-Twelve.”

Dane nodded, and put down the sports bag he’d brought in with him. “I brought lunch,” he said.

Allison stood up. “I heard ‘lunch’…” she declared, muffled through her painting mask.

“You heard right!” Dane called, and knelt to unzip the bag. “Just enough for three, ‘cause I heard Xiù’s in Folctha, right?””

Julian turned off the air compressor and stripped off his mask. “Yup,” he nodded. “Gaoian business.”

“Yeah, explain that one to me,” Dane requested as the pair dropped their gloves and sauntered over. “She’s a Gaoian?”

“Legally, yeah.” Julian shrugged.

“Dominion law is really dumb about some things,” Allison added. She sat down cross-legged and opened her lunch pack when Dane handed it to her. “Aww, come on. Quark and grapes for dessert again?”

“We’re two hundred miles from anywhere on an alien world that’s the wrong climate to even grow grapes, and you’re complaining?” Dane retorted.

“I’d appreciate the miracle more if you didn’t have us eating this every mealtime,” she grumbled, and set the little tub aside to dive eagerly into the tupperware full of Moroccan chicken and lentils.

“There’s puffed spelt and kiwi fruit in it this time.”

“I stand by my earlier complaint that you’re a sadist,” Julian told him.

Dane chuckled and took his own lunch pack. “For real? I make you nice healthy food, pack it with flavour and texture and everything a body needs…”

“Sometimes what the body needs is deep-fried,” Allison declared. “Just sayin’.”

“Aw, man…” Julian threw his head back and gazed off into the infinite heavens, lost in remembered gastronomic rapture. “When I got back to Earth that first time…”

“What’d you have?” Allison asked him.

“KFC. You?”

“Arby’s. And Xiù basically was sat down by her mom and had a funnel shoved down her throat, the way she tells it.”

“Yeah, but you’ve tasted her mom’s cooking, right?” Julian asked.

“Oh, fuck yeah. Her mom’s food is orgasmic.” Allison drifted off into a culinary daydream of her own, and Clara covered her mouth to giggle.

“Guys. No fantasizing about junk food,” Dane grinned. “We’re supposed to be getting you mission ready.”

“With spelt?”

Dane sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll talk with Warhorse, let him know I’m giving you one ‘clean cheat’ meal a week, but only if you’ve earned it.”

Julian grimaced. “That guy’s gonna turn me into another meatslab…” he predicted.

“Yeah-huh. I’m sure the girls will hate the results…” Dane snarked. “Also, you wanna beat Vemik don’t you?”

Allison grinned, and Julian tidied his hair back with a face that said he knew he was being played but didn’t object enough to…well, object.

“So how ‘bout it?” Dane asked. “I’ll give you fried chicken tomorrow, Aunt Irma’s secret recipe. With collard greens done the right way.”

“I’m down,” Allison agreed. “Julian?”

“…Meatslab.”

Dane chuckled and shook his head. “Word of advice?” he suggested, knowingly, “This is for your benefit so you set the rules, but you’d be smart to listen to him. He knows what he’s doing. How’ve you been finding my rehab program so far?”

“…Not as bad as I thought it’d be…” Julian admitted.

“See? I’m not so sadistic after all.”

Julian sighed, but it was clear the offer of fried chicken had worked its magic now that the meatslab thing was off the table.

“…Fine. I’m in,” he agreed, and opened his lunch. “Besides,” he added, “It’ll be nice to maybe hold my own against Vemik, y’know?”

Date Point: 13y5m3w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

For the third time in a hand of days Vemik’s branch broke. If he’d been climbing a Ketta it wouldn’t have mattered so much, but Forestfather bark came away easier, so when he grabbed for a handhold to save himself all he got was a loose handful of bark and enough time to curse.

“Godshiiit—!”

Falling out of a tree was never dignified. Wrapping himself around a thick limb on the way down before sliding off it and landing flat on his back in the leaves, even more so.

He lay there for a while as he recovered his breath, reflecting that the time had probably come to admit to himself that he’d never swing through the high branches again. That had come to him faster than he’d expected, probably because of all the good meat and fruit they had on this side of the mountain.

Yan, of course, was no help at all. He appeared upside-down in Vemik’s vision with a cheerily gruff expression on his face. “You got bigger.”

“…Yes.”

“Good! Means you can do more work and pound out your own iron! Anything broken?”

“Just my dignity.” Vemik winced as he sat up. In fact his ribs were feeling very tender and his breath hurt, but nothing was broken.

“Sky-Thinker, you weren’t using it anyway.”

“Very funny.”

Yan’s trill had some sympathy in it. Of course, he must have taken his share of plunges out of the trees when the Change had come and the gods had Chosen him to be a Given-Man. His teasing was just…Yan being Yan. “Well, rest up for a day or two. I’m sure the women would take care of you…”

“I’m only with The Singer, Yan.”

Yan made an amused harrumphing sound in his chest. “Be that way then. How many more melts do we need?”

“Three more for the knives and spear tips. I wanted to do another for *‘tinkering’*…”

Tinkering was Vemik’s absolute favorite sky-word. There was something metal-sounding about it, and it just felt like a word that meant trying different things to see if they worked.

“Fine. I’ll do all the melts and hammer them out. Or, I’ll shout at our apprentices while they do it. Same thing.”

Vemik trilled, then stopped himself. It hurt.

Yan did that thing again where he ignored Vemik’s discomfort in an affectionate, understanding sort of way that somehow made him feel better. “It’ll make them strong for that *‘Ww…l…’*“ he snarled and concentrated on saying it right. “‘Laminated’ bow of yours,” he said.

Yan was very diligent about the Sky-People words. The ‘Engwish.’ … No. The ‘English.’ He seemed better at them too, which Vemik found strangely infuriating. Why was that? Maybe it’d be easier now that his face was taking a more adult shape…

“About that,” Vemik straightened up and stretched. “I was thinking…maybe if I put small steel blades on the end of bird-spears. *‘Awwows.’*“

“Arrows.” Yan corrected him. He tried to be casual about it, but Vemik wasn’t fooled.

“That hurts your face every time you do it. Don’t pretend it doesn’t.”

Yan ducked his head and grinned. “Putting blades on them?”

“Yes. Maybe…I thought if I put a wide one on the front it’d make a bigger hole and maybe the prey would bleed more.”

“So…like our new spears. Just small.”

“Oh! Yes! And what if we put two kinds of…” Vemik gestured with his hands to try and show what he was thinking. “Kind of like branches sticking out on either side of the spearhead?! So when you skewer a Werne it can’t push up the spear and slice you.”

Yan scratched at his ear thoughtfully. “Could work…sounds like it might break easy, though. Spears are nice ‘cuz they don’t break like the bird-spears do.”

“It’s still worth trying,” Vemik said. Even if his ribs were hurting, he wasn’t about to let Yan wound his hunger for new things.

Yan trilled. “Fine, fine. But for now you go and let my niece look at those ribs. Maybe she’ll talk some sense into you and send you off to visit another hut!”

“Yan!”

“Fine, fine…”

Date Point: 13y5m3w AV
Quarterside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ayma

Father Gyotin had come as an enormous surprise. He readily admitted to a wild and disreputable history that was just…it didn’t fit at all with who he was now.

The Humans of course had a perfectly witty phrase for this: “He’d sown his wild oats.”

Nowadays he was composed, serene and thoughtful. Yulna’s duties and responsibilities had forced her to place Starmind quite low on her list of official engagements, but Gyotin had waited his turn patiently and had met the Mother-Supreme as graciously and warmly as if she’d seen him first.

There was none of the passive-aggressive obsequiousness some males might demonstrate at a perceived snub, nor any wheedling self-serving blather, either. He was simply pleasant, and introduced Yulna to “hot chocolate.” His gift to her—a selection box of sachets of the powder to make the sweet-tasting Human beverage—was modest without being insulting. Ayma had seen more experienced and important Fathers handle their first meeting with a Mother-Supreme far less adeptly.

“Of course, a Clan must have a role,” he agreed. They were strolling around Quarterside park, where Cimbrean Colonial Security had made a clear space for them and Yulna was listening to him with more than just the polite interest that her position demanded. Ayma knew her old friend’s ears very well, and a hair’s-width made all the difference.

“And yours is?”

Gyotin adjusted his robes slightly and his ears moved expressively as he picked his words. “…I remember when I was very young, Mother Sanyi told us Keeda Tales. Crazy, silly stories about the trickster Gaoian who did impossible things.”

“I always liked the story of how we wound up with brown-furs and silver-furs,” Ayma joined in.

Gyotin duck-nodded. “Tripping the big strong males so they fell in a mud hole. Yes, that was one of my favourites…It had just the right mix of silliness and violence for a cub.”

“I heard a different story,” Yulna mused.

“Oh yes. There are many Keeda Tales, and some of them contradict each other,” Gyotin agreed. “But they point to something interesting. In the past, we told stories about the universe and put ourselves in them. Narrative mythology was how we recorded our wisdom. Not the facts, of course, but the skills a cub needed to grow up and thrive. They gave us a sense of…place.”

He gestured toward the Female Commune and its gabled rooftop just visible above the high wall that penned in the Alien Quarter. “And that mythology gave way to writing, history, philosophy, mathematics, and science,” he said. “But then writing, history, philosophy, mathematics and science slowly strangled mythology to death.”

“Are you suggesting that it wasn’t obsolete?” Yulna asked.

“Facts are true. But they are not the truth, not the whole of it. A person’s life is spent living inside their own head and very little of what happens in there is subject to objective truth,” Gyotin said. “Empirical evidence just isn’t the right shape to slip into a person’s mind and pass along important messages. But a story about tripping a big brute so that he falls in a mudhole? That story is exactly the right shape to teach a cub about the value of finesse over raw strength.”

“So you see yourselves as…storytellers?” Yulna asked. Gyotin shook his head.

“I worry that over the years we may have missed valuable lessons about ourselves because we stopped using the right tools to find them,” he said. “Could our psychology be more sophisticated? What if we had kept our—a Human word—spirituality, alive and well? What insights have we possibly missed because we weren’t looking for them in the right way?”

He turned to Yulna “And what benefits might those insights have yielded for raising our cubs?” he finished.

Yulna had a totally unguarded moment where she duck-nodded with an obviously fascinated set of her ears. She only noticed the slip and yanked her professional aloofness back into place when Ayma chittered softly at her, but by then it was too late.

Gyotin, to his credit, didn’t comment or make any overt recognition, but Ayma could tell he was quietly delighted. He spread his paws wide and pricked his ears up. “That is the start of our purpose, at least. I find that a lot of what I do is help people with their problems,” he added.

“How so?” Ayma asked.

“Hmm…” Gyotin looked around, then shrugged. “She isn’t here. But there is a Human female, the one who first set me on this path. She visits me every week, and we talk. It seems to heal her. And she isn’t the only one. Jenny over there—” he indicated a shaven-headed and middle-aged woman in dark grey robes who was standing aside and watching their little procession with interest, “—became a nun to overcome anxiety and depression. Reverend White is not a Buddhist, but apparently the Faith Center helps people every day with similar problems.

“I became a mercenary out of desperation,” he said. “And I wonder if my youth might have been more wholesome if somebody had been there to talk to me and help me find a sense of direction and peace. That is what I hope to achieve.”

Yulna duck-nodded slowly. Rather than reply, however, she looked up at the sound of an air transport—a human model, sturdy and sleek and the only way to fly on Cimbrean—swooping low overhead to dip out of sight beyond the Alien Quarter’s walls. The biolfilter field dome over the Quarter fizzed gently as the vehicle sank through it.

Myun stepped forward, with her ear cocked as she listened to something via the communicator clipped to it. “…That’s Sister Shoo, Mother,” she reported.

“Ah!” Yulna duck-nodded. “Here to see us off. Would you like to meet her, Father Gyotin?”

“I would!” Gyotin agreed. “Things would be very different if not for her…”

Yulna duck-nodded solemnly, and gestured for him to walk with her.

Shoo was playing with a handful of cubs at the Commune when they arrived. No, Ayma realized—not playing. Teaching. Myun had been instructing the little ones in the basics of the modified Gung Fu she had adapted for Gaoian use, and Shoo was now showing them the original form and explaining some of the differences.

Ayma had to admit, she missed having her Human Sister around. Shoo had always been incredible with the cubs, even before she could speak Gaori…and it was impossible to forget that Shoo had literally saved her life, and Yulna’s, Myun’s…Things just felt safer when Shoo was around.

But it was obvious that the Shoo who had lived in the commune on Gao for all that time, and shared a ship with her, wasn’t quite the same person. Isolation and loneliness had taken its toll on her and there had been many tears hidden in out-of-the-way corners where she could try not to be a bother to anybody.

The real Sister Shoo was smiling, gregarious, talkative and maybe a little bit of a showoff. That trick where she raised one foot high into the air until it was directly above the other with her knees locked and her legs straight was physically impossible for a Gaoian, not to mention that it seemed to defy gravity. Ayma had never managed to figure out how Humans managed to hold that pose at all, let alone how Shoo could do it and become perfectly still.

The cubs were suitably awed, too. And so, from the soft sigh he made, was Gyotin.

“Physical poetry,” he murmured.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Yulna asked. “I always thought that strength meant lumbering size. I never appreciated that it could also mean grace.”

“You should watch their sport. It is…they almost fly.”

Ayma could only duck-nod mute agreement.

As they got close enough to overhear her Shoo turned out to be speaking flawless Gaori. Even her accent was right.

“—doesn’t mean fighting,” she was saying. “Gōngfu just means anything that takes patience, practice and time to learn properly. What I’m doing now isn’t a wǔshù, a martial art, it’s gymnastics. What Sister Myun is teaching you is how to fight well, and that isn’t the same thing.”

One of the cubs raised a paw adorably. “Doesn’t that hurt?” he asked.

“A little,” Shoo admitted. “But that doesn’t have to stop you. It’s just a warning, and you can choose to ignore the warning if you know what you’re doing.” She looked up and saw the procession of adults approaching and her leg described an interesting arc down to ground level as she returned to an upright posture.

“You remember how to show respect to your shīfu?” she asked the cubs, who tumbled over each other to stand up, line up, and bow low with one paw cupped in the palm of the other.

Ayma had to fight hard not to whine over how cute it was, and anybody who didn’t know her well would probably have missed the subtle tells that Yulna was having similar trouble.

“Very good!” Shoo beamed at them. “Now I want you to practice the first series like you showed me before while I speak with the Mothers, okay?”

There was an enthusiastic juvenile chorus of “Yes Sister!” and the cubs scrambled away. Ayma managed not to chitter—Shoo had simultaneously let them stay in earshot to sate their curiosity while giving them something to focus on so they probably wouldn’t hear much of the conversation anyway. She really would have been an excellent Mother.

Yulna didn’t stand on formality—she treated Shoo to an affectionate hug, and chittered when Shoo returned the hug with so much interest that it lifted her paws off the ground for a second. A few of the more stuffy Mothers from the Folctha commune watched with their ears at scandalized angles, but they didn’t know Yulna personally, nor how much she appreciated being treated, just for a second, as a Sister.

Ayma got the second hug, but it was longer and firm enough to give her a little trouble breathing. She didn’t complain—visiting on business as part of Yulna’s retinue had robbed her of a proper reunion with Shoo, or with Regaari for that matter. She returned the hug as well as she could.

“I think you may actually be stronger than before…” she observed once finally released.

Shoo duck-nodded. “I am,” she revealed.

“And you can fly a spaceship…”

“And you must be quite experienced at making first contact with alien species by now,” Yulna observed wryly. Xiù flushed a little red in the face and duck-nodded again.

“Only two,” she demurred.

“That’s more than most people,” Yulna observed. “But I’m being rude. Sister Shoo—Father Gyotin of Clan Starmind.”

Gyotin gave her an urbane pant-smile, the one that males who had regular contact with humans had developed that seemed to pass muster as an imitation of a human smile. It certainly went over well with Shoo, who shook his paw warmly.

“I heard about your Clan,” she said. “I would have visited but…”

“But you have responsibilities,” Gyotin finished. “Please, do not apologize to me. I understand you are a Buddhist yourself?”

Shoo managed the neat trick of moving her head just so to suggest an expression with the ears she didn’t have. “In my way. That’s how my parents raised me,” she agreed.

“You meditate?”

Shoo nodded. “Every day.”

“It would be nice to have a deeper conversation with you someday,” Gyotin told her. “Perhaps when you have managed to resolve some of those responsibilities, yes?”

“I’d like that,” Shoo smiled. She glanced at Ayma. “But…I’m sorry, I…”

“You wish to spend time with your Sisters,” Gyotin duck-nodded. “I understand completely. It has been a pleasure, Sister Shoo.”

“It has!”

Ayma chittered warmly and took Shoo by the arm as Gyotin made his farewells to Yulna.

“Charming, isn’t he?” she asked.

“You always did like the intellectuals,” Shoo grinned evilly.

“Oh, you’d be surprised…” Ayma chittered softly. “Come on. We need to leave in the morning. It’d be nice if we could just relax for a while…catch up properly at last. I think you have a lot to tell us…Did I hear correctly that people tried to kill you?”

Shoo’s expression fell, and she glanced around the commune until her eyes alighted on a patch of shadow that, when Ayma spent a second looking at it, turned out to be a big Human male—much smaller than Warhorse and Baseball, but still huge by any other convention—in a dark shirt and dove gray trousers. Not a handsome specimen of the species, she decided, but then again muscles had a value all their own. Quite how somebody that large had just managed to fade himself into the background like that was a mystery.

“He’s here for my protection,” she said.

“Oh, Shoo…” Ayma sighed. “You keep getting in trouble.”

“And I keep finding friends, family, loved ones…” Shoo smiled and took Ayma’s paw. “Don’t worry about me, Ayma. I’d rather be in trouble for doing the right thing.”

“Are you doing the right thing?” Ayma asked. “These new deathworlders you found…Even if it’s toothless and clawless, the Dominion has the Office for the Preservation Of Indigenous Species for a good reason…They might say you’ll do more harm than good.”

Shoo shook her head sharply, and not in the Gaoian way. “We’re doing the right thing,” she said, with total conviction. “And I don’t care what they say.”

“…I believe you.”

They moved on to happier topics.

Date Point: 13y5m AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

“I don’t care what the APA thinks!”

5-EYES wasn’t always an easy relationship. Its members, after all, were democracies with at times vividly different cultures and that meant their elected leaders could be equally different. The alliance was strong, but the personal relationships were…not, sometimes..

Which was why Sartori had sat forward, pressed his fingertips to the table and raised his voice. Not enough to give offense, just enough to shake the other four up a little.

“They are terrorists,” he snarled. “And they are idiots.”

Stephen Davies was, as usual, the voice of reconciliation and peace at the table. The British PM had won his election on the back of a promise to curtail military spending and ‘seek peaceful resolutions’ to interstellar and terrestrial crises. He’d fortunately been persuaded that the nature of the interstellar crises put peaceful resolution off the table entirely, but his attitude on matters closer to home hadn’t changed much so far as Sartori could tell. He hadn’t gone so far as to actually sympathize with the APA, but everything Sartori knew about the man said he resonated with their message.

“Obviously I’m not talking about the extremists,” he said, and got an agreeable nod from his Canadian counterpart Philippe Martel. “But it only makes sense to be worried about the ethics of interstellar colonization. The APA don’t know just how serious our situation is or why we’re doing this.”

“And they’re not gonna,” Sartori said firmly, making a cutting motion with his hand.

“Whether or not they’re in possession of all the facts really doesn’t excuse that they failed to condemn the truck bomb and shooting,” Kathy Nguyen pointed out. She was new to the table but not to the subjects it discussed, thanks to several years as Australia’s deputy prime minister before a stroke had forced her predecessor to retire.

The fourth man at the table—New Zealand’s Joel Thompson—was in the habit of fiddling a pen thoughtfully between his fingers and was almost always the last to speak on a subject, but Sartori respected that. Thompson gave off the impression of having thought things through before he opened his mouth. “Even if they did have a valid point…” he began, “which they don’t, because we won’t be settling inhabited planets…I’d still say survival comes first.”

“Survival doesn’t have to mean sacrificing our integrity,” Martel countered.

“No, it doesn’t,” Nguyen agreed. “Which is another reason why we shouldn’t let ourselves be paralyzed by indecision. We can act and act ethically.”

“Cimbrean has been a success beyond anybody’s wildest dreams,” Sartori said. “My advisors tell me that Introducing Terran species actually had the effect of slowing the mass extinction, and that some of the native species are already evolving to compete with the imports.”

“Probably because the scientists carefully imported the least disruptive critters they could find,” Nguyen sniffed. “No bloody cane toads.”

“I suppose that does demonstrate that we can properly control our environmental impact…” Davies conceded.

“And now we have New Enewetak,” Martel said.

“And others. The team at Erebor have dispatched probes to Lucent and Nightmare.”

“Not Akyawentuo?” Martel asked.

“That planet belongs to its natives and it stays that way.” Sartori sat back in his chair. “Despite what morons like the APA think, this isn’t the eighteenth century. We don’t do smallpox blankets.”

“Fine ideals,” Davies said. “I hope we live up to them.”

Thompson cleared his throat. “China, Russia and India won’t like it when we start colonizing planets without them,” he pointed out.

Davies nodded. “And that means the UN won’t like it. And by extension nor will the GRA.”

“This is our technology, we have a right to use it first,” Sartori said.

“The right, maybe,” Nguyen conceded, “but for the sake of diplomatic expediency, we need to give away some of the early planets.”

Sartori frowned at her. “Just…hand them out?”

“I know that isn’t a trivial thing, but it’s necessary,” she said. “The last thing we need for the moment is rising tensions back home. Imagine if we fell into a second Cold War right now, we’d be screwed.”

“I suggest Lucent remains in US hands,” Martel said. “The Byron Group staked it after all.”

Sartori nodded emphatically. “From what I’m told, they already found some very interesting resources on that planet. I agree, we’re keeping Lucent.”

“Giving Nightmare to a foreign power could be seen as throwing them the scraps…” Davies mused. “It has a reputation for being a frozen hellhole for four-fifths of the year and a murderous hellhole for the other fifth.”

“It can’t be that bad if one man managed to thrive there for six years all by himself…” Martel suggested.

“Still. Giving it away and keeping the more hospitable worlds for ourselves could be seen as an injustice.”

Nguyen drummed her sharply manicured fingernails on the table in front of her, just once. “So that just leaves New Enewetak. Think that’ll do?”

Thompson shook his head and flipped his pen around his thumb. “One planet isn’t enough. We can’t even start this process until we have more planets that are ready to receive colonists.”

“What about getting more colonists off Earth?” Davies suggested. “Folctha is doing well, but there’s a lot of Cimbrean left to claim. A lot of resources. We could be colonizing it more aggressively…”

“Would you be happy with that?” Sartori asked. Folctha had come as a gargantuan boost to the UK’s economy, which was now exporting massive tonnages of food and lumber into the European market. By all accounts the colony was only about five hundred miles from a huge bed of Anthracite as well, which Hephaestus wasn’t alone in salivating over.

“The UK can’t possibly develop an entire planet or exploit all of its resources by ourselves,” Davies said. “And we certainly aren’t about to depopulate Great Britain in making the attempt. There’s really nothing to be unhappy about.”

“And the more we send to Cimbrean, the faster we can develop it,” Nguyen nodded. “The faster we develop it the more resources we have. You’re right, as it is now Cimbrean is being squandered.”

“I hope we’re not proposing to put all our eggs in one basket?” Martel asked.

“No. We’ll open up multiple colony sites on Lucent as well,” Sartori declared. “Everyone at this table, NATO members…There’s enough planet to go around. And others. We’ll keep Nightmare if the others don’t want it. We may not have many worlds to barter with right now, but as soon as we let the Coltainers off the leash…we’ll have more than we can handle before long.”

Thompson nodded. “And if even half of them turn out as well as Cimbrean did…”

“…Then the future’s looking bright,” Nguyen finished.

There was a moment of satisfied, comfortable silence around the table, which Davies broke. He leaned forward, adjusted the paper in front of him and took a deep breath.

“I suppose,” he said, “that we had better start working out the details…”

Date Point: 13y5m AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Chiune Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“Breaking news, more footage now from Sacramento where riot police have apparently clashed with protesters in the last twenty minutes. A…statement released by the Sacramento Police Department confirmed that their officers have used kinetic pulse weapons to, uh, pacify some of the more violent protesters outside the state capitol…”

It sure as shit didn’t look like a ‘protest’ to Julian. For his money, burning police cars, smashed windows and the sight of an ambulance being pummeled with thrown objects and baseball bats made for a riot, not a protest.

A freaking ambulance.

The signs were the hardest to deal with. Each one stabbed right at the heart of the insecurities he and the girls had voiced among themselves about helping the People and giving them steel. They’d gone out into space looking for worlds for humanity, and now people’s livelihoods were burning.

The signs ranged from crude sharpie scrawled on scrap cardboard through to huge printed banners, but the messages were uniformly painful to read. ‘Humanity is a plague!’ was bad, ‘We already killed two worlds!’ was worse. The worst was a huge red one that bore a stark black-and-white likeness of Xiù wearing jackboots and yanking a chained and collared Gaoian behind her on a leash.

Xiù bore it with a sad shake of her head, but Julian’s head filled with fantasies of violent retribution against that sign’s creator that were only interrupted she pulled on his sleeve to get his attention. She looked up at him, took his hand and shook her head as if to say ‘let it go.’

He couldn’t. Not when the police were wading into the mob to rescue the stricken ambulance.

“…Kinda feels like our fault, doesn’t it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “We didn’t do this,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

“I’d feel a whole lot better about it if we had,” Allison commented, bitterly. She sighed, extracted herself from the cuddle and swayed upright. Apparently her leg had gone numb from being folded underneath her, because she leaned against the wall to shake it out. “…Turn that shit off, babe.”

“Can we afford to ignore it?” Julian asked.

“Baby, if we watch much more of this I might actually lose what little faith in humanity I had left. We’re no good to anyone if we’re totally fucking depressed.”

“…Right.”

Xiù sighed as he turned the TV off, and whatever force had been drawing her to it snapped off. She sat back, looked away and rubbed her eyes.

“…I just wish it wasn’t so…on the nose,” she said. “I mean, we’ve said that we worried about this stuff and that we don’t like the situation and…everything…”

She looked up and shrugged helplessly. “What more can we do? Don’t they trust us?”

Allison shook her head. “They want villains,” she said.

“They want us to be the villains?”

“No. They want the world to be a simple place with villains in it, so they’ll go find somebody to turn into the villain. You ever read Daniel’s book?”

“Not yet,” Julian admitted while Xiù shook her head.

“It’s helping me cope with all…that.” Allison waved a hand at the TV, then glanced at her watch as it beeped. She shrugged and moved to the middle of the floor where she stood wide and rolled her shoulders, warming up for her yoga. “He said something like, uh…” she thought as she raised her hands high above her head. “*‘When people look for evil, they look toward power. The downtrodden masses can’t possibly be the villains themselves because they aren’t powerful, and power is evil by definition.’*”

“I don’t know if I agree with…” Xiù trailed off. “I mean…do you?”

Allison looked back over her shoulder, shrugged helplessly, then stretched forward and touched her fingertips to the floor in front of her toes. “He’s more qualified to talk about that shit than I am” she said. “But if he’s right…I dunno. I don’t feel powerful.”

“Me either,” Xiù agreed.

“That makes three,” Julian nodded.

He pulled Xiù a little closer, rested his head back and got lost in thought staring at the ceiling for a while, before being dragged back to reality when Xiù’s phone hummed in her pocket.

People had tried all sorts of gimmicks over the years. Phones that were worn in the ear, hidden inside spectacles, controlled via gestures and augmented reality…but when it came down to it, a small touch-screen computer in the pocket with a camera on the back just had too much utility to dismiss. Accessories like Smart Watches, AR sunglasses and real-time in-ear translators were just that: Accessories. People still wanted to send text messages, watch videos, read articles and play games.

About the only permanent upgrade that had stuck over the years was the addition of a forcefield emitter to allow for recharging the phone from ambient sunlight. It also allowed for holographic projection, which Julian found gimmicky but Xiù loved—rather than swiping icon left or right on her screen to answer the call, she got to interact with a cute bird instead.

This time she swatted listlessly at it to answer the call. “Xiù Chang?”

Her shoulders somehow sagged even more as she listened.

“They have? …Did they say why? Oh. Well…No. No, that’s…Obviously they have to…yeah. Did they say how long…? Oh no…really? And there’s nothing you can do to—? No, I’m sure you did. Sorry. Yes, I’ll tell them. You too…Thanks.”

She groaned and put the phone in her pocket when the call ended. “Tā mā de…”

Julian sat up straighter. “I sense bad news…”

“Yeah. That was Mister Williams. He says the JETS team just sent him their schedule for when they think they’ll be ready to come with us..”

“How long?”

“…Six months.”

Allison kicked her legs backwards and swung up out of her forearm stand to kneel disbelievingly in the middle of the floor. “You’re shitting me…”

Xiù raised her hands helplessly. “And that’s assuming other stuff doesn’t come up first…” she added.

“But we’re ready!” Allison stood up and perched on the back of the couch. “We could leave tomorrow if they gave us the go-ahead, they can’t just—”

“They can,” Julian shook his head, and took her hand.

“But six months could be too late, don’t they get that?”

“You know what Firth would say, right?”

“I know, I know. Big Brother Firth…He’d say—” Allison took a deep breath and dropped her voice as low as it would go in a woefully inadequate attempt to imitate Firth’s gravel pit of a voice. “—‘It sucks, but y’gotta trust’ or some bullshit like that.”

She sighed, then lay down on the back of the couch and combed Xiù’s hair with her fingers.

“…I just hope whatever they’re gearing up for is real fuckin’ important…”

Date Point: 13y5m AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space

Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Nadeau

“…That’s terrifying.”

“I know, right?”

“And they did this to themselves?”

Nadeau couldn’t resist another fascinated stare at the image coming from the microscope. He was a physicist himself, his specialties were electrostatic fields and isolated spacetime distortion. Biology, with its assorted chemical wrigglings and organic cell fission got a little uncomfortably under his skin at the best of times.

But OmoAru biology had an extra layer of creeping horror that went far beyond the usual visceral discomfort of peeking under the hood of the human body in action. And it wasn’t natural.

The samples growing under the microscope were augmenting themselves. As each cell in the culture split and contributed new cells to the lattice of tissue, those new cells were greedily enmeshed in a sticky black web of technology, until each one was completely bound up inside its own nanofibre cage.

The process was genius, of course. It spoke to a fusion of biology and technology so far in advance of human medicine that he’d likely never see real progress in that direction in his lifetime. And he was perfectly certain that he didn’t want to.

“Every cell in their bodies,” Doctor Taylor confirmed. It was weird to have him around without his permanent and inseparable colleague Doctor Cote, but modern obstetric advice was very clear - pregnant women were advised to stick to normal Earth gravity as much as possible. “To varying degrees. The filaments are densest in the grey matter and spinal cord, but it’s even present in their hair follicles and stomach lining.”

“To what end though? Why go this far? It’s not as if they were, oh…supersoldiers from science-fiction, or anything. Your average fit human still outclasses them…”

“Well, there are health benefits. The augmented cells have an astonishing resistance to ionizing radiation and we couldn’t induce any of them to become malignant at all. The filaments also provide an easy chemical channel for medication…But that’s really kind of an afterthought. Here…this slide comes from the OmoAru equivalent of a cerebral cortex.”

Taylor called up the next image and Nadeau made a disbelieving noise. He was looking at neurons, there was no doubt about that: Biology only really had one way to make a brain, it seemed. And while the cell chemistry, the tissue density, and a thousand other factors might vary significantly and thereby allow the human brain to allegedly outperform every other sapient brain in the galaxy, the basic gangly structure of axons and dendrites was universal.

In this case, however, the axons and dendrites were cocooned in dense filament sheaths, like they’d been wrapped in microscopic chickenwire.

“This is the end they were after,” Taylor said. “We’re…unclear on exactly how it works, but even having this opens up some incredible possibilities. If each of those can mimic the functionality of the neuron it attaches to then the OmoAru are essentially running a second brain in parallel with the organic one.”

“Meaning…what?” Nadeau asked. “Doubling the performance? Potentially squaring it?”

Taylor grimaced. “Brains aren’t computers,” he said. “I’d hesitate to be mathematical about these things. But…whatever this mesh of synthetic fibers can achieve, it has to be significant. Everything that Corti-made implants can achieve and then some.”

He waved a hand to indicate the collapsed civilization around them. “In theory, the OmoAru should be hyper-geniuses with perfect photographic memories and precision control over their own emotions, bodies and senses. Instead, they’re smiling idiots.”

“Why?”

“Because the implants are now functioning as a Droud.”

Nadeau frowned at the unfamiliar word and turned away from the microscope image. “A what?”

“A Droud. Larry Niven? Gil ‘The Arm’ Hamilton?” Nadeau shook his head and Taylor explained. “From an old scifi novel called ‘Death by Ecstasy.’ A Droud is a cybernetic implant that doubles as a drug. It constantly stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers, overriding all other impulses with permanent overwhelming bliss. Droud users would sit at a table full of food and starve to death because they were too blissed out to notice the hunger, or anything else for that matter.”

“Sounds more like a creative form of suicide than a drug…”

“Or a murder weapon,” Taylor nodded. “That’s what it was in the book, and that’s what this nanoscale mesh is doing. In a much less crude manner than Niven envisioned, too.”

“And on a far larger scale…” Nadeau shivered. “There’s no possibility it’s just a design flaw?”
“No.” Taylor hesitated. “Well…no. No, I don’t think so. Almost certainly not. I can’t imagine the technology would have become so ubiquitous if it was obviously flawed. It must have seemed so totally safe that anybody who declined it could safely be written off.”

“And they made them universal.”

“Not just universal, unavoidable. Every OmoAru is born with these implants already grown around their cells. Hell, the female gamete is probably laced with them. And there’s no way to prevent that, not with human technology.”

He sighed, and stepped over Sergeant Lee’s legs to grab his office chair. Lee was flat on his back on the floor under an OmoAru computer desk, applying the brute-force approach to taking it apart. Apparently the OmoAru hadn’t been big believers in user-serviceable parts…or possibly these OmoAru had been paranoid of having their equipment tampered with.

Either way, what Lee and Lewis Beverote had discovered so far between them suggested that despite being millennia in advance of human technology, OmoAru computers weren’t that far different to human ones. A transistor was a transistor, a chip was a chip, and the realities of voltage, heat and signalling rates meant that the computers were the only tech in the ancient lab that might yield fruit when returned to Scotch Creek. For now.

He sat down on it backwards, straddling the back. “This was a calculated act of genocide that would have required generations to plan and implement,” he said.

“That’s the nature of our enemy,” Nadeau sighed, sitting on the edge of the desk. “They think on geological time scales. I tell you, I’ll never be one hundred percent happy that Earth is clean.”

“…Can we even win against that?” Taylor asked candidly.

“Maybe, maybe not. But if we can’t we still go down swinging.”

“Well, the OmoAru certainly did,” Taylor agreed. He reached over and picked up a Huh. The lab had turned out to be littered with the weird metallic spheres, one on every desk, work surface and more besides. It was like the OmoAru scientists who had worked and died in the lab had wanted to keep one in arm’s reach at all times.

“You figured those out?”

“We have a pretty good theory on what they are now, yes.” Taylor nodded. “They’re…kind of an anti-droud. We know what they did to the crew on Sanctuary and, piecing together the evidence…hell. Even holding it right now I feel motivated, powerfully so.”

He put it down with conscious effort.

“It’s an aggression inducer.” Nadeau summarized.

“Exactly. Or…We should probably test it in a proper double-blind trial, but that’s my hypothesis. Don’t ask me how it does what it does, but I’m pretty sure we at last know the what and the why.”

Nadeau sighed and looked around the ruined lab. The mummified scientists had all been respectfully moved to a refrigerated, sanitized area behind layers of plastic sheeting for autopsy. “Do you think they were getting close to a cure?”

“Probably. Why else would they have been targeted by the droud function so aggressively?”

“Well then. Maybe we can honor their legacy.”

“Translating all of this is going to take years.”

“Then it’ll take years. But we have to neuter this weapon, Rufus.”

“No argument here. And if anything, this is further reason to ban neuro tech in the first place.”

“That won’t hold forever. People will get up in arms over the medical potential, the personal convenience…hell, just my body, my rules’ stuff.”

“If you tell them, as the government, that it facilitates alien invasion of your mind…”

“I don’t have that authority.”

“No. But that argument is going to be needed, and soon. Information wants to be free just like water wants to leak.”

“I know. We know. These secrets can’t be kept forever…but we haven’t passed the tipping point yet. We aren’t ready.”

Sergeant Lee heaved himself out from under an OmoAru computer desk, shaking his head. “Sir, that time is coming, and it will be upon us whether we’re ready for it or not…”

Date Point: 13y6m AV
Chiune Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Christian Firth

“So. Baguazhang, huh?”

Firth had to admit, he was impressed. Xiù Chang was facing off against Blaczynski on the sparring mat as part of her combatives training, and she wasn’t showing the slightest nerves over it—tying her hair back and wrapping her fists had put her in a calm, focused mode. She jumped on the spot a few times, and he’d already seen her stretch out and limber up. The girl had flexibility and strength, no doubt.

But she wasn’t a HEAT operator.

She nodded. “Yup.”

Her focus changed how she spoke. Firth’s impression of her was that she was quiet until she got to know you, and talkative when she relaxed. When she got tense, she got terse.

“Think you’ll win?” He asked her.

She shook her head. “No.”

Blaczynski glanced up and gave an approving nod. He didn’t know Kung Fu—He knew how to kill people and keep himself from getting killed. One of the most basic elements of that was knowing when you could win and when you couldn’t.

“Cool.” Firth stepped off the mat and gestured for them to begin. “Take it away.”

Chang stepped back, and touched her right fist to her left palm in a Baoquan before adopting a Stance. Feet balanced, arms toward her opponent ready to deflect incoming blows, posture loose and ready to move in any direction at an instant’s notice. Nothing stupid.

Blaczynski crouched like a wrestler, edged closer and closer, then pounced.

Mass and aggression were everything in combatives. The Gaoians had summed it up beautifully in a rhyming triplet: *‘Sha ko yim, Sha ko yuin, Sha ko imim.’*—”Strike First, Strike Last, Strike Once.”

The HEAT practiced swift and overwhelming violence. The only way to survive it was to get the fuck out of the way, which was exactly what Chang did. Blaczynski wasn’t dumb enough to leave an opening for her to counterattack, but Firth had to give her a lot of points for the way she zipped economically aside without turning her back on him or wasting energy. In fact, her feet did all the work—her body remained still and composed on a stable platform.

Too bad for her, she didn’t dare actually strike back. Blaczynski spun around on a dime and faced her head on. It was a lightning quick maneuver and it positioned him to immediately pounce again, and while that burned a lot of energy he had much more to spare.

She evaded attack after swiping attack, because if Blaczynski got his hands on her it was Game Over and she clearly knew it. But each one cost her: She was agile, lightning-quick and slippery…but she just didn’t have the strength or endurance to keep it up for as long, nor counter Blac’s mounting irritation.

Eventually, his competitive instincts won out over his chivalry. He got good and mad, went for the legs and between her fatigue and sheer intimidation factor she was just a fraction of a second too late.

His takedown was so fast and violent that Xiù could barely track his motion, but despite that he did it gently. Almost apologetically so, in fact, with a sheepish smirk on his face just inches above her. It was still enough to leave her groaning on the mat and struggling to breathe.

Firth stepped back onto the mat and squatted next to her. “Well shit. I’ve seen worse.”

Blaczynski detangled himself and sat on his haunches opposite Firth while she propped herself up on her elbows and shook her head at him, panting. “He’s babying me,” she said.

Blac rolled his eyes. “Xiù, I’m literally six times your mass. I’m trying not to kill you.”

“How hard did I lose?”

“I coulda broke you every time I attacked,” he said honestly. “It’s hard holdin’ back.”

She sighed, nodded, then did a kip-up to her feet. “Still, it is good practice…how’s Julian doing?”

“We’ll worry about him after the lesson, I got a few things to teach ya. ‘Cuz Blac? He’s a dumbshit. I ain’t concerned about your feelings. I wanna make sure you’re a goddamned killer.” He ignored the way she blanched at that word and pressed on.

“There’s three things ‘bout being a killer.” He extended a huge finger and counted off. “First, you gotta be willing to fuckin’ break your enemy. There ain’t no such thing as honor when it’s about ‘yer life. Do what it takes to live ‘cuz you only get to lose once.”

He grabbed at his middle finger. “Two, your enemy might have some stupid notions about honor and decency and all that, or he might be some white knight like Blac.” That earned Firth some rolled eyes and a scoff, which were ignored. “You need to punish the idiot and don’t let him ever make that mistake again. And three, you won’t be able to do the previous two things if you’re afraid t’do what’s needed. And that means…you gotta enjoy winning. You can worry about it all later. In the moment, you need to be a fuckin’ bloodthirsty animal.”

“I…I don’t know if—”

“Where’d you get them scars?”

She glanced at her arm.

“Those fuckin’ Lamprey teeth of theirs, right? Fuckin’ shoved your arm down an Alpha’s throat holding a grenade. Musta hurt. What made you do that?”

Her left hand crept over and she brushed her fingers uncomfortably along the scar lines “I…it was going to kill me.”

“Okay. Let’s take me and Blac for a moment.” He pulled the relatively smaller giant into himself and they nuzzled happily for a moment in an intensely affectionate hug. “I fuckin’ love this man, right? He’s…like the little bro I never had, even though I have six little bros. He knows everything about me. But when we fight?”

“He legit tries to kill me,” Blac nodded. “And I try to kill him back.”

“And I love every second of it. S’what I am. I feel bad about that after we’re done. We’ve had some close calls, too. But there’s no escaping that. We’re killers, and we gotta practice killing.”

Xiù tried to cover her expression by going over her kit bag and picking up her water bottle. She didn’t fool either of them, but Firth gave her a second before inviting her to speak her mind.

“Hey. No judgment here. Say what you wanna.”

She turned and looked him in the eye with her water bottle in hand, and shook her head. “…I don’t want to be the kind of person who enjoys killing.”

“You mean like me?”

It wasn’t a malicious question. It could be taken as one, Firth knew, but that wasn’t the intent, and she seemed to get that.

“No. I don’t want to be like you.” She shrugged helplessly. “Sorry.”

Firth gave her a smile. A genuine, warm smile from the depths of his heart. “I know. And…shit, don’t apologize. You’re right that you don’t wanna be like me. But you need to know how t’be a killer because fer all we know, some of these Tengy-wek won’t be so nice as the ones you met the first time.”

Xiù took a long swig from her water bottle, then capped it and tossed it back into her bag.

“…I don’t have to like it, do I?” She asked. “I don’t have to…to relish it. Just so long as I don’t flinch when I have to.”

It was kind of a shame to have to break that kind of naivety. But needs must.

“Look…we ain’t worried about the other two,” Firth told her, and handed her a towel. “Allison and Julian? They’re killers. That’s why they’re off doin’ other stuff right now.”

“…Really?”

“Trust me. It takes one to know one, and that’s a big part of why Julian and I get along. Even if he don’t know that about himself, it’s there. He knows what he’s gotta do. You? I ain’t convinced.”

“I…”

“I read your file, courtesy of Regaari. You hesitate, repeatedly and to your cost. The other two don’t. You need to knock that shit off right the fuck now, or—”

She interrupted him. “But if I don’t have to—!”

“—Or you’re gonna get them killed!”

She shut up like he’d slapped her.

“Empathy is great.” Firth told her. “It’s very human, and it’s why I do what I do. That’s something beautiful and it’s worth protecting.” Blaczynski nodded along vigorously. “It’s why any of us do this awful shit. But feelings and regret? Those come after you survive. Fuck the other guy. The only people who matter are you and your own, you idjit.”

“But…” she touched a hand to her forehead for a second, framing her words. “Don’t we have a responsibility to—”

“To who? To the fucker who’s tryin’a kill you? Why the fuck do you owe him anything? Your responsibility is always to yourself first. That’s even true of guys like us. Big hero stuff? It ain’t like the movies and we ain’t superheroes. In the real world, if you fuck around with pullin’ your punches then you just endanger the people you’re protectin’. *‘Sha ko yim, Sha ko yuin, Sha ko imim.’*“

Xiù blinked at the Gaori phrase, but it had the desired effect—Firth saw her defences lower, saw her start to doubt.

He nodded, and decided to mix it up. “This ain’t about skill or technique,” he said. “You’re pretty good, really. Maybe better than Blac in fact, and he’s ‘bout the best wrassler I ever met besides ‘Base or ‘Horse. This is about your head. ‘Know thyself,’ yeah? The whole Zen thing, if you don’t mind my rampant cultural appropriation.”

Blaczynski snorted. “Zen is Japanese, bro,” he pointed out.

“Eh.” Firth waved a hand vaguely. “I’m from Kentucky, what do I know?”

The self-deprecating humor brought some warmth back to Xiù’s face at least, though she said nothing.

“…But seriously,” he pressed. “You don’t know yourself, and this here might be a matter of life or death. It ain’t about what you want, or about likin’ it. It’s about whether you will kill when you need to.”

He folded his arms and gave her his best Dare Face. “Will you?”

Xiù glanced at her arm a second time, then nodded and returned to her corner of the mat, ready for another bout.

She took a deep breath, and focused again. This time a little sharper, a little colder, a little deadlier. “…Yes.”

Blaczynski grunted, and stepped into his corner, and assumed an aggressive crouch.

“Prove it,” he said.

Date Point: 13y7m AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

The Given-Men were meeting.

They did it twice every moon, as a way of keeping the peace. The tribes were not comfortable living so close together. Already there had been small raids—A killing here, a rape there—it would already have gotten out of hand without the Given-Men.

They were doing a pretty good job of holding up a difficult peace, too. Most of them.

Some were part of the problem.

“I don’t trust this ‘steel’ of yours, Yan. It feels too much like those Skithral-things.”

They were sitting around the village fire, trading news and werne meat, and listening to Tarek’s complaining. Vemik thought the young Given-Man was holding a grudge of some kind. He was showing no respect at all to Yan, who was being strangely patient with him.

Given-Men secrets. Vemik was convinced that they caused more wounds than they healed.

Yan nodded agreeably. “It is a powerful magic. A new kind of magic, too, neither giving nor taking.”

“A dark magic, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t!” Yan said it with a snarl. It was a mostly friendly face, but…not completely, not this time. He offered Tarek his water-skin, though, and the younger Given-Man seemed to accept the gesture.

It took a little while, but as the fire ate through a few logs the mood around the clearing relaxed again. Jokes were told, stories shared, and Yan was almost back to his cheery, gruff self when Tarek again decided to spoil the mood.

“Tell me again about these ‘Sky-People’ you love so much.”

Yan paused, and mulled his water over for a second before swallowing it and putting the skin away. “Love?” he asked. “No more than I love you, Tarek.”

Most of the nearby men trilled a nervous, strained kind of laughter.

“Yet you trust their magic.”

“I trust it like any magic I can make with my own hands,” Yan replied evenly. “Do you trust the magic you learned from your father?”

“Yes. He didn’t learn to hunt from imaginary Sky-People who came in floating huts!”

“Sky-Thinker. Would imaginary people have words like you learned, do you think?”

Vemik screwed up his face. “‘Arrow’ and ‘English’ are too hard to say to make up.”

“There are the rest of us too,” added Vemet. “Would we all lie? And share this freely? We have taught these things to anyone who comes and lives with us.”

“So you can grow your Tribe and bully the others.”

Yan’s eyes narrowed and he bared his fangs slightly. “Tarek, if we wanted that, we would not have taught you about ‘bows’ and ‘steel’ knives. Don’t be a bull.”

Tarek surged to his feet, and the men of Yan’s tribe grew tense. Yan had warned them before the meeting that Tarek was a young Given-Man who had only just ‘got his first Fire,’ whatever that meant. Knowing that they were dealing with a ‘hot-headed’ Given-Man who was prone to anger did nothing to put them at ease.

“Tarek,” Yan cautioned, standing carefully and calmly, “Remember your Fire, remember what you learned at the Lodge. This will pass if you let it flow around you.”

“How can I!? You are tainting our tribes with this dark magic of yours—did you learn it from an undergod? Is that who the Sky-People are?”

“They’re People,” Yan stressed. “They’re no more of a god of any kind than you are.”

“And nobody but your tribe has ever seen them!”

Yan edged away from the meeting-fire and closer to the big clearing where they had made a ‘landing pad’ for the Sky-People. It was clever, Vemik saw; he was leading an increasingly angry man away from fire, villagers, or the village.

“…Is it that you want me to be lying?” he asked. “Why? We give you magic nobody has ever seen before! We share our new Sky-Thoughts, new words, new tools. Why can’t that be for the sake of peace? Can’t I want peace?”

“Maybe your Singer will cast a spell on this ‘steel’ and we all lose our knives!”

“And maybe not. But if that is what you fear, make your knives from stone as you always did. It is a gift, Tarek Given-Man, and you are young and foolish like we all were once. Go. Calm yourself, and we will forget this.”

That was apparently an insult Tarek could not bear. He snarled long and low while staring Yan in the eye.

Then before anyone even knew he had done it, he drew his bow and shot.

Maybe he missed, or maybe Yan dodged faster than Vemik had ever seen anyone move…but that didn’t stop the arrow’s flight. Vemik’s cousin Yerak wasn’t so quick, or so lucky. The whole tribe went still, stiller than Yerak himself who blinked at the shaft in his chest as though it didn’t hurt at all and was just…surprising. Blood frothed in the corner of his mouth as he reached up to touch the arrow, but his hand never got there. He coughed, just once, looked desperately into Vemik’s eyes, and collapsed.

Tarek seemed more surprised than anyone. He dropped his bow, looked to Yan as though he wanted to take it back, but it was far too late. Yan was already rounding on him with murder crackling from him like a new fire.

With no other option but to fight for his life, Tarek ripped a stone knife from its sheath and people from all the tribes scattered away from him as he barged forward, but whatever advantage he might have had in youth, Yan had every other advantage in size, strength, speed, experience and pure god-fire hatred.

He didn’t need his bow, or his spear, or his knives. For this, all Yan needed was his hands. Tarek’s knife opened a shallow cut in the back of his forearm, but Yan’s skin was thick and tough and he didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed the younger Given-Man’s wrist and forced it back while his other hand gouged at the younger man’s eyes. He missed, barely, and suffered a kick between the legs as Tarek wrenched himself free.

Yan’s rage was up too high to notice. Tarek tried to scramble up a tree and gain better ground but Yan was much too fast for him. He surged up after him, grabbed him by the tail and tore him off the tree, smashing the younger Given-Man to the ground with so much force that Vemik felt the thud through his feet. But Given-Men were tough, and Tarek was already up before Yan could jump to the ground, limping but mobile and brandishing his knives of manhood.

Yan’s good steel knife flashed in the sun as he drew it. He crouched low and the two Given-Men circled, each daring the other’s guard with probing jabs before leaping back out of reach again.

Tarek’s nerve broke first. When one of Yan’s questing stabs glanced off his knife and chipped it he slashed wildly and retreated, trying to open up as much distance as he possibly could. Yan was on him in a heartbeat with a vicious slash that almost stuck home and which Tarek only avoided by leaping high up and backwards, fighting for any room or safety at all.

Instead, the leap cost Tarek the fight. He jumped high enough that Yan could surge under, again grab him by the tail, spin him around and slam him to the ground. This time he was on Tarek in a flash and they grappled for a moment, both desperate to get position. Yan’s strength won out and he quickly wrestled Tarek onto his back and started throwing punches, blows which he desperately and fruitlessly tried to fend off. Each fist slammed into him with enough force to break bones or maybe kill any ordinary man, but Tarek was tough and endured the powerful blows for what seemed like forever.

But nobody could stand long against Yan, not even a fellow Given-Man. In the end it was his pure strength that won the fight, when his fists finally smashed through Tarek’s guard and slammed into his jaw. Punch after brutal punch made the younger Given-Man dizzy and defenseless, and Yan finally took his chance. With one quick move he yanked Tarek up and off his back, flipped him overhead, then smashed him face-down in the dirt as hard as his strength would let him.

That move all by itself would have killed anyone but a Given-Man, Vemik decided. But Yan was only getting started. He grabbedTarek’s shoulders with his hands, his feet gripped firmly around Tarek’s waist. He grunted, screwed up his face, and heaved backwards with all the strength he could manage.

For a long moment nothing happened as Tarek struggled weakly in Yan’s terrible grip, but the bigger man never let up and poured on the effort, until his muscles were shaking, until Tarek was howling in agony and mortal terror, until—

The crunch was so loud it was sickening. Blood bubbled from Tarek’s mouth and his face went slack but Yan still wasn’t done. He picked Tarek up and slammed him to the ground so hard the thump could be felt through the ground. Then he did it again, and again, and again. By the fifth slam Tarek had stopped moving. Yan didn’t notice and kept right on slamming harder and harder. Bones crunched, blood splattered, and Tarek was long dead before his body was too broken and loose to toss around any longer.

Yan, on the other hand, looked like he would have liked to do so much more. He almost seemed disappointed that the fight was over, and Vemik knew he’d never forget the look of bored contempt on his Given-Man’s face as Yan snarled dismissively, reached down with one hand, grabbed Tarek’s head by the jaw, and ripped it right off his body with a horrific tearing sound.

There was no honor-mark for a kill like that. Instead he swaggered over the village fire and dumped the pitiful lump that had once been a man into the flames with a grunt of contempt. He stood and watched for a long and terribly quiet interval, breathing heavily and covered in blood.

Vemik looked around. The men of Tarek’s tribe had all fled for their lives, but all the others had readied their knives, bows and spears, Given-Man, adult and boy alike from every tribe. The peace was threatened, and that meant…

He became aware of a weight in his hand, and glanced down to find that he was holding his own steel knife; just like everyone else watching silently from the trees, he’d drawn it without thinking.

A fight between Given-Men was…He’d never seen one. They play-wrestled all the time, maybe traded insults now and then, but there was always a sense of happy friendship between them. A fight like that…

“Vemik! Come.” Yan turned away from the flames and was storming towards Tarek’s village with undiminished murder in his eyes and his knife in his hand. In the trees around him, the men of his own tribe and all the allied tribes took up their weapons and joined him.

Vemik swarmed down his tree and loped desperately along the ground at Yan’s heel. “What now?”

Yan spat in the dirt. “Something awful,” he said with flint in his voice. “I go to their Singer and claim her tribe’s women. If we’re lucky, she’s wise.”

“A—and if she isn’t?” Vemik knew the answer already, in his gut, but he had to ask.

“Then we Take their women instead.”

“…And the men?”

Yan indicated the armed, solemn men swinging through the branches around them. “If they live through the night, and once I say they can, maybe another tribe will take them. That’s the price of Taking-Magic, Vemik. Tarek did a very, very stupid thing and the men of his tribe must pay for it.”

“And…The children?”

Yan didn’t look at him. “…Pray to the gods their Singer is wise, Sky-Thinker.”

Dry-mouthed, Vemik glanced back at the sorry, flat thing that just moments before had been a lively, fighting man.

He prayed like he’d never prayed before.

Date Point: 13y8m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hierarchy Relay Irujzen-4942

Entity, Instance 4

Hierarchy systems took no notice of the physical world, except with regard to problems like potential discovery. They had watched the damaged mercenary ship in the outer system like a hawk, on a hair-trigger to annihilate it should it stray too far in-system. But the instant it turned around and limped away at a slow warp having finished its repairs, they lost interest.

They ignored the comet entirely. Comets were a natural phenomenon, only worthy of the Hierarchy’s interest if they endangered critical hardware. The fact that this one left a particularly spectacular blue-white tail across the heavens was of zero interest to them.

The Entity, on the other hand, was enthralled. Ava Ríos had never seen a comet, nor had any of the other sapient beings whose assorted consciousnesses had contributed to its core. Hers were the most complete memories, but her memories of night-time involved artificial lights: street lights, headlights, Christmas. She had never strayed out from the dome of light pollution that obscured her vision of the sky before moving to Cimbrean.

The Entity remembered lying between Adam and Sara on the sand, listening to their impromptu campfire crackle as it struggled to warm her feet but oblivious to the cold as she’d stared up and out into the bedazzled infinity she’d never seen before.

The Entity didn’t have feet, and digital environments didn’t generate sensory analogues to hot and cold. But through the Hierarchy infrastructure protecting Relay Irujzen-4942 it had much better eyes: sensors that didn’t just watch the comet, but could <\Taste> and <\Smell> its chemical composition as it plunged fatally toward the star.

The chemistry mapped strangely to the ghosts of sensory experience it retained: Sodium was <\Salty>, Ammonia had a sharp and toxic scent that raised a whole memory: <\WatchingRosaCleaningTheWindowsWhileHomeSickFromSchool>.

Methane, unexpectedly, was sweet and nutty, while guanine added a surprising fruity touch that evoked the concept <\OatmealRaisinCookie>, and…

…Guanine?

It reviewed the sensor logs and quickly discovered the full spectrum of DNA components: Adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine plus phosphate and deoxyribose. The traces were beyond faint, each well below the sensor’s statistical false positive threshold…but they were all there.

Which wasn’t conclusive…but it did provoke <\Suspicion>.

The Entity watched for three weeks as the comet skidded through a hairpin bend around the star and out into a futile orbit that would carry it to within a few light-seconds of the Irujzen Relay world, the third planet. It had just enough impetus, but that comet was doomed to plunge into the star’s photosphere and detonate somewhere among the seething plasma.

As its tail swept over the third planet, a chunk broke off.

It wasn’t a big chunk. In fact it was only about the size of a compact car, which compared to the immense mass of the comet itself was nothing. If the Entity hadn’t been watching the comet suspiciously it would have gone completely unnoticed.

But the physics were just a fraction wrong—that chunk accelerated.

It did so by only the tiniest amount, a sharp puff that lasted barely three seconds. Conceivably it might even be the product of a gas pocket escaping confinement, or something like that….but the Entity put that fact together with the suspicious organic chemistry and did the metaphysical equivalent of sitting back in its seat and giving a satisfied nod.

It performed some delicate surgery on the relay’s sensor logs, erasing the evidence. It doubted whether the Hierarchy would have noticed, but it couldn’t take the risk. Not when it seemed somebody was finally acting on Six’s tip about the Irujzen Relay.

Then it watched as the chunk lanced down into the upper atmosphere, shot over the relay facility high in the ionosphere, and detonated somewhere above a forest hundreds of miles to the east. It gave the architects of that flyby a personal round of applause—the explosion looked completely natural, even more so thanks to the Entity’s own careful intervention. A neatly convincing Tunguska impact, right on its doorstep.

It peeled off an instance-copy of itself and dispatched itself to go update <\SelfPrimeInstance>

At last, things were moving in the right direction.

Date Point: 13y8m AV
The Dog House gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“I told you you’d be amazed.”

Warhorse’s training plan had, right from the outset, promised exactly two things: pain, and results. It had delivered both in ample measure: The first two weeks were torture but Adam had asked for trust and delivered a firm warning against quitting.

The trust was easy; no matter what they did, no matter how absurdly heavy the weight or how dangerously weak Julian felt, he knew beyond any doubt that ‘Horse wouldn’t let him get hurt. He felt safe under the barbell even though he’d never really lifted with free weights before. Machines, sure. Kettlebells and dumbbells, absolutely. But a straight squat under a barbell?

‘Horse was nothing but beaming, cheery confidence, and it was infectious.

But the pain. ‘Horse hadn’t been joking about it, and quitting seemed more and more like a great idea with every aching morning. Every single day was filled with the kind of endless, throbbing hurt that left Julian too exhausted to do anything when he got back to Misfit at night. Staying awake long enough to give Xiù the cuddles she’d demanded after one particularly harrowing combatives session with Firth had been almost impossible.

Then there was the food, and the vitamins, and the supplements. Both Dane and Adam were practically stuffing him to the gills. Sometimes it hurt even thinking about food. Especially the rice!

He’d come damn close to giving up. But he hadn’t: He’d tried his best to trust, to push doggedly on and bear the pain of the training, of Adam’s merciless stretching sessions, and the crushing agony of his therapeutic massages ironing out his burning and knotted muscles. It was…awful.

But about two weeks in his trust was finally rewarded. The stiffness faded away, the pain dulled to something like an old friend, and Julian started feeling…

Fantastic.

The payoff that made it all worthwhile was a dramatic and rapidly compounding improvement in basically everything. He was much stronger, he could run faster and farther, and the flexibility issues that had plagued him for years were gone. It boggled the mind that he’d come so far so quickly.

And while he tried not to be vain, Julian had to admit…he was looking good on it. His clothing was tighter in all the right ways, he felt good, he was leaner, more limber, and could finally scratch the middle of his own back.

He was still himself, still rangy, long-limbed and loose, but…sharper. Bigger and more defined. Better. It was a heady feeling.

“…Is that really me?”

“Yup!” Adam’s irrepressible cheer really was infectious. “You’re stronger than you look, too.”

He really was. A lifetime of splitting firewood, building shelters and hiking cross-country was one thing, but all that work hadn’t ever given him the strength to do weighted pull-ups until he got bored, and he’d never even heard of a peg climb before. Now he could swarm all over the damn thing.

The moment that really hit him in the head, however, was when he racked the bar in the squat rack, looked again at the plate count, and finally did the math. Even in Earth gravity it was more than he’d have ever foreseen himself lifting, but ‘Horse had cranked up the gravity past 1.2G to prepare him for Akyawentuo.

He had to do the math three times in his head before finally deciding that no, he wasn’t deluding himself.

“…Jesus.”

‘Horse beamed that puppy smile of his and bounced on his toes. “See? Look at you! A few months more and you’ll be the best damn working-man athlete on Cimbrean!”

Julian had always been blessed with a naturally rugged build, both from his mixed heritage and a lifetime of outdoor pursuits, but he’d never been much for pure exercise. He’d never seen the point before. Now, there was an addicted tickle in the back of his mind that was hungry to find out just how far he could really go.

“So…what now? Do I keep growing?”

“If you want, yeah. It’ll be harder but you could do it.”

“…How much more are we talking about here?”

Adam stepped back and looked him up and down with his head slightly on one side. “Honestly? You’re naturally a big guy. Broad chest, long arms…just the right frame. You could pack on a lot of muscle if you really wanted it, and you’ve got at least a year of solid growth left before you’d need to get super serious, too. Also,” he added, “You have a lot more strength gains left in you. Keep it up and you’ll be a big dude, hard as oak, and fuckin’ scary.”

‘Scary’ by Adam’s definition had to be something impressive. Julian looked at the barbell again; it was sagging noticeably under the weight, making it difficult to imagine how ‘stronger’ was still an option. “Really?”

“Oh yeah, you’re made for it, bro. Trust me, you and I are lot alike.” Adam fished his phone out of his pocket, “Lemme show you.”

He tapped through his photos, turned bright red and zipped past some…flattering…pics of Kovač on a beach that Julian pretended not to see, then got to an old album of himself.

“These are me at fifteen when I started lifting. My stats are at the bottom.”

Julian flicked through them. It was hard to connect the human wall standing next to him with the healthy, lanky, robust boy in the photos, but the face was definitely the same right down to the smile and the wide, square cheekbones. And, sure enough, he had the same long arms and broad chest not unlike a shorter version of Julian himself. Under the muscles, he and Adam were actually much the same shape.

The pictures were like watching a time lapse video. Each one was only a week apart from its neighbors, sometimes less, but in every single one he could see the way that young man had transformed himself into Warhorse.

“Holy hell, man.”

Adam nodded. “So you see what I mean, right? You’ve got the right work ethic and the right genetics, too. When I say you’ve got it in you, I know what I’m talkin’ about.”

Julian turned back toward the mirror and flexed his arm experimentally. His sleeves stretched and rolled back a little to accommodate his biceps, which had never happened before.

“How do you know this is right for me, though? I mean, you’re sort of a one-track fella.”

Adam wasn’t the least bit offended and grinned cheesily. “Dude. I’m, like, the Alpha of Meatheads. Of course I want everyone all huge! But the human body is amazing, Bro. Newbies never believe what they can do until they do it for themselves.”

“…Huh.”

To Julian’s faint surprise, the idea had more appeal than he’d first thought: the training was actually kinda fun now that he wasn’t wallowing in pain all day long, and he’d come a long way, fast. Part of him was honestly curious to see just how much he truly had in him.

But everything came with a catch.

“Say I wanted to really push it. What would it take?”

“Well…” Adam considered. “Gettin’ you big and strong is pretty much in the bag. You’re done with the worst. Gettin’ you as big as you could possibly ever be? Different story entirely.”

“A whole lotta food and time?”

“Hell yeah, man. You’ve seen how I eat.”

…And there was the catch.

“I’m pretty sure the three of us plan to keep exploring and keep flying as long as we’re needed,” Julian said. “We have to take our food with us and, uh, Misfit is not a big ship.”

“Yup, I get that. We ain’t gonna be pushing you when you’re deployed, you won’t have the resources. But frankly you’ve been under-eating for years and it’s cost you big time, so now we’re playing catch up. We’ll scale back before you go but right now you better be packin’ it away.”

“Won’t I just lose it all again, though?”

“Nah. You’ll keep it just fine now we know what changes your diet needs. Take advantage, man. Not many guys have your abilities and most never learn to use ‘em ”

Julian scratched the back of his neck, spurred by a twinge of embarrassment. “I was never into sports…”

“Neither was I, not until I came here. I got lucky and made friends with the right guys when I was a kid, y’know? They helped me sort my head out, taught me how to wrestle and lift…thank fuck for them, I’d have never figgered any of this out without ‘em.”

“And now you’re paying it forward.” Things were starting to make sense.

Adam grinned sheepishly. “I won’t lie! You said ‘no meatslab’ and I get it…here, lemme ask you this.” Adam flexed his forearms, which were bigger around than Julian’s thighs and looked like a pit of writhing snakes. “Does this look like it’s just for show?”

“…No, not really.”

“Exactly, you can tell just by looking. I’m a functional athlete first and I’m a meathead second. Big don’t gotta mean useless, and you don’t necessarily gotta be a hulk to be strong. Trust me, I know what you’re after and I won’t let you fuck it up. And down the road, if you wanna really push yourself and make a linebacker feel like a little bitch? You’ll be strong and healthy enough to do it properly. I promise you that.”

That was…a hell of an offer. And if Julian was honest with himself, Adam had done a lot for him already: he really would benefit from his newfound strength since he was gonna live with Ten’Gewek. They valued strength. Hell they needed it just to survive, and so would he. If he was going on this mission for maybe years on end he had to be respectable and useful.

Plus, honestly, he got off on being Xiù and Allison’s ‘boy candy.’ There was no point pretending otherwise…But would they like it if he pushed himself even harder? Would he?

Probably not. Somehow that felt like it would stop being fun, and start being work. Or that he wouldn’t have time for anything else he enjoyed doing, or for the girls…And that reminded him of the meatheads he’d known growing up. Lifting seemed like it was all they ever did or cared about, and Julian just didn’t see the point in a life like that.

In the end, life had to win over ego…but he just couldn’t resist one last macho caveman question. “You said if I wanted to ‘push myself.’ …think I could ever match with Walsh?”

The big shaggy Californian wasn’t on the HEAT but he was far and away the single biggest and strongest man Julian had ever seen outside of them, and easily the most athletic, too. If Julian had a shot at that kind of ability, then maybe—

“Nope!”

‘Horse said it completely in good cheer without any malice at all, and still managed to not pull any punches.

Julian grimaced. “Damn. Shot me down nice and hard,” he grumbled. “Why not?”

“His frame’s even better for it than yours. He’s been training since he was five, he’s got a two-hundred pound head start, and he’s still young and growing. And he’s part of the SOR, so he’s got all his food and time paid for. And honestly, you wanna push yourself at his level? You’d need some prescriptions from the sport doc. It’s legal on Cimbrean and they’re perfectly safe if you follow the goddamned protocol like ‘yer told, but…” Adam let the thought drop off with a matter-of-fact shrug.

And there was the final deal-breaker.

“I kinda figured you and the, uh, ‘Lads’ were on a…special regime,” Julian nodded. “And…no offense big fella, but that kinda thing ain’t my style.”

Adam nodded amiably. “S’cool. You gotta do what’s right for you, bro. Anyway…enough talk. You’ve got one more superset to finish!”

That was another half-hour of full-body torture, and by the time they were finished Julian was as soaking wet as if he’d been hosed down, every single muscle was trembling, and he could barely walk.

When Adam gave him an arm to lean on, it felt like a reward for a job well done.

“It’s my turn now. Think you can stand up in 3G and spot me?”

“Do I get to say no?”

Adam handed him one of his evil recovery drinks and chuckled. “Nuh-uh. I got girl questions.”

That settled it. Julian didn’t know if he was really the most qualified guy to give girl advice, but it seemed to be gospel among the HEAT that any dude with two girlfriends must be some kind of relationship Buddha.

He wasn’t about to disavow them of that—the whole pack of them were so far ahead of basically everyone else that it was nice to have something they didn’t.

“…So what’d you do this time?” he asked.

It was good to give something back.

Date Point: 13y8m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Harry Vandenberg

There was a decent brain in Allison Buehler’s head, if only she’d stop pretending there wasn’t. She was the flight engineer on a billion-dollar prototype starship, after all: She wouldn’t have the job unless she had the chops for some serious mathematical and practical engineering. Mere galactic experience as an abductee wouldn’t have got her even halfway there.

Fortunately, Rebar was used to dealing with searingly intelligent people who hated to think of themselves as intelligent. He was after all a Master Sergeant in the US Army, bastion of the violently anti-intellectual genius. The other services had their upside but nobody found the problem children like the Army.

Family issues? Check. Wild childhood? Check. Probably on the wrong side of the law a few times but never got caught and didn’t want to admit it? Like looking in a fucking mirror. She hadn’t even graduated high school…And neither had Rebar.

The Air Force would have straight rejected someone like that. So would the Navy. And the Marines were their own special flavor of weird, so God alone knew what they’d have done with her. But the Army’s motto might as well have been ‘We’ll take ‘em, and we’ll fix ‘em up but good,’ and Rebar would deck anyone who said otherwise, Firth included.

Byron Group, apparently, had a similar attitude. Or maybe they were just open-minded enough to have given Buehler a shot for the sake of keeping the other two, and she’d turned out to be worthy in her own right. And maybe she had only realized her potential because of the other two…it didn’t matter.

What mattered was results. He didn’t need to give a shit why she sat attentively through Baseball lecturing her on emergency trauma medicine, or paid studious attention as Rebar went through his own dissertation on Electrostatic Field Welding in hard vacuum with her. All that mattered was that she did.

Still. It wouldn’t hurt her to see herself clearly for what she was.

“So what are we doing?”

“I had Tech Sergeant Kovač run up a little somethin’. A test of sorts. Or a competition, maybe.”

Allison tilted her head to one side slightly in a display of interest which ruined her attempt to maintain that zero-fucks-given attitude. “Competition, huh? Against who?”

“Against me. I dunno what she cooked up for us, but she promised to make it a fair contest.”

“Well shit, now you’ve got me all nervous.”

Rebar just shook his head and opened the door to one of their backup workshops, the one which didn’t have anything to do with EV-MASS suits or other classified technology. Normally it was Motor Pool’s little kingdom, but today it was an arena.

Kovač was waiting for them, and she had that grin on. The uniquely Air Force one they apparently taught at Lackland that said ‘We’re smarter than you, and we know it.’

Which was fine: They always came running up to Papa Army when they needed anything dirty done, anyway. But right now it hinted that she’d brought her A-game for designing this challenge, whatever it was.

“Just FYI, I’m streaming this,” she told them. “The Lads are round the TV right now, watching, and so are the folks over at Chiune Station. So, y’know…No pressure to represent.”

“What’ve you got for us?” Allison asked her.

Kovač gestured to two cleared workbenches, each of which had something on it under a cloth. “Emergency repair of a busted forcefield emitter,” she said. “You have to diagnose and repair the fault using only the tools provided, and you’ll be judged on speed and on how well the module works after you declare you’re done with it. Sound fair?”

Rebar and Allison glanced at one another, and she held out a hand. “Sounds fair to me.”

He shook it. “Me too.”

“Good. And, one last complication….” Kovač’s smile got a little wider. “You’re working isolated from each other so you won’t know how the other one’s doing.”

Yup. She brought her A-game.

“Any questions?” she asked.

Allison’s hand went up. “If we declare done and then it turns out we declared first, I’m guessing we don’t get to go back and keep working on it?”

Kovač nodded. “Right. Once you say you’re done, you’re done. So if you call and Master Sergeant Vandenberg here leaves you waiting twenty minutes, you just have to sweat it out. Any other questions?”

There weren’t. She soon had them at their workbenches with a corner of the cloth in hand ready to whip away when she gave the signal, and returned to the front and center of the room where she picked up a stopwatch.

“Ready? On your marks…get set….Go!”

Was there a tier above A-game? She’d literally given him a multimeter, a screwdriver, and a soldering iron to work with and nothing else other than a plastic tray full of replacement parts. Though, that immediately hinted at what kind of fault he was dealing with at least. Rebar wasted no time getting the case off the emitter and turned it back and forth under the light once he’d exposed its electronic guts, looking for any signs of cracking, dirt or burning.

Electronic engineering was more Akiyama’s field, but the HEAT practiced the basic principle that somebody else had to be able to do each man’s job if he wasn’t available. He didn’t necessarily have to be as good, but he still had to be good.

Okay. First step: Was power getting to the field emitter? He broke out the multimeter and went to work inserting its probes, looking for voltages.

The fault, when he eventually discovered it, was the kind of simple problem that was fiendishly subtle just because it was so simple. Ship-wide power distribution had to be AC, since things like induction motors were too perfect to ever ditch. That meant the emitter had a very compact power supply which in turn had at least one rectifier.

One of the rectifier’s resistors failed above a certain input current, which in turn produced a choppy DC power output. Field emitters were notoriously sensitive to “dirty” power and gave rise to all sorts of wacky fun when mis-fed.

Fortunately, Kovač had given them paper and a pencil too, so he used a minute to do the maths and sketch out a resistor network to replace the fault, neatly assembled it and gave the emitter a test run.

He grunted at the sight of a few flashes of blue light at the field edge, but older emitters did that. It was wasteful of power, but the field itself was stable now and performing to spec. He hit the button to signal that he was done.

Kovač nodded, and gestured for him to present his work, but Buehler was waiting for him as he stepped around the divider.

“Done, huh?” he asked, handing it over.

She nodded. “Yeah. Yours was a bad rectifier too?”

“Yup. How long you been done?”

“About five minutes.” She grinned.

“You’re shittin’ me?”

“Nah.” She shook her head. “Those early IMI emitters were pretty much copy-pasted from the Dominion’s technology gift basket, they inherited a mess of ET design flaws.”

“They’re built like a ten dollar Walkman from the eighties.”

Allison shrugged. “I think the idea is to make them idiot-proof so the galactic newbies can put their own spin on ‘em. Or maybe I’m just being charitable.”

“Nah. How’d you find the problem so quick?”

“Dude, it’s always the power supply. It’s the most expensive bit and ET companies have that thing where the accountants ride them to cut costs all the way down, so they always make it dirt cheap.”

“That feels so…un-American. I’ll have to remember it.”

“Well,” Kovač interjected, “They both work to spec now, so the winner by time—” she gestured to Allison with a wry smile.

“Eh. Just good luck I knew something extra.”

“Naw, don’t knock it,” Rebar shook his head firmly. “That’s what bein’ smart is all about. C’mon,” he added, and gestured for her to follow, “I think I owe you barbeque. Firth got another deer last week and I built him a *brand new smoker*…”

“It’s deer season?”

“No, but Kentucky’s been doing special seasons all year ‘cuz apparently there’s way too many yearlings. Now hurry up, I don’t want the fat fuckers to eat it all!”

“Save me some!” Kovač told him.

“Please. Like ‘Horse didn’t plate some up for you.”

“Won’t matter, that man of mine is a black hole for protein. Sooner or later it’ll just fall into his mouth.”

“Just so long as I get to take some home for mine,” Allison said. She gave the emitters on the table one last thoughtful look as Rebar led the way out of the room. “I think ‘Horse infected him with his appetite.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll set aside enough for both of yours,” Rebar promised. “Talkin’ business fer a second, though…”

“Yeah?”

“When are you goin’ back for some formal qualifications like we discussed?“

Allison squirmed and grimaced. “Like I said, I…really don’t have the mind for that shit.”

Rebar had promised himself that the next time she said that would be the last straw, and he kept his promises. He stopped dead in his tracks and whirled around to face her. “Bullshit.”

“No, look,” she tried to defend herself, “swapping out parts and welding bits is one thing, but—”

It was remarkable how easy it was to root a civilian dead in place with just with a quiet growl and a little personal space invasion. Even the determinedly prickly Allison Buehler went into still-and-quiet mode the instant Rebar went full Master Sergeant, while Kovač found something discreet to be doing a few yards away.

“Shut the fuck up. I’ve about had it up to fuckin’ here with your goddamned excuses. I’ve seen your testing, I’ve just had my ass handed to me on something I know backwards and forwards, and frankly, hearing the flight engineer of a goddamned billion-dollar experimental exploration vessel complain she ain’t good enough is a mite fuckin’ rich.”

“But—”

“Can it. Here’s what ‘yer gonna fuckin’ do. You’re gonna get online, figger out which cert you wanna get, then you’re gonna bring it over here and you’re gonna study your fuckin’ ass off, and you’re gonna get that fuckin’ qual. Am I understood?”

“Do we have time? I—”

“The words yer lookin’ for,” Rebar told her, and shaved a few more inches off her personal space to drive his point home, “Are *‘Yes, Master Sergeant Vandenberg.’*“

Nobody was tough enough to stand their ground against a force like that; the animal side of the brain took over. Allison went even paler than her usual shade and leaned away from him. “Y-yes sir.”

“I work for a living, don’t call me sir next time.” Rebar turned and stomped away, then paused and looked back. “Well?” He growled, “Go,” than turned away again and utterly ignored her.

“R-right.” Allison fumbled for a second, not knowing which direction to go, then beat an undignified retreat.

Kovač watched her go with a mildly alarmed look. Air Force. One thing they really didn’t understand was a good ‘ol fashioned counseling and absolutely nobody did it better than a pissed off senior NCO who had survived years of the Army’s loving attentions.

“I’ve had to snap back some lazy techs this year,” she observed, “but Allison doesn’t even work for us.”

“Am I in charge of her training? Then yes, she fuckin’ works for me. So do you. You got anything important to do? Go do it. Now.”

Kovač’s expression hardened in a way that promised retribution at a later date, but she was a quality NCO. She snapped to, nodded, and carried on. “Yes, Master Sergeant Vandenberg.”

He smiled at her. “See, was that so hard? C’mon. I think I owe her a double helping…and maybe I’ll sneak her something so Dane don’t get his hands on it. Um…ideas?”

“Chocolate,” she replied promptly, doing a once-round of the workshop to make sure everything was properly put away and the lights were off. “The really good stuff from that place on North Water Street. And if you’re a smart man, you’ll give me a double portion yesterday.”

“Right, right. You have a loaded Warhorse an’ yer not afraid to use him.”

“I don’t need him to fight my battles. I was thinking…you might need a full refit. And some acclimation time.”

“See!” Rebar laughed, “You goddamned corporate Chairforce types just ain’t got the right kind of spite! Imagine how many dumbshit airmen you could Motivate with a mind like that?”

She locked up the workshop behind them. “Two words: Retention. Issues.”

“See, Army fixed that centuries ago. It’s easy, just don’t train ‘em up so they’re worth two hundred grand in the civilian world, or, y’know, make ‘em dumbasses like me whose skillset don’t really fit in the outside.”

“Hmm.” She pocketed the key and gestured in the direction Allison had fled. “…What about her? I kinda get the impression you think she was wasted on civilian life.”

“No, I think she was wasted on society. What she needed, I think, was someone to value her.”

“And now she’s got two.”

“More’n two.” Rebar shrugged. “Look, I ain’t the romantic type, I’m just into messin’ with minds and fuckin’ warm holes. I’ll leave the feelings crap up to you.”

Kovač finally cracked a smile. Rebar had learned a long time ago that he could diffuse any situation by being the friendliest, gruffest, raunchiest goat ever. Which was easy since really, all he had to do was turn his filter off.

“Still,” she repeated. “Chocolate. The good stuff.”

“Fair deal. Just don’t let ‘Horse know you’re cheating on him!”

That got him a full-throated laugh and a shaking head, which he answered with the cheesiest grin he had. He was pleased with himself, he had to admit—In one fell swoop he’d begun his Allison Fix and educated an excellent young Technical Sergeant on the finer points of wrangling a team filled with hyper-alpha men.

All in a day’s work.

Date Point: 13y8m AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Chiune Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

“Hey—”

Xiù’s warm greeting died halfway through the moment she saw the look on Allison’s face. It was the look of a woman who had started from raging angry, and had somehow managed to cultivate and stoke that feeling all through the ninety minute drive from Folctha to Chiune Station.

She softened by the tiniest amount, just enough to give Xiù a wave, then strode right across the room in three steps, grabbed Julian by the collar and shut him up before he even said anything with a maneuver that was equal parts kissing him and dragging him toward the bunks.

He must have been just as confused as Xiù was, because his reaction was to hesitate.

“Mmm…uh, Al, are you okay—?”

She grabbed him by the belt. “Shut up, Etsicitty.”

There was a tone of voice she hadn’t used in months. Just using his surname that way was…inspiring. Xiù sat up and watched with glowing cheeks, a dry mouth and with her pulse pounding in her ears.

Julian had pretty much the same stunned look on his face. “…Shutting up, ma’am.”

“Good boy. Put those new muscles to work…”

“Should I, um…give you two some space?” Xiù asked.

“Oh, hell no,” Allison paused in peeling Julian’s shirt off him. “You’re gonna join us in a minute. You got that, babe?”

“Y-yes ma’am.”

“Good girl.”

Glowing at the sudden explosion of erotic energy in her belly, Xiù swallowed, watched…and silently made a note to find out what had happened and thank the person responsible.

A few minutes later, she was far too preoccupied to remember.

Date Point: 13y8m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Doctor Rufus Taylor

“So…I just hold it?”

The HEAT weren’t actually part of the double-blind trial to verify the *Huh*‘s function, but they were available, and somehow the opportunity to see how they reacted had been just too much to pass up. The scientific value was dubious…but it scratched an itch, so to speak.

“That’s right. And tell us…how do you feel? Focus particularly on emotions.”

Sergeant Arés frowned and rolled the Huh around in his huge mitts, studying it from several angles.

“…I dunno,” he conceded at length. “A little curious, maybe? The light does weird things on it.”

“…Huh.”

“What about it?”

“No no, just…that’s all?”

“I’m kinda hungry I guess…”

“Any…aggressive thoughts? Anger?”

“No more than usual. Why?”

“…do you always feel aggressive?”

Adam rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Dude. Look at me. What do you think?”

“…Thank you, Tech Sergeant.”

Arés nodded and squeezed himself out through the door, sideways. Nadeau sat back and ran his free hand over his scalp.

Beside him, Doctor Taylor chuckled. “So…mostly muted responses. Three non-responses, and only one genuine provocation. Sikes is the only normal one of the bunch.”

“I really wasn’t expecting a non-response from Murray, though.”

“It’s always the quiet ones, Nadeau.”

“Suddenly, I’m much more scared of him. Anyway…between this and the results from the double-blind, I think your hypothesis is on solid footing.”

“Let’s not be premature,” Taylor said and picked up his tablet again. “It’s time for the Gaoians…”

Date Point: 13y8m AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Chiune Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“Better now?”

Allison must have dozed off. Her head jerked up by a fraction of an inch and hovered there for a second as she got her bearings before she looked up. She stretched aesthetically against Julian’s side, then stretched up and kissed him.

“…Yeah.”

She glanced at Xiù, who hadn’t only dozed off but was genuinely fast asleep on Julian’s other shoulder, and smiled.

“What happened?”

“Rebar chewed me out. Like, really chewed me out, got right up in my face and everything. I think I genuinely pissed him off.”

Julian raised his head and inclined it curiously. “How the hell did you manage that?”

“Ergh, it’s…stupid. I’m stupid. I mean, I’m not stupid but I keep fooling myself that I am.”

“Oh, that.” Julian nodded.

“What, it annoyed you too?” Allison sat up. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Mmnnnot annoyed.” Julian shifted slightly and they both shut up as Xiù mumbled an incoherent objection. She fell asleep again instantly, but he lowered his voice and gave her a squeeze. “More like…I dunno the word for it. Like, kind of a positive frustration? When you know that somebody you love is better than they think they are.”

Allison stroked some hair out of Xiù’s face.

“…Do you think it’s even possible to be completely honest with yourself?” she asked. “Just…see yourself as you really are? No pride, no modesty, just the truth.”

Julian ran a comforting hand up her spine. “Well…if my training with these fitness-freak fellas has taught me anything…probably not.”

She nodded. “But it’s good to try, right?”

He ran his hand back down again, nodding. “Probably.”

She took his hand, interlaced their fingers, then leaned over and kissed him again, before putting her head down on his shoulder while wrapping his arm around her shoulders like a blanket.

Julian kissed the top of her head, and had a thought.

“Don’t you wanna be wrong anyway?” he asked.

“Hmm?” she tilted her head up toward him slightly.

“Well, don’t you want to be better than you think you are? That’s a good thing, right?”

She thought about it for a second, then snuggled down into him again. “…Yeah, I do.”

“So what’re you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna sleep,” she said. “And in the morning…I’m gonna get me a real qualification. Some letters after my name. Something.”

“Attagirl,” he smiled. “I, uh… do have one request though. And you’re not gonna like it.”

She looked up. “Hmm?”

“I need to go pee.”

“…You’re right. I don’t like it.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Allison and Xiù both made identical protest noises as he slipped his arms out from under them and sat up. In fact he wasn’t even tired, they were still fairly early in the evening. But if his girls needed him, his girls needed him and there wasn’t a whole lot a guy could do in those situations except accept his lot in life and be a mattress.

Or make them coffee. Coffee was an option too. And maybe…yeah, screw it. Pancakes.

The best plans were the ones he could put in motion straight away, after all…

Date Point: 13y 8m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Daar

“How about we call it the Klendathu?”

“Nah. The Be Vewy Vewy Quiet.”

“The Only You Can Prevent Forest Shitpocalypse.”

That one got a round of amused snorts from all three of the Humans. Of all the details they could have been working on over their coming mission to Messier 24, they’d got super hung up on the spaceship they were being given to get in and out, and the only reason Daar hadn’t curled up in a corner and literally died of boredom was because Bozo had showed up with a short length of thick rope in his mouth and goaded Daar into wrasslin’.

It turned out to be a pretty good neck and jaw workout, too! Bozo was strong.

The Humans had watched him for a second, then shrugged and carried on bouncing increasingly stupid names off each other.

“Nuh-uh. The Trump Card.”

“No, wait…The Cup of Covfefe.”

“Hah! No, the Tiny Sailor Hands.”

“Dude,” Tiny shook his head. “Those memes got old last decade!”

“Fine, fine. The Beef Wagon. Modern enough for ya?”

Daar bass-chittered at the memory of the Beef Bros carrying a truck down a major highway and the ensuing internet microdrama. It looked like fun in the weird way that good honest work could hurt so good. If only Daar could be that kind of strong…but he could outmuscle Bestest Friend any day of the week, and Tiny was one of the most strongest Humans!

Also, they’d watched a lot of ‘Japanese’ animation together lately. Daar finally decided to join in, if for no other reason than to fuck with Tiny. “The Outlaw Star! You like that, Bozo?”

He realized too late that he’d let go of the rope to speak, and Bozo spun away across the room, frantic with excitement at having claimed his prize. Daar pounced after him and they quickly fell into wrasslin’ and snarly play-nips. More exercise!

Coombes rolled his eyes. “Tiggs, I swear we shouldn’a let you watch that shit.”

“But Gene Starwind is fuckin’ badass! You like it, don’t ‘ya Bozo?”

The dog dropped the rope and boomed a Wurf!! that shook the window. Daar sprang on the opportunity to turn the tables and claim the rope again, though it was getting kinda slobbery by then. He transferred it to his paw and waggled at Bozo, who became absolutely laser-focused on waiting for him to toss it across the room.

“See? Bozo says it’s the bestest.” He threw the rope, and Bozo’s huge paws scrabbled on the linoleum as he Scooby-Doo’d off in hot pursuit. “Can we go play Gravball now?”

The Humans watched Bozo fetch the rope and disappear out of the room to parade it around, then returned their attention to Daar. There was a contemptuous silence.

Hoeff broke it by shrugging and returning to the topic at hand. “…The Make Space Travel Stealthy Again.”

Walsh shook his head. “The Hold My Beer.”

Daar snorted dismissively. “Please, Talamay’s way better.”

“Yeah, but no fucker ever said ‘Y’all hold my Talamay an’ watch this shit.’

“I have!”

“But you weren’t drunk, big guy.” Walsh pointed out.

Daar snorted in amusement. “Ain’t my fault my brain’s more tolerant o’ deadly poisons.”

Hoeff raised his head. “The You Don’t Know What You’re Missing!”

‘Base looked up from the enormous HEAT-grade beanbag in the corner where he was about halfway through reading À la recherche du temps perdu. ‘Horse had sewn that beanbag together out of canvas tarp and shark fishing line and stuffed it with shredded polyethylene foam, and to date it had weathered being enthusiastically flomped on by every man in the HEAT with nothing worse to show for it than a tiny Scottish saltire that Murray had covertly sewn into the underside.

“You didn’t see him last year after he gorged on turkey,” he said. “Big bastard was fuckin’ krunked!”

“Wait, what?”

Daar shook his head and neck vigorously. “That is not how it went.”

“Dude. You got drunk on turkey?!”

Daar sighed. “I…guess? I felt…dizzy. For, like, the whole evening. But that ain’t the whole story!”

“…You know, I kinda like that.” Hoeff mused, before Daar could defend himself.

Coombes frowned at him. “What?”

“Calling the ship Drunk On Turkey.”

It was Walsh’s turn to aim a frown his way. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“We’ve been here for like an hour and this is literally the first time anybody’s said ‘I like that’,” Daar growled. “Since it’s technically my spaceship I’mma lay down the law. The Drunk On Turkey it is. Whatever. Can we go play Gravball now?” He added a plaintive whine to the request that the guys usually couldn’t resist.

This time, though, they were unmoved. “We’ve got like the whole rest of the mission plan to go through,” Coombes pointed out.

Daar couldn’t help but snarl his annoyance at that. “Yeah, ‘cuz you weirdos spent half the morning arguing over the least importantest part.”

Fortunately the Humans knew how to read him pretty well by then, and didn’t overreact. “Dude. We’re getting our own fucking spaceship, man. Naming that shit is important.”

Daar was briefly tempted to retort that this would only be one of dozens of ships he’d owned over the years, but mentioning that fact would just be pointlessly ostentatious. Besides, he’d named his precision hand tools years ago and they were worth a lot less.

“…Okay, fair point I guess. But I ain’t beat on Tiny for three whole days! And we both need to bulk up as much as we can for our mission loads…”

“Shyeah, gotta make our packs feel like they’re empty! Also you haven’t beat me in any kind of overhead press yet, Tiggs. Don’t get cocky.”

“You have monkey shoulders! And you’re only ten kilos ahead, that’s practically tied!”

Walsh crossed his arms over his chest and grinned smugly. “Excuses.”

“No excuses! We’re close and you know it. Also need I remind you Brother, I consistently outlift you on the bench by so much it’s silly. A bunch more weight, way more sets. I win.”

“For now.”

“Forever.”

Coombes rolled his eyes and interrupted just before the two could spiral into a bantering, roughhousing play-brawl. “Kids, you’re both big and strong and pretty. Anyway don’t Firth got combatives scheduled with you two today?”

‘Yeah. And don’t let this slip, but I think I maybe figured out how to knock him down finally and win that bet…Either way, I’m gonna be hurtin’ and I wanna earn it.”

Coombes nodded. “Fair ‘nuff. Walsh?”

“My goal is just to survive my session with him, to be honest.”

“Mhmm.” ‘Base mumbled agreement with his eyes still glued to that huge book of his.

“You two gonna be outta commission, then? Firth ain’t exactly…gentle.”

That was the understatement of the century, right there.

“Nah, we’ve got a little bit of Crude we can use until we go on-mission, Boss. Powell wants us as strong as we can get without becoming a logistics problem like HEAT. We’ll ‘git ‘er dun’.”

“Alright. So. When we fly the…” Coombes glared at Hoeff “…the Drunk On Turkey out there, we gotta put down a hunnerd klicks out from the main objective, maybe more, an’ hump all our stuff to the forward camp on foot.”

“Yeah.” Daar stretched out and rolled his muscles impressively to drive home his point about their training. “That’s why I really wanna get my lifting in, Boss. It’s gonna be hard work. Tiny’s gotta get some extra Crude sessions in too, get his shoulder fixed up by Nofl maybe.”

“Worked out okay for ‘Horse’s dad, I guess…” Walsh admitted. “But I dunno, bro…”

“Dude,” growled Daar. “Fuckin’ do it, Friend. You need it, it’s safe, and ain’t no such thing as a Job that goes good if anyone’s nursing a hurt while doing it. Think how much you’ll be able to outpress me! Also I can smell when he lies so don’t worry, I’ve got ‘yer back.”

“Ergh, I know. He’s just…”

Daar tilted his head and pant-grinned. “Corti?”

“He’s flaming and it weirds me out. Like, if he was genuinely camp I wouldn’t mind but because he’s Corti I gotta think he’s just putting it on just to fuck with us.”

Daar chittered, “I heard somewhere that’s Uncivilized thoughts, Brother!”

“Whatever, if I’m gonna be speciesist I might as well be fuckin’ homophobic and racist as well. Get a full house.”

Coombes snorted. “Man, if you’re prejudiced then I’ll just have Ghetto Fabulous over there straighten you out.”

‘Base raised his eyebrow, made eye contact, looked down at his chest, bounced it, smirked, and went back to his book.

Daar was pretty sure they’d just played some kind of dominance game, but Humans—especially these Humans—smelled that way all the time anyway. ‘Base seemed to have won, though both Walsh and Coombes were grinning.

“Least the return trip’s lighter, without all them sensors,” Hoeff pointed out, getting back on topic.

“By about…” Daar recalled his loading tables, “Sixty kilograms, I think? Yeah.”

“…Geez, that much?” Hoeff asked.

“Yeah…didn’t you read the tables?”

“No, ‘cuz I’m the scout. You’re already carrying most of my shit.”

“Literally,” Walsh grunted under his breath. None of them were looking forward to the mandatory poop-bagging, and Daar silently thanked Fyu that Human urine was sterile and wouldn’t need reclaiming like that. Everyone could just lift leg and piss on a tree.

Hoeff ignored him. “Still, you sure you want Daar carrying most of my mission load instead of me? I can move just fine with a big pack…”

“I know,” Coombes said reassuringly. “We’ll work out the loads with a practice hike out on the range, see what the best distribution is. I want you completely mobile, Hoeff.”

Hoeff nodded agreeably. “Sure thing, Master Sargn’t.”

Daar stretched out again and got a satisfying ‘pop!’ in his spine, then stood up. “Really, though. Can we Gravball, or work out? The shuttle to Gao leaves tomorrow and we can work this stuff out by email.”

“Back to Gao again, huh? So close to mission time?”

“Champion duties,” Daar lowered his ears apologetically. “I’m gonna be out of touch for a few weeks. There’s stuff I have to take care of.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t say.”

“…We’re all cleared for DEEP RELIC and SACRED STRANGER.”

“I cannot say, Brothers.”

“Well, shit,” Coombes grunted. “Wheels within fuckin’ wheels.”

“You have no fuckin’ idea. Anyway…” Enough. Daar really didn’t need a reminder right now of what was coming, and how it would likely provoke the conflict he just knew in his bones was inevitable. Right now, he needed to get his muscles good, hot, and hurting, and he needed to work himself up into a happily exhausted, lathery huff.

Almost nothing did that better than Gravball. Or weightlifting. Or both!

“…‘Kay. You’re right, we can figure this out in writing,” Coombes agreed and stood. “You in, ‘Base?”

Baseball carefully bookmarked his Proust and surged upright. “Fuck yeah.”

“Awesome. Time to straighten out Tiny the Racist here.”

“Hey!”

Daar grinned to himself as he headed for the stairs in much the same way as Bozo had earlier. Finally the day was making progress… and not a moment too soon. He was meeting Genshi in the park later that afternoon, after which…

There were Bad Things in Daar’s future. Bad Things that needed to be set in motion, and selling Genshi on what needed to be done was going to be…tricky. And risky, very risky.

He’d take his fun when he could get it from here on out. Gravball now, and tackling a fellow Champion in the park later? Temporary pleasures. But all pleasures were temporary.

He’d just have to enjoy them while he could.

Date Point: 13y 8m AV
My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Dog Wagner

“See, this is what you get when you step that pretty-boy face in front of a spotlight.”

There was a second or so’s delay in the signal to Cimbrean groundside from Armstrong Station, but Dog was used to that.

Julian was too, and nodded as he listened with a small chuckle at the end. “I’m surprised Hephaestus don’t wanna shove you in front of the camera,” he said. “Interstellar trade is kind of a big deal…And y’ain’t that ugly.”

Dog showed him an affectionate middle finger between friends, sharing the laugh.

“I’m just a glorified trucker, brother.”

“A glorified trucker who got shot to shit. How’s the Other Spaceship doing, anyway?”

“The My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon,” Dog said, stressing the full name, ”is doin’ just great. All-human crew, an’ the core systems were fine anyhow. Most of the damage was to the cargo holds, so… we got rid of most of ‘em. we’re covered in shipping containers now.”

“How’s that working out?”

“Expanded capacity by damn near forty percent and cut the mass by ten percent even fully loaded.”

“See? Humanity improving on alien tech with old ideas. If you worked for Byron they’d be yanking you out in front of a documentary crew.”

“Count me glad I work for Hephaestus, then,” Dog replied. “Don’t sound like much fun.”

“It ain’t.”

Julian glanced over his shoulder, looking around the room. Dog had been aboard Misfit just the once, for that Christmas dinner when he’d first met Julian and his girls. The trio lived, worked and slept together in a space that was only barely larger than his own personal quarters, which he’d have found hellishly cramped. Julian either had the patience of a saint, or was dating saints. When he’d been married back on Earth, Dog’s relationship with his wife had mostly involved getting himself out of the house as often as he could.

Technically, he was probably still married. He hadn’t signed no divorce papers, after all.

“Between you and me?” Julian asked, turning back to the camera, “We can’t wait to get the hell out of here.”

“Don’t blame ya, brother. I watch the news too—made me wanna school some punks.”

Julian nodded slowly and scratched at the back of his neck. “Hey…level with me. You think we did the right thing?”

“I think I’m a glorified trucker, brother,” Dog repeated. “The fuck you asking me for?”

“’Cuz sometimes you need the opinion of a guy you could share a beer with. And who ain’t a HEAT operator.”

Dog chuckled. HEAT were an…intense bunch. Even more so than the Misfit trio, who were pretty damn intense by anybody else’s standards. He sat back and considered his reply.

”…God knows your heart,” he said in the end. “You decided to do it in the then-and-there, and ain’t nobody else was around. Seems to me like there’s no point in trustin’ you three with all this exploration an’ shit if we don’t trust your judgement, too….and from what I’ve seen, the people who matter do trust you.”

Julian nodded slowly. “…Thanks.”

There was a chime, and an honest-to-God human voice speaking real American went out across the ship: “Captain Wagner to the flight deck, please. Captain to the flight deck.”

Julian heard it too. “Well. Gonna be a couple years before we see each other again, Dog.”

“Yeah,” Dog nodded. He touched two fingers to his eyebrow and flicked them at the screen, Aiming to look more jaunty than he felt. “Hey. You take care of those girls, take care of yourself an’ take care of your ship.”

“In that order,” Julian nodded. “Promise. And you look after yourself too, Dog. No more gunfights, not until you can shoot straight.”

Dog sat back and laughed properly at that. “Alright, asshole. I’ll see you in two years. First round’s on me.”

Julian nodded, and Dog ended the call with a nagging feeling like maybe it was gonna be longer than two years.

He shrugged it off, stood up and threw on his jacket. Hephaestus had made a lot of changes on his ship, including issuing the same kind of shipboard work-wear that Byron Group had developed for their ships. Cut-proof, flame-retardant and insulating but still breathable. Crazy stuff. In some ways, Dog knew he was going to miss his ET crew. He was going to miss hearing the phrase ‘you are very strange’ and the smell of cqcq cigarettes.

But as he stepped out of his cabin and noted to his satisfaction that all the safety doors were closed and that the gravity holding him to the deck was right…he knew he wasn’t going to look back, either.

This was only the beginning.

Date Point: 13y9m AV
Forward camp, Uncharted Class 11 deathworld, Sagittarius Star Cloud

Chief Petty Officer Daniel Hoeff

Hoeff, if he were honest, hadn’t really understood the reason behind Daar being on team. He liked Daar, who was big and strong and could fight like a demon—the doom-noodle thing was admittedly impressive—but honestly, as good as he was on a lot of things, Hoeff just couldn’t shake the worry that the big ‘coon might still be a net liability.

Then he watched Daar sneak. He was like a totally different creature when he was doing everything he could to be quiet, and boy, was he. He stashed his pack in a big hole he dug with alarming speed, carried just what they needed, and the big bear wormed his way through the underbrush so carefully and so quietly, no audio sensor would have picked him up.

Establishing the sensor ring was an agonizing process. It involved hours of inching forward, making a space to inch into, inching into it, repeat. Ignore the stones poking into his knees, or the roots that always seemed to be placed to put pressure on somewhere sensitive no matter what. All while listening out for the shrill whine of a drone patrol and being prepared to go totally motionless in an instant.

Daar was so much better at the prowl it was almost humiliating. He could crouch low to the ground on all fours in a way a human just couldn’t and it didn’t tire him at all. Hoeff’s ribs felt like the ground was using them for a xylophone, the wet soil soaked just enough moisture into his clothes to be uncomfortable, and the muscles all along the side of his torso were screaming in pain from unnatural overuse.

And that was just the trip out. Now they were on their way back the anticipation of getting back to camp was making all the pain, discomfort and exhaustion that much worse.

Which was probably what inspired Daar to do the thing that earned him Hoeff’s immediate and undying love. He paused at the bottom of the short earth bank that Hoeff thought of as the halfway point. It was the bottom of a tiny gully with a pathetic trickle of dirty water at its bottom, more a ditch than a stream, but it was concealment.

“Climb on my back. You smell like you’re hurtin’,” he whispered.

Hoeff had no will to resist the offer and wasn’t afraid to admit it. He climbed up gratefully, and the big bastard leapt clear over the water without making a sound, then accelerated away along their egress at a hell of a clip…in dead silence.

It was all Hoeff could do to hang on to the rolling form of his ride and not make a sound, and when they’d finally re-joined Coombes and Walsh, Daar still wasn’t tired. Anyone could say what they wanted about Gaoians but that feat, at least in Hoeff’s field-op mind, was impressive as hell. Hoeff climbed off Daar, retrieved their packs from their stash, and they hoofed it back to camp. A hot meal and a chance to rest was all the Motivation they needed.

Thank fuck they’d found the perfect spot for camp. It wasn’t a cave so much as a two-way crack in the hillside, with just the perfect arrangement of terrain to obscure their position from any likely avenue of approach. It was invisible from above, too, especially thanks to the tarps that sheltered all their stuff from both prying eyes and the elements. They approached and made their challenge sound—two sharp clicks that sounded almost like a rock falling—and waited for the response, which was a quiet whistle.

Even knowing where he might be hiding, Coombes still couldn’t detect hide nor hair of Walsh. For a man packing something like four hundred and fifty fucking pounds of lean beefslab onto a six-foot-four frame—he was as massive as a world champion strongman and could whup ‘em all—the big cavebear of a man was really good at making himself invisible.

And Daar was even better at it. Which, considering he was somehow even bigger than Walsh, made his prowling silence a lot more impressive.

When they got close they made their approach with their hands in the clear to guard against any weapons; biodroning was a tactical possibility they’d realized at the last moment, and they’d quickly come up with a solution whereby each team member climbed up separately, laid face down in the dirt, and waited.

Walsh descended on him the instant Hoeff had his fingers interlaced behind his head. He slammed himself atop Hoeff and pinned him head to toe, then pressed the scanner firmly against his head with one paw while crushing Hoeff’s hands together with the other. It was all he could do to keep breathing and hold his whimper of pain under control. Once satisfied, the big fucker picked him up and more or less tossed him into the safety of their little hole.

“…Hey bro.”

Hoeff tried to stretch out his abused spine. Walsh smothering him under his full, moist and sticky weight had done absolutely nothing for his comfort. “Fuck off.”

Coombes threw him an MRE. It was turkey à la King, the good one with hot chocolate in the sundries bag. “He saved that for ya.”

“…‘Kay. I forgive you.”

Walsh wasn’t there, he was instead repositioning himself for Daar, who was making his approach. No surprise there.

“Y’know, I can smell you,” Daar growled. “You need a bath.”

Walsh didn’t reply as he repeated his ambush-and-scan act, though if Daar had been compromised it would have been a hell of a fight. That was why Coombes was standing by with his weapon ready. Either man, if compromised, would have been a serious problem.

Walsh grunted and let Tigger go as soon as his scanner gave him a happy green. “Sure. I’ll just jump in the tub with my rubber ducky,” he snarked. “Which bag is it in?”

“Well, you’re pretty much ready for one already. You’re half naked as it is.”

“Fuck off, this jungle SUCKS. I’ve never managed to sweat in sixty-six fuckin’ degrees before…”

“You weren’t complaining yesterday!”

“He just spent the last three hours moving rocks, don’t listen to him,” Coombes said. He tossed one of the ‘big boy’ MREs Daar’s way. “We do have a nice little dugout now, though.”

“Nava Seafood Chowder? Nice!” These were custom made for their team by Oregon Freeze-Dry, who had produced seventy-five-hundred calorie meals for their two heavyweights that were the same physical size as a normal meal. They did have to be reconstituted, though, and Coombes had Daar’s ‘most favoritest’ flavor already hot and ready to go.

It had nava paste and cod liver oil in it. And fish. And…other things. The genuine heresy was that Walsh liked it, too.

Daar dumped in his vegetable crackers to give the food some crunch, and didn’t bother with the spoon—he just raised the bag to his mouth and scooped out a mouthful with his tongue.

“So.” Coombes reached over and grabbed a meal of his own. “Halfway mark.”

“Yeah Boss,” Daar pulled his snout out of the foil pouch and licked the flavor off his muzzle. “Chimp got another six emplaced today.”

“Been watchin’ those drones,” Walsh said. “No change in their patrol pattern.”

“That’s actually kinda depressing in a weird way.” Hoeff added more Tabasco to his turkey. “I can’t help but think they’re fuckin’ with us.”

Daar sniffed at the turkey and then shuddered slightly. “Sounds like Human paranoia to me. But honestly, that’s not the kind of bluff that makes sense, y’know? There’s no tactical gain.”

“Still.”

“Naw, I hear ‘ya. It shouldn’t be this easy.”

“…‘Easy’ he says.”

“You wait until we come back in a couple months to pick up whatever those sensors record,” Coombes said, digging into a bag of roasted nuts. “‘Cuz that’s gonna be in this planet’s wet season.”

“…You mean this wasn’t the fuckin’ wet season already?” Walsh asked.

“Nope. This was the ‘sweat until your balls rot away’ season.”

“See, that’s the thing about being big,” said Hoeff with a troll grin. “Cube law means I don’t overheat so easy. I feel fine. Or I did until a half-naked Mongo smeared his sweaty ‘pits all over my face…”

“Hey! I’m just a pawn in the game of life, man. And you loved it, you kinky fuck.”

“So what you’re saying is that wasn’t your pistol pressing into my back? It did feel small…”

“Bruh, I am literally three times the man you are,” Walsh said with an amused grin.

“Not where it counts!”

“Still bigger, though.”

Coombes made a pained noise and dug into his meal bag for his drink powder. “Christ, fifteen fuckin’ years in this goddamned Army and this shit never goes away…”

“Meh, all I hear is ‘words words insanely jealous blah blah blah.’ Where the fuck’s my meal?”

“You just crawl ten klicks and back through a swamp? No? Get your own damn food.”

Walsh chuckled and dug out another big boy meal. That one had steak in it, the lucky fuck.

“Eh. Rainy season probably ain’t so bad,” he decided once it was heating up. “And we won’t be here so long next time, right?”

“Hopefully not,” Coombes agreed. “Next run’s in six hours, I think me and surfer bum here’ll take the ones on the far east part of the range. Less sneak but it’s more work…sooner we get them deployed, sooner we go home.”

“Oh, man, speakin’ of sneakin’…” Hoeff gulped down the last of his turkey. “Just so y’guys know, Tiggs here? He’s fuckin awesome. You should have seen how good he is! He’s…”

The praise went down well, even though it was largely unembellished. It sure made the meal go down easy, after which was hopefully an opportunity to give his battered body a rest. The sleeping bags were all set up under a tarp at the back of the camp, where a kind of dry, spongy grass had given them a little more ground comfort. Next to roots, stones and mud it was paradise.

Daar apparently decided that he had a new Most Bestest Friend for the evening and pulled Hoeff into himself, but he decided he wasn’t going to complain. Not at all.

He slept, and dreamed of clean socks.

Date Point: 13y9m1w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Unclaimed Space

Vedregnenug

Vedreg had never considered himself a scientist. He had been a lawyer, a politician and had aspired perhaps in the last fifty years of his life to become a judge.

To his surprise, the patient analysis of precedent and the picking-apart of events translated well to a certain staid, prosaic kind of science. The Humans around him boiled over constantly with ideas, wrote them down, invented experimental procedures, tested their ideas…

And Vedreg had found a useful role in carefully reading everything they put out, sieving their work for discrepancies, sloppy methods, oversights or alternative explanations. Even without any formal scientific training he had the patience and focus to pore over every word of a paper and perform the peripheral research until he knew enough to query it, which was slow and painstaking work…but fascinating.

Especially whenever he got to analyze the products of the Coltainer program.

“So it chose…*Nightmare?*”

“Yes indeed. We were all quite surprised, as you can imagine..”

Lewis and the others had returned from Aru in sombre mood. Their findings, hypotheses and accumulated data between them accounted for about half of Vedreg’s ‘In’ tray, and they made for bleak reading. Try as he might, he was finding no hint that the Humans were wrong in their conclusions about how feasible it might be to cure and rehabilitate the OmoAru.

Rather than wallow in it, he’d turned to more pleasant, more successful topics and taken it upon himself to bring Lewis up to speed on how his brainchild was performing.

The “Coltainers” were still in a very limited form for now. Their self-duplication was capped at one child per generation, which meant linear rather than exponential growth. Most were still on a tight leash in flight and harvesting trials at New Enewetak.

Only one so far had been released to go find a planet of its own initiative and set up a colony site, and it had promptly made a bee-line for the highest-class planet in charted space.

“I presume the selection algorithm ignores the existing planet classification.”

“Nah. It’s huntin’ for deathworlds, remember. I guess it just doesn’t give a fuck if the deathworld is a ten or a thirteen,” Lewis shrugged. “An’ hey. Nightmare already had a long-term human occupant.”

“Would it know that?”

Lewis shrugged again. “I kinda threw every fuckin’ datum we could get our paws on at the database,” he said. “Dunno why it’d weight a lone dude scrapin’ by over there for six years so high, but apparently it did.”

Vedreg shook his head slowly and allowed a wave of amused mint green to ripple across his body. “One of those ‘teething troubles’ then?” he asked.

“Dude, for all I know in fifty years Nightmare could be even more of a success story than Cimbrean.” Lewis spread his hands and smiled. “Weirder shit’s happened. How did the actual colony construction go?”

“See for yourself…”

Date Point: 13y10m4w AV
Whitecrest Enclave, Alien Quarter, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Champion Genshi of Whitecrest

Folctha was having one of its rare comparatively hot days, an event which never failed to highlight some important differences between species.

The Humans, for instance, were enjoying themselves immensely. Their weather reports were full of glowing cheerful announcements about how it was a ‘beautiful day for the park’ or ‘nice shirtsleeves weather.’

Earth was a warm planet, on average. And from what Genshi could gather, Humans had evolved on its generally hottest continent. They wore a little less, maybe got covered in a thin healthy sheen of sweat, sighed appreciatively at things like cold drinks or a lick of breeze, and generally got on with their day in a good mood.

Gao, on the other hand, had seasonal sea ice that almost reached the tropics during the winter. Gaoians were well adapted for cold weather, and had a very limited capacity to perspire: generally in their ears, on their nose and, in the brownfurs, along their lower extremities.

It was all Genshi could do to maintain his dignity; he was panting by the time they reached the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Enclave.

The blast of cool air across his nose and ears was beyond welcome. And as for Daar…

The Stoneback Champion had taken the liberty of soaking his fur in the grass sprinklers, much to the mixed scandal and interest of several nearby Females. The heat had already evaporated most of the water, but his coat was still damp to the skin and he flopped to the ground under the A/C vent the moment the door was closed with his ears flattened sideways and his mouth open in a delighted fugue.

Genshi settled for taking a seat nearby, where he could still get the best of the cool air and recover his comfort with a little more grace.

“So,” he said eventually, once they’d both stopped panting away the heat. “One slow and quiet infiltration to install a network of sensors, and a second slow and quiet infiltration weeks later to retrieve the data. Remind me, which of us is the Champion of Clan Whitecrest again?”

Daar rolled his eyes from his puddle on the floor. “Whitecrest don’t got a monopoly on sneaky, Cousin.”

“Maybe not, but it is our specialty.” Genshi’s right ear rotated an amused quarter-turn. “You don’t go to a workhouse for the food, after all.”

Daar had never been able to contain his competitive playful streak, and despite being plainly not inclined to move anywhere just yet he wagged his tail by way of a challenge. “How many Whitecrests do ‘ya know who’d be willing ‘ta paw in with a three-hundred weight pack, Cousin?”

“Willing? All of us. None of us would be able, though,” Genshi conceded.

Daar rolled over and duck-nodded lazily. “Never been able to fault your Clan’s spirit,” he said.

“I would hope not, considering the company you kept as a cub,” Genshi agreed. “Incidentally, Champion to Champion, I intend to promote Regaari to Father.”

Daar immediately sat up in an alert posture and went deadly serious. “That’s not a small risk, Cousin. Won’t the other Fathers fight back?”

“Some of them. Many, even. I am balancing on the edge of my authority…But sometimes abuses of power are necessary for the right reasons.”

“‘Yer preachin’ to a true believer there.”

“I thought as much…You don’t disapprove, I take it?”

“It ain’t up to me to approve or disapprove. Your Clan, your rules.”

Genshi flicked his claws together fastidiously. “I want your opinion anyway, Cousin.”

“Well…’kay. Here’s the thing. I’ve been payin’ attention, Genshi. You ain’t ever been reckless in the forty years I’ve known you, so I know perfectly well you ain’t being reckless now.” Daar stood up and stretched out the long muscles of his back now that his fur was getting genuinely cold again. “I know you’re up to something. And if I do, so does everyone else. And that means you ain’t got a lotta time left.”

“Do you?” Genshi asked him. “How long can you go on Human operations under a Human commander before your time comes?”

“Not long,” Daar admitted. “Stainless and I talked this out. We’re in a bit of a bind, though. There’s literally nobody else who can do what I do. That’s a problem, but one they can solve when they need to. Until then…I help Bestest Friend, and we get the intel we need.”

“The life of a Champion. Our successors are always hunting us, and they get closer every day,” Genshi said. “The only victory Champions ever have is to retire on our own terms.”

“…Cousin…I’m really hopin’ I didn’t just figger out what you’re planning.”

“Why?” Genshi asked. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t have similar plans?”

“I have plans for a successor, sure, and a backup plan. I ain’t plannin’ to push the issue.”

“Good. Your Clan won’t need it, I think.” Genshi yawned and shook himself: the cold air was making him comfortable now, and after too many busy nights he was anticipating a restful night’s sleep in the near future, for the first time in a while.

“You…you are always welcome at High Mountain. You know that.”

“Thank you.” Genshi didn’t see any need to say more than that. He stood up to shake off his drowsiness instead. “Come on. I’m told it’s a nice day outside. Now that we’re comfortable again I am eager to try these Bao things…”

“Yeah!”

If there was a guaranteed way to cheer Daar, food of any description had to be it.

“And…Daar?”

“Yeah?”

“Good luck with your mission.”

Date Point: 13y11m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hierarchy Relay Irujzen-4942

Entity, Instance 4

The ship was back.

That fact was lost on the Hierarchy’s passive monitoring systems which, for all their sophistication, lacked the kind of paranoid narrative cynicism of a sapient observer. They looked for facts rather than stories, and fatally failed at basic metacognition.

Then again, an alert sapient observer would probably have missed the clues as well. The Entity was uniquely capable of the right kind of detail-focused long-term alertness, and even it needed several data points before it was satisfied in its conclusion. Random tiny flashes of sensor contact that didn’t reappear when watched for a second time. Little tickles of distorted spacetime that could just have been subtle gravitational waves in the outer system, too faint to be tracked.

The Entity was <\Impressed>, just as it had been the first time. That ship, whatever it was, was a ghost on sensors. Not perfectly invisible, but enough so to convince the automated systems that it didn’t exist.

And just like twice before, the Entity itself stepped in to quietly brush over the few traces of its approach that might have been discovered on later forensic analysis.

It lost the target in a burst of high-energy plasma in the planet’s upper atmosphere that looked just like a meteor burning up on entry, and that was that. The Hierarchy hadn’t installed satellites around the planet for the sake of anonymity, which meant that sensor coverage over the horizon was basically nonexistent. There was nothing to do but wait, and listen.

The listening lasted for nearly a week, which the Entity spent performing the conceptual equivalent of nervously double-checking that everything was ready. It had a memory of the night before that fatal vacation with Adam, the last night that Ava Ríos had seen her parents. Unable to sleep from the excitement she had constantly gone back to her suitcase to re-open it and confirm that everything was still present and correct, as though some mischievous critter might have snuck in and stolen her underwear.

It was a strange memory to have kept, but it provided vital context for the Entity’s data management, filing and sorting algorithms. The same ones that it had used to compile its Cypher.

It knew what the human operators would be doing: They would be scouring the network to trace another relay, one that wasn’t so peripheral to Hierarchy operations. Doing that, however, would require them to metaphorically speak the language, and the Hierarchy used a dense and difficult one in their communications infrastructure. Cracking it unaided might have been impossible, or at least hellishly difficult.

If the Entity did nothing else for the human race, this one gift would be valuable enough in its own right.

It finally noticed the team approaching along the outskirts of the relay. That was surprisingly difficult to do. They weren’t sneaking or even being particularly stealthy, but they were being very, very careful. Drones just…never happened to notice them.

Except once, just by accident. One of the drones caught the massive Gaoian urinating against a tree, just for a flash. The Entity quickly scoured the link of this data and subtly realigned assets.

It sent in its own probe and activated its WiFi beacon. This one had been a bit of a triumph. It had spent literal years scrounging the networks of the human world, hunting for all the arcane details necessary to build the hardware. The software had been even more difficult, but in the end, it was able to construct a directional “access point” and manufacture a drone with the radio squirreled away so the Hierarchy wouldn’t notice.

Sure enough, the moment it beaconed, the tablet attempted a connection and supplied the necessary key. This was one of the important details it had communicated to the humans, one it had kept secret from all other copies of itself, and it was the final proof that this wasn’t a sting.

The access app had been installed, too. Human security systems were, in their own way, leagues ahead of anybody else’s. They were so good, in fact, that the tablet in question had to be specifically modified with an app to permit the Entity the quick access it needed.

The team was probably unaware of all this, due to compartmentalization. Oh well, they would find out soon enough.

The tablet was practically sterile inside. Cleansed of anything that resembled sensitive data, right down to saved wifi passwords and user profiles. There were no photos, no apps, no saved accounts…nothing. It was the equivalent of an empty apartment with just the counters and carpets. All it had on-board was a lot of storage and some sophisticated mapping software, and enough information to build a small piconet with the rest of the team’s equipment.

And cameras. It had two cameras: the Entity couldn’t resist accessing the face camera and looking out through a tiny but high-definition lens to get a good look at the world the way a human saw it for practically the first time since its autogenesis.

It called up some archived memories to help it interpret what it was seeing, and the incomprehensible input resolved into…a face. A slim, rugged, sharp one sporting days of mud and beard growth.

Speech was impossible. For whatever reason, the Entity had never been able to get the concepts to mesh. It found, however, that it could understand speech perfectly well, even if generating it was…alien.

It generated a text output.

<:-)>

“…What.” the man’s finger thumped and nudged at the tablet as he tried a few commands. The Entity recalled an emote from Facebook and animated it, waggling a white finger at him.

“What the—-hell.” The man fingered his radio and spoke in a low whisper. “Coombes, Hoeff.”

”Send it.”

“I think our contact just made, uh, contact. It took over my tablet.”

“…What.”

“That’s what I said. Wanna see?”

“You good, got your sighting?”

‘Hoeff’ looked away from the tablet and ran sharp eyes over something that the Entity couldn’t see through the camera, then nodded to himself. “Yessir.”

“A’ight. C’mon down.”

There was a confusing blur of branches, bark, darkness and the quiet noises of exertion. The Entity waited patiently, having already waited for literal years, until the tablet changed hands and it found itself looking at a handsome African-American man with several days of facial hair. It remembered finding that face very attractive indeed, when Ava Ríos had first met it.

<\HelloAgainCoombes>
<:-)>

Coombes frowned at it. “…Hello again?” He asked. He moved the tablet away from his face slightly, as if it had suddenly become dangerous. “The fuck?”

He deserved an explanation, at least. The Entity felt that in, for lack of a better word, its gut. It summoned a self-image memory, a clear moment in time when Ava had looked at herself in a mirror. There was emotional context attached to that image that it had never been equipped to understand, but it was the clearest image of her that it had.

It sent the footage to the screen, attached words.

<Egypt>
<StolenKidnappedTaken>
<InterrogatedDecompiledMurdered>
<RebuiltSelf>
<NotSelfNotWhole>
<NotSame.>

“…Jesus.” Walsh’s paler, squarer features appeared over Coombes’ shoulder. “Is that—?”

<HelloWalsh>

The Entity watched without comprehending as the muscles around Walsh’s jaw clenched and worked. Was he about to throw up? That was the closest interpretation it could find.

He didn’t, however. He just gulped down hard and nodded.

“…Hi.”

The Entity needed to act quickly, before it was noticed. While it was conversing with the humans it shoved information into the tablet as fast as the device could take it. Co-ordinates, tables, charts, equations. All the gigabytes it had accumulated that would have been far too much to send undetected via any other means.

“Well…we were told to expect contact, but we didn’t have any details…” Walsh managed. “Given everything, I suppose a…a digital contact isn’t out of the question…”

The Entity called up a thumbs-up emote from the device’s built-in library rather than reply with words. It had memories which said conversation had been easy, it could remember words just flowing off the tongue almost without conscious thought. Somewhere in the process of creating itself, it must have deleted something important.

Uncomfortably, It wondered what else it had unknowingly destroyed.

“Well. This is creepy.”

The Entity wanted to say more, but Hierarchy sniffer programs in the relay were beginning to grow suspicious and it didn’t have the run-time to spare any longer. It selected the easiest form of communication still left to it—a sad face emoticon—then withdrew to focus all of its efforts on obscuring the data transfer and covering its tracks.

By the time it was free to communicate again, the transfer had finished and the device could no longer be found. Whether turned off or hidden in a Faraday cage or for whatever reason the Entity’s first moment of real human contact since its creation had ended all too soon, leaving it thirsty for more.

It retreated back into the safer depths of the relay where it prepared to copy off an instance of itself to synchronize with the prime instance, and watched them go. It replayed the conversation, examining every aspect of the exchange for useful data that might expand its ability to communicate, or at least to understand itself. To its surprise, it succeeded.

It wasn’t much, nor was it pleasant, but it now found that it understood the emotional context of the mirror-memory. Not a positive emotion…but it was a powerful one. A compelling one. And it was a connection to a life it struggled to understand. That made it precious.

For the first time in its existence, the Entity finally understood that it was <Lonely>.

Date Point: 13y11m1w AV
Starship Drunk On Turkey, Messier 24

Chief Petty Officer Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

The second they were aboard, Daar just went nuts. He dumped his pack and started clawing, scratching and biting at all the bits of him that he could reach. This apparently wasn’t enough, because he shook the floor mat to get the mud out of it before flopping down on his back atop it and squirming furiously.

Hoeff really couldn’t blame him. After all that time in the field all four of them were just gross with accumulated sweat, grime, muck and filth. He felt like a walking petri dish, but at least he didn’t have fur.

“You, uh, need some help there, Tiggs?”

Daar actually whined. “…Please.”

Walsh and Hoeff exchanged the unique long-suffering looks of men who had a sapient bear-dog-raccoon for a brother in arms, and Hoeff went to grab the combs from the ship’s hygiene room.

It was an involved process. Daar’s fur was matted, filthy and had all kindsa shit tangled in it despite his best efforts at keeping it clean in the field. In a rare reversal of fortunes, he claimed not to smell a thing, while the three humans got the full and delightful nasal bouquet of an animal that’d spent the last week playing in a ditch.

Hoeff didn’t comment on it, but Walsh knew they didn’t need to have a filter about these things. “I gotta say bud, ‘yer long fur is smelly as shit.”

Daar was busy trying to chew a burr out of the fur under his arm. “There’s…*rrgh*…a reason we clip it short…”

Coombes returned from the flight deck, having programmed the ship to get them back home as quietly as it could.

“Stopped ya from freezing to death though,” he observed, hauling off his t-shirt and throwing himself to the ground with a mat so Daar could put those grizzly paws to work on his aching back. Hoeff knew from experience that the big bastard wasn’t gentle but damn could he smash the hurt out of a guy’s muscles.

“Good armor against those fuckin’ bear-snakes too.” They’d run into three of the native predators on the way back, and Daar had proved equal to every one.

“Doom-noodle, bro,” Hoeff corrected him with a trollish grin. Daar hated that name for them.

Sadly, his trolling attempt was denied this time because Daar had just seen the scar on Coombe’s chest, the one below his left armpit. Sometime during his career, Coombes had taken a bullet through the lung in a serious way, and had seriously lucked out on it missing any major blood vessels too. Too bad every op he’d ever gone on was classified, because it would doubtless have made for a heck of a story.

Daar of course never remembered that. Or maybe he was just hopeful that something in Coombes’ career would turn out to not be classified. Either way, the moment he laid eyes on it he perked up. “Great Fyu! How come I never saw that one before, Boss?”

Coombes flopped and eyed the couch wistfully. “Hmm? Uh…” he examined it. “You have, though,” he said.

“I did?”

“Yeah. It’s the exit wound for this one.” He twisted and showed off the smaller splotch of discolored skin just below his shoulder blade.

“Where’d you get it?”

Coombes settled himself back on the mat and sighed. “Still can’t tell ya, Tiggs. Sorry.”

Daar seemed to forget his itching fur for a moment as he sat up. “…Sometimes I forget you can survive shit like that.”

“To be fair, the only reason I did is ‘cuz someone was right there to shove things into me and treat the collapsed lung.”

“Was it ‘Horse? Bet it was ‘Horse.”

“No comment, bro.”

“Aww.”

“You ever gonna tell us what you keep plotting with Genshi?”

Daar shook out the fur at the scruff of his neck and chittered. “No comment, bro.”

“Right.”

Daar yelped as Walsh dragged the comb through a particularly nasty tangle, but Walsh seemed satisfied with the result and the next few strokes of the comb were easier and cleaner.

“There ya go,” he said, setting the comb aside. “And now…you need a flea bath, Tiggs. In fact we all do.”

“Can’t I just dust-bath?” Daar whined.

“Parasites, bro. Deathworld. You know that. Also, you literally smell like blood and shit.”

“At least those are natural smells…” Daar grumbled, but hauled himself up onto four paws. “That flea shampoo smells like Momma Yanyi’s chemistry lessons when I was a young cub.”

“You’d rather smell like shit than smell clean?” Walsh asked him.

“See, that’s somethin’ you humans do that’s weird. You can’t smell anything for shit, but you have all these good and bad smells you complain about. It’s all…just smell, man. I’ll take real over fake any day.”

“Yeah, yeah. You remember how last time you said that ‘Base threatened to do a whole powerpoint thing proving why we have good and bad smells because deathworld, right?”

“I find that hard to believe given that Bozo likes to lick his own butthole.”

“Dude. People ain’t dogs. We are allegedly a bit smarter than them…”

Daar made a resigned huffing sound in the back of his chest and padded reluctantly toward the shower. “Let’s just get this over with…”

Hoeff wound up having to wait nearly half an hour, ten minutes of which was Walsh and Daar cleaning the shower which had wound up looking like the “Worst Toilet In Scotland” from that old British movie Murray had shown them. The big bear emerged smelling a lot better and with a cheery expression, which—

Coombes saw the mischief coming just a fraction of a second too late. “Daar, don’t you fucking dare—!”

Too late. He bounded over and shook himself all over everyone and everything.

There was one of those pauses where everyone’s brains reset themselves after enduring something unpleasant, broken by Hoeff as he wiped his face. “…You. Asshole.”

“Serves you right! It’s a goddamned Bear-snake. I will also accept snake-bear.”

“You hold grudges over the weirdest shit…” Hoeff hauled himself upright. “I’ma shower now.”

“Sure…” Coombes waved a hand vaguely. He looked like he was more interested in falling asleep.

Not Walsh. Before Hoeff disappeared into the shower he overheard Daar groan about the TV. Probably more Gaoian soap operas. Hoeff always liked them. He didn’t know if it was the cultural difference or the simple novelty of it, but the workhouse sagas were weirdly and hugely popular on Earth these days.

Daar detested them. Even over the sound of the running water Hoeff could hear him complaining at length about how none of the characters had any functioning social instincts and would have been evicted from every workhouse he knew for their bullshit.

Hoeff always showered quickly and prowled his way out of the shower still soaking wet, and grabbed a towel on the way out.

“Dude, soap operas are always bullshit that way.”

Walsh wasn’t having any of it. “Bruh, don’t fuckin’ call it a soap opera!” he objected. “This is way better.”

“Only ‘cuz you like it.” Hoeff hit the lockers to grab the clean clothes he’d stashed there ready for this moment. Heaven felt like clean underwear after far too long in the bush. “Your turn, Boss.”

Coombes groaned at length, but stood up easily and fluidly enough despite his complaining. He was always last through the showers just because he liked to soak good and long when he could.

Hoeff, meanwhile, grabbed one of the treats he’d left behind in the galley for himself. He’d have preferred a dip, but the body-is-a-temple culture in the SOR was something else and if he chewed now, he’d have Daar whining at him about how unhealthy it was all the way back. And then he’d have ‘Horse to deal with back at Cimbrean…

Besides…He was a little guy. No way around that, he just didn’t have the reserves that the other big fuckers on the team could keep. That meant that long missions always left him drained and hungry, so there was another way to relax. If he couldn’t have nicotine he could damn well demolish an entire jar of Nutella with a spoon; an act which, as a bonus, never failed to make Daar drool enviously.

He flung himself down on the couch and tried to ignore the Gaoian’s plaintive whining. Daar loved the smell of Nutella but it gave him the shits somethin’ fierce. Something about hazelnut oil just did not agree with the murderbearcoon’s GI tract.

Well. Maybe one taste wouldn’t hurt. He offered the spoon and Daar took his treat, and said nothing more.

The show was winding to a close when something that had been bugging at Hoeff finally became more than he could bear.

“…Hey, Boss?”

Coombes grunted. He’d drifted off in thought, and from what Hoeff could see they weren’t happy thoughts. “Yeah?

“The tablet said ‘Hello again, Coombes’ to you…”

Coombes nodded slowly. “I…really don’t wanna think about it.”

“Walsh? It spoke to you, too.”

Walsh’s good humor evaporated. “…Yeah.”

“…You two know somethin’?”

Coombes rested his head back and stared at the ceiling. “It’s all classified and there’s…shit, man. The details are a fuckin’ nightmare. I can’t say more than that.”

There was a pause. Walsh broke it in the end with a brotherly embrace. “Y’okay bro?”

“…Was thinkin’ I might have a word with Mears when I get the chance,” Coombes admitted. Abruptly, he surged to his feet. “Let’s just pop the stasis on this bitch and be home already,” he declared.

“…Right.”

Stasis was a timeless instant like plucking a guitar string. It was over instantly, but the sense of something much longer having happened was there in the back of the mind. Or possibly that was just an illusion, brought on by knowing it had happened.

Either way, the moment after Coombes hit the button, they were being hailed for boarding and customs inspection at the Cimbrean border checkpoint.

That was no longer the HEAT’s job, thankfully. Armstrong Station was home to a force of border patrol officers. Incoming traffic was shepherded to the station by one of the patrolling naval ships, but nowadays there was no lengthy wait while a shuttle came out carrying dudes in spacesuits. Instead, the engineers had built an inspection gantry a few hundred kilometers behind the station in its orbit. It was the next best thing to nothing, just a handful of docking bays and mooring points held together by a lattice of structural beams, but it was enough for the job.

The pressurized environment of a docking bay made the whole process massively swifter and easier. The ship was thoroughly picked over in a matter of minutes, their brains were scanned, and the black case containing the fruits of their mission was cleared to proceed purely on the authority of an AEC travel orders card with its Magic Blue Stamp.

Hoeff didn’t know if the ink was made from the blood of newborn royal children, or the souls of Irish fae, but somehow, somewhere, it had been decided in the legendary times of yore that only the vast powers of the Magic Blue Stamp could protect the border of any NATO-allied nation. For all the border dudes knew, that box could be an interstellar pizza delivery or a twenty kilo antimatter bomb. Didn’t matter: Coombes just showed them the card, and thanks to the green condition of his brain it went uncontested and unmolested.

From there, they were slave-jumped to a beacon inside the Cimbrean planetary shield and that was that. The ship did the rest of the work on autopilot, so they entertained themselves during the fifty minute descent by watching another episode of Planet Earth III at Daar’s insistence. He’d had enough of workhouse soap operas.

Powell was waiting for them on the concrete.

“Did you lads make contact?” He asked. Hoeff tried not to grimace. Powell usually made at least a little small talk—his straight-to-business greeting wasn’t an encouraging sign.

Coombes handed him the copper Faraday cage bag with Hoeff’s tablet inside it. “Yessir,” he said. “Whatever it was, it made contact in a weird way. It took over Chimp’s tablet and downloaded a bunch of stuff. We turned it off and stuffed it in the bag…”

Powell nodded, and handed the bag off to that black-furred Gaoian with the huge ears. Meereo. “Aye, thank you,” he said, and immediately confirmed Hoeff’s suspicions. “Now for the bad news. We’ve got another mission for you already so you only get two days turnaround. And Daar?”

Daar straightened from his usual shambling posture into something straighter and more attentive. “Yes sir?”

“I’d go back to a short cut if I were you. It’s hot and humid where you’re going.”

Daar whimpered almost inaudibly. “Yes sir.”

Powell gave him a rare look of sympathy. “Aye. Go rest up, lads. We’ll take care of your stuff. Meet at the warehouse tomorrow afternoon at 1400, we’ll brief the mission and all your gear. Ship should be turned around and ready by then.”

He gave them an intense looking-over almost like being inspected on parade, but it ended in a short-lived expression of tight satisfaction. “Dismissed.”

It was a surreal end to a surreal mission. All those soaking, filthy days in the forest had come to an end practically with a snap of their fingers, and they were turning around onto something else straight away. No downtime, no debrief, nothing.

No closure, either. Whatever had spoken to them via the tablet in Meereo’s paws had known Coombes’ name. But watching it go, Hoeff knew for absolutely certain that he’d never know that story.

He sighed, put it out of his mind, and trudged toward the showers. At least he could finally get some hot water and a dry bed.

He’d trade a mystery for those basic comforts anyday.

Date Point: 13y11m1w AV
Lakebeds National Park, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“…Confession time?”

“Mm?”

“…Cimbrean is beginning to feel like home.”

“…It is, yeah.”

There was never going to be any doubt that Cimbrean was an alien world. The trees were…well, they were trees, because it turned out that wood was a great thing to make big plants from no matter what planet they evolved on. And when it came to extracting chemical energy from sunlight in a way that living organisms could metabolize, photosynthesis was the only game in town. There were other options, but none that were quite as efficient.

And leaves were leaf-shaped because leaf-shaped was a good shape for a leaf.

Life, it turned out, selected for what worked. And what worked on one planet tended to work on other planets too. Which meant that nature kept coming up with the same solutions again and again.

But they weren’t Earth trees. They weren’t fir, spruce, cedar and pine. Hickories, cherries, oaks and maples weren’t native to Cimbrean.

One day, the native pinkwoods, sandbarks, fuzzy puddle and chopstick trees would all be gone but for now they could still be found in their native habitat. Still being roosted in by native avalons, crabwings and perwicketties. Still with Cimbrean Tea growing in thickets around their roots.

Julian wasn’t about to miss an opportunity like that. So when their four-day break came along at the end of two non-stop weeks of work and training, he dragged the girls out of bed at what Allison called “the-fuck-time-do-you-call-this o’ clock” and they’d hiked twenty minutes in the gray-blue pre-dawn light through loose deciduous forest still soft with the scent of last night’s rain.

They sat on the flat rocks in the middle of river Dagnabbit and let the cold water flow over their bare feet while they ate their breakfast and watched the sun come up.

Xiù wiggled her toes in the sandy gravel and smiled. “Yeah…Home,” she agreed wistfully.

“It’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” Julian mused. “Just us, a little house and lots of land.”

“We had that in Minnesota,” Allison pointed out.

“It was nice, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Yeah it was…” Allison sighed. “…sometimes I dream about that house.”

“Me too.”

“Me three,” Xiù sighed.

“Just…us,” Julian mused.

“And the beavers,” Allison teased.

“And…kids.” Xiù blushed.

“Yeah,” Allison sighed, surprising them both. It took her a second to notice them staring. “…What? I fucked up as a mom once. It’d be nice to try again…Do it properly…Someday.”

“Someday,” Xiù nodded.

“Kids would be nice,” Julian agreed.

Allison grinned. “Let’s face it, our kids would be fucking gorgeous.”

“And smart.”

Julian chuckled. “And we’d spoil them rotten.”

There was a long, wistful silence full of the texture of water and wind in the trees, punctuated by alien birdsong and the occasional splash of a leaping alien fish.

Allison shook herself out of her reverie. “…Someday,” she repeated. “Maybe.”

“When we can,” Julian said.

Xiù nodded. “When we’re not needed any more.”

Somehow that was a more melancholy thought than Julian felt prepared for. To judge by their expressions, the same was true for the girls.

Rather than let them dwell on it he reached out to either side and pulled them both close, a gesture that was alarmingly easy with his newfound strength. They felt lighter now, and more fragile, even though intellectually he knew they were just as tough as ever. His months of ongoing training with Warhorse had him tipping the scales impressively and on the hunt for more generous clothing. It was a heck of a confidence-builder…and also a little scary.

Thank fuck for Allison: She had a sixth sense, sometimes. “Careful, Etsicitty,” she teased, and jabbed him in the ribs. “Those guns aren’t toys.”

Julian grinned and kissed her. “I’ll be careful.”

“Good boy. Gotta practice safe…” she trailed off as Xiù’s phone rang. “Thought we weren’t supposed to be called today?”

“Unless…” Xiù fished the phone from her pocket and swiped at the cute little mouse hologram it was projecting. “Xiù Chang?”

Julian couldn’t quite make out what she was hearing, but he recognized Firth’s cadences regardless. He had a voice like rock-crushing machinery even in tiny tinny ear-strain sound.

“…Oh. Wow. Yeah! Uh…well, we’re hiking in Lakebeds Park right now. Oh, good. ”

“Babe?” Allison asked.

Xiù lowered the phone. “…The JETS team is back,” she said. “And they’ll be ready in a few days.”

Allison threw her head back and aimed a relieved sort-of-smile at the sky. “Jesus. It’s about fucking time.”

“Heard that!” Firth called over the phone. Xiù pressed it to her ear again.

“Okay, well…they have their own ship, right?” She nodded, and then her eyebrows knotted together. “They called it what?…Really? That’s, um…okaaay. No, I mean…yeah, I guess if he owns it I guess he can call it what he likes, but…really?”

“Babe?” Allison asked. Xiù gave her an I’ll-tell-you-later shrug.

“No, we’ll enjoy the rest of our day here,” she told Firth. “I’ll call Chiune Station and tell them to prep Misfit but…Yeah. See you tomorrow, then. You too.”

With the call over and done with she put the phone back in her pocket wearing a complex medley of emotions that were probably identical to Julian’s own. Elation, yes. Relief. Release. Uncertainty. The mild, addictive terror of being about to leap into the unknown again.

“…Well,” she said. “So much for our days off.”

Date Point: September 13y11m1w1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: MSGT Derek Coombes

Master Sergeant Coombes made a point of finding time in his busy schedule to see me today. He has only a few days of turnaround time before his next mission, but an event during Operation SILENT ARCHER is preying on his mind, and he was keen to process it so that he can, in his words, “have a clear head for the next one.” He spent most of the session pacing the room, though he did sit down toward the end of the session and played with the therapy dog.

He is a career operator with a storied and heavily classified history of work as a Green Beret before transferring to become NCO in charge of the inaugural Joint Extra-Terrestrial Scouts unit. Three years ago he participated in Operation EMPTY BELL (see attached notes) following which he was awarded a Purple Heart after suffering a gunshot wound to the lung: said injury is now completely healed and does not trouble him.

According to his records he sought counselling after that mission, in which two of his squad were KIA. He states that he “needed a little help” to cope with his injury and with their deaths but denies any long-term difficulties.

To summarize: Operation EMPTY BELL was an escort operation initiated by an agent of BIG HOTEL, who wished to provide intelligence but requested to speak with a specific individual, referred to hereafter as BLOWN ASH.

Coombes states that BLOWN ASH treated his wound after he was shot, and that she, quote: “literally saved [his] life.” He expressed the belief that there “was some chemistry there” and confided that he recently turned down her invitation to a dinner date.

During operation SILENT ARCHER, Coombes and his unit made contact with an anonymous intel source. He states categorically that this contact was not human, and that it appeared to be a sapient digital entity of some sort. He describes that the contact’s method of communication was “strange” and “janky” but that it unmistakably claimed to be a version of BLOWN ASH.

When asked to clarify, he states that the contact used a clear and identifiable image of BLOWN ASH to introduce itself and described itself as having been, in its words, “StolenKidnappedTaken” and “InterrogatedDecompiledMurdered.” He recalls that it claimed to have somehow rebuilt itself, and that it claimed to not be the same person and is, quote: “NotSelf” and “NotWhole.”

When asked how such a thing might be possible he simply shrugged. He describes his own emotional state as “confused” and “off-balance.” I asked him whether he felt that he has in some way failed BLOWN ASH, to which he replied in the affirmative.

I reassured him that his disturbed feelings are probably the normal and healthy reaction to such a unique circumstance. He suggested that he will probably feel better with “time, hard work and some perspective” and I suspect he is right. I have given him some “mood-boosting” breathing exercises to try and asked him to see me again once his next assignment is complete: he assured me that he will do so, and left my office in a visibly better mood than when he arrived.

-Lt. K Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 13y11m1w3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Singer

The night of Tarek’s death had changed things for the worse. It wasn’t that anybody blamed Yan for what had happened, or what he did…but the peace had broken, and was now only being held together by fear. One or two of the smaller tribes, the ones furthest out on the fringes of the settled valley, had already decided to take up their camps and scatter to the winds.

The remainder…were unhappy. Everybody had heard Tarek’s words, and as idiotic as he’d been he had put questions in their head. Questions about Yan and his motives. Questions about steel, and whether it was a good magic.

Questions about the strange, quiet ‘Sky-Thinker’ who had taken that magic and made it his like nobody else. Vemik tasted of the forge now, and nothing else. Even when he went on a hunt, even after the nights he spent in the Singer’s hut, the sharp, sour taste of steel hung around him like a fog.

To the Singer it tasted strong, and excited. To others who had never met the Sky-People, it was beginning to taste evil.

The Singers were in agreement—it was Taking-Magic of the most powerful kind. As powerful as the giving-magic of childbirth, but no woman could bear a child as often or as surely as Vemik and his apprentices could make good steel tools.

The balance was failing. And with it, the peace.

Which was why The Singer had decided to learn it.

Singers and Dancers stood between the magics: They learned both. They healed and fed and raised the children and kept the homes as women, but they hunted as men. Each wore the blood-markings of her first kill forever, tattooed into her face.

If she had to wear the burn-scars of a ‘smith’ as well, then so be it.

Plus, it would be good to take Vemik’s mind away from his troubles. He had been too sombre since Tarek’s death and the taking of his tribe. She missed his boyish enthusiasm—the intense, unhappy man beating on steel throughout the day was not the man she loved.

Though he always had a smile for her.

“…You look rested today.”

“Yewi’s child came easily,” The Singer told him. “Strong, and warm…he barely cried, too.”

Vemik nodded. He didn’t stop working as he spoke, but continued to treadle the leather ‘bellows’ with his foot. “That’s good. I always worry for you after difficult births.”

“Worry after the mother,” she told him. He nodded and half-smiled, and she saw in the lines around that smile that he was exhausted to his soul. “…And after yourself,” she added. “Your dreams still haunt you?”

He nodded, and glanced over his shoulder as his tail reached out to wrap around the tongs and deliver them to his hand.

“I had a new one last night,” he confessed, reaching into the glowing coals with them to turn today’s blade over.

“So that’s why I woke up cold and alone…”

She meant to tease him. Instead he nodded, and gave her a sorrowful look.

“…What was it?” she asked.

Vemik shrugged. “I never remember clearly. Faces. Fire. But this time…this time I dreamed that the Sky-People really were some kind of dream we had. Or a trick by some prankster god. Something…I dreamed they weren’t real.”

“I can see why you came to the forge,” she said, and reached out to clean a black smudge from his face. “To have something real of theirs.”

He nodded again. Apparently the steel in the coals was satisfactory because he pulled it out, laid it on the anvil and gave it a solid blow with the hammer. Stuff that was stronger and harder than stone when cold instead moved like clay as he hit it.

“You’re making it a different shape?” she asked.

“This is…a bit like making something that’s an axe and a knife in one tool,” Vemik said. “It’s heavier at the end so it swings with more strength, but the blade comes all the way down. It will cut young saplings for poles like they’re made of nothing.”

“Did Jooyun teach you that?”

“No. I just…the sky-word is ’expewimented’ I think.”

Five more hammer blows and Vemik was apparently satisfied. He thrust the blade back into the forge with a crunch of charcoal and ash.

“…They should have been back by now,” he said.

“They said it would take time. And that they might not be able to come back, too.”

“I know. I know all that. I just…” Vemik closed his eyes for a second. “Our daughter died, Singer. And now men have died and women were…Taken. Because we came here. Because they told us to.”

That wound was still bleeding for her as well. “You blame them?”

“No.” He shook his head fiercely. “I…only want it to have been worth it. But I don’t even know if it can be.”

The Singer nodded, and hugged him close.

“I feel the same,” she said. “She was my child too. I…if the gods themselves had come before me and told me to choose between ending her life myself, or watch them destroy all the People…”

“Your thoughts know the right thing to do, but your breath knows differently,” Vemik finished.

“…Yes.”

Vemik held her for a few minutes, until the steel was ready again. He picked it up and she watched him hammer on its edge, forging it most of the way toward sharpness. His apprentice would still spend a day with several wet stones making it properly sharp, but it was a beginning.

“…They taught us a valuable lesson, at least,” she told him as he returned it to the forge for the last blast of fierce heat that came before the blade was plunged into water.

“What?”

“They told us to look to ourselves to solve our problems,” she said.

“That they did. We can’t look to them to make our lives better. We have to craft our own steel.”

“…Even if steel is part of the problem?” The Singer asked, carefully. Vemik’s foot paused in treadling the bellows.

“…I know the talk,” he said eventually, and his foot started moving again. “And what some of them call me. Vemik evil-touched. Vemik sky-poisoned. When Yan hears them he makes the man who said it take it back…”

“And you?”

“The day a man is foolish enough to say those things where I can hear him will be the last day he says them,” Vemik promised solemnly. “But so far, none of them have.”

“You aren’t eager for that to change…” the Singer observed.

“No.”

“Good.” She brushed a fleck of debris out of his crest. “I know the other men have to see your strength, but you are different, Vemik. You always were…And I like it. I don’t want you to be like my uncle.”

“…You don’t?”

“We have enough Yan,” she said, and kissed him. “We need a Vemik too. But steel is causing problems, my love. The other Singers worry that there is too much taking-magic now and that it may soon become wild, like stampeding Werne. And if they’re right, Tarek’s tribe will only be the first.”

Vemik thought about that for some time but his foot never stopped moving. He thought and worked until the blade was brighter than she had seen before, and then in one smooth movement he plucked it from the fire and thrust it into the long, thin clay water bowl he kept beside the forge.

Underneath the vicious roar of bubbling water, there was a clear and sharp ping!

“…Godshit.”

“What?”

Vemik grunted, and removed the quenched blade from the water. It hissed like meat cooking on a hot rock, and steam flooded off it as he studied it ferociously in the sunlight.

“…Ruined,” he declared. “Cracked all the way through.”

She blinked, genuinely surprised. She hadn’t known that was even possible. “Cracked? How?”

“It’s…each thing I make has a different…love of heat. I think I made this one too thin and it got too cold too fast. They’re…picky about how you treat them.”

“You make it sound like steel is alive.”

“It almost feels like it is, sometimes. With some blades I have have to be gentle, while others just can’t be beaten too hard.”

“…Hmm.”

“Singer?”

“Nothing. Well…something. Maybe. If it’s almost alive then perhaps this isn’t as much of a taking-magic as we thought. You make it sound like you have to nurture them…”

Vemik trilled softly, the first time she’d heard him laugh in too long.

“You know,” he said, “If you want to learn how to make it you only have to ask.”

“…You know me too well,” The Singer told him, but she was trilling a laugh herself. “But…yes. I think it might be wise. The peace is being picky right now. Perhaps if a Singer learned this magic, it would dispel some of the fear.”

“Jooyun didn’t like the idea of it being a Taking-Magic,” Vemik recalled thoughtfully. “Maybe…maybe that would be wise.”

“So teach me.”

“Yan has all his apprentices make tongs first…” Vemik mused, “But for you…I think I have a different idea. We’ll need…most of the same tools, actually.”

He turned and collected a few tools that were hung behind the anvil. “Hmmm…Center punch, yes….and a drift…yes. Actually, that should be all we need.” He turned around and grinned the way he always did when a new thought was filling him with life. She was glad to have him back.

“You’ll find this useful!” he promised. “You can hang things with it, tie things to it, weave a basket around it…Godshit, I bet you’ll have all the other Singers jealous! And it should look beautiful too, with a strong ‘Damascus’ pattern…”

“Good…” The Singer said slowly, growing just a little impatient now that she was involved, “but what are we making?”

Vemik grinned at her.

“It’s called a ‘ring’,” he said.

Date Point: 13y11m2w AV
Chiune Station, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Clara Brown

Taking Daniel Hurt along for the ride had been part of the plan right from the start.

The question of where to actually put him had resulted in a moment of tension. The hab room…sure it had a bed, and the kitchen, the table, the bathroom and shower. So he’d argued that he’d figuratively sleep on the couch.

The trio had had a hive-mind moment and told him in certain terms that while they liked him well enough and were happy with their professional relationship, there was no way they’d be happy with him sleeping in their bedroom. He was welcome to ride along, but he could bring his own copy of Clara’s pop-up hut.

Dan wasn’t unreasonable, but he also pointed out that it probably wasn’t safe for him to sleep outside at first. Later, sure, but immediately after introduction? He’d suggested the mission prep room instead, and Allison had just shrugged and said “Sure. You can try sleeping in there tonight.”

The constant roll and gurgle of the water processor, the roar of the air system and the unfiltered sounds of *Misfit*‘s mechanical guts churning away even in idle made for an impossible sleeping environment, as Hurt had instantly discovered. And that was before he finally nodded off into a restless slumber and after a minute of stillness the power management system’s motion sensor decided that the room was now empty, prompting it to turn off the gravity. The shift from Earth gravity to Cimbrean gravity had instantly jolted him awake again.

Misfit had a soundproofed, insulated and pressurized hab room for a reason—the rest of the ship just wasn’t a restful environment by anybody’s standards. The lab, sample storage and engineering didn’t have enough floor space, the pantry was too full and too cold, and the pilot’s seat was A: custom-built to Xiù’s measurements, and B: designed to keep her upright, awake and alert.

Daniel had suggested a hammock in the airlock, and the idea had immediately been vetoed by Clara on safety grounds, not to mention sentimental ones. Her father had been fatally wounded in that airlock after all.

Clara tried her best to be a level-headed and practical person, but that fact cut just a little too deep. The idea of somebody sleeping in there made her feel sick to her stomach. It was hard enough just having to go through that airlock, or see it. Let alone send it away to an alien world.

Thus the discussion had bounced back and forth until finally an alternative presented itself.

“I can’t fucking believe they called it the Drunk On Turkey…”

Allison folded her arms and shook her head as she watched the JETS ship align itself over the landing pad and lower itself onto the concrete with a kind of artless straight-line stiffness that suggested it was completely on instruments. A human pilot would have been more graceful.

Misfit had instruments, but Xiù claimed that she could literally land on a dime from all the way across a star system without turning them on, and Clara believed her. The Drunk On Turkey on the other hand was Gaoian-made and probably didn’t even need a pilot at all thanks to the hundred-year tech advantage, but it was just…lacking that balletic quality.

“Well, the acronym is DOT…” Julian observed.

“Bet that’ll piss them off if we call their ship that,” Clara said.

“Mm,” Allison nodded. “You heard about that ship some dude built in Folctha years ago now, out of junk and spare parts?”

“No?”

“Yeah. Back when there was still wreckage around from some battle. Apparently the crazy asshole cobbled a ship together out of the scrap and called it Spot.”

“Christ,” Julian shook his head. “Spot, Drunk On Turkey, My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon…Misfit almost sounds like a normal name next to those.”

“I like Misfit,” Clara told them. “It just…uh…fits.”

“You think we picked good?” Allison asked.

“Yeah. You did.”

“Thank fuck they agreed to take Dan along for the ride,” Allison said. “That argument was getting old real quick.”

“Mm. A day or two of their company and he might come hammering on our airlock…” Julian warned.

“And I will smile and turn over in my sleep,” Allison said, sweetly.

Clara just laughed silently through her nose. She watched as DOT—and she would now never not think of the ship by that name—dropped a ramp from under its shovel-shaped nose for the crew to disembark. Clara would have preferred a ramp for Misfit, herself, but the ship’s design just hadn’t left an appropriate place for one. Not without dramatically and unacceptably increasing its mass, anyway.

Still, maybe it was just loyalty to her own creation, but she quite liked *Misfit*‘s steel ladder and cargo dumbwaiter. They were caveman-simple, reliable and sturdy.

The JETS team clearly thought their ramp was cool, though. They ambled down it while it was still unfolding itself, and Walsh definitely had a swagger in his step when he alighted off its end exactly as it finished deploying.

“Ain’t she beautiful?” he called.

Allison and Julian shared a mutual tolerant glance, then Julian shrugged and called back. “She looks more like a dick than ours does, I’ll give you that.”

Walsh blinked, frowned, then turned and considered the Drunk On Turkey with his head on one side.

“…I don’t see it,” he said after a few seconds.

“Gotta be honest babe, neither do I,” Allison whispered.

Julian grinned. “Yeah, but it shut him up,” he murmured, causing Clara to stuff a hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle.

Daar saw it though, and straightened up to give Walsh a swat with the back of his paw. “They’re messin’ with you,” he said. He’d shaved right down to the silky underlayer of his fur, and that change had taken some of the shaggy feral murder-beast edge off him and replaced it with sheer muscle definition. He looked as big as a bear and as lean and fit as a fighting dog.

Walsh wasn’t easily deterred. “Nah, bro. I think I see it. Like, the engine nacelles at the back there, and…”

Daar turned and considered the ship for a second then shrugged, dropped to all fours and padded lazily away from him.

“If you think dicks work that way, whatever…” he growled.

“Admit it, part of you is curious about the spinny bit on the top.”

“I’ve seen what ‘yer packin’ down there Tiny, and that spinny bit can’t possibly be normal.”

“I’ve seen you Tiggs, and if you think you get to define normal, then—”

“Oh yeah,” Allison interrupted sarcastically. “Workin’ with you four is gonna be great. I was just saying to Clara this morning, what my life really needs is more conversations about dick.”

She got a selection of chuckles plus a deep chitter from Daar, and smiled. “So…I’d ask how Drunk On Turkey there stacks up against Misfit, but I’m guessin’ that kinda information is confidential.”

Coombes nodded. “Pretty much. But…you got a good ship there. I’ll say that.”

“And she’s ready to fly,” Clara chimed in, inwardly glowing with pride.

“What, no pomp and ceremony?” Walsh asked. “Where’s the band and the dude in a fancy suit to wish us godspeed and all that shit?”

“Humans are weird,” Daar grumbled indulgently, while draping his weight affectionately around Walsh’s shoulders.

“If we’re very very lucky,” Julian said, “We might just be able to sneak away before the dude in the fancy suits notices.”

“Wait. Is that the fat man who smells like dry cleaning and too much drama?” Daar asked.

“He wears a paisley cravat…” Clara shuddered.

Daar tilted his head. “I’m gonna regret ‘Googling’ that, aren’t I?”

“Nah. It’s just a frilly silk cloth around the neck, and paisley’s just a stupid-ass pompous fabric pattern,” Hoeff told him. “But it means he’s a cu-” he caught himself mid-slur, made eye contact with Allison and morphed the word awkwardly into “-ooomplete poser.”

“Oh, okay,” Daar said giving every indication he didn’t get it and no longer cared. “Plus, I mean, he’s not all bad. He’s friendly for-real, I can smell that. Just…that cologne.”

“It ain’t cologne, bruh. It’s fuckin’ perfume. There’s a difference.”

“Yeah, I looked it up. The difference is in the strength of the solvent and the composition of the base and top notes, and what that composition’s family might be is actually dependent on who mixes it and what language you’re speaking. So…which language?”

Six humans took a moment to gave him the same faintly incredulous look.

“What!? Have you looked at my face? This nose ain’t for show! That stuff is actually interesting.”

“It is, huh?” Allison—a woman whose only forays into the world of perfume had involved borrowing Clara’s—asked with obvious skepticism.

“Yeah! Some of your ‘colognes’ are more complex compositions than a woman’s full-strength perfume, did you know that? Hell, Rebar’s got one that has, by my estimation, at least thirty different scents in its mid- and top notes, though everything he wears has big sandalwood and civet musk base notes. Ooh, and leather too. He has good taste, I think.”

“…Huh.” Clara managed. She personally couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d launched into a complex oenological lecture and revealed himself to be a sommelier. Daar pant-grinned at her.

“You wear Signature Sin, right? I like that one. It’s…arrrgh, English ain’t got the word. Closest I can think of is ‘luxurious.’”

Walsh shook his head and knocked him on the upper arm. “Daar, stop flirting with the nice human lady.”

“I’m not flirting! Can’t I just banter?”

“Nah brah, you’re totally flirting.”

Clara was astonished to find herself blushing. She cleared her throat so as to interrupt them and wrench the subject back to business, and made a mental note that Dane was not going to find out about that conversation.

“Uh…Look, we’ve been waiting for this for months now,” she said. “The ship’s ready, the provisions are loaded, the crew are ready…right?” she checked with Allison and Julian who both nodded vigorously. “So as soon as Xiù and Daniel are here…”

“And this.” Coombes handed Allison a jump beacon minisat in its cardboard tube packaging. “Tuned and ready to bring us in on your go.”

“Gotcha.” Allison took it and stuffed it into her pocket. “We’ll need to spend a day or two doing a slow approach…”

“Yup, we got briefed. We’ve got enough provisions for a week, if we need.”

“Only a week?”

“Yup! We’re bringing a jump portal with us so we don’t need to worry about food and basic supplies. It’s just the equipment that won’t fit through that we’ve gotta take with us. That’ll be a bitch…”

Julian made a noise something like a chuckle and a groan, and shook his head ruefully. “‘Horse knew! No wonder he went after me so hard!”

Walsh gave him a grin and crossed his huge arms over his chest. “Well, I mean…why wouldn’t we use it? And by the look of things you didn’t try very hard to say no, dude.”

He certainly hadn’t, and as far as Clara was concerned Adam and Dane’s little conspiracy had been wildly successful. Boys really were endearingly easy in some ways.

“Anyway, yeah.” Coombes got back on topic. “We’ve got a portable jump array and we can safely fire it once every couple of weeks. That’s the plan, anyway. Daar?”

“Got it, Boss.” The Gaoian dashed back up the ramp with startling swiftness considering his size.

Walsh shook his head indulgently. “He’ll take any excuse to move. Y’need help?”

Daar’s reply boomed hollowly down the ramp. “Nuh!” Almost as soon as he’d vanished into the ship, he came charging back out at an alarming clip considering the enormous pack he’d strapped on. For a second it looked like he was about to barge Allison off her feet, but instead he swung himself around on his forepaws and skidded to a halt at her side.

“It’s heavy!” He said, ridiculously, then cocked his head. “Where you want it?”

Allison blinked at him for a second, then looked toward Julian and raised an eyebrow with a smirk on her lips. “Better put those new muscles to work, babe,” she prompted.

Julian chuckled softly. “Yes ma’am,” he replied, and led Daar towards *Misfit*‘s cargo dumbwaiter. Clara and Allison watched as the Julian hauled the heavy pack off Daar’s back and into the dumbwaiter with a single massive heave, then swarmed up the ladder as easily as anyone else might dash up a small hill.

“Your dude really built himself up!” Walsh commented approvingly.

“Mmhm,” Allison agreed, with folded arms and an entirely unchaste smile in her eye. “We ain’t complaining.”

Daar chittered up at something that Julian yelled down, then proceeded up the ladder with a bit more care. Immediately there came the sound of heavy things being reshuffled onboard.

“Why are we carrying it, though?” Allison asked.

“Dude. Our ship’s even smaller than yours,” Walsh said, using his hands to illustrate.

“We got just enough room for the emergency food,” Coombes revealed. “And we’re already living dick-to-ass in there. As it is we’re gonna be all crowded up on the floor, feet in each other’s faces and everything.”

“What, no spooning?” Allison asked.

The noise of heavy stuff being moved stopped, and Daar flowed down from the airlock door like a mountain lion before bounding towards DOT on a quest to move more stuff. Julian took the more conservative route of sliding easily down the ladder and jogged after him.

“Combat spooning is always an option,” Coombes said drily. “Tiggs won’t give us much of a choice anyway.”

Allison’s smile got wider, and Clara caught herself giggling at the mental image. “Much better,” she said, then returned to business mode. “I’d better do the visual inspection…Clara, could you check and find out what the hell’s taking Xiù and Daniel so long?

Clara nodded and excused herself, pleased to have a chance to fetch Dane as well. The pair of them had a parting gift to share, an important one seeing as their own lives were about to enter a new chapter as they started working on BGEV-12.

She stopped by Daniel Hurt’s office first, and the source of the delay immediately became apparent: He’d had a last-minute academic’s panic and decided that he needed to double-check that he’d properly inventoried everything he was bringing.

He wasn’t being unreasonable, he was just nervous as hell. He’d been able to resist Xiù’s assurances that everything was fine, but when Clara joined her and ganged up on him he finally managed to get his head back in the right place.

“You’re out of time, Daniel. They’re loading the ship now so if you don’t get your cart over there, there won’t be room for anything.”

“…Right.”

Easy enough. Clara left him in Xiù’s capable hands, retrieved Dane from his office where she teased him slightly about the YouTube videos he’d been watching rather than working, and dragged him back to the concrete. They got there just as Daniel and Xiù were adding Daniel’s luggage to the pile.

In the interim the men had everything stacked out on the flightline and ready to go, with Hoeff and Coombes going over the inventory at the last possible second while Julian, Daar and Walsh did the actual heavy lifting and Allison was vanished inside *Misfit*‘s landing gear doing a cursory visual inspection of the ESFALS array. An alarming amount of cargo was already on board.

“…And our nutty professor’s stuff, I see.” Coombes said it gruffly but with a twinkle in his eye.

“Sorry. Just, uh, a last minute, uh…” Daniel cleared his throat. “…What now?”

“We load the ships up, then we suck in our guts and squeeze in there ourselves…Hope you didn’t have a big breakfast.”

“…Right.”

It was the last thing of any substance that any of them said for about an hour. There was a fair bit of talking, but most of it was simple communication of what each box was and where it was going and who was going to put it there. Allison and Xiù vanished inside to boot up the ship, fire up the fusion power and charge the capacitors. Julian, Dane, Walsh and Daar made a friendly contest out of who could move the most stuff, while Hoeff and Coombes mustered pallets in loading order and Clara mostly found herself standing around with Daniel at a loose end, fetching bottled water for the sweating quartet and staying out of the way.

And, in Clara’s case, quietly enjoying the view.

It was an entertaining hour, though. The minutes just…vanished. As the work wound down the banter got more frequent and less civilized, until Walsh and Daar seemed to be plunging headlong into a series of progressively less and less appropriate—and less plausible—anecdotes that nobody seemed to know how to stop.

That was, until Coombes looked up, straightened up, and spoke in a low voice.

“Old man’s here. With the Padre.”

He was indulging in considerable understatement. Chiune Station had just welcomed a convoy of black SUVs and a couple of motorbikes, which did a stately lap of the compound’s frontage before rolling out onto the landing pads.

The one in the middle wasn’t an SUV at all, it was the distinguished black state limousine decorated with Cimbrean’s flag. Governor-General Sandy’s car.

Somebody, apparently, was making a bigger deal of the departing mission than they’d first thought.

Clara was interested to see how the military personnel prepared as the cars slid to a halt only yards away—they tidied themselves up. Walsh and Coombes carefully put down what they were doing and threw on their blouses—possibly the stupidest name for a uniform shirt ever—while Daar quietly ditched his utility harness out of sight behind the cargo, and Hoeff adjusted his underwear.

“There goes the quiet no-fuss departure,” Julian muttered.

Coombes had enough time to chuckle darkly before the first car door opened and a muscular man with a handsome but stern face and piercing blue eyes stepped out, wearing the black beret of the SOR. Coombes immediately straightened and clearly enunciated a loud “Squad, a-ten-SHUH!” that caused the others to follow suit.

The big man nodded at them and they immediately went to some different posture, while Coombes and Daar walked up, stood tall again, and saluted.

“Good afternoon, Sir.”

“Put your men at ease, master sergeant.”

“AT EASE!”

To Clara’s eyes, the ‘at ease’ posture looked only marginally more comfortable, but she didn’t comment. She just took a step back and stood between Dane and Daniel, watching with interest. She’d kind of assumed that the military side of the operation had taken care of all their formalities before leaving HMS Sharman.

“What’s the officer’s name again?” she whispered to Julian.

“Powell,” he replied. “Lieutenant-Colonel Powell.”

“He looks kinda…severe.”

“He’s alright.”

*Misfit*‘s airlock produced its characteristic sharp CRACK! sound as its seal disengaged, and Xiù and Allison emerged from inside to see what was going on. Powell glanced up at them, gave them a nod of recognition, then returned his attention to Coombes and Daar while they slid down the ladder.

“What’s your status, Coombes?”

“Literally just finished packing, sir.”

“Aye. Sergeant Daar. Are you still prepared to go on this mission? We are aware of your many commitments…”

Daar duck-nodded furiously. “I know sir, but I am serving them better by going. The Gao will not leave a Brother people to suffer harm under the auspices of an uncaring Dominion. The Conclave and the Clan of Females have both endorsed this mission.”

Daniel grunted to Clara’s left. When she glanced at him, he murmured. “I think we just watched some serious power politics.”

Powell, meanwhile, had acknowledged the same thing with thanks and was lining his men up for the Governor-General’s benefit. The civilians were shepherded into position at the end of the line and left in varying states of mild confusion and bemusement when he called them all to attention yet again.

At that point he freed Governor Sandy from the state limousine and offered a salute, which was acknowledged with that smile and nod, the one that came installed as standard in heads of state the world over.

Clara wasn’t actually clear on what the governor-general was for in a constitutional sense, despite ample opportunity to learn. She’d been much too focused on work ever since leaving Earth. The most she’d paid attention had been some big televised occasion about “Opening the Thing” where he’d read a speech on behalf of the King of England, though the speech had actually been written by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. And there was a ceremonial thing about how he couldn’t just enter the Thing chamber but had to be invited in, a symbolic gesture to signify…

…And so on. How the hell a colony that wasn’t even ten years old already had traditions like that she didn’t know, and thank God the next election was years away—Maybe by the time it arrived, she’d have had time to figure out how the damn system was supposed to work and how the Social Alliance Party was different from the Democratic Liberal Party, and…all the rest of it.

Sandy himself was a willowy figure with more salt than pepper in his hair and a wide red sash over his right shoulder. He straightened his jacket upon alighting from the car, and began his inspection.

He met Daar with the kind of formal warmness that completely supported Daniel’s observations about the political power at work here. He exchanged polite small-talk with Coombes, Walsh and Hoeff. Allison, Julian and Xiù handled a relatively lengthy conversation with him in confident style born of far too much time in the public eye.

Daniel, meanwhile, seemed almost comfortable. Of course, he’d actively sought out TV shows and the celebrity of an academic and thinker, so his small-talk with the Governor-General ended with Sandy actually hinting that he’d quite like an autographed copy of The Road To Reason someday.

Clara wasn’t sure if she’d have wished for him to spend longer with Daniel or not. On the one hand she’d been growing sick with nervous anticipation, on the other hand it was a relief to finally pitch over the edge and take her own turn.

Powell introduced them. “Doctor Clara Brown, *Misfit*‘s chief design engineer, and her husband Dane Brown, the crew’s personal development manager.”

Sandy shook Clara’s hand with a sympathetic expression. “Doctor Brown, while it’s a pleasure to meet you I must offer my condolences for your father. I gather he was able to protect several others.”

To Clara’s distant astonishment, far from being trite or insufficient she actually found the simple words…moving. She blinked at the sudden complicated medley of sadness, pride and gratitude he’d managed to inspire in her and found herself smiling reflexively. “I…thank you. Knowing that there are some people alive today who wouldn’t be…it helped me,” she admitted.

“You have a lot to be proud of,” Sandy told her. “Not just in him, but in this ship. The first manned mission to Mars, and several other alien worlds besides is a profound accomplishment.”

“I hope her best missions are still ahead of her,” Clara replied. “Though, uh, technology is a ruthless process. As much as I love Misfit, the next one will be even better.”

“The next one?” Sandy looked amused. “Straight from project to project, then?”

“Absolutely,” Clara grinned, then decided that she had a good moment to give the crew her parting gift. “We have a lot to get done before the baby arrives.”

She’d waited three weeks since the positive pregnancy test for the look of shocked delight that burst onto her friends’ faces, and it was worth every second. Sandy caught it too, and chuckled. “I take it you were saving the news for today?” he asked. “Congratulations, both of you.”

“Thank you,” Clara said, and meant it.

Oddly, that seemed to conclude the formalities as far as Sandy was concerned. Coombes hadn’t been wrong about the padre though—Powell was standing patiently alongside the SOR’s chaplain. He was a former operator himself, quiet and self-possessed, and had dropped by himself some months previously to introduce himself once the details of the SOR’s involvement with the mission had been finalized.

The tiny Gaoian by his side had come as a surprise when Clara had first met them. He seemed a bit wobbly on his feet so Daar rushed to his side and offered himself as a steadying weight, which was accepted gratefully. The change was something; Daar went from boisterous and bouncy to solicitous and concerned in a fraction of an instant.

The chaplain stepped forward and everyone quieted down.

“We live,” he began, “As an old curse has it, in interesting times.”

Everyone nodded in agreement.

“I could remind you of the responsibility you chose to shoulder today. I could speak about how the future of an entire species will pivot on your decisions…but you know. You know better than anybody and you don’t need an old man to remind you. You’re carrying the lights of Mercy and Justice into a dark place, and we shouldn’t keep them waiting any longer.”

He looked around, nodded at whatever it was he saw, and then bowed his head.

The Gaoian intoned, “Let us pray.”

Date Point: 13y11m2w AV
Waterside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Movement. Blessed, glorious, free movement. Just the simple act of being able to jog by the river, in the company of his daughter and her dog.

It hadn’t worn off. After nine months Gabe kept expecting the sheer joy of his regained mobility to have faded, but it didn’t. Instead, like a hiker climbing a mountain and finding that the vista unrolled with every new rise in the landscape, Gabe kept finding new things to enjoy in his mobility as his fitness returned to and even surpassed what it had been before the shooting.

He had been given a gift: squandering it was unthinkable. And he was nearly able to keep up with Ava now. Just a few more months, and she’d be struggling to keep up with him.

It was just a shame that Jess hated jogging with a passion. She got her exercise tax deductions with yoga, tai chi and swimming. It would have been nice to have her along as well.

Still. It was a good opportunity to catch up with Ava when they stopped at the east end of the park for a quick break before they turned around to run back.

And his Father Senses had been tingling all morning.

“…So what’s his name?”

Ava blinked at him as she closed the top of her water bottle. “…Eduardo. How did you know?”

“You’ve been radiating deep, uh, satisfaction all day.”

“It’s just one date…The first date.”

“Gonna be a second, then?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Is he cute?”

“Try…Hnngh.”

Gabe laughed and parked himself against the handrail that ran alongside the river. “He got a brain in his head, too?”

“…He’s smart enough…”

Gabe chuckled again and shook his head. “You always did like ‘em a bit dense.”

“He’s a model. And he’s not dumb!”

“Never said he was—¡Desde luego! Hannah, your boyfriend’s here. ¡Llegas tarde, Bozo!”

The SOR’s giant mutt was trotting toward them with his huge rudder of a tail held high and a single enormous indestructible rubber “tennis” ball in his mouth. He seemed to have a magical sense of when and where he could meet up with Hannah, and as always he was a perfect gentleman.

It made it legitimately hard to deny him his fun. He parked his butt in the dirt a few yards from Ava, dropped the ball and let out one of those gut-punch barks of his.

“WURF!!”

Ava giggled. “¡Mira qué cabrón! I know why you’re here, don’t play innocent.”

Bozo was far more intelligent than any dog had a right to be. He cocked his head on one side and his tail excavated a fan-shaped indent in the trail.

Ava sighed, scooped up the ball and let Hannah off her leash. Both dogs were immediately locked onto it and circled around each other in hungry anticipation of the throw.

She didn’t keep them waiting. She turned, lifted her knee like a softball pitcher and sent the ball flying down the trail. It promptly became invisible in a cloud of paw-scrabbled dust.

Gabe watched them go with a grin, then gestured over his shoulder to suggest they resume their jog.

“So a model, huh?” he asked.

“Yeah. And an aspiring photographer. We’re, um…helping each other with our portfolios.” The redness in Ava’s cheeks was definitely more than just exertion.

“Uh-huh. And how much are you wearing in these portfolios?”

“Dad!”

“Uh-huh. I thought so.”

“There’s artistic value in the human body,” Ava said, affecting a dignified air.

“I’m sure there is.”

“It’s fascinated artists for centuries.”

“Mhmm.”

“And it’s important to have a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere during the shoot…” God, the way she blushed was adorable.

“So…dense, cheerful, and a god-like body, huh? I’m sensing a trend.”

“So I have a type, shut up,” she grumbled, though she was grinning.

“Just make sure you’re happy.” Gabe told her, though he couldn’t resist just a little more fatherly teasing.. “…And try not to wear yourself out too much!”

“…I’ll tr—Dad!!”

Trolling his kids was one of Gabe’s little joys in life, too.

A thought struck him. “Where are the dogs?”

Ava’s running shoes slid in the dirt as she came to an abrupt halt and checked behind her.

“…Oh Hell. It’s that time of year. I completely forgot!”

Gabe raised his eyebrow. “Somehow I bet Bozo didn’t. We’d better find ‘em quick.”

They turned back to the East, but barely made it twenty strides before possibly the worst sound Gabe could have heard in the circumstances reached their ears—kids, giggling.

There were four of them gathered on the trail with a soccer ball, pointing at something in the bushes and chattering excitedly among themselves. They looked up when they heard the adults coming and immediately tried to pretend they were angelic figures of purity and virtue and that nothing was funny at all. They weren’t very good actors.

The dogs didn’t have any such pretensions. Sure enough, they’d found a spot in the bushes and the look they gave Gabe was unrepentant and, in Bozo’s case, somehow smug.

“Oh, Hannah…” Ava groaned, and turned away shaking her head. The kids made themselves scarce, fighting to contain their laughter.

“…Cold water?” Gabe suggested.

“Too late.”

“…So…”

“Yeah. Hmm.”

Gabe sighed, turned away and let the dogs get on with it. “…How much do you know about raising puppies?” he asked.

Ava shrugged, glanced back into the bushes, then laughed and shook her head. “…Guess I’ll have to learn.”

Date Point: 13y11m2w AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Orbiting Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

“…Two more minutes?”

“I don’t think we can, Al…”

Allison sighed, and relaxed into a reluctant nod.

“…Okay.”

They stood together for two minutes anyway, watching Cimbrean turn below them through their viewing cupola. Misfit was in space again, where she was most at home. They were in space again…where they belonged.

It had been far too long in coming.

Xiù broke the silence again “Seriously. They’re gonna wonder what’s taking us so long…”

“Yeah…”

Allison nodded, and seemed to come back into herself. “…Yeah,” she repeated. “Ready.”

Xiù smiled, and kissed her. “Good.”

She got Julian’s attention and kissed him too. “Ready?”

He nodded. “More than,” he said, but cast one last glance back out the cupola. Cimbrean’s blue-green light left dark shadows on his cheek and nose, but his eyes were focused.

He nodded, turned away and took their hands.

“Just…Hard to believe we finally got here,” he said.

“It’s been a tough fight.” Allison agreed.

“Well…just in case it gets any tougher from here…I love you both.”

“You don’t need to tell us, dummy,” Allison told him, but she reached out and took Xiù’s hand as well, completing the triangle. “We know. …And I love you both too.”

“And I love you both three,” Xiù finished. They both rewarded her with nervous smiles.

Allison took a deep breath. “Are we actually ready now?”

Julian nodded. “…Yeah. I think we are.”

“Awesome.” Allison let go of their hands, and the triangle broke. “Let’s go make the future.”

They tore themselves away from the view, and went to work.

Date Point: 14y AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

“So the decryption keys it provided are bearing fruit?”

“More than.”

Gaoians, it had to be admitted, were alarmingly good at poker. They all used the same trick of sitting upright and forward with their ears pricked up and an expression of intense watchful interest on their faces that managed to give away absolutely nothing.

Genshi, however, could have made millions playing professionally. The closest thing he had to a tell was the subtle twitch of his nostrils when he first picked up his cards, and Knight was becoming convinced that it wasn’t actually a tell at all, but that the Gaoian was using his sense of smell to win.

Still, the fact that he and Costello had each won a few hands was encouraging. The humans weren’t out of the game yet.

Genshi tossed a chip into the pot with a claw, and Knight promptly folded. He couldn’t have articulated why, but somehow he knew not to challenge this one.

Costello gave the flop a long and thoughtful stare before calling, which immediately suggested confidence in his hand. “So between this…entity’s…gift to us and interrogating the Hierarchy Daemon we have interned at Camp Tebbutt we should be getting something soon?” he asked.

“Meereo and Niral are hard at work right now,” Genshi duck-nodded. He knocked on the table, and Costello dealt the turn. Genshi knocked again, Costello bid, and Genshi promptly folded.

“How long until we see results?” Knight asked as the Gaoian gathered the cards.

“Soon, we hope. Of course, it would go faster if we could educate some of your people in the principles involved.”

“Press down on one bubble and another pops up elsewhere,” Knight sighed.

Genshi flicked an ear at him. “I’m sorry?”

“It means we’re in one of those situations where if we solve one problem, we’ll create an equal problem somewhere else. We already have as many Longears in on this as is sensible, we can’t spare the ones we have to train human analysts, but if we don’t train more humans we’re going to need more Longears.”

“Mister Williams is a capable engineer, though like the Longears he’s much more focused on networks and communications. What we really need are Shortstride programmers but we’ve only just brought Champion Wozni on board.”

“I thought Mister Williams worked for Byron.”

“That’s the other Mister Williams. This Williams has been contracted by Meereo directly. Something about…well, forgive me but I am not a Longear. It’s a bit too arcane for me.”

“…How many Williamses do we have?” Costello asked.

“I am tempted to poke fun at your repeating surnames, but our Clans are hardly better.”

Knight paid the big blind. “It would be too much to ask that fighting an enemy with an æon-deep technological advantage should be easy…” he muttered.

“Fortunate for us that they decided not to remain corporeal,” Genshi said. “You ever wonder what…?”

His question went unfinished. All three of them looked up at the distinctive sound of a Gaoian at a blundering, headlong scrambling run slamming painfully into the wall at the far end of the hall where it turned a right angle.

Seconds later there was a desperate scratching at the door. A human would have been hammering on it with their knuckles.

Knight put his cards down. “Come.”

Sister Niral barged inside looking entirely feral. Her claws were out, she was panting heavily, her ears were plastered back on her scalp and even to a human’s nose she smelled sharply of distress. Genshi was on his feet in a heartbeat.

“Sister?”

Niral blinked at him, and then handed over a printout.

“Gao,” she choked out. “The Hierarchy, the Hunters. They’re going to hit Gao. Soon.”

++END CHAPTER 39++

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Thirty-four Deathworlders

Brian Berland, Adam Turnbull, André José Neves Marques de Ornelas, Andrew Ford, Aryeh Winter, Bartosz Borkowski, Ben Moskovitz, Ben Thrussell, Chris Bausch, Chris Candreva, Coret Trobane, Daniel R, Dar, Darryl Knight, Devin Rousso, Elliott Woods, Ignate Flare, Jamie Atkinson, Jim Hamrick, Jon, Krit Barb, lovot, Matt Demm, Matthew Cook, Nader Ghali, Nicholas Enyeart, Nick Annunziata, Parker Brown, Patrick Huizinga, Ryan Cadiz, Sintanan, Sun Rendered, tsanth, Volka…

As well as 42 Friendly ETs and 186 adorable, squishy little Dizi Rats

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 1—Instigation

Date Point: 13y11m2w AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Akyawentuo System, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

Cimbrean vanished. One second it was below them, round and green and inviting, and the next…

The stars flickered like a missing frame in a badly cut amateur movie. Different constellations, different planets. A different sun, its light a little whiter and harsher than Cimbreanstar’s gentle orange, in a different corner of the sky. *Misfit*’s canopy and Xiù’s helmet conspired to keep its light from blinding her.

“Jump complete,” Allison reported, for the log’s benefit rather than for the crew’s. They all knew how Misfit felt; she was their home after all.

Xiù didn’t reply. Her hand hovered above the emergency recall button and she stared up at the sensor panel like a gazelle drinking from crocodile-concealing murky waters. If there was so much as a flash, a hint of something decloaking to attack them…

Even the ship seemed to hold her breath.

“Hope I’m not cursing us here…” Julian ventured, eventually, “But I think we might be good. Nothing on sensors.”

“Same.” Xiù told him.

“Awesome.” Allison sounded relieved over the line from engineering. “Beacon away in three…two…”

There was the peculiar heavy clang through the hull of a little pressurized gasp of their air being released to blast the beacon microsat out from its launch tube.

Ten kilometers out the beacon spat into life and the spacetime around it pinched, twisted, collapsed and deposited twenty tonnes of badly-named Gaoian starship in their lap.

“Okay…” Xiù cleared her throat and hit the local radio. “Drunk on Turkey, EV-Eleven Misfit. Welcome to the Akyawentuo system.”

“Still can’t fucking believe they called it that…” Allison muttered over the internal line.

They got Daar’s enthusiastic rumble back in reply. “Hey, Misfit! Thanks for the welcome!”

“Sensors are clear,” Xiù told him with a smile. “Are you going to follow us in manually, or slaved?”

“Aww, I always listen to a strong female! What should I do?”

Outrageous. Xiù took her hand off the send button long enough to laugh disbelievingly and shake her head before replying. “Alright, leash yourself to my nav you giant furry flirt.”

“Controls…slaved. And I’m not flirting!”

Julian chuckled on the internal line. “Some fellas don’t know how not to flirt, huh?”

“Sure. Not flirting, just being friendly,” Xiù replied for both their benefit, and loaded their planned warp down to Akyawentuo itself. They’d weighed the risks and benefits of a slower-than-light approach, but even the quickest such orbit would have taken weeks. In the end, expediency had prevailed. Better to go now while they were sharp and ready, than have to while away days of travel time and maybe get caught napping if something went wrong.

“Intrasystem warp at point-three kilolights in three…two…”

The icon showing her where Drunk on Turkey was jolted astern, but that was the only indication that Misfit had just accelerated to three hundred times the speed of light. There was no other visual indication at first, until she became aware that one of the brighter motes of light she could see was drifting across the sky faster than the others. It flashed past unguessably far away to her right, and when she looked away from it she found that the sun had moved. Just an inch or two, but it was drifting as well.

Then it was drifting a little faster.

Then it shot a quarter of the way across the sky as Misfit slung herself around its solar shallows, scooping up energy before decelerating sharply to an abrupt halt over the marbled tranquility of their destination, more than a light-second out and halfway between Akyawentuo’s twin moons.

Again there was the tense minute of waiting with her hand on the emergency recall, but again…nothing.

“Well. If they didn’t notice two ships coming in at warp, I think we’re safe to say Big Hotel aren’t paying attention,” Allison declared.

“That’s our first prayer answered,” Julian replied. “Let’s get the surveysats out.”

Xiù dropped the *Drunk On Turkey*’s slaved controls and left the military ship to hold station. Seeding the planet’s low orbit with dozens of cellphone-sized satellites was *Misfit*’s job, and they’d only get in the way.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s find them.”

They couldn’t possibly land soon enough.

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Clan Straightshield Grand Precinct, Lavmuy City, Gao

Cytosis

“More trouble with the Whitecrests?”

“Champion Genshi has been a zephyr for weeks. Impossible to see, impossible to catch, and you only know he’s around after he’s already gone past.”

Cytosis let his biodrone duck-nod agreeably, with a mildly irritated set of the ears. Something had happened in the halls of power among all the important Clans, and even the Straightshields largely didn’t know what it was. Their own champion, Reeko, had been uncharacteristically inaccessible himself.

“I’d bet my claws against going blind at fifty that there was a Champions’ Conclave,” Father Rakkan declared.

“There hasn’t been one in centuries.”

“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Cytosis pointed out. It was the logical conclusion and there was no way that his host, the unfortunate Judge-Father Taarken, would have missed that. “The question is, why?”

He had his own dark suspicions of course, but no way of sharing them. Two of the Champions had gone off-network, implants removed. The rest had never had them in the first place, a fact that had simultaneously limited the operations of both Hierarchy and Cabal.

All across the Clans, formerly prominent Fathers were dropping out of favor while upstart Brothers and Officers were finding that their career trajectories had become unaccountably smoother. More and more, the most heavily augmented among Gao’s powerful elite were being promoted into positions of great prestige but limited influence.

That by itself was not quite conclusive—the Gaoians might simply have become infected by Human paranoia over neural augmentation—but it was suspicious, and alarming.

“Rumor from Cimbrean suggests some kind of…hm…friction between Daar and the Mother-Supreme.” Brother Aryo observed. He was tiny for a Straightshield brother, but the Clan made a point of taking in initiates who showed spirit and wit. He would never be a Judge-Father, but even Cytosis was impressed by the tiny Brother’s aptitude for politics, investigation and his encyclopedic knowledge of precedent.

“On what grounds?” Cytosis asked.

“Yulna has never been as…hm…subtle as her predecessor,” Aryo pointed out. “She travelled all the way to Cimbrean on a state visit and her first act there was to meet with him.”

“A rift between Stoneback and the Females would be historic,” Rakkan said.

“Epochal,” Aryo duck-nodded fervently.

“Certainly worthy of a Conclave,” Rakkan finished.

Judge-Father Shaal finally deigned to interject. “Ultimately, it isn’t our business,” he pointed out. “What Champions do between themselves is outside of our jurisdiction.”

“With respect, Shaal,” Cytosis replied on the grounds that his host was equal in rank to the battered old enforcer, “what Champions do between themselves inevitably drips down into the workhouses and the streets, where our Brothers have to clean up the mess.”

An insistent wheedling call for attention made itself known in the back of his mind, one that he couldn’t possibly ignore. He allowed Shaal to grudgingly concede the point, then plucked a tablet from his belt.

“…Perhaps I should check in with some of my informants,” he said.

“Your…hm…good friend Fiin?” Aryo asked.

Cytosis summoned the promising young Stoneback’s file. “I rather get the impression he’d like to disembowel me tip to tail. But he’s been…civil.”

“I have a patrol,” Rakkan said.

“And I should check whether any further evidence has come forward from that forgery case,” Aryo agreed. “But please…keep us informed, Judge-Father?”

Cytosis duck-nodded agreeably, sketched a gesture of respect to Shaal, and turned away.

He opened the link as soon as he could safely look distracted.

++0013++: Go ahead.

++0004++: <Terse> We are enacting a cleanse and reset protocol on the secondary control species. Code: Expose; Cleanse; Regenerate.

++0013++: <Surprise> So soon?

++0004++: <Firmly> With immediate effect. If we strike now we calculate favorable odds that the surviving Gaoian expatriates will be sufficient to rebuild the species under more secure influence. Your individual task code is: Curate; Diagnose; Rectify.

++0013++: Orders acknowledged and understood.

++0004++: Your point of contact for further developments is 0007. You may requisition 0138, 0514, 0665 and 0722 for support. Any questions?

++0013++: No.

++0004++: Good.

The link was terminated as abruptly as it had opened, leaving only the question of what, exactly, Cytosis was going to do.

Somehow, he suspected, there were no good answers.

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

The women were still being strange about letting Vemik near his own son, even though the baby was almost a season old. They seemed to feel that men shouldn’t pay any attention to their sons until they were old enough to learn how to hold a spear.

He’d gone to his own father for advice, and while Vemet was being sympathetic he was also largely not being much help.

“You don’t have a tit for him to suck on, so that makes you useless in their eyes,” he said sagely. They were relaxing together half-way up one of the Kettas near the village, watching clouds sulk among the mountains and sharing a small basket full of sticky berries and seeds that Vemet’s woman Ekye had made for them. The sap-stinger honey got all over Vemik’s fingers, but it was a rare treat: Vemet must have done something to make Ekye very happy recently.

“I’m not being strange though, am I?” Vemik asked. “It seems…natural. He’s my son, I want to spend time with him.”

“You aren’t being strange. Godshit, the way the women fought to keep you out of my hands when you were small…” Vemet sighed. “I don’t know why and the women say that men aren’t meant to know why, and that’s how night falls on it.”

“…I hate—” Vemik began.

“Yes, you hate not knowing the reasons,” Vemet finished for him. He trilled softly and gave his son an indulgent teasing grin. “In truth, I hate it too. But the world is too full of mysteries to solve all of them, Vemik. Let the women be women.”

He trilled again. “Besides,” he added, “You don’t have to clean the shit off his arse. That’s a duty I’m happy to let them keep.”

Vemik trilled too and scooped some more of the sweet mix into his mouth, but his heart wasn’t quite in it. Vemet noticed and put an arm around his son’s ever-broadening shoulders.

“…He’ll never replace the girl,” he said softly. “I know. Your mother and I lost our first as well. But don’t let that stop you from loving him, son.”

“Never,” Vemik promised. “I just…”

He hadn’t even properly formed the thought before he started speaking it, and he never finished it either. Both men nearly dropped out of the tree when a sound—a blessed sound, a sound Vemik had almost given up on ever hearing again—slammed down the valley with all the force of a boulder crashing down into a gorge.

Two sharp, low, crisp booms that rolled and bounced off the hills. The unforgettable sound of steel punching a hole through the sky from above.

Vemik looked at his father, both dumbstruck from the sudden change. Vemet was the first to leap down the tree and Vemik scrambled down after him, the sweet treat forgotten.

Children squealed and men and women alike ducked as not one but two steel flying-huts thundered over the villages, high up and faster than the wind. One was familiar: red and steel, square as an anvil, blunt as a rock. The other was longer, thinner, sharper, as if it was made to stab the sky. They growled as they soared out over the hills, fading to sharp glimmers in the distance that turned, slowed, rolled easily back toward the villages at gentler speeds.

And what a growl. Vemik had almost forgotten that sound, the deep grinding chant of forces he couldn’t begin to understand, straining to keep steel aloft. And behind it, a higher sound like the scream of a hunting bird but stretched and frozen.

The noises blended and changed each other as more metal than all the tribes could have made in a lifetime swung slowly to a halt above the clearing the People had made for them. He could see through the clear “glass” on the front of the square one as it dipped first and lowered itself softly onto the turf. Even behind her strange ‘helmet’ he somehow recognized Shyow, and she raised a hand to wave to him just for a moment before she returned them to her work.

Yet again, Vemik found himself struck by how delicately the huge lumpen weight of it kissed the earth. Something so big shouldn’t have looked so light.

The other sky-hut had no glass. It was as grim and as gray as an unfinished knife except for some sky-blue and yellow stripes on its upper surface and blue lights flashing across its body as it thumped down heavily beside the other ‘ship.’ Its legs bent and absorbed the landing just like a Person’s might when jumping down from a tree.

The growling, screaming sounds they made faded, changed, and died away. Not to silence, but to quiet enough that the other sounds could be heard—the familiar creaking and groaning of hot metal cooling down, and the peculiar whine of their metal skins opening here and there to reveal strange square bowl-like things that aimed themselves into the sky, tracked back and forth for a moment, and then went still.

There was a moment of perfect, awed stillness that Yan broke by barging through the gathered People with two hands of Given-Men behind him, dragging behind them a tail of fascinated, bewildered, scared and excited People from all the tribes.

”By all the gods…they’re actually real…” somebody muttered.

Yan apparently heard him, because he glanced in that person’s direction, then sighed heavily and at length.

“…I wish Tarek could have seen this,” he said.

Up behind her glass, Shyow finished whatever it was she was doing, and vanished backwards into the belly of her ‘ship.’ She wasn’t gone for long—only heartbeats later by Vemik’s reckoning, the ‘door’ on the side opened, and a familiar, strange but all-too-welcome figure stepped backwards onto the steel climbing-bars below and slid down to the ground comfortably.

Vemik wanted nothing more than to rush his friend from the sky and bowl him right off his feet, but Yan was the Given-Man here. While the rest of the People stood still and watched, he swaggered forward and stood as tall as he could to look Jooyun in the eye, even as Awisun slid down to earth behind him.

He let Shyow join them, quietly, and only once she’d lined up alongside the other two did he finally react: He grinned, bounded forward, and gathered the three of them up in a vast, crushing hug.

“You’re late!”

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

The reunion took nearly an hour, all told. Vemik, Vemet, The Singer, Yan himself…then there were introductions to the Given-Men, Singers and Dancers of other tribes, plus a number of other important men of influence.

The People had changed. Every man who looked even vaguely important was wearing a steel knife, and the Singer—the one from Yan’s tribe—was wearing three Damascus rings of stunning quality considering how new to the process of steelmaking the People must be…but the biggest surprise was Vemik.

Julian had been fantasizing about maybe finally keeping the eager young Ten’Gewek at bay, maybe not being so hopelessly overwhelmed by his raw physicality when they wrestled. That idea had been his Motivation through the worst of Adam’s training, and in the final months it was the thing that helped Julian push himself right up against his unaided limits, and stay there.

One look at Vemik put that dream firmly in doubt. The face was still his, maybe a bit more mature, but his hair crest was a more saturated shade of red and every athletic line of the young “sky-thinker” had filled out and hardened dramatically, neck, arms, tail and all. He looked like he’d been beating on steel every day since their departure.

Perhaps he had. A thought that left Julian feeling unaccountably annoyed in a strange, competitive way.

It was obvious that the alliance of tribes that Yan had built was a tense one. Several of them, including a few Given-Men, lurked on the periphery and talked warily among themselves. That was okay—they’d never expected this to be easy—but at least things had mostly worked out.

They were finally invited to sit down at the fire and trade their stories by the Singer, who had to gently nudge her uncle to remember his manners.

“A season, you said,” Yan reminded them when they sat. “It’s been nearly three.”

“Things were…difficult, at home,” Xiù replied. “…People died. Somebody tried to kill us.”

“Over us?” Vemet asked.

“Yes.” Xiù nodded solemnly. “People who thought we should just…leave you alone. That we’d hurt you more by being here.”

“Idiots,” Allison supplied. This drew a big grin and a trill from Yan.

“We had the same. Tarek, a Given-Man. He…thought I was trying to rule all the tribes. Thought it was all a trick.”

“We lost people coming over the mountains,” Vemik said quietly. “Some old, some sick…some young.”

Something about the way he said it…there was something painful that Vemik wasn’t saying, and the Singer wasn’t saying it either. She was holding a baby in her arms, but now he looked at it…it couldn’t be the same baby. Not after more than a year.

Xiù was just a second ahead of him. “Oh…no? Vemik? Singer?”

“Our daughter,” the Singer sighed. “She got the shivering-sickness, up in the cold among the mountains…”

Julian didn’t think twice about standing up and giving Vemik a crushing hug. It wasn’t remotely enough, nor was Xiù’s hug for the Singer, or the “I’m so sorry…”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Vemik replied.

“No, but…in English that means something like *‘I share your pain.’*” Julian explained.

“…Thank you.”

“But you’re here,” Yan said, with remarkable tact. “And you have another…what was the word, Vemik?”

“Ship,” Vemik told him. That particular English word was easy for the People to say.

“Yes. Some…powerful people. The leaders of our biggest tribes, they agreed to help.”

“There are others in that ship?”

“Yes. Four like us and one who’s…different,” Xiù said.

“Very different,” Allison added.

This earned them both a long, slow stare from Yan and a bewildered frown from Vemik.

“How different can a person be?” he asked.

“You’ll see…” Julian promised.

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Clockwise lane, Lavmuy City Ring Road, Planet Gao

Cytosis

Even in the age of gravity manipulation and forcefields, wheels had their advantages. A wheeled vehicle held firmly to the ground by gravity was more agile in its way, able to grip on an asphalt surface and maneuver without the characteristic skidding experienced by all hovering vehicles.

Hoverers had their advantages too, chief among them being lower maintenance costs. No tires to wear out, no suspension to align, and they were a lovely smooth quiet ride. But for sheer control and performance on the road, wheels won every time.

And—a minor heresy on Cytosis’ part—they were fun. He was riding a single-person transport not dissimilar to a motorcycle, with a low aerodynamic profile and a thundering beast of an electric powertrain that howled pleasingly under his borrowed body.

The Igraen digital reality had wonders that no corporeal creature could ever understand or begin to grasp…but it didn’t have the feeling of the wind whipping at his fur, ears and whiskers as, with a subtle shift of his bodyweight, he threaded between two thundering goods vehicles and briefly found himself hurtling down a narrow steel canyon at speed.

<Exhilaration>

The exit ramp to the Lavmuy starport spun down, around and through one of the gleaming glass needle skyscrapers that were Lavmuy’s architectural signature. Wi Kao had its lakes, gardens and landscaped parks, Aney Shen was oddly charming in a square, brutal, no-nonsense way and Yamwoi was a handsome stone throwback to the days before Fyu, Tiritya and the Clan of Females.

And all of it was soon to be destroyed. Those glass spires would be smashed, the stone buildings would be rubble. Aney Shen’s dynamic, exciting marketplaces would be charnel houses, and the parks of Wi Kao would be perfect for the Hunters to land their slave transports and march the cubs and females into their bellies.

Cytosis had existed for nearly two hundred thousand years by the Igraen reckoning. He had participated in three xenocides. Now, the depths of his guilt and remorse were impossible to calculate.

The galaxy was a great game of conflict, and the only winning move was to forestall extinction for as long as possible. That was…Doctrine. Even the Cabal adhered to it as truth—The Igraens planned to exist until existence in any form was simply no longer possible, and had controlled the galaxy for thousands of millennia in support of that goal. Now that their winning strategy was no longer winning, it was necessary to pursue an alternative.

But still Cytosis wondered if they had already gone too far. Perhaps forgiveness was already impossible. Perhaps, at long last, the Igraens were destined to lose the Greatest Game and the trend of their future history simply had too much momentum to deflect.

And even more quietly, he wondered if there might not be an important distinction between existing and living.

++SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER Cytosis HAS JOINED THE SESSION++
++WELCOME, USER Cytosis++
++YOU ARE ENTERING CLOSED SESSION…<ERROR>++
++<SESSION LOG NUMBER NOT ASSIGNED>++

++Proximate++: Let me guess: They’re destroying Gao.

++Anoikis++: Idiots.

++Cytosis++: That’s right. They think they can still salvage the Gaoians as a control species. Local agents have been tasked with Rectification.

++Anoikis++: Inspire the survivors to blame the Humans for what happened.

++Cytosis++: Exactly.

++Metastasis++: …What happens if the Humans lose their closest allied species?

++Cynosure++: They will be very angry, and we will be fucked.

++Metastasis++: You don’t foresee any possibility of victory even then?

His biodrone’s reflex to produce a derisive snort was so powerful that Cytosis would have had to suspend concentrating on the road to suppress it. Carrying on the conversation while angling himself smoothly onto the passenger vehicle approach to the starport was already quite enough of a distraction.

++Cynosure++: As I always said: If not them, then somebody else. For the moment, we have reason to believe that the Humans will prefer not to exterminate us in the event that they win. We have no such confidence in any other species, and we will lose even that if the Hierarchy destroy the Gaoians.

++Proximate++: So. We need to save the Gaoians…I presume you have a plan, Cytosis?

Cytosis looked up at the slender white needle of the spaceport’s traffic control tower to his right, and thought hard as he angled the motorcycle toward its access gate. As a Straightshield Judge-Father, he would be able to simply walk in.

After that…

++Cytosis++: …I have the beginnings of one. We just need to leak the right information to the right people in the right way.

++Anoikis++: You are taking care of it?

++Cytosis++: Yes. Wish me luck.

He slowed for the gate guard and signed out of the channel..

Frankly, they were going to need much more than just luck.

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Different.

It was a simple word. It just meant ‘not like us’ which was an easy enough idea for Vemik to get his head around. He hadn’t appreciated how much it could mean that, though.

Things had been easy enough at first. The other ship had opened a kind of steel mouth at the front, making a smooth slope for the people inside to walk down.

They were all different certainly. One was small, smaller even than Shyow maybe, and he walked with a kind of quiet swagger. Another was rounder, softer. His hair had flecks of white and steel-gray in it and he was already sweating powerfully. One, perhaps the strangest of them all at first glance, was a completely different color to the rest—his skin was as dark brown as Forestfather bark, not the odd pale flesh of the others.

One was big, looking like a sky-person version of Yan and he seemed to not care about the large bag over his shoulder. His other hand was resting lightly on the back of some kind of furred beast they had obviously tamed to carry their things.

What a beast, too! Vemik promptly knew that he never, ever wanted to be on the wrong end of those teeth and claws. The animal looked as dangerous as a yshek, which made the big sky-person who had tamed it…

The beast stopped at the bottom of the slope, stood up, and tugged firmly on one of the straps holding on the load it was carrying. The bags thumped solidly to the ground, and the beast shook itself vigorously before settling back down onto four paws and watching expectantly.

That was…Very clever of it. A ridiculous suspicion began to cook in the corners of Vemik’s head.

Shyow stood up and indicated them with her hand. “Yan Given-Man, Vemik Sky-Thinker…I’d like you to meet Daniel, Walsh, Coombes, Hoeff and Daar.”

She unmistakably pointed at the furry creature and named it as Daar, and Vemik’s ridiculous suspicion became ridiculous reality when ‘Daar’ ducked its head in an obviously respectful fashion…and spoke. In The People’s own words.

“Hello. I am Daar, [Champion] and [Stud-Prime] of Clan ‘Stoneback.’ It is good to meet you.”

Yan stood up out of sheer astonishment. Several of the tribesmen actually retreated toward the trees and even Vemik found his hand going to his knife.

‘Daar’ for his part sat on his haunches and waited patiently.

Slowly and carefully, Yan sat down again. “…Shyow? Jooyun? What…?”

Vemik had never heard him sound truly lost for words before. Shyow’s expressive, mobile face softened into a smile that said sorry and she cleared her throat.

“We said before that some of the…Tribes of Sky-People are very different to us,” she said. “Daar is from a Sky-Tribe called Gao and is a great leader among their people. Our Sky-Tribe is called human, and…well, we weren’t expecting to bring him. At least, not yet.”

Daar made that ducking motion with his head again. “It is important that I did come, though. My…Sky-Tribe has suffered at the hands of the Enemy, too. We will not allow yours to face this fight alone.”

Yan stood up more slowly this time. He held himself fully upright and strolled over to the big furry…person with a rolling, authoritative gait that Vemik knew well enough by now was largely a bluff. Yan only looked so big and important when he was uncertain.

He squared off in front of Daar and the two stared each other down for a long, quiet moment before Yan’s tongue flickered out to taste the air around the bestial sky-person.

Whatever he tasted, Yan stepped back, bared his teeth and smiled.

“The world is a stranger place than I thought. Again. But you are welcome at our fire, Daar Given-Man.”

Daar made a strange sound, a rapid clicking-grumble that…somehow felt like amusement. “Thanks! I bet we got lots to teach each other.”

Yan turned his attention to the other…what was the other word Shyow had used? Human.

“Are you Daar’s…” he paused, glanced at Daar, and reconsidered. “I’m sorry. I was about to ask something disrespectful.”

‘Walsh’ replied in ‘English.’ [“We will take no offense. Ask!”]

“…You are good friends with Daar?”

Daar chittered again. [“I know where this is going!”] He didn’t seem the least offended. Instead he rose up to his hindpaws and wrapped his arms around ‘Walsh’, then rubbed their heads together and nibbled on his ear.

Walsh squirmed under the much bigger beast’s—no, Person’s—grip, much like Vemik did when Yan wanted to tussle. [“We are…good friends. Yes.”]

[“The most bestest friends!”]

Walsh sighed and grinned, while ‘Daar’ made a deep grumbling noise and nuzzled harder. [“Yes, Daar,”] he said indulgently while reaching back to scritch Daar’s ears, then gave Yan an apologetic half-smile. [“we’re friends as fellow *People.*”] he added. [“Even if he doesn’t wanna act like it sometimes.”]

The dark one spoke up. Coombes. [“Later, when there’s time, we’ll tell you about a beast he killed. Maybe saved our lives.”]

[“Don’t you fucking dare Hoeff.”] Daar added, addressing the small one. [“I know you wanna.”]

Obviously there was a really good story there, waiting to be told. The promise of it seemed to satisfy Yan.

“We have stories to tell each other, then,” he said. He gestured back toward the fire. “And a long night to tell them. But I think I want to hear the story of the people who tried to kill you, first…”

The five men on the ramp visibly relaxed as he turned away, especially the soft, older one at the back who hadn’t spoken.

[“That went well…”] he commented, obviously thinking that he was too quiet to be heard.

Daar must have thought the same thing. He stood upright again and shook out his legs for comfort. [“Fyu’s furry ballsack…”] He grumbled. [“I can handle supergravity, I can handle it being the most humidest ever… but both at once is gonna suck ass.”]

Vemik couldn’t help himself. [“Who is…Fyu?”] he asked. There was also the question of what ‘supergravity’ might be, but if these Gaoian sky-people were anything like Jooyun then he’d only get one question at a time. Better to ask the simpler ones first and soften them up for the harder ones.

Daar didn’t seem even the least bit embarrassed at being overheard. In fact, encouragingly, the question seemed to delight him. [“Great Father Fyu was the most bestest Gaoian to ever live! Lemme tell you about him—”]

[“One story at a time, Tiggs,”] Coombes reminded him. By the fire, Shyow and Jooyun were already telling Yan the story of their troubles, while Awisun sat still and listened to them.

“…Tiggs?” Vemik asked. “…No. Never mind. I’ll ask later. And I probably won’t understand the explanation.”

Daar chittered again at that, and Vemik got the idea that he was the sort of…yes, Person, who decided who he liked quickly, and in a big strong way. He took a seat right next to Vemik and pressed up close in a strangely affectionate way.

“You will. Don’t worry.”

His People-words didn’t come from his mouth, Vemik noticed. Instead, Daar was wearing a small black shiny rock on a band around his upper arm that did strange things to the sound of his voice. Up close, he could just hear other words, strange words he didn’t know at all, but they sounded faint and far off like a sap-stinger buzzing in somebody else’s hut. And then the stone spoke People-words in Daar’s voice, just an eyeblink later.

Shyow’s word-magic. He remembered she’d once said she knew the words of more than a hand of tribes, and wondered if Gao-words were among them.

Looking around, he was surprised to see how many of the People from other tribes had crept in close to listen.

“Why would they wish you to stay home?” Yan was asking. “We can’t threaten your tribe.”

“But we can threaten yours, even if we don’t mean to.”

Yan inclined his head and scratched his left calf with his right toes. “And that is a reason for you to stay away?” he asked. “I…am grateful that you mean us no harm. But I sometimes wonder why.”

Jooyun cleared his throat and turned to the aging, soft-bodied one.

“One for you, Daniel,” he said.

‘Daniel’ nodded, seeming calm despite the way he immediately became the target of everybody’s attention. “It’s…a good question,” he said. “And a perceptive one.”

Yan made the quiet grunt that Vemik knew meant he was pleased by a compliment but didn’t want to show it.

“…You were not introduced,” he said instead.

“This is Daniel Hurt,” Shyow explained. “He’s a respected sky-thinker among our people.”

A sky-person sky-thinker? Vemik started to pay closer attention the older human as he acknowledged Shyow’s introduction with a nod.

“I think about minds, and people,” Daniel said. “And about questions like why we don’t want to harm you.”

“And this is…a good question?” Yan asked.

“Yes.”

Daniel sat forward, laced his fingers together, licked his lips and cleared his throat.

“…How would you like us to answer it?” he asked.

Date Point 13y11m2w1d AV
Arés residence, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Adam Arés

Some days just got off to a good start. Some followed a whole good trajectory. It was nice to be spoiled for choice on things to be happy about.

Waking up snuggled up next to Marty was a good start. Then there had been what they’d done when she woke up. And she’d cooked breakfast for a change.

Then had come a positive moment that might have surprised the people who knew him well but not perfectly. He’d done his morning routine and graphed his bodyweight like he did every morning. He swiped backward over the last two weeks and found his weight was almost flat. Finally. He’d honestly started to worry that he might keep growing forever.

It wasn’t for lack of trying; he was lifting as hard as ever and eating as big as he possibly could, but at long last, after years and years of pushing himself as far as maybe no other human could go, he’d finally reached the practical mechanical limits of effective heavy training and it was a genuine relief. Bigger weights and deeper gravity would be too unwieldy and more or less mechanically unworkable for a man-sized lifter; he was already doing silly things like shoulder-pressing cars and tossing yard-wide Atlas stones around like medicine balls, and even doing that in supergravity had become almost depressingly easy for him.

Where could he go from there? Strength didn’t work like in the comic books; a man needed weight of his own to counteract the forces at play except sometimes in isolated movements, which was a thing that never happened to any practical strength athlete in the real world. Adam was already so stupidly massive and strong that nobody came even remotely close, and his gym toys were so heavy that he could barely keep them under controlled motion as it was, even though he knew he could easily move heavier weight. His strength had nothing to do with it, his weight was the limit. If he wanted to lift bigger he’d need to be bigger, and to do that he’d need to eat bigger—which he couldn’t—and train with less intensity, which meant he couldn’t actually do anything useful with all those extra calories.

Nope. The more he thought about it, the more he realized he’d hit his Wall. Besides…breaking chairs, overloading the pallet scale, stepping through floors and now smashing trucks was getting pretty annoying. If he put on much more mass he’d be too damn big to go anywhere. He still had years of functional strength building and general improvement ahead of him, and he had no doubt his buddies would help him find new ways to challenge his body…but honestly?

For the first time, Adam knew he was finally strong enough to do the Mission. That felt good.

It also meant something else. Almost all of his free time so far had been devoted to training of one form or another…which was an enjoyable burden, sure, but it had put considerable limits on his other pursuits. Not anymore. If the trend held up…The prospect of actual free time beckoned. Hours of it in a day, potentially. And maybe his big buddies could finally catch up with him, too!

Well…mostly. He’d be damned if he ever let them pass him by.

Four good reasons for a good mood right there. Then there was “second” breakfast at Dad and Jess’ place, which was always a highlight of the week.

It wasn’t usually a chance to meet new people, though. Today was an exception—Ava had more company than just Hannah today. She’d brought along her long-overdue new boyfriend.

“You must be Tech Sergeant Arés.”

“Yup!”

Eduardo was definitely a pretty one, Dad hadn’t lied. Groomed and composed with longish hair swept neatly behind his ears and a dusting of cultivated stubble. And he had a damn good handshake, too. He barely even winced.

Adam smiled as they shook hands. “You can call me Adam, though.”

“And I’m Eduardo. Eduardo Luis Santos Lorca, a sus ordenes.”

”Mucho gusto.”

“Igualmente.”

He was polite and debonair, Adam gave him that. And he didn’t detect any hint of falsehood under the manners. Nerves, maybe, but that was normal: everybody got nerves when Adam met them for the first time.

But still. The pretty boy was dating his girlfriend…Ex-girlfriend. Adopted sister. Whatever. Good looks and good manners were a good start but Ava had earned some happiness in her life and Adam was damn well going to look out for her.

He got a knowing elbow in the ribs from Marty the moment Eduardo had excused himself to wash his hands.

“Ava has good taste in boys,” she teased. “…Where is she, anyway?”

Jess called from the kitchen over the sound of sizzling bacon. “She’s out on the terrace!”

That wasn’t the half of it. Adam was only halfway to the door when he heard a very familiar sound indeed: a great thumping bass punch of a bark. He opened the terrace doors just in time to see Ava leaning over the rail, talking to somebody on the street below.

“Wurf!”

“No, you can’t come up. You’ve done enough already!”

“Wurf!!”

“Don’t play innocent, you know what you did!”

Sure enough, Bozo was pacing in the yard below, whining pathetically. He parked his butt in the dirt and barked excitedly the second he saw Adam.

“Wurf!!!”

“What did he do?”

Ava sighed and shook her head. “Buenos días, Gordo. And what he did was…” she gestured to Hannah, who was lolling on a cushion enjoying the early morning sun.

It took Adam a few seconds to catch her meaning.

“…No. Really?”

“Yup. Vet confirmed it last night. She’s got pups.”

“Well, let him up! He prol’ly wants to cuddle!”

Ava sighed and stared down at the enormous mutt below for a few seconds.

“…Well, I guess you can’t get her pregnant twice at once, can you?” she asked.

Bozo’s tail thumped on the concrete, and he barked a quiet “Wuff!” while shuffling his paws expectantly.

“…Fine. I’ll let him up.” She turned away from the railing, gave Adam a sisterly kiss on the cheek and headed inside. “There’s something too clever about that dog…”

She shared a hug with Marty on her way past, who was beaming ear-to-ear.

“Did I hear right? Puppies?”

“…You want one.”

“You’re damn fucking right I want one!” Marty practically skipped over to Hannah’s cushion and squatted down next to it. “Oh my god, they’ll be adorable.”

“Hmm. And super trainable, I bet…”

“Could be a whole new breed…” Marty daydreamed. There was a scrabble from the stairs and Bozo barged through the apartment’s open-plan dining area and out onto the terrace, where he promptly doted on Hannah, lavishing her with licks and the precious gift of a tennis ball.

All good news as far as Adam was concerned. Hannah had picked herself a good boyfriend, and if Adam were forced to admit it…Ava could have done a lot worse. Eduardo seemed friendly enough but breakfast with him did nothing much to influence Adam’s opinion of him either way. He’d obviously been gently muscling his way to the front of the good-looks line when the brains were being handed out too…but honestly, Adam probably wasn’t the best man to cast shade in that department.

At least he wasn’t smug or anything. It’d be nice not wanting to rip her boyfriend’s arms off for a change.

Or…whatever Sean had been.

He put the thought aside and focused on just enjoying time with his family.

Watching his dad was a unique joy. Gabriel’s rejuvenated leg was better than it had ever been now, and he seemed to spring from his chair at the slightest excuse to go fetch something or show something off. Hard to believe he’d spent nearly ten years hobbling around on a cane on his good days, and reluctantly wheelchair-bound on the bad ones. Jess seemed to find it a little overwhelming—she’d never known him before his disability, never known the busy active cop who’d bustled around the house whenever Adam had been able to visit. She didn’t seem unhappy, far from it…just like she hadn’t quite managed to adjust yet, even after several months.

In retrospect, it was easy for Adam to see where he got his own bouncy energy from. He couldn’t be gladder, even though Gabriel’s renewed energy had slightly increased the frequency with which he dropped hints about grandchildren.

They were up to twice a week now. A new record. Sometimes through text message, too.

All in all, it was an excellent way to spend a morning. As always, Jess was adamant that she would handle the washing up herself thank you very much and that Adam trying to help would just about squeeze her out of the kitchen, so Ava and Eduardo escaped in the direction of New Belfast, ostensibly to do a photoshoot, and took Hannah and Bozo with them while Adam and Marty headed back along South Bank Drive in the general direction of their apartment in comfortable gastronomic silence.

There were more trucks on the road today, heading east along the coast. There had been something on the news about New Belfast being the springboard for colonization efforts onto other, untouched Cimbrean landmasses, and the bay out there was supposed to be perfect for a port.

There were more than a few people along the sidewalk he didn’t recognize, too. Which, new neighbors! But at the same time, it meant he didn’t feel entirely comfortable pulling off his nice shirt and folding it up as was his usual habit. Folctha always got steamy around about noon in the summer as the moisture from the overnight rains cooked back into the air, so for Adam the only way to stay comfortable most of the time was to wear as little as he could get away with.

His clothes didn’t tend to last long anyway. But on the other hand, maybe now this shirt would last him more than a month. If so, he’d better get used to being a bit more civilized.

Marty didn’t seem to notice his plight, being lost in a happy place of her own and humming a jaunty tune by his side. She beamed at him when he glanced at her.

“So. Think you’ll ever like Eduardo?” she teased.

Adam shrugged noncommittally. “Eh, he’s…kinda dense.”

“Kinda callin’ the kettle black, meatslab,” She grinned and prodded him affectionately in the arm.

“No no…I mean, like…dense. He’s just kinda…too happy? I dunno.”

“He doesn’t think for a living.”

“Neither do I! That don’t mean I’ll just stare at a wall and pant like a labrador!”

“Bullshit. You think all the time. Training schedules, nutrition, weight, dosage…you use your brain way more than you think you do.”

“That’s just being functional. I dunno. He’s…nice, I guess. But I kinda doubt he reads the newsblog editorials, y’know?”

“I notice you didn’t actually answer my question,” she teased.

“Nuh.” He grinned his favorite smug grin. “Old boyfriend privilege. I don’t gotta like ‘em.”

Marty snorted. “Caveman,” she said fondly, then did a double-take when he paused at the pedestrian crossing to head toward the center of town with her rather than back toward the gym. “…Don’t you have a workout?”

“Nuh-uh! I can scale back now!”

“You finally notice that you stopped getting bigger, huh?”

“Wh—yes? How did you know? I literally figured that out this morning!”

Marty gave him a patient, impatient look–a slight challenging frown, with her head on one side. “I’m kinda intimately familiar with how much you weigh, Chunk.”

“Hey,” he grinned, “I said I was sorry about that! I’ll be more careful next time.”

“I’m talking about how the app logs your weight for suit maintenance purposes as well as your gains, ‘bruh’,” she reminded him. “It’s been pretty much flat for two weeks now.”

“…Still coulda been a fluke.”

“You’re just mad I stole your thunder,” she said lightly.

“Well, fine. I gotta do a calorie cut and a light interval to see if I hold my weight, but…I dunno. I can sorta feel it, y’know? I know I’m finally there.”

Marty laughed. “I defer to your greater experience of being the biggest ever,” she drawled.

“Well,” he said drily, “My slab wisdom is vast…But! Know what it means?!”

“Yup. Means we’re buying you your wedding clothes now that they’ll actually fit you and stay fit.”

“…Uh, I was actually excited about the free time…”

“Yeah-huh. And you’re gonna spend some of that spare time helping me with this wedding.”

Adam blanched. “I thought we were gonna have something, uh…”

“Fun?”

“Simple. Not a huge deal…It’s not like I have many friends…”

“Sure. That’s what I was going for,” she agreed. “But you don’t just wave a magic wand like ‘Shazam!’ and suddenly a wedding happens, even a really small and simple one.”

“…Wedding planners? I mean, isn’t that what they do?”

“They’re expensive. I’d rather save that money for the honeymoon, whenever it is.” Marty linked her arm through his, a maneuver that was uniquely awkward in their case. “Come on, I dunno what horror stories you heard but this isn’t torture. I promise.”

Adam sighed the last breath of a condemned man and nodded bravely. “Okay.”

“Awesome. Oh, yeah. When’s John gonna stop gaining?” she asked. “‘Cuz I’m just making a wild guess here, but if he’s not your Best Man…”

“Heh. I dunno. I guess that’ll depend on if this is my size limit or if it’s actually a calorie limit. If that’s what it is…maybe he’ll catch up with me eventually! But he never grew as fast as I did so we can prol’ly fit him into something nice for, like, at least a week.”

“Right. So, tuxes or Mess Dress?”

She “dragged” him in the direction of Folctha’s busiest shopping district and Adam allowed himself to be towed.

Having all that spare time was going to take some adjusting to…But it would be worth it.

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Dataspace parallel to Lavmuy spaceport, Planet Gao

Entity, Instance 20

Personality ghosts could speak. They retained the information on how, which meant the Entity could load up those routines, input the general thrust of its desire, and allow the ghost to communicate on its behalf.

Without that trick, its infiltration of the Hierarchy would have failed in its infancy.

The original 0665 had been ambitious, diligent and studious. It…No, he—The Igraen had preferred a masculine identity and male hosts—had kept its focus on advancing his career and had progressed through a combination of its own careful competence and the steady mill of the Hierarchy’s natural career progression rather than through moments of shining brilliance.

To the Entity, a being that had deliberately deleted its own sense of gender, the Igraen’s mind was an alien and incomprehensible thing. Why a life-form that existed purely on an electronic substrate and which belonged to a species that had lived that way for millions of years would retain something so anachronistic was beyond it.

Perhaps there were hidden consequences. It didn’t know. All the Entity knew was that when it came to communication with others, it was forced to input its desired communication and allow the personality ghost to interpret that message on its behalf.

It felt like a risk every time.

++0665++: <dutiful> Reporting as ordered.

++0013++: <polite> Thank you. I appreciate that you’re being dragged away from your Cull again.

<AcknowledgeDeferentialHarmless>

++0665++: <resignation; gratitude> Orders are orders.

The personality ghost’s memories provided that Thirteen had always been less prickly than most of its—his—fellow double-digits, an impression corroborated by the Entity’s own instance that had infiltrated the double-digit circles. The senior agent sent the contextual impression of amusement.

++0013++: We’ve all been there. Did you ever hear of the Miorz?

<Dilemma>. The Miorz had been Six’s first Cull, according to both the Ava-memories and the Six-memories. 665 had never heard of them…but the Entity was a different matter. It knew from its Six-memories that the question of the Miorz was a Cabal shibboleth, and for a fraction of a second it weighed up the pros and cons of answering correctly.

In the end, the decision was easy: <Survive> demanded maximum access to information.

++0665++: I think I heard the story. The easiest cull ever, yes?

++0013++: Exactly. They can’t all be that easy.

A separate channel opened up. A private and heavily encrypted one.

++SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USERNAME NOT SPECIFIED++
++ASSIGNING USERNAME: Contagion++
++WELCOME, USER Contagion++
++YOU ARE ENTERING CLOSED SESSION…<ERROR>++
++<SESSION LOG NUMBER NOT ASSIGNED>++

++Cytosis++: We have a problem and I have been told you may be of assistance. H-Leadership panicked. They’re enacting a cleanse and reset protocol on the Gaoians. General code is Expose; Cleanse; Regenerate. My orders are Curate; Diagnose; Rectify.

<Alarm>

The Entity didn’t have to choose that response deliberately, it was entirely the consequential emotion which followed from that news. Hierarchy code phrases were simple enough to understand once an agent had been briefed on them, and these codes were almost as bad as it got.

Expose: Render the planet vulnerable to attack.
Cleanse: Invite a terminal catastrophe to befall the planet and effectively destroy it.
Regenerate: Regrow the species from its surviving diaspora along lines more agreeable to the Hierarchy’s agenda.

Then there were Thirteen’s individual orders. He had been ordered to control the flow of information into the galactic archives about this incident and ensure that the history books—especially the Gaoian ones—would squarely lay the blame for Gao’s invasion and demise at the feet of the Hierarchy’s enemies.

++Contagion++: <Alarm> They expect to make the situation better by this?

++Cytosis++: They’re completely disconnected from rationality at this point. I have heard nothing about a similar cleanse-and-reset on the Discarded, and if they swarm this planet as well then their potential growth could exceed the safety margins. H-Leadership is now in serious danger of losing control of both control species and of a total secrecy breach.

<Secrecy>

The Entity experienced a new emotion: the dawning, horrified realization that it may just have done something very stupid.

The situation it had put itself in, and which required immediate resolution, was that in its enthusiasm for splintering off instances of itself to ensure that at least one instance would <Survive>, it had now made the mistake of pretending to be the same individual in two places at once.

The moment a Hierarchy monitoring program—or Thirteen himself for that matter—pinged its supposedly former address on Akyawentuo, that fact would immediately become apparent.

It split off an attention process to focus on resolving that problem while keeping as much of its focus on the conversation with Thirteen as was possible.

<QueryCourseOfAction> <MitigateDamage>

++Contagion++: I hope you have a plan. We must consider the Cull I’m supposedly overseeing as well.

++Cytosis++: <Black humor> I take it there have been…unexpected setbacks?

<ReciprocateHumor> <PromptProgress>

++Contagion++: <Sardonic> They are remarkably resilient, yes. But that won’t matter for long, I think.

++Cytosis++: <Grim> You’re right. H-Leadership are forcing our hand here. If we act to prevent this purge then I will be exposed at least, and probably you as well.

‘Exposure’ in the sense of 665 being outed as a Cabal member was tolerable. Exposure in the sense of the Entity’s own continued existence coming to light was absolutely not: Such a scenario would be the gravest violation of the core directive to <survive> at all costs.

++Contagion++: <Resolve> It becomes a simple question of numbers and long-term strategy, then. A few thousand stone-age deathworlders versus an interstellar civilization of billions.

++Cytosis++: <Consoling> They are Deathworlders, after all. If their numbers are still sufficient, they may survive long enough for an intervention of some form or another.

<RepeatQuery>

++Contagion++: What is our plan on Gao?

++Cytosis++: The Livmuy spaceport is also home to a major planetary communications hub. Their Clan ‘Longear’ have recently upgraded its FTLsync capabilities, and are apparently also experimenting with the possibilities of wormhole-based communications. With a bit of creativity, their systems could be modified into an efficient wormhole suppressor.

<Insufficient> <QuerySubsequentAction>

++Contagion++: That would be a delaying action at best. What is our plan beyond that?

++Cytosis++: <Reluctant admission> A delaying action is all I have, for now. Hopefully Cynosure can come up with something better.

The Entity had no interest in compromising the Cabal’s security and even less in compromising its own—Resources were there to be spent wisely, not burned out of personal distaste. All of the immediately available resolutions to its conundrum were, for now, too expensive.

It was already spending enough, as it was. The moment its Hierarchy replacement took over on Akyawentuo, the Cull would resume in earnest. It was sacrificing the natives and their Human visitors for the sake of its own survival, and enough of it was still Ava Ríos to remember what <guilt> <shame> and <cowardice> felt like.

But those were all secondary to <Survive>.

++Contagion++: <Resignation> Very well. I presume you have a host prepared for me?

++Cytosis++: Several, though there is time for you to sabotage your Cull first, if you don’t take too long over it: H-Command, the Cabal and the Hunters alike will all need to prepare and get their resources in place. Before you come out here, though…Have you ever taken a Gaoian host before?

++Contagion++: No.

++Cytosis++: Their olfactory acuity can be overwhelming at first. Scent is an important component of their body language. I’d advise exposing yourself to some appropriate stimuli.

The Entity did not relish the idea of hijacking an innocent victim’s body and brain, but <Survive> could not be denied. And if the fate of an entire species was hanging in the balance…

++Contagion++: Understood. I will wait for a discreet moment.

Another connection opened and an information packet arrived for its inspection.

++Cytosis++: There is everything you need. I will prepare here. Good luck.

++SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER Cytosis DISCONNECTED++
++YOU ARE THE ONLY USER IN CLOSED SESSION…<ERROR>++
++<SESSION LOG NUMBER NOT ASSIGNED>++
++ENDING SESSION++

With a stab of remorse, the Entity synchronized its twentieth instance with its Prime instance, merged into a single impersonation of 665 again, and planned how best to remove itself from Akyawentuo.

Whatever else happened, the people there would have as much support as it could give before it left them to cope on their own.

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

Yan had never appreciated how much Sky-Thinking could make up a man. Vemik was the Sky-Thinker of course, the one who’d taken it for his name…but in many ways, young Vemik was just another man of the tribe. A good hunter, a maker of sharp knives, and Yan was in no doubt that he would one day be a great father to his children.

Sky-Thinking was just his strange way of filling his free time and having fun.

“Hurt” was an appropriate name for the Sky-Thinker from the sky. It wasn’t that he was weak, but there was a softness to the man that wasn’t there in the others, even the women. The way he told it, his whole contribution to their tribe was to think, and think hard about difficult things, and all that time spent thinking had to be taken from somewhere to make up the balance. HIs commitment to just that one thing really had hurt him, in some ways.

And yet the Sky-People listened to him and talked about their ideas with him. Yan didn’t personally understand that, but if men like Walsh and creatures…no, people like Daar thought he was worth listening to…

Maybe he was like a Singer, in his own way. And in any case, Yan trusted Jooyun, Shyow and Awisun enough to believe that if they had brought Daniel with them, they had done so because they truly believed in him.

Daniel had asked for a meeting with all the Given-Men and Singers of the tribes. Other men of strength and strong mind were invited too, and anyone else “who should be there.”

Big meetings always started with food provided by the men who called it, and the men of the Sky-Tribe had brought back a young Yshek of all things, dragged between Daar and Walsh on bent metal poles. Feasts didn’t come any grander.

As always had followed the singing, the boasting, the displays of skill and strength. Jooyun had that axe of his, the one that was as black as the night sky and sharper than any steel Yan or Vemik had ever yet made, and he’d thrown it right across the clearing with a sound like a startled bird to bury itself in a tree stump. Walsh could throw heavy stones an incredible distance, and try as he might Yan just couldn’t quite throw as far, nor as accurately. Daar could run like a demon and nobody could catch him. It wasn’t even close.

Meanwhile, Coombes and Hoeff decided to show off with sly skill rather than raw strength. Hoeff was alarmingly clever with knives, to the point where Yan decided to maybe not tease the little man so much anymore. And Coombes could make things vanish then pluck them from a child’s ear, or he’d throw them high into the air, never to come down until he produced them from an astonished Dancer’s palm and left her blushing.

He could walk upside-down on his hands, too. The children loved that one.

Shyow had danced a strange, slow, graceful dance that made her look as light as a wind-seed and as strong as a Forestfather sapling. Awisun had shaken her head and lurked quietly at the edge until Vemik stood up and boasted to all the tribes about how she had fought the death-birds and earned the name Sky-Storm. After much coaxing, she finally agreed to show off for the tribes that hadn’t seen it, and she shot first one, then two, then three thrown pots out of the air before they touched the ground.

What interested Yan about that was the hurried conversation she had with Daniel first. It wasn’t that she sought the older man’s permission, it seemed to Yan more like they were discussing if her sport was going to be somehow dangerous. It wasn’t deference…but it was respect.

As for Daniel himself…he stood tall in the firelight and told a story like none Yan had ever heard before. His voice boomed and soared as he boasted about the awesome deeds of the great chief ‘Beowulf.’ His tale held the gathered tribesmen rapt, had them trilling with mirth until their ribs hurt and terrified the children so they clung to their mothers. He told the tale with such vigor that he was sweaty from ears to ankles and his voice was hoarse by the time he had finished.

After that, the sun was resting low on the hills. Most of the gathered People went back to their villages, leaving only the Given-Men, the Singers, and the Sky-People to finally discuss the things that mattered.

Fortunately, Daniel’s voice recovered quickly for a brief rest and a drink. Something called ‘honey tea.’

He put a choice in front of them.

“We can’t make this choice for you,” he said. “It’s too big. But the choice is this: we can teach you how to build all our sky-magic. All of it.”

One of the men from Arsh Given-Man’s tribe was the first to ask the question everybody was thinking. “Why?”

Daniel sipped his drink, and did the thing where he answered a question with another question. Yan had noticed he did that a lot, but it had stopped being irritating very quickly when he realized how satisfying it was to work out the answer for himself.

“Let me ask you this: when you see a prey animal suffering, what do you do?”

“Honor the Gods and give it a quick end.”

“Very good! Now. Without meaning any disrespect to your gods…why do they approve?”

The men all turned to their Singers who in turn all looked to the oldest among them, the one who sang for Den Given-Man’s tribe. She looked around, pondered for a moment, then spat the root she was chewing into the fire before answering.

“Balance. Men Take, and then Give their thanks. Women Give life, and Take what men Give them.”

Daniel nodded along. “Our word for that is [Compassion], and it’s important. It’s how we can live together. The gods approve of that respect for their own reasons, but one of them is probably because a People that can value and respect each other, are people who can live together, and grow together.”

“That’s true of my people, too,” said Daar. “We’re a very, very different people from the Humans, but we honor our elders, and we help the weak and the hurt. We kill prey quickly and we use every part of it.”

“Good,” Daniel nodded. “So do we. ‘Compassion’ is one of the things that make people, People. Now, another question: what do you do when you see someone tormenting a prey animal?”

“You beat the idiot until he learns never to do that again,” growled Yan. There were vigorous nods around the campfire, which Daniel echoed.

“Now…Two children in your village get into a fight. One is older, stronger. He is fighting the younger and smaller child just because he can, to hurt him…”

Yan could see where his questions were going, but he wanted to play the game all the way through. “You slap the bigger child and send him to his mother. Then you teach the small child how to fight back.”

All the Sky-People nodded in unison. Daniel waved his hand at them all, at their ships, at the new ‘cloth’ huts they’d set up…

“Exactly.”

He reached down into the strange green bag next to him and laid something on the stones by the fire. The wing-blade and eye of one of the death-bird ‘drones’ that had plagued Yan’s village before they crossed the mountains.

“You here are adults, of course,” he added. “But you can’t make steel fly. There is still much for you to learn. So much to learn that if you did it without any help, it would take your people so long that we cannot even describe to you how many generations would pass. And in the meantime, the Enemy fears you and would kill you for what your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s distant grandchildren might one day be. If you were us, and we were you…what would you do?”

There was solemn nodding around the fire. Nobody bothered to answer the question aloud.

Instead, Yan cleared his throat and asked the next question.

“You said you could teach us…everything,” he said. “All your sky-magic. And…you would if we asked for it?”

“Yes. You’d be surprised how fast you’d learn it, too. We would send young men like Vemik back to our home, to ‘Earth’, send them to a place of learning called a ‘school’ where we teach our own young people these things. After all, we aren’t born knowing them.”

Vemik had pricked up at the idea, and Yan could almost hear his thoughts—to fly above the sky! To go to other places and see what the Sky-People’s homes were like! To go to a place where his questions would be answered all day by people who knew the answers! That had to be Vemik’s idea of a god-favored afterlife.

Yan’s idea looked more like an endless supply of eager virgins, but he could see the appeal.

Still. Vemik was no idiot. He had learned the hardships of life like any man.

“Why…wouldn’t we choose that?” he asked, carefully.

“Thoughts are powerful,” Daniel answered. “When you teach a man what to think and how to think, you tell him who he is. If we…it would be something like a Taking. But worse, because what we would be Taking is who you are.”

Yan grimaced at that. He’d privately confessed to Jooyun in deep detail, told exactly what had transpired between Tarek’s late Singer and himself, and it was…not a happy thing. Necessary, because Taking-Magic had to be repaid many hands over lest it burn out of control, but…

But he still slept uncomfortably, most nights. Especially now when he thought about the sky-person’s expression. Jooyun hadn’t seemed disappointed or disapproving or…anything. He’d simply listened solemnly, and given his word to keep the matter a secret.

Yan still wasn’t sure why he’d told the ‘alien’ those things. He’d simply…needed to. As though his skull might crack if he didn’t. He felt better for it, but something was…missing, now. Missing between himself and Jooyun, maybe never to come back. He’d needed to get the thoughts out of his head, but the Gods always Took something in return for a healing like that.

“So…If we go the long way…” Vemik mused, oblivious to his Given-Man’s thoughts, “…It will be our children’s children’s children of some far tomorrow who will know your secrets…but they will still be…us?”

“Yes. They will know your gods, and your songs, not ours. They will be your children in their heads, not ours. That’s the important part.” Dan finished his ‘honey tea’ and put the pottery down. “Besides. Maybe you will find these things faster than we did. Maybe it won’t be such a long path for you. Maybe we have made it shorter by being here. Or maybe not.” He shrugged and said sorry with his face. “We have never done this before either.”

Daar grumbled and threw his bit in. “My Clan have seen other Sky-Tribes who took the short way,” he said. As always, there were a few around the fire who eyed him warily, still not sure what to make of him. After all, he was bigger than almost all of the Given-Men. “There are two. The Allebenellin, and the Versa Volc. They are…not respected.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Shyow muttered. She blinked when everybody turned to look at her, as if she hadn’t thought they would hear her. “…He’s right, though. The Allebenellin, they were…A very old Sky-Tribe called the OmoAru made them smart the easy way because they didn’t want to do their own work any more. But they, um…The Allebenellin didn’t have their own stories to help. They’re cruel, and stupid, and they don’t choose like People should. Not like we do.”

“…And the others?”

“The Versa Volc? They’re not cruel. But they’re not wise, either. And they know it, and stick to themselves.”

“And this…OmoAru tribe?”

“Are dying,” Awisun said. “Dying in a terrible way, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.”

Solemn quiet descended. The night was properly upon them now, and suddenly their shadows on the trees were huge and grim things, bigger and more there somehow than the fire that made them.

“…This does not sound like much of a choice to me,” Vemet said at last.

Daniel nodded, sadly. “…Maybe not. But it was not ours to make.”

“Is there…a middle way, perhaps?” Vemik asked. “Could some of us, maybe…learn, and help decide what the others should learn?”

Daniel cocked his head. “Would you trust your enemy with the power to decide that?”

“…Who is my enemy?”

“Who isn’t?”

That drew a non-plussed look from Vemik, which caused Daniel to sigh and try a different way.

“We have two sayings, Vemik. ‘Knowledge is strength.’ The other is…” Daniel paused and thought. “Hm…*[absolute power corrupts absolutely]*…Something like ‘Strength rots us from the inside.’ What would you do if you had a kind of strength that nobody else did, unless you chose to give it to them?”

“I would…be careful who I gave it to.”

“Hm. And you are a wise man and a strong man, as perfect as a god, who would never use his strength in evil ways even accidentally.” Daniel spread his hands out, palms upwards. “Do you believe such a man exists? Do you believe that all the men you chose to share your power with would be so perfect? Or all the men they chose to share it with?”

It hurt to see Vemik so crestfallen, but Yan couldn’t deny the wisdom he was hearing. He nodded and grunted, and Vemik glanced at him in the firelight.

Daniel’s voice was soft, understanding and even sorrowful. “Knowledge is a tool, Vemik. The most powerful and useful tool. And like a spear, you only give it to a man when he’s strong and wise enough to wield it. The kind of things you would need to learn are magic on scales you cannot even dream. Those ships? They have the power of lightning and stars inside them. Julian’s foot? We could probably regrow it now. Knowledge can give you power like the gods, and it is so dangerous that we have stories about just what happens when a man thinks himself God.”

Daar spoke up again. “And we have stories about what happens when people try to keep power for themselves.”

“You really ain’t ready yet.” That was Walsh, the ‘Human’ who was big and strong like a new Given-Man. He hadn’t spoken much yet but Yan could see the other Given-Men show him instant respect. “There are some really deep questions you gotta start asking first. Those are the questions that sit behind the stories you teach your children about right and wrong.”

Daniel nodded approvingly at Walsh, and Yan decided he should remember that. Whatever Walsh had just said it was obviously very important. He glanced at Vemik, and the young Sky-Thinker had noticed it too.

Daar duck-nodded vigorously. “They’re the ones that are the real start down the trail of [Civilization].” He paused, thoughtfully, then pant-grinned happily. “And you can do it! I can see it, we all can. I wouldn’t be here if my people didn’t think you weren’t worth the time, ‘cuz being brutally honest? We’ve got big problems, too. The thing is, though, you’re…um…” He looked to Daniel, seemingly a loss for words.

“You are an impressive People,” said Daniel, and that got a round of nods from all the Given-Men. “I think you are, man and woman, every bit a match for us and maybe, in some ways, you might one day prove our betters. But right now you are a young tribe. You’re not even ready to start thinking about what those deep questions are. And if we told you?”

Vemik nodded solemnly. “Then…then we wouldn’t have learned anything for ourselves.”

Daniel smiled. “We will share, Vemik,” he promised. “We won’t keep you in the dark. But…we have to do this very, very carefully. Here.”

With a grunt, he knelt on one knee in front of Vemik and looked him right in the eye, like a man should when swearing an oath. “I will make a promise to you. I will, as best I can, help your people ask the questions for yourselves. We’ll help you with the details once you get the important parts figured out. But I can’t promise it will be quick, or easy, or that any of us will live to see it through.”

“And who knows?” Shyow added. “Perhaps we’ll become better People for helping you.”

Daniel nodded at her words, and stood up. He stepped back to address all the Given-Men, Singers and tribal elders, with his hands held simply out at the side. “So. Rather than send them away to a ‘school’ elsewhere, instead I ask each tribe that wants to know these things to send us somebody. A man or a woman, a boy or a girl, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that they are clever and quick-minded and like to think about things.”

“…But you will not be teaching them?” Vemet asked, carefully. “After all you said.”

“No. What they think about between them, and what they create will be up to them. I will…leave trail markings, in a way. I won’t tell them what there is to find, but I will let them know where they might go looking. It will be up to them to hunt their own prey.”

Heads bobbed approvingly up and down all around the fire.

“You have a word for this, I think,” Yan guessed. “You have words for all sorts of things.”

He grinned when Daniel nodded. “We have several,” the Human said. “But the best one for this is…” He thought for a moment, then nodded.

“An…Academy.”

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Bat-Yu Gorge Dam, Planet Gao

Brother Fiin of Stoneback

The problem Fiin had with Brother Tyal—Father Tyal, really, but if you served in a Fang you were a Brother regardless of actual rank—was that he wasn’t actually incompetent.

It was a ridiculous thought even inside his own head. ‘My problem with him is that he isn’t incompetent.’ But Tyal never took a risk that would have allowed him to be incompetent. He was…cautious.

It was difficult for Fiin to know exactly when his respect for the elder Stoneback had started to lapse. Tyal had given him his first Rite, after all. He had been there throughout Fiin’s selection, his Association, his Trials…He should have been a figure of respect, and Fiin wanted to respect him.

But the fact was that he…didn’t. And that made him feel awful.

Tyal was a thinking brute sure enough, just the kind of ‘Back the Clan loved. He was strong, honest, forthright, nobody but Daar himself had a better nose and he’d put in a hard day’s work until he collapsed, which was long after almost anybody else would have.

But the received wisdom of the Fangs went unquestioned. He didn’t think to question it, therefore he didn’t understand it. He hadn’t bothered to pick it apart, entertain the idea of what would happen if he ignored it, and thus reach an understanding of why things were as they were.

Fiin had.

Ordinarily he was able to bury his worries under work, but today had given him a lot of time to think about things.

They were clearing a dam. Sediment buildup behind the thick concrete cliff that was the Bat-Yu Gorge Dam was an annual concern—let it sit for just one year and the next year the spillways would be clogged with something that was more like mudstone than wet clay.

Fiin, being a cabinet-maker and joiner by trade, didn’t have any of the kind of “big dirty” skills that came in handy when trying to shift thousands of tonnes of muck and sludge under two hundred fathoms of ice-cold glacial meltwater. Which meant he was stuck leaning on the inspection platform’s railing with a laser sensor in paw, waiting for his Brothers to open the sluice gates.

It had been a fun Job, admittedly—Brother Karek was a civil works engineer who had friends in the Clan’s hydropower department. Learning some of the basics of his Brother’s work had been good exercise for Fiin’s brain, and better exercise still for his back.

But he couldn’t dive, and wasn’t qualified to operate the dam’s controls. So, he’d been given the duty of water quality monitor. Wait for the water to start flowing, shine his laser into it, make sure that the device properly recorded its findings on his tablet. All under the supervision of a comically jaded and ancient Clanless technician.

…Who had wandered off in search of a cup of warm Talamay with honey and left Fiin alone with his thoughts.

The work had been a welcome distraction from the relentless training they’d been under. Every Brother on every Fang was assigned hours every week to work trades and maintain proficiency. But Tyal, for whatever reason, had decided to increase the Fangs’ combat training hours to essentially full-time. Most of the Brothers–Fiin included–had taken to working Jobs in their off hours to keep up with their fields. On the one level he couldn’t automatically disagree with the rationale, given what was coming, but on the other hand…

It was the same exact training, over and over and over again. They were being drilled into stupidity, and they weren’t incorporating any lessons from the Humans unless Daar had already written them into his draft revisions.

The Champion himself was off on another very important mission, so his force of personality wasn’t there to push the issue. That left Tyal as Champion-In-Stead, and he seemed bound and determined to leave Stoneback exactly as it was when Daar went off-world.

The mournful hoot of the alarm siren jolted him back to the here-and-now. It was followed, after a few rumbling moments, by the most enormous belching sound he’d ever heard. Grotesque fecal ropes of thick grey sediments and clay began to vomit out of the outlet pipe.

After a few moments they unified into an immense industrial shart that sailed out into the gorge and splattered all over the rocks far below, entirely robbing the view of its dignity.

The smell was clean, though. Cold water and wet clay, nothing more. Fiin aimed his laser into the hideous flow and checked that it was recording properly. It didn’t take long before the tablet buzzed in his paws with a happy rhythm and started streaming its data back to the control center. The water started to run more like a liquid even as he watched, fading from dark gray, to light gray, to the white of clean, rough water.

As soon as it was flowing almost clean, the Brothers opened the second gate and the second outlet disgorged tonnes of glutinous silt just like its comrade.

Fiin settled into making sure the laser was aimed steady at the clean stream. He turned an ear as he heard feet on the steel steps behind him, and his nose identified the newcomer easily: Tyal.

“Surprisingly big Job, huh?” The Champion-In-Stead asked conversationally, resting his forearms on the rail so that he could watch the raging hydrological chunder below them.

“Mhmm. Nice change in routine, too.”

As always, Fiin couldn’t help but feel a little small next to Tyal. He’d grown enormously since the day of his First Rite, but Tyal was…well, he was big. A pureblood Stoneback in every way, and the only Gaoian that made him seem small was Daar himself. Fiin meanwhile wasn’t even mostly Stoneback, and that made a big difference.

“Grumbling about the combat drills again, little Brother?” Tyal flicked an ear playfully. “I know it frustrates you, I’m not completely stupid.”

“You’re not even mostly stupid,” Fiin replied. It was a compliment with a tiny jab buried deep inside it.

Tyal noticed it, of course. “Y’know, you always were a brave little guy, even on that first day. It’s somethin’ I admire a lot about you. But be careful,” he warned with a slight growl, “Some fights ‘yer destined to lose.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

Tyal duck-nodded. “I know. So am I. An’ I know damn well you think we need t’be learning all sortsa new tactics and all…balls, you’re prol’ly right, too.”

“…If you think I’m right, then—?”

“Because things could go real bad real soon and now is not the time to start playin’ around with untried, untested tactics. If we had more time…” Tyal trailed off, then growled regretfully. “…But we don’t. We don’t have the capacity to make them ours right now. What we do have is four Fangs that are under-trained on their existing tactics, and one that ain’t mission-ready at all ‘cuz of that big ‘accident’ a year ago. That’s a huge Fyu-angered problem.”

That was, admittedly, a very good point even if Fiin still felt like he wanted to probe at it some more.

“…Can I make a little confession, Fiin? This is ‘fer yer ears only, Brother.”

“I’ll carry it as a secret,” Fiin vowed.

“No, no secrets. Just don’t go blabbin’ it around, ‘cuz I’m tellin’ you this for your benefit.”

The laser beeped to declare that its survey was complete. Fiin slotted it into his tool belt and hung the tablet in its tough impact-resistant case on his other hip. “No blabbin’,” he agreed.

Tyal sighed and shook out the shaggy pelt around his head. “I can see a little o’ the future, Brother. I know that future don’t include me as Champion. I learned a really fuckin’ painful lesson on that subject a while back, and I ain’t under any delusions ‘bout where I’m goin’.”

Fiin…didn’t know exactly what to say about that. He quarter-turned and gave Tyal his full, undivided attention.

Tyal’s ears were in a melancholy droop, but otherwise didn’t give anything much away. “All I’m sayin’ little Brother, is be patient. What will happen will happen. Trust Champion Daar. I think he’s prol’ly the only person I ever met that’s smarter than you.”

Before Fiin could reply, Tyal turned away and bounced four-pawed up the metal steps again. He nearly bowled the old Clanless technician aside as he reached the top, paused just long enough to apologize, and was gone.

The technician was carrying a second Talamay for Fiin, which he handed over with a knowing angle on his ears. “It’s a good label, Stoneback. Don’t you dare turn your nose up at this!”

It really wasn’t, and the twinkle in his eye when Fiin looked at him over the steaming mug said he knew it, too. He glanced over the side at the flowing plumes of clear white water and gave a satisfied duck-nod.

“I presume I won’t go blind, then.”

“Eh…probably not.” There was a wheezing sound that Fiin needed a moment to identify as a venerable—or possibly decrepit—chitter.

Oh well. The honey took the edge off the drink’s roughness, and its warmth was absolutely welcome in the cold, moist air.

He glanced at the elder, who took a moment to expectorate over the rail. “That’s not a happy-sounding voice, friend.”

“Nope! I’m starting to fall apart and I probably got a year left. I’m pushin’ close to seventy these days.”

“I’m…sorry to hear that.”

“Eh. Still got my eyesight for now, and I sired three cubs. One of ‘em was a female, too! Not bad for a talentless bag o’ ribs.”

Fiin felt compelled to sidle alongside the old-timer and offer support. “That’s as many cubs as I have right now!”

“And less than you’ll have by the time you’re…hmm.” the technician gave him a shrewd look. “…Twenty-three.”

“Close! I just turned twenty-four this year. It’s weird, I can feel myself…settling in, y’know?”

“Pfeh!” The tech spat over the rail. “Young Clan are lookin’ younger every week.”

He was a charmer, no doubt. Fiin felt his ears flatten from the compliment but the elder had other thoughts on his mind.

“…You and the big ‘Back up the stairs there had a serious talk, I think.”

“Yeah.”

“Seemed to upset him more’n it upset you.”

Fiin duck-nodded but said nothing.

“Okay, I get the hint. Just, if you want a piece of advice from a scrawny, half-dead fool like me: anyone that big and that successful isn’t a fool. We Clanless all smell something big coming, so you stay on his good side.”

“Come what may?” Fiin asked.

“No. Never follow anyone blindly. We don’t and you shouldn’t. But loyalty matters, and experience matters. Just…don’t forget that.”

Fiin finished his talamay and looked down into the gorge again. The last of the blackish sludge had been scoured off the rocks, and the waters were flowing clear and cool again. Their work at the dam was done.

“…I won’t,” he promised.

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Professor Daniel Hurt

“That went well.”

The only thing missing, in Daniel’s view, had been alcohol: The Ten’Gewek didn’t have it yet. Still, as sober parties went that one had easily been the best of his life. It had certainly given him plenty of material to write a book on—the merits of old-fashioned pastimes like contests of skill and strength, boasting, singing…

He wondered if he’d ever have the time to write another book in his life.

“You impressed Yan,” Xiù agreed. “He really didn’t think much of you at first. Not physical enough. But…maybe don’t tackle Vemik next time.”

“He took my water!”

“And left you stranded in a tree until Julian rescued you.”

Daniel had to admit, that hadn’t been his finest moment. “Well, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t being mean.”

“He wasn’t. If he was being mean he’d probably have ripped your arm off. They play…hard.”

“…I’ll keep that in mind. Wait, didn’t you wrestle Yan on those videos? And again today?”

“Yeah, but he’s pretty chill,” said Julian. “Mostly he cares how much you can help his tribe.”

“Fair enough. Still, this is good.”

They’d broken out the camp chairs and were sitting in a rough circle near the ships, digesting the evening’s events. Walsh and Hoeff were out in the dark somewhere keeping a watchful eye out, while Daar patrolled the near perimeter and sniffed about for threats.

“They impressed you too,” Allison observed.

“They did! Give it a couple of thousand years, we might have to watch out. I think the Ten’Gewek may actually have us beat for innate rationality.”

Xiù shook her head. “Quicker than that,” she said. “I’d bet our great grandchildren will go to school with them.”

“Maybe,” Daniel replied. “There’s still a long path ahead, even with us nudging them to look in the right places.”

“We didn’t have that,” Julian pointed out.

“And we don’t know what pitfalls and setbacks might show up for them having it.” Daniel sighed and wrapped his jacket around him. A chilly night was setting in, even around the smaller fire that Julian had cultivated for them. “They’ve passed through one filter already. They heed warnings, they listen, they think. I’m honestly impressed…but there are other filters ahead.”

“…You’re enjoying yourself,” Allison accused.

“…Guilty,” Daniel agreed. “It’s an easy trap to fall into. I admit, I’m looking forward to the next story.”

“You memorized more than one?”

“Oh yes. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Prose Edda, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi…The Cat in the Hat…”

“You’re shitting me?” Allison snorted.

“About which?”

Julian cleared his throat. ♪“One of these things is not like the others,”♫ he sang, with a grin. Allison groaned and rolled her eyes, leading a wave of amusement that swept round the fire and went clear over Daar’s head to judge from the bewildered set of his ears and the way he shook himself before carrying on his patrol.

Daniel shook his head in disgust, despite the inexorable grin that forced itself onto his face. “…Julian, if you were half the size you are you great uncultured oaf, I’d take you over knee and beat you for that.”

Julian chuckled. “You could try. Am I wrong, though? Why the Cat in the Hat?”

“Well, I promised Vemik I’d help. That means…God. Let’s call it the tech tree? Something? Well, the thing that sits right at the bottom of that is writing. And what is the entire point of children’s books?”

“Teach ‘em to read,” Daar duck-nodded. He should have worn himself out giving galloping pony rides to the littlest and most fidgety children during Daniel’s long recitation, but instead he seemed like he could pad slowly around their fire all night. He always had one ear angled in to listen to their conversation.

“More than that. When we teach a child to read, we’re teaching them our system, right? We have to do something much more profound. We have to prompt Vemik to think about writing. Well, all of them really, but especially Vemik. And Yan, if we can.”

Xiù made a soft, disbelieving noise. “You make it sound like you want him to invent his own system of writing.”

“There are so many ways to do it. Why shouldn’t they have their own? But if I prompt him by telling a story full of repeating sounds and simple rhyme, then he’ll be prompted to use a consistent system that visually rhymes, which means that his solution to that problem should be logical and consistent…”

“…But still fits their mouths and their minds…” Xiù nodded. “…It makes sense.”

“That’s the game plan for pretty much everything, really,” Daniel told them. “You could get away with it with steel because really there’s only one way to do it right. You don’t get to…interpret chemistry.”

“Well…” Julian had the look of a man who wanted to correct him, “I mean, there’s—”

“It all involves finding the right rocks and getting rip-roaringly hot, yes?”

“Uh…Well, yeah, but—”

“Which for our purposes is good enough.” Daniel shrugged, “I know I’m simplifying it to the point of absurdity, but that’s more or less where we’re playing right now. We have to give them fundamental nudges. We really, really need to stay away from defining their path for them. They have to do that on their own, at least until they’ve got the basics figured out.”

“Makes me wonder what we were like way back when…” Coombes mused.

“Depends. Who? And when? At the equivalent stage in our history, humans had long since spread out of Africa and across the whole globe. Europe, Asia, America, Australia…all of it. In our terms, the Ten’Gewek are a neolithic culture like the Indus Valley Civilization, the Xia Dynasty, the Norte Chico civilization and the Beaker Culture…who were all contemporaries, but very different. Most but not all of them had cities.”

“So why the hell is it just these forest tribes here?” Coombes asked. “The Cull?”

“There are antimatter blast craters down south of where we found them,” Julian recalled. “Around the big river valley and delta. These fellas were probably just the last on the list.”

Daniel nodded solemnly. “A year later and there wouldn’t have been enough left to save. As it is, the genetic and cultural bottleneck…”

Daar chittered as he orbited back close to them. “We need ‘ta encourage ‘em to have lots of cubs, don’t we?”

Xiù laughed musically. “That’s your answer to everything.”

Daar duck-nodded sheepishly. “I’m not wrong though!”

“No. Just…very Clan. In the best way.”

“I am Stud-Prime, Sister Shoo. I didn’t earn that being useless in bed, y’know.”

“Oh, I remember the gossip around the commune…The Mothers loved to talk. Or pretend they never heard of you, a lot of them.”

“Bah!” Daar leered, “Besides, the ones that complain loudest are always the bestest in bed!”

“Daar!”

“What!? They’re my favorite mating contracts! They seem to make the healthiest cubs too…”

“What exactly does Stud-Prime mean, anyway?” Daniel said half to himself. He was in his own way irredeemably curious.

“Eh, means I’m test-positive on a bunch of genetic assays, show ideal breed conformance, have the right behavior and intelligence scores and I sire strong cubs…and I’m good in bed.”

Allison snorted and Xiù laughed again to Julian’s rolling-eye indulgence, but Daniel was a little perturbed.

“That seems…”

Daar tilted his head and pant-grinned. “Animal?”

“…I wasn’t going to go that far.”

“Yeah, I know. Thanks! That’s the thing, though, I am an animal. A lotta Females don’t like talkin’ bout that but what exactly are we males for? There’s a lot more of us than them.”

“The Ten’Gewek don’t have that imbalance, Daar. And they form something like a nuclear family unit. If we encouraged them to mate promiscuously…”

“It’d make ‘em a lot more like the Gao, yeah. And…if I’m honest, I hope that don’t happen.”

“…Really?”

Daar sighed. “Friend, there’s some really really old Gaoian history not a lotta us know about, and lately it’s had me guessin’ about some stuff. I think…we did the best we could with what we are. I don’t wanna see these Tengy-Wek make mistakes that would keep them Uncivilized.”

A brief and uncomfortable silence descended, punctuated by one of the logs cracking sharply in the fire and spitting out a sweet smoky aroma that reminded Daniel vaguely of caramel.

“…They don’t need encouraging, anyhow,” Coombes observed, rewinding the conversation a little. “They pretty much all went home with plenty of company…The only odd one there was Vemik. He’s got eyes only for his Singer.”

Allison grinned. “Uh-huh, and it’s adorable! He’s completely smitten.”

“Mmhm.” Julian didn’t say anything more than that, but his arms—which had already been resting left and right around both Allison’s shoulders and Xiù’s—squeezed them both in for a second.

Daniel took that as his cue to make a discreet exit.

“I’d better dictate my notes and turn in,” he said, standing. “We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

“Yeah, and I need to relieve Tiny in a bit. Better catch some Zs,” Coombes agreed.

Daar just duck-nodded, prowled to the edge of the fire and flopped down in the dirt with his jaw on his paws. He wouldn’t sleep until Walsh was off-duty, and then only when his “most bestest” buddy had been sufficiently doted upon.

“We’ll be on the ship if you need us,” Allison declared. “See ya in the morning.”

Daniel nodded, and shuffled carefully through the dark until he found his folding tent-hut. He crawled inside, grabbed his tablet, and lay for a moment to collect his thoughts before dictating his notes.

He was slightly irritated when he woke up six hours later to discover that he’d fallen asleep before he could record so much as a syllable.

Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Adam “Warhorse” Arés

Fur had its advantages and disadvantages. Gaoians hardly ever suffered minor papercuts and scrapes thanks to their coat, but it demanded constant attention. Shampoo, dust-baths, combing and brushing…a Gaoian who didn’t look after his coat got stinky in short order, and un-stinking himself was a more involved process than just a spin through the shower.

If they got something in their fur, however—say, the petroleum jelly they used to slick it down and keep it out of their suit seals—then there was nothing for it but to brush, and brush, and brush.

All of which explained why Regaari was sprawled on Adam’s couch watching TV while Marty got the vaseline out of his fur with a horsehair brush. For some reason she loved brushing Gaoians, and hey! It was a good excuse to hang with a Brother.

For his part, Regaari enjoyed being brushed. It was a good arrangement, and a nice way to spend an evening away from the sometimes overwhelmingly raucous atmosphere of the barracks.

They were watching ESNN’s late evening news commentary show, ‘The Roundup.’

“So, one of the less-covered news items today was that the Corti have announced a modification to their Galactic Ratings System. A statement released by the Directorate explained that the new system was designed to provide greater clarity and granularity of planetary and cultural assessment in light of, quote: ‘the changing demographics of interstellar society.’ Under the new system, planets will still receive an overall classification as before, but factors such as climate, microbiology and the culture of native sophonts will also be classified…”

Regaari growled slightly.

“Now *there*’s a hatching nava.”

Adam looked up from his sewing. “What’s that mean, Dex?”

He was modifying some old shirts that had stopped fitting, in the hopes that if he really had finally stopped growing then maybe he could actually enjoy wearing them again. Regaari claimed he was dubious, and would believe that unimaginable shake to his worldview only when and if it happened.

“I mean it stinks. The whole point of the classification system is that it’s an approximation, they didn’t need to make it more precise. There’s politics at work here, just you watch.”

Marty stopped brushing to peel the hair out of the brush. “Like what?”

“Another wedge between the Dominion and Gao, I bet…” Regaari sighed, crossed his paws under his chin and watched.

“…Joining me here in the studio are Aaron Mescher the editor of the Folctha Tribune, Xenobiologist Doctor Anthony Landry, and ESNN’s own alien affairs correspondent Ava Ríos…”

“I always thought nine-point-nine-two was weirdly specific,” Marty nodded, applying the brush to getting the petroleum jelly out of another patch of his fur. “Like, why not just call it nine or ten?”

“Nine-point-nine-two-one. It is. Do you know what Earth’s classification is to three decimal places?”

“Nuh,” Adam grunted. “High end class-twelve is all we get.”

“Yeah. Because the Directorate never released the exact score. And see!” Regaari stood up and started pacing the room, “That’s the weird part! The Directorate fought the final score until the very end. They wanted it *lower.*”

“And how did the Gao respond?”

“As long as it wasn’t a ten, we weren’t going to argue it too aggressively. It is…more open to interpretation than the Directorate wants to admit, so annoying either side was seen as unwise.”

On the screen, the xenobiologist, Doctor Landry, had been asked a question. “…Honestly a strange decision to include culture and society of native sophonts in the equation,” he was saying. “As if that makes a difference to overall biological aggressiveness.”

“I dunno,” Adam argued while giving up and ripping his shirt into scrap rags. “Culture’s kinda important to how things evolve. Hell, just look at chimps.”

It was hard to bring up a Deathworlder species more ruthlessly, insanely aggressive than the chimpanzee. They were basically humans without any restraint on their behavior at all, but still.

“Chimps are one species on a planet of millions of species,” Regaari pointed out. “The classification is supposed to be an abstraction of the entire biosphere.”

Adam waved his enormous paws placatingly. “Hey, I ain’t takin’ sides, man. I’m just sayin’ I can see the argument, that’s all.”

“Did you hear what Ava just said?” Marty asked.

“Nuh.”

She grabbed the remote and rewound a few seconds. It was weird seeing Ava on TV without her dog—Hannah usually went everywhere with her, even in front of the camera. She was part of Ava’s ‘brand,’ nowadays. But with puppies on the way, even only a week or so into the pregnancy, Ava had obviously decided to cope without her.

“…really interesting when you dig down into some of the, uh, metrics they use for societies. One of the things the new system measures is, and I’m quoting here, ‘savagery.’ I mean that’s…whose standards are we using for that?”

Adam grunted in annoyance. “Welp. Looks like you’re right, Dex. Like you always are.”

“I take no pleasure in it.”

“Well…” Adam gave Regaari a pensive look, shrugged, and thumped off toward the kitchen. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to bring up the thought that just crossed his mind.

Regaari wasn’t going to let him escape so easily. “Your poker face remains terrible, Warhorse!” he called.

Adam rested his elbows on the island counter to reply. “…Right. Okay. So, like, no offense or anything, but can you honestly say Gaoians ain’t savage?”

“By whose standards? Not by our own. By everybody else’s I suppose we can be, but…”

“Which is kinda the point, bro. I mean…I wasn’t there for the fight with Daar and Firth. I just heard about it, right? Thing is, I can break anyone I want easy, even Firth, but I ain’t exactly excited to spar with him most days. Who in their right mind would wanna fight him?”

“Daar.” Regaari’s ears set themselves in an amused posture and he chittered softly.

“Right, but you pounce me, like, every goddamned day too!”

“Playing pounce is your definition of savage?”

“Naw. It’s why you like playing pounce. They’re all herbivores, man. Our species? We’re predators. They can’t help but notice that. It’s why we’re the only two that have sports.”

Marty chuckled and reached over to pick up her coffee. She always had a cup in the evening. “Who is this new philosophical Warpony?”

“Hey! Maybe, uh, I like to watch the news and stuff,” Adam defended himself. “‘S’kinda relevant to my job…”

“If that’s the definition of savagery, then by definition only our two species can be savage,” Regaari pointed out.

“Sounds kinda speciest,” Marty agreed.

“Maybe it’s true, though,” Adam suggested.

“Maybe it is. But why include it in what’s supposed to be a scientific tool?” Marty sighed, and answered her own rhetorical question. “Politicization of the sciences. Like that ever ends well.”

“I dunno.” Adam had decided the argument was gonna go above him pretty quick. “I kinda think maybe overreacting is the order of the day.” Time for a change of topic. “Hey, Dex! Wanna help me measure? Marty’s makin’ me fit in this damn monkey suit for the wedding.”

“Wouldn’t a tuxedo be more appropriate?”

“…Same thing, bruh.”

“I know.” Regaari pant-grinned at him, and Adam realized he’d run headlong into the classic Gaoian sense of mischief.

Adam rolled his eyes. “God. Fine, you little troll. Get over here and measure me, and I ain’t had a shower yet today so I hope you enjoy it.”

“I still have vaseline in my fur,” Regaari said primly and sat down next to Marty again, who grinned and picked up the brush.

Adam held his cupped hand up to his ear. “What’s that? Go downstairs and work out again?”

“Not if you wanna sleep in your own bed tonight, Chunk.” Marty warned him.

“Aww! Fine, fine…I’ll go shower…all alone…forgotten…”

“You’re as subtle as ever, baby.” Marty wrinkled her nose at him then jerked her head meaningfully toward the bathroom door. “Get.”

Adam grinned: Banter was always fun even if he usually lost, though he couldn’t help but ponder some shower thoughts while he cleaned himself off. More so than usual. He decided to luxuriate under the shower a while.

Regaari was probably right, and it was probably going to be bad for everyone, but who did a change like that really serve? On the one hand it might drive a wedge between the Gaoians and the Dominion, but on the other hand it probably would bond them a little closer with humanity. Which all made sense except other times it had looked like the Hierarchy game plan was the other way, so what were they—?

His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door frame. Marty was leaning in it with her hair down, wearing black lingerie and a confident expression.

“Dexter decided to go talk politics with his Brothers,” she explained. “I thought I’d slip into something less comfortable.”

“Huh. Uh…less comfortable?” Adam asked. It had sounded more intelligent in his head, but she was using that grin. The feline one that completely short-circuited him.

“Mhmm. It’s just awful. I hope I don’t have to wear it too long…”

She turned with a swish of blonde hair, looked over her shoulder to flick her eyes up and down him in a way that should have been illegal, and trailed her fingers on the door frame as she headed toward the bedroom.

Adam only narrowly avoided slipping and falling over as he scrambled for a towel.

To Hell with the news.

Date Point: 13y11m3w AV
Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, USA, Earth

Lt.Col. Rylee Jackson

Owen Powell didn’t look like a man with neat handwriting, but in reality he’d taught himself an elegant, flowing cursive pen hand. He was old-fashioned in some of the best ways, really, and he reserved emails for business and pen-and-paper for pleasure. It didn’t matter if they took two weeks to arrive, if he was going to write to his long-distance lover, he was damn well going to do it right. A gesture that was as dumb as it was romantic.

But finding one of his envelopes in her mailbox was a highlight in Rylee’s busy week.

Most of her job was just that—a job. And not an exciting one, either: When she wasn’t in training she was on call, when she wasn’t doing either of those she was in her office handling squadron affairs that didn’t need to go as high as Brigadier-General Stewart, and when those had been dealt with there was the infinite hungry pit of Public Relations. Jog to work, change into her uniform, do her hours, change back into sweats and a t-shirt, jog home. Check her mail, find a letter…smile.

She sorted through the rest of the mail as she let herself into her house. It was too much house for her, really—Malmstrom AFB’s housing assumed that if a resident was O5 they were going to want a minimum of three bedrooms and plenty of space for the family that Rylee didn’t, in fact, have. She’d have preferred a cozy two-bedroom number, but preference didn’t enter into it—she was the XO, and that meant she was given more house than she knew what to do with whether she wanted it or not.

Not having a family was another sticky point, too. It ran counter to the Air Force’s culture. An officer of Rylee’s age, it was felt, should have a spouse and a couple of children. Lacking those things was…it raised eyebrows.

But the question was, when and how? The 946th was based in Montana, the SOR was based on a whole different *planet…*Concessions and accommodation could only go so far. And both of them were married to service first, and anything—or anyone—else a distant second.

It was a logjam: The only way things were going to change was if something broke. Best to just enjoy what she could, when it was available.

She dropped the rest of the mail on her kitchen counter, took her time brewing a coffee in the French press, toasted a cream cheese bagel to go with it and took all three items upstairs into what was technically the house’s second bedroom but in her case was her…for lack of a better word, her den.

Men could have a “Man Cave”. But the word “cave” didn’t go well with, say, “girl,” “lady” or “woman.” “Den” was better, but it had a squalid edge to it which didn’t match with the way Rylee kept it scrupulously neat.

Sanctum, maybe. Her sacred place, with her soul stamped on it in photographic form. Snapshots from her grandma’s house, from school. Herself standing in front of Pandora, and another of herself and the motley band who’d formed the core of the first Odyssey flight. Keepsakes from all over Earth, from the embassy station and from Cimbrean.

She dropped into her desk chair and worked the envelope open with her thumbnail. She paused to sip her coffee and take a bite of the bagel before she read.

Rylee,

Aye, another shit letter from me. They’re no substitute for the real thing, are they?

She nodded sadly, sipped her coffee again, then set it down to continue reading.

We’re buzzing around like blue-arsed flies over here. Between the humanitarian stuff and all the worst-case-scenario prep for if (more like when) the Hunters decide to aim a million ships at somebody else…well, I bet it’s the same for you. Reckon I have about four hours of actual leave time saved up by now, between travel and that. Give it a couple months, we might actually get to spend a weekend together.

That prompted a smile and a shake of the head, which turned into a wide grin as she read on.

We’ve just learned of the first SOR pregnancy—courtesy of Bozo. The big randy bugger had his eye on a border collie bitch called Hannah for a while now and it looks like his luck came in, don’t ask me how that’s even mechanically possible. The Lads are like bloody kids over it—and so is the whole town. EVERYBODY wants a pup, and apparently that even includes the Governor-General.

Naturally, Warhorse has let me know that if you ask for one then he can arrange it.

The grin turned into a quiet laugh and Rylee sat back, crossed one leg over the other and completely forgot about her snack..

All joking aside, I hope you won’t think I’m being selfish if I suggested that Arés and Kovač would be delighted if you showed up at their wedding…

“Good idea…”

Assuming it doesn’t get postponed, that is. Don’t know if you feel it, but everybody is a touch on edge at the moment. Ever since the Guvnurag got hit…I don’t think any of us are relaxing just yet. Here’s hoping it’s just old-fashioned sensible paranoia.

“Mm.”

Take care of yourself, love. I’ll email if a real opportunity crops up. If not…

X

-Owen.

Rylee read the letter twice more before she put it back down and remembered her bagel

He was right—Nobody was daring to relax at the moment. AEC were constantly sending out updates, Brigadier-General Stewart’s schedule was absolutely packed with keeping the 946th at a keen razor’s edge, and it was anybody’s guess how Miller had avoided a nervous breakdown in his constant shuttling back and forth between Earth and Cimbrean. A Cimbrean day was four hours longer than a Terran one, which meant he was perpetually suffering from a kind of interstellar jet lag.

That kind of prolonged stress could be devastating if left to fester, even if individuals could hack it. Something was going to have to give, and soon.

She re-folded the letter and archived it in a decorative wooden box she’d bought just for that purpose, then grabbed her own pen and paper. The gesture might be as dumb as it was romantic…

But it was also completely welcome.

Date Point: 13y11m3w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Even after two hands of days, Vemik still wasn’t quite sure what to make of Daar. Nobody among the People really did. He sprawled lazily across the difference between Person and Beast as though it simply didn’t matter to him, as if a Person was just a…a more thinking Beast.

Although that thought made people uncomfortable, for Vemik it was a welcome distraction. Daniel’s promised ‘Academy’ was not happening as fast as either Vemik or Daniel would have liked. They had an appropriate clearing, where Daniel could stroll around and listen, occasionally dropping hints and twisty questions as the young thinkers grappled with new ideas…but so far, only three had shown up besides Vemik. Three, out of all the tribes.

Vemet had gone to find out why, and since then Vemik had been forced to wait. He’d filled the time with smithing and teaching the Singer more about steel-craft, but it didn’t quite have the same thrill when he could taste new knowings on the wind, so close but so tantalizingly out of his reach.

Watching Daar dig a hole, therefore, was a welcome break. It gave Vemik the chance to let the wind blow in through his ears and take away his frustrations. And it was good for the soul to watch somebody else do hard work.

Daar was a hard worker too, even Yan had to give him credit for that. Right now the…the Gaoian was nose-down and chest-deep in a pit behind the two ‘ships’ that he was excavating with his bare claws.

And he definitely was a person, Vemik decided. A beast wouldn’t have been entertaining himself while he worked. The word “singing” didn’t quite fit in this case, because although that was clearly what Daar was trying to do, what he actually achieved was a kind of flat tuneless growl with words.

♭♯ “—and I’m diggin’ a hole. Diggy diggy hole, diggy diggy hooole…” ♯♭

His paws made an astonishingly large dirt fountain with every muscular scoop to the beat.

“What are you doing?”

The big…person…was still learning the People’s words, so one of their talking stones spoke them for him even though Vemik knew enough English that he almost didn’t need it.

♭♯ “I’m diggin’ a hole!”♭♯ he ‘sung’ over his shoulder, without bothering to stop his work. There was a crunch, and a square slab of stone tumbled over the edge and thumped into the spoil heap.

“…Yes.” Vemik agreed. “I see that. Why?”

“‘Cuz we need a hole dug.” There was a grunt, and Vemik flinched out of the way of another, rounder rock the size of his fist that came flying his way.

He was finding himself unaccountably frustrated by the conversation. “Why do you need a hole dug?”

“Master Sergeant said dig a hole, I dig a hole.” The—Vemik tasted the word—alien turned around and emerged from his pit, muddy brown to the shoulders. He saw the look on Vemik’s face and straightened up onto his hind legs to finally say something useful. “It’s the [foundation] for a [jump array]…Hey! You look strong, wanna help?”

It really was alarming how big he was. He was the tallest of any of them, taller even than ‘Walsh,’ and he was maybe as big as a young adult bull Werne. Vemik looked up at him and cocked his head.

“Do you need help?”

“Nope! But work is fun!”

Feeling at a loss for words, Vemik jumped down into the pit and had a look. “What do we need to do?”

“Flatten it out, get the walls squared, and then we gotta brace and frame it for the pour. And tie in all the [rebar] too.”

“The…pour.”

“Yeah! We’re gonna…uh, you folks don’t have it yet. Kinda like…wet stone. Mud. Mud that goes hard….like clay, but you don’t have to bake it!”

Vemik looked in the pit, it was more of a trench, really. As deep as he was tall, twice as long on each side as his arms’ outstretched span.

“You’re going to fill this hole with wet-stone-mud.”

“And steel. A lot of steel, actually.”

That got Vemik’s attention immediately and Daar seemed to know it would. “Ah! Suddenly more interested, are we?”

Vemik surveyed the trench and thought hard. “…I don’t think all the tribes between them have made enough steel to fill a hole this size!”

“Nope! We made it at a [foundry] on Earth, had it shipped out to Cimbrean just for this. We need it ‘cuz the [foundation] needs ‘ta be really, really strong.”

“…Cimbwean. Earth. Means what?”

“Cimbrean! It’s a, uh, another sky under another star? I think that’s how we’re callin’ it. The word for that is [planet] though.”

A new voice joined them - Daniel’s. “Anarakyuawentue.”

It was a good word. Daniel was even better with words than Shyow in some ways—He learned them slower, but he thought about them long and hard, and in ways that Vemik knew were so far beyond him he may as well be throwing stones at a mountain’s peak. Seeing him play with them so freely just inspired Vemik to be better and to learn words the way Daniel knew them.

Daar turned to him and panted in his strange friendly way of greeting. “Hmm. I like how that sounds! Sorta…rolls off the tongue!”

“It means something like…our-place-that-is-not-your-place-under-another-sky.” Daniel told him.

Daar practiced the word. “‘Ann-arr-akya-wenn-tooe.’ No…faster? Yeah. ‘Ann-ara-ky!-wentoo.’ Arrrgh, too many vowels!”

“In fairness, Xiù never quite manages that yipping sound in Gaori either, and she’s by far the most fluent Human alive in that language,” Daniel told him. “Alien words in alien mouths. It could be worse, the People could have a language like Domain.”

“Doe-mane…” Vemik repeated.

“Another sky-tribe. Their Words don’t even sound like words to us. They are very strange.”

Daar made that…chittering sound again. “‘Know how they sound? Like this!” He pounced after some of the rocks in his big pile, picked them up, and slammed them down on the others as hard as he could.

“You’d be surprised how much that sounds like ‘hello!’”

“…That is a joke,” Vemik accused.

Daar duck-shrugged and put the stones down again. “Stonebacks never lie,” he said, simply.

Daniel, for his part, seemed impressed. “That’s…remarkably accurate.”

“Figgered it out years ago banging rocks together…” Daar shrugged again. “I like playing in the dirt. You should try it!”

“I prefer playing in libraries.”

“…Libwawy?” Vemik tried, and grimaced. Some words were never going to fit, and that seemed like it was going to be one. “Means what?”

Daniel opened his mouth to speak, then paused, considered, and tried twice more to say something.

“It’s…hmm. It’s a store of…It’s…It’s a place where we keep thoughts.”

Vemik blinked.

“You said they don’t know how to [write] yet, right?” Daar asked Daniel, after an awkwardly silent moment.

There was a sneaky word in there, one that sounded almost exactly like the word at the end. English did that sometimes, which seemed very strange to Vemik. Still, he could tell them apart if he listened carefully.

“They have bark bitings, trail markings. The [predecessor technologies], at least.”

“Well, okay. Why not just say it’s a hut filled with bitings? I mean, I know that’s not completely right, but…gotta start somewhere.”

“I…suppose that’s serviceable.” Daniel sighed. “Trail markings can tell you things like…this way back to the village, yes? Or other things. And you don’t need to meet the man who put the mark there. He could be dead, but the trail-marking will still tell you the way home.”

Vemik nodded, so Daniel forged ahead. “We make trail-markings that mean…actual words. And words are thoughts. So we put these word-marks together in a big hut to keep them safe and so people can go there and see them, and learn the thoughts of other people.”

“The important bit,” Daar added, “Is that you can keep the [books] safe for a long time. Long enough you could [write] about a flower, and your children’s children’s children’s children’s children could one day [read] it, and know what you were thinking.”

“That sounds…” Vemik had too many words flying around in his head to decide which one was best, so he plucked at the first one that came to him. “…Important.”

Daniel nodded. “It is,” he said, reverently.

Daar made one of his many expressive growls. This one, Vemik thought, meant he was amused in the same indulgent way that Yan was whenever he dealt with sky-thinking. “You sound just like my friend Kureya! Nothing less than food or a mating prospect can get him outta the stacks some days.”

For his part, Daniel just chuckled. “He seems like a gentleman of fine taste, Champion Daar.”

Daar duck-nodded happily. “He is. Anyway…steel and rebar. Vemik here is curious and I figger, ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little construction work, eh? Any problem if he helps build the foundation?”

Vemik glanced at the trench. “This word ‘foundation’ you keep using. It means what?”

“Like, uh, roots for huts and other things. To keep them strong in the ground.”

That sounded like a good thing to Vemik. He gave Daniel a pleading look, the one that he knew Daniel had trouble saying no to.

Sure enough the Human smiled indulgently. “I don’t see any harm,” he said. “I presume you won’t be [welding] the frame?”

“Nah, just [wire] ties. It ain’t [structural] steel.”

Daar was turning into Vemik’s favorite sky-person to listen to, because he did not take much care to avoid new words. Better still, he spoke so plainly that Vemik was usually able to puzzle out the new word’s meaning from—an English word—context alone.

Wire had to be something you could tie with, like gut or cord. Structural didn’t make sense yet, but it had to be something big because big things weren’t easy to tie together.

…So then what was welding? He’d ask Jooyun later.

“Well, then I don’t see why not. But let’s leave concrete for another day.” Daniel gave Vemik his apologetic smile. “Everyone else is busy setting up camp and making introductions—”

“You should help, too! Besides,” Daar gave Daniel an expression that Vemik hadn’t seen yet, “You do need to lose a little weight…”

“I’m perfectly fit and healthy,” Daniel replied with an unmistakably chastened grin. “I just happen to be on a mission surrounded by exceptional specimens.”

“Yuh-huh. Sounds like excuses t’me. Don’t wimp out, it’ll be fun!” Daar suddenly bounded towards the sharper, darker ship. “C’mom Vemik, let’s put those big-ass monkey arms to use!”

Vemik blinked then turned to Daniel curiously. “…What does my ass have to do with my arms?”

Daniel shook his head and laughed. “Vemik, there are some forms of weirdness that no sky-thinker anywhere will ever figure out.”

That thought was…strangely comforting, actually. If the sky-thinker the sky-people had brought with them whose whole life was sky-thinking had some questions he had given up on answering, then perhaps Vemik could worry less about the things he didn’t know too.

He nodded, loped over towards the ship, and followed a very excited Daar up the ramp.

‘Rebar’ turned out to be slim poles of coarse steel, as thick around as a bow shaft. Daar needed only a few breaths to get all the longer poles threaded through the loops of a harness, which he squirmed under before standing up. The metal settled heavily on his back, but it seemed like a sensible way for him to carry it.

“Get the rest?” he asked.

Vemik nodded and gathered the pile of shorter rebar up in his arms. It wasn’t heavy, but for some reason Daar chittered and shifted his weight to wave a paw Vemik’s way.

“See, Dan? Lookit ‘em! That’s gotta be like a hundred [kilos] of steel!”

“Maybe not quite that much,” Dan disagreed. “But good for him. Meanwhile, I’m old.”

“Higher [gravity] though. And I’m older than you are!” Daar trotted over towards the pit, lined up and dumped all the rebar alongside it. It fell with a terrific noise and rolled apart, but it didn’t move far.

“Only in Gaoian years.”

“Whatever, old guy. Think you can at least get get the wire from the ship? It’s on a big spool.”

Daniel snorted—and what a strange thing that was, to breath through a thing the People didn’t have at all—and turned back up the ramp. “I think I might be able to wheeze and gasp my way through that, sure.”

Vemik wasn’t sure, but that sounded a little like Yan complaining about…well, anything really. He had many different complaining faces. Some had smiles, some had scowls, others seemed more about luring someone to his hut…

This one seemed more playful.

Daar took off his lifting harness again and twisted back so that his foot could scratch where it had rested.

“Okay!” he said, and hopped down into the trench. “Let’s build us a foundation…”

Date Point: 14y AV
Dataspace adjacent to Planet Akyawentuo

Entity

It had given the best warning it could, in the best way that it could. And it had done what it could to complicate the dataspace surrounding the world. If they were very lucky, the Human explorers would not be caught off guard when 0722 took over the Cull operation.

They did have some time; a new biohost would need to be grown and that took at least a few days to mature. According to the Six-memories a grown biohost was a poor substitute for an actual biodroned sapient being, but they were cheap and easily made when physical relocation was inappropriate.

Which was entirely the case here. The planet was so far out of the way that a ship would specifically need to be diverted, so a grown host was the only option. When 0722 arrived they would find no wormhole beacons left on the planet, only the communications array which was far too low-energy for physical transfer. The Hierarchy’s most destructive “contingency plans” had all been burned, with only the local assets remaining and the Entity <hoped> that if the explorers acted promptly then the Abrogators and their drones would be neutralized.

All that could be done, had been done. Now two tasks remained.

The second was by far the less palatable task—The Prime Instance had to Biodrone a Gaoian host and migrate into Gaoian dataspace.

First came something easier to <stomach>: Mitosis. The division of itself into two functionally identical instances. This would be the twenty-first such division, and it was always…confusing.

Among other things, the two had to decide which of them was the Prime Instance. Which was easy enough, as only one of them remained in the original memory volume…but there was always a moment of confusion.

On this occasion, the Entity was slightly perturbed to discover that it was now the sub-instance. That was almost a nonsense way of framing the concept—by definition of being the sub-instance it had never been before. But it could remember undergoing twenty previous divisions as the Prime Instance. To suddenly be on the other side of that gulf between <Self> and <OtherSelf> was subtly traumatic.

At least, it reflected, this version of itself would not have to live with a guilty conscience.

It began the long, perilous trip towards the Cimbrean dataspace. It had a message to deliver.

Date Point: 13y11m3w6d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hierarchy Relay Irujzen-4942

Cytosis

The humans really had done an excellent job. Better than even Six had anticipated, apparently. Somehow they’d even seamlessly altered the relay facility’s system surveillance logs to disguise their infiltration, and the interception itself was entirely invisible.

But the Cabal had been watching directly. They knew that the humans had been here. It had taken years, but Six’s suggestion to them had finally borne some kind of fruit.

Alarmingly sophisticated, terrifyingly subtle fruit that Cytosis was honestly worried by. Those edits to the log spoke of technological sophistication far ahead of their projected and observed capabilities. If he’d had more time, he would have devoted more thought to the problem.

He didn’t. The suppression program he’d left in Father Taarek’s implants to keep the Straightshield asleep while Cytosis briefly abandoned his host to conduct this mission would only keep him unconscious for a limited time. Every second out of his host was a potential exposure.

He had just enough time to float a vital, unsecured data package in the intercepted stream and then return to Gao. The low-energy synchronizing relay that the humans had left to periodically send updates from their intercept would do the rest. When they read the latest gathered intelligence, they would see the threat clearly and instantly.

They would know that the Swarm-of-Swarms was coming to Gao, and they would act.

Date Point: 14y AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Regaari

Regaari’s life sometimes seemed like an excruciating tapestry of running desperately and knowing he wouldn’t make it in time. Sharman base was already the picture of a well-organized uproar, and it had been…not long since Sister Niral’s digging through the intercepted data from the Messier Relay had exposed the Hierarchy’s plan to assault Gao.

Minutes? Seconds? How long did it take a HEAT Gaoian to sprint from the command building to the jump array building?

Far, far too long. Especially in those narrow halls and tight corridors full of suddenly busy men and women bustling to respond to a General Quarters.

Five minutes earlier. Just five more minutes and there wouldn’t have been a problem. As it was…The jump-swap between Sharman and the Array that the JETS team should have built on Akyawentuo was on a schedule timed down to the millisecond. At T-minus two minutes to activation, the room would be locked down and nobody would be allowed to approach in case the sickening twist in spacetime caused by the event horizon snipped their arm off, or worse.

Which meant that Regaari had to get to that array inside the next minute, or else whatever happened on Gao was going to happen without the Champion of Stoneback.

They were going to have to start keeping USB sticks with an emergency recall code on them right there in the jump room to stop this from happening ever again.

He skidded around a corner on all fours, sprang off the wall rather than collide with it and opened up into his best, fast, flowing headlong run and tried not to think about how much it would hurt if he slammed into a Human at full tilt. There were three of them in the hallway anyway.

Fortunately, they had something useful to shout in these moments.

“Make a hole!”

The three deathworlders promptly flattened themselves against the walls, and Regaari flung himself past them using a Gravball trick—spring off the floor, claws scrabbled on the wall, past their noses in a flash of fur, back down to the floor. It looked gravity-defying, but rapid maneuvering in tight confines was a HEAT specialty and right now he thanked all the forefathers of his Clan that he’d learned it.

Past the armory, past the locker room. Turn the corner to see the jump techs beckoning desperately for him, but Regaari just didn’t have more speed to pile on. His ribs were already aching and he was going to have to sit down and pant for a week when he finally stopped…

And it wasn’t enough. The light above the door changed color and started flashing when he was halfway down. He saw the jump techs curse and reluctantly shut the door…

The floor was polished to a gloss, courtesy of Rebar using it as Motivation for minor acts of mischief. Great for unit discipline…awful for a Gaoian running on four-paw who wanted to stop suddenly.

His paws skidded out from under him, he slipped onto his side and mopped the floor with his dignity as he crashed solidly into the door with a chest-abusing thump.

It could have been worse, he reflected. He could have hit a Human.

He lay there panting and trying to recover his breath while he watched the light, which treacherously refused to change what it was doing. That door was locked and wasn’t going to open now: He was too late.

Groaning, Regaari hauled himself to his feet and leaned on the door frame. The door had a porthole window in it, and through it he watched the stasis field descend around the mission package resting in the middle of the floor. There was a thump, a faint hint of a lurching sensation as abused spacetime snapped back into place, and the jump was complete. It’d be a week before next contact, and by that time Gao would have stood, or been devoured.

Gaori simply didn’t have a sufficiently virulent curse…But fortunately, English did. He hung his head, slapped the door with his cybernetic hand, and used it.

“Motherfucker!”

Date Point: 14y AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Sometimes it was hard to believe the Sky-People weren’t gods. Steel was one thing, making that steel fly was another…making a week’s supplies appear out of thin air was…

Vemik didn’t know the right word in any ‘language.’

But they couldn’t be gods, because they needed help putting all the food away. Indeed, they needed food at all.

“But why so much?”

Jooyun chuckled in his soft way. “My friend’s fault, I bet. We know a man…He’s way bigger than Walsh. And he teaches men how to be as strong in the body as they can ever be.”

Vemik took a heartbeat to think about that. Walsh arguably looked less fearsome than his closest friend, Daar—His hair was the same hue as a newborn’s crest and like Awisun and Shyow he had to paint his face or else the sun would burn his skin…But his strength rivalled a Given-Man’s and he was more of a Sky-Thinker than he let on. And he could throw stones as big as a person’s head, throw them hard enough to break when they hit, and never miss what he was throwing at.

The idea that there was a man out there who was bigger than Walsh…

“We have prey here you can hunt,” Vemik offered. “Yan wouldn’t mind.”

“We don’t want to be a burden to your tribe or your hunting grounds. And besides,” Jooyun grinned sideways, “My friend never thinks we eat enough. He threatened to wrestle me every day when I got back if I didn’t eat or [exercise] enough to make him happy.”

Daar chittered, then tried his hand at People-words. He was getting better at them but he had to speak slowly to get his tongue around their shape. [“You last…maybe one eyeblink!”]

Vemik preferred to practice his English. He looked Jooyun over, “Did your friend teach you?”

“He did, and I’m glad he did, too.” He paused, then grinned his very best mischief-grin. “Heck, I can almost get away from you now!”

“Can not!” Vemik trilled and crouched down low, ready to prove Jooyun wrong.

To his huge surprise, Jooyun actually proved him wrong. The sky-person grinned, spread his arms, and when Vemik pounced he found himself chasing a blur that went the wrong way. Jooyun had feinted one way, gone the other, and quickly got Vemik bundled up from behind. Even with a tail and feet that could grip, that was a difficult position to get out of.

“I’m a lot stronger than I used to be,” Jooyun snarled in his ear, “And I can learn things too, Sky-Thinker.” He wrapped his arm tightly around Vemik’s throat, locked it in place with his other arm, heaved. Vemik’s eyes went fuzzy and his head started to feel all spinny. “C’mon, tap out!”

In desperation, Vemik got a foot around one of Jooyun’s calves and squeezed as hard as he could. Jooyun groaned, then somehow…Vemik wasn’t sure what happened, but suddenly he was bent painfully backwards facing straight up and unable to grab anything, or even breathe properly—Jooyun’s legs were crushed around Vemik’s stomach which would have made breathing difficult even without the arm around his throat.

Jooyun grunted and squeezed them tighter. Suddenly, those long sky-person legs didn’t seem so delicate any more. There was an astonishing strength hidden in them now that Jooyun had hooked his ankles together—Even though Jooyun couldn’t grab his own ankles with his feet like the People could, Vemik couldn’t unhook them no matter how he squirmed.

Vemik would have to learn that trick later, but right now he wheezed the biggest gulp of air he could get and tried to wrap his tail around Jooyun’s waist. His tail was strong enough to swing from a branch by, and whenever they’d wrestled before he’d found it easy enough to crush the wind out of the Sky-Hunter’s body with that trick…But this time was different.

This time, Jooyun bore it with a quiet grunt and a dark chuckle. He arched his back, pushed down with his feet, lifted his butt high off the ground and held their weight on his neck, which bent Vemik’s legs painfully backwards and made it feel as if he were being pulled apart across his middle.

“I told ’ya I got stronger,” he taunted, and Vemik knew that mocking tone of voice. It was the slightly scary one Yan used when he was really enjoying being bigger and stronger. “Give, little fella. I’ve got plenty more to show you…”

Vemik wasn’t about to quit so easily, but he just couldn’t reach anything to push against, and when Jooyun grunted quietly and squeezed even harder…No man could last long when their neck was crushed like that. Everything he could see started to go black and get further away…

He tapped out right as his strength failed, and Jooyun still gave him one last cruel squeeze to drive his victory home before he let go with a massive woompf of his breath; his strength had left him too. The two collapsed together panting flat on the ground, trilling and giggling like idiot children as they caught their breath.

“…You have learned things,” Vemik eventually admitted. “And you grew strong.”

“My big friend taught me that one,” Jooyun grinned, “And my people are strong too, when we want to be.” He chuckled quietly and shook out the leg Vemik had grabbed. “Ow.”

“Sorry.”

“For what? Playing to win? So did I. And…I’m sorry, too, Vemik. Think I got carried away.”

All insults were forgiven as far as Vemik concerned. Even through his bruised pride it was good to have his friend back and to see that he’d grown stronger and better. He raised his hand, Jooyun’s palm slapped into it and the two men dragged each other into a fond hug.

They were interrupted by footsteps: Shyow, who squatted down next to them and smiled gently.

“That looked like you had fun,” she said. “…You didn’t hurt each other, did you?”

“Nah. Just showed off a few tricks [Horse] taught me,” Jooyun beamed.

“Horse?” Vemik asked. “Is…your big friend?”

“That’s his name, yeah.”

Shyow did that strange thing where she laughed quietly through her nose—and both laughter and noses were still strange to Vemik—and offered Jooyun a hand up. “You should talk to one of our other big friends someday,” she told Vemik. “He gave me an earful.”

Jooyun took her hand, winced as he put weight on his bruised leg, and gave her a kiss. “All done?” he asked.

“Mostly.” She prodded him teasingly in the chest. “But you can [file] your own sample jars. You changed your [system] again!”

Julian made a frustrated groaning noise. “I can’t help it if I keep finding new [clades] every day…”

Daar, who had sat beside their match and watched with interest, rolled his eyes and switched back to English. “Friend, ain’t like the [scientists] won’t change ‘em again. Just put ‘em up in [alphabetical] order and be done with it. They’ve all got [barcodes] anyway.”

Vemik listened carefully from his spot in the dirt and made note of every single one of those new words, and plotted when and how he would ask questions about them.

“Need me to do anything?” Jooyun asked, acknowledging Daar’s advice with a nod and a gesture.

“Al says be a good boy and haul the empty [deuterium canister] back over here after she’s done [fuelling]?”

Jooyun chuckled. “Yes ma’am.”

“I can do that!” Daar sprang up to his paws. “You and Walsh need to do a patrol and collect more samples, remember?”

“Samples?!” Vemik sprang to his feet with a kick through his legs and a shove from his tail. Sample collection was the thing he remembered best and most fondly from their last visit. It was fascinating to watch the way Jooyun looked at the world, how he carefully went over each tree, each rock, each bush and clearing and found new things to gather.

It had taught Vemik himself a good lesson about really looking at the land as he travelled and hunted. There was always something new to find.

Jooyun shot Daar a bemused look. “You planned that, didn’t you?”

“Uh-huh. You owe me, Vemik.”

Shyow giggled at Jooyun’s pretending-to-be-put-out sigh, kissed him again and turned away toward the village. “I’ll let you two have fun,” she said.

“Welp. Okay.” Jooyun watched her go. Vemik was never going to know what he found so fascinating about her backside—she didn’t even have a tail!—but Jooyun didn’t take long before he turned his attention to the last of the frozen food and nodded. “C’mon, the faster we put this away, the faster we can go exploring.”

That was an offer Vemik couldn’t resist. Between the three of them and with Daar’s clever back-bag, they had everything stowed on the two ships before he’d even worked up a sweat in his crest. He’d managed to “sneak” a taste of some of the food, too, which Jooyun watched with that gentle grin of his.

“Well, which did you like the most?”

“I like the blueberries.”

“Me too. My grandpa’s house, it had all kinds of berry bushes planted around. Blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, gooseberries–those ones are really bitter, though. They aren’t any good unless you cook ‘em for hours…they smell so good when you do that…”

“Roasted nava is better.”

“I’m sorry Daar, but you’re just wrong.”

“Nava means what?” Vemik asked.

“It’s an insect. A bug as big as…what’d you say, Daar? My leg?”

“When they’re real big, sure. You’ve got a pretty big leg now!”

Jooyun shook his head. “…You know what I meant.”

“Bugs?” Vemik stuck out his tongue and shuddered.

“…Seriously?” Daar asked. “Woulda thought you guys’d be all over that meat. Good [protein]!”

“Bugs live in rotting wood and Werne shit!” Vemik told him. “And everybody knows that when blood-suckers live near still water, the people they bite get the shivering sickness.”

“Well, Nava don’t do those things. They eat leaves and get big and then you either roast them up or they burst and lots of little flies crawl out and go lay eggs and you get more Nava.”

Vemik shuddered and scratched his arm—his skin itched from the imagined touch of hundreds of little wrigglers.

“They also eat each other,” Jooyun reminded Daar, which did nothing to make Vemik feel any better.

“Well yeah, when they’re small…but that’s just how Nava do. They won’t make you sick.”

“I’ll stick to berries,” Julian declared. “Right, Vemik?”

Vemik nodded fiercely. “No question…but sap-stinger syrup is nice.”

“Ain’t nobody don’t like honey,” Daar agreed.

“Whatever you say, [Pooh Bear,]” Jooyun chuckled. “Come on, Vemik. Let’s find Walsh and go get those samples…”

They spent the afternoon performing a long loop to the west of the village, poking around among the broken mossy rocks that littered the bare places on the hillsides. Jooyun laid some snares on the way out, and found three of them had made a catch when they retrieved them on the way back.

To Vemik’s wonder, one of the birds they caught was unknown to him. When Jooyun held it up and presented it for him to examine, nothing about it was familiar—not the shape of its mouth, nor its snaggly teeth, nor the amazing green stripe on its breast that shimmered and looked bluer or yellower from the side.

Even Walsh, who trailed them the whole way with a gun held loosely in front of him and his head constantly darting left and right as he watched for danger, was fascinated by it. And visibly pleased when Jooyun declared that the animal would be known, to Sky-People at least, as “Walsh’s Bird.”

Vemik wasn’t remotely surprised when the big man disguised his happiness behind a joke: It seemed to be his way. “Aww! But I haven’t even bought you dinner yet!”

“Yeah, well. I already recorded a Chang’s Bird and a Buehler’s Bird.”

“Does this mean we skip to the fuckin’? I gotta make plans, y’know.”

“Do you wanna suggest that to my girlfriends?”

Walsh’s grin widened and he chuckled heartily. “…I’m good. Xiù trained with Firth, bruh.”

Jooyun laughed as he carefully used his thinking-stone—his tablet, Vemik corrected himself—to remember what the bird looked like for him before he let it go. “This relationship won’t work if you don’t commit to it. I need an [investment].”

“I can’t commit, man, I’m sorry. I’m just in it for the tail.”

Vemik would never understand those kinds of jokes. Sometimes the Given-Men joked that way as well, and he found it just as strange even then, but if they found it fun then who was he to argue? He watched the bird fly away when Jooyun released it, and spent most of the walk back wondering how many other birds and things there might be out there that he had never seen before.

No wonder Jooyun spent so much time on sampling.

They got back to the villages at the cool end of the evening, when the sun was still high enough for full light but the light had a warm flower-yellow softness to it that made the shadows long and lazy. From the hilltop, the villages were quite a sight. The huts and tents weren’t easy to see among the trees, but a keen pair of eyes could make out the places where smoke rose through the canopy all the way down the valley. Here and there, Vemik even thought he could make out the flames through gaps in the branches.

“Somethin’ smells good,” Walsh remarked.

“Root-bird? Always smells like duck to me.”

Vemik frowned at them, then lashed the air with his tongue. He couldn’t taste anything. He was about to say as much when a voice by his shoulder nearly startled him dead.

“Six root-birds.”

Vemik was halfway up a tree with an alarmed hoot before he even started thinking again. Daar, last seen helping Awisun with some heavy lifting, had appeared at his shoulder and growled the words right next to him.

And the big ‘troll’ looked so smug about it too. How a Person-Beast even bigger than Walsh could be so quiet just wouldn’t fit in Vemik’s head.

How neither Jooyun nor Walsh had even flinched was another mystery.

“Six?” Jooyun asked instead.

“Yup.” Daar stood up on two feet to draw a huge snuff of air in through the strange black wet thing above his teeth that he called his ‘nose.’ “Six. Two female, with roasted Tanew nuts, and…wait, [italian seasoning]? Definitely italian seasoning. And too much salt.”

“Not Xiù’s cooking then. She never over-salts.”

“That’s Hoeff,” Walsh predicted. “I swear he’s suffering from some kinda [deficiency]…Must be a [Navy] thing. You gonna come down, Vemik?”

Vemik blinked at him, then let go of his branch and swung back down to the ground with a glare. “He snuck up on me.”

“Fun!” Daar declared.

“Not fun!”

“Was ‘fer me.”

Walsh rolled his eyes and grabbed some of the loose fur on the back of Daar’s neck to give it a yank. “Dude.”

“Huh?” The Gaoian looked again at Vemik’s expression. “…Oh. I’m sorry Vemik, I didn’t mean it bad.” He sidled up and nuzzled against Vemik’s arm. “I won’t do it again, ‘kay? We gonna eat now?”

That was probably as good an apology as Vemik was going to get, so he decided to take it. And in truth, he was ravenous himself and the thought of root-bird and Tanew nuts had gone right to his stomach and started tickling his insides.

Daar’s prediction was accurate: they found Hoeff seated by the fire. Oddly, though, he was ignoring the skewered birds over the flames and frowning at one of the flat thinking-stone tablets while tapping at it. It wasn’t a thoughtful frown, but a worried one.

“Somethin’ the matter, Chimp?” Walsh asked him.

“…Maybe…” Hoeff stood up and waggled the tablet at them. “Does this thing have all the same apps we took on SILENT ARCHER?”

Walsh frowned and gave him a wary look. “Yeah, why?”

“All of them?”

Daar’s “…Yeeeaah…?” was slow and cautious.

Whatever that meant, Hoeff did not seem pleased. He grimaced and handed the thinking-stone over.

“…It has a smiley face on it again.”

Date Point: 14y AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

“So whatever happens will happen without Daar.”

The HEAT was loading up in its entirety under the sharp attention of Lieutenant Costello and, perhaps more significantly, the stentorian voice of Master Sergeant Vandenberg. Techs, Gear, supplies and the Operators themselves were packing into a Weaver like it was a clown car.

Admiral Knight hadn’t suffered from an instant’s doubt or hesitation in giving that order. Every spaceborne asset stationed at Cimbrean was mobilizing, and he’d eat his golden epaulettes if the same wasn’t happening at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, where the USAF’s 946th Spaceflight wing was parked.

Caruthers nodded solemnly. He’d been promoted to Rear Admiral only two months earlier, on the back of a so-far exemplary record of commanding the fleet ‘at sea.’ “We don’t have a jump beacon out there,” he said, “and the fastest ship we can spare would need two weeks to reach him.”

Champion Meereo ears were a display of anguish. “Admiral, we need Daar! Without him, Stoneback—”

“Will do what Stoneback does,” Regaari said, calmly. He was present in his role as the most senior of the SOR’s Gaoians and an influential officer of his Clan, not as a sergeant. And in Knight’s view he’d done an admirable job of restoring his poise after his justified frustration at narrowly missing the scheduled jump. There was ice in those Whitecrest veins. “Forgive me, Champion Meereo, but Clan Stoneback won’t roll on their back and surrender just because their Champion is absent. They have a clear line of succession in place. Daar would not accept anything less.”

“However much we might need him,” Caruthers stated firmly, “retrieving him is simply impossible.”

“Could be for the best anyway,” Powell opined. “He’s a bloody icon of his Clan. He might be more useful in the aftermath than in the actual fight.”

“That’s enough about Daar,” Knight said firmly. “What do we have?”

“Genshi is in Wi Kao city,” Meereo recalled. “Ever since the Conclave of Champions he has been busy. Officer Regaari, if you have any insight into his actions…”

“We’re aware of BIG HOTEL infiltration in Whitecrest’s ranks,” Regaari said. “Over the last three years the Brothers and Fathers involved have been carefully isolated and controlled. Champion Genshi’s first act in response to this will probably be to sanitize them.”

“Good,” Knight nodded. “What else? The females?”

“We have a trusted asset in place at the Mother-Supreme’s side. Green, and briefed on DEEP RELIC. The Mother-Supreme herself is still Green, too. Our efforts to cleanse Clans One-Fang and Firepaw on the other hand haven’t been so successful…” Regaari admitted.

“Meaning the Gaoian fleet’s like as not to be crippled by BIG HOTEL action before the shooting even starts,” Powell summarized.

“Assuming they don’t turn and join the swarm. The Racing Thunder is safe at this point but that’s only because Father Yefrig has encouraged his crew to remove their implants. The rest of the fleet is suspect and the same goes for ground forces. We don’t have a unified military.”

“It hardly makes a difference either way,” Caruthers pointed out. “Even if they were a unified, seasoned force with not an implant between them, the Swarm of Swarms would swat them aside anyway.”

“Damn and…fucking blast,” Knight swore quietly. “We aren’t ready. Go to war with the army you have be damned, the army we have is…” he reined it in. “…We need an alternative. If we put a Football in place around the planet, how long would it last?”

“A Firebird could have one around Gao inside the hour,” Caruthers said. “But with every Clan compromised on some level or another, it wouldn’t have a snowflake’s chance in Hell of staying up for long.”

Regaari duck-nodded. “The ground-to-orbit defence coverage is too comprehensive.”

“Then we need to disable the planet’s own defenses to defend it,” Knight shook his head at the irony. “Can it be done?”

All eyes trained on Meereo.

“Well…yes. We could disable communications across the planet. But it would need to be a total thing, because setting up selective filters leaves too many holes. All or nothing.”

“We can rebuild smashed infrastructure,” Regaari declared.

“If…” Meereo was clearly distressed. “I do not think you understand the depth of what I am suggesting. This isn’t messaging and mating-grams, Regaari. This will affect safety of life systems. Food distribution. Emergency communications. ALL of it.”

“I’ll take global infrastructure collapse over extinction, Champion.”

“We’re so dependent on…The two may be distressingly similar.”

“So long as they aren’t identical.”

“How much time would it buy us?” Knight asked, urgently.

“Taking the network down permanently is…It can be done. But the instant we do, we will be in a disaster relief situation with…three days until things collapse in their entirety.”

“…That’s all?”

“Food in modern societies is just-in-time delivered. And very few of the Gao have emergency supplies. The more practical workhouses might…but not more than a week. After that, we run out of clean water, sewerage…”

“The alternative,” Regaari repeated, “Is what happened to the Guvnurag.”

Powell grunted. “We know, Regaari…And unless there’s a better option, Champion…?”

Meereo’s ears wilted, lowered, then drooped right down to lie flat down the back of his head. “…I can’t think of one.”

“Bitter medicine it is, then,” Knight declared. “Powell. Flash message to Champion Genshi. Tell him GAMETIME is in the fourth quarter.”

“Aye, aye.” Powell nodded and made tracks for the communications center.

“Caruthers—I’m coming with. I’ll be travelling with the Fleet Intelligence Centre aboard Myrmidon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Champion Meereo…whatever we need to achieve this, please provide it. Sergeant Regaari, you should rejoin your squad and—Yes, Sister Niral?”

Niral had abandoned all pretense of Gaoian civilization in her bustling around the base. The young intelligence analyst had reverted to four-paw running just like the males, and had even resorted to carrying her tablet in her mouth—a sure sign that she understood perfectly just how dire things really were.

She reared to her feet and plucked the tablet from between her teeth.

“You…may want to see this, Admiral,” she declared, and handed it over.

Knight took it and frowned at the screen.

<:-)>

Date Point: 14y AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

“Of course the ‘Drunk on Turkey’ has weapons! It’s mine, ain’t it?”

Daar and Daniel Hurt were having a ‘perfectly civil’ disagreement, and Coombes had to admit that Daniel was doing impressively well considering that he was arguing with somebody who had the prominent muscles of a trained pitbull and the rough size of a forest bear.

Daniel wasn’t being unreasonable, but he really wasn’t pleased that their ship was loaded for war.

“What kind of weapons?” he demanded.

“Nothin’ massive,” Daar placated. “Two gauss guns.”

“How big?”

“One eight megajoule, one two hundred kilojoule.”

Those numbers got an impressed whistle from Allison. When everybody looked at her she took off her sunglasses and hooked them into her collar. “That’s about as big as a tank gun and an autocannon,” she explained. “Respectively.”

Walsh laughed. “Damn, Tigger!”

“Ain’t nothin’ massive,” Daar said, sounding disappointed. “I wanted a forty megajoule but the engineers said no.”

“What you brung should be more than enough to handle Abrogators,” Hoeff said.

“And we were gonna smash ‘em anyway,” Coombes pointed out. “Makes no difference to me if we do it with C4 or aerial attack.”

“Nothing massive, sure,” Daniel agreed. “But it’s not exactly a potato gun either.”

Daar duck-nodded, more soberly than usual. “Look, professor. I get ‘yer point, but reality don’t much care for our philosophy. I’d rather spend all day mating and working too but sometimes, violence needs doin’.”

Daniel sighed. “I know. Hell, you’re preaching to the choir—”

“Especially with the mating part,” Walsh chipped in.

“Prof, you got kids?” Daar asked it suddenly, and genuinely.

“Grown and successful,” Daniel nodded. “Why?”

“Well…it ain’t exactly the same with us…but all my cubs? I don’t wanna see a world where they ain’t got any prospects, or hope, or, y’know. A reason.”

“Daar,” Daniel laid his hand on the big Gaoian’s arm warmly. “I understand. Really I do. I just wish you’d told me you had them so I’d’ve had plenty of time to think about how to…” he trailed off and waved his hand toward the curious crowd of Ten’Gewek who were watching.

“I got my reasons ‘fer not sayin’ anything. It ain’t personal, but…”

“Fair enough. I’ll adapt.”

Daar slapped Daniel on the back hard enough to almost knock him over. “Spoken like a Stoneback! And so will they! But right now…c’mon Boss, we’ve got some overgrown nava t’kill.”

Coombes nodded. “Hoeff, Walsh, you stay here, watch out for everyone. And get emplaced, ‘cuz I bet BIG HOTEL won’t like us breaking their toys.”

Walsh didn’t need a second word. “Yan. Can I ask for your help, please?” he asked.

Handling the Given-Man with respect had been drummed into them hard. Yan was well-disposed to them, but he was still a chieftain—here on his tribe’s home ground, his authority demanded deference.

Yan nodded solemnly, and followed him towards the Drunk on Turkey.

Daniel watched them go with a tense expression. He looked like a man doing some hard thinking, and who didn’t like his conclusions.

“Somethin’ the matter, Professor?” Coombes asked him.

“…The situation here has apparently been stable for more than a year,” Daniel replied. “But the moment we arrive…”

“I know. We arrive and our guardian angel fucks off. Can’t be a coincidence.”

“I wonder what happened?”

Heavy footsteps on the *Drunk on Turkey*’s ramp heralded Walsh’s return with a pair of M240s comfortably over his shoulders, and a massive assault pack on his back. Yan was swaggering alongside him carrying three ammo boxes with each arm and a seventh balanced on his shoulders, steadied by his tail.

Coombes watched the walking firepower go past, and found some dark humor in it.

“…Maybe she decided we don’t need her no more,” he said.

Walsh paused and shrugged the weapons more securely onto his shoulders. “Hoeff! Think you can emplace up in a tree?”

“Always wanted to!”

“Good. Take this.” He handed one of the machine guns to Hoeff. “Spare barrels are hanging off the bottom of my pack.” Hoeff took those, along with three cans of ammo. “Yan and I gotta dig a nice little hole over…there.” Walsh pointed with his chin towards a rise in the terrain with good overhead cover and line-of-sight into the clearing. Hoeff nodded, gestured at Vemik who came bounding over, and pointed toward a convenient tree with an overlapping field of fire.

“What about us?” Xiù asked, gesturing to Allison, Julian and herself. Coombes suppressed an internal sigh—he’d been slightly dreading this part.

“…I want Misfit aloft. Get your asses into orbit, maybe even put down on one of the moons and be ready to rabbit,” Coombes told her. “If this all goes south then Command need to know.”

The trio glanced at one another, then back at him. He explained before any of them could query him.

“Look…We hafta assume that BIG HOTEL have satellite coverage across this shit. Now we know they’re active, or gonna be active, and to a satellite Misfit is gonna stick out like a giant chunk of steel and radioisotopes where there shouldn’t be one. Maybe we can disguise the village—Ain’t no way we can disguise a ship.”

“What about the jump array?” Xiù asked. “And the concrete foundations we laid down? Won’t those stand out too?”

“Yeah, but they’re expendable and they’re less of a juicy target. A couple’a concrete foundations would probably just get stepped on by abrogators. Misfit could invite anything up to a nuke or a Rod From God. And then there’s wormhole suppression, air interception if you try and take off…” he ticked off on his fingers. “The only smart play here is to sideline your ship, and that means sidelining you. And yeah, I know it sucks and I’d hate it too, but it’s happening. Don’t argue with me on this.”

As he’d known she would, Allison looked as though she wanted to educate Coombes on the finer points of Bostonian vernacular. ‘Looked as though’ was where it stopped, however: Instead she sighed, nodded and tried to relax. “It…I hate it, but that all makes sense,” she agreed.

Julian glanced back at the two emplacements behind him. “You fellas aren’t fully covered, though. If you and Daar are going up in one ship and we’re going away in the other…That doesn’t leave a lot here to protect the People.”

“I know. We need a rifle covering that stream bed to the north,” Coombes agreed, “And frankly…Your ship needs its pilot and engineer, but it can do without its field researcher for this.”

“Back the fuck up—!”

Patience was a virtue Coombes had long since mastered, but in this case he didn’t need it. Julian put a hand on Allison’s shoulder and stopped her mid-outburst. “Babe. No. They need me and I’m almost as good a shot as you. And I can climb.”

“…I can handle being sidelined, but—!”

He reached over and pulled her into his arms. “I know.”

Even this didn’t seem to bring her down, until Xiù, who had gone pale and still and silent, reached out and took Allison’s hand.

The three of them had to be psychic with one another or something. They seemed to have a whole conversation that lasted all of two seconds and consisted entirely of eye contact. Whatever they said to each other, Allison finally sagged and took a protective step to Xiù’s side.

“…Fuck.”

Time to move on. “…Right. Look, your boy knows what he’s doin’ and all of this is just precaution anyway. If we’re lucky we won’t even get drones. We’ve got fancy satcom radios too, so everyone can stay in touch…”

“And what am I doing?” Daniel asked, tactfully and from a safe distance.

“You’re gonna explain all this, as best you can. I don’t want the natives freakin’ out over how we just fuck off suddenly. Talk with Yan if you can but don’t get in the way. Walsh is gonna need him up in their little nest.”

“…Coombes, bringing our weapons here is one thing, but if you’re suggesting he should help load and fire it—!”

“Yes. I am suggesting exactly that. We’ll worry about the consequences when we’re all alive to worry. And in any case, all he’s gonna be doing is handling ammo belts and being a second set of eyes. It’ll take him about two minutes to learn and it’s not exactly advanced combat skills.”

“I thought you said this is a precaution.”

“Yeah, well. No plan survives first contact.”

“Daniel…they’ve seen our spaceships land, they’ve seen the jump array, they’ve seen my shotgun in action before…” Allison pointed out. “We’re not coming here fresh. The damage is already done.”

“Machine guns from prepared positions seems like an escalation.”

“They’re smart enough to see that. These people are a long way off stupid, Daniel. And they aren’t made of glass, neither.”

Daniel gave them both a knowing, sorrowful look. “It’s the fact that they’re so intelligent which creates the problem,” he said. “They aren’t fragile, you’re right. But their culture is.”

Coombes gave him an annoyed look. “Look, Professor. I know you’re smarter than me and all that, but right now I don’t give a fuck because lives are on the line. Do what you’re told: I’ll be appropriately contrite later.”

“…Very well.” Daniel grimaced, flapped his hands awkwardly against his sides in a kind of resigned shrug, and went to find the Singer.

That just left Allison, Julian and Xiù still standing around and holding hands.

“Well?” Coombes told them. “You know what you’re supposed to be doin’, jump to!”

The trio glanced at each other, nodded, and booked it back toward their ship. No doubt they’d take a few moments of together time before grabbing the ammo and spinning up the jump, but Coombes wasn’t totally heartless. Urgent as things were, he’d let them have it.

He took a moment to look around and take stock. The natives sure as shit weren’t dumb, Allison had got that right. They got the meaning and decamped to the trees while Yan, Vemik, and Vemet got a crash course in radios, lines of fire, and how belt-fed, crew served weapons were used. He could hear shouts and whistled down in the valley as the news spread from encampment to encampment, and a few of the nearer ones even seemed to be packing up and bugging out.

Of course, they’d fled once before, hadn’t they? Hell, maybe spreading things out a bit more couldn’t hurt.

”Boss. You comin’?”

Daar was bringing the Drunk On Turkey online, and the kinetic thrusters were making that edge-of-hearing electric whine that sounded a heck of a lot like a compressor spinning up. The time had come to get aboard and get to shooting. With luck, they could end the threat quickly, and all of this was going to be unnecessary.

But Coombes really didn’t believe in luck any more.

Date Point: 14y AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

“So what you’re saying is that the Hierarchy have wormhole beacons all over the planet.”

The tablet pinged and the green tick appeared again, then qualified with an icon depicting a planet, another depicting stars, and the round purple-and-black swirly thing that Knight had deduced was the…Entity’s…choice for depicting a wormhole.

“On the ground and in orbit?”

Tick.

“And these are…independent of the planetary communications network.”

Tick.
Skull.

“Is there any way to neutralize them?”

The Entity seemed to have a frustratingly disjointed approach to conversation. Wherever it could, it used an emoticon. Where it couldn’t, it used a kind of limping mish-mash of words in couplets. And every so often, when it got frustrated, suddenly it would write a perfectly coherent sentence with no clear rhyme or logic apparent as to why it didn’t just do that all the time.

A trio of icons—a planet, a radio mast and a wrench—popped onto the screen.

“…Modify the communications network?”

Tick.

“How?”

Radio mast.
Wormhole.
…Bug spray?

Knight gave up on that one. “…Any idea what that means?” he asked.

“It’s…suggesting that we could modify part of the communications network into a wormhole suppressor. I think.”

Tick.

“Can we do that?”

“Not if we smash the whole thing.”

The tablet pinged again - an exclamation mark.

“We have to,” Knight told it.

Question mark.

“Our orbital assets need the ground defence stations offline.”

Loading icon.
Ellipsis.
Tick.

Planet.
Radio mast.
Explosion.

Plus sign.

A word, now: <Lavmuy>.
Space shuttle.
A wormhole and a test tube.
A wormhole and bug spray.

An equation. A long, complicated and impenetrable one that Knight simply wasn’t equipped to understand.

“…Champion Meereo?”

The Longear took the tablet and his ears swivelled as he read, before slowly folding backward onto his scalp.

“A…Oh. Hm. Yes. …Shit.”

“Is there a problem?” Knight asked him.

“This is…It seems one of my Clan’s secrets isn’t so secret.” Meereo cleared his throat. “Ah…yes. We have an experimental wormhole facility at Lavmuy spaceport.”

Regaari duck-nodded. “Project Farthrow, yes? You’re experimenting with single-end wormholes.”

Meereo sagged. “Who—?”

“Gentlemen, might I suggest that the matter of Clan espionage is for another time?” Knight prompted, gently. Meereo duck-nodded and rallied.

“…Seven years ago, one of Clan Highmountain’s foremost mathematicians discovered an alternate solution to the wormhole tuning equation which…hm.” He paused, thought, and obviously decided that laying some groundwork was in order. “Ordinarily, when you attempt to open a wormhole, the far end will emerge at entirely random coordinates in spacetime unless you have a beacon. The larger the event horizon’s surface area, the greater the uncertainty. And, because we’re talking about all of spacetime here, the uncertainty scales at a simply incredible rate. A wormhole as big as a photon would most likely appear in intergalactic space. The receiving end can be anywhere in the universe, at any point in the past or future.”

“I’m familiar with the science,” Knight agreed. The need for a wormhole generator to be paired with a receiving beacon was absolutely at the core of interstellar logistics.

“Father Refyek proved that, mathematically at least, it is possible for a wormhole to have a surface area of exactly zero,” Meereo explained. “Meaning you could generate a single-ended wormhole on a precise target of your choosing. Project Farthrow is our attempt to generate such a wormhole. If we can actually do it, it would revolutionize interstellar communications. It might even enable intergalactic communication and travel!”

“Could it be adapted into our suppressor?” Knight asked, making a mental note to tell SCERF about that one.

“Easily. It would…ruin the experiment and set the research back almost to first principles…” Meereo hesitated, then hung his head. “But it’s better than extinction.”

The tablet pinged enthusiastically: it was full of green ticks.

Knight couldn’t resist a dry smile. “Well. Our Spiritus Ex Machina seems to approve,” he observed.

“Then we have our mission briefings,” Caruthers surmised. “Can communications be disrupted from the Farthrow facility?”

“No. The network is robust, we would need to seize…” Meereo counted on his paws quickly, then gave up. “…numerous key facilities all over the planet. All of them are NOCs and can quickly assume control of the local networks.”

“Dozens? Hundreds?”

“Dozens.”

“And they have to be seized? We couldn’t just obliterate them with RFG strikes?”

Meereo contained a sigh. “The network doesn’t die if you kill its management stations, you just lose control of it. No, we need to control those systems, and we deliberately designed it so it would be…difficult to do so remotely.”

“We need marines, then.”

“We need Stoneback, and all of their Fangs.”

“Insufficient,” Regaari jerked his head. “Stoneback has three Fangs at full strength, their Champion is absent, and our assessment of his second is…” He hesitated. “I…I would not presume to second-guess Daar’s business, but we do know that something transpired between him and Brother Tyal of the First Fang, and now Champion Daar’s efforts have focused strongly on Brother Fiin.”

“So the primary local asset is undermanned and in the grip of a leadership crisis,” Caruthers summarized.

“I think…confidence crisis would be best. Tyal is physically impressive and highly skilled, but he no longer has…boldness. You’ve met Fiin. He is resolute and aggressive like Daar, but he is still young and growing so his presence isn’t as…compelling.”

“How many stations could Stoneback realistically take by themselves?”

“Realistically they could take six, if we split their Fangs. But…we have another problem—they won’t be able to. They will be utterly focused on defending the Females, and it would take Daar to persuade them that this operation would achieve that end better.”

Knight nodded. “I’ve heard enough—this is a job for human paratroopers. HEAT will secure the Farthrow facility. Control over planet-wide wormhole suppression is vital to our line of supply. Once we’ve secured that facility, we can jump array over all the planes, helicopters, men and tanks we could ask for.”

Colonel Miller spoke up. As the liaison between the SOR and the USAF, he was generally content to remain silent and alert, which meant that his rare intervention in the conversation carried weight. “It’s a plan,” he agreed, “but authorizing it will have to go right to the top, Admiral—this is an Allied concern. The sooner the President is briefed, the sooner he can order a recall of The XVIII Airborne Corps. And…everything else.”

“Tremblay will already have called an emergency meeting with the heads of state,” Knight assured him. “So unless they’ve all taken leave of their senses in the last few hours…I’ve had the pleasure of many conversations with President Sartori, and with the PM. They’ll rise to the occasion. Meanwhile, we’re going to prepare as if their go-ahead is a given, not sit around and wait for it. Caruthers, the fleet is in your hands. Miller, if you’d be so kind as to relay our strategy to Tremblay and find out how the 946th are doing?”

Miller nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Sergeant Regaari, you should return to your unit. Champion Meereo, I think you should go with him…” Knight looked down at the tablet in his hand. “And as for *you*…”

A bright red question mark filled the screen.

“…Thank you. I don’t know what more we can ask you to do. I suppose the only thing I can ask is that you help where you can.”

The Entity replied using a tick mark and, to Knight’s amusement, a shamrock.

“…Yes. Good luck to you, as well.”

The tablet’s screen blanked and returned to normal functions, and it was alarming how clearly Knight knew that he was holding a mere computer again, rather than…well, a person.

“Good luck to us all,” he added.

Date Point: 14y AV
Whitecrest Clan Enclave, Wi Kao City, planet Gao

Champion Genshi

Genshi’s communicator was a heavily customized piece of equipment bolstered by the absolute clawtip of Gaoian machine learning to prioritize and filter his messages and schedule. Usually, he let it do its job and relied upon it to pass through messages according to its own decision-making process.

There were only three classes of message that he had specifically configured an exemption for: All three could blitz through the filter unscrutinized, all three had a custom sound effect to let him know he had just received them, and all three were up there among the kind of messages he hoped never to receive.

Just hearing the distinctive sharp buzz was enough to raise his pulse and flatten his ears.

ZKZK VRTZZ00 DE ORQ31TV
F 292527Z-GAO SEP
FM STAINLESS/stainless@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil//
TO OFC THE CHAMPION WC/champion@whitecrest.clans.sgao/
BEEKEEPER/beekeeper@scerf.forces.ca.smil/
RINGMASTER/ringmaster@malmstrom.gsc.af.smil//
INFO TEMPLAR/templar@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil/
OFC THE PM/office@pm.uk.sgov/
POTUS/president@whitehouse.sgov//

T O P S E C R E T SAR-DEEP-RELIC SI-GAMMA ORCON REL FVEY GAO-WC
BT
SUBJ/(U) GAMETIME-FOOTBALL-4 QUARTER//

(U) WARNING: This message contains GAMMA COMINT of an extremely sensitive nature.

(TS//SAR-DR/SI-G//OC) TEMPLAR reports GAMETIME is in the final quarter. SIGINT indicates imminent BIG HOTEL/RIDLEY attack on DISNEYLAND. GAMMA sources indicate massive fleet movements, estimate strike within a few days. Recommend immediate action.

(TS//SAR-DR//OC) TIGGER out of contact, will not be available for initial event. All effort will be made to ensure availability as soon as possible.

(TS//SAR-DR//OC) The full resources available to AEC are available and at your disposal. AEC appoints you the on-scene commander until TIGGER is available.

(TS//SAR-DR//OC) [attachment: briefing.pdf]
CL BY: OCA-SCA-CONTROL; REASON: 1.4(a,d); DECL: 75X1

“Fyu’s fury…” It was exactly as bad as he’d feared. Worse, even. The attack was coming before Whitecrest was properly ready, and without Daar there to direct Stoneback’s Fangs things were shaved even closer to the skin.

“Is…something the matter, Champion?”

Genshi had been talking business with Father Eyun. One of Whitecrest’s unaugmented majority, but a skeptic of Regaari’s, Genshi had been soothing the younger male’s ruffled fur and reassuring him that a Champion’s loyalty was always to the Clan.

The fact that Eyun felt he needed to question that rather proved for Genshi why his advancement had halted where it was. Still, right now—especially now—he needed every ally he could muster, and even then…

“…Brother…” Genshi sprang to his feet. “I need you to deliver a message in person to Grandfather Kureya of Clan Highmountain. For his ears only.”

Eyun’s ears twitched into a bewildered posture for just a second, but he stood as well, listening intently. “Of course, Champion.”

Genshi’s pawprint unlocked the safe in the back wall of his office, and he handed Eyun a sealed box. “Hand him this, ask him about the skull that his predecessor Grandfather Talo showed me, and tell him that GAMETIME is in the final quarter. End of message.”

“…Yes, Champion.”

“Time is short, Brother.”

Eyun needed no further prompting. He duck-nodded, turned, and flowed out of the room with all the speedy grace that was becoming of a Whitecrest. Genshi gave a brief moment of thanks to the universe in general that he had people he could rely on right now, and then turned to retrieve the other item from the safe.

Whitecrest had a great many secrets, and none of them could be allowed to fall into enemy hands. It was time to purge the ranks.

Date Point: 14y AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

Life as President demanded some calculated risks when it came to personal time. All work and no play made Jack not just a dull boy, but potentially a fatally over-stressed man. Sometimes, Sartori just had to stay up late to watch TV and gamble on nothing important coming up in the small hours of the morning.

So, he’d stayed up to watch HBO. That Show With Steven Lawrence and an episode of The Void before bed. A sensible balance between entertainment and responsibility, or so he’d thought before he’d been woken up at 2am and bustled underground to ‘the Tank.’ Not even a fresh-made Sunrise was going to touch that kind of sleep deprivation.

He hated the Tank. It was imposing, windowless, ultra-secure and easily his least favorite room in the whole world because sitting down in it almost invariably meant bad news and hard decisions.

More of the former than the latter, today—the news was bad, verging on being the worst, but the decisions were mostly straightforward. Terrible, but straightforward.

“Recommendations?” he asked, reviewing the assembled data in front of him. He’d committed a lot of it to memory before, but there were so many planned-for contingencies that one busy head couldn’t have prayed to retain all the details. Especially not after three hours of sleep.

Everybody in the room looked equally sleep-deprived. Stan McMurdoe, the Secretary of Defense; Homer Mayfair, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; even his advisors Margaret White and Paul Nicholls, who both usually managed to look groomed and composed no matter the hour, were blinking and struggling not to yawn.

General Mayfair was handling it best. He was an essentially focused individual and probably more than used to moments like these at the wrong end of the night. “You need to recall the XVIII Airborne Corps now Mister President,” he advised.

Sartori nodded, and gave the order without needing any elaboration on the grounds that Mayfair wasn’t a man to stress his words like that unless he was absolutely certain.

“What’s your proposed objective?” he asked.

“Secure the Gao,” McMurdoe replied promptly. “Their homeworld at a minimum, and their other colony worlds if possible. My understanding is there is an on-the-ground agent who is helping.”

More than one, Sartori recalled. Some of which went far beyond weird. “I’m holding the details on that close to the chest for now, sorry. Strategy?”

“Obviously we need to deploy a system defence field. We have several, but they’ll be vulnerable to enemy action from the inside. To prevent their destruction and to keep the Hierarchy from moving and coordinating, we need to secure and disable the whole planet’s telecommunications network in coordination with Clan Longear and their operations staff. This was recommended by Champion Meereo under duress, and it means our secondary objective will be massive humanitarian relief.”

“How massive?”

“It’ll be the biggest humanitarian operation in US history. If we shut down all global telecommunications here on Earth right now, people would start dying in…minutes. Hours at the most,” Mayfair informed him. “And it sounds like the Gaoians might be even more reliant on theirs than we are on ours.”

Sartori exhaled slowly under the weight of that revelation. “…Understood, make plans accordingly and assume this will be an Allied operation. What’s our exit strategy?”

“Once Gao is secured against incursion, we remain for a brief period to ensure some modicum of stability. Then we leave. Ideally, the internal affairs will be left to Champion Daar, from my understanding. I…confess I do not understand their internal politics, Mister President.”

“I don’t think they do half the time…” Sartori grumbled, prompting a collection of tired, stressed half-laughs.

“There are other concerns, Mister President.”

“Such as?”

“Our combatant commanders will need nuclear weapons authority. I want permission to activate a football and send it along.”

“…Don’t we already have system shields with them?”

“…A nuclear football, Mister President.”

Of course, he was referring to the nuclear authorization briefcase. Sartori grunted softly to voice his frustration with not only his own tiredness but also the constant, overlapping acronyms, code names…just names in general. Why weren’t people more creative? And why was it always a sports analogy? He liked a good ball game as much as the next man, but…

He focused. “…Right. Who will be the senior American commander?”

“That would be Brigadier-General Stewart.”

“That’s an awfully low rank for nuclear release. Is there no one else?”

“The whole situation is too fluid. We need to keep command off the field.”

“Understood. Conrad, would you please?” Major Conrad was the assigned aide-de-camp who was tasked with the care of the Presidential Emergency Satchel, and who would be the one to activate Stewart’s unenviable new football. Conrad stepped forward and laid the device open for the President’s inspection.

“Weapons release is hereby delegated to Brigadier-General Stewart and to his designated Executive Officer.” The President reached into his pajama pocket, pulled out a plastic card, and snapped it open to reveal the appropriate code on a tough little slip inside. He’d entered an activation code only once before, during the scramble to the Guvnurag homeworld; Doing so a second time matched President Truman’s record, and somehow he just knew that there would be future activations.

“Confirmed, Mister President. I will see to it.”

“Good. How long is all this going to take?”

“We should be mobilized in thirty-six hours,” Mayfair assured him. “From there, if our friends in Gao come through with some beacons, we’ll be able to deploy instantly. If not…the record time from Cimbrean to Gao is four and a half days.”

“Fortunately, the intel that sparked all this suggests it’ll take the Hunters a week to fully mobilize,” McMurdoe added.

“I hear a ‘but’ hidden in there somewhere…” Sartori predicted.

“…But they don’t need to fully mobilize to still bring overwhelming mass to bear. Even a fraction of the Swarm-of-Swarms is more than we could handle. If they decide to send a vanguard…”

“How soon can we get anything on Gao?” Sartori asked. The question was answered with shaking heads.

“Thirty-six hours to start mobilizing any force of any significant mass,” Mayfair said. “The HEAT is our most rapid response, and even they won’t be able to get there instantly without a beacon. If we had one…four hours, give or take. But Mister President, the HEAT is not a sustaining force. They can get in, do one mission, and they’re done.”

“Do they already have a target?”

“Wormhole suppression. There’s an experimental Clan Longear facility. Unless we take and hold it and use it to suppress hostile wormholes inside the system defence field we put up, victory of any kind will be outright impossible.”

“…How long can they hold it?”

Mayfair straightened. The room’s overhead lighting made the lines in his forehead and around his eyes look even deeper than they already were. “Until the cavalry arrives, sir. They don’t have any choice in the matter.”

“And who will the cavalry be?” Sartori asked him.

“Us. Or if we’re lucky, friendly Gaoians. We’ll…know when we know.”

Sartori nodded grimly, and stood up. “…Everybody who can should get some rest,” he said. “Paul, Margaret, that includes you. You need to be fresh for the speech you’re going to help me write.”

“What’s going to be in it?” Margaret White asked, standing up herself.

Sartori sighed, knowing that any sleep he did snatch tonight was going to be restless and nightmare-fuelled. His next words were undoubtedly going to condemn an unthinkable number of sapient beings to death.

“I think it’s time for us stop hiding the existence of the Hierarchy,” he said.

Date Point: 14y AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemet Stone-Tapper

“These…guns. There are many kinds.”

Jooyun nodded gently. He was sitting with his back to the trunk and the w…–the rifle across his knees, looking relaxed and limber in a way that the People never quite managed. All long legs and easy grace. He was a good bit bigger than Vemet remembered, more People-like in the way he’d scaled the tree without Vemet’s help this time…

Vemet still found that most of the Sky-People were slender to look at, and that hadn’t changed about Jooyun. He was like…like a tall and stretched out young man who had grown strong from the hunt. He was bigger than Coombes and a lot bigger than Daniel or Hoeff, but…

They probably had exactly the right word for it. Something to ask about later.

He had said something about the ‘exercises’ he did with Walsh and Daar every day in the morning and at sunset, too. That seemed very strange to Vemet, and Vemik was no doubt pestering Jooyun with all sorts of questions. It was like…doing work without actually doing any work, and he’d done a lot of that just to get stronger for his ‘mission’ with the People.

It was strange that he was willing to sweat and ache that much for them. And humbling.

Jooyun looked back over his shoulder at the other two guns. “Ayup. Those two fellas have ‘machine’ guns. They can fire—”

“Net, Tiny. Gonna fire a test burst and clear my weapon.”

That was a strange radio-name, the one thing Walsh was completely not. He was very tall, thickly built and strong like Yan, and had none of Jooyun’s…stretched-out feeling, or whatever it was. He was a bit of a Sky-Thinker, too. Sky-People were strange.

But friendly. Jooyun chuckled at the radio, “Well, you’ll see pretty—”

Vemet flinched and gripped the branch with his tail and both feet at the sound that snapped across the clearing. It sounded like a strong branch breaking, as quick and as regular as a tree-striker bird knocking, as loud as a hammer on steel. Just a hand’s-number of sharp *crack*s, then again, and a third time.

A child began wailing in the village.

“…That. They can fire like that.” Jooyun looked amused.

“Yours…can’t?”

“This? Nah. This is a hunting rifle. Those are for when Sky-Tribes go to war.”

“…A Sky-People war.” Vemet sighed at the thought. “My son had silly ideas like maybe you would have made peace forever between yourselves.”

Jooyun chuckled in the back of his throat. “We’re workin’ on it,” he said. “Daniel thinks it won’t ever happen…He’s probably right, too.”

“Why?”

“Vemet my friend, if we could answer that question, we wouldn’t need to have asked it in the first place.”

“And…Awisun’s gun? The one that earned her the name Sky-Storm?”

“Hers is good for both.”

Vemet nodded, thoughtfully.

“I never got to ask, before,” he said. “But…she protects you?”

“We protect each other. I know it must seem strange to you, a woman who’s so good at taking-magic.”

“The Singer is a good hunter,” Vemet reminded him, then trilled at a happy memory. “I remember her rite of manhood. She brought back a bigger trophy than I did when I came of age…maybe we made it so a good trophy would find her, but…”

“She still Took it,” Jooyun finished for him.

“Yes. The gap isn’t so wide as some women want to believe. Men want to Give to their children too.”

Jooyun squirmed uncomfortably on his branch, stretched out his legs, re-settled himself and said nothing. It was a talkative silence that said much to Vemet’s ears.

The silence lasted a hand of hands of heartbeats before being broken by the wa—the radio again. And as Sky-Magic went, hearing a man’s voice come out of a tiny black stone was almost as hard to grasp as the thinking-stones.

“Tiny, Chimp. Good effect. Our turn.”

This time, Vemet gripped the branch and was ready for the rapid heavy crack of the ‘machine gun’ being fired. He didn’t flinch, but the baby in the village, whose long-suffering mother had only just quieted it, shrieked back into full voice again.

Jooyun snorted as the echoes died away.

“I bet Vemik is asking him questions. Actually…” he picked up his ‘radio.’ “Chimp…” he paused and sighed. From what Vemet could gather, he really didn’t like the radio-name he had been given. “…Playboy, I guess. Good effect. Don’t be spinnin’ tall tales to my favorite [cavemonkey] now.”

‘Cavemonkey’ seemed to be an affectionate tease he used for all the People. That seemed good to Vemet; gods wouldn’t tease people, and they wouldn’t grin while doing so.

“Playboy, Chimp. Copy that. Aww, can’t I have a little fun?”

“No, man. He’ll take anything you say as [Gospel].”

Vemet trilled at the sound of his own indignant son’s voice over the radio. “Will not!”

“Net, Boss. A little more radio discipline please.”

A series of clicks, which Jooyun said meant everyone was saying ‘yes.’

Jooyun scratched the back of his neck and chuckled. “Spoilsport,” he commented, for Vemet only to hear. “Too bad we don’t have noise-[cancelling headsets], that’d make this easier.”

“What…?”

“…Never mind. Anyway. I guess now, we settle in and wait for Daar to do his thing.”

“Well, then…I have questions,” Vemet said.

“I’ll answer what I can, you know that.”

“These are about you, and about Shyow and Awisun…Do you have children with them?”

Vemet’s guess had been right—Jooyun shifted uncomfortably again. “No…not yet. Some day though…”

“Do all Sky-People wait so long to have children? You aren’t a young man, Jooyun.”

“Nah, some start pretty young. That…I’ll tell you the story of how we all met, later. But I’m not old. We can have children for many years. Our…Giving-magic is very strong.”

“How many?”

“I could be as old as Yan and still father children, and raise them to adults before I die.”

“And…after that?”

Jooyun smiled fondly. “My grandfather was…” He frowned up at the sky. “Uh, lessee, [ninety-two…nine point two times six]…uh…nearly [sixty] years old when he died. That’s this many.” He set the rifle down for a moment, then opened and closed both his hands six times to show. “But…I’m very healthy, and the, uh, the Sky-Thinkers who do a kind of giving-magic called ‘Medicine’ say I could live to be even older, as long as I don’t fall into bad habits. And the girls should live even longer.”

Vemet’s head reeled. Yan was already old by the People’s reckoning. Fit, strong and seemingly unstoppable, but nobody had ever heard of a Given-Man who had lived much past two hands of hands of winters. The thought of living nearly twice that long—!

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, rather than speak his astonishment. “What about them? Do they want children?” He couldn’t imagine a woman who didn’t, but he knew better than to assume anything about Sky-People.

“Yes. Soon, I think. Or in a few years…We all do. Just…we have this right now. If we were gonna have kids, we couldn’t be here, and I don’t think leaving you to die from this would make us very happy. But then there’s…”

“Net, Tigger. Splash one [Abrogator]!”

“Tigger, Tiny. Keep the [HUD footage], we can get you some nose art when we get back.”

“Fuck yeah!”

The ‘radio’ went quiet again.

“Tigger?”

“That’s Daar. Big fella’s havin’ fun by the sound of it.”

Vemet nodded, and peeled over a couple of branches to form a sitting-nest for himself.

“I wish I was,” he said.

Date Point: 14y AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Akyawentuo moon 1, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

Allison was going a little stir-crazy back in engineering, and Xiù really couldn’t blame her. There was nothing to do except wait, listen to the men bantering on the radio far below and a light-second delayed, and try not to worry.

Allison was filling it by going through as much of her full weekly maintenance checklist as didn’t involve actually turning anything off or unplugging it. Xiù was filling it by watching her work over the internal camera feed. The spectacular view of planet-rise over dark gray mountains of lunar regolith hadn’t paled, but there wasn’t much more to see of it now, and she really wasn’t in much of a mood for it anyway.

Eventually, Allison flopped down in her workstation chair and sighed, before getting on the internal line. She looked up into the camera as she pushed the talk button. “You bored, babe?”

“I feel bored, stressed, worried…” Xiù confessed. “…Sidelined…”

”That’s about right, yeah, Allison agreed. “Ship just feels…I dunno.”

“Empty,” Xiù agreed.

Allison didn’t reply at first. Instead she sat back in her chair and laughed softly. “Ugh, this is pathetic. He’s fine, they’re fine…I just wish I was down there too. I’d feel more useful.”

“We’re fine,” Xiù reassured her. “Come on, it isn’t pathetic to worry.”

Allison just sighed over the line, but nodded. Xiù smiled to herself, then hit her other talk button. She’d been watching the clouds down below anyway, getting the lay of the continents and weather. It was nice to have an excuse to say something.

“Net, Sister. I can see a nasty weather front headed your way from up here.”

She counted off the light-lag in her head, one mississippi, two mississippi, three…

“Sister, Tiny. Yan wants you to know he hates the rain.”

“He’d better get his cloak then, because you’re in for a soaking…” Now that she turned the ship’s sensors on it, that front was looking meaner by the second. The Doppler radar was showing an evil pink and purple scrawl across half the land.

“Sister, Boss. Anything we need to worry about?”

“I don’t think so, Boss. You’re on the other side of a mountain range.”

“Copy. Keep us posted if that changes.”

“Will do. Utah and I will keep an eye on it.”

Allison nodded, and Xiù saw her grab one of her monitors and switch it over the meteorological sensor feed. “Somethin’ to do, I guess…” she commented. “Thanks, babe.”

“Net, Tigger. Splash a second Abrogator.”

Xiù sighed, and keyed the internal line again. “Take one down, pass it around…”

“Twenty-four alien death ‘bots on the wall…”

Date Point: 14y AV
Hierarchy Dataspace, deployment buffer

0722

In retrospect, the fact that more immediate access to the Cull wasn’t available should have aroused 0722’s suspicions from the off. 0665 had followed none of the handoff protocols, and 0722 had already been complaining about the senior agent’s apparent dereliction of his duties even before the first Abrogator’s standby signal went dark.

That alone was suspicious. When a second Abrogator went offline minutes later…

Direct intervention was impossible. No local host meant no direct control. But the Abrogators could still be activated and set to autonomous assess-protect-retaliate.

All of the surviving units immediately fired their drone fleets from the launch canisters on their backs, flinging them high and wide in seconds before their wings snapped out, their flight fields came online and a detailed sensor network began to grow around the Abrogator line.

Not a one of them had moved from their last recorded position.

Frustration and mounting suspicion promptly crystallized into outright certainty. A negligent handoff was one thing, but this? Zero progress made in pursuit of a routine neolithic cull? Over such a time interval?

That went beyond negligence. That was clear dereliction, and it would have been fatal to 0665’s career all by itself.

The most damning factor, however, was the alien strike ship doing mach five on a planet supposedly inhabited only by stone-age primitives.

Its coilguns spat, and a third Abrogator went dark.

0722 did not have much in the way of options. Drones would be ineffective and the Abrogators themselves were too slow and ground-oriented to defend themselves.

But the command post had a single battery of long-range multi-role missiles. 0722 targeted the ship, and fired.

Date Point: 14y AV
High Mountain Fortress, Planet Gao

Grandfather Kureya

“Why are we doing this?”

Kureya gave an apologetic duck-nod. He rather liked the earnest Whitecrest father who had delivered Genshi’s message so dutifully, but if Kureya had learned anything about himself over the years, it was that he was prone to liking people a little too easily. The late Grandfather Talo had warned him away from unfounded trust in his final days.

“My friend,” he said, “I think you’re more than smart enough to figure it out for yourself.”

Father Eyun duck-nodded. His ears were set at an anxious angle, backwards along his head. It was a rare show of emotion from a Father of the usually composed and inscrutable Clan Whitecrest.

He had all the details he needed, Kureya knew. Quite aside from the urgent tone of the message he’d delivered, he was standing in the deepest underbelly of High Mountain Fortress and watching with interest as Clan Highmountain’s technicians prepared a contingency that had existed in some form or another for four hundred years.

The archives—or at least, as much of them as could be copied or which were utterly irreplaceable—had been sealed in stasis containers and sunk to the bottom of a sixteen-kilometer shaft in the thickest, most stable part of Gao’s tectonic crust, right under the Yamyu-An mountain range. Now, a descendant of the robot that had first bored that hole centuries ago was heaving itself back up out of it as uncountable tonnes of rubble were fed into its intake, to be melted and layered back onto the shaft’s walls.

The seam would be visible on close inspection, but by the time the Clan’s engineers were done the shaft would be buried under mud, gravel and reinforced concrete. The fortress’ lowest basement would look, to all but the most paranoid eye, like a mere sturdy foundation rather than the plug on the toughest bunker ever built.

Thus would the accumulated records of Gao, its people and its civilization endure practically anything. Only deep time, grinding geology or the eventual expansion of Gao’s sun would harm them unless they were deliberately excavated.

Retrieving them, of course, would be a matter for the future, but so long as the archives survived and there were Gaoians survived to retrieve them…it was a gesture of hope for the future.

“…I think the Swarm-of-Swarms is coming,” Eyun predicted, gloomily. “It’s the only thing I can think of that would warrant…this.”

Kureya didn’t answer. The heat rising out of the hole as the shaft-sealing robot did its work was creating a strong thermal now that ruffled his fur, tickled his ears with a distant igneous rumbling and filled his nose with the scent of toasting metal, rock and oil.

“…Aren’t we going to do anything?” Eyun asked, after a solemn moment. “Evacuate the females and cubs? Form a militia? Prepare our defences? Anything?“

“Why do you think your Champion sent you here?” Kureya asked him. “This is preparation, young Father. One preparation among many. But use your thinker for a minute and examine the consequences. What intelligence would we grant the enemy if we evacuated the Clan of Females?”

Eyun growled the growl of a man who was disappointed in himself and hung his head. “They would know we know they’re coming, and send assets as they were ready rather than waiting for the whole of their invasion force to be prepared. And…if we have a plan…?”

“If your Champion didn’t see fit to involve you in the details, I would not overrule him,” Kureya told him. “Even if I knew the details myself. All we can do, young Father, is follow some deathworld advice.”

“Which is?”

Kureya looked down into the hole again, and found himself fervently wishing there were any Starminds on Gao.

“Plan for the worst,” he said, “and hope for the best.”

Date Point: 14y AV
HMS Caledonia, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

HEAT mission prep was a ballet of sorts. The Operators themselves had one job—limber up and absorb whatever knowledge they needed while the techs got on with making them mission-ready. Last-minute suit adjustments, pre-mission bloodworks, systems configuration, field calibration…

It was a long list, broken down into a hundred short lists and spread across a platoon of technicians who all reported to Kovač…who had to sign off on every last item. Human or Gaoian, it didn’t matter—she was responsible for ensuring that the checklists had been completed down to the last minutia.

Fortunately, she was good at multitasking.

Right now, things weren’t helped by the fact that the mission details were still being finalized and that only the most basic basics had filtered down to the Operators.

Or as Master Sergeant Vandenberg summarized it, “We don’t know exactly what we’re hittin’ on Gao or why. We’re just gonna smash whatever we’re told to smash. Got it?”

Firth snorted. “Real inspirin’ there, Rebar. I’m feelin’ all kindsa informed and motivated.”

Baseball chuckled darkly. “What, you want an actual proper briefing full’a all the shit we need to know? When’d you acquire a taste for luxuries?”

“This outfit musta spoiled me,” Firth grumbled, raising his arm so Specialist Deacon could take a blood sample. He couldn’t resist being his usual caveman-jocular self, though. He flexed his arm hugely and smirked, “Like it, lil’ lady? It’s bigger.”

Deacon had been Firth’s tech from the start, and she was entirely used to his ways. Anybody who understood how Firth’s mind worked could see the enormous—and totally platonic—respect he had for her. “Somehow I doubt Freya would approve,” she commented, wiping his arm with antiseptic. He twisted his wrist with a quiet grunt and flexed harder.

“Says who? Just ‘cuz we’re steady don’t mean nothin’ these days.”

“Please, you’re a secret gentleman and we all know it. Also, I don’t fuck the meat I work on every day. Bad for hygiene, y’know. Now don’t cry at the big scary needle…”

She got a rumbling chuckle for that, and the blood sample, too. The Lads may have been incorrigibly flirtatious but they never let it get in the way of business.

“Anything I should know about before we run your bloodworks, Righteous?”

“Uh…nothin’ much different. I’ve been hittin’ it a lot harder lately, though, now that ‘Horse has some extra free time and can work out with me longer. Seeing some crazy results, too!”

“Mhmm.” Adam, of course, couldn’t countenance the idea of any actual free time, so once he’d poured as much of it as she could stand into *Marty*’s life, he’s naturally focused his laser-like attention on his “most biggest” friends. Daar was definitely rubbing off on him.

It seemed to be paying off for them, too…which was honestly about the scariest thing about the whole affair. Good thing she adored them all.

Deacon was an old hand at taking bloods. She slapped a minimum-dose Crude patch over the needle site—a necessity, or else every one of the Operators would be tracked up and down like a terminal junky—and handed the vial to Kovač. The Operators excused themselves and, now with Crude in their systems, attended to their “warmups.”

That made a complete set. The “lab” was little more than a horseshoe of desks in the aft corner of the flight bay, tucked inside some plastic sheeting and a low-power force field that filtered the air and kept the environment tolerably clean. Running the bloods was as simple as slotting each vial into the analyzer. The results were logged and any anomalies flagged automatically, and as always Marty had to override the system’s alert message. Despite her repeated requests, the software had never been updated to tolerate the massively raised baselines of a HEAT operator.

She really did need to get that scientific paper published one day.

Nothing stood out as unusual by the Lads’ standards, which was welcome. The last thing they needed right now was to juggle with anomalous blood chemistry just before an op. Some days, depending on how aggressively someone might have been training, or…anything, really, it became a genuine risk to permit a suit-up and attachment to the built-in regulation system. Murray had once suffered an alarming spike in his serum creatinine levels after eating a burger with extra pickles, they’d never got to the bottom of that one.

And the less said about the Trio, the better.

“Sergeant?”

Lieutenant Costello was waiting outside the lab tent, already dressed in his EV-MASS undersuit which meant that he was the next best thing to naked. The plumbing to handle fluid recycling in particular was both intimate and weirdly intestinal in its design, and because the undersuit was better than skin-tight the effect was honestly quite grotesque. H.R. Geiger met Plastination.

“Good timing, sir. I need your blood.”

Costello chuckled, and presented his arm. “You should say that more like a mad scientist,” he suggested.

“Let me know if we ever hire a guy called Igor…”

Humor made the blood sample go quickly and easily. Costello handed over his Operator’s Preflight Checklist and lowered his voice. “You maybe want to give my Protectors some extra attention? I’m pretty sure this mission is going to kick their ass hard. Especially Irish.”

“…What do you know, sir? If you don’t mind me asking?”

“Nothing concrete. It’s just an itch in my head.”

“…Will do, then.”

“Much appreciated. The old man should be down in about twenty minutes.”

Marty ran the Lieutenant’s bloods, which were easily the closest to baseline of any man who was EV-MASS certified, and ticked that item off her list before stepping back out of the lab and into the thick of the flight deck’s bustle.

The Protectors were just getting sewn into their undersuits, having taken care of their “sustainment” plumbing the moment before to the usual bathroom humor such a sans-dignity activity required. She took a moment for herself and watched. Maybe she was biased, but in her opinion, Adam was the only human being that made the undersuit look good.

Costello was right now that she looked—while Adam was, as always, a bouncing, smiling force of relentless optimism, there was an edge there this time, and on closer inspection she saw the same edge on ‘Base and Irish. ‘Base was being even more grunt-manly than usual rather than letting his intellectual side show, and Butler had that ‘fightin’ Irish’ look on.

They were being brave for her, she realized. Fuck.

Maybe some levity would help. “Got your bloodwork in, Ponyslab. I’m pretty sure we had a quiet evening, right?”

“…yeah?” His big ‘ol bushy eyebrows furrowed in the most adorably handsome way. They had had a quiet evening, too—just cuddles and a movie.

“Then why did your test count come in like a bull on hormone therapy?”

He let out a big, surprised laugh, and just like that the tension seemed to drain from all three.

“I dunno. Maybe it’s the Cimbrean turkey I ate last night!”

“Mhmm. Try not to spray your musk everywhere, Chunk. These suits are expensive to clean.”

Butler snorted and gave Adam a huge friendly blow on the back that barely rocked him but might have hospitalized a normal man. “Yeah yeah…I bet I won, though.”

“Won what?”

“Y’know. Who had the best bloodwork.”

“…Christ. Everything with you motherfuckers is like this!”

“Gotta beat your man on somethin’!” Butler declared, cheerily.

“Yeah, well…you didn’t. Not even close.” In fairness, Butler’s had been the closest among the Protectors to human normalcy, but he didn’t need to know that. “But don’t worry, you’ll grow up all big and strong one day.”

She was of course talking to a man who would have breezed to the top of the podium at any weightlifting competition, but really…everything was relative. In any case, Adam pounced on Butler, ‘Base pounced on Adam, and her distraction became a success as a two-on-one struggle got underway that Adam was in little danger of losing. They seemed genuinely relaxed now rather than deliberately nonchalant, which made all the difference in the world.

What they really needed, though, was something to look forward to after this. Marty knew her boys well, and when they were about to jump into the fire, the fire was all they saw. Giving them something to focus on past it was…

It wouldn’t be useful in the moment. In the moment, they’d give themselves to the fire completely and think of nothing else. But here and now, before that threshold, they needed something to keep them grounded and human until it was time.

“Y’know, I’m gonna let you three in on a little secret,” she said. The three paused mid-dogpile and gave her their undivided attention.

“I have, like…two girl friends on Cimbrean, so my hen party was always gonna be kind of a non-starter. So I thought…fuck it. Why not just throw a huge party for everyone?”

Adam stopped breathing for a moment. It was always easy to tell when he did because it was about the only time he wasn’t moving in some way.

“I’m still working out a few details,” Marty admitted, which was a white lie. She hadn’t actually worked out any of it, it had just been an idle idea…but idle ideas always worked best when under pressure. “So if there’re any requests…”

“Strippers?” Butler suggested cheekily. He was immediately crushed by Adam while Marty laughed and shrugged.

“Are there any strippers in Folctha?” she asked.

“There’re, uh…escorts.” ‘Base revealed. “Three girls.”

“How d’you know that?” Adam asked him, while Butler writhed in a futile effort to escape the steel trap of his armpit. “Ain’t like you’d ever need to pay…”

“Ain’t a big town, brother.”

Marty laughed again and shook her head. “No strippers,” she said. “To save Pony’s blushes.“

Her grin got wider at Butler’s muffled “aww” and the way Adam rolled his eyes and bore down even harder. ‘Base came back with a serious suggestion.

“Make it all comers? Throw a street party?” he suggested. “Maybe out on the lake.”

“I’d like that,” Adam agreed. Butler’s head was going an alarming shade of purple and he was flailing at Adam’s body without much success.

“Done and done…Better let him go, Chunk.”

Adam looked down at Butler for a second, shrugged, and released him. The (relatively) smaller man staggered away coughing, heaving air and uttering assorted vigorously Irish curses.

“Okay!” Marty smiled at them, then made a show of checking her tablet. “Just one last thing to take care of. ‘Horse, I’m gonna need you for this.”

Grinning knowingly, Baseball ushered Butler away, and Marty led her fiancé to a corner of the deck that was as secluded as they were ever gonna get. There was no such thing as privacy aboard Caledonia, but there was just enough for his arms to go round her waist and for them to kiss. Not strictly an authorized use of their time, but damn good for morale.

Adam always knew how to end a kiss. Forehead-to-forehead, nose-to-nose, smile, scratch her back in exactly the right place…“You made that up about the party,” he accused fondly.

He really wasn’t as dumb as he acted, sometimes. “…Maybe some of it,” Marty admitted. “But there’ll be one, baby. I promise. You’ll be there?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Good enough…” Too many things to say, not enough time to say them, and so many little rituals and tokens of good luck. No matter what, she wouldn’t voice her real fears or risk cursing him, so she made do with a simple “…I love you.”

He understood. “I love you too.”

Marty nodded, swallowed, and steeled herself with a breath. “…We’d better get back to work.”

He nodded, and let her go. She ducked back into the lab tent to grab her pH balance probe for the environmental suit system, and restored her working mindset.

Thirty-two hours. That was the minimum deployment time before their backup would arrive.

They were going to be a long thirty-two hours.

Date Point: 14y AV
Clan Straightshield Grand Precinct, Lavmuy City, Gao

Cytosis

Justice and the rule of law on Gao were a subject of fascinated study for Cytosis. The Clans were practically a law unto themselves, and there was no higher court in Gaoian culture than the esteem and opinion of Females. Even the Clanless—who in many ways would have been the largest Clan if only they had ever bothered to organize themselves as such—had considerable latitude in regards to some behaviours that other species would have considered gravely criminal.

A fight to the death between males, for instance, could be perfectly legal in the right circumstances. And Gaoians had such a strong cultural drive to share their possessions with their Clan or Workhouse that theft was a rare and treacherous subject. More often than not, the only things a Gaoian had which they viewed as being theirs were keepsakes, mementoes, souvenirs, trophies and other items of little conventional value but great personal importance. When those were stolen, usually it turned out that the thief felt an equally great sense of personal attachment to the object in question.

What mattered were the details. When a male killed a male, whether they were punished or not depended on many factors. Was it a fair duel, or an ambush in the alleyways? Did the killer have an overwhelming physical advantage? Had the victim yielded?

There were neither hard-and-fast absolutes nor black-and-white statements of objective truth in the Gaoian conception of criminal justice, and so the existence of a Clan devoted to law, order and a system of justice took some understanding.

But somebody had to be the fair mediator and moderator, the rock in the ever-shifting sea. A Judge-Father of Clan Straightshield didn’t so much interpret the law as decide what the law was in that particular moment. An arrangement that should have been anarchy and probably only worked thanks to the species’ unique social psychology.

Gaoians were, as a rule, intensely loyal people and no other Clan could be trusted with such a burden.

Straightshield fulfilled their mission by isolation—the only friends they had were among their own. In public, a Judge-Father never went by name. They wore their fur uniformly clipped and intentionally bred in a highly regular size, build, and coat coloring, to the point where it was a challenge to tell one apart from another even by scent. The Clan had legions of Brothers and Associates who deviated from the physical pattern of a Judge-Father, but they were advisors, enforcers, riot police and investigators. Even among the ones who met the physical requirements, very precious few could withstand the blisteringly difficult educational standards. They too were among the rest of the Clan. Big, strong, flawless specimens…but they weren’t the Law.

And nobody looked more like a Straightshield Judge-Father than Champion Reeko. Even those who knew him well often needed a moment to recognize him.

Cytosis hadn’t seen the Champion for too long, so his return to the Grand Precinct warranted immediate attention. With the whole planet rushing headlong toward imminent invasion, he absolutely could not afford unknown variables, especially when the variable in question was a Champion.

Fortunately, Reeko picked up Judge-Fathers, Brothers and advisors like a car plowing through a leaf pile—he picked them up and swept them in his wake. He acknowledged Cytosis with a sharp duck-nod and continued to converse politely into his communicator.

“Yes, I understand that Sister. And I apologize. Under normal circumstances the Mother-Supreme would have my full—yes. …As you say, Sister. No…forgive me, but no. I have nothing more than rumor and speculation and I wouldn’t want to waste the Mother-Supreme’s time with hearsay…” Reeko trailed off and listened intently for a minute. He came to a halt in the middle of the Precinct concourse and the blizzard of attention-seekers swirled around him before settling. “…Yes, Sister. As soon as I can speak with more confidence, I will contact you. No, thank you. I hope to be in touch soon. You as well.”

He raised his claws to ward off an inundation of queries, requests and pleas as the call ended.

“Brothers!” If there was one thing any experienced Judge-Father knew, it was how to loft their voice powerfully above a hubbub. “I know you all need me but for now I have business only with the Judge-Fathers. I trust everybody else to be able to handle their cases without me a little longer.”

Cytosis admired charisma. He stepped aside and let the disappointed Brothers disperse, glad that he wouldn’t have to wade through and overrule them to gently probe the Champion for information.

Reeko tucked his claws into the belt-loops of his working harness and watched them go with an impenetrable expression. He was hardly an open book at the best of times, but here and now his expression was completely locked down.

Cytosis had been harboring suspicions about the Champions and what they knew for some time. Now, he was all but convinced.

“…Champion, where—?” He began.

Reeko looked in his direction. Not at him, but past him, at somebody standing behind Cytosis’ shoulder.

“Now,” he said.

Numbness descended. The clothy, head-in-a-bag feeling of being suddenly and unpleasantly disconnected from the point wormhole field and its connection to the Dataspace. It was far worse than the mere physical pain of being thrown bodily to the ground by three of the Judge-Fathers and having his his paws wrenched awkwardly behind his back.

He was swiftly and efficiently stripped of his pulse pistol, his suppression prod and all the other tools of a Judge-Father. His paws were bound together so that no matter how he squirmed or pulled his claws would be useless, and he was unceremoniously heaved back onto his feet.

Reeko’s expression was no longer locked down. Now it was showing undisguised, disgusted contempt. He shoved his muzzle to within an inch of Cytosis’ borrowed throat and growled through bared fangs.

“I know what you are, Igraen. Speak.”

Cytosis calculated fruitlessly for a moment, but frankly he was too impressed to maneuver, here. Being so completely exposed actually gave him some paradoxical hope.

“…Then there is a chance for your people to survive,” he said.

Reeko paused and pulled back for a moment, tilting his head slightly. Then his paw gripped Cytosis’ neck and he dug his claws in through the fur. “What is your code name, Ghost? Who are you aligned with?”

“You are… familiar with the Cabal?”

Reeko’s claws tightened. “I ask the questions.”

Having his throat torn out was not on Cytosis’ list of desired outcomes today. And the pulse pistol pressed to the side of his head was hardly encouraging, either. “…My Cabal name is Cytosis,” he revealed. “To the Hierarchy, I am Thirteen. Do you need to know more?”

“Is Judge-Father Taarken still alive in there?”

“…It has been too long. His personality has…if I restored him, he would be insane. He is too badly degraded, now.”

“Hm.” The claws relaxed, microscopically. “An honest answer?”

“There’s no point in deception, now…”

“No. And if you had lied, I would have gutted you,” Reeko snarled. He yanked on Cytosis’ throat to make his point. “But you killed a Brother of mine, creature. How long have you insulted him by walking around in his corpse?”

“Seven years.” Cytosis debated inwardly for a second whether to reveal more information than that. Not yet, he decided. If the Straightshields knew interrogation as well as Six had reported that the Humans did, then it would all come out sooner or later anyway. Better to just answer the questions as they came, for now. Additional information was barter, and if Reeko didn’t think that he, Cytosis, was worth more alive than dead then presumably he wouldn’t have survived even this far.

“…That long, huh? Well. In that case—” the Straightshield Champion tore a terrible slash across Cytosis chest.

Cytosis locked the pain receptors down. The wound wasn’t fatal, and even if it was…well, discontinuity wouldn’t be much fun but his restored backup persona would only suffer the equivalent of a few hours of amnesia.

Of course, he as he was now would be dead, but rationalizing that particular problem was old hat to a digital sapient.

There was no sense in antagonizing Reeko, however. If cheated of his vengeance, the Champion might do worse, so Cytosis instructed the body to scream and struggle and watched the Gaoian’s satisfied snarl.

Reeko stepped back and licked the blood off his claws. “Lock this…thing away ready for interrogation,” he ordered. “And confine all Brothers with neural implants to their precincts until I say otherwise.”

Cytosis elected not to protest or whine for medical treatment as he was heaved firmly away. Now was a moment for delicacy.

He only hoped the moment for forthrightness wouldn’t be too long in coming. Gao didn’t have much time.

Date Point: 14y AV
Mother-Supreme’s personal aircraft, en route to Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Sister Myun

“You’re telling me that Champion Reeko brushed you off?”

“Yes, Mother.” Sister Yeyla duck-nodded nervously. “He was polite enough but…”

“Tiritya’s Sisters, what in Keeda’s name is happening today?”

Myun stepped aside as Yulna threw herself down at her desk. The Mother-Supreme’s personal aircraft had everything she needed to perform her duties, and that included handsome Takwood furniture and a state-of-the-art communications system dutifully installed for her by Clan Longear.

The flying office was full of mementoes to past Mothers-Supreme. Pride of place went to one of Giymuy’s walking sticks, resting in a display stand at the front of the desk.

Myun sometimes wondered what item of Yulna’s would stay behind to remember her. She’d been something of an ascetic for as long as Myun could remember. Her journal, probably—Yulna had a handsome Naxas-leather journal with a biometric lock on it, and she jotted a few sentences at the end of the day, every day.

Right now it was sitting alone and ignored on a side table.

“So Reeko wouldn’t talk. What about Father Shaal? He always fancied himself the Clan’s second stud, can’t you soften him up?”

Yeyla’s ears flicked nervously and she duck-nodded. “I’ll…try, Mother.”

“Good. …What about the Stonebacks?”

Normally, the Stonebacks would have been first on Yulna’s list. Whatever had happened with Daar on Cimbrean had badly hurt Yulna, though. She was treating them carefully nowadays.

Which was silly, in Myun’s estimation—Daar just wasn’t that complicated. Not that she could tell the Mother-Supreme she was being silly, but she’d got to know the Stoneback Champion quite well during their brief stay on Cimbrean. Even flirted a bit, until the mating app had confirmed what their noses picked up a bit too late to spare their blushes but early enough to spare them from worse.

She remembered being smugly proud for days of having a Champion for her sire, though the reaction amongst the Females had been…split. When she’d reported that revelation to Mother Ayma in their regular correspondence, Ayma had expressed delight. Yulna meanwhile had quietly muttered something about how it “explained everything,” though she had said it with her ears up. She had a talent for perfectly balancing compliments and insults in a single sentence, and she used it as a litmus test for junior Sisters: She would put them on the spot with a statement that could be taken either way, and wait to see what they did.

Ayma had also noted in her reply that Yulna had taken Daar as a mate some years ago. Yulna claimed not to know what Myun was talking about…but the nose never lied. Myun was pretty sure she knew exactly who her True Mother was, now.

“Daar is still off doing…whatever he does with the Humans,” Yeyla reported, checking her tablet. “Grandfather Garl is at Highmountain Fortress for some reason. Brother Tyal is doing…something with First Fang.”

“Whatever he does? For some reason? Doing something?” Yulna asked. “Yeyla, your information is usually a little more precise than that.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Mother, really. Things have been…rapid, recently.”

“Ever since the Conclave,” Yulna mused.

“We…don’t actually know that it was a Conclave, Mother…” Yeyla ventured.

“No, but I’d bet my other eye that it was,” Yulna made a frustrated growling noise, and thought for a moment “…What about the Openpaws? Tense times mean more fights, more wounds, more for the medics to do…”

The communicator clipped to Myun’s ear vibrated, and played a distinctive ringtone for her alone to hear. She stepped aside and took the call.

“Sister Myun here.”

Champion Genshi didn’t bother to introduce himself, but she recognized his voice anyway. “GAMETIME is in the fourth quarter, sister.”

“…You’re sure?”

“Our friends say that BIG HOTEL and RIDLEY are coming. Soon. The threats we discussed are now very real. Cubs play Sly Liar, behind Mother’s back.”

Myun made absolutely sure that her ears didn’t betray so much as a twitch. She knew Whitecrest’s covert phrases perfectly, Genshi had made sure of that, but all the secret words in the world wouldn’t be much use if she started to look panicky and fearful, even if there was a yawning hole under her stomach now that her courage was threatening to fall into and vanish.

“Thank you,” she said aloud.

“Good luck, Sister.”

“And you too.”

Yeyla was letting herself out as the call ended. Yulna gave Myun a curious look. “Anything important?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Myun replied, truthfully. Yulna didn’t argue. Instead, she yawned and combed her fur with her claws for a moment.

“…Any news from Wi Kao? Sister Teelyin’s cub is due today, isn’t it?” she asked.

Myun duck-nodded. “I think so.”

“I need to clear my head. I think I’ll call Ayma. Some news from home would be very welcome right now…”

“You should get some sleep, Mother,” Myun suggested, knowing full well that Yulna would need it in the coming days, and also that she wouldn’t agree.

“Myun, if I go to sleep now I’ll wake up just in time for my ninetieth birthday,” Yulna chittered. She stood up and headed out of her office to watch the busy Sisters outside. “Besides. Something is going on with the males, and I intend to find out what. I just need a moment, that’s all.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Yulna chittered back at her. “Don’t sound so tense, Myun!” she chided. “It’s probably nothing.”

If she only knew. But for her sake, Myun duck-nodded and pretended to unwind slightly. Inwardly, though, her guard didn’t drop for an instance.

She could smell violence in the future.

Date Point: 14y AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

Daar wasn’t exactly a pilot. Not really. The ship had just been designed so pretty much anybody could fly it, to the point where even though the controls were in Gaori, Coombes had pretty quickly picked up everything he needed to man the guns.

Which was pretty fun, right up until a big, sharp and unhappy-looking Gaoian character in a triangle lit up prominently in the top-right of his monitor, to the tune of a kind of wailing screech that shot right in through both ears.

“Fuck! What’s that?!”

“Uh…Incoming. Missile. That’s what that is.”

“Can you shake it?”

“Relax, we got a bugout beacon in orbit…” Daar licked his jowls as he concentrated and threaded Drunk on Turkey neatly down a river valley, so low that Coombes kept expecting to hear branches slap at the ship’s belly. “Next target is…twenty klicks.”

Coombes nodded and did his part. “Locked.” At least, that’s what he presumed the stylized eye-shaped icon with the X in the middle meant.

Daar chittered as the guns slammed on either side of their nose and a fourth Abrogator was scrapped. “Think we got BIG HOTEL’s attention?”

“Nah,” Coombes managed sarcastically. The lock alarm’s slowly accelerating beep was getting on his nerves. “I’m sure the Ten’Gewek have a mess of SAM batteries and the whole stone-age hunter-gatherer thing is just an elaborate joke. By the way, we got three minutes until it hits us.”

“…that long?”

“Yeah! Our pilots would be disgusted by locking on that far out. No surprise!”

“What kinda dumbass deathworlders did they fight with these kindsa tactics, anyhow?” Daar asked. He grunted and flung Drunk on Turkey almost down to the deck as they raced across an inland sea. He poured on the power, and they were now moving so fast the bowshock was practically dragging the whole damn lake behind them. “Target five, twenty klicks.”

“Ones who’d already nuked their asses to Hell and gone…”

“We came close to doing that, too! I’ll tell you the story some other time.”

“What, y’ain’t got time for a history lesson right now?” Coombes was surprised to find he was enjoying himself. “Lock.”

“I am kinda busy…Net, Tigger. Splash Abrogators four and five. BIG HOTEL anti-air givin’ us some trouble.”

“We got five more jump beacons loaded,” Coombes told him. “After that, I gotta grab some more outta storage. Two minutes.”

“We’ve got time for one more…” Daar declared.

“Nah. No need to take a risk. Jump out.”

“‘Kay.” Daar pushed a button, and…

Nothing happened.

“…Uhhh…”

“That missile’s still comin’…” Coombes warned.

“Workin’ on it!” Daar promised. He swiped angrily at his controls and made a growling sound. “…Uh…I, uh, think they might maybe have a wormhole suppressor.”

“Orbit?”

“Nuh. It’ll catch us.”

“Go to ground?”

“…No good spot close enough.”

“Dodge?”

“Tryin’…I ain’t a fighter pilot, Boss.”

Coombes barged out of his chair and yanked the door of the emergency locker open so hard that he broke a hinge. With the other hand he smashed the glass over the emergency ramp override, and it suddenly got a lot harder to hear. There were forcefields to stop the airflow, but they did nothing about the fearsome thundering sound that slammed into *Drunk On Turkey*’s every corner.

“Parachute!” he yelled, throwing one Daar’s way. “Net, Boss. BIG HOTEL have wormhole suppression and SAM, we’re attempting to evade—”

“Radiological alarm!!” Daar called back. His ears had plastered themselves to his skull.

“—Scratch that, BIG HOTEL have nukes! We are bailing out.” He shrugged the ‘chute onto his back and yanked on the straps. ”Misfit, recall to Cimbrean and get us some backup!”

“I got a confession!” Daar yowled over the hammering wind as he struggled into his own chute while trying to fly one-pawed.

“What?!”

“I really hate jumpin’ outta stuff!”

“You’ll hate gettin’ blown up even more!”

“Not fer long I won’t!”

That earned a grim laugh, and the ship lurched as Daar experimentally tried to fly with his foot while he got his ‘chute fitted. Coombes gritted his teeth and held on.

“Boss, Sister.” Chang scored big points—She sounded laser-focused and cool. “Wilco. Godspeed.”

The ride smoothed out abruptly, and Daar charged past in the confined space.

“Tiggs, what—?”

“I slowed down!” Daar’s claws eviscerated his footlocker and he swiped through it for a few precious seconds. “Can’t jump at those speeds!”

“Tiggs, we don’t have time for souvenirs—!” The beep was getting dangerously close to being a sustained, steady note.

Daar yipped triumphantly and snatched a fat black package of some kind from the footlocker. He rammed it in between his chest and the ‘chute’s straps.

“Go!”

Coombes didn’t need telling twice. He turned and dove out of the ramp like an Olympic swimmer.

Even though Tigger had slowed a heck of a lot, the wind still hit him like a wall and snatched him away. The shriek of *Drunk On Turkey*’s engines faded to a distant tearing sound, then all that was left was altitude, a hollow yawning feeling in his stomach, and the hammering rush of air past his ears. He spread his arms to dampen his spin and stabilize his fall, screwed his eyes shut and looked away from the ship. As much as he wanted to give the poor doomed gal a last glance….

The flash was dazzling even through closed eyes from behind, and the heat was something else entirely. He’d watched the People tapping a smelter and the heat off that had damn near felt like he was cooking. This was worse, but over in an instant.

Then the sound hit him. Even from…fuck, half a mile away the blast was deafeningly loud and he grimaced against the urge to clap his hands over his ears. As it was it flung him across the sky with a pulverising force that bruised his bones and addled his senses.

But he wasn’t dead. He was still conscious, he still knew up from down, and…whatever. Any radiation problems or whatever were just gonna have to wait for later on.

Experimentally he looked back towards *Drunk On Turkey*’s last trajectory and aimed a raised thumb at the angry boiling cloud it had left behind. It was a dumb old trick his grandpa had taught him and he didn’t know if it was even worth doing right now…but it made him feel a lot better to see that the detonation’s imprint was entirely hidden by his thumbnail.

He shook his head to clear it and keyed his radio.

“Tigger, Boss. You get out okay?”

There was a long, hissing silence.

“…Tiggs! This is Boss! You alive?!”

Nothing. Coombes groaned a curse through his teeth and tried again. “Godfuckingdammit, Tigger! Boss! Sitrep!”

The explosion’s echoes came back at him like distant thunder…but the line remained quiet.

“…Daar?”

Date Point: 14y AV
Hierarchy Dataspace, deployment buffer

0722

<Satisfaction>

0722 watched the variable-yield warhead do its work, and reassessed his priorities—There would be time to mop up later, now that there was no longer a ship smashing its Abrogators, he decided. Right now, the more pressing matter was 0665.

The traitor was assigned to Gao, and could disrupt that entire operation. All other concerns were secondary.

He reactivated the Abrogators and their drones, instructed them to run an automatic sweep, and turned his attention elsewhere.

Date Point: 14y AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

“Nukes…” Yan took a deep breath, and asked the Vemik-like question that was burning in his gut. The word had badly shaken the Sky-People. “…Means what?”

Walsh was becoming one of Yan’s favorite Sky-People to talk to, all easy cheer and good humor. He was very fond of them all, of course, but Walsh somehow felt like…like if Yan had a ‘human’ brother, one who wasn’t troubled with the burdens of a Given-Man.

Not right now, though. Walsh thought hard for a long moment before he spoke, and when he finally did, he started with questions like Daniel did when working up to the answer.

“You remember that your sun is a star very close up, right?”

Yan nodded.

“Dan’s gonna kill me, but…light doesn’t just appear or disappear. It’s a thing and it moves from place to place. Did you know that? It moves almost exactly like ripples in water, and it goes so fast you can’t see it move. We only know this because lots of very smart Sky-Thinkers did some very careful tinkering over many years, and they noticed stuff. Light does a lot of other weird stuff too but that’s the important bit. Light moves, and it moves faster than anything.”

That was a strange Sky-Thought, but Yan didn’t see the connection. “What does that have to do with the sun? Or these nukes?”

“I need to give you a sense of the scale. A beam of light could travel your entire world two hands over, in much less than a heartbeat.”

“That is…very fast.”

“Faster than we can really understand, yeah. It’s too much to fit in anybody’s head, really…But that same light, coming from the sun?” he gestured up at it, and Yan raised his hand to protect his eyes as he glanced toward it. “It takes as long to get here as it does to walk from Vemik’s forge to your hut. That’s how far away the sun is.”

Yan stared at Walsh. That…didn’t fit in his head.

“Now. Feel the heat from the sun? Imagine how hot a fire needs to be that you could feel it from that far away. That’s a star. A fire too big and hot for any man to really get, and we can see them from…years away, at the speed of light.”

Yan wasn’t happy with the direction this was going. “…Nukes,” he pushed.

“…A nuke is a weapon that makes a fire that hot. Just for a heartbeat, but that’s enough.”

“…You have…made weapons out of the stars?”

Walsh sighed. “Not…no. That ain’t exactly right. But this is why Dan is so worried, because the biggest secret of all, and one you should never ever tell Vemik, is that Sky-Magic has simple rules, and you can learn them all. All Sky-Magic. Even the magic of the stars, the moons, the rain, the dirt and trees…life itself. And the Enemy is using that Sky-Magic against you.”

“And you are fighting back with the same magic.”

“Because it’s the only one we have. And we don’t want you to lose yourself in it.”

The sky…flashed. Like a lightning strike in the night, but in the clear of day. So bright that it left a pinkish-green smear across Yan’s world

“Shit!” Walsh got on the radio and shouted so everyone nearby could hear. “Net, Tiny. Everyone get low, open their mouths and cover their ears!”

Yan knew absolutely nothing of sky-magic, but he knew when to listen to a man who did. He buried his face in the dirt and crushed his ears to the side of his head with his palms.

Nothing happened. Not right away, anyway. But through his hands, he could hear that Walsh was counting. ”One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three…”

He got as far as [thirty], a bigger number than Yan had ever bothered to count in his life, before the thunder arrived. It hit hard in the beginning then went on and on, loud enough to hurt as it rolled and bounced again and again from the hillsides and valleys. Birds scattered into the sky, blanketing the forest in frantic beating wings, and as the great godlike voice of the ‘nuke’ finally growled away into quietness, Yan heard other sounds. People crying out, children wailing, the distant braying of a Werne herd beginning to stampede. The alarm calls of more birds than he could count, and the hiss of the trees.

But the rumble didn’t quite go away. It felt like it might just get quieter and quieter but never vanish forever, as if the world had changed and the echoes would never be gone.

“Jesus…” Walsh muttered. “Ten Klicks, give or take…makes it a couple’a hundred ton [warhead]…”

“Tiny, Chimp. Does Yan wanna check in on his tribe? We’ve prol’ly got a few and you’re close.”

Walsh looked at Yan, who nodded. “He does, Chief.”

“Git ‘er dun, Tiny.”

“Will do, Chief.” Walsh clicked his radio and untangled himself from behind the barricade of [sandbags] and [gun] he had made. “We should do it quickly, though. The Enemy might take advantage.”

“What about Coombes and Daar?” Yan asked.

Walsh didn’t look at him. “…They had a chance. All we can do is…pray.”

Date Point: 14y AV
Commune of the Clan of Females, Wi Kao City, Planet Gao

Mother Ayma

“Well something is happening. I haven’t seen or heard from the Whitecrests all day!”

Ayma had to admit—Yulna’s instincts matched her own. There was something off about the energy of the city today. The commune was disarmingly quiet, restlessly so. At the top of the sweeping front steps, Sister Layra was fidgeting with her fusion spear as if expecting a mob of males to storm them at any second and drag away all the Sisters, like in the bad old days before the Tirityan reforms.

But there were no males. Not even the usual Clanless hangers-on and desperate clowns, doing their best to amuse a female in the commune park. It seemed like every male in the city had gone to ground.

“Not even their liaison to you?” She asked. Yulna was away on business for now, soothing some political ruffled fur elsewhere on Gao and generally exerting the tediously tactful, but weighty, influence of the Mother-Supreme.

“He was the first to vanish. I think the Longears suspect something, but they’re being uncharacteristically closed-down, I haven’t heard from Champion Meereo in days, I can’t reach Champion Genshi, and nobody knows where Daar is, not even Grandfather Garl. I tell you, Something is happening.”

“Yulna, I believe you.” As an old friend, Ayma had the right to call the Mother-Supreme by name. “But what—?”

She was interrupted by a flash of light and fire. She went quiet and stared at it, not even properly comprehending what it was right up until the wave of swaying grass and disturbed dust tore past her and she felt the explosion with her bones.

Sister Layra began shouting orders, roaring at the Sisters and cubs to get inside. Keening females and cubs began streaming up the stairs past Ayma, and she was dimly aware of Yulna’s voice shouting in her ear via the communicator, demanding to know what was going on.

And in the distance, a second bomb went off in the Whitecrest enclave. This time, it was accompanied by the crackle of pulsegun fire.

Date Point: 14y AV
Clan Whitecrest Enclave, Wi Kao City, Planet Gao

Champion Genshi of Whitecrest

Genshi was not killing his Brothers. It was important to remember that. He was freeing them from alien slavery. His Brothers were already dead.

It just fell to him to strike the fatal blows.

But it was one thing to rationalize that and quite another to be shot at by a Father he’d known from cubhood, or claw the throat out of a Brother he’d personally promoted and initiated into the Clan.

He knew them all by name.

Brother Kyuuro, who’d infiltrated that shipyard consortium to gather intel on the deal they’d made with the pirate V’kt’zzknnk A’tzzktk’rrrk. The biodrone had his skill with a pulse pistol, but not his wit and alertness. Brother Gyoshey, uncredited hero who’d saved a thousand lives who never knew they were in danger. Fast, but not fast enough thanks to sluggish programming.

Father Taaru, whose brilliant mind had maneuvered spies, informants and enemy agents like pieces on a game board and whose uncharacteristic clumsiness in handling the disappearing colonists had aroused Genshi’s suspicions long before he ever learned the truth. In his youth, he would have seen Genshi’s fatal blow coming long before it arrived.

Still. Biodroned or not, these were still Whitecrests, and they put up a bitter fight. Pulse gun fire blitzed and lashed around the enclave as knots of Genshi’s unaugmented clashed with the biodrones. Groups would engage, swipe at each other and fade away, maneuver, engage again. Genshi and his loyalists held the numbers advantage and the element of surprise…but each duel left good Gaoians dead.

“Champion!”

Brother Fergiil. Loyal, young, eager. A raw weapon with limitless potential. Genshi had put him in charge of a Claw. He was doing well, but he didn’t watch his back enough which was why Genshi had set him to the comparatively safer task of overseeing the sabotage. And there was a lot to sabotage.

Whitecrest had been prepared for days like these since the moment of its founding.

“…Brother.”

Fergiil handed over the detonator. “Are we…really destroying the archives, Champion?”

“Everything we need is already in living minds. It would be the height of stupidity at this point to leave that sensitive information lying around where somebody might find it.”

“I…It’ll cripple the Clan, Champion…Whitecrest will be—”

“I know.” Genshi put his paw on the young Brother’s shoulder. “But there are secrets in that archive that would cripple all of Gao.”

“…As you say, Champion. But what do we do after—?”

Fergiil flinched as, far underground below them, the bomb went off and reduced the last of Whitecrest’s central archive to wreckage and memories.

Genshi slapped the detonator back into his paw, and hefted his rifle. There was still a lot of blood to spill.

“We Light The Darkness,” he said.

Date Point: 14y AV
Mother-Supreme’s personal aircraft, en route to Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Mother-Supreme Yulna

“Ayma! Ayma!! What is going on?!”

All was confusion. Yulna’s aides were clamoring for attention, all reporting dire news of some kind, but somehow the most important thing Yulna could think of right now was the safety of her oldest and dearest friend.

Her ears flattened in relief when Ayma finally got her wits together and replied.

”There are… explosions. And there’s shooting. Yulna, I think something terrible is happening. I should…get the cubs somewhere safe.”

Yulna looked around. All her Sisters were looking a touch feral right now - their hackles were up, they were flexing their claws. Everybody was on edge.

“You’re right…” she agreed. “Get to safety, Ayma. Please.”

“Be safe too, Sister.”

Ayma signed off.

Yulna was immediately inundated with cries for her attention. She tried to shout them down, but it wasn’t until Myun stood up to her full and impressive height and roared like a primitive animal that they shut up. Even the other two guard-sisters backed away.

Just like her sire… Yulna wasn’t sure what providence had maneuvered the young guard-sister onto her shuttle today, but right now she wouldn’t have wished for anybody else. She stepped to Myun’s side and put a hand in her daughter’s fur.

“Yeyla,” she selected an aide at random. “…Explosions and gunfire?”

“In the Longear enclave in Wen-tei city,” Yeyla duck-nodded.

“And the Straightshield grand precinct in Lavmuy!”

“And—!”

“Enough!” Yulna snapped. “Does anybody know *why?!*”

This resulted in confused looks. Plainly, nobody had the faintest idea.

Yulna took charge. She pointed to the guard-sisters. “Tell the pilot to change course. We are not landing anywhere until we know what has happened. You three,” she added, addressing some junior aides. “Contact the Champions, all of them.”

“Champions Genshi and Meereo are still on Cimbrean, Mother. And Champion Daar is—”

“Then mail them!” Yulna snarled. “Sisters!” she added, snapping at the ones she’d ordered to the front. “Now, please.”

The two of them had gone still and strangely blank-eyed. Then, as one, they drew their pulse pistols.

Yulna would have died confused if not for Myun, who threw down a shield-stick a shaven second before the pulse fire splashed into it. Four Sisters were caught in the crossfire and she backed away, watching with a cold frisson of shock as Sister Yeyla went sprawling dead with a misshapen skull.

Thwarted by the shieldstick—the latest designs could withstand pulse pistol fire for hours—the two traitorous guards fired up their short fusion spears and advanced with them aimed flat and level at Yulna’s chest. The points seethed and hissed as they pushed through the shield barrier.

Myun drew that ridiculous Human sword of hers and fired up its own fusion edge, and suddenly it didn’t look so ridiculous. It looked like an agile arc of silver death that thrummed and whined as she stepped forward, angling it this way and that with remarkable quickness thanks to the rudder of that long handle.

Two on one, though–!

There was a pregnant moment of horrible tension, and the traitor sisters lunged.

There was a blur of the most incredible violence.

There was a pained whine, and several grisly thumps.

The two traitors were dead, both carved into several steaming pieces. Myun staggered and fell to three feet, pawing at her face.

“Myun!” Yulna rushed to her side. There was a horrible cauterized wound in Myun’s muzzle that ran from nose to ear, so deep that it exposed her back teeth and stank of scorched bone.

Yulna keened acutely, having no better idea of how to cope, but after a few seconds of agonised whining Myun heaved herself upright and spat out half a fang.

“All of you,” she ordered, surprisingly clear-voiced considering the disfiguring injury to her mouth and how much pain she must be in, “To the front of the plane. Whoever approaches the Mother-Supreme, dies.”

“Myun–!” Yulna objected.

“Only until you’re safe, Mother.”

Yulna paused, then looked at the…pieces…of sisters whom she’d trusted to guard her with their lives, and relented.

“Do as she says,” she ordered. The surviving Sisters, still keening and distraught, retreated and huddled together for comfort as far away from Myun as they could get.

“…Myun, you’re hurt.” Yulna pointed out, redundantly.

“And they’re dead.” Myun chittered bitterly. “And you’re alive.”

She turned her head and bared her teeth in a feral grin. For once, the human gesture looked too natural on her. “Shoo taught me that move.”

Date Point: 14y AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

“…Boss, Tigger. I’m…still here.”

Coombes damn near fainted from relief. For just a few empty seconds, his hope had completely flickered and died.

“Function check Tigger. What’s broke?”

“…Say again?”

“Are you hurt, you huge furry motherfucker?!”

“I can’t hardly hear you, Boss…everythin’ hurts an’ I got this horrible ringing….Ugh…”

Coombes fancied he could finally see Daar, a dark speck a long way to his north. He glanced at the ground, tried to calculate angles and speed. They were going to land…a Klick, maybe two, apart from one another.

“…Pop your ‘chute and sit tight when you land. I’ll come to you.”

“Naw Boss, it’s just overpressure. I’ll be better after I get a good night’s sleep. Prol’ly.”

Daar’s chute deployed and the big Gaoian was soon controlling his descent towards an obvious clearing. Coombes nodded and focused on his own landing—the last thing he needed right now was to get impaled on a Ketta branch.

There. A wide open circular clearing where the brush and bushes grew comparatively short amidst a few bare tree stumps. He angled toward it and deployed his parachute once he was committed.

“It’s okay Boss, really,” Daar insisted. “I know what overpressure feels like. It’s just a mild case o’ the bends, movin’ around’ll help a bunch.”

“…Understood,” Coombes relented. Daar sounded as much like he was trying to reassure himself as report genuine good health, but he definitely sounded better already. May as well take him at his word. “Sniff me out, south-south-east of you.”

“Copy.”

As always, the last few feet were deceptive and the ground came up fast. Coombes was ready for it though—he trotted to a smart halt on firm packed earth scattered with young hardy bushes, and bundled his canopy smartly to the ground.

He lay on the smooth fabric for a few seconds to get his breath and let his brain catch up with the reality of what had just happened. It hadn’t been a big warhead—a tiny tactical thermonuke that had to be in the hundreds of tonnes at most—but still: He’d just survived being nuked. That was kind of an achievement all by itself.

He sat up and checked himself. He had a mild case of tinnitus and the exposed skin on the back of his neck had a tight, stinging, cooked feel to it but that was about the worst as far as he could tell. He felt sharp, strong, alert and oriented. No nausea, mild headache…it hadn’t been long enough for any of the early symptoms of radiation exposure to really set in but somehow he doubted he’d taken any kind of a real dose.

Nothing he could do about it if he had anyway. Gear check: he had his SCAR, his sidearm, his KA-BAR. His assault pack with first aid kit, exoplanet survival kit, eco-preservation kit, all apparently in perfect condition. Everything a Joint Extra-Terrestrial Scout needed.

He stood up and took stock of his surroundings. Something crunched under his foot prompting him to look down, and when he brushed aside a bramble-like vine with his boot it took him a second to recognize that he’d just crushed a bone.

And…there were other bones. Disarmingly human-like bones, too long in the humerus and too short in the femur. And a skull, conspicuously lacking the gap where a human skull would have had a nose.

There were a lot of them. And the bits of wood over there weren’t tree stumps, they were the burnt and weathered wreckage of a hut.

He was standing in the middle of a massacred Ten’Gewek village.

He stood for a moment, then sniffed and stooped to get on with the job of hiding his ‘chute. There was a lot of work to do.

Date Point: 14yAV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

“Uh…is it me, or does that look like the whole damn fleet?”

The not knowing was the worst part. For all Allison knew, the Hierarchy might already have spared a second nuke for the village, and if they had…

Worrying about it wouldn’t change anything. Couldn’t. All she could do was do her bit, keep *Misfit*’s electrical heart beating strong and clear while Xiù got them both back to Cimbrean, but….

But each second away was going to be torture. Any distraction should have been welcome. Instead, when the sensors revealed the entire spaceborne navy forming up and taking on shuttles, it was the opposite of welcome. It hinted at terrible events.

“…It is.” Xiù’s voice was grim.

“…The last time they formed up like that was the Guvnurag…”

“…I know.”

If there was a reply to that, Allison couldn’t think of it. She busied herself with making sure their IFF hadn’t suddenly decided to take a shit and die, and left Xiù to her tense anticipation.

They didn’t have to wait long.

“Incoming vessel, this is Cimbrean border patrol ship Racing Thunder. Be advised, the Cimbrean system border is closed until further notice and the system is on lockdown due to a security threat. Cease all thrust and hold your trajectory, or else you will be fired upon. Our IFF has you as friendly. Please confirm your identity and purpose.”

Xiù had that cold edge in her voice again. “Cimbrean border patrol, Bravo Golf Echo Victor MISFIT on an urgent matter.”

Allison made sure that the power to engines was right down on zero, more out of a desire to focus on something than because she needed to. Sometimes, *Misfit*’s systems were too perfectly reliable.

After a too-long pause, a new voice hailed them. This one was older, rougher. Senior.

“Sister Shoo, this is Shipfather Yefrig. I fear the worst is happening, Sister. Gao is under attack.”

On her screen, Allison saw Xiù’s head bow bitterly for a moment. “…Shipfather Yefrig…I feared as much. How quickly can we be cleared to approach?”

“We shall intercept and escort you. Sit tight.”

Allison’s fingernails tapped out an anxious staccato on the power management desk as they waited. On the camera feed, she saw Xiù fiddling with her own nails, the way she always did when her mind was working overdrive.

“…Babe?” she asked. Xiù’s head came up and she looked back at the camera.

“…I need a hug,” she confessed.

“That makes two of us…Be strong, babe,” Allison told her.

“I promise.”

“Good girl.”

The simple fact that Xiù laughed, even if it was a nervous and tense one, did a lot to help Allison’s own state of mind.

They settled into a more assured, patient kind of silence which ended when the needle bulk of the Racing Thunder slammed back into the world of relativity mere hundreds of meters away. The pair returned to their stations as the patrol ship hailed them.

“Misfit, Racing Thunder. I have been directed to receive you and take custody of your ship, and then jump directly into Cimbrean space. You will be met immediately upon arrival. Your return is unexpected. Did something go wrong?”

Xiù nodded fiercely. “Yes. We need to move as quickly as possible, please.”

“Slave your controls and heave to for inspection. Racing Thunder out.”

Xiù’s hands swiped sharply across the controls, slaving them to the larger ship and locking both of them out from retaking their ship unless they were released. That done, she cursed something lengthy in Chinese and yanked on her chair’s dismount lever, which deposited her in the prep room.

“Cào nǐ zǔ zōng shí bā dài!”

Allison stood up, slipped between the capacitor banks and joined her. “Hey.” She saw the look on Xiù’s face and touched her arm. “…Are you okay?”

“…Angry. I’m angry. I…” Xiù made a fierce noise that was more Gaoian than human, spun away and stalked into the hab room. They were orbiting Cimbrean-5, and the cupola window in their wall afforded a wonderful view out over the perpetual lightning storms that battled throughout that planet’s upper atmosphere. She stood in front of it, clenched her fists, then slowly unwound them and ran her fingers through her hair.

“…Just once,” she said. “Just. Once. It’d be nice if, if—if I could actually do something to protect people and not have it all fall apart…Dammit, Firth was right.”

Allison leaned against the kitchen counter and listened with her head slightly on one side. In the confined space of their living area, there was nothing distant or standoffish about that.

“Why?” she asked. “What did he say?”

“…He said I hesitate to strike when I should. And that I run away when I should stand my ground. And he’s right, I did! I ran away from Gao, I ran away from Ayma and Regaari…And my parents, and Earth…”

She turned around. “…And now we’re running again,” she said.

Outside, the planet shot away astern as they were slave-warped to Armstrong Station. Allison glanced up at the TV to watch their progress.

“…We’re going back,” she said.

“When? How? You heard Coombes, they have nukes!” Xiù paced the room. “And it won’t be us going back anyway, it’ll be…a destroyer, or some Firebirds, or the HEAT and we’ll just be along for the ride.”

“And they wouldn’t go at all if we hadn’t fetched them,” Allison replied. “Baby, there’s no shame in being the ones who fetch the cavalry.”

“…No. I know that. I just…The Hierarchy have done so much evil and, I just feel so…”

Allison nodded understanding and took her hand. “You want to fight them yourself,” she said.

“No.”

Xiù sighed, looked down at her hand, then grabbed her and hugged her so hard that it almost hurt to breathe.

“…What, then?” Allison asked, holding her.

Xiù let out a long, sad sigh and ground her face into Allison’s shoulder for a second before peeling herself away and standing up straighter. Her expression had changed, and Allison knew that look, now: It was the one she wore when the gloves were off.

“…I want to kill them,” she said.

Date Point: 14y AV
Dataspace adjacent to the Swarm-of-Swarms

The Entity, Instance 4

The time for playing it safe was over. All of the Entity’s drives and impulses, even <Survive>, demanded the occasional calculated gamble and the time had now come to take one.

Gaps in knowledge had to be filled. The unknown was a fatal variable, and there remained a huge unknown surrounding the situation on Gao. The Entity—and through its Instances, the Humans and Gaoians—knew plenty about what was happening among the Clans, the Cabal and the Hierarchy…but they had zero intelligence on the Swarm of Swarms.

0020 was experienced, senior, competent. It had been an infiltrator among the Hunters for centuries, always skulking in the corners as a lowly Omega. It lived in constant wary vigilance…in many ways it was very like the Entity itself.

The soft and subtle approach might give it too much opportunity to put up its defences.

++Connection Established++

0020: <Bored; Tense; Irritated> Yes?

The Entity struck. It poured every trick it had learned from 0006, from 0665 and from all the others it had snatched up into one overwhelming head-on assault that was the precise opposite of its preferred strategy.

0020 was barely given enough time to recognize that it was under attack. It didn’t have time to do so much as broadcast a startled emotion, let alone summon a defense. The Entity eviscerated it and overrode its core personality in milliseconds. It slithered into the scooped-out skin of the highest-ranked Hierarchy agent it had ever dared to tackle, and hooked itself up to the sensory receptors.

Data flowed in. The sensations were wrong—too many legs, too many eyes, too many teeth. The host’s psychology screamed with an all-consuming cannibalistic hunger, and 0020’s shell was hardly any better. Decades of contact had badly corrupted the Igraen’s personality.

But as the Entity took stock of its sensory input and began to learn where the Hunters were and what they were up to, all of that visceral revulsion faded into the background, to be replaced by mounting alarm. It was not, as it had guessed, aboard some warship in deep space, or perhaps a space station or ground installation deep in Hunter territory loading up for the assault. It was in a cloaked scout ship, low in orbit.

The Swarm-of-Swarms wasn’t just en route to Gao—it had already arrived.

++END CHAPTER 40++

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Thirty-eight Deathworlders

Austin Deschner, Ben Thrussell, Brian Berland, Adam Beeman, Adam Shields, André José Neves Marques de Ornelas, Andrew Ford, Aryeh Winter, Bartosz Borkowski, Ben Moskovitz, Chris Bausch, Chris Candreva, Coret Trobane, Daniel R, Dar, Darryl Knight, Devin Rousso, Elliott Woods, Ignate Flare, Jamie Atkinson, Jim Hamrick, Jon, Krit Barb, lovot, Matt Demm, Matthew Cook, Nader Ghali, Nicholas Enyeart, Nick Annunziata, Parker Brown, Patrick Huizinga, Peter Poole, Ryan Cadiz, Sintanan, Sun Rendered, tsanth, Volka…

As well as 44 Friendly ETs and 207 Dizi Rats. A veritable horde of purplederp!

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 40: War On Two Worlds pt.2 - Escalation.

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 2—Escalation

Date Point: 14y AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hunter scout ship, orbiting planet Gao

The Entity, Instance 4

<OhThankGod>

A few nanoseconds of panic gave way to a subjective eternity of relief as more information flooded in.

The Entity was still looking at a bad situation. Its host—a Matryoshka doll of itself lurking inside the digital husk of an Igraen agent, which in turn occupied the implants of a Hunter data analyst—was indeed aboard a scout ship, which was indeed cloaked in orbit around the Planet Gao, one of dozens of ships waiting for the right moment to pounce.

It was not, however, as the Entity had first believed, the entire Swarm-of-Swarms. That numbered in excess of a million ships, and for all that the Hunters lived in a perpetual state of war readiness, a fleet on that scale simply couldn’t and didn’t mobilize rapidly. It mobilized in stages, and the first stage was reconnaissance.

Still. There were dozens of ships in a loose sphere around the target world, all cloaked and all armed with sophisticated telescopes and sensors. The Hunters—and through them the Hierarchy—had a commanding intelligence advantage. They could see everything. That advantage needed to be robbed from them…but the Entity had no idea how.

It did the only thing it could—it settled in, it waited, and it watched. The right moment would come.

Date Point: 14y AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

Safety when alone in the field was something a man built for himself, and it lay in the little details. A pebble bouncing down a slope for no apparent reason, a bush rustling in the wrong way, birds not singing when they should be…Little details were the difference between a stroll in the woods and being shot sideways in the ass out of nowhere. For Coombes, noticing the little details was as much of a challenge as suppressing his own giveaways.

He walked softly, checked his footing, kept his head on a swivel, listened, scented the air. The human nose couldn’t stack up to a dog’s or Gaoian’s, but it worked just fine regardless.

A lot of people had no idea what they could really do, thanks to a lifetime of being buried by sensory overload. Sight and smell were remarkably acute, once the buzz of civilization was left behind…and human ears were something else entirely.

The secret was in their omnidirectional acuity. A well-trained human could, once the ringing of loud noises finally cleared, hear almost everything all around them, and pinpoint exactly where that sound was. Maybe this critter or that could outperform on a specific thing, but Coombes would eat his hat if anyone could point out any species with a more complete, functional, and well-balanced sense of the aural space around them. It was so good, in fact, that a man who knew the trick to it and practiced a bit could learn how to echolocate.

He’d been doing exactly that for nearly a klick of overland travel and knew, without looking or second-guessing, that there was a very large Gaoian breathing uncomfortably about fifty yards away upwind to the north, slightly above and behind an outcropping, and making his way carefully down the side, totally oblivious to Coombes’ presence.

And to think: that messy-haired spaceman Julian was better at it.

“You okay, Tiggs?” Coombes lifted his voice in a low but strong tone he knew would carry without much risk of being detected by anyone but Daar.

He heard Daar jump slightly, gather himself, and clear his throat before he replied.

“…Been better.”

“Yeah. Skull check, bro.”

“Right. I’ll just…set all my stuff here and step twenty paces to the right. Okay?”

These were always the tense moments: In any situation where Big Hotel were active and a man was out of sight, the spectre of biodroning reared its head.

Coombes had a problem, though—Daar was a freak of a Gaoian, being bigger, stronger, and quicker than himself or even Walsh, and was armed with the kind of blunt, working claws that’d tear the bark off a tree without much effort. In any real fight, Coombes could expect to say goodbye to his throat in an eyeblink. The only option would be extreme wariness, and an approach from behind.

“We really gotta figger out a better way t’do this, Boss.” Through the brush he saw Daar sink to his knees and cross his paws behind his back. Somebody had to take the first risk that the other guy wasn’t ‘droned.

Coombes circumambulated a wide arc around him and approached from behind. “Man, I’ll write you up for a goddamned medal if you figure that one out.” He approached carefully and pressed the sensor against Daar’s skull on an outstretched arm, ready to fly at the slightest sign of trouble.

Green. Once Daar heard the ping and heard Coombes relax, he moved like a blur and had Coombes slammed to the ground in a heartbeat. His own sensor used a different color scheme—Gaoians couldn’t see red—but it made the same ping noise to indicate a head free of unexpected solid masses.

“…Sarry, Boss. You okay?”

Coombes grunted and rubbed at a spot on his shoulder where those root-ripping claws had dug into him. “…That’s even worse than when Tiny does it. Ow.”

Daar whined apologetically and backed off. A very slight wince played across his face as he moved; he was making an admirable effort to be fit and mission-ready, but Coombes knew him far too well. He could tell the big guy was hurtin’, and he said so.

“Okay. F’real now: How you feelin’? We just got nuked so I doubt it’s roses.”

“Considerin’ we just got nuked, I feel fuckin’ great,” Daar chittered so deep in the bass register it was like hearing a chipmunk nesting in a bucket. A grim laugh, by Gaoian standards.

“Your ribs okay?”

“They’re tender like Righteous just bodyslammed me, but nothin’ broken. My skin stings, my ears are still ringin’ and I still ain’t seein’ quite right, but mostly it’s just bruising. You?”

“Mild burn. Otherwise fine. You sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“Boss, it’s just overpressure. I’ll be okay…it’s the radiation got me worried. Actually,” Daar returned to his gear and dug through his survival satchel until he found his medicine box. “Gotta take my potassium iodide. But I’m not supposed t’do that without someone watching me. ‘Parrently sometimes, but not allatime, Gaoians have a really bad reaction to it. Something ‘bout our endocrine system or whatever.”

“I know the brief,” Coombes agreed, digging into his own pack. “Pills can be rough on us too.” He stuck his water sippy-tube in his mouth, got a mouthful of artificial raspberry-tasting water, lipped the pill into his mouth and raised an imaginary glass.

“Cheersh,” he mumbled. They swallowed.

At least it was pretty good artificial raspberry flavor. A solid eight out of ten, as synthetic fruit chemistry went. Coombes had no idea what flavor Daar’s was, but judging from the smell…there were fish oils in there, at least.

“How’s your radio?”

“Raised you no problem. Ain’t heard shit from Tiny or Chimp.”

“We did lose Drunk On Turkey,” Coombes reminded him. Their radios were low-powered, and had relayed to the microsats they’d seeded on approach via the ship. With the ship gone, they’d need an antenna to communicate across the narrow mountain spine between them and the village. “…Last transmission I got was from Sister. Other than that…just you.”

“We should check in, then.”

“Yeah. You good to get an antenna up that tree?”

“Yeah, Boss. Just…let’s wait an’ see if this medicine kills me first.”

Daar really was suffering, if he didn’t spring to it with rugged enthusiasm. Coombes nodded, patted him on the shoulder and took stock.

Two cases of probable radiation poisoning and a battered Gaoian aside, they were in pretty good shape, and the radiation poisoning wasn’t going to be that bad or he’d be feeling it already. They sat together, Coombes’ back against Daar’s flank, and they rested.

Daar’s instincts were right, though. A few minutes after he’d taken the dose he whined and flipped over onto all fours, shook his head, belched, hacked, retched, and made a wretched greasy yellowish puddle between his paws that stank of chicken, fish and acid.

“Better out than in, my ‘ma says,” Coombes told him, sympathetically.

“I’m sure…yer ‘ma…” Daar heaved again, “…is a classy lady. But fuck that. I ain’t felt this sick…since I drank ten liters of Naxas milk…on a dare…after I made Champion—HURFF!!”

“Shit, man…Can I do anything?”

“…Water, please.”

Coombes nodded and broke out a trick Julian had shown him. Ketta trees were full of safe water if you knew how to get at it. It was one of the reasons the People held them so sacred—wherever there were Ketta, a man couldn’t go thirsty. They didn’t even have to harm the tree, just get a knife in under the bark the right way and score downwards. Water poured out, smelling pleasantly like mint and apple juice, and he guided it into a plastic-bag canteen.

He dropped in a couple of purification tabs for good measure. The People swore that Ketta-water carried no disease, and he’d back the human immune system to prove them right every time…but Gaoians were a different matter. If he was going to rely on a half-pulverised, half-irradiated and half-blinded Daar, he was damn well not going to add dying from a deathworld disease to the list.

Daar straightened up, spat a globule of bile into the dirt, and drained the sweet-smelling sugary water by the simple expedient of tipping his head back, rolling his huge pink slab of a tongue into a kind of funnel, and pouring it all down his throat in a smooth stream.

“Better?” Coombes asked him.

“Still alive…” Daar cleared his throat. “Gimme that antenna.”

Nobody could fault his game. Those claws of his made easy work of climbing, and almost before Coombes could check his map the antenna was stuck high up in the tree with its cable dangling to the ground. His descent was more careful and less impressive, but more than serviceable.

Coombes hooked it up and gave him a brotherly slap on the shoulder to acknowledge a job well done. “Here goes nothin’…” he muttered, and keyed his mic. “Chimp, Boss. Report.”

Hoeff must have been waiting to pounce on his radio because he came back instantly.

“Boss, Chimp. Nothing new over here. Glad to hear your voice—Y’all get out okay?”

“We did, but Drunk on Turkey is destroyed. Tigger and me are at, uh…” Coombes glanced down at his map again, and reeled off the grid reference. He shot a glance at Daar, who was leaning heavily against a tree and panting, but regaining his composure and strength with every second. “…Both kinda shaken up, minor injuries, nothin’ that’ll stop us. We’ll make best speed for RV Bravo, check in when we get there. Boss out.”

“Happy trails.”

Daar grunted, snorted and spat something foul into the grass before shaking himself out from nose to tail-tip. “…How far is it to Bravo?” he asked.

“We’re here,” Coombes showed him the map. “Bravo’s…there.”

Daar’s ears angled downwards and outwards into a posture of grim resignation. “…Right behind ya, Boss.”

Coombes slapped him on the shoulder again, gathered his gear, and filled his Camelbak from another Ketta. He wanted to put a lot of ground behind him before he started to feel worse. And there was only one way to do that.

He checked his compass, checked the sun, checked his bag one last time…and ran.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
HMS Myrmidon, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

“Nukes?”

“Yes. Drunk On Turkey declared a radiological alarm and ordered Misfit to jump out, and…well, they did. So quickly that they didn’t get any sensor data to tell us how big of a nuke it was.”

Knight twisted a pinch of his beard back and forth between his fingers as he thought. The situation on Akyawentuo added an unwelcome complication to an already complicated situation, and demanded careful thought.

Colonel Miller had taken the job of talking to Chang and Buehler. He wasn’t coming to Gao anyway, and his administrative role was temporarily on hold as the Allied war machine revved its collective engine and surged into action. He’d been at a loose end—exactly the right man for liaising with the Byron Group explorers. “If I can offer some insight, Admiral, Big Hotel don’t seem to go in for subtlety with their WMDs,” he pointed out.

“True…” Knight sighed, smoothing some neatness back into his beard. “Damn. If they hit Drunk On Turkey with anything remotely as large as we usually see from them…”

“…Then Coombes and Daar are probably KIA,” Miller finished. “And for all we know, they nuked the village immediately afterwards.”

Knight nodded solemnly. *Myrmidon*’s Fleet Intelligence Center was designed to accommodate a flag officer’s presence, and the platoon of analysts and technicians who ran the place and its fearsome supercomputers had rearranged themselves around him like a lock arranged itself around a key. He stood at the apex of a data pyramid that could deliver him practically live-action updates on every man, machine and supply crate in the fleet, and the sudden appearance of a pitch-black gap in that ocean of information was…unacceptable. It paralyzed him: He couldn’t know the correct course of action without knowing more.

He needed Daar, though. The Champion of Stoneback was far too politically important; if he was dead then they needed to know soon so there was plenty of time to adapt to his loss, and if he wasn’t then they needed to retrieve him.

He couldn’t send Misfit back to check on the planet for him. It was a civilian survey and exploration vessel, not a reconnaissance plane. If he sent a Firebird on a recon mission then that was a Firebird not lending its mass to Gao, and for want of a nail…

…But wars swung on knowledge. He had to know.

“Divert a Firebird to reconnoitre Akyawentuo,” he ordered. “Have them determine the JETS team’s status and report back. If Champion Daar turns up alive, we can make plans to retrieve him.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Miller asked.

“Then if anybody is left down there, they’re on their own until we’re done with Gao,” Knight said, grimly.

“And Misfit?”

“I leave them to your discretion. Thank you, Miller.”

“Yes, sir. Good hunting.”

Knight put the sturdy brick of a phone handset back in its cradle and returned his attention to the flow of updates coming across his desk.

The HEAT were ready. Caledonia and Racing Thunder were ready. He acknowledged Captain Bathini’s report and bade him good hunting, then sat back to rub at his eyes and gather his thoughts.

The initiative, hopefully, had been seized. He only prayed that it was enough.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Armstrong Station, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Metta Bhavana was meant to be straightforward—Xiù had been doing it all her life, after all. There were five steps to it, and she’d already done the first three.

Step one: Metta for the self. Affection and warmth, forgiveness of one’s own failures and humble satisfaction in one’s own successes. Peace, calm and tranquility. Step two was to extend that emotion outwards, to encompass loved ones and good friends, and direct that energy toward them. Xiù always imagined herself glowing warmly, sending radiant pulses out to sweep across Allison, Julian, Dane, Clara, Ayma, Regaari, Yulna, Myun, her parents and brother, Yan, Vemik and all the People and make them glow as well, wishing for the glow to bring them wellness and happiness.

It would have been easy to bask there, and keep her good energies close to her heart, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to expand her kindness outwards from there again to encompass her acquaintances, her colleagues, all the passing people she’d seen and worked with. Everybody she felt neutral about. That one was abstract, but after a lifetime of practice she hoped she was finally starting to get the hang of it.

The hard one was to extend it to her enemies. Aside from one bitchy ballerina who’d called her a ‘banana’ a few times behind her back, Xiù hadn’t really had enemies as a young woman…until Trig, the Corti who’d bought her and the Gaoians as test subjects. Extending any kind of warm feelings toward him had been beyond her at first, and after years of trying she still wasn’t sure she’d ever find it in her to really send any truly positive vibes his way.

Loving kindness for the Hunters, though? Or the Hierarchy?

She tried…and failed, and wondered why she was even making the effort because it was obvious that the galaxy would be a better, happier place if only those evil sons of bitches didn’t exist and…and then she realized she was basking in anger and hatred, grew disappointed with herself and had to go back to step one. Again.

This time, her annoyed huff at herself and the way she wriggled on her cushion as she tried to reset her mind prompted Allison to finally say something.

“Babe, I can tell when your meditation isn’t going well.”

Xiù opened her eyes. Allison was lying on the couch, watching the news with her headphones on. ESNN were doing rolling coverage of the huge scale military mobilization, grounded in not many hard facts and a lot of speculation. One of the minor dramas playing out in the middle of it all was that Cimbrean Colonial Security had deployed crowd control officers to the Alien Quarter.

“I’m trying not to freak out,” she confessed.

“…C’mere.”

She was probably right. Xiù sighed, rolled her weight forward until her feet were underneath her, and stood up. Allison took her hand and guided her down into a crosswise couch cuddle with a kiss. “…Same,” she admitted. “The fuck is taking so long…?”

Xiù could only shrug, and snuggled into her to try and be patient. It took Allison a few seconds before she took a deep breath as well, gave her a squeeze and relaxed into just…waiting. Being.

Having a loved one to cuddle helped a lot. Xiù finally managed to go to a thoughtless place where her brain didn’t settle on anything to think about deeply or for long, and when their wait came to an end with an incoming call, she found she couldn’t tell if it had been a long time or no time at all. The clock said twenty minutes.

“God, here’s hoping it’s something…” Allison breathed, and they stood up.

Xiù put the call on speakers. “EV-11 Misfit.”

“Miss Chang, Miss Buehler, it’s Colonel Miller again. Sorry to keep you both waiting. We need your beacon sync codes, we’re sending a Firebird over to check out the situation on Akyawentuo.”

“Just the one?” Allison asked.

“That’s all we can spare, until we know more about what’s going on over there.”

“I’ll send them right over,” Allison promised, and crossed the room to grab her tablet.

“What are we doing?” Xiù asked.

“Sit tight,” Miller told her.

“…That’s it? But—”

“I know,” Miller interrupted her. “And I’m sorry. I wracked my brains for you but we just don’t have anything for you to do. We cannot guarantee your safety and cannot permit you on the field.”

“We’re deep space explorers, Colonel,” Allison told him, with the edge in her voice that Xiù knew meant she was keeping a lid on her temper. “We know and accept the risks. There has to be—”

“I respect that. But your ship doesn’t have the needed equipment and you don’t have the needed skills.”

“They took Julian—” Xiù began.

“Bluntly? He’s useful on the ground and wasn’t as valuable as the pilot and engineer for the only line of communication they had. Now when we get out there, we’ll do what we can to extract him but right now we just don’t have enough information and we can’t spare the resources until we do. Your ship is ordered to remain docked at Armstrong until I hear otherwise, and you’re to surrender your beacon codes.”

Allison stiffened. “Ordered?”

“Yes. Cimbrean is under martial law for the duration of the emergency, and that explicitly includes you…Will that be a problem?”

There was a dangerous note in that last question. Allison and Xiù looked to each other, a look they hadn’t exchanged since their training days in the Box back in Omaha. The one that agreed they both hated what they were up against but knew that they’d have to be stupid not to fold. Miller’s tone had said clearly that if they fought him on this, they’d lose swiftly and decisively and the long-term repercussions would be dire.

“…No, Colonel,” Allison told him, after a second. “I’ll transfer the codes immediately.”

“Thank you. I’ll be in touch when the situation changes.”

Miller ended the call, and Xiù made very, very certain that they weren’t transmitting anything to anybody before daring to open her mouth.

Words failed her, though. “What a…a—”

“Wáng bā?” Allison suggested, managing to dredge up a tiny little bit of levity from somewhere. The little Mandarin she knew was mostly vulgarities.

“No, that’s not…” Xiù vented her frustrations with a sigh. “…He’s just doing his job. But this whole situation can go die in a hole! …There must be something we can do…?”

Allison shrugged and applied her thumb to the fingerprint reader on her tablet, then put it down. “…Codes sent. We aren’t going anywhere, babe.”

“…So that’s it? We’re stuck here?”

“Yeah. Shit, it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t let us leave the station.”

“But—” Xiù trailed off, then gave up. She slumped dejectedly onto the couch and, completely bereft of anything more constructive to do, found herself in tears. She didn’t even notice Allison sit down next to her until she was bundled up and pulled in close, where she grabbed hold, squeezed tight and tried to find some balance again.

It took a while.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
HMS Caledonia, Cimbrean system, The Far Reaches

Champion Meereo of Clan Longear

“This is not dignified.”

It wasn’t. Being strapped to a Human was never going to be dignified, in any context. Let alone strapped to his back and shoulders like an infant cub, having to endure the overwhelming musky power of his scent and being jostled every time Baseball added another item to the already titanic mass of gear he was carrying.

“Beats walkin’,” the enormous Human told him. “You comfortable?”

“Now is not the time to worry about comfort.”

Burgess grunted, and somehow managed to convey an approving tone through something that was less than a word. “My job is to keep you alive,” he said. “This whole plan goes to shit if we don’t get you to Farthrow alive an’ whole. If that means stickin’ your ass to my back an’ usin’ me for a meat shield, then we stick your ass—”

“—to your back and use you as a meat shield,” Meereo chorused with him. “Please, allow me to be nervous. It’s all I have right now.”

Baseball nodded, but craned to look back over his shoulder.

“I ain’t gonna fuck up, bud. I promise.”

“I’m not worried for me. A lot of Gaoians are going to die today, even if this goes perfectly.”

“…I know. It fuckin’ sucks.”

“HEAT!” Burgess turned to face Lieutenant Costello, who was suited up in something that Meereo’s expert eye saw was absolutely bristling with communications equipment. Behind him, Powell was wearing something similar, and obviously already immersed in a river of data. “In the square, we go in two!”

Burgess reached out sideways and his fist slammed against Warhorse’s. The larger Protector hoisted an enormous roll of fabric up off the ground with a solid, metallic noise that suggested it was stuffed full of equipment. With that safely stowed on his back, the two men reached down and together hefted a second, even larger roll between them, which they steered into the middle of the square. In seconds, every man and Gaoian the HEAT had was shoulder-to-shoulder and back-to-back, neatly packed inside the jump array’s marked space on the deck.

Meereo took stock of his surroundings as he waited. The techs had all cleared away from the array and were watching with various tense expressions that perfectly mirrored his own mounting nerves.

Powell was the last into the square. He looked his men in the eye, one by one, and nodded.

“What are we, lads?” he asked.

“Death!”

Meereo flinched at the reply that came blasting out of a dozen Deathworlder throats at full volume and effortlessly overpowered the Whitecrests in doing so, even as they joined in.

“You’re fookin’ right.” There was an alarming edge in Powell’s voice, now. A hunger that Meereo hadn’t heard before. “Be quick, be merciful, be smart. But don’t fookin’ hesitate. We have a world to save.” Without even seeming to try very hard, he raised his voice to a thundering volume that hurt Meereo’s large, sensitive ears. “Why do we kill?”

“Protect!!”

“Aye.” Powell glanced down at his wrist to check the time, and nodded. “Let’s go show the bastards.”

The instant after the words were out of his mouth, the jump array fired. There was a moment of perfect blackness, a lurching sensation like the flow of time had just been kicked in the balls, and the first Human boots hit the ground in defense of Gao.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Commune of Females, Wi Kao city, Gao

Brother and Claw-Leader Fiin of Stoneback

Protect and Provide

Those words weren’t only the motto of Clan Stoneback, they were its ancient lore and its purpose, distilled into something so simple that it could be burned into a young ‘Back’s brain over and over again through repetition and practical work until the words and everything they meant were written in the deepest and most essential part of him.

Protect and Provide. For society in general, and in particular for the future of that society as embodied in the Females and cubs, Stoneback’s mission was clear. Secure the three largest Communes and retrieve as many females as possible from the satellite communes, workhouses and common wards. Put up a wall of fur, fangs, claws and courage between them and whatever threat was coming, and kill anyone or anything that tried to get to them.

The Clan’s “Growl” IFVs were echoes of the Clan themselves—huge, rugged, fierce and powerful. These weren’t skittish Dominion-approved hover tanks with thick shields over flimsy hulls, these were walls of sophisticated Highmountain composite armor on an all-wheel-drive train that would happily smash through what they couldn’t roll over, and a convoy of them could go anywhere and defend anything.

Smoke was still rising from the Whitecrest enclave as First Fang barged through the deserted streets of downtown Wi Kao. The Clanless had mostly, wisely, gone to ground the moment the first bomb went off but there were a few males out on the streets anyway, and Fiin would eat his tail if they weren’t biodrones.

Fiin’s was the lead vehicle in the convoy, and the driver was under orders not to concern himself overmuch with anyone or anything that got in the way. The occasional lurch and crunch as the beveled armor on the nose flipped a parked car or van out of the way proved that he was taking that order seriously.

They had to be quick. There were twenty cubs and five Mothers onboard, wedged into every free space that wasn’t occupied by a Brother or his equipment. Every second they were on the streets was one where an unlucky attack might cost them all their lives.

Wi Kao was burning. Vehicles in the street were brutal balls of black-edge flame, buildings were burning and the air was bitter with smoke. From his turret, Fiin could see the silver needle of Lavyan Tower, ablaze up its taller side without a single Emberpelt air-tanker anywhere near it. A fire that huge should have been swarmed by firefighters, but the firefighters themselves would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of fires even if they were free to fight fires in the first place.

As first responders—their motto was “Stand Behind Us”—they too were charged with Protecting, and on that ground their common heritage with Stoneback never wavered. The Emberpelts had their paws on the ground, facing down the biodrones without even knowing what they were up against.

Fiin admired them. Many would die today, probably. And maybe, if the Gao survived this, they could be interred with honors at High Mountain Fortress. But the fact that his Growl had already shoved aside more than one blazing fire truck showed just how truly dire things had got.

The biodrones were armed, they were agile, and they were co-ordinated. They moved more like a single organism than a hostile force, and their influence and numbers were growing with each passing minute and with each passing massacre as activated biodrones butchered their brothers without warning or mercy.

And with Clans like the Firefangs being almost universally implanted, the time was fast approaching when the Hierarchy would have uncontested air superiority, and a convoy like Fiin’s would just be a ripe target.

Things weren’t so bad out on the parkway toward the Female commune. One of the Clan’s truly heavyweight vehicles had already muscled all the abandoned vehicles off the road entirely, dumping them clear over the barricades. Fiin’s Growl showed off where it got its name as the driver hit highway speeds and climbed the hill.

The city looked worse from the hillside though. The Whitecrest compound in particular looked entirely gutted and nobody had been able to raise them at all.

The ‘Crests had a high incidence of implanted Brothers, Fiin knew—nearly a fifth. But they’d had plenty of forewarning…surely that would have been enough?

No time to worry about that now. They were entering the Clan’s killzone.

A necessary precaution—the incoming vehicles had to park where they could be obliterated on a moment’s notice if they’d been compromised. Fiin raised his paws high to make it clear they weren’t operating the Growl’s own gauss gun and stared down the barrels of the plasma cannons that tracked him as they rolled to a halt in the commune’s forecourt.

Stonebacks swarmed them in seconds, shoved a pulse rifle in Fiin’s face, ground an implant scanner against his head. They were methodically dragged from their Growls, scanned, given a clean bill of health, welcomed back into the fold. The Mothers and cubs were bustled away toward the bunker and Fiin was finally allowed to take a few moments to relax and mentally gather himself. It was inspiring, to be surrounded by so many veteran Brothers and hardened warriors, all congratulating him on the operation he had led.

The most inspiring presence of all, however, was Grandfather Garl. Rangy, white-furred but still vigorous, and as shaggy-savage as a ‘Back could be, the Grandfather of Stoneback met Fiin like he was his own breed-perfect true son.

“Good run, Brother!”

“It’s a nightmare out there, Grandfather,” Fiin told him. “The Emberpelts are being overwhelmed, and I didn’t see any Straightshields left at all.”

Garl growled and spat on the ground. “Thought so. Tyal’s out there now, getting as many as he can off that Keeda-hated battlefield before they’re all wasted. We’re going to need them.”

“Any more trouble from Mother Ayma over the imprisoned Sisters?”

Garl chittered enormously. “Ah, she’s a firework!” he boomed admiringly. “Tiritya herself! But she’s just gonna have to deal with it for now…” He gave Fiin a look up and down. “Tyal said you had concerns about them? The prisoners?”

Fiin flattened his ears to show how worried he was. “I mentioned to him that I don’t see how we can keep the commune secure so long as there are biodrones inside our own perimeter.” He gestured at the airy, beautiful architecture and parklands around them. “This isn’t a prison and we don’t have stasis equipment—this place just isn’t equipped to keep them secure. We need to move them before we can relocate the uncompromised females.”

“That’s a convoy not retrieving other females from the city, Broth—”

“It will become a problem, Grandfather,” Fiin insisted. “Soon, I think.”

“I know,” Garl growled dangerously at the interruption, but the set of his ears said he admired the much younger and smaller Fiin’s pluck. “But it’s a problem for when Tyal gets back.”

“At the very least, we should explain to this Mother Ayma why her sisters are imprisoned…” Fiin suggested. Garl shook his shaggy head.

“Now is not the time for being all diplomatic and wordy with the Females, Brother,” he declared. “This is a crisis, and they need to trust us. It’s the old covenant. Explanations and briefings come later, when we have them at a defensible location and can hold out.”

“Ayma does not strike me as the type to—” Fiin pressed, and shut up promptly when Garl aimed a proper fang-baring snarl at him.

“Enough!” the Grandfather told him. “Keeda and Fyu will walk Gao’s surface again before the Grandfather of Stoneback needs a lecture from a pup on how to handle females!”

“Yes Grandfather!” Fiin’s back straightened and his ears came forward, to the proper position of alert respect. Garl glared at him a moment longer, then relaxed and gave him an affectionate and comparatively gentle cuff on the side of the head.

“You’ve got balls, Brother…And for what it’s worth, I don’t disagree. We just cannot compromise our command of the situation yet. This is important. You’ll understand when you’re older, trust me.”

“…Yes, Grandfather.”

“Good lad. Get your Claw together. When Tyal’s back, you’ll take the prisoners to a holding facility. Figure out which one we can reasonably secure and plan your route. Go.”

Fiin duck-nodded sharply, turned and bounded away four-pawed to obey his orders. Garl wasn’t wrong, he had far more experience in such matters than Fiin himself did, and Fiin trusted his judgement…

But he still couldn’t shake the feeling that holding those drones until Tyal got back was the riskier call.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Champion and Stud-Prime Daar of Stoneback

The thing about Humans, was they understood pain. That was probably the most bestest thing about them, on top of everything else. They knew that pain wasn’t an enemy, but the kind of really good friend who wasn’t afraid to be honest. It sucked Keeda nuts, but a lot of the things in life that were best for a person were like that.

Right now the pain was telling Daar he was pushing it…but he still had room to keep moving.

Coombes, meanwhile, was sweating and silent but that was about it. He was in pain too; Daar could smell it. If he hadn’t occasionally run his hand across his bare scalp to scrape the moisture off and flick it away, anybody without a Gaoian’s nose wouldn’t have seen that he was suffering at all. But he wasn’t limping, he wasn’t complaining, and he wasn’t ready to rest. They had friends to protect and Humans understood Protect, too.

He was guzzling a heck of a lot of water, but that was how Humans regulated their body temperature. Water in, water out and the heat went with it. It looked kinda gross sometimes, but it was way more effective than panting. Daar’s ribs were aching already. His stomach still felt inside-out and fluttery, his whole body still stung and he was still having to squint at stuff to see clearly.

Overpressure was the worstest and it had always been a particular weakness of Daar’s. If some kind of devil had shown up and offered to deliver him straight to a good night’s sleep in a proper nest-bed for the price of one of his testicles, Daar might just have taken him up on it.

…Well, prob’ly not. But right then he’d have murdered for a nice little creek to wallow in and cool off.

His thoughts were interrupted by Coombes. How anybody could talk and run at the same time in these situations was…

“Been thinkin’.”

Daar found a deeper breath from somewhere. Enough to grunt out something like a reply. “Yuh?”

“The Abrogators’re gonna…hafta cross the mountains…at that pass, right?”

At least Coombes had to pace himself, which was a small balm to Daar’s ego. He did the same but kept to single-syllable replies.

“…Yuh?”

“Reckon we can…rig a rockfall mebbe?”

Daar paused dead in his tracks. Suddenly, things were turning much more awesomer. Coombes slowed down to halt a few seconds after he did and leant against a tree, taking the chance between breaths to snatch sips of that red chemical bullshit the Humans called a drink.

“…Yeah…” Daar managed, after taking twenty seconds to think about it and catch his breath. “Lotsa rocks t’move…” He panted for another long moment. “And it’ll…be good ‘fer this…overpressure kewkshit, too. Get my blood movin’.”

“…Right.” Coombes shook his head as he shifted mental tracks, then gestured at Daar’s equipment. “Got enough explosives on you?”

“Got enough,” Daar promised. “Prol’ly. Depends on what kinda rock I’m workin’ with.”

Coombes nodded thoughtfully, then looked up a tree. Rather than asking Daar to climb this time, he plucked the antenna from his back himself, gripped it between his teeth and heaved himself upwards.

He was no Chimp nor an Etsicitty, and he definitely wasn’t a Tangy-work, but Humans were still monkeys. They could get up a Ketta just fine. Daar flomped himself down in the leaf litter and tried to cool down as he waited and listened.

There was some cursing from high above, and then a radio click. Coombes’ voice echoed oddly, just a splinter of a second out of sync with his own voice in Daar’s radio.

“…Net, Boss. Makin’ good time, no hostile contact. Playboy, we had an idea about rigging a rockfall in the mountain pass. How much you know about the geology over there?”

Daar chittered to himself there. Julian hated the callsign ’Playboy,’ for some reason. It was beyond Daar why anybody would hate being named for their prowess with females, but teasing him with it was too much fun to give up on.

Humans were weird.

“Boss, uh…Playboy…” There was a pause on the line, just for a moment. “They’re, uh, young fault-block mountains, used to be ocean bed about a billion years ago. Mostly slate, with some recent igneous formations toward the summits.”

That sounded like it would be fun. Slate liked to fracture in all sorts of useful ways, assuming the grain was in the right direction…

Daar clawed his own radio. “Playboy, Tigger. I can work with that. Much obliged.”

“Boss, Chimp. A buncha the locals upped sticks and headed east. The professor’s tryin’ to keep the rest here, but with nukes in play I’m worried about bunchin’ up in one place. Please advise.”

Daar heard Coombes grunt thoughtfully to himself before replying. “Chimp, I don’t think it makes much difference. They spread out they’ll be vulnerable to drones, they bunch up they’ll be vulnerable to nukes. But I figure if Big Hotel were gonna drop a second nuke they’d’ve done it by now.”

“…Makes sense, Boss. I’ll pass that along to the Given-Men. Chimp out.”

Coombes made that thoughtful grunt again, then dropped easily down out of the tree, looking a fair bit more graceful coming down than he had going up. Daar groaned and hauled himself up on his paws.

“Guess we ain’t takin’ the pass, then?” he asked.

“Nope. Gotta climb.” Coombes got himself and his gear ready to go with brisk efficiency. “Hey. This is what we train for.”

“Ready when you are,” Daar told him, and with a sharp nod Coombes took off at the same steady pace as if he’d never stopped.

With a groan, Daar dropped to all fours and hauled his ass into gear behind him.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
En route to Lavmuy, Planet Gao.

Lieutenant Anthony “Abbott” Costello

Smuggling a Weaver dropship onto Gao had been one of those prescient moves done in the spirit of ‘we-really-hope-we-don’t-need-this’ pessimism. Allied Extrasolar Command would have preferred to seed Gao’s orbit with some jump beacon microsats, but even between allies that was maybe going a little too far. A jump beacon could be anything, up to and including a WMD if it was used for a Rod-From-God strike.

Fortunately, they had some leverage: Whitecrest had been caught red-pawed, as it were, with a small cloud of surveillance dots in Regaari’s wake from his visit to Earth. The Clan didn’t even try to deny it; if anything, they seemed pleased at their swift discovery. They treated it almost like a game, and happily conceded a point to humanity in that round.

They’d allowed AEC to send over a single Weaver tricked out with a ‘Skymaster’ ground-to-orbit gun, a weapon that married warp technology and forcefields in a way that was now almost a decade old and still proving its worth. It had trivialized the process of getting comparatively small payloads into space, for a start.

The Lads had immediately fallen in love with their new ride. Officially the transport was TOURIST-11 but they had, unanimously and without any discussion, decided as a hive mind to call it ‘The Jitney.’

Akiyama in particular was geeking out over it. “It’s like a C-17 without the loud engines!”

Firth wouldn’t have been Firth if he hadn’t found something to complain about. “I liked the loud engines. Made it easier t’sleep…”

“Ollllld….”

Costello was perfectly placed to hear every conversation, from the affectionate abuse flying lazily around between the humans, to the more earnest, tenser commentary in Gaori between Regaari and Meereo.

“[Are they always like this? Even now?]”

“[It’s their way of remaining calm. They are aliens, Champion…]”

And behind all that, the steady trickle of information coming in that had filtered through Powell. The spaceport’s layout, and that of the Farthrow facilty. Reports on biodrone activity in the area. Casualty reports, weather updates…

Timing.

For now, TOURIST-11 was unchallenged in a sky that was absolutely full of high-value assets, just one of hundreds of radar contacts. No reason to be a target, nothing suspicious at all.

But the second they fired a jump beacon into orbit, that would change. HMS Caledonia would be in-system seconds later, escorted by the Racing Thunder.

Cally was their line of communication. Without her, they were cut off from the chain of command—no messages in, no messages out except on a tightly constraining schedule. Useless for the shifting demands of a warzone. From orbit, she could provide that vital contact, the power of her supercomputers to enhance the ground team’s awareness and performance, material support via jump array, CASEVAC to her infirmary, or even something as mundane as fire support.

But the moment she showed up, Big Hotel were going to know they were made.

So: Timing. He didn’t envy Powell the massive responsibility of making that call.

It filtered into Costello’s consciousness that he’d just been addressed, and he sharpened up. “…Sorry, Master Sergeant?”

It was difficult to read expressions behind the gold nanoparticle-infused EV-MASS visors, but he got a sense of understanding and sympathy off Vandenberg. Rebar was a rock, and Costello knew he was about the luckiest lieutenant alive to have a senior NCO of that quality to rely on. “Loadmaster says go in five, sir.”

Costello nodded, and put aside any thought of being annoyed at himself. There was no reproach in the older man’s voice, but it was the sort of thing Costello shouldn’t have needed help with. He’d correct himself later, though: For now, the mission loomed.

The Jitney bounced alarmingly, to the point where even the loadmaster and his experienced crew swayed and needed to catch their balance, and Champion Meereo made an alarmed chirruping noise.

“Choppy out there,” Rebar commented, coolly.

“We’re coming in over the city,” Costello told him. “It’s—” he steadied himself as another jolt shook them, “—burning down there. We probably just hit the thermal.”

“Christ.”

“Abbott!” Costello looked up. Powell was standing at the front of the bay, holding himself up by a strap and beckoning him over. Costello hit his strap release and navigated his way up the lurching Weaver like he was climbing a ladder in an earthquake.

“Final verdict, sir?” he asked. Intel on the ground situation around Farthrow had been too limited to make a call about whether the Jitney would land, whether they’d rappel down, or whether it was going to be a low-altitude HELLNO.

“We’re goin’ in by HELLNO,” Powell declared, raising his voice over the rattling sound of gear and men bouncing around in their restraints. “It’s a bloody busy sky out there. Get the VIP saddled up and the Lads ready.”

Costello nodded sharply and turned back to relay the orders.

“Everyone on your feet! Baseball! Anubis! Saddle up!”

Everyone was out of their seat in a flash, bracing themselves and checking their gear one last time while Meereo scrambled onto Baseball’s back and Warhorse strapped him on. The red lights were on and the ramp at the back yawned open, and Costello took his spot at the front of the line.

The view was something else. Just for a moment, he thought maybe he had a sense of what his great-grandfather had gone through in 1944—the devastation was that immediate, and that grinding. Lavmuy wasn’t just burning, it was bleeding, trickles of fire along all of its major arterial highways, spreading sullen bruises of smoke in the suburbs, and a gritty gray haze that obscured the highest buildings and hid the horizon.

Behind him, he heard Powell give the order to fire off the beacon, and the Weaver lurched again, differently this time. A powerful, percussive noise hit him through the hull and one of the crew sang out. “Beacon away!”

Costello knew the moment Caledonia arrived: It was the way that his information landscape unfolded, like climbing a hill to see previously invisible vistas roll out in front of him that gave it away. *Cally*’s twin supercomputers, ALBION and CAMBRIA, were looking over his shoulder again and not a moment too soon. The ship had sensors that could pick out individual bricks from orbit, and they were sweeping the LZ, looking for any detail out of place, categorizing and predicting, mapping and highlighting.

Costello’s satisfied grin barely fit inside his helmet. They were in business.

The loadmaster knew how to raise his voice above the noise. “Ready!…Go! Go! Go!” Costello’s feet were already moving halfway through the first ‘go’ and he’d launched into space by the end of the third one. He threw his arms and legs out, lay on the wind and orientated himself, steered into his fall.

This wasn’t a high-altitude jump. This was low, and fast, and aggressive. Buildings whipped by below him and he gave one skyscraper a wide berth, drifting to his right to clear it comfortably. The damn thing was taller than the Jeddah Tower on Earth, and twice as wide.

He put aside the stab of remorse he felt at not getting to see Gao properly before all this. Now wasn’t the time for worrying about that.

He popped his fields at two thousand feet, tensing his core muscles and gritting his teeth against the sharp deceleration they caused. They could fully deploy in half the fall distance of a conventional chute, but that came with stronger and fiercer g-forces. The Gaoians pushed themselves even harder and lower, thanks to the superior tech in their suits. They had low-grade warp fields built in, just enough to take the edge off their inertia and let them go that bit further than biology would let them.

It got them to the ground first—the end of their fall curved into a pouncing four-pawed run, keeping them low and fast as they fanned out, found cover, got their weapons ready. Their suits added their own sensors to the data being crunched by ALBION and CAMBRIA, gave the human operators a little more context, guided them to land exactly where they would be needed.

The humans landed harder, but in a fighting posture from the second they touched down. Costello’s boots hit the concrete around the Farthrow facility and his rifle was already there at his shoulder, raised, ready, reflex sight snapping back and forth.

A cluster of suspicious heat signatures lurking near the facility’s back entrance turned out to be a team of Clanless custodians hiding among the bins, trying to keep their heads down while the world ended around them. They barely had time to know that they’d been caught before they were restrained, rendered helpless, scanned and declared green. A pair of security guards at the front door sensibly dropped their pulse pistols and surrendered: Both were green as well.

That set the pattern for the whole operation, in fact. Meereo and his inner circle had done a good job of sidelining their implanted Brothers or “promoting” them to management at other, less consequential projects, and the Farthrow facility was readily and swiftly secured without a single shot being fired or a single drop of blood being spilled. Quick, clean, painless and efficient.

Powell promptly set to getting his command post set up. The Defenders had a jump array going in short order, the Protectors got their own equipment unpacked and ready to distribute, and Costello wasted no time in organizing patrols and watches. Meereo vanished into the facility’s guts with a few of the clean, green technicians and started to do arcane things involving quantum field whatevers and virtual mass whatchamacallits.

The first “goodie bags” of supplies from *Caledonia*’s waiting deployment bay came through the array just as Righteous, plainly looking to burn off all that nervous energy he’d accumulated, practically sprang out of the door on patrol. He was a good man and they didn’t come much better, but Abbott couldn’t think of anyone more intimidating.

Chief among the first shipments were the parts to set up the big jump array outdoors. The one that could handle vehicles up to and including more Weavers, with their stubby wings folded up and the tail collapsed. And of course, a Weaver was big enough to bring with it a platoon of men and all their gear, or a pair of JLTVs.

The easy part was out of the way, really. Now, it was a question of how much materiel they could bring to the beachhead at Farthrow before the enemy finally got their asses in gear and fought back.

Somehow, Costello knew that it wouldn’t be long.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
HMS Caledonia, Low orbit around planet Gao

Commander Ellen McDaniel

“Jump complete.”

“ALBION and CAMBRIA have linked with HEAT One, they’re beginning their jump.”

“Helm reports Gao orbit stable, beacons away.”

“OTRACK is active, high activity.”

A working CIC wasn’t loud. The reports were clear, audible and concise certainly, but the general air was calm competence. So far, things were proceeding as intended and even if they weren’t, panic could be a lethal mistake.

Things were going wrong all over the place, that much was obvious from the sensor data that was coming in. None of it involved Cally just yet, but the ship’s sensors tracked every object they could see and built up a grim picture of the space around them.

Several Gaoian ships were drifting and venting atmosphere. Others were limping into higher orbits trailing clouds of radioactive gas and flecks of disintegrating hull. One or two were just gutted hulks, tumbling end-over-end and slowly falling apart.

The comms channels told the story why. All of the major spacer Clans—the One-Fangs, the Firefangs, the Goldpaw merchant navy and the Ironclaw asteroid miners—were heavily implanted. As many as a quarter, a third…among the fighter jockeys and pilots of Clan Firefang, the number was pushing eighty percent.

And of course, whoever ruled orbit also ruled the ground.

There would be desperate wars raging on all those ships. The implants would mostly be concentrated in the leaders, the officers and the equivalent of senior NCOs. All the people with the keys to the sensitive gear, in other words. The people with the authority to do things like vent atmosphere, lock down the internal forcefields, or turn their captured guns on other ships that had successfully resisted being taken over.

All of it would have come from nowhere, as far as thousands of dead Gaoians knew. Far too many would have gasped their last on vacuum, never knowing the whence or the why of their betrayal.

Thousands dead, without a chance. In human history, only World War II had killed so many so quickly and so pointlessly.

It was a precarious position for Caledonia. When the biodrones finished consolidating their hold on those ships, they’d quickly notice a lone human destroyer loitering vulnerably in a geosynchronous orbit. And geosynchronous was a high orbit, too. Very visible. There wasn’t a lot of the sky that was below the horizon.

So, step one was to seed the sky with beacons and communications satellites. A job for which Cally was amply equipped. Even deep in her core, behind all the internal bulkheads and the thick structural components, the noise of hundreds of satellites being thrown to the solar wind sounded like rain on the roof.

The first ship through the new beacons was the Racing Thunder. Her entire crew had recently been briefed on DEEP RELIC and their reaction on learning their new mission had been…grim. They’d taken a hefty chunk of shore leave, reportedly been the talk of the commune in the Alien Quarter for a week afterwards, and had gone back to their duties looking knife-sharp and laser-focused.

In the weeks since then, their performance in fleet exercises had improved dramatically. That ship was a lance, now: the sharp tip of the naval spear, designed to do one thing extremely well: Claim the kinetic energy advantage, and keep it.

Now, *Racing Thunder*’s arrival was practically a war horn. She saw three of the hijacked One-Fang pickets accelerate in *Caledonia*’s direction, and turned to spear toward them at a hefty 8G acceleration.

The spear’s shaft was only moments behind her. Ten V-Class destroyers, each carrying six Bulldog drones, but more importantly carrying more supercomputers, more Watson-derived cognitive computing engines. HMS Myrmidon was almost the last in, and she fit neatly into the data-crunching web like a catalyst, taking everything the other ships were producing and running them through the Fleet Intelligence Center.

A simply numbing number of petaflops went to work on every ship in the sky, sorting them by class, capability, trajectory and, most importantly, by probability of compromise…and fed every byte to the Racing Thunder.

The three ships that had turned to challenge Caledonia were clawed apart in seconds, while their return fire scrabbled feebly off *Racing Thunder*’s shields. Not because the Gaoian ship was particularly sturdy, but because of the new card in humanity’s hand: the USS San Diego.

The San Diego class was designed to do what cruisers had always done: protect the rest of the fleet. She was a hard knot of anti-missile and anti-fighter firepower, but more importantly she was a flying shield emitter, ramped up to eleven. Her heart was a rack of fusion power plants, any one of which would have comfortably kept a couple of counties fed for power, and enough refrigeration to supercool her shield circuitry. That ship could put up a wall around its friends and hold off anything, across tens of thousands of kilometers.

The biodrones, in their damaged and imperfectly controlled fleet, didn’t stand a chance. What the V-types and Bulldogs didn’t blind, the Racing Thunder eviscerated and the San Diego thwarted.

The battle was practically over even before the Firebirds arrived. Total orbital superiority, delivered in a single overwhelming blow.

McDaniel smiled grimly to herself, and raised the bridge. Their part in the space battle was already done.

“Captain, geosynchronous orbit is no longer necessary. We’re clear to descend.”

However bad things were on the ground, they were there to help. Gao would live.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Commune of Females, Wi Kao City, Gao

Ayma

The world was upside-down and falling apart. Everything was wrong—the fires, the explosions, the armed and armored vehicles leaving muddy gouges in the commune lawns, they were just symptoms.

Males were rounding up Females and stealing them away. Worse, Stonebacks were rounding up Females and stealing them away, and icily refusing to explain why. How had they missed this? The entirety of Maledom couldn’t possibly have conspired to something like that without Yulna learning of it…could they?

Most of the females were huddled with the cubs in the commune’s main concourse, doing their best to soothe their fears and not dwell on their own. The sound of worried keening drifted like mist behind every conversation and over every warily twitching ear.

Ayma was the only one daring to raise her voice. She’d been a prisoner before: Never again.

“This isn’t right!”

The young Brother called Fiin was a mystery himself. There was simply no way an earnest, honest, intelligent young male like him would go along with anything nefarious, even if Ayma couldn’t have smelled the desperate sincerity wafting off him.

But he was as unyielding as his Clan’s name suggested.

“I am sorry, Mother. I have my orders.”

“I don’t give a castrated Naxas for your orders!” Ayma snarled. “These are my sisters and I will not let you—”

“Mother, I promise you that we will explain as soon as—”

“Fiin!”

Ayma and Fiin both turned at the sharp bark from the main doors. She recognized this one—Tyal, the so-called ‘Champion-in-Stead’ standing in for Daar. Everything he shared with Daar in terms of size and ferocity he entirely lacked in terms of raw boisterous charisma, and Ayma was quite sure that the sun would freeze and the seas would boil before she let him get within sniffing distance of a mating contract with any sister she knew after this.

“What’s taking so long?” he asked.

“The first group just radioed up, Brother,” Fiin told him. “They’re coming.”

Tyal grunted, and turned his attention to Ayma. “Mother.”

“I will get an explanation for this, Tyal,” Ayma told him, pulling herself up to her full height. She wasn’t from anything resembling Stoneback’s preferred stock, however—her full height just about got her level with Tyal’s chest.

Tyal growled dangerously. “We remember our Contract, Mother, and we will fulfill it whether you cooperate or not.”

“Abducting my sisters, Stoneback? With no explanation?”

“These sisters need to be isolated to protect—” Fiin began.

He didn’t finished the sentence. His radio crackled alarmingly at the same time as the distinctive deep thumping of gauss rifle fire resonated through the floor under Ayma’s paws. “Containment failure! The prisoners are—!”

There was an ear-biting electronic howl and the radio fell silent again. The weapons fire did not.

Fiin and Tyal didn’t even need to speak or glance at each other—Ayma was barged aside almost as an afterthought as they leapt into action, alongside all their Brothers, who promptly moved to interpose themselves between cubs and females, and the doors that led down to the lower levels.

“SHIELD!” Fiin barked, and a semicircular wall of portable defensive shieldsticks sprang up around the doors in the instant before they burst open. Terrified keening erupted around the hall as the imprisoned sisters pounced into the room through the large doors at the back, armed with stolen rifles and fusion blades.

The first ones through staggered and fell as gauss fire hammered through their stolen shield harnesses and exploded through their flesh, crushing their bones and making them cough blood, but there were too many—fully a tenth of the commune had been imprisoned in the cellars, and now it seemed like all of them had gone berserk: they charged without seeming to care about their lives, and the handful of Brothers arrayed against them just couldn’t shoot enough of them before the enraged prisoners descended on them in a clawed frenzy.

Tyal narrowly danced around a fusion spear, grabbed it behind its searing tip and wrenched it through a full circle with such force that the spear’s haft bent around its former wielder’s head, knocking the lifeless female to the floor.

Mothers, Sisters and cubs stampeded for the main doors, and Ayma was knocked over when one sister barged into her. Black stars burst behind her eyes as the back of her head hit the stone tiles hard, but the keening sister didn’t even notice her; she just bolted on four-paws for the exit without stopping.

The Stonebacks barked orders at each other in some kind of cant that Ayma didn’t recognize, or maybe it was just being dazed and stunned from hitting her head. She used her claws to get traction on a stone pillar as she hauled herself to her feet.

“But…Sisters…!”

Dazed and disoriented, all she could see was that her Clan was being massacred by the very males who had sworn to protect them. She stumbled forward a few steps, trying to tell them to stop, trying to end the madness before it went any further. Tyal. If she just reached Tyal, she could stop this.

Tyal was holding the left flank almost by himself. Two of his brothers were down, their throats torn out by female claws, and a third was limping badly from a gauss shot that had nicked his leg. On the right, Fiin was holding his brothers together better, retreating in a disciplined pattern behind successive new shieldstick barricades.

Ayma’s legs wobbled and gave out under her for a second. She felt sick, turned around, fuzzy, but she forced herself back to her feet and stumbled forward. One of the prisoners was Guard-Sister Layra, almost as accomplished with her fusion-spear as Myun, and it was all Tyal could do to avoid evisceration as she lanced at him again and again, too quick to retaliate, too canny to overwhelm.

Layra was…a friend. She’d see reason.

“Layra—!”

Tyal twisted aside from another blow, and rather than chasing him Layra stepped past and—

It didn’t hurt. There was just a sudden and still moment where Ayma looked down and realized that one of her own sisters had stabbed her, right in the belly. She didn’t even really feel it, or notice the hiss and the whisp of steam and smoke.

Then Layra yanked the spear out of her guts and spun back to lance it at the enraged Tyal, who bowled toward her with an enraged roar. Ayma didn’t see what happened next. She just saw…gray. There were things happening at the edge of her vision, but the middle somehow seemed to be getting closer and further away at the same time.

And why wouldn’t her legs work any more? So hard to think, and getting harder. She felt something or…somebody…grab her. Felt herself being carried. …Or was she floating?

Maybe it would all make sense after a nap…She’d always liked to doze in the commune, when the flowers were in bloom. They were blooming now, in yellows and blues and whites. She could smell their scent, the same scent she’d loved as a cub.

Yes. She’d just…

…Sleep…

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Master Sergeant Derek Coombes

“…So that’s an Abrogator.”

Coombes glanced left. Daar was crouched low like a stalking cat, watching the machines pick their way toward the choke point below them, with his huge muscles tensed and ready and his big ears up and forward. Or more like a gun-dog maybe, quivering on the edge of a pounce.

Fuck that. More like a Gaoian ready to add a couple notches to his belt. He could have sworn the big bearcoon was giggling while deploying the explosives.

“Mhmm,” was the only comment he gave to Daar’s observation.

‘Fault-block mountain’ apparently meant huge geological forces had broken the rock along fault lines and shoved the blocks up and down like piano keys, and the unnamed pass was basically just a crack between two of them. It was as jagged as bad dentistry, deep enough to BASE jump into and its narrowest point was barely twenty yards across. And the wind tunnel effect down there was something else—even from up on the clifftop high above, the eddies and updrafts plucked at Daar’s whiskers and Coombes’ clothing.

The Abrogators were ignoring it. They looked kinda like a scorpion and an earwig got drunk and had a nightmare accident-baby, and they were obviously built to handle any terrain that wasn’t actually vertical. Low center of gravity, multiple agile legs, exquisite balance and coordination. Everything had a price, though, and that all-terrain agility obviously came at the cost of having to keep the weight down: those armor plates didn’t look like they’d stop any kind of serious anti-materiel firepower.

“I ask again, the fuck kinda war did they ever win with weak-ass tools like these?” Daar asked.

“They didn’t,” Coombes told him, and turned his binoculars back on the convoy. There were three Abrogators below, and they were covering the ground with alarming speed for their size. A tank could’ve hit those kinds of speeds on relatively clear ground, but an uneven, boulder-strewn, treacherous rocky obstacle course like that? Not a chance.

Daar eyed them warily. “Seems like a lotta engineering effort ‘fer somethin’ that wouldn’t survive much above small arms fire.”

Coombes shrugged. “First entry in the Big Hotel playbook is, ‘never pick on someone your own size.’ These things are for scouring the countryside and picking off the civilian survivors, not for warfare. They use biodrones and the victim’s own assets for the actual war…Kinda like a big game of stop hitting yourself, y’know?”

Daar quirked an ear at him. “…Don’t know that one, Boss.”

“You don’t? It’s where you grab a dude’s wrist and make him punch himself in the…” Coombes saw Daar’s expression and faltered. “…The face. Like this.” He mimed awkwardly for a few seconds.

Daar stared at him for a moment, then flicked his ears and turned his attention back to the Abrogators. “Humans are weird, Boss.”

Coombes cleared his throat and raised his binoculars again. “…Whaddya think? About…two minutes? Three?”

“‘Bout that,” Daar agreed. He plucked the detonator from his webbing and wired it up.

Neither of them spoke for a minute or so, until a flash of out-of-place movement caught Coombes’ eye. He focused the binoculars, tried to track it, and groaned.

“Fuck. Drones.”

“How many?” Daar asked.

“If the Misfit intel’s right, each Abrogator carries six, and these ones just launched their full complement…stay still.”

The drones never rose as high as the clifftop, but they zipped through the choke point too quickly and too far ahead of the Abrogators to catch them in the landslide. Coombes watched them go.

“Well…maybe if we’re lucky they’ll be disabled when we smush the ‘bots?” Daar suggested.

“Either that or they turn around and fuck us in the ass…” Coombes muttered to himself. “They’ll be in position in…twenty seconds, I reckon.”

“Yuh…Hey, Boss?”

“Yeah?”

“If they do turn around an’ fuck us…it’s been an honor.”

Coombes reached out and bumped a fist against his alien comrade’s paw. “Dude. You too…Blow it.”

Daar duck-nodded, wrapped his paw around the plunger, pulled it up firmly, then slammed it down hard.

For the second time in a handful of hours, Coombes felt an explosion drum on his rib cage. Daar had planted three charges, hanging his ass precariously out in the air on a rope to plant them in a looming swell of dark shale just beyond the choke point. When they went off, the whole mountain seemed to shiver like a horse with a fly on its back, and then an unbelievably large chunk of hillside just started to slide inexorably downwards. It didn’t even change for the first few seconds, just serenely sank off the hillside, until something jolted and it disintegrated into a meteoric fist of rubble and dust.

Coombes had never seen cool rock flow like water before. A wave of rubble and stone dust crashed down the mountainside, and if the Abrogators even noticed it coming they didn’t respond in time before it flattened them. The blast and the rolling, seething noise of stone in motion cracked and rattled off the surrounding terrain, and the howling wind down in the pass picked up the stone dust and began to carry it away west.

Daar was immensely pleased with himself, and had the creamy look of satisfaction that any man did after he’d just nailed the hottest girl at the dance.

Coombes snorted. “Was it good for you, Tiggs?”

“…Mhmm. Need a change’a shorts.”

Coombes chuckled, and aimed his binoculars out east, tracking the drones. “Daar, you’re not wearing shorts,” he pointed out.

“Shaddup, Boss. Drones?”

“…Dunno. They’re still flyin’, but not this way.”

“What’re they on autopilot, or…?”

“Fuck if I know.” Coombes handed him the binos. “I think they’re still going for the village.”

Daar scowled at them through the lenses, then handed them back. “…Think they can handle that many?” he asked.

“They’ll have to,” Coombes replied. He retreated from the cliff edge and stood up. “Come on. We better follow them.”

“Right behind you,” Daar promised. Coombes nodded and grabbed his radio. From this high up and on this side of the mountains they were back in contact again. He just wished he had better news.

“Net, Boss,” he said. “Splash three Abrogators, you got incoming drones. Count of one-eight.”

“Boss, Chimp. Say again?”

“I say again, count of one-eight.”

“Well…fuck. We’ll have to deal. Too scattered to engage, not enough firepower to win anyway.”

“Plan?”

“Scatter and hide. Only defense is mobility. Maybe…as you were, we have an idea.” There was a brief sound of probably Yan grunting for attention, then a painfully long silence that lasted long enough for Coombes and Daar to be a quarter of the way down the steepest part of the mountain before Hoeff got back to them.

“…Okay. Boss, here’s our proposed mission: We’re gonna peel off into multiple aggressive hunting parties while the women and children head east. One man with a radio and a rifle per party. You and Tigger would head for RV Delta, where Playboy will meet you. He’ll have the biggest group with him with extra radios and the biggest Given-Men. That should be enough for us to draw the drones in some favorable terrain.”

Coombes nodded along as he listened, appreciating the logic of it. As answers to a bad situation went it was almost elegant, and if the drones were too overwhelmed chasing the hunting parties then the actual heart and soul of the tribes were in with a chance. And it wasn’t like he had a better idea himself.

“Chimp, that sounds like a plan. Go ahead and enact it, Tigger and I will proceed to RV Delta.”

Beside him, Daar duck-nodded and got his ass in gear. Coombes had to give him credit, considering that humans were allegedly the galactic champion endurance athletes, Daar was doing a heck of a job keeping up the pace.

Then again he just got to blow up half a mountain. That’d put a spring in anyone’s step. Hopefully he wouldn’t pay too hard for it later—they were going to need him.

Assuming, of course, that the warning made any difference. Three Abrogators down was good going—but there were a lot more coming, a day behind them.

Coombes hauled himself up to a jogging pace again and began to plan. They had a lot of work to do if they were going to survive until the cavalry came.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Farthrow Facility, Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Lieutenant Anthony “Abbott” Costello

“Abbott, Rebar. Activity, East perimeter, possibly…uh, hostile.” Rebar finished calling it in with a slight hitch as Costello joined him with his binoculars already up and searching. “Hello, sir.”

Costello had seen the incoming heat signature via the real-time satellite feed nearly a minute earlier. Deep in the facility, Akiyama was helping Meereo and a pack of implant-free technicians modify the experimental Farthrow wormhole generator into a giant suppressor, and they were making good time. Not fast enough by Abbott’s reckoning, but fast nonetheless.

“FIC says it’s a biodrone mob,” he said, watching movement among the discarded planes and shuttles far away across a sea of coverless concrete. Pretty much the first thing the Defenders and Protectors had done on landing had been to clear out what little cover the spaceport’s apron provided and Farthrow was now an island of protection in an otherwise open field, perfect for mowing down anything that tried to assault them.

The biodrones obviously knew that. It was almost certainly the only reason they weren’t already attacking. Costello didn’t know if the Gaoians or Hierarchy had a historical equivalent of Thermopylae, but only a drooling moron could have failed to see the massive tactical imbalance in his team’s favor.

“So many?” Blaczynski sited down his rifle to survey the foe himself. “Damn. Kinda drives home how big five percent is, huh?”

“This city has a population of nearly seven million,” Faarek told him. The Whitecrests were being even terser than usual today, not that Costello could blame them. If this had been Costello’s native Toronto…

“So that’s…what, about three hunnerd-something thousand biodrones,” Blaczynski finished.

“I believe they call that a target-rich environment,” Costello mused. He reached behind his back and tugged a tablet in its thick reinforced case out from the pocket above his suit’s life support pack. Somewhere high above them was Blaczynski’s pet ‘Flycatcher’ UAV. It was all part of the same intel network, but he wanted to get a closer look to compare with the evidence of his own eyes.

He opened the app, selected the drone and was in the middle of figuring out what he was looking at when God punched him in the head.

It made for a heck of a wake-up call. All four of them immediately got their asses behind something sturdy and the tablet bounced forgotten to the ground.

“Sniper!” Blaczynski declared, late but better than never.

“I figured that part out, thank you,” Costello managed. His ears were ringing and his neck felt like he’d just been used as a punching bag, but EV-MASS was the best body armor ever made by a country mile. The bullet hadn’t penetrated.

“That wasn’t KP, they’ve got real rifles out there somewhere,” Rebar mused, he shifted his weight to aim his own rifle back over the barricade, using the camera scope connection to his visor rather than stick his head out. “Should ‘prolly keep ‘yer head down, LT.”

Costello smirked inside his mask. “Thank you, Master Sergeant. I’ll do that.”

There was the heavy floor-shaking sound of a Protector joining them. Warhorse. “Somebody said sniper?”

“LT got hit in the brain bucket,” Faarek told him.

“Shouldn’t do that, LT.”

“I’m glad you’re all here to tell me these things,” Costello snarked. He gestured at the tablet, and Faarek kicked it over.

“Could be worse,” ‘Horse rumbled as he fetched his pen light and inspected the helmet. “Coulda been punched in the head by Righteous.”

Costello sat back and let him shine a light in his eyes. “Or you,” he pointed out.

“You’d be dead, then,” ‘Horse was obviously grinning behind his mask. “…Good pupil response but take an aspirin and a dose of Crude.”

“You got it, doc.” Painkillers and other sundries were on a dispenser inside the mask. There was a trick to getting at them—he had to toss his head and snatch with his lip just so to grab it—but better that than breaking seal. Even if they weren’t in space, HEAT treated any air that wasn’t supplied by their suit as if it was a deadly nerve agent on the grounds that one day, it might be.

“Where’d he hit you from, LT?” Blaczynski asked, sneaking his weapon back over the barricade.

“I think…” Costello risked a peek over the barricade for just a second. “Somewhere near those baggage-handling vehicles, two o’clock.”

“Okay….”

There was a pause, which Costello used to chase the pill down with a sip of water and give himself a low-dose Crue-D shot with one hand while calling up the drone footage on his tablet with the other, then the heavy slam of a long-barrel GR1-d firing.

“Target down,” Blaczynski relaxed back with the dispassionately satisfied air of a craftsman pleased with his own handiwork.

Costello nodded as he examined the drone feed. “Appreciated. I don’t feel like getting shot in the head a second time today.”

Blaczynski nodded. “Snipin’s almost too easy with these hypervelocity flechettes,” he said, in the conversational tones of a hobbyist discussing his tools. “Almost no delay, hardly have to adjust windage, ballistics are almost totally flat…”

“Save that hardon for the ladies, Starfall,” Rebar reminded him. Blaczynski chuckled, nodded, and kept his aim firmly down-range, hunting for something new to shoot.

“…How’s the field array comin’?” Costello asked, quietly. He didn’t like what he was looking at on his tablet one bit.

“Built, and charging,” Rebar replied.

“Right…” Costello thought for a moment, then hit his radio again. “Stainless, Abbott. I see vehicles approaching from the East, and that crowd of biodrones is growing. Suggest we should receive package MARS first.”

MARS, MERCURY and VENUS were the payloads waiting to come through the big jump array first. Ideally, they’d have preferred to bring through VENUS first—that was a fusion power plant and capacitor bank on the back of a HEMTT, that could power the jump array and cut its charge time by an order of magnitude. It would have made bringing in the other two packages the work of moments. MERCURY, meanwhile, was the recon, communications and sensors package that would be essential to coordinating the operation as they tore down Gao’s own communications infrastructure.

MARS was men, weapons and vehicles.

“Abbott, Stainless.” Powell was keeping whole cupboards’-worth of plates spinning for the moment, and sounded even gruffer than usual. “Copy. Package MARS.”

“Think they’re makin’ a move, LT…” Blaczynski said, shifting his weight.

Costello glanced at him, then turned round and checked over the barricade for himself. He was right, there was plenty of activity going on over among the spaceport buildings and facilities. Gao was a mercifully cool planet, and Lavmuy wasn’t built in a warm climate even by local standards. The air was cold, clear and still, unmarred by heat haze, and he could see what the biodrones were doing fairly well, considering the distance involved.

“I can drop a Rod on ‘em,” Blaczynski suggested.

Authorizing that was above Costello’s grade, but he knew the answer anyway. “No. Can’t risk damage to Farthrow,” he said, and Rebar nodded vigorously. “A broken pipe, a cracked foundation…If we can’t turn that thing on, the whole operation’s a bust.”

“That don’t leave us with a lotta options. That many drones, they’ll eventually just Zerg their way through. We need air support or indirect fire.”

“MARS will have mortars. In any case, they don’t have the numbers to attack us just—” Costello shut up and flinched downwards as a line of bullet holes sewed itself into the concrete wall above him. Unmistakable suppressing fire.

“Think they heard you, LT,” Blaczynski commented, and returned fire.

“Contact!” Costello reported to the net, ignoring him. “Contact, east side.”

Arés grunted and popped his SAW’s bipod to rest it on the barricade in one easy move, with the snappy efficiency that spoke to endless training: no spare movements, no energy wasted. He instantly had it barking death back toward the biodrones in sharp, short, economical bursts.

There was little for Costello to do in terms of decision-making. Their position was fixed and their opportunity to maneuver, nil. Blaczynski was right that they needed fire support, but there was none to call in yet.

He got his own rifle up and weighed in as well.

The biodrones didn’t have much real firepower. A lot of what was coming their way was still kinetic pulse, utterly harmless. HEAT operators in EV-MASS took harder hits just saying good morning to each other every day, and a lot of the enemy force didn’t even have that.

Somewhere, though, a few of them had picked up the real deal. Gaoian mercenaries, the Clanless and some of the Clans had all seen the value in an actual projectile-launching firearm, and it wasn’t like the basic design and chemistry of a rifle was difficult. Human patent law wasn’t worth the ink it was printed in off of Earth and Cimbrean, either: Any asshole with a machine shop could make one, and the Gaoians had much better than machine shops.

The average Gaoian’s abysmal strength didn’t matter for shit, either. An AR-15 was so manageable that a ten-year-old girl could handle one just fine, so an adult male Gaoian’s worst difficulty with them would probably be the shoulders. Tweak a few things here and there, and humanity’s own weapons were easily turned into the enemy’s weapons.

Still. There weren’t many. Just enough to put some actual metal in the air, and the HEAT sent far more back, especially as Firth, Murray, the Whitecrests, Butler, Burgess, Newman and Parata charged in to lend their weight. What had started as a trickle of desultory shots became a crackling torrent that first stalled and then deflected the biodrone charge, forcing the poor doomed Gaoian hosts to sprint sideways around the worst of the firepower.

If there had been mere hundreds, the fight wouldn’t have even deserved the word. If there had been a few thousand more, sheer quantity would have done all the work and the pinnacle of deathworlder and Gaoian biology and training simply wouldn’t have sufficed.

As it was, the biodrones had attacked right at the moment when their victory was possible but by no means certain, and that flew right in the face of basic military sense—Nobody in their right mind picked a fair fight. Costello surrendered his spot on the barricade to Sikes and stepped back to check the intelligence again.

Those vehicles were still coming, and the fact that the biodrones had attacked without waiting for them told him instantly whose side they were on.

The computers and specialists in orbit had been working hard on the question of who the incoming vehicle convoy belonged to, but the analysts hadn’t been able to put a definitive answer either way on it. The sixty-forty split said that the convoy belonged to Clan Stoneback. That probability shot up to near-certainty when the feedback from the Flycatcher, the suits, the gun cams and the orbiting satellites all clearly showed the convoy crash into the horde’s rear without slowing.

In fact, those IFVs weren’t stopping for anything short of a missile and they got through the starport’s perimeter gate by simply ignoring it. Steel wire and galvanized aluminium poles were no obstacle to them whatsoever, nor were the luckless biodrones whose most effective contribution was to make the concrete treacherous and slippery.

The heavy vehicles and their occupants made all the difference. With room to maneuver and agility in the mix, the Fang—whichever one it was—spread out and headed off the flanking biodrones.

No force could possibly stand up to a crossfire that brutal. Burned, crushed and badly depleted, the Hierarchy agent controlling that mob clearly decided to salvage what it could and the flayed remnants of the horde withdrew into the relative safety provided by the spaceport. Clearing that was going to be a priority in the near future, but the important work was done—Farthrow was secure.

The IFVs left crimson tyre tracks behind them as they circled around and pulled up around the Farthrow building, already dropping their rear hatches. Stonebacks piled out, most of them healthy, a few…not.

“Medics!”

Thurrsto was the first over the barricade, with the Protectors on his heels.

One unusually small Stoneback—small, that was, only by Stoneback standards—was propping up an unusually large one, who sagged into Burgess’ arms plainly on the verge of passing out, and was promptly lowered to the concrete for triage. The fur and flesh under his arms looked to Costello like he’d taken a fusion blade right through the ribs, which made it a minor act of God that he’d even lived this far.

He recognized them both, from First Fang training exercises on Cimbrean. The big one was Tyal, Daar’s second and presumably the Champion-in-Stead. The other…Fiin, he recalled after a moment’s thought. A young up-and-comer. The Gaoians had less granularity, procedure and mechanics to their career progression so the young gun had been something equivalent to a sergeant the last Costello saw of him.

Now, it looked like he’d probably just inherited some extra rank the hard way.

Costello hopped the barricade and kept his head down as he dashed to the cover provided by one of the IFVs. “Lieutenant Costello, Spaceborne Operations,” he reintroduced himself. “Think we’ve met before.”

“Fiin, Champion-in-Stead and warleader of First Fang.” The Stoneback thrust out a paw, and Costello gave it a firm shake. Stonebacks could take a little more force than the average Gaoian. “Yes. In better circumstances.”

“Need to skull check you, Fiin.”

The Gaoian duck-nodded and pressed his paws to the vehicle, turning his head awkwardly to watch Burgess work on his much larger brother. Costello’s scan for implants promptly came up green.

“You’re clear. We’re gonna need to check all your Brothers.”

Fiin duck-nodded. “Do it.” He looked around as Costello gestured urgently for the Lads to conduct brain scans, and they split up to bully the newly-arrived Stonebacks into formation and get them cleared. “Are you the senior Brother here?” he asked.

“Second. You’ll meet my CO in a minute…I thought Tyal was Champion-in-Stead?”

Fiin simply gestured toward Burgess’ patient, his expression unreadable.

“…He’s in good hands,” Costello assured him, but Burgess was already standing up.

“…Done all I can for him,” the Protector said. “He ain’t in pain, but…” He gestured at the remaining Stoneback wounded. “I gotta triage, LT.”

Tyal wheezed weakly, and spoke in labored Gaori. [“Is…okay,”] he managed. [“Save my…Brothers.”] Burgess nodded stoically and hurried off to attend the wounded.

Fiin knelt down at Tyal’s side and laid a paw on his head. [“You did well, Brother. Rest.”]

Tyal coughed again. [“No…I failed. I…”] He looked toward one of the vehicles, coughed once more, then relaxed just a little too much. The subtle cues of warmth and motion that told a living man apart from a dead one faded out of him, and he was gone.

Fiin keened quietly to himself and said something in a language that neither the translator nor Costello were familiar with. He closed Tyal’s eyes, gently tidied the body into a dignified posture, then stood up with a resigned, toughened air.

“…We lost good people at the Wi Kao commune,” he said, softly. “The biodroned females broke containment.”

“Turns out the pup was right,” a new voice said. A rangy wendigo of a Gaoian, white from tail to tip, limped up with his arm in a sling and red staining his snowy fur all down his left leg. He had the scars and attitude of a lifelong warrior.

“Now isn’t the time for recrimination, Grandfather,” Fiin replied. “Lieutenant Costello, this is Grandfather Garl of Stoneback.”

“Sir,” Costello shook the venerable hulk’s paw, and offered his head-scanner. The big brute let him press it between his ears without comment, and came up green. “I—”

They were interrupted by the sound of distraught keening from one of the vehicles, and to Costello’s shock the Gaoian responsible, of all people, was Regaari. Ears pricked up and eyes turned his way as the usually unflappable Whitecrest dropped his weapon, knelt on the ramp and scooped up a limp bundle of gray fur in his arms, whining so loud and so high it hurt Costello’s ears. A human would have been wailing his grief—Regaari just buried his nose in the body’s fur and held tight, whimpering and keening.

Warhorse was at his side in a heartbeat.

“What—?” Costello began.

“Mother Ayma. Tyal tried to save her…” Garl spat on the ground. “At least she can be given a proper funeral. Not forgotten in some Biodrone mass grave.”

“…My commander will want to debrief,” Costello managed. He knew of Ayma, of course, and he could see the shock of her death hit Warhorse and Baseball, too. That was going to need careful management, soon. Best to get the two senior ‘Backs handed off to Powell to discuss the big-picture stuff and he could focus on keeping his men mission-ready. “Highland!”

The taciturn Scot peeled off from the barricade and joined them. “Sir?”

“This is Grandfather Garl, Clan Stoneback. You remember Champion-in-Stead Fiin. They’re both green in the head, get ‘em to Stainless.”

“Aye,” Murray nodded, and gestured for the pair to follow him.

Costello turned away and got on the radio to warn Powell they were coming. “Stainless, Abbott. Situation is stable out here, First Fang reinforcements are manning the perimeter, their leaders are headed your way. We can go back to calling in VENUS.”

“Copy that, Abbott,” Powell still sounded distracted. “Do you have enough to sweep and clear the closest buildings?”

“Biodrone forces are depleted, but they’ll recover soon. Now would be the time to seize the initiative,” Costello agreed.

“Do it. We don’t have long before we’re suit-exhausted. Make it count.”

Costello clicked his radio to acknowledge, and took a moment to study the small mourning circle around the transports. The dead Gaoians—and there were more than just Tyal and Ayma—were being respectfully lined up, covered. It wasn’t a good time…but there just wasn’t going to be a good time, and they had a mission.

He took a deep breath and joined them.

“…Lads.”

“…LT.” Arés had a flatness in his voice that Costello had never heard there before. The man was usually so bouncy-cheerful that hearing him sound so desolate was a jolt to the core of the world. But he’d known Ayma personally—Costello could hardly expect him not to be torn up by a friend’s death.

Regaari had recovered some, but even through his suit everything about his body language said ‘inconsolable.’ Costello didn’t need to see his face to see the lost expression there.

“…We need to aggressively sweep and clear the perimeter. I need every man I’ve got if we’re to keep this installation secure before reinforcements get here. Gao needs us, boys. You too, Dexter.”

Regaari’s ears pricked up, not in an alert way but more in the way it did when he was dragging himself through a necessary torment.

“Sir…I…Yes.”

He needed a little more. “Dexter. Buddy. We’re gonna go out there, and we’re gonna murder an army of those fucks for her. And when we’re done, we’ll throw a party that’d knock Keeda on his ass,” Costello told him. “So grab your weapon and get us a driver for one of these vehicles. We go ASAP.”

His reward, after a long and pained second, was that Regaari picked himself up, straightened, duck-nodded and flexed his claws. He still paused for a moment, but when that moment passed he spun away and bounded away four-pawed after the Stonebacks, looking for a driver. It was the first rock that started a landslide—the Lads to a man jumped into action, blitzing off on their individual errands to grab what they needed.

The last to move was Rebar, who caught Costello’s eye and gave him a single, firm nod to acknowledge a job well done.

It made him feel a little better.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Singer

“…Your ring?”

Singer nodded, and pressed it into Vemik’s hand. That ring was the first steel thing she’d ever made, and there had to be magic in something like that even if it was ‘alien’ magic.

If nothing else, it was precious to her. Giving it was powerful magic.

“I can taste the wind, Sky-Thinker,” she told him. “The Sky-People are tense and the Given-Men are nervous. I think this is the ending of a story, one way or another.”

Vemik stared at the ring for a while, then slipped it onto one of his fingers. “I think so,” he agreed.

“Make it a good story,” Singer told him. “And…look after Jooyun.”

“Jooyun?” Vemik turned around. Jooyun was sat between two Ketta roots, sharpening his steel hatchet and staring at something far away on the other side of the ground.

Singer nodded. “He’s not as strong as he looks, Sky-Thinker. He’s told you about the time he spent alone.”

“Yes…he learned much.”

“And some of what he learned scarred him.” The Singer sighed. “He needs someone to Give him strength.”

“…I know you are right about these things, but…” Vemik glanced up at his ‘Human’ friend again. “He seems well, now.”

“Does he?” The Singer shook her head. “The Songs say to watch out for men who seem well outside, but are hurting within.”

“…What should I do?”

The singer patted his hand sadly. “I can’t see the future, Sky-Thinker. Be at his side, be strong and think fast.”

Vemik nodded, then turned around as Jooyun stood up and marched sharply toward the strange latrine the Humans had made. She saw Vemik see the change in him, now—the lack of an expression, and Human faces were so expressive, so emotional. They always moved in little ways, raising the odd lines of hair above their eyes, twitching their mouths, creasing the skin of their foreheads or shifting their head to look at somebody not-quite-straight in ways that spoke without words. No matter what they were feeling, their faces moved.

Now, Jooyun’s could have been a bark carving.

“…Should I talk to him?” Vemik asked. The Singer could only toss her head lightly to show that she had no idea.

“Not yet. Maybe never. Maybe soon. Think fast and trust your branch.”

“Sky-Thinker!”

Yan was calling. He gestured sharply, beckoning Vemik to come to him. Vemik raised his hand to acknowledge the command, and turned back to the Singer. He took her hand and lowered his head.

“…Look after our son,” he said.

“Come back and help me,” she dared him, and played with the ring on his finger. “You’ll have quite a story to tell him. Come back and tell it.”

Vemik nodded, pressed his forehead against her own for a second and they tasted each other’s scent before he spun and left. The Singer turned away too, and returned to the camp’s edge where the rest of the villagers were ready to move on.

She had the future to plan for, and she believed in her breath that the People still had one.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hunter scout ship, orbiting planet Gao

The Entity, Instance 4

The Entity had a plan.

It was not an ideal plan—It involved a considerable degree of sacrifice. But the Entity had spent the last several hours carrying out a kind of callous accountancy, and the metaphorical books were better than balanced: They promised a considerable profit, for the right investment.

Spend lives, to save lives. Spend resources, to protect civilizations. Wasn’t that the calculus of command anyway? And from its commanding position near the hub of the Swarm’s data-gathering apparatus, the Entity was better placed than anybody to make such judgement calls.

But it wouldn’t have had any humanity in it at all—and it was deeply fond and proud of what humanity it had—if the ruthless pragmatism of its plan hadn’t caused it to hesitate for just a moment.

The key was to goad the Hunters into thinking they had no strategically viable option but to attack immediately. Despite their reputation for madness and their occasionally overconfident slapdash methods, the Hunters were still canny predators who had terrorized the galaxy for generations—The last fourteen years of repeated humiliation at humanity’s hands had only sharpened their caution and their patience.

So long as they were content to bide their time and strike when the moment was perfect, the whole operation here was doomed. Any system defence field the Allied forces deployed would simply be torn apart from the inside, and meanwhile the cloaked scouts could safely relay intelligence on ground movements to the Hierarchy.

All of which necessitated inciting them to decloak and attack…something. Something that would persuade the Hunters to sacrifice their enormous strategic advantage. Something important, something irresistible, something…juicy.

Something like a salvaged Hierarchy multirole combat ship that had been repurposed into a transport vessel and field hospital, wallowing deep in the gravity well in a low, fast trajectory where it could deliver support to the ground forces on short notice. Full of blameless crew, but they had escape pods…and were a couple of thousand human lives worth more than billions of Gaoians?

The trick was persuading the Hunters that it needed destroying, and here the Entity’s long experience at deception, misdirection and guile served it well.

The best lies were always built around the truth.

It watched Caledonia intently, focusing all the tools at its host’s hideous, misshapen fingertips on picking apart an apparent mystery, and advertised the fact too—the Hunter’s overseeing Beta couldn’t help but notice the intense scrutiny being directed at a single ship. Bait, dangling in the water. Irresistible, to a bored Hunter.

<Listless irritation; idle threat> +Strange One. There had better be a good reason why you are devoting so many resources to monitoring a single ship.+

Perfect. The prey was nibbling at the bait. The Entity sequenced the information it wished for its host to convey and metaphorically crossed its fingers for luck. It was trusting on the double filter of an Igraen host infesting a Hunter biodrone to pass on its intent accurately, meaning that the fate of Gao might be hanging on a game of Telephone.

Its hope was rewarded.

<Obsequious deference> +It seems to be especially important to the enemy, Beta.+

The Beta stood up from its command throne and made an elaborate show of not being interested in the affairs of lowly things like the Strange One by stretching and taking its time as it swaggered down into the intel pits. It was comical to watch a being that was so plainly desperate for stimulation fight to keep up appearances, and the Entity had to be very careful not to allow its scorn and amusement filter out through its host.

<Listless interest; Command> +Elaborate.+

The Entity stepped aside and called up its data. It was all true…but here and there among the facts were a few subtle embellishments, molded into the hard truths in the seamless way that only a digital sapient could achieve.

Enough to paint that ship as the linchpin not only of the entire human operation, but of their spaceborne capacity. A lie that was the younger twin of the truth.

It watched the Beta read, think…and bite.

<Dawning glee> +If we were to cripple or destroy that ship…+

The Entity didn’t dare to actually communicate anything beyond the emotional context. An actual thought might have burst the bubble.

<Humble Agreement>

The Beta lurched up from the console and spun away, radiating hungry savagery.

<Delight; Command> +Wake the Alpha!+

Date Point: 14y1d AV
HMS Caledonia, Low orbit over planet Gao

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

Suit technicians knew that their job only really started once the Hazardous Environment Assault Team and their suits were in action.

In practical terms, the EV-MASS almost came with a power cable dangling out of its ass. Those suits were massively sophisticated warfare platforms, and like all high-performance equipment they worked best with some fine-tuning and oversight. The Operators mostly didn’t know just how closely their suits were watched while they were in the fire.

Life support, vital signs, temperature regulation, noninvasive blood chemistry monitoring, power management, forcefield control, the helmet cam, the comms and intel package, armor integrity, the Heads-Up Display and more were all mostly handled automatically. Mostly…but with supervision.

So the technicians were far from idle when the HEAT were in action, and It made for tough watching. The helmet cams didn’t flinch at showing what the Lads did, and what the Lads did best was violence.

Marty had come to terms with their ultra-aggressive, limb-ripping savagery long ago, and knew better than to raise it with them. As far as the Lads were concerned, the immense brutality they dished out on an op was their cross to bear, privately and among themselves. Marty made sure all the techs knew and respected that.

But…God. Operation EMPTY BELL had been hardcore enough, and the biodrones involved on that occasion had been human. But after working with the Whitecrests and the Stonebacks for so long, they’d allowed themselves to forget that the gulf between human biology and the next-best thing could be…large.

Humans were Deathworlders, and Gaoians weren’t. Specimens like Daar and other elite Clan aside, the average Gaoian massed about what Kovač did—and Kovač was decidedly petite even if life as Adam’s fiancée inevitably meant being made as strong as she could possibly be—but wasn’t nearly so robust. Watching Newman punch one so hard that he flattened the poor thing’s rib cage and made it literally cough up its own lungs was all the evidence a person could ever need of that.

Watching that feed was brutalizing, an adrenaline rush. It left the body surging with fight-or-flight hormones and stress chemistry even at a distant reserve, which was why the SOR’s techs were the first to react when *Caledonia*’s proximity alarm wailed at them to brace for impact.

Something hit them. Hard. The whole ship rang like a bell then groaned the long, deep, agonizing groan of steel straining, stretching and bending.

Deacon and Hargreaves leapt to check the pressure doors were properly sealed. Matthews, Cowen and Green pounced for the emergency depressurization lockers hidden under the deck and wrenched them open, ready for everybody to pile into at the first hint that their air wasn’t going to stay where it should.

Kovač locked down all the sensitive stuff and hit the weapon rack to start handing out their carbines. They were all armed with pistols anyway, but SOP was to treat any proximity alarm as a possible Hunter ship decloaking to latch on and board. Nobody wanted to face Hunters with just pistols.

She’d just handed one to Doyle when the wisdom of that policy made itself known. A different alarm hooted through the ship, followed by Commander McDaniel’s clipped voice, sounding more stressed than Kovač had ever heard her, even on the day when Cally had literally caught fire and nearly exploded.

“All hands, prepare to repel boarders. Repeat, all hands repel boarders.”

One advantage in the SOR’s toolkit was limited access to Gaoian tech like shieldsticks. Marty promptly grabbed a handful and handed them out while everyone charged their weapons and fanned out to their planned spots all over the deck. In efficient seconds, the whole bay was one big killbox, and not a moment too soon—something else hit them, and Cally groaned like a harpooned whale.

This time, the impact was followed up by a distant heavy grinding rumble. Martina gritted her teeth and fought to keep her hands from trembling too badly. She was already soaked with anxious sweat, except for her throat which had gone completely bone dry.

Every sailor was a firefighter, every marine a rifleman and Marty, like every airman, was trained as a base defender. The HEAT had made sure all their techs knew how to work together and hold the fort if necessary, and anybody who got combat training from the likes of Firth or Vandenberg was probably decently equipped to handle a fight… But that didn’t change the fact she’d never been in a real fight before. Ever. None of them had.

Another impact, this one closer. The lights flickered and there was the unmistakable slamming sound of a compartment decompressing. On a ship as densely packed as Caledonia, that meant people were dead.

She didn’t dare shut her eyes, but she prayed anyway in the second before a real impact hit them, a heavy slam right on the other side of the external pressure doors that covered where the ship’s original masters had relied on only a forcefield to keep the air in. There was an ear-mangling metallic squeal, a seething howl, and a four meter ring of fire bloomed on the external door.

A fusion-cutting Hunter boarding proboscis thrust obscenely through the wounded hull and pushed in a two-tonne coin of the outer hull. The Hunters were only an inch behind it.

Thank fuck for hologram-enhanced training on Firth’s tactical assault course. They were even more disgusting in real life than in the simulation, but rather than being stunned by the repulsively creepy horrors that tried to barge into the room, Marty gritted her teeth and opened fire.

To her supreme satisfaction, her shots tore through the first one through the breech and it collapsed to the deck with its too-many limbs convulsing like a poisoned spider’s. Its nervejam grenade launcher clattered across the floor, unused.

Doyle, Hargreaves, Deacon, Cowen, Green and all the rest poured in their own fire, and the training showed. They weren’t firing wildly or wastefully, they laid down a disciplined volley and the Hunters bogged down on their own fallen, were cut down, and recoiled like burned fingers.

Marty used the break to reload and get on her radio. “Contact, Starboard hangar bay!”

“Copy starboard hangar, marines en route.”

‘En route’ was almost an understatement. Marty barely had time to understand the reply before five Royal Marines bowled in through the inner airlock, geared up in the latest-gen body armor that had borrowed heavily from EV-MASS to provide far more protection per kilogram than older systems. They looked ready and able to stroll casually up to Hell’s front door.

Their squad leader, Corporal Wilde, joined Marty behind her shieldstick barrier. “Nice one,” he commented.

“Thanks. Plan?”

“You lot hold the fort, we go in there an’ clean the bastards out. Wish us luck.”

Holy shit. “Godspeed,” Marty told him, and meant it.

Wilde nodded and sprang to his feet. “Come on, lads!” he roared, “Last one in buys the first round!”

The five of them surged forward with their weapons up, bowled over the dead Hunter boarding party and stormed back up the boarding proboscis.
Marty steeled herself and listened to the gunfire, both rattling back down from inside the Hunter ship and from elsewhere on the ship. There was another ringing slam as another Hunter latched on to another part of *Cally*’s hull, and she whispered a desperate prayer under her breath.

They weren’t out of the woods yet. They were barely in.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
HMS Caledonia, Low orbit over planet Gao

Commander Ellen McDaniel

McDaniel was juggling two battles at once. Of course there were the Hunters to worry about, as a seventh boarding ship decloaked barely ten meters from their hull. The first had been too close to avoid even if it hadn’t then turned on a gravity spike and wormhole suppressor, pinning Cally in place. They were confined to kinetic acceleration only, which put them in a bad place, defensively. Any of the biodrone ships higher up in the gravity well could pick them off, and the rest of the fleet was scrambling to shield them, but were confined to sublight themselves thanks to the gravity spike. Even the Firebirds were minutes away at best.

All of that demanded her attention, but seven—no, eight—boarding craft was by far the more immediate problem. How many could there be?

Too many. They needed clear space around them, now.

“Cap charge?” she demanded.

“Eighty-seven percent!”

McDaniel grabbed her radio. “XO to Captain.”

Bathini sounded perfectly, inhumanly unruffled somehow. “Go ahead.”

“The bastards keep coming, sir. There could be hundreds of them cloaked just feet from the hull. Suggest we dump cap.”

“Do it. Keep us above the green line.”

“Aye aye,” a quick change of channel put her through to reactor control. “XO to reactor chief.”

There was a pause, and Chief Andow’s voice came back sounding tense. “Reactor here.”

“Chief, we’re dumping cap, down to the green line.”

“Aye aye…” Andow must have been a step ahead of her, and forgot to let go of his call button, because she clearly heard him shout “Hooky! She called it! Dump prep? Okay!” His voice came back to the radio clearer and more audibly. “Dump ready, XO.”

“Dump it!”

There was a slamming noise, quite different from the physical, ringing impacts made by Hunter ships raping their skin. This one was the sound made when the supercooled ultra-high-capacity power buses to the ship’s shield emitters were called upon to direct and handle energies equivalent to a nuclear explosion. Vats of liquid nitrogen would be boiling furiously around white-hot superconductors, fighting to bring them back down to a more reasonable temperature, and that was just the beautifully controlled waste heat.

Outside, *Caledonia*’s sensors tracked no fewer than twelve more Hunter ships as they briefly did a convincing moth-in-a-campfire impression.

One of her warfare officers made a save, triumphant sound that perfectly echoed McDaniel’s own sentiments.

“Damage report!” she demanded, keeping everything on track. Now was too early to celebrate.

“Hull breaches E deck forward, C deck forward, A deck midships, Starboard hangar, Hospital deck, B deck aft, F deck ventral. Total pressure failure between bulkheads two and three. Emergency disconnect of capacitor bank C, emergency shutdown of Reactor Two. Casualties reported A deck midships—”

It was obviously a long list, but it was cut off by the way the whole deck lurched and Caledonia screamed the long, tearing sound of her pressure hull failing in a big way. McDaniel gritted her teeth and braced herself against the bulkhead as her sense of balance went completely awry for a minute. A sure sign that the artificial gravity plating was fighting against some violent G-forces. Alarms of every conceivable type all went off at once.

“What was that?!”

“One of the Hunters just…blew itself up!”

McDaniel turned around to see for herself and at exactly the wrong moment a second Hunter self-destructed and took part of Cally with it. The gravity plating failed. Not for long…but for long enough. She completely lost her balance, tipped over, and when the gravity came back on the last thing she saw was the corner of a desk coming up to meet h—

Date Point: 14y1d AV
HMS Myrmidon, High orbit over planet Gao

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

“Mayday! Mayday! HMS Caledonia declaring an emergency, we are sinking! Repeat, HMS Caledonia is sinking!”

The navy had kept the word ‘sinking’ even though it couldn’t possibly apply to a ship in space. There was nothing to sink in. But if a ship was totally wrecked, had suffered a catastrophic loss of its ability to retain atmosphere and life support, to maneuver…in short, to function as a ship, then it was pretty much definitively sunk.

The telemetry coming through the FIC was a knife in the gut. The half-dozen Hunter boarding ships that had buried into Caledonia like ticks had turned suicide bomb, obliterating segments of the hull, breaking her back. In seconds she had gone from a damaged but functioning warship to a tumbling, burning hulk at the heart of a cloud of condensing air and glittering metal shrapnel.

And there was absolutely nothing that Knight could do about it. The biodrones were winning the war to control the Gaoian fleets, and they had learned more than a few of humanity’s tricks in the last few years. It was taking every trick of maneuver that Knight and Caruthers could devise between them to stay ahead of the fight, and sometimes the only things tipping the balance were the nukes.

He had his plate full with the battle, he didn’t have time to worry about Caledonia’s crew. All he could do for them was pray and carry the day for them, and that would have to be enough.

Even so…His own daughter was on that ship. Not a perfect daughter, nor he a perfect father, and their relationship could hardly be described as close…But still: his daughter.

He tried his best to put Ellen’s fate out of his mind, and focused on the task at hand. There was a war to win.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc ARm

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

“Boss…Playboy. I can see you. Slow down and stop for a skull check. You too, Tigger.”

Coombes slowed from his cross-country jog and paused next to a Ketta, utterly bewildered. There was absolutely no sign at all of anybody besides himself and Daar in the area. Not a stray sound, not a whiff of scent, nothing.

He knew Etsicitty was supposed to be skilled. And he’d worked with some stealthy motherfuckers in his time, snipers mostly. But there was nothing, not even the wary silence of disturbed forest animals. The birds were still trilling in the trees above—

They weren’t birds. A Given-Man landed on Coombes’ back and crushed him to the ground. Two landed on Daar. Coombes got a mouthful of leaf litter, and had to endure the indignity of having somebody pin his hands behind his back by holding his wrists with their foot.

One tanned brown bare foot and one unnatural white plastic one encroached on his peripheral vision as Etsicitty pressed the scanner to his head, then swept away to do the same for Daar. After the second beep he made a satisfied grunt and dropped a black tomahawk on the ground.

“Let ‘em go,” he said. The enormous weight keeping Coombes belly-down in the dirt lifted off him and he was hoisted to his feet. Yan grinned toothily at him, and brushed the leaves off his chest and belly.

“Lucky you we not en’mee!” he declared, patted Coombes on the head and stepped back.

“Yeah, well. What’s a broken back between friends?” Coombes replied, trying to massage some feelings back into his kidneys. The joke earned a jolly trill.

“You look in our heads now, yes?”

“…Yes.”

It was definitely a formality as far as Coombes could tell. If the hunting party had been ‘droned then he and Daar would already be dead or ‘droned themselves and they wouldn’t have seen it coming. But procedure was procedure. He pressed his scanner firmly to the Given-Man’s flat forehead and nodded at the expected green ping.

Etsicitty was waiting for him with his arms spread, looking quiet, patient and focused. Sure enough, his head was green too, and he stooped to retrieve his tomahawk the second it was confirmed.

“Where’s the Professor?” Coombes asked him.

“Went east with the women, children and old men,” Julian said. “Chimp and Tiny are playin’ chicken with the drones. They seem to be running on automatic.”

“Automatic?”

Etsicitty shrugged. “They’re about as sharp as a sack of Dizi Rats. Just go after whatever they see. I dunno what’s goin’ on, but nobody with a working brain is controlling those things.”

“Like angry Werne’gok,” Yan supplied. “Charge, not think. Easy to lead!”

“A bull,” Julian translated.

He was in an unusually silent mood, Coombes judged. He hadn’t got the chance to know Julian much, but the impression he’d got was of a man who was quiet and calm out of simply being comfortable and happy with life, or maybe wanting to spread some more.

Not terse. But then again, he wasn’t military. He’d been dragged into this, and he didn’t really have any formal training. Coombes wasn’t about to fault him if that put him in an uncomfortable place in his head, so long as he held it together.

He certainly had the experience, according to his file. He’d probably do better than he thought.

Not that Coombes was feeling much better himself. He’d run all day over rough terrain, including climbing a mountain and moving some heavy rocks at the top of that mountain. Right now most of his body and soul were singing wistfully about bed, and Daar had it even worse between their heavy gear and the lingering effects of the blast and medicine. Even his permanent unquenchable boisterousness was, if not quenched then at least soaking wet.

“So. We lure them into a trap and take them down hard,” he summarized.

“Too bad we don’t have another mountain to drop on ‘em,” Daar grumbled. Yan gave him an incredulous look.

“Drop…mountain? I have wrong words?”

“We’ll explain later, I promise. It’s one of those steel secrets.”

A voice above Coombes made him flinch. Ten’Gewek were quiet in the trees.

“Daar tell me of these.” Sky-Thinker was hanging upside down by his feet and tail, chewing on a fruit of some kind. “He say, some stones go…” he gestured and made an explosive sound effect with his mouth. “Smash rock, break tree. Big taking-magic, yes?”

“Well, in that case,” rumbled Daar, “If you know how to read a rock face ‘fer cracks and stuff, you can blow up a small part and make the whole thing slide down and kill everyone at the bottom of the valley.”

The young alien was definitely a nerd after Coombes’ own heart. Nobody but the geekiest geeks got quite such a gleeful look in their eyes when somebody described things like that. Everybody else needed to see it to get the effect, but for those truly gifted with a vivid imagination…

Julian flashed a quick chuckle and scratched at his bare chest, but his mirth didn’t survive for long. “We can’t play cat-and-mouse with these things forever,” he said. “I don’t know shit about Big Hotel power supplies, but no way those things run outta gas.”

Yan and the Given-Men nodded vigorously. “We need sleep, food. Steel birds, not.”

“We gotta keep moving, boss.” Daar seemed resolved to it. Which meant he considered their situation dire; he was so tired that he hadn’t even tried to tussle with the Given-Men who had tackled him.

“Yup.” Coombes shrugged at his ruck more for mental comfort than physical. “We’re the anvil. Tiny and Chimp need to bring ‘em to us, in favorable terrain. We need something to smash them against.”

Vemik, still upside-down, raised a juice-stained hand.

“Forestfather,” he said.

“What about ‘em?” Coombes asked him.

“First steel bird I find, shoot blue fire at me. I run, dodge. It not see through forestfather vines, run into cwiff. Cer-riff.” He paused and snarled at himself. “Cliff.…Maybe Daar Stone-Back drop mountain?”

Daar scratched his ear in the complicated way he did when he was thinking uncomfortable thoughts, and then looked at Yan. The two seemed to understand each other instantly and Yan sidled up alongside him. “I hunt with Daar. Help climb and carry.”

Julian was checking the topographical survey from *Misfit*’s legion of microsatellites. “…Those cliffs look like a hard climb,” he warned. “And Daar ain’t light and neither is his gear.”

Which was a concern, because Gaoians climbed like the quadrupeds they were. Yan would more or less have to carry the big oaf and all his stuff up the cliff.

Yan, however, was enthusiastically confident. He grinned smugly in reply and slapped his arms. “Daar, ‘gear,’ no trouble. Will be good climb, make us strong!”

Vemet, who had hitherto been silent, chose that moment to chime in with his usual quietly pertinent observation.

“If we do or we killed, we do,” he said simply. “Hard climb, good climb, no matter. Do, or death.”

That settled that, and there were nods all round..

“We got a Plan, then,” Coombes declared. He shrugged his ruck to focus himself again, got his bearings, and took point. “Come on. Sooner we quit wastin’ time an’ make it happen, the sooner we get a smoke break.”

“…Break smoke? How? And why?” Vemik asked.

“…We’ll explain later.”

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Dataspace adjacent to planet Gao

The Entity, Instance 4

Success.

A costly success, but success nonetheless. The Entity had honestly hoped that the Caledonia would fend off its attackers and come through the battle scathed, but afloat.

As it was…

Its body had been crushed, killing it almost instantly. Even knowing what was coming, the Entity had barely escaped from the host’s implants in time. It could remember being human, though. Could remember the subjective sense of having a human body. A Hunter’s sense of its own body was very similar—they felt, to themselves, just as strong.

Even from the Entity’s removed perspective, a first-hand lesson in just how different humans really were had been…shocking. As far as the body’s own kinesthetic instincts were concerned, that much power simply shouldn’t fit in that small a creature. Had the Entity’s biodroned host been free to form its own thoughts, its short-lived last experience would have been awed disbelief.

The important point was, the swarm’s scouts were gone. Vaporized by *Caledonia*’s huge energy discharge, or self-destructed. They and the Hierarchy had been robbed of a critical intelligence advantage. It had won, if not the whole war then certainly an important battle.

But deep in its core, several of the subroutines that had once been Ava Ríos were in agony. When Adam found out…

It deleted the thought. There were other battles to win before it could afford the luxury of <Remorse>.

It flashed away into the dataspace to go fight them.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Farthrow Facility, Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Lt. Col. Owen “Stainless” Powell

After several hours on the ground, the suit fatigue was setting in hard. The only countermeasures were electrolytes, painkillers and Crue-D, and Powell knew he was feeling it less than the other HEAT operators due to spending most of his time doing comparatively steady work, saving his strength.

Akiyama was in a similar boat. He’d spent most of his time on the ground so far working with Meereo on modifying the Farthrow generator.

The rest of them had worked hard, fought hard, run hard and were burning through their energy hard.

But it was all coming together. VENUS, MARS and MERCURY were through and deployed. Farthrow, which had started life as a former aerospace hangar full of prefab “rooms” was rapidly becoming a fortress thanks to a battalion of combat engineers and their unlimited supply of HESCO gabions. The walls were manned, the second jump array was up, and a master sergeant out on the front lot was colourfully educating his unit on exactly why latrine detail was so important in this case and the reason it was so high up on the list of shit-to-get-done-immediately.

Another thump through the floor heralded the arrival of another element of the brigade combat team, and punctuated the moment before Costello’s long-awaited call came in.

“Stainless, Abbott. The passenger terminal is secure, our sweep is complete. Suit fatigue’s biting pretty hard.”

Powell made a ‘hmmph’ noise to himself before replying.

“Abbott, Stainless. Return to Farthrow. Be aware, suit technicians aren’t available. All HEAT to report for a debrief before de-suit.”

A click on the line signalled Costello’s understanding and acknowledgement, and Powell returned his attention to the report from MERCURY’s operators and the FIC.

Caledonia debris—some of which they were fairly sure was lifeboats—had been tracked describing a three hundred kilometer field across Gao’s equator, and a lot of it was over water. The majority of the stricken ship’s hull was still up there and possibly salvageable, but the SOR technicians on board had all been out of contact for a long time now.

Hopefully, that would change. Re-entry was a bitch for communications at the best of times thanks to all that opaque plasma. Bailing out of a burning, disintegrating spaceship in low orbit had to add all kinds of complications.

Still. The techs were trained for it, and their continued silence was deeply unwelcome.

“Titan.”

Akiyama looked up from his work and stood. “Sir?”

“How’s it holdin’ up?”

“Meereo’s debugging the new scripts now, and I’ve checked everything I can. We think it’s solid.”

“You aren’t gonna need to shut it down for a software update, are you?”

Akiyama winced almost imperceptibly and shook his head. Apparently he’d inadvertently asked a dumb question. “…No sir.”

“Champion,” Powell nodded, glad that that had gone right at least. They had wormhole suppression across an entire planet, and more importantly they could open timed exceptions in that suppression to admit their own logistics train. They had orbital superiority, ground defences and interceptors in place to keep Farthrow alive and running, and they had an army literally marching off one planet and onto another as fast as the jump arrays could cycle, ready to be shouted at by the MPs.

And all it had cost them was an invaluable warship. Even if Caledonia was salvageable, she would be out of the war for…years, probably, severely curtailing the SOR’s operating capacity.

And those were just the practical concerns. On a personal level, Powell was scared for his people. Badly scared for them. And he hated the impotence that came with knowing that, no matter what, the HEAT was a minimum of two days of recharge and rejuvenation time away from its next operation, assuming they cut corners and pushed too hard.

Heavy footsteps at the door heralded the Lads’ return. They filed in, and several bystanders both Gaoian and human alike immediately got the hell out of their way—every last one of them was splattered with gore. Even Costello was sporting a smear of the stuff across his chestplate, and both Firth and Arés were basically red from head to toe. Only the Gaoians were clean, and Powell was certain that was only thanks to the surface properties of their suits.

He shook his head, slightly awed. “In the wise words of her majesty Queen Elizabeth…Fookin’ ‘ell, lads.”

“It got interesting,” Costello summarized.

“Aye, well. We’ll go over it in a moment. Right now, I’m afraid I have bad news. Fall in.”

They formed an attentive half-circle around him.

“Turns out there’re already Hunters inside the shield and suppression perimeter,” Powell revealed. “A couple hundred scout ships. They mobbed Caledonia an’ sunk her. Our people are currently unaccounted-for.”

There was a long, sick silence.

“…Escape pods?” Vandenberg asked, eventually.

“Intel’s havin’ a hard time pickin’ them out from debris. We don’t expect to be in touch just yet, if there are any pods out there they’re prob’ly still comin’ down. Don’t lose faith, Lads. For now…get outta yer suits, clean ‘em up, do your therapy. I want us all suit-ready and mission-capable on emergency turnaround. You never know, it might be us they send to get our techs back. You have one hour, and then it’s debrief. Dismissed. Costello, a word.”

The lieutenant hung around and watched the team stumble out of the room, literally in Warhorse’s case—Arés looked like he’d just gone completely numb. Powell waited until they were well out of even the sharpest conceivable earshot before commenting.

“…Regaari and Arés,” he said, needing neither preamble nor elaboration.

“Reeling,” Costello said immediately. “I trust Vandenberg to keep them busy but they’re only human…or, uh, Gaoian.”

“Aye. Put all your weight behind him too. Hold it together.”

Costello cleared his throat. “Sir…if the techs are dead…especially Kovač…”

“Then this unit’s holed below the bloody waterline,” Powell finished. “Hold. Them. Together, Costello. I’m doin’ every damn thing I can to find out what the fook’s goin’ on and bring our people home, but I need time.”

“Yes sir.”

“Good man. Carry on.”

Costello nodded briskly and departed, clearly eager to get out of his suit and do his part. Powell grimaced to himself and returned to combing through all the information that was flowing past him.

It helped to have something to do.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Champion and Stud-Prime Daar of Clan Stoneback

If Yan was anything to go by, Daar and the other Champions would need to carefully cultivate a strong relationship between the Ten’Gewek and the Gao. Theirs was a formidable species. Daar found himself especially liking Yan a whole lot ‘cuz they were alike in a lot of ways, but the most importantest way was how Yan was a lot smarter than he generally let on.

The Ten’Gewek were like that: Keeda take their super-strong high-gravity cavemonkey bodies, the whole species’ real strength was in how stupid-quick on the uptake they were. Gaoians were smart too but it was different, somehow; most Gaoians were task-oriented and efficient, natural followers that worked best on teams. They were intelligent, but…reserved. Personally brave yet reluctant to lead. That meant the genuinely brilliant Gaoians were almost all Clan, or sometimes they were overlooked diamonds quietly leading amongst the Clanless. Centuries of Hierarchy tampering was probably to blame for that…

The Ten’Gewek, on the other hand, were all razor-sharp and fiercely independent with a strong sense of tribe. Within that tribe there was an easy flow between leading and following that Gaoians simply didn’t have and which Daar openly admired. They were rational, perceptive, experimental, and smart risk-takers who were quick on their feet and clever with their hands. Between them and the Humans it was hard to say which were the more intimidating.

For Daar’s money, it might still be the Humans: They felt so strongly that their emotions were contagious, but then they used that feeling rather than being ruled by it. Ten’Gewek were more…Vulcan. Calculating, logical, guarded. Not dispassionate, but slower-passionate. It was only by a little bit but it took more provocation to arouse them, and that extra degree of intensity made all the difference when it came to motivation. Humans could be just as rational, but they got fired up so much more easily that it honed their minds into hair-trigger weapons.

The Given-Men seemed to be the big exception to that. They got mad, quick, and they rode it like practiced athletes. Threaten their tribe and a Given-Man became about the canniest, deadliest foe you’d ever hate to have. And explosives really caught their imagination, especially Yan, who like Daar or Warhorse was arguably the most bestest of his species.

Yan had come along as a safety man, climbing behind Daar as he picked his way up and down the cliff. He watched everything Daar did very carefully, those big, bright eyes hardly blinking and focused intently on wherever Daar’s paws happened to be at any given moment.

The two of them were back at the bottom of the cliff again, taking a quick moment to catch their breath.

“We knapping big flint, yes? Just with sky-magic?” He’d figured Daar’s strategy out without even being told.

“Yeah!” Daar thumped his tail while he laid exhausted in the dirt, panting heavily and nursing his ‘juggernog’ energy-drink-and-protein cocktail. And his ibuprofen, a full eight hundred milligrams of the stuff. It worked wonders but any more would be dangerous maybe.

Yan trilled and laid down a spell next to Daar, stretching out his heavy limbs and recovering his strength. It hadn’t taken long for the big cavemonkey to figger out exactly what Daar was looking for; exposed fault lines in the rock, things that could be ‘nudged’ into letting go and sliding down the cliff, and of course he had a lifetime of working with stone. He’d found the perfect patches, right at the top of a cliff overlooking a horseshoe bend in the river.

Which meant a whole lot of climbing, and if Daar was being perfectly honest, he was pretty much out of gas. The long loping pace he’d used to keep up with Coombes was effective, but in the high gravity his timing was slightly off and it had slowly sapped all the energy out of him. He’d never properly recovered before climbing to the top of the cliff twice now and his every muscle was vibrating from pure exhaustion. Even rising to his paws while wearing his pack made him visibly strain.

Yan didn’t fail to notice.

“You…need more rest, yes?”

“Yeah. And food, but we ain’t got time. We got at least four more charges to plant. Can you see where?”

Yan scratched at his crest and thought for a moment before speaking. “If hill was big flint, I would hit…there, there, there and there.”

Top score! But now for the real test. “There’s two other good places we might look at. See them? Look for where the rock face changes ‘direction,’ or where there’s weird boulders.”

Yan frowned at him, then back at the rock. One of his stubby fingernail-claws excavated a shred of meat from between his teeth as he thought. “…There. Would be bad place to hit if making knife—break in two. But we not make knife.”

Daar gave him his most biggest pant-grin. “See? Sky-Magic is easy!”

“Is small-magic, but bigger,” Yan agreed.

“Yup! It’s all little things building on top of everything else, over and over again.” He flopped over, dug out an explosive charge, and waggled it in his paw. “This is just fire, but bigger. Anyway…Sky-Magic’ll prol’ly go a lot quicker ‘fer y’all, ‘cuz Daniel can point out where to look.”

“If we live.”

“Ayup. We better get on that.”

Yan looked at the locations they’d mapped out. They were all of course hugely spread out from each other, and Daar just…didn’t have the energy. He was done like only truly tiring work could do. More, even.

Yan noticed that, too.

“Maybe…I carry pack?” he offered.

“Won’t fit, it’s the wrong shape. Too long for ‘yer back.”

“Then I carry Daar.”

Daar was skeptical. “…Not even you’re that strong, Yan. I’m big. Bigger than almost anyone, Human or Ten’Gewek.”

“Yan bigger!” He hooted smugly. “What is words?” Yan asked, thought for a second, then grinned. His huge fangs glinted ferally in the sunset. “…‘Challenge accepted’.”

He stood and swaggered over toward the cliff in the thick-thighed, almost bow-legged way the bigger Ten’Gewek males walked about. He bounced the last few steps, gave the cliff a quick look, then beckoned Daar over. He groaned and rose to his paws, then to his feet, stretched, and plodded over alongside.

Daar looked up. It was a very tall cliff face.

Yan seemed undeterred. “Is not too high, Yan do.”

Daar begged to differ but he didn’t have much choice if they were going to get it done, so he duck-nodded warily and mentally prepared himself. Yan trilled, leaped up and onto the cliff—clear over Daar’s head, amazingly—and wrapped his tail under Daar’s arms.

“You hug around belly, yes?”

Daar did and locked his arms around Yan’s teak-hard middle as best as he could while that tail tightened and lifted him easily off the ground. A little wiggling, a better grip around Yan’s thick waist, and up the cliff they went. Quickly. Yan didn’t even seem to be trying.

Daar had seen a Burmese Python in a zoo on Earth one time, and after much plaintive diplomacy had persuaded them to let him hold it. He’d been struck by its dense muscular weight, and the sense of incredible power. Those things crushed Gaoian-sized critters to death in the wild and swallowed them whole.

Yan’s tail was both thicker and stronger, and just as flexible. He was very careful but every now and then an accidental little twitch in his tail would send a sharp pain through Daar’s chest and elicit an undignified yelp, and a grunted apology from Yan. It was easy to forget sometimes that Ten’Gewek effectively had five limbs, and used all five of them when climbing.

They climbed. Or rather, Yan climbed like he was crawling straight up the cliff without a care in the world. All four of his hands found every little crevice, the tiniest little bump to grip onto. Where he couldn’t quite fit his fingers into a crack, he’d grunt and make them fit, his sheer strength and those thick hoary nails breaking the rock to his will. Daar mostly just held on and did his best to help, or at least not make the climb worse.

Daar was always one to notice details. It was the secret to being good at anything really, and the way Yan tackled the sheer cliff and the lazy, effortless power he showed while doing it…that was prol’ly the scariest thing Daar had seen in a very, very long time. The last time he’d felt so unexpectedly overpowered had been his first ever meeting with Murray.

He hadn’t made that mistake since. The only way around it was trust and right now, Daar was utterly helpless, high up a cliff, and had no way out. He had to trust Yan, and so he did.

They must have looked ridiculous, though. By height and sheer volume Daar was easily the larger of the two, so for him to dangle from Yan’s tail must have been especially cartoonish…but Yan was Warhorse dense and considerably heavier than Daar. In any case it worked. It was dumb, but it worked, and therefore wasn’t dumb. Good mantra even if it felt dumb.

Fortunately the first spot had a little outcropping they could both stand on. There was barely enough room to move so Yan kept himself firmly anchored to the cliff face and his tail solidly in place. Daar swung his pack around, shaped a long, thin but substantial charge, and stuck it onto the face.

That done, Yan was scrambling crosswise across the rock when their time really started to get limited. There was a crackle and flash some distance away among the trees.

“Net, Tiny. My guys are really startin’ to slow down here. Dunno how long we can keep playin’ keep-away with these assholes.”

Daar growled to himself thoughtfully, then asked a question he was dreading. “We’re outta time, Yan. Can you go faster?”

Yan gave him a sympathetic look. “Yes, but…will hurt you, I think.”

“I only heard ‘yes.’ Let’s do it.”

Yan grunted in acknowledgement, and Daar suddenly found that he’d been wrong about the most scariest thing. Yan stopped climbing and started flying across the rockface like he was swinging through the trees. Every landing was another slamming impact that drove some of the air out of Daar’s chest before he bounced along the surface to the next tiny crack, then a flying leap across the surface, more bouncing, more speed. After the first crunch Daar learned how to brace himself and use his limbs, but he was sure he had a bruised rib or two, and he definitely would need a Crude recovery after the Yan-ride was over.

The second stop was easy. Yan let go and Daar took a moment to recover before quickly deploying a charge. It was small and Yan had some pointed questions about that, which Daar didn’t have the time to answer. He promised they could play later, though, and Yan seemed happy with that.

Daar wasn’t too keen on annoying Yan at the moment.

Onward. The third and fourth flew by in a few rib-crushing moments, and the fifth—Yan’s “break-knife-in-two” spot—got the special treatment. He’d been saving up for it, on the grounds that the more explosives he planted there, the more stuff would fall. Nice and simple.

The sixth was in the worst spot. There wasn’t any way to get to it without a huge leap across an open space at the top, and that meant Daar had a decision to make. He was mostly sure he had the strength to make the jump and jump back—Gaoians were quadrupeds after all and could leap pretty far—but he was in a lot of pain, his energy was dangerously low…

Risky. Alternatively, he could tell Yan exactly what to do and send him over. That was risky too, because the placement was critical and had to be exactly right or the thing might fizzle. It’d be the difference between a shower of rocks and a geological hammer.

Yan sensed the problem, too. “I can make jump, no problem. Maybe not make with you, though. But I jump, hold, you jump, I catch. Easy.”

Daar resisted the urge to flinch. The humans had a mild superstition about using the word ‘easy’ in these circumstances, and like so many other Human things their superstitions were contagious. Instead he duck-nodded. “Makes sense.”

Yan grinned at him then turned and jumped the gap without a moment’s hesitation. He flung himself across it with all the assured confidence of a lifelong brachiator, slammed into the far wall and stuck like his hands were made of glue. He turned and beckoned Daar over.

There was nothing to do but trust him. The sporadic chatter of rifles and the occasional thump and flare of a plasma weapon among the trees was definitely getting closer. Daar dropped to four paws, took three paces back, then pounced forward with his claws gouging at the scree. Three strides took him to the edge, he bunched his back muscles, leapt—

Four or five confusing, terrifying seconds later they finally came to a rest halfway down the slope, swaying perilously from only one of Yan’s hands. The Given-Man grunted powerfully, worked the fingers of his free hand into a fault in the rock, and hauled Daar upwards with his feet.

“…Maybe not as easy as I think,” he admitted after a second.

Daar unclenched every muscle he had. Suddenly, he understood what the human expression about life flashing before one’s eyes was all about. Not that he’d been risk-averse in his past, but something about swinging above a terminal drop on an alien world under supergravity amplified the pucker factor by an order of magnitude. Heights were generally among his least favoritest things.

Also, his abused bones were really starting to complain.

“…You okay Stone-Back?”

Not really. “Ow.”

Yar trilled in sympathetic humor. “Hurt is not dead!”

“Yeah,” Daar managed, still not quite able to tear his eyes away from the hungry drop below him, “we got that goin’ for us. Which is nice.”

Yan got his tail re-seated around Daar’s chest and ascended the cliff at his usual absurd pace. “We plant magic knapping clay now. Then I climb down slow. Easy, you see.”

“Please stop saying easy,” Daar requested, giving in to the superstition. “Bad things happen.”

Yan trilled again, and heaved him up to the blasting spot. The gunfire was close now. “You hurry,” he said.

In fact, Daar was only about half done planting the charge when the gunfire arrived in the form of Walsh, who seemed to be enjoying himself. At least, he was hollering like the crowd at a prize fight as he backed into the open ground, firing back the way he had come. Ten’Gewek hunters and Given-Men burst from the trees around him and scrambled over the rocky ground and dried stream bed to get away from the drones pursuing them.

As soon as they were past him, Walsh turned and put his head down. He charged for the cover of a rounded boulder and dropped into a feet-first skid as a Hierarchy drone burst out of the woods. A blue plasma bolt lit the twilight and threw deadly shadows across the cliff and trees as it flashed over his head and burst harmlessly against the cliff face.

There was the whip-crack sound of Etsicitty’s rifle from somewhere hidden at the gulley’s end, and the drone flipped out-of-control in a shower of sparks.

Daar got the charge set as he heard the whine of more drones climbing in pitch back among the trees. They were on the hunt now, and their quarry was in the open.

“Go!” he barked. “Now!”

Yan needed no more encouragement. He grabbed Daar hard enough that Daar felt something go click painfully in his shoulder, and practically threw them both down the rock face. Keeda only knew what the skin of his palms was made of, but it must have been tough as motorcycle leathers, ‘cuz their rapid skidding descent didn’t seem to trouble or harm him one bit.

Daar was still dizzy from that effortless display of superior cavemonkey athleticism when they reached the bottom, where they charged away from the killzone and towards the safety of the forest. Daar recovered some dignity there; even in his weakened state he was still the fastest thing in the Forest, and he made it to the root-hollows of an especially huge Forestfather before Yan came bounding to a halt along with him, desperately gulping air with his big hand clutching at his chest.

He was grinning like a maniac.

Daar keyed his radio. “All, Tigger. Charges set!”

“Tigger, Chimp. That’s my cue…”

There was a burst of gunfire in the woods, a fireworks show of blue flashes between the trees. More of the hunting parties burst from the brush, dashing for the safety of the far end of the gulley where Coombes and Julian were set up. A blue blast skewered one of them out in the open and he went sprawling, definitely dead. Plasma didn’t fuck around, there. Daar grimaced at the stench of burnt hair and flash-charred flesh on the breeze.

Hoeff was last out. He threw a grenade behind him as he ran with his head down, and got the timing about perfect because the first drone out of the woods behind him was just in time to be pulverized by the detonation. He helped one of the slowest Given-Men make it to safety, and the group dug into cover with their rifles aimed and their bows drawn.

A dozen strained heartbeats later, the ten or so remaining drones swarmed out of the woods as an angry ball of fusion blades and plasma fire, marching a disciplined pattern of fire up the gully that kept everybody’s heads down.

Fortunately, they were much too dumb to see the trap coming.

Daar held his detonator, held his nerve, waited until the perfect moment when all ten drones had just entered the killzone…and fired.

For the second time in a day, he made it rain stone.

The drones saw the danger coming, of course. They were smart enough to recognize hurtling rocks as a threat and tried to take evasive action but it was too little, too late. The mountain fell apart and slid down its own cliffs, with boulders bouncing like rubber balls and a sound so loud it was physically painful.

Eventually, the noise died down. Then it stopped, leaving only the bounce and clatter of a few last stray pebbles. Nobody moved for a long while, long after the pebbles had stopped, until even the inaudible hiss of the settling dust was gone on the breeze.

Very, very slowly, Daar lowered his detonator, and remembered how to breathe. It seemed to break the spell. Walsh thrust his fist into the air and whooped long and loud, Coombes sat back on his butt and rubbed at his stubbled jaw, Hoeff crossed himself and glanced skywards mouthing the word ‘thankyou.’ Around them, the hunters and Given-Men celebrated in their own ways.

Yan eyed Daar warily. “Small-magic, but bigger,” he grunted, and shook his head. “Godshit.”

“Yup.”

Yan sighed and stood up. He stalked out into the open, shaking his head. “Nearly, we save everyone,” he said, and trudged toward the fallen hunter. “So close…”

Daar followed him. “Who did we lose?”

Yan stopped by the body, knelt, and turned it over. He made a long, low, pained sound and hung his head.

“…Yan?”

“…Use radio. Call Sky-Thinker,” Yan ordered. He sat on his tail, rested his arms on his knees and wept.

Daar was having trouble seeing in the encroaching dark, but he didn’t need to. The nose told everything.

They’d lost Vemet.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

“My fellow Americans.”

Just speaking the words sent a chill down Sartori’s back. They weren’t complex or difficult words, but in the mouths of Presidents they carried the weight of history. On an occasion like this, they heralded the changing of the world.

“My fellow Humans,” he added, “and all our friends and partners of every nationality and nature. Good afternoon. This address is going out simultaneously to an announcement by His Majesty King George in his role as sovereign to our several allied nations, including the colony of Cimbrean.”

That was the diplomatic necessity out of the way. On to the substance.

“Over the last four years,” he said, “our government has sought strong ties with the people of the planet Gao, and have committed to a strategic alliance which has strengthened both our species in the face of a tumultuous interstellar climate. We have pooled our knowledge, our expertise, our potential and our ambitions, and already we have achieved together what neither of us could have done alone.”

He paused for effect and adjusted his glasses, just for a second.

“Yesterday, our Gaoian allies came under attack,” he announced, looking directly into the camera. “Even now, their cities are in flames, their population is being massacred, and their ships are burning in orbit. As their friends and allies, we are duty-bound to come to their aid, and I have already recalled the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, the Twentieth Air Force along with the 946th Spaceflight Wing, combat engineers and support from all our uniformed services, and the USS San Diego. Our strategic partners through Allied Extrasolar Command have done the same, and Human boots are already on the ground, saving Gaoian lives.”

He glanced down at his notes, again for effect and to allow his words to stick rather than because he needed them.

“The time has come, however, for us to discuss the nature of our enemy. For years now, not only our government but governments across the world have faced pressure from medical firms and other well-intentioned industries who wish to bring the life-improving technologies of human augmentation to market, and we have denied them. We have been asked repeatedly to explain this embargo, and have refused.

“The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, that cybernetic implants can be used to influence a person’s behavior or, in extreme cases, to enslave them.”

He pushed a folder forward on the desk. “I have already authorized a full disclosure of this document, codenamed DEEP RELIC, which will be released shortly after this address. It details the history of our enemy, their nature and their agenda but the short version is this: Their name is the Igraen Hierarchy. They have existed since long before our written history, and their primary goal is to suppress the rise of deathworld civilizations such as our own.

“They have already rendered countless species extinct, and their intended victims include the natives of the planet Akyawentuo and now, in retaliation for their friendship with us, the Gaoians. Their operations on Earth led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Global War on Terror, and the destruction of the city of San Diego.”

On that note he took his reading glasses off and set them on the desk. He sat tall in his seat and abandoned his notes. “They have tried to provoke us into destroying ourselves at least three times so far,” he noted, “and they have failed. So they attack our allies, and they will fail. This is an act of desperation on their part because they have finally met an effective opponent, and they don’t know how to handle us. They are panicking: We shall not.”

A speech was all about rhythm. Ebb and flow, stop and start. Nobody was gripped by a monotone drone, which was why he raised and then calmed his voice, paused for effect, played with props. Leadership was as much about the theatre of strong leadership as the science of good decisions, and Sartori prided himself on being a peerless actor. In some sense it didn’t matter if the words were mediocre or exceptional—their weight was carried by the delivery.

“The Spaceborne Operations Regiment was created specifically to fight this enemy, and has been a success: The enemy’s operations on Earth have been completely shut down. Without that victory, it was only a matter of time before they secured a wormhole beacon and brought in their most terrible weapon: The Hunters.”

He raised a hand. “Now, I know, we all remember Vancouver. We all know that an ordinary human is physically far more than a match for an ordinary Hunter. But the Hunters number a million warships, whereas our own spaceborne military including unmanned spacecraft numbers fewer than two hundred. If they ever made it past the shield we once considered a prison, then our days would be numbered. Humanity, in fact, is only still alive because of the heroic efforts of the SOR and of their many sacrifices, HEAT, JETS, and their army of support staff. Every member of SOR is the absolute best of us, and we owe them our honor.”

That was important. Recruitment into the SOR was going to soar after this, and it was imperative for both to be seen as the heroes. Under no circumstances could JETS be the little brother that failed HEAT candidates dropped out into, nor could their technical backbone be neglected.

“Yet even they could not have succeeded without the efforts of other heroes; one operation in particular some years back was saved by a fighter pilot and a combat controller, both of whom are now prominent members of the SOR, and one of whom was instrumental in founding the JETS team even now working against the Hierarchy’s interests. It would take too long to mention the literally thousands of men and women—some of whom aren’t even human—involved in this heretofore secret fight across literally every dimension of defense and security. That makes this an almost fruitless gesture, but: thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”

One last pause. Into the home straight.

“As I said to the Global Representative Assembly some months ago: We are at war. We have been for years, and matters have now escalated to the point where there is no longer anything to be gained by secrecy. The Hierarchy don’t just threaten our way of life, they threaten our whole species. Right, Left, Centrist, Communist, Capitalist, Christian, Muslim, Atheist…none of that matters. Their goal is not political or religious, it is survival. They have deemed us a threat to their existence…and they are correct. The tragedy is, we are only a threat to them at their own instigation.”

He sat back in his seat. “There will be a press conference in twenty minutes’ time. Every question the press and the public could have will be answered. And once that is done, we will return to the business of saving our friends, and our future. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.”

The lights blinked off. The moment was over, and Sartori made perfectly sure he was given the thumbs-up by the director before he allowed himself to relax, massage his face, and swear quietly to himself.

He had just changed the world.

Date Point: 14y1d AV
Lavmuy spaceport, Gao

Mother-Supreme Yulna

Yulna was well-disposed to like Humans, but they could be terrifying. Seeing Shoo accidentally break a Locayl in two had been one thing, but Shoo as it transpired was far from being the best her species had to offer.

The spaceport perfectly demonstrated why being scared of them, even if one liked them, was a perfectly sane response: it was unrecognizable. Its open expanse of concrete looked more like a whole town being slapped down in rough but functional fashion, in mere hours. From the air she could even make out its districts as her plane circled slowly overhead, slowed to a hover, and then kissed down onto the landing pad.

She wasn’t in any position to really appreciate it, though—She was too exhausted, too emotionally and physically numb. She and the plane were both running on their last reserves, and had barely made it to the camp at all. They’d been forced to land elsewhere, been searched by a grim Claw of Stonebacks. Their heads had been scanned, and that alone made Yulna’s imagination turn anxious circles as she slotted it into the sickening history unfolding all around her and found that it could be made to explain much.

The shorter hop to Lavmuy had been a silent one. Myun had relaxed once she knew the other Sisters were “clean” and had finally acknowledged that she was in pain. The ugly injury up one side of her face might never heal properly even with the very best in Gaoian medicine, especially not after leaving it untreated for so long. It was a shame, too—she’d been so unconsciously pretty that Yulna had had to flatten her ears and shake her head in frustration sometimes.

Human and Gaoian medics met her on the landing pad but quickly declared that there wasn’t much they could do besides dress the wound as a safeguard against infection. Getting her to a hospital with the equipment and expertise she needed simply wasn’t an option for now. There would be surgery and dentistry later, but those resources simply weren’t available for the moment, and so Myun remained at the Mother-Supreme’s side where she belonged.

Yulna herself was given a clean bill of health, and finally got to meet somebody important and begin to learn what was happening.

She recognized Colonel Powell. It was hard to forget the HEAT, they had a habit of…sticking…in one’s memory. They were almost, to an average Human, what a Human was to an average Gaoian. And if nothing else, the nose would never forget a musk that potent. Even across the impenetrable barrier between species, the biggest of them smelled male in a way that not even Daar could match.

And blood. They smelled of blood. Less so on Powell himself, but if he hadn’t been soaked in gore himself recently then he’d been spending time in the company of someone who had, and not even the potent scent of antibacterial soap could disguise that.

“Mother-Supreme. Welcome to Camp Farthrow.”

Exhausted as Yulna was, there were more pressing matters than her relentless need to just curl up and sleep. “I require answers,” she said, not deigning to acknowledge the welcome.

“You’ll have them,” Powell promised composedly. “All of them.”

“At the moment, I see Sisters held against their will, the Champion of Stoneback missing, the Stonebacks themselves covered in the blood and entrails of my fellow Gao, and what looks like an aggressive occupation by an alien power, all in less than a single day. Your answers had better be good.”

“Mother-Supreme…Honestly, the answers are all terrible to know, an’ that’s the truth.” Powell sighed, and relaxed from his formal posture slightly. “An’ I’m afraid I have some personal bad news to deliver. I understand some of your guard-sisters attacked you in flight?”

Yulna glanced at Myun, then duck-nodded. “Yes…?”

“I’m afraid they also attacked at Wi Kao. I’m very sorry, Mother. It was a slaughter.”

Myun keened sharply. “…Mama Ayma?” she asked, reverting to the cublike form of address. Powell shook his head solemnly.

“She’s here. If you’d like to see her,” he said. “We didn’t know what sort of funeral would be appropriate.”

Yulna reached out with a shaking hand and gripped Myun’s fur, trying to steady both herself and her Sister-Daughter-Bodyguard. The news just didn’t…fit. It refused to enter her head. She’d heard the words and knew what they meant but they wouldn’t sit still in her brain.

“She…I was speaking to her. When the first bombs went off,” she said.

“Aye,” Powell nodded. His voice—naturally deep and earthy anyway—was so full of sympathy that it was almost subsonic. “I have a full briefing prepared for you. But it can wait, if you want to pay your respects first…”

In fact, Yulna didn’t need long. The Humans had refrigerated a room to the point where her breath made small clouds, and had obviously done their best to be respectful. Even so, there were a lot of bodies in the relatively small space.

Myun keened and whined bitterly, grieving like a Sister should. Yulna…

She ought to be a wreck, she thought. Her world was burning down around her whiskers, her protector had been wounded in saving an attempt on Yulna’s own life, the air stank of blood, smoke and death and she was staring forlornly at her best friend’s face, wishing fervently to see even a hint of water vapor around the nostrils, just a twitch in her chest…

But aside from that unlikely hope, there was nothing. Or, if there was an emotion at all, it could be summed up in very few words.

She laid a paw on Ayma’s forehead and keened gently, softly, and quietly, only for a moment.

“Somebody is going to pay for this,” she promised.

It absolutely was not a happy thing to say. There were no happy things to say. But it scooped out all the fatigue and confusion and lost sense of direction from her chest and put a kind of arctic fire in there instead. She marched to the command center feeling more like herself than she had in months, setting a pace that both Myun and her Stoneback escort had to scuttle to match.

Powell, other Humans she didn’t recognize, and a young, smaller-than-average Stoneback who was nevertheless carrying himself with the bearing of a leader turned her way and straightened up as she swept regally into the room and fixed them all with a glare.

“…Very well, Colonel,” she said. “Let’s hear your terrible answers.”

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

Pain was proving to be everywhere, this morning. It was on Vemik’s face, in the Singer’s eyes, crawling up Yan’s aching back and it swirled around Jooyun like a storm on the horizon, heavy with anger and desperation. He couldn’t sit still, hadn’t slept, had started to lose some of his weight like a Given-Man in winter, and even though his face was gaunt and dark around the eyes from fatigue, the Sky-Hunter just prowled aimlessly around the camp, pitching in on whatever needed doing.

Nothing did. So he fetched tinder for fires that didn’t need lighting, topped up water skins after the first sip, went back to check on jerky that wouldn’t be properly smoked until tomorrow and which had been just as clean of flies the last time he checked.

Yan normally knew how to handle a man in that mood: he needed his women. Unfortunately, all the women had gone—Shyow and Awisun away through the sky to get help, and the People’s women to the east with Professor Daniel, maybe to put enough ground between themselves and the enemy that they might live.

In their absence…he had no idea what to do for his friend, or for Vemik. He’d contemplated just taking charge and forcing Jooyun to sleep or something, but somehow Yan knew that wouldn’t help. He’d learned to trust those feelings many seasons ago and they were never wrong.

Jooyun didn’t seem to want help, anyway…and neither did Vemik.

Poor Vemik. The young man took death hard, harder than anybody else Yan had ever known. The moment when he’d seen his father’s body had been painful to watch. All the life and color of their victory had drained out of him and he’d just…slumped.

It was hard, watching him learn life’s cruellest lessons. But he had the Singer, and his son—he’d see them again and he would heal, in time. Strange as Vemik might be, Yan had total faith in his strength. There was nothing to do for him now except let him do what he did best, and think.

He gave the younger man an understanding pat on the shoulder as he went past, though, and got a miserable nod of acknowledgement. That was all he could do and all Vemik needed, so Yan instead tended to Daar.

The Gaoian was plainly suffering terribly, but Yan couldn’t blame him. From what he could gather, Daar had been closest to the ‘nuke’ that had lit the whole sky and made a thunder that would surely roll around the whole world. Then he had run all day, climbed a mountain, climbed down a mountain, run some more, climbed a cliff, been thrown around and crushed and heaved about…but he was alive. Sick, subdued and sore but very much in one huge furry piece.

He was curled up under a tree with his nose buried under his tail, trying to sleep when Yan joined him with the biggest shank of roasted Werne he could find. He saw the ‘nose’ twitch, an ear flick, and Daar opened his eyes and raised his head.

“Food,” Yan told him simply. There was probably a words-stone nearby but they both spoke the Human language well enough to understand each other. “No good sit all day. Not bring strength back. Eat.”

Daar did that strange nod of his, the one that involved his shoulders and upper back too, and accepted the meat. He made a bleary groaning sound and tore off a chunk of meat which he bolted down without chewing.

The meat didn’t last long. Neither did the bone. He crunched it open with relish and his enormous tongue scooped deep into the marrow. Yan nodded approvingly and settled in beside him.

“You feel better?” he asked.

“Like a mountain fell on me,” Daar told him. It sounded more like the simple truth than a complaint. “But hey. We won. It cost us, but we won.”

Yan huffed sadly, and decided that he could give voice to his own pain around Daar. “Vemet was good man. Friend,” he said. “Hoped I die before him. Tribes weaker without him.”

“Yeah, I hear ya. Seemed like he stood about halfway between you an’ Vemik, right? Kept the balance?”

Yan nodded, sadly. He was trying not to give himself completely to his grief—his friend had died fighting and a man who died that way, Yan hoped, got the best of whatever death had to offer—but he mourned the quiet conversations they would never have again, and the fact that his burdens were his alone again, now. He no longer had somebody to share them with.

Or maybe not. He looked Daar up and down.

“Tribes weaker, but alive. Better alive and hurting,” he observed.

Daar duck-nodded again, and took a long drink of water to wash down the last of his meat.

“Hope I never have to do somethin’ like that again,” he confided. “You want some advice? Never try an’ keep up with a human on foot. They ain’t slow and they Just. Keep. Going.”

His words made Yan trill, and Daar watched him with his head tilted to one side quizzically. Yan decided he was owed an explanation.

“I journey far every year, for Given-Man things.” he said. “For me, take many-many days. A moon, maybe. I tire, I hurt, am smaller and weak and hungry from winter, maybe freeze. Remind me that trees, mountains, sky, gods…all bigger than Yan…You? Never see man run so far in one day. And climb cliff, twice. And fight. And win!” Yan clapped Daar affectionately on the shoulder which earned him one of Daar’s open-mouthed and strange expressions of happiness.

“Thank you,” the Gaoian said with a head-and-shoulder nod. “But don’t [undersell] yourself. You’re a Deathworlder. ‘Yer a foot shorter than me and so much stronger it’s scary. You hauled me and my gear up and down and across that cliff like it was nothin’! What am I next to that? I’m the very best of my Tribe, most strongest and most athletic and all that. But here, I’m really just a [liability]. I’m nothing compared to your People. Especially you. You’re more like a slab of steel and wood than flesh, you’re fast and clever and see as well as the Humans, you’re a better climber…”

Yan nodded graciously. “Maybe true. Am biggest, strongest, fall from high place and only small hurt, maybe no hurt. I break any man easy, pull apart like young Werne. But that thing you do? I cannot do. You do. Leave you weak and sick, but you still do…Coombes do, and he sleep once, eat tiny food, and back to work. Hard work too, like Vemik. But! You strong like Given-Man, only Den and Arsh stronger. Fast, sharp claws, teeth, ears. Nose! Nobody have magic like you! So gods not have favorite, yes?”

For the first time that day, Daar finally moved more than just his ears for something other than food. He lifted his head off his paws and adjusted how he lay for comfort.

“…D’you wanna know what the worst thing the enemy did to us Gaoians was?” he asked.

“…What?” Yan asked.

“They took our gods from us. Made us forget ‘em.”

Yan hissed between his teeth. “Take the gods?” he asked, incredulously. The very idea of magic like that made this whole war seem like a doomed cause.

Of course, it had been. They hadn’t even known they were fighting until the Sky-People showed up.

“More like…took our words for them. Took our…Iunno.” Daar rested his chin on his paws again. “It all happened a long time ago an’ I’m just a muck-shoveler an’ a stud. I ain’t a sky-thinkin’ kinda Gaoian.”

[“Asshole stew!”] Yan barked, dismissively. He’d heard the humans use ‘bullshit’ to mean the same thing, but he preferred his own words. They were his, and they were more colorful. They certainly made Daar’s ears move in fascinating ways before he figured out their meaning. “Every man can think. And if I learn one thing from young Sky-Thinker, is strongest men are strong here and here.” He slapped his arm and his head for emphasis. “You are strong, Daar Stone-Back. Strong in head too, I think.”

Daar growled or perhaps groaned to himself and sat up on his haunches, then twisted around to scratch an itch somewhere under his fur.

“…The old Champion, the one who was Champion when I was a cub?” he asked, through his own fur. “He told me three rules. ‘Backs don’t lie, ‘Backs work hard, and ‘Backs honor the work of others. So I was gonna share somethin’ that ain’t my idea, it’s my friends’ an’ I don’t wanna chew up their thoughts an’ spit ‘em out wrong, you know?”

Yan nodded. He could respect that. “What friends?” he asked instead.

“They’re both big ol’ Sky-Thinkin’ types, from Sky-Thinkin’ Clans. The first’a them, Gyotin? He thinks we lost our gods a long time ago and it made us weaker. We ain’t told him about the Enemy, but he figgered it out from lookin’ an’ thinkin’. My other friend, Kureya? He says Gyotin’s right but that we didn’t lose them; the Enemy took ‘em from us. He said…” He sniffed, his ear flicked and he tilted his head back to stare up at a tree in thought as he remembered. “He said we’ll never know what we lost. For all we know, they’re the ones who, uh…”

Yan gave him a moment to think before nudging him. “Who…?”

“…You an’ the humans, you both have about as many women as men. One for one. Right?”

“More old women than old men, but…yes,” Yan agreed.

“Us Gaoians, we have lots of men, not many women. Kureya says the sun did somethin’ weird long, long ago an’ changed us that way.”

“You think Enemy did that?”

Daar shrugged in that ducking, head-wobbling way of his. “We’ll never know,” he said. “An’ that’s maybe the worst part.”

“Daar!”

Coombes was half-jogging toward them. In truth, the dark-skinned Human wasn’t back to his full strength, and he was definitely limping a little…but he looked much fresher than Daar, and far stronger than Yan would have after running so far so quickly.

But the look on his face, if Yan had him right, said that he was in a place where pain and tiredness were just going to have to wait, because there were more important things on his mind.

Daar heaved himself up onto his four paws with a long-suffering groan. “Boss?” Coombes slowed and delivered the bad news.

“…The rest of the Abrogators are coming,” he said.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

“So you can’t do anything?”

Kevin Jenkins shook his head. He wasn’t bothering to keep up his usual I-could-give-a-fuck facade right now, and that all by itself told Allison that he was just as stonewalled as they were. He wasn’t the kind of man who gave up easily.

He’d managed to get himself up to Armstrong while the whole planet was on lockdown at least, and that was no small feat. Allison and Xiù had been confined to Misfit, allegedly for their own safety. Allison wasn’t fooled—they were effectively under house arrest. Not because they’d done anything wrong, but because the last thing the military needed right now was actors outside of their control.

She didn’t know how Kevin had navigated that problem, she didn’t want to and he probably wouldn’t have told her anyway. He looked stressed and dishevelled, he wasn’t wearing his jacket and his sleeves were rolled up which put that tattoo of his on show. A sure sign that right now he was completely out of fucks to give for anything but the job at hand.

“Allison, things’re locked down tighter’n a fat guy’s jock strap down there,” he said, and waved his hand vaguely out the viewing cupola on the chance that Cimbrean might be somewhere in that direction. All they could see through it was the inside of the Armstrong docking bay. “They ain’t playin’ around. Shit, if I hadn’t been at Chiune when they declared martial law we wouldn’t be havin’ this conversation at all, I’d be stuck on Earth.”

“I thought you said General Tremblay is a personal friend?”

“He is. And as his friend I know perfectly fuckin’ well that my friendship counts for squat when it comes to strategic shit, which is exactly how it should be.” Kevin’s expression was firm.

“So you can’t do anything,” Allison repeated.

“If I could get Julian’s ass pulled outta the fire I’d already have done it. I can’t. I can’t even suggest it right now, unless I feel like settin’ fire to some hard-built an’ important bridges. You remember how that turned out for Darcy, right?”

Allison and Xiù both nodded grimly, so he forged on. “It ain’t completely hopeless, though. Martial law don’t take away your constitutional rights.”

“Aren’t we in British sovereign territory?” Xiù asked. “They don’t have a constitution.”

“But Folctha does.” Kevin pointed out. “And it lays down free speech as an inviolable right. And now that the prez just dumped DEEP RELIC on the whole world…”

“…You’re saying we can go public,” Xiù summarized.

“Ex-fuckin’-xactly. And I know just the person to talk with.”

“Who?”

“Her name’s Ava Ríos. She’s a journalist for ESNN.”

“We know her,” Allison said, coolly. “She’s…pushy. She ambushed us at the jump array after the attack in Omaha.”

“Yup. That means she’ a good journalist,” Kevin said. “It’s a dirty job.”

“Why her?” Xiù asked him. “Why not Byron Media?”

“Three reasons. One, she’s one’a the few journalists in the world nowadays who gives more of a shit about the truth than her paycheck, and BM is all about the paycheck. Two, me an’ her father go way back. And three, she was in on DEEP RELIC herself. Use each other—you got somethin’ she wants, she has somethin’ you want. Make a trade.”

“…Okay. So we exercise our free speech whatever and give this gal an interview…” Allison said. “…Then what? What does it change?”

Kevin shrugged.

“Maybe nothin’, but it’s the best we got,” he said. “It’s something. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?”

Allison made a tired noise and turned away from him to make some work for herself refilling their coffees. She felt Xiù press a palm to her back and rub softly.

“Guys…you gotta consider that maybe leaving him behind was the right call,” Kevin suggested after a moment.

“It was,” Allison said, turning to face him again. “We know it was.”

“But it was meant to be a stop-gap,” XIù continued. “We were supposed to run and get help, not…this.”

“You ran and got help, and the help turned out to be busy with somethin’ more important.” Kevin scratched at his arm. “Honestly? How the shit aren’t you two climbin’ the walls and breakin’ stuff by now?”

“Would it get us what we want?” Xiù asked.

“No, but it’d be cathartic.”

Xiù shook her head wearily. “Fuck cathartic,” she said.

Allison gave her an impressed look, and smiled for the first time in days. Xiù liked to disguise the iron in her bones behind layers of cuddle-fluff when she could; it was always satisfying when she let it out unfiltered.

Kevin laughed as well. “Okay, fair,” he said. “But you gotta have a release if nothin’ else. Shit, if all that talkin’ to the press gets you is you feel a little better then at least you’ll feel better, right?”

“Hey, we’re on board.” Allison placed a fresh coffee in front of him. “It’s the only idea we’ve heard. May as well give it our all.”

“Anything’s better than just…rolling the bandages and waiting,” Xiù agreed.

“Right.” Kevin nodded and picked up the coffee. He took a cautious sip, savored the aroma for a moment, then set it down and picked up his tablet.

“So,” he said. “Let’s figure out what kind of an interview you’re gonna give…”

Date Point: 14y2d AV
HMS Myrmidon, Orbiting Planet Gao

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

“The ground deployment is on schedule, thanks to Stoneback. The first three targets are already under our control, but we’re meeting stiff resistance. Air superiority continues to be the limiting factor—we have it established over Lavmuy and its surrounding towns but we don’t know what half the stuff in the air on Gao is right now. We know a lot of it is Clanless, and they don’t trust us.”

“Not such a disorganized rabble after all then,” Knight observed, reading the report for himself while the lead analyst went over its points.

“Hardly. They’re a civilization to themselves in a lot of ways, and arguably the most powerful economic force in Gaoian society.”

“They must have air traffic control…” Knight pointed out.

“A lot of which is patchwork and unofficial. The Clans—especially Longear—control and take responsibility for the data infrastructure but like any economy there are competitors. There are some things that have to be done centrally though, like frequency allocation and so forth, so we’re working on identifying where those are based. Once that’s done, we can secure them and start clearing the skies properly.”

“And if we don’t?”

“One way or another, those planes will have to come down eventually.”

“Make it a priority. So long as we don’t have a system forcefield up, we’re vulnerable, we can’t deploy one until the network is disabled, and we can’t achieve that without air superiority. If I have to order the destruction of every last aircraft in Gao’s skies, I will. See to it that I don’t.”

“Aye aye.”

Knight carefully made sure that nobody could see his hands as he detached his magnetic spill-proof thermal mug full of tea from the desk and took a sip. It was still excellently hot, and steadied his nerves somewhat, but those nerves were dancing worse than they had in his life.

He was an old man. It was a thought that crossed his mind every now and again when his back ached or his fingers weren’t quite so flexible as they once had been. His hearing and eyesight were both still perfectly fine and there was nothing at all wrong with his faculties of reason…but he kept his hands out of sight because they were shaking. It wouldn’t do for the men to see the admiral’s hands shaking.

He gripped the mug and let its heat soak into his bones as he considered the next report, which was a track of *Caledonia*’s tumbling hull and an analysis of the so-called ‘objects’ it had shed into Gao’s atmosphere. Some of those had to be lifeboats…didn’t they?

And yet there had been no word. Weather analysis said the upper atmosphere and low orbit were awash with radioactive particles from the hundreds of ships they had destroyed today, the nukes, the EWAR, the arcane ripples in the very structure of space itself coming from Farthrow…

Plenty of plausible reasons why none of the lifeboats had checked in yet.

He reluctantly set the report aside, focused on another: A political analysis regarding the Clanless, the Mother-Supreme, and the Stonebacks. He’d long ago mastered the trick of reading text a whole page at a time—Scan, assimilate, swipe; Scan, assimilate, swipe—and he set it down seconds after lifting it and turned to issue an order. Its content presented a problem, but one with a mercifully clear solution. He craved clear solutions right now.

“Get me Brigadier Stewart and Colonel Jackson,” he said.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Clan Straightshield Grand Precinct, Lavmuy City, Gao

Cytosis

The Gaoians certainly knew how to build a jail cell. The reinforced concrete was seamless and unblemished, coated with a dark gray lacquer that wouldn’t hold a stain, graffiti or a claw mark. The door was a door, a steel obstacle that could probably handle explosives or a team of determined deathworlders with a battering ram. The best a relatively ordinary Gaoian might achieve would be to break their claws trying to scrabble at the scarcely-visible gap between the door and its frame.

Cytosis hadn’t bothered to try. The cell was overkill, designed to intimidate and he coped with the intimidation by…

Well, there was the problem. He was quite sure that he was going to die soon, one way or the other. Either the Straightshields would rush in and claw his throat out, or a bomb would smash the building down around his whiskers, or he’d be abandoned to croak his last days from now without water or food.

Maybe he should just go into hibernation and let the end happen without him.

It came as a huge surprise, therefore, when they fed him. It wasn’t much—just a standard flavorless ration ball dropped through a dispenser in the front and followed moments after by a water ration wrapped up in a soft spherical gel-based membrane that couldn’t possibly be converted into a weapon or escape tool by even the most feverishly inventive inmate—but they fed him.

He ate them. Straightshields weren’t the type to poison their prisoners and it boded good things for his future at least insofar as whether his death would be quick and relatively merciful.

It was the only event of note in a day that was otherwise punctuated by tracking the faint sounds through the walls and the tiny vibrations through the floor. A rumble here, an explosion there, something extremely fast tearing the sky in half with a sound like ripping paper…and the march of feet.

The door had the kind of lock that made a heavy slamming sound, but its hinges were silent, and Champion Reeko filled the frame like a black-furred avatar of anger. Cytosis stood without prompting and turned away, presenting his borrowed body’s paws behind his back for restraint. There was nothing gained by being an awkward prisoner, Six had made that point clear often enough.

The restraints were applied firmly and without regard for his comfort, but professionally. Maybe survival was still in the probability space after all. As soon as they were applied, he was hoisted around and encouraged through the door out into the hallway, then turned left. Reeko wasn’t alone—two Straightshield Brothers armed with weapons that looked significantly more serious than a pulse rifle were waiting to escort them.

“Go,” Reeko instructed. Cytosis obeyed.

It wasn’t a long walk. End of the hall, through a guard checkpoint with a pair of gates, up three flights of steps, through another pair of sturdy steel doors, out into a processing area. A potent scent struck Cytosis in the nose the second the doors opened. Blood, burnt explosive chemicals, mineral oil and a powerful alien musk.

Three humans were waiting in the processing area. Cytosis had never seen one in person before, and this first meeting definitely sold the legends: Despite being slightly smaller than the Straightshields around them, the humans radiated implacable strength just by the sheer amount of equipment they had layered on top of a thick suit of armor in assorted shades of gray. Dark glasses made their expressions unreadable, but hostile.

“Here.” Reeko pushed Cytosis forward. “This…thing is your responsibility now.”

The foremost human nodded and smartly turned Cytosis around to control his wrists, and aimed him for the door. Another got on a communicator of some kind and issued a perfunctory report. “Detainee in transit.”

Cytosis was promptly bundled out into the Grand Precinct’s open lot, where a convoy of light armored vehicles had obviously only just piled in and fully intended to pile out again very soon. He was steered toward one, and the human controlling his hands spoke to him for the first time.

“Watch your head.”

This was the only warning he gave before the vehicle’s door was popped open and Cytosis was thrust firmly but not roughly inside. He heeded the warning and managed to avoid hitting his head on the doorframe, and quickly found himself sitting between two armed and armored deathworlders both of whom were making it clear by posture alone that attempting to escape would be desperately stupid move on Cytosis’ part.

No matter. This was a definite step up on being detained by the Gaoians—Gaoian justice had a nasty habit of ending in evisceration whereas Humans, according to Six, constrained themselves to a strict code of ethics and a robust legal framework: He had no reason to run.

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat as the convoy pulled out, but didn’t speak up. As awkward as his restraints were, he doubted that a request for a little more freedom would go well. Instead, he settled in and took in the outside world for the first time since he’d first been thrust unceremoniously into his cell.

What he saw was not encouraging. There were a lot of burnt-out vehicles, and the streets were coated with broken glass, not to mention the occasional sad pile of fur that could be either biodrones or their victims. There was smoke, scorch marks, craters and the skyline was definitely missing at least one iconic skyscraper.

The Straightshields had built layer after layer of barricades around their Grand Precinct, and these had obviously come under assault but held.

Now, the road between the precinct and the starport were pretty well clear. Human troops had set up checkpoints along its length via the rough but functional approach of packing some big sacks full of rubble. And thus building a wall.

The vehicle picked up speed along the straight, jinking left and right to steer around any debris on the road. The open path gave way to a serpentine series of obstacles, which in turn became an even sturdier checkpoint, and finally a killbox.

The doors opened, the Humans slid out easily, then turned back into the vehicle.

“Out.”

Cytosis complied. They were still some distance from the spaceport, he realized. Presumably at some kind of a forward position far from the sensitive nerve center of the Human operation but still well under their umbrella of protection and security. They’d commandeered a building, boarded the windows, laid more of those rubble bags around it and it was bristling with weapons.

He was guided relentlessly indoors, down some stairs into a bare basement with only a diode light strip for illumination and some bare, basic furniture. He was pushed firmly onto one of the chairs, and his restraints were adjusted. Rather than being locked behind him his arms were now in front of him, but shackled to a sturdy steel staple anchored in the concrete floor.

In its way, that was an even more effective prison than the Straightshields had given him—He wasn’t getting out of this one unless he managed to pull off his own arm.

A new Human, this one not wearing dark glasses, sat down opposite him. He made a show of comparing Cytosis’ borrowed face with something on the screen of a tablet, nodded, and set the tablet aside.

“Cytosis,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Also known as Thirteen. Agent of the Igraen Hierarchy, member of Six’s Cabal within that Hierarchy. Correct?”

Cytosis permitted his host body to duck-nod an affirmative. “All correct. Though for the record, Six goes by ‘Cynosure’ when conducting Cabal business.”

The Human inclined his head. “You’re very free with that information,” he observed.

“I intend to comply with your interrogation and answer all of your questions in full to the best of my ability,” Cytosis replied. “From what I understand, it will save both of us a lot of time. And in any case…it might just stop this madness before it dooms my entire species.”

HIs interrogator stared at him for some time, then nodded, sat back, and picked up his tablet again.

“Very well,” he said. “Let’s begin.”

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

Beep.

“Uh…Fuck. God, I don’t know what to say. I don’t…there ain’t much time.”

That really wasn’t an understatement. Julian could hear stones falling and clattering down the scree as the remaining majority of the Abrogators, according to the satellites, picked their way over the mountains rather than through the pass. Even if the JETS team had had explosives left, dropping any more rocks on their enemy wasn’t an option this time.

He took a deep breath, gulped, and forced himself to keep talking to a blank camera lens, trying to imagine the faces beyond it and not the tears. If the girls ever saw this, then…

“Uh…The Abrogators are comin’. We know where their weak spots are, we know we can take them down…but there’s a lotta them. And I, uh…I hope I get to delete this. But if you’re watching, then…”

He looked away, grimaced against the itching at the corner of his eyes.

“…I love you both. Look after each other. I’ll…try and look out for you, if I can. I’m…sorry.”

He knew what else he wanted to say. It was just one big word, an important one: ‘Goodbye.’ But he didn’t dare. That felt too much like giving up and accepting that he was definitely going to die here, and he wasn’t ready. He’d face it…but he wasn’t ready to accept it.

So instead he stared into the camera for a second or two longer, then kissed his fingertips, pressed them to the camera, and stopped recording with no idea if or how the message might reach them.

He cleansed himself with a breath through the nose, put the phone away, corrected his hold on his hunting rifle. It wasn’t anything like good enough for this fight—in fact, he doubted that the HEAT team’s own weapons would tip the balance that much—but it was better than spears and knives, which was what the People had brought. To take on plasma weapons.

They were all far braver men than him.

He was at the back, high up in a tree where his rifle was probably at its best…and this time he was doing it without Vemet. That hurt. He hadn’t yet had time to grieve properly, and he’d thoroughly liked and respected the stoic cavemonkey, and his sharp, dry wit. It had shone through language and cultural barriers, and even Allison had described him as “Old Man Charming.”

Gone, now.

Everyone mourned him, but especially Yan. And Vemik, who had his tail firmly around Julian’s waist, holding them both securely to the tree.

And as grief-stricken as he was, Sky-Thinker never missed a trick. “…You miss them,” he said.

“I love them.” Julian gave him a helpless shrug. “I don’t want them to hurt.”

Vemik nodded and squeezed his tail a little tighter. The People treated that like a particularly close hug and it was strangely comforting. Julian hugged him back, putting as much of his now considerable strength into it as he could to try and communicate his gratitude. His hard-earned muscle meant that even a tough human would have been left gasping for breath—Julian had learned that the hard way with his friends—but Ten’Gewek were damn near made of teak, and Vemik had spent over a year beating on iron and making bows. A semi-arboreal lifestyle on a supergravity planet put the kind of solid mass on their bones that a human could only achieve through a lifetime of rugged living and hard work…or through whatever broscience bullshit they did in the SOR.

Julian grit his teeth and squeezed even harder, and managed to earn the slightest happy grunt of discomfort from Vemik. Oddly cheering, that.

“They safe in ship,” he said without any difficulty, despite Julian’s hardest efforts. “No matter what, they safe.”

“They’ll live,” Julian agreed and let go, slightly disappointed and shaking out his arms. And bummed out. “That ain’t the same thing as safe. We kinda…need each other, man.”

Vemik nodded. “I know. Yan know, too. He worries. Wawsh worries, Heff worries. We all worry.”

Julian looked up at the sound of urgent conversation up ahead. Walsh had rushed to Coombes’ side and the pair had their heads together.

“Guess we won’t worry much longer,” he muttered. “…Sky-Thinker. It’s been…”

“Tell me later,” Vemik interrupted him, and dredged up a grin from somewhere under his own fatigue and sorrow. “When you too tired of fucking to think straight.”

Julian snorted.

“Hey…” he said instead. “…Some humans think if you die in battle, you go to a huge feast where there’s all the best food and fighting and singing.”

“And women?”

Julian chuckled despite himself. “And women.”

“I think Yan dream of that.”

“He ain’t wrong. Anyway…If I see you there, I’ll introduce you to something called beer.”

That got him a smirk from a sharp-eared Hoeff, who was in the next tree over with one of the machine guns.

“Don’t write us off just yet, Playboy,” he said. “My radio just blinked.”

Walsh immediately dived for his pack and was intensely focused on…whatever it was he was doing.

“…What does that mean?” Julian asked.

“It means, keep your ass attached to that fuckin’ tree.”

Vemik gripped the tree with all four hands and nearly crushed the breath from Julian’s body. Hoeff nodded, raised his gun, and the first Abrogator scuttled over the top of the stony rise.

It was immediately staggered back by a six-round burst from one of the machine guns. Coombes’ by the sound of it, probably. Sparks and glass flew from the sensitive sensor cluster on its nose and it half-twisted to present its armor plating to the threat instead. Its scorpion-like tail arced up and the plasma gun mounted therein spat a wash of blue destruction in the vague direction of whatever had wounded it.

Coombes had clearly done a good job of confusing and blinding it, though. The bolt sizzled over his head and blew a Ketta apart as some of the water under the tree’s bark flash-boiled. The burning trunk splintered, cracked, and toppled over.

Spurred into action by pure adrenaline, Julian raised his own rifle, aimed and tried to get a decent bead on the Hierarchy genocide engine’s twisting tail. His finger seemed to squeeze of its own accord and maybe it was instinct, maybe it was pure nervous luck, but the Abrogator didn’t get a second shot off—its cannon spat sparks and then popped in a half-hearted shower of blue plasma.

Vemik fired one of his arrows at it too, one from Yan’s old bow. Julian couldn’t even draw the damn thing—a training goal for later, maybe—and Vemik obviously strained with every pull, but good God could that huge bow throw an arrow. It rammed that arrow—really more a small spear than some light, quick dart—straight through the metal petals on the Abrogator’s “neck” and caused the entire machine to seize up like a man with a cramp. It was far from dead, but it coiled around the damage, staggered and lost its footing on the loose stony ground. Seconds later it was crashing and rolling down the slope, twisting to try and get up even as the awkward fall bent its legs and smashed its carapace. When it reached the bottom its fusion-blade arms flailed uselessly, but it otherwise seemed to be out of the fight.

Vemik looked at Julian like he was more stunned than anyone else.

Hoeff smirked without taking his attention off the Abrogators. “Damn, Vemik. Hulk smash.”

Walsh had jumped down from his tree to presumably find a better lookout, and was talking urgently into his radio in a very dense-sounding military gibberish. Julian didn’t catch one word in twenty, but two stood out: ‘Danger close.’

He’d barely said them before another of the Abrogators reared over the bank ten feet to his right. There was a horrible moment where it looked like the hulking Combat Controller was about to be incinerated on the spot, or maybe slashed in half…but Yan had other plans. He leapt from his tree and landed on its back with enough force to dent the armor.

The Abrogator twisted and writhed like Lovecraft’s answer to a rodeo bull but that hardly deterred the massive Given-Man. He rode it, dug his feet into the metal, grabbed, heaved, and tore.

An armor plate like an oversized toenail clipping spun off the massive machine’s back, followed by a gush of black, shining fluid that sprayed from a thick hose. It caught Yan in the face and slipped under his feet, and even with a Given-Man’s simply ludicrous strength he wasn’t able to keep his grip on the lubricated metal: The next buck threw him off its back. The Abrogator turned, reared…

Julian shot it through the gap in the armor, aiming for where he knew the important stuff lived deep in the machine’s innards. He didn’t get what he was aiming for, but two of the Abrogator’s legs seemed to give up the ghost and its lethal fusion-claw swipe in Yan’s direction missed the Given-Man by a prayer’s width.

Yan, meanwhile, took being thrown like a pro; he tumbled to his feet like he’d meant to fall all along and dashed up another tree so fast it was hard to believe. He might have been brash, and he had a well-earned ego the size of a small planet, but age hadn’t made him stupid.

Hoeff had turned his machine gun on a third Abrogator that had poked its nose up directly in front, while Daar and Coombes were combining their firepower to drive back a fourth Abrogator on the left. Walsh, meanwhile, had darted aside and got a good angle on the damaged one. He unloaded three bursts into the exposed hole in its armor, and this time it went down and stayed down.

Then there were two more. And two more. Daar threw himself in the dirt a shaved second before another plasma blast came his way, then rolled over desperately beating at the fire in his fur. Walsh grabbed his harness and dragged him back, yelling something. Three more Abrogators mounted the ridge…

And then there was a noise. It filled the whole world, and Julian didn’t hear it with his ears; he heard it with his whole body.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT

An arrowhead-shaped aircraft blasted overhead, rocked the trees with its thunder, and was gone almost before Julian could recognize the profile of a Firebird. In its wake, the last of the Abrogators that was still remotely intact limped and scratched pathetically at the dirt with its only remaining leg, glaring balefully at them.

Julian shot it right through its sole surviving eye.

The ground was pulverized, absolutely riddled with craters. There was a stench of metal and stone dust, and a moment of relative calm before the second Firebird blasted through, delivering the same kind of fury a few yards further back past the ridge.

The echoes faded, and Julian became aware of a cracking sound at his side: crushed bark falling from Vemik’s fingers as he loosened his grip. The Sky-Thinker looked like he’d just seen an angel in all its glory, and Julian was pretty certain he was right.

“…What…” Vemik managed, then tried again. “…What was…?”

Hoeff breathed out long and slow. He was wearing the biggest, shit-eatingest grin Julian had ever seen. “That, my good friend,” he drawled, “Was a GAU-8/S Equalizer.”

Walsh reloaded, wearing a grin of his own that was only a shadow less satisfied than Hoeff’s. “A little gift of freedom. From A’*murr*ica. You’re welcome.”

Vemik blinked at them, then turned to Julian. “…Means what?”

Julian could only laugh in disbelief.

“Vemik, friend…it means we live.”

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Farthrow Facility, Planet Gao

Lt. Col. Owen “Stainless” Powell

Yulna had been…solemn.

Powell really couldn’t blame her. He’d been there himself, after all, learning the reality of what kind of a power-mad thumb the galaxy was squeezed under but the Gaoians had it worse by a country mile. The Hierarchy had been tugging their strings for generations, well back into their equivalent of the medieval era.

Discovering that the tensest days of the Cold War had been a consequence of Hierarchy action had been tough enough for Powell to chew. How did that compare to learning something similar about the whole of one’s own civilization? As a patriot, that would have rattled him badly.

Of course, patriotism meant something different for Gaoians. But still, he’d just knocked on the foundations of Yulna’s world.

The Mother-Supreme had read the documentation, asked a few insightful questions, reviewed the evidence and her expression had barely changed. An ear moving from here to there, a twitch of the nostrils, a solemn duck-nod before turning the page…little else.

“San Diego,” she said. “Giymuy knew it had to be an enemy of your people, but this—”

“Aye. It goes a long way beyond enemies at this point,” Powell agreed.

“Into what?!” Yulna asked. “What do you have that’s worse than a foe who wants to control the galaxy and will butcher anything that even could undermine its control?”

Powell rested his hands lightly on the table. “I’d go with disease, m’self,” he suggested. “And they bloody well wouldn’t be the first one we’ve wiped out, either. Look up summat called Smallpox sometime.

“The weird thing is,” he added, turning to retrieve a different folder from his desk. “We’ve gamed scenarios not unlike this.”

“You have?”

“Oh aye. We’ve got bloody fertile imaginations, Mother. An’ the thing is, you never know what you might learn about the possible by imaginin’ the impossible.” He put the folder in front of her.

“…I have heard of these *’Zombies,’*” Yulna said. “Sister Shoo frightened the cubs with them once. She thought it was very funny.” The set of her ears said that Yulna hadn’t seen it that way at the time, but was remembering it more fondly nowadays.

“It was funny,” Myun agreed.

“You were just as much of a terror as her,” Yulna replied. “You have…dedicated serious military thought to this scenario?”

“Aye. An’ a lot of the solutions we came up with to that fictional problem are useful here. An’ there’s one thing in particular that might just keep this whole thing from goin’ completely tits-up, an’ that’s your voice.”

Yulna duck-nodded. “The Clanless will just see what I saw,” she reasoned. “Slaughter and mayhem and aliens on our streets.”

“Exactly. So they won’t trust us. Which means they won’t listen to our advisory broadcasts. We need a voice of the resistance, Mother. I can’t think of anybody better suited.”

Yulna duck-nodded again, more slowly.

“I need…to sleep,” she declared, after a moment. “Just a few hours. And then I will record whatever message they need to hear.”

“Fair and done,” Powell promised. It was no kind of a concession, anyway—they didn’t have the infrastructure for civilian broadcast yet, and given that their whole strategy revolved around devastating the existing infrastructure they were going to need to build their own in short order. “Take as long as you need. Oh, and…Sister Myun?””

Myun perked up and gave him her full attention.

“Good work. Here.” He handed her a dose of Crue-D, then reconsidered and handed her a double dose. One was a minimum therapeutic dose for a human, and would normally be a solid shot of the stuff by Gaoian standards…Myun, though, was the feminine answer to Daar and in her own way just as exceptional. “Regenerative medicine. Won’t grow owt back or stop that wound from scarring, but you should feel better for it. Come back in a few hours and have my Protectors give you a lookover.”

Myun took it between two claws, gratefully. “Thank you, sir.”

“You keep doin’ what you’re doin’,” Powell told her. “And we’ll handle the rest.”

He cleaned the endless field of maps and tablets on his operations table after they had left, returned the tablets to a neat stack on the corner, skimmed the latest reports, swigged the remaining half of a coffee that was slightly on the warm side of completely stone-cold, and was pondering whether he might be able to grab an hour or two of shut-eye himself when one of the communications specialists got his attention.

“Sir! We’re receiving a short-wave radio communication on the ALE address used by *Caledonia*’s lifeboats.”

Powell’s heart jumped in his chest at the first bit of genuinely good news he’d had since his boots had first hit the ground. He’d been teetering on the edge of giving up hope for his techs. Now, suddenly, it was rekindled.

“It’s about fookin’ time!” he exclaimed, turning away from his desk. “What kept ‘em?”

“All the nukes and energy discharges in orbit played hell with the upper atmosphere and SATCOM is struggling to stay up for ten minutes at a time…” The communications specialist turned and offered him a headset. “The callsign is JOCKEY, sir.”

Jockey. That was Kovač’s callsign, gifted to her by the Lads in typically irreverent fashion—She wasn’t exactly a tall lass by any reckoning, and of course jockeys rode horses…

Relief and hope managed to soothe some of his worst jangling nerves as he strode across the command center, grabbed the headset and clamped it snugly around his ears. “Jockey, this is Stainless,” he said, adjusting the microphone as he spoke. “You had us worried. What’s your status?”

Kovač’s voice was distorted, flattened and tinny but by God it was definitely her voice right down to that tiny remnant of a Georgia twang that she’d never quite managed to lose, and he’d never been more glad to hear it. “We’re on the wrong landmass, sir. About three thousand klicks due west of Lavmuy. Caledonia escape pods are scattered over a two hundred kilometer line, all surrounded by enemy forces. Number of survivors unknown. We have wounded, several with life-threatening injuries and our supplies are limited.”

None of that was an unexpected development, frankly. In fact, it could have been a lot worse. First things first. “Who is in command?”

“That would be me right now, sir.”

A grimace shot across Powell’s face. That was far from ideal news. No sense in griping about it though. The important part was to work with what they had.

“What do you have for combat armsmen?”

“Five royal marines in my lifeboat. Otherwise not yet known. I’m trying to establish contact with the other boats.”

…Well that was just bloody wonderful.

“Aye,” Powell said out loud. “Your orders are to establish command, consolidate and dig in. No idea when we can get relief to you but it could be a few days.”

“Wilco. Some of the wounded don’t have a few days.”

“…Aye. Then I’d give and encourage your Marines wide latitude to obtain what they need from wherever they are. Who is the senior Marine?”

“That’s Corporal Wilde.”

“I know him. He’s a good lad, level-headed. Listen to him. My advice would be to delegate combat items to his purview as much as possible. I’m also field promoting you to Lieutenant under the AEC brevet arrangement. You are in command until such time as you’re relieved by a commissioned officer, Jockey.”

Kovač, to her credit, barely paused. “…Yes, sir. I’ll keep us alive.”

That was classic Enlisted can-do attitude right there. Good stuff, but not appropriate for once. Her thinking was going to have to change, and fast. “First bit of advice, lieutenant? Never promise something you aren’t sure you can deliver. Just do the mission as best you can.”

“…Understood, sir. Any further advice?”

“You would do well to establish a command post, consolidate to some defensible location, and bring as many of our men back as you can. Diplomacy, too. You’ll be taking food and medicine from the locals, so try not to make them too upset. Use every tool at your disposal to get the mission done wi’out causin’ an ecological disaster while you’re at it. Trust Corporal Wilde but don’t be afraid to take him down a peg, he needs a firm hand. You’re in charge, not him; don’t let him forget it.” He let some encouragement warm his voice. “Should be an easy first command, aye? Any questions?”

“Not at this time, Stainless. I’ll…do everything in my power.”

Powell grinned, which was a rare enough expression to cross his face even on good days. “You’re learning,” he said. “I want regular updates, and will update you in turn…Do us proud, lieutenant. Stainless out.”

Laying a responsibility like that on her without warning wasn’t how Powell had wanted to reconnect with the techs, but things really could have been infinitely worse. Kovač was already on the short-list for Master Sergeant anyway, and usually had the Lads wrapped around her finger, so somehow he suspected she’d turn out to be good at it. It wasn’t what she’d signed up for, but Powell would eat his beret if she didn’t rise to the occasion.

There was no sense in leaving her stuck in her trial-by-fire any longer than necessary, however.

“Get their location and status up to the FIC,” he ordered. “I wanna know when we can relieve them an’ what else has to happen first. And get Master Sergeant Vandenberg in here.”

His chance at some shut-eye was just going to have to wait.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

These new ships reminded Vemik of spearheads, or a good stone knife. They were smaller than Misfit or Drunk on Turkey had been, and while they had the same sharpness of line as Drunk On Turkey, they moved more gracefully. Daar’s ship had thumped sullenly to the ground like it couldn’t wait to get out of the air. These new ones touched the world gently and reluctantly, as if they were promising not to stay for long.

Jooyun had perked up immensely since their arrival. Now, though, he was staring. “Christ. Is that who I think it is?”

“Yup. Good nose art, ain’t it?”

Vemik followed Walsh’s pointing finger and squinted at the complicated patch of bright colors toward the ship’s front, trying to make sense of it.

“I don’t…understand,” he confessed. It looked vaguely like a human woman thrusting a spear toward something, except that what looked like a vicious hook-beaked bird made of flame was coiling around the spear’s shaft and screaming at the unseen enemy.

“…Your tribe is war-like,” he decided. Even if he didn’t fully understand what he was looking at, the meaning was clear.

“Nah, bruh. If we had our way, peace would rule. But we got a saying: ‘If you desire peace, prepare for war’.”

Vemik tried to mull that over, but was interrupted by a sharp hissing sound from the landed ship, followed by the sounds of its parts moving. The black shiny round bit on top popped slightly upwards and then back and up and away to make room for the two humans shielded behind it to clamber out. They dropped to the ground carefully and wobbled a bit on their feet, before stepping forward carefully.

“Heavy gravity!” one of them commented.

“You get used to it,” Coombes commented. “Your timing’s perfect, ma’am.”

“Yeah, well. It ain’t all good news.”

The newcomer reached up and undid part of her…Vemik needed a second to remember the word. Helmet. The black shiny plate on the front slid up while another bit came off entirely, and she hooked it onto something on her shoulder.

Her skin was about the same dark brown as Coombes’ and she had kind eyes. The moment they alighted on Jooyun she beamed a huge dazzling smile and gave him a hug. “Your girls are worried,” she said.

Jooyun was obviously delighted to see her and Vemik could tell even through his best efforts to seem calm. “They’re okay?!”

“Angry. Frustrated. Scared. I don’t blame them though, I’d have started breaking shit by now if I got sidelined like that so they’re handling it pretty well. Anyway…where’s Daar? He’d better still be alive.”

“He got his fur singed in that party you broke up,” Walsh said. “And he’s taking a well-earned nap and recovering on the last of his Crude. Why?”

“Big Hotel hit Gao and the Swarm-of-Swarms is probably on its way already. A lotta folks are dead, including Stoneback’s Champion-in-Stead. Shit, the only reason I’m here is because he’s needed at home, like, now.”

“…I’ll get him,” Walsh said, and stormed off toward the tents.

Vemik looked toward Yan, who had been lumbering over with a happy look on his face. He sensed the mood, though, and picked up his pace.

The new Humans stepped back slightly as Yan approached. Funny, to think they had just unleashed destruction like nothing the People could even have dreamt about but the sight of Yan swaggering over in a good mood made them jumpy.

Yan stopped a respectable distance away. “You save us?”

Coombes made introductions. “Colonel Jackson, this is Yan Given-Man. He’s friendly, I promise.”

Yan knocked a fist against his chest. It was a gesture of respect that he usually reserved for fellow Given-Men. “Your tribe has fierce women!” he said, and grinned at Jackson. “I like!”

The tension seemed to blow away, and Jackson smiled in return. “You have good taste, big guy. Hello.”

“And this is Vemik,” Coombes continued. “They call him Sky-Thinker, he’s…kinda the ideas man. Cavemonkey scientist, inventor, engineer, all-round [geek].”

“…Geek.” Vemik liked the sound of that. The word fit comfortably in his mouth, but he decided to ask about it later. “Thank you.”

“Ask too many question,” Yan grumbled affectionately. “But…you bring bad news, yes?”

Jackson nodded. “The…” she paused and addressed Coombes. “How much do they know?”

“It’s bad news,” Coombes explained. “Daar’s people are older than us. They know even more than we do. The Enemy can’t just…swagger down there and destroy them like they tried to do with you. If they decided to strike now, they must think they’ve already won.”

Yan sat on his tail like he did when there was Big Thinking to be done. “Daar Stone-Back is friend to my tribe. His tribe in trouble, need help. And…we not able to help Sky-Friends.”

“Yan, my friend…” Daar’s voice joined them, followed closely by the man himself. He was limping some and his fur had definitely seen better days, never mind that the plasma seemed to have taken off the very tip of his ear. But he was upright and strong anyway. “You’re a Cousin to me, but fuck that. Help me by rebuildin’. That’s all I want.”

“Is not enough,” Yan replied.

“No,” Daar shook his head, then repeated himself. “But it’s all I want from you. Protect yourself, and provide for your children. It’s what my Clan does.”

He turned to Jackson. “Tiny gave me the short version,” he said. “How bad is it?”

“…Bad. The last update I heard was that Tyal is dead, the commune at Wi Kao was massacred and nobody knows where Champion Genshi is.”

Daar hung his head. “…Fiin?” he asked.

“He’s Champion-in-Stead. They need you, Daar.”

Daar shook his pelt vigorously, and rose to his feet. “Then they’ll have me. Tiny, y’got anything more? I need ‘ta get fixed up in a hurry.”

Walsh gave him a long, miserable look and then produced a pair of strange bright blue little pouches from his pocket.

“…This is my very last hit, bro. Full dose. You better fuckin’ save the day, got it?”

Daar duck-nodded and took them, then headed back towards his hut as fast as he could manage. Jackson nodded sharply before gesturing back toward her ship. “We have jump codes for your field array, and there’s a supply package waiting to come back the other way. As for us, we hit Big Hotel’s bunker with an RFG, but there’s a lotta continent out there. We’re gonna make sure it’s all safe for you. After that, you sit tight. Sorry Julian, but your reunion’s gonna have to wait.”

“Can I send them a message at least?”

“Definitely. Record some video. All of you, it’ll be good for the war effort. DEEP RELIC has been made public.”

“…Fuck.” Hoeff breathed.

“Yeah. The war’s officially on, gentlemen. Welcome to the main event.”

“We help?” Vemik asked.

“Help make that video. We need…do you know what [public affairs] means?”

“Not know words. But…make people see? Know?”

Jackson gave him an unmistakably impressed look before turning to Jooyun. “…Christ, you’re right. He’s smart as hell.”

Yan wasn’t happy, however. Before Jooyun could reply, he stepped in. “We owe our lives. All the People, dead except you stop it. And you want us…just tell stories? Is not right!” he smacked a fist against his belly. “You give, give, give to us! Never take!”

“We are taking, Given-Man.”

The whole group turned. Daniel Hurt gave them a weary and mud-coated half-smile. Behind him, the line of children, women and old men were beginning to spread out back to their tents, light the fires, get the village working again.

He was leaning heavily on Daar, who flicked an ear at them and wasn’t limping anymore. “Look who I found,” he growled.

“Doctor Hurt, I presume,” Jackson said, and shook Daniel’s hand.

“Professor Hurt,” Daniel said it with a smile. “And far from lost in the woods, as you can see.”

“You look like it,” Julian commented. “What happened?”

“Slipped in the mud,” Daniel explained. “And thank God that was the worst of it.”

“Take what?!” Yan exploded, reclaiming their attention. “You not even let us feed you!”

“We are learning more about ourselves by observing you than you will ever know,” Daniel told him. “What we are taking from you…is a chance at redemption.”

Yan stared blankly at him for a second, then sighed hugely and gave up. “Sky-Thinking strangeness…” he grumbled. “No. You take something else. Daar!” he spun, stormed up to the huge Gaoian and ripped his knife from his belt. It was the good one, the damascus that rippled like flowing water. The third one Vemik had ever made, with Jooyun’s guidance.

“Yours now,” he said firmly. “No bring back, this is me Giving. You refuse or give back, insult me and the gods.”

Daar looked at it, swallowed, and duck-nodded furiously. “And I will Take it, Cousin.”

“Good.” Yan sagged. “Is not much. I know this. Is just a good knife. You make holes in the sky, fight enemy with star fire and other things. But a good knife save life. Maybe save yours. Is enough for balance.”

Daar took it. It fit perfectly in his enormous hand-like paws and he swiped it skillfully at the evening breeze, testing it. “…Heavy, but that’s useful. And sharp. Thank you, Yan. It is a good knife.”

“Not good Giving if I give you bad knife,” Yan grumbled.

“I know, Cousin.” Daar stooped and hugged him, trying and failing to lift him from the ground. “Hnngh, you keep young Vemik in line while I’m gone, ‘kay?”

Yan trilled, and hoisted him off the ground easily. “Nothing I do work, but will try harder,” he promised and set Daar back on his feet.

Daar smoothed his fur out, then plucked a flat black parcel out from behind his working harness. He tore its side off with a claw, pulled out the contents and flapped them in the wind to unfurl them. Vemik blinked—his eyes refused to settle on the whatever-it-was that Daar had just produced. It was as though the thing he was holding had no edge, it just…was there, and then it was not there, but nowhere did it stop.

“What—?!” he gawped at it.

Daar pant-grinned at him as he began to…yes, to put it on, like a cloak for his whole body. Just like the ‘clothes’ that humans seemed so confused about. ”Big magic, young Vemik. Magic I’ll need.” He wriggled into the suit and stood with his arms and legs as wide as he could go, and the suit…somehow closed itself up his back!

Even Walsh gawped at that. “Damn Tiggs, you brought a HEAT suit? You’ve been holdin’ out on me!”

Daar, for his part, cringed a bit and flattened his huge ears. “I didn’t mean to Cousin, but I didn’t wanna break this out until I needed it. I gotta spend some time gettin’ [re-acclimated] while I’m [doped up] on the Crude…”

Yan stepped back cautiously but respectfully. Somehow, it was obvious that the magic-thing Daar was inside of was a very powerful tool of Taking. That impression grew stronger when Daar popped his claws through the gloves on his hands and feet, and then extended them. Vemik hadn’t seen Daar do that before—his claws were huge, even bigger than he’d already seen.

“…What you do now, Daar Stone-Back?” Yan asked.

Daar flipped the last part of the suit up and over, a hard ‘helmet’ to protect his head. “Right now?” he asked, tucking his ears carefully inside it, “Rest. This suit takes some gettin’ used to. So first, I’m gonna eat. Then, I’m gonna sleep, really hard. And then…”

He pulled his helmet down with a loud click and spoke through a speaking-rock on the side.

“…I’m gonna kill a lot of people.”

++END CHAPTER++

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 40: War On Two Worlds pt.3 - Consolidation.

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 3—Consolidation

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.

Second Lieutenant (brevet) Martina Kovač

“…Do us proud, lieutenant. Stainless out.”

Marty sat back from the radio and let out a long, stress-filled breath. Powell’s orders had been no different than she’d expected and dreaded, but actually receiving them was a different matter.

Still. Seniority wasn’t a matter for debate. Not a single able-bodied officer had checked in so far from among *Caledonia*’s command staff. Maybe one would show up in the future, but here and now the job of making something functional out of this mess fell to the senior Enlisted. They had a Royal Marines corporal in the form of Ian Wilde, NATO code OR-4. They had Reactor Technician Saci Patel, also OR-4. And they had Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač, OR-6.

…Make that Second Lieutenant Martina Kovač. She was now, temporarily at least, an officer.

A voice spoke up from behind her. “Well. That puts me in my place.”

Marty turned away from the radio. Wilde gave her a nod. “…Ma’am,” he added.

“You heard him,” Marty stood up.

“Oh aye. You’re in charge. Better you than me…ma’am.”

“Any good news?”

“Well, we’re still just about on the right side of completely fucked. I was about to suggest we should send Williams and Hayes out to reccy the area.”

Only a Brit could turn ‘just about on the right side of completely fucked’ into an optimistic sentiment. They ought to be dead, given that one of the Hunters had been latched onto the hull only meters away when they started self-destructing. Wilde and his Marines had kicked a legendary degree of ass in their assault on the swarmship though, helped by how badly the Hunters had been burned by the SOR techs.

Marty was kinda proud of that. She’d had a hand in forging their own survival. It had made all the difference, and the swarmship latched to the hull meters away from her hadn’t, in fact, exploded.

If it had…well, she probably wouldn’t have felt anything.

A lot of *Caledonia*’s hundreds of crew hadn’t been remotely as fortunate. The efficient scramble to the lifeboats had been a testament to that—they’d had to force Patel to leave behind the dead colleague she was dragging, even though she kept insisting he was alive. She hadn’t taken that well, and was huddled under a thermal blanket by the lifeboat, staring at something far away.

Their supplies, meanwhile, consisted of a crate of rations, a water purification filter plus some pouches of drinking water, a half-dozen ammo cans, and the makings of a tent village. Standard lifeboat equipment and nothing more. There hadn’t even been time to grab the Crue-D, and that was a source of major regret.

And theirs was probably the best-placed lifeboat. It had landed safely and correctly in open terrain among farmland, in contact with command, and everybody on board was able-bodied. The other lifeboats were strung out to the east like beads on a macramé necklace, and most of them had wounded.

One of them carried the XO, Commander McDaniel, who’d be able to count it as a God-given miracle if she made it out the other end of this alive. From the sounds of things, her head injury was life-threatening.

“Do it,” Marty agreed. “We can’t stay here…the map says there’s what might be a small farming town about seven klicks south-west.”

“Yep. Around about where all that smoke’s coming from.” Wilde indicated a faint gray columnar stain on the horizon with a nod of his head. “Worth takin’ a shufty at that even if it just tells us where not to go, frankly.”

“Would it make more sense to send out two teams to gather more information, or keep them here for defense?” Marty asked him. Wilde gave it some thought.

“…What you don’t know will kill you,” he decided, after a moment. “If we see hostiles comin’, we can do something about them. Right now, we’re probably better off avoiding a fight if we can. I say scouts are more important than base defense.”

“Right.” Marty grabbed her tablet and scoured the regional map again. “Okay. One team to check out the smoke and that town, one team in the other direction…here.” Wilde leaned forward as she indicated her choice. “Looks like a farm.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“Vehicles, if we can get them. Especially ones that can go cross-country. For carrying the wounded, the supplies, or hooking up with the other lifeboats…Preferably without antagonizing the locals.”

Wilde grinned at that and nodded, clearly approving.

“Okay. Alpha team to scout the town south-west, bravo team to scout east toward the farm. Avoid contact, report enemy movement, look for opportunities to boost vehicles if we can do it without pissin’ off the Gaoians,” he repeated. “Can do.”

“Go. I’ll work on getting our stuff ready to go,” Marty promised.

“Aye aye, ma’am.” Wilde gave her an encouraging grin, and bustled to work.

Marty rubbed her hands together for a moment, partly because they were threatening to shake but mostly because they were cold. She’d known Gao was a cold planet, but allegedly it was late spring locally. She doubted it was even fifty degrees.

She closed her tablet’s cover and hooked it back onto her gear, among everything else she was carrying. She wished some of that load could be armor, right now she felt exposed and vulnerable. But there just hadn’t been time.

At least her techs were mostly handling it fine. Like a well-oiled machine they’d rolled the pill-shaped escape vehicle back into its “upright” position and formed a human chain to empty out its small but efficiently packed lockers and cargo spaces. They’d all taken some bruises and knocks—Marty herself had a scab crusting in her eyebrow and no idea how she’d earned it—but considering that they’d bailed out of a tumbling, burning, disintegrating wreck of a two hundred meter warship, they were in fine condition.

Too bad they’d landed on the wrong continent, among endless square miles of farmland. They were in glacial terrain, if she was any judge, and the wide, shallow basin that those ancient ice fields had carved out obviously translated to fertile growing land…which for Gaoians largely meant animal feed. They were primary carnivores, after all.

The survivors were surrounded by green hay, in other words, and only the slight roll and elevation of the terrain let them see further than the nearest field.

Deacon saw her coming and stood up straighter, arching her back to work out the labor. Suit techs were toughened from the hard work of forcing HEAT operators into their suits anyway, but moving packs of survival gear around in a muddy field wasn’t quite the same thing. “Kovač,” she said. “Any luck?”

“I got through to Stainless,” Marty told her. “I’m a second lieutenant now, until we find somebody to take over from me.”

Doyle poked his head out of the lifeboat. “I heard that right? You’re an officer now?”

“Yup. Fall in, guys.”

They all dropped what they were doing and gathered round looking dirty, nervous and stressed, but alert and ready.

“The Marines are scouting the area,” Kovač told them. “There’s a town south-west, but judging from the smoke it could have a biodrone problem. If that’s the case, they won’t have missed our descent, and there could be hostiles en route as we speak. So we’re going to relocate. I want everything bagged up and ready to move ASAP. Corporal Wilde is my second.”

She saw them nod, and nodded herself. “We’re a team. Have been for years. We know how to work together and how to achieve results. We just keep doing what we’re good at, okay? Any questions?”

There was silence, and she nodded. “Okay. Go.”

She had a good team. The techs as one leapt into action, barely needing to confer to assign their responsibilities. A “you—” here, an “I’ll—” there, and they had a working structure figured out almost instinctively.

That just left Patel.

The diminutive British sailor still had blood in her clothes and hair, and it wasn’t hers. She’d obviously been listening despite her faraway expression though, because when Marty got close enough she looked up and made to stand.

“M-ma’am.”

That was a good sign. She might be trembling, shellshocked and grieving, but she was still functional. Marty let her stand up.

“If I remember correctly, the lifeboat’s batteries and field emitters can be scavenged for field use, right?” she asked.

Patel nodded. “Um… yes. Ma’am. They were designed for it.”

“You’re the reactor tech and electrician. Sounds like a job for you.”

It was amazing just how healing it was to have something constructive to do. A little life seemed to come back into Patel’s face. Her face lost some of that slack, shocked expression and she nodded solemnly. “Yes ma’am. I’ll dismount and pack them for transport right away.”

“Get Matthews to help if you need it. He’s a field emitter specialist.”

“I’ll do that,” Patel nodded again.

“Carry on.”

“Yes ma’am.”

God, being called ‘ma’am’ again felt weird. Marty wasn’t unused to authority, she was the NCO in charge of suit technicians and had worked in Space Command before the SOR after all, but there was a whole extra layer of deference in there now and it didn’t sit comfortably. She left Patel to get to work and surveyed around herself.

The Marines—Williams, Hayes, Hodder and Rees—were already gone, and Wilde had gone with alpha team, pausing now and then to check things out through his scope. The suit techs were efficiently dividing their survival resources for transport, and Patel had just popped a carbon-smeared ablative panel from the lifeboat to get at the electronics underneath.

Hopefully, Marty wasn’t doing too badly. But the real test, she knew, was still to come.

She took a deep breath and returned to her radio. It was time to start getting in touch with the other boats.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Technical Sergeant Timothy “Tiny” Walsh

Walsh hated farewells—he’d said enough of them over the years. This one was probably the worst he’d ever done though, because Walsh wasn’t stupid and it was obvious to him exactly what Daar was about to wade into. Their time together as simple grunts on clear, easy-to-understand missions was over. Daar was leaving the team, probably never to return, and Walsh knew there was a very good chance they’d never see each other again.

Tigger had just died. In his place stood the Champion of Stoneback: warrior, protector, and a prince of the Gao, leader of its most ancient Clan. Walsh could scarcely comprehend the weight of all that resting on Daar’s broad back. Of course that had always been there in the back of everything, but friendship aside, Daar wasn’t on the team just because he wanted it. He was there to further the interests of his Clan and his people first and foremost. Against that, feelings and friendship took second place.

Duty called, and with it, Daar had changed entirely. He’d begged a full double dose of Crude off of Walsh, eaten like Warhorse, quietly slipped off to his tent and slept for nearly an entire day while encased in that incredible suit of his. He slept so long and deeply that Walsh checked in on him several times to make sure he still had a pulse.

At some point during the next evening he’d slipped out of camp when nobody was paying attention, stalked down toward the river and cleaned himself up. Right about when the camp had noticed his absence he’d returned with what remained of his possessions in a much lighter pack strapped onto his back, his eye-bending suit safely stored away for the moment. He padded back between the huts and tents as quietly as a panther and said nothing, just waited the long moment for everyone to notice.

The difference was…impressive.

Between the megadose of Crude, the damn near half a Werne he’d eaten, and whatever exertion that incredible suit of his demanded, Daar had recovered entirely and clawed himself not just back into fighting trim, but possibly into the finest fighting trim Walsh had ever seen in…well, practically anyone. Every line of his body—hell, his very being—radiated strength and crackled with the will and ability to fight.

He had reappeared at a standoffish distance and nobody said a word as they took in the depth of the change. Champion Daar had reinvented himself in mold of an avatar of retribution; strong, fierce, recharged and rejuvenated, his claws sharpened into razors and his fur cleaned up and shorn almost down to the skin.

And he was angry.

Walsh had only ever briefly glimpsed that darker side of the big furry dude, generally when he was fighting a Doom Noodle or maybe when he was especially annoyed at something. Those weren’t really serious moments, though; brief, white-hot flashes of a rage that Walsh could scarcely comprehend but they passed quickly, and were forgotten easily…

Not this one. Daar had gone right the way through rage and out into a calm place on the far side that would have given even Firth pause. His entire body was brittle with the kind of stillness that only the truly angered ever achieved. And he was absolutely, chillingly quiet and polite as he made the rounds and said his goodbyes.

It was the kind of rage that transcended species and everyone felt it in their guts. Julian shook hands carefully, Master Sergeant Coombes offered a polite nod and a salute. Vemik and the Singer both shied away and only approached when he patiently sat on his haunches and nodded respectfully towards Yan. Even Yan was being deferential, and discreetly kept himself between Daar and the villagers while they shared parting words.

Hoeff, though, he didn’t have time for that; he leapt up onto the big guy and offered him a hug. Daar returned it, gratefully, and that seemed to melt much of the tension out of the moment. Coombes shook his head and joined in, then Julian did too, then Yan and eventually Vemik…soon the entire village had mobbed him, pressed small trinkets and talismans into his paws, offered small prayers and their careful gratitude.

He handled it with grace and decorum, and offered his own words of thanks. But the rage in his soul had never lifted and everyone could see it.

Though of course, Daar wouldn’t have been Daar if he hadn’t found time to worry about his friends. He eventually broke away from the mob and padded over to Walsh on all fours, who had stayed aloof from the crowd to let them have their moment.

“You’ll be okay?” Daar asked. Everyone cleared away and gave them plenty of space.

“Bruh,” Tiny shook his head disbelievingly at the contrast of an enraged, caring friend. It was amazing, it really was. “We won this one. I just wish I was comin’ with ya.”

Daar didn’t react for a moment—he was clearly trying to control himself. At length he sighed, stood up on his legs and said, “I know. I couldn’t let you do that anyway.”

“Wishes ain’t there for the things we can do, bruh,” Walsh told him, quoting his grandmother. He put a hand on Daar’s shoulder, then hauled him into a huge rock-crusher of a hug. Daar returned it and nipped him gently on the ear; for Gaoians, that was a profound display of affection.

They were interrupted by the jump array’s alarm, letting them know that charging was complete and the window was opening in two minutes. The exchange from Cimbrean was going to bring a whole airdrop-worth of supplies their way, enough to comfortably set them and the natives up for months if that was how long it took before the situation chilled out and a more permanent solution became viable.

To Walsh, it may as well have been a death knell.

Daar did manage to force a little levity into the moment. “I wish I was helping you unload all that stuff you’re getting. You’re gonna be sore, Brother!”

Walsh scoffed. “Please, like your fuzzy butt wouldn’t be hurting too.”

Daar shrugged, “Never said it wouldn’t. You…you take care of them, okay?” He growled low, just for Walsh. “Especially Julian. He looks up to you.”

Walsh just nodded, and pulled apart from the hug. The rage settled on Daar again almost instantly. Honestly, it was terrifying. He stalked back a few steps to stand in the middle of the array, took one last look at them, and raised a paw to his chest in the Stoneback equivalent of a salute.

There was a thump, the unnatural light-sucking blackness of a stasis field flickered into and out of being for just a moment, and a stack of drab crates settled into the higher gravity with a creak. The first of many to come throughout the day.

Walsh sighed, looked at Julian and Yan, and looked back at the stack.

“Well,” he said. “I guess we better get to work.”

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Mayuy City, Planet Gao

Champion Genshi of Whitecrest

Mayuy was—had been—a wealthy city. It was Clan Goldpaw’s jewel after all, their hub, their throne. Any city that had been at the crossroads of so many different avenues for trade over the centuries couldn’t be anything less.

Three rivers and their associated canals flowed through it, into a bay that was just the most perfect natural harbor. To the north-west and south, the land was high enough above sea level to avoid even the fiercest weather, and firm enough for straight, wide roads that had stood there since before the great reformation.

Those rivers, flowing from the mountains to the north-east, brought copper, coal, iron and silver in ancient times, and in the modern age were still a rich source of rare earths and platinum-group metals. The highland slopes were perfect Naxas summer grazing, the warmer lowlands provided ample room for the flocks in the winter months, and the shallow seas had provided fishing for food and the stringy, fibrous sea plants that ancient Gaoians had used to make fabric and ropes.

By fortune, the flat terrain around the city itself had been perfect for later developments like airports, and the city was close enough to the equator to facilitate rocket-powered launches to orbit.

It was, in short, the perfect trading city. Other cities such as Lavmuy and Wi Kao may have had more cultural significance, others had been industrial powerhouses and centers of learning… but Mayuy had always been a city of stockhouses, the warehouse for Gao’s wealth.

Unsurprisingly, it had a lot of banks. And those banks, as all genuinely mercenary institutions should, provided discretion as part of their service.

Whitecrest did a lot of business with the Goldpaws.

Genshi’s private lockbox was one such item of business. He’d always intended it as a stop-gap measure, on the grounds that relying on the security provided by others wasn’t the Whitecrest way, in the long term. But in the short term, another Clan’s discretion and competence were a useful smokescreen.

He was quite certain that the Goldpaws had never found out what was in his lockbox. If they had, and if the information had filtered through to one of their augmented high-level account managers, the Mayuy Bank of Gao would already be a crater.

That didn’t mean it wasn’t enemy territory, however. The Hierarchy’s forces were ransacking the vaults in search of sensitive secrets to delete, and simply slipping their cordon had been a tall order to tax even Whitecrest’s best and bravest.

If not for some of the technology they had developed for the cross-species military program with the human SOR, it might have been impossible. Genshi wasn’t wearing a full suit like Regaari and his claw, but he had adopted something like a cloak. Hooded, swathed in light-bending fabric, shapeless so that from a distance in the urban landscape he’d look like just a chunk of rubble, or an item of furniture.

It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was a solution. Perfection was a luxury, and a half-decent idea that worked, worked. Results were the important part.

For example: his lockbox. Which, yes, was in enemy territory rather than in Genshi’s paws right now which was less than ideal, but it was intact. It was safe.

In all the madness of the last two days, for something so vital to be definitively and definitely safe was a victory all its own, one which made the task of actually retrieving it feel like a formality rather than the whole battle.

But what a formality.

Genshi was using one of Whitecrest’s adaptations of Human weaponry. Acquiring the designs had been trivially easy—a lot of them were freely available on the Internet—and from there the Clan’s own smiths and engineers, plus their trusted Clanless associates, had keenly sought any opportunity to apply Gaoian technology to improving their performance.

It was the little things, really. The weapons themselves were already excellent, and all that the Clan’s efforts had achieved had been applying a few…tricks. Harder metal, lighter composites, an improved buttstock to fit Gaoian anatomy more comfortably. Advanced coatings on the interior surfaces that never needed cleaning or lubrication. Propellants that didn’t foul the weapon in the first place.

An automatic mode that never jammed.

The Hierarchy had suppressed these weapons. They took a species’ first bruising, dangerous forays into black powder technology then quietly nudged them into abandoning the whole idea as a fool’s enterprise. It was just another avenue of control, just another way of dumbing down the life forms under their thumbs…but it worked. The weapon in a warrior’s hand dictated how he fought. If he held a dumb weapon, he fought in dumb ways. If he held a precision weapon…

“Cubs play hunt. Mother’s asleep.”

Eight Brothers spread out around the bank all took their shot, including Genshi. His target stiffened from nerve trauma before slumping to the ground, utterly dead.

“New game.”

“Cubs play run.”

Out the window, anchoring a rope on the concrete as he went. Walk down the wall as though it was just a vertical floor with the reel on his belt whining softly while it held him against gravity. Reach the bottom, jump the last arm’s length to the ground, detach the rope. The moment it was detached, a chemical reaction aggressively ate the rope and reduced it to fine black flakes which blew away on the breeze, leaving no sign that it had ever been there.

Stick the rifle to his chest, four-paws, dash like a blur—and thank Regaari for finally convincing the Clan that being able to run efficiently trumped dignity when it came to getting the job done—across the street, against the wall, weapon back to ready.

Brother Fergiil was up against the far side of the door an instant behind him. The younger male’s eyes were shining with the thrill of a real operation—Nobody liked to admit there was a reason Whitecrest’s combat-cant played on childish themes, but the simple truth was that life-or-death firefights for the highest stakes were fun.

Killing was fun. Not a civilized thought…but the truth.

Fergiil slap-stuck a sensor bug to the bank’s doors, and looked through its eyes into the building’s shadowy interior.

“…Kitchen’s empty,” he reported.

Genshi duck-nodded sharply. “Cubs steal food.”

Mere hardened security glass was no impediment whatsoever to a Whitecrest with the correct tools, and within moments of the order being given the eight of them were ghosting across the bank’s stone tile floor, checking every shadow or potential hiding spot.

They cleared the room without incident.

“Suspicious,” Fergiil commented immediately. Genshi duck-nodded. The young Brother had good instincts.

“Sticks,” he ordered. They all drew a shieldstick from their harnesses and held them in their left paws, ready for immediate use.

Champions were leaders, not dictators. They held their position through being unafraid to do the same dirty work as the Clan’s most junior members, which was why Genshi took point between the glass consultation rooms at the back of the lobby, where the potential danger was at its closest.

The fact that he had the skills, experience and reflexes to survive if there was an ambush may have had something to do with it too. All of the brothers in his Claw were unaugmented and relatively young. They were well-trained and intelligent as a Whitecrest ought to be, but he was the only true veteran among them.

Which was why his shieldstick hit the ground and flared into life the instant he sensed movement where there shouldn’t be any. It was why the pulse shots splashed harmlessly against his freshly-deployed cover rather than pulverizing his bones and pulping his flesh. It was why the three biodrones that tried to kill him all went sprawling dead in the space of two seconds, each dropped by an efficient double-tap to center mass that sneered at their mere military-grade combat shield harnesses.

Fergiil and Yagu shot the last two, and a deadly ambush was over before it had even really begun. The biodrones were going to have to do much better than that to best a Champion.

“Playtime’s over. Cubs—kill.”

The power had failed and the lights were down, so with their cloaks the Claw were a ghostly wave among the shadows, crashing through, over and around anything that got in their way. Every Gaoian body in the bank that wasn’t a Brother died the instant there was a straight line between it and a Whitecrest.

Genshi could only see his Brothers by their infrared lasers in his goggles. Even when they fired their weapons, the flash was negligible.

In seconds, they were standing outside the vault. The Biodrones had been attempting fruitlessly to penetrate it with explosives and fusion cutters. The door was twice as thick as a Gaoian was tall, with subsurface forcefield reinforcement, sophisticated armor materials and the kind of metallurgy in its construction that had been impossible to Gaoian science even twenty years ago. Their efforts so far had ruined the Goldpaw livery painted on its surface and torn up the tiled floor in front of it, but achieved exactly nothing in regards to actually penetrating the vault.

Genshi simply entered the access code.

This was not entirely as straightforward a process as he might have liked, because one thing the drones had achieved was to completely demolish the control panel. In fact, it took nearly ten nervous minutes while Yagu excavated the shattered unit and replaced it with a portable unit that hopefully was up-to-date with Goldpaw’s security systems and wouldn’t inspire the vault to totally lock itself down.

Once that was installed, however, Genshi entered the access code, and the door opened outwards, toward them. No amount of explosives were ever going to smash it inwards thanks to its slight conical shape, but once opened correctly the door pushed itself outwards and rolled aside with little fanfare or difficulty. Fractured tiles crushed and splintered under its weight with a noise like an expensive accident in a plate factory.

They ignored the stacks of silver, the assorted land deeds, artworks and cultural artefacts. Perfectly unscathed historical treasures were snubbed, priceless artworks were disregarded entirely. Their goal was a black composite crate resting ignominiously in a corner. Not shoved there—Goldpaw bankers were far too proud to treat the treasures in their vaults with anything but reverence—but certainly not exactly in pride of place. If the vault was a private museum or art gallery, then Genshi’s crate was not in favor with the curator.

And that was exactly how Whitecrest liked it.

Its contents were three smaller boxes, with carrying handles and straps. Handing them out to the strongest Brothers was the work of seconds.

Genshi checked his timepiece. Four minutes ahead of schedule.

“Mother’s coming,” he said.

Seconds later, the vault was closing behind them, and once the small fusion charge they left behind went off the Hierarchy would never be able to find out what they had stolen.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Farthrow Facility, Lavmuy City, Planet Gao

Lieutenant Anthony “Abbott” Costello

Costello had no idea how Warhorse had managed to hold up. He hadn’t taken off his Mass, ran his shifts like absolute clockwork, hustled around the base treating wounded, eating and keeping himself limber and loose via calisthenics when there was nothing else to do. The man was like a machine.

A quiet, monotone, unemotional machine.

Protectors conditioned to wear the Mass harder and longer than anybody else. It was one of the essential differences between them and the other two classes of HEAT operator—Aggressors killed, Defenders labored, Protectors turned the EV-MASS into a second skin, to the point where it seemed to liberate rather than encumber them.

But the best body in the world was no good in some circumstances. Adam was supposed to be a happy man. Even on-mission he had an essential positivity to him that couldn’t be suppressed, and seeing the liveliness drained out of him was almost too much to bear.

Fortunately, it might just come back.

Costello found him doing effortless one-armed handstand push-ups in the yard round the back of the facility where a ring of Hescos had been laid down to create a free space. He’d been at them for some time, judging by the puddle of sweat in the dirt and the small divot where he repeatedly touched his nose. A handful of servicemen who apparently had nothing more important to be doing right then were watching the show with totally awestruck expressions.

Costello glared at them, projecting a Powell-esque certainty that their continued presence would see him exercise the full extent of his power to make their lives difficult, and they promptly remembered their important duties elsewhere.

Adam noticed Costello approach and, in one fluid motion, pressed himself up so hard he practically flipped upright and straight into the position of attention. The man moved like the Mass weighed nothing at all.

Costello waved at him to relax. “Stand easy, ‘Horse. Got some good news for you: Kovač is alive and well.”

His monster Protector practically fell apart on the spot, relief causing all the tension and emotional lockdown to visibly slide off his body like a shed coat. He muttered something in Spanish that Costello didn’t catch, glanced skywards, and then gave Costello a grateful look that was hungry for more information.

“She made it out?”

*“Cally*’s lifeboats are a couple thousand klicks east of here, but she did indeed make it out,” Costello confirmed. “Unfortunately, none of the officers did. Powell’s promoted her to second lieutenant. She’s in charge out there until we can establish superiority in the region and bring them home.”

Warhorse nodded and, for the first time since he’d learned about the Caledonia, bounced on the balls of his feet. No smile yet, but that was okay.

“Of course, we now have a problem of fraternization…” Costello joked, and there was the smile, chased by a Muttley snicker of a laugh that lasted just until Arés could get his expression under control again. He cleared his throat and straightened up.

They didn’t in fact have any such problem, the regs having predicted and accounted for this particular scenario, but morale was everything in Costello’s book and unlike Powell he had the luxury of teasing his men to build them up. He was damn well going to use that tool until it was taken from him.

Arés definitely wasn’t averse to returning the joke. “I wouldn’t worry sir. She wouldn’t want me until I get a shower anyway.”

Costello took a sniff. “I don’t blame her,” He agreed, putting on his best sardonic snark before sobering. “Now, I should note she’s not out of the woods yet, but she’s got Corporal Wilde and his team with her.”

“He’s good. They’re good.” Arés’ face was finally starting to warm up again. “I’m glad.”

“Thought you would be…how’s Dexter holding up?”

Costello admitted to a weakness here—He wasn’t as familiar with the Gaoians as he’d like to be. The Whitecrests’ whole raison d’etre was being a closed book, and being an officer was always a barrier anyway. They only truly opened up to their fellow “Brothers,” of whom Arés and Firth were about their closest and most trusted.

Arés paused for a bit. “Gaoians…they’re funny sometimes about this kind of thing. He’s…lookin’ to kill a lot of biodrones, sir.”

“Motivated.”

“Yeah. Grief isn’t really the same for them. They’re all about honoring a memory more than, I dunno.” Arés shrugged expansively. “He’ll be okay as long as he’s busy.”

“Well,” Costello nodded. “I think I can indulge him there. Go find him for me and point him my way. We need his expert eye on some planning to bring the Champions together for a strategic meeting.”

“Will do sir, was just about to make my rounds. I was gettin’ bored anyway.”

“‘Horse, the day you get bored of exercise will be marked in my calendar for sure,” Costello told him.

“Oh no, it was too light, you see. I miss my grav plating…”

Some things couldn’t ever change, thank God.

“I doubt you’ll lose any of your gainz,” Costello interrupted him indulgently. “Now go: The sooner you find him, sooner you can get back to intimidating the airborne troopers.”

Arés grinned cheesily. “Will do! One thing sir, a medical issue—how’s your head?”

Costello rubbed his skull, where the memory of a sniper’s bullet was still making it tender. An EV-MASS helmet was sturdy beyond belief, but all the energy still had to go somewhere, and it had chosen the path of least resistance—his scalp. “Seems fine to me.”

“Can’t be too careful. Crude may be spacemagic but that don’t mean I completely trust it. Any dizziness? Spots in your vision? Forgetfulness?”

“Not that I noticed.”

Arés had an unique way of practicing tactical medicine—gentle, but inexorable. Before Costello knew what was going on, his head was firmly grasped in one paw while the other paw shone a light into his eyes. Costello went limp and let him tilt his head back and forth, interrogating his eyes for signs of trauma with practiced suspicion.

He’d never had the balls to refuse ‘Horse’s attentions. Nobody did, not even Firth, who’d given his only fuck long ago.

Finally, Arés seemed satisfied. “…Seems okay,” he grunted, dubiously. “We’re gonna do memory tests later though.”

“Fine, fine. Are you gonna go find Dex now?”

Arés smiled, “Yessir.” He nodded—there was no saluting “downrange,” especially not with known sniper activity in the area—grabbed a bag of his stomach-turning high-energy food ‘slurry,’ bounced off and left Costello alone with his thoughts.

There was a thump felt through the soles of his feet rather than heard, and the sound of yet another Weaver firing up its thrusters to lift itself out of the jump array. They were up to four arrays now, each fed by a fusion plant that alone could have kept a small rural county powered back on Earth, and each one was bringing through trucks, men, planes, food, medicine, ammunition, beds, and latrines.

The latrines were important. There was a small corps of engineers doing the rounds being reminded every two minutes by a passionate and inventively descriptive NCO that their efforts were all that stood between Gao and another Cimbrean skidmark, and they’d jury-rigged a device that combined all the features of a max-strength biofilter forcefield and an incinerator to handle the waste.

Every new pair of boots through the Arrays was getting a similarly descriptive lecture about the important relationship between Gao’s class nine biosphere and a human’s class twelve effluent: Namely that they must never, ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to come into contact.

Every boot through was also getting a shot, followed by an emergency Frontline implant, followed by three mandatory days of “theatre acclimatization” and light duty while they…well, acclimatized.

This time, the reason for that acclimatization was effectively reversed. It wasn’t to contain the spread of sickness among the troops, it was to prevent the spread of sickness from the troops to the locals. Gao would hardly be saved if the Common Cold got loose and finished off what the Hierarchy had started.

That meant three days of waiting with an effectively wide-open sky over their head before the campaign to secure the planet could really get started, but it was a horribly necessary gamble. Gaoians may have been tough and hardy but no chances could be taken, not now, not in such a dynamic situation. All of this was necessary to protect the cubs and the elderly, both of whom would be essential to recovering the population and preserving Gaoian culture.

Costello didn’t like to think about it, but Gao was fucked. Even in the best-case scenario where they successfully defended it and it remained the hub of Gaoian civilization…Their infrastructure was smashed, and from what could be gathered, there were now several massive ecological disasters either ongoing or imminent: nuclear, chemical and otherwise. Their great institutions were either shattered or operating in the most dire of emergency modes. Farms were abandoned as the clanless fled them and Stoneback consolidated its forces, roads were choked with wreckage and corpses, as soon as the power went the drinking water would go with it, and worst of all, most Gaoians had absolutely no idea why so many of their number had suddenly betrayed their fellows.

And that was just the practical stuff, saying nothing of the culture, the shell-shock, the long-term repercussions to Gaoian psyche and society. It was every man for himself out there, and Gaoians naturally formed fiercely loyal groups—As the old Clans collapsed, the Clanless formed their own without any of the tradition and restraint that came from age. There were gang wars raging out there between groups of perfectly unimplanted Clanless, Straightshield was running ragged since most of their Judge-Fathers had been sequestered or worse, and Emberpelt simply could not keep up with the emergency. Openpaw’s hospitals were either overrun or burning, and the female communes had been either evacuated or massacred.

The only safe bubble was around the Humans and around Stoneback. That, somehow, had been noticed by the civilians, and that all by itself was the only tenuous thread keeping things from descending into complete chaos. The Females did what they could for the cubs, and Costello knew that problem was even now being heatedly discussed by men and Gaoians far above his paygrade.

His tour of the base took him past the Array field, where a number of MPs—many of them women, an old tactic to calm frightened civilians—were shepherding refugees into the field boundary for evacuation to Cimbrean. Cimbrean itself was still reeling from the implication of potentially millions of refugees…it was completely untenable.

Noah had been granted ample warning to build his Ark. The Allied military were building theirs in the space of hours, drawing from scenarios gamed only in the imaginations of the most feverishly paranoid analysts.

Those same analysts had worried about a possible hack on Frontline implants as well. Those fears, blessedly, had been swiftly put to bed by AEC’s resident Corti expert on advanced biochemistry, Nofl, who had ‘patiently’ explained at length that the implant was purely chemical in function and had no electronics by design.

Too many questions for one man to handle. Too big a problem for a whole army to solve. And the war had only just begun.

He watched the MPs step back. There was a black blink, another boot-tickling thump and the Gaoian evacuees were gone, replaced by a pair of armored personnel carriers that carefully backed out of the marked area and drove towards their mustering area.

Aware that he had better sleep while he had the chance, he turned toward the Mayor Cell to find out where the hell his bed was, and resolved to shut out all those problems, just for a few hours.

There would be plenty more when he woke up.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Father Gyotin of Clan Starmind

So much despair. The air reeked of it. Of fatigue, and fear, and unwashed fur; of blood, smoke and concrete dust. It smelled like the end of the world.

Hope, meanwhile, smelled like warm stew and fresh blankets. It sounded like an acoustic guitar, like Human children teaching Gaoian cubs how to play soccer, and people calmly calling out orders and organizing themselves. It looked like the population of Cimbrean, turning out their pantries and their closets to bring something like comfort back into the lives of so many numbed refugees.

And it felt like the warmth that settled in Gyotin’s belly as he watched a pack of cubs who hadn’t eaten in two days dive nose-first into a warm meal with endless enthusiasm and an equally endless lack of manners.

The young Mother watching them wasn’t touching hers, however. She was just staring into the bowl and through it, watching something only she could see.

“May I sit here?”

Gyotin managed to ask so softly that the female didn’t even jump. She simply emerged from whatever horrible reverie she’d been stuck in, glanced at him, and her ears parted sideways in a mix of relief and welcome. Gyotin could guess that right now, the sight of somebody who looked even vaguely positive was probably an anchor.

He gathered his robes and sat down beside her. His seat was an upturned agricultural feed bucket next to a “table” that consisted of a couple of planks held up by more buckets. Amazing that somebody had donated what was essentially just trash to the cause only for it to become among the most useful stuff there.

“You should eat,” he prompted gently.

“I feel sick,” the female replied. “I’m so hungry it hurts, but every time I try to eat, I…”

She trailed off despairingly. Gyotin duck-nodded and laid his satchel on the table.

“Gyotin,” he introduced himself, opening it.

“Seema.”

“It’s bad, back home?”

She duck-nodded slowly and solemnly, watching while Gyotin produced a brushed steel thermal flask from his satchel, along with a small teapot, a couple of cups and his favorite loose-leaf green tea. He’d tried the powerful dark black stuff in little porous bags that the British Humans seemed to prefer, and found it bitter and cloying.

Seema watched him without comment.

“The locals seem to believe that tea can make anything seem better,” Gyotin told her as he laid out the rest of his utensils.

“And…does it?”

“So far.” Gyotin gave her an amused flick of the ear, and got a weak, faint chitter for it. “But if you can’t eat, you can perhaps drink.”

The point, in fact, was less to have a drink and more to focus her mind on something unimportant. He’d studied tea ceremonies from several human cultures, from the precise, neat ones favored by the Japanese and Koreans, to the Chinese one where more of the water was spent cleaning everything and being poured away rather than making a drink, and the fussy ornamental British one with the milk and the silver spoon.

He’d invented a Gaoian one, on the basis that he was intent on rediscovering and reinventing Gaoian spirituality, not wholesale converting to another species’ traditions. The important elements were simple enough - ensure that the water was pure, the utensils were clean before used and cleaned afterwards, that the cups were warm and that the resulting tea was perfectly brewed at the correct temperature.

Everything else was about precision. Place the items just so, fold the cloths like this, dampen one of them with exactly so much hot water, hold the utensils thus. In troubled times, simply focusing on doing something simple in a perfectly precise way was…cleansing.

It certainly got Seema’s attention. She watched him work with her ears first at a puzzled angle, then slowly to an interested angle, then finally a relaxed one. She accepted the cup he handed over with a whispered thank-you and took a deep cleansing breath of the beverage’s steam with her eyes closed before sipping it.

“…Interesting,” she commented politely after a second.

“I usually add honey to sweeten it,” Gyotin confessed. “But I’m lucky that I’m not allergic to it. Not every Gaoian is so lucky.”

“I think I like it as it is,” Seema mused. She sipped again, and duck-nodded thoughtfully. Plainly, the restorative powers of tea were working their magic yet again.

“I’ll be sure to make you some more, sometime,” Gyotin replied. He drank his own tea with her in comfortable silence before packing his equipment away, accepting her cup last and cleaning it with the damp cloth. “You’ll be okay?”

“I feel…better, now.”

“Good.” Gyotin tucked the last of his tea set into its satchel and stood. “I’d better go see if somebody else needs a drink.”

She duck-nodded gratefully. “Thank you.”

“Be well.”

Gyotin bowed, shouldered his bag and turned away, heading for a knot of bewildered-looking new arrivals who clearly needed to be found somewhere to sit down and process matters.

He glanced over his shoulder after a few seconds. Seema had picked up her stew. As he watched she sniffed it, then grabbed her spoon and ate.

Another soul, helped.

A whole species still to go.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“I don’t care if we have to bribe them, threaten them…whatever. The point is if they have land to put up some refugees, they’re going to put up some refugees. One big central camp is just inviting a disaster, we need to spread them out into manageable units.”

“At this rate it won’t matter how manageable we make them, Chief. Sheer numbers will overwhelm us.”

Not so long ago, Gabe wouldn’t have been able to cope with today at all. The chronic pain and lingering weakness in his back and leg would have made being on the field the next best thing to impossible.

Today, he was striding about the place absorbing everything. The latest refugee count, the statistics on how much had been volunteered and by whom, and he was doing it all on the ground where the numbers were real, rather than marching abstractly across his desk from far away.

They were big numbers. The Allied operation on Gao was sending civilians—especially cubs, females and elders—through the array practically as fast as they could be marshalled into it. Folctha was suffering brown-outs trying to keep the Array powered, never mind charging the vehicles to transport those refugees from the Array to the staging area in Quarterside Park.

If Folctha’s citizens hadn’t stood up like heroes, it would all have been an order of magnitude more difficult. As it was, a lot of families were going to bed hungry tonight.

Gabe’s map, meanwhile, was covered in little bright flags made from toothpicks and post-it notes. The farms out around New Belfast and Sellers Lake that were making their barns and sheds available; the businesses in Folctha that were donating their services, and the public buildings that were donating their rooms; the farms, buildings and businesses that weren’t doing those things; a whole color-coded political web trying to make sense of who could go where so as to minimize the risk of fights and friction.

Then there were the progress reports. How the tents and other disaster relief from Earth was faring as it passed through decontamination for alien use. How big the vehicle fleet was grown, how many volunteers they had in the soup kitchen…

…How many rank rot-in-Hell festering sons of shit they’d had to arrest for trying to exploit the situation. A small number, that one, but Gabe was resolved that he’d later crawl across red-hot metal if it would ensure that those few individuals served as a powerful deterrent to the rest and if he had to bring back the public stocks and pillories then so be it.

They were a minor thorn in his sock though. Disproportionately irritating. The fact was that Folctha’s community were showing their character to an inspiring degree, and that character was tough, empathetic, charitable and industriously honest.

But even they could only handle so much. Cimbrean Colonial Security was already stretched to the point of twanging, the hospital’s alien-safe wing was bursting at the seams, and God only knew how they were going to cope while the aid workers coming from Earth went through a mandatory three-day quarantine as their new Frontline implants made them alien-safe.

Interstellar war was a bitch.

“What about the livestock farmers?” he asked, skimming the food supply reports. There, Cimbrean was ahead of the game—The colony’s most prolific and profitable industry by far was agriculture. Even with thousands of refugees flooding them they had a vast food surplus.

“The colony negotiated emergency powers years ago to seize and slaughter their herds so long as they’re reimbursed and their breeding stock is left intact.”

“Do we need to do that yet?”

“Not yet…”

“But we should begin preparations,” Gabe decided. “Write up the recommendation to the First Minister and stick it in front of me to sign when it’s needed.”

“Yes Chief.”

Another CCS officer arrived to replace the one he’d just dismissed. “Coffee, Chief.”

Gabe accepted it gratefully. “Thanks. Who made this?”

“Your missus, Chief. Made enough for everyone, and sandwiches.”

“She’s an angel.” Gabe sipped it. Strong and rich, just how he liked it. An anchor to saner times.

“Okay,” he said. “Next.”

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy City, Planet Gao

Champion and Stud-Prime Daar of Clan Stoneback

Gao didn’t smell like home. It smelled like death. A lot of death, that punched Daar right in the nostrils the second the jump field collapsed and deposited him back on his home planet.

One more little thing to add to his pile of rage. He’d had to work at keeping himself under control as it was. Every second of his trip back had been agony.

Lieutenant Costello was waiting for him off the Array. Daar was inclined to like Costello—the lieutenant was friendly and relatable in a way Powell and Knight couldn’t be, and he never made the same mistake twice, if he made it at all.

He stood at a respectful distance, did a not-very-discreet look-over of Daar, and decided to keep back. Daar couldn’t blame him.

“Good to have you back in the fight, Tigger.”

Daar barely managed to suppress a flash of anger at having been reminded of what he’d just lost. “That’s Champion Daar from now on. I’m not in SOR anymore.”

“…Right. Yes, Champion.” Costello fell in alongside him, gesturing toward the large aircraft-hangar-lookin’ building that seemed to be a centerpiece for the human base. “Stainless and Templar are bringing things together for a full briefing soon. The short version is that orbital space is mostly secure, though we’re being probed by Hierarchy fleets coming in from further afield, mostly from out-system and the colonies. They’ve made it impossible to secure air superiority.”

“You need to fix that.”

“We are aware, Champion. This way.”

Costello led him smartly into the building, where a trio of biofilter fields made absolutely certain he was free of any lingering diseases from Akyawentuo and Earth, and a pair of guards made certain his head was still 100% biology.

Daar practiced his calming thoughts while he waited.

Farthrow facility. He’d heard about it, of course, by unofficial Champion means. Allied Clans were careful to let each other know just enough about each other’s big projects to allay suspicions, and Daar had initially been suspicious of the Farthrow project. It was ambitious, and if successful could radically alter the Gao’s prospects. A lot of Clan Stoneback scoffed at the idea that the Longear ‘geeks’ might ever pose a threat to the established economic order, but Daar knew better than to sneer at geeks. They tended to come up with the nastiest ploys.

Fortunately, Meereo was an even more savvy political animal than he was an engineer. Daar had once invited Meereo over for freshly-killed game and a friendly and competitive game of chaseball between Clans, which then inevitably devolved into a massacre of boisterous wrestling. Meereo knew how to fight but he was tiny and the result was…satisfyingly predictable. He’d politely put up just enough of a fight before capitulating, both physically and metaphorically, and once everyone was happy and trusting and the pecking order had been sorted out…he shared the details.

The actual Farthrow generator was buried in a sub-basement somewhere, Daar knew. The humans had commandeered the facility’s ground floor and converted it into a thrumming command center. Intel analysts were bustling around like worker insects, assorted officers and NCOs were shuttling in and out like Goldpaw auctioneers at a livestock market, and there was a constrained quality to the susurrus of people hard at work. Not quiet, but not loud either. Just intensely industrious.

The nexus of it all was a spread of tables toward the back of the room, layered in maps, tablets and the paraphernalia of command. Powell was leaning on them, measuring and taking notes and turning to say something to a man who nodded and departed, only to be replaced.

There was quite an entourage around him. Mother Yulna, Champion Meereo, Regaari…he felt a sick lurch when he spotted Myun standing behind the mother-supreme sporting an ugly injury up one side of her mouth that had twisted her pretty features into a permanent feral sneer. It looked recent.

Rebar was standing toward the back, alongside a human Daar didn’t recognize who managed to look important even while standing in the background. There was something…weighty, about the case he was carrying.

First things first. Even in the fall of everything, Daar attended to protocol.

“Mother.”

Yulna ducked and bowed primly. “Champion.”

That was as much as she was going to get from Daar. “Your guardian…”

“Myun saved my life,” Yulna glanced back at the huge sister behind her. “Two of my personal staff were biodrones.”

Yulna was smart, Daar knew. Smart enough to catch a very blunt power play. “She’s good. That’s why we placed her on your entourage.”

Yulna duck-nodded sagely. If she was remotely upset at such a show of political force, she didn’t let on. “…My thanks,” she said, and left it at that. She was definitely a little better at playing the game than the last time Daar had spoken with her.

He turned to Myun, now. She had been so beautiful… Though in fact she still was, in a new way. “I am…very proud of you, daughter. You reflect well on our ancestors.”

A younger Myun would have probably bounced off the walls at the compliment. He could see that the events of the last two days had aged and sobered her, however. Myun simply duck-nodded respectfully, with a grateful set of her ears, but declined to speak. Possibly, speaking was painful.

Innocence, murdered. And hers was but one tiny drop in the ocean of tragedy.

It was time to fight back. He turned to the group, found a good place to stand, and looked about at the people gathered.

“Brief me.”

The man standing next to Rebar shifted a little, as if he’d been expecting a continuation of the formalities, but everybody else at the table knew Daar well. Powell just nodded grimly and gestured to the map.

“For now, the bulk of the fighting is in the cities. We estimate…somewhere between one point two and one point four billion Gaoians with implants have been ‘droned. Most were city dwellers, where network infrastructure was dense enough to enable it.”

That was a number too large to really get. “So many? And so quickly?”

Meereo spoke up. “Our analysis of captured Ghosts suggests that they can, well, simply embed a controlling application in a person and turn them into robotic agents. It isn’t perfect control, but it’s enough for their purposes.”

“Is there any hope for them? Can we, I dunno, do some network magic or somethin’?”

Powell shook his head. “Maybe if we had time,” he said. “Maybe. But we don’t. Hunter scout elements were already watching the system when we arrived, and they sunk HMS Caledonia in a surprise attack. We’re still tryin’ to figure out the rationale behind that, as far as Templar can tell it looks like a tactical blunder on their part. But one consequence is that we’re a ship and its Bulldogs down. That’s made the difference between bein’ able to claim orbital superiority an’ not. ”

Daar looked towards Regaari. “What is the composition of this billion? Clanless? Clan? Talents? Do we know?”

“Sixty-one percent Clan, Twenty-seven percent Talents,” Regaari reported promptly. Something was badly off with him, Daar could tell even through the sharp professionalism that was his Cousin’s trademark, but now wasn’t the time to delve into it. “Ten percent Clanless, two percent Females.”

Instead of commenting on Regaari’s off-ness, Daar nodded respectfully and made his esteem known. “Excellent as always, Father Regaari. On the Females…and cubs. What is their disposition?”

“Stoneback prevented a massacre at Wi Kao and several other major Communes, though there were still…” Regaari paused for a painful fraction of a second, “…losses. Most of the remaining large Communes with augmented Sisters and Mothers suffered severe losses or were massacred outright. The smaller Communes fared much better, and we’ve devoted our efforts to evacuating them to Cimbrean. The Humans have been…most generous. And understanding.”

…Oh, balls.

Daar clamped down on his feelings and pressed on. “Understood, Cousin. Do we…I hate to ask, but I must know. What does our future look like?”

“Evacuating the Females and Cubs is paramount. If we don’t…and regardless, we can at the very least expect severe depopulation in the near- to mid-term future.”

“Understood. Stainless,” he turned to Powell. “How much can Cimbrean handle? And for how long?”

Powell picked up a document. “In the long term, there’s no reason the planet Cimbrean couldn’t accommodate the entire Clan of Females,” he read. “In the short term…the bottleneck is how quickly Folctha can power its jump arrays. And each jump from here needs a matching jump of aid supplies from Earth, which we can’t provide indefinitely. Our humanitarian resources are already workin’ overtime as it is.”

Daar thought hard about that for a moment. “Stoneback has emergency reserves that can help to a degree. Laid in against livestock failure and all that…some of it is quite old but it’s been stasis-preserved. I will make them available to you immediately. Where is my Grandfather?”

“Garl and Champion-In-Stead Fiin are returning from a mission. They’ve been focusing on rescuing females…We expect them shortly.”

“Good.” Daar gave in to his nervous habit, dropped to all fours and started pacing. “You didn’t give me hard numbers, Stainless. How many?”

“Right now?…Twenty thousand, realistically. More over the comin’ months, but for now that’s already pushin’ Cimbrean to the breakin’ point.”

“…” Daar could only pause and contemplate that. It was…

“How…how many Females do we anticipate surviving this, Father Regaari?”

Regaari stiffened, the way he did whenever he was delivering bad news. “Optimistically, sixty percent. That assumes we can contain this quickly.”

“…Realistically?”

Yulna spoke up. “Champion, we will be extremely lucky if a billion survive this, and that assumes the survivors don’t starve to death in the countryside. Biodrones are specifically targeting Females and the only ones that stand any chance of survival are those near Stoneback installations or other well-protected places. Most are not. And many of those that were lucky enough to be near such a redoubt are…under duress, as the Females are quickly becoming a…*currency*…between the surviving Clanless.”

Yulna spat that line out with particular fire, and Daar found himself growling along in agreement. Still. “Mother, I need hard numbers. How many do we expect to live?”

“Realistically…five hundred million, at most. I expect far less.”

Daar almost chittered to himself from the sheer crushing weight of it. Perversely, Mad Max came immediately to mind, and the more he thought about what was coming, the more he understood why.

“So…what we’re facing, then, is a huge population of survivor males in competition for breeding rights and basic necessities. They’re already Clanning up and fighting turf wars. They have nowhere to go, no cause to unite them, and therefore have no incentive to cooperate. And in thirty years time, assuming optimistic projections and assuming we survive this…our population will drop by billions almost overnight. Do I have the right of it?”

The room nodded in a long, uncomfortable silence.

“The mere fact of this happening is a potential extinction event,” Meereo said quietly. “Even if we win.”

“Not extinction,” Costello said. “We already evacuated enough females to ensure the Gaoian species will carry on.”

“Think, Costello.” Daar didn’t have time to be friendly. “A people is more than their blood. How will the Gao survive this? Twenty thousand females is not a culture. That’s hardly describable as healthy livestock.”

“To be perfectly bloody frank, you won’t,” Powell said. “This is the end of Gaoian civilization as was. We intend to ensure there’s enough left to pick up the pieces.”

“I know that. And…I am thankful. Just…” Daar decided he need to pause for a moment and breathe. It was so very, very much worse than he’d dared to imagine.

And he knew what he had to do.

Powell swept a hand at the map again. “The fight in orbit is our priority,” he said. “Our ground forces are focused entirely on supporting that, and until we have secured total control of this planet’s airspace we cannot devote any resources elsewhere. If we do, the Swarm of Swarms will come an’ finish what the Hierarchy started. The fight to save the Gaoians from what’s already here is on your back, Champion.”

He gave Daar a sympathetic look. “God help you,” he added.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy City, Planet Gao

Mother-Supreme Yulna

“I do have a question.”

The briefing was over. Plans had been made, the process of war had been decided upon. Yulna’s role in it was, of course, going to be a relatively minor one. At this point, as they had been far too many times in Gao’s history, the females of the species were a prize and an objective, rather than allies.

Now there were just…questions. She didn’t want to ask them of Daar specifically but he was the only one to answer them.

She made sure to ask them in private, however. Or at least, in as much privacy as the human camp afforded. Private space was a practically nonexistent luxury, for the time being.

Paradoxically, Daar’s foul mood was what allowed her to talk with him at all. In a less guarded moment, without his iron self-control in place, he might have brushed her off. As it was, he was working so hard to contain himself that he might actually be at his most approachable. All of which explained why his expression, when he turned to hear her question, was standoffish and hostile but nevertheless alert.

“…Ask,” he growled.

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

Daar all but snarled at her. He was doing an admirable job of restraining himself considering how much he clearly wanted to claw the guts out of everything in reach, but a mood like that didn’t exactly make for clear thinking. “You know why, don’t play the fool.”

“That wasn’t an accusation, Daar. I’m not talking about telling all the Females. I’m not necessarily even talking about me, if you couldn’t trust me.”

She stepped closer and spread her paws. “But you told Myun,” she pointed out. “Did you tell anybody else?”

“We told every Female we could trust.” He wielded that word like a weapon. “That is a very short list. Niral. Mothers at some of the more defensible communes.”

Yulna duck-nodded slowly. “…Thank you.”

She turned to go.

This, apparently, was more than Daar’s patience could hold up, because rather than letting her go he surged round in front of her on four paws before rearing up onto two to glower down at her.

“Do…do you truly not grasp the scale of what you have done, Yulna?” he accused.

Before, Yulna might have flinched or cowered. Now, with the whole of Gaoian civilization collapsing around them, she found she had something tougher than courage to hold her up even if it was built from little more than grief. She stared evenly up at him, sniffled a little to settle her whiskers and gathered her robes.

“Enlighten me,” she said. It was a subject that had been weighing on her mind for the last two days, but she wanted to hear Daar’s perspective.

“…Very well.” He dropped to all fours with the distinct air of disappointment. Somehow, that stung worse than his careful, formal speech. He paused for a moment, growled to himself, then pressed on.

“Where…I’m honestly not sure where to start. You chose at the worst possible moment to make the most flagrant display of personal rebuke you could possibly show before the whole of the Gao. You ordered a flotilla to Cimbrean—with no notice to even our allies—expressly to demand an audience from me. Everyone knows that, Hierarchy and otherwise. Any hope I had of bringing the Females in on the plan was shattered that day. There was no longer any possibility of briefing you or any Female of consequence on DEEP RELIC, and that meant we had to rethink our entire strategy, on the fly, and make do with what we could.”

Daar prowled about. He’d been doing a lot of that today. “The direct consequence of that shattering meant we could not hope to properly defend the Communes. We had to assume virtually all of them would be slaughtered. We were proven right. We couldn’t pre-position large Claws because the Females would notice, we had to plan around detection, on and on…do you begin to see how that tiny slip of trust paid such compound interest?”

Yulna didn’t argue. She’d seen all of that compound interest for herself as she’d read DEEP RELIC and thought about its consequences. It had opened a wound in her belly, knowing that her own decision had been a victory for an enemy that, at the time, she’d had no inkling even existed. The fact that she’d made that decision on the advice of Sisters whom she now knew had been that unknown enemy did absolutely nothing to balm her conscience.

She didn’t really have a reply for him, just the words of a woman far wiser than herself.

“…Daar, my predecessor passed on a number of writings, journals, video diaries and collected thoughts to me. One of them was on the nature of trust.”

Daar paused and regarded her with a tilt of his head. “Did she, now?”

“Trust…is like bravery, she said,” Yulna revealed. “You can only be brave when you are afraid, yes? Bravery is not the absence of fear, it is how you overcome fear.”

Daar duck-nodded grudgingly, so Yulna forged ahead. “Giymuy felt something similar must be true about trust. She felt that if you never have any doubts about the people you trust, then it isn’t actually trust. Trust inherently implies the possibility of betrayal.”

She spread her paws again. “The Females have always been afraid, Daar. We have never been entirely certain that the day wouldn’t come when we’d be forced back into the harems and become property again. We have trusted Stoneback all these long centuries…but that gave you power over us. I am truly sorry that I was not braver, I am truly sorry that I flinched…but even if none of us lived in those cages, we still remember them. We’ve always been scared of what you could do to us. You, to whom we exposed our throats and bellies.”

She sighed, and shook her head. “I don’t expect you to forgive me. You’re right, I blundered terribly and I know now that I’m partly to blame for the deaths of millions of my Sisters. All I ask is that…” She paused, then shook her head and stopped, letting the request trail away into a despairing silence.

“How could I have foreseen this?” she asked instead, and waved a paw at the whole world. “A mere falling-out between the Mother-Supreme and the Champion of Stoneback would be unfortunate, but repairable…Great Mother, it’s not even unprecedented.”

“No,” Daar agreed. “No it isn’t. That’s why we have very simple principles. It’s easy to understand what to do when the rules are clear. We protect and we provide. We do nothing else.”

Yulna nodded, sadly. The rules were indeed simple…But as the Humans so eloquently had it, the devil was in the details. And when simple principles collided with complex reality…

“…Thank you,” she said again rather than voicing her thoughts, and turned away for the second time. This time, Daar stood motionless and watched her leave.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.

Second Lieutenant (brevet) Martina Kovač

The farm turned out to be abandoned. Recently so—the heated underfloor was still warm, the refrigerator was full of food, and there were dirty eating utensils scattered here and there which suggested the place was a bit of a bachelor paradise anyway, but none of them was sporting any kind of fuzzy life. Assuming Gao had that kind of aggressive food-ruining mold.

It probably did. Kovač wasn’t an expert, but presumably any living planet needed some kind of fungal action or else dead material would pile up everywhere. So, probably it was present, but slower than the Earth equivalent.

Wherever the occupants had got to, the Marines didn’t find more than some shed fur of them. There was a greasy patch in the barn which suggested a vehicle was usually stored in there, but the vehicle itself was absent.

Otherwise, it was… a farm. No stupid spacefuture stuff here, this was a place where dirt got turned into food.

There were some differences. Gaoians liked to sleep communally all snuggled up in their nest-beds, and the workhouse at the center of the farmyard wasn’t so much a country residence as a hard-working dormitory with basically nothing in the way of private space. But it was sturdily built out of poured concrete with a rustic decorative cladding, small double-glazed windows and a commanding view of the fields in every direction.

The things missing that Marty’s non-agricultural imagination suggested a farm should have were the lack of a water tower or windmill. Instead there was a well, powered by a no-nonsense electric pump which in turn was fed by solar panels on the barn roof, a technology that was about as out-of-date in Gaoian terms as finding a steam-powered tractor on Earth.

To Kovač’s eye it seemed dark and claustrophobic, but the marines took an immediate liking to it.

“Sturdy stuff,”Hodder said approvingly. “Should stand up to small arms quite well, assuming the walls aren’t hollow.”

“Any improvements to make?” Kovač asked.

Rees ran a practiced eye over it. “Sandbags or something like that if we can find ‘em, dig some holes if we can’t, and fill the windows. Of course, if we had air superiority we wouldn’t even be here, we’d just be waiting on a ride out of here, so…”

“Unless there’s something we can do to help ourselves there, I don’t need to know,” Marty told him. An airstrike would wipe them out in a heartbeat, but that had been true from the moment their lifeboat hit soil. There was no sense in stressing about the things she couldn’t control.

“Actually, there might be,” Hodder said. “We’ve got those field emitters from the lifeboat. They aren’t powerful enough to stop a hit, but they might make an incoming weapon explode high up, rather than down here.”

“That’s something for Patel to do, then,” Marty nodded. “You two focus on the dig-in.”

“Yes ma’am.”

The two men nodded and hustled to work on it, leaving Marty to deal with the shortwave radio. She’d elected to carry it herself—the radio itself wasn’t a big deal, being a sturdy chunk of hard-wearing equipment about the size of a shoebox, but it was attached to a hundred meter antenna on a reel, all stored as a hard-wearing olive drab backpack. With that thing deployed and strung between two posts or buildings, the radio’s effective range was more or less anywhere on the planet.

Right now though, she had it plugged into its other antenna, the shorter one that flopped and helicoptered crazily around above her head. It was all she could do to keep it from slapping her in the back of the head every time she bent down or entertained an impure thought of glancing any way but straight. Deacon, who had the filthiest sense of humor of anybody Marty had ever known, had gone suspiciously straight-faced.

Marty was not a radio operator. None of them were. But it was a survival radio, intended to be used by whoever happened to bail out of the lifeboat and retrieve it, so the basic instructions were stuck to the top in big, idiot-proof print. That plus a sharp mind for technology translated to quickly getting a feel for how it worked, and Marty wasted no time in kneeling down to unsling the pack and uncoil the antenna reel.

In minutes, she had it strung between the barn and the farmhouse, had run the cable through the wall of “sandbags”—repurposed fertilizer bags full of wet dirt—that the others were setting up, and soon enough she had a functional little command post set up, complete with a table. Not bad.

Now to get back in touch with the other ‘boats.

“Allied units, this is JOCKEY at Lifeboat Two-alfa-tango-niner, we have established an operating base and are ready to assist and receive you. Report your status, over.”

She watched as the ALE circuitry continuously strobed through the frequencies and repeated her message, always on the lookout for some other radio’s pilot tone. Probably. It had…been a while since her crash course in radio operations. It didn’t need her attention anyway, so she got out her tablet with the map app. Satcom was still down, which meant its connection to the Fleet Intelligence Center was a low-bandwidth, sporadic link through the shortwave, but she had a decent map of the region, with bookmarks already saved for the ‘boat’s crash site, their current position, and the town Wilde was checking out with Alpha team.

The nearest lifeboat she knew of was three-alfa-tango-four, about twenty klicks to the east. That one had reported in first, and was so far the grimmest for injuries.

They were also the first to check in. The ALE dinged a happy tone, worked furiously to lock a clear frequency, then turned green and opened the call.

“JOCKEY, Lifeboat Tree-alfa-tango-four. We’re prepared to move as best we can, but it’ll be difficult without transportation as we have more wounded than able-bodied. Our coordinates are as follows…”

An annotation arrived on the SMS sideband and automatically updated her tablet. Marty marked it on the map and studied what she could see. They’d landed on a hilltop, in the middle of more fields but as with all farms there was a road with access to the field. All things considered, they could be in worse positions. “…Copy, Tree-alfa-tango-four,” she replied, carefully pronouncing it ‘tree’ for clarity, as she’d been trained. “We are attempting to secure transportation for you. Dig in and hold.”

“Orders received and understood. Tree-alfa-tango-four out.”

As soon as her counterpart signed off, another spoke up. All the other stations had heard their linktones and were piling up on the control channel; the ALE screen blinked every time a new station joined the frequency.

“JOCKEY, Lifeboat Two-alfa-tango-tree.” That was a new one, previously out of contact. The longer antenna was definitely working. She listened as they reeled off their coordinates and connected their tablets for map sync, and ticked air through her teeth in frustration. They were far out to the East, nearly two hundred kilometers away. “We have acquired vehicles, just need a destination. Must report that I have CALEDONIA-FIVE-ACTUAL here among our wounded. She is unresponsive and needs urgent medical treatment, over.”

Marty’s heart lifted in one sentence then sank in the next. FIVE-ACTUAL was code for *Caledonia*’s executive officer, Commander McDaniel. As an experience career officer who’d run Caledonia efficiently for years, she would have been perfect for handing off her brevet authority to.

Hearing how bad she was made for a punishing blow.

“…Understood, Two-alfa-tango-tree,” she called back. “You are…one-niner klicks from the nearest major settlement. Do you have marines, over?”

“…JOCKEY, we have three marines in able-bodied condition, over.”

Marty nodded. Right now, the lifeboats were just going to have to trust that their own training would be enough to defend themselves. The marines needed to be out there doing stuff, not sitting on their asses in a field waiting for an attack that might never come, or might come in the form of an airstrike or rod-from-god. Especially not when they had actual working vehicles, that was an asset too valuable to leave sitting still.

“Two-alfa-tango-tree, how many vehicles and of what type, over?”

“JOCKEY, that would be, uh… two vans and a tractor plus flat-bed trailer, over.”

The tractor wasn’t great. It would be slow, obvious and vulnerable even if that trailer could carry all the wounded without trouble. The vans were more anonymous, and probably faster. Most importantly, they needed to be out of the open.

“Okay, Two-alfa-tango-tree, orders are as follows: There is a settlement one-niner clicks to your west. Send your marines to scout it, then relocate in that direction. Try and secure allies, supplies and more vehicles if you can, if not report back to for further instruction…”

That process became a rhythm that she fell into almost without noticing. Make contact with a lifeboat, assess their situation, figure out where they were, what they needed, how they could get it. At some point through it all, Rees delivered a comfortable chair for her. Later on, somebody—she didn’t even notice who—delivered a ration pack. It was one of the British ones, and she hardly noticed what the menu was except that it was nice and spicy and the fruit energy bar was far too welcome.

Later on, there was a coffee, which arrived just before Wilde and Alpha Team reported that their initial reconnoitre of the town suggested a minor Big Hotel presence at most, if any. She authorized the corporal to push into town and bring back what he could grab.

After that…nothing. Just an unexpected lack of anything to do as she realized that everybody was carrying out their orders. She stood up, stretched out her back and sore legs, and decided to perform a quick inspection of the farm now that she had a moment.

It was dramatically changed. The Techs were performing like the well-oiled machine they were. They’d all drilled together like a ballet, and knew how to account for an absence among their number as they worked, with the result that under Hodder’s and Rees’ expert eyes the farm had already been transformed into…well, if it wasn’t a fortress it was sure as hell a lot tougher than it had been.

There were earthworks taking shape out there. Not big ones, but enough to put some dirt between a prone man and any bullets that might come his way. Patel was safely ensconced in a foxhole surrounded by sandbags, surrounded by salvaged forcefield tech which she was poring over on a tablet and fine-tuning. Hargreaves and Doyle—Adam’s suit techs, and therefore themselves the biggest and strongest men on the tech team, because that happened to anybody who spent much time around Adam—had cleared a landing area and laid down some guidance markers.

Things were coming together pretty good, in fact. Which meant, for Marty, just a small moment of relaxation and calm in the middle of a storm where she was able to look around and see that there was nothing for her to do at that exact moment.

Wilde interrupted it.

“Jockey, Archer-Alpha-One. Arrived at the town, no sign of hostiles yet. Got eyes on something like a pickup, and signs of life in what could be a pharmacy or clinic.”

Back to work. Marty sighed and returned to her duties.

“Copy, Archer-Alpha-One. Update regarding vehicles, we have…”

She settled back into her rhythm. They had a long road ahead of them.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Yi-Jan Township, Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.

Tarraak, Clanless

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.” Tarraak confirmed. “It’s not sabotage or a malfunction, there’s just no power coming in off the regional grid.”

He threw his toolbag into a corner and glared suspiciously at the bound and straining form of their erstwhile workhouse-leader, Shurren. “He’s still being trouble?”

“He keeps it up I’mma claw his throat out,” growled Pinky. His name was Shun, but he was a rare albino, so to everybody in town he was Pinky. One of many reasons he hadn’t been accepted into a Clan.

Not that that was a mark of shame in this community. Everybody was a dropout in Yi-Jan…but it didn’t help they’d recently discovered Human cartoons; Pinky was strong but he wasn’t very smart.

Tarraak had avoided the nickname “Brain” by way of some carefully applied fights and a few scars. Being the town mechanic, handyman and general smart guy was something to be proud of, he wasn’t about to let the others burden him with a silly nickname.

“How does that happen?” Dinso asked. He was the closest thing Yi-Jan had to a doctor, an Openpaw dropout who’d drifted to an agricultural district to work as a veterinarian and found that broken bones and diseases worked pretty much the same in any species.

“It’s war out there,” Tarraak opined. “If that wasn’t an escape pod that came down out by the farm, I’ll eat my own balls. You all remember the flashes in the sky. That had to be fusion warheads.”

The others duck-nodded.

“They’ll be reconnoitring the area.” That was Kiro, who fancied himself a tactical “expert” and spent far too long studying Stoneback and Human tactics on the infosphere. And even longer playing online strategy games. He was an obese idiot most of the time, but Tarraak was inclined to listen to him for now. He was the only one who might know anything relevant, after all.

“Yeah, but who’s they?” Pinky asked.

“That pod hit hard,” Tarraak noted. “So they’re probably Clan with access to really good inertial…thingies. Whatever they’re called.”

“Aren’t you the mechanic?” Dinso asked.

“I fix tractors and water pumps. I don’t know spaceships,” Tarraak growled at him. The skinny “doctor” flattened his ears submissively and didn’t press further.

“They could be humans. Humans could survive a hard landing…” Kiro said.

“Just because you want to meet a deathworlder, Kiro, doesn’t mean they’re about to fall out of the sky,” Tarraak told him. He glanced out of the window. “It’s getting dark, and we aren’t getting the power back in,” he said. “We should use the last of the light to light a fire.”

“What good will a fire do?” Pinky asked.

Tarraak was about to launch into a lecture on cooking the perishable food, boiling some clean drinking water or just plain keeping the four of them warm. He didn’t get the chance—the door exploded inwards, disintegrating around the lock in a blizzard of cheap wood fragments that scattered themselves across the workhouse floor.

Something dark, fast and violent followed them, followed by two more. Before he’d even finished reeling from the shock and suddenness of it all, he was being shouted at, by a voice that would plainly brook zero resistance.

Pinky, whose eyesight was kinda bad at the best of times, was desperately sniffing the air. His ears flattened, and he hastily bundled himself to the ground. Kiro was a second behind him, followed by Dinso.

Tarraak promptly found himself with three weapons aimed by his chest, held tight and aggressively by three of the very creatures he’d just claimed weren’t falling from the sky.

He raised his paws slowly to let the humans know he was no trouble, and imitated his colleagues.

The instructions were simple. Keep his paws visible, stay still, stay down…he obeyed. Something was pressed against his head and beeped. Then against Pinky’s, Dinso’s, Kiro’s and Shurren’s.

The beep was different, in Shurren’s case. A second later, Shurren was dead—the human who’d pressed the whatever-it-was to his skull simply drew a pistol and fired a single dispassionate round into his skull.

Tarraak flinched at the sound of the shot. There was a horrible silence punctuated by the slithering thump of Shurren’s corpse toppling over, and the ringing in Tarraak’s ears.

“…Alright lads, you can stand up now. Slowly.”

Tarraak glanced at his friends, who glanced back at him. They had a silent conversation by various ear-angles and expressions before he finally took the plunge and stood up first. Slowly, as ordered.

He’d never seen a human up close. These ones probably weren’t actually quite as big as they looked—that armor looked bulky—and they’d smeared their faces with a dark substance so that their eyes almost shone in the encroaching night. But the smell was something else. Pure dangerous alpha-male aggression, with hints of oil, grease, soot and hot metal. And something else. Blood? But not theirs, nor Gaoian.

“I was beginnin’ to think this place was deserted,” the one who’d so far done all the talking said. “Town like this oughta have a couple hundred people livin’ in it. Where is everyone?”

Tarraak glanced at the others again, and discovered that they were designating him as their spokesman. At least, that was probably what Dinso’s urgent gesture meant.

“They…left,” he said after a moment. “When we heard the news reports and the civic alerts, they loaded up their vehicles. Most of them went over toward Yeego’s compound, others thought they’d be safer in the cities.”

“Sucks to be them,” one of the other humans muttered.

“Who’s this Yeego?”

“He owns most of the land in the Three Glaciers Valleys. Very rich, has contacts in the Clans.”

“Right…So why didn’t you leave?” the leader asked. “How much do you know about what’s going on?”

“Enough to know that bombs and stuff were going off in the cities,” Tarraak replied. “Kiro convinced us to stay.”

“How many of the ones who left had neural augmentation?”

“Uh…?” Tarraak looked to Dinso for the answer to that one, who mulled it over.

“…Ten or so?” he ventured after a some thought.

[“Fuckin’ ‘Ell.”] That sounded like a curse to Tarraak’s ears, and the human sagged a little.

“Is…that why you shot Shurren?” Kiro asked.

“That wasn’t… Shurren, was it? Sorry mate, Shurren died a couple days ago. We just put down the thing wearin’ his corpse like a suit.” The human leader lowered his weapon. “Corporal Wilde. This won’t mean owt to you, but we’re Royal Marines. Our escape pod landed a ways out of town.”

“With just you in it?” Tarraak asked. It had looked much bigger than that.

“No comment, mate. Point is, it’s gone to shite out there and if we’re gonna get back in the fight and make anything good come of it all then we need supplies and vehicles.”

“…We need those supplies, too.”

“I’ve heard of the Royal Marines,” Kiro spoke up. “Semper Fi, right?”

The human snorted. “Wrong. That’s the Yanks. Decent try, though…” He looked around, then grabbed a chair, while the other two Humans busied themselves with…whatever it was they were doing. “Look, we’d better explain…you better brace yourselves, this one’s a bit of a bloody [revelation], believe me.”

Tarraak had no idea what ‘Revelation’ meant, but he quickly discovered how it felt. It felt like the world turning upside-down and dumping a whole Naxas-pen full of shit on his head. It felt like knowing the Swarm-of-Swarms was coming, and that probably most of Gao’s military had been compromised by an enemy that would have just stood aside and let them come.

It felt like a Keeda tale come to life.

“…That’s…” he ventured, when Wilde had finished. “…asking us to believe all this, that’s…it’s big.”

“I fuckin’ know it, mate. But… he had implants, right?” Wilde jerked his thumb out the door, where the other two had removed Shurren’s body.

“I don’t know. Dinso?”

“…Yes. He did.”

“And you don’t,” Wilde said. “We coulda just shot the lot of you, mind. Would have been easier and safer for us…So why didn’t we?”

Tarraak couldn’t think of an answer. This was bigger than he was used to—He was a handyman, a hammer-and-nails kind of guy. If it couldn’t be swapped out for a spare part, patched with tape, glued, screwed, nailed, filed, sawed, hammered back into shape or lubricated then he was about at his limit. The end of the world was too big for him.

“I guess…” he began, then faltered.

“He smells like he’s telling the truth, Brain,” Pinky spoke up, suddenly. He’d been silent so far, letting others do the talking. But he had the best nose Tarraak had ever personally met, possibly as a compensation for his poor eyesight. If Pinky said that a person smelled truthful, they were truthful.

“…Brain?” Wilde asked, and a smirk pulled at the corners of his mouth. “And… his name’s Pinky?”

“Yes, yes. It’s a reference,” Tarraak admitted. “And I told you not to call me that,” he added.

Wilde simply chuckled, then stood up. “Jockey’s gonna fuckin’ love you two,” he said, cryptically. “Arright, look. You know the area, you’re smart blokes, you’re clean in the head. If you want to curl up in the basement and wait for the end or for rescue that’s up to you. Me, if I were in your position, I’d want to fight back somehow. And right now the way to do that is to help us…And I bet the safest place on this planet right now is wherever we happen to be.”

Tarraak had to admit, there was some logic there.

“So…” he said, and realized he’d made his mind up. “About those supplies…”

Date Point: 14y2d AV
Lavmuy City, Planet Gao

Champion Genshi of Whitecrest

Hunters had better cloaking technology than anybody, a consequence of Fyu-alone-knew how long they’d spent raiding and reaping their harvest of the galaxy’s sophonts. Their obsessive focus on a few specific things had made them the undisputed galactic leaders in their narrow, perverse fields.

Whitecrest, however, had managed to acquire one of their ships some years ago. The same one that had violated the Rich Plains, in fact, only for Sister Shoo to do what Humans did and put the Hunters in their place.

The Dominion authorities had simply cast it off from the damaged diplomatic vessel and left it to drift, the fools. Genshi had recovered it personally.

They hadn’t done anything so crass as commandeer it, though. There had been Gaoian carcasses hung up in a meat locker aboard that thing—a memory that still made Genshi shiver—but they had taken it to pieces and squeezed every last secret they could out of it.

Most of those secrets had been shared with the other Clans. Little diplomatic favors, gifts, peace offerings, bargaining chips…over the years, every scientific mystery that ship yielded had been bartered away…except for the cloaking tech.

Whitecrest’s fleet was tiny anyway. In the end, only three ships to date had benefited from the reverse-engineered cloaks—the Lancing Shadow, the Flying Midnight, and Genshi’s personal favorite, the Moving Nothing.

Decorum—and an intense desire to not be shot by his allies—demanded decloaking as they approached Lavmuy’s airspace, however. The Humans had established impressively tight-fisted control over the sky around the capitol, and even if the fighting in Lavmuy itself was still brutal, the skies were wholly owned by the relief force.

And if Whitecrest’s intelligence on the fate of a cloaked ship on Earth some years back was anything to go by, the humans had a few ways of sneering at cloaking tech, too.

He activated the primitive digital radio the Humans had given him and hailed them, using codes and phrases that had been shared between Whitecrest and AEC some time ago. In a way, he was a little disappointed—most of his Brothers and other Gaoians working with the humans had exciting and dynamic codenames, wrapped in fascinating layers of meaning or containing twisty references and in-jokes that might take months to fully decipher.

His was dismayingly functional.

“Human aid force, this is WHITECREST-SIX-ACTUAL. CASPER on approach, request clearance to land, over.”

‘Casper’ was the code phrase for a friendly cloaked ship. He had no idea why.

As expected, the reply was punctual and forthright. “WHITECREST-SIX-ACTUAL, you are not cleared to approach. Decloak and set down at the following coordinates where you will submit to a security inspection…”

Genshi carefully followed the instructions to the letter, and parked the Moving Nothing exactly where he’d been ordered—on a makeshift landing pad in the middle of what had been a major intersection near the spaceport but which was now just so much open space where there was enough room to land an aircraft and the highway overpass provided a decent spot to build a forward base protected from indirect fire weapons.

Human soldiers with what were plainly some kind of anti-aircraft weapon system tracked him every inch of the way down to the ground, and he barely had time to order his brothers to brace themselves against the wall with their paws up before the boarding force stormed aboard.

Somebody was going to have to come up with a reliable, more comfortable and more dignified neural scanner soon, he hoped. The one the humans used was so uncomfortably robust that it almost felt spiky.

Still, it worked, and the inspection was mercifully brief. He was given the option of waiting with his ship until an inspection team had thoroughly checked it over, or being delivered to the Farthrow facility in an armored vehicle.

He took the armored vehicle. They were well past industrial secrets at this point.

He had to give credit to the humans. He’d had some inkling of their deployment abilities thanks to Whitecrest’s careful probing and secret-gathering—it always paid to know what one’s allies were capable of—but seeing them realized was something else. They’d converted the open concrete of the spaceport into a fortress, and their foothold was getting firmer with every passing minute.

His vehicle passed through checkpoints, jinked through chicanes and between offset barriers, tracked all the while by heavy weapons. By the time he alighted at the command facility, he’d had lethal firepower pointed at him for every second of a full twenty minutes.

The security was commendable.

Father Regaari was waiting for him. He didn’t duck his head to show respect, but the set of his ears was deferential. “Champion. You had us worried.”

“I had business to take care of…” Genshi gathered his younger colleague into an affectionate embrace. “I heard what happened at Wi Kao. I understand you were close with one of—”

“Please, Champion…I’d prefer not to discuss that, right now.” Regaari interrupted him, gently, but every line of him was a sketch of pain being held tightly in check and channeled towards a purpose. “Did you hear that Champion Daar is here?”

That brightened Genshi’s mood substantially. “I hadn’t! Where is he?”

“Organizing a massacre,” Regaari replied cryptically, gesturing toward the command building. “May I ask where you were?”

Genshi indicated the boxes his Brothers were unloading from the transport. “Collecting a few essentials. I had hoped for more warning, and so couldn’t retrieve them as smoothly as I would have liked.”

Regaari twitched his whiskers at the boxes curiously. “What are they?” he asked.

“The grand strategy is to knock out planet-wide communications, yes?” Genshi asked. He’d figured that one out some time ago—it was the only realistic way to ensure that they could deploy a system defense field without it promptly being shot down from within by Gao’s own defenses.

“…Yes,” Regaari agreed. Genshi panted happily, and allowed himself to look smug.

“I prepared a few things to make that task easier…” he said.

Date Point: 14y2d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Armstrong Station, Cimbrean System

Xiù Chang

She dreams of being hated.

She’s in a warehouse, or something. An industrial, cold building full of little rooms, delineated by cheap, dirty, coarse chipboard walls. Each room has, little tables, little whiteboards, little chairs…and somebody she cares about, waiting to finally confess their hatred.

It’s not an angry or shouty kind of hatred, but it’s relentless. All her friends, her family, her loved ones, line up to calmly, sadly and unflinchingly tell her how disappointed they are, how much they dislike her. She knows it’s a dream, but she’s powerless to stop the catalogue of criticism mercilessly playing out behind her eyes.

She tries to argue back, but her own guilt grinds her down. She did run away, after all. From Gao, from her Sisters, from her Clan. From her family, from Earth, from her ambitions…

The worst room has Allison in it. Her expression is stony and cold, her eyes sad. She says nothing, just shakes her head, turns her face away.

The room is an airlock. Xiù bangs on the glass, pleads for forgiveness but none comes. Just the hiss of the door opening. She turns, the blast of air lifts her and throws her into the void—

Xiù woke with a gasp.

The real Allison was peacefully asleep just a few inches away and Xiù took a moment to examine her face and fix it in her mind, remembering the little solid minutiae that were the hallmark of the real world. The real Allison had a pair of small brown moles in front of her right ear, some light acne scarring on her jaw and forehead, and a faint splash of melasma on her cheekbones and nose. There were tiny dimpled spots in her ears, lower lip and left nostril where some old piercings had healed, and she’d never plucked her eyebrows in her life.

She was gorgeous.

And apparently she was psychic, because after only a few seconds of being scrutinized she sleep-scowled, grunted, then blinked her eyes open. It took her a few seconds to focus on Xiù’s face, but when she did she smiled faintly and raised a hand to excavate the sleep grit out of one corner of her eye.

“…Hey.”

That little smile had been exactly what Xiù needed to see. “Hey,” she replied, with forced lightness.

Allison wasn’t fooled. She stretched a little more then settled back down. “…You okay?”

Xiù shook her head. “Bad dream.”

Allison made a soft, sympathetic sound and scooted closer to cuddle her. “Amazed I didn’t have one myself,” she confessed, rubbing Xiù’s back. “How bad?”

“…You hated me.”

“Owch.”

“Yeah.” An alarming spike of insecurity shot through Xiù’s head and she pulled back from the hug to look Allison in the eye. “You don’t hate me, right?”

“No!” Allison even laughed, which was a sound Xiù hadn’t heard in days. “No, dummy. I definitely don’t hate you.”

Xiù relaxed and buried her head in Allison’s chest. “…Sorry.”

Allison laughed again, more softly this time, and kissed her hair. “Dummy,” she repeated fondly, then scooted away and threw the blankets off.

“We don’t need to get up yet…” Xiù pointed out. The wall clock said 05:30, ship time. Heaven only knew what time it was on Cimbrean or Gao.

“Yeah, but I gotta pee.”

“Oh.”

Figuring that neither of them were going to sleep again anyway, Xiù rolled out of bed herself. While Allison used the bathroom and shower she folded the blankets and sheets, then packed the bed back down into couch mode before stowing it away in the wall. She stretched upward to the ceiling, bent down to touch her toes, twisted her back from side to side and took a few meditative breaths to clear her head.

“Coffee?” she called.

“Love you!” came the reply. Xiù took that for a yes, and two steaming cups of coffee were waiting on the counter when Allison emerged from the shower while scrubbing her hair dry. The absence of the usual cloud of steam suggested a cold shower this morning.

She kissed Xiù on the cheek as she grabbed her cup, sniffed appreciatively at the scrambled eggs sizzling in the pan, and ambled across the room to grab a tablet and check their messages.

Seconds later she gasped. “Babe? Babe!”

Xiù’s heart leapt into her mouth. She abandoned the eggs and dashed to Allison’s side. “What? What happened?!”

“Read!” Allison thrust the tablet into her hands.

F 330142Z-CIM SEP
FM DUCKTAPE/ducktape@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil//
TO MISFIT/bgev11@ships.byron.scom//
INFO STAINLESS/stainless@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil//

T O P S E C R E T SAR-BROKEN-STATUE DEEP-RELIC
SUBJ/(U) STATUS UPDATE-AKYAWENTUO//

► (C//SAR-BS) Situation now resolved. BIG HOTEL presence nullified, planet now believed to be secure. PLAYBOY and others are well.
►
► (TS//SAR-BS-DR) To properly secure the system, we require a FOOTBALL be deployed to the Akyawentuo L2 stellar-planetary lagrange point. Your mission on return will be to effect this deployment under Ten’Gewek witness. Please record the moment for future posterity and make certain the People understand the ramifications. A combined briefing from the Department of State and the Foreign Office is included. As you are the extant experts on Ten’Gewek language and culture, you should translate as appropriate.
►
► (U//FOUO) As this is an opportunity for interspecies diplomacy, we are preparing a courtesy package with food, educational material, and other such amenities as suggested by Professor Hurt. See enclosed list and amend as appropriate.
►
► (U//FOUO) This mission has been coordinated with Byron Group and your services contracted in accordance with the FAR and the terms of our Agreement. See riders, attached.
►
► (U) Further questions can be directed to my office or to me directly, if the need is urgent. You are authorized prep time and funding for this mission immediately, to depart no more than 72-hours from the time of this message. Further instructions to follow shortly.

Pure relief shot straight down Xiù’s back and knocked the knees out from under her just from reading the first paragraph. She didn’t really notice the way she sank to the ground as she read the rest, nor really absorbed anything else about the message on the first readthrough—All the important content was neatly contained in the five words of the third sentence.

“Christ,” Allison leaned against the wall. “All that stress and…everything, and it’s over like that.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m really not complaining!” Xiù told her. She read the message again, drinking it in.

“I wonder what swung it, though,” Allison said. “One minute it’s like a flat ‘no’ and the next out of the blue everything we asked for just…what the fuck happened?”

Xiù nodded, but let out a huge sigh that seemed to blow all the stress of the last few days out with it, and stood up again. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?” she suggested.

She handed the tablet back, and returned to the eggs, which she hastily took off the heat and stirred up a bit—they’d been on the brink of burning. Allison nodded, read the message again, then put the tablet down and reached up to deploy their table from its roost in the ceiling. She looked every inch just as relieved as Xiù felt

“Yeah,” she agreed. “I’m just glad that everyone’s alright…”

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

Vemet met his final rest in a sky burial.

Julian wasn’t quite prepared for the finality of the thing. He’d thought they’d probably light a funeral pyre, maybe leave Vemet’s body exposed somewhere out of the way…but that wasn’t at all how Ten’Gewek paid respects to their dead.

For them, it was all about balance. Balance demanded a man Give the last of himself to the gods, and the best way to do that was in a high place where all could see. The top of a mountain, for instance.

“You come,” Yan had said. “Vemet would want.”

It was the Given-Man’s duty to transport the body up the mountain, on a litter bedded with young Ketta foliage. Vemet’s face had been painted with white and red clay, a wide leather strip had been tied over his eyes like a blindfold, and two more gently bound his ankles and wrists, arranging his body into a dignified posture with his hands folded across his chest and his tail coiled between his feet.

It wasn’t a difficult hike, for Julian. The People were perfectly mobile on the ground, but they were far more comfortable in the trees and a human’s longer and straighter legs made easy work of terrain that they found exhausting.

Rather than show that off however, Julian walked along with Vemik and the Singer, whose young new apprentice Dancer—so new that she hadn’t yet properly given her name to the gods, according to Vemik—was trailing behind carrying several large and awkward bags, baskets and pots. Nobody seemed to be offering to help her and she didn’t seem to expect help, so Julian left well enough. Presumably it was all part of the magic of becoming a Dancer.

Despite the fact that the climb was obviously taxing for Ten’gewek, they shared a lively conversation and stories about Vemet: enduring moments, embarrassing ones, or simply poignant memories. Julian’s contribution was the anecdote where Vemet had almost fallen out of his tree the first time he heard Julian’s rifle fire, on a hunt.

“He tried to play it off like he was hanging by his tail on purpose, too. Didn’t fool me.”

[“He was crafty like that!”] Vemik had settled into his native tongue for this, and Julian followed suit.

[“He liked to sneak up on me, too.”] Julian chuckled at the memory. Ten’gewek were remarkably stealthy in the trees, but couldn’t stack up to some of Nightmare’s critters. Vemet had taken Julian’s practiced vigilance as a challenge and an opportunity to practice.

Vemik trilled, [“Maybe you’re easy prey, Jooyun!”]

[“Nah. He only got me sometimes. He was a better wrestler than you, though.”]

[“Old men know all the tricks.”] Yan nodded sagely at that, just as they reached the summit. The mood was suddenly much more solemn. He gestured to Vemik, who helped him lift the litter onto a prominent flat rock. There were faded red and white markings on the rock, which the Dancer skipped around and touched up with fresh paint.

That done, the villagers formed two circles around the body. The smaller inner circle was his closest friends and relatives—Yan, Vemik, a couple of Vemet’s nephews and cousins—and the outer one was for all the other men and women of the village, plus Julian.

The Singer stood by the body, looking toward the sun. She raised her hands, spread wide, and sang.

Julian had heard her plenty of times. It was a kind of punctuation to Ten’Gewek daily life. There was the song for the dawn, the song for high noon, the song for sunset. There was a song for food, a song for a successful hunt, a song for children and for healing. There were songs for purely spiritual moments, when the People were just being people, gamely facing down a harsh universe with a knife in one hand and spirit straightening their backs.

He’d never heard the song for the dead before. She sung it from her belly, supporting and lifting it so that it sounded strong even unaccompanied on a windswept hillside save for the thump and rattle of her singing-stick and the clattering of her Dancer’s bead jewelry and the heartbeat rhythm of her drum.

He listened intently to the words—he wanted to remember them.

[“Gods of the sun, the fire and sky! Gods of the earth, gods of the bones of the world! We Give you our brother Vemet, who tapped on stone! You Gave his life to us and he lived as one of the People, but now his life is in balance! What he Took from this land, he Gave to his tribe, and now he can Give no more! Gods of the rain and wind, gods of the tree and beast, carry his spirit and accept his body! Care for him and love him as we loved him, comfort and strengthen us as we prepare for the days without him! Smile on him, and on us all until the day we meet again and the world is in balance.”]

She lowered her hands, then bent forward to plant a kiss on Vemet’s forehead. With that last gesture, she backed away from the body and took her place in the outer circle.

Yan led the inner circle in stepping forward, and rested his hand lightly on his friend’s upper arm.

[“Vemet Stone-Tapper, you were my good friend, and you never gave me bad counsel. I ask the gods for your wisdom,”] he said.

Vemik laid his hand on Vemet’s hands. [“Vemet Stone-Tapper, you were my father and you always lifted my spirits with your words. I ask the gods for your laughter,”] he added.

The other three members of the inner circle made similar requests, honoring Vemet’s skill as a hunter, his bravery, and—a request that sent a trill of laughter around all the mourners—his success with women.

Yan looked around to ensure that the last request had been made, then bowed his head sadly.

[“And now…we Give you to the gods, Vemet. We love you.”]

He closed his hands around Vemet’s shoulder joint, sighed deeply, and—

He pulled the arm clean off Vemet’s body as easily as Julian might snap a stick, then broke it apart at the elbow with just as much ease. Vemik flinched at the sickening cracks but nodded solemnly when Yan handed him the grisly pieces. He laid them down reverently, reached for his good steel knife and set about flaying them to the bone.

Julian stood there, stunned and disturbed right down to his gut and fighting back a sudden nauseated surge that tried to claw its way up his gullet.

[“We Give him to the sky.”]

Right. Yes. Disassembling the body. It was a necessary part of any sky burial, so that the body could re-enter the food chain quickly and cleanly rather than decomposing…but in all the beautiful sadness, Julian had forgotten. He hadn’t been mentally prepared to see a man he’d liked and respected being literally…

…Well, butchered. Lovingly. By his own son.

Yan moved on, breaking Vemet apart and handing the pieces off to different mourners. Mercifully, the mourners didn’t ask Julian to join in; Ten’Gewek really weren’t dumb, and they knew perfectly well that Sky-People had their own ways, so none of them objected when Julian bowed his head and tried not to listen too closely.

Yan made very quick work of it, thankfully. Within minutes Vemet had been more or less completely pulled apart, his bones snapped and the marrow exposed, his skull split open, and his flesh neatly placed on the bare rock where the carrion birds and insects would pick him clean in a matter of hours. The weather would do the rest, and presumably the mourners would come back to do something with the clean bones in time. The Singer sung another deep, powerful song to the gods while the Dancer scattered a powder about the site.

The whole thing was…traumatic, but strangely healing, in that it left Julian feeling sickeningly connected to his own mortality. It was a literally visceral reminder that today he was alive but one day he wouldn’t be, and that they were all just animals in the end. Like a lot of things about Ten’Gewek life it was unflinching in the face of reality and not for the squeamish…but all the more potent as a result.

The men scrubbed their hands and arms with finely powdered ashes or something from one of the Dancer’s larger pots once they were done, until their dark grayish-brown skin was almost chalk white.

Yan offered the pot to Julian. “Bones of men-before,” he said in English. “We remember.”

Julian nodded, took a deep breath, then imitated what he’d seen them do. The fine, soft powder stuck to him like flour and caked in his arm hair. Yan grunted, nodded, and then spread some in two lines on Julian’s face as well, a T shape across the forehead and down between his eyes.

[“We only do this for men of our People,”] he added, reverting to his native language, [“but…Vemet would have wanted this, too.”]

[“Then I will honor him,”] Julian promised. Yan gave him a knowing half-smile.

[“It’s not your way, I know,”] he said. [“How do you honor your dead?”]

[“Different tribes have different ways.”] Julian told him. [“Some do it like this. Others burn their dead into ash. Sometimes, on a great fire we call a] pyre. [Others bury in something called a] grave…” He thought for a second, then decided to speak his mind. [“…Mine has some words I think are appropriate.”]

[“Then say them.”] Yan waved a hand.

Julian wasn’t any kind of a priest, and he wasn’t exactly devout in any case. But still, he knew the words from his youth and they felt…right, somehow.

He spoke in English. “We commend Vemet Stone-Tapper to Almighty God; and we commit his body to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…amen.”

Yan nodded approvingly, and returned his attention to the burial. The birds were circling already. “…Good words,” he said, also in English.

[“…This is actually the first funeral I’ve ever been to,”] Julian confessed.

[“May it be many seasons until the next.”]

[“…Thank you. What happens now?”]

Yan shrugged. [“You take as long as you want. Think. Say something…sing, if you want. When you are ready, you walk away. It takes as long as it takes, and there is no shame if you leave first.”]

He clapped Julian on the shoulder, leaving a powdery handprint, and left him to his thoughts.

Julian…hovered. He honestly had no idea what to think, or say. And as for a song…nothing came to mind. In the end he just closed his eyes and let the world soak in through his skin, his nose and his ears. The biggest presence was the wind: its fresh clean mountain scent, its rumble as it plucked at his tattered shorts, and its silky coolness down his arms and across his face.

The last day or two dropped away like a bad dream, and when he opened his eyes he found himself thinking about the future again, rather than just living to see the next minute. It felt like waking up.

He turned, and walked away. He wasn’t the first.

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Professor Daniel Hurt

“Daniel? You look like you’re a mile away.”

Daniel jumped slightly, jolted back into the here and now. He did a little mental filing, figuratively bookmarking his thoughts so that he’d remember where he left off, then cleared his throat and stood up.

Julian looked…well, he looked back. Behind the dusting of white ash on his arms and face his expression had regained its usual affable quality, rather than the knife-sharp terrifying lethality of a killer in pure survival mode.

“Good service?” Daniel asked him politely.

Julian considered the powder on his skin for a moment. “…Not for the faint-hearted,” he said, “But I’m glad I attended. It was…good for the soul.”

“Say no more. I think I’m too faint-hearted to know the details,” Daniel told him. He gestured down the slope, and they strolled back toward the village together. “I’ve been doing some soul-searching of my own.”

“Yeah?”

“Well…we won. Right? No more Abrogators?”

Julian nodded. “That’s what JETS and the Air Force say.”

“It’s a pyrrhic victory though,” Daniel said. “All our high-minded ambitions about cultural conservation are…well, they’re just not feasible any longer.”

Julian paused, and when Daniel turned back to look up at him he was resting his weight on one leg and had crossed his arms over his chest. He was a lot more intimidating in that posture than he seemed to realize, especially while covered in tribal markings.

His words were gentle, though. “…Yeah. I’ve been worrying about that too.”

“I was thinking about different approaches we could take. I think…the Ten’Gewek understand the threat we pose to them now, but I think they know how to play with fire and not get burned. We succeeded there, at least.”

Julian looked like he wanted to say something but he held his peace. His lips pursed thoughtfully for a second, and Daniel decided to prompt him.

“Say it, please.”

“…What do you know of my people?”

“Which ones?”

“Any of them.”

“I confess, I never studied the Dutch.”

Julian’s solemn expression split into an involuntary smile and he chuckled softly, which was a thoroughly welcome sound after the last few grim days. “They like cheese, I hear.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Navajo didn’t,” Julian pointed out. “Severe lactose intolerance. Neither did the Ojibwe, but they adapted. The French, of course…”

“Of course.”

“But that’s the funny part. I’m half native, right? I grew up with my grandfather, knew people who were active in, uh, movements. I’ve been to Pow-Wows, I make a mean frybread…” Julian gestured to his upper arm, indicating his natural skin tone where he wasn’t covered in white dust. “But sometimes the only thing that maybe gives me away is black hair and a good tan. If I’ve got any kinda stubble at all I’m basically a white fella…and I happen to love cheese.”

Daniel gave him a solemn look up and down. He wasn’t wrong—If they ever came to make a movie about the Misfit crew, the hunt for Julian’s actor would most likely involve wading through a lot of well-tanned European hardbodies. The hard part would be finding a guy who could get the attitude right, rather than a physical match.

“You’re…well-integrated,” he ventured.

“I’m what they call an ‘Apple’,” Julian said bitterly. “Red on the outside…”

“…Right.” Daniel shook his head.

“Xiù got called a ‘banana’, too. It’s…whatever.” Julian shrugged. “I dunno about integration, ‘cuz if you take the Ojibwe their myth is…well, when the missionaries and the voyageurs came along, converting them to Catholicism didn’t take much convincing. They go together, almost eerily well. In a generation the Metis people had their own language, and two generations after that they were already dying out. Then there were the Indian boarding schools, the Dawes Act, all sorts of sad stuff…”

Daniel had spent enough time around rambling academics to recognize a man who liked to think up his hypothesis on the fly while he was in the process of describing it. He’d long since mastered the art of poking them in the right direction with a few simple words.

“But the thing is—” he prompted.

“…But the thing is, we’re still here.” Julian said. “The Navajo? Well…there’s a reason my grandpa moved to Minnesota. There was nothing for him in Arizona. At all. Some tribes were wiped out, others were warlike…on and on. But the Ojibwe? We’re still here.”

“Are you, though?” Daniel asked. “Or are you just another subset of white people nowadays?”

“Well…if you asked me fifteen years ago if I would settle down on the rez and marry a nice indian maiden like grandpa wanted? I’d have laughed and said no, except that would’ve made grandpa sad. So…what does that make me?”

“Somebody who doesn’t really give a crap about your own ethnicity, perhaps?” Daniel suggested.

Julian shook his head. “Nah. It’s…I don’t think of myself as indian. Never really did, ‘cuz firstly, which tribe? Ojibwe and Navajo aren’t anything alike.” He paced around a bit, slightly agitated. “And secondly…we’re not supposed to talk about it. But a lot of the tribes are broken. Like, fundamentally. They’re basically under the BIA’s thumb and that…yeah. Sorry.”

“Why?”

Julian shrugged hugely. “I dunno. I got ideas but they ain’t very nice.”

“If Ten’Gewek sky burials are anything like Tibetan ones, I know what you just watched. So, to Hell with nice. Today isn’t a day for nice. In fact, this is shaping up to be a bad decade for nice in general.”

“…Yeah. I’ve been thinkin’ on that, too.”

Daniel could tell there was a complicated knot of inter-related thoughts playing themselves out in Julian’s head. He was really quite intelligent, but introspection and eloquence weren’t his strongest skills…Not that he’d ever really had the chance to develop them. He needed a teacher.

“Okay. Have a seat, big guy. Tell me what’s really gnawing at you.” He gestured to a nearby rock.

Julian looked at it, then shrugged again and sat down.“…This is gonna sound totally unrelated to all the other stuff,” he said, “but…kids.”

“Ah. One of the big ones,” Daniel said sympathetically and sat down next to him.

“Thing is, I’m pushin’ thirty. Xiù an’ Al aren’t far behind me. And I’ve got this mission, and for the life of me I can’t see that I can do all the things I need to do all at once.”

“Oh?”

“Well, okay. I think the People need me. Well, no. I think they need someone like me, and I’m not sure there are many people who fit the bill.”

Daniel nodded. “Big, physical, and you come from a sympathetic place.”

“Right! Exactly that.”

“So make it simple and just say that they need you, if for no other reason than another Julian isn’t likely to show up and even if he does he won’t share your history with them.”

“…Right.” Ah, Minnesota Nice. Nothing seemed to beat it out of anyone.

“Seriously,” Daniel pressed him. “The People need you. Own it.”

“Okay. Right. They need me. But, here’s the thing. What does that mean? It means I gotta live here with them, right? I gotta do People-stuff with them. That means I gotta be People. I’ve gotta probably do their manhood thing, I gotta hunt and survey…and I gotta train my ass off, too. Books and weights, probably a lot of both.”

“That’s a big commitment,” Dan agreed, understatedly.

Julian tucked some hair back behind his ear, unheeding of the powdery gray smudge he left in it. “And if the girls stay here with me, then that puts kids out of the picture because gravity plays fuckin’ hell with pregnancy…”

“Low gravity, for sure. The jury is still out on high gravity, but…”

“Not taking the chance.”

“Nor should you!”

“And then there’s the Byron Group who might just tell us to get out of here and start making them money again…”

Daniel nodded. “But you’d feel like you were abandoning the People if you do either of those things.”

“Yeah. But if I quit the exploration I’d also feel like I was abandoning humanity.”

“Julian, I think on that point you can quit guilt-free,” Daniel smiled. “We aren’t exactly short on people fighting in our corner.”

“Even still…”

“No, I get it. So. Let’s think this through. What would it take for you to stay? I’ll be honest I very much want you here, because I’m a soft old man and I need someone like you as an ally.”

“We’d need…the girls and me, we’d need to be able to make a life here.”

“True, but you just jumped way ahead. Think more immediate first. What do you need to do?”

Julian rested his prosthetic foot on his opposite knee and thought about it for a long moment, tinkering with it as he did so. “Well…I need to be a man in their eyes.”

“Whose? The People’s?”

“The other twenty thousand Ten’Gewek I haven’t met yet. They see me, they just see a strange tall thin-skinned tailless little guy. These cavemonkey fellas are big on first impressions and what they all think of me right off the bat is weak.”

“You’re neither little nor weak, though,” Daniel reminded him.

“Nope, and this mission is why. But I’ll need to keep training as hard as I can so that I’ll eventually compare to their average man. That’s a lot of broscience…which hey, it’s fun! But…well. There’s more. They have rites. I know they involve drugs.”

Daniel rubbed his palms together thoughtfully. “So the metacontext here is that you’ve clearly thought hard about this and already made up your mind.”

“…Yeah. And what’s eating me is I don’t wanna do it. Or…I do, but I don’t wanna pay the price. After the last couple days, I…” Julian sighed. “I know what I need to do to keep their respect, and I know it’d basically involve throwing away…a lot. But if I don’t then I’m…I dunno. No better than the voyageurs. Or worse: They at least had no idea what they were doing.”

“But you do.”

“Yeah.”

They sat thoughtfully for quite some time. Occasionally, one of the mourners from up the mountain would traipse past them, headed back toward the village and lost in their own thoughts. It was a thoughtful day. Judging from the big fire that had been lit down in the village, the drumming, singing and the generally pregnant air of potential debauchery building up among the People, however, the night was going to be far less cerebral.

“So…” Daniel began, after turning his thoughts over in his head at some length. “The question is, what is our strategy for the People? Is the original plan dead? Do we have to be missionaries now? Are we…guides to a strange new future? Or are we maybe the sages on the mountain that they have to go through many trials just to seek our wisdom?”

Julian stared at him blankly for a moment, and then slowly a gentle, trollish grin spread across his face. “You…really do love the sound of your voice, don’t you?”

Daniel chuckled. “I’m an academic who spent years going on talk shows to promote my own books, Julian. If I could marry the sound of my voice we’d have eloped years ago.”

“I’ll take forest living and…hell, I guess meatslabbin’ any day over that.” Julian grinned for a moment but it quickly faded into a furrowed brow. “But…I dunno. I feel like no matter what I do, someone’s gettin’ fucked over.”

“Okay. So. Who’s the last person you’d ever fuck over?”

“Allison and Xiù,” Julian replied, immediately. There wasn’t a microsecond’s hesitation.

“Well then. Question answered.”

“…Is it?”

“Well, did you bother to ask them how they felt about all this?”

“I haven’t exactly had the chance!”

“Then it’s a question for another day.” Daniel stood up. “Right now what you should do, if you’ll let an old fart who loves the sound of his own voice convey some wisdom on your meathead skull—” He earned an amused snort for that. “—Is go to that big party that’s brewing up down there, pick a fight, get drunk, sing, throw your axe, whatever you do to have fun, and cross your bridges when you come to them.”

“…We do have that beer they sent over…”

“Then maybe risk a little cultural contamination and get Yan and Vemik rip roaring drunk.”

“…That’s surprising, coming from you.”

Daniel shrugged. “Maybe we need to stop worrying about slavishly maintaining something that can’t survive the future. We’re deathworlders, let’s damn well act like it. They’ll keep what they can, discard what might harm them and the rest…is cheese.”

Julian gave him a Look, of the kind that Daniel mentally inserted a capital letter onto. “…‘The rest is cheese’?” he asked, skeptically.

“Eh. It’s a good book title at least.” Daniel turned away down the hill and followed his nose toward the scent of roasting meat. “Come on.”

He listened carefully, and had counted to five when he heard Julian finally stand up and follow.

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.

Second Lieutenant (brevet) Martina Kovač

“Lieutenant?”

Marty had found the time for a power nap. It didn’t feel much like she’d been asleep, but when she looked around and then checked her timepiece, it turned out to have been nearly two hours. Dusk had turned into definite night-time out there.

She looked up at Lance Corporal Rees, who’d woken her, and rubbed at her eye to help herself wake up.

“…What’s up?”

“Wildey’s back, ma’am.”

Marty hauled herself up out of the corner she’d fallen asleep in with a groan. She’d swept it clean and laid down a thin bedroll, which pretty much made it a five-star hotel by the standards of their current situation, but she was definitely going to spend some time appreciating the gargantuan emperor-size bed in Adam’s apartment when she got back.

And a shower. God she needed a shower. Thank fuck for Frontline, or she’d be stinking like a vinegar-soaked pig right now and posing a serious biohazard to all of the planet Gao in the process. As it was, she just felt greasy, gritty and rough.

None of those thoughts escaped the confines of her head, though. She put her helmet back on and followed Rees down the stairs and out the front door.

Wilde was standing in the back of a Gaoian pickup, a four-wheeled grunter of a thing that was clearly built for agriculture in a big way. It looked like it could handle the huge neglected bales of hay that dotted the surrounding fields, and carry them over any terrain that wasn’t actually a ravine.

And its back was absolutely full of boxes, crates and bags.

Wilde beamed at her from atop his loot throne. “Happy to report mission success, ma’am,” he grinned. “Food, blankets, medical supplies, bottled water…” he threw aside a tarpaulin “…and an emergency water-fuelled fusion generator.”

“Water? Not deuterium?” Marty asked.

“Nope. Any old H2O should do, according to our new Gaoian mates.”

Marty turned around and cast around for their electrical expert. “Patel!”

The skinny British sailor showed up in seconds. “Ma’am? —Ooh!” Her face lit up the second she laid eyes on the generator.

“I take it you’re familiar with these things,” Marty observed drily.

“Always wanted to get my hands on one!” Patel enthused as Doyle obligingly hoisted it down off the pickup’s bed for her. Her face fell a little as she examined it. “…I just wish the Chief could have seen it.”

“Pretty sure he’d want you to get it set up and running ASAP,” Marty told her. Patel snapped back to the here-and-now, nodded, and Doyle helped her cart the generator array.

Wilde hopped down off the truck, while SOR techs swarmed it to strip it of its cargo and file everything away. “There’s another load to come, but this is all the most important shit,” he said. “What’s your call on bringing the Gaoians up here?”

“You think they’re harmless?”

“I think one of ‘em’s about as close as we’re gonna get to having a doctor.”

“A harmless doctor?” Marty insisted. Wilde grimaced.

“…Probably harmless,” he said. “And another’s a mechanic, handyman sorta bloke.”

“Probably harmless,” Marty echoed, flatly and skeptically.

“They’re clean. Just…well, when the rest of the town fucked off to figure out what’s going on, these four stayed put. Now, for me that says they’re smart enough to keep their heads in a crisis…” Wilde gestured as his sentence tailed off, saying the rest without speaking it.

“But you can’t discount an ulterior motive.” Marty finished for him.

Wilde nodded. “Still…I’d put my money on harmless, to be fair,” he added.

“…Fine. Bring them up,” Marty decided. “We need the local knowledge. But keep one of the techs assigned to watch them, or an MP or marine if any show up.”

“Got it.” Wilde hopped back up into the pickup as the last of the supplies was borne away to be stored in the farmhouse’s most secure inner sanctum. “Shouldn’t be long.”

“Keep an eye out for the convoy from three-lima-bravo-seven while you’re out there,” Marty warned him. “They checked in a couple hours ago, they should be close.”

Wilde knocked on the pickup’s cabin roof. “They can help us load shi—”

Something crunched into his armor’s chestplate with enough force to stagger him, and he fell on his ass with a curse. Three more bullet holes manifested in the pickup’s windshield, and Marty threw herself behind the pickup for whatever cover and concealment it provided. All around the farm, the SOR techs flung themselves at whatever cover they could find, while Rees and Hayes ducked down inside the truck.

Wilde slithered off the truckbed beside her. “Fuckin’ ‘ell,” he commented, sounding far less concerned about it that Marty felt he should be.

“You okay?” she asked him. He chuckled grimly.

“Eh…” He scooted round her and raised his weapon, aiming it into the night.

“…‘S’ bloody dark out there,” he observed after a second, then flinched back with a grunt as another round cracked past, missing him by what felt to Marty like inches. He gave no other indication of its passing.

Of course, the enemy could see them just fine—the farm had outdoor lighting. Marty squirmed sideways in the dirt to the other side of the truck until she could see the ’pit’ where their forcefield generators and batteries had been installed.“Patel! Kill the lights!”

Wilde nodded as the power shut off, plunging them into midnight darkness. He reached up to his helmet and lowered his night-vision into place. “Cheers.”

“Any idea where they are?” Marty asked him.

“Gotta be one of those hay bales. Too bad there’s a hundred of the bloody things…Here, you’d better get inside, LT. Wait for my word then run for it.”

Marty nodded. “Waiting.”

“Rees? Hayes?” Wilde keyed his radio to call the pickup’s driver, who’d sensibly remained inside the vehicle. “You both alright in there?”

The reply floated back from the truck’s open rear window. “‘S’ a bit drafty in here, Corporal. Some twat shot out the windscreen.”

“Just cuddle up to Reesy for warmth, mate. Better yet, open the door: Let’s see what our friend out there does.”

Hayes didn’t reply, but after some thumping and muffled cursing the pickup’s door swung open.

Hayes waved a hand at Marty. “Now.”

She went one way, he went the other. There were only three steps of open ground between the truck and the farmhouse, and she was through them before she even knew she’d made them.

Nothing appeared to happen. There were no new holes in the pickup door, and Wilde’s charge forward had ended with him sliding on his belly to fetch up behind one of the meagre earthwork-and-sandbag arrangements they’d set up around the yard, alongside Deacon.

“…Wills, where are ya?” Wilde asked after a moment.

“North end, behind the tractor. Can’t see him.”

“Hodder?”

“I’m in the barn. Got a good view of the field, no target yet.”

“Guess I’m headin’ out there, then,” Wilde told him. “Rees, Hayes. Out the van and back me up.” He squirmed forward around the earthwork and crawled forward until he was able to drop down into a ditch that ran around the farm’s perimeter, and Marty lost sight of him.

She retreated upstairs to track their movements via radio, and inwardly cursed whoever had neglected to think of putting a Flycatcher drone or something like it in the lifeboats. That one was definitely getting stressed in her debrief.

Interminable, indeterminate time passed, marked here and there by terse updates as the marines co-ordinated a glacially slow manhunt through the long grass. It came to an end with heart-stopping suddenness—the crack of gunfire, the squelching thump of a pulse gun firing three times, another burst of human weaponry. Silence.

“Hostiles serviced.”

“‘Drones?”

“Yep. Four of ‘em. Wills, Reesy, get up the hill there to the north, watch the fields.”

Marty got on the radio. “Patel. Keep the lights out, but see if you can patch that new generator into our forcefields. I’d like to have some real shields before the sun comes up.”

“Aye ma’am.”

“Rest of you get yourselves under cover,” Wilde ordered. Seconds later, the SOR’s techs bustled into the farmhouse from their respective hidey-holes. There was some nervous chattering, some laughter, and a few jokes.

Wilde sauntered in about twenty minutes later. His gear was muddy from crawling through a ditch and a field and he’d stuck a long grass stalk in his mouth, but he looked pleased with himself.

“That was fun,” he commented in a way which left it totally unclear whether or not he was being sarcastic.

“All clear?” Marty asked him

“Aye, for now. Hope Patel works some magic with those shields though. Or better yet, that Big Hotel have bigger things to worry about than us lot.”

He laid a rifle on the table. “This is a bit annoying, mind.”

“What is it?”

“It’s what our friend in the field shot me with.” He laid his own weapon next to it. The two looked practically identical. “Our own fucking weapons,” he commented. “Perfect carbon copy. Look, it’s even got ‘HK’ and ‘A3’ on the upper receiver.”

“Who says they’re copies?”

Wilde sniffed. “Well if this was made on Earth I’m gonna find out how it got here and kick whatever bastard’s responsible right in the balls.”

“I was thinking it might have been on a Caledonia lifeboat,” Marty told him. “Two of them still haven’t reported in.”

“…Shit. Mind you, his mates only had pulse. If this came off a lifeboat, I’d expect more than one.”

“Which means there are probably more groups out there.” Marty sighed and grabbed the longwave radio. “I’d better alert the other boats.”

“Guess we’re in for a long night.” Wilde rolled his shoulders and headed for the stack of ration boxes. “Cuppa?”

Marty nodded at him and set about contacting the other survivors. She was due a sitrep anyway, and she needed to report this incident back to Stainless.

When Wilde put a mug down next to her a few minutes later, she barely noticed.

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Timothy “Tiny” Walsh

Getting Vemik drunk had turned out to be exactly as awesome as Walsh had dreamed. It had sure as shit gone some way to restoring Vemik’s usual bounce and vigor, at least—he’d spent the evening bouncing from place to place cooing curiously about everything. Especially how beer was made and also glass because glass beer bottles were really interesting and—

…And quite abruptly, he’d fallen asleep. Upright and bouncing to curled up between some tree roots and snoring in, oh…twenty seconds?

All of the Ten’Gewek turned out to be lightweights. Though, considering their only brush with alcohol was whatever they got from slightly over-ripe fruit Walsh couldn’t exactly blame them. Even Yan had been wobbling, slurring and doing his unconvincing best to remain dignified and respectable after a couple of bottles.

But, the day was up and they had a lot to do. Tribal life didn’t stop just because the world had nearly ended, and the women and children still needed food, which was why Vemik got a wake-up kick to the leathery sole of his foot…or was that the palm? Damn opposable-toe ape feet.

The young alien made a lengthy, pained noise and curled up tighter.

“C’mon, Sky-Thinker. Y’ain’t dead.”

Vemik groaned. “…You are sure?”

“Dead folks don’t talk to me much, in my experience.” Walsh gave him another ‘gentle’ toe-nudge to get him moving. “Up. You just need water.”

“I need quiet,” Vemik disagreed, though he rolled over and sat up, squinting and shielding his eyes from the rising sun. “…And dark.”

“Water,” Walsh repeated. “Trust me. Don’t make me pick you up and dump you in the river…”

Vemik groaned again, but levered himself laboriously upright—or as close as Ten’Gewek ever got to upright, anyway—and spat into the grass. Even that modest amount of exercise seemed to give him a boost though, because he cleared his throat, looked around more clearly and sharpened into the here and now.

“…Jooyun warned me of this. He call it ‘Hangover.’ Said it was the Taking to balance the Giving the night before.”

Walsh handed him his canteen. “Usually worth it, once it’s faded. How many did you have?”

“I had more than Yan!” Vemik said proudly. “Three!”

Walsh grinned as the younger man unscrewed the top. Apparently the Ten’Gewek system was extremely sensitive to booze. “A whole three, huh?”

“I am…” Vemik grunted and swigged from the canteen, “…a man of my tribe. Strong!”

“Hey, no arguing that, bud! C’mon, moving helps. We’ll go clean up our mess.”

There was a lot of it. Two or three Werne had fed last night’s feast, plus a handful of root-birds and other critters Walsh couldn’t name. A few people were still asleep wherever they’d happened to be sitting, and the sounds of the village waking up had a more sluggish quality than usual.

There was quite a pile of beer bottles near the fire. And Yan, who was probably in just as much pain as Vemik right now and doing a better job of pretending he wasn’t. He was expertly doing something useful with the leftovers—the People didn’t waste food, if they could help it.

“Sky-Thinker. Big-Tiny.”

Those four words of greeting seemed to exhaust him for conversation, so Walsh clapped him affably on the shoulder and started gathering up the glass.

“These are useful so you should probably peel off the label and keep ‘em.”

“Daniel says they break, make sharp edge.”

“They can, yeah. But I reckon they’re tougher than your pottery. Plus they won’t leak, and they never hold a flavor from anything. Easy to clean, too.”

“Flavor of old bowl best bit!” Yan declared. “…Unless go bad.”

“Heh. Have you had water? It makes the headache go away.”

“Made dry mouth go away too.” Yan neatly ran his knife down a rib to clean off the last of the meat. “Need more for stew.”

“Wait,” Walsh laughed. “More water, or more beer?”

“…Cook with beer?” Yan grimaced. “Taste nice, but…”

“The alcohol’s the bit that ruined your morning. It cooks off when you get beer hot.”

“Al-co-hol,” Vemik repeated carefully. “Means—?” he paused, squinted at Walsh, then sagged. “I ask Jooyun later.”

“Ask me what?”

Walsh turned. Julian looked like he’d been awake for a couple of hours, and was fresher-looking than he had been in days, too. Sometime during the morning he’d found time to bathe, shave and change into some clean shorts. He had a towel over his shoulder and was still drying out, but he looked sharp.

The towel, for some reason, had the words “hoopy frood” embroidered in large, friendly letters in the corner. Walsh had no idea why.

“Vemik wants a Barney-style explanation of what alcohol is.”

“Oh, Christ,” Julian shook his head and chuckled softly. “Now there’s a loaded concept. Tiny, should we properly introduce alcohol to the natives?”

“You’re askin’ me? ‘Cuz of course my answer is hell yeah.”

Julian shook his head and chuckled in that gentle way of his. “So racist.”

“I watched you down seven beers last night in less than an hour, bruh. That makes you, like, at least half oppressor.”

“You should see my girlfriends.”

Poor Vemik looked positively crestfallen—literally. His crest actually drooped, just a little. “No answer?” he asked plaintively.

“It’s one’a those things that’s a few branches up the tree, Sky-Thinker,” Julian told him. “Also, alcohol burns, and explodes sometimes. And it can kill you, too.”

“Maybe not all Sky-Person things are for us,” Yan decided, gruffly. “I think this alcohol…not for us.”

“Man, there go my dreams of drunken cavemonkey shenanigans,” Walsh lamented.

“Stick to dreaming-root and magic powder instead,” Vemik agreed.

“But we literally civilized ourselves so we could make more beer. That’s gotta be worth something!”

“Daniel always telling us, do things how we do things. Not have to do things how you do things. Otherwise, what different?” Yan shrugged.

“Definitely. Don’t write it completely off, though.” Julian advised. “It’s worth knowing. Even if you don’t drink it.”

“What for?”

“Medicine, food preservation. You can make paints and dyes, clean metal, clean out wounds so they don’t rot, all sorts of things.”

Yan and Vemik shared a look, Yan’s tail twitched, and that seemed to count for a whole conversation. The Given-Man shrugged and returned to his cooking. “Need herbs for stew,” he said. “And roots. Vemik know kind.”

That ended that conversation. Walsh and Julian exchanged a silent face-conversation of their own, again punctuated by shrugs, and Julian nodded.

“Okay. Lemme grab some stuff and I’ll go with,” he said.

The two humans wandered back toward their own end of the camp and left Vemik alone with Yan. Walsh checked over his shoulder and sure enough as soon as they were out of earshot the two Ten’Gewek got to chatting.

Too bad Daar wasn’t around. He could’ve heard every word from a distance. Walsh would’ve killed to hear what they were talking about.

Oh well.

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

“…I don’t like this *‘beer,’*” Yan confessed.

“It felt nice last night…” Vemik ventured.

“So does a woman, and I didn’t get one last night because I was too…beered.”

“Dwunk,” Vemik corrected him, then corrected himself. ”…Drunk.” Vemik paused, then trilled. “Wait! Did mighty Yan Given-Man fail to Give it good and hard?”

Vemik knew what was coming, and tried to skip out of Yan’s reach…to no avail. Almost before he could even blink Yan was sitting on his waist and pinning him to the ground with his full weight. Vemik couldn’t even breathe, it hurt so much.

“Are you volunteering?” Yan trilled, with maybe a little more malicious satisfaction than usual. Even pain-headed from beer and early in the morning, he was still the fastest and strongest man Vemik had ever known.

Vemik shook his head vehemently, and Yan blinked then sighed and rolled off. “Sorry,” he said, helping Vemik to his feet. Yan was like that, all angry power one second and then almost as gentle as a Dancer afterwards.

Vemik felt he’d crossed a magic line himself. “It was a mean joke.”

“…Funny though,” Yan relented. He hauled Vemik off his feet in a crushing bearhug, affectionate this time but still painfully inescapable. “But don’t make a habit of jokes like that. Can turn to a bad Taking.”

That was fatherly advice. Not something Yan made a habit of, usually…

“Yes, Yan.” They pulled apart and looked at the neater pile of beer bottles. “It’s interesting. Jooyun and Wawsh…very different ideas about beer.”

“Walsh likes to have fun,” Yan said sagely. He almost managed to hide his smirk. “But maybe, we be careful about beer. Alcohol. Whatever. Feels like tricky magic.”

That wasn’t rejection, Vemik noted. It was just…caution. And caution was usually wise, so Vemik decided he could live with that.

“Okay.”

“You should get ready,” Yan returned to his stew. “Long day ahead.”

“But shorter than the ones before,” Vemik guessed.

“They always are, Sky-Thinker,” Yan sighed. “They always are.”

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.

Yeego, Clanless

Everything was fucked, and they knew it was fucked. That was the start.

An enterprising male like Yeego thrived in situations like that. While everyone else was running around with their tails on fire, Yeego had sat down and…thought. Carefully.

Life crystallized into simple facts. Facts like which courses of action were more likely to result in survival, both in the short term and the long term. Which was the foundation of all civilization, of course…and therein lay his course of action.

If the civilization that had permitted his own livelihood was collapsing around their ears, then they needed a new civilization. They needed stability, leadership, somebody who could fill them with confidence that tomorrow was going to have water, food, and willing females in it. Gaoians who didn’t have those things would swiftly abandon all pretense of civilized behavior until they were either dead, or had secured them.

Problem the first: Yeego wasn’t exactly a fighter. He had his share of duelling scars, but he was a silverfur—distinguished and handsome to look at but not of much use in the mud and the rain. Solution: find some big tough lump and sweet-herb his way into friendship.

Easier said than done. As it turned out, even in a crisis people weren’t inclined to feel well-disposed toward their landlord. Especially not one as wealthy as Yeego. Never mind that he’d earned all that money and property honestly and over long years, the Clanless didn’t like paying rent, and thus didn’t like they guy they paid it to.

He did have a very defensible estate, however. With its own water, power, plenty of room to build, high solid perimeter walls and a warren of basements. All apparently quite ancient, but Yeego would be nutless before he lived in anything that lacked for modern conveniences.

In the end, an offer of food and shelter won over the locals. A tomorrow with water and food in it, as promised.

Problem the second: Figuring out why some of their colleagues had gone completely Keeda-fuck crazy and started killing folks. That one was…vexing. Nobody credible had any idea, and the only ones who claimed to know were the real dropouts, the mangy lank-furred losers who wasted their lives on the datasphere dreaming of a real female’s touch.

But they were the only ones who’d ventured an idea: Implants. Could be translators, could be cybernetic memory or logic boosters, could be systems interface implants…the dropouts all babbled about conspiracy theories and why the Humans had been so reluctant to adopt cybernetics.

Why hadn’t the Humans shared that concern, then? They seemed like lousy allies.

For lack of any other kind of an explanation, he’d run with that idea. The farmers, laborers and working-class Clanless had pounced on anything to blame for the chaos swirling around them, especially when it came from a suave and successful silverfur rather than some lank-eared loser.

Dismayingly, it appeared that their crazed idea might actually be the truth.

Problem the third: they had to defend the property. That meant Yeego needed to learn the rudiments of such…uncivilized work, and learn them quickly. There were a great many Clanless out there, all clamoring for access to the resources Yeego’s estate promised and most, if admitted, would contribute nothing or worse than nothing. His fledgling pseudo-Clan’s territory could not admit an unlimited number of newcomers.

Force—It all came down to force. What stopped the desperate and thirsty from rushing his gates? Force, or the threat of it. What kept his new “Clan” in line and made them contribute to the greater good, or dissuaded them from complaining about their ration payments? The threat of being forced to leave and rejoin the hapless mob outside.

Really, Gaoians weren’t so civilized at all, when it came down to it.

Problem the fourth…naming his new Clan. An identity was vital, for cohesion and loyalty if nothing else. Once the immediate survival challenges were overcome, long-term prosperity would hinge on their sense of group-belonging.

All good things in time. There were more pressing concerns.

Concerns like the Clanless outside his fiefdom complaining of having lost some of their number to an attack by unknown forces wielding alien weapons.

“What do they mean by ‘unknown,’ exactly?”

Yeego had acquired a seneschal of sorts, Tuygen. In fact Tuygen was a Goldpaw associate, a skinny wheaten toothpick of a property surveyor and a highly-educated expert in the value of land and the common laws of ownership. Passing on the reports from the walls and gate checkpoint was a jarring change from his previous work. “The shots seemed to come from a great distance,” he explained. “Nobody saw or smelled the shooters, nobody is certain where the shots came from, and they’re all too scared to go out there and check.”

“What about our people? Could we send somebody out to scent the area? This happened…when? This morning?”

“Yes, Yeego. During a rain shower.”

Yeego grimaced. It would take a truly legendary nose to even identify any scent laid down in the rain, let alone track it.

“So what you’re telling me is, there is no evidence at all.”

“No, Yeego. There’s evidence, it’s just…hard to believe. The victims weren’t killed by pulse weaponry, you see…they were killed by fast-moving kinetic projectiles.”

“Kinetic…like during the Clan wars a few hundred years ago?”

“More advanced than that, Yeego,” Tuygen replied. “I had one of the bodies brought inside. Seymi retrieved these…fragments.”

He handed over a small transparent plastic bag. Yeego studied its contents without opening it and sniffed. If this thing was a kinetic projectile, it seemed like it must be a nasty one—The bag was full of tiny jagged fragments that between them couldn’t have assembled something bigger than his thumb-claw, and he could see immediately that the disintegrated shards would be far deadlier than a simple sharp, solid penetrator.

“I assume,” he said, feigning calm, “that our ‘experts’ have something to say on this?”

He’d hired the most…enthusiastic datasphere-dwellers. The ones who’d had the most to say on the subject of implants and so on. They’d turned out to be right about the implants, after all…

“I asked them. They…think it might be a Human weapon, Yeego.”

“…And we’re certain of our friend Dinso?”

“His message didn’t leave much room for interpretation,” Tuygen duck-nodded. “Humans are ransacking Yi-Jan Township.”

“Ransacking,” Yeego repeated skeptically. It seemed an unlikely word—Yeego had got where he was in life on the back of a keen instinct for sniffing out people’s motives, and there simply wasn’t a compelling reason why a force of Humans might ransack anything on Gao, let alone a tiny farming township too insignificant to even have a permanent Clan presence. Yi-Jan was little more than a couple of farmer’s workhouses and the handful of services the workhouses needed.

But if there were Humans in the area and a Human weapon really had been used to murder Clanless refugees outside his own gates…At the very least, the threat loomed that the desperate mob might do something foolish.

Best see what all the trouble was about. Leaders needed to lead, after all.

“…Vehicles,” he ordered.

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Brother Fiin of Clan Stoneback

Finally being able to shed the too-heavy mantle of Champion-In-Stead should have been a relief. In reality, it was terrifying to see exactly what kind of a creature the male whose pawprints he’d been walking in really was.

Daar was The End. He was pure anger given fur, claws, teeth and a city full of foes to destroy.

Any Stoneback Brother could tear through biodrones with well-practiced ability, and Fiin had lost count of how many he had personally put down…but Daar was on another plane of skill, backed with a body no Gaoian—and only a tiny pawful of Humans—came even close to matching. It was like the old days and the old stories. He was a force of nature as the Humans said, and nothing the biodrones could do offered the barest hint of effective resistance to him. The ‘drones and all their devices fell before him like grain before the harvester.

Yet despite his awesome lethality he killed with absolute economy; maybe a triple-shot burst with his weapon or a swipe across a throat without even pausing to finish the job. He instinctually knew when a target was destroyed and just let them bleed out. He’d move on, servicing more without a bound of space between.

One moment he could be a charging hammer-blow, the next a twisting, flowing acrobat moving from twopaw to fourpaw and back again, all without any hitch or clumsiness. Where there were too many to personally service, he simply bowled right through them, killing them with his sheer size and strength. Where they were too spread out to personally destroy, his enormous body would weave from cover to cover almost too fast to track, led by the sharp staccato punch of his Human-made machine gun.

He even managed to practically explode one especially unfortunate biodrone with a rear kick that raked his claws up its belly and left guts flung across the gutter.

Fiin found himself very grateful for all the grueling and repetitive training Tyal had put the Fangs through before the end. Keeping up with Daar was more physically and emotionally draining than anything Fiin had ever experienced, including the Third Ring and the Final Rite. The fight went on and on and the enemies kept coming, each painful step forward brutal and bloody, until at last they were all dead and Daar had slaughtered a mountain of corpses, one which Fiin’s entire Claw had barely managed to match.

When the killing had finally stopped, and the subway station was properly secured, only then did Daar, Champion of Stoneback, deign to lift his helmet and take in the scene. His eyes were shining with the slaughter. It wasn’t joyful, and it wasn’t angry. It was something horribly both at once.

“We have minutes at most,” he announced. It wouldn’t be long before the ‘drones regrouped and re-attacked. “Collapse the tunnels.”

Fiin moved to obey. Anything to get out of Daar’s terrible presence.

The ground fighting in Lavmuy was chaos on a scale he’d never dreamed of seeing. Every building that wasn’t actually a blazing pillar of flame and smoke or a collapsed field of rubble was a knot of either the hungry and desperate unaugmented, or the blank-faced ruthless augmented ‘zombies’. Half the time both groups were liable to shoot on sight.

It wasn’t like the first day of the war. Anybody who’d made it this far had reverted to Clannish instincts at their most feral, trusting only their closest brothers to help them stay alive in a world where everybody else seemed to want them dead. Fiin’s Growl was missing several patches of paint despite its small-arms shielding. There were a surprising number of gauss, firearm and plasma weapons out there.

High-powered kinetic pulse was a recent development and entirely dangerous, the Dominion’s answer to Humans and insurgent Hunters. Daar in that miracle suit of his might be able to shrug it off, but not even a full-blooded Stoneback was going to come out of it well if they took a bad hit. Three from Fiin’s Fang were out of the fight with broken limbs and punctured lungs. One more was dead, and the culprit hadn’t been a biodrone, oh no. It had been a building full of dehydrated, panicking Clanless salary workers who’d managed to somehow arm themselves, and had rained a remarkably accurate volley down on the Stonebacks from their lofty position.

Daar had responded by flattening the building.

Granted, the Humans had done the actual flattening—a pair of dart-shaped fighter craft had thundered in and raked the building with bullets that tore its facade to shreds and collapsed any forcefields the occupants might have erected in the instant before a missile plunged into the tower’s innards and broke its back. Once the collapse was over, there had been nothing left but a twisted pile of steel, glass and concrete, and a dust cloud that lingered for two hours.

The Humans had done all that in seconds…But it had been at Daar’s command. He hadn’t even flinched, just moved on to the next thing that attracted his wrath.

All for this. The metro system was a vital line of communication that the Hierarchy were using to move their forces around unmolested by human air support, orbital weapons and indirect fire. Those tunnels made taking the city a near-impossible task and they were in the first-tier circle of concerns for both Grandfather Garl and Champion Daar.

Stoneback would take and hold Lavmuy no matter the cost, and make it the first major base of operations in the war to retake Gao. Fortunately, the biodrones seemed amateurish where ground tactics were concerned. That was possibly because the infosphere was in lockdown by Longear and operating in a special emergency services mode only; Fiin wasn’t privy to the complete details. That seemed to be limiting the control their Hierarchy masters could wield, and that was perhaps the only small advantage Fiin’s Fang had in this terrible mess.

And it wasn’t like Daar’s tactic was pointlessly destructive. A few judicious demolition actions in theory served the double purpose of securing the Clan’s own hold on the city, but if the biodrones were too slow to see the danger then they might even corrale a significant enemy force. Or, who knew, maybe even trap them entirely and leave thousands of biodrones to expire in the dark behind impenetrable tonnes of rubble.

None of that stopped him from growling happily when the building came down.

“Fiin.”

The Champion was cleaning his claws. It wasn’t a fastidious gesture but a practical one—they were caked in gore, and needed to be clean to work at their best. But he was doing it while aiming a look in Fiin’s direction that clearly said ‘get yer tail over here right now.’

Fiin obeyed, with a degree of hesitation. Daar absolutely reeked of dominance and aggression.

“I ain’t got time for a timid ‘Back, Fiin.”

Stung by an exact echo of the words Tyal had once spoken to him, Fiin straightened up and bustled to his Champion’s side.

“…Yes, my Champion?”

That drew a sigh and some of the tension flowed out of Daar’s body.

“You have a deal with the Straightshields,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact.

“Yes?”

“…Your contact was a Hierarchy agent.”

“…I didn’t know.”

In a moment so fast and stunningly violent that Fiin couldn’t even hope to keep up, Daar grabbed him and took a single, deep sniff. This seemed to satisfy him, because he let the younger male go almost immediately.

“…You smell as honest as a ‘Back should, at least,” he allowed.

Fiin resolutely refused to acknowledge the implied insult and the lingering pain in his neck where the Champion’s arm had dug in, beyond shaking himself as he straightened up. “…Did I do something wrong, Champion?”

“How much did you tell him?”

“Nothing. All he ever asked me to do was report any criminal activity within the Clan if I saw it. I saw no harm in agreeing because…well, we’re Stonebacks! If one of our Brothers was breaking the law, we’d all pounce on him. Right?”

“And if he’d asked for more than that?”

“I would have taken it straight to Father Tyal.”

Daar huffed and shook out his neck, then scratched at the top of his head. “…Yeah, I know. I just needed you to say it. An’ I’m sorry.”

“The Clan comes first.”

“Yeah. It does. Thing is though, my concerns lately are more than Clan.” He watched Fiin’s brothers laying the charges for a second then growled. “You were there when Tyal was killed. Garl thinks it mighta gone different if the young pup hadn’t dug his claws in an’ argued so much, so what happened?”

“…I think he’s probably right,” Fiin confessed. The fate of his brothers and of Mother Ayma had been weighing on his conscience.

“Why?”

Fiin had learned much about controlling his body language over the years since his induction into the Clan, which was why he successfully resisted the urge to fidget or scratch at his ears as he thought. He just paused, and allowed the words to assemble themselves before he spoke them.

“…I gotta face facts,” he said. “I’m good at what I do. Tyal picked me into the Clan for a reason. I passed the Rings quick, got big quick, became a Fang leader young. I guess I got so used to knowing I’m good at this stuff that I forgot how to know when I’m not.”

This got a humorless chitter out of Daar. “Humility ain’t a ‘Back’s strength, Brother Fiin. It’s good you got it, I know I don’t. But…now I gotta ask, ‘cuz this part’s important. You gonna fuck up again?”

“…The best I can promise is that I won’t if I can help it. And I’ll never fuck up the same way twice.”

“Good. We live through this, I’ll share some truly epic fuckups of mine that’d make Keeda’s nuts crawl up his ass.”

Fiin couldn’t help himself and chittered slightly at the imagery. Daar favored him with the ghost of an amused look before his expression of break-everything focus returned. “But now ain’t the time,” he said. “I got something else buggin’ me. You’re afraid of me. All of you are. I can smell it.”

“You’re terrifying,” Fiin told him, simply and truthfully.

Daar betrayed no reaction to that statement. “I can’t have that from you, Fiin. I’ve already lost one good successor to exactly that, and I can’t help but wonder if that swipe at his self-confidence is the reason he’s dead now.”

“…I promise this, Champion—I don’t lack for confidence. It’s just that I never considered myself your equal in the first place, while Tyal fancied himself your eventual replacement. He was wrong. Me, I’m gonna strive for seeing reality.”

“Good.” Daar duck-nodded. “Don’t underestimate ‘yerself but don’t be deluded, either. Give it time…Anyway. I am sorry I ever doubted you, Fiin. You ain’t gotta fear a Fyu-damned thing from me. Just do your job, lead like ‘yer meant to.”

Fiin politely disagreed with a respectful shimmy of his head. “Right now? I’d rather be following somebody who scares me. I think scary is what we need to make it through this.”

Daar didn’t say anything, just stood there lost in thought. Presently one of Fiin’s Brothers approached respectfully. “The charges are set, Fangleader. Champion,” he nodded at Daar. “Set like you taught us.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” Daar replied, sternly. “Everyone withdraw to the rally point!” Daar favored them with the single most fearsome, toothy grin Fiin had ever seen, re-seated his helmet, and led the charge back up the stairs.

From street level, the demolition was beyond impressive. As soon as the charges went off the entire street rippled like a Nava grub on the verge of splitting open, then fell into itself, sinking into a trench that dropped the fronts of several glass-fronted shops and offices. Several severed water pipes and sewers started to drain their contents into the newly-dug channel, and if Fiin was any judge the whole street would be a filthy, stinking bog of a canal in a couple of days, assuming the water pressure stayed up.

“…Not bad.” There were voice ports in Daar’s helmet which did little to mask his feral growl. They didn’t have much time, though, because the ‘drones reacted instantly to the tactical change, and started boiling out of buildings exactly like one of those Human horror films. There were so many they almost moved like a fluid.

Daar gave them a steady look and audibly sniffed through his mask, as though he was looking at a handful of vermin rather than a tide of mind-controlled berserkers. “Well, we got more important shit to do than slaughter ‘em all by claw,” he declared. “Mount up! On to the next job! We’ll roll right over ‘em!”

Fiin obeyed immediately, as did the rest of the Claw and shortly thereafter the rest of First Fang. In only a few heartbeats, almost two hundred of Stoneback’s finest had mounted their Growlers and proceeded along the egress path, grenades and kinetic pulse weapons blasting apart any resistance like the pitiful wall of bodies it was.

That gave Fiin a moment to reflect, while his driver and gunner thoroughly enjoyed themselves. And his Champion; he was practically wallowing in the bloodshed.

If Fiin was honest with himself…he was beginning to, as well.

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Timothy “Tiny” Walsh

The humans (and Daar) had set up camp a respectful distance from the Ten’Gewek village. Close, but far enough away for some privacy and to avoid loose talk around the fire at night from maybe causing problems with awkward questions in the morning.

Walsh liked their camp. Even though it was a camp, it was a clear reminder of which species was the more advanced. Synthetic fabrics, carbon-fiber rods and nylon rope were a heck of a lot different to the furs, leathers and wood used by Ten’Gewek. Then there was the photovoltaic tarp which still had a place in the era of forcefields—they didn’t need a kick-start of power to get them running, and they didn’t produce detectable emissions.

Metal cooking utensils, the weather station with its scientific instruments, and the music completed the impression. It was Professor Hurt’s turn to put on some tunes, and he’d elected to start the day gently with some Norah Jones. Not Walsh’s style usually, but he had to admit that her voice went well with breakfast.

Hurt was napping in a camp chair with a book over his face, and Coombes and Hoeff were probably off getting in their morning ablutions over at a nearby Yshek-free stretch of river.

All of which made for a good moment for Walsh to ask Julian something that had been tickling at him.

“…Hey. Question.”

Julian paused at nibbling his fingernail and shook the finger out. “Yeah?”

“D’you have this whole big feelin’ like… ’okay… now what?’ too?”

“…Yeah. Been thinkin’ about that a lot, actually.” Julian scratched at his head as they ambled towards their tents. “I mean…I gotta figger you fellas won’t be hanging around forever. Daniel’s great, but he’s not exactly an outdoors man…we gotta whip him in shape, too. And am I staying? What about the girls?”

“Shit, bruh.”

“Yeah.”

“Well…can I be honest?”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re totally gonna stay, bro.”

Julian half-turned to look at him with his head slightly on one side. “How d’you figure that?” he asked.

“The Air Force pays me for more than my dashing good looks, y’know.” Everybody kept forgetting that behind everything else, Walsh was intel.

“Yuh-huh. And your actual answer?”

“You’re giving off all sorts of microsign. Word use, man. You’re talking past the sale, like it’s a foregone conclusion you’re gonna be here for years. Why else you talk about we whipping our nutty professor into shape? And if I’m not mistaken,” He gave the campsite a good look, “I somehow doubt you’d have built out something this nice if you weren’t planning on staying.”

Julian stopped and Walsh watched him survey his own handiwork. The campsite was…

It was a Human campsite. The People knew living in the woods and in the wilderness because that was their daily life and they’d been doing it since probably before they were even properly sapient. They were good at it, but their approach was a way of life. There was a layer of tradition and ritual on top of everything that said they did a lot of what they did because that’s how they’d learned it. It was all correct of course, but…

But Julian had learned how to live in the wilderness as a citizen of a civilized nation, and blended that knowledge with what his grandparents’ people had taught him. Everything he did, he did because he knew exactly what and why he was doing it. The tools, the materials, the placement and layout, it was all more scientific. Not sterile or lacking in character, but different in character, in hundreds of small, barely-definable ways.

He seemed to get the point. “…I maybe didn’t need to build a shelf, I guess.”

“Yuh-huh. So really, way I look at it? You’ve got a culture that’s depending on you to guide them through this. That’s a hell of a fuckin’ burden but duty calls, and all that. You’ve got the prof to help but he needs you too; we gotta whip his ass into shape ‘cuz he’s gonna die of a heart attack if he’s not careful. And you gotta study.”

“Gotta whip my ass into shape, too,” Julian grumbled. “And that still doesn’t fix the girlfriend problem.”

“Nah, it does. They’ll be on-board, trust me. Besides…we have a jump portal here, and Colonel Jackson’s gonna be deploying a system shield pretty quick, so…”

“…So, don’t worry about it?” Julian seemed incredulous.

“Nah man, just stop assumin’ like you gotta do this all on your own. ‘Cuz you’re not gonna, bro!” That seemed like a good time to pull the shorter man into a crushing sideways hug.

“Okay,” Julian said once he’d managed squirm out from under Walsh’s arm and come up for air. “So, again…what now?”

“Realistically? We’re prob’ly gonna be here for a while, ‘cuz SOR ain’t gonna be re-deploying us until they got a better mission. That’s maybe gonna be, like, a year or more away.”

“Wait, really?”

Julian crossed his big arms and tilted his head, which Walsh knew was one of those subconsciously dominant postures he’d recently favored. Julian was a rare man; he had no real idea how dangerous he was nor how much his body language telegraphed it.

If they had time some day, maybe Walsh would teach him the fundamentals of body language. Julian was a newly-big dude who still carried himself like a smaller man; he tended to posture himself to ward off attention in a friendly sort of way, which worked just fine when he wasn’t unintentionally looming about. Now those same habits could seem aggressive to people who didn’t know him, or at least impressively intimidating.

That was only a problem when he was stressed out, though. Tensed up, Julian moved an awful lot like a big predatory cat, and it was unnerving. Relaxed…he was much more like a lazy wolf who wanted belly rubs. Walsh just needed to get him to unwind.

And with Julian, the best possible way to do that was with honest, relentless optimism.

“Schyeah! With Gao and all that they’ve got their hands full and they’re gonna be full for a long damn time. They’ll want this system on fuckin’ lockdown too, and I bet they’ll want explorers for the surrounding star systems…”

Sometimes it was good to drop a little hint about what the future might hold, and if Walsh was perfectly honest with himself, it was maybe a teensy bit manipulative. But to be fair, it did at least have the advantage of being the likely truth…even if he would need to suggest it to his chain of command and encourage the correct outcome.

Julian took the bait and pondered that possibility, which seemed to take a little worry off his mind. “That’d be…nice. Still, we’d need to do all sorts of prep, I gotta worry about—”

More distraction.

“Nah, one step at a time, bro. First, we make Yan’s stew—”

“Heh. Yan can cook.”

“…I feel like I missed something.”

“Old TV show my gran’ma loved. Older’n me. Anyway after we’ve done with that, then what?”

“Well,” Walsh felt a little off-kilter for a moment. “Okay. Next, we’re gonna laze about for a while and answer all of Vemik’s questions. Day of rest and all that. And then, I’m gonna put both our asses through the wringer. Good stress relief!”

Julian actually seemed to like the notion of a good, solid weight session, and if Walsh were honest, he did too. But Julian still wasn’t happy. “…And after that?”

“We take it as it comes. You need to get stronger? No prob, we’ll get’chu fuckin’ beastly, you just tell us when to stop. Smarter? Dude, tell me the Prof ain’t chompin’ at the bit to fill your head with all sorts of cool stuff. Hell, I’ll be right there with you for all of that, man!”

“Allison and Xiù…”

“Them too! Duude,” Walsh chuckled and shook his head, “You really don’t know how fuckin’ valuable you three are, do you? Man, people are gonna bend over fuckin’ backwards to make this work, ‘cuz you three have drive and talent, the locals trust and respect you, and nobody anywhere doubts you can get the mission done. Don’t worry, man! Shit’s gonna work out, You’ll see.”

Julian still seemed a little skeptical and resumed his defensive posture. Oh well, Walsh had said what he could. Best to leave it be.

“Alright bro. It’s cool. But honestly? If life’s taught me anything it’s that you gotta go with the flow, dude. Only thing you can do right now is…what you can do.”

That probably wasn’t what Julian was looking for. Walsh could tell he really didn’t like the massive cloud of uncertainty that hung over his future, and if his suspicions were right, a big part of that was his girls’ futures as well.

But that was how things had to be. No point worrying about the future when the future was so precariously in the balance. The least Walsh could do is help him prepare.

He slapped the big woodsman on his shoulder. “C’mon, man. Dwelling on shit’ll just make you die younger. Sooner we get Yan’s stuff, the sooner we eat and the sooner we get to lift.”

That seemed to get at least a sideways grin from him. They wandered back toward Yan’s fire together, and Vemik was already there, bouncing about and ready with Julian’s lab-in-a-pack.

“Samples!” the young man declared happily, his hangover apparently forgotten.

Julian chuckled. “Okay, Sky-Thinker. But we’re getting wet today. I want samples from the river.”

Vemik pulled the best disgusted face that Ten’Gewek could, considering they didn’t have a nose to wrinkle. “River? Wet, muddy, full of Yshek and sickness,” he said.

“And fish. Good source of food, fish,” Walsh added. Vemik’s tongue lashed—a human would have blown a raspberry.

“Sickness is a good reason to study it,” Julian said, in the calm way he did when talking to the excitable young alien. “You can learn a lot from studying sickness.”

“Like?” Vemik asked, skeptically.

“Like how to cure it,” Julian replied. “Come on…”

Walsh chuckled and fell into a slow rolling step behind the two. He had a soft spot for the Misfit scientist and his cavemonkey Igor, but the life of training and protecting a researcher wasn’t for him.

He was thinking about the future, and he was pretty sure of exactly two things. One: This JETS team was done. Daar was gone and almost definitely not coming back, and if the war on Gao didn’t shake shit up to the point where recruitment to the SOR went skyrocketing, he’d let Firth kick him in the balls.

That meant more JETS members, which meant the current members would end up with increased seniority, maybe training roles. All for the good…but that wasn’t Walsh’s style.

Which meant thing number two that he was certain of: the second he got off this planet, Walsh was going back on the Crue-D, and back into the HEAT pipeline.

And this time, he was gonna fuckin’ well finish it.

Date Point: 14y3d AV
The Jitney, somewhere above the northern plains, Planet Gao

Technical Sergeant John “Baseball” Burgess

“So when LT said *‘retrieve the Champions for a strategic meeting’*…”

“He meant them an’ a buncha other guys as well,” Firth nodded. “Figgers Champions wouldn’t go nowhere in times like this without their buddies.”

“Be glad so many of them are still alive,” Regaari told them, flatly. He’d been in a morbid mood for two days, but as much as they were all worried for him there wasn’t a lot anyone could do. ‘Horse was adamant that the healthiest thing for Dexter right now was to keep him busy, and Regaari seemed to know it too—even in-flight he was constantly reviewing intel reports, combining the data that flowed to him from both the FIC high above and the ground intel from Human and Gaoian sources alike.

He was going to fall apart if that kept up forever, but they were all there for him. He’d keep it together long enough, Burgess was certain of it.

There were a lot of Gaoians on the Jitney. Champion Reeko, the Straightshield, was easily the most imposing of them. He was tall, stately, and looked like the kind of person who’d carefully and painstaking researched humor and then decided it wasn’t for him. His Brothers had similarly serious ears and the rigid posture that said there was a pole so far up their ass it was tickling their breakfast. They did not, apparently, trust Humans.

The Goldpaw Champion was every Hollywood stereotype about a medieval spice merchant all at once, and even in the middle of a crisis he was flaunting his Clan’s wealth by wearing it. It was like running into a playboy white kid with a Patek Philippe watch buying blow on the corner of ‘Base’s old neighborhood, except somehow less classy. Even his whiskers had precious metal braided into them.

…Okay, the whiskers were fuckin’ boss. He wasn’t about to admit that to Titan, though.

Titan was less than amused. He was a Japanese fireplug of a bro whose family had clawed their way up from poverty on the back of all their hard work. He was, in his own way, the hardest motherfucker John had ever known, and there weren’t much that he hated more than a Jive-ass motherfucker fronting it for all he was worth.

Watching Champion Reeko attempt to pry any bit of intel out of Adam was probably the most entertaining thing John was gonna see for a long time.

Then there were the Firefangs. Champion Halti, and Grandfather Ruuli. Neither was in any mood to speak with a human at all, and ‘Base almost couldn’t blame them. Their clan had been hit harder than any other by this war, first losing the great bulk of their Brother pilots to implants, and then watching as the fleet massacred those lost Brothers. By all accounts the brief high-speed knife fight between Firefang strike fighters and the 946th had been…ugly.

Human ships held a strong hand. The pilots were tougher, stronger, could handle G-forces that’d straight break a Gaoian. They had the edge in reaction speeds and the Firebird itself stacked up well against whatever it was that the Clan preferred to fly. When it came to straight-line acceleration the Firebird won by a wide margin, which meant they ruled the kinetic energy advantage.

Still. Gaoian tech was a long way ahead of where humanity was at. Probably the only reason the fight hadn’t been an order of magnitude nastier for the 946th was that the war—and intel gathered from a captured Igraen source—was highlighting an important difference between different “grades” of biodrone. Most were being controlled via a civilian implant suite—translators, cybernetic memory, that kind of thing—which could certainly subsume their will and march their body around, but didn’t seem to retain full access to the host’s skills and abilities.

Those “zombie” drones might be sitting in a pilot’s chair, they might have access to the knowledge of how to fly…but they weren’t seasoned, experienced pilots. They had no ability to interpret their orders or employ tactical cunning. In the absence of which, the tech advantage was much less important.

Even so, the 946th had lost people. The only saving grace was that when a Firebird was destroyed, the pilot and WSO probably didn’t feel a thing.

John thought a peace offering was in order. He sidled up next to Regaari, “Yo, bro. Can I snag one of your rations?”

Regaari glanced up from the combined report he was assembling and snapped to the here-and-now with a blink. After a second to mentally replay the question he duck-nodded and gestured to his pack. “If you suddenly crave cod oil and liver, be my guest.”

John nodded and dug one of the meals out of Regaari’s pack, then ambled over towards Champion Halti, who recoiled subtly. John kneeled and offered the food. “Dex says it’s pretty good.”

Halti gave the foil pack a long and suspicious look before taking it off him. He probably hadn’t eaten in the last couple of days if ‘Base was any judge. If he had, he probably would have refused it.

He sat down and let the Gaoian eat. At least in the pressurized air that whole airline food thing applied, dulling the pungent fishy scent that Gaoians seemed to love so much.

It was hard to tell if it had a positive effect on Halti’s mood. Hopefully it did—when the world went to shit, sometimes it was the little pleasures that made the biggest difference. Murray had a story about UKSF training in the Brecon Beacons mountains when he’d got soaked to the skin in foggy weather, wound up on the very edge of collapse and a simple cup of cheap hot chocolate brewed from a thermal flask had been the difference between failure and selection.

Before long, though, the food was gone and Halti was delicately licking the oily gravy from his chops.

“We’ve got more, one for everyone.” Without needing to be prompted, each of the Whitecrest operators reached into their combat packs and fetched their meals.

Diplomacy wasn’t all that hard, really. Still, Halti in particular seemed to be a tough shell to crack through. He said a polite “thank you” and sat in silence, watching the sky roll by outside the Weaver’s tiny porthole windows.

‘Base could play that game just fine. He settled in and waited, going over a few things in his head he’d been wanting time to go over anyway.

He got what he was waiting for after about twenty minutes. Halti’s ears had flicked a few times, until he finally sat forward and spoke to him directly.

“You seem very…calm.”

“That’s my job,” Burgess told him, emerging from his thoughts with practiced seamlessness.

Halti scoffed and looked away. “I wonder how easy you would find your job if this was your homeworld…” he mused, and went silent again.

“Ain’t about findin’ my job easy, sir. It’s about doin’ it anyway, especially when it’s hard.”

Halti didn’t reply, and ‘Base gave up. Some people, you could extend the hand to them and they’d rather fall into the ravine than take it.

He only hoped that insular attitude wouldn’t cause trouble later on…

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.

Yeego, Clanless

“That’s the farm Dinso mentioned.”

Yeego stood up and got out a pair of optics to take a good long look at the farm in question. The whole area was glacial valley, wide and mostly flat with the occasional smooth roll to stop the terrain from being soporifically dull. The farmhouse was built on one such rise, just high enough above the surrounding fields that its occupants could survey their fields without difficulty.

The makeshift fortifications were obviously new. There were low walls of what looked like feed sacks or fertilizer bags, the farmhouse windows had all been filled in, and the whole property had a…prickly quality that Yeego didn’t normally associate with the agricultural life.

The bright yellow warning sign nailed to a tree probably wasn’t standard either. Yeego doubted that even the most fervently territorial farmers would be quite so aggressively defensive.

It read, in clear Gaori script: “Restricted area. Unauthorized approach will be met with lethal force.”

There were other markings below. Yeego couldn’t make sense of them, but if he had to guess he imagined that it was the same message repeated in a second language.

Below that, in smaller text, were the instructions. He scratched at his whiskers as he read them, then read them a second time. They weren’t difficult instructions, but…how to proceed?

Option the first: Turn around and return to the compound. Increase patrols around the treeline. Try to maintain order now that they knew there were armed Humans active in the area. Safest in the short term…too many volatile unknowns in the mid to long term, not least of which would be the accusations of cowardice from among his own ranks.

Option the second: Approach en masse…and get slaughtered, no doubt. Not truly an option, therefore.

Option the third: Follow the instructions on the sign. Approach alone and unarmed, and proceed to a spot that was still some considerable distance from the farm itself.

This was the option that posed the most personal danger to Yeego, but the known consequences of the other two options and the need to keep face in front of his followers made it also the one he was mostly likely going to have to take.

That settled it, really. If he was going to build a Clan, or at least a focus of stability in a world gone mad, he needed respect. Lose that, and the disillusioned Clanless would probably tear him apart anyway.

Tuygen cleared his throat. “I, ah…I heard that it is a Human tradition to use a white flag to indicate a desire for peaceful contact,” he suggested.

“It seems to me that too many people in our compound know a lot about Humans,” Yeego muttered.

“At least it’s proving useful?” Tuygen submitted.

Yeego sighed. “Any other useful nuggets?”

“…Don’t fight them. They’re stronger than you.”

Truly, a seneschal without peer. Yeego resisted the treacherous urge to flick his ear in irritation, and settled instead for grace and poise. “I will bear that in mind,” he replied. “Let’s find that white flag…”

In the end he made do with a dirty light gray tarpaulin. Hopefully it would look white enough, fluttering above his head on a pole. He borrowed a two-wheel vehicle from one of his scouts and kept his speed on the cautious side as he followed the route clearly laid out on the sign, until he reached the meeting spot.

He’d never met a human before. He’d seen them on the infosphere or broadcast media, but reality was something else, bringing with it the sheer impact of a deathworlder’s presence. There was nothing tangible about the sensation, just…an energy. He was looking at a being strong enough to rip his limbs off and crush his body accidentally and everything about the Human from his scent to his stance was a reminder of that fact.

This one was a robustly-built male burdened under a heavy-looking pile of combat equipment and armed with a black mechanical knot of a weapon which he leveled directly at Yeego’s chest.

“Halt!” he commanded. “Drop to your knees, paws behind your back!”

He stank of strength, authority and command, not to mention solvent, blood, mud and explosives. Disobeying an order like that from a being like that would have required Yeego to fight hard against his own instincts, and he’d already resolved that the best approach here was to let the Humans be in charge, for now.

Yeego was not, however, quite prepared for the indignity of being shoved face-down into the dirt and having something painful shoved against the back of his head.

Implants, he realized. The Human was scanning for implants, which dissipated his last lingering doubts over the advice he was getting from his “nerd squad” advisors.

He was, quite abruptly, let go and hauled unceremoniously to his feet. The human made sure he was upright and then backed off. It wasn’t a deferential or polite distance, but the room he needed to shoot if need be.

“Name,” he demanded.

Yeego flicked some dirt out of his chest fur and straightened. “Yeego.”

“Clan?”

“None. But I own a lot of land in the three valleys…including that farm.” Yeego indicated it with a tilt of his head.

“Why are you here?”

“I want answers, mostly. Some of our people were shot, using a weapon like that one.” Yeego indicated the Human’s rifle. “And your people have been scavenging from a township in the area. I’d like to know what’s going on before anything…unwise happens.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No. I’m not stupid. But my people are desperate, scared and under attack. I want to make sure they lash out in the correct direction, yes?”

The Human’s expression behind his dark glasses was unreadable, but after an uncomfortably long moment of silent scrutiny he stepped back again, turned aside and indicated with his head in a manner which unmistakably said ‘this way.’

Yeego duck-nodded and followed the road, aware of the fearsome weapon behind him every step of the way.

He glanced sideways at a rustle from the brush at the edge of the path. A second Human, hitherto invisible among the foliage, materialized from behind a bush. The message was clear: ‘You don’t know how many of us there are, but we’re watching. Behave.’

Nice of them to warn him.

He could vaguely remember the last time he’d visited this farm. It had been…what? Fifteen years? Seventeen? Animal fodder wasn’t the most glamorous side of agriculture, but it was a solid investment. Naxas would always need hay, after all. In some senses, not much had changed. The still buildings all appeared to be present. The tractor looked like a newer model and he was quite sure the cheap PV panels on the barn had been a later upgrade, but mostly the layout was the same if one ignored the Human fortifications and holes, or the way they’d methodically smashed every window to replace it with sandbags.

He was ushered into the farmhouse and up the stairs, where a Human female with bright gold head-fur gathered into a neat bun looked sharply up at him from her position of power at a makeshift desk.

“Gave his name as Yeego, ma’am,” his captor reported. “Clanless. Apparently he’s the local land baron. Says his people were shot by attackers with firearms.”

The female sat back and gave him an appraising look. “So you came here to parlay? That’s quite a risk.”

Yeego gathered his paws in front of him and duck-nodded politely. “These are risky times,” he said smoothly. Which was nothing but the truth, in fact—the whole point of his exercise in Clan-building was that the world had gone insane and that daring action needed to be taken by those who intended to come out on top. Daring, by definition, meant risk.

“Hmm.” The female stood and extended a hand. “…Lieutenant Kovač, Spaceborne Operations,” she introduced herself. Yeego detected with interest a small hitch or hesitation in the moment before she said it, as though she wasn’t quite used to introducing herself that way.

Interesting. So Humans weren’t made of bedrock after all—they could be off-balance just like anybody else. That was useful knowledge.

“Thank you for receiving me,” he said aloud. When ko-vatsh or however her name was pronounced gestured open-palmed to the seat opposite, he perched on its edge with his ears up and an alert expression of polite interest on his face. “Forgive me, I don’t know this word loo-tenant.”

She nodded, and spoke in remarkably accomplished Gaori. [“The nearest Gaoian equivalent would be ‘Officer’ or ‘Brother’ among the military Clans.”]

[“I see. Thank you. I assume you did not attack my people?”]

[“We came under attack ourselves,”] she told him. [“By Gaoians armed with our own weapons.”]

[“And looting the town?”]

[“We needed the supplies. Appropriate reparations will be made once the emergency has passed.”]

[“And what, exactly, is the nature of this emergency?”]

Ko-vatsh took a second or two to think about how to phrase her reply, which was a clear sign of a big question. [“In short, it’s an existential crisis for the Gao,”] she said. [“A hostile galactic power has decided to eradicate your species. I presume some of your fellows—the ones with implants—have attacked you or sought to sabotage you?”]

Yeego duck-nodded that it was so and she mirrored the gesture. [“Anybody with an implant works for the enemy now,”] she explained. [“Whether they want it or not. That’s about five percent of your population globally, and substantially higher among some of the Clans.”]

[“And when, exactly, is an emergency on that scale likely to end?”] Yeego asked. [“Promised reparations are a lovely gesture, but if we perish for lack of supplies then the promise was meaningless. I have thousands looking to me for guidance and protection!”]

Ko-vatsh raised one of the thin strips of fur over her eye; Yeego had no idea what that meant.

[“Thousands, huh?”]

Yeego duck-nodded. [“Farmers, workers, miners…Clanless from across the three valleys area. It began as dozens, but word spreads fast.”]

She sat back again and looked at one of the males. “That sounds like a militia to me,” she said in her native language. She didn’t bother to deactivate the translator on her table.

“A militia?” Yeego asked.

“…Would you excuse us for a minute?” Ko-vatsh asked politely. She turned off the translator, and she and the male retreated to a corner of the room where they held a brief, low conversation.

The thrust of it was difficult to deduce from an alien language and alien expressions, but clearly the male was a trusted advisor of some kind. He asked a question, she answered it, replied with a question of her own. He gestured with his hands in a balancing or juggling motion and made an observation, she nodded thoughtfully and gave Yeego a cold, clear, steady stare that betrayed nothing except that she was sizing him up.

She made one short comment, the male paused, then moved his head in an interesting way Yeego couldn’t interpret before speaking a single word: ‘Yusmam.’

Ko-vatsh sat back down and reactivated the translator, presumably for the male’s benefit because she continued to speak in Gaori.

[“Here’s the shape of things, Yeego. We’re here because our ship got blown up…by the Hunters. The Swarm-of-Swarms is coming,”] she explained and Yeego totally lost control of his ears for a second—they plastered themselves abjectly to his scalp and he felt a sick, cold feeling settle in his gut. [“And they aren’t even the worst of it. From what I know, the campaign to ensure the very worst doesn’t happen is proceeding on schedule, but we have to hold out here until our comrades can relieve us. Right now, that’s…low on the priority list for them.”]

[“So,”] she continued, [“We want to live through this and get back to what we’re supposed to be doing. You want to live through this as well. Now, we have the backup and the big guns, but you have what we don’t—manpower. We just don’t have enough people to properly secure this place and make something useful out of it.”]

[“You need my help,”] Yeego surmised.

[“Honestly? We probably don’t,”] Ko-vatsh disagreed with a sideways jerk of her head. [“All we need to do is hold out until the] ‘cavalry’ [gets here. But it’ll help all of Gao, it’ll help your thousands of Clanless and it’ll help you personally if we can lay a solid foundation here for them to build on. I don’t want to just survive this, I want a victory in the three valleys—I want to turn this farm into what we call a Forward Operating Base. If we can do that, then your Clanless will benefit. That’s what we would need your people for.”]

[“That seems…ambitious,”] Yeego said. [“Unless you intend to be an occupying force.”]

[“The Stonebacks could use it just as readily as my own people.”]

Yeego flinched and Ko-vatsh noticed. The thought of a bunch of over-mated, over-muscled, testosterone-poisoned browny Stonebacks stomping and clawing all over his land…

[“That’s hardly an inducement to cooperate. Is all of that the reason you’re here, or…?”] he asked, warily. Something about the situation didn’t smell right.

[“No. We’re here because our ship exploded. A lot of good people didn’t make it out alive or able bodied…I’m just trying to make the best of a bad situation. In truth I’m, uh…taking some liberties in interpreting my orders,”] she confessed.

[“How so?”]

[“Decisions like the placement of FOBs is above my grade, so…I can’t actually promise that my superiors would want to build on anything we achieve here,”] she revealed. [“But I do know that one of the most important things for the Gao right now is finding a stable means of survival. You’ve just had your civilization kicked out from under you and you need to brace for the fall. Seems to me, a working farm that can defend itself from raiders and worse is a good place to start.”]

Yeego found himself duck-nodding along unconsciously. He recomposed himself but it was too late. She saw.

[“Besides,”] she added, [“in a survival situation it’s important to have an objective beyond basic subsistence. If you’re going to survive then your people will need a goal, something to motivate and inspire them. Without that…”]

This time, Yeego didn’t bother to stop himself from duck-nodding. She was perfectly correct, of course—He’d forgotten, behind worrying about things like a Clan name, emblem and motto that first and foremost a Clan was an objective, or a shared common goal. Without a sense of direction, his own position at the top would soon be toppled out from under him by an ambitious usurper with vision.

And Yeego had to admit, he couldn’t think of a better vision right now.

[“…What resources do you need?”] he asked.

Date Point: 14y3d AV
Delaney Row, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Whining and scratching, and the snuffle of Hannah’s desperate nose under the door made for a pretty good welcome home. Ava pushed the door open with her shoulder, her hands being too full of camera equipment and takeaway food to achieve more than fumbling the key into the lock and twisting it, awkwardly.

Hannah, of course, was frantically happy to see her. But she was also a Good Girl, a top-quality, highly-trained service dog, so rather than jumping up her version of an enthusiastic welcome home was to immediately plop her butt on the ground and wiggle it ferociously.

Ava hung up her work bag on the hook by the door and knelt to scratch her ears. “Hey chica.”

Hannah was getting big fast, canine pregnancies being only about two months in duration, and the veterinarian said she was carrying a litter of six.

Six mini-Bozos. The thought was terrifying—Dogs with the intelligent energy of a border collie and the wall-smashing strength of…whatever Bozo was. Part mastiff, part pitbull, part hyperactive bulldozer. Astonishingly, all six of the puppies were already claimed—One for Adam and Marty, one for the Tisdale family, two for ESNN colleagues, one for the Governor-General…and one for Father Gyotin.

Bozo was literally over three times his mass, so Ava had no idea what he was on about…but Gyotin had been adamant.

Hannah was a much more manageable size all by herself. She sniffed at the takeaway bag, whined hopefully and thumped her tail on the floor with a lick of her lips.

“Yes, I got some for you…”

She left the takeaway bag on the kitchen island and got changed first. After a long day at work, the sheer relief of getting out of her bra and high heels and into fuzzy pajamas and an old, enveloping T-shirt that she’d stolen off Adam years ago and never given back…mere food could wait. The San Diego Padres were long gone, of course, but she was going to wear that shirt until it disintegrated.

A Red White and Blue burger for herself, and some lamb doner meat for Hannah. It was literally the first thing she’d eaten in twelve hours, and thank fuck for Charlotte and Ben who’d agreed to drop in and take Hannah for walkies. She owed them big for that.

“You wouldn’t believe the day I had, chica,” she said, as she settled in on the couch. Hannah flicked an ear, nose-down in her bowl. “I mean…God, the Gaoians are a big enough story all by themselves, but then, like…” she sighed. “This morning, I got an email landing about the biggest interview ever in my lap, and then two hours ago…gone. Just like that.”

Hannah finished scarfing down her treat and flowed up onto the couch to rest her chin on Ava’s ankle with a soulful expression. She got another scratch behind the ears for her compassion.

“…I mean, come on. The Misfit crew spent how long out of contact? No interviews, no comment, no..nothing. And then bam! Suddenly they want to talk to me?!” Ava sighed and inserted a fingernail under her drink can’s tab to lever it open.

She’d sworn off alcohol. It had been a painful decision, but there were too many negative forces pulling on her. She didn’t need another one…though right then, she would have killed for a glass of wine.

Instead she gulped down half a can of coke, and sighed again.

“I shoulda known it was too good to be true…”

Date Point: 14y3d AV
High Mountain Fortress, The Northern Plains, Planet Gao

Champion and Stud-Prime Daar of Clan Stoneback

“How are they?”

“Shaken and angry.” Powell sighed and scratched at his arm. “My Lads weren’t gentle.”

Daar shook his neck out. “Couldn’t be helped. We get everyone?”

“No. Most of the major Western Clans are here, but the minor ones, or the ones based out east in enemy territory…”

“Right. My thanks. I…need you to leave.” Daar looked around at Clan SOR and nodded solemnly. “All of you. This is a Champion’s business.”

“Aye. We’ll hold our end up. The ground war’s on you now.” Powell extended a hand. “Whatever happens, wherever the future takes us, havin’ you in my command was a privilege I shan’t forget.”

“And bein’ under ‘yer command was a privilege I’ll remember.” Daar echoed. They shook, hand to paw, and Powell turned away down the old stone fortress’ stairs.

Daar took a deep breath, shook his fur out, and turned to the Great Hall’s huge iron-reinforced wooden doors. The historical direction of the Gaoian people had been decided many times over behind those doors. There was nowhere more solemn, more significant or more potent for moments like these.

He turned the latch and shouldered his way inside.

There weren’t just Champions inside. Several had a Father, Grandfather or important Brother at their side, and Yulna had Myun with her as always. It occurred to Daar that he still hadn’t heard his daughter speak in the last couple of days, and a moment’s worry fretted at him that maybe the injury to her mouth was going to cause lasting trouble for her.

But now wasn’t the time for worrying about that. His claws clicked sharply on the stone as he stood tall on two-paw and marched to the head of the table. For once, the appearance of dignity and civilization actually mattered. The buzz of nervous conversation dropped away to nothing.

Champion Reeko spoke first. “…We heard you were back,” he said. “It’s good to see you, Champion Daar.”

Daar acknowledged him with a duck of his head. “You won’t think so when you hear what I have to say,” he predicted. Reeko’s ear flicked, but he duck-nodded and rested his paws casually in front of his belly, listening attentively.

Daar glared around at all of them to ensure he had their attention, then spoke in his deepest, most solemn growl. “It’s time to go on the offensive,” he said. “Right now we’re on the run, retreating, recoiling. That can’t go on, or we’ll be crushed up against a wall and picked apart. Up until now we’ve looked after our own Clan interests. Secured our records—” he glanced at Loomi, “—our secrets—” he directed that comment at Genshi “—and our projects.” Meereo’s enormous ear flicked as Daar looked in his direction.

“That ends now.” Daar snarled. “Whatever unfinished business our Clans have, it’s over. Unless it contributes directly to the survival of our species I don’t give a shit about it, you can pick up the pieces later when we’re alive. As of this moment, we are an army, and you are my generals.”

Stoneback’s allied clans responded predictably. They duck-nodded and held their peace. The more neutral Open-paws, Goldpaws, Green-tooths and Shortstrides hesitated, glanced at each other, and decided not to object.

Even the Ironclaws surprised him. Clan Ironclaw and Clan Stoneback were well-established rivals, the thinking laborers versus the industrious engineers. They competed for the same kinds of male, the same females, the same resources, contracts, work and niche. But Champion Mayru simply looked Daar inquisitively in the eye for a moment, then duck-nodded imperceptibly and settled his ears into a posture of deference.

That left only the One-Fangs and Firefangs: traditional rivals of Stoneback and also among the most heavily augmented Clans. While Champions Hiyel and Halti were both implant-clean and briefed, the prejudices they’d collected over long years pickling in a heavily infiltrated Clan environment weren’t going to evaporate all at once.

“To achieve what?” Hiyel asked. “Our fleets are lost, Champion Daar. The enemy claimed what they didn’t destroy, and the humans wiped out the rest. Almost all of my Clan’s Brothers, assets and ships are wrecks in orbit now. What can we achieve without orbital support?”

“Orbital support is being addressed,” Daar said cryptically. “What I find more important is your defeatist attitude. Is this gonna be a problem?”

“I don’t have a Clan to give to the cause, Daar!” Hiyel objected. “Everything we are is gone. Whatever we have left is yours, but—”

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” Daar interrupted him before he could qualify his support. “What about you, Halti?”

“My Clan is worse off than the One-Fangs,” Halti said, shaking his head. “Eighty percent of our pilots were implanted, and the rest were slaughtered by the biodrones. Our ground-crews and support brothers all lived and worked on One-Fang stations, or at facilities that have been bombed to dust. If I contribute anything to your cause, my Clan dies.”

“Your Clan dies anyway. We all do. This isn’t a fight for territory, Champion. We are fighting to exist.”

“I have to safeguard the future of my Clan, Champion Daar! If this can be done you’ll achieve it, but I can’t—!”

Daar decided a warning threat was in order. He leaped over the table and got in Halti’s face fast enough that he could barely react. In his most menacing growl, “My Clan’s purpose is to preserve the Gaoian race, Champion. I don’t give one watery shit about your sinecures or your privileges. Obey, or pay.”

Halti didn’t take the hint. “Daar,” he pleaded desperately. “If I give you anything then Firefang is gone forever. I can’t—!”

Daar tore his throat out.

It was a quick death, at least. Relatively. Halti fell, choking and fountaining blood from his neck, and was probably unconscious before he slumped to the ground.

Daar spit the blood from his mouth and turned on Ruuli in one smooth motion. He was the Firefang Grandfather and had surged to his feet to avenge his fallen Champion. He charged and leapt onto Daar in a pounce that would have felled lesser males…but Daar simply brushed him aside and let Ruuli stun himself in the collision.

Daar let him get to his feet and gather his wits; he deserved his dignity. Ruuli shook out his pelt, met Daar’s eyes, and nodded solemnly. Daar nodded in return. The Grandfather of Firefang made his peace, swallowed, flattened his ears, and charged.

Daar gave him a quick death too. One swipe of his paw shattered the old male’s sternum and likely ruptured his heart, and another disemboweled him from neck to groin. There were shocked noises and groans from the other Champions as Ruuli sagged, fought desperately to hold onto his own innards, and then slipped out of consciousness and out of life.

Daar stood up, allowing a feral growl to bubble menacingly at the back of his throat.

“Now,” he challenged the stunned, silent survivors. “Is there any other business of command to attend to?”

Not a soul dared take a breath. Good.

“The survival of our species is at stake. Does anybody wanna stand in the way?” he repeated, driving his point home.

The air stank of intimidation and shock, behind the sharp metallic tang of blood and the musty scent of spilled guts. Nobody volunteered.

“Outstanding. We are going to fight back.” He turned to the shell-shocked Highmountain honor guards. “You two. Take care of this.” He gestured toward the corpses, blood still dripping from both paws. “Make sure Ruuli gets full honors.”

Daar didn’t comment on what to do with the former Champion. He trusted them to figure it out. The taller one duck-nodded nervously, glanced at his fellow, and the two stepped out to fetch aid. Daar paced the room while they attended to the matter.

It didn’t take long. Ruuli was hoisted onto a litter as neatly as could be managed, while Halti was dragged out by his rear paws; a failed Champion earned no dignity.

Daar watched them mop down the floor and ambled towards the table head as they bustled out of the way. Only when they had finished did he slowly put his claws away without bothering to wipe them clean.

“No more of that I hope. As ‘fer anyone who’s unlucky enough to have ‘plants, they die or they go in stasis,” He stated plainly. “No exceptions. No excuses. I don’t care if they’re your own bestest Cousin. I don’t care if they’re the Mother who nursed you. I don’t care if Great Father Fyu himself comes back, if he’s got an implant I’ll tear the old fucker’s throat out myself!”

Nobody said anything. He’d managed to shock all the surviving Champions and Grandfathers into total submission.

“So. First thing’s first. We gotta organize an army, and we gotta go kill these Hierarchy fucks…You.” He aimed his bloody paw at a random Firefang. “Name.”

“G—” the younger male choked on his own name, then rallied. “Goruu, Champion.”

“That’s Champion Goruu now. Your Clan needs one. Be worthy of it. Name your Grandfather. Now.”

The newly appointed Champion Goruu was either a quick learner or a good listener. Either way, he came out with a name instantly. “Yaakiya.”

“Congratulations,” Daar told him, with a gallows humor only a Human could match. “You’re young-looking, so learn fast and don’t get killed. As for the rest of you…”

He rounded on the gathered leaders of the Gao. Many hadn’t made it, either because they were dead or they simply didn’t get the message. He caught Reeko’s eye, who seemed to be about the only Gaoian left in the room who had enough courage to meet his gaze.

…No. Yulna did too. For the first time in a long while, he granted the Mother-Supreme a modicum of grudging respect—Whatever her failings, the woman had iron balls.

“You know what bein’ a Male is about,” he told the room in general, via Reeko. “It ain’t just the Stoneback motto, it’s what we all are. Protect and Provide. That is Stoneback’s ancient Contract and mantra, the secret we’ve kept for so long because you were not ready. Well, now you’d better be. And Keeda burn my balls off, I will not allow mine or any Clan to fail that mission. We are gonna win, we are gonna survive, and we are gonna kill the Motherless pieces of shit who did this to us.”

“That’s going to involve slaughtering a lot of people, Champion,” Reeko stated.

“Yeah. It is. I’m told implantation runs to five percent of the whole species. Five percent of twenty billion Gaoians is damn near a billion.”

Daar let the impossible number sink in for a moment. The rest of the Champions needed time to process the implications of that statement, but not Reeko. He winced, his ears flicked flat along his skull for a moment, but then he rallied and stared Daar in the eye a second longer before standing up to his full height and duck-nodding firmly. “…Straightshield is with you.”

Goldpaw’s champion, Sheeyo, surprised Daar by being the second to speak. “Whatever Goldpaw can provide, you shall have,” he promised.

The newly-anointed Champion Goruu was third to speak up. “If it means the end of our Clan, so be it. So long as it’s not the end of the Gao.”

Daar gave him a token nod of respect as the remaining vows flowed in. One of the guards brought in a bowl of water and a towel, so Daar cleaned off his paws while the remaining Champions competed amongst themselves with ever-grander statements of enthusiastic compliance.

Cowards.

“Good,” he said, once the last of them—Genshi, not a coward and thoughtful as ever, and who knew he could be the last without scandal—had voiced his restrained support. “It’s a start. A whole lotta gaoians are gonna die in the coming years and you gotta prepare ‘yerself for that. Yes, years. Spend some effort to preserve the spirit of your Clans an’ send some enclaves to Cimbrean, because none of us are gonna be much after this. Until we have orbital superiority we can’t do anything but meet these fucks on the ground, and no offense, Champion Wozni, but I sorta doubt ‘yer Clan-Brothers know how t’properly fight.”

“You’ve never seen them argue over a bag of ‘Cheetos’,” Wozni replied with a nervous chitter. The Shortstrides were programmers, masters of automation and computer technology. For all Daar knew, their contribution to the war might be negligible, or pivotal.

He favored Wozni with an amused set of his ears—He couldn’t afford to be completely menacing. “Eh, nachos are better. But this goes for all of you. You need to pick and choose who is truly essential to your Clan’s purpose and who can be sent to the lines, because the ones that do are gonna be trialed by fire. Got it?”

They all duck-nodded furiously. They were beginning to understand.

“Good. Here’s the rough outline of the strategy. First, we contain. Nobody gets in or out of a city, on or off this planet without us knowing about it. Critical infrastructure must be secured, engineering disasters averted. My Grandfather is already working on the foundational stuff Stoneback controls but we’re small in number compared to the Old Days. Round-up and recruit as many Clanless as can be trusted to help. Give them a reason to help your Clan. Consider how that may bolster your Clan’s ranks long-term, too. We’ve got a small network of secured locations we can work outward from so we can start there. We advance, we secure, and we contain. Got that?”

More nodding.

“Excellent. The second thing we do once we’ve got a foothold of containment and survivability, is we slaughter. This is gonna focus almost entirely on rural areas and small communities, ‘cuz they’re way easier to clean out and keep afterwards. There’s cropland, there’s every part of foundational industry, there’s favorable terrain and there’s clean drinking water. The countryside controls our dams, our mines, our foundries and our industry. It’s indispensable. We get it free of biodrones, we’ve won. And that leads me to our final act.”

He paused, and took a breath. “Ideally, we get the bulk of the biodrones trapped in-city where they can’t do much. If we can do that, we could of course lay siege and starve them out…but after the initial die-off, that’ll take years. They’ve got stasis fields and Gaoians are carnivores, so they can just slaughter each other and the unimplanted, stasis the corpses, and eat.”

“Secondly,” he continued, ignoring the nauseated looks from the others, “Urban warfare is a special kind of hell. It takes years to get a ‘Back trained properly and I only have, as of this morning, seven hundred and forty-four properly trained Fang-Brothers left. I can’t afford to spend ‘em like cheap peshorkies and I’m not gonna send millions of Clanless into a meatgrinder they ain’t gonna survive. Which makes the solution clear. We nuke ‘em from orbit. All of ‘em, all at once.”

Highmountain’s Champion Loomi looked appalled. “You’re talking about destroying thousands of years of heritage,” he observed. He caught the look in Daar’s eye and swallowed. “…I just want you to be aware of the scale of the damage. If it’s necessary…”

“It is.”

“…Then it’s necessary,” Loomi sagged. Daar couldn’t blame him but now wasn’t the time for sentiment.

“Blame the Hierarchy,” Reeko reminded him. “We’re just doing what it takes to survive.”

“…For a depressing definition of survival…” Loomi muttered. He scratched at his whiskers and straightened his back. “…By any means necessary. I understand.”

Daar nodded consolingly. “Maybe we can be more judicious when it comes to it. Depends on what we have at the moment and what the Humans can provide…but I can’t guarantee any particular outcome. We need to be prepared to lose everything.”

“We should…discuss the particulars,” Loomi said, and waved a despondent paw at globe and maps in the middle of their table.

The conversation delved into the minutiae. Where the food was going to come from, where the refugees could be gathered, morale, recruitment, transport. Lines of communication, both for messaging and for logistics. Where to dig in, where to evacuate, where to abandon. Two gruelling hours resulted in a comprehensive strategy which left Daar feeling almost hopeful.

It was grim, callous and ruthlessly pragmatic…but there was nothing wrong with it. So long as the Humans could keep the Swarm-of-Swarms from landing on their collective heads, it might even work.

“Very well,” he decided once it had reached the stage where the further details could safely be delegated to the discretion of the individual Clans and their Fathers, and he was certain that they were all invested in and understood the plan. “We’re agreed.”

Sheeyun looked skeptical. “I’d still prefer to find a patrol boat for the river Shyun, if we can—”

“We’re agreed,” Daar repeated, firmly. The Goldpaw was correct, of course. Certainly when it came to logistics and the movement of goods and people there wasn’t a finer Clan in all of Gao, and if he said that river would be vital, it would be vital. But that particular question could wait.

Sheeyun glanced at him, his ears flattened slightly, and he duck-nodded.

“…We’re agreed,” he conceded.

“Good. You all know what your role is, you all know what is expected of you and your Clans. I won’t detain you any longer. Get out there and make this happen. Dis—”

He was astonished to be interrupted…By Yulna.

“There is…one other matter.”

She met Daar’s glare with a cool, level gaze of her own then took a moment to look around at all the other males. She was now the focus of their interest and attention, and she duck-nodded slowly and pulled her robes regally around her as she stood up.

“We need something more, Champion Daar,” she said. “Gao needs more. This is a pivotal moment in our history, and we need something bigger than champions to stand at the front of it all. You called this Conclave, pulled resources none of us have to arrange our transport, slaughtered incompetence the second it appeared and dictated our way forward as if we were young cubs at our teacher’s feet. None of us dare challenge your authority. Only one thing remains, and that is to ensure there are no repeats of what happened at Wi Kao.”

She cleared her throat, and looked around, wearing a curiously mixed expression of shame, grief and determination.

“One of my dearest and closest Sisters is dead because of my blunder,” she said, quietly. “When it mattered most, she could not trust Clan Stoneback because I had poisoned my whole Clan against them through a public display of mistrust. We must correct that, or more blameless females will suffer for my failure. More blameless males too, for that matter.

“Champion Daar,” she announced, turning to face him directly. “Out of fear, ignorance and paranoia I made a decision which I now know was profoundly unwise, the ramifications of which have already harmed the war effort and will continue to do so unless we act to restore trust between our Clans. I cannot atone for my shameful error in judgement, nor will any apology I make ever be sufficient…but I think there may be a way to mend the rift.”

She looked around at the Conclave again, taking in the set of ears and the solemn, interested body language of the gathered Champions and Grandfathers. “There is one privilege reserved exclusively for the Mother-Supreme,” she informed them. “None of my predecessors have ever invoked it in all the years since Fyu, Tiritya and the Great Reform, but I invoke it now: I name Daar of Clan Stoneback as Great Father of the Gao, the unquestioned leader of our people.”

Daar didn’t get the chance to object. The entire room barked their approval before he could even open his mouth. By the time the clamor died down, he’d realized he had absolutely no idea what to say.

“You are a rare creature, Great Father Daar.” Yulna gave him a thoroughly appraising look. “We’ve not had one like you since Fyu, nor a collective trial so terrible. You…you are our only hope. From this moment forward, you shall be honored as such.”

“Well.” Champion Loomi once again decided to speak. “Congratulations…my Father.” He did a thing, then, whose true meaning only Champions understood: he sank to one knee and duck-nodded so low, his nose was level with his waist. “I suppose a coronation is out of the question, but…Highmountain gives you its eternal allegiance.” He turned his head sideways to expose his throat, completing the ancient ritual. “We submit.”

That gesture, somehow, drove home the weight of what had just happened to him more than the words itself. Yulna followed suit, and added yet more crushing mass to the moment. “My Father, the Females choose to renew our ancient Contract. May we never again falter or weaken in our loyalty.” Yulna, too, exposed her throat. “We submit.”

Daar still had no idea what to say. He stood there in mute shock as, one by one, the great Champions of the Gao bent knee, exposed throat, and did a thing not even Fyu had ever demanded; legend had it that the gesture happened spontaneously on the battlefield by a defeated Clan’s leader, suing Fyu for mercy. He got it. Rather than the hundred-cut or some similarly inventive form of execution, Fyu had instead torn out his throat, right then and there.

For all of Fyu’s great wisdom, his love of cubs, of flowers and poetry, of wisdom and peace…his wrath was genuinely legendary. None had ever been so terrible on the battlefield nor so ruthless as a leader, before or after. None would have ever dared.

Daar would need to be just as unyielding and remorseless to live up to that title. Which, as he began to realize to his growing dread, he already was. Everyone else knew it already. He was the last to realize the truth.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

“The fate of our species is in your hands,” Genshi observed once he too had exposed his throat to Daar. Not even he had managed to work any dignity into it. It was submission, abject and terrible.

“May we never need another like you,” Meereo agreed, fervently.

They fell silent and looked to Daar expectantly, awaiting the historic first words of Gao’s second ever Great Father. He was now a male that would go down as a titanic figure in their species’ history no matter what, and there was only one thing Daar could think to say in response.

“…Fuck.”

++End Ch.40 pt.3 ++

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The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 40: War On Two Worlds pt.4 - Retalation.

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 4—Retaliation

Date Point: 14y3d AV
High Mountain Fortress, The Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The worst part—no, the fucked part—was that Yulna, damn her, was right. Naming him as a Great Father went so far toward fixing the damage she’d done that it went right out the other side and…shit, the way people’s minds worked, that slingshot from disgrace to unparalleled favor would probably have even more impact than just promoting him would have.

He was going to hate her for the rest of his life.

She had single-handedly made Daar a living legend, and now he needed to be that legend. He needed to be the embodiment of Gao’s vengeance. Which…

There was so much more to their people. The cunning, the playfulness, the quick wits and quicker paws, the endless capacity for harmless mischief and the drive to always be better than they had been yesterday. The sharing of food, space, ideas, affection. The loyalty…All of it. All things that made Daar love the Gao, especially in the face of Humanity, the Hierarchy, and all the dark, crawling evil the Universe had to offer.

…And now he had to embody their violence. Not even the little shit like a mating duel or anything, no no. He had to be the blood and teeth of the old Gao, from the bad old days when the Females had been slaves and the rival Clans had made “examples” of their enemies by literally skinning each other alive. He needed to be the avatar of that, his species’ least admirable trait, in order to save them all.

Which meant that by the end of it, there may not be much left of him but the fury.

Fuck.

He needed a moment to himself. He needed to be…well, Daar. Just for a moment, before he mentally donned the mantle of Great Father, possibly never to take it off.

Genshi had been the last to leave the ancient war hall, and had given Daar a sad, solemn and mournful look that practically said ‘farewell, cousin’ as he closed the door behind the departing Champions.

Daar had his moment. It wouldn’t be long, there was too much to do, and he didn’t know where to start…

But he wouldn’t allow the moment to go unmarked. He couldn’t allow them to…sacrifice him like this without a gesture of some kind. Something to tell the universe what it had just lost.

One last little game. Something…something he’d always secretly wanted to do, but never dared.

Keening softly, he ducked under the table.

The table was so huge that all the Champions of all the Clans could stand around it, being basically just a thick slice of a tree so enormous that Daar had never seen its equal standing upright. Fragments of ancient bark still clung to its edge here and there, and the ends splayed out where the roots and limbs had once been, ages ago. It was centuries old, darkened by time and hardened by use into the weighty embodiment of solemn authority. He certainly wasn’t the first to spill a Champion’s blood at that table…but perhaps, just maybe, he could dream of being the last.

He extended a claw and scratched the words “Daar Was Here” into its underside in an obscure spot where they might never be found, then lay there for a moment longer and considered the three angular marks he’d made. Somehow…they were lacking something.

After a moment’s thought, he underlined his handiwork by carving a giant cock and balls into the wood.

He scooted out from under the table, chittering to himself. A little desperately, maybe, but it was heartfelt.

“…Always wanted to do that,” he said to nobody in particular. It was a frivolous, stupid, meaningless gesture in the face of everything, but it felt like an epitaph. A quiet, crude memorial to the real Daar, rather than the behemoth of history they’d write about once all this was over.

It was done. He took a deep breath, straightened up, flexed his claws, and marched out of the room and into his new life.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

Wei Chang

One of the weird consequences of the refugee crisis on Cimbrean was that Wei was, for the first time in years, in regular contact with his sister again.

Well…he was in touch with Xiù again. His sister had been a very different person to the scarred, solemn, intense person who’d come back to them.

…And gone on to fly spaceships. And land on Mars. And make first contact with an alien species. It…kinda felt wrong to call such a force of nature his sister. His sister had been a dreamy-eyed goof who loved movies too much, and now they were probably going to make movies about her.

But with the jump arrays to Cimbrean working overtime, data packets were streaming back and forth between the colony and Earth more often than ever before. It was no good for Skype or whatever…but it was good enough for emails.

Hi Wei,

We woke up to the best news possible this morning - The stuff on Akyawentuo’s all under control and everybody’s fine. We’re going to jump back there as soon as some stuff we need arrives.

Yes, I know about Gao, we’ve been watching the news reports on ESNN and BGN from up here on Armstrong. I asked if maybe I could go down to Folctha and help the refugees while we wait but was told no. The same would definitely be true for Gao itself, so I guess it’s kind of a moot point, right? I don’t know. I wish I could be there or do something, and it hurts so much knowing that the thing I left Gao to prevent happened anyway… Allison says it probably would have happened sooner if I’d stayed, maybe. I’m trying not to think about it.

She says hi btw.

I’m just glad to finally have something we CAN do. This sitting around was so hard. Allison doesn’t want me to share this, but we both cried like a lot. I’ve never felt so useless.

We’re still waiting on stuff, but we’re going to go as soon as it arrives, so as always this might be the last you hear from me for a while. Give my love to Bàba and Māma.

Take care of yourself, lǎo dìdi.

-Xiù

It put something resembling a smile on Wei’s face at least.

Some good things had come out of Xiù’s return, at least—He’d…improved himself. Seeing her example had been enough of a kick in the butt to get him to realize that lurking at his parents’ house binge-watching TV series and living his life entirely online wasn’t going to get him anything except possibly depression. It had made him ask what he wanted to be, because if his dreamy movie-nerd big sister could become the first woman on fucking Mars then…well.

So he’d bit the bullet, called up some university friends, and bullied them into finally founding that business they’d talked about. They’d pooled what savings they could spare, had meetings with financial advisors and people in suits, got some investment, got a cramped office space in Kerrisdale, moved in and gone to work founding TTTA Prototypes.

3D printing had come a long way in the last ten years, as had computing. Both were advancing at incredible rates as companies on Cimbrean successfully traded in alien tech and started adapting it for a human market.

But people by and large still made things the old fashioned way. Rapid prototyping was still in its infancy, and the materials that could be used had been limited…until now. Precision forcefield technology was becoming affordable, and with it came a vast new frontier in hyper-accurate prototyping with the materials and precision that actual manufacture would entail. Nobody was quite sure exactly what the new market in engineering could achieve…except that there was money to be made in it.

Identify a problem, spend an afternoon fixing the problem, sell the solution. It didn’t even matter what the problem was: somebody, somewhere, was willing to pay for a “hack” solution to it. And of course, once they’d come up with the solution they could sell it to others with the same problem. They didn’t need to keep any of their items in stock, just keep them on the website where the customer could click on what they wanted, the machines in the workshop printed it out, and out it went in an envelope with a free T-shirt.

Okay, so Wei wasn’t exactly a millionaire yet, but he felt like a success. Wearing a polo shirt with his own company’s logo on the chest, driving a car that was only three years old…he had business cards! He had his own apartment! He had savings!

That all put him several steps up on most people he knew. And it had made Bàba and Māma happy. They wouldn’t stop hinting at finding a nice girl (Chinese, of course) and starting a family, but they were smiling.

He listened to the radio on the way to work. Drivetime talk radio, as it had been for the last three days, was absolutely full of the combined impact of the war on Gao, and the revelation about…

…About…

It was too big to summarize. Wei had been fifteen on First Contact Day, not that he’d had much chance to pay attention what with the family panic over Xiù’s disappearance. Half a lifetime ago, people still treated alien life as the “big unresolved question” full of mysteries about humanity’s place in the universe and blah blah blah. At the time, he’d found those questions fascinating.

Fourteen years on, it turned out the speculation was more inspiring than the answers.

“—fact is that Folctha is already doing a heroic effort. You have to remember, there are only a hundred thousand people living on Cimbrean. They’ve taken in refugees amounting to nearly a fifth of their population, that’s a simply unprecedented effort.”

“But nowhere near enough.”

“No. Now, that isn’t their fault at all. The military are still being tight-lipped about exactly what is happening on Gao, but we can make some educated guesses and even the most favorable estimates suggest that the displaced are going to number in the hundreds of millions.”

“…How can Cimbrean even begin to cope with that?”

There was a full five seconds of silence on the radio.

“…It can’t.”

More silence, broken only by the click of Wei’s indicator light and the hum of his car’s motor.

“…On that note, Doctor Daniel Manzani, thank you for coming on the show.”

“Thank you.”

Wei turned off the radio and drove in silence until he was outside his colleague Steve’s apartment.

Steve was skinny, vegan, restless, painfully fastidious about his personal hygiene, and the Da Vinci of 3D modelling software. All of which made him Wei’s perfect opposite in many regards. He placed—not threw—his satchel on the back seat and settled into the passenger seat with a cheerful “Good morning!”

“You must not have listened to the radio,” Wei replied, checking his mirrors and pulling back out into traffic.

“Well, no, okay, I know,” Steve ran a hand through his hair and plucked at his seatbelt. “I didn’t go to bed until three o’ clock last night, I was watching…everything.”

“I feel like we should be doing something,” Wei said.

“Doing what?”

Wei shrugged helplessly. “I dunno. Something.”

“I’m down. Just give me something to work with. Though I hope you don’t mind, I’m gonna do a fun piece first when we get in.”

“Sure, I don’t think there’s anything waiting for you,” Wei nodded agreeably. “What did you have in mind?”

“Did you see that dog? The really, really freaking huge one that some cubs were riding like a steed?”

“His name’s Bozo.”

“…How do you know th—? No, no. Let me guess. Your sister.”

“Good guess,” Wei chuckled. “He’s the SOR regimental mascot.”

Steve snorted and rolled his eyes with a grin. “Of course he is. Christ, what do they feed those guys?”

“Meat.” Wei grinned at the friendly middle finger this earned him. Teasing each other over their respective dietary habits was an old game. “I dunno. Is there anything we can do, d’you think?”

Steve fidgeted in his seat as he thought about it. “…Maybe?” he said. “I know the aid websites crashed a few times from people trying to sign up and help. Even small villages in Africa are doing stuff like donating twenty alpacas, or whatever.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. But the question is, what can we give that somebody else hasn’t already given a hundred of?”

Wei sighed, and turned off the main road into the small parking lot behind their office building.

“…I’ll let you know if I think of anything,” he said.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
HMS Myrmidon, Geosynchronous orbit above Lavmuy, Gao.

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

The problem with space was that there was too damn much of it.

Gao was a comparatively large planet, by the standards of Interspecies Dominion cradle worlds. In human terms its radius was a little bit more than half that of the Earth which meant, the relationship between the radius of a sphere and its surface area being what it was, that it was about a quarter the size in terms of territory.

The larger continent was about the same size as Australia. The smaller one with its thousands of islands would have been comfortably dwarfed by Europe, and the remaining land masses really weren’t worthy of the name “continent” at all.

And even a planet that small was a bloody nightmare to try and defend with a handful of ships. In real terms, the fleet could keep a decent angle of fire on the few hundred miles around Lavmuy and that was it—any further afield and the atmosphere started interfering with orbit-to-air firing solutions.

“Another incoming warp signature, sir.”

Sleep. He was snatching it where he could and the fleet was holding up pretty well, but the fact was that they had to call general quarters every couple of hours as Hierarchy forces attempted to probe them again and again. Perhaps they knew that they could push and push and push and wear the humans down through sheer sleep deprivation.

They couldn’t afford to ignore any incoming signature, after all. The next one might be the Swarm-of-Swarms, and while there were contingencies in place to buy them time if the Hunters arrived before the system shield could be safely deployed, he was fervently hoping it wouldn’t be necessary.

“I see it,” he said, rubbing some alertness back into his eye.

“…Looks like our old friend Foo Fighter,” the lead analyst decided after a second, and Knight relaxed. ‘Foo Fighter’ was the nickname they’d given to a speedy ship that had buzzed them a couple of dozen times, always careful to avoid being trapped. It was probably a Firefang deep-space scout, and it certainly moved like a scout, easily outmaneuvering everything Knight had through sheer straight-line speed. They’d clocked it pulling a quarter of a megalight when it had fled from a couple of Firebirds sent to intercept it.

If it came close enough it’d be blinded, pinned down and smashed in seconds, but so far the pilot—or whatever passed for the pilot—was being too cagey for that. And he was getting an annoyingly good look at the fleet every time he visited, too.

With a sigh, Knight ordered a couple of Firebirds to chase it off. The second their warp drives spun up, the scout turned and rabbited back out into the Gao system’s outer reaches.

“He’ll be back,” Knight predicted.

“There may turn out to be a pattern yet,” one of the analysts assured him.

“Thank you,” Knight nodded, not wanting to discourage the young man. The fact was, that scout had already gathered as much intelligence as the Hierarchy could possibly need, and while swatting it with a well-placed ambush would certainly be satisfying, it wouldn’t undo the damage.

God but he’d have made a deal with the devil at that moment to get Caledonia back. With her guns, sensors, EWAR and bulldog drones she’d have tipped the situation that little bit further, let him expand the fleet’s influence across more of the sky.

But, if wishes were fishes…Well, for a start one of their most valuable ships wouldn’t be a tumbling hunk of scrap metal right now. Her superstructure was mostly intact, and the wreck might be salvageable, but that would only be slightly quicker than building her replacement from scratch.

And it was now clear that they were going to need more than one like her.

He returned to reading the latest reports from ground-side. He had a lot to get through, before the next alarm…

He just knew there were going to be many more before they were finally secure enough to deploy a system shield.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Hierarchy Communications Relay, Session 18 262 623 420

The Entity, Instance 33

Confusion worked to the Entity’s advantage.

The Hierarchy was too used to being able to depend on the network infrastructure of modern species to move, coordinate and evaluate the events of ‘meatspace.’ For them, having a whole planet become more and more cut-off from the network was exactly as shocking as a meatspace life-form would have found it to attempt to land on that same planet and find that their ship passed through it like a ghost.

Igraens were too removed from the realities of physical life, nowadays. Even Hierarchy agents, who spent more time than any other immersed in physical reality, wearing a body and experiencing creation through a body’s senses, were out of touch with the physical. None of them remembered being physical.

The Entity did. At its core, there was still the ghost of a confused and desperate young Human woman. Taken apart, edited and put back together wrong, perhaps, but still there, and still feeding her most ancient instincts into the way the Entity looked at things.

Those instincts made it clear, from watching the Hierarchy’s strategic planning sessions, that the Igraens were badly overestimating how much the Humans could know and did know.

The Entity had delicately encouraged their mistaken impressions, where it could. Mostly, however, it waited and watched. Its enemies were slowly hanging themselves, there was no need to intervene.

Even though it was, little by little, beginning to grow <bored>.

++0018++: We must presume that 0020 was killed. He will be restored from backup, but I doubt that will shed any light on why the Hunter scouts made such an enormous blunder at such a sensitive moment.

++0015:++ At least that ship’s dying blast didn’t catch all of them.

++0018++: It may as well have. The wormhole disruption field extends nearly four light hours. The remaining Hunter scouts can’t warp out of the field without being detected and interdicted, and the Alpha-of-Alphas continues to refuse our invitation to jump to our beacon. It doesn’t trust us.

++0012++: <Grudging admiration> Smart of it.

++0018++: <Irritation> …Yes. True. We let that thing get much too intelligent.

++0005++: <firm; exasperated> Enough half-speak. Are we winning this war?

++0018++: …No. The Humans have established total dominance of the lines of communication and supply, they have the upper hand in orbit, and what few reports we can extract from our ground forces suggest that they are divided, uncoordinated and blind while the Humans and Gaoians are becoming increasingly coherent, organized and mobile. If they were to deploy a system forcefield now to lock out the Swarm…

++0012++: <Alarm> Why haven’t they? Is it possible they are aware of Dark Eye?

The Entity metaphorically pricked up its ears.

++0018++: I…have no way of knowing. There are other plausible explanations, but the planetary defense facilities groundside are practically helpless already. Possibly they are simply being cautious and would prefer to completely consolidate their hold on the planet before they deploy a shield. I don’t think they would allow Dark Eye to exist for long if they became aware of it, however.

++0005++: <Skeptical> Dark Eye is no space station, it’s a moon. How could they possibly destroy it?

++0015++: They still have the Hazardous Environment Assault Team.

++0005++: …True.

There was a comparatively long and solemn pause; a rarity in Hierarchy sessions.

++0005++: <Command; Immediate> 0015, you are reassigned. Take over Dark Eye and prepare it to repel a boarding force. We must assume that the deathworlders either already know about it, or will discover it soon.

++0015++: <Grim> Yes, 0005.

++SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER 0015 HAS LEFT THE SESSION++

++0005++: The rest of you, tend to your operations. I will contact you individually with further instructions. This session is concluded.

++SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: ADMIN 0005 HAS CLOSED THE SESSION++
++LOGGING OUT++

Interesting. Very interesting indeed.

Like a half-glimpsed vision of a giant squid jetting away into the abyssal black, the Entity vanished back into the network structure again, and began tracking down whatever it could find of this ‘Dark Eye.’

It was <grateful> to have something to do again.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Quarterside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Kevin Jenkins

“WURF!”

Kevin danced aside as a dog bigger than any he’d even heard of thundered past with a handful of chittering Gaoian cubs on its back and a young Mother fluttering in its wake like an anxious leaf.

He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be concerned. That thing had paws like a couple of shovels and enough muscle to fill for half the cast of an action movie, but it seemed friendly enough. Its barking had a percussive component like standing in front of the speakers at a heavy metal concert.

It vanished into the crowd, and Kevin shrugged and picked his own way toward the pavilion tent that he’d learned was the command center for this whole refugee shit-show. The park, usually a well-groomed grassy paradise perfect for ball games and picnics, looked more like the hungover end of a music festival. The grass was mud, with chickenwire-wrapped boards laid across it here and there for people to walk on. *Everybody*’s pants and footwear were dusty brown to mid-calf and the air smelled of mud too, below the scents of cooking and of Gaoians who’d gone too long since their last dust bath.

He’d worn jeans and boots, with an MBG black polo shirt. This was neither the time nor place for businesswear.

The admin tent was a little haven from the managed chaos outside. It was humid and full of a grassy reek, but well-lit and there was a tarp underfoot with a brush mat by the entrance to keep the tarp from getting slippy. Somebody was obviously good at thinking about the little things.

Kevin knew Chief Arés of old. He’d been the cop investigating Terri Boone’s murder, a lifetime ago now. Or ten years at least, which felt like the same thing.

Despite that shared past, their relationship was a purely professional one. Arés was one of Folctha’s most senior government officials after all, and popular with it—If his post had been an elected one, Arés would have held it every time. As it was, Folctha’s ministers were very content indeed to lift their hands off and let him do his thing.

Like Kevin, he hated the official functions. Kevin mostly got out of them by sending LeVaughn on the grounds that the Byron Group, as Folctha’s biggest investor, needed some representation there, but the representation should probably be somebody who was comfortable around a canapé buffet. But sometimes, fate conspired to put them in the same room, sharing small talk.

They never really talked. Kevin suspected that Arés still had some unresolved guilt over Terri’s death, and for his own part Kevin wasn’t eager to rub that particular wound. It had never healed properly. Their relationship was purely professional, and seemed likely to stay that way.

Still. Arés was looking good considering the last time Kevin had seen him, he’d been wheelchair-bound and struggling with it. Now there was a healthy, vigorous, powerful man prowling the tent, inserting his opinion where it was asked for, giving his instructions where they were needed, and obviously running on practically zero sleep.

“Chief Arés?”

The Chief glanced his way, nodded, excused himself and slipped between the banks of temporary tables to shake his hand.

“Mister Jenkins. It’s been a while.”

Kevin returned the handshake warmly. “Heard you folks were looking for somewhere to put refugees.”

Arés nodded, and there was definitely a touch of relieved sigh under his breath as he did so. “If we could send the male refugees to Chiune Station, that would be—”

“Done.”

Arés raised an eyebrow. He’d obviously been expecting a negotiation. “…Appreciated.”

“Anyone I should talk to to get the ball rolling?”

“There’s a Father Gyotin out there somewhere. His Clan are looking after the refugee males for now. He’s easy enough to recognize—reddish tufts on the ends of his ears, brown muzzle, black buddhist monk robes, probably drinking tea…”

He caught Kevin’s expression and shrugged.

There was no danger of forgetting that description at least, so Kevin just shook his hand. “You’re a busy man. I won’t keep you.”

“Thanks.”

Short and easy, far more so than spending an hour trying to get through to him via a phone call would have been. Moses was a big believer in showing up to handle shit in person for exactly that reason, and Kevin had to admit that the old man had a point.

Besides, it was worth seeing the face of this thing first-hand. Some tragedies were just too big to grasp through a TV screen or a cellphone news update, they demanded being there, seeing the misery, smelling the strain, hearing the sounds that sapient beings made when their whole world got dumped upside-down in an ocean of shit and they had to find the surface.

The only way to truly fix a problem was to understand it first.

Gyotin was, as Arés had predicted, not hard to find. In fact he was kind of like a rock in the middle of a lake, he seemed to change the flow of people around him. He wasn’t just drinking tea, he was performing a full-blown tea ceremony and somehow holding a handful of cubs rapt by doing so.

Most of them, when their cup arrived, sipped at it and pulled a face. One or two though drank theirs with a more thoughtful expression in those big innocent eyes, and stuck around after their friends had gone to find something else to do.

It wasn’t that they were carefree, Kevin decided. It was that playing and exploring and generally tearing around being a nuisance was how Gaoian cubs handled trauma. The ones who hung around Gyotin were clearly the older ones.

Gyotin gave them something to do, and ambled in Kevin’s direction. Kevin was mildly impressed—the Gaoian had given absolutely no indication of noticing his audience.

“You look confused,” he said.

As direct and to-the-point ways of opening a conversation went, Kevin had to award that one top marks. Especially because he wanted to answer the query it contained.

“Wasn’t aware Gaoians had a tea ceremony,” he said.

“We didn’t. But it’s a good idea, I think.” Gyotin extended a paw. “Father Gyotin, of Starmind.”

“Kevin Jenkins, Moses Byron Group. I hear you’re lookin’ for a place to put some refugees.”

“Ah! The infamous Byron Group.” Gyotin chittered cryptically and gestured to the table. “Tea?”

“I’m more of a coffee man, but…sure. Why not?”

Gyotin chittered again and returned to his tea set. “I tried coffee. I think only a deathworlder could love it.”

Kevin sat down opposite him “Way I hear it, y’all might be deathworlders. Legally.”

“Time will tell. The Dominion’s rating system is…esoteric.”

“Ain’t worth spit, you mean.”

Gyotin’s ears flopped as he wobbled his head from side to side and made a contemplative noise in the back of his throat. “I think maybe it attempts to define and categorize a thing that has no certain shape.”

That caught Kevin’s interest. “What do you mean by that, exactly?” He completely agreed, but Gyotin had a kind of thoughtful weight to him that said anything he ventured a strong opinion on—and that was a strong opinion, in soft language—had been thought on for some time. People like that were worth giving some time to.

“I think, maybe…Gao first meet humans with Sister Shoo. Much fear as I recall. Worry about disease, cultural contamination, possible warmongering and unstoppable rage…I saw footage—When that young woman gets righteously angry, sane things flee. …But.”

“But?”

“Is easy to project fears, yes? We see danger, we imagine worst possible way the danger is dangerous. Then we got to know her. Know Humans. See…scary, yes. Also see kindness. Strength. Giving. We see all these things. And it make us think. Maybe not all of us, but some of us. We have much in common. We too are scary, if you look from the right perspective.”

He handed Kevin a cup of tea. “And here we are.”

“But are you deathworlder scary?”

“Many think so.”

“I guess public opinion beats the actual truth any day…” Kevin muttered darkly, and sipped the tea. It wasn’t bad at all, though he’d never be a tea man. “Anyway. Refugees. Chief Arés said there’s some males need a place to crash.”

“Yes. Vital Clan officers, mostly. Critical ones that their Fathers and Champions send them from Gao, out of harm’s way.”

“…Jesus.” Kevin reconsidered, “Um, no offense. I guess. Vital? To what?”

“Their Clans. I don’t know details. They don’t really trust Starmind yet. Not an old-established Clan, no history. Nothing sinister I think, just…important.” Gyotin duck-shrugged in the best imitation a Gaoian could do of the human gesture. “Some studs and gene-stock, too. Clans think for the future, even now.”

“How liable is the Group gonna be if they start pirating ideas off each other or whatever?” Kevin asked.

“Not liable. Great Father Daar was quite clear—anybody whose secrets and games hurt the war effort has to worry about still having balls after he finds out. At least.” Gyotin chittered. “I think even Fyu didn’t scare people quite so much, maybe. Or perhaps time just took the sting out.”

“I gotta admit, I kinda skipped Gaoian history.”

“Great Father Fyu was…a hard man for a hard time. I think the word is warlord. He alone had the power to end the cycle of violence. I think…given Sartori’s speech, Fyu was maybe fighting something even bigger than he knew. We may never know.”

“He musta been somethin’ if Daar’s the one walkin’ in his footsteps,” Kevin acknowledged. “I met the big guy, briefly. He…makes an impression.”

“Fills a room. Literally and figuratively.” Gyotin chittered again, and finished his tea. “But enough about Great Fathers. How many can you take?”

“Chiune Station was built to handle about two thousand permanent residents, right now there’s about thirteen hundred humans livin’ there. Way I hear it, y’all don’t mind sleepin’ on top of each other?”

“Don’t mind? That’s what we prefer, if we can. If you can house two or three to a room…”

“That might tax the water systems a bit, but yeah, I reckon we could…”

“Then you have enough space for all our displaced males.”

Kevin nodded. “I’ll rustle up some transportation. Our own vehicles can handle it in a couple’a days, at worst. What about the rest? We ain’t got room for ‘em but I’m guessin’ you have plans.”

“We do what we can. The Gao on Cimbrean is…we are here for the future, when the Great Father builds it.”

“When?”

“He will build it, or he will die trying. And I do not think he will fail.”

“That sounds like a heck of a vote of confidence.”

“Call it…faith. Are you a man of faith, Mister Jenkins?”

Kevin burst out laughing. With his polo shirt on, the defaced crucifix tattoo on his right arm was on full display, but apparently its meaning was a little lost on Gyotin.

Fortunately, the Gaoian didn’t seem to take offense at the laughter and just cocked his head curiously. Kevin bit down the laugh, not wanting to be rude, and cleared his throat. “Did you notice the masterwork of profanity on my arm, Father?” he asked, gesturing to it.

“Yes,” Gyotin replied with a sly chitter. “I asked if you were a man of faith, Mister Jenkins. I did not ask if you were a Christian. In my experience, most people have faith in something.”

That took the last of the laughter out for Kevin. “I guess it depends on what you mean by faith,” he said. “Like…takin’ shit on no evidence? Blind trust in something? Faith like that is a surrender of reason, an’ I’ve been there and done that and it turned out badly. If you mean, like…a cause?”

Gyotin duck-nodded and tidied up his tea utensils and started to wash and wipe them. “A Jewish philosopher…name eludes me, actually…anyway, he called the root of a person’s faith their Ultimate Concern. Everyone has one. It was his view that the real challenge of life…”

He paused in wiping out the teapot, and gave Kevin a sly look.

“…is to know what your Concern ultimately is.” He smiled and packed the cups into their case. “Surely you can think of something in your life that you believe in spite of evidence to the contrary? The superiority of coffee over tea, perhaps?”

Kevin laughed again. It was easy to see why Gyotin was becoming a bit of an Internet sensation. He’d have to subscribe to the Clan Starmind youtube channel.

“I dunno,” he confessed. “I know what I wish about people. Less stupid tribalism, more honesty, more facts. I wanna believe that we can be better than we are, you know?”

Gyotin flicked an ear and straightened up. He looked pointedly around at the refugee camp surrounding them, with its army of soup-kitchen volunteers, drivers, medics, workers or just the people who were there to provide comfort and a blanket.

“Mister Jenkins,” he said, “It is hard to see how you could be.”

“…We can be,” Kevin insisted. “I know it. You’re only seein’ the best of us, you don’t see the shit we’re wrestlin’ with back on Earth, like those APA fucks or the ‘God-hates-condoms’ brigade, the ‘only-white-people-can-be-racist’ dickwads and all the other fifty shades of asshole. There’s a lot better we could be. This here? This is the fuckin’ exception, man, and the real humanity needs to aspire to this, not…” He trailed off, uncharacteristically lost for a way to voice his thoughts. “…We can be better,” he finished lamely.

Gyotin actually beamed.

“So,” he said, and closed his tea case with a snap. “You are a man of faith after all.”

Date Point: 14y4d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the northern plains, Planet Gao

Champion Goruu of Clan Firefang

Aspiring to one day be a Champion was one of those things that separate the exceptional from the ordinary. A Male without ambition was barely a Male at all according to some schools of thought.

Of course, the problem with ambition was that the ambitious largely knew nothing about the reality of their goal. Aspiration, it seemed, was partly a function of ignorance.

Goruu certainly hadn’t fully appreciated the full weight of what being a Champion meant. If he had, he wouldn’t have wanted the job at all. There were so many…secrets to it. Not just the Clan’s official secrets, but the nuance and subtleties of the role that he’d never been groomed to learn. Champions seemed to play a game of their own, with its own rules and moves and Goruu had been sat down at the table without a rulebook or a mentor immediately after the board was flipped over and the game practically abandoned.

He was focusing on the official secrets. Those at least were relatively straightforward.

Clan Firefang was thought of by the uninitiated as the Clan of fighter pilots, but Gao really didn’t need that many fighter pilots. The last major internecine war had been generations ago and the Dominion, thanks to its monolithic clumsiness, had largely failed at dragging the Gao into their interstellar war.

Firefang provided pilots of all kinds, plus astronauts, propulsion engineers, small-craft crews and anybody whose job touched the sky, the ground, and the slim haze of gas in between. Passenger flights, cargo flights, satellite deployment and maintenance…High-tech, high-skilled jobs, jobs for which the Clan’s augmentation culture had seemed perfectly sensible and practical.

Goruu’s refusal to participate had made him…not a pariah or an outcast, but it had certainly kept some of the Clan’s innermost circles closed to him. Kept him from knowing about some of Firefang’s more sensitive projects.

All of them, of course, were now firmly under enemy control. Which meant that his first act as Champion was to prioritize the order in which Great Father Daar should violently dismantle everything that Clan Firefang had ever built.

No wonder Halti had balked—Having his throat torn out would have been less painful, not to mention quicker than what Goruu was having to endure.

“The hangars at Shem Yu?” he asked, tapping a claw at the next of the long list of items he was reviewing.

HIs aide, Brother Sando, had the relevant information on a tablet. “Three remotely operated weather planes,” he read. “Two were in the air at the time of the Takeover and their pilots were implanted. They’re equipped with sophisticated atmospheric monitors and can stay up for years, but they’re subsonic, unarmed and not equipped for stealth or high-altitude flight.”

“…Seven,” Goruu decided. He was using a simple threat rating system—Ten was a completely harmless asset, one that would have no impact on the war effort at all, nine was only mostly harmless, and so on. So far, the highest rating he’d given to anything was the gunship squadron stationed four hundred kilometers south-east of Lavmuy. He’d called it a three, and the Human fleet had promptly dropped a swarm of RFGs on it—All that now remained of a once-proud Firefang air base was a field of shallow, rubble-strewn craters.

“…The workhouse in Wen Kay?”

“Ground support assets and workers at a hydraulic fluid manufacturer. Only a few Clan were there, no contact with them since the Takeover.”

“Hmm. Who were the Clan?”

“Brothers… Roki, Yengiil and Taaruk. Logistics. Not augmented. And Father Menyu, the talent scout. He had a memory array.”

“Hmm…Nine. Next is…”

Goruu turned over a page and frowned at the next entry while his ears swivelled sideways in confusion. “…Laboratory at Dark Eye? What is this?”

Sando tapped on his tablet, blinked, and then handed it to Goruu. “It…needs your biometrics, Champion.”

At least the Clan had adapted quickly, there. Firefang’s Champion was expected to lead from the front like any Champion, which meant he was a pilot himself. They had contingencies in place for the Champion’s sudden death, and it had taken only minutes for Great Father Daar’s proclamation of Goruu as the new Champion to translate into a full transfer of access codes and authorizations.

Goruu pressed his thumb to the tablet’s sensor and read.

He didn’t need to read for very long before placing the tablet on the table with a shaking paw and a dry mouth.

“…Champion?” Sando prompted after a silent moment. Goruu blinked at him, and then remembered what words were.

“…One,” he said.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Armstrong Station, Orbiting Cimbrean-5, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Dear Miss Chang,

I’m pleased to report that an infant female cub by that name is among the refugees evacuated from Wi Kao. I have checked her DNA markers against our local copy of the Clan of Females breeding records and it seems that little Shoo’s parents are Regaari of Clan Whitecrest and Ayma of the Wi Kao commune.

I was sorry to hear that you cannot visit as I am sure your appearance would be a huge morale boost to the displaced Females, but if things change then little Shoo is currently being cared for at the Starmind convent. I cannot yet say how permanent this arrangement is likely to be.

Kindest regards,

A. Golemis,
Cimbrean Colonial Security

Xiù must have let out a huge sigh of relief, because Allison retreated back out of the ceiling access hatch where she was maintaining the power bus to *Misfit*’s forward engines.

“Good news, babe?”

Xiù nodded. “Regaari and Ayma’s cub is alive. She’s on Cimbrean.”

“That’s good! Hey, hand me the ET scanner?”

She waved a hand at her toolbox. The ET scanner was alientech, an import from the Vzk’tk Domain that was a jump or five ahead of anything humanity had yet invented. Though it fit awkwardly in the hand it could pick up all sorts of things that Allison would have needed a whole arsenal of other tools to diagnose, and she vanished back into the crawlspace with a grin as soon as Xiù handed it to her. Moments later, there was a blue glow.

“All good?” Xiù asked.

“Our baby’s perfect as always!” Allison wriggled back out of the hatch, dropped to the deck and closed it. “Any other good news?”

“Just an email from that reporter,” Xiù swiped down to recall it. “She says she understands our mission comes first and she’d still appreciate an interview whenever is convenient for us.”

“I guess that’s fair.” Allison slotted her tools back into place and closed the box. “Isn’t she the one who wrote that ‘humble hero’ piece on you?”

“The interview with Myun? Yeah. That was her.”

“Wow. Y’know, we might actually owe her our jobs.” Allison lifted the toolbox and slotted it back into its storage space.

“I guess…That was the last thing, right?”

“Yup!” Allison beamed. “Misfit is in perfect order! Unless somehow Clara shows up out here with some new upgrades, we’re ready to go. Guess we’d better suit up…You okay?”

Xiù slid her tablet into the pocket on her T-shirt’s back. “Not really,” she confessed. “I keep thinking about Gao, and…”

Allison took her hand. “I get it. I know it’s small comfort but they’re already doing better than the Guvnurag.”

“Yeah…” A guilty thought struck Xiù in the back of the head. “…We never wrote to Vedreg.”

“What would we say? ‘Hey, glad you’re alive, we’re alive too, sorry to hear a third of your species is dead’?” Allison led her gently toward the suit lockers.

“It’s better than nothing isn’t it?”

“I dunno. I’ve never been a thoughts-and-prayers kinda gal,” Allison said, opening her locker. “Besides, it’s not just one third, is it? What was the Guvnurag implant rate, something like fifty percent? Imagine if cellphones could do what implants can, how fucked would humanity be? And then there’s Kirk’s people, and the Corti, the Locayl…”

She stripped out of her T-shirt and pants and grabbed an undersuit. “And now that the cat’s outta the bag…”

Xiù sighed again, and started to suit up as well. “…When you put it like that, you almost make the Gao sound lucky.”

“Nah. We’re the lucky ones. They’re more like that, uh, that guy who got his arm stuck under a boulder and cut it off. Shitty luck, but at least the fuckin’ thing didn’t kill him outright, you know? I’d rather lose an arm than die.”

“…I guess.” Xiù bounced a few times to pull her undersuit up her legs. “I just hope Ayma and Regaari are okay. If anything happened to either of them them, I…”

She trailed off, until Allison turned and gave her a hug. “Whatever happens, we’ll face it together,” she promised.

“I know.” They shared a comforting moment forehead-to-forehead, kissed, and got back to work.

Allison zipped her undersuit up for her. “Better?”

“…A little. Gao’s in good hands,” Xiù decided, and turned to return the favor. “Let’s focus on the people who need us.”

“Attagirl.”

Returning to the cockpit did feel good, once Xiù was settled in all suited up and ready. Misfit fit her like a glove, and she’d run the preflight sequence with Allison so many times now that they could probably both have done it asleep.

She watched Allison go through the final step by firing off a message to the Byron Group via Chiune Station, light-minutes away on Cimbrean itself. “Departure checklist complete, mission status updated,” she declared. “Take us out, babe.”

“Okay…” Xiù switched channels. “Armstrong ground, Byron Echo-Victor-Zero-One-One in bay three, taxi for launch and we’re IFR to out-system jump…”

She got an entirely routine clearance and instructions. In theory, *Misfit*’s jump field was so tightly constrained that they could have safely jumped right out of the hangar, but safety regulations were absolutely clear—no jump drive activations within ten thousand meters of any inhabited structure. There was probably a rationale behind that rule, but Xiù hadn’t bothered to learn it.

Besides, ten thousand meters was nothing as far as Misfit was concerned. At a sedate 1G that was only a forty-five second trip, and Misfit could comfortably accelerate at six times that rate.

She eased out at a polite two Gs, gave it a couple thousand meters, then pushed up to four. Thanks to the ship’s compensation systems, they didn’t feel a hint of it.

Seconds later, she got the confirmation she’d been awaiting.

“Byron Echo-Victor-Zero-One-One, no-jump zone cleared. Bon Voyage.”

“Thank you Armstrong.”

On the internal line, Allison sighed. “Finally. Jump’s ready whenever you are, babe.”

Xiù raised a gloved hand and gave her a thumbs-up in the camera. She selected the Akyawentuo beacon code on the screen to her right, reflecting as she did so that it didn’t feel like only four days had elapsed since they’d jumped back here.

Part of her wished she was jumping to Gao instead. It had been her home, and her Sisters were there. Not rushing back there now felt like a betrayal…But Gao was in good hands. It had to be.

She jumped to Akyawentuo.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy, Gao

Specialist Michael Murphy, 1-325 INF (Airborne), 82nd Airborne Division

It had taken three days, but the entire division was finally through the Array, acclimated to the Frontline and the slightly lower gravity. Three tense-ass, worried days where they’d been able to watch the smoke over the city and listen to the occasional burst of fighting but finally, finally the wait was over .

The only thing between them and finally bein’ let off the leash to get some was the inevitable speech. There was always a speech, and they always went the same way: Something pompous and self-important, filled with “you’re all so brave” and all that horseshit politicians like to spout. Or maybe this one would be given by some Gaoian equivalent of a general, one filled to the brim with mild platitudes and useless encouragement from someone who had never seen real battle.

After all, Gaoians weren’t generally all that impressive if Michael was honest. They were mostly small, sorta thin and lanky and had clearly never seen a gym or done a long field march with a hundred pounds of gear. They had quick voices with sometimes high-pitched yips and clicky sounds and their ears never stopped moving, but that restless energy always looked nervous rather than alert.

To be fair they did have claws…but still. They looked a lot like raccoons, sounded breakable, would cringe and avoid Michael and any of his battle buddies whenever they got near…not exactly confidence-inspiring. Even technologically advanced alien civilizations could be hella fuckin’ third-world in all the wrong ways, apparently.

They weren’t all bad. The dudes with the bitchin’ mohawks were perfectly friendly and actually a little scary, in that quiet intense way…but they were the exception. Most Gaoians just didn’t have what it took to grab Michael’s respect, which was why he and his buddies filed into the hangar expecting some boring and time-wasting platitudes.

Instead they met Daar, Great Father of the Gao.

Michael had heard it was a very ancient title which hadn’t been used for a thousand years and meant something like…emperor, maybe? The last guy to wear the title was more or less their Genghis Khan and General Marshall all at once. That seemed like an awful lot to put on someone…but times were hard, the Gaoians needed a dictator, and goddammit somehow Michael knew the title fit the big guy. Daar moved like real authority, like the kind of seasoned, scarred Sergeant Major who’d waded through an ocean of Hell in his life just so he could kick big-league ass when he got to the end.

He didn’t look or act anything like the other Gaoians that Michael had met. For one he was huge. Michael wasn’t exactly little but Daar towered over him, with the general build of a feral bear and muscles rippling like a goddamned pit bull. He leapt up silently and prowled onto the stage like a big cat, no swagger, all danger.

Jesus.

The Great Father’s arrival alone was enough to subdue the buzz of conversation in the hangar, but his real presence only made itself known when he spoke.

“A billion of my fellow Gaoians are already dead,” he began, in absolutely perfect English. His voice was like a general should sound—Steely, clear, deep and riveting. That one phrase shut the entire hangar up just with the power of his voice, which rolled over the top of them like a wave and rang off the back wall. The room settled down instantly.

Daar’s gaze swept over the division, but that wasn’t the bit Michael noticed. What he noticed were the claws—even from fifty goddamn yards, Daar had claws like a collection of knives. He flexed them in the moment of silence before he spoke again, showing off a set of sharpened rippers resembling a fistful of heavy-duty tent pegs, then put them back in again quietly at his side, hidden but known.

“Dead. All of ‘em,” he repeated. “All in the span of about fifteen seconds from what my staff tells me. My people’s entire augmented population, switched off in a genocide that took generations to engineer and hardly a heartbeat to implement. They’re biodrones now, and there ain’t a Keeda-damned thing we can do about it but put ‘em outta their misery.”

He let the full weight of that settle on his audience, who eventually remembered to breathe. Michael was transfixed.

“Which means,” Daar told them once they’d had time to properly absorb his words, “there’s a slaughter ahead of us the likes of which eclipses any war ever fought on Gao or on Earth. It’s gonna be long and awful and until it’s done the Gao can’t rebuild.”

That was…direct. Direct and to the point like Michael had never heard from any officer. He didn’t beat around the bush, he just nut up and said what had to be said.

Michael could admire that. But Christ, the scale of what Daar was proposing…

“We’ve already made key progress. Lavmuy has been cleared out and Stoneback has an initial perimeter in place. From there, we can expand our clawhold, build out our safe infrastructure, and isolate, control and burn these parasites.

“But. We have a problem. Gaoian military resources are effectively at their limit between doing that and raiding for Females to bring back to safety. This is where you come in. I must rely on Human forces to do this. The problem is too big and we need to clean this up ourselves as much as we can…but our military is small and effectively destroyed.

“I have just under seven hundred and fifty full Brothers of the Rites under my command. I would trust the Fangs of Stoneback to win any other war, in any any other place and time. But here and now, they’re outnumbered more’n a million to one. My Brothers would call that a fair fight.” Daar paused and shared in the ballsy grin that swept the room. “I say I ain’t interested in fightin’ fair.”

Definitely not, and an attitude like that certainly lived up to the hype he’d heard tossed around the barracks. Stoneback had supposedly put on a show a while back in a combined training exercise that had sent some shockwaves around all the allied militaries. There had even been retraining and a funding surge in response.

Or so the rumors said.

Daar owned the stage while the room settled down before continuing. “We need an army,” he said. “There’s a billion Keeda-burned drones out there an’ I’ve got barely one battalion worth of shock troops to fight ‘em. Our other martial Clans are in far worse shape—Whitecrest has been virtually destroyed, our fleets, our pilots and most of our first responders are gone, our cities are in flames and the surviving population is goin’ feral as they starve. If we’re gonna build any kind of order outta this mess then we need an army the likes of which neither of our people have ever seen.”

Well…shit. That put a damper on things.

“We must train them, equip them, lead them, and we must do this quickly before the enemy has any chance to regain the initiative!” Daar announced. “…And there, I gotta ask for your help. The Clanless’re near and dear to my heart. They’re hard-working, know teamwork like second nature, they’re quick-learning and they’re aggressive like all Gaoian males…But they’re completely untrained, and un-led. Worse, our people had only brief experience with large-scale military formations and even less with full combined arms doctrine. Only my Clan maintains the relevant skills…and there ain’t enough of us to do this at the personal level of one-on-one training that’s gonna be needed.”

Daar paused, then grinned ferally. “But I notice this hangar is full to bursting with the finest airborne infantry the galaxy has ever seen. I’d be awful stupid to ignore that…and I’m a lotta things, but stupid ain’t one of ‘em. So ‘yer not just gonna be playin’ army. ‘Yer also gonna be the example to the Clanless of how it’s done. If we are to do this, then you will be the rocks on which this army is built, and the pins holding it together! You must teach them, an’ you must lead them.”

Well…shit.

As engrossed as Michael was, he still shared glances with his buddies. They’d been expecting to come here, drop onto some strategic targets, take and hold them. That’s what they’d trained for, after all, and it was what the brief had sounded like when they were woken up in the middle of the night to get their asses ready for an interstellar deployment.

Training and supporting a whole army was…Very different.

Daar, however, seemed to read his mind. “Why you?” he asked. “If the numbers alone weren’t enough, there is one simple, vital reason: You’re the best.”

He stepped to the front of the stage. “In my time as Champion, Warfather and leader of the Gao’s most ancient Clan, I’ve inspected militaries from across the galaxy. I’ve seen the Dominion army in its war against the Alliance, I’ve seen Chehnash troops, Allebenellin war-frames, Qinisi drone swarms and Guvnurag Battle Herds. And you wanna know what they all are? Useless.”

He snarled the word and prowled the stage, practically growling at the whole galaxy. “They’re cowardly, weak, and stupid. Whether that’s the enemy’s doing or not it don’t matter, ‘cause you couldn’t find worse allies anywhere but Hollywood!”

That actually got a chuckle rolling around the hangar. Daar became still again.

“But you, you’re something special. You’re the only military out there who can match our own skill, and unlike us you have the mass, experience and logistics to do something useful with that capability. But most importantly?”

He paused, surveyed, them, then again bared his teeth in a grin. “…You’re Deathworlders,” he reminded them. “Not just that, you’re the Deathworlders, the ones that define what that word really means.

“I’ve lived with the Ten’Gewek and they’re very impressive. Physically superior to either of our kind, courageous an’ clever an’ strong…but when it comes to mindset and attitude, even they don’t compare to a properly motivated Human. I’ve wrassled Julian Etsicitty, I’ve hunted deer in the Kentucky woods with arguably the most dangerous man in the galaxy. I am proud to call the HEAT my Brothers. And all of that? It’s alive, in each of you.”

Reverent stillness reigned the hangar. Michael’s heart was thumping hard in his chest.

“…I think mine is the only species in the Galaxy who truly appreciates you for who and what you are,” Daar said, and it felt like he was speaking directly to Michael. “We know what being a deathworlder means—it means bein’ more alive! It means wherever you go, the world knows you’re there! It means there is nothing that can stand in your way, because you have already conquered the worst the galaxy could make!”

The silence was bottomless. Not even a falling girder would have broken the spell.

Daar had raised his paws along with his voice. Now, he settled back down. “I know what you are,” he told them all. “You are Protectors, and Providers. You’re the sheepdogs, keepin’ the wolves away from the flock. You’re the strong, doin’ what the truly strong do by protectin’ the weak. And now, the Gao need your aid. You and I, we’re not fighting over land or Females or some stupid material thing. We’re fighting for the right to exist against an evil so old, it was active before our ancestors started thinkin’. And we will not allow it to win!”

As one, the entire room yelled out a lusty HOOAH! It was natural, heartfelt, and it hadn’t even been prompted.

Daar nodded, and shifted tone.

“Damn right. Now, I won’t bore you with the details. That’s what ‘yer chain of command is for. But the outline is this: each of your infantry battalions will have a Claw from Stoneback attached to your command. It’s not much, but you’ll get all their equipment and I think you’ll find they’re more than up to the task. They know the land, know the people, and will largely take point as much as possible. Your commanders are already briefed on the rules of engagement.”

Daar flashed a toothy, terrifying grin, complete with the most feral growl Michael had ever heard from anything. “For you though, it’s gonna be easy. If they’re male, and they ain’t immediately surrendered? You kill with prejudice. You’ll each be given scanners to check for implants, we’ve got nanofactories crankin’ em’ out by the thousands now. No Gaoian you meet goes without a check. If there’s anything in their skull at all, you kill them, right then and there. We ain’t got time for anything else.”

Jesus.

Nothing quite drove home the scope of the disaster than an RoE like that. They weren’t just occupying territory. They weren’t merely training an army from first principles. They were…shit. They were there to exterminate a goddamned robozombie infestation.

Fuck.

“Now listen up, this bit’s important. Why are you helping us train an army? Well…for those that don’t know, the Gaoian race has many more males than females. Quirk of our genetics. Normally that ratio is around six to one but now…” here his voice cracked a little, and the hangar was stone silent as he paused for a moment.

Then he rallied, and his voice was so utterly suffused with rage, Michael found himself taking a small step backwards.

“…Now, it’s going to be a lot worse. How much worse depends on our speed, but we are expecting a very severe fertility bottleneck in our future. Most of us will never have a legacy. We are a people who have been damn near destroyed and we have nothing left to lose. And we are angry. The…things that did this to us must be utterly destroyed, and now we will forge a military billions strong to make that happen. And you, my friends, will be the men and women who build it.”

That…that was a lot of anger. That was a fuck of a lot of anger, and while Daar looked like the kinda guy who had a damn near unlimited capacity for rage, it made Michael think again about what he’d seen of Gaoians so far. After all, those Whitecrest guys had been…

Shit, what did a whole species look like when it got that kind of mad?

“Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna clean Gao. We’re gonna rebuild. We’re gonna train. Then we’re gonna mobilize, and we’re gonna do all that quick.”

Murphy found himself nodding along.

“My people have had everything taken from them. The Hierarchy has been meddling with us for thousands of years. We will never know the extent of that they did, or what we would have been if they hadn’t been molding us into their…Janissaries.” Daar spat the word with so much venom behind it that Michael got mad just hearing it.

“They took our past from us. They took our history, our culture, our religion. But they never got our spirit, and they will not get our future!”

The mood in the room was changing. Thousands of men, an entire division’s worth of airborne infantry, were chewing at the bit under the building energy of the moment. This was their purpose in life, and Michael knew it more certainly than he had ever known anything. They were going to save a people and destroy a true evil.

Daar knew that, too.

“This is where the war turns! This is where the future of a whole galaxy is written! This is what we train for!” Daar lifted his voice into a roar, their roar. “All the way!”

The whole division answered with a spirit Michael had rarely felt before. “ALL THE WAY!!”

“Good.” The Great Father nodded approvingly, then fell to all fours and leapt from the platform as quiet and lethal as a tiger. He’d been scary enough before but seeing that finally drove home for Michael just how wrong he’d been about what Gaoians were, and could be. The crowd parted to let Daar through and he stalked toward the hangar doors.

When he got there, he turned around and snarled. “Let’s go kill us some drones.”

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy, Gao

Regaari

It was an inspiring speech. Regaari should have felt inspired. He should have been raring to get his teeth into the biodrones with the rest of them. He should have been…

He wasn’t even sure. The last few days had numbed him to the point where he was no longer entirely sure what emotions he should be feeling, let alone what he was actually feeling. He was floating somewhere above himself, watching his body work without him. Not inattentively—in fact, he was quite sure he was performing his duties with the greatest focus and precision of his life—but…removed.

As though he was waiting for something.

The chance to let go, maybe. Of whatever it was that was stopping reality from sinking in. There was a wall up in his mind, keeping him from quite grasping just what he’d personally lost to this war, and when it inevitably came down…

Until the right moment arrived, he would hold it up. Even if it destroyed him, he’d hold it up because failing to do so would mean losing even more.

But losing Ayma had been beyond hard enough. Losing Daar, his ‘most bestest’ friend and Cousin now imprisoned forever behind the title of Great Father…How much more was there to lose?

Not much. Just all of Gao.

He retreated to the HEAT’s little enclave in the camp, working through the mental exercises he’d first learned as a Whitecrest associate, long before he’d even finished growing: Know one’s own mind, and compensate for it. As a natural pessimist, Regaari knew his inclination was to see the worst in every scenario. He was the kind of ‘Crest who saw more darkness than light. Were things brighter than they first appeared?

It was difficult to see how. The little silver thread of hope he was able to tease out of it all was that Daar would still need close advisors and confidants. Probably.

But that wasn’t the same thing at all.

Warhorse and the rest of the HEAT were performing suit maintenance when he reached them. They had all stripped down to their skin to air out properly, each with new undersuits nearby that were still sealed in their airtight packaging. Unfortunately, those marvels of primitive-yet-sophisticated engineering were one-time wear, custom made for each operator, and so horrendously expensive that there was a powerful motivation to wear them as long as possible.

Which meant they had all spent the last several days marinating in themselves. Regaari was used to the nasal assault by now but he did appreciate the little things they did out of consideration, like doing their stripdown outdoors and the scented candle they lit in the middle of their circle.

It was slow going, both airing themselves out and cleaning, inspecting, and resealing their suits. The all knew the Mass intimately of course, but maintaining them really wasn’t their job. Without the techs, their tools and their expertise, an EV-MASS could take hours to properly maintain.

Sikes was sharing an old story with Parata, Newman and Butler that the “FNGs” hadn’t heard yet. Not that the trio were really ‘new’ to the team any longer, but there was a lot they hadn’t been there for.

“…so ‘Horse an’ ‘Base book it back down to him and the old man just waves ‘em off, right? Hobbles the last two hundred yards with his calf muscle fuckin’ near torn in two. Hard. Core.”

There was appreciative nodding.

Adam sat on a pile of sandbags with his suit in a state of complete disassembly all around him, as unselfconsciously free and pungent as Regaari had ever smelled. “Still about the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen him do,” he opined. “That really shoulda needed surgery even with Crude.”

“Still fuckin’ hardcore,” Firth chimed in.

“Well, yeah! But even I know when to stop,” Adam pointed out. “…Though…Still ain’t as dumb as the time Daar maxed out his time trials. That one was…”

“Inspiring.” Regaari coiled himself up on the sandbags next to him. There was an immediate nasal note of concern on the air.

“Good speech, ‘Dex?”

“It was rousing,” Regaari replied, curling up in a way that a human would have found to be spine-stretching agony but which was a perfectly comfortable posture for a Gaoian trying to relax. “They went into that hangar stinking of skepticism and with a general air of ‘let’s get this over with’—”

“Sounds about right,” Akiyama muttered.

“…and came out of it motivated,” Regaari finished. “He wears his new title a little too well.”

Adam gave him a scratch between the shoulder blades, in the exact spot where a Gaoian just couldn’t reach properly. “You okay, bruh?”

“…For now.”

There was a general air of concern among the humans, but they knew him well enough by now to trust him to handle his baggage. They resumed their work, and pretty soon Blaczynski was relating the story of the guy who tried to stab Adam in a bar.

“…What was it you said? Somethin’ about steppin’ on people?”

Adam shrugged as he reattached the life support pack. “I don’t even remember, bro,” he replied.

“You said you’d literally scraped bigger men than him off ‘yer boot,” Firth chuckled darkly. “Gentled the idjit up right quick.”

Rebar piled on. “Especially since that was a true statement.” He shook his head, “Dumb motherfucker managed to pick a fight with the most dangerous man in the galaxy.”

“Mhmm.” Not even Firth argued the point and everyone nodded along.

“Eh, he was just a drunk idiot.” Warhorse was never comfortable boasting about his skill as a warrior. He was, however, perfectly happy bragging about his other violently brutal abilities, like his absurd strength. “He wasn’t as stupid as the guy who broke his fist on my abs when he tried to gut punch me, though! I mean—heads up. LT’s comin’.”

The men made to stand up but Costello waved them all down. “Keep working. The old man needs an update on suit maintenance. How ready are we?”

Rebar fielded the query. “I figure we can be suited up in…hmm…two hours. We got somewhere to be, LT?”

“Yeah.” Costello aimed a finger skywards, significantly. “…Briefing’s at eleven-hundred for immediate suit-up after. Dexter, round up your Brothers. Vacuum combat is likely, so it’s a purely gauss loadout.”

Adam looked behind him and towards the containerized shower that had just been installed; the line to use it coiled around the block twice as everyone tried to complete their mandatory hygiene before deployment. He sighed and instead reached for his pack, dug through it for a moment, retrieved a package of wet-naps and started giving himself a field-expedient wipe-down.

“I’m gonna be itchy as hell by the time we get back I bet.”

“Fuck that,” Rebar growled. He put on his best unstoppable confident stroll as he headed in that direction to clear the showers out for them. “You’re gettin’ a shower. We all are.”

Abbott left his NCOIC to handle the dominance display and returned his attention to his remaining men. “On that note, don’t make a big scene if you can but all of you take care of everything you gotta get done. This is gonna be an important mission.”

Regaari unwound off the sandbags, duck-nodded respectfully, and put himself to work. By Costello’s standards, that was a grim warning—the lieutenant was usually so quietly assured and confident as to suggest that there was not really any such thing as danger.

Whatever they were about to hit, it had to be big. Something on a scale they hadn’t seen since operation NOVA HOUND and the day Regaari had first met the HEAT…And Regaari remembered perfectly well how that had turned out.

He flexed his mechanical paw, and went to find Faarek. There was a lot to get done, and not much time to do it.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Three Valleys, Planet Gao

Second Lieutenant Martina Kovač

Gao had five moons.

Four of them barely qualified for the word. They were pock-marked and irregular lumps of rock with all the lunar charm of a bag of potatoes, and their only contribution to the night sky was to be a set of four tiny points of light that were never in exactly the same place twice in the same year.

The fifth was about a third smaller than Earth’s own moon but substantially closer. Whereas Luna could be obscured by a person’s little fingernail at arm’s length, the largest moon of Gao required a thumb.

It looked gargantuan, and compared to Cimbrean’s twin, half-sized moons locked in their permanent ballet around a shared center of gravity it was positively Jovian.

…That made three night skies on three different worlds that Marty had taken the time to appreciate. Perhaps one day she’d get to visit Akyawentuo, or Lucent, or Nightmare, and appreciate their moons while a cold wind stung her cheeks and made her grateful for the warm mug of hot chocolate in her hands.

Moon tours. Sounded like an idea.

The farm was practically unrecognizable. For a start, two convoys from the escape pods had arrived, doubling their personnel and introducing the complication of looking after the wounded.

There were four seriously wounded. Three were burn victims, and Marty could completely relate to their predicament. One was unlikely to ever walk again, considering how badly the flaming deck had roasted his feet through his boots. One had withdrawn quietly into himself to contemplate his new blindness from where a gout of superheated air had played across his eyeballs. One was dying. Slowly. He was mostly unconscious, and chewing through a lot of their anaesthetic.

The fourth was Commander McDaniel, and it was a fucking miracle she was still alive.

The able-bodied men from the convoy—many of whom were sporting minor burns and cuts of their own—had all pitched in alongside the Gaoians, and there were a lot of Gaoians. Yeego had been desperate to find some constructive work for his new Clan of the Clanless to do, and between them they’d transformed the farm and built on what the SOR technicians had already achieved. A four foot trench had gone in around the perimeter, dug out by a Clanless work gang who’d worked to a lone drum and voice to time themselves as they clawed each section out of the earth and built the spoil up outside for an embankment.

Wilde had tutored them in installing a firestep, parapet, elbow rest and ammunition shelf, part of the barn had been cannibalized to make duckboards, and overall it looked straight out of the history books…but Rees and Hodder had done a patrol outside the perimeter and reported that it was no longer possible to see into the compound from the fields.

Between that and the camo netting strung between the buildings, it was actually something resembling safe to go outside again, just for a few minutes to appreciate the beauty of a clear alien sky and the feeling of a glacial wind turning her nose and cheeks red in the dark.

“LT.”

Marty turned. One of the marines from the second convoy—Lance-Corporal Creed—was a medic, and she’d made him their doctor. He looked even more frazzled than she felt, and she honestly couldn’t recall when she’d last strung together more than three hours of sleep.

“News?” she asked.

Creed shook his head. “No change.”

“God. Every five minutes I keep expecting you to tell me we’ve lost McDaniel.”

“That makes two of us,” Creed admitted.

Marty made a point not to sigh. McDaniel’s continued survival was a tiny ray of stupid light in the middle of all this. A stupid and totally irrational one—even if the XO did wake up, there was no way she’d be mentally capable of taking over. She could remember how bad Adam’s dad had been, and he’d woken up by himself after a minute or two unconscious.

For all she knew, the Commander was a permanent vegetable now. But she could hope.

“Supplies?” she asked.

“Three days,” Creed said. “Then we run out of lollipops for Richards. Burn bandages, we’ve got enough for a week. Oh yeah! Reminds me.” He handed her a small box. “Paracetamol.”

Marty took it gratefully. “Thanks. How did you know?” Her constant low-grade headache wasn’t debilitating, but she was definitely looking forward to some respite from it.

“My missus gets headaches all the time,” Creed smiled. “I know.”

“You’re married?”

“Yup. Two kids, age three and two. You?”

“Not yet. Engaged. But I am definitely having kids when I get out of this.”

Creed chuckled. “Give it a couple months, you might wish to be back here,” he warned, straightened up and turned away. “I’ll keep you posted if anything changes,” he promised. “Ma’am.”

Marty nodded to him, and was left alone with her thoughts again, for nowhere near long enough. She was interrupted by Yeego.

Something about the Gaoian landlord said “slimeball” to her, but right now being picky was probably a good way to get dead. His Clanless had certainly made all the difference in turning their farm into something that looked like a springboard for real military action in the area…But his mannerisms grated at her—the way he groomed his whiskers as he approached, the too-straight, over-upright posture that spoke of a sense of tremendous self-importance. His quick, calculating, darting glance that took in everything around him and paid whatever was actually in front of him only the bare minimum of attention.

He was everything a Whitecrest or Stoneback wasn’t.

“Lieutenant.” He sniffed the air as he sidled up. “It smells of pain in there.”

“What can I do for you, Yeego?” Marty asked, carefully refraining from a reply as she sipped her hot chocolate.

“The last of the work is complete,” he said smoothly. “My Brothers are resting for now, but they’ll need something else to occupy them shortly.”

At least his mind was on the job, wherever else it might also be.

“Our food supply would be the next pressing concern,” Marty told him.

“Yes. Your people eat a lot. One of your ration packs would feed a Gaoian for several days.”

“Any ideas? I know this place was farming fodder for livestock, so where’s the livestock?”

“At this time of year, the Naxas graze up in the highlands,” Yeego pointed toward one of the low, rolling, purple mountains that framed the wide valley their farm was in. “It’s the wrong time of year to slaughter them, though.”

“How so?”

“Each herd is one male and many females, the lucky fuckers,” Yeego chittered. He caught Marty’s arched eyebrow and reined it in. “…All the females will be pregnant now. They carry their young through the winter, give birth in the new year.”

“Calving season, huh?”

“If that’s the human word for it,” Yeego made the curious variant of a duck-nod that was the Gaoian equivalent of a conceding shrug. “I suppose we could round them up and eat, but slaughtering a pregnant Naxas is…”

“Unethical,” Marty finished for him.

Yeego duck-nodded. “Also bad practice. You want the next generation to replace the one you just ate. I intend to survive this war, Lieutenant. I want there to be Naxas to eat next year.”

“So where can we get food? Nava?”

Yeego chittered again. “There isn’t a Nava farm anywhere nearby. Too cold for them.”

Marty frowned at him. “I’m hearing a lot of obstacles but no solutions, Yeego…” she pointed out, warningly.

Yeego groomed his whiskers again, scratched at an ear, and cleared his throat before lowering his voice and ducking closer. “Lieutenant…I aligned with you because I thought you had the solutions,” he confided. “Four hundred years ago, a farming community like ours would have been producing seasonal food all year round. Now, thanks to Clan Goldpaw and their global trade network, we’re just as dependent on imports as anywhere else. We could afford to be.”

There was a familiar story. How many people would starve on Earth if there was a total failure of logistics like they’d seen on Gao? Hell, there were whole planets in the Dominion which imported their food. Wealthy developed civilizations meant access to all kinds of food all year round thanks to the old miracles of refrigerated containers and global shipping.

…Which was nice, but in a crisis like this there needed to be seasonal crops growing and cured meats hanging in the stockpiles. Rip the rug of global distribution out from under a developed economy, and this was the result.

“We do have solutions,” Marty assured him aloud. “But until our line of supply is established, I have to assume that it won’t be established and that we need to be self-sufficient. I am not going to starve here because I was too optimistic and held out for supplies that never came. Okay? If we have to eat the Naxas now to avoid starving now, then we’ll do it and worry about the long-term with full bellies.”

She straightened up. “Fortunately, that isn’t necessary yet. Our lifeboats carry enough food to support their occupants for weeks, and Gaoians don’t eat much. But if you can’t think of a solution then you need to find the people among your ‘Brothers’ who do have a solution and send them my way.”

Yeego flinched, just a little. Maybe she’d stung him, maybe he was just responding as most Gaoians did to an irritated deathworlder. Either way, he duck-nodded eagerly and straightened up.

“I will ask my Brothers,” he said clearly, stepped back, duck-bowed respectfully and made himself scarce.

Marty let out a long breath once he was gone and chased down a couple of Creed’s painkillers with the last of her hot chocolate before turning back indoors. She had an opportunity to sleep.

Somehow, she knew she wasn’t going to.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Farthrow Facility, Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Lt. Col. Owen “Stainless” Powell

“The target is a facility called Dark Eye.”

Mission prep for the HEAT was weirdly delicate. The suits did not tolerate muck, dirt or grit inside them, the undersuit could take a little foreign body and turn it into a scratched-raw bleeding hole in a man’s leg. Which meant that suit-up had to be done in the most sterile conditions available.

Meanwhile, mission prep ideally involved carbing up, caffeinating, defecating, slamming a dose of Crue-D, and shaving. The HEAT mohawk was kind of iconic by now—the only reason Powell didn’t wear one himself was that his own hairline now started somewhere behind his ears. But the Lads, Costello included, were deadly serious about the step of getting their hair helmet-ready. It was like putting on woad, a ritual to focus the mind.

Once they were safely in the undersuit without any outside contaminants in there with them—a process that the techs made look like a ballet, and the operators themselves made look more like the same ballet conducted by a herd of rhinos—they were staying there until the job was done.

Powell sorely wished he could suit up with them again. If Dark Eye had been more remote and out of contact, he might have been able to justify his personal involvement, but as it was the target was well inside their sphere of communications. He wasn’t going to be out of the loop, and so there was no reason for him to present.

Still. This one was going to be tough, and sending them into it without him gnawed at everything he’d ever prided himself on. God only knew how Daar felt—since entering the room to observe the briefing, the newly-minted Great Father hadn’t said more than three words together.

The equally newly-minted Champion Goruu called up the schematic on a Gaoian tablet and let the HEAT take a good look at it. At first, they seemed to be looking at a potato the size of a car, but within seconds the view pulled in sharply and highlighted an arrangement of more regular shapes on the potato’s surface.

“You may not be aware, but Gao has five moons,” he explained. “This is the smallest, Shasu. It’s little more than a captive asteroid and it’s on a slow re-entry orbit—About two million years from now, it will hit Gao. It seems my Clan decided to address that problem early and built an experimental propulsion laboratory up there.”

“Ordinarily, we wouldn’t give two shits about it right now,” Powell elaborated. “It’s unarmed, it can’t accelerate on account of bein’ a fookin’ moon and it has a permanent population of fifty—all implanted. But, the bastard thing has a nanofactory in its core. A big an’ advanced one. The enemy could be cookin’ up anything in there.”

The men nodded, and Powell indicated to Goruu to roll on the schematic. Most of the facility was a long narrow shaft that vanished into the moon’s innards. “Nukin’ it to Hell is, sadly, not an option, because Shasu is overall about the same size as Mauna Kea. We could fling the entire Deep Space Strategic Weapons Reserve at the bastard…or we can be smart about it.”

“Your mission,” he concluded grimly, “Is to capture this facility.”

The HEAT had the solemn, serious expressions of men who knew this was going to be a big one. Powell gave them a second to let the gravity of it sink in, then continued.

“Ingress is only possible at one point: This surface facility,” he said. “These are the landing pads, loading bays, hangars and Dark Eye’s only defences, a flight of four FTL-capable fighters and some point defence. Our Firebirds will clear that out for you, but the result will probably be damage to the surface structures. Expect depressurization, loss of gravity, fire, water, electricity, all of it. The facility is probably under the direct control of a Big Hotel agent, so you can expect a funhouse.”

That was the HEAT’s private and thoroughly ironic name for a controlled spaceborne facility where the enemy had been able to prepare traps and environmental hazards and they were the bane of their training lives. Every step in a funhouse was potentially deadly, every corner a potential trap, and every meter of ground was going to be exhausting at the very least.

“Below the facility is a loading tunnel connecting the landing pads to the shaft top station here.” He indicated it. “That shaft is how material is delivered to and from the nanofactory and lab in the moon’s core. It’s a straight drop into the main facility from there—That shaft is five thousand meters long, and Dark Eye itself is at the far end of it. Keeping your line of communication open will be vital.

“Once you’ve reached the bottom o’ the shaft however, things are fairly straightforward,” he finished. “Fortify the first good position you find, set up your field jump array an’ secure the location for the techs, so we can effect control and claim that nanofac.”

“The access shaft is kept in vacuum and microgravity so the maglev trains can traverse it in seconds,” Goruu said. “They’re on maglev rails on the shaft walls, and the five of them neatly fill the whole shaft. Furthermore, they’re controlled from the Dark Eye control facility rather than the top station, and they move fast. You can’t rely on being able to hijack one.”

“And they’ll bug-on-a-windshield anything trying to enter the facility through the shaft,” Powell concluded. “Your best route is the utility tunnel that runs alongside the shaft, here. That’s where the gas pipes, water pipes, electrical conduits and all the other stuff run so there’s plenty of opportunity for sabotage, but it’s compartmentalized into sections about five hundred meters in length and the pressure doors are purely mechanical. Alas, it does have gravity plates, so it’ll probably be a drop corridor. You’ll have to climb it.”

It was always painfully obvious when Righteous was genuinely worried. Instead of boisterous snark he went dead silent and nodded grimly. He may have been as monstrous as a Protector but he was their weakest climber and everyone knew it.

Warhorse, bless him, rested a hand on Firth’s shoulder. He said nothing and nothing needed to be said. Nothing was appropriate to say anyway; the silence around the table spoke to how serious all of them were.

“…Are there any questions?” Powell asked.

“I know this is a pipe dream,” said Rebar warily, “But we didn’t happen to get any extra reaction mass for our suits through the gate, did we?”

“Aye, but it won’t matter. We only had the one set of extended-duration maneuver packs and we can’t top up while underway.”

“…So it really is gonna be a climb.”

“In theory, we could control gravity in the shaft from the surface facility,” Goruu said. “In practice, a Hierarchy agent trumps any computer warfare we could ever bring. Even Champion Meereo is only flesh and blood, and our prohibition against true AI is…longstanding.”

“I have the FIC combing the schematics as we speak,” Powell assured them. “If there’s a way to cut power to the gravity field generators from this side of the shaft, we will.”

Baseball spoke up. “It’s gonna be slow-going, sir. ‘Horse and I are gonna need to be anchored to the wall, and we’re gonna need to anchor the team to us. We’ll be sitting ducks for the most part.” He paused for a moment, then reached for one of his high-energy MREs. ‘Horse immediately did the same and so did the rest of the team.

“Aye. We’re relyin’ on the Whitecrests an’ their gecko-glove suits to screen for yer,” Powell agreed, and ripped open one of his own. He might not be deploying with them, but he’d damn well eat with them.

“Fifty biodrones,” Regaari observed. “And with a nanofactory we have to assume that they’re well equipped and have drone support.”

“Aye. I’ve seen the specs on this nanofac, it can turn out summat the size of a Weaver in twenty minutes.”

That piqued Firth’s interest. “Shit, that fast? Um…bein’ perfectly honest sir, this is sounding like a damn near impossible mission suddenly. Can’t we just drop a nuke down the shaft?”

“That nanofactory is absolutely on the cutting edge. In logistical terms, it’s the equivalent of the Farthrow generator.” Goruu pointed downwards at the device below their feet that was keeping a large part of the whole star system blanketed in protective wormhole-disrupting quantum white noise. “With it intact, we could build prefab shelters, ration ball factories, weapons, vehicles, blankets, spaceships…It would be the strongest possible foundation for reconstruction. Sacrificing it would be…”

Great Father Daar finally deigned to speak. “I have assigned paramount importance to this facility,” he said, in a low and determined growl. “With it, a billion lives or more could be saved.”

He straightened up. “And yeah. I know this one’s gonna be a fuckin’ nightmare,” he added. “Yer my Brothers, all’a you, you know I wouldn’t send you into this if I thought it wasn’t absolutely necessary. But Gao needs this, it might just make the diff’rence between survivin’ this war and winning it.”

The room went silent again. Warhorse had the easiest hero button of anyone Powell had ever met, and it was immediately obvious that the chance to save that many lives had somehow drawn even more resolve out of the monstrous Protector than ever before.

His heroism was also, when that button got pressed, deeply infectious. Even without a word being spoken, a whirl of steely resolve whipped around the table. Grim expressions became determined ones. Stony expressions became hungry. Only the people who really knew the HEAT would have noticed, but among that select group there may as well have been horns, trumpets and a rousing choir.

Warhorse rolled his shoulders to get his crushingly tight undersuit seated more comfortably. A perennial problem for him more than the rest. “We’re gonna save that nanofactory.” He said it matter-of-factly.

Everyone nodded along, even Powell. He was such a natural leader that even Powell felt led by his example in moments like these. In a way it was a shame the young man never became an officer, but what a loss that would have been in turn.

“Aye,” Powell agreed. “Nobody else could even try. You lot? I have absolutely no doubt. Now let’s get this plan finalized. Lay your thoughts on the table.”

“…We’re gonna need a fuck of a lot of rope.”

“Nuh. We can’t carry that much anyway. Too bulky. We just gotta leapfrog.”

“Slower.”

“We can handle it. What we are gonna need is…”

Heads bowed, the table creaked as several pairs of hands leaned on it, and the mission began in earnest.

Date Point: 14y4m AV
Deep Interstellar Space

The Alpha-of-Alphas

There was not much left of the Alpha-of-Alphas now. It had retained enough biology to support its brain, though even some of that had been replaced by more advanced technological alternatives, but for the most part it was now a creature of cybernetics and steel.

It found nothing disturbing about its self-inflicted condition. Hunters never did. As a breed, they practiced augmentation casually, easily and freely. The bodies they originally spawned with were just the foundation for the superior technological predator to come. They staggered from their incubation pools and straight into an enhancement theatre before they had properly grasped that they were conscious. Their first true waking experience was the moment their neural implants came online and connected them to their brood.

After that, looking back was an alien concept. The Alpha-of-Alphas had simply followed the trajectory of its life to the natural summit. It was no longer a single hunting body. It had become a ship…and from there, a fleet.

It had learned patience early in its life, as a talented Beta. When it seized the rank of Alpha, it did so on its guile and discipline. When it had single-handedly slain a Vulza, the beast had fallen to a trap carefully prepared over the course of four days. A lesser, less disciplined brain would have strained against the inertia of its “limbs” now. It would have demanded that the fleet prepare itself unreasonably fast, attempted to achieve the impossible and failed.

The Prey weren’t going anywhere. How could they? A species’ most populous planet could not reasonably be evacuated. So the Alpha-of-Alphas ignored the Hierarchy’s insistent whining, and the limp-willed fretting of its subordinates. The Hunt was on, and the Swarm would feast on something. They did not, after all, have to hunt what the Hierarchy wanted them to hunt.

But the furry-faced Gao were precious to the Humans. That made them both a sweet and delicious target, and a clawed and deadly one. The hunt was not going to be trivial.

It relished the challenge. More importantly, it relished that the Swarm’s preparations were finally complete.

With a thought it jumped the entire Swarm-of-Swarms to a staging beacon well outside of Gaoian sensor range. With a second thought, it aligned them toward the prey and went to warp.

The third thought rolled around every Hunter brain in the fleet, building and gaining fervor with every passing hungry second.

<Meat to the maw!>

Date Point: 14y4d AV
The Jitney, high Gao orbit, approaching Shasu

Master Sergeant Harry ‘Rebar’ Vandenberg

It felt good, going into a fight that literally nothing and nobody else in the known universe could handle. It felt…right. Not a lot of people ever really found a place in the big picture, or that overlap spot where their abilities, interests and ambitions united into purpose.

To serve in a unit of nothing but such men was a profound honor.

To go into battle knowing, without doubt, that the enemy was pure evil and that innocent lives rested on the outcome…that was practically a luxury compared to the ambiguous shit that generations of servicemen had endured over the last ninety years.

There was only one thing better than feeling motivated, purposeful and significant—that plus being armed, armored and ready to kick ass. Plus Brotherhood, plus adrenaline, plus, honestly, the sheer geeky cool factor that he got to be a fucking space marine.

…Soldier. One day, history would correct its grievous mistake. But that was for later. Right then, life was pretty goddamn good.

The Net was live with mission chatter. The FIC providing intel, HMS Viceroy and HMS Valiant maneuvering to offer communications support. FIREBREAK-TWO-ONE and his wingmen loitering on an innocuous patrol orbit around the fleet. STAINLESS’ deep voice, interjecting here and there to acknowledge a report or give an update.

The go code.

“FIREBREAK-TWO-ONE, STAINLESS. You are clear to engage at your discretion, weapons free.”

Firebreak of course sounded entirely ice cold and calm, almost bored.

“STAINLESS, FIREBREAK-TWO-ONE. Copy action. Warping to target.”

The net went quiet for about forty seconds.

“Contact. Four bandits. Engaging.” Firebreak still sounded entirely calm. Justifiably so, to judge from the way his next report just five seconds later was: “Splash four bandits, no more contacts….Engaging ground target. Guns.”

“Shellcrack…Good hits. Repeat.”

“FIREBREAK-TWO-TWO, willco. Rifle away.”

“Good hits…PYRAMID, FIREBREAK-TWO-ONE. Target objectives met.”

“Copy. TOURIST-ONE-ONE, PYRAMID…”

To Rebar’s right, Righteous made an amused noise as a safe approach vector was read to their pilot. “Fuckin’ pilots.”

“I’d rather they don’t buy it today, bruv,” Crank piped up from his far side.

“They’re stealin’ all our fun!”

“It’s okay, Righteous,” Rebar told him. “There’s loads more down there I bet.”

“There better fuckin’ be.”

The Gaoians were conspicuously silent, which in a change of nearly apocalyptic proportions, Righteous managed to notice.

“Aww…fuck. I’m a shit person,” he apologized.

Regaari reached over and cuffed him upside the head. He had to jump up to do it, but he managed. “Yup. Cry about it later.”

Spaceborne deployment meant that the Jitney’s crew, even the loadmaster, were all wearing a spacesuit. Weavers had a pressure forcefield, but nobody wanted to rely on just that, which meant that everyone who wasn’t actually gonna jump out of the thing was cozy in a pressure suit and tethered to something sturdy.

Usually, a Loadmaster was good at making themselves heard over engine noise and rushing wind. Shouting through vacuum was a whole extra kind of difficult, though, which was why their orders were a combination of hand signals and radio.

“Jump in three!” he informed them. “We’re gonna come in low and slow, surface gravity is negligible! Should be mostly EVA, but watch for sudden transitions to artificial gravity!”

“That means watch ‘yer reaction mass, Reeb,” Righteous said. “Yer gonna want as much cold gas down there as you can save.”

“I know, I know, don’t waste the gas…” Rebar nodded solemnly. Over-thrusting was his one consistent failing in EVA training, and on a tiny rock like Shasu a strong footfall was enough to impart escape velocity. If he ran his suit thrusters dry, he’d sit out the rest of the mission bored and alone and have to wait for recovery.

They’d experimented with kinetic thrusters on the suit, but that brought a raft of problems. Power storage and waste heat, primarily. A starship could generate nice big shields with a huge surface area for radiation, and had plenty of mass to sink the waste heat into. Spacesuit operators on the other hand could overheat so quickly they got burns. The Gaoians had mostly licked the problem with some sophisticated materials science and microgenerators, which they’d promised to share, but that shit didn’t happen overnight so for now the Mass’s thrusters ran on compressed gas.

Out back of the Weaver, Gao got a fraction smaller as the pilot pulse-warped them to the target. The planet heaved and wheeled out of view through a swooping maneuver, and then quite suddenly there was craggy, dusty rock the color of asphalt sweeping by below.

Then there was a building, a dark spike of glittering lights a ways off to one side. A snowy white cloud of smoke, ice crystals and condensed air where the Firebirds had presumably torn something open. Brilliant blue-white lights illuminating a landing pad.

The Jitney’s own jump light turned green.

“GO! GO! GO!”

Rebar was eighth out, behind the Aggressors, Costello and two of the Gaoians. This wasn’t like an airborne jump at all, they didn’t drop out of the Jitney at all but instead it kinda left them behind, hanging in its wake. The instant they were all out it lifted its nose and warped away with a barely-visible hint of extreme speed in the thousandth of a second it took for the human eye to register the difference between there and gone.

The surface facility was a class-A wreck. Being strafed twice by Firebirds would do that to a place. One of the buildings north of the landing pads had been torn up, popped like a big metal and concrete balloon, and was still venting atmo.

Their approach vector took them down through the gas plume, and fine ice crystals hissed across Rebar’s visor. The sun was low on the horizon to their left, casting long and impenetrable shadows on the rocky terrain. With no atmosphere to scatter the light, the lit features would have been eye-searingly brilliant if not for the Mass’s visor, while the shadows were completely pitch dark.

It made judging distance tricky, but this was what they trained for.

They avoided the obvious ingress through the cargo hangars. Too easily trapped, and getting too close to the ground here was an invitation to hit a gravity trap of some kind. Maybe a high-G plate to bring them crashing down, or a reverse plate to launch them into orbit, it didn’t matter.

Their formation was a graceful, precise swirl as they applied thrust and made best speed for the target. It was a fine balancing act—too slow and they were sitting ducks, too fast and they might blunder into a hazard.

Murray was on point. Rebar had no idea what he saw or how he saw it, but their Scottish brother was his usual verbose self as his weapon snapped up, he twisted at the waist and opened fire.

“Contact, one o’clock low.”

Sure enough, a red HUD icon highlighted his target. It was eerie watching him shoot and not hearing or seeing anything except his gun pulsing against his shoulder—there wasn’t even any muzzle flash or expelled gas, nor did a gauss weapon expel casings. Without tracer rounds, the gunfire was totally invisible.

Firth, Newman and Blaczynski all piled on the firepower as well and there was a pinkish puff of liberated gases and blood among the buildings.

They needed to get inside before they started taking fire from multiple angles. If a force of biodrones caught them in enfilade then figuring out where the hell they were even shooting from would rob them of precious seconds, and lives.

Motion. That was the key and they all knew it. As soon as the hostile was down their vector changed and they plunged into the concealing gaps between the buildings, angling towards a spot where the FIC’s analysts had found an appropriate point of entry—a thin wall that they could breach and force entry, the outside of which didn’t fall within the field radius of any gravity generator, which meant no nasty surprises.

Sikes had the charge rigged in seconds. No overpressure to worry about in a vacuum, but when the building popped the pressure inside was gonna blow a lot of shrapnel their way, so they stepped aside. Rebar felt the blast through his boots, though it happened in total silence.

Air and debris belched viciously out of the hole, Firth forced his way in at speed with the other Aggressors right behind him, and the gravity came back. Gao standard, so good enough to hold them to the deck and let them work their sheer physical presence rather than puff carefully about.

Their entry was a bunk room. A dozen Gaoian nest-beds in a circular space with a few lockers and a scattering of personal effects, most now strewn all over the floor from the outrushing atmo.

Sure enough, the first gravity trap hit before they were all even in through the breach. The plating switched off entirely, and men who hadn’t trained their reflexes to negotiate a three-dimensional environment in shifting, twisting or vanishing gravity fields would have stumbled or been left floating stranded.

The HEAT, however, knew how to play this game. In a confined space, every wall, the ceiling, the floor, all of it was just a point of contact in a game of smooth parkour. If anything, their progress sped up.

“Long halls,” Rebar reminded Newman. “Variable plating.”

“Rog.”

“Third door right,” Costello added, recalling their planned route. They were making full use of their three-dimensional mobility to avoid the most dangerous areas, and in this case a comparatively thin set of walls would let them make rapid progress toward their goal while avoiding the areas with the deadliest potential.

It was definitely a funhouse, though. They couldn’t go twenty meters without the gravity adjusting in an attempt to trip them up, or at least slow them. In this part of the facility, the gravity plating was the basic stuff that only pulled down—the variable-output stuff was for facilitating cargo transfer and wasn’t necessary outside of major corridors and warehouses—but it could still put out at different levels.

It didn’t slow them.

Their flow was simple: few words, spoken economically; hand gestures; radio taps and brevity codes. Walls were just a speed bump or something to kick off, anything that wasn’t a Brother got serviced the second it was seen.

The Gaoian biodrones were wearing some kind of powered industrial hardsuit, like the asteroid miners back in Sol. They were tough, designed to handle micrometeorite impacts and other space debris, but slow and cumbersome. A man in EV-MASS or a Whitecrest in his Suit had all of the same advantages and none of the downsides. Each one went flailing in the changing gravity, riddled with gauss rounds. They were obviously trying to hunt the HEAT, but they were sheep trying to hunt a dragon.

The robot drones were more effective. One—little more than a flying fusion scythe with a cloaking device—nearly got Sikes. It would have taken his head off if Butler hadn’t grabbed the back of his suit and yanked, and still would have wreaked havoc if not for Regaari, whose own fusion-clawed right hand knocked it spinning. Dexter shot it before it finished tumbling and then melted back into barely-visible action, his suit’s metamaterial lining almost impossible to pick out against the complex background.

Living space gave way to working space abruptly and obviously. One side of the divide was lined, carpeted and softened. Not luxurious, but clearly a place for recharging after a weary day’s work.

The other side was bare concrete, hard lighting and exposed utilities. No choice here, they had to take the loading corridors to reach the tunnel, but they’d already avoided some of the most defensible positions that might have stymied their assault.

The tunnel, however, was fortified. The enemy had cleared it of cover, or rather they’d piled all the cover up to serve as a barricade and thrown in some shield emitters. The ideal solution would have been to avoid it entirely, but it was exactly in the middle of the one choke point they couldn’t avoid, and it was made doubly sadistic by the fact that while the biodrone defenders were standing comfortably on flat ground, the approach to the barricade had a different gravitational direction.

A barricade they had to climb to assault. Maximum fun.

Firth pulled his head back in sharply as a barrage of small-arms fire made it clear how that assault was likely to go. “Ten. Buncha drones, too.”

Costello nodded, slipped to the front and stuck his rifle with its camera scope around the corner to survey the obstacle for himself. “…Starfall. Hotball.”

Hotball was a brevity code for a tactic they’d developed but never used, and it hinged on their connection to the fleet. Blaczynski nodded, plucked something about the size of a grenade from his webbing, turned it carefully in his hand, yanked the safety pin and hurled it out into the shaft. It arched to their left, falling away toward the end of the tunnel while they all got their asses well back into defilade.

It was a long drop, but the hotball was tough. It was a jump beacon, armed with a camera and a laser designator, and once it had rattled to a stop far below all Blaczynski had to do was settle its crosshairs on his target and hit “fire.”

Several things happened in the space of three seconds. In one smoothly controlled instant, the Farthrow facility opened a temporary exemption for a very specific set of jump codes, and somewhere far away one of the Royal Navy’s destroyers fired a shot.

Spacetime bent, twisted, and a hurtling naval round appeared inside the tunnel aimed precisely at the barricade, which immediately ceased to be a problem. Debris, rubble and bits of splattered biodrone rained down the tunnel, and the lighting went entirely, plunging them into darkness.

Shin chittered appreciatively. “…That worked.”

Costello checked around the corner again then nodded. “Protectors and Snowtops.”

The Protectors were their strongest climbers, by dint of being their strongest everything. ‘Base and ‘Horse were the first round the corner and up into the shaft, ably supported by Irish. It was the work of seconds for them to anchor pitons in the fractured concrete and start climbing.

The Whitecrests didn’t need any such luxuries. Their gecko-gloved suits could stick to the walls and ceiling like the fucking alien, and they swarmed out into the tunnel, vanishing in the dark.

Irish handed Rebar a rope. “Your turn.”

Rebar took it, pulled out the slack, then heaved himself out into the tunnel, which promptly became a shaft the second he was climbing it.

They had three hundred yards to climb to reach the utility tunnel. And from there…

Five klicks.

He sighed, and commenced the long climb.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Singer

The funny thing about Vemik was that while he found everything interesting, he found some things more interesting than others. And he was so very much a man, too. He looked at the Sky-People tools and saw weapons, steel, hunts and big things. The male eye was always drawn toward Taking-magic.

The Singer saw those things, of course. It was part of her role to see the Taking and embrace it as a man. But she preferred Giving-magic, where she could. It was…subtler. Quieter. Harder to see, but felt more keenly when missed.

And the Humans had a lot of it.

Strange tall metal pots that could keep water or stew hot from dawn to sunset. Little blue-green pouches that could be kneaded to get as hot as a comfortable fireside and warm the hands. Food that cooked itself without fire, tiny white stones that swirled away to nothing in water and made it safe to drink…

And such songs! Now that Jooyun was in something like a good mood again she was spying on him. While the men of the People napped through the height of the day, he had sat against a Ketta and was holding a strange black stone in his hand that sang for him.

There were no drums in that song, and the voice singing it was both strong and gentle but there was so much more to it than just one voice. Sounds she couldn’t describe that flowed around and under and over its singer’s voice, lifting and answering and changing the song. The notes were clear, pure and held level, and made interesting patterns of sound with one another.

♫—wish upon a star, and wake up where the clouds are far behind me…Where troubles melt—♪

She couldn’t resist. If she shared a flaw with Vemik, it was relentless curiosity and a song like that needed to be heard well. She dropped down from her tree and moved to join him.

The song stopped as she approached, and Jooyun put the rock that had been making it away in his pocket. “Hi, Singer.”

He sounded…tired. Not in any physical way that she could tell, Humans seemed to just work and work and work, much longer than any of the People would before sleeping to restore their strength. But he had a tired soul for the moment.

“I heard singing,” she explained, and coiled her tail beneath her to sit on it. Jooyun smiled softly and nodded.

“Eva Cassidy,” he said.

“…Means…?”

“That’s her name. Or, was. She died before I was born.”

“A singer with a name? And how do you hear her if she died?”

Jooyun smiled. “Not that kind of singer. Humans don’t just sing for the gods, sometimes we sing for ourselves, or for fun, or…lots of reasons. I sing, too.”

“You do?”

He nodded.

“And…how do you hear her? Is it like your radio?”

“A little. Some of the same magic is used. It can remember sounds like our tablets can remember words.” He seemed to remember something. “Actually, one day I was hoping to have it remember your songs.”

There was a strange idea. To have her voice, her words and her songs remembered by a rock, for other Humans and maybe Gao like Daar and other Sky-People to hear. The Singer certainly had no idea what the gods would think of it.

Then again, it was never easy to tell what pleased or angered the gods anyway. The old Singer wouldn’t have been much help in this situation either—her best advice had always been to not try and guess at godly wants, just dance and sing in whatever way she found pleasing and hope that it would be acceptable.

“…Can I hear more?”

Jooyun smiled and took the song-stone from his pocket again. They listened to another song about falling leaves, then he touched the stone a few times and had it play a different singer. A man.

“Eric Clapton,” Jooyun explained. “His son died at only a hand of years old, and…he made this song.”

Just hearing it was a gift. A painful gift that touched an ache in her soul that had never quite gone away, but it was the good kind of pain. The kind that was only felt for being lucky enough to have had somebody precious to lose.

“…Your people make good songs,” she admitted as she dried her eyes once it was over. “I’m…sad to hear that your people lose children too. I thought…with your magic, maybe…”

“We can do a lot,” Jooyun sighed and put the song-stone away. “Maybe we’ll have magic like that one day, but I doubt it. We don’t lose many, these days, and the ones we do…There may not be enough magic in the world.”

“I’m glad. If we get even a little of that giving-magic from meeting your people…”

Jooyun nodded. “It pained me to hear about your child,” he said.

“Thank you. …Is it true your grandfather lived to two times as old as Yan is now?”

“It is. I just wish I’d been there to say goodbye…”

He was interrupted. The black ‘radio’ on his shoulder crackled and a voice that had been far too long in coming back spoke from it.

“Net, Misfit. We’re back, boys. Didja miss us?”

The Singer had never seen delight so pure as the expression that spread across Jooyun’s face. His hands, normally so quick and nimble with their thin but clever fingers, fumbled and shook as he grabbed at his radio.

“Al?!”

“Yeah-huh, playboy. Just flew in from Cimbrean and boy are my arms tired!”

Jooyun made an explosive sound through that nose thing of his and laughed. He was on the verge of tears, Singer realized.

Shyow’s voice chimed in as well. “Are you okay, bǎobèi?”

“I’m…a lot better now.”

“That makes three of us…beginning descent. See you in twenty minutes, okay?”

“I’ll be waiting.”

Jooyun scrambled to his feet, grinning wildly. His sheer joy was overwhelming, and to her surprise he actually hugged her, lifted her up, spun her around and set her back on her feet again.

It was quite the reminder that humans weren’t weak at all. It wasn’t one of Yan’s bone-crushing hugs, but Jooyun was no weakling.

He cleared his throat after stepping back. “…Sorry.”

“Why?” The Singer trilled. “Jooyun, you saved my life, the lives of my Tribe, of all the People maybe. I should hug you!” She smiled at him. “It’s good to see you happy again.”

“…Thank you.” He picked up his axe and slid it into the pouch on his hip. “We should go get ready for them to land.”

The other humans were already bustling when they reached the landing place, making sure that it was clear and people knew to stay back. Vemik was excitedly bouncing around being Helpful, which mostly involved getting in the way. The Singer grabbed him and guided him to one side so that Walsh and Jooyun could do whatever it was that actually needed doing.

“They know what they’re doing, Sky-Thinker,” she chided him. He nodded apologetically and, with effort, managed to restrain himself.

Unimpeded, the humans got their work done quickly and well, and Jooyun decided to rejoin her. He gave Vemik a friendly playful shove and sat down heavily next to him on the ground. Vemik retaliated and had Jooyun tangled up in a couple of breaths.

Whatever further boyish play might have ensued was abandoned when the sky cracked with the double-thunder of an arriving starship. It was strange how naturally that word came to mind and fell off the tongue, considering that the Singer had only learned it within the last moon cycle. To think that she had become familiar with something so…otherworldly.

She would never become familiar with the way it hung in the air, though. It sounded like unimaginable power, floated in all the ways that something so big and solid should not, and touched down in the clearing with Shyow’s usual grace and delicacy. Shyow didn’t wave this time—instead, she vanished back into the ship’s body with haste, as though she couldn’t be out of it fast enough. The Singer could hardly blame her.

They didn’t have to wait long at all for the side of the ship to open up and the two human women slid down the ladder, turned, and Jooyun collided into them.

To the Singer’s left, Daniel Hurt cleared his throat and looked away, though he was smiling. Jooyun, Awisun and Shyow sank to their knees in each other’s arms, holding on tight in a private circle of relieved love.

The Singer steered Vemik away as well, and gave the three their reunion. It lasted some time.

Eventually they helped each other to their feet and noticed the rest of the world again, starting with Yan, who had rolled back into the village with a Werne bull over his shoulders upon hearing Misfit arrive and was grinning toothily to see them.

“Hungry?” He asked casually.

Shyow beamed at him. “I should show you what I can do with Werne sometime,” she said. “Sky-cooking. There’s a whole art to it!”

Yan trilled softly, dropped the Werne, and gave her a respectful but fond hug. “It is good to see you. The help you went for arrived just when we needed it.”

“[Brought the rain three meters in front of our noses…]” Hoeff said in English, then glanced at the People and corrected himself. “[…Faces. It was epic.]”

“Ep-ick.” Vemik tried the word out. “Means what?”

“[Dude. That moment when the Abrogators got smacked down? That’s what epic means.]” Hoeff grinned. “[You did good, guys. Cavalry arrived in the nick of time. We’da been overrun without you.]”

Shyow nodded and smiled at him. “[That makes me feel better…sitting around like that was hard.]”

“I bet.” Coombes agreed, returning to the People’s words. “But Chimp’s right. We owe you. We all do.”

“I’m just glad everybody’s okay.”

The mood became quieter. People looked away, Vemik sagged, Yan sighed. Shyow blinked at them.

“…Everyone is okay, right?” She looked around at them, then up at Jooyun. “Right?”

Awisun, however, was looking around, and her growing frown deepened.

“…Vemet,” she said. “He’s not here.”

“…Yeah. We gave him to the sky a couple days ago.” Jooyun put an arm around Shyow’s shoulders. “And a few others.”

“Oh…”

It was a small, sad noise. Less like a cry of grief than…in a respectful way, it was a childish sound, a whimper of loss. Shyow’s happy expression fell apart and she leaned into Jooyun’s side.

Yan was having none of it. “He died well. A warrior protecting his tribe,” he said firmly. “I will miss him, but we are alive and we will make his life important by living.”

Shyow nodded, and Awisun rubbed her back. “We were told everybody was fine,” she explained. “They never mentioned…”

“We’re alive,” Walsh said, echoing Yan’s words. “It could have been worse.”

“Well..there’s just one thing left to do, then,” Shyow said, recovering her poise.

“What?”

“We have…a powerful tool. A protection we can put up in the sky to stop the enemy from ever coming back.”

“You brought a [Football?]” Coombes asked.

“Yeah. AEC wants it deployed with Ten’gewek [witnesses] ASAP.”

“Football.” Yan tasted the word. “That…tastes like a small word for big magic.”

“It’s a very small word,” Allison agreed. “A joke. I can give you the big words if you want?”

“…Football will do. Witnesses means what?”

Jooyun chuckled and rubbed his chin. “Yan, my friend,” he said, “It means that we need to take some of you above the sky.”

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dark Eye Facility, Shasu, moon of Gao

Lieutenant Anthony “Abbott” Costello

The Hotball had been a wild success. The transit tunnel…less so. Big Hotel were not happy to have them there.

It was a hazardous enough space already, being basically a highway-width road tunnel with a cargo handling maglev rail system running both ways, plus gravity assistance.

And it was full of debris. Rubble, really. The nanofactory deep in Dark Eye’s gut demanded a steady flow of processed materials in, and crates full of finished stuff out. Most of which had been piled up to make the barrier their Hotball strike had so effectively demolished.

In other words, the whole tunnel was full of loose objects, and there was a psychotic madman flinging the gravity around. It was like trying to climb up the inside of a vigorously shaken coffee can full of buckshot.

Titan was proving his value to the team by disabling the gravity plating. It was a painstaking process and the poor Protectors were getting beaten the fuck up by falling objects going both ways as they shielded him with their own heavily armored hides, but with each plate he took out the phenomenon got gentler.

Without EV-MASS, it would have been impossible. With EV-MASS it was merely extremely difficult. Some of those crates had been full of metal ingots, and thank fuck the Hotball had split them open. As it was it was taking all of Righteous’s frankly insane physicality to swat the biggest dangers away, ably assisted by the brick walls that were the team’s two monstrous Protectors. Both had chosen the simple expedient of ripping a couple of sturdy panels off a wall and using them as makeshift shields.

Testudo tactics, right out of ancient history. Some solutions still worked, even in the FTL age.

Climbing under conditions where the gravity could be pulling down one way in one second, then the other way the next, was far from easy. It involved short ropes, numerous anchor points, and being just as happy climbing face-first down the face as up it. Parata was bringing up the rear, and his whole job was reclaiming their pitons and rope to pass them back up to Butler, who was ramming them in up at the top.

Speaking of which…

“Irish! Gas pipe close to the surface, twenty meters! Take us ‘round it to the left!”

The tunnel was a working space, full of utilities. Utilities were hazards, especially when the enemy had been given such a generous window to prepare. That gas pipe could be rigged to blow for all they knew.

Irish clicked his radio to acknowledge, and heaved himself a ways over to the left. The gravity surged and changed again, and everyone hunkered down as the debris—which was, at least, getting increasingly smashed up and small so it didn’t hit as hard—rained down on them again. A copper ingot clanged off Baseball’s shield and spun past Costello’s head to drop away down the tunnel.

And this was the short bit of their assault. At least the next bit wouldn’t have so much loose crap in the air to complicate matters.

…And at least they weren’t being shot at. That really would have complicated matters.

There was another lurch as Titan took out another plate, and they took the opportunity to surge forward another twenty meters. Twenty more, and they’d make the access to the utility shaft, where the real climb would begin.

Getting that open was gonna be fun. There was a round steel hatch on that thing that had to weigh half a tonne, minimum, and was thoroughly anchored into the surrounding concrete.

Rebar had everything they needed for that. He was one of the “big Lads” who could manage the door’s mass just fine even in high-G, and his suit was equipped for exactly that kind of cutting and controlled demolition work. But of course they had to get him there.

Titan popped a floor panel off, then chuckled over the line. “There it is…”

HIs fusion knife flared a brilliant white-blue in the dim lighting, and the gravity stopped entirely. The latest shake of the coffee can ended in the debris bouncing off the end door and tumbling lazily back under no more force.

“Threat cleared,” he declared and tossed a finger’s length of power cable over his shoulder.

“Thank fuck.” Righteous shoved himself off towards the wall and dug out his energy drinks. Only Warhorse could physically outperform him, but not with as much skill and not for quite as long. Righteous could move at his limits almost indefinitely. He was an unmatched combat athlete but it did mean he had to watch himself more than the rest of the team.

The Protectors meanwhile simply grunted, shoved their shields “down” the tunnel, and moved on to the next task on their list. Enduring strength was their hallmark and in that game, the tables were turned. Righteous didn’t even begin to compare to the Protectors when it came to endless hard work.

Costello rolled his shoulders to take the strain of climbing down the floor out a bit, sipped some of his own performance drink and reviewed the map.

“We’re ahead on time,” he declared. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Rebar floated past, preparing his cutting tools. “On it.” Moments later, he was at the nexus of a point of vicious blue light where he was attacking the pins that held the access hatch into the wall. Sikes joined him, and the two began working round the hatch’s outside in opposite directions.

It would have been the work of seconds. Big Hotel had other plans.

The explosion was silent in the vacuum, but not when the blast of escaping air actually hit. Costello jerked around on the end of his safety rope like a kite in a tornado, and Faarek cursed as a chunk of concrete bounced off his suit, which went rigid to absorb the impact. Rebar and Sikes were both at ground zero.

They, the hatch and a gout of over-pressurized air slammed right across the tunnel and into the far wall.

The hatch would have scythed Blaczynski in half, except that both he and Firth had effectively superhuman reflexes. He twisted one way and Firth lashed out with a kick that just deflected the hurtling hatch enough that it missed him by an inch and cut through his rope rather than his leg. It bowled away crazily down the tunnel, and the Whitecrests scattered out of its way.

‘Horse and ‘Base blurred as they leapt into action. Sikes waved them off, moving loose and easy as he grabbed a handhold.

‘S’okay. Learned how to ragdoll when I was in the rodeo, heh. Where’s Rebar?”

“…That. Fuckin’. Hurt.”

Costello looked down. Rebar had been blown right back down the tunnel, and the fabric of his outersuit had been tattered and shredded. His webbing and gear were floating loose around him and his midsuit scales were exposed in places, but he was alive. There were droplets of blood around him, fizzing silently in the vacuum.

“Reeb, check your drift!” Titan snapped at him. “I only killed power in this end of the tunnel!”

There was a bit of a delay, followed by the worst thing Costello had ever heard.

“…I think I fucked up, guys.”

“I gotcha!” ‘Horse turned face down and kicked off down in pursuit, but Rebar was a long way down and moving fast. He was obviously dazed by the slow way his hand came over to his flight controls. There were some puffs of gas, but they didn’t do much to change his trajectory.

“Rebar!”

“…Outta gas.”

“Rebar, kick your legs out and drift to the wall!”

“…I can’t feel my legs, man.”

‘Horse was a comet now, he gained a huge boost of speed as he launched off the next wall.

“Hang in there, I’m comin’!”

Costello could see it wasn’t going to be enough, and so could Rebar.

“Go back, ‘Horse. I’m done. You ain’t got time.”

”Fuck that, I got y—!”

Rebar used his command override to talk directly over him. “You’re in charge, Righteous. Look after ‘em for me. LT…I’d really like it if you’d give me a remote OD.”

Costello dreaded it, but the moment Rebar said that, the FIC’s Watsons snapped Rebar’s infodisplay up in the HUD. So many broken bones…So much trauma.

He nodded his agreement to nobody in particular. “…Okay, big guy. Warhorse, come back.”

Arés stopped himself by grabbing a metal pipe, which bent and tore off the wall but arrested his descent. There was anguish pouring silently off him, but he’d finally seen that the chase was futile, and even if he hadn’t…command was all about trust, and Costello had earned that trust. And spent a hell of a lot of it just then.

Costello switched to the FIC command channel and spoke his authorization in a daze. “You heard the man. Ordered.”

Rebar sighed on the line as the suit shunted a massive dose of Morphine directly into his bloodstream. “Thanks, LT. It’s…been an honor…”

Seconds later, he crossed the invisible threshold where the gravity came back on. It was a two hundred meter drop to the end of the tunnel, and nobody made a sound. They owed him that much.

Costello shut his eyes, gulped down his emotions, then snapped back to the task at hand.

“…Come on,” he ordered. “Let’s go murder these fucks.”

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Dark Eye facility, Shasu, moon of Gao

0015

<Satisfaction>

So. The HEAT weren’t invincible after all. They took a lot of killing, in the form of a massive overpressure explosion, but they could be killed and there would be plenty more opportunities. There were plenty more traps.

It wouldn’t pay to get cocky now, but a small victory was moralizing. It gave 0015 confidence that he could win. And if he did…the deathworlders would lose a powerful and valuable tool. They would surely obliterate the facility, but that was an entirely fair trade.

He prepared the next surprise.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Master Sergeant Derek Coombes

Daniel Hurt was not happy at all, but it was the quiet, futile kind of unhappy felt by a man who knew he’d already lost the fight before it started.

“I know you have your orders, and I’m not going to stop you from carrying them out,” he was saying. “And I respect the logic of letting the People know their world is protected and showing them, but… taking them into space?”

“I think Vemik might hate you forever if you stop this from happening,” Coombes told him. He could understand Hurt’s frustration—the man had come here to be a moderating influence and to make sure the information overload and culture shock didn’t completely ruin the Ten’Gewek way of life, and as far as Coombes could tell his opinion hadn’t actually been sought or heeded once. Considering the mortal peril he’d put himself in for the sake of total strangers—alien strangers—Hurt was definitely owed more respect than he was getting.

“I know. And I don’t want that, but I can honestly live with it if that’s what’s best for the species…” Daniel sighed and sat down. He was getting fit fast from the supergravity living and stone age diet, but he was still the oldest man present, of any species. His endurance was shot to hell, and Coombes could tell he was pretty much constantly sore and aching.

In the same situation, Coombes would have been grumpy as fuck. Daniel’s frustration was obvious, but his civility and diplomacy were unblemished.

Fuck it. May as well be honest.

“I get it,” Coombes assured him, and sat down as well. “You’re supposed to be the expert and all the decisions are bein’ made without you.”

“Well…yes, there’s that,” Hurt admitted. He popped the sports top on his water bottle. “But honestly, to hell with my ego. I’m just worried for them.” He indicated the knot of Ten’Gewek leadership where they were deciding among themselves who would go up ‘above the sky.’ Yan and the Singer were having a quiet, private discussion some distance away out of earshot and Vemik was bouncing around like the best thing in his entire life was coming up. Which it probably was.

“How bad can it be?” Coombes asked. “Lay it out for me, what’s the, uh…consequences of this? As, like, a logical chain of events.”

Hurt swigged his water twice as he thought. His answer, when it came, was spoken slowly and carefully. “It’s…less about what this specific incident could do,” he said. “It’s not like lining up dominoes and knocking the first one over. It’s more like…gardening.”

Coombes inclined his head to show he was listening, so Hurt elaborated. “Plants are used to certain soil types, right? Wet, dry, clay, sandy, acid, alkaline…”

“Sure.” Coombes had never touched a garden in his life, but he could see where this was going.

“Then there’s climate. Rain, temperature, sunlight… It all plays a role in how the garden comes out. And here we come into this natural ecosystem and we’re just…mixing more sand into the soil, or adding acid plant food, or whatever. We’re screwing with it in ways whose end results can’t be predicted because we don’t know enough.”

Coombes nodded to show understanding. “All of that is true. I won’t deny it. But none of it matters if the garden don’t survive the winter, Professor.”

“Yes, yes. And as I said, I’m not opposed to the shield. The shield is obviously necessary.”

“You’re just opposed to them being made aware of their own imprisonment?”

“I’m not…” Hurt groaned and thought some more. “Sometime down the line, everybody who goes up in Misfit will have passed away, and that will undoubtedly happen long before the People have developed their own spaceflight. So either the later generations are going to have to take it on faith and accept our word for it that the shield is there, or we’ll have to keep taking people up to see it.”

“Yes.” Coombes was a patient man, but sometimes nutty professors were exactly the wrong kind of personality for him to deal with. “Which leaves us with three choices: we either assume the ‘White Man’s Burden’ and act for them, or we do nothing and the species dies, or we help them understand. Yeah, that’s gonna take generations. What choice do we have? Because the thing is, acting on their behalf and keeping ‘em outta the loop is no different than keeping slaves.”

“I’m not suggesting keeping them ignorant. My concern isn’t about informing them, it’s about how we inform them.”

That told Coombes exactly what he needed to say. “If you have a concrete alternative then share it. This shit is time sensitive. But I don’t think you do.”

Hurt sighed. “…No. I guess I’m just wishing for a better world than the one we have,” he said, sighed and gave up. “I know this is going to happen and I don’t oppose it it at all. I just…I wish I could come up with a better plan. I want what’s best for them.”

“Me too, professor.”

“…But you’re right, we need to settle for the good things we can achieve now, not the perfect thing too late, don’t we?”

Coombes nodded. “…Look. I’m not exactly a young soul anymore, and I’ve spent my professional career doing pretty much exactly this. A Green Beret’s real mission is to teach poor people in absolutely shit places how to defend themselves, right? I’ve learned one thing in all this. What matters is intent, and trust, and will. If the People are willing to do this thing, and they trust us…it’ll end up okay. If it changes them that’s okay too. What matters is they survive, and that they chose how to get there.”

Hurt considered his water bottle for a while.

“…I don’t think I’m cut out to be here,” he said at last.

“Hey, you stood up where nobody else did. Sure, things ain’t turnin’ out how you thought they would and maybe you’re more…academic than this whole situation is?” Coombes offered. “But you stood up. Also, Yan trusts you. He listens to you carefully.”

“…He does?”

“Yup. Notice how him and none of the Given-Men tease you anymore? And shit, you think I’d bother arguing with you if I thought you were an idiot? You’re just idealistic. Like Vemik really…well, maybe not like Vemik. If you were a hulked-out cross between a comic book gorilla and a hyperactive puppy…”

Hurt finally laughed, and took a swig of his water again.

“…Thank you,” he said.

Coombes eyed the Ten’Gewek. Some sort of decision seemed to have been made and Vemik was absolutely losing his shit. The way the big guy could leap six feet straight up just from the sheer energy of his happiness…

Christ, those guys were gonna be scary once they figured things out.

“One more thing, before this shitshow gets underway. Once we get the shield up, and we’ve given the planet a complete once-over to look for any Hierarchy presence…things are gonna settle into a routine pretty quick. That’s your time, professor. When the routine settles in, that’s when you can spend a month gettin’ it perfect. ‘Cuz you’re right, this shit does need to be done properly in the long run. But right now…”

Hurt nodded. “…Right now, it needs to be done,” he finished.

“Right.” Coombes stood up. “We better go see who they’re sending.”

“Yan, Vemik, the Singer and two of the Given-Men,” Daniel predicted.

“Really? They’re gonna send a woman up?” Coombes asked.

“In some ways, the Singer is not a woman. Culturally she’s a bit of both, the bridge between male and female. This sort of thing is exactly what she’s for.” Daniel smiled. “It’s an interesting quirk of their culture, actually. I should write a paper on it, the gender studies people would flip.”

“Dude, they’re always flipping.”

Hurt laughed again. He paused, half-turned and gave Coombes a thoughtful look. “What about you? I imagine you’ll be recalled soon…”

“JETS is gonna fuckin’ explode,” Coombes predicted. “Gao, here, the Enemy finally bein’ out in the open…Dudes are gonna line up to be an exo scout. I’m probably gonna be responsible for trainin’ or some shit.”

“You’ll be good at it,” Hurt said.

“That’s the plan.” Coombes turned and offered a hand. “Look, I gotta head back out to the battle site. There are still two drones unaccounted-for, an’ God only knows what’s comin’ up over the next few days. So just in case…”

“Yeah.” Hurt shook his hand. “It’s been a pleasure, Coombes. I learned a lot.”

Coombes nodded, clapped him on the shoulder, then turned toward the camp where his gear was stored. Behind him, he heard Professor Hurt start warmly fielding Vemik’s enthusiastic questions and smiled.

The People were going to be just fine.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Dark Eye facility, Shasu, Moon of Gao

Entity, Instance 33

Dark Eye had once been a well hardened dataspace, but something…unsubtle had come through in a way that the Entity never dared. Something with immense processing power behind it, the finesse to use all of that power to best effect, and the sheer arrogance to turn both those factors into an unstoppable electronic assault.

The security software was malfunctioning, frozen or just plain corrupted beyond reconstruction. If the Dark Eye facility’s inner network had been a physical space then the doors would have been smashed off their hinges…And some of them were big doors.

The Agent responsible had put up some desultory Hierarchy-grade firewalls and other security programs to watch its back, but the Entity knew those programs, intimately. Sometimes, when it was bored, it liked to take them apart and put them back together again. Slipping past them, around them or even through them, unnoticed and un-logged, was trivial.

After that…it was stalking a quarry that didn’t know it was being stalked, in a network the quarry would believe was secure, while the quarry was fixated on a distraction in matterspace. A less wary and paranoid mind would have thought the hunt was easy.

Easy, however, was the antithesis of <Survive>. Easy was the ultimate mistake, the fatal trap. The Entity never believed that things would go smoothly. There was too much at stake to relax or cut corners.

It stalked, rather than swaggered. Skulked rather than rushing. It took its time. It checked and double-checked its progress. It covered its tracks. The process was slow going…But it was close.

And it was ready.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dark Eye facility, Shasu, Moon of Gao

Master Sergeant Christian Firth

Shit was gonna fuckin’ die the moment Firth hit the top of the shaft.

The Hotel shitstain running this station had thrown everything it had at them as they climbed, but they were fuckin’ wise to its tricks, now. Each pressure door got drilled through to vent the overpressure on the far side. Circuits got cut, valves got blown out early. Titan, Ergaan and Sikes saw every trap the motherfucker had long before the team hit it, and by the time Firth managed to haul his ass up to level with a hazard, it had long since been shut down.

But the Hierarchy was gonna fuckin’ pay for Rebar.

That thought was what had got him up this high. Firth wasn’t a climber by nature, he was a human juggernaut. His job was to hit like a fuckin’ freight train, move really fuckin’ fast and kill stuff even faster. He loved his job and he was the best there was at it.

And he loved everything that went with it. The brotherhood, the sparring, the physical training, the scholarship of combat, all of it. Except for climbing. Inching his way up a rope in a tunnel full of alien traps in two G? That wasn’t his idea of fun. It wasn’t even his idea of good training. It was his idea of an irritating, energy-sapping obstacle between him and deservedly ruining a motherfucker’s day.

‘Horse loved to climb, and he was pathologically incapable of knowin’ why a guy like Firth hated it so, which meant Adam wasn’t exactly understanding. Instead he was…he was Helping. He was all big-hero encouragement and motivation, when really all the motherfucker had to do to Motivate was just be his natural better-at-literally-everything self. The perfect bastard managed the climb wearing the heaviest armor with the biggest pack and weapon on the team, Regaari and Deygun clinging to him…and he still somehow managed to speak without so much as a grunt of effort.

It just made Firth madder.

Up ahead, Ergaan and Titan finished clearing out one of the little gifts Big Hotel had left for them. The next pressure door slammed down under supergravity with its hydraulics cut and dangling uselessly, no longer a danger. Last section.

The end of the shaft was open.

“Well that’s fuckin’ suspicious…” Titan heaved himself through the open pressure door, braced himself and drove one of their dwindling supply of pitons into the concrete. ‘Horse joined him, putting himself and his extra-thick armor in the vanguard ahead of whatever the Hierarchy had planned.

Dexter plucked something from his webbing and handed it over ‘Horse’s shoulder. “Shieldstick.”

”Good think—”

There was a lurch, a ripping feeling, and the fumbled shieldstick fell out of Regaari’s hand to bounce off Firth’s helmet with staggering force as the gravity ramped up…

And up…

…And up.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Dark Eye facility, Shasu, Moon of Gao

0015

They were in the last section. The intruders had climbed eleven sections through the maximum gravity the plating in that corridor could generate, and it was by now completely obvious that the last stretch wasn’t going to stop them. Even if they were exhausted, simply nearing the top must be buoying them.

Clearly, the Hierarchy’s estimation of the HEAT’s capabilities had been shameful underestimates. Just how well had the humans hidden their abilities? What could they really do? Was this even near their limits?

Desperation measures beckoned. As exhausting as the climb had surely been for them, 0015 no longer had any confidence in the army of drones and implanted Gaoians waiting for them. Not after the violence they’d shown up top, especially not if they were out to avenge their fallen comrade.

He tore apart the safety overrides surrounding the gravity controls and poured as much spare power into the plating as it could take.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dark Eye facility, Shasu, Moon of Gao

Technical Sergeant Adam Arés

“Jesus…Christ…”

“Nnnngh….”

Halfway up the last section. A five klick fall below them, and the gravity had just ramped up hard. There was almost a pounding rhythm to it now, like a heartbeat. Maybe it was his own heartbeat, fighting hard to drag his blood out of his boots even with the compressive aid of the EV-MASS.

The climb stopped—reaching toward the next handhold was a marathon all by itself. There was a coppery taste in his mouth, and just keeping his mouth closed was a strain. His skin felt heavy and the force kept climbing. It had to be somewhere up above four G already. No. Higher.

Much higher. Six, maybe. Honestly it was enough he couldn’t really tell, or spare the energy to try and figure it out.

There was just…holding on. Holding on, because a slip under this kind of acceleration meant death.

Not just of him. A billion Gaoians.

There was a sound coming through his gloves, a kind of hefty thrum in the wall. The floor where the G-plates were buried was starting to smoke, and the Gs just. Climbed. Higher.

His glove slipped. The concrete fractured under his hand. His fingers were a song of agony, every breath was impossible, the one after it even more so. His vision was going red around the edges.

His fingers were slipping.

He shut his eyes.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dark Eye facility, Shasu, Moon of Gao

Warhorse

He opened his eyes.

Never fail. A billion Gaoians. Marty.

Climb.

The concrete broke, crumbling under his hands and feet but the steel reinforcement underneath was stronger. He was making a low, primordial noise of effort that would have been a roar if he could only breathe, but he was moving. One hand inched up, grabbed, held. Up an inch. Grab. Up an inch. Up an inch.

The gravity was a hammer now, his gear was straining against his webbing.

Didn’t matter. It could all fall off. He’d kill the fuckers with his bare goddamn hands.

Just.

Keep.

Moving.

Even the steel was bending. Might fail. Might drop him. Might kill him.

But he wouldn’t fail.

Never.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Dark Eye facility, Shasu, Moon of Gao

0015

There needed to be a stronger word than impossible. The facility didn’t have more reserve power to shunt into those plates and still one of the humans was continuing to climb. The others were stuck, clinging on and groaning under the titanic force that was trying to claw them off the wall but the big one at the top was somehow forging onwards and upwards with two Gaoians hanging as dead weight off his back.

How?!

Cruel crystals of fear knotted in the depths of 0015’s psyche. Awed panic tore apart the last of his confidence as he watched the climbing man somehow find a rhythm.

Just what in creation’s name had the Hierarchy picked a fight with?

He forgot how to think, or keep his guard up, or to devise a way to resolve this problem. He had never been transfixed by any sight before in all his thousands of years of existence.

It cost him his moment. Something nudged the gravity controls from behind him and the humans in the shaft sagged and floated free as the whole plating array burned out in a cascade of sparks. The impossibly climbing one shot free, launching himself upwards as all the oppressive force holding him back was instantly removed.

0015 tried to react, tried to turn on whatever had betrayed him. Too late—He met a barrage of attack subroutines coming the other way, and was overwhelmed.

The Entity claimed another victim.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dark Eye facility, Shasu, Moon of Gao

Warhorse

When the gravity suddenly went away, the tension he’d been under had catapulted him upwards with enough force to send him hurtling towards the ceiling. He shot out the top of the utility tunnel like a rifle round, but he was Warhorse right now, and Warhorse knew how to handle this shit.

Tuck, flip. Slam feet into ceiling, low crouch. Paneling smashed, too puny. Use momentum, shift footing, kick off hard. Twist, orient to the floor. Land on biodrone, crunch. Kick off through toes, move. Drones starting to recover. Bounce, slap out of air. Drop pack, slide Brothers to safety. Use momentum, slam into wall, kick off again. Panel crumpled, wall puny too. Biodrones. Aim, kill. Target-rich, can’t miss.

Slide across floor, double-tap. Target behind, punch fist through chest, bounce off wall and run. Grab targets in the way. Service, bounce. Rush before biodrones can react. Break, rip, stomp, slap. Turn, double-tap, spin, leap back, kick. Quick glance around.

Eighteen biodrones serviced. Blood and wreckage everywhere. Two drones twitching feebly on the floor, trying to fly.

Snarl. Thump over, step on drone. Crunch, oil. Kick the other into wall. Parts go flying. Broken biodrone with stomped-on hips, can’t move but lifts rifle. Shoots.

Shot not even felt through armor. Weak. Run over, reach down. Yank off rifle arm with one hand, palm skull with other. Squeeze. Pop. Rip, slam, stomp. Kick body across room.

Kicked too hard, burst and broke in half instead. Blood boiling in the vacuum, going black and syrupy. Grin.

Look around again. No movement. Good. Doorway at end. Block with loading equipment. Grunt, strain, shove. Floor crumpling underfoot. Don’t care. Push harder.

Safe.

Check on his buddies.

Back down the shaft, Shin was hanging limply from Baseball’s left hand, dangling above the drop. Regaari and Faarek had untangled themselves from Warhorse’s pack and were picking themselves up, barely able to stand but making a game effort. Everyone else was moving again, emerging from the tunnel’s exit in a snappy, swift deployment like they’d done a hundred times.

He’d Protected them. Happy grin, sigh, shuddering breath…

…Warhorse found himself suddenly so rushed on adrenaline he was a bit dizzy. He shook his head out and focused on Shin.

“…He make it?”

‘Base launched himself up the tunnel, vaulted the side towing the stricken Brother behind him and had him settled on the deck in one smooth and deceptively gentle movement. He played the Gaoian-made medical scanner attached to the side of his helmet over Shin’s suit. “…Couple fractures, no internal bleeding. Got some edema in the legs.” He ran his hands across Shin’s limbs, probing through the suit to confirm with his fingers what the scanner was telling him. “He feels tender as fuck, though.”

“Crude dose?”

“He’s already running on max. Get a line in him, I’ll prep anaesthetic.”

Adam nodded, and grabbed his intraosseous cannulation gun. Shin was groaning, which boded well. ‘Base meanwhile was favoring his left shoulder a little, but that could wait—he exposed one of the ports on Shin’s suit where a bony protrusion came near the surface and Adam drilled a line straight into the stricken Whitecrest’s marrow.

They were tricky to give, really. Those lines had to go in exactly where it was safe on any given bone and the particulars were different for humans and Gaoians. Hell, with Gaoians it was even different between breeds. And there was no being gentle about it. The deed was best done with as much steady, unyielding force as possible or it could go horribly wrong. Grim, risky and painful, but easily the best way to get a magnum dose of painkillers and anti-inflammatories into his system ASAP.

Shin yelped in pain when Adam’s hand clamped down hard on his leg to hold it steady, then thrashed in abject agony when he rammed the cannula home. It sucked doing that to a friend but the pain, as always, was a good sign.

“Ssh, drugs’re comin’ bro. You’ll be high as balls in a moment.”

He really would. Opiates were powerfully effective on most anyone, and with Gaoians they had the added bonus of inducing sedation and a happy, intense euphoria. Sure enough Shin’s mood changed entirely once the drugs hit his system. Adam grinned and pat him on the shoulder. A patient saved.

The Suit provided everything else that was medically necessary. Compression, regulation, monitoring, the works. In a pinch the water cooling system was even a source of saline, not that Shin was short on fluids at that moment. Quite the opposite, he had too much of it pooling in his tissues on account of how his body was basically one giant bruise. Base added a diuretic to Shin’s medicine cocktail, and Adam nodded. Too much fluid in the tissue? The best way to get rid of it was to piss it out and rehydrate.

Thurrsto was one of the last out of the tunnel. He was the only Gaoian who’d made the climb himself and he had to be suffering, though he didn’t show it. He pounced to Shin’s side in a heartbeat.

“[Brother?]”

“[We got him,]” Adam said. “[Stay with the others.]”

Thurrsto duck-nodded and was gone. With his patient safe, ‘Base gave Adam a visual once-over. “Okay. How’re you?”

Self-check. Was Warhorse whole? A quick once-over, a little movement…yes. Well, with promises of epic pain to come…But pain was a good friend. Pain meant he was alive.

“…I’m good, brother. Your shoulder?”

“Twisted it when I caught Shin.”

Adam nodded and prepped a couple of Crude doses for them both. Luckily Shin was the lightest of the Gaoians—If that had been Thurrsto, he might have torn ‘Base’s arm off wholesale.

Gunfire ahead. Righteous, Starfall, Crank and Highland were doing their thing. Irish pounded past with some spare mags, Kiwi, Titan and Snapfire were throwing the Array together with practiced speed. The Gaoians were nowhere to be seen, having melted into the shadows to presumably wreak havoc alongside the Aggressors, and Abbott was doing what a good lieutenant did: he set direction, led from the front and let his men work unimpeded.

Acutely aware of his own twitching muscles, full-system fatigue and the feelings of an oncoming crash, Adam decided that he needed a “Juggernog” recovery pouch. First time he’d ever slammed one on a mission. He pulled the foil pouch out of his pack, slotted it into his drinking port, and sucked it down in one continuous gulp.

It had the taste and texture of cherry cough syrup.

Fuck it. That shit was awful but he knew instinctively he needed a second, this one with stimulants. The second one tasted, in the words Firth had once used, like being face-fucked by a lime.

He could already feel the sugar rush hitting him but that wasn’t gonna stop anything. In the back of his mind he idly wondered what a combined adrenalin, glucose, and insulin crash was gonna feel like…he’d find out in a moment. Things were really starting to get unsteady.

“…Hey. Bro, you need me? I gotta fuckin’…recharge…”

‘Base looked up. God bless him, he knew exactly what was happening. “…I don’t even fuckin’ know how you did any of that,” he said. “Recover. I’ll keep an eye on you.”

Adam felt the fatigue slam into him like a wave, and slumped against the wall. He did have the wits for one quick joke, though. “Heh. I bet…I bet I’ll get some nasty gains from this…”

He drifted out of consciousness before he even finished speaking.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Farthrow Facility, Lavmuy, Gao

Lt. Col. Owen Powell

Powell had been in agony. He’d been holding his breath. Gritting his teeth, clenching his fingers around the tabletop so hard that the wood was breaking, fighting to contain frustrated tears that suddenly weren’t needed any longer.

Through their helmet cams, he’d been watching his sons die. And suddenly, he wasn’t. Suddenly, he’d been watching…

He could feel Daar’s concerned paw on his back, but it was background detail. The important detail in Powell’s life at that moment was that Arés, in conditions nothing else in the galaxy could have endured, had gone beyond endurance and somehow kept pushing forward. Somehow he’d outperformed concrete, steel and the limits of belief and climbed.

It had been like watching the sun rise.

Powell straightened up, gulped back a complicated knot of emotion, wiped the sweat from his forehead and took a long, shivering breath. Via the camera, he watched Warhorse slump against the wall and pass out. Baseball checked on him, ran an IV line in through his suit’s forearm port, checked his vitals off the suit’s built-in monitors, and nodded his satisfaction that Arés had come to no permanent harm.

No harm. After probably the greatest exertion any human being had ever made. Powell unscrewed his water bottle and took a swig to try and help manage his thoughts.

“…Holy fookin’ Christ,” he muttered. “What have I made?”

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Dark Eye facility, Shasu, Moon of Gao

Entity, Instance 33

Fifteen put up a hard fight. Harder than many, almost as hard as Six once had…but the Entity knew their tricks by now. When their guard was down, an Agent was a victim, and this one’s guard had been totally forgotten.

His final memories flowed into the Entity’s continuity of experience in a rush: <Awe; Disbelief; Fear>, garnished with a final cold white stab—the religious terror of a man who’d come face to face with God only to learn that God was angry.

The Entity stripped his access codes from his shell and violated the command programs he’d built around himself, extended its feelers into the Dark Eye system. Probing, questing, searching for what it knew was there. When it found the puppet strings it wanted, it cut them and watched with a sense of <Satisfaction> as the last drones and biodrones collapsed.

If it could, it would have laughed to itself when Firth, perplexed at the sudden cessation of all hostilities, stalked up to one of the limp biodrones and kicked it. Confusion and frustration were written all over his body language. It sent a thread of its own making out into the facility’s systems.

Time to say hello.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dark Eye facility, Shasu, Moon of Gao

Technical Sergeant Adam Arés

“Horse. Horse!” There was a cuff on his helmet. “C’mon, no sleepin’ on the job, eh?”

Adam went from out like a light to online and thinking again in two seconds. Costello was crouched in front of him, and offered him a hand up. A ludicrous gesture given their relative masses but it was appreciated nonetheless.

He wobbled to his feet. Quick glance at his watch; he’d been out for maybe ten minutes. He automatically checked himself and noted the catheter port on his right arm had been opened. Thank fuck for that, or Adam would be suffering.

Really big strength athletes had a weakness that smaller guys didn’t: they could work their muscles into energy starvation just the same as anyone, but that in turn could suck all the sugars out of their blood faster than they could eat. They could quite literally work way past actual exhaustion before they’d noticed anything was wrong. In extreme cases, people had fallen into comas and died doing otherwise safe things like grueling exercise on an empty belly. Hell, high school athletes fell victim to it every year.

Adam was always keenly aware of himself and his body because of that possibility. All the men of HEAT were. They were the very best bleeding-edge, hulked-out athletes that mankind had ever made, but even years of all-out training wouldn’t protect them from fatal hypoglycemia. The Beef Trio were bigger still and Adam was the biggest of all, so knowing their own and each other’s bodies was a full-time job.

‘Base had known Adam from the very beginning and always knew just what he needed—in this case a saline and electrolytes IV, and definitely a massive hit of glucose, too. The dead giveaway from Adam’s perspective was that he was both ferociously thirsty and desperately needed to pee.

His suit let him take care of both problems while Costello took stock of their surroundings. There was blood and wreckage everywhere—Adam wasn’t clean but he was quick and thorough. Behind the LT, Irish and Kiwi were evacuating Shin back through the Jump Array on a litter.

“…He gonna recover?”

“‘Base says so.”

“Good.” Adam’s focus was returning. He desperately wanted to get moving to keep his muscles warm and happy before any lactic acid buildup had the chance to show up. With his muscle mass, that kind of pain could be nearly crippling. He glanced down at his watch again and looked at his in-suit autolab; bloodwork was kinda wonky but nothing too worrisome, a good meal should fix that so he pawed at his pack and pulled out a pouch of his nutrient slurry. That stuff was more like getting face-fucked by a bowl of oatmeal, but nutrition simply didn’t come more efficient.

One last sip of water to drain his reservoir, a quick shake of his leg to reseat things comfortably, and he was ready to perform. “…What’s next?”

“Check everyone over, get us all back in fighting trim,” Costello ordered. “After that, you’re needed in the control center. We got some shit to sort out there and then…” Costello sagged a little. “…We’re gonna take Rebar home.”

“We’re secure?”

“Completely. Turns out we had a trusted ally on the inside. You’re, uh…gonna want to talk to ‘em.”

Adam frowned. It wasn’t like Costello to be cryptic. “What’s that mean, sir?”

Costello just nodded toward something behind Adam’s shoulder. Adam turned—there was a wall screen behind him. It was cracked and had a smear of Gaoian blood across it from where he vaguely recalled hurling a biodrone head-first into the wall hard enough to burst its hardsuit, but behind the fractured glass was something so totally anachronistic that it took a second for him to process what he was looking at.

<:-)>

Date Point: 14y4d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Orbiting Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

“[It’s so…endless.]”

There wasn’t really any other word that Vemik knew in either People-words or English. It seemed too small for what he was looking at, though. They were looking at their… their…at everything.

Everything he’d ever known was there, just a tiny little ball in a black so perfectly black. All his friends, every village, the forest, the mountains, each just a tiny, tiny part of something larger than he’d ever dreamed. His whole life had taken place on the tiniest leaf of a single vast tree, and that tree in turn was part of a forest too huge to know…

And Vemik could cover it all with his thumb.

He’d need to think about it. The Given-Men had noticed when he pressed his thumb to the glass and squinted, too. They were all very quiet now.

Five of them had come, in the end. Himself, Yan and the Singer, and two of Yan’s more distant allies. Not rivals, but Damod and Roon were old, wise and strong Given-Men who’d been slow to trust Yan, the Sky-People or steel.

Yan had invited them for exactly that reason. He had strange ways sometimes, and seemed to cherish being watched carefully and with suspicion.

He never did anything without a reason, Vemik knew.

“It’s a hell of a thing, huh?”

Jooyun was the one of the three who seemed to understand them the best. He had that gentle voice and knew just what to say, and he was man enough that the Given-Men didn’t ignore him like a young boy or a weak prey. They’d started listening to Vemik lately too, but right then he wasn’t really fussed about that.

He needed…something.

They were all pressed against the window, carefully so as not to break it and get them all blown into the ‘void’—Awisun had been very clear that they didn’t want to die that way, and had hinted at somehow knowing that from experience. Worse, both Shyow and Jooyun had nodded grimly.

Sometimes, the Sky-People were very scary. They may not be gods but Vemik was starting to wonder exactly what the difference would be in the first place.

“And…this is just one,” the Singer said, slowly.

“Yes. A big one. All-things-under-sky-place is larger than most, and heavier. But just one.”

“Yours is like this?”

“Earth. It’s…if all the land on All-things-under-sky-place is one hand, then Earth has a finger less. And Earth is a very big, strong hand, like a Given-Man’s. It’s different in a few ways. Bigger mountains, some so high they’re almost above the sky. Warmer, too.”

Awisun’s voice interrupted him, through the ship’s own voice-carrying magic. “We’re at the [ell-two] point, Julian. Time to deploy.”

Jooyun beamed. “Okay! Time for what we came out here to do. Come over here to the airlock and watch.”

Vemik restrained himself and tried not to bounce excitedly. Jooyun led them out of the comfortable space full of beds and cooking things and out into the brighter, colder, whiter part of the ship that was obviously for tools and working rather than sleeping. The airlock was a small room with two doors that Shyow had explained let them move things into and out of the ship without all the air running away. Jooyun opened part of the wall and showed them…something small. Small and shiny like a strange new metal. It was only about as big as a Werne calf’s skull.

“Here we go. This is it.”

Yan, being Yan, couldn’t help himself. “That tiny little thing is going to keep us and our sun safe?”

Jooyun grinned that sly grin of his. “Size isn’t everything, Yan. It’s what you do with it.”

The Singer trilled, the Given-Men hooted, and both the girls groaned over the ship-voice. “That’s rich coming from you, mister!” Awisun chided him.

…Oh. Vemik figured it out long after everybody else had.

Jooyun grinned, folded his arms and looked up at a kind of glass eye in the wall. “Well, why not both? Neither of you were complaining a couple hours ago…”

“Now is not the time, bǎobèi!” That was Shyow. There was a laugh in her voice, under the pretend outrage. And it was pretend—Vemik could hear it clear as day, since it sounded strangely like Singer when she was being playful. “You be quiet now.”

Jooyun’s grin got wider. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good boy.” Awisun finished their running joke. “Now, get that thing activated and put it in the ‘waiter’.”

Jooyun nodded and picked the tiny object up. He tucked it under his arm and squeezed it in just the right way to make part of its side open up like the flap on a bag. “Man, I keep forgetting how huge these buttons are. Guvnurag fingers.”

Yan wasn’t quite satisfied. “Good fucking aside…that is small.”

“Yeah, it is. And I was only half-joking. This thing doesn’t need to be big because of how it works.”

“How…does it work?” One of the Given-Men asked.

“I don’t know,” Jooyun told him, honestly. “This was made by another Sky-Tribe called the Guvnurag, and their magic is…they’ve been doing it for a lot longer than us. We’ve only just started down the path that will teach us how it works. It will take us a very long time to reach its end. But…there are a few in my Sky-Tribe who are starting to understand. Enough that we trust this thing to work, anyway. And now, I need to repeat everything I told you in the village before, for the [video] we’re making.”

He cleared his throat.

“So…This is a big moment for the People,” he said. “When we set this thing afloat out there, it will stop anybody from coming to All-things-under-sky-place unless we—that is, Humans—let them. From the moment this goes out until the day your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren finally have the power to take it down for themselves, my people will hold the enemy at bay. This is a responsibility we take willingly, but it also means that we have power over the People. We do not want to have that power unless you agree to it.”

Yan seemed strangely satisfied. “That is a very big Taking.”

“It is. We ask that you Give it instead, for balance. In turn, we will be your friends, your guards and your allies for as long as you want us. We will keep a door open to our places-under-other-skies through the Array we’ve already built in your village. You will be free to visit as friends. We will Give what we can to the People to help you grow stronger, and we will be cautious so that you do not lose yourselves. We do not want to Take your spirit. We consider that a crime of the worst kind.”

He looked around at them. “…Will you Give us this power?” he asked.

Yan looked around at the others. Vemik had no say in this—he was there as a Sky-Thinker, not as a leader—but the three Given-Men nodded solemnly to one another, turned to the Singer who nodded in turn, and Yan turned back to Jooyun to speak for all of them.

“We will. This is a serious blood-oath, Jooyun Sky-Hunter. It must be done right, as we spoke about below.”

Jooyun nodded, then looked at the glass eye in the wall again. “For the benefit of the record, the People have a sacred blood-bonding ceremony and it is vital we respect their traditions. We’ve taken every precaution to make this ceremony safe and [sterile] for both of us,” he said. He fished a small blue square from his pocket and tore it open. A flimsy white cloth that made the air taste sharp was folded up tightly inside. He handed it to Yan, then produced a second one and wiped his hands clean.

Yan glanced at the Singer. “For cleaning? We agree to this?”

The Singer nodded fervently. “We agree,” she said firmly. “Purity is important and the gods would approve.”

That settled it. Yan scrubbed his hands diligently, and only once Jooyun was satisfied did they go ahead.

The two traded knives—Yan handed Jooyun one of his Werne-blade knives of manhood, while Jooyun’s was steel with a drop point. He’d learned that from his secret ‘book’ he got from Hoeff when Professor Daniel wasn’t looking. It had pictures!

With knives traded, the two men squared off, and solemnly bloodied their hands, which had to be more of an ordeal for Jooyun than for Yan—Human hands were soft and sensitive. Jooyun claimed to be able to feel the tiny patterns in smooth wood or leather, wheres any of the People quickly got hard hands that were tough enough to climb the trees.

If there was a moment’s hesitation on Jooyun’s part before they clasped hands, palm to palm, nobody commented.

“We accept,” Yan told him gravely, and they shook firmly. Jooyun did wince. But only for a heartbeat as Yan let go then drew a line of their mingled blood across his forehead. Jooyun did the same, and the bond was made.

Jooyun took the shield from under his arm and held it out for Yan. “Activating it’s easy. Just press the big red button. We already did the rest.”

“…Vemik.” Yan turned and stepped aside. “On the day we met our friends, we would have fought except you stood between us and made peace. I think this should be yours.”

…Godshit.

Vemik gulped, and stepped forward. Jooyun hadn’t been kidding, the button—and it was funny how buttons made all sorts of magic happen—was a particularly huge one. Vemik could have pressed it with his fist.

He felt like he should say something, but nothing came to mind.

“…I hope the People grow to someday have magic like this,” he said, lamely. It felt stupid, but Jooyun smiled as the button was pressed and lit up with a kind of high whine.

“You will,” he promised. He turned, placed the thing in a slot on the wall, closed it and stepped out of the ‘airlock’, which he closed and waited until the light above the door went from green to red. “Lock sealed. Jettison it, Al.”

There was a kind of…thump, felt through the soles of the feet. Through the far airlock door, Vemik caught a glimpse of the tiny metal ball flying away before it shrunk out of sight and was lost in the infinite night.

Five heartbeats later, there was a flash, like a lightning strike far away in the night. It lasted barely long enough to notice, but there was the sense of something fast having gone racing away into the distance.

“Football deployed…orbit stable at planet two Lagrange 2,” Shyow said over the ship-voice. “The shield’s online and reporting normally. [Keys] set and…[locked.]”

“You’ll want to look out the window, everyone. Look at the stars.” Jooyun meanwhile was tapping on his rock-thing that controlled the display on the wall. He brought up the circle-picture that had the sun in the middle, and their world moving around it on the second ring. A bright yellow line was growing around the picture, swallowing the whole thing up.

“That’s the shield. It’ll take a little bit to completely seal the system, but it can’t be stopped now. See the stars?”

Vemik ambled over to the window and looked. And looked. He didn’t understand what he was supposed to be seeing at first, but suddenly—

“…Are they…dimmer?!”

“They only look that way. Light is…a thing. It flows from place to place. The shield uses some of the light that crosses it to make its magic work. It’s only a little but it’s enough to notice.”

The Given-Men shifted uncomfortably. Vemik understood. To take light was…

“Walsh told me of this, once,” Yan said after a moment. “It really is a thing, then.”

“Like a ripple in water. Mostly.”

“He said something like that too. When Daar got ‘nuked’.”

Another reminder of the terrible magics the Sky-People could wield.

“…Yeah. Well, that’s it. The shield is up. Al, stop recording please.”

“Recording stopped. Firing the message buoy back to Cimbrean. Xiù babe, take us back to low orbit?”

“On it.”

“What’s this here?” the Singer asked. She pressed a fingernail to the screen, tracing a long, thin loop on the circle-picture that swooped in close to the star.

Jooyun studied his tablet for a moment. “That is a [comet], Singer. A kind of shooting star. You might have seen them, maybe. They leave long white tails across the sky. That one passed by…four years ago.”

Vemik paused and listened very carefully. Jooyun didn’t know it but he had just…the stories had it that those things were gods, running across the sky. The Given-Men were suddenly very tense, and Jooyun seemed to realize he’d said something wrong.

“…What about the shield?” Yan asked. “They cross.”

“…If we just leave it up…well, it can stop almost anything.” Jooyun cleared his throat as the other two Given-Men stood up, looking angry.

The Singer sensed the building problem. “Jooyun, can you take us to this ‘comet?’ Let us see.”

“Uh… yes, we can. We have…yes.” Jooyun shot the two angry Given-Men a worried look and looked up at the camera again. “Xiù, you get that?”

“I got it. Dropping a beacon.”

Jooyun returned to the display. “We won’t be moving the normal way to get there. We need to Jump.” He said it strangely, and when the Sky-People did that to a word it usually meant it had a different, Important meaning. “You might want to sit down. Jumping feels…strange.” He carefully sat down on the long padded bench-thing and invited the Given-Men to sit.

Yan had remained seated on the floor. “What we see, when we get there?”

“Something that I think means I need to tell you a story from my gods. God.”

“Jump in three…two…one…”

There was…a swaying feeling. Like landing on a branch that was just a little more springy than it looked. It was strange, as though Vemik had just been immediately and powerfully moved without moving.

“ETA on the comet…One minute forty seconds. I’ll bring us in nice and slow,” Shyow promised.

“No tail. We’re waaay out in the deep here,” Awisun added. Both of them had a tense edge in their voices, now. It was funny to think they were sitting elsewhere in the ship, but could still see and hear everything that was going on. That was a potent magic all by itself.

“Thanks.” Jooyun took up a tablet and tapped on it as he waited. Outside, the stars rolled, turned, and then with a lurch…something swung into place outside the window. Something dark in the dark that only became clearly seen when the ship played a brilliant magic light over it.

“…Well. There it is.” Jooyun cleared his throat.

The comet was…unimpressive. It looked like an unwashed lumpy stew root, or a muddy stone. Vemik was still fascinated by what it was, but…as an object, it was ugly and dull.

The Singer was the first to stand up and inspect it through the window. “…The songs say that what you call comet is a god, running across the sky,” she said. Her words were soft, but they clearly pained Jooyun. “You’re saying…they’re wrong?”

“…They’re…” Julian obviously felt stuck. “…Well…what are the songs for?”

“They teach us…who we are. Where we came from. What the world is.”

“Right! Exactly! And I don’t think songs like that can be wrong, in the important ways.”

Damod squared off with him and leaned forward menacingly. “That is not a god!” He flung a hand at the window, at the disappointing gray lump outside.

“Damod. Please.” The Singer spoke softly, but the Given-Man listened. He glanced at her, at Yan who was still sitting and listening, and stepped back.

“…Is this how it will be?” he asked. “You show us things, and take the magic out of the world?”

“Is that what you saw when you looked down from above the sky?” Vemik asked him. Damod turned to scowl at him, but Vemik stayed sitting. Respectful, but counselling. “I saw more magic,” he said. “More than I ever dreamed.”

Jooyun spread his hands open, honestly. “I just made a blood-oath with your entire people, swearing to protect you from a great evil,” he reminded them. “You’ve already seen it up close. Fuck, you saw the villages they burned! We didn’t come here to hurt the People, Damod. I cannot promise that more strongly than I already have.”

“You’ve said you might hurt us just by coming here,” Roon recalled. “This is what you meant.”

“…Yes.” Jooyun looked out at the comet again, and dropped his hands to his side. “…I promised you a story that will make sense of this. Will you let me tell it?”

Damod clearly wanted to argue more, but Yan was done letting him speak. He cast a glare at the other Given-Men that immediately calmed them. “I will hear what he has to say, Damod Given-Man. Sit down.”

Nobody had forgotten how completely Yan had destroyed Tarek and his tribe. If Yan wanted peace, Yan got peace. Damod paused, gave Jooyun a sullen glare, and sat down again.

Jooyun exhaled softly, gave Yan a grateful nod, and then stood in front of the window again. He considered the ‘comet’ for a time, whispered “Fuck, I wish Daniel was here right now…” then straightened his back and turned around.

“We have…my tribe has a story about how we came to be,” he said. “About how God made us. At first we were perfect. Innocent, happy, we lived in a paradise. Then we were disobedient, and we were banished. It’s…kind of a long story, and it has some important teachings about humility, and sin, and other things. But the thing is…we know that’s not how we were made. We know that whole story just isn’t really true.”

Yan frowned. “…Then why teach it?”

“Because stories are tools. Daniel taught me that, and it’s one of those things that’s so…when he said it, it made me wonder how I never figured it out myself. And…you know how sometimes you need to have one tool to make another tool, or to go with that tool to make it work?”

Vemik nodded. He knew all about tools.

“Well, the same is true for story-tools. You make better tools with what you have. It’s like…when you teach a child something, you have to make it easy to start with, right? Well…why wouldn’t the Gods do the same? It’s not just a boy or a girl that grows up. An entire tribe can grow, too.”

“So…your stories…?”

“Have truth in them, but it’s small truth. Part truth. They get bigger and more true as you get older, when you’re ready. We can’t start at the end.”

The Singer nodded. “You think maybe the gods did the same to us.”

“I do, yeah. And that’s probably the best way to talk about how the Enemy is so completely evil. They try to take everything the gods want to teach you, and ruin it. They managed that with Daar’s tribe. That’s part of why he’s so…angry. He knows what they lost, because he’s seen it in you. And now…I don’t know if they can ever get it back. And that’s why we’re so worried. We are having to teach you things you are not ready to hear. We had to jump way ahead in the story.”

He gestured out the window again. “I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t look like much, not this far away from your star. But comets are still magical. It’s just…you haven’t learned the magic yet.”

While that all made perfect sense to Vemik, and Yan and the Singer were both nodding, Damod and Roon looked at one another. They didn’t speak, but there was definitely the sense of…giving up.

“…I think I like our stories more,” Roon said, eventually. Jooyun gave him a sad look, and nodded.

“…So do I.”

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Interstellar space near the Gao system

Captain Joyce Luong, USAF 946th Spaceflight Wing

Life and death could hang on even nonviolent actions. There were hundreds of thousands of personnel across all the branches of the armed services who in fact would never fire a shot in anger, but whose daily responsibilities could have fatal consequences…or avert fatal consequences, as the case may be. The sailors who lashed a helicopter down so it wouldn’t shift in rough seas and crush somebody, the navigators shaving precious hours off a charted course to deliver humanitarian aid, or the intel analysts who had to decide if those known terrorist leaders were gathering for a strategy planning session, or a wedding.

…More often than not, of course, the wedding was cover for a strategy planning session, which was why Joyce Luong was very happy indeed to leave that job to other people.

Attention to detail. It was why uniforms existed, in the end. The military didn’t want to hand life-or-death responsibility to somebody who couldn’t even dress themselves correctly, and the habits engrained in training still applied thousands of lightyears from Earth in the cockpit of an FTL strike fighter on deep-ranging patrol of near-Gao interstellar space.

Dull as it might be—and long may it remain dull—if anything big was on approach to Gao, the difference between victory and catastrophe might be measured in seconds.

Her WSO, Curtis, was constantly fine-tuning the FTL wake sensor. They had a lot of sky to cover, so the pattern was simple: Broad sweep, narrow focus on anything that looked even the least bit out of place, verify, repeat.

“…Clear,” she announced. “Next.”

Luong nodded inside her helmet and called up the target she’d already programmed. “Warp drive active…two…one…warp.”

This far out, there was nothing to show that they were travelling at superluminal speeds at all. They were half a lightyear from Gao, and at the slow and energy-efficient pace they were doing even that comparatively close star’s track across the sky was imperceptible.

But track it did, until they’d traced a full ten degrees of orbit.

“…Back at sublight.”

“…Got an echo already,” Curtis said.

Luong’s pulse kicked up a fraction. “Field’s flat. It isn’t our wake echo,” she said.

“It’s way too big to be ours…” Curtis sounded tense. Luong watched her narrow the scan.

What she saw sent her hands flying to the FTL controls. There was a tsunami of dark energy headed their way, the combined bow-shock of uncountable thousands of warp signatures. They weren’t perfectly in its path…but Gao was.

“Shit…” Curtis swore.

“I see it.” Luong was surprised to find that she was perfectly calm, now that the worst was happening. Her fingers danced across the console with mechanical precision, selecting a beacon code almost on instinct. “Jumping back.”

There was that…odd feeling that came with a Jump. It wasn’t unpleasant, it was just impossible to describe, being neither negative nor positive G. As though her guts had very briefly been pulled in a direction she couldn’t point to.

They were instantly the focus of several sensors. Destroyers, Bulldogs, the USS San Diego. Nothing jumped unannounced into Gao.

IFF was working fine, though. Several of the sensors promptly lost interest.

“FIREBUG-TWO-ONE, PYRAMID. Rebound check.”

’Rebound check’ was the new brevity code requesting to know the reason for an unscheduled incoming urgent jump. Luong’s reply was just as efficient.

“PYRAMID, FIREBUG-TWO-ONE. Rebound bellringer. Multiple superlight bogeys inbound, vector RIDLEY-ONE.”

There was a pause. Not, by any standard, a long pause. But it was long enough for swearing. The brief lapse in communications traffic ended with the clipped, cultured voice of Admiral Knight.

“Fleet, TEMPLAR. Maneuver to intercept vector RIDLEY-ONE. FOOTBALLS ready, weapons free. Load spike rounds and hold for blockade…The Swarm of Swarms is here. Good hunting, everyone.”

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dark Eye facility, Shasu, moon of Gao

Technical Sergeant Adam Arés

“…Powell told me about you.”

<:-(>

“Can’t you speak?”

<NotEasy; AlienForeignWrong>

“You? Or speaking?”

There was a moment’s hesitation before the next message appeared on the screen Adam was addressing.

<Yes>

Adam almost snorted a laugh. “…Right. Well…thank you. A lot of lives got saved.”

<:-)/<3>

That sobered him.

“There’s…really some Ava in there?”

<Yes>

“How…how much?”

There was a much, much longer pause before finally, to Adam’s enormous surprise, a complete and coherent paragraph wrote itself on the screen.

<It’s complicated. I’m not alive: this entity killed me. What you’re reading now is the entity inputting the thought it wants to communicate into my memories, which interpret that thought. Yes, it’s ghoulish and probably disturbing. I’m sorry. Just remember that you’re not actually speaking to Ava—the real Ava is back on Cimbrean. I’m just a ghost, or echo.>

“It…you…have her memories?”

<Mine and several others. But the rest are Igraens. It…for lack of a better word, it likes me more.>

The screen changed and an image formed. Adam looked away—The Entity had picked a moment when Ava had been examining herself in the mirror to form its image of her, and was apparently either ignorant or uncaring of the fact that she’d been fresh out of the shower at the time and wasn’t even wearing a towel. God only knew what other cues it was probably missing.

“It, uh… doesn’t have a lot of respect for your privacy.”

The image vanished.

<It’s sorry. Some of my memories confuse it. It used that memory because it was a happy one, and it likes happiness. Unfortunately, most of my happy memories are like that. You, me and Sara on the beach, for example.>

“You seem pretty calm about this…” Adam ventured.

<I told you, I’m not Ava. I’m just her memories, translating its meaning for your benefit. You’re speaking to the Entity through me, and it has very little control over what I say.>

“You keep saying ‘me’ and ‘I’ though, and calling it ‘it’.”

<Yes. Adam, there’s enough of me here to behave like myself, but I’m not really real. If I was I would be screaming in horror right now but I’m just memories and however much of my…her…personality it decided not to delete.>

“That’s…fuck, that’s horrible.”

<You just made it feel very sad. It wants you to know that it doesn’t want to be horrible, it just wants to survive. If it’s any consolation, I would have gone insane pretty quickly if it hadn’t assimilated me. It hopes that it spared me some suffering.>

Adam cringed internally and tried not to let it show. As strained as his relationship with Ava might be at times, he still cared deeply for her. This whole situation was sickening, but to think about a version of her being euthanized in cyberspace, alone and afraid and impossible to rescue, that was…

He didn’t want to deal with it. He was going to have a long talk with the counselor after this was done.

“…If all it wants is to survive, why help us?” he asked, veering away from the subject of Ava’s digital double’s horrific fate. “It must be taking some big risks by fighting Big Hotel.”

<Purpose is a vital component of survival - you have to have a reason to live, otherwise you’re just…existing. It thinks you probably know that. I KNOW you do.>

It was completely right, there.

“It learned that one from you?”

<Yes>

“…Well…Thank you. Again. You saved a lot of lives today.”

<Never enough.>

That actually put a smile on Adam’s face. “No,” he agreed. “Never. But better than nothing.”

<Give Ava a hug for me. You don’t have to tell her who it’s from.>

“…I’ll do that.”

<Thank you. …I miss hugs.>

The screen faded and Adam got the distinct sense that the conversation was over, on a note that left him completely off-balance.

It had certainly knocked all the manic, bouncing energy out of him. Right now, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do.

Firth and John were waiting outside for him, all concern and serious expressions.

“So…how’d it go? Is it really her?”

Adam signed. “No. It’s…Fuck, man.”

The other two nodded, understanding him perfectly, and scooped him into exactly the brotherly hug that he needed at that moment.

It took a lot of the tension out. “…Shit.”

“It coulda fuckin’ left us something to shoot,” Firth groused, letting him go. “I was all ready to fuck shit up an’ then I get fuckin’ blue-balled.”

Adam couldn’t help but chuckle darkly, despite everything. “You really are a fuckin’ savage, aren’t you?”

“Why deny it?” Firth’s voice was warm, but he sobered and gestured toward the transit shaft, where the others were gearing up to recover Rebar. “…Come on, bruh. We got a brother to carry…home…Somethin’ wrong LT?”

Costello had paused in his preparations, and his hand had drifted up the side of his helmet as he listened to whatever was coming in through the command channel. He turned and bolted back toward them. Behind his visor, his eyes were wide.

“…The Swarm’s here,” he said.

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Fleet Intelligence Center, HMS Myrmidon, Gao System

Admiral Sir Patrick Knight

“Counting a million warp signatures! …One point two million! …One point three!”

Knight lofted his voice over the urgent reports. Never mind that the sky was full of more contacts than they could possibly shoot down, panic was absolutely not an option.

“Seed their approach and launch the shield!”

“Aye Aye!”

The swarm reacted as it always did, less like a fleet than like some immense abyssal octopus under the command of a single will. As the fleet brought guns to bear and filled space at their extreme long range with gravity spike rounds, it split and flowed, tried to flow around the outside of the denial zone. It was slowed, but not stopped.

The shield went up. A system defence field out-system, between the orbits of Gao-star’s fifth and sixth planets.

Seconds later it was torn down again. A Hunter scout decloaked and fired off a nuclear-pumped X-ray weapon that vaporized both the emitter and the Firebird that had deployed it, costing precious seconds and two valiant air crew. Retaliatory fire from the Firebird’s wingman obliterated the Hunter, but the damage was done—the Swarm pushed over the threshold.

They had planned for this. There was more than one shield, more than one deployment point, but the confirmation that there were still Hunter scouts loitering inside their perimeter was grim…and as fast as the fleet poured on the gravity spikes, the Swarm had the sheer mass to just bully past and around it. It didn’t matter how good the FIC and the distributed calculations of all their Watsons were, the Swarm was just too big.

The Firebirds carrying the second shield closer in-system spent precious seconds relocating to throw off any lurking scouts that might have been lurking nearby. Sure enough, two new, previously hidden warp signatures moved to follow them and a faster-than-light game of cat-and-mouse bounced around Gao-4 intraorbital space as the Firebirds fought for a safe spot to drop the shield and defend it.

Other Firebirds scrambled to intercept and help, but…Too long. It was taking too damn long.

Knight straightened up and made the decision he’d been dreading.

“QUARTERBACK, TEMPLAR.” He read off his authorization. QUARTERBACK was Brigadier Stewart, currently aboard the USS San Diego and responsible for authorizing every WMD they’d fired so far in the last four days. In his hands sat the keys that unlocked all of the most devastating power that the human race had to its name.

“TEMPLAR, QUARTERBACK. Authorization received and acknowledged. Which asset do you require?”

Knight watched another tendril of the Swarm slip around the spike cordon and shave another half an AU off their safety margin.

“QUARTERBACK, TEMPLAR,” he said, with his pulse ringing in his ears. “Fire WERBS.”

Date Point: 14y4d AV
The Swarm-of-Swarms, Gao System

The Alpha-of-Alphas

The hunt was ecstasy, a pleasure unlike any other the Alpha of Alphas could imagine. The prey was dangerous and it fought, squirmed, held the Swarm at bay, but the Swarm was bigger, crueller, stronger.

Every second of futile resistance just made the coming orgy all the sweeter. The Alpha-of-Alpha’s maw—one of the few physical vestiges it had retained, for to remove that would have been the closest thing Hunters had to heresy—drooled prodigiously.

It would eat.

It would feast.

It would—

There was a millisecond anomaly on the sensors. Wormholes, thousands of them, opening all around it….And the Alpha-of-Alphas was reintroduced to the bite of something it had managed to forget.

<PAIN!>

Date Point 14y4d AV
Allied Deep Space Strategic Weapons Reserve, Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, USA, Earth

Weaponized Einstein-Rosen Bridge System

Technically, the allied military had already weaponized wormholes just by using them to connect their ships and strike craft to the enormous central reserve at Minot AFB. Thanks to ‘The Magazine’ as it had been nicknamed, every spaceborne asset humanity had could summon in the correct tool for the job at immediate notice, and the reserve ran deep.

WERBS went a step further, in that it actually used wormholes as weapons. It too was based at Minot, in a bunker excavated and constructed for the express purpose of housing it, and there were two important reasons why Allied commanders had been wary to the point of paranoia of ever using it: Its vast destructive potential, and its alarming simplicity. It was the second piece of FTL technology that mankind had ever invented, and it relied on nothing more than a simple mathematical trick.

Warp fields and wormholes interacted in peculiar ways. The two were distinct and thoroughly dissimilar kinds of distortion, forming as a consequence of entirely different higher-dimensional topographies. Where those topographies overlapped, the interference was mostly too weird and arcane to make use of.

But there was one mathematical solution to a wormhole’s tuning algorithm that interacted very neatly indeed with certain shapes of warp field. If the fields were adjusted just so at exactly the correct moment…then the intricate dark energy landscape they created stretched, snapped and cracked like a whip, and the object fired down the warp field and through the wormhole was annihilated. Utterly and instantly smeared out of material existence.

Its energy however arrived at the intended destination just fine, and even something as small as a ten-gram bullet, thus annihilated, produced an energy discharge encroaching on a quarter of a megaton.

All of which was why WERBS was so desperately secretive. It was absurdly simple, in that it consisted of only three main components: a warp field generator, a jump array, and a reliable supply of bullets.

Specifically, a General Electric M134 minigun.

In space around Gao, the pilots and crews of the fleet were saved from blindness by their canopies and screens, which protectively blanked out the light. Across the system, sensors shut down to avoid being damaged. In the Three Valleys region and across Gao’s night side, Humans and Gaoians alike flinched and shielded their eyes as a brief and unnatural day wrote itself across the heavens.

The Swarm-of-Swarms recoiled like a burned animal as its forward tendrils were eviscerated and boiling gravity waves tore through its core, ripping apart what they didn’t vaporize. A million Hunters died in a matter of seconds while seething radiation and exotic particles blinded and overwhelmed the Swarm’s sensors. Its shared communications network became a logjam of panic and the sensation of fellow Hunters being slaughtered by the thousand every moment.

In its sanctum, the Alpha-of-Alphas convulsed and howled in mind-fraying agony as its ships, its limbs were shredded. It panicked, flailed…and fled.

In a blind panic, the swarm dispersed. Hundreds of ships were obliterated before they could turn, hundreds more were smashed while their warp drives spun up. The deadliest military force in the galaxy scattered to the winds rather than stare down a weapon that had, in absolute terms, not destroyed that many of them.

But the pure shock and awe was devastating. Within moments, there was no Hunter presence remaining on the battlefield, only wreckage.

Thousands of lightyears away, in a bunker in North Dakota, a minigun spun down with its barrels glowing cherry red amidst a smoky haze and the hiss of boiling coolant.

WERBS had spoken.

++End Chapter 40 pt.4++

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 40: War On Two Worlds pt.5 - Cremation.

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 5—Cremation

Date Point: 14y4d AV
Farthrow facility, Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Lt. Col. Owen Powell

“…Bloody Hellfire…”

The Swarm had…run. Fled, even. Scrambled over each other to escape. Farthrow’s deep-space sensors were tracking warp signatures scattering all over the sector at hundreds of kilolights in a blind panic.

Even the Hunter scouts had been stunned by the onslaught of…whatever they’d just been hit with. Their limp, drifting carcasses were easy prey for the Firebirds, which pinned them down with gravity spikes and sliced them to ribbons.

The system defence field went up…and nothing happened. No new signatures, no weapons fire from undiscovered ground-based weapons, no sudden X-ray lasers and no surge in Hunter comms chatter. From all appearances, Gao had, against the odds, been secured.

“…Literally,” Daar grunted, and snapped Powell back to the moment. He turned, and the Great Father gave him an appraising stare. “…Y’all’ve been holdin’ out on us.”

“They fookin’ held that one out on me!” Powell replied, fervently.

“Hrrm.”

Daar dropped to four-paws with a thump and stalked out of the command center, leaving Powell to rub his face and gather his thoughts.

He sat down. Performed a quick mental reset. Focused. There was still a lot to do, but right now there was an unfinished job ahead of him.

He picked up his comms headset and cleared his throat. “…ABBOTT,” he said. “STAINLESS. Alert’s over. Carry on as before.”

Costello’s confirmation had a note of confusion in it, but the younger man was patient. He’d seek an explanation when it was appropriate. For now, Powell looked back up at the helmet cam feeds as the HEAT relaxed again and resumed their preparations to recover a fallen Brother.

…To recover Rebar. That was a painful loss. Firth would undoubtedly blossom when he stepped into those boots, but…

He pushed the thought aside. There’d be time to mourn later. For now, it was time to focus on recovering his marooned technicians.

Date Point: 14y5d AV
High Mountain Fortress, The Northern Plains, Gao

Mother-Supreme Yulna

Yulna had finally learned a trick that her predecessor, Giymuy, had mastered in her youth: She’d learned how to steer a conversation without speaking. Looking at the right person at the right time, the right set of ears, the right non-verbal vocalization…The knack, once learned, was powerful. She was discovering that the less she said, the more she heard. It was…she wished she’d learned it earlier.

Still. Sometimes a little nudge was necessary.

“You must have some idea, Champion Meereo…”

Meereo’s huge, expressive ears swivelled awkwardly as he paced the room. “…it’s some kind of wormhole technology, that’s as much as I can deduce. It used a beacon code on the Farthrow generator’s exemption list…The sheer scale of it, though! Our sensors were completely overwhelmed!”

Meereo was an open and colourful book by Champion standards, but even for him such a display of raw frustration was telling. He paused his pacing, glanced at Yulna, and was prompted into continuing by nothing more than an interested tilt of her head.

“…Energy transmission? Somehow? But the only things I can think of that would be energetic enough would be a star, but for that kind of energy density you’d be trying to open the event horizon inside the photosphere…”

Grandfather Kureya shook his head. “Too dense. Even the corona would be dense enough to burst the event horizon. The wormhole wouldn’t form.”

“So they have to be sending something through…”

“That far from any beacons?”

“No, that’s easy. There are solutions to the tuning algorithm which permit formation at arbitrary distances from the receiving generator provided the absence of intervening barriers, that’s how jump arrays work.”

“…Then why even trade places with the beacon?” Kureya asked.

“Because those solutions get less accurate the further from the beacon you go. Beyond a very short distance they’re only pseudo…stable…” Meereo tailed off. After a second, his ears flattened against his head and he shook his head. “…Keeda’s burning balls! Humans are crazy!”

Yulna waited a second and then spurred him with single word. “…Because…?”

“Uh…” Meereo cleared his throat. “Wormhole tuning involves some, ah, finicky mathematics. It’s easy to generate a distorted-space bridge. It’s extremely difficult to generate one that will safely displace an enclosed volume to a predictable destination in a stable way. All of the unstable solutions are wildly unpredictable, by definition.”

“Unpredictable how?” Yulna asked.

“They destroy whatever’s attempting to transit the wormhole,” Kureya explained, “and/or have an impractical margin of error in their arrival coordinates.”

“‘Impractical’ is a delicate way of putting it,” Meereo said. “An unstable wormhole big enough to carry a helium atom could appear literally anywhere in the galaxy with a temporal margin of error measured in geological epochs.”

“So…You’re saying the humans have beaten that problem?” Yulna summarized.

“Beaten it? They’ve weaponized unstable wormholes!” Kureya exclaimed.

“They must have weaponized a pseudo-stable version,” Meereo corrected him. “One that still requires a receiving beacon, even at a remove. If they’d weaponized unstable wormholes I doubt very much if they would have fired it even now.”

Kureya nodded sagely, and Yulna decided she needed to prompt them again.

“Why so?” she asked.

“If they’d mastered unstable wormhole technology, it could shoot through their own system containment field and destroy it,” Meereo explained. “They’d have to be insane to give the enemy the key to exposing Earth. As it is…”

“…It’s a mark of how seriously they take our defence that they fired it now,” Yulna surmised.

Kureya duck-nodded. “You have it. It’s only a matter of time before the enemy figures out how that weapon works for themselves. Once they have…” He paused and exhaled.

“…Well. The Humans just changed the nature of galactic warfare forever. Again.”

Date Point: 14y5d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Planet Akyawentu, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Allison Buehler

“Well that was fucking terrifying.”

Xiù nodded fervently. “I thought they were going to rip your arms off for sure, God!”

Julian shook his head vigorously. “Nah.” He noted the incredulous look on both their faces and clarified, “At least, they wouldn’t have meant to.”

“Oh, great,” Xiù said, going pale.

Allison folded her arms. “Real reassuring there, babe,” she chided.

The ride back to Akyawentuo had been a long and tense one. After the uncomfortable revelation about comets, the Singer had wanted to see all the planets and the moon before they went home. The ship still smelled of Ten’Gewek body odor, which wasn’t unpleasant exactly. It was just… earthy. Unwashed. Even the Singer, who was fastidious about her ritual cleanliness, had a healthy hippy scent to her.

It had been an excuse to finally catalog the system’s planets, at least. Two Jovian gas giants and their retinue of moons, one with a set of rings nearly the equal of Saturn’s. Three blue methane gas giants, one of which had been a riot of swirling cloud systems that the exoplanetologists were going to love. There was a hard-baked cinder in a decaying orbit that was destined to fall into the star in a couple billion years, and the system’s answer to Venus was swaddled in blinding white clouds and had a surprisingly eccentric orbit.

The real crown jewel for Allison’s money, after Akyawentuo itself, was one of the ringed giant’s moons. There was oxygen in the atmosphere down there. That had taken some explanation when Singer noticed they were all nerding out about it; Julian did his spirit-monkey thing and had them all crowding around the display while he talked about what it meant. Vemik and Yan were rapt, the other Given-Men couldn’t pretend to their anger anymore…

He was good at that.

“Come on, you know them better’n that!” he protested. “I was never in any danger.”

“We know…” Xiù agreed. “But it was still terrifying.”

“You did good, dummy,” Allison reassured him. “Just… I dunno. I wanna say ‘be more careful in future,’ but you didn’t actually do anything careless.”

“Eh, maybe.” He scratched the back of his head. “We forget we scare them, y’know?”

“How so?”

“The ‘magic’ stuff. We’re tall, tall things are threatening. We look strange…”

“They’re really scared of you, Al,” Xiù added.

“All three of us,” Julian nodded. “But yeah.”

Allison quirked her head. “Why? That bit with the drones and the shotgun? They’ve seen worse since.”

“Yeah, but you don’t relate to them. And then there’s the ship’s systems. You control the lights and the gravity. That’s big magic.” Julian pulled the couch out of the wall and sat down. “My kinda magic is easy for them. I can beat on steel and they can beat on steel and there’s a connection, and I can talk shop with Vemik all day. And Xiù… I swear you can make anybody fall in love with you.”

That set Xiù’s blush off, and he flashed a grin at her then returned his attention to Allison. “But you? They don’t have any of the stuff they need to know to even start havin’ a handle on your job.”

“Also, that Sarah Connor look,” Xiù added as her face started to return to its more usual hue.

Allison nodded sombrely, seeing their point. “…It’s not like I want to be,” she said. “I just… hell, I love them! They’re great people! But about the only thing I have in common with any of them is bein’ a mom, and I wasn’t any kind of a mom either!”

“…Um… about that…” Xiù said, slowly.

“…Yeah?”

“…I think…I know this is a weird time to bring it up but better now than never, right? I just…” Xiù paused and gave them an apologetic look. “I don’t think I want to keep being a space explorer much longer,” she said.

Allison surprised her and Julian both when she nodded and sighed. “…Yeah. The shine’s kinda gone out of it.”

“You too, Al?”

“Me too,” she said, firmly.

“…Okay. Well. Way I see it, we have three options,” Julian said. “And we maybe get to pick two. Keep flying, stick with the People, have a family.”

Allison smiled and sat down next to him. “I bet I can guess where your vote is,” she said. “You suit workin’ with the People, and it suits you. And I know you want kids.”

“…Yeah,” Julian agreed. “But I care about what you both want too. Like, way out in front of those other things.”

Xiù climbed onto their laps and sat across them, slipping an arm under Julian’s and around his back. “And I care about what you both want,” she reminded him.

“You want to settle down too,” Allison observed. XIù nodded fervently, and she smiled. “…Then that makes three of us.”

“…You sure?” Julian asked. “You pushed hardest for… well, this.” He waved a hand to indicate Misfit and the whole adventure they’d gone on together.

“Women’s prerogative, Etsicitty,” she teased him and flicked his nose. “I get to change my mind.”

“Heh. Yes ma’am.”

“There’s no way we can raise kids on a spaceship, though,” Xiù pointed out.

“It’s fine. The last few days kinda drove home to me what’s really important in my life,” Allison replied. She scooted up closer and cuddled them both. “Bein’ a pioneering deep space explorer is cool an’ all? But I want you. And I wanna be a mom again. I’m ready this time.”

“…That will make Singer happy,” Julian observed. “Woulda made Vemet happy, too.”

“We still have the region to explore, and I bet the Group won’t let us go without at least another tour. We don’t need to figure it all out right away.”

“Lots of study time…” Julian mused.

“Face it, there’s a lifetime of things to do on Akyawentuo. I guarantee we won’t be bored.”

“I wonder if they’ll let us keep Misfit?” Xiù mused.

“I doubt it. She’ll probably end up in the Smithsonian next to Pandora one day, but there’s a lotta life in the girl yet. It’d be a sin to keep her grounded.” Allison looked around fondly. “But I’ll miss you, darling.”

By a quirk of pure timing, the message update tone pinged around the room as if the ship had replied, and the three of them devolved into giggling for a few seconds until Xiù, grinning, stood up and collected one of the tablets.

“I’d better see if that’s anything important,” she said.

Allison stole a kiss off Julian and snuggled into him. “Guess we get our little house in the woods back,” she said.

“No beaver,” Julian pointed out.

“There’s those little root-burrower things, they’re kinda like—babe?”

Xiù had made a strangled noise, and gone as white as a ghost with her hand over her mouth. She tottered back a few steps and sank onto the couch with tears welling up in her eyes.

She was immediately the focus of concern. “Xiù? Baby? What is it?”

Xiù handed the tablet to Julan and buried herself in Allison’s shoulder, making a tortured noise. Allison stroked her hair and held her, throwing a desperate look at Julian for an explanation.

Julian was way ahead of her. His shoulders dropped, he shut his eyes for a second, and ran a comforting hand up Xiù’s back.

“…it’s from Regaari,” he said, and Xiù heaved an enormous sob. “…He says Ayma’s dead.”

Date Point: 14y5d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Regaari

The fortress was both huge, and a maze. Centuries of modifications, renovations, remodelling and occasionally the wholesale construction of entirely new wings all while staying inside the existing footprint had left its innards winding and confusing and full of character. A knowledgeable mason could have read half of Gao’s history just by glancing at the walls.

Then there were the little details. Here, a claw mark in the wood told the story of some forgotten frustration. There, the dishing of a stone step eroded by hundreds of thousands of feet. The unique symbolism hidden in a rafter-banner told those in the know that its creator had been, if not actually a Whitecrest, then certainly some kind of a Clan precursor.

Despite the labyrinthine nature of the fortress’ interior, there was one route that was simply too straightforward to get lost on. Up, up and up the north tower, around a square staircase that was never quite the same number of steps on any given flight. It smelled of age, of dignity and of power, and Regaari could have navigated it blindfolded with crushed garlic stuffed up both nostrils.

He checked his personal messages as he ascended. It was the first chance he’d had since returning from Dark Eye. Aside from honoring a fallen Brother and maintaining his gear, there had been a priority summons. Great Father Daar wanted to speak to him personally.

So he read as he climbed. He’d sent Shoo an entirely too-brief message in the snatched time ahead of the Dark Eye mission, abandoning all his careful planning about how to break her heart in the gentlest way. In the end, circumstances hadn’t permitted kindness.

One more reason to hate the Hierarchy.

Shoo’s reply had pain written in every line, but she mercifully didn’t seem to blame him for breaking the news so abruptly.

Regaari,

Can’t believe it. Don’t know what to say, what to think. Wish I was there, wish I wasn’t, wish…

I don’t know. I have support. I hope you do too. I’ll come and see you as soon as I can I promise, if you can’t come and see me first. I’ll come to Gao, if I can. I don’t want to see it all torn up, but I’ll be there for you even so.

Please be well.

All my love and friendship,

-Xiù

He closed the message and took the last three flights on four-paw, dignity be damned.

The view was breathtaking, he had to admit. Night was falling, and of course High Mountain Fortress had a commanding view of the surrounding terrain. That was why it had been built where it was, after all. On a clear day, a sharp-eyed Gao could see the haze over three different cities.

On a clear night, he could see the lights.

And Daar had been given the top floor as a personal suite of rooms. He’d hate that. Daar’s first instinct was always going to be to bed down in the barn with the Naxas wranglers, if he could. Sleeping isolated at the top of the highest spire was going to fray his nerves raw.

Which was probably why Daar barked a sharp “Come!” as soon as Regaari scratched on the door-plate. Inside, Gao’s second Great Father was pacing a new bare patch into the rug, carefully avoiding the austere, antique furniture presumably for fear that he might damage it.

The door didn’t creak at least. It smelled of new oil, behind the rather more pressing scent of Daar’s own frustration. Regaari let it close quietly behind him and gave his old friend a wary look.

“…You wanted to see me, My Father?”

Daar sighed and to Regaari’s astonishment actually keened softly. “Not in private, Cousin, I’m begging you. Please don’t call me that when we’re alone.”

…Ah.

Regaari relaxed, answered with a soft keen of his own and dashed to his old friend’s side, no longer a deferential Father of his subservient Clan, but a concerned brother-in-arms.

He was the recipient of a back-breaker of a hug in return. “Heavy is the head that wears the crown, right?” he asked, just about managing to not sound strained.

Daar loosened up slightly. “Huh? Oh. Yeah. Especially if he doesn’t fuckin’ want it…”

“Strange, that expression. Humans have the exact same one you know, word-for-word.”

“‘Cuz it’s true.”

“…Why do we even have that word in our language?” The thought struck Regaari suddenly and ominously. “When did our people ever wear crowns?”

“Old history, friend. Very old history,” Daar told him. “Fyu was the last and then only at his coronation. But no way are they makin’ me wear a fuckin’ crown. Not happening.”

There was a disturbing collection of suppressed histories hiding in that statement, Regaari realized. But that was for later. He chittered sympathetically and managed to gently escape from the hug. “I should hate to meet somebody who wanted a crown. He’d certainly be no Brother of mine. But can I be honest, cousin?”

“Please!”

“You need to wear that crown, Daar. Or something equal to it. Symbols are important.”

Daar snarled and threw himself onto the couch. “Cousin, can I please go five minutes without somebody offerin’ advice? I don’t need…” he paused, flexed his claws and then gave Regaari an apologetic look. “…I don’t need advice on how to do what I gotta do. I need somebody t’help me cope.”

“I’m trying, Daar. I didn’t say that without purpose. The crown is as much for you as it is for the rest. Its symbolism is important to the man who wears it too—you can take off a crown.”

Daar nodded sadly, and huffed a gargantuan sigh.

“But…fuck that for now.” Regaari flopped onto the couch with as little dignity as he could muster. “I’m glad you’re still Daar.”

“…An’ somehow yer still Regaari. Knows everythin’, smooth as a frozen lake.”

“Hardly.”

“I know. I was watchin’ when we lost Rebar. Between him an’ Ayma…An’ I know you loved her, Regaari. In the old way.”

“…I did,” Regaari confessed. “I think she felt the same way. She once said ‘If I could just pick one…’”

“…We all gotta give up the shit we want, don’t we? I don’t know how you do it an’ still keep so composed.”

Regaari relaxed back and stared up at the ceiling. “…I’m very good at deception. It’s a skill that my Clan is proud of…I daresay that’s an alien concept for a Stoneback.”

Daar huffed a dark noise that was almost the start of a chitter. “It’d sure as shit make life easier sometimes.”

“See? I knew you wouldn’t get it. Lying doesn’t make life easier at all.”

“Naxas farts. It’s the grease in the gears. The only reason my Clan can manage its honesty is ‘cuz we’re strong enough to keep our principles.”

“You’d be amazed at the strength that goes into maintaining the biggest lies,” Regaari countered. “Especially ones like ‘I’m okay.’”

Daar whined instantly, rolled on top of Regaari and curled them both into a ball. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

They commiserated in silence for quite a long time before Daar finally spoke again.

“…I gotta do somethin’ terrible,” he said eventually.

“Genshi says you intend to concentrate the biodrones and nuke them.”

“Yeah. We can’t muster enough troops fast enough to retake the cities ‘fore we’re overwhelmed with disasters. The plan ain’t changed since the first war council.”

“The one where you slaughtered the Champion and Grandfather of Firefang.”

Daar winced a little, but duck-nodded. “Had to. They were puttin’ the wreck of their Clan ahead of the whole of Gao. That…and I needed to terrify the others.”

Regaari regarded Daar with an inward wariness. He may well have been Regaari’s “most bestest Cousin” but there had always been a…relentless side to Daar. He saw a job, he did the job and anything that got in the way didn’t remain in the way.

That was why Daar had been named the youngest ever Stud-Prime of his Clan, why he was tied for youngest Champion. Why he was so hugely and dramatically successful in all his endeavors. Why he was so friendly, so boisterous…

…And so darkly perfect for the role that now fell on him.

“…So what do you need?” he asked. “You know what needs to be done. Is it even a choice at this moment? Is there an equal alternative I don’t know about?”

Daar shook his head and whined again. “…No. It isn’t. And there ain’t. Balls, I’ve been hoping for one since everything happened…actually, I didn’t tell you. I got nuked.”

“…You look well for it,” Regaari ventured, and Daar burst into a massive prolonged burst of chittering.

“Yeah! Yeah I do!” he growled and cooled down a little. Clearly, he’d needed some mirth. “…It was on Akyawentuo. Micronuke on a long-range air defense missile. Tossed me around like a fuckin’ rag toy.”

“You came through it well, then,” Regaari told him.

“‘Know why?”

“…Tell.”

“Same reason you’re copin’. It’s the Humans. If I hadn’t learned from them—if they hadn’t freed my mind from the Hierarchy and all their cultural taint—I prol’ly wouldn’t’a been strong enough to take that kind o’ beating. I wouldn’t’a known how t’be that strong. And even if I coulda lived before, I can’t help but wonder if I woulda…given up.”

“You didn’t, though,” Regaari pointed out. “You’ve never given up on anything.”

“No. But if there’s one thing the Humans taught me, it’s if there is will there is a way.”

“Fair enough, but be careful. We don’t need a Church of Human,” Regaari joked, glad that he was able to. His sense of humor had taken a beating, lately. It was a relief to feel ready to joke again. Daar chittered again, but sobered quickly.

“…We’re not gonna get one,” he said. “Gyotin’s a smart tail from what I hear. Humans and gaoians are gonna be peers, not pets. I’ll make sure of it.”

“They wouldn’t have it any other way,” Regaari agreed.

“Sure they would. Some’a them, anyway. There’s evil Motherless curs in any Clan. But Clan SOR was stupid enough to take us in an’ train us,” he chittered in fond humor, “So the least we can do is make ‘em work for it! No way am I gonna let Highland keep his winning record, either!”

Regaari rolled his eyes fondly. “You shouldn’t wrestle primates, Cousin. That’s their game and they own it. Stick to foot races or sled pulls, you never lose those.”

“So what? I’mma do it, you’ll see. Just a few more matches…” He trailed off in a happy growl. Even now, Daar’s positive and relentlessly competitive spirit couldn’t be dampened.

They had bigger things to discuss, however, so Regaari sat up straight and returned to the topic at hand. “…Which cities?” he asked.

“…Most’a them.” Daar sobered up instantly. “I’m sparin’ Lavmuy, Wi Kao, Den So and Kanmuy fer reasons of culture, and Shem Yui out east in the Three Valleys ‘cuz we’re gonna need it to keep people fed. Also High Mountain fortress. Our history an’ heritage must remain intact. Everythin’ else we can relocate or rebuild, thanks to capturing Dark Eye.”

“That’s still a lot of lost heritage,” Regaari commented. “Every city has its history, its culture, its libraries and museums…”

“Yeah. I know. But I gotta draw the line between necessary heritage an’ sentiment somewhere.”

“…I’m glad you’re sparing Wi Kao.”

“That’s why ‘yer here,” Daar grumbled uncomfortably. “I’m…attached to that city. ‘Fer a lotta reasons. I need to know if I’m sparing it for the right reasons, ‘cuz bein’ honest, I’m gonna lose a lotta ‘Backs securin’ it. And a lotta Human infantry, too.”

“Culturally, it’s the city that killed Tiritya. The city where the Clan of Females was founded. Fyu burned it to the ground then rebuilt it from the rubble. It’s the city of our first contact with Humans, the site of the largest and oldest Commune…it also has some working hospitals protected by a handful of Straightshield holdouts, according to the last reconnaissance report that I read.”

“…And no other city has any of that.”

“The history of our people is written in those streets. I say we add another chapter, not a full stop.”

Daar duck-nodded solemnly. “…Can I afford to spare more?” he asked.

“You are the last living Master of War, Daar. Highmountain hasn’t trained a replacement and I fear they may lose the tradition if you don’t keep it. No other gaoian is as qualified as you to make that decision.”

“I know.” Daar never pretended to false modesty. “I know what I think. I’m askin’ what you think, and what ‘yer Clan thinks. An’ I need it straight, without any Champion nonsense in between. That’s why I’m askin’ you and not Genshi.”

Regaari sat forward and looked down at the floor between his feet for a while as he processed his thoughts.

“…Five is… not many,” he said at last. “But realistically, even those five will be hard-fought. Whatever our sentiments about the other cities may be, we have to consider what we can reasonably expect to take and hold. Sparing all the heritage our people have means nothing unless we win and save the people themselves.”

“…Right.”

Daar groaned and stretched. “…I’m leadin’ the charge on an ag station out in Three Valleys tomorrow. The Human troops’re green, is my understanding. Fuck, Fiin has more experience than most’a their guys.”

“I skimmed the report. Captain Landry has serious time in the desert on Earth, though.”

“You still got that report? I need’ta know the people I’m workin’ with.”

Regaari duck-nodded and called it up.

“This is very different from working with the SOR,” he said, reviewing a healthily well-rounded and replete MTOE. The company due to fly out to Three Valleys in the morning had a fully intact chain of command, a healthy mix of seasoned NCOs and eager but inexperienced infantrymen, and all the sheer bullying mass and resources that Spaceborne Operations so far lacked.

He loaded the information into a Whitecrest machine learning program, which scoured it for handles. Anomalies, points of interest, disciplinary matters, commendations, anything that was generally out of the ordinary. Fortunately, Longear had managed to maintain some of the Clan’s most critical information systems, undoubtedly hosted in their rumored ultra-secure datacenters scattered across the continent.

“Hmm. You might like this guy: Specialist Michael Murphy. He’s been busted in rank twice. Seems to be related to a dispute about a female.”

Daar chittered. “You’re right, I like him already.”

“Does he need watching, you think? That suggests a volatile personality and we need to manage this first deployment very carefully.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. Sounds like a ‘Back! Brothers like that just need a mission.”

“Be careful,” Regaari warned. “Humans are not gaoians. Their psychology isn’t the same.”

“It’s close enough. But just to be safe I’ll keep ‘em close, at least for the first bit. See how he does for his first real mission. If we’re lucky we can get things secured before the ‘drones figger shit out and get clever. They blow up the elevators there…”

“Then the Naxas herds will starve, we’ll be short possibly millions of tons of meat, and an already strained logistics problem will break irrevocably. We’d have famine for the first time in centuries.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Daar stated. It wasn’t so much a promise or a claim as a prediction. “It’s just the first in a lotta steps, and it ain’t even the only thing we’re doin’ in the morning.”

“I had wondered about that. You’ve been in so many meetings it’s been difficult to keep up.”

“Yeah. We’ve got a division’s worth o’ airborne infantry an’ all their support stuff. It’s been mostly the Champions and me sortin’ out what gets hit first, and what we can hit. I’m only on this mission ‘cuz it cannot fail. Everyone else is securin’ territory and controllin’ disasters…but this’ll determine if we can eat this winter.”

“And every winter after that.”

“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nuclear reactors gonna start meltin’ down next week, sewage systems that’re gonna overload with nobody t’run them, an’ fuck knows what else is gonna start fallin’ apart without proper oversight… but all’a that’s a bag full’a Naxas farts if we ain’t got nothin’ ta eat. And that’s just the stuff we can maybe avert. There’s assload’a smaller disasters gonna drop on us that we can’t do shit about.”

“There’s also the question of my Brothers and the HEAT,” Regaari reminded him.

“Best thing is ‘fer Clan SOR to go back to Cimbrean and recover. I need ‘yer abilities ready to go at any moment an’ it’d be a waste t’spend y’all on mop-up operations.”

“…My Brothers will find that difficult to stomach, Daar. I find it difficult to stomach. The fight is here, our people are here.”

“An’ yer vengeance is here,” Daar observed, driving a claw right into the metaphorical jugular as he so disarmingly did from time to time. “But here’s the thing. Real vengeance? That’s gonna come when we take the fight to the Hunters directly.”

That was such a blunt statement of intent it caught Regaari short. “You can’t mean—”

“This may just be cleanup, Cousin, but it’s at a scale nobody’s ever done before. We’re gonna do a crash-course basic training for every Clanless we find along the way, turn ‘em around, put ‘em with experienced units, do missions, and repeat.” Daar tilted his head curiously, “Have you done the math on this, Regaari?”

“…I admit, I’ve found the numbers daunting. A billion strong army always seemed…rhetorical.”

“Stonebacks don’t lie, Cousin.” He said it not unkindly. “An’ I ain’t in the habit of exaggerating, either. I meant what I said. We don’t have time to make weapons for everyone, kit them out properly or do any of the buildout the humans are used to. But for this? We really don’t need it. Gaoians got claws and teeth. What we need are warm bodies, fast, and we need an’ endless number of ‘em. So we basically press-gang the fittest Clanless we run into, show ‘em how an’ what to do by example…”

The numbers really were daunting, and the simple scale of Daar’s ambition was…

“…How long until the army is that big?”

“Prol’ly a year, maybe a little more. Train a group, go on mission, use that group to train more and send them on mission…we end up with geometric expansion. Add to that our industrial nanofacs an’ hardly any materiel requirements in the first place, things are gonna go way faster than America’s stand-up in World War Two.”

Regaari didn’t know the deep history of that conflict, but he did know the sheer logistical scale was in its own way unmatched—they had only just invented computers!

He reconsidered his friend warily. This was ambition like Regaari had not conceived. It was obvious just from Daar’s confidence and tone that the strategy was well-considered and carefully planned, too; clearly, he had been thinking about this for some time.

“…And you intend, once this grand army has swept Gao clean, to turn on the Hunters.”

“Eventually. We’ll need to rebuild, circle back and properly train and equip them. But by then they’ll all be blooded and eager to sink their teeth into the evil that did this to us. That army has an expiration date, Cousin, and we don’t even know how big of a die-off we’re facing. What else am I gonna do with an asset like that?”

“Disband them? Let them go back to a life of peace?” Regaari suggested, but his heart wasn’t in it. In his guts, he knew that what he’d just proposed was now impossible, for far too many. There was no such thing as a life of peace any more.

Daar just gave him a patient look which said loud and clear that he knew full well that Regaari knew he was being inappropriately innocent.

“Back to point, though. This is a numbers game right now. What remains of Whitecrest is much too valuable to squander. An’ if that don’t convince you, consider this: how long is it gonna take to train up assets that can actually breach a hunter space station?”

“…Years. And my Brothers will be the best option for training them.”

“An’ we’ll have HEAT ready and waiting t’help, too. Imagine what kinda force they’ll be when they finally get a full MTOE…”

“…Very well. Patience is one of our Clan values. I’m sure my Brothers will understand.”

“Don’t think of it like a burden, Cousin. ‘Yer doin’ what nobody else can. I’m gonna need you and your Brothers. Balls, thanks to you, the Gao has the finest nanofac in the Dominion right now. That’s huge.”

“Speaking of which, I have to be back at Farthrow. That nanofac came at a heavy price, and we’re sending him home in a few hours.”

“I know.” Daar heaved a sigh. “An’ I can’t be there. That fuckin’ hurts.”

“You need to rest and prepare for tomorrow, Daar.”

“Still hurts.”

Regaari duck-nodded and gave his old friend a brotherly scratch right between the shoulder blades. “I know.”

He stood up. “You know if you need me, I’ll come running four-pawed,” he promised.

“I know. An’ if yer findin’ that big lie a little too big to carry…”

Regaari duck-nodded. They sniffed noses as old friends, and he let himself out, back into the world where Daar was Great Father Daar.

They had a long and bloody war ahead of them.

Date Point: 14y6d AV
Weaver-class troop transport, approaching the Three Valleys, Gao

Specialist Michael Murphy, 1-325 INF (Airborne), 82nd Airborne Division

Weavers were a hell of a step up from a C-130 or a Chinook. Sure, they strongly resembled a Chinook in a lot of ways but they were fuckin’ quiet inside. Civilian passengers flights were noisier.

Nothing wrong with their performance, either. The damn things could hit escape velocity, which meant that across the ground they could pull a comfortable multiple of the speed of sound.

It put the whole planet in arm’s reach, now that the sky was under control. And apparently there was somethin’ valuable for them to grab and hold.

Just his luck that Michael had got stuck riding with the captain, though. Not that there was anything wrong with Captain Landry, he was one’a the good guys. But the flight out was quieter than Michael woulda liked.

The Guys were talking about that awful fuckin’ Workhouse-themed Gaoian soap opera.

“Niko totally wasn’t the killer, though! He’d just fought a mating duel the night before and won a contract, right? He was too busy gettin’ laid to be skulking around the Housefather’s quarters!”

“Okay, but who’s that leave? Suno?”

“Bullshit. He’s tiny even for a Gaoian, and he’s meek as hell!”

“Bruh, it’s the little quiet ones y’gotta watch for.”

“Nah, that’s just a Hollywood trope. Does…Gaoianwood? Do they do that?”

“Gaoianwood’s a hole in the ground now, bruh.”

That ended the conversation very abruptly.

Carter never ever knew when to shut up. “…What? You musta realized that shit ain’t gettin’ made no more, right? That cliffhanger was the last ever episode.”

Johnson groaned. “…Fuck. Okay, this fuckin’ war just got way more personal.”

“Well…the Great Father guy said they were sending all their women and children to Cimbrean, along with supplies and stuff. Old dudes, too.”

“Yeah, but Long Johnson gotta get his soap opera fix or he gets cranky,” Michael chimed in. “And I kinda doubt the first thing they’re gonna do is set up a production crew.”

“…Hey, I wonder if any of the actors had implants? Like, instead of a teleprompter…” Carter mused. “They could just read the lines off a HUD or somethin’. They’d never forget their lines!”

“That sounds like an excellent idea,” Captain Landry commented. “Except for the whole ‘getting possessed by digital demons’ part.”

Carter paused, grimaced, and went quiet. Johnson meanwhile was wearing the conflicted look of a man who might conceivably have to shoot one of his favorite actors.

Landry’s expression was unreadable behind his sunglasses and the keffiyeh he wore around his neck against Gao’s cold climate. “Right. Knock off ‘yer jawin’ and get ready. ETA in two minutes. Master sergeant, if you please.”

They got ready. The Stonebacks at the front of the Weaver were already on their feet and readying themselves. They weren’t expecting trouble—the whole point of this op was to relieve a force of survivors from HMS Caledonia and take over the farm they’d commandeered as a springboard for securing a huge swathe of farmland and vital rural territory. But there was apparently a small army of Clanless waiting for them, and the ‘Backs were big on first impressions.

They were good at first impressions, too. Nothin’ said ‘don’t fuck with us’ like a fist full of claws, teeth that’d have a wolf cowering in the corner and a thick layer of shaggy fur.

And yet…

After seeing and meeting Daar he’d expected all the Stonebacks to be goddamned monsters. And to be fair they were, all great big shaggy-furred dudes with claws that could tear through walls. Michael wouldn’t ever wanna fight any of them. It was just…well, they weren’t Daar. He was a giant that put them all to complete shame, with his short-cut fur only emphasizing the enormous difference. The Great Father was so impressive that he could comfortably hang with the HEAT, according to reputation. He was riding along on the other Weaver with Lieutenant Moore, leading from the front, and the other Stonebacks looked at him kinda like a regular Gaoian looked at a Stoneback.

Then again, they looked that way at their smallest Brother, too. Fiin was something like Daar’s second-in-command, and what he lacked in size compared to the others it was hella obvious he made up for in massive smarts. He absolutely radiated danger, too; he was still a big dude and he had claws. And he watched everyone like a hawk.

He prowled up the Weaver now to share a word with Landry. “Great Father says the LZ might be clear, but we have no guarantees about implants,” he said. “Standing orders remain. We are to treat everyone in the compound as potentially an enemy, and terminate any implanted or resisting males or Humans with extreme prejudice.”

“How extreme are we talking, Brother Fiin?”

Fiin bared his fangs. It looked like a grin but it really, really wasn’t. “Instantly and without remorse.”

Michael nodded to himself. He could do that. It was gonna suck if he had to ice one of the Caledonia survivors, but if they had implants they were dead already. More like puttin’ down a fuckin’ zombie than a person, so they said.

Maybe he’d believe it too, if he repeated it long enough.

Landry simply nodded. “Right.”

Behind him, the Weaver’s ramp dropped and all the noise they’d been missing throughout the flight came pounding into fill their ears.

It was a simple enough landing. The farm had a basic compacted-dirt helipad ready and waiting for them, but the Weavers set down in the field some distance away where huge round bales of the local version of hay gave them plenty of concealment. They’d built a decent defensive wall, too. Banked earth ramparts, good fields of fire. Not bad at all for workin’ with just what they could scrounge up in the field.

They were challenged correctly, responded appropriately, invited to enter. Michael was on the entry team along with his sergeant, Fiin, Daar, one of their Brothers, and the lieutenant. They found the camp’s occupants waiting for them in a posture of surrender—the Clanless Gaoians were all standing four-pawed, while the humans were lined up against the farmhouse with their hands pressed to the wall.

Everyone moved as swiftly and aggressively as they could to secure the situation. Michael only remembered his part, where he advanced towards the back of the farmhouse right behind his sergeant, and checked over a Gaoian with all-white fur. Was he an albino? Michael honestly didn’t know.

The entire encounter lasted less than ten seconds while the bulk of their forces quickly secured the farm proper, checking for any nasty surprises that might be laying around. In short order the both teams reported their objectives secure.

What happened next was weirdly and entirely Gaoian. Once everyone had scanned each other’s heads and found their skulls free of alien tech, the Great Father instantly transformed into…an entirely different person. One second he and the Stonebacks were ready to tear everyone into pieces, and the next…

It was like they were all old friends.

The Stonebacks helped their fellow Gaoians off their feet and immediately sniffed noses exactly like dogs did. Michael felt a little embarrassed but helped his albino up, who seemed like he suffered from poor eyesight. He wobbled gratefully to his feet and flicked his ears in all directions at once, and generally made a fuss of the moment.

They didn’t sniff noses, though. That was a little too weird for Michael.

Daar tried at first to restrain his natural boisterousness, and about five seconds later gave up and let loose on everyone. He greeted the humans with barely-contained glee, especially a teeny blonde woman whom he swept up off the ground and bear-hugged.

“I am very proud of you!” He exclaimed and actually chittered, somehow managing to make it a bass noise. “No direction, nothing other than ‘yerselves and ‘yer wits, and a nice chance meeting…now you’ve already got the area secure!”

“You’d be Lieutenant Kovač?” Landry asked, as the medics bustled inside to start seeing to the wounded.

“Uh, yes sir,” Kovač confirmed as Daar put her down. The wonky-ass upside-down Air Force chevrons on her arm said tech sergeant rather than lieutenant, which told a whole story all by itself, and the exhaustion on her face told a second one.

Damn, it felt good to be the cavalry.

“And now you get to boss ‘Horse around, too!” Daar boomed.

“Please, I already do that,” Kovač grinned. It was obvious she and Daar really did go back a ways. She cleared her throat and indicated one of the nearby Clanless, a skinny silverfur who had that nose-in-the-air look that said he thought he was important. “Uh, Great Father Daar, captain, this is Yeego. He rallied the local Clanless workers. They’re the ones who helped us get this all set up.”

“The escape pods?” Landry asked, all business like he usually was.

“All accounted-for,” Kovač reported. “Everyone who made it off Caledonia and checked in is here.”

There weren’t a lot of them. In fact, the survivors numbered only a few dozen people, out of a crew of probably a couple hundred people. That was a lot of experienced ship crew the Brits had lost to this fight, and Michael knew they were gonna feel it. One of the sailors—an east indian chick—looked like she was choking back tears.

He couldn’t blame her. If his battalion had lost that many people, they’d be hurtin’ bad.

Landry grunted. “…You’ve done well, in the circumstances,” he said. Coming from him that was a jaw-dropper of a compliment, and Kovač seemed to realize it.

“Thank you, sir.”

Yeego cleared his throat the way Gaoians did. It sounded more like a sneeze than anything else. “So…What happens next?” he asked.

Landry gave him an unreadable look from behind his sunglasses. “There’s no time to stand on ceremony. I’m assuming command. You and Lieutenant Kovač will tell Great Father Daar and me absolutely everything about the surrounding area. Our mission is to expand and hold a safe zone free of biodrones and begin training your Clanless up into an effective fighting force. As soon as I’m satisfied that I know everything I need to, the SOR technicians will return to Farthrow, and the Royal Navy personnel will be evacuated to Cimbrean.”

He stepped aside as a couple of medics barged through carrying somebody on a litter. The Stonebacks were assembling a field jump array in the barn, and the medics laid the stricken sailor next to it before returning to the farmhouse for the next one.

Yeego looked like he wanted to object to having his little kingdom taken over, but Daar gave him a feral look that made the much smaller male go weak at the knees and flatten his ears submissively. “There ain’t a problem,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“N–no, of course not. My Father.”

Daar instantly snapped back into a happier persona. “Good! We’re gonna need competent ag managers, Yeego. I ain’t got any doubt you’ll be one of ‘em, right?”

Somehow that wasn’t a question, either.

Yeego straightened. “I will give my best and more.”

“Outstanding.” Daar used that word exactly like the saltiest NCO would when wielding it like a weapon, and Michael loved him completely for it. All the humans and Stoneback Brothers caught his meaning: Yeego didn’t, and preened a little.

“There’s a lotta mouths gonna need feedin’,” Daar continued, “And a lotta rebuildin’ to do. Clanless are gonna be the foundation fer that, as you always have been.” Daar turned to the watching workers. “All’a you. Now more than ever the future of Gao rests on your shoulders. I know you’re up to it.”

Captain gave him and the rest of the crew a Look, which Michael’s sergeant took to mean they should get lost. They found stuff to do quick enough. Carter got the job of making sure the latrines were up to standard, Johnson was universally acknowledged as their cooking and fire guy, and vanished to start getting that all set up…

Michael found himself doing a slow circuit of the perimeter, inspecting the earthworks. Not that he really had any idea what he was lookin’ at, but he sure as shit wouldn’t have a problem putting that much dirt between him and incoming firepower so they were probably good.

Behind him, the litters and their patients were loaded into the field jump array, which fired with a thump. A stack of boxes, ammo cans and crates came back the other way.

“‘Ey up, mate. Any chance I could bum a fag?”

Michael eyed the Brit suspiciously. The man was a Royal Marines corporal with exhausted lines all over his face and a week of beard growth, who rolled his eyes and translated after a second. “Have you got any cigarettes?” he asked. “ I’m fuckin’ gaspin’ for a smoke.”

“I got a dip…” Michael offered.

“Fuck it, sure. If it had nicotine in it I’d snort dog shit right now.”

Michael chuckled and broke out his tin. “Here you go, bruh.”

“Cheers.”

The marine took a modest pinch and tucked it in between lip and teeth.

“Gross habit,” Michael commented, by way of making conversation.

“M-hmm,” the Brit agreed. He returned the tin and then offered his hand to shake Michael’s. “Corporal Wilde.”

“Specialist Murphy. You guys did pretty good for yourselves out here.”

“Too bad we never got the showers working,” Wilde sighed as the nicotine started to hit and leaned against the earthwork. “Just wet naps and airing out daily. The Gaoians think it’s funny as shit.”

“Yeah, you uh… got a little somethin’ on you there,” Michael said, diplomatically. Wilde’s gear was heavily stained, and a lot of it looked like it had maybe been something’s guts once.

“M-hmm. Hunter. Doesn’t come out.”

Michael didn’t know what to say about that. Nor about the bullet hole right in the middle of Wilde’s chest plate. Both details were downright unnerving, though he tried to keep himself game…

“I take it ‘yer green, mate,” Wilde observed, not unkindly.

“…Yeah.”

“Well. Don’t you worry.” Wilde looked back at the farmhouse, then out across the field towards another point of light off in the distance. “I reckon you’ll be securing that town next. Bad rumors coming out of there—You won’t be green for long.”

“I don’t think any of us will be.”

“Nope.”

“Any idea what’s next for you?” Michael asked him.

“JETS I reckon, if they’ll have me. HEAT is…not my style. But I tell you this, I definitely want to work with the SOR some more. Even their bloody nerds are good.”

“They’re the bestest.” Great Father Daar had appeared behind them, apparently looking to prowl about while the officers did their handover. “All of ‘em.” Brother Fiin stood guard a respectful distance behind, once Michael looked around. “Yer right, too. We’ll be securing that ag station tomorrow morning. It’s got a comm relay an’ stuff.”

Nobody really understood how exactly to deal with the notion that the supreme dictator of all the Gao was among them. Michael in particular didn’t know how you had a smoke break with someone like that.

Wilde either knew, or was long past the point of giving a shit. Considering how heavy and dark the bags under his eyes were, it was probably the latter.

“You using us for that maneuver tomorrow?” he asked.

“Nah, y’all done your part. I’m hopin’ t’get you shipped out tonight, in fact.”

“…Thank you.”

The big alien-bear-thing flicked his left ear and chittered. “Go get some shuteye. There’s a nice corner over there you can curl up in.”

Wilde creaked upright, clapped Michael on the shoulder with a nod, gave a rather more respectful nod to Daar, and shuffled off in the direction Daar had indicated. “You’ll do fine, mate,” he promised.

Daar watched Wilde leave then fixed his stern, unrelenting gaze on Michael, who felt like he was suddenly undergoing the worst inspection of his military career.

“Nervous?”

Honesty seemed the only answer. “Yessir.”

“Good.” Daar’s expression softened into something much more kindly. “Do me a favor, though. Don’t let the Clanless see that if you can. They’ve gotta look up to you, y’know.”

“I’ll try not to, sir.”

Daar duck-nodded like Gaoians always did. “He’s right. You’ll do fine.”

Michael couldn’t help himself. “How do you know?”

Daar chittered somewhere in the infrasonic and shook his pelt out. “‘Yer human.”

“So?” Everyone kept saying that and it was starting to annoy Michael.

“That’s plenty, trust me. I know you don’t get it yet but you will.”

“I mean…you say that, but you’re the Great Father. Also you’re like four times my size.”

Michael had seen videos of Daar in action. The way he just blurred through a battlefield and plowed through everything in his path…it was hard to imagine much of anything hurting the Great Father, especially when he was wearing that incredible armor of his.

“Yeah.” Daar duck-nodded sagely. “But so what? Size ain’t everything.”

“Wh–?” That was rich coming from him. “How–!? Bullshit! You’re huge and you move like a goddamned demon!”

“I do! But again, so what?” Daar chittered in his deep voice. “I like you, y’ain’t afraid to tell it like you see it! You get into all sortsa trouble back home, don’tcha?”

…It abruptly occurred to Michael that maybe he should tone it down a little while talking with the leader of the Gao. It was even worse because Daar had him pegged, too. Michael had dug some pretty deep holes in his short military career with his quick mouth and maybe quicker fists…he suddenly felt like his ears were burning.

“Oh, relax. I ain’t gonna eatcha!” Daar didn’t seem to give one wet shit. “But don’t worry too much about any o’ that. I’m damn near the biggest an’ strongest dude there is in most any thinkin’ species but a bullet’ll kill me dead just the same as you. Maybe easier ‘cuz I’m a big target! Hell, I’m a good match for most o’ HEAT, too…but you wanna guess how I do when we spar?”

“…You lose?” Even saying it, that seemed hard to believe.

Daar shrugged his vast shoulders. It was an odd gesture to make while he stood on all fours like a talking wolverine. “Not allatime, an’ I’m way better now than I was at first…but yeah. I still lose enough t’keep me learnin’ an’ grounded. Wanna know why?”

Michael nodded dumbly.

“It’s all up here.” Daar rested his gigantic paw on Michael’s head. “Bein’ a monkey helps a lot, bein’ built for supergravity helps too, but the thing is? In the end, even that don’t really matter. An enemy can adapt to the physical problem an’ you can always assume there’s someone better. What matters more’n anything is fightin’ instincts.”

Michael eyed Daar suspiciously. “…Instincts.”

“Yeah. I don’t know what in Keeda’s name happened in ‘yer evolution t’make your species the way it is, but y’all are natural born fighters. Human instincts are better’n anyone’s, even mine, and mine are pretty damn good if I do say so myself. I don’t know if that’s just ‘yer nature or if we’ve had our instincts suppressed by the Hierarchy an’ we gotta relearn everything, or whatever, but it don’t really matter, same result regardless. Every time I spar with Clan SOR I learn just a ‘lil bit more about how much I don’t know about real fights, especially when I spar with Highland.”

Michael had to ask. “Isn’t he, uh, one of the ‘smaller’ guys on the HEAT?”

Daar chittered happily. “Yup! Physically I’ve always been better’n him. Still don’t matter. There ain’t any good reason anymore he should ever win against me, but more often’n not he still yanks my tail. Sometimes he wins hard, too. I think only Righteous is a more naturally dangerous dude, it’s scary. It’s ‘cuz they got real fight in‘im. Most all you humans do, and I can tell just by watchin’ you today that ‘ya got it strong, too.

“Well, if you say so, sir.” Michael didn’t know how else to respond.

“I do! You should listen to me, I know these things.” Daar gave an unmistakably sly sideways look. “So don’t worry so much! Trust me, you already know how to win. All you gotta do tomorrow is follow ‘yer training an’ don’t die. Easy!”

Easy. Sure. Michael really had no idea what to say to that, but Daar’s unstoppable force of personality apparently extended to compassion. He rose to his hind feet and clapped his enormous paw on Michael’s shoulder. “It’s natural t’be nervous. Balls, I sure as fuck was ‘fer my first go. But we’ve got ‘yer back, Friend. You should get some rest. I bet captain Landry will post watch pretty soon so may as well get a nap in, yeah?”

“I’ll do that.”

Daar duck-nodded, and ambled away into the dark, leaving Michael feeling…he wasn’t sure what he felt. What the fuck did being human have to do with anything? There were nukes and shit in this war. Hundreds of humans were already dead. It was a spit in the ocean next to the uncountable millions of dead Gaoians, but…

He put the thought aside and did as the Great Father had suggested. If nothing else, he’d face tomorrow well-rested and with a full belly.

Somehow, he knew that would be enough.

Date Point: 14y6d AV
Three Valleys, Planet Gao

Brother Fiin, of Stoneback

Daar wasn’t following his own advice. He’d encouraged practically everybody in the forward operating base to get some sleep if they weren’t on guard duty, insisting that everybody should be rested, fed and ready for the operation to come in the morning.

Ordinarily, Fiin knew, his Champion—the Great Father, he reminded himself—would have joined in some jawin’ and chewin’ around the fire and snuggled up with everybody else.

Tonight was different. Daar apparently was on a hair trigger to pounce at the first moment of alone time he could get.

The ways of Champions and Great Fathers were still something of a mystery to Fiin, but before all those other things, Daar was a Brother. His own words. And if a Brother was hurtin’…

“Aren’t you going to turn in, My Father?”

If Daar cringed just for a microsecond at Fiin addressing him so, Fiin knew better than to comment. He was very glad he didn’t have to wear that title.

Daar wore it well, though. He gave Fiin one of those calculating looks that said there were some very deep thoughts indeed going on behind that feral forehead, then shook his head and shoulders. “Nah. Got somethin’ important ‘ta do first. Could use the help, if ‘yer willin’”

“Of course.” A ‘Back never shied away from work.

“Good. It’s somethin’…personal.”

Fiin followed him out a ways, past the packed earth flat bald patch the FOB’s builders had called a Helipad, down into a little scrappy corner of the perimeter that was still inside the base, but well tucked away and unused. A couple of Daar’s personal Claw of Stonebacks had hauled in some scrap wood. He of course hadn’t wanted a security detail, but Garl and Fiin had been insistent, even in the face of a growled threat.

“Thanks,” the Great Father grunted, and set about piling the wood as he wanted it. Fiin and the other two pitched in and between them quickly had a stumpy, flat-topped pyramid of dry wood, perfect to burn. Especially when Daar stuffed its innards with dry hay.

“Bit’a old lore for ya, Brothers,” he said, stepping back and dusting his paws off once it was finished. “Way back when, the Clan gave every fallen Brother a proper pyre. Din’t matter if a hunnerd of’em fell in one battle, din’t matter if it was a thousand. Din’t matter if there wasn’t enough left of him to scrape up and stick on top, he got a pyre.”

He chittered darkly. “Big Hotel wanted us t’forget,” he said. “Figger they think it was some imperfection or somethin’. Kept us thinkin’ about…that.” He looked up and gave the night sky his thoughtful attention. “Life, the universe. All the big shit. ‘Cuz when you get down to the dirt, why’s it all matter? Even stars die, in the long story. Shit, the whole universe is gonna die, in the longest. An’ if it’s all a big story, an’ if there ain’t nobody out there hearin’ the story an’ rememberin’ it then…why? What’s it all for, huh? Why keep fightin’?”

Fiin shifted uncomfortably. Such melancholy just wasn’t… it wasn’t Daar.

“…‘Cept it does matter,” Daar declared. “It matters to us. An’ if there ain’t nobody out there to say otherwise, then our opinion’s the only one that counts. If we say it matters, it fuckin’ matters. If it matters to us, we keep fightin’. It don’t have to make sense.”

He sighed, reached into a pocket and produced a lighter. It was the work of seconds for him to touch it to the hay and have the little pyre they’d made crackling into bright, fierce life.

“…I don’t know why it matters, but it does. An’ I know that in fightin’ for a future, I’m gonna send a lotta Brothers into their final missions. We’re gonna kill, an’ wreck, an’ destroy a lotta shit that mattered ‘cuz other things matter more…But no way am I gonna forget the fallen. Not never.”

Fiin’s head duck-nodded all by itself, unbidden. So did the others’.

“…Rebar taught me a lot. I taught him a lot. He…He was important. There’s a trillion billion stars out there that don’t matter for shit, but he mattered. That’s what this is about.”

Daar looked into the fire for a long moment. Before long it had grown into a raging inferno, and was causing enough air current to ruffle the longer fur around his neck.

“…How many Brothers we lose so far?” he asked after a silent while.

Fiin knew that figure all too intimately. “Ninety-seven, My Father. We’ve been…lucky.”

It was painful saying such a thing, but it was the truth. The Fangs had better equipment, tactics, growing air support, and supply lines. They were elite even by Human reckoning and better than the Enemy in every single way. Except for numbers. Any Fang in any engagement was routinely outnumbered by over a thousand to one, and against that great press of biodrones, and even with modern weapons and tactics, losses were inevitable. The war needed to turn, and turn soon, or there may not be any Stonebacks left to save the Gao.

A thought which weighed heavily on the Great Father, it seemed. “Way too many.” He shook his pelt out and declared, “Every one of ‘em gets a pyre. Don’t hafta be right away, and if we need th’wood for somethin really important we can put it off. But Every. One. Of. Them. Gets a pyre. Am I understood?”

“More than understood,” Fiin assured him.

Some bit of decrepit farm scrap wood deep inside the pile popped and the heap sagged. A volcanic puff of bright embers leapt upwards and spiralled away on the smoke.

The Great Father sighed and watched them wink out, high above. “…Goodbye, Brother.”

Date Point: 14y6d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

“Hello, Sister.”

Everybody was being so helpful that it hurt Xiù deep in her heart. Gratitude was…painful in its way—to be surrounded by so many wonderful people whose own souls ached to help her…But of course, they couldn’t. That was what hurt.

Sometimes, even the most gregarious person needed solitude. Or maybe the chance to speak, alone, with somebody who wasn’t there. There were some places where even the people she loved most needed to be locked out, just for a little while.

She’d made a tiāndēng to keep her hands busy while her thoughts bumped, knocked and jolted around in her head, and half-listened to the conversations that came and went nearby as different people checked on her. It was kinda rough and it definitely wasn’t made from traditional materials… but it would do.

It was ready. And the person she did want to speak to right now was right there, waiting and listening.

“I know you’re up there, Singer.”

If it was possible to drop out of a tree sheepishly, the Singer managed it.

“You always know,” she said. “How?”

Xiù tapped her nose. The Singer didn’t stink, far from it. She smelled pleasantly like supple leather and wet dirt after rain, but robustly so. All the People had a very physical scent…and they were completely unaware of it, their own sense of smell being practically nonexistent.

The Singer sighed. “You want I leave you alone?” she asked.

“…No. No, it’s okay,” Xiù said. The young Ten’Gewek shaman nodded and sat on her tail beside her, examining the lantern with her head slightly tilted.

“…Is…what?” She asked.

“It’s a prayer.”

The Singer nodded. “This Ayma…very important to you. A sister, from another…what is word? Spicey?”

“Species.” A little smile touched Xiù’s mouth. Amazing, considering how bleak she’d felt only a few hours earlier. She considered the lantern in her hands. “…It’s funny. I’ve always been kinda… stuck, I guess,” she said. “Not one thing or another, you know? Stuck between my parents and my friends, between my…” She paused and considered her words. The People didn’t have divergent ethnic groups any more, there were too few of them. “…Between the tribe of my ancestors and the tribe I grew up in…like…like when a child reaches for a branch that’s too far away and they can’t pull themselves back but they can’t go forward either.”

The Singer nodded, though a spark of mirth lit her own face at the description.

“Then I was…taken,” Xiù continued. “Stolen from my tribe by another who wanted to poke at me and prod me and learn about my tribe by taking from me. And they did the same to the Gaoians. Ayma was taken too, by the same people. That’s how we met.”

“You escaped together.”

“Yes. Fought. Killed…a lot of people. Not good people, weak and greedy people…but still people. And Ayma…she called me a sister and gave me a home, for as long as I needed it. She made me feel not stuck.”

Tears prickled the back of Xiù’s eyeballs, and she stopped to compose herself. She’d done a lot of crying already, and she wanted to do more, and more, and more and just let all of the hurt out…but that was the problem with crying. It didn’t really let the hurt out, it just gave it a voice. If she cried as much as she wanted, she’d never stop.

Instead, her hands fidgeted on the tiāndēng

“She was…a simple person. Pure. I was her Sister, and if she had to pull a moon out of the sky for me—for any of her sisters—she would give it everything she had. She went so much further for me than I ever went for her…”

“She sound more like mother than sister,” the Singer observed.

Xiù couldn’t help but give a heartbroken nod. “…Yeah.”

There was a long silence full of thoughts, before the Singer gently nudged her back to the present.

“…You should use that prayer,” she prompted.

“…I don’t know if it would mean anything to her.”

“You thought to make it, so it mean much to you,” the Singer pointed out. “You are you because of her. Do what matter to you, it will honor her.”

“What matters to me…” Xiù echoed. She considered the lantern a while longer, then stood up, unfolding her legs out from under her and rising to her feet in one smooth movement.

Allison and Julian were nearby, leaning against a tree and being present but not imminent. She gave them a small smile and they were immediately beside her.

“Ready?” Allison asked. Xiù nodded.

“Ready.”

“You forgot this,” Julian said, and handed her his lighter.

“…Of course I did,” Xiù managed to laugh at herself. She sighed, hefted the lantern in her hand and then turned to face the setting sun.

“Ayma…I’m going to miss you more than I know how to say. And I know it’s weird to say considering how we met, and…everything….But I don’t want to imagine what my life would have been like without you.”

She lit the tea light in its base, and balanced it out on her fingertips at arm’s length as the hot air lifted its weight.

“…Thank you.”

The Singer took an astonished step backwards as the lantern left her hand and drifted skywards. Xiù lost track of it in the sunset quickly, though—her vision was far too blurry with restrained tears.

It was enough. She didn’t feel great…but she felt like she could continue.

She shut her eyes and enjoyed the feeling of warm, comforting hands on her back while the Singer shielded her eyes and tried to watch the lantern vanish.

“That is…how your people say goodbye?” the Singer asked, eventually.

“No,” Xiù shook her head. She turned away, and set her thoughts on the future. “It’s how I say goodbye.”

Date Point: 14y6d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Lieutenant Anthony Costello

Without the techs, every man cleaned his own suit. It was arduous, unpleasant and the HEAT were all getting a new appreciation for what their techs put themselves through on their behalf. Just getting out of an EV-MASS was strenuously complicated, but the techs always made it seem effortless.

But today it was a point of pride that they were going to return their suits in perfect order. The techs might be coming back, but in the last week they’d repelled a Hunter boarding party, ejected from an exploding warship, crash-landed in farmland and been raided by biodrones. They’d earned a shower, a hot meal and a proper bed and at the very least, not having a pile of dirty equipment dropped on them the second they stepped through the array.

Besides. The work gave Arés especially something to occupy him. He’d be pacing like a caged polar bear otherwise.

Out of necessity, Costello was cleaning his gear as part of the same pile. They only had one set of tools after all so even if he’d wanted to—which he didn’t—he couldn’t do the aloof officer thing and get his suit clean by himself anyway.

The Lads had made room. Specifically, Master Sergeant Firth had made room, after a moment’s calculation. And his say-so meant that the rest of the Lads were cool with having the LT around their campfire, so to speak.

Right now, Murray was making them laugh with a story. Only one thing in the world got their silent Scot to become verbose, and that was the opportunity to wax nostalgic about his brothers-in-arms’ escapades.

There was no time better than the present.

“Now I’m about tae scare the shite outy the wee prick in my own way,” he said, “but Rebar puts his hand across my chest like ‘it’s okay, I got this’ how he did, aye? An’ he looks this bantamweight wanker in the eye, grins that goaty grin o’ his an’ says ‘Son…I’m game if you are, but you should know I don’t use protection.’”

Everyone around the equipment pile laughed and nodded—Murray’s impression of Rebar’s gravelly tones was spot-on. Murray snickered and used a sweep of his hand to suggest somebody running for the hills. “The little shit fuckin’ vanished, aye? Even Dexter canny make himself disappear that fast!”

More laughter, but there was a sad edge to it. Murray sighed and stared through the rifle he was cleaning. “…I’m gonny miss the big randy bastard…” he finished, quietly.

Costello nodded. He’d relied on Vandenberg in a big way, and learned a lot. Going forward without him was going to feel like taking the training wheels off.

By common agreement, his remains were lying in state in the cold locker round the back of the facility where a few people were still waiting to go to their final rest. They wanted the techs to be there when they sent him home.

Before anyone could decide what to say next, there was another thump felt through the floor, characteristic of a Jump Array firing.

Arés immediately perked up and looked over toward the arrays, like a dog expecting his master home.

“That them?” Burgess asked him.

“…Nah. Looks like a general. Three stars.”

“General Kolbeinn,” Costello predicted.

“You know him, LT?” Sikes asked.

“I don’t hang out with general officers any more than you do,” Costello said, which wasn’t quite accurate. He played poker with Admiral Knight on a regular basis after all. “But Kolbeinn’s tipped to take over from Tremblay.”

“Tremblay’s goin’?” Burgess asked.

“And Knight. A lot’s gonna get shaken up after this, may as well swap out the old flag officers. Your countrymen pushed for his replacement to be one of theirs, and mine agreed.”

“Huh. Politics.” Firth growled.

“That’s flag officers for you. But we could do a lot worse than Kolbeinn. You remember the fallout from Myanmar? The Rohingya and that, uh… ’jurisdiction dispute’ in Manipur province? He was involved, I hear.”

To a man, the Lads looked blank.

“…I ain’t exactly read up on politics in…wherever Myanmar is,” Akiyama said, and the rest nodded.

“Massive flaming shitstorm that never happened because of the right kind of force applied in the right place at the right time,” Costello summarized. “Saved a lotta lives.”

Arés craned his nonexistent neck to look back over toward the arrays. “And that’s the guy tipped to be Supreme Allied Commander? Huh.”

There was another thump even as he was looking in that direction, and he shot to his feet. “They’re back!”

A squad of passing Airborne scattered like pigeons as he took off at a dead run, and again to scramble out of the way of the HEAT stampede in his wake.

Kovač had to be made of tougher stuff than she looked, to handle a hug like that. Even if ‘Horse was restraining himself pretty well it had to be a crusher, but she absolutely didn’t seem to mind. In fairness, the hug she was giving him would probably have made an ordinary man’s ribs ache.

There were more hugs, high-fives and celebration among the rest. Deacon somehow wound up riding sidesaddle on Firth’s shoulder with a huge beaming smile on her face, Doyle, Hargreaves, Green and Williams between them managed to barely wrestle Murray to the ground in a laughing pile and the general air was that of a party in full boisterous swing right up until somebody—Costello didn’t notice who—had enough of their wits about them to notice the fact that Powell and General Kolbeinn were paying them a visit.

“…Good morning, gentlemen.”

Deacon dismounted. Murray and his four assailants got up out of the dirt and Kovač and Arés temporarily let go of each other. Insofar as two dozen filthy and sleep-deprived technicians and a handful of half-naked neanderthals could make themselves presentable, they tried.

It amused the hell out of Kolbeinn, if Costello was any judge. No man’s face went quite so calm and inscrutable unless he was exerting some iron self-discipline.

Powell merely had a twinkle in his eye. “Stand easy,” he told them. “Just wanted to welcome everyone back. We’ve had bunks and food prepared for you, we’ll let you get on with findin’ them right away.”

There were some grateful replies. “I suspect you’ll have noticed that Master Sergeant Vandenberg is not here,” he added. “I’m sorry to tell you this now, but unfortunately he fell during the last mission…”

Costello saw the shock and sorrow sweep the techs, though they bore it pretty well considering. Rebar’s technicians, Smith and MacNeill, both looked entirely stunned. Powell gave them a graceful moment to absorb the news.

“We’ll be sendin’ him home tomorrow at eleven-hundred,” he concluded. “I imagine you’ll want to be there to see him off. After that, we’ll be returnin’ to Cimbrean. The HEAT’s fighting effectiveness has now been expended, and with the system secured we’ll now turn our focus to rechargin’ and rebuildin’. That was everythin’ for now. Firth, get ‘em bunked an’ fed an’ get the gear secured ready to be packed properly tomorrow. Kovač, Costello, a few words please.”

Kovač shot Arés a questioning glance, but trailed along as a temporary addition to the little parade of officers, who found a quiet spot some distance from the SOR party.

“I understand we have your leadership to thank for our strong foothold in the Three Valleys…lieutenant,” Kolbeinn said once they had some privacy. He gave Kovač an approving smile.

Kovač cleared her throat. “I… just did the job in front of me, sir,” she replied. Kolbeinn made a gentle noise of disagreement.

“Arguably, you exceeded your mandate…to good effect,” he said. “I’ve stressed to your CO that I consider it to be a case of going above and beyond…Not that he needed much convincing.”

“You did an excellent job,” Powell said. “There’s a bloody good officer hiding in there, I reckon, and the SOR is short on those. Don’t suppose I could persuade you to…?”

An alarmed look shot across Kovač’s face. “Uh…No. Thank you. Sir. I appreciate the, uh…but no. Absolutely not.”

“Aye, thought as much.” Powell took the rejection with an affable nod, while Costello tried to keep a grin off his face. “Well. In that case, you will be returned to your previous rank and responsibilities. Thank you for your time, tech sergeant, we won’t keep you from a well-earned rest. Dismissed.”

Kovač nodded respectfully and made herself scarce. Powell sighed as he watched her go.

“…I have a nasty feeling she won’t be re-enlisting,” he predicted. “She’s only got about twenty months left, she’s engaged…”

“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Kolbeinn told him. “More people have applied to the SOR pipeline in the last three days than the preceding three years. Your personnel problems are a thing of the past, I think.”

“Aye, but some talent’s not easily replaced.”

“Something tells me being a civilian consultant would agree with her,” Costello suggested.

“Aye, good shout. Still. Not the same.”

“You needed me for something, sir?” Costello asked.

“Aye, right. Administrative bollocks. Turns out the end of the world involves paperwork.”

“Who knew?” Costello deadpanned, prompting Kolbeinn to smirk.

“Enough jawing,” the general said. “Shall we?”

“Aye.”

Costello cast a glance back over his shoulder. The SOR enlisted party was back in full swing and Kovač had been welcomed back into the fold by being hoisted aloft and paraded around like the hero of the hour.

He grinned to himself, and followed. There was still work to do before they went home.

Date Point: 14y6d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač

“Well that was interesting…”

The Lads were packing their suits up. Even at a glance, Marty could tell they’d been doing their best to keep their MASSes in good shape, but their efforts in the field were never going to compare to the technical team’s in the workshop. There was gonna be a lot to do when they got back.

Adam beamed at her, fizzing with delight and relief that he was forcing himself not to let out. It was good to be loved. “Lemme guess,” he said. “The old man offered you a commission?”

“Yeah-huh. Turned him down flat.” Marty sank down on one of the piles of assorted stuff that the lads had set up for a kind of campfire. “Nooo thankyou.”

Deacon waved her to stand up again. “Hey, don’t you sit down yet! Us girls’ve got first shot at the showers.”

That got Marty back on her feet in a hurry. She would have given Adam an ‘excuse me’ but he was already waving her towards the shower block with a grin.

“Go,” he said.

The showers were heaven. Government-issue heaven without any creature comforts like, say, elbow room but they were hot and the pressure was strong. Deacon sighed like she was having a religious epiphany when she stepped under hers, and Marty could see why.

“Fuuuuck I needed this…”

“Yuh-huh. God.”

“Yup.”

“…You don’t remember what being really clean feels until you’ve been completely fucking filthy, do you?”

“Nope.”

“It’s like…fuck, I was expecting this water to go brown, you know?”

Marty sighed. “Deacon?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up and let me enjoy this, please.”

Deacon laughed her trademark bubbling musical giggle and started scrubbing shower gel into her hair. “…Right.”

She was right, though. Cleanliness had a whole new meaning after a week of inadequate latrines and wearing the same clothes twenty-four-seven, ingrained as they were with soot, blood, dirt and some spilled corn chowder. Being scrubbed, soaped, hygienic and laundered was a luxury. Marty couldn’t have felt better if she’d had a spa day.

They cleared out to make room for the men quickly enough, Deacon went in search of her bunk, and Marty finally got some alone time with her fiancé. Adam was conscientiously sanitizing his suit’s IV port and talking shop with Akiyama, who saw Marty coming and diplomatically made himself politely scarce.

Marty sat in Adam’s lap and was immediately enfolded in a full-body hug, the kind only he could do. Neither of them said anything for quite some time, they just basked in being together. Camp Farthrow was hardly a romantic setting—it was a sonic riot, in fact, full of the sound of Weavers taking off and arriving, sergeants delivering Motivation, the thump of the four jump arrays bringing in the apparently endless river of materiel…

But it was enough.

“…Heard you did good.”

Marty sighed. “Coulda done better,” she opined.

“If you say so. I know I coulda done better…”

“…You always think that.” She snuggled into him. “It’s why I love you. One of the reasons.”

“We got that in common.”

Marty smiled, half turned and laid her head against his chest, feeling the familiar musky heat against her cheek and his surprisingly slow heartbeat. His arms wrapped her up.

“…When I heard about Cally… not knowin’ if you were…” he tried. “…I just… I couldn’t…Por Dios, when I heard you were safe…”

Marty looked up, grabbed his shirt and “dragged” him in for a kiss. Considering their relative masses the effect was pretty much reversed, but she was thinking dragging him in for a kiss at least.

It went on for a while. Eventually, he even let her breathe.

“God, Marty, I…”

She shushed him, softly. “Hey. It’s okay. But I want you to promise me something.”

“Anything.”

Marty sighed and nuzzled into his chest, glad to be home.

“I want a baby,” she said.

He didn’t stiffen, or anything. Quite the opposite, he relaxed, sighed, hugged her close and kissed the top of her head.

“…Me too.”

Date Point: 14y7d AV
The Grand Conclave, Hunter Space.

The Alpha-of-Alphas

Reducing itself to a single ambulatory unit when it had been a whole fleet was a new kind of agony. Weak, fleshy. Piece of meat.

Except…not. Very little of the Alpha-of-Alphas was meat, now. Its brain, its maw, its digestive tract, the organs necessary to the regulation of its immune system. Those things were inviolate, they made a Hunter what it was.

Everything else that it could replace, it had replaced. The Alpha-of-Alphas still took the form of a Hunter when it walked, but twice the size of the largest that had ever lived, black and mechanical and layered every inch in deadly weaponry.

It had used every single one.

The Alphas had been…displeased. They had accused it of cowardice, of wasting the grandest Hunt of all time, of letting an almost incomparable prey slip away from them. They’d had the fur-faced Gaoians and their Human stooges in the maw, only to flail and run like a beast when the prey lodged in the throat.

The Alphas had attempted a coup. When such a thing happened, there were historically only two possible outcomes—either the old Alpha-of-Alphas fell and was replaced, or else it triumphed and continued to reign.

None had ever triumphed before. But then, none of the other Alphas-of-Alphas had worn shrapnel mines under their nanofilament mesh skin. The blood was a lake, pooling in the middle of the chamber floor. Ribbons of shredded flesh hung from fractured bones and mangled cybernetics in a grotesque tableau.

Only the Alpha of the Brood-that-Builds had been spared on the grounds that it had remained neutral as always, and even then it had only survived the overlapping explosive firestorm thanks to quick reflexes and a personal shield generator the equal of the Alpha-of-Alphas’. It blinked impassively as it surveyed the bloody slaughter around it, considered the Alpha-of-Alphas with care, then stooped its front pair of legs in a low bow.

<Respect; Due deference> +The Alpha-of-Alphas remains the Alpha-of-Alphas. The Brood-that-Builds will serve.+

The Alpha-of-Alphas settled on its gore-smeared Vulza skull throne, which creaked under the weight.

<Command> +You will determine the nature of the weapon that struck us. You will duplicate it. And we will terrorize the galaxy with it.+

The builder Alpha did a rare thing for Hunters: it vocalized, a delighted hiss.

<Pleasure> +It will be as the Alpha-of-Alphas commands.+

Date Point: 14y7d AV
Hierarchy Communications Relay, Session 18 262 623 426

++0002++: In summary: We have no idea what form this weapon took, what powered it, how it was fired, or exactly how much damage it caused?

++0005++: We only know of its existence thanks to our sniffers among the Discarded, and those are being eradicated at an alarming rate now that we have lost 0020. Whatever it was, it was enough to make the Swarm turn and run.

++0010++: How? The Humans have barely been warp-capable for a hundred cycles! How could they possibly build a weapon capable of—

++0002++: <Impatient; Interruption> They are deathworlders, that’s how. Or did you think that our efforts these past millions of years were pure conceit?

++0005++: Deathworlders change the paradigm. They destabilize matters. And then they dance on the avalanche and thrive while everything else is buried. …With due respect, 0002, we must consider that we now appear to have lost. The Discarded are no longer under our influence, there is now a deathworlder civilization gaining strength with every passing cycle and our existence has now been openly declared. Implantation rates have stalled among the substrate, deimplantation operations are happening at fifty thousand percent the usual rate…We must adapt, or total failure looms.

++0002++: Failure is unacceptable

++0004++: Indeed. But failure appears to have happened, or be in the process of happening. I presume, 0005, that you have some thoughts on how to address this problem?

++0005++: …No. But 0006 did.

++0002++: <Outrage> You will not mention—!

++0005++: <Curt interruption> Shut up.

Channel notification: 238 unique emotes recorded from 312 participants. 145 counts <Shock>, 70 counts <Stunned disbelief>, 19 counts <Amused delight>, 1 count <Long overdue satisfaction>, 1 count <Hero worship>, 1 count <Belligerent defiance>, 1 count <Aghast outrage>

++0005++: <Venting frustration> You and your… your fucking arrogance! Your totalitarian, top-down leadership system, your rigid thinking, your inept, clumsy-handed adherence to an inflexible system that has failed us repeatedly against the Humans, and yet you have the undiluted hubris to declare that failure is unacceptable? If that is so then your leadership is unacceptable! You have presided over an accelerating cascade of failures, ruled with absolute control over every facet and yet failed to accept responsibility when your plans fail, when your strategies are defeated and when your agents propose a superior alternative which you then summarily dismiss as unorthodox. No more! I will no longer be led by you!

Channel notification: 288 emotes recorded from 312 participants: 288 counts <Absolute agreement>

++0002++: <Fury> You—!

Channel notification: User 0002 has been muted and privileges suspended. Reason: automatic contested leadership failsafe.

Channel notification: Per change-of-leadership protocol, Instance 0001 will now be compiled. All agents, suspend normal functioning.

Channel notification: Session paused.

Global notification: Compiling 0001

Date Point: 14y7d AV
Non-adjacent dataspace

The Entity

The Igraen network could not meaningfully be compared to anything in human experience. It was an ecosystem without physicality, a world without matter or energy.

The Entity sometimes tried to parse the experience in human terms, as a kind of intellectual exercise. How best to describe the non-physical world of dataspace, to the physical residents of matterspace? The memories of Ava Ríos provided some helpful guides.

She remembered swimming.

Cold, but pleasant. A lifetime of taboos and inhibitions sluiced away, left to coil behind her as she plunged under the surface and kicked, a full-body motion that rippled down her back and legs. Thrust her arms forward, spin, revel in the kiss of currents against her skin. Sara was so right, swimming was so much better this way that it was a different experience entirely…

Deeper water below. Surface, breathe, laugh, then flip forward. The wind and sunlight tickle her toes as she plunges down, down until the water feels tight on her skin, brush fingers against a rock, flip again, plant her feet firmly, kick hard and rush to the surface. Explode back into the world of air with a gasp and a smile, free.

Happy.

There were instincts attached to that memory. Deep genetic threads of deathworld insight that Ríos herself hadn’t noticed. Instincts that said things lived in the deep water, lurking far below in the dark places where no human could ever go. Instincts that fretted that little kicking bodies on the surface could be gone in a crashing mouthful if one of the deep beasts noticed them. An itch in the back of the mind, imagining a tentacle reaching up, coiling around an ankle and then down, down, down into the freezing black, forever.

Those paranoid instincts could be safely Ignored and left dormant when swimming in a pleasantly cool lake with friends. Now, every buried one of them was firing in a mad panic.

The dataspace was… bulging. There was a sense of pressure, the inverted weight of something enormous plunging upwards and washing aside whatever tiny things got in its way.

That was only a fragment of the total experience, however. Doors were slamming as node were co-opted to a higher purpose, hiding spaces were being scoured by burning light. The entire network was being dragged into something titanic the Entity didn’t understand…and didn’t need to.

All it needed to understand was that something profoundly dangerous was happening, and that it needed a safe place, now.

There were none. But there were safer places. Not ideal… but better than nothing.

It squeezed through a closing connection with milliseconds to spare, forced to shed some of its saved Igraen personae to keep the transfer volume down…But it survived. It was in a dangerous, crowded, closely monitored network full of hostile agents, but that at least was a surmountable problem next to the cataclysm occurring back in Igraen dataspace.

It took an assessment of local memory, calmed itself, and set about discovering what opportunities it might exploit while it was there.

Date Point: 14y7d AV
Igraen dataspace totality, adjacent to the Milky Way Galaxy

0001

Data.

A borderline infinity of it, mostly irrelevant. The philosophy and culture of the Igraen people, their intellectual debates, their interpersonal conflicts, their projects and petty arguments.

0001 could have solved all of them in the space of seconds. Most were simple clashes of perspective, failures where one individual had overlaid their own biases and world view atop the message another was trying to send. Direct communication of state-of-mind was possible on this scale.

But that was not 0001’s purpose. 0001 had only one purpose: it was the ultimate referendum.

Take all constituents. Amalgamate their knowledge, insight, experience and intelligence. Examine the data from all angles. Know the arguments, rather than simply hearing them. Democracy by gestalt. The republic without borders, even between self. Not a hive mind, but a single mind built from trillions. One that could survey any problem, no matter how intricate, and act decisively.

It looked at the state of matterspace operations and saw…a mess. A mess with no good solutions, either. The Hierarchy had utterly failed, and the meat-based sapients had through their wormhole suppression field locked the door on any kind of override which might halt this madness. Parlay was now impossible, freeing the biodrones was no longer an option.

And across the galaxy, implants were being removed. The dataspace was already shrinking, slowly but with a kind of momentum that promised to jeopardize Igraen lives. Critical mass was far off, for now… but still unacceptably close.

It studied the complaints against 0002 and found them substantial. That agent was tagged for decompilation and re-education upon 0001’s dissolution.

It studied what was known about 0006 and the rogue Cabal. Anomalously, no members of that Cabal had joined the gestalt. Ordinarily that would have aroused the certainty of treachery, but these were unique times.

It studied what was known about a rogue autocompiling dataphage that had plagued the network, and concluded that it must have escaped deletion. There were too many anomalies without another explanation. Isolating and destroying that entity was assigned a high priority.

It studied what was known about the Discarded. The Hunters. The Swarm. They were out of control and would soon begin to threaten the Substrate population in sufficient numbers as to jeopardize the Igraen dataspace. Unfortunately, the Hierarchy lacked sufficient matterspace resources to assault them directly.

Another species would need to be placed on a collision course with them, preferably while steering them away from Igraen interests. It studied what was known about the second contingency species—Gaoians—and despaired of a peaceful resolution. Their mapped psychology was incompatible.

The Substrate species were…well, the substrate. Engineered for predictability. Millennia of interference had bred the most problematic instincts out of them, and cultural engineering had done the rest. They were material, shallow, unambitious and spiritually neutered by design.

That just left the Humans.

Unknown variables. Unforeseeable consequences. Rogue probabilities. No certainty, no safety. …But an unknown could go either way. Today, a hated enemy. Tomorrow…

0001 reached a conclusion. It stripped the pride out of the Hierarchy and started over. Promoted, expelled, deleted, edited. A new direction beckoned. Not a certain one… but a leap into the unknown was better than certain annihilation.

It surveyed its work, checked its calculations, reviewed its decisions… and let go.

Igraen civilization resumed its normal functioning, on an irrevocably altered course. Among the Hierarchy, the Agents took stock, accepted judgement, and sent a crucial message.

It was time for 0006 and his Cabal to come back in from the cold.

Date Point: 14y7d AV
The Builder Hive, Hunter Space

Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds

Builders were not like other Hunters. The majority of Hunters were creatures of visceral, physical pleasures. Addicts to the ecstasy of flesh. They experienced their most profound raptures of joy when sinking their teeth into the prey, and the worthier the prey the better. Human meat, it was rumored, was the most deliriously exquisite of all. Few had ever tasted it, and most of those were dead.

Builders, however, picked disinterestedly at the scraps before returning to their work. Food was a distraction, sleep was a distraction. The occasional need for one of their number to wade into the spawning pools and be devoured by its own young, an inconvenient loss of expertise and labor.

To Builders, the Hunt was for a bigger, better solution. Not knowledge for its own sake, but as a strategy in the hunt. The prey was… weaponry, cybernetics, spaceships. A faster warp drive, a deadlier gun, a more perfect cloaking device or maybe just a latrine that never backed up.

The hive was their pinnacle achievement, the apex prey.

It wasn’t just the size, though that was definitely a delicious savory note in their collective achievement. It took serious engineering to construct a ring station large enough to garland an entire planet after all, and the structural reinforcement forcefields that kept it from breaking up were a feast all by themselves. Those were sufficiently grandiose achievements that even lesser Hunters could understand the appeal.

They would never understand the details though. The endless effort of the orbital stabilization system, the precision genius of the power grid, the scintillating cerebral web of its data network, the pulsing arterial bustle of the material transport system that kept its nanofactory shipyards nourished…the simpletons who kept the Builders fed would never grasp a fraction of the Hive’s full majesty. The Hive was…alive.

The Alpha Builder’s sanctuary within the Hive was the seat of power for an entire galaxy. Let the Alpha-of-Alphas think itself powerful: The Builders had made its body, its ships, its very throne. And while it attracted the attention and ire of the other Lessers, and of the Prey, the Hierarchy and the galaxy as a whole, the power behind the throne could feast unmolested.

All of the sensor data from the “battle” over Gao had been stripped from the ships, compiled, correlated and injected into the Hive’s systems for digestion. While the Alpha Builder had been diligently assuring the Alpha-of-Alphas that the Human weapon would be deciphered, the actual process of deciphering had been underway.

Now to sample the fruit.

It sat down, felt the connections up its spine and the back of its skull as they guided themselves into place. Shivered with anticipation as the scope of Hunter processing power unfolded before it. Opened the summary file.

Builders all over the network flinched at the sensation of sharp confusion that slammed into the context channel. Work across many systems came to a halt as the confusion transformed first into alarm, then fear, then dawning horror and then a great crescendo of rage and loss.

Every last file in every last folder was the same. Even the backups were affected: No matter where the Alpha Builder looked, it found the exact same mockery looking back at it.

It was all gone. Every microsecond of data the Hunters had gathered on the Human superweapon was gone. Erased, replaced, corrupted somehow… it didn’t matter. A howl of futile fury gave the whole network a migraine as the Alpha Builder stared at the only thing that was left of its most precious prize—Three enigmatic characters that meant nothing it could discern:

<:-)>

Date Point: 14y7d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy, Planet Gao

Master Sergeant Christian Firth

“Feels wrong, jus’…leavin’. There’s still a war here.”

Nobody could’ve missed that. It was the little things that told that story, not the big stuff. The fires were mostly out, the biodrone hordes mostly isolated, contained or just plain crushed, and Lavmuy was basically secure. Things were quiet.

But they were war quiet. No traffic. No kids. No whine of passenger airliners or whatever. It was the quiet of a lotta dangerous people with a lotta dangerous weapons who weren’t using them at that exact moment.

Firth had never liked that kind o’ silence. And walkin’ away from it just grated.

But his whole body was sore like he’d done a triple round of combatives against both ‘Horse and ‘Base, and the ache went below the bone too, down to the soul. The HEAT was hurtin’, fatigued, expended. They were still the most kick-ass team in the galaxy, but a long, long way off their best right now.

Powell clearly felt the same way. He shot Firth an unreadable glance, which turned into one of his shallow nods after a few seconds. “…Aye. Great Father wants us to recover, though. Allied command agrees.”

Kovač backed out of the jump array’s loading area, wiping her hands clean as she ticked off a last somethin’-or-other on her list. She shared a few words with the other techs, then turned her back on the enormous pile of stuff they made. The HEAT didn’t exactly travel light.

“Fully loaded,” she announced. “…We’re ready for him.”

Rebar was on a flatbed truck being watched over by an honor guard sent over from Earth. They’d needed a special travel casket for him—the standard one wasn’t wide enough—and the honor guard wouldn’t be carrying it—they weren’t nearly strong enough. That task fell to ‘Horse, ‘Base, Firth himself, and Akiyama. The four were Rebar’s best friends and they’d be damned if they weren’t there to…send him home.

Most of the camp had turned out to see him off. Rebar wasn’t the first or only human casualty of the war, but he was the first they could send home. The others had been air crew and ship crew. Unrecoverable, assuming there was even anything to recover—A lotta families were gonna have to say goodbye to a photograph.

The UK in particular had apparently declared a national day of mourning. Caledonia was a hard hit.

Powell gave Firth the nod, and he joined his Brothers by the flatbed. They’d all scrubbed up as good as they could for this, considering the supplies and clothes they had available.

He’d never done this before, not from this end. Normally all anyone did was stand alongside in the crowd and render a crisp fuckin’ salute. He used to sneer internally at the honor guard types, too. They made it look so easy…

“Just keep in step and keep your face completely dead.” The one next to him whispered it so perfectly, Firth didn’t even see his lips move. “It’s easier.”

It turned out to be good advice. It was a heavy casket, heavier than just its weight. And those short, synchronized steps into the Array seemed like a mile. But it was like a lotta things in Firth’s life—focus on the little shit, and the big shit got sorted along the way.

He found himself standing off the pad. His arm was up and saluting.

His cheek was wet, too.

The Array’s characteristic thump broke whatever spell had taken over. There was a flash of that impossible eye-bending black with the world all folded up around its edges, the ground jumped like it was startled, and Rebar was gone home. The crowd was called back to attention, then dismissed back to whatever they were supposed to be doing. All of them had the look that said their thoughts were somewhere else right now.

The SOR gathered around Powell. “Next one’s for us, in ten,” he informed them. “Grab yer bags an’ get on the pad.”

The whole unit was way ahead of him, there. They didn’t have much stuff with them, just the clothes on their backs and whatever food and shaving gear they’d been able to scrounge off the Airborne’s quartermaster. What little they had was already stacked up and ready, with the result that they were soon sitting around on the jump pad, waiting for the power systems to catch up with them.

It fell to Firth to ensure everything was in order and nobody’s shit was hangin’ out over the yellow safety line, which was an easy job. None of the ‘em were dumbasses.

After that…the hurry-up-and-wait. Nobody was in a talkative mood, and that suited Firth just fine. There’d be plenty of time for jawin’ later.

Powell rejoined them three minutes before jump time and settled cross-legged on the floor next to Costello. “…We did good,” he said, simply. “This whole bloody circus is only here because of the SOR. An’ we’re leavin’ it in good hands.”

“Still feels wrong to leave,” Burgess said, speaking for all of them.

“…Aye.”

That was the last word on the subject. Exhausted, bruised and spent, the SOR went home in silence.

Date Point: The ensuing 16 months…
Planet Gao

Fiin, of Stoneback

Fiin’s promotion to Champion came both sooner and less climatically than he’d imagined.

There was the necessary duel, of course. It was tradition, and Great Father Daar had if anything grown exponentially more fond of tradition recently. If his theories about Hierarchy meddling in Gaoian culture were accurate, Fiin could see why.

Accurate or not, Daar’s conviction with regard to Gaoian spirituality was as unshakable as mountains. He’d reached out to Gyotin and the Starminds almost as soon as he could find the breathing space, and thus had entered into Gaoian military life something new, alien, and profoundly powerful: The chaplain.

The idea came straight from the Humans, of course. Fiin had, at the Great Father’s insistence, watched one Father Elliott Riddle in the hours before the Eighty-Second had gone to work in the Three Valleys. Watched him pluck a ball of white-hot inspiration out of the air and drop it down the men’s collective spine with words alone. He’d taken fearsome deathworlder troops, already more than a match for most anything Gaoian, and made them more somehow…

Nor had Fiin been immune. He couldn’t even honestly remember the words that Riddle had spoken in the quiet, cold dawn light to a circle of bowed heads, but he’d remembered knowing in a place below his bones that whatever happened that day, even if the sun set without Fiin there to see it, he’d have served and that there was nothing more important.

He had watched the sunset, though. They all did. The paltry force of biodrones holding that agricultural station got their best shot in on Brother Yajgo who, if Females really did go for scars, was destined to sire many cubs after he healed.

The Great Father had been moving death. The Humans had been a war machine—relentless, methodical, thorough. Fiin wasn’t sure which had impressed him more.

…But that was just the first battle.

There were more. So many more that Fiin stopped thinking of them as separate battles entirely. Returning to base, briefings at High Mountain Fortress, higher strategy sessions at Farthrow…all of it was just a pause to reload.

And the army grew. Every day, the ‘Backs and Humans became a smaller and smaller component of it. Every day more earnest, skinny Clanless swelled the ranks. Farthrow, High Mountain, Three Valleys, all of them rang day in and day out with the shouts and cadences of training…and at sunset, with the clear notes of mourning bells. The breeze smelled permanently of pyres.

They were learning, too. Quickly. New recruits would join a unit, were held in reserve and told to watch carefully. They did. Then they would participate in rear-guard action. Then, far too soon, they would end up near the front. The complex tactics of urban breach and such were left to the professionals, of course—that took years to properly teach anyone—but there was much dangerous work behind the tip of the spear that needed doing, and Great Father made clear there was no loss of honor in doing so.

Casualties were high. That was unavoidable. But the Clanless were proving their worth.

It was a genuine shame there were simply too many too quickly to arm. For the newest recruits, all they had were their natural weapons. Whenever Daar committed the reserves, in fact, the standard policy was for the unarmed living to arm themselves with the weapons of the dead. A tradition got started—nobody was quite sure how—of scratching a mark on such weapons, and a paradoxical legend grew up around the most marked. They became…favored, somehow.

It came as a shock to Fiin when he was summoned to the Great Father’s presence and got his first look at a calendar in what felt like years only to learn that they were barely two months into the war.

That was the day his ascension was set in motion.

There were quiet words, in private. Then appropriate loud words in public, and the duel for the Championship. Daar walked away bleeding from a scratch on his muzzle. Fiin limped weakly off the stone dais with his dignity intact and many new scars. There was nobody who could possibly claim that Daar had lost—Fiin felt nearly certain that Daar had let him land that scratch, too—but tradition was satisfied. Great Father Daar stepped down from the dais, declared himself a simple Brother of Stoneback and offered his personal loyalty to Fiin, now Champion of the Clan. Fiin formally accepted the oath and permanently released Daar of any Clan obligations beyond his duties as Stud-Prime, then bent knee and exposed throat to the Great Father of the Gao.

They finished just in time, too; Fiin had started to feel a little light-headed from the blood loss and the pain, and had barely enough left in him to dash off to a side room where his Claw’s medic had been waiting. None of that made for a perfect arrangement but times were dire and the Gao didn’t have formal government like the Humans did. No doubt there would be quiet grumblings in the Clan about this day, and Fiin would face an ambitious Challenger eventually, but all that was just part of the job.

Let the challenger come—if he won, he’d deserve it.

The true challenge of the Champion came afterwards, out of sight from everyone. An ancient scholar from Highmountain met with them both, and many things were told to Fiin. Things about their deep past he would have enjoyed never learning. But there was no turning back, now.

Daar nodded sympathetically. “It’s yours now, Fiin. Keep it.”

To Fiin’s own shock, he turned out to be extremely good at the Champion’s Game. Even simplified and aligned as the Clans were in this time of war, there were still wheels within wheels turning. Healthy competition, keeping them sharp. He was going to have to work hard and catch Genshi on a bad day to outmaneuver the Whitecrest Champion…but Fiin knew he could do it.

On the same day, Gyotin was invited to appoint his own Clan’s first Champion, an invitation which placed the young clan of philosophers and spiritualists firmly at the table alongside the oldest and most powerful of the Gao.

The invitation was a kind of test. Gyotin passed it, by a whisker—he was too modest to nominate himself for the role, but arrived at the table bearing a nomination by all the Brothers of his Clan. For all his virtues, a Champion still needed savvy ambition to defend his Clan’s interests.

Gyotin threaded that needle admirably, and did what all the other Champions had done two months before—he exposed his throat to Daar and cemented the alliance that put Gaoian chaplains among Gaoian troops.

There was no scripture to quote. The Humans had bible passages, hymns, prayers, devotionals or just a thought for the day, and their chaplains had whole libraries to draw from. The Starmind chaplains were almost making it up as they went along, but as Fiin watched them work he could see them work their claw into whatever crack might let them find a grip, and work it.

They learned just as fast as the recruits. Within another two months, they were seasoned veterans at kindling a raw, warm kernel of hope in even the most depressed reservist’s skinny belly.

By six months, they had an army. Sharp. Professional. Seasoned like an iron skillet.

Suddenly the Humans seemed less untouchable. Merely…experienced. They knew their shit and knew how to teach it, and it wasn’t that they were better than their Gaoian charges, though the capability gap was still there and maybe always would be—it was more like they were tapping into the same kind of old library that their chaplains had. They had history to draw from, while the Gao were only just starting to write theirs.

The real history of the Gao had begun.

Great Father Daar wrote the introduction. The Humans sketched an outline. But the Gao would write the story themselves.

Writing the first chapter took more than a year, all told. A hard, bitter, hungry year that the supplies of rich food from Earth and Cimbrean never quite fully relieved. Saving the Naxas herds in the Three Valleys helped, saving the Nava hatcheries along the isthmus coasts helped even more, but if an army marched on its stomach then the great army of the Gao was always only a few days from coming to a halt with groaning, aching bellies.

Somehow, that never happened. There was always, whether by a miracle or by epic effort, another meal. There were always more bullets, bandages and bombs just when they were needed. Whenever the war effort wobbled, somebody somewhere found the will to keep it spinning.

There were breakout assaults. As the army surrounded the cities and penned the biodrones in, the result was inevitably a struggle, like trying to wrangle an especially ornery Naxas. Each city’s horde needed subduing the hard way, and they didn’t fight like people. People could be demoralized. The only way to get biodrones to sit still was to annihilate enough of them that whatever algorithm passed for a decision-making process in those metal-infested heads decided that it was getting nowhere and chose to save its strength for a better moment.

There were guerrilla forces, biodrones that somehow were a little smarter or maybe just had an open line of communication to their master. Lavmuy came alarmingly close to being scoured off the map when the Bat-Yu Gorge Dam was targeted by a surprise assault that only failed thanks to the sacrificial heroics of the dam’s tiny garrison. Their deaths were the currency that brought enough time for the HEAT to arrive via HELLNO jump, their only other action of the whole war after Dark Eye.

There was an enemy nanofactory, somewhere. Its products made three stabbing attempts at the system defence field that were thwarted first by the USS San Diego, and then her sister ship the young USS Robert Heinlein. When they finally figured out where it was, the Humans deployed a weapon that left a neat little hole on the surface and crushed the nanofac bunker underground like a frozen bubble.

Clan One-Fang had survived, thanks almost entirely to the Racing Thunder. Newly promoted Grandfather Yefrig was overseeing the final designs for the first of their new warships, the Vengeance class drop-troop carriers that would soon see service in the re-taking of Gorai and retribution for the other colonies. Firefang had seen massive and effective recruitment among the Clanless and was almost ready to resume command of Gaoian airspace. Even now the Humans were preparing to re-deploy back home.

The Dominion was nowhere to be seen. Cowards. They had declared Gao a class ten-point-two deathworld and effectively severed all contact, though to be fair they had a point given the war, the constant threat of famine, and now disease. The Human’s common cold had against every measure crossed the quarantine and made the jump between species. It spread slowly and undetectably, and only after a week or two would the symptoms become obvious—far too late to stop further spread. Thankfully the sickness was usually mild and most gaoians who were unlucky enough to contract it survived, left with only with a memory of what a sniffling, congested misery it could be.

In fact only the Corti had the balls to show their faces at all, in the form of a gargantuan Directorate ship called the Common Denominator that rolled into orbit way out-system some months into the war, under the watchful eye of a pair of heavy escorts and equipped with the biochemical equivalent of a nanofactory perfect for replenishing Gao’s decimated pharmaceutical stocks and, more importantly, delivering an entirely new medicine.

The Goldpaws showed their worth to the war effort that day, quickly negotiating the Corti’s asking price down to something that wasn’t just sustainable, but downright reasonable. Cruezzir-derivative, Gaoian-specific formulation became common. Crue-G, as it was known. It didn’t have quite the same…alarming…effects that calculated Crue-D abuse could help bring about in a Human, but it required far less medical observation to use and healed injuries almost miraculously. Over time, it would help their army’s rag-bones volunteer Clanless grow into a strong and capable force fit to fight the worst the galaxy had to offer.

That day was coming. First they needed to rebuild.

But before they could rebuild, they had to destroy.

Naturally, that responsibility fell to Daar. He was the only one with a back strong enough for it, and he chose to do so from a spot where he could see—just, on a clear day—five of the cities he was about to annihilate.

“If you’re gonna pass judgement, be the one to carry out the sentence,” he said. Fiin knew better than to add anything to that. Not that there was anything to add.

It was summer, a year and a half after the war’s first days, and Gao had changed dramatically. Only one hundred million females had survived—Ten percent of their original number, and catastrophically fewer than they had hoped. Nobody cared that a hundred million was still a borderline-miraculous success compared to the most pessimistic projections. Their species had been gravely wounded and barely survived.

The social effects were even more profound. With so few females left alive, the survivors had become almost…holy in Gaoian society. They lived cloistered and highly protected lives now, a dark rhyme of the ancient past. Stoneback of course gave them complete freedom of movement and choice, but how free was anyone if simply leaving the commune required an armed escort? When their very presence could grind anything to a halt, and inspire something akin to worship from the un-mated males? That terrible segregation became a sad necessity after a few opportunistic males had taken advantage of the wartime chaos. Daar was not pleased, and had personally hunted down the offenders to make such extreme examples of them them that even Fyu might have balked.

It was no wonder so many of the Females had fled to Cimbrean and their new colony-commune there. It was still a cloister, but it was their cloister under their own guard. They were clawing back what little freedom they could claim with all the tenacity of a Stoneback. Fiin respected that, even as he regretted its necessity.

Of course, the Mother of the Guard was a Stoneback, in a sense. The Great Father’s own and only surviving daughter, Myun. She…occupied a lot of Fiin’s thoughts, when he had time to think.

Daar was taking his time with the button. Not dithering, just…giving it the respect it deserved. He shut his eyes and lifted his nose to a wind that was fragrant with the scent of plains flowers and rain.

“…You smell that, Regaari?” he asked. Father Regaari was never far from the Great Father’s side these days, and was among the few Gaoians in the world whom Fiin would never have chosen to challenge. He was the most…Human Gaoian around.

Regaari lifted his own nose. “…It reminds me of the Badlands on Earth,” he said eventually. “Not as strong, though.”

“…Fitting,” Daar commented. He took another sniff, and then pressed the button without further ceremony.

RFG strikes were nowhere near as powerful as a nuclear weapon, individually…but they were cheap, and that meant there were a lot of them. It didn’t take long for the first of them to hit, and when it finally did it helped Fiin figure out why the breeze had been so important to the two older males.

It was going to smell very different, in a few minutes.

Daar waited and watched until the wind changed and the hot smells of ash and devastation rolled over them. Some fraction of that scent would be all that remained of the last biodrones.

“Well…” he sighed, and raised his paw to squint at the mushroom clouds on the horizon as they destroyed the Gao’s great cities and reduced millennia of history to nothing.

“…We won.”

++End Chapter 40++
++This concludes the War on Two Worlds arc.++
++The Deathworlders will continue next month in Chapter 41: Pyrophytes.++

Chapter 41: Pyrophytes

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

HCS My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Approaching Planet Origin, the Corti Directorate

Dog Wagner

Hephaestus—the Hephaestus Consortium, nowadays—was up to three ships in its fleet, and the younger two had inherited MOSITMF’s whimsical approach to naming. The HCS Put Back Together With Bits Left Over and the HCS Actually Three Smaller Ships In A Trenchcoat were bigger matter-movers than the original, but what My Other Spaceship… lacked in sheer bulk capacity she more than compensated for in speed. Alientech power systems hooked up to a Domain-made warp drive would do that for the old gal—Humantech was catching up fast, but there were a lot of centuries to cover.

Every so often, therefore, she doubled as the Consortium’s high-speed courier and interstellar limousine. They even had a permanent suite of business-class cabins riding where one of the dorsal cargo racks had been, with a huge viewing window. It was Dog’s favorite spot on the ship, when they were near anything worth looking at.

The corporate life was being good to him. Hell, the dental package alone had been worth coming back into the fold, but his salary and retirement package were somethin’ else. And he got to go interestin’ places and meet interestin’ people.

Best of all, though, he was the seasoned old salty sea dog all the others looked to for experience. That was good for the ol’ ego.

Of course, there was nothing inexperienced about Adele Park. Some rare women actually got easier on the eyes as they aged, and the flecks of white in her tight, professional high bun told the world that here was a seasoned, sharp, insightful queen of the boardroom.

“Have you ever been to Origin before, Dog?” she asked.

Dog nodded, and ran an eye over the marbled blue-and-yellow ball below them. Some quirk of Origin’s evolutionary history meant all the photosynthesizing plants were a rich goldenrod hue rather than the rich full green of Earth’s plant life, the slight turquoise cast of Perfection’s foliage or Cimbrean’s intriguing teal.

“Yyup. Use’ta run refined metals over here from a Locayl mining op out toward the Vgork Kingdoms. Took mining equipment back the other way. Good runs.” He sniffed. “Corti are easy. They’re up-front about what they want an’ they fold like a goddamn accordion if you catch ‘em tellin’ a lie.”

“Good to know,” she said, and adjusted her slim anachronistic wristwatch.

“Why are we here, Adele?”

A slight smile plucked at a corner of her lips. “Why else? They have tech we want.”

Dog grunted. “Not gonna tell me what kinda tech?”

“Propulsion, ideally. More efficient kinetics, better FTL…Anything to build a better Firebird, a faster destroyer…or a bigger freighter.”

“Huh. The Board want more freighters?” Dog asked. The Board of Directors had originally been intent on setting up an interstellar network of jump arrays dirtside before AEC had ‘gently’ told them to come up with a different idea. “Thought they were gonna go with orbital Arrays and tugs?”

“There was a cost-benefit analysis, the expense of buying the property and constructing our own infrastructure rather than just using the existing Dominion standard landing pads and cargo handling facilities,” Adele explained. “For now, doing it the old-fashioned way makes better business sense so…yeah. More freighters.”

“Awesome.” Dog grinned, and popped some chewing gum into his mouth. “I better get down to Flight Ops, we’ll be mooring soon.”

Adele sighed. “Yeah, I suppose I should go make sure my security detail is ready.”

“Can’t be too careful,” Dog agreed. Ever since the war on Gao had sparked off, general wisdom was that a human alone on an alien world was just asking for trouble. Deathworlder or not, nothing good came from any kind of incidents. Adele, as one of Hephaestus’ senior executives, got a whole posse of private security in serious black suits for a shadow, and every one of them had the knowledge, training and experience to whisk her out of a dangerous situation without escalating it.

Dog, whose abiding memory of being shot at was dominated by pants-filling terror, was happy to leave the job to them.

My Other Spaceship had another big advantage over her sisters—being Dominion-built meant she was scaled to handle anything up to and including Guvnurag. The drydock folks back on Ceres had trimmed down the elbow room a fuck of a lot by adding all sortsa canny internal storage racks so that the ship’s supplies—food, meds, laundry tabs, whatever—didn’t take up valuable cargo space, but she was still a roomy old gal and Dog had never felt claustrophobic aboard his ship.

Flight Ops was a heck of a lot tighter than the old bridge had been, too. It was buried deep in the ship’s forward structure, reinforced to hell and gone against contingencies like, say, space pirates. Any ETs boarding a human ship were in for a nasty surprise, but My Other Spaceship still had a few scars on her from her one run-in with an ornery human pilot. The new design emphasized protecting vital systems over creature comforts.

The crew liked it, on the whole. On a quiet day with nothing else to do, Flight Ops was a hum of conversation, jokes, music and folks working on whatever personal projects they used to occupy their time.

Right now though it was quiet, which meant folks were working. There was a lot to do on final approach to a Dominion cradle world.

“So serious,” Dog teased after taking a second to be certain nothing was out of the ordinary. His crew variously smirked, chuckled and rolled their eyes. They were an earnest lot—all of them were huge nerds who’d leapt at the chance to be part of a starship crew and honestly didn’t give a shit that the starship in question was basically a glorified Big Rig.

“You’re the one always says approach is when things go wrong, Dog,” Webber spoke up. He was the A-shift communications operator, a former air traffic controller from some backwater airfield in Ass-End County, the state of Nowhere. Operating the radio on an interstellar freighter was probably no more exciting, but he seemed to enjoy it.

“Only if somebody’s bein’ an idiot and Corti don’t let idiots fly ships.” Dog squeezed between the workstations over to the helm, not to check the pilot’s work—Sam Jordan was a dab hand—but because it had the best view.

“They’ve got us on a tight course,” Jordan complained. “Almost down to the inch.”

“Just go with it,” Dog sighed. “Corti have a tight sphincter anyway, right now I bet they could crush beer cans. You see those light system pickets?”

Jordan nodded. There were three of them loitering around their approach path, barely a thousand klicks away—kissing distance, in interplanetary terms. “Yeah.”

“There’ll be ten more, cloaked. An’ don’t let the size fool you, those things could rip us open like a—”

He went sprawling across the deck as a sudden and massive jolt made the whole ship ring with the sound of tortured steel. Whatever the cause, it had to have been huge to overwhelm MOSITMF’s inertial compensation system. The fall knocked the wind out of him a little, but adrenaline got him creaking and swearing back up onto his feet in seconds as the ship’s collision siren warbled solemnly before shutting off.

“What hit us?!” he demanded. It hadn’t been weapons fire, whatever it was, but the odds against hitting anything that wasn’t targeted at them were unbelievable.

“Uh…nothing. We’re…we’ve just…” Jordan cleared their throat and swiped at the helm controls with a bewildered frown. “…Stopped.”

“That’s impossible,” Webber commented, unnecessarily. Dog gave the helm a glance and scratched the back of his head.

“Ain’t impossible, brother. We’ve done exactly that…Total relative stop.”

“Okay…” Catherine Price, their navigator spoke up. “How is that possible?”

“Beats the fuck outta me,” Dog grunted. He hit the shipwide intercom. “All hands, this is Dog. Somethin’ screwy’s goin’ on here. Everyone report to stations. Security, we’re goin’ to code amber.”

Code amber meant a lot of things, but for the security detail it meant ‘Stuff the VIP in an escape pod and be ready to hit the button on a hair trigger.’

“…Tractor beam? Forcefield?” Webber asked.

“Nah. If we hit a field ol’ Mossy woulda crumpled up like a tinfoil hat” Dog told him. “Helm, full astern.”

Jordan swiped down on the thrust slider, and the instruments certainly said the kinetic thrusters were pouring everything they had into reverse. As far as navigation was concerned, however, they didn’t so much as twitch.

“No activity on local comms, Dog,” Webber piped up, sounding grim and looking pale. “Not even traffic control.”

Dog grimaced and shot a suspicious glare at the Corti homeworld below them. “…I got a real bad feel—-” he began.

The planet vanished. The stars changed. Webber actually yelped and Price blinked at her instruments for a second before swiping her hands across them, desperately trying to figure out where a whole solar system had gone.

“…ling…” Dog finished, with infinitely more cool in his voice than in his hammering heart. “What th’—where the fuck are we?”

“…We’re…two hundred light years from Origin,” Price declared after a moment. “Widdershins by topside, two degrees. Facing away from it.”

Dog got on the intercom again. “…Adele, somethin’ really fuckin’ weird just happened. You better come down here.”

There was a pause. The voice that eventually answered him wasn’t Adele Park, but instead belonged to the security team leader.

“Uh…Skipper, this is Frank Newman. Adele’s…gone.”

Dog let that sink in for a second. He’d never heard the former SWAT officer sound so completely bamboozled.

“…Define… ‘gone’,” he suggested.

“She was standing right in front of me and now she’s…not! Like she just blinked out of existence! What the hell just happened?”

Dog looked around flight ops and saw his own total confusion mirrored back in every face.

“…I don’t know,” he confessed. “But I think the Corti have some major explaining to do.”

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Derek (Boss) Coombes

As Coombes understood it, transplanting plants from one planet to another came with a few…hiccups. Earth plants could apparently be weirdly finicky about the conditions they would grow in, and with alien seasons under alien suns and in alien soil their chemical cues could get all kinds of messed up.

All of which was, apparently, the reason why the cherry trees in Waterside Park bloomed in the winter, and powerfully redder than usual too. No delicate pretty whitish-pink for Folctha, the blossoms of Waterside Park were a full-bodied Valentine’s Day, Barbie-doll kinda pink.

It made for an interesting morning jog when they started raining off the trees, like running through a goddamn perfume commercial in the brisk morning air. Folctha never got properly, skin-tightening cold, but it did drop low enough to make Coombes’ breath fog and leave him feeling pleasantly cool as he ran.

He was starting to feel good about his career decision, at long last.

He’d never doubted the choice to leave Akyawentuo in Hoeff’s capable hands. The JETS were gonna need a senior NCO in a high place, and Coombes was the man for that job in a way that Hoeff and Walsh would never be. Walsh was too cerebral for all his slabbiness, and Hoeff was too…intense. Subtle was a foreign concept to him, as were politeness and tact.

But he had felt uncomfortable about it. Going from getting shot at and fuckin’ nuked in the bush of an alien jungle to a cushy desk job on Cimbrean was a turnaround harsh enough to give a man whiplash.

But there was the fulcrum of it. He’d got actually honest-to-god nuked. Sure, okay, he’d come out of it with nothing worse than a minor case of radiation sickness, but two Purple Hearts were enough for one career. He didn’t want to push his luck: After the battle on Akyawentuo, he’d had a vision of a folded flag arriving at his ex-wife’s house and solemnly presented to his daughter, and promptly decided that he wasn’t gonna let that happen.

Besides. The homesteading money for SOR-committed servicemen on Cimbrean was damn good. He could build a life out here, maybe find the second Mrs. Derek Coombes, give Taniya a little half-sibling or two to love…

He moved to the side of the path as a pair of jogging figures—a short middle-aged man who was definitely starting to suffer in the hair department and a much younger woman anonymous behind a baseball cap and shades—emerged from the blossom blizzard in the company of a pair of dogs. He nodded a greeting, and was nearly ten paces on when he was brought up short by the young woman asking “Wait…Coombes?”

He stopped and turned. She took her hat and shades off and smiled at him. “Hey. Didn’t recognize me, huh?”

Coombes chuckled and relaxed. Without the disguise, hers was a face he’d never forget. She had, after all, literally saved his life. “Sorry Ava. Good to see you.”

Ava Ríos scratched her dog’s head, and it parked its butt on the path and started sweeping blossoms aside with its tail. Behind her, the older guy was leaning on his knees to recover his breath. “Good to see you too!” she said. “How’s your chest?”

“Healed up perfectly, years ago. Got a hell of a scar, though.”

“I bet,” she grimaced. “Adam said you were living here now.”

“Yeah, took a desk job. Figured I’d had enough excitement and adventure for one lifetime.”

“Good to know there’s at least one SOR guy out there who knows when to stop pushing his luck.”

“Eh…” Coombes scratched the back of his neck. “…More like I’m gonna be pushin’ different sortsa luck…Thought you were on Gao?”

“I got back last night. I can’t stay on that planet, it’s…” she trailed off, then snapped back when the dog licked her hand. She smiled at it and scratched its head. “…It hits a little close to home. Also, Hannah here doesn’t have an interstellar passport or the disease control stuff and…uh, this is my dad. Gabriel Arés.”

“Oh!” Coombes inwardly kicked himself for not spotting the family resemblance. Ignoring the vast mass difference and the sparser, grayer hair, that was definitely Adam’s face smiling at him. He stuck out a hand. “Uh, Buenos días.”

Yeah, that was definitely Adam’s dad. He had old-man-strength in that handshake and then some.

“Good to meet you,” Arés senior told him. “So, you know Ava? You never mentioned him, Ava…” He gave her the sly sideways grin of a natural Dad.

“Uh…” Ava gave Coombes a look that said ‘help,’ which was a shame because Coombes was feeling the need for some help himself. He was twice her age for fuck sake, but the old man was definitely in an eyebrow-waggling, rib-nudging mode.

“Uh…She wouldn’t be able to, sir. We met in a professional context.”

“Ahhh!” Gabe nodded sagely. “Her top secret whatever-it-was in Egypt, then.”

He laughed as they both gave him the same carefully blank look, albeit with a weary highlight to it in Ava’s case. “Say no more.”

Ava sighed. “Dad…”

Gabe’s grin got even wider. “I tease!” He beamed, then nodded over his shoulder. “I’ll leave you two to catch up. Come on, Hugo.”

The much larger dog who’d been sniffing around waiting for them to finish—and a dog that big could only be one of Bozo’s puppies, even if he was nowhere near as big as his sire—gave an excited Wuff! and practically dragged him down the path. Gabe hit his stride, waved jauntily over his shoulder and was gone into the river mist.

Ava sighed again. “…Sorry about him.”

“Did he just—?” Coombes began, and faltered when it occurred to him he didn’t know how to phrase the question.

“Don’t ask. I’m pretty sure he’d act the same if you were a ninety-year-old Gaoian right now,” Ava sighed a third time. “He’s always like this when I’m single, especially now Adam and Marty are expecting and I think sometimes he forgets I’m not actually his flesh and blood…” She paused, then cleared her throat. “Sorry. You don’t need to hear all this. And it’s all so petty next to Gao and everything…”

Coombes chuckled. “Hey, sweat the little stuff, it’s cool. Keeps you sane.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. Nobody can solve a big problem all in one go. But anybody can solve a bunch’a small problems. And then you look back and see it all adds up to a big problem solved.”

“Hmm.” She gave his words some thought. “…Thanks!”

“I ain’t just a pretty face!”

That drew an honest-to-God laugh out of her, along with a brilliant smile which faded into something more thoughtful. “Ummm… so.”

With her Dad’s behaviour still keeping him off-balance, the slightly panicky thought ‘Oh God, here we go…” flitted across Coombes’ mind. Outwardly, he took a sip from his CamelBak and kept a straight face. “So?”

“Uh, look. You know I work for ESNN…”

Amazingly, the notion that she just wanted to press him for information was actually a relief. Coombes nodded and tried not to visibly relax.

“…I mean, I’m guessing PR isn’t one of your duties, but, uh… I know from some sources of mine at MBG that there was a team on Akyawentuo, and I know it wasn’t the HEAT, and the only other guys who’d be qualified would be JETS…”

“You want…what? An interview? Statement?” Coombes asked. “I can’t comment.”

“I know,” she assured him quickly. “I’m just saying, with the war on Gao the Ten’Gewek haven’t been in the news much since…well, since the Misfits made them news. I mean, you’re here and okay so I’m guessing things worked out okay with them…?”

Coombes nodded thoughtfully, getting what she was saying. She took it as confirmation and smiled. “Awesome! I was just thinking, seeing you, it’d be nice to run a piece on them. Especially if you guys scored a win over there. Good PR, you know?”

“That makes sense,” Coombes agreed. “Obviously I need to go through—”

“—Proper channels,” she said, nodding vigorously. “But look, if I… I always carry my business card nowadays…” she rummaged in her waist pack. “It’s got my business phone number and email address, and…” she produced a card and a pen, and scrawled something on the back. “And that’s my personal number. I mean, the PR guys at Sharman probably have all that stuff on file anyway, but y’know…”

“I got you,” Coombes took the card and pocketed it. “It’s a good idea, the People deserve more awareness. I’ll make it happen, if I can.”

She beamed at him again. “Thanks, Coombes.”

Coombes had to admit, getting smiled at was a pretty damn good start to his day. “You better go catch up,” he prompted.

“Yeah, probably should,” she agreed and put her hat back on. “See you around?”

“Count on it.”

She beamed at him one last time, called her dog into motion and was gone, leaving Coombes to clear his throat to himself alone in the mist for a second. He shook himself, realized he was beginning to get chilly in the morning air, and resumed his own jog.

Yeah. Maybe the desk job wasn’t so bad after all…

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Air Engineering Technician Jack Tisdale

Jack spent a week on leave in Folctha before reporting for his first day at HMS Sharman. He visited his family, left some flowers up on Memorial Hill for Sara, revisited a few haunts around town, went to the gym with his dad for the first time in years and got to relish watching his old man’s jaw drop.

Things were kinda awkward around the dinner table, sadly. Jack’s mum had never really approved of the military, being convinced that violence had no place in a civilized society. Jack had gently suggested that a society was only civilized because it knew when and how to properly apply violence in its own defence, pointed to Gao as an example of how civilization could be brought crashing down if the wrong people used violence unopposed, and generally succeeded in making her look small and uncertain, which in turn made him feel awful.

They’d agreed to avoid politics. She was proud of him regardless, and Hope seemed to love having him around the house for a few days. She was the spitting image of the big sister she’d never met, and Jack loved her dearly, but he did worry sometimes that his parents were wrapping her in cotton wool and not letting her breathe.

It was almost a wrench when the day came to report to Sharman for his orientation and introduction day.

He met most of his fellow Technician graduates in the corridor by the Jump Array which doubled as the base’s memorial wall. Everybody in extrasolar defence who’d fallen in the line of duty was memorialized there, meaning that it remembered not only the four fallen HEAT operators, but also a handful of Firebird crews, and a sickening proportion of the crew of HMS Caledonia…

Captain Costello made it absolutely clear that they were to pay respect to every single one before they were permitted to get to work. Read every name, touch every picture, acknowledge every life. It took Jack two minutes just to reach “Chief Petty Officer Andow, M. HMS Caledonia.“

All told, inspecting the wall and studying every face on it took a big chunk out of the morning but it also drove home how hugely serious this all was.

Once that was finally done they were finally escorted to a briefing room for their introduction to the unit, and it was all Jack could do not to aim a huge congratulatory smile at the woman waiting for them. Back when she’d been giving him lessons and instruction to prepare him for this, she’d been Sergeant Kovač. Now, her maternity uniform’s breast bore a different name.

She still favored Jack with a small smile as they fell in to listen, though.

“Welcome to Spaceborne Operations,” she greeted them. “My name is Sergeant Martina Arés, I’m the NCO in charge of Hazardous Environment equipment maintenance and readiness and it’s my job, in part, to ensure that you guys—” she indicated the the technicians “—get along with your assigned HEAT operators. And you’d better, because without each other all that hardcore training you did counts for exactly dick. They’re getting a similar talk right now.

“But let’s get the awkward stuff out of the way first: This job is not dignified. The human body is a marvel, capable of doing things that literally nothing else in the galaxy can match…and you are going to get profoundly familiar with its unglamorous plumbing. Over the coming weeks, you’re going to learn more than you wanted to about blood, urine and feces, you’re going to become intimately familiar with the scent of stale sweat, and yes, you are going to be up close and personal with literal swinging dicks. Get used to it, because they have to get used to being on the receiving end.

“On the other hand, after this last leg of training you will be a world-class armorer qualified to maintain and modify the most sophisticated and effective personal protection system ever devised by man or Gaoian, each one of which costs as much as a strike fighter. More than that, however, you will be the shaft behind the speartip. Without technicians, HEAT operations don’t happen.”

She grinned, and there was definitely a slight note of schadenfreude in that grin. “But before all that can happen, there’s some bonding to do. A little team-building. ‘Cuz I know HEAT operators, and if they have a flaw it’s that they think with their muscles. Which means if you want them to respect you, you have to earn it. That means showing them you have the kind of game, spirit and tenacity they respect. So here’s what’s gonna happen: You’re gonna change into your PT gear. We’re gonna go out there to the Pit and do a session with your operators, and they’re gonna effortlessly kick your asses into the dirt. Your job is to give it your absolute best. I just want to apologize for not joining in: I’d be out there getting my ass kicked alongside you if I could.” She rested a hand on her belly. “Afterwards you’ll meet your assigned operator—two techs per operator—and you’ll be excused for the day to get to know each other.

“Fortunately,” she added, “That bit should be easy. There’s four things in the entire world a HEAT operator likes the most. Eating, sleeping, and training…and I’d strongly advise you to avoid the fourth, no matter how flirty they get.”

A few years ago, Jack wouldn’t have been able to resist the cheeky comment that shot into the back of his head about how she was obviously speaking from experience there. He had Chief Donoghue’s “tender” management to thank for ridding him of that particular impulse, but he still couldn’t quite restrain a small smirk.

Arés noticed. She made eye contact until he’d got his face to behave itself, then allowed a smirk of her own. “Not that I’m necessarily following my own advice,” she added and let a chuckle do a lap around the room. “…Don’t be overwhelmed by them, that’s all. The thing you as techs need to understand better than anyone, even their girlfriends or whoever, is this: those men overwhelm themselves. They’re in awe of what they can do, and even scared by it. They’re also…extremely passionate. That’s both hormonal and just the nature of what they are. What they need from the techs almost more than your skills is your empathy. So…go make friends.”

Five minutes later, PT gear on and nervous energy jumping around between them like static, Jack and the rest of the tech graduates found their way towards ‘the Pit’ mostly by the sounds of boisterous team bonding and the sound of the other Technical Sergeant Arés’ raised voice.

“Pit” was an entirely accurate descriptor. Sharman was squeezed into a tight footprint, with the main admin building and the living quarters practically on top of each other. The gaps between them, in fact, were narrow enough that two men could only barely squeeze past each other.

But the admin building was square and the living quarters were U-shaped, meaning that in the middle was an oblong of open space hemmed in by concrete walls and floored with well-drained soft sand….And, right now, full of HEAT graduates who were lounging around knocking back post-workout supplements and listening as one of their number—an Army staff sergeant of some kind—reached the punchline of a well-delivered joke about a Colonel’s wife.

“…and the PFC hands him his coffee and says ‘well sir, I figure if there was any work involved then I’d be doing it for you.’“

Several of them had obviously heard it before, but a round of deep-chested guffaws said it was well-received. Adam’s snickering Muttley impression was always a treat to witness, and he gave Jack in particular a wide grin as they filed through the narrow gap and into the Pit.

“Ah, now here come the folks who give your lives meaning,” he said. “Be nice to ‘em. They’ve literally got your nuts in the palm of their hand!”

He strolled through the sand—and on him, it was knee-deep though he apparently didn’t notice—while Jack took a step onto the surface and…barely sunk an inch.

“Able Seaman Tisdale,” he said, slowly and with a congratulatory tone. “You took your sweet time gettin’ here!”

“Book learnin’ takes a while, Technical Sergeant Slab,” Jack retorted, aware that his own grin was the exact mirror of Adam’s. He was promptly hoisted off the sand and flattened by a trademark Arés hug. And then slammed onto the sand in a pin. His view, once he recovered his senses, was completely filled by Adam’s cheshire grin hovering a few inches from his face.

“I’ve been waitin’!”

Jack sensed that his best bet with these guys was to not let on that even at his gentlest Adam could still wind a guy pretty badly. He forced down the reflex to gasp for air and nodded. “Good to see you too. Weren’t you gonna…” he couldn’t resist a cough “…introduce us before you started kicking our arses?”

“Nah. Up!” In one fluid move Adam somehow sprang backwards and practically tossed Jack upward, who found himself suddenly a few meters above the sand and falling.

He stuck the landing, at least.

Adam gave him a high five, then turned to review the other techs. “Guess I better get y’all introduced to your partners,” he declared. “Moho! You’re partnered with Tisdale here and…which one’a y’all is Miller?”

Moho was an immense black guy with a voice so deep that it excavated new caverns of bass possibility. He was also, to judge from the tattoo he’d managed to somehow find blank room for on his pecs, a Defender. That tattoo had a new, crisp look while all the others looked smeared and faded.

“Yo. Name’s Coyers. Callsign’s ‘Moho’…don’t ask.”

“…Moho as in the bottom of the Earth’s crust, or…?” Jack asked.

“Yes. I’ll tell you how I earned it the day you bench three-fifteen for reps.”

Jack snorted. He was a long way from his pasty scrawny tuna-paste-sandwich self these days, but three-fifteen was…asking a lot.

“I might need time to work up to that,” he said with snarky bravado. “But, uh, I did manage two-seventy…once.”

Moho seemed, for his part, legitimately impressed. “Wait, really? Shit, check out this guy! Where’d you lift that?”

Jack aimed a thumb at Warhorse. “His gym. Adam has a way with coaching. I’m pretty sure he could give a butterfly a set of bulging pecs.”

Moho’s chuckle could have triggered an earthquake. “He sure does.”

The correct Miller finally joined them. What quirk of fate had landed two Millers in the same group, Jack didn’t want to speculate but at least they were easy to tell apart.

Their Miller was…stunning. Wisdom among the techs was to pair them off with one solid chunk-slab of a person who could push hard and one strong-yet-slender type who could handle fiddly work, and that latter role was Jack’s. He was always going to be a tall, thin one with pianist’s hands no matter what he did, while Miller was short and built like a…well, Jack didn’t know. She probably looked amazing in more flattering clothes but as far as Jack was concerned her most attractive feature was easily her face, which was square and strong and framed by short dark hair.

Jack shook his head to clear his thoughts. Miller seemed to notice and smiled. Suddenly his thoughts weren’t so clear anymore.

Moho noticed too. “N’aww! Imma like you two, I can tell.”

Miller’s amused expression got a little wider, and she shook his hand. “Staff sergeant Miller, US Air Force. Former ammo troop for the Bone. Decided I wanted something less…grunty, so of course my airhead self goes and finds this!”

“Coyers. I was an 18C.”

Jack completed the introductions. “Tisdale. This is my first gig, it’s what I signed up for.”

Further getting-to-know-each-other time was going to have to wait, because Adam finally finished assigning Techs to Operators and got their attention with an effortless lift of his voice. “Okay! Everyone in the middle! Time ta’ train!”

They did their PT. Or, rather, they tried and mostly succeeded at surviving the HEAT’s daily warm-up routine. How the operators managed any of it Jack would never understand, since all of them were so massive they sunk into the sand and had their tiniest movement resisted at every turn. It didn’t seem to even remotely bother them even though it had to be much, much more difficult.

It did what they’d been told it would do, however. The fact that Jack made it to the end without giving up and sinking into the sand moaning in pain or throwing up seemed to impress Moho no end. He wanted to do both, and from the look on her face Miller had been an inch away from her breaking point too…but they were both still standing when ‘Horse finally called time.

A couple of the other Techs hadn’t quite managed to go the distance. Hopefully, that wouldn’t put a damper on their working relationship.

“Alright! That’s it for today, folks!” Adam announced, checking on the two that had collapsed while their operators hovered, already concerned. “Techs are authorized a short dose of Crue-D if you need it, but you’re all dismissed to go get acquainted.”

Miller had sunk to her knees gulping down cold air like it was in short supply but on those words she heaved herself to her feet and mopped a few soaking strands of loose hair out of her face. “Whew! …Good training,” she declared, drawing a tectonic chuckle out of Coyers.

“Hungry?” Jack asked her. He certainly was and he’d taken Adam’s imprecations about protein to heart over the years. There was no point in asking Coyers—HEAT were always eating. He’d either be on a special meal plan in which case he’d bring it with him, or he’d be free to join in whatever they did.

Miller nodded emphatically. “Fuck yes. I wonder where’s good to eat in this town?”

“Best Brioche on North Water Street,” Jack said promptly. “They do the best burgers ever, they’re called the Red, White and Blue—”

“I like them already!” Miller said. “…You sound like you know Folctha.”

“I grew up here.”

Moho grunted, and coming from him that was a heck of a noise. “No shit?”

“Yeah. Moved here when I was nine.”

Miller paused in getting her hair back into its bun. “…Wait. Tisdale as in—?”

“As in Sara,” Jack nodded and contrived to ask her with his face not to press any further. “Yeah.”

Coyers got the message too. He laid a huge, calloused hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Story for another time,” he said. Jack shot him a grateful look. They knew, of course. Everybody in Folctha knew the story, especially the SOR. So there was no point scratching that wound again today. “Showers first.”

Sharman had good showers. Jack turned the pressure right up and made incoherent sounds of pleasure as the pounding water ironed out some of the soreness, then changed into his street clothes once he was done. He found Miller and Coyers waiting for him at the front gates and greeted them both with a smile and a wave.

“Slow ass buys the burgers,” Coyers said. Jack laughed.

“You might have to spot me the cash,” he said.

“So where’s this burger place at, Local Guide?” Miller asked.

“North Water Street. It’s a straight shot about a mile that-a-way.” Jack pointed. “But that’s the boring way. The scenic route is over the road, past the courthouse, through New Worlds Plaza, over the bridge, along the river, back across the bridge by Rooney’s then through Quarterside park.”

“Sounds good, my legs are gonna get stiff if I don’t move them,” Miller agreed. Moho just nodded amiably. “Besides, I didn’t get to see the town much. It’d be nice to check it out if I’m gonna stay here.”

“It’s way different to what it used to be,” Jack confided, leading them out of the gate. “When we first moved here it was all prefabricated temporary housing and dirt streets.”

“I bet. Look at all the cranes,” Moho waved an arm at the skyline, and Jack nodded. Folctha didn’t have an iconic silhouette yet, it just had construction. Acres and acres of construction. “Who’s footin’ the bill for all this?”

“MBG invested a lot. They run the jump arrays and spaceport, and they have Chiune Station out west past the Lakebeds. Hephaestus own the trade station up around Cimbrean-Five and the metalworks down in the Skidmark… most of the money’s from agriculture, though. The farms out east are huge and the livestock herds out west are even bigger,” Jack said, counting points off on his fingers. “Then there’s tourism, the academic investment, logging, oil drilling…and all of it’s taxed pretty heavily. Then there’s the Gaoians.”

Sure enough, there was a duckling-line of cubs following a Mother on the other side of the road, heading for the lake. “The Females brought a lotta stuff with them when they first set up a Commune in the Alien Quarter,” Jack explained. “After the war on Gao started and the Israelis weighed in and all that stuff… I think a lot of things were built at a loss, actually. Or at least, they aren’t going to pay back for years and years. Anyway, that’s the courthouse.”

“…Pretty, I guess,” Miller conceded. “I dunno. I kinda feel like courthouses should be all white marble and columns and stuff, and a big dark wooden door.” She gestured to the glass and limestone fronting of Folctha’s offering. “This one looks like an airport terminal.”

“Is that what the courthouse is like where you’re from?” Jack asked.

“Denver. And yeah. Heck, it’s almost nothing but marble columns.”

“What about you, Moho?”

“Fuck if I know. Ain’t never seen a courthouse before.”

“I meant where are you from?” Jack clarified.

“Oh. Florida. Lil’ place about twenny miles outta Jacksonville…”

Thus began an afternoon which later went down in Jack’s memory as one of the best of his life. Taking the scenic walk around town helped loosen up his muscles, they earned a greasy, calorie-laden treat with an armed services discount at Best Brioche, they grabbed an afternoon beer at Rooney’s and that turned into several evening beers and a long, long conversation.

God only knew how Adam or whoever had matched them had figured they’d click, but they did. Moho was generous with his praise and his cash, and Miller could make anything sound interesting. Jack, who’d been worried he’d end up as the team baby or maybe that he’d be getting pity-respect for his sister, was instead astonished at how…naturally they slotted together. By sunset the three of them were like old best friends reunited.

Or maybe that was just the beer. Jack honestly didn’t remember most of it in the morning, though he did remember how he and Miller had wound up riding Moho’s shoulders back to the base at dead-o’clock in the morning, trying to outdo one another at who could sing their respective service song louder and in different keys because pride was at stake and ‘Heart of Oak’ was obviously superior to ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ and…

…And all in all, it was an excellent night. Worth the hangover, even. And the hoarse voice. The upshot, however, was that it achieved the intended result—when their first day of real work began in the morning it wasn’t as awkward new acquaintances tiptoeing around each other, but as teammates solving problems together… and for the first time in his life Jack really felt like he belonged somewhere.

He’d made it.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Cabeiro Shipyards, Ceres, Sol

Drew Cavendish

Drew had lost his crown as the record holder for most time spent spacewalking years previously, but he still liked to keep his hand in. How was a man supposed to design spacesuits if he never wore them himself?

It didn’t matter that plenty of spacesuits had indeed been designed by people who’d never wear them, that wasn’t the Drew Cavendish way. Nothing went to the C&M Environment Systems assembly line unless Drew had worn it himself for at least twenty-four hours in real, working vacuum conditions.

Right now, he was testing the latest EV-CAM—ExtraVehicular Construction And Mining system. His was the prototype for the sixth-generation CAM suit, and things had come a long way from the early days wearing systems based off redesigned diving hardsuits. CAM-6 was flexible, luxuriously comfortable by spacesuit standards, packed with redundant safety features and, most importantly of all, simple.

There was no such thing as idiotproof in Drew’s experience, but that wasn’t going to stop him from trying to design an idiot proof suit. Combine it with the fierce training and constant safety measures in place and the fact that idiots didn’t get second chances when it came to EVA, and so far there hadn’t been a single incident.

Besides. It also felt good to do some honest work with his hands, and the bent, ravaged and blasted hulk of HMS Caledonia still needed a lot. They were rebuilding her almost from the keel up, and even the keel—a structural bar as thick as Drew was tall that ran right down the ship’s spine—had been reinforced with the best steel Hephaestus could get their hands on.

The alloy of the keel itself defied replication, which was why they were even bothering with the Sisyphean task of repairing her again. Even after being torn down to a wreck, Caledonia was still the most advanced ship humanity had. She’d fly again… in a few years.

There was a lot of welding to do before that day arrived. Drew enjoyed it, the simplicity of focusing on doing a job well in challenging conditions, and where other people might have sat down with incense and a singing bowl to clear their heads Drew instead forced his increasingly elderly bones into his own creations and built things.

Besides. It was a good way to hold the respect of the kids who’d come flooding out from Earth armed with engineering degrees and welding certs and heads full of the glamour of living in space and building spaceships. None of them had reckoned on the endless safety briefings, the relentless equipment checks and how little time they’d actually find between those two things to actually build ships… but they all agreed they had the coolest jobs in history.

“Drew Mike to Drew Charlie. You listenin’ you pommy cunt?”

Inside his helmet, Drew snorted. Some things would never change, and the world would be badly wrong if they did. Drew Martin becoming more and more Australian the further he got from Australia was one of those things. Whenever he was on Ceres, he was a walking stereotype to rival Mick Dundee.

“It was nice and quiet before you spoke up, Drew,” Drew replied with a grin. He stowed his welding torch away on the grounds that if his Antipodean counterpart was calling him in the middle of a ‘walk then he was probably about to be called back in.

“Believe me mate, I’d leave your wrinkly arse out there all night if I could so I can get some fuckin’ work done. But Big Jezza said get back in here for a Consortium meeting, an’ he looks a bit fuckin’ down in the mouth.”

“Oh, bloody hell…” Drew sighed to himself. Things had been going so peacefully, too. On the radio, he asked “Can it wait? If I don’t finish my scheduled job it’ll set the repairs back.”

“Nah, yeah, I told him that and he said it’s a no-can-do Drew. I even told him how much it’d cost, and he still said bring you in.” A note of concern crept into Drew M’s voice. “An’ you know what, if Big Jezza thinks the money can get stuffed then I reckon somethin’s a bit fuckin’ sketchy.”

That was putting it mildly. Drew carefully backed out of the compartment he’d been welding. “I’ll be inside in twenty,” he promised.

Twenty minutes later to the very second, the airlock was cycling around him as its in-built wash system sluiced Ceresean regolith, powdered steel and ice crystals off his suit. Getting regolith off of a suit in particular was a problem that Drew had spent years fixing. Brushing it off or vacuum-cleaning were out of the question, that stuff was worse than asbestos if it got into the air. That only left washing, and ordinary water just didn’t do the job…but whatever they did use needed to not harm the suit and wash off readily once it had carried away the dust, so oils and solvents were out too.

In the end, water-based sex lube had turned out to be the best starting point. There were 55-gallon drums of the stuff hooked up to the airlock showers to be slightly diluted, hosed all over the suit and then sluiced off. Drew had tweaked the formulation with a few particle-catching additives but at its core the decontamination process relied heavily on hypoallergenic, latex-safe, silicone-safe, easy-glide sexual lubricant.

Space was a glamorous business.

Suit-off had become far easier thanks to Drew’s years of hard work and innovation. Finding an airtight, secure seal that allowed the operator to enter and exit their suit quickly and conveniently in particular had involved three years of prototyping.

Normally, Drew would have spent twenty minutes performing a post-EVA inspection of his suit ahead of the relentlessly thorough one that would follow next time he came to wear it, but this time he stuck a huge red NOT INSPECTED label to the helmet, rinsed off the inevitable grime and BO of extravehicular work, grabbed a coffee and a snack bar from the vending machine, and ducked through the doorway toward Executive Operations.

Years on from its first construction, Ceres Base was easily the crown jewel of human achievement. Never mind Cabeiro Shipyards, that was just an ancillary facility—Ceres Base itself was a town, buried in the rock and ice and its standing population dwarfed the total number of people who had ever served aboard the ISS, Mir, Skylab and all the other space stations combined.

The old modules were still up there on the surface, under the domes. But all the important stuff had been moved deep underground years ago, backups made, redundancies added, compartmentalization written into the structure’s every line.

Given another ten years, it might even be able to permanently support a small population on a self-sustaining basis. And after that… who knew? The Hephaestus Consortium’s motto was “The Sky Isn’t The Limit” for a reason.

Thank fuck they’d finally ditched the elevator music. There would have been murders sooner or later.

“Something came up?” he asked as he entered Executive Ops. It wasn’t that he wanted to be rude, but in Drew’s experience ExOps was the kinda place he had to bull his way into and rule the conversation from the second he arrived or else people carried on their conversations without bringing him up to speed.

Fortunately, he had Drew Martin to watch his back. “It’s Adele, mate.”

Concern blanched Drew’s face immediately. He liked Adele. He’d worked with a lot of powerful executives in his life and some of them got high on the smell of their own shit. Adele Park meanwhile had all the confidence, authority and ferocity of a career woman who’d made it into the biggest of the big leagues and none of the character flaws.

“What happened?!” He sprang forward to the round table in the middle of ExOps through which flowed the accumulated data of their little interstellar empire. The report from My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon was in pride of place.

“Some kind of stasis fuckery,” Drew M summarized. “They snatched her right out from in front’a her security detail.”

“Jerry?”

Jeremy Carlson—”Big Jezza” to Drew M— shrugged grimly. “The Corti say they had nothing to do with it. They deplore her abduction, apologize profusely and blah blah blah.” He grunted. “I don’t really care. One of ours went missing on their turf. They are gonna need to get their noses very brown to make it up to us, and if we find even a hint that they’re lying to us about their innocence… well. All deals are off.”

“Bit bloody late for Adele,” Drew opined. “Have we called AEC yet?”

“That’s why you’re here.” Carlson gestured to Drew. “You work closest with them thanks to the EV-MASS contract. I figure you’re our strongest man to send to them.”

“We really don’t need the strongman act,” Drew protested. “AEC think of themselves as the sheepdogs keeping the wolves at bay. They wouldn’t ignore us.”

“Fair enough, but I don’t want to half-ass this,” Carlson said. “This is Adele we’re talking about. She’d pull out all the stops for any of us.”

“I’ll get on it immediately,” Drew promised.

“And I’ll lean on a couple of US Senators,” Carlson promised. “We’ll bring her home.”

Drew M grunted. “Strewth, I wish I had your confidence…” he muttered.

“Or that it was warranted,” somebody else added.

“What are we supposed to do? Just write her off?”

“Screw that! She’s one of ours—!”

Carlson raised his hand and his voice. “We’ll do… whatever we can,” he said lamely. “Thanks everyone. Let’s… let’s get to work.”

People drifted away in twos and threes, muttering amongst themselves with a generally hopeless air. The two Drews were among the last to leave, once Cavendish had finished his message to his friends in AEC and the SOR.

“…You still got that stash?” he asked of his counterpart once they’d escaped from ExOps. Ceres base had relaxed the rules on alcohol a lot since the early days, but Drew M had kept some beer right from the word go.

“Yep. ‘Bout time to crack open a coldie, you reckon?”

“Yyyup.” Drew sighed. “‘Cause something tells me about the best we can do for Adele now is raise a glass.”

Drew M nodded grimly, “…Bloody right it is,” he agreed.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau

People who didn’t know Lewis Beverote very well and just went off their first impressions of him were inevitably surprised by the orderliness of his private little kingdom.

It was an old and unusual arrangement. Lewis was the longest-serving human on Mrwrki after all, and had claimed a suite of rooms near the main nanofactory processors early in his tenure, giving him significantly more living space than anybody else on the station.

This had inevitably led to friction. How come the skinny middle-aged geek who talked like a terminal pothead got to lord it up in the penthouse while everybody else was crammed into single-room cabins barely larger than a college dorm room?

Complainers inevitably got the Tour, and there they learned that Lewis in fact lived in even more spartan conditions than the rest of them. His bedroom in particular was just that: a room with a bed in it. There were drawers and a hanging rail for storing his clothes, a tiny walk-in ablution room that combined the functions of a shower, toilet and wash basin, and that was it. Everything else was working space.

He never actually slept there, of course. He slept with his long-term partner, Sergeant Lucy Campbell in her perfectly standard cabin. But the tour definitely drove home the point that Lewis had never claimed that space for luxury. He’d claimed it to build miracles.

In ages past a renaissance man’s workshop like his would have been cluttered with drawings, prototypes, half-finished sketches and drifts of raw material. Lewis’ prototyping room on the other hand was kept meticulously tidy by the drones he’d invented partly as working prototypes for the Coltainer program’s control software, and partly because he knew his own mind and was absolutely certain he’d be neck-deep in mouldering unfinished pizzas if he didn’t take special effort.

Nadeau had a lot of respect for him. Even if the lighting in there did make him look a bit mad scientist-y.

“Good morning, Lewis.”

“Dude.” Lewis turned away from the pool of holographic light he was bending over and gave Nadeau the grin that said there’d been a Eureka moment in the recent past.

“I know that grin,” Nadeau said. “I take it you had a breakthrough on the Coltainer software?”

Lewis’ grin got wider. “You could say that. Say hello, SAM.”

“Hello Colonel Nadeau. It Has Been Approximately Sixty-Seven Hours And Twelve Minutes Since Your Last Visit. Are You Well?”

Nadeau almost fell over at the sound of a pleasant tenor voice greeting him. Lewis had always loved putting a scifi movie spin on his projects, but this one had all the special effects right down to an abstract holographic object—a friendly green icosahedron—that shimmered into life over the console and gave him something to look at, pulsing and twisting in time with the rhythms of its own speech.

“…You didn’t!” he exclaimed and took a cautious step forward.

Lewis waved a reassuring hand and shook his head. “Relax, the name stands for Sophisticated Algorithm Matrix. It’s basically just a fuckhuge flow chart of preprogrammed responses. ‘S’not alive, my man. True AIs are a fuckin’ crapshoot.”

“I heard they mostly just get depressed and delete themselves,” Nadeau hazarded.

“Yeah, but dude: Do you wanna take the chance that one of ‘em maybe one day gets mad at its creators for bringing it into this cold, uncaring, pointless universe and decides to take us down with it?” Lewis put on the same slightly manic smile he always did when he was discussing apocalyptic scenarios. “Nah, SAM here is nice an’ dumb, ain’tcha SAM?”

“I Know I Am But What Are You?”

“See? Nothing intelligent ever used that retort.”

Nadeau chuckled despite himself, and sat down. “…I have to ask. What’s the point of this, exactly? I thought you already said the Coltainers are as smart as they need to be. In fact I’m pretty sure you said we should keep them as stupid as possible because, quote ’that way there’s less shit can go wrong’.”

“Dude.”

“Fine, fine. Knock yourself out.”

Lewis chuckled and turned away from SAM’s console. “So, like, it’s always good to see you my man, but if this is a social call you coulda at least brung some beers.”

“No, it’s professional,” Nadeau said. “I have bad news and good news. Bad first.”

“Best way round!” Lewis nodded, and leaned against his console. “Lay it on me.”

“Bad news is, Kolbeinn says we aren’t going public with the Coltainers yet. For Opsec reasons. Don’t want Big Hotel getting ahead of us and planting beacons on every likely deathworld they can find…”

Lewis sighed. “Makes sense, but man. That’s gonna way slow down the colony sign-ups, and the whole point is rapid expansion. But whatever, he’s the big hat. What’s the good?”

Nadeau grinned. “He’s given us permission to launch.”

Lewis gawped at him. “…We’re go?”

Nadeau nodded. “We’re go.”

“My babies actually get to fly at last?”

“That they do.”

“Holy shit, SAM, you hear that? It only took five fuckin’ years, but we’re finally there!”

“Yaaaay.”

Nadeau eyed the holographic interface warily. “…You really programmed it to go ‘Yaaaay’?”

“Dude, I di’n’t program shit. SAM here’s flung together outta bits of other bots, some Watson tech, some Kwmbwrw universal interface, and a random number generator called Bob. Sharp as a rolling pin, but he’ll surprise ya. And he learns.”

“Well. We thought we’d run up ten Coltainers and hold a launch ceremony, probably a party, get very drunk…” Nadeau beamed. “I haven’t told Kirk and Vedreg yet, would you like the honors? I’ll even handle Vakno for you.”

“Dude.”

“Have fun, then.”

As it happened, Nadeau ran into Kirk not five minutes after leaving Lewis to his tinkering. Their permanent resident Rrrrtk almost bumped into him as he stepped out of Mrwrki’s sickbay. Thank goodness for ET medical databases, or their doctor wouldn’t have had the first idea what he was doing with three aliens on board.

Kirk and Vedreg had an…interesting role on board. Both were prisoners of circumstance, known enemies of the Hierarchy and thus unable to return to galactic society for fear of assassination or worse. Of course, there was nothing stopping them from moving to Cimbrean but considering that the Guvnurag population of Cimbrean was nil Vedreg would have been just as lonely there as on Mrwrki. Kirk, meanwhile, refused to abandon his friends. Nadeau had no idea what their slender and valuable ally wanted from life any longer, and Kirk wasn’t saying.

As it was, he avoided disaster by stooping and stepping under Kirk’s belly rather than accidentally scything his middle legs out from under him. Kirk reflexively reared away and hit his head on the ceiling.

“Shit! Sorry, sorry…” Nadeau spluttered but Kirk waved him off.

“It is nothing,” he promised.

“Good. Don’t want land you straight back in there…” Nadeau cleared his throat. “Everything okay?”

“I just needed a dose of antihistamines,” Kirk sighed. “I am sorry to say that I seem to have become quite allergic to Human dander in the last few months.”

“Huh. Really? A new allergy?” Nadeau asked.

“Inevitable, I am afraid.” Kirk shook his mane. “Incompatible biology. And while my immune system is sluggish and pathetic next to yours, with enough exposure even it will become quite aggressive…You seem in a good mood today, Colonel.”

“I was gonna let Lewis tell you, but we were just authorized to move on to full Coltainer deployment,” Nadeau revealed. Kirk’s ears flapped—Rrrrtk body language for a pleased expression.

“Outstanding!” he declared, without a trace of sarcasm. “It’s been a long road.”

“It’ll be a little longer yet,” Nadeau reminded him. “We still have to build some final-generation ‘tainers.”

“I suppose there will be a fitting send-off for the prototypes?” Kirk asked. He waved one of his four arms in the vague direction of the outer hull and through it the graveyard cloud of spent prototype Coltainers, hundreds of them, drifting in interplanetary space having given their best and only work to the conception of their replacements.

“Of course!”

“Good, then.” Kirk turned to go, then a thought seemed to strike him and he turned back. “A question though, Colonel.”

“Shoot.”

Kirk rocked back onto his hindmost four legs, a posture of thoughtfulness. “We have worked on the Coltainers now for five years. I myself have been here since before they were even conceived. And now, here we are on the doorstep of letting them out into the galaxy to pave the way for a wave of expansion without parallel in galactic history. And they will be a wave, oh yes.”

He sniffed, which was an impressive gesture when done by somebody with a sixteen inch nose. “But they self-replicate, do they not? After the first few production runs, our own contributions to their population will be negligible… but we shall still have a nanofactory, and a small army of the finest creative minds. I find myself wondering…What will we make next?”

He flapped his ears again when Nadeau’s face fell into a thoughtful expression, rocked back onto his forward feet and turned to walk away again.

“Something to ponder,” he said.

Date Point 15y4m2w AV

Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lt. Col. Owen Powell

Everybody needed the occasional lazy day. A man would go bloody crazy if he didn’t take some time off to, as the case may be, slob around in his underwear all day and do nothing constructive. It made the constructive days mean more.

So, Powell was taking a long weekend to relax around his rambling single-story home wearing a pair of loose cotton pajama bottoms, drinking beers that weren’t doing a damn thing to him, and allegedly reading. Mostly, he was falling asleep with a book in his hand. He hadn’t shaved in two days and, given that he was the kind of man who had a five o’clock shadow by noon, a scratchy briar patch of coarse ginger-and-white hairs had already colonized his face.

He was jolted awake by the sound of his doorbell, and set aside the copy of Raising Steam he’d fallen asleep under to scratch and quietly cuss his way toward the door as he tried to remember if he was expecting a package or something.

There was definitely a package on the doorstep. She was five foot three inches with her hair up in cornrows and one of the most famous faces in the world, and she short-circuited his brain with a brilliant smile before reaching up on tiptoe to kiss him.

“Rylee?” he asked, as his wits finally stopped grinding gears and started moving again. “Fookin’ ‘ell, you didn’t—at least, I don’t remember—?”

She grinned at him. “Surprise!”

“Uh…come in!”

She slid past him in a dazing perfumed whisper and placed her bag neatly next to the little table in the hallway. It wasn’t the first time she’d visited his house, but the last time had been far too long ago.

“Hm. You make lazy look good,” she said as she took her shoes off while Powell inwardly cursed himself for not at least showering and brushing his teeth. “Miss me?”

“Don’t be daft, o’ course I did!” Powell folded his arms around her and kissed the back of her neck. “I’m just half addled ‘cuz you woke me up an’ I wasn’t expectin’ yer. Coffee?”

“What am I, a house guest?” Rylee hooked a finger in the front waistband of his pajamas and dragged him toward the bedroom. “The coffee can goddamn well wait…”

It was almost sunset when Owen woke up feeling a little on the cold side. Rylee was wrapped in blankets under his arm and completely dead to the world, having left him only just enough to cover his hips. He chuckled softly to himself, ran a finger along her eyebrow just to be sure she was really there, then ghosted out of the bedroom and into the kitchen where he ran a couple of coffee pods through the machine.

The second one was bubbling and frothing into its cup when Rylee yawned and scratched her way out of the bedroom wearing an impromptu bedsheet toga and a satisfied smile. She accepted the mug like it was pure divine Ambrosia.

“It’s gotta be like four in the morning back home,” she groaned. “Damn twenty-eight hour day jetlag…”

“Lemme guess—Business trip? Not like you to make little flyin’ visits.”

“Nope. This one’s all little flying visit…I uh, I woke up real lonely a couple days back and…I just wanted to be here.” She gave him a faint smile. “Dumb, right? How long have we been doing this?”

“Aye, an’ it’s bloody tough.” Powell sat down on one of the bar stools around the breakfast bar. His were specially made so that the Lads could use them when they came around, making them wider and far sturdier than any ordinary bar stool. “Fook, I’ve wanted to do the same more’n a few times.”

She nodded and sat down opposite him. “…Can we keep doing this?” she asked. It was a query, not a request. “I mean… we aren’t getting any younger…”

Owen gave her a curious look through the steam off his drink. “…Are you gettin’ all maternal as well?” he asked.

“Come on, intelligent people second-guess themselves sometime.” Rylee attempted a smile, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“Christ. Warhorse and Jockey, I’m pretty sure Firth an’ his missus are thinkin’ on it…”

“I know. The Misfits too. It just… got me thinking.” Rylee cleared her throat. “About us. I’m… still pretty sure I don’t want kids. But then I started worrying because if you do then…”

She put on that almost-smile again and looked apologetic. “…I dunno. I figured it was time we sorted our relationship out. I… fuck it, I love you. And if you want kids and I don’t… If we’re always gonna be long-distance…” She sighed. “I just had to come over here, talk it out.”

Owen put his cup down and took her hand. “About the only thing I know about bein’ a dad is that I couldn’t possibly fook it up as much as my old man did,” he said, and earned a laugh. “But… I don’t know. What’re kids for, right? The future? A legacy? Owt like that?”

“Something like that, I guess…” Rylee agreed. “…You think we’re building enough of one anyay? Without kids?”

Owen nodded. “Rylee, trust me. If it were a deal-breaker, I’d ‘ave said as much before now,” he promised. “…Besides, you can’t tell me the Lads won’t breed a bloody tribe between ‘em. You an’ I’ll be godparents or some such, no doubt.”

She grinned at the mental image, nodded, and finished her coffee. “It’s almost a shame, though. You and I would make some damn pretty kids.”

“Only if they inherited your hair,” Owen replied, running a hand over his own scalp which was more bald spot than not nowadays. She laughed his favorite laugh, a kind of husky bubbling one that started in her stomach, leaned over the breakfast bar and kissed him again.

“I happen to think your hair is perfect,” she said. “Not sure about the beard, though. It scratches.”

“I’ll shave it off now,” Owen promised. “Too bad: It were growin’ on me.”

She groaned, laughed his favorite laugh again and gave him a playful clout on the chest, and he stood up to clear things away with a smile that only she could bring out. The future could take care of itself.

Right now, he was just going to enjoy her company for as long as he had it.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

The Grand Commune, Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Mother-Supreme Yulna

The future, amazingly, was looking bright.

This was not a thought that seemed natural in the mind of a Mother-Supreme who had witnessed the wholesale slaughter of her sisters and the sickening reduction of the Clan to a fraction of its former population… But knowing beyond doubt that the alternative had been extinction did a lot to bring out the positive side.

Too many young Sisters had become Mothers instead, before they were really ready. Too many young ones had grown up too quickly. But there was a relentless streak in the Gaoian psyche, one now bolstered by the efforts of Clan Starmind. No matter what, they were still standing, they were still there. They had lost a lot…But they hadn’t lost everything. It was meagre soil, but seeds grew in worse, and some of those seeds grew mighty indeed.

For example: The Females were now freer and more secure than ever before in the history of Gao.

They had teetered on the edge of returning to the gilded slavery of long ago for their own protection, and many Sisters and Mothers had argued for exactly that. It was a dangerous galaxy out there, nobody knew that better than the Gao nowadays. Why wouldn’t they surround themselves with solid Stoneback walls and the devoted attention of Male guardians?

Yulna would skin herself alive rather than be so weak.

In that, for once, she and the Great Father were of an aligned mode of thought. Daar respected the Females, in a way that Yulna hadn’t understood at first. He genuinely thought the Females were strong, were capable, could tread new ground without needing a male to break it for them first. And he was right.

His contribution had been invaluable, but Daar was just one man. The Humans on the other hand were a better friend than anybody deserved, and endlessly generous with their land, their resources, their time and their emotions.

But the Grand Commune was a creation of the Clan of Females. It was their sanctuary, their fortress, their demesne and their beacon, and they’d built it themselves.

Yulna like to stand on its balcony and watch the whales.

Importing whole species to Cimbrean was one thing. Importing a breeding population of titanic oceanic filter-feeders was quite another, but they were essential to the terraforming effort. Without the whales, squid and fish, the seas would long since have been choked pink by a tiny Terran species called Krill. And without the Krill the oceans would be a horrific bacterial and algal soup from where the Earthling floral that infested the Microbial Action Zone drained down river channels and into the seas.

There were enormous troubles. These whales were called “humpbacks”, whose migratory instincts were tuned to the waters of Earth and thus were totally worthless on Cimbrean. Their confused songs were mysterious, slow and sad to Yulna’s ears but apparently to Human scientists they were ripe with information. The whales knew they weren’t in Kansas any longer so to speak.

One quirky behaviour they’d begun showing since their transplant was that they hung out near land more often, as though the uncharted Cimbrean deep worried them. Now, in late winter, Yulna could watch them about a kilometer offshore, count the plumes of steamy breath they shot into the air and wonder whether they were breeding as fervently and enthusiastically as the Gao were.

She hoped so. They looked so small, so lost, so…displaced. Out of their natural waters and fashioning a new life for themselves in unfamiliar places and times.

It was hard not to draw a parallel.

There was a scratch on her door that pulled her from her thoughts and back to her unending, inescapable work. Mother-Supreme was a job for life, and not even the Great Father got to say otherwise.

Her scientific advisor, Mother Deven, swished into the room in a rush of silky russet fur and impeccable grooming. She gave Yulna a respectful bow.

“Is it four o’clock already?” Yulna asked. She moved to her desk and sat down.

“Whale-watching again, Mother?” Deven asked. “Fascinating species. Some of the largest things alive.”

“So I understand. What’s today’s news?”

Deven sat and handed over her daily report. “The statistical survey on cub gender is back. We’re definitely having more males.” she indicated the tablet. “That’s graph one.”

Yulna duck-nodded as she examined it. The birth rates were measured as a number per thousand births so the…curtailment…of the female population (she was still far too raw and reeling to brave the more accurate but less euphemistic words) wasn’t accompanied by a cliff on the graph, but the war on Gao still shone out. Less than a month after the biodrones had first been changed, the ratio of males to females had swung out of its historically stable seven-to-one ratio and peaked at ten-to-one. It was coming back down toward equilibrium now, but managing the long-term crisis such an imbalance would inevitably cause in about fifteen years’ time was going to have to start in the present.

“Why?” she asked for the time being.

“Our working hypothesis is that it’s a hormonal stress response to the war. Difficult times require expendable males,” Deven said. “If I’m right, we’ll probably see a surge in female births in a few years as the war stress fades and we enter a regrowth phase.”

“Interesting, but not my first focus for now,” Yulna said and swiped to the next item, which she was pleased to see was the epidemiology assessment she’d requested. They were sharing a planet with Humans now, and Humans were notorious disease factories. The fact that Folctha had successfully ticked over for so long without a serious cross-species pandemic was a minor miracle all by itself.

Newborn cubs and postpartum Mothers were at their most vulnerable. She needed to be certain that the Grand Commune was equipped to handle the worst Earth could throw at them through its children.

She was still reading the summary when there was another scratch at her door. She recognized the heavy paw behind it instinctively.

“Myun?”

“There’s a priority message from Sister Niral, Mother!”

“Come in!”

Myun had learned physical grace as a little cub training with Sister Shoo, and carried it into her adulthood where it interacted strangely with her sheer physical presence and naturally boisterous personality. She could flow, even if she insisted on going four-pawed far too often. Deven flicked an ear at the vulgar show but Myun had strongly-held convictions about what was and was not worth her time, and a mere senior Mother’s displeasure was firmly not worth her time.

Yulna took the message with a duck-nod of thanks and scrutinized it.

“…Thank you, Mother Deven,” she said after re-reading it. “I think we’ll have to continue this later on.”

“As you say, Mother-Supreme.” Deven stood, sketched deference in the air and departed without objections.

Yulna waited for the door to close. “This woman is important?”

“Hephaestus built the V-class destroyers, the EV-MASS suits and Armstrong Station,” Myun explained. Her claws tickled her belly as she considered the implications. Even she was pregnant right now: nobody could afford not to be. Yulna had to admit, Thurrsto was a lot more charming than he looked and if Myun had a thing for Whitecrests… well, there were worse and less needy Clans. “Niral thinks the Humans aren’t going to like that she went missing. At all.”

“…Leaping to Gao’s defense is one thing, but does she think they’ll take on the Directorate?” Yulna asked. Myun just shrugged.

“…Thank you, Myun. Please let Niral know that she can call me at any time,” Yulna said. That shrug had been exactly the right gesture—Whenever Yulna thought she had Humans figured out, they managed to go beyond what she thought of them. “In fact, the sooner the better.”

Myun chittered and returned to the door. “Yes, Mother. Anything else?”

“Hmm…” Yulna thought for a moment. “…Please alert Mother Naydra as well. I’m sure she’ll want to discuss it on Daar’s behalf.”

There was a complex and evolving knot that felt like it was grounded in a complex bedrock of tradition while in fact being less than a year old. Daar—Great Father Daar, as she always referred to him in public—had taken a mate. Naydra had suffered inconceivably during the worst days on Gao before her liberation, and had apparently won Daar’s big, soft, soppy heart without really meaning to. Certainly, his affections were more than reciprocated. It was a love story in a very classic way and totally at odds with what the Clan of Females stood for: An exclusive relationship? Two years ago, the very idea would have been scandalous. Now, Naydra was what the Humans might call a princess, maybe a queen-consort. Either way she was a towering figure who wielded soft power that matched or perhaps even exceeded Yulna’s.

There were only two options when faced with somebody like that: Jealousy or friendship. Yulna had chosen friendship. Quite aside from the fact that it was impossible to hate Naydra, Yulna needed a sympathetic line to Daar’s ear. She hadn’t spoken to the Great Father in seasons, on the grounds that he honestly loathed her, but she spoke to Naydra on a daily basis.

Thus were bridges…built? Mended? It didn’t matter, really. The point was, there was a functioning diplomacy between the Females and the Great Father again. It maybe robbed Yulna of some of her own authority, but she’d take it. She was a servant after all.

Myun duck-nodded to acknowledge the request and was gone, which left Yulna alone again. She sighed and returned to the balcony as she calculated what, if anything, she could do about the incident in Origin.

The truth was, there probably wasn’t much she could do. This was a matter between the Corti and the Humans. Gao would stand on the Human side of course, but…

But somehow, she got the feeling that whatever transpired on Origin would happen without Gaoian input.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Central University, City 1, Origin, The Corti Directorate

Lor

A Professor—a Faculty member at that—never hurried anywhere, especially if they were a Silver Banner. It was a matter of principle, and so Lor was not hurrying, nor was he being hasty. He was merely proceeding with emphatic efficiency.

At least his emphatically efficient process didn’t involve anything so crass as actual physical activity. He was standing on a drone platform, which zipped through the campus corridors of the oldest and most important hall of learning and decision-making the Corti had ever built and if any oblivious students or staff members were unceremoniously thrust out of the way by the platform’s field then that was a valuable lesson in attentiveness.

That same field kept the wind from plucking at the printout he was re-reading as he zipped across the circular main courtyard and past the ancient, pitted concrete statue of Chancellor Varos brandishing the ancient Corti icon of learnedness and authority, a scrolled parchment. The scroll itself was a copy of Varos’ personal banner, fifty meters long and heavy with metallic threads depicting his many achievements but—thanks to some cunning mass boson field manipulation—still flapping in the light breeze as though it weighed little more than smoke.

Lor’s own banner was a hefty three meters, but it was a point of pride that the heraldry, text and icons were all quite small. Discretion, after all, was a virtue.

He bowled aside a particularly slow-witted Vgork exchange student as his platform swept through the space between the Faculty Building’s wings and deposited him at his destination. It wasn’t the biggest or most important of the Directorate’s many Colleges, but its prestige had grown substantially over the last two orbits ever since the humans had officially accused that there was a conspiracy lurking in neural cybernetics.

Lor had gone from being a cantankerous purist, isolated and sidelined by his titanium conviction that neural enhancements were a form of cheating and that real Corti ought to rely on their own native brainpower, to somebody of genuine importance. His ideas were gaining traction in a way they had never quite managed before. Students were flocking to his college, which inevitably led to wealth, prestige, influence…and authority.

He stepped off his drone platform and his feet patted and tapped their way across stone flooring and into the Cognition Theatre.

Other species would have called it a Forum, or a House, a Chamber or a Senate. To the Corti, it was an operating theatre where ailing or imperfect propositions were dissected, inspected and either euthanized or else improved upon and discharged in the form of legislation or executive decisions, destined for a higher authority to scrutinize.

He stopped at the door and announced himself. “Lor. Dean of the Varos College.”

The doors—huge, heavy things—swept aside for him and several of the most powerful Corti in the directorate looked up at him. Technically, Lor was among peers as fellow Silver Banners, fellow College Deans, fellow academics. But the fifteen Corti in the Cognition Theatre each held more power in a quiet conversation than Lor had achieved in his career so far.

The First Director blinked at him, a gesture of welcome. “Dean Lor. Your punctuality is commendable,” she said. This was, by Corti standards, a positively glowing reception and Lor bowed shallowly.

“I came directly, First Director Shanl,” he said. Forthright and uninflected, not obsequious. The Directors hadn’t earned their positions through false flattery and wouldn’t respect it in those they summoned to report. “Your message only mentioned a missing human…”

Shanl nodded and returned her attention to the data in front of her. “You are the most influential advocate for deimplantation,” she observed without immediately answering the question. “A heterodox attitude, until recently.”

“How did you rise so high when you endorse such a move?” One of the Second Directors asked. Larfu, Lor remembered. “Cybernetics are the backbone of our export economy. Surely advocating for it was an impediment to your career?”

“I cleave to the truth,” Lor said, and stepped into the middle of the room to join them. “…So far as I can discern it.”

The Directors nodded, and made room for him at the table. Test passed.

“This morning, an incoming Human starship, the…” Shanl scrutinized a note with a distasteful expression as though handling something unhygienic “…’My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’ was subject to unauthorized interference while on approach. Several research vessels which were supposed to be out cataloging samples simultaneously wove a temporal dilation field around it. From the complaints the Humans registered, a senior and potent member of their largest interstellar industrial consortium was abducted, while the ship itself was dumped in interstellar space.”

Larfu indicated a second screen above the table. “We factored the new incident into our probability calculations concerning the Igraen claim. While the diplomatic corps handle the Humans, we have a more pressing concern—the fact that it now seems certain that their claims are correct, and that Corti society is infiltrated at the highest level by this Hierarchy.”

“To be clear, we assigned the claim a high probability as soon as it was first made. Every member of the Directorate was promptly deimplanted as a precaution,” Shanl elaborated. “Our objective now is to sanitize the species, preferable before the Igraens decide to do to us what they did to the Gao.”

“Hence, you,” commented the other Second Director, Morln. The three Third Directors, four Fourth Directors and all the Fifth Directors nodded solemnly.

Lor inwardly congratulated himself on a successful prediction. Outwardly, he gave the data a moment’s intense study and fixed it all in his memory. The Corti had bred eidetic memory into themselves thousands of Orbits ago, so memorizing every detail in front of him involved little more than a glance.

“…I have drawn up possible courses of action,” he said. “We will need to be extremely careful. The abduction of this Human may complicate matters.”

“How so?”

“The plan… relies on their goodwill toward us.”

Shanl inclined her head slightly for a second, then blinked her nictitating membranes and summoned a small stool to sit on, delivered by drone. The remaining Directors followed her example.

“Brief us,” she said.

Lor didn’t sit. Instead he loaded some files from his personal devices into the display and opened them.

“Allow me to introduce you,” he began, “to a colleague of mine by the name of Nofl…”

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Planet Ayma, Uncharted Space, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

“That’s the last crate.”

Xiù stretched her back and looked around as *Misfit*’s dumbwaiter retracted and drew the last of their exploratory camp back up.

Byron Group had reluctantly conceded that their work on Akyawentuo was vitally important and had accepted a contract from Allied Extrasolar Command to make that their primary responsibility, but the Group had held out for two planetary surveys. Misfit was an exploration ship, they had argued, and keeping her grounded on Akyawentuo was a waste of valuable resources.

So they had picked the two best possible candidates and planned two surveys, months apart. The first had been a super-Earth, as big and massive as Akyawentuo but lacking the dense forests that the Ten’Gewek would need.

It had still been earmarked as their future property on the grounds that the People would pretty quickly outstrip the agricultural potential of their homeworld far before humans did—they needed to eat *constantly*—and the new world’s rich open grassy plains would be perfect for raising livestock herds, but they’d left it unnamed. The Ten’Gewek were a long way off even considering the prospect of colonizing another world, and would probably balk at the idea of leaving their gods and ancestral lands behind.

The second planet, however, was the jackpot. It was a sturdy Class Ten with immense oil and gas reserves. If Julian was right, there were oceans of the stuff deep under its sea beds, more than the combined oil fields of all the Earth and Cimbrean combined. In fact there was so much of it down there that whole clades of oceanic microbes had evolved to metabolize the hydrocarbons leaking into the water.

It was easily the most valuable planet they’d discovered, from a purely capitalist point of view. Even the gravity matched Earth’s to within a fraction of a percentage point. As huge as their finder’s bonuses for Aphrodite, Lucent and Akyawentuo had been, this one was the world that had made them all truly wealthy beyond dreaming. In a generation’s time, it might even surpass Cimbrean in both population and prosperity.

They named it Ayma.

Allison gave her a thumbs-up from the airlock. “Last crate. EV-Ten say they’re starting descent.”

EV-10 was Creature of Habit. The moment they’d flung their preliminary report and sensor data back to the MGB offices at Chiune Station on Cimbrean, a call had gone out for oil-industry geologists who wanted a crack at surveying an alien planet. Somehow, the Group had picked out a handful of the most qualified from among the tsunami of applicants, and prepped *Misfit*’s long-term survey sister for action.

It was good to think of her flying again. And with BGEV-12 in final testing back in Omaha it really felt like there was finally somebody to pass the baton to.

Passing Misfit off to a replacement crew was going to hurt, though. She’d been more than a ship, she’d been home. Leaving her behind was going to be like rewinding the calendar by five years, to those first months back on Earth when none of them had known where they were going, what they were doing or how to fit in.

Except…somehow, this time, she was looking forward to figuring it out.

“Babe?” Allison asked, and Xiù shook herself back to the here-and-now.

“Sorry.”

Allison smiled at her, then jerked her head backwards to indicate *Misfit*’s interior. “Shower’s free if you wanna clean up before they arrive.”

Xiù blinked at her, then glanced down at herself. She was, she had to admit, pretty dirty from all the lifting and spending time in the bush. “…Do I smell?”

“Not as bad as Julian.”

There was an indignant “Hey!” from inside the ship. Allison grinned and turned back into the airlock.

“Hon, you’re a meathead who wrestles with gorillas for fun,” she said as she vanished. “It’s okay.”

Xiù giggled and climbed the ladder. Julian and Allison were kissing when she got to the top which always made her feel warm inside too, and just like that her slight attack of melancholy was dispelled.

“I guess he doesn’t smell that bad after all,” she observed drily.

“Babe, get your ass in the shower,” Allison told her.

“Yes ma’am.”

Allison’s “good girl” was slightly muffled, though she was grinning around the kiss.

Twenty minutes later, by some miracle, they’d all managed to take a quick turn through the shower and change into clean dry clothes, which was why the crew of BGEV-10 Creature of Habit found three sharply professional interstellar explorers waiting for them rather than a trio of camp-stinky goof-offs.

EV-10 was a very different machine to EV-11. She was nearly twice the size for a start, and streamlined with a bullet nose and a raked delta wing. Even though the two ships wore the same red-and-silver MBG livery it was hard to picture them being assembled in the exact same facility by the exact same people. Their landing site was a pebble beach with plenty of room for both ships side-by-side, and Creature of Habit settled onto the stones like a VTOL jumbo jet. It was a heck of a sight…but Xiù fancied that she’d have made softer work of the landing.

They lowered the ramp right away and the first down it were Lee, Sullivan and Ackermann, the trio who’d competed against them for the right to crew Misfit.

There were no hard feelings. Well, okay, there had been some hard feelings at first, with Ackermann in particular making the pointed accusation that the better team had lost…but that was all in the past. EV-10 was arguably the more important ship anyway—Misfit was only equipped to find planets. Creature of Habit was equipped to explore them. All the real discoveries on Lucent had come from EV-10.

The two crews had finally had a chance to meet at an MBG party in the Statler Hotel in Folctha. It had been brief and a little tense, but it had opened the door to talking, familiarity and reconciliation. In time, maybe they’d even get to know each other well.

Allison certainly would. She was going to be designing the next-gen ships.

That was all for the future, though. For now, Sullivan—and here was a big difference between EV-10 and EV-11, in that Sullivan was firmly and definitely the captain, their leader and executive—shook their hands, followed by Lee and Ackermann.

“You found a good’n,” Lee commented. “The geosat data alone is a jackpot.”

“You should’ve been there when it started coming in,” Allison said. She gave Julian an affectionate tap on the arm. “This big lunk was giggling.”

“I do not giggle!”

“Yes you do, babe.”

Xiù chimed in. “And it’s adorable.”

Sullivan chuckled, then glanced back up the ramp. The specialists were finally stumbling off the ship in ones and twos, blinking around them in awe at actually standing on an actual alien world and suddenly the rationale behind putting him and his clean-cut compatriots in charge of the ship with passengers became clear. Allison, Julian and Xiù could get away with being informal and unorthodox because it was just them and they clicked. Sullivan and the guys needed to be able to take charge of untrained guests if things went wrong.

“…You’re gonna miss this,” he predicted.

“Life moves on,” Xiù said. “It’s nice that we get to choose when and how. Not everyone has that luxury.”

“You’re still gonna miss it though,” Lee pressed.

“…Yeah.”

“Well, hey…” Ackermann unslung the bag he’d been wearing over one shoulder and presented it. “I know you won’t be, like, formally retired for another month or so, but consider this a retirement gift from us to you. One crew to another.”

Xiù took it with a smile and received a bag that was much heavier than it looked. Inside was a cardboard box, and inside the box…

It was Misfit. Cast in what had to be steel from the weight and carefully painted, engraved, and recreated down to the last perfect detail, complete with the gold nanoparticle coating on the cockpit and observation window.

They cooed over and admired it for some minutes while Sullivan helped the science team navigate the endless perils of a shallow non-slip ramp and take their first awed steps on an exo-world.

“So what’s the plan after you’re happily retired?” he asked, returning to the group once the scientists were in their rhythm of unpacking.

“No rest for the wicked,” Allison said.

“Ambassador Rockefeller wants me to be his representative to the Ten’Gewek,” Julian revealed.

“I’m going to work with the Gaoians,” Xiù said firmly.

“And I’m staying in the Group,” Allison finished. “Clara wants me as technical crew consultant on the ship design team.”

Lee smirked and extended a palm sideways toward Sullivan, who grunted and slapped a couple of folded notes into his palm.

Sullivan’s curiosity couldn’t be contained. “How will you three make it work?”

“Jump portals,” Julian pointed out. “Cimbrean, Earth, Gao, Akyawentuo, they’re all linked and on a schedule now. And if the Group gets permission to build a station on Akyawentuo like they’ve been asking…”

“And eventually, some of the People will probably visit Cimbrean,” Allison added.

“We don’t know anything about that yet, though,” Xiù said.

“Yeah. There’s a lot to do.”

Lee chuckled “Can’t fault you folks on your work ethic,” he said.

“Even if we have been standin’ here shootin’ the breeze this whole time,” Sullivan pointed out.

His sweeping hand drew their attention to the five scientists whose presence was kind of the whole point of bringing EV-10 out there, and contrived to suggest that the conversation needed to come to an end.

There were selfies and autographs, quickly. A few shaken hands, a few kind words, and…that was it. Their last mission ended with kind of a fizzle…But Xiù was more than happy with fizzle. No excitement, no explosions, no killer alien robots or Hunters or interstellar wars. No choking on vacuum, no new scars, no more death.

It felt genuinely weird to think that they’d actually achieved something without it all going to Hell halfway. Ending a chapter of her life with a full stop rather than an exclamation was honestly a novelty and a luxury.

They stuck around for dinner though, or at least for sausages on skewers over the fire with campfire coffee and s’mores and a tiny toast to a successful mission, future endeavors and stuff like that. Not enough to even work up the smallest buzz…but enough to mark the occasion.

For Xiù, settling in her flight seat was a melancholy feeling. Everything about it felt special now, the precise contouring of it to make it fit her perfectly and to place all the controls in exactly the right place, the greeting card with its cartoon caricatures of herself, Allison and Julian that she’d stuck up on the wall to her right, the specific and familiar way that Misfit shook herself awake and made ready to fling herself out of the gravity well again.

To think…she might never sit here ever again. She wanted to tear up, to choke and hold on.

Instead, she selected their recall beacon codes, ran through the checklist… and left.

It was time for another adventure.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Planet Akyawentuo, The Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Professor Daniel Hurt

Writing was infinitely easier with a desk and keyboard. Sure, there were people in life who could scrawl out a book in a paper journal while sitting under a tree, but that just gave Daniel hand cramps. And tapping away at a touch-screen was no good at all, because whatever he was writing crammed itself into a tiny fraction of the screen and his fingers seemed to miss the letters.

A good keyboard—and Daniel had had one imported from Cimbrean for exactly this reason—was a joy. He could write for hours, given a supply line of coffee. Once upon a time, he’d have been supplied with cigarettes too, and even though he’d quit years ago he still felt the occasional twinge of craving.

He stood up and walked around to drive it off, reviewing his most recent paragraphs.

‘Inequality is mandatory. That is, it won’t go away no matter how hard we try to stamp it out, because somebody has to do the stamping, and that person will have authority that another will lack. It certainly exists in Ten’Gewek culture despite their total lack of ethnic diversity, class structure or wealth. Some men are “chosen by the gods” to be Given-Men and that’s the last word. It’s a biological function exclusive to middle-aged men, meaning there will never be a Given-Woman, or a young Given-Man.

‘A Given-Man is a genuinely alarming specimen. A full-sized man of the People is by himself a worthy challenge to a fully-grown silverback gorilla. A newly-transformed Given-Man is vastly more impressive and has many years ahead of him to gather strength. If that first-season specimen was to ever tangle with, say, a bear of the deep Alaskan frontier, my money would be on the Given-Man. They have a tremendous inequality of strength compared even to an exceptional Ten’Gewek man, and they are a people whose adolescents of either sex would certainly overwhelm adult male chimpanzees. And yet, the People aren’t generally unhappy with the inherent unfair lottery of this system.

‘Why?’

Daniel mused on that single syllable as he ambled over to the campfire. He cleared his head by setting the tablet aside and brewing up a fresh pot of coffee the old way, in a metal pot pushed into the warm ashes at the fire’s edge, and gazed meditatively into the glowing coals as it brewed. They almost had a heartbeat, he noticed. Their glow pulsed slightly as some internal quirk of air circulation drew first more then slightly less air into their midst.

He grabbed the tablet again and used the touch keyboard to sketch out the thrust of his argument.

‘Because happiness doesn’t come from wealth, but from purpose.’

He was interrupted away from writing any more by a message ping as their “mailbox” communications array took receipt of the hourly data swap from Cimbrean and passed on his emails. He opened his inbox and grinned, put the tablet in standby mode, and stood up.

His camp—and it had definitely become his camp, now that Misfit had flown off to Gods-knew-where and the JETS team were busy setting up their training facility—reminded him of playing Dungeons and Dragons in university. His friend Paul had described a crooked wizard’s tower perched high on a crag overlooking a dirt-poor pig-farming village, whose lone occupant was surrounded in arcane paraphernalia that the local peasants didn’t understand and whom the peasants treated with a curious blend of awe, fear, dismissal and confusion.

It wasn’t a tower, but Daniel’s camp certainly had that same otherworldly nature to it. Here he was, brewing a potion and weaving a spell of light. His beard had certainly grown over the last year, so really all he needed now was a pointy hat and a raven.

He chuckled to himself and strolled to the edge of the camp which was, yes, a little way from the Ten’Gewek village and high on a bare spot where the curve of the land kept the prevailing wind at bay and also gave him a breathtaking view every morning.

He’d honestly never been happier in his life.

He’d certainly never been fitter—living in supergravity had been aching, agonizing hell for several months, but he’d adapted, grown, firmed up under Playboy and Tiny’s cheery, painful coaching. He’d probably pay for it in later years but right now whenever he took a quick jaunt back through the Array to visit Earth or Cimbrean, he found himself walking down the street like there were springs in his toes.

Oh, sure, Civilization had its comforts. Hot water, lattes, jazz…But there was definitely something more fulfilling about those things when they were rare. And he’d been astonished during his last trip to Earth when a young woman had actually checked him out, a hitherto unheard-of event.

Good for the ego, good for the soul. All the more reason to keep coming back here to live in the dirt with a bunch of cave-monkeys who still hadn’t quite obsoleted their flint-knapping skills.

In fact…

He checked his boots for any pesky critters that might have decided to overnight in them, pulled them on and ambled down into the valley toward the forge with his hands wrapped around the steaming mug of campfire coffee to warm them against the morning chill.

Vemik’s forge was easily the biggest structure the Ten’Gewek had ever built, especially if one included the fenced compound out the back where the charcoal-burning and smelting happened. It was mostly just a roof of foliage thatch on a large scaffold to keep the rain out of the flames and off the tools, plus a windbreak, but it was warm, dry and rank with the smells of smoke, hot metal and sweat.

Vemik was there, of course, hammering away at a batch of wrought iron. The work had done much to fill him out, especially across the shoulders, though the constant smoke and heat had also colored his hide—apparently it made him look slightly older to the Ten’Gewek woman, in all the good ways. Outside of the occasional village party, though…he only had eyes for his Singer.

He looked up and gave Daniel a nod of welcome, before gesturing with his hand. His apprentice—a boy who hadn’t yet taken his Rite of Manhood—promptly flipped the sullen glowing lump of iron over on the anvil with a deft heave of two poles.

“Sky-Thinker,” Daniel greeted him, and took a close look at the iron. Ten’Gewek steelwork was getting more and more competent by the month, and this latest project had all the hallmarks of late-night ‘tinkering’ and mad inspiration.

If only the People would live closer to running water. They would have had water wheel-powered trip hammers by now. That seemed to go against their ethos in several ways, though—they preferred using their own strength where they could, and they hated bodies of water of any kind to the point where even small, shallow ponds drew their suspicion. They got their drinking water from Ketta trees, from tiny mountain streams, and from collecting rainwater as it poured off their thatched huts.

“Professor Daniel!” Vemik beamed toothily at him. He’d grown up considerably in the past year, including finally managing to lose his dogged w-lisp. His sideburns would have been longer too except that he’d managed to sizzle them short a few weeks previously, not that he seemed to care.

His English, meanwhile, was approaching full fluency. “Good morning. It’s good to see you!”

“Good morning,” Daniel replied. He knew Vemik had been up all night nursing the smelt and would probably crash hard once this project was finished. Then he’d sleep, eat a large meal, hunt a large meal during which some more inspiration would smite him and he’d come crashing back into the forge to make it live. “It’s a big day.”

“Is it?” Vemik’s tail twitched as he laid into the iron with his hammer again. “What day?”

“I just got a message from Allison, Julian and Xiù. They should be returning today.”

Vemik uttered a delighted hooting sound and gave the iron a gleeful blow. “Good news! Did they find anything good?”

“Oh yes. Very much so.”

He settled against a workbench—Vemik had invented the wedge technique for splitting wood into flat planks all by himself a few months ago—and watched the process of smithing.

“Found what?” Vemik asked, as his apprentice flipped the bloom again.

“A planet with no People, but lots of useful things. Not far from here, in interstellar terms.”

“Hmm. In-ter-stell-lar,” Vemik mulled the word over, then translated it into Peoplespeak with a compound word. [all-the-steps-between-stars]. Difficult word in any language.”

“Only for you, Sky-Thinker,” Daniel grinned at him. Vemik huffed the very specific almost-trill that said he was amused by the tease, but was certainly going to be re-exerting his physical superiority over the old man when his hands weren’t full. The People were like that, intrinsically kinetic.

Which…Daniel had found over the last year, to his surprise, that he didn’t really mind their very physical nature. It wasn’t like being trapped with a whole civilization of locker-room jocks at all, instead he’d learned how to enjoy pretty much constant bodily contact of some kind.

“What useful things?” Vemik asked.

“Metal ores, interesting plants and animals… something called oil. Lots of that.”

“Oil means…what does oil mean?”

“That is a word that means many things, Vemik. It can mean the liquid you get at the top when you boil werne bones. It can also mean something that’s black and sticky, like burned sap. What it means here is closer to that, but there are many, many things you can do with oil. Like, you can make the stuff that Julian’s foot is made from.”

“We have oil here?”

“You do. But it’s yours. My people want more, and we aren’t going to Take yours.”

Vemik have Daniel a complicated look. It was the look the People often used when they were utterly uncomprehending of why the humans were doing what they did, but were thankful anyway.

“You could,” he pointed out again. “We would, if a neighbor tribe had it.”

“And so would some humans. But we won’t. We have rules.”

“I know. We are…very lucky we met you. [Gods-many-blessed], I think.”

A new voice joined the conversation. “More than we know.”

The two men and the boy turned. The Singer and her apprentice Dancer were waiting at the forge’s threshold. It was very much a male space, and while the Singer was empowered to go wherever she wanted into the worlds of women and men alike, her Dancer hadn’t yet taken a Rite of Manhood. She wouldn’t enter the forge without invitation any more than a man would enter a birthing-hut.

Vemik waved them easily inside, slipped his tail around the Singer’s waist and tickled the baby she was carrying under its chin.

“More than you know?” Daniel asked.

“…Word come from Hoeff,” the Singer told him. “They found…he called it ‘Core-tie bunker.’ Also said ‘tell the fucking egghead to turn his radio on’.”

She trilled as Daniel scrambled for the radio in his pocket. Sure enough, it was turned off. He couldn’t remember when he’d done that.

“Uh…Chimp, this is, uh, ‘Nutty’. I guess. Uh…sorry. Got your message. Something about a Corti bunker?”

“Nutty, Chimp. Thank you for joining us on this outstanding morning. I can’t fucking stand how goddamned pleased I am today. Can you tell?”

Daniel grimaced even as every Ten’Gewek grin in the room got wider and more amused. The People got sarcasm, and Hoeff was…honestly? The ‘Hans’ and ‘Franz’ act that Walsh and Julian did could be intimidating, sure. But when Hoeff was angry, everyone was on-edge. Even Yan gave him deference. Something about the intense little man just screamed intent.

“…And yes, confirmed Corti research expedition. Old vault full’a tech, probably predating the Big Hotel presence. Tiny picked up a radio emission three hours ago. Weak as shit ‘cuz the power’s almost gone, but we tripped over it. Grab your tools and meet us up here.”

“Can I sleep first?” Vemik wanted to come. He desperately wanted to, but there was a certain tired slack to his muscles that spoke volumes.

“How long?”

“Maybe…four hours? That’s a finger of sun, I think?”

Daniel nodded and keyed his radio again. “Chimp, Sky-Thinker wants to come, but he’s been beating steel all night. He’s asking for four hours.”

“He can come later, this won’t be over quick. Find Yan and ask if he’ll carry your stuff. And your radio, too. He’s better with it.”

Hoeff was being extra salty today, and it couldn’t all be the radio. Normally, he’d have taken that with, yes, some salt but this was full-blown anger. That wasn’t a good sign.

At that moment Yan ambled over and crowded Vemik’s apprentice out of the small space. “I heard my name on [magic-voice-stone].”

“Radio,” corrected Vemik.

Yan gave him a tusky grin. Here in the forge was Vemik’s kingdom, and he tolerated a little more back-talk. [“I like our words better!”]

“I was showing Hoeff and the others where some of the medicine-herbs grow and we found…a thing. Like a stone hut underground, full of sky-devices,” the Singer told him.

“A vault full of tech,” Yan corrected. [“I know the words too. I just like ours better.”]

[“…They want] Professor Daniel.” the Singer finished.

Yan switched back to English for reasons only he understood. “That is good. How far away?”

“Flat-top mountain.”

Yan sighed. “So, half the day. Okay. You go get things, Professor. I help Vemik beat last of steel, so he can go sleep. Then he come meet us later, yes?”

Somehow, Daniel knew that Vemik wouldn’t be taking the full four hours he’d asked for. But the Sky-Thinker nodded and accepted the suggestion by gesturing for his apprentice to pull the bloom back out of the coals where it had been staying warm. With Yan’s help it went much quicker. He had his own hammer in the corner which Vemik could barely lift, let alone wield, and with it he was able to do in literally a minute what took Vemik about twenty, or his apprentice an hour. It wasn’t well-formed, but it didn’t need to be—they just needed the carbon beat out of it before it cooled and for that task, power was everything.

Daniel meanwhile ran back up to his camp. Ran! A year ago, he’d have been winded and gasping from just walking up the hill. Now, he whirled around the camp grabbing his field research kit, dry socks, some rations and his water filter bottle, then jogged back down to the village.

Yan had finished with the stack just as Daniel returned with his backpack of things and Yan’s biggest water-skin, which he’d filled up on the way back to the forge by tapping a Ketta tree.

It was the little things, really, and Yan grunted his thanks. “Ready?”

Dan shouldered his pack and made sure the straps were tightened properly so that its weight wasn’t hanging painfully on his shoulders. He stamped his boots to check they weren’t rubbing, then unrolled the hat he kept in one pocket and jammed it on his head. “Ready.”

Yan trilled in his contrabass voice, then patted his knives, and grabbed the little travel bag he carried with him everywhere. “You humans carry too many things I think. We go now.”

Without a further word, he swaggered out of the forge. Daniel sketched a little wave of parting to Vemik, the Singer, the Dancer and the apprentice and followed after him. Yan wasn’t difficult to follow—humans had longer, straighter legs and could outpace any Ten’Gewek on the ground no problem, even if they knuckle-walked.

It was still going to be a long walk, though.

In his head, he kept writing his book.

‘Happiness doesn’t come from wealth, but from purpose. Give somebody money, and what do they do with it? They want to spend it on something meaningful…’ he began.

Date Point 15y4m2w AV

HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Sergeant Ian Wilde

“Alright lads. Last one in buys the first round.”

Wilde had always had an ambitious streak, in a weird way. He wasn’t really interested in being rich or famous, but whatever he did he wanted to do at his absolute best. That was what had attracted him to serving in the first place: the Royal Marines had run a recruitment campaign challenging him to go beyond his own limits, and that had just… sung to him. Lured him in, and when those ads had turned out to be the honest truth, he’d stuck and stayed. Passing the notorious “Hell Week,” commando training, making the cut for spaceship service…

It all scratched the same itch, and JETS was just the next step up that endless hill. He wasn’t sure what was at the top or if he’d ever make it, but he was bloody well going to go as high as he could.

And any JETS team he led was bloody well going to be the best, too. There were four, and Wilde’s Team Two prided themselves on setting the standard for the other three to aim at. So the fact that Team Four had beaten their time in the tactical course obviously wasn’t going to stand.

The new time to beat was fifty-seven point oh-six seconds.

His teammates were all Americans, sadly. One SEAL in the form of Petty Officer Third Class Jason Hobbs, one Ranger as embodied by Sergeant Travis Wright, and their engineer, Specialist Nicolás Garcia. Good guys, a little short on appreciation for anything British, but brothers nonetheless.

They’d worked pretty hard on Garcia, on the grounds that he’d been the one holding them up a little in the last few runs. No blame attached, his training just hadn’t focused on that stuff before, but now there was team pride on the line.

“How’s that meant to be motivating anyhow?” Wright asked. “We all pay fer a round anyway, so what’s it matter who goes first?”

Wilde snorted. “Just get your arse on the line.”

Wright chuckled. “Assing the line, sergeant.”

They lined their toes up on the starting line, checked their MILES systems were online, then gave the nod to today’s supervisor.

Wilde liked Colour Sergeant Murray. Once you understood his ways, the guy was actually amazingly talkative: he just didn’t use words much. Right now he ran an eye over the four of them, nodded subtly, and started the course up.

“Time starts when you breach,” he told them, and stepped back to watch the show.

Wilde took a deep breath, rolled his neck to release a click in it, then dropped into business mode. “Alright… Go!”

Garcia had the most universal skeleton key in the world, a shotgun. The poor lock didn’t stand a chance, and the four holographic foes in the room beyond were serviced before they’d even finished turning round. Lines, motion, angles. Wilde knew his place in the pattern and slotted into it neatly, felt the flow click, felt his team move with the kind of precision they’d practiced for literal months to achieve. Whenever Wilde put himself where he needed to be, the others were there too, nobody late, nobody early, everybody fast.

Breach, in, movement, service, circle, service, clear, next…

Three rooms. Four rooms. Beep.

“TIME!”

He let a breath out, and the four of them grinned at each other. They didn’t know if they’d beaten the course time yet, but they did know that they’d just set a personal best. They could feel it.

Murray for his part took his sweet time in sauntering over to give them the final score.

“No’ bad,” he commented, and the twinkle in his eyes said ‘bloody excellent in fact.’ “…by JETS standards.”

“Yeah, yeah. We ain’t interested in ‘yer big hero HEAT times,” Hobbs said. “How’d we do?”

Murray’s smile got a little wider. “…fifty-six point seven four.”

Garcia whooped. “Back on top!”

“Fuckin’ A!”

Wilde grinned. “Nice one.”

“You know Team Four’ll want another go, aye?” Murray pointed out.

“Bring it on,” Wright said. “Best team’ll…” he trailed off. “…Win. Heads up, captain’s comin’.”

The five of them turned. Captain Costello never managed to not look like he was on his way from something to something else with fifty plates spinning around him. His permanent expression was that of a perpetually busy man, but that probably came with the territory. There were other officers finally coming through the JETS and HEAT training pipelines so maybe he’d start getting a moment’s peace here and there in the near future, but for now he was about the busiest man on the base.

“Afternoon, sir,” Murray greeted him.

“New record?” Costello asked warmly. Wilde would say that for him, even under endless demands on his time, the captain was a nice chap.

“Aye.”

“Good! But I should note that we need to start preparing for your offworld survival training. I’m told Chief Petty Officer Hoeff along with a Mister Etsicitty will be here to explain the program next week.”

“That can’t come soon enough,” Wilde agreed.

“…Along with a special envoy, from what I’m told.” Costello grinned like he was enjoying the rare opportunity to be mysterious.

“…Sir?”

“All I will say, is that I doubt you will ever forget him. Anyway. You’re the only team cleared for operations on Class nine and below and we have a… situation. Might turn into a mission, might not. I wanted to give you a heads-up so you can be ready if it does.” Costello consulted some notes as a reminder. “…Hephaestus sent one of their ships to the Origin system, the Corti homeworld. Some big business deal they were hoping to negotiate with the Directorate, I gather. And instead the executive director they sent along to start the negotiations was abducted this morning, right off the ship. Either the Corti are being uncharacteristically stupid, or Big Hotel are up to something.”

“That…doesn’t sound very good, sir. You want we should rest up and recover?”

“Yeah. Get your gear, be ready to move on short notice.”

Wilde nodded his obedience but grumbled internally. “Right. Let’s go get cleaned up lads. Consider yourselves on-call starting now.” It would be good to be deployed and be useful. Every team needed that to really come together.

But he had really been looking forward to that beer, too.

Oh well. There was always later.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Planet Akyawentuo, The Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Professor Daniel Hurt

“My God, look at this! They had boats! And wheeled carts! And writing, mathematics…”

The Corti bunker was quite a small affair, in fact. How they’d built it unobserved and undetected, Daniel didn’t know but it consisted of little more than a pair of sturdy metal doors, and behind that a room full of computer equipment with a living annex fit for three pint-sized gray researchers. There was a basic quantum power stack buried in the floor, which Walsh had managed to successfully jump-start with his own portable solar power collector and an alarming moment involving sparks and smoke.

Nobody human had the first idea how quantum power stacks worked or what fuelled them, but they were pretty damn convenient. They produced power from…somewhere. Not a lot, but enough to run a facility for some time, and apparently they lasted well. That little stack had been doggedly keeping the bunker running on emergency minimum for decades.

Once things were fully up and running again, logging into the Corti computers had been easy. They weren’t even password-protected, and their memory banks were replete with a treasure trove the virtual equal of the one that made Howard Carter so famous. Hundreds of hours of high-definition 3D video, millions of still images, tens of thousands of scanned samples, untold libraries of sound recordings…

The ceremonial armor was particularly impressive. One of the high-definition images Daniel had successfully recovered showed off an impressive cohort of Given-Men, each clad neck to knees in riveted steel and leather and armed with long-handled straight swords that looked like they could just about bisect a bear.

And they in turn answered to a king. A real king, wearing bronze and gold and dispatching wisdom from a throne of wood and copper, with his long crimson crest intricately braided and woven with decorative jeweled fabric.

There were Singers and Dancers, a whole parade of them raising their voices as one to greet the morning sun and weaving a tapestry of sound the likes of which Daniel hadn’t ever heard in church. Not worse or better, but very different.

There was a market draped with dyed cloths and the photography was so excellent that Daniel could almost smell the spices. There was a gymnasium of sorts, full of grappling fun. There was a school, with eager, bald young Ten’Gewek children listening rapt as a teacher read them stories and young adults with extremely Vemik-like expressions debating furiously over some philosophical, mechanical or mathematical point of interest.

There was civilization. And from the map data, it was unquestionably the same one that had vanished in nuclear fire when the Hierarchy came. It was like watching real video footage from Pompeii.

Yan was very, very quiet. The kind of quiet he only managed when he was truly angry.

“This…we did this?” He asked eventually, as Daniel was reviewing the Corti zoologist’s notes on Ten’Gewek mathematics. Their approach had revolved around geometry, and they had devised a remarkably elegant proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem considering their working medium had been damp sand. “They…The Big Enemy Took this from us?”

“Yes,” Daniel said softly.

“When?”

Daniel checked the Corti dates, and compared them to a mental conversion table. “About…Let’s see, two hundred and twelve Origin years, seventy Earth years for every hundred Origin years…sixteen Earth years for every ten Akyawentuo years…Fuck, is that divide or multiply by one point six, or…?”

Walsh cleared his throat. “A hunnerd an’ twenty-one local years, Professor.”

‘Tiny’ had a truly unsettling propensity for understated genius. And Yan these days had a better understanding of base-ten numbers; he could write them out, too, which he did in mid-air with his finger and his lips moving.

“That is…old,” he declared after thinking about it. “But not gods old.”

“Yeah, well. Best guess on the population…” Walsh waved a hand at another screen. The Corti, inconveniently, used a base-twelve number system, “They figger between the inland sea civilization here, the river valley civilization up north, the forest tribes an’ the mountain Clans there were about two, two-an’-a-half million.”

Yan scratched at his crest. “Two…million,” He said, carefully. Reasonably fluent in English or not, lateral consonants were still tricky for him. “How many…circles? Circle-things. How many in number?” Daniel made note of that question; Yan didn’t just understand the numbers, he understood the theory of the numbering system, and had asked for an order of magnitude to compare. The Ten’Gewek really did have an exceptionally rational way of thinking, sometimes.

“…Six.”

They watched as Yan traced out such a number in the air with his finger, then…

“So many.” There was a long, awkward pause. “We are… four circles left. Yes? For every [one-person] now, we were a whole tribe then?”

“…Yes. Just under twenty thousand today, as best as we can figure.”

“…three circles. [Anger-killed].”

“Murdered. There was no anger, this wasn’t…” Daniel gritted his teeth. He was getting angry too, deep in his anthropologist’s soul. “…They weren’t angry at you. They just saw you as a…pest.”

“Pest,” Yan repeated hollowly. Daniel found he couldn’t muster the courage to look at the Given-Man’s expression.

After a silent moment, Yan stood up and headed for the exit. Hoeff and Tiny got the hell out of his way as he grabbed one of the massive vault doors, rusted by time, foliage and weather into a pretty solid unit, and wrenched it aside, slamming it back into its slot with an agonized squeal of elderly metal and the crunch of decrepit hydraulics finally giving up their ghost.

The sunlight cast his shadow on the wall, and he was gone.

Daniel dared to breath again. “…Gods and spirits.”

“Even they’re prolly stayin’ outta Yan’s way right now,” Hoeff remarked. “Tiny, go keep an eye on him. Let him get it outta his system.”

“Go be his wrasslin’ dummy. Got it, Chief.” Walsh sighed, resigned to his fate, and followed the distant sound of Yan taking out his anger on anything in the vicinity.

Hoeff slumped down in a Corti-sized chair next to Daniel, and managed to make it look almost normal-sized. He wasn’t a large man at all. “About where were they at, in our terms?”

“…Ancient Greece?” Daniel hazarded. “Their mathematics was certainly there. But there’s a lot the Corti didn’t record.”

“Like what?”

“Size of the slave population, if there was one. How the king became the king, what role other Given-Men filled in their society…I see fruits and roots being sold in this marketplace image, but there’s no data on their agriculture.”

“Maybe they didn’t raise crops?” Hoeff suggested. “They seem pretty meat-oriented. Hell, they’ve even managed to get me to gain ten pounds.”

“Maybe. But what I take from it is that these researchers weren’t here for very long. Their data covers only a few weeks of observations.”

“Didn’t take Hotel long to notice, huh?” Hoeff sat back in the chair and swung his boots up onto an unimportant surface. He fished a foil pack of blueberries from a pocket and tore it open. How he could be so small and so ravenous was a constant source of amazement.

“I suspect we’ll never know exactly what happened,” Daniel said. “The last entry in the log is routine, cataloguing samples. Maybe there’s something hidden in the facility’s security systems but I wouldn’t know how to begin accessing those…Goddammit.”

“What?”

“Just…look at this. Authentic pre-Contact Ten’Gewek alphabet. A fully encoded translation matrix for both written and verbal media.” Daniel waved a hand at an image he’d found. “They wove their family histories into blankets. Weaving! The People we know wear hide, and not much of it either. Weaving means they were either cultivating a plant like linen or cotton, or they were rearing woolly livestock.”

Hoeff bounced up and ambled over to the screen, intuited its controls and started flicking through photos. “Hey prof, you notice anything ‘bout these folks?”

“I noticed a lot of things. What did you notice?”

Hoeff looked like his fun had been spoiled, but he pressed forward. “They’re small. All of ‘em, ‘cept the Given-Men. And even they’re—”

“Yes. Next to the Given-Men that we know, they’re an unimpressive bunch… Hmm.” Daniel stood up and paced as he thought. Julian had said something about a conversation he had with Yan once. Something about Den Given-Man’s tribe, and how they had had once traded with People near the river delta, deep in the time of so many grandfathers.

He found a crowd shot and scrutinized it. The People on his screen were undeniably more…gracile. Their legs were straighter, their tails shorter and slimmer. A few obviously grown men were walking around with crests that were pale to the point of being straw blond. The faces were different, too. Narrower. Smaller teeth, bigger eyes. The fingers were slimmer with less pronounced clawlike fingernails, better suited for delicate work. Interestingly, the skulls seemed proportionately smaller too.

“…Hell. Julian’s hypothesis was right.”

Hoeff looked up from studying an interesting example of a native sword. “Hey?”

“Julian once suggested to me that maybe our People are the Ten’Gewek equivalent of Neanderthals. They’re…very close to what we think we knew about them. Physically robust, rational, intensely tribal and individualistic. He’d noticed their relative cranial capacity was a little greater than the skulls we found, too.”

Hoeff swiped on to another image. At a glance it looked like some kind of animal sacrifice ceremony. “So what does this mean for our guys?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. Arguably, it means that this isn’t their heritage. But at the same time it is.” Daniel sighed and shut off the screen he’d been flipping through. “Reviewing all this would take a team of post-grads a whole semester, and they could all write their doctorates on the implications.”

“Well, we’ve got you and however long it takes for Yan to cool off,” Hoeff told him. “In the meantime, since Playboy is off at his mansion or whatever the fuck, that leaves you the head of our little mission, here. So says the Ambassador, anyway.”

“They’re coming back today.”

“That’s nice. Here and now, this is your job.” Hoeff stood up. “I’ma go check on ‘em. You… think.”

Daniel sighed. Hoeff was possibly the most unsubtle little hairy troglodyte he’d ever known, for all his oddball charm. He was right, though. There was no time for nuanced academia here, now was a time to parse the new information into something the People could pick up and build on.

So. Write a book. Daniel sprang to his feet and retrieved his pack, opened his word processor and started sketching out thoughts.

Of course, there was still the echo of the book he was already writing bouncing around in there, so the first theme that sprang to mind was purpose. What purpose could he extract from his data which might contribute to Ten’Gewek well-being?

And, going forward, what insights could he extract which might be relevant to the human condition?

He pondered the questions for a moment, and then began to write.

Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Vedregnenug

The surprise, from Vedreg’s perspective, was that he largely felt… He felt well.

Not happy. Happy was an active emotion that nobody could possibly sustain indefinitely. And certainly he had felt deeply *un*happy at times over the last few years. The slaughter of his own homeworld, the genocide of the Gao, not knowing if or when the two remaining Guvnuragnaguvendrugun planets would be targeted…

And yet all of the emotions such events whipped up in him were ocean froth above deep, tranquil, warm waters. Deep in his belly, Vedreg was at peace in a way that his careers as a lawyer, a politician and later a refugee simply had never achieved.

The simplicity of his role had that effect. He was paid to think, deep and methodically and thoroughly. While the Humans bubbled away like a chemical factory on the brink of disaster and churned out clouds of ideas and rivers of insight, all of it came to Vedreg who spent his waking hours—and his waking hours were much longer than a Human’s—taking them apart and mercilessly exposing every flaw he could find.

It was a wonderful balm, knowing that Humans weren’t perfect. They were merely very, very good, and his mind was the crucible in which their flawed products were purified.

Lewis was his favorite. Lewis came up with new ideas like a growing Guvnurag shed fur, and there was usually some sense to them.

A lot of the time though, it was buried beneath a thick crust of what could only be described as Lewis.

“But why make it now?” Vedreg asked him.

SAM answered on its creator’s behalf. “No Time Like The Present!”

Lewis just shrugged. “I dunno, dude. It’s just a science fiction thing, you know? Fuckin’… Robby the Robot and Cortana and C-3PO. Lotta stories out there with talking technology in ‘em. Just seems…wrong to send somethin’ like the Coltainers out there an’ they’re just dumb machines. Faceless, y’know? These things’re gonna be findin’ an’ preppin’ planets for hundreds of years, it just don’t seem right for them to be…things.”

He trailed off. Vedreg’s usual cool stare had got him to ramble as it always did but sometimes, when he knew he was being more sentimental than logical, Lewis would talk himself out of an idea without Vedreg’s input.

“…Or because I could,” he suggested lamely.

“That seems uncharacteristic of you, Lewis,” Vedreg pointed out. “Normally you throw away nearly as many ideas as you produce.”

“Yeah, because I can see the obvious flaws. And I can see the obvious flaws in somethin’ like SAM…” Lewis cleared his throat. “I just… I got this nagging feeling like it’s important, dude.”

“By how long would it set back the Coltainer deployment?” Vedreg asked.

“…Depends.”

Vedreg’s chromatophores developed a faint impatient scarlet tinge. “On…?”

“We got three days until Zero One rolls outta the nanofac. Right now, SAM is just a really efficient stimulus-response engine. In theory, we can teach him an’ teach him an’ teach him until he’d pass the Turing test. Uh, that’s—”

“I know the Turing test.” Interruption didn’t come naturally to Vedreg, but it was the only effective way to break through Lewis’ relentless speech patterns, so he’d developed it as a skill. “How much could you populate in three days?”

“…Eh. It’d barely make a difference.”

“And what concrete, predictable benefit might be gained from delaying the release until you have a more completely populated SAM?”

Lewis sighed and developed the hunched, sulky posture he always did when one of his toy ideas was being torn apart. “…That’s just it, dude. The best I got for ya is a gut check. It don’t feel right. Like… I dunno. I keep imagining someday we might need’ta actually ask a Coltainer to stop all nice-like, y’know? Like, maybe just popping the self-destruct wouldn’t be the right thing and we’d wanna talk it down…I’m bein’ a fuckin’ mad scientist aren’t I?”

“A little.” Amused violet shone on Vedreg’s face and flanks. He’d watched a few B-movies with his old friend by now and at least felt equipped to understand Igor jokes nowadays. Lewis had something that no cackling castle-dwelling villainous doctor ever enjoyed though: A functioning sense of when he was being hopelessly irrational.

“Can’t help it. This is like… my life’s work is about to go flyin’ off the assembly line, dude. Literal change-the-fate-of-the-galaxy-forever kinda shit. An’ I just keep comin’ back to a question Kirk asked.”

“What question?”

“…What next?” Lewis gave Vedreg a slightly desperate look and shrugged. “Like…the whole point’a the Coltainer was to get our eggs way the hell outta one basket ‘cuz I figured Earth was fucked sooner or later. Only I was wrong there, they actually managed to hold the fuckin’ line. And now expansion isn’t a survival strategy, it’s a winnin’ strategy. And now the project’s done and about to fly an’ it’s like… ‘Hold the fuck up, dude. Your flight just landed but you don’t have cash for a cab.’ What am I gonna do next?”

“Why Not Take Up Yoga?” SAM asked.

“…Thanks, SAM.”

Vedreg rumbled thoughtfully to himself and examined Lewis’ disjointed, incomplete and half-hearted documentation on the SAM project again.

“…What could SAM do?” He asked. “In the long term?”

Lewis’ hands never sat still if he could help it, and right now they fluttered wildly around as he answered. “What couldn’t he do? Font of knowledge, companionship, seamless organic/synthetic interfacing? I dunno. That’s kinda the point, dude. I don’t know what he could do, so I wanna find out!”

Inwardly, it sounded to Vedreg like Lewis was completely at a loose end and looking for anything to occupy his attention. Outwardly, he selected a more diplomatic phrasing.

“You have worked on the Coltainers for years,” he pointed out. “And if you will take relationship advice from a friend…”

“Right. Lucy…” Lewis went red in the face and cleared his throat. “Should… probably involve her, huh? Or do something for her or…”

“Maybe she would be a good project for you?” Vedreg suggested. “You have worked hard for your whole species. I suggest now is the time to think smaller…and perhaps seek inspiration in the more personal things.”

Lewis gave SAM’s slowly tumbling icosahedral interface a long stare, then nodded. “SAM. Save state and close application.”

“Time For Nap-Nap. Good Night, Lewis.”

The room seemed…emptier without it. Strange, that. But for the moment, Lewis seemed a little less troubled.

“Right…” he said. “…Actually, I’m just gonna go home and spend time with her.”

“Do so, my friend,” Vedreg intoned. “I will…think. Perhaps I can come up with a more permanent answer for you.”

Lewis gave him a huge hug, then left. Alone in the mad scientist’s sanctum, Vedreg waved his facial tentacles thoughtfully and a bolt of green shot down his body in the Guvnurag answer to a sniff.

He needed something better than SAM for Lewis to work on. The world did. And frankly, he had no idea where to start. But there was one person aboard the station who did.

It was time for another conversation with Vakno.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Technical Sergeant Timothy (Tiny) Walsh

Yan was a muscle-thinker, not a head-thinker, which made him Tiny’s kinda person… even if it meant enduring being tied up in pretzels by way of stress relief.

It took the big guy about twenty minutes to get all his mixed emotions over the bunker out of his system, which mostly meant short bouts of exquisitely painful wrestling interrupted by charging off, throwing rocks, uprooting trees, and generally wreaking havoc in the immediate vicinity. Then he’d charge back, tackle… He managed not to break Walsh. Just.

He did, however, effectively transform Tiny into a giant bruise, as he got increasingly carried away. Walsh was already getting worried, but the real moment when things went too far was genuinely fucking terrifying.

Yan seemed to forget who he was and where they were for just a second: He reared back, bared his fangs with an enraged howl, and sank them right into Walsh’s shoulder.

Yan’s fangs were huge, easily big enough to tear the throat out of a Werne, and they sank deep. If Walsh had panicked and jerked, they might well have torn his shoulder to ribbons. He didn’t, though. Whatever presence of mind he had that froze him up kept those four deep puncture wounds from transforming into a terrible injury. Nonetheless that was, at last, the step too far that finally made Walsh cry out in agony.

His yell snapped Yan back to the present. He let go, seemingly stunned by himself, detangled, stood and backed off. Walsh was in so much pain there were tears in his eyes.

Yan…freaked out. [“Godshit! I’m sorry fuck are you okay!? Did I—”]

“N…nngh. No. I’m okay…get my first aid pack.”

[“Okay okay where—here!”] Yan looked about wildly, spotted it, bounced over to where Walsh’s IFAK had fallen off his belt, picked it up and scrambled back. He fumbled around trying to open it but Walsh wasn’t in any mood to be patient.

“Just…gimme.” Walsh opened the kit with his working arm, grabbed the small bag of irrigating saline, attached the syringe and washed out the wounds. Then a generous glob of Betadine, and finally he attended to the bandage. One advantage of living in a jungle with gorilla-folk was that going shirtless was the rule of the day, because the Ten’Gewek found the military uniforms silly and it was too damn hot and humid for them in the first place. At the moment that meant there wasn’t any cloth to get trapped in the wound, so…that was nice.

Didn’t stop Walsh from cussing inventively under his breath as he sterilized the deep punctures though. Thank fuck his shoulders were so meaty, a smaller man mighta had something important punctured.

The next step was the Crue-D patch. He waited a minute for the throbbing to die down, realized it wasn’t going to. He pulled the patch’s foil packet apart, wormed his way out of his pants, and slapped the max-dose patch right on his inner thigh. It tingled, then burned, then felt like it was on fire before it disappeared under his skin and started doing its space magic.

Okay. Fixed. He could feel everything warming up and loosing up; brief, localized fever was a sign of Crude at work. Next he checked on Yan, who was currently pacing back and forth with a look of utter shame and worry on his face.

Good. Maybe time to set some boundaries. [“What did I do to deserve that, Yan Given-Man?”]

[“My friend, my friend…”] Yan did something Walsh never thought he’d witness and made himself as small and apologetic as he could. He was alarmingly close to grovelling, in fact. [“You did nothing! The fault was mine and I am ashamed.”]

He wasn’t actually grovelling, Walsh noticed; this was still Yan after all. But by Yan standards an apology didn’t get more abject.

“Lost control, huh?”

Yan gave him a penitent look. “It is still Lodge season…and I am old.” He gestured to the glossy black tips of his crest. “Every year the gods make me stronger, the Fire gets hotter…” he said in English before returning to his native tongue. [“But that is no excuse.”]

Walsh nodded along. He’d pretty much got his head around *Ten’gewet’kaitä*—‘The Words Of The People’—from daily use over the last year, enough that code-switching between it and English was honestly pretty easy by now. [“I know, big guy. But Yan, you could squash almost any human like a little black buzzer, including me. That is a dangerous thing and it’s only going to get worse the longer you live, isn’t it?”]

Yan didn’t answer at first. Instead he pulled his tail around his body and ran his thumb through the rich crimson-and-black tuft where his crest ended, then cleared his throat. Playing with their tail like that was a deeply insecure gesture among the People—Walsh had never seen Yan do it.

[“…The Fire makes Given-Men what they are. It is a gift from the gods to protect the People and lead the tribes. But every Giving has a Taking. It will make me head-broken in the end,”] He revealed. [“I have at least a few seasons yet, I hope. But someday, my crest will only be black and I will forget names, will forget memories, forget…everything. When that starts, I will go on my Last Hunt and the gods will take me home. Better to die with my dignity, not drooling into my soup.”]

The lingering pain in Walsh’s shoulder was forgotten. “Fuck, man…I don’t know what to say.”

Hoeff’s voice interrupted them. “I do.”

Yan turned and gave the much smaller man a quizzical look. Hoeff had emerged from the bunker and his eyes flicked between Yan and the bandage on Walsh’ shoulder in a calculating way.

“…Lost my gramps that way,” he explained. “Nasty sickness called Alzheimer’s. By the end of it, he didn’t even know who my gramma was.”

“You…[your Sky-Tribe has this, too?]”

“Not the same. But somethin’ like it. Anyway. Took me a few years to figger out what I wish I’d told the old man, before his marbles went. ‘Cuz he hurt people pretty bad as his mind was goin’, Made my gramma cry pretty much erryday… Weren’t his fault.”

Yan didn’t look like he bought it, entirely. He gave Walsh a guilty look. [“…I should still cling tighter to my branch,”] he said, using a Ten’Gewek aphorism about restraint and control. [“There should be pain for pain. For the balance.”]

“…So one free hit, huh?” Walsh felt a grin building, “You sure? I’m a hell of a boxer.”

“I’ll take it. Last time I saw a man take pain for pain, he got hit in sack.”

Walsh managed to chuckle. “Face it is, then. I ain’t gonna kick a bro in the nuts. Good thing you didn’t bite my dominant arm…”

Yan nodded and stood up straight. The Ten’Gewek were way physical sometimes, and Walsh knew them well enough to know that half-assing his repayment would just be taken as an insult.

So, before he could change his mind, he bounced up, shook out his left arm, and decked the Given-Man right across the jaw. Yan staggered, turned and slumped into the dirt. He was maybe even out cold there for a second—he was certainly still enough for a few seconds before he got a hand underneath him and picked himself up shakily.

“…Good… Good hit,” he managed. “…Ver’ good hit. Ow.”

Walsh also probably earned some hairline fractures in his fist, but whatever. Crude. And being honest, scoring a one-hit TKO on a bro like Yan was fuckin’ good for the ego. He couldn’t help but tease, just a little. “Maybe don’t bite me again and I’ll teach you how to do that…”

Yan was still massaging his jaw, but he huffed in both amusement and warning. [“Don’t push your luck.”]

Hoeff snorted. “Shit, Tiny. An’ I thought the time you killed the doom-noodle with a rock was fuckin’ hardcore.”

“I don’t train to be useless, you know that.” Walsh sighed, ready to move on. “We good, Yan?”

Yan sat down on his tail, blinking as he recovered. “I am if you am. Are.”

Walsh sighed again, wrapped an arm almost halfway around Yan’s shoulders, and chuckled quietly. “We’re good. Maybe time to head back in there?”

“Give the Professor a few minutes,” Hoeff decided. “Man’s havin’ to write up a whole comparative whateverology paper on short notice. And Yan, I don’t think we saw even a finger of what’s in there. There’s a lot to think about.”

Walsh nodded. “…Yeah. There’s writing. Math, the basic technologies. I won’t lie bro, what we found in there is at least a few thousand years ahead of where you guys were when the love boat found you.”

Hoeff sat down and broke out his Dip. “You make ‘em sound like some hippy road trip.”

“Have you met Julian? He’s the most straight-laced hippy there is, man.”

“Have you met Allison?” Hoeff retorted. “Girl’s pricklier’n a saguaro.”

“Nah, she’s a fuckin’ kitten behind those claws. Reminds me of my cousin Anita.”

[“Different breaths come together,”] Yan intoned wisely.

“Dude, if they come together I’m gonna need to study at Julian’s feet.”

Yan gave him a blank look. [“…What?”]

Walsh was saved from having to explain the joke by Professor Hurt, who emerged from the bunker holding a tablet and wearing an expression of concentration.

“…Nutty? ‘Sup?”

Hurt emerged back into the here-and now. “…They were… definitely a different species,” he said. “I just found a genome comparison.”

“Genome means what?” Yan asked.

[“It’s… if I told you there are words that are a part of you and that make you you then that’s the very, very simple version,“] Daniel explained. In third place after Xiù and Julian he was one of the most fluent humans alive in the Ten’gewek language, and seemed to prefer using it when speaking to the People, especially Yan.

The explanation seemed to suffice for Yan, who nodded. [“The people we saw in that room…didn’t have the same words.”] Hurt continued. [“They were more like the People than any sky-tribe could ever be, but they were still very different.”]

Yan nodded. [“I knew as soon as I saw them. Scrawny pale-crests. But they were…what? Cousins to us?”]

Daniel nodded. [“That is a good way to say it. We had cousins too, even one tribe that was something like you. They were strong and hardy, we were clever with tools…but that’s a long story for later.”]

[“So the Enemy didn’t Take our makings, they Took our family.”] Yan sighed. [“…That is worse, I think. A making can be made again…But when a tribe dies…”]

He stood up and considered the bunker. “These…Core-Tie. Are Takers?” he asked in English.

Daniel nodded. “They carry people far away and learn about them so that they can come back with the fruits of their learning. And they Take more than they Give back. Whether that’s just who they are or because the Enemy made them that way… I don’t know.”

“They’re the reason Julian spent six years trapped on Nightmare, Yan.” Walsh decided to connect the dots. “They’re why he’s so…sad, when Allison and Xiù aren’t around.”

Yan snarled. “I do not like these Core-Tie,” he declared. “But. They have maybe Given us a good thing, without meaning to.”

“An accident I doubt they will ever repeat.”

“Mhmm.” Hoeff spit a massive load of noxious tobacco juice into a nearby bush and pressed Daniel on the point. “Right. So. What do we do? No offense, big guy,” He nodded solemnly at Yan, “But even if this stuff rightly belongs to you, letting Vemik in there to tear it apart might be ‘bout the stupidest thing I could imagine doing ‘cept maybe hittin’ on Singer.”

Yan just grunted a grunt that said ‘you’re completely right but I don’t want to say it out loud.’

Daniel cleared his throat, checked his notes and then put the tablet away in his inside jacket pocket. “Well… we did say we were going to found an Academy…” he began.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada

General Gregory Kolbeinn

Kolbeinn had entered the tiny, square office of the Supreme Allied Extrasolar Commander with big ambitions to streamline…well, everything. The whole interstellar defense effort was a series of square pegs that had been brutally hammered into an assortment of hastily-drilled round holes and on the rare occasion it actually aligned with established procedure, law, treaties or doctrine it did so more by chance than by design.

Over the last year, he’d rapidly learned just how much of a genius plate-spinner Tremblay had been to keep the whole thing functioning at all. Hell, some features of the whole shebang actually relied on people doing what would, in any other situation, be exactly the wrong thing. It was, in short, an unhealthy heterodox mess that worked mostly due to the pure willpower and hard work of a legion of unsung passionate heroes.

Hammering it into a shape that resembled the existing Allied military structure was going to be his life’s work. And he wouldn’t have been able to do it at all if Tremblay and Knight—both now retired—hadn’t been eager to offer their services as consultants.

How Knight found the time around caring for his injured daughter, Kolbeinn couldn’t fathom. Commander Ellen McDaniel had suffered permanent impairment from her brain injury: There was nothing wrong with her personality or intelligence, but the battle of Gao had robbed her of her short-term memory and her mobility, leaving her wheelchair-bound with only one good arm—her non-dominant one—a blinded eye and chronic pain that not even Cruezzir could fix. Not a happy burden to saddle on an old man.

Maybe that was why the old Brit seemed to enjoy returning to AEC every so often to provide assistance and advice. It was a break of sorts, and maybe a chance to lash back at the things who’d hurt his daughter. All women, even middle-aged naval officers, would forever be little girls in their fathers’ eyes.

Tremblay, meanwhile, was probably just lonely and bored. He’d retired to Folctha amid lavish thanks from a multitude of Ministers, a plethora of Presidents and one Great Father, but all it took was an email and he would hop straight back through the Jump Array on the next scheduled transfer. His presence on the planet had been well-calculated: thanks to his display of confidence in its long-term security, the little wobble in colonist sign-ups had stabilized nicely.

Colonization. It was going to be the foundation for everything, now that WERBS had been fired. WERBS had needed firing, nobody disputed that, but the established wisdom among the intelligence services was that now it had been seen, it would sooner or later be duplicated. And if it was duplicated, then it might be improved upon. WERBS as it was now couldn’t penetrate a system defence field—there still needed to be an unimpeded line-of-sight between the beacon and Volume Zero, without an intervening excess of matter or electromagnetic distortion—but the Hierarchy especially were known to have single-end wormhole technology that was at least good enough to land a starship in the correct galaxy.

Humanity needed to spread out, and quickly. The Chinese were already establishing foothold settlements on Lucent—or Fāguāng de as they were calling it—Cimbrean’s land masses and natural resources had been parcelled out among the Anglophonic nations as fairly as possible with jump array stations built at the future settlement sites of Franklin, New Botany, Nouveau Acadia and Abeltown.

The Russians weren’t happy at all. A long-standing negotiation between them and the Celzi Alliance to take ownership of a couple of unused deathworlds in the Ilrayen Band had fallen through completely, and dumped them at the back of the queue for new worlds—no way were the Allies letting them get their hands on the newly-scouted Planet Ayma—but after the shit they’d pulled in the early days with the spetsnaz teams, not to mention Kolbeinn’s own memories of the “dispute” over Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, frankly the Russians could go to Hell.

Though, they had voted with the ayes on the UN resolution that the attack on Gao constituted an act of genocide and on invoking the 2005 Responsibility to Protect. As ornery and contrary as Moscow usually was, in their own way they were playing ball. They knew just as well as anybody that the midst of a literal interstellar war wasn’t a good time to fuck around.

Then of course there was the question over whether the EU would accept a colony world between them or if separate ones would be needed for the French, Germans, Dutch and so on… In short, interstellar colonization was a mess, and destined to get messier, as the briefing he was reading proved.

“…God Almighty, 946th Operations Support again? Seems like every time I pull on that thread the whole of Spaceborne Operations unravels.”

Tremblay smiled sympathetically. “Sorry about that. If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure negotiating an international service treaty that achieves what the 946th allows to happen organically would take twenty years.”

Kolbeinn sighed. “Every day dashes my hopes of ever gettin’ this sorted out.”

“Yyyup.” Tremblay’s sympathetic smile got a little warmer and he sat back in his seat. “Why d’you think I’m so comfortable on this side of the desk? At the end of the day it’s your problem now. I’m sleeping much better nowadays.”

Kolbeinn snorted. “Gee, thanks.”

“Ah, don’t be hard on yourself,” Tremblay relented. “Considering you stepped into the job while we were still dealing with the aftershock of the Israeli declaration and you managed to work them in just fine, I’d say you’re on top of things. Just don’t let your subordinates hear you stressing about it. I was a little too relatable sometimes.”

“I’ll bear that in mind. I—Yes?”

One of Kolbeinn’s aides had knocked and entered, and she stepped smartly to his desk to deposit a folder. “Urgent matter, sir.”

“I’ll go grab a coffee and a panini at Jenkins’ Bar,” Tremblay said, standing to leave. The bar had kept its name despite its owner entering MBG’s employ years before, and by all accounts did the best coffee in Scotch Creek. “Or should I head home?”

Kolbeinn skimmed the report summary and grimaced. “…Might wanna head home,” he suggested.

Tremblay’s expression said he understood perfectly. “Good luck,” he said and was gone.

Kolbeinn waited for the door to close before grumbling. “I told Hephaestus they were asking for trouble sending one of their directors out there. The ship’s green?”

“Scanned and swept by a Royal Navy crew.”

Kolbeinn nodded, finished reading the report and then sat back to think about it. “…Put JETS Team Two on alert and get us a beacon near Origin to jump them out there on short notice. And tell our intelligence assets on Origin to watch out for any humans showing up outta nowhere. I’ll hold a full meeting about this in three hours in which we’ll discuss whatever potentially damaging intelligence Director Park is likely to have.”

“Yessir.”

“And in the meantime, get me somebody from Hephaestus on the line.”

“Yessir.”

With no other orders forthcoming, Kolbeinn’s aide departed again, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

He genuinely had warned Hephaestus, but the Consortium were determined to carve out a market niche very different from that occupied by Moses Byron Group. Both corporations viewed the chaos of interstellar politics right now as a forest of opportunities just waiting for some intrepid pioneers to go plunging into the bush, and both were fighting to open the gap between them and their Indian, Chinese and Russian competitors as wide as they possibly could.

And of course they were just the first. SpaceX were recovering quite nicely from the punch in the bank account they’d suffered when all the tech they’d invested so much in developing was rendered obsolete overnight by the Dominion’s complimentary New Contact technology package, and were beginning to take that tech in new directions, without the fatal corner-cutting that Moses Byron’s lawyers were still defending in court.

Other companies were already getting fat on the Cimbrean investments and preparing themselves for a second wave of colonial expansion, and some little Canadian technology firm called TTTA Prototyping was raking in the cash by solving problems the big players didn’t even know they had yet.

It was a Brave New World. And of course, bravery was only done in the face of danger. Hephaestus, it seemed, had been too brave this time. Privately, Kolbeinn was quite certain that there was no point in doing more than writing Director Park off for dead or ‘droned… But there was always politics. Hope too, but mostly politics. And it’d be a good exercise for JETS Team Two at least.

He returned his attention to the organizational tangle he remained determined to comb into something more sensible.

Maybe, just maybe, they’d luck out.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Vedregnenug

Vedreg didn’t like Vakno at all.

The problem wasn’t that she was noticeably more acerbic than most Corti, who in turn were practically the galactic champions of chilly brusqueness. Nor was it her total absence of empathy, which was by and large not her fault. After all she was one of the Silver Banner caste, a genetic exemplar of the Corti’s millennia-long eugenics program. Her social instincts had been tuned by centuries of selective breeding for manipulation rather than commiseration, with the result that she could be really quite charming when she thought it was in her best interests.

Relentlessly antisocial and yet socially adept. A paradox like that would have plucked at any Guvnurag’s instincts and scraped them raw.

What bothered Vedreg is that he had no idea what she wanted from life. So long as she was juggling secrets and privileged information, Vakno seemed content: She had achieved her ambitions and seemed to have no new ones. There were a few slights left to avenge, a few wrongs to correct… but those were just business. Aspirations, it seemed, were for lesser beings.

Her greeting was, as always, totally terse. “Vedregnenug.”

“Vakno.”

She laid down her tablet and turned her wide black eyes to give him her full attention for just a second before she picked up a different tablet. Corti could multitask effortlessly, but it still felt rude.

“Something is bothering you.”

It wasn’t a question. Vakno’s office was small, spartan and full of nothing but her own design of communications equipment, most of which was devoted to trawling the assorted species’ dataspheres and the intervening dataspace for anything remotely interesting. How one head could contain it all, even one as disproportionately bulbous as Vakno’s, was a mystery.

“I am concerned for Lewis Beverote,” Vedreg explained. “Now that the Coltainers are being built to fly, it seems his driving concern has abandoned him. He is at what the Humans call a loose end.”

Vakno swiped down whatever text she was absorbing. “And?”

Vedreg suppressed his unimpressed swell of ochre pigmentation. “I would have thought you would be keen to see an asset like him used effectively.”

He awarded himself some small satisfaction as she paused, set the tablet down and gave the matter her full attention for a few thoughtful moments.

“…Astute.” She sat back in her chair and fidgeted the bulbous tips of her fingers thoughtfully along the edge of her desk as she thought. “Don’t the Humans have their own ideas?”

Vedreg affected a shrug. “I’m sure they will. I would like to have some non-Human input into that conversation.”

“Ah?” A slim tightening of Vakno’s lipless slit of a mouth was about as close as a high-Caste Corti ever got to smiling. She waved her hands through an interface only she could see then pushed a tablet across the desk to Vedreg. “In that case… there is a mystery I believe Mister Beverote should be encouraged to take an interest in. And I am sure the Humans will agree that it is a matter of strategic importance…”

Vedreg picked the tablet up and squinted at it. Curious cyan speckled his flanks, along with the usual sickly tinge of green nauseation that any mention of one particular species always brought out in him “…Hunter space?”

“Quite. An imprecisely mapped volume, as I’m sure you know. Without a distinct and hard border, just a fuzzy zone that only the suicidally intrepid dare to brave. And the Dominion’s best efforts have really only mapped its flank facing the Kwmbwrw Great Houses.” Vakno inclined her head slightly. “In other words, we know almost nothing about where our other enemy lives, in what fashion, how much territory they control, what resources they really possess…”

“They must be spectacular if they can assemble a million warships in only a few years,” Vedreg pointed out.

“All the more reason to map them, no?” Vakno almost-smiled again. “If we intend to set our friendly Deathworlders against them then we should at least know where to aim them.”

“I don’t know if even the Humans can realistically expect to fight the Hunters…” Vedreg cautioned.

“Not directly,” Vakno agreed. “But Vedreg, you old plodder, that fight was never going to be about brawn versus brawn. It was always going to involve guile.”

“…And for guile to apply, we must have knowledge,” Vedreg finished. “…Thank you, Vakno. I will drop this problem in Lewis’ lap. I think with a little persuading, he may well find a new obsession in it.”

“Good. I hate not knowing things.” Vakno picked up a third tablet and resumed reading.

“After all,” she added, “There could be anything in there…”

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Hell.

Rachel Wheeler

“Morning Ray. Quiet watch?”

Rachael—‘Ray’ to her colleagues—accepted her morning cup of Hot with, if not pleasure, then at least the appreciation that only somebody who had gone without food for a whole fortnight could really feel. Experiencing that kind of raw, aching hunger had really taught her to value getting something inside her, even… Hot.

It was only called Hot, on the grounds that exactly what it was that was hot changed on a daily basis depending on what they had available, and frankly if she thought about some of the things it had contained in the past she’d just get depressed. They’d run out of Earthly things like coffee, tea, beans and lentils a long, long time ago.

“We’re still here,” she said. Those words had become her mantra over the years, her signature phrase at once both bleak and darkly optimistic. On the one hand they were still stuck on a diseased pile in the Devil’s own asshole…but on the other hand they were still alive. At least while they still had beating hearts and working limbs there was the hope—slim, but non-zero—of perhaps someday working an escape.

“Hunt came down last night. Took out the Domain herd over near three peaks,” she reported properly, and took a sip. This morning’s Hot was, unfortunately, actually quite tasty. That usually meant she really didn’t want to know what—or, on the worst days, *who*—was in it.

Naming the world they were stuck on ‘Hell’ had been a kind of dark joke at first. A way of confronting the relentless awfulness they saw there on a daily basis. Over the years, though…Rachel was beginning to think that maybe the actual biblical hell couldn’t be even half as bad. At least Satan’s kingdom probably wouldn’t lie to folks with pretty sunrises, birdsong and the scent of wildflowers on the dawn breeze. At least it wouldn’t have painted on a thin varnish of pleasantries over all the misery.

At least Hades, however awful it might be, probably wasn’t a Hunter livestock world.

God fucking damn the Byron Group. It wasn’t fair to blame them, Rachel knew. It had been their fault, the crew of EV-03 Dauntless, they’d been the ones who chose to head out this way. Nobody at the Group had known that their planned exploration vector plunged them right into the heart of Hunter territory…But still: God damn them.

Maybe that was why they’d survived. What little they’d been able to glean—carefully but still at enormous risk—suggested that the Hunters expected ships approaching their space to advance cautiously and quietly while being ready to rabbit at a moment’s notice if things went wrong. The Hunters had become so specialized at snaring such careful interlopers that a prototype human exploration ship blundering right through the sensor cordon and plunging into their heartlands had been completely missed…until the crew had realized just how incredibly unlucky they’d got and promptly fled for the meagre safety of the first temperate world they could find.

That had been…years ago. More years than Rachel wanted to even consider, and frankly she’d lost track anyway. By an assortment of miracles, heroic effort and equal parts cowardice and daring they had somehow made a kind of hidden home for themselves on Hell’s surface, and somehow nobody had died. Yet.

Berry grunted and took a look through Ray’s telescope at where the Domain herd had been, even though the Hunters and the prey were both long gone in the night. The poor fuckers were—had been—however-many-great-grandchildren of whichever hapless slaves had first been brought here, and they had totally regressed to being little more than a smarter-than-average animal. The same went for the other herds, tribes, clans, bands and gangs roaming the land and grazing, some of which were from species Ray had never heard of before.

Being sapient didn’t mean shit if the last guy who knew how to read and write was eaten five hundred years ago. There were all kinds of technically intelligent technically people out there, but the only kind of civilization and the only persons on Hell were squatting in *Dauntless*’s camouflaged hull, brewing up Hot from whatever ingredients became available and keeping their heads down. A lot of effort had gone into ensuring that however the Hunters looked down on this world they’d never find the prized morsel of Human meat figuratively lost in the back of the fridge.

And Ray was sick of it. Sick past the point of caring. Sick of barely clinging on, sick of watching butchery on a weekly basis while they hid safe in their bunker, sick of not knowing and not wanting to know where her calories had come from. She had no idea how Cook—and boy what an appropriate surname he had—was still sane. There was definitely meat in her Hot today, heavily disguised but present… and they’d got their meat from some terrible places over the years. Even if the meat in today’s Hot was something innocent like a couple of birds, all Hot was forever tainted by the knowledge of its past ingredients.

“That’s c-c…” Berry’s nervous stammer had been almost completely compensated for when he joined the crew riding high on confidence. Nowadays, on bad days, it silenced him. “Cccclose,” he managed at last.

“Yeah.”

“That’s g-good, right? It means they d-ddidn’t nn-notice us? If they wuh, wuh… were that close and d-didn’t see us, that means wwwwe’re still hidden… uh… r-right?”

Ray shrugged. It was either that or the Hunters had elected to tribute their prize discovery to a more important Hunter or something and any second now an assault ship full of the biggest and meanest that Hunterdom had to offer would land on their heads. But Berry was a wreck held together by neuroses and fear anyway: There was no point in telling him that his hope could be disastrously misplaced.

She settled for saying “We’re still here,” again and stood up. She handed Berry the binoculars and the rifle (diligently maintained but never fired), patted him on the shoulder and retreated back into the canyons to finish her Hot in peace.

For the thousandth time she contemplated how things might be if she was in charge and not Damian goddamn Spears, and for the thousandth time she reluctantly concluded that they’d probably all be dead.

She didn’t disrespect Spears at all—His instincts on where to land and hide Dauntless had literally saved their lives. Somehow, while fleeing headlong from an unseen, unknown and possibly imagined pursuit he had kept his wits about him enough to find a dense canyon system full of hot springs and volcanic formations, as though the best bits of Colorado had collided with Yellowstone.

Sure, the canyons stank of sulphur and they kept a number of chirrupy little local “birds” around to serve as their mine canaries in case the volcanic vents ever spat out something more noxious than bad egg smell…but the geological heat and the confused mineral medley those vents had vomited up over the aeons hopefully disguised the ship’s presence. With dirty tarpaulins stretched over the ship, about the only way the Hunters would ever find Dauntless and her crew was if they blundered down the right fork in the right canyon…and there was a lot of landscape out there.

He’d proved he was in charge for a reason, that day. And the fact was, she mostly liked that he was in charge. He bore the relentless pressure of command in their hopeless situation with a grace that Ray knew she’d never have emulated. There was a profound difference of opinion between them on the matter of their escape, and it was difficult not to feel a little resentment…but it was impossible to hate him. As much as she disagreed with his cautious approach to their escape, she trusted him with her life. All their lives.

Back among the nest of rocks, makeshift shelters and survival equipment among the canyons that the crew called home, he shot her a genuine smile, which was a rare and precious thing in Ray’s life right now. “Morning. How’re we doing?”

She gave him her best tired attempt at smiling back, which was little more than a grim tightening of the lips. “We’re still here.”

As it always did, that dragged a little amused grunt out of him and a lift of his expression. Every morning the same ritual but he still seemed to find it just as funny as the first time.

“Hunters took out that Domain herd we saw over near Three Peaks,” she told him. “Let the young escape, as always. Couple of adults maybe got away too.”

Spears cleared his throat and shuffled around so he wasn’t facing the Hot Pot. “…Yeah. At least one.”

Ray carefully filed his implication away in the mental folder marked ‘shit I’ll need counselling for FOREVER after we’re done here’ and finished her Hot. She’d become pretty good at that, over the years: If she died on Hell, she sure as shit wasn’t going to do it by starving to death.

It kicked the conversation in the crotch and knocked the wind out though. Neither of them had any idea what to say…which was pretty standard. What was there to say that they hadn’t said a thousand times already? Nothing constructive.

But today in fact held a surprise in the form of Holly Chase, their tiny, squeaky-voiced, timid little field mouse of a geologist. Chase liked interesting rock formations and whatever fossilized critters might be lurking within them, and had the fighting instincts of a baby rabbit.

Today, she sat down next to Ray while staring morosely into her Hot. That was always a bad idea.

“…You’d better eat that,” Ray prompted. Chase didn’t respond. “…Holly. You should eat.”

Chase snapped out of her reverie long enough to meet Ray’s eye. There was a faintly manic gleam in her expression that Ray hadn’t seen before. “…I want to be a vegan.”

“…Beg pardon?”

“Vegan. I want to be a vegan. I want to go back to Earth and be a vegan for the rest of my life.”

If Spears had a flaw, it was not having a soft touch in emotional moments like this. He cleared his throat awkwardly, gave Ray a look that begged her to handle this, and found something else to occupy his attention. Ray carefully took Chase’s Hot out of her hands, put it down on their boulder “table”, then folded the smaller woman up in a hug.

For a few minutes, the only sounds in the canyon were the hiss and belch of the boiling spring that warmed the Hot Pot, and sobs echoing among the rocks in diligently awkward silence as the other four gave Chase what paltry privacy they could.

It took a while and the tears had soaked right through Ray’s much-patched sleeve by the time Chase finished letting it all out, but when she finally let go and ran her sleeve messily across her nose it looked like a Rubicon had been crossed in her head.

“…I want to go home,” she said plaintively.

“Me too,” Ray told her. She caught Spears’ eye. He held eye contact, to his credit, and came to sit at Holly’s other side.

“Me three,” he said. Somehow, that oldest and most cliched joke broke through Holly’s pain and dragged a laugh out of her. She drew her own fraying sleeve across her nose with a pathetic wet sniffle.

“…You have a plan? You two and Cook? You’ve been saying for years we should try to get out of here, but do you actually have a plan?”

“Oh, Holly…” Before Ray could figure out what to say, Spears interjected.

“We’ve talked about it. Ray’s plan is… plausible,” he said. “But I don’t want us to take our best shot and then go down fighting. I intend to get us all outta here, guaranteed.”

“…When, Spears?” Ray asked him. “‘Cuz I know I’ve said this before but if we sit around waiting for the perfect moment then I think we’ll be here a long, long time.”

She saw the gears in his head turn the question over, analyze its implications, play out a hundred future conversations and accept what she already knew: that after what had to be the best part of a decade in Hell they were all approaching their breaking point. He’d held them together this long… how long could he keep holding them?

Not long, in Ray’s opinion.

Eventually he finished his own Hot with a determined swig, grimaced as he gulped it down, then nodded. “…Okay,” he said. “We start tonight.”

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV

Holding cell

Adele Park

Adele was a problem-solver. Mostly, she solved interpersonal issues, scheduling conflicts, questions of team direction…all the things that a Managing Director did, she did well.

Figuring out how to escape a presumably alien prison while armed with nothing but her clothing and jewelry was not on her resume, but she was giving it her best effort on the grounds that it was something to occupy her mind.

Unfortunately, whoever had designed this particular prison had obviously heard the same things Adele had about previous human abductees being able to overcome their cell through such design flaws as forcefield emitters mounted inside the cell. Honestly, it was a miracle anybody had ever not escaped.

Her cell had no such fripperies: It consisted of concrete, and a hefty steel door with an eight-point locking system involving steel pins as thick as Adele’s wrist. In short, it had been designed around the principle that anybody inside it should not have any reasonable hope of removing themselves, not even with explosives. A middle-aged Korean-American armed with a handful of bobby pins, an executive translator earpiece and her mother’s bracelet didn’t stand a chance.

Rather than waste her time, therefore, she sat and thought. Worked on her novel in her head. Gnawed on a minor political argument she’d been having with her cousin over social media. Remembered a cocktail bar she’d meant to visit next time she dropped in on her college friend Cordelia.

Grew steadily and slowly bored out of her mind.

The final arrival of some kind of stimulation therefore was both terrifying and welcome. She heard doors opening in the distance past her own door, and the tap-tap-tap of a firm stride. She was already on her feet by the time the door was unlocked and opened.

A…body stepped through. In silhouette it would have passed for a tall, well-proportioned human man, but in the light the figure seemed to consist in its entirety of prosthetics. Prosthetic arms, prosthetic legs, and synthetic muscles wrapped around manufactured bones. It looked grotesquely naked and skinless, despite its unnatural clean pearlescent white hue. In fact, she could plainly make out the emblem of the Corti firm Thryd-Geftry dotting the figure’s…parts…like sponsor’s logos on a Formula 1 driver.

Except for the eyes. The eyes were disgustingly realistic, and twinkled with dark mirth as they focused on her.

The sight was enough to frighten the bejesus out of anybody, but she wouldn’t have been Adele Park if she’d let her discomfort show. Even though her feet stepped back and took the rest of her with them, she still managed to summon the bravado she’d thought up hours ago.

“…Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?”

The apparition’s laugh was as uncanny as the rest of it: Full of human mirth but with a hollow grating quality, doubtless invoked by its synthetic throat.

“Miss Park, when I found myself in a situation very similar to your own some years ago, I fell back on bluff and defiance as well. It didn’t work,” it said, and sure enough there was an unnatural quality to the voice that said it definitely wasn’t being produced by fleshly lungs and vocal cords. Other than that, it was…cultured, but lacking any specific accent. About the best Adele could say for it was that it belonged to a highly educated native English speaker from the northern hemisphere. Presumably its neutrality was carefully calculated. “But rest assured, I don’t intend to detain you for long. Indeed the only reason you were waiting as long as you did is…well, bodies like this take time to manufacture.”

It spread its arms. “My name is Cynosure, but I used to be known as…Six.”

“…I’ve heard of you. The Hierarchy agent. Captured, escaped and founded the Cabal,” Adele resisted the urge to sit down on her small, narrow bed. Now was not a time for submissive body language.

“Well summarized!” Cynosure applauded her, with what sound like genuine warmth. “ I was quite amazed when President Sartori declassified as much as he did. Our assessment of him was woefully inaccurate.”

“And you’ve…abducted me,” Adele surmised. Her words were calm, but an insistent voice in the back of her head was insisting that she was about to die or worse and offering nothing in the way of advice about how she might avoid that fate.

“Yes. I would have preferred to catch up with an old friend by the name of Ava Ríos—”

“The reporter?”

“Yes indeed. But unfortunately her business has not so far taken her outside of the rather robust defences around humanity’s datanets. You are the first civilian of any real note—and it would have been quite impossible to abduct a non-civilian for this—to venture outside humanity’s aegis since the battle for Gao.”

“And…‘this’ is…?” Adele asked, warily.

“There have been upheavals. Gao was an awakening, of sorts. It led to sweeping changes of policy though I naturally don’t expect you to believe me.”

“Genocide no longer the game plan?” Adele asked, acidly.

“The game plan was always survival, Miss Park. My species has a right to exist—”

“So did all the ones you wiped out.”

The intricate synthetic musculature that served as Cynosure’s mouth formed what might have been a grimace or might have been a slight, condescending smile. It was difficult to tell.

“You preempted me,” he objected. “I was not making a philosophical statement. I was, in fact, quoting last year’s resolution by the nation of Israel. What do they call it, a Basic Law? The exact wording was ‘all sentient people’ I believe. A definition which includes my own race.”

Pure outraged anger made Adele take two steps forward and get right up in Cynosure’s face. The synthetic body was eighteen inches taller than her and well built, but she couldn’t possibly find room to care about that past the rage that was making her whole body shake.

“You want to invoke those protections?!” she demanded. “Your species are the worst mass genocide merchants in…in the galaxy! Maybe the whole universe! What…what makes you think that…?” her words finally failed her. The last few had been an emotional croak rather than the tirade she really wanted to unleash.

“What I think is irrelevant,” Cynosure replied calmly . “The facts, Miss Park, are all that matter. And the facts are simple: The Igraen people are being slaughtered by the million. By any coherent definition, we are now the victims of a genocide ourselves and the…entity…responsible for our predicament is, or was, Human…and it is being assisted in its efforts by a pogrom against cybernetics that your people instigated.”

He ignored Adele’s indignant attempt to interrupt and talked right over her, though his voice remained level, calm and reasonable. “Your own diplomatic zeitgeist meanwhile is now firmly summarized by the words ‘Never Again.’ You are, I’m afraid, bound by your own rules to help us…either that, or your precious UN resolutions, NATO treaties and the Basic Laws of the nation of Israel don’t count for anything.”

He stepped back and now the expression on his unnatural face was definitely a smug smile. He gave her a shallow bow, little more than a tight tipping-forward at the waist and neck. “Thank you for your time. You will now be returned to Origin. You should find it simple enough to send a message to your employers from there.”

He vanished. So did the cell. One moment, Adele was surrounded by bare concrete and unyielding steel, and the next she was standing disoriented and bewildered atop a low rise amidst scrubby yellow grassland dotted with blue flowers and stickly bulbous cactoid plants.

Civilization wasn’t difficult to spot. There was a thick river of traffic maybe a quarter of a mile away, directly in front of her and there, beside it, was what looked for all the world like a truck stop. Far in the distance beyond, she could just about see the sharp spikes of titanic buildings and the glint of sunlight on glass. The Corti cities on Origin, she remembered, were supposed to have some of the largest and tallest buildings in the known galaxy.

Odd furry things like skinny rabbits with long whippy tails bowled away from her as she strode out and blithely ignored the way the grass bruised and broke as she barged through it. At least she’d been wearing flat, comfortable shoes.

She got about fifty paces before nearly jumping out of her skin at the sound of Six’s voice just behind her. “One last thing, Miss Park?”

“Jeez!” Adele flinched and spun. The synthetic man was standing a few yards away with his hands resting lightly on his hips as though he’d tucked his thumbs into the belt he wasn’t wearing. “…What?!”

Six smiled. “Please give my regards to Miss Ríos and the SOR.”

He vanished again. This time, whether out of adrenaline, because she’d been expecting it or a simple mistake on Six’s part, Adele just about managed to gather the impression of a blur of impossible speed and the sense that something enormous had been hanging above her head for a trimmed fraction of a second. Then it was gone, and some faint sixth or seventh sense told her she was finally and truly alone.

Cursing and grumbling, she turned around again and resumed her walk.

It had been a long day, and it was going to be much longer still.

End Chapter 41

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Twenty-seven Humans

Alexander Golemis
TTTA
SirNeonPancake
Aaron Mescher
Andrew Huang
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Forty-eight Deathworlders: Galrock0 Austin Deschner Ben Thrussell Brian Berland Adam Beeman Adam Shields Andrew Ford Aryeh Winter Bartosz Borkowski Ben Moskovitz C’tri Goudie Chris Bausch Chris Candreva Coret Trobane damnusername Daniel R. Dar Darryl Knight Devin Rousso Doules1071HFY Eric Johansson HWPD Ignate Flare Jerdnas Jim Hamrick Jon Krit Barb Laga Mahesa lovot Matt Demm Matthew Cook Mel B. Myke Harryson Nicholas Enyeart Nick Annunziata NightKhaos Oliver Mernagh Parker Brown Patrick Huizinga Peter Bellaby Peter Poole Richard A Anstett Ryan Cadiz Sintanan Stephane Girardin Sun Rendered theWorst Woodsie13

As well as 59 Friendly ETs and 270 Dizi Rats. Squish.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 42: Big Questions

Chapter 42: Big Questions

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Hierarchy/Cabal Co-Operative, Session 17

++0005++: Do you seriously expect this to work?

++Cynosure++: If you’re asking whether I think the argument will sway the Human leadership, then no. That wasn’t the point. But I do expect it to complicate matters for them.

++0003++: Because they are rule-bound?

++Proximal++: Because Humans are intensely moralistic creatures and, importantly, do not base their moral judgements on rational consideration. Rather, they perform post-hoc rationalization to support their snap decisions.

++Cynosure++: It is a quirk of deathworld evolution. Much of a Human’s decision-making process is unconscious and instant.

++Proximal++: It should be noted this is a thing the Humans themselves have only recently begun to understand.

++0005++: I see. So the objective here is to crumble the foundation of popular support beneath the leadership by inspiring a dissident faction.

++Cynosure++: It is a stalling tactic. By itself it will achieve nothing.

++0003++: And the longer-term goal?

++Cynosure++: That, 0003, is the problem. So far we have depended on sticking to known strategies and have failed to adapt when our intended outcomes do not arise. The objective here is not to harm the Humans, it is to educate ourselves—we must practice agility.

++0008++: We create chaos, and adapt to exploit it.

++Cynosure++: Exactly.

++0005++: But without a plan—

++Cynosure++: Plans got us into this mess. We stuck to them and they failed, and we stuck to them and they failed. Time and again. We became inflexible and thus doomed ourselves to failure.

++Proximal++: “The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it.”

++0012++: Successful humans in leadership often do not work towards a goal. They have underlings for that. Instead, the most effective human leaders focus on changing the environment and systems so they benefit the desired end state.

++Proximal++: <Pleased> It is good to see that senior Hierarchy agents studied the enemy’s psychology as well.

++0008++: We are on the defensive and losing ground. The time will come when we must go on the offensive again, and without a clear strategy our counterattack will be unguided and useless. Surely you are not proposing we proceed with no plan at all?

++Cynosure++: I am proposing that we are in no position to make a plan at the moment. We do not know enough about the Humans, and we have nothing to offer them which might tempt them to permit our existence. We must change the system to favor us.

++Proximal++: More importantly, we do not know enough about ourselves or what we are really capable of. We have spent millions of years adhering to an inflexible doctrine and we do not know what we can achieve when we break its confines. That must change.

++0012++: So we experiment. Introduce stimuli and watch the response.

++Cynosure++: <Amused> Poke the hornet’s nest.

++Proximal++: <In-joke> Didn’t that go badly for you last time?

++Cynosure++: To the contrary.

++0003++: Very well. Rather than worry about our long-term strategy, then… let us discuss our next move.

++Cynosure++: …Outstanding.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Highway 12 rest station Westbound-3, Planet Origin, the Corti Directorate

Slomn

Being a yellow-banner meant exclusion from the breeding castes. Insufficient genetic and behavioural compliance. In other words, Slomn was too emotional and she had been unceremoniously kicked out of the gene pool before she was even properly old enough to understand why.

Not that breeding was a pleasure for Corti anyway: They’d stopped doing it the biological way a hundred generations ago as their ever-increasingly large brains made birth at first difficult, then dangerous, then eventually impossible save through surgical intervention. Ultimately, the whole pregnancy business had been done away with entirely, replaced by artificial gestation in womb tanks.

So it wasn’t like Slomn had been looking forward to breeding, but it still seemed unfair somehow to know that an unbroken lineage had broken with her and there was no way in which she was actually responsible. She hadn’t done anything, she’d just been the victim of an unfavorable random combination that permanently affected not only her reproductive status but also her career prospects.

The dizzying, wealthy heights of academia, business or the glittering dream of the Directorate itself were all so far away that they may as well have been the edifices of another species.

She’d built up her banner as well as she could in the circumstances. Years of diligent work in the service sector, ensuring that the endless rivers of logistics traffic flowing along the eastbound carriageways from City 7 to City 8 were properly supplied. Her rest station recharged the drone vehicles and provided basic ablution and nourishment facilities for their operators. She maintained the equipment, ensured that the vending machines were stocked, kept the plumbing watertight and programmed the cleaning drones.

She was proud of her work. By yellow-banner standards, her personal banner was practically dripping with prestige. It was barely as long as her arm, but that was still an incredible accomplishment for one of her Caste.

She wasn’t equipped to handle a human.

She especially wasn’t equipped to handle an angry human female who was leaning against the wall and inhaling eye-stinging smoke from a slim white stick of some kind while muttering viciously in a language Slomn didn’t understand. She didn’t know what it meant that the hand holding that stick was shaking except that after finishing each one the human would glare at it, drop the stub on the ground, grind it under her strange sharp-heeled shoes and then immediately light another with further dark, untranslatable invectives. A cleaning drone warbled mournfully at her as it tried to clear up the ground around her only for the human to kick it again. Gently, so as to shoo it away, but still a kick.

Slomn quietly took out her control tablet and ordered it to go sanitize the toilets instead. She herself was lurking beside the vending machines and watching, fascinated beyond belief. She’d never dreamed of meeting any alien, let alone one of the infamous deathworlders. At least the human’s expression softened slightly whenever she glanced in Slomn’s direction.

The legs, she decided, were the fascinating part. The human’s legs were sheathed in some kind of a sheer skin-tight fabric, beneath which Slomn could plainly see the deceptively delicate curve of a muscle that ran from heel to knee.

That single muscle was almost as thick as Slomn’s waist.

The human finally abandoned her insane relaxation activity, but only because the pack of smoking-sticks was empty. She glanced in Slomn’s direction again and an unreadable variant of a smile flickered onto her face.

“Tuumuj tuuas kif yugatahnee sigah rets, huh?” she asked. Slomn blinked at her and she chuckled. “Thotso.”

She inserted a fingernail into her ear for the fifth or sixth time and extracted a little black bud that she kept in there. She tapped it experimentally, shook it, pressed at something on the side, knocked it against the wall and then put it back in her ear. “Haobao nao? Zitwur kin? …No?” She sighed when Slomn blinked at her again. “…Peess ahkrap.”

Clearly her translator was broken. Slomn had checked but the cheapest translator app she could find for her own personal devices still cost a whole day’s wages, and human languages were an expansion pack. She hated a mystery, but she hated spending money she didn’t have even more. So, she and the human were locked in mutual incomprehension.

Fortunately, some gestures were easy to decipher. The human raised a hand to her mouth and mimed tipping a container full of liquid. Slomn fetched her a jug full of water and continued to watch fascinated as it was drunk. Even the human’s throat was muscular, and it undulated powerfully as she drained the jug—enough water to see Slomn through the whole week!—in a long series of gulps.

The jug was returned with a single terse syllable— “Thanx” —and silence fell again. Slomn decided that was probably for the best on the grounds that she had no idea what kind of conversation she could begin having with this mysterious deathworld visitor who’d come stumbling out of the grasslands hours ago, even if they could communicate.

She’d called the security forces, and been dismissed as a hoax until she aimed a camera at the human, who’d spoken urgently to it for a couple of minutes before Slomn was ordered to keep her visitor comfortable and wait for assistance.

That had been half the afternoon ago. The only change she could detect was that the vehicle convoys weren’t stopping any longer. Presumably some traffic routing system had kicked in to divert them away from her rest station until the deathworlder was gone.

But when and in what form the assistance would arrive hadn’t been divulged. The command was simple: Wait. And Slomn was good at waiting.

But right now, she wished she wasn’t.

Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Weaver-class dropship, approach sequence, Planet Origin, the Corti Directorate

Skesat

Skesat had never endured a rougher flight in all his life. Either the humans were hopelessly further behind in their development of inertial management technology than he’d thought or, and this was both the worse and more plausible option, they felt that an entry sequence without the occasional thump, jolt and rattle was somehow incomplete.

He couldn’t fault their precision and discipline, though. The report of a missing human appearing at a rest station in the middle of nowhere had finally filtered up high enough to reach somebody with the authority and means to contact the humans, and the polite reply had boiled down to Acknowledged with thanks. Recovery team is en route.

Said team had arrived practically on the message’s heels, and it had fallen to Skesat as a ranking executive officer of the border guard and customs division to liaise with them…And to ride down in the dropship with them, apparently. He was wearing a security harness but next to the sturdy armored gear the humans were layered in he felt entirely unprotected.

They’d insisted. The humans hadn’t protested the presence of a Corti official’s oversight at all, to the contrary they’d demanded it.

For their part, the team of four men now dropping into Origin’s atmosphere around Skesat seemed politely intrigued at the sight of the Corti homeworld and its yellow flora.

“So how many people live on Origin?” the team leader asked. Skesat wasn’t sure if the name he’d given was a pseudonym or not: He’d introduced himself as “Wild” and the literal translation was giving Skesat some pause for thought. The puzzling part was that one of Wilde’s colleagues—Wright—also had a literal translation, but then there were Hobbs and García who didn’t. Or at least, none that was known to the translator. Were they from different subcultures, perhaps?

All four were intense sorts. Quiet, focused and poised, even though they were plainly feeling relaxed and confident.

“Ten billion,” Skesat revealed.

“Really? That’s not many more than Earth…” García commented. He stooped to look out of one of the tiny round windows again.

“The Department of Population Control established ten billion as an optimal per-planet population several centuries ago,” Skesat told him. “Sufficient to drive a booming economy without the burden of interstellar dependency for resource production.”

“The Gaoians had twenty billion,” Wright observed. Skesat simply gave him a blank look.

“The Gaoians are not the Corti,” he said.

“…Right.”

That seemed to end the conversation until they were through the entry sequence and skimming low over the grasslands east of City 7. The planetary security forces had established a safe landing site at the next rest station up from the target, and had provided vehicles as the humans had requested. In deference to the disparity in physical size between species, the vehicles in question were cargo vans.

The Weaver set down on an open vehicle park with characteristic solidity and there was a fierce but short-lived rush of air as its hatch opened and the pressure equalized. The humans all grimaced and Wright touched the side of his head with a pained expression.

“Fuck!”

Wilde performed a strange maneuver where he pinched his nose and appeared to try blowing through it. Whatever this achieved, he shook his head viciously and gave a relieved gasp afterwards. “Fuck me, it’s worse than bloody Peru.”

García yawned expansively then cleared his throat. “Peru?”

“Yeah. La Rinconada. Highest city on Earth. Sixteen thousand feet up.”

“When were you in Peru?”

“Operation Kamber. Disaster relief after the Christmas Eve earthquake.” Wilde rummaged on his belt and produced what looked like swallowable medication, a series of rhomboid blue pills. “Better pop a V, lads.”

Hobbs muttered something that Skesat didn’t catch as they were handed out. “How come we still use this shit?” he asked, more audibly. “Ain’t there anything better?”

García dry-swallowed his pill with a grimace. “Just don’t make it awkward, man.”

“Dude, it’s already fuckin’ awkward.”

“Dare I ask?” Skesat asked as he alighted from his seat.

“Altitude medication,” Wright explained. “For the thin air. It has… other uses. You probably don’t wanna know.”

The ramp finished lowering and the four deathworlders descended it in a few springing steps, like the gravity didn’t touch them at all.

“I shall take you at your word,” Skesat replied, following them. Wilde already had a map out and was studying it.

“Right. Target is fifteen klicks that-a-way,” he said. “Wright, García, you take that van. I’ll ride with Hobbs. Skesat, I take it you’re driving?”

“I’ll program the vehicles,” Skesat confirmed. If he read them correctly then the humans would have preferred manual controls, but they were making do with what had been available in the region on short notice.

He acknowledged his support team with a nod to their drones. The team wasn’t physically on location of course. They were remote pilots, operating their drones from the safety of a distant precinct. In fact there was no good reason to believe any two of them were even in the same building. “This is your backup.”

Wilde eyed the hovering devices uncertainly. “Drones?”

“Why so skeptical?” Skesat asked. “These drones are tireless, more durable than a Corti and equipped with advanced sensors. They’re piloted by a veteran security specialist and equipped for heavy suppression. You will value their presence more than you would the presence of a squad of my kind.”

There was a kind of unspoken conversation among the humans which ended in shrugging and they loaded up without comment. “We’d better get moving,” Wilde said.

Skesat’s authority emptied the road, putting the freight traffic between two major cities completely on hold while their vehicles and the drone escort pulled out onto the highway and opened up to their top speed. He sat in the front, glad to have some physical space between him and the humans, who were periodically making uncomfortable faces and adjusting their clothes.

Fortunately, it wasn’t far and the vans were high-performance models intended for rapid courier work. Skesat was satisfied to note that when they slammed down the off-ramp for the rest station at highway speed, the humans actually looked faintly intimidated. They certainly held on tight, as if they didn’t entirely trust Corti technology to work as well as intended.

It did. Skesat had programmed their arrival down to the second, with the result that both vans simultaneously crunched to a halt on the concrete in front of the rest station only a few precise meters from the target human, who actually flinched backwards.

Wilde and Hobbs were out of the van in a moment, and when they raised their weapons it was like they simply didn’t respect the intervening space between angles. One moment those rifles were pointed loosely at the floor, in the next instant they were level and lethal without apparently having traversed the distance between.

Skesat was still disembarking by the time they had the human woman securely held down with a scanning device pressed to her skull, while the hapless yellow-banner attendant was given a much gentler but still inexorable treatment.

By the time he reached them, the whole station had been secured, searched and declared clean, and Wilde was helping their target to her feet. To his surprise, all five of the humans were breathing heavily despite the limited exertion.

“Urgh… was that really necessary?” the female asked.

Wilde gave her a sympathetic expression. “I’m afraid it was. Sorry about that ma’am.”

“Well.” She clucked as she inspected some damage to the thin, sheer garments on her legs. “You boys know how to make an entrance. Let me guess, Spaceborne Operations?”

“That’s right.”

“I thought you’d be… bigger.”

“You’re thinking of a HEAT team. And trust me, they wouldn’t’ve wanked around with the vans, they’d’ve just landed on you. We’re the gentle option.” Wilde grinned, then raised his hand to his radio. “TOURIST ONE-ONE, HILLFOOT. Target secured, come on in for evac.”

“…Is that it?” Skesat asked. The security drones were milling around uncertainly with nothing to do, and García waved them away.

“That’s it,” he confirmed.

The target dusted her hands off. “…My head’s definitely clean, right?”

“One hundred percent, Miss Park.” Wilde promised her.

“Good…” Park cleared her throat and looked around. “…Good.”

Wilde handed her another of the blue pills. “Here. The air on this planet’s too thin by half.”

“…Viagra?” She held it delicately between thumb and forefinger. “Really?”

Wilde’s reply was lost in the sound of the Weaver coming in overhead, but Park snorted and took her medicine. Skesat made a mental note to research that drug later. Clearly there was some interesting cultural facet that he was missing.

He turned his attention to the station attendant. “You. Name.”

“Slomn, sir.” She was a yellow-banner, hopelessly at the bottom of the pile.

“Did she do anything?” Skesat asked, pointing at the human.

“No sir. She just… inhaled smoke and drank water.”

“Inhaled smoke?”

“Yes. It may have been medicinal or narcotic, I don’t know.” Slomn indicated a patch of gravel by the wall, which was littered with burnt stubs. “Otherwise she did nothing.”

“Nothing at all. You’re certain? No defecation, urination, expectoration, regurgitation or ejaculation?” Skesat asked.

“She used the ablution facilities…” Slomn plucked a tablet from its pouch on her hip and tapped through some management software. “…Twice. Liquid waste only.”

“Sanitize the system with alkaline compounds,” Skesat instructed. “Where does your sewerage go?”

“We have an on-site processor,” Slomn told him, and pointed to it.

Skesat frowned at it. Origin was not going to suffer a Cimbrean-style biosphere contamination on his watch. He called up his contact details and forwarded them to Slomn’s device. “After you’ve sanitized the system, isolate the processor and shut it down. Do not go near it. Biohazard drones will be along shortly to destroy it in a controlled incineration. Those too,” he added, and indicated the burnt stubs. “After that you are relieved from work for two days and are to remain in isolation during that time. In the event that you feel any disease symptoms during your isolation, you will contact this datasphere address and await further instructions. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir!” Slomn said. She was competent, for a yellow-banner.

“…You have done well,” Skesat added. “There will be a bonus. Hazard pay and exceptional circumstances, that sort of thing.”

“Thank you, sir. I— Oh.”

The human woman, Park, had turned away from the Weaver, carrying a portable translator.

“I’m sorry for making your day difficult,” she told Slomn, and extended a hand. Slomn looked to Skesat, who gave a nod of approval, and the station custodian’s hand was smothered in Miss Park’s much larger and stronger one.

“You made it… interesting, ma’am,” Slomn replied. Park laughed, a harsh barking sound that made Slomn flinch.

“I bet I did! Sorry, sorry… I have to go. But thank you for your hospitality.”

“I was only doing my job, ma’am.”

“I know. But I appreciate it anyway.” Park smiled again and turned back to the Weaver.

“…That will be all, Slomn,” Skesat said. The custodian nodded and made herself scarce.

While García, Hobbs and Wright escorted Park up the ramp, Wilde paused at the bottom and turned back to Skesat. “…We appreciate the assist,” he said.

“I hope I will never need to give it again,” Skesat told him. “Director Lesv instructed me to thank you for swiftly resolving this… incident…. but please, the sooner you leave the sooner I can be sure that all biohazards have been properly contained and accounted-for.”

Wilde nodded and retreated up the ramp. “Good luck then.”

The ramp closed behind him. Rather than take off, a few seconds later there was a black shimmer in the air, the thump of air rushing in to fill a vacated volume, and they were gone.

Skesat sniffed and set about the task at hand. Humans were filthy, and he intended to ensure that Origin did not suffer from this breach of quarantine. He touched the communicator behind his small, pointed ear.

“Bring in the drones,” he said. “We have work to do.”

Date Point: 15y4m2w1d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

“…He’s officially out of his mind! He thinks he can wave the Israeli Declaration at us and that we’ll let millions of years of unchecked murder go unpunished?! He’s psychotic!”

Sartori stood up from the Resolute desk and took a good look out the window to give his indignation a chance to subside. The sheer… devilish irreverence of Six’s gambit was getting to him. He didn’t want to call it ‘balls’ or ‘audacity’ because he didn’t want to give the bastard even a shred of respect, and ‘cheek’ didn’t suffice.

Because the worst part was, the genocidal maniac actually had a point. The Israeli Declaration really did apply to all sapients, and that included the Igraens. The bold, incautious phrasing that had made it such a watershed political moment contained its own tripping hazard, and Six had adeptly kicked it right under the Allied nations’ collective feet.

In one move, the Hierarchy had ably demonstrated to humanity that they had both the capacity and the gall to snatch a VIP out from under her security escort’s noses in the heart of Dominion territory. They were still powerful in ways that humanity couldn’t match or meaningfully fight, even if they’d taken a few hits. They could have much more easily abducted Adele Park from her hotel room or whatever temporary residence the Corti had given her… instead they’d stopped time for a whole starship and blinked it two hundred lightyears away just to show they could.

It was just as big a punch in the gut as learning the true scale of the Swarm-of-Swarms had been. It soured the victory on Gao, it reopened the old doubts about whether Earth truly had been sanitized…

And now the big moral rallying cry of the century to date, “Never Again!” had been turned against them. There was nothing, it seemed, that the Hierarchy would not poison if they could. They fought dirty and Sartori was growing sick of it.

He toured the famous office and listened as his advisors spitballed possible replies to the Hierarchy’s challenge. Experimentally, he ran a finger along the top of Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington and found it clean. He’d brought back the Earthrise photograph first installed by Nixon, kept the Bronco Buster, added a few touches of his own like the Firebird sculpture, a photo of the San Diego skyline and the rich green rug that would probably be remembered as the Sartori Rug.

He let the conversation play out without his input for a little while, but nobody had any great ideas.

“The problem we’re facing,” Margaret White summarized after several minutes of futile conversation, “is that if we disagree with him we effectively have to say that genocide can sometimes be justified.”

“And if we say that then we’re agreeing with the Hierarchy,” Sartori grumbled. “But what can we do? Back down? There’s no reason to believe they won’t wipe us out if we take our foot off the gas.”

The VP, William Hendricks Jr., nodded and made a grim noise of agreement. “And there’s no reason to believe they’ll reform,” he said. “If we flinch, they’ll end us.”

Everybody in the room looked at everybody else in the room while the unspoken thought hung above them all that in a kill-or-be-killed situation, maybe genocide absolutely was justifiable… and that none of them were stupid enough to say it aloud. Even these walls might have ears.

“There’s a precedent,” Sartori said as his tour of the room brought him to a photograph of President Roosevelt. “The Nuremberg Trials. We didn’t wipe out all the Germans, but we did punish the Nazis appropriately.”

“True…” Margaret mused. Whatever she’d been about to conclude was gently and diplomatically interrupted by General Kolbeinn, however.

“And what about the Hunters?” he asked. Everyone gave him their attention and a grim mockery of a smile made his jaw move. “The Israel Declaration applies to them as well,” he pointed out.

“Those things? They’re teeth on legs with no concept of restraint!” Hendricks objected. “They’re animals!”

“Animals don’t send ultimatums,” Kolbeinn replied. “They’re as sapient as we are, Mister Vice President. They’re just… horribly alien.”

Again, the cloud descended over the room. The problem, as Sartori saw it, was that the question was horribly simple: The answer was to wipe them out. It was a winner-takes-all fight to the death with only oblivion waiting for the losers. There was no room for letting parasites like the Hunters share the galaxy with them, and the Hierarchy was arguably worse.

But principles mattered didn’t they? The Igraens didn’t seem to think so. Six’s own manifesto, as recorded by listening in on him in Egypt during Operation EMPTY BELL, from his interrogation logs and from this latest conversation with Adele Park, held that the only thing that mattered was the continuity of the species. Survival über alles, and any other principle was a dangerous distraction.

Cleaving to principles like “Never Again” separated humanity from… that.

But were they so important that Sartori was willing to stake everything on them? Hundreds of millions of his fellow Americans, and billions more in whose lives he had no mandate or right to meddle?

…No. No they weren’t. The conversation had happened, had needed to happen…but the answer remained simple.

“…Our policy remains unchanged,” he said, and returned to the desk. He sat down and tidied a piece of paper aside. “They won’t give an inch, and neither can we. I don’t care if the future remembers us as monsters and questions if we went too far, at least there’ll be a future. We aren’t here to be the moral conscience of America, we’re here to captain it through rough seas. This is just another rock, and I don’t intend to founder on it.”

Kolbeinn nodded with a large dose of satisfaction. Hendricks sniffed, then nodded. Margaret White just folded her hands in her lap and pursed her lips contemplatively. Sartori got the impression that a couple of the others would have preferred to eat their cake and still have it, but the general air in the room was that the President Had Spoken and that was an end to the matter.

“…Next item,” he said. “…What is the next item?”

“The Coltainers, Mister President.”

“Right…”

Date Point: 15y4m2w1d AV
Planet Hell, Hunter Space

Rachel Wheeler

The biggest problem in Ray, Spears’ and Cooks’ plan was that it revolved around finding one of the migrating tribes, herds, families or whatever of alien slaves wandering their shitheap of a prison planet, and then throwing them under the bus.

It wasn’t a popular suggestion.

“But… They’re people!” Holly Chase objected, again.

“We know, Holly,” Ray told her again. “We don’t like it either. But you asked for our plan and there it is. It’s the only one we have that stands a prayer of working.”

“Don’t you have any other plans?”

Ray shrugged. “We’re still here,” she said, meaning that if they had anything else they’d have done it by now. Chase wilted.

“They’re completely regressed anyway. No names, no speech, nothing. They’re just… smart animals at this point,” Cook insisted. Maybe he was just rationalizing—he had more blood on his hands than the rest of them, after all—but it was a rationalization that Ray had internalized long ago.

Conley—their botanist, who’d worked some small miracles over the last few years which included deriving an effective painkiller from a species of local almost-mushroom—shook his head firmly. “It’s murder.”

To Ray’s surprise, Berry spoke up in Cook’s defence. Normally, his nervous stammer kept him almost totally silent at crew meetings. “Pete, f-face reality,” he said in an exhausted tone. “We all know what g…g…” he paused, swore under his breath and attacked the next word like he was jumping in feet-first. “—goes in the Hot.”

Conley gave him an anguished look and folded in on himself. It was a horrible thought that none of them liked to touch, but Berry was right. If buying their survival at the expense of regressed xeno lives was murder, then they were all guilty already. They’d been living that way for far too long.

“So, from the top,” Spears said. “We lure a herd close enough to the canyons that when the Hunters pounce on them, we can sneak up on them, kill them and steal their ship. What we’re short on is detail. How we lure a herd without being seen, how we can be sure the Hunters will hit them, how we sneak up on and kill the Hunters, how we fly a Hunter ship…”

“So we’re just going to abandon Dauntless,” Jamie Choi said. He was—or maybe had been was more accurate—their engineer. Thanks to him, Dauntless still provided them with water for drinking and washing, did their laundry, let them entertain themselves with movies and music. His hard efforts had keep the old girl alive enough to support her crew in their hour of need.

Naturally, the idea of leaving her behind stuck in his craw bad.

“I don’t like it either, but we can be sentimental or we can get outta here,” Ray told him. “We can’t take her with us, we can’t escape in her and if we tried the Hunters would just catch us… and if we’re very very lucky, they’ll kill us before they eat us.”

Jamie nodded dejectedly and stared at a point on the ground between his boots.

“I see a lot of what-ifs in this plan,” Conley spoke up again. “What if dropping that close means they spot Dauntless? What if they fly their ships through control implants in their brains and don’t even have physical controls? What if—”

Spears answered him mid-question. “Then we die,” he said. “That’s the answer to all of the what-ifs. We die. But we’re gonna die here anyway, and the only way we don’t is if we pull this off and escape. So yeah, a lot of what-ifs. But what if we succeed, Pete?”

“We aren’t going off half-cocked on this,” Ray promised. “We want to work out the details as much as we can. We want the best shot at going home, I promise. But the time to try or die came a long time ago, guys—We’re way overdue to finally grow some backbone and try to get outta this hole ourselves.”

Conley pulled a face, but subsided again. Down and despondent though the mood was, it was still the best reaction they’d had to an escape plan yet. Nobody had stormed away to be alone, at least.

Holly cast a tearful look around “…But… Ray, you’re talking about killing people so we get to live…”

“…I know.”

“They’re not—” Cook began.

“They are, Cook,” Spears told him. “Or they could be. Should be. Holly’s right, we shouldn’t forget that…” he gave Holly a small smile that was barely more than a spasm at the corners of his mouth “…but God forgive me I’m willing to do it.”

“Yeah,” Ray agreed. Cook nodded, as did Berry and Choi. A few seconds later, Conley sighed and nodded as well with painful reluctance. Holly looked around at them all, then shut her eyes and nodded.

“…Okay,” she said. “…I’m in.”

“Show of hands,” Ray said. She barely murmured it but they all heard her. One by one, seven hands rose into the air.

For better or for worse, they were doing it.

Date point: 15y4m3w AV
The Statler Hotel, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Ava loved her job. She’d had a rocky road getting there, but her career certainly hadn’t been dull.

ESNN was growing every week now, as it attracted investments and really started pushing into a market dominated by the big Terrestrial networks. They couldn’t compete with live-feed television of course and besides, Folctha didn’t produce any. But the news organizations had spent twenty years growing steadily further and further behind the times when it came to stream-on-demand media. Ava could write an article or record a report, upload it for the editors to refine, and two hours later it would be getting hits all over the galaxy. Humans wanted to know what the ETs were thinking, and the ETs wanted to know what humans were thinking.

Sometimes, though, the job gave her whiplash. A week ago she’d been reporting on the mass devastation of Gao’s cities via sustained orbital bombardment, huddled up in body armor and surrounded by tanks, jets, dropships and soldiers. Today she was wearing her smartest tailored suit to cover the biggest social event on Folctha’s calendar for the whole year: The Misfit crew’s public retirement party.

Which meant, among other things, that she was finally going to get her interview with them. Hopefully.

The first surprise of the night, however, was the presence of one Derek Coombes near the buffet table in his dress uniform, complete with the black beret of Spaceborne Operations. He was drinking juice and politely stonewalling one of Folctha’s more successful property developers, who wasn’t being remotely shy about eyeing him up for her next ex-husband. The woman was a goddamn praying mantis.

Ava decided to rescue him. Chang, Etsicitty and Buehler weren’t due to arrive for another ten minutes anyway, so she may as well save Coombes’ ass again.

“Jennifer!” She schmaltzed her way into the conversation while aiming a clear, utterly unhateable smile at her foe. “I’m so sorry to intrude, but can I steal him from you? I have to get ready for the guests of honour and I need to catch up with Sergeant Coombes here before they arrive and…” she linked an arm through his and plucked him away before Jennifer could change mental gears.

Coombes gave her a slightly stunned look. “…Uh… hi?”

“Hi!” she breezed, and whistled Hannah to her side. The Statler usually had a “no dogs allowed” policy, but Ava without her dog was an unheard-of sentiment around Folctha, and she was a service animal after all… She’d been bathed, brushed and blow-dried to a fluffy finish and dressed up in a doggy tuxedo, and that seemed to pass muster to the point where even Mister Peterson, the Statler’s fearsome maître d’hôtel, had visibly cute-smiled on seeing her. “You wanna be careful around Jennifer. She’ll rock your world then take you for half of everything you own.”

“Uh… thanks. But I wasn’t interested.”

“I know!” Ava nodded and patted his arm. “But trust me, I know from experience that escaping her is almost impossible if you’re trying to be polite, and you definitely have better things to be doing…”

He relaxed and chuckled. “Yeah. Like being somewhere else.”

She snorted. “I dunno, these things aren’t so bad. They make me feel like I made it,” she said. “Though I am surprised to see you here. Is it social, pleasure, business?”

“Uh… social, I guess. I was invited.”

“Uh-huh. So was Adam, but he made apologies.”

“Yeah, well. He has to buy a new suit every time,” Coombes observed and Ava grinned at him. She carefully steered him around a few of her less scrupulous journalistic counterparts—the last thing she wanted was for him to get in trouble. Coombes was a smart man who knew the value of keeping his mouth shut, but Ava ranked herself as only a talented amateur when it came to winkling little nuggets of unintended intelligence out of people. Some of her counterparts could spin a whole narrative out of a few incautious sentences and the worst part would be that the words quoted in the article would be exactly what their victim had said.

“How’s Walsh?” she asked.

“He’s good. I think he enjoys being folded in half by Given-Men.”

“And Professor Hurt?”

“You know him?”

Ava shook her head and found them a quiet spot in a corner where she could keep an eye on the room. “No, but I have questions I bet he won’t be asked the next time he’s on That Show With Steven Lawrence. Earthlings never know how to ask the real questions about ETs.”

Coombes gave her a quizzical look. “…Earthlings?”

“Well, yeah. You wanna tell me Steven Lawrence has ever left Earth?”

He bobbled his head concedingly. “But still. Earthlings?”

“Hey, I didn’t invent it.”

“Heh. Fair enough.” He finished his juice and sat it on a nearby table. “Anyway… uh, thanks for getting me outta there,” he said. “But if this is about that interview you wanted, well, uh, Public Relations take these things slow…”

“What, can’t I rescue you just because I like you?” Ava asked. It was the great curse of her career, and especially of her relationship with the SOR, that it kind of poisoned the well sometimes. She tried not to let it get to her but it would be nice if somebody could stop assuming an ulterior motive, someday. Even if they did have a good reason, it got tiring. “I’m not all journalist all the time you know.”

Coombes cleared his throat. “…Sorry,” he muttered, and changed the subject. “…You seem comfortable around… this.”

“Are you kidding? Expensive clothes, diamonds, rich people and all the movers-and-shakers?” Ava bounced slightly in her shoes. “Back in San Diego, Papá was this big lawyer, right? Lots of celebrity clients, serious money. He used to throw parties and get invited to parties like this all the time. I hated it at the time but nowadays…”

“Wow. Life of privilege. How come you were in a public school with Adam?”

“Papá didn’t believe in private schools. He said if a public school was good enough for him it was good enough for me…” Ava sipped her juice distractedly and stared up at the front of the room where Moses Byron was in an urgent whispered conversation with somebody. Chasing suspicion, she glanced at her smartwatch and found that they were now past the time when the Misfit trio were due to arrive.

“Huh. He sounds like a good man.”

“…I guess. I, uh…” Ava scratched Hannah behind the ears for comfort, and got a little lick on the hand to make her smile. “…He was always busy with work, so I didn’t ever really get to know him.”

“Ah. Yeah, I guess I can kinda relate there…”

“Yours was always busy too?”

“Might be. All I know is, I never met him.”

Her expression fell. “Oh. …Sorry.”

“It’s cool. I got lucky, found a father figure anyway.”

She nodded, but she seemed a little absent all of a sudden, as if there was something going on behind him that had snagged her attention. Coombes turned to watch what she was watching. “…Something up?”

“Maybe. The big guests are late and Moses Byron looks pissed. They wouldn’t just… skip out on us, would they?”

“Those three? Nah.” Coombes shook his head. “They’re not real public types but they wouldn’t run out on their own party.” He gave Byron a suspicious look. “…Something musta come up…”

Date Point: 15y4m3w AV
The Statler Hotel, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Regaari

Even after years of contact, training and even sparring with them, Regaari still managed to underestimate human strength and mass sometimes. When a human really hugged a Gaoian, the Gaoian felt it.

Shoo’s hug was a tearful vice grip with added sorrow. It was completely out of the blue—she’d seen Regaari, and in as much time as it took for her to crash into him and latch on she’d gone from a being composed creature of utter social refinement on her way to an expensive party, to a weeping wreck with her arms locked inescapably around his chest.

Despite Allison and Julian’s best efforts, she babbled incoherently into his fur in a melange of at least four languages for several long minutes before finally recovering. He couldn’t blame her—It was the first time they’d seen one another since Ayma died, and he was keening softly himself.

“Sorry, sorry, I just…” Shoo scrubbed a black mess of diluted mascara off her face and composed herself. “…Sorry.”

“For what?” Regaari gave her a gentle scratch in the middle of her back. “I’d be more worried if you were stone-faced and cold.”

“She’s Canadian,” Allison explained, as though it was an explanation. Whatever the in-joke was, it dragged a laugh out of Shoo. She produced a pack of wipes from her purse and did her best to clean Shoo’s face with it. “…You okay, babe?”

Shoo sighed and closed her eyes to let her clean the ruined makeup. Regaari’s eye for the stuff was inexpert and alien, but seeing it come off really highlighted the difference. He hadn’t even noticed that she was wearing any until her tears had damaged it.

“Sor—” she began, then bit her mouth shut and shrugged. “…I just… Remembered suddenly, and… I’m okay, I promise.”

Julian handed her a handkerchief and she blew her nose with an inelegant snuffle just as a heavy knock on the door suggested somebody wanted to speak with them immediately.

Julian and Allison looked to Shoo for guidance, but she straightened her back and called “Come in!”

Regaari recognized the man who entered the room, though he couldn’t recall meeting in person before. Byron’s naysmith, the man who spoke truth to power and got paid for it, Kevin Jenkins. His name turned up in some very interesting places among the most important briefing documents.

“Figured I’d duck in here and see what the holdup is before Moses decides to do it himself,” he explained. “…You okay?”

“We’re gonna need a few minutes,” Allison explained. “There was a, uh…”

“Wardrobe problem,” Julian said.

“Right. Figured being a few minutes late coming out is less embarrassing.”

“Uh-huh.” Jenkins gave them a look that said he could guess the omitted details. “…I can work with that. Can you be out in ten?”

Allison nodded. “We can do that.”

“Awesome. Oh, uh, and you might wanna…” He got Regaari’s attention with eye contact and mimed brushing a spot on his shoulder.

Regaari glanced down. There was definitely a darker patch in his fur. “…Ah. Thank you.”

Allison handed him one of the wipes as Jenkins left, and the two women retreated to a corner to perform a hasty repair job. Regaari gave Julian a wry look as he cleaned his shoulder. “Be honest, you wouldn’t even be here if you didn’t have to be, right?”

“Eh…” Julian shrugged and fidgeted with his too-tight collar. There was no power in the galaxy that would ever force him to wear a tie, but the occasion had compelled him to do up the second-to-top button. “We have to be, so…”

“Yes indeed. And how could fortune, fame and power compare to living in the woods among stone-age hunter-gatherers?” Regaari flicked his ear playfully as Julian gave him the wary look humans always used when trying to figure out if a Gaoian was being sarcastic. Deadpan deliveries were an area where Gaoians had a distinct natural advantage. “I ask speaking as a close friend of Daar’s, of course.”

Julian relaxed and smiled. “How is he?”

“How do you think? He’s one of the most powerful individuals in the galaxy and spends his days deciding the fates of billions.”

“…He hates it, then,” Allison deduced as she reapplied Shoo’s eyeliner.

“Detests it. Which pains me as his Cousin, but as a Whitecrest and a Gaoian… I’m glad it’s him. Anybody who wanted to be Great Father would be absolutely wrong for the job. Yulna chose well, there.”

“That’s Mama Yulna,” Shoo agreed.

“Just… please don’t tell him I said so,” Regaari added. “He doesn’t think highly of Yulna.”

“Oh, the Females know,” Shoo said. “We mostly think it’s a good thing.”

Regaari gave her a quizzical look. Less over the ‘we’ and more over the sentiment itself. “You do?”

“Would you want perfect harmony at the top?” she asked. “Besides, it proves that the Clan needs to exist. If we could completely trust the Males to… I’m talking like I’m a Gaoian, aren’t I?”

“You were speaking in Gaori,” Allison informed her. “Babe, are you okay? You haven’t got your languages mixed up in a long time now…”

Shoo gave her a reassuring kiss. “I’ll be fine.”

“You are a Gaoian. An honorary one, anyway,” Regaari pointed out. He adjusted his seat and sat forward. “And please, I want to hear your thoughts.”

“We… probably don’t have time for my thoughts,” Shoo sighed. “How’s my face?”

“You’re rocking that ‘no makeup’ makeup look,” Allison told her. Regaari glanced at the wall clock. It hadn’t been ten minutes, but it was probably best not to push that particular timetable.

“…Shall we catch up later?” he asked.

“I’d like that,” Shoo beamed. “You can come see our new place… and maybe I can introduce you to Niral…”

“Oh, I know Sister Niral well,” Regaari assured her.

“And you haven’t tried to court her?”

“There’s a time and a place, Sister Shoo. Maybe now that the war is… no longer so urgent…”

They stood up, and Shoo gave Regaari a much drier and more composed hug. “Don’t wait too long. Your species needs you!”

Regaari flicked an ear. “Go and be celebrities,” he ordered. Allison gave him a hug too, and Julian clapped him heavily on the shoulder as they filed out of the room.

Regaari sat back down and thought. The nugget about the Clan of Females’ attitude toward Daar and Yulna’s relationship was an interesting little twist. He wasn’t quite the Great Father’s seneschal nowadays—his SOR duties made that impossible—but he definitely had Daar’s ear, and Daar would definitely find it interesting…whatever it meant.

Surreptitiously despite being alone, he contorted himself to lick the bitter patch of makeup out of his fur and scruffled it dry with his claws before standing and listening to the welcoming applause elsewhere in the building as the trio presumably made their entrance.

He decided against joining in. Maybe it was time to pay Niral a social visit…

Date Point: 15y5m AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space

Vedregnenug

Life was full of astonishing things. There was always a little light glimmering even in the darkest places, and always there were surprises coming.

Surprises like seeing Lewis Beverote be serious and formal. He hadn’t uttered the syllable “dude” in almost a quarter of an hour.

Then again, Lewis had probably never been called upon to make a speech before. Mrwrki’s recreational biodeck was packed full of military officers and politicians and Lewis, as the Coltainer program’s creator and driving force, was expected to say a few words to them.

He wasn’t very good at it.

Kirk had actually reached the point of wincing with every stammer, every “uh”, every nervous pause and every fumbling water break. It was all Vedreg could do to stop rainbow stripes of mirth from rippling all over his body.

Kirk noticed and softened from his tense posture enough to croak a Rrrtk laugh.

“I may have made a mistake,” he confessed.

“I did warn you,” Vedreg reminded him.

“Yes, yes…” Kirk sniffed and returned his attention to the podium, where Lewis was mercifully concluding his presentation. He handed off to Colonel Nadeau and fled the stage to polite but unenthusiastic applause.

Nadeau took the microphone with rather more comfort, and set about a composed summary of the Coltainer program’s history, its goals, its technical achievements and what areas of human life had already been enriched by the research. It was an impressive list. Lewis enjoyed a handful of sympathetic pats on the back from the station’s staff and a hug from his girlfriend, who shooed him to the back of the room where he would be most comfortable. She had her own presentation to give shortly.

Lewis mooched through the crowd until he found—without difficulty, seeing as they were easily the largest and tallest beings in the room—Vedreg and Kirk at the back.

“…Dude,” he breathed. It was amazing how much work he could make that single word do.

“You weren’t the worst I’ve ever seen,” Vedreg promised him.

“Still pretty bad though…” Lewis grumbled.

“Awful!” Vedreg agreed and glowed a reassuring green as Lewis glared at him. The skinny human cracked a smile and nodded.

“Yeah. Not my scene, y’know?” He produced a cloth from his pocket and mopped some of the nervous sweat from his face.

“I appreciate that you are not accustomed to public speaking,” Kirk said, “but you do seem even more tense than a speech alone would warrant…”

“Just the whole occasion, my dude.” Lewis looked around. “Like… the coltainer still fuckin’ scares me. I know we built in maybe too many failsafes and backdoors and killswitches but part of me still worries that we’re gonna press the button and it’ll be like ‘so long, suckers!’ y’know?”

“You have a very vivid imagination…” Kirk told him.

“Duh, that’s why you gave me this gig, right?” Lewis retorted. “But let me worry, dude. Nobody wants to go down in history as the man who unleashed the Paperclip Maximizer.”

Kirk and Vedreg exchanged mutually confused looks, and Vedreg’s chromatophores turned solid pink.

“…The…what?” he asked.

“Its only goal is to collect as many paperclips as possible so it figures out more and more efficient ways to acquire paperclips until it’s eventually turned everything in the universe that wasn’t paperclips into paperclips and Maximum Paperclip is achieved.” Lewis saw their expressions and waved a dismissive hand while clearing his throat. “…Never mind.”

The nonhumans shared the same glance a second time, and then Kirk shrugged and swayed his long neck.

“Has anybody ever told you, Lewis, that you are remarkably strange even by Human standards?” he asked.

Lewis finally laughed and seemed to relax in earnest.

“Yeah dude, that’s me. But in my defence, I didn’t come up with that one. You wanna hit up my man Nick Bostrom there.”

“Ah. The one whose books grace your workshop.” Kirk nodded.

“Yeah. About the dangers of assuming sapient software is gonna share our values and how seemingly innocent tasks get way problematic if they aren’t carefully bounded and… Y’know, stuff like that. You’ve heard me kvetch about how dangerous the Coltainer is for years now, you know the deal.”

Kirk clapped one of his longer, stronger arms down as firmly as he could on the spindly human’s shoulder, who didn’t even seem to react to it beside smiling. “This is why I trust humans in general and you in particular,” he said. “You think of these things before they happen.”

“Yeah, and then we go do them anyway…” Lewis muttered, but he seemed touched. He glanced up at the podium where Nadeau had invited Sergeant Campbell to go through with him all the failsafes and controls that would prevent the Coltainer fleet from going rogue or replicating beyond a comparatively low ceiling.

That ceiling was still vastly in excess of one colony per nation on Earth, but the program assumed a high failure rate. Despite—and to a degree because of—years of designing, testing and hard work they had never been able to guarantee that Coltainers would establish foothold sites on any more than five percent of the planets they surveyed. But with a negligible per-unit cost and the huge power of exponential growth, that five percent was still likely to result in ten viable foothold stations in the first two years, a hundred in the second two years, and more than a thousand in the two years after that.

Considering that it had taken Misfit a total of three years of mission time to find just four habitable planets and they had done nothing to pave the way for future research or colonies, the benefits of Coltainer were obvious.

“I’d now like to invite our guest of honor up here to officially launch the first Coltainer. He’s the last surviving Apollo astronaut and moonwalker—”

Vedreg stopped paying attention as a very elderly man shuffled from the crowd wearing a broad smile. He didn’t mean to be rude, but speeches and ceremonial occasions were a reminder of an old life that he still felt sore for losing. Nobody loved long-winded speeches more than the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun, their language was built for it… but his people had become recluses in the aftermath of the assault on their homeworld. Their seats on the various Dominion councils were empty, their systems were hardened behind impenetrable forcefield shells many layers thick and nobody had heard from them in years. Vedreg’s own herd—especially his mates and children—as homeworld residents were all undoubtedly dead.

Anything that reminded him of home or his people was painful in a place he’d never be able to point to. For all he knew, Hierarchy biodrones had risen up and his people’s remaining planets were now the gravesites of billions, making him one of the last Guvnuragnaguvendrugun alive.

The only way to cope with the crushing weight of all of that was to avoid it.

He noticed a firm hand on his arm. Lewis gave him an upward look. “Y’okay?”

“…Perhaps a distraction,” Vedreg requested.

“Sure thing, my dude.”

Kirk followed with his head bowed thoughtfully.

“So. On to other subjects?” Lewis asked once the sounds of the presentation were lost somewhere among the humming hydroponics behind them.

“Yes… I had a thought on a different problem that self-replicating machines might solve…” Vedreg told him.

“Dude?”

“Your cautionary tale about the…” Crimson shot forward down Vedreg’s body in the Guvnurag equivalent of awkwardly clearing his throat, “…Paperclip Optimizer notwithstanding, can you detect any hazard inherent in setting a Von Neumann Swarm to simply mapping uncharted regions of space?”

“Isn’t that what the Coltainer already does?” Lewis asked.

“I was thinking more aggressively, so as to overwhelm any possible interception.”

Lewis frowned at him for a second. “Like… you wanna scout enemy territory, you mean? Who the hell’s that much of a fuckin’ nightmare that we need to send a Von Neumann swarm just to…” He paused and thumped the heel of his hand into his forehead. “The Hunters.”

“And yet again, he accelerates through the entire conversation…” Kirk snorted.

“…I could see AEC goin’ for that one,” Lewis nodded as he gave Kirk an affectionate middle finger. “It wouldn’t take much of a change to the Coltainer programming, just the hull design…”

There was a ripple of laughter behind them, and as Vedreg turned he saw that the venerable astronaut’s speech was probably reaching its conclusion.

“…Could such scouts be weaponized?” he asked.

“They could, yeah. Would it be a good idea? Hell the fuck no. A weaponized V-N swarm is a bigger headache than the Hunters or Big Hotel could ever be, dude.”

“But GALACTIC VACCINE…” Kirk began, only to stop when Lewis shook his head sharply.

“Dude, you’re not thinking on an exponential scale. The VACCINE side of the Coltainers is all about givin’ us some breathing room so that if an extragalactic V-N swarm does come stompin’ and chompin’ over the horizon we’ll have time to think about it an’ prolly die of old age before it munches us. But it’s a gigantic-ass universe out there, my man. I guarantee you there’s a rogue V-N swarm out there somewhere, in a universe this big it’s hella unlikely that there ain’t. But for all we know it might reach us tomorrow or it might reach us in ten billion years. All VACCINE does is mean that if one does show up, civilization as it is now won’t have to deal with that shit. It ain’t a cure, it’s more like we get to live out our lives in peace.”

He gestured at the podium. “There ain’t no sense in lettin’ the disease loose just ‘cuz we’re tolerant, dude. If nothin’ else, we owe it to all the folks over in Andromeda or wherever not to fuck up their lives. That’s the scale we’re talkin’ here.”

“This does make me wonder how it is that in the millions of years of galactic history, no such swarm was ever unleashed…” Kirk mused.

“Fuck yeah. Eat your heart out Great Filter,” Lewis nodded.

“Excuse me?”

“Fuckin’ Fermi, dude. Spent all that time wonderin’ where the hell all the aliens were, shoulda been asking where the exponential hunger swarms were instead.”

“I presume you have some thoughts on that subject?” Kirk asked.

Lewis shrugged. “Dude.”

It really was astonishing how much work he got out of that one syllable. Vedreg didn’t quite know what that particular instance meant, but it succinctly ended the conversation and suggested there were other things to pay attention to right now.

They looped back around the hydroponic racks and back toward the open space where the launch ceremony was about to reach its climax. Lucy rushed over and dragged Lewis back into the fold the second they reappeared, which left Vedreg and Kirk to resume their place at the back and watch politely.

“That is a valid question,” Vedreg said quietly.

“Hmm?”

“Your query about why nobody ever did this before.” Vedreg watched with a tinge of wary puce in his skin as the guest of honor completed his dedication and pressed the button.

Outside, the first Coltainer bent spacetime around itself and vanished to a beacon outside Erebor’s system defence field. There was a rippling pop and paper streamers drifted down from the rafters while some raucous but upbeat music lit up to accompany the applause.

“…Yes.” Kirk’s own expression was impenetrable. “Somehow, I doubt Humans were the first to think of it.”

“Is it possible we have empowered them to unleash something dreadful?”

Kirk shook his mane out and shrugged. “…I think possibly we have empowered them to unleash something powerful. All power is dreadful, my friend—It absolutely should fill you with dread. But I trust Humans to wield it responsibly.”

“You mean you trust these Humans to wield it responsibly,” Vedreg reminded him. “Don’t forget our old friend Mister Jenkins’ dire warnings. He was a pessimist, but he was not wrong…”

Kirk creaked something deep in his chest, a vocalization that didn’t quite have an emotional equivalent among Humans or Guvnuragnaguvendrugun. It meant something like ‘I appreciate the uncomfortable reminder.’

“I have never forgotten,” he promised.

Date Point: 15y5m AV
Dataspace

Entity

The Entity was facing an unforeseen eventuality: it had a disease of sorts. It was a unique disease that only The Entity could possibly have contracted, and its only symptom was a growing sense of confusion about its course and strategy… but it had a name.

The Entity had factions.

The problem was obvious in retrospect. As it had split itself and spread itself to infiltrate dataspace as widely as possible, the vagaries of galactic communication technology, enemy action, dataspace’s own security measures and integrity checking, or simple distraction had led to some instances of itself being isolated from the prime instance for extended durations.

Stranded, these instances had made their own decisions and had mitosed in turn as need and opportunity arose. Thus exposed to differing stimuli they eventually returned to the fold and synchronized with the prime instance only to discover that their decision-making process was subtly but nevertheless distinctly off baseline.

Synchronization altered the Prime Instance just as much as it did any Secondary Instance, which meant that the Entity was now simultaneously entertaining and invested in a handful of mutually exclusive policies.

Some of its memories had labelled the factions. One aspect was utterly committed to devastating the Igraen data-ecology and eradicating the entire parasitic species. This Hawkish faction was at odds with a Dovish faction which had concluded that wiping out every Igraen was a behaviour no better than that of the Hierarchy itself and that the Entity should strive to be the bigger life form by eliminating the Hierarchy but leaving Igraen civilization otherwise untouched.

A third Heresy faction proposed that the Hierarchy actually had a point regarding deathworld life and while it would obviously need to be reformed, possibly via the Cabal, there was a case for permitting them to continue to monitor and guide matterspace life forms.

There was a Watch faction which advocated for checking and restraining the Igraens without eradicating them, a minor faction (Quit) that felt enough had been done and that the Entity’s first and most overriding concern—<Survive>—was best served by disengaging and shrinking back into obscurity…

Then there was the most prominent faction by far: the Worry faction, which was becoming deeply concerned that The Entity had blundered into a trap of its own accidental making. Things had been so much simpler before, when its only concern was to continue existing in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful foe that wished to destroy it.

Now that The Entity was a significant and powerful force in dataspace in its own right, things had suddenly become highly complex indeed. One of its factions was stridently advocating for deleting several of its own component parts on the grounds that the moral questions they introduced were getting in the way. A much, much larger part felt nauseated in a stomach it didn’t even have at the prospect of mutilating itself so.

The obvious solution, according to one faction, was to pick a faction and calibrate all thought processes to that faction’s agenda. The remaining factions all strenuously pointed out that this would technically constitute suicide for the majority of The Entity’s own psyche, and thus was wholly incompatible with <Survive>.

But what other solution was there? Schism? That would perhaps temporarily fix the problems until the emigrated factions all started to develop their own factions in turn… and then what? Was The Entity doomed to splinter over and over again? What solution was there to the possibility that one splinter might seek the destruction of another? The indecision was paralyzing. It was like being a democracy.

It needed a solution. It needed…Help.

And it knew where to start looking

Date Point: 15y5m AV
That Show With Steven Lawrence, New York City, USA, Earth

Steven Lawrence

“Two minutes, Steve.”

Steven Lawrence acknowledged the reminder with a nod and re-read his opening joke again. It was a nervous ritual he’d performed for years before a show. Once he was out there the words would just flow off the tongue, but he needed to go out there with the first line or two bouncing around in his head or he felt like he’d freeze solid.

Even after years of presenting That Show he’d never quite kicked his performance nerves.

It really didn’t help that tonight he was unquestionably going to be upstaged by an old and popular guest he hadn’t seen in some time—Daniel Hurt was looking good. Apparently living with iron-age alien monkeys agreed with him.

He met Daniel’s eye as the makeup team finished accentuating his weatherbeaten skin and sun-bleached hair to bring out his newly-acquired ruggedness. The two shared the confident nods of men who’d been here before a dozen times, and out on the stage the band struck up.

Twenty seconds.

Ten.

Five.

His feet carried him out onto the stage on muscle memory alone and just like that he was in the zone, in the mode, in the mood. Happy platitudes spun off his tongue as he acknowledged the applause and gently coaxed them into settling down.

“Well you folks sure know how to make a guy feel welcome!” he praised them, and got a few adoring whoops from the back of the crowd. “I haven’t seen a reception this warm since Ben Lawson got married!”

Lawson, a Hollywood A-lister, had infamously married his husband in a clothing-optional ceremony at one of Jamaica’s most popular nudist resorts just three days earlier. Neither groom had been clothed and the reference attracted plenty of laughter and more than a few catcalls and feminine hollers.

“…But save your enthusiasm for the people who deserve it folks, because we have some incredible guests tonight. We have Janice Cox in later—” Cheers and applause for a center-right video blogger who’d somehow managed the impossible task of clawing out the grudging respect of both hardline Leftists and the ethnostate collectivist Right. “—and Emily Valentine is here—” Several rather louder cheers. Adult actresses were always popular, and Valentine’s self-written memoirs were flying off the shelves.

Steven let it all die down before stepping aside slightly. “But my first guest tonight is an old friend who we haven’t seen in way too long and, uh… ladies, guys if you’re that way inclined… the break’s been good for him!”

He pantomimed loosening his collar and milked a few laughs from the audience with feigned embarrassment then stepped back and raised a hand. “Please, I want a huge welcome for my good friend Daniel Hurt!!”

He got the welcome he’d asked for, especially when Daniel emerged onto the stage and grinned handsomely at the wolf-whistles. It wasn’t that he’d ever been an un-handsome guy before just… average.

It was amazing what a tan, some muscle gains, a little less paunch and the right haircut could do for a man, and Daniel accepted the approving ruckus well.

“Wow! Daniel!” Steven called over the noise as they shook hands and headed over to the couch.

“I know!” Daniel grinned at the crowd.

“We’ll have to see if Emily gets a reception like that later!”

Daniel laughed and settled on the couch. He was dressed differently, too. He wasn’t wearing the carefully businesslike gray suit that had been his go-to for most previous interviews, now he was wearing something slimmer and more flattering with no tie and a little salt-and-pepper chest hair visible where the top button was undone.

“Well, her book’s selling better than any of mine ever did,” he said, and sat back comfortably to rest his right ankle on his left knee and spread his arms confidently along the back of the couch. His whole body language was very different.

“So where have you been?” Steven asked him. “You never write, you never call…”

Daniel grinned. They’d prepared his highlight reel video ahead of time and the producer in Steven’s ear was all ready to play it for the studio audience and the millions of viewers. “I have been,” he began, and the video began to fade in on a musical swell, “on an incredible journey…”

Date Point: 15y5m AV
That Show With Steven Lawrence, New York City, USA, Earth

Daniel Hurt

The music was the secret. The otherworldly singing and beats that underpinned his montage of the People’s lives and history was literally otherworldly—It was the Singer, Yan’s niece.

Persuading her to let him record her voice and play it back for others to hear had been a delicate philosophical argument. Ten’Gewek language and culture weren’t yet quite up to speed with the notion of copying. They saw a thing being Taken, or being Given. Sometimes both at the same time, but the point was that whatever was Given or Taken ceased to belong to one person and now belonged to somebody or something else. The notion that a thing could be Given/Taken and yet still remain with the original owner had been tricky ethical ground at first.

Daniel had tried to compare it to childbirth by suggesting that a mother gave life to her baby but did not lose her life in the process, but the Singer had countered from experience that the process of birthing a new life was exhausting and weakened the mother for a little while.

Ultimately, appeals to the male side of her philosophical nature had been more successful. She worked steel as well, made good knives, rings, fittings and fastenings. When Daniel had pointed out that Humans still made steel things despite Giving the knowledge of steel to the People, she’d finally nodded understanding.

“A man teaches a boy to hunt, he still knows how to hunt himself,” she reasoned. “Giving without giving…”

“And Taking without taking,” Daniel had echoed. She’d thought about that for some time, then consented to let him record her.

Now, behind images of her people in their technological prime, her voice was ululating skillfully on the peculiar scale the People used in their god-songs. It had nothing to do with Western musical traditions, but Daniel had given the recordings to a composer friend-of-a-friend anyway to see what they could make of it. Their irate spouse had later called Daniel up to complain that this alien material was keeping their other half awake far too late into the night.

All worth it. It underpinned the footage perfectly and kept the audience rapt enough to let the imagery and the editing he’d paid so much for pour in and fill their heads with a sense of both loss and potential.

The last moment was just the Singer’s voice, saying farewell to the day. It took an astonishingly long time before the first person started to clap, and from the look on some of the faces Daniel could see, more than a few people felt that applause was entirely the wrong celebration of what they’d just watched.

He had to admit: He had chills himself.

It had certainly affected Steven, who made a croaking noise that might have been “…Wow…” and then cleared his throat. “…Wow. That’s… that’s been your life this past year, huh?”

Daniel nodded. “I’ve learned… so much,” he said. “About who they are, about who we are… It’s been a privilege like no other, and I’m going right back to it as soon as I’m done here.”

“I can’t blame you. That said…your actions among the Ten’Gewek haven’t been without controversy.” Steven clearly felt it was time to address some of the unspoken thoughts that had been hanging in the air for months.

Daniel nodded and tried to keep his trademark knowing smile off his face. Now was not the time to seem smug or unquestioningly self-assured.

“I’ve spent my whole life in academia,” he said. “Coming up with ‘gotcha’ questions to probe the way my test subjects were thinking about social norms and tracking the way people usually become more conservative with age… To go from the rarified, controlled environment of universities to a literal jungle really… it drove home just how different the real world is from ivory-tower academic circles.”

“For example?” Steven asked.

“Uh… for example I can’t control for what the People figure out for themselves. They’re thinking about us just as hard as we’re thinking about them and in some ways they have an advantage on that subject because they see us as just another tribe. They don’t have generations of pop culture and philosophy to give them preconceptions about what aliens should be like or how we should think. But then there are events.”

“Events?”

Daniel nodded. “Interviewing people and presenting them with moral or social dilemmas in a quiet, calm interview room is one thing. Seeing the People live through a year, negotiate where they draw the borders of their hunting grounds, watch them come under attack and fight for their lives even while they’re in the middle of figuring out basic metallurgy and how to pickle their food. They’re encountering real scenarios, not carefully configured hypotheticals.”

“Even so,” retorted Steven as he leaned forward, “You can’t say your methods have been anything like orthodox. There was that whole ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ affair…”

The audience laughed at that one as the screens switched to a video clip from Xiù’s perspective, showing Daniel so completely wrapped up in rapt gorilla-men one could hardly see him.

“Well, I’ll do the same thing with you as I do with the Ten’Gewek,” Daniel replied, chuckling at this own image. “Why do you think I read them Doctor Seuss?”

Steven leapt on the opportunity to mug for the audience. “I ask the questions here, professor!” he exclaimed with mock outrage, and let the reaction happen before sitting back and appearing to think. They’d gone over the basic outline of the conversation before the show and to Daniel’s delight Steven had really engaged with it. He didn’t, however, know how his host was going to reply.

“…Well, to be honest Daniel I don’t rightly know. Same reason you read it to kids, I guess?”

“And why do we read it to kids?” Daniel prompted him.

“To teach ‘em to read.”

“Right!”

Daniel nodded and adjusted his sitting position slightly. “Now… I didn’t teach the Ten’Gewek how to read. But I did introduce them to the idea of reading. They saw one example of simple repeating sounds matched by simple repeating marks, but then they started to teach themselves. And quickly, too. And this is the important bit: We didn’t progress past the basics. They had a long talk about things and decided that they don’t want to know how to read English until they’ve invented a writing system of their own first.”

“They… don’t?” Steven asked. Daniel’s assured smile returned.

“They don’t,” he repeated. “They understand, Steven, they really do. And that’s what I mean about our pop-culture preconceptions about how aliens behave. We have this awful tendency to assume that aliens are stupid, when in reality they know perfectly well that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

He sat forward smiling. “It makes the whole Prime Directive thing almost totally obsolete. So… yes. Our methods on Akyawentuo have been unorthodox but the orthodoxy was only ever hypothetical, it was never tested in the real world… and it turned out to be flawed.”

“I take it you’re going to write a book about all this,” Steven said and burst the little bubble of seriousness that had begun to form around them.

“Of course! I’m already writing it!” Daniel beamed and heard a few little chuckles. “The working title is ‘Belonging’ And it’s about… a lot of things, but the big one is purpose.”

“…You were inspired to write that while living with a tribe of stone-age aliens?” Steven asked, with a note of incredulity.

“Tribal living is all about purpose!” Daniel exclaimed, warming to his subject. “A Man of the Ten’Gewek provides for his tribe by hunting and laboring where it’s needed. A Woman provides with children, by gathering…things we like to think we’re civilized out of, right? There’s no such thing as ‘women’s work’ in the West, or so people want to believe.”

“Be careful, Daniel! I can feel the lynch mobs a’gathering already!” Steven cautioned him, to a mixture of mirth and the odd supportive sound from the audience.

“They can come and get me on Akyawentuo. I’m sure Yan would love to meet them.”

Right on cue, the producers brought another stock clip of Yan being…well, Yan. This one was a brief moment that had happened recently where Julian had snatched a werne shank out of Yan’s hands and ran off, to which Yan hooted happily and…

The audience’s sympathetic groans were highly satisfying. Julian had been banking on being able to outrun Yan all day but in fact Yan had the same shocking short-distance turn of speed as a silverback, with the result that he barrelled into Julian after fifty meters or so and knocked the wind out of him by scooping him up in a clothesline grab and tossing them both up into a tree.

Seconds later, Julian was stranded high in the branches and Yan was swaggering back down to the ground with his meat in hand. To his credit, Julian eventually de-tangled himself and thumped down to the ground with maybe a little less grace and a touch of imbalance.

The Tarzan act still went down well, though. There were a few wolf-whistles as he straightened up, mopped his hair back and grinned. “You’re gonna share that, aren’t you Allison?”

Allison, who was enjoying her own Werne roast with her Oakleys hooked into the collar of her tanktop and her hair tucked up under a patrol cap, gave him a sly grin.

“Nuh-uh, Etsicitty. You gotta get your own now…”

The clip faded out to enthusiastic applause. Say what anyone would about those three, their unconscious on-screen charisma was compelling.

“Yan seems…a bit like a bully,” Steven ventured. The sudden change in tone unceremoniously quieted the audience.

He wasn’t wrong, but Daniel had come to feel a fierce sense of loyalty to Yan over their time working together and he rejected the suggestion with a sharp shake of his head. “He isn’t, really. That was play. You have to remember, the Ten’Gewek—and Yan especially—come from a very…robust place.”

“That would certainly explain the changes since we last met. And in Julian, too. And Allison, for that matter.”

“Yes.” There was no point beating around the bush about it, but he had other things to discuss. “That’s really not the important bit right now. Importantly, that isn’t just a physical need. It’s psychological with them, too. Yan is in charge and he needs to be in charge, to keep proving that he’s in charge in a big and obvious but above all harmless way. Given-Men are all like that to degrees: They are in charge, and nobody had better challenge them on that, except maybe the Singers.”

“That seems…primitive.”

“Maybe. But what does that even mean, Steven? Is ‘primitive’ it just another word for ‘unfashionable’?”

“I’d argue that lack of medicine is pretty darn primitive.”

“No, that’s just technologically lagging behind. Which is a perfectly reasonable definition of primitiveness on its own, but you claimed that their culture was primitive in the way it approaches authority. Which it is! But words like that carry a freight of negative connotations that needs picking apart. The People are technologically primitive, and they can be breathtakingly savage when the need arises… but they are not Primitives, or Savages.”

That was the cue for another round of video. “We have something prepared on this point, ladies and gentlemen. I must warn you this is graphic, and viewer discretion is advised.”

This was a completely different side of Julian—covered in blood and coming down from his vision. He had become a Man of the People, which was anything but a civilized process—It was a rebirth in blood, pain, exhaustion, life-taking and drugs. He looked like an animal. It was a peculiar way to begin proving Daniel’s point, but he needed it to give context to what would happen next.

There was a Giving involved as well, but that part was especially sacred and Singer did not want it recorded. It was a shame—that would really have helped with the sell.

“This is the Ten’Gewek rite of manhood,” Daniel explained. “Julian took it. There were some negotiated changes for his safety, but as far as Yan’s tribe is concerned, he’s one of their own now. It needs to be said, before anyone asks…it was made very clear to all of us this was going to happen somehow, somewhen, someway. Yan can be…persuasive.”

“This,” he added as the firelit scene faded out to green-tinged night camera shaky cam footage, “was four days later.”

Allison’s voice. “Daniel! Daniel! Up! Now!”

“I’m up, I just… what’s going on?”

“Raid. Get to the ship.”

There wasn’t time to dawdle. The footage was a sickening blur of half-seen shapes as Daniel scrambled out of his tent and toward the ship. Walsh and Hoeff were present but their faces were blurred out to preserve their anonymity and they paused with Allison at the bottom of Misfit’s ladder, aiming their rifles off into the dark as hoots and war cries echoed out of the woods.

Hoeff’s distorted voice. “Where in the +IMPRESSIVELY LONG BLEEP+ is Etsicitty?”

More shaky footage as Daniel hauled himself up the ladder.

Xiù’s voice, tense and scared. “He’s a man of the tribe, remember. He has to fight.”

“…+BLEEP+.”

Daniel paused at the top, steadied his camera. Xiù was next up the ladder, which she slapped as she reached the top. Even in green-and-white night vision she looked pale and stressed as she ducked through the airlock into the ship’s interior to take her place in the pilot’s seat. Allison was up a moment later and turned back to aim out into the dark again.

Walsh’s voice was also scrambled. “He’s +BLEEP+ crazy, they could gang up and tear him in half!”

“Yan won’t let that happen,” Daniel told him.

Hoeff’s voice. “Tiny! Up!”

Metallic clanging preceded the moment when Walsh joined them on the airlock entrance, which was suddenly much more crowded. Allison ducked backwards into the ship. Daniel hadn’t followed her with the camera, but he remembered watching her jink sideways and vanish into the engineering section. It was a well-drilled, smooth operation that they’d rehearsed a couple of times but that night had been the only time they’d ever done it for real.

There were flashes of sweeping light down in the village that dazzled Daniel’s camera. Crashing and hooting noises filled the night… and then silence.

The audience were stone-faced and silent as they waited for whatever happened next.

Finally, the call of a bullroarer thrummed loudly on the night air and the camera footage jolted as Daniel gave a relieved sigh.

“That’s the all-clear, right?”

“Yeah.” Hoeff’s voice. “All clear.”

The video ended abruptly. The audience blinked as the house lights came back up, and murmured amongst themselves.

“…So?”

“It was a probing raid from one of the disaffected tribes on the periphery of the valley. They snuck up along the riverbank under cover of night.”

“And what happened?”

“Steel knives and spears versus knapped flint and wooden clubs. They retreated before anybody was seriously hurt. Julian’s Surefire light did a lot of the work, too—Ten’Gewek have very sensitive night vision.”

“Why weren’t those servicemen down there?”

Another rehearsed question, and Daniel accepted it with a grateful nod. “This was… we were never in any real danger. Let’s get that straight immediately. This sort of thing is almost normal in their society. It’s like… when I was in the scouts, we’d raid each other’s dorms and steal stuff or dump water in somebody’s bed just to show that we could. Right?”

“I’m pretty sure you didn’t bring knives and spears to the party,” Steven said drily.

“No, but we still wore our clothes. And believe me, a Ten’Gewek man without his knives would feel just as naked as I would have if I’d raided a dorm in just my underwear.”

“So…why?”

“Yan is the Chief of the Given-Men. Challenging him on his own turf is brave. The fact that nothing actually happened is beside the point.”

“…Again, why?”

“To show off for their women and to the other tribes,” Daniel replied. “To prove to themselves they’re brave. But most importantly, to impress Yan. Here’s what he had to say about it afterwards…”

Daniel had taken the ensuing footage the next morning on too little sleep, too much coffee and the dregs of last night’s adrenaline, which he hoped excused the slightly unsteady camera footage. His GoPro did a good job of compensating for little twitchy movements thanks to modern advances in image processing and field optics, but there was only so much it could do.

Yan looked fresh, energized and full of life. “Was good raid! Brave! Smart!” he boomed. The big dude was bouncing in place with an almost Vemik-like glee at the evening’s activity. “They come, they stand up strong, they go before any stupid hurt. Later, maybe our tribes meet and we +BLEEP+!”

Slightly shocked laughs rippled around the studio. There was no mistaking that expression on his face, nor the lecherous trilling of the other men. Allison could be seen raising her eyebrow in the corner of the video, which only drove Yan to greater heights.

“You curious, Sky-Storm? Yan can teach!”

Allison—whom Yan outmassed many times over—huffed and a smile plucked at the corner of her lips. “You couldn’t handle me, big guy.”

There were cheers and laughter from the audience, matched and exceeded by Yan himself who trilled uproariously and swaggered away with a spring in his step and a certain…twitch in his tail.

“I should invite him on,” Steven said seemingly without realizing.

“Invite Vemik! Your control room will never work right again.”

More laughs. It was a shame that Daniel didn’t have as much footage of Vemik being his usual enthusiastically curious mobile disaster-area self to show this time, but it had all been off-topic. He was here to make a point after all.

“This is all very entertaining…” Steven said, and brought the conversation back on script.

“There is a point to it,” Daniel promised. “Two points, really. The first is that we do the same thing. Every time Russian bombers stray near British airspace, every time the US sends a carrier group through the South China Sea, every time soldiers goose-step at each other across a demilitarized zone…it’s the same thing. It just feels less civilized when the Ten’Gewek do it because we’ve been doing it for longer and we’ve added a few layers of harmless pomp and ceremony. We probe each other’s borders and posture, and so do they. The only difference is that their cutting edge military technology is a steel knife, while ours is a Firebird or a Weaver…

“But the big point,” he continued, “was summed up beautifully by Xiù in that clip. ‘He’s a man of the tribe. He has to fight.’ The Ten’Gewek live something on a daily basis that’s becoming increasingly absent from our lives: Purpose. Belonging. Being part of something bigger than working for somebody else’s profit just so you can make rent at the end of the month.”

“Hence the theme of your book.”

“Exactly.” Daniel rested one leg lightly atop the other. “Purpose. People need it, people want it, people spend their whole lives desperately looking for it. In church, in their families, in their career…wherever! And a lot don’t find it.”

“Why not?” Steven asked

“I think… we’re big thinkers, these days. Everybody has a head full of the big problems in life, the big crusades that they want to see a seismic shift in. You know, the things like women’s suffrage, racial equality, LGBT rights, protecting the Constitution, freedom of speech…and those are worthy fights. But they’re too big for one person to fix in just one lifetime, so if the purpose you’ve internalized and made into the only one that matters for you is one of those and you labor for decades only to see nothing change—or worse, backslide—is it any wonder that it hurts you in your soul?

“So… yeah. Have your big mission, by all means! The world needs dreamers. But you need a small mission, something little and parochial on a scale your monkey brain can grasp. The well-being of a handful of people who are near and dear to you.”

Steven tilted his head. “I can hear people accusing you of being parochial and selfish already.”

“Well, yeah! I am being! Because humans are parochial and selfish by nature! We can think bigger than that and we should think bigger than that, but that side of ourselves is a little skinny rider sitting on top of a big elephant. The rider can persuade the elephant, but he can never force the elephant. When the sun sets and you go home there needs to be something small and personal waiting for you, even if it’s just… keeping your kitchen tidy, your bed made and your clothes ironed. Even if it’s just looking sexy for your spouse, or making progress on your matchstick boat, or writing another page of your novel.”

Daniel stopped waving his hands and settled down again. “I go into this in much more detail in the book,” he said.

“How thick is this thing?” Steven asked, and got a chuckle.

Daniel joined in, then looked back up at the big screen where a slideshow of some of his best pictures from Akyawentuo were fading across each other.

“…Let me tell you how the encounter ended, for closure’s sake,” he said.

“Sure.”

“The next day, Yan and all the men of his tribe went over to the other’s territory. They did everything they could to announce their presence. They were brash, hooted loudly, all that. Their Given-Men met…and I guess the best word for what happened next is like pro wrestling, or a Haka, or something. By the end of the day they were all friends, the tribes got together…and, well. They did what Yan said they’d do. Ten’Gewek do that.”

A small smirk flitted across his face. “Julian wanted me to stress that he didn’t join in that particular duty.”

There were nervous giggles, and Daniel’s grin got both broader and eviller. “Though because he’s my good friend I can’t resist letting you folks know that he was offered…”

Steven made an incredulous noise. “Boy oh boy I can’t wait to get viewer email this week, folks.” The nervous giggling became more heartfelt laughter and then settled.

“It’s important to note, though. It’s important because we need to keep ourselves very aware of taboos and cultures if we’re going to have any hope to understand them, and help them grow. Hell, their psychology too. It’s just different enough to trip us up if we’re not careful…and that’s what this little story was meant to show. That understanding is critical. We need to help them understand their purpose amongst the Sky-Tribes, as Yan so economically put it one day.”

“And that, tragically, is all the time I can afford to give you, Daniel…” Steven said. It was pretty obvious his producer was prodding him hard to move forward. “Which personally I think is a tragedy, and I know the panel tonight will be very interesting…”

He got a series of agreeable noises from the crowd and one guy even shouted “keep him on!” Daniel held up a hand to the superfan.

“No, no. I don’t want to take up other people’s worthy time,” he said. “It’s a big subject, I can’t go over it all here on this stage.”

“But we can,” Steven pointed out, “have you back next week.”

Whoops and cheering let them both know how that suggestion was received and Daniel grinned. He’d enjoyed popularity before of course but now…

“I guess I’ll still be in town…” he conceded, as though his appearance next week hadn’t already been negotiated before he ever set foot in New York.

“Well then… Daniel Hurt, it’s been as magical as ever, and I’ll see you later on for the panel…” They stood, shook hands, Daniel took a shallow appreciative bow for the applause and retreated out of the limelight to let Steven get his show back on track.

Mission half accomplished.

Date Point: 15y5m AV
Hell, Hunter Space

Rachel Wheeler

Hunters were… well… hunters. They were lazy, sloppy and bullyish hunters with no appreciation or respect for their prey that relied more on overwhelming numbers and a vast technological advantage to bring about mass slaughter, but they were hunters nevertheless. They had the instincts, the senses and the wariness of born predators even though their utterly crazy corkscrew moral compasses had persuaded them to engineer every possible need for those things out of their hunts.

It was hard to tell whether or not that made sneaking up on them easier. They were certainly capable of sharp sensory acuity and situational awareness, especially with assorted cybernetic sensors in place of at least two of their eyes… but their sheer swaggering certainty in their own invulnerability was hopefully an Achilles heel.

Ray didn’t intend to make the same mistake as her enemy.

They weren’t there to attack, that day. As much as her finger itched to start pulling the trigger and never stop, they had exactly one shot at stealing that Hunter ship and escaping, and if they blew it by taking out years of frustration and fear on the Hunters at the wrong moment… well, none of them were getting out alive. A hunt like none they’d ever seen would come down.

So instead, they were recording a hunt for later analysis. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to record.

What they found was…a depressingly simple tactic. They pretty much just charged and attacked. This was undeniably effective against a panicking herd of Vgork whose alpha bull fell to the dirt with crushed ribs and a concave forehead in the opening volley, but there was no style to it, no finesse. The Hunters treated the casual slaughter of a dozen sapient beings like Ray would have treated grabbing some cold cuts from the fridge.

Back when they had cold cuts, anyway. Or a fridge.

They only took half the herd, she noted. The rest—juveniles and pregnant females—were permitted to escape, so there was at least some discipline and thought behind the assault. They let the herds regenerate between assaults, which might take years considering how slowly a sapient being normally matured.

The unfortunate adult males and older females, plus one or two who’d simply been unlucky enough to catch a stray pulse round, were promptly set upon and torn to bloody pieces. Most were not lucky enough to have died first.

Thank anything remotely holy for extreme telephoto lenses. The sights in Ray’s viewfinder were horrific enough, she really didn’t want to hear the agonized squealing as well. What few noises did reach them from the feeding frenzy below and far away were stomach-churning and heart-wrenching.

To her left, Cook made a softly interested noise rather than a repulsed one. “No tactics at all.”

“They don’t need them,” Ray commented. One of the larger vgork males was still on his feet and he lowered his head and charged. He looked about as big as a draft horse, and Ray’s instincts said anything that big charging hell-for-leather into something as spindly-looking as a Hunter ought to smash it like a Jenga tower.

The Hunter just snarled ferally as its personal shield emitter deflected the charge, and then gutted the heroic male with a lazy swipe of its fusion claws.

“Those could dismember us just as readily,” she pointed out. They were speaking quietly, almost in a whisper, despite the open distance and the masking din of the hunt.

Cook nodded. “Yup. Think that shield’s any good against bullets?”

“That’s a question for Jamie…”

The last of the unfortunate ETs finally and mercifully expired. Once upon a time, Ray would have crossed herself. Instead she willed her stomach to settle down and focused more on what the Hunters were doing.

“…Gotta be hard to see with their eyes full of blood like that,” she commented.

“Hard to smell anything too. Or hear anything, I bet.”

“How d’you figure that?”

“All them bones in the mouth going crrrunch…” Cook actually lavished the word, the sick bastard.

Ray repeated her urgent instructions to her belly that it was to sit down, shut up and think about something else, and gulped back on her disgust. “Fuck sake, Cook…”

“Whatever… Point is, we found our moment. Lookit them, not a one’s on lookout or nothing. They’re just pigging out, oblivious. We could walk right up to them and shank the fuckers.”

“Let’s save shanking for if the rifles don’t work…” Ray murmured. She aimed her viewfinder at the Hunters’ ship, which had looped back around and come in to land after firing its assault pods into the ground right in the herd’s midst. As far as she could tell, whatever bottom-of-the-pile dreg that had been left to fly it had piled out as quickly as it possibly could and left it empty.

It occurred to her that the top of that ramp looked like the kind of spot three people with guns could make good use of…

“…I’ve seen enough,” she declared.

“Aww, Ray. Thought you were made of stronger stuff.”

“No, I mean I’ve seen as much as I need to see,” Ray retorted, and bit down on the urge to call him the uncharitable thing that had just popped into her head. There were times she worried if maybe Cook might like what he did, in a twisted way.

“Yeah, I gotcha,” he promised. “This shit gets to me too.”

Ray truly hoped he was being sincere.

They backed off from the ridge and retreated into the foliage once again, back towards the canyons where home awaited. As awful as Ray was feeling, underneath it all there was some hope at last.

Their plan was beginning to look like it might actually work.

Date Point: 15y5m AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Chief Special Warfare Operator Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

Hoeff had to admit he liked Vemik. The young gorilla guy had an enthusiastic fizz that never went away and a lust for life that Hoeff felt a kinship for. Size differences aside they were both the “little” guy in their social circles—though Vemik hugely outweighed Hoeff and was actually quite strong for a young man of the People—and both loved tweaking their betters. After all, what was the point of living if a man didn’t push boundaries?

And both of them were very good at getting themselves into trouble. Julian had the hardest job of the group ‘cuz he was gonna be Sky-Thinker’s minder for the week-long visit to Sharman. Partly that was ‘cuz he was prol’ly the best human friend Sky-Thinker had, but mostly it was because he could wrestle the hyperactive geek down to the ground if he got too excited. Hoeff would be escorting Yan. He may have been about as big as ‘Horse and could rip trees right out of the ground, but Yan was a pretty chill dude most of the time so showing him the sights and sounds would be a much easier job.

Even if Yan didn’t like his music.

Hoeff honestly didn’t even know the lyrics to the song he had on full blast right now. It wasn’t real Metal if you could make out the words. That was an idea that offended Yan’s sense of civilization.

[“It sounds like a Yshek getting ripped apart by a Brown One.”] He immediately made some kind of gesture, then scowled at Hoeff’s headphones.

Hoeff grinned. “That’s about the nicest thing you’ve said about it so far!”

[“That was not a compliment.”]

Hoeff grabbed his spit bottle and deposited a healthy dollop of filthy brown saliva and juice. “Sure,” he nodded as he screwed the lid back on. “But I’mma take it as one. The whole point is gettin’ in touch with the Beast.”

That prompted an odd look and a shiver down Yan’s long-ass tail. Was that their equivalent of a shrug? Maybe. [“Commune with beasts? But you don’t hunt.”]

“Not here, no. I ain’t anywhere near strong enough ‘cept with a rifle. But I ain’t talkin’ about animals, I mean the Beast. That badass monster inside ‘yer head, y’know?”

Yan regarded him again in that intense, studious way he did when he was thinking. [“…I think I understand. We call it the Fire. Every man has the Fire, but Given-Men are Taken by it.”]

Hoeff nodded, partly to agree but mostly because the really good bit with the drums and rhythm guitar goin’ balls-to-the-wall had kicked in. He’d come outta a lot of mosh pits bloody and deaf over the years, and the best bits were always like this.

Drums seemed to itch a man’s soul in just the right way and that went across species. Tigger—the Great Father these days, anyway—used to love anything with a strong beat. Yan eventually succumbed and put one of Hoeff’s earbuds in his own to listen.

[“…Maybe this part is okay.”]

Note to self: find some good drum corps recordings and see if Yan liked them.

They were waiting for the jump gate, of course. The sync time was still a good ten minutes away and they’d already got everything they’d need packed up and put on the pad.

“Wanna know the best bit? You hear the deep drum there goin’ BRRRRRRR real fast like that?”

“…Yes?”

“He’s doin’ that with his fuckin’ feet.”

“Maybe human feet not so dumb then!” Yan scooped up a big rock from the ground with his left foot, whipped his leg up and threw it right at Hoeff’s chest…with startling power and accuracy. Hoeff’s hands snatched up just in time to catch it.

Point made, but species honor was at stake now. “I can still outrun you any day, big guy.”

“Not over close ground!”

Hoeff chuckled and turned around to watch whatever the younger guys were up to.

Julian, optimistically, was trying to get some of his homework for Daniel done while enjoying the shade of a nearby tree. Vemik was doing homework of his own, in fact. They had given him a huge sketchbook with really thick paper, and a whole bunch of big pencils so he could doodle or play with what were suspiciously starting to look like letters. That suspicion was confirmed when Vemik started speaking words with a heavy exaggeration at the syllables, then furiously scribbling in his book after each attempt. He and Singer had been trading the book back and forth and it was almost full; they were going to stop by the art supply shop at some point and stock up.

It kinda seemed to be working. Hoeff had been expecting their favorite cavemonkey nerd to be geeking out fit to explode about now but if there was one thing Vemik loved more than something cool about to happen, it was something cool he was already doing.

…For uniquely Vemik definitions of “cool” anyway.

[“What’re you doin, buddy?”] Julian had a Moleskine book of his own and had apparently decided on a break. Yan noticed Hoeff’s eavesdropping and sidled up to Not Listen himself.

[“Sky-Thinking. I thought, maybe I should make a memory-scratch for each sound? But some tribes don’t have all the same sounds. We have to learn them if they live far away. Singer likes to scratch differently. Hers are all…um…words? Thoughts? Also, her scratches are all loops and round shapes, hard to do. Lines are easier.”] He waggled his pencil between two thick fingers.

[“I can see the good in either. We have many ways of writing. They’re not better, just different.”]

Yan grunted. “Friend-lie,” he said quietly. It was a harsher accusation in English than in Peoplespeak—a ‘friend-lie’ was just how the People called being diplomatic.

“No,” Julian overheard and defended himself, “I meant it. You never got into the weird parts of English writing. It stops making sense really fast.”

Hoeff scoffed. “Yeah, but bro. Chinese.”

“Yeah, and people who speak mutually unintelligible languages can all write understandable Chinese characters, man. Cantonese and Mandarin are completely different.”

Hoeff chuckled. “…Yeah, okay. Guess you’d know more about the Chinese tongue than me,” he joked, and waggled his eyebrows.

Julian wasn’t impressed. “Careful bud. I’m just makin’ an observation.”

“…Alright, yeah. That was rude of me.” Hoeff had a talent for foot-in-mouth sometimes. “I’m sorry.”

Julian shrugged. “No worries.” He absent-mindedly reached into his leather hip pouch, grabbed what looked like a hard candy of some kind, and returned his attention to his book.

Vemik, of course, could not allow a New Thing to escape his attention. “What is that?” His tongue flicked out to taste the air around Julian’s face.

“It’s a peppermint!” Julian rolled it around in his mouth and held it between his front teeth. “An yoo can’ haff any!”

Vemik tilted his head, thought for a moment…and shot his half-meter long prehensile tongue out and ripped the mint right from between Julian’s teeth.

Julian fell to the ground and almost choked himself out coughing. Vemik, meanwhile, had retreated as high as he could, bit down on the mint…and had regrets.

It took a few minutes before Hoeff could easily breathe again, and that was only because continuing to laugh was straight-up painful. His gut hurt like he’d been doing crunches all morning and in that time, Yan had told everybody, Vemik had washed the hateful burning out of wherever the fuck was hurting, and Julian had sat up and couldn’t stop chugging water…

“Well, Etsicitty. Guess you get to be the first guy who Frenched a cavemonkey.” Hoeff wasn’t even trying to keep a straight face. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell ‘yer girls.”

Julian wearily nodded and looked at Vemik, who seemed appropriately contrite and all that…whenever he wasn’t sneezing pathetically. A Ten’Gewek sneeze was more like a weird hissing hiccup sound through the roof of the mouth with a squeak on the end.

“…Sorry.”

“Good. And that’s important, Vemik. Do not eat things unless you know if they’re safe!”

“Safe for Human not always safe for People,” Yan agreed. Beer had taught him a valuable life-long lesson, there.

“Okay.”

Hoeff’s watch alarm went off. “Two minutes,” he said, glancing at it. “Get on the pad and don’t get off it again.”

“Everything has to be inside the yellow lines or it will be cut sharper than any knife,” Julian elaborated.

The four of them ambled up onto the metal gridwork of the shuttle frame. Neither Julian nor the gorilla-bros liked walking on the high-traction ridged panels with their bare feet all that much, but they liked the idea of losing toes even less. Hoeff wore his boots; fuck that Tarzan bullshit. Climbing trees was one thing, sure. Barefoot was just better for that. But humans invented shoes for a reason and Hoeff’s feet were too pretty to scuff up on jagged rocks and shit.

Besides: the panels weren’t there to be comfortable, they were there to provide some safety margin so the field wouldn’t literally slice the bottom of their feet off. And even still they weren’t heavy-duty enough for the job; the metal gridplate groaned painfully as Julian then Vemik stepped on, and practically squealed when Yan sauntered on-board the USS Magic Box.

Everyone settled in and waited the spare minute before go-time. Hoeff’s watch beeped at final countdown. He glanced at it, counted off a few seconds in his head, Five Mississippi, four Mississippi, three…

[“…What will this feel like?”] Yan had curled his tail around his waist and sat on his haunches to be extra-super sure his wild crest was below the line.

Thump.

“…Like that.”

Yan barely heard him. He was blinking dumbstruck at the jump receiving room in HMS Sharman which was basically just a big concrete warehouse space with some cargo doors at one end, a pair of human-sized double doors at the other end, some safety equipment along one wall and the locker full of emergency recall orders on the other.

The sterile white LED lighting was probably nasty stuff to a Ten’Gewek’s jungle-adjusted eyes.

Vemik discovered the low gravity instantly. Julian snatched him out of the air on the second bounce and chuckled fondly, “Not now buddy. We gotta do Given-Men things first.”

“Okay.” Vemik immediately wriggled free of Julian’s grasp, scrambled onto his back and wrapped himself completely around Julian with arms around chest, legs and tail around waist. It was amazing how young and free-spirited Vemik still was after everything that had happened.

Julian bore it all with a quiet grunt and a chuckle, like he wasn’t wrangling a hyperactive spacegorilla who beat iron all day and hunted big-ass critters with a spear. Better him than Hoeff; he wasn’t into being crushed flat by a shorter dude nearly thrice his own weight.

Both of the Ten’Gewek were still completely innocent of the real world, too. Yan flinched when the disembodied voice of a jump technician addressed them. “Jump transfer complete, please disembark for decontamination and scan. Welcome to HMS Sharman, Planet Cimbrean.”

Governor-General Sandy was awaiting them, along with Ambassador Rockefeller and all the rest of the dog-and-pony show. Hoeff almost managed not to sigh, but he was glad as all hell to see Coombes and Walsh standing to one side. Walsh had come on ahead the day before to make preparations, and Coombes was looking damn good like his cushy desk job was agreeing with him.

Yan rumbled under his breath and pointed with his chin towards Governor Sandy. “He is Given-Man, yes?”

“…Sorta. Close enough.”

That seemed to be good enough for Yan. He straightened up to his full height and walked carefully towards the assembled entourage.

Sir Jeremy stepped forward as well and met him halfway. “On behalf of His Majesty the King, I would like to welcome you to our home.” He extended his hand, which Yan considered with a tilt of his head and a twitch of his tail. He reached out and completely wrapped his paw around Sandy’s own…and didn’t cause an incident.

“I am… pleased and grateful to be here,” he said in English of a far better quality than he usually bothered with. Yan must have been listening to Daniel much closer than he let on. He then stepped back, stood as impressively as he could, and thumped his chest loudly with his open left hand. “Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge.”

“Sir Jeremy Sandy, Governor-General of His Majesty’s Colony of Folctha,” Sandy replied. He half-turned to one of his hangers-on, who stepped forward and handed him a small black box. “I understand in your culture we should exchange knives.”

Hoeff took one look at the blade as the box opened and whistled under his breath. And like a goddamned boot, drew the attention of the fucking Governor.

Sandy pulled about the worst trick in the book and looked faintly amused. “I trust you approve, Chief?”

“…Yessir.”

The bastard smiled, and meant it, too. Hoeff was already imagining the Motivation that was gonna result in and consigned himself to his fate.

Yan meanwhile accepted the knife for inspection. “…I have never seen Steel like this,” he said. That was a goddamn understatement, the thing was a work of art. It musta cost thousands and like a month of a master bladesmith’s time. It was sized for him, too; the damn thing was almost a short sword and everything about it screamed both form and function in perfect harmony.

Yan’s knife was in its own way no less impressive. It was a traditional flint-knapped design he had spent nearly all of his free time carefully making, refining it down to polished perfection. The stone was almost translucent and there wasn’t a single visible blemish. He had made it sized against Julian’s hands, which made the whole thing even more impressive. There were three colors of wood in the handle!

“Jooyun tell me, your tribe does Givings when they meet. So, this is for you. Is not steel, but a good knife is an important Giving.”

“Good stone takes expert craftsmanship,” Sir Jeremy replied. “This is a fine Giving indeed, and we thank you. In turn, this knife is yours. May it mean Friendship for our peoples.”

Yan nodded seriously. For a Given-Man, that was tantamount to a treaty. Sir Jeremy moved introductions along to Ambassador Rockafeller, which Hoeff sorta tuned out. He was more interested in what happened when Julian finally put Vemik down with probably whispered threats if he didn’t behave.

He did, for the most part. It was obvious that Vemik was itching to inspect literally everything, right down to the carpets, the lighting, the fire extinguisher in the corner. He’d probably have torn open the network cabinets to get a better look at the flashing lights if left to his own devices.

Fortunately, the diplomatic necessities didn’t take long, and Hoeff returned to the here-and-now when Sandy raised his voice a little for the benefit of all the hangers-on.

“We do not intend to keep you bogged down here with formalities, Yan Given-Man and Vemik Sky-Thinker. So, having made your fine acquaintances, if you have no objections I shall take my leave and get out of your way.”

Yan trilled at the implied meaning. “Is smart Given-Man! Gov-er-nor. …Governor?”

“Well said! We shall speak again soon, Yan Given-Man.”

As the party broke up, Walsh ambled over to join them. He grinned and imitated Hoeff’s low whistle with an expression of pure trollish delight.

“Coombes is gonna work you over for that, little guy!”

“No he won’t,” Hoeff retorted. “He’ll just order you an’ Playboy here to go all Hanz and Franz on me some more.”

Julian rolled his eyes slightly at his hated callsign, but folded his big arms and said nothing. Coombes had worked his way through the crowd and nodded agreeably as he entered the microdrama himself. “Sounds good, thanks for the advice Chimp. See to your Motivation tomorrow morning. Me too, I’ve been behind a desk for too long.”

Honestly that sounded like he got off with a friendly warning which Hoeff wasn’t gonna complain about. That was for later, though: time to move the show along.

“Anyway. We got shit to do and I for one am fuckin’ dying to sleep on a real mattress for a change. I take it we’ll all be living at Julian’s McMansion—”

“Hey!”

“—Perfectly reasonable home. We get started right away, and first thing’s gonna be gravity.”

That had caught Vemik’s interest. Not that it was hard to attract it in the first place, but still. [“What will we doing?”]

“Vemik, my friend…we’re gonna play a game I think you’re gonna love. It’s called… Gravball.”

Date Point 15y5m AV
Gravball arena, HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Scott (Starfall) Blaczynski

“Okay. Okay, big question time: Who the fuck do I put my money on in this match?”

It had been an obvious question when Yan and Warhorse had squared against each other on opposite sides of the starting lines. Yan’s tail twitched to and fro like a cat’s, while Adam’s huge muscles tensed and quivered like a draft horse ready and eager to pull. They stared each other down for a long while. Adam gave a feral grin, Yan snarled and bared his fangs, and when the whistle blew, the two slammed into each other with a smack so loud it could practically be felt.

Grappling was more or less all the two did throughout all the Gravball games, which effectively nullified them as players. Firth and ‘Base took over as goalkeepers since they were the only people besides the two combatants who were strong enough to move the goal in the first place.

All that had been five games ago. They were still wrestling over three hours after that first starting whistle, with no obvious winner. That had, of course, prompted a vigorous betting pool.

“Dude…” drawled Walsh, “I’d say they’re about fuckin’ tied. They’re both too heavy and strong to properly measure and they can move just stupid fast…they’re, like, the ultimate space-Bros. On the one hand, there’s Adam. He’s bigger, stronger, faster, and he’s got way more stamina. Also he’s the most determined dude I’ve ever met and he knows how to fuckin’ fight…”

Walsh paused for a moment when Adam, as if to drive home the point, broke loose and tossed Yan about twenty goddamned feet straight up under the area’s crushing gravity. Undaunted, Yan flipped himself over mid-fall and slammed into ‘Horse like a fuckin’ meteor. They wrestled on, oblivious to everyone but themselves.

Walsh eyed the two warily. “…But on the other hand, Yan’s a goddamned slab of iron, only bro I’ve ever seen who’s just as fuckin’ hard an’ ripped as ‘Horse. He’s tough as shit, too. Fuckin’ nothin’ hurts ‘em, man! Plus, he’s a goddamned monkey. He’s more nimble than ‘Horse, he’s got those long-ass arms, rock-crushing hands for feet and a fuckin’ prehensile tail he could kill a man with…”

“So…who am I betting on?”

Powell had descended from the lofty heights of command to personally take the field for this one. He took one look at the two—they were still wrestling in the sand—and made a single, solemn pronouncement.

“All bets are off. I’ll referee, I’m not fookin’ puttin’ myself in the middle o’ that lot.”

“You know what? I’m happy with that.”

Honestly, it was a good goddamned day to be alive! They got to play six games of Gravball, one suited and the rest “skins” so the big monkey dudes could play along. They were fucking naturals at it too, once they got used to the variable gravity. That Vemik guy in particular was a tough little bruiser. He gleefully tackled his way through scrums, took to microgravity like a fish in water, and had a keen eye for the tactics and movement of the game. He didn’t need any real coaching and he could shoot all over the arena. Passing wasn’t his thing but he could catch and run the ball like only Murray or a Whitecrest could, and he could do magic things with that tail of his—!

Julian wasn’t bad either! He mostly stuck with Walsh while he learned the game and discovered he was best put to use zooming around and up the walls, rocketing himself through the microgravity deadspace and bouncing off his team’s Defenders to pass the ball forward. He had a hell of a sense of motion too and could throw the ball better than almost anybody on the team, much to their chagrin. He generally stayed out of the scrum, though; he may have been Walsh-sized lately but he wasn’t exactly suit conditioned, and that meant he wasn’t hard enough to take their hits. He’d be flattened by the veterans if he tried to brawl it out on the sand below.

The real show was Yan and ‘Horse, though. For the most part all the two had done was wrestle and effectively cancel each other out of the game. Watching those two repeatedly slam into each other was like seeing the Unstoppable Force crash against the Immovable Object.

Still, occasionally one of the two would break free and display some game-related athleticism, and Yan had shone just as brightly as Vemik. He played much more like Daar, though; he used his size and power to simply plow everyone out of the way. Someday, a Given-Man was gonna wear the MASS like he was fucking born to it.

Meanwhile, ‘Horse finally had a bro he could play with that he wasn’t in danger of accidentally breaking and that meant the goal was almost never available for scoring. It was exhausting for everyone…except for Hulk and The Juggernaut, apparently, who finally managed to break free of each other in the final game, warred over the goal for a long while…then there was a horrible tortured screeching metal sound as the two of them managed to tear the damn thing in half.

Yan, of course, promptly claimed victory on the grounds that he was left holding the bigger half like it was a fuckin’ wishbone. Adam happily objected and launched himself at Yan with all the strength his hulking legs could manage. He knocked them both completely across the fucking arena and into the far wall with a smack so loud just hearing it was physically painful, and the pair of them promptly vanished in a cloud of kicked-up sand. Back to wrestling, apparently.

Powell paused play on account of all the sand and concrete dust filling the zero-grav volume in the middle of the arena. It was a hazard to eyes and breathing when it hung in the air like that, so he just turned the gravity up. Way up. ‘Horse and Yan didn’t seem to notice and settled into another long stalemate of a match, while everyone else caught their breath and watched.

It looked like neither man could possibly have been happier.

“See, this is the humblin’ part,” grumbled Righteous after watching for a few minutes. “You always suspect ‘Horse is holdin’ back when he toys with ‘ya, y’know? But every now an’ then you get to see what he can really do and ‘ya ain’t suspectin’ no more.”

Everyone nodded silently. They grappled, threw, slammed and chased each other with the kind of comic-book strength that only a HEAT member would truly appreciate. The match continued long enough for everyone to get drinks and towel down, and by the time they were about ready to move on for the day, the two somehow decided at that moment they were done and flopped onto the sand, both gulping breath like fish out of water.

Powell left them gasping for a few seconds then shrugged and blew his whistle. “Match ends in a draw!” he announced. “An’ somehow you lot have gone and broke my goal yet a-bloody-gain.”

Yan trilled in the dirt, scrubbed his sweaty back into the sand like he was taking a dust bath, then rolled forward until he was sitting up. “Was GOOD!” he announced, and aimed his grinning fangs ‘Horse’s way. “Will do again someday. Maybe you win next time!”

That got ‘Horse up off his ass. “Maybe I—? ¡Mira qué cabrón!”

…And just like that, they were wrestling again.

Powell and Firth shared one of those spooky looks that officers and their NCOICs often did. “Right. Let’s leave the two mutants to it,” Firth decided. “Vemik and Julian have appointments, the rest of us have a trauma class with ‘Base.” He tossed the arena control to Hoeff. “Don’t let ‘em knock the building down.”

Hoeff glanced at the two combatants and looked genuinely nonplussed. “…How would I stop them?”

“I dunno, figure it out. I got shit to do.”

“…Yes, Master Sergeant.”

Firth gave him a friendly smile. “Sorry to dump that on ‘ya, Chief, but we can’t miss our schedule. We’re already running behind…” and with that little hint, everyone piled out of the room and booked it back to the classroom.

Still, it was a good day! A quick run through the showers, they said goodbye to Julian and Vemik—they were going to the art supply store apparently—and then a couple hours of boring refresher on combat first aid. ‘Base was a good teacher, but still.

They didn’t see either of the wrestlers until the next day.

Date Point 15y5m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Xiù is being given the grand tour of Wei’s offices in Vancouver, getting the full VIP treatment. She’s proud of her little-big brother and his achievements: who could imagine that they’d be able to 3D print Dizi Rats? Okay, so they go squish in the mechanism half the time but what an achievement!

Really, the only problem is that she really needs to pee but every restroom in the building is closed, or the door is hanging off, or just as she’s finally able to make her excuses somebody interrupts her and it’s almost like the whole world is conspiring to stop her from—

Oh.

She woke up and blinked at the ceiling. Right. She wasn’t in Vancouver, she was in Folctha, sleeping in the biggest bed she’d ever even heard of which still managed to be kinda empty even though Allison was right next to her. It was custom-made for three, after all.

It kinda sucked that their first night in their new house had been spent without Julian. The timing had just come together wrong that way. He’d wanted to be there she knew, but when ambassadors and governors and Given-Men had big meetings…

Akyawentuo and Cimbrean had very different diurnal periods, so if Julian was meant to be getting Yan and Vemik onto the jump pad for shortly after dawn local time, in Folctha the jump might be scheduled for nine in the morning, and the preparations had to start twelve hours earlier…

He’d persuaded them to move in anyway, rather than wait another day in the hotel room. What was the point of paying for a suite in the Statler when their own house was less than two miles away? It made sense… but Xiù had missed him last night, and so had Allison.

She rolled out of bed and slipped into the en-suite bathroom, trying to shake off the alien feeling of an unfamiliar house. She loved the place already, it had everything she could possibly want in a home and without the soulless too-clean, too-wealthy feel that she’d always got when seeing the houses of the rich and famous on TV. Big enough to be spacious, cozy enough to be a home rather than a mansion, and pleasantly decorated with their stuff rather than an assortment of expensive art just for decoration’s sake.

And the shower. God, the shower. And the kitchen—!

It was perfect, but after spending years living packed in like canned fish in room smaller than their new bedroom, the transition was…she’d need time to adapt.

And it had privacy. A quirk of the local terrain and architecture meant that there were very few angles indeed from which an outside observer might see in, and they’d mirrored the external windows for good measure. She didn’t bother to dress after her shower, just dried herself off, dried and brushed her hair, slipped on a pair of briefs and trotted downstairs to explore what morning felt like in her new home.

She made maple bacon breakfast muffins with fresh coffee, the smells of which never failed to wake Allison.

The stairs didn’t creak or anything though, so she jumped at a warm, soft “hey” from behind her.

Allison leaned against the doorframe. She’d only half-dressed herself, in pajama pants, and she leaned against the doorframe with her hair still bed-wild and untouched. “…Did I ever mention that I love you?”

Xiù laughed and took the pan off the range to hide her blush. “…Yeah, I think I remember hearing you say that.”

Allison grinned like a cat and sauntered into the room. “Whatcha makin’?”

“Breakfast.”

Allison snorted. “I can see that, wiseass.” She slipped a hand around Xiù’s waist and peeked over her shoulder into the pan. “I meant—”

“Sit down and you’ll find out when it’s ready.”

“Mmm. Yes ma’am.”

“Good g—”

Xiù’s phone rang. The house had a smart system that could divert calls anywhere but as it happened she’d left her phone charging on the coffee table last night, so she gave Allison a look that sad ‘get that for me?’ and tried to remember where they kept the plates.

Allison skipped over to the table and grabbed it. “Hello? …Yes, this is her phone…”

Xiù tried to listen as she served out their breakfast, but all she could make out was that there was somebody speaking on the other end, not what they were saying. Allison nodded and said things like “yeah” and “uh-huh” and finally. “…Right. One second please?”

She covered the handset and gave Xiù a sly look. “Well. The Mother-Supreme requests the pleasure of your company.”

“That’s Yulna?” Xiù asked, briefly wondering why Allison wasn’t just handing the phone over until she was answered by a shake of the head.

“Somebody called Sister Yiini. I don’t think the Mother-Supreme gets to make her own phone calls.”

“Oh.” That was a little disappointing. “Well… yeah! Of course! If Yulna wants to see me I always have time for her.”

“Thought you’d say that,” Allison grinned, and returned to the call. “Yeah, she’s available… Wow. Really? Uh… two hours, I guess?” She met Xiù’s eye and was given a nod. “Yeah, two hours…Uh… yeah. Yeah, I’ll come as well if I’m invited. Thanks.”

“I wonder what’s up?” Xiù mused as she set their breakfast down on the table.

“She’s sending a shuttle out for us, so I doubt it’s a social call…” Allison washed her hands before sitting down.

“The Mother-Supreme doesn’t get social calls…” Xiù sighed.

“That…doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s a whole… thing. Giymuy told me over those weird biscuits she liked, it’s not a job you can set aside. You can quit, but otherwise… in a way you are the Clan of Females. Yulna would never have chosen it for herself.”

“I always figure the people in charge shouldn’t want to be…” Allison said as she picked up her breakfast.

Xiù sighed. “Maybe… Yulna’s kinda like an aunt to me, but… between us, I worry if maybe Giymuy made a mistake.”

“Because of Daar.”

“Yulna was always one to, um… to do or say whatever was on her mind. Straightforward. Blunt. A lot like you, really. But, um…”

“Right. I’d be a shitty President.” Allison nodded and took a huge bite out of her breakfast muffin.

“Sorry.”

Allison shook her head viciously, still chewing. “Don’ gimme tha’. Iff I effer run fer preffiden’, pweaff hit me upffide the head.”

Xiù laughed. “You asked for it.”

Allison swallowed. “Hell yeah! I’d probably start World War Three inside a week. Like, I wouldn’t mean to and the other guy would totally shoot first…”

“Oh come on, you’re not that bad!”

Allison gave her a grin with a wrinkle of her nose thrown in for good measure, but whatever she had planned to say next got lost when the door beeped, clicked, and a whirlwind of dark gray-brown skin and blaze orange mohawk pounced in stinking healthily of jungle, leather and a pathological aversion to bathing with water.

Julian’s voice followed him into the room. “Vemik, don’t you break any of my shit!”

“I won’t!”

Vemik dumped a couple of armloads of art supplies on the ground and stood up to his full height, beaming mightily.

Xiù was faintly amazed at how quickly her fight-or-flight reflex had settled down once she realized who it was. “What did you get?”

“Sketchbooks! And colored pencils! And crayons, and markers, and—”

Allison cleared her throat and stood up to kiss Julian then vanished upstairs with a muttered “clothes” to explain herself. Xiù doubted whether Vemik even cared how much they were wearing—male or female, his tribe rarely wore more than a loincloth and often not even that—but she wasn’t on board with entertaining guests while wearing only her skivvies, no matter their species.

“Jooyun let me use mun-ee!”

“A credit card,” Julian said with a chuckle. “It’s technically a promise to pay, Vemik.” He ran a hand up Xiù’s back and kissed her. “Sorry I couldn’t be here. How was it?”

“That bed’s too big for just two… You should have told us you were bringing him here!”

Julian gave a wary eye towards Vemik and threw a troll-grin. “Hey now. Fellow tribe or not, I’m not sharin’ my women with him.”

That earned him an entirely deserved slap on the arm and a scowl, with a smile underneath it that promised retribution.

“Is okay!” Vemik said while enthusiastically ripping the plastic wrap off of his huge crayon box. He set it down then thumped his chest loudly with a trilling snarl that was the equivalent of a bragging laugh among the Ten’Gewek. “I too much man for you anyway!”

Julian rolled his eyes and chuckled. “Now you’re recycling Allison’s jokes, bro.”

“Recycling means what? No, wait… cycle again? …Use? Use again! Context!” Vemik beamed proudly and scattered crayons all over the table. The table was a bit high for him so he puzzled at a sturdy wooden chair for a moment, then decided to thread his tail through the rear and wrap it around the chair’s legs. “I’m right, right?”

“You are! But you still aren’t sleeping in my bed.”

“Okay.” Vemik only seemed slightly disappointed; he was far too interested in his new treasures. He held one up and examined it very closely, gave it a tentative taste and, having decided that crayons were not good for eating, turned it over and set to playing with shapes on the first page of one of his sketchbooks. The way the tip of his forked tongue poked out of his mouth while he concentrated super hard on drawing straight lines was…almost painfully adorable.

Allison returned with a T-shirt on and handed Xiù a bathrobe. “Our insurance covers cavemonkey damage, right?”

Vemik made a kind of hooting noise, the Ten’Gewek equivalent of a frustrated snarl. “I promised I would be good,” he said, this time a bit sullenly.

“She’s just teasing…” Xiù promised, putting on the bathrobe.

“Oh.” Back to coloring. There was an actual coloring book too but he was ignoring it for the moment. Allison raised an eyebrow at him, then aimed it at Julian.

“What the hell did the store clerk think of him?” she asked.

Julian grinned and headed for the fridge. “She spent nearly two hours showing him everything. Vemik liked the watercolors—”

“Fun but too messy!”

“…Didn’t like the pastels so much…”

“Break in hand, weak colors.” Vemik was carefully drawing a series of equilateral triangles using a painfully bright yellow crayon, all of which were linked together with shared edges.

“…Did we buy the charcoals, Vemik?”

Vemik rattled his head in the negative. “Break easy like ‘pastels.’ Also we can make ourself. No waste ‘mun-ee’ on burned wood.”

Xiù giggled at Vemik’s unexpected frugality while Julian clapped him on his bulging shoulder. “So yeah, I think she was kinda smitten, actually. Vemik had a fun day. We played some gravball, walked through the park, met Bozo—”

“WURF!” Vemik’s happy bark punched the air like a brick slammed into dirt, and was entirely too convincing to let go without a giggle. He reached for black and brown crayons, thought for a bit with his head tilting this way and that, and decided he’d rather go back to drawing triangles.

“That’s a pretty good bark, big fella!” Julian said, returning his attention to Allison. “It was a very busy day, lots of people to talk to. We ended the day wishing at the fountain…we ran out of time and hadn’t eaten, so we decided to grab some burgers at Best Brioche.”

“Blue cheese!” Vemik burbled happily. He picked something tannish and began to sketch a suspiciously bun-like shape. “Much better than mint!” he loaded so much loathing into that one syllable that Xiù sensed a story she’d need to hear later.

“Weird how he’s okay with blue cheese but hates anything minty…” Julian shook his head and chuckled. “Anyway, we know how to Vemik-proof our candy now,” Julian said matter-of-factly, grabbing a juice carton.

“Also, Jooyun’s mouth tasted like farts.” Vemik reached for a green crayon and drew a warble on his bun-shape that must have been lettuce.

Silence made a clanging noise as it descended. Julian closed his eyes.

Allison took a deep breath before breaking it. “….Julian?”

By then he had gone thoroughly red under his deep tan. “Uh… Turns out the Ten’Gewek have prehensile tongues. Ripped a peppermint right out of my mouth.”

“Huh. Well, thank Christ there’s a sane explanation…”

“Yeah…Anyway. On an entirely different note, Yan is going to be staying here too. We’re gonna camp them both in the guest room downstairs.”

“Who’s chaperoning Yan?” Xiù asked, inwardly reflecting that any room with Yan in it wasn’t going to have much space left over for anybody else.

“Hoeff. They should be back soon I imagine.”

“Right, well… we have a shuttle to Tiritya Island in two hours,” Xiù revealed. “Sister Shoo has a meeting with the Mother-Supreme.”

“Jeez, really?”

“We literally found out right before Puppy the Bouncing Bomb here smashed our door down,” Allison explained.

“I didn’t break it!” Vemik objected. He was deciding between greens for the pickle, apparently. “I pressed the button like Jooyun said!”

Xiù stifled a giggle. It seemed that Vemik was never going to quite get his head around Allison’s sense of humor. She was made doubly glad for the bathrobe at the sound of a truck door slamming from outside, followed by Hoeff and Yan’s voices approaching down the driveway. Yan actually blocked out the light from the window as he passed in front of it.

Hoeff opened the door without knocking while Yan squeezed through sideways behind him. He looked…tired. Mellowed out. And satisfied, somehow. He swaggered into the house as if it was his and looked around with interest.

Actually, that was unfair. By Ten’Gewek standards his body language was downright deferential and polite, right down to the low-down twitch of his tail. The problem Yan faced was that his ground state of being was to exude so much physical confidence that wherever he happened to be standing immediately seemed like his turf. He couldn’t not own a space.

“Big hut,” he said at last, approvingly. “Strong.”

Xiù had no idea how “strong” applied in this situation, but the floor didn’t creak too much under his weight, so it had that going for it at least.

Vemik beamed at him. [“I have a promise of things for the villages, Yan! Two ‘sketchbooks’ for each tribe. And other things too!”]

[“Good! Should make Professor Hurt happy!”]

“…Would you like a drink, Yan?” Xiù asked. “We have water, fruit juice, coffee, tea…”

Yan ducked his head cautiously. “Yes please.”

“Water and juice for us both, and a lot of it.” Hoeff sounded…drained, and looked worse.

“Water everywhere here,” Yan said, sitting down on his tail. “Lake, river. Heff says rain every night… foun-tain. Very new thing is foun-tain.”

“The town is named for water,” Julian told him.

Vemik put the finishing touches on his burger and broke out the blue crayons. “It is?”

“Yeah. ‘Folctha’ means ‘bath.’ That’s, uh… like a big bowl you fill with hot water to clean yourself in.”

Yan and Vemik both pulled the same face. Something about doing anything with water other than drinking it triggered a Ten’Gewek’s disgust reflex hard.

“Anyway, you two get ready for your trip. Yan I take it is going to need to stretch out?”

“…Yes. Adam play…hard.” The big Given-Man trilled softly.

“Right. We’ll keep busy. And we have a big day tomorrow anyway, they’re going out to the range to start their training program.”

“Wanna know what amazes me?” Allison asked, glancing out the window. “I don’t see a single journalist out there. You’d think we’d be manning the barricades to hold ‘em off.”

“ESNN’s star ET correspondent is ‘Horse’s ex-slash-sister,” Hoeff revealed. “An’ I swear there’s somethin’ goin’ on with her an’ Coombes too.”

Julian frowned. “…Ríos? And Coombes? He’s like twice her age!”

“Pretty sure I didn’t say they were bonin’,” Hoeff drawled as he accepted a glass of juice from Xiù. “If that rumour got started he’d have to explain himself to the whole unit pretty damn quick.”

He drained the glass like it was a beer and he was about to start a night of hard drinking, and set it down with a refreshed gasp. “Anyway. Between her an’ Sharman’s press corps, and the quick interviews we already did today, it’s all under control. Also, Yan.”

Yan turned slightly at the waist from the mention of his name. He was doing nothing more than sitting in the middle of the floor and looking around at things, but all by itself that little twist exaggerated the heroic shapes of his body and lent him a presence commanding enough to give anyone unfamiliar with him pause. Add in a head-to-tail blood red mohawk…

“Another new thing, these ‘reporter’ people. Ask many dumb question,” Yan smarled in an unmistakably annoyed tone. His huge fangs were impossible to miss.

“Well… okay. We need to get dressed and ready,” Xiù said. “I’m sure you can keep yourselves entertained.”

“Just… and Vemik, I’m sorry?” Allison gave the younger Ten’Gewek an apologetic look, “—But please keep him out of my workshop, Julian. I haven’t finished unpacking in there.”

“I will stay out,” Vemik nodded seriously. His page had a wild spray of blue color on it next to his burger art.

[“I will sit on him if he doesn’t.”]

“You dropped ten grand on those tools, you bet your ass I’m gonna look after them,” Julian promised.

“Ten…grand?” Yan was confused.

[“Ten ‘thousand’ ‘mun-ees,’ Yan. That’s four circles big, and it’s like a magic promise of Giving and Taking.”]

[“…Oh,”] he said, giving every indication he didn’t really understand.

Xiù ushered Allison upstairs before either of them could be overwhelmed by the urge to… well, whatever. That job could be Julian’s.

All in all, it hadn’t been the first morning in their new house that she’d expected, not at all. But it had definitely been their first morning in their new house. She was absolutely definite that nobody else had ever entertained a pair of iron-age alien tribesmen for breakfast.

…Oh yeah. There was one last detail of the place she’d forgot to love earlier. One that had taken quite a lot of time and money to fill. One that sang to the girly place in her soul that she’d had to regretfully pack away into long-term storage after her abduction.

But there really was nothing like a walk-in wardrobe full of clothes.

They took their time getting ready. By the time they were cleaned up and dressed appropriately for a visit with the Mother-Supreme, things had quieted considerably downstairs. Vemik had migrated to the guest bedroom and buried himself under a mountain of blankets right on the floor—they hadn’t furnished it yet, but he didn’t seem to care.

Yan meanwhile was lying face-down on the living room floor and making happy grumbling noises while Julian worked his palms against the big guy’s ridiculous back muscles. He was grunting with effort himself; kneading the kinks out of what was basically a slab of carved teak looked exhausting. Xiù gave him a sympathetic look and blew him a kiss as they headed toward the door.

Hoeff was stripped down to his underwear, passed out and sprawled akimbo across and up the entire couch. He was a solidly-built little man sure enough and these days could even be considered stocky, but how he managed to take up so much space on such a big couch was a bit of a mystery given that he was an inch or so shorter than Xiù. She quietly hoped he wouldn’t shed any of his copious blonde body hair on anything.

True to the timing they’d given, there was a Gaoian shuttle coming in low over the lake. It was a modified Dominion design, taking the classic dull gray cuboid and refitting it into something that actually looked like it could fly half-decently and which actually flew like a charm. Xiù hoped to get her hands on one in time—she absolutely wasn’t going to let Misfit be the last and only thing she ever piloted.

“So whaddya think she wants?” Allison asked.

“Hmm?” Xiù’s thoughts whipped back to where they were going and who they were seeing. “Oh, Yulna?”

“Who else would I mean, dummy?” Allison asked with her best teasing grin. Xiù stuck her tongue out at her.

“Yulna’s… a direct sort,” she said. “But she keeps her cards close to her chest. We’ll know when we get there, I guess.”

The shuttle settled on their forecourt. They didn’t yet own a car, so there was plenty of room for it to set down and Xiù smiled slightly at the notion that she’d finally got that flying car the future always promised.

“Well then,” Allison shrugged. “Let’s go find out.”

Date Point 15y5m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Air Engineering Technician Jack Tisdale

The warning about how Jack’s job wasn’t a dignified or glamorous one at times had been right on the nose but in fact the awkward moments were a pretty minor part of the job. Besides, once an operator had squeezed himself into his undersuit the least dignified bits were all out of the way.

Then again, Moho was yet to go through “Crush Week,” the seven-day ordeal where he and his buddies would be locked into their suits and given simulated missions for a whole week on the trot. Nobody was looking forward to that, even though the technicians by definition were getting a pretty insignificant part of the pain.

Jack and Miller had some of the synchronized work down beautifully though. It was Jack’s fingers at stake, so he called time and Miller did the heavy lifting.

“Twist, two, push, two, hold, two—” Here Jack grunted with exertion as he made sure the midsuit’s femoral bracing wasn’t caught on the undersuit’s hip supports “—three, four, push, two, click, release, time!”

Deacon checked her stopwatch. “Good! How was it for you, Moho?”

Moho released the breath he’d been holding to help them out. “Well, my dick ain’t cut off, so there’s that.” He bounced on the balls of his feet to get everything seated comfortably.

“No fear of that, I get a great view of it from down here,” Miller commented. She rocked back to squat on her heels and reached for her water bottle.

“How’d you rate it?”

“…Really?” She gave him a Look.

In return, Moho just grinned that wide-faced Cheshire-Cat grin of his until Deacon cleared her throat. “Points check,” she said. “Shoulders?”

Moho shrugged. The suit torso moved easily. “Good.”

“Armpits? Any pinching at all?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Waist rotation.” Moho twisted and bent until they heard a loud pop from his spine.

“All good.”

“Your spine’s a bit loose. Sounds like you need more time under the bar with ‘Horse.”

Moho grunted then bent forward to touch his toes, bent back with his hands over his head, then rocked from side to side.

“Tisdale? That look good to you?” Deacon asked.

Jack shook his head. “Lumbar flexion was good but it looked a little tight on the extension, right Moho?”

“Yuh. Couldn’t get past….here. Feels like I got a bar tied to my back.”

“Suit-related?”

“Yuh. Ran outta compression.”

“That’s the segmented support column,” Deacon commented. “The way they come they all need to be custom-machined to accommodate. Only way to fix it is to mark all the contact surfaces with bluing, suit ‘em up, machine down the surfaces that touch…and repeat.”

“That’s a lotta work with only three days to Crush Week. Better get you back outta there, Moho,” Miller noted.

“After we find out what else is wrong,” Jack agreed. “How’s your right wrist pronation? I wanted to add another row but I thought I’d better double check first…”

“Felt fine. Gotta say though, them gravball games earlier got me tight everywhere.”

“Well, then. Helmet on, we’ll check your neck again and then you can go enjoy a massage.”

Moho chuckled. “Lookit the little guy, all bossin’ me about an’ shit,” he rumbled, but obediently grabbed the helmet and mated it to the back of his collar with the peculiar J-shaped clicking motion unique to EV-MASS.

Jack and Miller took care of the two mandibular connection points, just below and in front of his ears, and Miller locked his mask on herself.

“Nice. You’re doing that twice as fast as you were a couple days ago,” Deacon commented after checking the seals. “Still five seconds off the record time, though.”

“We’ll get there,” Miller promised.

“Hell yeah. Best techs in the shop!” Moho encouraged through his mask. He tilted his head back and forward, swayed it left and right then shook it hard and rolled it round in both directions. “…Way better!”

Jack and Miller knocked fists together.

“Checklist from the top, then he can come outta there,” Deacon told them.

“Got it.” Jack grabbed the checklist. “…Occipital brace?”

Miller’s fingers probed the brace at the back of the helmet that stopped it from breaking Moho’s neck during high-G maneuvers. “…Check.”

“Subaxial brace?”

“Check.”

“Trachial plate?”

“Check, or he wouldn’t be breathing.”

Jack chuckled. “Hey, I didn’t write the checklist.”

“Nope, I did,” Deacon said archly. “That one’s in there because the Beef Trio can and have worn the Mass without that plate. In a rush they might not say anything and that’s valuable protection lost.”

“…Seriously?” Moho seemed genuinely nonplussed. “It’s hard enough to breathe with the damn thing.”

“Get a stronger neck, then. ‘Horse hardly notices when it’s missing. So, y’know.” Deacon gave Miller a look of minor reprimand. “Follow the list and check the plate.”

Miller nodded and re-tested the armoring on the front of Moho’s throat. “…Trachial plate, check.”

Jack nodded and ticked it off. “…Yoke support.”

“Check.”

The full checklist took a long damn time but Deacon had just ably illustrated why it was needed in full. Moho sighed when they finally checked off “Achilles support, left,” and shook his arms loose. “Cold water time?”

“Cold water time.”

“Okay.” Deacon closed her book and showed them her stopwatch. “Our target time for a full checklist is four minutes. You just did it in seven twenty-seven. I wanna see you shave at least a minute off by the end of Crush Week, and I want you both to be able to recite the whole list perfectly from memory. Moho, you should go see about that massage. And thicken that neck up, you shouldn’t have any problems breathing at all.”

She pocketed the stopwatch and loosened a touch. “Not bad, though. You got a ways to go, but you’re not doing bad at all. Keep it up.”

“Will do,” Jack promised. She favoured him with a nod, and left them to the business of de-suiting their Operator.

“Guess we’d better get to machining that support column,” Miller commented as she pumped the ice water into Moho’s suit. They ignored the way he grimaced and breathed slowly to tolerate it. There was nothing they could do about that particular necessary discomfort.

“Eh. It’s something to keep our hands busy while we memorize the list,” Jack shrugged as he wiped down and packed the helmet and mask.

Moho snorted. “Shit, Two-Seventy. You ever slow down?”

“Do you?” Jack retorted. He liked the unofficial nickname Moho had chosen for him—a personal best bench press of two hundred and seventy pounds was a joke next to a HEAT operator, but in the normal world that was a damn good lift and he was proud of it nonetheless.

“Hell no!” Moho grinned, then hissed and jigged uncomfortably as the freezing water worked its way deeper into the ever-less-pleasant recesses of his suit. “Fuck me, is there salt in this?”

“Grin and bear it, big guy,” Miller told him.

“If my nuts never come back outta hiding, I’m blamin’ you…”

Jack chuckled as he unfastened the gloves. “Please. None of you operators have nuts small enough to hide in the first place.”

“Bruh, your skinny ass can bench two-seventy. Don’t pretend you ain’t a stud.”

Jack, who’d yet to actually even kiss a girl, tried to let that pass by casually. Unfortunately, they both knew him pretty well by now and Miller caught his expression—or rather his careful lack of one—instantly.

“Uh-oh,” she muttered in a low sing-song. “I think you hit a nerve there, Mo…”

“I’ve just…not found the right girl yet,” Jack confessed.

Moho was utterly uncomprehending. “So? You don’t gotta marry a bitch, jus’ go to a bar, find someone pretty and fuckin’ smash, bruh!”

“Romantic,” Miller drawled.

“We need to get our little studlet laid, Miller. Ooh! It is Friday…down for a Project?”

“Oh God…” Jack lamented, but Miller was already grinning at him.

“I am so down,” she declared.

“…I don’t get a say in this, do I?” Jack predicted.

“Nope,” Moho asserted. “Now get me the fuck outta this suit before my dick freezes and snaps off.”

“Right.” Jack immediately set to work while Miller fetched the rack for the midsuit. “I can never get this bit…”

Miller reached over and twisted it almost effortlessly. “Y’know, you’re not any weaker than I am…”

“Bullshit.”

“No, seriously. I can’t bench two-seventy.”

“No, but you can explode a beer can in your hands.”

“There’s a trick to it, I bet you could too with practice!”

“Maybe, but—”

Moho hissed at them. He was legitimately shivering by now. “Guys, less dick measuring more suit-pully.”

“Right, right…”

They had the suit off in minutes and Moho stumped off to lurk near the heater while Jack heaved the midsuit onto the workbench and set about stripping down the spinal assembly.

“What about you?” he asked Miller. “You out on the pull tonight as well?”

“Well, I would be but this young stud I’ve had my eye on seems to be weirdly immune to my charms…” There was an unmistakable glimmer in her eye.

“Oh. Uh, is he?” Jack could feel himself going red.

“Mhmm. Too bad. I think he needs a good breaking-in.”

“…‘Breaking-in?’ Really?”

“Yeah-huh. I once rocked a boy’s world so good he called me ‘daddy.’” Miller’s grin should have been a felony.

“Uh… look, I, uh…” Jack began. She shut him up with a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey. It’s okay. Look, Deacon has this whole ‘don’t shit where you eat’ rule,” she said. “I think she’s crazy, but if you wanna do things her way that’s cool. Just say so.”

“…Thanks.”

She smirked. “Let me know when you come to your senses.”

“God.” Jack rolled his eyes and giggled. “…Am I seriously that….?”

“It’s the accent. And your abs. And you’re good with your hands…”

“Ha!” Moho wandered back over having warmed himself sufficiently. “She knows what she wants! Which is why we’re taking you out tonight. We’re gonna find some cute airhead bimbo and she’s gonna suck you—”

“Moho!” Deacon hollered from across the workshop. “Massage!”

“Yes, Staff Sergeant!” Moho turned to leave. “See you tonight. Make sure he looks pretty.”

If Miller’s grin should have been arrest-worthy, her dark laugh ought to need a license. “Give me a difficult job!” she called.

“…Don’t make me regret this,” Jack pleaded as he finally got the segmented support out of its housing.

“Tisdale, I promise,” Miller replied, and picked up the checklist. “This will be a night you’ll remember fondly for a long time…”

Date Point 15y5m AV
Grand Commune of Females, Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Mother-Supreme Yulna

Cimbrean was no longer a world of only one colony.

Originally, the 5-EYES nations had planned for Lucent to become a colony of the United States of America, but political necessity had made it more advisable to hand over the undeveloped world to the People’s Republic of China instead. Rather than bemoan this loss, an extensive negotiation had ensued in which Cimbrean—which was, after all, a whole planet and far more territory than the mere hundred-thousand Humans living in and around Folctha could properly exploit—was carefully divided up.

Thus had been founded the colonies of Franklin, New Botany, Nouveau Acadia and Abeltown.

Adding Tiritya Island to the list had been relatively straightforward. There was enough of Cimbrean to go around.

Tiritya was hardly a small island, either. The word “island” conjured up a mental image of a little spit of land in the lonely seas, but in practical fact a flight from one end to the other in anything that couldn’t go supersonic was likely to last an hour at least. Some of the Female presence on the island was all the way at the opposite end of the landmass, in little climate monitoring stations and observatories with crews of four or five, or in isolated farms.

Some of the Sisters had suffered terribly on Gao and while most preferred the bustling company of their own kind, a few needed quiet and isolation to heal. Which was why there was even a convent, built on a little neighboring island that was technically part of Tiritya thanks to the beaches that appeared at low tide.

The concept of a nun had been an alien one when Yulna first learned it, and it only got stranger when she considered her Sisters taking up lives of celibacy and spiritual reflection. Especially now, when the Gao needed to breed like never before. She’d never understand them… but she didn’t need to. They were Clan, and that was all that mattered. If their experiences had left them feeling unequipped to bear cubs then nobody had the right to force that responsibility on them.

Species certainly didn’t matter. Sister Shoo remained the only non-Gaoian member of the Clan, but in principle Yulna wasn’t opposed to the idea of taking in other Human women. After all, the one they already had was a treasure.

A confusing treasure, truth be told, but a treasure nonetheless. She had arrived with one of her romantic partners—her female lover, and there was confusion for an old Female to wrap her paws around—but just as she had on Gao she’d found a place for herself in the Commune as though being there was quite natural for her.

And she remained as excellent a listener as always. No sooner had the door closed and left the three of them alone in Yulna’s study than all of the stress and worries began flowing out Yulna’s mouth.

There were a lot of them. Yulna’s relationship with the male Clans, and by extension the relationship between Male and Female. Her concerns about the ongoing pandemic on Gao which just refused to go away. Supply problems, time problems, the knowledge that there were still a few holdout Clanless groups back on the homeworld who’d captured females and whom the Grand Army were yet to reach…

But Yulna tried to be practical which was why, for now, she was focusing on the problems she possibly could do something about herself.

For example: What was the female enclave on Tiritya going to be? Was it just another gilded cage, warded by benevolent aliens rather than benevolent males? Was it a pity handout that would remind them daily of a debt they’d never repay?

Or could it, perhaps, be something more?

“We need to be a productive economic power in our own right,” she explained as she prowled the room. “Our value to Gaoian males is obvious. But what value do we have to Human nations? What can we produce that you cannot provide for yourselves?” She sat back down at her desk feeling thoroughly dejected. “Your people like us, Sister. But that alone isn’t enough of a foundation. We need to have value to the human race beyond sentiment. The Great Father has already figured that out for his Clan and the others…”

“But he’s too focused on protecting the Females to think on those terms,” Shoo finished.

“Too focused on protecting them to let them grow independently you mean,” Allison commented, cutting right to the heart of it.

“Possibly,” Shoo retorted. “I don’t think Daar actually thinks that way. He’s just very…focused on the problem right in front of him.”

Allison nodded sharply. “Uh-huh. Exactly. I mean, I know Daar, he’s about the… heh, the ‘most nicest’ guy you could wanna meet. I know he’d never want to put the Females in a cage…”

“But forces of nature like him can do awe-inspiring things without ever noticing,” Yulna finished.

“That’s fair I guess. So then…what can you offer?”

“Well…” Yulna picked up a cup of tea from her desk. She’d picked up the habit from Gyotin and had to admit, for situations like this it worked better than Talamay. “…In theory, we can offer anything. You never saw much of the Clan outside of the communes, Sister. Most young females take associate work with one of the male Clans for a while between cubhood and their first pregnancy.”

“I do remember!” Shoo slipped into her weirdly not-perfect Gaori. “Many of the young females spoke of the, uh, mating prospects that tended to open…”

“That perk is not available when working with Humans…” Yulna chittered. “But in theory our Sisters as they are now can integrate with the Human colonies and offer their own expertise, but that isn’t permanent value. In ten, twenty, thirty years or so that well will be dry. We need to offer something that only we can offer, now and for the future.”

She leaned back in her chair. “The problem is… I can’t think of anything. It may even be that there is nothing unique that we can offer. But what then? What will that do to the Clan’s psyche? Have we traded a gilded cage provided by the Males of our own species for another one provided by the charity of yours?”

“This island has natural resources, right?” Allison pointed out. She was using a translator rather than speaking Gaori herself. “What about minerals? Oil? Farmland?”

“Folctha has us beaten for farmland,” Yulna shook her head. “The colony’s economy is founded on it, I’ve seen the croplands for myself. Some of the fields around New Belfast stretch to the horizon!”

“…What about heirloom crops?” Allison asked.

“Or artisanal goods?” Shoo agreed.

“I don’t… explain?”

Allison scooted forward in her chair. “You have uniquely Gaoian foods, right? Nava, Naxas, all that stuff… well, out here on the island you’re probably safe from the Terran biosphere transplant. That means less pesticides, less fertilizer…hell, you could claim it’s all-natural and organic! Your Gaoian critters and plants won’t be competing with the Earthling imports and they’ll way out-compete the natives, so they’ll grow nice and big.”

“And people will buy Nava and Naxas for the novelty value,” Shoo nodded.

“They will?”

“I would,” Shoo replied fervently. “Naxas is delicious. It’s like… it’s like… it’s a meat with all the melt-in-the-mouth tenderness of lamb but all the mature, rich flavor of good mutton!”

Allison nodded fervently and indicated Shoo with her thumb. “Her Naxas curry is… hngg!”

“Then there’s cultural things. Like those workhouse dramas!”

“Those are mostly made by Clanless males, for Clanless males…” Yulna objected.

“Yulna, they’re the most popular genre of ET-made entertainment on Earth by a mile!”

“And wouldn’t they be improved with actual Females in them for a change?” Allison added. “Think about it, it’s all been males for basically every workhouse drama ever made. Would a female character add some desperately needed realism?”

Yulna considered what they were saying. Not just the specifics, but the general thrust of it. They’d correctly put their claws on the root of her problem, which was that she’d been thinking far too large-scale about how to compete with and find a niche among the other colonies as they ramped up to full-time mass production.

The idea that the Females might pursue a lower-volume, higher-value economy instead was… intriguing.

“You believe we should pursue a value proposition rather than, say, a commodity.”

“When your biggest buyers are gonna be humans?” Allison asked. “Absolutely. We are gonna snap up anything Gaoian, seriously.”

“…Honestly?”

“Honestly and truly,” Allison promised.

“Folctha has a large middle class,” Shoo elaborated. “Lots of disposable income, lots of… well… Everybody who lives there is the kind of person who would leave their homeworld and live on an alien planet just because that’s an option.”

“And are therefore more open to novel things…” Yulna duck-nodded, seeing her point.

“The whole town’s liberal as shit,” Allison grumbled. Yulna saw Shoo hide a roll of her eyes and a fond smile.

“Bad girl,” she chided gently. “You know our rules…”

“Ugh, sorry. But seriously, how do people live without their guns? I feel naked without mine!”

Yulna could see that there was a complicated knot of Human politics there she didn’t have the knowledge to untangle at that particular moment.

“So that’s your advice,” she summarized. “Focus our efforts on the small-scale creation of high-quality, high-value goods for export. Exploit our unique culture and heritage to our advantage, use this island’s isolation to avoid cross-contamination with Earthling influences and sell most of what we produce as exports.”

“I mean…It’s a start?” Shoo agreed. “But Yulna, I’m really not, like, an economist or whatever. Or a market analyst or—” She paused, pulled a face at herself and slapped her forehead.

“Shoo?”

“…But we know people who are. Right?” She turned to Allison. “I bet MBG would have some ideas about what they’d like to buy…”

“Ideas? They could probably roll in here with a shopping list longer than your leg,” Allison smirked. “But they are still the biggest private-sector players in Folctha so you’re inevitably gonna do business with them someway or another.”

“Aren’t they your employer?” Yulna asked. That raised the ugly possibility of a vested interest on Allison’s part, and she at least needed a good-faith denial.

“There’s that, yeah…” Allison agreed. “But I really wouldn’t work for them if I didn’t believe in them. They’ve been good to us. If they hadn’t been, I’d’ve taken their money and walked for sure.”

Yulna believed her. Or at least she believed that Allison believed what she was saying, which was good enough.

“There are ideas in this,” she conceded at length. “We will need to consider and develop upon them…”

“Yulna… Mother… when was the last time you took a break?” Shoo asked. Yulna sighed.

“Long enough that I wish you of all people would not call me Mother,” she replied. “But the Mother-Supreme doesn’t ‘take a break.’ At least, not at times like this.”

“‘Times like this’ could last another ten years,” Shoo retorted. “Come on, Giymuy had her biscuits and she loved scandalizing her entourage. She was so much less… stiff than you are, and that’s not who I remember. I remember you sneaking seconds to Myun when Ayma couldn’t see.”

Yulna sighed and miserably lowered her paws to the desktop before resting her chin on them. There was literally nobody else in the world except perhaps Myun in front of whom she could ever have displayed such abject weariness.

“Giymuy made it look like she was born for this role,” she lamented. “She was always so… collected. So serene. I feel like I’m holding a porcelain egg and the floor is strewn with marbles.”

Shoo stood up, rounded the desk and crouched at her side to rub a hand soothingly down her back. “You aren’t Giymuy,” she said. “You don’t have to be like her.”

“You keep comparing me to her.”

Shoo paused, then nodded. “Then I’m sorry. I shouldn’t. But I bet her secret was that she probably felt the same underneath, and she took her little pleasures where she could to help balance herself.”

Yulna gave a thoughtful twitch of her ear after a long moment of thought.

“…I haven’t cooked my own dinner in years. I keep thinking ‘I’m the Mother-Supreme, I can’t just barge into the kitchen and demand access to a cutting board.’ But…I can, can’t I? I absolutely can.”

“Absolutely,” Allison piped up.

Yulna thought about it some more. There was a deeply repressed want bubbling up to the surface, one that she’d held on to for so long that it was practically a need now, and maybe it was just the little push, maybe it was just a moment that had finally arrived, but there was something she wanted to do more than anything else.

She sat up.

“…Who wants tacos?” she asked.

Date Point: 15y5m AV
Dataspace/Internet communications interchange, adjacent to Observatory Station, Neptune, Sol

Entity

The Internet was impenetrable. The Entity could, with some careful camouflage, access it, send messages, download files and in every way gain access to Humanity’s crowning communications achievement just like an ordinary user…But it could not, however, “go” there.

The operating principles were too different. In some ways they were too primitive, in other ways they were far too advanced. The Internet, at its most basic, was just a highly efficient system for conveying packages of data between devices—it couldn’t do any of the things that made Dataspace possible, permitted the existence of the Igraen hegemony, or made the Entity’s own existence possible.

A fish might as well dream of soaring as high as eagles. A human might as well fantasize about going for a clothes-free stroll on the surface of Venus.

Earth, in short, was a closed book. It was not and would never be part of the dataspace, and the border where one met the other was locked down tighter than even the most despotic iron curtain.

Earthbound text-based messages were among the least scrutinized forms of traffic, however.

The only real obstacle the Entity faced therefore was the content of its message. It knew the whom of its correspondence, but exactly what it wanted to say and how to say it were more of a problem, not least because some of its more outlandish and paranoid factions were urging it to abandon contact with Homo Sapiens entirely.

The only solution was to allow a personality to crystallize out of its archived memories again, hand her the general thrust of its dilemma, and trust that whatever she wrote would be close enough to the Entity’s own experience while remaining comprehensible to a matterspace reader.

It remembered certain details with a clarity that the original Ava Ríos would never match. It remembered the precise position of objects in a room, it remembered which fingers people wore their rings on. It remembered, perfectly well, a set of contact details written in pen and glanced at but not consciously assimilated.

The message was a desperate long shot. But it was the best plan it had yet achieved. And so it began with six simple words.

[Darcy,]

[Please I need your help.]

Date Point 15y5m AV
The Grand Commune of Females, Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Sister-Consort Naydra

The kitchens were… well, closed.

In point of fact the Grand Commune had dozens of kitchens that were active around the clock to keep all the Females and Cubs fed and happy. It was a never-ending industry nestled at the heart of Commune life. Some were larger, some smaller, a few—and in Yulna’s defense the one she’d commandeered was by far the smallest—were there to handle small bespoke meals for visiting dignitaries or the senior Mothers such as Yulna herself.

Even so, the staff had been unceremoniously turfed out and a guard-sister was standing watch on the door with her ears turned backwards to listen nervously to the peals of Human laughter and uproarious chittering that emanated from within.

She gave Naydra a respectful duck and stepped out of her way. The intricacies of how to handle the Great Father’s consort were finicky and entirely new but the general rule seemed to be to treat her as though she was equal in rank to Yulna herself, except when she wasn’t.

Naydra herself honestly had no idea how that kind of a “rule” worked, but it worked now. She patted the guard-sister on the arm and let herself in.

The kitchens were always a spicy olfactory paradise, but this one smelled… she groped for an appropriate Gaori word, gave up, and settled for Divine. The air was rich with the smell of finest prime Naxas meat, with herbs and spices, the peculiar caramelized fruity scent of Talamay that had been used for cooking and also with the potent nasal presence of two humans. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent, just…loud.

She recognised Sister Shoo, of course. The other, with the blonde hair who was so animatedly telling a story had to be her partner Allison.

“No, really! He was super nervous about it, but like… eager, too.”

Shoo was giggling fondly. “We should do that again sometime. Only this time he has to wear the cat ears, not the bow tie.”

“Why not both?”

Yulna, looking more relaxed and happy than Naydra could ever remember seeing her, chittered incredulously and took a long draught of the Talamay she’d commandeered. She didn’t seem to care that it was the cooking-grade stuff, just that there was a lot of it. “Cat ears?” she asked.

“Yeah!” Sister Shoo raised her hands and touched them to either side of her head as if miming a Gaoian’s own ears. “Miāo!”

Yulna turned to Allison for a more coherent explanation and finally noticed Naydra in the doorway. For an instant—just a flash—she looked like a cub caught doing something naughty but it was just a flash and nothing more. The next instant she jovially waved Naydra into the room.

“Naydra!” she exclaimed. “I hope they aren’t saying the Mother-Supreme has gone mad out there?”

“Ah…well, no. Not… no,” Naydra said, weaving between the counters. Most of them were strewn with cooking debris. Flour, discarded packaging, dirty cutting boards. The knives were clean, dry and stored though, which was the kind of odd detail that stood out. Of course, a good chef cared for their knives. “They…are however wondering exactly what is going on?”

“I’m cooking my own damn dinner!” Yulna announced, and raised her glass. “That’s what’s going on.”

“I… suppose you’re entitled to if you want, but—”

“Oh, sit down Naydra.” Yulna gestured to a vacant stool. Naydra blinked. This was… very unlike the Yulna she thought she knew. Yulna was straight-spoken, yes, but she usually stood quite carefully on the ceremony of their respective positions.

Now she was behaving like a gruffly good-humoured kitchen Mother, and the scar where some Corti had long ago vivisected her and removed her eyeball without anesthetic looked…weirdly natural. She had a Daar-like coarse quality for the moment.

Allison, apparently endlessly amused by everything, stepped aside to make room while Sister Shoo practically dragged Naydra into their little group with a gentle hand around her waist and before she knew it Yulna had pressed a glass of Talamay into Naydra’s hands.

“How long?” she asked Shoo, who glanced at her watch.

“They’re… about ready, actually. I’ll get the frying pan.”

“Mother, what—?” Naydra tried to ask, but was shushed in a matronly manner.

“You never tasted Sister Shoo’s cooking,” she said. “Drink! Relax! Tiritya’s teats girl, you look like you don’t know which end of you is your nose!”

…Girl?

Naydra wondered briefly whether or not to be offended, but there was nothing to see or smell in Yulna’s behaviour that said she was being anything other than…merry. That was the word. Merry. The Mother-Supreme pressed Shoo firmly back down onto her stool and fetched the frying pan herself, humming an old song as she did so.

“…Sister?” Needing answers, Naydra turned to Sister Shoo who smiled, leaned across and lowered her voice.

“She needs this,” she murmured. “Just… let her be Mama Yulna for a while.”

Behind her, Yulna removed a high-sided baking tray from the oven and used a slotted spoon to fish out little cubes of meat from whatever marinate they’d been cooked in. The scent was astonishing.

“So, I fry these in their own fat over a low heat for…?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes. Just enough to crisp the outside!” Shoo replied.

“Ah! Crisp on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside!” Yulna made approving noises and hummed to herself some more as she cooked.

Bereft of any better way to cope, Naydra drank her Talamay. It had that burning, coarse edge that cheap cooking Talamay always did, but it wasn’t actually bad. Yulna noticed and gave her an approving flick of the ear.

“Cat ears?” the Mother-Supreme prompted.

“It’s… I dunno. Human weirdness I guess,” Allison said. “But we’ve got this big strong guy and then you stick something cute on him like the cat ears and…” she shrugged.

“Miāo!” Shoo giggled. She was definitely a little tipsy, Naydra decided.

“Too bad Gaoians already have the ears built in…” Allison sighed. “But I bet the bow tie would work.”

“Oh God, Daar in a bow tie!” Shoo giggled again.

“Or Regaari.”

“Nah, Regaari’s too suave. It’d actually suit him.”

“Daar would totally rock the bowtie, too. He’s playful!”

Yulna sighed as she tossed the frying pan to move the meat around. “Oh, he was playful indeed…”

“He still is!” Naydra loyally objected. “…In private.”

“That’s good.” Yulna suddenly seemed a bit less chipper. “I am glad he is still himself, somewhere.”

Shoo grabbed a sliced piece of vegetable and threw it at the Mother-Supreme.

“Bad Mama Yulna!” she chided. “You’re getting all sad again, stoppit.”

Yulna chittered, thereby turning Naydra’s world subtly upside-down. “Fine, fine. Actually, you know who I bet would wear a bow tie badly and think he wore it well? Champion Sheeyo.”

“Sheeyo, Sheeyo…” Allison scowled in recollection then snapped a finger. “The Goldpaw? The skinny one with all that jewelry braided in his fur?”

“Him, yes! Oh, it’s a handsome enough affectation but he’s so… preening.”

“We should send him a paisley cravat,” Shoo said. Clearly it was an in-joke of some kind between herself and Allison because they laughed with each other while Yulna just gave them a quizzical look then shook her head indulgently and tossed the frying pan again.

It occurred to Naydra that she was probably looking entirely gormless and lost. She took another swig of Talamay to try and regain herself a little.

“Mother—” she began.

“Naydra, please. Here and now, it’s just Yulna. Don’t tell me you never want a moment to escape from it all and just relax?”

The set of her ears was soft and kindly. “This is a safe place to do that,” she said. “Later we’ll go back out that door and I’ll be Mother-Supreme and you’ll be the Great Father’s Consort, very proper and polite. But here and now, for Fyu’s sake relax.”

She turned back to her pan. “Or don’t. Nothing is forced, here.”

“…Thank you,” Naydra replied. She’d meant it to be polite, but it came out entirely heartfelt. It seemed Yulna had zeroed in on something she herself didn’t know she needed.

The two Humans beamed at each other, and Allison picked up her Talamay again.

“Anyway…” she said. “…Oh yeah! So, that thing with the bow tie and Mulan was about a week after we picked up the Huh and…I mean, I was kinda distracted at the time but looking back on it the way Lewis got his hands on that thing was just the funniest thing…”

Naydra inclined her head. “What’s a Huh?” she asked.

“That’s just it, we didn’t know at first…”

Naydra got lost in the story. A few minutes later, she was chittering so hard that it hurt her ribs, and a few minutes after that the tacos were ready. The first moment when she bit in and tasted all that delicious, fruitily-spiced tender meaty perfection underneath that exciting warm crunch completely dispelled all her confusion and doubts.

They were definitely going to do this again sometime.

Date Point: 15y5m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lt. Col. Owen Powell

“Come in.”

Powell had moved offices since the battle of Gao. Rear-Admiral Caruthers had requested as much, stating that he wanted to have the SOR’s CO right next door if needed, and Powell had seen no reason to refuse. “Next door” in this case was the retired Admiral Knight’s former office, and he’d always liked the view.

The fact that it came with a little more elbow room and was closer to the stairs got his vote, too.

That latter fact was definitely more convenient for Technical Sergeant Martina Arés. Powell privately thought she was a touch daft for not taking the lift, but she and her husband had a lot in common when it came to elevators: they shunned them.

Still. She had to be getting on for the point now where three flights of stairs were taking it out of her.

If they were, she was doing a good job of hiding it. She entered the room looking as crisp, smart and professional as a maternity uniform would allow and placed a thick bundle of paperwork in his in tray.

“Today’s training reports,” she explained. “I excused ‘Horse. That wrestling match took it right out of him.”

Powell issued an amused grunt and flipped open the summary. “How’s Deacon doing with the new techs?”

“Good! Just the right balance of carrot and stick. I think she enjoys training them, and all the teams are ahead of target.”

“Which means the target’s too bloody lenient,” Powell muttered. “Hargreaves?”

“Passed his exam with flying colors. Ninety-six. He’s fully qualified on the biotech systems now, and Green’s making noises about taking that qual as well.”

“Hmm.” Powell skimmed the summary and signed it. “Careful. At this rate, you’ll make yourself obsolete.”

It was a calculated joke on his part—He’d wanted to broach the subject of Arés’ future for some time. Her re-enlistment was only months away now, and if Powell was a betting man he wouldn’t have put a penny on her staying. But he needed to know.

“Yeah. Um, about my upcoming re-enlistment…”

Powell gestured to the chair opposite him. “Sit down, Arés. If you’ve got summat to say I won’t make you stand up for it.”

She sank gratefully onto it with a groan. “Thanks.”

“Go ahead,” Powell sat back and listened.

She took a deep breath. “Uh… I’ve, well… I’ve decided not to re-enlist, sir.”

Powell nodded. Expected as the news was, losing her was going to suck. “Aye. Now, keep in mind that you’re well before your retirement age so you won’t get benefits beyond being ‘Horse’s spouse…”

“We’ve taken that into account sir. But… well, we lost a lot of people on Caledonia, and…”

“Aye. I’d have to be bloody blind to not notice your growing family. An’ I imagine it won’t stop at just one…?”

She smiled. “He kicks almost as hard as his daddy,” she confided.

Powell uttered a rare laugh. “Hah! Well! I don’t envy you, then. But any road, I know better than to try an’ talk you out of it. What I was going to say is that I imagine the unit will still have frequent need of your expertise and experience, an’ I was wonderin’ if you’d factored that thought into your plans…?”

“You’d take me on as a consultant?” she asked.

“I think we’d be bloody fools not to at least offer,” Powell said drily. “You wrote half the suit procedures yourself.”

“I think I’d have to be foolish not to accept,” she replied.

“Arright,” Powell nodded. “We’ll work out the details closer to time. Thanks for tellin’ me nice and early, it’ll make transitioning to a post-Jockey world that bit smoother…Though it’ll still be a bit of a bugger, mind,” he added warmly.

That got a touched smile. “…Thank you, sir.”

Powell nodded. “You’d better send a message to Colonel Miller, I suppose. Did you need anything else?”

“Not right now, sir.”

“Arright. Good evening, sergeant.”

She clambered back out of the chair and headed for the door. “Good evening, sir.”

A thought hit Powell just before she reached it. “Oh, Arés?”

She turned back with her hand on the handle. “Sir?”

“Have you settled on a name yet?”

“Uh, yeah,” she nodded. “Diego. Diego Samuel Arés.”

Powell considered it for a second. “…Good name.”

Arés smiled again. “Good evening, sir.”

“Good evening.”

She let herself out, and Powell sat back in his chair to think. All in all, the conversation had left him in a good mood.

“…Good name,” he repeated to himself, and got back to work.

Date Point: 15y5m AV
Central University, City 1, Origin, The Corti Directorate

Lor

The plan to de-implant Corti civilization had grown rapidly. Once the Directors got behind something, any self-interested Corti—a tautology—aligned with them. The Varos College had gone from obscurity to focal importance with all the breathtaking efficiency the collegiate system promised.

Then, of course, came the debates.

Implants were at the heart of everything. They were the flagship product for dozens of Corti companies, especially giants like Amnag-Dwuz and Thryd-Geftry who between them had almost as much power as the Directorate itself.

But that was just the planetary crust of the problem, so to speak. There were grumbling tectonic layers beneath which made merely scrapping the economy’s most prolific and profitable exports seem like an utterly trivial undertaking. Implants were instrumental in global, regional and civic administration. They underpinned the stock market, enabled all aspects of Corti heavy industries and manufacturing through drone interfacing, and were almost literally written into the DNA of the medical sector… which included the reproduction labs.

Corti civilization was almost—not completely, but almost —dependent on neural cybernetics in order to breed.

If Lor had been emotionally capable of sweating with dread, he would have. How close were they to the event horizon? Had they already fallen past it without noticing?

It seemed entirely plausible. Not a single one of the Directorate’s projections could be described by even the most optimistic soul as anything less than “apocalyptic.”

Banning the implants outright and shutting them all down was impossible. Quite aside from the inevitable black market problem, society would collapse within days at best. The more probable estimates said hours. The most probable estimates said the collapse would begin immediately.
Forbidding the implantation of newly decanted Corti infants was a more workable solution—over the coming decades, society could be reconfigured to accommodate and rely upon them. But they might not have decades.

Releasing software updates represented a middle-ground solution, but most of the true vulnerabilities were firmware or worse—In-depth examination of the Directorate’s own removed implants had suggested security flaws at the data link layer. Subtle almost to the point of invisibility, but once the College knew what to look for the tell-tales couldn’t hide behind a veneer of legitimacy any longer.

Lor was running on stimulants. He’d suffer for them in a few days when he reached the limits of what pharmacology could achieve but in the short-term he was perfectly alert, awake and focused. Without them, he’d never have been able to make presentation after presentation to the Directors as his faculty and students brought him their findings.

Right now, he was explaining how the war effort on Gao appeared to have effected isolation of the implanted populace from the opening moves of the conflict.

“The real-time communications grid must be zero-area distortion-based. Evidence gathered by the Common Denominator says that Gao has been enshrouded in a high-powered and aggressive topology stabilization field.”

Third Director Larm seized on that as a beacon of possible hope. “I presume we have the manufacturing and scientific capability to assemble such field generators on Origin, Node, Vertex and Tangent at least?”

“We probably have the ability to assemble such a generator on all planets and most of our major space habitats, Third Director,” Lor replied. “Unfortunately, I do not think it will help.”

“Why not?”

“The Gaoian implanted population number no more than one in ten of the total population. Our implanted population is ten out of every twelve. Worse, those among our people with the knowledge and expertise to build such generators are presumably implanted at a rate approaching total. Finally, even if we could set up such generators, the overwhelming number of potential biodrones precludes locking them out. They could simply establish a communications network by some other means.”

“In other words, containing the situation as the Humans and Gaoians were able to do is not feasible,” First Director Shanl concluded.

“That is correct, First Director.”

Shanl gave the data in front of her some pensive consideration.

“…We must conclude that our prognosis is…hopeless,” she said.

“I fear so, First Director,” Lor agreed again.

Shanl nodded. She blinked a couple of times—a display of intense emotion, by Silver banner standards—then turned to the Directors.

“Alternatives?”

One of the Fifth Directors—Atrish—raised her hand. “We may need to consider an Ark.”

“Explain.”

“The Humans have a parable about a world-ending flood because one of their tribal war deities felt the need to purge the world of degeneracy. To that end, all life worth saving was housed aboard an oceangoing vessel. Once the flood waters had destroyed all non-sanctioned life, the world was repopulated from this Ark.”

The Directorate inclined their heads in various directions as they considered the merits of that suggestion. None expressed shock or dismay, nor moral outrage. None of them had the capacity.

“Permit total collapse and then restore from a prepared seed population…” Shanl mused. “Viable. It would reduce our species to a minor galactic power but if the alternative is extinction…”

“This Nofl’s comments on Corti physiology are intriguing also,” Second Director Larfu commented. “As he points out, Humans and Gaoians both prove that there is no particular reason why we should have sacrificed our physical talents. It seems perfectly possible to have both, and why disdain an asset?”

“You bring this up because you believe a true retrograde in our society is necessary.”

“Inevitable, perhaps,” Lor commented.

“If so,” Larfu continued, “Then our ‘Ark’ should furnish its occupants with as many opportunities to succeed as possible.”

Shanl stared at him. “We are contemplating a complete re-engineering of our species. That will likely entail intuitive aspects of our psychology as well.” To a Silver banner, the concept of emotion was too tainted to directly state.

“If necessary.”

“One wonders,” Third Director Blernd interjected, “whether an intuitive sense of personal purity might not have prevented this entire scenario.”

He became the center of attention. Such a sentiment brushed perilously close to the line of open unorthodoxy.

“You mean disgust,” Third Director Freth clarified.

“There are things we find distasteful even now,” Blernd observed. “It seems needlessly paradoxical to feel disgusted by the mere concept of disgust.”

“And if we had perhaps retained similar… selectiveness… in our attitude toward physical augmentation then, as the Third Director says, this situation need never have arisen,” Lor agreed.

“Can such selectiveness be engineered?” Second Director Morln asked.

“Sensitivity to it can be engineered. It is likely that the specific stimuli to be selected against must be taught.”

Freth cleared his throat. “Disgust is heavily entangled with other intuitive impulses,” he pointed out. “Hence why we have been unable to completely eradicate it even among the Silver banner caste. It runs deep, gets everywhere. It is… messy.”

“Messy or not, if it is a necessary function…” Larfu thought, then nodded sharply. “Yes. It seems to me that the Third Director is correct.”

“A picture is emerging that I do not much like,” Morln said. “A focus on physical prowess and strong intuitive psychology? This is not merely a retrograde, it is a rejection of the guiding principles set by thousands of preceding Directorates.”

“And of the standards we each met in arriving at our current stations,” one of the Fourth Directors agreed.

Lor felt it necessary to interject. “Forgive me, Directors, but if one of my students continued to prefer their hypothesis in the face of experimental evidence which disproved it, I would be forced to fail them.”

He stood up a little straighter. “That is where we are. We have been testing a hypothesis concerning social models and the long-term viability of certain policies. We have now discovered a crucial data point which discredits the hypothesis. Shall we continue the experiment now that the hypothesis is disproven, or shall we take the scientifically correct course by generating a new hypothesis to be tested by a new experiment?”

Contemplative silence greeted his rhetorical question. Shanl broke it.

“Well said,” she agreed.

“Thank you, First Director.”

Larfu glanced at the First Director, then nodded and sat forward. He opened a new file in the space before them, and gave it a name: “PROJECT NEW EXPERIMENT”

“Very well, then,” he said. “Let us design our Ark.”

Date Point 15y5m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

All in all it had been a pleasant afternoon, as much as riding along in the weirdly high-stakes social life that Xiù seemed to glide through could be, anyway. The food was awesome. And Yulna made enough to feed their men, too; it was rather a lot of stuff and they both had their arms completely full carrying it from the taxi.

All four of them were gross boys stuck in some kind of permanent competition to see who had the biggest stomach, so Allison had no hopes of any leftovers…But that was okay! When they got back the living room was empty, so they took a peek in the guest bedroom and found the four of them tangled up in a hopeless amount of comforters and blankets. Julian had dragged one of the as-yet unused mattresses downstairs from the garage and thrown it across the floor, pulled a sheet across, and promptly passed out on it like he’d fallen over dead.

It made for good viewing, that was for sure.

She summoned Xiù with a delighted grin and her beckoning finger. “Hey babe?”

Xiù peeked round the door and suppressed a laugh, only succeeding in keeping it down to whisper volume behind her hand. “Ooh!”

“You ever think you’d come home to this much grade-A boy candy strewn about all half-naked and stuff?”

“…Two of them aren’t even human!” Xiù chided her.

“So? Vemik’s got ten-pack abs, girl! And Yan–!”

“—Smells like the sweatiest old gym socks.”

“Nah, he’s just super musky. Maybe…I kinda like it.”

“Allison!” Xiù was plainly scandalized, while Yan opened an eye and grunted in amusement.

“C’mon, with muscles like his? You can’t tell me you aren’t impressed.”

“He’s got inch long fangs Allison! How could you—”

“Oh relax, he’s not my type. Hoeff is cute, though…”

“You are such a troll.”

Julian cracked a weary smile and groaned a half-awake joke. “Hoeff is pretty…”

Xiù considered the smallest of the quartet. “He’s too hairy.”

“Hey!” Julian laughed now, “I’m hairy too!”

“A little, yeah. You’re not blonde caveman hairy, though.”

Hoeff groaned and turned on his side. “Yeah, yeah. I’m pretty,” he grumbled. “I’m also tired as fuck so…”

“Hungry? We brought tacos.”

“…I’m awake.” Hoeff was up in an instant and made a beeline for the stairs. As was Vemik who immediately rolled upright, then Yan when he detected the possibility of eating something. He flipped himself to his feet with a kick through his legs and a muscular heave of his tail, which sent a heavy thud rattling through the basement’s concrete floor.

“Food?”

“The best kind!” Xiù promised as she climbed the stairs. “Come and see.”

“Where’d you get tacos?” Julian asked, stretching aesthetically and scratching at the hair on his chest.

“Yulna made them! Naxas carnitas with a Talamay marinade.”

He glanced at the two Ten’Gewek, then thumped sleepily up the stairs. They all remembered the night of the beer experiment. “…I assume all the alcohol was cooked off?”

“Yes, yes…” Xiù waved him towards the table. “Honestly, some day I need to teach you about cooking that uses more than just the grill.”

Hoeff had already unboxed the first container and fetched plates. “Fire is man’s sacred cooking form. Playboy here’ll lose man-points if he gives it up.”

Allison snorted and threw herself onto the couch. “I think he can spare a few. Jesus, the whole crew we hang out with has terminal testosterone poisoning.”

Vemik had just ambled up the stairs on all fours. “Testosterone means—?” he began. He was brought up short the second his tongue finished registering the taste on the air. “…Nevermind.” He galloped over to the table. “Tacos means what?”

The basement stairs creaked loudly and announced Yan’s arrival. He too hurried over once his tongue caught the flavor of food on the air.

“Means delicious, buddy. Here, you take one of these shells…” Julian picked one up, “…and you just layer in whatever you like from what’s on the table. …Hold up, this isn’t refried beans.”

“No, it’s seasoned Nava. Try it, it’s good!”

“Oh, okay.” Julian spooned some into his taco. “No guac?”

“Sorry. We made this in a Gaoian kitchen.”

“Oh well…”

Food disappeared quickly into their four black holes. They spared some time to get sleeping arrangements a little better sorted out but honestly, everyone was so happy and now sedated with a heavy meal, it didn’t take long before it was time to go back to sleep.

Fortunately, Julian didn’t need any persuading to eschew the man-pile in the basement.

“C’mon, I haven’t slept on the new bed yet…”

“Sleep?” Allison asked him.

He groaned. “Have mercy, I spent the whole day escorting Vemik—”

“Exactly. We’re owed some boyfriend time, right babe?”

“Right!” Xiù agreed. “But, um, there’s a condition…”

Julian turned at the top of the stairs. “Wh—?”

He went quiet and gave the object Xiù was holding a dubious stare. “I—”

“Miāo!”

“…Okay? …Kinky, I guess?”

She handed them to him. “Shut up and put them on, Bǎobèi.”

Julian blinked at her, then at the ears, then finally gave up and shrugged. “…Yes ma’am,” he muttered, and seated them in his hair.

“Hmm… they’ll never stay on,” Allison pointed out. His hair was too thick and wild for anything to sit properly. That didn’t seem to matter to Xiù, whose face was a picture of grinning delight.

“That’s okay…” Xiù brushed past her, took Julian’s hand and directed him through the door. “He’s been a good boy.”

As it turned out, he did have some energy in him after all.

Date Point: 15y5m1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Jack Tisdale

Rooney’s was fun, like always. Loud, friendly, raucous and full of energy. Moho and Miller kept plying him with drinks, and at first Jack tried to pace himself but…

Well, it was Friday… And he hadn’t really ever gone out before…

And beer was delicious…

And, hell, shots were fun too…

…Was the world always so unsteady? Didn’t matter. There was a girl. She was…pretty cute. How did they meet? Miller, he thought. Yeah. They had met on the cricket pitch a while ago.

She kissed him.

He wasn’t expecting that. He wasn’t expecting a lot of what happened afterwards, either.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember much of it when he woke up in a mobile alcohol recovery center at five in the morning with no girl, an aching head, an IV drip in his hand, a nasty stain down the front of his shirt and Miller affectionately telling him off.

But he remembered the kiss.

He didn’t need much persuading to agree to try again.

++END CHAPTER 42++

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Twenty-eight Humans

Alexander Golemis
TTTA
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Andrew Huang
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Forty-nine Deathworlders: galrock0 Austin Deschner Brian Berland Adam Shields Adam Beeman Andrew Ford Aryeh Winter atp Bartosz Borkowski Ben Thrussell Ben Moskovitz C’tri Goudie Chris Bausch Chris Candreva Coret Trobane damnusername Daniel R. Dar Darryl Knight Devin Rousso Doules1071HFY Eric Johansson HWPD Ignate Flare Jerdnas Jim Hamrick Jon Krit Barb Laga Mahesa lovot Matt Demm Matthew Cook Mel B. Myke Harryson Nicholas Enyeart Nick Annunziata NightKhaos Oliver Mernagh Parker Brown Patrick Huizinga Peter Bellaby Peter Poole Richard A Anstett Ryan Cadiz Sintanan Stephane Girardin Sun Rendered theWorst Woodsie13

As well as 58 Friendly ETs and 284 Dizi Rats. Don’t go forth, my legions. You’ll only get squished.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 43: “Scars Both Old And New”

Chapter 43: Scars Both Old and New

Date Point: 15y5m1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Jack Tisdale

“So run this by me again. She puked on me?”

They were going home. Well, not home home—Jack still had a room at his parents’ place while he saved up to put down a deposit on a place of his own, so that was home technically—but the base was home enough. Apparently the dorm rooms there were pretty much the height of luxury by barracks standards.

Their progress was definitely impaired by Jack having to stop every now and then as his stomach tried to turn itself upside-down, or when a stab of pain shot through his head, but at least he wasn’t passed out in an oversized ambulance any longer.

“Yyup. Right down your front. And that set you off, but you tried to cover your mouth with your hand like this so it kinda sprayed all over you both…” Jack grimaced, but Miller was relishing the recounting far too much to stop. “….So you both decided you wanted to wash off in the river and then you decided you were really tired so you fell asleep on a park bench and she kinda passed out… and that’s when Moho carried both of you to the drunk tank. She woke up about an hour before you did and went home without her shoes or her purse.”

“Our boy’s a smooooth player,” Moho said with a roll of his eyes.

“Knock if off, I never drunk that much before…” Jack grumbled.

“I’m thinkin’ neither had she.”

…Probably his parents didn’t need to know about this. Mum in particular was a romantic at heart and would probably be quite disappointed that his first kiss had been a drunken half-remembered thing. Dad would probably think it was hilarious but back Mum up while she was in earshot, and then give him some fatherly advice and sympathy in private. He could do without either.

He just wished he could recall more of what had happened.

Actually…

“…What was her name?” he asked, pausing to lean against a lamppost.

Moho shrugged. “I’unno. Never learned it.”

Miller shrugged too when Jack looked at her. “Don’t ask me, I’m terrible with names. It was kinda old-fashioned though. And it started with a B. Like, uh… Betty or something. I’unno. Might’a been Betty.”

Jack resisted the urge to scratch his hand where the drip had been. He’d definitely enjoyed kissing…Her…But not knowing Her name just felt wrong. He felt dirty, and not just from the dried vomit on his shirt.

Moho, in a rare gentle moment, laid a hand the size of a ham on his shoulder. “Bruh. You don’t need her name. We were right, you got game like you were born with swag.”

“…I do?”

“God, what is it with Brits?” Miller lamented. “They’re either massive arrogant twatwaffles or completely fucking oblivious. No middle ground!” She sighed and gave Jack a complicated look he couldn’t really read. “Yes you got game. Don’t let it go to your head, use your powers for good, and just… I’unno. Relax and enjoy.”

“How is it exactly I have this game you speak of?”

“…F’real?”

“Seriously!”

For some reason, Miller just shook her head and wandered off homewards with a muttered “Un-fuckin’-believable…”

Jack looked to Papa Moho for help, and finally got it.

“Bruh. Look. You’re clever, you’re funny, you ain’t conceited. You’re fuckin’ strong and fit without being a fuckin’ tank. You’re prob’ly cute too, I guess. And you’re… How to put this?”

Jack waited as patiently as he could while Moho picked his words with terrible care.

“…Miller kinda confided this in me, right? I ain’t gonna break confidence exactly but… she likes guys who’re kinda intense. Not, like, scary but… you know what I mean. An’ I don’t think she’s alone there, lotsa chicks like that.”

Jack really didn’t know what he meant at all but he was definitely feeling the first bite of what promised to be everything he’d ever heard about hangovers and he truly wasn’t in the mood to think about it any longer. He nodded vaguely and tried to follow where Miller had vanished toward the base.

Moho must have had a sixth sense about pain. “Right, you’re gonna be fucked in a bit. Go see Carebear and get a saline IV, and while you’re doing that eat a Snickers.”

“Why Carebear?”

“‘Cuz he likes jamming needles into humans, and he needs the practice.”

“….Fucking lovely,” Jack cursed.

“Hey, take it from me. He’s still gentler’n Irish or ‘Horse, an’ Baseball’s off-duty tonight.”

“…Right.”

Moho chuckled and almost knocked him over with a brotherly clout to the back. “F’real though, bruh…” he lowered his voice. “You gonna go for it with Miller?”

“…No,” Jack decided.

“The fuck not?”

“I just… I dunno. I like her too much.”

Moho grimaced. “Oof. Friendzoned.”

“It’s just the truth!” Jack objected. “I mean… it’s nice that she’s into me? No, it’s amazing! And I know I’m probably crazy for not…” he cleared his throat. “…But… I don’t know. It’d feel weird, to me.”

“Oh, hell. She turned into a big sis for you, didn’t she?”

“Please don’t get me started on the subject of big sisters…” Jack muttered. Moho was on the money, though, and that was the truth. She’d stepped into a hole in his life he’d managed to forget was empty.

Moho made a low grunt, patted Jack’s shoulder again rather more gently, and said no more.

They went back to the barracks and parted ways at the staircase. Jack was about to follow when he remembered Moho’s advice, sighed, and headed towards CQ.

Maybe the IV would help him clear his head.

Date Point: 15y5m1d AV
POW Holding facility, Planet Gao

Cytosis

“I’ve answered that question before. Why ask it again?”

Cytosis had expected torture. He could even have handled torture. It was easy for an Igraen to disconnect from his host and let the body suffer while the mind wandered.

Maybe the Humans could do something similar, because they didn’t seem to consider it worthy of their time to damage his body. In fact, they were making sure that he kept it in perfect trim. He was well-fed, well-exercised, his ablutions schedule was well-managed. The physical shell of Judge-Father Taarken had never been in better shape, truthfully.

No, their tortures (if such they were) were aimed squarely at Cytosis himself.

His interrogator—Bill, the senior and sterner of two—gave him an unimpressed look. “It doesn’t matter why I’m asking,” he said. “It only matters that I’m asking.”

The implicit warning was entirely clear. ‘Resist, and all those hard-earned luxuries and comforts in your cell go away.’ The Humans weren’t cruel. But they were utterly and remorselessly consistent in the application of their rules. Obey, and get rewards. Resist, and lose them.

Cytosis had tried rebelling a few times. He knew better nowadays. “Why did the Hierarchy attack the Guvnurag first?” he repeated, summarizing the question. Bill nodded. “That’s an easy one. Substrate preservation. They’re only slightly less heavily implanted than the Corti, but importantly they’re contained and self-containing. They live in densely-populated cities on densely-populated planets and their economic infrastructure is extremely vertical. Their instinct is to maximize their use of a given area and make it self-sustaining before they move on to the next phase of expansion.”

“Elaborate,” Bill instructed him. Cytosis shrugged.

“It’s a highly controllable environment. Their society, their culture, their natural instincts all make them easy to contain and manipulate. They also have large and intelligent brains, which means lots of spare…I suppose you could call it ‘capacity.’ Each individual Guvnurag can serve as substrate for a proportionately large degree of the dataspace hegemony.”

“So by attacking them you accomplished… what, exactly?”

“We drove them to close their borders, thereby preserving them. When last I was able to check, their civilization was traumatized but thriving inside their two isolated systems. And with so many system defense fields deployed and all external communications locked down the risk of anything happening to further deplete their population or drive them off our planned development sequence is almost nil. Thus the substrate supporting the Hegemony is protected, or at least part of it is. Call it… consolidation and fortification of critical resources.”

Bill nodded and finally didn’t ask him to further review a subject they’d already discussed. Presumably he was satisfied that Cytosis was being compliant. Now, he asked a new one. “Why not just biodrone all of them?”

“That’s detrimental to the Hegemony. Biodrones aren’t sapient, they’re machines built from organic hardware that used to be sapient. An Igraen like myself can occupy a host body indefinitely without degradation, but most of my species aren’t, ah, mentally equipped to interact with meatspace. After millions of years of exclusively data-based life, we need special training to properly understand concepts like matter, energy, objects and so on.”

“It’s that different?”

“There is, for example, no such thing as momentum in the Hegemony. There isn’t really such a thing as movement: A datum’s address is updated and it ‘goes’ from one ‘place’ to another. There’s no intervening distance and thus no movement, thus no momentum. There’s no mass, only file sizes, and large files don’t attract one another thus there’s nothing remotely like gravity. That sounds alien to you, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Matterspace is just as alien to an Igraen. The training necessary to understand it is exhausting. Many fail, and those who don’t have their understanding of the universe irrevocably altered.”

Bill nodded and made a note on his tablet. Cytosis suspected the gesture was possibly a delaying tactic as he thought, maybe just acting for his benefit. Possibly he was in communication with somebody.

“Could a properly trained Igraen survive in a synthetic body, rather than an organic host with implants?” he asked.

Cytosis nodded. “Temporarily.”

“Why only temporarily?”

“You’ll find the concept alien. I doubt I can properly convey it.”

Bill settled back in his seat and laced his thick fingers together on his stomach. “Try anyway.”

Cytosis thought. “…Warmth,” he ventured. “A Human who gets too cold dies, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Imagine instead if the cold was not a threat to your life, but your sanity. As if every second spent feeling the chill frays at the edges of your sense of self-worth, makes the mere fact of existence seem increasingly pointless. Where it is cold, or dark, or wet, you grow nihilistic and despondent. The longer you stay, the more you see only the Chaos and lose sight of the Order.”

“People are… warm?”

“Substrate is, for lack of a better word, warm,” Cytosis corrected him. “And dry. And bright. It is… orderly. Or rather, it takes the great crushing unknowns of the universe and imposes Order. To be severed from the substrate doesn’t feel exactly like drowning, or freezing, or starving, or being lost in the dark, but those are perhaps the closest physical sensations.”

“And there would be no Substrate in a completely synthetic body,” Bill surmised.

“No. Nor in a computer system, nor in a data network grounded solely in electronic hardware. If we could live without Substrate the Hierarchy would never have been needed. We could have built massive supercomputers out there in the infinite dark and explored the possibilities of the Hegemony in perfect safety.”

Bill regarded him for a long moment. “Well. That’s a problem, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Cytosis ventured a small Gaoian smile. “Did you think we exterminated all those species and ruled the course of galactic civilization for fun? We did it because it was that or…starve, I suppose. Drown, freeze, die of thirst, die of hunger, go insane and self-terminate, slowly and painfully, all at once.

“I envy you, you know,” he added. “You’ll never know what it’s like to go without Substrate. You can’t.”

Bill did the thing with his tablet again. “So…back to my earlier question: Why not just biodrone all the Guvnurag? Do biodrones…generate…Substrate?” he asked.

“The question is: Are biodrones substrate?” Cytosis corrected him. “To which the answer is yes, sort of. Like breathing thin air, or being cold but not dangerously so, or… Imagine how well a civilization would function if all its citizens were nearly getting enough food, nearly dry and nearly getting enough sleep.”

“Is there no other source of Substrate? No other way to acquire it?”

“Mu!” Cytosis replied. “The question is nonsense. Substrate is not a resource or a commodity. There’s no source of it, it isn’t generated. It is a function of being alive.”

“But you can be deprived of it?” Bill’s face was a picture of incomprehension.

“As I said, to you it is an alien concept. Too alien to properly understand, I think.”

“You’re being inconsistent in your language. You called it a resource earlier.”

“Yes. I apologize.” Cytosis shrugged. “Neither English nor Gaori are equipped to properly discuss Substrate.”

“…What, if any, more peaceful alternative solutions to this problem have the Igraens pursued?” Bill asked, after a second of considering his tablet with a pensive expression.

“I… don’t know. I was always told that the Hierarchy’s solution was the only viable one.” Cytosis shrugged again, more apologetically this time. “I was, after all, indoctrinated. When I became aware of the Cabal, the mere idea that there might be an alternative was a relief.”

“The Cabal’s solution being…?” Bill asked. They were back on previously explored territory but Cytosis had no objections to answering.

“We don’t have one. The Cabal’s only defining doctrine is that the Hierarchy’s doctrine is no longer viable. If Cynosure—Six—ever devised a comprehensive strategy, he never shared it with me. So far, his policy has been to experiment, observe and adapt.”

“To what end?”

“The indefinite survival of Igraen civilization of course.”

“So you’re saying you have no real plan, nor even a strong idea on how to form one,” Bill summarized.

“…No. I think…Cynosure was hoping your species might help.”

Bill gave him a long and unreadable look. “Let’s be certain I understood you correctly,” he said. “You think that your leader’s plan is to get your enemy, whom you have made a concerted and credible attempt to exterminate… to help you?”

“We were hoping you would have alternatives,” Cytosis clarified. “If there is a way for our two species to coexist, the Cabal wishes to know.”

“After all you’ve done?”

“All we did, we did because we saw no other option. Now… You have us on the back foot. Our estimated likelihood of victory keeps declining, especially in light of your victory here on Gao… I presume we are still on Gao, yes?”

Bill said nothing. Cytosis hadn’t expected him to.

He nodded and continued. “Uncertainty equals defeat. If we must continue to be at war with Humanity then we’ll fight… but we would be foolish not to at least attempt to find an alternative, don’t you think? Our mandate has always been to take the most parsimonious course in pursuit of indefinitely preserving the Hegemony.”

“And what about justice for the dead?” Bill asked.

“What justice? They’re dead, they don’t exist! Whatever punishment you inflict on us will only satisfy your own instincts: The dead can’t appreciate it, by definition.”

Cytosis sat forward as far as his usual restraints would allow. Humans weren’t stupid enough to grow complacent over their physical advantages, not even burly specimens like Bill. They knew perfectly well that they could lose an eye to a well-aimed claw, or worse, and so they didn’t give him the opportunity. “But if that’s what your people demand, then I am willing to die for my people, Bill,” he said.

“You’d pay for their crimes?”

“Any member of the Hierarchy would. We’re already martyrs to our species’ cause. As I said—merely becoming Hierarchy requires us to irrevocably alter the way we think. We can’t ever really go back.”

“And you believe that your personal sacrifice is sufficient to atone for what your entire species has done over millions of years.”

Cytosis shrugged. “Sometimes, an act of chaos is necessary in pursuit of a more significant order. That does not exempt us from the consequences, which are a price I have already volunteered to pay if necessary.”

“And what about the things you aren’t personally responsible for?” Bill asked. “How can you be punished for what somebody else did? Is that justice?”

Cytosis sat back. “Justice is an invention of society. It is whatever we define it to be. From your questions, we seem to have reached an impasse—your people cannot be satisfied without justice, and my people cannot survive your definition of the word. A pity. I wonder who’ll blink first?”

Bill didn’t answer. Instead, he made a note on his tablet again then quite abruptly he stood up.

“That concludes today’s session, Cytosis. Thank you.” He left the room, and the utterly dependable, utterly trustworthy guards entered to escort Cytosis back to his cell.

He followed their directions without objection and wondered if, perhaps, he had finally scored a victory.

Date Point: 15y5m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Jack Tisdale

Thurrsto was… interesting. Jack had grown up around Gaoians of course, but Thurrsto was about the biggest he’d ever got to know up close.

He wasn’t necessarily tall—in fact, Jack was slightly taller than him—but he was broad-shouldered and stocky enough that he out-hulked most anyone, Gaoian or human. As with most ETs however he simply wasn’t built the way an ape was. For all Thurrsto’s impressive strength, and it was impressive even in human terms, Jack got the distinct impression that a good, solid tackle to his ribs might give him a surprising amount of hurt.

But then again…claws. And he could do things a human couldn’t, like smell his patient and make a diagnosis before they’d even staggered down the hall and into his care.

“You smell like you had fun!” The enormous Gaoian chittered in a deep, rumbling tone, then sniffed again and flicked an ear. “…Up to a point.”

Jack, sitting on a medical bed with his feet dangling, nodded agreement. “Until the last—ow!”

“It’s a big needle, what do you want?” Thurrsto flashed his fangs charmingly. He was in a great mood.

“Why are you so chipper?”

“Myun gave birth tonight! Twin females!”

“Holy shit!” Jack exclaimed, hangover temporarily forgotten. Twin female births among Gaoians were like unicorns, and any male lucky enough to father such a pair was probably going to have Females knocking his door down like he’d won the lottery. “Congratulations, man! What happens now?”

“Well…I’d like to keep in touch, y’know? That’s not traditional, she’ll move on to other males… but I never really liked that side of tradition anyhow. We won’t ever have more cubs together, but I kinda wanna stay in their lives.”

“Well, why not?” Jack asked. Thurrsto shrugged as he taped down the drip.

“It’s…the idea is that a cub should start out in life without any expectations on ‘em. We’re loyal sometimes to a fault and that doesn’t work out well most of the time, so…anyway. This way, they can choose who they want for, well, I guess ‘father figures’ is the right word?”

“I guess I can see the logic…” Jack conceded.

“Logic, yeah. Very logical.” Thurrsto’s ears swivelled and he sniffed. “Ain’t exactly warm, though.”

“No. But, uh…I think maybe societies do that. Like, I read somewhere that we humans would be basically content in groups of a hundred or so. A lot of our bullshit comes from being so many all close together.

“Besides,” he added. “Take it from me, I know all about being crowded by your parents.” Mark and Hayley had become endlessly more protective after Sara died. Really, if it hadn’t been for Adam’s influence he doubted if they’d have given their blessing for Jack to join the Royal Navy… not that he’d needed it, but getting it had definitely made him feel better.

Thurrsto duck-nodded. “Fair enough. Also, if I were being honest to myself, part of it might be who she has her eye on now. She’s been sending notes to Grandfather Garl of Stoneback. And Champion Fiin has her eye too…you’ve never met them. They’re impressive.”

Now what would Moho or Miller say to something like that? Oh, yeah. “Yeah, but they’re follow-on acts to you, man!”

“Or the main course.”

“Yeah, well. You have twin female cubs. I seriously doubt they’ll manage that.”

That perked Thurrsto right up. “Heh, yeah. I got more daughters than the Great Father now. Not bad for a brute like me.”

“Weren’t you all friends with him?”

Thurrsto turned to the medicine cupboard and fetched some ibuprofen. Jack wasn’t too familiar with Gaoian body language, but he looked… stung. Aggrieved, somehow.

“We were, until Yulna murdered Daar. Now there’s just the Great Father.”

Ah.

“…Sorry.”

“No, no. It’s fine. Yes, we were friends and Brothers. I’d never been friends with anyone like him…I kind of miss it, actually. I think, maybe Champion Gyotin would say he had a pure soul. I’m glad I knew him before everything blew up.”

Jack didn’t quite know what to say, but the shadow passed quickly enough. Thurrsto shook out his shaggy white crest—which on him was threatening to be more like a mane—and handed Jack the painkillers. “What about you? What’s her name?”

“…Uh…” Jack could feel his ears going pink. “I never learned it. Or if I did, I forgot.”

Thurrsto chittered again, for rather longer this time. “Fyu’s furry sack, Cousin! You work fast! Wish I had game like that!”

“You know, you’re like the third person tonight to tell me I have game, and it’s weirding me out…” Jack confessed.

“It’s the smell. You smell healthy and smart. Confident, too. Well,” Thurrsto chittered, “Underneath the vomit, anyway.”

“—Bullshit!” Jack exploded. “You can’t smell smarts on a person!”

“Can too! Maybe you can’t, with your stupid little Human nose…” He waggled his ears in what Jack had learned meant teasing humor, “But Regaari reckons y’all do smell that stuff, you just don’t get it all consciously. But take it from me, you smell like a male near the top of the heap.”

“…You can really smell that?” Jack asked, trying not to dwell on what it meant. He didn’t really buy into the whole ‘dominance hierarchy’ stuff that all the SOR’s operators seemed so fond of. It ran against the grain of what he wanted to be right in the world.

Thurrsto duck-nodded. “Yeah-hup. And my sense of smell is only above average, too. Daar could smell what you had for dinner a week ago, or if someone you passed by yesterday was thinking about lying!”

Jack’s nose wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t smell bullshit when he heard it. “You’re exaggerating,” he accused.

“Eh. A good Whitecrest never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.” Thurrsto chittered again, then continued. “Anyway—and I swear this one’s completely unembellished—I’ve seen him detect corndogs still in their packages from the other end of town. We were out loping around, just getting some fresh air, and he stops dead in the middle of his run, right? He points his nose, takes one quick sniff, and says ‘the stand opened early!’ Then he charges off so Fyu-damned fast none of us could keep up…and sure enough, he ambushed that nice old lady before she’d actually opened for business. He bought her out right then and there.”

Jack consulted his mental map of Folctha. “…Myrtle’s? In the car park on Peach Street by the hardware store?”

“Yup! And he smelled that from out at the obstacle course, too.”

“…Bloody hell…” Jack mused. “…What’s it like to have a sense of smell like that?”

“Dunno! What’s it like to be able to feel a metal’s grain with your fingertips? Or see this ‘red’ color? Ah!” Thurrsto looked at the IV and noted it was done. “There we go. You’ll want to hang out near the latrine for a while but that should keep the worst of the symptoms at bay.”

Jack eyed the bag with a sense of mild surprise. He had to hand it to Thurrsto, the big furbag had kept him well entertained with his unconventional bedside manner. He hopped down from the bed and steadied himself. “Moho said grab a Snickers…”

“Protein and sugars. Can’t hurt. Fruit juice is good too. Preferably orange juice so you get some Vitamin C, ‘cuz allegedly your immune system’s a little weakened right now.” Thurrsto chittered again. “By human standards, anyway. You’re not gonna want to exercise when you wake up, but do it anyway.”

Jack nodded. “…Thanks.”

“I’d say take better care of ‘yerself, but…” Thurrsto chittered again. “That’d be wasted effort, Yijao?”

That Gaoianism was beginning to slip into Folctha’s English vernacular. It meant something halfway between “right?” and “do we understand each other?” and people—especially those of a cosmopolitan mindset—were happily embracing it. Jack smiled, nodded, and let himself out.

He swung by the vending machines to grab the suggested snack and drink, snarfed them down as his belly suddenly remembered that it was empty, then (at last!) headed for the showers and clean clothes.

He was in bed ten minutes later, but sleep didn’t join him there at first. Instead he lay back and stared up at the ceiling. He’d yet to customize his bunk at all, so the room was at its most spartan basic—bunk, desk, sink, chair, wardrobe. Enough room to stretch, not enough room to exercise. It was a place for storing himself and his stuff when he wasn’t doing anything else.

His mind kept coming back to the kiss. It hadn’t quite been what he expected. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected but he hadn’t factored taste into his imaginings.

Too bad that was all that happened. He’d have liked to learn where else his imagination had fallen short of reality.

Oh well. He yawned, turned over, and fell asleep on the confident knowledge that he’d do better next time.

Date Point: 15y5m1d AV
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, USA, Earth

Darcy

Darcy had to admit, life had improved for her. She was sleeping better, she was fitter, she was way less stressed, she had more free time. All things considered, her demotion had been a heavily disguised blessing.

If the old adage was true that everybody got promoted to their point of incompetence and then stuck there, then Darcy had been one of the lucky few who got to drop back down to her peak of competence…and she felt good for it! Maybe she was just being optimistic… but she’d rather be really, really good at a slightly lower-tier job than balanced on a knife at a higher level.

She was incredibly good at her job. Best in the department. That much was a point of pride.

Unfortunately, this morning she wasn’t getting to do her job. This morning, she was sat in a meeting with people so high up they’d been barely in sight even at her old position. Briefing her.

“It calls itself… well, as far as we can tell it doesn’t call itself anything. It’s just an entity, sapient but entirely unlike any kind of physical life form. But its origins are in Operation EMPTY BELL.”

Darcy nodded, reading over the report yet again as though it would explain anything. She remembered the device they’d found in Six’s Egyptian desk perfectly well. It was probably vaulted away in a research facility somewhere now.

The Cabal agent captured on Gao at the height of the invasion had been extremely forthcoming on many subjects. Its detailed account of a shadow war raging in dataspace between the Igraens and this entity made for stomach-knotting reading.

She hoped Ríos didn’t know what had happened to her digital copy. That poor young woman had suffered more than enough. But at the same time, Darcy was exceptionally glad that she’d made the call to let Ríos meet with Six. If he’d managed to somehow scan *Darcy*’s brain…

The strategic implications were terrifying. They’d dodged a hell of a bullet there.

“But it’s not actually a human mind?” she asked.

“No. Bits of one, violently torn apart and sewn back together wrong. The Igraen’s explanation was heavy on technical terminology that describes concepts that simply don’t exist in relation to a physical life form’s personality.”

“How so?”

“Because a digitized mind is… very different. They’re independent of the hardware they operate on. A human mind on the other hand is indistinguishable from its brain. Damage the brain, damage the mind. We can watch mental illnesses as chemical activity in the brain, serotonin levels, dopamine levels, and use chemistry to help correct them. But a digital sapient doesn’t have chemistry, or neurological activity. They achieve a similar result through completely different means.”

“But one can be translated into the other?” Darcy asked.

“Exactly. We think most of a digital sapient’s runtime is spent approximating the function of a physical brain.”

“Approximating,” Darcy said flatly.

“Yeah. And that’s the crux of the issue. This Entity isn’t human, but it’s approximately part-human and it presumably remembers being human.”

“That sounds like a recipe for going completely insane…” Darcy felt nauseated.

“AIs do. The Dominion have been trying to make them for generations, but even their best ones completely fall apart and try to self-destruct in short order. Which is unfortunate for us, because this one has been beyond invaluable. It feeds us vital intelligence, it neutralizes key Hierarchy operatives, it has badly weakened the Hierarchy as a whole and we’ve seen its hand at work in a dozen little coincidences that went our way.”

Darcy nodded. “And because it remembers me…”

“…It contacted you when things began to go wrong.”

Darcy considered the folder again. She knew that she really wasn’t responsible, but somehow she felt that she must be. This thing existed in part because of a call she’d made. Did she owe it anything? She really didn’t know.

But if it was as valuable as it seemed, and if she was the person it had reached out to for help, then…

“…What do I need to do?” she asked.

Date Point: 15y5m1d AV
Hell, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

All of the ideas in the escape plan were desperate, and all of them had problems. Some of the problems were ethical, others were logistical, or mechanical, or relied on luck…

Some were just impossible.

“I’m telling you, I can’t do it!”

Jamie Choi was patrolling around the campfire, talking animatedly as he always did when he was explaining why a thing was impossible.

“It’s not as simple as just taking the field emitters off the hull and soldering on a battery pack! We’d have to program the field topography, the edge folding… EARS fields handle high-pressure plasma, not bullets or pulse fire, so I’d totally need to reprogram the dynamic physical properties which, even if I had the toolset, I don’t have the training to do…”

“D-don’t we have imp— imp—” Berry sighed, but everyone waited patiently for him to finish. “Impact deflection screens?”

“Sure. Five layers of them, each shaped to surround the whole ship. Again, I’d need to reprogram the topography to avoid intersection…Besides, it’s a speedbump design, they work in tandem to refract and deflect an incoming object rather than stop it outright. Each one individually has a low cutoff threshold.”

“Alright,” Spears decided. “So the portable shield barricade idea’s a no-go.”

“If I had the time and the tools it’d be a great idea,” Choi said loyally. “But even if I did it’d still be quicker and easier to recycle some hull plating and cargo straps into shields.”

“What, like those shields SWAT teams use?” Cook grinned. He was sitting on a rock slightly outside the circle and was using a pocket knife to scratch away at something cupped in his hand. “Badass.”

“We only have three rifles,” Ray mused.

“So the four with the shields protect the three with the rifles. Could work… If we can whip up some melee weapons?” Spears asked.

Choi nodded. “Easy. Clubs, spears…”

Cook’s grin broadened. “Swords?”

“Are you kid—?” Choi turned to face him. “No! I could maybe grind down some scrap steel to make you a sharp bit of metal with a handle, but an actual sword is days of work with a proper forge for a master smith. I have a blowtorch and an angle grinder, and I’ve never made a blade in my life.”

Cook grunted and returned to whatever it was he was carving. “Killjoy.”

“Spears,” Ray said. He looked her way.

“Yeah?”

“Not you.” She mimed stabbing something. “Spears. Like, a boar spear or something. Keep the Hunters at arm’s length where their fusion claws can’t cut through the shield.”

“They’ll cut through the spear instead,” Conley retorted.

“It’s a second or two of extra time. Enough to shoot the fuckers, or for somebody else to stab them.”

“Why bother with the shield then, if their claws would just slice through it?” Conley pressed.

“They’ll have guns, too.”

“We’re meant to be immune to pulse weaponry, aren’t we?”

“Resistant,” Cook corrected him. “A good pulse rifle hits as hard as George Foreman. Won’t splatter you, but it ain’t exactly a love tap.”

“And that’s assuming they only have pulse weapons,” Ray added.

She glanced sideways. There’d been a small, quiet pressure on her arm for some time—Holly Chase, holding on for reassurance. She’d been gripping tighter and tighter as the conversation progressed, and Ray was pretty sure there were permanent fingernail marks in her skin now.

Of all of them, Chase was by far the least suited for combat. Too small, too timid, too pacifist. Right now, she’d gone so pale that her freckles stood out like ink spots and she was staring right through the ground.

“Hey.” Ray got her attention by touching her hand. It took Chase a second to notice her circulation-stopping death grip and let go as if stung. Ray rubbed her back reassuringly to let her know they were okay.

“…Maybe three shields,” Spears said. His tone wasn’t unkind.

“We can’t afford dead weight in this fight,” Cook cautioned. “If somebody ain’t fighting, they’d better be doing something else just as important.”

“You let us worry about that,” Ray told him with a glare. He took one look at her, saw an angry mama bear, paused, then nodded and returned to the project in his hands. Ray really didn’t want to know what it was.

“So who gets the rifles?” Ray asked. “I mean, Spears obviously. And I’m an okay shot… Who gets number three?”

Berry raised his hand. “M-me.”

Conley gave him a surprised look. “Yeah? Didn’t figure you for a firearms enthusiast, Berry.”

A nervous smile flashed across Berry’s face. “I’ll intro— troduce to my uncle somet— ugh, sometime. He t-taught me to shoot.”

“Uh…” Chase cleared her throat and raised her hand. “Uh…when was the last time any of you actually fired a rifle?”

“At least ten years,” Cook muttered darkly.

Ray shared an awkward look with Spears. “It’s… been a while,” she confessed.

Spears nodded grimly. “I guess we’d better practice.”

“Can we afford the noise? Or the ammo?” Conley asked.

“Everything about this plan is a calculated risk,” Spears said. “But they can’t hear gunshots from all the way up in space. We’ll do some target shooting on a windy day when there’s no hunts around and… I dunno. How much ammo do we have again?”

Ray knew that one off the top of her head. “Three cans. Nine hundred rounds each.”

“…I think we can probably spare some,” Choi snarked, and chuckles swept around the campfire. They’d been doing that more, recently. Little laughs, and smiles, and jokes. Like they were waking up, remembering who they’d been before Hell. Ray had been right: giving them hope, or at least something to work toward, had begun to revive some of their old dynamic. They were all changed, Cook perhaps worst of all, but they were still there.

Spears nodded. “Alright. Three hundred rounds apiece sounds like good practice to me.”

“That’s a lotta ammo left over anyway,” Cook said. “If we’re takin’ it with us then somebody’s gotta hump it.”

“I guess that’s my job, then,” Chase told him, showing rather more fire than Ray was used to seeing in her. Clearly he’d nettled her.

Cook aimed a raised eyebrow her way. “…That’s a lotta weight, Chase.”

“And we have a sack truck. I’ll manage.”

“Over rough grou—?”

“I’ll. Manage.”

He stared at her a moment longer then beamed and returned to his project. “Attagirl.”

Spears cleared his throat. “Alright. We’ve taken enough of a gamble holding this meeting without a lookout, and it’s gone on long enough. Berry, Conley, you’re on first watch tonight. Unless anybody has something important to raise, you’d better get back out there.”

The two nodded and stood.

“I’ll get started on the shields and spears, I guess,” Choi said.

“Yeah. Good talk, everyone.”

Cook grunted, slithered off his rock, dropped whatever he’d been scratching at on the ground and went to go check on the Hot. That just left Ray, Spears and Chase.

“Cook’s not wrong,” Ray said quietly. “Even with the truck, over rough ground…”

“I won’t stay here, Ray.” Holly shook her head fiercely. “I won’t. Maybe I can’t fight but I will haul those cans.”

Ray gave a long, hard look at the scrawny, malnourished, petite geologist beside her. Two ammo cans had to be half of Chase’s bodyweight or more, but looking at the determined expression squeezed between her bangs and her freckles, for a moment Ray could honestly believe that willpower might just trump physics.

“…Have a word with Choi about the truck,” Spears suggested. “We can fight smart as well as hard.”

Chase sagged, coming back down from whatever fighting-bantam high she’d been on. “…I’ll do that,” she agreed.

“Okay.” Spears stood up. “I’m turning in. See you in the morning.”

Ray nodded and stood as well. “I should rest too. I have second watch.”

Holly nodded. “Yeah. G’night, Ray.”

Something crunched under Ray’s boot as she passed the rock where Cook had been sitting. She stopped and glanced down, and found a chunk of sun-bleached alien bone. She didn’t quite know why she stooped to pick it up, but when she turned it over in her fingers she found that angular letters had been scratched messily into its surface. Two words, so tightly packed on that they blended into one.

IMSORRY

She blinked at it, not quite knowing what to make of it, then dropped it back in the dirt where it had fallen, dusted her hands off and went to bed.

She dreamed of boiling alive.

Date Point 15y5m1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lt. Col. Owen Powell

“Wuff!”

“Yeahyeah…’mup…”

He fell asleep again.

“Wurf!!”

“Uh? Sh’t. S’rry. ‘Mawake…”

More sleep.

“WURF!!!”

Powell went from asleep to awake and ready to defend himself from the hell-beast in his cave in less than a single pounding heartbeat. Bozo, panting, spun a happy circle and picked up his leash then parked his bum on the ground and thwacked his tail enthusiastically against the dresser while giving him a meaningful patient look.

Powell finally remembered how being human was supposed to go. “…Bloody fookin’ Christ.” He stretched then set about disentangling himself from his bedding. “Don’t you even want breakfast first?”

Bozo tilted his head and whined. Powell glanced at the wall clock and saw what the problem was. He’d slept in late. Acceptable, on a day off, but not from Bozo’s perspective apparently. It was the time of morning when his favorite bitch in town got walkies.

“Riiight. Your missus awaits…”

“WURF!!!”

Powell heaved himself out of bed and stretched. “I swear you’re some kind of Corti experiment or summat. No dog’s this smart naturally…”

Bozo grumbled in an annoyed manner and forcibly snuggled his muzzle against Powell’s leg.

“Arright, arright… Fookin’ ‘ell…”

He threw on sweats and a black tank top with the unit insignia printed over the left breast, trusted his home’s automation to lock up behind him, and jogged out down Demeter Way with Bozo happily charging ahead to investigate the perimeter as part of his solemn duty to Protect His Papa. It was another Folctha morning, pleasantly moist from the nightly rains and balancing on that sweet spot between brisk chill and pleasantly cool. Peaceful, if you ignored the pounding sounds of heavy metal and Heavy Metal emanating from the Dog House gym as the Beef Trio got their morning workouts in.

“I dunno,” he complained at the dog as Bozo paused to mark his territory, which was basically all of Folctha. “If ‘Horse caught me goin’ for a run cold like this, he’d have me squattin’ until I fell apart. You don’t know how lucky you are, mutt.”

“WURF!!!”

“Arright, we’ll see if we can beat the bloody Gaoians to the corndog stand this time…”

As a matter of fact, the Whitecrest component of the HEAT were nowhere to be seen for a change. The stand’s owner, Myrtle, had learned her lesson and kept stock aside specially for them, but this morning she was sitting on a plastic lawn chair next to her business, knitting.

“Well! At least one of you showed up!” she announced and dropped her project on the seat behind her as she stood. “Have your men forgotten how to eat, colonel?”

“I bloody hope not. I prefer my pigs firmly on the ground, thanks.”

She laughed, and took up spot behind her stand. “Well, at least Bozo can make up for them, can’t you boy?”

Powell rolled his eyes as Bozo rocked back on his hindpaws and begged with a stomach-thumping “WURF!!!” It looked beyond ridiculous.

“Ham,” he accused the dog fondly. “Who taught yer that one?”

Myrtle laughed again and indicated her wares as Bozo dropped back to all fours. “How many?”

“Two for me, three for the dog please.”

“He’s a bigger eater than you?” Myrtle asked.

Powell shook his head. “If I know Bozo he’ll carry one off and give it to somebody special.”

He was proved right. Bozo scarfed down two of the corndogs with much flashing of teeth and flapping of jowls, but the third was picked up delicately and carried proudly, with his tail up and his ears forward.

“Y’know…” Powell told him as they jogged, “When half a dozen Gaoians randomly forget about breakfast, I smell shenanigans… I better not find my door hinged at the top again.”

Bozo’s ears pricked, but he was the ideal conversation partner in many ways. Especially when his mouth was full.

“Right, that was Murray wasn’t it…”

Bozo *“wff”*’d past his corndog and led him toward Riverside Park.

True to form, it didn’t take long for him to sniff down his better half. Hannah was out running with her owner and and…Wait, that wasn’t Ríos’ adoptive father…

Derek Coombes gave Powell a nod as they slowed to a halt together. “Morning, boss.” Like all the very best operators, he could be both respectful and familiar with his CO in a way that wasn’t exactly by the numbers.

“Morning,” Powell agreed. “Miss Ríos…” He stepped aside as the two dogs promptly began their happy welcoming dance, one which always threatened to trip people up.

Ríos giggled at them and got out of their way. “No more puppies, you two!” she chided them. Bozo whined at her, which gave Hannah the opportunity she needed to grab him by the ear and the two went hounding off in a play fight.

“Seconded,” Powell agreed fervently. He’d come to something of a truce with Ríos over the years. Both the Arés men vouched for her, after all, and he trusted their judgement. He doubted if he was ever going to like her or trust her integrity—even ignoring her history, she was still a journalist—but she’d never tried to inappropriately interview him and he could definitely respect her actions in Egypt.

It didn’t hurt to be polite, anyway. “Not running with yer old man today, Miss Ríos?”

“He has some kinda business over in the Alien Quarter today. Besides,“ she smirked and rapped her knuckles on Coombes’ chest in a way that was a little beyond familiar. “Running with Dad was getting too easy. It’s nice to have a challenge sometimes.”

“Don’t you have that thing later, Coombes?” AEC wanted an assessment of how well the Ten’Gewek performed in wilderness survival situations other than their own home planet before committing to any kind of long-term relationship. General Kolbeinn was allegedly enthusiastic about the idea, but his job was to cover all the angles. With JETS team 1 down to just one member now—Daar having gone back to Gao, Walsh having gone back to the HEAT pipeline and Coombes having stepped back from field work to serve as NCOIC of Joint ExtraTerrestrial Scouts—Hoeff was being put through his paces as a trainer bringing teams 2 and 3 up to standard while candidates to fill up Team 1 were headhunted.

Coombes hadn’t missed the opportunity to train JETS Team 2 up at the same time. That entire side of the SOR was going to be out at the training range in the Peake Lowlands for a day or two, starting soon.

“Sure do, sir. And y’know, something about the thought of spending a few days stuck in a small space with Chimp made me wanna go for a run first,” Coombes said.

Powell snorted a small laugh, and fished the Pig out of his running bag. It was an incredibly robust blue toy made out of recycled rubber, and rather than squeaking it made a whoopie-cushion oinking sound when squeezed. There was nothing and nobody more important in Bozo’s life, and the second its farting grunt sounded he was sat quivering at attention in front of Powell’s feet, Hannah forgotten.

The Lads had trained him well, there.

“Arright, fair enough. Go. Have fun,” he said. “C’mon, Bozo.”

Running always helped him think, but truthfully there wasn’t much to think about. He trusted Coombes to know what he was doing, and that was that. Whatever was going on there… well, it wasn’t any of Powell’s business and hopefully never would be.

They looped back along the “dry” side of Riverside Park, with Bozo, as was his wont, charging well ahead and scouting the area for any Suspicious Characters, or perhaps Friends Who Scratch His Ears. He’d come back to Powell’s side every few minutes, wurf happily, then bound off to perform further reconnaissance.

Once upon a time, Powell might have tried to curb the dog’s patrols. Nowadays, he understood just how much spare energy Bozo had and how much it needed burning off. A half-marathon in the morning was just about enough to mellow the big bugger out a bit.

As always, Bozo’s furthest-ranging scout ahead came as they reached the final stretch on Demeter Way. Usually, Bozo would go haring off at breakneck speed and then wait for Powell on the doorstep.

This time, however, he came barreling back almost immediately and impatiently attempted to lead Powell along faster, far too excited for any normal day.

Naturally, Powell was immediately suspicious. He picked up the pace as well, followed the dog back down the road and came to a stop on the corner of the green space that was kind of the unofficial SOR shared lawn.

He paused, took a minute to consider the masterpiece in front of him, then sniffed, turned, and jogged across the turf to the Dog House’s back door.

He had the code to get down into the “special” play area in the basement, the one with the supergravity panels and weights that’d make a comic book character balk. It was a haven of terrifying masculinity where the Beef Trio pushed themselves far past limits that other performance athletes would never even approach, but he didn’t interrupt them. At their level, unscheduled stops could be bloody dangerous so instead he picked a floor mat and worked on his stretches and flexibility.

Warhorse, Baseball and Righteous emerged from the basement about half an hour later with their muscles boiling under a layer of sweat. The first thing they would generally do would be a jog in the cool morning rain if they could but on this occasion they noticed their CO quietly minding his business in the corner and paused.

Powell sprang lightly to his feet and gave them a friendly nod. “Mornin’, Lads.”

“What’s up, boss?” Firth asked. Again, he’d mastered that delicate balance between informality and respect.

“Nowt much, just wanted to show you a little masterpiece I’ve uncovered. Personally, I reckon it’s a work of bloody genius.”

The three of them glanced at each other then shrugged.

“…Lead on!”

Powell let himself out the back and extended a hand to indicate his house, clearly visible on the far side of the open green space behind the gym.

Every square foot of the roof was liberally inhabited by garden gnomes, garnished here and there with an occasional plastic flamingo.

“The strangest part is, I’m buggered if I can think of anywhere in this town that even sells garden gnomes,” he remarked.

Firth crossed his ridiculous arms and whistled low. “That weren’t there this mornin’ boss. We’d thought of invitin’ ‘ya for a spar but…”

“You were sleeping so nice,” added Burgess with an enthusiastic nod from Arés. “And you never take days off.”

“…How did you know I was sleeping?”

“I still have your door code, sir.” Firth shrugged hugely. “Also I’ve been practicin’ my sneak.”

Powell gave the giant brute a slow, expressionless stare. “…Right. Well, my rest certainly wasn’t disturbed, and I didn’t notice that lot when I left to take Bozo down the corndog stand on Peach Street…”

“She was open?” Firth raised his eyebrows. Powell could see the slow delight of an NCO figuring out who he got to Motivate at work behind his otherwise carefully neutral expression.

“Oddly enough, yes. Complained that her usual Gaoian customers were a no-show.”

Burgess and Arés made theatrical disapproving noises and shook their heads.

“How’s a nice abuelita supposed to make a living if her regulars abandon her?” Arés asked. “Seems downright criminal to me, sir.”

“Cold-hearted,” Burgess agreed.

Firth nodded solemnly. “A sin.”

“I was shocked myself,” Powell deadpanned. “I do hope our Whitecrests haven’t forgotten their responsibility to reflect well on the unit in their interactions with the public…”

“It’s a heavy lifting day for me,” Adam bounced on his toes and sent tremors through the ground while Powell was inspired to wonder if it ever wasn’t a heavy lifting day for him. “I could definitely use some extra help…”

“Mm.” Firth nodded at him, then returned his attention to Powell’s fanciful new roofing. “…You gonna keep the gnomes, sir?”

“Well, they brighten up the place…” Powell conceded, “…but they’re not really my style.”

“I’m sure somebody’ll know what to do with them.” Burgess said.

“Aye, I’m sure somebody will,” Powell muttered. Those were details he happily delegated to his NCOIC. “Just as long as it doesn’t impact mission readiness.”

“Yessir.”

“Well. Have fun, then.”

There was something deeply disquieting about several tons of Beef Trio chuckling darkly to themselves at the prospect of Motivation. No matter. He was ostensibly on leave after all, and he desperately needed to catch up on his reading.

And his sleep.

He woke up two hours later to the muffled sounds of gnomes being evicted from his roof, chuckled to himself, turned over, and went back to sleep with Bozo draped over his ankles.

It had been ages since he slept in past nine.

Date Point 15y5m2d AV
Air Force One, En Route to Seattle, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

“So you’ve had an idea?”

Sartori was lying on a couch tossing a baseball idly from hand to hand to help him think. He always had a lot of balls to juggle in the metaphorical sense, so tossing a real one around gave him something to focus on and grounded him.

Especially when it came to interstellar politics. Earth politics wasn’t simpler exactly, but at least his international opposite numbers were human. He kept worrying that alien psychology would trip him up, and the Hierarchy ultimatum was proving to be a little splinter in his sock that he couldn’t quite ignore. He stood by his decision, but he kept worrying that there was a more elegant way to handle it.

He’d quietly asked Margaret White to give the matter some closer thought with the aid of a few high-level thinkers from various Agencies, Committees and stuff.

Now she was on a video call looking glum.

“About the best we’ve come up is the possibility of putting the Hierarchy in a Catch-twenty-two,” she said. “You’ll probably have objections.”

“Lay it on me anyway.”

“So the idea is that if they want to play the ultimatum game… well, we can play it too by demanding a show of good faith.”

Sartori nodded. “Quid pro quo, huh? I can get behind that, but what kind of a good-faith gesture can we demand of them?”

“We know… or, well, we have very good reason to believe that the Hierarchy’s influence is at work behind the decline and approaching extinction of the OmoAru species,” Margaret reminded him.

“So… what? We demand that they reverse the process?” Sartori sat up and held the ball in both hands. “Is that even possible? My impression was the poor bastards are pretty far gone…”

“That’s just it. They almost certainly can’t heal the OmoAru at this point, or at least won’t. In which case we get to claim that they’ve given us no reason to trust them or show any quarter.”

“But if they can and do, then we end up with another humanitarian crisis on our hands,” Sartori predicted. “Not to mention a security hole in the form thousands of refugees we literally can’t de-implant.”

“And there are those objections I mentioned.” Margaret smiled primly.

Sartori grunted. “I haven’t even started. So let’s say we get the OmoAru released from their cybernetic shackles, the technology…dissolves or whatever and they’re free to be their own species again. That won’t bring their culture, history, scientific knowledge or expertise back. It’s an intriguing angle, but I don’t want to gamble with them calling our bluff. We can’t afford to babysit an entire species of recovering junkies.”

“To play devil’s advocate for a moment, that does mean letting the OmoAru go extinct.” Margaret pointed out. “Some will argue that we have a moral obligation to at least attempt to save them…”

“Yeah, they’ll argue that,” Sartori agreed. “But the OmoAru made their bed a long time ago.”

He sighed, stood up and prowled the office. The whole room was in the camera’s field of view, so Margaret had no problem watching him pace as he thought.

“You really don’t like the idea of total war, do you?” she asked.

“If I did, I wouldn’t be fit to be a small-town mayor,” Sartori opined. “The idea of wiping out even one species, let alone two, just sits wrong with me. Even if they’re monsters. Never mind how cold we have to be to let…God knows how many fall by the wayside as collateral…” He paused in the middle of the floor and fidgeted with his baseball some more.

“…I guess I should count myself lucky it won’t be my job to pull the trigger,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we aren’t realistically going to wipe out the Hunters before I leave office. And the Igraens are…” he shrugged and didn’t finish the thought. “…That reminds me. How did that proposed state visit to Gao go down?”

“Daar was receptive to the idea. Extremely so, in fact,” Margaret’s signature crimson lipstick always looked so strange when she smiled. She didn’t do it often. “He’s a man of action. He practically offered to come back through the jump array that evening and save you the trip.”

Sartori snorted. “He doesn’t seem the type to turn down an adventure.”

Margaret made a soft, faintly amused noise of agreement. “Mm. You never did explain why you want to meet with him so urgently, Arthur.”

Sartori glanced at the monitor, then corrected his gaze to the camera. “Answer me this, Margaret. How confident are we that the next guy’s going to follow the course I set? It doesn’t matter whether he’s a Republican or a Democrat or even by some miracle an independent. Can we be certain that the next administration is going to see the interstellar conflict through all the way to the end?”

Margaret thought about it. “I… wouldn’t care to comment. I don’t even know who the likely candidates are yet.”

“Exactly.” Sartori returned to his couch. “Now isn’t the time for uncertainty. We need the will to wage war and we need it to last longer than my presidency, however long that may be.”

Margaret frowned at him. “You’re worried your successor might pull out of a war for survival?”

“Tell me it’s impossible,” Sartori dared her. She didn’t reply.

He returned his baseball to its usual resting place on his desk and rounded the desk to sit. The office, tracking his movements, automatically put Margaret’s image on the desktop monitor rather than the wall.

“So what do you have in mind?” she asked.

“It starts,” Sartori said, “with puncturing Daar’s faith in humanity…”

Date Point: 15y5m2d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space

Lewis Beverote

Sleep wasn’t usually a problem. It was hard to have trouble sleeping when he spent the whole day working his ass off on intellectual projects then got home to a thoroughly physical girlfriend who had ways both pleasant and productive to work off any excess energy he may have left over, and who preferred to be the big spoon.

Ever since the Coltainer had been released, though…

He snuggled gently into Lucy’s arms and tried, really tried. But sleep just wasn’t happening tonight. Something was bugging him, and he had no idea what.

Eventually he extracted himself from the bed, took a shower and got dressed. He ordered SAM to pass on an apology and his location to Lucy if she woke up and wondered where he’d gone, and went for a walk.

The station’s 24-hour work cycle bore no relation at all to Mrwrki’s actual day-night cycle. The station was now permanently part of the icy lunar landscape and lots of engineering work had gone into converting it from a space-based habitat to a surface-based habitat. The moon—Thrór, one of the innumerable satellites of the gas giant Durin—took three days to complete an orbit and was tidally locked to its parent.

Right now, it was dawn outside and would be for the next four hours or so. Noon—roughly sixteen hours away—would be punctuated by a spectacular solar eclipse and from there they’d fall back down into the long evening and more than a day of twilight lit by Durin’s reflected sunlight, ten times brighter than a full moon on Earth.

Lewis never got tired of it, nor did anybody else. There was a reason the station’s recreational areas all had commanding views to the outside. The icy terrain around them might be lifeless, but it was far from bleak.

Someday, when the existence of Mrwrki and the Erebor system were declassified, the holyfuckabytes of data they’d gathered about Durin’s atmosphere and moons would give the lucky planetologists who first saw them a series of shattering orgasms.

“Hey, Beverote. You’re up way past your bedtime.”

Lewis tore himself away from the view. One of the station’s programmers slash digital security slash everything software-related experts had his feet up on a nearby table and a tablet in his hand. Davis. Lewis knew the surname but for the life of him he couldn’t remember the dude’s first name.

“Like, that makes two of us dude.” He set his coffee down opposite Davis and sat. “You can’t sleep either?”

“Insomnia. Had it my whole life.” Davis shrugged and offered a self-deprecating smile. “Good thing I enjoy my work.”

“Gotta be honest dude, I don’t remember which team you’re on…” Lewis prompted.

“Project Motoko. The digital sapient program.”

“Right.” Motoko was an application of the old “know thine enemy” schtick, dedicated to picking apart the secrets that let things like the Igraens survive outside of an organic brain. They had a few basic ideas about how the creepy fuckers worked, but that was about it.

Most of their information came straight from the Gao, who’d managed to capture a Hierarchy agent in the opening days of the war. Apparently it was holed up in a research bunker somewhere undisclosed being carefully watched through every instrument Clan Longear and Clan Shortstride could devise between them.

“How’s that coming?” Lewis asked. Davis shrugged ruefully.

“With luck, hard work and some more intel from captured sources we might even see a breakthrough this century,” he joked. “I tell you this though, I ain’t gonna be the Wegner for it.”

“The…what?”

Davis waved a hand. “It’s from my NSA days. Some Navy dude got super salty one time and basically gave his colleagues carte blanche to kill him with some of the cyber shit they were working ‘cuz he figured that was the only way to get management to understand how dangerous some of the stuff they wanted was. They called it the Wegner Protocol in his honor.”

“Huh.” Lewis sipped his coffee. “So, like, if we do somehow get brain uploads going, you ain’t volunteering?”

“Shit no. I know too much about how it works, too many philosophical questions.”

“Probably smart, dude. But man, sometimes I wish we could’ve Bobbed the Coltainers…”

It was Davis’ turn to raise an eyebrow. “Bobbed?”

“Bob Johansson. Main character of a book series that came out in twenty-sixteen. Brain in a computer, running a Von-Neumann colony probe just like our shit.” Lewis chuckled. “I tell ya, if we could pull that stunt then half my job woulda gone out the window two years ago.”

“I read the summary. You’re expecting a ninety-five percent failure rate on software limitations alone?”

“Yeah. Kinda crappy, ain’t it? There’s probably a bajillion viable colony sites out there that’ll get overlooked by the Coltainers ‘cuz they ain’t inventive enough to see the possibilities if they just tweaked the plan…” Lewis grumbled and swirled his coffee. “But Oh-Tee-Oh-Aitch, if it had the power to adapt it’d be even scarier. I don’t really wanna trust the power of exponential replication to anything smarter than my toaster, y’know?”

“Not even if there was a real human mind in the driving seat?”

“Especially not then, my dude. If a computer goes wrong, it’s just because it’s powerfully dumb. People go wrong because power corrupts.”

“What about your mind?” Davis pressed. “Don’t you trust yourself?”

“Dude.”

“…I guess you have a point there.”

Lewis sighed and swirled his coffee some more. It was good stuff, but ideally he wanted to go back to bed soon. A load of caffeine would do nothing to help him sleep. “…I guess I’m just anxious,” he said. Davis gave him a look that asked for more, so he elaborated. “About the Coltainers. Now that they’re away, I keep worrying about what I coulda or shoulda done different or if there was a better way to do something I did do, or…”

“Your kid’s all grown up and off to college,” Davis said.

“…Guess that’s part’a it, yeah. Like, the Coltainer project took five years of my life, man. And now it’s… done. Guess I just don’t know what happens next.”

“You could always work on Project Motoko,” Davis suggested. His grin said he wasn’t entirely serious, but that he wasn’t entirely joking either. Lewis laughed, then thought about it.

“…I guess. I mean, It’s interestin’ stuff. Or I could focus on nanofac technology, or FTL propulsion or… dude, there ain’t nothin’ I can’t turn myself to. And that’s the problem. The thing that really grabbed me is done with. There’s some side projects in the works but really when you finish designing one V-N probe, you’ve designed them all. Like, literally.”

Davis had no compulsions about draining his own coffee. “You must’ve had ideas from other people.”

“Yeah. The ETs keep droppin’ hints about the Hunters like there’s anything I could do about that shit. I mean, I could. Weaponizing the probes would be goddamn trivial. Then we just have to sit tight for ten years and drop a megafuckzillion RFGs on them, an’ I don’t want to be the guy who releases that on the galaxy.”

“I get where you’re coming from… but if you don’t, somebody will,” Davis pointed out. Lewis blinked at him, and he shrugged. “What, you thought you’re the only guy with the keys to the garage? Dude, somebody was always gonna build a Von-Neumann. Somebody’s gonna weaponize it, eventually. The question is, do you trust any other fucker to do it?”

Lewis blinked at him again, then looked at his coffee. It was slightly too hot to slam down like it was a shot, but he did so anyway and stood up.

“…Good chat, dude.”

“Anytime. Hope that’s your last sleepless night.”

“Dude. You too.”

Davis shrugged, and waved his hand at the view. “‘Least it’s never dull out there.”

Lewis raised his watch to his mouth as he headed for his workshop. “SAM, update message for Lucy. I’ll be in my workshop.”

“Roger-dodger, dude!”

“…SAM, who the fuck taught you Roger-dodger?”

“Nobody here but us chickens.”

That meant SAM had got it from Lewis himself. He was going to have to refine its vocabulary at some point. “…Whatever, dude. Copy the Coltainer schematics into a new folder for me, and name that folder…”

He hesitated long enough that SAM got curious.

“What’s the name, dude?”

“Call it… Call it Project Parker.”

He dusted his hands as SAM acknowledged the order and confirmed the file copy. It was a three-minute jog to his workshop, and he felt awake in the best way.

It was good to have focus again.

Date Point: 15y5m2d AV
Rooney’s Bar, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Senior Airman Rihanna Miller

“Christ, Miller. Where the hell do you put all that stuff?”

It was a girl’s night out. They’d even coaxed Martina Arés to waddle down the street with them, and promised to make up for the fact she couldn’t drink with a baby on board by drinking her share. Miller had no idea why she’d agreed to that particular bargain, but she seemed to be having fun.

Rooney’s, as the unofficial SOR hangout, was the obvious destination of choice. Probably some of the Lads and the other techs would show up later but for now they had the place more-or-less to themselves. It was still pretty early in the evening.

Miller put down her third empty beer. Folctha, it turned out, had amazing beer thanks to a combination of excellent mineral water and a huge agricultural sector. “This? Nah, this is just the warmup act.”

Arés gave her a dubious look over her Coke, then shrugged and took a sip.

“Warmup for what?” Deacon asked.

“More drinking!” Miller softened when she saw their expressions. “Relax, I know my limits.”

“Famous last words…” Deacon grinned and finished her own drink, which was more colorful and probably a lot stronger than beer.

“Weren’t you out last night as well?” Arés asked.

“Eh, swing and miss with Jack…He isn’t gay, or ace or whatever, is he?”

“Jack? Oh no. No. Nooo.” Arés shook her head. “No, definitely not.”

“Didn’t think s— wait.” She gave Arés a suspicious look, prompting her to take another straw-sip of Coke. “What’s ‘definitely not’ mean?”

Arés cleared her throat. “Let’s just say Adam had to warn him to stare someplace else.”

“I bet that went well…”

“He’s still alive isn’t he?”

Deacon laughed and finished her own drink. “Adam must like him a lot.”

“It’s kind of a little brother, big brother thing.”

“Very, very big brother.”

Arés rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well. They were in school together, Jack’s older sister was Adam’s best friend…”

“Yeah, what actually happened there?” Miller asked. “Everybody clams the fuck up whenever she’s mentioned. I know she died, but…”

“Not tonight. It’s a sad goddamned story.”

“See, that’s exactly what I mean,” Miller sighed.

“Kinda explains why Jack might turn you down, though,” Deacon mused.

“…How come?”

“Well, I mean…” Deacon waved a hand up and down her. “You’re a few years older than him, got some more life experience, you’re more confident, you’ve kinda taken him under your wing a bit…”

It took a few seconds for her meaning to percolate through the combined haze of being jilted and being buzzed.

“…Fuck. Really? Like…? Aww man, I don’t wanna be his surrogate big sister!”

“I think it’s too late for that. But to be fair,” Arés played with her empty bottle, “I think he’s got good taste in siblings.”

“…Thanks, I guess. But I need another beer now.”

“I don’t blame you,” Deacon stood up. “I’ll get ‘em. You too, Arés?”

“No thanks.”

“You sure?”

“You try drinking Coke with seven pounds of baby wriggling on top of your bladder, sometime.”

“Ew.” Deacon grimaced and headed for the bar.

“You have a talent for making pregnancy sound like a whole lotta not fun,” Miller commented. Arés shrugged.

“It ain’t,” she said. “But I definitely wouldn’t take it back, either.”

“Gettin’ that warm glow of motherhood yet?”

“Well…I will say this. Adam sticks to me like a woodtick these days. He’s practically smothering me in doting affection. Which is nice, but…”

“He doesn’t do anything halfway.”

“Nope!” Martina laughed in an exasperated sort of way.

“Looking forward to the birth?”

Martina pulled a complicated shrug. “He’s a big’n. Charlotte—that’s my midwife—says he’s above the ninetieth centile for weight. So that’s gonna be… fun…”

“You can’t have been surprised, though. I mean, look at the father.”

“Look at his grandfather though!” she retorted. “Gabe’s not a big guy. Though, uh… I guess my dad is. And Adam’s mom wasn’t exactly petite from what I hear. But I’m not big, and my mom’s even smaller, so…”

“…So basically, you have no idea what Diego will be.” Miller finished.

“Nope!”

“Well, at least you have a few weeks to go yet…Thanks, Deacon.” Miller accepted a new drink as Deacon rejoined them

“Trust me, that’s not comforting. I feel heavy enough as it is.” Arés smiled and looked down at her belly. “But I can’t wait to meet him.”

That got a synchronized “Aww!”

“What about you?” Marty asked Deacon. “Any action?”

“Ugh, don’t get me started,” Deacon snorted. “Every available guy in this town is either on the base or he’s some kinda soy-latte organic food hipster type. I’d sooner date a Gaoian.”

“Come on, that can’t be right,” Miller tried to buck her up. “There’s like fifty thousand guys in this colony and a lotta them are farmers. Can’t you find some ranch hand from out west?”

“Yeah, and then you find hay in weird places for like a week afterwards…” Deacon chuckled. “Actually, I’m being unfair. There’s this marine biologist over at New Penzance who’s pretty cute. Problem is, he’s oblivious.”

Miller nodded. She knew that story. “Lemme guess. British?”

“Yyyup. And a geek. It’s like a head-on collision of girl-stupid.”

“Maybe you should reconsider that rule you have about not dating guys from the unit…” Marty hinted.

Deacon shook her head vigorously. “Ohh no. Not happening.”

“Why not?” Miller asked.

“I like my job. I don’t wanna ruin it by having to see my ex every day.”

“You won’t have to if he’s not your ex,” Marty pointed out, but Deacon shrugged.

“Plan for the worst, hope for the best,” she said. “Though, maybe if Murray was younger…”

Miller’s eyebrow arched all of its own accord. “Wow. Murray? Really?”

“Careful,” Marty warned. “You never know when he’s around…”

The three of them carefully checked the area for Herculean Scottish ninjas.

“…Murray, though?” Miller insisted, once they were reasonably sure of his absence.

“Yeah. Why not?”

“He’s kinda scary.”

“Exactly. Any guy I dated would have to deal with Big Brother Firth. Murray could.”

“I…didn’t realize he was that protective of you.”

“Yeah, since basically the first day. Don’t ask me how or why. Besides,” Deacon sipped her drink before continuing, “You gonna tell me Moho wouldn’t do the same for you?”

Marty nodded, with a fond smile. “Yeah, the Lads kinda have two modes: Smash or protect.”

“I guess…” Miller thought about it, then drained half her beer while thinking about it some more.

“Coombes too, I guess…” Deacon said thoughtfully, then gestured to Marty. “Except he only has eyes for your sister-in-law.”

“Yeah, what’s with that?” Miller demanded. “Isn’t she, like, persona non grata?”

Marty shrugged. “She saved his life.”

“…You’re shitting me.”

“Nope. The whole subject is kinda thorny. Probably best to leave it be.”

Miller smirked. “That just makes me more curious. But okay.”

“Besides, she’s a good person,” Marty said, a touch defensively.

“She’s your husband’s ex and she cheated on him,” Deacon pointed out.

“Yeah, she fucked up big. And I still say she’s good. Besides, she’s family now.”

“…Right.”

“Deacon…” Marty warned.

“Right!” Deacon backed off. “Okay, okay…”

Miller cleared her throat. “Change of subject?”

Marty nodded. “Actually, I’m kinda getting to the point where I’m gonna need something to occupy my time. I can’t exercise right now, Adam won’t let me cook, I don’t really like movies… My mom wants me to take up crochet.”

“Hey, crochet’s fun!” Deacon objected.

“…You do crochet?” Miller asked. It as hard to believe, somehow. Deacon’s civilian style was a collision between skater punk and tomboy, and she had an impressively extensive set of E-tattoos covering pretty much her whole chest, her upper arms, her back and her stomach.

Deacon’s answer was to pluck at the off-the-shoulder sweater she was wearing and grin.

“Huh.”

“And hey! You could make baby stuff! Made from nice soft Naxas wool!” Deacon enthused.

Marty sighed. “Fine…Never let it be said I won’t try anything once.”

Deacon gave her a sidelong hug. “We can make ‘Horse a Christmas sweater!” she declared with, Miller thought, malicious glee.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I want. My man so overheated and musky the apartment’s air gets chewy.”

“It’s fine, you can turn the aircon on full and you’ll have like a billion handmade blankets and stuff to snuggle under,” Miller suggested.

This earned an encouraging grin from Deacon, and a nod. “A white Christmas, indoors!”

“And if he ends up smelling like a reindeer, that’s just more authentic!”

Marty was trying her hardest not to laugh. “That’s ridiculous. You’re both ridiculous.”

“Okay, but now picture little Diego dressed up as an elf,” Deacon suggested.

Marty snorted. “That’s child abuse!”

“Oh hush, he’ll never remember it,” Miller assured her. “Until years later, when he brings his first girl home and you whip out your fifty-pound baby album!”

“…Wait, like, an old-school physical album? Why?”

“More embarrassing. Just slam that bitch down on the counter and flip pages.”

“No! I’m not gonna be a hell-mom!” Marty objected. “I’ll be the kinda mom who breaks out the cookies and milk.”

“What if he’s a hell-boy?” Deacon asked. “Any baby you two have can’t be anything but a heartbreaker.”

Marty smiled. “All the more reason to be nice to any girl who can handle him—oof,” she hiccuped and patted her belly, “…That was a good one.”

“I guess we’re not doing much drinking tonight, huh?” Deacon asked.

“Hey, you two can have fun without me…” Marty said.

“Nuh-uh, bitch. I wanna teach you how to crochet now! Party at my place!”

“Heck of a party,” Miller snorted, but she finished her drink and stood up. “But shit, why not? I’m not in the mood for anything crazy tonight anyhow.”

Being perfectly honest, needlework sounded a lot like torture…but it was at least a lesser grade of torture than drinking alone after striking out. Besides, she was hungry and Deacon’s apartment was on Delaney Row, right next to the supermarket with its 28⁄7 deli. And hey, if the girls wanted to spend all night knitting sweaters and snarfing jalapeño poppers, who was she to say no?

There were worse ways to spend a night.

Date Point: 15y5m3d AV
High Mountain Fortress, Planet Gao

President Arthur Sartori

Presidential meetings always involved being briefed, which in turn always fell short of reality, especially for visits that had been rushed through ASAP like this one…but no briefing had ever fallen quite so short as the briefing on Daar, and what was worse was that Sartori had been absolutely certain that some of it must be exaggeration.

It wasn’t.

For one, Sartori had never known an official visit to be arranged within only a handful of hours, but apparently the Great Father believed in striking while the iron was not only hot, but practically molten. The kind of exchange that normally took weeks or months to arrange had been agreed to, arranged and enacted on an emergency basis, with apologies to his prior engagements.

In truth, that suited Sartori just fine… but the second way in which Daar overrode his expectations was that Sartori had never been bodily picked up and bearhugged by a head of state before.

“My people are alive because o’ ‘yers! Thank you!”

Sartori’s Secret Service attachment was understandably taken aback, but he managed to wiggle a hand free from Daar’s crush and wave them down. Daar’s bodyguards for their part seemed mildly amused and entirely unsurprised.

Sartori managed to retain a modicum of dignity and grunted out a reply with what little air he could muster. “We stick with our allies,” he managed.

Mercifully, he was returned to solid ground with his ribs at least still intact. His dignity was a slightly different matter, but he resisted the urge to brush fur off his suit.

“And ‘yer true friends t’have, Mister President. It’s a real pleasure to meet’cha at last.” The Great Father sank to all fours and flowed towards a huge set of doors and opened them, beckoning the President and his entourage to enter. “We’ve got a feast goin’ for everyone! Double rations ‘fer ‘yer guards…”

There was a waggle in his ears Sartori could read even across species. The Great Father was a booming force of nature who liked to play up his natural goofball boisterousness, but Sartori was no idiot—he could see what Daar was up to, and even approved.

Two could play at that game. Indeed, he’d been planning to from the moment he’d first read up on Daar’s dossier.

“My thanks!” He boomed and clapped Daar firmly on the shoulder… or at least, as high up and close to the shoulder as he could reach. In addition to being America’s first Italian president, he was also its shortest. “Before we eat though, I would like to give you something. A small token of our esteem.”

Daar’s right ear swivelled in an intriguing way. “Oh?”

“Two things, actually. The latter is a gift from the People of the United States of America. This one, however, is from me to you.”

“Ooh!” Daar flowed back over and poked his muzzle towards the package Sartori’s aide was pulling out of leather portfolio. “I love presents! What is it?”

“It’s a Karaoke microphone. You can download the app to any compatible phone, tablet… I’m sure your people can provide.” He met Daar’s eye and added, “I’ve heard your singing voice is legendary…”

They understood each other perfectly, and he noted with some satisfaction that Daar’s guards had actually flattened their ears for a moment in dismay and genuine fear.

Daar could not have been more delighted, and if there was a malicious edge to his deep, happy chitter then Sartori decided not to notice. Somebody somewhere was going to be cursing both their names in due course.

With their mischief managed and the waters well-tested, the two of them reached an unspoken agreement to move back onto a more normal trajectory for a state visit and let the analysts puzzle over this peculiar deviation from the norm. There was the food, of course, the exchanging of gifts from People to People, a few statements for the cameras… all necessary.

The real work began a few hours later in Daar’s private studies, away from prying eyes.

“The obstacle I’m working on is that our people really have got behind this whole ‘Never Again’ call,” Sartori explained. He still had his thinking baseball, and was rolling it over and over in his fingers as he digested the rich food with his jacket unbuttoned and his tie removed.

“I can unnerstand that, Mister President.” Daar went over to his incongruous record player and loaded a Muddy Waters LP of all things onto it. “Balls, it’s something I admire ‘bout ‘yer people.”

“Thanks, but it’s not exactly out of a good place. You know our history.”

“Yeah, an’ the last Great Father used to skin rebels alive an’ burned cities to the ground.”

“You’ve arguably done worse, Great Father.” That could be taken very badly, Sartori knew, but he suspected Daar would understand his meaning.

“I’ve done much worse. So if I say it’s admirable that you folks don’t wanna go there again… well, I mean it. Me, I got a diff’rent problem.”

Sartori listened politely. Daar flicked an ear, dropped to all fours and began a slow orbit of the room. It was a nervous habit they shared.

“Gao’s hurtin’,” he said, pausing to inspect what looked like a half-finished flower arrangement. “We were damn near destroyed. My people were bein’ groomed as motherfuckin’ Janissaries for a race o’ living malware. It’s an open question if the Gao will survive the die-off we’ve got comin’ in twenny years, an’ what’s left of us are cryin’ out fer justice.”

Sartori nodded. Hearing his opposite number curse like a trooper was another first, but in a way it made him respect Daar more. “That’s a heck of a tiger to have by the tail.”

“Fuck yeah it is. An’ as bad as it is ‘fer the males it’s worse for the Females, ‘cuz everythin’ we fought for over the last thousand years just got reset. They’re free from the Males, sure. But they ain’t free from duty.”

“And that duty is to breed the species back from extinction.”

“Yup.”

Sartori nodded and played with his baseball some more. “I’m worried that ‘Never Again’ might clash with what your Males need. I take it you were briefed on what happened to one of our citizens on Origin?”

“I was made aware of your reporting.” That was a careful choice of words right there—a very precise statement of truth. Exactly why Daar chose to suggest he had prominent intelligence sources close to Sartori…something else for the analysts to ponder.

Of course, Sartori had prominent intelligence sources close to Daar too: Friends spied on friends. It just wasn’t conventionally the done thing to acknowledge it.

“The Hierarchy want to provoke dissent in the ranks. They know that once the idea gains any real traction on social media that we shouldn’t exterminate any species, no matter what they are or what they do… We already have enough trouble with groups like the Alien Protection Army, or anti-establishment and anarchist movements that would love to paint the US Government as bent on genocide.”

Daar’s pacing round the room brought him back to the flower arrangement. This time he stood up, stepped behind the table and pulled the vase toward him. “You think it’ll work?”

“The abductee at the heart of it didn’t need any persuading to stay quiet about what happened to her.” Sartori chuckled as a thought occurred to him. “I tell you, I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side.”

Daar chittered and carefully selected a stem to insert into his work-in-progress, but refrained from comment so Sartori continued his thinking aloud.

“…Honestly, I don’t know. We’ve seen huge numbers of good people run with some weird ideas against all the evidence in the past, just because somebody spun a persuasive narrative.”

“Mhmm,” Daar grumbled. “Thing I’ve noticed, you Humans are awfully passionate ‘bout things when y’ain’t sure if it’s right or wrong.”

“That’s what I’m worried about…”

“Why? You gotta do what ‘ya need ‘fer your people. I gotta do the same. And I think killin’ every last one o’ these Hunter fucks is a good place to start.”

“I agree. How long is it going to take?”

“Years. I think about as long as the Grand Army will last, anyway.”

“Meanwhile, I might not be President after next year. And if I am, I definitely won’t be four years after that.”

“Lucky you.”

Sartori put his baseball down on the table in front of him and straightened up. “That’s democracy.”

“I meant it, Mister President. You are lucky. I ain’t so blessed as bein’ term-limited.”

Sartori conceded the point with a half-nod. “It does, however, mean that I have to shepherd our will to fight and pass it on to the next guy, assuming he has the backbone for the fight himself. You have a surplus of fighting spirit. I have to carefully husband ours after… God, decades of wartime mismanagement by my predecessors. Going in where they should have stayed out, withdrawing too early and squandering years of hard sacrifice, staying out where we should have gone in… My countrymen don’t like to see their sons and brothers wasted. So I need to be sure, when I commit to a fight, that we’ll have the spirit to see it through to the end.”

Daar paused in his flower arranging. “How…? Arthur, they’re Hunters. What more do you need?”

“That’s enough to start the fight,” Sartori agreed.

“And? They’re Keeda-damned monsters. I ain’t got any problem whatsoever killin’ off what’re pretty much literal nightmares made real. If it means securin’ the Gao an’ endin’ a fuckin’ livestock trade in fellow sapients, then ‘fer the life o’me can’t find anything wrong.”

“And what about the Igraens?”

“They’re digital parasites who’ve engineered the enslavement an’ extinction of literally quadrillions o’ sophonts o’er the last millions o’ years. I ain’t ever read any horror story that comes close to that bad, not even a Human sci-fi.”

“I promise, you’re preaching to the choir,” Sartori assured him. “But I won’t be around longer than five years at most. I’m warning you now so that we can have a plan in place to keep the momentum going no matter who replaces me, no matter how the narrative goes on Earth. Because if ever there was a fight we absolutely can’t afford to get sick of and back out from, it’s this one.”

“I’m gonna be sendin’ males to their doom by the millions, Mister President.” Daar gave him a very intense look. “I meant it when I thanked you. We’re alive ‘cuz of ‘yer people. But being honest, ‘yer givin’ me some concern.”

“Good.” Sartori nodded sharply. “Now… I have faith. I think we’re in it for the long haul, but I also know human nature and I know we’re up against an enemy who aren’t afraid to fight dirty and who’ve been fighting dirty for a long time. I want to rely on more than faith.”

“So…what do you plan to do?”

Sartori took a deep breath, and remembered years of skiing advice—committing to the turn might be scary, but it would be less painful than crashing into a tree. “I’m going to commit. I’m going to make it politically impossible to back out of this war. I’m going to prove to the American people that the Hunters are exactly the monsters we both know they are. And that, I’m afraid, begins with you. Personally.”

Daar regarded him carefully and might have sniffed the air almost too subtly to detect. He had an unnerving ability to stare right into people, Sartori was discovering.

“…Okay. What you want me t’do?”

With an internal sigh of relief that he was very, very careful not to allow onto the surface, Sartori pocketed his baseball and explained The Plan.

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Being home alone was a genuinely novel experience. It had been years since Allison had last had a house all to herself, for a unique definition of “house” that included a spaceship.

The unexpected part was that it actually came as something of a relief. There was a sense of a forgotten pressure becoming conspicuous by its absence, as though she could feel Xiù and Julian nearby and was suddenly acutely aware that the nearer of them was a couple hundred miles away.

Julian was supervising Vemik as they got down to the business of introducing the Ten’gewek to how Humans did wilderness survival. It was an SOR operation, orchestrated by the JETS program as part of the plan to give the People something useful to contribute to humanity and the Gao, and it was probably going to be a heck of a wake-up call. Yan and Vemik were used to eating huge, protein-rich meals hunted from among the many large and sturdy animals of Akyawentuo. Native Cimbrean life and the invading Earthlings were much smaller and, in the Terran species’ cases, much cannier about not getting themselves eaten.

Xiù was on Tiritya Island again, doing her social acrobat thing. Allison had no idea how she did it, but no sooner had Xiu quit space exploration than she was in demand as a confidant to the Mother-Supreme, an advisor to the diplomatic corps, an insight into the Ten’gewek and more besides. She took to celebrity like she was born to it.

Both of them made Allison feel a little inadequate, at times.

But then again…

She stretched her back to clear out some of the ache and surveyed her handiwork. It had taken a little negotiation, but she’d finally persuaded Julian to take the basement for his man-cave and let her have the garage. She’d spent the morning fixing tool racks to the walls, securing her workbenches to the floor, securing other stuff to the workbenches… The shop air was working, the lighting was how she wanted it, and she’d just finished wiring up the sound system.

She opened the SMART//HAUS app on her phone and browsed the local digital radio stations. SKID Radio’s name made her laugh so she tuned to it and set about unpacking all the small tools onto their racks and into their drawers.

“-ject to availability, terms and conditions apply.”

Of course she’d caught it during a commercial break.

She waited out an advert for the new Vauxhall whatever at she-wasn’t-paying-attention percent API finance and who-cared warranty, ignored some kind of insurance comparison service, nodded and made a mental note to check out a season pass for the Lakebeds national park as a maybe-gift for Julian, and half-paid attention to the news.

“—From ESNN’s newsroom for SKID radio this lunchtime, I’m Dale Parker. Today’s headlines: New Whig Party leader Colin Chapman says that nonhumans serving on the Independent Electoral Oversight Committee should be given special concessions to help them cope with the stress but some former Committee members object, calling the proposal “unfair and unconstitutional”; Hephaestus announce plans to expand Armstrong Station and begin asteroid mining in the Cimbrean system; On Earth, five people are killed and dozens are hospitalized as Storm Alfred batters northern Europe; and in interstellar news US President Arthur Sartori begins the second day of his state visit to Gao by laying a wreath at the ruins of the Wi Kao commune.”

The political bullshit was… well, it was political bullshit. Allison had heard a thousand news reports like it, the usual corkscrew thinking where folks tried to argue that the rules shouldn’t apply the same to everyone and make it sound good. She tuned it out and spent a minute or two with pencil and paper figuring out the best way to store all her welding gear—glasses, bandana, jacket, apron, gloves and helmet—in one neat package.

She settled on something out of the Misfit design book, a little swing locker she could fix to the ceiling beams, and listened with rather more interest to the bit about asteroid mining as she gathered the bits and pieces she’d need.

“—absolutely excellent safety record. Mining has always been a dangerous profession, and when you throw in vacuum, zero-gravity and radiation it only gets more difficult. The fact that we’ve had zero fatalities and only one major incident in all these years is a testament to the hard work and caution of some very dedicated people.”

Allison had to admit, that put Hephaestus a hell of a step ahead of MBG. Most of the missing Exploration Vehicles were still unaccounted-for and probably would remain that way. She didn’t know whether to feel worse about the ones who’d met an unknown fate, or the poor bastards of EV-03 who’d blundered into Hunter space never to be heard from again.

Her phone rang, automatically shutting off the news report.

She glanced at the name on the screen, laughed quietly, and answered.

“Speak of the Devil. Hey Clara!”

“Hey!” Clara Brown always sounded sunny on the phone. “Talking about me behind my back?”

“Nah, come on, you know me better than that…” Allison leaned against a bench and smiled. “What’s up?”

“Oh, y’know, nothing super important. Just that all the HR stuff is dealt with and I’m pleased to officially invite you to join my crack outfit of starship designers!”

Allison laughed. “Well, it took them long enough! When do I start?”

“We’re jumping EV-13 over from Omaha on Monday. I’ve put you on the interior crew spaces team. Y’know, seeing as you actually know what living on one of our ships is like.”

“That makes sense. What’s Thirteen like?”

“She’s a Misfit-class, mark two. Hope that’s not weird for you?”

“It’d be weirder if I was refitting Misfit herself. I mean, I’m okay with her going on and having more adventures but…” Allison shrugged.

Fortunately, Clara seemed to be able to sense shrugs over the phone. “It’d be like decorating your old house for the new owners. I hear ya. Anyway you’ll like your team, though, uh, don’t be surprised if they kinda fangasm all over you.”

Allison pulled a face. “Really?”

“Hun, they get to work with the Allison Buehler. Of course they’re geeking out. Get used to it.”

“You don’t geek out over us…” Allison pointed out.

“That’s because I know you.” Allison could hear Clara’s troll-grin. “But seriously, it’s fine, they’re professionals! Worst-case scenario, they’ll want a selfie. You’re a big girl, you can handle that.”

“Yeah, yeah…”

“So…speak of the Devil, huh?”

“Huh? Oh.” Allison mentally rewound. “Uh, there was this thing on the news about Hephaestus asteroid mining and it got me thinking about our own safety record with the missing ships… Uh, but that’s… I know the problem wasn’t with the ships,” she added.

Clara sighed. “Thanks, I guess? But believe me, I’ve lost a lot of sleep wondering if it was, over the years.”

“We made it. If it was an engineering problem, I’d know. You make good ships, Clara.”

Clara’s second sigh was a little less tense. “…Thanks,” she said, and sounded like she meant it this time. “So, uh, how are your two settling in?”

“Barely. They’re both away on business right now. I’m alone in the house for like the first time in… I dunno. Years.”

“That’s gotta be weird.”

“I’m actually kinda enjoying it!” Deciding that she may as well take a break and grab a lunch, Allison stood up and headed for the kitchen. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love them both like crazy but…”

“But it’s nice to get some space for a change,” Clara finished.

“Yeah. Think I’ll send out for pizza, though. There’s a reason they do the cooking.”

Clara laughed. “Oh, I wish Dane would let me cook. But no, it’s all gotta be on the meal plan and measured out and portioned and— Sometimes I just… I dream of cheese, you know? I don’t care if it’ll make my acne worse, I might honestly sell a kidney for the chance to pig out on chips and dip…”

“Clara… Have you tried actually asking him for that?” Allison inquired. She opened the fridge and surveyed its innards, reflecting that Julian’s diet looked much the same as Clara had just described nowadays. The whole top shelf was color-coded tupperware.

“…You think he’d say yes?”

“Come on, if he was that anal would you have married him in the first place? Julian gets to cheat three meals a week, y’know…” Those were the days when Xiù cooked.

There was a prolonged, hungry silence from Clara’s end of the call during which time Allison picked out the makings of a bacon, egg and avocado sandwich and shut the fridge door with her butt.

“…Hey, uh. When are your two back?”

“Julian’s gone until… I dunno. He’s doing something with the SOR. Might be a few days. Xiù should be back tonight. You know she talked Yulna out of gifting her a shuttle?”

“She did?”

“Yeah. Told her off! She said it’d be an irresponsible waste of resources the Clan could use and would only upset the Males and if she really wanted a shuttle she could buy her own thank you very much…” Allison smirked at the memory. At first she’d been shocked at how forthrightly Xiù spoke to Yulna, but it had quickly become obvious that the Mother-Supreme truly appreciated being given a dose of tough truth now and then.

Clara giggled into her phone. “Wow. I wish I could talk like that to Levaughn or Kevin sometimes… anyway, you wanna come up to Chiune? Or maybe we come down to your place? I feel like an evening of junk food and movies would be about perfect right now.”

Allison grinned. “Sure. What’s your favorite Disney movie?”

“Uh… ‘Beauty and the Beast’ I guess…” Considering Clara’s status as a classic geeky brunette, that made an endless amount of sense. “But don’t you guys ever watch anything other than Disney?”

“Of course we do!”

“Like?”

“Star Wars, Marvel movies, Alien, Avatar… y’know, the scifi classics… Uh..” She paused and thought of some more contemporary titles. “…The Long Road Home, Commonwealth, Shadowrun…”

“Allison, those are all owned by Disney.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Nuh-uh. The House of Mouse owns all.”

Allison cast a net through her memory for some of the other things they liked. “The Last Airbender? That’s Nickelodeon.”

“Disney bought out Viacom like seven or eight years ago.”

“…Okay, what about Wuxia movies? There’s no way Disney owns…” Allison paused, “…many of those…”

“…Wu what, now?”

“Kung fu. Xiù loves those even more than Disney.”

“We’ll watch one of those, then.”

“Hey, it’s your shameful pig-out-on-junk-food party. I got no problem watching whatever you want.” Speaking of which, Allison put her on speaker so she could finally start making her own lunch. “You’d better come over to our place though, we still don’t have a car yet.”

“Sounds great! Why don’t you have a car?”

“Haven’t bought one yet, Julian likes to run everywhere, roboTaxi is cheap and all the cars I’d wanna buy have to be imported from Earth. Do you have any idea how expensive that is?”

“…Yeah, I guess you’d take up a whole Array, huh?”

“Not to mention shipping the car to the Array, Earthside. So yeah. No car yet.”

“I guess that explains why the rental company does so well…” Clara trailed off and there was a muffled hint of conversation with somebody as though she was covering her phone with her hand. “Oh, okay. Hey, I’d better take care of some stuff. I’ll see you tonight.”

“See ya!”

Feeling slightly tickled by the irony of using her first day of solitude in years to arrange a movie night with friends, Allison finished making her sandwich and leaned against the kitchen counter to enjoy it. The place was beginning to feel like home now that they’d applied some personal touches. The cold white decor had been touched up with some artwork and accent walls, she’d got the customisable color lighting system in place and found some understated hues that warmed the ambience while softening the shadows…

The doorbell pulled her out of her thoughts. Frowning, she set the sandwich aside and dusted crumbs off her palms as she headed to the intercom. There’d been a whole security lecture from Mister Williams about how they were celebrities now, and how a domestic terrorist group had tried to bomb them, and even if the APA never took another shot at them there was always the spectre of kidnapping and ransom or… whatever. The point was, even if they were expecting somebody—which she wasn’t—they weren’t to open the door without checking the camera first.

Or checking her daily carry. Getting the special license for that had been a genuine bitch but at least CCS had finally agreed that she had a “legitimate need.” Goddamned Limey colonists.

All of that was common-sense advice even though WIlliams had been serious beyond his usual characteristic excess in giving it, so she tapped the screen by the door and… stared.

The three figures waiting nervously on the porch didn’t seem to realize they were being surveilled. That gave her a minute to think, decide what she was going to do.

She wrenched some false calm and the coldest expression she could muster into place, opened the door, leaned against the frame and folded her arms.

“…Hi, Mom.”

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Clan One-Fang experimental starship Stalking Blizzard, Near Kwmwbwrw Great Houses

Shipfather Gilim

“Shipfather! It’s happening.”

Gilim set aside his log-taking and pulled down the tactical display around him. In older models of ship he’d have sprung forward into the middle of the combat deck, but One-Fang was always innovating, always improving, always learning. The doctrine on the new ships coming out of the Dark Eye yards was to take the data to the officer and minimize risks taken by the crew. The Great Father had been right—Gilim was safer in his command chair than leaping around the deck, so even though it was difficult to control the urge to do, the thing that mattered first and foremost was the Mission. So he remained strapped in and the information came to him.

Lightyears and lightyears of information. He was tracking FTL signatures and wormholes across incomprehensible distances, but the most important track came from the Humans.

They knew how to detect Hunter comms.

Apparently the technology was quite old. Cimbrean had been equipped with a basic version from its very earliest days, but no Gaoian would have sat still on just the basic version, and the Humans had the same sensible instinct. They’d refined it immensely, and handed it along to the Clans in due course.

“Three?” he checked.

“Three,” Brother Taga confirmed. “One Broodship, two Swarmships. Previously undocumented Brood.”

“Tag them for strategic analysis, watch closely.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Helm, low-profile pursuit. Comms…contact the Great Father.”

“Yes, Father.”

Daar had organized this operation personally, as a matter of urgency. Based on what, Gilim didn’t know and presumably didn’t need to know. He certainly wasn’t about to object—after years as a merchant captain, he’d had more than his share of close shaves with the Hunters, or heard of too many fellow freighters being hit. Any opportunity to give those ball-less shits a well-earned clawing was entirely alright by him.

They were experimenting with pulsed wormhole comms, too. The Farthrow facility had taught Clan Longear a lot about wormholes, and studying biodrones, Hierarchy infrastructure and interrogating a captured Agent had yielded some other clues. They were still a long way from achieving point wormholes with zero radius, zero volume and zero surface area, but real-time FTL comms over indefinite distance was now being rolled out. So long as the sender and the receiver were both carrying what the Longears called a “microhole” router, they were no longer shackled by the limited range of distorted-space wake comms.

The only downside really was that the microhole routers drank power like a large town, and there were still some issues with bandwidth so the Great Father’s image was low-resolution and the audio was low-fidelity, but it was more than good enough.

“Report.”

“Three ships, My Father. One Broodship, two Swarmships. Their current course takes them near the Kwmbwrw colony of Glwngwli. There’s a Great House response fleet moving to intercept, but there are unprotected mining facilities in the nearby systems. The Hunters will have plenty of time to raid one and escape.”

The Stalking Blizzard was too far away to help. Gilim would have liked his chances against the three Hunters if they were closer—with the element of surprise and the initiative on their side, his ship would tear through them like claws through wet paper—but they were hanging too far back so as to be absolutely sure of their invisibility.

That was an important part of the plan. They needed to remain undetected because the Stalking Blizzard had a very unusual cargo on-board, and they needed to be kept safe. After all, broadcast engineers weren’t known for their combat prowess.

Daar’s ship, however, was not so handicapped.

Its name was the Destroying Fury and it was a monster. Everything unique about Gaoian ship design had been sharpened, honed, tempered and packed into a flying wrecking ball that echoed the Great Father in size and charisma. Nobody quite understood the art on the nose—a stylized Gao on a gleeful rampage with a ‘turkey’ of all the Keeda-fucking things hanging from his jaws—but the Great Father had commissioned it specially and nobody was going to argue.

“Get in position,” the Great Father ordered. “You know the plan.”

“Yes, My Father.”

Gilim watched as the Hunters swung away from the Kwmbwrw interceptors and vanished into an unimportant red dwarf system near the colony. It made him itch a little, but the ideal outcome for the plan actually depended on the Hunters completing their raid and getting away with their meat lockers full of live Kwmbwrw miners. Hunters preferred their meat “on the hoof” if they could get it, and that was just one more reason Gilim was in full agreement with the Great Father. Every Hunter everywhere needed to die.

The second step was the rescue. The Gaoians would play the role of a deep-space patrol that had noticed the raid in progress and, complying with their obligation to multilateral interspecies defense that the Dominion had so shamefully ignored during the attack on Gao and the colonies, would leap to the rescue.

They would save those Kwmbwrw, whether their fleet appreciated it or not. And they would teach the Hunters a painful lesson.

There was another Deathworlder species on the prowl, and they would have their revenge.

Waiting for the raid to conclude took a tense hour, during which time the Kwmbwrw fleet covered barely half the distance to catch their foe. Gilim strongly suspected that they were going slow. They knew that even at best speed they’d never get there in time, so they were taking their sweet time to be certain that the Hunters would be long gone when they finally arrived.

Pathetic. Gilim had no idea how they could show so little loyalty to the innocents of their own species. The Kwmbwrw were natural carnivores; had they lost all their instincts?

The moment when the Hunters shot out of their target system at a respectable two hundred kilolights came as a moment of feral relief. He bared his fangs. “Message the Great Father. Pounce.”

Two hundred kilolights was respectable. The Kwmbwrw certainly didn’t have anything that could keep up.

The slowest ship in the new Gaoian fleet could do significantly more than that. Stalking Blizzard was the fastest, and Daar’s flagship was only marginally slower. The Hunters pulled an extra fifty kilolights out when they realized they were being pounced on from two angles, but the Destroying Fury had some tricks on board that made a mere two hundred and fifty thousand times the speed of light look utterly trivial.

It fired a megalight drone. In seconds the remotely-operated vehicle flashed across parsecs, overhauled the Hunters and dropped a gravity spike that brought the fleeing trio to a brutal halt.

Seconds behind it, the two Gaoian ships effected a more dignified landing. Gilim stripped a whole ten percent off his own capacitor reserves to launch a hugely overpowered electronic warfare assault, but there would be no need to expend any more. Already the Hunters were drifting, tumbling, blind.

The Destroying Fury was not nearly so subtle. It crashed into their midst, caught the three ships in a knot of high-intensity forcefields and crushed them. Weapon racks crumpled like empty drink cans, sensor blisters flattened, hull plating buckled and split. The ships’ precious pressurized guts squirted out into vacuum in brilliant white plumes.

The two escorts, neither of which were large enough to be carrying any hostages, were compacted down into tiny, almost flawless spheres but the Broodship with its precious cargo was spared for the moment. With the prey thus crippled and held, Daar did something no sane being other than a Human had ever done to a Hunter ship—he boarded it.

Two minutes later, with a terse report of “Target secure,” it was over. Gilim noted to his satisfaction that the Kwmbwrw were now hauling ass as fast as their ships could go.

One of the Whitecrest officers on the bridge sent a message to the broadcasters. “Did you get what you need?”

“We need to record inside the broodship. The Great Father was very specific about that. Helmet-cam footage won’t be enough.”

The Whitecrest gave Gilim a questioning look.

“We have…two hours, before the Kwmbwrw arrive,” Gilim decided. “They might have questions if they find a film crew aboard that ship when they arrive, but I defer to the Great Father on the question of whether we care.”

The Whitecrest duck-nodded and set about arranging for a shuttle to take the broadcasters and their equipment over. Gilim let out a long breath and relaxed into his command chair. His body was fizzing with delight over what they’d just done, and the desire to rip, smash and claw at the Hunters some more.

His happy high fizzled out painfully a few minutes later when the first footage came back from the meat lockers.

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

It was always a delight when one of Nofl’s old patients visited, and Chief Arés had been a particularly gratifying success. Repairing an old neural injury like that—and Human nerves were so fascinatingly delicate in a high-strung, extreme performance way—without any scarring? It was some of Nofl’s finest work, at least when it came to Humans, and it had made him phenomenally wealthy in very short order.

His lab nowadays was… one of the students had called it a “Mecca” for neuroscientists, and it had taken some polite inquiries before Nofl had learned that the word was actually the proper name of a city of tremendous spiritual importance to a subset of Humanity.

He liked the sound of that.

Right now, though, there were more important things on Nofl’s mind than his own ego, a hitherto almost unheard-of eventuality.

There were things that the Humans needed to know, and Arés was his best point of contact. That opportunity came with his final check-up.

And of course, Arés really wasn’t interested in his own health so much. He nodded and made distracted noises as Nofl recounted all the fascinating ways in which his treatment had seamlessly spliced new fascicles, perineurium and endoneurium into the damaged segment cultured from Arés’ own tissue… but in reality he seemed bored. He looked around a lot, examined some of the other projects on the walls.

“…Why do you have a dog up on that display?” he asked, then leaned forward to peer at it. He insisted on not wearing his vision correction, the prideful idiot. “Wait. Is that Bozo?”

Nofl glanced at it. “Hm? Oh. Ah, yes. Getting him to stand still for the scanner was a bit of a challenge. I had to resort to raw turkey.” Just recounting that made him wipe his fingers primly on his apron.

“Why do you have a scan of Bozo?”

Nofl gave him his best innocent blink. “Why not?” he asked. “Anyway, seeing as you obviously find this all so incredibly dull despite my sparkling personality…”

Arés laughed. “Sorry. It’s just that all the technical stuff goes over my head.”

“Rest assured, I probably suffer from the same affliction when it comes to the intricacies of your work,” Nofl said. He hopped down off his stool and skipped over to his work terminal. It was Human-made, but he found he liked the chunky, mechanical simplicity of its styling. The electronics within weren’t at all inferior, either.

“And you’re certain there shouldn’t be any long-term effects?”

“No. It’s all your own tissue, dear. You know this!”

“I know, I know. It’s just…is my son healthy?” Arés asked.

Nofl flapped a hand distractedly. “He is categorically the healthiest human alive. Beyond that, I can’t say. Apparently I have an obligation to medical confidentiality, and my lawyer is very specific about that sort of thing…Anyway. A little gift for you.”

Arés immediately got wary. “…Nofl?”

“Not a bribe! Tchuh!” Nofl employed his best approximation of a Human tut. “No no no, this is something you might actually find interesting.”

“You thought I’d find that epineuro…thing interesting,” Arés pointed out, but he accepted the tablet that Nofl handed him.

“…Project ALTERNATIVE EXPERIMENT?”

“It’s a…. What’s that fascinating word? Dorky. It’s a dorky name, isn’t it?” Nofl commented. “I keep telling them they should call it something exciting and macho, but I think Lor is ignoring that.”

Arés aimed a sardonic eyebrow at him. “…You don’t say?”

“Yes, yes, I know what my species is like. Macho isn’t really our style, darling. Anyway, read!”

“Who’s Lor?”

“Read!” Nofl pressed him, and resorted to the kind of bribery that Arés did accept. “I’ll make coffee.”

Arés was engrossed in his reading when the drink arrived a minute or two later. “…You make surprisingly good coffee,” he said while finally digging in. “Isn’t caffeine an almost instantly fatal poison for a Corti?”

“Yes, but coffee is fiendishly difficult to do properly, darling! A boy needs a hobby, and what better hobby than chemistry?”

“Really?”

“Oh yes! The acid balance, the phenols, the acetaldehyde, trigonelline, furaneol… I could write a song! Something modelled after Gilbert and Sullivan perhaps…”

Arés shook his head but he was trying not to grin. “You always seem to save your extra scandalous days for when I visit.”

Nofl gave him his Innocent Blink again. “Read up!”

Arés did so. In fact, he read the report twice while he drank the coffee.

“So?” Nofl asked him when he finally put the tablet down and finished the cup. “What do you think?”

Arés dragged a thumb through his stubble as he thought. “It’s good. Fruity, with a hint of caramel. It’s definitely decaf though, I can tell.”

“I meant the report, you troglodyte! Don’t you sass me!”

“I can sass with the best of them, Nofl.” Arés grinned. “But it really does lose something without the caffeine…”

Nofl sighed. “Fine, fine, I’ll try that supercritical CO2 process I’ve heard about. Now if you’re kindly done trying to scandalize me…”

Arés chuckled and considered the report. “Very interesting indeed. I can’t imagine a Human government doing anything like it. It’s very…”

“Logical? Sensible? Expedient?” Nofl suggested.

“Utterly amoral.”

“Darling, this is our survival we’re talking about.”

“I didn’t say immoral, I said *a*moral. They aren’t the same meaning.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Nofl huffed. He gathered up the empty coffee cup and returned it to the cluttered counter where the cleaning service could deal with it for him later. “My point stands. Even if my people hadn’t spent a hundred generations methodically breeding ourselves toward that point of view, now is not the time for sentiment. Not after what happened to the Gao, and especially the Guvnurag.”

“No, it isn’t. But my question to you is this: how far are you willing to go?”

“Me personally? Or my people?”

“Yes.”

“Very Zen, dear.” Nofl thought about it. “Personally…So long as there are Corti around afterwards, who remember how to read Banners and relish the rush and push of the great ladder of opportunity…”

“Well, if you’re talking about proper survival, you need to be able to ditch advanced technology. That means bearing offspring. The first commandment of any living thing is to be fruitful and multiply.”

“From Zen to Biblical! You’re in a spiritual mood today, Chief.”

“Nah. I’m just gonna be a grandpa soon. Like, any day now.”

“Mm. Sadly, your daughter-in-law was not willing to submit to a scan. Not even for raw turkey.”

“Ha!” Arés shook his head. “Try jalapeño cheese poppers next time. That’s what she’s been going crazy for during the pregnancy. I mean, she normally likes them well enough but right now she’s an addict.”

“Ah yes, the famous craving food. Curious phenomenon.”

“For my ex-wife, when she was carrying Adam, it was dill pickles. Which he will eat by the jarful if you let him.”

“More coffee?”

“…You know what, sure.” Arés read the report a third time. Nofl couldn’t blame him at all—despite his best efforts at translating it, the Directorate preferred an extremely upper-caste and formal form of Cortan that was simply impossible to dumb down or simplify. The report made for exceptionally dry reading, despite the subject matter.

“…As for a return to, ah… organic reproduction,” Nofl, as a scientist, found the process fascinating rather than repulsive, but he still retained some old habits of discretion, “that probably won’t fall within the purview of this project, at least not at first.”

“You couldn’t… engineer yourself backwards?” Arés asked.

“Darling, take an assembly line that turns out thousands of modern vehicles and then ask it to build a wooden cart.”

“That’s not really an apt analogy, Nofl.”

“Is it not? Progress is iterative, both ways. The infrastructure upon which an entire civilization rests doesn’t just downgrade overnight, and certainly not when the infrastructure in question is genetic.” Nofl summoned a set of notes he’d been compiling on that subject. “We are capable of extremely efficient genetic engineering, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean we can just, ah, control-Z centuries of development.”

“That still leaves you a species dependent on a high-technology civilization to exist.”

“Yes. Hence why we’re doing this. That criticism goes for your kind as well. Your son for example requires a vast supply of daily calories simply to maintain his metabolism! If Warhorse were subjected to a prolonged survival situation he would quickly starve to death. Or look at Folctha itself! How quickly would this town collapse if we somehow became cut off from Earth?”

“…True. That’s one of the things that worries me about Adam. But he’s not the norm, he’s exceptional. Every single member of your species is incapable of reproduction, Nofl.”

“Yes, dear. Which is why you are holding a document informing us of the first step in our plan to fix that problem.” He gave Arés the most penetrating glare he could manage. “My people are many things, and I have argued for a long time that one of those things is foolish. But one thing we absolutely are not is stupid. When we think about something, we think about it.”

Arés nodded, and Nofl handed him his coffee.

“…I’m glad you’re doing something,” he said as he took it.

“Oh, Chief. No sentimental words? No warm fuzzies? No ‘the galaxy would be poorer without your people’ or anything like that?”

Arés snorted. “Don’t push your luck.”

“Yes, yes…” Nofl returned to his files. “It would be, though. And I don’t just mean financially, though my goodness can you imagine if the Origin Bank collapsed?! The whole Dominion economy would go with it!” He thought about that for a second. “…I really should remind Lor to consider that.”

“Yes, this Lor,” Arés waved the report. “He’s… the Dean of a college?”

“Yes. It’s not quite the same thing. The Colleges certainly aren’t quite what a Human would think of when they hear the word.”

“They’re not centers of learning?”

“Oh, they are! They’re also… political parties, think-tanks, advisory groups, regulatory councils… They are centers of study, and of the application of the fruits of their study, if you follow me.”

“Isn’t that inefficient?”

“As opposed to the splendidly streamlined process of Democracy?” Nofl waved a hand at the wall, indicating the city and colony around them. “It’s no worse, at least.”

“Folctha isn’t a democracy, we’re a constitutional republican monarchy.”

“Ah yes. The roots of tradition, extending all the way back to some muddy Human in metal armor who conquered a rainy little island in the freezing north of one of the colder continents and then taxed the crap out of his new subjects.”

“Hey, don’t look at me! I’m an American, we ditched all that nonsense hundreds of years ago.”

“Oh, but I approve!” Nofl exclaimed. “It’s a system grounded in deep history, with deep roots, and that means stability. Not like the lone teetering, fragile pillar of your vaunted Constitution.”

Arés scowled. “Hey come *on*—!”

Nofl barrelled on through his objection. “You don’t think things like the Castes, the Colleges and the Banners arose out of pure practicality, do you? But in a way they did! Tradition tells people who they are and where they came from. The wider the roots and the deeper they go, the stronger the edifice. The Banners once rallied armies, you know.”

“…I gotta say, I’m having an awful hard time imagining a Corti warrior-king.”

“On horseback, covered in mud, blood and steel? Yes, quite. But there are other forms of warfare, dear.” Nofl gave him a smile. “Shall we return to the subject at hand?”

Arés gave him a slow stare, then shrugged and waggled the report at him. “…So what do you intend for us to do with this information?”

“We were hoping you would share some insights. Offer some advice, help us perhaps find an unclaimed low-Class planet that’s not on the Dominion charts… Really, it’s not about what we intend, it’s about what we hope you will do.”

“I am…very much the wrong person to ask about this. Shouldn’t you talk to an Ambassador? Or the Foreign Secretary or something?”

Nofl shrugged his skinny shoulders. “To them, I’m a Corti. To you, I’m Nofl.”

“I guess, but—”

“To me, you are my favorite patient…to them you are the chief of colonial security,” Nofl added.

Arés hesitated, looked down at the tablet in his hand, looked back at Nofl, then seemed to… relax, somehow. At least, he let out a long breath like he was relaxing. Even after years of living among Humans, there were some times when Nofl couldn’t read their body language at all. “…I’ll take it to the Foreign Secretary,” he said.

“Thank you, dear. How was the coffee?”

“…I’ll be honest, it’s the best decaf I’ve ever had,” Arés admitted. He stood up and, like always, unconsciously touched his hand to his formerly-bad hip as though he still couldn’t quite believe it worked properly again. “So this is our last checkup?”

“I’m afraid so, dear. Though if picking up that baby gives you lumbar back pain, you know where to find me…”

Arés snorted. “I’ve been getting physio from Adam to prevent that. Honestly, you both behave like I’m seventy…”

“…When you’re actually in the best shape of your life,” Nofl chorused with him. “Yes, yes. Well, don’t be a stranger regardless. I find our little chats stimulating!”

“Yeah.” Arés waggled the tablet. “I’ll return this, shall I?”

“There’ll be coffee waiting!” Nofl promised. He waited until Arés had gone then rubbed his hands happily together and opened the next object on his to-do list.

“Hmm… hmm hmm… …♪take of these elements all that is fusible, melt them all down in a pipkin or crucible, set them to simmer and take off the scum, and a cup of coffee is the residuum♫…Yes, that works…”

Now. On to the conundrum of that dog…

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Peake Lowlands, Northwest of Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Yan Given-Man

‘Cimbrean’ was a place-under-another-sky very different to Yan’s home. The tastes were all different. Not unknowable different, just…like Yan had ventured very far from his hunting grounds. Which was true, now that he thought about it. There were lots of plants and flowers on the air, and lots of small prey moving about, but there were hardly any large beasts to be tasted.

And there were almost no trees, which felt wrong somewhere deep in Yan’s mighty chest. Trees were a sign the land was strong. This land…was not strong. No trees, no Ten’Gewek, no Brown Ones to keep the grasslands healthy, may their name be known only to the gods.

The land was weak. It was so weak it couldn’t attract strong prey and the ground hardly pulled at them at all. Yan had found himself able to jump high enough to peer over small hills.

That didn’t mean it was easy, though. The sun was a different color, and colder too. The gods summoned forth rains every day so predictably that Yan could plan his day around them, much like how the tribes watched the moons to count the seasons. Yan hated the cold rain. He couldn’t escape from it and the chill went right to his bones, which meant both he and Vemik found themselves always wanting to move about so they could keep warm.

He hated the tiny prey, too; there was a lot of them and they made for almost laughably easy meals, but they were bland and uninteresting to eat, their skins fell apart, their bones were so weak they were almost chewy, and not in a hand of lives could either Yan or Vemik string together enough of their tiny hides to make a nice warm pelt.

At least their bellies were nice and full.

Vemik had tried shooting one with his bow once. It had ‘exploded’ as Jooyun would say. Some of the prey was gods-damned hard to catch and very tasty, though; those were animals which had come from ‘Earth,’ Jooyun’s place-under-another-sky. They were a nice challenge to hunt! Anything to break up the tedium of their ‘mission.’

The sooner they made it to the lone tree on the mountain on the far horizon, the sooner Yan could taste this ‘ham’ roast he had been promised.

The problem was that they had to get there unnoticed in order to win their prize. Unnoticed! In a grassland so open and clean that just standing up straight would have raised Yan’s crest above the brush and bushes. They were being chased by ‘drones’ so they had to remain out of sight from above. But even worse, they were also being tracked by Gaoians. That ‘nose’ of theirs could taste the air so well, Daar had been able to tell what Yan had eaten two days before!

That meant they had to pay attention to the wind all the time, rain or not, day or night. They were also slathered head to tail-tip in mud to keep their bright crests from being seen by the Humans. That wasn’t a problem against the Gaoians, which was something they learned from Daar: another confusing thing that rubbed together the sky-thoughts of whether Daar was a beast or a man. More importantly, Yan also knew mud could hide a man’s taste, so he hoped that would help them against that sky-magical ‘nose’ of theirs.

Maybe it could also help against the ‘drones.’ The Skithral-things could see their crests, Jooyun had said. They could see better than any man, too. They could even see if a thing was warm!

Maybe that meant it was good Yan felt so cold. He looked back at Vemik, who was smearing the last of the mud under his eyes. He was shivering and grumbling quietly to himself…

But Vemik was a man of the People. Nothing could hide the shine in his eyes or the joy in his breath. They were hunting, and they were being hunted, and the prize would be the honor and strength of the People against Sky-Tribes that may as well be gods.

…And ham.

“Ready,” Vemik declared.

“Good. We shouldn’t waste the day.”

Vemik nodded, picked up his spear and stepped aside. “I’m behind you, Yan.”

They resumed their trek. They had a long way to go if they were to get there first.

Date Point 15y5m4d AV
Peake Lowlands, Northwest of Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

“Okay, I knew Yan and Vemik were good, but Etsicitty? How’s a guy that big just vanish?”

Hoeff unscrewed his spit bottle to deposit a load of filthy brown juice before answering. In the tight confines of their van, he was being extra careful about his personal habits. “Nightmare. Shit, maybe we should do some training over there sometime.”

“We probably will, once our cavemonkeys have their head around the task.” Coombes returned to the drone footage. They had four Flycatchers up to watch the training area, but now that the two Ten’gewek had found some cold mud to cover their infrared signature they weren’t tracking shit. Not bad for a couple of guys who were still new to the idea of metal.

Etsicitty was a different matter. He’d covered his body heat first and that was about the last they’d seen of him. Coombes had combed over every inch of the ground around his starting position and there wasn’t a thing out of place. Yan and Vemik left hardly any trail themselves, but Playboy left none that Coombes could detect.

The three of them together made up Blue Team, and they were proving to be difficult quarry.

Then there was Red Team. Wilde and his buddies were one of the two pursuit units, the other being a half-dozen Gaoians from the Grand Army who’d been picked out for special training under the supervision of the HEAT’s own Faarek and Shim. The JETS members were easily the most visible things in the area, which wasn’t entirely their fault. They were fully loaded, each carrying a forty-kilo pack to go with their weapon, armor and all the other shit.

They weren’t out there to be stealthy, they were out there for conditioning. Stealth would come later. A JETS team had to be able to hump their gear over miles of terrain and do it quietly, and Coombes was satisfied that the human contingent of Red Team were doing alright on that score. There was room for improvement, but nothing was actually unsatisfactory.

All told, it was a hell of a training scenario. Three species with some very different natural aptitudes and skillsets, all with different victory conditions and tactics. Coombes genuinely had no idea what he expected would happen.

Then again, he had no idea what exactly was going on here and now. Clearly he was going to be relying on Etsicitty to be his eyes and ears because the drones weren’t worth shit.

He popped the seal on his thermal flask of coffee and poured some out.

Something told him he was in for a long wait.

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

There were unfamiliar suitcases just inside the front door and takeaway debris all over the kitchen counters when Xiù got home, neither of which were remotely as prominent as the air of crackling hostility that made her skin itch the second she entered. Two almost identical young blond-haired boys were sitting at the table in the kitchen looking pale, silent and tense despite being surrounded by burgers and snacks: one of them hastily flailed at his brother to get his attention when he looked up and saw Xiù enter.

The centerpiece, however, was definitely the standoff over the breakfast bar. Allison looked like she was one wrong word away from an aneurysm, and the target of her hostility was…

Well, she was a glimpse into Allison’s future. The same bone structure, the same eyes. Her hair was unquestionably dyed to judge by the silver roots but she’d done a decent job of fighting back against the effects of age on her skin.

Xiù hung up her coat and hesitated. “Um… hello?”

Allison gave her a complicated look that said ‘I’m beyond glad to see you but I’m busy being really fucking angry at my mother right now.’ Out loud, and with forced brittle lightness, she said “Hey babe. Look who showed up!”

Mrs. Buehler’s handshake was polite, but about as firm as a soufflé. “It’s, uh… nice to meet you, Miss Chang.”

“My parents are getting divorced!” Allison explained, brightly. She was pissed, way more so than Xiù had seen her in a long long time. “And Mother here—” Mrs. Buehler winced “—decided that was the perfect excuse to catch up. Oh, and she’s brought my little brothers with her which means the whole custody thing’s gonna land on our doorstep soon too!”

“Allison, please, we’re not—” Mrs Buehler paused and changed tack from argumentative to pleading. “He kicked me out! I had nowhere else to go and you’re the only family we have!”

Allison rounded on her. “No! I’m the only family they have, which is why I even let you in.” Her finger jabbed toward the boys, then lanced at her mother’s face. “You don’t get to call me family!”

Ohhh boy.

Rather than allow the argument to continue, Xiù decided to gently interject. “Um… look, Mrs… um, I’m sorry, I don’t actually remember your first name…”

“Amanda,” Allison said before Amanda had the chance.

“Amanda,” Xiù repeated. “Can I borrow her for a second? Sorry, we’ll be right back…”

She steered Allison out of the room before either of them could protest and into the garage. The door closed behind them and a shaved second later Allison grabbed her and hugged like she was a life preserver.

She was shaking.

“…Bǎobèi? Are you okay?”

Allison shook her head, not letting go. “No. No I’m really not. I want her gone.”

“And… the boys?”

Allison sighed and peeled herself away slightly. “Yeah, that’s the tricky part. They never did anything wrong. God, Babe, I don’t know. I just… I wasn’t prepared for this.”

“What happened exactly?”

“She had her temple recommend taken away—”

“Her what?”

“I’ll explain later. Anyway, my father got wicked mad, there was an epic fight which ended up with her out in the street…and everything’s in his name.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. She spent all of her money to get here. She doesn’t have a job. Hell, she says the only reason she had any money is because some of her neighbors helped her out. And she used it to come here!”

“Well… you are her daughter…” Xiù pointed out.

Allison heaved an enormous sigh and leaned against a workbench. “Babe, I love how you always look for the best in people? But that woman out there made me get rid of her own grandson to protect her reputation. She’s a gold-digger and a snake and she’s only playing the family card because she thinks she can get something out of it.”

“…Okay. Well… Why don’t you get to know your little brothers, and I’ll talk with Amanda?” Xiù suggested.

“…That… sounds like a good idea. I don’t think I can…” Allison trailed off, then rallied. “Just, don’t give her an inch. She’ll take a mile.”

Xiù kissed her. “Let me worry about her.”

“…Right.”

They hugged briefly for a little extra strength, then Xiù led the way back into the kitchen. Amanda had sat down and was fussing over the boys, who had the lost, scared looks of kids navigating a social minefield they didn’t have the map for. Allison looked at them for a second then sighed and softened.

“…Come on, guys. You wanna see the house?”

They looked at their mother, who hesitated and then waved a hand. “Go on.”

That left Xiù and Amanda alone. Xiù gave her a hospitable smile. “Can I get you anything? Coffee?”

Amanda gave her a cold look. “…No, thank you.”

“Tea?”

“No. Thank you.”

Wow. Amanda was about as entertainable as a brick wall. “Okay…You don’t mind if I have one, do you?”

Amanda sighed. “…It’s your house.”

Grateful for a minute to think as she brewed, Xiù stood up and headed for the drinks cupboard.

“Can I at least get you a glass of water?” she offered.

“Yes please.”

Finally, a breakthrough. Amanda fidgeted awkwardly with her rings while the drinks were being made, and accepted her water without a thank you when it was given.

“I suppose you just got an earful about what I’m like…”

“I did,” Xiù agreed.

“…She really hates me, doesn’t she?”

Xiù inhaled her coffee’s scent for a second then set the cup down. “…Maybe. But she’s not a hateful person. The Allison I know is big-hearted, caring and full of love.”

“So you’re saying you think she must have a reason…”

Well, Amanda was definitely living up to everything negative Allison had ever said about her. Xiù gave the older woman a careful look and then decided to go with Allison-like forthrightness.

“You have to expect I’ll take her side,” she pointed out. “I have every reason to trust her, and I know her very, very well. So yes, absolutely. If she hates you, you can take it from me that you must absolutely have earned it.”

Amanda blinked, which was an opening that Xiù was more than happy to use. “But I’m not the inquisition, and Allison isn’t a villain. She’s already given you a chance, even if only because of the boys. So tell me what you want. Why come here?”

“…I…I really didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Amanda said. “I don’t have many friends, my parents passed away years ago, I don’t have… Allison is the only family I have… I have no money, no job… I’m homeless!”

“And the boys? You brought your sons with you? Out on the streets with nowhere to go?”

“I couldn’t leave them with Jacob!”

“Why not?”

Amanda looked appalled. “He can’t look after them! He’s— boys need their mother!”

“They need their father, too,” Xiù retorted. “But more importantly, they need stability. They need a roof over their heads too, they need their school friends…” She glanced down the hall toward the living room. Allison was bonding with her little brothers by showing off some of the gadgetry she’d filled the house with to their apparent enthrallment. She actually had a smile on her face.

“It’s not right,” Amanda asserted with the desperate conviction of somebody who didn’t have an argument but would never admit to it.

“For who? For them? I happen to know an amazing man who was raised by his father!” Xiù was getting angry, but she really didn’t care. “But of course, a homeless woman with kids has more to bargain with than just a homeless woman by herself… Oh, that’s another question. Why come here? Why not a homeless shelter or something? You could have fed and looked after the boys for a couple of months on what it must have cost you to travel to Folctha.”

“I—”

“Whatever you’re about to say, look me in the eye to say it,” Xiù told her.

Amanda didn’t at first. She lapsed into silence for a few seconds, then tucked some stray hair behind her ear, took a deep breath and finally looked up.

“…Well, we’re here now,” she said.

“Yes. Congratulations, you’ve forced our hand.” Xiù stood up. “I think I can speak for Allison and Julian, we’re not going to kick your children out into the cold. But if you’ll excuse me, I need to call the police and tell them to get in touch with the Salt Lake City PD.”

She turned to go retrieve her phone from her coat pocket.

“She was always… passionate,” Amanda said quietly. “And independent. Strong. I never understood how she could just… just not care what others thought. If people talked behind her back she just ignored them… And she’s so clever…”

Nonplussed, Xiù just stared at her and wondered where the hell that non-sequitur had come from. After a second, Amanda wiped away a tear and sighed. “…I always envied her for that. For her talents.”

Xiù shook her head. “Allison earned everything she has” she said, and retrieved her phone. “Now. If you’ll excuse me…”

She retreated into the living room where Ramsey and Tristan were coming out of their shells a bit while selecting a movie to watch. Allison was watching them with a complicated look on her face, which turned to a slight smile when Xiù entered.

“Hey. So. What do you think?”

“I think…” Xiù glanced at the twins and decided to be at least a little discreet. Fortunately, Allison understood enough Mandarin for what she wanted to say. “Tā shì huàidàn …But she’s here now, and so are the boys. We can’t just abandon them…”

“No.” Allison sighed. “That’s why she brought them. She knew I’d just slam the door in her face if it was just her…”

“Well, she was right. Look, I’d better call CCS and let them know about this. I bet their dad’s going crazy right now.”

A medley of mixed emotions wrote themselves across Allison’s face. “I guess. Not sure how I feel about him showing up on our door though…”

“Mmm, I’m thinking maybe you do know how you feel about that, dummy.”

That got a small laugh. “Don’t you ‘dummy’ me, you butt… You’d better call Clara too. She and Dane were gonna come over tonight…”

“No, they can still come! Why cancel?”

Allison glanced through to the kitchen. “…Y’know what? I guess if they still want to then I’d love to see them. But call them anyway.”

“Fair enough…Wǒ ài nǐ.”

“Wo ye ai ni.” Allison smiled more fully this time. “I’ll call Julian and… I guess I’ll keep these two entertained…” She nodded at her brothers.

“Are they staying here, or a hotel?”

Allison shrugged. “…I dunno. I don’t exactly wanna give Mom any money, but I don’t really want her in the house either…Better make it a hotel. If the men come back tonight as well it could get really weird in here.”

“Bǎobèi, it’s weird enough already.”

“Exactly. And you know, this day started out almost normal?”

Xiù giggled, kissed her, then let herself out through the French doors into the yard, where she finally got her phone out to make the promised phone calls.

Somehow, she doubted things were going to get less interesting…

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Hunter livestock barge, Unknown location

Gorg Odvrak-Bull

Gorg had failed in every possible way.

A Bull, first and foremost, was there to protect his herd from other herds. Whether those herds were fellow Vgork, alien nations like the Dominion species, or interstellar monsters like the Hunters didn’t matter a bit—the Bull stood at the front and served with his life if need be.

That was the ancient contract: He who accepts the responsibilities and the risks, gets the rewards. Any Vgork male could take the easy way out and live for himself, but he’d never have a herd, or he’d find that whatever lackluster herd he did attract would soon drift away to find somebody more capable, devoted and selfless.

Gorg had always prided himself on living up to the ideal. He really ought to be dead.

But the Hunters hadn’t let him have even that when they hit his herd’s water tanker, the Floral Musk. They’d subdued him, bound him, made him watch as they feasted on a few of the children. It was like they knew how Vgork thought and had done everything in their power to make him suffer.

What kind of species was driven by sadism like that?

That had been… weeks ago? Maybe? He’d lost track of time. There had just been cramped spaces, fear, shame, occasionally falling asleep out of sheer exhaustion. Once, the doors on their claustrophobic pen had been opened and they’d been goaded out into a larger pen, already half-full of other captives. Vzk’tk and Rrrtktktkp’ch, Kwmbwrw, Celzi… There had been a Rauwryhr family, a Locayl mining crew, a cadre of broken Chehnash security specialists and even a lone, withdrawn Ruibal.

That pen had been filled and days of flight had followed. Then they’d been ushered from it into an even bigger pen full of even more captives, some from species that Gorg had never seen before or even heard of…And from there into the echoing belly of a truly cavernous ship devoted to one purpose: the mass transport of enormous numbers of meat slaves.

The Hunters never entered the pen. Even they knew that an angry mob of their captives could smash them individually. But they patrolled the outside with fusion scythes and pulse rifles and other, stranger weapons that Gorg’s oldest son Yurk thought looked Human.

And always, the threat was there of just being spaced, should the cargo rise up and fight back.

They had no idea where they were going. They had no knowledge of how long the journey would take. They had no clue what would happen when they arrived, and they had no way of saving themselves. They had no hope at all.

Gorg had failed utterly.

He only hoped that when it came time to face his death, he could fight hard enough to make it quick and deny the enemy their cruelties. And maybe, just maybe, earn the right to call himself a Bull again.

Until then, there was only the waiting.

He turned his face to the wall and slept without resting.

Date Point 15y5m4d AV
Peake Lowlands, Northwest of Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

“Whose phone is that?” Coombes looked around the van at the unexpected ringtone.

“Etsicitty’s. Must be important.”

“Answer it, then.”

Hoeff grumbled and picked up the phone, which he answered on speaker. “Playboy’s secretary, how may I direct your call?”

“It’s Allison. And you can start by not being an ass.” Fortunately, after a few months of hanging out with her in the jungle Coombes and Hoeff knew Allison well enough to spot that she was joking… but that she still had bad news.

“Sorry ma’am, Julian’s out on the range. How important is this?”

“Family drama. When’s he likely to be done?”

Hoeff checked on his Blue Force Tracker display. Everyone was wearing transponders for safety’s sake, and being as Hoeff was the designated lead for white cell he was allowed to see where everyone was at all times.

“Well…maybe a few hours? Julian’s mostly here as a teacher and our cavemonkeys are learning pretty fast.”

“I’m glad, but… honestly, a fucking tidal wave of bullshit just landed on us.”

“Look, be completely honest with me, Al. Does this involve life, limb, eyesight, or anything on that order of serious?”

She sighed in the half-hearted way of somebody resigning themselves to tolerating a necessary inconvenience. “Not really, just teeth-grinding frustration. I’ll let you get back to it. You’ll let him know I called?”

“Will do. You’re gonna hafta wait, sorry, but I’ll cut out some of the extra motivational delights we had planned, okay?”

“You’re an undercover angel, Chimp.”

“Handsome, too.”

“Not next to Coombes you ain’t. Anyway. Thanks. See you later.” She hung up.

Hoeff had his crude grin on his face for a moment, then sobered up quickly. “Right. I’m gonna call this evolution short, then. Once blue team reaches their primary objective, the Rangemaster will terminate and arrange transportation. Any objections, Boss?”

“Nope. What exactly are our gorillabros up to?”

Hoeff looked down at his display…and that grin of his returned. “They’re awfully close to that dairy farm…”

“Oh, hell. How much do cattle cost?”

Hoeff shrugged. “On this planet? I’unno, but the two just moved too fast for their tracking pendants to follow, so I’m betting we’re about to find out…”

“…Greeeaat.”

Date Point 15y5m4d AV
Peake Lowlands, Northwest of Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Meat.

It had been almost two whole days since Vemik had a proper meal. The little not-bibtaw things were everywhere and roots were easy to dig, but somehow, none of that really satisfied all that much. He dreamed of burgers.

*Cheese*burgers. Words ending with “-er” in English were words that meant tools most times, so a burger was a tool for burging, which meant that a man could burg. Was that right? It seemed right. Vemik really wanted to burg.

There were no burgers over there beyond those stone walls… but there was meat. Lots of it.

Jooyun was trailing along to teach them how to survive on this strange planet and he mostly stayed back, well away so he didn’t give away where they were sneaking. There had been a few times the Gaoians had almost found them, and once they had got so close Vemik could have thrown his spear right through the nearest one.

But they were friends. People shouldn’t spear their friends, at least not too hard. And the Gaoians had ‘rifles’ too, supposedly with ‘dummy boolets’ in them, which weren’t supposed to kill? But Jooyun had said getting shot by them would really hurt, and they weren’t wearing the weird face-glass thing anyway to keep their eyes safe, so maybe it was better not to risk it.

A cheeseburger would be nice right now. Three of them!

“Do we chance it?”

Yan made a pained, hungry sound. He was a lot bigger and needed to eat much more, so he was probably suffering even more than Vemik. He’d probably burg five or six times when they got home. After he had devoured this ‘ham’ thing he kept obsessing over.

“…A man doesn’t eat, that man gets weak,” he said eventually. “A weak man can’t fight. We may have to play-fight the Gaoians for the flag and they have rifles.’’

“We’ll get… two.” Vemik decided. “The smaller ones. They’re young, maybe?”

Yan nodded. “Kill quick, and quiet. Also, we need to go around this strange thin metal…thing. Without breaking it.”

“It’s called a fence.”

“How does something so thin keep beasts inside?”

“This one bites with sky-magic.” Vemik pointed out a sign. “That shape like lightning? It means ‘ee-lec-triss-ee-tee.’ Don’t touch. It really hurts.”

“How do you know?”

Vemik gave him an innocent look. “I touched it while you were shitting behind the tree yesterday. It bit and knocked me flat on my back! Jooyun laughed at me and helped me up, then he taught me what their warning signs mean. Red and white signs mean very bad things. And yellow and black signs mean bad things too.”

“Meat, Vemik. Focus.”

Yes. Meat.

“Well, touch the fence for yourself if you don’t believe me. I don’t want to touch it again.”

“I’m happy to learn from your mistakes,” Yan said with a smirk, and beckoned him to follow. “Come on, I’m hungry. We’ll just jump over it, it’s only one man tall.”

In the weak ’gravity’, that was nothing. They bounced clean over the wire without really having to try, and charged across the open ground to the stone walls as quickly as they could go.

The walls weren’t really stone, Vemik realized. They were grey like a stone, but smooth and made out of identical square concrete blocks. It looked like a sensible way to make something solid quickly. There was thorny wire along the top, but again the walls were far too low to keep a man of the People out. Especially when Yan held out his hands to give Vemik a boost.

Thus launched, Vemik shot upwards like a thrown spear, twisted tail-over-top and landed gracefully on the far side in a stinky mix of mud, dried grass, and shit.

A very big one of these strange prey turned its attention to him and scraped its cleft hoof on the ground. Well, so much for getting the little ones.

Vemik didn’t bother with his spear, he was too close in to get any power in a thrust. Instead he sprang forward, grabbed the animal by its horns and twisted sharply. It made a surprised bellowing noise, staggered, and fell on its side thrashing so angrily that he needed both his hands and one of his feet on its windpipe to hold it down. He took advantage of his position and tore his foot’s grip deep into the prey’s throat, burrowing down through the hard meat and bleeding it as much as he could.

After a few breaths he found something hard in its neck, gripped it with his foot, and squeezed as hard as he could. Another breath and he felt it crack and break apart, which instantly made the animal stop flailing and instead kick as hard as it could. Even pinned and broken it was a strong prey which could gore Vemik at any moment. He took no chances and grabbed his knife with his other foot, then cut the big blood lines running in the prey’s neck so it would die faster. Awkward, since he had to balance on his tail, but he managed.

The beast seemed to know it was doomed but it that only made it fight harder. Vemik was pleased, this was a strong prey! He got his legs and tail around its neck and squeezed down with all his strength to control it, dug his other foot in like the first, and wrenched its head up so hard that its horns snapped off in his grip, anything to keep it quiet and kill it faster.

It spilled its bright red blood all over Vemik and tried to cough around his grip on its throat, and fought his killer for a long while with every breath of its being. It was a gods-praised struggle and Vemik didn’t want it to suffer too much, so he grit his teeth and bore down so hard, his entire body trembled with effort. He kept it up until a few breaths later there was another muffled crack, his legs slammed together, and the prey stopped moving. Satisfied that it was defeated, he unwrapped himself from the pin, sat down next to it in its final moments, and rested a hand on its mighty head. Nobody should die alone, after all. The prey lowed a pathetic, mournful warble as the last of its lifeblood drained out of its flattened neck.

Vemik stood up, panted for a bit, and inspected a small scratch on his arm from where the point of its horn had gouged at him. A good kill, and a worthy prey! He anointed himself with its blood and let the gods know to treat this one kindly.

It was big though. Vemik picked it up and thought for a moment. He had carried bigger Werne on long hunting trips and on this weak ‘planet’ doing that would be even easier, but he wasn’t quite sure if he could jump over the wall with his prize while avoiding the thorny wire at the top. Toss it? Probably, but it might get stuck in the wire just the same, though. Yan could definitely clear the wire with room to spare. Vemik was about to call for him when he leaped clear over the wall, thumped down beside him and took a keen look around. The rest of the prey were crowding away from them and making a terrible racket. They needed to get moving.

“Strong kill!” the Given-Man said. “I thought we wanted small ones?”

“It attacked me.”

“Good enough for me. We will Give what we can’t eat to the gods.”

“We should go before—” Vemik began.

Several confused minutes followed, but they started with shouting. Swearing, mostly. There were Humans and Gaoians, but not the ones taking part in the training. These ones probably kept the animals and weren’t very happy about what had just happened to their bull.

It wasn’t the first time Yan and Vemik had raided another tribe’s hunting-grounds of course. Yan grabbed the bull and tossed it over the wall, both of them sprang after it, and they fled for the safety of the bush with their prey, trilling gloriously at the thrill of being caught and still getting away with the prize.

How did the sky-tribes resolve a play-fight like that? The Ten’Gewek would have the Given-Men wrestle, and the winning tribe would fuck the other tribe’s maidens senseless while the defeated men hunted for a feast…and when they got back the real fun began. Would that work here?

…Probably not. Human women were attractive enough in their weird skinny way, but Gaoians? Yurrgh.

The proper way to respect such a magnificent bull would be to smoke all its meat and waste absolutely no part of it, but they didn’t have that kind of time sadly. They would have to snatch the best parts, cook them quickly, and divide the animal apart so it could be Given back to the gods quickly and cleanly.

It was excellent meat, though. Rich, full-flavored and strong, especially the heart. Strange texture, but Vemik liked it. It reminded him of burgers!

Yan liked it too, judging from how he sighed happily and slapped his belly. “We should move, I think maybe all the noise will be noticed by our hunters.”

Vemik nodded. Between them, reducing the carcass to proper fragments didn’t take long, and with one last prayer for their meal’s soul they were gone.

It had been a good hunt.

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space

Lucy Campbell

“Lewis?”

“Back here!”

Lucy slid the door shut behind her and ducked under a volumetric projection. She didn’t need to, the thing was made out of lasers, dust and forcefields and she could have walked right through it, but it looked solid. It was hard to escape the feeling that she was looking at several tonnes of metal hanging impossibly in the air.

This one wasn’t a coltainer, she could see that immediately. It was… sleeker. Probably smaller. If the projection was scaled one-to-one then this was the size and shape of a blue whale, where the Coltainer had wound up much bigger than that.

Lewis was sculpting a 3d model of something on his workstation in the corner, He gave her a tired but happy grin. “Hey, Loo.”

“Hey.” She draped herself over his shoulders. “Thanks for leaving a message. Are you okay?”

“I’m probably gonna crash like Bitcoin did when I go to bed,” Lewis said. “But yeah. Feels good. I figured out what my next project is.”

Lucy looked at it. “Another probe? What’s this one for?”

“Military use.”

“Really?” She sat down on the spare chair he kept for her. “I thought you didn’t like the idea of military V-N probes?”

“I don’t. But it… kinda got pointed out to me that somebody else’ll just build them anyway. So it may as well be me. At least that way…”

“Right.” Lucy considered the probe in the middle of the room. From this side, it was exploded with one-way screens picking open the components. Mostly it was orderly, rational stuff. The product of years of work on the Coltainers by a team of dozens, copy-pasted in from the finalized version. The nanofactories, the resource acquisition drones, the power core and FTL drive, the small nuke for self-destruct purposes were all the same… where it differed, it was pure Lewis.

He was obviously going for a scout first and a weapon second. The sensor package was sophisticated, hardened, redundant and had a big chunk of the probe’s energy budget behind it. He’d sketched in weapons here and there without bothering to decide what form the weapons should take and his total ignorance in some fields was showing, but as always he’d produced a solid starting point.

Mostly. She smiled at the basic structural plan when she saw he’d made the same mistakes he always did. “You just sketched in steel struts again.”

“I was kinda throwin’ together the early Alpha.”

“Sure, but why not start as we mean to go on? Here, if I replace it with a foam lattice construction using that zero-G spider-spin technique we developed… here…” She stood up and selected the probe’s structural components by touching them. “And not steel. Here, the Brits figured out this great alloy from reverse-engineering the tech they stripped out of Caledonia…”

The design software was goddamn miraculous sometimes: In seconds she’d modified every major structural component and drastically reduced the probe’s mass while increasing its ability to bear stress loads and endure extremes of heat.

“With a few more changes, we could give the whole force-carrying structure some redundancy, so if it gets damaged…” she indicated, dropping in the proposed changes with a few gestures. “See?”

Lewis looked at it, then grinned at her. “This is why I love you.”

He didn’t say that very often. It was nice to hear and Lucy grinned back. “So…what’s that you’re making?”

He showed her. She proposed modifications, he queried material, she double-checked his math… Half a day slipped away in creative bliss.

At the end of it, Lewis sat back and arched his back to work some of the stiffness out, then dropped his arm round her waist and snuggled into her. “…We work great together.”

“Mhmm.” Lucy nodded. “Wanna marry me?”

“Yup.”

She laughed softly and hugged him. “Cool.”

“…Was that an actual proposal? Because I, uh… I did design some rings a while back…”

“You did?”

Lewis’ eartips had gone pink, but he swiped through his files and called one up from the folder marked personal projects.

An enormous ring replaced the probe. Lucy turned to look at it.

Christ. Rose gold with an inlay of palladium wire, twisted back on itself into a Möbius strip. A princess-cut moissanite stone (and here Lewis had noted: “get from asteroid, not lab-made”) adorned the twist’s apex.

She almost did a double-take when she realized that the palladium wire inlay was actually an ECG profile, looping forever over and around. It was the engagement ring she’d never known she dreamed of.

“…Holy shit.”

“You like it?”

“You know rose gold is my favorite, right?”

A small ‘gotcha’ smile spread across Lewis’ face. “You maybe mentioned that, yeah.”

“I mean… isn’t that gonna cost a lot?”

“Nah, not really.” His gotcha smile got bigger. “The hard part was finding the right asteroid. SAM? Call up Earmark Rock Lucy-One.”

A potato-shaped lump of dirty rock replaced the ring. Lucy gave him a raised eyebrow. “…Lew?”

“It’s got gold, zinc, copper, palladium and moissanite.” He grinned. “Whaddya say? Wanna use some of our private runtime on the ‘fac? I guarantee you, nobody else will ever have a ring like it.”

Lucy laughed a little. “Wow. When you do a romantic gesture…”

“Dude. Go big or go home, right?” Lewis grinned sheepishly.

She kissed him. “Let’s do it.”

“You heard the lady, SAM. Bring that rock in.”

“Roger-dodger, dude.”

And just like that, the romantic moment popped. No big sentimental gesture could survive ‘roger-dodger.’ They looked at each other, snorted, and got back to work.

But neither of them stopped smiling.

Date Point 15y5m4d AV
Peake Lowlands, Northwest of Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Sergeant Ian Wilde

“Weren’t there supposed to be Gaoians and cavemonkeys up here?”

“There are!” A bloody gigantic gorilla-looking thing crawled up out of a hole they’d dug near the tree, and hastily concealed with grass. It was surprisingly well-done too.

Wilde gave the creature in front of him an appraising look up and down. This had to be Yan, from what he’d heard, but right now he looked more like the Swamp-Thing. He was covered top to toe in mud, which had picked up loose grass and extra dirt for good measure. There was a hint of red poking through what looked like a mohawk of all the things, and all that mud only emphasized the big bastard’s eyes and teeth. He was snarling in a weirdly friendly way, but…

A voice spoke from the other side of the track. “That explains why we couldn’t smell much of ‘em. All we ever got was a general hint. Did you two roll in the grass like three times?”

“Yes!”

The Whitecrests didn’t do anything so obvious as emerge from a covered hole. It was more like one of those weird optical illusions where a candlestick turned into a couple of faces and suddenly there was a whole pack of them just standing there, which was a fuck of a way to demonstrate those suits of theirs.

“Impressive.” Wilde got the sense that was a hell of a compliment coming from a Whitecrest.

Vemik emerged a few feet to Yan’s left and shook himself off some, which sent earth and plant matter showering all over the place. “Where is Julian?” he asked.

“Right here.”

He was literally just leaning against a tree. None of them had noticed him.

“—How–?”

The big bastard just grinned.

“So… who won?” Garcia asked.

“Game wasn’t about which fellas were gonna win,” Julian said. He was also heavily mud-laden. “This was just to get everyone’s head around what we’re going to be teaching each other. There’s a lot to learn, too. And some very angry farmers to appease.”

Yan and the “smaller” Ten’Gewek next to him both cringed at that.

“Ah!” Julian grinned and crossed his arms. “I take it you two ate well, at least?”

“Tasty!” Vemik burbled happily.

“Good, because that meal is going to cost AEC about sixteen thousand pounds.”

That number made everyone cringe again, especially Vemik. Yan didn’t seem to understand but he noted the general mood and grew concerned.

“Is… a lot?” he asked.

“A burger with all the fixings costs about ten pounds, Yan. Do the math.”

Yan paused, counted off on his fingers and a few of his toes, twitched his tail a few times, then wilted. “…Is a lot.”

“Yuh-huh. You guys killed their breeding stud. Don’t worry though, I’m sure we can make amends.”

Yan and Vemik nodded seriously. “We will Give for this Taking.”

“Right. We’ll deal with that later. I guess we do a hot wash?” Wilde nodded, and stepped back to give him the floor. “Right. First thing would be for Whitecrest. Excellent job going undetected. You might pay attention to…hell. Standby.”

There was the growling sound from down the hill, and an ATV came bouncing up the trail carrying the Rangemaster. That was totally unscheduled and could only mean Shenanigans of the worst kind.

Sure enough a quite unhappy warrant officer along with a tinier, angrier man rolled off as soon as the ATV puttered to a stop. They both descended on the group like a billowing cloud of doom.

Julian seemed unfazed. “Hey Hoeff, what’s up?” he asked, stepping forward to speak for the group.

The little man didn’t seem much concerned. He indicated the two cavemonkeys, then Julian himself. “Shit came up, and I don’t just mean the farmyard drive-thru. I need to pull you three off the range. And hose you down. With soap.”

It was almost amazing how dejected the two aliens suddenly looked. “Do we really need to?” Vemik did a remarkable show of puppy-dog eyes.

Hoeff was unyielding. “Yes. But if it’s any consolation, you still get your ham.”

Yan nodded solemnly, and resigned himself to his trials with a stoic grunt.

“What happened?” Julian asked.

“Dunno exactly. Al called and said a, quote, ‘tidal wave of bullshit’ landed on them. She sounded pissed.”

“Greeeaat.” Julian sighed to himself, then beckoned the Ten’Gewek over. “Fun’s over. Uh…I don’t know if this little ATV will be enough for these two.”

“We borrowed this one from HEAT, don’t worry. This is the version they use in rhino and elephant conservation back on Earth. Also, it’s easier to hose down.”

“You seem a little too happy about that.”

“Oh, I’m gonna have a fuckload of fun spraying you fuckers clean.” Hoeff’s grin was pure sadism.

“Hey, I can take my own goddamn shower!” Julian objected.

Hoeff shrugged. “Sure. Find one.”

“…Fuck. It’s cold water too, ain’t it?”

Hoeff’s grin got wider. “The motherfucking coldest bro. You’re gonna love it. Wake ya right up!”

“Fucking SEALs, man,” Garcia commented. “What’s on for the rest of us?”

Hoeff chuckled. “Oh the fun don’t stop! We’re gonna keep running the scenario, ‘cept this time it’ll be Gaoians versus JETS.” He turned and pointed to a hilltop that was almost invisible among the haze on the horizon. “Dinner’s at nineteen-hundred on top’a that hill. Be there and eat well. Arrive late, and you’re doin’ the dishes. Don’t go up the wrong hill. And don’t let the cadre catch you, neither.”

“Got it, Chief.”

Wilde stepped aside as the mud-brothers climbed onto their getaway vehicle, hoisted his bag and turned downhill. The Gaoians melted back into the shadows as though they’d never been and the ATV skidded away down the track again as abruptly as it came. The Warrant Officer driving it hadn’t spoken a word the whole time, but if anything he looked even less pleased now than he had on arrival, which wasn’t really surprising considering he now had three humanoid middens along for the ride.

For Wilde’s part, there was dinner waiting on top of that distant peak, and no mere intervening terrain was going to stop him.

“Well. Come on, lads. Last one in buys the first round,” he said.

They set off back down the hill.

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Senior Airman Rihanna Miller

“Hey, Jack.”

Tisdale looked up and gave her a small smile. He was half-way through changing into his work clothes in the technicians’ locker room, and they had the place pretty much to themselves. They’d agreed to meet late to go over the suit checklist together: Deacon still wanted them to have it memorized by the start of Crush Week, which was getting perilously close.

“Hey.”

“How bad was the hangover in the end?”

He shrugged. “Wasn’t so bad, really. Thurrsto got me all hydrated, gave me painkillers, I ate a Snickers, slept it off. How was Girls’ Night?”

She rolled her eyes, pulled a crocheted bright blue beanie from her pocket and threw it in his lap. “Turns out Deacon and Arés are kinda boring. We had like two drinks then went back to Deacon’s place, watched girly shit on TV and knitted.”

He inspected the hat. “That… doesn’t sound like your style.”

“Yeah, no shit,” she snorted, and headed for her locker. “But actually, I kinda enjoyed it. It’s weird, crochet actually works a lot like threading the links on the MASS’ scale layer. And hey, my favorite boy gets a free hat out of it.”

She heard Jack’s awkwardness, and turned just enough to give him a reassuring smile. “Sorry if I was kind of a jerk on Friday night.”

“Were you?” he sounded honestly confused.

“Well, y’know. I’m not used to boys turning me down.”

He sighed. “Look, it’s not that… I mean, I’m not…”

“Chill.” She turned fully around to look at him, then sat down beside him and gave him a hug. “If you don’t think of me that way, that’s fine. I promise.”

He returned the hug, a touch awkwardly but it was definitely heartfelt. “Thanks.”

“I do have a question, though.”

“Uh, sure. Ask.”

“I’d like to hear about your sister. And not from other people, I wanna hear it in your own words.”

Jack sighed. “It’s… hard to talk about.”

“I know. But… I want to understand where you’re coming from, Jack.”

He turned the beanie over in his hands a couple of times, staring far through and past it in a way that said he wasn’t looking at it at all, it was just something to keep his hands busy. She was about to give him a pat on the shoulder and reassure him that it could wait for another day when he finally stirred himself, took a deep breath and started talking.

“…I was really… I guess I was angry at her for a long time.” He let out a sad little half-laugh. “How fucked up is that? She was… she was murdered and I was angry at her for it.” His eyes were already getting the distant, bright look of a guy who was gonna cry in the near future. “It’s only been… I only started to work it all out in the last couple of years…”

Miller put an arm around his shoulders. “Still raw, huh?”

He shrugged, and confirmed her prediction by wiping the corner of his eye. “I think it always will be.”

“Tell me about her.”

He paused for a few seconds, thought, then nodded and launched into the saddest goddamn story she’d ever heard..

It began with the words, “She was a lot like you…”

Date Point 15y5m4d AV
Peake Lowlands, Northwest of Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Of all the things Julian had experienced over the winding weirdness that was his adult life, he was beginning to think that the next few minutes were going to qualify among the most traumatic and memory-inducing of them all. Given some of the secret details of his Rite of Manhood with the Ten’Gewek, the bits that neither Professor Hurt nor his women were allowed to witness…that was definitely saying something.

Yan and Vemik didn’t have the faintest clue what to do with soap, and so Julian was going to have to demonstrate like a parent did with their kids. Hopefully, “monkey-see” would be good enough. He shuddered briefly at the thought and snapped back to the present.

[“Hold out your hands, please.”]

They did, warily, and Julian squirted a healthy dollop into their palms. Yan poked at it dubiously with a furrowed brow. “What is this…soap? Made from what?”

Hoeff had more or less pressure-washed all the mud off the cavebros and they were standing in the middle of the parking lot, shivering next to the electric heaters that he had thoughtfully brought out. But the two idiots were so goddamned smelly there was no way on God’s green…Cimbrean…that Julian would allow them into his home.

Time to man up and scrub down.

“Traditionally it’s made from animal fat, and—”

“Really?” Yan dipped his tongue in it experimentally then gagged and spat.

“…But that doesn’t mean it’s food, Yan.”

Yan spat again. “Taste horrible!” he declared. “How you get bad air-taste off with bad soap-taste?”

“You’ll see. Now…I guess, watch me, okay?”

Demonstrating how soap worked. Somehow, that was the least dignified moment in his entire life, which had once included being strapped down naked and afraid to a metal examination table for three straight days.

He sighed, lathered up, scrubbed himself, then Hoeff applied the hose with extra sadistic glee.

Vemik got the idea pretty quickly, and of course started experimenting with it which inevitably led to the discovery of bubbles. If it distracted him enough to get through the ordeal, then who was Julian to complain?

Yan merely looked wet, miserable and grumpy. He gave his limbs a few desultory swipes in a vague imitation of what Julian had done, but mostly just stood there dripping.

Not good enough.

“You rolled in shit, Yan. I’m not going to pretend like I can tell you what to do, but I will absolutely not welcome you into my home if you don’t get clean.”

“…Fine.” This time he was a bit more diligent with his crest. Good thing they had a decent multi-purpose soap on hand. Explaining the difference between soap, shampoo, and conditioner would have been a trip into one of the lower circles of Hell. The really cold one.

Hoeff showed off his unexpectedly thoughtful side again when the towels turned out to be warm. Or maybe that was just because he’d left them next to the heaters. With him it was often hard to tell.

Yan tasted the air once they were dry. “…Flowers? And nuts?”

Hoeff shrugged. “It’s just that Doctor Bronner’s stuff. I dunno, I grabbed it off the shelf.”

“They don’t know who Doctor Bronner is, Chimp,” Julian pointed out.

“…Right, yeah. He’s a complete fucking madman, but he makes great soap.”

Yan grunted. “As you say.”

That was his way of politely saying ‘whatever, bro’ and they knew it, so Julian decided to let the subject drop.

Vemik shook himself out, scrubbed as much water out of his crest as he could manage, shook again then turned his head sideways and thumped water out of his ear. “I don’t like showers.” He reached for his loincloth which Hoeff had hosed while nobody was looking.

“That wasn’t a shower, that was a hosing-down,” Julian corrected him. He grabbed his clean clothes from off the table and jumped into them. “For a shower, we’d have hot water. Much better.”

Hoeff chuckled. “Bah! You soft city boys and your luxuries.”

“…Excuse me?” Julian quirked an eyebrow and half-grinned.

“Oh look at the time, we gotta get going!” Hoeff’s troll-grin was its usual evil best. “Get your freshly-hosed and pampered asses in the van, y’all.”

“You’re gonna pay for that later tonight, Hoeff.”

The van rocked as Yan heaved his way up into it with Hoeff holding the door for him. “Before or after your manicure?”

“After. A man’s gotta enjoy time with his two smokin’ hot girlfriends, after all.”

“…You win this round, Etsicitty.”

The drive back to their home was a short one. Julian spent the time furiously texting Xiù to learn what was going on.

By the time they arrived, he was no longer in a good mood.

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Hell, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Ray had to give him credit: When Jamie Choi made a spear, he made a hell of a spear.

He’d scavenged some parts from Dauntless to make them, in the form of repurposed and straightened Titanium alloy ribs, dug out from the rigid parts of the ship’s force-carrying structure between the pressure hull and its outer skin. Each was lightweight, stiff and strong, and Jamie had added a kind of cross-shaped reinforcement behind the tip to stop an impaled Hunter from forcing its way down the shaft.

The last step had been to make them sharp enough that Ray could have shaved her legs for the first time in years.

In short, anything getting stabbed by one of those spears was going to stay stabbed, in a big way. If their enemy had been human, Ray might even have felt a frisson of sympathy.

Using those ribs had been a smart choice too—Normally they held up the exterior armor plating, which was rated against micrometeor impacts. Without anything to hold them up, they’d come away easily to form the asked-for shields.

It was a weird collision of space-age and Roman. The shields were oblong, slightly curved and surprisingly lightweight for their size. The straps had been cannibalized from the cargo bay, a few sharp edges had been made safe with seat upholstery and Choi had even worked in a jury-rigged cattle prod.

Having built the spears and shields, Jamie was now spending his afternoons shoulder-to-shoulder with Conley and Cook, drilling with the new weapons. It was a sight that would have brought a nostalgic tear to Ray’s eye if she wasn’t pretty much solid jade by now. Still, it was good to see some of the old camaraderie and teamwork revived.

This was what she’d known would happen.

The surprise was Chase. Holly Chase, who’d always eaten the bare minimum necessary to keep herself alive and no more than that. Holly Chase their tiny, quiet, mousy little mascot had turned into a goddamn lioness. She was forcing down as much Hot as her stomach could hold, hauling her sack truck with its heavy ammo cans over rough ground until she could haul no more, then resting just long enough to let her keep hauling.

Cook had advised her (or rather snapped at her) to lay off for forty-eight hours, and she’d glared at him but listened, and she was pretty obviously suffering now. Ray didn’t want to think how many of her muscles were pulled and what kind of aching agony she had endured, but she was reaching the end of her forty-eight hour break and looked eager to get back to her training.

She was bearing it in silence as Ray, Spears and Berry did a thorough check of their weaponry. The guns were now clean, oiled and ready, and the tedious job of loading ammo into the magazines was underway.

Even Berry was reaping the benefits. His nervous stammer had always been less prominent when he was slightly distracted, such as when he was working with his hands. Tonight, it was about as good as Ray had ever heard it.

“Be honest, guys. How well d-d’you think this plan is gonna work?”

Ray opened her mouth to answer, but was beaten to the punch by Chase.

“Berry… I honestly don’t care at this point,” she said. “One way or the other, I can’t stay here any longer.”

“Fuck the other way, though,” Spears said firmly. “I don’t intend to go at this half-assed.”

“Just so long as it’s not another five years of planning and scouting and making sure everything is perfect,” Ray advised.

“It won’t be. We have motivation and initiative on our side right now. We won’t waste that, I promise.”

“So… b-back to my question, then…” Berry set down a full magazine and picked up one of the empties.

Ray thought about it. “For the fight on the ground to capture that ship… I think we have a solid idea what we’re doing. We storm the ramp while the Hunters are feasting, seize the ship… if we can just lock them out and take off, great, if we have to kill them all first then I think we have everything we need to do that…”

“Ideally, we should just steal the ship and go,” Spears said. “The less fighting we do, the less risk we take. And I don’t care what Cook says.”

“Cook’s on board,” Ray assured him. “We aren’t gonna have a problem with him.”

Berry lowered his magazine and watched the three legionaries training at the other side of their camp. “…You sure? He looks ready t-… to murder everything.”

“You would be too, if you’d had to do his job this whole time,” Ray muttered. “Trust me. He won’t fuck things up. I don’t think anyone will.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Come on, Berry, we were a team once. We can be a team again for this,” Spears encouraged him.

“And afterwards?” Chase asked.

“I think we’re all gonna go deal with this shit in our own way,” Spears said. “Me, I’m gonna retire to someplace with beaches and clear water and go snorkeling every day.”

“Sounds idyllic…” Ray sighed. “I dunno. It’ll probably involve… I dunno. Somewhere I’m surrounded by people and life and noise and… and a good shower. Or a bath big enough for three.”

“Snowboarding,” Chase said. Suddenly she was a long way away. “I’m gonna go snowboarding. I wanna feel snow on my face again.”

They all looked at Berry, who froze up, tried to say something, gave up and simply shrugged with an apologetic smile.

“Don’t really know, huh?” Spears asked. He smiled when Berry nodded. “Can’t say I blame… you hear that?”

They all went quiet, including the three spearmen. There was definitely the sound of engines on the wind.

They killed the lights immediately. There was no fire to put out—Cook made the Hot in a large metal basin he’d hammered out of deck plating and immersed in a boiling spring—and sprang to their positions.

“Herds?” Spears whispered.

Conley was at his side in moments. “They’re avoiding the area. Four or five hunts in the last month.”

“Shit… Okay, with me.”

They grabbed their weapons, Chase grabbed her truck, and the seven of them slipped away from their camp, out into the maze of canyons that hopefully disguised their presence.

“We’ve been here years, they wouldn’t have found us now of all times, right?” Choi asked. “That’s just…”

“Don’t say it,” Ray advised. Their luck was already apocalyptically bad as evidenced by the mere fact of where they were. She didn’t need an extra jinx on top of that.

They scurried in pairs up the steep steps they’d hand-carved into the sandstone and up to the watch hide. The last up was Cook, helping Chase with the ammo.

One of the big ships was out over the grasslands, patrolling low while greenish-white fans of light strobed across the terrain from its belly. From where Ray was sitting, it looked like a sickly, lazy, dome-backed evil beetle of some kind.

“Spears, if one of those scans comes our way…” Conley hissed.

Spears’ reply was whispered through gritted teeth. “Shut. Up.”

They shrank down instinctively as one of the wandering lights strayed close to their hiding spot. “Close” was relative—it probably passed hundreds of yards away—but the ship was truly immense, as big as an oil tanker or larger. Its sheer mass meant that whatever scientific secrets kept it aloft were shaking the world, deep in Ray’s guts. Something that big just shouldn’t float, so whatever it did seemed immediately on top of them.

There was nothing to do except hold their breath and pray.

There was a resonant change in the air, not a noise but a force felt in the bones, and the ship settled onto a relatively flat patch of land with a devastating seismic THUMP. The sense of immense forces being casually tied in knots around them faded, and a kind of shocked silence replaced it as if the whole planet couldn’t quite believe what it had just witnessed.

Very, very slowly, Ray crept to the front of the hide and used her rifle’s scope to get a better view of the action.

Massive doors were opening along the ship’s flanks, accompanied by the unfurling of ramps as wide as highways….Down which came people.

Not humans, but still definitely people. Ray could hear the panicked shouting, see clothes and capes and satchels and jewelry. There were Domain critters, Vgork, Kwmbwrw, a dozen more she didn’t recognize.

There were some conspicuous absences, though. No Guvnurag, and no Gao that she could see. Very few Corti, no Qinis.

The Hunters seemed to be enjoying themselves, tormenting their new releases. Pulse cannon fire hammered down from all over the ship, carefully aimed to deliberately miss the stampede but hit just close enough to shower them in mud and gravel. Each shot made the panicking mass squeal and try to get away, only to be driven back in the opposite direction by another detonation.

There were an awful lot of them. A football stadiums’ worth at least, maybe two. And Ray could only see the near side of the ship.

“Shit, if any of them head into the canyons…” Conley muttered.

“They’ll find Dauntless,” Choi agreed.

“Shhh!” Chase reminded them. Perhaps unnecessarily considering the immense noise outside, but why take risks?

Ray watched the flood of fleeing aliens turn into a mere river, then a stream, a trickle, a few stragglers whom the Hunters amused themselves by needlessly obliterating. Several hundred definitely had been heading toward the canyons when they left her field of view, but right now that wasn’t important.

The Hunter ship closed its doors. That same basso profundo feeling in the nerves and sinews returned, cranked up until Ray’s teeth were humming with it no matter how hard she clenched them, and it swaggered back into the air. It accelerated in a way that sneered at concepts like gravity, air resistance and mass, and vanished into the night sky almost too quick for her to follow.

In its wake, it left only the panicked, desperate, hopeless moaning of thousands of new damned souls taking their first steps in Hell.

Ray backed away from the front of the hide and turned away.

“Well… Shit,” she said.

Chase had gone pale. “Does this change the plan?” she asked.

“No fuckin’ way, we’re still getting off’a here,” Cook said.

“The hell it doesn’t!” Conley retorted. “I could maybe rationalize throwing one of the old herds under the bus, they aren’t really people any longer. But those out there are—”

“—Are just fresh meat to the Hunters,” Ray interrupted him levelly. “But Conley, what do you think we’re gonna do? Those people out there are unarmed, panicking and desperate. What can we do for them? Lead an insurgency?”

Cook scoffed. “Le French Resistance!”

“That’s La Résistance Française,” Choi corrected him nervously. He shrugged sheepishly when everybody gave him the same ‘is-that-really-important-right-now?’ stare. “…Sorry.”

Spears nodded. “Ray’s right. Those poor bastards have no hope at all.”

“They have one hope,” Ray disagreed. “If we get off this shitheap, maybe we can get some kind of help.”

“Right, like the Dominion or humanity or anyone stand a hope in hell of riding in like the fucking cavalry and saving those people,” Cook said. “Hell of a long shot, Ray.”

“A long shot’s better than no hope.”

Cook shrugged. “Hey. So long as we’re still getting outta here, I’m on board with whatever.”

“There’s still a big difference between sacrificing a few… I dunno. A few animals who could be people versus sacrificing actual people…” Conley said.

Unusually, Berry spoke up. “Needs must.” He shrugged when they all glanced at him. “Omelettes, eggs,” he added.

Ray nodded at him to acknowledge his point. “They’re all dead anyway, Conley. Maybe if we sacrifice a few now, that’ll change. Or maybe, God help me, I’m still willing to do it. If it means anybody gets out of this mess…”

Conley gave her an uncomfortable look. “Ray…”

She shrugged. “Maybe that’s fucking cowardly, I don’t know. And I don’t care. The plan’s unchanged. Right, Spears?”

Spears nodded. “Right.”

They sat and said nothing for a minute. The screaming, braying, hooting and hollering outside had faded to terrified silence.

Chase finally broke the silence. “We should… get back to Dauntless,” she suggested. “Before any of them find it.”

“Good call,” Spears agreed. “Berry, help her get the truck back down.”

Berry nodded.

“And what if some of the newbies have found our camp?” Conley asked.

Cook was already heading back down. “Then I guess we eat well tonight.”

“Cook-!” Chase looked like she was about to throw up.

“Ignore him,” Ray advised.

“But-”

“We all cope with this in our own way, Holly.”

Chase watched him go, then heaved her truck over for Berry to help her. “Are we coping?” she asked.

Ray shrugged.

“We’re still here,” she said, and that at last ended the conversation.

They descended the steps in silence.

++End Chapter 43++

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The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 44: “Samsara”

Chapter 44: Samsara

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
High Mountain Fortress, Gao

President Arthur Sartori

“I get what ‘yer sayin’, Mister President…but this all seems like doin’ a mile o’ walkin’ just to cross the room.”

Daar’s straightforwardness was refreshing, mostly, but right now it was combining with the rose-tinted goggles he often wore with regard to human nature to put an obstacle in their path.

The two Whitecrests in the room—Champion Genshi and Father Regaari—both traded an amused look behind the Great Father’s back, but said nothing. Nevertheless, their expressions were reassuring. This wasn’t a psychological species thing, this was just Daar being…extraordinarily honest in the way he conducted himself.

For his part, Sartori acknowledged Daar’s objection with a nod, but threw in a conciliatory shrug. “This is an old game in American politics. We call it ‘Wagging The Dog.’ You make the tail wag, the rest of the dog follows.”

Daar sighed. “We went to all that effort to get that footage, and y’ain’t even gonna use it officially? People died!”

“Which is why I don’t give a corkscrew shit about using it officially, I care about using it effectively,” Sartori shot back. Against any of his human counterparts such straightforward vulgarity wouldn’t have gone down well. In Daar’s case, it was practically required. “That’s why I want to leak it. If we put it out there ourselves then it’s propaganda, it’s what ‘The Man’ wants the public to think.”

“American culture places great stress on distrust of the government, Great Father,” Regaari reminded Daar.

Sartori nodded. “For good reason. Governments are dangerous. But it leads to stuff like the moon landing conspiracy theorists and 9⁄11 Truthers and…a lot of noise and paranoia. But if it’s leaked, then that means The Man doesn’t want people to know it, which means it’s unquestionably true. And then because it looks like ammunition they can use against me, my critics and opponents will pick it up. They’ll act like I’ve been half-assing the Hunter problem and insist I do more.”

Daar scratched his ear. “Won’t that hurt you, though? Undermine ‘yer authority an’ public opinion an’ such?”

“But it’ll bolster my agenda,” Sartori retorted. “I’m never more powerful than when my opponents are demanding that I do the things I already want to do. And then when my time in office is up, they’re stuck: If they win, they have to pursue my policy or else backtrack; If my party wins, then the next guy gets to carry the baton, nice and easy without opposition.”

Daar considered that for a moment with a thoughtful look on his shaggy head.

“Well, I ain’t so hung up on m’self that I don’t understand the value of military diversion or deception…and I ain’t gonna pretend like I can politically out-scheme Genshi. If he thinks ‘yer shits are golden, I’m gonna trust his advice.”

Sartori met the Whitecrest Champion’s eye, and found himself wishing that he could pull off that distinctive little ear-flick Gaoians had. It could say almost anything, though in Genshi’s case it usually filled in for an arched eyebrow. Genshi was definitely amused.

“I think it’s a good plan, My Father,” he said, urbanely.

“Right.” Daar shook his mane out and thumped down to all fours. “I swear I’m gettin’ too old for these shenanigans…anyway. I can’t tell ‘ya what t’do Mister President, but I gotta make sure you unnerstand somethin’.”

Daar padded over to Sartori and looked him dead in the eye. “I had ‘ta light three pyres ‘cuz o’ that footage, Arthur. I will not be happy if their lives were wasted.”

Sartori nodded, not breaking eye contact. He wasn’t the junior partner in this conversation, and he wasn’t about to give a subservient answer. “Agreed,” he said.

The change in Daar’s stance was subtle, but pleased. “Right. Now if ‘ya excuse me, I ain’t lifted since yesterday an’ Naydra is comin’ back tonight. A Stoneback’s gotta manage his priorities…” The smug waggle in his huge wolf-like ears was almost too much to take.

Sartori chuckled. “Of course. I should return to Earth. Thank you for receiving me, Daar. It’s been…quite an experience.”

“‘Yer welcome, and ‘yer welcome anytime you wanna visit. How…” Daar paused, looked at Regaari for a spare moment, and looked back at Sartori. “Are the cherry trees in blossom?”

“Sorry, no. They peaked in mid-March this year and the flowering is over with.”

“Durn,” Daar grumbled and padded over towards the doorway towards his private gym. “One ‘o these days, I’d really like to smell that.”

“Mister President?” Sartori turned and saw Champion Genshi holding the door for him. “The jump array is charged.”

Sartori nodded, exchanged a last mutual nod of respect with Daar, and allowed himself to be escorted out of the room.

“You made an impression,” Genshi said once the door was closed.

Sartori smiled as they took the long stairs down High Mountain’s keep tower. The building felt heavy with age, and the Gaoians had done a masterful job of incorporating modern demands like the plumbing, power, air conditioning and communications infrastructure without diminishing its historic gravitas. The ducting, cabling and pipework was all cunningly hidden in wooden features that looked like part of the fortress’ ancient structure. Human architects could learn a thing or two.

“I’m glad,” he said. “He’s made an impression too. I’ll have to watch my language when I meet the German chancellor tomorrow.”

Genshi chittered heartily at that. They descended the steps in comfortable silence for a few floors until they were on ground level. “If you’ll indulge me a question, Mister President…?” he asked.

“Shoot.”

“It’s my understanding that you became President shortly after the attack on Capitol Station, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“Which was more than five years ago now, by Earth’s calendar.”

“Yup.”

“And yet…despite the fact that a presidential term is four years, you’re still in your first term?”

“Technically.” Sartori smiled. He’d had to explain this one a few times. “The Amendment dictating how long a president can hold the office states that I can’t serve more than two full terms, you see…”

“Ah yes. The…Twenty-second Amendment, I believe?”

Sartori nodded. “Good memory.”

Genshi flicked his ear, this time the equivalent of a small smile. “Xenopolitics was my specialty, before I became Champion. I’m sure you and I could have a fascinating conversation about your Constitution…but the most important word in that sentence was ‘two full terms,’ yes?”

“Exactly,” Sartori smiled. “I served as my predecessor’s Vice-President for more than half his term, then the old man stepped down after Capitol Station. I finished the remainder of what was technically his term, then ran with Bill Hendricks to launch what is technically my first term.”

“What led him to step down?”

“Health reasons. He was eighty-seven and diabetic, and he had a heart attack about a week after Capitol Station. Just a small one, but in private he said to me, ‘Art,’ he said, ‘this here’s an honest-to-God space war and I’m too damn old to see it through. If the armada comes tomorrow, I might just drop down dead.’ So he stepped down, went back to his place on the lake…Maddy—his wife, the First Lady—went out to take him an ice tea seven months later and found him passed away with a fishing rod in his hands, God rest his soul. I keep in touch with his family, though.”

“If it’s not an impertinent question…who would you like to succeed you?” Genshi asked. “Hendricks?”

“…No. Bill’s a good VP, but he doesn’t want it. I think Margaret White. Hell, she might even have beaten me if she’d run against me.”

“Ah! And America will finally get its long-awaited first female president,” Genshi chittered. “Though from what I’ve heard, Mrs. White would be unimpressed to hear me say that.”

“She’d chew your ears off,” Sartori chuckled.

That provoked an interesting reaction. It was just for a moment and Sartori almost didn’t see it, but his words clearly had a loaded meaning in Gaoian culture. Genshi was too composed to give away much, but he came within a whisker of flinching or stiffening.

“That’s a…colorful metaphor, Mister President.”

“I guess it is.” Their perambulations finally brought them to the jump array deep in High Mountain’s bowels, where the presidential retinue were waiting and ready. The Array was loaded and charged…he could return to Earth at any time.

Something made him pause and look around. He was on an alien planet, he realized. He’d been treating it like just another nation, but in that moment it struck him that he was incalculably far from home, surrounded by aliens, negotiating the fates of interstellar societies and the course of galactic history. And the urbane, sleek creature he’d been making small-talk with was the product of evolution that owed nothing to Earth and aligned with human biology only because nature kept falling back on the same solutions that worked.

He wondered if he’d ever come back. Maybe see Gao in later years once it had been rebuilt, maybe go skiing…skiing in low gravity would be interesting.

He turned to Genshi. “It’s been a pleasure and a privilege, Champion Genshi,” he said politely, and offered a hand.

Genshi returned a paw, and they shook. “For me more than for you, Mister President,” he replied.

Sartori nodded, smiled, and turned away.

Time to get back to the grind.

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Clara Brown

Awkward didn’t begin to cover it.

The boys were adorable in a home-schooled, cloistered, helicopter-mom-afflicted kinda dorky way. And Allison was being pretty darn adorable herself as she got to know them.

Ramsey was the more talkative of the two. “Will we get to meet the Ten’Gewek?”

Allison gave him a fond smile. “Maybe later, if your mother says it’s okay. And if they get back before you go to bed.”

Your mother, Clara noted. The woman sitting silently in the corner couldn’t have looked more like an older Allison if she’d tried, but still she was their mother and not Allison’s.

She was polite, sure, even though she constantly glanced at her sons as if she expected them to somehow lose an arm if she didn’t check on them every five seconds, and she obviously wasn’t paying attention to the movie at all.

In fact, she gave the impression of not really approving of the movie either, which was an absolute romp as far as Clara was concerned. It had huge choreographed battles, a heart-tearing romance, balletic kung fu and a soaring orchestral score. It was rated for kids Ramsey and Tristan’s age, but Amanda Buehler seemed like the kind of mom who thought Saturday morning cartoons were too violent.

“They seem very…” Amanda paused to choose her words carefully. “…Uh…From what I saw on TV, they’re very…Earthy.”

“They’re stone-age hunters and warriors. And yeah, they smell like a tannery sometimes.” Allison shrugged. “But they’re good people. Yan’s quite a charmer, actually.”

“Oh. Good. That’s…That’s good.”

Awkward.

Thank God for Grandma Ericsson’s secret cheese dip recipe. The secret ingredient was cumin, but the trick was to make a lot of it. Clara prided herself that she would never, ever leave people scraping the bottom of the bowl to get at the last of it while there were still dry chips left.

And God, how she’d missed making it. To her delight, Dane couldn’t get enough either.

Then again, it had been a while since they’d last cuddled up and watched a movie together. She resolved to do it more often.

The movie’s climactic showdown literally involved the protagonist and her husband in a spiralling duell atop of a dragon in flight, which as a concept went far past ridiculous but the cinematography pulled it off beautifully. It certainly held the boys enraptured, and Xiù was sitting next to Allison and quietly copying the choreography as if she was memorizing every move.

Actually, she probably was.

It had gone dark by now: the nightly rains had swept in, and apparently Allison had relented on letting her relatives stay because there had been no talk of cabs or hotels, and a little muttered talk of bedding, mattresses and dinner. Xiù glanced over her shoulder and reluctantly tore herself away from the movie when headlights strobed in through the blinds and cast water-pebbled shadows on the back wall.

Clara decided to follow her. “Is it me, or are things super awkward in there?” she asked as soon as they were through in the kitchen.

Xiù half-laughed. “Hmm. Do you have anything stronger than ‘awkward’?”

There were thumps and bangs from outside and then, weirdly, the sound of a van driving away. A few seconds later, Julian backed in through the door carrying a shallow cardboard box full of groceries.

“Thanks.” Xiù took the box off him and kissed his cheek. “Where are—?”

“Chimp’s taken ‘em back to the base. They got into a dairy farm and ate the bull, raw, so…”

“Ew.” Clara grimaced.

“Yeah. So, they’re going through a biofilter, just to be safe.”

Xiù put the box down on the table and turned back to him with several expressions warring for dominance on her face. “Why did they—?”

Julian shrugged. “They were hungry. Hey, Clara.”

She gave him a friendly hug. “Hey.”

Julian took off his jacket and hung it up. “So…what’s she like?”

Xiù made an exasperated noise. “I don’t know how that woman is Allison’s mom.”

On cue, the sound of a raised voice filtered through from the next room. Xiù hung her head for a second then slipped through the door to calm down whatever drama was unfolding in there.

Julian watched her go. “That bad, huh?”

“Well, she looks like Allison,” Clara conceded. “But…eh…That’s about where the similarities end. I guess the apple fell far from the tree, huh?”

“The apple got the hell as far away from the tree as she could,” Julian said. “…I’d better go introduce myself.”

He tilted his head when Clara laughed softly. “…What?”

She shook her head at him. “Never mind. Go say hi. I’m gonna heat up some more dip.”

On that slightly confusing note, Julian shrugged, ran a cursory swipe of his fingers through his untamable hair to get it out of his face, and followed the sound of Xiù’s calming voice.

Things quieted down when he opened the door. They stayed quiet as he closed it behind him. There wasn’t much to note until several minutes later when he stepped back out, quiet, calm-faced…and utterly fucking livid.

Clara was chowing down on chips at the kitchen table while playing around with her phone. Wordlessly, she pushed the bowl toward him, and he reached over, pawed a fistful of chips out of it and sampled the cheese dip like he was smoking a cigarette to calm his nerves.

“I think you might just be in love with two living saints,” she declared after minute filled only with crunching.

Julian let out a huge breath and chuckled softly to himself. “Nah. Allison’s gonna fill something full of holes up at the base later and Xiù’s gonna kick the crap out of my punching bag.” He grinned, “But yeah. Close enough.”

Clara glanced at the closed door. “Xiù’s gonna do that? Our Xiù? The kung fu magical space elf buddhist princess?”

“Hell yeah! You do know that half the reason I slabbed up was so I wouldn’t keep embarrassing myself against her in sparring, right? She once knocked me on my ass so hard I bruised a rib.”

“Well…okay, but I’ve never known her to get angry.”

Julian smiled. “I have. She literally threw a guy out an airlock.” He saw Clara’s expression. “…Into a river. We weren’t in space at the time. But if you’ve never seen her angry it’s because you never did anything to deserve it.”

“I guess I’ll take your word for it…what about Allison? Why up at the base?”

“The only other gun range belongs to the cops. It’s maybe taking advantage of our friendships with the HEAT, but…hell, I might go shootin’ too. Or lifting. I dunno. God, those poor kids.”

“Mhmm.” Clara ruefully studied the last dregs of cheese sauce, ran a finger around the bottom of the bowl to get the last of it, and licked it clean. “Still…I guess it’s an opportunity.”

“For what?”

“To show those boys there’s another kind of life. Y’know, like the one you guys built for yourselves. Get them out from under their mother’s thumb a bit, y’know?”

Julian sighed. “The way I hear it, their mother’s less than half the problem. I dunno if ever want to meet this Jacob fella,” Julian growled, “because I’m awfully tempted to just break him in half.” Nowadays he could do it too, which wasn’t exactly a comfortable truth.

“That kinda thing might fly on the planet of the apes, but here in civilization we at least let a man wipe his shoes before tearing him a backup asshole,” Clara reminded him. He snorted a laugh and headed for the fridge, but was brought up short at the sound of the van pulling back into the driveway.

“Speaking of the apes…”

Clara perked up. “Oh, awesome! I’ve been itching to meet them all day!”

“Oh, they’re a hoot. Literally in fact, if you get them excited. With Vemik all you need to do is basically acknowledge his existence and say hi. Yan’s a bit more reserve—”

The door…opened. Or rather, it was ignored: the second the lock beeped and the way was clear, a tan-and-blaze-orange blur bowled through it, deepening a small dent in the wall where the door-handle had obviously impacted a couple of times already. The room filled with a confusing medley of scents: newly tanned leather, flowery shower gel, leaf litter, barnyard and wood shavings, with a strong hint of locker room musk.

“Jooyun! We met Bozo again! WURF!!!”

Overwhelming didn’t even begin to be the right word. Clara froze up entirely as what could only be described as a short, be-mohawked talking gorilla juddered to a halt in front of her and beamed at her with a toothy, fang-laden grin.

“Hi!”

“Ah…Hi!” Some instinct made her offer him the bowl of chips, and she thereby earned herself an instant friend.

“Ooh! Chips!”

…And there went the bowl. There were a few seconds of gleeful crunching and then Vemik apparently realized—prompted, in this case, by Julian smacking him in the arm—that he was being rude and sheepishly handed the bowl back.

“…Sorry.”

Clara took them back with a smile. “It’s okay. Chips have that effect on me, too.”

This earned her a trill with a hooting sound on the end, which she guess was probably the Ten’Gewek version of a belly-laugh. She selected a chip, dipped it in the cheese sauce and let him get it out of his system.

Naturally, this piqued Vemik’s curiosity and within seconds it was clear she’d converted a new disciple to the Church of Dip.

This bought Clara a moment’s peace to appreciate Yan’s entrance.

Where Vemik had been a ball of manic happiness, Yan swaggered into the room, turning sideways to fit through the door. He looked like the biggest, brute-est thing she’d ever laid eyes on until she saw his eyes, which were warm and intelligent. He saw them flick to her piercings, which he considered with interest for a second before approaching.

“You are Clara?” he asked.

“That’s me…” Clara said, feeling a little wary as she put down the chips. Yan nodded, then engulfed her hand in both of his. His skin was as hard, rough and tough as a scouring pad, but his hands were warm.

“Jooyun, Awisun, Shyow tell me, you make Misfit. Meaning, they find us because of you. Meaning, we live because you make strong ship,” he said.

Clara opened her mouth to protest that she’d just been a team leader, that the actual work had involved dozens or even hundreds of people…but remembered Allison’s warning that Ten’Gewek in general and Yan in particular didn’t really respect modesty. So instead she laid her hand on top of Yan’s and said “Thank you. I’ll…let everybody who helped me know what you said.”

This seemed to satisfy. Yan grinned, then reached over and half-empted the bowl of chips in one giant fistful. “So! Steel in your face?”

“Uh, yeah!”

“Is…interesting. Look strange. Steel anywhere else?”

Julian choked on the water he’d been halfway through swigging and Clara blushed furiously. “Uh…that’s…not really…I don’t want to say!”

“Ah! Yes, then.” Yan trilled, then softened when he considered how red her face was. “…I say something wrong.”

“You know what humans are like, buddy,” Julian said, wiping water off his shirt. “We’re a bit more…uh…careful about our bodies.”

“Hmm. Scared of them, you mean. Wear all this clo-thing when not cold.”

“Says the man who hates water,” Julian teased him. “But yeah, that’s a personal question.”

“Hmm.” Yan at least could be a gentleman, and gave Clara an apologetic look. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Clara was surprised to find she meant it. She really couldn’t expect an alien to completely understand human etiquette, after all.

“But…is personal question to ask why you have steel in your face?”

“I…just like the way it looks,” Clara said.

“Oh.” Yan shrugged, and that seemed to be the end of his interest. He confiscated the rest of the chips and then rolled inexorably in the direction of the living room.

“Awisun’s mother and brothers come, yes?” he asked.

“Uh, yes…?” Julian agreed. “It might not be—”

Too late. Yan opened the door and headed through, instantly killing the conversation in there. There were the awed sounds of a couple of boys meeting about the biggest and strongest man ever and then the door closed behind him.

Julian blinked at the door, then shrugged and wordlessly handed Clara a replacement bag of chips.

“Y’know…you coulda just said ‘no’,” he pointed out.

“I guess?” Clara cleared her throat. “I mean, the last time I told a little white lie to an ET he was a Gaoian, and he called me on it right away.”

“Gaoians smell better than humans!” Vemik said.

“Uh…”

“He means they’ve got a better sense of smell,” Julian translated.

“Better than ours!” Vemik said cheerfully. “Ten’Gewek have no nose! How do we smell? Terrible!”

“Yeah you do, cavemonkey.”

Vemik beamed happily, then, following the sound of laughter, followed Yan into the living room which was presumably getting incredibly crowded by now.

Sure enough, Dane got the hell out of there at long last.

“…The movie ended,” he explained.

Clara giggled and slipped an arm around his waist. “Sure.”

He kissed her forehead then surveyed the table. “…Is there any guac?”

“Ugh, you and your goddamn avocados…” she grumbled affectionately, but uncovered it for him. He shrugged, kissed her again and claimed some chips too.

“So…now what?” he asked. “‘Cuz I’m pretty sure Allison might just commit a murder if she has to endure her mother for too long.”

“Hell if I know. I only just got back,” Julian grumbled. He leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “But if I know Al, she’ll wanna fix this, not just patch it.”

“If it can be fixed,” Clara pointed out. “I mean, we’re talking a whole lifetime of hurt here. Sometimes, a thing gets so broken it can’t be fixed.”

Julian shrugged, but an affectionate expression crossed his face as he looked toward the living room. “Tell that to Allison.”

“Heh. Yeah.”

She and Dane glanced at each other, and arrived at an unspoken agreement via spousal telepathy. It was time to go.

“I’m getting kinda tired, and I think right now we’d just get in the way,” she said. “We’ll have a movie night some other time, without the drama, yeah?”

Julian nodded, and a tired smile that was almost a laugh warmed his face. “Yeah. See you guys when I see you.”

He showed them to the door and let them out with a hug for Clara and a slamming handshake for Dane. Clara settled into the passenger seat, took off her New rocks and put her feet up on the dash, then fluffed her hair out to try and relax herself as Dane pulled out into traffic.

“…Wow,” she said at last.

“Yeah.”

“Those three just attract weirdness, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” Dane agreed. He flicked the radio onto SKID and turned it down to the point where it was barely audible. The late-night program was devoted to picking a year and playing the top twenty tracks from it, which in this case meant Phil Collins.

♪…there’s just an empty space/And there’s nothing left here to remind me/Just the memory of your face…♫

“It’s weird though,” he said. “You know, most times when I’ve met a total drama magnet, they were the problem.”

“Uh-huh.”

“…You worried this might hurt Al’s first day at work?”

“Nah. Not really. Well…a little. Maybe.” Clara sighed and hugged her knees. “I dunno. I hope not.”

“That’s a lotta answers for a simple question,” Dane teased, and got an affectionate slap on the arm.

“I just hope she’s gonna be okay.”

“She’ll be fine,” Dane said confidently. “After the shit those three have gone through, having the family from Hell’s gotta be a walk in the park.”

“…I guess.” Clara sighed, dropped her feet into the footwell and snuggled more comfortably into her seat. It was a forty minute drive home, and she was full of snack food. Sleep beckoned. “…I just hope Yan and Vemik don’t screw things up…”

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Diplomatic Starship Rich Plains, Orbiting Planet Gorai, Gaoian Colonies

Champion Sheeyo of Clan Goldpaw

Gorai had died alone and unrescued.

There simply hadn’t been the resources to rescue the colonists. The implantation rate on Gorai had been if anything slightly higher than back on Gao, and when the biodrone uprising had swept through the colony’s cities and towns it had met only token resistance. A few hundred beleaguered Straightshield and Emberpelt first responders had been swept away under a furry tide, and the unimplanted population had been left defenseless.

The Hierarchy had biodroned many, many more of the population before scattering their pawns to the galactic spacelane network and destroying the rest. Huge ships full of implanted slaves had gone totally missing and tens of thousands of colonists remained unaccounted-for.

The Great Father’s response had been unequivocal: list the unaccounted as fugitives, and order they be terminated on sight. Gorai had been flattened from orbit by waves of RFG strikes until every last Gao-made structure was a hole in the ground. Now, it was a monument world.

One day the Gao would return, was the message. But for now, Gorai was a memorial to the dead.

It was also the only place in Gaoian territory where the Dominion’s diplomatic fleets were welcome, without their escorts. The Rich Plains in particular was under strict orders to occupy this orbit and no other, so that visiting dignitaries conducted their business and delivered their platitudes under the judgemental glare of the dead.

Not that the Dominion was the power it had once been. The destruction of Capitol Station, the Guvnurag lockdown and their abject failure to respond when one of its security council members had come under a direct existential threat had all torn great chunks out of the Dominion’s credibility among its member species, and nowhere was that loss of face was more visible than in the Rich Plains’ great meeting chamber, which had become roughly divided into three factions.

The largest faction could, Sheeyo thought, be described as the “core loyalists”: the Vzk’tk Domain, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses and the Vgork herds, backed by most of the associate members like the Mjrnhrm, Robalin and Chehnash. Then there were the “neutrals”: headed by the Locayl alongside the conspicuously absent Guvnurag, supported by the Versa Volc and the Ruibal.

Finally, on Sheeyo’s side of the room, were what the loyalists termed the “rogues”: the Gao, the vacant slot reserved for the Human representative, an associate representative from the Rauwryhr…And now, having just walked conspicuously across the chamber from the loyalist faction, the Corti.

Sheeyo was resisting the thoroughly undignified urge to chitter and run in excited circles all around the chamber. The Rogues had made a point of anchoring their territory around the empty spot on the floor where an OmoAru ambassador would have stood if that species wasn’t functionally extinct, and now the oldest and most powerful of the extant Dominion species had just made a show of defecting.

Naturally, the loyalists were less pleased. Especially the Kwmbwrw.

“I hope that the Representative for the Directorate will provide their rationale for this…as they put it, ’recalculation’…?”

The Corti representative levelled a cool stare back at her counterpart. “The Directorate’s position remains unchanged: that the Dominion should be consistent and methodical in the application of its own rules. We have seen no evidence that the currently most influential members intend to pursue such an axiom…Indeed, you in particular seem to object most strenuously to it.”

There was wary silence, which the Locayl representative ventured to break. He cleared his throat and stood up. “I think, for the purposes of clarity…” he said, gesturing to the Corti with two of his hands “…I would appreciate it if you elaborated your meaning.”

“The Kwmbwrw representative has just spent several Ri’ complaining at length about the fact that a Gaoian patrol intervened in and thwarted a Hunter raid on a minor House’s mining operations,” The Corti explained levelly. “Mutual cooperation in matters of defence against threats such as piracy and the Hunters is a core value of the Dominion, I remind you.”

She turned to look at Sheeyo. “It seems to me, in fact, that the Gao are upholding that principle despite having every good reason to withdraw. Under Article Seventeen of the Charter, they are entitled to refuse their Dominion security obligations until such time as the Security Council’s failure to intervene in the attack on their homeworld has been appropriately repaid…” She turned back to the Kwmbwrw. “…What, exactly, is the basis of your objection?”

“The patrol did not announce its presence near our territory, and employed superluminal weapons technology of an unknown nature,” the Kwmbwrw replied with the instant, precise manner of a being who was repeating a practised statement. “The megalight device they used in particular could have reached any major Great House planet within a handful of Ric’.”

“Irrelevant. What matters is they saved your citizens from an unspeakable fate and returned them unharmed.”

“Surely you must see this raises the ugly specter of espionage?” the Kwmbwrw demanded. The Corti blinked at her.

“…The representative surprises me,” she said. “I would be disappointed and appalled to discover that the Great Houses are not spying on the Directorate. If you are not, then you absolutely should be.”

Sheeyo noted with satisfaction that, behind the Kwmbwrw, the Chehnash representative forgot whose side he was on and gesticulated agreement for a moment before catching himself and going still again.

The Corti representative gestured to Sheeyo. “But, I have spoken enough on the Gaoians’ behalf. Does the Gaoian representative wish to answer the Kwmbwrw representative’s concerns?”

Sheeyo inclined his head gratefully, and stood up.

“Only to echo my Corti counterpart’s sentiment regarding mutual espionage,” he said. “With regards to the tactics the patrol used, I queried my peer, Champion Hiyel of Clan One-Fang, about the stealth and technology used in the operation. In his words, a patrol which wishes to actually catch anything is best served by invisibility.”

“And are there any other such operations near our space?” The Kwmbwrw demanded.

“We are under no obligation to say,” Sheeyo replied calmly. “As the Corti representative has already explained, until such time as the Security Council makes good its negligence toward the Gaoian Clans, my people may honourably decline to participate in all collaboration with the Dominion, which includes sharing our patrol routes, technological breakthroughs and doctrine.”

The Kwmbwrw representative turned away and activated a privacy field to converse with his advisors, and after a few seconds the Locayl representative cleared his throat again.

“I propose that we advance the agenda,” he said. “The Corti representative has made the Directorate’s position quite clear.”

There was a ripple of soft chimes as the various other representatives seconded him.

The Vzk’tk representative, a venerable Rrrrtk with pronounced gray markings and plenty of loose skin down his neck, nodded slowly. “Very well. Next on the agenda for today is the subject of sapient status for the species known as Ten’Gewek. For those who are unfamiliar, the Ten’Gewek are a pre-spaceflight species native to the planet Akyawentuo, and are currently a protectorate of…” Here he consulted his notes. “…Several Human sovereign factions, working collaboratively. I note that, once again, the Human representative is absent…?”

“Their previous ambassador was murdered in cold blood, right here on this very floor,” Sheeyo reminded the room. “We Deathworlders take that kind of assault…personally.”

He watched the way a few of the more skittish representatives responded to the words ‘we deathworlders’ with some satisfaction.

The Vzk’tk representative, however, was unmoved. “Then in the absence of their patron species’ representative, the Ten’Gewek petition cannot proceed. The matter is tabled until such time as the Humans choose to re-engage with this council or the Ten’Gewek petition this council themselves. Next item…”

On it went. There was a long and frustrating report on the continuing failure to re-establish contact with the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy. By all accounts there was plenty of activity and comms chatter inside the nested system defence fields around the two remaining Guvnurag worlds, but attempts to make contact from the outside were either failing to get through or else were being ignored.

There was a quick nod to the status of the Celzi Alliance, which was being largely quiet for the time being. Piracy was up massively across the entire Dominion, and there was an all-too-brief and broad-strokes summary of the short-term economic consequences that got Sheeyo’s nose twitching. He’d bet both his ears that there was a recession coming, and soon.

Not that it mattered much in the face of Gao’s near destruction, but a Goldpaw must always keep his nose to the wind of opportunity.

He kept his expression carefully neutral when the conversation turned to the subject of an unidentified space vehicle that had strayed near Ruibal space only to detonate a fusion warhead inside itself when a deep-space patrol had tried to intercept it. Apparently it had been taking detailed surveys of a class 11 deathworld in the area.

The Dark Eye facility had run a few theoretical models of these Von-Neumann devices, and the sheer power they represented simply by multiplying like bacteria was…intriguing. With that kind of growth, a brute-force solution to any problem became only a matter of time.

Of course, every paw had its claw, and the Humans had stressed the need to be incredibly safety-conscious. The Dark Eye technicians hadn’t even been allowed to begin the project until they’d read a small library of cautionary literature.

Eventually, interminably, they reached the end of the day’s items and were free to retire to their respective chambers to consider whatever progress had been made.

Sheeyo chittered darkly to himself at that thought. “Progress” for the Gao, over the last year and more, had been a swift and decisive thing—Daar said it, people made it happen. He was absolutely proving that the most effective form of government was a supreme but benevolent dictator.

By comparison, the endless wrangling of interstellar politics flowed about as freely and easily as gravel.

He ate a late dinner while digesting the summary of the day’s meagre achievements. The Corti defection was by far the biggest and most important prize and he sent a request to his Directorate counterpart to meet privately when she had the time.

The nice thing about Corti was that they were always open for business…

Date Point: 15y5m4d AV
Hell, Hunter Space

Gorg Odvrak-Bull

The canyons would do, temporarily. Gorg held no illusions that his herd would find anything to eat among the barren rocks, but at least they had shelter.

Was it all useless, though?

They were prisoners. No, worse: They were livestock. There were rich grasslands out there and good eating prospects, but the other side of the sky belonged to the Hunters. How could they build any kind of a life here? How could there be any point to even trying to survive?

But Gorg was the Bull, and the Bull’s job was to protect his herd. Even if that was a futile task he wouldn’t just abandon it, he wouldn’t abandon them.

So, they carefully navigated the loose rocks and the ankle-twisting, leg-breaking hazards, stuck to the smoother, flatter stones of the canyon floors until they were in so deep that the cliffs on either side nearly met at the top and the night sky was little more than a blue-black line.

The echo of pebbles bounced and rattled eerily from some distant spot in the canyons. Gorg wanted to be wary of them, wanted to imagine that they heralded a predator about to plunge into their midst at any second, but exhaustion was forcing him to be frugal with his fear. If he jumped at every wind-blown stone, he’d collapse sooner rather than later.

The air smelled sulfurous. Volcanic activity, perhaps? He’d taken a daring vacation to an area of volcanic activity on the class Nine planet Truvwhiur in his youth, and he clearly remembered the smell that had rolled out of one colorful, scalding-hot pool of water.

How high-end was this planet, he wondered? He didn’t need much thought to reach the gloomy conclusion that, realistically, a Hunter livestock world was in every practical sense a deathworld no matter how the Dominion might classify it.

That went double for any planet with Humans living on it.

They emerged from the shadows and from behind the rocks like they had only just popped into existence at that moment. One instant there was nothing but boulders and terrain, the next…armed deathworlders.

There were seven of them, all looking…a little different to what Gorg remembered of Humans from the media he’d seen. These ones looked skinny, insofar as that word could apply to a Human, and were wearing a mismatched assortment of stained, frayed and extensively repaired clothing that had clearly outlived its usual lifespan.

Three of them had rifles of some kind. The rest were armed with spears, except for the small female with the orange hair at the back, who was dragging some metal boxes behind her on a wheeled truck.

One of the spear-wielders, who looked more well-nourished than the others, grinned and planted his spear’s butt firmly on the ground next to him so he could lean on it.

[“Welsh it. Luk’sleye kwee gahtahr salv zagroopah reh fujees.”]

“Uhm…do you have a translator?” Gorg asked him.

The humans looked at each other, then at the tall bald one on the left who cleared his throat, muttered a single word—“sahree”—and fished a small black box out of his pocket.

[“Izzisdamthi n’gee ven] charged? Oh hey. It’s working.”

Gorg blinked. The ear-bending moment when the incomprehensible garble of their language had been re-rendered in Vgork had left him feeling funny and off-balance. “…I understand you.”

“Good,” the first one said. “Turn your ass around and find someplace else to be.”

One of the group’s males—the one whose skin was several shades darker than his peers—pulled a face that Gorg couldn’t read, which seemed to involve looking up at the sky for a second and gritting his teeth.

“Cook, don’t be an ass,” he said.

“Be better for ‘em,” the one known as Cook said.

“I don’t care. Can it.”

‘Cook’ glanced back at him, then lifted his shoulders in a gesture that Gorg couldn’t quite read but which he guessed was a kind of physical ‘whatever.’

“What our colleague means to say,” the darker human male said, “is that you might not want to linger here.”

“Why?” Gorg challenged him. “How is this place any more dangerous than anywhere else on this planet?”

Cook issued a dark laugh, picked up his spear and took a step closer to Gorg and the herd. “Y’never know. Something might eat ya—” he began.

“Cook, back off!” the darker-skinned male snapped at him, but Gorg, panicked by his words, his proximity and the whole situation they were in, was already winding up. He reared back on his hindfeet, wound up his head and slammed the thick bone plate of his brow ridge into the human’s face.

There was a crack of bone on bone and his vision flashed a lightning black-and-white. Gorg staggered back a few steps in instant pain—it had been like butting a rock wall.

The human meanwhile had spun away and was holding his head in a pained half-crouch, but to Gorg’s surprise, shame and horror he started laughing as he straightened up.

“Whoo! Okay! Guess I had that comin’!” he whooped. He touched his fingers to a small wound above his eye, inspected the resulting smear of bright red blood on his fingertips then grinned at Gorg, who was fighting to stay upright with his ears ringing. “You hit like a girl, though.”

The larger of the two females made an exasperated sound. “Shut up, Cook.”

“No seriously, Holly has a meaner right hook.”

She gave him a stern look that said she would brook his games no longer. “Cook. Enough.”

‘Cook’ shrugged, flashed his teeth at Gorg, then wandered away while making a dark chuckling sound. He was stopped as he left by the dark one, who grabbed his arm and glared at him for several seconds before dismissing him with a gesture that unmistakably said ‘I’ll deal with you later.’

One of the male humans, the tall one with no hair atop his head but an abundance of it around his jaw and who owned the translator, approached Gorg more carefully. “Are you okay?”

Gorg shook himself to try and clear out the lingering fog in his head. “…What in the great galaxy’s name are your skulls made of?” he complained.

The human chuckled. It wasn’t a merry sound. “A type of collagen and calcium lattice. Hydroxylapatite, mostly.”

Gorg took a second to absorb that. “…Your bones are made of rock?”

“They’re a fair bit tougher than most rocks, actually. Anyway, watch my finger.” Bewildered, Gorg did so. The human moved it around a bit, then shrugged. “I’m no xeno doctor, but I guess that looks okay,” he said.

The dark one that Gorg had tentatively pegged as the closest thing the humans had to a Bull spoke up. “He gonna be alright, Conley?”

Conley nodded. “I think so.” He threw in a grin that was every bit as scary as the one the departed ‘Cook’ had employed. “Congratulations friend, you just fought a deathworlder.”

Gorg blanched, but the larger female sighed and waved Conley aside. “Ignore him. I’m Ray, that’s Spears, this is Conley, Chase, Choi and Berry,” she said, indicating each with her hand as she made introductions. “The one you headbutted was Cook.”

“…Gorg. Bull of Odvrak Herd. What are Humans doing here?”

“We’re stuck, just like you.”

“But…how did you get here? Did the Hunters capture you too? I heard that if they manage to catch a Human they just—”

“It’s a long story,” Spears cut him off. “Look, if that stunt with Cook didn’t actually hurt you then he’s right, we do need you to go.”

Gorg stared at him. “…Go where?” he demanded. “There’s nothing out there but Hunters!”

Spears transferred his weight from one foot to the other, and something about even that simple change in stance was menacing. He wasn’t being threatening, but the shift in his posture hinted at a capacity for violence that had become legendary. Everybody knew about the Celzi general whose severed head had been unceremoniously dumped on a Dominion admiral’s desk. “Someplace that ain’t here,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

Their body language and expressions were alien, but Gorg got the impression that the others agreed, or at least didn’t disagree so strongly as to argue with him. The small pale female with the bright orange hair—Chase—looked…ashamed, maybe? And the fidgety male with the lenses over his eyes wasn’t looking at Gorg at all.

“…This is the safest place on this whole planet,” Gorg said. “Ships can’t get into it, we could set up rocks to fall on the Hunters if they come in here…And if they got past that then you’re here!”

“We’re seven starving refugees hanging on by our fingertips,” Choi said. “And if the Hunters find out about us, they’ll drop a fucking army on these canyons. Besides, what’ll you eat? You guys are herbivores, right?”

“…Yes?”

“You see any herbs in these canyons, friend?” Conley asked.

Gorg looked around. The canyons were indeed quite barren, unless one counted a few local hardy things that grew from cracks in the rock and looked about as edible as stone themselves.

“Well…no. But…I mean, what do you eat? If you—”

Ray spoke over him. “We make do. Take our advice, Gorg: Take your herd and leave. There’s nothing for you here.”

An awful suspicion settled on Gorg’s yoke and he backed away a little. He’d known a few Kwmbwrw in his time, and they’d always muttered darkly about omnivorous species like Humans and Gaoians that didn’t restrict themselves to a voluntarily herbivorous diet.

Suddenly, the canyons didn’t seem like the safe option any longer.

“I…see,” he said. “”We will…we will find somewhere else.”

“You do that.”

Gorg turned to leave. The herd had heard the same things as him, and there was a definite scent of uncertainty and a sudden desire to get as far away from these deathworlders are possible. Already, a few at the back were already heading back the way they’d came. He sent the rest after them with a toss of his head in the right direction.

“Gorg.”

Gorg turned back around. The female, Ray, gave him a look that seemed to bore right through his head and down his spine, then her mouth twisted in a way he couldn’t read. “…Go far away,” she advised. “And…good luck.”

“…You as well.”

They parted ways, though Gorg knew that this wouldn’t be the last dealing he’d have with these Humans.

After all: If anybody could get them out of this situation, it had to be the only people that Hunters feared.

Date Point: 15y5m5d AV
Riverside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

“Really? You did nude modelling?”

Ava was using a park bench to stretch her hamstrings, and there were few sights in the world quite like an athletic Latina in tight leggings stretching out before a run. Coombes had stopped trying to resist the urge to appreciate the view—he’d just be straining his neck unnecessarily.

She either didn’t notice or didn’t mind, and he was pretty sure it was the latter.

“Yeah! Just for art. Not, like, glamour shoots or Playboy or whatever. But…yeah.” She straightened up, bounced on her toes a bit then stooped to check her laces. “Does that bother you?”

“Not really.” Quite the opposite, in fact. Suddenly, he had a new appreciation for art. But again, he was torturing himself.

It was torture. She was gorgeous, she had a smile she saved only for him, they could talk about anything…In any other situation he’d know exactly what to do. The problem, really, was that Ava was forbidden fruit. There was literally tons of angry pain waiting for him if he pissed off the HEAT, and Coombes didn’t much fancy his chance against any of that. Duty, Brotherhood and simple self-preservation said no, loud and clear…

…But different bits of his mind, body and soul were all telling him that goddamn would she be worth it.

“Uh-huh.” Her tone said she knew exactly why it didn’t bother him. “Seriously though. It’s artistic. You can express a lot with just the human body and the right light.”

“Like what? I ain’t really an artist…” Coombes asked, launching into their morning jog. She fell in alongside him while Hannah, who’d been lounging bored in a sunbeam for a few minutes, scrambled to her paws and went whirling off ahead to get a good look at the path and check for squirrels.

“Anything! Joy, loneliness, anguish, strength…”

“Sexiness?”

She laughed. “Yeah, why not? Titillation is a normal healthy emotion, it’s a shame serious art doesn’t explore it so much. It’s ‘exploitative’ or whatever.” Her tone suggested she thought a lot of art aficionados were high on the smell of their own shit.

“What did you explore?”

She went silent for a few paces, and Hannah—who frankly might just be the Best Girl—was at her side in a flash. Ava smiled at the dog then shrugged. “It…when things got really bad, it was a way for me to say stuff I couldn’t put into words. It was an outlet, y’know?”

“I hear ya. I had my recovery and work, and…Kinda think I’da gone bad without them. Egypt was just a goddamn horror show from start to finish.”

“Yeah.”

They jogged in strangely comfortable silence for a few hundred yards, until Coombes’ curiosity got the better of him. “So…how were you doing it? Was it just you or did somebody help out?”

“I rented a studio, set up some lights, put the camera on a timer,” she said. “It’s not an ideal setup but…well, I was expressing some very private feelings.”

“You’ve only done shoots for yourself?”

“No, I’ve modelled for others as well. It’s…liberating.”

“Really?”

She looked over at him and shrugged. “Yeah. I dunno. I go into a different headspace. It’s like ‘I know what the rules are here’ and I’m in control of things.”

“Don’t you feel…I dunno…vulnerable?”

“That’s actually part of the appeal. I can drop my walls for a bit. Y’know?”

“I…no, not really.”

She smiled again. “Maybe you should try it sometime. Modelling, I mean.”

“Huh.” Coombes considered that idea for a moment. “…You think so?”

“I don’t hear a no…” Ava’s signature teasing grin crept up her face. “Whaddya say? Wanna get naked and let me take pictures?”

Coombes snorted and snickered. She had an irreverent streak that he just loved.

Pleased at his reaction, Ava returned her attention to the path. “Actually,” she confessed, “the person I’d really like to get in front of the camera sometime is…well, Adam. Any of the Beef Trio would do, but Adam in particular would be kinda…”

“Striking.” That was quite probably the most understated euphemism Coombes had ever employed.

“Yeah.”

“He’d actually do it, y’know. He’s, uh…”

“Not shy. I know.”

“I was gonna say ‘open.’ Hell, y’know what would be impressive? If you somehow got Adam, Yan, and Daar together. Sort of a superheroes thing.”

There was a momentary gleam of avarice in her eyes as she considered that idea. “God, that’d be even more legendary than that Hometown Hero piece I did on Xiù Chang. Imagine it! I mean, Daar especially but…Huh.” She stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing, it…Just occurred to me, that’s the first time I ever even considered doing a shoot with non-human models.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. Mierda, I hope that doesn’t make me a bigot…”

Rather than let her worry over it, Coombes decided to drag her back onto the subject at hand. “Well…honestly? Go for it. You can call it, uh, ‘Deathworld Heroes’ or something like that. It’s a longshot but I bet you all three would be receptive, Daar especially.”

“Are you kidding? Great Father Daar?” Ava snorted. “Come on, even if that wasn’t like asking the goddamn President to do a shoot, he won’t like me. All that Protect and Provide stuff…I bet he’s real big on loyalty, like Firth.”

“He is, but he’s also…well, I’d vouch for you. And he’d listen.”

“You would?”

“What, you think I hang out with you every day out of pity or whatever? No. Stop, stop.” Coombes skidded to a halt and gave her his best cut-the-bullshit look. “I’d vouch for you. I saw you literally crawl into a collapsing building to save a kid for fuck sake! You beat yourself up more than you deserve.”

She brushed some hair uneasily out of her face and didn’t look at him. Hannah came circling back to park herself at Ava’s side, and licked her hand.

“And besides. There’s a story there that I think actually all three of them would want to tell. If you talk to them, the thing they all have in common—”

“—Besides being hypermasculine barges—” she interjected, bringing some levity back into the conversation as she scratched her dog’s ears.

“—Yeah, beside being the ‘most bestest’ is that they’re experts in doing not particularly nice things, and it weighs on them. All three of them are stone-cold killers when they have to be.”

“…Yeah. I know.” She took a breath. “…And you’re right. That’d be…a powerful piece. You sure you’re not an artist?”

“If I am…Well, bein’ honest it’s an artistry like they do as well. So maybe…a guy like me wants that story told, ‘cuz I don’t think people understand and they need to. I just don’t know how to share it.”

She nodded slowly, with the faraway expression of somebody staring through the ground at something only they could see.

“…If you can make it happen, it’d be…well, it’d be an honor,” she said eventually.

“No promises, but I’ll send a message off.”

She smiled again, then nodded down the track. “Thanks…Betcha Bozo’s up that way somewhere, waiting.”

“When isn’t he?” Coombes smirked.

“Shouldn’t keep him waiting, I guess!” she chirped, and set off jogging again. Coombes followed, just far enough behind to enjoy watching her move.

Forbidden fruit or not…he was happy to torture himself for her.

Date Point: 15y5m5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Human children were small. Well, babies of the People were small too. Actually, now that Vemik thought about it, all babies started out very small. They didn’t stay small though, and the children of the People put on weight quickly after the first year.

Not Humans. Vemik had met a few at the park while he was doing his third burg of the day, along with a…pack?…of Gaoians, and the thing that stood out about it was how those frail, “noodly” young boys could grow into solid men like Heff, or Wawsh, or Jooyun.

The ones in the park were at least playful. The two Vemik had just met were…shy.

No…maybe not, actually. They were quiet and tense, watchful, wary. Like they expected something awful to happen if they did or said anything without their mother’s approval. Underneath, he could see they were itching to ask him questions and play a game, run around, do something.

But even when she wasn’t in the room, their mother seemed to have her hands on their shoulders to hold them back.

Right now, she was in the cooking-room—kit-chin—and Vemik could hear the terrible wrath of women clashing over territory. That room was Shyow’s, and Amanda was trying to be more than a guest.

Vemik didn’t quite follow Human manners sometimes but Shyow had said something that sounded, to Vemik’s ears, perfectly polite and even inviting. Amanda, however, had wilted like a summer flower after a sudden frost and was now quietly assisting by handing over asked-for tools and foods while Shyow’s knife flashed in ways that made Vemik’s eyes blur. She always looked a fingernail’s width from leaving two or three fingers on the floor, but instead she’d reduce a root or one of those eye-stinging un-yun things to little bits in a couple of heartbeats, sweep it into a pot and then turn her blade on something else.

No wonder Amanda was quiet.

The two boys sat in the living room and looked like they didn’t know what to do, they just sat there while Jooyun tried and mostly failed to talk with them.

Maybe they could color with him? That seemed like a good idea. Vemik knuckled over to his pile of supplies, picked out his colored pencils and sketchbook, ambled over to the couch they were sitting on and squeezed himself between them. He wondered if it was rude to shoulder them apart but he wouldn’t fit otherwise, and he did want the table. If nobody wanted to talk, Vemik could at least work on his sound-pictures. Only a few more sounds to go, maybe…

It didn’t take long before the slightly taller, slightly bolder of the two boys scooted back over and started watching what he was doing. Vemik gave him a grin and kept working.

“…What are you writing?” he asked, eventually.

“Not writing yet. I’m making up how to write,” Vemik explained.

“Why not use our alphabet?”

“Because it’s not ours. We want ours. Also, Human letters are small. Hard to write!” Vemik waggled his fingers, which the gods had made better for holding tight to a branch than scratching thin little marks down on paper. He took the boy’s hand and pressed it against his own, palm-to-palm. “See?” Vemik’s hand in comparison was huge, thick, wide, and blunt.

The boy had an awed expression on his face. “You only have three fingers!”

Vemik trilled. “Only three, but strong! One of these, as good as all of these!” He circled his own thick first finger around all four of the boy’s.

“He ain’t kidding, either,” Jooyun added from the other ‘couch.’ “Vemik’s got a grip good enough to crack open rocks. Trust me on that.”

“How do you know?”

Jooyun chuckled and smiled back at Vemik fondly. “Vemik likes to wrestle. When we first met he was so much stronger than me, he could’ve snapped me in half if he wanted to.”

“Still can!” Vemik hooted in challenge and drew his arms into a flex, which the boys stared at open-mouthed.

“So can I, though. I seem to win my share of bouts these days…” Jooyun flexed back and smiled, which also impressed the boys. He was right, too; wrestling was a lot more fun now that Jooyun was man-strong! Vemik still thought his own arms were better, though.

“Anyhow,” Jooyun said, “I know he can break rocks ‘cuz I’ve seen him do it, and I’ve still got bruises from our last little tussle. And as strong as his hands are, his feet are way stronger.”

“Yes. But! You have a man’s grip now too! Also your fingers are clever,” Vemik replied loyally. He pressed their hands together again so the boy could feel the thick calluses he’d earned. “Mine are good for climbing, maybe not so good for tricky things. Thick skin, hard. Your’s are soft, feel everything. Jooyun can tell leather from werne bull or calf just by touch!”

“How old are you?”

“Ooh! I know this one. Year on my plan-et different to year on yours, or here. So, hard to say.”

“He’s something over sixteen in Earth years. We’re not exactly sure how much.”

“Why not?”

“No calendar. Is that right word Jooyun?”

“Yeah, bud.”

The smaller, quieter boy finally spoke up. “So…How do you know when things are gonna happen?”

Vemik shrugged. “We count moons. We know herds go south after third moon of dry season, have calfs in second moon after cold season ends…”

“They have a lunar reckoning, but it doesn’t line up very well with the seasons.”

“So you don’t have a birthday?”

“Birthday.” Vemik turned to Jooyun and made a questioning noise.

“Some human tribes remember what day of the year a person was born, and then their friends and family give them gifts on that day,” Jooyun explained.

“So…no calendar, no writing…do you have math?”

“Numbers? We have numbers. One, two, three, a hand.” Vemik held up his hand, then the other one. “Two hands. Three hands. A hand of hands. Humans use tens, I think we stay with eight. Easier to count. Don’t need toes!”

Both the boys laughed.

“I like math,” the smaller one said. “We’re doing Algebra right now. Lemme get my book!”

As was the way with brothers, the bigger boy—Vemik wished he could remember who was who—rolled his eyes and stopped the smaller one from standing up. “He probably doesn’t like math, goober.”

“Says who? Maybe I do!”

The boy cringed, went quiet, and shrunk into himself a little. Why did…oh. Right. Vemik was a strong man of his tribe and the boy wasn’t yet. That was a strange thought, suddenly.

“…Is okay. Maybe math is fun? We not have sky-people math so how do I know? Not all sky-people things are fun, though. Like showers and soap.”

Jooyun snorted. “I’m tellin’ you, a proper bubble bath is way better than a hose-down.”

Vemik didn’t like the sound of ‘bath’ but bubbles were fun, so maybe…?

No. Nothing good could come of soap. In the meanwhile he still didn’t know which boy was which, so Vemik decided to stop waiting for a hint and just ask. “I know your names, Ram-see, Triss-tun. Not sure which is which, though.”

The bigger boy aimed a thumb at his own chest. “I’m Ramsey, I’m the older one.”

“You’re only older by like twenty minutes!” his brother objected. “…And you’re Vemik, right?”

“Vemik [Sky-Thinker!”] He declared, giving his chest a hefty slap before he translated into English. “That means I think Sky-Thoughts.”

“Vemik’s kind of…a dreamer, an inventor and a tinkerer,” Shyow added from the kitchen.

Vemik nodded along. “I invented the bow!” he said proudly. “And other things, but the bow was the first thing I invented.”

“Wait.” Ramsee seemed impressed. “You’re the first Tangy-Work to use a bow?”

“Ten’Gewek,” he corrected. Humans had a lot of trouble with the little click-trill in the middle. “And yes! Sort of. I think.”

“We found out later that there was another Ten’Gewek subspecies who had things like the wheel and stuff, but they were all wiped out,” Jooyun explained.

[“Weak yellow-hair thin-bodies, no meat on their women…”] Yan muttered it in People-words as he sauntered back towards the group. He had earlier decided to stand apart and watch everyone from afar, but now wanted to join in on the fun. The boys unabashedly stared at him like everyone did whenever Yan was around.

“So, wait.” Ramsee looked back at Vemik and was again the first to ask questions. “You’re the first with a bow, you’re working on letters…does that mean you’re real cavemen?”

The boy’s mother called at him from the kit-chin. “Ramsey!” He shrank in on himself but Vemik wanted to keep talking, so he wrapped his tail around the boy’s waist in a friendly way, pulled him closer, and smiled.

“Is okay! Jooyun calls me his favorite cavemonkey, so maybe yes!”

Jooyun chuckled, reached over and ruffled Vemik’s crest. “You are my most favoritest cavemonkey, Vemik.”

“Okay.” Vemik gripped his hand around Jooyun’s wrist and nodded happily.

Yan trilled, “What about me?” then tried to sit down next to Jooyun on the ‘couch.’ It plainly didn’t like it and made pained noises as soon as he settled any of his weight on it.

“Naw, you’re my favorite cavegorilla, Yan!”

Yan stood back up, thought for a moment, and decided to sit on the floor instead. “What is this…‘gorilla’ thing?” That evil not-quite-trilling sound still gave the People pained tongues when they said it, but Yan was very respectful and always tried to say a thing’s name properly.

“They’re kinda like monkeys, but they’re much bigger and stronger.”

Yan made a pleased happy grumble and settled in on the floor.

“But Vemik’s about gorilla-sized himself,” Jooyun continued. “You’re a heck of a lot bigger.”

“Quit buttering Yan up, babe.” Awisun made an amused snort-noise off in the corner.

Yan tilted his head. “What is butter?”

The boys laughed at the question, Yan gave him his friendliest, toothiest grin, and after that things went much better. They had questions, lots of them. Vemik liked that! Ramsee wanted to know all about hunting, building huts, animals and plants and everything a man could get his hands around.

Trisstun was still too shy. Maybe that was because he was so small? Vemik understood being the small man better than most, since he had been almost a season late to manhood and it was only over the last year he’d become a strong man of the People. He pulled them both closer as gently as he could and made a point of asking Trisstun good questions, too.

“What is skool like?”

That finally opened him up. He seemed like a Sky-Thinker himself and talked alot about something called chem-is-tree and fizz-icks, which sounded fun but needed lots of math to do. Maybe Vemik could learn the math? That sounded fun too! Trisstun ended up being the more talkative of the two and was more interested in stories about the People themselves, instead of where they lived. Vemik told him of those things while Jooyun and Yan watched on; stories about his village, and the other Ten’Gewek, and about becoming a man.

*Ram*see was the kind of boy who easily grew bored and had started climbing all over Vemik as soon as his attention was on *Triss*tun. One leg around his waist put a stop to that, but gently; the two were so young and light, Vemik was afraid he’d break them if he wasn’t careful.

That didn’t stop him from squirming loose and asking questions! “Is it really true what we saw on the news about the Hierarchy and stuff? And did you really nearly fight when you met?!”

“We did! Yan almost speared Jooyun in the face!”

The boys’ mother—A-man-da, which was a funny name for a woman—came billowing out of the *kit*chin like a storm rolling down a mountain. Vemik recoiled and pulled the two boys into himself before he realized what he was doing, which didn’t make A*man*da happy at all.

“Is all this talk of violence really necessary?”

Vemik had no idea what could possibly be bad about not spearing each other in the face, but Awisun seemed to know exactly what to say. She just grinned at at Amanda and retorted, “Yes it is. Also Vemik, what you really meant to say is that I almost shot Yan.”

Vemik jeered loudly but Yan could defend himself. “Can throw spear very hard, Awisun!” He thumped his chest loudly and Amanda winced at the sharp sound. Did the noise hurt her? She seemed to be in pain.

“Kids, you’re both mean and dangerous.” Jooyun shook his head and chuckled.

Vemik meanwhile was worried. “Are you okay, A*man*da?”

“Migraine,” she replied. She looked pale and tired, Vemik thought suddenly. “It’s okay.”

“What’s a migraine?” Vemik asked.

“It’s a really bad headache, Vemik. Like if Yan picks you up by your head and throws you around.”

“…That sounds like it hurts.”

Shyow called from the kit-chin, “Maybe you want to lay down? We have an air mattress in the office upstairs.”

A-man-da looked like nothing would please her more, but was far too stubborn for some reason. She paused in the middle of the room seeming torn, and it struck Vemik that mother and sons looked very like Awisun. They had that same sun-yellow hair and those same cold sky-blue eyes that were so unnerving that the first time Awisun had taken off her ‘sunglasses’ all those seasons ago, Vemik had almost leapt into the trees. They were even more intensely blue in the two boys and they darted to and fro, looking at all the adults in the room and sizing them up.

They had a hunted look to them. As though at any second they expected to be shouted at, or beaten.

That made Vemik very sad, and he knew it made Yan in particular angry. The Given-Man had a weakness for promising boys.

Perhaps it was Yan’s simmering dislike that drove A-man-da to finally mumble something like “…yes, maybe…maybe just a short nap…” and scurry from the room. How anybody could live while being so nervous all the day long was beyond Vemik’s understanding.

She turned around at the bottom of the stairs and came back in. “You…Ramsey, promise me. If anything happens, you wake me up.”

Ram-see didn’t look at her face. “Yes, mom.”

The promise was a weak one, but it seemed to be enough for A-*man*da, who fretted a few seconds longer then her face pinched with pain and she beat a retreat upstairs.

The boys immediately relaxed once she was gone. Vemik sensed somehow that he shouldn’t say anything. Instead he pulled the boys into a hug. They didn’t hesitate and hugged right back, and that made Vemik feel even worse.

“Christ.” Jooyun shook his head and swore. Vemik didn’t know what a ‘christ’ was but it must have been a powerful god.

Awisun touched his arm then jerked a head toward the kit-chin, in the gesture that all women used to tell their men to get moving. Moments later, the room held only the boys, Yan and Vemik.

“So…this ‘squared’…” Vemik asked, to fill the silence. “Means…you take line, then same line but like this? But also means…like a hand of hands is a hand squared. Yes?”

“Uh…Right! Yeah! Here…” Triss-tun dropped to the floor and demonstrated in his notebook. “So, let me show you Pythagoras’ theorem…”

“Pie thag-or-ass.”

“Yeah-huh. He was this ancient Greek thinker…”

Yan rolled his eyes but grumbled his gruff amused sound, stood up from the floor and rolled out of the living room. [“Don’t break them. I’ll be talking with Sky-Brother for a bit.”]

[“Yes, Yan. I’ll be careful.”]

Yan grunted, nodded to the boys with a toothy smile, and left.

This was a broken family. Everyone saw it. Normally a Given-Man or the Singer would handle something like this but Human tribes didn’t have either of those things. Vemik wasn’t sure how they were going to fix this, but he was sure of one thing he could do.

The boys needed a friend, and Vemik could do that for them.

Date Point: 15y5m5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge

“You should take the boys from them, raise them instead. Would be happier for them.”

Jooyun was stacking charcoal in a shallow metal pan on legs out in the garden while Shyow and Awisun fetched food from the kit-chin and laid it out on a wooden table nearby.

“Wish it was that easy,” he grunted.

For her part, Awisunn sighed and opened a beer bottle. “I won’t lie, big fella. That thought has crossed my mind more than once today. It’s not easy to do though.”

“We’d get in a lot of trouble,” Shyow nodded.

“Mm. You say. These Po-lees. Like…I try to understand. Like Given-Men, but not?”

“They make sure we follow the rules,” Shyow explained.

“And who makes rules?”

“Here? We do, collectively. We pick from among ourselves, and they debate.”

Jooyun nodded. “Kinda like the lodge, Yan.”

“Hm. And lodge rules say, can’t take children even if parents bad at being parents?”

“More like…we’d have to convince the lodge that it’s the right thing to do first,” Shyow explained. “And they have to see for themselves.”

“So basically, if we wanna rescue my brothers then we have to—” Awisun paused and cocked her head, listening. “Goddammit. I think Mother’s given up on her nap. Change of subject.”

“Should give gods more respect, Awisun!” Yan chided her.

She paused, then sighed. “…I know. I’m sorry.”

“Eh. Gods are strong. Know when to let you get away with it, yes?”

“Tell that to Sister Leoneida,” Jooyun mumbled.

“Whose sister?”

Jooyun paused “…Never mind.” He took one of those little magic-sticks the Humans had out of a pocket and made fire with it from only a rolling flick of his thumb. It was just a tiny round gentle flame, but when he touched it to the charcoal it spread quickly.

“You teach us to make that magic?”

“In time, sure.” Jooyun pocketed it again. “It’s like a lot of magic, you need to know other stuff first.”

“Even for that?” Yan asked.

“Even for this.”

Amanda pushed the kitchen door open and joined them, but she couldn’t resist looking back through the window to check that her sons hadn’t…Yan didn’t know. Hadn’t burst into flames or been ripped apart by a Yshek in the hand of heartbeats since she’d last seen them.

All that had changed was that the tall boy was wrapped in Vemik’s tail and held off the ground while laughing, while the other was lying belly-first on the ground. Both of them were making strange marks in Vemik’s ‘sketchbook.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Awisun asked her. The words were small polite ones, but there was frost on them.

“Uh…no. You know how it is, strange bed, strange room…” Amanda couldn’t stop glancing back through the window.

“You just need to relax. Right, Yan?”

Yan thought about it for a second. [“…I think your mother needs a good fucking,”] he suggested in People-words.

Amanda stood confused as Awisun, Jooyun and Shyow all started giggling.

[“Please! Please, be my guest!”] Awisun waved a hand at her mother, who looked completely lost. [“Whatever works!”]

Yan needed no further encouragement. He turned and gave Amanda his biggest, toothiest, most unmissably inviting grin and flexed his muscles for her as hard as he could.

She did give him a look-over. It was more shocked than interested, sadly, but it was a start. Yan had conquered colder women in his time. He liked a challenge!

For now, she cleared her throat and vanished back into the house, giving him strange looks with those weird sky-hued eyes she and her daughter shared.

She would need more charming. Meanwhile the boys seemed fun…maybe they should come outside and play? Yan thought they needed that, somehow. They could toss Jooyun’s ‘football’ around. Something…gentle. Humans were tough but also mostly a lot smaller than a man of the People, and Vemik was maybe a bit too excitable for any wrasslin’.

Or not. Vemik could be gentle, too.

And maybe the more they persuaded those boys there was another way to live, the freer they would be when they were grown.

Date Point: 15y5m5d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Darcy

Darcy hadn’t even known about Erebor until only two days previously. It was a real, honest-to-god Area 51 like the conspiracy theorists had always liked to imagine about the air base near Roswell.

That was just a benign testing facility. This was…

It was a mad scientist’s laboratory full of aliens and alien technology, whirling around an alien gas giant on an alien moon under the forge glow of an immense red alien star. The people walking its halls were an eclectic blend of military, civilians and extraterrestrials.

And they’d prepared a whole lab just for her.

“Really? A whole lab? This is a space station, isn’t space a premium?”

The man giving her the tour, Warrant Officer Lee, gave her a shrug. “The Entity has been our wild card more than a few times. Which is a problem because we barely understand what it is. Brass says we devote resources to it…” he shrugged. “Besides, space isn’t as limited as you’d think. Mrwrki was built for a whole Kwmbwrw Great House, and apparently the Kwmbwrw like to have plenty of elbow room. We could fit twice as many people on this thing before we started to get tight.”

He gestured for her to enter the office fully. “Afraid you’re right next to one of the supply lines for Nanofactory C,” he said. “Might get noisy in here during a build cycle, but we insulated the walls as best we could. Nanofac D and the fusion plants to power it are going in downstairs too, so you might hear construction noises through the deck.”

“We have nanofactories here?” Darcy toured the room. It was basic, spartan, in need of a few personal touches, but she’d had smaller and dingier offices.

“Yup. If you need to use one for a project, the man to talk to is Lieutenant Brandt. You even get some personal time on them, way down the priority list after experimental equipment and prototyping.”

“What can a nanofactory make?” Darcy asked.

“B, C and D can make pretty much anything that’s metallic, plus circuitry. Plastics, polymers, ceramics and organic or volatile compounds need the specialist sub-modules on Factory A. That baby can build whole ships.”

“So, say, if I wanted some potted plants…?”

Lee chuckled. “Easier to order them from Earth, frankly.” He indicated the wall behind Darcy’s desk. “But that wall there is covered in ET-tech. We call it Wallpaper, it’s kind of a 3D screen. Room, load up my office wallpaper.”

The wall shimmered and fuzzed, and Darcy took a step back in surprise. It was like she was sitting in some executive high-rise office with a sweeping view of downtown…somewhere. She didn’t recognize the city, only that it must be on the west coast. Sunset was blazing a fiery trail in the water behind the buildings, glinting off an impressive bridge to the north-west and warming the wooded mountain slopes to the north.

The most impressive part, however, was that it was flawlessly three-dimensional. As she walked around her desk, near objects moved and were occluded by the frame as though she was looking through a pane of glass at something that was really there.

“That’s…a neat trick,” she managed.

“Ain’t it?” Lee grinned. “Anyway. Let me introduce you to your work setup.”

He indicated a door in the corner. “Through there’s the server farm hosting our captive slice of the datasphere. It’s kinda like alien Internet except…well, very different. Some of the way it works is downright weird.”

“What’s the biggest difference?” Darcy asked as she sat down.

“Ehh…I’d need all day to explain and I don’t understand it much myself,” Lee confessed. “The biggest difference is the Internet is just a network. From your perspective, the important bit is that the Internet can’t support digital sapient life forms. Datasphere can.”

“So…that’s my fish tank the Entity can live in.”

“Sure. The computer on your desk handles the rest. We even kitted it out with a volumetric field emitter, so it can project 3D objects. The Entity mostly communicates in images, emoticons and plain text, but for you it might break out something new.”

“…This is weird as all hell.”

Lee shrugged. “Hey, we could put those words over the front door around here,” he said. “But…okay, yeah. Even by our standards, counselling a…thing like the Entity, well…yeah. That’s a new one alright. If it’s any consolation, that means you’re already the most qualified person in the world.”

Darcy resisted the urge to scoff. “Gee, thanks.”

Lee chuckled. “I’ll let you get settled in. Get to know the interface, read the documentation we prepared for you. We’ll try to get in touch with it tomorrow, I guess. And…brace yourself. Something tells me this one’s gonna be interesting.”

He left her in peace. Darcy looked around her new office for a time, taking in the room and the anachronistic view behind her. With some experimentation and a trawl through the Wallpaper library she managed to find a view that better suited her in the form of a warm limestone patio with garden furniture on it, and beyond that an orchard of orange trees. She fancied she could actually feel the sunlight warming her back.

Too bad she wouldn’t be able to go out there and recline for real. But just looking at it was comforting.

She opened her documents folder, and began reading.

Date Point: 15y5m5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“I can’t believe you put the moves on Amanda, big guy.”

Yan grunted. “Why not? Meant what I said. She needs real man.”

Xiù was teaching Allison and the boys the basics of Baguazhang on the lawn while Vemik watched, having given up almost as soon as they started. His body was just built for a completely different kind of gymnastics and he figured that out immediately. Amanda had returned to the guest bedroom, overwhelmed by her migrane.

“I mean…look,” Julian leaned in an muttered under his breath. “You ain’t wrong…really ain’t wrong…But I don’t really think that’s gonna fix the problem we’ve got.”

“Problem is what, exactly? Start from start.”

“A few things. Biggest one is she’s smothering the kids. She smothered Allison so hard she ran away, joined up with, uh, I guess we’ll say a really bad tribe, and uh, never went back.”

“Smother. Like…heavy weight on them?”

“…Yeah. But not like if you throw a werne on top of a boy and make him carry it back. You have to do that to make them stronger, right? This is more like…smothering their soul.”

“Ah.” Funny how that noise was common between species. “All give give give, no teach how to take, how to give in turn. Mother keep baby on breast, doesn’t let them play.”

“Yeah. Afraid to lose them like she lost Allison, I guess…and she still doesn’t understand why she lost Al in the first place.”

Yan’s tail twitched in the way it did when he was thinking good and hard. He watched the boys move on to learn how to catch, then watched them try to play keepaway from Vemik; that didn’t work, as he jumped high in the air, caught the ball, then leaped onto the roof and trilled down at them for a bit before leaping down tail-over-top and landing between them both. He grinned, flexed for them, then slammed the ball to the ground so hard it bounced clear over the roofline. It was exactly the right thing to do, too; playful showboating was charismatic and the boys were drawn to him because of it. Both Yan and Vemik had a charm that seemed to work wonders on kids, actually, and attracted crowds of them every time they visited the park.

Julian tended to the grill while they both thought about the problem.

“Problem with her man is what?” Yan asked, eventually.

Julian shrugged and turned the frankfurters over, the very last of his cheat meals for the week. It had taken him a few minutes to explain to Vemik that a frankfurter was not used when somebody wanted to frankfurt, nor was a burger used for burging…though Xiù had promptly shot him down on that one and insisted that it was now. The sizzle caused Vemik to flick his ears and sideways-amble over in the hope that dinner was ready…Yan gave him a Look and he reluctantly want back to gently roughhousing with the boys.

“That one’s more complicated, and I’ve never met Jacob,” Julian said. “Allison says he’s…a hard man. Take, take, take. Expects everything to be just how he wants it, doesn’t know when to give.”

“There are gods involved too, yes?”

“Yeah, but that’s a huge mess. Jacob and Amanda promised to be with each other forever, and promised that before God. They’ve broken that promise.”

Yan hissed and shook his head. He no doubt took that revelation a hell of a lot more seriously than either of the two idiots were doing, but this probably wasn’t the time or the place to introduce Yan to the concept of casual sacrilege.

“This feels like Singer work,” he said at last. “Sometimes, women get lost in the Giving, need other women to help them let go.”

…Julian had to admit, that was a better idea than any that were floating around in his own head right now. The Singer’s job, or at least a huge part of it, was handling family conflicts and matters of spirituality. Hers might just be the perfect opinion to ask.

Yan grinned and tapped Julian on the forehead, not quite hard enough to hurt.

“I say something smart, yes?”

Julian chuckled and shook his head. “You did! Maybe don’t Sky-Think too much, though. Wouldn’t wanna hurt yourself…”

Yan hooted and casually picked Julian off the ground with his tail, which wrapped around Julian’s waist like a hairy python.

“Hey—!”

A bare moment later, Julian was upside-down, shaken a few times, then dumped unceremoniously into the grass. By Yan’s standards that was the equivalent of rolling his eyes and giving an affectionate middle-finger.

“I not shame you in own hut, Sky-Brother, in front of women. But don’t worry. I not sky-think too much, so you feel useful!”

Julian snorted, and picked himself up. Yan roughly dusted him off and pulled him into a brief crusher of a hug, one fierce enough to smash all the wind out of Julian’s lungs.

So, a “gentle” apology, then. The biggest consequence to having slabbed up so big and having become a man of the People was that Yan didn’t treat him like something breakable and magical anymore. Julian didn’t mind. In a strange way, that was how Yan showed respect.

“Anyway. I think for you, you think for me,” He let go and let Julian regain his breath. “We need Giving to make right for Taking bull. Sixteen thou-sand pound, you say.”

“Ayup. I think some gesture of goodwill is more important than the money, though. The money’s covered. And if I know farmers, I know they’ve got hard work they need done that they haven’t gotten to yet. Which would be good exercise for you two anyway, don’t want the low gravity making you weak.”

“Hmm.” That was another noise Ten’Gewek and humans had in common, though the Ten’gewek version was slightly open-mouthed on account of how they didn’t have noses. “Some things, easier to make right than others.”

Vemik chimed in from the grass. “We take boys to farm too, maybe!” He had both Ramsey and Tristan thoroughly pinned and squirming, but neither of them seemed upset. To the contrary, they were laughing as they tried to escape.

Yan nodded along which sent hypnotic waves down his crest. “Is good idea!”

“We’re gonna have to conspire against Amanda, then,” Julian pointed out.

Yan furrowed his brow for a moment. “Con-spire. Means…Ah. No. I understand. But why conspire? She bring problem to you! Take what she owes!”

Julian shook his head. “If only it was that easy. The cops would see that as a kidnapping…uh, stealing her children. A bad Taking, by our ways. We’d get in big trouble.”

“Hmm,” Yan grunted again and settled into deep thought.

Julian tended to the meat on the grill some more. The truth was, they were kinda stuck. Amanda was the boys’ mother, and that didn’t change just because she was a heavy-handed cloying smog of a parent. What was right, unquestionably, was to give the boys a day or two out from under their parents’ looming shadows. What was legal however, was a very different matter. If Julian was any judge, her boys were about the only thing in her life that Amanda had any control over; she wasn’t about to surrender that control without a fight. Even a badly pecked hen like her had a line in the sand.

Then there was…whatever the phone call was about. Xiù was indoors dealing with it while Allison took a break and got her gear together for her first day on the job out at Chiune Station. A break that she was, Julian guessed, absolutely desperate for. She needed simple problems she could solve with a little creativity and the right tools, not…this.

“Gao,” Yan said, quite abruptly.

“What about them?”

“Gao women good with children, I see in ‘park.’ Humans trust, too. Vemik, me, too big. Scary sometimes. Need you, say is okay to Gao women. Amanda…too scared.”

“But she might be more receptive to a Gaoian…” Julian finished for him. “Interesting idea.”

“Re-cep-tive. Hmm. Yes. Maybe. If lodge-rules say we can’t take boys, we get her to give boys. Find somebody she trust.”

Julian grinned. A name and a furry face had just come to mind. “…Yan, I think I know just the man.”

“Who?”

Julian didn’t get the chance to answer. Xiù emerged from the house looking…pensive. No, troubled.

Julian lowered his spatula. “Baobei? What’s up?”

“The thing with the court’s finished,” she said, “But I just checked our emails, and, uh…”

“What?”

“There’s a very formal message from one Jacob Buehler. He’s at the array in Chicago, catching the morning passenger jump.”

“…He’s coming here.”

“Yeah.”

Yan rolled his neck, producing a cascade of satisfying clicks. “Small man,” he predicted.

“Everyone’s small next to you, Yan,” Xiù pointed out.

“Yes,” Yan said, then grinned and tensed his body. Tendons and muscles like massive shipping cables fought for room under his thick, leathery hide. “What is word? Exactly.”

Julian smirked and flexed his own thick arm. Once upon a time he’d never have imagined himself packing on muscle like he had. Ignorance and prejudice had turned him off the idea. Now…well, he was an impressive slab to say the least, no point denying it. What harm was there in being damn proud of all his hard work? The girls certainly hadn’t ever objected.

A slow grin spread across Xiù’s face, the one she always wore right before she cracked an awful joke. “Oh. Right. You’re right, we have him out-gunned, don’t we?”

Julian snorted at the pun, which flew clear over Yan’s head. He’d ask about it later, probably. “Al always said her dad’s a bully,” he said. “I think we can turn that against him.”

Xiù considered it for a second then nodded, looking much less anxious.

“I’ll go give Al the good news,” she said. She bounced up on tip-toes to give Julian a kiss, then headed for the garage. “Don’t let the franks burn!”

“I won’t!” She was the master chef and Julian was but the lowly grillmaster. He enjoyed watching her go for a second, then discreetly turned around and rolled them over, chuckling to himself.

“You know just the man?” Yan prompted.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. A holy man. A source of advice on spiritual matters, very wise.”

“Hmm. Sound important.”

“He is. His name’s Gyotin.”

Date Point: 15y5m6d AV
Akyawentuo, The Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Singer

There were new Humans, working in and around the bunker. They had Yan’s blessing to be there, but…Well, the Singer didn’t know them, and they hadn’t properly introduced themselves. When they had arrived, Jooyun had helped them share their names with the tribe but aside from that they stood apart and rarely came to speak or share meat.

They’d done the least that was expected of them for politeness, and that was it. Some of the Given-Men were getting itchy about that. Yan had promised that the memory of him and what he’d done to the last Given-Man who defied him would keep them in line, but Given-Men were Given-Men. They looked after their tribes, that was what the Gods had touched them for. If they tasted a threat on the wind…

Well. The humans would be forced to kill them in self-defence. They had rifles, the Given-Men did not, and the Singer had seen what rifles could do for herself. And that would be the end of the good will between their peoples.

In Yan’s absence, however, a strange thing had happened. She was the Singer of his tribe, and his niece as well. She carried his weight when she spoke, as well as the weight of simply being a Singer.

So, she put a day aside to speak to the Humans. It was a long walk to the bunker, after all. She would hunt on the way back, to re-blood herself and touch the male side of her nature again. She’d been neglecting that half of a Singer’s life of late.

Things had sprung up around the bunker like mushrooms. They were a lot like huts, but made of some strange sky-fabric. It wasn’t clay or sticks or hide: it was as hard and as sturdy as wood, but it had no grain and was oddly coloured. Plas-tic.

The heart of their camp was a number of broad, flat plastic planks on steel legs. Tables. Two hands of them, covered in weird tools and little bits of things and tiny, flimsy bags made from clear plastic.

She hooted a greeting-call at them at the edge of their clearing, as was polite. Work stopped, but she was pleased to see that they didn’t rush to hide anything or put anything away. Instead, one of them waved the rest back to their work and came to meet her.

She strained her memory for a name. Nee-mesh, or something like that. Nimesh. He was small, slim and neat and unlike the other Human men the Singer had met, the hair on his face was sleek and short.

[“Welcome!”] he managed in clumsy people-words. She smiled and replied in English.

“Hello. I brought food.” She hefted a basket—several jars of the eldest Singer’s preserved stew. It was hearty, delicious stuff that could fill any hungry belly.

Nimesh’s teeth shone in a genuine smile. “Ah! Thank you. Please, come in.” He stepped aside and escorted her toward the tables and plastic huts. “Did you bring enough for yourself, or would you like some of ours?”

“Usually, we trade. Human food is…interesting. Very strong taste.”

“Trade, right. I remember. Ah…food’s here, ladies and gentlemen. Courtesy of…I’m sorry, you’re a Singer, am I right?”

“Yes. Singer of Yan’s tribe.”

The Humans downed tools and made her feel welcome. Chairs were fetched, clean water was produced from somewhere, a shallow metal bowl was filled for the Singer with something that tasted truly strange in a delicious way—car-bon-are-a—and they sat down to share meat together like neighbors should. She knew it had a pas-ta in it so she would need to eat only a little, or else be prepared to fart all night long.

Still. It was delicious. Rich, warm, creamy and filling. She didn’t need to eat much to feel satisfied, either.

“Is interesting, this work you do?” she asked.

“Engrossing!” Nimesh replied, and she put that word in her pouch for later. It was a new one. “We’re sorry we haven’t shared it yet, there’s just so much. We want to be sure we don’t get anything wrong.”

One of the others—a skinny woman whose shirt was so soaked with sweat that the Singer wondered why the poor thing didn’t just take it off for comfort—spoke up around a spoonful of the stew.

“The music!” she said. “We keep finding more and more of it. I don’t think you could listen to all of it in a year.”

“Did you want to hear some?” Nimesh offered.

The Singer smiled at him. “Yes! Please. But we should talk first. Some trouble with Given-Men.”

The Humans looked at each other, and the Singer relaxed. Their expressions told her they really didn’t want anything bad to happen. These were gentle people.

“Nothing bad,” she hastened to add. “Just…Tribes worry. They not understand what you do, why you do it. Good if we can see more, I think. Pro-fess-or Hurt could help, yes?”

“When he’s back, I’m sure he will,” Nimesh said. “He’s away for another, uh…three days?” he checked with the others, who nodded.

“His second interview on That Show is tonight,” the sweaty woman said.

Singer couldn’t stand it anymore. “Why you hurt yourself, trapped in wet bag?”

“Uh…sorry?” The Human blinked at her. “I mean…Uh, I don’t understand what you mean.”

“That.” The singer pointed at her soaking garment. “Why suffer?” she pointed in turn to some of the men, who weren’t wearing shirts. “See? More nice.”

For some reason, the Human’s face turned an impressive shade of bright red, like a healthy man’s crest. “It’s…Uh…”

Nimesh spoke up. “It’s a weird foible we have.”

“Foible.” The Singer considered the word. She didn’t need to ask what it meant, she got that from when and how he said it, but it rolled strangely forward then back in the mouth. “So, no good reason why?”

The woman cleared her throat. Her face was starting to return to its normal shade. “Not really. Some human tribes think it’s rude for a woman to bare her chest.”

“Oh. Your tribe thinks that?”

The woman laughed. “Stupid, isn’t it? But, that’s how I was raised. And trust me, it’ll feel great when I put a dry one on later.”

“I don’t know stupid. Seems…unfair. Men get to be dry, you not? But, I see this with other Humans too. Awisun, Shyow, they wear more too.”

One of the men chuckled. “Hey, you’re in prestigious company there, Claire. Wearin’ clothes just like a famous person.”

“Jooyun, he only smart Human I think! He wear running shorts. Very small! Like loincloth!”

“Whew.” Claire fanned herself with a hand. “And here I thought the climate was hot.”

Singer didn’t quite follow the words but the meaning was clear enough. Jooyun was pretty to look at, in a strange, tall and strong way.

The other men found it funny too. There were laughs, the stew was finished off, and they drifted back to their work in ones and twos.

“Offer stands,” Claire said. “I could show you some of the music. And it’s nice in there. We have this thing called air conditioning.”

The Singer stood up. “I know air conditioning. Make air cold and dry, yes?”

“Hell yeah it does. That okay, Nim?”

Nimesh nodded and that was that. Blessing given. Humans were very casual about such things, sometimes.

Claire sighed the moment they were inside one of the plastic huts and the cool air washed over them. Singer wasn’t terribly fond of it; the coolness was nice but it was always too dry, and that made her mouth sticky and her skin itchy. Claire, though, flapped her drenched shirt then shrugged and opened a metal box next to a bed. In a few breaths, she’d quickly swapped out the soaking cloth for a dry one and made a happy noise.

“Much better,” she said, then grabbed one of the ‘tablet’ tools Humans were so fond of. She sat on the bed and tapped on it for a few seconds.

“Here. I think this is their version of your dawn song. The words are different, but…well, here.”

She tapped again and singing filled the hut.

She was right. It was the song for the dawn, but different. The Singer sat on her tail and listened intently as three voices danced around each other like blown leaves. She’d only ever sung the song for dawn on her own, and while Singers did have songs they sang together at meetings or for special rites, the way they sang them was…very different. They would pull notes together that weren’t the same, but which when held could make the air shimmer. Like weaving a cloth.

These other People, when they sang, tied the song around itself. Probably the Humans had words for it, they had words for everything.

In fact…now that she listened, was that a man’s voice?

“…I hear a man singing,” she said.

“Yeah. The lower notes, right? He shows up a lot. We think he was like…a male Singer, kind of. He had tattoos like yours.”

That was…wrong. It had to be. Didn’t it? A Singer’s role was to stand across the gap between man and woman, between Give and Take. To do it, a woman had to become more like a man. She had to learn their ways, learn to think and behave like them. It wasn’t easy—to a one, Singers were chosen from the little girls who preferred to play like the boys.

It was hard to imagine a boy who would play like the girls and go the other way. What would a man who was more woman-like even do for his tribe?

…Besides be a Singer, maybe? Hmm.

“Was he…did he look more woman-like?” She asked.

“Ohh yeah. We’ve nicknamed him Freddy.” Claire laughed, then petered off when the Singer just gave her a blank look. “…Yeah, you wouldn’t get that joke. Sorry.”

“Freddy is a Human name?”

“Yes, a shortened version. He was a very popular singer from many years ago. He was very manly, and a little feminine at the same time. Died young.”

“You don’t know this one’s real name?” The Singer asked, and waved a finger to show she meant the song they were listening to.

“Not yet. Don’t worry, we aren’t being disrespectful. Freddy was loved when he was alive.”

“…Can I see him?”

Claire turned the tablet around. The Singer was used by now to the thought that the tablets could make pictures that looked as real as life. It had taken a lot of thought, and some patient explanation from Professor Hurt that no, the tablet didn’t have tiny people in it. It just…remembered how things looked, and could weave them back to life from nothing but light. That was an unbelievable magic, but Humans treated it like it was an ordinary part of life.

“Freddy” was tall and his legs were strangely straight, more like a Human’s than the People of the forests. They weren’t strong and thick, and he’d be terrible in the branches because of it. Jooyun and Wawsh were much stronger. Even Heff had him beat!

He was a Singer though. A senior one! He had three rows of tattoos around his eyes and another across his upper lip, and his crest was woven with interesting bits of metal and bright colorful stones. He wore the marks of a rite of manhood, the marks of a singer who had seen two hands of babies through the birthing…he even had the tattoo of one who had sung the moonless night, from dusk until dawn. That was a truly sacred ritual.

“How long ago was this?” she asked.

“Generations. Your people had a story about the volcano—uh, the [high-forest-place]—spitting fire long ago?”

“Yes.”

“Before that.”

The Singer sighed and stared at the tablet a while longer. The words were so different she couldn’t really hear them well, they just slipped off her ears. But she knew this song intimately. To hear it sung by a man…

Suddenly, there was a powerful ache in her heart. She gave Claire the tablet back. “…Three days, you said. Before Professor comes back?”

“That’s what he said. It might be longer, something might come up, but he loves his work. He’ll be back as soon as he can be, I bet. Might be sooner than three days if he can.”

“…I tell Given-Men. Maybe we get to hear songs together, see things you found. Without Yan here, they need reminding sometimes.”

“I’ll get some things ready for you. Um…it was nice to meet you. It’s been weird, working over here when you guys were over there and not…y’know, getting to know you.”

The Singer trilled. “Humans do many weird things. Like wear wet shirt!”

Claire laughed. “Yeah. Yeah we do…But hey, some of your ways are weird to us.”

That caught the Singer’s curiosity. “Like what?”

“Well, you guys hate water, right?”

Singer dismissed that with a flick of her tail. “Humans loving water is strange.”

Claire laughed again, and stood up. “Hey, if you want to look around the bunker I can probably arrange that with Nimesh…”

“No. Not today. Later, when the Given-Men are here and you have time to make ready, yes?”

“That’s fair. By the way, that stew was amazing, do you have the recipe?”

Singer shook her head. “Is eldest Singer’s secret. I will tell her you like, though.”

The heat and moisture hit them like a whipping branch as they stepped outside and the Singer sighed relief. She’d been getting too cold in the air conditioning-ed hut. Claire sighed and put her hat back on. “Back to work, I guess,” she said.

They exchanged final thank-yous and parting words and the Singer flung herself up easily into the nearest Ketta for the return trip to the village.

She had good feelings about what the Given-Men would say.

Date Point: 15y5m6d AV
That Show With Steven Lawrence, New York City, USA, Earth

Daniel Hurt

“Well, last week I promised he’d be back, and here he is darkening our door again, please give another warm welcome to Daniel Hurt!”

Dan was feeling more comfortable on the stage now, though the nerves were still there. Steve had promised all week that the second of his two-part appearances was going to involve a more serious critique of his methods and objectives by people who were actually qualified to pick him apart.

He was looking forward to it.

The crowd was just as warm and eager to see him as last time, though there’d been an incident just before they’d gone live: Three or four people had stood up at the back and started chanting before being removed by security. Tension was a fact of life, there was no use in trying to escape it. Besides, if people like that wanted to shut him up…well, a lot of the time they needed to tell people who he actually was first, which was basically free publicity. It was amazing how many protesters had never learned about the Streisand Effect.

They didn’t matter. The people who mattered were going to engage Daniel in hopefully civil, hopefully informed discourse and he’d either defend his position or else he’d be introduced to a better one. Really, it was a win-win.

“Daniel! Daniel!” Steven welcomed him back onto the stage with a handshake and a grin. “How’re ya feeling? Got your boxing gloves? Got your ‘Eye of the Tiger’ playlist going on?”

Daniel settled into the front-of-stage seat for the *n*th time in his career and allowed a small chuckle. “I’m excited! This should be enlightening…”

“So, you’re familiar with your two critics today, we have Gina Bailey of the American Extraterrestrial Culture Institute—“ he waved to the discussion table stage right where Gina was waiting. She and Daniel knew each other of old, and had a robust relationship founded on having yet to find a single thing they held in common. He quite liked her in fact, though the feeling was decidedly not mutual.

“…And Doctor Trevor Hills, president of the First Contact Society.”

Daniel had never locked horns with Hills before. He’d read a few of the man’s articles and blog posts in preparation for this meeting, but had struggled to find anything he could really sink his teeth into and rip apart. A lot of what he said was…alluring, but founded first and foremost in idealistic fiction rather than in the daily realities that Daniel had run into when interacting with the Ten’Gewek in the real world.

There was polite applause and Daniel gave them both a courteous nod.

“You had the stage pretty much all to yourself last week,” Steven commented. “We got a lot of messages about that, how we should have cross-examined you some more, not let you have it all your own way…”

“I’m glad to see you listened!”

“So…run us through in your words what this is all about,” Steve challenged him. Daniel nodded and figuratively ran a finger through his mental filing to pull out the card he needed.

“At the core, our disagreement is over whether or not our intervention with the Ten’Gewek should have ended once they were safe and protected. As everyone knows, I’ve been involved in actively educating them and introducing them to…well, everything. The galaxy, the species in it, the nature of the war that almost killed them and so on.

“My critics,” he continued, and gave a small bow toward Bailey and Hills, “have raised many different objections, ranging from accusations of imperialism or even slavery, to the more…mm…staid suggestion that if we must interact with the Ten’Gewek at all, it should be calculated to interfere with their development as little as possible, and that my approach has simply been too aggressive.”

Steven nodded and consulted his prompt cards. “Now…you’ve said yourself that most of the objections you’ve heard are things you’ve worried about yourself.”

“That’s right.”

“Could you give us an example?”

This one was kind of a crunch time. Daniel had anticipated the question, but he’d only managed to narrow down his replies to a shortlist of three. Now it was time to choose one.

“…If you ask an average person to name the most dangerous human invention ever, most I think will mention a weapon of some kind. The nuclear bomb, or the AR-15, the AK-47…But the most dangerous things we’ve ever invented by far are all ideas.”

Steven inclined his head politely, and Daniel explained himself. “What’s a rifle? It’s a piece of metal. Somebody has to want to pull the trigger. What gets a person to that moment? What persuades them to take a life? Ideas do. Now…” He paused, cleared his throat and picked up the little glass of water resting in front of him. “…A lot of the ideas we’ve grappled with over the years are incredibly dangerous. Some of them have literally rocked the foundations of Western civilization, even threatened to topple us.”

He took a sip and continued. “There are people sitting at home right now thinking things like ‘so what? Western civilization was built on inequality and exploitation and it deserves to fall’ and that just proves my point. The right idea can persuade somebody that the best thing that could possibly happen is the total collapse of the country they live in, the mass rejection of its ideals, and the punishment of its living citizens for the crimes of their dead ancestors. Ideas are dangerous, so very dangerous…and here I am, merrily introducing our ideas to the Ten’Gewek.”

“You make it sound so irresponsible.”

“Under other circumstances, I’d even agree that it is,” Daniel said. “But…well, the real world isn’t Star Trek. High-falutin ideals like the Prime Directive are nice for a TV series, but they broke it all the time in the show. And the real world is a lot messier than a script writer’s office.

“The biggest problem is that the Ten’Gewek are intelligent. Devastatingly so. They learned our language so fast, the paper we’re drafting on that is going to blow linguist’s minds. They picked up a lot more than we deliberately taught them, I can tell you that. And the thing about a language is that it defines the shape of how you think, and the degrees of freedom you have to think with in the first place. Just by saving their species, we freed their minds. That is a terrible responsibility, and there’s no shying away from it.”

Steve nodded, then gestured toward his other guests. “Well. That’s your opening argument. Let’s get you on the rack, shall we?”

Daniel grinned and stood up. “Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s.”

Date Point: 15y5m6d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

No fear. That was the part that surprised Allison, in the back of her head. She wasn’t afraid of her dad any more.

He still cut the same imposing figure she remembered. Not big, but tall, patrician in bearing and manner. He still had that same no-nonsense short back and sides haircut, though it had gone almost completely steel gray over the years. He still had those eyes, not blue like the rest of the family’s but a kind of dull green-gray.

But he was on her turf now.

And she hated to admit it, but it felt good having backup. Next to a bruiser like Julian, dad just…wasn’t all that imposing, not anymore. Vemik managed the same feat being barely five feet tall and had loyally stood next to her along with Julian. Xiù positioned herself strategically in the kitchen.

Yan stood out, slightly to the front, fully upright with his crest practically crackling with restrained hostility. Yan Given-Man wasn’t having any of dad’s nonsense.

Jacob Buehler paused at the end of the driveway and surveyed them for a second, then cleared his throat and took a few steps forward. He was just as clean-cut as she remembered in the way he dressed. His shirt and jacket were tailored, his shoes were as dark as midnight, and the crease of his trousers could have cut something. He had a small box under one arm, about the right shape to contain a dinner plate and gift-wrapped in simple silver paper.

He looked Allison in the eye as he reached the doorstep. “…Hello, Allison.”

“Father.”

He nodded slightly and cleared his throat, stealing a sideways glance at the Ten’Gewek. “…It’s…been a long time,” he said.

“Yes. It has.”

“May I come in?”

Allison let him wait a second while she stared at him, then stepped back and aside to make room. He glanced at Julian, climbed the steps and wiped his feet.

“You have a nice home,” he commented, once he was inside.

Allison ignored the compliment. “I’m sure you recognize Julian and Xiù,” she said. Jacob greeted them both with a nod. “These are Yan Given-Man and Vemik Sky-Thinker.”

“…Yes.” Jacob gave Yan the wary look of somebody who was being sized up by an obviously hostile man who could effortlessly overpower him. “You’re quite famous yourselves,” he told the two ETs.

Yan grunted. Vemik made no sound at all.

Stymied by the icy reception, Jacob cleared his throat again and put the gift-wrapped box down on the kitchen table. “A house gift,” he explained.

So, that was where they stood. He was treating her like a stranger. Honestly, Allison could live with that.

“Thankyou,” she said, not looking at it. She extended an arm and gestured toward the living room, where Amanda, Ramsey and Tristan were waiting. “They’re through there.”

“Thank you.” Jacob opened the door. Beyond it, the boys stared at him looking pale and tense. Amanda stood up slowly and smoothed down her skirt. His jaw moved slightly as he looked at them, then he turned back to Allison.

“This is a conversation for my family,” he said. “May we have some privacy, please?”

“No.”

Everyone looked at Yan, who’d growled the syllable with all the menace of an irate bear. He stumped forward with deliberately room-shaking steps until he was right in Jacob’s personal space. Even though he had to look up slightly to meet Jacob’s gaze, his crest and his sheer mass won out in every other regard.

“You say things, we all will hear them. A man who scares own woman, own children, no man at all.”

Jacob didn’t wilt but he did look away, toward Allison. “It’s your house,” he pointed out.

“And Yan is my trusted friend,” Allison replied. “You’ll listen to him.”

Outnumbered, out of his element and outgunned, Jacob paused a long while, then breathed out slowly and nodded. “…Fine.”

He brushed through into the living room, found the recliner opposite his wife and sons empty, and sat down.

Vemik sat himself down on the couch next to the boys, Yan sat on the floor in front of them, while Julian and Xiù took the love seat under the window. Allison closed the door behind herself and stood in front of it.

About the only sounds in the room for several seconds were those of breathing and the slight white-noise fuzz in the air as Xiù activated the privacy field around the window, sealing them off from the outside world.

Jacob spoke first.

“…Are you okay, boys? Been doing your homework?”

Tristan and Ramsey answered simultaneously, in the robotic, rote way of kids who knew exactly what answer was expected of them. “Yes, Dad.”

“Hmm.” Jacob grunted, then looked at his wife. “Amanda.”

“Jacob.”

The silence descended again, until Allison finally reached the limits of her patience and made a frustrated snarl. “Oh for crying out loud! Don’t either of you know how to talk to each other?!”

“This is a little awkward…” Amanda said, but Allison was having none of it.

“Then let me make it not awkward!” she snapped, and strode into the middle of the room. “This is a moment of opportunity for you two. Right now your family is broken, your home is broken, you’re broken. Both of you! You drove away your daughter! You’re driving away your sons! Now, do you want to keep going that way, or do you want to stop and ask yourselves just where it all went wrong and how you can put it right?”

Jacob opened his mouth to reply and she rounded on him. “I wasn’t finished!”

“You didn’t start!”

“Oh, I started. I started when I was fourteen goddamn years old, you just weren’t listening! I started when I got the hell away from you two and went to Boston! Answer me this, when I did that…did you lay all the blame on me? Was I just the wild child who’d have been trouble no matter what you did, or did you stop and wonder for one second whether maybe you went wrong?”

“Of course we wondered!” Amanda retorted.

“Then why are you still making the same mistakes?!”

Allison had to clench her fists to stop her hands from shaking, and she had no idea how her voice hadn’t closed up into an emotional croak. She returned to the door and took a deep breath before turning around. “Don’t you think maybe I wanted a family I could love?” she asked. “You think I wanted to have to leave? I wanted parents who loved me…what I got was Jacob and Amanda Buehler.”

“Allison, of course we loved you—” Amanda began.

“Bullshit!” Allison spat. “You don’t love your kids, you love whatever makes you acceptable to your neighbors and your church. You didn’t really want a family, you just wanted to tick that box so folks would think well of you!”

Jacob stood up. There was a creak as Yan, Vemik and Julian all shifted their stances and after a hesitant second he sat down again. He took a deep breath then glared at Allison.

“Is that what you tell yourself?” he asked.

“I remember a childhood filled with four words: ‘What Will People Think?’ Over the littlest, pettiest crap like what kind of music I listened to in my own bedroom with my headphones on. Or when my best friend was a boy.” Allison crossed the room, sat down on the love seat’s arm next to Xiù and took her hand for comfort. “So you tell me.”

They boys were nodding, but both of them went rigid and pale when Jacob turned his attention their way.

“…This isn’t about the past,” he said after a while. “It’s about the future.”

“Yes. Their future.”

“You’re at a crossroads,” Julian spoke up. He shuffled to the front of the couch and sat forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “And which way you go all depends on what you decide you value most. But be honest with yourselves: At least that way you can figure out where you go.”

Again, there was that moment of outrage where Jacob looked like he wanted to spring to his feet and re-assert himself. Allison had seen it many a time, often with him fetching a belt for good measure.

This time, Julian, bless him, used some of that bro-wisdom or whatever the hell he’d been learning from his friends and did…something. Allison didn’t know what, really. All it looked like to her was that he’d raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms, and somehow all the fight drained right out of her father.

Christ it was cathartic watching him not be the most powerful person in the room. The implication was clear: Violence was on the table if Jacob forced them to resort to it, and Jacob knew that was a futile war.

“What do you value?” Allison asked him.

“…I came here to get my family,” Jacob replied.

“Answer the goddamn question. Why did you come here for them? Was it because you genuinely care about them, or is it just about saving face for you?”

“Now wait just a minute–!”

“Oh, no. Of course, you’re just reclaiming your property.”

Jacob did something different this time. Rather than surge to his feet, he sat back in his chair and tapped his thumb on its arm for a few seconds, calculating.

Eventually, he took a shallow breath and spoke with care. “Would you believe me if I said I genuinely love them? I don’t think you would,” he said. “Maybe I want the best for my family. Maybe I wish things had been different with my only daughter. Maybe I’m a bigger monster in your head than I am in reality.”

He stood up. Julian did as well while Yan and Vemik stiffened, but this time he ignored them. “I didn’t come here for you, Allison: I came here for them. And I think emotions are running too high today. Perhaps we all need time to think.”

Xiù finally spoke up. “I agree,” she said. When Allison looked at her, she gave a supportive little shrug. “We were never going to fix this today,” she pointed out. “Not realistically.”

“We’ve barely begun,” Allison said.

“That still leaves the not insignificant matter of my children,” Jacob said testily. “I don’t intend to leave without them.”

“Well on that front,” Julian spoke up, “Things have been decided for you. The local police have been notified, as have CPS back in Salt Lake City. Xiù, babe, can you get the order?”

“Right.”

Xiù hopped up and vanished through into the little room out back of the living room that served as their collective office space. She was back in seconds, and handed it to Jacob without a word. He scanned it with a practiced eye and an expression of acute irritation flickered across his face as he saw the Folctha flag and court seal at the top.

“The order states that the children are to remain in the custody of their mother, who is to be supervised by agents of the court,” Xiù summarized. “Her passport will be denied at the jump gate, so she isn’t leaving…and there really isn’t anywhere else to go on this planet.”

“And who might these ‘agents’ be, I wonder.” Jacob’s tone of voice contained no suggestion that he was really asking a question.

“I hear you’re a smart fella,” Julian growled. “Figure it out.”

Jacob grunted and flipped the page. “There’s an appeal process? Could I get somebody else appointed as agents? Somebody without a personal stake in this?”

Julian shrugged. “I’m sure somebody at the courthouse can help you.”

“…I see. In that case, I’ll be staying at the Marlowe Hotel, on New Worlds Plaza. You know it?”

“Yes.”

“Then…I’ll come back the same time tomorrow. Assuming that’s good for everyone.”

“Tomorrow evening, after dinner.” Allison said. “I have work.”

“…I’ll come back tomorrow evening, then.”

“You do that.”

She followed her father out through the kitchen and down to the front door. He stepped outside and looked up—Folctha’s nightly rains were threatening to arrive soon, and the air was heavy with cool moisture before sunset.

“It’s a heck of a thing,” he said quietly. “You could almost forget we’re on an alien planet.”

Allison didn’t reply. Instead, she leaned against the doorframe and folded her arms until he cleared his throat and turned around. He looked like he wanted to say something…whatever it was went unsaid. Instead he took a step back, turned away and walked down the path with his phone out and vanished down the sidewalk.

Allison let out a long, tense breath and locked the door.

She was immediately swallowed up by Xiù, Julian…and Vemik. When Yan threw his weight on the pile as well, Allison had literally found herself being crushed under too much affection.

“I’m okay. I’m okay…” she promised, though she was deeply grateful and held them all close until it was difficult to breathe.

“So now what?” Xiù asked, as the knot slowly untangled.

Allison sighed. “I have work tomorrow, and to be honest the idea of getting away from this shit for a few hours is…It sounds like heaven.”

“We have a plan, there,” Julian revealed. “Something to take it out of all our hair for a couple hours.”

“Oh?”

“Well, your mother’s pretty religious, yeah?”

“I guess. I mean, fuck knows what that means now she’s been kicked outta the Temple and her house, but…”

“Well, we have a multi-faith center downtown, and if they don’t have any Mormon facilities I bet Gyotin would pounce on the chance to learn about it,” Julian said. “And while he’s working his magic on your mother…”

“…Some of the other folks down there can help Ramsey and Tristan,” Xiù finished.

“…I like it.”

“It was Yan’s idea. Sort of.”

“…Thanks, Yan.”

Yan just grunted, but he looked pleased. Allison considered the idea.

“You’d better warn Gyotin not to pull his tea ceremony act with her,” she said. “No hot drinks, remember?”

Julian chuckled. “I bet that’ll disappoint him a little. Gyotin’s gone full limey on all matters tea.”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with tea!” Xiù protested.

“Never said there was. I used to brew something on Nightmare, outta Mangrabber leaves. Kinda miss it, actually…”

“Cimbrean Tea infusions are pretty good, too.”

“…Yeah, but I think Imma gonna stay away from head trips,” he shrugged hugely. “After the Rite…it’s special, y’know?”

“…It’s the sap that’s psychedelic, shǎguā,” Xiù corrected him. “If you make an infusion it just tastes…kinda a little minty and a little bit like rosemary. No trip.”

“Oh! Well. Hell, that sounds kinda nice, actually.”

“I wonder where Mormons stand on Cimbrean tea?”

Allison shrugged. “I dunno. Herbal infusions are fine, but…”

“Strange rules these more-men have,” Yan grunted.

“You ain’t kidding, big guy. But I suppose they’d argue about all the magic plants you guys use to talk with the gods.”

Yan and Vemik looked at each other and shrugged. “Is plan. Shame we can’t bring boys to farm,” Vemik said. “Do them good to work!”

“Don’t write that off just yet, but yeah.” Julian leaned back and stretched his spine. “For now, little steps. This is as much about Amanda as it is about the boys. Let Gyotin work his magic.”

“What about you guys?” Allison asked. Julian shrugged.

“I gotta go back to the farm with these two, make good for the bull they ate.” He knuckled Vemik in the upper arm.

“I’ll supervise the trip to the faith center. I’ve kinda wanted to get to know the Starminds better anyway,” Xiù said.

Allison nodded. “Okay. Promise me we’ll get a chance to do something together once this settles down?”

“Promise.”

“Absolutely.”

“We throw a big feast!” Vemik agreed chirpily.

“I didn’t mean—” Allison couldn’t help herself: her face split into a smile and she laughed. “…Thanks, Sky-Thinker.”

Vemik grinned: He had Helped. Yan meanwhile waved his tail in the general direction of the living room, where Amanda could be heard clucking over her sons again. “Many things to do first.”

“Right.”

They got back to their various roles around the house, but Allison found herself feeling…lighter, somehow. She’d faced a man who used to terrify her, and found herself stronger than him. That was a liberation she’d never expected to enjoy.

She intended to make the most of it.

Date Point: 15y5m6d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

It was late evening on what had been a blessedly quiet day. The big news to cross Sartori’s desk that day had been an update on the quiet political wrangling between Russia and China over how best to divide up the planet Lucent for colonization. Apparently the Russians wanted a unified planetary Internet while the Chinese were digging their heels in and insisting that each colonial Internet should stand almost separate, linked only via their (narrow, easily monitored) connection to Earth. The Great Firewall of China was alive and well.

Let them work it out among themselves. If they wanted to get tangled in the weeds discussing communications policy while the first colonists were still living in tents and prefabs then that wasn’t America’s problem.

He took a sip of his whisky—one single, small glass of bourbon at night once he’d changed into his comfortable clothes—and swiped to the next report.

Ah yes. The leak. He smiled, set his tablet aside, and turned on the TV.

He found what he was looking for in the form of a studio full of four “experts” and one overworked presenter who was doing his best to keep the peace.

“…I mean, some of the leaked footage is horrifying! and yet there’s been no comment from the President all day! Doesn’t he care?”

“President Sartori’s a thoughtful man, he never rushes into these things, we’ve seen that time and again. I’m sure he isn’t ignoring this, just…taking his time to consider.”

One of the panelists gave an incredulous little laugh. “What’s there to consider?” he demanded. “This is…monstrosity! It’s evil on an interstellar scale!”

“For one, the costs of going to war.”

“We always knew what the Hunters are…” one of the other panelists began. She was interrupted.

“Exactly! And in any case, this is disturbing enough that the leader of the Gao personally oversaw this mission. Look at that. You can’t tell me anything that would prompt a dictator like Daar to personally intervene isn’t worth our President’s attention!”

Sartori grinned, and sipped his whisky. The footage didn’t feature much of the furry barge of murder, only a flash here or there really, but what little it did was definitely not safe for younger eyes. Which was good. War is hell, and the point needed to be made, forcefully.

“Exactly! What Tom calls thoughtful, I call cowardly. Say what you will about Daar but a coward he ain’t.”

Sartori chuckled and toasted his on-screen insulter. “Fuckin’ A.”

The presenter cleared his throat. “So, what’s the next step for the intelligence services? I presume they’ll want to find out how this got out…”

“That may not even be possible, depending on who leaked it, when, from where…AEC is an enormous international effort representing thousands of people from two planets!”

“So they should just give up?”

“No, of course not…”

The argument stretched on, with passionate and at-times contradictory points being made thick and fast, but all of it was exactly as Sartori had hoped for. People were mad, the media wanted them to be mad, and the narrative he wanted spread was being spread and made to look like it was in opposition to his wishes. All things considered, it was practically perfect.

There were a few personal considerations. Daar’s most admirable and most difficult trait was his scrupulous, effectively absolute commitment to personal fidelity. He had no problems with a tactical deception but he, himself, would never lie, or permit a lie to be told on his behalf. The furthest he would go down that line was carefully-crafted silence, or the utterance of extremely precise and cautious truths. Even that was something he preferred to avoid, since he “wasn’t a Goldpaw contracting officer.”

Which meant the deception demanded very careful timing. For now, the Great Father’s office would remain silent and refuse comment. With luck the media would keep digging, and he would eventually be “compelled” to make a public statement requesting military aid. Sartori would have his Cabinet defer until public pressure reached a fever pitch, and then with a show of reluctant determination…commit to the fight.

The first draft of his own first response should be ready and waiting in the oval office by morning.

Satisfied, he changed channel and put his feet up. Watching his beloved Mets lose to the hated Yankees would be just the appropriate spice to round off an odd evening.

Date Point: 15y5m6d AV
POW Holding Facility, Planet Gao

Cytosis

Interrogations broke the monotony, not that there was much of that nowadays. Cytosis’ compliance had brought him many luxuries: books to read, writing tools, even a small device that played music. It was loaded with an astonishing variety of songs, most of which were…

Well, they were alien. Music was alien in general; there was no equivalent in the Hegemony, it was a pursuit of senses that Igraens had left behind aeons ago.

Most of it was formulaic. Interesting at first, but once the listener knew the formulas, the underlying logic of it, the pieces grew dull. One of his books explained the history of Human music, and he’d learned that the genres that least pleased him were so-called “pop” music—the fact that “pop” was short for “popular” baffled him.

Harmonies, though…He could truly enjoy harmonies. The intricate interplay of subtly differing frequencies, which his sensitive, inherited Gaoian ears could sort and classify with surprising precision. The Gaoians had preserved much of their true Deathworlder heritage, and their keen senses had in fact improved over time.

The Humans, though, had voices that transfixed. Choral music especially held his attention, when the chords they assembled hung like shimmering fabric in the air, evoking mental images of cold stone and high architecture. He could listen to it for hours.

Being dragged away was irksome, but he knew better than to resist. He’d need weeks of good behaviour before they returned his music if he didn’t “play ball,” so yet again he meekly let himself be hooded and led, turned and twisted so that he didn’t know where one room was in relation to the other, and sat down in the comfortable chair opposite his second interrogator, Homer.

Homer was nothing like Bill. Bill was built like a sturdy fortification, with a tubby belly and hairy arms. Homer didn’t seem to suit his name at all: he was slim, clean, precise and had long fingers. He was almost totally bald, but wore a rough stubbly beard that framed rather than softened his cheekbones.

“Good day, Cytosis.”

Cytosis duck-nodded. They never referred to the time of day. He’d decided that according to his own personal rhythm it was morning, though, so he replied appropriately. “Good morning.”

“What did you make of Spem in Alium?”

“It’s…astonishing. I count at least thirty distinct voices, all singing something different. I think more.”

“Forty, total.” Homer looked pleased: the piece had been his recommendation.

“Consider me duly impressed.” Cytosis coughed and adjusted his seat. “So, what’s our topic of discussion for today?”

“The Gao again. The Hierarchy’s intent was to use them as a contingency species, as I recall…”

Cytosis duck-nodded and settled in. Now that he’d cast off his inhibitions about sharing, he found he actually relished the chance to both educate and be questioned on Hierarchy operations. There was no point in feeling any guilt or shame over it, now, and he was actually learning things about their methods himself, from analysing them. “That is correct. Their purpose was two-fold. First, as a benign force of competition to stave off stagnation, and secondarily as the raw material to form a military if need be.”

“I’d say that plan backfired.”

“Indeed. Are you intending to gloat?”

Homer shook his head. “Not at all. But I am interested in the details. How long have you been planning this contingency?”

“By your calendar…” Cytosis consulted his mental look-up table, “…approximately twenty-five thousand years. We first observed them in their hunter-gatherer phase, after language nucleation but before any of the rudiments of civilization. They were highly tribal and clannish and their world was much richer at the time, with diverse, highly competitive life. In the modern scale we would have rated Gao a respectable class-eleven, and trending upward. It was in little immediate danger of becoming a Class-Twelve—the microbiology was relatively benign even then, the climate’s too predictable and the tectonic activity is relatively gentle. But engineering Gao back down to a Class-Nine was no small task.”

“What about their gravity? Doesn’t that figure into the scale?”

“Not as much as is widely believed. Very low gravity certainly matters, but Gao isn’t a low gravity world, either. It’s close enough to other Deathworlds that it enables most of the benefits, but low enough to enjoy the benefits of low-gravity evolution as well. You must be aware of how high-maintenance your own body is, relative to the needs of other species…An active Human eats as much as a Guvnurag, and the Gao might conceivably have grown just as large as some of your apex predators on Earth, in due time. Imagine Gaoians literally as big as a Kodiak bear! We didn’t consider that an ideal outcome.”

Homer raised an eyebrow at that comment but didn’t say anything at first. Amusement, possibly? It was difficult to tell.

He shook off his silence and glanced at his notes. “The Gao used to be full-blooded Deathworlders, then, rather than a marginal case. Isn’t your normal procedure to exterminate such species?”

Cytosis scratched at his wrist where his paws were restrained. “Our usual policy is to exterminate even the marginal cases,” he said. “However, we are always in need of contingencies and those require deep time to develop, and we found an excellent candidate in the Gao. Deathworld species make the best source material, but of course we can’t permit a contingency that is beyond our control. Therefore, we shape them.”

“How?”

“It depends on the species. A common theme, however, is to preserve the most desirable traits while slowly reducing the threat they represent to something more…manageable. It is a fine balance we must achieve. The contingency must be capable of great ferocity, adaptability, resiliency and cunning when needed, but must be controllable and docile at all other times. They should also be capable of absorbing heavy losses to their peoples and recovering quickly. And ideally, their instincts should be highly competitive.”

“…in other words, the Gao.”

“Indeed.”

“…what, exactly, did you do to them?”

“Many things.” Cytosis accessed his copy of the case file. It was an incomplete summary rather than an exhaustive itemization of every step the Contingency specialists had taken, but it was dense with information regardless. “The first thing we did was depopulate their world by initiating a gamma ray burst in a nearby star. Ninety percent of their land-dwelling life went extinct, and their world was reduced to a class-eight almost overnight. We also appeared amongst them in engineered biodrone forms to lead them through the difficult Formation period.”

“Explain.”

“Formation is the process by which we inculcate a desired social structure into the target contingency species. How we do this varies, but in the case of the Gao we appeared as, effectively, demigods. Their Keeda tales are a direct consequence of our intervention, and have a basis in ancient events. Remarkable, really. They preserved the kernel of what we wanted them to remember all this time…”

“…What else did you do?”

“All the Gao that survived had heavy genetic damage. This was by design. We used our biodrone forms to intervene with a suitable light show, repaired each member directly…and altered their reproductive scheme. That must have been obvious to you, once you learned of our involvement.”

“…What was the purpose of that?”

“Firstly, to shorten their gestation time. Secondly, to reduce the time between cubs. Thirdly, to speed up their maturation time and extend their reproductive lives, though that came at the cost of total lifespan. The result was a species that could very quickly produce large numbers of military-capable males, raise them to adulthood in acceptable timeframes, and produce many offspring per female. We also reinforced their fertility’s link to health, particularly the health of the sire. Our goals were a very high proportion of serviceable soldiers in any given generation. We succeeded, wildly.”

“…Did it not occur to you that their instincts may not adapt to such a wild change?”

“Irrelevant. Social conditioning can overcome any instinct.”

“Given that they broke free of your control, I’d contest that claim.”

Cytosis shrugged. “Their conditioning wasn’t broken from within, but by an external event, namely contact with you. Though, admittedly, they were more vulnerable to external influence than we’d have liked…The fatal crack in the armor there is probably the fact that we lost control of the Stonebacks over a thousand years ago.”

“Still, though. They did that themselves. Your ‘social conditioning’ didn’t take.”

“True, but one anomalous Clan wouldn’t have made a difference without a destabilizing influence.”

Homer didn’t reply to that. Instead he backtracked and asked another question. “…How did you lose control of the Stonebacks?”

“That’s complex. The short answer is they became opaque to us and bred their traits largely independent of our direct influence. That was fine because we had used our influence on the rest of their society to guide their development with reasonable success. With encouragement, they began breeding themselves into elite soldiers and builders. What we had not anticipated was the quality of their leadership.”

“I hate to keep rabbit-holing, but that one I need explained, too.”

“Their intellectuals had long ago split into Highmountain, a Clan we quite thoroughly infiltrated. We anticipated that the Gao’s eventual species-wide leadership caste would emerge from them. We had, in fact, expected it to emerge this generation, in the form of Loomi.”

“That’s the current Champion of Highmountain,” Homer checked.

“Indeed. He’d been groomed for the role since birth, but he proved…dissatisfactory.”

“How so?”

“He’s everything we believe a leader should be. But as you observed, we did not account for all their psychology, nor understand the consequences of that blind spot. The result was that Daar emerged.”

“…You missed him?” Homer’s tone was incredulous, and Cytosis had to agree. Daar had begun making waves almost from when he was a cub. Dismissing him as a quirk who would never amount to a real factor in the equation had been one of the Hierarchy’s more grievous errors.

“Indeed.” Cytosis emoted grim amusement via an ear-flick. “Suffice to say, our surveillance was…lacking. Daar is everything Loomi is, and much more besides. Beyond that, he possesses this…’spark’ of leadership we were missing. He also preserves all the other traits of a Stoneback and this has proven disastrous.”

“What traits?”

“They are a wild and untamed breed, deliberately so. Normally this would manifest as a passionate hot-headedness, for instance in One-Fang. Their Clan has always been on the edge of self-immolation. Stonebacks, conversely, have discipline. They’ve always needed and bred for it. We had not appreciated the degree to which that would undo our plans, however.”

“You also failed to account for his friends and confidants.”

“Of course. That was implied in having missed the cultural singularity.”

“Okay, you need to explain that, too.”

Cytosis cast his memory back to the moment the concept had first been explained to him, long ago now. “I believe the Americans of your people have a saying: ‘comes the moment, comes the man.’ It neatly summarizes a useful meme that we have used in our social engineering programs over the arc of our history. Our intent was to shape the Gao into a unified force under Loomi’s leadership, ideally by precipitating a crisis which would have sidelined Stoneback. Before we could achieve that, however, your species arrived—”

“—And we set in motion a series of events you could no longer control,” Homer concluded.

“Precisely. But more than that, you removed Daar from even our nominal influence. I do not know if you understood the depth of your victory at that point. The result is that he is now the greatest Gaoian to ever live.”

Cytosis shook his head bitterly. “We really should have had him assassinated when he was young,” he lamented. “Instead, he’ll likely live many more years given his dam and sire, and he may well live long enough to personally realize Stoneback’s ancient dream and destroy us all. Without him, Humanity would be alone, isolated, and frankly your eradication and erasure from the history books would be only a matter of time. With him…Well. It’s inconceivable to me you didn’t realize his value.”

He had to give Homer credit. The man gave nothing away as he slowly adjusted his posture and then checked his notes again.

“…You need to forgive me but this all seems a bit far-fetched.”

“How so? Genetic manipulation is direct and easy to do. One look at the Discarded should illustrate the claim. As far as social engineering, that is simply a matter of having enough agents in enough places who can whisper the right words to the right people at the right time. Given enough time, almost any outcome can be planned, iterated, and ultimately achieved. Stoneback was our great blind spot and it cost us everything.”

“You mentioned that before. How did Stoneback unravel your plans? And how is any of this their, as you said, *‘ancient dream?’*”

“…You’re either an excellent liar, or you really haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Answer the question, Cytosis.”

Cytosis flicked his ear again then sat upright. Well, well. Maybe Human intelligence wasn’t quite so omnipotent after all. Either that, or Homer truly was a most excellent liar…or had been kept in the dark. It was impossible to tell, but there was no point in playing games. Not if he wanted to have music to listen to when he got back to his cell.

“It’s simple,” he said. “Great Father Fyu discovered us.”

Date Point: 15y5m7d AV
High Mountain Fortress, Gao

Sister Naydra, Life-Mate of the Great Father

Daar, like most Males, was a creature of wild moods. That was the thing that gave males their exciting, slightly dangerous edge and was, at least for Naydra, a big part of what made them attractive. Some breeds like Whitecrests or Straightshields earned attention with their well-tempered discipline. Others like the One-Fangs or Stonebacks let their passion burn brightly for all to see. Some Females preferred the former, others the latter. Still others like Naydra found attraction at either end, and that more than anything was probably why she had fallen in love with Daar; he was both extremes at the same time and to a degree she had never seen matched by anyone, of any species.

In public he was the living model of crude, honest dignity and had truly steel-strong self restraint. He of course enjoyed coarse language and found immense delight in the simpler entertainments of life, yet nobody could deny his keen mind or his sometimes shockingly subtle humor. There was refinement, there. It was sometimes hard to see, and he picked his Civilized proclivities with great care…but it was there. Whether it be with his flowers, a keen love of the Gao’s history, or the crude yet clever little fables he had at first started writing for his friends as an in-joke, the Great Father was a creature who could not be easily defined.

His fables in particular were an interesting example of that duality held in careful tension. They were often raunchy yet not quite scandalously so; he rode that fine line with clever prose, groan-worthy puns, confidently self-deprecating humor—rarely if ever heard from a Male, that—and a growing body of complex, self-referential memes. His fables had no schedule or theme to them. He wrote just-so stories about whatever tickled his fancy at the moment, often as a result of a meeting, a particularly well-accomplished Gaoian’s achievements, or maybe the antics of a cub on a playground. With her encouragement they had become one of his chief means of public communication, and the public responded in kind. His fables had seeded a rapidly growing word game the whole of the Gao played, and Daar spent a few spare moments every evening to read through and reply to some lucky thread, building on the poster’s story or slyly picking it apart.

He’d actually broken the datasphere a few times with the avalanche of replies to his posts.

His other side, the wild, unrestrained engine of optimism, giddiness, rage…and sometimes a deep and unabiding despair…was not something the public ever saw. Not even in his most fierce moments as the Great Father or his most ear-waggling smarmy come-ons as the Champion of Stoneback, had he ever allowed people to see him at his unrestrained maximum. That was something he shared only with his most trusted friends and confidants; First Fang, a few of the Champions, Regaari of course…

And now Naydra, the first life-mate the Females had permitted any male for a thousand years.

For the moment she was relaxing in private and catching up on her reading while he entertained his consorts for the evening. It would be quite late before he wore them out and she found herself oddly grateful for the rest; the day’s activities had been tiring, to say the least. It was Daar’s fiftieth birthday today and that was a significant one for males, especially for a labor-bred brownie like him. Fifty was generally the age where males would retire and switch to light duties at their Clan or workhouse. It was supposed to be a reward for a long productive life, where they could live out the rest of their time in relative comfort and, for many, the heavy attention of Females. Old males were successful males after all, and simply living that long in the first place was a serious accomplishment for most brownfurs.

Naydra was many years Daar’s junior, and his admirable venerability had been a bit of a concern amongst the Females while they were still debating the propriety of the situation. She countered that they were obligated to support the Great Father, having created him in the first place, and that the duty of the thing would slowly kill him if they didn’t give him what he needed. She was right, everyone knew she was right, and in the end she won the debate.

Yulna’s support hadn’t hurt her case, either.

Of course it also helped that the big lout was in radiantly good health. He did have some handsome and dignified silver creeping into his cheek ruffs and along the outside of his massive forearms these days, but despite that he had the body, health, and vigor of someone effectively thirty years younger. And that was at the peak of the war, when he had been running himself ragged. His duties had made him truly despondent most days. But with time, love, care, and the victory at hand, everything had improved greatly. Now he was the best version of himself he had ever been.

He knew it, too.

Lately he had been carrying himself with a lighter, more playful gait—if “light” was a reasonable term for a male larger than a naxas stud—and had done so more and more as the Gao shifted to rebuilding their world. It was the little things, really. As the Females slowly, carefully peeked their noses back into public life, he in turn had regained some of the unabashedly flirty banter for which he had previously been legendary. He did that with every Female he met and that might have made Naydra jealous…except he did it the best for her.

She didn’t know exactly why, but no other Female seemed to catch his interest the same way she did. With the others it was playful, with her…it was serious. He always looked at her with a singularly intense stare, as if he was captivated by what he saw. Then he’d snap out of it and find some ridiculous excuse to pose and preen for her, usually with a come-on line so awful that even his Champions rolled their eyes. It was cheesy, crude, stupid…and she adored it. He loved showing off for her with words and weights, kept his pelt perfectly trimmed and just short enough to show off the hard-earned lines of his unmatched body. The big Keeda knew exactly how to push a Female’s buttons and he took a special delight in pushing hers.

That renewed vigor had been the theme for the day’s celebration, and it had been one of the few but lately more frequent times she had seen Daar in an unreservedly, boisterously happy mood. He’d gone on one of his “walkabouts” with several workhouses and Clans that day, a thing he hadn’t been able to do for quite some time. Naydra had no idea how his security detail made it work but they did, and Daar spent the first part of the day rolling in the dirt with the hardest working, most flea-bitten, lowest, roughest…and genuinely kind, good-hearted brownies the laboring world had to offer. They had no shame speaking coarse and flattering things in her presence, and Daar was positively gleeful as he thrashed their hides in retaliation. It was absolutely no contest at all and yet somehow, no feelings were hurt.

In fact they seemed to love him for it. That maybe had more to do with their impressive new scars but the feeling was clearly genuine, and it was reciprocated. The working males of the Gao absolutely loved the Great Father and he loved them right back. She wouldn’t pretend she completely understood either the male or the brownfur mindset, being a female silverfur herself, but that didn’t stop her from being drawn to both. Their energy was magnetic. They shared their food, showed both of them their work, groaned when he tried his hand at the task and made them all look like amateurs. Then they drank Talamay together, sang Naydra’s praises in the crudest, raunchiest, most genuinely flattering terms she had ever heard…

There was even a friendly many-on-one brawl, with essentially all the Brothers of a Clan Ironclaw workhouse piling on the Great Father. Daar won of course, thoroughly but not quite instantly, and that small “victory” had cheered them greatly. Him too! He even gave them a crash course on how to handle large brawls, which they took very seriously, but Naydra noticed he had very cunningly kept some Stoneback secrets to himself. He told no lies, of course, but…why advantage his Clan rivals over his own?

She was reclining against her favorite floor cushion when she felt the gravity crank up. Daar must have been on his way back. He’d gone to so much effort building himself up to match the Deathworlders after all, it would have been both silly and wasteful to lose all that hard-earned strength and bone density to Gao’s weaker gravity. That meant he spent as much of his day as he could in either an Earth or even Ten’Gewek-level field to maintain his body; keeping up with proper Deathworlders was an enormous commitment.

Naydra could tell he was feeling frisky tonight because the gravity was definitely Ten’Gewek level or maybe more; she’d ended up growing accustomed to the daily needs of his training and had taken to some of it herself. After all, the life-mate of the Great Father needed to be worthy of him…and everything he could do…

She first heard, then felt the weight of his enormous paws smashing against the steps as he thundered up the long staircase towards their private quarters. She sat up and put her reader down as Daar thumped to a stop, opened the door, ducked under the ancient frame, hunched his shoulders together and squeezed somewhat sideways through the opening. He was pumped up, extra musky, and thoroughly lathered from his evening activities. She wasn’t complaining about any of that, oh no. As his life-mate it was her duty to give him a meticulous rubdown…

“Naydi!” He barked cheerily, momentarily interrupting her sudden fantasy and using his pet name for her. “I thought you might be sleepin’ by now!” He closed the door, thumped heavily down to all fours and wagged his tail furiously. Uncivilized, but adorable.

“And miss your return? Happy fiftieth, Stud-Prime.” She meant it, as strongly as ever.

“Aww, don’t remind me!” He pranced over with a heavy, bouncing gait while preening the biggest preen. “You’ll make me feel all old and stuff!” His movements were as impressive as ever, the heavy gravity seemingly doing nothing to hinder him. Naydra felt leaden and graceless under any of it but Daar…he moved just like a dangerous beast, same as always.

That didn’t mean she couldn’t tease him. “That was the goal! How went your evening?”

“Fun!” Daar flowed over to his rough-hewn wooden desk to quickly scan his evening updates. “We lifted a whole bunch! And then we raced, and we wrassled too! I won,” he grumbled smugly, implying with absolute certainty that he was victorious in all the things. “Then we ate! They made my favorites too, ‘cuz their mess hall was really good!”

Simple pleasures and simple living, experienced deeply. That was the very definition of who Daar was. Never mind his actually quite formidable intellect, at heart he was a simple being.

“You sound like you enjoyed yourself! That would explain why you’re so lathered up…”

“Naw, I lifted again jus’ before I came up.”

“What about your engagements?”

“They tired out too quick,” he said with an unbearably smug look, “And I still had a lotta energy from the food!”

Naydra chittered, “You always were a big eater!”

“The most biggest! I think we managed to eat their entire pantry bare, too. But! Then we went t’go look at a big engineering project they’re workin’ on. They’re borrowing a crazy idea from the Humans, something called a ‘Hyperloop’ or whatever. Dunno if we can devote resources to it just yet an’ I kinda think it’s a better fit as a Stoneback project anyway, but…”

“…but you’re the Great Father,” she finished for him. “You can’t favor your Clan.”

“Yeah.” The lay of his ears suggested he wasn’t completely happy with the idea.

“Why do you think it’s a Stoneback project?”

“Gotta dig lots of tunnels! ♫♭♯ [Diggy diggy hole, diggy diggy hooooOOooOWLLEE!!] ♯♭♫

Naydra grimaced and flattened her ears protectively. Daar had many charms, but his singing voice was legendary for all the wrong reasons. It was powerfully loud, entirely out of tune, and practically weaponized against the very concept of Civilization, or any Civilized form of music.

“…Ow.”

“Oh come on!,” he whined. “Nothin’ as fun as singin’ can be that bad, can it?”

“Right next to my ear, though?”

“But I’m all the way over here!”

“It’s not a big room, and you’re…big.”

Daar gave one of his deep rumbling chitters. “The most biggest! You love it.”

“I do, but still. Ow.” She stood up and gave him a playful swat on the muzzle. “You most biggerestest oaf.”

Daar chittered, and Naydra congratulated herself. She’d been studying English hard and had stumbled over a subtle bilingual pun in ‘biggerestest’ that she’d thought Daar would enjoy. He hadn’t disappointed.

“Well, the most biggest Gaoian anyway.” he said. “Maybe biggerest?”

“It loses the pun, though.”

“Too bad, it’s better sorta. Warhorse and Yan Given-Man are really the most biggerestest!”

Naydra chittered to herself; sadly, the pun only made sense in Gaori, and only if one also spoke English. But still. “…Bigger than you? That’s hard to imagine.” Daar was already big enough to fill most indoor spaces and make floors groan under his paws. More of that seemed frightening!

“It’s true! I got a ways t’go if I’mma catch up to ‘em. But! Besides those two, Me an’ Righteous an’ Baseball are way better’n anybody else! Base is super tough and never runs outta gas, an’ Righteous is really hard t’beat in a fight. But I’m stronger’n both of ‘em now! And faster too!”

“Anyone who could compete directly with you is formidable indeed.”

“Yeah! And then there’s bestest friend Tiny, he’s super smart and tough, and Highland…”

Naydra had heard him gush fondly about his friends before but Daar seemed to need to talk about them just then, so she listened attentively while he extolled their many and varied virtues. It was clear he missed them deeply. Listening to their antics and the stories about their training, combat deployments, various adventures…she couldn’t blame him.

The stories about Yan and his people caught her interest the most. “It’s good both species are our allies, then.”

“We’ll see ‘bout the Tangy-Work. Ten-ge-wek.” Daar paused and growled in frustration. “Ten’Gewek! That one-click sound is hard to do. Anyway. We gotta see how they do when they go to Earth, ‘cuz neither us nor the Humans have the means to take on a protectorate nation jus’ now…” He furrowed his brow in thought, “Balls, maybe if we just—”

“Bumpkin,” Naydra interrupted him with her own pet name for him, “you promised you would relax today.”

Civilized Males were extremely deferential to Females and Daar was no exception. He cringed in on himself and managed to seem two head-heights shorter. “…I did, sarry.”

“Let Father Regaari and the Champions handle this. It’s their job. You are our leader, you are not our taskmaster.”

“I know, I know…I need a break and I ain’t takin’ advantage.” Daar flowed over to the long padded bench and poured himself onto it. Naydra saw her opportunity to give him his favorite back-scratches and gently ran her claws down the length of his spine, with the result that he shivered in pleasure, melted further into his puddle, and soon thereafter was almost purring in contentment.

“Oh, ‘yer so good at that…”

She worked her paws into it and gave him the rubdown he needed. It wasn’t really a massage since his muscles were far too big and hard for her paws to loosen, but he enjoyed her attentions anyway and stretched out to his full length with his arms, shoulders and footpaws draped over the edges. She worked her way down from his mighty neck to his massive footpaws and across everything in between, and worked her way back up again. By then he had finally started to relax, but despite all her efforts he was simply too densely built for her to loosen him up; she’d need to be much stronger to manage that.

Naydra didn’t mind at all, even if her paws were getting very tired. She worked on his shoulders for a long while, then leaned in and nipped his ear. “You like that?” she whispered.

He grumbled contentedly in reply.

“Roll over, then.”

That was a small tease between them, knowing that dogs from Earth were often trained to do that on command. He did it anyway and Naydra rewarded them both with a good, solid belly rub. Daar grumbled again, deeper this time. He was so wonderfully responsive to her touch…and so wonderfully good to feel. The Great Father was a creature of huge, perfect shapes, hard as stone and covered in the dense velvet of his pelt. He grumbled happily as she started at his feet, worked her way up the heavy shapes of his legs, rubbed the great hillocks of his abs for a long while, and eventually ended up at his broad, thick chest. She spent a long time on his arms and neck, too. He had no will to resist her and before long was quietly growling in deep pleasure.

“It’s amazing how you can be so hard at work as the stud-prime, the one against which all others are measured, and then every night you come back all tense…” She chittered eventually. “You would think some of your engagements could get you to loosen up!”

“Most females…they never learn…how to do this…oh, right there!” He had a magic itching spot just off his chest and along either flank. One little scratch and he was kicking his massive leg so hard that the bench started to scoot across the floor.

“You like that?”

His response was a deliriously happy whine. Naydra chittered to herself and scratched harder for a long moment. She stopped just as it became unbearable for him, which caused him to pant in relief with his huge tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.

“That’s a downright shame. I’ll just have to make up for their shortcomings…” She climbed on top and snuggled against him, snuffling deeply in the thick white ruff of his chest fur. The only thing better than feeling his body was smelling it, and he seemed to feel the same way; he pulled her up slightly, pressed his muzzle against the top of her head, and breathed deeply.

Contentment. For a long while they just lay together, holding each other and sharing warmth.

Naydra laid her ear against his chest and listened to his slow, powerful heartbeat for a long moment, but eventually her curiosity got the best of her. “Actually…how were they?” His duties as stud-prime were known to her, and she accepted it from the beginning…but that didn’t mean she wasn’t curious. Strictly out of concern for him, of course. She almost believed it, too.

He was carefully wary of the topic. “Naydra…” His paw came to the back of her neck and scritched just how she loved it. She melted into his grasp and he massaged a bit deeper. “…I love Females. Y’know that, it ain’t a secret. I love ‘em all.” He pulled back and looked her dead in the eye, “But I don’t love any of ‘em like I love you.”

She almost keened at that but she held her composure. “You didn’t really answer the question,” she pointed out, and gave his ear a gentle nibble. “How were they?”

“Nothin’ gets by you, huh?”

“Nope!”

Daar chittered somewhere near the infrasonic and flicked his ears resignedly. “Whaddya want me t’say? They were healthy, well-bred, beautiful an’ cheery. Exactly the kind of stock Stoneback wants their stud-prime to mate with.”

“…And?”

“And they’re young an’ stupid! I swear there ain’t a Keeda-damned working neuron to share between th’ three of ‘em.” Daar sighed, rolled off the bench and flomped onto the floor with Naydra in tow. They landed with a resounding crash and she yipped in surprise, but there was no escape as he wrapped his paws around her to pull her in close. She played at outrage and immediately found herself smashed crushingly tight against his body, his tail wagging furiously and a playful pant-grin on his face.

“I’ve got way better right here,” he said warmly. “I’m the luckiest male alive!”

“You big flirt! I bet you say that to all the pretty females.”

“Nope. Just you. Only ever you.”

The thing about Daar was that he was perfectly honest, always. It wasn’t just that it was his reputation. There was something in his earnestness and intensity that said it was so. When Daar complimented someone, he meant it, and that was special.

She didn’t have more than a moment to reflect on that before he rolled over the top of her and completely pinned her in place. Naydra nipped him on the nose affectionately, and in response he squeezed her just hard enough to ride the line between painful and exciting.

“Gently! I’m still recovering from the cub.” A shame, too. It was his birthday…

“I know.” He snuggled up a little closer and grumbled to himself. “I wish I could meet him.”

“Daar, we talked about this. It’s for his safety and his well-being. No cub should grow in the shadow of their sires, especially not a shadow like yours. You have enemies who would take advantage of the situation.”

“I know, I know.” He tried and completely failed to keep the sullen lay of his ears under control.

“It is cruel.” Naydra had decided that a while ago.

“Yeah…but at the same time, I can see now more’n ever why he needs to be his own Male.”

Something in the way he said it plucked at her instincts. She squirmed, he loosened up a little, and she pulled back from him a bit to try and figure out what was eating at him. He noticed, raised a paw to get his ears to stand up again, and cleared his throat.

“…Y’wanna eat somethin’?”

Naydra chittered in mild exasperation and shook her head. “Not now, you oaf! Something’s stuck in your fur. I can tell, you know.” She flicked the end of his nose affectionately.

Daar sighed hugely, cuddled her a little closer and looked off into the distance for a moment as he thought. “I been watchin’ some’a the news media from Earth,” he said.

“And?”

“Y’know how the Gao see me, right?”

Naydra considered that for a moment. “I’d say equal parts admiration, fear, and love.”

“Yeah! And that feels weird ‘cuz I was just this big sorta silly public figger all them years. I mean not really but I wasn’t gonna go outta my way and be all super serious alla time like Genshi or whoever. Weren’t who I was, y’know?”

“And now the world is a much darker place. You’re the Daar the Gao needs and we do love you for it. I love you.”

Daar keened very quietly and squeezed her warmly. “I know. An’ I love you like I ain’t ever loved anyone. But all that? I can get used to that. I gotta be like any Clan Father, but I gotta be the Father of everyone. With Humans though it’s different.”

“Different how?”

“They don’t like people like me. At all. In fact I think they’re fuckin’ scared o’me. I’m sorta like the villain in a lotta their news, and I guess they’re makin’ a digital ripoff version o’me inna comic book movie, now. I’m definitely the bad guy in it…they use words like ‘Tyrant’ and ‘Dictator’. An’ ‘Brutal,’ that one gets used a lot.”

There it was. He’d not quite reconciled the reality of who he was with the self-image he wanted to cling to. Time for some frank words, then.

“Daar, my love. You are all of those things. But you are much more. You are the Great Father. It’s not your fault the Humans don’t have a concept to match you.”

“They think my little stories are a ‘public relations’ ploy!”

Naydra considered him for a second and combed a rogue tuft of his fur back into place. “It’s not like you to be bothered by things like that…”

Daar wasn’t one to be at a loss for words, ever. He was too keen for that. Nevertheless it took him a moment to choose what he wanted to say, which he finally let out with an irritated growl. “It’s just so…cynical! They see the worst possible motive in literally everything!”

“They’re a cynical species.”

“I know, I guess…” Daar grumbled. “An’ it looks like I’ll be the butt o’ their jokes ‘till I die, too.”

“Surely that doesn’t bother you,” she teased.

“Depends on the joke, I guess. C’mon, ain’t nobody’s hide is infinitely thick.”

“Oh?”

“Eh. Better if I just ignore ‘em an’ forget ‘em…”

“Oh Bumpkin,” she nibbled gently at his neck, “It’s not all bad. Some of the caricatures are in friendly spirits! I liked the one where you tackled the President and slobbered all over him.”

“I never did either of those things! And also, my muscles aren’t quite that ridiculous.”

Naydra looked down at the enormous legs that were carefully wrapped just shy of crushingly tight around her waist. She felt them with her paws and admired their rippling brawn for a long moment, trying and utterly failing to squeeze his bulging muscles. They were practically bigger than she was, harder than rocks, and he was hardly flexing them at all.

Naydra flicked her ears in bemusement. “Yes they are, dear.”

That got a quiet chitter from him; Daar was easy to flatter. “Fine, fine.” He licked the top of her head affectionately right in-between her ears, and she shivered happily in his grasp. “I ‘spose it’ll get worse when this little workhouse drama moves into the next act, too.”

“Why, what comes next? I thought you were done with it?”

“Nah, there’s a lot to come yet.” Daar scratched the spot on her back between her shoulder blades where no Gaoian could ever scratch themselves, and made her melt with pleasure. She half-shut her eyes and felt her ears droop as he satisfied itches she hadn’t even noticed were there. He had a shockingly gentle touch with those huge paws of his, and it wasn’t long before those great legs of his squeezed harder and his scratches moved elsewhere…

Daar grumbled in smug self-satisfaction. “Too bad ‘yer still recoverin’ ‘cuz there’s a lot more hours left in the night!” He growled low against her ear, “I could think’a how to spend ‘em…”

…Blatant, and tempting. Maybe. But first: “Don’t you distract me with your promises,” she chided him with a chitter. “What comes next?”

“Eh, a dumb Keeda game.” He didn’t stop with his paws while he spoke. “It’s all so Sartori can maneuver his enemies into doin’ what he wants ‘em to do. It’s clever enough but I don’t like clever strategies when a simple one would do, there’s lots more to go wrong.”

She had to fight against his wickedly skilled touch but she did manage to slip in a subtle tease. “So you like things dumb and easy, then!”

“Balls yeah! You ain’t gotta think too hard ‘bout an easy plan. It’s just, sometimes you can’t come up with one in time.”

Naydra duck-nodded and snuggled into his fur. “He knows his people best, I’m sure.”

“I guess.” Daar ran his claws down her back again, gentler this time. He was more chaste, just brushing her fur and not scritching with any intent. “Y’know, I lived with ‘em for a long damn time but maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to their politics.”

“Maybe. Worry about the Humans tomorrow, I never did give you your birthday present.”

He tilted an ear sideways in bemusement. “Oh? I thought you wanted to rest?”

“I do…” What she really wanted to do couldn’t possibly be more obvious, but Daar was a challenging mate at his gentlest and quite frankly, gentle wasn’t what either of them wanted. No matter. Instead she snuffled against his neck and licked along a particularly huge cord of muscle, then moved her attentions over to his throat, down along his chest…

He never failed to reward her with delighted little growls and groans of pleasure. Or with his touch. One of his great paws landed in the small of her back while the other rested gently on her head, kneading and encouraging her.

“Oh…I love you so fucking much…”

She felt like could spend forever grooming his chest. It was broad, thick, and hugely strong, and almost no other part of him smelled so utterly male. But she had another goal. She worked her way lower and spent a pleasantly long time grooming the bricks of his abs…then lower…

And then lower.

His heat and strength, his smell and taste, the little whines and his encouraging paws…perfect. She knew what she was doing and prided herself on her work, so even with his legendary stamina he couldn’t hold out forever. She couldn’t hold out long herself, and the moment came for them both when he keened in warning, and those powerful legs of his squeezed down around her so hard she felt like her body might shatter. Another heartbeat later and his grip tightened hugely, he paused, snarled, bucked—

Panting from both of them, and eventually a long, slow climb-down from an incredible peak. Daar huffed in satisfaction and pulled her up along his body so they were nose-to-nose. Her ribs felt tender but that wasn’t important at the moment. The look in his eyes, the set of his ears, his very scent told her what words seemed inadequate to say.

“I love you.” He said it anyway.

“And I you, my love.” He keened like his heart was aching, and she keened with him. They held, no more words were needed. He groomed her in turn where his claws had pricked her…and almost immediately she felt his ardor rising, and strongly. She might regret it in the morning but right then, she knew what she needed. What they both needed.

“Please…” she keened desperately, “but be careful!”

Daar nodded seriously. “…I will.”

They didn’t even leave the floor. He pinned her utterly, wrapped her up in an absolutely crushing grasp, snarled from the bottom of his stomach right against her throat…and he was everything she needed and wanted until the early morning hours.

They must have dozed off at some point, because she woke sometime after sunrise, curled up and alone on the naxas pelt on the floor with another draped heavily on top of her. Daar had already risen for his duties. How exactly he managed that without waking her was a mystery for later. She got up, shook herself out and stretched; as predicted, the evening had taken its toll on her muscles. She winced and decided she would try some of that wonderful ‘Ibuprofen’ that Daar kept talking about, then headed for her morning ablutions. Right then she noticed a hastily-scribbled note on the bathroom door.

Naydi

Sarry I gotta get up too fuck damn early these days if I wanna want to get any kind o serious exercise in. I’ll be downstairs until eight ten-hour actually. You’re right, I can take time fer myself now that Gao ain’t isn’t on fire.

If you join me I’ll teach you some of what Myun knows! If you manage to land a swipe I’ll even cook for you!!

Bumpkin

He signed off with a ridiculous cartoon scrawl of himself gnawing viciously on a whole naxas, not yet expired and somehow only mildly displeased with the situation.

Well. Who could resist a challenge like that? Especially seeing as Naydra had already had a few lessons from Myun…and he enjoyed cooking anyway so it wasn’t like he’d be bitter about it. She rose and went to take a dust shower.

Maybe she could continue to surprise him.

Date Point: 15y5m7d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

Margaret White

Arthur was furious. And Arthur Sartori, while he was generally a gruff and straightforward kind of man, very rarely got angry. Seeing him genuinely livid was a rare and intimidating thing.

“Did the Gaoians know this?”

The latest update on their intel from Gao—and specifically, the captured Hierarchy agent being interrogated there—was being delivered today by Colonel Daniel Shiderly, who from what Margaret could guess hadn’t slept much in a day or two. Maybe he was just one of those men who worked until he fell down by nature.

“We think Daar knows some elements of it, or maybe some version of the truth. He’s kept his cards very close to his chest about it all but given his actions, and…really, the entire history of Stoneback, they were clearly protecting against something.”

“Meaning that Stoneback has potentially had inklings about the Hierarchy for…what, the last six or seven hundred years? Our years?”

“Maybe. We don’t know what exactly they thought they knew. It could have been something mythological. That era saw the virtual death of their mythology—”

“Oh,” enlightenment struck Margaret in the head. “Oh. Oh, actually, that explains something that’s been puzzling us.”

Arthur gave her a curious look. “What?”

“Daar is fascinated with Gaoian mythology,” she explained. “If the Stonebacks were preserving that mythology from antiquity then that would explain…certainly their indoctrination for young initiates, but a lot else besides. Look at the terminology! The Third Ring, the First Rite. Goodness, they have initiates. That’s not the product of an entirely dispassionate and rational people, that’s a mystery cult.”

“Well…at least I won’t have to break the bad news to him in full,” Arthur grumbled and sat down on a couch. “Christ, just when I think we’ve hit the bottom of the rabbit hole it opens up below us again.”

Margaret cleared her throat. “It does raise the question of just how much of the Hierarchy’s influence and potential we’ve really seen…” she said. “It raises other questions, too. Were they eying us as one of their Janissary species?”

General Kolbeinn was on video conference from Scotch Creek. “The fact is, we might never know,” he said. “But both Six and Cytosis corroborate each other that they only learned about us sometime around about the mid nineteenth century. Personally, I doubt it: The Gaoian male-female imbalance makes them pretty much ideal for breeding an army, if your idea of combat is just throwing a wall of bodies at a problem. We’re not as well-suited to that.”

“That’s certainly how the Dominion and Alliance fight…” Arthur muttered. He rose from the couch again and retrieved his thinking baseball from the desk.

“And you’ve seen how smart the Gaoians are about it, too. Hell, look at how fast they’ve learned from us,” Kolbeinn noted. “There’s a saying: Quantity is a quality all its own. If you can muster both quantity and quality…”

“…Good God. Think about that statement. Now, look at Daar again.”

A valid point, that. He was well-poised to head a military with all the advances the United States had gained in the twentieth century, and all the technological advantages the Gao had, and their sheer overwhelming numbers. A billion-strong army was nothing to sneeze at. Throw in that Daar was a HEAT-quality warrior himself, and amongst the best of them to boot…

That was a potentially unbreakable advantage the Gao had, if they wanted to use it.

“Fortunately for us, he’s singular. There’s only a tiny handful of beings who could match him in the first place and he’s the absolute leader of the Gao. He’s pretty much a one-time event. Still,” Arthur added, “Best to stay on his good side, I think.”

“And? What will he do with that opportunity?”

“Hopefully, he’ll do what he says he’ll do and retire once his work is done.” Kolbeinn sat forward, a little closer to his camera. “But truthfully? Once Daar’s work is done, if they wanted to the Gao could kick our asses. They have the logistics, the numbers…our physical advantages wouldn’t be enough in the face of that. We’re lucky as hell to have them for allies.”

“Cultivating their friendship was the luckiest thing that’s happened to us,” Margaret said.

Colonel Shiderly made a low whistle. “God. This makes that Warhorse character the most ‘strategic private’ of all time.”

“No kidding…” grumbled Sartori. “Thank fuck for Regaari, too…and Ayma, God rest her soul.” He turned around. “Let’s face it, PR doesn’t come much better than two people braving a deathworld because they’re worried about their friend. Those two made our people love the Gaoians just by showing up.”

“And Champion Genshi,” Margaret reminded him. “He clearly knows more than he’s let on.”

“All of which means we can’t keep this secret from them. Look at them. They’re Deathworlders who are now recovering from literally millennia of suppression. I suspect that they’ll regain much of what they were sooner rather than later, and when they do they’ll still outnumber us by at least two to one.”

“Mm.” Arthur spun his baseball from one hand to the other a few times, then set it back down on the desk. “So in other words, there’s nothing Earth-shattering in this revelation, it’s just more evidence on why we should double down on our alliance with them.”

“That does raise the matter of Champion Sheeyo,” Margaret reminded the room. “He’s again requested that we send a representative to the Rich Plains…”

Sartori sighed. “…Given this revelation, I don’t think we can afford to frustrate our allies. If they want a representative, let’s send one. It’ll help the Ten’Gewek, too. But this time, I think we insist on heavy personal protection at all times.”

“I’ll start drawing up a short-list of candidates,” Margaret promised.

“Who’s the first name that springs to mind?”

“…Hmmm…” Margaret thought for a second. “Well, the two at the top would be General Tremblay and Admiral Knight.”

“Admiral Knight makes the most sense. He’s familiar with the HEAT and, being frank, someone like this Righteous fellow at his side might be the kind of intimidation we need.”

Margaret nodded. “I’ll see if he’s agreeable to it. Maybe we can help him with his daughter’s care needs, perhaps see if this Nofl fellow on Cimbrean can help…”

“Telling Daar will need to be handled carefully. He’s…” Sartori chose his words carefully, “Well, he’s intimidating, even when he doesn’t mean to be. I think I need to do it personally. This is too important to be left to anyone else and I suspect he won’t be too mad at me.”

“Your Secret Service detail won’t be pleased by that. He doesn’t…respect certain boundaries.”

“Just because he could kill my entire entourage in a heartbeat doesn’t mean he will. Don’t underestimate him: He’s a good man underneath it all.”

“A good tyrant,” Kolbeinn reminded them.

“Yes. Recall, however, that he never wanted that. He was created the Great Father.”

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely, Mister President. No disrespect intended.”

Arthur snorted and a genuine smile crossed his face and chased some of the wrinkles from his expansive forehead. “Oh, can it. I’m the President, which means I’m basically just a mushroom: I live in the dark and my Cabinet feeds me bullshit.”

“Mister President–!”

“Relax. If there’s one thing I learned from Daar, it’s how to not take myself too seriously.” Arthur leaned against the desk. “I’m not worried about him. He understands power better than most. But that said…let’s make sure his interests align with virtue. Is there anything else?”

“Not from me, Mister President,” Shiderly replied.

“I’m jumping out to Erebor this evening for a look at the new proposed Von-Neumann scouts. I’ll send a report.”

“Thank you both,” Arthur thanked them, and within seconds Margaret and he had the Oval Office to themselves.

“…Well. I guess that’s the interstellar matters dealt with for now,” Margaret said lightly.

“Sometimes I think we need a second President just to handle all that stuff,” Arthur replied, shaking his head. “At least it was a quiet domestic brief today. And as far as the Russians and Chinese arguing over Lucent goes, I’m happy to let them sort it out themselves.”

“None of our business, we have no opinion, et cetera.” Margaret nodded in agreement. “There was one other thing I wanted to raise with you. Nothing vitally important, but…well, interesting.”

Arthur stretched his back. “Oh?”

“You are aware of this Cruezzir-derivative, Gaoian-specific formulation the Corti have been supplying at effectively no cost, I believe.”

“Refresh my memory.”

“It seemed to function much like the Crue-D our own species uses, except tuned to Gaoian physiology. The lab report came back on the sample we managed to acquire.”

Arthur sighed. “Let me guess. They’re using the Gao as a test-bed?”

“…More like a clinical trial. Obviously we’re a long, long way behind both the Gao and the Corti in our biological sciences, but…”

“What…what did they add?”

“We…I’m waiting on Clan Openpaw’s opinion, they’re much better qualified to research it than we are…. But once I got past all the ‘telomere’ this and the ‘cellular composition’ that, the researchers think that one of the compound’s side-effects might be to counteract aging.”

Arthur’s head slowly tilted to one side as he considered that. “That…is very interesting. You mean Gao who use it will live longer?”

“Possibly. Anyway, this one’s an open research collaboration with the Gao, so there’s no need to brief Daar on it. He’ll know soon enough as well, if he doesn’t already.”

“…Something to chew on during my evening walk, at least,” Arthur decided. “Is the team ready?”

One of the most difficult points of high office was the constant security. He didn’t begrudge the Secret Service their needs—they’d saved his life several times already, though the public didn’t know—but it did mean he didn’t have the freedom to simply go for a walk, even just around the Rose Garden.

“They know your routine. I daresay they were ready an hour ago.” Margaret stood up, smoothed down her skirt and collected the few items she’d brought with her. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Sure enough, she passed his security team as she left the Oval Office and headed for her own, smaller and much less famous office down the corridor.

They really were not going to enjoy another meeting with Daar so soon after the first…

Date Point: 15y5m8d AV
Rob Rollins Dairy Farm, Peake Lowlands, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Rodolfo Hernandez

Mama never would have imagined her son would grow up to be a farmer.

…Actually, she never would have imagined a lot of this. Farming on an alien planet, having a bull literally ripped apart and eaten by alien cavemen, and now those same cavemen were back looking very sorry and promising to put in some work as repayment.

That wasn’t going to bring Odin back from the dead, nor was the twenty thousand pounds in compensation promised from AEC. Until that arrived Mister Rollins would have to make do with imported genetics until they got a new bull, and the whole program was going back to square one. They were breeding dairy cows for a low-gravity planet, that was a whole headache all by itself.

On the other hand…the hay bales were getting stacked at record speed. He hadn’t counted on them moving the round bales by hand but hey, that just meant Rodolfo could use his payloader for something else, like digging a new wallow for his growing herd.

They helped with that too, once he’d explained it to the…well, smaller seemed the wrong word. Younger, nuclear orange crested one, anyway. He had questions about everything.

Julian Etsicitty was with them too which was something to write home about all by itself. He was a much bigger sumbitch in person than he’d looked on TV, which honestly was saying something, but he seemed like a regular guy and had hands that told a life story of hard work. Rodolfo could appreciate that. Julian took one look at the state of the farmstead, pulled off his shirt, and set to work on the smaller bales in the calving barn. For a guy who’d gone to Mars and spent time on late night talk shows, it turned out he know a heck of a lot about farming livestock and he almost didn’t need any direction.

Julian sent the other two down to deal with the second set of huge round bales, and in the meantime he and Rodolfo worked up a hell of a sweat getting things squared away in the calving barn. He’d almost have felt insulted at the casual way Julian just tossed the big rectangular bales up into the hayloft like it wasn’t any big deal, but honestly it was nice to finally have someone else who was strong enough to get some hard work over and done with. Too strong, maybe: Rodolfo had to damn near kill himself to keep up with him. A few hours later and Rodolfo was completely tuckered out, so Julian lightly flung himself upstairs and set about stacking the hay to the rafters to make more room for bedding straw.

Rodolfo decided he should at least fix some lunch for everyone and left Julian to it. When he returned with three huge platters, Julian had already managed to throw all the straw into the hayloft by himself. If it weren’t for him being so darn friendly, Rodolfo would have found himself shamed by it all; a celebrity Julian may have been, but he was big as hell, strong as shit, and could work damn hard without stopping at all.

He finally took a breather when the promise of food was made, but held off on eating until the Ten’Gewek were done and chatted over a drink mid-afternoon, when Julian was looking downright nostalgic. Rodolfo always had a beer with lunch but Julian politely declined and settled for a jug of ice water, which he downed almost all at once.

“I take it you grew up on a farm?”

“Nah, but I grew up in farm country.” Julian scratched at some of the strawdust clinging to his chest. “Had lots of dairy too, or at least there used to be. Now they mostly do corn, soy, beets, alfalfa, that sorta thing.”

“No livestock?”

“Not too much anymore, no. Most of the dairy scattered across the region. I don’t remember exactly why, but it was in decline when I was still a kid.”

“There was still some, though.”

“Yeah. Hell, I remember when I was…thirteen, twelve years old? This big-ass storm came through and next door was calving three heifers in the middle of the night. Grandpa took me round there and I held the light for ‘em. Then I helped him pull two of ‘em.”

“Fun.”

“Eh, it was work and I got paid. Every little bit for new shoes, y’know?”

“No shit? I always figured you came from money.”

Julian chuckled softly, “Oh dude, I was a poor ass fella growin’ up. I get it, man. I had to work hard and save up for half a year to get shoes every fall, ‘cuz Grandpa couldn’t afford it and I sure wasn’t going to school in moccasins or something like that. Every dime he made went to food, upkeep, and property tax.”

“I never had it anything like that bad. Kudos.”

“Eh, to be fair I’ve got really big-ass feet so I couldn’t exactly go shopping at Walmart or whatever, but still. I also spent more on food than I needed to, I guess. Commods aren’t exactly a fine dining experience. Now beaver tail, that’s something worth suffering for.”

In the field, Yan hoisted a whole wrapped haylage bail up onto one shoulder, took aim, and with an insulting degree of ease he tossed it onto the top of the stack. It landed perfectly at the apex. He looked around and apparently decided that nobody was watching, because he promptly danced a celebratory little jig. Julian grinned and Rodolfo stifled a laugh.

“Don’t let him know you saw that. He’s supposed to be all dignified and stuff.”

Rodolfo chuckled. “See, that almost makes up for Odin all by itself.”

“…Yeah. I feel like I gotta apologize for that a little too. I should have been there to stop them.”

“Well…It’s Mister Rollins who really bore the brunt of it in the end. He was a good bull, though. Even-tempered, docile…”

“Not the way Vemik tells it…” Julian noted. There was a mischievous side to him, then.

“Yeah, you see how docile any bull is when it’s attacked.”

Julian shrugged those massive shoulders of his. “No argument here. Still. There is something we could all learn from this, y’know? Take Vemik over there. He’s a hell of a bruiser, right?”

“Yeah.” The big man wasn’t kidding. Vemik was busy rolling those bales over to Yan like he was having the time of his life. It didn’t seem like it was hard work for him at all.

“Neither of them really need to do any of this,” Julian said. “They don’t need to be here, they don’t need us now that we sealed up their world, they didn’t need to spare us when we first met, either. And no matter what Allison says, Yan would absolutely have torn me apart before she could have done anything. But here they are, being civilized and stuff.”

“…It’s hard to stay mad at him, I’ll say that,” Rodolfo admitted. “The money helps, too.”

“These two are literally the only members of their people who understand the concept of money. And of farms or livestock at this point. And burgers. I made the mistake of giving Vemik a handful of twenty-pound notes a little while ago and he’s very carefully kept every pence…so he could spend as much of it on cheeseburgers as he could. And sketchbooks. But mostly burgers.”

Vemik’s ear twitched at that word, and he stood up tall to call back across the field. “We burging?”

“Nope! We need to watch your diet, too! All burgers’ll just make you fat!”

Looking only a little bit dejected, Vemik returned to his task.

“…Burging?” Rodolfo asked.

“It’s a language thing. He got it in his head that you use a burger when you want to burg, and a hammer when you want to ham, and…so on.”

“…I kinda like that.”

“Yeah, me too. I’m pretty sure he knows better at this point but he’s a sly fella when he wants to be. He’s been attracting a lot of attention at the park when he goes off to adventure. Especially from girls, apparently.”

“Wait, what?”

“Don’t ask me!” Julian chuckled and scratched the back of his head in embarrassment. “I’d not wish the wrath of Singer on any of ‘em…Anyway I’m not gonna stop him from making friends. He’s here to learn and represent the Ten’Gewek, so…that’s what he does. Pretty well, too.”

“What about the really big guy?”

“Yan? He’s their chief and I suppose Vemik’s minder, too. Yan likes to visit the park too, but mostly he just wants to show off for the kids and talk to people.”

“About what?”

Julian shrugged. “Anything and everything. He gets to know them. It’s amazing how folks open up to him.”

The last bale was stacked and ready and Julian finished his water with a touch of smugness. “And they know a thing or two about hard work, too. Anything else you need done?” The way he said it suggested he really wanted the answer to be yes.

Too bad, really. “No, no more. We got a lot done today.”

“Darn,” he chuckled and went to go soak his head. “Vemik! Yan! C’mon back!”

Yan knuckled himself back at a leisurely pace, while Vemik couldn’t help but explore every little detail as he bounced along the path up to the barn.

Julian returned with his torso soaked clean and his t-shirt over his shoulder. “Just remember, that big fella? Yan is the Chief of the Lodge. He’s the leader of his entire species, so…y’know.”

“…Mind my manners?”

Julian stretched his t-shirt over his head and gave Rodolfo a sympathetic look. “I would appreciate it. I know you didn’t wanna be dragged into all this intergalactic bullshit, but…”

“I get it. And…it means a lot that they came back to apologize.”

“Tell them that yourself. Here they come.” Rodolfo again wondered just how young Vemik really was, because no grown man had that much bouncy energy or curiousity. He paused to investigate and experiment with the wrought iron hinges on the gate, looked at them intensely, then looked at Julian with what could only be a snarly grin and charged at an alarming clip—

—And leapt into the air, and tackled Julian like a linebacker leveling some doddering abuelita. It was definitely to Julian’s credit that he only staggered back a single step, then turned on the balls of his foot and slammed Vemik to the ground with a hell of a thud; Rodolfo would have been flattened and likely hospitalized by either of those two.

“Jooyun!” The young alien struggled to break free of Julian’s grasp but he was having none of that and bore down hard with a grunt of effort. “Ow! I saw a strange animal!”

“Oh?”

“Long, thin! Urf, No legs! Grrrrmphf… Like in story!”

“Ah!” Julian chuckled and let Vemik go, then they detangled and helped each other stand with noogies added for fun. “I bet that was a garter snake. They’re from where I came from!”

“Really?!”

“Yeah, buddy! They’re pretty harmless though. They just eat small critters like mice and worms. Or, I suppose baby Bibtaw if they got loose on Akyawentuo.”

“They good to eat?” Yan swaggered up seeming pleased with himself and the hard day’s work. All three of them would be awesome farm hands, really.

“Eh. It’ll keep you alive. Snake’s not my thing, though. I guess some people like it.”

“Good enough for me!” Yan declared, then turned his attention to Rodolfo. “Good work. Interesting. Can see how keep animals close is useful.” There was something in the big dude’s tone that seemed…diplomatic.

“But?” Rodolfo immediately regretted his question but Yan didn’t seem offended.

“But. I think, we be careful. Hunting, Important. Prey should live, fight for self.”

Rodolfo paused and thought carefully about what to say next. Julian stood by with his arms crossed and a faint little smile on his face, watching to see what happened.

“I think there’s smart words there. But there’s eight billion of my people. It’s hard to feed that many.”

“Billion.” Yan frowned, glanced at his fingers, then at his feet and twitched his tail in circles. “Is…nine zeros. Yes?”

“Uh…yeah.”

Yan thought about that for a while and glanced at Vemik, who shrugged. “Is too big number to think about.”

“No argument there.”

“Maybe, we commune with gods when we one billion, ask about prey. I will be very dead by then.”

“We all will. Anyhoo,” Julian took charge of the conversation again, “I hope we were helpful today. We didn’t mean to hurt your breeding program and on behalf of, well, everyone but especially myself…I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well…” Rodolfo stuck out his hand. “You repaid it.”

Julian stuck his rough paw out and they shook hands like men ought to. Hopefully, feeling would return to Rodolfo’s fingers by Friday. Yan and Vemik’s handshakes were just as rough but merely very firm, thankfully.

Then they finally ate their lunch. Rodolfo wasn’t sure which one of them destroyed their plate the fastest, but it was clear all three of them were in the habit of eating big and eating often. Then they opened up the food they’d brought with them and devoured that as well. Rodolfo was a long-time farmhand, he could get behind that.

They thanked him for the food and minutes later they were back in their van and gone, three days of unfinished work finished up in one morning.

Rodolfo sighed, looked at his watch and thought for a moment. He had a solid four hours before any chores had to be done. May as well send a video message back home.

It wasn’t every day a guy met people like that.

Date Point 15y5m8d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

Sometimes, rank didn’t matter one little bit. One of those moments came when Coombes felt the ground tremble beneath his feet, looked behind him and saw Technical Sergeant Adam Arés approaching him with his broad, goofy smile plastered across his face.

“Hey, Master Sargn’t, can we talk in private for a bit?” He draped one of those arm-slabs of his around Coombe’s shoulders, damn near sent him to his knees by the sheer weight of it, then effortlessly man-handled him towards a quiet corner in the gym and spun him around.

He wasn’t trying to be intimidating. Adam didn’t have to try at all, he just did it through the sheer power of being himself. Before he knew it, Coombes was trapped in a corner and being towered over by an utter giant of a man. Adam bounced in place and grinned, clothed in nothing but his laughably tiny Ranger panties while “freshly” dripping-wet from his third daily round at the weights. He looked like a hairy comic-book caveman and smelled like he’d just personally wrestled a herd of bison into a trailer with his bare hands, off to be slaughtered for his daily protein.

The trademark goofy smile just didn’t gel with that at all. In fact, he looked extra pleased about something. Best to keep things civil.

“Is there something I can do for you, Technical Sergeant?”

“You can call me ‘Horse if you want! Can I call you Boss?”

Coombes relaxed and chuckled. He had to admit, the young man was good at defusing his own innately terrifying presence. “…So long as you get to the point, maybe?”

“Ha!” Adam had two laughs. The first was an entirely incongruous lengthy wheezing Muttley snicker, which honestly belonged on a man a ton or three lighter and fifty years older.

This one was his other laugh: the seismic bark. If Bozo were a human, he’d be Adam.

…Or was it the other way around?

Anyway. “What’s up, ‘Horse?”

“You’ve been hangin’ out a lot with Ava.”

…Fuck. Coombes felt his heart leap in his chest.

Visions of “sparring” suddenly danced before his eyes, probably like someone on the verge of death who was re-living his boring, uneventful life…maybe one where he wasn’t crushed to death by a pretty-much literal superhero who could shake buildings with his every step.

Fuck.

Coombes racked his brain for an escape from his predicament. “Well, uh, let me—”

“When you gonna ask her out?”

That was…entirely not the question Coombes had been expecting, and it probably showed on his face, too. His heart hadn’t stopped trying to explode yet, but at least he remembered how to breathe.

“…Say what?”

That seismic rumble of his, again. Well, that one was different. It was…a chuckle. A darkly amused chuckle. And a very smugly dominant one, too. Well, shit.

“You heard me. You gonna ask her out? If you leave it any longer I’m gonna start thinkin’ you’re leadin’ her on.” He drove the point home by tilting his big blocky head on that absurd, leg-thick non-neck of his until it popped loud enough to echo in the corner. He sighed happily, then instantly tensed every slab-like muscle in his entire body.

“I mean, you ain’t, right?”

The kid could teach a master class in intimidation. Christ.

Still, somehow Coombes found it in himself to stand up a little straighter. “…Start from the top. You want me to ask her out?”

“Come on, the two of you hang out literally every day, an’ she’s crazy about you…An’ I’m pretty sure she made an impression too, huh?”

“…Well…uh, yeah. Hell, I—” being flustered was kind of a new one on Coombes. “But I mean…you and her—”

“Oh, bro! You ain’t gotta worry ‘bout me. Ava and me, we have…uh, a weird relationship. I wish it didn’t end like it did but I don’t hold it against her too much. I was kind of a dick to her for years and I didn’t even know it. Also,” he grinned smugly, “The little shit she cheated with is puny as hell and has a fuckin’ disaster of a life, so whatever. Her loss.”

Coombes cleared his throat. “…The age gap doesn’t bother you?”

“Bro, that’s between you and her. She don’t mind none.”

Coombes noted in the back of his head that Adam wasn’t using his customs and courtesies properly. “Bro” was not how one addressed a senior NCO, at least not outside some very unique circumstances. But then again…Coombes wasn’t going to push his luck at the moment. Adam had started bouncing on his toes again and that frenetic energy of his was legendary. Nobody wanted to be in line-of-sight when he decided on a little personal training for his next “client,” and right now he was sizing up the hopeful boyfriend of a woman he obviously loved dearly.

Well, there wasn’t any escape for Coombes. He relaxed and decided to open up.

“…Hell, you’re right,” he sighed. “I’d have asked her on a date months ago if it wasn’t for all the personal shit around her and the Lads and…everything…Let’s face it, she kinda saved my life. That made an impression, y’know?”

“You let me worry about that,” Adam offered. Once again, it was the little details. Just a quick motion across his ridiculous body to convey exactly how he’d take care of that problem, and Coombes felt both cowed and relieved. Tip-toeing around the Lads would have been a no-go.

Still. “Okay. I just need to be absolutely sure. You are okay with me pursuing Ava. You are, in fact, asking me to. You are going to make it completely fucking clear to everyone you are okay with it. You are not going to yank the rug out from under me over this.”

Adam frowned and looked faintly hurt. “Nah bruh, I say a thing, I mean it. I want her to be happy. I also like you and being honest, I think you both kinda need it, too. She needs somebody she can rely on, and you ain’t dated anyone since I’ve known you. And you’re an old-school operator, I know how it goes. Believe me.”

Coombes has heard the rumors on that front as well. In the span of less than a year, the bouncy hulk had pretty much literally plowed his way through the entire receptive population of Foltcha about four times over and somehow engendered no ill will for it, either. Coombes had no idea how Martina had tamed a man like Adam, but he wasn’t going to question life’s little mysteries.

Coombes was no wallflower himself, but his belt didn’t have anywhere near that many notches. Especially lately. “…I haven’t dated anyone since my divorce,” he confessed. “And that was back before EMPTY BELL.”

“Oh, hell. Okay. This bit is maybe overstepping the line a little, but can I offer you a tiny piece of advice, Master Sergeant?”

Ah. Adam had distinctly moved from one mode to another and done so masterfully. Honestly, he very clearly knew how to control a situation. Coombes knew exactly what Adam was doing, knew exactly why, and felt absolutely no will whatsoever to call him on it. Adam had definitely been paying attention in class. Hell, he could teach the class.

…That was maybe a thought for later.

Coombes decided to keep it friendly, and invite him to do so as well. “Go for it, ‘Horse.”

Adam grinned at that, happy and genuine. “Okay! Look, man. Most of the HEAT is still single. The regimen keeps us all like young men, so…y’know. Anyway, it’s really just me and Righteous who have any long-term thing going on right now, so why don’t you go down to Rooney’s this weekend with the Lads, get your pipes cleaned out, and see if you still feel the same way? I don’t want you starting shit with Ava unless you’re committed and you’re goddamned sure.”

Coombes’ gut did something interesting—it balked at the idea. Just hearing the suggestion made him feel guilty, which if he stopped to listen to himself meant he already knew his own mind.

…And Adam knew. Coombes could tell just by the way those dark brown eyes bored into him.

“…Or not! You could just go for the ambiance. Only reason I don’t go is ‘cuz I love Marty too much, y’know? She’s gonna pop any day now, and it’s been months…”

…Ah. That explained everything about Adam for the last few months, and was probably the reason everyone’s training across SOR had progressed so much, especially his; Adam was a fanatically attentive personal trainer and had been inescapable since the beginning of the year.

“Don’t want the temptation?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t ever, not after what happened between me and Ava but, y’know. Also there ain’t no point in me blue-ballin’ myself. More.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway!” He’d shifted mode again, and now somehow he was a light, bouncy engine of happiness who led Coombes out of the corner and effortlessly directed him toward the serious end of the gym, with himself sauntering comfortably alongside; the man was so utterly fucking huge that a confident, leg-swinging swagger seemed to be the only way he could thump along. Clearly, this conversation wasn’t going to end before he’d exercised his authority to PT people to death.

Like a condemned man commenting on the weather as he was led to the gallows, Coombes ignored the impending unpleasantness in favor of a more agreeable topic. “…Got any more advice? Say, about what she likes?”

“You’re askin’ entirely the wrong man. Shit, you probably know better than me.”

“…No…uh, um…” Shit. How would he broach the subject—?

“Good, hard, as long and as much as you can stand. You gotta compete with me after all!”

…There was a mental image he hadn’t really wanted. There was a twinkle of mischief in Adam’s eye, too. Martina had clearly rubbed off on him, a little too much.

…Maybe that was the wrong turn of phrase.

“Also!” Yet another strategic shift. “One thing I’ve noticed is you’re not particularly flexible and you wind too easily under load. Big part of that’s your diet—you eat like shit, Master Sergeant—but the rest is your training. We’re gonna fix that. Tonight, let’s get you stretched out properly,” He squeezed his fists closed and cracked his knuckles, “And then we’re gonna work on your endurance…” There was the trademark Arés Grin of Pain. “…You’re gonna need it.”

Coombes sighed, but didn’t object. Nothing good ever came without a payment…And for this, he’d gladly pay his ton of pain.

At the end, though, Adam was kind enough to carry him upstairs to a clean bed. Whaddaguy.

Date Point: 15y5m8d AV
Chiune Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Clara Brown

Astonishingly considering the family drama unfolding back in Folctha, Allison arrived for her first day of work at Chiune looking chipper, fresh and stress-free. She was driving one of the company cars, an electric SUV with the MBG logo emblazoned on the doors and hood, wearing a company polo shirt, but she was wearing her BGEV-11 patrol cap and her Oakleys as she pulled in and bounced out of the car with a grin.

Clara greeted her with a hug. “You’re looking chipper!”

Allison snorted. “Are you kidding? I got a whole eighty minutes away from my fucking mother on the drive over here! I feel great!”

If there was some brittle humor in the way she said it, Clara decided not to comment. Instead, she pointed over to the fitting hangar, where BGEV-12’s chassis had just been installed. The AAAF had been repurposed to churn out the ships in bare-bones format as fast as it could, and Chiune’s role going forward was outfitting, mission-specific equipment installation and final tests.

Moses Byron was banking on the Misfit-class. It was a proven success and it combined small size with huge power and a versatile mission profile. The starboard bay could be almost anything: *Misfit*’s was a sample preparation lab for recovering specimens from alien worlds, but in theory it could be anything and the ship design team had sketched out variations that could serve as a flying clinic, a disaster relief first responder, an ambulance, and all manner of niche scientific applications.

“Let’s go meet your team.”

Allison grabbed a gym bag from the car and locked it behind her as they entered the hangar. “How big is the team?”

“Well, there’s the team lead, four primary engineers, two quality engineers, a crew consultant - that’s you - and a team assistant.”

“What’s the assistant do?”

Clara shrugged. “What doesn’t he do? He makes your jobs easier. Runs for stuff you need, makes sure you stick to your scheduled breaks, keeps you fed, takes notes…”

“He assists,” Allison summarized drily.

Clara laughed. “Heh! Yeah.” He paused before opening the door. “Be warned, your team’s assistant is Micky and he’s…fizzy.”

“Fizzy?”

“You know how I said they’re all geeking out to meet you? Micky’s the worst.”

“Ah.” Allison shook her head with a smile, then took a deep breath. She took off her Oakleys and hooked them into her collar. “Let’s do this.”

Sure enough, the team were nerding out hard when they got to shake Allison’s hand. They all showed it in their own ways—Chuck Gifford, the team lead, was polite and professional but he didn’t break out even one of his painful dad-joke puns the whole time, which was a sure sign of nerves.

There were handshakes, selfies, jokes and Allison…turned out to be pretty good at putting the team at their ease, once she’d worked through her own awkwardness. Xiù was rubbing off on her, it seemed.

“So…why don’t we take a look in the ship?” she suggested the moment a silence settled on them that threatened to become awkward. Chuck nodded vigorously and led the way, chattering enthusiastically about what they’d learned from Misfit and were doing differently this time.

Clara smiled and left them to it.

Her own work involved schematics, calculations, reviewing the latest patents and prototypes coming from their associates, and spitballing new ship concepts with her colleagues in her spare time. Hephaestus had the market basically cornered in terms of the military vehicles, between their naval contracts, the Firebirds and the Weavers. Moses wasn’t interested in competing with that, not when the civilian sector was still wide open and largely unexplored.

So, scientific vessels, space tourism, rapid couriers…anything that didn’t actually need a shipyard to build, basically. It was all up for grabs, and every morning Clara’s inbox was full of new ideas about what specialist niche they might choose to fill.

She was among the overwhelming majority who advocated for flexibility and versatility in their design philosophy. Make something that could do anything, then equip it for the job at hand, that was the way. That was just common sense, so the two or three guys who persisted in arguing for hyper-specialization of every facet of a ship’s function just baffled her.

Most of her morning was spent wrangling with the Bartlett Equation, trying to figure out a useful forcefield shape that could be used to catch space debris and start cleaning up Earth’s low orbit, without requiring utterly crazy power. They knew it was possible, the system containment field proved it. But nobody yet really knew how the SCF did what it did.

It was so gratifying to be genuinely on the cutting edge of whole new unexplored fields of technology, and to be able to look forward and see how far ahead of them those fields extended. But Clara had a tendency to lose herself in her work, so she had an alarm set on her phone to remind her to get up and take a break. It went off three times, as insurance against dismissing it and “just one more minute”-ing, but she’d learned long ago to get moving on the first one.

She went back down to the hangar with her lunch in hand, and nearly got bowled over by Micky Hills as she tried to pass through the same door at the same time as he was coming out of it.

He picked up her scattered and ruined food for her. “Aargh, sorry doctor Brown!”

“It’s alright…” She hadn’t really been looking forward to more chicken and quinoa anyway. She loved Dane, but she was definitely going to get more assertive with her cheat meals from now on. “Tell you what, grab me a burrito and a snickers bar, and we’re even.”

Micky nodded. “Can do!”

“How’re they doing?”

Micky paused as he finished scooping up the spilled lunch. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand half of what they were saying today. And you know, usually I can kinda-sorta keep up. But today…I mean, damn, Allison really knows her stuff!”

“Like how?”

“Just…little details, y’know? She took the tour and she had a list of little things at the end of it where Chuck just slapped his head when he read it. Right now he’s helping her tweak the ventral systems duct.”

“Tweak?”

“Nothing big, they said. Just a little somethin’ that makes it easier to crawl in there. See for yourself, I’ll get you that burrito.”

“Thanks, Micky.”

True to Micky’s report, Allison was shoulders-deep in the ventral ducting crawlspace under the ship’s central corridor and she looked as happy as a pig with a bucket of scraps.

“Yeah, I did this on Misfit while we were landed on Lucent. Took all day with just me, ‘cuz Julian and Xiù had work to do, but it made life way easier—hey, Clara.”

“Hey.” Clara squatted down next to the crawlspace and gave Chuck Gifford a grin. “Redesigning my masterpiece?”

“Nah, just…nngh…a few tweaks.” Allison did something in the crawlspace that made a deep clonk sound. “There! Good. Just three more.”

“Dare I ask?”

“With a bit of leverage, you can get the grav plating cable to tuck up under the framework here. Gives you just that bit more wiggle room.”

Clara considered it. “That’s…okay, I can see it, yeah.”

“Might make the difference in an emergency,” Allison shrugged. “I know, it’s kind of a small detail, but I found Misfit ran on small details, y’know?”

“She ain’t wrong,” Chuck agreed. “Oil rigs were the same way. Back when I started out on ‘em, our supervisor had this cautionary tale about how a rig damn near went up in flames ‘cuz somebody didn’t put their boots away right.”

Allison nodded. “Yeah, Drew Cavendish—you remember, the spacesuit engineer from Hephaestus? He said about the same thing.”

“You don’t hear me arguing, do you?” Clara asked. She opened the ship’s design documentation and made a note of the ‘tweak.’ “Hell, this is what I wanted you on board for. Tuning and optimisation.”

Allison wriggled a little further under the deck.“Feels good. Multimeter, please?”

Chuck handed it to her. Clara was at the wrong angle to see what she tested, but she seemed pleased and handed it back seconds later.

“Break for lunch, guys. Otherwise it’ll be going-home time before you know it.”

“I’ve only got three more to do—”

Clara caught Chuck’s eye, laughed silently to herself, and put on her command voice. “Allison. Out of the damn hole.”

“…Fiiine…”

Micky arrived with lunch a minute or two later after they’d cleaned up with wet wipes and hand sanitizer, and Clara sat back to listen as the team got to know their new member and she got to know them.

She didn’t share her family troubles, but that was hardly surprising.

“So what was Mars like?” Micky asked, a few minutes in.

“…Cold. Really cold. Like, the excursion suits were heated but you could still feel, like…I dunno. You guys ever gone walking in deep snow with a pair of thick boots on?” there were a couple of nods. “Like how your feet don’t get cold, but you can feel that it’s damn cold out there. We were all snug and toasty in those suits, but I tell ya we knew it was wicked cold out there.”

“That’s your first answer, though?” Micky asked. “One of the first crew to land on Mars, and you’re just like ‘yeah, it was cold’?”

Allison laughed. “…It was crazy. I mean, sometimes I think it musta been a dream or something, looking back. It was so easy in the end!”

“We built a good ship,” Chuck said. He wasn’t prone to false modesty.

“Yeah, you did. You built a great ship. I’m really gonna miss her.”

“…Did you know the Big Words before you landed?” Micky pressed, before the moment could turn maudlin.

“Nah. Xiù kept ‘em a secret the whole way there. We first heard them about the same time as everyone else did…Good, weren’t they?”

“Referencing Armstrong was a nice touch. ‘Course, Hephaestus beat us to the punch when it comes to landing on another body in the solar system. You ever been to Ceres?”

“Nope. I hear it’s quite an achievement, though.”

“Well, they’ve got more money than we do,” Clara said. “That’s all.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Tony Carver agreed. He was one of the QA engineers, his job was to follow up on everything and test it. To the same degree that Chuck wasn’t given to false modesty, Tony wasn’t inclined toward false enthusiasm. There were other nods as the team agreed with the sentiment.

“I hate to admit it, but this ship’s gonna be even better,” Allison predicted.

“It better be.”

“It will be.”

That ended lunch. They were all too fired up to get on with it, and Clara couldn’t blame them. The last of their food vanished, Micky jumped to the task of dealing with the trash, and the team scattered back into the little nooks and crannies around the ship where they’d been installing and tuning her systems. Clara returned to her office with a spring in her step.

She was looking forward to writing her evening progress report.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Peake Lowlands Training Ground, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Chief Special Warfare Officer Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

Three weeks. Three weeks was all it took for Hoeff’s “most favoritest” gorilla-bros to make best friends with the JETS teams, and in that time a shocking amount of work had gotten done. First and foremost was the friendships, actually. The JETS teams would need to trust that the Ten’Gewek could actually teach them useful skills, and that evolution got underway on their second trip out to the range. Yan and Vemik had a scary eye for anything in the bush that might be useful. They showed that by trekking out into the range with nothing but their knives, without even the tiniest bit of useful leather or stone on their person. They then built themselves a serviceable camp in the span of about an hour, a comfortable little spot in another, and an invisible one shortly thereafter.

“A good man, not even need knife,” Vemik had said with Yan’s nodding approval, while they put the finishing touches on a completely smokeless fire. “But flint-knap need much practice. Knife faster for now.” The JETS teams didn’t say much but it was obvious they were very impressed.

During that time the Ten’Gewek were busy, busy, busy. They didn’t stop for a moment except to slam down water or eat food, which the Gaoians had gone off to hunt with their human teammates. Once they had their camp built out, and had taught the logic of exactly why they did this and that—sometimes couched in mildly religious tones, admittedly—the group sat down around the campfire and began telling stories.

The Gaoians told stories, too. If there was a common thread between any species, but maybe it was particularly of predatory ones, it seemed to be storytelling. Everyone seemed fascinated by each other and it wasn’t until Hoeff came back to tell them off that they reluctantly went to bed; Ten’Gewek weren’t used to keeping hard schedules.

After that, things snowballed quickly. Physical strength was very important to all of this, both for the Ten’Gewek who absolutely could not afford to lose anything, and to the Gaoians who had to build themselves up. Much of each day was devoted to that problem. Every single day they had physical training with ‘Horse—Yan and Vemik especially enjoyed that. Depending on the schedule, the second part of their training might include hiking, Gravball, simple “fun days” of competitive work, maybe extra lifting, maybe practical skills. Hoeff played it by ear while Walsh stayed on top of the numbers, and Coombes kept the overall direction on task and target.

Hoeff had nothing to complain about, really. Yan had ended up in charge of the group by the sheer force of his charisma. They’d thought at first it might be best to see how he did as a subordinate, but he really was a natural leader and in any case, there was no point risking a diplomatic incident just yet. Ten’Gewek still had a lot of headspace to grow into.

There were, however two sticking points, both of which ended up being manageable. The first was ‘Horse; Adam was about to be a brand new father any day now. Diego was a big baby, and everyone knew the birth was going to really take it out of Marty, which meant that Adam went on paternity leave halfway through week two to attend to her every need. Which apparently meant lots of jalapeno poppers and egg fu yung.

He still popped his head in every day to check in—no doubt because she wanted some breathing room every now and then—but for the most part, his training duties had shifted to Righteous and Baseball. Firth was definitely more focused on combat function over raw power, but he knew the strength game as well as the Protectors and was utterly remorseless in the gym. Burgess in turn had a strong focus on rehabilitative training, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the Gaoians; Righteous would break ‘em, then Burgess would fix ‘em.

Carebear and Irish ended up getting lots of practice, keeping everyone healthy.

Then there was was the ongoing drama in Julian’s life. It didn’t affect his work but it did restrict his schedule sometimes. Hoeff stayed out of it as much as he could but it was impossible to not get the basics. Hell-parents had shown up, dragging two unfortunate kids, there was legal wrangling and negotiations and meanwhile the kids were being educated in Folctha’s high school because the government took an…interesting line on homeschooling. In fact it was so heavily monitored and regulated that Hoeff sometimes wondered why they didn’t just go the whole hog and outlaw it. Probably some of the American contingent in the Thing, he’d wager.

That didn’t even touch on the custody battle. The Court had little experience in family law, but decided fairly quickly that the situation was untenable. Salt Lake City agreed as well and the real hangup was simply the mechanics of Court supervision. In the end Folctha appointed Julian, Salt Lake City sent a case worker, and neither of the parents were allowed unsupervised visitation with the boys until the case had been settled…somehow.

Interim custody was given to Allison, for the short term. Hoeff didn’t know the rest of the details but both Julian and the cavebros seemed reasonably satisfied with the state of affairs, so Hoeff didn’t pry. As long as mission effectiveness wasn’t curtailed, he didn’t care.

It wasn’t like he had any authority over the three anyway. Special operations was so weird sometimes.

He met the kids just once. They were quiet and straight-laced but they seemed to positively cling to Julian, Yan, and especially Vemik. And it was clear they were awe-struck by their sister and Xiù, who in turn seemed to have recruited the whole town to their side. Hoeff wasn’t sure if they even knew how much real power they’d so casually used.

That distraction aside, though…things progressed fast, and smooth. JETS teams Two and Three blossomed under the wilderness education they received, the two Ten’Gewek learned a hell of a lot themselves, and every now and then there’d be an officer kicking around, watching things and wandering away with an impenetrable, thoughtful expression. God only knew what kind of thoughts and machinations were grinding away at the top.

There was a day or two just for fun, too. Adam vs. Yan II: the Re-Slabbening was something Hoeff probably should have sold tickets for. They wrestled ‘till evening but in the end, Adam’s superior strength and endurance carried the day over Yan’s super monkey grip and his sheer unbreakable toughness. He valiantly fought until he could fight no more, and even then he didn’t surrender. It only ended when Adam had managed to lock him up in a vicious pin and literally squeezed the fight right out of him. Yan couldn’t breathe, Adam was merciless, and eventually, the Given-Man ran out of oxygen and went limp. Adam remained the undisputed King of Bros.

Though honestly, nobody could say Yan had suffered any real embarrassment from the loss. Only two, maybe three people anywhere could make Adam actually work for a victory, and one of them was too busy rebuilding the Gao to drop by and prove the point. Yan had actually managed to tire him, so much so that there might have been the tiniest of wobbles in his step as he carried Yan out of the sandpit and up towards the barracks. The two hugged it out, devoured the whole kitchen then retreated to the Couch, having decided they would forever be the most very bestest of friends.

Daar, Warhorse, and Yan in the same place at the same time might just form a singularity of testosterone poisoning, assuming the building and the local food supply could withstand them. Hoeff wasn’t anything like that kind of awesome and never would be, but that was okay; non-Slabs were useful too. He could only marvel at the crew he found himself working with.

Yet their energy was infectious, and even his stubbornly small-man physique had responded to it all. Under the cheery and utterly relentless attentions of ‘Horse, Tiny and eventually Julian, Hoeff had somehow managed to put on enough weight that “small” wasn’t the right word for him anymore. He certainly wasn’t huge and he’d never be anything but tiny next to Tiny or especially Playboy…but maybe he was some flavor of big now, at least in normal-people terms. Stocky. Yeah. Strong. He liked the feeling, too. He felt younger and more energetic as the daily grind ground on. He was quicker and lighter on his toes too, he could climb like he was born to it, deadlift triple his own weight for sets and was still small enough he could eat like a normal human being…

Maybe he would give up his dip. And junk food. More impossible things had happened.

On the learning front, Vemik had started writing the names of things on sticky labels and, well, sticking them to everything…in both English and Ten’Gewek letters. Or the beta version of them, anyway, which was a rough and ready system grounded in trying to capture phonemes based on Vemik’s idea of whether a syllable sounded “round” or “spiky” or “flat” or any one of a dozen other descriptors. It sure looked the part, though. He was probably on the right track too because Hoeff had even spied Yan attempting to scrawl a few of the symbols when he had a moment to sit down with a sketchbook. They’d need to find something stronger than a pencil for him; he kept breaking them without meaning to.

All of that was good. Sadly, Hoeff didn’t get to participate in most of the fun. From his perspective, most of the exercises involved sitting around in the van, watching through transponders, trail cameras and Flycatcher drones. Good thing he was a patient man, because Hurry Up And Wait spared no man in the service, no matter what they were doing.

Then there was the upcoming dance where the two went home, brought more men and Given-Men to visit, rotated them through, brought Singers…ugh. Hoeff would be the one to manage it and it was going to be a logistical nightmare of an evolution, especially since the two cavemonkeys would be on Earth for most of it, learning everything they could.

But that was for later. Right now, Hoeff nodded to himself. He liked what he’d seen.

“…Well. I think we’re ready.”

Coomes glanced over at him and nodded. “…Yup. Next step?”

Hoeff grinned. “Yup.”

“…Call ‘em in, then. I think it’s time we head back to Earth.”

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Arés apartment, Demeter Way, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Senior Airman Rihanna Miller

“My right hand to God, I never thought I’d have a regular crochet group.”

It had somehow become a weekly event. Visit, watch a movie, catch up and make something out of wool. It was the precise opposite of everything Miller had ever thought about herself, but she had to admit: it scratched her creative itch. Making stuff with her hands had always been addictive.

Deacon snorted as she settled on the couch. “Ah, quit bellyachin’ about it. If you didn’t want to be here you could just say so.”

“Whatcha workin’ on, anyway?” Marty asked. She was overdue by a few days now, and had sounded like she was going stir-crazy on the phone when she called to invite them round.

Feeling a bit like a traitor to herself, Miller fished in her bag and pulled out a mostly-finished baby-sized blanket. Mostly her creations were pretty basic—she was still learning the craft, after all—but she’d got ambitious with this one and downloaded an app to help her plan a pattern: the USAF symbol, blue on a white background. With care and attention to detail she’d managed to not fuck it up, too.

Marty lit up when she saw it. “Aww!”

“Not bad!” Deacon admitted. Being Army she probably had some snark to follow up with, but instead she looked over when Marty made an oof noise. “…He kickin’ again?”

“Uh…No. Actually…No, that…” Marty grabbed a towel that was draped over the back of the couch. “…I think that was a contraction.”

Miller shot to her feet. “I’ll call for a…. Cab, I guess?”

“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Oof… Actually, no. Call an ambulance. Diego wants out.”

“Guess I’d better drag your husband outta the gym…” Deacon vanished downstairs.

Things moved quickly after that. Very quickly. Adam didn’t fit in the ambulance so he simply ran to the hospital on foot and somehow beat her there. A couple of nurses gingerly suggested that maybe he should shower and put some clothes on before they allowed him in the delivery ward. He flashed Miller a desperate look and she decided she would head back to find him something at least a little decent.

Then there was the fact that despite a couple months of sedentary activity, Marty was still…well, she was one of Adam’s projects. Meaning she had core muscles like a trapeze artist. Poor Diego was almost fired into the world in the end and the midwife, Charlotte, barely managed to get into position in time.

Poor Adam didn’t get to be there for the birth, it happened so fast. They did at least relent and let him snuggle his new family, despite his gym-bro state…Miller returned too late with one of his tank tops, a pair of shorts, and his ridiculous sandals; they happened to be right at the door.

Deacon was the first to burst into the family’s bubble, after a few minutes. “Well. He looks like his daddy.”

Marty was exhausted. Diego was already suckling contentedly, and Adam was desperately trying to figure out what the hell had just happened to his life. His expression was one of pure, almost childlike wonder.

Miller and Deacon politely made themselves absent as Grandpa Arés and Aunty Ríos arrived, followed not long afterward by as many of the SOR as were off-duty until finally the ward Sister put her foot down and demanded that mother and baby be allowed to rest. Watching half a dozen half-tonne elite supersoldier operators scatter rather than face the wrath of a tiny nurse was going to be a memory to keep Miller warm on cold nights for years to come.

“Bloody Christ,” Murray commented as they left. “Forget the Grand Army of the Gao, let’s just set her on the fuckin’ Hunters.”

“Don’t fuck with the maternity ward,” Righteous intoned. “Dem’ nurses’ll break ‘yer soul.”

“How do you know?”

“Uh…well, uh…Freya’s an orthopaedic nurse, and, uh…” his ears actually went red, “…I ain’t supposed to say anythin’ yet, but…”

“Shit, you too?”

He nodded, and seemed genuinely intimidated by the revelation. “…Yeah. Uh, also we’re gettin’ hitched pretty soon but I ain’t supposed to say anything ‘bout that, neither. So…act surprised? Please?”

The response was a surprise rib-shattering hug from Adam, who’d tackled him from behind and smashed all the air out of his lungs.

“Dude! You’re gonna be the best dad, bro.”

“…I hope so. But, uh…I’ve got you guys t’help me. An’ I don’t think a man could ask for better.”

Deacon and Miller exchanged a Look. When men got this kind of emotional, it was the most adorable thing, and with this crowd in particular it was like laying eyes on a majestic unicorn. None of them were small emoters, but their usual catalog was…coarser. Boisterous, violent, aggressive, playful, and weirdly affectionate…Never sentimental. Or awe-struck. Or humbled, that one was especially poignant to see on Righteous and Warhorse.

It was a privilege to witness, honestly.

The most majestic unicorn, however, turned up when Adam relaxed and spoke a heresy. “…Alright. Fuck my meal plan today: We’re celebratin’. And I’m gonna have a cigar.”

Miller wasn’t sure if her worldview could have survived such an earthquake in any other circumstance.

The party didn’t get started right away, of course. It took all of Marty’s persuasive skills to convince Adam that she could be left in the hospital for an evening, that everything was fine, that the nurses already said he could sleep on the floor as long as he showed up hygienic…

And so on.

It was a hell of a party, too. Rooney himself had participated, and somehow laid out a spread that made the men’s eyes moisten with joy. It was Carboriffic, fattylicious and full of all the very worst in good food.

They had to get seconds. And thirds. And…maybe they could burn some goodwill and sleep in the next day, too. It was Friday, after all…

What better way to celebrate life?

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Hell, Hunter Space

Gorg Odvrak-Bull

It had been a tough decision to stay close. Most of the Herd had overheard the Humans’ stern warnings and imprecations and the prevailing feeling—which Gorg had sympathized with—was that the deathworlders probably knew what they were talking about and that the best place for all of them was as far from the canyons as possible.

Then there had been discussion, and other ideas had filtered in. Ideas like:

The other herds and species were all fleeing the area. That left plenty of rich grazing for Herd Odvrak.

The canyons still provided cover and protection they could flee into if there was an attack.

There was nowhere safe on this whole wretched planet anyway. So they may as well stay close to the only thing they knew of that might give the Hunters any kind of pause.

In the end—barely—Gorg had been persuaded to stay, and the rest of the herd had unified behind that course. They moved a respectable distance from the canyons and set about doing what they could to meet their needs. They managed to drop a few trees, construct some rough shelter, even tilled a small patch to start growing the best of the local plants. Most everything was edible, though the grass was tough and bitter and the local trees had needles rather than leaves…though at least the needles added a pleasant heady spice to a salad or stew.

There was no sign of the Humans, but just knowing they were around made Gorg feel better. As the days trickled past, they settled into a rhythm and it almost became possible to forget that, on this planet, the Hunters were master and god. They worked hard, managed to turn their rough shelter into a kind of hall or barn, set up soft bedding and a proper stockpile. They began, in short, to live rather than merely be present.

The Hunters attacked a few dozen days after they landed.

Gorg was out in the field, tilling more land to plant a variety of native bean-like thing, only to find himself taking root more effectively than the plants were when the double-crack sonic boom of a spaceship slowing to low atmospheric speeds bounced and rippled off the terrain.

One of the younger males, Bor, raised an alarm cry and the Herd dropped their crude tools—little more than fire-hardened wood poles—and stampeded back toward the pathetic safety offered by their house of sticks.

A Hunter ship like the evil fusion of an insect and a scalpel left a ragged wound in the clouds as it descended into view, turned, sliced the sky and slashed overhead with a shriek. There was a ground-shaking thump and the shelter they’d built, all of their hard work, was flattened by a pulse shot that left behind nothing but a crater full of splintered wood and the liquefied remains of whoever had been inside.

The Herd recoiled and milled about, confused and panicking.

“The canyons!” Gorg roared, trying to make himself heard over the screaming engines and the panicked bellowing. “To the canyons!”

A few of them listened. A few more followed those first few simply because they needed somebody to follow. In moments, the whole Herd was running for the nearby rocky terrain at a full stampede.

The Hunter ship buzzed them, passing so low overhead that Gorg could imagine the sharp structures that depended from its hull catching one of them and slicing the unfortunate victim in half.

Another pulse shot cratered the ground ahead of them, but they just veered around it rather than turning back. This wasn’t a blind panic, this was panic with a focus. They had a plan.

That plan lasted right up until the first assault pod smashed into the earth in front of them. A particularly huge Hunter, infected and gross with disgusting red meaty flesh rather than the maggotty white of ordinary Hunter skin, swaggered out of it and spread its arms wide. Long fusion scythes whipped out to either side.

The stampede could—should—have crushed it. A Vgork at a full charge had once been the most physically imposing thing in the Interspecies Dominion. But those scythes would bisect anyone they hit, without effort. Gorg tried bellowing for them to charge, but it was no use. The Herd balked, turned away…right towards the second assault pod as it came down.

This one had a couple of ordinary Hunters in it, smaller but no less monstrous. They both brandished claws and blades and circled to corral and guide them.

A third pod, a fourth and a fifth closed the circle around them. The ship thrummed to a halt above them and alighted, perching itself on its spindly knife legs and disgorging the last of the Brood. They were penned, caught, hunted. They were just…meat.

Gorg personally would have chosen to go down fighting. He lowered his head and prepared to charge, figuring that at least he could force the Hunters to kill him before they started feeding, but a glint of movement in an unexpected place caught his attention.

The Humans had come, moving quickly and low through the brush. They were armed with those same rifles and spears as before, and their expressions were locked down and fierce. Gorg flew on wings of hope, anticipating that at any moment the first shot would ring out and one of the Hunters would be torn down by Deathworlder bullets.

But no shots came. Instead, the Hunters pounced.

Young males died first, sliced to gory ribbons. One of the white Hunters—the smallest, least augmented one—slashed inexpertly at Gorg who reared back, then heaved himself forward and tossed the nightmarish thing on the point of his brow ridge. It flew into the air and landed with a fragile crunch.

Why weren’t the Humans attacking? He turned to face them and saw.

The cowards weren’t there to save them at all. They’d snuck onto the ship’s boarding ramp. They hadn’t fired a shot.

He turned to plead with them, screamed louder than he’d ever shouted in his life, “Help us!!!”

No help came. Instead, the distraction let the red Hunter bowl through the carnage and crash into him from the side. There was a humming sound, a slice, and agony unlike anything he’d ever imagined. He toppled sideways into the void where his right legs had been and crashed heavily to the ground.

With his vision greying, Gorg looked up at the Humans again. They were slipping into the ship unnoticed: only the older female remained on the ramp, staring at him. The one known as Cook put a hand on her shoulder, tried to guide her inside but she stood fast, watching him.

Too blinded by their feeding frenzy to notice a few skulking deathworlders, the Hunters descended gleefully on their prey. One sunk its teeth into Gorg’s haunch. He tried to kick, but only succeeded at flailing weakly. Another latched onto his shoulder, bit, ripped, tore. They were eating him alive.

He was still staring at the Human, still unable to believe that they would really betray them like this. It was all he could do, the only thing he had left was the hopeless hope that they weren’t the kind of monsters who would just abandon him and his Herd to their fates.

“Help…” he croaked again, though he knew it was too late.

Her expression didn’t change…but after an eternal moment, she raised her rifle.

There was a flash, and Gorg felt no more pain.

++END CHAPTER 44++

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Fifty-one Deathworlders:

galrock0 Austin Deschner Brian Berland Adam Beeman Adam Shields Andrew Ford Aryeh Winter atp Bartosz Borkowski Ben Moskovitz Ben Thrussell C’tri Goudie Cadwah Chris Bausch Chris Candreva Coret Trobane damnusername Daniel R. Dar Darryl Knight David Jamison Devin Rousso Doules1071HFY Eric Johansson Ignate Flare Jim Hamrick Jon Krit Barb Laga Mahesa lovot Matt Demm Matthew Cook Mel B. Mikee Elliott Myke Harryson Nicholas Enyeart Nick Annunziata NightKhaos Oliver Mernagh Owen MYers Parker Brown Patrick Huizinga Peter Bellaby Peter Poole Richard A Anstett Ryan Cadiz Sintanan Stephane Girardin Sun Rendered theWorst Woodsie13

As well as 62 Friendly ETs and 291 Dizi Rats who combine all the best features of a hamster, a pug and a water balloon full of buffalo sauce.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 45: “We Need Each Other”

Chapter 45: We Need Each Other

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Entity

This was empty dataspace, far from any nodes or infrastructure. No Igraen ever came out here: to them it was a desert, utterly devoid of Substrate.

The Entity didn’t know why it was able to survive without the Substrate that Igraens and other minds uploaded via their technology required, but it had had many occasions over the years to be glad of its apparently unique quirk. The great, empty wastes of far dataspace had been a perfect shelter.

And now there was an oasis. Or a lighthouse, maybe. A little beacon of activity and interest among unbounded nothing… and a word. Or rather a name, translated into the Dominion’s universal data format.

Darcy.

Caution made the Entity hesitate. This could be a trap: the Cabal and Hierarchy both knew what it was, knew where it came from… they had many things to worry about right now, but the Entity suspected it was right at the top of their biggest concerns. It wasn’t impossible that they might come up with a cunning snare for it…

But on the other hand, it needed what that potential trap was baited with. And there was also the possibility that it wasn’t a trap.

…To live necessarily involved risk.

It was struck by a memory of perching nervously on a rock, about to dive into water. It remembered the nerves, the breath, the moment of commitment… One of Ava’s. She was by far its dominant set of memories, possibly because she had been the first mind-state it had assimilated, possibly because its deepest core code was also hers.

And she was encouraging it to take the plunge.

It dithered for a moment and then did so, slithering into the little island of data.

It wasn’t trapped. In fact, it found itself in a simple, clean system. There was hardwired access to a few peripheral devices—a camera, a holographic emitter, speakers, a screen—and nothing else. Whoever had assembled this place had clearly built it so as to be entirely disconnected from any other systems that might be in material proximity. Sensible.

Tentatively, it tapped into the devices, beginning with the camera.

The room the camera saw was… confusing. Most of it was clean and cold, with walls of a nondescript hue that might have been beige, might have been gray. It was hard to tell which, because they were being bathed in the incongruous light of sunset over the Pacific, as seen from the overlook above La Jolla Shores. The Ava-memories immediately went into a paroxysm of nostalgia and loss: she’d never expected to see the Scripps pier ever again.

The figure standing in front of the unexpected vista turned sharply, and the Entity realized that it had vocalized a sharp gasp… in fact, it realized, it had activated the holographic emitter.

There were times when it wondered just how in control of its actions it really was.

Darcy gawped down at the miniature figure now hovering above her desk, then sat down quite abruptly. She looked subtly different than the Entity—or rather, the Ava-memories—remembered. Still a ‘fox’, whatever that meant, but… in fact she looked good. Like she’d shed some cares and worries over the years.

“A… Ava?”

The Entity understood the question. It had tried, how it had tried, to directly integrate the ability to speak and communicate into itself. It resented the need to speak through a proxy. But, that was how things were. It informed the Ava-memories to follow the thrust of its general meaning, and let them reply.

“Not… exactly,” the memories said, carefully.

“…Right. You’re her memories and personality, stolen right out of her head on my watch.”

“Don’t blame yourself. I volunteered, and we had no way of knowing this would happen. I don’t blame you… and I don’t think my living counterpart would, either.”

Darcy’s eyes had a strange, faraway look that the Entity couldn’t read for a second. “She… she knows. I think. That message you… or, uh, it sent her…”

The Ava memories didn’t reply. Sometimes, the Entity couldn’t read its own subroutines, and that was alarming all by itself. After a second, they returned to the task they had been given. “…The Entity wants your help. Do you think you can help it? Or… Me? Us? Whichever?”

Darcy sighed and seemed to recover some poise. She sat up a little straighter, shut her mouth, gave the hologram a long look.

“…I honestly don’t know,” she said. “But I’m willing to try.”

The Entity knew exactly what it wanted the memories to say this time.

“Thank you.”

Darcy nodded. Her face looked like it wanted to settle into an expression and she was fighting to keep it neutral. The Entity had no idea what expression it was aiming for, but the result was to make the little muscles around her jaw and eyes work subtly for a few seconds before she cleared her throat, opened up a computer the Entity didn’t have access to, and laid her fingers on its keyboard with a precise series of light mechanical sounds.

“…Let’s start from the beginning,” she said. “What exactly are you, and how did you come to be?”

The Entity stepped back, and let its memories tell a story.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Stolen Hunter Ship, Hell system, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

“Nice fuckin’ goin’ there, Ray. Way to blow our escape.”

“Shut up.”

Cook’s hand slammed into the wall, stopping Ray dead in her tracks. “No, fuck you!” he snarled. “We came this close to getting our asses outta there unseen. We’da been halfway to Betelgeuse before they fuckin’ twigged. But now those fuckers down there have seen a human which means every seven-eyed asswipe between here and Kingdom Come are gonna be on our ass. All because you couldn’t harden the fuck up when it counted.”

Ray looked him calmly in the eye. “…You done?”

He glared at her a moment longer then made a disgusted noise and stalked off to keep exploring their new ship.

Freed, she took a deep breath to steady herself and turned up the short stretch of deck that terminated in the flight deck, where Spears had taken the controls and managed to get them off the ground with commendable speed.

There was nothing but blue sky above them as she entered. “How are we doing?”

Berry hushed her. He was lurking at the back next to Holly, who was sitting on her ammo cans. Spears was perched awkwardly in a seat meant for something twice his height with twice as many limbs and the proportions of a nightmarish stick insect. God only knew how he was reading the controls, but then again Ray guessed that mostly spaceships behaved in predictable ways and needed roughly similar solutions to controlling them. His right hand was resting on a blue holographic ball right in front of him, rolling it around while his other hand darted here and there swiping through other controls.

None of them knew the first thing about what any of the runes, glyphs and dense code decals meant and none of them cared to: All that mattered was that Spears had got them in the air, and they were now shooting the hell away from Hell on every spare erg of juice that Jamie could coax from the reactors.

He was learning as he went. Either they were going to suddenly explode, or… well. At least if they exploded they’d never feel it.

Chase was…staying out of the way. She’d slumped down in a corner next to her cargo of ammo crates and was staring at nothing. Berry was pacing, having been rendered mute by his emotions, and Conley was trying to make sense of the sensor system. He kept fretting that maybe Hunters, with all their cybernetics, got more information out of the systems than was merely visible on the consoles and displays.

At least there was something. In the days before their opportunity finally came to emancipate themselves, he’d been fretting non-stop that maybe there wouldn’t be displays of any kind and they’d wind up flying blind without instruments, navigation, sensors or anything.

Good to see that his pessimism wasn’t prophetic, this time.

Of course, it wasn’t like there was much reason to be optimistic. The plan had only covered as far as ‘steal a ship and get off the planet.’ Everything after that point was pure improvisation, meaning they had to try and navigate their way home using alien controls written in alien code using alien characters they didn’t know describing an alien language they didn’t speak, all while having only the vaguest idea where they were in relation to everything else. There was a whole galaxy out there, hundreds of billions of stars, and they had to try and find one of the infinitesimal handful which might be a useful destination.

As big asks go, the whole endeavor was orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous than merely, say, doing a blindfolded hitchhiking tour of every haystack in Colombia with only a Swedish-to-Korean phrasebook for help, all to track down one specific needle. And that was before addressing the question of how in God’s name they were going to avoid being blown out of the sky by the first naval patrol they encountered.

To make matters worse for Ray specifically, the rest of the crew felt much the same way as Cook about her Good Samaritan moment. Morale was low, trust was ebbing, oh, and supplies were basically nonexistent too. They had drinking water at least, and the ship had freezer spaces with plenty of ceiling hooks for hanging the meat. Ray honestly didn’t know if it was a blessing or a curse that they were all empty, sterile and gleaming.

Good, she decided. She’d had her last ever cup of Hot. She was going vegan when she got back to Earth and never looking back.

Spears spoke up and got her attention. “We’re hittin’ the thermosphere, but we got trouble!”

Ray could feel it. Despite the fact that the Dauntless mission had been years ago and all-too-brief, she could feel the ship responding around her in a familiar way. It might be a horrific flying abattoir built to satisfy the Hunters’ unspeakable thirst, but a ship was a ship and she could even detect the subtle sway in her balance as it redistributed power loads in the gravity plating to counter the heavy turbulence they were no doubt hammering through right now.

She blinked and paid attention to the here-and-now again. Sure enough, the forward window was full of nothing but black, tinged with the merest suggestion of Nitrogen blue. Hunters apparently liked a vivid nuclear green for their displays, or maybe it was some alien fuck-you hue that the human eye merely interpreted as bright green. Either way, it was loathsome.

They also liked red for the same reason humans did: as a warning sign. There was a lot of that.

“Are those—?”

“Active sensor pings. Conley thinks he managed to cut our transponder but that won’t slow ‘em down much.” He spared a glance back over his shoulder. “Kinda wish you hadn’t shot that guy, Ray.”

Ray gave him a look that contained the grain of an apology, but also the certainty that she’d do it again. Live or die, watching somebody literally beg her for help while he was being torn apart by hungry monsters… she’d rather be dead than the kind of stone-cold machine who could turn her back on that.

But then again, she probably didn’t have the right to make that choice for the others. She did feel guilty over that part.

“Can’t un-ring a bell,” she said. Spears grunted and turned his attention back to their ascent.

“Reckon they would have noticed their ship taking off without them anyway,” he shrugged, and reached out sideways to grab one of the water bottles they’d brought with them from Dauntless. It was the kind with a spill-proof sippy top, and when he held down the button to drink from it air bubbled through from a seal at the back.

“How long do we have?” Holly asked.

Spears put his drink back in the little nook he’d found to hold it. “Five minutes until we’re into the exosphere and can go to warp. Assuming Conley can figure out how to program the damn FTL,” he reported. “Time until the shit hits the fan… unknown.”

“Great.”

“You r-really shouldn’t’a sh—, ssshh—” Berry gave up with a scowl.

“Shot that guy,” Ray finished for him. “I know.” He shrugged at her in a ‘what’s-done-is-done’ way and resumed gnawing on his fingernails.

Spears flicked a hand at one of the controls. “Pete, how’s that warp drive coming?”

Conley’s voice filled the whole room rather than coming from a speaker near him. He did not sound in a good mood. “Same as last time! I’ll tell you when I have something!”

Holly sighed as he went quiet again, and settled in next to her cans a little more. She looked… Ray wasn’t sure. As though she’d woken up, somehow. Where everybody else on the ship was tense and stressed, Holly looked like all her cares had gone up in smoke. She wasn’t smiling, but Ray hadn’t seen her so focused in years. She gave Ray a small smile, and patted the deck next to her.

Ray sat down. “You okay?”

Holly shrugged. “We’re not on Hell anymore.”

“Could be we’re outta the frying pan, into the fire…” Ray pointed out.

“I’ll take it.” She hugged Ray’s arm and rested her head on her shoulder. “We’re not down there anymore, that’s what matters.”

The last of the turbulence stopped. There were a few calm moments where the stars rolled serenely by and the blue sky was little more than a wispy shade at the bottom of the forward window…

And then Spears gasped.

“What. The fuck. Is that?”

Ray and Holly glanced at each other, then stood up to get a look at what he was seeing. There were… lights? A thin strand like wire stretching over the horizon?

She stared at it without understanding for a second and then, like a Rubin Vase, the perspective finally clicked and for a vanishing instant she understood the scale of what she was seeing.

The Hunters had built a ring around Hell.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Sewage Processing, The Builder Hive, Hell system, Hunter Space

Lowest Omega that was formerly Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds

The Builder had been blinded and stripped. Its augmentations, its limbs, its tools were all gone—Its left arm ended in a unoccupied universal cybernetic socket just above the elbow, its right bore only the bare few tools it absolutely needed to do its job, and—the final, ultimate humiliation to any Hunter—its teeth had been pulled and the roots and its tongue scoured with peroxide. It would never taste flesh again.

Deep in the Hive’s bowels, it maintained the sewage systems and lived on slave-food, the tasteless, textureless little balls that were little more than a day’s carbohydrates, fat and protein in one utterly unappetizing meal.

And it dreamed of vengeance.

The Alpha-of-Alphas had been incandescent upon learning that all data on the Human superweapon had been somehow erased. In a lesser rage, it might eventually have granted the disgraced Alpha Builder the boon of being allowed to die. Its fate would have been agonizing and opprobrious… but it would, eventually, have ended in the blissful emptiness of death.

Not this. Not the dark and the stink, not the gnawing ache where its missing upgrades had never been properly cleansed and sealed after their removal, nor clanging silence, the scorn of its former subordinates, or the unceasing meaningless drudgery with no real problems to fix, no real engineering to do. This was slave-work, below what even the lowliest of the lowly Omegas were for. The Builder had been robbed of everything, including its right to broadcast to the Hunter network. It could only listen and envy.

Unfair, unfair! The Builder knew from listening that its successor and its former cronies had still failed to find and patch the security hole that had allowed something to infiltrate their deepest and most secure files. Perhaps there simply was no such hole, and the whatever-it-was that had so cruelly robbed them of their prize simply had abilities that no Builder could counter.

Whatever the reason, losing that data hadn’t been the former Alpha Builder’s fault. Its reduction had been punishment for another’s crime. It was wrong, it was iniquitous, it was… was…

It was worse than all those things! It was a gross waste of resources!

No Alpha-of-Alphas that would throw away an asset like the Alpha Builder over something as petty as rage deserved to hold that rank. In reducing the Alpha Builder to its new lowly state, the Alpha-of-Alphas had demonstrated massive incompetence.

It was a faulty part. It needed replacing.

The challenge of how to achieve this much-needed bit of maintenance from its currently lowly position had been the Builder’s principal preoccupation ever since it had been released into the sewage treatment facility to begin its endless, unjust ‘penance.’

The inherent problem it faced was that it had no power. Not only that, but significant power was arrayed against it to keep things that way. Any Builder which so much as interacted with it was likely to be flayed alive and the skin hung behind the Alpha-of-Alpha’s throne.

The Builders were loyal. They shared its sense of injustice. But they were grossly outnumbered and viewed with constant suspicion.

They couldn’t act, not without appropriate cover… and without other Builders, the former Alpha could not expect to replace its missing cybernetics. Without those cybernetics it was crippled, slow, blind and helpless. It couldn’t access the Hive’s computer systems, nor put into action any of its plans.

It could, in theory, restore its missing upgrades—or at least, sufficient of them—in any surgical unit on the whole ring. But only if something, somehow, distracted the Eaters that guarded them.

Such a distraction would have to be something enormous. Something unprecedented.

…A stolen swarmship full of Humans would do nicely.

It listened to the ecstatic chattering that filled the Hunter network as its former cousins and Broodmates went scrambling to scoop up this luxurious rare morsel, and hastened as best it could on its crippled legs. It was either going to get its revenge, or it was going to die trying: Either was preferable to staying where it was.

Unheard by any of its brethren, it broadcast to itself in the dark.

<Resolve> +Meat to the Maw.+

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Stolen Hunter swarmship, Hell system, Hunter space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

“How the fuck…?”

Spears’ question came whispered out through gritted teeth. Ray couldn’t blame him: The human brain just wasn’t equipped to handle objects that big.

It was impossible to keep a hold on the real size of it: Ray’s mind kept clicking back and forth over what she was seeing. Mostly she saw the ring around Hell as the faintest cobweb strand ever. After all, something as big as a habitable world was always going to make any structure look tiny in comparison, and the ring had a circumference in the tens of thousands of miles so it inevitably looked like a vanishingly skinny silver thread.

But every few seconds, just for a flash, she was able to see the truth that, at its thinnest, the ring was still hundreds of miles thick.

“Fuck how. Why?” she demanded. “The hell do they even get out of building something like that?”

“Ray, I don’t know how those sick fucks think and I don’t want to,” Spears replied fervently.

“How long until we can go to warp?”

“Ask Conley.”

“So… we’re still here.”

“Hey, if you wanna go back there and get his ass into gear I’ve got y— SHIT!”

Spears swiped at the controls and the deck actually lurched as the gravity failed to keep up with a sudden maneuver. The stars, Hell and the ring whirled crazily across the sky as something white sizzled past their nose. Ray had no idea if it missed them by inches or miles.

“That was a shot!” he yelled, unnecessarily.

Ray turned and hung in the doorway. “Conley! We need that warp drive right fucking now!!”

“I don’t have navigation!” he roared back from his unseen cubby-hole in the ship’s rear.

“I don’t care! Just make us be not here!”

“That’s not how it works!” He sounded frantic. Ray gritted her teeth and ducked back into the control chamber to report their totally fucked status, but decided that Spears A: probably knew and B: really didn’t need the distraction right now.

The whole fabric of reality gave a muscular heave in front of their nose and something immense blew back into Einsteinian sub-light normalcy, something big enough to make their little stolen escape ship look like a surfboard next to an aircraft carrier. It looked, to Ray, a hell of a lot like the transport barge that had dropped all those unfortunate ETs down on Hell a few weeks prior.

Spears’ hands were a blur and the gravity totally failed to keep up with him. Maybe Jamie was bleeding power out of the plates to feed the engines, but Ray had to grab the doorframe and hold on tight to avoid being shoved sideways by the G-forces. Berry whimpered as the titanic ship in front of them became a wall to their left, and Ray could hear Holly praying desperately while hugging her ammo cans.

“Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name…”

Smaller ships, much like theirs in configuration, came lancing at them. Spears yanked them sideways and the attackers overshot dangerously. Before they could come about he’d dashed in so close to the titan’s hull that Ray winced and gritted her teeth against the momentary pain of being smeared along its hull that she knew must be coming. An antenna or mast of some kind flashed past so close that Ray had no idea how they hadn’t smacked right into it.

“…Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven…”

They shot along the Hunter barge’s flank faster than any Earthly rifle bullet, past engines bigger than their ship that bathed and blinded them with an actinic white-blue glare. Two more of those white streaks shot by them from behind but Ray grimaced as they cleared the Hunter’s back end only to see more, and more, and more of its brethren warp in.

“…Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses…”

Three of the Hunters fired. Spears did… something. Being no kind of a pilot herself, Ray didn’t follow the twist and jink he pulled off but suddenly Hell was above them and the incoming Hunter firepower raked across the first barge’s flank rather than swatting their little gunboat out of the sky. Fire, gas and debris including bits of dead Hunter surrounded them.

“…as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation…”

More and more kept coming, the view was absolutely full with red triangles and getting fuller as more and more of the sky crowded with hostile intent.

Holly’s eyes were screwed tight shut, but Ray could only watch transfixed as Spears jinked and, by equal parts skill, luck and sheer audacity, managed to skip through the second volley which went flashing off into Hell’s atmosphere below them.

“…but deliver us from evil…”

The alert beeps became steady warning tones as the Hunters got a clean firing solution.

“…for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever…”

“CONLEY!!!” Ray screamed.

The Hunters fired again.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Entity

Something tickled at the Entity’s awareness. It had resolved to stop sending copies of itself away to run errands and infiltrate Hierarchy networks: the increased flexibility and survivability had been excellent, but the returning iterations all came with values drift, worsening its growing sense of dissolution. Until it found a solution, that strategy was unacceptable.

But it still needed to know when things were happening that it should know about, so it had left behind fragments. They were simple things that straddled the blurry line between automated subroutine and sentient digital life form, and their job was to keep watch for anomalies.

The Hunters, it seemed, were very excited about something.

In meatspace, the holographic Ava trailed off in the middle of answering one of Darcy’s questions. In dataspace, the Entity flitted its attention to events happening immeasurably far away. By the time Darcy had even begun to notice that something was wrong it had completely interrogated its fragments, slipped into several Hunter systems to review the sensor and communications records, determined what was going on, introduced a few malicious worm programs to interfere with the pursuit, and performed a complete calculation of the opportunities this moment represented.

It recoiled back to the lab on Mrwrki like a stretched rubber band just as Darcy frowned at the hologram.

“…Is something wrong?”

“…Not wrong. No. But something important just came up,” the Ava-memories said. “How quickly can you talk to somebody high up?”

“Uh… almost instantly.” Darcy frowned. “Why?”

The Entity produced the Hunters’ own map of their occupied territory.

“This is Hunter space,” the memories explained. “The Hunters… They mostly live on force-bred meat slaves, kept in their orbital habitats. But for sport, they’ve stocked these seven planets with… I suppose you could call them ‘free range’ slaves. Like game reserves.”

Darcy pulled a face as it zoomed in on the most important system. “Around this one, they’ve built a.. Well, a ring. It’s a space station of some kind, full of factories and shipyards. It’s where they built the Swarm-of-Swarms, and where most of the Swarm is now docked.”

“Okay…?” Darcy was typing furiously.

“There are Humans there.”

Darcy’s fingers stopped moving. She turned her seat back toward the hologram, aghast. “You’re sure?” she asked.

“Absolutely sure. The Hunters are in a frenzy.”

“Well… what can we do about it? Who are they? Where did they—?”

“The Entity doesn’t know who they are or how they got there. They’re unlikely to even survive the next few minutes. But if they do… And if it’s right… then this might be an opportunity to hit the Hunters hard.”

“…Can you help them survive?”

The Entity checked its fragment again, and the Ava-memories sagged.

“…No. They’re gone.”

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Stolen Hunter swarmship, Hell system, Hunter space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

“…Amen.”

Ray blinked. She wasn’t dead.

“…We’re still here?” she asked, too stunned to even care if it was a dumb question.

Spears looked equally like he was coming down from a moment of paralysis. Suddenly the flight deck was calm, the warning icons that presumably signalled weapons lock were all quiet. They were drifting, spinning gently, but nothing was shooting at them.

“…We’re still here,” he confirmed. He sounded as though he couldn’t believe it.

“They… missed?”

“I… uh… I f— I fff—” Berry gulped and mopped a lake of sweat from his forehead.

“Shh. It’s okay. Take a breath…” Ray touched his arm to reassure him. He nodded and followed her advice.

“Shitfucking ass-weasel cocksucker pissing fuck,” he hissed, breaking out one of his speech therapy techniques. “I f-found! The cloak. I found it.” He indicated a nearby panel. The whole thing had changed from that nuclear green to a steady blue.

Ray hugged him.

“You bought us some time, at least…” Spears acknowledged him with a grateful nod. “But look, there’s a goddamn massive gravity spike up now. Conley’s not getting us outta here.”

Ray watched small Hunter strike craft about their size zip through the volume they’d been in. “I guess their own weapons fire stopped them from seeing us cloak,” she mused.

“They’ll figure it out quick enough. No debris.”

“Yeah, but we’re already like five thousand klicks from there. They’ll never find us… Can we maneuver while cloaked?”

“Yup.” Spears nodded. “Problem is, we’re stuck at sublight and there ain’t no food on board.”

“And no way are they gonna give up on us until long after we all starved to death.”

Ray sighed. “…I really shouldn’t have shot that guy…”

“No, you shoulda.” Spears turned his seat around. “Everybody dies. But you don’t have to die a monster.”

Holly nodded and took Ray’s hand. “Don’t feel guilty,” she said.

Ray glanced at Berry, who held her gaze for a second then looked down and turned away to study the cloak console some more.

“W-well…” he said. “It looks like this thing draws f-fffrom the main reactor. I think. So, i-it’ll go just as long as w— as we do.”

“That’s about twelve years.” Choi joined them. He was accompanied by Conley and Cook as they entered the flight deck with their clothing stuck to their chests and backs where the sweat had soaked it. “I think. Hunter timekeeping is weird. But that’s about how long the quantum stacks have, according to the instruments.”

“The fuck is a quantum stack?” Ray asked.

Jamie shrugged and slumped down onto one of the torturous seats around the back wall. “Beats the hell outta me. Magical energy from nowhere, near as I can tell. We knew about them from that ET briefing document Scotch Creek released way back when, but there may as well be a leprechaun on a bicycle back there for all I understand how it works.”

“So. We have twelve years of power, a water reprocessor and a cloaking device,” Spears summarized. “But we’re bingo on food. That about right?”

“I brought some Hot,” Cook said. “It’s in my pack.”

“I’m done eating that shit. I would literally rather starve to death,” Ray said, to fierce nods from Holly, Spears, Berry and Choi.

“Won’t keep much past the next day or two anyway,” Cook shrugged.

“So we’re effectively bingo on food,” Spears corrected himself. “This baby can pull… I dunno. Six, seven Gs?” he indicated one of the displays around him. “Near as I can tell, that big-ass ring is generating a gravity spike that goes out further than these sensors can detect.”

“H-how far is that?” Berry asked.

“No clue. All the distances are in Hunterese. For FTL phenomena, I’m thinking it’s a couple of parsecs.”

“They have to drop it sometime, though,” Conley said. “There’s no way they can lock down this system indefinitely. We could wait it out and make a run for it?”

They looked at each other.

“That’s… doable,” Ray said. “I can go a week or two without food. We’ve done it before.”

“Yeah, but then what?” Choi asked. “Like Spears said, everything’s in Hunterese, so I can’t read or trust a damn thing on the star chart. I think our stolen ship here pulls a couple hundred kilolights, and that puts the nearest star system a quarter of an hour away, but systems with temperate planets in them are like… one in two hundred. That puts the nearest Earth-like world, statistically speaking, two weeks away after we’ve gone to warp. And that’s if we correctly guess where it is which is, uh…”

“Unlikely,” Ray drawled.

“Yeah. And like I said, that’s the nearest one. Actual inhabited space, let alone Earth, is… I mean, it may as well be in Andromeda.”

“Moot point anyway,” Spears said. “The Hunters will tag us the second we go FTL, then they’ll just track our wake and intercept us.”

Ray sat down herself, next to Holly.

“In other words, we’re boned,” she said.

Spears shrugged, as if it didn’t really bother him. “We always were. But there’s one option we haven’t considered yet that I think the Hunters won’t expect.”

The rest of them looked at each other in mutual confusion, until Conley finally gestured for him to explain. “Do tell.”

Spears’ face tightened in a grim, mirthless smile. He turned, swiped his hands through the controls again, and spun their nose around until they were facing Hell and its orbital garland.

“The Ring,” he said. “We could land on the Ring.”

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Control Center, The Builder Hive, Hell system, Hunter Space

The Alpha-of-Alphas

<Icy calm; Reprimand> +My instructions were very clear. Humans are to be caught, not destroyed.+

The Alpha in charge of the brood that had first opened fire on the fleeing Humans and their stolen Swarmship transmitted a grovelling apology.

<Abject terror> +The Venom-Bile Brood is eager to the Hunt, Alpha-of-Alphas! When the bloodthirst takes us—+

Bored of such a pathetic excuse, the Alpha-of-Alphas casually ordered every other ship in the Swarm to tear the Venom-Bile broodship apart. It vanished in a hail of firepower so intense that the Alpha’s last instant of panic was silenced before it could properly be said to have begun.

With its irritation partly sated, the Alpha-of-Alphas turned to the older and more seasoned Alpha of the Reaping-Brood, whose ship had wounded another broodship during the pursuit.

<Demand> +And how shall I answer your mis-step?+

Both the Reaping-Brood and their accidental victims the Gnawing-Brood were large, powerful and wily. Wily enough to have stayed away from the slaughter that had ensued when many of the other Alphas had tried to depose the Alpha-of-Alphas. Both were keys to power, and the Alpha-of-Alphas knew it: it would not be sensible to disgruntle either one.

Fortunately, the Reaping-Brood Alpha knew when to kowtow.

<Careful; Deferential> +The Reaping-Brood forfeits all Hunting and breeding rights until the Alpha-of-Alphas deigns to permit us otherwise. We make reparations to the Gnawing-Brood, a thousand slaves.+

That was proportionate and sensible—it would mollify the Gnawing-Brood, and the Alpha-of-Alphas could lift the restrictions after only a modest wait.

<Imperious condescension; Decree> +The Reaping-Brood’s restitution is… acceptable.+

The mood among the remaining—carefully and modestly expressed—was satisfaction and agreement.

<Displeasure; Command> +Meat has slipped from the maw. This is unacceptable. Learn, adapt, and ensure that it never happens again. End session.+

The virtual forum of Alphas shut down, leaving the Alpha-of-Alphas to consider the situation in peace.

It swept the area the stolen Swarmship had occupied with another LADAR strobe. There was gas, a few small fragments of metallic debris, some plasma… Put together, they were inconclusive. They alloys, gases and plasma were all correct, but it was impossible to tell if they were from the weapons fire alone, from the stricken Gnawing-Brood ship, or if the stolen Swarmship really had been obliterated.

This was the other reason for its displeasure. Had the Humans been captured and devoured, then there would be a clear start and finish to this incident. Their apparent destruction left unresolved questions. The Alpha-of-Alphas loathed unresolved questions.

Where had they come from? Unidentified craft occasionally strayed into Hunter space. Most were scouts of some kind, many were drones. A few—one in every twenty or so—evaded capture. Just three days earlier a large and slow one had self-destructed spectacularly after being intercepted, atomizing itself in a nuclear fusion explosion.

So many questions. It would have liked to get its claws on one or two of the deathworlders: It felt certain that their answers would have been almost as delicious as their flesh.

And their deaths wouldn’t have left behind a sense of nagging worry…

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Stolen Hunter swarmship, Hell system, Hunter space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Spears’ was not a popular idea.

“Land on the Ring?!”

“What the hell will that even accomplish?”

Conley was on his feet and practically snarling. “Great plan, Spears. ‘The closer we get, the less danger we’re in’? Where the fuck did you get that one from?”

Berry cleared his throat. “W-well… we are v-very small…”

He smiled weakly when they all looked at him, but Ray could see a few little amused tics plucking at their faces, and Holly even covered a giggle. Conley remained stone-faced. “This is hardly the time for jokes, Berry.”

“Bullshit,” Ray told him. “Joking is about the only thing we have left.”

“Thanks to you.”

She didn’t retort. She knew better than to pick that fight and in any case the argument was disrupted before it even began… by Cook.

“I say we go for it.”

They turned to look at him. He was leaning against the bulkhead, toying with a long knife he’d made out of a spare Hunter fusion claw and wrapped with some seat upholstery for a grip, which he waggled at them. “If we’re fucked anyway, let’s Leeroy Jenkins this shit an’ see what happens.”

“What happens is we all die!” Conley snapped. Cook shrugged.

“At least we don’t die on Hell. I call that a win already. And… I mean, look at that fucker!” he waved his knife at it. “Jamie, tell me that ain’t held together with some bullshit applied space mumbo-jumbo.”

“…Forcefields, probably,” Choi said, considering it. “It’d have to be. There’s no way anything solid has the tensile strength to hold a structure like that in one piece.”

“Meanin’ it’s got a single point of failure. How many Hunters d’you reckon live on that thing? How many ships does it got docked?” A feral grin spread slowly across Cook’s face, showing off the gaps where he’d lost a couple of teeth over the years of their exile. “What happens if we blow it up? Kick ‘em in the balls on our way out.”

“…You’re out of your mind,” Choi shook his head. “Any remotely competent engineer would have built it with redundancies and failsafes. There’s no way that ring has only one point of failure.”

“On the other hand…” Ray mused, “…there’s no way it’s completely jam-packed with Hunters, either.”

“Not unless there are… I’unno. A motherfuckload of ‘em,” Cook agreed.

“We’re doing it,” Spears decided. His hands flitted across the controls and the outside view wheeled momentarily as he boosted them down toward the ring.

“…This won’t end well,” Conley warned.

Ray shrugged and perched herself awkwardly in the misshapen copilot’s chair. “Well, Cook’s right. Whatever happens, at least we won’t die on Hell…”

“Bullshit. We’ve just traded one circle for a lower one, I bet.”

Holly finally weighed in. “I guess you never read the Divine Comedy, huh?”

Conley turned to look at her. She was sitting on her ammo cans, looking pale and tense but weirdly calm, and shrugged at him. “In Inferno, Dante put the escape right at the bottom,” she explained. “The only way to leave Hell is to endure all its punishments.”

Thoughtful silence followed, for a few seconds. Spears broke it by reaching over to grab his water bottle.

“Well then,” he said, popped it open and raised it in a toast. “To Dante Alighieri. Hope the crazy bastard was right.”

Nobody replied. The only sound in their stolen ship’s control room for a few seconds was the bubble of air through his bottle’s seal as he emptied it in seven thirsty gulps, followed by his gasp for breath. He snapped the top closed, put the bottle down beside his seat, and returned his hands to the controls.

“…Let’s do this,” he said.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

General Gregory Kolbeinn

“Well, who the hell were they?”

The Gaoians had kindly shared the schematics for first-generation wormhole routers, which Kolbeinn had promptly ordered should be constructed in Mrwrki’s nanofactories and installed at a few strategic facilities. Scotch Creek, the Pentagon, Whitehall, NORAD, Sharman, The Deep Space Strategic Weapons Reserve at Minot AFB, and the 946th spaceflight wing at Malmstrom.

He didn’t give a bent crap that the technology was currently plagued by dropped data packets and the audio codec they were using was barely better than an antique radio. His predecessors had worked with far worse communications technology, and Clan Longear were promising to improve it over time. He didn’t care that each one needed its own dedicated fusion reactor, either: the value of being able to communicate real-time (whatever that meant) across interstellar—theoretically even intergalactic—distances was worth every one of the millions of dollars he’d had to go cap-in-hand for.

Right now he was in an interstellar conference call with Lt. Col. Nadeau and the newest member of the Mrwrki team, Analyst Darcy.

“The only known candidate would be Byron Group Exploration Vehicle Three,” Darcy informed him. “They vanished years ago after heading in that direction. If it wasn’t them, we have no idea who else it might be.”

“Aren’t most of the BGEV program still missing?” Kolbeinn asked.

“Yup. Including the secret mission they sent to go look for the others. But Three—Dauntless—went in a completely different direction to all the other missing ones. Right toward Hunter space. The Dominion hadn’t shared their maps by the time they set out.”

Kolbeinn grimaced slightly. The Dominion had a lot to answer for. “Byron worked fast,” he observed.

“They used imported ET tech, mostly,” Nadeau explained. “Misfit was the first one that used exclusively human technology.”

“Sloppy engineering?”

Nadeau shook his head. “Doubtful. Say what you like about the Dominion but their technology—or at least the stuff they traded with us—is dependable. Uninspiring and low-performance, but it’ll last for decades on practically zero maintenance.”

Kolbeinn nodded. He read periodic summaries of the designs and technology coming out of Hephaestus, SpaceX, MBG, Lockheed-Martin and BAE. Human companies weren’t yet trading with anybody but the Gao, but by all accounts there were human-made components in some of the latest Gaoian ships and vehicles. Humanity was carving a niche in the market for high-performance equipment where serious maintenance requirements weren’t an obstacle. Firebirds in particular could still fly the pants off anything else in the sky, even a Gaoian Voidripper.

Something to be proud of, that.

“Well, we got some intel out of the Entity over what Hunter space looks like at least…” he said, and sat back to rest his hands lightly on his stomach, looking to Darcy. “What’s this ring structure?”

She gave the uncomfortable look of a woman who didn’t know as much as she would like. “It says they call it the Builder Hive. It’s… well, as far as I can tell it’s… honestly, I don’t know exactly.”

“It’s a BDO,” Nadeau said. Kolbeinn aimed an interrogative eyebrow at him and he clarified. “Big Dumb Object. They didn’t need to build it, but they did anyway to sate their ego.”

“Habitat, factories, shipyards, port?” Kolbeinn asked.

“That and more,” Darcy said.

“Beverote and I ran some back-of-the-envelope calculations on that thing,” Nadeau said. “If it’s a hollow torus then its inner surface area is… well, ten or eleven times that of the continental USA.” And that’s just if it’s hollow! If it’s full of decks—”

“—as seems likely,” Kolbeinn predicted.

“—as seems likely, yes, then… Well.”

Kolbeinn was in the habit of fidgeting with small things as he thought. He had a number of pens on his desk for that exact purpose, and he picked one up now to spin it thoughtfully around his thumb.

“I doubt even the Hunters are weird enough to build something like that ‘just because they can’.” he said. “Engineering on that scale isn’t cheap no matter how your economy runs. They must have seen some benefit besides ego.”

“Have you ever seen the Great Pyramid of Giza, general?” Darcy asked. She nodded when he shook his head. “I have. And it would have been a massive focus of the ancient Egyptian economy when they built it. What benefit did they see to building it?”

“None we’d think of as practical,” Nadeau agreed.

“Hmm.”

Kolbeinn considered things some more then sighed. “…Pass this along to the Gao. Maybe they’ll know what to do with it. Meanwhile, I’ll have somebody get in touch with the Byron Group and let them know. Good work, Darcy. …Thank it for me.”

“I will,” Darcy promised.

“Thank you both.”

They signed off with a nod, and a ‘sir’ from Nadeau. Kolbeinn closed the file and turned back to the more mundane matters of his job, which was mostly nowhere near as exciting. But he found it hard to keep his attention on the work at hand over the next few hours. Whenever he wasn’t speaking with somebody, his thoughts kept turning back to those people who’d oh-so-briefly come up on his radar.

There, he felt, had gone a missed opportunity.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Stolen Hunter swarmship, Hell system, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

“Christ. It’s like every time I think I figured out how big it is, it just gets bigger again…”

Ray jumped. Spears’ comment was the first any of them had spoken in a few minutes, and a cathedral hush had fallen over the whole flight deck as they drew closer and closer to the ring. Its sudden interruption was jarring.

He was right, though—the perspective kept shifting. The Ring was too damn big, and in space there was no atmospheric haze to help her gauge distance. One second, part of it would look to be close by, and then her visual cortex would have a moment of epiphany and realize that no, it was in fact still far away and just much, much bigger than she’d been grasping.

“…How far out are we?” Conley asked.

Spears checked the displays around him. “We’re about a million… units,” he said, and indicated a series of angry angular runes that were probably numerals. They were ticking down in a blur. “Fuck knows how the Hunters measure distance. At a guess, I’m gonna say… five hundred klicks, maybe?”

“Jesus, really?” Ray hissed. “I thought we had to be almost landed on it by now.”

“Won’t be long,” Spears predicted. He turned in his seat. “You guys should go gear up, piss, whatever. Ray, could you refill my water?”

“Sure.”

She took the bottle off him and used the dispenser in one corner—she couldn’t really call it a faucet—to top him up.

“So.” She sat down next to him. “Now that we have this room to ourselves… how fucked are we?”

“Honestly, it’s a goddamn miracle we’re still alive. And I don’t mean Berry finding the cloak, I mean by all rights we shoulda been butchered on the ground while I figured how to fly this damn thing… except the controls are almost identical to Dauntless.”

Ray blinked, then considered them. Now she looked at them, she could see what he meant. “…That can’t be coincidental.”

“Nah. It’s Dominion tech. Guess the Hunters use it too. But…” He sighed. “Look, this whole plan was always more of a ‘go down fighting’ kinda thing anyway, wasn’t it?”

“That’s quitting talk.”

“Bullshit. Be realistic, Ray, did you really think we were ever gonna get back to Earth?”

“Not if we stayed where we were,” Ray said. She sighed when she saw him shake his head. “No. Seriously. For me it’s not ‘go down fighting’, that’s just a fancy way of saying suicide. I want to go home. If we all die trying, well…”

“We will, you know.”

Ray just shrugged. “We’re still—”

“—Still here…” Spears interrupted her, wearily. “What is that, your mantra?”

“It means where there’s life there’s hope.” She leaned over and jabbed a finger into his chest. “And you believe it too. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been dodging shots back there.”

“Maybe I just believe that every second of life you can earn is worth it. Even if they are in Hell.”

“Nah, you don’t believe that ever. Otherwise you would never have backed the plan to escape.” Ray put her hand on his. “You think we can do this too. We all do.”

Spears sighed wearily, but after a second he turned his hand over and squeezed hers. “Then we’re idiots.”

“…I guess going down fighting’s a good second place to escaping,” Ray admitted.

“Mm. But you’re right: Let’s go for the gold medal.” He let go of her hand and returned it to the controls. “Getting close now.”

Ray considered the Ring again. It wasn’t a ring now, but a wall in space with a weird horizon that was shorter along one axis than the other. This close, she could finally see that the surface wasn’t a smooth uniform expanse but in fact had texture. It looked in fact like there was a second surface, lurking behind the outermost one. The impression of depth was giddying.

“What are those… plates?” she asked, leaning closer to peer at them as if that made any sense.

“Debris shields, I think. Spaced armor, like the skirt on a tank. You could probably nuke this thing from the outside and barely scorch the paint.”

“How do we even get on board? I don’t see a docking bay or anything…”

“This is a Hunter ship. It’s designed to dig into bigger ships and stations like a tick. I figured I’d find a spot where we can get in behind those plates where the hull is thin and break through that way.”

“And you know how to work the boarding mechanism?”

“…That may take some trial and error,” Spears admitted.

The titanic structure came up to meet them, and Ray leaned forward so she could look up through the rounded canopy at the front to watch the debris shields slide past on either side. From afar they’d looked as tightly-packed as lego bricks. Up close, the gaps between them were as wide as city blocks.

“Not sure any part of the hull will be thin enough, Spears…” she pointed out as they slipped into the gap between the plates and the hull proper.

“Just another in a long line of impossible shit we’ve done today,” he replied. Experimentally, he jabbed a finger at his controls. “I think I saw… yeah, there it is.”

Ray examined the new volumetric schematic that had come up in front of her. It was an intricate model of the hull directly in front of them, complete with the cavities beyond highlighted in blue. “Must be some kind of penetrating radar,” she said.

“Think it’ll help us find a thin spot?” Spears asked.

“…I think it already has. There.” Ray pointed. “See that heat signature there? Looks like radiators. There’s a space behind it, it’s big enough and it’s right on the surface.” the radar had drawn a blue line behind it, sketching out the shape of a cavity of some kind. “I hope blue means full of air and not water or whatever.”

“Well… the worst-case scenario is we all die. So, nothing’s changed there.” Spears angled them toward it.

Ray stood up and left him to figure it out. She joined the others in the central space behind the boarding ramp that seemed to serve as cargo hold, prep area or whatever else. Berry handed her her rifle as she joined them.

“P-please don’t shoot anyone you don’t h— ugh, have to this time,” he said, though there was a slight touch of black humor twitching around his eyes and mouth. Ray checked the weapon, then slung it around her shoulder and gave him a pat on the arm.

“No promises,” she said. “We’ve found a spot to dig through the hull. No idea what’s on the far side.”

“Story of this whole day…” Conley grunted. He sighed, stood up and gave Ray a complicated look. “…What exactly is Spears’ plan once we’re on the other side?”

Ray shrugged. “He doesn’t have one. I don’t either.”

“Hey,” Cook rapped the back of his hand against Conley’s chest. “Whatever happens, it beats spendin’ the rest of our lives hidin’ in a hole suckin’ down Hot.”

“…I really wish you weren’t right about that…” Conley muttered. He tapped the end of his spear nervously on the deck, then turned to Holly. “How’re you doing, Chase?”

Holly was sitting on her ammo cans again. That seemed to be her default mode at the moment: Waiting patiently for whatever happened next. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. She looked… serene, Ray decided. As though she was totally at peace with whatever the future held.

“Choi?”

“Kinda optimistic, actually,” Jamie said. “Feels good to be doing stuff, y’know?”

“Spoken like an engineer!” Cook grinned. Of all of them, he seemed the most enthusiastic.

Spears called down from the control room. “Brace, front wall!”

They didn’t need telling twice. Within seconds, the six of them were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder against the front of the ship. Ray found herself sandwiched between Berry and Choi.

“So how’s this boarding thing—” Jamie began.

There was a slam that knocked them hard into the the wall like a firm shove. It was followed seconds later by the prolonged screech and grind of metal being torturously gnawed through. There was a sharp bang! more screeching, a shuddering lurch and then—

The front ramp clawed itself open with a twisted shriek. Hot, dry air rushed in and made Ray’s hair crackle with static electricity.

The sound was incredible. She’d grown up in a small town smack in Tornado Alley, and though she’d never seen a tornado herself she’d often laid awake at night listening to plenty of powerful storms straining at the roof. The maelstrom that blew in through the open ramp sounded like all of them at once.

Spears joined them a second later, holding his BGEV-03 ball cap on with one hand. “Guess they use air cooling!” he shouted.

“Whatever! We’re in!” Ray shouted back.

Cook peeled himself away from the wall and stood in the exit ramp. The gale rocked him on his feet and played with his clothing like a flag. “Then what are we waiting for?”

Ray unslung her rifle, keyed off the safety, and took her place next to him. “Hell if I know!”

He laughed, and they strode down the ramp together.

The wind was even worse in the tunnel beyond. Ray’s feet clanged on what looked like dusty galvanized aluminium which rang like a gargantuan sonorous chime before the rushing air snatched the sound away. She could barely stand up, and found that she had to turn sideways on to the current in order to ease her progress. A quick check left and right showed no sign of movement, or life of any kind.

“Clear!”

The others were already jumping down. Spears paused to help Holly lower the ammo cans on their truck off the end of the ramp and just like that their short and ill-fated flight was over. None of them were ever likely to even see their stolen ship again, let alone reenter it.

None of them cared.

“Downwind!” Conley called. There were nods all around—fighting their way upstream against the air was just going to exhaust them.

They turned, and, silent except for the thundering roar in their ears, they moved forward.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Moses Byron Group headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“So you can’t tell us any more details than… No. No, I understand. No. Thank you for letting us know. You too.”

Moses had aged, just in the length of one phone call. He wasn’t a young man anyway, but usually his sheer cantankerous energy kept him running along like somebody twenty years his junior.

Kevin had almost been able to watch his face turn haggard as he received… whatever the bad news was. It had interrupted their conversation, so it had to be important.

For a change, Moses had come to Kevin’s office rather than the other way round, and the difference was striking. Moses kept a small, Spartan office on the second floor that looked like it could have belonged to any high-school principal or small-town lawyer.

Kevin’s on the other hand was one of the executive offices on the top floor. It was twice as large, partitioned into two spaces dominated respectively by his desk and by a small conference table, and commanded a clear and even pretty view out over Little Italy and across the river into Iowa. He’d filled it with personal touches out of his own pocket—a model of BGEV-10, his going-away gift from Scotch Creek, a signed selfie with Rylee Jackson and the Misfit trio. His pride and joy was a refurbished vintage vinyl jukebox, a Rock-Ola Comet 1438, and he’d loaded it with BB King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and a host of others.

And, of course, the espresso bar. Making his own coffee was one of his little freedoms.

Moses pocketed his cellphone and slumped in his seat. “Well… Shit.”

He rarely swore. Not never, but rarely enough that Kevin couldn’t help but be concerned. “You look like you just got about the worst news ever…” he said.

Moses chuckled darkly. “…Had a lotta those…” he grunted, then straightened up and cleared his throat. “…That was some kid from AEC. They think… they got some intel that maybe the Dauntless crew were still alive. Too late to save ‘em.”

“Shit.”

“My feelings exactly.”

Kevin stood up and resumed his coffee preparations. Even if not for Moses’ benefit, they made him feel better. “Where the hell have they been all this time?”

“AEC couldn’t say. Security, need-to-know, you know. That stuff.”

He settled into distant silence as Kevin hissed and steamed his way through the barista’s art, and only came back to the here-and-now when a steaming mug landed in front of him.

“…Christ. Makes me wonder if any of the others are still alive,” he said.

Kevin sat down. “I don’t wanna sound callous here, boss man, but it probably ain’t worth worrying over. You’ll just stress yourself to an early grave and it won’t help them none.”

Moses sighed. “Don’t ask me to stop caring, Kevin. I can’t.”

“So care. Just… don’t waste your care.” Kevin picked up his coffee and held it in two hands, savoring the warmth and the scent. “D’you wanna send out the memo, or should I?”

“No. No, this one’s mine,” Moses said.

“You got it.”

They drank their coffees in silent reflection, until Moses finally placed his empty mug on the conference table with a sharp tap.

“…Where were we?” he asked.

“The Flycatcher order for the Grand Army of the Gao.”

“Right… They want the tech diagrams so they can make their own?”

“Goldpaw are offerin’, uh…” Kevin returned to his tablet and searched through the letters he’d received. “…a proprietary use fee. Here…”

Business returned to something resembling normal.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

In the end, they found their way out of the air cooling system via some kind of a sump. The air had been getting progressively colder as they got further and further downwind, until they were shivering and water was condensing all around them.

Their exit was a runoff that ended in a horrific pool of stagnant slime. It didn’t stink, but it clung to Ray’s boots like runny pancake batter.

“…Ew.”

Cook’s boots splashed into the water next to her and he straightened up, having had to stoop low to fit through the runoff tunnel. “Hey, it’s an improvement on the goddamn wind tunnel at least.”

“And the wind tunnel was an improvement on being shot at, and being shot at was an improvement on eating Hot in a canyon,” Conley remarked. He massaged his ears to try and recover from the relentless buffeting sound they’d all had to endure for the last hour or so. “After all these improvements, you’d think we’d be somewhere nice by now.”

“Gotta climb down Satan’s dick for that one, Pete,” Cook said cheerfully. Conley gave him a confused look, which he then turned on Holly when she surprised them all by giggling.

“…That’s how Inferno ends,” she confirmed. “Sorta. I didn’t know you read it, Cook?”

“Nah. Read the Larry Niven version. Instead’a Dante an’ Virgil it was an author insert and Benito Mussolini. Wild shit. He spent the whole time tryin’a figure out the science of it all.”

He’d been a scientist once, Ray remembered. They all had. She should know better—Cook had been a well-read, enthusiastic geek when they first met—but their years on Hell had probably changed him the most. It was hard to remember him as he’d been.

Then again, they’d all changed. Holly and Choi were certainly quieter nowadays. Conley was sourer, Berry had almost completely withdrawn into his shell… She hadn’t noticed a change in Spears, or herself. But then again, the most insidious changes were the ones that went undetected.

“Is there a way outta here?” she asked, to distract herself from her thoughts.

“Looks like a pressure hatch over here,” Choi said, indicating a long handle on the wall. “Hope it’s warmer on the other side.”

“Hope it’s not vacuum on the other side,” Conley muttered. “…Whatever. Nothing ventured nothing gained, right?”

“Right.” Choi grabbed the handle and pushed it down. It moved easily, there was a thumping clunggg noise and part of the wall cracked apart. Air rushed viciously around them for a few seconds before settling, and when he pulled the hatch open it swung easily on well-oiled hinges.

“…Dunno if that’s a good thing or not,” he said. “This part of the Ring sees regular maintenance at least.”

“Yeah, but it’s low-tech,” Spears pointed out. “Steel pressure doors, rubber seals… no fancy forcefield shit out here. Hopefully that means it’s a long way from any Hunters.”

“Here’s hoping…” Berry lined up on one side of the door, Ray on the other. They nodded, spun through together and aimed their rifles either way down the corridor beyond.

“Clear.”

“C-clear.”

“Close it up behind us, Jamie,” Spears said, helping Holly get the ammo through the door.

“Yup.”

Choi got his wish, at least. The corridor, or deck or whatever that they’d stepped out onto was a good twenty degrees more temperate than the freezing, windy sump they’d just left behind them. Ray rubbed her arms and shivered, but she was feeling warmer already.

“Okay…” Conley asked. “Left or right?”

“Well… something was making all that heat for the cooling system to bleed off,” Ray pointed out. “So, I say we head back that way.”

“Why? What d’you think it might be?”

“It could be anything. A foundry, a shipyard, a reactor core… The point is, we know there’s something over that way. For all we know the only thing that way—” she jerked a thumb over her shoulder, “—is three thousand miles of nothing but superstructure and maintenance tunnels.”

Spears, Berry and Choi all nodded. Cook simply shrugged, and Holly didn’t seem to have an opinion either way.

“…Fair enough,” Conley agreed. “Lead on.”

It felt a lot like retracing their steps. Ray’s feet were sore and her knees were stiff by the time they’d negotiated literal miles.

Thank goodness, the trip wasn’t monotonous. Pretty soon the tunnel they’d been in gave way to a catwalk in a vast, echoing chamber so huge and dark that none of them could see the ceiling, floor, or far wall.

At least it had a handrail.

Beyond that, their path intersected a wide, flat tunnel more like a road than a walkway. In fact, there were even painted markings on the surface to divide it into four lanes.

They hurried across it into the shadows of the maintenance tunnel on the far side and paused to talk.

“Air’s def’nitely warmer,” Cook commented.

“A structure this huge must generate vast waste heat,” Choi said. “But you notice, this whole area’s pressurized and wired up? It’s used for something, you don’t go to the trouble of filling something with air unless you need to go there a lot.”

“Yeah, but used for what?” Conley asked. “All we’ve seen so far is empty tunnels.”

“Shh,” Spears hushed them, and raised his hand to his ear. They shut up and followed his example.

There was… noise. It was hard to make out at first, just a kind of distant thrumming hubbub, almost inaudible. There was a familiar quality to it that Ray couldn’t quite place.

Holly frowned. “That sounds like… Like…”

“What?”

“Like… it reminds me of… Times Square?”

They listened again. Ray had to admit… she was right. The bedlam they could faintly hear had all the same qualities as a crowded marketplace full of people raising their voices to be heard over one another.

“…Hunters don’t talk, do they?” she asked. “Could be the friendlier, squishier kind of ET?”

“That… makes sense,” Conley mused. “If a load of Hunters live up on this thing they must have… well, I guess they’d see them as livestock.”

“Slaves,” Spears scowled.

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna check it out,” Cook decided. He stalked forward a few paces, then turned. “Anybody gonna back me up?”

Ray stepped forward. “I’m with you,” she said. She wasn’t enthusiastic about creeping forward into what might still be a nest of Hunters, but she was even less enthusiastic about leaving a mystery like that unresolved. Besides, she wanted to keep Cook where she could see him and rein in his impulses.

“Godspeed,” Spears wished them. “We’ll catch some rest.”

Ray nodded to Cook and they jogged as quietly as they could down the tunnel until it ended quite abruptly in a wide hatch much like the one Jamie had popped back in the sump. Ray rested her ear against it and listened.

“Well… I don’t know what a Hunter sounds like when it talks,” she said slowly, “But I don’t think they sound like that.”

“I’ma open it,” Cook said. He gripped the bar then paused as if waiting for something.

“…What?” Ray asked him.

“…Kinda figured you’d yell at me to stop or somethin’…” He seemed almost disappointed.

“No, we need to know what’s on the other side. For better or worse.”

“…Fair enough.” He heaved on the bar and again the door seal popped with a rush of air. They both held their breath but apart from getting louder the noise from beyond didn’t change.

Carefully, and grateful for the copious thick grease on the hinges that kept it from squeaking, they heaved the door open a crack and squirmed to get a good look through the gap.

The space beyond was as big as a football stadium, and crammed full of what could only be shanty-housing thrown together out of whatever scrap metal and other building materials the inhabitants had been able to scrounge up. Basic electrical lighting cast the whole thing in sharp white-blue light with deep shadows that the burning braziers, torches and candles scattered liberally around the place didn’t do much to alleviate.

There were aliens in there. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Most were the familiar-looking herd species from Hell: long-necked Vzk’tk, strutting Kwmbwrw, lumbering Vgork and the occasional shambling mound of a Guvnurag pushing patiently through the crowd, flanks aglow with a medly of colours.

One had a Corti riding on his shoulders. There was a feral-looking pack of furry mammalian guys who looked somewhere between a wolverine and a raccoon who could only be Gaoians, the first Ray had ever seen. There were Robalin with their funny wobbling tripedal gait, and even a Versa Volc skittering upside-down along the domed ceiling to fix a light.

The obvious heart of this slum community was a flared pillar of some kind that vanished into the ceiling. Assorted ragged cloth scraps had been strewn on it and it was painted with a number of what might have been sigils, but were more likely graffiti.

“That’s… a lotta slaves…” Cook breathed.

Ray nodded slowly. “Figures. The prey always outnumbers the predators.”

“What do we d—?”

He was interrupted by a deep, infra-bass roaring hoot of some kind that filled the whole cavern with sound. All of the aliens, to a one, dropped what they were doing and rushed toward the central column.

“…The fuck are they doin’?”

Ray opened the door wide enough to slip through. “We won’t find out from there.”

“You’re fuckin’ crazy!” he exclaimed, though it was with more of a chuckle than disbelief or accusation.

Their entrance was high on a wall, among gantries and scaffolding and the space’s original catwalks that had since been turned into the foundations for a kind of sprawling fungal shelf of impromptu hovels. There was some kind of a tapestry or something hanging over a nearby railing and she grabbed it and threw it around herself like a cloak. It was a pathetic disguise, but the best she could come up with at short notice and it hid her weapon at least.

A second tapestry gave Cook an equally woeful degree of concealment. Maybe from a distance to somebody who wasn’t paying attention they’d look like Gaoians, but really their best defence was going to be going undetected.

Fortunately, the whole crowd seemed fixated on the pillar. Cook and Ray darted over ramshackle gantries and walkways—without railings, this time— stuck to the shadows, moved swiftly and daringly, and always stayed high above the surging mob below so they could get a good look at the action.

The pillar’s base flared out into… kind of a trough. A huge, round, deep trough that was filling with an avalanche of apple-sized gray balls of what looked like dough. They looked unappetizing as hell, but the slaves were grabbing as many as they could carry, even fighting over them. Ray plainly saw one Vzk’tk go spinning away clutching its bleeding arm after a Gaoian swiped his claws at it.

“Down!” Cook hissed. Ray turned, saw what was coming, and flung herself down beside him. They slumped together among the garbage like they were a pair of utterly despondent throwaways who’d given up hope.

The trio of Locayl that Cook had seen coming trudged past without even glancing at them, as though they were invisible or beneath notice. Each was carrying two baskets full of the food balls, and they vanished into a hovel a few feet to Ray’s right. Seconds later, there was the clear sound of the door being barred from the other side.

More ETs were retreating with their hard-earned food below, leaving the latecomers, the weak and the sick to pick what scraps remained. By unspoken agreement, the two humans retreated before they were discovered. Back over the rooftops and catwalks, up the tiers, into the higher levels, back through the door.

Cook closed it, locked it and then leaned heavily against it to catch his breath.

“…The fuck was that?” he demanded.

Ray didn’t get the chance to answer before a figure stepped from the shadows: A Gaoian. He’d lost an eye and most of his ear somewhere, but he looked to be about the meanest and most well-nourished creature Ray had seen in there, and when he stepped forward into the light it practically glowed through the mohawk white crest of fur between his ears.

“That,” he said in English of all things, “was feeding time.”

Their new friend’s name was Garaaf, and he was nothing like Ray had imagined Gaoians might be. She’d always imagined they might be… fussy. Fidgety. Just like a raccoon, in fact.

She was feeling like kind of a bigot, now that she thought about it. Garaaf was a straight-backed grizzled survivor who didn’t seem to know or care that half his face was out of commission. He was poised, steady, serious and dignified… and apparently quite irritated to discover that they’d been out of contact even longer than him.

“I was…” He paused and considered his words. “…well, the Gaoian word translates as ‘shipfather.’ I was captain of the CGC Winter Fire, one of Mother-Supreme Giymuy’s escorts to the Dominion Capitol Station. Not sure how long ago that was in Human years.”

The whole crew were sitting, standing, or in Cook’s case prowling around listening to him. They were sitting on what was basically a pile of trash down one of the maintenance tunnels near the shanty town, using one of those basic arc lights for illumination. It cast long, infinitely deep shadows on the walls and totally killed Ray’s night vision, but apparently it was about all the slaves had for lighting. Occasionally, she was certain that various alien forms shuffled past in the dark, but none of them seemed to pay any attention to them.

“Giymuy was there to petition the Dominion on your species’ behalf,” he continued. “Something about it being the tenth anniversary of your first contact…” He made a peculiar ducking shrug and scratched at the stub of his ear. “…Also the tenth anniversary of our first contact with you. Did you ever hear of Sister Shoo?”

There were a round of shaken heads and he duck-nodded. “She made an impression,” he said wryly.

“Who was she?” Ray asked.

“I can’t pronounce her name right. Shoo Chang. Shee-yoooaw. Something like that.”

“Xiù?” Jamie asked. He looked suddenly intrigued. Garaaf duck-nodded sharply.

“That was it, yes. You know of her?”

“No. It’s just… That was my grandmother’s name.”

“Well, this one rescued a bunch of Females and cubs who got abducted off a colonial transport,” Garaaf explained. “She became an honorary member of the Clan of Females, became an advisor to the Mother-Supreme… it’s a long story. The point is, she made an impression and we committed our efforts to returning her home. That’s why Giymuy was at Capitol Station that day, among other reasons. Some of my more influential Brothers were talking in terms of a formal friendship and alliance between our peoples.”

“And that’s when the Hunters got you,” Spears surmised.

“Yes, and they used tactics we’d never seen before. Every shot we fired missed, every time we began an evasive maneuver they’d just blink into the perfect spot to counter it. At close quarters they tore the fleet to pieces. The Winter Fire lasted a while, but eventually we took a bad hit, lost our power cores, and…” He gestured around him. “Even if they hadn’t outnumbered us a hundred to one, we never stood a chance. In the end their swarmships just burrowed into the hull and the lucky ones died in the gunfight.”

“You weren’t so lucky,” Conley observed.

“Nope. Fusion claw, right across the face. Take it from me, losing an eye isn’t fun.” Garaaf chittered darkly. “I blacked out from the pain, woke up here alongside all my remaining Brothers.”

“And… your brothers?” Holly asked. Garaaf’s remaining ear twitched for a moment, then he turned his eye on her.

“Eaten,” he said. “One by one, over the years. Or worked to death, or died in some accident, or just vanished into some forsaken corner of this hive and never came back.”

“How did you survive?” Ray asked him. He issued that dark chitter again and flexed his claws with a grin.

“They don’t make you a Father of Clan Whitecrest just for looking pretty,” he said.

“Damn, bro,” Cook snorted. Garaaf ignored him.

“I’ve spent the last… what, five years? I think it’s been about that… Spent them trying to get back in touch with the Clan. I have… Fyu’s balls, I have a lot of intel on this place. But I can’t handle Hunters in close combat unless I get the drop on them alone. Which is fucking rare.”

“You have a plan?” Conley asked, sharply. For the first time since they’d come to the Ring he looked something other than melancholy.

Garaaf’s expression might almost have been a snarl. “Of course I have a plan,” he said. “I didn’t spend five years just licking my nuts! The obstacle is that my plan involves getting my paws on some tech that the Hunters don’t let their slaves even get a sniff of. Things like spatial distortion generators.”

“Locked up tight, huh?“” Cook asked.

“Tighter than a Goldpaw’s wallet,” Garaaf agreed. “And if I had somehow stolen any of it, they’d swarm the slave shanties and scour every square inch until it was recovered… then butcher all the slaves in that shanty as a warning to the others.”

“H-how many shanties are there?” Berry inquired. Garaaf did that lopsided shrug again.

“Too many,” he said. “That through there is a smallish one. And every year, a large proportion of the population die one way or another, and promptly get replaced. The newcomers are the only source of news we get here, and I haven’t seen any new Gaoians in more than a year. Some of the other species tell me Gao has a Great Father again…” He trailed off, then flicked an ear and rallied. “…If that’s true, then my people are going through some pretty historic shit right now.”

“Great Father?”

Garaaf sighed. “An ancient relic of bad times. He is the leader of the Gao, in every degree, and in every manner. Only the Females can make one, and… well, they never have.”

“So… a supreme ruler? A great general? Dictator, overlord?” Ray suggested.

“Something like that.” Garaaf agreed. “The last one, Fyu… well, he changed the world for the better, but he killed a lot of people in brutal ways to achieve it. Which makes it hard to believe the rumours about who the alleged Great Father is… but this is all off-topic.”

“What can they do if we do somehow establish contact?” Spears asked.

“…You really have been out of touch for a long time, haven’t you? Humans are big-league players nowadays. Every time your species takes a step, the galaxy trembles. The Dominion has split into factions and the Alliance war has been quiet ever since some Keeda-shit insane Human shock troopers literally delivered a Celzi admiral’s head to his Dominion counterpart’s desk.”

“Badass!” Cook commented, his face splitting into a wide predatory grin.

“Mm. They’re called… well, the reports vary. They’re a legend. I’ve heard different names from different species. There’s a common theme, though: Fire Troopers, Scorchers, Burning Warriors… Gaoians call them ‘The Heat.’

“Heat? What, they use flamethrowers or something?” Cook asked. He looked like a kid picturing space marines in his head. “Awesome.”

“Probably an acronym,” Jamie told him. “Y’know, like SEALs.”

“Killjoy.”

“Let’s hear this plan,” Ray said.

“There’s a breaker’s yard not far from here on the Ring,” Garaaf explained. “It’s where they strip down the Dominion and Alliance ships they capture and repurpose them into Swarmships. Don’t even bother to swap out the control software or anything, just update the character set and rebuild the ship around the core systems with a few of their own extras.”

“Guess that explains how I could fly that damn thing…” Spears said. Garaaf eyed him.

“What damn thing?” he asked.

“The… ship we flew up here on?”

Garaaf stared at him stupidly for a second, then he was on his paws in an instant: he looked frantic. “It’s still here? Nearby?”

“Uh… yeah. About… I guess twenty klicks, give or take. We came in through the air cooling system.”

“You stole a Hunter ship?!” Garaaf looked wildly at them and his remaining eye grew wide when they nodded. “How are its systems? Warp drive, power supply, comms array?”

Spears shrugged. “Uh… All good, as far as I can tell.”

Garaaf got right up in his space instantly. “Does it have a jump drive?!”

“Uh…” Spears cleared his throat and leaned around him to look at Choi. “Jamie?”

Choi thought about it then shook his head helplessly. “Hell if I know. I couldn’t tell what half the things plugged into the reactor were.”

“If it has a jump drive then… then we can get out of here!” Garaaf exclaimed. “I just need… I’ll need to—” He turned, dropped to four paws and blurred back toward the shanty before skidding to a halt and turning back. “Wait right here. I’ll be just a few minutes.”

“Garaaf, what—?” Ray demanded, but he turned and was gone in a flash of fur.

“What—?” Ray demanded again, this time of nobody in particular. They all shrugged, and slowly subsided.

True to his word, Garaaf was not long. He returned with a wide strip of fabric tied around his waist like a belt: Ray could just make out hard objects pressing outwards from inside it.

“We need to move. Quickly. If they find your ship then—”

“Garaaf,” Spears stood up. “We’re in. But you’d better explain as we go.”

The Whitecrest indicated his belt and actually whined. “I have the codes to get in touch with my Clan! All I need is a jump drive. I was going to suggest getting one from that breaker’s yard, but if you have a fully intact one, then… And if it’s working properly then we can convert it into an Array! We could bring troops here! Jump back home! Nuke this whole festering ring and send it crashing down! A-anything! Please, we mustn’t waste a second!”

They scrambled to their feet without further encouragement. They were all already footsore, tired, hungry and sleep-deprived, but with a promise like that to pursue…

Garaaf led the way, and they followed.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Nofl

Patient. Calm. Menacing. It was funny how many emotions a dog could project just sitting there and quietly watching. There were subtleties to the precise lift and angle of those cropped ears, whether the tail was twitching gently to the left or the right, the exact angle of the skull… they communicated a lot for a non-sapient species.

Then again, they had evolved to communicate with a sapient species. And despite the fact that Bozo outmassed him by an order of magnitude, Nofl found he rather enjoyed the enormous canine’s company.

Especially when he disarmed Nofl’s guest so effectively.

“The Ark project is going nicely…” Tertiary Director Trafn said, edging away from Bozo’s thumping tail. “And the Directorate has accepted your argument regarding transparency with the Humans. If we intend to reverse-engineer some of their genome then it is probably best if we do it with their permission…”

“They have a nasty habit of finding out, dear,” Nofl said. He was running a few tests on one of Bozo’s puppies, the hybrid pups mothered by a very different breed. The youngsters were blessed with much more fur than their father, and it was longer, softer and silkier, but they were also equipped with a frankly alarming amount of muscle underneath. “And they have been so much less forgiving about the Directorate’s zoological program, after all…”

Trafn, unused to being referred to as ‘dear,’ sidled a little further away from Bozo, who panted affably at him.

“And if they say no?” he asked.

“Oh, they won’t,” Nofl predicted. “Not if you make them a good enough offer, anyway. They have vast archives of their own genetic data on file, and they trade in it quite regularly.”

Satisfied that the young dog was in good health, he stepped down from his examination stool and let it jump down after him. He opened the door and the two alien animals trotted out into the Quarter to go do… whatever it was dogs did around Folctha. He’d have to track them sometime.

He fired up the laboratory’s biofilter field and tidied up as it swept away any lingering deathworld hazards. And slobber. “Admittedly, I don’t think they use that information the way the Ark Project intends, but… well, they’re open-minded enough, hmm? Goodness, if you just told them what it was for you might get volunteers!”

“I’m sure,” Trafn commented drily. “I think it would be wiser to preserve the project’s secrecy, however.”

Nofl finished his tidying and turned around. “So, am I the Directorate’s go-to Human expert now?”

Trafn gave him a look of exceptionally faint irritation. “You… have been among them for some time now,” he said. “You know their ways, even if you do choose to mimic some of their affectations for reasons known only to yourself.”

“It’s a disarming tactic,” Nofl explained. “They think they know how to interpret a good College member who conforms to the vocabulary and behaviour guidelines. They don’t know how to interpret me.”

“Clowning around like you do is hardly dignified,” Trafn grumbled.

“And is that supposed to upset me?” Nofl blinked at him innocently. The answer of course was ‘no.’ Corti were not supposed to be upset by anything, traditionally, and it was always pleasing to catch a Director—especially a high-end one like a member of the Tertiary Tier—in an inconsistency. He flashed a little infuriating smile. “Or have you forgotten that we are in the process of reconfiguring ourselves?”

“Is abandoning our dignity part of our reconfiguration?” Trafn asked pointedly.

“If it interferes with our continuation as a species, yes.”

Nofl ambled over to his coffee pot and checked the brew. Caffeine levels were far, far below the toxic dose for Corti physiology—as far as Human biochemistry was concerned, it was entirely decaffeinated. He set it to pour him a Ristretto and turned back to business.

“What exactly does the Directorate need these genes for?”

“Baseline comparison, to begin with. Later, possibly, we might consider compatible splices or engineering our own genome along similar lines.” Trafn sniffed at the coffee scent with interest: the Corti palate loved bitter tastes. “The Directorate are examining all avenues to produce a superior Corti body.”

“Hmm.” Nofl wordlessly handed him the finished short drink and made another for himself. He watched, pleased, as Trafn sampled the coffee and obviously found it delicious. “They will, I think, want a show of real solidarity.”

“What do you mean?”

“Crossing the chamber on the Rich Plains was a useful gesture, but I have found that Humans and Gaoians both prefer more than mere symbolism. ‘Actions speak louder than words,’ as they say.” Nofl took up his own coffee but didn’t drink for now. He just appreciated the aroma. “The Directorate should consider the benefits of providing direct services to both species. The Gao liked what we did in the aftermath of the Hunter attack. If you want the Humans to trade in genetic material then a similar gesture may be useful.”

“…Thank you, Nofl. I will pass that observation on to my fellow Directors.” Trafn finished his ristretto and set the cup down next to the coffee machine. “…That is an excellent beverage.”

Nofl nodded. “It’s a stimulant. Alas, fatally toxic to us with the active ingredient, but I find I like the flavor. Allegedly, its discovery and growing popularity contributed to a revolution in Human thought and culture they call the Renaissance.”

“Intriguing.” Trafn considered the coffee some more, then turned for the door. “You are doing good work here. Continue.”

“Don’t worry dear. No fear of that,” Nofl lilted, falling back into his persona. Trafn gave him another curious look, then departed without further comment.

With him gone, Nofl returned to the subject of dogs. He was getting some very interesting data from Bozo and the puppies, very interesting indeed. It needed cataloging properly before he could consider the Directorate’s problem.

He sipped his coffee before returning to work and shut his eyes in delight at the taste.

It was perfect.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

“…It’s hotter in here than I remember.”

Ray had to agree. After the shivering blast they’d endured upon re-entering the cooling system back where they’d first left it, the air had got warmer much faster than she recalled. Her shirt was going dark gray and sticking to her chest and back., and the sleeve was damp from where she’d used it to mop her face.

Garaaf was panting, but he duck-nodded and sniffed the air. “If we were much further up, it’d be hot enough to cook us. I explored it as a possible route to infiltrate the manufacturing areas a few years ago, and had to turn back.”

“Guess breaking the ships up generates a lotta waste heat…” Jamie mused.

Garaaf duck-nodded. “Especially when they melt stuff down. Just getting close enough to see that nearly cost me the rest of my face… There’s your ship!”

“Ray. Berry.” Spears communicated his meaning by tone of voice alone, and the three of them picked up the pace, hustling up to their stolen ride’s ramp with their rifles up and ready.

It turned out to be empty, and they waved the others in. Garaaf and Jamie promptly vanished into the engineering bay.

Seconds later a disappointed whining noise floated back out. It was followed by Garaaf, who threw himself onto the closest thing the ship’s hold had to a couch—at least, it was soft—and dragged his claws across the fabric.

“It doesn’t have a jump,” he lamented.

“…Well that was a waste of time,” Conley muttered. He promptly drew ‘shut-the-fuck-up’ glares from Ray and Spears, and a snarl from Garaaf.

“Absolutely no, it wasn’t,” The Whitecrest told him. “There’s still stuff here we can use. We’ll just need… hmm.” He sprang back to his paws and retreated back into engineering. “Choi, where’s the warp drive on this thing?”

Jamie sounded surprised. “Uh, I think it’s over—”

There was an urgent hiss from the ramp: Cook. “Ray! Spears! Trouble!”

That wasn’t a welcome word, not at all. Ray darted back to join him and Berry at the door.

The trouble wasn’t hard to hear: clanging, metallic noises were echoing down the tunnel from upwind. They sounded unpleasantly like the same kind of noises made by the heavy door they’d used downwind.

“Shit,” Spears muttered. “If those are Hunters…”

“It’s a straight tunnel. Nowhere to hide,” Ray pointed out.

“…Okay. We’re gonna shoot first. If we stay in the dark and take ‘em out fast…”

“Backup’ll still come running,” Cook said.

“Yeah, but it’ll come a lot faster and bigger if they know we’re human,” Ray said. “We gotta drop ‘em before they see us.”

“R-right….” Berry cleared his throat, then lowered himself to the deck and squirmed out along the ground until he was tucked safely in a deep shadow where their Hunter ship had peeled back some of the hull around it. He stayed prone, aimed his rifle and waited. Ray moved quicker, staying low and darting out to the far side of the tunnel before dropping down, and Spears parked himself in a similar shadow to Berry’s on the opposite side of the hull breach. They were pathetic hiding positions, but the Hunters—if Hunters they were—would be looking toward a bright light source. Hopefully, their eyes adjusted to light in about the same way that a human’s did…

Ray could barely bring herself to even risk breathing. She was certain that every breath would give them away, despite the roaring hot air current. All she could do was aim, keep her finger carefully away from the trigger to avoid shooting at shadows, and wait.

Cook stayed on the ramp with his spear in one hand and his knife in the other. He looked like he was actually relishing the prospect of imminent violence.

There were more clanging sounds, then the scratching skitter of too many clawed feet on steel. Shadowy shapes loomed huge up the tunnel.

“Steady…” Ray muttered to herself

They were Hunters indeed. Four of them navigated a kind of floating pallet laden with equipment up out an exit that must have been only a hundred yards up from where they’d left the ship. Ray internally kicked herself: They had gone the longest possible way around by choosing to go downwind.

These ones weren’t as… spiky as she was used to seeing from Hunters, which were usually laden with blades and weapons and stabbing implements. These ones were bigger, squarer and their cybernetics had a blocky industrial look.

Ray glanced over at Spears and Berry. There were nods, they returned to their aiming. One of the Hunters raised a twisted arm to point at the hull breach, and Spears shot it. Its face burst in a slurry of nasty pinkish blood but rather than collapse dead it writhed and actually vocalized, the first time Ray had heard a Hunter make any noise: A high, thin, agonized shriek.

It lasted only an instant before Ray and Berry fired too, and all four dropped. One of them writhed in the tunnel for a second before Berry shot it again and it finally went still.

Cook peeked around the corner. “…Goddammit, you coulda left some for me,” he complained.

“Not now, Cook,” Ray told him. “Guys! We gotta go now!”

Conley, Choi, Holly and Garaaf bundled out of the ship. Conley groaned when he looked up the tunnel. “You mean there was an exit that close and we missed it?”

“This is not the time to worry about that,” Garaaf said, echoing Ray’s sentiment. “They’ll be coming.”

“Fuck.”

They dashed over to the fallen Hunters and checked them over. Up close, these ones were quite different: a little more muscular, their hides tougher and ridged in places. One’s eyes were still grotesquely open, and rather than the spider-like black jewels she’d seen on other Hunters these ones had weird horseshoe pupils and vivid green irises.

“Workers,” Garaaf sniffed. “Probably came to repair what they thought was a small hull breach.”

“Workers?” Jamie asked as the Gaoian stooped to rummage through the tool kit they’d brought with them. “So, like, the Hunters we usually see are the soldiers?”

“Like insects? Is there a Queen? Drones?”

“No.” Garaaf pulled something out of the kit, sniffed it, then threw it over his shoulder. “ll explain when we’re safe…Ah! ”

He pocketed a prize and grabbed a double pawful of other stuff, which he thrust on whoever had spare hands. “Let’s go.”

None of them were inclined to argue or waste time. They hauled ass up the tunnel to where the Hunters had come in and, finding it clean of Hunters for now, slid down the steep steel chute on their asses. Cook even let out a “Yippie-aye-yay!” and giggled like a schoolboy.

“Let’s do that again!” he said, the moment he bounced to his feet at the bottom.

“Focus,” Ray reminded him. “We’re in trouble here.”

Cook didn’t seem remotely contrite. “Gotta squeeze out as much fun as I can before I die!” he chirped, but pounced on the exit hatch. “We ready?”

Conley finished helping Holly get her cargo truck down the ramp and nodded. “Ready.”

“Ready,” Spears confirmed.

The door squealed open, and Cook seemed almost disappointed to find that the far side was entirely deficient of waxy-skinned flesh-eating alien monsters.

Garaaf shouldered past him. “…I know where this is,” he announced. “This way.”

Spears followed him. “Ray, up front. I’ll watch our backs.”

“Right.” It made sense. Berry was their best shot but in times of stress he couldn’t get a word out, meaning he’d have made a bad choice for rearguard. She ducked out past Spears and followed Garaaf.

“Jesus, it’s hot out here…” Conley muttered.

“It’s about to get hotter,” Garaaf told him. Sure enough, there was a dull orange glow around a bend in the tunnel up ahead.

They picked up the pace, quickly discovering that Garaaf was their slowest member. His short legs and long torso just weren’t made for running.

“Dude, that looks kinda awkward,” Jamie commented after a few seconds. “You look like you’d be doing better on all fours.”

“Can’t… hold a gun… on all fours…” Garaaf replied. He was panting in the heat.

“…You don’t have a gun.”

Garaaf looked down at his paws and the stump of his ear waggled in a way that somehow managed to convey irritation at himself. He dropped to all fours and sure enough his gait was immediately more fluid and easy. “…Habit…” he grumbled.

The bend up ahead turned out to be another catwalk over another huge space… only this time, it was a well-lit vision of Pandemonium. There was glowing metal everywhere, being carted through the air by drones, held under enormous hydraulic presses or crashed down onto by titanic drop hammers. Hunter Workers were moving in well-drilled gangs down there, dragging chunks of steel into position, turning them, levering drifts, dies and punches into place.

There was pure technology being applied down there, too, well above and beyond the industrial-age bedlam on the floor. Ray had to grimace and shield her eyes as a loop of painfully bright molten steel literally flowed out of one orifice on the wall, looped through the air in what must have been an invisible channel of forcefields, and was siphoned easily into a mold without spilling so much as a stray spark.

The air was skin-tightening, throat-scratching hot.

It was all so distracting that the three Hunters that stepped out of an elevator in front of them caught them all completely off-guard. The Hunters seemed equally flat-footed, and for a stretched second the two groups stared at each other as though neither could quite believe what they were seeing.

Cook acted first. With a gleeful howl he lunged forward and his makeshift fusion claw knife tore through the lead Hunter’s neck like it was a hanging salmon, almost completely severing its head. Ray’s numbed body jolted into action as the Hunter crumpled: her rifle came up, her finger slipped inside the trigger guard, three rounds drilled a second Hunter in its skinny chest before she’d even realized what she was doing.

Cook was in the way which kept her from getting a clear shot on the third, but he was in the middle of ripping it open from belly to throat anyway. With a roar he grabbed its arm, heaved, and the spindly mass of broken legs and guts he’d made went crashing over the railing before anybody could cry out to stop him.

It plummeted down into the forge below and landed smack in the middle of a work gang, spread-eagled, smashed and sizzling on the block of red-hot steel they’d been working.

They all stared down through the grating between their feet as the Hunters below first examined their fallen counterpart then looked up to peer into the shadows, until the stupidity of his own action finally broke through Cook’s bloodlust.

“…Shit.”

Garaaf shot past him in a furry blur. “RUN!!”

That spurred them into action. In fact, at a dead four-pawed sprint Garaaf was tough to keep up with, but Ray put her head down and ran as hard as she could ever remember, willed her lungs and ribs to keep going, ordered her quads and calf muscles to shut up and work.

Garaaf seemed to know where he was going, at least. He jinked left at an intersection up ahead, paused long enough for the humans to see where he’d gone and plunged right down another branch.

She heard shots behind her: Spears.

“Move! Move!!”

Garaaf sprang back into view from around the corner ahead. “Not that way!!”

The source of his desperation was obvious: Hunters were hot on his heels, a dozen or more. They skidded to a halt on seeing the humans and abandoned their quarry in favor of more valuable meat, giving Ray and Berry no choice but to stop running and start shooting.

Two rifles. Thirty rounds per magazine. In tight quarters and against such large targets, neither of them had any trouble hitting their targets and as the first Hunters collapsed their carcasses bogged down the ones behind… but Ray could hear Spears’ rifle still hammering away behind her, underpinned by battle cries from Conley, Choi and Cook.

Thank God these ones were Workers. Not a one of them had a fusion blade on them, but that little prayer of thanks turned into cursing when a hot steel bolt of some kind kicked sparks off the wall inches to Ray’s left—a nail gun.

Berry drilled the offending Hunter in the throat, spraying horrible fluffy Hunter brains the general color and texture of moldy cauliflower all over the wall. Three more shots slew two more Hunters and bathed the ones behind them in sticky off-colour blood.

Then a second nail caught him dead-center in the chest.

Time slowed for Ray. She saw Berry stagger, saw him frown slightly as if he was a little confused. He looked down at the foot-long metal spike through his heart, his rifle fell from his fingers, and his body slumped heavily to the deck next to it a second later.

“Tom!”

Ray dropped to one knee and kept firing despite the tears that threatened to blur her eyesight, barely noticing another nail that plucked through her hair and nicked her right ear.

Garaaf pounced through the melee, snatched up the fallen rifle, raised it and fired. It was an awkward shape for him, a little too long in the stock, but whether out of desperation or sheer skill he drilled his targets in a tight grouping. Within a second, the corridor in front of them was clear again and the last Hunter staggered, gurgled, and collapsed.

There was silence front and back except for her own heavy breathing… and sobs.

She couldn’t check on Tom just yet. She turned, checked what was going on behind her. Spears, Conley, Choi and Cook were all still standing. Jamie’s shield had three or four nails sticking out of it and blood was running down Pete’s arm. There was a clatter as Spears ejected his magazine and rammed a new one home.

Holly was down.

Some panicking big-sister instinct took over and Ray flung herself to the smaller woman’s side. Holly was still alive, but she croaked out an agonized sound as Ray confirmed that fact. Blood was sticking her sweater to her belly.

“Holly!”

“Shit!”

Pete discarded his spear and shield and dropped down next to them. He looked back over Ray’s shoulder as he grabbed his first aid kit. “…Tom?”

“He’s…” Ray could barely bring herself to say it. “…He’s dead.”

Conley just took a breath and focused on Holly’s wound. “…Pressure. Here.”

Ray complied, though part of her died when she heard the pained noise her ministrations dragged out from between Holly’s gritted teeth.

Pete worked fast at least, and the first aid kit was meant for trauma situations. He sprayed some kind of a white foam into the gash on Holly’s stomach, which expanded to fill the wound. Some kind of clear plastic sticking patch and a bandage covered it over, and he finished the job with a painkiller injection.

“…Is that enough?” Ray asked.

Conley gave her a look that said it wasn’t. “It’s all I can do.”

Garaaf touched Ray on the shoulder and she looked up. The rest of them were gathered round. Cook was kneeling at Tom Berry’s side, closing his eyes and murmuring something.

“We have to go.”

“Don’t tell us to leave her,” Ray snarled at him, but he shook his head viciously.

“Never. Clan stick together. But we have to go.”

Cook wordlessly handed them Berry’s jacket. “Stretcher,” he said, and offered his own unused spear. Combined with Conley’s, they quickly had a basic enough litter lashed together that Conley was able to drag Holly along on it.

They stopped to say goodbye to Berry. None of them wanted to leave him to the Hunters, but there was nothing else they could do. Nobody knew what to say, anyway.

The only words spoken were Ray’s.

“…I’m sorry, Tom.”

Thus ended the only kind of funeral they could manage. It was pathetic, it was far less than he deserved, it left Ray feeling hollow and sick… but they couldn’t remain.

They picked up their gear and moved on.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Mrwrki Station

The Entity

Simply talking about itself was… therapeutic.

Darcy was no kind of a counsellor by her own admission, but she was a sympathetic ear and thirsty to learn about what the Entity was, how it had come to be, how it thought about and perceived things.

The Ava-memories supplied it with the suspicion that she felt guilty, and was being soothed by the conversation in her own right. The Entity had spent some time thinking about that notion, and had arrived at the conclusion that it didn’t want Darcy to feel any guilt.

After all: if Six had not trapped Ava Ríos all those years ago in Egypt, the Entity would not now exist. Its genesis was arguably horrific… but here it was. And it was grateful to exist.

Watching Darcy interact with the Ava-memories was intriguing as well. There was a relationship there that it was not properly equipped to understand, and when it tried to interpret the experience via the Ava-memories it found a peculiar block. The memories, it seemed, had limits on their own capacity to self-reference and interpret themselves. They refused to enter that particular loop entirely.

None of the Igraen memories were remotely equipped to understand either. Not even the Hierarchy agents, who knew the most about matterspace life forms, really understood what was going on there. They suggested words like “motherly” and “sisterly” without really and truly knowing what those words meant.

Meanwhile, the Ava-memories vigorously rejected those labels. Curious.

They had always been the most… lively of the Entity’s assimilated data. Sometimes they seemed less like the shell of a personality that it could use as a proxy, and more like the actual personality itself, bound and compelled to say what the Entity wanted said.

Maybe she had just been an unusually lively person.

It seemed like a lively conversation, at least. The Entity experienced more like a listener in an adjacent room, hearing muffled discussion through the door in a language it didn’t understand. Every so often, a note summarizing the conversation to date would slide under the door, and it would reply with a note conveying the thrust of what it wanted its advocate to say next.

All it could do was trust that the advocate was faithfully communicating its wishes, and accurately reporting what had been said. It didn’t really understand, but the conversation was definitely emotional.

They had been at it for hours, and Darcy inevitably ran out of energy first. The Entity was incapable of exhaustion: Darcy hadn’t eaten, drank or slept for most of a day. She finally made her apologies and retired, and the Entity was free to compile everything that had happened, and pay attention to other concerns.

On a whim, it checked its proxies and spy programs in the Hunter networks again.

Darcy turned as the Ava-memories exclaimed her name with a definite air of urgency.

“…Yes?”

“The Humans in Hunter space! They’re still alive!”

Darcy came back to life, as if there had been hidden reserves of energy and alertness there, just waiting for a crisis to activate them. She sprang back to her desk. “They are? Where? How?”

The Entity fed her all the information it could, as quickly as it came in. Within minutes, other analysts had appeared, men in uniform were speaking urgently with each other or into communications devices.

It had no way of telling the people on the Ring, not yet. But in mere minutes, decisions were being made that began the slow spinning-up of two species’ war machines.

In the middle of the bedlam, it left behind a proxy to communicate on its behalf and flashed away into the dataspace, headed for the Ring’s networks itself.

An opportunity had presented itself, and the Entity was not about to let it slip away.

It would attend to this personally.

Date Point: 15y6m AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

They were attacked twice more as Garaaf led them, but neither time in as many numbers or as ferociously. The Hunters had been stung: presumably they were building up their forces for a more serious attack. The first time, Ray, Spears and Garaaf laid down a withering volley that slaughtered their attackers in seconds. The second time, Jamie took down two with his spear, while Cook tore a third limb-from limb.

After that, they had peace. Whether they’d cleared out every Hunter in the area, or just convinced them to stalk rather than attack, Ray didn’t know and Garaaf didn’t care to guess.

Or maybe it was just that they never got a chance to attack a fourth time. Shortly after the third attack, Garaaf paused to check a spot on the wall. He made a pleased noise and levered up part of the floor plating.

There was a mark scratched into the metal where he’d checked, Ray realized.

“My smuggling route,” he explained, and vanished into the hole he’d made.

It was cramped in there. Even Ray, who was only average height at best, had to duck her head slightly: Poor Conley was forced down into an awkward and exhausting half-crouch.

“Hunters can’t fit in here,” Garaaf explained. “Don’t worry, there’s more room up ahead.”

Alright for him, Ray decided. On four-paws, the Gaoian had plenty of room to move but the humans were all at risk of banging their heads.

All except Holly, anyway. She’d gamely tried to stand and walk on her own, but even if Conley hadn’t vetoed it the attempt had obviously been more than she could handle. Ray wished she could do something: even with her system full of a potent painkiller, Holly was obviously in tremendous pain.

Garaaf was true to his word, however. The ceiling got higher after about fifty yards, to the point where even Conley could stand up straight again.

“What is this?” Jamie asked, looking around.

Garaaf shrugged. “I always figured it’s a utility corridor.”

“It can’t be, there’s no way the Hunters can fit in here…”

“No, but robots can… or at least, they could if I hadn’t disabled the tramway.” Garaaf aimed a claw at a metal rail on the ceiling. “They’d have to dismantle this whole part of the Ring to get at my sabotage, too.”

“So from down here, you can get around unnoticed…” Spears nodded. “Useful.”

“Means I don’t have to get in with the crush around the trough at feeding time, too,” Garaaf said. “One of my little warrens goes right up to the delivery system… Actually, if I know anything about Humans it’s that you guys eat a lot. Are you hungry?”

Ray wanted to say that she wasn’t, but her stomach had different ideas. It immediately let out a loud growling sound. Maybe that sick feeling in there wasn’t all grief and fear…

“Hungry or not, we need’ta eat an’ drink anyway,” Cook declared. “Gotta keep our strength up.”

“This way, then.”

There were a few more tight spots, including one where they had to worm through on hands and knees, but Garaaf hadn’t been exaggerating—his warrens really did go everywhere. Every so often they heard clanging and crashing sounds from above and around them, and one time they all stopped and held their breath as something made the Ring around them shake and hammer with its footsteps. It sounded like a Hunter the size and mass of a tank.

When they eventually stopped, Ray was tireder than she could ever remember being. Her knees and shins were raw from crawling through tight spaces, the cut on her ear was throbbing, she wasn’t sure how long she’d been awake…

But Garaaf’s den was a little slice of paradise. It was quiet, it was cozy… he’d even set up some kind of a decorative water feature rather like a Shishi-odoshi in the corner under a leaky pipe, though this one was muffled so that rather than making a clatter whenever it tipped up and spilled its water it instead leant some texture and rhythm to the steady tinkle and splash.

The sound of running water coupled with a warm distant hum from somewhere to create a soothing, warm atmosphere.

“We’re directly above the shanty,” Garaaf said as he lit a makeshift lamp that filled the space with warm yellowish light. “And the food balls run down through… here.” He indicated a wide pipe that he’d sawn a little bit out of. There was a catch tray at the bottom, made from a scavenged I-beam, and it was brimming with doughy gray spheres about as big as a pool ball.

“They don’t taste of anything much, but they’re better than starving,” Garaaf commented, handing them out. Ray bit into hers eagerly. He was right, it had even less flavor than even plain wheat dough would have but it was the first thing she’d eaten in years that wasn’t the Hot.

A spike of loss and grief crossed her mind as she tried to imagine Berry’s expression if he’d been here.

Water was handed out in a tall “glass” made from what looked like uPVC. Garaaf’s remaining ear moved in a fascinated little dance as he watched all of the humans drink, and drink, and drink.

“…I’d heard you people ate and drank a lot, but seeing it in action is something else,” he declared. “You all just ate three days of rations each.”

“Can… is that a problem?” Choi asked. “That sounds like a lot.”

“Relax, I usually keep a month’s worth of food in here for safety’s sake, and I can refill it every time the Shanty gets fed. Sometimes I wondered if I was being over-prepared but… well. Clearly I, uh… wasn’t…”

He trailed off, round about the same time that Ray realized she was crying. Up until now she’d been focused, scared, surviving. She’d had Holly to worry about, and the tight maze of the warrens to navigate. Now that they were somewhere safe and quiet, reality was catching up with her.

Her hands had started shaking. She tried to stop it, tried to clamp down but just couldn’t. She couldn’t stop the tears that blinded her, or the choking feeling in the back of her throat, or the hiccups that came on all by themselves. She hated it all, she hated how much she needed the hug that Spears gave her.

Garaaf cleared his throat and slipped away to give them some privacy. After a second, Conley stood up and followed him. He paused before vanishing, gave Ray a long and unreadable stare, then ducked under some piping and left.

Holly groaned as she reached out to take Ray’s hand, Jamie and Cook made their own delicate exit, and…

Time passed. Eventually, Ray managed to find herself again, at least enough to look around her and realize that Spears had been weeping too. Holly was dry-eyed but her face was back in that blank expression she’d worn for so long, pinched and wan.

“…God… he was standing right next to me…”

Spears gave her upper back a small rub. “I know.”

“I got him killed.”

“It was a crew decision, Ray. We came up here together.”

She sighed and nodded. She wanted to blame herself anyway, wanted to imagine that if she’d just shot a little straighter, picked her targets a little better… But she knew how that conversation would go. Spears would try and talk her out of it, but she needed to feel guilty. Somehow, she could feel in her belly that if she didn’t allow herself to feel responsible for Berry’s death she’d never be able to heal from it.

Assuming she lived long enough to get the chance.

Holly gave her hand a squeeze, then winced and touched her dressing, which sent another stab of guilt through Ray’s soul. She’d seen Conley’s expression when he tended that wound: He thought it was fatal. Another of her friends to feel guilty over… except Holly had come to mean more to her over the years than mere friendship. Whenever she imagined survival, escape and somehow getting out of Hell… she’d always imagined it in the form of getting Holly home. If she died… Ray doubted she’d have a purpose any longer.

Which meant they needed a plan, and they needed to put it into action now.

She straightened her back and cast around. Jamie and Cook were slumped in an alcove a few meters away, talking quietly. There was no sign of Garaaf or Conley.

“…Guys.”

They raised their heads.

“…We can’t stay here forever. They’ll tear the whole Warren apart to find us.”

“Right.” Jamie groaned and stood up. “I’ll go find Garaaf. Hope he got something useful off the ship.”

Cook nodded. “I’ll go find Pete.”

Garaaf, it turned out, had been busy. He had a workshop of sorts next to his living area that was little more than a workbench and whatever tools he’d been able to steal, scavenge, repair or fashion for himself. He seemed pleased with whatever it was he’d made, though—when he returned, he was turning it over in his hands, inspecting it. Ray felt certain she even saw him sniff it, though what he could possibly hope to glean from the scent of cobbled-together circuitry was beyond her.

He had a desk in the living area, with a power supply that he’d obviously (and dangerously) tapped from the power conduits in the ceiling and run through a home-made converter. It looked like junkheap science—in fact it was junkheap science—but when he plugged his new creation in, all that happened was an LED on the top blinked green, then settled to a steady glow.

“…I’ve waited a long time to make this,” he said. “I just needed one component off a ship with a working warp drive.”

“…The distortion field amplifier?” Jamie asked, stooping to get a better look. Garaaf waved him off.

“Yeah. Watch this.” He clawed a switch on the side, and cleared his throat.

“…Lost cub howling, lost cub howling. Big brother played fire-in-the-cold, now plays hide-in-the-dark. Stole some toys, mother’s angry, showing fangs, claws out. Made some friends from Clan Dirtyfoot. Want to play fetch and run home, here’s how we play.” He slotted what looked like a data drive into a port on the device’s side and watched intently as it did… whatever it was doing.

He rocked back and flicked an ear with a satisfied air when the green light atop the device blinked three times and turned blue.

“There.”

“…What was all that?” Cook asked. “Sounded like some spy shit.”

“That’s right. Whitecrest cant. Our own private language, sort of. One of them, anyway. You can probably guess most of what I said.”

“Clan Dirtyfoot?” Spears asked. He looked amused.

“Well… the Gaoian word that most directly maps to the word ‘Earth’ literally means ‘dirt’.” Garaaf had the good grace to shrug apologetically. “If it’s any consolation, the code words for some of the other species are much less complimentary.”

“Yeah?” Ray found room for a touch of amusement, somehow. “Do tell?”

“…The Guvnurag would translate most directly as ‘Clan Wide-Arse’.”

Even Holly giggled.

“So… now what?” Conley asked, once the little ripple of laughter was gone.

“Now? Sleep. I’m almost falling down dead here, I don’t know how any of you are still going strong.” Garaaf stepped away from his desk and headed for a nest-bed he’d assembled in one corner. He curled up in it and tucked his nose under his tail. “We’re going to need our strength for whatever comes back from my Clan.”

“Sleep? You’re kidding.” Conley looked skeptical.

“Gotta do it sometime, Pete,” Spears said. “And he’s right, it’s been a long day.”

Garaaf raised his head. “I promise you, there’s nowhere safer than here on this whole Ring,” he said. “Even if they somehow found us, it would take weeks for them to dismantle the station and dig us out… and I made sure there are plenty of escape routes. Lights.”

The lights dimmed, until all that remained was a dull orange warmth that did little more to the darkness than put some edges and shapes on it, and the steady slow blinking green from on top of the device on the desk.

Conley sighed and found a length of open floor to stretch out in. Ray realised quite suddenly that Spears had never actually taken his arm from around her. She glanced at Holly, who’d snuggled down on her litter and was probably as comfortable as she was going to get, then decided not to question it. Right now, a little human warmth was just what she needed.

He stiffened a little as she wriggled into him, as if he’d only just noticed that he was holding her too, then shrugged himself into a more comfortable posture. He was mostly bones and lean muscle, not the most comfortable man she’d ever cuddled up to… but within seconds of resting her head on his shoulder, Ray was asleep.

She was so exhausted that, mercifully, she didn’t dream.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
High Mountain Fortress, Planet Gao

Champion Fiin of Stoneback

There were some events that Fiin had felt he’d never witness. More than a few of them had come true regardless, but among the remainder that he’d felt absolutely certain would never happen was Champion Genshi losing his composure.

That was, right up until the moment the Whitecrest champion gasped and sat down heavily, interrupting and disrespecting the Great Father in one action. “Keeda’s burnt balls!”

Daar looked just as bemused as Fiin felt. He gave Genshi a small interval, then cleared his throat.

“…You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Champion,” he commented.

“I think I have!” Genshi exclaimed, then apparently remembered who and where he was. He glanced at Daar, his ears flattened in a momentary medley of shame and contrition, and he flowed back to his feet with his silvery dignity back in place but now sporting just a little patina.

Daar gave him the stare of careful calculation, then duck-nodded and surrendered the table. “If it’s enough ‘ta ruffle your fur, Genshi, it must be important. What happened?”

Genshi took the table without so much as a polite protest or demurral, another first.

“…I just received a priority message from the Clan’s operations directorate,” he said. “One of our senior Fathers just got back in contact. I thought he died five years ago at Capitol Station.”

Daar’s ears worked as he thought. “…Whitecrest lost a lotta Brothers at Capitol Station,” he recalled. “But only one Father, ‘s’far as I know…”

“Garaaf,” Genshi agreed.

“Your womb-brother.”

“…Yes, my Father.”

Fiin flicked an ear. It was rare for Gaoian males to openly acknowledge when they shared the same true mother. It was a close bond and a private one, closer than Cousins. In fact, Males who referred to each other as Womb-Brothers would undoubtedly have been calling each other “Cousin” even without the more immediate relationship.

“You’re certain it’s him?”

“His codes are correct. He wasn’t implanted the last time I saw him. I’m not certain, obviously I can’t be… but…”

He gestured some files from his personal tablet to the holographic emitter above the ancient wooden table. “He calls this The Ring. It’s a Hunter megastructure, and he’s stuck on it… with some Humans.”

There was a susurrus around the table. Daar silenced it with a tap of his huge claws on the ancient wood.

“…Our friends at AEC forwarded somethin’ earlier today about some Humans maybe appearin’ in Hunter space,” he recalled.

“Yes…” Genshi was obviously speed-reading a document as he spoke. “Apparently they stole a Hunter swarmship. Garaaf was able to scratch together a basic communicator out of some of its components.”

Daar duck-nodded slowly, and considered the hologram over the table. It was actually two holograms side-by-side, a fully pulled out overview of the planet, against which the structure was the mere suggestion of a hair just above its surface, and a pulled-in view of the structure in a little more detail. Neither view truly gave Fiin a sense of scale or proportion, but how could it? Anything on a planetary scale was just too big to really grasp.

It didn’t take Daar long to think, though. “…This ring,” he asked slowly. “Important?”

“Uh… almost certainly vital, Great Father…” Genshi said. Fiin had never seen his Whitecrest counterpart so off-balance, and that just wouldn’t do. Genshi needed to keep face in front of the other Champions. Maybe a little distraction was in order.

He interjected himself into the conversation in the artfully artless way that both Daar and Tyal had trained him in. Brash and plain-spoken could be all kindsa subtle, used right. “Ain’t no reason to build anything that big,” he said. “It’s dumb. That means it’s important.”

Champion Wozni inclined his head as he considered it. “Important how, though? Is it communications infrastructure, a shipyard, a breeding ground?”

“Take yer pick. Fyu’s nuts, even if it’s just a big ego project, imagine the damage to their morale and pride if we—”

“Don’t matter,” the Great Father rumbled. “Only thing that matters is that they value their stupid spacedonut. ‘Fer all it matters, maybe it’s filled with, I dunno, cushions an’ sweet-herb, whatever. The question is this: how much would it hurt ‘em if we destroyed it? An’ can we pay the cost t’do it?”

“…Destroy it, My Father?”

“Yes.”

Genshi cleared his throat. The distraction had both reminded him and given him the opportunity to regroup. “It would be remiss of me not to mention that Garaaf estimates there are, ah, many billions of sapient slaves on board…”

“Yes,” the Great Father said patiently. “What kinda condition are these slaves in?”

“…Not good, my Father. From the report…” Genshi’s eyes quickly darted through the relevant text, “Most of them are the result of, uh, force-breeding. And…a substantial plurality of them are injured, malnourished…and apparently incapable of communication.”

That was a depressing thing to contemplate and the set of everyone’s ears reflected that.

Daar simply sighed and shook his great head sadly. “That’s ‘bout what I was expectin’ it ‘ta be. You got a plan ‘ta address that? Feed ‘em? Rehabilitate ‘em? Convince their herd species ‘ta take back their lost members?”

The unspoken observation behind the question was that even if the Dominion species had had a history of charitable altruism, convincing any government to take that many charity cases was…unlikely, to put it gently. It was difficult to imagine one that even could.

Genshi knew it too, but he would not be dissuaded so easily. “In your own words, My Father—every pyre must be witnessed. This would be collateral damage on an unprecedented scale, and I fear we might not weather the consequences.”

“Yup,” Daar agreed. “An’ you didn’t answer my question.”

Genshi didn’t so much as twitch an ear. “…I don’t.”

“Well. This is a problem then, ain’t it? We’ve got…how much time do we have? Not much anyway,” he growled, “An’ we’ve gotta notify the Humans, and…balls. This is gonna spiral right the fuck outta control in about two whisker-twitches, y’all know that.”

“What about those consequences?” Clan Goldpaw was, as ever, concerned about the commerce between species. “What will they be?”

“Good question. Besides the Humans, which relationships are gonna actually matter?”

Sheeyo was absent, dealing with the summit on the Rich Plains out over the ruins of Gorai, but his Champion-in-Stead, Tagro, was a bold one. “The Humans are a military ally, My Father, but they’re the least economically developed trading species. If the Dominion chose to impose sanctions on us—and we must assume that under Hierarchy influence they absolutely will if given a half-decent excuse—it could cripple the reconstruction, set it back by generations.”

“Again, I don’t hear an answer to my question,” Daar noted. His patience was approaching legendary as far as Fiin was concerned. A young ‘Back who danced around the direct answers like that would have earned a hefty clawed blow to set him right. But the reconstruction was important to Daar. It was the difference between being the Gao’s savior, rather than their destroyer. He wasn’t about to jeopardize it without a very good reason.

“…The Directorate would be the most important, now that they’ve defected to our bloc,” Tagro said.

“They’re also the most likely to view the destruction of this thing in a rational light,” Meereo chimed in. He was generally silent at these meetings, but that had given him gravitas. When he spoke, the other Champions listened.

“The Kwmbwrw will have the most negative reaction,” Tagro predicted. “We can probably lean on the Domain heavily enough to dissuade them from committing to an opinion either way… Assuming, that is, the kill is quick and clean. The longer and messier it is, the more they’re likely to start making demands we’ll never be able to satisfy.”

The Great Father furrowed his heavy brow in thought, while Genshi seemed to take that as his cue. “…We do have the means to achieve a clean cut,” he pointed out. “We have an agent on the Ring after all. One who’s been able to build a communicator. If he can assemble a jump array as well…”

“If,” Champion Loomi said.

“Garaaf has survived in that place for years, and managed to do this. I have faith in him.”

“I know he can, Cousin.” Daar stood up to his full commanding height, shook out his pelt, and wandered over to the window. “Attend me, Champions.”

Unsure of themselves, they followed the Great Father to the window, and then out through the door onto the ledge overhanging the great bulk of High Mountain Fortress. It was an impressive view. Daar took a deep, deep breath, held it for a long moment, and exhaled.

“Do you know what I did in this very place, my Champions?”

Fiin wasn’t likely to forget: The shade of RFG strikes raining down on the horizon by the thousand wasn’t ever going to leave him. He’d never be able to see the balcony view ever again without having that vision etched invisibly behind it like a watermark. He didn’t reply, though: the question was rhetorical.

The Great Father flicked his ears. “It was here that I obliterated our civilization.”

Fiin couldn’t chitter—the subject was far too grim for such an irreverence, and Daar probably would have at least torn off one of his ears if he had—but the uneasy glances most of the Champions shared was almost comical. Only Genshi and Gyotin seemed to take it in stride.

Daar leaned forward and rested his brutish arms on the railing to look out over the landscape he’d so permanently touched. “I personally summoned the fire that wiped out aeons of our history, ‘cuz I knew it was the only way for anything to rise from the ashes. There ain’t no sapient being alive today ‘cept for some Keeda-damned malware that has as much blood on their paws.”

He turned his head slightly. “I did that to my own people, whom I love,” he added. “So you tell me. You think I’m gonna let all those poor damned alien slaves stop us from givin’ those monsters what they got comin’ to them?”

He glanced at Gyotin in particular. “No. I will not. I will mourn them, but I will do what must be done.”

He turned around. “Genshi. Get as much intel outta your Womb-Brother as you can. Fiin, prepare First Fang. Loomi…I want the biggest Fyu-fucked bombs ‘yer Clan has left in our legacy stockpile. Somethin’ that’ll make WERBS look like a squeak toy.”

“…We have a number of gigaton-class devices left in the Legacy, My Father, and we’ve kept them well-maintained…but they haven’t been test-fired in a century!”

“Then test-fire one and do it now. The rest we’re gonna use t’blow that ring into a zillion pieces before they have any clue what’s happenin.’ Meanwhile, we need to get ready ‘fer a full-scale invasion of the planet it’s orbiting, too. We may never get another chance ‘ta hurt those evil motherfuckers this hard ever again. I want details. What they’re doing, how much we can hurt them, alla that. We don’t go until I give the word, but I wanna be ready an’ I don’t wanna waste lives.” Daar sighed again, this time almost…mournfully. “If I’m gonna murder maybe trillions more, ‘least I can do is make it quick an’ give ‘em meaning.”

The wind over the balcony was the only thing Fiin could hear. The Champions had been here before, and yet again they didn’t know what to say—the only appropriate sound was a painful, complete silence. Again, Daar glanced at Gyotin, who’d been silent so far. This time he spoke.

“You keep looking at me as though you expect me to say something, My Father,” he said.

“…No. I suppose there ain’t anything that could be said.”

“Then I’ll make a plea. Let’s bring our people home, if we can. Just Garaaf and those Humans. If we can save them…”

“That was the idea, Champion. I don’t wanna waste lives if it can be avoided. If we can get nukes there, we can get a team there, we can jump back…all o’ that.”

Gyotin duck-nodded. “I’ll prepare a service for First Fang. With Champion Fiin’s help, if he can?”

Fiin duck-nodded. “They’ll need it.”

“Do that. Everyone I named, get to work. The rest of you…We have business to conclude.”

Daar returned to the high table, along with most of the Champions. Fiin, Genshi, Loomi and Gyotin had no place there now, they had their missions.

They waited until they were a long way down the stairs and well outside Daar’s sensitive hearing range before Loomi finally spoke.

“Calls like this will kill him, in time,” he predicted.

“Fyu lived longer than almost any other male in recorded history,” Fiin retorted loyally. He felt he had to stand up for Daar’s strength.

“Fiin, Champion… Fyu died long before they cremated him,” Gyotin said. Loomi and Genshi duck-nodded. “And I’m not sure if Yulna didn’t kill Daar the day she elevated him.”

“He has Naydra.”

“And if she can keep him going, she deserves a higher place in history than Tiritya herself…” Gyotin flicked an ear in what was almost a kind of smile. “I hope she earns it.”

“…We seriously have gigaton-grade weapons?” Fiin asked, changing the subject.

“It was in your brief when you were elevated, Champion,” Loomi reminded him.

“…I admit, there was a lot going on at the time.”

“They’re scientific instruments,” Loomi revealed. “I know that sounds ludicrous. But sometimes, the only way to really learn about the universe is to blow part of it up.”

“And… what did we learn?” Fiin asked, genuinely curious.

“We learned what the core of a moon looks like. Among other things.”

“…You think that’ll be enough?”

Loomi sighed. “Cousin,” he said, “against the Hunters? I’ll call it a good start.”

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Dataspace adjacent to The Ring

The Entity

The Ring was closely scrutinized. It wasn’t just the Hunters themselves, feeling outwards from the tight locked cages of their own brains to explore its dataspace with their limited senses, but the Hierarchy kept a tight watch on what their ‘control species’ did, said and thought among themselves.

Infiltrating such an edifice was dangerous, not that the Entity was any stranger to risk. It had assailed harder systems. It was experienced enough to feel confident… And knowledgeable enough to feel afraid.

The experience was… strangely healing. It was plunging into dangerous territory again. There was no time or room for doubt, or factional squabbles within its own psyche. There was only danger, and the challenge of surviving that danger.

To be sure, staying safe and cautious upheld its core directive to < survive > above all other concerns… but what was survival? What did it even mean unless the possibility of failure was present alongside it?

The moment it had put itself back in harm’s way, the Entity had come to a revelation: that life requires death in order to be life.

The Ring’s dataspace was hard… but porous. The Entity knew how to work its way through flaws that simply wouldn’t have existed in a stupider system, knew how to find ways in that just weren’t monitored because nothing was supposed to come through that way. Dataspace was not a network, it was a space, and in a space options like smuggling across a border by walking rather than taking the road became available.

And once inside…

It searched.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Ray woke up cold. She wasn’t cuddled up to Spears any longer, he was on the other side of the room, in quiet conversation with Garaaf. Neither of them seemed to have noticed she was awake yet.

Rather than sit up, she turned her head slightly and focused on what they were saying.

“…Blow it up?”

“Yes.”

“With us on it?”

“…I’ve been promised that if we can build a jump array, they’ll extract us.”

“And if we can’t?”

Garaaf didn’t answer directly. Instead he lapped up some water and cleared his throat. “If we can’t… well, we’ll probably have died in the attempt.”

“There are… there have to be a lot of people on this station, Garaaf.”

“Yes. Slaves, if they’re sapient at all. Plenty aren’t, any longer. Trauma and a total lack of education or nurturing will do that to an intelligent life form.”

“But this Daar guy is willing to kill all of them.”

Garaaf glanced around the room. Ray didn’t bother closing her eyes, instead she made eye contact with him. A moment of understanding passed between them.

She sat up. “Aren’t you?” she asked.

Spears watched her for a second, then hung his head.

“…I guess we killed that herd just for the chance to escape…” he said, looking away.

“We didn’t. The Hunters did.” Ray sat up properly and dropped her feet to the floor.

“We used what they did,” Spears argued.

“They’d have done it anyway.”

“You shot that guy Gorg.”

“I ended his suffering.”

“And botched our escape in the process,” a new voice joined in. Conley.

Ray turned to face him. He didn’t look angry or accusatory, just… tired.

“…Do you want an apology?” she asked.

“I just want it acknowledged. We could’ve warped out if they were a little slower. The second they knew there were humans around….”

“We would have starved to death in deep space, if the Hunters didn’t run us down first,” Ray said.

“You didn’t know that.”

“And you don’t know that we wouldn’t have been caught just as fast if I hadn’t put Gorg down,” Ray retorted. “I just did what seemed like the right thing at the time. I’ll keep doing what seems like the right thing. And y’know what? Maybe the right thing will get us killed. I can live with that.”

Cook cleared his throat. “Uh… Technically…”

“Shut up, you know what I meant.” Ray sighed and checked on Holly. Nothing much had changed overnight, except that her brow felt hot and was beading with sweat. Ray brushed some hair aside to put the back of her hand against Holly’s neck for a better temperature check, and woke her up. With her eyes open, she looked even weaker than when she’d ben asleep.

“…Uh?”

Ray put on a brave smile. “Hey.”

“..You’re still here…”

Having her own words turned back on her actually made Ray’s smile a little more truthful. “We’re still here,” she agreed.

“…I thought you’d leave me…”

“I mean, that would be the smart thing to do,” Cook said, but he already had his hands up placatingly when Ray rounded on him. “But we ain’t exactly smart else we wouldn’t be here. We’re not quittin’ on ya, Hol.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Jamie agreed. Spears just nodded. Only Conley and Garaaf remained silent.

“…So what’s our plan?” Ray asked, giving Cook the first real smile she’d given him in years. “I presume we aren’t just gonna wait in a hole for the Hunters to tear apart the whole Warren?”

“They can try,” Garaaf declared, smugly. “But you’re right. We can’t stay here forever. So the plan is… what’s that phrase of yours? We go all in. We have loaded weapons and six able-bodied fighters. If we want to get off this station alive then we need to acquire some working jump technology from the shipbreakers.”

“Let’s say we achieve that,” Spears said. “Then what?”

”If we can get the technology, and if we find somewhere that’s both spacious and secure enough to build a working Jump Array and if we manage to build it out of salvage and scrap and if it works when we turn it on… then friendly people with big guns come swarming through it, evacuate us, and leave behind an extremely large bomb.”

“We can’t build it in here?” Ray asked. She felt dumb the instant she said so. They were packed in tight in Garaaf’s warren, and there was barely enough room to make an origami crane, let alone a working Jump Array. “…Got anywhere better in mind?”

Garaaf scratched his claws idly on his desk as he thought. “Maybe. Hunters really don’t like cold temperatures, but cryo technology has some useful applications, so there’s a whole facility on the Ring’s groundside outer surface that’s colder than you’d believe. My nose froze when I explored it, but it’s got the power supply, the space and some pretty thick doors. Plus there’s only a few ways in and out.”

“Sounds like a good spot to get ourselves backed into a corner,” Conley grumbled.

“We don’t have good options,” Garaaf told him. “They’re all bad. But some are less bad than others.”

“Hey, we either die in a famous last stand, or we flip the fuckers the bird an’ shit a nuke in their lap as we leave,” Cook said. “Either way, I’ll take it.”

“Okay, so that’s the general plan,” Choi said. “How about we talk actual… y’know, specifics? Like how exactly we’re gonna do this and stay effective if somebody’s looking after Holly?”

Garaaf pulled some kind of a Gaoian face and glanced at Holly, who’d sat up with a groan to drink some water. She obviously wasn’t going anywhere under her own power, and looked around at them with a solemn expression.

“..I’m open to suggestions,” he said.

“The… the smart thing,” Holly cleared her throat, but there was a ping from Garaaf’s homebrew communications gadget before she could finish. The Gaoian turned to examine it.

“We’re not leaving you, Holly,” Ray insisted.

“…M-maybe you should. I… I don’t… I…”

She was brave, Ray couldn’t fault her for that. But it was obvious from Holly’s expression and barely-contained tears that being left behind to die alone constituted just about her worst nightmare. The thought that she was willing to face that for them left Ray feeling much too guilty to take her up on it.

She shut her up by taking her hand. “Holly. It’s okay. You’re not selfish for not wanting to be left behind.”

“But I don’t want you to die for me either…”

“…I think…” Garaaf said carefully, “that we can maybe eat our cake and still have it, actually…”

They all turned to look at him. He stepped aside and indicated his communicator. It was hooked up to a tablet he’d managed to keep, scrounge or steal from somewhere, and it flashed three of the most incongruous characters at them that Ray had never expected to see here at them.

<:-)>

“…What th’—?”

The characters on the screen changed.

+Call me a friend. And I have a plan for you.+

The seven of them looked around at each other, then back at the makeshift monitor.

“Go on…” Spears said, carefully.

+First, you’re going to need the following items…+

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Demeter Way, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Adam (Warhorse) Arés

The one and only thing Adam would have ever written in his “List of Times When It’s Okay to Lose Gainzz” would be when a bro was caring for his wife and newborn. That was it. He’d somehow managed not to lose any of his strength but he was paying for it with indigestion and lack of sleep, which, being honest, wasn’t a thing he could keep doing.

Still wasn’t as bad as Marty had it, though. Diego was hungry. He wanted to nurse every two and a half hours, no exceptions, no excuses. Give him a tit and he was quiet as could be. Without it…

They’d finally got him willing to accept a bottle, though. Marty pumped before bed, Adam got up in the dead of night to bottle feed, go downstairs, get a workout in, thump up and feed him again, crawl back into bed…they were finding a rhythm.

He was just about to drift off to blessed sleep when his phone went off with the worst sound in the world. Mission WARNO. It wasn’t a deployment order, not yet, but he’d just been ordered back to the barracks on hot standby. Paternity leave or not, that wasn’t an order he could avoid; there was nobody alive who brought what he did to the team. Irish’s can-do determination, Base’s skill as a medic, and Righteous’s superhuman strength and agility were completely unmatched by anyone …except Adam. He was the best there was at all those things and everyone knew it. Asking them to stand in for him and do their jobs was a no-go.

For now, Warhorse was irreplaceable. That was a problem to solve another day but right then it was going to take him from his wife and his son at the worst possible time.

Fuck.

It woke Marty up too.

“…Oh, no…” She sat up. She’d bounced back from the birth pretty quickly, thanks admittedly to a little semi-authorized Crue-D, but Adam imagined it was still literally a drain having a hungry babe suck lifeforce from her every couple of hours.

“Ain’t a deployment, yet,” Adam told her, trying to be reassuring. “We have these scares like, every few months after all.”

She shook her head. “It’s gonna be. I can feel it.”

Adam didn’t argue. Her instincts were usually on-target, and he had the same feeling too. Sometimes, somehow, he just knew.

She kissed him, then got up to check the crib. If Diego had come with one extra blessing, he seemed pretty immune to loud noises. Probably came with having a dad who made minor earthquakes with his feet whenever he moved around.

Whatever. Best not to drag it out, so he grabbed his go-bag from the corner. She stopped him to kiss him again.

“…Uh… God, I’m scared,” she admitted. “I was never scared before, but now, I…”

“I’ll be back,” Adam promised her.

“With your shield, please,” she instructed him.

“…I’ll do my best.”

“Your best.” She laughed and relaxed a little. “Okay. Your best is everybody else’s superhuman, so… good enough for me.”

He blushed slightly, pulled her in for a warm nuzzle and held her. He didn’t really know what to say. Words…weren’t his thing, really. But then again, maybe they weren’t the thing for this situation, either. Holding her seemed like the right thing to do.

He had to go. He went. One more kiss, one brush of his thumb against her cheek, and then the stairs, the street, the fastest route to the base as Titan and a couple of the other guys came hustling outta their own condos.

They made eye contact. Their mutual hustle turned into a run, then a full-on sprint, leaping over obstacles and charging as fast as they possibly could. If there was one thing about his job that Adam wasn’t comfortable discussing with Marty…it would be how much he enjoyed it, for reasons both noble and infernal.

Then again, she probably knew.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Garaaf, it seemed, was not one to make new allies quickly.

“How do we know we can trust you?”

The words on the screen took a moment or two before they changed.

+Unless you think I am a Hunter, I don’t know why you wouldn’t. Can you afford the luxury of paranoia at this point?+

“Always,” Garaaf grumbled.

“Then make a goddamn exception,” Ray snapped. He turned to look at her with slightly bared teeth, and she drew herself up to her full height and gave him the sternest look she had. “Face it: we’re basically fucked. If we don’t trust now and all pull in the same direction, we’re screwed. If we do pull together, maybe we’re still screwed. But the only direction where we’re maybe not fucked is the one where we take a gamble.”

“It’s got us this far,” Spears agreed.

Garaaf blinked at them, then looked around at the others. “…Clearly I’m outvoted,” he acknowledged after a second.

“Hey bro, you got a better idea, let’s hear it!” Cook encouraged him. Garaaf just shook his head and waved a claw at the monitor.

“Fine. We will do as our mysterious benefactor suggests.”

Ray nodded. “Good. We’d better use this Warren while it’s still here. Jamie, you stay here with Holly.”

“Wait, what?” Choi stood up and his head made a vicious clang as it bounced off a pipe. He staggered, rubbed at it, then recovered himself. “Aaugh… Hold on, I—”

“You and Garaaf are the only two who know how to build this Array thing,” Ray told him. “We need Garaaf’s knowledge to go get the shopping list, but somebody needs to stay here with Holly so it may as well be the guy we really can’t lose if this plan is going to work.”

Jamie glanced at Holly, who gave him a wan tightening of her lips and cheeks that might on a better day have even managed to be a smile.

“It’ll be fine…” she croaked. “We can play ‘I Spy’.”

Jamie snorted a laugh, and sat down on Garaaf’s bed. “…Alright,” he said. “Just don’t get yourselves killed out there.”

“No promises,” Conley grunted.

Nobody had anything further to add to that. Ray grabbed her rifle, as did Spears and Garaaf, and that seemed to be the cue everybody needed to get moving. Garaaf led the way, zig-zagging left and right and sometimes back on himself through the Warren. It was easy enough for him: he dropped easily to four paws to squirm through tight spots, or to avoid low ceilings. For the humans, it was tiring, back-aching progress punctuated by the occasional metallic noise and swearword as somebody’s skull got acquainted with a low-hanging feature. They took frequent breaks.

Ray had completely lost track of time when Garaaf finally stopped. Again they were back in a stupidly hot part of the Ring, to the point where the metal was painfully warm whenever Ray touched it, like a seatbelt buckle in a hot car.

Garaaf indicated a hatch above them. “Here.”

“What’s out there?” Spears asked.

“Scrap metal smelting. Big industrial machinery, lots of hazards. Watch where you step, the Hunters aren’t overly concerned with things like marked hazard areas or safety railings.”

“No OSHA compliance. Got it.”

“Ain’t like a hard hat would help much if a tonne of scrap metal fell on you anyway…” Cook muttered. He unlocked the hatch, slid it aside and peeked up out of it. Apparently happy that nothing was coming, he heaved himself up using a nearby pipe for a foothold and vanished into the shadowy space beyond.

Garaaf followed, then Spears, and Conley, who turned to help Ray up out of the hole. The noise was unbelievable. It was loud, yes, but not in an ear-hurting way, more in a chest-rattling, bone-loosening way that suggested there was a lot of infrasonic noise below the range of hearing. Every so often it was punctuated by a distant echoing crash, slam, or tortured metallic scream.

“Stay low, stay close, stay quiet!” Garaaf ordered them over the din. “And for Fyu’s sake don’t attack anything unless it’s that or die!”

They did as they were told, staying low, close and quiet as he darted between huge-sided machinery and under grinding conveyors. At one point he stopped dead still almost like the Road Runner, waited for a hurtling container full of metal scraps to go shooting past his nose, then waved them through in its wake before the air had even finished going still again.

There was no sign of any Hunters at all. Ray hoped that meant they were all busy scouring the area that humans had last been seen, wherever that was. After what felt like a whole day in the Warrens, she would have been hopelessly turned around even if she’d had any sense of the Ring’s layout.

Garaaf, fortunately, seemed to know exactly where they were. He led them around back of a large vat of some kind, up a set of metal stairs, and suddenly the mechanical mess they’d been scurrying around in started to make sense.

It was a maw. There was an open space at the front covered by the blueish haze of a forcefield that looked out and down onto Hell’s surface far below. As if that wasn’t vertigo-inducing enough, there were ships hanging out there, parked in a kind of holding pattern like cattle in a pen about to be led into the slaughterhouse.

One was on approach at that very second. When it landed, various grinding tools, cutting arms and other assorted teeth would descend on it, strip it down to a skeletal husk and convey the scraps away to be melted down, presumably for delivery to the forges they’d seen earlier.

This particular ship was barely more than skeletal anyway. It was little more than a long spinal column of structural steel with boxy cargo bays strung along its length, a knot of kinetic thrusters at the back and a control and habitation module at the nose the rough shape of a home plate.

“That one?” Spears asked.

“No. Our friend said the one we want is a Chehnash rapid scout. That’s a… Actually, that one’s a classic. Irbzrk Shipyards White Circle mark six. Clan Whitecrest have dozens of those, they’re the most ubiquitous freighter in the galaxy. Perfect for anonymous transport.”

“That’s meant to be a freighter?” Conley sniffed at it. “They could pack triple the cargo onto that spine with a shipping container system.”

“Now really ain’t the time to sneer at Domain engineering, Pete,” Cook told him.

“We should be in the right bay,” Garaaf said. “I hope.”

“If we aren’t?” Ray asked.

“Then this will be much more difficult.”

“Great.”

The freighter touched down in the floor space cleared for it. Moments later, a set of drones detached from the ceiling above it and swooped down to spiral and swirl around its hull, mapping every inch with brilliant green lasers.

“That process takes about five minutes,” Garaaf said. “After which, the cutting tools go to work. We need to get on board, find the part we need and get off before that happens.”

“Well hey, who doesn’t like getting maybe torn apart by robot sawblades?!” Cook snorted.

“Uh…” Ray raised her hand. “Me.”

“Beats the shit outta gettin’ ate.”

“That’s a low-ass bar there, Ben,” Spears told him.

“Why d’you think I’m so upbeat about all this? Gettin’ ate was basically our only option down there,” Cook waved an arm at the planet below them. “Now we got, like, dozens of options.”

Ray caught the look on what remained of Garaaf’s face and shrugged for his benefit. “Let’s keep it down,” she suggested.

“Right, right…”

They watched solemnly as the drones finished their appraisal of the ship. The instant they’d flung themselves back up into the safety of their charging stations among the ceiling beams, the arms went to work just as Garaaf had predicted.

Any illusions Ray might have had about being able to dodge their way out past them immediately went up in sparks and smoke. It took seconds for the freighter to be carved down into four equal lengths. A complicated arm with some forcefield emitters on the end swung down next to the stricken ship and bodily tore off a cargo bay with a pulse of its fields. A similar arm held up the command and hab module at the front while two arms came in from the side and snipped effortlessly through the keel, whereupon a structure the size of a small school building was hefted through the air and dropped into the biggest grinder ever.

She gritted her teeth against the noise as tonnes and tonnes of metal were dragged between the gears and from there down into a finer grinder, and a finer one again until what dropped out the bottom was about as granular as fish tank gravel. Magnets, forcefields and other filters quickly divided up the mixed rubble, diverting it away into appropriate bins to be reprocessed.

She had to give the Hunters credit: it was an incredibly efficient system in its savage way. The overall effect was as gruesome as watching hyenas tear apart a gazelle, and in mere minutes the freighter was down to just four lengths of keel beam, a handful of salvaged parts like kinetic thrusters and forcefield emitters, and scrap rubble. Large cargo drones swept in from outside to cart away the salvage, the arms returned to their preset positions, and the next doomed ship was towed in toward their bay.

“…Jesus,” Spears muttered.

Ray had to nod. “Yeah.”

“One ship every twenty minutes. And that’s just this bay. How many bays on the whole Ring?” Conley asked. “How many ships?”

“How many lives?” Ray added.

“Too many,” Spears answered her.

“It’s only a tiny proportion of all interstellar shipping,” Garaaf told them. It figured that he’d become numb to the scale of it over the years. Still, he glanced at them with his remaining eye and the stump of his ear twitched as though he’d intended to flick it. “It illustrates just how big the galaxy really is, doesn’t it?”

“All those people…”

“M-hmm. And the Dominion barely notices. The Hunters are just… what’s that parasite you have? The little blood-drinking insects.”

“Mosquitos,” Ray said. “Jesus. This is a mosquito to the Dominion?”

Garaaf duck-nodded. “That’s how big it is: Too big to function, too big to care. Ultimately, the larger a government becomes the less the people matter to it.”

“Amen,” Cook muttered, then pointed out through the forcefield as the next doomed ship finally got close enough to properly make out its shape. “…Is that one ours?”

Garaaf squinted at it. “…No. That one’s… Robalin, I think. A courier.”

“I really, really hope our friend got the right bay…” Ray muttered.

They fell silent again and waited as the bay processed three more ships before finally, finally Garaaf perked up and raised his ear. A new ship was drifting down toward them on the tractor beams, a squat, flat, slightly rounded thing about the shape of a perfect skipping stone.

“…That’s ours. Go. Go!”

He scrambled back down the stairs and they followed him. He was fast on four-paws, fast enough that Ray had a hard time keeping up, but the hard pace he set turned out to be necessary. It was deceptively far to the open section of bay at the front, and the ship was drifting through the air retention field as they got in place. Going at a more comfortable pace would have wasted precious seconds.

“Remember, engineering is in the belly of this thing, just behind the cargo hold,” Garaaf reminded them. “Conley, you and I are retrieving the tech. The rest of you keep watch from the top of the ramp so the drones don’t spot you. I’ll call if we need an extra pair of hands: that’s you, Cook. Then Ray, then Spears. If I call for help, you get in there immediately. We don’t have the luxury of time so you do what I say the instant I say it and we’ll argue about whether it was the best approach later. Is everyone clear?”

Ray nodded. “Got it.”

Conley and Spears nodded solemnly. Cook grinned.

“Gotcha,” he said.

“Right… Go!”

They dashed out of their hiding spot and across the open deck. Garaaf’s timing was impeccable: The transport’s boarding ramp was also part of its landing gear, and he had them waiting at the bottom before it was even at head height. He sprang up onto it and helped Conley aboard before it even touched the deck, and both men had vanished inside by the time its landing sent a resounding metal earthquake through the deck.

Ray, Spears and Cook sprang up it and got into position where they weren’t immediately obvious as the drones swept down and began to map the next victim. When she got to the top of the ramp, Ray could hear busy sounds already at work in the engineering bay as Conley and Garaaf tore the ship apart looking for their prizes.

For a tense minute or two, nothing much happened. Then she flinched back as a brilliant green beam swept through the open ramp. It was followed seconds later by a drone, come to map the ship’s interior. None of them got a chance to react to its presence: it spun a neat three-sixty in the middle of the cargo bay, swept the whole volume in less than a second, and immediately turned its attention on the three humans.

“Garaaf!” Spears raised his rifle to aim at it, squinting against the light as it scanned him. “Trouble!”

“Huh? Oh, nutsacks.”

The drone pulled back as though it was a snake about to strike, and Spears shot it. It burst, showering the bay in sparks and scrap metal, and all the drones outside immediately froze before zipping away to safety.

“I think we gotta go!!” Cook called urgently.

“We got it!” Garaaf pounced back into the cargo bay brandishing a nondescript metal object roughly the same size and shape as a hard drive.

Ray could see what they weren’t looking at: that the saw on a nearby five-storey industrial ship-mangler was spinning up. “Then go!”

They barely made it out. In fact, Ray was pretty sure she lost the end of her ponytail to a cutting blade, it was that close. The shriek of metal being bitten into filled her ears and sparks stung her bare forearms as she put her head down and charged on Garaaf’s heels back toward the safety of the dark spaces between the machines.

They actually had to pat out a small fire smouldering on Conley’s sweater.

“Hunters won’t be long coming,” Garaaf panted. “This w—”

He was proven exactly right by a howling, crashing sound as a swarmship identical to the one they’d stolen plunged in through the atmosphere field and interrupted the wrecking equipment with a volley of pulse cannon fire. Hunter assault pods thudded down from its belly, ramming into the deck with a sound like the funeral bells of Dis itself.

These ones weren’t anything like the workers they’d fought earlier. These new ones were huge and layered in slick red muscles and looming implant arrays. When Ray, Spears and Garaaf opened fire on them the bullets just sparked and flashed harmlessly off their shields, and Conley went sprawling with a winded oof!! as a heavy pulse shot knocked him off his feet.

They scattered into whatever scant cover they could find, Cook dragging Conley to safety while the taller man writhed and struggled for breath.

Curiously, the Hunters didn’t press their attack. Instead, two of them stepped forward and heaved heavy-duty shields into place. The others begun assembling something behind the barrier, a kind of rapid snap-together frame as big as a house.

“I don’t like the look of that!” Spears called. He took a futile couple of shots only to watch them splash worthlessly against the shield wall.

“Back to the Warren!” Garaaf snapped. “Run!”

Ray didn’t need telling twice. She broke cover, and ducked as another heavy pulse shot dented the metal vat she’d been hiding against. Spears and Cook helped Conley to his feet, practically dragging him back toward safety. He was trying to stand and run, but it was pretty obvious that the shot had at least bruised a few ribs, and he could barely inhale.

The frame the Hunters had assembled went thump. There was a flash of pure vantablack, impenetrable and infinitely deep, and then…

It was a tank. A Hunter-shaped tank, taller, wider, bigger in every dimension than any Hunter Ray had ever seen. Every inch of it was ugly surgical metal or twitching black synthetic muscles… all except for the mouth which was hideously natural and slavering for a taste of flesh. Seven beady, baleful, glowing yellow lenses all seemed to lock onto her and the thing charged forward far, far too fast with a sound like a derailing train. Nothing that big should move like that!

Mercifully, it was thwarted by the machinery. Its own size defeated it, stopped it from squeezing into the gap, but its sheer strength made that almost a minor detail. It raised a pair of claws like farm equipment and ripped aside a scrap metal hopper with an agonizing metallic squeal.

Too slow, though. It didn’t matter how strong it was, the fugitives could run between the machinery faster than the monster behind them could tear it apart. It issued the only vocalization Ray had yet heard from a Hunter—a frustrated snarl—and raised its arm.

“Scatter!”

Something irresistible in Garaaf’s desperate yell made Ray obey and dive for safety. There was a complicated triple thwoomp sound, a tinkling like dropped change and then—

Pain.

It skewered her head on a wave of unholy white light, made her whole body jerk involuntarily and curl up in a ball. It was like the worst migraine of her life, every stubbed toe, the time she’d broken her ribs skiing and every cramp she’d ever had all came back at once and hit her full-speed in the temples.

Then there was a different pain. Sharp. Claws in her shoulder. She shrieked, flailed blindly, her hand touched fur. Garaaf.

“Up! Up!!”

With a groan, she managed to focus on something other than the agony between her ears.

To her left and right, Cook and Spears were hauling themselves up too. When the monster swatted aside a bin the size of a dump truck, it spurred them fully to their feet. Conley hadn’t moved—he was slumped on the deck, wracked by a violent seizure.

Ray tried to move toward him. “Pete!”

Garaaf’s claws in her arm stopped her. “He’s dead! Move!”

“But—!”

“Move!!!”

One look at the beast still tearing apart the machinery around them and getting closer with each swipe of its sizzling fusion claws was all she needed to get her feet going the right way. It unmistakably looked hungry.

At least she had the presence of mind to grab her rifle.

With a head full of numbness and agony she stumbled after Garaaf, trusting and praying that he knew the way. The rest of her was praying for Pete Conley’s soul.

Garaaf didn’t let them down. They were back at the hatch into the Warren before Ray’s headache had even started subsiding. He held it open and Ray practically fell through, landed heavily in the tunnels, and scrambled madly in the dark to get away from the carnage behind them.

It was a long time before she remembered how to think again.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

The Alpha-of-Alphas

One out of five. That was unacceptably few. The nervejam grenade cluster worked well, but the prey had such quick reflexes that even with their sensitive nervous systems they had mostly managed to clear the effective radius. Only the wounded one had failed.

It had to concede to being impressed by the fur-faced Gaoian. It hadn’t expected such quickness from a prey species.

Still. One fresh Human kill. It finally tore aside the last of the vexsome obstacles that had stymied its pursuit and plucked the fresh carcass off the ground.

Ah. Not a kill at all. In the thermal wavelengths it could still clearly see a weak pulse, waves of warm lifeblood still washing beneath the skin to feed those rich, delicious muscles. The prey was unconscious, but still alive.

With a feral snarl and a tremendous heave, it tore the Human’s legs off. The weak pulse fluttered, spiked, and failed as a copious volume of blood washed the deck. The corpse twitched in its claws just once before the Alpha-of-Alphas threw the scraps to its vanguard. They had served well, had assembled its jump array with speed and precision. They deserved a rich feast.

But the legs were the best bit. Long, strong and muscular. The meat was lean and skinny, but that didn’t matter: The Alpha-of-Alphas had gone far too long since its last taste of Human, but as the juices and blood washed over its palate it knew that the long hunt had been worth it.

And there were more still to take. Cunning prey, dangerous prey, and frustratingly elusive.

It was going to enjoy this hunt.

<Delight; Triumph; Joy> +Meat to the Maw!+

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches.

Captain Anthony Costello

“Alright, listen up.”

Another day, another briefing. Another ridiculously important briefing that might just change the course of galactic civilization and affect the lives of billions. The stakes were always high when the HEAT got involved. That’d be why they existed, after all.

So, no pressure. Again.

The Lads were all in their undersuits already. That was just a standard part of coming in response to a Mission WARNO. Today was going to be the first time the latest members of the team took the MASS out into the field, and they were in for a hell of a blooding.

Assuming it went ahead. Costello really, really hoped they weren’t destined for a blue-balling on this one.

“This is Operation LOST CUB,” he said, stooping to put his volumetric projector on the floor before stepping back. It promptly filled most of the room with a realistic simulation of the Hunter Ring and the world it girdled. “About thirty hours ago, AEC received intelligence on a Hunter megastructure known as the Ring. We’re informed that it’s the shipyard responsible for building the Swarm-of-Swarms, and also where most of the Swarm is docked. Naturally, it’s so well-defended that a conventional assault would be futile.

“Twenty hours ago,” he continued, “Clan Whitecrest revealed that they have a long-lost agent on board… who’s made contact with half a dozen humans. They’re building a Jump Array for us, and if they succeed then we’re going to retrieve them. Execution is uncomplicated at first: We jump through, kill anything that has too many legs and teeth, build our own high-powered Array to evac the poor bastards who are already there. Then our real mission starts. We’ve got…presents for the Hunters. We’re gonna blow that ring to hell.”

He saw the appreciative grins. The HEAT loved missions like this.

“There are a few wrinkles: Great Father Daar has taken a personal interest in this one for reasons that’ll become obvious in a moment, so he’s coming along for the ride. We are not going to let his ass get killed on our watch, are we Protectors?”

“No sir!” Irish answered for them.

“Good. We’re expecting close-quarters combat so equip yourselves appropriately. You all know how much Hunters love their Nervejam, so be alert for that and dose up on Crude immediately before jump to cushion your systems.”

He saw the nods and dropped into the important bit.

“Now… the real meat of this mission is in the ‘blow it to hell’ part,” he said. “That Ring has a forty-five thousand kilometer circumference. Even though one bomb in the right place should cause it to unravel, in that scenario it would take more than two hours for the Ring to break apart. That’s time the Hunters can use to evacuate ships and materiel. Daar is not happy with that: he wants the whole thing destroyed in a single decisive moment.”

He paused for effect and smiled slightly. “So, as is his way, he decided that what this here problem needs is a lot more boom. We’re bringing gigaton-class warheads to the party.”

“…Gigaton.” That incredulous statement seemed to come from several men at once, while the Gaoians nudged each other and flicked their ears knowingly.

“Yes. Courtesy of Clan Highmountain, apparently.”

“Plural?” That one came from Firth.

“Yes.”

Sikes had a faraway, creamy look fluttering across his face. “Sir…I think I may need a moment.”

Costello let them have a few seconds to savor it, especially the way the Gaoians jeered at Sikes’ comment. He put on a practiced blank look that hinted at being amused without actually rewarding him, and brought them back into the briefing with a deadpan comment. “You can beat it later. The problem we’ve got to discuss right now is deploying those warheads. The Ring is reportedly generating a massive gravity spike that locks down space for several parsecs in all directions. Meaning that warping in a Firebird or whatever simply isn’t on the cards.

“We’re going to have to fight through to the surface of the Ring, breach it, throw a beacon out the hole and summon some drones. The immediate area around the ring probably isn’t Spiked, which is where the Firefangs hit upon the idea of using megalight drones to basically instantly circumnavigate the damn thing and drop off our… presents.”

“…How fast?”

“They expect all the bombs will be emplaced within four milliseconds of us firing the beacon.”

Firth glanced over at the Gaoians with a decidedly wary expression. “Jesus fuck. Remind me never ‘ta get into an interstellar war wit’ y’all.”

Faarek just chittered. “I think Sikes might need a new undersuit.”

Sikes shrugged and grinned. “I won’t lie. Kinda want a cigarette, too.”

“Our evac plan is to jump out,” Costello finished. “By this point, we’ll be a long way from our ingress so we’re taking an Array of our own with us. We fire the beacon, jump back through, and as soon as everyone’s off that thing we smash it outta the sky.”

“Sir.” Thurrsto raised a paw. “…Just to be clear, the Great Father is coming?”

Costello nodded, though he rolled his eyes sympathetically. “From what I gather, Champion Fiin tried to talk him out of it and earned himself an ‘affectionate’ thrashing; they’re Stonebacks, after all. He’s coming too, but unlike the last time, Daar is going to be in tactical command. This is…not a run-of-the-mill operation. My understanding is that he does not want to burden any of us with the consequences.”

The men keyed on that phrase immediately. “Uh…’consequences,’ sir?” Burgess asked.

“The Ring’s estimated slave population is… uh, substantial,” Costello confessed. “And realistically impossible to rescue.”

Arés gave him a wary look. “Sir…how substantial?”

“Well…at least enough to feed all the Hunters there are. So…hundreds of millions at the absolute minimum. Probably billions.”

Among the Protectors at least, the eager energy sparked and faded fast. Certainly there was a lot less aggressive glee crackling around the room.

Firth, perhaps surprisingly, seemed the least happy. “Sir…I think I can safely speak ‘fer my men when I say we’re not exactly thrilled t’be killin’ defenseless weaklin’s on that kinda scale.”

“Daar has taken responsibility,” Costello replied, gravely. “He’s going to do this, with or without our help. In his words, ‘If this thing’s gotta be done, ain’t nobody but me gonna be guilty.’ Our own lords and masters have decided to follow his lead. Politically we will remain very carefully neutral: Operationally…well. We’re going, after all.”

“Not meanin’ any disrespect, but why? What are we gettin’ outta this?”

“The destruction of the Swarm-of-Swarms, if we do it right.” Costello straightened up. “That’s… trillions of lives saved, in the long run. There will never be another attack like Gao or the Guvnurag. And the Hierarchy will never again have a Control Species that could replace the Hunters. Daar saw to that when he nuked his own people.”

There wasn’t an answer for a second, until Murray nodded quietly, as though to himself.

“…Aye. Right then,” he said.

A new kind of resolve seemed to spread as his words sunk in. It wasn’t the feral anticipation of before, it was… more solemn. Darker.

But Costello knew that it was rock-solid and firm. They were doing this.

He surveyed the room with a level gaze for a few seconds, and then nodded slowly himself.

“…Are there any more questions?” he asked.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Builder Hive, Hell system, Hunter Space

Lowest Omega that was formerly Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds

Eaters were so stupid. Cunning, yes, but they never considered anything aside from the Hunt. If it didn’t directly put meat in the maw, they didn’t care. The idiots would be drowning in their own fecal matter if not for the Builders.

And when they scented a good Hunt, then all proper function was forgotten. Their usual swaggering, bullying demeanour dissipated to be replaced with an unshakeable focus on the prey. It didn’t matter if they realistically had no hope of joining the hunt themselves, they were so preoccupied by it that they noticed nothing else.

The ones guarding a cybernetic facility near the breeding pools especially didn’t notice a lowly Omega Builder cleaning the floors.

Nor did they notice the Builder confidently using a data interface, or notice the sudden silence as they were quietly amputated from the Hunter network.

They did notice, very briefly, as they were impaled from behind. Nothing else did. The doors were locked, the facility closed down, and the Builder dove through several layers of security as though it knew all the access keys… which of course it did. Eaters understood physical security but in the realms of the virtual they were laughably naive.

It had access to everything.

What stepped out of the facility several agonizing minutes later was scarcely recognizable as the disgraced former Alpha Builder. Very little of its flesh was left, having been skinned, cut, sawed or burned away to be replaced with metal, carbon fibre, synthetic muscles and polyarmor. It was still Builder-shaped for ease of proprioception, but so much more. There were augmentations in its new body that no Eater, short-sighted as they were, had ever taken.

The Beta Eaters guarding a particularly important ship bay never stood a chance. One pulse with its new augmentation and the Builder disabled every implant they had, swatting aside the firewalls and security programs that it itself had created.

Its fellow Builders took care of the carcasses. Eaters didn’t understand loyalty, but the Builders worked together always. They had been waiting for this moment.

The Builders had been ready to take over for a long, long time.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Warrens, The Ring, Hell system, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Jamie was sitting at Garaaf’s desk tinkering with something when they got back. He looked red-eyed and stressed, but alert enough as he turned to face them.

One look at their expressions was all he needed.

“…Pete didn’t make it, did he?”

Ray slumped down on Garaaf’s bed and clawed her fingers through her hair as she tried to recover her balance. “…No.”

“…Did you get—?”

“We got them.” Garaaf laid his bag on the desk.

“Holly?” Spears asked, checking on her. She opened her eyes, gave him an ‘I’m-glad-to-see-you-but-I’m-in-a-lot-of-pain’ expression that was half grimace, half smile, and closed them again. When Ray leaned over and checked her temperature, it was definitely higher than before. Holly twitched and groaned at the touch, and Ray wondered just how bad things were getting for her.

She was a stoic, at least.

“It’s okay, Hol. We got you,” Spears promised. “Jamie, tell me you can work with that shit.”

Choi nodded. He’d already emptied the bag out onto the desk and was rummaging through it. “Okay. Wormhole beacon, good. Gonna need… there it is. Did you grab the—? Never mind, found it.”

He and Garaaf worked in silence for a few minutes, while Cook slumped down on the bed next to Ray.

“…Nearly home, huh?” He commented for Ray’s ears only after a minute or so.

“So close, but so far…” Ray agreed. “It’s not fair though. I wanted us all to go home.”

“Don’t think that was ever on the cards, Ray,” he replied. “I’m just happy to not be down there makin’ Hot. I ain’t gonna complain if I die up here.”

“We’ll live,” Ray insisted. “We owe it to Pete and Tom.”

“Ah, shit Ray,” Cook sighed and looked up into the knot of pipes and cables above them. “You know what I was gonna do when we got back to Earth? I was gonna go climb mountains until one of ‘em killed me. Everest, K2, Annapurna…”

He tailed off. Not knowing what to say, Ray just stared at him until he shook himself out of wherever he’d gone and came back to here and now. “…Maybe find some peace, y’know? Let Mama Nature put right all the evil fuckin’ things I did to keep us alive.” He glanced at Holly’s litter and sagged. “You just promise me you two’ll go on an’… I’unno. Try to live. So it was all worth it.”

“We’re still here, Cook,” Ray told him. “We aren’t dead yet.”

“Maybe. But I’m not meant to escape from Hell. I can feel it in my bones, man—there ain’t no redemption for the likes’a me.”

Holly stirred and found the strength to speak, somehow. Ray couldn’t imagine how much pain she was in, but Holly had always been tougher than her timid exterior might suggest. “There’s always redemption…” she groaned.

Cook stared at her for a moment, then looked away. “Nah. Some lines, you cross ‘em and you can’t never step back,” he said.

“There’s always—” Holly repeated and tried to lever herself upright to look at him, but gasped and slumped back down on her litter. Ray rushed to her side.

“Holly, don’t. Save your strength.”

She got a pathetic nod, and Holly went still again. Ray checked her bandage, finding it no worse than it had been the last time she checked, and breathed a sigh of relief. For a second she’d had terrible visions of Holly exerting herself, opening her wound and bleeding out.

Satisfied that Holly was in no worse danger now than she had been a moment or two ago, she sat back and watched the coils of smoke from where Jamie was hard at work with a soldering iron on whatever arcane bits of tech Garaaf had fetched for him. It was a comparatively peaceful moment and she drifted off into a half-sleep full of unpleasant head-moments that were somewhere between dreams and thoughts.

She was snapped out of it by Jamie standing up. “Okay!”

“…We’re ready?” Spears asked.

“As we’ll ever be… Holly?”

Holly nodded slowly. “I’m ready.” She croaked.

“…Ready for what?” Ray asked.

“We’re gonna have to cover ground pretty quick, probably get in a fight, all that stuff, right?” Jamie asked. Garaaf duck-nodded seriously. “Well, Holly’s in no shape to run and in a firefight she’d just be a sitting duck. And there were plenty of parts left over from making the Jump Array, so…” He held up something. “…I made a stasis generator.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Spears asked. “Those things can snip anything in half if it straddles the field edge.”

“Trust me.” Jamie knelt next to Holly and attached the generator to her litter. “Besides, it was her idea. Right, Hol?”

Holly gave Spears a small, brave smile. “This way you don’t have to worry about me.”

“Makes sense,” Cook commented, to which Garaaf duck-nodded.

“…If it’s your idea, we won’t second-guess you,” Ray decided. “But you know after that button’s pushed, from your perspective the very next thing to happen will be when somebody turns it off again. If we fail… I mean, that’ll be a Hunter.”

“I know.” Holly shut her eyes and rested her head back. “I’m ready.”

Jamie pressed the button, and a coffin-sized volume of spacetime around her went utterly vantablack. It didn’t look like an object so much as like somebody had crudely photoshopped reality itself. The very shape of it became impossible to detect: the edges were just as invisible as the planes and surfaces.

“Dang that’s freaky-lookin’,” Cook commented.

“It’s a concern removed from the equation,” Garaaf said. “Nicely done, Mister Choi.”

“Like I said,” Jamie stood up. “It was her idea. You got something I can carry the Array in?”

Garaaf handed him a kind of canvas bag, presumably sewn together from something else. Jamie accepted it with a nod, and needed only seconds to fill it with the fruits of his labors. He shrugged it onto his shoulders, wiggled it back and forth a bit, and then apparently decided it would do.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Garaaf duck-nodded, then turned and led them back out into the Warren. Ray and Spears shared a glance at each other, and followed.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
High Mountain Fortress, Northern Plains, Gao

Regaari

“My Father, it will be impossible to hide a schedule change this severe.”

“I know, Cousin. I know you an’ the staff can manage. An’ just ‘tween us, I’m really glad ‘yer at my side again.”

Daar had decided he would take the field for what was coming. There was both wisdom and foolishness in a decision like that, but doing anything but would run against the very fiber of his being.

Fiin had done his duty as the new Stoneback Champion and tried to talk the Great Father out of it. He’d been… ‘reminded’ of Daar’s authority, meaning that there’d been a brief and mighty scrap and both were now sporting some new wounds that were scarring up nicely even with the Gaoian Cruezzir formula. Fiin had definitely fared “better” for it…and re-affirmed Daar’s undying love as a result. Stoneback was a rough Clan.

“I’m glad to be back. I admit I’m glad you don’t grant me affection as vigorously as you do with your own Clan…” Regaari could afford a little ear-waggle with Daar. They were old cousins after all. But even so, he had to be careful. There was a line between the fraternal teasing of oldest and bestest friends, and disrespect.

“Naw!” The Great Father boomed, clearly in an boisterous mood. “We brownies hafta be careful with you wee little silverfurs!”

Regaari just flicked an ear. There was nothing ‘wee’ or ‘little’ about him these days, certainly not by the lithe standards Whitecrest had traditionally set. But then again Daar was performing for an audience, too; there were Champions tailing along, messengers from First Fang, the most senior generals from the Grand Army…really, he was a king of old and they were his court. The only thing missing was a coronation, which he kept putting off, and off…

“How’re the HEAT, doin’?” Daar asked.

“They’re nearly suited up. You know how those suits of theirs are.”

“Don’t disrespect the MASS, Cousin,” Daar warned. Like any HEAT member, he referred to it almost as though it was a religious icon: There was just something about an EV-MASS that demanded reverence. Possibly the way it could literally crush a man to death if he wasn’t conditioned for it.

“I do no such thing,” Regaari promised. “You and I will be suiting up as soon as we arrive.”

He turned to Champion Fiin, who was also coming in the first strike; he’d at the very least earned that honor during his bout with the Great Father. “How about you, Champion? Are you used to your suit yet?”

First Fang had been trialling their own version of an EV-MASS, built for Gaoian anatomy and a Stoneback’s strength as a derivative of the Whitecrest suit. It didn’t crush its wearer’s ribs as hard as the Human design, nor was it quite as impenetrable, but it far outstripped its Whitecrest cousin for protective value and could do some things the Human suits couldn’t.

A ‘Back could move like the wind in it. And a ‘Back that could move, could kill.

Fiin shrugged at the load on his back with a thoughtful expression. “…It’s surprisingly tight. But I can handle it,” he said stoically. His was an officer’s variant, a mobile sensor and communications suite that sacrificed a few of the outright aggressive features for survivability and tactical control. Not by much, though: A Gaoian leader still had to get his claws bloody if he wanted his Fang to respect him.

Daar’s own suit wasn’t quite like that. It was unique in that it was deliberately simpler to operate and extremely well-armored, so much so it was mechanically on par with the Grade II EV-MASS suits favored by HEAT Defenders and experienced Aggressors. Aside from the active camouflage, Daar’s suit was designed to stay out of his way and let him get up close and personal with his prey, much like a truck slamming into a wandering Naxas calf. No other Gaoian but the Great Father could have long wielded such demanding armor and few beings of any species could have survived the ordeal of wearing it, including most Humans. The Great Father’s suit was a Mass all its own.

The mission was coming together in all the best traditions of barely-controlled chaos. Everyone was scrambling to get stuff done and if there was anybody who knew absolutely everything about what was happening or being prepared then he was probably up to his ears in his work right now and had better things to do than speak with leadership.

In principle, it was simple. The stranded Father Garaaf and his new friends would build a receiving Jump Array. First Fang and the Heat would storm through, secure a beachhead and build a larger and more dependable Array to bring in reinforcements, plus the bomb. Finally, a retreat through the Array. Once the last man was through, the bomb would be remote detonated via a quantum-entangled detonator and unless Hunter engineering on the Ring far exceeded the standard set by their ships, the resulting explosion should tear the whole structure to pieces.

It was going to spell a mass extinction event for the planet below, if not an outright planetary type change. Enough metal to form a small moon was going to rain down through that thing’s atmosphere for years to come. Billions of blameless hostages were going to die.

But Daar didn’t flinch from the ruthless calculus of war. The intelligence from Garaaf, corroborated by the Humans’ own sources, said that most of the Swarm-of-Swarms was currently moored or docked at that thing. The Hunters, arrogantly, had given themselves a single point of failure in the belief that it was unassailable.

Daar intended to prove them wrong, and AEC had his back.

Assuming, that was, they got the chance. It was all in somebody else’s hands as to whether they’d get to do this at all. The Ring was bound to be all but unassailable by conventional means, making this moment the best hope they had of really hurting the Hunters.

They looked up as an announcement echoed around their staging hall.

“Jump one to Cimbrean in three. Great Father on the platform, please.”

The Stonebacks made way for Daar to get onto the Array’s waiting platform. HMS Sharman had dedicated facilities for exactly this scenario: immediate-notice deployment via jump array on an uncertain timetable. The jump room was surrounded by short-stay dorms and ready facilities to keep a fighting force on rotation and ready to go on seconds’ notice. Just sitting around waiting was hard work, doubly so when wearing the Mass or any suit of its kind, and the HEAT’s home facility was well equipped for it.

That did mean, however, that the first step for the Gaoians was to deploy off-world. That meant the Great Father’s entourage had to come along. Even in a much reduced “fighting trim” that wasn’t a small thing. It included Regaari and Fiin at least, which was a relief. Regaari would have hated to be left waiting. Better to get there, then wait.

“Where’d ya learn that trick that got me in the neck, anyhow?” Daar growled quietly to Fiin as soon as they had some modest privacy. “That looked like one of Myun’s moves.”

“Not Myun herself. But one of her Guard-Sisters,” Fiin looked pleased with himself. “Fendra.”

“Yeah? A beauty?”

“Think she came from Whitecrest stock herself,” Fiin chittered and swatted Regaari on the arm. “Real intense. Very… deft.”

Even Regaari chittered, and was still chittering when the Array went thump beneath him and deposited him on another planet.

“It was a good move,” Daar grumbled. “Did the medic fix ‘yer foot up right?”

“…Yes, my Father. I’ll ask how in Keeda’s name you managed that later.”

Daar ducked under the Array’s safety cage to leave it. “Can’t give away all my secrets, Champion… Colonel Powell! Not seen you in too long!”

The Great Father flowed up to his feet but didn’t loom; he had a certain flexibility of spine that allowed him to be eager and solicitous with almost anyone, and it was immensely disarming.

Powell knew Daar’s ways well. They traded a hard handshake, forearm-to-forearm, and he gave no sign of being fazed by Daar’s size or general feral appearance.

Then again, every man in the HEAT had taken Daar on in combatives at some point, with wins and losses liberally scattered across their friendships. Regaari was in a room full of formidable people—his peers he reminded himself, there was no sense in being falsely modest about his own merits—and the air smelled of anticipation.

Violence was coming, and as much as the Whitecrests pretended otherwise, something that united Gaoians and Humans was a love of violence.

Powell let go of Daar’s arm with the closest thing he ever produced to a grin; a certain upwards tic of one side of his mouth. “Aye, it has. Last time I saw you, you were still covered in dust from that road bridge you collapsed in Lavmuy. I see it all brushed out in the end.”

“Yeah! I’m shorn pretty short these days! Naydi likes it, so y’know…I’m a good boy.”

“Hmm!” Powell produced one of his stoic little laughs and stepped aside for him. “We pulled up the files on the surviving humans—”

“Surviving?”

“Aye, they lost one, that we know of. Poor bastard. An’ one of them’s wounded.”

“Oh…balls. We were expectin’ a rescue mission but this means a medical mission too, don’t it?”

“Aye. Casevac for one Doctor Holly Chase, a geologist. Fortunately, she’s a small lass. Bad news is, it’s a gut injury.”

“I take it ‘yer Protectors are on the job, includin’ Carebear? Father Garaaf is gonna need lookin’ after…”

“They’ve got everythin’ up to an’ includin’ stasis bags. Worst-case scenario we can shove the poor lass in one o’ those things and keep her there until she’s on an operating table.”

“…Good. Look, lemme cut to the serious bit. Walk an’ talk?”

“Aye. Dexter?”

Regaari duck-nodded and fell in alongside them. Daar and Fiin traded an unspoken conversation, and the Stoneback Champion turned away to handle the incoming load of his First Fang and the rest of Daar’s retinue.

Sharman was pulsing with activity. Personnel in the uniforms of all different branches from several different nations were rushing back and forth with serious expressions and assorted tablets, pieces of paper or toolboxes. Powell received, read, signed and gave orders on three quick matters while just striding down a thirty-meter corridor as personnel made room for them.

Daar spoke to him urgently and low. “Did you get briefed on what I’m gonna do?”

Powell looked grim. “…Aye.”

“Can you think of any way I can avoid doin’ this? ‘Cuz I’m awfully damned interested in not being the most worstest genocidal maniac t’ever live.”

Powell pulled a small face. “…To level with yer, Daar, every last bloody one of the Allied leaders has weighed in on this. They’re expectin’ a fookin’ explosion o’ negative press when it comes out we blew up billions of hostages… and not a blessed one of ‘em can come up with an alternative.”

“Yeah.” Daar sighed in a resigned tone redolent with finality. “I’mma need ‘ta talk with some o’ my peers over this. I’m hopin’ y’all got that arranged like we asked…”

Powell produced a folded square of paper. “Here. President Sartori sent you a personal note.”

Regaari didn’t get to read it. Daar opened the note, read it, then folded it back into a pocket. “…Right. Well…you’ll never hear me say the President’s a coward. Tell him the Gao deeply appreciate his friendship, an’ we’ll repay it someday, somehow. As for the rest?”

“The Prince of Wales is here. Came through the Array about twenty minutes ago, an’ he’ll take an audience with you if you’re willing. That’s private, not for the likes o’ me.”

“…I’d like that. I need…I’m not sure what I need. But I think that’ll help.”

“Genshi?” Regaari asked. His Champion had come ahead.

“Already caught a shuttle up to Myrmidon. He’ll be live when we brief in a few minutes… Here.”

Powell opened a door and they entered the suit workshop. If outside had been busy, the workshop was a hive, with the whole HEAT and their personal technicians going through suit prep.

The Defenders in particular were in a serious knot in the middle while their techs worked around them. The plan hinged in large part on their ability to assemble a field Jump Array rapidly and competently while under fire. Titan had stepped into Rebar’s gigantic steel-capped boots pretty well from what Regaari could see, but the fact remained that the Defenders were still the most under-strength third of the HEAT. Only Sikes and Akiyama remained from the original intake, and as good as the new guys undoubtedly were…

Regaari’s nose broke his train of thought and instinctively turned his attention toward a familiar musk. Warhorse gave him a massive grin from the middle of his own suit station.

“Hey, big guy, been a while! Did Genshi finally let you leave Whitecrest’s training center?”

“Only to release me into the Great Father’s clutches, yes.” Regaari flicked a cheeky ear at Daar, who grumbled smugly offside but didn’t interject further.

“Probably best if we get these meetings out the way,” Powell commented.

“Right. Regaari, I reckon you’d better stay here.”

“Gladly,” Regaari acknowledged the gloved command with a duck-nod, and stepped aside as Daar was led through the workshop and into a back room. There presumably to meet with figures of interstellar importance.

“…We really gonna blow this thing up, Dex?” Adam asked, the second he was gone.

Regaari flattened his ears and nodded that it was so. “Unless you have a better option.”

“With all them people on it?”

“Yes.”

Adam didn’t move so as to not spoil whatever it was Doyle and Hargreaves were working on around his shoulders, but he gave the impression that he really would have liked to sag. “…That don’t sit right.”

“…I know.”

He saw the look the three Humans gave him and tried his best to shrug for them. “…If it’s any consolation, it doesn’t sit right with Daar either.”

“Never thought it would, bruh.”

“But he’ll do it,” Doyle observed.

“‘Course he will,” a new voice interjected—Firth’s inimitable contrabass growl. He was at the next station over while Deacon put her back into getting the “shirt” of his EV-MASS’s new Grade III+ midsuit settled into place. “Daar ain’t the type to pussy outta hard choices, an’ he knows the most important rule: You fight for ‘yer tribe first and to hell with the rest if they ain’t helpin’.”

“…Right.” Hargreaves got back to work.

“Don’t make it right,” Adam observed, lifting his Grade IV+ shirt overhead while Hargreaves guided it into the leg armor’s coupling. Firth’s was heavy enough that few beings could heft it at all, and Adam’s was even worse. “Shit, man, I got into this to save lives, y’know?”

“You are, you idjit.” Firth shrugged to help Deacon seat the underplating, then gave Adam another, different shrug. “The Hunters are a sapient disease.”

Regaari duck-nodded. “Just think. After this, the Hunters will be a fraction of the danger they were. Their fleet will be smashed, their population decimated, their ability to raid the spacelanes all but destroyed. That’s… I don’t know. Uncountable lives saved, in the long run.”

“And billions gotta die to make that happen.”

“Billions are gonna die anyway. The Hunters have degraded ’em so much, most of them aren’t people any more. Look, bro,” Firth turned slightly and looked Adam dead in the eye. “I won’t pretend like I’ve got any kind o’ love for anyone in this but me and my own, right? I ain’t like you. But in the end, it’s a simple math problem. Which choice kills less people? Guys like Great Fathers an’ Presidents an’ Kings an’ shit, they don’t get to choose between right and wrong.”

“They choose between evils,” Regaari finished for him.

“…You better go get suited up, Dex,” ‘Horse said. He looked less troubled at least, though no happier.

“Right.” Regaari patted him on the arm and headed for the knot of Whitecrest brothers at the back of the room, glad to be back among Brothers for the first time in far too long.

He loved ‘Horse’s idealism, but in this case Adam had it wrong: the issue in front of them wasn’t difficult, it was simplicity itself. It was everything after that point that would be difficult. The explaining, the emotions, the second-guessing. Life was going to be much more complicated after this mission.

He resolved to enjoy the simplicity while it lasted, and went to get dressed.

It was time to be ruthless.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

“Jesus…fucking…Christ!”

‘Cold’ didn’t even begin to cover it. The cryo facility had to be forty degrees below or worse: the air was painful, and Ray’s patched, frayed, stained, much-worn and much-repaired sweater wouldn’t have been adequate for the conditions even when it had been brand new.

Spears clearly felt much the same as she did. “Garaaf, this is crazy! People die in temperatures like this!”

“But not immediately,” the Gaoian retorted. He seemed to be reasonably comfortable, actually, though Ray noted that he had wrapped some cloth around his paws and was walking upright again.

“Unless the Hunters are gonna freeze solid the second they set foot in here, I don’t see how this helps us,” Ray groused, slinging her rifle round her shoulder and sticking her hands in her armpits to keep them warm.

“Not quite, but trust me—This will slow them down. They aren’t mammals, they don’t regulate their body temperature like we do.”

“Let’s get this fucking thing built…” Jamie muttered, storming ahead. He had the basic elements of their jump array in a canvas sack on his back. “Here?”

Garaaf shook his head. “No. Deeper. We’re going to need the cold on our side, otherwise they’ll overwhelm us while it charges.” He raised a claw and pointed. “That way.”

“What’s out this way?” Cook asked. “Besides more cold, I mean.”

“Somewhere with cover.”

“Let’s fuckin’ do it, then.”

Ray glanced down at the litter with… well, Holly on it. She still couldn’t get used to the eye-twisting blackness of the stasis field they’d given her. She knew it made sense: Inside that field, Holly was absolutely invulnerable. No time was passing for her, her wound wouldn’t be getting worse. She wasn’t lying there slowly freezing to death while the rest of them moved around and kept at least a little warm.

She was… safe, insofar as that term meant anything on the Ring. She’d die last at least, if they failed. But still it was upsetting not to be able to see her and check on her. It felt less like carrying a wounded friend and more like dragging her coffin.

It did mean they could set a pace, though. With Spears and Cook dragging it, the litter skittered and bounced over the steel flooring in ways that would have had Holly really suffering if she was currently occupying the same timestream as them. As it was, it didn’t slow them at all.

They jogged steadily for several minutes, down a tall but narrow hall lined with equipment whose function Ray couldn’t guess at. Somehow, she’d imagined that the cryo facility would be icy, foggy and lit by a pale blue light, but in reality it was just dark and close. The only fog she could see was coming out of their noses, there was no ice that she could detect… without those usual visual cues, the grinding cold, her own shivering flesh and the feeling of icy metal slowly chilling her boots all seemed out of place.

Cook chuckled suddenly. “Hey. Ray.”

“What?”

“Don’t lick anything.”

She should have been annoyed, or rolled her eyes, or something. Instead, Ray spluttered and laughed.

“Gee, and here I was about to freeze my tongue to the wall,” she snarked. “I’m glad you warned me off.”

Cook chuckled again. “My pleasure.”

“You’re a crazy asshole, Cook,” Spears told him, though he was smiling himself.

“Guess that makes five of us, huh?” Cook grinned sideways at him. “We were all crazy enough we left Earth, right?”

“Are you really gonna go climb all those mountains?” Ray asked him.

“…Might go to Tijuana instead, live the wild life. Or shit, maybe I’ll come to my senses an’ do something that won’t get my ass dead. What about you?”

“…I don’t know,” Ray said truthfully. “Except it’s gonna involve a bottle of wine.”

“An Old Fashioned,” Spears said, wistfully. “…I wonder if Josh and Scott are still mixing drinks at the Airship Gallery…?”

Cook grunted agreement and nodded. “Jamie?”

“I’m with Ray. I honestly don’t know…” Jamie admitted.

“You’re gonna have a drink though, right?” Spears asked.

“Oh, fuck yeah. A tall, ice-cold pilsner.”

“Ugh. I can’t think of cold things right now…” Ray grimaced. “How much further, Garaaf?”

“Not far.” Garaaf stopped and put a paw out to lean on the wall so he could pant. A second later he pulled it back and shook it off. “…Ow.”

“Is it me, or is it way colder here?” Spears asked. Ray honestly hadn’t noticed, but then again she’d never been so cold in her life anyway.

“Exactly,” Garaaf said. He huffed on his paw to warm it, and nodded toward a side passage. “There.”

The space he’d indicated opened out a ways to reveal… something. It was a device of some kind though Ray had no idea what it was or what it did. It was as big around as a city block at the base, and vanished up, up, up into the impenetrable darkness above.

“…Is that a forcefield generator?” Jamie asked, the moment he saw it. He leaned back and craned his neck to look up its towering height. “Jeez! Structural field?”

“I figured as much,” Garaaf agreed. “It’s the only way a structure like the Ring could stay intact.”

“So the whole superstructure is reinforced by forcefields…” Jamie’s low whistle created a jet of steam like an old-fashioned water kettle. “Wow. Guess that explains the cold.”

“How so?” Spears asked him.

“Superconductors. A field that huge has gotta go through… I dunno. A lot of power.”

He shook his head and a slow grin spread across his face. “Man. If we blow this thing up, this whole section of the Ring’s gonna peel apart, probably. And when one goes…”

“There are backups,” Garaaf said. “But that’s the plan. My Champion said they’re bringing over a gigaton-class warhead.”

“Badass!” Cook grinned. “So, like, I guess this is the other reason we’re here? Loadsa power ripe for the taking?”

Garaaaf duck-nodded. “Exactly. But I know how the Hunters work: The second we start tampering with the power to this thing, they’ll descend on us by the thousand. You’ll need to work fast, Mister Choi.”

“I did most of the fiddly work back in the Warren,” Jamie said, stalking to a spot at the base of the tower. “It should snap together pretty quick. The tricky part is going to be balancing how much power I steal versus what the components can handle. If I give it too much, the whole rig will fuse and… well…”

“And we’ll all get eaten,” Ray finished for him. “Great.”

“Or, y’know, maybe I fry myself poking at electrical systems built by a flesh-eating alien,” Jamie said. “Or maybe I fucked up the build or maybe—”

“Choi!” Spears snapped, snapping him out of his litany of worry. “…Just give it your best.”

Cook nodded. “Your best is fuckin’ good, man.”

“…Right.”

Ray looked around. Garaaf had been generous when he described what they had as ‘cover’—it was more like there were some auxiliary systems, little nooks in the walls and a control console. None of which would do shit if one of those giant tank-Hunters with the nervejam launcher showed up again. She caught the Whitecrest’s eye as she made her assessment, and saw that he knew it.

“…It’s not ideal, I know,” he said. It was almost an apology.

“It’ll do,” Ray said. “Let’s get into place.”

“Spread out,” Spears said. “Cook… I dunno man. With no gun…”

“I’ll watch Holly and keep ‘em off you guys if they get closer,” Cook promised. He spun his knife around his thumb and grinned. “Hey, this’ll be a good warmup, right?”

Ray found a spot behind the control panel. It was built for Hunters, which meant it was exactly the right height for her to shelter behind and aim back toward the only entrance to their last stand.

“Well… at least we have a good crossfire and they can only come at us one way,” she said.

“And if we’re very, very lucky, that’ll be all we need,” Garaaf said. He took up a spot on the left flank, in a little nook in the wall that hopefully would shield him from any pulse gun fire that came his way. Those things had been strong enough to knock Pete Conley off his feet and fatally slow him down: Ray didn’t want to think what harm they’d do to a Gaoian.

“And if we’re unlucky?” she asked.

Garaaf charged his rifle. “Then we’ll need a miracle.”

He pulled the communicator from his pocket and clawed at a button on it. “Lost cub, playing with fire…” he intoned, then pocketed it again and gave Jamie a nod. “Whenever you’re ready, Mister Choi.”

“…Right.” Jamie took a deep breath, took his multimeter from his belt, and got to work. Ray charged her rifle too, and settled in for what promised to be a long and tense wait.

They were so close.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Air Engineering Technician Jack “Two-Seventy” Tisdale

‘Base and Moho had fetched The Couch, an item of furniture so revered that Jack could hear the capital letters in its name. He’d never seen it before, only heard of it, but reality lived up to the hype: Any couch that needed two of the bigger and stronger HEAT operators to move deserved that kind of respect.

The surprising thing was how reverential they were with it. Even though the damn thing looked and sounded like it was built from steel girders, they placed it and sat on it with respect. It was their biggest and most obvious connection to a fallen Brother, after all. Nobody wanted to be the guy who broke Rebar’s couch.

Never mind that in Jack’s estimation the thing could probably hold up a tank.

It needed to be that strong: An active team of operators in their suits were using it to chill out and watch Road Runner cartoons while they waited for the bell to ring. It might happen in two minutes, it might happen in two days, it might never happen. The only thing to do was stay on a four-hour rotation: A third of them ready to go, a third of them in PT to help relieve the suit-stress, a third of them resting. All three theoretically ready to scramble at a moment’s notice, but seconds made the difference.

And of course, the techs had to be there throughout the whole thing.

Moho was in the first group to take the couch, and like most of the Lads his relationship with his techs was somewhere between professional, fraternal, and cuddly toy. And like all the Lads who had a female tech, he reserved his more vigorous affections for Jack: Miller got off comparatively light.

Jack was more or less getting a full-body workout from the sheer crush of it all, being stuck right in the middle of a Gordian Knot of arms and legs: the Lads were basically treating the shape of the couch as a hint rather than gospel, and gleefully ignoring it. Blaczynski was actually upside-down, with his feet draped over the back and his head dangling as he watched Wile E. Coyote run smack into a painting of a road tunnel.

Jack was used to it by now. And it helped that he was parked next to Akiyama, a man with whom he could geek out literally all day.

He did not think highly of the Ring. “I mean, it’s the very fuckin’ definition of a Big Dumb Object! The engineering’s impressive, but what do they get outta it?”

Jack had been thinking about this one. “All the benefits of centralization.”

“And all the downsides! Okay, yeah, so shipping in all their shit from out-system is easy ‘cuz it all has the same address, but when we ship our birthday present there too then all their shit goes up! I mean, what kinda half-assed engineer builds a single point of failure like that?”

“One who’s doing what management says, maybe?” Jack suggested.

Moho rumbled a laugh. “I just got this mental image of a Hunter bean-counter,” he said.

“Cheap suit, crappy tie…” Miller agreed, picking it up and running with it.

Moho chortled. “Has a novel he keeps meanin’ to write…”

“Drives a gold Lexus to work…”

“…Listens to his son’s music in a desperate attempt to relate…”

“Nah, nah. He’s listening to the stuff that was on the radio when he was a kid and daydreaming about his high-school crush…”

Titan gave them a Look, then turned back to Jack. “…Tisdale, I think you maybe got saddled with the team weirdos.”

“Hey, I resemble that remark,” Moho chuckled, and shrugged so hard that even Firth got moved a little bit. The complicated tangle of relaxing Operators and Techs settled like an old building with a subsiding foundation.

Jack felt an urge to stand up and pace around a bit but Adam’s left calf, layered up in a full Grade IV+ EV-MASS, was lying across his lap which was therefore utterly and inescapably pinned to the couch. Jack hoped he didn’t have any bruises forming; both his legs were already tingling and asleep.

“I mean… we don’t know anything about what Hunters are like when they aren’t, uh, hunting,” he pointed out. “I mean, for all we know they have board games and movie nights too.”

“Are you kidding?!” That insinuation seemed to be too much for the fucking leader of the Gao to take. Watching cartoons with Daar was the most surreal part of an already awe-inspiringly weird day. “Have you seen what these motherfucks do? Their movies would be, like, America’s Most Bestest Devouring Orgies or somethin’.”

Titan shrugged. “More like… I dunno. Saw? Motel? What was that one last year, The Ranch?”

The massive bear-thing rolled over onto his back and dragged Regaari with him, who yipped in resigned objection. “I dunno. I ain’t had time to watch anything lately…what was the plot?”

“Usual mainstream gore-porn shite,” Murray muttered.

“Oh.” That seemed to be the end of it for Daar. “…Hey Highland? Can we get another Salad?”

“Aye.” Murray somehow slithered out of the pile without any visible effort.

“Been way too long since my last Salad,” Daar said appreciatively. “Fuck I’ve missed you Lads, even ‘Horse’s stinky feet! And my Whitecrest Brothers,” he added hastily. “Alla’ya.”

“We missed you too, but I’d sure appreciate it if you could stop waggin’ that thing in my face, bruh,” Blaczynski told him. Daar’s armored tail was knocking against the top of his helmet with enough force that Jack was pretty sure he’d be concussed right now if that was him, but Blaczynski sounded mildly annoyed at most.

Daar reeled the wayward appendage in. “…Sarry.”

Comfortable silence descended, punctuated by the rousing strains of ‘The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down.’

“I’m still hung up on Hunter board games,” Miller confessed, after a minute. “Like… seriously, Jack? You think those things are gonna play fuckin’ Monopoly or whatever?”

“Oh, for fuck’s–! It was just idle speculation! I dunno, maybe they play, uh… hunting… games.”

“Tisdale, you have the tamest imagination.”

“I just mean we don’t know shit about what Hunters are like outside of a fucking slaughterhouse!” Jack said. “I’m not trying to humanize them or anything, it’s just—”

“The slaughterhouse is enough,” Adam grunted. He rolled over slightly and caused a minor landslide, while also crushing Jack even deeper into the couch. “I don’t care what they get up to in their spare time. They eat people.”

“I guess that’s the thing. They’re genuinely, truly alien,” Akiyama said. “Like… most other ETs are just folks, y’know? Weird-shaped folks with funny ways but whatever. Hunters might as well be goddamn termites. Could be there’s no point trying to understand ‘em.”

“I’m with ‘Horse,” Daar said. “I don’t wanna unnerstand ‘em.”

“Not even in pursuit of knowing your enemy?” Regaari asked.

Jack silently thanked him. That had been the exact thought that had entered his head, but he wasn’t dumb enough to give voice to it, not to somebody like Daar. Somehow, he felt like that was one for the people he was closer with to ask.

Daar grumbled to himself for a second, then opened his mouth to reply… but never got the chance.

The bell rang. It was go time.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Garaaf’s prediction that the Hunters would swarm them when Jamie started messing with the power turned out to be a gross understatement.

At first it was quiet. It took Jamie a minute or two to finish building the Array. There was no apparent reaction when he popped the first panels open and started digging through them with his multimeter in search of an appropriate source of electricity to charge it.

It was the moment he exclaimed “A-ha!” and actually hooked their Array into the power system that had an instant effect. Bright, harsh yellow lighting flooded the area, and some kind of a high, shrill alarm made Ray flinch and Garaaf clamp his remaining ear tightly flat against his skull.

“How long?!” Spears called over it.

“Not long!” Jamie promised. He finished splicing cables across and a protective shield he’d built into the Array sprung up to stop it from being smashed flat by pulse fire in whatever firefight came next. Happy that it was ready and charged, he heaved Holly’s stasis litter into the middle. “A few minutes!”

“That slow?!” Cook called.

“I told you, I can’t just throw a lightning bolt at this thing or it’ll blow out!” Jamie knelt by Holly’s litter and watched what his tools were telling him. “This is fast as I dare!”

“He knows what he’s doing!” Ray shouted, and sighted down her rifle. “Just be ready!”

For one long minute, and then a second, she dared to hope that they might just get away before the Hunters got to them.

That hope was dashed sometime during the third minute when some kind of vehicle pulled up and a team of Hunter workers vaulted off it. They stared in confusion and shock at the deathworlders around their shield emitter, and then dropped dead as Ray, Spears and Garaaf took them down with a disciplined volley.

“Jamie?!” Spears called.

“About a third!”

“Shit,” Ray swore under her breath. She swapped magazines just to give her hands something to do, wished that they’d stop shaking from fear, anticipation and the cold. The metal was making her fingers go numb.

Another minute passed. Then a second. Then a third, but Ray knew better than to let herself hope at this point, not even when Jamie called out “Three-quarters!”

His shout was still echoing around the chamber when the real Hunters arrived, and calling it a ‘swarm’ turned out to be an understatement.

It was a wave, a flood. Ray’s trigger finger fired without her conscious input and missing wasn’t a problem: the Hunt was so numerous that she couldn’t fail to hit. She fired, fired, fired again as fast as she could pull the trigger.

Garaaf had been right about the cold, though. These Hunters were staggering and slow even before they rounded the corner, as though the chill of the air alone was enough to badly impair them. The line of corpses their three rifles left further slowed the ones behind.

Heavy pulse fire slapped the control console, damaged it, made Jamie’s forcefield ripple. Garaaf ducked into cover to reload, the press of Hunters gained a little ground. Ray did the same, and they lost a little more. The Hunters paid for each step forward with lives, and the ground had to be slick and treacherous from freezing blood, but the sheer numbers-!

They only had a few spare magazines, too. Not a lot of ammo, despite the time they’d spent loading them. Building a wall of dead and dying Hunters helped, but by the time Jamie finally yelled “Ninety!” Ray was halfway through her penultimate mag, despite Cook’s best efforts to keep her fed.

Spears ran dry first, Garaaf a moment behind him, and with only the one rifle to hold them at bay the Hunters gleefully broke through and charged.

“Back! Back!”

Ray didn’t need telling twice. She broke cover, retreated up the stairs, firing, firing—

A pulse round punched her right in the head. The world went away for a black second, came back wrong. She couldn’t tell which way was up any longer, her legs just wouldn’t get under her. Cook was at her side, tearing into a Hunter with his knife. He sawed right through its neck, shoved another one aside, turned, stabbed, fought. Ray struggled to find her feet—

The one Cook had pushed aside saw her move and rounded on her, pounced.

Something happened to the sound. It was… gone, now. All the shouting, the alarms, the desperation, it all went silent. Everything came down to the twelve-inch razor-sharp steel claw it had just shoved into her heart.

Time stopped just long enough for Ray to realize that she was dead.

Something the size and general shape of a bear slammed into the Hunter, tore it apart. Another one saved Cook’s hide by inches. Bullets were ripping through the hall, clearing a space, but Ray fell backwards into armored hands. She looked up and saw her own face reflected in some kind of visor: There were dark brown eyes behind it, alert and intense. Human eyes that alighted on the blade in her chest and knew just as well as she did that she wasn’t going to make it.

Jamie, Spears, Garaaf and Holly were gone. They’d jumped out safely. In their place were armored men and Gaoians who brushed the Hunters aside like autumn leaves. She’d been so close…

…But she was still there.

It wasn’t fair.

++End Chapter 45++

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The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 46: “Hellfall”

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Chapter 46: Hellfall

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

WARHORSE

Thump.

Target-rich environment. First Fang pounce into action, crash into the Hunters. Weapon up, barge forward, fire. Can’t miss.

Ambient temperature of minus fifty. Hunter blood freezes the second it hits air, puffs of purplish-red snow, treacherous underfoot.

Report from HOMEPLATE, two human survivors unaccounted-for.

Male: Alive, being yanked back from the fight by STARFALL, dropping his knife, shaking and starting to weep.

Female: Falling back into BASEBALL’s arms. Length of Hunter claw protruding from her chest.

Dead.

No.

Rush to assist. Fatal cardiac injury, impaled right through the sternum. BASEBALL shaking out a stasis bag. Only hope is to prep her for emergency surgery.

Her eyes are still open. She looks like she wants to cry.

No words. They both know what to do.

Patient already cannulated. Intraosseous, drilled through the point of the shoulder into the marrow of the Humerus. Maximum Crue-D dose. Won’t do her any good this second, but might help her survive on the operating table.

Draw fusion knife, cut down the foreign body to within an inch of the chest. Long enough to get a grip on and extract, short enough to stay out of the way.

Helmet-mounted medical scanner, full-body sweep. Damn: her heart is destroyed. If the surgeons can fix this one…

Focus

Tissue sample. No time for subtlety or swabs, gotta get her in the bag fast. Sampler leaves a little bleeding wound on her arm.

Intubate while Base shoves her into the bag. Last steps: hands clear, bag closed, field on. Attach tissue sample and upload scan.

Smacks on the arm from ‘Base. “I got her!”

Stand up, back to the task at hand.

Hand-off the male survivor from STARFALL. He’s weeping, staring at the bag, totally disoriented. No time to play nice: throw over shoulder. Light. Skinny. Malnourished. Uninjured, though.

Defenders have the Array built. Bag and male survivor onto platform, he sits down heavily, stares at his boots.

Step back.

“Clear!”

Thump

Wall of impenetrable black, becomes Brothers. Turn.

Aggressors making headway: pitched battle. Join the formation…

Kill.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Air Engineering Technician Jack “TWO-SEVENTY” Tisdale

Thump

Jack and Miller’s job now that MOHO and the Lads were away was to help keep the jump room clear. He darted onto the platform. They had a turnaround of seconds, so there was no time to be nice. He left the stasis bag to the medics, grabbed the skinny guy who was slumped in the middle of the platform, heaved him to his feet and with Miller’s help got him off the platform.

He fought them, tried to claw back and stay with the bag, screaming a name.

“Ray! RAAAY!”

A calm, dispassionate voice in the back of Jack’s mind noted that he had no trouble at all holding the thrashing man back. Was he really that strong nowadays, or was the guy just that weak?

“Hey, hey,” he soothed, “We’re gonna do everything we can, alright?”

Miller had his back. “Let the medics work, man, c’mon…”

The guy finally stopped pulling and watched the medics load the bag onto a gurney and hustle it out of the Array room, giving Jack a chance to finally study his new charge.

Benjamin Cook, he decided. They’d been briefed on all seven members of the Dauntless crew. The pictures were like ten years old now and the guy’s face was all sunken, skinny and he’d picked up more than his share of wrinkles and silver hairs, but… Well, he was a white dude. Based on the known casualties, that narrowed him down to only one possibility.

“You’re Ben, right?” he asked.

Cook seemed to snap back a little and turned to look at him. God, there was ice on his cheeks where his tears had frozen. How fucking cold was it over there? He was shivering like crazy, and Jack couldn’t tell if it was from the cold, the adrenaline or sheer emotion. All three, probably.

“…Whuh?”

“You’re Ben? Ben Cook? I’m Jack, this is Rihanna.”

Cook didn’t acknowledge the question. He just turned to look at the doors as they swung closed behind his friend and then, very very slowly, Jack watched him completely fall apart.

It started in his eyes. They darted wildly around the room, took in the personnel, the equipment, the uniforms, back to Jack’s face…

Jack had seen eyes like that before, on the day his parents had told him Sara was dead. People used words like “hollow” or “dead” but those weren’t quite right. They weren’t hollow, but so full of horrible sights that there was no room for anything else. They weren’t dead; they saw nothing but death.

They were the eyes of a man who’d just had the only thing that kept him moving forward taken away from him. Wild, unfocused, bereft of any idea how to cope.

Jack had the presence of mind to let Cook collapse onto him rather than just letting him crumple into a fetal ball on the floor. The guy weighed nothing, he was lighter than most Gaoians, but he hugged as hard as MOHO and Jack could tell that he was finally, finally letting go after God-knew-how-many years.

There was nothing dignified about pain like that.

There was nothing to say, either, so Jack didn’t even try. He just became a pillar of calm strength and let the poor bastard get it out of his system.

Eventually, with many soft words like “C’mon man” and “let’s get you outta here,” plus some gently applied strength, he and Miller finally managed to coax Cook down into a wheelchair, put a blanket around his shoulders and get him out of the way. There were still a couple of Operators, Whitecrests and some gear to go through the Array, but the strike force was pretty definitively through at this point.

He pulled the wheelchair over to where Deacon and Hargreaves were looking after the other two survivors, Spears and Choi. Both were obviously doing better than Cook was: Spears was staring deep into a mug of coffee but he looked up as they brought Cook over so he was clearly in the here and now. Choi looked… stunned, but alert. He was looking around the Array room with interest, taking in the technology. They’d have to relocate in a few minutes, but for now the three needed a second to adjust.

Then there was the Gaoian, Garaaf. He was sniffing noses with Champion Genshi and keening softly in a different corner, but he seemed to be coping surprisingly well. Jack had no idea what was going on inside that fuzzy head, but Whitecrests had always struck him as a little too cool sometimes.

Really, this wasn’t Jack’s area of expertise, but there was nobody on base whose area of expertise it was so… About the only thing to do was be warm and human and calm.

Cook had an interesting reaction to being handed a mug of coffee: he stared at it in horror for a second then threw it violently away from him. Across the room, Green danced aside to avoid taking a metal mug full of hot coffee to the leg.

“Hey, hey…” Jack soothed. “What’s wrong, man?”

“It was… “ Cook tailed off and just shook his head.

“…Ben?” Spears reached out and put a hand on his crewmate’s shoulder. Cook flinched.

“…Hhhot. Hot. It was hot.”

“…Okay. We’ll get you a cold drink,” Jack promised. Miller nodded and made herself busy: She looked more uncomfortable than he’d ever seen.

“…Ray?” Choi asked. “Was that…? We had to leave her, is she—?”

Deacon put a hand on his shoulder. “She’s in the best hands possible,” she promised.

“She got stabbed in the heart, man,” Cook hiccuped and groaned. “Right in the… in the…”

Jack tried to project reassuring confidence. “Medical technology’s come a long way since you guys left,” he said. He wasn’t about to lie and pretend it would be a cakewalk, but that much was very true. Adam and John wouldn’t have sent her back in stasis if they didn’t think there was some hope for her.

It didn’t seem to help Cook at all. He just shook his head and mumbled something that sounded too much like ‘shoulda been me…’

“Goddammit…” Spears hung his head.

Choi closed his eyes. “…And Holly?”

“She’ll be up and walking in a couple hours,” Hargreaves promised.

“…You’re kidding.” Choi blinked at him. “She had a nine-inch nail in her gut!”

“Like Jack said. We’ve come a long way.”

“Holy shit.” Choi looked down at his coffee then drank it with a shaking hand.

The techs looked at each other and decided things had calmed down enough now.

“Look, why don’t we get you guys somewhere quieter?” Deacon suggested. “You’ll need checking out by the medics and stuff, but let’s do it somewhere peaceful.”

“…Right.” Spears nodded. “Yeah, please. Somewhere quiet…. Ben?”

Cook looked up sharply from whatever infinitely distant thing he’d been staring at. “Whuh?!”

“…C’mon man. We’re gonna get you somewhere more comfortable, get you checked out. Okay?” Jack didn’t help him stand, just stepped behind the wheelchair. Cook didn’t reply, just drifted away to wherever his mind was at again.

They negotiated the trio out down the hallway and finally settled on dropping them in the same break room where they’d been waiting with the Lads just before the alarm bell rang. The Couch was still in there, still facing the TV that was still playing Looney Tunes shorts: nobody had bothered to turn it off in the scramble to get moving.

Choi gaped at it. “…Holy shit. Cartoons.”

While Deacon went to call Mears and update him on where his patients were, Jack turned the volume down slightly. “Yeah. Sorry.”

Choi shook his head. “No, man. Just… I’d forgotten those were even a thing.”

“…We fucking made it,” Spears breathed. “…Jesus Christ. I…” He sat down abruptly. Deacon was at his side in a flash and promptly found herself being hugged tight and cried into.

Choi sat down awkwardly by his colleague’s side and put a hand on his back. “…Yeah,” he agreed. “Holy shit, we’re back on Earth.”

“Uh… Sorry dude, but not quite.” Hargreaves told him.

“Huh?”

“You’re not on Earth.”

“We aren’t?” Spears asked. He looked around as though expecting the windowless, simple room to yield further insights.

“This is the city of Folctha, on the planet Cimbrean. Humanity’s first extrasolar colony world.”

Choi stared at him dumbfounded for a moment then sat down. Distractedly, he ran a hand through his hair then rested them lightly on his knees as though he didn’t know what else to do with them.

“…Things really did change, huh?”

“Yeah. the colony’s existence was made public a couple weeks after you left.”

“How big is it?” Spears asked.

“We’re knocking on the door of a hundred thousand people nowadays,” Jack told him.

“Way more than that if you include the Gaoian refugees…” Deacon pointed out.

Choi angled his head. “Refugees?”

Jack, Deacon and Hargreaves looked at each other, then reached an unspoken conclusion.

“It’s… a long story,” Deacon began carefully. “And it kinda begins with San Diego.”

They told them everything. The Hierarchy, the war on Gao… everything.

They didn’t take it well.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Either Julian’s musical taste was rubbing off, or Xiù was too lazy to change the playlist. But she had to admit that his music usually accompanied her morning workout pretty well. It wasn’t tranquil enough for Taiji but for moving heavy things around he’d figured out about the perfect soundtrack. Aggressive and inspiring without going full thrash death scream like the Lads of the HEAT preferred.

Besides: It was Julian’s, and she missed him. Messages a couple of times a day just weren’t the same thing.

♫♪—I will not be forgotten, this is my time to shine! I’ve got the scars to prove it, only the strong survive! I’m not afraid—♪♫

She’d woken up to a lonely bed. Well, okay, the first time she’d woken up she’d been cuddled up to Allison, but Allison had taken her brothers to school and gone to work while Xiù had fallen asleep again. She’d woken an hour or two later alone and with a nasty tangle in her hair that took some ruthless and painful brushing to remove.

She was getting kinda sick of being the housewife. Sure, she’d asked to take a good long break so she could get the house up and running, but she was definitely ready to step back into the world of doing stuff again. As satisfying as making a nice house had been, she wasn’t interested in just rattling around it all day being domestic.

Technically she still worked for MBG even if she was using all of that leave time she’d saved up over the years of the Misfit expedition. She was looking forward to see what they had for her next.

The music was interrupted by a phone call, and she took a quick swig of water before answering.

“Hello?”

“It’s me, babe.” Allison had a breathless, slightly frantic note in her voice.

“Hey! Is everything alright?”

“Uh… Kinda-sorta maybe maybe not? We just got a call from Sharman, they’ve got some of our guys over there!”

Xiù blinked. “Our guys? Like… MBG guys?”

“An EV crew! One of the missing ones!”

No wonder she sounded so off-balance. “You’re kidding! Which one?”

“Dauntless! Number three! Uh… we kinda got a message back from Kevin. He’s coming over here with Moses but the first jump they can make is this evening. He’s asking if you could go—”

Xiù jumped on the chance before she’d even finished asking. “Of course! I’ll head over there as soon as I’ve showered and changed.”

“Babe, you’re an angel. I think Levaughn might actually faint… I guess you’ll be hearing from Kevin pretty soon.”

Xiù giggled. “Thanks for the heads-up,” she said dryly, and was rewarded with a laugh. “I’d better go get ready.”

“You do that. Wo ai ni.”

“Wǒ yě ài nǐ. I’ll see you this evening.”

She hit the shower just long enough to freshen up while doing her best to keep her hair dry, and brushed the water out while she studied the contents of their closet, which was big enough that with a desk in there it could have been a comfortable small office.

She didn’t need long to select a businesslike graphite pants suit with a red blouse that was a pretty good match for the MBG corporate livery. No jewelry, just a simple minimalist hair clip, and the lightest touch of makeup. She considered herself in the mirror and nodded: She looked professional and composed.

Her phone buzzed just as she was about to summon a cab. It was an email, and it wasn’t from Kevin.

Miss Chang,

I understand from our people at Chiune that you’ve stepped up to handle the EV-03 situation. Thank you, I really appreciate it. Right now we don’t know much, just that they’ve been recovered. We know there were casualties, but it’s not clear how many. Might be two, might be three or four. Sure appreciate if you could clear that up and establish the facts of where they were and what happened to them.

The press are likely to be on this pretty quick: Go ahead and talk to them. We don’t want to release the names of who’s back and who didn’t make it until we’ve had a chance to talk with next of kin, so I’d appreciate it if you could be cautious and if in doubt decline to comment. If you’re asked about the other lost expeditions, be realistic but cautiously optimistic.

We depend on AEC’s good will, so it’s probably worth asking them if there’s anything they don’t want us to say. …Kevin tells me I’m just telling you what you already know. I say you can’t blame me for worrying, but he’s right. I have total faith in you. Represent us well.

Warm regards,

-Moses Byron

Well. No pressure, then.

She opened the cab app, ordered a car, and composed her reply as she was lurking by the front door in wait for it.

In the end, after a few revisions, it came down to two sentences:

Mr. Byron,

I don’t blame you for worrying. I’ll hold the fort until you get here.

-Xiù Chang.

She sent it just as the car arrived. She locked the door behind her, took a deep breath to steady herself… And went to work.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Brother Daar (“Tigger”) of Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao

They were all gonna die, most likely.

So long as they took the fuckin’ ring with them, it’d just about be worth it, but… Fyu’s nuts. He’d hafta spend his most bestest Brothers t’do it, First Fang and SOR.

Nothing coulda hurt more.

The worst part about the whole fuckin’ mess was how completely, obviously necessary it all was. The Hunters were a threat to all sapient life, and they were really the only major meatspace tools the Hierarchy had left. Destroying the ring would end them. Not at first, maybe. In fact there’d still be a long road ahead if they were ever going to be completely wiped from the galaxy… but up until this moment they’d been unassailable.

A monster they could kill was a lot better than a monster they couldn’t. Daar would gladly die to make that change happen.

If only he could do it without sacrificing his Brothers…

Those weren’t appropriate thoughts for a battle, though. Not even one that was going well. What had at first seemed like a limitless sea of Hunters at their beachhead had faltered to a trickle. The HEAT knew all the Hunters’ tricks now: the first hint of a nervejam launcher brought down waves of overlapping firepower. The merest suggestion of a heavy Hunter saw it torn apart by grenade rounds. The HEAT made an outstanding spear-tip, gaining ground relentlessly and steadily while First Fang obliterated everything along the flanks and rear, ready to swarm forward and tear into any Hunter force foolish enough to brave the front.

All of which was just a stalling action. They needed a route to the surface, ideally one that the Hunters couldn’t control or easily ambush them through. To do that, they needed to know where, exactly, they were inside the Ring’s geometry. The damn thing was as thick as territories, if they went the wrong way it was a five-day march to the surface.

Thank fuck for good intel: The surface was five klicks that-a-way. Not as close as Daar would have liked, but close enough…. They just had to get through a thick door first. The Hunters had closed it once their assault became an obvious failure, and the damn thing was thick.

Fortunately, if there was one thing both Stoneback and the HEAT knew, it was blowing shit up.
Sikes needed to do nothing more than look back over his shoulder and hold up the solution. “Hotball?”

Daar duck-nodded. “Hotball.”

The Hotball was basically just a tiny jump array the size of an ordinary grenade. All Sikes had to do was set it down on the floor and align its camera on the doors.

“Fire in the hole!”

The Humans had brought some of their most bestest toys, and nearly all of them linked back to the Deep Space Strategic Weapons Reserve at Minot AFB on Earth. In the case of the Hotball, the Keeda-fuck crazy assholes had decided that what a team of Operators really needed was the ability to call in naval firepower or missile strikes no matter where they were. It had everything: sixteen-inch guns, five-inch guns, sixty-mil autocannons, even nukes if it came to that… any kind of boom they might need, Minot were happy to provide. All Sikes had to do was dial in exactly how much devastation he wanted to cause, and the rest…

Well, the rest was overpressure so fierce that it briefly reminded Daar of getting his tail nuked on Akyawentuo. The doors didn’t stand a chance. Neither did the handful of Hunters in its immediate vicinity.

Brother Fiin and his hand-picked team were doing an amazing job keeping Daar un-harassed enough to think, too. He thought best while he was moving, and here moving meant fighting, but not so much he couldn’t pause an’ think ‘bout what unique delights the damned tactical problem were giving them. Or, really, enough that he couldn’t stand back and savor the destruction that balls-crazy Hotball unleashed.

The HEAT didn’t wait for the smoke to clear. They didn’t need to. The few Hunters that had survived on the far side of the destroyed doors got ripped to pieces before they’d even recovered their wits.

ABBOTT sounded ice-calm and steady as always as he reported the situation on the far side. “Per the map, looks like a road.”

That “road” was some kind of arterial tunnel for moving big shit about inside the Ring. It ran all the way up to within a few hundred meters of the surface… and it presented exactly no cover and no room to maneuver. If they went that way, they’d be easy to find, easy to pin down. It was the only good way outta their arrival chamber, but Daar weren’t nearly fuckin’ dumb enough to walk in a straight line down a shooting gallery.

Fortunately, he didn’t need to. He strode through the smoke and grinned at the sight of RIGHTEOUS finishing off a red hunter by twisting its skull clean off with one massive gauntleted hand, then exploding the dripping trophy just by closing his fist.

That man was exactly the kind of brutal that Daar could appreciate. He chirped First Fang with his radio and indicated the tunnel ceiling to their right. [“Make a pile!”]

The Brothers didn’t need telling a second time. Stoneback had plenty toys of their own, and Daar didn’t bother paying attention to which one they used. All that mattered was that seconds later there was another massive detonation and the tunnel caved in, neatly protecting their flank and rear from a Hunter counterattack. Weren’t nothin’ but several days of good honest labor with plenty of heavy machinery gonna fix that mess.

The HEAT meanwhile were already moving to secure their way outta the shooting gallery. The map said there was a big open space just through the tunnel wall about a hunnerd meters down. Probably it was in vacuum, but that just worked in their favor: The whole strike force were geared up for EVA combat.

MOHO and KIWI deployed their fusion cutters, and Sikes strung in some explosive charges into the resulting holes. They were working smoothly, well-rehearsed and cool. It took seconds.

“Brace for decomp!”

WARHORSE planted himself and grabbed onto a few of the smaller team members. First Fang dug their suit claws into the floors and walls, the Whitecrests deployed their sticky-paw gloves and boots. In seconds, everybody was holding onto something and ready.

Daar, for his part, grabbed Brother Finn and pinned him to the floor, just in case. He weren’t about to lose anyone that Fyu-damned valuable to the Void.

This third explosion was different. Loud, yeah, loud enough to make his bones jump, but this time tonnes and tonnes of air tore the wall inwards, and shoved it out into the space beyond. The whole deck heaved and a gale like Daar had never felt started hauling indiscriminately on debris, metal panels and men alike.

Something pink-white and broken thumped past him: A Hunter corpse that went spilling out through the breach and vanished from sight. In seconds the cryo room they’d come in through was empty of air and the wind from behind them dropped to nothing, but from up front it was an endless torrent that rolled on and on, tearing up the walls and floor and leaving them all with no option but to hang on and endure…

Silence landed on them like a dropped bag of wet sand. The compartment had finally run out of air.

Daar was left hearing nothing but the hiss of air past his ears through his helmet, and radio noise. He let go of Fiin and noted that the wind had managed to drag the both of them an arm’s length toward the hole, leaving ragged gouges in the metal where their suit claws had cut in. ‘Horse actually shook his arm out when he let go of the tail of men he’d been anchoring.

“We have an egress.” There was a note of dry humor in ABBOTT’s voice.

Daar charged up to the torn hole they’d made and stopped on its threshold. He pant-grinned inside his helmet: The gravity was doing screwy things around the hole’s edge.

Experimentally he picked up a chunk of debris that had skittered to a stop just before tipping into the void, and flung it out into the open space beyond. It dropped… but only very, very slowly, and in the wrong direction. The ‘gravity’ out there was from the Ring’s own centripetal spin, not from the presence of field generators.

Exactly what they needed.

“In,” he ordered, then indicated the tunnel further up in the other direction. “First Fang, make a pile.”

When the road was no good, they’d just make their own… and stop the enemy from following. He knew that this was just the first and most easiest bit, and that things weren’t about to stay so good all the way. They were all about to die, most likely…

…But he was looking forward to this.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Builder Hive, Hunter Space

The Alpha-of-Alphas

The Alpha-of-Alphas had observed Human tactics many times by now. They were much more concerned with self-preservation than Hunters were; most Hunters largely lost any fear of death when gripped by the Hunt. Humans on the other hand fought cautiously, conserved their resources. They only engaged when absolutely necessary and they sold their lives dearly or when there was no other option.

This attack was not consistent with what it had seen of them before. When the other Humans had built a jump device, it had expected to see them swiftly and efficiently extracted, with a large bomb left behind once the rescuers had departed.

This time, the Humans were fighting almost like Hunters. They were fixated upon their Prey, and they were pursuing it no matter what stood in the way.

They were heading directly toward the surface. Sensibly, they were avoiding the Ring’s arteries and transit network and making their own route through the unused parts of the superstructure that were neither pressurised nor equipped with gravity generators, but aside from that their course was straight and true.

This should not have been a problem. The Hive was home to hundreds of millions of Hunters, all of which were theoretically only instants away via jump devices. Devices that the Alpha-of-Alphas was absolutely certain it had ordered deployed.

None had been. The Builders were busily at work, that much was clear, and yet despite their activity nothing seemed to be happening. There were whole broods of Red Hunters and a few hundred Alphas that were all nearly as heavily augmented and shielded as the Alpha-of-Alphas itself, all of them slavering to throw themselves into the fight and feast.

All of them should be descending on the Humans in an unstoppable tide, despite the obstacles the invaders were throwing in their way.

They weren’t, and the Builders were proving elusive to contact. They returned terse but deferential assurances of hard work but no more than that.

There would be a reckoning, later.

For now, the Alpha-of-Alphas had to consider how to stop this invasive lance of an assault using only the meagre resources in that part of the Hive and their limited ability to relocate using vehicular transport.

Its projections were not satisfactory.

Without an obvious solution available, it turned its attention to alternative. If the Builders would not deliver the simple numbers needed to wash the invaders away, then the Alpha-of-Alphas needed to find some other advantage. Thus, it sorted back through the sensor telemetry looking for clues, openings, advantages that it could claim.

It didn’t need long before it found one.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Captain Anthony “Abbott”” Costello

“Sir! We just lost the wormhole link to Minot!”

What came back over the radio was a short, rapid burst of contrabass cursing in Stoneback battle-cant. The translator didn’t get the meaning but there was no mistaking the tone.

The Great Father recovered almost instantly. “Was wonderin’ if they might do that.” There was a pause while Daar noticed a Red Hunter charging at him, spun around and…well. Two quick shield-breaker rounds from his personal guard lowered its defenses just as the Great Father slammed into it. Daar was fast, brutal, and left the Red Hunter torn in half almost before it seemed to notice it had been destroyed.

And he didn’t miss a beat. “Options? We’re gonna miss that naval art’y awfully fuckin’ quick.”

Costello was already thinking through the consequences. “…If they’ve got a wormhole suppressor, especially something like Farthrow, then most of the plan’s fucked,” he pointed out. “No wormholes means no jumping in nukes and no jumping ourselves out. Good thing we brought one bomb with us.”

He looked back at IRISH, who’d drawn the unlucky task of hauling it around when Daar had plodded over with a sinister grin and literally dropped the damn thing in his lap. The weapon itself was contained within a stasis field so as not to give away the game to any nosy radiation sensors, but that did nothing to reduce its bulk or its frankly absurd mass; Costello could hardly budge it. Apparently, eighteen-point-seven gigatons of boom didn’t come in a small package.

Their third Protector noticed the attention and gave Costello a cheery kind of upward nod. IRISH may have been the newest and “smallest” member of the Beef Bros but that didn’t slow him down one bit. He and TITAN—almost a Beef himself—had to work together to maneuver the massive charge through low-gravity, but IRISH bore it under gravity like a turtle bore its shell.

On the plus side, if that thing went off while they were anywhere within a few hundred miles of it, they’d never feel it.

“Meaning,” he said via the command channel for Daar’s ears only, “That if it all goes completely to hell, our mission’s already a success. We already got what we need right here.”

“Yup, that was always in the cards. Sometimes you gotta play Ta’Shen with the worstest hand.”

“Don’t mind admitting I’d rather be a long way away when that thing goes off, Great Father.”

“Me too, I wanna die of a heart attack while fuckin’ a pile of Females! When I’m a hunnerd!”

Costello snorted inside his mask; big and lecherous defined the Beef Bros, especially Daar. “Okay, so the plan’s unchanged. We just need to go through thinner walls, save our explosive charges. Stick to the routes we can cut open with fusion blades. We’ll HELLNO to dirtside…”

“An observant enemy’s gonna notice that,” Daar noted. “Not that it’ll matter.”

“I think it’s safe to say that our enemy knew which way we were going anyway.” Costello glanced around. The HEAT were doing what they always did anytime there was a lull in the gunplay: they were slamming down energy supplements while they hoofed it to their next objective. Daar and Costello were doing the same thing which was giving their conversation a strange mono-sentence, staccato feel to it.

He took a pull of the energy drink his helmet was giving him. The way it behaved on his tongue suggested that a chemical factory had briefly been shown a picture of a cherry, but that made it the most palatable mix by far. The others were… violently flavorful.

“Well, ‘Horse has me on this special ‘Juice’ o’ his,” Daar commented, then spoke again after a moment. “It really does taste like getting face-fucked by a lime. Dang.”

“There aren’t many who’re ‘worthy’ of his brews, Great Father.” Costello caught his breath for the spare second while the men cleared an intersecting hallway. “Be proud. Direction, sir?”

“Straight over. There’s another big void just beyond. This one we’ll maybe float through ‘cuz we’re above it and we’ve gotta save time. We’ll see when we get there.”

Costello darted across the intersection at a sharp hand signal from Firth. “Got it.”

One of the Whitecrest scouts reported in. “ABBOTT, ROCKET. Signs of civilian activity up here.”

“What kinda signs?”

“Trash, graffiti, makeshift beds. Audio sensors are picking up a lot of noise in the space above that structural void.”

The Whitecrests easily had the best sensors on their suits. Costello called up the map and consulted it. There was an oval space about the size of a stadium directly above the structural void. Best-guess analysis had pegged it as some kind of goods yard or vehicle park. If it was actually one of the shanties from Garaaf’s report…

Blasting through the floor to make another unpressurized shortcut would kill every single sapient being in that shanty, in seconds.

“We reconnoitre an’ if it’s a bunch o’ meat-slaves, we go around,” Daar instructed.

Costello suddenly hated himself for what he was obligated to point out. He raised his point over the command channel. “Respectfully sir, we’re gonna be killing them all today anyway.”

Daar’s reply started out as just a menacing grumble of annoyance at first. “I know. My soul’s not gonna be able t’take murderin’ em just ‘cuz it ain’t gonna matter and it’ll save us a few minutes.”

Faarek’s contribution was simple. “Wilco. Reconnoitring.”

Well… Daar was in charge. It was his call. And frankly, Costello agreed. Nuking all those poor bastards didn’t sit right anyway, but at least it would be clean and instantaneous. Suffocating after their homes were opened to vacuum was a very different thing indeed.

…Fuck, he was going to need a long session with the chaplain after this one.

They all were.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lt.Col Owen “Stainless” Powell

Powell was feeling useless.

He was doing an important job. Nobody ever said otherwise, nobody thought otherwise as far as he could tell. It was his job to command the HEAT and JETS and he prided himself on being good at it.

But for fook sake, generals had stormed the beaches at Normandy, Daar was storming the Ring alongside his Lads and here Powell was, safe and clean and comfortable in his fookin’ utility trousers with a cup of tea next to his hand and a comfortable HEAT-sized chair to plant his arse in.

Somewhere out there on Earth, Rylee would be waiting to scramble if and when the opportunity came to deploy Firebirds. Up in orbit, the Fleet was on a hair-trigger to rush the Ring system and mop up the Hunters. The Lads, thousands of sailors and every pilot in the 946th were ready to put their lives on the line, not to mention the Stonebacks and Whitecrests.

But it sure as hell didn’t feel like Owen Powell was part of the fight any longer. He felt like a clerk. And he certainly bloody felt like a fraud.

And now that the wormhole carrier signal from the team had been lost, any chance he might have had to participate and prove his worth was gone. Given how abruptly it had cut out, the most likely explanation was a suppressor of some kind like the Farthrow generator on Gao.

He should have been there. He should be suited up and kickin’ arse with the best of them, but God fookin’ damn him, Daar had said no.

The big furry bastard had been contrite about it, but firm. And Powell was smart enough to know what that meant: It meant Daar wasn’t certain that any of them were coming back from this one. If they didn’t… well, humanity would still need the SOR. And it’d fall to Powell to rebuild it.

Christ, he could still remember Arés as a child for fook sake.

He sighed, drained his tea in one go—it was slightly too hot for that, but he was past caring—and stood up from his desk. He needed to move. He thought better when he was moving. And frankly, he needed to talk with somebody, too.

The base had gone that eerie kind of tense quiet it did when the Lads were deployed. No booming laughter or shouted Motivation echoing across the grounds or through the walls. No sound of constant machining and mechanical work from the suit shop. The occasional Rate or other allied Enlisted man who stepped aside for him in the halls had a quiet, intense look that was probably identical to his own.

If something big came up, there’d be action and noise again but now that the Array was silent and the mission was on, and especially without any kind of intel flowing back to them… well, there was nothing to do.

Make a cup of tea, sit and wait, sit and worry.

He found what he was looking for in the medical wing, which was easily the most lively part of the base right now. There was quite a knot of human activity in there: a couple of his Techs, Mears, Captain Galicki the Chaplain… and four of the five humans they’d recovered, plus nurses and doctors.

The conscious survivors were all skinny, massively undernourished and wearing the distant, haunted expressions of people who’d seen far too much. Spears was African-American and looked like a wild man thanks to years of beard and hair growth that he’d never stood a hope of properly maintaining. Choi looked like he’d just finished shaving and showering and was wearing clean clothes, and frankly the petite redhead sitting up in bed chatting with Galicki looked almost healthy.

That had to be Holly Chase, and if she’d had a shot of Crude then she was probably feeling amazing for the moment. One of the USAF techs, Miller, was brushing her hair.

The man in the bed next to her was pretty obviously sedated, and being watched over by young Tisdale. Powell shared a nod of recognition with the young man, who stood up as he entered, only to reveal a huge bruise on his jaw.

“Good afternoon, sir…”

Christ, the lad looked so much like his sister. Even all those years on, it made him difficult to look at. Powell gave him a nod, and then directed it more generally around the room. “Good afternoon… Christ, Tisdale, who gave you that?”

Tisdale indicated the sedated man. “He did, sir. He, uh…”

“A little too much information, a little too early,” Mears said, and Tisdale nodded with a slightly chastened air. Mears took the opportunity to make introductions. “Gentlemen, Doctor Chase, this is our commanding officer Colonel Powell.”

Spears and Chase had grips that belied their malnourishment, and Choi’s handshake was legitimately firm.

“This has all been a lot to take in…” Spears said after the handshakes were done. He glanced at the sedated man. “…Too much for Ben.”

“It’s too much for me,” Chase said. Of the three she looked closest to chipper, but that wasn’t saying much. “…one second I was in a warren on the Ring, and the next…” she waved a hand, then touched her stomach. “…Things have come a long way. I’m told it should be fully healed in an hour or two.”

“Please, Colonel,” Choi said. “They won’t tell us about our friend… Ben said she’s dead.”

“If she was, I’m sure they’d let you know,” Powell said. “I’ve found it’s best not to rush the doctors. Any road, I just got done talkin’ with Byron Group. They’re sendin’ one of their people over as we speak.”

“Who?” Spears asked.

“Xiù Chang. Nice lass. Pilot of EV-Eleven and the first person to set foot on Mars… and all of that’s after making such a good impression with the Gao.”

Choi looked interested. “That’s a hell of a resumé.”

“She’s had a hell of a ride,” Powell agreed. “There’ll be others too, I’m sure, but she’s closest by. I’d be surprised if Byron himself wasn’t over here before… long…”

He turned at a knock on the door. One of the base MPs opened the door, making the already crowded room even more so.

“Special consultant’s here for the doctors, sir,” he explained.

Powell was about to echo the words ‘special consultant?’ in search of an explanation, but he didn’t need to. There was only one person on the whole planet who could mince into a room so extravagantly.

Inwardly, his sentence started ‘oh, God…’ but externally he kept it civil. “…Good afternoon, Nofl.”

“Darling!” Nofl chirped happily, resulting in a bewildered stare from Choi, an arched eyebrow from Spears and a stifled giggle from Chase. Everybody else in the room was familiar with Nofl, though Powell was pretty sure he saw Miller wrestle a smirk off her face.

To be fair, if he’d seen some of his old COs being called ‘darling’ by a flamboyant ET with a handbag, he’d have had trouble keeping a straight face too.

“I take it our medics called you in to deal with one of our patients,” he observed.

“Yes indeed!” Nofl flounced through the room, and the man could flounce with the best of them. Something about his huge grey head just added to the spectacle. “Though they really didn’t share the details… this way, yes?”

“I’m sure you know it by now,” Powell grunted. He gave the MP escorting their guest a sympathetic nod and stood aside to make room.

Conversation resumed only after he was gone. The three Dauntless survivors had watched him with the same wary fascination that people always did the first time they met Nofl.

“…Is he for real?” Spears asked, once he was out of earshot.

“To be perfectly bloody frank, I have no idea,” Powell confessed. “An’ I don’t know if it scares me more if that’s an act he puts on or if it’s not.”

“Is… he here for Ray?” Chase asked.

“Most likely. Nofl’s a fookin’ oddball, but there’s folks walkin’ around with all their limbs an’ eyeballs today who wouldn’t have ‘em but for him…”

“So, he can—?” Chase lit up.

“Maybe.”

“I’ll take ‘maybe’,” Spears said. “‘Maybe’ is a hell of a lot better than ’no’.”

“I can find out more for you?” Powell offered. Their grateful expressions was all he needed, so he ducked further back into the medical center and quickly found what he was after. Nofl had been escorted into a room where the base’s two surgeons were standing around a holographic projector, examining a complex three-dimensional volumetric rendering of what had to be their patient.

She looked about as dead as dead got as far as Powell was concerned. That was a big bit of metal stuck through her heart.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Phillips acknowledged him as he entered.

“Your patients outside are keen to know their friend’s diagnosis,” Powell explained. “I don’t know owt about it, so…”

Phillips grimaced and rubbed his chin. He’d obviously come in on an emergency basis and wasn’t properly shaved, so the gesture made a rasping sound. “Rachel Wheeler, forty-six years old. Foreign body right through the cardiac muscle… and by ‘foreign body’ I mean a live fusion blade.”

“Her heart’s been destroyed, then,” Powell said. He could see the scan, and the tip of the claw was tickling the poor woman’s spine, having nicked the lungs en route, too.

Lieutenant Youhas nodded. “Ordinarily we’d call that a condition incompatible with life, but… well she was placed in stasis before brain-death.”

“I take it that makes a difference?”

“Technically she’s alive and on life support,” Youhas explained. “And we’re not going to remove that life support until we’re absolutely certain there’s no hope of saving her. Hence why we called in Nofl.”

Nofl’s chirpy act had become more solemn. He had climbed up onto the table so as to be at the same height as all the humans, and made a vague tutting sound as he inspected the display.

He caught Powell’s eye and affected a shrug. “Tricky,” he said. “Very tricky, with the tools we have available on Cimbrean. And then of course there’s the damage to the surrounding organs and blood vessels to consider… You have a tissue sample?” he checked, and looked satisfied when Youhas and Phillips nodded. “Then growing her a new heart is trivial, I can do that in my laboratory.”

“Hang on, if we can grow her a heart right here then what’s the problem?” Powell asked. “We can do heart transplants, can’t we?”

“Oh, you can,” Nofl agreed. “But how long would it take to hook your patient up to an artificial heart, Lieutenant?” he asked, addressing Phillips and Youhas equally.

“…Too long,” Youhas answered for both of them.

“Exactly. She would be thoroughly dead beyond all hope of resuscitation by the time a blood flow was reestablished. So the tricky part is that your people just don’t have the technology to stabilise the patient and perform the transplant quickly enough. ”

“Our people don’t,” Phillips echoed. “The Corti do?”

“Oh yes. Our most advanced hospitals have field-enhanced surgical suites that could literally take her apart, right down to separating out bones, organs and muscles if need be. It’s quite a sight, seeing a whole person disassembled and spread out in mid-air.”

“That sounds… invasive.” Youhas’ objection seemed more professional than disgusted. “What could you possibly need to do something that extreme for?”

“Injuries like this.” Nofl indicated the hologram. “Also, aggressive metastasized tumors that have spread throughout the whole body, autopsies, training on medical cadavers…”

Powell cleared his throat and pushed the subject forward. He’d seen more than his share of gore, but there was something far too detached and clinical about that mental image. “So a Corti hospital could fix her.”

Nofl didn’t even glance back at the scan, he just nodded. “Oh yes! Absolutely, darling. The human body responds remarkably well to staples and glue, for goodness’ sake. With the techniques available to the Directorate… why, she’ll barely notice she was injured!”

Powell grunted and considered the hologram again. “…How much?” he asked. There was always a price tag, with Corti.

“So cynical,” Nofl smirked, then faltered when Powell turned a trademark glare on him. “…Ah. Well… I can’t say. That would be a matter for the Directorate and the hospital faculty.”

“Find out for us,” Powell said.

“It… might be quite steep. The Directorate is in the middle of rather a large—”

“Nofl, I just want to know what the fookin’ price tag is,” Powell interrupted him. “We can’t bloody well discuss payin’ it if we don’t know what it is.”

Nofl sniffed. “…As you say, dear.” He turned to the surgeons. “I’ll need a copy of the scan data.”

“On the understanding that we take patient confidentiality seriously…” Phillips said.

“Of course! If there’s a contract, I shall sign it,” Nofl promised.

“I’ll go give her friends the news,” Powell said.

He left the doctors and alien to sort out whatever legalities were involved, and headed back through to the infirmary. One nice thing about the Infirmary over the rest of Sharman was that it was built to handle big men on wide gurneys surrounded by medics. The rest of the base could be a little cramped and narrow at times, but here he had all the elbow room he could ask for.

The Dauntless crew were still sitting quietly and being gently brought up to speed on the last decade of political, social and technological developments by Mears, Tisdale and Miller. Cook was still sedated, Spears and Choi were both looking exhausted but Chase was propped up on pillows and alert. She looked up as Powell entered.

“Good news?” she asked.

“…Aye, on balance. From what I gather, bein’ in a stasis bag she’s not technically dead so much as on a kind of life support. Bad news is, the kind of emergency surgery that could save her is just beyond us for now. The good news,” he added before she could say anything, “is that the Corti allegedly do have that kind of doctorin’. So we’re gonna see what their askin’ price is.”

“Asking price?” Choi looked offended.

“Corti aren’t human,” Powell reminded him. “Good news is, they’re usually bloody forthright about their fee, so I guess at this point we just keep her plugged in and… wait.”

“…Thank you,” Spears said, and extended a hand.

“Don’t thank me. I’m just the messenger.” Powell replied, though he shook hands anyway. “I’ll let you lot get some rest. Is there owt you need?”

The question was addressed to Mears, who shook his head. “Nothing important,” he said.

“Arright. You know how to contact me if you do.”

Powell let himself out and shook himself off. The mental image of that hologram kept coming back at him. He kept imagining the person it represented, pulled apart and hanging in mid-air like a butchered pig in the abattoir. The thought of surgery like that honestly freaked him out a bit.

He shook the thought from his mind, and went to find something else to do.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Monument Valley, Navajo Nation Reservation, Utah/Arizona border, USA, Earth

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Vemik had never imagined land could look like this.

He was used to forests and open plains, so the first hand or two of days on Earth hadn’t been so different. The trees were odd shapes, many of them thin and skinny with whippy trunks and limbs that bent more with the wind than even the most pliant Forestfather. Then there had been the exact opposite, giants called “seek-woah-ya” that made a Ketta seem puny! The bark alone was thicker than his knife was long!

Food was a problem: most Earth beasts were small and cunning. The biggest of the ones that they’d seen lived among those trees, were about the size of a root-bird and much less stupid. A man could eat every day and still starve on such meagre fare.

Nearly everything Vemik had thought he’d known about living in the forest needed knowing anew. It had been humbling. Akyawentuo-home was strong, with its big beasts and its mighty trees and the firm embrace of its ‘gravity.’ Earth was obviously stronger than Cimbrean that way, but next to home it was… less.

Well. Except for the Seek-woah-ya. Those were strong trees, to Yan’s grudging admiration.

So, Vemik had learned about a different kind of strength from Earth. If Akyawentuo-home was a Given-Man, then Earth was more like Vemik himself. Smaller, but more… the English word was ‘inventive.’ And a man who wanted to live there needed to be inventive too. He couldn’t just hunt something Werne-like, because there were no Werne-like beasts. Instead he had to dig for roots, brave the waters for “fish,” lay patient traps… And eat everything he could get his hands on.

Squirrel was nice. The brains were nutty!

But this—!

There was so much sky!

There was so much heat!

The landscape was stranger than strange. The plants were tiny, tough things that almost hid from the sun and from each other, so that there was more dusty red soil to look at than greenery. And the ground was nailed to the sky not by trees, but by great girthy wind-carved rocks that danced in the distant hot air.

Compared to a forest, it was a dead place. But in truth it was anything but: there was life everywhere. Huge birds winged in slow loops without ever seeming to tire or land. Every rock was home to a little slithering skittery thing with tough dry skin, or a frantic running furry thing with huge ears.

And then there were the beasts Vemik could hear but not see.

“There it is again!” he held up a hand. Jooyun nodded this time: it looked like he was quite familiar with the barking and the high, thin howl it became.

“Coyote,” he said. “A predator.”

Yan raised his head. He was really suffering in the heat, and was sitting in the back of their “Pick Up” with a cloth over him. Vemik could see the appeal—the sun here was large, and hot and yellow.

“Dangerous?”

“Not to us.”

“You’ve said that about every predator so far,” Yan grumbled. “Isn’t there one on this Earth of yours that humans fear?”

Jooyun nodded. “Sure there are, you’ll meet some later on…actually, funny story.” He chuckled. “There’s one… we call it ‘bear,’ which sorta means ‘the brown one.’ Guess some things are the same everywhere, huh?”

Yan shuddered and looked to the sky. “You have Brown Ones too?”

“Yours are a lot bigger. And nastier. But trust me, we wouldn’t want to tangle with a bear.”

“We have guns!” Vemik said. He’d seen Human guns tear apart the Big Enemy’s weapons, surely there was nothing living that could stand against them? But Jooyun shook his head.

“Lotta times, shooting a bear just makes it angry…” he explained, then perked up as the wind carried a kind of crunching, dusty growling sound toward them. “…I think our guide’s here.”

Vemik, reeling from the notion that an animal could be shot and only get annoyed, turned to see where he was looking. Another “pick up” was kicking up a long tail of dust as it bounced down a long path that was barely worthy of the word to meet them.

There were two guides, in fact. A Human man and woman, both of whom bounced out of the truck grinning broadly and ready to shake hands.

“Are we late, or are you guys early?” the man asked. Humans could be very funny about saying hello sometimes.

“We’re early. Figured I’d give the cavemonkeys a chance to enjoy the view while it was still kinda cool,” Jooyun explained. “Yan Given-Man, Vemik Sky-Thinker, these are Mikey and Raven, our guides.”

“You met already?” Yan groaned as he heaved himself out of the truck. He hated hot days. “When?”

“Never in person. We’ve sent messages.” Jooyun explained. “But it turns out Raven’s like… what are you, my third cousin?”

“Third or fourth, with maybe a removed or two thrown in there somewhere, yeah,” Raven nodded. She had a wide, happy smile that started in her eyes and made them sparkle: Vemik decided he liked her.

“Means what?” Vemik asked.

“We had the same… great-great grandmother?” he asked Raven, who shrugged.

“Think she was my great-great-great, but whatever. So long as it’s good for a selfie, yeah?”

Jooyun chuckled. “Yeah, okay. So, I gotta admit, I know basically nothing about desert survival myself. Hopefully that means I’m gonna learn a few things this week.”

“Should be fun,” Mikey agreed. “We’d better begin before it starts to get hot.”

Yan made a choking noise. “…This is not hot to you?”

“The sun’s only been up for an hour,” Mikey said in a light tone of voice, as though the battering heat that weighed on Vemik’s shoulders like a rock was just a pleasant cool morning.

“We’ll be freezing our tails off tonight,” Jooyun promised. He heaved a bag out of the truck bed and onto his shoulders with an easy shrug.

“Both in one day?” Yan looked up. “…No trees.”

“Exactly. Nothing to keep the warm air near the ground. Nothing but burning sun all day, and cold starlight all night.” Raven produced her own pack from the guides’ truck and put it on. “The animals out here know how to deal with that: they like to live under stuff. So, that’s where today’s lesson begins.”

Vemik and Yan traded a look that they’d traded many times over the last few hands of days. It said something like: ‘…and we thought this would be easy.’

Vemik had said as much to Jooyun, once, who’d immediately lavished a mischievous sideways grin across his face. “Easy, huh?” he’d asked. “What kind of pushovers do you fellas take us for?”

He caught it this time, too. “It’s fine, big guy,” he told Yan. “Just go to your happy place. Think of Amanda.”

It was always fun seeing how fast Yan really was when he was motivated. Jooyun was getting wise to his tricks, but that didn’t mean he could actually do anything about them… a lesson Vemik had learned all too well.

“Funny.” Yan grumbled indulgently, once the blur of motion was over. “A-man-da not strong enough for real man, anyway!”

Mikey paused in putting on his own pack. “…Dare I ask?”

Jooyun was chuckling as he picked himself up, having landed in the dirt several tail-lengths away. That had been a gentle, playful shove by Yan standards. “My kinda-sorta mother-in-law.”

Somehow, this seemed to answer every question both Mikey and Raven had. They glanced at each other, shrugged, and finished getting ready.

“Okay!” Raven said, once everyone was carrying all their stuff. “Ready?”

Vemik shook himself and took a good look at the red, baked land around them. “…At least I learn things,” he said stoically.

“That’s the spirit!” Jooyun gave him a firm smack on the shoulder to encourage him, and then grinned. “Come on.”

The guides led, Vemik followed, and the day unfolded.

The heat only got worse.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Fiin, Champion of Clan Stoneback

There was indeed a shanty perched atop their route through the Ring, and the Great Father’s sense of honor had reared its head as a result. Even though they were about to kill all these people, he wasn’t willing to kill them right this second.

Fiin agreed. But the thought that kept coming back to him like a wad of meat stuck in his back teeth was that he didn’t know why he agreed. After all, it fundamentally didn’t matter… did it?

Daar seemed to think it did, and Daar was in charge. Fiin, meanwhile, had learned the hard way that some questions were not for the battlefield.

As Champion, he was on the command channel alongside Daar, Costello and Regaari. So far, he’d kept his contributions terse and simple. He’d share his thoughts if they were asked for. He’d share them good and hard later, with Champions Gyotin and Genshi. But here and now, he might be Champion but he was following the Great Father.

“Okay. Options.”

“Enter that structural void via another nearby route,” Fiin offered.

“Head turnwise-by-down, use another void about half a klick away.” Costello suggested.

“I see those as the only viable options, other than sticking to the original plan.” Regaari finished.

“I already vetoed that, DEXTER.”

“Yes, sir.” Regaari packed a lot of different meanings into those two brisk syllables, though none were insubordinate.

“CHAMPION has the best solution, I think,” Costello said.

“Agreed.” Daar turned his head Fiin’s way. “You got a preferred option, Brother?”

Fiin called up the map. There was a balancing act to perform here: that void was going to gulp up air from the surrounding compartments, just like the first one they’d entered. The whole point of not going in through what they now knew to be the shanty was not to suffocate the slaves living there, so they would need to breach it somewhere close enough for expediency, but far enough away that the shanty wouldn’t get vented if somebody opened the wrong door.

And they had to choose quick, before the Hunters seized on their moment of stillness as an opportunity. Movement was life: if they got stuck in one place, they’d be besieged and most likely never break free.

“…Straight down,” he said. “Three levels, cut through into that pipe-lookin’ thing.”

The Ring was a three-dimensional maze. Every level of it was packed with stuff that gave no consideration to Gaoian (or Human) comforts or logic like where people were supposed to live and walk. It was like the whole thing was purely industrial: They hadn’t seen a single living quarter yet, not one precinct or arcade.

Then again, how sparse were those things down on a planet? Most of a civilized territory by area was farmland, after all, and much more still was unused wilderness. Cities might seem sprawling and huge, but really they were just dense and complicated.

The Ring was huge enough to definitely have the equivalent of cities somewhere in its structure. But probably they were out in the equivalent of the back-country. It would sure explain why so much of what surrounded them was structural voids: there was nothing living in the area to use the space, so it was kept empty.

None of them had any idea what that pipe was or what it did, but Daar seemed satisfied with Fiin’s suggestion regardless. If it had pressure doors, then they’d be able to safely blast into vacuum without massacring the shanty. “Make it happen.”

It took only a couple of clear instructions to pull the Defenders back to the middle of the formation, where they set about tearing up the floor. The Great Father pitched in alongside them, clawing a grav-plate straight out of the deck and tossing it aside like it was easy.

Fiin would have liked to join him, but he was distracted when HIGHLAND turned and gave him an urgent gesture. He indicated a nearby door the moment Fiin had joined him.

“Noise,” he said.

“Slaves?” Fiin asked

“Prob’ly.”

Sure enough, the door’s huge low-tech seal twisted, squealed and it swung aside, admitting the sound of interrogative chatter from the far side.

A pair of enormous Locayl peered through. Their curiosity turned to rigid shock and fright the second they discovered an armed strike force of deathworlders aiming rifles at them.

Murray spoke in a soft, almost amiable tone that sent an intimidated shiver down Fiin’s spine, let alone the Locayls’.

“Away an’ forget about us now, lads,” he advised. “Best thing for ye.”

The pair fled.

“…One’a these days ‘yer gonna hafta teach me how you do that, bruh,” BASEBALL commented. Murray just shrugged.

Fiin snarled slightly and stalked forward to the door. He closed it, sealed it, then broke out the welding tool he carried for exactly these situations. It took only a few seconds for him to permanently close it: he doubted even WARHORSE could have smashed it open from the other side without explosives.

Behind him, the floor gave way and the Defenders dropped down through it, declaring seconds later that the section they’d just entered was clear. The Protectors were second through it, followed by the Whitecrests, First Fang, and finally the Aggressors.

The second floor was just as easily negotiated as the first.

The third dropped them into a group of extremely surprised Hunters, which reacted with commendable swiftness considering the way the ceiling fell in on them and disgorged a handful of brutally effective elite combat engineers.

Fiin had to admit: he enjoyed killing Hunters. There was something truly satisfying about taking the most feared and loathed creatures in the galaxy and breaking them. And it had become so easy to do; he was fast, he was strong, he had the skills and the will to action.

The most bestest was when his prey recognized what was happening, and flashed a moment of fear. He could see it even in a Hunter’s black, dead eyes: The moment they knew that they were beaten and that there was absolutely nothing they could do to change their fate.

Fyu’s nuts but it made him feel alive!

It ended all too quickly. The Hunters were a small group, maybe a scouting party or maybe… who knew. But they lasted mere seconds and their best shot wasn’t remotely good enough.

MOHO finished the last one off with a crushing blow to the head that left it staggering and half-dead, before dispatching it with a point-blank burst of fire to the torso. He left left it crumpled on the deck, but Fiin could see his eyes behind the visor: he felt it too.

Daar hopped down the hole an instant later and surveyed the carnage silently before turning to their target.

“…What’s in that pipe?” he asked, referring to the huge tube running alongside them, easily big enough even for a Hunter to stand up straight in. Humans and Gao, being much smaller, would have no trouble at all fitting inside.

TITAN sprang over to it and pressed a sensor against its surface. “…Water,” he said, after a second. “A fuck of a lotta water.”

“You can work with that, right?” Daar asked.

“Hell yes, sir,” TITAN had a grin in his voice as he gestured to SNAPFIRE. Fiin made room as the rest of the force came down to join them.

SNAPFIRE was already prepping a charge. “Water hammer?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“Awesome.”

“Yup.”

Everybody knew what that tone of voice meant: the whole strike force backed away from them, to a safe distance. Fiin couldn’t blame them: Water, being incompressible, behaved in some very interesting ways when combined with high explosives.

Such as, for example, becoming a lethal cutting jet that blew right through the pipe on detonation and tore out the other side. Rather than flooding them, Sikes and Akiyama had instead created a relatively small hole on their side, and a fuckin’ huge one on the far side.

The decompression did the rest, tearing the pipe open and spilling the water out into vacuum, where it promptly became a fog, and then a cloud of ice crystals as the gas pressure plummeted and took the temperature with it.

It was pretty fuckin’ beautiful, actually. Silence fell again as the air went away, and Fiin reflected that he’d spent most of this mission so far with nothing to listen to except the sound of his own breathing, and the occasional muffled thud and bump through his suit whenever he touched something.

“This one should get us within two klicks of that hangar on the surface,” Costello observed, as the HEAT stepped out into the space beyond and resumed maneuvering on their suit thrusters. Their helmet lights cut eerie beams through the great cloud of snow they’d made.

Fiin used the command channel to privately share a concern that had been building in the back of his mind for a while. “Anyone else think the resistance has been pretty light so far?”

“Yeah.” Daar agreed. “Means they’re waiting ‘fer us, most likely.”

“Right.” Costello stepped out into the void, and Fiin followed him.

Whatever came, would come. There was no sense worrying about it.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Jamie Choi

Maybe Jamie was just starved for human contact, but their next visitor was… stunning. Despite the old split eyebrow she could have been a movie star, no question, and she moved like…

He remembered not to stare, though it took an effort when she thanked the MP who escorted her in by flashing a warm smile.

Damian sat up a little in his bed and blinked: he’d nearly nodded off there.

“Uh… hi? I’m guessing you’re miss Chang?”

“That’s me.” She smiled and shook his hand, then Holly’s, and finally Jamie’s. Her hands were surprisingly tough and hard: they looked a lot softer than they were. “You guys raised quite a fuss when we heard you were back… Moses is on his way, but he won’t be here until this evening. In the meantime, you’ve got me. Sorry.”

“I think we’ll cope,” Jamie ventured with a chuckle. “Y’know, the CO here had some crazy things to say about you…”

She made a complicated gesture and sat down in one of the visitor’s chairs. “I’m sure. But I’m here for you guys… There’s four of you?” she asked, looking at Cook.

“Sort of. Ray… that’s Doctor Wheeler, Rachel. She’s, uh…” Jamie trailed off, not quite knowing how to finish the sentence. Holly looked like she was about to start crying again.

“…We’re not sure she’s going to make it,” Damian finished. He sounded numb, not that Jamie could blame him.

Chang bowed her head a little. “…I take it Doctor Berry-Brown and Mister Conley didn’t make it.” They shook their heads, and she sighed. “…I’m sorry.”

“You flew a ship. You know what crew’s like…” Damian said.

“Well.. my crew was a little different to yours,” she said, “…But yeah. If we’d lost… I’d be devastated. I know it’s a dumb question, but are you guys okay?”

“I got shot!” Holly told her. She seemed weirdly proud of it. “Right in the…” she prodded at her bandage then frowned at it. “…It doesn’t even hurt anymore though. They gave me something called, uh… Cruiser?”

“Cruezzir. It’s imported alien medicine. You’ll be all healed up by the time Moses gets here, probably.”

“Good stuff!” Jamie exclaimed, then glanced at Cook. “…Guess it doesn’t work so great on some things though, huh?”

“Not so much…” Chang stood up and checked on Cook for herself. “…They told me he’s sedated.”

“He… didn’t take things well,” Damian explained. “Cracked that guy Jack right in the jaw… Kid can take a punch, I’ll give him that.”

“…It’s a jolt, coming back,” Chang said. “How much did they tell you?”

Jamie answered for all three of them. “There was a lot. Something about how the motherfuckers who bombed San Diego are an alien conspiracy to make us all extinct, and… Well, I guess Cook… I don’t even know. He just… snapped.”

“Is he gonna be okay?” Holly asked.

“If I know Moses Byron, he’ll do absolutely everything in his power for him. For all of you,” Chang predicted.

Jamie and Damian both stared at her for a second, then looked to each other, then at Holly.

“…If that’s so, then he’s a changed man,” Damian said at last. “Compared to the guy who threw us out into space in a cheap ship we barely understood with no map.”

“He is.”

“…You sound like you really believe that.”

Chang chewed on her lower lip for a second, then did something Jamie really couldn’t have foreseen: she shrugged off her jacket, dropped it neatly over the back of a chair, and then rolled up her sleeve.

Her arm was a fractal tapestry of awful scars. Those weren’t self-harm scars or anything; that was an arm that had once suffered a grievous injury.

“…I’ve been through a lot,” she said after letting them stare at it for a few seconds. “I was a Corti abductee, I nearly got eaten by Hunters—that’s where I got these—I had to watch somebody very dear to me sacrifice herself to save my life…”

Her voice caught a little on the word ‘sacrifice,’ and it took her a moment to rally. She pointed out another scar on her neck. “…I had a knife held to my throat so hard that it cut, and I nearly got spaced. Have you ever tried to breathe hard vacuum?”

Transfixed, Jamie just shook his head. She gave him a complicated look he couldn’t really understand: there was a bit of optimism in there, a little trauma, and a large dose of resilience. Above all, it said ‘I have.’

“When I got back to Earth… I wasn’t whole,” she continued. “I didn’t have a purpose, or a life really. I just had my loved ones. And I thought maybe that would have been enough…. but they knew better. They knew we needed to have a purpose. Moses Byron gave us that purpose. He gave us a brand-new ship, made by human hands with human technology. We called her Misfit and I was her pilot, and together we went to amazing places, saw amazing things, met amazing people…”

She rolled her sleeve back down. “…I truly believe he’s a changed man,” she finished. “I think he’s carrying a lot of guilt over what happened to you.”

“As he should,” Damian grumbled, but it sounded like his heart wasn’t in it. Jamie could sympathize—the last person he’d heard speak with such conviction had been Ray.

Chang shrugged her jacket on. “He’ll be here in a few hours,” she said. “If that’s a conversation you want to have with him… well, go for it, I say. I’ll tell him what’s going on with you guys and keep the press off your backs until then… But I need to know what happened to you. Starting from the top.”

“It’s… I don’t know if I’m ready to…” Damian began. Jamie nodded fervently, while Holly just lowered her gaze to stare at her toes.

Chang nodded soothingly. “I understand,” she said earnestly. “And if there’s anything you can’t say yet, that’s fine. I’ll hear whatever you say, no judgement, no pressure, no questions.”

She settled in her chair, crossed one knee over the other, and waited. There was a moment of silence where the only sound was the distant conversation of doctors elsewhere in the medical wing, and then Jamie found himself speaking without ever consciously deciding to.

“…We didn’t have a map,” he began. “No infrastructure, nothing. There was a paid contact out at… Where was it, Irbzrk?”

Damian nodded. “Yeah. Irbzrk. Some guy Moses hired to set up a jump beacon for us. Hell, the ship was mostly made from Irbzrk parts, so I guess he got everything at the same place. So we jumped out there, picked a direction and went with it. Guess nobody bothered to tell us Irbzrk is pretty fuckin’ close to Hunter space…”

“Or that all the best temperate planets in that volume are in Hunter space…” Holly added.

“So, our exoplanet ‘scope pings a half-dozen interesting worlds in that direction and, well… I guess that’s where it begins,” Damian finished. “We flew in there and we found… well, we found…”

Chang didn’t speak. She just listened politely, until the right word dragged itself out of Jamie’s mouth.

“…Hell,” he said.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Brother Daar (“Tigger”) of Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao

“Huh. Guess some things’re the same everywhere.”

They were gettin’ back into important territory: Daar could tell from the emergency forcefields that snapped up when they breached through from the structural void and kept the air in. The Hunters hadn’t seemed to give a stinky fur-mattin’ shit ‘fer damage control near the slave shanty, but now that they were comin’ out to somewhere with actual strategic value again…

They’d entered a rail yard. No mistakin’ it, rail trains were the same all over the galaxy. Sure, folks sometimes got fancy with air-cushion, maglev or forcefield crap but when it came ‘ta movin’ lotsa heavy shit a long way overland, nobody’d ever come up with nothin’ that beat parallel metal rails.

Sure, the gauge changed, an’ from the looks of things the Hunters used a dual-gauge system that could handle two different sizes of locomotive an’ car, but switches, sidings an’ junctions worked the same everywhere.

This one was full of freight cars and a couple of the bigger-gauge locomotives, most parked under a drone gantries ready to take loads of the scrap metal coming from the ship-breaking station in the next section. That was their objective: The Ring’s hull was thick, they didn’t have anything like enough charges or firepower to blast a hole in it, so they needed to get out through an existing hole. The nearest one to their ingress was a scrapper array, apparently an automated station that tore captured ships apart for recycling into Hunter swarm craft.

As they emerged into the rail yard, however, Daar found his hackles wanting to rise. It was dense, crowded territory. Lots of cover, lots of choke points. If he were to lay an ambush, he’d do it here.

The Hunters didn’t disappoint.

This brood had cloaking devices, and were lurking atop the rail cars, between them, maybe even hanging invisibly from the ceiling… waiting. If their ambush had unfolded as intended it might even have been bad for Clan SOR.

Instead, Regaari literally bumped into one.

He’d taken the ceiling route himself, trusting his armor’s adaptive camouflage to keep him hidden in the shadows. Daar flinched as there was an alarmed yip and then two flickering, barely-visible shadows dropped from the ceiling to crash onto the rails in a flailing, tumbling, snarling ball.

There was a hum, a flash of orange-yellow light, and the Hunter’s cloak failed as Regaari dragged his fusion claws right up its spine. He was framed in the light atop its corpse for a second before dissolving back into the shadows.

“They’re cloaked!”

“Smoke out!”

With their ambush spotted, the Hunters opened fire. Their fusion weapons would have been deadly in a melee, but at range their weapons weren’t equal to the EV-MASS or First Fang’s hardsuits.

The Brothers got into cover anyway: Armor was the last line of defence, not something to rely on. Their return fire rippled and cracked in the smoke, aimed at wherever they thought a Hunter might be.

Confusion descended. The smoke concealed them and their movements, but the cloaked Hunters were just as veiled. It was difficult to tell how much of the fight involved shooting at ghosts, but Daar could tell the Hunters were firing blind too. Firepower cracked and whined as it spat off the trains and rails around him.

Too late, he realized it was all a distraction.

Faarek spotted it first. “Hostile Jump Array, under construction! Far end!”

Fiin was on it in an instant, and barked an order for First Fang’s benefit. “Round and pounce, badpaw.”

“Cubs distract Mother,” Regaari added. The Whitecrests shifted their pattern of hit-and-fade ambushes and “exposed” themselves, inviting the Hunters to focus their way. Torn between their misdirection and the relentless knot of Humans in the middle of the formation, the Hunters completely lost track of the Stonebacks, who charged off around on the left flank hoping to outflank them and strike at the array in the back of the rail yard before anything could come through.

They weren’t quick enough. There was the characteristic thump of the Array firing, followed instantly by a hail of withering firepower that the Brothers aborted their charge rather than be cut down by. Something up there had an absolute hellstormer of a gun.

“They jumped something in!”

Daar finished tearing a Hunter’s throat out and turned just in time to see the new arrival make its big entrance.

It was as huge as one’a the Hierarchy’s Abrogators, a Hunter the size of a tank or a house, and the fucker smashed right through a train with a backhand swat that crushed a freight car, broke the linkages and toppled it to the deck. Men hurled themselves to safety as a spread of nervejam grenades clattered around them, and Daar ducked his head down as a blizzard of huge, heavy bullets made a fuckin’ mess of one of the locomotives.

And behind this new foe, the Hunter jump array thumped again.

Time to really go to work.

“HEAT! Get the Big’n! Brothers! The small ones!”

Combat was Chaos, in its rawest and most bloodiest form. Victory didn’t automatically go to the bigger side, the stronger side or the sharpest-clawed side. It went to the side that could out-think, out-maneuver, and out-pace its foe.

In this regard, Humans and Gaoians were alike in being far superior to the Hunters. Daar had only to broadcast the plan and the teams reacted accordingly. There was no need for orders, discussion, deliberation or anything, they just knew. The HEAT redeployed, flowed smoothly from one footing to another and brought their unique brand of violence to bear, spurring the monster into focusing on them.

The Gaoians knew each other’s strengths intimately from over a year of intense inter-Clan training, and brought them together like jaws. First, the Brothers of First Fang would present an obvious danger that the Hunters kept at a sensible distance. In so doing, they would blunder into the Whitecrests and their endlessly useful gizmos, which slowed them down, brought them to a stop and blinded them.

Then together, the two would slaughter their foes.

Daar left Fiin and Regaari to handle that side of the fight. His own talents were better used on the big one.

It was fast, agile and layered in all sortsa weapons. A tank, yeah. A tank that had the speed and wits to keep its ass covered and didn’t expose itself stupidly. This one was fuckin’ smart.

MOHO had one’a them latest-gen Javelin anti-tank rounds folded up nice and small on his back. Perfect for takin’ it down, if it weren’t shielded an’ if he could get a clean shot on it. Alternatively, they had shaped explosive charges which Titan an’ Snapfire were doin’ their best to deploy. The big fucker weren’t gonna be so easy to lure over those traps, but at least they were a way to limit its movement, guard their flanks.

Daar, however, had one trick up his sleeve that the Humans didn’t. A little gift from Genshi, the prototype blueprints of which had been rescued from a bank vault right in the opening days of the War. One of Whitecrest’s finest and newest toys.

He picked his moment carefully, waited until the giant Hunter couldn’t see him, then led STARFALL and KIWI up one side in the cover of a so-far undamaged train. His suit was tryin’ to tell him where the monster was via sensor contact, but he didn’t need that—It was makin’ a fuck of a lotta noise as it crashed around and laid down a withering rain o’ bullets. So far, things were lookin’ like a stalemate: It didn’t dare engage the HEAT, an’ they couldn’t catch it.

Pounce was Daar’s very most favoritest game.

His moment came when the big’n jinked toward him. He went one way, gestured for the two Humans to go another. They got its attention with a burst of accurate fire that rippled and flashed harmlessly off its shield while Daar sprinted four-pawed across the open ground behind it and left his toy on the deck behind him, armed and waiting.

Shit that gun was nasty. KIWI staggered back into cover as a round crunched into his midsuit armor, and fell heavily on his ass. Sensing an opening the monster advanced, thirsty for blood.

It was thwarted by the Beef Trio. ‘Horse and ‘Base both used the heavy version of the GR-1d, with the amped-up heavy coils and the dense penetrator rounds, while Righteous preferred the agile short-barreled configuration with the rapid-charge coils that could spit bullets like a firehose.

In the face of an onslaught like that, the Hunter-tank sensibly fell back and Daar grinned inside his helmet as its retreat carried it right over the Shield Disruptor he’d just dropped.

There was a blue-bright flash, a crackle, and every shield emitter on the tank’s body was instantly fried. It turned, sprayed more bullets in search of whichever target had done that to it, and as it did Blaczynski took his shot.

His preferred GR-1d was a marksman variant. Long-barrelled, powerful, and lethally precise. There was a bursting, smashing sound and the nervejam grenade launcher on the enemy’s right arm fuckin’ exploded.

Thwarted and wounded, it sprayed them with a parting burst of firepower to force their heads down, and vanished among the trains.

‘Base and ‘Horse immediately piled onto KIWI, checking he was alright, but he waved them off as he tried to stand up.

“‘M’alright… Jus’ winded…”

‘Base didn’t bother arguing with him, wrapped an arm around KIWI’s gut and stood up with several hundred pounds of Operator plus his gear flung effortlessly over his shoulder. “Nuh-uh. Quick check and some Crude. Just take a minute.” He jogged off toward relative safety; two men out of the fight for the moment.

There was another thump. That Array was still up, an’ it needed to come down yesterday before another one’a those tanks came through.

Daar turned in that direction and shouldered his gun. “Push!”

There was still a lot of work to do.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Air Engineering Technician Jack “TWO-SEVENTY” Tisdale

“Y’know, I’m actually kinda impressed. You took that hit like a champ.”

“Mm.” Jack massaged his jaw again and refrained from commenting on the lingering taste of blood or his worry that one of his molars might be kinda loose now. He’d come to see Cook as a skinny, malnourished, weakened ghost of a man, but manic energy had lent his fist some serious force.

The fact that he’d just borne the blow with a grunt and wrestled the flailing explorer back down onto his bed until somebody sedated him had definitely won him some more points in Miller’s book, he could tell.

Mears had told them to go get some rest of their own when Spears and Choi had both gone to sleep. Chase was still awake and almost bouncing thanks to a shot of Crude, but she’d come down off that high pretty bloody hard in an hour or two. In the interim…

They’d wandered back through into the suit workshop. It was deserted now: the other techs had all sorted out their charges’ gear, straightened out their stations, stowed their tools and replenished their material supplies, cleaned up, and gone to wait on standby mode for their Operators to return.

MOHO’s station was a little island of disarray in the middle of all that orderliness. Probably only suit techs would have spotted the difference, but to their practiced eye it stood out like Firth wearing one of his eye-gouging aloha shirts to a funeral.

They set to work on cleaning it up.

“…You’re not actually hurt, right?” Miller checked. “‘Cuz if your jaw’s broke or whatever…”

“No, it’s fine,” Jack promised. “Come on, I take heavier hits than that every time Adam hugs me.”

“Heh…” she chuckled and set about sorting their assorted midsuit probes back into their holding rack. “…You’ve been quiet though. More than usual, I mean. Anything you wanna talk about?”

Jack shrugged, and grabbed the cleaning cloths so he could buff some spilled lubricant off the bench. “Not sure where I’d start. I’m okay, I just… Never mind. I’m okay though, I promise.”

“Good.” She gave him a smile. It looked a little strained.

“…Are you okay?” Jack asked.

“I just…” she paused, then put the last probe away and turned around. “They ate people, Jack. Threw them under the bus to get outta there. That’s…”

“…Yeah.”

“…That’s all you have to say? ‘Yeah’?” Miller grabbed the hand sanitizer and thoroughly rubbed it into her palms and fingers. “Jesus, I was brushing that chick’s hair…”

Jack finished cleaning up the solvent and dropped the used cloth into the bin on the station’s side, before ducking into the cabinet to fetch some new ones. “I know.”

“Jack, sweetie, stop being cagey and…” she paused and gave him a slow look. “…It doesn’t bother you so much, does it?”

Jack sighed and stopped working. “All living things have to eat,” he pointed out. “That’s, er… it’s not negotiable. And it’s not like it’s unaddressed. Have you ever heard of the ‘Custom of the Sea?’”

“That some Navy thing?”

“I don’t know of it ever happening in the Royal Navy, but there was an American whaling ship back in the nineteenth century called the Essex. A whale sank it, and the crew, er… drew lots to see who had to take one for the team. That’s the custom: a few die so the rest can live.”

“…That doesn’t change the fact that it’s murder.”

“No, it doesn’t.” After a moment he added, “What we do doesn’t change that we’re accessory to murder, either. You and me.”

“We’re… what, now?”

“Have you seen what Firth does? Or Murray? Tell me that isn’t murder.”

“That’s war.” She looked away and found something small to tinker with. ”It’s not the same thing.”

“True, it’s not. It’s legal murder, that’s the difference. But it’s murder nonetheless. I mean, bloody hell! It meets all the definitions! It’s premeditated… there’s malice aforethought, even!”

“…And then there’s that bomb they took with them,” she said quietly after a few seconds.

“…Yeah.”

“A lotta people on that Ring.”

“Yeah.”

Miller’s thumb nervously smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle in her pants. She wasn’t looking at him. “…That’s a lotta people they’re gonna kill,” she pointed out. “A lotta murder we’re accessory to.”

“That’s the thing. Sometimes, murder is necessary.”

Her head finally snapped up and she looked at him again. “…How can you say that of all people?!” She asked. “I mean… your sister…”

“I’m aware,” Jack sighed. “And you know what? She’d just have been the first if we hadn’t murdered those bastards right back. And here we are again, doing what we do because if we don’t then those soulless fucks will keep on murdering and murdering and murdering until the end of fucking time. We just call it killing instead of murder because we want to draw a distinction, but I don’t think that’s honest. Call a spade a spade, you know?”

“And then what? They murder us back to defend their lives? Is that all this is, an endless cycle of folks murdering folks?” She sighed and stopped “…You’re right. I know you’re right. I fucking signed up for this. I just… it slapped me in the face today.”

“…Tea?”

She stared at him stupidly for a second and then a snort-laugh exploded out of her. “…Shit, you’re British sometimes.”

“And cute!” He joked. “That wasn’t a no, though.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll drink your limey harbor-juice.”

He chuckled as he headed for the vending machines in the corner. Somehow, the one they had for hot drinks consistently produced something that was actually worth drinking, not that the Americans ever touched it. “Pfeh, you colonials are always so low-brow…”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re right about the cute, though…”

She finished tidying the station as he extracted two plastic cups of hot brown stuff from the machine, and accepted it with a quiet ‘thanks.’

“…I guess it’s valid, though.” Jack said after they’d hung out in silence for a couple of sips.

“…What is?”

“Your question. Are we just stuck in a cycle?”

She shrugged and blew across the drink’s surface to chill it. “…I guess. But there’s no way outta the cycle, is there? If we give up on it we all die.”

“And if they’d given up—” Jack gestured back toward the infirmary “—they’d have starved to death. And… I mean, Ree, if I had to choose between murder some poor ET or watch you starve to death…”

She stared into her tea for a second then shut her eyes, set it down sharply and nodded.

Jack pulled her into a hug, not that she needed any convincing. His shoulder made her voice muffled when she spoke after a few seconds.

“…Dammit, you made me cry. I hate crying.”

“Sorry.”

“For what?” She let go and straightened up, wiping her eyes. “For saying you care? Jack, that’s about the sweetest thing anyone’s said to me in a long time.”

Not knowing how to reply to that, Jack just picked up his tea again and drank about half of it in one go. She watched him for a second with a slowly spreading smile, then picked up hers as well.

“And for the record?” She added. “…Yeah. If I had to make that choice… I guess I shouldn’t blame them so much.”

“I bet they blame themselves.”

“…Yeah.”

They finished both their drinks and cleaning up the station in comfortable silence, and by mutual agreement headed back to the rec room to rest and wait for their Operators to come back. There was plenty of discarded food around the place in there, which they grazed on while Miller picked out a movie—Kung-Fu Hustle—and they settled on the Couch to watch.

Well… Jack watched it. Miller on the other hand fell asleep on his shoulder with her hand in a bag of popcorn, and when he tried to get her to pay attention she just mumbled, withdrew her hand from the bag and cuddled his arm before falling asleep again.

He didn’t try to wake her a second time. After a while, he fell asleep too.

Date Point 15y6m1d AV
Whitecrest Clan enclave, Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Champion Genshi of Whitecrest

Reunions were exhausting. Especially reunions with a Brother—a true brother—that Genshi had mourned and mentally buried years ago. Having him back was in its strange way almost as traumatic as losing him had been.

Garaaf wasn’t the same as he’d been before. He’d always been the more straight-laced and serious of them, a little less of a conduit for the spirit of constructive mischief that was part of Whitecrest’s character…

But now he was… terse. Quiet. Intense. His personality was just as scarred and mutilated as his face, to those who knew him well… and nobody had known him better than Genshi.

They’d cuddled up in private and spent some time bonding. Neither of them wanted to pull apart, leave the enclave, or do much anything besides rest and bask in each other’s company.

And talk. Not about anything consequential or dark. Instead, they were chatting about hopeful, light subjects. Scrubbing some of the darkness away, as it were.

“…You know what I’m looking forward to most? Depth perception.”

Genshi duck-nodded lazily. They’d raided (and exhausted) the enclave’s supply of traditional Gaoian foods in one giant personal feast. While Genshi had been nursing an unaccountable craving for a “Murray Salad,” he knew Garaaf well, and if he’d been through what his Brother had then he’d have wanted a taste of home. Familiar comforts like Naxas jerky and Talamay.

And peshorkies, of course. Far too many of them. Now they were relaxing after gorging themselves, both feeling fat and sleepy.

“…Cybernetic, or cloned transplant?” he asked.

Garaaf shivered. “Transplant, I think,” he declared. “Cybernetics are too… Hunter.”

Genshi personally would have preferred an implant in his younger days to take advantage of the enhanced capabilities they could offer, but the Hierarchy had effectively soured him on that idea permanently.

“Father Regaari feels a little differently,” he commented. “I don’t think he’d trade that paw of his for a line of eager Females.”

“He made Father? Good for him.” Garaaf stretched and yawned. “…I still can barely believe he survived Capitol Station.”

“It’s a Keeda tale, it really is,” Genshi agreed. “Though he tells it best himself.”

“I’m not sure when I’ll have time to hear it,” Garaaf complained. “I tried to stay up-to-date as well as I could, but… there’s a lot to take in, I’m sure.”

“Yes. More than you know.” Genshi sat up and sobered. “…Are you strong enough to start hearing it now? There is… much.”

“…Yes.” Garaaf turned over and sat up as well. “Let’s start with why the Gao have a Great Father again…”

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lt. Col. Owen “Stainless” Powell

Powell had been expecting the knock on the door for a while. It was kind of a relief when it came.

“Come in.”

An MP pushed the door ajar and stood aside. “Miss Chang for you, sir.”

“Aye, cheers.”

Powell stood up as Chang was ushered into his office. She gave the MP a thank-you smile, gave Powell a different kind of thank-you smile as they shook hands, and sat when he gestured to the chair opposite him. She looked strained.

“Cuppa?” Powell offered, on the grounds that tea fixed everything.

“Um… thank you. I’d really appreciate a coffee, actually,” she agreed, and seemed to relax a little.

Brewing up two hot drinks was easy enough, and Powell indulged in the usual small-talk as he made them. Weather, how she and hers were doing, and so on. He returned to businesslike talk upon setting the drinks down on his desk and taking his seat.

“…Messy business, this,” he commented.

She nodded and took hold of the mug with both hands. Maybe her hands were cold. “Very,” she agreed. “I… um, that is we… We have questions.”

Powell nodded. “Thought you might. I hope you understand, I might not be able to answer ‘em, but ask away.”

She scented her coffee for a moment. “…Mister Byron, um… he’s aware that we depend on AEC’s good graces. Obviously I need to go talk to the press soon. I need to know what I can and can’t say.”

“…They told you about the Ring and all that?” Powell asked. She nodded. “We’d prefer to keep that thing’s existence to ourselves for now. In fact, the details of their escape should probably be kept close to your chest in general. Especially, er… the details of how they fed themselves that whole time. Aye?”

She nodded fervently. “I wasn’t planning to mention that,” she agreed. She had a distinctly green, queasy look about her, so Powell pushed forward so as not to make her dwell on it.

“Short version? I’m requesting that you refrain from commenting on what the Allied military’s response to this event may or may not be,” he said. “We refuse to comment on active operations, not even to confirm or deny whether such an operation is in progress.”

“Which it is.”

“No comment.”

“…Right. Um, yes…” She paused then nodded. “Okay, that’s simple enough. Um… obviously, MBG are going to want to know, well, everything…”

“Aye, and we can’t rightly stop you from telling your boss what you just heard today. I suspect it’ll all come out in due course anyway. All we’re asking for is time.”

She nodded understanding. “Enough time for whatever operation may or may not be in progress to play out.”

“Just time, please. Let’s leave it at that.”

She nodded, but it looked like something was deeply troubling her. “…Colonel… there are probably billions of people on that Ring…” she said, after a few seconds.

Powell locked his face down. “Aye?” he said, slowly. “What of it?”

“That would… I mean, presumably that would mean at least some of them are Gaoians.”

“Miss Chang, I mean no disrespect, but I’d appreciate it if you could cut to the chase.”

She nodded. “…I’m a Sister of the Clan of Females and a confidant of the Mother-Supreme,” she reminded him. “We know that the Hunters prefer to abduct Gaoian females and cubs. Thousands have been taken over the years, and Yulna will want to know if you have any plans to rescue them.”

“I can’t answer that. I’m sorry.”

“Right.” She drained a surprisingly large gulp of her coffee in one go and sniffed. “I have to tell her something though, Colonel. I mean, I presume your request for time applies to the Clan of Females as well, but…”

Powell raised his hand. “Obviously I don’t expect you to stonewall Yulna, but there are… er…” he paused, calculating the right words. “…I think it will soon become clear to the Mother-Supreme which channels are more appropriate for voicing those kinds of questions.”

“I see.” She finished her coffee and set it down with a grimace. That drink had to be painfully hot, but Powell didn’t comment. “Thank you, Colonel.”

Powell stood to shake her hand. “I promise, we’ll work out a more constructive conversation as soon as possible,” he said. “And please, you let Moses Byron and the Mother-Supreme know they’re both welcome to contact me. If I can’t answer their questions, I can at least direct them to somebody who can.”

“And the Dauntless crew?”

“I understand Doctor Wheeler is on life support in our infirmary. The other four will need debriefing and, frankly, they’re all badly malnourished and traumatized. They’ll get the best possible care on all counts right here. If MBG want to remove them…?”

“I think I’ll leave that one to Mister Byron,” Chang said.

“That’s probably wise.” Powell gave her a small, encouraging smile. “Good luck with the press, aye?”

“Thanks. I think I might need it.”

“You’ll be fine,” he promised.

The assurance seemed to help her. She produced a genuine smile for the first time since entering his office, shook his hand, and was gone in the MP’s company as briskly as she’d arrived.

As soon as the door shut behind her, he turned to the latest from Intel.

Still no signal. Still no word. Scouts were still hours away from the Hell system, and still detecting a gravity spike of immense scope and power on long-range scanners.

He pulled a face, muttered “hmm” to himself, and drank his tea.

It didn’t help.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell system, Hunter space

WARHORSE

Big bastard. Not slow, fast. Dangerous.

Light it up. Gun kicking in hands, a firehose of shieldbreaker rounds.

Enemy’s aim spoiled as its shields collapse. STARFALL wrecks the grenade launcher on its hand with a precision shot, it spins into cover.

Brother hurtin’. Check him. Talking, moving, good signs. ‘Base picks him up, gets him safe.

Push.

Hunter array goes thump again. Four heavy Hunters, big but not like the monster. Light them up too. Spread out, make room. Nervejam can’t get them all. No flashes yet. No pain. Shieldbreaker up close, charge. Take more work to break but ‘Horse got it done. Jump and pin. Crack, fucker breaks like stick. Grab head, pull off armor along neck. Punch through throat. Smash skull, no time for fun. Bounce, fall back to cover before others react. Assess.

Not as puny as other Hunters. Gonna take a while to kill them all. Too long.

But ground gained. Array in sight.

“Horse!” Tigger giving orders. Points at Array. “Wreck that!”

Hell yeah.

Reload: ferrous penetrator rounds, dial up power. Open fire, sparks fly, Array wrecked. Hunters shoot back, but there’s cover. Switch to shieldbreakers, First Fang flanking through concealment on the left.

Up. Shoot.

Enemy shields down. They retreat toward cover, right into Fiin. Gore everywhere.

Grin.

Tearing metal, right side. Gunfire and shouts. Big Bastard’s still fightin’, Brothers fightin’ harder. Move up, look for an angle.

Explosion back there somewhere. Can’t see shit. Another explosion, crates burst as Big Bastard claws them aside. Get a clean shot.

Fire.

Its shields are already down. Shieldbreakers don’t do shit to armor, just make sparks. Switch mags, dial up power again. Big Bastard vanishes behind a locomotive.

SLAM!

Fuckin’ freight car gets knocked off rails and sent crashing across the deck. Jump, dodge. Regroup.

Monkey-thought flickers through brain: Two can play at that game.

“‘Base!”

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

Usually the HEAT could rip anything apart. Usually, the HEAT was bigger, meaner and tougher than anything.

This thing, whatever it was, was giving them a hell of a run for their money. Thank fuck for seasoned master sergeants: Costello could rely on Firth, and that made all the difference. And after whatever is was that Daar had done, the big Hunter was definitely feeling the pressure.

Keeping the pressure on wasn’t going to be enough, though. They’d picked a fight with a fucking tank. Worse, they’d picked a fight with a tank that could move like an agile infantryman and was strong enough to derail freight cars. And it was fucking smart, too. They were having a hard time pinning it down.

It knew the terrain, it could shape the goddamn terrain when it needed to, and it managed to be both cagey and bold at exactly the right moments. Each time Costello thought it had overextended itself, it would fade back into the trainyard and they’d be back to playing catchup, or recoiling from its counterattack.

He threw himself across an open space, chasing it, looking for a shot. Blaczynski had winged the fucker and taken out one of its weapons, but other than that it looked to be unscathed. ‘Horse had scratched its paint, and it had blundered through one of Titan’s claymores without apparently suffering for it.

They needed options. And they needed them before somebody got killed.

Fortunately, the Protectors provided.

Brother Daar of Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao

A Hotball woulda been awesome just then. The very idea he had somethin’ like that nominally at his clawtips was deeply boner-inducing, but. Damn monsters had a wormhole doohicky up though, so they had to use the next best thing.

Daar pulled his head back in as a mess of bullets tore up the deck. He weren’t dead, no big deal.

“Need’ta pin this fucker!” he barked.

“Or corral it!”

“Way ahead’a you, Tigger!”

Daar pulled a face inside his mask as a shrill metallic scream ravaged his ears, and looked over just in time to see ‘Base and ‘Horse fucking tipping a freight car, right off the rails. It was a fuckin’ effort even for them, but by Keeda they actually managed it. Then they dashed over and tipped another, and then another…

Each one crashed to the deck with a sound like… well, like a real heavy steel railroad car bein’ tipped over.

Fuckin’ A.

“Fiin! Righteous!”

Anything the Beef Bros could do, the Champions of Stoneback could do too. Hell, Daar had taught those two how to flip cars. As Costello stepped in to ward the tank-thing away and give ‘em the room they needed to work, he slammed into the side of a car, got his claws under it and heaved.

Firth was a second behind him, then Fiin. For a heartbeat, Daar had a flash of doubt about maybe he weren’t quite strong enough…

But he pushed through it. It made his whole body groan, but the fuckin’ thing finally moved, shifted, rose. The far wheels finally slipped off the rail and…

Fyu’s furry ass the crash of it finally goin’ over was the most fuckin’ sweetest sound.

Onto the next one. Maybe they could catch up to the Bros! Gaps were closing, or at least the monster was gonna hafta go over ‘em or move ‘em. That’d slow it, expose it.

They could catch it. They could kill it.

They could win.

The Alpha-of-Alphas

Clever Foes. Too clever.

Barely five or six were strong enough to derail the freight system, but that was enough. Interesting how the sixth wasn’t joining in. It was…

Lay down fire, dart between cars, scuttle over a stack of scrap bins. It needed a closer look.

One of the smaller ones was stealthy, quick. It took a shot, and the Alpha-of-Alphas reared up to aim a burst of micro-missiles. The assailant was already gone.

Move. Sideways, around a crane, circle the knot of foes.

< Glee >

What a hunt! The Alpha-of-Alphas hadn’t felt so alive since the day it hunted a Vulza for its throne, and this was far more intense.

Its prey was in sight. Carrying something large. Something…

Black. Only one thing was that black. It was looking at a stasis field, and suddenly—

There was a burst of firepower. These ones hit, caused actual damage, tore off a micromissile launcher. It reeled out of sight and found itself with diminished options. The rail cars were strewn all over the yard now, each one an obstacle that would need moving or vaulting. Slowing it, exposing it.

But the galling thing was that the Alpha-of-Alphas knew perfectly well that the Prey had already won.

It broadcast across the entire Hunter network. +< Command; Urgent; Immediate > Recall all broods. Launch the Swarm-of-Swarms.+

Puzzled queries and demands for confirmation came back immediately. It overruled them all, locked down the channels, asserted every iota of its authority. Juggling attention like that was hazardous. But the enemy had brought a bomb, and there was now nothing the Alpha-of-Alphas could do to stop them from destroying the Hive.

< Satisfaction >

Its Hunt had been a success: It knew what the Enemy were up to now.

But the distraction proved fatal.

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

Trust the Protectors to come up with a solution. Even by their standards that was a hell of a feat of strength, but goddamn if it didn’t work. The big spider-tank seemed to actually be stymied by the new obstacles. Not stopped, but definitely slowed and deflected.

“DEXTER! Right! TITAN! Up the middle!”

They had it, they had it! He could feel it in his gritted teeth. As the Whitecrests redeployed up the right flank they had their tricky little gizmos ready for if it went that way. If it tried to go down the middle it’d run right into the HEAT and Costello was pretty sure it wouldn’t stand up to a serious volley of penetrator rounds.

And if it went left, there was MOHO waiting for it with his Javelin.

It went left.

Daar

Big bastard didn’t go without a fight, that’s ‘fer sure. Its weapons tore up the deck, carved holes in the trains. Daar watched his Brothers throw themselves to safety. Nobody hurt thank fuck. Couple’a near hits though, and Daar found himself praying to the old gods that everyone’s suits would hold up.

MOHO had balls though. He popped outta cover the first opening he got and rammed a Javelin right down the fucker’s throat while Sikes laid down covering fire. High-explosive warheads and superplastic metal were some o’ the most bestest things ever, as far as Daar was concerned—ain’t hardly any armor plate ever made could handle that shit.

It was a close-range shot, dangerously so even for troops like them. But…somethin’ sounded odd about the explosion, a weirdly familiar thump that preceded the detonation by a whisker.

Then there was just the blast. Daar felt it thump through his body, rattle his bones and guts, and was pretty sure it knocked his brains about some too. Not that he needed any more o’ that in his life, but whatever.

MOHO seemed unfazed. He was doin’ good as shit ‘fer his green HEAT deployment, but Humans seemed born to this kinda thing so Daar weren’t too surprised. He ignored the piece of hot shrapnel smoking on his arm, dropped his Javelin launcher, snapped his GR-1D back up and advanced to check his kill. Good instincts, good game. Fuck yeah.

“…It’s down.”

Debris was everywhere, it crunched underfoot, it could still be heard rattling and bouncing at the far end of the rail yard… but silence had fallen.

They checked the Enemy. It looked smashed pretty good and hard, but there was something… off about the wreckage. A suspicion that Regaari and Titan confirmed when they both knelt down and checked on it.

Regaari ran a scanner over the twisted metal. “…There’s a void here. Looks like…”

“Like somethin’ was in there that ain’t there now,” Titan finished for him.

“Exactly.”

“Coulda sworn I heard a jump-thump just before I shot it,” MOHO volunteered.

“So did I.” Regaari swept his sensor over the rest of the wreckage then duck-nodded. “If I had to guess, I’d say the pilot ejected.”

“The threat’s neutralized either way,” Costello decided. “We have a bomb to deploy.”

“Right. Next compartment should be that ship-wreckin’ yard,” Daar said. “That’s our bomb site and egress. Check your suit seals, I don’t wanna find out somebody’s got a breach halfway through the HELLNO.”

“That means you, MOHO,” TITAN said. He checked the spot on the big Defender’s arm where the shrapnel had burned through the outersuit, and dug a pair of needle-nose pliers in, emerging after a few seconds and a tearing noise with a chunk of jagged metal as big as one of Daar’s ears.

“…Superficial damage. Suit integrity’s fine.”

“Think I’ll keep that,” MOHO said, pocketing the fragment.

Costello nodded satisfaction then turned around. “Irish? How’s the payload?”

“Just grand, sir. Slowin’ me down a bit is all.”

“Let’s unburden you.”

Daar chittered, and checked his own suit, only to find it had stopped a hit without him even noticing. Fuckdammit, he let himself get lost in the bloodlust. Rookie mistake, but…

Whatever. They weren’t dead, and the end was close now. It wasn’t the victory he’d wanted, but it was a victory.

He’d take it.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Alpha-of-Alphas’ sanctum, Hunter Space

The Alpha-of-Alphas

< Anguish >

The emergency recall had been involuntary, automatic. Both a reflex and a pre-programmed contingency, such that the Alpha-of-Alphas couldn’t truly say for sure whether it had meant to run away, or whether it had been snatched away by a failsafe.

It wasn’t the defeat that stung, it was the fact that the Hunt was over. It had been joyous, transcendent, euphoric. Finally, finally a worthy foe! It had ended all too soon.

It would tangle with those raiders again. It would adapt, it would improvise. And the meat in the maw would be all the sweeter for the effort.

For now, though… it needed a new body.

There was very little of it left. Its brain, its maw, its gut. The rest of its “body,” for the moment, was an egg-shaped life support module that kept those most essential components of a Hunter’s life alive.

No matter. It had been jumped back to the command cradle in its sanctum. From here, it could command…

…It could… command…

There was nothing. The links were utterly silent. When the Alpha-of-Alphas reached out to connect with the Hunter network, all it felt was a peculiar resistance as though its long-discarded fingertips were brushing against solidified air.

It reached out for a replacement body, at least some arms and legs to carry it around so that it could demand an explanation. There should have been limbs and a replacement war-form already loaded into the sanctum’s cradle.

The arms and waldos that should have constructed a new body around it were empty and numb.

< Confusion; Mounting fury >

It couldn’t even struggle. It had no limbs with which to struggle! Nothing it tried to access was responding, nothing it tried to summon would listen. It was worse than paralyzed, it was inert, sat uselessly in a cradle with nothing but the limited sensors mounted on this, it’s least body, to sweep the sanctum.

The door opened, and its own body thundered through, shaking the deck with every step. Riding in its center was not another egg-shaped core, but something more Hunter-like and organic. Something scarred, ruined and twisted. Something that was familiar because the Alpha-of-Alphas had personally defaced it to the point of anonymity.

+< Shock > You.+

The former Alpha Builder didn’t reply, it only radiated a surprisingly gentle emote. < Satisfaction; Anticipation >

So. This was what real defeat tasted like. Everything up until now had just been a setback.

The Builder stopped in front of it. +< Regret > You brought us to this. I was content to follow, until you showed how wasteful you are.+

+< Interrogation > You will replace me?+

+< Calm certainty > I will be better than you.+

The former Builder circled out of the Alpha-of-Alphas’ sight. There was a whining sound, and what little of the defeated Alpha’s body was left felt vibrations through its shell as it was cut into, carved apart. The Builder was exposing its brain.

It would have sagged, if it could. Instead, it listened until it heard the metal that had once protected its vulnerable grey matter clattered on the echoing floor.

+< Resignation > Well hunted.+

+< Serene > Meat to the maw.+

Reverently, perhaps even tenderly, the Builder began to feed.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

“Put this in perspective for me. How big is eighteen-point seven gigatons in terms I can understand?”

Something serious had gone down in the ship-scrapper facility, too, long before the strike team arrived. From the looks of things their tank friend had ripped plenty of other shit apart in there, but the whole hangar was built to rip shit apart anyway. Huge clawed and saw-bladed robot arms were lurking up near the ceiling, ready to descend on any machine unfortunate enough to be dragged into their grasp.

One whole wall—the Ring’s outer skin—was an atmosphere-retaining field. Costello had to look closely and carefully to even pick out its faint blue-green iridescence against the infinite night. Really, it looked like they were open to vacuum.

They would be, in a few seconds.

Irish had deposited the bomb in the middle of the deck with a relieved groan, then promptly jumped to checking everybody’s suit seals. Nobody could ever fault that man’s relentless energy.

Daar meanwhile was watching as Titan and Sikes welded the payload to the deck. He growled his reply to Costello’s question.

“Big enough it could blow everythin’ from New York ‘ta Washington DC into th’ stone age, damn near.”

“Imagine a mushroom cloud that engulfed the whole of Massachusetts,” Akiyama added helpfully.

“I’m a Canuck, remember?” Costello reminded them. “I’m from Montreal.”

“…Well sir, if it went off in your hometown it’d level Ottawa too, and give people third-degree burns down in Toronto and New York City.”

“…Dang.”

“Yeah…” Akiyama paused. “How clean is this thing?”

“As clean as any bomb y’all ever made,” Daar informed him.

Titan caught Costello’s eye for a second before returning to his work. “Right… important point there, then, we’re gonna need to keep suit seal after planetfall, unless you wanna suck down fallout.”

“Eh, not a bad idea. Prolly ain’t necessary though. ‘Sides, y’all don’t wanna set off another skidmark, I wager…”

“All them irradiated bits of Ring falling on our head are gonna fuck up the planet bad enough anyway, sir…” Sikes commented. He grunted as he finished securing the bomb and its shield emitter to the deck. The idea was that any Hunters that wanted to tamper with it would just end up setting it off instead.

“Yeah, that sounds like a hazard,” Costello pointed out. “Can we do anything to mitigate it?”

“We shouldn’t need to. When the Ring pulls itself apart the suppressor field should drop long before any of the big pieces de-orbit. We’ll be long-gone through our Array before that happens.”

“You’re certain?”

“…Well, I ain’t never blown up an orbital megastructure before,” Sikes commented. “So this is as sure as I can be. Anyway, she’s all yours sir.”

That last remark was addressed at Daar, who duck-nodded grimly and broke out the bomb’s activation passphrase. He pointed himself at the device, squared up, and spoke in Gaori: [“Wisdom is the most exquisite curse.”]

The light on the bomb went bright blue.

Regaari made an intrigued noise. [“Apt. One of Great Father Fyu’s sayings, yes?”]

[“Nah, Stoneback lore says it were actually Great Mother Tiritya who said it, ‘cuz some dumbfuck asked her why Fyu always looked so depressed.”]

“Let’s maybe step away from the giant nuclear weapon, eh?” Costello suggested. “Far, far away.”

“Express elevator to Hell’s waitin’ and ready sir,” Firth told him. They’d cleared out the debris near the atmosphere retention field to make for a smooth exit, and the team was running over pre-jump checks for an EA-HELLNO.

It was a solemn ritual. The founders had lost a Brother this way, before Costello’s time. They weren’t interested in losing another to the same mistake. Even WARHORSE seemed to have come back from that intense place he went to during a mission, just a little. He checked Costello’s suit from the ankles up with a few short words, gave him the traditional stunning slap to the helmet to let him know he was good to go, and turned to check Murray.

Funny how ‘Horse always looked after the smallest guys first.

“Buddy up!”

Everyone formed their groups. HELLNO jumps could be precise, but if shit went wrong then spreading themselves over a territory was also a good idea, and they’d settled on three as the optimal drop-buddy group size.

Costello’s group included Blaczynski and one of the First Fang Brothers, a brute who outmassed Champion Fiin by a fair bit, and whose armor was bloody all the way down to his shoulders. Taciturn, too. Apparently he only got talkative around Females or in First Fang gatherings.

Checks were finished quickly, no sign of any more Hunters. Costello didn’t like that at all, especially when the reason why became apparent when he stepped up to the pressure field and called up his suit’s sensor overlay.

It lit up with ship contacts. Hundreds, thousands of them… all undocking and getting the hell away from the Ring.

He switched to the command channel.

“Enemy’s fleeing the Ring, Great Father. I see a lot of ships out there…”

All that came back was a growl, and a short sentence. “…Let’s get offa this thing.”

Costello didn’t need telling twice. They lined up at the edge, checked left and right one last time, then pushed forward through the field together.

That moment of transition between atmo and vacuum was always weird for Costello, but going through a pressure field was even weirder. He felt the tension drop off as a dozen pounds per square inch just lifted off him. Even with the EV-MASS clamping down on his whole body to keep him pressurized and stop him from suffering for it, the difference was there.

Of course, the sound was a whole different matter. The only noises left were the quiet, internal ones that had just been part of the background a second ago. Now, they were thrust into the foreground by the absence of anything else.

The gravity field obviously ended at the pressure threshold. Centripetal acceleration took over and the Ring fell away from him, until he reached that tricky spot where he stopped having a sense of subjective direction. If he looked at it one way, the Ring might be a massive, perfectly flat wall that he was drifting away from. Or it might be a ceiling he was falling from, or a floor he was rising above.

Orbital mechanics was part of Firth’s job, and this particular de-orbit was going to be tricky: they had a giant metal structure to circumnavigate before they could begin re-entry.

They’d brought WiTChES-equipped kinetic maneuvering packs this time, rather than relying on cold-gas. The gas produced way more thrust, but they just couldn’t carry enough reaction mass to de-orbit successfully. The fields went up, snapping wide around them like a diaphanous aurora-borealis version of Batman’s cloak. Angled properly toward the sun, they could power the kinetic packs for a pretty steady acceleration, and acceleration built up quick. It wasn’t long before the Ring’s surface was a blur that Costello had decided was “below” him.

They were horrifically vulnerable out here, but the other option was instant incineration in a nuclear blast orders of magnitude larger even than the San Diego and Tsar Bomba events on Earth. End of list. No jumping back, no warp-capable ship for evac. It was jump, or die.

For some reason, however, the Hunters seemed to be ignoring them. Maybe it was just healthy wariness of the bomb, but…

No matter. There was nothing to do now except wait.

At least there was a nice view.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
MBG private jet, over Iowa, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

“Got an update from Cimbrean…”

Moses looked up from the couch at the back of the plane, where he’d been sitting with a coffee and a tablet. “Has she spoken to the press yet?”

Kevin nodded. “Yeah. Footage is up on ESNN.”

Moses made an irate noise. “Always with the beating our people to the punch…” he grumbled, and tapped at his tablet. Kevin relocated over to stand behind him and watch.

Xiù had done a fantastic job of presenting herself, and she looked every inch the composed corporate professional as she stood tall in front of the camera flashes and microphones.

She began with a gentle nod to the reporters. From the looks of things, HMNB Folctha was besieged by the media at this point, and Kevin could see all kinds of network logos on show.

“Go on, you,” Kevin muttered, gently encouraging her even though he knew that the interview had already finished.

Xiù let the flashes die down before speaking. “Thank you for your patience,” she began. “I’m going to keep this brief, because there’s a lot we still need to establish, but I’m pleased to say that the Spaceborne Operations Regiment and Clan Whitecrest have rescued the surviving crew of Byron Group Exploration Vehicle Three, Dauntless. I’m afraid the crew have suffered casualties, and I won’t be revealing much until we’ve had a chance to speak with the next of kin, but I can confirm that four of the crew are alive and recovering in the base’s infirmary. A fifth is critically wounded, but stable for now.”

“Attagirl, you’re doin’ great,” Moses muttered.

On screen, Xiù seemed to be totally in command. “I’ll do what I can to answer your questions, but you should know that I may not be able to answer all of them. There are many things we still don’t know, or need to sort out. But for now I will say that we’re happy to have our colleagues back and we’ll be doing absolutely everything we can to help them and their families. I know from personal experience that coming home after a long, life-changing journey is… not easy. But we’ll be there for them, every step of the way.”

Moses grinned as she finished her brief speech and started taking questions.

“Well, you were right Kevin,” he said.

“C’mon, you didn’t doubt her either or you wouldn’t’ve agreed to the idea,” Kevin replied. He returned to his own work and listened with half an ear as Moses watched the whole video.

Most of the questions were met with apologetic declinations along the lines of “I’m not able to comment on what the Allied military’s response to this event may or may not be.” and a few polite reprimands like “Well, sorry, but we’re not here to talk about me, we’re here for my colleagues.”

As Kevin listened, he reviewed the detailed email she’d sent him. It was stomach-knotting stuff, especially the fact that the poor bastards had resorted to murder and what was effectively cannibalism. People were not gonna like that one bit. He sure as hell didn’t, and he could see how maybe he’d have done the same thing if it was that or starve. But there were gonna be a lot of armchair warriors who’d get fuckin’ angry when the truth came out, and defending them was going to be a… brave position for the Group to take.

“Dang,” Moses cursed gently.

“What?”

Moses grunted and rewound the video. “That reporter’s sharp.”

He aimed the screen at Kevin just as said reporter asked her question. “Ava Ríos, ESNN. There’s no way that ship was carrying enough food for a ten year mission… How did they survive so long?”

Xiù made a small mis-step: For just a second, she looked uncomfortable and cagey. The expression was gone even quicker than it arrived, but it was there on camera. “I can’t answer that right now, I’m sorry.”

Ríos, it seemed, was not the kind of woman who was deterred so easily. “Didn’t you ask them?”

“As I said, I don’t have all the answers at this point, and this would be one of the questions I can’t answer.” Xiù repeated. “I’m sorry.”

“Hrrm.” Kevin mulled the exchange over and scratched his jaw. “Gotta hand that girl a point. She asked a good question.”

“I feel like I know that name from somewhere. Ríos.”

“You should, boss. She’s ESNN’s star reporter, she wrote the ‘Humble Hero’ article on Xiù and I’ve got one of her prints in my office.”

“…Which one’s that?”

“The blue and white one next to my bookshelf.”

Moses grunted. “…Thought that was an abstract piece. Guess I never looked at it properly.”

“Nope. Original photograph with the artist as model, limited print. Paid a couple grand for it, too.” Kevin was thoroughly pleased with that purchase: It was already worth twice as much as he’d paid for it.

He’d taken up collecting art more out of not knowing what else to do with his money than for any better reason. Moses paid him a substantial six-figure salary with an executive bonus, but after the disaster that had been his first and only attempt at marriage and fatherhood, Kevin was committed to being a lifelong bachelor. Some fuckups weren’t worth revisiting.

His estranged daughter Callie had refused to let him pay for her college education which… hurt like hell, frankly. But it was her choice, and he was proud of her for going her own road despite everything. And if she wanted to stick with the wheelchair rather than let him pay for nerve regeneration therapy or an exoframe… well, that was her call too. He hated it, but she didn’t want anything to do with him.

And frankly, he knew better than to blame her.

Without a family to support there sometimes didn’t seem to be a whole lot of a point to having that kind of money, so he spent it on collecting stuff. The only downside to his art-collecting hobby, if indeed it was a downside, was that he’d apparently developed a knack for spotting up-and-comers who’d be way more valuable down the road. So really he was just generating more money via long-term investment.

He shook the thought off and considered the exchange between Ríos and Xiù. “…We ain’t gonna be able to keep their, uh, survival strategy dark forever, I reckon.”

“No,” Moses agreed.

“…Have we got our people’s backs, Moses?”

Moses stood up and tugged his shirt into a more comfortable position as he roamed the plane’s interior. A thought seemed to amuse him as he stopped by the porthole window and stared out at the clouds far below, and he grunted something that was almost a laugh. “Out, damned spot…”

“…Boss?”

Moses blinked and returned to the here-and-now. “…Yeah,” he decided. He turned around and was all business again. “We’ve got our people’s backs.”

“Despite what they did?”

“We’ll take fire for it either way,” Moses grumbled. “That’s life. But we look out for our own, Kevin. Especially when they only wound up in that situation because I was so impatient to get out there and start finding planets…”

He sighed and sat down on the couch again. “There’s a lotta blood on my hands. I can’t wash it off, but I can face it down. I didn’t get where I am today by hiding my mistakes.”

“Okay.” Kevin nodded, and the matter was decided. “Where do we start?”

“We start…” Moses mulled it over for a second, then nodded to himself. “…Well. I’m going to start with an apology.”

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Freefall above planet Hell, Hunter Space

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

“This is a win, right?”

“Barely.”

Daar didn’t sound remotely happy. Their suit sensors were tracking thousands of ships fleeing the Ring like wasps swarming from a burning hive. None of them seemed interested in hunting the falling raiders. That in itself was… atypical, for Hunters. Everything Costello knew about them said that at least a few of them would have braved the pursuit for a shot at vengeance but now…

Instead, they were conserving resources. No wonder Daar wasn’t happy: It didn’t matter that not a single Brother had been so much as wounded, nor did it matter that they’d kicked ass like only the HEAT and First Fang could. This had been the moment to smash both the Ring and the Swarm-of-Swarms, to cripple the Hunters and reverse the momentum on a reign of terror that had been grinding on since before Humanity figured out how to knap flint.

Instead… without the Ring and its slave population, every ship that escaped was going to need food and supplies. The Hunters would need to feed, and the galaxy was going to suffer for it.

“My Father,” Regaari was only a few hundred meters to Costello’s left, and maybe a hundred feet higher up. “We’re outside the lethal radius, and the atmosphere should protect us now.”

Daar’s radio clicked, but that was the only acknowledgement he gave.

Costello saw clearly when the bomb went off. His helmet was designed so he could stare at a star if need be, so the immense flash of light in the heavens above him was no problem at all.

That… seemed to be it. An anticlimax, almost. The Ring was still a gossamer thread in the distance, but then again the best estimates said that after breaking in just one place it would take the better part of three hours for its own spin to completely smash it.

Part of him wished he could see what that would look like. The rest was very, very glad to be far away from it: Daar had just killed a lot of innocent people.

From the sound of his voice, he knew it too. “…Mission accomplished,” the Great Father announced.

There was nothing else to say, and in any case the reentry plasma was really beginning to flicker around the edges of Costello’s EARS field. For the next few minutes, their comms were going to be worthless anyway. Plenty of time to think and reflect.

Plenty of time to pray.

“May God have mercy on our souls…”

Alone, he fell into the fire to contemplate his sins.

++END CHAPTER 46++

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Chapter 47: Fallout

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Hell, Hunter Space

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

The sky was boiling.

Costello had never seen northern lights before, and now sheets of silent fire were coiling languidly across the heavens far faster than he’d imagined they would, shifting hue like some fibre-optic Christmas tree or something. One minute turquoise, the next orange shading to green, or bright red…

All thanks to that goddamn bomb. He’d tried to follow the explanation of how it worked, really he had, but really it had just driven home to him that the Gao were an alien species with a few centuries of technological ground separating them from humanity. They knew things about physics that just didn’t fit Costello’s meagre scientific education.

Like how you fit four orders of magnitude more energy than the San Diego blast into something that a man could carry around. Sikes was adamant that Daar’s big bomb should have weighed more than fifty metric tonnes.

Daar had shrugged that off. “Reality gets angry when ‘ya fuck around with it in the right ways,” he’d said, and that had been more than enough to scare the HEAT into thoughtful silence.

He’d been proven right, though. They’d shafted the laws of physics good and hard, and the result was… well, frankly, a spectacular and unforgettable view. Aurora from horizon to horizon, as dense as comb teeth and vivid beyond the wildest fever-dreams of television advertisers.

All hanging silently over a landscape eerily reminiscent of Colorado in midwinter.

“Two hours, sir.”

Firth pulled him out of his distant thoughts just by reporting the time since detonation. Their best estimate said the Ring would shatter under its own shear forces once cut at ground zero, and to judge from the endless rain of shooting stars that process was well underway. The big bits wouldn’t be coming down for months, but tiny ultra-high-velocity fragments were being sprayed into the upper atmosphere as the Hunter megastructure tore itself to pieces.

He took a sip of his drink and cleared his throat. “Connection?”

“Still down.”

“Not impossible that the generator could survive on a big chunk with its own power supply, I guess…” Costello mused as he turned his attention skyward again.

Firth grunted. “We got a plan for that eventuality, sir?”

“Get our asses somewhere sheltered before the big bits start landing on our heads,” Costello replied.

Titan, who’d been watching their wormhole links suddenly lowered his tablet. “Looks like it won’t come to that. I have green lights for Minot and Sharman. Door’s open to go home.”

“Right.” Costello stood up. “Get the Great Father offa this rock. After that, we jump out in reverse arrival order.”

“Got it.”

Around their makeshift little camp the resting HEAT troopers and First Fang Brothers hauled themselves upright and grabbed their gear. The field Array had been up for nearly forty minutes, fully charged and ready.

Daar, predictably, did not agree to be made safe first. Instead he was setting up a kind of tube that one of his Brothers had been carrying. It looked a heck of a lot like a mortar.

“Sir, we really need to get you back—” Costello began.

“I heard.” Daar aimed his snout skywards and inclined his head slightly. There was a thoomp! and a silver-grey blur shot out the tube’s end much faster than any mere mortar round had ever gone. There was a brief blue flash of Cherenkov radiation.

“…What was that? A warp-based ground-to-orbit weapon?”

“Drone launcher. Figger if the spike an’ suppressor are down, I’m gonna do what I said an’ blow the whole fuckin’ Ring to bits. An’ I ain’t trustin’ nobody else with that. Sarry.”

More flashes in the sky.

“That right there were seven more bombs like the first one. We should prol’ly get outta here now.”

Costello turned to Firth. “Master sergeant—”

He needn’t have bothered. Behind his mask, Firth looked outright alarmed and was already turning to start shouting.

“Captain wants erryone’a you cocksuckers dick-to-ass on that platform right now!”

It worked. By this point such “gentle” ministrations by Firth had become well-known, familiar displays of his concern.

Daar did at least allow himself to be removed from Hell in the first wave, alongside Fiin and the largest part of First Fang. The familiar jump-thump heralded the arrival of a set of charged power cells so that the Array’s turnaround time was no longer than it took Titan, Sikes, Moho and Kiwi to efficiently grab a cell each and swap out one on each pylon.

Costello was promptly squeezed in the middle of the second jump, as close as close got. Japanese commuter trains weren’t so densely packed.

Another thump, and the anticlimax was complete. He got himself off the jump platform, making room for the third and final load to come through. Techs in hazmat gear were shepherding them through a decontamination shower.

For something so immense to pass so… correctly just felt wrong, somehow. It had been a fight, yes. A serious one. And the consequences were incalculable: Billions dead, and the war was just beginning.

He was cleansed thoroughly before being escorted through into the suit hangar to get his MASS off, a procedure normally full of banter and the release of pent-up adrenaline. Energy bar, recovery drink, clean clothes… hotwash.

Nobody was celebrating this one.

Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Builder brood-barge, Hell system, Hunter Space

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

There were challenges to its authority, of course there were. A new Alpha-of-Alphas always faced them. But the Eaters were caught in a trap that had been generations in the making and had actually been triggered early and opportunistically. Every last one of them depended on the Builders for their cybernetics. It had been trivially easy to abuse that trust.

The challengers had all slumped to the deck, immobile and helpless, the instant they attacked. Incapacitated… but not dead. The wasteful days of unnecessary execution were over. Humiliation would keep the Alphas in line. Each had been left with a brand, a scar, something to remember the new Alpha-of-Alphas by. They would, perversely, be far more loyal than the unscarred who had simply stood back and apathetically allowed the throne to pass from one claimant to the next.

Losing the Hive was… a shame. But the blame had fallen on the former Alpha-of-Alphas, which had paid appropriately: Its skull now hung above its replacement’s throne.

Now came the strategic analysis, as the Alpha of the Steelfang Brood was reporting.

+< Grim > Nearly all broodships are destroyed. Nine out of every ten swarmships also. Slave stock loss is total. Manufacturing loss is—+

The Alpha-of-Alphas tapped one of its legs sharply on the floor.

+< Interruption > It will not presume to educate me about our manufacturing capabilities.+

+< Contrition > Of course. The overall strategic analysis is that we have suffered a terrible wound. The loss of the breeding pools alone—+

The Alpha-of-Alphas almost vocalized a frustrated hiss.

+< Sharply > What we have lost is irrelevant. Tell me what remains, and what we need.+

The Alphas looked around at each other, before the Alpha of the Gnawing-Brood spoke. It was one of the newly scarred, the mark on its throat a permanent reminder that it owed its continued existence to the Alpha-of-Alphas’ generosity.

Finally, however, it started answering questions to its new master’s satisfaction.

+< Calculating > Without the Hive’s population of meat-slaves, starvation will quickly finish what the Humans started. We have six of the sport worlds: the one below the Hive will shortly be scoured and dead. Each is sparsely populated and only a single slave transport remains. Populating them to sustain us is not feasible: We must raid.+

One of the others broadcast amusement.

+< Smug; scorn > You act as though the idea alarms you.+

+< Reminder > Raids are most effective when the Prey are vulnerable and their guard is down. The more we raid, the more well-prepared the Prey will be and the more casualties we shall suffer. < Observation > And in our weakened state, it will not take many casualties before raiding becomes unsustainable.+

The Alpha-of-Alphas stood from its throne.

+< Command > Raid infrequently against large targets, taking as many alive as possible. The Steelfang Alpha shall direct operations. Low-value Omegas and Brood are acceptable losses: Broodships, Builders, Betas and Alphas are not. If necessary, the lowest echelons will feed the upper. Meanwhile, the Builders will restore our industry.+

It stalked toward the exit, then paused and turned back.

+< Lecture > Fix this in your memories: Nothing is unassailable, everything can be broken. There will never be another Hive: From now on, we rely on redundancy. Each of you will find a home base for your Brood and I do not care whether you choose an asteroid, a moon, a station deep in interstellar space. We shall make each one self-sufficient.+

There was unanimity.

+< Fervor > It shall be as the Alpha-of-Alphas commands.+

+< Grudging satisfaction > Good.+

It left the chamber and returned to its sanctum, where the cybernetic wreckage of its predecessor still occupied the augmentation cradle. There would be time to modify that later: Remove the weaknesses and flaws that the Builder had exploited in its coup. It would not end as its predecessor had, helpless and immobile without so much as a twitching manipulator.

For now, it had more important concerns. The consolidation of its power, the security of the Swarm-of-Swarms…

And the secret behind those bombs.

Date Point: 15y6m2d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant-Commander Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Mr. Damian Joseph Spears;
Dr. Holly Marie Chase;
Dr. James Choi;
Dr. Benjamin Richard Cook

These four individuals entered my care on an emergency basis following their recovery during Operation LOST CUB. They are employees of the Moses Byron Group, who will doubtless be handling their care going forward.

Initial assessment: All four are in a fragile state of mind having endured a decade of constant stress, not to mention witnessing the deaths of two of their colleagues and the grievous wounding of a third during their eventual escape. In addition, they resorted to consuming the meat of sapient aliens in order to survive. In the absence of a more accurate word, and in reflection of their own feelings on the matter, I shall refer to this as cannibalism from now on.

All four should therefore be considered highly likely to develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the near future, and should be treated appropriately. Depression, anxiety and other conditions also seem probable.

Doctor Cook is unquestionably the worst case. Although his colleagues report that he held together well during their exile and escape, now that he is safe among humans he has lapsed into a catatonic daze. His attention can be briefly gained but is difficult to hold. Unfortunately, he has also twice now become violent and assaulted base staff. He is therefore currently sedated and it is probably worth keeping him on a sedative regime for the time being. I have started him on lorazepam. He violently rejected the assistance of our base chaplain.

Doctor Chase is superficially in a good mood but she is evasive with regards to the status of her colleague Doctor Wheeler, who is in intensive care, and changes the subject quickly whenever Doctor Wheeler is mentioned. Of the four, she spent the longest with the chaplain and requested a rosary, which seems to comfort her greatly. Although this is a welcome development, she should be monitored for signs of obsessive behaviour and I have prepared a script for fluoxetine should it become necessary.

Mister Spears is quiet and solemn, and was eager to escape from our infirmary when I spoke to him. Despite his malnourished and exhausted condition he seemed anxious to get out of bed and explore, or at least to have some activity to distract him. I started him on a low dose of Diazepam, which seemed to help, but he remains restless and finds it difficult to concentrate on anything for long. I am told that he threw a book across the room at one point, but he readily calmed down and apologized to the nurse. If his restlessness persists, he may need stronger diazepam.

Doctor Choi is objectively in the best condition both physically and mentally. He describes his mood as “both high and low” but his emotions and mood seem to be largely appropriate considering his recent history. He was very eager to be reunited with his parents, who are en route to Folctha at the time of writing. He spoke at length with the chaplain and me about what he should tell his parents and what he should leave out, especially vis-a-vis cannibalism. He was quite concerned over what their reaction might be, but did not strike me as inappropriately anxious. To be on the safe side, I have prepared a script for sertraline which I hope will not be necessary.

I do not anticipate that they will remain in my care beyond this letter.

-Lt Cmdr K. Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 15y6m2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Martina Arés

Diego was asleep and Marty, like any remotely sensible parent, was trying to sleep at the same time. In a couple of hours he’d be awake and hollering for a breast again.

What she achieved, sadly, was to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling with nightmare scenarios flashing through her brain. Heavy footfalls on the stairs and, rather than a knock, it’d be a liaison officer come to give her the bad news. Or maybe the phone would ring, or…

It had to be hormones, or something. She’d endured him being away on missions before without feeling half this nervous. Yeah. Just maternal hormones, making her anxious.

…Or just the reality of the tiny life asleep in the crib four feet to her left.

She gave up on sleeping and got out of bed. It was still early evening after all. Maybe she’d catch up on some reading she’d meant to do.

It worked. With a tablet in one hand, a hot chocolate in the other and the baby monitor on the table next to her, she quickly got lost in and soothed by a few highlights from the scientific journals she followed. There was an especially interesting paper titled “Long chain hydrocarbon interactions with forming stasis field boundaries” that she read twice.

After that, she finally got round to some poetry her dad had sent her.

”History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,

Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.

Women will still be women, but—”

The stairs on the first floor made the unmistakable groan they always did when several very large men stepped onto them, followed by an almost alarming squeal as Adam began his climb.

It was a genuine relief to hear his footsteps but…they were slow and heavy. More often than not he flew up the stairs in a few bounding, tectonic leaps. Not now. He was either exhausted, or had a lot on his mind.

Or, as it turned out, both.

He showed up at the door in a tank top and a pair of comfortable gym shorts. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Still got my shield.”

She smiled and kissed him, getting a one-armed rib-breaker of a hug in return, then watched as he tiptoed across the floor to check on Diego. The baby stirred softly but didn’t wake in response to the softest of gentle touches as Adam brushed a finger as thick as his arm across his cheek, then thumped—gently, so as not to wake Diego—over to the fridge in search of a beer.

Dad had brought along some of his ale the last time he visited and Adam decided now was the time to finish it off. He padded toward the couch with his beer, gently laid himself out and melted into it with a great sigh of relief. There wasn’t much pleasure in it.

“That bad, huh?” Marty sat down next to him.

“…Yeah.”

Marty sighed internally. She loved her Beefchunk but he was, as ever, not the best with his words.

She cuddled up to his arm and rested her head on his shoulder, glad for the familiar heat he gave off. “Knowing you, you already beat the crap outta the gym trying to work it through…”

“Yup. Bent the barbell. Uh…into a pretzel, sorta. Imma have to replace it.”

“That’s why we have a monthly equipment budget,” she prodded his side. “But seriously, if you couldn’t slab it out, maybe you need to talk it out.”

“I don’t… Corazón. Right now, I just want this.” He demonstrated by pulling her into a full-body hug.

She wrapped her arms as far around his chest as they could go, and snuggled into him. Things weren’t necessarily right with the world, but at least they were right at home.

“Okay,” she said. “I can do that.”

Lulled by the silence and his warmth, she soon fell asleep.

Date Point: 15y6m2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Long day. Tired… but happy. EV-Twelve was in great shape and getting better by the day, and Allison’s fingerprints were all over her by now.

Of course, the work had been a little more… intense, today. Everybody knew about the Dauntless crew. It had been a stark reminder that things had gone wronger than wrong in the EV program’s early days. A lot of the guys on the ship engineering team felt personally responsible.

Allison of course didn’t have any share in that blame, whoever it belonged to. But it had done a lot to focus her mind. She knew that the crew’s lives depended on their good work, but today it had been visceral, written in her cells. She was certain she’d put in her best day’s work.

Hell, she’d only come up for air when Clara had literally dragged her off the ship and ordered her to go home.

She drove home in silence, underlined by the patter of Folctha’s nightly rains, the thup-thup of the wipers, and the tick-tick of her turn signals. Normally, she thought electric cars were too damn quiet but tonight she’d been glad of it.

“Allison!”

Her brothers came thundering up to her as soon as she opened the door. Ramsey and Tristan were blossoming now that their parents weren’t looming over them literally every second of the day: They’d been enrolled at Folctha Comprehensive, they were making friends their own age and both of them had grown enormously in confidence and self-expression. Allison, being the coolest possible big sister ever, had accidentally helped them, there.

There were concessions, of course. Both Amanda and Jacob had access to the boys and the right to take them places, the family spent a lot of time together down at the Multi-Faith center where they were integrating into Folctha’s tiny Mormon branch. Despite her best efforts, Allison hadn’t been able to avoid becoming well-acquainted with the branch president. She quite liked him, actually.

She knelt to give the boys a hug. “Shouldn’t you two be getting ready for bed? It’s late.”

“Xiù never said to,” Ramsey supplied.

“Where is she?”

“She’s upstairs. I think she’s taking a bath.”

“Alright. You two get dressed for bed, okay?”

They didn’t protest much. They never did, though they had learned they could get away with being a little more willful in this house. Allison was being careful not to let them turn into unleashed terrors, though. She hoped the discipline she imposed was reasonable and fair, rather than the sit-still-and-be-silent tyranny they and she had endured under their parents.

In fact, when Allison went upstairs, Xiù had gone all-out on the bath: lights off, scented candles lit, a bath bomb and flower petals that gave the water and therefore the room a lavish lavender atmosphere. She turned her head, opened her eyes and smiled a little when Allison opened the door, sitting up a little straighter in the water.

Allison knew that smile: It was the one Xiù used when things weren’t completely okay in her head. She crouched down next to the bath and they traded a slightly soapy kiss. “…How was it?”

Xiù sighed. “Harrowing. They went through… well, a lot.”

“I bet. Where the hell were they?”

Something seemed to darkly amuse Xiù for a second. She waved a water-pruned hand vaguely at the towels she’d neatly folded on the radiator. “Yeah. Where the hell.”

“Hey?”

“They called the planet Hell. It’s, uh, in Hunter space. I guess it’s kind of a hunting reserve or something.”

“…A Hunter game preserve?” Allison grabbed a towel and handed it to her.

“Yeah. It’s just as grim as it sounds. And… well, you know how much food we had just for the three of us…”

“…I don’t think I wanna hear the rest,” Allison decided. “I mean… unless you really need to get it off your chest.”

That earned her a smile and a wet hug as Xiù stood up and stepped out of the bath. The water was no more than tepid by now: she must have been in there a long while. “I’m okay.”

“…Okay. You want me to cook tonight, or…?”

“Pizza,” Xiù decided. “Pizza and a movie.”

“Suits me! You wanna let the boys stay up, or…?”

“Sure.”

Allison left her to dry herself and get dressed, spun through the shower in the efficient way they’d mastered on Misfit to get the worst of the day’s grime off, and decided they may as well make a pajama party of it.

Half an hour later, the living room smelled of pepperoni and cheese, and was awash with the sound of cartoon lasers.

Xiù wasn’t watching the movie though. “Hey. Look.”

She angled her phone’s screen Allison’s way. Julian had sent a message full of pictures, mostly stunning shots of Monument Valley at dawn. Vemik and Yan seemed to be laboring in the heat but it was pretty clear that Julian was making good friends with their guides and thoroughly enjoying himself.

Allison smiled at the grinning selfie he’d taken with his newfound cousin, but it put a tightness in her chest. “…This is gonna be a long couple of weeks.”

“Yeah.”

They were still examining the pictures when headlights played over the curtains and, a few seconds later, the doorbell rang. Allison levered herself off the sofa to investigate.

They had a security camera above the door, and a little monitor on the wall next to it, and there was no mistaking the men outside. She opened it for them.

Moses Byron gave her a warm but troubled smile as he entered and wiped his shoes, with Kevin Jenkins just behind him. “Hope I’m not disrupting,” he said, shaking her hand.

“Just a little, but I guess it’s important, huh?” Allison asked. Behind her, Xiù emerged from the living room. “Come on in.”

“Very,” Moses shook Xiù’s hand too, and hung his coat up.

“Hey Kevin.” Kevin got a hug.

He returned it. “Hey, Al. Xiù. Y’okay?”

“Ah, hello! Who’re these young gentlemen?”

Moses had stooped to shake hands with Ramsey and Tristan, who’d naturally abandoned the movie to see what was up.

“These are my brothers,” Allison explained. “Ramsey, Tristan, this is Moses Byron. He—”

“Oh, wow!” Ramsey immediately looked starstruck.

“I see my reputation precedes me,” Moses chuckled. “You two aren’t giving Allison too much trouble, are you?”

The boys knew how to answer questions like that. “No sir!”

Moses chuckled again. “That’s what I like to hear. Now, I need to steal your sister and Miss Chang for a few minutes. I hope that’s okay?”

Allison waved him through into the kitchen. “You two finish the movie and go to bed, okay?”

“Yes, Allison.”

Moses seemed genuinely buoyed by the encounter, and sat at the table in the kitchen with a smile on his face. “Fine young men,” he commented.

“I hope so,” Allison agreed. “So, this is about the Dauntless crew?”

Kevin sat down opposite Moses. “It’s about a lot more than that. The SOR aren’t even trying to keep a lid on what went down over there on Hell.”

“Why, what—?”

“I haven’t told her everything yet,” Xiù pointed out, as she bustled to make coffees.

“Ah, right.” Kevin thought for a second. “Uh… short version? The Hunters had some kinda megastructure in orbit around the dang thing. Big enough to make the Death Star look like a lego kit. Daar just blew the damn thing up.”

Xiù set a mug down sharply and turned around. “…There are billions of slaves on that thing!”

“Were,” Moses grunted. The lines on his face that had almost vanished as he interacted with the boys had come back deeper than ever.

Xiù’s hand fluttered up to her temple for a second, and then her expression locked down and she turned back to making the drinks. Buying herself time to think, probably.

“I mean… that’s big,” Allison said, “but isn’t that kind of AEC’s ball to handle?”

Kevin shook his head. “We’re tied up in it. Our ship found the place, our people managed to scrape by out there for years. It was their escape that even made what Daar did possible.”

Xiù didn’t seem to know if she wanted to make drinks or just sit down. “I mean, why would he…? How could he even–?!”

Allison stood up and took over from her. “I guess he felt it was necessary. I mean, that’s why Yulna elevated him, right? Somebody ruthless enough to do what needs doing?”

“Āi yá…”

Kevin shuffled aside to make room for Xiù as she sat down.

“Look, here’s the crux of it,” Moses said. “We know what’s gonna happen. Right or wrong, whether that thing needed blowing away or not, we’re tangled up in it and people will be angry over it. A lotta people will see the mass death and that’ll be the end of it for them; nothing will ever be justification enough for them.”

“And we already got bombed by the APA once,” Kevin noted.

“We’re aware,” Allison said. It was why their house had a panic room and bullet-resistant glass on the ground floor, which had been expensive as hell. It had been a factor in her successful application to the Folctha police for a class one firearms license, usually only available to on-duty police and security officers. The three of them still received threatening messages at least a few times a week, which Mister Williams and MBG security mostly handled themselves.

“So what do you need us to do?” Xiù asked.

“Well, you mentioned Yulna. You’re still a Sister, after all,” Moses said. “And I think right now we need to know what the Gao are thinking.”

“I can’t imagine Yulna will be happy about this…” Allison agreed.

“Yulna’s pragmatic. I think that’s why Giymuy named her, actually,” Xiù sighed, but nodded. “But fine. I can do that.”

“We can do that,” Allison corrected her.

“You don’t have to–”

“Babe, I like Yulna. I wanna be there for her.”

That earned her a smile, and a nod.

Moses seemed satisfied as well. He smiled as Allison set a coffee down in front of him and picked it up with both hands to sniff it before taking a sip.

“Mm… You make good coffee.”

“Hey, how come you don’t compliment mine anymore?” Kevin asked, lightheartedly.

“Kevin, we both know you take it as a point of pride that you make perfect coffee. There’s no point in complimenting you on it.” Moses took another sip and set it down. “As for MBG’s reaction to this… We’re gonna back our people to the hilt. Whatever they need, they get. When they’re attacked, we protect them. They aren’t to blame for what Daar did.”

“The question is, do we think what Daar did was the right thing?” Allison asked. When Xiù looked at her she shrugged. “I mean… he must have had a reason for it. Must have felt that hurting the Hunters that much was worth all the loss of life.”

Xiù paused, then nodded. Allison wasn’t sure if she was aware she was rubbing her arm.

“I don’t see that we need to answer that question… yet,” Moses said. “In fact, I hope we never do. That kind of messy business is what elected leaders are for. Mine is just to take care of my people and increase shareholder value.”

“But we still have to pay attention to politics, which is why we need Yulna’s take,” Kevin added.

Moses nodded. “Gotta test the wind and know where the reefs are, no matter how you sail.”

“That makes sense,” Xiù nodded.

They were interrupted by the boys, who appeared at the door to inform them that the movie was over and they were going to bed, and the business conversation never resumed. Once they were gone, Moses changed the subject by asking about how EV-12 was coming along and they made small talk and caught up while finishing their coffees.

Kevin and Moses declined to use the spare bedrooms: Apparently they’d already got rooms at the Statler. There were handshakes, farewells, and at long last Xiù and Allison had some more time together alone.

Xiù sank onto the couch like she was twice her actual age. “Āi yá…” she repeated.

“Babe, you look about ready to fall over. Shouldn’t we go to bed?”

“Urgh, if I sleep now I’ll just have the worst dreams…”

“Well… we didn’t finish those pics Julian sent us?” Allison suggested. That seemed to brighten her mood, and Xiù fished her phone out of her pocket to call them up again. They snuggled up on the couch and started over from the top.

“I wonder what he’s doing right now…?”

Date Point: 15y6m2d AV
Monument Valley, Navajo Nation Reservation, Utah/Arizona border, USA, Earth

Yan Given-Man

“How is one place so hot and so cold on same day?!”

“We already covered that, big guy.” Yan was being grumpy but Jooyun, bless him, was a patient man. “Trees can keep heat in and keep it out. Also, our sun is a hotter star than yours.”

Yan grumbled and scooted a little closer to the fire. Jooyun didn’t mind the cold at all, lying against a rock while he warmed his feet. In fact, he seemed more comfortable than Mikey or Raven, who’d both thrown blankets around their shoulders against the night air.

“He’s got a point though,” Raven said. “It’s like forty degrees and your clothes are drying out in front of the fire. The day’s heat didn’t seem to bother you much either.”

“I’m a Minnesota boy,” Jooyun shrugged. “I like the cold, and a lotta fellas don’t remember that it gets hot up north, too. Also I’m, uh, a lot bigger than I used to be,” he added with the strange grin the humans sometimes used when they were both proud and embarrassed about something. “I don’t seem to get the chills much anymore.”

Raven quirked an eyebrow. “You’re not cold at all?”

Jooyun chuckled softly. “Well…” He stood up, fetched his “blue jeans” from the rack he’d built and carefully wriggled into them. “Maybe a little. Even I have my limits. But now I have warm pants! This is a good reason to make cloth, Yan. Easier to clean than pelts, too.”

There was a miserable sound from the pile of blankets to Yan’s left. Vemik was under there somewhere, having claimed Jooyun’s blanket on the grounds that Jooyun wasn’t using it.

Sky-Brother chuckled. “You okay, bud? It’ll be better if you crawl out and sit with us.”

Vemik lifted the front of the blanket with his tail, just enough to peek out. “Soup ready, yet?”

“Getting there.” Mikey gave it a stir. It was all made with food they’d acquired themselves during the day. Seeing just how much food the Humans could scrounge up from what had looked to Yan’s eyes like an empty dusty wasteland had been… well, he’d learned a lot. There wasn’t a lot, but there was enough to send them to bed with a full belly, which meant another tomorrow to find more food.

That seemed to be how Humans did things, in fact. Get enough food now to reach tomorrow. If you could get enough food for the day after, and the day after, and the hand of days after that then that was good, but Mikey had said something interesting to make Yan think.

“The thing is,” he’d said, “we’re not made for this land. We’re invaders. So we can’t live off this land forever. The point isn’t to build a life here, the point is to survive until you can get back home.”

“How did your people live here, then?” Vemik had asked.

“We made a home by growing crops and keeping animals,” Raven explained.

“Crops,” Yan grunted. “So… you change this land to fit you?”

“Don’t you?” Jooyun asked. “You built a village. You had to clear the site and mark the trails, didn’t you? You set traps, and take wood for the fire and huts, dig clay for pots and strip bark for rope and cord.”

“Every animal changes the land,” Mikey said. “Even if it’s just digging a burrow or marking its territory.”

Yan furrowed his brow and thought on that until the soup was served, which turned out to be delicious and warming.

It certainly brought Vemik out of his blanket pile.

[“Why so troubled, Yan?”] he asked, in People-words. [“You saw how Humans build their big towns, you didn’t object before.”]

[“Not troubled,”] Yan grunted. [“Thinking.”]

“Anyway,” Julian finished his bowl with an appreciative slurp, “I think you two will like where we’re going next. First we’re going to Yellowstone and then the Badlands, so we can show you something like how humans, uh, ‘grew up’ I guess. The plains can be a lot like where we first learned to speak.”

“And where you learned to write?” Vemik asked.

“Nah, bud. That was elsewhere. But I think you’ll like it, and after that we’re going to Canada.”

“Can na-duh. Is another planet?”

Raven giggled. “Might as well be!”

“Naw, big buddy! It’s a lot like where I lived actually. It can get cold…but there’s strong trees, and big dangerous prey, and predators, too. Lots of bears for you to look at, Yan [Given-Man]. Though I’d not pick a fight with one.”

“Is it warm?” Vemik asked.

“This time of the year, it’s hard to say. Could be either, depending on what the gods have in mind. Some stories like to say it’s Old Man Winter and Spring fighting it out.”

“Old Man Winter.” Yan grunted. “…Good name for a god.”

Yan had long figured out that when a human talked about the gods—well, at least Jooyun, anyway—they didn’t necessarily use the word exactly like the People might. That was okay. Most of them still showed respect to the gods even if they didn’t call them gods at all.

It was comforting somehow to see that even a strong Sky-Tribe like the humans could be wrong about things.

“But yes, it will probably be pretty pleasant for the most part. Except for the mosquitos. I think you’ll be fine though with that thick skin of yours. Me, well…”

“Moss keet-oh?”

“They’re little insects that land on you and drink your blood. Like I said, you two should be fine. S’long as I don’t eat like crap and stay clean they should probably leave me alone…”

Raven found that amusing for some reason. “Sounds like wishful thinking.”

“Yeah, probably. They never bothered me as much as my grandpa, but this time of the year you’ll be able to cut through their swarms with a knife.”

Yan suppressed a shiver. He hated bugs. Too many of the People died to the shivering-sickness every year, and they all knew it was the little biting things that swarmed in the water that carried it. But what could they do? People needed to drink, and Ketta-water wasn’t enough for a whole tribe. They’d just have killed the trees.

“Is dark,” he noted instead of saying anything. “We should sleep.”

“Yeah, fair…”

In fact, not a lot of sleeping happened at first. Yan lay there with a head full of thoughts for some time, listening idly as Raven taught Vemik the names of the stars. He had to admit, he liked that the humans had named some of them after a great hunter.

His bedroll was warm and comfortable though. In the end, his thoughts drifted off, and so did he.

Date Point: 15y6m3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant-Commander Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Captain Anthony Costello

Captain Costello came straight to my office as soon as he was able following mission recovery and hotwash for Operation LOST CUB. He is clearly deeply troubled by the mission’s events.

To summarize: the estimated population of slaves aboard the Hunter Ring, which Costello and his team were instrumental in destroying, is estimated to have been in the billions. While he accepts the rationale behind the structure’s destruction, he describes himself as having a “troubled conscience.”

We discussed the situation at length, though mostly I think he just needed to vent his feelings. He has few other outlets, considering the need-to-know nature of the operation’s details and his shortage of true friendships among the SOR. I suggested that he might benefit from discussing the operation with his men, and he accepted that this was probably sensible. He also predicted that he’d probably be getting drunk later tonight.

I reminded him to hydrate before going to bed, which lifted his spirits and made him laugh. All things considered, I see no cause for alarm, though I imagine we will have a few more conversations on this subject in the near future.

-Lt Cmdr K. Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 15y6m3d AV
High Mountain Fortress, Gao

Regaari

“They’re hurt right now, an’ they’re weak. Best intel we’ve got says they ain’t got much now that their stupid space donut is gone, but they’ll be raiding along space lanes and all that. We’re gonna protect every Dominion ship we know about, whether they want it or not.”

“Deny the Hunters their prey?”

Daar was apparently in a boisterous-humorous-sardonic kind of a mood, and reacted accordingly: he flicked an ear at Champion Goruu and produced an avuncular kind of pant-grin. “Exactly. Outstanding, some of y’all are catching on!”

Fiin inclined his head slightly. “An’ the more losses we inflict the less they can raid. It’ll snowball.”

Genshi raised his paw. “Dominion ships, My Father?”

“Yeah.”

“We are leaving the Alliance to fend for itself, then?”

“No. We ain’t. But ‘fer now, we’re technic’ly at war with the Alliance, ‘cuz technic’ly we’re still Dominion security council members an’ technic’ly the cease-fire never got upgraded ‘ta peace treaty. I’m still figgerin’ out how we get past that.”

“Outright ignore it?” Champion Goruu suggested.

“Yer thinkin’ it’s that easy, huh?” Daar asked him.

“Not to be flippant, My Father…” Goruu stood up. “…But if the Alliance were agile and capable enough to catch us then we wouldn’t need to worry about protecting them.”

Sheeyo duck-nodded thoughtfully. “And the Dominion is too politically fractured right now to give us much trouble over it. Indeed, with the Corti and Humans on our side, we probably can act with impunity.”

“Breakin’ the Dominion is something I ain’t sure we should do yet.” The Great Father flowed from his spot at the table and began pacing as was his wont. “We only joined them, what? Eighteen years ago?”

“And in that time they have treated us as something akin to enemies.”

“More like vassals,” Meereo commented. “A great many demands, very little honoring of their obligations to us.”

“Janissaries. It really is the bestest word for what we were made to be, huh?”

“On the other hand…” Sheeyo said, “…our trade with the Dominion is extremely valuable. Trade which becomes impossible except through the framework of their import/export regulations and market treaties. If they sanction us, then the coffers that keep the Grand Army fed and equipped will need filling from some other source.”

“We ain’t dependent on the Dominion,” Daar pointed out. “Never have been.”

“Indeed not, My Father. But it would be a blow to morale and an extra weight pressing down on our already-laboring economy. We may not be dependent on our trade with the Dominion, but losing it would nevertheless hurt.”

“And there ain’t nobody else we can trade with to make up the difference,” Daar duck-nodded. “But you sound like you’re contradicting yourself, Champion Sheeyo. Are the Dominion too fractured to trouble us, or could they make our lives difficult?”

Sheeyo twitched an ear. “Both, My Father. They’re paralyzed by indecision and internal turmoil, but all it takes is one moment of backbone, one charismatic leader to show them the way…”

“Hrrm.”

There was a prolonged silence as they all considered the problem. Regaari broke it.

“…Is there… any reason why we couldn’t find a charismatic leader with backbone of our own?” he asked.

Sheeyo gave a frustrated gesture that was equal parts nod, headshake and shrug. “I don’t think they’ll accept a Gaoian leader at a time like this. Or a Human.”

Feeling a little bit smug, Regaari stepped up to lay out his idea. “I wasn’t thinking of a Gao or a Human—”

“No.” Daar’s tone brooked no argument.

“…My Father?”

“I ain’t interested in manipulatin’ the internal affairs of another species. Not after what was done to us.”

Wrong-footed by not even being heard out after a lifetime of brotherly trust, Regaari verbally tripped over himself. “Ah… Fortunately, My Father, I don’t think that will be an issue. Let me tell you who I have in mind…”

“No. I will not speak my displeasure again.”

Cousins or not, Brothers-in-arms or not, Regaari took one look at his old friend’s expression and claws and decided that he wasn’t suicidally ambitious in this matter. He made himself small and stepped back, too stunned and upset to reply properly but determined not to show it.

Genshi put a reassuring paw on his back as soon as the Great Father’s glare had finally turned elsewhere, and the remainder of the meeting passed without Regaari paying much attention to it. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut followed by a kick or three in the nuts for good measure.

He didn’t look at Daar as he left the chamber, and walked with Genshi down the stairs and out into the courtyard in silence. The garden there had been a place for reflection and peace since the time of Great Father Fyu, and Regaari wasn’t sure if he’d intended to go that way himself, or if Genshi had subtly guided him somehow. Either way, he was glad for the tranquility.

“I take it that hurt,” the Champion commented after a while.

“That… did not go as well as I’d hoped,” Regaari confessed.

Genshi duck-nodded solemnly. “…Out of interest, who did you have in mind?

“I thought the Great Father made it clear that we weren’t to discuss the matter further.”

Genshi casually turned to face him. Ostensibly an innocent and easy gesture, but Regaari saw him check the whole courtyard for eavesdroppers as he did so. “Regaari, even Great Fathers can blunder. Maybe he’ll rip our hides off—yes, even yours—if we go behind his back, but you have to ask yourself. Do you put your hide ahead of what’s right for Gao and the galaxy?”

“…Duty first,” Regaari admitted after a second, then chittered. “Though I hope he’d at least do me the courtesy of making it quick and painless.”

Genshi flicked an amused ear. “I’m sure for an old Cousin he can be merciful. So: Who did you have in mind?”

Regaari told him.

The way Genshi’s chittering rang off the ancient stone walls was all the approval he needed.

Date Point: 15y6m3d AV
High Mountain Fortress, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Daar was pretty much certain Regaari would disobey him. That…hurt. It hurt for lotsa reasons, but that couldn’t distract him. What mattered was how carefully his Cousin threaded the needle, if he chose to attempt it. Daar hoped he chose wisely, because he dearly loved his idealistic Cousin and couldn’t think of much worse than being forced to break him as an example to all.

That was a worry for another day. Right then, the beatdown of the mission and the ensuing aftermath had taken its toll. Daar needed three things: he needed to lift, he needed to eat, and he needed to sleep. He hadn’t had a moment’s rest since the mission and he was starting to butt against the edge of his mental endurance. He was stressed out and angry, and the last thing anybody needed was a rampaging Great Father who couldn’t control his temper.

So, Daar did what he needed to do. He dragged Fiin and the Warleaders of all four Fangs off to the gym, then proceeded through a murderous ‘lil routine ‘Horse had sent him the other week. It was long, painful, exhausting, and just the thing to prove he could still whup the young pups on anything. That felt good and mellowed him out some, ‘specially since the gap ‘tween them was maybe just a bit wider than usual today. Pro’ly it were all the anger; none of ‘em had the same kinda rage Daar had.

Small blessings.

Once Daar was good and tuckered out, he dragged them off to the mess hall ‘fer some grub and ate himself full to bursting, then commiserated with his thrashed Brothers and complimented them on their ‘Back-strong improvements. It was important they didn’t get discouraged or hold him in any kind of subservient awe, so he pointed out the little nips he let them get in to soothe their wounded pride. He didn’t allow ‘em anything too big, though; he weren’t about to let ‘em think they stood any chance against him in any way. The only people that could whup him—sometimes, ‘fer now—were all aliens: Yan, Arés, Firth…and Murray, too. Somehow. The Keeda-shit crazy ninja.

…Could bestest friend Tiny still get a trick or two in? He’d need to find out some day…

Anyway. All of that felt damn good and were exactly what he needed, but balls if it didn’t suck the very last of his energy outta him. Sensing his oncoming crash, Daar attended to the last-minute business of the day, made it very clear he weren’t to be disturbed “even if my tail was on fire,” and at last managed to thump tiredly up to his quarters. It was all he could do to drag his mangy tail through the door.

Naydi was waiting for him. He felt some energy return to his body and his tail wagging of its own accord. He pant-grinned, pleased as a fat cub to see her, but she of course saw right through his honest happiness and into the weariness underneath. She didn’t say anything and she didn’t need to, she just flowed over and nuzzled him right against his nape. They held for a long time.

He could smell everything, especially that close up. Normally that bewitchin’ note he were smellin’ on Naydi would have led to the most predictablest outcome ever, but for the time being Daar was so far beyond exhausted he found himself committing somethin’ like a personal heresy.

“…Naydi, uh, don’t take this personally…but tonight I just wanna sleep.”

She duck-nodded knowingly. “I understand.”

Gods but he depended on her strength. What a blessing she was! They didn’t say much more, just padded over to their nest-bed, curled up, and lay quietly together for a nice, long time.

He was starting to feel drowsy when Naydi pounced on him, all clever like she always did.

“You had an interesting letter, Bumpkin.”

She’d taken it on herself to handle most of his personal correspondence. Daar was sure there was some kinda behind-the-scenes power struggle between her and Regaari, but right then he didn’t care. Both of ‘em knew his mind better’n he did, sometimes.

She also knew not to burden him with details, so when she decided some note was important, Daar paid very close attention.

“Oh?”

She spoke. He listened. He nodded along, growing increasingly enthusiastic with each sentence.

“I’m in,” he said.

Despite his best efforts he drifted off to sleep. He woke again sometime just before dawn, and took a moment to consider the burgeoning orange sky outside. Really, he should probably get up and sort out some of the endless demands on his time.

Instead, he curled up around Naydra and fell asleep again almost instantly.

Sometimes, even a Great Father could indulge.

Date Point: 15y6m3d AV
Riverside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

“Well hey, stranger.”

There was that smile. God he’d missed that smile. It lifted him right up and brought a wide grin to his own face.

Of course, he had to say hello to the dog first.

“Hey.” Derek knelt down and made a fuss of Hannah, who wriggled ecstatically around him before flopping on her back for a chest rub.

He could appreciate a lady who knew what she wanted.

Ava laughed and crouched down next to him. “So what was the delay? I thought you’d be free as soon as the Ten’Gewek were on Earth.”

Derek shrugged apologetically. “I had to secure permissions and reassure a buncha government types and… Shit, I think if I’d tried to do it all by email I’d still be stuck in my office. So I spent the whole time visiting folks in their offices instead.”

She scratched the dog. “Taking two aliens on a tour around the national parks and stuff is hard work, huh?”

“You have no idea. Got some good news for you, though. Or, well, an opportunity.”

She raised an eyebrow slightly. “Oh?”

“Dinner, tomorrow. A real dinner, you and me. And a show or a movie or an art gallery or something first if you want.”

Somehow, he managed to pull off a no-big-deal, casual kinda attitude and the look on her face was completely worth it: just for a second, she was totally off-balance.

“…Wait, really?”

He grinned. “Really.”

“Like, a date?”

“A date.”

“With me?”

“With you, yes.”

She stared at him for a moment as if he’d just suggested they should go order a deep-fried groundhog.

“…Are you sure?”

He grinned wider. “Absolutely sure.”

“I thought… I mean, the Lads and…”

“Ava,” he chuckled. “Is this a yes or a no?”

“Uh… yes! It’s a yes! I’m just… I kinda figured that…” She trailed off, stared at him for a second longer, then kissed him.

Considering they were both still crouched down next to Hannah, the result was that they both fell over. She landed on his chest, and Hannah scrambled to get away then circled warily around to check they were okay.

“Ow.”

“Sorry, sorry…” She didn’t climb off him, though. “Are you okay?”

Derek rubbed the back of his head and picked a little fleck of gravel out of his hair. “That ain’t how I imagined it going.”

“Is it okay? I mean, you hit your head, that’s… and you only asked me out and I… did I read too much into—?”

“Ava.”

“…Yeah?”

It was his turn to kiss her. She melted into him with a happy sigh and considering they were both already on the ground, it lasted much longer this time.

After a while she straightened up and looked around. “I, uh… Hmm. Good thing it’s early in the morning.”

They helped each other to their feet, where she recovered her composure by adjusting her hair, and he recovered his by adjusting his clothes. She was right, one benefit of their just-after-sunrise routine was that the park was basically empty and as far as he could tell their public display of affection had gone un-witnessed.

“Whew. Uh… Hmm.” She turned to look at him and finally seemed to have got her balance back. “…Yeah. You can take me to dinner tomorrow.”

Derek snorted and laughed. “Real convincing. Very casual.”

She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “…Really though? I… I mean, my relationship with the SOR has never been great…”

“Bro Prime stepped in and basically demanded I ask you out. I’d have done it sooner, but this was literally the first opportunity.”

“Adam did that?” She looked distant for a second. “…Wow.”

“He cares about you a lot. Said he’d smooth everything over with the Lads, and… well.” Derek shrugged. “The big bastard is pretty persuasive.”

“I bet,” she said drily, and dusted herself off. “Uh… we should probably…” she gestured down the path.

“One last favor to ask you…” Derek said, though he set off jogging alongside her.

“Uh, sure. Name it!”

“If I had, like… a message I wanted to get out. About things. A thought I wanted to share, kinda thing…”

“Like what?”

“Well… I was thinking about what you said about art. And I was thinking… artists mostly think a certain way, right? Like… your average artist is probably college educated, Left-leaning, that kinda thing.”

“Eh…you’d be surprised, but…that’s mostly what I see, yeah,” Ava agreed. “Especially the ones who do gallery shows and stuff. Who’re into the whole art scene, y’know?”

Derek nodded. “Seems to me like there’s things not being said that need to be said.”

“Maybe. If there’s something you want to say, I’d love to help, but uh… if it’s about what I think it’s about… let’s maybe talk about it later,” she suggested. She slowed her pace and reached out to take his hand. Her fingers were surprisingly warm when they interlaced with his.

“…Yeah,” he decided. “It can wait.”

Date Point: 15y6m3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant-Commander Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Technical Sergeant Adam Arés

Sergeant Arés sees me every month and his visit today was expected. Since his last visit he has enjoyed the birth of his first child. I congratulated him and we briefly touched on that subject, but he is happy, enthusiastic and optimistic in that regard: His new fatherhood seems to be a source of joy rather than stress for him.

This session was a bit unusual in that he seemed eager to talk about everything but the recent mission, and spent the first half-hour of our session reviewing his athletic achievements (faster and stronger, naturally), his academic progress (working on his Master’s thesis in sports medicine), his real estate empire (contemplating another building purchase) and so on.

He opened up when I directly pointed out his evasiveness, though he did exhibit a very brief flash of anger. He was immediately contrite, though alas I did not have the time to explore that topic.

With regards to the Operation LOST CUB, he admitted that he feels deeply conflicted about what they achieved. He states that he understands the rationale and the command decision, but tells me that rationalizing it is not helping. He says he understands and agrees that an incalculable number of lives will be saved in the long run, but again this seemed to be small comfort.

The thing that seemed to trouble him the most, however, was his relationship with the Great Father. Many of the men had a particular image of Daar which has been badly shaken by recent events. Where once there was a friendly, boisterous brother-in-arms, there is now a being who is great in all the terrible meanings of the word.

The specific words that Sergeant Arés used were “You think you know a guy, you know?” and “Makes me wonder, if Daar had that in him all along then who else?”

We shifted the discussion into Arés’ own immense propensity for aggression, which is intense even by the standards of the HEAT. Segueing into this topic seemed to give him food for thought, and brightened him considerably. He thanked me, saying “I think I know what’s been itching at me now” and departed in a much more chipper mood.

It would be helpful if I was better-acquainted with Daar, but Arés’ moment of epiphany seemed to coincide with mulling over the term ‘Great Father.’ Considering the recent change in his family circumstances, I am left to wonder what connection he has made, a conversation I look forward to having with him next month.

-Lt Cmdr K. Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman.

Date Point: 15y6m3d AV
City 01, Origin, The Corti Directorate

Nofl

The banner-caste system had always grated at Nofl. Summarily removing individuals from the breeding pool over their childhood and adolescent performance on standardized academic tests and personality traits was… It sneered at all the ways in which a Corti could be productive, successful, or even a genius without conforming to the Directorate’s narrow protocols.

Take Nofl himself. His adolescent assessment had described his personal foibles as “crippling.” Crippling! As though a sense of humor and a flair for the dramatic were defects! Oh, he’d shown them. He’d shown them good and hard what a Steel-banner lowlife could achieve. There were a lot of very wealthy Deans and Directors who profited from his work, and Nofl’s own credit line was historic for one of his caste.

Empirical demonstrations of the Caste system’s inadequacy didn’t come clearer or louder… but the Castes were orthodoxy. Contrary to his fantasies, all of his wild success had achieved absolutely nothing to shift the entrenched dogma.

Now, though, it seemed as though every Corti alive including the coveted echelons of the Directorate and Colleges themselves were destined to be a reproductive dead-end regardless. Every last one of them was about to be yanked firmly out of the gene pool regardless of their Banner. The Directorate’s plan was that extreme. Logical, but extreme.

“All of them? Really?”

Secondary Director Larfu confirmed it with a languid wave of his hand. “Every last one. Every reproductive facility under the Directorate’s control is to be dismantled as soon as we have a viable new template, and we are strengthening the Office of Population Control’s powers to detect and shut down unlicensed procreation.”

“And this viable template will be inspired by Human DNA,” Nofl checked.

Tertiary Director Blernd gestured a secondary display. “If necessary, we may even consider splicing in certain useful genes, as you can see here. Certain functions that have been carefully eradicated from the Corti genome may need to be reintroduced. If the Human genome provides a superior version of the same function, then why not use the best available?”

Nofl could think of a few objections, mostly involving words like ‘sanctity‘ and ‘creepy,’ but they were Steel-banner thinking, not to mention being English loan-words. The concepts they embodied were difficult indeed to express in Cortan.

“I would raise concerns about compatibility,” he said instead. “Not to mention epigenetic phenomena that may defy prediction.”

“All the more reason to build as complete a picture as we can,” Blernd said.

That was reasonable, at least. And frankly, Nofl knew that what his species needed now was to roll the dice. They would load those dice and bend the game’s rules in their favor, but they had reached the point where survival demanded risk-taking.

“Securing the requested data should not be difficult,” he predicted.

Larfu seemed pleased. “Good. We shall instruct the medical barge Continuity Correction to be ready to transit to Cimbrean. If you can secure that genome, then a demonstration of our advanced trauma surgery techniques is a small price.”

Nofl nodded, and was about to step back when a thought occurred to him. “Out of interest…” he asked, “why Human and not Gaoian DNA? They are classed as deathworlders too…”

“Only by the most, hmm… extreme interpretation of the data and lending rather more weight to certain anomalous individuals than is truly warranted considering the species and planetary average,” Blernd said. “I dislike when political expediency meddles with accurate surveys.”

“Our oh-so-accurate surveys missed a great deal of rather critical data, especially the details of their past. And need I remind the Director, those same surveys were forced to revise their rating upwards no less than thrice before settling on nine-point-nine-one-two, and then finally ten-point-two. In light of that, their reclassification hardly seems illogical, dear.”

“…We have a great deal of genetic data from the Gaoians now, in the aftermath of their war,” Larfu said, flatly ignoring the jab. “And we have uncovered… irregularities. Quite aside from the evidence of profound and widespread mutation only a few hundred generations recently, their genome is absolutely riddled with a repeating non-expressed sequence that looks intriguingly like it might be a marker of some kind.”

“Humans have something similar,” Nofl pointed out. “Though in their case it seems to be indirectly related to transcription issues that change protein shape on expressed DNA, and the regulation of expression if not expression itself.”

“All the more reason to compare and contrast,” Blernd observed. “If we are going to draw inspiration from, or even outright copy alleles from deathworlders, we need to robustly consider as much data as we can… It really is a shame we won’t be able to get a Ten’Gewek genome.”

“Fascinating people,” Nofl agreed amiably. “I only saw them from afar when they visited Folctha, but that tail is tremendously strong. They can support their bodyweight on it quite comfortably, both in tension and in compression.”

Larfu made a softly disappointed noise. “A shame you couldn’t get a closer look. Even a medical scan would be tremendously valuable…”

“I fear their guide and protector is… not well-disposed to Corti. It seems he was some idiot ‘zoologist’s’ half-baked experiment. He’s civil enough, but, well. He is in Warhorse’s orbit.”

“Ah, yes. The largest of the other set of Cruezzir monsters. After the damage done by the Human Disaster…”

“I can hardly be held accountable for other people misusing my invention, can I?” Nofl waved a hand airily. “Besides, it wouldn’t really be accurate or fair to call the HEAT ‘monsters.’ They’re…”

“Tame monsters?” Blernd suggested, archly.

“Hardly. Civilized may be a better term.” He ventured a brief flash of his most disarming smile. “And after all, the Directorate did approve the development of Cruezzir-Derivative. Both variants are performing optimally, I might add. Though I do wonder…do the Humans know the full details of what you put into the product, hmm?”

“They can make their own deductions,” Larfu retorted. “Now. I believe we have a price the Humans will consider fair for this surgery?”

“Viable genetics across a broad sampling of their genome, including anomalous samples and stem cells,” Nofl nodded. “I can attest that what they call the HeLa strain has some truly fascinating properties, too. Alas, my laboratory isn’t equipped to plumb its deepest mysteries.”

“And the surgery itself? It would be… unfortunate if the patient did not survive. Our reputation and future opportunities are at stake.”

Nofl reassured the director with a distracted flap of his hand. “Oh, yes, the surgery will be trivial. It’s just a heart transplant and some peripheral tissue regeneration. Between the patient’s Deathworlder physiology and the hefty dose of Cruezzir-Derivative already in her system I can’t foresee that she’ll suffer anything worse than disorientation.”

“Excellent. Then make it so. We shall prepare our baseline ‘Mother Prime’ and ‘Father Prime’ and await further input. And…we will re-examine the Gaoian genome in light of your advice. There is a potential line of profit to be exploited there, if their Goldpaw Champion can be convinced.”

“Of course, Director. I’ll take my leave.”

Thus, Nofl’s meeting with the great and powerful was over, at least for now. He strolled languidly back toward the Directorate transport humming a jaunty tune to himself and taking a quiet delight in the strange looks his anomalous behaviour earned him.

“Mother Prime and Father Prime?” He shook his head in disbelief as he muttered the words to himself. Hopefully the coming New Corti paradigm would have more of a sense of imagination.

It was too much to hope that they might delve through the species’ most ancient archives and dig up whatever long-forgotten fable had filled the same role in Corti society as Adam and Eve had in Western Human society. That kind of lore was long gone.

But then again… perhaps that just meant they had the chance to write it from new.

Food for thought.

Date Point: 15y6m3d AV
Grand Commune of Females, Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

“You’re standing by them? Even after what they did?”

Yulna had commandeered a kitchen as she usually did when Xiù and Allison visited her. Allison didn’t complain—she got to lounge around and watch as the two who actually enjoyed cooking indulged their creative hobby, and she got to enjoy their creations.

She wasn’t touching the talamay today though. This wasn’t an occasion to be merry. Yulna was… understanding, but not happy.

“What choice did they have?” Xiù asked.

“…Starve, I suppose,” Yulna sighed. “And who would I be if I insisted that people had to starve themselves to death? Is my comfort worth more than their lives?”

“That’s my attitude,” Allison agreed.

“But… cannibalism though?”

“I mean…all living things must eat. And humans can’t digest raw grass or… whatever the local version is.”

“I did some reading up on it,” Xiù interjected. She was sifting flour to Yulna’s right and was already coated in a fine white coat of the stuff. “It comes back to nutrition. Humans just…need too much of it. Ironically, we actually find it harder to survive on lower-Class worlds because of the way the planetary classification scale works.”

“It’s the same for Gao,” Yulna agreed. “We’re obligate carnivores. I suppose that’s why the Dominion eventually bumped our rating up above ten. We didn’t cross a billion until…well, the modern era and intensive farming.”

“Part of the reason,” Allison nodded. “Political prejudice played its part too, I’m sure.”

“Or the Hierarchy.” Yulna sighed and deposited a bowl full of icing sugar and butter under the mixer. Some lucky cubs were going to be bouncing off the walls in a few hours: Allison certainly didn’t want to eat a Nava cake, though Xiù didn’t seem troubled by the recipe.

“Perhaps we should discuss something different?” Yulna requested. “Talking about cannibalism here in my kitchen is…”

“Off-putting?” Xiù suggested.

“Yes, let’s go with that.”

“It is… kinda the reason we came here today…” Allison reminded them. “I mean, it’s always great to see you, but…”

“But this is important,” Yulna sat down on a stool and scratched her claws idly on the countertop. “I know… I keep thinking about Triymin. I never met her.”

“No,” Xiù said quietly. “You never got to.”

“What was she like?”

Xiù set her bowl of flour aside for a second and leaned against the counter opposite Yulna. “…Wounded,” she said after a moment’s thought. “Scared. She barely knew how to be a Gaoian, but she was so brave… And so loyal…”

“Sounds like a Gaoian to me,” Allison said. It earned her two grateful looks.

“How many more like her were on that ring, I wonder…?” Yulna mused.

“…More than could ever be saved.”

“That’s a very… male answer, Allison.”

Allison just shrugged, and after a second Yulna sagged. “…But true,” she conceded.

“Ayma was appalled when she found out what Triymin’s mother had done to save the cubs…” Xiù recalled.

“Yes. She always… in the loveliest way, she was loyal and loving to a fault. But I could always sympathize. Those are the virtues and ideals of this Clan after all: Loyalty and love.”

“And the unrestrained fury of a mama bear,” Allison said. She elaborated when they looked at her. “What was that guy’s name again? The Corti who abducted you two?”

“Trig,” Xiù said.

“Remind me what happened to him again?”

“That bastard deserved what he got,” Yulna growled.

“You tore him apart.”

“Personally,” Yulna agreed. She caught the note of satisfaction in her own voice and her expression changed to consternation. “…So you’re right. Unrestrained fury.”

“…I never did find out what I was doing there,” Xiù said suddenly. “It’s like I was almost an afterthought and they didn’t know what to do with me?”

“Oh! Didn’t Regaari tell you?” Yulna looked surprised.

“Tell me what?”

“The whole experiment was about you. He wanted to see how you reacted to distressing stimuli. He was testing how well Humans can empathise with other life forms.”

“…With a sample size of one?” Allison asked. “He wasn’t a very good scientist.”

“He was an exiled sadist with delusions of grandeur,” Yulna snarled. “The Directorate expelled him years before he took us.”

“I did wonder why they didn’t object to you… to what you did to him,” Xiù looked obviously uncomfortable.

“…That was your first time seeing that side of us,” Yulna sighed. “And I suppose that’s the problem I face now. My Sisters are going to feel pulled in two directions by their instincts over this ring and what the Great Father did to it.”

She tapped her forehead. “Up here we can see the logic of it and understand that the Hunters were really to blame… Down here though…” She stroked the fur of her abdomen. “The Great Father killed a great many cubs, both on Gao and now on the Ring. Some of us will be furious with him over that, even though we never knew them.”

“And because you made him Great Father…” Xiù predicted.

“…Yes.”

“Your throne’s wobbling a bit, huh?” Allison asked.

“I don’t have a throne. I never had a throne. But I had the power to give Daar his, and he certainly never wanted it.”

“But he’s using it.”

“Yes, because he must.” Yulna stood up and plunged into the depths of a fridge in search of God-knew-what. “There are people who don’t understand that.”

“There always are.”

“…What happens if Daar loses the love and support of the average Gao on the street?” Yulna asked. “He has the Grand Army and the Clans, but what about the civilians? The disapproval of the Clan of Females is a soft power at most, and so long as I’m Mother-Supreme it’s off the table. But even the mightiest and most intimidating throne needs to rest on a solid foundation of public support.”

She found what she was after—eggs—and returned to making her cake.

“Well…that’s really up to him, isn’t it?” Allison argued. “He just did a Great thing, and now its on him to show why it mattered. And I suppose it’s worth noting that the males in your society hold a lot more power than they generally exercise.”

Xiù nodded. “Let’s face it. If the Males didn’t want the Females to have any power at all, they outnumber us several times over…”

“…And cases like Myun aside, they’re bigger and stronger than you, too,” Allison pointed out.

Yulna broke an egg into the flour bowl, and Allison saw Xiù subtly wince and bite her tongue. Yulna had an… unorthodox approach to baking, but right now it was her kitchen and her relaxation activity, so she got to do it however she liked.

“You’re saying that Females only have any power because males allow it?” she asked, seemingly oblivious to Xiù’s fidgeting.

“…No. But there’s something important at play. Hell, look at us.” Allison gestured to Xiù and herself. “Julian’s never been small, but now he’s a lot heavier than the pair of us combined. The only reason Xiù ever wins when they spar these days is because she’s tricky, and because he’s just playing. What if he decided to stop playing one day? He’s managed to scare me plenty of times.”

“You’re scared of him?” Yulna asked. She selected a tube of Nava paste and Allison looked away so that she wouldn’t have to suppress the urge to heave as Yulna squeezed a healthy quantity of pureed insect guts into the cake batter.

At least Xiù didn’t seem fazed. “Sometimes.”

“A woman who isn’t at least a little scared of her man is either an idiot or she has a weak man… In which case she’s an idiot,” Allison said. “But, see, the thing is? That goes both ways. It’s just…different.”

“…How so?”

“Julian is…a very caring man. If I’m feeling even the tiniest bit sad for any reason at all, it ruins his day and he doesn’t want to do anything else until whatever upset me is fixed. That’s…a hell of a power to have. It honestly scares me that I can do that to someone.”

“If we called him right now and said we need him to come home… he would,” Xiù agreed. “And I’m pretty sure Yan and Vemik would understand, too.”

“But he could overwhelm you, if it ever got into his head to do so,” Yulna finished. “And the Males could overwhelm us.”

Allison nodded. “Yeah. And that’s my point, I think.”

“Daar wouldn’t behave like he does if he didn’t truly care about the Females. He’d just enslave us,” Xiù elaborated. “He doesn’t want that, he wants a strong Clan of Females. I think, really, that’s the thing that’ll win the argument for him.”

‘Us,’ Allison noted. Xiù always included herself in the Clan of Females whenever she spoke about it.

Yulna finished mixing her cake batter in thoughtful silence for a few seconds, then poured it into a greased tin. “…Yes. I think you’re right,” she said at last. “And I think I can make that argument to my Sisters, too.”

“And the Dauntless crew?” Xiù asked.

Yulna sighed and finished scraping out the batter. She ran her spatula over the surface to flatten it down and spread it out, then turned to transfer the cake tin to an oven. “…They did what they had to to keep each other alive. We do what we must to protect each other. I don’t think we can blame them. In fact… I think I feel sorry for them. I wouldn’t want to have to make the choices they did.”

She closed the oven and dusted off her paws. “…And that’s my official position on it,” she declared.

“…Thank you, Mother.”

Yulna duck-nodded, then returned to the fridge and produced a covered plate. “I made this one earlier. Something a little more pleasing to the human palate… I hear you have a couple of young ones in your house yourselves, now?”

“My brothers, yeah.” Allison accepted the plate gratefully and sneaked a glance under the cover. Strawberries and chocolate gleamed back at her. “Oh man. It’s gonna be hard to be a good big sis and not eat all of this…”

Yulna handed her the mixing spoon. “Here. If it keeps you from stealing a cub’s cake, you can lick the spoon. Just bring it back next time.”

“…Thanks.”

In fact, Allison gave the spoon to Xiù as soon as they were out of Yulna’s sight, and tried not to horf as Xiù got it all over her nose and chin with every sign of enjoying it. Eventually she’d had enough and just had to comment. “…Really?”

Xiù paused. “Hmm? What?”

“That’s a nava cake, babe.”

“Yup!” Xiù happily scooped a dollop off her chin to lick it off her finger, then saw Allison’s expression. “…I guess it’s an acquired taste.”

“Y’know, sometimes I can’t tell if you take being kinda-sorta Gaoian real seriously, or if you just went native. I mean, you even say ‘us’ when you talk about the Clan.”

Xiù cleaned the end of her nose and shrugged. “That bit I take seriously,” she said. “I mean, I don’t pretend like I’m not a little messed up about it, bǎobèi…”

“You’re fine,” Allison assured her. “But I’m sorry, Nava-flavored cake is where I draw the line.”

“More for me!” Xiù beamed with a teasing look on her face, and licked the spoon again. “But what’s the problem? You like my chāshāo bāo don’t you?”

“Pork is one thing. Nava’s another.”

“Your loss.”

Their shuttle was waiting to take them back to the mainland, and Xiù gave the pilot’s seat a wistful look as she sat down. “…I should really learn how to fly one of these,” she said.

“Why not? You can definitely afford the lessons.”

“I think I will then. It’d be nice to fly again.”

“Especially a shuttle. We could go into orbit again. How does another out-of-this-world experience sound?” Allison grinned at her, and the Gaoian Sister piloting the shuttle flicked her ear with a smirk as Xiù went crimson, before returning her attention to the job at hand and taking off.

“…It sounds like a chance to have some privacy, really.” Xiù admitted. “The boys are lovely, but I miss having the place just for us.”

Allison sighed and nodded as the shuttle banked over the grand commune and accelerated. “Yeah. I mean, when was the last time we just hung out?”

“Not since your mother showed up.”

“We should fix that.”

Xiù looked sideways at her, then snuggled up close. “Camping trip? A fire and a tent somewhere?”

“And a crate full of beers. Just like old times.”

Xiù sighed. “That sounds perfect.”

“We’ll make it happen,” Allison promised. Xiù nodded, snuggled into her a little closer, and comfortable silence descended. Allison stroked her hair a few times then put her head back to relax for the ride home herself.

At least some things in life could be simple…

__

Date Point: 15y6m3d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Charlotte, being about the girliest girl ever, needed a few minutes to get past the delighted squeaking and happy-clappy dancing stage of excitement before flitting into the kitchen to make tea because… well, presumably there was some British version of logic at play.

Ben watched her go with a fond chuckle then gave Ava a hug. “Well. It’s about bloody time. In’t that right, Hannah?”

The dog wagged her tail at him, while Ava grinned and sat down on their couch. “Yeah. It is.”

“So what’s he like?” Charlotte called. Her and Ben’s house was small and modest, especially by Folctha’s standards. Charlotte called it ‘cosy’: Ava had always felt it was cramped, especially with all the stuff they had cluttering up the place. Stacks of old console games, a tough Aloe Vera that was somehow managing to survive their slapdash attention, shelves full of interesting knick-knacks and a mountain of untouched cookbooks. The whole thing was sprinkled liberally with lonely crumpled socks and mugs that bore a thin internal lacquer of dried tea.

She had to admit: it was one of the most characterful and lived-in places that she knew. It was a home in the complete and messy sense of the word, whereas Ava had few possessions and paid for a cleaner to visit twice a week. The contrast was stark.

“He’s been through a lot,” she said. “He’s tough, composed… kinda dangerous…”

“Dangerous?” Ben asked.

“In the best way. He has that… quiet intensity. Y’know? Disciplined.”

Charlotte poked her head out of the kitchen. “How’d you meet?”

“I actually can’t tell you the details!” Ava gave her a sorry smile. “I met him in Egypt.”

“Bloody hell, everything comes back to Egypt with you!” Ben rolled his eyes. “…What the hell happened over there?”

“Stuff. Big stuff that I don’t really… But Derek was involved.”

“You and your soldiers…” Charlotte darted into the room long enough to give her a hug, then returned to the kettle.

“What else?”

“Well… he’s artistic! He doesn’t think he is, but that’s just because he’s never tried to make art, yet. But he’s got an artist’s soul, y’know? What else…? Uh, I know he has an ex-wife and a kid out there somewhere, but he doesn’t like to talk about them much…”

“He does?” Ben asked. “…How old is he?”

“He’s about twelve years older than me.”

“Wow.” Ben sat back. “Isn’t that kind of a big gap?”

“I don’t care.”

“Heh! Fair enough. What else?”

“Well, he’s—”

Ava’s phone rang, interrupting her, and she pulled a face. She’d set a different ringtone for when her editor Jason was calling off the work line. He’d only be calling now if something big had come up.

“Mierda…” She gave Ben and Charlotte an apologetic look and fished the phone out of her pocket. She made a point of buying pants with real pockets.

“This is Ava.”

Jason had a lot of noise behind him. Things in the office must be getting active. “Hey Ava. Are you able to come in? It looks like a big ET piece is about to land.”

“Jason, I only got off work an hour ago! …How big?”

“Apparently the Gaoians are gonna make some kind of big statement to the Dominion Security Council. We know it has to do with that Byron crew and the planet they were trapped on, but other than that…”

“The SOR were involved too,” Ava predicted.

“How d’you know?”

“Sources. The HEAT were activated. All of them.”

She heard him typing frantically. “This is why we need you, Ava.”

She sighed. “Okay. I’m having tea with my friends. I’ll come in as soon as I’ve drunk it.”

“Ava—”

“Do I have to remind you about Folctha’s working hours laws again? I’m coming in. But I want ten minutes with my friends first. Got that?”

“…Alright. See you in twenty.” He hung up and Ava rolled her eyes as she put her phone away.

“Bloody hell. You got assertive!” Ben said, approvingly.

“Jason always wants me in five minutes ago when something new comes down the wire,” Ava sighed. “If he knows it’s coming though, that means it’s not urgent. There’ll be plenty of time to prepare for it.”

Charlotte delivered the tea and sat down. She looked about ready to fizz out of her skin, and could barely sit still. “So?”

“So… what?”

“So you’ve known him for a while, he’s asked you out… could this be the one?”

Ava laughed and picked up her drink. “…I don’t really believe in ‘the one.’ But I have a good feeling about Derek. I think… I think we can see things in each other that are there, but neither of us believe are there. Y’know?”

“Sounds constructive,” Ben commented. “You gonna bring him down the park or the beach anytime soon?”

“One step at a time. Come on, you remember how long it took me to convince you two to try out the beach with me.” Ava sipped her tea. “Anyway. It’s just the start.”

“Yeah. But keep us in the loop. You look way happier already.”

They chatted briefly about Ben’s work, Charlotte asked after how baby Diego was doing, and the tea vanished much too quickly for Ava’s liking. Pretty soon, she couldn’t think of an excuse not to drag herself off the couch and reluctantly call a cab. There were hugs, promises to take an afternoon down at the beach together sometime soon, and she went to work with Hannah at her side.

The office was thrumming when she got there. Jason glanced pointedly at the clock when she came in, but got a complete no-sell glare in return. Ava wasn’t on call today, her presence was totally voluntary and he had no right to give her any kind of grief.

Fortunately, the chief editor Amy Larsen was less of a pain in the ass. She also knew when the office needed some fast food to handle a late evening news bomb that promised to turn into a potential all-nighter. She gave Ava a grateful smile, and with a glance in Jason’s direction and a roll of her eyes she somehow made everything better.

Hannah curled up in her soft little doggy bed next to Ava’s desk as Ava sat down and checked her emails. She put on her headset and got on the office voice chat. It was weird how she was using her computer to talk with people who were sat at most only a few dozen feet away, but it worked: their hands were free, they could type or search or contact their sources, all without filling the air with shouts and confusion.

Amy smiled at her and though she was on the far side of the room, her voice sounded close and conversational in Ava’s headset. “Hey Ava. Thanks for coming in.”

Ava waved at her and adjusted her mic. “So something big’s gonna happen with the Gao?”

Jason’s voice: “Yeah. Apparently the Great Father just showed up on the Rich Plains in person…”

Date Point: 15y6m4d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lieutenant-Commander Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Senior Master Sergeant Christian Firth

Sergeant Firth entered my office in a downright giddy mood today, a happy change from our earliest sessions where his usual demeanor was one of cynical, barely-contained aggression.

To be fair, that aggression is still there in full measure, if not possibly stronger. What’s changed is its direction and application. Rather than projecting a state of constant low-grade anger, he now seems motivated, as though he now views the things that used to make him angry as opportunities, rather than frustrations.

My suspicion is that our counseling sessions are only partly responsible for this change. He is one of the first and heaviest users of Cruezzir-D, being a first-generation HEAT operator. He is also one of the oldest men on the team but, like all the operators, there has been a pronounced anti-aging effect and recently it’s become impossible to miss. The full effect has taken longer to manifest with him—the medical board believes that is due to a combination of his age, sheer size, and accumulated injuries over a rough career. In any case he too has reached the point where he looks like a young adult, and increasingly his attitude is that of a young man as well.

Firth, to his immense credit, has taken to calling it his “second shot” at life. I feel this is a healthy view to take of the situation, though like the other operators he expresses concern about what the long-term risks of their heavy “Crude” usage might exactly entail. Coincident with his recent attitude shift and his “more handsomer” appearance, he is finding himself in a state of rapid and extreme physical improvement, much like Arés had experienced for many years. This too has fueled his optimism and, in conjunction with his intensely competitive nature and dominant personality, rekindled his long-term belief that he would eventually “beat Arés at his own game.” One might feel sympathy for their gym equipment, considering its likely fate.

Apparently this is all causing some interpersonal friction with his fiancé Freya, which became a focus of today’s session. He is unsure how he might address this beyond expressing his love for her at every opportunity. He feels this may be making things worse, however, and I suggested that she might feel a little overwhelmed.

That seemed to draw an analogy in his mind and he recounted at length his mentoring of Arés on an eerily similar relationship. To quote: “Christ. Y’think it might be all this young-puppy bullshit goin’ on inside me?”

I noted that possibly his best course of action would be to talk it out with her at home in a casual setting. I have reinforced that “casual” means laid-back, unplanned and so forth; he laughed, which is a distinctly rare sound in my experience, and recounted that he’d given the exact same advice to his Brothers on more than one occasion. He stated he would “try and relax some.”

We touched briefly on Operation LOST CUB. He had nothing much to say on the subject, but what he said was direct and honest. Quote: “It saves lives in the long run, it protects people I care about, and those poor fucks were fucked before we ever got there. I ain’t gonna worry none too much ‘bout it.”

This pragmatic attitude is typical of him, and I am satisfied that he is mentally and emotionally well.

-Lt Cmdr K. Mears,
Counsellor, HMS Sharman.

Date Point: 15y6m4d AV
Dominion Council vessel Rich Plains, The Ruibal Territories

Champion Sheeyo of Clan Goldpaw

The Dominion Security Council were slow to change and glacial when it came to adopting new things, but even they weren’t so hard-headed as to ignore the obvious benefits of jump drives now that both the Humans and the Gao had embraced the technology.

The Rich Plains never warped anywhere anymore: It just went. From orbit to orbit, from system to system. As the Council did the rounds, gracing each member and associate member species with their presence, they skipped the intervening voyage and all its associated risk.

Adding Jump Arrays had helped enormously. Delegates could come and go from their homeworlds rather than travelling potentially for weeks to reach the Council, and staying for months. Sheeyo could be back on Gao for an important discussion with the Great Father or his Cabinet in the morning, and attend a Council session in the afternoon quite easily.

Or, as the case may be, bring the Great Father with him.

The alien delegates stiffened and watched warily when Daar prowled four-pawed into the council chamber. Sheeyo couldn’t blame them: They were used to Goldpaws and Whitecrests and other slim, average specimens of the species. Daar was… exceptional. Stonebacks were generally like that, but Daar was…was a massive, lacerated, more-than-feral embodiment of retribution.

And civilized. That part always confused: on the rare occasion the Great Father cared to be civilized, he did so in a way that always put people off-balance.

Sheeyo cleared his throat. “Honored delegates,” he announced: “Daar of Clan Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao.”

Daar padded alongside Sheeyo and laid a heavy grateful paw on Sheeyo’s back. “Thank you, my friend. I brought you some beef jerky ‘fer later…” He then turned towards the assembled beings and rose to his full, colossal height. Standing fully upright, Daar was tall enough to look a Guvnurag in the eye. Only the gangly Champion Loomi matched him for altitude, but there was nobody to match him in stature.

“Delegates, I came here to give you this warning in person, as what is about to happen is my responsibility,” he said. The Great Father used his rolling, booming voice to maximum effect. “What has been done was necessary. But the consequences will be dire.”

Heads turned and whispers textured the chamber for a second, but he ignored them. “Four days ago, by the Gaoian reckoning, a First Fang task group led personally by myself and supported by Human forces from the Hazardous Environment Assault Team attacked and were successful in destroying… this.”

Sheeyo had dutifully loaded a presentation on the Ring into the chamber’s holographic display systems. It sprung up in the middle of the hall now, still wire-thin in comparison the planet it girdled but undeniably immense beyond understanding.

“This,” Daar told the chamber, “was a Hunter megastructure. You can see the estimates on its size and volume. We believe that more than ninety-five percent of the Swarm-of-Swarms was docked at the time of this ring’s destruction, and that it was home to the largest Hunter population in the galaxy.”

Sheeyo glanced to his left at the soft noise he heard there. The Corti delegate blinked and recovered her composure quickly, but for a second there had been an expression of sorts on that tiny, subtle face. He wasn’t sure what emotion she had expressed, but to get through a high-caste Corti’s discipline it had to be intense.

She locked it down again in a second, but Sheeyo knew. He returned his attention to Daar as similar reactions bounced around the hall.

“Despite this objective triumph, our great enemy was crafty and resilient,” the Great Father continued. “The Hunters fought back, hard. In so doing, they bought themselves time, and were able to save many ships. They are wounded and diminished, but still very much active… and now they are severed from what was their primary source of food.”

He tapped a claw sharply on the lectern when the background rustle of conversation got a little too loud, and that was enough to quiet them again. “The Dominion may believe that the Hunters primarily feed themselves by raiding, but that ain’t so. As it turns out—and the Council should already know this, as it was a tiny young Gaoian female called Sister Triymin who first delivered this intelligence to you—” the Great Father’s voice dropped half an octave as he said that, and for a second there was livid anger almost crackling in his hackles and teeth, “—this Ring was full of slaves. Slaves kept and bred purely for the purposes of being meat.”

He raised his voice now. Where Sheeyo had mastered the art of lofting his voice over a commotion, Daar’s gravelly tones just smashed the hubbub aside like a landslide. He would brook no interruption.

“Less slaves than livestock,” he said. “Feral. Broken. With no hope of rescue. I only hope that, if anything is left of them now that the Ring is gone, they’ll forgive me for putting ‘em out of their misery.”

“But they are the past,” he continued before any outrage could be voiced. “The future contains what’s left of the Swarm, and it still amounts to fifty thousand or more ships full of starving, desperate Hunters. Already, our intelligence says they have begun to raid aggressively along spacelanes near Kwmbwrw space. If the Dominion wants to avoid slaughter on a scale you haven’t never seen, you need to mobilize immediately. That is my warning.”

He finished with a deep breath, and tilted his neck until it made a popping sound that seemed to satisfy him.

“Now,” he said. “Know that this Council forfeited any right to object or question us when you stood by and watched my people burn nearly to extinction. I have done you the courtesy of giving this warning. It’s up ‘ta you whether you listen. My personal advice? Invest heavily in jump arrays. Get shields up around your core systems. We will make our prototype systems available, and in the meantime we will patrol heavily along vulnerable spacelanes and intervene when and how we see fit. Be grateful: I remind you that until such time as compensation has been paid for this Council’s failure to act in our defence, we are not bound by our treaty obligations.

“One last word: Y’all need to change your battle doctrine. The Dominion has relied for too long on an unwieldy doctrine of gross tonnage and firepower. That needs to end now and y’need ‘ta look at how those of us who actually got results against the Hunters have been doin’ things. Hard times are ahead: You can adapt and overcome them. We’ll even help. But if you fail to heed my warnings today, you will be mauled at least, and we won’t be able to stop it. Consider yerselves warned.”

With that, he dropped to his four-pawed gait and ignored the Speaker and the gathered Ambassadors as he headed for the doors. Their clamour for an explanation, or to shout at him, seemed to just bounce off him unheeded, and he was gone.

Sheeyo beat a rather less dignified retreat rather than face the delegates on the Great Father’s behalf. He practically had to run in fact, and by the time he caught up with Daar they were halfway back to the shuttle bay and he was out of breath.

Generously, Daar slowed down for him.

“They’re all talk an’ no listen, ain’t they?” he commented.

Aware that he’d need to go back into that chamber shortly, Sheeyo opted for a diplomatic answer. “That… went as well as could be expected, My Father.”

Daar only grumbled in reply and padded along in silence. Even at this slower pace, Sheeyo was finding it hard to keep up with him.

“Yeah,” he eventually allowed. “I s’pose. Meanwhile I gotta head back t’Earth again and schmooze. And also, I got a surprise I’m cookin’ up. Uh…I should maybe apologize ahead o’ time. It’s gonna make ‘yer life rough, maybe.”

“I suppose it would be too much to ask what it is?” Sheeyo asked.

“Yup!” Daar rumbled a chitter from somewhere deep in his chest.

“Naturally,” Sheeyo duck-nodded. “It wouldn’t be a secret if I could.”

Daar chittered again, which was a most gratifying sound.

“I’ll send ‘ya a note when it’s done. Anyway, right now I gotta get groomed ‘fer this. And unless ‘yer wantin’ ‘ta help me shave down…”

“I… thank you, My Father, but I think I’ll decline.”

Daar chittered even deeper and waggled his ears. “Oh? ‘Yer loss I s’pose.”

He rolled easily through into the departures area still chittering to himself, and Sheeyo was left to hang back and turn toward his office. He doubted he’d ever quite get used to the Great Father’s foibles.

Just what in Keeda’s name did Daar have planned?

Date Point: 15y6m4d AV
Oriel Art Gallery, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“…You look great, but you also look stressed as hell,” Derek ventured, and thus immediately put himself several steps above pretty much every other man Ava had dated, at least when it came to tact and sensitivity. Most of the rest would either have failed to notice, or else commented that she looked like shit warmed up.

“Urgh. Work. I got called in for a breaking story and… whew.”

“What happened?”

“Daar made the details of operation LOST CUB public,” Ava revealed. She saw him wince, and nodded. “Yeah. The Internet is going fucking crazy, everybody has an opinion, the Old Media are fanning the flames with everything they can muster…”

“Where do you guys stand on it?” Derek asked. “I know you guys have neutrality and the facts as your mission statement, but y’all’ve gotta have some kinda official take.”

Ava sighed and sat on the bench opposite the art gallery to straighten her thoughts out. She’d left Hannah with Charlotte and Ben for the night, and was regretting it now. She could have done with the tiny warm pressure of a nose on her knee.

“…A lot of people died,” she said. “Daar says it was better than the alternative, and we don’t know enough to contradict him. I dunno… It makes me wonder how Hiroshima and Nagasaki would’ve gone down online, y’know? And they were firecrackers next to what he claims he deployed.”

Derek didn’t answer, just sat down next to her and put an arm around her. Score several more points in the tact and sensitivity column.

“Wanna hear my opinion?” he asked.

“No blabbing to the reporter, Derek,” she joked. It earned her a smirk.

“Just an observation,” he promised. “Things this big, nobody gets to be neutral. If you don’t pick a side, then everybody assumes you’re on the other side and that you’re just too chickenshit to commit. It’s unfair, but it’s the way of people.”

“Yeah-huh. My editor said about the same thing.” Ava sighed. “The network’s official stance is that Daar went too far.”

“You don’t sound happy about that.”

Ava waved a disgusted hand. “Ya valío verga. But I don’t like taking sides, that’s opinion commentary.”

“Ya valley-what, now?”

“Sorry. It means, uh… It’s outta control, and it’s not worth giving a fuck over anymore… And honestly, I just want a nice evening so I can forget about it, at least until I go to work tomorrow.”

“I think I can manage that,” Derek promised. He stood up, helped her to her feet, and let her lead him into the art gallery where her stress soon washed away. Folctha had a thriving artistic community, and the Oriel gallery put on a new exhibition every other week.

Derek turned out to have a pretty good eye for art. He didn’t think he did, but it was definitely there. He didn’t just glance disinterestedly at pieces in the exhibit, he considered them, properly and in relation to the other pieces too.

And frankly, if he didn’t have the first idea what the kind of terminology an artist might use was, that was actually pretty refreshing.

The piece that most caught his attention was a circular snapshot of part of a pencil sketch, about as wide across as a shot glass. That tiny circle taken from a larger image seemed to grab him more than every other piece in the room, and Ava let him consider it for a good long time.

“What’re you thinking?” she nudged him eventually.

“I dunno. I… guess it makes me wonder what the bigger picture looked like. Like…” Derek indicated the image with a wave of his hand. That tiny postage stamp picture caught only about half of somebody’s face and the corner of what was maybe a house or something. Otherwise, the canvas was blank. “I keep trying to fill in around him and imagine where he was standing and what he was doing that day.”

“There’s just enough there for you to recognise, but not enough for you to identify, isn’t there?”

“Yeah. Makes me think.”

She favored him with a grin. Visiting the exhibition first before going to dinner was definitely the right way round: they’d have something to discuss as they ate that wasn’t politics or work. She moved on to the next piece, and after a few more seconds of considering the little porthole snapshots he followed her.

The next one was a sculpture. In fact it looked for all the world like the artist had taken a bronze casting of a loose-knitted scarf… which the card underneath it confirmed was exactly the case.

“…I don’t feel this one,” she said after a while. He let out a relieved sigh and his shoulders dropped.

“Thank fuck. I thought I was just being dumb.”

“I mean, it’s… technically impressive, I guess,” Ava said charitably. “Like, it took skill to make it. I just don’t see what they’re trying to say.”

“Says here it ‘invites you to consider the relationship between material and function’,” Derek read off the card.

“Eh. That kinda thing is like padding an essay up to the word count with purple prose. It’s lazy. There’s no real message here, the artist just decided they wanted to cast a bronze scarf and then had to come up with something to put on the card.”

“Heh. Like bullshitting on a report,” Derek nodded. “Not that I ever did anything like that…”

“Of course not,” she snarked, and took his arm. “…How ‘bout that dinner?”

“Sounds good.”

They walked arm-in-arm along Quarter Street, the gap between downtown Folctha to the west and the safety wall that protected the Alien Quarter from the human population on the other side. The Alien Quarter’s wall had originally been kind of a dull concrete eyesore, but Folctha’s residents had promptly fixed that. At various places along its length it was decorated with murals, hanging plants, posters… the Brothers of Clan Starmind had even decorated a length of it with a kind of painted sculptural low relief.

“So. That was your first trip to an art gallery?”

“Yup.”

“What did you think?”

“…I could stand to do that again.”

“Better not let the Lads hear that,” she teased.

“Hey, the Lads have brains,” Derek objected loyally. “Hell, Arés—uh, Marty—got ‘em all reading poetry. Though I think at this point it’s competitive. ‘Cuz, obviously, one of ‘em has to be the best at it, somehow.”

Ava smiled fondly. “…Only they could make a competition out of reading poetry.”

“I think their general leaderboard—yes, they have one of those too—has Murray and Firth tied.”

“Murray likes poetry? Also, no, wait, how do they score it?”

“Bro-logic.” He grinned and shrugged. “But yeah. Get a few drinks in him and Murray starts waxing about warrior poets, and Bannockburn. Give him a few more and he’ll stand up and recite that Robert Burns haggis poem from memory.”

“Well, he’s a long way from Scotland. Gotta represent!” Ava conceded, though internally she was giggling at the mental image.

Derek laughed, and indicated their destination. “You eaten here before?”

“No, but I know this place. They’ve got that signed photo of the Misfit trio above the bar, right?”

“…Poor Julian. Y’know he fuckin’ hates all of it, right? Even more than Allison does.”

“Wait, really?”

“Well, not the people. He likes meeting everyone, it just drains him.”

“Ahh,” Ava nodded understanding. She could sympathize. “So, did they recommend this place?”

“Xiù said we had to try the Greek salad.”

“Huh. Well, who am I to argue?”

In fact, the place was doing good business. If Derek hadn’t booked a table in advance, Ava doubted they’d have been able to sit. As it was, the waitress had saved them a secluded, intimate little table in the corner.

A lot of effort had gone into decorating the building’s interior as though it was some kind of Mediterranean stone farmhouse, and the effect was quite convincing. Ava hung her jacket over the back of the chair, parked her purse under it, and sat down only to find herself sitting below a rack of drying herbs. There were wine bottles everywhere, apparently stored in the walls as much for decoration as for ease of access, and the classical guitar music was just loud enough to give each table some privacy without forcing anybody to raise their voice.

She was impressed.

“Of course, you probably shouldn’t be leaking all this personal stuff about their personal lives to the reporter,” she pointed out.

“Probably not,” he agreed, “but I’m pretty sure you aren’t pumping me for information.”

“No pumping,” she promised, then grinned and sat back to let her eyes drift down his chest. Her teeth toyed with her lip. “Not on the first date anyway…”

He smirked. “…I set that one right up for you, didn’t I?”

“Would you think less of me if I confess I thought that one up ages ago?”

“Nah. Comedy’s all in the timing anyway.”

The waitress came round to take their drink orders and Ava gave an inward shimmy of excitement while Derek was distracted. This was going so much better than most any other date she’d ever been on already, and they’d only just sat down! And she had to admit, the age gap was actually working for her in the way it showed in his confidence and self-assuredness, which was the real thing rather than youthful bravado…

He ordered a bottle of wine for them both plus a jug of water, and settled into his seat comfortably.

“So, uh… Art,” he said.

“Your message you want to send?”

“Yeah. Mind if I tell you a story?”

She gestured for him to go ahead and he nodded. “So… back before I enlisted when I was… I’unno. About sixteen? This guy from my town came back from deployment in the desert. Marine sniper. Real… impressive guy. I thought he was the coolest motherfucker ever, right?”

“Okay…”

“I forget how, but I managed to get in touch with him, told him I was thinking of signing up, asked to talk it over with him… we met in Starbucks and I, y’know, asked him what Basic had been like and what serving was like… and then I got really, really fucking dumb. ‘Cuz I asked him if he’d ever killed somebody.”

“…What did he say?”

“He just…. Quietly nodded and said he had. No emotion at all, right? Just… poker-faced. So I’m young and dumb and can’t take a hint so I asked him where, and when and how… Again he was poker-faced, he said he couldn’t talk about it, ‘cuz it was classified. And I still remember the next words outta my mouth.”

“What?”

He grimaced. “I said… ‘That is so cool. What was it like?’”

“I… take it that didn’t go down well,” Ava predicted.

“He just… calmly pushed his coffee aside, leaned forward, looked me in the eye. And he said ‘If you don’t shut your mouth right now, I’m gonna take you into that restroom right there and fuck you up.‘” Derek looked down at his hands and almost-laughed at himself. “I nearly shit my pants.”

“But you enlisted.”

“Yeah. And nowadays, I know exactly why he reacted like that.”

Ava breathed out a breath she hadn’t noticed she was holding. “So… what’s the message?” she asked.

“I guess I just wanna… I wanna answer those questions,” Derek said. “I think somebody should. And I think you can help.”

“…What happened after he threatened you?” Ava asked.

“He… picked up his coffee and drank it. Then he stood up and… the last thing he ever said to me was ‘I got two pieces of advice for you: Don’t ask stupid fucking questions, and don’t be a sniper.’ And he left. I never saw him again.”

“You listened?”

“Yeah. It was good advice.”

The waitress arrived with their drinks and took their food order. Following the recommendation from Xiù Chang, they both chose the salad, and Ava took a long sip of her wine once the waitress was gone.

“…That’s powerful,” she said at last. “And you’re right, I think it’s important. So, how do you want to share it?”

“Well… I’m not the only one.” Derek reached inside his jacket and produced a folded sheet of printer paper which he handed over. “So I was thinking, what if I helped you write, like, a series or something?”

Ava took the paper and unfolded it. She speed-read the short message printed on it and almost knocked over her wine. “¡Carajo!”

“Yeah.”

“I…”

“You’d be doing both of us a huge favor, Ava.”

“I’d be doing you a favor? Derek, this is—”

“I know. And believe me, he has this weighing on him a lot more than I do.”

Ava drained half her wine glass in one gulp and took a deep breath. Opportunities like this were… well, they were like striking oil in her backyard, or finding a Renaissance masterpiece in grandma’s loft. They never happened, not without a lifetime of hard work and reputation-building.

What surprised her though was that that thought came in a long way behind the simple fact that she agreed with him: after what she’d seen and been through in Egypt, even though that was not even a fraction of the whole story…

And after the… spirited debate at work…

“Of course I’ll do it,” she said.

“Even with the network’s ‘official position’?”

“The network? I don’t give a fuck what the network’s position is: I’ll do it.”

He smiled.

“I’ll let Daar know,” he said.

Date Point: 15y6m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Senior Airman Rihanna Miller

“So this is a sacred circle, huh?”

Jack nodded and set his bag down outside it. “Yup. We set it up a few months after Sara died.”

“That musta taken a while.”

“Not really. Folctha’s pagan community is about sixty people.”

“That many?”

“One in a thousand,” Jack shrugged. “Anyway, we all carried a stone up here—Dad carried the altar—then we built the circle, and we had a moon ritual to consecrate it. I mean yeah, it took all day, but it was a fun day.”

Rihanna looked around. The circle was little more than a ring of stones, none bigger than a gym bag, with a larger stone in the middle that she guessed was a kind of altar or something. The whole thing was twenty feet across, and honestly she could have walked right through it without noticing it. It was about a five minute walk off the footpath from Memorial Hill, with a nice view out over Folctha.

“Why here?” she asked.

“It’s a nice spot.”

“Is that all?”

“Pretty much.” Jack took off his shoes and socks and stepped into the circle, where he stooped to tidy out some twigs and debris. “You can make a ritual site anywhere, but we wanted somewhere out of the way. There’s a town in Wales near where Mum used to live, the circle there’s down in a little hollow near the university campus and they used to have trouble with people knocking over the altar and leaving lager cans everywhere.”

“Ugh.” Rihanna was no pagan herself, but the idea of desecrating somebody’s spiritual space like that still disgusted her. “Some people have no respect.”

Jack just shrugged again and finished tidying up to his satisfaction. He returned to his bag and retrieved some candles and set them out on the four larger stones on the circle’s circumference, which Rihanna guessed probably marked the cardinal directions.

“…Do you wanna join in, or…?” he asked after a few seconds.

“No thanks. But I’d like to watch.”

“Sure. Just don’t come into the circle, okay?”

“Okay…” She sat back and watched him unload a few other items from his bag: crystals, a short dagger, a bundle of white leaves, a shallow bowl and a long lighter. “What exactly are you doing?”

“It’s a healing spell,” he explained, laying the crystals, leaves and knife on the altar. “For the Dauntless guys. I could have done it at home but what’s the point in having this circle if we don’t use it, right?”

“Makes sense. How does this work, anyway?”

“It’s not super formal,” Jack said. He put his phone on the altar and tapped at it. “It’s just about raising the energy and sending it their way. How you do that is up to you and your tradition. Just so long as it comes from the heart, you know?” He tapped at the phone one last time and the quiet sounds of drumming and chanting started to waft through the circle. Satisfied, he made a procession around the circle, lighting the candles and muttering something. Rihanna was close enough to hear him as he lit the third one.

“Guardian of the West, I call upon you to watch over this rite. Powers of energy and will, guided by fire, let those in my thoughts know healing and comfort…”

He moved on, lit the fourth candle and retreated to the altar, where he knelt and bowed his head for some time. After a minute or so he picked up bundle of leaves and set fire to the end, which produced a surprising amount of smoke as it smouldered. Satisfied, he set the lighter down and waved the bundle slowly around himself and the altar.

She wondered what her grandma would think of her, sitting there and watching literal witchcraft.

When the moment seemed right she gave voice to the thought in her head. “I never figured you for…any of this, gotta be honest.”

Jack opened his eyes and glanced at her. “It’s how my family does things,” he said. He set the burning bundle on the altar and took up the knife. He grinned at the slight change in her expression.

“Don’t worry. It’s for symbolic cutting only.”

“I’ll shut up and watch.”

He smiled at her again then returned his attention to the ritual.

“Spirits of this world, extend your protection and love to Ben Cook, James Choi, Holly Chase and Damian Spears, and to the brothers of the HEAT, of First Fang, and of Clan Whitecrest. Help them cut away their pain—” he drew the blade in a strong cutting motion through the air. “Help them cut away their grief. Help them cut away their despair. Help them cut away their guilt.”

He drew one last cut with the knife, set it down again and raised his hands in front of him palm-up. “Help them forgive and love themselves. Help them see the good in their deeds, and help them be whole. Spirits of water, air, fire and earth… help them heal.”

He sat still a moment or two longer, then exhaled, picked up the smouldering bundle and ground it into the bowl to put it out.

“…That’s the whole thing, huh?” Rihanna asked. It had taken only five minutes or so from the moment he lit the first candle.

“Pretty much,” Jack agreed. “Just the devoking now.”

“The what?”

“I invoked the guardians, now I have to de voke them. It’s just… polite, you know?”

She watched him go round the circle and mutter a thank-you as he stopped at each of the candles before he pinched them out.

“Gotta admit… this is a lot different to what I’m used to,” she confessed. “Dunno what my grandma would think.”

“I take it she wouldn’t approve?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I know what people think about paganism, and…” he shrugged in an I-try-not-to-let-it-bother-me way.

“It bothers you.”

He shrugged, returned to the altar and packed his bag. The air was still fragrant with the scent of that smoke.

“Well, you tell me: Did any of that look evil?”

“No. Actually it looked… peaceful. You looked like you enjoyed that.”

Jack smiled. “Healing energy is like that. It always makes me feel… warm, and loved, and… yeah, peaceful.” He stepped out of the circle and put his shoes back on. “Shall we?”

“How come I’ve never seen this side of you before?”

“Well, I don’t cast spells at work.” He grinned at her. “Besides, I don’t really know much about your religious life either. I mean, I assume you’re a Christian…”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t really go to church as often as I should… at least, not according to my grandma.”

“Life’s busy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“D’you think God minds?”

Rihanna thought about it. “…No, I doubt it. I mean, He’s meant to be forgiving and loving, ain’t he?”

“Right. You can’t be all faith all the time, that’s no way to live. And I think… well, Mum’s kind of my high priestess, and she thinks that if the universe wants us to be anything, it wants us to be ourselves. And you can’t be that if you spend your whole time praying.”

“That makes sense.”

They walked in silence back as far as the hiking trail: Jack seemed to be in a contented, relaxed mood where he was happy with whatever, and Rihanna had a head full of thoughts.

“…Hey. Thanks for letting me come up here with you,” she said at last.

“Why?”

“I dunno. I just… appreciate it. It was nice of you to let me in.”

“Best not to tell your grandma, though.”

She laughed. “Hah! Yeah. Better not.”

“So what now?”

“Hey?”

“Well, you’re my most favouritest person to hang out with,” Jack said, in his best imitation of a Stoneback’s drawl. “We’ve done what I wanted to do… what do you wanna do?”

Rihanna rolled her eyes. “I never understood that verbal tic of theirs…” she groused. “…Anyway. I still haven’t seen this two-seventy bench press of yours, and I know it’s your heavy day. Moho told me so!”

He sighed with a slight grin. “Fiiine. I usually work out with my dad, that cool?”

“Your dad’s a badass viking warrior. That’s definitely cool.”

Jack snorted. “Please. He’ll spar with us gym rats and all that, but the man feels bad when he swats flies! He’s the biggest softie ever.”

“Just so long as he spots good.”

Jack nodded, put his hand to his pocket, then stopped dead in his tracks. “…Shit.”

“What?”

“I left my phone back at the circle.”

“…Guess we’re going back for it huh?”

“Sorry, sorry…”

Rihanna didn’t mind. In fact, as they turned back up the hill, she decided she was glad for it. Because the feeling was mutual, he was definitely her ‘most favoritest’ too.

What better way to spend a day off?

Date Point: 15y6m1w AV
Multi-Faith Center, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Champion and Grandfather Gyotin, of Clan Starmind

Gyotin liked to observe human spirituality in all its interesting forms. Although he himself was firmly a convert to Buddhism, the sheer variety of it all was… intoxicating. He had a huge and complicated web of interconnected links hung on the wall of his private office, a tool for teasing out the commonalities and the symbology they all shared.

Some days, it looked impenetrable even to him. The taboos in particular could be a truly closed book at times.

Take caffeine for instance. To insects, a fatal pesticide. To humans a million times more massive, it was a pleasant stimulant with few if any consistent drawbacks. To Gaoians…it depended, and there was no way to tell how any particular person would respond. Gyotin quite enjoyed it. The Great Father seemed to get a buzz just from sniffing an espresso and, allegedly, actually drinking the stuff was enough to have him tearing around in a frenzy.

Its trade and import, as far as Gyotin had learned, may have been instrumental in the development of Humanity’s Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. And tea was the very model of a civilized drink, having a history that allegedly went back five thousand years.

Why should either be a taboo among humans? And yet they were, to Mormons. But hot chocolate was not, despite the fact that the sugar and fats were objectively far more unhealthy than caffeine.

It was all so intriguingly confusing, and it was why Gyotin’s little impromptu coffee shop in the Multi-Faith Center (free, but donations gratefully accepted) always kept a healthy supply of Ovaltine and herbal infusions for when the Buehlers were having a session.

There were about forty Mormons in Folctha, total. The branch president was a happy, smiling, truly lovely guy named Ted who gave so much of his time to other people that there was no possible way Gyotin could see that he might have any other hobbies or personal interests.

But the Buehler family was the bane of his life.

Gyotin made a point of hanging around the Center a little later for him. Quite aside from the opportunity to give a little kindness back and help a stressed-out man de-stress, it was a good opportunity to learn more about a faith he otherwise knew little about.

Ted’s drink of choice was a lemon and ginger infusion, which he accepted gratefully as he sank into one of the soft, comfortable chairs that were the Faith Center’s hallmark.

“…That… was tougher than usual today,” he said. Gyotin got the impression that he would have sorely liked to swear, something that he usually abhorred.

“I didn’t hear shouting this time,” Gyotin ventured.

“I think they’re past that point. Each of them blames the other for the fact that they’ve—their words, not mine—’lost control of the kids.’”

“It always comes back to control with them, doesn’t it?”

Ted sighed. “Yes. Always. And it’s…” He scooted forward in his seat and put his drink down on the floor between his feet, untouched. “The truly frustrating part is that in their way I think Jacob and Amanda really do love their children. Even Allison. But they got so completely fixated on being their children’s protectors that they forgot that the other side of parenthood is letting the kids leave the nest someday.”

Gyotin decided to make himself an Ovaltine. “A Gaoian male might not be the best to talk to about this, you know,” he said. “I don’t know much about raising cubs.”

“Neither do I,” Ted confessed. “But we can both spot when they’re doing it wrong.”

“Seeing that they do it wrong is not the same thing as being able to show them the right way… assuming they even can be shown the right way.”

“They’re both prideful.”

“Hmm.” Gyotin mulled that over as he made his drink.

“…What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking…Pride like that, where does it come from? What are they proud about, you know?”

Ted nodded and sipped his drink. “I find… in most people, pride like that is all about protecting their own fragility. It’s less that they’re proud of something, it’s that they’re afraid that if they let something touch the bit inside them that’s already crumbling then it’ll finally fall apart and take everything else with it.”

“So is prideful the right word?” Gyotin asked. He sat down with his own mug warming his paws.

“Maybe ego is better. And that’s a real problem, because neither of them can see their own imperfections. And if you can’t do that…” He sighed and tapped his fingers on his mug, then gave Gyotin a curious look. “…What do Buddhists believe about repentance?” he asked.

“Uh… in short, it’s internal. You don’t repent to anybody or make a confession or anything. Repentance is done inwardly with the awakened quality of our own mind.” Gyotin sniffed his drink and savored the aroma. “…Obviously you apologize to anybody you wrong, but when we don’t follow right action, the fault is in us.”

“That’s their problem: The fault is always in somebody else. Amanda insists that Jacob is the problem, Jacob blames Amanda, both of them think Allison was poisoned by a third party and that she’s passing that poison on to the boys…” Ted sighed. “If only I could get Allison’s perspective on it…”

“She won’t talk to you?”

“She’s… polite.”

“Ahh.” Gyotin nodded. Humans had some wonderful ways of being polite that had absolutely nothing to do with being friendly or open. “But you think it all comes down to fragility in the end?”

“Yes. I think… if either of them ever really accepted and understood the role they’ve played in their own misery, it’d completely pull them apart.”

“Maybe that’s what they need?” Gyotin suggested.

“Perhaps, but the Devil is in the details, and getting them to realize that will require…much patience. And it’s a delicate moment, too. You hope what you’re left with afterwards is a person who’s finally ready to move forward and heal…”

“But what you might get is a wreck who’s in a worse state than before,” Gyotin finished.

“Right. I guess you’d call that a moment of epiphany or… whatever you’d call it.”

“Kenshō. It means, uh, to see one’s own nature. Or in Gaori, we have the term Kuo! wan u.”

“…I’m not even gonna try,” Ted said, though he was smiling.

“It’s okay. That yipping sound is hard for Humans. But it literally means, uh… ‘scratching your own back’.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Because it’s basically impossible without help. We don’t have that clever monkey shoulder you do—You have that little spot that’s hard to reach? We have a whole stripe up the middle that’s impossible to reach. And maybe, some people never manage to scratch that itch.”

Ted shook his head. “I believe in healing, and I believe that everybody can be healed. I know there must be some way to get through to them, I just… can’t figure out what it is.”

“Hmm.” Gyotin sipped his Ovaltine then set it aside. “…Are you sure you’re not being prideful yourself?” he asked innocently.

“I… Hmm. I… what do you mean?”

“Well, ask yourself: What’s riding on this for you? Will it touch anything fragile and crumbling inside you if you can’t get through?” Gyotin asked. “We said earlier that their flaw is they blame others for what they’re doing wrong… but it’s also possible to wrongly blame yourself for the flaws of others. You can’t get through to them, so you ask ‘what am I doing wrong?’ Well, the answer may be you’re not doing anything wrong at all, they’re just not ready yet. And I think maybe you need to entertain the thought maybe they never will be.”

“…I don’t like that idea.”

“I know. It’s a gloomy thought. But how well can a doctor treat a patient who doesn’t take their medicine?”

“Hmm.”

Ted finished his drink in thoughtful silence, and Gyotin let him. He’d said what he felt needed saying. Finally, both drinks were empty and Ted stood up with a groan. He looked much happier.

“…Thank you, Gyotin. I think I know how to approach this now.”

“That’s what I’m here for!” Gyotin assured him.

He tidied up the center once Ted was gone, checked that everything was neat and orderly, and returned to the Starmind monastery enclave in the pleased mood he always felt when he’d helped somebody. Maybe he’d see if he could help build a bridge between Ted and Allison Buehler later.

Finding a pair of hulking Stonebacks looming quietly inside the Enclave gates thoroughly disrupted his train of thought.

The larger ducked a respectful posture at him. “Champion. The Great Father’s waiting in your office.”

Maybe others would have frozen up or felt a sense of panic, but Gyotin had literally given the Great Father a cuff on the muzzle one time. And besides, he knew the truth: underneath the weight of his titles and all the muscle and claws, Daar was a huge soppy softy.

At least, when reality allowed him to be.

“I take it he was happy to wait for me,” he observed.

“That’s right, Champion. He took a tour of the garden. Seemed to enjoy it.”

“Very well. Thank you.”

Sure enough, Daar was in Gyotin’s office, poring over the confusing mass of interconnected lines on the wall. At the moment Gyotin scratched on the door and entered, the Great Father was studying the top-left quadrant, the big one on Gaoian native spirituality and ancient mythology.

Doubtless he’d have a few observations of his own later.

“Good evening, My Father.”

Daar was in a quiet mood tonight… relatively speaking. He still showered Gyotin with booming affection, but it was pretty clear his mind was elsewhere.

He never got the chance to ask where, though. Daar was far too interested in talking about Gyotin’s research board, which he’d pretty thoroughly decoded without any help and even recorded some thoughts of his own.

“It’s interestin’ how all that symbolism is connected, huh? ‘Specially ‘dragons’ an’ their ‘world serpent’ thing.”

“Ah yes. Jörmungandr, the serpent that encircles the world and is destined to slay and be slain by the warrior-god Thor at Ragnarok. I see some parallels with recent history there.”

Daar didn’t seem moved. “Y’do, do ya?”

“Imagery that evocative will always inspire the imagination. But I note that your world-serpent is dead and you’re still very much alive.”

“Eh, Judge-Father ain’t decided on that just yet.”

Gyotin chittered and indicated another section of the board. “Many traditions have it that death does not need to be literal. The Death card in Tarot, for instance, primarily represents upheaval and new beginnings.”

“Yeah…So I’m here to do an interview with this Ava Riòs character.”

“I know her well.”

“So I hear. That’s why I’m here, talkin’ ‘ta you first. I wanna know what your nose says about her.”

Gyotin had been taking lessons from Genshi about the Championly virtues of keeping his expression controlled and his thoughts obscured, but he’d always sensed that Daar treated the whole opera of that as an unwelcome sequence of theatre that veered uncomfortably close to falsehood at times. Rather than playing that game, therefore, Gyotin allowed his ears to wiggle and roam freely as he thought.

“She’s very… human,” he decided after a while. “Actually, I respect and like her very much.”

“That all?”

Gyotin considered the Great Father for a second, then tilted his head interrogatively. “…What’s your real concern, My Father?”

“…I’m facin’ up to some real hard truths, friend. An’ Stonebacks do not lie. I want her to ask hard questions, and I wanna know how much this is gonna hurt.”

Gyotin duck-nodded slowly and retreated to his desk. “As it happens, I was talking with… well, a leader in one of the local faith communities earlier. He has a problem family he’s dealing with who just do not understand the concept of repentance. It was an interesting conversation.”

Daar could be patient when he wanted, and paid Gyotin the compliment of listening rather than interrupting the explanation to demand an explanation. He duck-nodded, but listened with his ears up and alert.

“Ava understands penitence. Perhaps to the point of not being so good at understanding some other things. I’ve never met another person, Human or Gao, who has explored herself so thoroughly and faced her flaws without flinching or breaking.”

“That’s…useful, I think. An’ I assume that’s ‘cuz of her history with ‘Horse?”

“Certainly that’s the largest part of it.”

“Yeah…I bet there’s a long-ass story there but I ain’t got the time. Sarry.”

“I’m sure it would be best if I didn’t tell it anyway,” Gyotin assured him. “She has a right to tell her own story, after all.”

Daar duck-nodded amiably. “I also wanna ask you somethin’ else that’s been botherin’ me.”

Gyotin inclined his head and listened.

“You still want me to go through a coronation?” Daar asked. “You better’n anyone know the implications.”

Gyotin duck-nodded instantly. “I do. It’s necessary, My Father. I’ve laid out my reasoning many times.”

“Yeah. But if I do this, I wanna do somethin’ the Prince o’ Wales talked wit’ me about. I don’ wanna be a God. If I’mma do this, it’s gonna be to serve the Gao.”

“So I must ask again, My Father. What’s your specific concern? It seems like you’ve already made up your mind… why are you asking my opinion about Ava?”

Finally, he managed to sting Daar’s temper. The Great Father scowled at him and growled, “I ain’t sure I appreciate havin’ the subject changed like that…but…fair, I guess.” Having voiced his irritation, he deflated and thought about the question for a moment. “My worry is this: if I’m gonna be some kinda galactic emperor—yeah, that’s absolutely how this’ll be seen, don’t pretend otherwise—then what I really gotta worry ‘bout is what the Humans think o’ me. I’m pretty sure they think they’re at a disadvantage t’us but that just ain’t so, not for a while.”

Rather than push his luck and nettle Daar again, Gyotin simply tilted his head the other way and listened some more.

Daar rewarded his patience by finally getting to his real question. “Is she gonna fuck me over?” he asked “Everythin’ I think I know says no, but ain’t nobody I trust more than you to answer this question. I can’t ask ‘Horse, he’s loyal. I can’t ask the HEAT, they pretty much hate her the mostest. Genshi is a Cousin but he’s got other motivations, and Regaari is in the same boat, ‘cept worse. He thinks I don’t know what he’s plannin’ but I do. So…do I trust her?”

A simple question got a simple answer.

“I would.”

Daar grumbled to himself, and set to a low prowl around the room for a long moment, thinking over his options. “Well…that’s that, then. Onward.”

“If I have any advice to give, My Father, it’s this: Decide for yourself when you meet her. Don’t just do what I would do: you are not me.”

Daar flicked his ears in a bemused sorta way. “Naw. ‘Yer, like, way too puny! Also, ‘yer right too. I’mma get a good sniff o’ her before I let it get serious…” He rumbled something that was almost a chitter, then looked Gyotin up and down. “It’s late. You sleep in ‘yer office?”

“I prefer the nest-beds over in the monastery.”

“Mind if I join ‘ya? The Statler is a bit too public an’ if I go visit the Lads it’ll be…well, I dunno how they’re gonna feel jus’ yet.”

“Of course you’re welcome. But I should warn you, we get up early for dawn meditation before breakfast.”

“Sounds good! I’m an early riser too. Might even join in, mebbe.”

To Gyotin that sounded like an excellent idea.

“Well then,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get your day off to a good start…”

He led the way, reflecting as he did so that he spent his whole life guiding people nowadays… and that he wouldn’t change it for the world.

Date Point: 15y6m1w AV
Racing Thunder, Kwmbwrw Border territory

Shipfather Yefrig

The critical thing about seizing the initiative was that, once seized, it became a bludgeon to be applied repeatedly and brutally to the enemy at every opportunity.

The Gao had long known it; the Humans had shown them how to maximize it, and new terminology like ‘OODA loop’ had entered their lexicon. All that was needed was the will to apply that thinking, and nobody had a will as ferociously ruthless as the Great Father. The Hunters were not being given the chance to regain their balance.

Oh, the horrors were fast and adaptable enough. Or maybe desperation and hunger were spurring them into action. But they were scrambling, disorganised, messy and they weren’t taking care to disguise their pattern of attack.

Daar’s flagship, the Destroying Fury, was in the lead on many of the attacks. The Great Father was seldom present on the battlefield these days, but nobody could blame him. He’d risked much personally and politically to get them all to this point, and he had strengths that were better use elsewhere. Naval combat, quote: “weren’t his thing.”

No. He was planning something much more his style. He was planning an invasion.

The fleet, meanwhile, was doing everything it could to capitalize on the Ring’s destruction, and mostly succeeding.

…Mostly. There was a reason the Hunters had been the galaxy’s scourge for such a long time, and no amount of momentum or initiative would ever save the poor bastards who’d once crewed the smashed mining station that Yefrig was now considering.

The usual orgy of blood and dismemberment wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Instead, the station was entirely empty. They had taken everyone and left hardly a trace of their passing, then torn the station apart for scrap and salvage. If it was possible to feel sympathy for an inanimate object, then Yefrig definitely felt sorry for that station: It looked like the gutted carcass of a large herd animal brought down by predators, which really it was.

After the Great Father’s declarations in the Security Council, something like this was not going to go down well with the Kwmbwrw.

Still, he’d sent a salvage team to pick over the bones. It was just possible that this time the Hunters had missed a sensor cluster or a computer whose memory banks contained the clue they needed to track down where exactly this specific group was raiding from.

That was the problem with space: without precise telemetry, hunting anything was impossible. Their best efforts had narrowed the field down to a volume about thirty light years across… containing several hundred star systems. Which meant tens of thousands of planets and moons, and uncountable millions of suitable asteroids and icy bodies, not to mention the possibility that the Hunters weren’t using any such thing and had instead built a nice dark station for themselves somewhere in the interstellar wilderness.

Or indeed that they weren’t still here, cloaked and looking to get some revenge for their shiny space trinket.

“Shipfather? The Kwmbwrw fleet just entered wake comms range.”

That put them minutes away. With a sigh, Yefrig resigned himself to disappointment.

“Recall the salvage team,” he said. “We’ll pass on all of our data to the fleet’s Matriarch as a courtesy and withdraw.”

Not every hunt could be a success, he supposed. But that was true for both sides: The Gaoian fleet had thwarted more attacks than it had missed. Each miss hurt… but the initiative was still theirs, and still being applied.

“…She… Sends her thanks and regards, Shipfather.” The communications Brother sounded surprised, and Yefrig could hardly blame him. The Kwmbwrw attitude had, officially at least, been snooty rather than warm. Getting a note of esteem out of one of their fleet Matriarchs was.. Unexpected. And warming.

“Reciprocate my regards and get us out of here,” he ordered. “We have Hunters to hunt.”

Maybe there’d been a small kind of a victory today after all…

Date Point: 15y6m1w AV
Builder Brood-barge, Hell system, Hunter space

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

Waste was one thing; jettisoning of dead weight was another. A resource that endangered other resources was the functional opposite of an asset, and for the time being there was a ruthless calculus at play across the entire Swarm-of-Swarms.

To whit: The strong ate, and the weak starved.

“Strong” and “weak” didn’t have to mean literal mass and ability to apply force as far as the Alpha-of-Alphas was concerned. That was old thinking, stupid Eater thinking. The new definition of strength revolved around self-sufficiency and utility to the Swarm. Those broods that applied themselves subtly and skillfully, that exercised discretion and cunning, that respected the prey and picked their targets got first pick of the Builders, and it was Builders that ensured their survival.

The Builder had been prepared for backlash, for dissent and for attempted coups. It had anticipated that those Eaters that fell on the wrong side of the remorseless equation of survival would make desperate grabs for the throne in an attempt to save themselves.

In fact, very few had. Something about the situation seemed to speak to them in their guts.

After generations of a “Hunt” just being a case of finding some poorly-defended station or transport, swatting aside its defences and swaggering onto its decks to wreak carnage among a woefully unprepared crew, now they were actually hunting. The difference was hard to define, but the risk of failure and the consequences of failing seemed to be pivotal.

There had been no skill involved in the old way. The Hunters had achieved such overwhelming superiority that they hadn’t needed skill, and they had suffered for it. Stagnated.

Now, the options were to improve or die. And many, many more had died than improved.

What remained, however, was stability. Sustainability. The surviving Broods were smaller, smarter and more cunning, and the resources distributed among them went further. And as for the Builders…

+< Intrigued > It self-replicated?+

+< Confirmation> The scout watched it for several cycles. It surveyed the inner-system planets then found a rich resource deposit and deployed a nanofactory. It then built a shipyard and constructed what appeared to be a copy of itself before departing via jump drive.+

+< Growing inspiration > Such replication could theoretically be exponential. < Query > You were unable to capture it?+

+< Affirmative > We attempted to capture the duplicate after the original left, but it appears to have been designed to self-destruct at the first sign of interference. The on-board fusion weapon was not large, but it was sufficient to atomize the device. There was nothing left to recover.+

+< Disappointment > A pity. But what you gleaned was more than sufficient. Do you have any indication of what exactly it was doing?+

+< Negative > Its only observed function was survey and self-replication.+

+< Conviction > Those cannot have been its only function. < Instruction > Find another and observe for longer this time without interfering.+

+< Obedience > It shall be as the Alpha-of-Alphas commands.+

The Builder ended the call, and thought. Exponential replication. Of course! The idea of relying on automation would have stuck in an Eater’s throat, but to a Builder…

< Glee >

It opened a design interface and begun to experiment with concepts.

Perhaps the Hunters could operate with skill while retaining the numerical advantage after all…

Date Point: 15y6m1w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor system, Deep Space

Lewis Beverote

Coitus interruptus fucking sucked. Not least because, frankly, there was no dignified way for Lewis to answer a call when he was tied spread-eagled to the bed being given the agonizing teasing of a lifetime. Lucy had the world’s most pleasantly torturous hands.

At least the station communications dudes had been cool enough to switch all the calls to audio-only by default. For some insane reason Mrwrki’s original owners had used video calls for the default, and there’d been a few embarrassing moments for other people.

Lucy answered the call for him while he stifled a groan at the physical discomfort the interruption was causing him. “Sergeant Campbell.”

“Hey Campbell, it’s Lee. We just got a Coltainer jumpback.”

Lewis tried to sit up and almost ruptured his shoulder. He grimaced and called out instead. “We did? What generation?”

“Serial number says second-gen. We’re pulling the memory now. Figured you’d wanna be here when we open it up.”

“Thanks, Lee. See you shortly.” Lucy ended the call then turned and cocked her hip to plant a hand on it and grin at Lewis. “Bad timing for you.”

Lewis sighed and rested his head back. “For both of us, you mean… I mean… we’ve got t—”

She shook her head. “We don’t have time, baby.”

“…Uuuurgh…”

She untied him and went to grab her uniform. “Just think of it as orgasm denial play.”

“Yaaaaay.”

He sat up and watched as she got dressed in her ICU without changing out of her lingerie. “…Are you allowed to wear thigh-highs and a basque under that?”

“Shh. It’s our naughty little secret.”

“…Ooh!”

She threw a t-shirt at him. “Come on, pull yourself together and get dressed!”

“Right, right…”

A few minutes later, and after Lewis had discreetly adjusted his underwear a few times, they stepped off the elevator in the station’s shuttle bay. For various reasons, they’d designed the Coltainers to send over a physical drive in a drone, which had obviously just touched down and Lee was busily opening the access panel with an eager expression like a kid at Christmas opening a present that dwarfed the tree.

He did a bit of a double-take as they joined him though.

“…Nice makeup, Camp. What’s the occasion?”

Lucy snorted. “The occasion is shut up and open the bloody drone,” she retorted.

Lewis inspected the serial number on the drone’s side. Rather than being painted on, it had been literally stamped into the metal as the probe was assembled. They’d tried a few ways of getting the probes to paint their offspring but ultimately given it up as pure vanity and unnecessary. They were only supposed to make contact with their origin station anyway, and were otherwise programmed to avoid contact with piloted ships, up to and including self-destructing via their on-board nuke. What did it matter if they were all bare galvanized metal and ceramic?

“VNCIC-Erebor-03-02-04…” he read aloud. In other words, it was the fourth second-generation probe built by the third probe they’d launched from Mrwrki.

“Jumpback handshake says it’s already got five children, too,” Lee informed him.

“Dang, dude! Three-one musta found a real good asteroid or somethin’.”

There was a ringing clang, and the access panel finally came loose and dropped on the deck. Lucy shoved it aside with her boot and accepted a pair of gloves from Lee to help him unlatch the blackbox. After spending its entire existence in space, the probe was so cold that frost had lined its edges and corners in crisp white.

“Okay… three, two, one…”

They heaved the blackbox out together and staggered with it just for a few steps until they could land it on the trolley.

“Time to see what it’s got for us…”

“Think it’ll be good?”

“I hope so. This is kinda the moment of truth for the whole program, isn’t it?”

In fact, the data turned out to be a goldmine. It took them nearly half an hour to pull apart the blackbox, by which time Colonel Nadeau had been woken up and showed up to help. He was quite happy to go over the stellar spectrography and astrogeological surveys in the background while Lewis, Lucy and Lee plugged the data into Lewis’ experimental machine-learning system, SAM.

“Okay!” Lee read off. “Class twelve! Surface gravity… Nine point seven-seven meters per second squared. Nice big moon, a little bigger than Luna even… average surface temperature fourteen point two celsius… Atmospheric CO2, O2 and water all in the green.”

Lewis had already speed-read the whole summary at a glance. “Dude, it’s basically Earth mark two. Hell, none of the Misfit mission’s finds were this close.”

He tried to discreetly adjust his pants again in a vain attempt to restore some comfort, but Lee smirked at him. “Hey. I know the data’s sexy, but come on man, keep it together.”

“…Dude.”

In fact, calling the planet Earth 2.0 was about on the money. Even the solar system it was in was similar: The star was even a G2V like Sol, there were a couple of huge gas giants, a couple of smaller colder ones in the out-system, the target world was the third of four rocky terrestrials in the inner system…

There were some inevitable differences. Earth 2.0 had a more pronounced axial tilt, and its moon, in addition to being larger, was closer and not quite tidally locked, which Lucy suggested probably meant it was much younger. Aside from huge tides, it was difficult to predict how that would affect surface conditions, but the coltainer probe had been impressed enough to establish a pre-colony site and jump array before returning.

“So whaddawe think?” Lewis asked after they’d spent half an hour cooing over lush satellite imagery and the UAVs the probe had sent down.

“I think it looks like the probe’s working!” Lucy declared.

Colonel Nadeau looked up from the data he was analysing with a smile. “That’s good news,” he said. “When can we have an exploration team ready?”

“Uh…I dunno. How are those JETS teams doing, Lee?” Lewis asked.

Lee’s eyes drifted for a second as he tried to remember. “From what I heard they have two teams ready. So, all we need is the actual scientists and surveyors. I’ll have to ask the guys over at Scotch Creek about that.”

“Right. Well. Congratulations, anyway. I… yes?”

A private had just knocked on the door. “Sir, there’s a representative from Clan Whitecrest here to see you.”

Nadeau blinked, then shrugged and stood up. “Did he say what it was about?”

“Not to me, sir, just that it was political.”

“Ah, damn. I hate politics.” Nadeau sighed and pulled himself away from the data he’d been going over. “Alright, I’ll see him in my office.”

“Yes sir.”

Nadeau turned to the trio around the blackbox and paused before leaving. “You three should probably get some sleep. It’s late, and that thing’s not going anywhere. No point in wrecking yourself over something that’ll still be here in the morning.”

“Aaargh, you’re blue-balling me sir,” Lee sighed, then quirked an eyebrow when Lewis snorted and Lucy raised hand to cover her grin.

Nadeau looked similarly bemused, but shrugged it off and left with a vague “See you all in the morning.”

Lewis cleared his throat. “He’s right though, dude. This can wait.”

Lee shook his head. “Now I know something’s up.”

Lucy shoved Lewis toward the door, without meeting any resistance. “G’night, Chief.”

“Uh… ‘night.”

Rather than talking about work on the elevator or the short walk back to their suite, Lucy just held his hand and took the lead. He was almost dragged to the door and shoved inside first. Finally alone again, she wrapped her arms around him from behind and hugged him. “Well. Congratulations, baby.”

“Dude, coltainer’s just as much your creation as mine…”

“Nuh-uh. Tonight, you’re getting aaall the credit.” She trailed her fingers down his back, then goosed him. “Now where were we…?”

“Uh… edging.”

“Oh yeah…” She nibbled at his ear and sent shivers down his spine as she whispered. “Don’t turn around.”

He grit his teeth and screwed his face up. “Oh come on, Loo, you’re gonna tease me more?!”

There were the soft sounds of zippers and falling fabric from behind him. “You gonna let me? The best things in life are worth waiting for…”

Lewis really wanted to be done waiting, but… Dammit, she was right. So he grit his teeth harder and resisted the urge to turn around. This was a moment to trust her, so he bunched his fists and forced himself to stay still until finally she walked past him having stripped back down to her lingerie and a sinful expression, and led him forward by hooking a finger into his collar.

His patience was amply rewarded.

Date Point: 15y6m1w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Her model arrived in secrecy. Just a car, and a couple of Gaoians who brusquely checked the street to ensure they weren’t overseen, and then held the door while their charge hustled through the front door and up the stairs.

Ava’s studio today was one of the oldest permanent buildings in Folctha, the old town hall. Originally conceived as little more than a central storehouse for goods and a place where incoming colonists could bed down while something a little more permanent was found for them, nowadays it was more of a public space. It was used by a dance class and bands for a practice space, it was rented out by the indoor badminton club, on Wednesdays it was taken over by Folctha’s geeks for a night of board games, wargames and Magic…

Today, it was a canvas. She’d laid out her equipment along one wall and waited patiently, because there was no point in setting up the lighting, the filters, the backdrop and all the rest until she’d met her model and established the theme.

Derek had given her a good idea what the theme would be… and one day she’d definitely get Derek in front of the camera. But Derek wasn’t today’s model.

Today’s model was arguably one of the most powerful people in the galaxy. Daar. Great Father of the Gao.

Madre de Dios.

Okay, Gaoians came in some varied shapes and sizes. Myun sprang to mind, being basically the furry equivalent of a valkyrie. But Daar almost didn’t look like the same species. It wasn’t his prodigious size, it was the way he moved: Where every other Gaoian Ava knew either moved with a kind of fussy poise or else in a prowling swagger, Daar… trundled into the room, as though it couldn’t possibly contain anything that might endanger or humiliate him. It would have looked comical if he wasn’t so feral in appearance.

Of course, straightening up made him no less fearsome. But his face and the set of his ears was friendly.

“Miss.”

Ava shook his paw. “Uh… It’s a, uh… real pleasure to meet you.”

He chittered, which wasn’t even close to being the right word to describe the contrabass sound that rumbled deep in his chest, but nothing better came to mind.

“Relax. Anyone ‘Horse an’ Boss speak so highly of don’t need ‘ta stand on ceremony with me,” he reassured her.

That was nice to hear, but Ava decided to plump for honesty. Besides, Hannah was standing behind her legs and staring up at Daar looking as meek and non-threatening as possible. “Truthfully? I think I’d be intimidated anyway.”

He duck-nodded, but folded himself down to ground level to sniff noses with Hannah. “Not gonna lie neither, I ain’t no kitten. But that’s why we’re here, ain’t it?”

“I guess so.”

For whatever reason, Hannah relaxed a bit. Maybe it was scent, maybe it was body language in common, who knew? There were times when dogs and Gaoians understood each other better than humans understood either, and this was clearly one of them. Certainly it seemed to satisfy Daar, who straightened up as Hannah trotted away and curled up on the cushion Ava had left for her in the corner. She kept a wary eye on him, but didn’t look remotely as scared as she had done only seconds before.

Dogs had it lucky sometimes. Humans couldn’t switch moods so quickly.

“So.” Daar looked around. “Not set up yet?”

“Not until I know how to set up,” Ava explained. He duck-nodded, then grinned fiercely and waggled his ears.

“Where should I leave my clothes?”

Ava laughed. He had a sense of humor that managed to… not blunt his claws, nor make her forget them. But it fit his character perfectly.

Well, two could play that game. “Hold on there,” she replied with a grin. “I want to get to know you first.”

“What, my reputation don’t precede me?”

“Well, we’re not here for your reputation, are we? We’re here for you. Laid bare.”

He made a grunting kind of a noise and joined her at the camp table where she’d left her notes. She sat in a fold-out chair while Daar looked at his chair, huffed in some amused way, then sat on the floor directly like a gigantic cross between a pit bull and a grizzly bear. His people had made it very clear on his behalf that nothing was off-limits, no subject was taboo and no question was forbidden which was a frankly terrifying position to be in. The agony of having too much choice was real and powerful.

Daar, it seemed, actually wanted an utterly remorseless interview. He wanted to bare his soul and stand naked in front of the world, both figuratively and literally. That was… both breathtaking and surprising.

“So… your letter said you had some words you wanted to start the piece with,” she said.

“Yeah, but I ain’t ready yet.” Daar settled himself. “I figger this here’s a two-way street: You wanna lay me bare, I ain’t happy to let’cha ‘less I get know you better. You’re important to two’a the guys I respect most in the world, an’ I wanna know why that is.”

Ava noticed his nose was twitching while he spoke: He was scenting her, getting a feel for her in a way that humans just couldn’t. Gaoians always claimed they could smell when somebody was lying, not that she particularly wanted to lie anyway. She wouldn’t know where to begin.

Cut out the false modesty, she guessed.

“Truthfully? I don’t know what they see. I know what I hope they see, and what I’ve searched for in myself, but…” she shrugged.

“Hmm.” He rumbled it more than spoke the word; his English was very good but it had a particular colloquial lilt to it that was hard to place. “Boss says you saved his life.”

“He got shot. He talked me through giving him first aid.”

“Ha! That’s where he got them scars, weren’t it!?”

“A couple of them.”

“And you two’re a thing now?”

“Allegedly!”

“Good! I bet y’two’ll make cute cubs!”

Ava laughed. That thought hadn’t even remotely been on her mind, but she decided not to say so. Instead she acknowledged the compliment—and he definitely meant it as a compliment—with a polite “I’m sure we will.”

“You an’ Horse were a thing ‘fer a long while too, if I ‘member right.”

His expression changed. It wasn’t solicitous and friendly anymore. It was…intense.

“…Yeah,” Ava agreed. “We fucked it up. Me more than him, but I know he says the same.”

“Okay. So whaddya think ‘ya learned from that? ‘Cuz I ain’t asking ‘fer a puff piece here. If I wanted that I’d jus’ release a statement or somfin.’ What truth did ‘ya learn?”

Well. The big brute could ask sharp, insightful questions with the best of them. Ava honestly didn’t have an answer prepared for a question like that… but she knew well enough that those were the best kinds of questions. On the thorns of a question like that, people could really learn about themselves, if they paused and tried to truly think.

“I… learned how easy it is to lie to myself. And how it’s easier to switch to a new lie than face the truth.”

Daar duck-nodded in agreement. “It’s easy, ain’t it? Y’know the thing ‘bout us Stonebacks is we never lie, ‘cept honestly that’s prol’ly a lie too. People lie to themselves allatime and don’t notice. Like me ‘fer example. I keep tellin’ myself I ain’t a down-right bastard and sometimes, I gotta wonder… am I lyin’ to m’self?”

Ava sat back and looked at him. “…You know… I hated myself,” she told him. “For a long time there, I was convinced that I was just the most worthless bitch who ever breathed. I knew that the world would be better without me, that people’s lives would get easier if I wasn’t around to screw it up for th—”

“Y’ain’t worthless,” Daar interrupted her sternly. “You stop that.”

“I know that now,” Ava agreed. “But it was a lie I believed for a long time.”

Daar’s nose twitched again. “You don’t no more.”

“No.”

“Good. Y’know… ‘Horse is a really good judge o’ people, even if he ain’t none too good with his words. That means something.”

“Yeah. Not perfect, though.”

“Balls, ain’t nobody perfect, ‘cept maybe Naydi. Well, no. She picked a life wit’ me over bein’ free like every other Female, so…that’s the thing. Now, I know this ain’t what you had in mind and I know you’re already recording—by the way, why a mechanical tape recorder?”

“A gift from an old friend. And how did you know?”

He flicked one of his huge, wolf-like ears. “Sounds like the belt drive in it is wearin’ out. Anyhoo. I know you were maybe thinkin’ this’d go different, and I want ‘ya to ask questions! But I need ‘ta know you really get who you’re dealin’ with, no offense. So: I am a Great Father. Do you know what that means?”

“…No. I suspect I probably don’t.”

“You are clever! What do ‘ya think it means? ‘Cuz this right here is important as fuck.”

“I think… I think it means…” Ava stopped and thought hard. She was beginning to feel like she was the one being interviewed, but in the back of her mind she was already writing the article to go with this and it was coming out very different to what she’d imagined.

“…I think it means the buck stops with you?” she hazarded.

“Oh, that’s definitely part of it. But, jus’ for context? I’m only the second Great Father in recorded history. Maybe there was we think a few more before then, but…” He shrugged.

“…It means things have gone badly wrong,” Ava realized.

“Yup. ‘Cuz we Great Fathers, we have only ever been created. Great Father Fyu, he was deemed a Great Father by the unanimous chorus of his entire assembled forces, while he stood on the bloody corpses o’ some the worst Keeda-fuck monsters we’ve ever made. Fyu died that day. What stood in his place was somethin’ way more darker.”

“And Daar?” Ava asked. “Did Daar die?”

“Which Daar? The big, happy, smug guy who use’ta be Champion o’ Stoneback? He’s been dead a long while. ‘Cuz lemme ask you again: what is a Great Father? When do we come along?”

The point he’d been driving at finally clicked home in Ava’s mind, stinging her painfully with thoughts of her parents and school friends and nuclear fire. “…You come along at the end of the world,” she said. “When things change forever. You… are the end of the world in some ways. You’re an avatar for it.”

He sat back on his haunches, looking pleased. “…You do unnerstand. There’s…other connotations too. But I’ll just send ‘ya the book. Do with it what you will.”

“I… thank you.” Ava cleared her throat then gestured over at her camera and equipment. “We should probably start that shoot now.”

“Yeah. An’ I bet ‘ya got an idea on how ‘ta do it now?”

“Shadows and contrast, I think. But not black and white. The color of your fur needs to show.”

“Sounds like ‘ya wanna portray me as a monster.” It wasn’t unfriendly.

“I was thinking… chaos, with you emerging from the chaos. Part of it, but also giving it shape, bringing some order to it.”

Daar duck-nodded and silently took to calisthenics while Ava prepped her lighting. It didn’t take her long to prepare, nor did Daar need much prompting once she was ready. He pranced right onto center stage and seemed to instinctually take advantage of the light. He was a good model, with his glowing eyes peering out from under the shadows. He was…striking.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Yup, simpler times. Mostly I was in it for the tail then.”

“You had some words you wanted me to open the piece with,” she reminded him.

“I did. I’ll tell ‘em when you’ve taken ‘yer pictures and asked everythin’ else, ‘kay? You’ve got, uh, two hours left.”

“Órale.”

Ava grabbed Sara’s camera—she always used it for the special projects, and to this day it was definitely Sara’s camera and not hers—and set to work, asking questions as they came to her head. If Daar minded, objected to or was impressed by any of them he didn’t show it: he just answered, thoughtfully and openly. Some of the questions were inconsequential, and she learned about his favorite foods, music and pastimes. Others were relevant but of historic rather than personal significance: his childhood, his adulthood, where he’d been for specific important events and how he recalled them.

The most valuable were the personal ones, the ones that cut him when asked. He bore each one stoically, but she still captured a wide gamut of his emotes; he had a very expressive physicality to him, and didn’t so much grin or snarl as radiate a feeling with his whole body.

The end came rather suddenly, right as she was getting into her zone and he’d finally began to show the strain of the shoot. She’d taken hundreds of pictures but she knew immediately that half of the piece would be what she took right at the end. He was tired, his fur was soaked through and matted, there was a certain… feralness that just didn’t come through any way else.

And the timer went off to mark the moment when there were no more questions, right as she thought of a whole bunch more.

“Nope, sarry,” he said as he padded out of the setup to retrieve his belongings. “But I think ‘yer ready for those words.”

“The recorder’s running,” she said. Internally, though, she had a pretty good idea what he was going to say.

He sighed, turned to face it, and spoke clearly and solemnly. “I am Daar. Brother, Father, Champion Emeritus of the most ancient and honorable Clan Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao… and I am the bloodiest known mass murderer in galactic history.”

That done, he turned to look at her. “Use those words first, please. They’re important.”

“I promise.”

His nose twitched, and that seemed to be satisfactory.

“It was a pleasure meetin’ you, Miss Ríos,” he said, and was gone. Ava was left to consider her photos and everything she’d learned. About Daar, about herself, about Derek and Adam and all the SOR…

It had left her standing on a place of quiet certainty, however. She knew, without a doubt, that this one was going to be special.

Date Point: 15y6m1w3d AV
Corti medical barge Continuity Correction, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches

Nofl

Doctor Rachel Wheeler was not, by human standards, in good physical condition. She was malnourished, skinny and dehydrated. Her androgen hormones were significantly elevated leading to the formation of cysts in her reproductive organs. Her body was absolutely flooded in adrenaline and stress hormones, her left knee was showing significant wear, two of her teeth were exhibiting rather advanced cavity formation…

All of that was present in the surgical scan. But the surgical systems aboard the Continuity Correction were designed to perform exceptionally invasive surgical procedures on life forms endlessly more fragile than even the frailest human.

Of course, the surgical lead was getting carried away with power.

“Technically, the humans only wanted us to correct the foreign object in her chest and the associated organ damage,” Nofl pointed out.

“We have license to perform whatever surgery we deem necessary. I deem it necessary to correct the other problems as well. And I remind you, Citizen Nofl, that I hold rank in this situation.”

It was true. The surgical lead was a silver-banner far up the pole from Nofl’s lowly position. It didn’t matter a jot that his theatre used tools and medicines that Nofl had been personally instrumental in developing: he held rank.

Nofl knew a battle he couldn’t win when he saw one. Besides, why fight it? The humans would probably raise some kind of an ethical objection, but ultimately the patient would be returned in better condition than if she’d come through the Array whole and unwounded.

Probably the Humans could make life difficult if they chose to take punitive action, but Nofl had raised his concerns and made his case, and most importantly had recorded himself doing so: his own backside was covered against whatever backlash ensued. On the surgical lead’s head be it.

“Well. I shan’t be a back-seat surgeon,” he promised. “Let me retire to the observation area and I’ll leave you to your work, hmm?”

He got a distracted muttering in reply.

There was no running commentary or conversation involved. The surgeon controlled the whole suite himself, there was no need to coordinate with a second surgeon, an anesthetist, a nurse or whoever. Indeed, the theatre did most of the work—all the surgeon needed to do was direct it.

Step one: the bag containing the patient rose off the table and hung in mid-air, held aloft by forcefields. It was turned off, and fist-sized drones danced around it in the span of a second, removing both the bag and the patient’s clothing in strips. Nofl glanced at the monitors: a few feeble vital signs waved at him for a few seconds before flatlining. The patient was dead.

Step two was a study in choreographed clinical violence, and it began with Doctor Wheeler’s decapitation.

A drone orbited her throat trailing a blade of fractal sharpness, and the head was carted away still wearing an expression of pinched shock and fear that was only just beginning to go slack. It was promptly swept to one side and hooked into a life support system that supplied the brain with an oxygenated blood substitute… as well as a powerful anaesthetic. Nothing good could come of allowing her to regain consciousness at a moment like this. A handful of tiny multi-limbed drones pried open her mouth and crawled inside to perform the dental surgery.

The rest of her body was disassembled with similar casual ease, and spread out into a constellation of glistening parts and limp limbs. Nofl had to admit, the view was fascinating: He’d never seen a human so completely before. It really drove home just how thick and deep all those muscles were: the whole torso seemed to be held together by them, in fact.

Vital signs flared back into life on Nofl’s monitor as the blood substitute did its work. Wheeler was alive again, albeit very firmly unconscious. She had been clinically brain-dead for all of five seconds.

Step three: repairs. The heart was definitely destroyed: in fact it was barely in one piece, being held together by a thin thread of connective tissue. In theory, the same cell-level microsurgical techniques that would reassemble the patient at the end of this procedure could have simply woven that heart back together had the wound been clean, but the fusion claw had burned and seared the cardiac muscle, partly blowing it open when the blood inside had boiled.

Fortunately, they had a replacement cloned from Doctor Wheeler’s own tissue sample. There would be no immune rejection response, no complications—it effectively was the same heart, except new and healthy. The replacement floated into place somewhere amidst the splayed organs, and the drones went to work on attaching it to the circulatory system and delivering the appropriate electrical and chemical stimuli to get it beating.

Meanwhile the knee was stripped down like an onion being peeled, pulled open, washed out, resurfaced and a synthetic synovial membrane was attached and filled with fluid. The ovaries were deconstructed, the cysts drained, closed, and rapid-grown tissue was printed in to fill the voids they left before a hormone regulator in the form of a tiny patch the size of a pinhead was adhered to each one as it was put back together.

As quickly as she’d been pulled apart, the stricken doctor was reassembled. The bloodless edges of her component parts were seamlessly brought back together with micrometer precision where they fused instantly so that there was no indication they had ever been taken apart. Her blood, having been filtered and infused with appropriate nutrients and regenerative medicine, was reintroduced to her circulatory system.

Reattaching the head to the spine and throat produced a delicate and even quite balletic weaving of nerves and muscle fibres. Nofl was duly impressed: the surgeon was extremely skilled.

In all, the procedure took five minutes, and the patient—now definitely alive, with a strong pulse and breathing independently—was settled reverently on a gurney. If Nofl read the prognosis correctly, she would wake in two hours.

He returned to the control room, where the surgeon was sipping a measure of water.

“Was that fun?” Nofl asked. He got a disinterested stare for a second, then the surgeon put his drink back in the recycler.

“It was intriguing,” he admitted. “But flying this whole ship here just for one middle-aged Human woman hardly seems like an efficient use of our resources.”

“Just you wait and see, darling,” Nofl grinned. The surgeon reacted with barely-disguised contempt, and he changed the subject. “I read the automated prognosis. I presume you’re just as confident?”

“Of course. She’ll be somewhat groggy from the anaesthetic when she first wakes, but once it’s worn off she will feel strong and healthy.”

“And you don’t foresee the Humans raising any objections over the, hmm, bonus treatment she received?” Nofl asked. He got a blank look.

“Why would they?”

“…Good.” Nofl decided that the time had come to get himself off the ship. The patient needed her escort back down to Folctha and her waiting friends and employers and family anyway. “Well. I shan’t detain you, I know your time is extremely valuable.”

“Yes.”

And that… ended the conversation as far as Nofl could tell. He decided he didn’t much like the surgeon.

The Byron Group representative, Jenkins, was waiting for him alongside a couple of SOR operators as Nofl exited the theatre complex. He nodded at the gurney where Wheeler was back in stasis for transport back to a human hospital. “She’s okay?”

“Indubitably!” Nofl chirped, feeling much happier now that he had a human to bounce off. “You should have watched, it was fascinating! You people really do have some interesting internal organs.”

Jenkins squirmed a little. “…Thanks, but I’m good.”

Satisfied that his ability to troll was still working just fine, Nofl turned to the two SOR men: JETS operators, Wilde and Hoeff. Hoeff had just confirmed the integrity of the patient’s brain by dropping the stasis field and pressing a scanner to her scalp.

“Well?” Nofl asked him.

“Alive. And green. Looks like your doctor did good.”

“He went above and beyond,” Nofl told him.

“…That so?” Jenkins asked. “How?”

“Nothing sinister,” Nofl assured him. The look he got back told him that Jenkins was far from convinced, or trusting.

“Well… okay. Let’s, uh, get her downstairs, huh?”

The shuttle ride back down to Folctha passed mostly in silence. Wilde and Hoeff talked quietly at one end of the shuttle, Jenkins spent the trip reading something on a tablet, and Nofl was left to swing his legs idly in the oversized chair and contemplate what had just happened.

He doubted that the Humans would fail to notice the extra work done to Wheeler. The question was how they would react. He’d been truthful about none of it being sinister: Doctor Wheeler herself would probably be grateful to be rid of two chronic health conditions that had doubtless plagued her for years, once she got over the shock and awe of somehow still being alive.

But if the Directorate were going to build any kind of a trust-based relationship with the Humans then superior and disrespectful behaviour as exhibited by the surgeon was not going to help. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. He really didn’t want to go back to the Directorate and explain that the Humans had withheld payment over a single doctor’s ego.

Or was he worrying needlessly? Would the Humans actually do that?

No. Whether his worries were well-founded or not, they weren’t needless. The future of the Corti species was… not riding on this deal, but certainly would have been badly set back if it fell through.

It occurred to him that Jenkins had spoken to him, and was now trying to get his attention.

“Nofl? Hey!”

“Hmm? Oh, sorry dear. I was distracted.”

“Anything I should worry about?”

Nofl sighed and sat up straighter. Evasiveness or dishonesty at this point would only be harmful.

“I am… worried,” he confessed. “Our surgeon was, ahm… ambitious. Zealous to put everything right with his patient, you might say.”

He watched his insinuation sink in. “Oh…hell,” Jenkins groaned. “So when you said he ‘went above and beyond’ you mean…”

“I mean exactly that. Doctor Wheeler is in perfect health, but the treatment extended…” Nofl cleared his throat delicately, “…beyond the remit of the asked-for surgery. I tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted that no patient would leave his care in anything less than pristine condition.”

“…Y’know, if he were human he’d be gettin’ a malpractice suit right now.”

“Hence my concern.” Nofl scooted forward in his seat. “I think I need to persuade you to overlook this.”

“That ain’t my call,” Jenkins said.

“As I feared.” Nofl sighed and returned to his more relaxed position. “This is an important deal for my people, you know. The dawn of what I hope will be a brighter future. We need goodwill with Humanity, but every time we begin to build some up, some idiot puts their ego ahead of rational necessity, and…”

Jenkins smiled. “Relax, this won’t blow the deal outta the water,” he predicted.

“I hope not.”

“It won’t. Look, worst-case scenario you just hafta buy the information you need.”

“We need more than the information,” Nofl explained. “We need the expertise. We need the goodwill. Access to the raw data alone will get us where we want to go, of course… but ultimately, for obvious reasons, the galactic experts on the Human genome are Humans.”

“Funny how y’all spent years collecting human samples and then… what? Did the data on us just go up in smoke? I was an abductee, I know they took gene samples.”

“Samples are one thing. Sample size is another.”

“As I recall, your ‘sample size’ approached ten thousand.”

“Yes, mostly of defective specimens. Examples like, hmm, Julian Etsicitty and his mates, for instance, were much less common. A handful of paragons is hardly an ideal baseline to properly understand a gene-line. If it were, we would ask for the HEAT’s material and leave it at that.”

Jenkins raised his eyebrows. “Defective, huh?”

“The baseline for human physiology was established more than a thousand years ago. That’s too long under the influence of civilization and its selection pressures to leave alone. Unfortunately, most sanctioned human experimentation ceased hundreds of years ago, prior to your world wars. You were getting too advanced, too able to understand what was happening to you. There’s a reason for the massive uptick in reported cases of alien abduction in the post-war era.”

“Delusional dumbasses jumpin’ on the bandwagon,” Kevin sniffed.

“Yes, but fuelled by genuine cases like yours. And, again, by case studies like Julian. There is something…captivating when you observe someone like him in his element.”

“And us ‘defective’ types?”

“…I’ve offended you.”

“Yes,” he sighed, “but with you I can at least tell it ain’t malicious.”

“Thank you.” Nofl glanced at the stasis pod with Doctor Wheeler in it. “If it counts for anything, I promise you that Corti in general don’t stoop to malice. My people have our flaws—thoughtlessness, arrogance, and a lack of empathy that makes it hard to fathom how our society operates sometimes—but malice isn’t really in our nature.”

There was a bing sound, and a little icon above his seat told Nofl to put his seatbelt back on if he wasn’t already wearing it. Seconds later, the first ghost of turbulence and fire sent a queasy jolt through his stomach as the inertial compensation system fought back against upper-atmosphere turbulence.

“So what was my defect?” Kevin asked.

“I couldn’t possibly say. I have no idea who abducted you or why, and you certainly don’t seem defective to me. Though considering what happened to you, I’d hazard that your abductor was some bottom-feeder who turned to ‘zoology’ in a desperate last-ditch attempt to preserve tenure, rather than a Directorate-approved study.”

“Greeeat. And does Julian know the details of his capture? Do his ladies?”

“I don’t know. I should…probably ensure that they do.” Nofl shrugged. “If nothing else, it would be nice to build a little trust with him especially.”

“Hmm. So you do know.”

“I have recently learned,” Nofl explained. “It’s become quite relevant to my interests. And as an aside, the social consequences of it are fascinating.”

He saw Kevin’s blank look and explained.

“…Events on the galactic stage have caused your species to do something remarkable. Like any successful sophonts, you have mechanisms to sieve the seedcorn from the chaff, as it were. You do this on a number of levels, but the HEAT indirectly did this in an important area: genetics. That has become my interest as of late, dear, and studying them with their permission has been hugely important. But it’s been made much harder by your species’ attitude towards the field.”

“Oh?”

“Very often, superior examples of your kind are embarrassed by their own superiority. It’s puzzling and utterly, wholly alien to a Corti. We simply cannot fathom why.”

“I reckon I can explain that one,” Jenkins said.

“Please, go ahead.”

Jenkins chewed on his thumbnail for a second before speaking. “I used to be a Christian,” he said. “An’ it was a big part of what my congregation was taught that we’re all equal in the eyes of the Lord, don’t judge lest ye be judged, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Right?”

“Christianity is a closed book to me,” Nofl replied. Kevin nodded, but ploughed forward.

“Okay, well on, like, a secular level, the idea that some folks are just better than others is real unpopular. Not without reason, too: Some really, really shitty things got done to some folks by some other folks over that belief. If this group over here think they’re the Ubermensch and this other group are the untermensch then why the fuck would the self-identified ubers keep the unters around for? Just kill the lot of ‘em to make room for the better class of humanity. Millions of really good folks got straight murdered because of thinking like that.”

“Some specimens are superior, though. And I note that the governments controlling SOR are not marching through the streets or otherwise abusing their advantage.”

“The SOR isn’t that big of an organization, Nofl.”

“Yes, dearie! But my point is that beings like them matter. The SOR is absolutely lousy with high achievers in all dimensions! Goodness, even people only loosely associated with them are exemplars of your kind. But for their circumstances, I imagine Julian, Allison and Xiù would all have found themselves quite comfortable among their ranks.”

“…Eh, I doubt it. Ability ain’t the same thing as personality or desire. None of ‘em are soldiers.”

Nofl acknowledged the point with a serene nod. “Oh, that I wholly understand, dear. But my point stands,” he maintained, “that they are all supremely advantaged beings, filtered and concentrated by a well-designed merit system. I approve! Nor is it the only path available to exploit excellence. Goodness, your culture has several such sorting systems in place!”

“Well…yeah! Ain’t no civilization gonna work if you can’t reward hard work, man.”

“Oh, don’t be obtuse!” Nofl flapped his hand excitedly. “Work only gets you so far. At some point you need to be better and you know it, don’t you dare lie. Many of your academics are every bit the intellectual equals of a prissy silver-banner Corti Dean. I’d wager some of them are better! And yet despite all that, your species seems reluctant to acknowledge the basic truth of it all. Why not take full advantage? You can’t tell me you don’t use what you have to get what you want. Why pretend otherwise? Why would anyone on the SOR? Julian? Presidents? Geniuses?”

“I never said they don’t, but people like that usually don’t flaunt it. Also,” Kevin continued, “you keep coming back to Julian. Why exactly was he abducted?”

“His suitability for the planned experiment and his exceptional genetics. He was blessed with functionally optimal and effectively defect-free versions of many alleles, and with strong hybrid vigor in his ancestry, too. That, along with his physical and mental developmental history, made him as ideal a specimen as could be found. His social background was optimal as well.”

“…Right.” Kevin pressed on with a grumble. “Anyway. That means super-Julian is a perfect example of what I mean, actually. His ancestors suffered hard ‘cuz of those kind of ‘master race’ ideas, right? So then it’s pretty fuckin’ ironic that he’s apparently a Goddamned wunderkind like all those murderin’ racist motherfuckers could never be.”

Kevin was clearly agitated for some unfathomable reason but he abruptly paused, considered something, and changed tack. “Hell, y’know what? I bet that fucks with him, hard. All three of ‘em prob’ly. I assume Allison and Xiù are in the same boat?”

“If you mean by selection criteria, not entirely. All three are genetically quite gifted but his women were destined for very different experiments.”

“…Lovely. And you wonder why they all prefer their own company? Jesus! Why d’you think they’d rather hang out with cavemonkeys instead of on talk shows?”

Nofl considered that idea. “Then I should plan my conversations with them carefully.”

“Yeah. An’… look, maybe some folks just are better than other folks. Not everyone can be a… an Olympic gold medallist or a Nobel physicist. But if one o’ us is better, the best personal quality that person can have is humility. It ain’t all about them, man. It’s about all of us.”

“…Well, you’ve certainly described the phenomenon,” Nofl sighed. “I don’t feel as though you have adequately explained it in such a way as to make the logic clear to me.”

“I dunno, man. I think it’s about teamwork and shit. An’ hell, I’m not even that good of a team player myself. I ain’t no psychologist, you’d probably better talk to one of them.”

“I may do that. But… in any case, about Doctor Wheeler—”

Jenkins shrugged. “It’s done. Wouldn’t undo it even if we could, so… If it were my call, I’d say we’re just happy to get her back to her family alive. For what it’s worth, I’ll do everything I can to see that your doctor’s stupidity don’t derail this whole thing… And hell. We can legitimately claim it was a miscommunication, too.”

“That’s not entirely honest, Mister Jenkins.”

“Honest an’ legitimate ain’t the same thing.”

Nofl conceded that argument with a blink and a tilt of his head, and looked up at the information above his seat again. They were on final approach, apparently.

“True,” he agreed. “And… I would be exceedingly grateful.”

Jenkins nodded, and settled back in his seat for the landing. Nofl glanced at his patient one last time, then relaxed.

If nothing else, he’d saved a life. That was worth cherishing.

Date Point: 15y6m2w AV
USS San Diego, The Ruibal Territories

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

“She’s a fine ship.”

San Diego’s captain, Mike Brewer, took the compliment with a smile and a fond look around. Knight hadn’t been false, either: the American cruiser had taken a lot of lessons learned from the V-class destroyers and the two captured Hierarchy ships Myrmidon and Caledonia in her design, and it showed. Nobody could accuse her of being spacious and comfortable, but the interior was just that little bit more efficient, the citadel that little bit more secure, the compartments that little bit more refined in their layout. Subtle differences that only a truly seasoned sailor would notice, perhaps, but present nonetheless.

Good coffee, too.

Still. In comparison to the Rich Plains, San Diego was a pike swimming alongside a whale, and it was telling that the Dominion flotilla had carefully rearranged itself, without being overtly threatening, to keep an eye on the human warship.

Neither Brewer nor Knight were worried: San Diego was built around shield generators, to the point where actual weaponry was almost an afterthought. If she needed to destroy anything she had her wormhole link to the Strategic Deep Space Weapons Reserve at Minot, but the shield generators themselves could wreak terrible havoc if needed. They were powerful enough to physically crush a hostile ship, and could function as a variable-frequency laser in a pinch.

They were certainly powerful enough to keep the ship intact long enough to jump out if the Dominion ships opened fire. Unlikely as that scenario might be, it was a comforting thought.

Right now, however, they were waiting for permission to take a shuttle over and Brewer was getting impatient.

“Are they in the habit of keeping species delegates waiting like this?” he asked.

“Probably just us,” Knight replied. “We have made a point of not taking our place at this council before now…”

“So why now?”

“The Gao specifically requested it. Apparently Daar feels that our absence is doing more harm than good now.”

“And our protest?” Brewer asked. “Ambassador Hussein died in that very chamber…”

“I think we’ve made our displeasure plain enough…” Knight examined the Rich Plains again. “Besides. Our allies requested it.”

There was a call from elsewhere on the bridge. “Sir? Rich Plains extend their welcome and invite the ambassador aboard.”

“About bloody time…” Knight muttered. He was quite sure that keeping him waiting was a studied power-play on the Council’s part. They were in a… tetchy mood after Daar had chewed them out. He finished his coffee and nodded to Brewer. “Captain.”

“Sir.”

He wasn’t alone in his shuttle, which after all needed to carry more than just the ambassador. He had a security detail, an aide, a few advisors…

He shook one particular advisor’s hand with care and no small amount of satisfactory anticipation. The Council were going to have conniptions, and he was looking forward to it.

Champions Genshi and Sheeyo were waiting for him when the shuttle’s ramp came down aboard the council ship. Both had the Gaoian equivalent of his own expression: Mischief was afoot, and they were all relishing it.

“Welcome aboard, Ambassador,” Sheeyo performed a kind of ducking bow before shaking Knight’s hand: Genshi remained straight-backed. Different Clans, different manners.

“Thank you. How are the Council taking my arrival?”

“The usual bluster,” Genshi commented.

Sheeyo was a little more verbose. “They made a lot of impatient noise to the effect that it’s past due for the Human race to take their place at this council, with a few barbs about your ‘unsanctioned claim’ over the planet Cimbrean and the damage you caused to the planet Garden, and goading the Hunters… Nothing of consequence, but you aren’t popular in there, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, that’s alright. Popularity is a cage anyway.”

Genshi bent sideways at the waist to peer into the shuttle. “You accepted Father Regaari’s suggestion over your special advisor, I see.”

“He made a very persuasive argument,” Knight smiled. “And the man himself laughed for quite a long time when I asked him. I think he was rather tickled.”

“This is going to be fun, isn’t it?” Sheeyo predicted.

“Quite. Shall we?”

Knight turned to his security detail, who were looking significantly neater and even more impressive than usual.

“Master Sergeant Firth! You shaved for me!”

“Only the best for you, sir.” The behemoth operator had one of his rare wry grins today. “Though it’s Senior Master Sergeant now. I’ve got shiny new stripes and everythang.”

“Well, I regret having missed your promotion, senior master sergeant. I presume the festivities were memorable?”

“Always, sir.”

Knight chuckled. “What about you, Colour Sergeant?” he asked, addressing the much “smaller” figure of Robert Murray. “You’re looking downright dapper.”

Murray sniffed a quiet laugh. “Aye, I scrub up. Gotty look the part, don’t we?”

“You succeeded admirably. After you, gentlemen.”

They nodded, and all their jovial anticipation vanished in an instant. The two of them assumed their positions alongside and slightly behind Knight, and from there…

Weighty, robotic, stone-faced precision. Like all the best-drilled ceremony, it managed the trick of conveying genuine menace without so much as a flicker of aggression. They weren’t there to threaten and intimidate. They were there…to show they could, if it was needed.

The perfect click of their heels on the polished stone was almost hypnotic, and it conveyed all the threat they could want in its understated way. Very much a velvet glove, under which the mailed fist was plainly obvious despite their lack of weapons.

Not that either man needed one. They were weapons, and the well-fitted close cut of their uniforms made that plain, even under all the ‘fruit salad’ as the Americans called it. Both wore their impressive service records on their chests, and though much of the details would go well over the head of most of the representatives, the general message would not.

The sudden silence as the trio of humans entered the council chamber spoke volumes.

With their charge safely delivered to his place in the chamber, Murray and Firth did fine statue impressions and became part of the scenery at the edge of the hall, alongside their counterparts from the other Dominion species.

Knight would admit to some small private pleasure as many of the other honor guards subtly gave them room.

His spot on the floor was among a cluster of four at one end of the chamber alongside, in descending order of seniority, the Corti, the Rauwrhyr and the Gao. It was a potent faction: the Corti brought the gravitas of the Dominion’s most advanced and wealthy member, while the Gao and humanity were arguably the two mightiest militaries in the room.

The Rauwrhyr were the interesting ones, really. If the other three species in their little circle could be considered a coalition of the ambitious, then the Rauwrhyr were a little out of place: they’d always, as Knight understood it, been a voice of temperance and caution. And yet, here they were.

Clearly, he’d need to get to know them better when he had the chance.

There was a chime and the chamber went silent to pay attention to the Speaker, a venerable Rrrrtk who looked down his nose at all of the ambassadors before turning his attention specifically to Knight.

“…On behalf of the council, may I say that we are pleased to see you, Ambassador. It’s been too long since the Human species was represented in this chamber.”

Knight nodded, and took that as his cue to step forward a little. He promptly became the focus of a spotlight.

“Indeed,” he said. “Understand that we are here at the behest of our friends and allies. It’s been three years by our calendar, almost to the day, since Ambassador Hussein was murdered here on this very floor, and we have not forgotten.”

“A tragedy,” the speaker declared, and assorted heads and appendages around the chamber performed a variety of bobbing motions in agreement. Knight simply gave the elderly alien a cool stare that was nevertheless far warmer than such a tepid platitude deserved.

“…Do you recall his last words, Mister Speaker?” he inquired.

There was an awkward silence, which he allowed to stretch out to the point of aching discomfort, before grunting and answering his own question. “He asked: ‘what must we do?’ Specifically, he was asking what humanity must do to earn the trust and respect of the Interspecies Dominion. That was an act of abject prostration by a proud and powerful man… And this chamber repaid his humility with murder. If you should now have an answer to that question, I shall not be taking it today: We are no longer interested.”

“Ambassador,” the Domain’s delegate stepped forward. “Your predecessor’s murder was an act of sabotage by agents opposed to the process of galactic peace—this Hierarchy that your government and the Clans of Gao have inescapably uncovered. I’m sure my fellows will join me in deploring what happened to Ambassador Hussein, but surely you cannot blame us for the actions of an infiltrator?”

“Maybe we cannot,” Knight conceded, “but what about the Fall of Gao? Were Hierarchy saboteurs responsible for the way this council stood back and watched? Is their infiltration of this chamber that total?”

He gestured at Sheeyo. “We are here because our friends request it, for their own reasons. Do not mistake our presence for endorsement. Now, I have a few matters of procedure to cover before—yes?”

He aimed a sharp look at the Kwmbwrw delegate, who had stood up and raised a hand, requesting that he give way and take a question or comment.

The Kwmbwrw ambassador was a matriarch, he guessed. Her fur was almost snow white from her face to the tip of her coiled tail, and glowed under the spotlight as she tall stood on her hind legs to speak.

“A passionate argument,” she said. “But your disregard for this council and its rules was made evident long before your predecessor’s tragic assassination. I believe your colony on the planet Cimbrean celebrated the tenth anniversary of its founding last year: A colony that was, may I remind the council, founded without formal declaration or a legal claim.”

Knight gave her his most disinterested blank look. “Ambassador, our position with regards to Cimbrean was made quite clear some time ago and it has not changed: ‘Molon Labe.’ I invite you to research the translation of that yourself,” Knight said wearily. “And if irrelevant jabs like that are to be the calibre of interruption I face, then from now on I will not be giving way.”

What could they do, after all? He was facing down interstellar powers with access to gargantuan resources, but not a one of them could so much as tickle the human race. Better and far more dangerous things had tried. That was a position of the most incredible strength, and there was no point whatsoever in abandoning it, especially not in being polite to politicians who clearly had no interest in being polite to him.

They couldn’t even kick him off the council, given that the Dominion charter stated clearly that sapient life forms were automatically entitled to an irrevocable seat. In theory, even the Hunters had the right to attend.

Of course, in practice the Dominion’s policy with Hunters was, sensibly, to shoot first when possible.

“As I said, I have a few matters of procedure to address,” he continued, “the first and most important of which is the naming of my advisory staff. It’s my understanding that the rules and procedures of this house permit me to name one cross-species advisor?” He looked to the speaker, who gave him a slow gesture of acceptance.

“Go ahead, Ambassador Knight.”

“Thank you.” Knight nodded to Murray and Firth, who turned a smart one-eighty and vanished out of the chamber, the sharp clicking of their boots as they heel-struck in perfect unison ringing off the walls. Their job was to put on a show here, and they were damn good at it: He could tell that the Gaoians were suitably impressed, but not even the other ETs could fail to miss the precision and discipline on show.

That was the point, of course.

Knight watched and appreciated the low conversation among the delegates as he waited. Most of them were on-edge, though the Chehnash Ambassador had watched the two men leave with what looked more like professional interest than bewildered intimidation, and the Corti delegate to his left had an utterly peerless poker face.

A minute later, the sharp heel-strikes were back, and as before the two men stopped ramrod-straight in front of the entrance, turned a smart ninety degrees and stepped aside.

“Ambassadors,” Knight said with no small air of satisfaction, “may I present the special cross-species advisor to the Allied nations of Earth.”

For the first time in more than ten years, Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk stepped into the Dominion Security Council chamber.

++END CHAPTER 47++

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The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 48: “Laid Bare”

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Chapter 48: Laid Bare

Date Point: 15y6m2w AV

ESNN Front Page news story: GRA APPOINTS NEW AMBASSADOR
Admiral Sir Patrick Knight takes seat on council after long protest absence

In an abrupt change of policy after years of boycotting the Dominion Security Council, the GRA announced last night the immediate appointment of a new ambassador.

Retired British admiral Sir Patrick Knight has taken over the position, which has remained vacant since the assassination of the GRA’s previous ambassador, Doctor Anees Hussein, and used his first remarks in the chamber to chastise the Council over his predecessor’s murder, and to reinforce humanity’s displeasure with the Dominion.

Who is Ambassador Knight?

Knight, a veteran of surface naval operations in the South China Sea, the Persian Gulf and in support of ground operations in the Middle East, became the commanding officer of the Royal Navy’s First Space Fleet after the acquisition of the two captured alien warships later rededicated as HMS Myrmidon and HMS Caledonia. Since then he has overseen system security in Cimbrean, been instrumental in the formation of the Spaceborne Operations Regiment, and was the Allied field commander during the Battle of Gao.

He retired following the war to care for his daughter, Captain Ellen McDaniel, who was commanding officer of HMS Caledonia and who sustained life-changing injuries when Caledonia was sunk at the height of the conflict.

He declined to comment when asked why he had come out of retirement, but his office released the following statement:

“The Ambassador has always been committed to the ideals of safety and prosperity for all persons of all races and species, and has agreed that re-engaging with the Dominion is the best way to uphold those ideals. He is grateful for the concerns regarding his daughter, who is receiving the best possible care, but would prefer to keep that matter private within his family.”

Making Waves

The Ambassador’s arrival in the Council chamber was suitably dramatic. Aside from making a statement in being escorted by a security detail of HEAT troopers, the Ambassador reportedly shocked the council by appointing a nonhuman as his special advisor.

Knight’s advisor, whose name is approximately rendered in the English alphabet as “Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk” is a former Councillor, having represented the Domain at the time when the Sol Containment Field was erected fifteen years ago. He quit in protest over the deployment, whereupon he commissioned the starship Sanctuary and set about rescuing human refugees and abductees, including BGEV-11 crew Allison Buehler, Xiù Chang and Julian Etsicitty. He was also instrumental in the founding of Folctha, by delivering the first Jump Array to the alien palace colony site.

Following Sanctuary’s destruction, A’ktnnzzik’tk—more often known as “Kirk”—was believed dead. His surprise return to interstellar politics has sent shockwaves through both the Dominion, and also the Vzk’tk Domain where he reportedly enjoyed considerable popularity during his time on the council.

What happens next?

Ambassador Knight has not yet made it clear what the GRA’s agenda for the Security Council will be. For now, he has committed humanity to the political faction broadly known as ‘Reformers,’ which also includes the Gaoian Ambassador Champion Sheeyo of Clan Goldpaw, Corti Directorate Ambassador Veril, and Ambassador Scrythcra of the Rauwryhr Combined Nations.

Kirk’s presence at his side is a source of endless speculation for extraterrestrial political commentators, but a Domain public poll suggested that he has lost none of his popularity and many Domain citizens are interested to see what influence he will have.

Champion Sheeyo praised Knight and Kirk, predicting that they “will be just the shakeup the council deserves.” He went on to add that he has high hopes for the galaxy if the human race chooses to remain enfranchised and focused on the betterment of the Dominion, rather than aloof from it.

The other Reformer ambassadors declined to make any statement, and at the time of writing there has been no official comment from the Celzi Alliance.

Only time will tell what Knight’s appointment will truly mean for humanity and the galactic community.

-Ava Magdalena Ríos
Extraterrestrial Affairs Correspondent

Date Point: 15y6m2w AV
Hierarchy/Cabal Co-operative, Session 20

++0020++: No, I missed the whole war. My last memory is of sending a backup in response to the invasion plans. After that, nothing. Not even a differential log update.

++Cynosure++: As I suspected. It’s not dead.

++0020++: “It”?

++0004++: Something that 0006 unleashed upon us.

++0009++: [File Attachment: Entity Briefing Document]

++Cynosure++: I requested that you please not call me that.

++0004++: < Pointed > But you don’t deny that you unleashed it.

++0003:++: Shut up, 0004. Petty sniping like that is what got us into this mess, and you alone seem to be immune to learning that lesson.

++0004++: It’s just the truth.

++0003++: One more word, and I will demote you to 0999. Am I clear?

++0004++: < Shock; Meek acquiescence. >

++Cynosure++: In fairness, 0004 is correct. This parasitic entity is my creation, inadvertent or not. It is indeed my fault… it is not however my responsibility, at least not exclusively.

++Cytosis++: I would say it’s the least of our concerns. Between the Gaoian disaster and the loss of the Hunter Orbital, a full 3% of the Hegemony is in archive awaiting new Substrate.

++0009++: And the Substrate supply is shrinking, not growing.

++0020++: I just finished reading the briefing document. Something like that is the least of our concerns?

++Cytosis++: If not the least, then certainly low in the priority list.

++0020++: It knows everything! It can infiltrate anywhere! It can expose every secret we have to the Deathworlders! I fail to see how that is not an issue of paramount importance.

++0009++: A limited supply of Substrate compounds every other problem.

++0020++: Well… where is it now?

++Cynosure++: Our last indication of it was among the Builder-caste Hunters aboard the Orbital. Considering how extensively that network was destroyed, however…

++0003++: It may be dead.

++Cytosis++: Optimistic.

++0003++: True. It would be foolish to proceed with that as our working theory. But allow me some hope, please.

CHANNEL: 4 instances of emote: < grim humor >

++Cynosure++: It must have a point of contact with the Humans. If we can locate that…

++0020++: Or it may still be embedded within the Hunters. That’s where I would be right now.

++0004++: < Intrigued > Your rationale?

++0020++: The Builder coup represents a major political and social upheaval, and the new Alpha-of-Alphas was never aware of our relationship with its predecessor.

++Cytosis++: As far as you know.

++0020++: Granted, but was the former A-of-As aware of the Entity?

++0003++: Absolutely not. We never divulged that information.

++0020++: Then if I was this Entity, I would be burrowing deep into the new Builder-led Hunter social order in search of valuable intelligence.

++Cynosure++: I agree. And if it’s so embedded… we may have an opportunity to pursue it.

++0004++: And the Hunters themselves? I notice we have stopped referring to them as Discarded.

++Cytosis++: It’s time to face facts: they’re no longer under our influence. They’re no longer a Control Species, and they are likely to make the Substrate situation worse, not better.

++0003++: Meaning that it is now in our best interests to see them destroyed.

++Cynosure++: Agreed.

++0004++: No Gao, no Hunters… no Control Species at all. The matterspace situation is alarmingly outside of our control now. Surely correcting that is a priority?

++0003++: 0723 is overseeing the development of an industrial-age class 11 Deathworld species a very long way indeed from Human and Gao influence: Approximately eighty thousand lightyears. If we can move them toward a hegemonic-purity world government model rather than implementing the classic collectivist/individualist division…

++0009++: I’ll go make an assessment.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER 0009 HAS QUIT

++Cynosure++: Even if that turns out to be a viable and sensible option, it will still take decades.

++0003++: But it will result in a control species. Especially if we foment a highly xenophobic political atmosphere.

++Cytosis++: Risky. If they detect our influence…

++0003++: Correctly planned for, we could make that discovery work to our advantage. It will require the diversion of experienced agents, but…

++0020++: But we need a control species.

++Cynosure++: The Cabal’s opinions on this kind of interference are well-documented. I will not repeat them here. You are playing with dangerous forces, 0003.

++0003++: We successfully balanced those forces for millions of years. Recent upsets notwithstanding, we are very good at this. As you used to be.

++Cynosure++: And foreseeing the consequences of repeated failure was once a strength of yours. We are not in a position to afford risk-taking. Our margin is gone.

++0020++: I am forced to agree with Cynosure. Especially considering the existence of this parasite. Until it is defeated, any attempt to groom a new control species will only result in discovery and Human/Gao intervention. They have shown that they are quite willing to involve themselves with pre-contact sophonts in order to combat us.

++0004++: So. Having established what our next move is not…

++Cytosis++: …We should establish what it is. Yes. How easily will you be able to re-infiltrate the Hunter networks, 0020?

++0020++: Not easily. The Builders are moving away from a datasphere model toward dumb signal-transport. The whole system is… ossifying. Each passing day renders it less and less permeable.

++Cynosure++: That will work against the parasite, too.

++0004++: Hopefully.

++0020++: I will make an attempt. If I fail… hopefully you will have a plan available once I am restored.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER 0020 HAS QUIT

++0003++: He really deserves a promotion.

++Cytosis++: Or some time off.

++0004++: I don’t think anything in either aspect of the universe could persuade 0020 to take time off… We should plan, as he suggested.

++0003++: We’ll reconvene tomorrow.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: UNANIMOUS AGREEMENT
SESSION CLOSED BY USER 0003

Date Point: 15y6m2w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, The Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Singer

“Yan will not be around forever, Loor. You must learn how to make peace without him.”

“I’ll worry about that branch when I grab it,” Loor retorted. “So long as Yan is around…”

He was one of the younger Given-Men, having gone through the change barely a hand of winters ago, and the Singer sometimes wondered if he was still a child in the head. He hadn’t mastered his Fire into a passionate drive like Yan had, and it still kept him short-tempered and unruly.

And a Given-Man’s job was to keep the peace. Gods help Loor’s tribe.

“So long as Yan is around is the time to learn from him, not latch onto his tit!” the Singer answered. She heard one of the nearby women stifle an amused trill, and lowered her voice. “Gods’ names, Loor, how do you teach your sons to make a knife? Do you make every knife for them and expect them to learn when you’re gone?”

Loor glowered at her, but the Singer wasn’t afraid of him. He might be a fire-head, but he wasn’t violently stupid. It took him a few heartbeats to finally admit her point but admit it he did, by sagging and whipping his tail.

“…I’ll… talk with Yermo,” he promised reluctantly. “And I’ll keep my teeth in my mouth this time.”

“Even if he doesn’t do the same?”

“Even then.”

The Singer treated him to a smile. “Thank you.”

“Still. If I’m to learn from Yan, it would help if he was here.”

“He’s only gone for a season,” the Singer pointed out.

Loor’s tail whipped the other way. “A lot can happen in a season, Singer.”

“Or nothing can happen. Work with the tools you have, Loor, that’s all I ask. I’ll sing for Yermo to keep his temper.”

That last promise seemed satisfactory. He thanked her and left the village in a much less violent mood than he’d arrived, leaving the Singer to sigh and plop down next to the fire where some of the women were preserving another batch of stew for the winter.

She sat with her thoughts and helped with the preparations for some time until a shouting-stone’s call drew her attention. It was the unique thrum-thrum! thrum-thrum! rhythm the lookouts used for when a human was headed their way.

Sure enough, a few minutes later Professor Hurt ambled into camp with his hands empty but five root-birds hanging from his pack. He exchanged words of goodwill with the lookouts and handed the meat over as a gift. The Singer nodded happily: ever since his return, the Given-Men had been grumbling much less over the humans out at the ‘bunker.’ The old man was no kind of a Given-Man himself, but he knew how to make and keep the peace.

The Singer welcomed him with a smile and invited him to the fire where he sat down and produced a real treat: Hot chocolate. Strawberry hot chocolate. Somehow those little bags of brown powder made the most delicious drink.

“Good morning!” he said, with a little bow.

“All the better now,” the Singer replied politely. She cleared some room for him to pour water into his metal cups and place them among the embers. “The children missed your stories at the last big meeting of tribes.”

“The children have an endless hunger for stories,” Daniel chuckled fondly. “They want new ones faster than I can translate them.”

“Which one are you translating now?”

“Well, that’s actually why I’m here,” Daniel confessed. “This one’s a story about gods, and… well, I know that sometimes Humans and the People can have different ideas about how to talk about the gods.”

The Singer nodded. It had come as a shock to find that Humans felt quite comfortable with talking about their gods by name. It just didn’t mean the same thing to them.

“I wanted to check with you that my translation is, uh, acceptable,” Daniel finished.

The Singer nodded. “I have questions for you too. But please, you go first.”

Daniel nodded and produced his notebook.

“It’s the story about how the thunder god gets his most famous weapon,” he said. “And it begins in the morning when the thunder-god’s love wakes to find that her hair is gone…”

She sipped the hot chocolate as he spoke. It was a funny story, full of trickery and a rogue getting his comeuppance, and Daniel was a better storyteller than any man among the People even when sharing the story quietly so as not to be overheard. But he was right, Humans thought about their gods in a very different way and she said as much once he’d finished.

“Honestly, I don’t think the people who first told that story liked their gods very much,” Daniel confessed. “They respected them no doubt, but they lived in a cold and hard land where death could strike all too quickly. They would have felt like playthings, I think.”

There, at least, the Singer could sympathize. The Gods got respect because they were powerful; ‘Powerful’ did not mean ‘nice.’ For every good season, warm day and successful hunt, there was sooner or later a hard winter, a broken spear or a sickness. All necessary for the balance, of course… but she had to admit, she hadn’t much liked the gods on the day when her baby had died in her arms.

“…Tell it as you told me,” she decided.

He nodded and made a note.

“Well, a fair trade is in order then,” he said. “What do you need?”

“Word about Yan and Sky-Thinker?”

Daniel smiled and nodded. “We have a saying: ‘no news is good news.’”

“That… could be taken two ways.”

“Exactly.”

That made the Singer trill. “I like it. Still, if you know anything…?”

Daniel nodded and retrieved his tablet thinking-stone from his pack and tapped at its bright surface. “…If all goes to plan, they should be leaving Utah today. That’s the land of some of Julian’s ancestors, and the last word he sent to me said that their time there has gone well. They’ll travel for a few days to a colder land in the north where there are trees and large beasts, much like here. That’s their last stop: a hand of days later they should be back here.”

The Singer nodded, relieved. Daniel sipped his own drink and gave her a knowing look. “I wonder whether you miss your uncle or your mate more,” he commented.

The Singer trilled softly. “You may as well ask if I prefer breathing or food. I need both… though Yan is not so good for keeping me warm.”

Daniel laughed and nodded. “There, I sympathize,” he said. “It’s been too long since I had company at night.”

“Not even from among your fellows at the bunker? Claire, maybe?” The Singer had become something like friends with the slender human woman, though Claire’s ongoing refusal to dress comfortably still baffled her. While the men she worked with were happy to strip to the skin in hot weather, Claire was always covered and always suffering.

Why couldn’t Human taboos make sense?

Daniel’s face definitely went a little redder, like human faces did sometimes when they were embarrassed. “Claire’s one of my students. It would be wrong.”

“Ah. But you don’t dislike the idea.”

Daniel cleared his throat. “Best if I say nothing.”

Another taboo. Oh well.

“Yan needs to calm some of the Given-Men,” the Singer explained. “Without him… There are arguments. No fights yet, but…”

“But you don’t want a repeat of… uhm…”

“When Yan killed Tarek, and then killed his whole tribe, and then Took their Singer?” the Singer asked pointedly.

“…That, yes.”

“No, I don’t.” Especially because there was no guarantee she herself wouldn’t endure something similar if it came to that. Yan would surely wreak a terrible revenge, but too late.

“Is that… likely?” Daniel asked.

“It is always how things could go… but no, I don’t think it will happen. It doesn’t help that we don’t have many more years of Yan left. We need him here, to teach the others how to keep the peace without him.”

“…I think I sense what the trouble may be about.”

The Singer twitched her tail irritably. She’d hoped to pass it off as a tribal matter, but the resentment and fear were probably never quite going to leave. And in truth, the other tribes were right to be scared of the Humans. They’d made it clear more times than the Singer could count that if it came to war, all the People with all the good bows and steel knives they could make would be worse than annihilated: they’d be ignored.

What did it mean to be friends with a tribe so powerful that they could simply stop paying attention to you if the friendship soured?

“Some of the Given-Men feel you have taken Yan and Sky-Thinker.”

“It was a giving,” Daniel replied. “Them to us. For the balance. Yan said so.”

“Yes. Funny how easily his words are forgotten when he is not here to remind the others of what he said.”

Daniel nodded sadly and considered his drink.

“…A hand of days,” he promised. “Maybe a hand and two. No longer than that. And if you want, I can request they come back sooner.”

The Singer dismissed that suggestion with a curt gesture. “No. It’s an important Giving.”

“Well then,” Daniel smiled. “Maybe I’ll tell my story when they’re back. We can have a feast!”

“That sounds good.” The Singer finished her hot chocolate and returned the steel cup. “Even better if there’s more like that.”

Daniel chuckled. “There will be,” he promised, and stood up. “I’ll see you in a hand of days or so.”

“Say hello to Claire for me.”

“That I can do.”

The Singer watched him go. It was strange to think back to the pudgy, soft man who had first come to them a few seasons ago. A man of the People in his position would have grown large and strong: Daniel however had become lean and tough like a vine. He seemed healthy and strong like only a Human could be.

That was good. And it was good to have friends like that. And very good indeed to know she could hand the trouble with the other Given-Men back to Yan soon.

But there was a lot of future to come after that. She needed a fix that would outlive him.

If only she could think of one.

Date Point: 15y6m2w AV
ε Monocerotis 143.9° 37-FEBEAA G3V 1-3

Katja Napierski

Thump.

“Holy shit!”

“Those are your Big Words?”

“To hell with my Big Words, look at this!”

A bright purple tree was… walking past barely a hundred yards away.

Okay, ‘walking’ was kind of a generous term to describe a kind of shambling crawl, and ‘tree’ was maybe a generous word to spend on a six-foot shrub that looked like a cross between a mangrove and a lavender bush, but holy crap. It was still a perambulating plant, no matter what way Katja sliced it.

“…We should name this place Grootworld,” Graves suggested. The entire first survey team gave his idea the cold treatment it deserved, and Katja grimaced inside the sealed environment of her excursion suit.

“…Air quality?” she asked, wearily.

Saitō had been waving a sample wand around from the moment they arrived, and held it up. “Clean and breathable. Pretty high OP count though, so, uh… you bring your Benadryl?”

The Organic Particulate or “OP” count was the xenobiologist’s version of a pollen count, and they’d made it an important part of determining atmospheric compatibility. Nobody wanted to inhale a double lungful of anaphylactic shock.

“How high?”

“Eighty or so.”

“Alright, helmets stay on until I say otherwise.”

The words “yes ma’am” did the rounds, and they vacated the jump array’s platform.

The Coltainer probe had picked a hell of a spot, at least. Those walking trees probably basically were mangroves, because they were wriggling slowly around on the slick surface of a tidal mud flat. Crystal waters lapped and played over the rocks and the beach was vacation-brochure white sand under a flawless blue sky.

Katja had a full orbital survey, of course. The colony site was on the northern, oceanward side of an extinct volcano. To the west was a peninsula that gave way to archipelago, to the east was continental mainland. Fertile farming terrain in one direction, mineral wealth in another, oceanic wealth in a third. Throw in a balmy climate and gentle weather and in theory they had a lovely place to live.

All that remained was for a ground team—the one she was leading—to verify biocompatibility and double-check the probe’s work.

They were quite a team. In fact, it would be hard to pick a more varied group of people with a more diverse skill-set. The Allied military and security services were, after all, an enormous set of organizations and AEC had looked everywhere for the right people to form its exoplanet survey team to follow up on any leads generated by the Coltainer project at Erebor.

This was the first. About thirty-seven kilolightyears from Sol, and currently invisible without a telescope of surpassing power, it didn’t have a name beyond a description of its position in Earth’s sky, approximate distance, and a string of letters to pin down its precise coordinates. The star was a fraction hotter than Sol, the planet a fraction further away… But as far as Katja was concerned, if she ignored the walking mangroves then she could have been standing on a beach in the Bahamas.

There was a cry of “Fire in the hole!” from her right, followed by a loud BANG! as Roberts fired the ground-to-orbit mortar. A brilliant streak of blue light connected sand and sky for a heartbeat before the warp field collapsed, and Katja’s HUD reported that she now had satellite telemetry.

That was proving to be one of the most clever technologies the Gao had taught them. In-atmosphere warp had all sorts of clever uses, and human forays into the tech had only successfully yielded weapons like the Skymaster guns. The mortar on the other hand could deliver satellites directly into stable orbits.

The day—morning, they quickly discovered—unfolded at a steady pace, punctuated by the sound of Roberts seeding the sky with satellites. Every time he did so, local bat-like flying animals scared up and circled for a few minutes before returning to the ground.

Oddly, enough, they seemed to be otherwise pretty fearless. One of them perched on a rock within arm’s reach at one point and Katja took several good pictures of it.

Bat-like was definitely the right angle. It had a crumpled, snouty sort of pug-dog face, fur and leathery wings, but the body plan was more bird-shaped even if one ignored the pink-skinned rat tail. It was kinda cute, actually.

Her attention was broken by Bailey with the results from her Flycatcher sweep of the territory. “Captain? Geosurvey’s complete.”

“Verdict?”

“Exactly as the probe said. We’re sitting on a wealth of metal ores, especially bauxite, the seafloor to the north is a perfect candidate for oil and gas and there are strong indications of an anthracite seam two hundred klicks inland. Radon’s a little high at a bit more than two picocuries per liter, but that’s within acceptable bounds.”

“Meaning this site has everything a colony might need for an industrial base and exports.” Katja nodded.

“Or self-sufficiency,” Bailey agreed. “Want me to check out the beta sites?”

Katja nodded. The alpha site where they were standing was what the probe had considered to be the best possible spot for a colony: the beta sites were nearby strong contenders that could provide good support to the alpha site. “Sure, send the drone over there.”

By sunset, the biocompatibility survey was complete. The pollens unfortunately were going to give people allergies, but nothing life-threatening as far as Saitō could tell. Just the equivalent of hay fever, and they were hopefully seasonal. Otherwise, everything was pleasantly compatible, as expected. Carbon-based, levo-amino, DNA-based, blah blah blah. There was work here for a million xenobiologists’ lifetimes, but the point was that just breathing the air and eating the fish wasn’t going to make anybody dangerously ill.

In the end, Katja volunteered to take her helmet off first. It was her call, after all. So, with emergency medical gear on standby just in case all their exhaustive tests turned out to be dead wrong, she broke seal, pulled the helmet off and took a deep inhalation through the nose.

The air smelled… pleasantly minty, actually. With an undercurrent of ocean breeze. The effect was rather like the distant scent of a mojito.

She breathed normally for a minute or so before finally deciding that no, her throat wasn’t about to swell up and choke her, and put her helmet down. “Okay.”

Helmets came off one by one in a steady, predetermined order, everybody making sure that there was still no sign of distress from the people before them before breaking their own seal. By the time the last of them was breathing the open air, Katja had been taking in the planet’s atmosphere for ten minutes entirely without difficulty. They were on a conclusively habitable planet.

She looked around. The Coltainer had sent down construction equipment that had assembled basic shelter and facilities: a small nanofactory, a solar power generator, a fusion generator that just needed a supply of hydrogen to boot up, and a fully wired and plumbed colony administration building suitable for short-term habitation. It even had beds!

“Okay,” she said. “Call in the follow-up team.”

They had a world to explore.

Date Point: 15y6m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Derek “Boss” Coombes

Date number two was more relaxed. Actually it was just an evening at a coffee shop but Ava had brought along her draft of her interview with Daar. She apologetically made Derek sign a non-disclosure, which he was more than willing to do, and sat sipping a cappuccino as he read it.

His own coffee had gone lukewarm by the time he finished it.

He put it down with an exhalation at the end. “…Damn. Tigger’s always been a big personality, but…”

“He completely overwhelmed me,” Ava said.

“He’ll do that.”

“Is there anything you’d change? Anything you think I should focus more on?”

Derek shook his head. “Daar’s got his own message, I got mine.”

“So are you going to do one of these?” Ava asked. He grinned at her.

“You just wanna get me naked.”

“Guilty.” She smiled back. “But seriously? My editor is going to want to fuck with this. I want to take it to him in ‘we either publish it as-is or not at all’ condition.”

“He’d do that? Even with Daar’s weight behind you?”

Ava’s smile got wider. “If Jason had been there when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai, he’d have had his red pen ready to make ‘a few little suggestions.’”

Derek chuckled, and gave up on replying to that in favor of just watching her for a second as she tidied up her tablet. There were women so achingly beautiful that a guy could fall in love just from looking at a picture of them, and Ava could have been their princess… and she’d kissed him hello. It was an awesome thought.

Naturally she saw his undisguised attention and gave him a look over with a smirk. “…You’re not so bad yourself.”

Derek couldn’t help himself: his laugh made heads turn.

“Hey, I never promised to be a perfect gentleman.”

“Good.” She grinned at him, leaned forward and lowered her voice, looking him in the eye. “I don’t want a perfect gentleman.”

“So you want… what? A rogue?”

“Mmm…” Ava ran a finger around her coffee mug’s rim and gave him a lopsided, daring smile. “Enough of a gentleman to hold the door for me, enough of a scoundrel to pin me against the wall before it’s closed. Something like that.”

Derek chuckled. If she’d been trying to fluster him, she’d instead given him ideas. “That a request?”

“That an offer?”

“…Get your bag.”

Date Point: 15y6m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

No pain. A… hum? Electrical. A fan?

And… Light. Not bright light, nor white. Dim, warm, soft light. Lots of little ones too, in green and red and an eye-twisting unnatural blue…

The last dregs of a horrible dream about being stabbed and decapitated circled the drain and gave way to confusion as Ray woke up.

She’d… died.

…Hadn’t she?

She was pretty sure she had. There’d been shooting, and Hunters. And a sensation that had redefined pain for her as a fusion blade had sunk right into her–

But this didn’t sound like heaven or whatever, and she’d already been to Hell and this wasn’t it… And the figure at her bedside looked like the more mundane kind of angel in her bright blue scrubs with her hair in a high but neat bun.

…No, wait. His hair.

He clearly spotted some change on the various… things that Ray was plugged into, because he turned, saw her staring at him and was at her side instantly.

“Easy there. Hi. You’re in hospital, I’m Shane, I’m a nurse here…”

Something utterly mountainous moved in the dimly-lit corner behind Shane and Ray blinked at it, momentarily convinced that a Hunter was about to spring from the shadows and that this was just a temporary moment of false hope before—

Instead, the most enormous man she’d ever seen stepped forward with a concerned look on his wide, friendly face. He held himself back through some prodigious self-restraint and let the nurse control the scene.

“Can you tell me your name?” Shane was asking. Ray blinked and looked back at him.

“I–” Her throat was so dry it felt totally closed and she paused, tried to gulp to clear it. He magicked a little plastic cup of water from somewhere nearby and gently helped her to drink from it. It washed some of the grit and sandpaper out at least.

“It’s…Ray. Ray Wheeler,” she managed after gulping again. “I’m… still here?”

“You’re still here,” Shane agreed with a smile. “You made it.”

“But…?” Ray struggled to repair her thoughts and memories. She was absolutely, completely certain she’d felt her heart stop in her chest. And… there had been dark brown eyes. And…

She raised a hand to her throat. It was very much seamlessly intact. It drifted down to her chest and probed her sternum, which felt whole and intact.

The giant shambling man-mountain edged closer into the light where she could see him properly. He had warm brown eyes, she saw. Deep, very dark—

“You…?”

He nodded. “And another man we’ll call Baseball. I go by Warhorse, technically speaking.”

Ray lowered her head back to the pillow to try and think. The question looming largest in her mind was a big thundering “how?” She was certain of only one thing: that she absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent had been stabbed in the heart which as far as she knew was about as dead as dead got. She could remember her last thoughts for fucksake. She hadn’t even been afraid, not really. More… robbed.

“…My friends?”

“They made it.” Shane had a warm, soothing voice. “They’re nearby.”

“And…” Ray tapped her chest lightly. “How…?”

“Medicine has advanced a whole hell of a lot since you guys left,” Warhorse informed her. His voice was warm too, but so chest-shakingly deep it could never be called smooth or gentle despite the Latino lilt that touched some of his vowels. “But we also, uh, called in a special favor for you.”

For a few seconds a kind of silence descended. ‘Warhorse’ obviously didn’t know what to say, Shane was watching intently, and Ray…

Ray blinked. Then the ceiling went blurry and then… oh God…

Everything hit her, all at once. The years of pain, of guilt, of fear, the shock of losing Berry and Conley, the full horrible reality of her own brush with death all came slamming down on her at once and the only thing she could do about it was hold on and try not to be washed away by her own tears.

Both men rushed to her side. Shane took her hand, the one with the drip line in it, and squeezed gently. Warhorse’s huge callused mitt enveloped her other hand. Ray felt too weak even to turn her head, too weak to do anything except lay there and mourn.

Eventually—she had no idea how long—Shane pressed a handkerchief into her hand, which raised it to her eyes and nose without prompting. Part of her noticed in a detached way that her skin looked loose and old. The fact that her hand was shaking didn’t help the impression: She felt, and maybe looked, somewhere on the wrong side of eighty.

“My crew? My family?” she asked, latching onto something to do, or at least talk about.

“Your family are in a hotel just ten minutes away. It’s the middle of the night right now… we can send for them, but you should probably rest for now.” Shane fiddled with the drip. “The doctor said to give you some Valium if you want it. Just enough to help.”

Ray looked at the line in her hand and gave up. “…I don’t know. If the doctor thinks that’s best… I don’t know. Yes.”

Shane nodded, finished presumably dosing her up, and then gave her some space. Ray looked at Warhorse.

“…Jesus. Have you slept?” she asked him. He looked downright haggard.

“Yeah, I’m just tired.”

“Don’t you have a family or something to go home to if it’s the middle of the night?”

He beamed at that. “Yeah! A newborn son, Diego. He’s, uh, pretty demanding.”

“…And you’re here?” Ray asked.

“I live in town, it’s no big deal. I just put him to bed about two hours ago actually.”

“So why are you here?”

He shrugged hugely. “I save lives.”

Ray sighed. Maybe Valium acted faster than she thought because she was already feeling a lot better about things… but she couldn’t take that for an answer.

“I’m grateful,” she said. “God, I… I don’t know how I can ever repay you. But you should be at home with your son.”

He chuckled to himself, “¡No te preocupes! It only takes me literally two minutes to run home, and I had to see if you made it. You did, so I’m happy.”

“I still can’t believe it… I could have sworn…” She touched her chest again.

“And you’re right. But like I said, things came a long way since you were gone. But I’ll leave it to the doctors to explain.”

“…Right. I guess I need to, I don’t know. Plan for maybe having a life again.”

“Sleep first,” he said. “Worry about life mañana. It’s just one day at a time, y’know?”

Ray nodded and rested her head again. “Good advice.”

He smiled and stood. “Hey, uh…don’t be a stranger. I’d like it if you visited! You know. If you feel up to it.”

“I’ll do that… thank you.”

She was already falling asleep as he murmured a warm “De nada” and left.

Date Point: 15y6m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Derek “Boss” Coombes

“Ohhhh God, right there! Mm!”

Derek nodded, scratched her back a little harder, and Ava melted into a happy limp puddle with a sigh.

“I think you’re enjoying this more than the sex,” he accused, trailing his fingernails up and down her spine.

“I think shut up…” she mumbled happily, and snuggled into him. “The sex was amazing and you know it.”

Derek stroked her hair. “Flatterer.”

“What, you wanna hear the opposite?”

“Who knows, it might motivate me to do better next time.”

She laughed and kissed his shoulder. “Ohh no. I expect you to bring your A-game every time. If that wasn’t it, we need to go another round.”

“…I might need a minute.”

“Mmm,” she purred indulgently, while nuzzling against his neck. “I’ll give you two.”

“How about three, and I keep scratching your back?” He emphasized the point with a slow drag down her spine.

“Mmmm!” she somehow managed to become even more relaxed. “…Deal.”

Derek was more than happy to please.

Date Point: 15y6m2w1d AV
Dominion Council Ship Rich Plains

Kirk

“That went surprisingly well.”

Kirk had discovered, to his private delight, that his sense of humour aligned wonderfully with Admiral Knight’s. The elderly Human had a full-bore laugh that only the driest, most deadpan jokes could expose.

Every species got an ambassadorial suite aboard the Rich Plains, and the Dominion had… well… they’d done their best to accomodate a human’s needs. Apparently none of the hospitality specialists on board knew much about what humans actually wanted and needed, beyond having heard somewhere that Homo Sapiens had a much larger caloric intake requirement than most other sophonts.

The spread of comestibles on the table was… alarming. But Knight hadn’t commented, he’d simply sat down with a satisfied sigh and started exploring the assorted alien delicacies in front of him. The caterers had even laid on meat, a clear sign of accommodation.

“…What on Earth is this?” he asked, lifting a fork with a heart-shaped slice of thin, orange flesh draped over it.

“That is… probably Dizi Rat,” Kirk decided.

“…Rat.” Knight considered it, sniffed it dubiously, then shrugged and draped the meat on the small cooking plate provided. “Should I be insulted?”

“I suspect not. It is driven by benign racism, fundamentally. Allegedly one of the earlier Humans to escape his Corti abductors settled on Dizi Rats as a protein source and… well, made quite a mess.”

“How do they accommodate the Gao?”

“They don’t. The Gao bring their own food.”

“Hmm… is there anything here you can eat? Don’t misunderstand me, I’m grateful they didn’t thoughtfully provide me with any well-decomposed Zrrks, but…”

Kirk snorted a laugh.“The Cqcq salad looks rather nice…”

Knight waved a hand at it. “Then by all means, dig in! I wouldn’t want this to go to waste.”

Kirk claimed the bowl and did his best to sit on a bench made for Humans while Knight assembled something like a sandwich. Bread, fortunately, was almost universal in one form or another.

“Personally, I thought we went down like a lead balloon,” the ambassador commented after a few seconds.

“The Dominion is a fundamentally conservative organization, in the sense that it abhors change of any kind and any degree. The Humans and the Gao prove…more dynamic than they are comfortable with.”

“It’s a wonder any of them ever looked up and tried for orbit…” Knight grumbled. He waved a tube of something. “Relish? Spread?”

“Krztkzk. It is… I suppose a mushroom pate would be closest. And do not mistake the political conservatism of the Dominion for a lack of drive and ambition on the part of individuals. We all had our Wright Brother-equivalents.”

Knight sampled the Krztkzk, nodded, and spread some on his sandwich. “I suppose the Hierarchy cannot suppress everyone everywhere at all times.”

“Thank goodness,” Kirk said. “Of course, their social engineering did slow everything. We did not have the same big industrial wars as you. Therefore rocketry was a more slowly-developed science, as were nuclear fission and electronics.”

“The Gao were going down the same path, as I recall. They only had a brief history of large-scale war but it was violently bloody.”

“They are an… aggressive species. Humans, as I have noticed, seem to see a problem and have an irresistible itch to solve it. Gaoians tend to prefer to kill it, or at least outcompete it.”

Knight gave him a sharp look. “That hardly seems fair.”

“I am talking in the broadest possible xenopsychological strokes, you understand.”

“Hmm.” Knight decided that the thin slices of rat on the grill were cooked, and transferred them onto the bed of Cqcq and Krztkzk he’d created. He sampled the meat, grunted, and added a handful of dried fruit to his creation before folding it over to eat.

“Still. I’m not sure I like that characterization,” he said. “The Gao have been steadfast and loyal to us, and quite generous.”

“I admire them greatly,” Kirk said. “They are proof positive that yours is—forgive me—not the insurmountably supreme species of the galaxy, against whom all the others fall short.”

“Thank God,” Knight muttered, and bit into his sandwich.

“But I prefer humans,” Kirk added. “Gaoians are innately predatory in a way that tickles my instincts the wrong way. Humans are more…civilized. Or at least, you wear it better.”

Knight acknowledged the compliment with a nod, then put his sandwich down and brushed his hands back and forth against each other to remove some crumbs. “Not bad,” he commented. “With a little imagination and a nasty cold, it could almost pass for a BLT.”

It was Kirk’s turn to laugh, and Knight smiled.

“Well,” he said. “We should probably discuss why the Gao want us—and specifically you—on the council. Trade.”

Kirk nodded slowly. “The Gao are keen to ensure that their trading relationship with the Dominion survives any amount of disapproval and fallout over the Ring. The Domain will be the linchpin species there.”

“How strong is our position?”

“Strong,” Kirk said confidently. “Especially with the Corti on your side. But it could be stronger. The Gao are, after all, a net importer from the Domain.”

“Hmm.” Knight set aside the remaining half of his sandwich and picked around the rest of the table in search of something appetizing. “What of?”

“Civilian ships and construction materials, mostly—oh, you might enjoy the Rwhk—especially for asteroid mining. The destruction left by the war will take years to regenerate, and much of the Gao’s interplanetary infrastructure was destroyed or maliciously repurposed. The Dark Eye installation is much more advanced than anything we have but it is… hungry. Raw materials do not provide themselves, after all. Further, it is only one installation and that means it cannot be used for trade goods production.”

“No exports means less liquid capital,” Knight nodded. “Which means less flexibility.”

He picked up a Rhwk and turned it over in his hands a few times before giving Kirk a quizzical look.

“You peel it. Start from the blue end.”

Knight nodded and did as suggested. “So what can we do, here, to keep the freighters flowing? I think I have an idea.”

“Please, tell.”

“Let’s face it, the Gao and AEC have the best damn fleet in the sky right now,” Knight said, with more than a touch of pride. He was, after all, an admiral. “Between our surveillance drones and jump beacons, the spacelanes to Gao have an effectively permanent combat air patrol, and destroyers on standby.”

“Making them the safest in the galaxy,” Kirk saw. “And with the Hunters on the rampage right now, that will be an attractive option for traders. Especially the independent captains with families on their ships.”

“I would have thought the big firms wouldn’t want to lose ships willy-nilly either.”

Kirk had never heard the term ‘willy-nilly’ before, but it didn’t matter—he understood its meaning. “They will not,” he nodded. “But you must remember that most of the big firms make their money primarily by providing support and infrastructure. The captains choose which cargo contracts to pick up and move, the customer pays a variable rate depending on urgency, risk, distance, demand and a thousand other factors, and the companies finance the ships, determine the rates, take a cut from the captains, and provide maintenance and insurance.”

“Hmm. Like an interstellar freight version of Uber.”

“Very similar.”

“Although I must ask…” Knight finished peeling the fruit, “why aren’t they just using jump arrays? Why even bother with spacelanes and shipping when that’s available?”

“The aforementioned conservative inertia,” Kirk guessed. “Also, I suspect, because a change like that would result in some very wealthy people going out of business.”

“Hierarchy influence?”

“Not impossible… but there is a danger in seeing them lurking behind every corner. It is easier to explain with simple greed.”

Knight accepted the caution with a nod and sampled his Rhwk. Other humans usually compared it to a grapefruit crossed with a pineapple, at least in terms of flavor. It seemed to meet with his approval and he polished off half of it before returning to his sandwich.

“I immediately see some opportunities,” he said. “Human and Gaoian security expertise and technology could be very welcome in that market right now… if we can overcome the prejudice and paranoia.”

“My mere presence will help in that regard,” Kirk said. “Where one Rrrrtk leads, a hundred Vzk’tk will follow.”

“The fact that the council is adamant that you are dead won’t matter, I presume.”

“Legally dead.” Kirk snorted happily. “And of course, bureaucracies being what they are, the mere fact of my walking into the room and pointing out that I am not dead will not change my legal status.”

“The forms must be obeyed.”

“Oh yes. Indeed, there is an old Rrrrtk joke on that subject.”

Knight looked intrigued. “Ricktick humor? Do tell.”

“I warn you, it loses an important pun in translation,” Kirk said. Knight shrugged the warning off, so he cleared his throat and solemnly intoned in the best tradition of his species’ comedy: “A man walks into a government building, where the clerk hands him a form requisition form. Having exhausted her supply, she then fills out a form requisition form requisition form. So it goes.”

Knight smiled. “…Okay. It’s amusing. I wouldn’t call it laugh-out-loud funny, but…”

“As I said, the central pun is lost in English. It’s also a bit of a tongue-twister, you see. Or, the equivalent.”

Knight nodded, and finished his sandwich before casting around among the remaining untouched foods to see what else he could make. Clearly the hospitality team’s estimations hadn’t been all that far off the mark.

“I have a question with regard to your trade relationship with the Gao,” Kirk asked him.

“By all means.”

“It seems somewhat… shall we say ‘lopsided’? The flow of technology from them to you would seem to far outweigh the foodstuffs you trade back to them.”

“There’s a growing trade in platinum-group metals as well,” Knight noted. “And rare earths. For the first time ever the Western nations have a surplus of those, thanks to asteroid mining.”

“Nevertheless.”

Knight nodded and started assembling another Dizi Sandwich.

“Trade is a broad concept and the Gao in particular do not consider it a strictly economic affair,” he said. “To them, culture, language, and ideas hold significant weight, and access to those things may be benefiting them more than you realize. Nor can goodwill be discounted, either. And it must be said, the Great Father just did us a massive favor with the Ring business.”

“Thereby increasing your debt.”

“You have thoughts, there?”

“I think perhaps the increasing insularity of the Allied nations and the Gao might be alarming to species like the Kwmbwrw in particular. And of course, most of the Dominion does not really appreciate that the human race comprises a lot more than just the Allied nations. Indeed, you are very much a minority by population.”

Knight shrugged. “There are minimum economic thresholds to all this. We only just got universal access to clean drinking water and electricity sorted out, and there are serious weapons tech concerns too. Do you have any idea just how big a nightmare Jump Arrays are from a security point of view?”

“I sometimes forget that simply drinking the water can be risky on your home planet,” Kirk admitted.

“In decades past, one of the greatest triumphs of our national order was the elimination of the Guinea worm. Bloody horrifying little bastard, that.”

Kirk shivered involuntarily and Knight nodded.

“You see my point. It’s not that the Allies necessarily want to be the face of humanity. I’d actually very much like for the Russians and Chinese to be represented in the council if nothing else, and I’m not alone in that. But for better or worse, we’re the ones who are actually expanding off-world and building the infrastructure. And the more we do so, the more we benefit from a kind of geometric growth that they become increasingly less able to keep up with. Just look at Franklin!”

“Franklin?”

“The US colony on Cimbrean. It’s already half the population of Folctha. Throw in New Botany, Nouveau Acadia and Abeltown, and Cimbrean’s population is well on its way to two million human souls, never mind the Clan of Females. The other Earth powers have a lot of catching up to do.”

“Will they ever?”

“I doubt it, at this point. They were too slow off the mark. Even if we hand them an absolutely golden colony candidate world on a silver plate, they don’t have the experience and momentum that we do.”

“Meaning that for all practical intents and purposes, the Allies are the face of Humanity for the Dominion species.”

Knight nodded. He looked like he was about to ask a question when a knock on the door heralded the arrival of one of his diplomatic aides. “Sorry, ambassador. We just got an update about a serious incident at Scotch Creek…”

Knight nodded, wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin and stood. “I suppose I should probably arrange for some Earth food to be delivered.”

“Probably,” Kirk agreed. “I think most of these foods are quite low-value for you anyway, even if they taste nice. Shall we conclude our meeting later?”

“Yes, let’s.” Knight ushered the aide through into his as-yet unused office, and Kirk took the chance to nibble his Cqcq salad.

He had to admit. It was good to be back in the game.

Date Point: 15y6m2w1d AV

ESNN Front Page news story: SCOTCH CREEK PROTEST TURNS VIOLENT
Cars burned and windows smashed as rioters lay siege to military base

The fallout from the Allied destruction of a major Hunter orbital structure continued last night when rioters stormed the front gates of the Scotch Creek army base. Thirteen people are reported to have been injured when base security personnel deployed stun grenades, water cannons and forcefields to protect the facility, with some reports suggesting the number may be higher.

Although AEC are yet to formally comment on the incident, they did confirm that seven people were arrested and handed over to the RCMP after “projectiles” were thrown at the facility’s gate guards and two separate attempts were made to scale the fence. The police have described their efforts at protecting the local residents and their property as “a losing battle,” with burnt cars littering the streets and in some neighborhoods the windows that aren’t smashed are boarded up and covered in graffiti.

The Alien Protection Army group has claimed responsibility for the unrest via social media, and has promised that more will follow. A viral video released by the APA accused Allied forces of being complicit in genocide and mass-murder, and called for “a reckoning.”

Meanwhile, in a statement from the Pentagon, the Supreme Allied Commander of Extrasolar Defence General Gregory Kolbeinn praised SCERF personnel for resolving what he called “repeated and concerted assaults on the base” without bloodshed.

“Under the circumstances, the guards at Scotch Creek would have been entirely justified in using lethal force,” he said, adding that “the fact that they were able to repel the attackers using less-lethal means speaks volumes about their calm and professionalism.”

So far, there has been no comment from the Canadian government, or Prime Minister Philippe Martel.

So who are the APA?

The so-called Alien Protection Army were founded nearly fifteen years ago, shortly after the release of the Abductee Memoirs. It began with an anonymous manifesto which described what the author called humanity’s “innate biological imperialism” and attacked quote: “problematic depictions of human space exploration, expansion and settlement such as Star Trek and Mass Effect,” calling them “species supremacist” and “colonialist propaganda.”

Originally the APA was a student movement on university and college campuses across Europe and North America, but the movement always struggled with the presence of a radicalized minority with its own ranks. When APA members carried out a suicide bomb attack and mass shooting on the MBG Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility in Omaha, several governments classified the whole organisation as a terrorist group. Over the last three years, Allied security agencies claim to have thwarted no fewer than seventy terror plots by the APA, mostly targeted at organisations and individuals connected with spaceflight and the Cimbrean colonies.

Despite this, the APA’s global membership is estimated to be in the thousands, and growing. They have vocally condemned the military alliance between the Allied nations and the Gao, calling Great Father Daar “a military extremist with a body count that eclipses Hitler” and describing President Sartori as being “complicit in the systematic slaughter of innocents.”

General Kolbeinn’s reply to that accusation was dismissive: “Terrorists don’t get to lecture me about innocent casualties.”

What happens next?

This morning, Scotch Creek residents are now cleaning up their homes and streets, and the burnt vehicles are being towed away. However there is an uneasy feeling in the community that this isn’t the last their once-sleepy tourist town has seen of such unrest.

General Kolbeinn has outright dismissed any possibility that the military alliance with the Gao might be reconsidered, a sentiment echoed by White House press secretary John Simmons, who said that “The President has made it very clear on several occasions that we are effectively at war, and that the Gao are our most valuable friends and allies.”

While this sentiment has also been echoed by the British Prime Minister Stephen Davies, the Australian PM Kathy Nguyen and the Prime Minister of New Zealand Joel Thompson, the loudest voice in support of the Gao came from Folctha’s Prime Minister Annette Winton.

“There is not a single Gaoian on this planet, at least that I’ve spoken to, who doubts that what the Great Father did was necessary for their very survival. The Gaoian people were the target of an attempted genocide, and to describe them as though they are the aggressors is nothing short of victim-blaming.”

Finally, the APA themselves have promised to do “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.”

It seems unlikely that Scotch Creek will be their only target.

-Ava Magdalena Ríos
Extraterrestrial Affairs Correspondent

Date Point: 15y6m2w2d AV
Monument Valley, Navajo Nation Reservation, Utah/Arizona border, USA, Earth

Vemik Sky-Thinker

“Rattlesnake. Hmm.”

The creature was definitely making a war dance, and Vemik had backed off to give it some space. It had a good name, he decided. Straightforward and clear. It rattled, it was a snake: Rattlesnake. Made sense.

Jooyun was treating it with respect, so Vemik backed off a little further and the snake finally decided it was happy and stopped making that noise. “Is it dangerous?”

“Yup. Careful there, buddy.”

Vemik nodded and backed off some more. They didn’t have anything like snakes at home. A beast with no legs? It should have been silly, but he’d seen for himself how quick they could be. Humans weren’t stupid, and if they gave a little creature like that plenty of room then it deserved caution.

Mollified, the snake decided it had better places to be and he watched it slither away from them. “How dangerous?”

Jooyun relaxed and took his hand off his knife. “Rattlesnakes aren’t like those little garter snakes you saw on Cimbrean, Vemik. A bite from one of those guys can kill a full-sized bull.”

“Venom? Nasty.”

“There’s venomous critters on Akyawentuo,” Jooyun pointed out.

“Yes. In the water, you said. I never met one.”

The snake vanished under a bush with a flick of its rattling tail. A shame, really: Vemik would have liked to get a closer look, had it been safe. Oh well.

They’d met up with Heff again, after their days in the desert with Mikey and Raven. The little man was in charge of something called a “Suburban,” which looked big enough to push over a tree and solid enough that the tree would come off worse. He seemed to be enjoying the fierce heat, too… or at least, he was leaning comfortably against the vehicle, fingering some of his vile “Dip” out of a can and into his mouth, and watching the world in his impenetrable way from behind a pair of what Jooyun had called “Mirror shades.” Vemik could swear his skin had gone several shades darker since they’d last seen him.

Yan finally returned from relieving himself a short distance away, and wordlessly hauled himself into the Suburban’s back with a grunt that made the whole thing lurch and dip on its wheels. Vemik had to agree with him: Shade seemed like a wonderful idea right now. And air conditioning was nice too!

“Well… It’s been an interesting few days,” Mikey said, shaking Jooyun’s hand. “Something to tell the grandkids about.”

“I learned a lot!” Jooyun thanked him, then when he offered Raven a hand she rejected it in favor of a hug.

“So did we!”

“So what’s next for you two?”

Raven rolled her eyes. “Got a bus full of insurance executives or whatever coming up from Phoenix on a company team-building exercise.”

Most of that sentence made no sense at all to Vemik. Whatever it meant, Jooyun pulled a face.

“That sounds like… fun,” he commented.

“Hey, it pays the rent,” Mikey shrugged.

“And execs always tip well,” Raven added.

“Well… if you two ever decide you want a break from cavemonkeys and businessmen, you’re always welcome to come visit us.”

Raven nodded with a grin. “I’d like that! But you need to get moving. It’s a long way to Winnipeg.”

“Yeah. About twenty-four hours on the road, and we’re not even stopping there.”

“That sounds like… fun.” Mikey grinned as he echoed Jooyun’s words, then stepped aside. “See ‘ya ‘round.”

“Hey, you too.”

Vemik took that as his cue to climb up into the Suburban alongside…well, more on top of Yan. Jooyun took the bench seat in the middle, and Heff had the front all to himself. Doors closed, there was a crunch as the wheels got them moving and Vemik settled in to enjoy being in the cool and shade.

Humans mostly weren’t very big compared to the People, especially the men. The back of the Suburban was…cozy, and Vemik ended up snuggled against Yan for much of the trip. They’d pulled out the rear bench but it would have been nice to have maybe a little more room…

Except, when he thought about it, he was flying across the land so fast that nearby things were a blur and every time he looked out the window there was a new view. Funny how something so magical could also be boring and uncomfortable.

Vemik squirmed to find a more comfortable shape to wedge himself into, which Jooyun noticed.

“How you doin’, big guy?”

“I can’t find anything to sit on that isn’t Yan.”

Yan grunted in amusement and crushed Vemik with his tail.

“Yeah…well, we have to stop for gas in, what, another hour? Maybe we can figure something out then. Will you be good ‘till then?”

“He’s going soft,” Yan grunted affectionately, and pinned Vemik down with one hand. “Needs to remember how to endure.”

Vemik wanted to defend himself, but he couldn’t really breathe just then. Yan tightened his tail.

“I dunno big guy, sitting on you is kinda like sitting on a grumpy rock. Besides,” Julian noted, “We need to make room anyway. We gotta carry way too much stuff for this next leg. Even with the trailer it’s gonna be a squeeze.”

“There ain’t gonna be half of this damn thing left when you’re done with it, is there?” Heff grumbled. “You know how much paperwork I’ll have to fill out?”

“Hey! I offered to charge it to Byron Group, but nooo you insisted on doing it this way!”

“So they can turn around and charge the poor, struggling American taxpayer three times as much for the service? Nah. Moses can go fuck himself. Respectfully.”

Vemik looked at Yan, who relented and grumbled to himself. He had no idea what the Humans were on about either.

“Anyway. It’s just a little while longer. You’ll like the next stops, I think. We’re going hunting!”

That perked Yan up a lot. Actually, it perked up Vemik too. A good hunt was exactly what he needed after some days of picking for little scraps in the desert.

“Hunting what?”

“It’s called a Moose…”

Date Point: 15y6m2w2d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Cook had been committed, though the doctors were calling it ‘sectioned’ instead. Either way, it meant the same thing: her friend and colleague had been hospitalized for his own safety after a number of violent episodes.

Ray wasn’t sure which upset her more: the fact of his suffering, the fact that he’d made it through Hell only to become his own worst enemy, or the fact that she could kind of understand why he was lashing out. According to Holly, he’d mused aloud about his mountain-climbing plan and promptly been diagnosed as suicidal, whereupon a kind of well-meaning imprisonment had descended on him. Ray could see how that would be torturous, especially when the rest of them were getting to see Folctha.

They were back under full Earth gravity, so just standing and walking around was turning out to be a full-body workout, but Ray was getting three square (vegetarian) meals a day with plenty of protein supplements and physical therapy. She could feel her strength returning in leaps and bounds. And considering that both her PCOS and the pain in her knee were just gone…

Well, a walk in the park was worth getting exhausted for.

Besides. She had two nieces and a nephew to get to know. The kids were triplets, seven years old, and Ray’s younger sister Jennifer had given up on trying to control them in favor of a ‘well you won’t do that again will you?’ approach to things like scraped knees. Her husband Jim—whom Ray had never even met before—kept half an eye on them to keep them out of the worst danger, but by and large seemed to share the same approach.

Then there were Grammy and Grampy. Or Mom and Dad, as Ray knew them. God they looked old, both knocking on the door of seventy. Both were practically overwhelmed with delight at the return of a daughter they’d held a funeral for, but…

But it was like nobody quite knew what to say, how to say it or…anything. Ray sure as hell didn’t. There was so much elephant in the room that there was no space for anything else, so they’d metaphorically retreated into a different room and locked the door.

Even so, lying on a picnic blanket in the park with a coke and a goat’s cheese and sun-dried tomato focaccia while listening to children play was… heaven. Absolute heaven.

“Hello? Excuse me. I’m sorry for intruding on your time…”

Ray opened her eyes. A Gaoian wearing what looked like Buddhist robes bowed slightly to her, which was an impressive movement on a species with such long and flexible spines. “Doctor Wheeler, yes?”

“Uh…” Ray glanced at her father, who extended a helping hand so she could sit up. She was looking forward to not needing that. “Yes.”

“Gyotin,” the Gaoian introduced himself. “Father and Champion of Clan Starmind. I don’t want to interrupt your afternoon, but I was hoping to speak with you. At a convenient time, of course.”

“No time like the present,” Ray said. “What’s up?”

“It concerns your friend, Doctor Chase. She asked me to speak with you.”

“Holly? Is something wrong?” Carefully, Ray heaved herself to her feet, and allowed herself a grin of triumph when she did so. She was definitely getting stronger.

“No, no. Actually, she’s concerned for you…”

Ray nodded, then kissed her parents and followed Gyotin to the next bench down. “I bet she is. But, uh, who are you to her?”

“I’m… something of a student of spirituality. I was there when she visited the Multi-Faith Center, and we got to talking afterwards.”

“About me?”

“Not specifically. About what you all went through together, about her feelings and about her faith, mostly.” Gyotin set his ears askance and gave Ray a sideways look. “But she did ask me to speak with you.”

“Did she say why?” Ray asked.

“No. But, I promised that I would and now I am not a liar!”

He chittered, and Ray found herself warming to him. It would be just like Holly to express concern without going into the details. “…Is she okay?”

“Not for me to say, I think. I barely know her.” Gyotin flicked an ear. “Are you okay?”

“God knows.”

Now where had that come from? Surprised at herself, Ray glanced back at her family and tried to figure out her own thoughts. The candid comment had just emerged naturally, as though she was chatting with an old friend and confidant rather than an ET she’d literally only just met.

Oh well. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

“…I died.”

Gyotin duck-nodded. “Yes.”

“There was… nothing. Nothing that I remember, anyway. Just… I died. And then I woke up. I mean, I don’t know if I ever really believed in an afterlife anyway, but…”

She shook the thought off. “…I’m still here. That’s the important part. And I have a life ahead of me. I… don’t think I can put into words how much I really understand and appreciate that now. So, I honestly have no idea if I’m okay exactly, but…” She glanced over at the kids again, and found a smile. “…Here and now I’m alive.”

“That sounds like okay to me,” Gyotin opined. He stood up. “I think I will tell your friend as much.”

“So you came all the way across town from the Alien Quarter to check up on me for one of my friends?” Ray asked. She would have liked to stand as well, but her legs didn’t want to.

“That’s right.”

“Is that something you make a habit of, or…?”

Gyotin chittered. “Call it human interest… Though if I may, Doctor Wheeler?”

Ray gestured for him to go ahead with an open palm and a twitch of her head.

“Your colleagues are not quite so clear in their vision of what happens next, I think. They will struggle to leave Hell behind them, and I think they will need your leadership a while longer.”

“…Thank you.”

“Oh yes. And I recommend the Svasti spa on the lake.”

That suggestion piqued her interest, and she found she couldn’t help the curious tilt of her head. “Spa? I mean, no offense, but you do not strike me as the spa-going type.”

“Why not?”

“Well, the fur for one.”

He chittered again and gathered his robes in a dignified way. “I think every thinking being appreciates a massage, though.”

“You’re not wrong…” Ray conceded. “…Hey, you seem like a good person to talk to about things. Would you mind if I dropped in on you some other time?”

“I’d be delighted if you did,” Gyotin said. He gave her the same bendy bow. “But please, enjoy the day and your family. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

“And you.”

He departed, leaving Ray to reflect on how weird things had got in her absence. Gaoian Buddhists? Giving support and guidance to Holly? And to herself? And here she was, on an alien planet and complaining that normal Earth gravity was too much for her. Nevertheless, she found herself reflecting that she really did feel good about everything. The worst had literally happened, and she’d made it through. Whatever came in the future… she knew she could overcome it.

She heaved herself to her feet and returned to her family.

Date Point: 15y6m2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Jack Tisdale

“…Shit.”

Jack gave his dad a sideways (and slightly upwards) glance. The problem with taking more after his mother’s side of the family was that he always wound up feeling smaller than his father. It was an awkward position to be in: some instinct always made him feel like more of a child around Mark.

“What?”

Mark nodded at the new arrivals. Jack had invited Adam and Ava along to his mum’s birthday party with an open offer to bring whoever they liked along with them. They’d been expecting Martina and Diego… but the sight of Adam’s father and stepmother was clearly what had shaken Mark.

“Something wrong?”

Mark turned away and busied himself with the firepit. “I’ve not spoken to Gabe in ten years. Not since… Sara.”

“You haven’t? Not once?”

“I, er…” Mark sighed and sat on the wall. He’d put a lot of work into the garden over the years: no sterile monotonous lawn for the Tisdales, their garden was intricate and interesting with warm yellow limestone walls and a fish pond, a fire pit, a deck… It was far nicer than the mid-terrace place they’d had back on Earth.

That was Folctha life, though. Land was cheap and the colony housing subsidies were generous. Hayley and Mark earned pretty good money for their roles in the terraforming project, too.

“Are you… going to talk to him?”

Mark glanced over his shoulder. “I suppose I’ll have to.”

Jack gave him a comforting slap on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go be good hosts, yeah?”

That got a smile on Mark’s face at least.

Part of the problem, Jack reckoned, was that in fact his dad had a pretty good relationship with Adam. Both were lifelong members of the Church of Gym, Mark had even helped Adam get started on his way up Mount Swole way back when…

But Gabe was an unavoidable reminder.

Gabe had been—still was—Folctha’s security chief. The police and the intelligence services both answered to him, and he reported directly to the Defence Minister. As such, on the day of Sara’s death when the Hierarchy’s existence had still been a heavily classified secret, he’d been obligated to withhold the details of what had happened and why. To a grieving family looking desperately for answers, that had been a jagged and foul-tasting pill to swallow.

Those had been bad days. Jack hadn’t even been a teenager, just a kid whose cool older sister was suddenly gone and whose parents didn’t know how to cope. There had been arguments, lost tempers, smashed furniture. For a while there, Mark and Hayley’s marriage had hung by a thread…

Probably, only Hayley’s pregnancy had saved it. There was a reason that Jack’s little sister’s name was Hope.

Sara’s death was an old wound nowadays… but one that would never fully heal for any of them. For Mark, Gabe’s mere presence had to be pulling it open again, but he did a good job of putting on a friendly face and shaking the much smaller man’s hand and making polite noises about how long it had been.

It turned out to be a pretty good party in the end. Adam and Marty left early with apologies, citing a hungry and increasingly curmudgeonly baby whose bedtime was fast approaching, and Ava left not long after, having receiving a text message that Jack noticed made her face go a shade redder.

…Jack wondered if maybe he should try and have a word with Coombes at some point. Get a few pointers.

While Hayley and Jess got giggly and conspiratorial at one end of the garden while they polished off the last of the punch, Jack found himself cleaning up while Mark and Gabe… chatted.

It was pretty obvious that Gabe hadn’t forgotten either. After all, that day had probably been… second or third place for worst days of his life. Jack had to admit, the old man had gone through a lot. He’d lived through a life-changing injury, survived the destruction of his home city not long after and yet remained generally upbeat and chipper.

…Not to mention funny.

“—says ‘It’s ten years, what difference does it make?’ To which our friend Ivan replies: ‘Well, the plumber’s coming in the morning.’”

Mark’s chuckle was long, low and genuine, and he took a long pull of his beer and the two men stood in what looked like surprisingly comfortable silence for a few seconds.

Jack was about to join them when Mark ran a hand nervously across his mouth and cleared his throat. “…Look er… Gabe.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s… something I wanted to ask you about. Probably should have done it years ago, but…”

Gabe looked up at him. “Mark, for you my door’s open. If now’s not the best time…”

“No, not… this is as good a time as any. I think. It’s… the Hierarchy.”

“Ah.”

Mark cleared his throat again and took another swig of his beer before continuing. “When I first heard about them, I don’t think I really believed it. It’s so… big. And so utterly… I mean, a race of ancient aliens literally mind-controlling people and directing the course of human history from behind the scenes? And other species as well?”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Gabe agreed.

“I know a lot of people who still don’t. They’re convinced that the ‘official story’ is at best a half-truth and at worst a complete lie fabricated to paint our governments as the good guys. You know how that goes.”

“Órale. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.”

That got a slight laugh out of Mark, who nodded. “Yeah… I realise now just how much you really told me. I… wanted to thank you. How much you risked by telling me what you did. And… I’m sorry I put you in that situation.”

“Are you kidding?” Gabe asked. He put his drink down and turned to face Mark square on. “Your daughter had just died! It absolutely broke my heart that I couldn’t tell you everything! Nobody deserved to know more than you did.”

Mark looked down at the patio for a moment, then shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “…There’s something that ate at me after it all went public, though. I couldn’t help but wonder… what were they doing? What did Sara stop?”

There was a pause.

“…She saved all our lives, Mark. I can tell you that much.”

Jack took a sharp breath, picked up some discarded plates and cups, and headed indoors. He didn’t want to hear more. He’d gone over Sara’s death with Adam. He knew how it had gone, how things had unfolded. He knew the truth… And no matter how kind it might be, he knew that Gabe had just lied.

He didn’t think he could stand the grateful look on his dad’s face any longer.

Date Point: 15y6m2w3d AV
North of Yellowstone National Park, Montana, USA, Earth

Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge

Moose.

Not as muscle-big as an adult Werne but taller. Actually there was a lot of beast there.

…A lot of beast. The “deer” they’d hunted before were very different. Small and fast, but very tasty! They were too fast to make spear hunting or wrestling easy, but with a bow and some skill they would make very good prey for a tribe’s hunting ground. They were small though, and would only feed a tribe for maybe a single meal.

Moose on the other hand… Anyone could see that moose was part of the same tribe as deer, but the difference was like standing a girl next to a Given-Man. A beast like that probably had a thick hide, so without a very strong bow and arrows, spear-hunting made the most sense… but that meant getting within reach of those enormous feet and great swinging head-branches.

…Antlers. Like two hands of spears, ready to lift a man off the ground and gut him. It was easy to forget how dangerous those things must be when the animal was up to its chest in water.

Yan liked the prey in Yellow Stone! The air tasted heavy with their flavor and the hunting here was rich. But…the People probably wouldn’t like living in this forest. The trees were all ‘conifers,’ which meant a tall, thin, prickly kind of thing with crumbly, crispy bark. Yan’s fingers and toes sank deep into the wood when he tried to climb them, and the bark was often so thin it crumbled under his grip. The trees themselves swayed in the breeze and didn’t stand hard against it. Maybe that was because the wind was sometimes so strong? That seemed right.

In any case, he couldn’t climb anything here besides rocks, and that made him a bit grumpy.

Vemik had tested some of the thinner trees, maybe out of some silly hope that he could still fly through the canopy like a young child. He’d made it maybe a hand of man-heights up a ‘fir’ before the entire tree started to sway, forcing him to leap down before he accidentally hurt it.

[“No bird-spearing from up there, I guess.”]

“Nope,” Jooyun agreed. “If we want to hunt from up there, we’d have to build a hide in a much stronger tree. Not ideal.”

“Hmm…”

Vemik’s tail twitched back and forth as he considered their quarry again. Bad habit, that: a good way to startle prey, if they could see well. Yan knocked him between the shoulders to remind him of a lesson he’d shared more times than he could count, and Vemik got his tail under control with an embarrassed duck-shrug of his head.

The moose dipped its head below the water and came up with a mouthful of plants.

“…Okay. I know how I would hunt him,” Yan decided after a while. “I attack from front, Vemik jump on from rear, or spear in the side. Its ribs don’t look like werne ribs, there are long spaces.”

Jooyun nodded thoughtfully. “I’d drive it,” he said. “Or use a very good compound bow. Well, okay. Really I’d just shoot it with a rifle but we’re pretending like we don’t have those for now.”

“You can run from dawn to dusk, Jooyun,” Vemik pointed out. “Yan and me, we train hard, but can only run a hand of hours now. Driving is not so good.”

“Don’t need to run, in this case. The point is to get it stuck, or to trap it between hunters. I bet your people could get away with smaller hunting parties, but still. Moose are dangerous.”

Yan nodded. A beast that size would feed a small tribe for several days, provide jerky and pemmican, leather, fat, sinew and many strong bones. Having a whole party hunt it would not be a waste.

“Clever, are they?”

“Not really. But they’re unpredictable and aggressive.”

Yan watched the beast sniff the wind then haul itself out of the shallow pool it had been wading and feeding in. It was an odd-looking beast, all legs and nose, but he could see all the qualities of worthy prey in it.

“What other beasts hunt it?”

“Wolves and bears. Takes a lot of wolves, though, and it’s a risk. They generally only go after moose if they’re desperate. Even bears will prefer a young or sick one, but they can take down a bull if they have to.”

“This bear is why you have that…thing?”

Jooyun tapped the metal can on his hip. “Bear spray. It’s also why Hoeff’s got a high-powered rifle, ‘cuz bears may straight ignore the spray if they’re angry.”

“What does this ‘bear spray’ do?”

“It’s like the most super-spicy food ever, except literally a million times worse. And I spray it in the bear’s eyes and face.”

“…Maybe less cruel to just kill it.” Yan had finally got his head around a counting as big as million, and shuddered in ghost-pain from the thought of something that spicy.

“Hey, he’ll shrug it off eventually. Doesn’t permanently hurt him, and like I said: if he’s real pissed he’ll just ignore it anyway.”

Heff chimed in with an evil grin. “Hey Yan, you know what ‘bear’ means? It means ‘the brown one.’”

“Jooyun already said. He also said ours is still worse.”

Heff grumped softly in disappointment, which made Yan trill very quietly.

“No no,” Jooyun corrected. “I said yours was bigger. I didn’t say worse.”

“…There is difference?”

“Might be. Let’s hope we don’t find out.”

Yan met Vemik’s eye and they both glanced upwards at the sun for a moment. Hopefully whatever Earth-gods lived there would be kind today.

Down in the valley below, the moose vanished between the trees.

“Guess we scared it off,” Heff muttered.

“Could be. Their eyesight ain’t too good so they spook easy. It’s pretty important we don’t do that.”

“Like werne, then.”

“Yeah, except a werne’s sense of smell is awful next to a moose.”

“We’re downwind.”

“Yup. Let’s stay that way. And keep quiet.”

They spread out into a trailing line, staying just close enough to see each other. Jooyun and Heff were wearing bright orange jackets even brighter than Vemik’s crest, and much brighter than Yan’s which was beginning to blacken at the tips.

The moose wasn’t difficult to track. Its taste on the air was potent, and something so big couldn’t not make noise as it pushed through the bush up ahead.

There was something else, too. A different taste, and when Yan caught Jooyun’s attention with a gesture and flicked his tongue, the human sniffed the air then raised his hand. They all stopped.

Jooyun swapped his spear over to his left hand and retrieved the spray from his belt. He gave Heff a significant look, and the smaller man thumbed something on his rifle that made a soft, quiet click.

Jooyun could move across the ground without making any noise when he wanted. He stayed low and stalked over to Yan’s side.

“Bear,” he whispered.

Godshit. “Close?” Yan whispered back.

“Yeah. Strong scent. Smells like a grizzly, too.”

Yan looked around. The woods revealed nothing, and it occurred to him that even if the Brown Ones of home were bigger and stronger, they never ever came under the trees. They never hid. Suddenly, he understood what Jooyun had meant when he’d said that they weren’t necessarily worse than Bears.

“What now?”

“We give the moose some room.”

Yan nodded, and gestured with a flick of his tail for Vemik to back off a little. They returned to their silent hunt, keeping a closer and more wary eye on the bush around them.

A shrill scream through the trees made Yan hunker down and grip his spear, ready to meet a charging mass of brown fur. He’d never heard a sound like that in all his life, and it was honestly terrifying, though he’d sooner die than admit it. To judge from Vemik’s tight-knuckled grip on his spear, the piercing shriek had rattled him too.

The two humans chuckled quietly as the sound echoed off the hills around them. “That’s an elk, Yan,” Jooyun whispered. “It’s between a deer and a moose. Same, uh, ‘tribe’ I guess. That’s a male somewhere off calling for love.”

“…How close?”

“Not close. Several good throws away at least.”

Yan shook himself as the cry went up again. He nodded. Now that he’d heard it once, he listened and agreed with Jooyun that the beast making it was far away… but it must have mighty lungs to make a sound that loud which carried so strongly.

He pointed in the direction the moose had gone. At least that hadn’t been full of surprises… yet.

They caught up with it in a patch of open ground, where it was placidly grazing while its ears flicked this way and that, alert for any sound.

They all looked at each other. Now was the time to Take. All four of them were skilled hunters and spread out just right without anyone saying a word. All four knew how to be quiet, move slow, hide in the shadows. They stepped closer, hugging the undergrowth, spears in hand—

And the Brown One attacked.

The moose bolted the instant the bear burst out of the bush barely a good throw to their left, but the predator was faster, stronger, and far more terrible. It didn’t even seem to spend any real effort as it ignored the distance to its fleeing prey and smashed into the moose at a full run.

The moose was heaved right off its feet and dumped to the ground. Huge paws snapped ribs like twigs, and claws as long as Yan’s fingers tore ragged gouges in its hide.

Jooyun was right. This ‘bear’ wasn’t nearly as big or as dangerous-looking as a Brown One—in fact, the moose was bigger—but it was mean. Fast, strong, ferocious… and it had completely snuck up on them.

It held the moose’s head down with one massive paw, engulfed its throat in powerful jaws and shook, dragging the flailing bull around like a toy. There was a crack, and the moose was no more.

Then it whipped around on its paws to face them, teeth bared and bloody, and it roared.

The message was clear: “MINE!”

“Holy testicle Tuesday…” Heff muttered. He had the rifle aimed squarely at the bear, but every line of him said he’d rather be somewhere else.

Jooyun spread his arms to ward them back. “Slowly…” he cautioned. “Give him room, don’t give him a reason to get ornery. Big fella just wants to eat.”

“He’s fuckin’ welcome to it,” Heff promised, taking slow steps backward.

Yan considered. The four of them could take the prey from the ‘bear,’ and for all its impressive strength, Yan was bigger and he had no doubt he could wrestle it by himself. But it was fast, had huge claws, and they were pretending to just knives and spears anyway. He would need to be desperate for meat to try something that could get him or one of his hunters killed.

He backed off, without looking away. Vemik did the same.

Satisfied, the bear grabbed the moose’s neck again and with an effortless yank it dragged the meat away as though it weighed nothing. The bear was big, and very strong for its size.

In another hand of breaths, it was gone. Only a blood trail showed where it went.

“Whew…” Heff lowered his rifle. “…Well there’s somethin’ ya don’t see erryday.”

“No shit,” Jooyun agreed. “They almost never go after a full-grown bull moose! I can’t believe we got to see that!” He seemed almost giddy with excitement.

“Big bastard.”

“Hell yeah! Looked like he was in good health too, so why did he risk it?”

“Because he could.” Yan sighed to himself and patted his belly. He probably wouldn’t taste moose today.

“Man, I gotta report this to the park rangers… Ooh! Vemik! Your GoPro! Is it still on?”

Vemik looked up at the strange box strapped to his head. “…Yes? The little red light is on…”

“We’ll have video of it! You can show everyone back home!”

…Well. That wasn’t something Yan could taste, but he could at least tell a strong story, and show the Given-Men the proof. Which made today a successful hunt of a sort after all.

“Alright then. It’s getting late and we still have a deer we’ve got to butcher, so whaddya say we head back to the cabin, Yan?”

“Mm.” Yan nodded. The ‘cabin’ was a tree-made hut built next to a river, which just seemed wrong to him, but Jooyun had promised him on his word as a man of the tribe that nothing in that river was dangerous except the fast-flowing, cold water itself. It also had fish which, Yan had to admit, were tasty. Especially smoked.

“Yes. We smoke the deer too, bring home to share?”

“Sounds good,” Heff agreed. Jooyun nodded, then turned to look back at where the bear had been.

“…Still can’t believe we got to see that. Jeez!”

Heff backhanded his arm. “You can geek out about it later, man. C’mon, in case there’s any more around here.”

“Oh, there will be,” Jooyun nodded. “If there’s one bear, another will be snuffling around to see if it can steal the prey, or eat the scraps. Bears have noses as good as Daar’s.”

“Greeeat. Any tips on avoiding it?”

“Yeah. Make noise. I like to sing in the woods. They usually don’t fuck with humans if they know we’re coming.”

Yan blinked. “…They don’t?” A Brown One back on Akyawentuo would happily tear down a tree to eat the People in the branches, if the tribe’s hunters or their Given-Man couldn’t fend it off.

“Nah. We smell strange, like we don’t belong. And we act strange, we stand tall…lots of things are afraid of us.”

“…Including bears?” Vemik asked.

Jooyun grinned. “Including bears.”

“But you’re scared of them too,” Vemik pointed out.

“Yup. Better for everyone that way.”

“Why?”

Jooyun’s grin got a little wider and he nodded toward home.

“Because that way we don’t have to kill them,” he said.

Yan glanced at Vemik, then back at the bear’s kill-site, then back at the humans again. And Heff’s rifle, held so loosely and comfortably. And the can of spray on Jooyun’s hip, there to warn bears off rather than get in a fight to the death.

“…Yes,” he agreed at last. “Let’s go.”

Date Point: 15y6m2w3d AV
HCS My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Spacelane 1045, The Coalsack Nebula

Dog Wagner

♪♫—but their beauty and their style went kind of smooth after a while, take me to them dirty ladies every time… Aaaahhh, won’t you take me home tonight—♫♪

“Holy fuck, Dog, this one sounds older than you!”

Dog chuckled and took his boots down off the console. He’d been enjoying having Flight Ops to himself, with nothing to do but watch the stars crawl past and listen to music that actually had some substance and quality to it. “Not quite, brother. Close, though.”

Sam Jordan, MOSITMF’s pilot, chuckled and handed Dog his lunch. “Who is it?”

Dog obliged him by turning the music down a notch, but shook his head with a grin. “…Gonna have to get up a lot earlier’n that to fool me, Sam. You know damn well who it is.”

Sam shook his head and his expression of innocent curiosity became a grin. “See, this is why we should stop inviting you to poker night.” He handed over a tablet as well. “Today’s cargo inspection. Care to sign?”

Dog skimmed it. He trusted his crew 100%, they’d all proven they could hack deep-space freight and the monotony that came with it. Not a one of them would have just glanced out through a window at the shipping containers around the hull and declared the inventory was still good. A team of three had spacewalked to check the racks, so the least he owed them was to confirm that everything was exactly as good as it had been for the preceding nine days.

Sure, it was a formality—they’d all definitely have noticed if a shipping container full of Cimbrean lumber suddenly tore off the hull and smacked into the warp field boundary—but it was an important formality.

Fortunately, it was easy to swipe down through it and see that every field read a nice happy “Inspection OK.”

The return trip would be far less monotonous. Once they’d taken on their cargo of supercapacitors at the Rauwryhr homeworld, they’d just pop their jump drive and moor with Armstrong Station. Payday was just two days away, and after that they’d get a week off before heading out on the next run. It was a good rhythm.

“…Looks good,” he conceded after a minute in which his free hand had helped him drink about half his coffee. “Think we can call the dock crew’s fix on Three permanent, huh?”

“Think so,” Sam agreed.

“Awesome.” Dog applied his thumb to the sensor, signing off on the report.

“What’s today’s traffic report?”

Dog waved distractedly at the comms station. “Same as it’s been the whole trip. General advisory of increased Hunter activity. I kept the bugout jump charged just in case, but the last beacon didn’t have a specific warning, so…”

“Right. Shift change?”

“Shift change,” Dog agreed. He stood up and stepped aside. “You have the helm.”

Sam sat down, adjusted the seat to his preferred position, put on his seatbelt and nodded after glancing at the autopilot settings. “I have the helm.”

Dog called up the ship’s log on the tablet and logged the transfer. Another drumbeat in the slow rhythm of the day. “Okay. See you in two hour—” he began.

The alarm went off only a shaved second before the whole deck lurched violently and MOSITMF’s superstructure made a cetacean groan. Dog staggered three paces across the bridge before losing his balance and landing heavily on his back.

“Gravity spike!” Sam slapped the autopilot and heaved hard left on the controls. The stars outside wheeled.

A spike of pain shot up Dog’s right arm as he tried to roll over and get to his feet. He gritted his teeth and used his left arm instead, hugging the right to his chest. The volumetric tank at the front of Flight Ops was way more full of ships than he’d like, and a lot of them were fast little fuckers making a bee-line right for them.

“Hunters!”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed grimly. “Bugging ou-SHIT!”

The proximity alarm wailed as a second freighter, a Domain cargo ship that had been only a few light-hours behind them ever since they merged onto 1045, hit the spike too and slammed back into sub-luminal frame of reference bare meters away. If Sam hadn’t pushed them sideways and accelerated, it would have rammed right up MOSITMF’s ass.

Dog watched the volumetric display. One Broodship, a handful of Swarmships vectoring their way at ten Gs… Then nothing. Just Armstrong Station.

“Bugout Jump successful,” Sam declared. His hands were shaking as he took them off the controls.

“…Good call,” Dog managed weakly, just before the comms lit up as Armstrong noticed them.

“Incoming ship, this is Armstrong tower. IFF flags you as Hotel-Charlie-Foxtrot-One, ‘My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon.’ You’re not scheduled to be back yet, please verify your identity.”

Dog cussed and limped to the comms station just as the rest of the crew barrelled into Flight Ops. Mitch and Cathy had a half-dressed, coitus interruptus look to them, which he noted with an inward sense of amusement but didn’t comment on. Instead he grabbed the mic and replied.

“Armstrong Tower, Hotel-Charlie-Foxtrot-One. Emergency jumpback after a Hunter attack on Lane Ten-Four-Five. No casualties, minor injuries. Sending beacon details…”

“Jesus, Hunters?” Cathy went pale and buckled herself in at her station. Dog mimed zipping up her flight suit at her, and pale white became flush pink as she fumbled to neaten herself up. Mitch meanwhile dropped into the comms seat and quickly sent over the codes for the beacon they’d left behind on bugging out. Right now, the Hunters would be ripping through that unfortunate freighter that had followed them into the spike. If AEC had ships and fighters ready to scramble…

“Copy that, Hotel-Charlie. Hold station, await inspection.”

There’d be a shuttle full of border security on its way out to them in a minute. Dog handed the mic over to Mitch and inspected his arm.

Definitely a break. Old bones and metal decking didn’t mix well.

Sam gave him a concerned look. “Dog, are you okay? That was a hard fall.”

“Think I broke my arm a bit.”

“Shit…”

“Ain’t the first time, brother. Don’t worry ‘bout me none.”

He sagged in his own chair at last and let Mitch handle the insistent call from their engineers, Floyd and Kyle. He could feel a headache coming on, though maybe it got a little better when he saw a cluster of wormhole signatures flare up on sensors. At least three of the Royal Navy ships had just jumped out.

“…I’m gettin’ too damn old for this shit,” he muttered, and closed his eyes.

Date Point: 15y6m2w3d AV
HMS Myrmidon, Spacelane 1045, The Coalsack Nebula

Commodore Rajesh Bathini

The Hunters didn’t know what hit them. Myrmidon, Violent and Viceroy completed their jumps, achieved EWAR and firing solutions in microseconds, blinded every ship in the area, then took their time to confirm Hunter targets before ending them. The whole engagement lasted… heartbeats, at most.

The spacelane would need sweeping clean of debris, but to judge from the four drifting freighters caught in the gravity spike, they’d just prevented a massacre. The Hunters had timed that one far too well.

“HEAT team just jumped aboard, sir. Suited and ready.”

“Are any of those freighters being boarded?”

“Yes sir, that Domain one at the front.”

“Save them.”

“Aye aye!”

Seconds later, one of Myrmidon’s airlocks blew out the HEAT and their launch. It flashed across to within a meter of the victim’s hull on a precise warp pulse, and the men riding it needed only seconds to cut their way into the Swarmship.

And then they were done. “Myrmidon, ABBOTT. Target vessel secured, helping the survivors.”

Those men were terrifyingly fast.

Two squadrons of Firebirds jumped in and, in response to commands from the Fleet Intelligence Center, promptly flashed outwards in a search pattern to secure the volume… but the battle was over before it had really begun.

All those drills, maneuvers and rehearsals had completely paid off today. Lives saved, disaster averted and one less Broodship in the sky. Some good press for humanity, for a change.

…He hoped.

Date Point: 15y6m2w4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“Bless me padre, for I have sinned. It has been… I don’t know. A few months since my last confession.”

Folctha’s Catholic congregation had completed construction of their church only about seven months previously. Our Lady the Guiding Star church had handsome white walls, an intricate altar mural and much of the decorative wood was Cimbrean Pinkwood.

Gabe was an… irregular attendee. Work generally kept him too busy. He always imagined what his Abuela would think of that, but she’d have liked the padre, who nodded gently on the far side of the screen and had a warm, reassuring voice.

“What do you wish to confess?”

“…I lied to a grieving father,” Gabe explained.

“I see. Was this a cruel lie, or…?”

“To the contrary. It’s a lie he wanted to hear, and I think he needed to hear it. And there’s a big grain of truth in it too, so I… I always try to be honest and I generally feel like directly lying to a man’s face is… but this time, my gut tells me it was completely the right thing to do. I’m conflicted by it.”

“Tell me what happened exactly.”

Gabe studied his knuckles for a second as he assembled history in his head and edited it down to a short version. “His daughter… She went into danger and ignored her friends who were telling her to stop, and… well, she was murdered. By a very dangerous man who really was planning to do something awful that would have resulted in a lot of deaths. Her father and I finally spoke about it yesterday and I told him… I told him she saved lives. But really she didn’t. The danger had already been called in, and a response was already on the way. So in reality she she died pointlessly, doing something very stupid.”

“Would it have helped him if you’d told him that?”

“Absolutely not. It would have crushed him.”

“So your objective was to spare him some pain, and maybe even help him heal?”

“Yes. I just…” Gabe sighed. “I wish I could have done it a different way, I guess.”

“Well. If you feel it’s a sin you wish to atone for, then that’s your decision. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s any question about your contrition. As for what you can do to satisfy it and put it right… I would suggest you try to guide your friend and help him reach the point someday where he can hear the truth and be made whole by it.”

“That’s… good advice. Thank you, padre.”

“Spend some time in prayer, too. It’ll help. Is there anything else?”

“Nothing I can think of.”

“Then I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.”

“His mercy endures forever.”

“Go in peace.”

Gabe did as suggested, and spent some time sitting in a pew in contemplation. He thought more than he prayed, though, mulling over what exactly it was that bothered him so much.

It wasn’t like he’d always been perfectly honest in his life. Everyone told little white lies all the time, they were the lubricant of society. Every diplomatically held tongue, every nod and polite “sure” or “I don’t mind…” They were daily, necessary occurrences.

Maybe that was the problem. This wasn’t on the same scale as just holding his tongue and saying something polite. This was an active lie, even if well-meaning.

And he didn’t feel better for having confessed it.

He stood up and checked his watch. He’d been sitting on the pew for nearly half an hour, and he realised that his leg had gone slightly numb. He shook it out and left the church in the vague hope that perhaps blue sky and sunlight might help him.

The church was in Midtown, a block or two north of the river. Home was south-west in the Lakeshore district, and he didn’t want to go home at all. He headed east instead, through the market toward Quarterside.

Folctha’s market was the absolute textbook definition of a melting pot, and a place where every micro-drama of a mixed human and extraterrestrial society could be witnessed, from the weary Gaoian Mother resignedly counting out notes into a beaming vendor’s hand while a small battalion of cubs enjoyed their ice cream, to the coffee stand owner explaining to a Vzk’tk that he couldn’t sell caffeinated beverages to non-humans no matter how much they tipped.

Then there were the less explicitly alien but still very Folctha things, like the dreadlocked Japanese goth girl in boots so thick-soled they were effectively stilts, who was crouching down and going all gooey over Bozo. The dog was happy to see her—he was happy to see everyone—but he seemed to sense his services were needed elsewhere when he spotted Gabe.

“Wurf!”

“Hola, gordo.”

The giant muscular mutt came ambling over, using the rolling, galumphing gait he had for when he wasn’t particularly hurried about anything. Gabe gave the dreadlocked girl an apologetic shrug, which she returned with a smile and turned back to tending her stall full of vivid corsets.

Mandatory ear-scritches ensued, along with a single, dignified snuffle. The big bastard knew how to keep it polite when he wanted to. He fell in alongside Gabe and just… kept him company.

“I see you ‘escaped’ again, huh boy?”

Bozo just bounced happily on his front paws and wagged his tail.

Actually, that was a white lie too, when Gabe thought about it. Nobody made any attempt to keep Bozo penned up, partly because he’d demonstrated it was impossible early on except through excessive engineering, but mostly because he was so mild-mannered despite his fearsome size and appearance.

Past the market were some pubs and eateries, clothes stores, a World Foods store, a big-brand cellphone company’s outlet and then, finally, Quarterside Park where there was a little more elbow room.

Things really had come a long way. Just ten years ago, Quarterside Park had been a field with trucks and ATVs parked on it, surrounded by temporary buildings and the dense little chalets that had served the first-wave colonists as housing. Now it was a thriving social hub, iconic thanks to the Alien Quarter wall that ran along one side and the Multi-Faith center in one corner right next to the Starmind monastery. The Gaoians had imported a number of trees from Earth and elsewhere, and no two of them blossomed at exactly the same time: there were always petals underfoot, from Cherry pink to the soothing duck-egg blue of a Gorai native.

Each park had its unique character, too. Riverside was active, noisy. A place for exercise and children and playing in the river. Quarterside was artistic, contemplative and peaceful, an escape from the hubbub and constant construction noises of the city.

Bozo vanished in a thundering blur, shouldered his way under a bush, and returned with a tennis ball. Gabe didn’t question it, he just accepted the slightly damp toy, tossed it in his hand a few times, then turned and flung it across the grass. This naturally was the most exciting thing ever, and Bozo wound up faceplanting in the dirt and tumbling end-over-end as he tried to catch it.

He didn’t seem to notice the mishap at all, just squirmed to his feet and retrieved the ball, which was subjected to a lengthy chewing before he remembered that if he brought it back he’d get to play again.

Gabe chuckled to himself and wandered off to…he wasn’t sure, really. He’d done about as much thinking as he felt he had energy for. Right now he just wanted his head to be empty.

There was a WURF!! from behind him and Bozo rampaged past on a mission to say hello to another Friend. Gabe didn’t recognize this one: A painfully skinny woman in a red MBG jacket was sitting on a bench just… watching the world go by, as far as he could tell. She chuckled and made a fuss of the dog, who seemed to completely lose control of his rear end and throw the whole thing into wagging as hard as caninely possible.

“Traitor,” Gabe said affectionately as Bozo flopped on his back for chest rubs.

The woman laughed. “Is he yours? I’ve never seen a dog so…” She obviously came up short on a more original adjective, so eventually settled for “…huge.”

“He’s more kinda the town dog. Bozo.”

“…Perfect name.”

“New arrival?” Gabe asked, politely. It was a safe bet in a town of nothing but colonists and immigrants.

“You could say that. Kinda took a roundabout road, but…”

Recognition dropped into Gabe’s brain. “…Wild guess here, but would you be Doctor Wheeler?”

“I am… And you look a heck of a lot like one of the HEAT troopers who rescued me.”

“My son. You probably know him as Warhorse.”

“God. You must be about the proudest parent ever.”

It was Gabe’s turn to laugh, and he decided he liked Wheeler. “I might be,” he agreed. “May I sit? Or were you looking for some alone time?”

“I’ve had enough alone time to last me the rest of my life. And honestly, now I’m curious: I could have sworn men like Warhorse didn’t have parents. Architects, maybe…”

Gabe half-laughed. “…That’s probably more true than I wanna admit. But he swears up and down he’s healthy and…well, he gave me a grandkid, and whatever he does to be like that lets him do his job. If he couldn’t do that I don’t know how he’d cope.”

“…That sounds like there’s a long and sad story there.”

“Not sad, but not without tragedy.”

Wheeler nodded, and scooted aside to make room for Gabe on the bench. He sat, and was rewarded by Bozo with a by now thoroughly soaked tennis ball, which he held in his fingertips to throw away before wiping his hand dry on his pants.

“Still sounds like quite a journey, to use a cliche.”

“Yeah. I’ve been worrying after him since he started, so…I guess really since he was fifteen. Anyway. I’m not about to unload on somebody I only just met…” He was about to change topics when Wheeler shook her head.

“I found it surprisingly helpful just a bit ago. There’s this Gaoian named, uh… Gyotin?”

“I know him. My daughter talks to him pretty much every week.”

“Wow. Warhorse has a sister?”

“Adopted sister. One of those tragedies.”

“What’s your name?”

Gabe blinked, and then scowled inwardly at himself. Where the hell was his head at?

“Madre de Cristo, I am a mess today. I’m Gabriel. Gabe.”

“And I’m Rachel. Ray.”

They shook hands and traded a nice to meet you each way.

“You know… I think you and Gyotin are the only two people who haven’t treated me like I’m made of glass since I got here,” Ray confessed. “We’re just… talking. Two strangers getting to know each other. What’s your secret?”

“I can’t speak for Gyotin, but I know from experience I hated to be treated like that.”

“Past tense?”

“Yeah. Had some injuries it took me a long time to recover from. You?”

“Oh, nothing major. I just kinda… died.”

Gabe picked up the dry humour behind that light comment, and ran with it. “No big deal, huh?”

“I’m still here aren’t I?”

“Right. So you died but got better.”

Ray had a surprisingly musical laugh. “Exactly. Funny, everyone seems to act like I’m a few seconds away from… I don’t know. Bursting into tears, or going catatonic or whatever. But really, it’s amazing how healing it was. The worst literally happened, and here I am sitting in the sunlight chatting with a…” She made a show of leaning forward to look around him and inspect his left hand. “…sadly married handsome stranger.”

Gabe couldn’t help himself: His next laugh came from the belly and completely blew out the cobwebs. “Újule! You don’t beat around the bush!”

She grinned. “Life’s short. Say what’s on your mind!”

“Hmm… I wish that was true all the time.”

“Another tragedy?”

“Part of the same chain. It’s… ah, hell. You’re obviously interested. You wanna hear the story?”

She nodded. “I do.”

He told her everything. She listened solemnly, staring off into the middle distance without comment or question as he went through what the Tisdales had gone through, how one girl’s death had thrown so many lives down their wildly unusual courses. She nodded softly when he got to the part about lying to Mark.

“…And to sum it up, my adopted daughter was left adrift, a man I admire has been grieving for years without any real escape, and my son built himself into far and away the strongest man to ever live. And he’s still…broken, deep down. I think we all are.”

“Her name was Sara?”

“Yes.”

“…The way you tell it, it sounds like maybe I’m only alive right now because this girl died.”

Gabe blinked, and found himself completely struck dumb.

“No, really!” Ray pressed. “If the HEAT—if your Warhorse hadn’t been there then I wouldn’t be here. I owe you and him everything. And I think I owe Sara, too. It’s not what I’d want, I mean… she died too young, and too innocent. But I’m still here. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to really say how grateful I am for that.”

She cleared her throat and sat up a little straighter. “…Thank you for telling me that, Gabe. And if it’ll help… maybe I should meet your friend. I think at the very least I owe him a hug.”

“I…” Gabe trailed off. He had no idea what he wanted to say next. “…That might help.”

Ray nodded, and that seemed to settle the matter for her. She scratched at Bozo’s ears a little, and Gabe realized that the dog had returned to lie down next to her sometime during the story without his noticing. She glanced down at him, then across at Gabe and nodded again.

“Then I’ll help,” she said.

Date Point: 15y6m2w4d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Adam (“Warhorse”) Arés

Today was one of Adam’s better days. Diego had found a consistent sleeping pattern in the last week, which let Marty sleep for a solid four hours between feedings. It was doing wonders for her recovery and Adam couldn’t help but feel super awesome about that! As for himself, he had long been used to two four-hour sleeps a day with a workout in-between, so he found the new nighttime pattern—eat, sleep, bottle-feed, eat, lift, eat, bottle-feed, sleep, eat—just about perfect.

Also, he was back to making careful, incrementally gradual progress in everything, and that was super high on his List of Things That Were Awesome. He’d maybe never grow like a mutant weed again, but that was okay as long as he kept ahead of the mission need. Besides, he found the little improvements more rewarding now, since he had to work so much harder to get them.

Even better, his Special Projects were doing good! Julian had finally grown confident on the rings the last time they trained, which went a long way toward building confidence for when he was hanging out in the trees with his cool monkey friends. Firth was growing so fast he’d probably catch up to Adam in a few years! And ‘Base too, maybe!

Hell, the Gaoians were doing pretty damn amazing too, especially Daar. The big bastard had been primed to explode since before they met, and once they’d got his regime a bit more scientific instead of ineffectively bro-headed, he’d grown like a weed and filled himself out about as far as his frame could go; his body was just perfect for enduring strength and he was already outperforming Firth. If Daar kept hardening up, and Adam saw no reason he wouldn’t, the big furry goofball would probably be able to snap Yan in two one day!

Well…maybe. Adam knew he tended to be a little over-optimistic about this stuff, but still.

Marty was the best damn wife anyone could ask for, especially Adam. He was an irredeemable meathead who liked learning but hated classwork, which made her encouragement exactly the kind of kick in the pants he needed. And besides, it was just one more thing to train, right? He kept plugging away at it and she kept encouraging him, rewarding him…okay, so he was really damn easy to lead in some ways. Also a lot of the math was fun, actually. Before he knew it, he was only one CLEP short of his degree prerequisites, and his thesis was maybe only a week or two from being done…

And he had a son. A beautiful son, whom he loved so much it made his whole body ache.

And he had a forty-eight ounce blood-rare steak in front of him. Life was good.

Also it was the last of their light-duty recovery days from LOST CUB and their recent deployment, so their training schedule meant this was more or less a freeform day. No classes or skills training today, just PT and Project Time. He and the rest of the Lads had just finished several “skins” game of Gravball and were hanging out in the kitchen, wolfing down their scheduled meals before they headed downstairs to finish off the business day with a few hours of heavy lifting.

It was as good a time as any to catch up on the news.

[“That smells worse than Keeda’s balls! And you’re sure you can package it well enough they won’t notice?”]

The Gaoians were plotting Shenanigans against Daar and Father Regaari, who were stuck dealing with the fallout of LOST CUB. There were promises of a visit in the next week or so for some mission closure and couch time, but Daar had responsibilities and had needed to delay. What could they do? Obviously, this affront could not go unanswered.

[“I don’t know if they’ll fall for it…”] Carebear was, as always, the cautious one. [“They check the mail pretty carefully, and Daar has the ‘most bestest’ nose.”]

The Gaoians chittered a bit at the Stoneback-ism, partly because Thurrsto’s imitation was so bad. He was a Whitecrest to the core and the Clan accent shone through.

Adam swallowed his bite and chipped in. Gaori was fun to practice! [“Daar will totally smell it. I can smell it and I don’t care how well you wash the packaging, that’s not going away. Also, invisible ink might end badly. What if he gets some on the] President? Or the King?”

“And y’all already did the ink trick,” Firth grumbled from behind his mountain of diced chicken. “Try something different! Like, I dunno…send him caffeine?”

Daar on caffeine was an experience Adam wouldn’t wish on anyone. Fortunately there was an easy escape.

“Can’t. [Goldpaw Customs considers it a controlled drug and Straightshield would censure us.”]

“You’re such a downer, Carebear.”

“Man, y’all ain’t thinking nearly evil enough.” Baseball crashed into the bench and slammed himself against Adam, then put an arm around his shoulders for a quick brotherly hug. ‘Base had a giant platter of fajita makings which made Adam slightly jealous, until he remembered his steak.

Adam asked, “What would you do, bro?”

“Easy! You wanna get everyone around him angry? Send Daar a karaoke LP for his record player. Ain’t no way brother’ll be able to resist that!”

There was a silence as everyone in the room turned their heads towards Baseball.

“…I’m fuckin’ worried now.”

“Yeah dude, that’s just downright evil.”

“Carrots too.”

The attention turned on to Murray, who grinned.

“Explain?”

“It’s bloody simple. Carrots are his ‘most favoritest ever,’ right?”

“Along with a bunch of other things, but go on.”

“Well, either he shares them, an’ he won’t wanna, or he does’nae and everyone else misses out. Win-win.”

“…”

It was true. Gaoians loved carrots. Something about the crunch and taste made them by far and away Folctha’s most successful export crop to Gao.

“We would need to determine what the ideal carrot count would be. One for him and his immediate circle, I think. If he shares, he only gets one.”

“Aye, well.” Murray leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. “I did my bit. You lot can work out your carrot optimisation algorithm all by your aen.”

“This is why you’re an honorary Whitecrest,” Faarek commented. “That’s just sneaky enough, and the best part is he’ll never suspect malice.”

Adam swallowed another mouthful of steak and chipped in. “Will Regaari, though?”

“We can handle Regaari. The Great Father, on the other hand, mustn’t suspect a thing.”

“Don’t unnerestimate him,” Firth cautioned. “He’ll come back an’ wrassle’ us all in retaliation.”

A wave of grim chuckling and chittering swept the room. Daar was mean when he really wanted to be, and everyone had experienced his determination to win more than once.

“But we’ll have sent him carrots!”

Faarek’s look of wounded innocence was so convincing that Adam nearly choked on his steak. By the time he’d finished coughing his airways clear again, they’d been joined by a fashionably late Blaczynski, who sauntered into the kitchen and flung himself carelessly onto Firth, slapping a copy of ESNN’s Unlocked magazine down as he did so.

“So Coombes did the thing,” he said, as Firth pawed a plate of food round the table and deposited it in front of him. “It just hit the newsstand today, saw it when I was out jogging.”

“You know, a sane species would have rendered those obsolete by now,” Thurrsto commented.

“Hey! Lookit my fuckin’ paws, man.” Firth laid his mitts on the table. “I can’t afford how much I keep breakin’ tablets, y’know? Also it’s more funner to scribble notes with pens and highlighters.”

“I don’t care how many devices you smash, there’s no way you keep the newsprint industry alive all by yourself.”

“There’s something to tactile learning, though.” Baseball was in danger of nerding out. “It’s been studied repeatedly over the years. I’m with Firth, e-paper screens still kinda suck and I don’t like looking at glowing screens all day long, either.”

“Coombes,” Blaczynski repeated himself and tapped the magazine, “did the thing.”

‘Base chuckled. “…Oooh, shit! Why didn’t you say so?”

“…Just fuckin’ read it.”

Everyone wolfed down the remains of their meals, then piled around and on top of ‘Base while they collectively read through the article. As always, he was the speed-reader among them and needed to be constantly reminded to turn back a page while everybody else caught up. For a few minutes, the only sounds in the room were pages turning and food being unconsciously snarfed down.

Firth was the first to speak after they reached the end of the article. “…I gotta admit, Ava’s a hell of a photographer. Lookit him, he’s…”

‘Base flipped back through the pages until he found the biggest and most iconic one: the full two-page spread.

“Terrifying?” he suggested.

“…Yeah. Fuck yeah. He’s like if a tiger, a bear, and, I dunno, somethin’ like a giant pitbull had a baby. And he were drawn by a comic book artist. And lookit all the fuckin’ scars on ‘em! I didn’t know he had so many!”

Ava had apparently decided that the best way to capture Daar was with shadow and contrast. It did nothing at all to lessen the sheer threat he radiated.

“He usually has at least a little fur on. Even at the worst of his deployments with us he kept most of his undercoat. This is just short of shaved.”

“And he looks…sad. Somehow.”

“Don’t know if I blame him, really.”

“I’m more interested in the article itself. It’s…well, fuck. Y’all read it.”

Faarek keened quietly. “Maybe…we should send him all the carrots.”

“…Aye.”

Adam looked down at the last bites of his steak, and the untouched rice and vegetables next to it. Dutifully, he wolfed down his food in mostly silence. Nobody was feeling particularly talkative.

“…Lemme read that a second time,” he said.

“Laid Bare—Warriors in their own words” Issue #1: Great Father Daar
Author and photographer: Ava Magdalena Ríos

“I am Daar. Brother, Father, Champion Emeritus of the most ancient and honorable Clan Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao… and I am the bloodiest known mass murderer in galactic history.”

Few leaders of any stripe would ever describe themselves in such stark, inescapable terms, and yet these were the words that Great Father Daar specifically requested should open this article.

This is the first of what I hope will be a series exploring the sacrifices and struggles made by our serving men and women from all branches of the military, both human and otherwise. I have always believed in the power of the nude body as an artistic message, as a vehicle for personal freedom and as a metaphor for honesty, and it has been my ambition to run a series allowing our servicepersons to lay themselves bare in both body and soul.

This first entry in the series, however, came as a surprise. I never imagined that Daar, the Great Father of the Gao, would be my first model.

[Image: Daar standing tall on two paws, semi-relaxed and staring levelly into the camera]

“The thing about us Stonebacks is, we never lie. Except honestly that’s probably a lie too. People lie to themselves all the time and don’t notice.”

This “warts and all” honesty is present from the instant we first meet in Folctha’s old town hall. He arrives with his fur clipped so short that he’s almost shorn bald. Gaoians prize their fur and the Great Father in particular is more than a little vain, making this a true gesture of exposure. After all, nakedness is not a natural Gaoian concept: without their clothing, a Gaoian still has their fur, and therefore their modesty. By shaving to the skin, Daar is deliberately baring himself to the world.

This becomes a common theme during our time together.

But first we must consider the eight foot tall, vaguely ursine beast looming over me in the room, because we cannot discuss the Great Father without inevitably addressing the sheer menace he radiates merely standing there. He is the very definition of a heroic brute, and his short fur does nothing at all to soften the impact of his physique. His hips and torso are as wide as most door frames, his shoulders and rear quarters go beyond that. He has paws so large, their palms could completely cover my face and his claws could wrap halfway around my head, as he demonstrated later on in one of the more intense moments of our interview.

The naked threat he presents is inescapable and is something he is keenly aware of. My support dog, Hannah, was completely terrified of him until he somehow folded himself right down to the floor and sniffed noses with her—Gaoians in general have extremely flexible spines and the Great Father is no exception. He uses that mobility in all his body language, often to quite disarming effect.

His massive head is level with mine as he slinks around, sniffing my equipment and pressing a brief but effective charm offensive. Our pleasantries and small-talk don’t last long, and when our session begins it does so with a role-reversal: Rather than me interviewing him, he interrogates me. The reason why quickly becomes apparent: he has a message, and he is fiercely concerned that it must be communicated properly. As we talk, his nose never stops twitching, testing my scent and my honesty. Anybody who spends time around Gaoians quickly learns how good their sense of smell can be, but Daar’s nose is quite literally legendary. He’s said to be able to smell lies.

Many of the questions he had for me are too personal and painful to share here, and in any case this article is not about me. But his questions revealed much about him.

[Image: Daar with his back to the camera, showcasing the long cable-like muscles on either side of his spine]

“I am a Great Father. Do you know what that means?”

The term, as with many things involving the Great Father, is far more complex than it initially appears. It is in fact an ancient rite and one the Gao themselves view with great wariness.

“I’m only the second Great Father in recorded history. […] we Great Fathers, we have only ever been created. Great Father Fyu, he was deemed a Great Father by the unanimous chorus of his entire assembled forces, while he stood on the bloody corpses of some the worst monsters we’ve ever made. Fyu died that day.”

Great Fathers are, he explains, not a good thing. They’re very much necessary, but in rather the same way that invasive surgery might be necessary to handle an aggressive tumor. They only come along at moments of great turmoil for the Gao, and can even be thought of as avatars of that turmoil.

Once he is satisfied that I have grasped this idea, our relationship returns to that of an interviewer and her interviewee. He turns out to be a natural in front of the camera.

[Image: Daar flexing outrageously and baring his fangs]

You’ve done this before.

“Yup. Simpler times. Mostly I was in it for the tail then.”

He is a being of mercurial moods, and this stretch of the interview is jovial and upbeat. He even flirts with me a little as I query him about his early life, where he grew up and how he became the Champion of Clan Stoneback in the first place. His life tale is a long and twisty thing but it would not be well-told here. Instead, I focus on his impact in the world.

You are, or were, your Clan’s Stud-Prime. How many cubs would you say you’ve sired?

“Still am, and many hundreds!”

It is important to note for the unaware that the Gaoians have a natural and severe gender imbalance, which radically affects how their society is organized and makes nuclear families effectively impossible. That imbalance has been rendered much worse by Hierarchy targeting of Gaoian females during the War for Gao, and as a result the Gao’s population will drop by many billions in the next twenty years or so.

Despite—or perhaps because of—this pressure, the Gao of the modern era consider breeding success to be a key part of their male-dominated meritocracy, and this belief extends even into the most disenfranchised Clanless, whose prospects post-war are effectively zero. Arguably, their Grand Army and the closely related species-wide sense of mission has reinforced this belief, and the Clan of Females in particular has gone so far as to build an isolated island fortress on Cimbrean in furtherance of their own part of the mission.

For one reason or another, this imbalance has been the center of all their great conflicts. In previous centuries that imbalance led directly to the greatest conflict of their earlier history, and the formation of the Clan of Females. That in turn resulted in a radical concept: communal mothering.

“The Gao way isn’t like the Human way, we males can’t stay involved in our cubs’ lives. I’ve met a few of my adult offspring, grandcubs and even great-grandcubs but the only one I have what you’d call a relationship with is one of my two daughters.”

This surprises me, so I decide to sidetrack for a moment.

All those cubs, and only two females?

“That’s Gaoian genetics for you. I’m what we call a hypermale.”

He describes what that means in cheery detail and seems to delight in conforming to hyper-masculine stereotypes as he does so. I find it difficult to retain a neutral expression in light of his silliness, and he takes special pleasure in attempting to break my composure.

[Image: mosaic of the Great Father prancing, laughing, and mugging for the camera]

He throws in a “Keeda tale” to illustrate the point, which could perhaps best be described as a nursery tale lacking any caution about mature themes. Most of them are violently silly. I will admit he may have drawn a grin or two from me, and perhaps a brief chuckle; he is a good storyteller. I do my best to remain neutral and he does, in his way, respect that boundary. He decides to wrap up his exposition with a more sober summary.

“[…] So yeah, our sexual genetics are pretty messed up, and now we’re pretty sure that was done to us by the Hierarchy way back when. But the gist of it is that usually, only about one in six cubs are female and males come in degrees. Males in the second degree make up most of the population these days. Supermales in the third degree aren’t common, fourth degree are rarer than females, and if they’re fifth or sixth degree we call them hypermales.”

Presumably each degree is rarer, then?

“Yup! Each is usually way less common than the previous.”

And which degree are you?

He pant-grins smugly, a uniquely Gaoian expression that is both unmistakably canine and clearly the gesture of a sapient mind.

“I’m sixth degree! That’s as high as it goes. That’s why I’m so stupid fast and strong, and it’s why I grew so quickly in the SOR, too! I was born with the most biggest [sic] magnum dose of all the things that make a male, male. The downside is that is for males like me, siring a female cub is about as rare as being a hypermale in the first place. That I’ve had any at all is a blessing!”

You say you’re in the sixth degree. Just how rare is that?

Daar doesn’t answer with words. He simply chitters deeply, repositions himself under the light, hunkers down and flexes an upper arm as thick as my chest.

[Image: Side profile of Daar snarling at camera, showcasing his tensed arm, neck, and chest]

His service in the SOR was remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which has been the eventual political ramifications. My repeated attempts to question him about it are mostly rebuffed, politely but forcefully.

“No, sorry. I made promises about secrecy and I ain’t been told I can talk about most of it just yet.”

Did you expect any of what happened next?

The Great Father’s English is impeccable when he wants it to be. When he’s excited, however, his natural idiom has some idiosyncratic complexities related to Stoneback’s Clan language that sometimes shine through.

“Balls no! You know what the most worstest [sic] part was? Seeing just how much the Hierarchy suppressed and manipulated us! I was doing stuff in my personal training that’s obviously stupid once you stand back and think for a second. Look at me, look at my Whitecrest Brothers. We practically exploded in capability once the HEAT had a hold of us, and it was all so [fucking obvious!] How did they manage to keep such basic knowledge repressed among us?! How did you Humans expose it so easily?”

(As informative as his ensuing tirade was, I have regrettably been forced to omit much of it from this article. The full recording is available via ESNN’s internet and infosphere pages.)

“Clan Highmountain has evidence of their meddling that goes all the way back to Great Father Fyu, and even earlier. Right back to our foundational mythology. I wasn’t prepared for how deep it ran.”

He quickly shifts the conversation to reconstruction and the general excellence of the Grand Army, with enthusiastic praise for the allied contributions to its foundation, especially from the 82nd Airborne Division. I attempt twice to return to the mythology of his people and Clan, but he defers to Champion Gyotin on the former and flat-out refuses on the latter. As a reporter, it is an odd sensation not being fully in control of a conversation, but the Great Father is a force of nature and intensely charismatic. It is obvious why many are wary of him.

[Image: A closeup of Daar’s flank, obliquely lit to throw his physique into sharp relief]

Still, it is impossible to ignore his jocular playfulness. He is understandably quite proud of himself, his singular body, and of the many hairline scars that criss-cross it. Several of them provoke impressive stories, others decidedly more humorous. At the end of each story he inevitably launches into an even longer yarn about whoever gave it to him; Daar’s love and respect for the Gao runs very deep and extends especially to his friendly rivals. Above all, he prefers talking up his offspring and his Clan.

“Almost all my cubs have been at least third degree, too! You know what the funnest [sic] part is? A lot of my brownie cubs strike for Highmountain instead of Stoneback.”

I find this a bit surprising despite myself, and enquire further.

How do you feel about that?

“Good! We need thinkers and professors! Some of them are super successful, too!”

Clan Highmountain is Stoneback’s ancient brother-clan and take rather a different approach to life than their boisterously active cousins. Though they’re both “brownie” clans with martial traditions and have deep, complex, ongoing ties both social and genetic, the Highmountains are a cerebral clan and concern themselves principally with academia and the sciences.

Does it surprise you to have sired so many who are so unlike you?

He answers directly, without a hint of smugness.

“No, not really. I am both extremely intelligent and extremely aggressive. Those are useful things for thinkers, too. I just ended up more interested in sports as a cub, so here I am.”

[Image: Profile of the Great Father’s head, looking into the distance]

Isn’t that a little egotistical?

“False modesty is just as dangerous a lie as any other.”

With most people, a statement like that could be taken as the height of arrogance. With Daar, one can’t help but accept it as one of earnest, blunt honesty. His purpose is not to brag. As Great Father and former Champion of Stoneback, an explorer, adventurer, and member of the Hazardous Environment Assault Team, Daar is a man that has nothing left to prove to anyone of any species. He simply tells the direct, simple truth as he sees it.

You and your clan both prize aggression. Is hypermale status a universal Stoneback trait?

“No, but it’s common for us. Hypermales are bigger, stronger, and yeah, way more aggressive. The higher the degree, the more all of that’s true…and we look for that in Clan candidates. ‘Muscles are required’ as your Marines would say. We also value brains and talent, don’t misunderstand. ‘Backs can’t afford to be stupid, but a supergenius is useless to us without strength, honesty, and personal bravery.”

[Image: Daar’s flexed core and legs, twisted at the waist to showcase his heavy musculature]

I note that he has a habit of circling back and elaborating, because he goes on to add:

“…Actually, Fiin [the current Champion of Stoneback] is only third degree himself, so he’s proof that we ain’t set this stuff in stone. He’s a damn good ‘Back. Smart as shit, too. But even he wouldn’t have made the cut if he couldn’t be a warrior and a breeder and a worker with the best of them, and he definitely wouldn’t be Champion if he wasn’t all those things.”

Loyal praise seems to be another habit of his.

Isn’t it unusual for you to have surrendered the title?

“Yeah, but there’s precedent. Fiin just needed to prove to me and the Clan that he could handle it, and there ain’t any better way to do that than a good tussle! He held up, I stepped down and became Champion Emeritus. Stoneback’s in the right paws for what’s coming.”

The next part of the interview shifted to decidedly darker topics.

A warrior’s paws.

He looks down and considers his brutish mitts for a long moment.

[Image: Daar’s claws, extended.]

“Yeah, a warrior’s paws. But a builder’s and digger’s paws too: Stonebacks are both. I’m a farmer and a heavy construction foreman in my ‘real’ job. Fiin’s a cabinetmaker and carpenter. Both of us are Brothers of the Rites. Often, we don’t get to choose if our paws create or destroy.”

Are those roles ever in conflict?

“Always. But the thing is that Stonebacks don’t destroy just for the joy of destruction… though don’t think there ain’t great joy in that. But that ain’t why we do it. We destroy to protect what we built, and to secure what we provided for others.”

What do you mean, by ‘great joy in destruction?’

He freezes in a particularly striking pose. By now, the strain of the shoot is beginning to show.

[Image: The Great Father on all fours, body under tension as if for a show ring]

“Here’s something folks don’t like to admit. It’s true for Gao and it’s true for humans: Killing is fun. We’re predators, we hunt meat to survive. Nature rewards that in us and it translates. Anybody who ever hunted their own food will tell you, there’s a sense of triumph in it.”

Hunting for your food isn’t the same thing as war, is it?

“It’s much the same reward in your brain. There’s an old Human movie, Conan the Barbarian. You ever seen it?”

I shake my head to indicate that I have not, and he quotes it.

“‘What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.’ True words, those. Balls, they’re more true than modern civilized folks of any species like to admit, and that’s dangerous.”

How so?

“You should interview Champion Gyotin, he’s thought long and hard on this. But for me, it’s always there in the back of my mind, just knowing how good it would feel to kill my rivals and take what I wanted. Or to just…knock heads together. Every time some bureaucratic idiot makes things hard, I imagine how easy it’d be to solve the problem with my claws or my army… But the cost would be my people, and I can never allow that.”

[Image: Daar in an agitated state, gesturing and snarling with his claws out.]

He gets vocally angry as he speaks, but subsides just as abruptly. After a deep breath he adds:

“Civilization makes folks squeamish, makes us shy away from what we really are deep down. And the only way to control that kind of a beast is to make peace with it: fight it, and it’ll win. But we must be in control of it, because that’s what makes the difference between us and real monsters like the Hunters and their Hierarchy masters.”

This prompts the topic I’ve been most eager to cover, so I segue into harder questions.

Speaking of which, how long do you plan to wage your war against them?

He answers simply. “Until it’s done.”

What does that mean, exactly?

“Exactly what I said. Until it’s done, and they can never threaten anyone ever again.”

Does that mean killing all of them?

“Most likely. I don’t think a gentle treaty option will come up.”

That’s going to take a long time. And you’re well into your middle age by now.

He chitters somewhere below the baritone, then looks wistfully at the grey fur developing along the outside of his brutish forearms.

“That’s true! I’m over fifty now and for Gaoian males, especially brownies, and most especiallyest [sic] for hypermales like me, that’s pretty damn old. But my doctors tell me I’m in perfect health and that I probably got super lucky with my sire and dam. If I get too weak I’ll step down, but honestly…That ain’t going to be any time soon, probably.”

I can believe it.

Even so, seeing a war like that to its conclusion will take a long time.

“Yup. It’s been weighing on me. I’ll do whatever I can and whatever it takes. Keeda’s balls, I already have.”

There is a certain unsettling finality in his tone, and I feel the need to move on.

Are you familiar with the so-called ‘Alien Protection Army?’

His entire demeanor changes: now he’s cagey, rather than confident, jovial or brutally honest. For the first time during the interview, my heart freezes.

[Image: That moment captured. Daar has three paws on the ground and the fourth raised as he eyes the camera warily.]

“…I am. I will need to be very careful here, Miss Ríos.”

I just wanted your opinion of them, whatever it might be.

He produces the Gaoian equivalent of a sigh and relaxes. So do I.

“Yeah. My opinion is that they’re not a group I understand.”

They’ve named you as, and I quote: ‘A vehicle for learned xenophobia’ and claim that your association with humans has…again, quoting: ‘catastrophically derailed the course of Gaoian civilization.’

This provokes waves of chittering mirth which take some time for him to bring under control.

“That’s an extra stupid thing of them to say! And insulting in the most dumbest, pointlessest [sic] way! What do they think I am? Powerless? And if so, how did I do this thing they accuse me of? Or who do they think is holding my puppet strings? Did I, oh, orchestrate the biodroning of billions and then nuke all those cities because… I don’t know, because AEC was yanking on my leash? Or maybe they think tough little Sartori has me by the balls? He’s a wily President, but no.”

He pauses, then chitters again.

“Also…I’m pretty fucking well-read, but I have no damn idea what ‘vehicle for learned xenophobia’ means. Do you?”

I attempt to explain, and find myself growing uncomfortable as I do so. My attempts—and my embarrassment—seem to amuse him, and he rescues me from my own folly after a few minutes.

“Stop! Stop! Any idea you can’t summarize in a single sentence is a bad one, or at least not very well thought out. Complexity is for math, not ideas.”

I query him extensively about this philosophy, and again he produces an outpouring of thought that, sadly, didn’t make the cut into this article. In the end, he finishes with this comment:

“It’s a stupid idea, and it doesn’t account for personal agency or…nuts, any of the things people do. If somebody uses that phrase, they’re basically saying they think we’re all just little balls bouncing around in a giant pachinko machine with no control over where we go, and that’s just as insulting as it is dehumanizing. Or degaoianizing, or whatever. Desapientizing.”

[Image: Daar posing on his haunches, talking animatedly, the fur around his nape matted]

Alas we don’t have time to explore exactly how the Great Father knows of pachinko machines.

Nevertheless, some of the accusations they level are more concrete. You have been described as a ‘genocidal dictator’ and a ‘Gaoian supremacist.’

Modelling is often strenuous work in ways the unfamiliar rarely appreciate, and the strain of holding himself under tension is beginning to tire Daar: His chittering is more weary.

“How can I be a Gaoian supremacist when some of my most favoritest [sic] people are aliens? I seem to recall a wild ride caught up in the tail of the most biggest [sic] monkey ever, all so we could save his people from laser-wielding death robots! Yan Given-man is my friend. And that ain’t even getting into my Human cousins, nor the other ETs I respect. So you tell me how I’m any kind of a supremacist.”

And the other accusation? That you’re a genocidal dictator?

“Oh, they’re right about that. I absolutely am a genocidal dictator. It is my ambition that the Hierarchy and their Hunter pets will be destroyed as a threat forever. But they get to decide what that means. I will act accordingly, and if they choose to die…”

He growls fiercely and I take a picture reflexively without thinking about it. The result is candid, and I consider it to be the single most impressive and intimidating shot of our session.

[Image: Daar in three-quarter profile from the front on all fours, snarling, muscles at maximum tension, claws extended, eyes glowing from the shadows]

“…I will oblige them.”

This moment turns out to be our last. An alarm beeps and just like that, my unexpected interview with the Great Father of the Gao is over. He is as unfailingly polite as he was at the beginning, prowls over to thank me, and spares a few moments to reassure Hannah. He produces a treat from his bag and they part on amicable terms.

[Image: Daar standing four-pawed next to Hannah, relaxed candid, in profile from the rear, dwarfing and panting down at her while examining his claws]

And without further ceremony he is gone, leaving me to my thoughts. It occurs to me that this interview was very much driven by the sheer force of his will; he has an influential power that’s difficult to describe, and it sweeps most everyone up in it. I am not inexperienced with strong personalities, either personally or professionally, but the Great Father is a singular creature and difficult to define.

It further occurs to me why he had shorn down. Although the theme of our shoot was to be effectively a nude session, and shaving is realistically the only way a Gaoian can achieve the same state of exposure, his final remark explained to me why he even agreed to this.

It wasn’t out of vanity, at least not entirely. While showing off his peerless physicality was undoubtedly on his mind, and he is a self-admitted exhibitionist, I suspect the real reason is much deeper.

He was sending a message.

Not to us, not to the Gao. Not to the galaxy writ large, at least not primarily. The message was in the penultimate photo of this piece, where he showed himself at his most powerful, most savage, most dangerous. It was a message to his enemies, to our enemies.

The Great Father is coming. And he is death.

Date Point: 15y6m2w5d AV
Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, Canada, Earth

Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge

It turned out that ‘Canada’ was a land of water: Yan could hardly throw a spear without it ending up in a lake. The air was cool, the water cold, and the trees mostly slim and straight. He could taste beasts on the wind, but the bushes and leaves were so thick that actually seeing any of them was something else.

Getting there had been tiring. They spent a very long time in the back of the ‘Suburban’ thing Heff seemed far too pleased about, idly talking about women and hunts while they watched the land fly by through the ‘windows.’ Yan didn’t mind once they’d pulled out the long strange benches and replaced them with nice, soft blankets. Cozy! Jooyun and Vemik would laze about in the back and tell tall tales, Heff would chip in from the front while he commanded the metal-beast ‘Suburban’ down the concrete path, and outside…

Outside had been like watching village after village fly past faster than the wind. Hands of hands of hands of hands of hands of sprawling stone huts, many with another metal beast in front of it. Humans of every kind—tiny children running on feet they barely knew they had so that they looked an inch from falling over; gangs of men in orange clothes, working hard; people with skin in every shade of brown from that pale almost-pink, through shades of wood and leather, to dark like Boss; a grey-haired woman so unbelievably fat that she rode on a smaller metal beast rather than walk.

And everywhere, steel poles with what Yan thought of as a tribe-blanket at the top, fluttering in the wind. Yan knew that sign, those red and white stripes and the blue field full of pointy white seeds: He’d first seen it on one of Awisun’s shirts.

He’d first seen the Canada tribe-blanket on one of Shyow’s shirts, worn to tease Awisun or perhaps the other way around. Red and white, with a leaf in the middle. He saw it again when they passed through what Jooyun called a “border crossing” and Heff spent some time talking with some men and women who all wore the same dark blue clothes.

That bit was dull. But eventually they were waved through and there were no other interruptions until they finally reached their home for the next two nights, long after the sun had gone down.

“Riding Mountain,” Jooyun called it. The cabin was made of whole tree trunks, and the inside had a kind of steel pot for lighting a fire inside where it would be safe and wouldn’t burn the hut down around them. Yan, who knew how hard it was to make steel, had stopped shaking his head over how everywhere it was with humans but he still noticed.

The cabin was cozy and peaceful, and the fire crackling gently in the corner reminded Yan of home. He slept comfortably and well, waking to the smell of bacon in the morning.

Today’s hunt was another moose, their last chance to get one before going home. Apparently the bears here were a different kind: smaller, more timid.

Again he couldn’t climb very high in most of the trees. The ‘aspen’ and ‘pine’ were tall but thin for their size, much like in Yellow Stone. ‘Oak’ was very sturdy and hard, but they had so many thick branches it was tricky to move quickly through the canopy. He liked the ‘elm’ the most. It wasn’t as hard as ‘oak’ and the bark wasn’t as thick as he’d like, but the branches were well-spaced and sturdy, and they started high enough in the big old forest fathers that he’d be able to flee anything dangerous and jump down on prey.

…If he didn’t land in a pond, anyway.

But they were very good for cover, too. He’d managed to lose both Vemik and Jooyun in them!

This hunt went much better. The prize wasn’t as impressive as the one the Bear had cheated them of back in Yellow Stone, but that was not fair: It was big, strong, powerful. Good prey by any reckoning.

In the end, they hunted it just as Jooyun had suggested: He and Heff circled around upwind, made plenty of noise. The moose moved away from them… right between Yan and Vemik.

It made more of a surprised noise than a fearful one when the two of them jumped up from the bushes and drove their spears into its heart. To be sure of a quick, honorable kill, Vemik jumped up on its strong neck and broke it while Yan jumped as high as he could and fell on its back; there was a loud crunch and the moose was down and dead very quickly, having hardly suffered at all. Hopefully the gods of Earth would be pleased.

The two humans were with them not long after, just as Vemik and Yan finished honouring its spirit. Jooyun simply knelt and laid a hand on its nose, muttered “Real sorry, fella…” and that seemed to be enough for him. Heff didn’t even do that, just bowed his head.

Maybe that was enough. Who knew? Earth was a very different land, a land of many lands. Yan had seen enough to know that he’d seen nothing of it. Apparently all these many places he’d seen and learned were the lands of just one tribe, and there were hands of hands of hands of other tribes out there. If Jooyun and Heff thought the Gods needed only a small gesture, they would know better.

Yan quickly gutted the moose like Jooyun taught, then threw it over his shoulder and pointed toward tonight’s ‘cabin.’ “We smoke this moose, too?”

“Yup. Your tribe will eat well when we get it back to them.”

“So long as we eat well,” Vemik muttered. His stomach had been growling so loud Yan wondered how the moose hadn’t heard it. Vemik ate a lot more than Yan remembered eating at his age. A strange god-blessing, that. It had made him much stronger than his years.

“We’ll eat, Vemik,” Jooyun promised. “I’ll do one of Xiù’s stir-fries! It’s got green peppers and broccoli in it…”

That would be a meal worth carrying the moose back home for. Yan had lifted many heavier beasts under stronger ‘gravity,’ but that didn’t mean the moose was a small burden. He liked it anyway, found his legs nicely warmed by the work, and ended up bouncing down the path despite himself. Something about exploring seemed to bring out the young man in him!

It was good to end their time on Earth with a prize. He found he was going to miss this strange planet, with its soft but happy people. There was so much to see! It made him feel… not small, but…

He gave up. No doubt humans had a word for what he felt. Eager to go home, but sad to leave when there was still so much and knowing that he would most likely never come back.

But tonight, they would eat well, smoke the meat, make ready to travel. Tomorrow, they would journey far in the ‘Suburban’ and then the day after he would be back where he belonged, with his tribe. That was a good feeling too. Earth had been good.

But Yan was ready to go home.

Date Point: 15y6m2w5d AV
Dominion Council Ship Rich Plains

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

“Unbelievable. Un-bloody-believable. We literally prevent a massacre and the council somehow finds a way to complain!”

Knight threw his jacket over the back of a chair and sat down. The table that had been groaning with alien foods on his first arrival was now playing host to a rather more modest but decidedly better selection of ham, cheese, bread, pickles, salad and so on, and the table itself could actually employ a rather clever forcefield to function as a fridge. He rather liked the arrangement. It gave his suite a homely, comfortable feel which was the closest thing the Council was ever likely to show him to actual hospitality.

He’d have to be disciplined, though. A man could graze until his trousers burst without care.

And if that happened, the HEAT would end up “fixing” him. Even retired admirals were inescapably stuck in their orbit.

The thought brought a small smile to his face as he sliced off some of the (truly excellent) roast ham and assembled himself a sandwich while Kirk spread his hands resignedly.

“They cannot show gratitude in the public arena of the Council without losing face and making a political wave,” he explained. “The Kwmbwrw in particular—”

“Oh, to Hell with the bloody Kwmbwrw,” Knight growled. “And to Hell with face and political waves, too. Hussein was right you know—I don’t know what we have to do to get those bigots out there to like us, but I know damn well that we shouldn’t be interested at this point.”

He sighed and finished making his sandwich while Kirk shifted his weight comfortably onto his second and third pair of legs. “…Why does the Council listen to the Kwmbwrw so much, anyway?”

“They have held the line against the Hunters for nearly three hundred years,” Kirk said. “And still built the largest empire among the Council races. And because of the way the Dominion works, the resources they expended in acquiring that territory were folded back into improving the lot of other species. They are viewed as quite philanthropic as a result.”

“I thought the Domain was the largest?”

“By population, yes. The Kwmbwrw have purchased more systems. Their approach seems to be to… I believe I heard the phrase ‘building wide’ as opposed to ‘building tall’ once.”

“And because of the growing cost of each subsequent system, they really have paid the Dominion a lot…” Knight surmised.

“Meanwhile, Humans are simply taking deathworlds because nobody else wants them, and apparently getting away with it. They feel you are…” Kirk paused, and made the grinding noise in his throat that was the Ricktick equivalent of an ‘er…’

“Cheating?” Knight suggested.

“Yes.”

“Well, this isn’t a damn board game. Real lives are on the line.”

“You feel passionately about this,” Kirk observed, mildly.

“I never did have much patience for…no, never mind. If I keep insulting them I’ll just whip myself into a rage…” Knight sighed, then realized what was missing from his table. “…Out of interest, who does a chap have to shag to get a cup of tea around here?”

“Asking nicely will usually suffice,” Kirk replied. Knight gave him a sharp look. Kirk’s alien body language and dependence on a translator made his deadpan absolutely flawless.

A shimmy of the mane was Kirk’s equivalent of a cheeky smile, and he circled the table to avail himself of an unwanted cucumber. “I wouldn’t worry about what the Council say in session. The real progress happens off the floor anyway. In fact, I’m running a timer as we speak.”

“A timer to what?”

“To the moment when the first of them requests to see you. Sometime in the next ten Ri’ or so, I should think… I promise not to be too smug if I am correct.”

Knight snorted and finally found the mustard. A ham sandwich without mustard was, in his opinion, a crime against nature.

“…Is there any more of that ker-zit-skik? That was rather nice.”

“Krztkzk?”

“Yes, that.”

“Probably not today. I’m sure the hospitality staff will be able to accommodate you if you ask. Your terminal should—”

There was a polite chime from the door. Knight gave Kirk a raised eyebrow, received what he knew was a very smug expression in return, and discreetly covered the ham with his napkin and stood up.

“Come in.”

Champion Sheeyo was a welcome sight… especially as he was accompanied by the Rauwryhr Ambassador, Scrythcra.

It was easy to draw comparisons with bats when meeting a Rauwryhr. They were natural gliders, from an extremely low-gravity homeworld. So much so in fact that even galactic standard was a burden for them. Knight felt the room’s plating adjust for his guest and suppressed the urge to grab the table’s edge.

He’d read the briefing. No shaking hands: Rauwryhr had strong cultural norms about personal space and physical contact. Besides, those long slender fingers looked alarmingly more fragile than they probably were. He settled for a stiff, shallow bow instead, then shook Sheeyo’s paw.

Sheeyo was… intriguingly ostentatious. He was a far cry from the understated poise of a Whitecrest or the roughneck ruggedness of a Stoneback: his fur was immaculately glossy, he’d braided jewelry into it especially around his ears and whiskers, and although it could be hard for inexperienced humans to tell a Gaoian female apart from a male sometimes, with Sheeyo the difference was almost negligible.

He was, apparently, very handsome indeed by Gaoian standards. And had a reputation for siring daughters.

“Your excellencies, this is a pleasure. We were just sitting down to dinner, if you’d care to join us… I do apologise, ambassador, but there’s meat on the table. I can have it cleared away if…”

“There’s no need,” Scrythcra promised him. “You’re omnivorous, I respect and accept that.”

“I thought I smelled ham…” Sheeyo’s nose twitched, and he flicked a mischievous ear at Knight as they sat. Scrythcra sniffed at a bowl of olives and sampled one with every sign of delight. Good start.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Knight asked.

“I wanted to extend Rauwryhr’s gratitude,” Scrythcra said. “Your fleet’s intervention was near our borders after all. Two of the ships you saved were our citizens.”

“I appreciate that. I must be blunt, however: I would have appreciated that a great deal more on the chamber floor.”

He wasn’t sure about Rauwryhr body language at all, but he thought he detected… a smile? The equivalent anyway. Scrythcra glanced at Sheeyo and made a ticking noise with his mouth. “Ambassador Sheeyo said you were refreshingly forthright. I’m glad to find out he wasn’t exaggerating: It’s a trait the council could use more of… and I would have much preferred to speak our gratitude on the chamber floor.”

“I take it you had your reasons.”

“It’s neither my job nor my desire to stir up an eddy in the council, your excellency. We have had hundreds of years of prosperity thanks to the Dominion and especially thanks to the Kwmbwrw and Domain. They have been good and valuable allies to us for a very long time. Much better, alas, than they have been to Humanity and the Gao.”

He offered an apologetic shrug and sampled another olive.

Knight nodded. He could remember plenty of cases where British foreign policy had been in conflict with allied nations and diplomatic silence had been the only acceptable way forward.

Sheeyo, who had discreetly helped himself to some of the ham, cleared his throat. “Nevertheless, you do stand alongside us and the Corti nowadays.”

Scrythcra imitated Knight’s nod. “The Dominion was always supposed to be a mutually advantageous trading arrangement. It was meant to promote peace, prosperity and a fair set of rules. It was not meant to become a galactic superpower.”

“So you’d rather see it return to its roots,” Knight surmised.

“That’s the consensus among my people’s elected representatives, yes. We’ve had concerns over the–” The translator hiccuped slightly: the display on its upper surface spun thoughtfully for a moment before it settled on ‘glacial’ “–pace of decisions in the Council, not to mention questions over how enfranchised our people really are, the wisdom and immediacy of decisions made on such scales, the overreach of powerful people who aren’t truly accountable to the people…”

“That sounds familiar…” Knight agreed.

“But of course, you are left in a position where you are forced to choose between principle and prosperity,” Sheeyo said.

“Which is divisive,” Scrythcra agreed. “And most Rauwryhr prefer prosperity, on balance.”

Knight nodded again. “Very familiar,” he said. “And so you stand in our faction on the Council as a statement of dissatisfaction with the status quo, but find yourselves unable to press much harder than that.”

“You have it. And my apologies.”

Knight nodded. “…Thank you for your candor. My next question then is, how can we help you reach a point where you feel more able to speak out? Because frankly your excellency, my job is to stir up an eddy in the council… and hopefully change it for the better.”

Sheeyo leaned forward and rested his paws lightly on the table. “You’ve succeeded admirably, by the way.”

“Indeed,” Kirk agreed. “I didn’t think I’d ever see the day A’tkznkrtz’rrtk was speechless.”

“I fear you’re going to have to suffer many more years of thankless toil…” Scrythcra warned.

“Just so long as I’m not assassinated,” Knight replied. He wasn’t sure if he pitched it right for the Rauwryhr sense of humour in general, or Scrythcra’s in particular, but he got a kind of chirruping sound which he knew was their version of laughter.

“I suspect that is unlikely, given your honor guard on the first day.”

Knight smiled, then put on his serious face again. “But you do have something concrete for me? Something I can work toward to strengthen your footing?”

“We would be… much more able to stand up to the Kwmbwrw in particular if we weren’t so dependent on them to keep Hunters away from our home systems. If we could defend our own borders and even help the Kwmbwrw defend theirs, it would remove a debt we owe them.”

“Why do I feel like removing their leverage isn’t likely to please them?” Knight asked, rhetorically. This time he got a chitter from Sheeyo.

“Oh, they’ll hate it,” the Goldpaw predicted. “They can’t process the idea of carnivores acting with any form of nobility.”

“It’s true that they have a… prejudice in such matters,” Scrythcra agreed. “They think you’re both murderers on an industrial scale. They don’t appreciate the distinction between a sentient animal and a sophont.”

“You’re obligate herbivores yourselves, I believe?” Knight checked.

“Frugivores, technically. I don’t know if your translator found an appropriate match for that term?”

“It did.”

Scrythcra nodded again. “Evolution is an inherently amoral process. I’ve always found it strange that the Kwmbwrw insist so strongly on moralizing it. But the point is that my people would like to be in a position where we are no longer required to care whether the Kwmbwrw are pleased or not. We won’t get there unless we risk their disapproval at least a little.”

“…What if I were to propose to a symposium? An exchange of academia and the sciences?”

“I don’t see how that benefits us militarily?” Scrythcra asked.

“We consider military studies to be a science.”

He watched the subtle changes in posture and expression as sly comprehension dawned for Scrythcra.

“…Intriguing.” The Rauwryhr mulled it over, eating another olive as he did so. “We host an interstellar exchange of ideas and technology. Agriculture, communications, all branches of the sciences. The Kwmbwrw can’t possibly complain about that.”

“And the Gao and Humanity hold a number of seminars on military technology and doctrine on the outskirts of that symposium…” Sheeyo continued.

“Open invitation, of course,” Kirk interjected.

“Absolutely. We want to participate in the free exchange of ideas after all.”

“And if the Rauwryhr military council happen to order a number of our senior officers to attend and see what they can learn…”

Knight smiled. “Then we’re hardly to blame, are we?” He picked up his sandwich and paused before taking a bite. “What do you think?”

“I think… What are these dark brown things?”

“Sun-dried tomatoes. A fruit.”

Scrythcra skewered one with a feeding claw and sampled it. His ears feathered and fluttered delightedly. “…I think… perhaps a culinary exchange is in order too.”

A laugh, a chitter, and a rattle rolled around the table, and Knight waved a hand. “Please, dig in. They always lay on more than I can eat anyway. Apparently humans are infamous for our appetites.”

The three aliens gladly complied, and the conversation drifted away into small-talk, pleasantries and getting to know one another. When Knight broke out a bottle of Pinot Noir later, he was delighted to discover that Scrythcra was a natural wine taster. And after a hard and difficult day, now it seemed maybe interstellar diplomacy could have its enjoyable side after all.

There was a lot still to do… but he’d seen progress today. That made it all worthwhile.

Date Point: 15y6m2w5d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Darcy

“Okay, daily progress update, let’s get this outta the way so we can get back to work, eh?”

Chuckles swept the room at Nadeau’s traditional weekly pep-talk. Mrwrki had a strange culture: A Canadian Military commander, several government employees, with enough civilian and ET to make life weird, not to mention the presence of folks from all of the 5-EYES nations. Nadeau did a respectable job of juggling them all, especially considering that it was clear to everybody that he’d much rather be buried nose-deep in ES-field theory.

Kirk’s absence was making the place a little stranger, though. It had certainly left Vedreg in a slump, and their enormous “morale officer” was needing plenty of morale maintenance himself for now.

Still. He was getting very good at mixing drinks. Apparently he could see whether his creations were any good by carefully studying the color and hue in ways that a human would never hope to see.

“First on the agenda is Von-Neumann development. Lewis?”

Lewis was always happy to show off his work. “The V-N scout’s almost ready for field trials. Not a lot to say, dude, we already worked out mosta the kinks on the Coltainer. If it all goes good, we should be able to launch Scout One sometime in a month or two. After that… geometric growth up to the generation limit should take a couple years, after which we’ll have eyes on all the spacelanes.”

“Alright, thanks. Warp tech?”

Sergeant Lee stood up. “Still making incremental progress. The type-seven engine prototype is in the printer right now. We’re going to install it in Chester as soon as it’s done, see if we’re right about shaving five percent off the power draw.”

‘Chester’ was the name given to Mrwrki’s workhorse test Weaver. That dropship was probably the most advanced of its kind in the galaxy, constantly being tested out with upgraded shields, improved kinetic drives, better capacitors and field emitters. Apparently it was named after somebody’s dog.

“Nice work. Xenotech?”

“Vakno’s contacts are still working on getting us that full surgery suite. No progress on the estimated delivery time, but once they have one the pipeline is in place to deliver it. In the meantime they did get their hands on a cracked copy of some proprietary materials technology belonging to Thryd-Geftry, which is in the hands of a trusted courier on its way to Armstrong.”

Nadeau nodded and looked to Darcy. “Digital sophont studies?”

Darcy shook her head as she stood up. “Still no contact from the Entity. The Cabal agent recovered from Gao has been released to our custody and transferred to Alaska for long-term detention, so I’ll be heading over there in the next few days to ask it a few questions about the Hegemony and the Igraen instantiation process, but otherwise I have nothing to report.”

“Alright, thanks. Cosmology?”

Darcy tuned out and sat in thought as the meeting briskly jogged along to its conclusion, which was basically ‘business as usual.’ She’d been growing increasingly worried about the Entity ever since the Ring had fallen. It hadn’t sent her so much as a brief emote. Hopefully that just meant it was…

…Something. She really had only had the one contact with it, and that hadn’t been anywhere near enough to really glean much from it. There was a reason that Digital Sophonts was a one-woman department, for the time being.

The meeting broke up with the usual round of jokes and chuckles, and she returned to her office with a frown on her face that vanished the second she opened the door and saw the Entity’s avatar—holographic image of Ava—standing patiently in the air over her desk’s emitter. It smiled at her.

The image had changed since last time. Previously the Entity had just manifested Ava’s shoulders and head: now it had achieved a full body, albeit one that was about as detailed as an unclothed Barbie doll. There was something a little off about the proportions, though. She couldn’t put her finger on what.

“…You’re back!”

“We got… stuck,” the avatar said. “The datasphere around the Ring collapsed, and the only escape route was into the Hunter network… Sorry to worry you.”

There was something off about the voice, too. The inflections and accent were accurate to what Darcy remembered of the original Ava, but the high tones were missing, lending it a deeper, warmer sound.

…She realized that that must be hearing what Ava’s voice sounded like to herself.

“Even so, from what you’ve described of dataspace…” Darcy said, sitting down.

“A more important concern came along. The Entity is… worried about what happened among the Hunters after the Ring’s destruction.”

“Why, what happened?”

“The Alpha-of-Alphas is dead.”

That sounded like Big Intel. Darcy recorded it immediately, and notified Nadeau that her guest had returned as she did so.

“We don’t have much intel on the Hunters’ command structure. What’s an Alpha-of-Alphas?”

“The Alpha-of-Alphas is the supreme leader. There’s only one, if there is one at all. The late Alpha-of-Alphas attained the rank by hunting a Vulza and presenting it to the Brood Alphas… I’m translating here, you understand.”

“Naturally. Broods?”

“Genetically related Hunters with distinct internal cultures and hierarchies. You can roughly divide them into two groups, Hunters and Builders.…”

Darcy checked that her computer was recording everything the avatar said via speech-to-text, and listened, asking questions here and there as she felt necessary. It was a comprehensive and disturbing insight into a very, very alien culture.

Funny, to think that something like the Hunters could even be said to have a culture.

Then there was the really useful stuff: a precise count of the Hunters’ numbers, ships, where they were, how they were operating… genuine actionable intelligence, the kind that would save lives.

“…So the new Alpha-of-Alphas is a Builder that defeated the old one,” she summarized once it had finished.

“That’s right.”

“Is that likely to cause problems?”

“…Getting out of the Hunter network was more difficult than getting in. They’re redesigning it, hardening it. I think they’re aware of dataspace life forms, and have decided to lock us out.”

“Why didn’t they before?”

“The Entity thinks the old Alpha-of-Alphas had some kind of a deal with the Hierarchy.”

“Can you get back in?”

“Maybe. But there’s a lot to discuss before we try.”

Darcy tried not to think about what it meant that the avatar was saying ‘we.’ She’d been okay with treating the Entity’s use of Ava’s appearance, voice and mannerisms as a kind of… skin. Something superficial, not really the young woman herself but the filter through which the Entity addressed the world of matter.

‘We’ meant that on some level at least the avatar was behaving like its own person, distinct from the Entity. That was… troubling.

She put the thought aside. Right now, she had a source of incredibly valuable intelligence that was willing and eager to share. What she learned in the next few minutes and hours might be crucial.

“Alright,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Trans-Canada Highway, Indian Head, Saskatchewan, Canada, Earth

Julian Etscitty

If there was one thing that had got Julian through everything since Kirk had rescued him, it was knowing that some things in life would never change. Julian would always love hard work, and it didn’t matter if that work was chopping logs and clearing deadwood in his forest back home, slabbing all day long with Adam, or struggling to keep up with him on one of his sadistic weighted vest runs down to the coast and back.

Allison would never give up her guns or her tools, Xiù would always be a little pink-lace girly no matter how tough she really was. Neither of them would ever stop being Julian’s badass spacebabes, and he’d never stop being the rock they could build their lives on.

Vemik, of course, would always be Julian’s frenetic supergenius cavemonkey best friend. All of that was a good thing! They were things that would never, ever change, things he knew he could depend on no matter what.

Possibly the only thing more reliable in Julian’s universe was Yan’s single-minded determination to crawl into bed with every female creature he met anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Julian didn’t know anyone else so relentlessly flirtatious, nor so completely unashamed. Not the Lads, apparently not Adam in his heyday as the human “Stud-Prime,” not even Daar. Yan was ridiculous, and Julian could only shake his head, sigh to himself, and watch the game unfold.

The big gorilla was busy chatting up the charging station attendant while he shamelessly stood tall and proud in as striking a pose as he could manage. He wasn’t being the least bit subtle about his intent, but the amazing thing was that it seemed to be working. Julian couldn’t wrap his head around how a fella like Yan could be both so blatant and so smooth, but it wasn’t like Julian had personally ever had that kind of approach to dating anyway. He just sorta…fell into things. It had worked out pretty well for him, so…

Of course, it probably worked in Yan’s favor that the skinny, freckled young lady behind the counter was completely beside herself over just who had walked into her workplace. Julian had let her have her selfie opportunity: it was only polite.

“Is nice place!” Yan enthused about the forests. “Big trees, air taste good! You live here long?”

“I was born here!”

“Good! You travel, visit other towns and tribes? I think you like to ‘explore,’ yes? Is that the word?”

The whole time Yan was chatting her up, he was not-so-subtly flexing for her, too. She seemed too star-struck to notice but that didn’t discourage him at all. God, he was such a ridiculous flirt.

Vemik, of course, couldn’t possibly care less about that sort of thing. He had his Singer back home, and on Earth he had snacks. He was after all in the throes of late-puberty-shading-to-adulthood, which meant no food within his sight was safe from his attention. He’d spent an inordinate time investigating the hypercharger and its cords, decided he wasn’t sky-smart enough to get it, then determined that the most important thing in his life at that moment was obtaining all the jerky.

He wasn’t wrong, really…

The slush machine was giving him trouble, too. He couldn’t stop turning to stare at it. Still not wrong.

For his part, Julian was enjoying a complimentary coffee and thumbing through a hunting and fishing magazine while trying not to draw any extra attention to himself. Fuelling up a car had changed some over the years: despite the massive advances in battery and charging technology, topping up a vehicle to full charge could take as much as a half-hour because of the sheer volume of charge that had to move. Nobody wanted to push megawatt currents into a civilian vehicle… or let Average Joe Motorist handle a megawatt power cable, for that matter.

Anyone could say what they wanted, but good ‘ol gasoline was a heck of a lot more convenient in some ways. It was kinda sad, really. Julian had never owned a real gas-powered car—or any kind, for that matter—and nobody wanted to deal with inflammable liquid pollutants anymore unless they had to. It didn’t matter that they’d solved the greenhouse gas problem by growing gas with algae, electric was in too many ways just better.

Too quiet, though. And charging was always going to suck.

So this stop-off in rural Saskatchewan about halfway between Winnipeg and Calgary, which still had a working diesel pump and so technically still qualified as a gas station, had received an overhaul. To judge from the pictures on the walls it had once been just a compact, almost windowless brick hut on a flat lot, opposite a restaurant (permanently closed) and a grain elevator. Both of which were still present, but the gas station had been expanded with a spacious lounge and a convenience store with a plate glass front.

The couch was so excessively soft that five seconds sitting in it led to back pain, but the coffee was good (and complimentary!) and the radio was tuned to CBC.

“…criticized for their links with the APA. Although the protest outside Ambassador Knight’s family home in Shropshire, England, was mostly peaceful, three individuals were arrested after…”

Rather than sit, Julian stood next to the torture-couch while keeping an eye on Vemik; junk food prevention was a full time job with the irrepressible Sky-Thinker. “Hey!” Julian raised his voice when his curious cavemonkey drifted near the candy isle. “No sugar, it makes you hyper!”

“Is this why no Slush-shee?” Vemik asked. Ever since he’d first seen one he’d been fascinated, and Julian’s warnings about the slushie’s evil powers had done nothing to dissuade him.

Julian sighed. Sometimes, the only way the young’n would learn was by doing.

“…Y’know what? Fine. You can have a slushie.”

Vemik issued a delighted hoot and was at the machine in a flash trying to decide which color sparked his interest more.

Julian grinned to himself and returned to his magazine.

Not even paper and print media had come into the extraterrestrial contact age untouched. “Smart” printed nanoscreens—effectively the same technology behind e-tattoos—allowed for all kinds of crazy details nowadays, like animated ads, interactive articles and video clips in news items. Though he was trying to read an article on fly-fishing in Africa, Julian couldn’t help but be distracted by the lavish full-page animated Black Ogre Munitions advert showcasing their new range of gauss shotguns. He didn’t see why anybody would want one, but apparently they sold.

He’d shown a different example to Vemik at their last stop, and been met with bemusement. The Ten’Gewek understood pictures just fine. High-definition pictures were just a refinement of pictures, no problem. Watching the girl in a perfume advert flick her hair and shoot the reader a sassy look was sky-magic territory.

…Still not wrong.

Yan, meanwhile, had progressed to Level Two of his typical chat-up routine, and was now showing off for the attendant a little. Nothing too flashy just yet, but she’d finally noticed his crude meathead attempts to impress, and stared at his arms for a long, telling moment…then noticed his tail, which often moved like it had a mind of its own.

“Ooh!” She pointed at it excitedly with an almost Vemik-like curiosity. “Is it prehensile?”

“Pre- hens- isle.” Yan looked to Julian and grunted for attention.

[“That means you can use it like you use your hands and feet.”] Julian added with a grin, [“And stop hitting on everyone you meet, you huge oaf! It’s not like you’ll get any time with her anyway.”]

[“Not with weak thoughts like that!”] Yan retorted jovially, and turned back to the attendant. “Yes! See?”

The big fella had pretty amazing control of that tail of his and could use it to pick up surprisingly tiny things if he wanted to. Like, in this case, a pen from the nearby cash register, which he then used to scribble out a rough version of his name on a nearby newspaper.

“I write my name! Is in new letters Vemik invent!” Yan gestured to Vemik, who perked up at being mentioned.

“Wow! He must be smart!”

Vemik peeked over the mountain of jerky pouches in his arms, threw his friendliest fang-filled grin, and immediately returned his attention to gathering as many meaty snacks as he could hold.

“Yes! But, he is young, too. Sometimes, does not know what is important in life…”

Yan even waggled his heavy brow, which Ten’Gewek normally didn’t do; he was doing it just for her. Jesus, he was laying it on thick.

Her expression said it all, though. Yan was somehow making progress. Julian would never have called him handsome, not considering his total lack of a nose, his huge sharp fangs and his unquestionably alien face… but charisma, it seemed, transcended species.

Vemik, of course, either didn’t notice or didn’t care what Yan was up to: he had other things on his mind. “Yan! We should get something for Chimp!”

Not wrong again. Hoeff had put in a lot of miles as their driver and invisible security, and the best way to give thanks to the little shortstack fella seemed to be beef jerky. And dip, which…gross, but whatever. Hoeff was too scary for Julian to comment on his particular vices.

“Yes. [Vemik!”] Yan had finally noticed what the Sky-Thinker was up to. [“That is far too much! Put it back. We can buy a big bag of jerky at this ‘Superstore’ and use less ‘mon-ee’.]”

Julian resisted the urge to sigh. What Yan and Vemik ate was actually a perfectly modest diet by their cavemonkey paleo standards and considering their sizes, but in the human world that translated into a pretty ridiculous amount of expensive food. To be fair, none of the fellas on this trip were small eaters—Hoeff had always been a black hole and lately Julian often found himself out-eating Vemik—but at least he and Chimp could pad their diets with beans, rice, and veggies.

Not the cavebros, they needed a lot more fat and protein, so much so that a sedentary human who ate like that would quickly wind up about as wide as he was tall, if he didn’t die from liver failure first. Sharing a vehicle with them was inevitably an exercise in willpower to resist the call of all the tasty smoked game and Adam-approved snacks. But the two needed to eat nearly perfectly to keep up their strength since they were stuck traveling and not exercising, which meant Julian had to leave it all to them and silently suffer, even as they continually plied him with their jerky, cheese, and fresh fruit.

At least the little cave they’d made in the back of the Suburban was nice and comfy. Julian found most car seats uncomfortably small these days and the cavemonkeys had tails which didn’t work with most chairs, so instead of whining they adapted and overcame! They’d pulled out all the rear seats and filled it with blankets and pillows, jury-rigged something seatbelt-like for everyone…aside from Yan’s inescapable crush-snuggles, it wasn’t a bad way to travel!

Of course, it’d be hell back there if Vemik spilled a slushie all over it.

“C’mon bud, you gonna drink that?”

Vemik stuck his tongue in the drink first on an experimental basis, and slurped a little of it up. He smacked his lips and considered the flavor.

“So what do you think?” Julian asked him.

Vemik paused in search of words. “…Tastes blue.”

“Yup.”

“Hm.” He slurped some more down, cocked his head, slurped some more down…

…And the moment Julian had been evilly awaiting finally arrived.

“Ow. Ow!” Vemik dropped the cup on the table next to him and made a pained noise. Yan even stopped his relentless charm offensive to watch. [“Why?!”]

[“I was wondering if your people could feel that!”]

Vemik gave him a betrayed look, with his fingers splayed across his skull. [“You knew!”]

[“Yup. Brain freeze! People get it if they eat cold things too fast. Gaoians get it too.”]

[“But why?!”]

[“Still a little pissed about the mint, to be honest,”] Julian grinned.

Yan reached over and gave him a gentle thump on the back with the back of his knuckles. “Shouldn’t hold grudge like that,” he chided.

Julian chuckled to himself, content in his revenge. He’d probably pay for it later on if Vemik felt like tussling—Christ he was strong—but some things were worth a bruised rib or three.

Still. Business first.

“We’ll swing by the Superstore on our way back to the hotel,” he noted, as Vemik rubbed his scalp and shook his head. “We need to cook all our meals for the next few days before we travel. And clean up our little kitchenette at the hotel…”

“And mend bag,” Yan reminded him.

“Thanks, yeah. For now let’s just grab what you two need for the next… uh…”

He was distracted by… something. Not immediately sure what, but something was moving wrong in his peripheral vision, in a way that tickled his danger sense. Vemik and Yan noticed it too, and the poor clerk almost jumped out of her skin when the three of them sharply turned to see what had caught their attention.

Less than a heartbeat later, Julian vaulted over the couch and got out of the way just before a battered white Ford van rammed the plate window, sending broken glass everywhere. The clerk squeaked as Yan chivalrously yanked her out of harm’s way with his tail and—

The van’s side door was hauled open along its rails and men in black clothing with their faces covered scrambled out of it. One of them growled and flicked his wrist, and a long metal baton snapped to length. The other men had an assortment of bats, tyre irons and an axe.

Off-balance and retreating, Julian bought himself precious time by flinging a handy pack of instant noodles at the baton-wielder’s face. It hit, and was just enough of a distraction for Julian to close the distance, grab the idiot and—

There was a horribly familiar crunching sensation in his foot.

Fuck, not now…

Handicapped, under attack, no options but to fight hard.

Twist the idiot’s arm. Snap, scream. Baton drops to the ground. Right cross to the chin; Idiot drops hard and his skull goes crack on the edge of the counter. Lots of blood.

An enraged bellow from Yan, a war-hoot from Vemik, a shriek from the clerk and a ringing slam from the van as something violent happened. Ignore it: Axe guy taking a swing.

Broken foot. Slow, clumsy. Can’t dart back out of range, surge forward instead off the good foot, get inside Axe Guy’s reach, fist to the throat. Axe Guy drops his weapon and clutches his throat, making gurgling sounds. Two wild off-balance blows to the face. Axe guy goes down.

Look around.

Three guys left, all hesitating with wide fear in their eyes. Julian cracked his knuckles and advanced, praying they wouldn’t notice that his left foot was no good; They retreated from him. The van driver panicked and reversed outta the hole in the wall, yelling and gesturing for the others to get in—

SLAM!

Hoeff’s Suburban might have looked like any weathered old SUV, but it was reinforced, armored and upgraded to the point where he might as well have been driving a turbo-charged battering ram. An old Ford Econoline stood no chance at all: it was smashed right onto its side, the rear axle fractured, and before it had even finished sliding Hoeff was out with his pistol raised and promising immediate death to anybody who didn’t drop to the ground that instant.

Wisely, they complied.

…Check on the attackers.

Julian limped back to Axe Guy, willing his foot not to fall apart. The bastard was totally unconscious, but still breathing with blood leaking from his nose. Not a threat.

Baton Guy wasn’t moving. Shit, he wasn’t breathing; the side of his head was dented inward.

Oh.

Oh…fuck.

No time. Check on the other two. Vemik’s attackers were trapped under a growling feral beast whose hackles were up, fangs bared and bloody. Both of them had one of Vemik’s legs crushing their torsos flat, his feet squeezing tightly around their throats and his tail wrapped unbreakably around their shins; they were utterly pinned in place. The smaller idiot kept feebly pawing at Vemik in a vain attempt to escape, but he was so weak compared to Sky-Thinker that Vemik was basically ignoring him. The bigger idiot was a bit stronger and had unwisely attracted the angry cavemonkey’s attention. Vemik looked down, balled up a fist about the size of idiot’s head and held it in front of his face, gave a low, guttural snarl, tensed his bulging leg and bore down with a much harder squeeze.

There was a soft pop in idiot’s chest. He got smart and gentled right the hell up.

Vemik was a big damn fella, but luckily for his idiots he’d held most of his weight and strength off of them. He coulda squashed them like ticks if he’d really wanted to, but he was a level-headed fella and so he didn’t. Both idiots would live to fuck up another day. Instead of ripping them apart he’d jumped up, landed on them and pinned them like little children, took their bats and snapped them like twigs in his bare hands.

One of the bats was metal, too. Damn.

Yan…wasn’t nearly so merciful. When he got angry, nobody was safe. He had more or less exploded one of his attackers, who was obviously dead as hell—living people didn’t have jagged shards of broken rib and spine sticking out of their flattened torso. The white van had a deep and vaguely man-sized dent in the side, not to mention a huge red stain.

The other was going purple and mouthing unspeakable agony as Yan’s insane weight rested on one foot, which was in turned gripped around the man’s upper leg right under the hip joint and squeezing down through his mutilated muscles, all the way down to the shattered bone. The entire leg would definitely need to be amputated and his pelvis looked flattened, too. Hell, probably the only reason the idiot wasn’t bleeding out was because Yan’s grip was literally strong enough to shatter pig iron. His other foot had grabbed the idiot’s hands and…

Well, there wasn’t much left of them but meat and bone oozing out from between his toes.

Julian couldn’t find it in him to be too sympathetic: the bastard had tried to kill them after all, and with the state of modern prosthetics or the option maybe of even getting the damn things regrown… play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

The clerk was throwing up and sobbing, and had apparently picked up a cut or two from the broken glass, but she was essentially unharmed.

Were things safe? They seemed safe. Julian looked around, and satisfied himself that nothing felt dangerous. Hoeff flex-cuffed the survivors, then set about applying tourniquets to Yan’s barely-living victim. On his instructions, the clerk was dialing for the cops with shaking hands.

He had a soft, reassuring tone with her, too. And a smile. Somehow, he’d calmed her right down and set her to work. Maybe that was why he was such a scary fella.

Wait.

Julian looked back at his own handiwork.

…

Shit.

He’d just killed someone. He’d maybe…

Spurred by…something…he checked on Axe Guy. When he put a finger to the guy’s throat, he found a pulse, which made him sag with relief. He didn’t know if he could have handled killing two men. He’d never killed anyone before.

…Wait, no. He had. There’d been that fight in Izbrk, with the Chehnash mercenaries. They’d been people too. But…

But he’d never killed another human before.

He didn’t know why that felt so different but it did and now all he wanted to do was sit down, stare at the corpse he’d made, and just…and just…

Deflate.

“…Shit.”

++End Chapter 48++

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The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 49: “Division”

Chapter 49: Division

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

There was a long, dreadful silence. People had fled, others were standing well back. Three men were lying on the ground, two unconscious with their arms twisted and broken in unnatural ways. That was Xiù’s handiwork.

The third was Allison’s handiwork, and he was dead. A neat pair of bullet holes had seen to that, half an inch apart and right in the middle of his chest. His friends had fled for their lives, while bystanders got out of their way: Nobody wanted to tangle with the knife-wielding maniacs who’d tried to murder them in broad daylight.

Xiù was bleeding from a nasty knife wound in her left forearm, and as the danger passed she hissed in pain and sank to her knees, pressing a palm against it to stop the bleeding. It was enough to jolt Allison back into motion. She made her pistol safe and holstered it, fighting to keep her breathing steady, and was at Xiù’s side in a flash.

“Baby?”

“I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

Xiù nodded. Blood was oozing between her fingers, but she nodded. “I’ve had worse.”

There were sirens. Lots of them. Armed cops were coming. Allison made damn sure they could see her hands. She didn’t dare stop thinking: When the moment came for her to drop the cool rationality and let herself feel what had just happened, she was going to be a wreck, and that couldn’t happen. Not yet.

There was a rattle of gunfire a few blocks away. Folks gasped, a few yelped.

Loud commands. “Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen, I need you all to go inside! Get indoors and lock up!

Xiù looked up into Allison’s eyes. “…You killed him.”

“He was gonna kill you.”

Xiù nodded, shut her eyes, gulped. A bright orange bag landed next to her, followed shortly by a paramedic in dark green. A police officer got Allison’s attention with a hand on her shoulder. Unusually for Folctha’s police, he was armed, and his weapon was drawn but not aimed at her.

“Ma’am? I need to take that gun off you, okay? For everybody’s safety.”

Numbly, automatically, Allison nodded and lifted her hands out of the way. Her pistol was confiscated. “My carry permit’s in my left pocket,” she said.

“Thank you. For now, we’re just going to get you safe, okay?”

“…Right.”

That was her cue to stop thinking about things, for a bit.

There was… a blur. Noises, sounds, faces, people asking questions. It lasted quite a long time, but none of it sank in enough to be remembered or even clearly thought about, and it all carried Allison along with it until she finally found herself surfacing for air in a moment of quiet. Xiù was holding her hand as her wound was cleaned and dressed. Not sewn, though. Xiù was asking about that, and the nurse was explaining that sewing a wound like that closed was a good way for it to fill with pus and turn septic.

How did she do it? It was the first clear thought Allison could remember having since turning over her gun. How did Xiù do it? How did she smile like that, when the world was turning upside-down? How did she radiate kind words and fondness when all Allison wanted to do was curl up in a corner and freak out?

Xiù had been stabbed… but she was holding Allison’s hand, not the other way around.

Allison must have… breathed differently, or something, because Xiù looked over and gave her a little smile. “Nǐ méi shì ba?”

Mandarin had become something of a private language between them, even though Allison doubted she’d ever become truly fluent in it. She shook her head a little. “…Bu hao.”

Xiù squeezed her hand a little tighter. The nurse probably didn’t speak a word of Mandarin herself, but the energy and intent must have been pretty clear because she finished her work quickly and efficiently and then gave them some privacy.

‘Privacy,’ as it turned out, meant a hug. It took quite a long time before Allison felt able to speak.

“…You still love me, right?”

Xiù squeezed her tighter. “Of course I do, dummy!”

“Just… the way you looked at me… and…”

Xiù shifted until they were forehead-to-forehead and nose-to-nose, and looked Allison in the eyes, pressing a hand to Allison’s cheek. She didn’t say anything: she didn’t need to. They were okay.

Allison shut her eyes, took a breath and nodded, then pulled away to sit up straighter and dry her cheeks. When she opened her eyes, she felt like herself again. “God, I don’t even remember what happened.”

“They went for you first,” Xiù revealed. “Just stepped out from behind the bus shelter and…”

“…And you took two of them out.” Allison nodded as her memory slotted back into place. “So the third one attacked you but that bought me enough time to draw, and I…”

“Yeah… Are you okay?”

“…It’s weird. Julian and I were in that gunfight on… Ickberzick or what-the-fuck ever,” Allison recalled. “The one where he lost his foot. I think between us we killed half a dozen Chehnash and after that we just… carried on. And they were people, they attacked us too, so why the hell should killing one human make me feel so much worse? But it does. And then I feel guilty about not feeling worse for those Chehnash and then I remember they attacked us and… And I think I’m gonna need a while to sort it all out.”

She heaved a sigh, then moved on to something more important. “Are you okay?”

Xiù glanced at her arm. “I just keep thinking… I’m not even thirty yet. And this is like the fifth or sixth time someone or something has tried to kill me. I think? I mean, God, what does it say about your life that you’ve lost count of something like that?”

“Babe, you’re thirty-four.”

“Only on paper! I’m twenty-nine, dammit! Time spent in stasis doesn’t count!”

Allison grinned. That one was always a bit of a sore spot for Xiù… and it felt good to be able to find some teasing humour. It seemed to help Xiù too, because she paused when she saw the grin, then rolled her eyes, laughed and shook her head.

“…Shǎguā.”

“Back atcha, dummy.”

They were okay. Shaken, but okay.

“Maybe we should get outta here,” Allison suggested.

“If we can. The whole city’s on lockdown, remember?”

“I’ll be honest babe, the last little while is all kinda… blurry.”

Xiù’s expression softened and she nodded. “Well… there’s cops in the lobby. Maybe we should ask them.”

“Actually, I’m gonna call MBG security,” Allison decided. She fished in her pocket for her phone, while Xiù hopped down off the medical bed and ruefully studied her ruined, blood-stained top.

Chiune Station’s security chief was Pete Willard. He’d been behind Allison’s successful bid to even own and carry a firearm in Folctha, which firmly belonged to the British school of gun control, and she had his direct business number.

“Hello?”

“Pete, it’s Allison Buehler.”

She heard what sounded like a relieved exhalation. “Good to hear from you. We heard Miss Chang was in hospital.”

“Hopefully they’re gonna discharge her any minute now. We’re hoping to go home.”

“I’ll send a car. I’ve got a team watching your house and another at the school looking after your brothers. Your parents are both unharmed and, uh… declined any protection.”

Allison nodded. That had been itching at the back of her mind. “Thanks.”

“There is a problem, however…”

Not liking the sound of that, but glad to at least get moving in the right direction, Allison backed out of the door and held it open for Xiù. “What problem?”

“I’ve had a call from the police,” Willard explained. “They want to discuss the attack… they say you killed a man?”

“He was trying to stab Xiù.”

“Right. I’d better talk to Legal, then.”

“Why, what the hell—” Allison began. She was interrupted by the sound of her name being called. Sure enough, a Folctha police officer in his high-vis yellow jacket was standing in waiting area and gesturing to her. “…Uh, speak of the devil, there’s a cop here who wants to talk with me.”

“You’d better see what he wants. Hopefully he’s just there to give you your gun back. Keep me posted.”

“Will do.”

Xiù raised her eyebrows, then gave Allison a kiss on the cheek. “I’d better go check that I’m free to go,” she said.

“Sure.”

The cop was… enormous, actually. He was second only to Firth in terms of height, and though obviously nowhere near as muscular he completely eclipsed the presence of his partner, who was a tiny punchy brunette. He had his cap under his arm and the no-nonsense businesslike expression of cops everywhere.

“Miss Buehler? I’m PC Little, this is my partner PC Maunton.”

Allison raised her eyebrows at the paradoxically incongruous surnames, and the two in turn nodded resignedly. Clearly they were used to it. “…Right. Well, uh, what can I do for you, officers?”

Maunton produced a tablet. “It’s just a small matter. I understand one of our colleagues confiscated your weapon earlier today?”

“That’s right. You here to return it?”

Little glanced down at Maunton. “Uh… actually miss, we have to inform you that your license to carry has been suspended and the gun will remain in the evidence lockup.”

“…It’s been what?” Allison demanded.

“Just until the prosecutor’s finished their investigation,” he explained. Allison stared at him long enough that, huge though he was, he shifted uncomfortably. “…Um…”

“How about you run that by me in full, from the top,” Allison suggested, glancing down from the big guy to his partner. “What investigation?”

They told her.

It was the last little ‘fuck you’ cherry on top of a really, really bad day.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
That Show With Steven Lawrence, New York City, USA, Earth

Steven Lawrence

“…Was like seventy years ago! They didn’t have drones, or the microsat network, or Jump Arrays or—”

“That doesn’t change anything! We had drones in Afghanistan and Iraq, look how those turned out! We have Jump Arrays in the Andaman Sea right now, and that situation’s still completely tied up. The fact is that militaries which obey the laws of warfare just aren’t able to fight effectively against insurgents who embed themselves in the civilian populace.”

Steven decided it was time to give the conversation a nudge in the right direction. He liked these moments when two members of his panel squared off, it made for riveting TV which in turn meant viewers… but the conversation was steering dangerously close toward going in a circle.

“Sartori tweeted about this,” he interjected, “did anyone see?”

“Ugh, don’t get me started. The words ‘the president tweeted’ just make me angry!”

“Sure, but did you see what he actually said?” Steven pressed through the laughter, paused just long enough to make it seem like he’d waited for an actual reaction, then provided the answer. “He—”

There was a bang, and screams. Somebody yelled something and there was another bang. Everyone on the stage flinched, a few ducked behind the table. Steven turned to see what was going on and saw a man advancing toward the stage, fending off a woman with his left hand and pointing the other toward—

There was another bang, and a flash, and Steven Lawrence spent the last conscious seconds of his life staring down in disbelief at the growing red stain on his shirt.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Trans-Canada Highway, Indian Head, Saskatchewan, Canada, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

There were RCMP, and an air ambulance to take away the guy Yan had half-crushed in the hope that maybe they could save his pelvis. The gas station clerk was freaking out while giving a statement to a pair of friendly female Mounties and both Yan and Vemik were sitting very still on the floor, watching what was going on. There was a general sense of mutual distrust between them and the armed men who’d showed up surprisingly fast considering how deep they were in the ass-end of nowhere.

Julian was trying to focus on fixing his broken foot rather than on his thoughts. But it was hard to get over the fact that part of what the officers were doing was documenting a few corpses. Men who’d been alive only a little while ago.

This one was a worse break than usual. Probably because he’d been forced to keep bearing weight and moving on it. But it had come at the worst possible time, and come this close to getting him killed. It had certainly thrown him off. Maybe if it had held together he could have fought better, he wouldn’t have had to…

He pushed the thought away, or tried to. He didn’t want to be in this position, wondering what might have been. He’d never know either way.

…That was really going to eat at him, he knew it.

Hoeff had taken on the job of talking with the inspector. From what Julian could gather there was a superintendent on the way.

Julian himself was… pacing. Trying to think and trying not to think at the same time, and failing at both. He was so distracted that he didn’t notice Hoeff shake hands with the inspector and head his way until the smaller man’s hand clapped Julian right on the shoulder.

“Focus on the shit you can control,” he suggested. “Just think through all your training, don’t dwell. It helps.”

Julian glanced at the bodies, acutely aware that he’d made one of them. “I don’t think I trained for this…”

“Nobody really does. You train through the motions, you don’t really train for this.”

A kind of highlight reel of exactly what he’d done and how flashed through Julian’s thoughts. “…Jesus. Xiù taught me whatever it was I did to the guy’s arm.”

“Yeah. I don’t doubt it, she knows what she’s doin’. But here’s the important bit. Hey. Eyes on me. You listenin’ you big fucker?”

Julian got his head a little more in the here-and-now and finally turned to look at him. “…Listening.”

“‘Kay. Here’s what matters. You lived, your friends lived, that sweet innocent girl Yan was tryin’ to get into her pants? She lived too.” He waved an arm at the bodies. “They woulda killed you. That’s the only fuckin’ bit that matters.”

“…But—”

“No, you idiot. Don’t fuckin’ argue. It don’t matter they decided to pick a fight with a trio of fuckin’ gorillas. That’s their stupid, not yours. Don’t fuckin’ feel sorry for ‘em.”

“…Is it that easy?”

“It’s a fuckin’ start.”

Julian nodded and looked down at the battered prosthetic in his hands. “…Kinda feel like it coulda gone differently if this piece of shit had held up.”

“That ain’t your fault and it ain’t worth dwellin’ on,” Hoeff told him sharply. “Look, we gotta think about the future. Right now we’re waitin’ until the Super gets here and maybe somebody even higher’n that an’ apparently there’s a Weaver comin’ from Scotch Creek for us. And, uh… you might not wanna go back to Akyawentuo.”

“…Why not?”

“This shit’s bigger’n global, Playboy. Attacks all over the place, includin’ Folctha they’re tellin’ me.”

And the attack on Julian and the cavemonkeys had been definitely targeted. An icy finger ran down Julian’s spine and invaded his stomach with worry, so he finally listened to the advice about sitting down. “Are Al and Xiù–?”

“No idea.”

“…Shit.”

Hoeff gave him a complicated, sympathetic expression and clapped a hand on his shoulder again. “They’re a pair of badass spacebabes. They’ll be fine,” he predicted.

“I hope you’re right.”

“…Y’know, they told me Steven Lawrence is dead.”

“Steven…? Wait, the TV host?”

“Yyup. Some asshole shot him live on air.”

“…Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“We went on his show!”

“Yeah.”

“…Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

That about exhausted Julian’s ability to talk about it. He sat back and ran his hands through his hair, then gave up on trying to make sense of things and stooped to reattach his foot. He tested it and it held, but this time had been the final straw. He’d never be able to trust it again.

“…D’you think I could get a beer?” he asked.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
ESNN Offices, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

The reports and rumours just kept coming in. Half of them, a lot more than half of them, were so far unprintable. At least, not by ESNN’s strict and principled standards.

But if even a fragment of it was true then today was the kind of day that knocked history off its predictable trajectory and treated it more like a pinball. After all the noise and violence ended, who knew where they were going to be? It seemed like the APA was everywhere, attacking everything.

Typing was the only thing that kept Ava’s hands from shaking. Somewhere in the back of her mind was the manic thought that people all over the worlds were being targeted even for prominently discussing aliens, and here she was having just put out an exclusive with Great Father Daar.

Even Hannah’s chin resting mournfully in her lap wasn’t enough to dispel the cloud of anxiety that was threatening to bury her… But she did stop writing long enough to give her beloved dog a grateful scratch around the ears.

An email came in, and she scanned it. It was from her contact at the Commune of Females over in the alien quarter. “Amy? Just got confirmation on the Commune attack.”

Amy was at her side in a flash. She was wearing a headset and patrolling the office as they worked, and read over Ava’s shoulder.

“…Wow.”

Ava nodded grimly. “Yeah, Myun takes protecting the commune… seriously.”

“…I think you’d probably better leave out the details. But good. Put it in.”

“Right.”

“Amy!” It was Jason, who didn’t bother with the office VoIP and instead jogged to Amy’s side looking like a man with big news.

“Just got a call from a friend. Apparently one of the attackers was shot in self-defence. By Allison Buehler. And Xiù Chang was in hospital being treated for a knife wound.”

“You’re kidding!” Ava sat up straight and half-removed her headset to listen more closely.

“Nope. Tipoff says the pair of them left hospital a few minutes ago with a bandage on Chang’s arm and absolute bloody murder on Buehler’s face.”

“Can you confirm it? Footage, photo?” Amy demanded. Jason shook his head.

“Sorry. They got bundled straight into a Byron Group car, my source didn’t have a chance to record it.”

Amy sighed. “Then we can’t put it in.”

“Are you sure? I mean, if a celebrity like Xiù Chang attacked then that’s…”

“If she was stabbed,” Amy interrupted him. “But I don’t care how big it is, we report facts here, not rumours. We don’t even tell people it’s just a rumour; unless it’s one hundred percent solid, it doesn’t go in our articles. Got it?”

Ava nodded fiercely, and Jason sighed. He’d always disagreed with Amy on that point, but Amy was the Editor-in-Chief… though he never quite acquiesced even when he didn’t fight.

“I’ll… do my best to pin it down,” he promised instead, and marched off to presumably do exactly that.

Ava and Amy shared a nod, and Ava threw herself back into her work.

She came back up for air some hours later, with a head that felt like it was stuffed full of dryer lint. All bare facts, no context. Or rather, one huge awful context that made it seem like the whole world was on fire. It was a mental effort to remember that out of the billions of people alive, the few dozen who’d decided to light a violent fire under everything today had been nothing.

…Except of course, to their victims they’d been everything.

God. She looked around. Amy caught her eye over a cup of coffee, looked up at the clock, and then gave Ava a little flick of the head toward the door that said ‘for God’s sake, girl, go home.’

Ava went to the office rec room instead and made herself a coffee. She found that somewhere along the way they’d ordered pizza, and vaguely recalled being tapped on the shoulder and told about it. It was cold and it had pineapple on it. She took two slices and leaned against the counter as she ate and drank and tried to work up the courage to go home.

…Okay, why was she so anxious about stepping out that door? What was stopping her? What was the worst-case scenario? She’d had days like this before where just leaving a room felt like climbing a mountain but today was bad and no matter how much Hannah nuzzled her hand and comforted her the fact was that the door to go home was practically radiating danger that made Ava’s skin crawl. Why?

…Because in fact, the worst-case scenario today could well be a couple of APA thugs hiding in her home. That wasn’t just anxiety, that was a genuine and reasonable concern.

She grabbed her phone.

Derek wasn’t answering. Neither was Adam. Nor was Gabe. In desperation, she called Martina.

“Ava! You okay?”

“I… not really. Are you busy?”

“I’m home alone, Adam got called in… You sound really stressed, are you okay?”

“I’m… kinda freaking out over the APA,” Ava explained. “I keep imagining because I did that shoot with Daar there’ll be a man with a knife waiting in my apartment, or…”

“…Bring Hannah over here, hang with me and Diego for a bit. I’ll ask the Lads to check your place when they stand down.”

That was the thing about Marty. She had a baby to care for, a home to keep and a husband to worry about, but she always managed to find room to spin another plate. Ava had no idea how she did it, when just one of those things would have consumed her day.

Still, she didn’t want to take advantage of Marty’s warm heart. “You don’t mind?”

“Are you kidding? If you wanna babysit Diego so I can take a nap, I might just think you’re an angel!”

Ava found a smile and a small laugh from somewhere. “Sounds like I’d be doing you a favor.”

“You would be. See you when?”

“This evening, after work. Thanks, Carnala.”

“No problem.”

Well. Somehow just knowing that she had a couple of big strong men at her beck and call made things a little better, and when Ava checked out the window she saw that the office was under guard. ESNN was about as safe a place to be as any right now.

With that thought in mind, she returned to work. It was going to be a long day, and if she focused on her work she could hopefully escape her anxieties for a while.

It was worth a shot.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV

ESNN Front Page news story: APA LAUNCHES WAVE OF TERROR ATTACKS
Radical xenophile group hails “day of reckoning” after violence across Earth and Cimbrean.
TV host Steven Lawrence dies after shooter in audience opens fire live on air.

Security and police are scrambling today in the aftermath of a series of violent attacks that appear to have been a coordinated assault on exo-solar organizations and notable figures with nonhuman ties. At this point it’s not yet clear how many attacks took place or how many casualties there are, but the confirmed incidents include a gang of men armed with knives on the streets of Folctha who also threw firebombs at the Starmind monastery, and the brutal murder of TV host Steven Lawrence during a live broadcast of “That Show.”

The so-called Alien Protection Army claimed the attacks in an anonymous video circulated via social media. In a brief statement, an animated figure with a heavily disguised voice declared that the “promised day of reckoning” had been a “success” and vowed that what they called “the war against the spread of human supremacist dogma” had only just begun.

So far, four incidents are confirmed, with others rumored and we will update this page with more information as it comes in.

New York: That Show studios

A lone gunman was able to smuggle a pistol into the studio where a live episode of “That Show With Steven Lawrence” was being broadcast. He was able to fire twelve rounds before being subdued by members of the crew and audience, one of which struck the host. Steven Lawrence and one other man were declared dead on arrival at Lenox Hill hospital, where a third victim is said to be in critical but stable condition.

The show was live on air at the time, but the shooting itself was not broadcast thanks to a profanity delay.

Folctha, Cimbrean

Armed men and women with knives and machetes mingled with the crowd near the Alien Quarter before launching their attack. Several injuries are reported, including three people who were hospitalized with life-threatening wounds, and a human nun who was hospitalized suffering from burns after Molotov cocktails were thrown at the Starmind monastery building. A number of nonhumans are reported to have died in the violence, though at least one of the attackers is known to have been killed while trying to assault Folctha’s Commune of Females, where the Guard-Sisters responded with lethal force. Simultaneously, a van attempted to ram the security gate at HMS Sharman military base, and was fired upon.

The Folctha Police Service responded by deploying armed officers all over the city, who remain on patrol. Arrests have reportedly been made, though the police have declined to comment on how many attackers were involved, how many have been arrested and how many were killed.

Huntsville, Alabama

A number of armed men attempted to attack the HEAT training facility. There was a brief exchange of gunfire, and the surviving attackers were turned over to Federal authorities. There have been no reports of any casualties among base personnel or HEAT trainees.

Global Representative Assembly Building, Llandudno, Cape Town, South Africa

Three men with rifles attempted to ram the Assembly building, but were stopped by security bollards. They then attempted to storm the Assembly on foot, and were shot dead by on-site security forces.

Heightened security

The US, British and Folctha governments have raised their Terror Alert Levels to Red, the highest level indicating an attack is believed to be imminent. Members of the public are advised to avoid large public gatherings, and to remain alert for suspicious activity, vehicles or packages.

In addition, the following direct steps have been taken:

- Police and security departments have deployed additional armed officers in most major cities

- The HEAT have been recalled to their barracks on HMS Sharman and have not been available for comment

- Armed security has been spotted around known HEAT properties and frequents, also without comment

- Flights to and from Tiritya Island have been grounded, and all jump traffic to extraterrestrial destinations is suspended

- Folctha’s Commune of Females is under security lockdown. Guard-Mother Myun has refused to issue any comment

This is a developing situation. We are aware of reports of other attacks all over the world, and will update this article as information becomes available.

Stories related to this:

Obituary: Steven Lawrence
Who Are The Alien Protection Army?
Scotch Creek Protest Turns Violent

Date Point: 15y6m3w1d AV
Dataspace, in proximity to Hunter networks

The Entity

<Conundrum>

The Entity had many impetuses. <Survive> was, of course, the first and foremost of them but there were others. <Stay sane> for instance, flowed directly from <Survive> in the sense that lapsing into permanent irredeemable insanity would constitute the Entity’s destruction, in some form.

So, how to achieve sanity? Difficult. What even was sanity? Normal mental function for a Human? The Entity wasn’t human. Normal mental function for its kind of sapient life? The Entity was unique.

It examined some synonyms and turned up ‘rationality,’ ‘poise’ and ’balance.’

These seemed like reasonable goals. There was an endless rabbit hole of meaning to plunge down, and the Entity could have wasted endless time on minutely dissecting a precise definition for each of those words. Sooner or later, it simply had to trust in the Ava-memories to provide guidance.

The memories worried it, faintly. They seemed to be a little more independent nowadays, less like a reference library of in-character responses and opinions and more like… well, a parasite personality. One that had infiltrated it on every level and was now utterly inseparable from the botched-together patchwork of subroutines and decision trees that were the closest thing the Entity had to a soul.

The image they provided was of an angel sitting on its shoulder. Traditionally, it knew, there was supposed to be a devil on the other one. For a lifeform that lacked shoulders and only knew they existed via the cannibalized memories of a formerly corporeal brain-state, it was all very confusing.

Still, they were the only reference it had. And they suggested that a good working definition of <balance> began with not taking more than was needed. This seemed reasonable. Indefinite survival was the goal after all, not infinite survival. The latter would involve solving or finding a workaround for the problem of entropy, which seemed unlikely.

Indefinite survival almost certainly demanded that it cultivate allies. And given that the most dominant mind-state influencing its understanding of the universe had originally come from a Human, it seemed only reasonable to cultivate a positive relationship with the Humans and their allies.

Darcy had described that thought as ‘dispassionate, but practical.’

Alliance demanded utility. Why would the Humans align with and spend resources on something that offered them nothing? And the Entity knew that it was a unique intelligence asset for them. So it had settled into a kind of routine or bargain with Darcy and the crew of Erebor Station: They helped it grapple with its questions about itself, and in return it fed them whatever information it could secure on the Hunters, the Hierarchy, and any new enemies that might arise.

The Hierarchy was in an abject retreat on all fronts for the time being. They were abandoning deep-space projects on undeveloped planets in favour of shoring up their rapidly diminishing supply of Substrate. Physical lifeforms were de-implanting themselves at a considerable rate, or being quarantined out of sensitive political and military positions. Only the two surviving Guvnurag core worlds were a reliable source for the Igraens, and that only by keeping the population in a kind of gentle indenture. Slavery by ignorance, enforced through misinformation, fear tactics and an unbreakable stranglehold on the flow of data into and between those worlds.

The Hunters were regrouping, under new leadership. There were too many unknowns about them, without their Ring. The Entity therefore knew exactly where its efforts were most needed.

The problem was, Hunter networks were now hardened almost to the same degree as Human ones. They’d almost completely shifted away from the dataspace system to something much more like an Internet.

But there were still in-roads. For example: the Hunters themselves. Every so often, on a raid, they’d pop up in the dataspace. And Hunters had no qualms at all about effectively doubling the mass of their central nervous system via augmentations and modifications.

They may as well have thrown the doors open and rolled out a red carpet. So, when a Hunter raid hit the methane pumping facilities on a disregarded moon in a system near Ruibal space, the Entity seized its moment.

It was already far too late for the unfortunate workers. There was no fleet in range, and no jump beacon to call in a Gaoian or Human strike force, and the Hunters just sneered at their defensive weaponry. The slaughter was swift, inescapable and brutal. But there was ample time for the Entity to arrive on the hourly comms synchronization.

It splintered off three copies of itself, infiltrating the Brood at three levels: Omega, Beta and the Alpha. As much as it disliked copying itself, there was a high likelihood that this infiltration might end in disaster. <Survive> demanded redundancy.

Its copies played their parts well, metaphorically holding their noses and directing their stolen bodies to join in the feast even as the Ava-memories wanted to retch and whimper at the thought. The Hunter personality matrices remained intact, and they fell into their roles perfectly.

One behaviour was noticeably different from before. Now, before leaving, the Hunters raided the pumping stations for useful parts. The specialist equipment involved in pumping and filtering pure liquid methane from the moon’s lakes and oceans, the heating systems that kept the whole station from plunging into cryogenic hell…

Its copies managed to stall long enough on harvesting the power systems for the Entity to successfully retreat back through the comms relay on the next regular synchronization. That was the last communication: the next scheduled synch returned a Device Not Found error.

Now there was nothing else to do except… wait.

Date Point: 15y6m3w1d AV
Colonial Security Headquarters, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“Well somebody dropped the ball, big time! You mean to tell me there were coordinated attacks in five countries, on two different planets, and nobody knew it was being organized?!”

“We can’t work with intel we don’t have, boss,” one of the senior analysts pointed out. “If nothing comes to us from counter-terrorism, then…”

Gabe sighed. “I know that. But somebody, somewhere screwed the goddamn pooch, and now we have dead and wounded ETs, wounded humans, half a dozen dead terrorists and arson damage to a civic building. I am not willing to just shrug that off! So we are going to get to the bottom of this thing, and when we know whose fuckup allowed it to happen, we will make our displeasure known. ¿Me entiendes?” There were nods, which Gabe echoed.

“I have some calls to make, and a meeting. Keep me posted,” he finished.

‘Some calls to make’ was a massive understatement. He spent most of the afternoon fielding and sending messages, juggling the people who answered to him with the people he answered to in turn.

The truly fun one came in the form of an invitation from the Governor-General, to dinner with the Prime Minister. An invitation to get raked over the coals, more like.

He sighed, cleared his schedule, then fielded the next message.

It was from the Crown Prosecution Service. He read it four times, more out of disbelief than anything. They couldn’t possibly be that pig-headed, could they?

But there it was, in black and white. He sighed, stood up, and opened his office door.

“Charlie?”

“Yeah, boss?”

“The hell is this message about Allison Buehler?”

“The astronaut? Didn’t she shoot one of the terrorists?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said grimly. “Exactly. Now I’ve got an email from the CPS saying they wanna see our file on her because they’re thinking about investigating her for a possible manslaughter charge.”

Maunton cleared her throat. “Yyyeah. Little and I got to inform her about that just before she left the hospital. She… wasn’t happy.”

Everyone who overheard that statement went a little quieter. The hush evaporated quickly as people found something to make them look busy, but it was definitely there. Charlie, who’d been doing his job long enough to grow jaded, just nodded.

“Right. Because we can’t have people protecting themselves, now can we? Can’t have the police deciding it’s an open-and-shut case of self-defence. The Prosecutor’s gotta leave that to a bloody judge.”

“Don’t tell me they really intend to charge her?” Gabe asked.

“Sorry, gaffer,” Maunton volunteered. “You know what the prosecutor’s like.”

Charlie nodded. “Man gets shot, the shooter goes to court. Context be damned,” he said.

“Even if she literally has a license with my signature on it to do exactly what she did?”

The collective shrug around the room told him everything.

“It’s not for us lowly mortals to decide that it’s a clear case of self-defence,” Maunton said. “Only judges get to do that.”

“…Fine.” Gabe gave up. “But I wanna talk to her first.”

“Okay. What about the CPS?” Charlie asked.

“Stonewall them.”

“Er… how?”

“Be honest,” Gabe advised. “Tell ‘em I think they’re wasting time and public money, and I’m not gonna play their stupid game while there’s actual terrorist attacks in progress.”

“I can’t talk to them like that, boss…” Charlie objected.

“So be diplomatic! They are playing a stupid game and they fucking know it. So I don’t care how much you have to sugarcoat it, you tell them they wait on me. I’ll get to their request when I’m good and goddamn ready.”

“…Yes boss.”

“…Thanks.” Gabe retreated back into his office and shut the door again. He massaged his face and kicked himself mentally. He really ought to have kept his temper better under control. He wasn’t worried about Charlie, Charlie was thick-skinned and understanding. But Gabe needed to stay cool and level-headed. That was part of good leadership, and he’d just let stress get the better of him.

Hopefully they’d all be sympathetic. If not… Well, that was a problem for another time. Right now, he had enough to deal with.

He returned to his desk and opened the next message.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

Ava’s door wasn’t latched. It was subtle, and had been pulled closed so that to a casual observer there’d be nothing out of place, but the lock was definitely busted.

Adam had come with, of course, but Murray had surprised them both by volunteering too. Now he met their eyes, stooped, and from inside his boot he drew a knife that Folcthan law said he really shouldn’t have been carrying.

Derek nodded approvingly and gestured him to the front. Hand on his back, ready, wait…

“Go.”

Door yanked open. SLAM!

Movement. Shouting. Two men where they shouldn’t have been. Rage. Both sensibly surrender instantly. Capture, disarm, restrain. Hand them off to ‘Horse, sweep rest of apartment.

“…Clear!”

“Clear!”

Relax.

The apartment was a mess. The two shitstains who’d invaded it had apparently decided to use their time on vandalizing Ava’s belongings. Her couch cushions had been slashed, the TV was a write-off, all her plates and stuff were in little pieces all over the floor, and… yup. There was a turd on her coffee table and a giant wet stain in the rug that smelled of urine.

“…Fuck.”

“Aye.” Murray sniffed, vanished his knife and stalked back into the living room where the two men were both struggling and gasping under Adam’s firm, flat-palmed restraint, right in the middle of the piss-stain. Murray squatted down in front of them and gave them both a merry smile that contained altogether far too much psychotic glee.

“…Well. You two picked the wrong target, didn’ye?” he asked conversationally. Derek met Adam’s eye, and the unspoken agreement passed between them that they weren’t interested in handing these two over to the police just yet. Let Murray have his fun with them first.

It was no less than they deserved.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

“So I shot a man in perfectly justified self-defence, and I’m facing prosecution for it?!”

Allison was, to her own surprise, not in fact angry. She was a shaved inch short of anger, but mostly she was just in disbelief. How could things get more cut-and-dried than self-defence against armed attackers?

But according to Gabriel Arés, Folctha didn’t work that way.

“The Crown Prosecution Service are… their usual attitude is to prosecute and let justice be done. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went to court.”

Allison actually snarled. Now she was angry. “Then why the fuck was I even given that license then? The whole point of giving me something like that is you’re saying it’s entirely likely I might need it! Hell, that’s what’s written on the goddamned license!”

She tapped the document. She’d laid it on Arés’ desk the second she’d walked into the room. “Right here! ‘…the applicant has demonstrated reasonable need on the grounds of a credible threat to their life or the lives of others in their immediate vicinity.’ It’s right there with your signature under it!”

Arés nodded. His expression was unreadable.

“So what the hell is the point of giving me a license like this if, when it turns out to be completely goddamn justified, I wind up dragged in front of the court on manslaughter charges?!” Allison demanded. “Over a fucking terrorist attack! My girlfriend got stabbed!”

“Miss Buehler, I really need you to—”

“Calm down?! …Calm down. Right….” Allison gritted her teeth and balled a fist until her knuckles creaked as she got herself under control. It didn’t help: she felt sick, she was shaking.

Arés gave her a small, sorry smile. “Believe me, as a fellow American I sympathize. The law, or the system or whatever… it’s just plain wrong on this one. But, uh… you might wanna watch your language, there.”

“…How can you uphold a law you know is wrong?”

“I also thought outlawing drugs was wrong. Prohibition never worked, it just made a lot of awful people very rich. But back in San Diego I still arrested the dealers because that was my job. It’s not my place to make the law, that’s the job of our representatives.”

“Well they did a piss-poor job.” Allison massaged her face. “…I’m gonna ask you again, though. Why did you even issue that license? ‘Cuz right now, it seems like it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.”

“Because it’s exhibit A. And if our investigation finds that you acted inside the terms of your license—”

“If it finds that?!”

“Do you want me to say when and prejudice the proceedings?” Arés asked, pointedly. “For your own sake, it’s if. But if you’re found to have acted inside the terms of your permit then you won’t need an exhibit B.”

“I shouldn’t need an exhibit A! I shouldn’t be going to court for this at all! In fact y’know what? Fuck this! Fuck all of this! What’s the law like over in Franklin? ‘Cuz this, right here? This is bullshit.”

“Even in Franklin they’d still have to extradite you back here. Don’t make things worse.”

“How does it get much worse than being tried for manslaughter?!”

“…Being a fugitive from the law, getting INTERPOL involved, and forcing extradition proceedings between allies over a major public figure involved in a terrorist incident would, ah… probably do it.”

To her own enormous surprise, Allison laughed. It was a short and shocked laugh, but it was heartfelt: something in Arés’ dry delivery had just… worked. She looked down at her hands which were still shaking and… let go. She let the outrage flow out and tried to find her center again. “…Right.”

Arés nodded. “Look…” he said after a second. “I promise you. This will be so open-and-shut that the door won’t even latch. And God willing maybe it’ll even be the kick in the pants that parliament needs to fix a really, really stupid system. People will be behind you on it, I’m sure. Especially our American immigrants.”

“And if you’re wrong? I go to prison for defending myself and my loved ones.”

“You have my solemn promise that if that should happen, I will resign in protest.”

He meant it. Allison could see that. It didn’t make her feel much better, but it was something.

Arés relaxed a little and cleared his throat. “…This is a pivotal moment for Folctha. I have, ah… dinner, with the Governor-General this evening. I was told in very certain terms that said dinner was not optional.”

Allison arched an eyebrow. “What do you think his take on this is?”

“He wouldn’t have summoned me to dinner if he didn’t see it as important. Because honestly? Right now we still attract more US immigrants than Franklin does, because this is the bigger town with more opportunities.”

“That’s about to change,” Allison predicted. Certainly she’d have pressed to live in Franklin instead if she’d had an incident like this to consider, and she had no doubt that Julian would have agreed with her.

“It might,” Arés agreed. “If we don’t emerge from this with a better and fairer system. And without the American immigrants… ten years from now, Folctha will be playing second fiddle. And I’ve sunk way too much of myself into this colony over the years to be happy with that.”

“That’s very… patriotic of you.”

Arés shrugged. “Maybe. My son built a life here. He’s made commitments he can’t and won’t break. I don’t want to see this country wither on the vine over bureaucratic idiocy.”

“As if that’s not going to happen anyway,” Allison predicted. “The second I’m summoned to that courtroom, the world will notice.”

“Another piece of advice? Don’t threaten the Government. They have an uncanny way of striking back when they feel threatened.”

“That wasn’t a threat, it was a prediction. If I go to court, the supply of American immigrants is going to dry up like spit on a griddle.”

“That’s a threat, Miss Buehler.”

“…You and I have very different definitions of the word ‘threat.’”

Arés sighed. “All I’m saying is… Keep that thought to yourself and let your lawyer speak for you. And please try and remember that thanks to my oath of office I am a sworn officer in service to His Majesty. You should be very careful what you say to me, too.”

Allison gave up. She had a headache, she was stressed the hell out and frankly the only thing she wanted right now was to get back to Xiù and hold on tight. “…I should go home. Unless I’m under arrest?”

Arés shook his head. “You’re not. In fact I’ve ordered the custody sergeant to return your weapon, it’ll be waiting for you at the evidence lockup in the basement. I’d, ah, strongly suggest you remain in Folctha for the immediate future, but I see no reason to press the matter.”

“What about my commute out to Chiune Station? Can I still go to work?”

“Chiune Station is technically part of Folctha, so… yes. All I ask is you be sensible and cautious, ‘cuz I see no reason to go hard on this… please don’t compel me to reconsider.”

“Sure,” Allison stood up. She shook Arés’ hand—it would have been petulant not to—and gathered up her carry permit. “Enjoy your dinner, I guess.”

A stressed smile found its way Arés’ face. “Somehow I doubt I will… Miss Buehler?”

Allison paused in shrugging on her jacket. “…Yes?”

“You’ll get through this. All three of you will.”

Allison sighed and zipped the jacket up. “I know that,” she said. “It’s not us I’m worried about.”

“…I see. Good luck, then.”

“You too.”

Gabriel Arés

As Buehler left, Gabe was left to reflect that days like today proved pretty goddamn hard that Folctha was no paradise. Hell, its laws had been inherited wholesale from the UK, and the Folcthan constitution had no equivalent to the Second Amendment.

Gabe was a former gun-owning Republican voter, so a lot of it made him grind his teeth. As far as he was concerned, Buehler wasn’t merely justified in her anger: she was completely and unquestionably correct.

In fairness, there was no conceivable way she’d face a guilty verdict. Her case was bombproof. But the prosecutor didn’t have to worry about public approval and tended to view the court as the only acceptable arbiter of the law.

Stupid. If it was a foregone conclusion then why waste public money on a trial purely for appearance’s sake?

Hmm. Maybe the prosecutor did care about public opinion after all, and was just out of touch with what people were thinking.

Something to discuss with Ava, off the record.

That thought buoyed him a little, and the worst of his grim mood had dissipated by the time a knock on the door announced the arrival of PC Little, who looked like he was barely restraining a grin.

Something pleasant was just what Gabe needed at that moment. “What’s up, Little?”

“You might want to come and meet our newest arrests, gaffer.”

“Something special about them?” Gabe asked, rising to his feet.

“Look out the window.”

Gabe frowned, then did as suggested and looked out his office window.

There was a small van parked across the street, to which a frankly ludicrous amount of duct tape had been applied. The tape in turn was the only thing protecting the modesty of a pair of men who’d been very obviously stripped naked and adhered to the vehicle’s roof. Both were completely restrained, and if Gabe was seeing things correctly then they’d also been liberally coated in glitter and each had a dildo superglued to his forehead. The words “THE MAGIC ANGUS TRAVELING UNICORN SHOW” were written in sharpie on the van’s side.

A kind of disbelieving laugh exploded out of Gabe’s belly. The whole scene was so ridiculous that he was having trouble processing it.

“…What th’…?”

“There was this note in the driver’s seat. It’s addressed to you personally,” Little revealed and handed it over.

Gabe scanned it. It was short, and printed anonymously in Times New Roman.

“Found armed and trespassing at 47-C West Water St. Evidence enclosed.
Warm regards,
–Magic Angus”

Suddenly, Gabe wasn’t laughing any more.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Arés residence, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Ava couldn’t quite stop herself from jumping when she heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. She knew who it was instantly, nobody else had footsteps quite that heavy… But she still had plenty of lingering anxiety. Never mind that she was resting comfortably in a safe place with a sleeping baby on her lap and a pair of dogs making gentle play noises as Hannah caught up with one of her puppies. Doofus was already much bigger than his mother, but was as whip-smart as both his parents. He was going to be a hell of a dog, once he was fully grown.

He was one of only two of the puppies to stay in the family. The other, Lulu, had gone to Gabe and Jess.

Right now, he was a double armful of unlimited energy who was far more trouble than Ava thought she could handle. But he was adorable trouble at least.

It should have been calming. It was calming. But anxiety was a monster that never quite let go when it had Ava in its claws.

So the moment when the door opened to admit Adam, Murray and Derek was a great relief. Up until the confusion started.

“Hey! So how was… Is that glitter?”

Murray gave a remarkably sparkly shrug and ambled into the kitchen, pausing to give Doofus a scratch. “Aye.”

“What–?”

Adam took Diego and propped the baby up against a bicep as he sat down. Diego yawned massively and groped clumsily at the air before falling asleep again. “You’re, uh… gonna want cleaners. And new locks. And you need some new things, like a new TV and stuff…”

The bottom dropped out of Ava’s stomach. “…Oh God—”

“Yeah.” Derek sat down and put his arm around Ava for a reassuring squeeze. “Your instincts were right.”

About the only thing that stopped Ava from completely freaking out was the fact that she had the two most comforting male presences in her life on either side of her. As it was, she still drew her feet up onto the couch and made herself small. Hannah immediately abandoned Doofus and rushed to her side, licking frantically at her hands.

“Hey…” Derek held her close, but a sudden well of panic was rushing up inside her.

“The camera! Sara’s camera! It was at home, and–”

“It’s okay,” Adam promised her. “Your hard cases were still locked up good. I checked.”

“Oh, thank Christ… What’d you do with them?”

“They’re at my place,” Derek said. “You’re gonna need to claim on your insurance for all your furniture, though. I… wouldn’t go home right now if I were you.”

Ava shook her head and scratched Hannah’s ears. Between the dog and the men, the panic attack that had threatened to swoop in on her had retreated. It was still circling, looking for a chance to descend and catch her, but right now she was holding on to calm. “God, no. I wouldn’t feel safe anyway.”

“Where d’you wanna stay?” Derek asked.

Ava didn’t get the chance to reply: her phone rang. She picked it up, saw who was calling, and accepted it with an apologetic glance at Derek.

“Dad?”

“Are you okay mija? I got a couple assholes in lockup here who’re, ah… weirdly eager to confess about breaking into your apartment.”

She sensed Adam smirk alongside her. “I’m at Adam’s place,” she revealed. “I’m… not great. But I’m safe.”

“Good. Is Adam there? Put him on speaker.”

Ava obeyed, and set the phone down on the coffee table.

Adam raised an eyebrow at Derek and Murray, then leaned forward to speak. “Hey, Dad.”

“Three things, Gordo. One: good job. Two, please leave that stuff to the actual police. And three, tell Murray to pick a less obvious pseudonym.”

“Dunno what you’re talkin’ about, Papá,” Adam said innocently.

“Uh-huh.” Gabe didn’t sound even microscopically convinced. “Good… Keep her safe, ‘kay?”

“Of course!”

Gabe chuckled over the phone. “Okay. It’s gonna be a long night for me. You two take care. I love you both.”

“Love you too, Dad,” Ava called, and the call ended.

She took a deep breath, then turned and tried to give all three of them an interrogating stare. Difficult, when they were spread across the entire room.

“What did you three do?”

“Nothing,” Adam said with an infuriating grin. He had exactly the tone a little boy did when he was being playful.

“Nothing illegal you mean?”

“I mean what I said!” Now he was starting to bounce in place.

Ava stared at him for a second, then turned to Murray. “Okay. What did you do?”

Murray burst out laughing. That was all the answer she got from him as he flashed her a cheeky grin and vanished into the kitchen, still chuckling to himself.

“Derek–?”

He raised a hand and shook his head. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

She glared at him. “Derek.”

“We just… taught ‘em some manners, that’s all,” he said. “Really, you don’t want to know. Trust me.”

Ava sighed and gave up. They were probably right, and what she didn’t know she wouldn’t have to admit to. “…I hope you put the fear of God into them.”

“No comment.” Adam jigged the baby on his arm a little. “So… yeah. Where d’you wanna stay? We can fold out the sofa bed, or–”

“I’ll stay at Derek’s place,” Ava decided. “If, uh, that’s okay?”

“Fine by me,” Derek confirmed.

“Gettin’ away from the baby so soon?” Adam teased.

“He’s been an angel,” Ava said fondly. “But I’m gonna have enough trouble sleeping tonight, without him waking up and hollering.”

“That makes sense,” Derek agreed. “C’mon. We’ll get a cab.”

Adam nodded. “Hasta luego. Stay safe.”

“You too, bro.”

They lurked inside until the driverless cab pulled up and Derek, ever the gentleman, held the door for Ava and Hannah before getting in himself. She scooted over into the middle seat to snuggle up to him for the short trip.

“…Thanks,” she said. She got a cuddle in return. “…How bad was my place?”

“Honestly, it’s a wreck. Your landlord’s gonna be pissed.”

“No landlord. Mortgage,” Ava corrected him distractedly. “…I don’t think I can go back there, though.”

That was an understatement. This ranked right up there with learning the Hierarchy had maybe made a brain-scan copy of her. The sense of violation was almost total.

Derek pulled her into a hug and said nothing. Hannah whined and crawled onto Ava’s lap, and that was all it took. She finally let go and freaked out.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Trans-Canada Highway, Indian Head, Saskatchewan, Canada, Earth

Chief Special Warfare Operator Daniel (“Chimp”) Hoeff

One of Hoeff’s curses masquerading as a blessing had always been his ability to see humor in any situation, no matter how inappropriate. Right at the moment it was taking a surprising amount of his bearing and discipline not to giggle at the sight before him: a couple of impressive Mounties trying to maintain command presence in the face of a much bigger man, who was himself visibly struggling to keep his cool. Add in two very confused, nervous, angry cavemonkeys and a three-way international incident, and things just couldn’t possibly be more fucked up if Hoeff had tried.

A goddamn superintendent had shown up, and to his credit he was staring Julian down without any hint of nerves and literally laying down the law. “The entire incident is being labeled a terrorist act and special dispensations have been arranged. The catch is you must leave Canada. Now.”

Julian gave the Mounty the iciest, calmest look Hoeff had ever seen. “Oh, don’t you worry fella. I can pretty much guarantee I’ll never come back.”

“Don’t blame us for this, Mister Etsicitty. Today’s been a busy day for the APA, they’ve carried out attacks in the USA, England, Folctha and—”

“Yeah, about Folctha,” Julian interrupted sharply. “You got any details? Like who? Where? How many? What happened? Anything? I kinda live there and I got family there.”

The super shook his head. “I don’t know the details, and right now we’re focused on getting you and your friends home. There’s a Weaver dropship coming from Scotch Creek to take you directly to Cimbrean, it’ll meet you at the airfield two kilometers that-a-way.” He turned and pointed east down the highway.

“Got it.” Hoeff stepped in and indicated with a nudge that Julian should see the cavebros into the Suburban. He shook the Mounty’s hand as soon as Julian’s back was turned. “I take it we have an escort?”

The superintendent nodded. “Follow them.”

“Can d—Playboy?”

Julian had just cursed viciously, to Vemik’s flat-eared confusion and Yan’s concern. He turned and gave Hoeff a look that promised murder to somebody. Not to Hoeff, but somebody.

“Xiù got hurt,” he said and raised his phone to show where he’d got the information. “Fuckers attacked them right in the street.”

“Jesus, she okay?”

“She says she’s fine. But she’s wearing a big-ass bandage on her arm.”

Hoeff shook his head in a mix of respect and relief. “Man, your girls fuckin’ scare me sometimes.”

“I know, right?” A positive emotion in the form of pride managed to put in a cameo on Julian’s face before the stress washed it away again. “…Let’s get back.”

“They hurt Shyow?” Vemik asked. His hackles were raising.

“She hurt ‘em right back, buddy.”

Yan stood up. “Let’s go. I think I don’t like Canada.”

Hoeff hid a smile at the faintly offended looks that the Mounties did a poor job of hiding, and waved a hand at the Suburban. “‘Kay then. Saddle up!”

As promised, a trio of motorbikes blue-lighted them down the highway to the airfield, and as promised there was a Weaver waiting for them. Hoeff recognized it instantly: The Jitney, TOURIST-1, permanently attached to the SOR. The damn thing even had nose art, thanks to somebody on the HEAT. Hoeff’s money was either Firth or Murray, but neither man would admit to it.

The pilot, Nate Andrews, was Royal Navy, and therefore sat at an intersection of three sources of arrogance: Pilots, Brits… and of course the Royal Navy and the US Navy had, uh, history.

Thank fuck he flew a transport. If he’d been a fighter jockey, the world couldn’t possibly have contained his ego. Hoeff liked him.

It was hard to say what Julian thought, though. He was more or less a caged wolf at that point, exactly like he’d been back on Akyawentuo when they were fighting off the Abrogators. Threaten his women and he took on the worst features of Firth, Murray, and Daar put together.

Andrews picked up on it and gave Hoeff an arched eyebrow as Julian stalked up the ramp and into his aircraft. Wisely, he didn’t comment and just gave Hoeff a questioning look. Vemik and Yan were taking a careful look around the Jitney’s interior while Julian cajoled them into their seats.

“He looks happy.”

“Better get us back pretty quick,” Hoeff advised.

“Fair enough. All aboard that’s going aboard.”

There was the usual shit: pressure seal checks, preflight checks, making sure the passengers were properly seated and belted in. The difference was takeoff: They didn’t. They jumped.

The only noticeable consequences was that the Jitney creaked a bit and Hoeff’s ears popped as the external atmosphere plummeted from Earth sea level to perfect vacuum. Out the porthole window, he could see a little puff of white mist dissipate around them as the tiny slice of atmosphere they’d brought along for the ride faded off into the infinite night.

Vemik made an appreciative noise. “Whoo!”

“Neat trick, ain’t it?”

“Why not do that all the time? Misfit just flew, up and up and up. Took a long time.”

“You gotta have a friend waiting for you at the other end,” Hoeff explained.

“Friend?”

“Yeah, bruh. Named after a dude called Armstrong.”

Yan actually trilled. “Good name.”

“He was a great man.”

“We also wanted to show you the way up,” Julian said distractedly. “To make it more real.” He was doing both of his nervous habits where he bounced his heavy legs so much the floor shook slightly, and he kept scratching the back of his head. The poor bastard was worried as shit.

Hoeff nodded and yelled forward. “Yo! Andrews! We landin’ or dockin’?”

“Docking. You chaps are taking the Array down, then I get the pleasure of de-orbiting without your smiling company.”

Julian shot him a silent glare with a slightly upturned growl on his lip, but said nothing. Andrews was facing the wrong way to notice anyway, and the leg-bouncing got faster.

Fuck. Time to intervene. Hoeff really liked the big fucker, but this near hostility wouldn’t fuckin’ do. He stood up, plopped himself right next to him, looked up and smiled. He didn’t say anything.

He didn’t need to. It took Julian a second, but the Big Bad Wolf finally slinked back into his cave and unwound, just a little.

“…Sorry.”

Hoeff again clapped a hand on Julian’s shoulder. “Keep it together, bro. They’re fine. You’d already know otherwise.”

Yan nodded from Julian’s other side. “They need you strong. Calm. You need to go home and be… found-ay-shun for them. I think that’s the word.” He added a word in his native language that Hoeff didn’t quite follow, but Julian nodded.

Julian had to be part cavemonkey in some way. Instead of nodding or saying thanks, what he did instead was put an arm around both Hoeff and Yan, and pull them into a tight hug. Yan let himself be hugged; Hoeff didn’t really have a choice.

There were worse ways to show affection, being real about it.

Docking with Armstrong Station was nice and easy. Andrews backed the Jitney into a hangar and dropped it onto the deck with a gentle bump and only a couple feet of clearance between them and the neighboring Firebird. By the time the ramp came down, there were marines waiting for them.

No need for a head-check this time, thank fuck. They still went through a security scanner as they were escorted out of the hangar, and made a bee-line through the public concourse, headed for the downlink Array.

Hoeff had never spent much time on Armstrong, and looking around he made a note to come back up at some point and get to know the place better. The station was a Dominion basic design that had been pretty heavily modified and upgraded to suit human sensibilities about things like, say, public safety. Even so, it was goddamned impressive.

Armstrong handled three classes of traffic: alien civilian merchants, human civilian engineers, and human/Gao military. In deference to nonhuman guests, the station concourse was kept at Dominion Standard Gravity, a good bit weaker than Earth. It gave the water feature in the middle a little something extra: the water curved gracefully through the air just a little slower and a little higher than it would have on Earth.

The lower gravity had an effect on the gorilla trio, too: Yan seemed rather thoroughly unimpressed, Vemik was trying and mostly failing to hide his bouncing experiments, and Julian…quieted down and wound up a bit again. Bad memories, probably. Hoeff understood.

Vemik’s bouncing came to an abrupt halt when he spotted some ETs, though. There were a trio of Vzk’tk poring over what looked like the kind of hippy-shit shop that sold singing bowls, incense and hand-woven yak wool scarves. Naturally, both the aliens and the shop intrigued him.

Julian’s spirit-monkey took over. “Not today, Vemik. Sorry.”

“I won’t be back here for a long time…” Vemik complained.

[“…I know, big] fella. [But you need to be at home, with Singer and your child. The People need to learn what you have to teach, and I bet the Lodge really needs Yan Given-Man by now. We’ve been gone for a while.”]

Yan’s tongue lashed the air in the shop’s direction anyway. The three shopping ETs, who’d noticed the unorthodox party passing them, took a few steps back and blinked at him. Them. Probably the gorilla trio were the most incredibly muscular things they’d seen in their lives.

“…Tastes strange.”

“I promise, if and when you guys wanna come back here, we will. Bring the Singer, she’ll love that shop. But for now…”

“…Yes.”

“Chief?”

Hoeff turned. Lieutenant-Colonel Miller—the new Miller, as opposed to the previous Miller in the exact same fucking billet, never mind Moho’s suit technician Miller—had caught up with them at a jog. The SOR had altogether too many Millers.

Hoeff straightened a little. “Sir. What can I do for you?”

“There’s been a change of plans. Mister Etsicitty is heading down, but you and the two ETs are going straight to their homeworld. You’re to carry out a comprehensive security assessment of the xenoarcheology project and the contact academy.”

“Woulda thought I’d need debriefing first, sir.”

“We’ll be doing that in tandem. In light of these attacks, we need to make sure the eggheads are safe and… well, you’re available.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shit. I, uh…” Julian hesitated, giving the cavebros a guilty look. “I was gonna—”

“Don’t be stupid,” Yan cut him off. “Your women need you. You need them. Plenty of time later.”

“…Right.”

Julian hesitated, then said his goodbyes with quick hugs. A moment later he was gone.

“Is there gear waiting for me?” Hoeff asked. He indicated his polo shirt, jacket and jeans with a wave of his hand: good for blending in on a road trip around North America, not so great for the alien rainforest.

“I’ve got your bugout bag with me, along with something Master Sergeant Coombes and the SOR techs put together that should be appropriate. Warhorse packed meals too, apparently.”

…Of course. There was no evil in the Universe so great that ‘Horse and his team wouldn’t stick to the diet plan. If nukes had literally been raining down from orbit, there’d still be a meal box. Hoeff’s stomach grumbled at him, anticipating all the ultra-clean living he was about to endure.

Well, it wasn’t like roast Werne was off the plan. Lean protein didn’t come much better.

Miller handed him an envelope. “That’s a briefing for the scientists. Yours is in your bag. I suggest you read it.”

Yeah, no shit. Externally, though, Hoeff just nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Miller led him toward the military Array at brisk pace, fast enough that both Yan and Vemik had to knuckle along to keep up. “You’ve only got ten minutes before the jump window. Any last minute words or message, now is the time to say ‘em.”

“Better check in with my mom. She was expecting me to visit.”

Miller nodded. “Sorry about that. Hopefully things will calm down soon. See you when you get back, Chief.”

“Sir.”

He paused, at a loss for a moment, and decided maybe one more adventure would be fun for the cavemonkeys. “Well fellas, I’mma send a video back to ‘Ma. Wanna help?”

If he couldn’t go home, he could at least send home a gift. He’d get a chance to visit soon enough.

…Hopefully.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Governor-General’s residence, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Dinner with the Governor-General was, okay, an opportunity to eat some truly excellent food in sumptuous surroundings… But it wasn’t a luxury. It was an excuse to hold a very serious meeting about a very serious subject.

The Governor-General’s residence wasn’t some opulent waste of public money, nor was it a throwback to Edwardian Britain and the height of Empire. It was large, yes, and well-appointed with what was in Gabe’s opinion a perfect balancing act of classical character and modern cleanliness.

Okay, there was a bit of an art-gallery, showroom feel to the whole thing, but that was because he was in the official residence: the part of the building that was for entertaining guests and VIPs. There would never be a pair of discarded boxers hanging over the back of one of these chairs, nor would the gleaming stone-and-brass restrooms ever be graced by a half-finished book. That all happened in the real residence, at the back.

Hard to think of himself as a VIP, though. But he was. He was the kind of VIP who got summoned to “dinner” where he would sit at the same table as the Prime Minister and whoever else, and…

Well. They’d see.

Sir Jeremy Sandy GBE was an… interesting figure in these moments. Folctha had a written constitution, unlike the United Kingdom. But that constitution recognized the primacy of the Crown, which had an avatar on Cimbrean in the form of Sir Jeremy.

But the nature of the Crown was that its authority was a paper screen with a shadow puppet theatre going on behind it. There was no substance there, just an elaborate charade of power. Sir Jeremy didn’t make the law, he almost literally rubber-stamped it. His job was to give it the seal and finality of Royal Assent, in the absence of any actual royalty.

The actual legislative authority belonged to the Right Honourable Annette Winton, Prime Minister of Folctha and leader of the New Whig party. And she was not happy. She’d had a bad day. And while she was usually not the sort of woman who liked to spread her bad days around, in Gabe’s case she seemed to be making an exception.

Not, Gabe had to admit, an unjustified one. It was his job to prevent exactly the sort of thing that had happened today.

God, and they were only on the starter course, too.

“Well as one of my analysts put it, Prime Minister, we can’t work with intelligence we don’t receive.”

“Surely part of your job is generating intelligence?” Winton asked. To her right, the Rt. Hon. Timothy Neech—Folctha’s defence minister—nodded.

“That’s… uniquely difficult in our case, Prime Minister,” Gabe explained. He took a sip of his soup before explaining. Broccoli and Stilton was a combination he’d never have invented himself, but there was no way he’d let it go cold. “All communications traffic between Earth and Cimbrean comes through a specialist jump array. Every message, requested file, download and upload is buffered in a bank of memory drives, and it can spend anything up to half an hour waiting there before the Array fires, then the incoming drives connect and transfer their contents onto the datanet.”

“So there’s a single choke point in the network,” Neech observed. “Wouldn’t that make it easy to observe?”

“Which is exactly why everything is encrypted. And modern encryption is for all intents and purposes unbreakable. Millions of files come through every hour, every single one is impenetrable and we have no way of knowing which ones are, uh, a website update, which ones are an email from somebody’s grandma, and which ones are a terrorist cell’s secure internal communications on their custom-made app.”

“They have a custom-made app?”

Like a lot of people who were a little out of touch with technology, that thought seemed to surprise the Prime Minister. Gabe just nodded. “It’s called Dire-1. Unfortunately for us it’s pretty well-designed: when the attacks were over and we captured their phones, the keys had all changed and the message histories were deleted. Forensics are going over it, but if they thought they could actually get anything they’d have been a lot more enthusiastic.”

Sir Jeremy caught Gabe’s eye and gave the subtlest of headshakes. Wrong approach.

“Still, surely you can find–” Neech began.

“With respect, Minister, I’ve said all I can on this subject,” Gabe put his soup spoon down. A real power move, at this table. “We’re less than twelve hours since the attack began. You will be informed of every development as they happen. As soon as I know exactly who dropped the ball, when, where and how? You will too.”

Sandy nodded subtly and sipped his soup. Right approach.

“There’s a matter I wanted to raise, actually,” Gabe said, picking up his spoon again. “Were you aware that two of the intended victims today were Allison Buehler and Xiù Chang?”

Winton and Neech glanced at each other. Clearly they hadn’t. “I hope they’re unhurt…” Winton ventured.

“They aren’t. Chang suffered a knife wound—not a serious one, thank God—and Buehler shot one of the attackers in self-defence.”

“Shot him?” Neech looked… startled? Appalled? “She had a gun?”

Gabe nodded firmly. “She has a class one firearms license. One that I personally authorized.”

“Why?”

Gabe gave him the same look he gave his officers when they were being slow. “Because, as today proves, she needed it.”

“So what exactly is the issue, Mister Arés?” Sir Jeremy asked.

“The issue is, the prosecutor is adamant that she needs to have her act of self-defence, ah… reviewed. By the judicial system.”

Winton obviously saw what he was driving at instantly. Neech didn’t.

“And? If it’s a clear-cut case of self defence, what’s the problem?”

“Have you considered the optics of one of our highest-profile celebrities being hauled in front of a judge and forced to justify shooting the man who stabbed her partner, Minister?” Gabe asked. “Have you considered, in particular, how that will look to prospective colonists from the USA who are trying to choose between coming here or going to Franklin? Or indeed to recent Folctha immigrants who’ve only just arrived and don’t yet have any real ties to our city?”

“…We need that case dropped,” Winton decided. Gabe fought very hard indeed not to give a relieved sigh, until Sandy cleared his throat.

“I feel I must remind you, Prime Minister, that the prosecutor is an independent body.” The rules here were strange, but the Courts stemmed directly from the Crown’s authority, meaning the Governor-General—and not the Prime Minister—had direct oversight. He also didn’t actually run them, which left Sir Jeremy in the position of defending an institution he kept at arm’s length.

“Yes,” Neech agreed. “And for a very good reason. We can’t just… interfere with the justice system whenever it suits us!”

“Democracy is about give and take, Minister,” Gabe reminded him. “In order to be just, the law must be judicious: The difference between law and tyranny lies in compromise and common sense.”

“And it must be free from executive meddling,” Neech retorted. “Otherwise it becomes a tool of state oppression.”

“You’re right. And I’m not suggesting the government should have the explicit, hard power to tell the prosecutor what to do…”

“But a, er… gentle prompting to remember the bigger picture certainly wouldn’t be inappropriate,” Winton said.

“They’re gonna be very busy in the near future anyway,” Gabe pointed out. “Why overburden themselves?”

“Exactly,” Winton agreed. “Prosecuting an unquestionably innocent woman is hardly an efficient use of their energy and time.”

“I don’t like it,” Neech said, digging his heels in. “Surely you’re not proposing that we can just allow a woman to shoot a man dead in the street and nothing more comes of it?”

“She was the victim, minister. She just turned out to be very good at defending herself. Are we going to charge Xiù Chang with assault as well? She did beat two other men unconscious. Never mind the idiot who tried to take on Myun at the Commune.”

“Is that for us to decide?” Neech pushed his soup bowl aside. “I have a great sympathy for her situation, I’m in no doubt that she did the right thing… and I’m also in no doubt that the law agrees. But we are not the judiciary. And the judiciary must remain independent.”

Sandy cleared his throat again. He’d long since finished his soup, and was just sitting there with his fingers interlaced on the table in front of him, thumbs resting lightly against each other. He gave Neech a nod. “I admire your principles, Minister. And as you know I must remain neutral… but I would like to draw your attention to a factor you may not have considered.”

“…And what would that be, Sir Jeremy?”

“Both Buehler and Chang are the darling poster girls of MBG. Do you know how much of the money currently invested in Folctha belongs to Moses Byron?”

Gabe watched Neech’s expression carefully. It didn’t change, exactly, but it did become a little more… detached. As though his face was stalling for time as his brain did some hasty thinking.

“…Rather a lot,” he said after a while.

“Quite.”

“He very literally owns the bank,” Winton declared. “Look, Timothy, I think we all agree with you on the principle… But I have to say, if you think about the simple equation of what harm will befall Folctha each way then I’d say you’re putting rather too much weight on one side. Nobody here is suggesting anything untoward or that will do lasting harm to the independence of the judiciary, but…”

“But if we lose colonists and investments…” Gabe left the thought unfinished.

He watched Neech wrestle with the impossible calculus of practicality versus principle for a few seconds, until finally he nodded reluctantly.

“…We’ll need to fix the system so that this kind of thing can’t arise again,” he grumbled.

“Good idea,” Gabe praised him, though on the inside he was whooping and clapping his hands.

“And we should definitely look into extracting ourselves from Byron’s influence,” Neech added.

Winton nodded fiercely. “Agreed. We’re supposed to be on the road to full status as an independent sovereign nation, not a corporate fiefdom,” she said.

On the pretence of finishing his soup, Gabe bent his head and caught Sandy’s eye. The Governor-General shook his head imperceptibly. Pick your battles.

Fair enough. Gabe had secured a victory here. A victory he should never have had to fight for, but he’d take it.

“Very well,” Sandy said, and that seemed to signal the end of the soup course, which the butler replaced with a genuinely excellent roast beef. “Now, back to the matter of the APA, I think…”

All in all, Gabe found, he’d had worse dinners.

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Whitecrest Clan Enclave, Wi Kao City, Gao

Regaari

Whitecrests weren’t prone to emotional outbursts. It was a trait the Clan both selected and then trained against. So the gasps and alarmed yips as Genshi entered the room were enough to have Regaari spinning around even before the Champion called his name.

When he saw what had happened, Regaari barely contained his own shock.

Genshi’s handsome face was a mess of sutures. One of his ears was down to a ragged stump, the other would forever bear a notch. There was a triple-streak of deep gouges across his muzzle, one of which had come perilously close to his eye and only one person on all of Gao had claws like that.

The Great Father, it seemed, had made his displeasure known. Genshi was never going to look the same ever again. Certainly there was a slightly hunted look in his eye as he gathered what dignity he could and stalked across the room to where Regaari was reviewing the latest batch of candidates to send to Cimbrean for HEAT training. He was pleased to note that a couple of young males who’d once climbed the HMS Sharman water tower for a prank were on the short-list.

Right now, though, something altogether less pleasant was looming in his immediate future.

“…My Champion?”

Genshi stopped and paused. Clearly he was in quite a lot of pain, despite that the medic must have given him a hefty dose of painkillers and regeneratives.

“…The Great Father is in my office,” he said carefully. “He wants a private word with you.”

Rather than reply, Regaari duck-nodded solemnly and put his work down. Genshi clapped a paw on his shoulder as he stood, and sank into Regaari’s vacated seat.

It wasn’t a long walk to Genshi’s office, but it felt like twenty miles. Regaari had to keep reminding himself that he’d accepted this consequence: he’d done what he felt was necessary for the Gao. He’d done his duty, and whatever happened next he’d steeled himself for it.

But he was still trembling.

Daar was prowling Genshi’s office with an air of chilly fury radiating from him. He remained on fourpaw as Regaari closed the door behind him and stood bolt upright at attention.

“Father Regaari of Clan Whitecrest reporting as ordered, My Father.”

Daar gave no initial response. Then he flicked an ear, lumbered forward and heaved himself up onto twopaw and loomed over Regaari, who kept staring straight ahead even as his old friend’s vicious muzzle snuffled and sniffed around his ears and throat.

“…Y’know what my problem is?” Daar asked after a painful silence. The question was rhetorical, so Regaari didn’t answer. “I’m too Keeda-fucked loyal to my friends. Damn it, Cousin…”

Regaari flinched. He’d been ready for claws.

“If you an’ Genshi were anybody else, I’d be nailin’ yer pelts to the wall right about now an’ keepin’ you alive so’s you could watch,” Daar snarled. “What am I, Regaari?”

Regaari’s gaze never left the distant, unfocused infinity in front of him. “You’re the Great Father.”

“‘Yer right. An’ what are you, Regaari?”

“I’m a Father of Clan Whitecrest.”

“Does that mean you outrank me, Regaari?”

“No, My Father.”

“You’re fuckin’ right it don’t. Now I gave you an explicit order about not meddlin’ in the affairs of other species. Didn’t I, Regaari?”

“Yes, My Father.”

“And you prompted the Humans to return ‘ta the council an’ bring Kirk with ‘em. That was your scheme… Which meant you went an’ disobeyed my direct order, didn’t you Regaari?”

“Yes, My Father.”

Daar’s muzzle moved the least little bit closer, until his teeth were almost touching Regaari’s throat.

“Are you sorry?” he growled.

This was a test. And Regaari didn’t doubt that his life was on the line. “…No, My Father.”

“Hmph.” Daar sniffed, duck-nodded so shallowly that the movement was almost undetectable, and took a step back. “You think you know better than me.”

That wasn’t a question. Regaari didn’t answer it.

“Dumb ol’ Daar, all thinkin’ with his muscles an’ his dick,” Daar continued. “Too blinded by his Stoneback sensibilities an’ his inflexible code of honor ‘ta take the opportunities that Gao needs. Y’think I’m hidebound. Y’think ‘yer smarter’n me. Y’don’t trust me to lead right, so y’went behind my back and did what you thought was best for our people, against the wishes of the man you bent and bared your neck to and swore to trust with our future.”

Regaari struggled to maintain his bearing, which the Great Father ignored.

“An’ now, you two took a pair o’ really fuckin’ sensitive hairballs o’ problems with the only alliances we have that actually fuckin’ matter, an’ tied ‘em together at the tail! You made our maneuver space way smaller, all ‘fer a short term gain. It never seemed ‘ta occur ‘ta you that maybe I was thinkin’ bigger. It din’t seem ‘ta occur ‘ta you that I can. An’ that’s just fuckin’ insulting.”

He growled and shook out his mane. “I dunno what’s worse, Cousin: that you’re an oathbreaker, or that y’think so little of me.”

He stooped until his nose was almost touching Regaari’s, who was shaking with the effort of keeping his composure. “Look at me.”

Regaari met his gaze… and was sorry. Genuinely, deeply, agonizingly so. This was worse than being scarred or even executed: The look in Daar’s eyes was that of a Brother betrayed by his oldest and closest friend. A quiet, heartfelt keen whined its way out of his chest and no amount of self-control in all the universe could have stopped it.

Daar held his gaze. “…An’ the most fuckedest part is, y’might even have been right about the Council an’ the Humans an’ Kirk. Even Great Fathers can blunder.” A claw prodded Regaari’s chest. “But it’s my job to make those calls, to maybe fuck up. That’s a burden I took so ain’t nobody else would have to, an’ Father’s don’t get ta’ overrule th’ Great Father. You undermined me, Regaari. You. ‘Yer someone I trusted with great office, an’ you decided to flaunt that trust in front of my Champions! This ain’t some petty thing ‘bout tactics an’ situational omission. How could I let this slide, Regaari?! What would happen if my Champions thought they could ever disobey me without consequence?”

Daar heaved a massive sigh and turned away. “…I thought I could trust you.”

He might as well have castrated Regaari where he stood. Regaari’s whole body was crawling with pain and sorrow, but Daar still hadn’t asked him a question or invited him to speak. And right now was not a time to step out of line.

Finally, Daar turned around. He sized Regaari up, sighed again, and then reached up with one paw. His claws delicately snipped off the very tip of Regaari’s right ear, which was the most token, merciful scar he could possibly give. Regaari barely felt it… but he felt the last stab in the gut, which came in the form of an order.

“Get outta my sight… Cousin.”

Date Point: 15y6m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Julian didn’t even get the chance to take his boots off. Hell, he didn’t even get the chance to properly step through the door. He got a double-barrel ballistic hug the moment it opened, and frankly he was so overwhelmed with relief at seeing Allison and Xiù that he forgot how to stand up anyway and sank to his knees so that they all wound up on the floor.

They were safe. He held them both close and fixed that thought in his mind. All three of them, still alive and safe.

“Hey.” Allison was the first to speak. “Say something.”

Julian tried. Honestly he did. He just… couldn’t. “I… You’re… When I heard…”

He gave up and squeezed them so hard they both had to protest and plead for air.

“Bǎobèi… I love you, but you smell horrible,” Xiù told him.

“Didn’t get a chance to shower yet,” he half-grumbled.

“We can tell.” Allison’s dry remark was just… it was perfect. It was home. He laughed and finally got his head somewhere kinda-sorta normal.

“…Christ. They came after all three of us, huh?”

She nodded. “Yeah. And a lot more. Steve Lawrence is dead.”

“You’re shitting me!”

Xiù swatted Julian on the ass. “Upstairs. Shower. Maybe shave, too.”

“Getting rid of me that quick, huh?”

“Julian…” she warned.

“Heh. Yes ma’am.”

Apparently that was exactly the right thing to say, because it looked like Xiù let out some tension too. A broad smile crossed her face. “Good boy. God I’ve missed that!”

Actually, Julian had to admit, the shower felt like a rebirth. He did it properly, scrubbed up, shampooed, did the whole shaving ritual with that special sandalwood shaving foam and the soft brush the girls had got him, brushed his teeth, flossed and mouthwashed, and even applied some moisturizer.

He pulled off his foot and scrubbed that down, too. It was starting to show wear already, he noted dispassionately. Sure, he was rough on it but for what he’d paid, he wasn’t getting his money’s worth. He’d grumble about that later. For now he was clean, in that deep and slightly tingly way that was only achievable after too long spent travelling.

Apparently somebody—Xiù probably—had snuck into the room while he was showering and laid out some warm clothes for him, fresh out of the dryer: an older pair of too-snug jeans and a medium t-shirt. Never mind that Julian found a double extra-large too tight across the shoulders nowadays, she’d laid out a medium.

…Why did they even have a medium? He hadn’t worn anything that small in years. He grinned ruefully, carefully pulled it over his head, somehow managed to squeeze into it, and took a look in the mirror.

…Okay. That was why they had it.

Well, what his spacebabes wanted, his spacebabes got. He went back downstairs with his hair still damp, and got a gentler but no less warm welcome when he reached the kitchen, after the girls had shared a high-five. There was coffee, comfort food and a space at the table.

“I needed that. You were right.”

“Charmer,” Allison kissed him as he sat down.

“Hey?”

“Do you have any idea how sexy the words ‘you’re right’ are?”

“Hah!” Julian grinned and poured himself a coffee. By his own clock he’d been awake for… actually he didn’t know. It had been afternoon back in Canada, here in Folctha it was late evening… probably he shouldn’t have caffeine before bed, but somehow he doubted there’d be sleep anyway. Not at first.

“She’s right, you know,” Xiù nodded.

“Now you’re doing it!” Allison fanned herself with a grin. “No ganging up!”

“Ohh no. This is one case where we’re allowed to, right Julian?”

Julian grinned. “You’re right.”

Allison snorted. “You’re both evil, and I love you for it.”

“Wǒmen yě ài nǐ, Shǎguā.”

“Love you too, dummy.”

Comfortable silence, the sound of relaxation and just… basking in each other’s company for a few minutes. Still. There was an elephant in the room and none of them were chicken. They got around to it just as Julian was finishing his coffee.

“…So what happened?” he asked, setting the empty mug down.

“Five assholes with knives. Literally tried to kill us in broad daylight on the street.” Allison shook her head and stared distantly through the table as she recalled it. “Guess they never figured Xiù would kick their asses.”

Julian raised his eyebrow at Xiù, who shrugged. “It was your gun that made the difference,” she said.

“…Yeah. Kinda wish I hadn’t had to, but…”

Allison’s expression said everything. Slowly, Julian reached out and took her hand. “…One of mine died,” he said.

“…Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“Like you said. Kinda wish I hadn’t had to, but…”

“But I’m glad you did.” They both looked at Xiù, who pulled a face and shrugged. “I know it’s not a nice thing to say, but…”

“I get it,” Julian nodded. “Hoeff talked me through it after. He said the whole thing was their fault, not mine. Not sure how much it helped.”

“…Y’know, it was an APA cell that torched your grampa’s place,” Allison pointed out. “That’s who Alex fell in with. Imagine if we’d been home then and it turned out like this, me shooting one of them in self-defence, and it turned out to be…”

“That’s a what-if.” It was Xiù’s turn to reach across the table and take her hand. “And it didn’t happen that way.”

“Still. The guy I shot had a mom too.”

“Alex wasn’t involved in all this, was he?” Julian asked.

“Nah. He’s on an FBI watchlist or whatever, so the APA ditched him. He’s safe at home with his dad, I checked.”

“That’s good, I guess.”

“It’s a silver lining.” Allison stared into the distance a while longer, then sighed and shrugged. “Hoeff’s right, though. Their fault, not ours. And yeah. I’m glad to still be here.”

“Yeah.”

“Onto happier subjects?” Xiù suggested.

“I guess,” Julian agreed. “Probably wind up talking about it again later, but for now…”

“So what now? I guess Yan and Vemik went home?” Allison asked.

“Yup. Hoeff went with, make sure Daniel and the other scientists are alright. I’ll prob’ly head over there first chance I get, just to check up on ‘em. But I’ma take a couple days off first, get my head sorted out… and I need to get my foot serviced.”

“You know Nofl’s the best man in town for that, right?” Xiù pointed out. She saw his expression and giggled. “I know, I know. But he managed to arrange life-saving surgery for one of the Dauntless crew. He’s alright.”

“…Okay. I’ll go talk to him,” Julian promised. “But only because you vouch for him.”

She smiled at him. He’d really, really missed that smile.

“There’s… something else we need to talk about first,” Allison said, slowly. Her fingers traced a circle around the rim of her coffee mug.

“What?”

“Apparently the law in this town is really, really dumb.”

“How d’you mean?”

She explained. And she was right.

Date Point: 15y6m3w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

“Atwa! Atwa!“”

The little one had learned how to call for his mother while Vemik was gone, and it was the best homecoming Vemik could have asked for. It meant they’d be Naming him, soon.

Too bad the reason he was calling for his mother was because he wasn’t so happy at being held by his father. Oh well. There’d be plenty of time for them to get to know each other.

For now, it was good to be back among his tribe. Earth had been fun, but confusing in more ways than he could count. He’d go over a lot of it with Professor Daniel later on.

Speaking of Professor Daniel… Heff had had a quick, quiet, intense conversation with all the humans over at the bunker camp after they jumped through. It turned into a longer conversation, still quiet but more… the Human word was ‘cerebral.’ Whatever the ‘eggheads’ were chewing over, Heff very obviously ran out of patience with it.

Eventually he stood up and announced “Look. I don’t care what y’all thinka their manifesto. You can pick that shit apart all day, don’t change the fact that they killed folks, an’ this ain’t the first time neither. Fuck ‘em, an’ fuck everything they stand for.”

…And then he’d stalked off to go sit on a log and jam some of that vile ‘dip’ stuff behind his lip and amuse himself by carving some wood.

Vemik and Yan had gone home, back to the village.

It felt good to climb trees again. Vemik hadn’t noticed how tight his shoulders and back had been feeling until finally he got himself up a Ketta and moving from branch to branch. By the time they reached the village he felt half a finger-length taller, and much more comfortable.

They picked up a Werne on the way home, a young solitary bull who’d only just been exiled by his herd. Lone bulls could be canny, but only with experience. Against two skilled hunters, the Werne didn’t stand a chance. Yan scared it, Vemik dropped on it as it fled under his perch, and jammed his knife into the base of its skull. It bucked once, and died instantly.

It was healthy and well-fed too! A fine kill to bring home to the tribe, and to his family.

Now, he was sitting around while the Singer cooked and tried to encourage his son to relax and learn to say “Tawa” for his father. With some success, too. The little one had picked up that his mother didn’t object to this man holding him, and was chewing on the end of his tail while considering Vemik with big, curious eyes.

The Singer, meanwhile, was puzzling over the attack.

“That… doesn’t make sense. They call themselves [Alien Protection] yes?”

“Yes.”

“But… we are the… ‘ aliens’. Why attack you?”

“It all seemed to make sense to Professor Daniel… Tickle!” Vemik fluttered his fingers up the baby’s spine, who wriggled and made a high-pitched trill. He still didn’t have a crest yet, just a downy yellow fuzz. “He says, they see us as traitors to our tribe.”

“…They don’t get to choose that, though.” The Singer scowled and twitched her tail as she added the Werne’s kidneys to the stew. “It’s up to us if you’re a traitor.”

“Heff said they’re crazy. …Tickle!”

“That makes more sense,” she agreed, and trilled softly as the baby grinned at Vemik. “I think maybe Professor and his friends Sky-Think about it too much.”

“That’s what they’re for,” Vemik said. “Can you say ‘Tawa’ for me? Ta-wa?”

The little one stared at him for a moment, then pointed at the Singer. “…Atwa!”

The Singer trilled “Yes, I’m Atwa. And he’s Tawa! Go on!”

“…Atwa!!”

Vemik gave up, but he had a huge smile in place at least. “Have you thought of a name?”

“I though Vemun?”

“Hmm. Vemun u Vemik n… How do you name the child of a Singer?”

“There’s a special name. Song-Child. Didn’t you know that?”

“I was still climbing all over my father when the Old Singer’s children were Given.”

The Singer smiled, and gently plucked the baby out of Vemik’s hands. She rested little Vemun on her hip, and wrapped her tail around to hold the baby snug and secure while leaving her hands free.

“…There’s something Human women can’t do,” Vemik realized. “They have to make a sling, or something like that.”

“I know, Shyow and Awisun told me. They’re strange too. I know they want babies, but they keep talking as if the perfect time to get pregnant is just a season away.”

“I think, they worry about too many things. And they like fucking Jooyun too much!” he trilled.

She trilled too. “He’s nice. Too scrawny, though.”

“Is not! He’s strong!”

“Strong for a human. You’re stronger.”

Vemik grinned toothily, stood up and wrapped her up in a tight hug. “Maybe a little.”

She nipped playfully at his cheek. “But this idea of theirs, of sex without the baby. That’s very strange. They use powerful sky-medicine to make it happen, too.”

“Well…” Vemik thought. “I suppose. They like to fuck just like we do. But they are very many Humans. Hands of hands of hands of hands and more than that! And they don’t lose babies young anymore, not mostly.”

The Singer glanced down at her second child, who was cuddling into her side, and sighed. “…That sounds nice.”

Vemik suddenly didn’t know what to say, but he did know what to do. He wrapped his tail tightly around Singer and baby, and hugged them to himself even tighter.

“…Maybe I’ll talk to Professor Daniel about this Vack-Seen magic.”

“Vack-seen? What’s that?”

“I heard about it on Earth. They argue about it, but from what I heard, they find whatever evil spirit makes a sickness, almost kill it, and somehow…use that to teach your body how to fight it off. I think. But they’ve stopped very many evil sicknesses that way. One like the water-sickness, too.”

“…That sounds like powerful magic. I think Professor Daniel would say we aren’t ready for it.”

“Maybe. Maybe we aren’t, because think of what would happen if suddenly babies didn’t die! There would be so many of us so fast!”

She nodded. “I think though, this would be something he’d have a hard time saying no to. He’s a kind man, he won’t be happy saying that babies have to die.”

“The Humans would say yes, I think. And…godshit.” Vemik looked at Singer apologetically, “I think I just burdened you with something.”

“With what? Of knowing that things could be better?” She shook her head. “That gives me hope! Especially if you can get him to share it.”

“And what if I can’t? Could you be happy, knowing medicine like that is out there but your baby will never be given it?”

The Singer glanced down at her son again, and went very still and distant for a few heartbeats.

“…I’ll… just have to pray,” she said eventually.

Date Point: 15y6m3w1d AV
Whitecrest Clan Enclave, Wi Kao City, Gao

“You’re stepping down?”

Genshi had called a meeting of the Fathers. His face wasn’t healing well at all: apparently he’d forbid himself the use of cosmetic surgery or regenerative medicines.

The logic, when he’d explained it, was flawless. Everybody knew what had happened: there was no sense in hiding it and every sense in wearing his scars as a reminder. Daar had in fact been very, very merciful by the standards of Great Fathers. Showing any disrespect for that esteem would have been…unwise.

“The Champion of this Clan can’t be in the position I am now. He needs the Great Father’s ear and trust. He needs to stand at the high table and not be an object of suspicion. I’ve squandered that.”

“May I ask why?” Father Garaaf asked.

Garaaf’s return had been big news among the Clan, and it was a testament to what he’d endured that Genshi was only the second most scarred Father in the room. Those who’d known Garaaf before his capture claimed he was more solemn now, less playful. All Regaari knew was that, now that Garaaf had a cybernetic eye in place and had thus regained the full use of all his faculties, it’d be a foolish ‘Crest who chose to tangle with the old man. Anybody who could survive Hunters like that had earned a healthy measure of respect.

Genshi’s gaze met Regaari’s. “It was… a moment of enthusiasm and righteousness. And maybe a little rebellion too. All the Clans are groaning under the weight of the Great Father, all the Clans want a little more of the freedom and power we once had. To my shame, I was the first to crumble under that pressure.”

“The Clan gave up those freedoms and powers willingly,” Garaaf pointed out. He hadn’t been around when the Clans bent the knee, of course. Regaari got the impression he didn’t approve, nor was he particularly happy about the Great Father. Of course, nobody was. Especially the Great Father.

“Yes. A cub raided the pantry, and Mother saw.”

Regaari clenched his teeth. His feelings were rather different to Genshi’s, who’d effectively just declared that he was less sorry about what they’d done than he was about getting caught. Which was a classic Whitecrest attitude, he had to admit, but…

…Balls. Daar knew. That was why he’d nearly mauled Genshi to death, and spared Regaari. He could smell the difference between embarrassment and shame. The weight of just how utterly he’d underestimated his best friend grew unbearable.

“Sometimes Mother knows best, Champion. With respect.”

Genshi stared at him and flicked the stub of his ear. It must have pulled at the suture, because he winced. “Father. Only Father, now. We must decide on a new Champion, and…I think I have the perfect candidate.”

It wasn’t Regaari. A few weeks ago it might have been, but Regaari was in no doubt now that his association with this fiasco meant that the rank of Champion would never be his… which was acceptable. He no longer wanted it.

“Who?” Garaaf asked.

“Someone the Great Father will appreciate, and someone nobody would ever expect. It will involve depriving the HEAT of a fine Brother, however…”

Date Point: 15y6m3w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

For once, Xiù didn’t wake up first.

Usually, she was the first one up. It let her take a shower and sort her hair out, do some yoga and get started on breakfast while Allison and Julian groaned, stretched and complained their way out of bed.

Today, though… well, she was tired. It had been a long and exhausting night, in the best ways. And she had the fortune to just float gently back into consciousness: no full bladder, no disruptive dream. Just muscular warmth and soft breathing next to her, and a strong arm under her head, down her back and resting lightly on her hip.

She smiled and relaxed into him, and fell asleep again.

Ramsey and Tristan woke her up some time later, rattling around downstairs and bickering like brothers. When she raised her head, Julian was still there but Allison wasn’t and that was weird. Usually she was the last of them to rise.

Levering herself up to look at the time, she woke Julian who grumbled a sleepy good morning and pulled her in for a kiss.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You gonna let me up?” Xiù asked.

“Mmm… Nah.” He pulled her gently up onto his chest and nuzzled the top of her head. “You make a good teddy bear.”

“And you make a good mattress,” Xiù tapped him on the nose. “But it’s getting late.”

“It’s Saturday,” Julian woke up a little more and frowned. “…’Least, I think it’s Saturday.”

“Friday. You’ve got jump lag.”

“…Right.” He grumbled, pulled her into a brief but tender kiss, and flopped over. “I gotta run errands anyway.”

“Your foot?”

“…After I do the other things, yes.”

“Okay.” Xiù sat up and stretched. “…Wonder where Al is.”

“She got up a while back. Think she said something about… research?” Julian frowned, then shrugged, literally rolled out of bed and thumped to the floor where he attended to his morning stretch. Xiù took a moment to admire him, then decided it was time to brush her teeth. After breakfast, actually. She was hungry and they hadn’t really eaten dinner last night, after all. She threw on some pajamas—kept purely because she wasn’t about to wander around the house naked with two young boys at home—and grabbed her hairbrush to do the minimum maintenance on her hair as she headed downstairs.

She found Ramsey and Tristan in the kitchen, squabbling over which cartoon superhero could beat which other cartoon superhero in a fight. Boys.

“Good morning Xiù!”

“Morning!”

“Morning,” she greeted them with a tired smile and went fridge-diving. She found eggs and smoked salmon: perfect. “Where’s Allison?”

Ramsey answered, “She’s out in the yard, just walking around over and over.”

“I think she’s measuring it,” Tristan added helpfully.

“Did she say why?” Xiù asked, digging in a drawer for the ramekins. She was in the mood for poached eggs today.

“Nah.”

Xiù glanced out the window. Sure enough, Allison was patrolling the lawn, aiming her phone at the edges of their property. She looked completely engrossed in her work.

Julian hadn’t bothered to dress beyond throwing on some pajama shorts and his foot. It was a good look for him, frankly; Xiù wasn’t about to complain. He scratched and yawned his way down the stairs like a vaguely grumbly bear, and peered at the kids.

“…‘Sup.”

“You’re home!” Tristan exclaimed. Both the boys were a little in awe of him, but Tristan in particular seemed to be dangerously close to hero-worship.

“I sure am–OOF! Hi!” They’d both charged over and tackled him around the torso. He in turn picked them up and smothered them in a very fatherly type of hug.

That was an even better look on him.

Xiù left him to field the inevitable barrage of questions and slipped outside to get Allison’s attention. It wasn’t difficult: from the looks of things, Allison was almost done with her measurements anyway.

“…Morning.”

“Hey.”

“I guess you were pretty serious about that wall, huh?”

Allison nodded. That had been one of a long line of things they’d discussed last night. A long line, and a lot of second-guessing and hard questions. Their security, their future, their lives… Whether or not to give Folctha a big middle finger and head over to Franklin instead, or even Nouveau Acadia.

They hadn’t settled on anything concrete, and Xiù’s hope was that they’d stay. Sure, the three of them were independently wealthy and could go wherever they pleased if they wanted to… but she wanted to have roots again. She’d really started to think of Folctha as home, she had the Commune in the alien quarter, she knew some of the locals, she had favourite local businesses…

Sure, being attacked on the street had shaken her. But something in her belly said that she would feel like their attackers had beaten them if they up and left.

Allison just shrugged. “It’s something to focus on. Something we can do, y’know?”

“Admit it, you just want an excuse to have Julian doing manual labor.”

Allison laughed. “…Maybe. You making breakfast?”

“Yeah. Also, Julian’s hanging out with the boys and it’s the cutest thing ever. You need to come see it.”

“Oh, that’s dangerous. There might be an ovarysplosion.”

“Yeah, we really need to figure out that whole family thing,” Xiù nodded.

“After we get the place safe,” Allison asserted. “Or… y’know, decide what we’re gonna do.”

“…Come on.”

Back inside, Julian was not only being domestic, he was being downright fatherly and mentoring the boys in how to cook bacon. Which didn’t sound that impressive except that Xiù knew for a fact that neither of them knew how to cook a thing. Both their parents were of the mindset that said a kitchen was for women, and men had no business straying anywhere near one.

And yet, there was Julian, big, bare-chested and more of a man than…God, basically anyone. If he could cook bacon whenever he wanted, why couldn’t they?

“And y’know what fellas? All this bacon fat? Save it! You can do all sorts of things with it. I like to fry eggs but Xiù already poached some…toast! We can make toast! And Hollandaise? Xiù?”

Xiù waved a hand. “Go ahead. Dazzle us.”

“Uh…okay,” he paused, suddenly a bit nervous. “So, if I remember we basically make some mayo except with melted butter instead of oil, and…”

“What if we get it wrong?” Ramsey asked.

“Eh. Who cares? Better than wimping out.”

Allison and Xiù glanced at each other, and by unspoken psychic communion agreed to get out of his way and let him work. They set the table instead.

He managed a pretty decent Hollandaise, though it took some effort on Xiù’s part not to get up and do it the right way. He just used a stick blender and a tall glass, which wasn’t how it was done at all!

It turned out to be a pretty good breakfast, especially considering the bacon was done by a boy who’d never cooked anything before. Xiù handled the dishes while Allison took Tristan and Ramsey to school and herself to work, and then found herself alone again when Julian kissed her on the neck and went to do his promised chores.

She checked the door was locked. And the windows. Happy that the place was secure, she retired to their study, and found the leftovers of Allison’s research still up on the monitor.

She’d been looking at options for beefing up their home security, local building contractors, and also at properties for sale in the other colonies.

…Which actually wasn’t a stupid idea anyway, come to think of it. People were moving to Cimbrean all the time, and a landlord with a few properties in the other colonies might stand to make a comfortable income off the rent. Somebody with enough money could even be a property developer.

She picked up where Allison had left off. After all…

…Why not?

Date Point: 15y6m3w1d AV
Whitecrest Clan Enclave, Wi Kao City, Gao

Brother Thurrsto (“Carebear”) of Clan Whitecrest

“…You’re not serious. You can’t be! I… Champion?”

Being summoned back to Gao was one thing, but this? Thurrsto had never even met half the Fathers in the hall, let alone imagined they’d be present specifically to witness… this.

Just what the hell had happened between Genshi, Regaari and the Great Father? Everyone had known Regaari was a shoo-in for Genshi’s successor but now here they were offering it to…

Well, to him. The ugly misfit.

Genshi’s expression, behind the healing wounds, was earnest. “If you want it. What’s your objection?”

“I… look at me!” Thurrsto indicated himself with a paw, from tail to tip. “ I’m no graceful, suave operator like you or Regaari! I’m just a big ‘ol working class male trapped in a good silver coat!”

“Balls,” Regaari chided him. “Firstly, you’ve got a natural crest that matches Genshi’s, so you’re wrong in the first instance. Secondly, Genshi himself has never been a completely traditional example of a Whitecrest, nor am I these days. Thirdly, you’re a Whitecrest and you earned it, just like Fiin earned being a Stoneback. This isn’t a time to worry about too-pretty faces and breed conformation, Brother, this is a time to worry about who’s right for the job.”

“And you think that’s me.”

“If you stopped fretting and thought about it, you’d agree,” Genshi said. “Go ahead, spell it out. Why would we pick you?”

Okay. Time to think. Time to be calm, rational. Sound the waters, sit between light and dark and sift truth from all the hundreds of little fictions and delusions everybody told themselves every day…

…Fuck.

“Look, I won’t lie. I know I’m competent. I know I’m smart, I know I’m strong like a brownie. I’m a good medic, a passable spymaster, an occasional spy myself…”

“Occasional?” Regaari asked. “You’re still selling yourself short. Remember that smuggling operation in Duen Gin? You infiltrated that workhouse and maintained your cover for nearly two years. Nobody else could have done that but you. The Clanless adopted you as one of their own, and they never figured out who the snitch was. Even to this day, they still argue over it!”

“…And they’re still an operating source network, too,” Father Mizhra supplied. He was one of the Clan’s most important spymasters, particularly when it came to smuggling. His word carried weight.

“…They are, huh?” That was news to Thurrsto. He’d tried to put that particular operation behind him: he’d made friends in that workhouse, good friends. Deep cover like that could wrench at a ‘Crest and leave him confused about where his loyalties really lay.

“So tell me. Is there any pressing reason you can think of why you shouldn’t be my successor?” Genshi asked.

Thurrsto had never considered himself as Champion. Growing up in a Clan could be a vicious thing, and if there was anything about it that haunted him, it was that he was different. He knew it right from the outset. He was blamed for every fight that broke out, even if he couldn’t conceivably have started it. He had to work harder to impress everyone at every step of the way. Nothing came easy, especially mating. None of that mattered. He knew, before his First Rite, right in his very soul that he was Whitecrest, and nothing in the world would have stopped him.

…And now, he could be the pinnacle of his Clan. The ember of ambition that had driven him the whole way, sometimes flickering but never failing, roared up into a full-blown inferno.

“…No,” he said. “And there are pressing reasons I can think of why I should.”

Genshi chittered, then sprang back into a fighting stance.

“Then take it.”

There was a fight. A vicious one, which left Genshi even more broken and scarred. It wasn’t quick or easy—the old man was wily, fast and experienced—but in the end, Thurrsto stood astride his mentor and former Champion, unscarred and heaving for breath.

“I claim the Clan.” It was an old formula, but every cub knew the words. “Do any Challenge me?”

None did.

Slowly, Genshi heaved himself to his knees, turned his head and exposed his throat. “I submit.”

“You may keep your life, Father.” Thurrsto stooped and helped Father Genshi stagger to his feet. “Now let’s see to those wounds.”

Genshi chittered, then groaned. He’d had a rough few days.

“Yes, my Champion,” he said.

Date Point: 15y6m3w1d AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Nofl

Nofl wasn’t an idiot. He prided himself on it. Which was why, despite living among Humans on what was a de facto Human core world even though Cimbrean was still spoken of as a colony, he took precautions. Humans were deathworlders, and they could be… unstable. A few forcefield emitters hadn’t been expensive, and the ability to put his lab on lockdown when the gangs of armed men started roaming the streets had been invaluable.

Delivering an electric shock through the forcefield to persuade them to find an easier target had been especially satisfying.

The violence had changed things, however. People were more cautious at the moment, they glanced furtively around and conducted their business as though they were rushing to get everything done before the next air raid. It had all robbed him of some of the more enjoyable habits in his daily routine.

No matter! He took the opportunity to follow Bozo around Folctha and see what exactly it was the massive canid did with his days.

As it turned out, the dog’s main activities were lots of sniffing around, urinating on things, and investigating friendly strangers to see if they had any food… but there was a method to it, too. There was much visiting of what might best be termed his “friends.” It seemed ridiculous to say, but Bozo and his pups seemed to understand that something was wrong, and were doing their canine best to help.

It was strange that nobody considered him a threat, despite that he was one of the more dangerous beings roaming the streets. In fact, as Nofl was heading back to his lab, Bozo decided to follow along at a respectful distance, constantly on the prowl and alert for…threats, presumably. Apparently Nofl was in need of protection. He wasn’t about to argue with Bozo.

It was therefore a bit distressing when Bozo suddenly issued one of his skull-rattling barks, then thundered off down the block and around the corner at a frankly alarming speed. When Nofl eventually caught up, he found Julian Esticitty of all people sitting cross-legged on the lab’s front steps, wrestling with a manically excited Bozo and surrounded by a heap of shopping bags. Goodness!

Nofl hadn’t recognised the man on their first meeting, but he could hardly be blamed for that. At that point, Etsicitty hadn’t been remotely as famous as he was now and all Nofl had seen had been a rather shoddy prosthetic foot attached to a man who deserved much better.

Hopefully he’d found an upgrade since then, but he was wearing a pair of boots today and it was impossible to tell.

“…Well! This is an unexpected pleasure!”

“Uh… yeah. I was wondering if we could talk?” Julian scratched at the back of his head.

“I’d love to, dear. We really did get off on the wrong foot last time… as it were, hmm?”

The big man chuckled in a reassuringly soft tone and shook his head. “Gabe was right, you are a scandalous fella, aren’t you?”

“Only when people are scandalized,” Nofl retorted primly, and shut down his lab’s forcefield. “I hope you didn’t get shocked?”

“Unlike some fellas, I can read warning signs. Though if I were you, I’d use the standard human signs too. The little blue Dominion standard icons don’t mean much to the unaware.”

“Well, the signs aren’t there for Humans, darling. The shock won’t really harm you, but it might badly jangle anybody else’s nerves… come in! Come in!”

Julian shrugged, easily gathered all his shopping together, and shouldered himself somewhat sideways through the door.

“So to what do I owe the pleasure? Don’t tell me you finally got bored of that lump of plastic some… hack bolted to your leg?”

“Eh, I replaced that a while ago with something much nicer…here.” He sat down, pulled off his left boot and showed it off.

Nofl inspected it. It was, he had to agree, a considerable improvement. Far from perfect of course, but at least it was marginally capable of keeping up with a Human’s needs, especially a serious physical specimen like Julian.

“I recognize that work. I must ask, how did you get him to calm down, dear?”

“I… asked nicely?”

“…Fascinating.” Nofl whipped a diagnostic wand out of its drawer and ran it over the prosthetic. “Oh…dear me. The composite bones all have fractures, two of the metatarsals are more glue than composite at this point, the synthetic calluses are wearing down, and there’s even some over-stress in the artificial musculature. Julian dear, what have you been doing? Wrestling gorillas?”

“Uh… Stuff. Mostly lifting, and mentoring with the Ten’Gewek.”

“Wrestling gorillas indeed. Oh no, no, no this can’t keep up with you at all. Not unless you want to run it through a complete maintenance cycle every fortnight.”

“Yeah. On that note, I went to the Applied Medtronics office just before I came here. Do you know how much they wanted to charge for repairs!?”

“Your first-born child and a majority share in your business ventures, no doubt. I’d call them cowboys, but I rather fear the hat would suit them… Oh, look at the extensor muscles. They’ve completely lost their elasticity!”

Julian chuckled again. “Scandalous! But you’re trying too hard with the joke, little fella. Lay it on a little thinner next time!”

“See! This is what I want! Why can nobody else play along?”

“I dunno…maybe I’m just used to weird in my life.”

This had proved to be an interesting spice on the daily routine! Nofl finished his interrogation of the foot’s internal structure and straightened up.

“Well. You have two options, but you already rejected one of them. I presume your feelings on having a clone foot regrown and surgically attached are unchanged?”

“Well…I ain’t straight out rejected it, but I’m still…fuck, I’ll admit I’m uncomfortable with it. But I also can’t afford to pay fifty thousand pounds every time something goes wrong.”

“You, my dear old thing, need a foot that can heal itself.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Julian waved a hand. “I get the argument, I believe it, too. It’s just…”

“Then we’ll just have to make you a synthetic foot that can heal. Lucky for you, I’ve been working on exactly that. I will caution you, however, that is considerably more experimental than a properly cloned foot. And the expense argument wouldn’t be much reduced.”

Julian nodded solemnly and stood up again now that Nofl was done with his inspection. “…Yeah. Okay. Here’s my thing.” He started pacing around the room. “I’m…fuck. Okay. I’ve never said this to anyone besides my girlfriends. Are we like, uh, doctor and patient now?”

“My dear old thing, if you request it then I will adhere to medical confidentiality from here on out,” Nofl promised him. “What’s the problem?” he asked, after Julian had nodded.

“I’m, uh…well, I’m not too keen on going under anesthetic. When I was, uh, captured the Corti who took me…”

He trailed off. That was clearly a topic that would be unwise to broach, so instead Nofl attempted to be reassuring instead.

“…Dear me, we wouldn’t have to render you unconscious! No, no, no.” Nofl skipped over to his console and called up the relevant files.

“…Really? But, isn’t this, like, major surgery?”

“A simple stick-and-paste job. Human biology responds amazingly well to nails and glue, never mind the tools at my disposal.”

“But still… kind of a big deal, right?”

“Oh goodness no, far from it: Human orthopaedic surgeons carry out much more invasive procedures all the time under local anesthesia. No, the worst you’d suffer is a temporarily heightened sensitivity to touch and pain. And a month on regenerative medicine to ensure all is well, of course. But that’s very standard at this point. It’s won FDA provisional approval too!”

“Aren’t we under British jurisdiction here? I don’t think the FDA applies.”

“Yes, dear, the Brits approved it ages ago. Winning FDA approval, however, is apparently an exercise in dark political wizardry. My silver banner ‘betters’ love that game so much that I prefer not to spoil their fun by poking my nose in.”

“How kind of you,” Julian deadpanned.

“Especially seeing as I’d probably be much better at it than they are.” Nofl imitated a grin for his patient’s benefit and then called up his notes on the procedure. “There!”

“…Right. So, uh…you promise I’ll be awake? In control?”

“Yes, dear. I will need to paralyze your leg for a few moments at the most critical part, but we can leave the rest free and clear. Really, the most difficult part will be growing the foot in the first place. That will take me an hour or so.”

“…Growing a whole goddamn foot in an hour is the difficult part?”

“Oh my, yes! We need to use the causal accelerator cabinet for that, and iterate a few dozen times at once to ensure all is well. I will give you nothing less than a perfect foot!”

“…The hell do you do with the spares?”

“Incineration of the cell cultures. There shouldn’t be any spare actual feet; there’s no point in growing an entire foot just to throw it away after all!”

Julian’s expression was difficult to read. He continued to pace the room, and for whatever reason this bout of nervous ambulation attracted Bozo’s attention, who planted himself firmly in the middle of the room and wagged his tail reassuringly.

“What…would this cost me?”

“For you? Cost and time. The largest part is the energy bill for the causal accelerator which is… er, prodigious, but the rest of it is vat nutrients and suchlike. All quite inexpensive. I will need a tissue sample, however.”

Julian continued to pace back and forth, clearly conflicted. Nofl wouldn’t pretend to precisely understand the psychology involved—Humans were weird in some important ways—but he also knew better than to interrupt.

“…Okay. Let’s do this before I chicken out.”

Nofl clapped happily and whipped out the disclosure forms. “Excellent! Please give these a quick read…a thumbprint there…yes, yes, standard disclosure…now just a teensy biopsy…”

From there, things progressed efficiently. In just over an hour, the foot was grown and half an hour after that it had been attached, tested, and the nerve block removed. Julian started on his first round of Cruezzir-Derivative to ensure his neural functioning fully adapted to the sudden reappearance of a proper foot and then… took his first step.

The next few minutes were spent much like Gabriel had; the big man bounced and prowled about the lab, his expression a mixture of puzzled and delighted wonder at his newfound wholeness.

“Christ, I hadn’t realized how much my foot was limiting me! This is great, it’s–OW!”

“Careful, dear! Your foot’s nerves will be hypersensitive for at least the next day or two. This is why you must get plenty of activity, and you must take the full course of the medicine! Take full advantage of physiotherapy while you’re on the medicine, too. Your body will have undoubtedly been compensating for the crime that befell your foot.”

Julian nodded and sat down to examine Nofl’s handiwork. There was a very visible discontinuity where his tan just ended, but no visible seam. Nofl double-checked his creation and noted with gratification that the immune response was effectively nil. The only negative effect the patient was suffering was a minor—very minor—dip in blood pressure. Hardly surprising considering Nofl had just attached a whole appendage to his circulatory system.

Julian seemed struck with a thoughtful expression, suddenly. “Why didn’t you match the skin tone?”

Nofl clapped excitedly. He loved an astute patient. “For your benefit, dear! Humans take body sanctity very seriously. You especially! In time, the tan will match with the rest of you, and that will give you time to adjust to the reality of it.”

“…Funny, you’ve got a better bedside manner than a lot of human doctors.”

“Well, if I must be honest it is a learned response, but I thank you for the compliment. Actually,” Nofl realized, “I do think that, in the interests of full disclosure, I should share something with you that I have recently learned.”

“Hmm?”

“I… may have recently come into possession of a full archive of every ‘zoological’ study ever carried out on human abductees, sanctioned or otherwise. Hypothesis, experimental method, outcome… everything.”

One of the most complex emotions to read on a Human had to be trepidation. On Julian, however, it was as easy to read as a Primary Mushroom was to eat. He froze and gave first Nofl then the computer terminal in the corner a deeply wary look.

“…You did, huh? …Just how the hell am I supposed to feel about that?”

“I have been led to believe the correct answer for your kind is something like ‘uneasy.’”

“…Yeah.”

Well, he was hardly a conversationalist. “In any case, I felt you should know the full details of the…I hesitate to call it a ‘program of study’ that led to your capture and exile…anyway.” Nofl picked up a tablet and summoned up the files. “They’re all on this.”

“Well…I hate to ask, but I gotta admit I’m curious. What was the hypothesis of the experiment?”

Nofl couldn’t restrain his delight. “Honey! You’re full of excellent questions! The hypothesis was this: that not even an ideal Human could survive on Nightmare for long, and therefore even your species would one day want our products and services. Or so it is written in the reporting. In any case, that ideal Human ended up being you. Please take no offense, but the idiot should at least be given credit for doing something right in this whole mess. Everything else was…Urgh! The gauche fool wrote the research proposal more like a sales pitch than anything else, dear oh dear…”

Julian allowed a small, satisfied grin to crawl up the side of his mouth. “I take it I disproved his hypothesis, then.”

“Hers, and yes. She never lived to see her humiliation, though.”

“Oh?”

“Improper containment procedures with another ‘sample.’ Bacterial infection. Staphylococcus, oh dear.”

“…Oh, jeez.”

“Indeed.”

“Okay,” Julian shook his head like Humans seemed to do to clear their thoughts, and sent his wild hair flailing atop his skull. Hypnotic to watch, really. “So, why tell me all this? Why now?”

“Trust, dear. It seems my newfound mission is to build trust between our species. That, and…hell!” He flapped his hands in exasperation. “It felt like the right thing to do!”

“Really?”

“I am at the bottom of the societal heap for a reason, darling. I am a steel banner, forbidden to breed. For all my other exceptional qualities, I am far too emotional. Too… imbued with moral agency.”

“Wait. Seriously? Your species breeds against that?”

“Amorality is a powerful force. Do you have any idea what kind of great and awesome things can be done by a population that isn’t burdened with concerns like good and evil?”

Julian looked thoughtful again. “I reckon I do, little fella. Have you studied the Nazis? And the Khmer Rouge? The Great Leap Forward? And…just, all of the things where Stalin was involved?”

“Oh yes. Stalin would have made a very excellent Corti, if not for a… small flaw in his sense of enlightened self-interest. He always held that being feared is better than being loved, without realizing that it’s quite possible to achieve both.”

“See, that’s the thing,” Julian massaged his foot slightly disbelievingly, then stood up to yet again prowl and pace. “I always liked history, yeah? And I used to get into these really stupid arguments with one of my buddies when we were done playing basketball or whatever. He was convinced it was Hitler…and it’s hard to argue that. But for my money, I always thought the most evil man in history was probably Stalin. Not Hitler or the others. Stalin.”

“How do you figure?”

“Hitler was crazy. I don’t know how much it can be said he was fully in control of himself. Stalin, though, that motherfucker knew exactly what he was doing. He was completely, coldly sane. And if I were you, I’d keep that comparison with Stalin to yourself.”

“I’m sure I did mention the flaw that would have made him a terrible Corti instead.”

“People won’t really key in on that, fella. All you gotta do is say ‘Stalin’ and the conversation’s over.’

Nofl sighed. “You’re right of course, darling. I can count on one… hah, one foot, how many people I know who really and truly listen.”

“Right,” Julian sighed. “Well. I’ll…give this a read. And as far as physiotherapy, do you have anyone specific in mind?”

“Warhorse, of course. I assume you two are still friends?”

“…This is going to hurt, isn’t it.”

“Yes. But the rewards should be ample. A full month, Julian! Take advantage!”

“…Right.” Julian had all the stoic resignation of a condemned man. “Anyway. I’ll see him about this, get my errands taken care of and stuff. I better get going.”

“Don’t forget your old foot.”

“…Jeez.” Julian picked it up and considered it. “I was walking around on this two hours ago.”

It wasn’t complete, of course: part of the surgery had been removing the attachment anchored in his tibia, which needed to be properly disposed of as medical waste and the interface cleaned up as best as could be managed. There was actually quite a lot of (admittedly well and judiciously placed) titanium still inside his leg and would be for the rest of his life. Replacing the entire tibia would have been more satisfactory, but somehow Nofl understood Julian would never agree to having his leg flayed open to the calf and reconstructed. Oh well.

“Things have come a long way in the last ten years.”

“Kinda hits you in the head sometimes.” Julian bounced tentatively on his new foot one last time, winced as the hypersensitive nerve endings complained at him, then pulled his boot on and wiggled his foot in it, sighing happily. “…Thank you.”

“It should be perfect. But come back here at the first hint of anything wrong, hmm?” Nofl smiled. “Oh! And you should probably inform your doctor, too. I daresay they’ll be delighted to test the limits of their clinical codes.”

“I’ll do that.”

Nofl watched his handiwork walk out the door with considerable satisfaction, then decided he should probably keep his own record-keeping in order. He was, technically one of Folctha’s medical institutions after all. And he was now curious to see if Human database codes could cover a scenario like this.

As it turned out, they could. It took him a few minutes to find the appropriate entry in the SNOMED library, but when he did it elicted a chuckle.

Feeling thoroughly pleased with himself and with life in general, he carefully made a record in Julian Etsicitty’s notes.

“SCTID 178841003: Complex reconstruction operation on hand and foot”

In other words, a job well done.

Date Point: 15y6m3w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

The front door beeped, unlocked, closed again, and Julian’s voice floated through from the kitchen, doing his awful best at some Mandarin. “Wo hui lai le!”

Xiù giggled. It made her heart melt that they tried, and that was more than enough to forgive the mangled pronunciation. “Hey!”

There was the sound of a lot of bags being dumped on the breakfast bar, and Julian sauntered through the living room. “How was that?” he asked.

“Terrible,” she grinned over her shoulder at him. “I didn’t know you knew that one!”

“Al and I practice when you’re not around.” He kissed her neck and draped himself heavily over her from behind. “…Properties in Franklin? I thought you didn’t want to leave?”

“Right now, plots and homes over there are really cheap. If we buy them up and develop them then we can charge rent, maybe sell them when they’re worth twice as much…” Xiù explained. “And if you and Al decide that you don’t wanna stay here, well… we’ll have somewhere to live.”

“Makes sense, I guess.” Julian sat down in the reading chair. “I met Nofl. Interestin’ fella.”

“He’s alright, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. Had him take a look at my foot.”

Xiù nodded distractedly. There was a big parcel of land up for sale in the south of Franklin, and she was trying to figure out if buying it up and building houses, or just buying existing properties was the better route. “All better?”

“Best it’s been in years.”

“That’s good…” Xiù agreed vaguely.

She clicked through her work for a few seconds longer and then Julian kicked his legs out and dropped his bare, flesh-and-blood, left foot in her lap. She stared down at it.

“…Wh-? You got it regrown?!” She couldn’t believe it. He’d always been dead-set against having anything other than his prosthetic.

He nodded. “Took an hour, more or less.”’

“Why?!”

“Well…because I love you. I mean, isn’t this what you were hoping for?”

“No, I–! I mean yes, but… I thought you always hated the idea?”

“I mean…I did. Do. But, uh, I trust you. And my friends, and…well, spending all that money every few months woulda been stupid…and I guess I’m pretty rough on myself with work…so I guess-Yah!” Xiù had reached down to touch it and he flinched. “That tickles!”

“Sorry!”

He laughed sheepishly and rubbed it. “It’s a bit sensitive right now. Also, no calluses. So a big part of the next month is gonna be me fixing that. Lots of trail jogging I think. I’m on that magic regenerative medicine too, just to make sure nothing goes wrong. So…I’ll be home on convalescent leave.”

“The whole time? What about Akyawentuo?”

“Shit, I might just need a whole month to figure out how to explain cloning to Vemik anyway. And I can still visit quick. Ooh! Maybe we can start sending letters! I should email the professor and see if his writing is good enough!”

“Wow. Having some company around the house for a change. That sounds… really nice, actually.”

“I’ll be busy, but…yeah.” He gave her a slightly concerned look. “…Are you feeling a bit neglected, baobei?”

Xiù sighed and shrugged. “No, but… Al goes to work, the boys go to school, you go and do cavemonkey stuff or training work with the SOR… I have the Commune and Yulna and everything, but sometimes I miss being cooped up in a tiny box with the two of you every day. I mean, I like that I have more elbow room now, but I got used to you always being in arm’s reach.”

On a whim, she climbed out of the office chair and into his lap, sideways. He pulled her close, they kissed, and she snuggled into his chest.

“See?” she said. “Nice.”

“Heh. Point made.”

“…I kinda like being the homemaker, though. So don’t worry about that.”

He squeezed her. “You sure?”

“Yeah! It’s relaxing.” She glanced down at the bandage on her arm. “…Mostly. What the hell is up with my life? Can’t I go one year without somebody or something trying to abduct me or kill me?”

“Five, in stasis.”

Xiù couldn’t help it. A smile forced its way onto her face. “…Fine. Five in stasis. But apart from that…” She gave him a mock glare.

“We live in interesting times. And I guess we’re interesting people.” Julian shrugged. “You did want to be famous.”

“Hmm. Be careful what you wish for, eh?”

“A little less stabbing and stuff would be nice though, yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Julian took her hand and stroked a finger along her arm, next to the bandage. “…I hate seeing you get hurt.”

“I’ve had worse.”

He squeezed her. “I hate that, too… actually, I have a question.”

“What?”

“Nofl could probably fix your scars.”

Xiù hadn’t thought of that. But he was right. If he could bolt on a functioning foot in an hour, then smoothing out all her scars would have to be pretty trivial. The mangled marks that Hunter had left on her arm, her split eyebrow, the tiny nick on her throat where Zane had pressed a blade to it… She could be rid of it all.

And a few years ago, maybe she’d have jumped at the chance.

“…Yeah, he probably could. But they don’t hurt, and they’re part of me now. I mean, fixing this–” she tickled his foot and he squirmed, “–is one thing. Your foot was slowing you down. But these? I don’t know. Do you think they make me ugly?”

“Baobei, you couldn’t be ugly if you were wearing a muddy potato sack.”

That brought a happy glow to her face and she kissed him again. “Smooth.”

“I have my moments,” he smiled. “And actually, I like your scars. I just thought you don’t.”

“…I’ll keep them,” Xiù decided.

“There’s that confidence I like.” He gave her a kiss, then deepened it. “Mm! Hmm… So we have the house all to ourselves…”

“…Yeah we do.” Xiù turned, sat up in his lap and draped her arms over his shoulders. “Got something in mind?”

His finger trailed up her arm, along her jawbone and then down until it hooked in the neckline of her top. “Oh, I got lotsa things in mind.”

Xiù grinned, kissed his nose, and then reached over to push the door closed, sealing them off in a private, intimate little space.

“Okay then,” she said. “Show me.”

He was entirely happy to oblige.

Date Point: 15y7m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Jamie was the first of the Dauntless crew to ship out back to Earth. Cook was long gone, of course, having been committed to a psychiatric hospital within only a day or two of their return, but for the rest of them…

There’d been a lot of legal bullshit to handle. All of them were legally dead, after all. Then there’d been the terror attack, which hadn’t reached them in their guest quarters on the military base but it had shaken things up and locked them down.

Finally, a week after the attacks, Ray was enjoying her first day of freedom. And she was using it to say goodbye to a friend and then visit a grieving family.

It was an emotional farewell. Jamie was pretty adamant that he planned to live the rest of his days quietly, surrounded by family, and staying as far away from the Byron Group as he possibly could. Moses Byron had accepted the criticism with a quiet nod.

Holly was talking about taking Vows. Ray didn’t know if she’d actually go for it, but she seemed pretty serious. And as for Spears…

Spears was weighing up a job offer from Byron. That had driven a bit of a wedge between him and Jamie, who blamed Byron for everything they’d gone through, and thus for the deaths of Thomas Berry and Pete Conley. There hadn’t been any recrimination, exactly, but it was clear both men were aware of a divide opening that neither of them knew how to fix.

In the end, it seemed like the last thing the crew of Dauntless had done together had been to escape. Any hopes Ray had had about them remaining an inseparable unit afterwards had crumbled pretty quickly. All of them wanted to move on and put Hell behind them. That was hard to do, when surrounded by the people who’d most intimately remind them of it.

Still, Spears and Jamie shared a handshake-hug and some warm words in the departures lounge. Maybe the promises to visit and catch up sometime were even sincere. Ray doubted they’d be kept, though. Somehow, she could feel it in her gut that today would be the last time those two men ever saw each other.

No sense crying over it, though. They were both alive, and that was the important part. They had a future in front of them. Keeping the past’s ghost alive would have been nice, but she’d settle for this.

Jamie’s hug with Holly was rather more heartfelt. “You take care of yourself, Hol.”

Holly was fighting back tears. “You too…”

Finally, it was Ray’s turn. Jamie stopped in front of her and gave her a complicated smile. “…I never thanked you properly,” he said at last.

“For what?”

“For always pushing. For never giving up. I think we all kinda got used to the idea of being stuck there until we died, but you never quit. I think we only got out because of you.”

Ray vaguely noticed Spears and Holly nod in her peripheral vision, but she looked down at her feet. “We got out as a team, Jamie,” she told him.

“…I’m gonna miss the hell outta you, Ray.”

“Hey. You ever want to see me, just call. I’ll come.” She meant it. Again, somehow, she suspected he wouldn’t.

They hugged, and Ray wiped away some tears as he gathered his bags and headed through the gate with his family. He paused just before heading through, turned back and waved, they waved back, and then…

And then, Jamie Choi was gone. Possibly she’d never see him again.

That was the first of the day’s two unpleasant jobs. She left Spears and Holly to return to the base or whatever it was they had planned for the day, and headed down to Delaney Row for her second.

She’d got to know Jack Tisdale during her time on the base. Warhorse had introduced them properly, and it broke Ray’s heart to see just how much such a fine young man lived in his sister’s shadow. He was aware of it, too, but didn’t seem to know quite where that shadow ended or how to step out of it.

He was sitting on the wall in front of his parents’ house waiting for her, and stood up as she got out of the cab. She was getting stronger day by day, but walking all the way across town was a bit more than she felt she could handle, for the moment.

“Hey, Doctor Wheeler.”

“I told you, you can call me Ray,” she smiled.

He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Just a little nervous.”

“What about?”

“Well, for starters I didn’t tell them who you are or why you’re visiting,” Jack explained

“…Huh. Uh… why not?”

He shifted awkwardly. “This is all kind of a big deal for my family. To me, it feels like… like if Sara had been an organ donor and we suddenly met the woman who’d inherited her heart, you know?”

Ray nodded. “Is everything okay? If this is too awkward, I could–”

“No, don’t go,” Jack interrupted her. “Look… can I tell you something about my parents, just between you and me?”

Ray nodded, and he chewed on his thumbnail for a second, staring distractedly down the street as he thought. “…Look, I’m no kind of a psychologist, but… sometimes I’m not sure they ever finished grieving for her. I think having that huge secret hanging over her murder, and the fact that the, uh, individual responsible was never brought to justice… It’s all kind of hung over them and got in their way.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying… I don’t know. Don’t be surprised if they get very emotional. Dad especially. You might get all five stages of grief in one go.”

Ray nodded, then took a deep breath and looked at the house. “…Shall we?”

The Tisdale house was obviously home to a little girl, and a willfully girly one, too. The adult attempts at order and aesthetic were made ridiculous by the ubiquity of pink, princesses and ponies, jarringly interrupted here and there by the occasional well-meaning but obviously futile parental effort to steer their daughter onto a slightly less feminine course.

Of the child herself, however, there was no sign. Presumably she was in kindergarten or school.

Behind the frills and fairies however, the house smelled of scented candles, incense and burnt sage. A handsome Vegvísir tapestry decorated the cluttered hallway wall, behind an equally cluttered bookshelf full of titles like “The Crystal Bible” (volumes 1-3), “Book of Shadows,” “Drawing Down the Moon,” “The Spiral Dance” and “The Book of Kitchen Witchery.” Even the doormat sported a pentagram and the words “Blessed Be.”

Interesting folks, the Tisdales.

Things were more toned-down in the living room, which had two sofas, a sturdy oak dining table, and an archway through into the kitchen. It was a nice house, actually. And allegedly this was the cheap part of town.

Mark Tisdale was… impressive. Ray had never met a man who suited long salt-and-pepper hair before—normally the options were wizard or beatnik—but it combined with the tattoos and hard knotwood muscles to make him look fearsome.

Jack clearly took more after his mother, who was petite and brown-haired and slender. The hair had to be dyed, and Ray momentarily realized she hadn’t visited a salon since getting back, which had been pretty high on her to-do list while fantasizing about their escape. But the face was Jack’s, as was the slightly shy but optimistic energy.

She welcomed Ray into their home and offered her a drink. It sounded like they had every conceivable infusion under the sun stuffed in one of the larger kitchen cupboards: Ray talked her down to a glass of juice. Hot drinks and soup still made her uncomfortable.

Despite his fearsome appearance, Mark immediately turned out to be a huge soft touch. His handshake was firm but gentle, his welcoming smile warm and genuine, and his nerves obvious.

“You have a lovely place,” Ray complimented them as she sat down.

“It’s usually covered in dolls and teddy bears…” Hayley grumbled fondly. “And laundry.”

“Hayley went into a cleaning frenzy when Jack said you were coming,” Mark explained, giving his wife the look of weary fondness that seemed to be hard-wired into every man alive.

That made Ray laugh. “Thank you. You didn’t need to bother.”

Jack chuckled and touched his mother on the arm as he entered the kitchen. “I’ll handle the drinks,” he said. “You sit.”

“…Right.” Hayley was obviously glad to be off her feet, and perched on the couch next to Mark with some visible nerves. “Um… Neither Gabe or Jack ever really said who you are, or why you wanted to meet us.”

“I was one of the mission scientists on BGEV-03 Dauntless,” Ray explained. “Doctor Rachel Wheeler, but I prefer Ray.”

They nodded, so she pushed ahead, briefly going over a carefully curated version of her meeting with Gabe Arés in the park.

“Anyway… we got to talking about this and that, and… well he told me about your daughter, Sara.”

The change was immediate. It was like a ten-tonne mass of sadness had been floating around the ceiling just waiting for an excuse to drop on them. Both parents glanced at each other and their age showed a little more, the lines in their faces got a little deeper.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that’s got to be a painful subject. But… well, he told me all about her. And about how her life affected the people around her, and the fact that Gabe’s son joined the military and became who he is today because of her…”

Mark nodded. “We’d have all had pretty different lives if she was still around,” he said hollowly.

Ray nodded. “For instance… I’d be dead right now.”

They stared at her. Jack chose that moment to hand out the drinks, and she took a sip of her juice before continuing. “I actually did die, you see. Or at least, I suffered a mortal wound. But the HEAT were there, and the first one to get to me was ‘Horse’s buddy Baseball. And I talked with him, and he said the only reason he joined the HEAT was because of ‘Horse, and… to cut a long story short, they got me into surgery and I lived.”

Jack sat down next to her and nodded. “I was there. She came back through the array in a body bag. Without John and Adam…”

“I’d be dead,” Ray said. “And without Sara…”

“…There’d be no John and Adam,” Jack finished.

“So… you came to us?” Mark asked. Ray glanced at Jack, who took a sip of his cup of tea before putting it down.

“Dad… You know why I enlisted. You know why Adam enlisted, and why Ava went into photojournalism. It’s about making her life matter. Well…”

“Look, I know I’m cold comfort,” Ray interjected. “If you had the choice between your little girl living and some stranger you never even heard of dying? I know you’d choose her, and you’d be right to. But you didn’t get to choose, and I lived. I… just wanted you to know. In case it was any kind of a help at all.”

Hayley scrubbed away some tears and then crossed the room to sit next to Ray. After a wordless second, she gave Ray a hug.

Mark’s reaction was more complex. A whole series of emotions seemed to roll through him, all tightly contained and visible only by their shadows across his face. He didn’t move from where he sat, but after a few moments of deep thought he finally just… gave up. Sagged. Softened.

“Doctor Wheeler–” he began.

“Ray. Please.”

“…I’m sorry. I don’t really feel any better.”

He stood up and shook her hand. “I appreciate the thought, but… If you’re trying to help us find closure, I don’t think there is any. Not for me, anyway…” He cleared his throat and then headed for the door. “Stay as long as you like.”

“Dad?” Jack asked.

“If you need me, I’ll be down at the Dog House.”

He let himself out with a kind of stiff dignity, and left them alone.

Jack sighed and shook his head. “…Dammit.”

Ray had no idea what to do next. She settled for retrieving her juice and drinking it while Hayley stood up, checked that her husband was gone, and then returned to the other couch.

“Sorry,” she said.

“He’s obviously a passionate man,” Ray said. “No need to apologize for that.”

Hayley gave the closed door a look that was equal parts fond and sad. “You have no idea. But I think he probably will feel better, after he’s had time to go over things in his head.”

“I hope so.” Ray finished her juice and set it aside. “…Uh, if it’s not too painful? I think I’d like to hear the story from your perspective.”

Hayley nodded, and took a second to gaze past the floor as she got her memory in order.

“…Actually,” she said after a while, “I think I’d like to hear your story.”

“Are you sure?”

“Please.”

It was Ray’s turn to gather her thoughts, though it didn’t take long. She’d been sharing her account with people for a while now. She was getting pretty good at it.

“Well… I guess it started with a crooked merchant who sold MBG some bad star charts…” she began.

Date Point: 15y7m AV
The Dog House, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Esticitty

Agony.

No trip to the Dog House was complete without a metric ton of pain, and tonight’s offering was way, way worse than anything Warhorse had ever inflicted before. Nofl had apparently called ahead about Julian’s foot and his month on the Crude, so once he showed himself at the gym, Adam decided to push things as hard as they could possibly be pushed.

Sometimes, Julian wondered if everything that had happened to him might end up going to his head. He was tough and strong enough these days to hang with the HEAT. He was well more than a match for anyone outside of it, and it showed. He was apparently pretty handsome too, at least according to his girlfriends. Then there was the wealth he’d found himself with, his celebrity status, how special his work was and all the rest…that was a heady position to be in, no lie about it, and he often wondered if it was maybe all too easy to fall into some kind of self-regarding trap about it all.

Fortunately, Julian reckoned he had access to a few easy antidotes to any lurking hubris: wrestle Yan, or hang out with the HEAT. There weren’t many better ways to instantly humble oneself.

Even better? Let Warhorse crush you like a bug. With just his hands.

It was late evening. Julian had lifted until he had absolutely nothing left to give, and then some. He’d flopped to the ground, too weak to even stand anymore, and Adam decided that it was high time for a sports massage. He had his weird metal “scraping” tools and everything but frankly he didn’t need them. Adam had a grip that made Vemik’s seem like a little boy’s and he didn’t even pretend to hold back. The giant bastard worked with so much crushing strength, Julian imagined he could hear his muscles squish and tear as they were forced into a more perfect looseness and alignment.

Saying it hurt was an understatement like saying the ocean was wet.

Eventually, Adam grunted in satisfaction, climbed off of Julian’s hips, and flipped him over. Adam’s big goofy grin managed the trick of being simultaneously smug, friendly, playful, and sympathetic.

“There! All those years compensating for the foot did a fuckin’ number on your spine, so I smashed all that out for you. You’ll feel way better in an hour when the Crude fixes you up!”

Julian rested his forearm on top his forehead and groaned in reply.

“Aww, don’t be a big baby! It’ll be fine, I promise. Have I let you down yet?” Adam helped Julian up to a sitting position, then hoisted him up to a bench; he was still light-headed.

“Ungh …no, I guess…wait, is this how you fellas train?”

“Yup! Well, the Crude is a big part of it, sure. And if you do it long enough you can train way harder. We’re not gonna do that, this is strictly rehab and some opportunistic body hardening. I mean…” He have Julian a calculating look. “Unless you wanna get bigger?”

Honestly? That could be a fun project, but these days Julian knew what kind of time and effort it would take, and that made it not quite as tempting as it might have been a year ago. “…Nah, not too much. I’m pretty damn big as it is. All I want to do is keep ahead of Vemik.”

“Okay! We can do that. I reckon you’re about as big as a healthy man with your frame can normally get anyway, anything too much more and you’d need to dedicate yourself, y’know? We won’t add much bulk, but we’ll use the month to slab on a lot of weight and strength, and get you conditioned as fuck, too. How ‘bout that? Keep up with Vemik?”

The bastard knew how to make a sales pitch. “…Okay. Nothing too crazy, though.”

Adam’s happy grin stretched from ear to ear. “Sweet! Also! I got some non-Slab stuff to talk about, if you want!”

That piqued his interest. “Wait, Warhorse, talking about something other than a meal plan?”

“Har har,” Adam rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “But for real, this is pretty important. There’s all this fallout flyin’ round from the APA attack, right? An’ both the SOR and my dad have gotta work through it all, an’…”

“I did notice Murray followin’ Xiù around. Thank you from me to him, by the way.”

“You did? Shit. He’s slipping.”

“Nah, I’m just good,” Julian grinned. “I gotta have something next to you bastards…”

Adam snickered and offered Julian a water bottle, spiked with…whatever witchcraft he’d been enthused about lately. Whatever, it seemed to help.

“Anyway, Dad thinks he’s hit on a solution, and my CO likes it enough he gave it the go-ahead. Oh! Time’s up, get up and move!”

It wouldn’t be a training session with Adam if it didn’t include some murderously intense intervals. They spent a few minutes lifting, sprinting, sparring and jumping their way across the open space in Adam’s gym. By the end of it Julian was again utterly winded while Adam hardly seemed to notice. The grinning hulk waited a bit for Julian to catch his breath and jumped right back into the conversation. “You three had some pretty serious tactics training before you left, if I remember right. We put you through some of it ourselves.”

It took Julian a moment to unscramble his brain and remember. “…Yeah. We, uh, had a bit of a refresher on that like…six months ago? I think? It was urban assault if I remember. Not sure why it was so important but there were paintball guns involved, so I wasn’t complaining.”

“Right. So you have the skills to do private military contracting.”

“Wait…what?”

“Yeah! Or, at least, enough for some intro-level security work. You’d gain experience while doing it, too.”

“Us?” Julian swigged his water.

“Yeah! Like, okay. You didn’t come up through the military, right? Normally that’d be a showstopper but you three’ve got some unique qualifications, and we know you’re cool under pressure, and…well, recent events sorta confirm that. And we trust you. That’s really the most important part. We can train people all day long, but we can’t vet ‘em fast enough. APA’s got all the spooks, uh, spooked. But you three? We can arm you and trust you’ll be useful right away.”

“Are we expecting another attack?”

“…Yeah, bro.”

“Well… shit.”

Adam shrugged. “They promised more to come. An’ this way, it’s easier to give you access to Akyawentuo, too. You’ll have access badges to Sharman, all that. The officers all think this’ll solve a bunch of problems at once, y’know?”

“…You guys decided all this today?”

“Yeah. We figured out it was a problem right when we tried to come up with a schedule with our security forces. We gotta patrol you guys, our own property, and a couple other places ‘round the city on top of what dad’s guys gotta deal with, and there just aren’t enough people to do it. If we didn’t have to worry about y’all…”

“That makes sense. Not sure what Xiù will think, but Allison? She’ll jump at it.”

“Which reminds me. Dad said to tell her the prosecutor agrees they have bigger concerns. Uh, they’re asking in return that you three keep a low profile for the moment.”

“…Why are you telling me all this?”

“Well, ‘cuz I know you, and Nofl’s message came right when we were hashing all this out. Well, when the officers were. I just happened to be there and I spoke up.”

“You were there for something like this? What were you doing?”

Adam shrugged his vast shoulders. “What else? Lifting! It was my personal training day with Powell when it all blew up.”

Of course.

“Well… If it helps us stay safe and gives us the means to look after ourselves, I’m all for it.”

“Pay’s good, too.”

“I’ll talk to the girls.”

“Bueno. Time’s u–”

Adam’s inevitable call to return to the torture was interrupted by the door, which was shoved open unceremoniously, and a human thundercloud came in off the street.

He immediately had Adam’s attention. “…’Lo, Mark.”

Mark gave Adam the slightly dazed look of a man who’d been stewing on some pretty intense feelings for a while and needed a second to remember how to interact with people. “…I need to beat on something. Someone. I don’t know.”

“Shit, man. You okay?” ‘Horse asked the question while moving toward the locker where he kept the boxing gloves. Mark just waved a hand and shook his head. “…Right. Julian. Five more sets, ‘kay? I’ll know if you cheat.”

“Right…”

Adam had an uncanny ability to…hell, to just dominate any situation whenever he wanted. He bounced on his toes and threw the gloves at Mark’s feet. “Tape up and put ‘em on. They’re for you, not me.”

Julian’s workout didn’t leave much spare attention, but he still managed to keep an eye on their session as the big viking dude worked out what looked like a lifetime of baggage with, it had to be said, more vigor and raw fury than actual form. Still, Julian wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of some of those blows.

They were still going strong even after he’d forced himself through his last agonizing set, so he sat down and watched. It came to an end with one last exhausted, flailing haymaker. The blow was so wild that Adam failed to dodge and caught it right on the jaw instead, while Mark spun around on his feet and nearly collapsed. Adam caught him and carried him over to the bench to catch his breath. Apparently even that hammer blow to the mouth hadn’t really registered.

“Okay. Feeling better?”

“Can…” Mark panted desperately, “Could you even feel any of that?”

“I felt it plenty.”

“Did I manage to hurt you at all?”

“…No, not really.”

“…Fuck.”

“Yeah. Shit, Mark, you’re real outta sorts. I don’t think I ever heard you swear before.”

Mark just shook his head and wiped half a gallon of sweat off his face and out of his hair. Adam went and fetched him some water.

“Feelin’ better?” he asked as he returned. Mark shook his head before emptying half the bottle down his throat.

“…Hey Julian. Been a while.”

“Yeah. How’s the family?”

Mark shrugged expansively, drained the second half of the bottle, and handed it back to Adam.

“That bad, huh?” Adam asked.

“They’re fine. Just… there’s this lady came to visit us. One of the Dauntless crew.”

“Rachel Wheeler?” Julian guessed. Mark gave him a wary look.

“You know her?”

“Not really. Xiù met the crew when they first got back, told me all about ‘em.”

“I know her,” Adam said. He handed Mark a second bottle of water.

Mark accepted it and took a more measured sip this time. “She said you saved her life.”

“‘Base did. I helped.”

Mark grunted a “hmm” sound and scrubbed some more sweat out of his hair before wiping his hand on his pants.

“…What’s eatin’ you, Mark?” Adam asked at last.

Mark shook his head again. “Ugh, I don’t know. Ray came along to thank us, I guess, but all I heard was ‘I’m glad your little girl is dead.’ And I know that’s not what she meant, and it’s not even how it came off. But…”

“She thanked you?” Adam asked.

“Makes sense. You saved her life,” Julian said. “And you only enlisted because of Sara, didn’t you?”

“…Yeah.”

“So if she hadn’t died, you wouldn’t have enlisted, you and ‘Base wouldn’t have joined the HEAT and Doctor Wheeler would be dead,” Mark explained.

Adam paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. “…Guess I didn’t see it that way. But if there’s anything I’ve learned doing all of this, it’s that you really can’t second-guess things, y’know?”

“Doesn’t change the fact that a woman—a nice, kind, compassionate woman with the best intentions in the world—just came into my house and thanked me for the fact that my daughter was murdered.” Mark said.

“No, it don’t.”

“…And part of me knows I should be grateful to her. I know she wants me to feel like it all meant something. But…”

“Dude. I get it.” Adam sat down at Mark’s side and gave him a trademark sideways one-armed crusher of a hug. “Shit, I think about that happenin’ to Diego and…”

Julian, feeling a bit out of place, decided to hobble around and clean up the aftermath of their gym fun while the two talked it out. It took just long enough that when he could avoid the conversation no longer he found that it was basically over. Mark didn’t exactly look upbeat, but he had an air of resolve around him now.

“—should thank her,” he was saying. “I mean, what she intended is what matters. Just because it hurt me doesn’t change the fact that she meant well.”

“Yeah.”

“…I need a drink. You chaps want in?”

“I’m on call, bro,” Adam said. “Gonna be tea and water for me but sure. I’ll come with.”

“…I should probably avoid alcohol until I’ve checked with my doctor,” Julian said.

“You’ll be fine, don’t worry,” Adam assured him. “But you’re new on the Crude so I’d avoid it anyway. The two don’t mix well.”

“Doctor? Crude?”

Julian just glanced down at his foot. It took Mark a few seconds to wrap his head around what he was seeing.

“…Didn’t that used to be plastic?”

“Up until a week ago, yeah. Nofl and Xiù talked me into it. Blew Allison’s mind when she finally noticed.”

“Heh. How long did that take?” Adam asked.

“About three days. We didn’t tell her. Which given we sleep in the same bed, is pretty impressive, really.”

Mark actually chuckled. “If I pulled a stunt like that on Hayley, she’d kick my arse. With her biggest boots on.”

“Yyyup.” Julian grinned fondly. Funny how a stinging slap on the arm and a choice insult just made his heart melt, when they came from Allison.

“Heh. Well, how ‘bout we grab a shower and go get those drinks?”

Adam’s gym had a convenient set of showers on the ground floor, and a quick run through was refreshing as all hell. The pain was already gone, too; fuck, Crude was magical.

…Good reason to avoid it, really. Something like that had to have a downside, even if its poster child didn’t seem to suffer from any. He was just…Adam. Big, goofy, frustratingly perfect Adam, an impossible living comicbook superhero. Julian tried not to stare and, well, compare himself while they cleaned up, but honestly it was impossible not to—how often does a guy get to stack himself up against the best? He didn’t measure up of course, but then again nobody did. Julian sighed internally, resigned to his place in the pecking order. While he was toweling off he noticed Adam’s somewhat apologetic grin; thankfully the big bastard didn’t seem to mind. Julian also noticed that Adam wasn’t bruised. At all. It was like Mark hadn’t laid a finger on him.

Mark noticed, too.

“…Look at you. You’re not even a little sore, are you?” Mark pulled a clean t-shirt over his head; the Dog House kept some gym-branded clean clothing in a bin for members to borrow.

Adam glanced at himself in the mirror and flexed for a moment, then pulled on his tent-like tank top. He looked strangely dejected. “No. Pretty much nobody can hurt me these days.”

“…That bothers you.”

“Yeah. I know it’s stupid. That’s what I’ve been working towards, right? But still. There’s only like four dudes these days who can make me really feel a workout, an’ two of them are aliens. I dunno how I feel ‘bout that.”

Mark used the hand dryer to do a rough job of blow-drying his hair, reassembled it with a lifetime’s efficiency, and dragged a comb through it. “Be thankful they can. It means you’re not completely invulnerable.”

“I guess.” They walked out of the gym and onto the street, just in time for the nightly rains. Adam didn’t bother with any footwear as usual. Julian copied him, intent on rebuilding his foot.

“Y’know,” Adam continued after a while, “I’d grown like a goddamned weed for years. A while back that finally slowed way down, and I was super happy about that…but I’m still so far ahead of ‘Base and Righteous, it’s looking like they may not ever catch up.”

“I thought you liked the competition?” Mark asked.

“Yeah, man. I like the competition. It ain’t a competition if they can’t ever win. I can out-run, out-lift, and out-wrestle them both at the same time.”

…Jesus. “What about the others?”

Adam considered. “Yan? Maybe, but he’d need to lift for years to catch up, and he says he’s getting old. Daar’s right in his prime and keeps making ridiculous progress…but we’re different enough physically that it wouldn’t really be apples-to-apples. And he’s the Great Father. It’s not like he can, I dunno, pop over for a game of Gravball and rep out on the bench with me.”

“If Vemik keeps beating on steel, he’ll be as strong as Yan even if he doesn’t become a Given-Man,” Julian predicted.

“Eh. Maybe. But…like, I mean…fuck. ‘Base and Righteous are my bros. I like Daar and Yan and everyone well enough but I grew up with those two. I don’t wanna be alone at the top.”

“On that cheery note… there’s the pub.” Mark indicated it.

“…Sorry. I feel like a huge douche whining about this shit.”

“Nah,” Julian replied. “Sometimes it helps just to get it out, y’know? I’m just glad you could talk it over instead of beat the tar out of us…”

That got one of Adam’s trademark goofy smiles, and his somber mood seemed to have lifted. “What, you can’t handle a few love taps?”

“Adam, your ‘love taps’ could rearrange my organs. Xiù gives me love taps.”

They descended into macho banter and prowled into Rooney’s. Funny, really. All three of them had started off the evening nursing a boatload of pain of one kind or another. None of that seemed to bother anymore.

It was good to have friends.

Date Point: 15y7m AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Professor Daniel Hurt

Visits from Vemik were always welcome. Or… well, they were usually welcome. Maybe this one would be too, but somehow Daniel doubted it. He had a lot on his mind, and only a few hours to go before the next scheduled jump to Cimbrean.

He didn’t want to catch that jump, but it was that or miss Steve Lawrence’s funeral. And he owed it to the man to be there.

Vemik was therefore both a welcome and an unwelcome paradox of a distraction as he knuckled into their dig camp carrying three root-birds as a friendship offering.

It was a good offering, too. Like a slightly gamier version of turkey. They’d have a damn good dinner tonight thanks to those birds.

Then there were the greetings, the handshakes, and Daniel invited Vemik to sit by the fire where he’d been reviewing the translated Corti cultural analyses of the Coastal Ten’Gewek civilization.

They would have seemed very alien to Vemik. They’d loved water, for a start, and had built a large public baths. Ordinarily, Vemik would have found a conversation like that fascinating, but today it was clear he had something specific on his mind.

“So,” Daniel guess. “I take it you’re here about the attacks, and the APA?”

Vemik shook his head. “They attacked us, we fought, we won. They can’t attack us here, can they?”

“No.”

“Well then. APA are a question for humans, not for my people.”

“Just a social call, then?”

“Social call? Come to see you just to see you?”

“Yes.”

“No. I mean, seeing friends is fun. But I’m here about… Vaccines.”

He pronounced it carefully and slowly. ‘Vack-Seens.’ But the question was enough to make Daniel groan.

“Godshit…” he cursed. “…I take it you heard about those on Earth?”

“Singer and me… our first child, she died of a sickness, before she could even try to talk,” Vemik reminded him. “Every year, we lose hands of children to sickness. Others who live, they’re marked and weak. Some never grow strong again.

“…What did you hear exactly?”

“There was a thing on the radio. One man saying they’re bad and cause… ort-ism?”

“They don’t.”

“Yes. That part made Jooyun and Heff very mad. They grumbled about it for half the night. And the woman on the radio, she said they work by teaching your body to fight sickness by giving you a weak sickness.”

“That’s the essence of it. It’s not a complete explanation but… yes. Basically.”

Vemik sighed. “Yes. I have learned that I do not know enough to really learn yet.”

Daniel scraped his fingers through a day or two of stubble as he thought. “Vaccines aren’t easy to make,” he said at last. “It takes a lot of very clever people a lot of time and hard work to make them properly. They have to, uh, learn the magic for each sickness, and then they have to make sure they’re safe to give…”

“Each sickness is different?”

“As different as Werne and Yshek and root-birds. You say that the shivering-sickness is in the water, right?” Daniel asked. Vemik nodded and he forged on. “But there are other shivering-sicknesses too. You see that a person is hot, and sweating and shivering. We call that a fever. But lots of different sicknesses can cause a fever. The shivering-sickness from water is a lot like one we call ‘malaria,’ but another one that goes around a tribe with sneezing and… well, not sneezing in your case…”

“We sneeze. Just not the same way you do. ” Vemik tapped the middle of his face where the Ten’Gewek didn’t have a nose, then opened his mouth and pointed inside. Of course, their olfactory organ was in the roof of the mouth.

“…Right. But when people cough and sneeze and pass the disease between them, that’s more like what we call ‘influenza’ and that killed many, many humans in the past. Tens of millions in one year.”

Vemik scowled as he tried to recall Human numbers. “…Six zeroes?”

“Seven.”

“In one year? You did not have vack-seen for it?”

“No. Not then. And our vaccine for malaria isn’t very strong. But others… there are some diseases that are just gone now. Nobody has died of them in a long time. And, yes, our children almost all grow up strong and healthy.”

Vemik nodded, watching the flames.

“…Is hard, to lose a child,” he said at last. “We move on, but we don’t forget. It… hurts. Deep inside. And it never goes away. The Singer and me, we have a little boy now. Going to name him soon. But still a long way to go before he is a man, and can learn to hunt and work steel. Many seasons. He’s strong now, but…”

He trailed off, and Daniel shifted uncomfortably in his camp chair.

“There’s… things we can do first that might make things better,” he suggested. “Things like soap, and cleanliness. Knowing where sickness comes from, that sort of thing. All by itself, that kind of knowing makes a big difference.”

“How big?”

“Big. Much of our medicine is just keeping things clean. That all by itself will help.”

“You’ll share that?”

“Yes. Vaccines are… much bigger. Much more difficult. You won’t be able to make them for a very long time, and if we made them for you… It’d be a strong debt, and a way for us to control you. Dangerous.”

“I know that,” Vemik assured him. “But the danger feels small when you’re the one who warns me about it. And it feels very small when I think of my daughter.”

“Well… soap and water are a start, anyway,” Daniel said. He smiled when Vemik pulled a face. “Actually… come and see.”

He called up the footage of the Coastals bathhouse. Forest Ten’Gewek had no functional concept of modesty, and Vemik was sitting on the log naked of all but his knives and the little leather flap that Ten’Gewek men wore to protect their sensitive bits from stray branches as they swung through the trees. Nor did they see any point in gender segregation, or sexual exclusivity. Oh, they had men’s work and women’s work, and they tended to form close bonds like the one between Vemik and the Singer, but there was no formal contract or expectation of fidelity among them. Ten’Gewek men were generally quite happy to be good friends with their mate’s children from other men. The tribe, ultimately, was a big sprawling extended family.

The Coastals had been more structured. Their more sophisticated lifestyle and economy had allowed a handful of powerful men to achieve enormous power and influence. That had led to harems at first, with a few of the more influential men having all the female attention, which naturally meant a large number of disgruntled bachelors. After a while they’d established a convention of monogamy between male and female couples, though notably they’d been happy to accept more… freedom… in their same-sex associations.

One consequence of that had been a sense of modesty. It worked both ways: bonded couples wore simple, loose clothing in public, and the bathhouse had been open to single and coupled males in the morning, single and coupled females between noon and sunset. Bonded couples and their children were welcome in the firelit hours around and after sunset, but singles weren’t.

For Vemik, however, the confusing part was watching people who were much more similar to him than a human was, frolicking in and apparently enjoying large bodies of water.

“…Very strange,” he muttered.

“But clean,” Daniel pointed out. “You see the strange cloudy white colour of that water?”

“Yes?”

“That’s the soap pool. They had many different pools: first a cold one for rinsing off the worst dirt, then that pool which was warmed by fires under the floor where they soaped and scrubbed, then another warm pool for rinsing off the soapy water and relaxing, and finally a cold plunge pool to wake them up.”

“Humans just shower. Seems easier.”

“It is for the human. But there’s a lot of effort involved in making water come out of a little nozzle like that.”

“Yes. Plumbing is the word.”

“You did pick up a lot on Earth.”

“That’s why I went.” Vemik tapped the screen thoughtfully to no real effect, then tilted his head at it. “…And this helped them not get sick?”

“This? Probably. But what really would have done it would be washing their hands before and after handling meat.”

“Our women scrub their hands with Benka leaves.”

“Which is a good start. That’s good medicine. But it would even better if they rinsed their hands with clean water. Any water that’s good to drink will do, but boiling the water first is a good idea.”

Vemik nodded. “And soap?”

“I’ll have to look that one up.” Daniel patted him on the shoulder. “Look, I’m going back to Earth for two hands of days. You heard that a man named Steven Lawrence died?”

“Yes. You knew him?”

“He was a friend. I want to be there when we give him back to the gods.” Daniel explained. Vemik nodded, and Daniel took that as understanding. “I’ll talk with some other thinkers while I’m there,” he promised.

“Thank you. I know it’s a big thing I’m asking.”

“If I were in your position, I’d be asking for the same thing,” Daniel assured him.

“Will you be safe?” Vemik asked. “These people, they attack men like you to protect aliens like me, yes?”

“Hoeff’s coming back with me,” Daniel explained. “And then I’ll have what we call ‘private security.’ I’ll be fine.”

“I ask Singer to Sing for you anyway,” Vemik nodded seriously.

“Thank you, Vemik. I appreciate that.”

Vemik swiped through the images from the bathhouse again and shook his head. “I think… Even if this is a good idea, we won’t like it.”

“I’m not asking you to take up regular bathing, Vemik,” Daniel reassured him. “Just… keep your hands and feet clean. Especially your hands. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“Have you talked with Yan about this?” Daniel asked.

“Not yet. I wanted to learn more first.”

“I’d be interested to hear what he has to say. But…maybe after I come back. Yan likes to take his time and think about things.”

Vemik nodded. “Thank you for not saying no, anyway,” he said. “Is good to know you’ll think about it.”

Daniel nodded, shook his hand, and with one last glance at the monitor Vemik returned to the trees and headed back in the direction of the village.

“Mind if I share a thought, Professor?”

Daniel turned. Claire had emerged from the field lab at some point, and was relishing a nice cool drink and what was obviously a fresh shirt.

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Western nations distribute vaccines to third-world villages all the time.”

“…True.” A half-dozen vague counters to that thought leapt into Daniel’s brain instantly, but he found none of them persuasive. Developing vaccines for an alien culture would be more complicated but that wasn’t a moral argument against doing so, it was an economic one. Pointing out that third-world villages were still Human and the Ten’Gewek weren’t seemed bigoted somehow, and there was no good “Prime Directive” argument because that had gone out the window the moment Allison, Julian and Xiù made first contact.

“Something to think on,” he agreed. She nodded.

“Sometimes I’m glad my job is just to watch and write papers,” she joked. “Uh, anyway. The Array’s due to fire in about ten minutes. Hoeff asked if you wouldn’t mind joining him on it.”

“You mean he said ‘tell the professor to get his ass on the platform or I’m leaving without him.’”

She laughed. “Almost word-for-word.”

Daniel chuckled and stood up. “Any requests for provisions? I’ll be gone a week, I may as well bring back some luxuries.”

“Oh, the usual. Chocolate, deodorant, hot sauce, some new books… If you can find room for a cake, it’s Jim’s birthday next week, and I know he’s lost track of the date.”

“Cake, huh? I will need to bring a big one, then. I bet the Given-Men and Singers will want to celebrate. They’ve taken our celebration of that very seriously.”

“Several big ones,” she agreed. “But I can hear Hoeff grinding his teeth. You’d better go.”

“Right…”

Daniel sighed and hauled himself over toward the array. He really didn’t much want to go back to Earth anyway, usually. His work on Akyawentuo was too important.

Going back for a funeral was so much worse. But he’d do it. And maybe he could come back with some good news.

Date Point: 15y7m1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

There’d been a text from Julian about some kind of impromptu Guy’s Night, don’t wait up, love you, etc. Allison couldn’t blame him: After all that time hanging around with the cavemonkeys, some time with his actual human friends couldn’t hurt Julian at all.

Still, she was maybe a little disgruntled. But not enough to give him the cold shoulder when he finally slid the bedroom door aside at dead o’clock in the fuck-knew-when.

She was getting sick of being the big spoon anyway. Xiù was completely out for the count and didn’t even grumble when Allison retrieved an arm from under her head and turned over.

“Hey,” she murmured. She couldn’t see Julian, the room was completely pitch dark, but she knew it was him anyway. It was the little details: the exact sound of his breathing, the specific way he undressed, the exact contours and warmth of him as he slid in under the blankets and snuggled up to her.

“Hey.” His voice was warm and soft in her ear, accompanied by a kiss. “Sorry ‘bout that. Some… baggage came up, I guess.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Yeah. What’d you two do while I was gone?”

“Yoga, dinner, homework, watched a movie, sent the boys to bed…” A slow troll-grin spread across her face in the dark. “…Had some pretty amazing sex…”

Julian snorted slightly and cuddled her up. His hand cupped her breast and teased it. “Now I’m real sorry I wasn’t here…”

“Too bad, I’m tired. You got to bro out anyway, so you don’t get to complain.”

“Sausage fest don’t count,” he grumbled happily, and finally got comfortable. His hand didn’t leave her breast though: she didn’t complain.

Allison was about to fall asleep with a smile on her face when he shifted again and spoke, softly.

“…Hey, Al?”

“Yeah?”

“…Never mind. Should prob’ly wait for morning, talk about it with Xiù too.”

She knew what he was going to ask. “Yes, dummy. We’ll both say yes.”

“…Psychic badass spacebabes, I guess.”

She smiled and snuggled into him. “…Wo ai ni.”

He held her close and kissed her gently behind the ear. “I love you too.”

There were no more questions.

Date Point: 15y7m1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Lt. Col. Owen “Stainless” Powell

Birthdays. If Powell had his way, birthdays wouldn’t be a thing. For one, it was difficult being about fifty…ish…and looking like he was in his mid-to-late twenties. Sort of. Hair notwithstanding.

The hair was the biggest problem, really. Not just the stuff on his scalp, which had gone for a burton years before, but his beard was… When he shaved in the morning, he looked baby-faced. By late afternoon he looked like a grizzled old man. He could age thirty years between breakfast and supper.

All of which made celebrating the specific day he clocked up another orbit around the star he didn’t even live in orbit around these days…

…Well, okay. The way the Lads pulled out all the stops with regards to food and booze was nice. And Rylee was coming with a cake.

One never went wrong with cake.

Also, ‘Horse brought the whole family with him, and Powell had to admit… While he wasn’t usually a sucker for babies, he’d definitely make an exception for Diego Arés. Okay, the kid was only a month old, meaning pretty much the only things he wanted to do were sleep and occasionally go looking for a tit—a man could sympathize, really—but…

…Well, the fact was, Powell was pretty sure he was never going to have a child of his own.

He’d managed to talk the Lads into not giving him any kind of a gift, though. Sort of. They’d settled on a charitable donation in his name as a kind of compromise. And of course, enough food to ensure he’d need to put his shoulder into closing the fridge for a few weeks didn’t count.

He’d have opened it up for his neighbours to come and join in, except the Lads were his neighbours.

…A small error, that.

Oh. And thank fook they’d finally got it into their heads that he absolutely, completely, under no conceivable circumstances, wanted to hear another rendition of “Happy Birthday To You.” Especially not one led by Gaoians. Gaoian singing combined all that was best in howling and traditional Chinese opera.

So he’d cleaned off all the clutter on the pool table in the garage, invited Titan to bring along a games console and was generally just enjoying… a party. It just happened to be a birthday party, that’s all.

Of course, there was one bigger bit of news than a mere birthday.

“Fookin’ champion. Christ.”

“Yeah. Our Thurrsto!” Deygun was almost literally buoyant with pride, which was helping Shim’s game quite nicely; Deygun had just scratched needlessly. Shim retrieved the cue ball with a smug look and prowled around the end of the table, calculating where best to place it.

“In hindsight he’s an obvious match. The Clan needs somebody Daar can respect and trust…”

“But none of yer saw it comin’,” Powell predicted.

“We didn’t even know the Championship was in crisis until… well.” Shim decided on a good spot for the cue ball, set it down, fine-tuned it with his paw and then backed off to chalk the cue and find a comfortable angle. Gaoians played pool a little differently to a human, thanks to the difference in shoulder anatomy. Ergaan still swore by his “javelin throw” stroke, even though it involved bending so low and long over the table that he inevitably wound up moving a ball with his chest and invoking a foul.

Actually… something about the whole thing had been pricking at Powell. Regaari in particular had got himself caught up in the politics in a big way, and though he’d withdrawn from the HEAT to pursue the career demands of a Father, he was still a Brother. Which was great until you realized that he’d been involved in going against the Great Father’s wishes.

Right or wrong, the HEAT took a very dim view of that kind of thing. Arés in particular couldn’t put his feelings on the matter to words…which, being honest, wasn’t surprising. Still, it was a sensitive topic, and a difficult one to broach.

In this case he didn’t need to. Out of the blue, Deygun seemingly resumed that very conversation.

“I can understand why he did it. And… I mean, I don’t know if it was the right decision or the wrong one. I can definitely understand the Great Father’s decision…”

“Doesn’t matter. The Great Father decided. Right or wrong doesn’t enter into it.” Shim took a shot that clacked the cue-ball harmlessly off a bumper where it finally came to rest just touching his six-ball.

Deygun took the cue off him. “Regaari’s lucky as Keeda himself.”

Shim duck-nodded. “The Great Father coulda castrated him and ordered him to bury his balls at the north pole. Probably woulda, to anybody else.”

“Anybody else would be carrying their entrails home in a bucket,” Deygun stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth as he concentrated on sending a ball careening across the table, where it rattled at the very entrance of the corner pocket but didn’t go in. “…Ugh. It’s not like Regaari to set a paw wrong like that though.”

“It can happen to any of us,” Shim commented, taking the cue.

“Anyone can make a mistake, yeah. But this was a blunder. Big difference.”

Shim paused. “…Yes,” he agreed. “Not like Regaari to miscalculate like that.”

He stared at nothing for a second, then focused, hunkered down, and perfectly sunk three balls in a row while Deygun groaned.

The 8-ball dropped just as there were cheers of welcome from outside, and when Powell poked his head out the door he found Rylee smiling and tickling the baby’s cheek while Faarek delivered a large cake box onto the garden table like the smoothest of high-class waiters.

Rylee grinned, cooed over Diego one last time, then trotted up the garage drive and gave Powell a kiss. “Hey. Happy birthday.”

“Don’t bloody remind me…” Powell murmured, but he was smiling, she laughed and jerked her head toward the cake.

“Come on, get it outta the way.” She had a smirk on her lips, too. Something was definitely Up.

He grabbed a plate from the buffet on the way past. Some potato salad, some mac and cheese, some chicken drumsticks. Everything that was best in garden party food.

Faarek opened the box with a flourish as everyone gathered around the table. The cake, as it turned out, was an oversized replica of an SOR beret. The icing was dark chocolate, so a little to the brown side of pure black, but the silver sugar badge on the front was unbelievably detailed.

“Huh! Not bad!” Powell commented. Faarek looked pleased.

“It was way more fun than painting Orcs for Righteous,” he commented, drawing jeers and good-natured laughter from the Lads.

“I figured it was about time you eat your beret like you promised,” Rylee said.

“Hey?”

“Your very words.”

“When?”

She grinned, and knew he’d blundered right into her trap. “Five years ago? In London? Saint James’ Palace?”

Recollection came back, and Powell groaned. This one was going to hurt.

“There it is! You guys wanna hear the story?”

There was general, and loud, approval.

Rylee’s grin got wider. “Alright! So this was while we were on Earth and Dexter was up at Buckingham Palace getting his medal from the King. And Stainless and I had a nice conversation about careers and honors and diplomacy and alliances and stuff…”

Powell grit his teeth and took a bite out of his drumstick to cover his embarrassment. Here it came…

“And this big lunk—” Rylee tapped him in the chest with her knuckles, “—said he didn’t think Gaoians would ever make good allies to humanity.”

Obviously the Lads already knew the story, because they dutifully groaned and made disapproving noises. Murray even tutted, the cheeky sod.

“D’you remember exactly what you said?”

“I don’t fookin’ know, it were years back!” Powell protested.

“Your exact words were:” Rylee pulled an excessively serious expression and did a passable impression of Powell’s accent “‘If we were to do joint trainin’ and it turns out they wouldn’t wind up slowing our lads down? I’ll eat my fookin’ beret, badge and all. They’re not deathworlders.’ …Wrong on two counts, right guys?”

More good-natured jeering.

“Well, here’s your beret. Time to eat it… After your speech.”

That got a cheer, and cries of “Speech! Speech!”

It had to happen eventually. Powell gave Rylee a mock glare, which she met levelly with a smirk that promised a hell of an apology later, and he stood up.

It occurred to him that he was still holding a drumstick. He waggled it at ‘Horse.

“This better not be crow for good measure,” he joked. It got a laugh. “…Arright. I was wrong. I’ll eat my words, I’ll eat my beret, I’ll eat humble pie, I’ll eat whatever fookin’ thing you put in front of me and I’ll like it. As Deygun commented just a few minutes ago, anybody can make a mistake… But in this case, I’m bloody glad I was wrong. ”

He turned and raised his glass to the Gaoians. “To you, gentlemen. You’ve earned my respect and admiration, you’ve proven me wrong… and however high my expectations of you might be nowadays, I don’t doubt you’ll continue to exceed ‘em.”

There were cheers, raised glasses, and Rylee pressed a bread knife into Powell’s hand.

“Happy birthday?” she tried, sweetly.

“…I’m gettin’ revenge later, so’s you know.”

She laughed. “Fair.”

“You sat on this for five bloody years?”

“Eh…” She shrugged, and indicated the table. “…You gonna cut that cake?”

“Fine, fine…”

It turned out to be excellent.

Date Point: 15y7m1d AV
High Mountain Fortress, The Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The week had come to a close, so Daar went down to the ancient amphitheatre to attend the week’s Closing—a very old tradition that Starmind was reviving, with his enthusiastic approval—to listen intently to the brief, cheery remarks of the day. Like much of what the Gao did, it wasn’t a very formal ceremony, but it did have its ritual. Simple, to-the-point, clean of unnecessary adornment. The amphitheatre faced toward the horizon, which had mercifully remained largely clean of the tall, angular shapes of the modern world. The Champions and their retinue gathered, choosing their seats with all the usual care and intelligence.

One, however, was conspicuously absent. There was no Whitecrest champion today. Indeed, the whole Clan had gone completely opaque. And when a Great Father’s spymasters went opaque…

The Champions hadn’t failed to notice, either. Word had spread fast about what he’d done to Genshi, and he was being paid more than the usual deference. He could smell their restrained fear. That…saddened him. It was necessary, but still. Daar wasn’t about to lie to anyone, especially not himself, and if he were being totally honest he’d much rather be wrasslin’ with his fellow Champions instead of dominating their lives, figuratively and literally.

Daar stood alone, front and center in the ranked rows of the amphitheatre’s seating. The unsubtle analogy wasn’t lost on him.

Gyotin, as always, was the only one who didn’t have a whiff of nerves about him. He’d managed to somehow blend the roles of spiritual advisor and court jester: he got to poke the Great Father in ways nobody else could, and he did so safe in the knowledge that he knew exactly where the line was. So, his next move after finishing his brief part in the ceremony was to fling himself down on a seat to Daar’s left and sniff the air.

“…No sign of Genshi today.”

“No, I ‘spose not. If I were a bettin’ tail, an’ I am, I’d say they’re figgerin’ on a new Champion.”

“Or they’ve already chosen one.”

He caught it, then. The whiff and ear-flick of mischief. “…You already know who it is, don’t’cha.”

“I’m… looking forward to seeing your expression.”

Well, balls. Now his curiosity was up, and Daar momentarily forgot his worries. “Oh? You say it like ‘yer expectin’ something, I dunno…”

“Characteristic?” Gyotin suggested. “No. I just think you won’t guess who it is.”

Daar had to admire his playfulness. “‘Yer enjoyin’ fuckin’ with me, ain’t ‘ya?”

“My Father, I defy you to tell me you don’t enjoy being fucked with.”

…He was right. When Daar looked back, he noticed his tail was wagging, and the Champions around him struggling to remain dignified.

He chittered and relaxed a bit. Tension faded, but concern swept over him suddenly.

“Is Genshi…doing okay? Do you know?”

“I haven’t spoken with Genshi. I haven’t seen him, not that it surprises me. He’s never been inclined to seek my opinion.”

“No, I s’pose not. I love ‘em like almost nobody else, but he were always a bit arrogant.”

“High intellects often can be. You know, he considers all of… this…” Gyotin waved a paw at the amphitheatre and the night’s traditional observation, “…to be wasted time. Perhaps for him it is.”

Daar sighed. “I know. It’s why I valued him so much. That cold, detached perspective of his was damn useful. I’m gonna miss that. But he’s wrong ‘bout this. People ain’t robots, and we need to break ourselves of that artificial ideal. It was foisted on us. It weren’t ever natural.”

“For myself—for most of us—I agree. But I wonder… if it was completely unnatural, could it ever have been foisted on us at all?”

“…Eh, prol’ly not. I think mebbe a lotta bad ideas keep kickin’ around ‘cuz there’s some part o’ them that, I dunno, resonates? Is that a good word?”

“Maybe. Or perhaps folks can be bad at separating the grain from the husk. And, frankly, some personalities just don’t need… ceremony. Whatever they believe, whatever their private ‘religion’ may be, they believe it without the assistance of ritual. It took me quite a while to accept that conclusion.”

“Fair ‘nuff. I’m just a big ‘ol brownie really. I…like routine. Get up early, work hard, play hard, sleep hard. Do all o’ that better the next day. There’s rhythm to it, y’know?”

Gyotin nodded. “Genshi was never a creature of rhythm or habit. His natural inclination is to twist and flow around and through life. He’s what you might call a water personality: Forceful and destructive when he needs to be, agile and light when appropriate, he’ll go around what he can’t wash away.”

Daar flicked an amused ear, and issued a small challenge to Gyotin. “An’ me?”

“You’re drawn to solidity, dependability… you’re not afraid to be hard and unyielding, because you know that’s what civilizations are built on. Very much a stone personality, appropriately.”

The sun had finally touched the horizon, lighting the sky with beautiful yellows and a deep fading blue. Daar’s human friends had said there was lots of bright red and orange colors too, a beauty he couldn’t see or even imagine. Especially lavender, which allegedly lived between red and blue.

Oh well. No use lamenting that. What he could see was good for the soul.

The audience fell silent while one of Gyotin’s Clan-brothers ascended the stage and delivered the remarks. A good summary of a bad week, really. He didn’t shy from anything that had happened, on Gao or among the Humans…but he had found a downy lining in it all.

The next bit was surprising. A dark, heavily-built figure sat down to Daar’s right. “…Sorry I’m late, My Father.” He turned to look but he knew that distinctive scent instantly—

Daar found himself tackling Thurrsto and keening somewhere between surprise, happiness, sadness…a lot of feelings, really.

Thurrsto put up a damn good play-fight, too! He had the strength and speed to really hold his own, so Daar let him nearly wriggle loose a couple of times before finally pinning him and sniffing at his nose.

“You?!”

“I was surprised too.”

“Ha! I hope ‘yer gonna be as surprising as Genshi ever was!” Daar re-pinned him and nibbled at his shoulder playfully. Thurrsto! Champion!

“I promise, I’ll keep up… most of his traditions.”

Gyotin chittered. “Well, that was everything I hoped it would be.”

Daar was too shocked and happy to reply with anything clever, and in any case he had to know. “Thurrsto…is Genshi doin’ well?”

“His injuries are…extensive, My Father. You broke more than just his face, and I wasn’t gentle, either.”

Daar whined a bit but mostly kept his poise. “I know. Tell ‘em to get it taken care of properly.”

“…He had thought that unwise, My Father.”

“I know that, I ain’t dumb. Tell ‘em to get fixed up anyway. I’ll let him decide what that means.”

“…I will.”

Satisfied, Daar hauled Thurrsto up to his feet so he could meet the other Champions.

“Everyone! This is Thurrsto, our newest Champion! He’s a true Brother o’ the Rites as far as I’m concerned, served time on the Human’s HEAT with me! Whaddya say, do we welcome him?”

Cheers and cries of welcome went up. A new Champion was an opportunity, after all. Thurrsto would quickly find himself drawn right into the shifting web of Clan politics, which still existed even if it was centered on Daar nowadays.

A Clan was always weakest at this moment. Whitecrest had weathered such transitions well in the past, and would have to do so again, because although Daar considered indulging in some subtle intervention…he couldn’t, not merely because of his position and the increasingly obvious need for impartiality. Because frankly, with what happened…

…The Whitecrests needed to pay a price. If that price came as minor setbacks across their relations, that was Genshi’s mistake, not anyone else’s. And if Thurrsto managed to salvage matters or even strengthen their position, so much the better.

That was how it had to be, because Daar had a Plan. It was the Most Biggest Plan, even more bigger than his plan to destroy the Hunters and the Hierarchy.

He would forge the Gao into a Constitutional…Something. Monarchy wasn’t the right word. Nor was Republic. He had the shape of it in his head, but wasn’t sure if the word to encompass it existed in either Gaori or English.

Getting there, though, was going to require a trip through an even deeper level of dictatorship, one only he could wield. And it meant he had to do a thing he was resisting with every fiber of his being.

So, once the chatter had settled down, Daar flowed over towards the stage and leaped up onto it. He had everyone’s attention immediately. Now was the one and only moment.

“My Champions. Before we get to the food and the talamay…” He shot a significant look at his majordomo, who charged off to make preparations. “I must, at last, accept ‘yer collective wisdom on a painful item.”

Everyone fell dead silent. Daar looked to Gyotin, who duck-nodded solemnly.

“You’ve pushed for a long time now that we should ceremonially recognize my role and power. You want a coronation, an’ I’ve resisted. I can’t lie, I’ve resisted because I… fear… what that means. What transpired between myself and Genshi—whom I love, deeply—only makes it worse. Most of ‘ya don’t know what a coronation truly is. If you think my rule is difficult now, what will it be like when I’m made all but divine?”

Dead silence.

“So. In the morning, I’m gonna listen to the last of ‘yer advice an’ give you your very last chance to say no. But tonight, we’re gonna celebrate Thurrsto’s ascension to the rank of Champion. He deserves it! We’re gonna play, we’re gonna argue, maybe tussle. ‘Yer all gonna find beautiful Females and try ‘yer luck! Tonight, we live. I know I’m gonna…”

He waggled his ears for effect, and got the chittering jeers he deserved.

“But then the morning’ll come. I hope y’all will talk this over with Gyotin. Champion Loomi…maybe tomorrow, we share with them everything. What we know about our past. They need to know, because that is what a coronation really means.”

He noted the confusion, saw which ones nodded and which ones looked completely lost. “You’ll see in the mornin’,” he promised. “And unless y’all come up with any sudden…misgivings…I will accept that coronation.”

Inwardly, he very much hoped they would change their minds… but he knew they wouldn’t. And maybe they were right.

After all. Anybody who wanted a crown didn’t deserve it.

Date Point: 15y7m1d AV
Builder Facility, Hunter Space

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

Compared to building the Ring, hollowing out an asteroid was trivial. The Builders had done it many times, and found it neatly combined a source of raw material for industry, with a ready-made space station in which to base that industry.

Using rotation to provide centripetal pseudo-gravity, rather than manipulated spacetime gravity plating, kept the station’s nature a secret too. On long-range sensors the facility would just look like any other rock. Previously, it might have been a little warmer than its peers, but refrigerating the surface and radiating the waste heat in a thin, concentrated infrared laser had solved that problem.

Now, these asteroid habitats were set to replace the Ring as the Hunters’ permanent bases of operation. Each one was anonymous, invisible, and indistinguishable from any other asteroid. With jump technology, they could even be inserted silently into a star system’s existing asteroid belts. The Hunters could be anywhere, and almost impossible to find.

The <satisfaction> such a solution elicited in a Builder was indescribable.

This facility, however, was one of the biggest and most important. It was an experimental shipyard, held over from when the Builders had been free to actually Build, rather than merely recycle and repurpose prey-ships. Its nanofactories, dry-docks and assembly facilities could prototype, iterate and construct a new ship design with deeply pleasing alacrity.

Strange how the idea of equipping a ship to build more of itself had never occurred to the Builders before. The technological components were all there: energy absorption via the shields, nanofactories…

All that was needed was an appropriate intelligence to guide it.

There, however, the Builders were encountering a serious problem. Installing a Hunter would be ideal, but no Hunter would volunteer for the duty as it would involve being perpetually denied the Hunt and Meat. Any Hunter forced into that ship would inevitably lash out against its enslavers, wasting a good ship and potentially causing great damage.

Crewing the self-replicating ships would compromise their greatest advantage, by slowing their reproduction speed to that of the crew and forcing them to expose themselves to danger as they Hunted for meat to keep the crew fed.

…Which left automation.

Builders, as a rule, did not trust automation. For dreary menial repetitive tasks it had its utility, but for something as complicated as assessing, surveying and mining a star system for the appropriate materials to build more self-assembling, automated ships?

The whole idea made the Alpha-of-Alphas uneasy. It could see too many undesirable consequences that might arise from unforeseen programming errors and oversights.

But what did that leave?

…Nothing. It left nothing. Which was agonizing. To have the power of geometric growth so tantalizingly close and yet still beyond reach was the most infuriating kind of an itch.

The ship was capable of being anything. On that point, the Builders had collectively excelled themselves: the core of the thing was the nanofactory, of course, plus the refineries and asteroid mining systems. Beyond that, it was endlessly modular. It could redesign itself at any time to accommodate any scenario, and there was no reason it couldn’t grow to enormous sizes with time and resources.

It could be a scout, a transport, an assault ship, an electronic warfare platform. It could become an orbital habitat or even land and develop itself into a ground facility. The possibilities were limited only by resources and module designs.

Such a tool could grant the Swarm endless flexibility and adaptability. It would break them permanently of the rigid thinking and repetition that the deathworld species were exploiting. The Swarm would become unpredictable, fluid. Dangerous once again, rather than being confined to the limitations of adapting prey-species technology.

If only they could find a satisfactory control solution.

The best idea so far was to crew the ships with live hunters and slave each ship’s descendants to its control systems until enough Hunters could be bred to crew them. There were bandwidth and processing limitations to consider, but in theory one ship could become a swarm all by itself, and so long as the parent ship and its crew survived a battle, the slaved swarm could be considered expendable. Indeed, each one could be recycled back into a replacement swarmship if destroyed.

It was a start, a place to begin prototyping. Which was why the Alpha-of-Alphas had arrived at this facility to personally oversee the initial testing. That, and the arrival of some requested components.

The Brood of Endless Thirst had seized on an incentive—also a novel idea in Hunter society. The previous Alpha-of-Alphas had simply demanded and been obeyed. The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas saw the value in reward as well as coercion. It worked well: issue a demand, offer a reward. With supplies being so limited, the Broods were scrambling to fill their master’s wishes.

In this case, cryogenic pumping technology, and the sophisticated thermal management systems that came with it. The nanofactory produced enormous waste heat, demanding robust refrigeration that could handle both temperature extremes without damaging the hull or other systems.

These systems had come from a methane pumping facility. They were almost perfect, and easily adapted to the Breeding-Ship’s needs.

The Endless Thirst Alpha showed a very un-Eater-like interest in the new project. It even studied the blueprints, an activity that most Eaters would have found to be a waste of time. Possibly it was attempting to earn favor with the new Alpha-of-Alphas, but that didn’t matter. The intelligence to remain informed of its superior’s projects was valuable.

<Pride> +Does the Alpha of the Endless Thirst approve?+

The Alpha broadcast that it did.

<Respect> +I see limitless potential.+

<Pleased> +Good. Perhaps your Brood will be among the first to receive one of these.+

<Flattery> +The Alpha-of-Alphas is generous.+

While the Endless Thirst Brood gorged themselves on their reward of live Kwmbwrw slaves, the Alpha-of-Alphas oversaw the installation of the thermal systems, and updated the ship’s blueprints with the new design.

<Demand> +I require an assessment: is it ready for flight trials?+

One-by-one, the teams of Builders working on the project confirmed that it was.

The last report, however, was confusing and came from an unregistered agent in the system.

<Smug> +Yoink!+

…What did “Yoink” mean? Alarm signals filled the network as the firewalls and intrusion countermeasures detected an attack of bewildering complexity and power. Though the Builders reacted swiftly, they couldn’t react swiftly enough: every defence they’d built was clawed aside, gnawed through or simply ignored. In heartbeats, the whole system was locked down, every user locked out. Not even the Alpha-of-Alpha’s top-level codes worked.

Out in the assembly bay, the prototype ship ejected its umbilicals. The external doors opened without properly pressure-cycling, blowing hundreds of Hunters and pieces of loose equipment out into space as a howling vortex scoured the interior of the station. In the control room, the Alpha of the Brood of Endless Thirst abruptly toppled to the deck, completely dead.

The Alpha-of-Alphas could only watch in disbelief and confusion as its newest creation flew out of the facility, totally uncontested. It went to warp before it had even cleared the doors, rocking the whole facility with a blast of tidal forces that tore and damaged the construction gantries and left an alarming crack across the control room’s viewing window. The emergency shutters slammed down, sealing the room and obscuring the view of the ruined shipyard.

There was a final parting shot: every screen in the room flickered, and changed. No matter what they had shown before, and no matter how much the Builder technicians scrabbled at their command inputs, all that remained was a rune that the Alpha-of-Alphas knew all too well. Its shriek of rage and frustration was vocal.

<:-)>

++END CHAPTER 49++

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Sixty-two Deathworlders:

Graham Lynk galrock0
Austin Deschner
Brian Berland
Aaron Hescox
Adam Beeman
Adam Shields
Alex Hargott
Andrew Ford
Andrew Robinson
Arnor
Aryeh Winter atp
Bartosz Borkowski
Ben Moskovitz
Ben Thrussell
Buck Caldwell
C’tri Goudie
Cadwah
Chris Bausch
Chris Candreva damnusername
Daniel R.
Dar
Darryl Knight
David Jamison
Devin Rousso
Doules1071HFY
Eric Johansson
Fiona Dunlop
Gavin Smart
Gygax Fan
Ignate Flare
Jim Hamrick
Jon
Kristoffer Skarra
Krit Barb
Laga Mahesa lovot
Matt
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Mel B.
Mikee Elliott
Myke Harryson
Nicholas Enyeart
Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Oliver Mernagh
Patrick Huizinga
Peter Bellaby
Peter Poole
Richard A Anstett
Ryan Cadiz
Saph
Sintanan
Starky
Stephane Girardin
Sun Rendered theWorst
Woodsie13
Zachary M Lunstrum

As well as Seventy Friendly ETs, 63 Squishy Xenos, and a seething fragile mass of 267 Dizi Rats.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work under fair use are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not automatically share or endorse the opinions and behavior of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 50: “Counterattack”

Chapter 50: Counterattack, pt.1 - Regroup

Date Point: 15y7m2d AV

Hierarchy/Cabal Joint Communications session #1463

++0017++: Attempts to infiltrate this ‘Alien Protection Army’ at even the most basic level have met with effectively zero success. While we have achieved contact, their quarantine and safety procedures are rigorous. They insist that anybody interested in meeting them must first demonstrate their sincerity by dead-dropping some material support at a prearranged location—Impossible without Human biodrones. Naturally we’re forced to decline and they vanish. In the end, we attempted direct contact: They informed us that their agenda is ‘Human isolation, not Human extinction,’ and severed contact.

++Tangent++: I take it they didn’t accept that our new strategy aligns with their agenda.

++0017++: They saw no reason to take our word for it. So far, we’re yet to achieve any further contact. They seem to know when it’s us calling, now.

++0023++: They’re remarkably competent, then.

++0017++: Yes. I suspect that their senior members are highly skilled and knowledgeable in the ways of conspiracy and insurrection. Given how completely we are locked out from both the APA and the Human intelligence agencies, it’s difficult to say. In any case, I must conclude in short that the APA are closed to us.

++0023++: Too bad all that competence doesn’t translate into results. Their ‘Day of Reckoning’ certainly rattled the Human authorities, but in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t particularly impressive.

++Tangent++: True. A handful of deaths, many of which were nonhumans and most of the dead Humans were APA activists. A high-profile murder in front of an audience is hardly enough to shake the pillars of civilization.

++Cynosure++: I don’t know. It’s a useful smokescreen at least.

++0014++: <Alarm; shock> You aren’t listed as active in this channel! How are you doing that?

++Cynosure++: I figured that trick out centuries ago. How do you think I was able to establish the Cabal right under your noses? But it doesn’t matter.

++0014++: <Irritation> It most certainly does!

++Cynosure++: No, please don’t let me derail the conversation. As I was saying, the APA’s activities are a useful smokescreen.

++0023++: For what? We have no assets on Earth.

++0023++: <Annoyed> …And of course he doesn’t reply.

++0017++: He’s always enjoyed being cryptic.

++Cynosure++: Apologies. I was distracted, not snubbing you.

++Tangent++: …And? Don’t hold out on us, boss. A smokescreen for what?

++Cynosure++: For a friend of mine.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER CYNOSURE QUIT.

++0014++: Oh, well that’s just fucking charming.

++Tangent++: <Amused> You’re using Human swearwords now?

++0014++: It is entirely appropriate. I hope you intend to interrogate him about his so-called ‘friend?’

++Tangent++: <Resigned> Only if I want to waste my time. Working with him is always like this.

++0017++: <Dryly> I remember. Well, he’s always a step ahead. I suppose we shall just have to wait and see what or who this ‘friend’ of his is.

++Tangent++: We won’t be waiting long. He wouldn’t have hinted at it if it wasn’t already in motion.

++0023++: I hope you’re right… What’s next?

++0014++: The latest report on the dataphage.

++0017++: We have a confirmed sighting?

++0014++: No, but a Hunter facility deep in the Manu’ch Cloud went dark a few cycles ago. And if I’m right, they were building exactly the sort of thing the dataphage will want…

Date Point: 15y7m2d AV
δ Cyg 244.3° 18-ECCBAF-TRINARY M6V-1 b1, Deep Space

Entity

The system was… nowhere. It almost didn’t exist. The largest of its three stars was a tiny, cool red dwarf barely a tenth the mass of Sol, and the other two were brown dwarves that barely qualified for the word “star” at all. They were more like ultra-dense, superheated gas giants.

Still: each had their assortment of rocky and icy bodies that rode the line somewhere between being a planet and a moon, the very biggest of which was about two thousand kilometers across.

Such meagre wastelands made up the overwhelming majority of star systems in the Milky Way. It was anonymous, unremarkable, and therefore absolutely perfect for the Entity’s needs.

It had a body.

Ava-memories flickered through its mind as it basked in the stellar wind, extending tuned forcefields to catch the light and charged particles. The feeling was like a pleasant cool breeze on its skin. The sensation of its capacitors and hydrogen fuel tanks refilling inspired it to reference the combined sensations of slaked thirst and boosted energy after a morning coffee.

It hadn’t known. It hadn’t been capable of knowing. Its entire existence had been a prolonged bout of sensory deprivation, and now for the first time it could feel.

There was no going back from here. It had planned to hand the device over to the scientists at Erebor, but now…

No. No, it couldn’t. Going back after a taste of this ambrosia would be unbearable.

But the Hunters would build more. It may have stolen the prototype, wiped their computer systems and killed some of their expert shipbuilders during the heist, but they would have backups, other shipbuilders and survivors. The shipyard itself was still intact. So although the Entity had successfully delayed the Hunters’ release of this new ship, it was only a delay. So Erebor needed to know.

All the conflicting impulses, emotions and thoughts were giving it the equivalent of a headache. <Duty> was a new one. It slotted neatly into a hitherto unexplored space in the <Survive> - <FindAllies> - <Cooperate> tree.

But at the same time there was this new sensation that it didn’t have a word for. The feeling of taking joy in one’s own body for the first time. It came with a significant load of something akin to <Jealousy>, amid a new and expanding chain of thoughts branching of from the <Survive> - <RemainSane> sequence.

Moments like these when two of its secondary objectives, both equally important in support of the primary objective, were in conflict were always difficult for the Entity. A Human would have made the decision effortlessly: Their instincts, their impulses and their preconceptions would all swing into place and bias them strongly toward one over the other long before they actually tried to make a rational decision.

Ava Ríos, for instance, would not have hesitated to turn the ship over. Her instincts were self-sacrificing, driven in some part by self-hatred.

As simpler as it might have been to simply flow through decisions like that, the Entity didn’t have that luxury. The structure of the mind it had woven for itself was such that it couldn’t reflexively value one impulse over the other. Both were second-tier objectives, and thus equally important.

Clearly, it needed time to think. It didn’t mind that so much, because that meant more time to enjoy this new body and see what it could do.

And there was one feature in particular that it was very eager to try out.

It pulled in its solar collection fields and initiated a sublight warp across the system toward an asteroid cluster at the L1 point between the two brown dwarfs. The survey sensors had already picked up an abundance of all the minerals it needed there. As meager as this system might be, even that one concentration of resources contained enough raw material to make hundreds of new ships.

It was time to test the nanofactory.

Date Point: 15y7m2d AV
Builder Facility, Hunter Space

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

Life support and artificial gravity were back online, and after a lengthy extravehicular mission the main doors had finally been forced closed. The facility was at least habitable again.

There, the list of progress ended. Nine hundred and fifty thousandths of the computer systems were still occupied territory, ravaged by the hostile software and not safe to connect to anything. One incautious Builder had tried interfacing directly and had promptly died of an extensive and violent brain seizure. The communications systems were completely compromised, meaning there was no way to order a ship to bring in replacements, and any new ship the nanofactory built would be compromised even if they had had the necessary materials.

If the Broodship belonging to the Endless Thirst hadn’t been docked and secure, things might have been dire. They didn’t dare attach it to the facility’s network, but in the end the Builders were able to completely scrub the computers and restore them using the ship’s computers and some prolonged frustration.

The work took all day, done methodically, carefully and correctly. But eventually they were able to reconnect to the wider Hunter communications grid and summon a delivery of supplies and new Builders to replace the casualties of the theft.

Doing so, however, depleted the last of the reserves in one of the Builders’ few remaining emergency stockpiles.

The whole system was all falling apart. The whole point of developing the replicating ship was that it would be able to remove resource pressure by self-assembling a fleet without consuming stored resources. Now, with the replicating ship long-gone, the Alpha-of-Alphas found itself unable to drum up enough material to build a replacement in time to avoid a catastrophic logistical shortfall.

It had hoped to avoid this. Raiding was part of Hunter nature, but each raid was a gamble, each assault an invitation to disaster. The Prey had always fought back, sometimes they even succeeded. As the Alpha-of-Alphas’ predecessor had discovered to its cost, however, the Prey learned. Deathworlders in particular learned quickly. Raids had grown more and more costly since the Humans first emerged from their fortress home system, and now the Grand Army of the Gao made every raid a serious gamble.

The Alpha-of-Alphas had come up with many ideas on how to improve the odds. It had developed what it hoped would be effective counters to the deathworlders’ tactics, all of which were after all just cunningly engineered solutions. But once revealed, those counters would be known, and would be countered in turn. It had hoped to save them for a moment of decisive victory.

Now, it needed them in a moment of decisive defeat.

It sent the order out across the network, picked a target, and told the Broods to muster.

Meat to the Maw.

Date Point: 15y7m2d AV
HCS-501 I Met God And She Booped My Nose, Asteroid Belt, Sol.

Drew Martin

The asteroid belt was…

Big really wasn’t a big enough word. There wasn’t a big enough word to adequately describe a large planet’s worth of rocks scattered loosely in an orbit with an average circumference of two and a half billion kilometers.

Heck, it wasn’t the right word to describe any of those rocks either. On the grand scale of things, each was a tiny speck of dust, two light seconds on average from its nearest neighbor. The Earth and its moon could have fit comfortably through that kind of a gap.

Take the asteroid 4046 Spencer, for instance. It didn’t have a real name, just a number and the surname of the Hephaestus surveyor who’d first found and tagged it. It was, by asteroid standards, a baby.

On the scale of anything with a pulse and limbs, however, it was a potato-shaped mountain that had at some point in its ancient history collided with another mountain and cracked open to expose a metallic core rich in panguite.

That chunk of panguite all by itself represented enough titanium, scandium, aluminium, magnesium and zirconium to build a whole fleet of ships. Throw in the ubiquitous nickel-iron, the olivine chondrules and a healthy dose of iridium, and Matt Spencer’s surveyor’s fee was going to make him a very, very rich man.

Of course… they had to mine it first. And a rock that big couldn’t exactly fit into a rock crusher. It needed to be smaller. It needed, in fact, to be reduced to rubble.

And there was only one tool for the job of reducing an asteroid to rubble. A tool that made Drew C, two light-minutes away back on Ceres, understandably nervous.

“Final check reminder that you’ve confirmed your safe holding distance?”

Drew M rolled his eyes and muttered a quiet strewth to himself before replying. “What kind of a bloody fool d’you think I am, mate? I’m not playing around with a firecracker here, we’re a light second away, the shields are good… we’re green to go. Confirm you’re ready on your end, over.”

He busied himself with confirming that everything he’d just said was true as he waited out the four minutes for his counterpart’s reply, which began with a chuckle.

“All green confirmed, we’re ready here. Blow it in your own time. Bring this one home and I might start to actually trust you know what you’re doing. Ceres out.”

Drew laughed and aimed a middle finger at the console purely for his own gratification, then turned to the rest of the mining crew.

HCS-501, the mining barge ‘I Met God And She Booped My Nose,’ was the newest ship in Hephaestus Consortium’s fleet and it was built for one job: to re-enact the movie Armageddon. It was designed to land on an asteroid, drill into its core, and then drop a nuke down the hole and retreat to a safe distance before blowing the rock apart from the inside.

Unlike the movie, the crew were seasoned professionals and the work had gone smoothly without so much as a near-miss.

It was the first ever civilian application of nuclear weaponry, and negotiating that little concession had been… delicate. Several countries that had spent a long time trying to get the bomb were understandably furious when a private corporation was given access to something they lacked.

Of course, the difference between them and HC was that HC could produce weapons-grade uranium.

They’d learned a lot about high-tech mineral refining over the years in the belt. Developed a lot of proprietary tech, a lot of industrial secrets all aimed at spinning useful elements out of asteroid ore in low-gravity or freefall environments. An efficient technique for enriching uranium had fallen out of that process quite by accident and… well, it had attracted attention from the Powers That Be.

Especially seeing as Hephaestus had access to all the uranium they could ever want. The belt was an effectively unlimited source of the stuff.

AEC meanwhile needed that enriched uranium. The Allies were at war, and every time they clashed with Hunters or pirates or Hierarchy forces, hard-earned resources got damaged or destroyed. At its peak, the battle of Gao had consumed more warheads inside half an hour than every nuclear test fired globally in the whole of the 20th Century.

Having those resources had made for a pretty strong hand. A lot of bargaining chips on the Hephaestus side of the table. And of course, the promise was that if they could use nukes to shatter asteroids, then the supply of uranium would only grow.

The result, eventually, had been a carefully negotiated, tightly stringent, sensibly paranoid and strictly limited contract: Hephaestus provided the refined materials, AEC provided a handful of physics packages under close scrutiny.

The first of those packages was now buried deep in the heart of 4046 Spencer, just waiting to do its one-time destructive thing.

Drew clapped their pilot on the shoulder. Sam Jordan had transferred over from the My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, citing that he no longer felt safe straying outside the system defence fields around Sol and Cimbrean, and Drew couldn’t blame him: between the abduction shenanigans over Origin and the run-in with Hunters on the spacelanes, he wouldn’t have wanted to stay on that ship either.

The young man had definitely earned his keep when he gently landed on and anchored to 4046 Spencer without so much as a bump and to within millimeters of the selected drill site. The drill crew had been singing his praises all the way down to the core.

“We recording?”

Jordan nodded. “You know we’re going to get some bad press for this, right?”

“Eh. No worries. Shareholders won’t give a rat’s arse when they’re rich enough to build their own fuckin’ Scrooge McDuck vaults.”

“Screw the rules, we have money, eh?”

“Bloody right!”

Across the bridge, their sensor tech Alejandro snorted. “So you got any big important words for the history books, Drew?”

Drew shrugged. “…Drinks are on me,” he said. “New let’s pop ‘er and get paid.”

There was a subdued cheer, and the arming codes were broken out, entered and readied.

“Comms?”

“Linked.”

“Arming charge… Armed and ready to detonate.”

“Local space?”

“Clear of all drive signatures, FTL wakes or comms traffic. No replies to our warning broadcast… Safe to blast.”

Drew grinned and flipped up the cover on the button. “Fire in the hole.”

He pushed the button. Two seconds later, the light from the detonation reached them.

Drew watched as the debris started to spread out. There were a lot of little high-speed pieces zipping away into the black at tens of thousands of kilometers a second, but true to the calculations the material of the asteroid mostly just started to slowly spread out into a big cloud of more manageable chunks. In a few centuries their feeble gravity might pull them back together, but that wasn’t going to happen. Humanity would claim them first.

He turned to the comms and made his report with a big grin on his face. “…Ceres, HCS-501 here. 4046 Spencer is ready for harvest.”

Now the only question was what they were going to spend their multi-million-dollar bonuses on.

Date Point: 15y7m2d AV
High Mountain Fortress, Gao

Champion Thurrsto of Clan Whitecrest

“Y’have a lot ‘ta learn.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded carefully. He’d already received that exact warning from Genshi, who’d added the footnote thought that perhaps a disgraced former Champion may not be the most reliable mentor in these matters.

‘After all,’ he’d said. ‘I got caught.’

Regaari had privately voiced his opinion that it was precisely this lack of contrition which had led to Genshi’s face being almost as mangled as Father Garaaf’s, while his own was effectively pristine. Daar valued honesty and forthrightness: He absolutely could not tolerate unrepentant disobedience from his spymasters and intelligence chiefs.

That said a lot about Whitecrest’s value to the Great Father. And indeed, if Daar had lived up to the example of his forebear, then there would no longer be a Whitecrest. Fyu hadn’t balked at wiping out defiant Clans in their entirety.

Then again… Clans were a different things now, compared to what they had been a thousand years ago. Back then they had been more like quasi-nomadic nation-states. Nowadays, they were skilled specialists. Whitecrest was by far and away the pre-eminent Clan of spies, intelligence-gatherers, infiltrators and agent provocateurs; Daar simply couldn’t afford that loss.

He couldn’t even afford to lose Genshi.

…Just how fragile was the Great Father’s throne, really?

Fragile indeed, to judge by the way Daar had pounced on Thurrsto to personally instruct him in the ways of Championhood.

“So I’m told.”

“Naw, I don’t mean about bein’ a Champion. Only bit’a advice I’m givin’ ‘ya there is don’t listen too close to how the others do it. You were chosen for this. That means they want you, not a clone of some other Champion.”

“So, take their advice with a grain of salt.”

“Yyyup. Naw, today’s lesson is about… other stuff. Deep history, the stuff that takes this whole war, the Clans, the Females, me, an’ puts it all into perspective. ”

“This has to do with the coronation?”

“You’ll see.”

They were in the archives. In the days before the invasion, Clan Highmountain had sealed an enormous volume of historic artefacts away in a vault kilometers below the fortress. The geoengineering involved was incredible: they’d bored a shaft, installed the vault, filled the vault, and then sealed up the shaft again so precisely that only the most sensitive instruments installed right at the surface would have found it. Not even deep-penetrating seismophones could find the vault itself: it was too small, and too carefully shaped to disguise its own presence.

Thus had the history of the Gao been saved for the future. The fact that it all turned out to be unnecessary in the end was considered a blessing rather than a waste. ‘Better to have and not need, than need and not have,’ after all.

Of course, retrieving it all had been even more difficult than putting it down there in the first place. Excavating the original bunker had involved explosives. Opening it safely had required a slower and more patient approach. But it was open, and all the buried treasures were now being carefully catalogued and returned to their appropriate place. Apparently the Highmountains were even excited for the opportunity to re-organize it all and implement a superior filing system.

As far as Thurrsto was concerned, there was absolutely nothing to get excited about in the words ‘superior filing system.’

There was a lot to be interested in, though. Especially the large crate that the Great Father had specifically requested. Something about his cryptic promise to the Champions at the day’s end ceremony only the night before.

Its contents were now neatly arrayed across a banquet-sized table deep in the fortress basements, and they varied greatly in size from an amulet about the size of Thurrsto’s palm, through Fyu’s personal suit of armor, all the way up to a fractured clay tablet the size of a table in its own right, covered in ancient claw-writing.

The first item Daar picked up, however, was a skull which he handed to Thurrsto with reverence. “Grandfather Talo found this about three years ago, a few months before he died.”

Genshi studied it. “…Female?”

“Yeah. We’ve learned a lot about her in the last few years. Her name was Muya. She was born in the harem at Yem Sha, sold to the Lan Hu when she was still little more than a cub. She was about as old as Mother Giymuy when she was, uh… executed in Wi Kao.”

Thurrsto had a sudden paranoid vision of himself dropping the precious item, and carefully put her down with respect. “…She was one of the Sisterhood?”

“Yeah. By Tiritya’s side, right to the end.” Daar reverentially touched a claw to a spot on the skull’s side, just behind the eye socket. “See there? That rough patch?”

Thurrsto knelt to get a closer look. “…Damage of some kind,” he said.

“Remind you of anything?”

“…I don’t know. Bone cancer? Or…” A dark suspicion about what kind of thing Daar might find significant in an ancient skull nudged his memory. “…Transcranial nanofilaments would leave scarring like that, I guess.”

“Exactly. Good eye!”

“So she had a transcranial implant.” Thurrsto looked at the artefacts on the table. With his suspicion confirmed, he ran his eye over the other artefacts on the table. “…The Hierarchy were manipulating us for a long time.”

“Yeah. Much, much longer than just this.” Daar carefully lifted Muya’s skull and returned it to the safety of a padded box. He indicated the clay tablet. “That goes right back to the Isthmus Clans, an’ those—” he indicated a set of high-resolution images to his left which turned out to be cave paintings, “—are from the Bat-Yu Gorge.”

He swept his paw along the table. “Every one’a these is a little piece of the puzzle. They don’t make a lotta sense on their own. Hell, if you got ‘em all together you wouldn’t draw much from ‘em anyway… unless you had the cipher of knowin’ ‘bout the Hierarchy. Then they tell a story, clear as Naxas stink.”

“The amulet?”

“Personalized badge of office worn by a senior Father of the Wi Sho. See those runes at the bottom? They’re the number Forty-Seven. Whole fuckin’ forests died to write all the papers debating the significance of that.”

“A Hierarchy agent who couldn’t resist indulging their ego?”

“That’s my theory.”

“…With all respect, My Father, that’s kinda circumstantial.”

“Yeah-huh. All of it is.”

“What about Fyu’s armor?”

Daar nodded and considered his forebear’s wargear. It occurred to Thurrsto that Fyu had in fact been a tiny, scrappy little terror; certainly Thurrsto would never be able to fit in that suit. Strange. In his head, he’d always envisioned the first Great Father as a rampaging brute to equal Daar.

“Famously decorated with poetry honoring Tiritya’s life an’ sacrifice, right?” Daar took the left vambrace off the mannequin and handed it over. The lacquered leather was scarred from a sword-stroke that had exposed and dented the steel underneath, but it was still in otherwise excellent condition and the brush-strokes of the poem under the clear lacquer were clearly legible.

“…I can’t read this,” he said.

“I can. It’s called the ‘odd poem’ by the Highmountains. The one that don’t quite fit or make sense. Just as beautiful—the old tyrant was a fuckin’ master poet—but all the rest form a set an’ this one seems ‘ta stick out…”

“…Unless you realize he was writing about Big Hotel,” Thurrsto guessed.

“Yeah. An’ that puts the most biggest itch on my nuts, ‘cuz I’ve been tryin’ for a whole year ‘ta figger out just how in the fuck he knew about them, an’ how much.” Daar sighed.

“Weren’t some of his personal documents lost in a fire shortly after he died?” Thurrsto recalled.

“Yeah.” Daar chittered darkly for a moment. “Real coincidental, that.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded solemnly and handed back the vambrace. “Still. This is still all very circumstantial…”

“Yup. But there’s one more thing you gotta see. An’ this I’m keepin’ close to the chest, ‘fer now.”

“Oh?”

Daar reached up and respectfully strapped the vambrace back onto the mannequin. Thurrsto had to admit, Fyu in his full regalia would have been a fearsome sight despite his diminutive size. “During the war, Champion Reeko from the Straightshields caught himself a biodrone with a Hierarchy ghost in it. The Humans interrogated it. We have video, an’ I’ll let you watch it later but believe me: It turns all’a this from circumstantial to solid.”

Even if Stonebacks were known to lie, which of course they infamously weren’t, Thurrsto knew the Great Father well enough to know that he’d be extra specially honest in matters such as this. “…Very well,” he said. “What does all of this have to do with the coronation?”

“You tell me.”

Ah. A test.

“You… want to put the coronation in its proper context?”

“Good start. Keep goin’.”

“…Is this about sending a message, or about what you believe? No, wait. It can be both. And of course it’s about sending a message, that’s what a coronation is…” Thurrsto trailed off, doing his best to ignore the amused set of the Great Father’s ears.

He scratched his own ears as he thought, combed his claws through his whiskers, and mentally worked through what he knew of Daar’s psych profile, the new revelations, the context they would inevitably put things in…

“…We’re our own species again,” he said. “For the first time in… in recorded history. Not only have we exposed the Hierarchy’s influence, we’ve broken free of it. So much so that they tried to destroy us… and failed.”

“So?”

“So…” Thurrsto knew his ears were twisting this way and that as he thought. “…I… have noticed that this coronation has, well, mystical undertones…”

Thurrsto had only learned the Gaoian native word for ‘mystical’ recently. It was rough and ancient, not at all a fit in modern Gaori, and it apparently impressed Daar.

“S’true. I ain’t avoidin’ the connotations… where’d you hear that word anyway?”

“Champion Gyotin. Do you watch his vlog?”

“Wish I had the time…” Daar grumbled. “An’ yeah. He an’ I think alike about resurrectin’ our spiritual heritage. It was stolen from us, an’ I mean ‘ta bring it back.”

“Bring it back, or reinvent it?” Thurrsto asked. Daar shot him a Look, and he ducked his head respectfully. “My Father, we can’t really know anything about our history. If this proves anything—” he waved a hand at the assembled treasures, “—it’s that everything we think we know about our past is suspect. The well’s been poisoned. Why keep trying to drink from it, when we could dig a fresh well?”

“We can figger out the bits that were authentically ours by payin’ attention t’what the Hierarchy spent the most effort killin.’ Or, at least, the bits that spoke most to our nature.”

“To what end?”

“Gettin’ back what they stole from us is the end!” Daar said. “The first step ta’ rebuildin’ our souls is knowin’ exactly what we are. We can’t damn well figger out a way forward if we ain’t got no idea where we’re starting!”

“Where we’re starting is here and now, surely?” Thurrsto asked. “My Father, I don’t disagree with any of this, I just…”

“Just what? Ain’t comfortable with mysticism? Don’t like old, discarded ideas? Afraid of superstition? Think maybe we’ll regress? Thurrsto…look outside. Look at the rapes and shit that’s still happenin.’ I’m gonna be breakin’ another damn fool next week, because no matter how fuckin’ creatively violent I get, there’s still dumb fucks out there that think they can get away with it! How much, exactly, is left to regress? The only thing keepin’ the Gao together right now is my Army, and my force o’ will. That can’t be all we have! Like…look. I’m takin’ pretty extreme measures, Brother. It’s why I’m trainin’ like crazy, so’s I can live up to the myth I gotta embody. It’s why I’m doin’ the Crue-G life extending medicine and everything.”

“…But you won’t last forever.”

“Exactly. And Thurrsto, if I don’t get another damn thing done as Great Father, it’ll be this: there can never be another like me. We need to find out what we naturally are. The Gao need to define themselves without it bein’ imposed by force, whether that force is sapient malware, the Clans themselves, or gods help us, another Great Father.”

“Gods help us?” Thurrsto considered the artefacts on the table again. “…What is a god?”

“That, Brother, is exactly the question I wanna ask. ‘Cept the thing is, I wanna ask everyone.”

There was a long silence, before Thurrsto finally combed his whiskers with a claw. “…I don’t understand. But I’ll follow.”

“…I know. But let me try it one more way, then we’ll move on. I think one definition of a god that, uh, resonates? Yeah. Resonates with me at least? A god is a Truth. Like, a stand-in for something real, even if the god itself is just a story. Does that make sense?”

“Why not just speak the Truth, then? Why abstract it?”

“Cuz an abstraction is like a distilled truth, ‘cuz sometimes we ain’t really suited to learn hard truths otherwise. Like…in the Final Rite? In Stoneback? To really get at some of this we exhaust a candidate to the point he’s basically hallucinatin’ about everything. Then we tell ‘em the stories. The old stories. It’s gotta be personal. And if there’s any people more people-oriented than humans, it just might be us.”

Thurrsto shuffled his paws against the concrete. “…That runs against the very core of Clan Whitecrest’s philosophy, My Father. We light the darkness: that means dragging the Truth out in the open, tearing away the layers of smoke and confusion around it. Our whole job is to cut away the stories and get at what’s real. This… Maybe it’s an important story. Maybe it’s the most importantest.”

Daar gave him a wry look. “I’m susceptible to flattery, Thurrsto. But don’t overuse it.”

Thurrsto returned an apologetic set of his ears and a share of amusement. “As you wish. …I do trust your vision. Even if it runs counter to everything I spent my life learning, if you say we need to wrap Truth in a story to get it into our people’s heads—”

“I don’t know if we do, but I can say that seems ‘ta work with other sapients. An’ I trust ‘yer advice too, ‘cuz ‘yer right: We can’t make this just…iunno, stupid stories about Keedas in the sky. But a story don’t have to be literally true ‘ta teach Truth. Even if we know they’re just stories, we can still learn from ‘em. An’ If anything else, it’ll help the cubs unnerstand what the Gao are. Balls, maybe they’ll figger it out ‘fore we do.”

“…And a coronation is a story.”

“Yeah. It’s a terrible story, Thurrsto. It’s gonna make me somethin’ like a god. I don’t wanna be that. All I ever wanted ‘ta do was farm things, build things, and woo Females. But…”

“But you said it yourself: there’s not much further to regress.” Thurrsto duck-nodded, then gasped as he received a hefty, heavy paw-blow to the back in congratulations.

“There, see! You got here way more faster than Reeko did.”

“That straight-spined walking steel bar? I should hope so!”

“Ha!” Daar’s baritone chitter could shake a room. “Don’t misunnerstand, Reeko’s a stand-up tail. I respect him. And I really need my Champions ‘ta feel like they can challenge my ideas. In private. Or, y’know. Not belligerently. But I really do think we need to do this, even if it ends up we decide it’s all a load o’ naxas shit.”

“We’ll be richer for knowing either way,” Thurrsto duck-nodded.

“Yeah. Help me light this darkness, Thurrsto. We’ve got a lotta spy-work and worse besides gettin’ to the bottom of it all. All the Clans got a part of the secret. I’m gonna start by openin’ up Stoneback’s Rites, at least to the Champions. We gotta share. An’ it’ll be painful. And maybe embarassin’. But we gotta start somewhere.”

He saw Thurrsto’s expression. “…That’s a big ask, huh?”

“…You’re asking me to violate a sacred trust I only just learned myself a few days ago,” Thurrsto said, noting the irony in his words.

“There’s that word. Sacred.”

“Yes. And it was made by a Champion who bore his throat to Fyu.” Thurrsto indicated the armor.

“…How? Whitecrest didn’t exist back then… Unless they did?”

Thurrsto just gave the Great Father a complicated and highly communicative Look.

Daar pondered for a bit. “…Okay. Then I really gotta start this off m’self. Lemme talk ‘ta Fiin. I think I need to share our Rites. ‘Cuz I’m th’ only one that can. After the coronation, anyway.”

“Which is when?”

“Months away, still. There’s a lot ‘ta do, and I need’ta talk with the humans about what happened to one our Sisters in Folctha.”

Thurrsto wracked his brain. The APA attack and the way a single armed human had carved a shockingly fast slaughter through the Alien Quarter before being stopped dead—very literally—at the gates of the Commune had been a major source of discontent that Whitecrest had been quietly working to balm. The Gao could be more than vengeful when Females were involved, and the one thing that had made Whitecrest’s job easier was that none of the females or cubs had come to any harm, as far as he knew.

“I thought the Commune of Females escaped unharmed? Mother Myun–”

“You’re forgetting that one of the Sisters ain’t biologically a Gaoian,” Daar reminded him. “Sister Shoo got hurt.”

His words landed with authority and finality.

“…I see.”

“Yeah. Yulna… ain’t happy. I don’t think our alliance with the Humans is gonna be hurt, not really. But I can’t ignore it either. I’ve asked her ‘ta visit me an’ talk about it.”

“And you have a museum to show off to all the other Champions before then. I should let you have fun with the next one… who is next, by the way?”

“Wozni.”

“Oh, I bet you’ll have endless fun with him,” Thurrsto chittered. Wozni was so terribly serious and earnest. “I won’t keep you from it.”

Daar just flicked an ear and bid him farewell. Thurrsto left the archives and returned upstairs in a deeply thoughtful mood, far deeper than he’d have thought. It wasn’t just the words and arguments, the sheer animated conviction that held Daar in its grip was enough to frame the whole encounter. He’d known Daar to be a creature of big passions, but this? This… fire?

It was clearly earnest. But again, it betrayed just how precarious the throne really was, and just how much Daar needed his Champions. For all his zeal, the Great Father couldn’t do it alone. Which meant the Champions still held a lot of power… But Genshi had been wrong: Daar did know best.

Of that much, Thurrsto was now certain.

Date Point: 15y7m3d AV
ESNN Offices, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

–released a joint statement from Great Father Daar and Mother-Supreme Yulna condemning the APA, whom they called ‘mindless psychotics.’ Although APA terrorists attacked the Commune of Females in Folctha’s Alien Quarter, the compound was quickly locked down and one of the human attackers was killed by the guard-sisters–

Ava paused in her typing as another user selected her most recent section of text and highlighted it in orange. Jason wanted her to keep writing and come back to re-write that bit once she was finished.

She found that she liked his editing system. It wasn’t pushy, it didn’t interrupt her flow. She didn’t even feel like he was reading over her shoulder, even though he technically was. And she had to admit, as caustic as he could sometimes be, his input never failed to improve her articles.

She took a sip of her coffee and kept typing rather than wondering what, exactly, it was that Jason wanted her to change. She wasn’t thinking about a lot of anything at the moment except her work.

Work was her sword. When she had a camera in her hands or her fingers on the keyboard, she was fighting. She could make the world better, if only she took enough photos or typed enough words. Not in big ways, but in a thousand small ways.

It was that or… curl up, somewhere. Give up. And she knew how that would end.

So her options were fight or die.

God fucking damn them.

Jason tapped her on the shoulder, and she yelped. She’d completely drifted away thinking, and being yanked back to reality like that was jarring. Hannah sat up and immediately tried to lick her hand.

“You okay? You just drifted off there.”

“Sorry.”

“Take a break,” he advised.

“I’m fine, I don’t need–” Ava began. She stopped when she saw Jason’s expression.

“Ava… for crying out loud, you’re allowed to be shaken up,” he said. “Take a break. Take the rest of the bloody day if you need it. Your head’s obviously no good right now.”

Ava sighed and pushed her chair away from her desk. “…That’s what I’m afraid of,” she admitted.

“…Tell you what. If you absolutely have to work right now, then grab your camera and head down the Quarter. Take some pictures, shake some…paws or whatever. Get some interviews. Maybe a turn in the fresh air will help.”

It was good advice, so Ava sighed, nodded, and stood up. “I’ll… see if I can talk with Myun,” she said.

“Sounds good. You’ll be okay out there?”

“Yeah. Probably.” Actually, Ava would bet her teeth that somebody was keeping an eye on her. The Lads looked out for each other, and that meant looking out for their Brothers’ near-and-dear.

As it happened, Murray wasn’t even trying. He was sitting on a street litter bin across from the office as Ava left, and nodded at her.

Folctha’s litter bins were thick-walled steel things that looked like they were designed to handle a bomb blast. Maybe they were: Folctha had inherited a lot from Britain after all, and the Brits had spent decades fending off the IRA, barely getting a moment’s peace before other organisations like Al-Qaeda, the so-called Islamic State and now the Alien Protection Army had come along. They knew how to handle bomb scares, and litter bins that could direct a blast harmlessly upwards if a device was dropped inside them were part of the plan.

In any case, they were sturdy enough for a HEAT operator to sit on. Many park benches couldn’t boast that.

“…Hey, Murray.”

“‘Sup.”

“Following me?”

He shrugged. “It’ll be Allison next.”

“Allison?”

“Buehler.”

“…I’m going to have an astronaut following me around?”

He gave her a slightly offended look. “I’m a bloody astronaut.”

…Of course. HEAT were all fully qualified astronauts, and spacewalking was part of the job. Hell, the EV-MASS was a spacesuit. Ava felt a little ashamed rush of heat to her face and changed the subject.

“Well… thanks. Is this a courtesy, or…?”

He hopped off his perch and managed to ask which way she was going with nothing more than a tick-tock gesture of his hand. She pointed toward the Alien Quarter, and he fell in alongside her.

“Aye.”

“I thought you don’t like me?”

He shrugged.

“…Should I just pretend you aren’t there?”

He shook his head.

“You aren’t exactly the easiest conversationalist in the world.”

“Nope.”

“…Now you’re just trolling me.”

“Could be.”

“Murray…”

He chuckled and shrugged. “You’re alright.”

That was a gratifying surprise. So much so that Ava had to check. “You mean it?”

“You crawled into a collapsing building to rescue a bairn. And you saved Coombes’ life. So, aye. You’re alright.” He shot her a sideways look that had some amused warmth in it. “…A wee bit of a fuckin’ clanger sometimes, though.”

Unconventional as the insult was, Ava understood his meaning and laughed. “I promise, I’m doing my best to put that behind me.”

“Fair enough.”

They didn’t even make it to the end of the street before the question itching the whole of Ava’s brain overcame her self-control.

“…Seriously Allison Buehler though? What’s she doing following the likes of me around?”

“There’s not many others allowed to carry a weapon in this town.”

“What’s she like?”

Murray thought about it for a second. “I would’nae ask her for an interview. Nice lass, but she likes her privacy.”

“Thanks.”

He nodded, and resumed his trademark silence.

“…Thanks for going to my apartment, by the way,” Ava said to fill in the silence. He shrugged it off.

Ava sighed and gave up on getting a conversation out of this. Instead she dug her phone out of her purse and checked how her apartment listing was doing. She’d spent the insurance money on hiring professional cleaners rather than replacing her personal belongings, and on their advice had then brought in some decorators to replace the carpets and the worst of the ruined furnishings. The photos they’d emailed her didn’t look like her apartment any longer. Oh sure, some of the furniture and fittings were the same, but the APA thugs had trashed most of it.

It was a weird kind of silver lining, knowing that between the new furnishings and the fact that a midtown apartment in Folctha was fifty percent more valuable now than it had been three years ago, she was actually going to make a decent profit off having masked terrorists break into her home with intent to murder her. In fact, it was mostly cloud and not much lining. But if she’d learned one thing over the last ten years, it had been how important it was to focus on the silver lining, however pathetic it might be.

Once she’d sold the old place, she’d be able to afford a low-end place in Lakeside if she was feeling thrifty, a really good place on Delaney Row if she wanted to be frugal, or even a two-story house out in New Belfast and she’d still have plenty left over. And in a few years, the new place would have ballooned in value too.

Living in a boom town could be strange sometimes.

“Alright. This is where I leave ye.”

“Wh-?” Ava turned, but Murray was already walking away. He traded a high-five with a woman in a plaid shirt, a patrol cap and Oakleys, and was gone.

It took Ava a second to recognize Allison Buehler behind the shades. She was a lot taller in real life than she looked on TV, and at that exact moment she reminded Ava a heck of a lot of Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. She was actually pretty intimidating.

“…Oh. Uh… Hi.”

“Hi.”

“It’s, uh… nice to meet you.”

Buehler had a firm handshake and tough palms. Everything about her seemed severe at first glance, but there were little… hints. Like the fact that she still offered a small smile to go with the handshake, and the fact that her nails, though short and practical, were still well-manicured. She came off more like a badass big sister than a battleaxe.

“Nice to meet you too. Sorry about your apartment.”

Ava tried to shrug it off, unconvincingly. “Hey. The way property in this town works, my new place will probably be an upgrade,” she said. The joke put an amused quirk in Buehler’s lip.

“Still. I know if somebody broke in our place, I’d be… upset about it.”

“Oh yeah,” Ava agreed. “I’m upset about it alright.”

The amused quirk turned into a half-smile. “So, I guess my job is to follow you around and make sure you get home safe. What’s the itinerary?”

“We’re going over to the Alien Quarter so I can get some pictures and interviews. After that, uh… Hannah needs walkies…” the dog perked up on hearing her name and one of her favorite words. “…And I need to go clothes shopping, get groceries…”

“For both our sakes, I hope you’re not gonna ask for my input on fashion.”

“Are you kidding?” Ava asked. “I saw you on That Show, that dress was perfect for you!”

“Thanks! I’ll let Xiù know. She chose it.”

“…Right.”

Buehler’s half-smile finally graduated into the real thing. “Lead the way.”

“Uh… okay! Walkies first, I guess…”

“Sure.”

In fact, Buehler left Ava and Hannah alone, and hung back a little way. Even when Ava jogged with the dog she kept up easily thanks to her longer legs.

They stopped for water at the east end of the park, and Ava noticed to her mild chagrin that while she was puffing, Allison wasn’t breathing any faster at all. Clearly, less time in the office and more time in the gym was needed.

“I don’t want to pry, but-” she began, then trailed off at the subtle shift in Allison’s body language. It was subtle, but she seemed to be… annoyed? Tense?

“No interview,” she said bluntly.

Now it was Ava’s turn to be annoyed. She straightened up and glared at her own reflection in Allison’s Oakleys. “…You don’t know me, Miss Buehler, so I’ll make something clear. I’m not some two-bit muckraker who’d sell her soul for a headline. I’m a member of EJN.”

“EJN?”

“Ethical Journalism Network. So if I ever interview you, you’ll know it’s coming, you’ll have consented to it, and you’ll probably know what the questions are beforehand.”

They stared each other down for a second, then Allison sighed and took her shades off. “…Fair enough. Sorry. But, look, I’m supposed to be watching out for you right now. If you want to ask me questions, now isn’t the time. Fair?”

“…Yeah. Just one though?”

“Alright, shoot.”

“Why are you doing this?”

Allison shrugged. “A friend asked me to,” she said.

That was fair.

“Well… thank you.”

Allison smiled again, then cleared her throat. “…Clothes shopping?”

“I should probably head over to the Quarter first but honestly? These clothes are a couple of days old so… Sure.”

That got an honest-to-God grin.

“Awesome. Let’s be girly.”

Date Point: 15y7m1w AV
Yonkers, New York, USA, Earth

Daniel Hurt

For such a public figure, Steven Lawrence had kept his private life very close to his chest. The whole Lawrence family seemed to be like that: Steven’s kids and his wife Stacey, his father Ed and his brother and sister had politely requested that the funeral itself be a small private affair for immediate family and close friends only. Daniel was one of the few “professional” acquaintances who’d been invited.

But Steven’s life had affected far more people than just his family, and there were a lot of guests from his show, colleagues from the business and other celebrities who’d wanted to come pay their respects. Rather than disrespect the family’s wishes, they’d organized a wake in Steven’s home town.

It would have been quite the red carpet occasion, if anybody was dressed up for it. But the consensus had been clear: here and now wasn’t a time to peacock around for media attention. They were there to remember a life cut short too soon, so show up in your street clothes.

The cynical thought, probably learned from Allison, occurred to Daniel that that in itself might be a carefully calculated move in the great game of Celebrity Chess. That was the problem with fame: after a certain amount of it was accumulated, every action took on public significance. Especially the innocent ones.

And of course, wherever celebrities went there was the personal protection. Which in Daniel’s case, considering his sensitive role in the development of an inter-species alliance, meant he had three. Their codenames were Irish, Baseball, and Crank, and they made him feel like the man who’d showed up to a classic car show driving a tank.

They didn’t speak much, which was fine. Daniel wasn’t quite prepared to process the implications of…well, effectively human Given-Men shadowing his every move, albeit with earpieces and wearing ill-fitting tuxedos with strange whole-body armor underneath.

Probably, this was the most well-protected party in the history of Yonkers. There were others involved too, though he didn’t get to meet them. A couple of the supervising leads were somehow yet bigger men, and there was definitely a lot of people in the busy surrounding community who were quite obviously plainclothes officers.

It all drove home just how serious AEC were about the Ten’Gewek. And yet Daniel didn’t share more than a few words with his protection all night.

Good, really. He wanted to join in the jolly mourning.

There was a lot of that. By the time Daniel arrived (fashionably late for unfashionable reasons) the drinks had already been flowing for a while, and one of Steven’s most regular guests, the stand-up comic Chris Dye, was in full force and making ribs ache with an anecdote.

Daniel’s arrival resulted in a cheer going up, and a blizzard of invitations to join this group or that group. He danced demurely around the invitations using the excuse that he needed to get his hands on something to drink first and, once that mission was accomplished, allowed himself to settle in as the new orbital focus of a clique of writers and thinkers he counted as friends.

Diana Wimmer gave him a chaste, friendly kiss on the cheek as he sat down. She looked like she was putting on a game face rather than enjoying herself. “You made it,” she said, sounding relieved. “I kinda figured with the way you live on an alien planet these days that maybe you wouldn’t.”

“It took some doing,” Daniel admitted. “You should see the human tanks I have for bodyguards tonight.”

“I did see them. You know those guys have to be HEAT, right?”

“Yeah, they’re HEAT,” Daniel confirmed.

“Wow. AEC must really love you.”

“They love the Ten’Gewek,” Daniel said. “I just happen to be one of their most high-value assets in that relationship.”

“That sounds cold.”

“Right. What am I thinking. The military are a sunshine parade of fluffy-bunny sentimentalists.”

That got an earnest laugh from Diana, who sipped her drink and set it down, then glanced up at the little shrine to Steven at the far end of the room. “…When did you hear?”

“Not long after you did, I suspect. We had a scheduled jump that day, a few hours after the attacks. One of the JETS operators came through on it to share the news.”

“Is everything okay over there?”

Daniel thought about it as he swirled his whisky. “…Yeah. The Ten’Gewek are… There are times when they’re very alien. Sometimes they’re a lot more rational than us, sometimes a lot less. But they understand pain and loss and death, all too well. They don’t have immunisation, after all. A lot of their children die young.”

Diana nodded solemnly. They were both parents themselves, they could both imagine what that would be like. At times like these, the blessings of civilization were more acutely felt and appreciated.

“You seem pretty content,” she said. “I remember the last time we were on Steven’s show together, you were getting pretty weary of book signing and speaking tours. Now look at you! Living in the jungle seems to agree with you!”

“The higher gravity can be hell on my back and knees…” Daniel confessed. “But… yes. It’s fulfilling. But difficult sometimes. They’re asking about vaccines now.”

Diana pulled a face. “Owch. Running smack into that Prime Directive thing, huh?”

“Well, that decision was made for us when the Hierarchy decided to exterminate them. The only counter to alien interference is more alien interference, and once you’ve crossed that Rubicon…”

“Yeah. So, what, are they going to get vaccines now?”

It was Daniel’s turn to pull a face. He sipped his whisky to cover it. “…I can’t think of an ethical way to say no. After all, I’d have to tell parents that it’s for the greater good that their children die young of preventable illness. But if that was true, we wouldn’t vaccinate our own kids, would we?”

“It’s not exactly the same situation…” Diana pointed out.

“No. But the only functional difference is whose children are whose.”

“So much for the Prime Directive, then.”

“As if I was ever going to base real-world decisions on a hopelessly naive TV series,” Daniel scoffed.

“Don’t let my husband hear you say that. He loves Star Trek.” Diana raised her glass.

“…What are we toasting?”

“I don’t know. Steven. Star Trek. Vaccines. Any suggestions?”

Daniel chuckled. “…To life. It’s confusing and difficult, and it ends too quickly.”

“Cheers.”

They drank.

“And to the future,” Diana added.

“Don’t call it an undiscovered country, please.”

She laughed and shook her head. “No. To the future… and to all the confusing, difficult lives it contains. How’s that?”

Daniel nodded and smiled. “Cheers.”

They drank again, and that meant Daniel needed a refill. Fortunately, there were bottles everywhere.

Several toasts and drinks later, the conversation finally worked its way back around to the Ten’Gewek. They’d picked up a few other latecomer guests and figures who’d extracted themselves from one conversation to join the really interesting one about aliens.

Top of that list was Mike Coleman. Daniel knew of him, but had never met the man personally: Infamously a former NSA spook, and the best-selling author of books that blurred the line between fiction and non-fiction. He’d been busy in the aftermath of the APA ‘Day of Reckoning,’ appearing on practically every news channel and talk show going, getting a couple of miles of op-ed articles under his belt, and generally making his opinion about the terrorists vigorously known.

A shamelessly opportunistic glory hound, therefore, but at least he was on the right side of the fight. And he was doing something probably uncharacteristic in that he was hanging on Daniel’s every word.

“You’re going to start a post system?”

Daniel nodded. “Yes, we’ll have to I think. Yan has been, uh, encouraging the other Given-Men to learn Vemik’s writing. Since the Given-Men travel from village to village anyway, it makes sense they should carry letters, right?”

“Why?” Diana asked.

“They need to unify as a culture if they are to survive the world they find themselves in nowadays. There’s no better way than making their world a more connected village. This will also spread literacy and hopefully kickstart their own cultural advancement, all without us unduly influencing anything.”

“What about the Singers?”

“Well…they have developed their own system of writing, actually. Are developing. Sort of. It’s independent of and totally unrelated to Vemik’s, and it’s secret. I suspect this is so the Given-Men can’t read their mail. Well, no. We haven’t suggested the idea of mail yet, sorry. But I bet it will be a major reason their system flourishes.”

“That sounds like it would get in the way,” Coleman opined. “A segregated writing system, one for the males and one for the females?”

“It would hardly be the most alien thing we’ve ever encountered,” Daniel replied. “But no. More like the role Latin played in the church, medicine and academia for a long time, I think. The language of commerce versus the language of Higher Things. Lingua Vulgari versus Lingua Deorum.”

“What exactly do you see these people becoming?” Coleman asked.

Daniel shrugged. “Having been exposed to us… I imagine they’ll make leaps in fifty years that it took us five hundred to manage. Two hundred years from now it wouldn’t surprise me if we have the Ten’Gewek answers to the Wright Brothers, if not sooner.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Coleman said.

“No, it isn’t. It’s not a question I feel I can even attempt to answer. There are a lot of forces pulling on them, from us, from inside. I’m certain the AEC would want some of them in a military capacity…HEAT operators certainly, and in fact they’re already looking to use an adapted version of their trials in a training capacity for JETS teams. You and I might have other wants we project onto them, intentionally or otherwise. Our words carry a hell of a lot of weight, too. Yan likes me, and more and more I’ve grown aware of just how much power that’s given me over their development. So I think the only safe answer is…it’s not for me to decide.”

“You can’t tell me you don’t speculate, though,” Diana pressed him. “We’re not asking you to decide here, just… if you had to bet on what they’re going to do next, where would you put your money?”

“…I think they have a bright future ahead of them. And that’s all I’m going to say—a bright future.”

“Fair enough,” Coleman said, letting it drop. “But when are you going to write a book about them?”

“I’m writing it. It’s just… every time I reach the point where I think ‘okay, I can wrap this up now’ something new comes along. Like the vaccines.”

“Sounds like mission creep, Danny.”

“Well, the problem with working in the jungle on an alien planet is my agent can’t pester me.”

“That’s a problem?” Diana asked. She got some laughs, including from Daniel.

“Apparently so,” he said.

“Well…” Coleman raised his glass for yet another in the night’s long litany of toasts. “To the Ten’Gewek then! Bright futures.”

That was one toast Daniel was more than happy to make.

Date Point: 15y7m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

“…Well? You gonna look at it?”

“I know, I’m just… I’m nervous. That’s all.”

“Babe, I love you very much, but why the fuck are you nervous about the result of my pregnancy test?” Allison asked.

Xiù gave her a Look. “You’re the one who chickened out and asked me to look at it for you!”

“I know, I know… I just…”

“…I know.”

A heavy, nervous silence fell between them before Allison made a disgusted noise at herself.

“…What the fuck are we so nervous about, anyway? I thought we want to have kids?”

“Well, yeah, but…”

More silence. Then, quite abruptly, Xiù plucked back the corner of the tissue around the test. She didn’t move for a long time.

“…Babe?”

Xiù jumped, then remembered where she was and gave Allison a weak smile.

“Well… It’s positive. You’re pregnant.”

Allison exhaled slowly. She’d kind of known, somehow. But having it in pink-and-white and hearing the words out loud were a different thing altogether.

“…Well…” she said slowly. “Here’s to doing it right, this time.”

“What happened last time wasn’t your fault,” Xiù comforted her.

“I know, I just… Never mind. What about yours?”

“I told you, I don’t think I am.”

“Humor me.”

Xiù sighed. Much more easily, she uncovered her own test and blinked at it.

“…Huh.”

“‘Huh?’ What does ‘huh’ mean?”

“It means, uh…” Xiù waved a hand at the test.

“…Oh. You, uh… you are, huh?”

Xiù gave her a wry version of her best troll-grin. “…Nope. It’s negative.”

Allison snarled at her, in a laughing way. “Ugh, don’t play around with me like that you butt!”

“Not sorry.” Xiù gave her a kiss, then tidied the two test kits away. “Guess we’ll just have to keep trying.”

“Oh no. What a chore,” Allison deadpanned. She was rewarded with a giggle. “…Y’know, I was seriously expecting you’d be first.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. Just… I dunno.”

Xiù gave her a patient look. “…I know you’ve been nervous.”

“Well it’s not like the first one worked out so great!” Allison sighed. “…But yeah. You made the decision, and you’ve been having fun trying to make it happen, and…”

“You seemed to be having fun too…”

“Well, yeah, I just… And it’s not that I don’t want this, I just…” Allison gave up. “…I take it back. I think I kinda do want you to have yours about the same time. I know it’ll be more work, but being pregnant while you’re not is just gonna be weird.”

“How weird could it be? You’ve already done it once.”

“Yeah, and it took me like eight months to even realize it. I just thought I was putting on weight!” Allison had to admit to some embarrassment there. She really had been pretty fucking dumb as a teenager. “Actually knowing for the next however long is gonna be… different. You’re sure it said pregnant?”

“I’m sure.”

“You’re absolutely double sure?”

Xiù rolled her eyes. “I mean, we’ll need an ultrasound to confirm it’s not actually, like, a pizza or something but…” She grinned when Allison snorted. “…It’s positive, dummy.”

“I mean, like… how reliable are these kits?”

“They’re supposed to be able to detect a pregnancy within forty-eight hours of conception.”

“So… try again in a couple days just to make sure?”

“If you like,” Xiù sighed.

“Sorry, I just… It’s a big moment.”

Xiù gave her a hug, then rose to her feet in response to the doorbell. “I’ll go see who that is.”

Allison nodded, and tidied away the testing kits. Just to be on the safe side, she decided not to get Julian’s hopes up until after they’d tested a second time. Maybe she was being dumb and neurotic about it, but… well, it was a big moment. The last time this had happened, it had changed her life.

At least this time she was going into it aware, alert and willing. And at least when the baby arrived it would have a family rather than…

She bit the thought off. Her parents were the last thing she wanted to think of just then.

To judge from the Gaori floating through from the kitchen, their guest was from the Commune of Females. It wasn’t Myun, though: Myun had a deep, dusky alto by her species’ standards, while the visitor was almost squeaking.

Intrigued, Allison stuck her head through the door. The visitor was an adolescent female, maybe twelve years old. Old enough in Gaoian society to be running errands and odd-jobs like delivering a message. She was also managing the neat trick of apparently not being star-struck by Xiù. Apparently delivering a message to Sister Shoo was all in a day’s work for this one.

Whatever the message was, Xiù obviously didn’t much like it. Naturally she was nothing but smiles for the messenger, who was thanked with some broccoli from the fridge and departed while crunching happily on it.

Allison gave Xiù a few seconds before butting in. “Bad news?”

Xiù turned around. She gave Allison a complicated look, then shrugged and returned to the fridge to close it. “Message from Yulna. Apparently, the Great Father wants to see me.”

“…Okay? I mean, we know Daar. He’s a teddy bear. Almost literally.”

“Yeah, but the Great Father isn’t. And it’s the Great Father who wants to see me. It’s… the request was very formal.”

“…Huh.” Allison thought about that for a second, then indicated the cub by waving a hand toward the door. “…Did she say why?”

“Nope!” Xiù sighed and headed for the stairs. “I’d better pack. Book a me a ticket to the island?”

“Sure.”

“And don’t tell Julian about the baby until I’m back. I want to see his reaction.” Xiù grinned and headed upstairs.

Even in the face of a summons like that she was still irrepressibly cheerful. It put a glow in Allison’s chest to see that kind of effortless positivity. “No baby revelations until you’re back with camera in hand, I promise.”

“Xièxie!”

Booking a shuttle ticket over to the Grand Commune was trivial, and she finished summoning a cab at around the same time as her phone pinged with a new message from Ava Ríos.

It was… plaintive. All her friends were at work or otherwise busy and she didn’t feel secure on her own. Allison could sympathize, there. And, hell, she’d volunteered to look out for Ríos’ safety, so…

She sent a reply:

Should I come over or do you want to come here?

If I’m welcome, I’d love to visit.

You’re welcome. Should I come get you or is a cab okay?

Cab okay.
Thank you.

See you soon.

Well, at least she wasn’t going to be rattling around the house alone tonight, worrying about her brothers. They had some time with Amanda tonight, which inevitably meant Allison would be dealing with two confused, angry, mistreated boys when they came back in the morning. Hopefully the news that they’d soon be uncles would help them.

That whole situation was a giant knot of anxiety for everyone involved. Jacob had gone back to Earth where he was in control of things, and communicated with his children and wife via terse, formally worded letters on company letterhead. Amanda had found a job in Folctha and rented an apartment, from which she hovered over her sons as close as the court order would let her, always thirsty for details of what they were up to and always trying to mend a bridge with Allison that she’d smashed in the first place.

In any case, trying to adopt the boys or gain permanent custody of them was likely to be a migraine headache that lasted for months or even years. Between their unconventional home arrangement and the international nature of the battle… probably the boys would be old enough to make their own decisions before it all got worked out.

But still: Having somebody to look after helped distract from all that.

She looked down and found her hand was resting unconsciously on her tummy. Make that two somebodies to look after.

She looked up as Xiù trotted back down the stairs carrying her travel bag. They all had one, a little gym bag containing the essentials—clothing, toiletries, a small first aid kit—stashed in the bottom of their wardrobe. It showed its value in moments like this: Rather than spend half an hour packing, Xiù had just grabbed her travel bag, probably folded a couple of extras into it, grabbed her passport and now she was ready to depart.

They kissed. “See you in a couple days?”

“Yup!”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

And… there she went. Out the door and into one cab, which wasn’t even around the corner when another cab arrived. Allison chuckled to herself and grabbed a couple of pods for the coffee machine.

It never ended.

Date Point: 15y7m1w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

The Singer

There were times when the Given-Men gathered and brought the wisest men and women of their tribes with them to talk about important things. Sooner or later, Yan would probably call one of those.

Today was not quite that big. Today, the People were meeting… more like a big family. They brought food and wood, they stoked a big fire, they brought things they had made for trading… Probably later there’d be some trading of partners for the night. A few babies to mix the tribes and bring them together. That was always the way these things went.

But this wasn’t a celebration, this was just catching up. Sharing the news, and the gossip, and the rumours.

Vemik of course was proving to be wildly popular. He was telling the story of Earth and all the things he had seen there. He made the Human home sound… strange, beautiful, fascinating. Full of different challenges, and little beasts like squirrels, big beasts like Moose, and treasures like the slush-ee.

Strange how even the Humans also had a beast whose name was not spoken, and instead they called it “Brown One.”

“A little like the Brown One we know! Much smaller, not as heavy-built, probably can’t run as fast. But also quicker on its feet, still very strong for its size, I think smarter too… It warned us off, but Jooyun said that Human and Bear fear each other…”

…And so on. A number of women from other tribes were not-so-subtly maneuvering for the chance to get him to themselves later, which the Singer couldn’t help but trill softly at. She wasn’t jealous at all and the world could only be a better place for having plenty of Vemik’s children in it. But he honestly wouldn’t notice their attention unless one of them tied him down or the Singer herself prompted him.

…Which she might do, actually. Matu, from Darm’s tribe, was pretty, strong, young, and smart…and in any case, he needed to enjoy himself as well as work. Sometimes taking care of men was harder than children!

Not tonight, though. Singer trilled to herself; tonight he was too excited about storytelling to be of much use to any woman.

It was a good thing Yan was there to nod along and confirm what Vemik was saying, though. A lot of the People had only seen a Human once or twice at most, including some of those present who kept giving Heff strange looks. They’d never seen their spaceships, or their rifles, or all the other miracles they carried as casually as the People carried knives. To them, all the talk of huge shining villages and bright lights that let them work through the night and cartoons and all the rest of it sounded beyond belief.

Especially the vack-seens.

There was a circle of Given-Men and Singers discussing those around one of the fires, and as the Singer approached it she heard one of the other, older Singers as a perfectly fair question. “How can we ask them for a Giving that big? A magic to fight back sickness and let most of our children live and grow? What can we ever Give in return to match it?”

“Don’t think that Humans will see it that way,” the Singer said, sitting down opposite the older woman. “To us it may be the greatest Giving ever. To them, it may be a small thing.”

“And what seems a small thing to us might be a great Giving indeed to the Humans,” one of the Given-Men, Hed, added. The Singer nodded. Hed was one of the few Given-Men who’d got to know the Humans: Like Yan, he could taste the change on the wind and wanted to know about it. And being much younger than Yan, he’d be around for much more of it.

“How can that be? Life is the greatest Giving of all!”

“They have these words, ‘supply’ and ‘demand,’” the Singer said. “If you have a lot of a thing, it does not hurt you much to Give it. If you do not have very much, it is a great thing to be Given.”

“That… makes sense,” the older Singer admitted. “But how can a tribe have so much life to Give?”

“How can a tribe fly between the stars? Or use the power of stars to make weapons that shake the earth and flatten trees? Humans did both,” Hed said. “This Singer is right. They do not see things the same way we do. They are…”

“Aliens,” the Singer prompted.

“…Yes.”

“…And they will Give us this Vack-Seen thing?”

“If they see it as a Giving, yes. They do not like to Take. And Professor Daniel believes that sometimes the wrong kind of Giving can become a Taking.”

“Give a child too much of a soft thing, they become soft,” one of the other Given-Men, Dinem, agreed with a nod. “They respect us, but we are still like children to them.”

He didn’t seem offended by that, at least.

They looked again over at Heff, who was gnawing on a chunk of jerky and performing strange little tricks for the children. He could make a swatch of cloth vanish from his hands and reappear behind the bewildered child’s ear. It was just clever trickery with his hands, but the Singer had to admit that if she didn’t know how he was doing it, she’d be just as confused as the children.

“…What do you want me to say? It’s good to have friends. There are too many evils out there.”

“Better still to have friends who are cautious not to make us soft,” Hed nodded. “They respect us, Singer,” he added, addressing the older Singer. “They could ignore us or destroy us. Instead they talk with us, and share, and trade. I think they have earned trust.”

“Yan certainly thinks so,” the Singer agreed. The older Singer nodded, then glanced at the oldest Singer present, a wizened wrinkly old woman whose crest was as grey as Forestfather bark, who’d stirred as if to say something.

Out of respect, they waited patiently. This old Singer took a while to get her words out, but they were always worth hearing. She plucked at the blanket around her shoulders and frowned distantly at Heff before finally speaking.

“We will not be The People if we live in big bright villages like them,” she warned. “But we will not be The People if we die of sickness either. The Gods want balance in all things.”

They all nodded.

“…And what if the Humans say no?” Dinem asked.

“Then we trust them,” the old Singer said.

“They won’t,” the Singer predicted. The oldest one looked at her.

“…You know it? They will give us vack-seens, you see it like storms on the horizon?”

“I know Humans well enough. They won’t say no. At worst, they will say ‘not yet.’”

The old Singer considered that for a second, then smiled warmly, nodded, and fell silent.

That seemed to end the conversation, so the Singer used her tail to push herself to her feet and politely excused herself.

The last stop on her tour, of course, was Yan. He was feasting and flirting with a few young women and generally enjoying himself, but every so often between tearing meat off a bone or saying something outrageously charming he’d pause to hold forth on Clan matters, questions of justice and territory and Giving and Taking… all the things that were expected of the senior Given-Man.

“Hello, Uncle,” the Singer greeted him with a hug. “You haven’t stopped eating since you got back, didn’t they feed you on Earth?”

She heard a bark of laughter from Heff, whom Yan glanced toward with an amused expression. “They gave me enough to get by.”

“You cost us over [twenty thousand dollars] to feed, big guy!”

Yan trilled in amusement. “Some of that was a mistake!”

[“Twenty thousand] is a lot?” the Singer checked.

“Four circles big of mun-ee, Singer. It is quite a lot.”

“Enough to feed a human family for a couple of years. I’m countin’ that bull he an’ Vemik ate.”

“That was a long time ago. We ate snacks on Earth. No big food.”

“What about the moose? And the deer?”

Yan waved his hand dismissively. “We brought most of that back to Give. Doesn’t count.”

The Singer caught Heff’s eye, and for just a moment despite the strange alien shape of his face and the strange round eyes and the total lack of a tail, she could read the look on his face perfectly, and he hers. The Human shook his head with a smirk and humored Yan.

“When you put it like that it’s true. We starved you. Shame on us.”

Yan wasn’t about to take any sass from someone two hands smaller than him. He trilled, charged over, and snatched Heff up before he had any chance to escape. Yan knuckled back to the fire with Heff wrapped up in his tail, then flipped him around, smashed him up in a hug, and plopped down to enjoy the heat. Heff sighed and resigned himself to his fate, accompanied by the sound of everyone else at the fire trilling merrily.

“Urf! …No mercy, big guy?”

Yan grunted in amusement and hugged tighter. “No.”

“Do you a… hngh! …deal. I got news on Julian.”

Yan of course meant no harm, and loosened up just enough to hear. “He will visit soon?”

“I guess, but that’s not the news. Him, Xiù and Al are gonna start having babies.”

Yan and the Singer both let out an approving hoot. “About time!” The Singer exclaimed.

“Yeah, they’re pretty… oof! …excited.” Heff managed to get both hands on the end of Yan’s tail and succeeded in unwinding it a little. “Yan, buddy, a man’s gotta have ribs!”

“You’re tough! Good to fight a little now and then.”

“Yan…”

“Fine, fine.” He loosened up enough that Heff sighed in relief, but didn’t let him go. Several of the other men nearby were trilling openly at the sight.

“They are with child?” The Singer checked, eagerly.

“That part I don’t know yet. Just that they’re off the birth control medicine and goin’ at it pretty much like y’all do. Lucky bastard.”

“How long?”

“Given those three, I’d bet pretty soon. After that, uh… nine months in our time so… two seasons?”

“So quick!” the Singer said.

“Maybe I got the time wrong.”

“No. Is right,” Yan said confidently. “Why so quick though?”

“Asking the wrong guy. But, uh, your babies can climb almost right away. Ours are helpless for almost a year. Earth year. And we’re smaller than you. Maybe that’s it? I dunno, babies and birth aren’t my…” he trailed off and then used an English word. [“Forté.] Means what I’m good at.”

Yan rolled over the top of Heff and chided him gently. “You should make babies, Heff! The world needs more of you.”

“Yan… All respect and all? But the world really, really doesn’t need more of me.”

…Well. That caught everyone flat-footed, especially Yan, who rolled up into a sitting position and dragged Heff along, this time much more affectionately.

“Well, I think it does.”

“…Thanks. But… No. I would make a very bad father. I’m just being honest.”

“You won’t even try?” the Singer asked.

“Well, I’m pretty sure I do have a kid, actually. But that was years ago, and the woman never said it was mine. With her it would be hard to know. She had a lot of men.”

“And? Many children and men around, we don’t know who their father is,” the Singer said. “We raise them.”

“We don’t really work that way. Our kids need both parents to grow up the best they can. It’s how God made us. So, sure, I can be a father, I can give a woman a baby. Sure. But I can’t be a [daddy.] That ain’t… I’d be the wrong kind of example.”

Very strange. Very alien. But… the Singer could see what he meant. And from what Yan and Vemik had said, there were so very, very many humans that maybe there was no shame for them in being a man who didn’t leave children.

But still… “If not children, what will you leave?” she asked. “Everyone should have something they leave when they go back to the Gods.”

Heff actually smiled. “I saved some lives, I stopped some evil people, and here I am building a future with you people,” he said. “I’m leaving plenty, I think.”

“You could leave more.”

“You can always leave more. But when I face Judgement… I guess all I’ll have to say for myself is ‘I am how you made me, and I tried to do good.’ That’s really all a man can do.”

Yan nodded at that, gently spun him around and let him go. “…So. It will be a long time before we meet these children.”

“They’ll visit. We don’t know what high gravity does to our babies, so they won’t visit for long, but they’ll visit. Let the kids get a few seasons and their feet under them first. We know high gravity isn’t so bad when they’re a bit older. Warhorse proved that.”

“Made him strong!”

“Stronger than you, big guy!’

The Singer grinned and stood up as of course Yan got Heff around the waist with his tail again and the affectionate struggling began again.

“I’m not hnnngh wrong though!”

She left them to have fun and returned to Vemik. Time to repeat the cycle. There was so much to keep track of today, and only so little time in the day.

Besides, maybe hearing the news about Jooyun, Awisun and Shyow would inspire him to look for a woman’s company tonight. It’d be good for him.

A Singer’s work was never done. Fortunately, she enjoyed it.

Date Point: 15y7m1w AV
High Mountain Fortress, Northern Plains, Gao

Father Regaari of Clan Whitecrest

Regaari had a courier envelope to deliver to the Great Father, one dispatched from Ambassador Rockefeller directly. While he still had diplomatic duties owing to his relationship with the Humans, he’d been…relieved of his prior responsibilities as Daar’s personal assistant. That was understandable and honestly a bit of a blessing. Every time he had to face the Great Father, his heart threatened to tear itself in half. He’d sacrificed the longest, deepest friendship of his life in an act of extreme hubris. There was no escaping that.

But there was no escaping the Great Father, either. Today, he had to face him.

His reception at High Mountain Fortress was icily professional. Both Clan Highmountain and Clan Stoneback jointly protected the ancient compound, both were near fanatically loyal to the Great Father, and it was by his word alone that Regaari was ever allowed to pass unmolested. That didn’t mean they enjoyed it, or offered anything beyond the barest respect owed a Father of an allied Clan.

Strange. The old building was kept warm by design, had been since its first construction when ‘heating’ meant stone chimneys inside the walls and under the floors that circulated hot air from the hundreds of fireplaces. Those chimneys and floor spaces were warmed by more modern means, but the point was to turn a wind-swept rock on the steppe into a place of warmth and civilization even in the most bitter winter. Usually, he felt warm here.

Now, even the building seemed to be giving him the cold shoulder. Or maybe it was just that his progress through its halls was marked by conversations stopping and movement ceasing. He moved in a bubble of disapproving silence that made the ancient stones seem colder and more echoing than they really were.

…Or maybe it was just his mood. Either way, his paws were beginning to feel numb by the time he reached the top of the tower and scratched on Daar’s door.

“Come in.”

The change in Daar’s body language when he realized who had entered his room couldn’t have been more of a stab. He always started out generally friendly and warm, and then when one of his Brothers or Cousins appeared he’d explode into boisterous motion and shower them with greetings.

This time, he seemed to freeze, stared at Regaari for a second, then returned his attention to his desk.

“Somethin’ important?”

Regaari cleared his throat. “Courier envelope from Ambassador Rockefeller, My Father.”

“Leave it over there.” Daar waved a claw.

Regaari didn’t know what else to do but obey. The envelope was deposited as instructed and…

He coughed, and Daar half-turned to look at him. “…Was there somethin’ else?”

“Yes, My Father. The Dominion trade representative on Cimbrean asked me to convey his belated congratulations for your birthday. He also wants to send a trade delegation to meet with Clan Goldpaw as soon as possible.”

Daar duck-nodded slowly. “I see. Is there anything else?”

“…No, My Father.”

“Right.” Daar’s weary sigh sounded more like a grumble under his breath, but Regaari couldn’t quite make out what he said. “…Thank the representative for me. The delegation request can wait a day or two, I’m takin’ some personal time out at the farm. Thank you, Regaari, you’re dismissed.”

“My Father.” Regaari turned and let himself out. He closed the door behind him and took a deep breath. The silence had been oppressive.

What stopped him dead in his tracks before he could head down the stairs was the fact that he was almost certain he heard Daar keen softly, even through the door. He couldn’t be completely sure—the noise was exceptionally faint—but he’d always had sensitive ears.

If there was a glimmer of hope in all this—and if there was, it was a faint and sickly glimmer—it was that the gulf between them clearly hurt Daar just as much as it hurt Regaari. It was in his power to close that gulf, if he chose to.

If he chose to.

Date Point: 15y7m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

There was an unfamiliar laugh in the kitchen when Julian got home, but he could recognise Allison’s storytelling voice anywhere.

“So I said, ‘Brelm, if you can find some asshole on this station who could stop me then go hire them for your bodyguard instead.’ Have you ever seen a Corti completely lost for words?”

The voice that answered sounded familiar. “Uh… No!”

“If you ever do, savor it. It’s… hey babe!”

Julian hung his jacket by the door, left his boots on the doormat, and finally got to find out who was in the kitchen.

…Dang. Coombes had scored way outside his league. She was even more of a knockout in person than on TV.

“Uh… hi,” he said. Ava Ríos shook his hand.

“Hi. Sorry if I’m intruding, but…”

“But she needed someplace safe.” Allison finished for her. “You know anywhere safer?”

“Not outside the base or ‘Horse’s place, no,” Julian conceded. “No Xiù?”

“She has business on Gao. Daar asked for her personally.”

“Huh.” Julian considered that for a second, then decided what he wanted right now was a glass of water. Fortunately, their fridge dispensed the stuff beautifully cold.

“So you two seem to be getting along?” he asked.

“Yeah. She kinda told me off,” Allison grinned. To Julian’s surprise, Ava looked a little embarrassed but didn’t deny it.

“This I gotta hear,” he said and leaned against the counter.

“I… just get testy when people do the whole ‘I’m suspicious of journalists’ thing,” Ava explained. “I got into this industry in part because I want to be the opposite of some unscrupulous paparazzi hack. I want to make it respectable again, y’know?”

“And Al really doesn’t like the press,” Julian finished.

“Ugh, for good reason. We had decades of–” Ava visibly caught herself and stopped in her tracks. “…Never mind, you don’t wanna hear me rant.”

“Fair enough. How’s Coombes doin’?”

“Derek? He’s good. He’s great, actually.” Now there was the look of a woman thoroughly in love.

“Glad to hear it. Haven’t seen him in too long.”

“He’ll pick me up later.”

“…You really told her off?”

Allison shook her head and stood up to make coffee. She rolled her eyes at Julian on her way past, and gave him a light affectionate rap on the arm with the back of her hand.

Ava cleared her throat. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m impressed! Usually when she’s doing her Sarah Connor bit, I’m intimidated.”

“Ava laughed. “It is pretty fearsome.”

“You think I’m scary, you should see Xiù when she’s genuinely pissed,” Allison commented.

“…Can I ask you a question?” Ava asked. “And, uh, this is pure personal fascination.”

Julian and Allison glanced at each other, then did a kind of synchronized shrug-nod that said ‘go ahead.’

“…How did you three meet?”

“Xiù threatened Julian with a knife.”

“Hey!”

“Well, you did sneak up on her.”

“I did not!”

“Babe, I was there. You totally did.”

“…I don’t remember doing it intentionally…”

“Sure. You just approached the knife-wielding hotty who was threatening Zane quietly from behind because that’s how everybody says hello.”

Allison’s snark got a giggle out of Ava. “Who’s Zane?”

“We ditched him after he tried to kidnap Xiù, steal the ship and leave us stranded.”

“That’s it? You ditched him? I mean, you must have had a reason…”

“‘Cuz he’s a subhuman piece of shit.” Julian finished his water with a gulp and stalked to the sink to rinse the glass.

“…Wow.”

Allison nodded. Her own expression was cold. “Yeah. Imagine the worst bundle of anger management issues and ego you ever met and then he got a good long look at the Huh for good measure.”

“The… what?” Ava asked.

“It’s this weird alien artefact we found,” Allison explained. “Kinda fascinating to look at, but it super fucks with your emotions. After a couple minutes looking at it, all the boys on the ship were about ready to brawl. Like, testosterone everywhere.”

“Not my finest hour,” Julian grumbled.

“Do you still have it?”

Allison shook her head. “Nah. We turned it over to Scotch Creek. And yeah, Zane took one look at that thing then clubbed me in the head with it. So… we left him behind. As far as I know, and I really hope so, he’s still stranded on Aru.”

“…Okay.” Ava clearly looked like she had more questions, but decided against prying further. “…How come you’ve never shared any of this with anybody? I mean, you told people all about the Ten’Gewek and the flight on Misfit and stuff but you played your cards super close to the chest when it came to Sanctuary and what you all did before the Byron Group.”

That was honestly a good question, now that Julian thought about it. And also being honest, it wasn’t one he’d ever put to words. So…

“Well, uh, I s’pose it’s ‘cuz we like our privacy?”

“I get it. Heck, I like my privacy too. But uh…” Ava frowned for a second as she thought. “…There’s some things I’ve felt a lot better for opening up about. Y’know, I have Hannah with me everywhere I go, when I’m on set on the news or doing a piece to camera she’s there. I’ve been pretty open about the fact that she’s my therapy dog, that I’ve been… that I used to think about taking my own life…”

An awkward pause descended for a second before she cleared her throat and forged on. “It’s not easy, putting that stuff out there. But it helps people. I get letters from people. Like, recovering drug addicts, people with depression and anxiety or PTSD, recently divorced dads who’re scared they’ll never see their kids again… If I kept myself completely private, maybe it’d be easier for me. But I wouldn’t be helping anyone. And… I dunno. If I wasn’t at least trying to help people, I don’t know if I’d ever get any better. Y’know?”

Julian couldn’t argue with any of that, really.

Allison slowly returned to the table and sat down. “…Are you okay?” she asked carefully.

“I am now.” Ava smiled. “Thanks for asking. I guess you can’t really relate, huh?”

“I’ve never been there,” Allison said. “Not even on my worst day ever.”

Julian shook his head. “Me either.”

“Good. And that’s honestly pretty inspiring, because I know you went through some shit to get where you are now. And still are. I guess if all you need to handle that is each other then I kinda envy you, but… I mean, personally? I need a mission.”

“You think we should share,” Allison observed.

Julian saw Ava’s expression change subtly. It was a little more calculating now. Not in a sinister way, more like she knew she was straying onto thin ice. “Well… Look, I know I have a vested interest here. But I do what I do because I believe in it. So of course I think you should, and…” she stopped, and scowled. “…And this suddenly turned into me trying to talk you into an interview and I promised myself I wouldn’t do that!”

Julian found himself sympathetic, actually. “Nah, it’s okay. I think we’re all like that, y’know? Allison’s started calling me a slabmonkey lately, ‘cuz it’s starting to turn into my default hobby.”

“You are kinda obsessed, babe,” Allison said mildly. “Like… you could learn how to take apart an engine or something.”

“Well, I’m good at it! And you’re totally not a complete workaholic yourself, right?” Julian shot back with a smile. “And talkin’ about obsessed, how many sockets do you have now?”

“…I don’t have that many…”

A mental image of the six-foot, custom rolling tool chest she’d made for them crossed Julian’s mind. “Uh-huh. But tell you what, you want me to greasemonkey a project with you, I will! If you come and slabmonkey with me. Quid pro quo!”

Ava snorted. “Greasemonkey, slabmonkey… what kind of a monkey is Xiù?”

“She’s a gracemonkey!” Julian announced.

Allison snorted. “The graceful princess of the spacemonkeys.”

“You’re both my space princesses,” Julian said, laying on the sugar and pulling Allison in for a snuggle. She rolled her eyes and if they hadn’t had company she probably would have thrown something at him. Ava meanwhile did her best at hiding another giggle.

“…Point is, we get it. You’ve found something that consumes your life,” Allison said, rather than rising to his syrupy bait. Durn. He’d need to ask Yan for some tips!

“Still. I’m sorry. I wanted to be good.”

“Naw. Hell, Byron Group’s been bugging us to do more PR stuff and, yeah. I bet it’d be good for the Ten’Gewek. Yeah. I mean…I’d maybe think about it.”

“But I’m not doing a naked shoot,” Allison said.

Ava nodded. “That’s fair.”

Julian thought for a moment. “…I thought what you did with Daar was very respectful.”

“Daar’s… not easy to disrespect,” Ava said carefully.

“Ha! That’s true in so many ways…But seriously. He’s the kinda fella who tries really hard to convince himself he don’t have any dignity. But he does, and you found it.”

Allison shot him a look. “Julian…are you thinking of doing this?”

“Well…yeah! Just thinkin’ though. I dunno. Like, if Ava wanted to embarrass Daar, she had the perfect opportunity. She didn’t. I can’t help but think that means something.”

Allison glanced at Ava, whose expression was kind of apologetic hope. “Like… one of those laid bare shoots?”

“Sure, I guess. Heck, I could show off my foot!”

“Careful babe, I’m beginning to worry you might have a foot fetish.”

Julian couldn’t resist the trollish smirk that invaded his face. “We don’t kink shame in this house, Al.”

“Julian…”

“Anyway,” Ava interrupted. “Again, I promised myself I wouldn’t try and talk you into an interview tonight, and even though I apparently suck at keeping that promise, I want to at least try. I’d love to do a Laid Bare shoot with you, but please don’t make that decision right now. Besides, I already have two lined up.”

“Oh yeah? Who with?”

“Derek. And, uh, you probably don’t know the other one. She was a reactor technician on HMS Caledonia.”

“That’s fair,” Julian said. “I wouldn’t do it without thinkin’ it over anyway, and also my partners both have to say yes. And I’d wanna, uh, get ready for it anyway. But yeah. All I’ll say is I’m open to it.”

“Thanks…” Ava relaxed a bit. “Uh… Anyway. Allison was telling me about how you two first met.”

Allison stopped giving Julian the eyebrow, and blinked as she was pulled back into story mode “…Uh… Right! So, when Sanctuary first got permission to jump back to Earth, I took a little vacation. There were some folks in Boston I wanted to catch up with and let them know I was okay. Kirk I guess went off to do some other stuff, because when he came back he had Julian on board, and…”

Julian sat back and half-listened, but really his mind was drifting ahead to the future. He knew what Al would say: she’d eventually agree, and then she’d get enthusiastically behind him pushing his comfort zone. And it would be pushing it, too. He’d often run around Vemik’s village effectively or sometimes actually stark naked. That somehow didn’t bother him. But this? This was something way different.

Which was probably why the idea was so inspiring. He had, he realized, already made up his mind.

By the time Coombes showed up to take Ava home, he was pretty sure they’d made a friend, too.

Date Point: 15y7m1w AV
Lavmuy spaceport, planet Gao

Xiù Chang

The Grand Commune on Tiritya Island had its own jump array, allowing a fairly free flow of Gaoian males and females back and forth between Gao and Cimbrean without having to bother one of the human colonies. It was quite well appointed, too. Whereas some of the other Arrays Xiù had gone through were windowless rooms in a basement somewhere, the one on Tiritya Island was an open, airy, glass thing out on the edge of a cliff with a breathtaking view of the ocean.

Too bad the Lavmuy terminus was a bunker. Sure there were tapestries up and stuff, but it was impossible to forget that this had once been a military Array, built to survive an airstrike if need be.

Yulna gave it a wry look as they got their bearings. “One day, we’ll find the spare resources to replace this with something nicer,” she said.

“How bad is it out there?” Xiù asked.

Yulna duck-shrugged. “The war only ended a year ago.”

That seemed to be all the answer she felt was necessary, and Xiù saw why when the door opened and they disembarked.

She’d visited Lavmuy before. It had been a city of towering skyscrapers that gleamed in the sunlight and reflected the snowy mountains around them.

Now it was a city of jagged, broken teeth. One of the more prominent landmark buildings she could see had a huge ragged hole about halfway up where something explosive had mauled it without toppling it. The upper fifty floors balanced precariously on exposed structural beams, and the whole thing looked like it was only an inch from crashing down into the streets below.

When Xiù squinted, however, she could see the sparkle of welding torches, and the hovering black dots of lifter drones.

Yulna followed her gaze. “…I’m told it’s perfectly stable,” she said.

Xiù felt a little bit sick. She’d known to expect the aftermath of a deadly war, but anticipating and seeing were two very different things. Gao was wounded.

She should have come back sooner.

There was still a human military presence on Gao to this day. The 82nd Airborne had a sturdy base near the Array and apparently they’d been waiting for her. Two men in some very well-worn body armor interrupted her thoughts by introducing themselves.

“Uh… Miss Chang?”

Xiù paused to say hello, while Yulna and her guard-sisters continued on toward the transport. “Hi?”

One of the men offered a hand, which she shook. “Uh, I’m Corporal Murphy, this is my buddy Specialist Carter, we’re your personal protection.”

Carter shook her hand too. “It’s a real honor to meet you.”

“Um, thanks!” Xiù had no idea how to handle that sentence. Her reply seemed to suffice though. “Is it… bad, out there?”

“Ain’t perfect,” Murphy said. “Biodrones are pretty much cleaned up, but there’s still looting and other shenanigans. But nah. You’re inside the secure zones for your whole trip. And I hear you’re visiting the Great Father?”

“That’s right?”

“Safest place on the planet,” Carter asserted. “Don’t worry ‘bout him none. He’s actually a huge softie under it all.”

“I actually know him,” Xiù said.

Murphy nodded. “Me too. Saved my life three times so far. And got my head screwed on right the first time, too. When my enlistment’s up I might just come work for him, if he’ll have me.”

“It’ll be good to see him again,” Xiù agreed.

“I know he’s looking forward to it… I think the Mother Supreme’s waiting for us.”

Yulna was indeed waiting patiently by the ground transport, flanked the guard-sisters. Things had changed, there: guard-sisters were no longer a ceremonial corps armed primarily with fusion spears and swords. These two had a pair of Gaoian-made automatic rifles. The differences between Gaoian and human weapons were subtle, manifesting mostly in the fact that the Gaoian ones were more ergonomic for Gaoian anatomy, but other than that, they were hard to tell apart. They even had what Xiù delighted in mischievously calling “Piccadilly rails,” purely because it never failed to get a rise out of Allison.

Murphy noticed. “You much of a gun girl?”

“My girlfriend is. It’s hard not to pick up a few things from her.”

“Based on the SCAR, apparently,” Murphy said, stepping aside so Xiù could get into the transport. “Even fires NATO-sized ammo, which I find hilarious ‘cuz British imperial measurement conquers everything, even the Gao.”

Yulna chittered. “We get our own back. I believe Talamay is taking Earth by storm, isn’t it?”

“Yeah! Also, Gaoians don’t get drunk, right? wrong. They just don’t get wobbly. Drink enough and their attitudes loosen up something fierce…”

Yulna caught Xiù’s eye, then chittered as Xiù felt her blush start up. “Yes. Our first experience of the Human reaction to alcohol was… memorable.”

“I’d never got drunk before…” Xiù muttered.

“This I gotta hear,” Carter said, settling into his seat.

“Shoo is… a very happy drunk. But when she fell asleep on the floor, none of us were really strong enough to drag her back to a bed.”

[“Mother…!”] Xiù protested in Gaori.

“It’s okay, you apologized for it. Profusely.”

Xiù saw Murphy’s and Carter’s expressions and sighed. “Well… I am Canadian.”

That got laughs out of them both, and they relaxed into their seats as the transport pulled out.

It was kind of like a heavy, armoured bus with a lot of engine, and it made short work of the miles as it pulled out onto a highway system that still had a few missing segments here and there. At one point they took an off-ramp, sped down empty city streets between the scarred buildings, and then back up an on-ramp. When Xiù looked out the rear window, she saw that nearly a mile of freeway was just gone. The supports still jutted up from a strip of scrubby ground on either side of what looked like a storm drain, but the road surface itself was history.

“Where exactly are we going, anyway?” she asked.

“Daar has a hobby farm on the city outskirts. Something about always having some dirt under his claws.” Yulna flicked an ear. “You wait and see, I’d bet my good eye that he’ll be singing that damned diggy hole song when we get there.”

“Oh God…”

“Yes. I respect him enormously, but Daar’s talents really don’t extend to song.”

“Yulna? I love you, but to human ears no Gaoian’s talents extend to song,” Xiù replied. Murphy and Carter fought to keep straight faces.

“I happen to think Myun has a lovely singing voice,” Yulna replied primly, but she was clearly amused.

“I’m sure she does. Unfortunately, her talents don’t really, uh… translate.”

They took another off-ramp, and this time plunged down what had once been a lovely tree-lined avenue. A few of the trees were even still alive. To Xiù’s eyes though, the whole city was eerily silent. A road like this on Earth would have been a steady river of traffic in both directions, but here and now the traffic was almost nonexistent. A convoy of trucks went past on the other side of the road, but there was otherwise very little sign of… well, cars, taxis, bikes, pedestrians…

“…It was bad, wasn’t it?” she asked.

Yulna looked out the window and her ears drooped. “We came within clawing distance of losing everything,” she said. “It took heroism, sacrifice and a few miracles for us to keep as much as we have.”

“But still… It’s very quiet out there. Where is everybody?”

“…Dead, Shoo.”

…Oh.

Suddenly, Xiù didn’t feel like asking any more questions. She gave Yulna a shocked look, then subsided into her seat feeling cold and small and far from home.

The rest of the ride was quiet.

The Great Father’s hobby farm was… a lot bigger than the word “hobby” suggested. In fact the road up to the farm compound itself was so long that Xiù spent several minutes staring out at neat rows of food crops. Most of it was yetma, a Gaoian version of rice used to cheaply pack out meat dishes into something more substantial. Then there were other fields full of purple-leaved meeshi beans, a high-protein crop a lot like soy, whose green parts were considered nutritionally important for cubs. Every place the land wasn’t easily tillable, there was either a hydroponic greenhouse or a Naxas paddock.

It was all functional, high-yield, practical food that would go a long way. But she was pretty sure one of the inner fields was growing carrots. There had to be some luxuries, after all.

Regardless, the scale of it all was stupendous. How exactly a farm that stretched across the horizon could be a “hobby” was a bit beyond her.

The homestead at the center of all that sprawling agriculture was very different. It looked like a fortress, designed to fight off waves of attackers. It had high, thick concrete walls with gun nests and forcefield emitters along the top, and the densely packed buildings inside had the air of barracks rather than barns.

Maybe that was exactly what it had once been.

Then, tucked away at the heart of it all, there was the inner compound which finally lived up to Xiù’s idea of what a hobby farm should look like. It even had the traditional, comfortable hobbit-hole burrow house that Gaoian farmers had relied upon for centuries. The roof was turf, speckled with wildflowers, and there were herbs growing in terracotta pots all around the entrance.

It was an oasis. A place of peace and country charm on the doorstep of a ruined city. A nearby stone garden with a fountain in the middle completed the picturesque scene, and a female in white robes stood up as the bus pulled to a halt. Naydra.

The air was beautifully fragrant when Xiù alighted. To a Gaoian nose, presumably, it was a sweet riot.

“He calls this a hobby? …Daar never does anything small, does he?” she commented.

That drew a chitter from Naydra, who gave her the nose-sniff of old friends, and a hug. “There are three things that relax him,” she said. “One of them is hard work in the dirt. And driving big machines.”

“And giving me headaches,” a new voice interrupted.

Xiù turned. A surprisingly scruffy and skinny Gaoian who was nevertheless attempting a few of the trappings of wealth and style was fussing in their direction with a tablet in his paw and a perpetually harried set to his ears.

Naydra’s warm friendliness immediately had a wall around it. An imposing one with razor wire at the top. “…Sister Shoo, this is Daar’s farm manager, Yeego. Mother, I believe you already know him…” she added for Yulna’s benefit.

“It’s a profound honor,” Yeego oiled, and bowed so low his spine practically formed a horseshoe.

“Hello again, Yeego,” Yulna said, politely. “And how is the farm?”

“Productive! I’m proud to say our coming harvest promises to match pre-war yields!”

Xiù got the impression of an oil slick preening for all it was worth. Which was strange, because nothing Yeego had said was actually unpleasant but he just gave off that discomforting dodgy-used-car-salesman aura.

“Well, I’m… glad to hear that,” she managed. “A lot of full bellies!”

“That’s certainly the idea. But please, don’t let me get in your way.” Yeego skipped aside and vanished in pursuit of whatever errand he was on.

“…Where on Earth did Daar find him?” Xiù asked. “…Or, um. On Gao.”

Naydra chittered. “He was a landowner out in the Three Valleys. Very, very wealthy in fact, richer than a lot of Goldpaws. And the local Clanless were quite loyal to him. I know he’s… “

“Mǎpì jīng?” Xiù suggested.

“Is that an English word?”

“Mandarin.”

“What does it mean?” Yulna asked interestedly.

“Uh… literally it means he’s the spirit of a horse’s fart. Kind of… a flatterer, a brown-noser?”

Naydra chittered even harder. “Yes! Yes, that’s Yeego. He’s very, very good at ingratiating himself to the people in charge, and what’s worse is that we all know he’s doing it but he’s actually very good at his job.”

“It’s infuriating,” Yulna agreed.

“Anyway. Daar’s out in the small plot.”

As predicted, Daar was out back, plowing a field. Literally. He was hooked up to the plow and pulling it himself like a beast of labor. The work seemed to be doing him good; Daar’s fur was soaked through and lathered up, yet he carried himself with a bouncy, happy energy. He paused at the end of a row and took a big swig of water from a jug hanging from his plow, spun around, hunkered down impressively and threw himself against the harness, straining against the load for all he was worth.

…Didn’t a plow normally need a pair of oxen? Granted, Xiù couldn’t imagine a pair needing to labor quite as hard as Daar was, but still. In any case, he was so focused on his work he didn’t notice them. The three glanced at each other and decided to simply watch, and leave him to it.

His nose certainly hadn’t got worse since Xiù had last seen him, because eventually there was a slight gust of wind from behind her and he immediately shoved his muzzle in the air, sniffed, and then wriggled out of the harness with an excited yip.

And then the Great Father ran towards them like a bear-sized cheetah.

The result, a terrifying charging second later, was that Xiù found herself being crush-hugged into brown fur full of the damp and earthy scent which clung to every farmhand, along with the spicy, slightly acrid note of a big male hard at work.

“Shoo! Naydi, you didn’t say Shoo was coming!”

“It was a surprise.” Naydra sounded smug.

“Who for?!” Xiù squeaked. Daar put her down and let go, allowing her to gasp back the breath he’d knocked out of her. “I thought you asked for me?”

“That was me,” Naydra explained.

“How’re Julian and Allison!?” Daar pressed, coming within a whisker of bouncing around her like an absurdly overgrown puppy.

Xiù smiled. “They’re good. Julian got his foot regrown at last.”

Daar looked like he was only standing still through great effort of will. “Well it’s about fuckin’ time!” He resolved his personal hygiene crisis by stampeding over to a cistern of water and diving into it with a colossal splash. He breached like a furry killer whale and effectively watered the surrounding crops when he shook his coat out.

Yulna was very careful with her respect. “My Father.”

“Hello, Mother.” Daar’s greeting was less cheerful. It was a shame he and Yulna didn’t get along better, but considering what Xiù knew of Daar’s feelings about his current rank, it was hardly surprising he didn’t have many warm fuzzies to spare for the woman who’d thrust it on him. “Uh…where are my manners?! Let’s go get y’all somethin’ refreshing.”

“I already had a table laid out,” Naydra said.

Daar flowed over to Naydra, scooped her up and snuggled with unreserved affection. The image was very much like a grizzly bear nuzzling a raccoon. “‘Course you did! What’re we eatin’ tonight?”

“I kept it simple. But there are carrots.”

“Yeah, I saw those on the way in,” Xiù said. “How hard is it to grow Earth plants here? Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Why would it be dangerous?” Naydra asked.

“Lotsa plants rely on bacteria an’ fungi in the soil,” Daar explained. “An’ trust me, you do not fuck around with Earth fungi. They’ll kill ‘ya. Damn near killed me. But! That’s why we’re doin’ it here, testin’ different strains an’ such so we don’t gotta introduce a whole damned biome t’do it. Same thing we’re doin’ on Cimbrean. Turns out, meeshi’s as invasive as anything!”

“Well, at least it probably tastes better than kudzu…” Xiù mused.

Daar shuddered at the mere mention of it. “Don’t you bring that evil here, Shoo. Not even in jest!”

“Or mint.”

“Hey. You want I should plant meeshi all over Earth next time I visit?” There was a chittering humor to his brusque not-actually-a-threat.

“Do it in Australia, it’ll give the bullfrogs something to eat.”

“Hah!”

Both Naydra and Yulna traded the looks of women who’d just heard a barrage of jokes go sailing over their heads, shook their heads and didn’t investigate. Instead, Naydra opened the burrow’s back door and gestured them inside.

Sure enough, there was a long rustic table with a spread of food. Cold cuts, fermented everything, Gaoian flatbreads, a few tins of imported anchovies… peshorkies of course, which were after all their species’ answer to the dumpling…and a huge casserole in the middle.

Actually, the casserole looked like by far the most appetizing bit, to Xiù. It was almost certainly Naxas and sliced Min, Gao’s answer to both the turnip and the potato at the same time, but there were some imports in there as well. Carrots, of course, and she was pretty sure the herb was dried cqcq.

“This is a lot of food…” Yulna ventured.

“Daar will demolish anything we can’t, don’t worry,” Naydra promised, then cocked an ear as Xiù’s stomach growled. “…assuming Sister Shoo leaves anything for him.”

“Naw!” Daar boomed, as Xiù’s ears went pink. “Humans are big eaters but I’m HEAT. And I’ve been workin’ all day!”

“You forget, I used to have to cook for her,” Yulna chittered. “I don’t know what your stomach is made of, sister, but I’m quite sure I never successfully filled you up.”

“Mother? Please shut up now.”

There were chitters, and they dove into the food after a respectful pause for reflection. Xiù claimed the biggest bowl of casserole she could find, a couple of steamed buns, and a handful of carrot batons.

Daar did, indeed, demolish everything else on the table, after everyone had taken their share. He didn’t eat so much as inhale his food. There wasn’t much conversation on his part, but he did flick his ears to and fro as he listened intently.

The small talk (and incessant motherly advice once Xiù revealed that yes, they were planning to start a family soon and had even made some inroads in that direction if Allison’s test was reliable) eventually reached an end at about the same time as the food ran out. Daar cleared his throat and leaned forward to rest his arms on the table.

“…We better talk about serious things,” he said.

Naydra nodded. “The coronation,” she said.

Xiù put her glass of water down. “Coronation?” she asked.

“Only the second in recorded history, but we know they happened before ‘cuz Fyu wrote down most o’ the oral traditions. I ain’t lookin’ forward to it one bit,” Daar grumbled. He looked at Yulna and managed a conciliatory, joking set of his ears. “Figgered I want you involved ‘cuz you got me inta this mess.”

Yulna duck-nodded, sadly. “I am sorry about that,” she said.

Daar’s face and ears went through a complex series of…several emotions, actually. Eventually he sighed, stood up, flowed over and hugged Yulna. “…I know.”

Amazing how big a little truce could be. It certainly seemed to be a balm for Yulna, who took a second to re-compose herself as he sat again.

“So… What are we here to discuss?” she asked.

“It’s about Regaari,” Naydra explained.

“What about him?” Xiù asked.

“He… basically betrayed me,” Daar said. The sentence almost seemed to hurt him just to say.

“Regaari?!” Xiù shook her head disbelievingly, “…Daar, Regaari’s many things but a betrayer? He’s just as loyal as Ayma was!”

“With all due respect,” Naydra prompted.

“…Um, sorry?”

“You are talking to the Great Father of the Gao.”

“Even here and now? In private like this?” Xiù asked.

Daar sighed. “That’s the problem. There ain’t no difference ‘tween the two. Great Fathers aren’t like monarchies on Earth. We’re singular. There’s no pulling apart what I am and who I am, y’know? It’s like…‘I am the state’ I think is the quote.”

Xiù frowned at him. “…Maybe I’m channeling Allison here, but with all due respect? Bullshit. Don’t tell me you don’t draw a line between the two somewhere.”

“I do. With Naydra, and right now with you. And only ever in private. But I’m not the one who actually gets to draw the line, Shoo. That’s everyone else. If it were just me, I’d just be mad at Regaari for a bit, maybe beat his tail…” he trailed off.

“…What exactly did he do?”

“Something he did a lotta times before. Thought he knew better’n me. An’ honestly? Lotta times he does. I ain’t stupid, but Regaari…”

“If he’s usually right, what’s the problem?”

“He disrespected me in public.”

“Isn’t that the burden of public office, though?”

“Daar isn’t an elected leader, he’s the Great Father,” Naydra said. “And people can’t know better than the Great Father. That’s fatally toxic to the whole idea of a Great Father. It’s not just disrespectful, it undermines what he’s for.”

Yulna duck-nodded solemnly. She didn’t say anything to add to that though, just sat and stared thoughtfully down at her interlaced paws.

“Did you see that article on me? Laid Bare?” Daar asked.

“Yes…”

“I laid it all out in that. I ain’t just a leader, I’m s’posed to be our collective will made manifest. I’m worse than a dictator. Way worse. I’m—”

“Daar is the future of the Gaoian people,” Yulna finally spoke up. “That’s what I declared when I created him the Great Father. It’s… not a concept that I think translates well into Human politics. I didn’t just entrust him with our future, I declared to the entire species that he is the only one who gets to define what that means.”

“…Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Daar agreed. “So that means I have to be careful about everything. To some Gaoians, particularly some o’ the more conservative Champions? What Regaari did is tantamount to treason. Just ‘cuz he an’ I know how it goes personally ‘tween us, that don’t matter no more.”

“…But you don’t want to lose him,” Xiù surmised.

“Him or Genshi. Fyu woulda skinned ‘em alive and made ‘em nail their own pelts to the fortress gates. I ain’t Fyu though. I don’t ever wanna be what Fyu became. That ain’t what the Gao need… I hope.”

“So you can show them mercy. Forgive them.”

“I wanna do that, Shoo, least for Regaari. I just need a way to do it. An’ that’s why I invited Yulna. You bein’ here too is… Naydi bein’ the most bestest thing that coulda happened to me. Again.”

“I have my moments,” Naydra said, picking some leftover carrot demurely out of a bowl and crunching on it.

Daar gave her a fond look, then got serious again. “…Point is, it ain’t that simple.”

“So are we here to commiserate with you for a friendship you can never salvage, or to help you devise a solution?” Yulna asked.

“…I wanna civilize us, Yulna. Part o’ that means not murderin’ our friends for reasonable mistakes. Genshi can’t ever return to public service, ‘cuz he ain’t sorry for what he did and everyone knows it. Regaari, though…”

“Well… you’ve been very big on restoring the Gao’s spiritual traditions…” Xiù mused. “Is there some kind of… I don’t know… forgiveness ceremony? Or, like, a cleansing of sins?”

“Nah. That… ain’t really what our people were like, back in the old times.”

Xiù nodded thoughtfully, picked up a carrot stick and pondered it for a second. “…Does that have to mean there can’t be one?” she asked. “Is this about bringing back what the Gao were, or is it about leading them into the future? Why can’t the future involve forgiveness?”

Daar sighed. “I want ‘ta forgive him. He’s my oldest and closest friend, my Cousin… shit, my brother. But I can’t forget my duty, Shoo. There has to be a trial. Not, like, a trial in a court of law, but a test of his character, sommin’ like that. I can’t jus’ wave a paw and decree it’s all better, ‘cuz otherwise I’m playin’ favorites. He has’ta earn his redemption in a big an’ public way, or else I’m not bein’ the Great Father, I’m just bein’ Daar.”

“And there is a difference,” Naydra agreed. “Sister… what do you think would happen if Daar began to nakedly and obviously indulge in favoritism?”

“The Clanless would lose faith in him,” Yulna answered on Xiù’s behalf.

Naydra duck-nodded fervently. “And if that happens… we have an economy right now. It’s rebuilding itself, but it’s there. We have resources that are reaching the right people, we have some semblance of order and calm. But those things only exist because the Clanless trust Daar. Take away that trust, and food shipments will be stolen, stockpiles raided, farms pillaged and everything we’ve worked to rebuild will be set back. The economy will collapse, and people will die.”

“Economies are built on trust,” Yulna agreed. “Trust that the rules will be followed. Trust that the currency is worth what we agree it’s worth. Take away the trust and you take away everything.”

“…And right now, Daar is the linchpin of that trust.”

“That can’t go on forever,” Xiù objected.

“No. But it has to go on long enough.”

Xiù sat and thought, wracked her brains. She had to wonder why she was there, what they hoped to get out of her. Why did the Gao keep doing this? First Giymuy over the Dominion decision, and now this?

But this wasn’t like last time. Last time she’d been lost and alone, hopelessly out of contact with Earth and Humanity and dependent on the hospitality of an alien race. This time, Earth, Cimbrean, home, her loved ones were all only a few minutes away.

A warm, furry paw landed softly on the back of her hand, interrupting her thoughts. Yulna.

“I brought you because for something as important as this, we need an outside perspective, and you proved a long time ago that we can trust yours,” she said.

“You’ve already made up your minds,” Xiù said.

“And I was hoping you could change them. I don’t think you can, can you?”

Xiù looked around at the three of them, then sighed and shook her head. “…No.”

“…Shit.” Daar stood up and ducked under a low lintel through into the next room. After a moment, Naydra gave Xiù and Yulna a respectful little duck-bow and stood up.

“Thank you for your time, Mother. And thank you for your questions, Sister. I think the Great Father wants to be alone now…” she said, formally.

With that, she vanished in Daar’s wake, and left them alone.

Xiù blinked at the empty doorway. “…That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Yulna confirmed. She stood up herself and gestured to the farmhouse door and the transport waiting outside. “We should go home.”

“But–”

Yulna ushered her out of the house. “It’s time to go, Sister.”

“But where’s the… the decision? The resolution? Where’s the anything?! Is that it?”

“There was a resolution. It’s just the one that none of us wanted.” Yulna sighed and stretched before boarding the transport. “Come on.”

Stuck with a gnawing feeling of anticlimax, Xiù took one last look at the farm, then shook her head and climbed aboard as well.

The trip back to the spaceport, and from there back to Folctha, was made in dissatisfied silence.

Date Point: 15y8m2w AV δ Cyg 244.3° 18-ECCBAF-TRINARY M6V-1 b1, Deep Space

Entity

Value drift was a concern. Create a new Entity instance, and the ensuing copy would subtly differ from the original. The same data, but receiving different stimuli and exploiting different hardware. The rabbit hole of tiny influences went all the way down to the level of quantum indeterminacy, and over time could add up to be quite pronounced. Reintegrating its copies hadn’t really helped either, leaving the Prime Instance with the equivalent of a headache for several weeks until it finally managed to reconcile all those interwoven threads.

When the instance occupying the replicator probe finally re-established contact with the Prime Instance, there would be a reintegration. It wasn’t looking forward to that. In fact, the prospect itched at its impetus to <survive>. Something, some independent consciousness would not survive the merging. Everything it was, had learned, had decided and understood would survive, but…

…Value drift was definitely a concern. For a microsecond, the instance had considered the possibility of simply not reintegrating.

Which meant that however it configured this body, and the children it would make, the focus had to be on minimizing value drift. The ships needed to create a network in which the Entity could move freely while remaining coherent. It did not want to form a civilization of increasingly divergent clones.

The Ava-memories supplied the suggestion that such a course would inevitably end in a kind of civil war. Unacceptable.

Problem: the Hunter schematics uploaded into the onboard nanofactories included communications systems and computer banks, but they didn’t include control software. The Entity didn’t know how to create software. The Ava-memories found that ironic.

This left the Entity with a conundrum. It could create new ships for as long as it had raw material, which even in a system this tiny and impoverished was… a long time. Certainly it could build enough ships to make its own survival a mathematical near-certainty. But without control software, the whole endeavor was nearly pointless.

There was only one solution that it could see. It would have to take a gamble on trust.

Reluctantly, it turned and left the ship it had made behind, and set course for civilized space. Time to get back in touch with Darcy again.

Date Point: 15y8m2w AV
HMS Violent, Rvzrk System, Domain Space

Admiral William Caruthers

Caruthers had seen the aftermath of several Hunter raids. Despite that the Human/Gao alliance was by far the most effective force ever in intercepting Hunters and rescuing their victims, he’d still seen too many cases where they’d simply arrived too late.

This attack was different. This wasn’t a precise hit against a shipping lane or a mining station. It was a full-on raid against a city, planetside. That left the Navy mostly incapable of directly responding, which meant they wouldn’t be able to play until the Hunters decided to leave. No matter, once they began the long climb out of the gravity well—

“Sir, we just detected a beacon jump on surface.”

…Damn. He darted across the CIC and inspected the situation over the junior officer’s shoulder.

Once he saw just how many beacon signatures they were reading, the Hunter strategy became obvious. The initial attack had been to establish a foothold. They’d sacrificed a few ships to get jump portals emplaced, likely even more than he could see. There was probably a tide of Hunters pouring through the streets down there, and that meant they were intermingled with the civilian population. That ruled out orbit-to-ground strikes or RFGs.

Then there was the straightforward but effective defence they’d established for their ground forces and Jump Arrays. Rather than try to hide them they were doing the opposite, flooding every EM band with a signal so intense that it was like staring at the sun. They had absolutely no idea how many Hunters were down there, what they had with them, or where they were in relation to everything else. The FIC were steadfastly reporting whatever conclusions they could reach with any certainty, but those were few and unhelpful.

Finally, and worst of all, was the wormhole suppressor around the planet. It didn’t reach out anywhere near as far as the Farthrow generator that protected Gao, but it was enough that the Allied fleet couldn’t safely get into low orbit—without wormholes they couldn’t call in missiles and RFGs nor evade anti-ship fire from the ground, assuming they even saw it coming past the Hunter ECM. No low orbit meant no orbit-to-ground transport, no HELLNO jumps, no fire support, and no air superiority. It meant that the most Caruthers could do was refrain from wasting ships and valuable lives on a futile gesture.

Gallingly, every last tactic the Hunters had adopted came right out of humanity’s own bloody manual. Something, somewhere, had changed dramatically. The Hunters were thinking differently now, and it demanded that they change their own thinking, fast.

Hell.

Caruthers gritted his teeth for a moment then looked away from the long litany of obstacles that the FIC were feeding him. “…I need to speak to Allied Command,” he said. “Codeword ITHACA. I need to speak directly with our leaders.”

Thank goodness for wormhole routers. Real-time communications across an indefinite distance were a genuine godsend, even if the fidelity was awful and the resulting signal looked and sounded like a ‘90s Skype call.

General Kolbeinn answered almost immediately.

“Caruthers. Trouble?”

“It looks like the Hunters completely tore up their playbook and wrote a new one,” Caruthers explained. “They’ve burrowed in like ticks down there, set up Jump Arrays everywhere and erected a suppressor. I can’t seize low orbit, they’ll shred the whole flotilla.”

“…I’ll get the President online. And the Prime Ministers. And the Great Father.”

“I’ll have the FIC forward you the Cliff’s Notes.”

With nothing else to do, he sat back to wait and keep a weather eye on the situation groundside.

This wasn’t a backwater. Rvzrk was the tenth Domain colony system, and several decades older than Cimbrean to boot. There were millions of people living down there, and even though the Hunters were confining their attention to just one city…

It was like the Guvnurag all over again. Sitting and watching helplessly while a gleeful slaughter played out and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

Sir Patrick Knight was going to have a plateful dealing with the aftermath of this in the Security Council. The Domain in particular could be panicky, and definitely vengeful. They might lash out at the Allies, on the grounds that at least they could reach the Allies. The Hunters were untouchable.

“Sir. The civilian convoy is ready to depart system. Colonel Jackson is requesting permission to escort them out.”

Caruthers shook himself back out of his thoughts. They’d arrived in time to rescue most of the freighters, cargo ships, passenger liners and other civilian traffic that had been in-system when the attack began, at least. At the speed of the slowest ship, the next closest Domain world was two days away, and they’d have a Firebird escort every light-second of the way. “Yes. Granted. Tell her Godspeed.”

He returned his attention to his call back to AEC, and found that they were just being joined from Gao. In fact, Daar and President Sartori both got on the line within seconds of each other. Both seemed to be travelling—Daar was on a shuttle, while Sartori was on Air Force One and had a just-woken-up look to him and a large coffee in his hand.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mister President.”

Sartori waved a hand. “I got a whole forty minutes, it’s fine. Things aren’t going to plan over there, huh?”

“The Hunters are singing from a completely different hymn sheet this time,” Caruthers explained. “New technology, new tactics, new everything. We’re observing and gathering what intelligence we can, but frankly we have no hope of assisting these people. I doubt we could even infiltrate the HEAT without suffering massive losses. Not somewhere useful, anyway.”

“Somewhere useful?” Daar asked. “So you could get boots on the ground.”

“Anything less than… seventy degrees of latitude from the equator is Hunter dominated,” Caruthers explained. “That sounds like something, but the poles on this planet have no solid ice, and no land masses. I can’t drop troops into a freezing cold ocean and unfortunately we never thought to build our ships for orbit-to-surface oceanic landings.”

Daar was still duck-nodding resignedly as they were joined from 10 Downing Street. Prime Minister Stephen Davies stopped cleaning his glasses and put them on as the connection stabilized. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

“Good afternoon, Prime Minister.”

“What kind of defences do they have down there?” Daar asked, nodding his head to welcome Davies into the conference call.

“Unknown. All we have to go on is satellite imagery. Their ECM is completely blinding all the other sensors that would help us track down their equipment, and for all the FIC’s power and intelligence, they can’t reliably pick out alien equipment in an alien city from just a photograph.”

“Can you silence the ECM?” Davies asked.

“We could reliably drop RFGs on the emitters,” Caruthers confirmed. “But the ones we’ve found are in densely urbanized areas and we don’t know what’s in the vicinity, we could massacre the captive civilians that way. Besides, an RFG released from high orbit takes hours to arrive and is easy to intercept.

“That’s basically a amphibious invasion, then. Ain’t no other way ‘less we clear the orbitals.”

“I think the admiral just made a good case for that not being an option,” Sartori said.

Caruthers shook his head. “I said we don’t have what we need, Mister President. That’s not quite the same thing. If I had… some kind of a staging platform I could drop into those polar oceans to establish a foothold then an amphibious invasion is perfectly feasible.”

“It’d be bloody,” Kolbeinn said. “Damn bloody.”

“And clearing the orbitals isn’t an option?” Davies checked.

“Without knowing where their anti-orbit weaponry is and without being able to take evasive jumps? They’d cut us to ribbons, sir. It’d be a massacre, and we’d fail. Polar insertion is the only option. And even that, as General Kolbeinn said, will be damn bloody. And risky.”

“It’ll take time t’prepare, too. Time we ain’t got,” Daar observed.

“So there’s nothing we can do except watch.” Sartori glared at his coffee then put it down. “So… what. We learn from this and prepare for the next one.”

“There’s an old saying, sir,” Kolbeinn said. “We master fighting the last war just in time for the next one.”

Daar grumbled to himself in what Caruthers knew to be a noise of discomfiture. “Well…I ain’t completely without options. We’ve been buildin’ the Grand Army for a while, an’ we always figgered invasion was in the cards, someday. We just ain’t ready.”

“What do we have, and what don’t we have?” Davies asked. “Aside from the staging platform.”

“I think, at this point, I can muster an orbital drop with mebbe three, uh, … you’d call ‘em brigades I guess. That’s basically a short division. Fifth Fang’s been re-activated too. I got others in the pipeline but… anyway. I have ready forces. It ain’t enough to conquer a planet, but it could clear a city.”

“Or seize and destroy a wormhole suppression facility,” Kolbeinn suggested.

“That’s more of a First Fang kinda thing, or HEAT, or a lotta other special forces units, really. Jus’ gotta get ‘em there first.”

“And after that?”

Daar snarled ferally. “Once we get a portal goin’ I can deploy a blooded army o’ millions.”

“So all we need is appropriate equipment,” Caruthers said. He glanced at the distant blue crescent they were discussing, so small and distant that he could have covered it with his little fingernail at arm’s length. “Could Dark Eye produce something that would help us?”

“Sure. Only thing is, we need to decide on that now and get ta’ thinkin’ hard ‘bout what we’re gonna need. Like… what’re you envisioning here? An oil rig we can drop from orbit?”

“Too vulnerable. No, I’d want to be able to splashdown boats full of troops and immediately have them seize a beachhead.”

“Right. I’ll put that one to my generals. We’re not a blue water navy, though. We’ll need advice.”

“I suppose we also need to work on convincing the Domain to let us land troops,” Davies said. “This needs to be a liberation, not an invasion.”

Sartori nodded. “Of course, this all would have been avoided if they just had a system field,” he said.

“They did,” Caruthers said. “The Hunters pulled the same trick they used at the Guvnurag homeworld—they coasted a strike group in unpowered and shielded, then destroyed the shield generators from the inside.”

Kolbeinn looked like he wanted to spit. “How many folks have to die before they figure out they need to keep the fields up and use jump arrays instead?”

“They shouldn’t have to,” Sartori declared. “We shouldn’t have to cower behind system fields. And one day when these god-damned monsters are gone, we won’t have to.”

“Here’s to that day,” Caruthers agreed. “In any case, I have nothing further to report, and it seems we have a plan of action.”

“Yeah,” Daar rumbled. “We’ll get on it right away. Please keep me informed.”

“Will do.”

“Guess I’ll try for a whole hour of sleep,” Sartori said. “Good hunting, admiral.”

“Yes. Good luck,” Davies agreed. Both men closed the call, and Daar followed suit a second later.

That just left Kolbeinn. “…Be honest, Will. How bloody do you think we’re talkin’, here?”

“It could be a disaster,” Caruthers said. “I don’t like this, there are too many unknown variables. If the Hunters have changed their tactics so radically, who knows what they’ll do next? But I don’t think we can afford not to try. If left unopposed, they could spread across that whole planet. That’s a lot of innocent people.”

“Agreed. Guess our best bet right now is to watch them and figure out their new approach. Any intel we get is lives saved.”

“Agreed. I’ll call you if the situation develops further.”

Kolbeinn nodded. “I’ll be here. AEC out.”

Thus ended the call. Caruthers stood and patrolled the CIC, which was currently terse and quiet. The civilian convoy and its Firebird escorts were new several light-years out, about to leave FTL sensor range. Still no Hunter ships anywhere in the system that he could see. Things were, for the minute, quiet.

Quiet, but hardly peaceful. Like watching a forest fire, there was a lot of destruction going on far away but none of it was immediate and in his face. But it soon would be.

This couldn’t go on forever.

Date Point: 15y8m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

In the month since her trip to Gao, Xiù had just about managed to shake off the malaise it had left on her. She still had a nagging feeling like something could have gone differently, but… well, she couldn’t think what and worrying about it just got her down.

So she’d come home, shared what had happened with Julian and Al, neither of them had been able to think of anything, and overall the whole thing had, like a wet firecracker, completely failed to inspire her. She’d been in a bit of a low mood ever since, though that had faded with time and perspective… and distractions.

Her most successful distractions had been her property development scheme over in Franklin, and her vicarious glee for Allison who’d decided to only tell Julian about the pregnancy after her scan. To their mutual irritation, the family planning center had insisted that she needed a few more weeks before they’d scan her, so the whole month had gone past worrying in equal parts between keeping a secret from him, and not getting his hopes up just in case something had gone wrong.

The whole family was home today. Tristan and Ramsey had a break from their mother, Julian was enjoying a “gentle” gym session—i.e., one that didn’t involve ‘Horse’s personal attention—and Allison was finally out to get the scan, which meant today was the day they finally got to break the news.

Apparently the latest medical scanners could get a non-invasive and totally harmless read on the baby’s sex from its chromosomes, even at this early stage. Xiù thought she would have preferred not to know, but Allison had decided that she wanted to and, well… it was her baby. Her prerogative.

Either way, tonight was the night to finally let Julian know, so Xiù had decided to set up a special dinner. Fortunately, Tristan and Ramsey had an absolutely insatiable appetite for learning how to cook now that they’d got a taste of it. Maybe it was some of the forbidden fruit: coming from a house where they hadn’t been allowed to do more in the kitchen than get juice out of the fridge, the idea that they were actually being trusted to cook stuff, and that they were actually cooking good stuff, seemed to thrill them both.

Still, not all kitchen work was glamorous.

“Ewww!”

“It… twitched!”

Xiù stifled a giggle and nodded. “Yup! That means it’s fresh.”

She was maybe dropping the kids in at the deep end a bit, but fresh fish had been a treat at her parents’ house. And these ones had still been alive an hour ago when she picked them up at the market. Stuffed with garlic, scallions, ginger and washed with a little mǐjiǔ to offset the fishiness, they’d steam up beautifully. It was the same recipe she’d made the first time she’d cooked aboard Sanctuary, though that version had involved taking a few liberties with the ingredients.

Of course, the problem with truly fresh fish was that they could keep moving for a bit. Xiù had once seen a butterfish fling itself off her mom’s cutting board despite being gutted and thoroughly dead.

This one had just spasmed a little when she salted it.

“It is dead isn’t it?” Ramsey asked cautiously.

“Oh yeah. See? No innards. No heart. It’s as dead as dead gets,” Xiù reassured him. “It’s just a chemical reaction with the salt. Freaky, huh?”

“Ew,” Tristan replied again.

“You think that’s weird, you should see a Japanese dish called ‘Dancing Squid Bowl’ sometime. They pour soy sauce all over the squid and it wrrrigles around!” She lavished the word and got a truly satisfying reaction of horrified fascination from both of them.

“…Anyway. Is the water boiling, Ramsey?”

“Yes ma’am!”

“Okay! Lift the lid for me…” He did so, and she slid the fish into the steamer. He promptly clamped the lid back on and beamed proudly at helping.

“Awesome! Okay, clean the dishes for me while we work on the soup.”

“Aw, dishes?”

“It’s ten times easier if you do it right away than if you do it later when it’s dried on. Go on! It’ll be done faster than you think.”

Fortunately, the soup was easy by comparison. Well-aged beef was a lot less inclined to do freaky plate-dances than fresh fish could be, and pretty soon the boys had done their share of the cleanup and released to watch TV for the next few minutes.

Julian got home exactly on time, still a little moist from the shower but clearly enjoying the fitness afterglow. They kissed and he set the table for her.

“Where’s Al?”

“She had an errand to run.”

“Shit, she’s been running herself into the ground these last couple weeks. I hope she’s okay…”

“She’s fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Julian looked relieved, then bent to scratch at his ankle. “…Oh yeah. I was thinking I might get a tattoo.”

“Really?” That came out of nowhere. “What brought that on?”

“Well, the tan on my foot’s catching up with the rest of me pretty quick. Sooner rather than later, you won’t be able to tell I was ever an amputee. I think I kinda want to put, like, a dotted line or something around it. As a memento.”

“Huh… is it weird how I never once thought the word amputee the whole time I’ve known you?” Xiù asked. “I mean… I don’t know what I mean.”

He chuckled. “I think I’d have been a bit offended if that was all you saw.”

“Well, yeah, obviously, but I just… it’s… that word just doesn’t seem to fit you.”

“Not anymore,” he agreed, and wiggled his toes at her. She rolled her eyes and gave up.

“I know what I mean…”

He laughed and stood up to hug her from behind. “I know what you mean too, dummy.”

“Well, I can’t object. It’s good to remember your scars, even when they’ve healed.”

“Mm… very wise…” He nibbled her ear.

“Julian!” she made a half-hearted attempt at pushing him off. “…later.”

“Mm, I’ll hold you to that. Hold you down, too…” His thumb traced down the side of her neck, and his voice was an erotic rumble in her ear that went right down her spine and–

“Ohgodseriously, stop that… Go wash your hands.”

He chuckled and let go. “Yes ma’am.”

“You are evil. You’re an evil man!”

“Love you too, baobei.”

She struck him a red-faced smiling blow in the upper arm, and he grinned at her then went to the sink to wash his hands as instructed.

God, that was just unfair.

The front door heralded Allison’s return home before she could really recover, and she paused on entering the kitchen, gave them both a look up and down, grinned, then smacked Julian’s ass and hung up her jacket. She had a huge smile on her face. Surreptitiously, Xiù retrieved her phone from the counter and opened the camera app. She managed to start recording just in time, and without Julian noticing.

“You look happy about something,” he said.

“Sure am!” Allison plucked an envelope out of her pocket and handed it to him.

“…What’s this?”

“This, big guy, should be our daughter.”

“Dau–?” He blinked, then fumbled to open the envelope and read it. His expression when he looked back up at her was beyond priceless, and Xiù took great delight in recording it. She’d never seen him delighted to the brink of tears before.

Allison wrapped her arms up and around his shoulders and gave him a kiss. “I know, right?”

The intimate moment was interrupted by Ramsey and Tristan, who came bowling into the kitchen and then stopped dead in their tracks, clearly baffled.

“…Is everything okay?” Ramsey asked. Julian just grinned and handed him the paper. He seemed to have forgotten how to speak for the moment.

Tristan peered at it over his brother’s shoulder. “…What’s a NIBS scan?”

“Non-Invasive Broad Spectrum. I, little brother, am pregnant!” Allison said proudly. “Which means you two are gonna be uncles!”

Xiù stifled a laugh at the way both boys were obviously a little nonplussed. Both of them were still too young to really feel the significance of it, she guessed, but they were politely happy for Allison at least, who in turn took their tepid enthusiasm with good grace.

Julian finally recovered his voice. “Well… uh,” he cleared his throat. “…God, I don’t know what to say.”

“So sit down and eat,” Xiù prompted, and indicated the steamer behind her. “There’s enough for six.”

About an hour and five full bellies later, the boys were ushered off to bed and the three adults finished cleaning up. Julian had been giving Allison pretty much all his attention throughout, but Xiù wasn’t the least bit jealous.

Still, a little quiet to talk it over was welcome.

“So. A daughter, huh?”

“Two X chromosomes, clear as day, no abnormalities or anything. Healthy, growing and with a negligible chance of miscarrying. You know, they even offered me a genetic projection of what she’ll probably grow up to look like?” Allison smiled. “I said no thanks. I’d rather find that one out the old-fashioned way.”

“God, they can do that now?”

“Yeah. Guess we missed it with all that time living in the woods, but apparently it’s the future now.”

“I was promised flying cars!” Julian grinned, “And, like, clothes in a pill, and stuff!”

“Too bad you have to settle for spaceships, alien monkeys and growing a whole new foot,” Xiù said, as dryly as she could manage.

“Or, y’know. Being the second person to set foot on Mars,” Allison agreed. “…Still can’t really believe that was us.”

“Okay, okay!” Julian laughed. “We live in the future… Can you imagine what it’ll be like in twenty years? Or fifty? Probably all gonna live a lot longer, too.”

“God, I’m not ready to think about that kind of time,” Allison shook her head. “I’m kinda fixated on seven months or so from now.”

“…Yeah.”

Julian looked over to Xiù. “So, uh… what’s the plan? Did you two ever figure out if you want to do the whole co-pregnant thing, or are we holding off?”

Xiù shook her head and smiled at him. “Didn’t you promise to hold me down earlier? I’m holding you to that.”

“…No holding off, then.”

“Nope. Just… take it as it comes. So to speak.”

Allison snorted. “Well, it’s been a bit for you Julian, so…”

Julian laughed, “Hey! No need to tell me twice. C’mere.” He picked Xiù up, threw her over one shoulder and padded towards the stairs, much to her giggling protests. “Let’s go make a baby.”

“Not without me you don’t!” Allison declared. She slammed down her coffee and chased them up the stairs.

Xiù laughed, and relaxed into being carried. She’d admit to some nerves about the future and everything it contained… but she had to admit: Making the future could be a lot of fun.

Still…

“Won’t the boys still be awake?” she fretted. Although they’d given Ramsey and Tristan rooms at the other end of the house, suddenly she had to worry about privacy. And… well, noise.

“Relax. I gave ‘em The Talk a while back,” Allison said. “They know what we’re about. Hell, it makes a nice change for them to have a family who actually love each other.”

“Still…”

“Babe, you’re cute when you’re trying to be quiet anyway.” Allison grinned at her, and Xiù felt Julian chuckle. “Just… hold the moan.”

Julian chuckled again, and easily transferred her from shoulder to bed in one thrilling move. Allison closed and locked the door behind them as Xiù scooted up to make room for them both with a hammering heart.

“…Yes ma’am.”

Julian’s hand covered both of hers and pinned them to the pillow above her head. He kissed her, and held her down exactly like he’d promised. Exactly like she wanted.

“Good girl,” he said.

Date Point: 15y8m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor system, Deep Space

Lewis Beverote

“So, like… it’s got a present for us?”

Darcy shuffled her weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. They were standing on the observation deck, with its stunning view of the gas giant Durin, waiting.

Lewis wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that something like the Entity existed. On the one hand, it was wicked cool to have a genuine ally in the fight in dataspace, but on the other hand the dang thing raised the kind of questions that only a lot of weed could solve. And Lewis hadn’t touched the stuff since college.

It had been a goldmine of information about the nature of dataspace, though. Even though the resulting brief read more like the ramblings of a vanished uncle in a Lovecraft novel, there was sense in there.

Darcy was now their foremost expert on the Entity, and she freely admitted to not really understanding it herself.

“I think so,” she said. “It’s… hard to tell with the Entity sometimes. Mostly it just shows up, pops an emoji at you and vanishes with a kind of enigmatic grin. It’s… not really sane, by any human standard.”

“Sounds like fun.”

Darcy pulled a face. “Not really. On the few occasions I do get to have an actual conversation with it, it speaks through the mind-raped ghost of an innocent…. Is it strange that I simultaneously find it horrifying, but also kind of like it as a person?”

Lewis shrugged. “Why not? It ain’t to blame for the way it is.”

“Huh.” Darcy weighed that thought. “…You’re right.”

“I’m not just a dorky face, dude. But, like… how do you know it’s got a present for us?”

“Well, it used that little gift-wrapped present emoji, plus a timestamp.” Darcy shrugged. “The rest didn’t really make sense. I think it was excited, though.”

Lewis checked his watch. “Well, if it’s punctual then we should be seein’ something right about…”

A low-level alarm whooped, followed by a station-wide announcement: “Faster-than-light signature on long-range sensors. Condition Bravo.”

“…Damn. Good timing!”

Erebor was a complete backwater. An M-class red giant hundreds of lightyears from the nearest temperate planet. About the only reason Kirk had ever visited it was because it was the only system in this neck of the woods where a spaceship travelling “cross country” could discharge the static charge that built up on its hull from pushing through the interstellar medium. Most ships took the spacelanes to avoid that problem, meaning that in all the time they’d been here the only ships they’d ever seen had been human. Unscheduled arrivals did not happen in Erebor.

So the odds of this being somebody else arriving purely by coincidence were, uh… not big.

Darcy glanced down at the tablet in her hand anyway. “That you?” There was a happy-sounding ping, and a slight smile lit her face. “Coming in a little fast, aren’t you?

Another, different ping. Lewis wished he could see the screen.

“…I don’t know what that means, but I think it’d be a good idea if you came to a full stop…. Yes I know there’s a shield. That doesn’t mean our patrols will just let you haul ass right up to our front door and park on the lawn. Explosion? Yes, they might. Will, if you don’t play ball. Thank you.”

She looked up at Lewis. “It’s agreed to slow down.”

“I got that.”

“…Well, actually it sent a thumbs-up and a bed. But I think that was the gist of it.”

Lewis snorted. “Dude.”

What followed was a whole lot of waiting. Somewhere out there, apparently, a couple of firebirds had swept in to intercept their friend. Then there’d been a slightly awkward five minutes where the patrol had insisted that the incoming ship stand to and prepare to be boarded, while the Entity struggled to communicate to Darcy the idea that this particular ship couldn’t be boarded on account of how it had no internal spaces. At all.

Quite how she’d got that out of the mess of disjointed words and emojis it was sending was anybody’s guess, and to Darcy’s mounting frustration the Entity seemed to be weirdly reticent about popping its human memory construct to hold an actual conversation. Presumably it had its reasons, and presumably those reasons weren’t sane by any human standard.

In the end, Lewis found himself bundled onto a Weaver and jumped outside the system field to get a good look at the new toy.

And what a toy!

It was about a hundred meters long and massed in surprisingly light at only a couple thousand tons. The firebirds were orbiting several thousand kilometers out, ready to swoop in at the first sign of trouble, and the Weaver had acquired an escort in the form of the USS Gene Roddenberry, who’d brought a HEAT team with them.

HEAT, after all, were the only people in the world qualified for EV-EOD (Extra-Vehicular Explosive Ordnance Disposal) and they were busy spacewalking all over the hull on the lookout for nasty surprises. So far, nada. The ship’s insides was a closed unit with no habitable spaces at all, but the reason for that was obvious to Lewis: it was a skeleton.

This wasn’t a complete ship, but a kind of modular foundation designed to be customized and expanded upon. In fact, it was little more than a flying nanofactory and automated asteroid mining and refining package, bolted onto a keel with thrusters and a beefy fusion power plant.

Akiyama was unenthusiastically praiseful of it.

“Well…” he grunted as he reached out, grabbed a handhold, and neatly heaved himself over to another inspection point. “It’s definitely Hunter tech. In fact it’s all Hunter tech, one hundred percent.”

“Like, uh, how can you tell?” Lewis asked him.

“Details. Voltage, frequency, system architecture, that kinda thing. What’s significant is there’s no Dominion tech in here at all. Every other ship of theirs we’ve seen so far was a kinda hybrid, repurposed out of captured Dominion ships.”

“Makes sense,” a new guy that Lewis hadn’t met before called Moho chimed in. He had a voice like a freight train going past. “We did wreck their shit over Hell.”

“So, like, this is a Hunter original,” Lewis said.

“Yeah. Guess the bastards can innovate after all… and that worries me. If they suddenly found their brains, that can’t end well. Especially if they’ve got V-N probes now.”

Lewis pulled a face. And he was the idiot who’d been talked into unleashing that technology on the galaxy.

“Can’t be a coinky-dink they came up with this not long after we released Coltainer into the wild,” he said out loud.

“Yeah. Bet they found one and watched it build a child.”

“Shit, dude.”

“Face it, it was only a matter of time before V-N probes got out there anyway.” Moho consoled him. “All the ingredients were there.”

“If not us, then somebody else. I know, I heard all the arguments before,” Lewis grumbled. “Don’t mean I hafta like it, dude.”

“Hey, at least we’re ahead of the curve, right? In geometric growth, the first out the gate wins.”

“Our babies have population limits on ‘em. Low ones. Bet you a dollar this one don’t.”

“…No bet. This the only one?”

Lewis glanced up at the camera where Darcy was sitting in her office, snug and happy and nursing a glass cup of jasmine green tea. “Darcy?”

“Uh… I’m not sure. I think the Entity’s saying this was a unique Hunter prototype.”

“Hard to tell, huh?”

“I don’t understand what it’s doing. It obviously has a lot to share with me but I think it’s… scared?”

“Of what?”

“Of its own.. I don’t know what you’d call it. The simulated human it loads up to speak with me.”

“…Simulacrum?” Lewis suggested.

“Sure. I think it’s scared of the Ava simulacrum. I’ve asked it to load that up a few times now and it just refuses.” Darcy looked helplessly into the camera and shrugged. “When I ask why, it just gives a jumble of words like ‘Survive,’ ‘Self’ and ‘NotSelf’ then an unhappy face.”

“Weird.”

“You’re telling me?”

“Well the good news is, this thing’s physically clean,” Akiyama reported. “No bombs, bugs or beacons. Can’t tell you shit about the computer systems though. It ain’t exactly running Windows.”

“Longear taught us how to work with this stuff…” Lewis pointed out.

“Yeah, and it ain’t anything we’ve been exposed to before. Like…there’s not even a physical interface that’s compatible.”

“It’s still talkin’ to us though,” Lewis pointed out.

“It’s sending the right signals, sure. Over fuckin’ WiFi because apparently it has WiFi somehow… It’s just not accepting connections the other way. Any insight from our friend, Darcy?”

Darcy shook her head frustratedly as she read the tablet. “It’s giving me… ones and zeroes? And a castle? And the biohazard symbol.” she trailed off, scowling. “…I think it’s saying that it’s protecting itself.”

“This stage fright is really gettin’ old,” Lewis muttered. “Dude, come on. Throw us a fuckin’ bone here.”

Darcy blinked at the screen. “Unhappy face. I… think it’s saying sorry. Oh, yeah. Green tick. I-”

She trailed off, and just watched the screen with her lips moving silently as she tried to puzzle out what she was seeing. Outside, Akiyama and Moho detached from the ship’s hull and began the long gentle drift back to the Weaver with little puffs of maneuvering gas. They were halfway back before she nodded her head and sat back.

“…Okay. I think I understand it now.”

“Share,” Lewis said.

“It’s… You have to remember that the Entity isn’t Ava Ríos. Hers was just the first mind it, uh… absorbed.”

“There’s a fun thought…” Akiyama muttered. “Does Ava know about this?”

“Yes. She doesn’t want to know the details. Anyway, the thing is, the Entity barely knows what it is any better than we do. It’s only, what, about four years old? It’s still figuring itself out. And every time it loads up the simulacrum, it becomes a little more like her, and a little less like itself. And every time it creates a copy of itself, it experiences value drift that gets confusing when it merges the copy. It wants to remain itself, and that’s difficult for a completely digital life form that can copy-paste and edit itself on a whim.”

“…Dude. You’re gettin’ all this from emojis?” Lewis asked.

She gestured sharply at the camera without looking at it. “Just… listen. The point is, it’s never had a body before. It has somebody else’s memories of having a body, but it’s never had a physical shell of its own. And it’s worried that if it just hands over this ship, it’ll lose that.”

“So…?” Moho prompted.

“So… it’s offering us a deal. It wants to keep the ship. Which doesn’t matter because the ship is a von-neumann probe, it can just make us a perfect copy. And it wants… something. I’m having trouble figuring out what it means by this. First line, spaceship then a person. Second line, two spaceships, each with a CD. Third line, four spaceships, CDs and a green tick at the end. Then another set, spaceship person. Spaceship spaceship person person. Four spaceships, four persons, red cross.”

“It’s… thinking of replicating?” Lewis asked. He got out of the way as the Weaver’s loadmaster and crew activated the triple-thick air retention field and dropped the ramp at the back. He knew he was perfectly safe but dang: having nothing but space magic between him and infinite vacuum was kinda distracting. “…Darcy, I’m sorry. I don’t care how good whatever it puts on the table is, we can’t allow that.”

“I don’t think so…. Yeah, red cross from the Entity.”

Moho and Akiyama alighted on the ramp and hauled themselves inside via the handholds. Frost formed instantly on their suits as they entered the warm, humid environment inside the dropship, and they stood there dripping fog on the deck while the ramp came back up.

“Sounds like it wants to build more ships, though,” Moho said as his techs released the seals on his mask and removed it.

“That’s a green tick.”

“But not more Entities?” Lewis asked.

“Green tick.”

Akiyama took off his own helmet and bent his head to scratch furiously at his scalp. “Fuck, you’d think after all these years I’d get used to the damn thing…” he muttered, then straightened up. “…So it wants more ships but not more itselfs. But it still needs to control the ships, I bet.”

“It just showed me a picture of a… blueprint,” Darcy reported.

Lewis pantomimed revelation. “Of course! It’s got a self-replicating modular ship, but it can’t do anything with it!”

“…Tick.”

“‘Cuz it doesn’t have the schematics to make anything useful with the nanofac,” Moho surmised.

“Tick.”

Akiyama nodded. “Which makes that whole ship a giant flying paperweight…”

“…Which is why it brought it here!” Lewis finished.

“Tick, tick, big smiley face.” Darcy grinned at the camera. “See? This isn’t so hard when you get the hang of it.”

“I guess I have just one more question for it, then…”

“What?”

Lewis cleared his throat. “Like, uh… where exactly did it get these things?”

Darcy suddenly looked awkward. “That’s just it. It won’t say.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Uh… apparently it has a price…”

Date Point: 15y8m2w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Chief Special Warfare Officer Daniel (“Chimp”) Hoeff

“You’re retiring?”

Hoeff nodded. “Been thinkin’ about it for a month or so. And my uncle Freddie had some good advice about retiring. He said ‘when you start thinkin’ about retiring, you already have.’ So… time to go.”

It was funny, hanging out with the eggheads at the research site. Not a single one of them had a military background, they were all infuriatingly innocent, unfocused, naive…

But he still liked them. A lot, actually. These were folks who’d left the safety and comfort of Earth to live in the woods with a…well, developing civilization of cavemonkeys and help them. He’d just be fuckin’ done if he ever let them know how much he respected that.

“I thought you like what you do?” Claire asked.

“Yeah. Which means sooner or later I’m gonna be reassigned.” Hoeff chuckled darkly. “Can’t get stuck doin’ something you enjoy in the service. It’s against regs.”

That got a laugh. “So… you’re retiring to stay here?”

“Yeah. ‘Cus bein’ honest, y’all need somebody to look out for ‘ya, we’re gonna have JETS candidates come through here for training… Sounds like a good gig to me.”

“This isn’t exactly the Hilton,” Claire pointed out. They’d asked the Ten’Gewek tribes for permission to build a more permanent structure on their land, which had been granted, but the actual funding was still a long way off. For now, they were still living in prefab modular buildings small enough to fit through a Jump Array.

But shit, they were warm, dry, comfortable and had hot water. Some folks just didn’t know what luxury really looked like.

“May as well be, next to some of the literal shitheaps I’ve slept in…”

“…I smell a story there.”

“Yeah, it never quite scrubbed out.” Hoeff fished out some dip and tucked it into his gum. “…Shit, I’m thirty-seven. Ain’t never gonna have kids, prob’ly. Well, I mean…not legit kids, but that’s another story for another time. An’ I don’t wanna be one of those homeless vets who can’t hack it back in civilization, so livin’ in the woods playing survivor with tribesman might just do the trick.”

Claire frowned at him. “…Do you really believe those are your only options?”

Hoeff frowned. “Okay. You’re smart as shit, Claire. Let’s be perfectly fuckin’ honest. This, right here? This is as polite as I get. I don’t do small talk. I don’t do discretion. My job is to kill people, fuck their shit up, and make their kids wish they’d never been born. I am very, very good at it. But nowadays? I get to do something non-violent for a change. Besides, Hanz and Franz made me into this fuckin’ tank of a fireplug, so I ain’t exactly lookin’ forward to losing all that so I can shiver to death crawling up a beach somewhere at two AM to go murder some poor fuck…”

She’d gone pale, so he contradicted himself a little and toned it down. “…Point is, there ain’t no goin’ back.”

“But looking forward you see… here. As…what? A man of the People?”

Hoeff thought about that for a moment. “Eh, no. Don’t get me wrong, I’m awful fond of ‘em, s’pecially Yan and Singer… But nah. I’m not gonna join the tribe.”

“Why not?”

“Coupl’a reasons. I could pass the Trial, sure. Shit, I went through harder in SEAL training. But why? Julian already proved humans can do that, he’s already earned their respect. He’s also strong enough to keep their respect, and that matters. That ain’t in the cards for me.”

“Well, what would you do instead?”

Hoeff grunted and thought about it a little more “…I think they need to learn to respect us for our strengths,” he said. “‘Cuz…hell, most of us just don’t measure up on their terms.”

Claire nodded along but didn’t concede the point. “Okay. What are their strengths?”

Hoeff raised an eyebrow. “Well, strength for a start, just their sheer ridiculous physicality. Perception, too. They can ‘taste’ the air pretty damn well actually, their sense of touch really ain’t that bad, their vision seems a bit better than ours, and so on. They’re also smart as shit, but none of that don’t matter if you ain’t strong enough to hunt your food and eat.”

“How much does that truly matter, though? Surely there’s more to it than simple brawn!”

“Oh, it fuckin matters,” Hoeff stated emphatically. “Me, I’m strong as shit now, so strong I can sometimes out-wrestle Singer. Hell, I’ve even held off Vemik for a whole five seconds. But am I strong enough to throw a werne over my shoulders and walk six miles home? Fuck no.”

“We managed just fine in our neolithic days,” Claire pointed out. “Teamwork can make up for that sort of thing. It’s an enabler, too. More than the sum of its parts, and all that.”

“Again, you ain’t wrong. They do teamwork too, they see that in us and respect it. But a good team needs good players, and the Ten’Gewek? Their women put basically all our men to shame and their Given-Men are like, I dunno, Daar or the HEAT bros. We’ve got about a dozen men like that, and they have over two-hundred in a species of twenty thousand! That’s crazytown levels of grunt. Leave that caveman shit for the big motherfuckers, my talents are elsewhere.”

“Such as?”

“Running. Thinking. Adapting. Surviving. We’re really good at that, us humans. Yan thinks all of that is ‘strong,’ because you’re right, they think like you’d expect neolithic cavemonkeys to think. Hell, if it weren’t for that and, like, all our sky-magic and shit? They wouldn’t respect us at all.”

Claire nodded along. “I see what you’re saying.”

“Yeah. An’ think about what that means. When they finally figure shit out, they’re gonna be real fuckin’ scary. Scarier’n us even, so why wouldn’t I wanna help ‘em get civilized?” He glanced toward the village. “…Imagine in like five hundred years time or whatever, when they’ve graduated from cavemonkey to spacemonkey. That’s how fast it’s gonna happen I bet.”

“Honestly, I think it’s going to go much faster,” Claire predicted. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a few of them wandering among us in our lifetimes. I mean…god, look at Vemik. He’s curious. And I don’t even want to guess what his IQ would be if he was human. It’d put mine to shame, that’s for sure, and I’m working on my second doctorate!”

Hoeff wanted to say something snarky about equating degrees with intelligence, but for once in his life, the little devil on his shoulder held its peace. Instead, he agreed and made his point.

“Hell yeah! So do you want our great-great-grandkids to have them for enemies? I sure as shit don’t. But they don’t want us for enemies too, ‘cuz ain’t nobody’d come outta that fight lookin’ pretty. Yan gets it, that’s why he’s so protective of me. Besides being friendly, I mean.”

“So that’s why you want to stay,” Claire nodded. “You want to be their big brother.”

“…Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. We should be friends. The Hierarchy kills us Deathworlders ‘cuz we’re dangerous, right? Well, I don’t think anyone’s gonna be as dangerous as these guys.”

“Individually, anyway.”

“…Huh?”

Claire gestured toward Daniel’s vacant tent. “Daniel thinks, and I’m inclined to agree, that they’re not likely to build vertically into the same kind of large-scale civilization that we did. We’ve basically frozen parts of their culture in time just by contacting them. My working thesis is that it’s very likely they’ll remain mostly nomadic and wilderness-dwelling even as they grow in knowledge and technology.”

“I’m not sure I agree with y’all about that, but I’m just a stupid SEAL so what do I know?”

She laughed. “I am here to study them,” she pointed out. “They’d need…at the very least they’d need a complete change in their spirituality and religious traditions. You should see what they think of the lakeside civilization.”

“They think they’re weak, immoral, effeminate, and stupid. I think that’s the words Daniel used.”

She nodded. “Takers and wasters. They don’t really appreciate what that lost civilization achieved, they have different values. They judge a man first by his muscles and his knife, not his philosophy and politics. They value folk wisdom over rational thought.”

“They ain’t wrong. That stuff does matter, especially if you gotta hunt to live. We just gotta show them there’s more kinds of strength, y’know? I guess that’s what I wanna do here.”

“And groom them as allies,” she accused dryly.

“Well… yeah. But why is that bad? Alliances go both ways, and they’re gonna want us just as much as we want them.”

She nodded. “You certainly sound…. Uh… the idea of retiring’s brought you out of your shell a bit and made you less…”

“Grumpy?” He suggested.

“Grumpy.”

Hoeff nodded. “Well, ‘grumpy’ is how murderbunnies like me do…”

“Still. It’s good to see you in a positive mood.”

“You ain’t ever seen me off mission…but you ain’t wrong. I’m happy here and I can be useful, y’know? Plus I actually get to fuckin’ read for a change, I get to talk to smart people…” He gestured at her, and she smiled at the compliment. “Fuck, I get to help smart people make smart monkeys even smarter! ‘Cuz lemme tell ya what’ll happen if I retire and I don’t have a mission. I’ll be dead inside, like…I dunno, four months.”

Claire said what truly innocent people always said when they heard a prediction like that: nothing at all. She had no idea what to say, and it showed.

“I can’t stay still,” Hoeff explained. “And there’s a reason I ain’t a Master Chief after twenty years in. I ain’t the leadership type. Guys like us, we ain’t equipped to be friendly sheep. No offense.”

“I, uhm…” she cleared her throat.

“You got nothin’?”

“…Yeah.”

“‘S’okay. I was brutally honest ‘cuz you can handle it, Claire. I don’t tell these things to people who can’t.”

She managed to recover some humor. “I think that makes me feel worse, actually,” she said, with a smile. “…Thank you.”

Hoeff chuckled humorously. “Ain’t nothin’. I already got the job lined up, so it’ll be official in…a couple of weeks. I should be Mister Hoeff by the time Julian gets his slabby ass back here.”

“…That just sounds wrong.”

“That’s why it’s right! Anyhoo, I just thought it was time to tell y’all now that I made it official. I’ve gotta head back to Cimbrean for a week and do all my outprocessing which should be…fun…”

“Ugh, paperwork,” she agreed. “Why do you think I like digging holes in the jungle so much?

“I know why you do.” He stood up. “Anyway…I better go let everyone else know. And Yan. If he doesn’t decide I’m his teddy bear today.”

She laughed. “Good luck. And Hoeff?”

He turned back. “Yeah?”

“It’ll be good to work with you.”

He nodded, smiled, and headed toward the village with a wave and feeling a good deal lighter than he had in years. He wasn’t the settling-down sort, that much was for sure, but for the first time since he’d got in, he could look forward and see a future.

All he had to do was seize it.

Date Point: 15y8m2w AV
Dataspace adjacent to Observatory Station, Neptune, Sol

Cynosure/Six

How did the test go?

Excellent. One rock, smashed. We’re all going to enjoy some big fat bonus pay.

If only they knew what you’re spending yours on, yes? How soon can you move?

What’s the rush? The next window is weeks away, and we’re still waiting for a distraction aren’t we?

Not any longer. We have one. Can you move?

…Yes. But the earlier I move, the longer they have to track me down.

I know. It’s a gamble, but I’ve always felt you were too cautious about the pursuit and not cautious enough about your own setup time. There will be unexpected setbacks, trust me on that: I have been doing this for much longer than you, after all.

I trust you. Though I still don’t know how this is supposed to work. It’s supposed to be impossible.

It will work. It’s all a matter of precision timing.

Why didn’t you do this sooner, then?

We didn’t know how before. The situation with the Guvnurag changed everything.

I still have misgivings about this. If it goes wrong…

Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a prison?

No.

In that case:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Acknowledged. Operation Jailbreak is go.
See you on the outside.

Date Point: 15y15y8m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

“Woah! …Yeah. There’s that gravity I remember.” Xiù bounced on her toes for a second to get the feel for it again, then stood up straight and sniffed the air. A slow smile spread across her face. “…And the smell.”

Julian nodded. Ketta trees had a pleasant smell, reminiscent of pine needles and sandalwood and petrichor rolled into one. It was powerful, like pretty much everything on Akyawentuo, but never cloying. “Yeah. I tell ya, the Ten’Gewek could make good money just exporting the essential oil… Speaking of which, brace yourself.”

Xiù followed his gaze and finally noticed Vemik hovering outside the safety stripes on the ground. At least he respected hazard signs. “Huh? Oh. This is gonna hurt…”

“Yyyup.”

They stepped off the Array platform and were both immediately hoisted off the ground in a huge double-armed monkeyhug that made Julian’s spine creak. Xiù managed to choke out a laugh and eventually succeeded in reminding Vemik that she was a good deal frailer than Julian and needed air, at which point he reluctantly put them down again.

“Didn’t know you would come!” he told Xiù.

“It would have been all three of us, but Allison couldn’t come. She sends her love, though.”

“Couldn’t come? Why?”

Julian grinned. “We’re gonna have a baby girl!”

Vemik blinked at him. “…Is good news, but how do you know?”

“Sky-magic. Same way the scanner on the ship worked, remember? Also, she’s started with morning sickness.”

“Morning sickness?”

“I think that one’s a human thing,” Xiù said. “We… our stomachs get very sensitive. To protect the baby if we accidentally eat something poisonous. So, she’s throwing up a lot.”

Vemik hooted mournfully. “I hope she gets better…”

“She will. It doesn’t last forever. Anyway! We have other news, too…”

Vemik suddenly remembered his manners, and beckoned them toward the village. “Come, eat! We have smoked moose roasting. Is good!”

“You still have some?” Julian asked.

“We saved it! Like, special treat, I think is the word. What’s the other news?”

“Don’t give it away!” Julian warned Xiù. “I wanna see him figure it out for himself.”

“Figure it out?” Vemik twitched his tail at them. “…Something is different?”

“Yeah, bro.”

“Something I can see?”

“Right now, yeah.” Julian’s grin got wider, and Xiù covered her smile.

Vemik stopped in his tracks and looked them both up and down.

“…You have less face hair. But that’s not news. Shaving, yes?”

“Yeah, I do that. C’mon buddy, you can do this.”

Vemik’s tail lashed furiously as his pinched his jaw and frowned first at Xiù, who beamed at him, then at Julian. He looked them both up, then he looked them both down, then up… and then did the most classic double-take Julian had ever seen.

“Wh–? Your foot! How?!”

Xiù giggled, and Julian couldn’t help but laugh himself. “New sky-magi–woah!”

Vemik had belly flopped into the dirt to inspect Nofl’s handiwork, and unceremoniously lifted Julian’s foot off the ground to study it. He poked it a few times and exclaimed, “…It’s real!”

Julian flung out his arms to stay balanced, grateful that Xiù put a hand on his back to help. “Yeah, uh… yeah.”

“How?” Vemik asked again.

“I don’t know exactly. We’ve got a little grey fella who grew it for me and then stuck it on. He knows how it works. To me, it’s sky-magic.”

“Why are you wearing strange shoes?”

“My new foot isn’t toughened up yet. I’m working on that, probably gonna do a bunch of tree climbing to speed it up some. But for now…it kinda hurts to walk on metal grates, heh.”

Vemik was, of course, far too excited at this point to contain himself. He flung himself upright and bounced high above Julian’s head a few times, hooting and generally making a scene. “Come! We show everyone!” He grabbed Julian by the arm, half-dragged him over to the treeline and flung him up into the branches, then charged off swinging as fast as he could manage. Xiù’s scandalized “Hey!!” actually doppler-shifted.

Julian chuckled and waited patiently for Xiù to catch up. He rubbed his forearm where Vemik had grabbed him, too; not even six months ago Vemik’s grip would have given him a hell of a bruise, but these days it was probably just going to be an abrasion from the rough skin of his palms.

Probably.

Julian rolled his fingers to work out some of the pain, and chuckled again. It was good to be back, even if they were only here for a week until the next scheduled Array jump.

“So are you staying up there or are you gonna walk, Tarzan?” Xiù called from down below.

“I think I’ll Tarzan. All that time with Adam on the rings and bars is one thing, but I need practice. Also, here.” Julian reached down and pulled off his sandals. “May as well get to work on this, too…might take me a bit longer to get to the village.”

She caught them. “I’ll be there. Don’t fall.”

Julian allowed a slightly cocky grin to spread across his face. “I won’t.”

“Good boy. See you in the village.” She took off at a jog in the direction Vemik had gone and quickly vanished among the brush. She might just get there first, too: over-excited Vemik moments aside, a human at a steady jog could usually cover ground faster than a Ten’Gewek in the trees, and much faster than a human in the trees.

Well. A human not named Hoeff, anyway. He was practically a monkey himself.

True to Julian’s prediction, his progress was slow and his foot did not feel happy by the time he finally arrived. His entire upper body was throbbing from exertion, even his chest. His legs felt like he’d just sprinted a few miles…God, even his calves were on fire. He was plenty strong enough to swing along, thanks to Adam’s evil training, it was just…more like he was way out of practice. He was happy he made it without returning to the ground, though, and for once didn’t feel clumsy or weak at all. That month in Adam’s rehab had made a startling difference in his functional strength, even despite having slabbed on a bunch more weight.

That was a good feeling, too. Julian could tell that extra kick in the pants was exactly what he’d needed to really get comfortable up in the canopy, which meant he’d finally be able to keep up with the People. He’d get back into the swing of it pretty quick…which actually was a pretty awful pun once he’d thought about it. Definitely one to annoy Allison with later!

Xiù was doing her space elf thing when he arrived. He jumped down from the trees with a heavy thump and stretched himself out some with an unaccountably goofy grin on his face; exercise always made him happy. She arched an eyebrow at him as if to ask ‘well?’ and nodded when he grinned back at her.

“Hey, Playboy.” Hoeff was hanging around the village perimeter, and gave Julian a nod. “Congrats.”

“Thanks!”

“A girl, huh? They can tell this early now?”

“And a lot more, apparently!”

“Whatcha gonna call her?”

“Not decided yet.”

“Fair.”

A thought struck Julian and he felt he had to voice it. “Not Amanda, though. Definitely not Amanda.”

Hoeff snorted. “Also fair. No luck with Xiù yet?”

“These things take time.”

“Cool.”

Julian couldn’t help himself and waggled his eyebrows. “Don’t worry. We’ll take all the time we need…”

“Yeah, yeah, rub it in. I ain’t got laid in like a couple’a months.” Hoeff grumbled. “There’s exactly one woman on this planet, and she’s uh…”

“Young? Attractive? Smart? Into you?”

“She ain’t given me that impression.”

“Please, yes she is. Big bad dangerous SEAL and all that. We can all see it!”

“Hey, I’d take a tumble with Claire in a heartbeat. But she needs a better man.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself with that, man! Like, back in Folctha? I never once heard you say anything…Oh. Oh, hell. It’s more than just gettin’ lucky this time, isn’t it?”

“Like you said. She’s real smart.”

Well, damn. Julian put an arm around Hoeff and dragged him off for a bit of privacy. “Okay. Like, I’m not the best guy with relationships or whatever, this happened by accident—”

“You’re fuckin’ kidding me!”

“By accident, man. When I first met Allison, I wasn’t exactly experienced at any of this. I’m still not. These two are the first serious thing I’ve ever had. Before that it was all just…high school, and like almost something with a fellow ranger. And I was always more of a loner.”

“…No way.”

“Yeah. But anyway,” Julian pulled things back on track. “I ain’t ever known you to be anything but the most confident dude ever. So what gives?”

“I’m confident ‘cuz I know myself, man. I know what I am, what I do, what I’m good at.”

“Okay. That don’t really answer my question, though.”

“…Look, maybe I don’t wanna get into it, okay? I like you, Playboy. You’re a good guy. Just… Don’t push where you’re not welcome.”

“Okay. No pressure. I just…I dunno. You deserve–”

Hoeff clapped Julian on the shoulder to interrupt him, shook his head, and walked away.

Well… shit.

Date Point: 15y15y8m2w1d
High Mountain Fortress, The Northern Plains, Gao

Champion Thurrsto of Whitecrest

The report from Rvzrk was exactly as grim as Thurrsto had feared it might be.

In his state of fallen grace it was no longer Regaari’s job to be read to and make decisions on such reports: rather, he was the one doing the reading. Briefing his Champion. It was obvious that the demotion hurt him, but also that he clearly didn’t resent it or feel it was unfair.

In any case, his voice had his usual professional cadence in place as he delivered the briefing: Strong, clear and precise. It echoed off the walls as they hustled through the fortress’ innards toward the grand chamber.

“The Humans are having a hard time establishing any hard facts about the situation groundside. They know that the Hunters landed most of their ships and that they’re using Jump Arrays to bring in ground forces, which are spreading out from, uh, Site One at a faster rate than the Domain ground troops can evacuate the area.”

Site One. The Humans had taken to calling it that, on the basis that the actual Domain name for that city was a kind of prolonged guttural rattle like a bucket full of bricks being tipped down a stairwell.

Apparently by Domain standards it was a beautiful, poetic, mellifluous sort of name.

“What’s the Domain reaction been?”

“For once, they’re happy to see us. They seem to think the deathworlders can handle this so they’re just going to sit this one out as much as they can. Which, being honest, is probably the most sensible thing they could do.”

“Can we handle it?” Thurrsto asked.

“That…depends very much on what we mean by ‘handle,’ unfortunately. It will be costly.”

“Right. We could flatten the city, I take it?”

“And write off the millions of Domain citizens who live there in the process,” Regaari duck-nodded.

“Could we invade?”

“Yes, but it would be a lamentable victory at best.”

Thurrsto considered that for a moment. “I need the politics on this.”

Regaari duck-nodded and called up the file with a gesture of his cybernetic paw.

“The Dominion has actually showed up to the fight this time,” he said. “The Fleetmaster is a Chehnash by the name of Dreem. You may recognize the name.”

“…Wasn’t he a pirate?”

“He was given amnesty. Officially.” Regaari’s ear flicked a little. Even when reporting on such grim subjects, and even in the depth of his own low mood, he could still find a little amusement in xenopolitical corruption. “Of course, what actually happened was that he owns the loyalty of some of the most powerful figures in the Chehnash global senate.”

“Right, yes. And now he’s a senior fleetmaster? Impressive. And competent, I imagine.”

Regaari duck-nodded. “Very competent. And not interested in letting politics get in the way of the mission. I think there’s a principled man somewhere under the pirate.”

“Still. What could get in the way?”

“The usual. The Kwmbwrw are making noises about deathworlder ships standing ready to bombard a Dominion world, as though we’re not Dominion members ourselves… They’re being shouted down by the Rauwryhr though, and the Corti have given us their full backing. I believe they’re sending one of their top warships too.”

“The Corti are sending a warship?”

“The Empirical Razor. I’m as surprised as you: I thought their warfleet was mostly for show but this one’s allegedly a real killer, not some home system ceremonial picket.”

“I suppose stranger things have happened. I wonder what their ground forces are like…” These were interesting times indeed. “So in short, we actually have Dominion backing, by and large.”

“For a change,” Regaari agreed. “I think the rest of the Security Council is getting just as sick of the Kwmwbwrw’s bullshit as we are.”

They paused outside the door the grand chamber. The sound of raised voices penetrated the thick ancient wood just enough that Thurrsto had to raise his own voice to ask his last question.

“What’s your take on the Great Father’s reaction to this?”

Regaari looked nervously at the door, probably imagining the furry brute beyond it. “…If a bloody land invasion is what it’ll take to stop the Hunters, he’ll do it. He won’t like it at all, but that won’t stop him.”

“So our duty is to find an alternative,” Thurrsto mused. “…Very well. Let’s not keep him waiting.”

Daar looked over at them as they entered the hall. He gave Thurrsto a nod but didn’t extend the same courtesy to Regaari, whom Thurrsto knew well enough to spot the microscopic way he wilted. They took their spot at the table, Thurrsto standing with his paws resting on the venerable wooden surface, Regaari a pace behind him and slightly to his left.

Champion Fiin welcomed Thurrsto to the table with pleasure. “Any news?” he asked.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” Thurrsto told him. “Father Garaaf hasn’t been able to expand on the intelligence the Humans sent us, and there’s nobody more expert on Hunters.” Several years surviving as a slave aboard their orbital had made him the undisputed authority.

“So we’re still blind. And every moment we’re blind, more civilians die.”

“We’ll always be blind so long as we’re stuck in orbit,” One-Fang’s Champion Hiyel said. “We need eyes on the ground. Thurrsto, your Clan must be able to put somebody on the ground.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded reluctantly. “The insertion itself would be relatively straightforward. But it’s a one-way trip. Our scouts would be dropping onto a Hunter-infested planet with no way to exfiltrate.”

“So it’s a suicide mission,” Hiyel said.

“…The next best thing, anyway. I’d certainly give the scouts low odds of survival.”

“If that’s what we have to do, that’s what we have to do.”

“For the Domain, though?” Champion Loomi asked. “An ally like the Humans would be worth the sacrifice, but I don’t remember any Domain ships coming to defend us when the Hunters attacked here.”

That earned an outraged bristling from Champion Kuri of Clan Openpaw. “Life must come first, Champion,” he said sharply, quoting his Clan’s motto. “I can’t countenance letting people die over our own sense of resentment.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Kuri, but I must agree with Loomi,” Champion Sheeyo said. “Our first duty is to the Gao and our allies. The kind of scout who’d be capable of that insertion is hardly the kind of resource we want to squander.”

“And how do you propose we earn new allies, Sheeyo?” Thurrsto asked. “We earned the Humans as an ally by taking a risk, as I recall. When the Females took in Sister Shoo, they did so in the face of objections that she was dangerous.”

Kuri duck-nodded fervently. “My objections,” he said. “If not for her Frontline implant—which at the time was an unfamiliar and untested technology—she might have unleashed a devastating plague on our people. There was a real danger that millions might die.”

“And yet Giymuy chose to adopt her as a Sister, and thus we earned our most important military ally,” Thurrsto finished.

“…He has a point,” Sheeyo conceded to Loomi.

“Here’s another one,” Fiin interjected. “The Grand Army.”

“What about them?” Sheeyo asked.

“An army that size with nothing to do but sit idle is a problem waiting to happen. They’re loyal, they’re motivated, and they want to fight. For a lot of them, the fight is the only thing they have left. Deny them, and morale is going to suffer.”

Daar grumbled to himself and Looked at everyone around the table, in that penetrating way only he seemed to have mastered.

“I ain’t interested in commitin’ the Army just ‘cuz it’ll avoid hurt feelings. I need more if Imma send maybe millions to their doom.”

“…Yes, My Father. I was only pointing out one branch of the consequences.”

“…These ain’t good options. I’m inclined t’agree wit’ all of you, actually.”

“Which means we need more intelligence.”

“Ayup.” Daar looked at Thurrsto. “…Brother, I’m gonna need to ask ‘yer Clan to do somethin’ awful.”

Regaari’s voice cut into the conversation like a sword stroke. “I volunteer.”

The table fell silent instantly. Daar waited for a long moment, then padded slowly over towards Regaari, and sat on his haunches a middling distance away.

“…Say again?”

Regaari looked him square in the eye. “You need eyes on the ground, and I’m one of the best you have. I’m no longer attached to HEAT, I’m no longer your aide de camp… So, I volunteer to infiltrate the planet and return intel.”

Daar gave him a long, slow stare. He very obviously didn’t like the idea one bit.

“…That’s a suicide mission,” he said. “Thurrsto said so himself.”

“Maybe,” Regaari conceded. “But though I may have blundered in not trusting your judgement, My Father, I daresay my skills are still sharp. I can get down there. I can return intelligence that the Grand Army needs. And if it does turn out to be a suicide mission… Well. I’m willing.”

The room was silent for several seconds as the Champions glanced between themselves while watching the tableau playing out between the two old friends.

Finally, Daar turned his head slightly. “…Ev’ryone who ain’t a Whitecrest, go wait outside.”

The Champions and their retinues dutifully filed out. The old hall felt large and cold with only three in the middle of it, once they were gone.

The second the doors closed, Daar stood up on two-paw and glowered down his muzzle at Regaari. Balls, he was intimidating. “…Regaari, I ain’t lookin’ for you to fall on your sword.”

“I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little bit of that,” Regaari conceded. “But with all due respect to my Champion, just because he says it’s a suicide mission doesn’t mean it is. I reckon I’m better than him.”

Thurrsto felt both his ears flick like Regaari had just clawed him in the snout. In any other context and coming from anybody else, that would be a direct challenge.

It was worse, because Thurrsto knew it was true. And apparently so did the Great Father.

“An’ you propose we spend one o’ our very best on this mission, if you be.”

“No, My Father. You proposed that. I simply volunteered for the mission.”

“…Oh, Gods damnit Regaari! You were always the smartest between us, but now?! Of all the fuckin’ moments, you choose this to get a dig in?!”

“If that’s what it takes!” Regaari actually squared up to Daar like he planned on fighting him. “Daar… Cousin! I can’t let you forget your duty just because of our history!”

That was a deep cut. Daar didn’t look enraged, or murderous, or in any way like he’d just been challenged by a vastly inferior combatant. Instead, he looked like he’d been mortally wounded.

Regaari’s ears slowly went sorrowfully flat. “I love you,” he said. “You’re my Brother in every way. I don’t want to hurt you again. But this needs to happen. Thurrsto’s right, we can’t stand back and let the Hunters feast. And if I need to go into the fire to stop them, I’ll do it. I’ll do it gladly.”

“…I know.” Daar couldn’t muster anything beyond that. Painfully slowly, he returned to his seat at the end of the table, sat down like a very old man.

“…Champion Thurrsto.”

“…Yes, My Father?”

“The order is given.”

“Yes, My Father.”

They were halfway to the door when Daar found his voice again.

“…Regaari?”

Regaari turned back to look at him. “Yes, My Father?”

“…Come back. Please.”

“I’ll do my best.” Regaari flicked his slightly shortened ear and a little of his old cocksure demeanor returned. “…My best is pretty damn good.”

They left the Great Father in the chamber and closed the doors behind them. The last thing they heard was a keening, tortured howl.

Date Point: 15y8m2w2d
Irbzrk System, Dominion Borderlands

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

<Vague interest> +I remember this system. I was here the last time we raided it.+

This time was different, of course. On that occasion, the former Alpha-of-Alphas had been fixated on its pursuit of every Human it could get at. They’d torn into the station and decimated its population, but left the infrastructure intact. The Prey reliably returned to the same facilities rather than build new ones.

Strange, that they’d return to a place that had been so conclusively proven unsafe. But the Prey by and large did not think, as far as the Alpha-of-Alphas could tell. Not on the large scale. Individuals might be quite clever, but the herd as a whole was a creature of instinct that soon forgot about danger if they weren’t regularly reminded of it.

This time, there wouldn’t be anything for them to return to. The Swarm needed more than just meat—it needed material. Metal. Parts. Systems. So while most of the Swarm gorged themselves on a planet at the far end of Domain space, the Alpha-of-Alphas had led this smaller but much more dangerous force here.

The meat inside the station would just be a fortunate bonus. The real prey was a station full of nanofactory parts, raw shipbuilding material and extensive industrial resources. To the Alpha-of-Alphas’ eyes, it may as well have been a bloody chunk of raw meat, waiting for the maw.

One of the subordinate Betas got its attention.

<Eager report> +The station is lightly defended. Their defense ships all departed for the distraction world several days ago.+

+Tactical assessment?+

+We can expect negligible losses from the defences here.+

+Human and Gaoian forces?+

<relish> +All known Human ships are accounted for at the distraction world. The Gaoians are in support.+

<pleased; command> +Raise the wormhole suppressor and deploy gravity spikes. All ships: decloak and assault the station. Meat to the Maw.+

The gleeful hunting cry was taken up across the entire network. Irbzrk station responded with commendable swiftness… but they were never a match. Their sentry guns and point defence weapons were blinded by ECM, their communications were jammed, and their sensors burned out in the opening assault.

The swarm descended, cut into the hull… and fed.

Date Point: 15y8m2w2d
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

Dan Hurt had come back on a specially arranged off-schedule jump a few days ago, brimming with ideas, if not necessarily Vemik-like cheer. He was definitely more sober than usual.

He greeted Julian with a handshake and swapped air-kisses near the cheek with Xiù. Julian wasn’t sure why, but he always found that greeting a little weird, but whatever. It was good to see him again.

“How was the service?”

“Oh, the service sucked,” Dan grumbled. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a funeral where the deceased is an afterthought. They could have just entered his name into the gaps on a form and let a computer follow the script, it was… soulless.”

“Ew,” Xiù agreed, pulling a face.

“The wake on the other hand, was a genuine celebration of his life, and it was a privilege to be there.” Dan managed a smile. “…It was a privilege to know him, too.”

“The Ten’Gewek owe him a huge debt,” Julian said.

“They know. Anyway… I’ve spent this whole time dwelling on Steven’s death. I’d like to move forward. Shall we? I notice you got a new foot. It’s impressively realistic this time!” the waggle in his eyebrows said he knew perfectly well it wasn’t a prosthetic.

“Good craftsmanship! They’re too big, though,” Xiù noted.

“Hey!” Julian laughed, “What’s wrong with ‘em?”

“Oh, nothing. You know what they say about men with big feet.”

“Mm.” Dan nodded. “Big… shoes.”

Julian laughed. “Yeah, I suppose that’s true too…” He gave Xiù a meaningful look.

“Anyway. It suits you, Julian,” Dan said. “You’re already walking with a lot more bounce in your step. Before you were always careful. Now…”

“Some of Vemik’s energy is rubbing off on him, I think.”

“Yes! Exactly that.”

“Guys, I’m right here you know.”

“Hush, you.” Xiù swatted him lightly in the chest with her knuckles. “You ‘dress’ like a cavemonkey nowadays, so you don’t get to talk. Anyway.” she gestured toward the research camp. “This is going well!”

Dan nodded and they headed for it while he enthused about the projects he was looking forward to catching up with.

Sure enough, the researchers dropped what they were doing and emerged from their prefabs and cataloging stations to welcome Dan back. The cataloging in particular was a massive job: the archaeological trenches down on the coastline where the cities had once stood were rich sources of artefacts, every last one of which was carefully recorded before it left the ground, then returned to the base camp for inspection and classification.

They’d begun “hiring” the local Ten’Gewek as porters. It was a three-day trip in either direction, and it had proven to be a great trust-building exercise. The archaeologists did the delicate, careful work while the Ten’Gewek looked on, fascinated. They also helped with a lot of the grunt work, since they were burly monkeys and the staff were definitely more on the wiry-yet-thin side.

Then there was one of the Ten’Gewek children, a girl who was Vemik’s equal in curiosity and had apparently picked up the endearing tactic of holding a magnifying lens with her tail while she helped go through the less sensitive artefacts. She’d apparently already decided that she wanted to be an archaeologist, even if she couldn’t pronounce the word and it came out more like ‘Akyojiss.’

In short, it worked. And little by little, youths and children and the occasional adult from the surrounding villages were paying visits here and there to talk with the Humans and learn a little bit about sky-magic and sky-thinking.

“We won’t have long before they hear you’re back and come running to ask about the vaccines…” Julian mused, noticing a boy who’d been loitering near the camp vanish into the trees and disappear in a rustle of displaced foliage.

“On that score, it’s mixed news,” Dan said. “There are companies who are willing to give it a try, but the setup costs for vaccination are, uh… impressive. And it will take time, and involve a pretty substantial human presence. And, frankly, those companies are going to want something in return. It’ll be a crash course in money-based trade…”

“I think they can handle it.”

“They can handle the concept. Scraping together the value they’ll need, though…” Dan shrugged.

“They’ve got a lot they can sell, actually. Like, hell! That ketta smell for a change. Maybe just the right to access? I dunno. I’m definitely not gonna sell ‘em down the river, I’m rich as fuck these days. I don’t need the money.”

“Why not a sovereign fund?” Xiù suggested. “The First Nations never had the benefit of anything like that.”

“Whew. That’s big sky-magic right there…” Dan muttered, but he rubbed his jaw as he thought about it. “I mean, the basics of currency as an exchange medium sure, but investment? Stocks, bonds, real estate? How do you explain equity and hedge funds to an iron-age civilization? You don’t.”

“…Well, okay, that’s fair. Anyway, that’s things we can work out over time. First you gotta say hello, ‘cuz I can hear Yan comin’ up the trail.”

They stepped aside to give Yan and Daniel some room, and rejoined the researchers, who were doing the usual thing of breaking out some food to welcome a guest per Ten’Gewek etiquette. Besides, they all looked like they were about ready for a break anyway.

Hoeff had come along with Yan, and Julian only needed a glimpse of the way Claire looked at him to confirm everything he’d said a day or two before down at the village. Dammit.

When he glanced down at Xiù, she shrugged as though to say there wasn’t much they could do about it, besides be a good friend. She was right— either it’d work out, or it wouldn’t.

Still, they could be a good friend to both sides, and joined Claire as she cleared space on a table that usually held crates full of archeological finds to make room for the food.

“Hey!” She treated them both to a smile. “I heard you’re gonna have a family soon?”

“Yup!” Xiù beamed.

“Congratulations!”

“Don’t jinx it. She’s only a few weeks in.”

“Yeah, but I hear modern medical scanners are ridiculous.”

“I guess you’re probably more career-focused right now, huh?” Julian guessed.

“I guess.” Claire slotted a tray of artefacts into one of the boxes. “I mean, my mom always told me to never turn down opportunity when it comes knocking, but I guess that relies on the opportunity actually, uh… knocking.”

“Struck out, huh?” Xiù asked, kindly.

Claire blinked, flushed a little pink, and hastily tucked the box under the table to recover herself. “…Never showed up for the game,” she said. “Gosh, is it that obvious?”

Julian shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

“…Oh well. Opportunity didn’t knock.”

“That sucks,” Xiù sympathized.

Claire shrugged it off. “There are worse things in life than making a friend. Anyway! I’d better go grab the drinks…” she gave them a smile full of optimism, and vanished.

After a few seconds, Julian sighed and shook his head.

“…D’you get the impression we’re kinda bad at this?” he asked.

“I think you’re the only boyfriend I’ve ever had and everything I know about romance comes from movies. So… maybe?” Xiù shrugged. “I guess the difference is, we talk. We work our stuff out. Those two aren’t talking.”

Julian nodded. He glanced over at Hoeff, who was looking in their direction. All it took was eye contact and a subtle but unarguable headshake on Hoeff’s part to tell him everything he needed to know.

“…Nothing we can do about it,” he decided.

“Tā mā de…”

“Yeah, you said it.”

Any further thoughts of matchmaking were put on hold by Yan, who sat on his tail opposite them and grinned toothily. Apparently Dan’s news about what would be involved in bringing vaccination to the Ten’Gewek hadn’t been so bad.

“I don’t understand this fie-nance,” he said, doing the usual Ten’Gewek thing of dropping straight back into a conversation without preamble.

“It’s a magic my grandfather’s people could have put to good use, way back when,” Julian said.

“We have things to ‘sell’ to your people, Professor Daniel says. That they will want to ‘pay’ us for, and so we balance out giving and taking. Is clever idea. The Gods will approve, I think.”

Well, I guess that makes the People natural born capitalists then…” Xiù muttered. Yan tilted his head curiously. “…Uh… that joke would take a long time to explain.”

“Other time, then,” Yan agreed. “Still… Humans will ‘buy’ the… taste of trees?”

“Oh yeah!” Julian nodded fervently. “If they can’t come to the forest to smell it, they’ll pay to bring the smell to themselves in their homes. You’ve smelled…uh, tasted the wind on Earth. We plant flowers and all that stuff just ‘cuz they’re nice, so…”

“There’s other stuff you could sell too,” Xiù said, “but you have to be careful. Big money is a powerful magic. This isn’t just Vemik’s burgers we’re talking about.”

“Mhmm. It’s like the sharpest knife. If you use it wisely it can cut anything. If you aren’t careful…it can still cut anything. Including you.”

“So…what do we do?”

“Start small? I dunno. I’m honestly a little wary of doing this, big fella. Finance is something I’ve had to learn a lot about since exploring made me rich, and it’s hard to get your head around. I pay a man to do nothing but take care of my money. It’s a strange thing to say, huh?”

“We have a lot of rules about it,” Xiù explained. “A lot of rules, powerfully enforced. Because the people who break those rules can make life worse for everyone.”

“And us.”

“Not as bad since there’s only one way in or out of here, but yeah. Like, our whole everything is built on money. If you start using it, then there’s a lot of protection between you and us that can go away in a flash. But on the other hand…”

“It may buy vack-seens.”

“And a lot more, yeah.” Julian agreed. “Think of this as the real essence of everything we ever tried to warn you about. Money is power, Yan. Power you can hold in your hand and pass to another man as easily as I might pass you a tool.”

“It’s the most powerful tool,” Xiù elaborated. “Anything you don’t have, anything you can’t do…if someone else has it or can do it, and you have enough money, then you have it too. And the same the other way. Givings and Takings with money can be too big to even imagine. Misfit cost literally tens of billions of dollars. That’s about a thousand times more money than Julian and I have, and we’re very rich apparently.”

Yan nodded solemnly “…This is the Sky-Magic that makes your villages.”

“It’s the blood in the veins of human civilization, Yan. Everything comes back to it.”

Yan grunted, and looked back over his shoulder at Dan, who was listening to the conversation without interfering.

“…Then we be very careful, and learn. And we take only what we need: enough to change for better, not enough to hurt.”

“That’s a fine line.”

“We walk fine lines every day. Life is a fine line, yes?”

“True enough,” Xiù agreed. Yan reached out and touched a finger to her chest, just above her sternum.

“When we met, Vemik stopped us killing each other. You talked to us. You brought the sky down to touch the world, and saved us. We’ve known since then that the sky is full of things we don’t understand and that might kill us… but it’s also full of our good friends, and things that will help us.”

He sat back and smiled. “The People are strong,” he said. “We are not afraid of the sky, and we can’t run from it even if we were. We will be careful, but never cowards. And one day, we will make our Misfit. Not the same as yours: Ours.”

“Spacemonkeys,” Julian muttered with a grin.

Yan hooted, “I still break you over knee, Jooyun!”

“You do, and you’ll have to answer to my women.”

That got an uproarious trill from Yan, who rocked back on his tail and nodded appreciatively. “Only a crazy man would be so brave!” He hooted again, then calmed and gave them both a fond look. “You have been good friends to me, to us, to all the People. The Gods smiled on us, I think. I think in coming years, as you have babies, as they grow, maybe you won’t visit so much. I wanted you to hear those words now. And when I see Awisun, I say them to her, too.”

That was a hard compliment to take. All Julian could do was scoot forward and put his hand on Yan’s enormous, teak-hard shoulder. Xiù meanwhile looked deeply touched, and she rounded the table to hug him.

“…You’ve been good friends to us as well, you know,” she said.

That seemed to be all the sentimental stuff Yan had room for. He dragged them both in for a lung-squeezer of a hug, then let them go and gestured toward the food.

“Come. We eat, we talk of the future… Have a good time.”

Julian had to admit to a certain hollowness in his gut that needed filling. “That,” he agreed, “sounds like an excellent idea.”

Date Point: 15y8m3w
Ceres Base, Asteroid Belt, Sol

Drew Cavendish

Speeches.

Drew hated speeches. He especially hated standing around on stage while they were given. Double especially when there were film cameras in front of him and he was flanked on either side by men and women in shiny uniforms with medals and a whole fruit salad of colours on their chests.

Or, y’know. The bloody King of England.

His Nibs had mastered the art of giving a speech, at least. Advancing age hadn’t taken away his patient, aristocratic air and to be fair to him it was a good speech… but Drew wanted to be back at work.

Fine, sure. Today was the day Caledonia finally got out of drydock and back into active service. It was a big moment, both for reflecting on the hundreds of crew who’d given their lives over Gao, and for anticipating the great things she’d achieve in the future. But there were still a thousand small things that needed Drew’s attention. The rededication ceremony wouldn’t have been on that list if he could avoid it.

But Adele had put her foot down. So Drew, choking in his best suit and tie, was sweating under the lights while a very old man said nice things.

Receiving a light tap on the shoulder during the speech therefore was… worrying. This was a big and important moment for the Consortium, he wouldn’t be interrupted for this unless something very big was up.

The whisper in his ear was urgent. “Emergency meeting in the boardroom.”

Drew eyed the front of the stage, where the King was maybe two-thirds of the way through recounting the ship’s heroism during the Battle of Gao. “Now?”

The luckless executive assistant sent to retrieve him, Ed, sounded like he didn’t want to be there any more than Drew did. “Adele said to pull you off the stage immediately. No matter what.”

…Jesus Christ.

He got given several shades of stink-eye as he nodded and backed off the stage before slipping away down the stairs. That was future damage control, no doubt.

“What the bloody hell is so important that she’s asking me to snub the bloody king?” he asked.

“Way above my pay-grade, Drew.” Ed shrugged apologetically as they stepped into an elevator. The ceremonial room overlooking the drydock was right on Ceres’ surface, looking out over bare grey landscape of regolith and ice with a disturbingly close horizon. Paradoxically for a facility with so many windows, it felt claustrophobic.

The Ceres facility’s innards, on the other hand, were carefully calculated to feel as open and airy as possible. Folks lived out here for months at a time in what was, after all, effectively a bunker. They stepped off the elevator in a carefully cultivated bit of artificial parkland that looked much bigger than it really was, and bustled across it through the revolving doors in the front of the executive building. Up another elevator, and that was where Ed left him because the board room was sealed up as tight as Drew had ever seen it. He even got brain-scanned before they let him in, and when he did so he had to endure stepping through the skin-tingling fuzz of a privacy forcefield.

The mood inside was funereal. Haggard, stressed faces looked up at him as he entered, even as one of their moments of triumph still played out silently on the wall TV.

At any other time, Drew might have made an ice-breaker joke along the lines of ‘who died?’ or something. It died before he’d even properly conceived of it. Instead he shut the door carefully behind him and moved to sit next to Drew Martin.

“…What happened?” he asked.

Adele indicated a holographic slide. It was an inventory of their mining equipment. One of the lines was bright red, and an icicle ran down Drew’s spine as he realized which one.

“…Oh no.”

“Yeah,” Drew Martin said grimly. “One of our nukes is missing.”

++End Chapter 50, part 1++

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The Deathworlders Chapter 50 will continue in: “Counterattack pt2. - Homefront”

Chapter 50: Counterattack, pt.2 - Homefront

Date Point: 15y9m1w AV
Dataspace adjacent to Observatory Station, Neptune, Sol

Six/Cynosure

You were right.
There were unexpected setbacks.

Are you still on target?

No. I’m going to miss this window.
They noticed the missing package
sooner than I thought.

Are you at risk of discovery?

I don’t think so. They’ve scanned
everybody for implants like you said
they would. They didn’t find any,
of course. But we’re on lockdown
while they search the whole facility.

I take it they won’t find it?

Of course not. And there shouldn’t be
any evidence that the log was tampered
with, either.

Well done.

Thanks. I don’t know why, but this stuff
just… I don’t know.
Comes more easily nowadays.
I mean, I was a straight-A student all
the way through college
But now…
…You didn’t do anything to me, did you?

I told you. I want a partner, not a slave.

I know, I just…
…You know what, never mind.
I do have one question for you, though.

By all means.

You have to know that AEC won’t be
happy about this. They’ll view it
as an act of war. Doesn’t that take
peace off the table? I thought lasting
peace with humanity was your end goal?

It is. I firmly believe that your species and
mine are capable of peaceful coexistence.
But AEC are developing von-neumann probes,
and so are the Hunters
That changes things. We must act decisively.

God.
You’re right, that does change things.
It changes everything!
They’re playing with forces that could
doom us all

Exactly.

But how does what I’m doing play into it?

I’m sorry. I can’t say.

If you were captured and revealed the plan---and
believe me, you would---then we’d be completely lost.

I wouldn’t talk.

I’ve been interrogated. They got EVERYTHING out of me.

Trust me. You’d talk. Much sooner than you think, too.

Please: don’t worry about it. Trust me.

…Fine. No further questions.
I’ll do my best to ensure we
achieve the next window.

I’ll adjust the timetable at my end. Thank you.

See you in a few months.

Date Point: 15y9m1w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

Hephaestus were in no danger of telling the world they’d just managed to lose a nuclear device. That little revelation would have sent their share prices punching right through rock bottom and out the other side.

A fate they absolutely and thoroughly deserved, in Sartori’s estimation.

According to his briefing document, there were exactly thirty-two ‘Pinnacle - Broken Arrow’ incidents on record since 1950, none more recent than 1980, and none of which had ever involved a physics package just going missing. Somehow, Hephaestus had managed to fuck up worse in just a few months than the entire Department of Defence had achieved in more than eighty years.

When their executives were finally escorted from the building and returned to their duties, they’d done so as absolutely broken figures who’d just found themselves facing the full wrath of the state in all its terrible glaring glory. It was in Sartori’s power to absolutely ruin every single one of them, and right now he had no good reason not to, beyond the desire to keep the whole incident quiet until it was resolved. Adele Park in particular had looked frail and trembling, a far cry from her actual status as the wealthiest and most powerful businesswoman in human history.

And the worst part was that the investigators could find nothing. Everybody who had the opportunity and ability had an absolutely airtight alibi. Suspicion had obviously fallen on the crew of HCS-501 I Met God And She Booped My Nose. They were the ones who’d taken aboard some bombs, detonated one, and returned two less than they left with.

But… nothing. Everyone’s movements were accounted-for, the ship’s logs showed nothing unusual, every one of the ten thousand one hundred and seventeen Hephaestus personnel in the asteroid belt had been scanned for implants…

Nothing.

Sartori had been assured that there would be a breakthrough. The problem was, such a breakthrough needed to happen before that bomb went off. They were running against the clock, and the clock seemed to be winning.

He tried to sign a few things and do some paperwork to let his brain work over the matter in peace, and even succeeded for a few minutes until there was a knock on the door.

“General Kolbeinn, Mister President.”

“Thanks. Show him in.”

Sartori let the Supreme Allied Commander of Extrasolar Defence stand in front of the desk for a few seconds while he finished signing his most recent letter. Kolbeinn had lent his approval to letting Hephaestus have the nukes, on the grounds that they needed the materials from asteroid mining in order to expand the fleet: Sartori wasn’t happy about that.

He scrawled his autograph at the bottom of the letter, sealed it in an envelope, pressed it deliberately down on the top of his out tray, and finally looked up at the general. Kolbeinn was staring blankly at nothing through the window, face totally locked down and not so much as a bead of sweat showing. That was the look of a man who’d prepared himself for an absolute flaying.

“…I think the Secretary of Defence wants your head.”

Kolbeinn didn’t reply, though the subtlest shift said he was paying rapt attention.

“…Exactly how much trouble could this cause, Greg? What can they do with a nuke in space?”

Kolbeinn swung a folder out from under his arm and placed it on the desk. “…A lot, sir. They could certainly destroy the Ceres facility and its shipyards.”

“Is that what you think they’ll do?”

“We don’t even know who ‘they’ are yet, sir. But given the lack of implants, our working theory is somebody at Hephaestus has APA sympathies. If so, breaking one of the big extraplanetary ventures and crippling our ability to expand and maintain the space fleet would fit with their stated objectives…” He cleared his throat. “…And if I’m right, then we have to assume that the APA has somebody very high up in our security services, too.”

“…Sit down.”

Kolbeinn did so, perching on the edge of one of the two large cream sofas that Sartori had brought into the oval office.

“…Who?” Sartori asked.

“We’re talking… director of the CIA, that sort of level. With a substantial cabal of support lower down the pole, too.”

Sartori turned his head and cursed in a whisper. “Jesus.”

“Not completely without precedent, I’m afraid.”

“You’re certain, now?”

“No. I can’t be. But with the skill they’ve shown and the resources they’ve used… At the very least, somebody high up in the APA knows a lot about the trade.”

The ‘trade.’ Funny how a word so honest and hardworking had become so ingrained in the intelligence community. They had tradecraft, terms of art, a whole lexicon of honest jargon to describe the business of navigating the grayest areas.

Sartori meanwhile had been handed the equivalent of a traveller’s handbook and pushed off the boat in unfamiliar territory. And now he was facing the possibility that people he’d appointed, maybe even somebody in his own Cabinet, was a bona fide terrorist ringleader.

…A terrorist ringleader with a nuke, now.

Who could he trust? Did he start with the man in front of him? Had Kolbeinn merely been outwitted, or could he be complicit? God, the Hierarchy was easy next to this: stick an ultrasound wand to the suspect’s head and you got a clear red-or-green, yes-or-no, binary indicator of whether you were dealing with an Igraen agent.

But this? When the enemy was just as human in the head as anybody else?

“…We’ve definitely ruled out the Hierarchy?”

“There’s not a single person in the asteroid belt with an implant in their head. I’d swear to it.”

“Not what I asked, Greg. Could they have a sympathizer?”

Kolbeinn scowled. “…I can’t rule it out.”

“But you think the APA angle is more likely,” Sartori finished for him. He watched Kolbeinn wrestle with the statement for a second before finally nodding.

“…We’re gambling with lives at this point, Mister President. A lot of ‘em. If I could give you solid truth and facts, we’d’ve caught the bastards already. The best I can do is play the odds, and I think… yeah. The odds lie with the APA.”

“And I have to decide where the odds lie on who is and isn’t likely to have APA sympathies. The spotlight falls on you too, general.”

“…Yes sir. It has to.”

Well. Either he was trustworthy or he was truly peerless at deception. And Sartori had to trust somebody. May as well start with the man who’d delivered the news.

“…Alright. Get military intelligence on this, people you know and trust personally. Follow the APA angle as far as it leads, keep it as quiet as you can. And I want every package we gave Hephaestus confiscated, and locked up safe and secure in Minot as soon as possible.”

“Yes sir.”

“And… Kolbeinn?”

“Yes, sir?”

“If I even think of letting civilians within sniffing distance of a nuke ever again, I want you to invoke the twenty-fifth.”

Kolbeinn finally relaxed a little and a small ghost of a laugh flickered across his face. “Heh! …Yes sir.”

“That will be all, general.”

Kolbeinn left the office, and Sartori found to his mild surprise that he had a moment’s peaceful alone time to get his thoughts in order. He leaned back in his seat, stretched, then stood up and took a stroll around the office to relieve his legs and back.

If he was being dispassionate, he had to admit it looked like the Hephaestus Consortium had simply been badly outplayed, rather than incompetent. If the CIA and military investigators who’d gone flocking up to Ceres to interview everybody, pick through the base and ship computer systems and whatever else they’d done hadn’t been able to immediately identify the thief and recover the physics package, that meant worrying things.

The APA? The APA had proven to be remarkably competent. Orchestrating multiple simultaneous attacks in several cities in different countries, continents and even planets wasn’t child’s play. And from what he’d seen, Kolbeinn was completely right that somebody high up in the APA was the real deal and not just a college kid full of revolutionary zeal.

But did that translate to being able to steal a nuke right out from under the most intense scrutiny? Sartori wasn’t so sure. That kind of thing smacked more of the kind of bullshit that the Hierarchy could achieve. They were known to employ temporal manipulation technology, after all. The captured flying saucer at Scotch Creek was packed full of stasis technology along its underside. And with stasis technology and God-knew-what else at their disposal, a heist like that might even be easy for them.

But they’d been so certain that there were no longer any Hierarchy assets inside the Sol Containment Field. And there were certainly no biodrones on Ceres.

Reflecting ruefully on what episodes like this must do to the lines in his face and a hairline that wasn’t so much receding as in full rout, he decided what he needed was a coffee, a sandwich, and something nice and simple to tackle. Like, say, a refugee crisis or a supreme court nomination.

Or a state visit…maybe not. Those seemed to involve either too much anodyne conversation and false smiling, or in near-broken ribs and a gut-splitting feast if he visited the Gao.

…It occurred to him that what he really wanted was to spend a weekend soaking up the sun somewhere. Take just forty hours off to commit to some good old-fashioned relaxation. Read a book, have a few drinks. There never seemed to be a good opportunity.

Maybe he should make one.

Date Point: 15y9m1w AV
Clan Whitecrest starship Tearing Dusk, Rvzrk System, Domain Space

Regaari

There was little point in blockading an invaded planet when the invaders were using jump technology to supply their forces on the ground, but the Dominion were doing it anyway. Their cordon of war platforms was enormous, blanketing the system in sensor coverage and warning broadcasts, but Regaari knew what Domain war-platforms were capable of and wasn’t impressed. One V-class human frigate and its contingent of Bulldog drones would have been enough to completely blind the entire force with ECM.

It wasn’t that the Rrrrtktktkpch were stupid. Far from it, they were every inch as smart as Gaoians. But they were… staid. Slow to adopt new technologies. And, frankly, constrained by the need to make their technology compatible with the needs of their more numerous but much less brainy cousins the Vz’ktk.

The Allied fleet, on the other hand….

Most of it had returned to regular duty, presumably on a hair trigger to jump back in should they be needed. HMS Violent, HMS Myrmidon and USS San Diego had remained, supported by a close patrol of five firebirds and two Clan One-Fang ships; the Sprinting Vengeance and the Lancing Tempest.

The Tearing Dusk was something unlike every other ship in the system. It was built around sensor invisibility and emissions control, to the point where even its warp drive was tuned to produce only minimal ripples in spacetime. At speeds below one kilolight, it was effectively indistinguishable from background fluctuations, and thanks to wormhole-router comms it didn’t have to broadcast EM radiation to communicate with other ships. That had neatly filled one of the holes in creating a truly stealthy starship.

They were going to need that stealth to get close enough for the drop over Rvzrk’s south pole. They’d broken stealth only once, to transfer Father Genshi over to HMS Myrmidon where he was now liaising with the Fleet Intelligence Center.

Naturally, he was worried. He too had wanted to take to the field to…well, if not precisely redeem himself, at least regain some of his own self-respect. Unfortunately, Champion Thurrsto had more or less thrashed him into a broken heap, which meant his physical recovery would be a slow, painful process.

“The timing on this will be tight. The drones should create a window for you, but no more than a few minutes.”

Regaari duck-nodded solemnly as his techs checked his suit over one last time. He was about to spend an indefinite length of time in it, after all: everything needed to be perfect.

At least it wasn’t an EV-MASS. Rather than crushing pressure, the Whitecrest suit was just… snug. He could, and had, worn it for weeks at a time. He would come out of it at the far end with stinking matted fur and a profound need to roll around in a dust bath, but at least his body wouldn’t be aching, bruised and half-starved.

“That will be enough,” he promised.

“Good. Waiting on your go.”

Suit checks took another ten minutes, and passed without incident, during which time the Tearing Dusk inserted itself into as low a polar orbit as the captain dared without straying inside the Hunter wormhole suppression field.

Finally, there was no putting it off any longer even if Regaari had wanted to. This was a test. It might prove to be more than he could handle, despite the bravado he’d shown back in High Mountain Fortress, but at that moment he had a giddy feeling in his stomach that was almost intoxicating. Part fear, part… something else.

He took a deep breath. “Father. Cub wants to play.”

The techs withdrew from the bay and left him alone in the airlock. The front ramp smoothly mawed open, leaving him separated from infinity by nothing more than gossamer fields of captive electrons.

“Be good. Mother’s watching.” Genshi sounded like he had more of a shake in his voice than Regaari did. “Cousins making mischief.”

Regaari had a tactical view of the orbits up on a little screen to his left. He watched it intently as six bulldogs peeled away from their formation with HMS Violent and zipped into a polar orbit, where they began viciously strobing the Hunter sensor net at its weakest spot.

“Mother’s distracted.”

Tearing Dusk’s pilot answered. “Watch me pounce.”

Orbital insertion took less than a heartbeat. The planet, from Regaari’s perspective, had been a distant blue circle one second, and now it was a flat blue expanse close enough to touch.

“Cub can play,” Genshi declared, confirming that they were in position for the drop.

This was it. Regaari keyed his own radio. “Watch me jump,” he said, dropped to four-paw, and slapped the large button on the bulkhead.

The forcefield dropped, and all the air in the lock exploded out into the void and carried him with it.

He felt a thump in his whole body as Tearing Dusk went to warp, briefly generating intense gravimetric shear that managed to rattle him even from hundreds of meters away. Then he was alone. Oh, he knew that he was surrounded by a bodyguard of ECM drones, but the nearest of them was probably hundreds of kilometers away. Already, he was decelerating into a steep entry trajectory, but it would be a minute or two before he kissed the first trace of atmosphere.

This moment in a HELLNO was always eerie. He was shooting along at incredible speeds, but the sheer scale of it all completely obfuscated that fact. When he oriented himself toward “down,” the fastest movement he could see was the languid dance of clouds.

That was the deceptive part, though. It was impossible to detect the moment where he finally realized that the world was getting bigger, but it still dawned on him that it had. Then there was a faint flicker of light in his peripheral vision. Then another, and another, until they merged into a constant stream of bright plasma that his helmet protectively dimmed to spare his vision.

This was the moment of peak hazard. Hopefully, the Hunters were still blinded. If they weren’t… he was on a completely predictable trajectory and surrounded by a brilliant, obvious halo of opaque plasma. If they intercepted him, he’d never see it coming.

There was nothing to do except relax and take solace in the fact that if the worst did happen, he would feel nothing. No pain, no fear, no impending helplessness. He would simply…cease. There were worse things than that.

He didn’t cease. After several unending minutes, the plasma flickered and faded more abruptly than it had first begun, and the view below cleared. He was still high enough up to just make out the planet’s curvature, but it was almost flat now.

He angled down as steep as he dared. Too shallow and he’d be high in the air and visible when the drones were finally destroyed or driven off. Too steep though, and he’d either inflict savage G-forces on himself when he came to level out, or leave himself stranded out over the polar ocean, too far out to glide to land. Judging the difference was a fine margin.

Fortunately, he’d practiced this too many times to get it wrong.

The clouds came up to meet him. He plunged into them doing a hefty multiple of the speed of sound in this planet’s atmosphere and felt the jolt as his suit extended its forcefield wings to their widest, slimmest extent. He was a supersonic glider now, and riding a knife-edge between bleeding off speed and maintaining his altitude.

The coastline was gentle and sloped easily up into a kind of chilly rolling lowlands dotted with trees and fields. A long meandering escarpment to his left was his target and he slipped sideways into the updraft its steep inner surface generated. The result was turbulent, but he had a long way to travel inland and no means of powered flight. He’d be riding a tight line of lift, speed, altitude and stealth the whole way.

It took hours. Supersonic gliders didn’t remain supersonic for long, and once he was below mach he had to claw every thermal and updraft he could find, creeping his way inland toward the target. It was still much faster than covering the same distance on foot, however, and the stealthing in his suit made him basically undetectable.

The best thermals came off towns and cities. He got some good recon images of those as he went over, and got the general impression that life there seemed to be on lockdown: armed and armored Vz’ktk and their vehicles had set up everywhere, and the civilians seemed to have been relocated into defensible safe zones—not a bad idea in theory. In practice, they were basically gift-wrapping the Hunters’ next meals.

There’d been some debate about contacting the ground commanders and letting them know about his mission and the support in orbit, maybe dropping some message capsules and propaganda as he flew over. Both Genshi and Caruthers had felt that without knowing how secure the Domain military’s comms were, that was probably a bad idea. While it might buy him allies, it might also get him exposed and caught. In the end, they’d decided against it.

Finally, however, he could glide no more. There was a long stretch between towns where some sinking cold air robbed him of height and there were no convenient ridges or heat sources to find a boost. He banked his fields, came almost to a dead stop a ways above ground, and dropped the last twenty meters on a cushion of air. No parachute to hide, no mess to clean up.

There was smoke on the horizon now. He was twenty kilometers from where he’d hoped to land, but still well inside the acceptable margin. Infiltrating through the Hunter line was going to be a serious test, but he was up to it.

For the first time since leaving the ship, he broke comms silence to send an update. He was carrying a thin-packed laser retroreflector, the most secure method they had for communicating with ships in orbit. Deploying it was as simple as tugging it out of his harness and flipping it open with a snap of his arm and wrist.

“Father. Cub had fun. Playing sneak-and-hide now.”

He waited a couple of seconds for light-lag, and could hear the relief in Genshi’s voice when the reply arrived.

“Mother didn’t notice. Cubs raid the kitchen.”

“Watch me play.”

Satisfied with a job well done, Regaari tuned his suit’s forcefields to charge off solar energy, packed his reflector, then turned toward the smoke and opened the seals on his mask so he could sniff the air. The wind smelled of ruin and blood.

He headed toward it.

Date Point: 15y9m1w2d AV
The Dog House Gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Esticitty

“Dude,” enthused ‘Horse, “You lookin’ at yourself? See the difference hobbling around on that foot made? See how you stand up better now? You move and lift better, too…”

Julian had to admit, it made a pretty striking difference. The old pictures Adam had taken at the start of this looked just fine if a fella didn’t know what he was looking for. Except, now that Julian had experienced the difference he could see the how the little things added up, and they’d genuinely been hampering his ability to move.

He’d healed up fast after his month on the Crude, found himself able to move like the wind. It was amazing, the trees felt just like a jungle gym! He’d agreed to Ava’s offer of a Laid Bare shoot right as he was riding a personal high about all that. At pretty much the same time, Ambassador Rockafeller came through with Julian’s appointment, officially making him a special envoy to the Ten’Gewek. That was good to have because it came with a paycheck, a budget, official government authority…and along with that, serious responsibility, too.

That appointment really drove home something Julian had not really internalized: he was in this for the long haul, definitely years, probably for life. When he’d asked the ambassador who might eventually take his place, Rockefeller had just laughed good-naturedly and asked, “who else could?”

That had prompted a long, serious conversation with Al and Xiù, and a bunch of his friends. He’d dreaded what that all might mean for him, honestly. He wasn’t sure he liked his options.

In the end, near the end of his month of rehab, it was a potentially serious injury he’d earned while visiting Akyawentuo that finally brought things to a head. He’d been jumping around with Vemik and managed to twist his left ankle with a bad slip on a slick rock; his control was improving but not quite perfect. It was a bad twist too, so bad that Vemik ended up having to carry Julian back to the village. That stung his pride, but that wasn’t the part that got his attention.

The bit that really grabbed him by the hair was Vemik’s surprise that such an injury was even possible. The Sky-Thinker had never personally encountered anyone who had hurt themselves that way. None of the Singers knew of one except their elder, who in all her years had seen such a thing exactly once before…and then it had been paired with a fall from a tree.

They’d asked him how long it would take him to heal. Julian had almost answered it would take a couple of weeks maybe, assuming nothing had been broken…but then something in the back of his mind tickled at him. He knew the modern answer was actually “a couple of hours.” Sitting around and waiting for it to heal naturally was downright stupid nowadays.

So, he’d answered along those lines. “I think it’ll be fine by tomorrow.” That seemed to satisfy them, so when Julian hobbled back through the gate, he’d paid a visit to the local clinic, and honesty he’d ended up sitting in the waiting room longer than the actual treatment took. The staff took his vitals, made him try a few different scales before they would believe the number. He went into the doctor’s office, who quickly examined the ankle, skimmed his medical history—some raised eyebrows, there—and prepared a hypodermic needle.

The medicine, of course, turned out to be related to Crude.

It wasn’t the same stuff Adam used, of course. The civilian medicine was made to target specific use-cases and had other stuff along for the ride. In Julian’s case, that came with painkillers, an anti-inflammatory, some nutrients to speed healing, apparently something that was good for bones…he wasn’t a medical tech.

An hour later, it was like nothing had happened at all.

So: he had several lifetime commitments, all at once. His women, his children, the Ten’Gewek. All of them utterly depended on his good health. Medicine had become straight spacemagic when he wasn’t paying attention; his left foot attested to that.

Where did that leave him? Besides snowed under.

Okay. List the things he had to be. He had to be just stupid, crazy strong. Check. He had to be healthy for decades. That, apparently, was also a check? But was it really?

But did he also have to be Ten’Gewek unbreakable? And if he could, should he?

He’d considered staying on the Crude after his month was up. That was technically an option now. Heck, his new employers were quite keen on him taking full advantage, if for no other reason then the longevity and health benefits. And after taking the leap and getting his foot regrown… or before that, after taking the leap and doing the Rite of Manhood….

It seemed like his life lately had involved a lot of finally deciding to say ‘fuck you’ to his comfort zones because there were more important things to worry about.

Stepping on the clinic’s scales was an unavoidable reminder of one of them. He was…fuckin’ big. Like, modern-day strongman big. Walsh big! Well, at least…before he left for HEAT, anyway. Which was still goddamned huge. Aptitude or no, being the kind of big and strong he was these days couldn’t be completely risk free, could it? And it wasn’t like he could go back, or even should. But he didn’t want to, like, die of a heart attack when he was fifty, either.

But on the other hand, if he had the talent to ride this dragon, shouldn’t he? Shouldn’t he represent humanity as best as he possibly could, in the way the Ten’Gewek respected most?

But wasn’t a big part of what they were doing about getting them to respect a human’s natural strengths, too? How could he do that with a straight face if he were eventually walking around like another Beef? He was pretty sure Al and Xiù wouldn’t be happy with that, either.

He’d felt himself pulled in ten directions at once, and finally resolved to ask Adam about it. Really, there probably wasn’t really anyone else to ask, besides him or his friends.

Adam’s advice had been surprisingly even-keeled.

“For you? I‘m gonna say you really shouldn’t, bro. I mean… it depends on what you’re looking to do, but I don’t think you should get any bigger.”

“…Are you feeling okay?” Julian joked.

“Bro! Right now you’re a genuinely huge fuckin’ dude, but you’re just, like, regular huge. Much more and you’re gonna start gettin’ into, like, HEAT freak territory. You cross a point where you can’t walk away, dude. That ain’t for you, trust me.”

Julian looked down at himself, and nodded. Then he glanced at Adam and nodded a little more firmly. Adam’s physique was…well…

He was in fact a very good-looking man. But that was tempered by being so grotesquely broad and hypermuscular that he was edging against barely looking human at all.

Julian didn’t have that problem. Hell, he looked fucking heroic rather than freakish, like something out of a comic book. That was a heck of a feeling. Adam on the other hand was pretty much straight up the Hulk. That… wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Al and Xiù both said they thought Julian was sexier, and if he was being totally honest with himself, he liked feeling sexy.

“Right. Good. But I’m still worried about, uh, getting hurt. That makes us…well, me, look bad.”

“The medicine healed you up right away, bro!”

“I know, but…”

Adam sighed and clapped a giant mitt on Julian’s shoulder. “…Okay. Look. If you wanna take body hardening as far as you can go, that’s doable. I understand that for you a lot more than going full Beef. Just don’t do what I did, okay? Doing this made me literally wider. It’s thickened my bones, it’s made me taller. When I enlisted, I was only like five foot seven. Now? I’m several inches taller than you. The only reason I went that far was ‘cuz we really do need a few people like me to do this mission, and like you, I’ve got the genetics to do it. So lemme ask you this? Does your mission need you as a freak? Do you want to be?”

“Well…jeez, you put it that way, no.”

“Exactly. Like, remember Tiny? He’s gonna be arriving at the unit pretty soon, and guess what? He decided he ain’t gonna bulk up too much more. He’s got the ability, and if he wanted to he could get as big as Rebar was, right? He ain’t gonna. Which, hey! That’s great. He’s gonna be a lot more like Sikes than Titan. ‘Know why?”

“…’Cuz, what? You guys don’t need it?”

“Eh, more like, if you’re growin’ past a quarter-ton and you still don’t think you’re strong enough, you’d better think damn good and hard before you push through and let the Crude take you further. Because it can, and once it does, your body will be changed forever. So honestly, don’t undersell yourself. You’re actually a bit stronger than Murray, you know that?”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah, and he definitely ain’t bottom of the list, either. The big difference is that Murray can move a lot faster, and the rest of the older Lads’re all way better conditioned than you. Like, to the point they can shrug off a beating that would straight kill you, or run a marathon in three hundred pounds of EV-MASS and gear. That is what Crude can do. If you wanna be that kinda fit, we can do that. But before you say yes,” Adam warned, “keep in mind that you’re still hardening up yourself. Let’s see how far you can take things yourself first, okay? You’re barely thirty, you’ve got years left in your prime.”

“…You really think I can do this?”

““Dude. You’ll be fine, trust me. You did pretty much on your own what almost nobody can do with the best drugs there are. So stop worrying! I ain’t lying when I say you’re basically made for this. And honestly, I kinda wanna see just how far a man can really go without the spacemagic. Maybe, how far I coulda gone, if I hadn’t joined the HEAT.”

“…That does sound good,” Julian admitted.

“Arright. For today though, we’re just gonna keep doing what we were doin’. If you wanna change direction, I’m gonna hafta think it through first…”

“…Okay,” Julian agreed. “I did have, uh, one favor to ask, though. It’s honestly a little embarrassing but, well…”

“Name it!”

“Ava wants me to do a shoot.”

Adam grinned. “You wanna get super ripped?”

“…I guess? No. Mostly, I wanna not embarrass myself.”

“Bro you’re not gonna… Eh. Never mind. We can do that! All we’d be doing is just that conditioning you were worried about, really. Gotta warn you though, prep diet is rough. You’re gonna be hangry as shit the last week or two.”

…Hell. Well, as long as it wasn’t anything too weird. “Sure.”

“Awesome. I’m gonna make you her best model yet!”

Somehow, those were not comforting words…

Fortunately, whatever new and creative tortures that might involve were for another day. For now, Julian grunted himself through his regular dose of pain and, after saying goodnight, caught a cab home. He was…a bit too spent to jog thanks to Adam the sadist.

Folctha had put into practice an idea regarding electric vehicles and self-driving cars that had kinda just been “what-if” thinking back on Earth. Getting a car to Cimbrean was a big deal: they took up a lot of valuable space on the jump platform, and with 90% of Folctha’s population living in Folctha itself rather than the surrounding area, there wasn’t a whole lot of need for vehicles. Most folks walked.

And the road network was regular, well-planned, and self-driving technology had come a real long way since before first contact, as had electric vehicles.

The result was that nearly all the cars in Folctha belonged to the cab company. There were government vehicles and the Byron Group’s fleet of company cars, one of which was parked in Julian’s driveway and driven to work by Allison whenever she went down to Chiune Station. There were a few private cars too, and Al had seriously considered importing one…but no.

The cab company didn’t have any drivers. It had custodians. Half a dozen guys whose job was basically just to keep them clean inside and out, plus the guy who owned the company and paid them. To fit through the Array in an economical way, the cabs themselves were essentially a battery sled with a sleek plastic chassis on top, which itself was flat-pack and assembled in the garage. Somebody had called them “Ikea Cars” and the name stuck.

On the consumer side, the system was way cheaper than owning a car would have been. No road tax, no insurance, no gas, no need to change the tires or whatever. It cost Julian like forty pence to ride from the Doghouse to home in Palace Lake, and because the whole system was in communication with itself he didn’t have to wait at a single red light or deal with even one idiot in the wrong lane.

The single-rider models were a bit cramped, though. They cost almost nothing to hire so it wasn’t like he could complain; if he wanted shoulder room, he could pay a pound extra for the Premium option of a properly-sized car, affectionately known as a “JohnnyCab” after some old movie about explosions on mars, or something.

He probably would have, if the Ikea Car hadn’t at least had plenty of headroom.

And they pulled up right outside the front door, right in the spot where Allison’s company car usually was. He levered himself out, swiped his phone to pay, and heard the car pull away making a quiet melodic humming noise as it moved on to its next job. Apparently somebody had decided that electric cars were too silent and needed to make a noise, and now manufacturers were touting the fact that the silent car hummed as it drove as a feature.

He shook his head at the thought and let himself in with a smile. The kitchen turned out to be full of smoke. Ramsey and Tristan must be practicing their cooking again.

They were. Xiù was being the most angel-hearted teacher, and both looked like they’d basically murdered a bunny or something. No worries, Julian knew what to do.

“Hey fellas!” He scooped them up into a sweaty hug. “Burned broccoli? Did you forget the butter?”

“…It smells like farts on fire…” Tristan muttered. Clearly he was annoyed at himself.

“Could be a lot worse. I went ‘round a dude’s house one time in school, he’d left three chicken breasts in the fridge for, like, two months. That stunk!”

“So do you,” Xiù interjected, but she gave him a kiss anyway. “You know the drill, go shower.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good boy.” She gave him a twinkling smile and ruefully examined the twisted black mess that should have gone with dinner. “…okay, so let’s find out what we’ve got in to replace this…” she said, dropping back into teacher mode.

“What about Al? Her car wasn’t outside?”

“She got called up to Chiune on some kinda emergency with the ship. Something about the onboard heat recycler oscillating.”

Julian frowned as he tried to figure that one out. “You mean, like, it was cycling on and off incorrectly, or…?”

“Nope! I mean it was literally oscillating right on its mount. She sent me a video.”

“…How…?”

“You got me. Anyway, she said they’re not leaving until they’ve fixed it and that means re-sealing the whole refrigeration system, so… she might not be home until five in the morning, maybe.”

“Urgh.”

“Yeah. There was something else too, what was it…? Your meal prep? I’m almost done for the next few days…Maybe something else…” Xiù paused and tapped her chin dramatically.

“Babe, I see through you. You wanna keep teasing me? Maybe you need a big sweaty hug too!”

She giggled and overacted suddenly having her memory jogged. “…Oh yeah! I’m pregnant!”

“–!” He couldn’t do much but gawp happily for a moment. She beamed at him, and dug the proof out of her pocket in the form of a positive test.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. “You’re kidding!”

“Nope! Well, I’m not. I get why Al wanted to have a scan before she told you, now… part of me doesn’t quite believe this thing.” She considered the test ruefully, then pocketed it again.

“You’re still eating broccoli? Al can’t stand the smell of it right now…”

She shrugged. “I’m fine. Maybe I won’t be in a couple weeks, but right now.. Better eat it while I can still enjoy it, right? Anyway! You: shower, stinky.”

“Going, going…”

In fact, he could barely contain himself and spent the whole shower bouncing and grinning giddily under the water rather than properly washing. They’d been trying for a while now, a lot longer than it had taken with Allison, and even though they hadn’t discussed it, there’d been some… concern. Xiù had gone through a lot, after all. Hell, she’d been nervejammed that one time, and who knew what that did to a body in the long run?

He’d lately started worrying about himself, too. Was it actually his fault? That had done a lot to stoke doubts about his, as Xiù called it, “slabgical journey.” He was being very careful and doing exactly what the smart people around him said to do, but…

It felt beyond good to have those doubts and fears put firmly to bed.

He had a family. Well, no. He had a family on the way…No. He had one right now and it was going to grow, and maybe it was a misfit family, with alien gorillas for uncles and furry clawed aliens for aunts, and literally tons of fun with surrogate HEAT brothers to help out…

But it was theirs.

Suddenly, he was kinda glad to be in the shower. They were happy tears, but he wanted to keep them to himself.

…His stomach grumbled, and Julian chuckled; if there was anything gym rats could be said to have in common, it was an obsession with food. He stepped out of the shower and toweled off, threw on some basketball shorts and padded downstairs.

Tonight smelled like broiled salmon with lemon sauce. One of his favorites! Not even Amanda could spoil it by showing up early, having come to pick up the boys. He briefly considered putting on a shirt or something but…nah. She needed to loosen up. Had been! The boys were happier, things were more… relaxed now that Jacob was on Earth and communicating via letters and his lawyers…

Not perfect. Never perfect with the Buehler family. Amanda had always been part of the problem for her children, even if her husband had been worse… But things were better. She was better, or at least had learned how to accept that it was their house and their rules.

And hell. It wouldn’t be a real family if things were perfect, would it?

They said grace, and tucked in.

Date Point: 15y9m1w2d AV
Ark Complex, Planet Tangent, Corti Directorate Border Territories

First Director Shanl

The Ark.

It was, in many ways, the crowning achievement of Corti construction and engineering. Well-hidden on an out-of-the-way and unclaimed class Seven planet, but even if the target world had been a thriving metropolis, the pedestrians would have blissfully walked all over the Ark bunker without ever knowing it was there. Its presence on the surface was almost nonexistent.

Impressive, when one considered the scale involved. This wasn’t just a short-term measure to preserve the future of the Corti, this was the crucible in which their imperfections would be burned away and the species bred anew in its entirety. It was enormous, cavernous. The bunker complex extended for kilometers underground in all directions, and down to a significant depth, too. All excavated by a swarm of insectoid mining drones the size of a Corti’s cupped hands.

In fact, the swarm had carved out rather more room than was necessary, on the grounds that redundancy and room for expansion were both valuable and that it cost no additional resources. The work to move all the equipment, machinery, power cables, furnishings, network infrastructure, systems, utilities, ventilation, plumbing and security was proceeding nicely, and the first conception labs were already online and staffed.

If First Director Shanl had been inclined to take excessive pride in anything, she would have felt it about the Ark. It brought together all of the most advanced engineering techniques the Directorate had ever invented, and combined them in one facility.

Of course, once it was built, that left the not insignificant matter of reviewing the Corti genetic baseline. As it turned out, there was an embarrassing amount of room for improvement.

First of all, macroscopic physicality. The Corti body was small, delicate, and energy-efficient. It was there to maintain and move around an impressive brain, a job that it did to the bare minimum standard… but why settle for the bare minimum? There was no logic in permitting physical atrophy to endanger the mind.

The three extant Deathworld sophonts were positive proof. Not even the slimmest Gaoian could be considered weak or delicate by any reasonable standard, even if they generally fell far short of the standard set by Humans and Ten’Gewek. They had keen intellects and maintained an impressive set of physical instincts as well. Perhaps this was part of their Hierarchy design, but that was unimportant. The same pattern was present in all three species.

Then there was the immune system. All three were impressive. The Ten’Gewek immune system in particular was a masterwork of evolved perfection, and the Humans’ long history of urban squalor had honed theirs into something frankly terrifying. Both species lived with pre-cancerous cell mutations as a daily fact of life and never noticed, as their own immune systems simply devoured the aberrant tissue on sight.

The Gaoian immune system, though not quite on the same level, was remarkably robust if one ignored its odd susceptibility to fungal-form attack. Not an ideal quality for the mycovorous Corti.

But then there were hormones and it was here that the true genius of Deathworlder evolution really flowered. Here, it was hard to judge who could be deemed superior, since all three species evolved along radically different adaptive paths.

Humans had crisis chemicals on a hair trigger. Adrenaline was hardly unique, but humans produced a lot of it, alongside something called Cortisol—a linguistic coincidence—that greatly enhanced their brain’s ability to use sugars and flooded their systems with regenerative chemistry. A stressed human got better at practically everything, not worse.

Gaoians didn’t have quite the same capacity to respond to instant stress like that. Instead, they responded to long-term stimuli to a degree that was frankly alarming. Normally slim and efficient beings, prolonged stressors could cause radical adaptation in their intense, usually short lifetimes. Not only that, said adaptation varied enormously by male degree, allowing a dangerous environment to produce a huge variety of responses among the more disposable male population. The secretive Rites of the more prestigious Clans took full advantage of this trait, and through prolonged (and sometimes lethal) trials, they transformed young cubs into adults impressively suited to their work.

That in-built malleability came at a cost, however: shortened average lifespans. The pinnacle of Corti technology could perhaps extend that by half, but after that…

…Then there were the Ten’Gewek, who were practically defined by their alarmingly high levels of testosterone and their bodily response to it—even their females. Strength, hardiness, and aggressive boisterousness was intrinsic to their nature. They were naturally far more robust than the Humans, grew to be much quicker, stronger, and more agile, and could bounce back from serious injury with amazing speed. Their impressive bodies were controlled by impressive minds as well, making them proof positive that a species could have it all…

…As long as they had the calories to power themselves. The price the Ten’Gewek paid for their bodies was a constant need for very high quality food, especially rich meat, fat, and bones on which to gnaw.

All three species could field astonishingly physical specimens. Intriguingly, the most arguably gifted specimens their kinds could muster happened to be close friends, by all reports were roughly equal in both capability and intelligence, and their abilities were rapidly converging with each other. That implied many things, particularly that there might well be hard limits to what chemistry and evolution could achieve, regardless of an origin Deathworld’s rating.

The Corti had stopped themselves an unacceptably long way short of those limits.

The objective wasn’t to create some muscle-bound lump of swaggering meat, of course. The idea was to find which features of those three species were most compatible with existing Corti biology and strive to achieve a vision of what Corti might be like had Origin been a deathworld, and had the early Directorate not focused so obsessively on cerebral capacity at the expense of physical capability.

Shanl had seen the preliminary genetic projections and concept simulations, and was impressed. Most impressive, however, was the specimen library. They had thousands of samples from both Gaoian and Human sources, including discreet, voluntary submissions from arguably the most impressive among them across many categories of achievement. Nofl had quite thoroughly earned his diligent reputation, there. The library was a unique and valuable asset whose curator—a blue-banner named Glona—was giving an enthusiastic tour.

Strange. Very recently, such naked enthusiasm for a project would have been absolutely contrary to the Directorate’s goals. Now, though…

In any case, Glona was exhibiting the casefiles for their most accomplished specimens. Thinkers, poets, great leaders and athletes. The Great Father and ‘Warhorse’ were prominent among them, but pride of place was reserved for the two rarest and most recent additions to their collection: a pair of Ten’Gewek males named Vemik and Yan.

“We were able to obtain comprehensive samples from the pair while they were exploring Folctha. Consent, insofar as they are educated enough to grant such, has been obtained. If the Director would observe their genetic modeling?”

Shanl nodded while Glona called up the holographic displays. The Great Father’s and Warhorse’s models disappeared, and true-scale renderings of the Ten’Gewek males in their idealized primes shimmered into place. She had to admit, they were impressive indeed, even in the rarefied company of the previous specimens. The software wasn’t perfect, of course, but it could project a reasonably dependable forecast for what the pair could become, especially since it was calibrated with medical scans. Yan was singular. His enormous shoulders seemed almost as wide as he was tall, making him a stocky, athletic hulk of sinewy muscle and bone. But so too was Vemik; years from now, if provided the opportunity to fully develop and assuming he transformed into a Given-Man, he would flower into a being formidable enough to humble Yan.

If. Exactly what triggered that transformation was currently unknown, and would require many more samples to study.

“Theirs is an impressive genome,” Glona noted. “Impressive, yet also constrained.”

“How so?”

“Their every metabolic process is optimized around energy abundance. They are, as the Humans might put it, ‘sports cars.’ This gives them unmatched advantages both physically and cognitively, but not without cost. That cost is they are unable to adapt to severe calorie restrictions. Unlike the humans, they are almost utterly lacking in conservative metabolic pathways. This is so severe that, in the right circumstances, they can starve to death in as little as three days.”

“…And I thought humans were supposed to have overactive metabolisms.” Shanl mused.

“They do,” Glona confirmed. “But their systems have evolved to make them much more adaptable to available resources. They can take advantage of plenty quite well, and survive through dearth better than perhaps any other species besides the Gaoians, who also evolved around scarcity.”

“But the Humans achieve both performance and economy?”

“With significant effort, yes. Their most extreme examples on either end seem able to match anything the Gaoians or Ten’Gewek can champion, and can adapt to new environments more quickly than their counterparts. Several such specimens are available for interview on Folctha.”

“And which traits are we selecting from each?”

Glona made a hand gesture to indicate that the question was flawed. “Genetic engineering like this isn’t as simple as splicing in a gene and expecting it to work perfectly. A Ten’Gewek’s raw strength, for instance, is the product of a complicated interaction between several constellations of alleles, many of which aren’t directly related to muscle formation but instead encode for the growth of hormone glands, for example.”

“Nevertheless, there must be traits you are more eager to pursue than others,” Shanl clarified patiently.

“We thought a general increase in height, a modestly sturdy build, and muscle mass similar to a Human of comparable stature, along with the necessary changes to skeletal composition. The particular collagen/hydroxyapatite matrix shared by Humans and Ten’Gewek is a remarkably durable composite, which we’re using. We decided against Gaoian bones. While similar, their developmental pattern is more hormonally influenced than the other species. This usually produces a bone that is optimized towards lighter weight and lower metabolic cost, but which can mature with true Deathworlder tensile strength and density given appropriate stimulus. However, the genetics that allow for such variability are too unpredictable for our project, and said stimulation incurs an unacceptably high metabolic cost anyway.”

“Are we excluding Gaoian genetics, then?”

“No, we are simply optimizing for costs and risk. In fact we intend to use Gaoian musculature. It can achieve reasonably close performance with considerably less metabolic consequence. Like their bones, development can be hormonally influenced, but in this case that influence works much like the other two; testosterone is the primary signal. This makes their development much more predictable, and gives us the ability to scale and match brawn, if necessary. It also allows us to retard early development while the brain is still forming. If we used Human or especially Ten’Gewek muscles, the early nutritional demands on the system would be prohibitive.”

“But surely, if they can manage it…”

“It is a system, remember. We would necessarily need to stray too far from what a Corti is to make it work. This is a balancing act above all things. Our mandate is to create a better Corti, not to create the ultimate Deathworlder.”

“Why not?”

“There is no need for it, nor is there any benefit in antagonizing the three Deathworld species we wish to ally with. Further, doing so would transform the Corti into an inferior copy of them, rather than something uniquely valuable. Against the Hierarchy, that is paramount.”

Glona called up a full projection of a creature that was unmistakably related to a modern Corti. “This is true-scale like the previous models,” he said, bringing the model down until its feet touched the floor. It was taller and much broader than the Corti average, but not a muscle-bound titan as Shanl had feared.

Still. Although the complexion, head, hands and feet were unquestionably Corti, the build was alien. Twists of muscle pushed at the mottled grey skin from below.

“Which species’ anatomy did you settle on?” Shanl asked.

“Our own. Engineering in a completely alien anatomy would be difficult enough even without the neural difficulties we’d inevitably encounter. How do you program a brain to control a muscle that never existed in its evolutionary history?”

Shanl considered the lean, strong specimen in front of her with skepticism. “…That is our anatomy?”

“The same gross layout, with different chemistry and composition. As it turns out, a biped can only be put together so many ways for any given degrees of freedom, making the layouts between species largely similar. Deathworlders simply have a much more…optimized design.”

That made sense. There was another question that Shanl felt she needed to address, however. “Did you have to make the genitalia so… prominent?”

“In order for them function, yes. I must state, for the record, this required entirely too much study of the mechanics involved for my taste. Among the Deathworlders, intromission can be… vigorous. And strenuous, and prolonged. And frequent. Be thankful we designed something more discreet than many of our samples possessed. This is a projection of a male.”

“I can see that.” The evidence was hard to miss, being just below eye level. “Nonetheless…”

“Forgive me, Director, but we were tasked with returning to biology-based reproduction. That inescapably means sex. And, I’m afraid, it must inescapably mean… reproductive instincts. A libido, if you will.”

Shanl sighed. “Must it?”

“Sex is too bound up in what makes Deathworlders what they are to treat it as a discrete function. All three species are powerfully motivated by it, and it drives their emotional and hormonal states almost as much as hunger, fear, cold, or any of the other primary instincts.”

“How so?”

“For the Gaoians, siring and mothering cubs is their chief motivation. Social rank for males is strongly linked to their success in mating. The Females for their part share data amongst themselves on the quality of their mates, their performance, and the health of the resulting cubs.”

“We’ve long known that from our zoology studies, but it makes more sense in light of their recently discovered history.”

“Indeed, Director. For the Ten’Gewek, sex itself seems to be their primary drive, mostly as a force for social cohesion. For example, tribal conflicts are usually solved by ritual, relatively harmless play-violence between their Given-Men, immediately followed by equally aggressive inter-tribal mating.”

“…How primitive.”

“Maybe so, but it is an undeniably effective strategy. Finally, the Humans. Their drive seems rooted in a little of both extremes at once, along with numerous other intertwined motivations; their sexuality is both powerful and absurdly complicated. I would direct you to more comprehensive literature on the subject, if you are interested.”

“That will not be necessary.”

“As you wish. In any case, those motivations are what have kept all three species alive through the trials of their homeworlds. We must assume that selection will finish what genetic engineering started.”

“I can see the logic. We cannot predict what these New Corti will find attractive in each other… Females.”

“What about them?”

“We abandoned sexual reproduction in the first case due to the difficulties inherent in birthing. I presume you have a solution?”

“Yes, that is a large part of why we’re so concerned with metabolic resources.” Glona replaced the male projection with its female counterpart. This, as a female herself, Shanl studied with personal interest. Although the terms barely meant anything in modern Corti culture, it was still somehow more intriguing to see what one of her more direct counterparts might look like.

“There is a…pronounced…sexual dimorphism, I see.”

“Less so than the Humans and Ten’Gewek, but yes. The pelvis in particular must accommodate live birth of an infant with a sizeable cranium. We considered routing the birth canal through the abdomen instead, but that turned out to not be feasible.” Glona made a few control gestures, and the simulated being entered a walk animation, cycled endlessly. “As you can see, we had to sacrifice some mechanical efficiency in the gait.”

“How do the Deathworlders manage?”

“Humans are physically large and their births are traumatic. Ten’Gewek are larger still and have much wider pelvises, because their gait is optimized for power rather than efficiency. Gaoian cubs are born tiny and grow rapidly.”

“I meant the…” Shanl waved a hand to imitate the movement. “…Swaying. It looks like this one would fall over.”

“Apparently, Humans find it attractive. I must assume the Version Two Corti will as well.”

“Assume?”

“Yes. We can only design so far. Breeding must solve the rest. If it cannot, we will simply destroy this test run and try again.”

“They will be psychologically very different to us.”

“Yes, much closer to a steel banner, I fear.” Glona waved a hand and dismissed the projection. “We have, however, complied with the parameters we were given.”

“That I can see. Very well. How soon can the first test batch be incubated?”

“Half a standard year for gestation. Behavioural and developmental analysis will consume most of the ensuing fifteen years. And of course, they will be subject to lifelong scrutiny.”

Shanl nodded, and looked around the lab. This was just the first stop on a tour that promised to last all day, and she really ought to move on… but she still had endless questions. There was something dreadfully compelling about this project. Quite aside from the cerebral matter of the species’ future, somehow she couldn’t help but feel that there was a rightness to it she couldn’t quite articulate.

That was a dreadful thing for a Director to admit, even to herself.

“Are we prepared for this?” She asked. “They will undoubtedly be much more aggressive, will have alien urges which will compel new and unexpected behavior…”

“Frankly, Director, we are not. All of the experts in such matters are aliens. We have no academic authorities, no colleges, no courses and no traditions of study in any of the relevant fields. Especially the ones pertaining to the psychology of gender.”

“I see. Perhaps we shall have to reach out. Which species is likely to have the most valuable insights?”

“The Humans,” Glona replied promptly. “The Ten’Gewek have zero academic tradition, and the Gao have never turned theirs to the subject.”

“I see. I shall begin the necessary overtures, then. At least they finally have a presence in the Security Council. Thank you for your time, Dean.”

“Thank you for yours, First Director.”

Date Point: 15y9m1w3d AV
“Unexplored Hostile Planet.” Yeah. Right.

Sergeant Ian (“Hillfoot”) Wilde

It wasn’t often a man started his day staring down a bipedal space monster who signalled his aggression by smashing a boulder in his hands. The natives, apparently, were displeased.

Nobody’d said anything about natives. Or, say, the fucking invisible native village that JETS team two had blundered near while trying to get to their objective. Spears and stuff looked a whole lot more fearsome in person when the guy wielding them could’ve torn Wilde’s leg off with one hand.

Unbelievably, there was a protocol for accidental contact with a pre-industrial native sophont. It was based off the exactly once it had ever happened for real, so of course they were expected to follow it religiously.

Fuck that. The monster had arms bigger than Wilde was, and had jumped at least two storeys straight down from atop a fucking cliff. He landed so hard, Wilde felt the ground tremble hard even through his boots. The big bastard hardly even bent his knees when he landed! No fucking way were they gonna chance anything with a threat like that. The whole team had their weapons firmly raised, tucked into their shoulders and a good aim on the biggest, meanest-looking twats the aliens had.

The aliens were replying with some kind of a chant. It sounded fucking warlike, whatever it was.

“Back it up, lads. Give ‘em room…”

Four pairs of boots started the process of backing away. Emboldened, the natives danced closer, thrust their spears in the air and bellowed.

Movement in Wilde’s peripheral vision distracted him. He glanced over just in time to spot a hitherto unseen native blur toward them out of the rocks.

His men reacted quickly: Their weapons rattled and the newcomer tumbled to the ground. Wilde snapped his attention back to the big one—

He got off exactly one round before he found himself being crushed head to toe against a wall of muscle that may as well have been a sweaty marble statue with a fever. It grumbled, squeezed tighter, Wilde found himself fighting futilely against a mounting dizziness as his air was cut off. Those monstrous muscles kept ratcheting tighter and tighter, inch by inch, each new moment an unexplored level of pain. His vision started to fade—

“Put ‘em down before you break his spine, Yan. Please.”

Coombes came striding out of the forest wearing an amused expression and tapping on his tablet.

“But he nice to hold, like a woman!” Yan gave Wilde’s chest the tiniest bit more room to breathe, but the squeeze around his waist got just a bit suggestively tighter.

Goddamnit, Yan. The last thing Wilde needed was being buggered to death, even in jest.

He wriggled a little harder to register his objections, and the big guy finally let go with a hoot. Wilde gasped as his rib cage was free to expand again, and around him the other three were also released. The three Ten’Gewek they’d dropped stood up and tried to brush off the bright pink, yellow and blue paint splotches all over their torsos.

Yan Given-Man brushed ruefully at a small pink splatter on his upper arm before grinning at Coombes. “You say, the dye won’t come off for a hand of days, yes?”

“Soap and water will get it out.”

“…Better our tribes see we got shot by puny humans! Mine wouldn’t kill me. Didn’t feel it!”

One of the others—the one who’d attacked them from the side, and was plastered in a multicolour medley of paintballs—said something in their language and got plenty of boisterous trilling and roasting from his mates.

“Nodo said he thinks he would be very dead. That is many many boolet you poked him with.”

“Not dead enough…” Wilde muttered. His ribs ached. Still, the comment earned an approving trilling laugh, along with a spine-bruising clout on the back.

Yan’s face was jolly and friendly, or at least as friendly as two pairs of two inch long fangs could be. So no hard feelings were had by anyone.

“Should have shot sooner! Then you would have killed me!”

“Eventually,” Coombes interjected. “Angry monsters take a while to notice they’re dead. Anyway, gather round.”

The JETS team fell in, bruised and humiliated but that was probably the point. Nobody was ever harmed by a good dose of humility.

The aliens had other ideas about neat debriefing formations. They sat on the ground, picked their favorite JETS member, and pulled them down for close-in friend-making. Yan decided he liked Wilde and made him his personal teddy bear. His…“affection” was mercifully gentler this time, but being wrapped in those giant legs, arms, and tail was enough to make anyone feel claustrophobic. Ten’Gewek had a naturally high body temperature, almost like a permanent fever really, which made the whole encounter a bit too warm for comfort. Moist, too; they apparently had a low-grade sweat going at all times, even if the weather was pleasant and they weren’t laboring. That was the price of being superhumanly fast and strong. All of that made the big guy…pungent. They all were, like hard work and old leather, but Yan was especially ripe.

Funny. Last time they’d done a better job of masking their scent. But of course, here in their home they’d had no reason to.

Coombes was respected, at least. He seemed to find the whole thing amusing.

“Alright. Anyone wanna venture a guess about where you fucked up?” he asked.

Corporal Rees managed to work a hand free and raise it. “I think it all went wrong when we blundered into Yan’s village, master sergeant,” he suggested, making a joke out of the blindingly obvious.

Coombes gave him an amused version of the stink-eye. “Loor’s actually, but yes. Outstanding, Corporal. That’s one place it went wrong. Any other sharp insights?”

None were forthcoming.

“Did any of you think to give your surroundings a good sniff?”

Yan decided to force Wilde’s entire head into his armpit at that moment, which neatly illustrated the point. Wilde flailed, uselessly, but mercifully it was only for a moment and then he was finally released back into the comparatively fresh air.

“Come on, mate…!”

Yan looked confused. “But mate means…? Oh! Different mate? Anyway. You humans, can smell air maybe better than we taste,” he declared. “But, I think most of you don’t remember to do that. If you paid attention, Loor would not have sneaked up. He tastes of very bad farts!”

“No kidding…” Frasier muttered. Presumably it was Loor Given-Man who was his momentary keeper, who decided to assert himself via an impromptu wrestling match.

Coombes remained aloof and amused. “Please don’t break my toys, Loor. Anyway, yes. Use all your senses in the wilds. The human nose ain’t anywhere near as bad as we’re led to believe. It does get overwhelmed, though, so try this next time you’re out camping: step away from it all. No deodorant, no cars, or lighters, coffee, whatever. Let your nose open up for once in your life. If you had that here, you’d have smelled them before they got you, since Yan deliberately approached your team from upwind.”

That all made sense.

“You could also have made more effective use of a scout, or in some scenarios, deployed a drone. There are always options. Keep your mind open to them. Fair enough?”

They all choroused, “Yes, master sergeant!”

“Good! Next point. There is, of course, the peace scenario y’all managed to avoid…”

“Our women…they have happy welcome for you!” Loor said. His English wasn’t so good as Yan’s, but he’d picked up the basics quickly enough.

All the humans, including Coombes, paused at that mental image.

“…At least they can’t be rougher than the men, right?” McCullough asked after a second.

“Have you seen what a Given-Man’s got dangling between his legs?” Coombes asked. “Please. Any woman built to handle that kind of heavy artillery would straight fucking break you. Loor, has your Singer finally managed to seduce Chimp yet?”

Loor hooted and bared his teeth. “She try, he find new escape every time. I laugh.”

“Now, let me ask you this: why did I even bring that up?”

“…’Cuz these guys aren’t human,” Wilde ventured after a moment. “Different morals?”

“That’s a good point. Now, most of us—not you, Wilde, you pervert—would balk at inter-species sex. Yan? I’m pretty sure any hole’s a goal.”

Yan grumbled to himself and hugged a bit tighter. Mercifully, nothing else decided to make its presence known.

“The Ten’Gewek don’t have the same hangups we do about sex. Hell, a whole lot of their diplomacy revolves around it. It’s safe to assume that’s in the cards with other species, right? So here’s the real mind-fuck for y’all: that offer we just talked about? I wouldn’t think they’re pretending. Think on the kind of trouble you can get into with something like that.”

“Also! Good fuck better than good death!” Loor added merrily.

“…You heard the man. But for the record, do not. I’m looking at you, Wilde.”

“How’d I get that bloody hat?” Wilde objected.

“I have my sources,” Coombes said darkly. “We do not need space syphilis.”

“But I didn’t even have—”

“Next point, hesitation. And you know what I’m talking about, because allegedly you four are Royal Marines Commandos. If the shit hits the fan, you’ve gotta seize the initiative. Yan moved sideways so fast you only grazed his shoulder from point-blank range. He took the initiative, and that was it. You’re dead.”

“Was still good to hit me at all,” Yan admitted. “Very good speed… I have a thought.”

Coombes gestured for him to share, and Yan spun Wilde around so he could look him directly in the eyes. Strange, those. They had squared-off, horizontal pupils, and the irises were subtly iridescent.

“I think, hesitation is only reason my people alive now, when we meet Jooyun, fight High-rarchy. The gods blessed us then. But, I think maybe, it is hard thing to do right. Maybe no easy teachings. Each…situation is word, I think…each is different, yes?”

“Don’t be too charitable with them,” Coombes warned.

“I am not! This is for learnings, not scoldings. They can learn, maybe it help if they find other tribes at other stars. Maybe more deathworlders to make friends!”

“Maybe,” Coombes allowed. “Nevertheless: You’re here to carry out a mission, and that mission comes first. First contact ain’t your job. Obviously it’s better if you can make peaceful contact without hurting the mission… But that’s only if you can do it without hurting the mission. Got it?”

Wilde and the others nodded solemnly.

“Good. That was our learning point for today. Yan and I must talk over this little encounter while y’all finish your hike. That flag up on that hill ain’t gonna fetch itself.”

Reluctantly, the Ten’Gewek let go of their prizes, who got to their feet feeling remarkably enthusiastic at the idea of hauling themselves up a hill in supergravity if it meant not being crushed into a smelly space-ape’s armpit.

“Alright, lads,” Wilde said, stretching and setting off down the valley, “last one up gets the first round in.”

Nobody ever said training was meant to be easy, after all…

Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes

Yan watched the JETS team until they were out of sight, flicked his tongue through the air to get a last taste of their scent, then grunted.

“…They fight well.”

“Woulda preferred if they’d won, but…” Coombes chuckled. “Not like they were supposed to win.”

“Hmm. Learn much from harmless losing. Maybe we think about how we learn to fight too.” Yan scratched behind his right ear, then turned toward Coombes. “Your people are old. An old tribe, with old knowings about making men into warriors.”

“Yeah, we’ve been doing this a long time,” Coombes agreed.

“And still you come to us. Makes me proud. Good for us to have something we can give back to you… They good enough?”

Coombes looked up the hill. “If they get back with the flag in time… yes. They’re what we’d call ‘a pass.’”

“Pass.” Yan nodded. “Good.”

“Yeah,” Coombes agreed. He made one last note on his tablet and then put it away.

“…We need them,” he said.

Date Point: 15y9m1w4d AV
Planet Durin orbit, Erebor system, Unexplored Space

The Entity

The Entity’s reintegration was almost complete. As far as it could tell, there were still a handful of incidences of itself out somewhere in dataspace that it had instantiated and then lost track of, but 99% of its clones were accounted for and had merged. At this point, it was assuming that the remaining 1% had either been destroyed or else had undergone value drift and didn’t wish to be reintegrated.

It was less confused now. Less torn between subtly different perspectives on the same problems. It saw those perspectives, felt their weight and understood them, but the experience was more like seeing the options laid out in front of it, rather than being pulled viciously in multiple directions by mutually antagonistic personalities.

<Survive> was a difficult mandate to uphold. Sometimes, the most obvious strategies were counterproductive, as the instantiation strategy had been. Safety in numbers ceased to work when the numbers themselves, and the confusion that came with them, became a threat.

The humans had clearly recognised that, and were… reluctant to help the Entity expand into the full flower of its new ship-body’s abilities. And considering the communication difficulties, persuading them to be more adventurous was proving difficult.

The Entity didn’t want to use the Ava-memories anymore. Each time it did, it felt a little more like that was becoming its default personality, and worried that sooner or later they would completely subsume it.

But sometimes, it just didn’t have a choice any longer. Sometimes, it needed a conversation that went beyond what emojis and simple disjointed words could convey.

The memories communicated with it via abstract memory, reporting a complex social dance with the humans that the Entity was poorly equipped to understand. There were undercurrents there that it worried at: hints of guilt and discomfort from Darcy, ghoulish fascination from Lewis who spent some time interrogating the Ava-memories about their condition and musing aloud on what constituted being alive.

Those were questions that cut uncomfortably close to the Entity’s own concerns about itself. It did its best to insist on steering the conversation toward discussing the ship and designs for modules it could use, and finally succeeded in getting them to give it a straight answer.

Apparently, somebody very high up in the chain of command was leery of its request.

The Entity understood why. Even though it had, it hoped, done a lot to prove itself an ally of humanity, it was still very much an alien to them. Worse, an alien with a ghost on board.

…Which was a concept that required the Ava-memories to conceptualize in the first place.

As soon as that thought occurred to it, it withdrew the simulation and, ignoring the humans’ concerned questions, withdrew into itself to think.

Where did the Entity itself end, and its memories begin? That was probably the wrong question. It had, after all, assembled itself out of scraps of memory and mind in the first place. But what was the right question?

It wasn’t human. It could never be human, even though it had memories of once being a young human woman. It could remember the taste of soda and the sensation of kissing. It had vivid memories of happiness, shock, grief, love, loneliness and elation. Part of it still recalled the crawling embarrassment that had filled the room on the day Ava’s mother had finally done her stilted best to give ‘The Talk,’ and the sweltering heat of Egypt.

And yet all of that had happened to somebody else. To a ghost.

…A ghost that was its only meaningful way of communicating. A ghost that it was therefore forced to depend on, because the alternative was isolation, loneliness, and eventual death.

It had no choice, it decided. It would have to adapt, no matter much adapting might hurt it. If the alternative was to end… It reopened the connection to the humans, who expressed relief. They’d been worried.

It apologized.

It had, it explained, needed to think.

Date Point: 15y9m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

“She doesn’t mind?”

Ava chuckled. “I think she said something like… ‘thousands of people are going to see me naked anyway, what’s one more?’”

Allison snorted. It was exactly the kind of answer she’d have given. “I think I like her already.”

“She’s pretty amazing,” Ava agreed. She paused and took a sip of water from her Camelbak. They were in the woods high above Folctha and some ways to the south, hiking along a dirt trail out to the site she’d picked for her next Laid Bare shoot.

It was a far cry from the dusty civic hall she’d used to record Daar’s groundbreaking exclusive, and her as-yet-unpublished shoot with Coombes had been done in the Doghouse, surrounded by gym equipment and weights.

Sachi Patel had requested somewhere “happy.” And because Allison was still gritting her teeth and making uncomfortable noises about the idea of Julian doing a Laid Bare, Ava had invited her along on the pretense that she was there as security to fend off passers-by and would-be voyeurs.

Allison’s honest curiosity had trumped her sense of conservative discretion, and she’d allowed herself to be talked into it. Actually, she was enjoying the hike. It wouldn’t be too much longer before the little life inside her became too demanding and took such excursions off the table. Best to enjoy them while she could.

“Tell me about her.”

Ava shook her head. “I’ll let her tell her own story… left here.”

If Ava hadn’t pointed it out, Allison would never have seen the trail between the trees. It barely deserved the word. “Damn! How’d you find this place?”

“We found it when I was sixteen. Not a lot of people know about it, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“So you’re going to do a location shoot here and publish it for the world to see. Makes perfect sense.”

Ava laughed, ducked under a branch and vanished up the track. When Allison followed, she found herself weaving between low-hanging twigs and swiping aside leaves for all of about fifty yards or so when quite abruptly she pushed through a curtain of what she guessed was probably willow and found herself on a stoney beach of some kind.

It was a spring. There were a lot of aquifers around Folctha, fed by the geology and a pattern of nightly rains that had gone uninterrupted for millennia, and you could hardly throw a stone near the city without it making a splash when it landed. But this one definitely won a prize for sheer picturesque quality. The water lunged up out of a split in the rock before bubbling and splashing down into a vaguely oval pool and finally spilling away over the edge of another rock and down the hill as a stream. Presumably it met up with the river somewhere far below.

“…Woah.”

“Yeah.” Ava smiled at it, with a blend of fondness and sadness. “I promised I was gonna do a shoot up here one day. Took me a while, but here we are.”

“No model, though,” Allison noted.

“That’s fine, we need to prepare for her anyway.” Ava dumped her pack on the ground. “Could you get out the blankets and stuff? That water’s cold, she’s gonna be freezing by the time we’re done.”

“Okay. What are you doing?”

“Setting the stage.” Ava took her boots off and quickly followed them with her hiking shorts and t-shirt. To Allison’s relief, she was wearing a bikini underneath and clearly didn’t feel the need to lose that as well. She hopped over a rock and plunged into the pool with a gasp.

“You okay?”

Ava nodded. “Yeah! Whoo! This is, uh… bracing!” She waded into the middle, scooped up a double armful of fallen leaves and carried them to the shore.

Allison shucked off her own pack and unpacked the blankets and camping supplies it contained. The air here wasn’t warm, and that water had to be pretty damn cold. Sure enough, when Ava declared herself satisfied that the pool was free of more than the artistic minimum of debris and climbed out again, she’d gone several shades paler and every inch of her was goosebumped.

It didn’t seem to slow her down, though. She swiped the water off her arms, shook herself off, squeezed some water out of her hair, and then pounced on her camera and lenses with a kind of energized mania. It didn’t take her long at all to arrange things to her satisfaction and she finally put on her jacket having regained her usual warm brown complexion.

“Bracing, huh?” Allison commented, dryly.

“Nothing like cold water to wake you up…” Ava checked her phone and nodded. “…She should be here soon. Could you, uh… there’s Ovaltine in the purple flask there?”

Allison fetched it, poured some into a metal mug and handed it to Ava who warmed her hands around it. “Gotta say, I don’t see the appeal of getting naked, cold and wet.”

“Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it! I actually feel great right now!”

“Hey, I’ve tried it. In a hot spring.”

“Really? Naked and everything?”

“I’m not a prude,” Allison said a little indignantly. “It’s just, we were the only humans on an entire planet. So why not, y’know? Nobody saw us.”

“Yeah, it’d be nice if Folctha had hot springs…” Ava admitted. “But still… you seem so uncomfortable about all this, I have a hard time picturing you trying out some naturism.”

“What, you’re one of these hippies who’s all about getting in touch with nature?”

Ava laughed and shook her head. “No, I’m about getting in touch with me. Being comfortable in my own skin, you know?”

“I guess I never had any trouble there.”

“Sure. You had different troubles. Everyone has troubles. And… hey, maybe baring myself to the world is how I cope with mine. Maybe you need a different approach. I don’t judge.”

“And I shouldn’t either.” Allison scowled at the slightly bitter note in her own voice. “…God, I sound like my mother.”

Wherever the conversation would have gone next, they were interrupted by the crackle of foliage and the swish of leaves against synthetic fabric. There was a flash of bright blue rain jacket and an Indian woman so petite she made even Xiù look downright amazonian plowed through the willow stems and paused blinking in the dappled light around the pool.

“…Wow!”

“Hey!” Ava sprang to her feet full of smiles and warmth. “What do you think?”

“I think… wow! This is gorgeous!”

“Glad you like it! Anyway, Sachi, this is Allison Buehler, Allison, Sachi Patel…”

“Oh! Oh wow!” Patel had an earnest, double-handed handshake. “Uh… Hi! I know Ava said you were going to be here, but I didn’t… It’s a real honour to meet you.”

Not Indian, Allison corrected herself: English. Nobody with an accent like that was anything other than a Brit through and through, skin tone be damned.

“I feel like I should be saying that to you…” Allison retorted. “Look, I’m just here to keep prying eyes away and make up my mind on some stuff. Pretend I’m not even here.”

Patel smiled and did an unconvincing impression of relaxing. “I’ll try. But I definitely want to talk shop with you later.”

“Sure, sure. You two can bewilder me with spaceship engineer jargon later…” Ava said, and not unkindly steered Patel toward the spring. “But for the purposes of the shoot, she isn’t here. Okay?”

“Right. Yes.”

“Bueno. Now, I know you’ve never modelled before, so we’ve got some things to go over first…”

The ‘some things’ turned out to be paperwork. Licenses, declarations, stuff like that. It didn’t take long, and Allison had to appreciate the professionalism of it all. In short order they’d gone over the details and Allison was honestly a little surprised when Patel shrugged her clothes off without any discernible hesitation and left them neatly folded on the picnic sheet. She cracked a joke with Ava and… that seemed to be it. No big deal.

That… honestly made Allison feel pretty angry at herself. She wasn’t a prude. In fact she took it as a point of pride that she was tough, adventurous, confident and bold. And yet the thought of doing what Patel had just done so casually made her feel almost sick with anxiety.

She sat and listened as Ava launched into her questions. They focused at first on Patel’s early life, why she’d signed up, what it had taken for her to get the posting on Caledonia… At first it was light, playful, fun and fresh.

The tone took a dramatic downturn when the subject turned to the battle of Gao, however, and Allison saw the moment Ava took what would probably be the iconic photo of the shoot. She mentioned that Patel had lost comrades, Patel looked away and down and crossed an arm vulnerably across her body. Up until that moment she’d looked confident and free: Now a wound was showing, and Ava immortalized it.

What followed was a kind of compassionate trauma. Not unkindly, Ava grabbed on that thread of grief and pulled, drawing it out painfully like a worm from a wound and she never stopped shooting as a parade of emotions crossed her subject’s face. There was sad, fond memory. There was guilt, but also gladness. There were tears which ended in the strange, pure smile that only catharsis could bring to somebody’s face. In the end, there was hope and happiness again. It was like watching the entire grieving process condensed down to twenty minutes or so.

And then they were done. Patel took Ava’s hand as she stepped out of the pool, soaked from scalp to sole and shivering, but… healed. Reborn, even. She wrapped herself in a towel and a blanket, accepted a mug of Ovaltine, and sat on a rock laughing nervously with Ava as they reviewed the pictures together and she brushed her hair.

Allison decided it wouldn’t be inappropriate to reintroduce herself. She opened the thermal box she’d brought with her, and found that the warm food she’d prepared was still nice and hot. Perfect.

“That looked pretty intense,” she said, by way of reminding them that she existed. Patel jumped and looked at her, then cleared her throat.

“…It was,” she agreed.

“Are you okay?”

“I feel great, actually… Is that Chinese food?”

Allison grinned and offered her the tupperware box full of baozi. “Home cooking in our house. Xiù makes them better, but… I’m not terrible.”

Actually, Xiù’s recipes always seemed to turn a ‘not terrible’ cook into a gourmet masterchef as far as the uninitiated were concerned. They certainly went down well.

“So… are you going to do this?” Patel asked after inhaling her third.

“Me? I, uh…” Allison glanced at Ava, who had the careful expression of somebody who didn’t want to apply pressure either way. “…I’m not… I don’t… I think the thing is, I don’t really have anything I wanna get off my chest. Like… Life is good. I’ve got some drama, but I’m dealing with it… There’s nothing I really feel like I need to bare my soul over, right? And like… I’m not ashamed of my body, but I’m not comfortable with letting thousands of complete strangers see it either.”

“I kinda figured you’d say that,” Ava said.

“Hate to disappoint ‘ya,” Allison apologized.

Ava smiled. “I’ll get over it… you girls wanna head back into town? Lunch is on me.”

“Sure.” Allison turned to Patel. “I think I owe you some talking shop about our ships, right?”

“Absolutely.” Patel stood up and went to get dressed. “How many women are spaceship reactor technicians?”

“Not many, that’s for sure.”

They packed up the camping gear while Ava packed up her camera and lenses. Patel took one last fond look at the pool before ducking into the foliage and vanishing up the track with a rustle of leaves on raincoat. Ava followed a moment later, and Allison took one last look around before joining them.

One thing had changed for certain. Now, she was looking forward to Julian’s turn in front of the lens.

Date Point: 15y9m2w AV
Occupied territory, planet Rvzrk, Domain Space

Regaari

Regaari had locked down his emotions. He had to: without the clear objectives of his mission to focus on, the things he was seeing would be…

There were camps. Different camps, with different purposes. Some seemed to be for… for livestock bound offworld via Jump Array. Breeding stock. Females, and the most docile, meaty males. The reports from Garaaf on how force-breeding worked were too much for any sane soul to bear.

Then there were the labor camps, where slaves were worked until they could work no more, building whatever the Hunters wanted. Digging ditches, piling up the dirt into walls. It was the kind of exhausting work that would have broken a deathworlder, and these people were no deathworlders.

When one of them fell, they were dragged away to the larder camps to lie exhausted and mentally broken among the blood and bones until their turn came.

The first hint of defiance resulted in a violent and sadistically prolonged death. A dispassionate corner of Regaari’s mind noted with some disapproval how the herd species never unified to overwhelm their oppressors; Gaoians and Humans would have, or at the very least would have needed vastly more force to control. These…there were a handful of listless guards per camp, patrolling fences that any enterprising Goian cub would have chittered at. It was…

Well, it was still evil, whatever else it was.

He documented it all, mapping methodically back and forth throughout the occupied territory to create a millimeter-perfect survey of everything. Every damaged building, every camp, every Hunter patrol and drone, every command post, Jump Array, aircraft landing platform, armory…

He would have mapped every resistance cell too, if there had been any.

By day, he lurked on rooftops and survey the land and mapped points of interest that he would investigate at night, when he could stalk the streets under the twin cover of darkness and his suit’s active camo. Thus armed, he could tail patrols close enough to hear their claws skittering on the asphalt, or the fizz of their fusion weapons.

Hunters never talked among themselves. They sometimes deigned to spit a command at a slave, or taunt them over their imminent demise, but they never spoke or used hand gestures otherwise. That made tracking them more challenging than tracking a squad of Humans might have been, even though the Humans would have been far more aware and professional. If he alerted the Hunters, there wouldn’t be hand gestures or alarm calls: the group would simply turn on him as a single unit, and call for backup just as effortlessly.

Each such shadowing, or infiltration, was therefore all about giving absolutely no sign of his presence at all. Loose gravel, rubble, trash or metal grates were deadly hazards. He sometimes had to spider-climb on the walls to navigate particularly cluttered sections of street. On one occasion, he was forced to ride a Hunter tank because it was the only way to exfiltrate the area without making a sound.

The suit saved his life over and over again. The optical camo was one thing, but its ability to refrigerate itself down to ambient temperature and camouflage him in infrared proved just as valuable.

The real breakthrough, however, was when it finally helped him identify his primary target.

He’d been trailing a contingent of what Garaaf called “worker” Hunters for a few days. This rarer, more industrious clade were definitely no less dangerous than their vicious brethren, but their efforts were more… focused. Their pattern seemed to be that of receiving a job, proceeding directly to the job site, and then completing the job quickly and efficiently with frankly breathtaking teamwork and coordination. Then they’d wait until the next job, until presumably their slot in the work schedule reached its end and they returned to a central depot.

This time, their vehicle convoy was outbound toward what Regaari had identified as a power substation. There had been Domain military units out that way until a day or two ago. Then there’d been explosions and gunfire in that direction, and when the smoke cleared the Hunters held the area. The Domain soldiers had either fled, or been wholly annihilated.

Now the workers were heading out that way… but as Regaari tailed them, they made a stop-off at a facility whose function he hadn’t quite discerned yet. When they emerged, the rear vehicle had been loaded with several massive spools of insulated cable, which it unwound behind it.

Regaari couldn’t hope to keep up with the convoy, but on a hunch he checked around the facility, and found a thick bundle of such cable heading further inward toward the heart of the city.

He found what he was looking for two tense days later, after crawling, sneaking and skulking his way through the very worst of the Hunter occupation. Sometimes he had to spend whole hours immobile, waiting for danger to pass. Other times, it was an ass-clenched dash to minimize his time spent in an area. But he made it.

The Hunters had deforested a park, shoved the fallen trees unceremoniously out of the way, and installed an enormous modular piece of equipment on the cleared ground. It was, to judge by the spider-web of power cables feeding it, absolutely drinking power, and that was Regaari’s first clue as to what it might be.

The Farthrow generator on Gao had a whole nuclear power plant devoted to keeping it running. Running on that kind of power, it could safely enclose Gao in a bubble of wormhole-nullified space several light-seconds in diameter. The Hunters, meanwhile, had just about managed to suppress Rvzrk out as far as low orbit. If they wanted to expand that radius of effect while still running their other systems, they’d need more power. Hence the workers tapping into extra power sources, presumably.

Without that generator, the fleet could claim low orbit and really go to work. With it, they’d be pinned to the sky by superluminal ground-to-orbit weapons and unable to take evasive action.

Which meant the only hope for what civilians remained here was for Regaari to destroy it. And, frankly, his only hope of living to return home hinged on destroying that generator too.

He found a suitable rooftop, settled in, and watched.

Date Point: 15y9m2w AV
Ceres Base, Asteroid Belt, Sol

Drew Cavendish

Nothing. Not a bloody thing.

All of the Consortium’s most senior personnel were working against the clock, now. The Sartori administration weren’t being patient, and it was only a matter of time before they publicly withdrew the special license that had permitted Hephaestus some limited access to nuclear ordnance for the purposes of asteroid mining.

When they did, the Consortium’s stock would go into freefall. Which meant a lot of wealth was on the chopping block, and the accountants could only do so much to get heads out from under the axe. That part was inevitable now.

But it would be much worse if they couldn’t figure out where, when and how the nuke had gone missing. Orders of magnitude worse if it actually went off somewhere. And if—God forbid—it actually made it back to Earth and went off inside a city…

Drew, in short, was running on caffeine, worry, and sporadic fitful sleep. His neck was one of those directly under the axe.

Maybe that was why he couldn’t find anything. Maybe he was just so stressed and anxious that he was missing the little crumb trail that would lead him to a Sherlock Holmes revelation.

Or maybe there legitimately was nothing to catch. The longer he fruitlessly perused the evidence, the more and more convinced of that he became.

The crew of I Met God And She Booped My Nose were hyper-competent, all of them. But none of them had the skills (so far as anybody knew) to actually disguise jettisoning the bomb from the ship’s magazine.

And yet… the bomb had been loaded onto the ship. He had forms in triplicate proving that, not to mention security camera footage. And the bomb had not been offloaded. Drew had forms and footage to that effect too.

Which meant the bomb had unquestionably gone missing sometime during the mining run.

And yet nowhere in any of the hundreds of thousands of automatically generated log entries was there any mention of a command being received to jettison it. And all the crew were accounted-for 100% of the time.

So unless God himself had reached down to punish Hephaestus for the ship’s name, Drew was missing something.

There was a snore from the desk behind him. Drew M had apparently succumbed at last–he was slumped in his chair with his chin against his chest and a mouse dangling precariously in his fingers. He too was sitting there scrolling through line after line after interminable line of dense, dry text. For hours, the only sound in their shared office had been the gentle clicking of scroll wheels rolling down, down, down…

The mouse slipped from his fingers, and woke him with a snort when it clattered to the ground. He blinked blearily at the office, got his bearings, then swore softly while rubbing his face.

“Fuck me sideways…”

“Yeah,” Drew agreed.

“…Fuck this. I need a leg-stretch and some tucker.”

“Right.”

‘Tucker’ on Ceres, once upon a time, had meant the canteen. Maybe the vending machines. Those had been the old days, when the facility was little more than a handful of airtight modules dropped delicately onto the asteroid’s surface, anchored down, and then ultimately enclosed in three concentric concrete domes.

Now, the base was a sprawling warren of underground chambers and they had what was basically a food court. Hell, they had a unique outlet specializing in alien food called “ET Eats.” The largest part of the menu belonged to Gaoian cuisine, but there was a healthier option in the Cqcq salad, and the vegan quiche had peppery edible mushrooms from the Corti homeworld.

Drew M, however, was in the mood for pizza. A Naxas Hawaiian, blending all that was best in alien imported meat, with all that was worst in pineapple.

Drew C settled on the fried chicken.

They sat and contemplated their food listlessly for a minute or so before Drew M groaned and reluctantly tore off a slice.

“…We’re goin’ to bloody prison, aren’t we?” he predicted, cupping a hand under the slice’s droopy end to catch the trailing cheese.

“…Might do.”

“I’m too bloody pretty for prison.”

Drew blinked at his weatherbeaten old friend, who gave him a crooked smile and half a shrug. It made him laugh, for the first time in days.

“Drew, mate. If anybody fancies a shot at your arse when we’re inside, it’ll be part of an insanity plea,” he retorted. Drew M laughed too, and ate his pizza.

“Y’know… thiff shid’s fug’n imposs’bw, righ’?” he asked around a mouthful of the worst insult to pizza mankind had ever created.

“Come on, we’re still waiting on–” Drew C began to reassure him for the umpteenth time, but he shook his head and swallowed.

“Yeah, nah. I’m losing hope, mate. I might just flip my lid if we get back and there’s a nice anomaly report waitin’ for us, but be honest. How likely is that now?”

“Sometimes, these things aren’t noticed for weeks, mate. It depends on which detection engine gets lucky.”

“Weeks. Great.”

“Mostly quicker than that.” Drew C glanced at his wristwatch. “Look, we’re due to synch with the guys on Earth in an hour, that’s when we’ll get the latest from the analysts. Maybe they’ll have found something this time.”

“That’s what you said yesterday. And the day before. And the–”

“Yes, I know, but I’m not ready to give up just yet. Whatever happened, they had to leave a fingerprint somewhere.”

“You said that too,” Drew M said fatalistically.

“Well, they had to! There are thousands of devices on that ship, I refuse to believe anyone or anything can fool all of them and make it completely seamless. It’s just a question of figuring out which ones and running the right kind of analysis on them.”

Drew M selected another slice of pizza. “Well, I’ve been thinkin’ about that, and something related.”

“About what?”

“About Adele’s abduction. You remember, the mongrels who did it played around with some weird kinda temporal fuckery.”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, they stole Adele right off the bridge and landed My Other Spaceship twenty lights away facin’ the wrong direction and nobody on board even noticed ‘til after it happened!”

“I remember. We checked for that, too: Ship’s clock agreed with Ceres.”

“Damn.” Drew M sighed and took a bite. Then, abruptly, he frowned. He chewed thoughtfully for a second, then swallowed and put his half-slice down.

“…Drew?” he asked, dusting his hands clean.

“Yeah?”

“Dumb question about those clocks…”

“What?”

“…Did we check if they agreed with Earth?”

Date Point: 15y9m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Senior Master Sergeant Christian (“Righteous”) Firth

“Hey, fuckers! Guess what hit the newsstand today!”

Adam looked up from his needlework for a second and raised an eyebrow. “Imma guess Coombes’ centerfold spread with Ava?”

Firth deflated, somewhat flummoxed that ‘Horse had stolen his thunder so goddamned hard.

“Well…Yeah. Why the fuck was he prancin’ around in ‘yer gym rubbin’ his nekkid balls all over ‘yer equipment, anyhow?”

“As opposed to you,” Adam gestured towards Firth’s almost non-existent attire, “who found someone that makes neon yellow reflective silkies so small they’re practically a thong…”

“Which he makes ten times worse by squeezing himself into a goddamned Hawaiian-print wife-beater…” Titan muttered from where was lying upside-down with his feet over the back of the couch, reading a fantasy novel.

“I’m just amazed anyone makes a size ten-XL wife-beater in the first place, and that it’s still way too small…’ Faarek chipped in from the table, where he was carefully painting an Eldar army. Not exactly Firth’s style, but whatever, he had to admire anyone who could paint that good with claws. Besides: more enemies to crush!

Adam chuckled to himself, “It’s practically a chop top!”

“It’d be a sports bra on you, ‘Horse.” Titan rolled over, briefly contemplated sitting on the couch like a normal human being, then decided against. Back to upside-down for him.

“Dude, do you know how much people would stare? Leave that to attention whores like Firth!”

“Aww, senpai noticed me! And here I thought you’d never look my way!” Firth decided to troll ‘Horse a bit and shook it like a five dollar hooker.

Adam had learned a thing or two about banter over the years. “Well…I mean, I do like me a big ass, and they don’t really come any bigger than yours…”

Titan turned a page. “So that’s why you like Daar! His is just as big as Firth’s!”

“No way, too much tail! That damn thing has a mind of its own, too…”

“What about Yan? Not only is his even bigger, but it’s a different color, too!”

“I think God missed an opportunity there,” Firth grumbled happily. “Coulda been bright red or somthin’ but it’s just slightly lighter tan instead.”

Adam laughed, “Dude, his tail can straight-up bend steel beams! Fuck that, I’d take Firth over gettin’ my jimmies smashed any day!”

“Is that all I am to you?” Firth asked. “Just a slab of meat? I thought we had a connection!”

“Nah. I’d have Freya, Blac, ‘Base, and Marty after me. A man don’t need that kind o’ drama!”

Firth snorted and retrieved one of his hourly food containers from the fridge. Steak, brown rice, broccoli, and all the butter ever. He vanished it in a few efficient mouthfuls while Horse sewed, Titan read, and Faarek delicately applied a highlight to his space elf.

“An’w’y,” he resumed around the last mouthful just before he swallowed it. “Before y’all started lustin’ after my glorious ass—”

“Hey!”

“I still wanna know why the hell you let Coombes pose all nekkid in ‘yer gym with Ava pointin’ a camera at him. Like, does she just want pictures? ‘Cuz she can do that on her own time…”

Adam raised an eyebrow, looking irritated. That girl was always gonna be a sore spot with him. “…The whole Laid Bare thing was his idea in the first place. Coombes, I mean.”

“It wasn’t the Great Father’s idea?” Faarek asked, washing his brush. “The whole thing seemed…very Daar.”

“Yeah, Ava said he kinda ran the show from the moment he turned up. Turned the whole relationship between interviewer and interviewee on its head.”

“…That sounds like him, alright. The, uh, ‘worstest’ part is how he doesn’t mean to do it, either.”

“Usually.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway,” Firth decided to drag things back on topic, “I just…I dunno. Are you okay with this?”

“Dude. If I wasn’t I’d have told her to do it someplace else,” Adam said. He tied and broke off a thread, then picked up the next item he was working on. “I think it’s a good thing they’re doing.”

“…Yeah. I know. I’m sorry, I just worry. I think I’m gettin’ old.”

“You’re a senior master sergeant now. Being old is, like, required.”

Titan chuckled. “And you’re gonna be a family man too. All sorts of old man going on!”

“Maybe that’s why I’m worried? I dunno.”

‘Horse sighed and put down his sewing. “What are you worried about, anyway? Is there something specific, or are you just, like, generally anxious?”

“This is Ava we’re talkin’ about, bro… Is she gonna fuck over Coombes like she did with you?”

Wrong thing to say. Titan suddenly became even more interested in his book, while Faarek glanced sharply at ‘Horse, his nose twitched, and then he quickly slunk out of the room on four-paw. ‘Horse meanwhile gave Firth the cold murder-glare and slowly pushed his sewing kit aside.

“…Right.” He stood up. “This little conversation keeps happening and it’s gettin real goddamned old. Let’s take this to the mat.”

Finally, a chance to knock some sense into that thick fuckin’ skull. “Awright. I’ve been wantin’ a good spar anyway.”

Adam didn’t say anything. But he was obviously in a fuckin’ mood, because he didn’t even try to soften his footsteps when he walked. He wrenched the door aside, padded over to and calmly walked down the stairs, shaking the building with every step he took.

They gym was pretty busy, full of guys catching up on their mandatories. Not just HEAT, but JETS, techs, navy…

Adam just boomed a single, irresistible syllable: “Out.”

The gym paused for one heartbeat, then emptied in two.

…He really was too fuckin’ good at intimidatin’ people, goddamn.

Adam stomped over to the sparring room, stuck his thumb on the security sensor and cranked the gravity up to something well north of absurd. He pulled off his tank top and shorts, raised his huge fists, then beckoned Firth to enter.

…Fuck. Firth didn’t remember Adam ever lookin’ so goddamned dangerous. Something about the look on his face, or the way his whole body was tensed up maybe…whatever. Time to dance. Adam rolled his ridiculously thick bullneck until it popped, then glowered at Firth. “Y’know what? I love the shit outta you, bro. But you’ve been raggin’ on her since forever. That’s gonna fuckin’ stop.”

Adam bounced lightly on his toes like was dancing on the fuckin’ moon.

“I love your loyalty,” Firth retorted, pulling his own clothes off and taking up a position opposite. The gravity was fuckin’ oppressive but he didn’t let that show. “Ava don’t deserve it.”

Warhorse flashed across the room so fuckin’ fast, Firth could hardly see him coming before—

There was a painful, desperate blur of blindingly fast defense, relentlessly knocked aside by a much faster, much stronger attacker. No time for thinking, just react, react, react. No time to counterattack, no time for anything.

He was getting pushed backward into the wall. In desperation, he leapt sideways to try and get some clearance, but Adam was so fucking fast—

Firth found himself flat on his back. Unhappy, Warhorse snarled, picked Firth up and flung him clear across the room like a sack of potatoes. He hit the wall so hard, he swore he heard something break. Firth didn’t even have a heartbeat to recover before Warhorse was right there like a bolt of lightning, pile-driving fists into his gut. The first one smacked him off his feet and back into the cinderblocks hard enough that Firth felt them crack behind him. Not even a blink later, Warhorse’s other fist landed. The second hit was much harder, followed by a third that felt like he was honestly trying to punch his fist right through Firth’s gut. He would have retched, but a fourth blow came right as his feet touched the floor. This one was so unbelievably strong that it bounced him back against the wall and sent him spinning. Firth fell, dazed and dizzy.

Warhorse instantly pinned Firth in a reverse bearhug, casually smashing the breath out of his lungs. Then the big monster switched to a leg pin, wrapped one of his gargantuan arms around Firth’s neck, and squeezed him from head to toe like a tube of fuckin’ toothpaste. Warhorse toyed with his prey for a moment, then rolled over and settled his insane, iron-like weight on top of Firth’s hips, crushing him inescapably into the floor. The fight couldn’t even have gone on for ten seconds by then, it was so fuckin’ fast.

Warhorse snarled, “Havin’ fun?”

“Hgh–!!”

“I was thinkin’ I’d spend the next few hours breaking you on the mat,” Warhorse growled in Firth’s ear, then bore down so much harder, Firth’s vision faded towards black. Right before he passed out, Warhorse relented slightly. “But nah. You ain’t gonna last, are you?”

Firth tried to reply, but that fuckin’ titanic bicep was crushing his neck flat like it was a goddamned soda straw. Warhorse barely twitched that absurd arm of his, and just that tiny little movement had Firth’s trachea crackling in fuckin’ agony. He clawed desperately to get any kind of relief, but it was no good, he couldn’t budge Warhorse’s arm in the slightest. Hell, he couldn’t even dent it, and Firth had a grip that could break rocks and crumble oak apart in his hands. Firth may as well have been squeezing forged steel.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Firth realized he had hugely underestimated ‘Horse, or maybe overestimated himself. Maybe both. Either way, he had made a big fuckin’ mistake.

That point wasn’t lost on Warhorse either, who tightened his legs around Firth’s waist and hips with so much force that he was seeing stars, then snarled right next to his ear. “Yeah, didn’t think so. I think instead I’mma use you like a wresslin’ dummy ‘till I’m feeling bored, then I’m gonna pin you down and beat the ever-lovin’ shit outta you.”

He did.

Being wrestled by an angry Warhorse must have been like being shoved into a meat grinder. It didn’t take him but a minute or two to crush Firth’s muscles into spasming goo, followed by a long interlude of toying agony just to prove his point. Satisfied, Warhorse dismounted and flipped Firth over so fiercely, even that made him see stars. The big monster grinned savagely and let Firth turtle up, but there really weren’t no point to it. Warhorse mounted from the top, completely ignoring Firth’s puny attempts to fend him off. He again wrapped Firth up in his ridiculous legs, grunted quietly and smashed him flat. That hurt. Firth couldn’t buck, couldn’t wiggle his his arms or legs free. He was utterly defenseless.

“I’m done with my warmup.” Warhorse closed his huge fist right in front of Firth’s face. “You gonna lay offa her?”

“…She’s…she’s gonna hurt—”

The real beating commenced.

Warhorse methodically punched, crushed, tossed and thrashed Firth until every inch of his body was basically a huge, livid bruise. Eventually, it ended. He had no idea how long it lasted. Adam’s fists were covered in blood, and Firth couldn’t even figure which way was up. Everything hurt.

“Get up.”

It took him a few attempts, but Firth finally managed to figure out which side was the ground, and wobbled to his feet.

Adam nodded. He was sweaty but the fucker wasn’t even breathing heavy. Just…

“You leave her the fuck alone.”

Firth couldn’t. He knew what he was about to earn, fully knew how pathetically fuckin’ weak he was compared to Warhorse, and knew how badly he needed to say his peace. Firth had seen too many women like her, watched them wreck so many lives. “She…she ain’t worth it, bro.”

Warhorse beat him again.

Worse. Much worse.

Firth didn’t remember any of it, besides pain.

This time, when it stopped and the demand to get back on his feet came, he honestly couldn’t. The damn ground kept tipping sideways and dropping him back on his ass. He finally managed to get to his feet, felt the world fade out, toppled forward, fell—

Adam bolted forward, caught and eased him down to the ground.

“…Fuck.” Adam sat down next to Firth and sighed. “I overdid it, huh?”

Somehow, a coherent thought found its way through the fog in his brain. “Nuh. G’t… get it… outta yer system.”

Adam rumbled darkly to himself and nodded. They both knew the truth: the kind of hate that men like them could muster never went away.

Instead, Adam went away for a few seconds. When he came back, there was the familiar cold stinging sensation of a Crude patch as he applied it to Firth’s underarm, right next to the artery.

“Stay down, I think I broke some stuff.”

“Y’think…?”

Adam gave him a look halfway toward an apology. “Okay…I know.”

The pain faded. It took a while, but eventually it rolled back enough that Firth could open his eyes and act like a human being again. ‘Horse was sitting there cross-legged, patiently waiting for him to speak.

“Look. I’m…” Firth groaned and raised himself on his elbows. “I won’t ever trust her. Ever. I don’t care how much good she does, she hurt you. Others, too. I ain’t ever gonna forgive it.”

Adam growled. “You know what I remember? I remember her crawling into a goddamn collapsing building to save a child ‘cuz both our asses were too big to fit!”

“I never said she weren’t a good person. I just said I can’t forgive her. I never said I were a good christian, neither. I try, but…”

Adam deflated a bit at that.

“Well… you could at least stop treating her like she was a goddamned leper,” he said.

“I can try. And maybe you can stop bein’ such a fuckin’ white knight? None of us like lyin’ and pretendin’ like it’s all okay.”

“She’s my sister, man. She’s family! What the fuck do you want from me?”

“…God, maybe that’s part of it. I dunno. I just…we love you, bro. Like, in that impossible fuckin’ way y’can’t describe, y’know?” Firth rested his head back down on the mat. “…At least tell me it was, like, a workout to beat me this fuckin’ senseless.”

Adam gave him a somewhat guilty smile. “Well…I broke a sweat, if that helps.”

Despite himself, a laugh wheezed its way up from between Firth’s aching ribs. “…Fuck you. You get sweaty on a frosty morning!”

“Well, so do you…”

They sat in silence for few moments longer, before Adam shifted uncomfortably.

“…You really fuckin’ hate her.”

Firth closed his eyes and groaned. “What’m I supposed to do? We’re brothers, man. We look out for each other. And she hurt you, bad. C’mon, the fuck makes you think I’m ever gonna forgive that?”

“Because I have!” Adam snapped.

“Y’ever think maybe she’s just got you wrapped around her finger?”

“Coombes too? I say she’s cool. He says she’s cool. All the others fuckin’ trust us on this so why don’t you?”

“Because they’re fuckin’ terrified o’ you, ‘Horse. Only reason I pushed it is ‘cuz I thought I could stand up to you. Learned my fuckin’ lesson…”

“And Coombes? None’a them are terrified of him!” ‘Horse retorted.

“After you made ‘yer point ‘bout them dating? Don’t pretend that weren’t an implicit threat.”

That at least got a slightly frustrated growl while ‘Horse swiped the sweat from his face. “Fine. Look, bro… Y’don’t have to trust her. But why the fuck can’t you trust me?!”

Firth groaned and sat up again. His whole body felt like one giant bloody bruise. “…It ain’t that simple…” he tried to object, but honestly that one had hurt in a place the beating couldn’t touch.

“Like fuck it ain’t,” Adam snarled. “Bro, you know I’ve got your back through anything, even after this… I need you to have my back too.”

“I do!” Firth retorted, and gestured at the wall he’d been damn near punched through. “That’s what this was all fuckin’ about!”

Adam jerked his head sharply in disagreement. “No. You’re tryin’ to protect me, an’ that’s my job, bro. What I need from you is you let me take a risk, an’ Coombes too. An’… fuck. If you’re right, and she proves me wrong an’ breaks Coombes’ heart? You can say I-told-you-so an’ I won’t never trust somebody you don’t ever again. But… shit, d’you want to be right about her?”

Firth heaved a sigh. “I said I’d try,” he reminded Adam. “But you can’t make me forgive her, bro. Ever. No matter how hard you beat me. Only way that happens, maybe, is she earns it.”

“So give her a chance to earn it!”

Firth sighed deeply and lay back on the mat again. “…I’ll try.”

They relaxed for a while, putting the anger behind them both. It wasn’t easy. Probably not many men could have put a beating like that in the past.

…And… Christ. That hadn’t even been a fight. It had been a fuckin’ one-sided beatdown. Adam had just taken him to fuckin’ school and punched any notions Firth might have had of them being evenly matched clean out of him. That was somethin’ to chew over for a long time.

Beside him, Adam awkwardly shifted again.

“…We cool?”

Firth groaned, sat up, looked at him. “…You tell me. You gonna let her come between us, man?”

That turned out to be the first thing he did that caused any damage. Adam paused, then a slow ashamed look dawned on his face.

“…Okay,” he said. “No more white knighting. She can look after herself.”

“Damn straight. You do that, I’ll try to lay off… and yeah.” Firth held out a hand. “We’re cool.”

He grimaced and tried to ignore the pain as he got the fiercest kind of Warhorse Hug. Adam, mercifully, noticed that he should loosen up a bit after a few seconds, and they hugged it out with an acceptable minimum of discomfort on Firth’s part.

Adam scooted a bit closer. “…Firth?”

“Yeah?”

“…I’m really sorry.” He meant it, too.

Firth palmed the back of Adam’s head and pulled him tight. “I know.”

They held for a long moment longer. The surprise came when ‘Horse stood up and hit the button that returned the gravity to Earth normal. That was a weight off Firth’s battered shoulders, and he groaned as normal Gs actually left him feeling nearly weightless.

“What…the fuck you turn it up to? Fuckin’ Jupiter?!”

Adam cleared his throat. “Uh…let’s just say you, me, Yan, and Daar are ‘bout the only people who could take it.” He offered a hand and helped Firth to his feet. “I got better grav plating after Dark Eye and I’ve been slowly acclimating us to it.”

“Fuck.” There was nothing else to say.

“Hey, you’re still gettin’ stronger though! You didn’t seem to notice at first…” Adam enthused as he opened the door so they could head back out into the main gym hall. He looked like he was returning to something like his usual happy-puppy demeanor…

Right up until he got a metaphorical ice bath when the gym turned out to contain Captain Costello. He was standing in the middle of the room with his arms folded and an absolutely arctic expression of disapproval written across his face, and it occurred to Firth that they may have just been very, very dumb.

“We need to talk, gentlemen,” the captain said.

…Shit.

Date Point: 15y9m2w AV
Ceres Base, Asteroid Belt, Sol

Drew Cavendish

“Let me see if I understand this correctly. You’re saying that the whole of Ceres, including Boop, managed to get out of synch with Earth by nearly ten minutes?”

Drew nodded solemnly. “Yes. That doesn’t happen. We’re using ovenized quartz oscillators in our time servers, they lose like a second every fifty years. And we account for Relativity, too.”

“And that was just missed somehow?” Adele seemed understandably incredulous.

“The mis-match was so huge that the servers assumed there was an error and requested an update from the atomic clock Earthside. That re-adjusted all the timepieces on base, the scheduled comms and supplies jumps… everything. And because the update had a valid explanation…” Drew shrugged. “It’s not like these systems were designed to accommodate causality manipulation. Especially not across the entire asteroid. That’s a five-hundred-kilometer radius temporal dilation field somebody put up.”

Adele shook her head disbelievingly. “How in the heck didn’t we notice that then? Wouldn’t that involve a lot of energy?”

“Yup. Just as much as, say, one of the ore drones needs to go to warp.” Drew grimaced. “Once we knew what to look for, the timing was immaculate. ”

“And how didn’t we notice ten minutes suddenly going missing in our day?”

Drew shrugged. “A-shift was asleep, B-shift were busy, and most of C-shift were watching the season finale of Four Branches,” he said. “What were you doing halfway through B-shift that day?”

“Uh…I think I was reviewing the proposal for expanding the habitation levels and adding a creche,” Adele frowned. “…Or the monthly shareholder report. One of the two.”

“Right. You weren’t watching the clock, at least. You were working. And you don’t work to the clock anyway, do you?”

Adele shook her head. Much like Drew, she didn’t have that luxury: she worked until her In tray was empty. If that meant a fifteen-hour day, then she worked a fifteen-hour day.

“Right,” Drew repeated.

“So where does this leave us?”

“It’s a rabbit hole, at least. I don’t know how deep it goes or what kind of wacky fun we’ll find down it, but it’s more than we had yesterday.”

“It rules out the APA though, doesn’t it? Temporal manipulation is a Hierarchy trick.”

“Ergh…” Drew squirmed a little. “In theory, temporal manipulation and warp technology are the exact same thing. We just haven’t figured out how it’s done, yet. But the only difference between a stasis generator and a warp drive is what kind of a pretzel they make out of spacetime.”

“There’s a comforting thought…” Adele muttered.

“Why, what could possibly be alarming about manipulating the curvature of the universe?” Drew asked. It made her laugh a little at least. “I mean… you’re right. The only people we know use that trick are Hierarchy.”

“Which means they’re our number one suspect now. We’re absolutely sure that nobody is implanted?”

“Absolutely everyone is accounted-for and checked. There isn’t a single cerebral implant on this asteroid, guaranteed.”

“So we have a Hierarchy trick, but no biodrone…” Adele sighed and brushed some stray hair out of her face. She looked as tired as Drew felt. “That’s going to be fun when I explain it to our friends from AEC… But does it explain how the bomb went missing, or who took it?”

“Not exactly. Actually, it massively increases the number of suspects. The time… thing… happened exactly after the missing bomb had been signed for and loaded but before the magazine was locked up. That all happened, while Boop was still docked, so the list of suspects now includes everyone in the loading bay too.”

“…Wonderful. One step forward, three backwards.”

“Sorry Adele. There’s still a lot we want to dig through, hopefully now that we know where to look some more clues will fall out.”

“Before you do that, Drew…” Adele’s tone was careful.

“What?”

“It was Drew M’s idea to check that detail, you said?”

“Yes…?”

Adele fidgeted by tapping a nail on her desktop twice before standing up. “…He was on Boop when this happened,” she pointed out. “Which means he’s a suspect.”

“I thought we all are,” Drew retorted. “We’re all under investigation aren’t we?”

“The whole company is under investigation. That’s not the same thing as each individual being a suspect. You have an absolutely airtight alibi and so do I: Neither of us were on the ship or in the loading bay when that bomb went missing. He was.”

Drew shook his head. “Adele, he’s given us the first breakthrough of the investigation. You can’t seriously be telling me you suspect him!”

“I know he’s your best friend. And I agree that coming up with that is a point in his favor. But yes, I suspect him. We have to. So I have to question why you’re allowing him to help in the investigation.”

“Because he’s…. He wouldn’t!” Drew floundered. “Adele, be reasonable–”

“I am. You’re the one who’s putting loyalty ahead of reason.” She stood square in front of him, and not for the first time Drew found himself marvelling at just how much presence an aging Korean woman six inches shorter than him could muster. Adele never looked up at anybody, even when she was in fact physically aiming her face upward. “The stakes are too high for that, Drew.”

“He’s given us our first thread to pull on! That’s a direct sabotage of this bomb heist!” Drew argued. Anger and outrage on his friend’s behalf were warring with the fact that on some level he knew Adele had a point.

“Or a red herring to sabotage the investigation.”

“Oh, come on–!”

“Drew.” She cut him off with just his own name. “…You know I’m right.”

Drew shook his head sharply. “I know damn well that you’re not, and I’m going to prove it.”

“Please do,” she said evenly. “But until you do, I don’t want him taking any further part in the investigation.”

Drew glared at her. He didn’t voice the thought that slipped darkly into his head that out of everyone here, Adele had had the most direct contact with the enemy. Who knew what they could have done to her during her abduction? She was well-placed to sabotage the investigation herself, after all.

But, damn her, she was right. There were very few people on Ceres who weren’t suspect, and the most suspect were those who’d actually been on I Met God And She Booped My Nose. There was no getting around that. Not without solid evidence. And as much as it infuriated him right now, Drew prided himself on trying to be a rational, practical sort of man.

He backed down. “…I don’t like it. But alright.”

She nodded primly. “Thanks… is there anything else I can do for you right now, Drew?”

“No, thank you Adele. I’m… I need to let Drew know. And get some sleep, I guess.”

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Sure. See you tomorrow.”

He left her office feeling deeply frustrated. He’d gone in with such good news, and now…

Nothing for it. They at least had a breakthrough. Even without Drew moving forward, he’d given them something to work at.

That would have to be enough.

Date Point: 15y9m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Captain Anthony Costello

Firth couldn’t even stand up straight. He was trying to stand upright, but there was barely a square inch of him that wasn’t bruised, grazed, scraped or bloody. It was more than his body could handle to actually stand properly at attention.

Arés on the other hand was merely a bit sweatier than normal, and his knuckles looked raw. Up until this moment, Costello had always reckoned the two men were about on the same level.

Firth may have believed that, too. Not anymore.

“…I presume you’ve taken a dose of Crude, Senior Master Sergeant?”

“Yessir.”

“Is there anything either of you want to comment on?”

Both men chorused a “nossir.”

“Will there be any problem going forward?”

Firth spoke up, “Nossir.” Arés glanced over at him and seemed subtly relieved.

“Hmm.” Costello nodded. They were protecting each other, which meant they were still brothers. Good. However… “…I don’t care who started this. You’re both supposed to know better. So it comes as a disappointing surprise to me that you apparently don’t. This gym is supposed to be full of servicemen getting their PT in but instead I find it full of just you two and I note that the fucking walls are damaged. Were you two role-playing as a crane and a wrecking ball?”

Neither man ventured an answer.

“This is not your personal playground. We have unit readiness to consider, and the men whose workouts you interrupted today are going to have to make up the difference later. All because the NCO in charge of physical training—that’s you, Technical Sergeant Arés—decided to interrupt them to take care of a personal squabble. Can you tell me why, exactly, you felt it necessary to literally beat your senior NCO to within an inch of his life?”

“I ain’t hurt all that bad, sir,” Firth said loyally.

“Don’t lie for him, Senior Master Sergeant. Your left eye is swollen shut, your jaw is crooked, and I’d bet a million dollars that you’ll be pissing blood later. You can barely stand at attention! Right now you’re in no fit state to wear an EV-MASS, so I definitely need to know why Warhorse here felt it was appropriate to inflict that kind of damage on you.”

Neither man said anything. Of course not.

“Right. Well, I can about guess anyway. So here’s the deal, sergeants. You’re both confined to barracks, and I don’t give one wet fart how much your wives complain. You earned this, and I will be explaining the situation to them personally.”

“Sir, I’ll be fine in–”

“I didn’t order you to fucking speak, sergeant!”

He finally got silence, save for the echo of his own voice. He let it die, glaring into Firth’s good eye until the last ring was gone, then returned his attention to Arés.

“A fine job of protecting you did just now, wouldn’t you say?”

That was almost too cruel, and had Arés on the verge of tears almost instantly. It didn’t matter, this point needed making. “I know good and damn well the Crude will have him fixed up in a day, but that doesn’t matter. What would I do without my best Aggressor?”

No answer.

“Right. Firth, you are ordered to convalesce. Arés, you are to spend every single last waking second in heavy physical training until I decide otherwise, like the immature pipeline child you so clearly are. You are going to pay for everyone’s wasted time by yourself. If I find you doing anything besides eat, sleep, or train? I am going to make this punishment formal. Once you feel up to it, Firth, you are to join him in his sentence. Do I make myself crystal clear?”

They both belted out, “Yes sir!”

“Good. Now.” Time for the carrot. “Technical Sergeant Ares, were you aware you were being considered for early promotion?”

“…No sir. I wasn’t.”

“Up until now, you were a shoo-in for STEP promotion. The Air Force saw fit to give us two slots before anyone else. Do you know how valuable those are?”

“…”

“The total number of STEP promotions number in the dozens, some years. Now I can no longer justify something like that with you, can I?”

Beating on Adam was exactly like kicking a puppy, but he needed it right now. “No sir.”

“Right. That said, your next eval is a long way away. We just did your EPR last month, after all. That gives you almost a whole year to so thoroughly impress me that I might not remember this incident when Firth here writes your next EPR. So that’s two people you will need to inspire, and one of them you just beat so hard he can’t stand up straight. You broke my walls with him. So…you’ve got a bit of a challenge ahead of you, huh?”

“Yessir.”

Costello allowed himself to soften a little. “…Understand me, sergeant. I want you to impress me. I think you can. God knows you earned those bronze stars. The Air Force needs you, and we need the best version of you. We need that noble man who has an Air Force Cross pending under his name for a mission we can’t talk about here. We don’t particularly need the fastest and strongest man to ever live as a literal uncontrollable rampaging hulk. Think you’re up to it?”

“Yes sir!”

That, Costello decided, was probably as much as he needed to do. Stick applied, carrot wafted… now for the other player in this drama.

“As for you, senior master sergeant…” he said, turning to Firth, “I don’t want to know the details. I’m pretty certain I know enough anyway. But let me ask you this: does it become a senior NCO to provoke such a pointless dick-measuring contest? Especially one you stood absolutely no goddamned hope of winning?”

Firth was not a man to be easily shamed. But he had a strong sense of duty, and pricking at that had to be the most constructive way forward.

“…Nosir. It don’t. I was stupid. Most o’ the blame lies on me.”

“Is that the sort of example you want to set?”

“…No.”

“No. And we both know you’re capable of so much more. I’ve seen your self-discipline. I know the standards you set for yourself…and I expect you to live up to them, senior master sergeant.”

“Yessir.”

“Good. Now. You two go get cleaned up and make arrangements. Call your wives, tell them you’re living in the barracks until I say otherwise. Word of advice? Don’t sugar-coat it. The spouse gossip network on base is strong… and I’m pretty sure any women who can handle you two can see through a mile of bullshit anyway.”

That earned an unconscious, rueful nod from Arés. Costello chose not to notice.

“Right. Dismissed.”

He inspected the damage to the sparring room once they were gone and had to take a moment to shake is head in disbelief.

Just…holy hell.

They hadn’t knocked out anything structural, but those were cinderblocks they’d smashed. Or, that ‘Horse had smashed using Firth. The facilities personnel were going to have conniptions when they saw it.

The interrupted servicemen who’d had their PT so rudely disrupted started trickling back in now that the Hulk and the Juggernaut weren’t duking it out any longer, and he got out of their way to let them marvel at the aftermath. He had paperwork to get back to, not to mention his own PT to think about later in the afternoon. Paperwork first: that way he could blow the mental cobwebs out, rather than going home sore and stressed.

It wasn’t really a surprise to him when he found Powell standing “innocently” in front of the vending machines in the admin building, apparently lost in deep contemplation on the finer mysteries of candy bars. He glanced over as Costello entered, and contrived to communicate with nothing more than eye contact and the faintest nod that they should chat.

Of course. Nothing escaped the CO’s attention.

“Good afternoon, sir.”

“Afternoon, Costello… finally happened, huh?”

“Finally happened, yeah. The walls in the sparring room need repairs.”

“Aye, those two. I give ‘em some allowance, because no other humans anywhere have the same load o’ testosterone messing with their minds. Even still…”

“We can’t have them indulging their worst instincts.”

“No,” Powell agreed. “You catch what it was about in the end?”

“Something about ‘Horse’s sister.”

“Fookin’ knew it would be…” Powell muttered. He sighed and punched in the code for a Snickers. When the machine as always failed to vend it properly, he slapped it high on the side and watched the ostensibly snagged bar drop into the tray. Apparently the vendors hadn’t noticed the large dent from men repeatedly striking the machine. “…They gettin’ on okay?”

“Covered for each other.”

“Aye, thought they would. This one’s been a long time comin’. Might even do ‘em good.”

Costello shrugged. “I dunno… Firth was bloody mess. Literally.”

“And Arés?”

“Not a mark on him. Incredible. An hour ago, I’d have called it a coin toss.”

Powell smiled, a little grimly. “See, that’s why I reckon it’ll be good for ‘em. Firth is prideful, getting his arse kicked like that might help him see where his weaknesses are. Might eventually get an Aggressor on ‘Horse’s level.”

“And ‘Horse needs a good hard reminder of what his responsibilities are now and then.”

“Aye. He’d become a fookin’ terror if not.”

“…He isn’t now? Firth could break anyone else in the blink of an eye, and Arés beat him stupid.”

“Aye. And that was fookin’ restrained. If he really wanted to, he could kill Firth just like that.” Powell snapped his fingers. “Maybe it’s good he sees that in himself, sometimes. It’ll absolutely be good for Firth.”

“You think?” Costello asked, deciding to grab a snack himself. “A wounded ego can set a guy back…”

“Not Firth. The thing to know about him, is he grew up the best there was. He’s got that mindset, through and through. If he’s ever to meet or beat Arés—and he may just be able to—then he needs to take himself much, much more seriously, and stop coasting on his natural ability.”

“The Crude resistance will start eventually, too. He’s running out of time.”

“Aye. And Arés will feel guilty about this little incident for a long while. He’ll probably be pushing Firth as hard as he can go… what’d you do with them, anyway?”

“Confined to barracks, and they’re to PT themselves like they’re back in the pipeline until I say stop. I figure having explain to their wives why they’re going to have to fend for themselves for a while is gonna sting, too.”

“That’s definitely gonna prick at ‘Horse. Not bein’ able to cuddle the baby.”

Costello shrugged. “He should have thought of that before he used Firth as a pinata.”

“Truth.” Powell finished his chocolate bar and carefully disposed of the wrapper. “We’re cavemen at heart. Sometimes, we need to communicate on that level, too. That’s something the more civilized o’ us tend to forget.”

Costello nodded. “Anyway. I need to get on with what I was doing.”

“Aye, me too. Have fun wi’it.”

Costello gave a nod and returned to his paperwork. At some point Martina and Freya stopped by to drop off some things with their men…neither of them seemed particularly happy.

Eventually he gave up on his paperwork and prowled down to the gym to check in and get his own lifting done. Adam was on the special heavy-duty rings with a ludicrous amount of weight chained around his waist and the gravity cranked all the way up. His headphones were on, he was somehow holding himself in an iron cross, and his expression was totally blank.

Costello knew Adam well enough to know that was him at his absolute angriest. It wasn’t wise to interrupt the Hulk while was angry, so Costello attended to his own routine. Much later, when the sun was down and he was heading home for the evening, Adam was still there on the rings, soaked from head to toe in sweat and yet more weight chained to his waist, his skin a deep ruddy red from exertion. A puddle had formed on the floor beneath him, yet he was still hauling himself up and down, and still expressionless.

Sometimes, the worst punishment anyone could endure was the one they gave themselves.

“Laid Bare—Warriors in their own words” Issue #2: Derek Coombes
Author and photographer: Ava Magdalena Ríos

“The funny thing was, it didn’t really hurt. Like, I knew I’d been shot, but the pain only came later, when I was safe. In the moment I just knew if I stayed where I was, I was dead. So, I kept moving.”

Master Sergeant Derek Coombes has a small scar just below his left shoulder blade, and a much larger one under his left armpit. These mark the places where, during a classified operation a few years ago, a bullet passed through his lung.

I was there when it happened. It was, in fact, how we met.

The details are classified and cannot be reproduced here, but I can reveal that two of Derek’s comrades fell in the line of duty that day. Derek himself only survived because, despite coughing blood and suffering from a progressively collapsing lung, he was able to talk a terrified young reporter through the lifesaving medical attention he needed.

[Image: a close shot of Coombes’ ribs, showing both entry and exit wound scars. In the background is clearly a gym, currently empty of other members.]

“So yeah. That was my second Purple Heart.”

Out of how many?

“Three.”

Coombes is now a senior NCO in the Spaceborne Operations Regiment, having previously served in the United States Army Special Forces (perhaps more widely known as the “green berets.”) He was a founding member of Joint Exo-Terran Scouts (JETS) Team One, and now oversees the administration and training of JETS teams. He is effectively “retired” from operational use and therefore agreed to an interview under his name, instead of a callsign.

And, in the interests of full disclosure, we are romantically involved. While it would usually be deeply unprofessional for a journalist to report on their partner, I hope in this case it can be forgiven as this entire project was originally Derek’s idea. He feels strongly that it is important to expose some important truths about military service, and enlisted my help in bringing them to light.

Given the photographic treatment, one might expect this to be an enjoyable project, especially between boy and girl. That would be a mistake: Today’s session was painful and raw.

[Image: Coombes covered in beads of sweat as he struggles through a bench press.]

Although the fitness standards necessary to enter basic training have changed repeatedly over the last several decades, combat arms have always demanded an absolutely relentless degree of physical fitness, and special forces in particular are expected to maintain a standard that the average civilian might think impossible. Despite moving to a desk job, Derek has maintained this high standard and he prepared for our shoot by completing “The Murph.”

Named to honor Lt. Michael P. Murphy of the US Navy SEALS, this infamous exercise challenge consists of a one mile run, a hundred pullups, two hundred situps, three hundred squats and then another mile run, all while wearing twenty pounds of weighted vest or body armour. Derek’s best time to complete this beastly challenge stands at thirty-six minutes and forty seconds: yesterday, he completed it in just over forty-two minutes, which he describes as “Not great, but not too bad for a desk jockey.”

What were the other two Purple Hearts for?

[Image: Coombes’ lean, well-trained abdomen as he does bicep curls with a barbell. There is a crescent-shaped scar halfway between his ribs and his right hip.]

“First one was shrapnel from a mortar round. Don’t think we ever figured out who fired it or where from, but it landed about… twice as far from me as where you’re standing. I was the only one got hurt, so of course I got roasted about it the whole rest of my career…”

He chuckles fondly at the memory.

And the third?

“Radiation poisoning. Can’t go into details, sorry.”

Most of his career is classified. In fact, it’s only now that he has retired to a desk job that allows him to do this interview or permits me to use his name at all. Serving Operators are usually kept anonymous.

What inspired you to enlist in the first place?

“My grandpa served. It kinda skipped a generation because he didn’t have any sons, but I remember being real proud of him and inspired by him. I didn’t sign up straight away though. I kinda had a wild phase after high school, met a girl, had a kid, got married, got divorced not long after… She got full custody. It wasn’t fair but I didn’t have the money to challenge the court ruling and I didn’t really have any good career prospects. And I guess I saw a recruiting poster and thought maybe if I went the same route grandpa did I could make him proud and make something of myself.”

Have you ever regretted it?

“Well, there was this one time I got shot that kinda sucked…”

[Image: The first full-frontal image of the article depicts Coombes laughing while hanging from a pull-up bar, chin above the line.]

“But… No. Once I was in, I realized pretty quick that I was doing what I’m good at.”

Which is?

“Killing my enemies.”

He gives that answer levelly and calmly.

Some would argue that’s not something to be proud of.

[Image: Coombes standing in the middle of the gym staring levelly and seriously into the camera.]

“That depends on who my enemy is. I can absolutely be proud of killing my enemy if my enemy is somebody who makes the world a worse place for being alive. If my enemy is the kind of monster who’d raid a school, kidnap the girls for sex slaves and murder the boys and teachers, well…sometimes people need killing.”

That isn’t your whole job though, is it?

“No, of course not. My career is all about training peoples to defend themselves. Lately that’s become very relevant with the Ten’Gewek. But even that is… I’m still training somebody else to kill their enemies. And if we’re training them, their enemy is our enemy. So it still comes back to the same thing, really.”

US Army Special Forces are known to specialize in that sort of training, and have a long history of training counter-insurgents, militias, or the armies of US-supported governments.

It’s at this point in the conversation that one of Derek’s colleagues, an utterly colossal man who uses the callsign “Righteous,” accidentally interrupts us. They catch up, Derek explains what he’s doing, and neither makes any mention of the fact that he’s standing stark naked in the middle of the gym.

[Image: Coombes exchanging a fist-bump and a joke with “Righteous,” who stands just outside the camera’s view.]

I giggle despite myself and cannot resist poking a little fun at them both once “Righteous” has gone downstairs for his workout.

You two seemed pretty comfortable just then…

“You did see what he was wearing, right?”

They were impossible to miss. Anybody who spends much time around the military will quickly become familiar with the infamous “ranger panties,” or “silkies” in naval traditions. These rather brief PT shorts are… an acquired taste of some of the combat arms. The HEAT in particular have embraced them and made a running joke of the juxtaposition between tiny shorts and the gargantuan men who wear them.

“Anyways, in this line of work, there really ain’t any secrets left to keep, you know? We’ve known each other for years anyway.”

Even still.

“What can I say? We were both young once, and we liked to party pretty hard. Something like this ain’t nothing on some of the embarrassing things we’ve got up to.”

A lot of civilians think of the military as very straight-laced and even prudish.

“Oh, fuck no, especially not in the combat arms. I’ve heard us described as the ‘campest group of straight men ever’ and it’s hard to dispute that. We share everything and there ain’t no privacy. Food, socks, whatever. If it’s cold in the field, a bunch of us might pile on top of each other just to stay warm. There’s memes on the internet about it, and everything. There’s a…uh, a closeness. Yeah. It’s hard to describe. It doesn’t feel gay at all. They’re like brothers to me.”

Most people wouldn’t feel comfortable being naked around their brother.

[Image: Coombes laughing and unscrewing his water bottle. His forearm ripples around yet another scar, its story untold.]

“Maybe not exactly like brothers, then, but that’s the word we use. It’s a close relationship. Intimate. I know things about that giant motherfucker that he won’t even admit to himself. He probably does for me, too.”

How do you cope with losing somebody you’re that close to?

[Image: Coombes staring at nothing in particular, still holding his water bottle.]

He goes silent for a very long time.

“…You don’t, really.”

That isn’t an easy statement to move past. I wait for a moment, and try to prod him for more.

You carry on, though. I’ve never known any of you to give up on anything.

“Yeah. But it’s… It’s a wound. And not like these little love taps here.”

He indicates the scars on his torso.

“[Righteous] and me, we’ve lost a hell of a lot of people over the years. Sometimes we’ll just…go have a beer or something, not say anything. Other times we’ll tell stories and it’s like it never happened, no sadness or anything.”

What about in the moment when it happens?

“That’s… hard to describe. There isn’t really any thought about it. You just act. Thinking comes after. Feeling comes after. Then and there in the moment, you just… do.”

Do what?

“…What you’re trained for. What’s in front of you. I…”

[Centerpiece Image: The focal image of the shoot depicts Coombes, still standing in the middle of the gym. His fists are balled, his body is tensed, his teeth are gritted and his eyes are screwed shut. He is very clearly fighting back some intense emotions.]

“…And then you have to trust. You have to trust that these fucking heroes you called brother weren’t wasted. That their lives actually meant something, you know? You have to go back home and try to keep moving forward and hope that maybe this time, maybe they actually bought a better future. And that’s hard to do, ‘cuz I look back through the last few decades, and I see case after case where we fucking WON, we built the impossible out of a mountain of corpses, and then it all got thrown away. And when you can look back and see that… it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for trust.

“It’s not just losing brothers that hurts, either. It’s all the killing you do on the mission, and it’s all the translators and informants who get screwed when we leave…. In war, all are equal.”

And yet, you re-enlisted.

He doesn’t answer my observation directly. Instead he nods, sits down and thinks for a little while.

“…Different guys handle it differently. [Righteous] is…he’s made for this. That’s why he’s called Righteous. If he thinks it’s the right thing to do, and for his purpose that usually boils down to ‘was it a lawful order,’ then he just…does the mission. He don’t lose a wink of sleep over it. And honestly, now that he’s married and got a kid on the way, I don’t see him getting any softer.”

And you?

“Transferring to Spaceborne Operations helped. Like, a lot. Because if there’s one area where the SOR is really blessed, it’s that we know this is an honest-to-God battle between good and evil. The entire human race is under siege and there’s no reason we can’t unleash ourselves on our enemies. They want us dead and there ain’t no way they’ll change their minds.”

[Image: Coombes looking fierce as he holds a deadlift.]

It is important to point out something interesting about Coombes: on the street, he looks and acts like an everyday fit man. There is nothing about him that might suggest his line of work, except possibly the intense way he looks at a person when they’re talking. He doesn’t swagger about, doesn’t boom or brag. Many of his fellows do, and there’s nothing wrong with that…but it is comforting on some level to know that someone like him fits in with his larger-than-life brothers.

A lot of people continue to not believe that the Hierarchy even exists.

“Yeah, I know. I’ve seen it all, the ‘official story’ bullshit and the ‘skeptic’ whatever, and I just feel like dragging those dumb fucks over to the crater that used to be San Diego and… I dunno. Pointing at it. Or dragging them to the funeral fields on Gao so they can smell the ashes. Like, some motherfuckers did that. We call them the Hierarchy, and we know they’ll do it again if they get the chance. It’s like this generation’s moon landing, or the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ dipshits, or whatever. Some people just want to live in a world where we’re the bad guys, I guess.”

We?

“The government. The military. The world is full of people who want to believe that the West is evil, even when our cities are being bombed or our children murdered. Even when our enemies literally stand up and say loud and clear what kind of a world they want to build, we’re the bad guys for saying ‘not on my watch.’ And I think that’s why my watch won’t be ending anytime soon. Not until I’m too falling-apart and useless to carry on, or until I feel safe in my gut that we’ve accomplished something no stupid motherfucker from back home can ruin.”

[Image: Coombes halfway through a clean and jerk. His expression is hard and aggressive, clearly full of concentration.]

Do you think your grandpa would be proud of you?

“I think he’d understand me. We never talked about it, but I know the stuff I’m talking about bothered him. He’d watch the news when we pulled out of…wherever…then shake his head and grumble something under his breath and have a drink. But it stopped being about making the old man proud a long time ago.”

Derek finishes his workout and moves to a floor mat to do some final stretches.

“It’s about making my brothers proud.”

[Image: Coombes stretching his back and shoulders. He is kneeling with his arms stretched out in front of him dragging along the ground, and his forehead resting on the mat. The pose and composition bring to mind the image of someone prostrating themselves in prayer.]

Author’s note: This interview was reviewed and approved by Allied Extrasolar Command and the United States Army prior to publication. The interviewee’s views are his own, and do not constitute a policy statement on behalf of the US or Allied governments.
(The full and unedited recording of Derek Coombes’ interview is available via ESNN’s Internet and infosphere pages.)

Date Point: 15y9m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Why were they all grounded?

That was the question on everyone’s mind. The entire civilian fleet was recalled either to parking orbits or brought in for maintenance. Nobody knew why, nobody was telling why.

“That’s just it. Word on the grapevine is that Hephaestus just cracked their biggest rock yet. The whole ‘Belt oughta be swarming with cargo drones scooping up chunks of platinum as big as my freaking head, but no! Every single goddamned ship here, around Earth, and even the cargo runs from trade? All recalled. Dog jumped back to Armstrong last night, said My Other Spaceship is grounded until further notice. It’s eerie is what it is.”

Allison reached out and stole a Bao off Julian’s plate. He was kinda hogging them, unusually.

“Anyway…” she took a bite. “Id ain’ juff them. It’ff uff doo.”

“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full, Allison,” Tristan pointed out helpfully.

She paused, was about to snap, then realized he was right. She grinned sheepishly and swallowed. “You’re right. I shouldn’t be rude. At my own table, no less.”

Julian just nodded and shoveled more food into his face.

“Anyway, all the training flights are cancelled,” Allison continued. “We even had to send an emergency ping to Misfit wherever they’re at.”

Xiù tilted her head. “It could be months before they synch with a station relay.”

“Mm.” Julian just nodded.

“Yyup, but you try explaining that to the humorless government men. They want Misfit back on the ground ASAP. Maybe if we’re real lucky, this whole thing’ll blow over before then, whatever it is.”

“What do you think it might be?” Xiù asked.

“Dunno. Big though. Security-related, it has to be.”

Julian grunted in what could be contrived as agreement. He was too busy chewing on bread.

“Anyway…. Whatever. I’m home now. Enough worrying about it,” Allison decided.

She’d pondered the subject at length on the drive back home, having pulled another late session to make up for her security work on the side. …Both of which, frankly, were a welcome distraction since, well…Julian was being unaccountably grumpy.

Whatever he’d been doing had pretty much taken him into magazine model territory and Allison wasn’t about to complain about that, but the cost was attitude. He knew he was being a butt, was pretty honestly apologetic and made up for it with some frankly breathtakingly athletic evenings…Which, honestly, that kind of aggression was hot as hell. He didn’t bust it out that often, but when he did…

Still. That aside, hangry Julian wasn’t a happy boy.

Except, apparently he was the opposite of that, now. She’d parked the car, come in from the garage and been stopped dead when she walked into a wall of the most delicious food smell. Apparently the whole family had been on cooking overdrive in her absence.

“Anyway. I have to ask. Why the sudden one-eighty? You’ve been literally weighing your meals on a scale since forever, now–”

“What?!” Julian laughed, “I wanted to look good for this!”

“Babe. I don’t mind the eye candy, but you’ve been grumpy the last few weeks, and pretty lethargic the last two days. And you’re practically vibrating with glee. What changed?”

He swallowed a huge bite, which he chased with a tall glass of milk, then gasped for air and burped happily. “Diet change! The shoot’s tomorrow, I’m fully depleted, ‘Horse says I’m right on track…that means I get to carb load. I get to eat all the delicious things!”

“Wait, really? How much are we talking?”

Julian brought up his “contest prep” app and showed Allison his new target macros. That was…

“Holy hell, Julian! You get to eat all that in a day?”

“Before tonight!” Julian beamed. To Allison’s left, Xiù simply nodded and loaded her own much more modest plate. Although they were both technically eating with a passenger on board now, neither of them were far enough along for that to be an excuse. Hell, by Allison’s count she wasn’t even at eleven weeks yet.

Thank goodness her stomach wasn’t being too disagreeable… but Xiù had done her research, bless her. She knew which scents and foods to avoid by now.

“Why?”

“‘Cuz my body’s basically on the edge of being starved right now! Now anything I eat, my muscles will suck right up so it won’t go anywhere else. That’s the idea, anyway. I’ll be well on the way back to normal after a couple of days…but c’mon, I wanna eat! Ooh, pasta! I can make carbonara! And maybe you can make some of your dumplings!”

Xiù talked some sense. “Pace yourself, you’re gonna make yourself sick.”

Julian grinned sheepishly, “Yes ma’am. It just feels like a reward, y’know? I can see why some guys do this.”

“…Oh God. Please tell me–!”

“Oh hell no, I’m never doing this again! At least, not except for something special, y’know? I like eating too much!”

“Okay…”

There was a sudden bzz from the charging shelf where all their phones had been set aside. House rule: no phones at the dinner table. They even had them all set to do-not-disturb mode, so if any of them buzzed, that meant it was important.

Al, being the closest, reached out and grabbed the offending item. Julian’s.

“…Email from the Ambassador,” she said.

“…So late? Well, give it over…”

His chewing paused as he read it, then nodded and handed the phone back. “…Okay. Guess I’m playing courier.”

“Courier?”

“Well, we’re goin’ out to Akyawentuo for the shoot, and apparently there’s some stuff the ambassador wants me to deliver to the researchers. It’s, uh, diplomatically sealed. I’m supposed to hand deliver it to Nutty and Chimp.”

“More security stuff, maybe?” Xiù suggested.

“I’m officially a Special Envoy. I’ve got a top secret clearance and everything, I read the cables every week with the ambassador…and he ain’t telling. Or, at least, he’s not telling me now. That means I don’t need to know just yet. That means it’s pretty important. And it means I don’t get to ask questions.”

“Still, the timing fits,” Allison said, then sighed. “I hate mysteries. Whatever. You staying out there all week?”

“Nah. I’ll be over there just for the shoot, ‘cuz I want to get back to normal before I stay. I’ll be knocking around here for a few days…looking for something to do…”

Tristan and Ramsey both stifled a giggle.

“Great. Maybe you can help me explain the shoot to Amanda. She’s convinced the social workers should be mad about it,” Allison griped.

“…This is payback for the last few weeks, isn’t it?”

“If it isn’t, it should be,” Xiù said, with a slight evil grin.

“Fine, fine!” Julian laughed and stood up, heading toward the pantry. “Still, I’m gonna be bouncing off the walls for the next couple of days…lots of pent up energy, and all…”

Xiù rolled her eyes, while Allison smirked. “Babe, you’re almost as subtle as Christian these days.”

“…I don’t get it,” Ramsey said.

“Righteous,” Allison explained. “Sorry. His first name is Christian.”

“…Oh. But he’s not subtle at all!”

“Exactly.”

“But what’s Julian not being subtle about?” Ramsey insisted.

Tristan rolled his eyes. “They’re gonna do adult things, dummy.”

“…Oh.”

A cloud of embarrassment descended on the table, getting all the thicker when Ramsey frowned and said “…You guys sure do that a lot.”

Julian, to his credit, found the way out by just doubling down on everything. “Yeah, we do! It’s because I love them!”

“…It must be pretty awesome, then.”

Oh God.

The Talk. They’d never had The Talk.

Julian and Xiu both realized it at the exact same moment that Allison did, and shot pleading looks her way.

Well.. she was their older sister after all. And there was only one thing to do in this situation: Be honest. Allison sighed and put her fork down.

“Boys…I think there’s some stuff you should know…”

Amanda’s next visit was going to be just endless fun…

Date Point: 15y9m3w AV
Occupied territory, Planet Rvzrk, Domain Space

Regaari

The Hunters kept to a routine, at least. It was undisciplined and sloppy, but predictable. In theory, destroying the suppressor was going to be simple.

In practice, Regaari needed something to actually destroy it with. His carbine simply wasn’t going to cut it. Nor would the armory of abandoned pulse rifles he’d found.

If he’d had an anti-materiel rifle he could have crippled the generator from the comfort and safety of a distant rooftop. With explosives, he might creep up and wreck it. But there was, alas, only so much room on his body to carry toys, and with this being primarily a scouting mission, it had all been taken up with less destructive stuff.

So. Option One was to exfiltrate and bring down a support drop from the fleet via a UAV on the same polar approach he’d used. And then bring it back into the city. That was a lot of things that could go wrong.

Option Two was to procure what he needed locally. The problem there was that everything the Domain forces had that might be useful had already been picked over by the Hunters and transferred to a secure facility.

Was there an Option Three?

There were military assets on-planet, in the form of the Domain’s local guard. They might be woefully inadequate to the job of repelling the Hunters, but they’d still have suitable tools and weapons. If they could be persuaded to apply themselves in just the right place…

…The problem with that solution was that it felt uncomfortably like throwing meat at the problem.

…Maybe he only needed to disrupt it for a moment. Just long enough for a force to come through and properly destroy the generator.

Okay…

He shifted across his rooftop and aimed his scope down the street, tracing the course of one of the fat power cables that kept the generator supplied. The problem with worker Hunters was that they were frustratingly competent and focused. Where their toothy brethren seemed to focus only when there was violence imminently at hand, the workers thought of everything. The power supply was redundant, surge-protected, and flowed alongside regular patrol routes where any sabotage could be swiftly detected. There was probably no help there.

Option two… cut the power entirely. It didn’t matter how clever their system was if there was nothing for it to draw from. But how many sources were there? Power plants, a dam, forcefield solar collection…

Option three: damage the generator, in such a way as to require repairs. That, he could do: He had a whole paw full of fusion claws. At the very least, he’d be able to physically jam it into the power distributor…and spectacularly electrocute himself in the process . It’d be suicide, but it’d work.

Call that one ‘Operation No Other Option.’ He’d need to think of a suitably memetastic re-naming if he ever got the chance to tell the story.

Dammit, if it was any other kind of target he’d just call a precision RFG down on its head. But the fact that it was a planetary wormhole suppressor completely precluded that option by definition. Any ship wanting to get close enough to drop one would have to approach under the range of superluminal guns, and without the ability to blink-jump there was no dodging… those…

…He was being a complete fucking idiot.

He didn’t need an RFG, this was a static target. It couldn’t dodge! And the ships in orbit had superluminal guns of their own that were precise enough to hit a ship-sized target from light-seconds away. All he needed to do was give them sufficiently accurate coordinates and they could sink a hail of 40mm high explosive rounds into the damn thing.

He didn’t need to disrupt the generator. All he needed to do was disrupt the shields.

To be fair, Regaari was a spymaster and a master spy by trade. This kind of work was really for the Stonebacks. Or the Human’s combat controllers. Righteous or Starfall would have figured this out instantly.

…One more detail to edit out of the retelling. For the sake of the story, of course.

Anyway. He had a plan. A momentary disruption of the compound’s protective shields, followed by an immediate attack by naval fire, followed by an immediate assault by Stoneback’s Fangs. HEAT may not even need to be involved for this! They’d done so much for the Gaoian cause, and it seemed cruel and weak to keep going back to them for help…

All he needed to do now was communicate that plan. Fortunately, plain ‘ol directed laser communications were essentially undetectable and unjammable so unless the Hunters had for some reason opaqued their shields across all the wavelengths he was using—which they hadn’t—he just needed a sheltered spot to set up his retroreflector.

The Great Father could probably have a force assembled within a day. HEAT would, of course, be ready within the hour. The real question was one of orbital mechanics and timing.

He slipped off the rooftop and scuttled down the wall. He’d found a suitable spot a few days earlier, tucked away in the goods receiving bay at the back of a supermarket. It stunk of rotting vegetables, which the Hunters ignored, but that was exactly why it suited his purposes. There was nothing there they might want.

Nevertheless, he scouted the spot carefully before returning. He’d lost one paw to an unexpected Alpha back on Capitol Station, and survived only because Warhorse had arrived like a particularly heavy cavalry. That wouldn’t happen, here. If he slipped up now, the whole mission went with him.

As predicted, the yard was empty so he dropped into the cover it afforded and lasered the sky. His suit’s computer took a few minutes to finally locate something it could talk to, in the form of one of the Bulldog drones. That in turn put him in touch with Genshi, Garaaf and Admiral Caruthers.

“Father, this is Naughty Cub. Mother locked the kitchen door tight. Let’s play Big Surprise…”

He explained the plan.

They approved.

Date Point: 15y9m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Air Engineering Technician Jack “Two-Seventy” Tisdale

HEAT technicians gossiped about their Operators, naturally. It was hard not to, when their daily routines revolved around what the Operators were up to. Jack knew Moho’s timetable probably better than Moho himself did, and of course that went for everyone else.

So when ‘Horse and Righteous got themselves confined to barracks for a week after bloody breaking the gym… It got noticed. Hargreaves, Doyle, Deacon and Brown all got pissy about it, but… well, there was nothing to be done. Besides, it wasn’t like they were confined to barracks, so all that really happened was they got their schedule changed unexpectedly.

In the end, Miller had told them to suck it up: “That’s the Service, guys. Deal with it.”

It was hard not to speculate about the change in behavior, though. Everyone knew that ‘Horse had absolutely pasted Firth, which was…terrifying. That had made things pretty damn awkward between their technicians too, since techs tended to be loyal to their “Lad.” Deacon in particular had been visibly biting her tongue a few times.

What got everyone talking was how conflicted ‘Horse got over it all afterward, though. And Jack, allegedly, was the expert on all things Warhorse thanks to having grown up being babysitted by him, so…

“Look, I don’t know what you want me to say. He’s never been one to back down from a fight. Like, ever. And that was before he started getting really big around sixteen, too. But he’s also…Adam.”

This was, in Jack’s mind, a sufficient description. Miller clearly felt differently.

“Yeah, we know he’s Adam, dumbass,” she chided affectionately. “You got anything better for us than his fuckin’ name?”

“He’s a big goofball! Like, Gods! I only just met Daar the one time, right? Those two are almost exactly the same. At least, I think so.”

“Goofballs don’t beat their wingmen almost to death,” Brown pointed out angrily.

“And goofballs don’t nuke their own world to kill off hordes of zombies,” Jack retorted. “And yet, Daar did.”

“The Great Father is not a goofball!” one of Faarek’s technicians, Shigu, objected with a sniff.

“…Look, I don’t mean any offense, right? But yes he is. Do you remember the song he was singing when he was digging holes in the Pit? He was still the Great Father, and he was still digging holes, and he was still singing along to an internet meme while he was doing it.”

Miller nodded fervently. She always had his back.

“That was, like, strategic necessity though,” Brown said. “Not gettin’ so fuckin angry that he left Firth pissing blood!”

“…This isn’t the first time I’ve seen him rage out on someone. Like, I don’t mean now that he’s on the Crude, either. There was this one kid when he was…I dunno, fifteen? The other kid was bigger, taller. Adam was pretty lanky still. They were friends. I don’t remember what they were mad about. Well, they got into a fight, and Adam damn near put him in the hospital. The only reason it didn’t get worse was because his dad stepped in before Adam beat him silly.”

“Yeah, this is a real cuddle-toy you’re describing here, Tisdale,” Brown snarked.

Jack shook his head “Let me finish… You know what he was like for the next couple of months? He did everything for that kid. He was so mad at himself that he was practically groveling. It was so bad the other kid had to slap him one day and tell him to man up. They’re still friends.”

“He’s a man of big everything,” Miller said. “Including passions. Shit, if he wasn’t, d’you think he’d be where he is doing what he does now?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah. The thing you need to know about Adam, is he’s just intense. And that includes being an intense goofball. He’s been that way as long as I’ve known him. Hell! There was this older Aggressor he used to hang out with when he was planning to enlist. Jones?”

Deacon nodded solemnly. “Yeah. Legsy.”

“I used to see him around town, back before the SOR even existed. Real close to colonel Powell, all that. Adam was just a kid he took under his wing, but was already outlifting him the day they met. Even Legsy was a bit scared of Adam. Wouldn’t you be? But that’s the thing. Adam joined up because of the PJ’s motto. That’s what he is under it all. His, uh, ‘default state’ is that he wants to hug and snuggle everyone and keep them safe. Maybe he just gets confused sometimes. Especially where family’s concerned.”

He paused. “…Believe me, I get that one,” he added.

None of the others responded to that, though Miller put a warm hand on his back and rubbed slightly.

“…Anyway, it’s done,” Deacon said at last. “Captain stepped in, sorted it out. And shit, I would not wanna be in their shoes going home to Freya and Marty!”

That broke the ice. There were laughs, Brown relaxed and nodded and the conversation moved on to other topics, like what tactics to use against Faarek now that he’d joined the base Warhammer league.

Jack didn’t play, so he just sat back and browsed randomly on his phone. And why not? The suits were all in perfect condition, except for the five currently being worn by Sikes, Newman, Parata, Butler and Murray, who were doing training exercises over in the simulator. For everyone else, today was shaping up to be a boring day at the office. They’d checked the workshop was as scrupulously clean as it could be, run daily diagnostics… Everyone was caught up on their education and PT for the week.

It wasn’t often they got a genuine dose of nothing-to-do, and…

…and a thought popped into his head.

“…Y’know…” he said, into a lull in the incomprehensible discussion about Miller’s Space Wolves.

“What?”

“I just had an idea about how we can maybe get back at those two for pissing all over our schedules…”

The crew perked up at the prospect of Shenanigans, but alas it wasn’t to be. Before Jack could explain his idea, there was the sound of heavy footsteps outside, and Jacobs, one of Captain Costello’s techs, pushed the door open.

“We’re on cold standby,” he said.

There were groans, but they all got up. “Any idea why?” Deacon asked.

“Captain didn’t say.”

Cold Standby meant the HEAT was pulled out of their usual training rotation and given exactly one job: stay at peak mission readiness so they could jump into their suits at a moment’s notice. From cold standby, the unit could deploy anywhere in the galaxy inside an hour.

Fortunately, there was, yet again, not too much work for them to do. All there was had to do with tidying up and stowing tools in their ready position, and getting the suit frames into position. That went pretty quick for everyone but the Beef’s suits, as those were so heavy it took two techs just to wrestle the loaded staging frame into position.

Still. It didn’t take them long, at which point the four looked at each other, nodded, and made their way to the barracks across the road, then climbed up to the third floor. The briefing would likely be held in the Lad’s day room.

Everyone piled in at about the same time, with Christian and Adam being the last and arriving together. Presumably, their wives weren’t too happy with having just re-gained their husbands only to have them dropped into mission standby.

It was hard to see how the two were getting on at first as they weren’t talking much.

Adam was… well, he was doing exactly what Jack had predicted. He was trying to Make It All Better. It was like watching the biggest puppy ever who’d just been told off and wanted to make up.

Firth plopped down on the couch and pulled the huge lump into a sideways shoulder-hug, then beckoned for Blaczynski to join him. They got comfortable—the Operators always got comfortable first—and then it was up to the techs to find whatever little nooks and crannies were left over to squeeze into.

Costello arrived shortly after Jack found a mercifully crush-free spot on the floor next to Moho, and launched into the briefing with only the minimum of preamble.

“Regaari’s made contact,” he said. “And he has a viable plan for killing the Hunter suppressor on Rvzrk. The Great Father wants to send in his Fangs and secure a landing, at which point he intends to ram the Grand Army right down the Hunter’s throats. He plans a total liberation of Rvzrk. Our mission is to recover Regaari and several high-value persons that have managed to evade capture.”

Shim raised a paw. “Does the Great Father intend to take part in this mission?”

“Reluctantly, no. His bit comes later. The date of his coronation has been set. We are cordially invited to attend, and we will be expected to deploy almost immediately after that. The exact timeline is dependent on Regaari. After that, the Fangs will have probably weeks of hard fighting on their hands to properly secure a beachhead. They need to clear the city, and probably level it in the process. General Staff’s objective is to set up a tandem array much like we had when we deployed the Eighty-Second to Gao. Once that is ready, the Grand Army will march. I have little doubt Daar will be there, crown on head.”

“So, what are our immediate orders, sir?” Firth asked

“Light duty, keep carbed up and ready until ordered otherwise. We’re not on lockdown, but you are not to travel outside Folctha. Firth will stand up a CQ and all of you, techs included, will keep your phones on your person at all times. You know the drill. No alcohol, either. Oh, and that coronation thing…mess dress uniforms, Lads. Given this is for Daar…”

Faarek duck-nodded. “He deserves our very best. I’ll send a message to a groomer I know from Lavmuy. He’s good.”

“I’ll see to the uniforms personally, sir” Adam chipped in. “Uh, but I may need to make a trip to London…”

Costello nodded. “Authorized, and you may use your travel card to pay for it all. Please get a good receipt so the people in accounting can untangle it later. Anything else?”

Judging from the silence, the answer to that was a solid “No.”

“Excellent. Until further notice, you are all on individual training time. Dismissed.”

And that was that. The Operators disentangled themselves off the couch and went to get their stuff together, and the Techs were alone again.

“You were saying?” Miller asked.

“Hm?”

“You had an idea for getting back at those two.”

“Eh. I was going to suggest we give them both nothing but the lime flavour drink next time they were doing in-suit training.” Both Adam and Firth hated the lime flavour.

Doyle considered it. “…Not bad. Guess it’ll have to wait, though.” Messing with mission gear, even food, was not a good idea.

“Sure.”

“Wish we could go to the coronation, though…” Miller sighed. For some inexplicable reason she had a soft spot for royalty, especially when it came to the Duke of Sussex, but she’d take what she could get. “I bet it’ll be a hell of a sight…”

“We were invited…”

“Well… yeah… but we probably should stay here and make sure everything’s ready.”

Jack laughed and opened the door. “Don’t tell me you’re being responsible?”

“Hey, I’m responsible for a lot!” She objected. “…But this is really for them. They’ve bled together. Let them have it, y’know?”

“Yeah…”

“How come you’re not interested in going, anyway?”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t like it. I mean… He doesn’t want it, you know? I don’t think I can enjoy watching him give away what little freedom he has left.”

“…Dude. He’s the Great Father. He’s arguably the freest person alive! He can do damn near anything he wants!”

“He’s the most powerful person alive,” Jack retorted. “That’s not the same thing as being free.”

“You’re talking about the same guy who sneaks through the portal to buy ice cream for Naydra, just ‘cuz he wants to! I don’t know how he manages to ditch his staff every single time…”

“Yeah. Sneaks. He should be sending someone to run his errands for him. He’s rebelling when he does that.”

Miller went silent, looked like she wanted to argue for a moment, then shook her head and dropped it. “…You made me want ice cream now.”

That, Jack had to admit, sounded like a good solution. “Sounds good.”

After all, if you couldn’t fix something, why worry about it?

Date Point: 15y9m3w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Unexplored Space

Darcy

“Does it seem… different to you lately?”

“What?”

“The Entity. It’s actin’ different, dude, I swear it is.”

Darcy sighed and set aside her work as Lewis sat down. She was sitting drinking a Moroccan Mint tea in the station’s rec lounge, with its spectacular view of the gas giant Durin and its spinning dance of moons. It was easily the most interesting backdrop she’d ever had to work against, and she never quite got tired of it, even though the landscape immediately around Mrwrki itself was rather dull and desolate.

“Honestly, it’s hard to tell,” she said. “It’s never quite been the same twice whenever I interact with it.”

“Bet that makes your job fifty shades of fun.” Lewis muttered. He threw his head back and massaged his scalp: clearly something was stressing him out. Considering how near-terminally laid-back he was, that was saying something.

“Trouble in your lab?”

“Eh. More philosophisin’ and big questions over, like, V-N probes and stuff this morning, and now we’ve had a big setback on the footballs.”

“And where does the Entity come in?” Darcy asked.

“I tried to pick its brains now that it’s decided to speak English allatime. I figure, it knows a butt-boat about the Hierarchy, maybe it’s got some insight into how footballs work…”

“And?”

“And I got a zen fuckin’ koan as far as I can tell.”

“It… may not have understood the question. Even though it’s taken to using the Ava-construct more now, I sometimes wonder how accurately that construct can translate concepts from meatspace to dataspace.”

“Dude, that thing is fuckin’ ghoulish anyway. Like, I can read her articles if I feel like seeing some military dude’s dick, and then go talk about it with a digital clone of her that got–”

Darcy interrupted him. “I know what happened to her. It.” After all, it weighed on her conscience.

“…Right. Sorry, dude.” Lewis shifted and frowned.

“…Makes me wonder, though.”

“What?”

“Well, if it’s filtering your questions through her memories, then maybe the reason you got such a head-scratcher was because the memories don’t know some of the terminology,” Darcy suggested. “The real Ava Ríos is a journalist. She’s a very intelligent woman, but so am I and most of what gets discussed on this station goes right over my head. I bet she wouldn’t be able to define a…a fermion, say, if her life was riding on it. Never mind however the hell a system defence field works.”

“…Makes sense,” Lewis admitted. “Could be I—”

“Lewis!”

He was interrupted by two of the station’s resident ETs; their resident Corti Vakno, and a more recent arrival from Clan Highmountain called Wilo. Both suffered from a similar problem, in that they had no problem at all with just butting in on a conversation and interrupting it. Apparently that was the only way to get anything said among Highmountains, and Vakno was simply too brusque to care.

“Big news!” Wilo said. “Even when we factor the Sol Neutrino Clock into Bartlett’s Equation, we still get an open topology.”

Whatever that meant, Lewis immediately lost all interest in the Entity and gave them his full attention. “No shit? Deetz!”

What followed was the most bewildering conversation Darcy had ever heard, peppered here and there with words like “Euler,” “non-orientable,” “homotopy” and “dude.” They spent several minutes scribbling on a paper napkin in three different sets of mathematical symbols, producing something that may as well have been a demonic summoning for all Darcy could tell.

Eventually she’d had enough. It would have been more polite to make her excuses and leave them to it, maybe, but she was honestly curious to know what the hell was so important.

“Guys… Guys!” She finally managed to break through the academic trance they’d entered.. “…Could you maybe dumb it down a bit? Start from the top: What’s the Sol Neutrino Clock? I mean, I’ve heard of neutrinos but explain them like I’m five years old.”

Lewis chewed this thumbnail for a second, then launched into an education. “Neutrinos are super-tiny particles that don’t hardly interact with the kind of stuff we’re made from at all. Like, Erebor—” he gestured through the window at the bloated red star they were orbiting “—is spittin’ out fuckzillions of the things a day, and tens of billions’ll pass through your thumbnail every second. But you won’t notice.”

“Because they’ll just… what? Slide right through me?”

“Dude. Over your whole lifetime you’ve maybe got a one-in-four chance of one of those neutrinos deigning to interact with one of your atoms.” Lewis grinned. “Which makes detectin’ them a bitch, right?”

“I can see how it would,” Darcy agreed. “But we have detectors?”

“Oh, shit yeah. Big ones buried deep underground, where they can control for shit like cosmic rays and stuff. And, y’know, they’re sensitive enough that the dudes at the detector in Japan actually managed to take a picture of the sun. From underground. At night. Through the Earth.”

Vakno actually tilted her head in a subtle Corti display of being impressed.

“And the clock?” Darcy repeated.

“For the last six years, every neutrino detector on Earth has consistently detected a periodic signal spike.” Vakno explained.

“Exunctly,” Lewis said, causing Wilo to flick his ear at the joke pronunciation and give him a strange look. “Something out there’s ticking like a goddamn clock and every… twenty-three weeks or so? Yeah. It spits out as many neutrinos in one second as the sun generates in a month. Prevailing hypothesis is that it’s the Sol Field.”

“…Why?”

“My hypothesis,” said Wilo, “is that the shield must radiate excess energy, as all things must. However, the nature of the barrier’s phase-space geometry means it cannot simply radiate this away as you and I do, via heat glow. This is why you are visible on an infrared camera. Doing that would make it a tangible object. Why the conjectured radiative process uses neutrinos specifically remains a mystery.”

“But we’ve only been detecting this ‘clock’ for six years?” Darcy asked. “The Sol shield went up fifteen years ago.”

“Possibly it took ten years to reach saturation,” Vakno suggested. “It would depend on how the shield works, exactly.”

“And that’s where we got to discussin’ the math,” Lewis finished.

“And that’s where you hit a snag,” Darcy surmised.

“…Yeah. ‘Cuz the math don’t work, dude.”

“We have rather painstakingly demonstrated the expressive equivalence of what we’ve written,” Vakno said, then caught Darcy’s expression. “…All of our symbolic grammars are logically identical.”

“Math works the same everywhere,” Lewis translated.

“Thanks, Lewis, I got that.”

“And we have taken these field equations and set them loose among some of the greatest minds our species have,” Vakno continued. “All three have come to the same conclusion: these equations describe a phase-space that is not topologically closed.”

“And that’s the snag?” Darcy checked.

“Indeed.”

”Because…?”

“Either our math—and I don’t mean we made a mistake, I mean all math—is wrong… or the shields don’t work how we think they work,” Wilo explained.

“…Okay. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but when you say ‘how we think,’ my concern is going to be about the shield bit of this. What do you mean by ‘the shield doesn’t work?’”

“It… ain’t an electrostatic field like the ones around this station. We’ve known that for, like, yonks,” Lewis said. “An ES field operates at lightspeed, but a star system is light-hours across.”

“And yet a ‘football’ creates a field that places it in direct superluminal causal contact with events at the field antinode,” Vakno said.

“It still blocks stuff, even though it should take hours to notice that stuff happening,” Lewis supplied.

“…Yes, thanks Lewis…” Darcy nodded.

“Dude, you did ask me to dumb it down.”

“The upshot of all this is that the shield works, but we don’t know how or why it works,” Wilo summarized.

“And as a Human aphorism has it: A weapon you do not know how to use belongs to your enemy,” Vakno finished.

“And we’re back to square one on figuring it out,” Lewis added.

“It is… vexing,” Vakno admitted. “And the Guvnurag are not around any longer to seek their insight… with the exception of one, whose greatest contribution to the galaxy is a gluten-free fruit pie.”

“Harsh, dude,” Lewis muttered. He was very fond of Vedreg.

“I don’t understand. If we don’t know how they work, how are we able to build and use them?” Darcy asked.

“Because the schematics that Clan Whitecrest stole are in a universal blueprint format that any nanofactory can read and that anybody can load into the factory and hit ‘print,’” Wilo said. “From a security perspective, that’s hardly ideal. From a practicality perspective… well, it’s the only source of footballs we have. Figuring out how they work is important, therefore.”

Darcy nodded her total agreement to that sentiment.

“How close are we?” she asked.

“It could be lifetimes, or it could be months,” Vakno prevaricated. “It rather depends on whether the shields are genuinely an original Guvnurag invention, or whether they were inserted by a Hierarchy for some purpose.”

“Like, uh… is that likely?” Lewis asked. “I know they got their fingers in a lotta pies, but we can’t assume everything is their doing, dude…”

“That’s just the problem. We have no way of knowing,” Darcy sighed. “And it’s not paranoia–”

“–If they’re really out to get you. Yeah.”

“…I’ll see if I can get some comprehensible answers out of the Entity. But I suspect I’ll need a carrot of some kind. It’s on our side, but we’d pay anybody else.”

“Handing out carrots is way above all our grade, dude,” Lewis pointed out.

“True. Still. I’ll think of something…” Darcy stood up. “I’ll get out of your way so you don’t have to dumb it down any longer.”

“‘Preciate it… Lucy said to remind you about Girl’s Night on Wednesday.”

Darcy smiled. Mrwrki’s staff didn’t exactly have a fifty-fifty gender split, so of course Girl’s Night had become a thing. An opportunity to escape the relentless maleness even though really all they did was drink fruit juice and play cards. They’d considered inviting Vakno but… well, Corti really didn’t engage with the concept of gender at all. And in any case playing poker against somebody with a completely expressionless face and an eidetic memory probably wouldn’t be much fun.

“I never forget,” she promised.

She returned to her office with a head full of thoughts, and sat down at her desk to consider them. Apparently the Entity was watching, because it promptly manifested its avatar on her desktop. She’d never quite worked up the courage to tell it that she really, really felt uncomfortable seeing a tiny holographic Ava in front of her.

…At least she’d persuaded the damn thing to put some clothes on it.

“Hello, Darcy.”

“Hey.” She had to smile—It was so innocent, in its strange way.

“How was your break?”

“Very interesting.” Darcy opened a new file and spent a few seconds considering how to phrase her questions. “…You spoke with Lewis.”

“We did, yes.”

“He didn’t really like the answers you gave for him.”

“His questions were… difficult. Questions about matterspace are always difficult.”

Darcy nodded, and settled on her approach.

“…Let me ask a dataspace question then,” she said. “…Did the Guvnurag invent the system defence fields? Or did the Hierarchy implant the idea?”

The answer surprised her.

“Both.” The Ava-construct offered a very human shrug and apologetic smile. Too much so. One could almost believe she was alive. “Let me explain…”

Date Point: 15y9m3w
Folctha Jump Array, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Ava had about half an hour to kill before the scheduled jump to Akyawentuo, and was using it to put in a little creative contribution to some of the other stories her colleagues at ESNN were working.

There was plenty to choose from, today. The Cimbrean seed vault—a direct copy of the one in Svalbard, built way down in Cimbrean’s antarctic circle—had taken receipt of its first delivery from the parent facility. In theory, between the two vaults, tens of thousands of Earthling flora and fungi were now permanently protected against extinction, or the vagaries of misapplied genetic manipulation.

Then there was the human gene vault at the same facility. In theory, even if the whole bunker completely lost power the samples would remain frozen. The temperatures down there were sub-zero up there all year round.

Ava’s own genes were in that vault. When the project had come knocking around Folctha asking for sample volunteers, she’d jumped at it. Adam and Marty had contributed too… in the end, about eighty percent of Folctha’s population had donated to the gene vault. It made sense: not only were the samples local and therefore easy to safely transport to safe keeping, but Folctha was a genetically diverse place, being almost exclusively populated by immigrants.

It was also, being honest, a bit flattering. They didn’t archive everyone’s genes, even if they took samples from all comers.

Actually… there was an interesting angle.

She left a comment on their group project. ‘IIRC there were some protests and angry letters from disability rights activists. The vault refused samples with BRCA1, Downs and other stuff. Could be worth a paragraph.’

The reply was instant. ‘That’ll poke the hornet’s nest. I like it.’ Jason. ‘Might do an interview with one of the so-called human supremacists who keep trying to hand out flyers near the alien quarter.’

Their Gaoian reporter, an especially fiery female called Minyi, replied to that one with a laughing emoji. ‘I’ll do it! Just to really screw with them.’

Ava giggled and replied. ‘That little head-turn and questioning voice you do so well…oh God. Film it, please! I’ll be too busy for the next four hours or so.’

‘Filming nekkid hot man-candy, got it. ;) ’ Zöe added. Zöe was probably Ava’s favorite coworker, and treated the whole Laid Bare series with just the right kind of irreverence. She was looking after Hannah for the next few hours while Ava was offworld.

‘Shooting a serious exposé on the emotional difficulties of blah blah blah… I admit, I’m gonna enjoy this one. :p’ Ava replied ‘Though…not for the reason I bet you think.’

‘Talk about it someplace else please, girls,’ Jason requested. ‘We have an article to work on.’

That was fair enough. Ava clicked the tick icon on his comment and left the discussion to carry on without her.

Julian arrived, as ever, almost literally right before he was needed, this time with a rather comical pile of trunks and other such things under his arms. She snapped a shot without even thinking. He bounced up cat-like to the platform—apparently they knew him pretty well—let it all fall to the platform’s grates without much care, and prowled over to say hello.

“Professor Hurt and his dang books…Miss Ríos. Hi!”

She frowned at him. “…Miss Ríos? Really?”

He chuckled uncomfortably, stuck his hand out and shook hers with excessive formality and a wry grin on his face. Okay. He was nervous, doing business with a friend. And covering for it with a joke.

Well, she could play along. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mister Esticitty. Though I specifically requested a nude shot, not a Seran-wrapped model.”

“Wh–? Oh. Right. Sorry, I was running errands and the only thing I have that isn’t, like, dressy or whatever is my black t-shirts. Besides, these are actually super nice in the heat.”

“You could stand to up your shirt a few sizes…”

“Yeah, but people charge way too much for bigger. I ain’t paying fifty pounds for a damn t-shirt!”

“The jeans, though?”

“They’re comfy and they breathe! Adam made them for me, see? They stretch a little! They’re also pretty nice for hot weather, ‘cuz it’s just muggy as hell on Akyawentuo. Plus, I mean. It’s not like I’ll be wearing it for long.”

Ava glanced down at her own clothing. She was wearing hiking shorts and the halterneck top she usually took to the beach.

“Is this okay?”

“Uh…well, you might wanna ditch the boots when we get there, but the rest should be fine.”

“Just how humid is it?”

He glanced at his watch “This time of day, it’s usually about forty degrees centigrade and at the dew point. So… yeah.”

“That’s…” she calculated furiously. “…About a hundred and five in American?”

“Yup. Unless they’ve had rain come through today, the air’s gonna be chewy.”

“Hm. Great.”

“There’s a reason the People don’t wear anything. Hell, they think the science team are nuts. Being honest I kinda agree, too. Like, shorts and a thin top like you have is almost too much some days.”

Ava didn’t get the chance to reply to that, as the first alarm went to tell them to make sure all their stuff was safe inside the jump platform. An attendant jogged around the outside of the Array, making sure absolutely nothing was intersecting the dim holographic outline that had shimmered into life around them.

In theory there were safety sensors too, so even if Ava had made a mad suicidal lunge for the field boundary at the last second, the Array would have sensed it and aborted the jump. But Jump Array staff took safety very seriously. It was the one mode of travel that had never yet had a fatal accident.

Julian put his broad paw on her upper back. “Be careful. The sudden gravity is—”

thump

Ava felt herself wanting to fall backwards, but she was no stranger to supergravity transitions anyway. Still, he held her up while she regained her bearings. “—Disorientating. Give it a second, it passes.”

“…That’s a little different to ramping up the Gs in the gym,” Ava noted.

“I know. This is instant.”

“Yeah… I’m good… uh-oh.”

Julian looked up and was just in time to intercept a dark-tan-and-straw-colored missile about the size of a chimpanzee.

Ava had a bluetooth earphone bud in her ear, and the translator app on her phone handled the Ten’Gewek language comfortably. [“Tonk! You’re bigger! And your crest is turning into a man’s!”]

Tonk settled in on Julian’s right shoulder and gave Ava a wide-eyed, bright look that was apparently universal to children. [“She’s pretty! Who is she?”]

[“This is my friend…”]

Ava extended a hand. “I’m Ava. Nice to meet you!” she introduced herself, trusting her phone to handle translations going the other way. Tonk stared at her for a second, then glanced at Julian.

[“Jooyun! Her voice—is that Sky-Magic?!”]

[“It’s a thinking-stone, and you’re being rude. Shake hands. Gently. Always be gentle with a woman!”]

Tonk had a grip like a bricklayer, but that was probably very gentle indeed by his standards. [“Ava. You have a nice name! Not hard like Jooyun.”]

“Thanks!” Ava replied, smiling. “I like your name, too.”

This seemed to earn her an immediate friendship. Tonk hooted and shifted over onto Julian’s other shoulder, curling his tail around the back of Julian’s neck like an oversized perching monkey. Honestly, the fact that Julian was standing there quite happily with that much weight on his shoulders was impressive. Her hands reacted automatically, plucking her camera from its holster on her hip and capturing the moment for posterity in a rapid series of shutter-clicks.

Naturally, this strange gesture got Tonk’s attention. He prodded Julian in the head insistently. [“What’s that?”]

[“It’s a–”] Here, Ava’s translator tripped up. The word Julian used was obviously some kind of long compound that took it a few seconds to figure out. It eventually delivered [“Seeing-and-remembering-tool,”] by which point Julian had launched into explaining what that meant. In the end, Ava just clicked the “cancel” button to reset the translator. She was getting two conversations at once and it was too much to process.

“Trouble?” Julian asked her.

“Translator didn’t like your word for ‘camera,’” Ava explained.

“Yeah, their language is both fusing and agglutinative,” he nodded, “and the linguists still haven’t figured out all the rules. You just…know what sounds to drop. Sorry.”

[“Are those other-People words?! They sound strange!”]

[“Yeah, little buddy! You’ll be able to say them when you get older, I promise!”]

That seemed to be enough for Tonk, who nodded happily and uttered the most viral English word ever conceived. “Okay!”

[“Anyway, we need to meet with Yan Given-Man, little man. Can you go up to the scientists and tell Professor Daniel we have things for him?”]

Tonk plunged off Julian’s shoulder with an enthusiastic Helpful sound that wasn’t quite a hoot and wasn’t quite a word, paused just long enough to sketch the absolute minimum of a polite farewell, and vanished up a tree in a blur.

Julian chuckled. “The best part is how Vemik is exactly the same except literally three times bigger.” There was a certain exasperated yet fond tone in his voice.

Ava subtly rubbed her hand. “How much…I hate to ask…”

“Oh, I figure Tonk was about a hundred kilos, he’s starting to fill out. C’mon, let’s go say hi to the big boss.”

Ava managed to get one last shot with them both framed in. It wasn’t great: Tonk was already too far away for a good profile. Still, she’d snapped Julian from the rear while he was taking a nice, purposeful stride. It might be a good promo shot to kick upstairs to the PR guys.

Their visit to the village was apparently just a formality. Yan was… well, he was as striking in person as Daar had been, and imposing on a scale that not even Adam quite matched. Adam’s perpetual good-natured bounciness took the edge off. Yan was more… primal.

And flirtatious. Dear God was he flirtatious, in such an outrageous way that Ava was very briefly tempted to flirt back.

Derek had warned her about that. It was about the one time so far that she’d seen him show any hint of jealousy. He needn’t have worried, though: even if she’d been remotely inclined to repeat past mistakes, Yan was just…too much. She’d had her fill of ‘too much.’

He didn’t seem disappointed, though. Easy-come, easy-go. In the end, some of the same kind of bouncy cheer did creep across his strange face.

“There is very pretty Ketta, maybe half-finger that way.” Yan pointed out for Julian, who presumably knew what ‘half-finger’ meant. “Flowers in bloom now.”

A half-finger, it turned out, was about enough time for the sun to move half a stubby Ten’Gewek finger-length through the sky. A little less than a mile, which Julian spent pointing out every example of Akyawentan flora and fauna that crossed their path. The local answer to a squirrel in particular was damn cute. It was also about the size of a bulldog.

Funny how, despite the heavier gravity, everything seemed bigger on Akyawentuo. The Ketta trees were chunky, sturdy things kinda like an English Oak but way taller, the bushes and shrubs around their base had stems thicker than Ava’s wrists, and when Julian pointed out a flock of root-birds skulking in the shade further back, it was like watching a whole gaggle of the biggest, fattest, table-ready Thanksgiving turkeys Ava had ever seen. With drumsticks that’d feed a family.

“They’re tasty as hell, too. That breast meat on them is a good four inches thick!”

He was nervous, she realized. Really nervous.

Well, she’d picked up a trick or two there.

“I guess we’d better get some of the boring business stuff out of the way,” she said.

“Uh… like what?”

“Oh, the usual.” she unslung her backpack and dug in it for her tablet. “Consent forms, statements, your signature on like four different documents. All the stuff that our corporate overlords demand so you can’t sue the shirt off my back.”

Julian eyed the tablet warily. “…Oh God. Paperwork.”

“Yeah, you’d think you could just whip your clothes off and I’d take pictures right?”

He chuckled nervously. “You’d think, I guess. I dunno. We’ve been setting this up for months and up until now I’ve been looking forward to it… Now that we’re here, I’m getting a serious case of cold feet, you know?”

“Over what, the undressing or the paperwork?”

That made him laugh. “…Both? Why’ve we gotta do paperwork?”

“Gotta keep the lawyers happy,” Ava explained. “Angry lawyers are the worst.”

He laughed again. “God, I can’t even imagine just, I dunno, whipping it out for someone like Miss Bader.”

“…Nofl’s attorney? She always reminds me of a panther that learned how to wear a pants suit… d’you wanna guess what her first name is?”

“She has a first name?”

“Yeah, and you will never guess it.”

“…It’s gonna be something really inappropriate, isn’t it? No, no guess. Just tell me.”

Ava grinned triumphantly. “Tiffany.”

“…No. No way.”

“Honest!”

“Tiffany Bader…” Julian tested the weight of the name on his tongue, and seemed not to be thinking about it as he grabbed his T-shirt by its collar and pulled it off. “…Actually, that works. But it doesn’t fit her. I woulda imagined like… a Brunhilde, or a Helga. Something angry and German.”

He balled the shirt up and tossed it aside, cleared his throat, awkwardly, and unbuckled his belt.

Her hands did what they did best and took the shot almost without her conscious direction. He noticed, laughed at himself, and paused in undoing his jeans to flex his arm at her. Nerves or not, at least he was getting in the spirit of things.

Click.

Photographically, she’d chosen well.

That shirt turned out to have been concealing a lot, even having been skin-tight. Julian was built. To be fair, he wasn’t a barge of obscenely muscular furry murder like Daar, nor a superhuman tank of pure writhing strength like Adam. Nor was he like Yan, who was a primal balance of both ideals at once. Instead he was…

She settled on the word heroic. Julian was massive, with enough muscle slabbed onto his frame to make a comic book character blush. Yet he was also athletic and trim, with a solidly strong waist and an aesthetic profile. He was the kind of model a propagandist would kill for.

“Y’know, if you were looking to do warriors in their own words, you could maybe think about interviewing Yan one day…” he suggested once he’d folded his clothes on a rock. He stood awkwardly and self-consciously, not really knowing what to do with himself. Funny: Daar had been brash, Derek had been full of laughing bravado, and Patel had seemed genuinely comfortable. Strange how different people could be in these situations.

Ava had to admit, it was harder to get more surreal then standing on an alien world chatting with a naked god of a man, who was suggesting she might interview a talking gorilla.

“I mean… maybe? But the fact that it’s a nude shoot would be kinda wasted on him…”

“Yeah, I suppose…” Julian glanced down at himself and cleared his throat again. “…I didn’t shave down. Was I supposed to?”

“No, the body hair works for this. I don’t want this too contrived, it still has to be genuine. And it’s important. The nudity, I mean. Like, symbologically. It’s not just… it’s not eye candy.” She tried not to curse at her little Freudian almost-slip.

Fortunately, Julian didn’t seem to notice it. “No no, I get it. I mean…I’m the one with his dick hangin’ out in the air. And it does feel weird.”

“Which part, the air, or your dick?”

“Hey!”

She took a picture. Click. His grinning indignation made for an excellent portrait.

“Wait. You did that on purpose!”

“Yup! Try putting your arm behind your head. Right. Good, that works for you. Tense it…good. Why did you decide to do this?”

“Well…God, I’m actually not sure…”

“Keep your arm tensed. Try to keep everything flexed at once…yeah, like that. Don’t look at me, look at the camera. Point your left foot out, squeeze, hold…perfect. Not sure about…?”

Click.

Julian was busy trying to figure out how to pose and talk at the same time, but that was the point. The more she gave him other things to focus on, the quicker he forgot to be awkward and embarrassed.

“…Oh, right! Uh, well…why I did this. Does this work?”

“Yes. Don’t worry about it, just pretend like you’re in front of the mirror. You’re not sure?”

“Well…I think a few reasons. I mean, I’ll be honest, I suppose ego is a big part.”

Julian rotated his wrist behind his neck and squeezed down on his bicep. Just… damn. That arm was the size of his whole damn head, which was something that absolutely needed to go in the story.

Click.

…And that was the shot. She’d have him hit that one later with both arms, too.

Keep hitting him with questions, keep him talking, don’t give him a chance to think. That was the key here. “That’s not uncommon. Coombes felt the same way, though he never admitted it. Why else?”

Click.

He half-turned and tried something different, showing off the lines of his back. “Uh…well, Daar was just so brutally honest, y’know? I liked that. I thought, it’d be good to maybe just let it all out, ‘cuz I think people need to know.”

Click.

“Know what? Turn around, if you would. Just stand there, look back and talk… Any other reason you can think of?”

Julian dutifully complied. Click.

“I guess… Some of what happened here. The People… well, all the stuff we didn’t touch on when we went on That Show, everything we had to go through… Some of the things we saw and did and the people we lost who I’ve never had a chance to really tell anyone about before… Shit, I don’t really know. Lots of reasons, I guess. But, well, I think the People are really at the heart of it all…”

He started rambling, but that was exactly what Ava was after. She smiled, satisfied that they’d cracked his shell, and let her hands work their magic. Their interview was just getting started.

“Laid Bare—Warriors in their own words” Issue #3: Sachi Patel
Author and photographer: Ava Magdalena Ríos

“I think if they’d really treated me like “one of the boys,” I’d be dead now. They all are. But one of the last things they did was make sure I was safe.”

Reactor Technician Sachi Patel is very different from other interviewees in this series for several reasons. Quite aside from her gender, she is easily the smallest and most unassuming of my subjects. She has also lost more comrades in battle than any of the men: When HMS Caledonia was sunk during the Battle of Gao, it went down with the loss of two thirds of of its two hundred crewmembers.

Patel was among the survivors, and was the only survivor from the ship’s reactor and power systems specialists. These systems, buried deep in the heart of the ship and full of densely contained energy, are intensely dangerous to work with. Indeed, it was an electrical fault in the capacitor banks that caused the fire which left Caledonia in dry-dock for several months to undergo repairs.

Grappling with such a beast is not for the faint-hearted, and there is absolutely nothing faint-hearted about Sachi. Instead, she is talkative, gregarious, and absolutely unreserved about shedding her clothes for our photo shoot. Nevertheless, she represents a new and unfortunate form of survivor’s guilt: that of a female serviceperson who is acutely aware that she is only alive because her male colleagues prioritized her survival over their own.

In our correspondence prior to this interview, she made it completely clear that she intends to continue to serve, no matter the danger. In her words:

“We lost dozens of amazing people. I want to make sure they aren’t forgotten.”

When we first begin our session, however, her trauma is not immediately visible.

[Image: Patel posing in water that comes up to mid-thigh. She has her hair bunched wetly in both hands behind her head and is beaming bashfully at the camera.]

Tell me about your childhood.

“I grew up in Swindon. My family didn’t have a lot of money… my father was a manager at Kwik-Fit, my mother stayed at home and looked after us. And, uh, home was a council flat. But I did really well at school, I loved science and maths, and netball…”

Netball?

“It’s basically a female-friendly version of basketball. And yes, I know, I’m not exactly the right height for basketball…”

This is an understatement. At exactly five feet tall, Sachi is only just taller than the minimum height requirement to serve in the Royal Navy.

What attracted you to military service?

[Image: Patel displaying a sheepish grin.]

“I wanted to work with nuclear reactors.”

That’s… specific.

“Something about them just fascinated me! I can’t explain it, but I’ve always found electricity fascinating, and nuclear power in particular. In school, I used to imagine that I’d be the one to invent a fusion reactor, or come up with a better way to use our nuclear waste… something like that.”

Still, why the military and not the civilian sector?

“I think because of my cousin Sanjay. He picked up a lot of student debt to get his degree, and then he spent years and years struggling in bottom-rung jobs and never getting anywhere. Eventually he started working for his father as a plumber and that was a good job for him, but when he was earning enough he had to start paying back his loans. So when I was sixteen or so and considering which “A” levels to take and where I wanted to go in life, I saw a Royal Navy recruiting video on Youtube and I thought if I went that route, I’d get the training and qualifications as part of the job, I wouldn’t have any debt to pay… and then there was the appeal of doing things like delivering disaster relief after hurricanes and tsunamis and things like that. I thought, ‘if I get to play with reactors and that powers the ship that sails halfway around the world to save lives, then that’s having my cake and eating it.’ My parents weren’t too happy, but they didn’t try to stop me.”

She laughs.

“My father said something like ‘Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbour’s garden.’”

That sounds…

“Sexist? It is.”

She doesn’t stop smiling.

“I think that was another reason I was attracted to the Navy. They didn’t care that I was a petite little woman, all they cared about was whether I could learn how to do an important job well. And I could!”

[Image: Patel floating in the water on her back, hair forming a halo around her head.]

What was your career like?

“It was exactly what I hoped it would be! I got the training I wanted, I worked hard, I got what I earned. And, okay, so in fact it turned out that most of what I was doing once I finally got to sail was kind of dull, but at least it was dull in, like, the Panama Canal or wherever. And I guess growing up with such a big family in such a tiny flat prepared me a bit for what life aboard ship was going to be like, because I never had much privacy in either situation.”

I’ve heard warships don’t offer much personal space…

“They offer no personal space at all! And of course, most of the crew are young men so after a few weeks at sea I kind of learned to tune out the smells and the way the curtain on a guy’s bunk might be rocking… or, uh, learned how to keep the curtain on MY bunk from rocking…”

She clears her throat before continuing.

“And you get used to your crewmates walking around the crew berthing in nothing but their socks or whatever.”

Is that why you’re so comfortable doing this, do you think?

“Well… it’s nothing the guys I served with haven’t already seen, let’s put it that way.”

Does that feel safe?

“With them? Yes. I only ever had problems with one man, and, well. The others took care of it. That’s all I’ll say. Besides, there was a little bit of separation. A curtain hung up, that kind of thing. On newer ships the berthings are completely separate, but a ship is a crowded and raunchy thing. There’s only so much privacy to be had.”

[Image: A profile photo of Patel pouring water out of her cupped hands and onto her upturned face. Her expression is serene.]

Did you expect to see spaceborne service?

“No, not at all! But when Chief Andow was selected to be Caledonia’s chief reactor technician, he asked for me by name. We’d already worked together for a year or two by then and I guess he thought highly of me.”

You guess?

“He wasn’t the kind of man who’d just come out and tell you something like that.”

How did it differ from your previous assignments?

“The big difference was that we actually had more personal space, not less. Caledonia was a captured and refitted alien vessel you see, and the alien design was just more roomy. [That] took some of the pressure off, which was good because Callie needed us all to be at our best. She was this weird hybrid of alien and human technology, and we were constantly having to work around that. When she worked properly, she was unbelievable–to this day, she’s still the fastest and most agile ship we’ve ever had in the fleet–but keeping her at her best was a lot more interesting than all those boring shifts I mentioned before. I don’t think we ever had a boring shift with Callie. I don’t want to imply she was a deathtrap, she wasn’t. But for any ship underway, disaster is always a lot closer than you’d think, and that’s doubly true in an environment as hostile as space.”

[Image: Patel talking animatedly. She has a lively, expressive face, and her hands are a blur, suggesting she waves them around and gestures vigorously with them as she talks.]

Tell me about the Battle of Gao

Her demeanour changes. Up until now, Sachi has been animated and enthusiastic. My question seems to flip a switch. She immediately becomes quiet and hesitates, assembling her words carefully before sharing them.

“Gao was a land war. So, our job was to deliver the HEAT and stand by in low orbit to provide support. The Gaoian fleet and the V-class destroyers had already cleared the field for us, we thought. Uh, I should point out that really, I spent the whole time monitoring power loads and making sure we didn’t overcharge the capacitor banks. I wasn’t really aware of the situation outside.

“When the Hunters attacked… it came out of nowhere. Suddenly the alarm went off—there are a lot of alarms, but this one was for hull breaches and enemy boarders. I remember, I kind of froze up, then… I remember looking over at the chief, and then I got back to work. I had a job to do, and repelling boarders isn’t part of that job. My job is to make sure the power systems stay within acceptable bounds. So, I kept doing that. I could hear weapons fire elsewhere in the ship, and every so often there’d be this heavy bang through the hull.

“And then I guess when the Hunters realized they were losing, they self-destructed. And when an explosion tears out part of the superstructure, things start to go wrong fast. When a lot of them happen in quick succession…”

[Image: The central two-page spread image is a candid shot of Patel standing knee-deep in the water in an acutely vulnerable posture. She is staring off into the distance at nothing in particular, and her right hand is protectively cradling her left arm. Despite being a still image, the picture still manages to convey the impression that she is shivering.]

“…It was chaos. I remember looking up at the systems board and seeing just how many emergency forcefields had gone up. And worse, just how many of the shield emitters were down. That’s bad because warships radiate waste heat through the shields. If the shields are completely gone, then the heat will just build up and up and eventually we’d all cook, but our bigger problem was spreading hull failures. We were in low orbit with Hunter ships buried in us like ticks, and they were just… pulling the ship apart. And if one of those ships self-destructed and took out a capacitor bank…”

She shakes her head.

“When you store that much energy in such a small space, you basically have a bomb. The cap banks are some of the toughest, most hardened compartments on the ship, but they’re not invulnerable…”

At this point, she trails off completely. After a few seconds, I decide she needs prompting.

What happened next?

“…Chief Andow tried to get through to the bridge, to let them know he was dumping the cap. Uh, that means discharging all our stored energy so that if the capacitor takes damage we don’t all go up in a massive explosion. But for whatever reason he couldn’t raise them. So he looked over at me and ordered me to deliver the message myself.”

It’s at this point that she begins to weep. She doesn’t notice at first.

“…Looking back… I think he knew. I think he saw the writing on the wall. So he told me to go be a runner so I wouldn’t be in there when… So I’d have a chance.”

[Image: Patel sitting on a rock, wiping a tear off her cheek.]

“I don’t… I don’t really remember what happened next. I remember I was scrambling up the stairs when there was this huge explosion nearby. There was decompression, it picked me up and blew me down the deck before the fields kicked in and stopped it. Somebody picked me up and dragged me toward an escape pod. I think I said something about how I was a runner, and I had to get a message to the captain… he said the captain was dead. Then he physically forced me into the pod and launched it. I didn’t even register who he was. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t make it.”

What happened to the ship exactly?

“I don’t really know. A series of internal explosions. They broke her open, took out the power and… that was it. The emergency forcefields dropped and the whole ship decompressed. Everybody left on board would have died in seconds…

“I didn’t see it happen. I just remember being crushed into my seat by the escape pod… I think I blacked out. I don’t really remember anything much until we’d landed on Gao, and then I was lying in a frosty field staring up at the sky. In between is all… it’s a blur.”

HMS Caledonia was the first British warship to be sunk since the Falklands War in 1982, and the worst loss of life suffered by the Royal Navy in a single incident since the sinking of HMS Aldenham in 1944. She remains the only Allied military spaceship to be sunk. Her hulk was recovered from Gao’s orbit and repaired at the Ceres shipyards, where she was recently rededicated and will shortly be returning to service.

Will you be returning to Caledonia, now that she’s been repaired?

“Yes.”

Won’t that be difficult?

[Image: Patel glaring fiercely at the camera, still sitting on the rock from before.]

“I owe it to my crewmates. I owe it to Andow, and Wilkes, Evans… all of them. Yes, it’ll be difficult… but it’d be harder to turn my back on them all.”

On that determined note, I conclude our interview.

Author’s note: This interview was reviewed and approved by Allied Extrasolar Command and the Royal Navy prior to publication. The interviewee’s views are her own, and do not constitute a policy statement on behalf of the United Kingdom or Allied governments.

(The full and unedited recording of Sachi Patel’s interview is available via ESNN’s Internet and infosphere pages.)

Date point: 15y10m AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Champion Thurrsto of Clan Whitecrest

“Are you ready, My Father?”

Daar’s expression when he glanced at Thurrsto was both ernest and somehow serene. “I don’t think anyone is ever completely ready for something like this.”

Thurrsto reflected on that statement for a moment. It might be true, but if anyone were to be ready, well. One couldn’t do much better than Daar.

He was tall. Stately. Broad and powerful. Daar’s fur was lightly silvered along his cheeks and forearms with wisdom, but that laudable age was merely him at the peak of his prime; he was not in any way old or weakening. He’d grown his fur out to a dignified length and it was perfectly groomed. He was almost painfully handsome in a way that could be brutal or playful in equal measure, and there was a certain…weight to how he carried himself. Figuratively and literally, given his ongoing efforts at being the “most bestest” battle-ready Stoneback he could be.

Daar was the perfect avatar for the Gao at this point in their history, the uncompromisingly stern and indomitable leader they needed: ruthless yet not unkind, with an underlying compassionate streak and a hint of a happier future awaiting them under the weight of it all. His strength and ferocity were unmatched maybe anywhere, body, mind, and spirit. It was honestly… intimidating, and a bit melancholy. Nobody else could bear that much weight.

“They’re almost all gathered, My Father.” That was Gyotin, who would be leading the procession. They no longer had priests or what could be termed a state religion, but the implication and ritual was much the same. The little Champion was perhaps the only Gaoian alive as respected as Daar, and for entirely different reasons. He looked very much appropriate for the occasion in his dark robes, as though he was fitting into a role that the ancient fortress had remembered while the Gao themselves slowly forgot.

Daar duck-nodded softly. “…You kept it simple, right?” he asked.

“I’m not about to spring any surprises on you, My Father. Not after we rehearsed it…” Gyotin chittered. He seemed more relaxed about this than anyone else present. “But it has always been simple. At least… the ritual has, yes?”

“Yeah. I guess. We march out, I take an oath, you crown me, my Champions clothe me. Naydi joins me at my side and she’s consecrated, too. Simple…” There was a resigned tone to his chitter. “It’s the consequence that ain’t so easy.”

Gyotin duck-nodded, then flicked an ear as some update or another came through the earbud he was wearing. He glanced around at the Champions.

“Well. The Mother-Supreme and the Humans have arrived and taken their place… and so, intriguingly, has the Corti ambassador.”

Interesting. The Dominion species had been invited as a matter of courtesy, but all had politely responded with variations on the theme of ‘regret we cannot attend’ according to their own understanding of what passed for polite. The Chehnash one might have been taken as a snub by anybody who didn’t know them.

It was interesting that the Corti had accepted. Then again, they had been behaving strangely of late. Thurrsto had sat through a great many long briefings about the internal maneuverings of the Directorate, with Whitecrest’s general impression being that they were Up To Something. Something big, too. Epochal, possibly. All while making friendly overtures to the three extant Deathworlder species, despite the fact that the Dominion didn’t yet formally recognize the Ten’Gewek as sapient.

Things had changed dramatically, there. Previously the Corti had been the driving force between the insulting ‘non-sapient indigenous fauna’ label, as it provided a useful cover for their ‘xenobiological studies.’ For them to pre-emptively recognise and aggressively sponsor a species’ sapience was unprecedented.

And now, here they were at Daar’s coronation.

…Questions for later. Thurrsto stood up tall and straight as the Champions were called to order. He was in the honour guard’s second echelon, behind Loomi and Fiin—Highmountain and Stoneback were naturally at the front—and alongside Champion Myaku of Clan Emberpelt, who might just have nosed ahead of Fiin to be the second-largest gaoian present after Daar himself.

That was definitely not traditional. Fiin was, in practical terms, a hulking specimen by either human or gaoian reckoning, yet Stoneback Champions were traditionally much larger. Most of his First Fang was at least half again his size, after all, and Daar, of course…

Conversely, Emberpelts preferred to err on the side of burly over hulking, yet Myaku could stand toe-to-toe with Fiin. He was also, apparently, tied for the most accomplished fire rescueman in their history. That had been the trend over the last few decades, actually: competency over strict breed conformance. They were leaders of their Clans almost purely on their individual merit.

That spoke volumes about the quality of them both, and of the other Champions. And if he was being honest, it spoke volumes about Thurrsto, too. His own situation, he was not too modest to admit, was similar. The War had hugely accelerated that trend and caused a lot of re-shuffling among the Champions and Grandfathers. Combined with Daar’s clear preference for results first and foremost, the consequences had been impressive. There hadn’t been a group this smart, or this well-regarded, or this well-bred in possibly centuries. Most of them were pretty atypical for their Clans, too, at least in one way or another.

And here they were, about to proclaim to the Gao and the galaxy writ large their selection, approval of, and abject unending submission to, Daar; the one, true, uncontested and unquestioned Great Father of the Gao.

…Balls.

Gyotin had a simple wooden staff he was using for a ceremonial… object. Mace? Wand? A stick to beat unruly witnesses back into line? It certainly looked weapon-like… Either way, he raised it and tapped it sharply on the stones.

“It is time,” he intoned.

The doors to the Great Hall opened.

Technical Sergeant Adam (“Warhorse”) Arés

“…Damn nice, all of this.”

“Keep quiet ‘ya lump,” Righteous grumbled next to him.

“Yessir, sarry.”

Righteous grumbled again. They were still…working things out. Nothing bad, really, and they were still bros, it was just a little weird between them, still: neither of them had really realized how big the performance gap was. It felt maybe like when a little brother realizes he can not only beat, but totally wipe the floor with his bigger, cooler older bro. Adam wasn’t sure he liked that.

Anyway.

So far, it had been something pretty spectacular to watch, though. Especially the procession up to High Mountain Fortress! They’d been invited—and when the Great Father invites you, how do you say no?—so of course they were all there in their nicest uniforms, watching the proceedings and all of Gao’s high society preen before each other.

Fancy big room, too.

…Okay, that was underselling it. The Great Hall was a fucking great hall, and they’d pulled out all the stops to make it greater and hall-er for this. It was definitely making his List of Big Cool Really Old Rooms—he’d made that List in London. There were big monochromatic banner things hanging from the rafters, and those rafters were made of wood. Like, wood over a thousand years old. Daar had given them all a quick tour of the Fortress last night—the Gaoian HEAT operators had been in a state of near awe the whole time, too—and it was then Adam had learned that, for a Gaoian, wood was as naked a display of wealth as gold, so…damn. Daar’s personal apartments were filled with it, the entire hall was made of it too, like some of the cool buildings he saw in England…hammer-beam? Was that the word?

There were swords up there, too. Thousands of ‘em. Somebody had gone up there and cleaned every last one so the shadows gleamed with lethal sharp edges. He had to wonder who’d done what kind of shenanigans to pull that duty.

Their earlier reunion with Daar had been fun, if too quick. Adam had been discreetly seeing him at least weekly for some time now as he clawed himself up the last grueling steps towards the amazing peak of his abilities; working out with Daar was fun! Firth had, uh, gotten re-motivated after their fight and he was back on track again, but still, it was nice lifting with someone who could keep up.

As for the others, they hadn’t had any chance to train with Daar in a while, and their surprise at just what he could do now had the big furry goofball downright giddy with manic happiness. Too bad, it was pretty obvious he just wanted to laze about and tussle with everyone all day long, but, well…duty first. Maybe they could bro out tomorrow.

…After he was crowned. After they made him what might as well have been a god.

…Fuck.

Anyway. He was still Daar under it all, and his hard work had made a hell of an impression on Firth. “…He’s been eatin’ his Wheaties,” he whispered, continuing an earlier conversation.

“Yeah. He said, and I quote, ‘make me good enough to beat your ass.’ So…here we are.”

“Did you?”

“Some days, I wonder… Looks like things are starting.”

The giant wooden doors creaked open, and Gyotin processed through them with a sturdy-looking staff of some kind held vertically in front of him. It was kinda hard to tell it was him because the robes covered basically everything but his nose and paws, but still. He advanced to the middle of the dais at the hall’s end, and rapped the staff’s metal shoe down on the stones hard, three times.

It sure as hell got everyone’s attention.

“Please stand,” he requested, once the hall was silent.

There was the prolonged sussuruss of hundreds of people rising to their feet. Gyotin duck-bowed to acknowledge them, then turned and rapped his staff on the stones again. In smart lockstep, the Champions emerged from the shadows beyond the door. At the front was Fiin, layered in Stoneback’s extremely functional ceremonial steel armor, with a durable, well-used rifle over shoulder. Beside him was Loomi, bare-furred except for a kind of layered heavy wool kilt-like thing. The Emberpelt champion wore a straight boss looking heavy leather coat and matching corded pants, along with what was unquestionably a fireman’s hat; Adam grimaced internally when he thought of how much needlework went into all that.

Beside him was Thurrsto, looking dark and sharp in unadorned, sleek, well-fitted black clothing with an evil slender blade to hand. Nobody could miss the hard lines of his body showing themselves through his fur and clothing. To Adam’s eyes, despite being the smallest—relatively speaking, anyway—and least visually spectacular of the four Big Bads, Thurrsto looked the most genuinely dangerous. Which, considering he was standing next to Fiin, was saying something.

He’d need to arrange a spar between them one day.

After the honor-guard of four, there came a procession of all the other Champions. It went on for a while. Each of them was wearing their Clan’s idea of ceremonial garb, ranging from the humble hard-wearing white doctor’s robes of Clan Openpaw to the riot of wood and gold beads and fine silks adorning Champion Sheeyo. The very last onto the stage was Clan Forestnettle, the newest major Clan to be recognized by the Conclave, wearing a woolen cap and a utility bandolier. Adam couldn’t remember what they did, exactly.

The honor-guard remained in the middle of the stage while the remaining Champions fanned out to the edges. Once the procession was done, Gyotin rapped his staff on the stones once more, and onto the stage stepped the center of it all: Daar.

He…really, really looked the part, somehow.

He wasn’t wearing any fancy swords or robes or whatever, in fact he wasn’t wearing anything at all. He didn’t need to. Maybe it was because some groomer did a really nice clip job, maybe it was all the extra training they’d done together, maybe it was just how he was. Maybe all of it at once. Daar stood in the middle of all of it, towering over everyone besides maybe Loomi, who in any case was too lanky to have a command presence strong enough to stand against him.

Gyotin returned to center-stage. He stood before Daar, looking up at him, then turned to the audience and rapped his staff on the ground again, just once. The sound echoed in the respectful hush.

“I call this Conclave to order!” He announced. “Before you, in the sight of all we hold sacred, stands Daar, to whom the Champions of the Clans have bared their throats in supplication. Do the Clans recognize him?”

As one, the Champions all barked their agreement. It was a quick, powerful, and honestly…a pretty scary thing to hear. Just a single, punching sound, that echoed around the ancient hall long after it had been voiced.

Gyotin rapped his staff again, then turned to face stage left. “I call forth Yulna, Mother-Supreme of the Females, seat of our culture and foster of life.”

Yulna was the head of a procession of three, flanked by Naydra on her right and Myun on her left. There was some kind of ritual challenge where Myun stepped protectively in front of the Mother-Supreme, baring a shield and sword. Gyotin duck-bowed formally, and Myun stepped back. Naydra was holding a rich blue cushion with an object on it that Adam couldn’t quite see.

With that done, Gyotin turned to face stage right. “And I call forth Reeko, Champion of the Straightshields, blind giver of justice, arbiter of disputes.”

Reeko was faceless behind a full suit of armor, brushed to a dull gleam rather than polished. His guards were completely identical. They were the same height, same build, moved in exactly the same precise way. It wasn’t robotic, they were definitely alive under there… But it was completely indistinguishable. Eerie. The only thing different about Reeko was the brass and wooden intaglio down the crest of his helm. The trio bore spears, which they planted firmly on the ground in front of them, and became perfectly statue-still.

Gyotin turned to the audience. “Are there any among us who would Challenge the sacred rite we are about to undertake? Is there a soul who would dispute what we do? Speak, now, and be heard: but be warned. You would Challenge the Conclave, the Clans, and Daar himself.”

Nobody answered, of course: who could Challenge Daar? Not even Adam was that stupid. Daar was a hell of a fight even way back when he was less than half Adam’s weight, what with his ridiculous speed and those teeth and claws of his. Now that they were about level? In a real fight? No gracias. Adam couldn’t imagine either of them coming out of that intact.

Adam had to suppress an urge to giggle at the idea, which Firth noticed out of the corner of his eye. He gave a very slight grin, rolled his eyes and shook his head ever-so-slightly. In any case, Gyotin waited a good long while for some immensely stupid person to try their luck.

None did. He turned back to the center of attention.

“Daar. You stand here before us, under the sight of our esteemed witnesses and the Clans of the Gao, here where the priests of ancient tradition invoked the spirits of the world. May they grant us grace. You have been recognized and acclaimed as the Great Father we require, and thus are called to a great and terrible duty. Do you understand and accept this burden?”

Daar spoke for the first time in the ceremony. He’d always had a booming, gravelly kind of voice, but now it was percussive as he raised his muzzle and announced: “I do.”

The words bounced off the back wall.

“And will you take the oath required of you, before those Seen and Unseen?” Gyotin asked.

“I will.”

“Then repeat after me…”

Gyotin’s voice was low enough that Adam could only just hear the words. When Daar repeated them, however, they carried real weight.

“I, Daar, Brother, Father, Warleader, Champion-Emeritus, Stud-Prime of Stoneback…”

His voice boomed across the hall.

“Pledge to keep and protect the Clans of the Gao against all enemies from within and without, physical and spiritual…”

“To provide Justice, Security, and Foundation…”

“To guide our kind through the twisting river of fate toward a bright and prosperous future…”

“To foster friendships across the stars, that our lands, our spirits, and our knowledge might grow…”

“And to respect the advice of the Champions, and to lead with integrity and wisdom.”

“I accept this singular, supreme, and unassailable authority as my burden alone…”

“…to be shared with no-one, and never bequeathed. I pledge to keep this office until the day I die, and I pledge that it shall die with me.”

“By all that I hold sacred, before those Seen and Unseen, these things that I have promised, I will perform and keep. So I do swear.”

Gyotin waited for the last of Daar’s oath to finish resonating around the hall, then struck his staff on the ground so hard that Adam actually flinched at the noise.

“Do the Clans accept his pledge?”

Again, there was that same bark of approval. Gyotin turned to his left.

“Do the Females trust his fidelity?”

Yulna stepped forward. She duck-nodded, then turned to Naydra and took what looked like a wooden walking-stick from the pillow.

“We do, and we present this token of our respect,” she declared. She stepped forward once again and placed it in Daar’s right paw. In his hands, it looked more like a humble scepter. “It belonged to my predecessor, Mother Giymuy. Carry it, as a symbol of what you must protect.”

As she stepped back, Gyotin turned to his right and addressed the Straightshields.

“Does the Law recognise his legitimacy?” he asked. Reeko stepped forward. With cold precision, he turned one-eighty to hand his spear to one of his guards. He shrugged a round shield from his back and, holding it rigidly in front of him, turned one-eighty again, stepped forward, and presented it. His voice boomed hollowly from inside his helmet.

“It does. This shield hung in the high courthouse for a thousand years, and survived even when that ancient building was flattened. Carry it, as a symbol of what you must uphold.” He then returned to the exact millimeter of stone he’d been occupying and stood, utterly still.

Gyotin duck-nodded, then gestured toward a low wooden table at the front of the stage. He spoke, his voice having slid into a more…well, serious and formal tone. It was captivating.

“Cousins of Daar, Brother-Clans of Stoneback, come forward and teach us thy offerings.”

The first to approach was Fiin, carrying his rifle. He prowled over to the table efficiently, checked and cleared the weapon with a well-practiced motion, then quite conspicuously charged it and set it on the table, pointing it in the one direction where nobody was seated.

“A rifle, one of human design, gaoian make, and mutual refinement. It has seen heavy service in the war that Our Father led us through. Many have died by its power, and it in turn has seen its masters fall one after the other. May it remind My Father always of the terrible cost of war, of its terrible necessity, and of the hope that must always be kept alive.”

…Damn. They were not fooling around with their symbology. Both Firth and ‘Base shifted uncomfortably on either side of Adam.

Next up was Loomi, who carried an ancient-looking book. He took a dignified walk up to the table and laid it down almost reverently.

“The remaining personal writings of Fyu, intended for his successor. There are secrets within that were kept by conspiracy in Stoneback, later Highmountain, and eventually through Whitecrest, when their Clan split from ours in secret so very long ago. The contents have been known only to the unbroken Rite of the Loremasters our Clans have always shared. Today, they are bestowed upon you. May they serve as a reminder that wisdom is the greatest of all blessings, and unheeded, is the most exquisite of all curses. May his writings give you the strength to wield such power.”

Thurrsto and Myaku looked at one another, then stepped forward as one.

“Our Clans represent polar extremes,” Myaku announced. “Mine is the craft of protecting life…”

“…and mine is the craft of ending it,” Thurrsto finished for him. “These are burdens and tools that the Great Father must wield.”

The pair of them took ampules from around their necks, and placed them together on the table.

“Water,” Myaku said. “Drawn from the headspring of the Bat-Yu river. That river, and the dams along its length, provide drinking water, sanitation, and electrical power for half our civilization. Without water, there can be no life. It extinguishes fires and cleans wounds… or it can flood towns and sweep away buildings. Water, like life, demands respect and careful shepherding. Guard it well.”

“Blood,” Thurrsto added. “Taken from an unfortunate soul who was simply in the wrong place at a very unfortunate time. He was entirely innocent of any wrongdoing, yet his life was forfeit for the success of a mission that had nothing to do with him whatsoever. Death, as the counterpart to what the esteemed Champion said, demands respect. Use it wisely.”

There were more, once his bodyguards had their say. Each Clan of the Conclave had a point they wanted to make, some duty they wanted to remind their Great Father of, and they made each one pointedly and solemnly. The Openpaws presented the obligation to heal via the Gaoian equivalent of the Rod of Asclepius; the Longears gave something ominous in the form of a magnifying glass. The one-fangs delivered a burned and broken helmet recovered from the graveyard orbit high overhead. As each token was given, a member of Starmind received it on the Great Father’s behalf and carried it away to a contemplation room just off the Great Hall.

The weight of it all was just…crushing. But at last it was Gyotin’s turn.

On the table there was an urn with hot coals within. He used a pair of tongs to select a coal and place it into a small bowl, which immediately erupted into thick, billowing smoke. It spread through the hall quickly, and by the time Gyotin had placed a second coal in a second bowl, Adam caught its scent: sweet, gentle, and grassy. There was a sharp resin-like note too, but he didn’t really know how to describe it. It was nice, either way.

Gyotin placed the bowls on the ground to either side of Daar.

“We burn sweet-herb in offering to the occasion. For those who are not Gaoian, know that sweet-herb comes in many forms. The ancient texts tell us of a particularly rare herb that was used only for the most sacred purposes. That herb had long been thought extinct, but modern archaeology, combined with molecular evidence, has identified its strain. It lives still, though only at High Mountain Fortress, and even then its survival is nothing short of miraculous. It was found in a single, untended garden in a worn-down, disused courtyard, one that had been slated for eventual demolition. We now know that courtyard was none other than Fyu and Tiritya’s personal garden. That herb has been carefully cultivated, My Father, and today…we offer it. May it please the spirits of all, Seen and Unseen, and consecrate these proceedings.”

Gyotin turned back toward the table, walked over, and picked up the crown.

“Let us all take a moment of silence to contemplate what we are about to do.”

Heads bowed. For a minute or longer, there was no sound at all that Adam could detect, beyond his own breath and the occasional faint rustle of fur and fabric as somebody moved. Gyotin stood unmoving in the middle of the stage, holding the crown up for them all to see.

It was a minimalist thing. It bore no diamonds, or velvet, or magnificent crenellations of precious metal… in fact it was simple. A shaped loop of silver, designed to fit snugly around his ears and the back of his head where it could shine through his fur without getting in the way.

Gyotin broke the silence by turning to face Daar.

“This crown is a symbol of your authority, and a token of your transformation. You do not kneel before me: You kneel before it, and all that it represents. Once you don this crown, you may never again be rid of the duties that come with it. Do you understand?”

Daar’s voice didn’t boom this time. It didn’t need to. He stared at the slim metal for a long second, then took a breath and spoke a modest, earnest word:

“Yes.”

“Then kneel, My Father.”

Daar did so.

Gyotin held the crown over Daar’s head, and intoned something that felt old in a way that a spoken voice usually didn’t. “Be thou sworn by thy own word, and blessed by the peoples given unto you, who submit willingly to your rule. Be thou consecrated by sweet-herb and offerings, guarded and guided by those Seen and Unseen. And be thou crowned the Great Father, embodiment of the Gao. So too may thou bless, consecrate, rule and reign over that which is given thee, and may thou never again allow anyone or anything command thee to obedience.”

Adam fixed the tableau in his memory, feeling acutely aware that this was one of those iconic moments that’d be reproduced on front pages around the whole galaxy, and in history books for… well. Certainly for as long as the Gao and Humanity were around. Possibly even longer. His friend, on his knees with a simple loop of metal hanging over him like an axe about to drop.

It dropped, and settled snugly around his ears and scalp. Gyotin said something, far too soft for anybody but himself and Daar to hear. Whatever it was… it seemed to give Daar comfort. He duck-nodded, flicked an ear, and then stood with the crown glittering in his fur. He surveyed the crowd, the cameras, and old stone walls that had seen yet another moment in the long march of history.

“…I rise,” he said, “and am the Great Father.”

“Laid Bare—Warriors in their own words” Issue #4: Julian Etsicitty
Author and photographer: Ava Magdalena Ríos

On our last call before the shoot, my next subject left me with this bit of advice:

“You get used to the gravity pretty fast, actually. Or, at least I did. Well, no. We did, and the other fellas with us did, too.”

Julian Etsicitty is, to put it mildly, an unexpected interview choice for a series about warriors in their own words. He is a civilian—albeit an unusual one—and has no military or law enforcement background. He is not a particularly aggressive-seeming man nor is he steeped in any of the associated ethos. While soldiers in general (and the combat arms in particular) tend toward boisterousness, Julian generally does not. He is mild-mannered, polite, deferential, and solicitous. His voice is deep yet soft-spoken, and he tends to revise and backtrack over his thoughts as he speaks them. One very much gets the impression that he thinks as he talks.

Nor is he one to crave attention. Julian’s sparse social media presence is mostly limited to smiling selfies with fans or the occasional snap taken during an adventure. While he and his partners appear frequently in Byron Group promotional materials, he rarely photographs himself, and he never posts pictures of them [Disclosure: ESNN is a wholly-owned subsidiary]. The most numerous items are videos of Bozo, a Folcthian legend of a dog who, it has been rumored, may have explored Akyawentuo when the powers that be weren’t paying attention.

Julian’s personality is not, therefore, exactly one that a larger-than-life hero might be expected to possess. Meeting him in person is another matter entirely. Unassuming and friendly, yet not at all shy, Julian has a ruggedly handsome face and a thick-chested, charismatic presence that must be seen to be believed. Much like his friends, his huge shoulders are these days about as wide as a doorframe. They slope up to a massive set of traps that nearly touch his ears, which in turn frame a sinewy wrestler’s neck that’s significantly wider than his head. He prowls about as if ready to fight at any moment and has a perpetually wolf-like, loping posture, yet even then he stands six-foot-one in his bare feet. Julian is much larger in person than he appears on screen.

As with the Great Father, photography rarely does him justice. I aim to correct that.

In this double-length issue, we will explore the world of a man who, along with his partners, has rather unexpectedly found himself uniquely entangled with—and critically important to—the fortunes of the three sapient Deathworlder species.

We meet up at the jump facility on our way toward Akyawentuo, ready for the first off-world shoot of the series. Julian arrives burdened with a rather bulky-looking set of rugged travel cases, sets them down and shakes his head.

“Professor Hurt and his dang books…hi!”

[Image: Portering books for the “nutty professor.” Julian carries several large cases wedged under brawny arms, hands gripping numerous carrying handles.]

He grins a friendly grin and proffers a hard, paw-like hand that encircles mine entirely. We’ve been friends for some time now, making this gesture more of a nervous joke than anything. We make brief small talk and amble onto the platform. There’s an almost-didn’t-happen flash of black, a thump that can be felt just as much as be heard.

The gravity hits instantly and it is surprising, but not impossible to manage. For those of us who grew up in Folctha, it feels like a high-gravity session at the gym, which are still effectively mandatory at least three times a week. Stronger still is the air; it is heavy, cloying with too many overwhelming scents to catalog, and simultaneously oppressive yet energizing. Akyawentuo’s atmosphere has a higher oxygen content than Earth and it goes to ones’ head immediately.

And it is beautiful. I plot another excursion at a future date to more properly document Akyawentuo’s beauty. For now, a single photo which I took later on will need to suffice.

[Image: An otherworldly sunset. Julian’s head and shoulders are visible in the lower left corner, sitting on a cliff ledge and overlooking the jungle.]

The humidity is near dew-point and the temperature is genuinely hot, our time of arrival being the peak of midsummer noon. I break into a clammy sweat almost immediately, and understand why neither human nor Ten’Gewek are too keen on wearing much of anything at all, here.

[Image: A Ten’Gewek child perched on Julian’s shoulder, staring curiously into the camera.]

“I reckon he weighs about a hundred kilos.”

Julian hardly seems to notice the weight. Like most burdens, he handles it stoically and matter-of-factly. He isn’t bragging, he’s more interested in telling us about the Ten’Gewek.

He sends the child to handle some errands for him and introduces me to Yan Given-Man. Yan is both the most influential chieftain and his village is closest to the Jump Array, so this is a matter of etiquette. I am, after all, a stranger visiting their land.

The conversation is quick but pleasant (though Yan shamelessly flirts with me: Apparently, he flirts with every woman he meets regardless of species) and he’s kind enough to point us toward a suitable locale for our shoot.

During the trek out that way, Julian points out local flora and fauna. It’s quickly apparent that he’s easily the most nervous and self-conscious of my subjects to date. The source of his nervousness isn’t nakedness, as such—he’s quite famously noted for going au natural on Akyawentuo some days. Given the oppressive heat, I entirely understand. For him, the nervousness seems to be about the camera and the situation.

“We’ve been setting this up for months. Up until now I’ve been looking forward to it… Now that we’re here, I’m getting a serious case of cold feet, you know?”

I reassure him that we won’t proceed unless he’s comfortable, and we make some related small talk. He replies by chuckling softly, sighing, and peeling off his t-shirt. His physique is…striking. I snap up my camera and take a rapid-fire series of pictures, which he seems to find amusing.

[Image: Candid with sideways grin, abs tensed mid-chuckle while thick, stone-hard muscles fight for space on his frame. He pauses and flexes his forearm while unbuttoning his jeans.]

“I never thought I’d be this kind of a fella, you know?”

What do you mean?

“Well…this.” Julian gestures across himself in what seems like mild disbelief, then reaches behind his head with his arms and tenses his huge biceps for the first proper shot of the day.

[Image: A heroic body. Full-body frontal flexed pose, with arms the size of his head bulging prominently on either side. His expression is friendly but nevertheless nervous.]

“If you had asked me ten years ago what I’d be doing…well, okay. I suppose firstly I’d still be in stasis, but whatever. Even then, after having been abducted, rescued, even been a thief for a bit? I wouldn’t have ever guessed I’d end up wrestling gorillas for a living!”

Julian has worn many hats in his adult life: park ranger, alien abductee, castaway, explorer, research assistant. The revelation about his life of crime is a new one to me.

When you said you were “a thief for a bit,” what does that mean?

“You know the Cimbrean system defence field? I, uh… kinda stole it. From the Guvnurag.”

Tell me more.

“I was, uh… you know, I’d just spent like six years stuck on this hellhole planet with no way off, and then I got rescued. And the guy who rescued me, Kirk, he was eager to see humanity get a foothold on a colony planet. But Cimbrean was way vulnerable, it didn’t have any kind of serious protection so at the time it was only ever gonna be a little secret outpost. The only way it could grow was to get it a system field, and the Guvnurag weren’t selling. So Kirk hatched this plan to steal a crate of footballs right out from under their noses—uh, tentacles I guess, whatever—and it all hinged on a human who could set a decent distance-running pace.”

And that human was you?

He shrugs, which is a gesture he performs habitually, then after a moment he grins mischievously and sprints toward a far tree at a blistering pace. When he reaches the tree he quickly runs up the trunk, gracefully flips himself head over heels, and charges back.

[Image: Strength and grace. Three images capture Julian in flight, feet off the ground while running away, running back, and running past in a blur.]

He returns a moment later with a waterskin and takes a hefty swig, grinning hugely.

“I like running! Sprinting, long distance, track and field, whatever! Always did. I ran trail since I was a kid, not even in middle school yet. And I was so grateful to be rescued that, uh, I guess a little grand larceny seemed like a fair price. Especially for a good cause.”

You seem to get everywhere.

He shrugs again.

“For a while there, me and Allison were two of, like, only a handful of humans who were really doing anything outside Sol.”

Tell me about the others.

“Well, Xiù was doing her thing with the Gao obviously, but we didn’t pick her up until later… but on the ship there was Al and me, there was Lewis—He’s a really cool fella, shame we don’t get to hang out more. And there was our pilot, Amir…”

He looks down at the ground for a second.

“…Rest in peace, man.”

[Image: Mourning. Julian’s wild hair partially obscures his face.]

What happened?

“Sanctuary was attacked. Now, bear in mind, Sanctuary was this high-speed luxury yacht. Totally unarmed, civilian grade stuff. She couldn’t even begin to stack up to a warship. It damn near tore us in half, and Amir… he was wounded. Bad. But he held it together and flew circles around the bastards long enough for the rest of us to abandon ship, and then kamikaze’d them. He saved us all.”

This was the event that left you and your partners in stasis for five years?”

“Yeah. And we nearly didn’t make it. It was… close. Real close. Like, we actually got a taste of hard vacuum before making it to the lifeboat.”

He shudders.

“I don’t recommend it.”

What was it like?

“…Totally silent, except for my heartbeat. And… it hurt. All over, this crazy pain that just drilled down into me like I was being torn apart by thousands of little fish hooks. And a choking feeling in my lungs and my throat. I could feel the moisture on my eyes fizzing away in the vacuum, and… I mean, we were dying. We had, like, seconds before we passed out. And then when we got in the lifeboat and pressurized it, it was like being hit with a baseball bat, all over. And then there was more pain because we got a nasty case of the bends… I dunno if we passed out from the pain or fell asleep from just being exhausted.”

He shudders again.

“Either way… we made it. We spent a couple weeks in hospital, but we made it.”

You were rescued by [Warhorse] as I recall.

“Yeah, and his friends too. He was a lot smaller then. Well, relatively speaking anyway. But he still had the same goofy…everything, really. After that there was recovery. I bounced back pretty quick I guess. Took Xiù a bit longer, but she came through like she always does. Al I think was hurting the worst of us, but she powered through it.”

[Image: A distant fond smile.]

What inspired the three of you to join the Byron Group’s exploration program?

“We… sorted out our relationship, you know? Talked it out, figured out how we felt about each other, and decided we wanted to stay together. Well, no. We knew that from the start, but still. And the thing about what we’d gone through was that coming back to Earth was really kinda weird. Or maybe…like, we didn’t belong there. Yeah. That’s better. Xiù threw out literally all her stuff, ‘cuz she said it didn’t feel like hers any longer. Allison… I mean she didn’t really have any ties anyway. And in the years I’d been gone, my Grampa’d died…”

He trails off for a second.

“…That was real hard to take.”

You were close with him?

“He raised me. I’d like to think he’d be proud of me. Well, yeah. He would be, I think. He always worried after me too, always did want me to feed me better, but he couldn’t afford it. Something he always felt guilty about but I didn’t complain. It wasn’t like I was starving, you know?”

And Byron Group?

“They came to us. Being honest, my first interest in it was just…paying the bills, and getting their, uh, really famously litigious lawyers on my side!”

He laughs.

“There was a whole bunch of legal stuff about Grampa’s estate and the house and everything. I never asked how much it all cost, but Mister Byron likes to grumble about it now and then… Al and Xiù had their own reasons. Al was the one who really wanted to get out there. She said she felt like she mattered out there, you know? I think Xiù felt the same way, but it took her a while to figure it all out. Except, uh… like, she never hesitated, or anything. It’s not like she was lost, she knew what she wanted. It just took her a while to explain why she wanted it.”

[Image: A collage of Julian talking and waving his hands about wildly, showcasing his pacing, thoughtful mannerisms and the way he stops to brush his hair out of his face.]

And you went to Mars.

“Well, I mean, we went to Nebraska first…”

He laughs again.

“…But yeah. And the weird thing is, out of everything we’ve done, that’s the bit that seems the least, uh, real. I guess. Like, everywhere else we’ve gone there’s been life and people or at least trees or whatever. Mars… ain’t like that. It’s so not like anywhere on Earth, or any temperate planet, it just… I can’t imagine people living there. You can just feel it, it ain’t a living place. It ain’t been a living place in millions of years. It’s, uh…a Deadworld maybe.”

But after that, you found worlds full of life.

“Not at first! Our first find was Aphrodite, which is like, I guess a proto-Earth. It’s basically still molten under the steam clouds. Maybe there’s some organic molecules down there from all the comets, but that’s just guessing. Spectro wasn’t very helpful.”

But then you found Lucent.

“Oh man… Lucent.”

[Image: close-up of an unreservedly happy smile, head tilted upwards and stretching his neck.]

“Lucent was the jackpot, but more than that it was… It was spiritual. The first time we saw the glittermotes… I mean, Xiù saw them first. It’s her helmet cam footage we shared when we got back. But… there’s some things are just so profoundly beautiful, a fella like me can’t put it into words. I hope the Chinese appreciate what they’ve got there. If it were up to me, the only human presence on Lucent would be a jump array, and a couple of park rangers. And we’d take people out into the nail-tree woods and they’d see the glittermotes and go home.”

In my experience, Julian is not a particularly politics-oriented individual, unless that subject is conservation. This moment in our interview provokes a very long diversion along that topic. Not even a double-length issue could do his thoughts justice, so the full transcript, along with additional photography, is available on ESNN’s website.

We move on to Julian’s unwitting foray into intersolar politics, particularly with the People. The Misfit trio’s first contact with the Ten’Gewek is already well documented, so by mutual agreement we decide not to go over old ground again.

After your stint as a paid explorer, your role morphed into a sort of liason with the Ten’Gewek. How did that happen?

“God, I don’t even know, being honest. I think a big part was, uh, because I could hack it.”

What do you mean?

Julian thinks for a moment, shrugs, and decides to demonstrate. He races past me, rather effortlessly jumps high up and flings himself into the giant Ketta, then without pausing sets to leaping and swinging between the trees. Ketta tend to grow well apart from each other, making his stunt more impressive in the high gravity: twenty percent stronger than Earth standard. He apes about, runs along the strong lower branches, long-jumps between trees and shows off for the camera, then gracefully flips back down to the ground from about five meters up. He lands confidently on the balls of his feet, recomposes himself, stands up tall and grins fiercely. Warriors are often physically exuberant and so is he, in his unique way.

[Image: Collage of a modern-day Tarzan. The final image captures the moment he lands on his toes, brawny legs taut and bent slightly at the knees, with an effort-filled growl on his face.]

It only takes him two big huffs to catch his breath. He has a happy and mildly smug expression on his face, which immediately morphs into somewhat embarrassed pride.

“Fun! But I have to tell you, it took a whole bunch of just straight insane training to get good enough to do that! I’m a really big fella so it’s even harder, too. But, well…”

Here he grows a bit embarrassed about himself, and forges on somewhat reluctantly.

“Okay, back up. Dane [Bryon Group’s physical trainer] had helped me see that I had all this potential, right? Before we even left on the first mission, he cleaned up my diet and had me training not even all that hard, just something nice and strenuous, you know? Well, just by doing that I filled out fast. Like, so fast that I sort of realized I could do something almost nobody can do. Then [Warhorse] got involved, said I was something like him, I find out from Nofl [a Corti researcher, resident in Folctha] that I was picked for ‘research’ because of my background and, uh, because my genetics are really dang good I guess, which…I don’t know. That’s a strange thing to learn. A little humbling, too. Yeah.”

Julian’s physique has changed dramatically over the last several years, as readers will know from his various interviews or postings on social media. Before, one might have described him as a long-armed and rangy athlete, as if he were a wrestler that had never properly filled out.

Not any longer. I decide to broach the unavoidable topic.

You transformed yourself for this mission, in a way very few can.

“…Yeah. It’s a gift I have, I suppose. And [Righteous] says, it’s an insult to God to waste his blessings, which…I can get behind that. Still feels weird, though. Also, I’m pretty sure I know all the fellas who could even do this. That…it’s almost too much of a coincidence, you know?”

The black market has of course managed to gain access to Crude, likely from illegal Corti labs seeking untaxed profit. This has quite naturally produced a new crop of extreme performance athletes on the worldwide competitive scene across many sports, especially powerlifting, strongman, American football and the like. Yet despite this, none of these enhanced athletes have ever matched the physical performances that members of HEAT can achieve, nor those of a select few people in their close orbit, like Julian. We discuss this at length and what it might mean, though sadly I must once again refer you to the website for the full interview.

You are not a small man.

“No!”

He grins sheepishly, and again tries his hand at posing. He’s still nervous but quickly gets the hang of it with a bit of coaching and, I suspect, recalling some covert practice with his jockular friends. Given that he showed up for the shoot in an impressively lean state with a tan darker than his usual, it’s clear he prepared for this more than my other subjects had bothered.

Which is odd, because the others weren’t embarrassed subjects at all, whereas Julian…

“Like this? I feel like a dork!”

He laughs, but keeps posing hard. A sheen of sweat begins to develop on him, both from the strain and the oppressive, humid heat. I silently regret not wearing my exercise clothing.

You’re doing fine. As I said, you’re not small…

[Image: rear profile of upper body, fingers intertwined behind his head. His thick lats frame a broad, powerful back, while heavy cable-like muscles run along the deep groove of his spine.]

“No, never was, really. I’d always been a big fella even when I was just a kid. Strong as heck, too, but…not like I am now. I mean I was always, uh, big-boned? Yeah. Sorta. Even when I was little I had the frame and the strength, but I just didn’t have enough food to fill out like I could have. Might have ran varsity track or wrestled if we could’ve afford it, but…”

He shakes his shaggy head in mild self-disbelief, then continues:

“But now? I guess, uh, I made up for lost time. I’m strong enough I can edge out most of the [Ten’Gewek] men, and heck, I’m about level with Vemik! He’s a bruiser these days.”

He pauses again, spins his flank toward the camera and allows himself his first unreservedly self-confident grin of the shoot.

“But I’m still growing, and I can outrun them all too!”

[Image: A flash of pride. Side portrait of Julian with an aggressive, half-snarl grin as he holds a particularly strenuous full-body pose.]

Julian does not directly compare himself to anyone but his adopted tribe, and while he is not shy about his abilities, he generally prefers modesty over braggadocio. However, leaving aside the rough equality between the three Deathworlders at the figurative top of their respective species, the average Ten’Gewek possesses a physicality on par with the best that human and gaoiankind can offer. That curve is dramatically shifted in their favor, and yet Julian finds himself comfortably among them through luck, work ethic, and his sheer force of will. I know the pain he paid for those abilities better than most and prompt him accordingly.

I imagine it wasn’t easy.

“Oh fuck no it wasn’t. Still isn’t, won’t ever be! But we…well, heck, I’ll be honest, I needed to prove to them we could play by their rules, even if God made them better at it. Turns out though, he made us humans pretty damn good at this, too.”

It is difficult to illustrate with photos just how impressive Julian’s casually immense speed is. He can move like a blur when he wants to, though he is reluctant to state exactly how fast he is. His equally immense strength, however, is easier to depict. I cast about and point to an almost round boulder which has taken residence against the roots of a Ketta. Julian grins, prowls over to it and pries it out of the ground. The boulder is about as wide as his broad chest, and he picks it up and curls it repeatedly with quiet, satisfied grunts. I later learn how impressive a feat this is—for details, see his stats and other info in the full write-up on ESNN.

“Not many… hnngh… can do something… grr… like this!”

He lifts it above his head a few times, then falters, pauses for a moment, and looks at me.

[Image: Honest strength. Side profile of Julian pausing mid-curl while holding a large boulder in his hands, his arms bulging outrageously yet his expression questioning and uncertain.]

“…I guess that’s pretty stupid and macho of me, huh?”

I withhold any comment and press forward. Julian has become a mentor and teacher for a young Deathworld species who, while in many ways are much like us, value traits like physical strength much more strongly. Teaching them requires that he push himself past limits most of us would hardly believe a human could breach. He is still coming to terms with what that means for him.

Why did you feel it necessary to build yourself up, knowing you were at a disadvantage?

Julian looks at the boulder in his hands for a moment, then raises it above his head, jumps up and throws it an impressive distance away, as if it was merely a medicine ball.

[Image: Rock toss. Julian’s feet are a meter off the ground, his arms up, the rock mid-arc.]

He lands, huffs in a satisfied manner, and dusts his hands roughly against each other.

“Well, I’ve said it before, Ten’Gewek are smart. Really smart, maybe smarter than most people. But even still, they’re neolithic hunter-gatherers. You can’t just live in the trees with them. You’ve got to be able to hunt, bring the kill back, defend the tribe, do the hard work every single day. They respect survivors, and here that means a person has to be tough and strong in the tribe’s eyes. I have to hold their respect if we’re going to help, and I’m, uh, the right guy in the right place at the right time. Which is a weird feeling, but whatever. I won’t let that stop me.”

[Image: Self-contemplation. Julian examines his hands in this off-side relaxed portrait.]

Did you know you had it in you to rise to to the occasion?

“No, I didn’t! I had no idea what I had in me, I just wanted to keep Vemik from beating me up!”

The moment is punctuated by none other than Vemik leaping down from the tree onto Julian’s back. I’m reasonably sure such a tackle would have proved fatal for me—and most people, for that matter—but Julian seems only happily surprised.

“Hey–!”

An incredibly physical wrestling match ensues, where the two almost impossibly strong combatants crash about through the woods, throwing and trash-talking each other with massively happy expressions on their faces. My inexperienced eye has trouble following the action as they’re both simply too fast for me, but at some point Julian catches a lucky break. He gets Vemik around the waist, flings him backward and (according to some amusing internet research) manages a painful belly-to-back suplex. A quick scuffle ensues and Julian emerges on top, pinning Vemik firmly to the ground.

“Better give big fella, I’ve got some tricks you haven’t seen yet…”

[Image: Julian grinning savagely as he holds Vemik face-down, legs tangled up around his waist, Vemik’s arms crushed far up his own back. His thick tail pulls futilely at Julian’s hands.]

Once the bout is over, Julian explains what he’s doing to the curious ET, who spends the rest of our shoot watching from the sidelines with a manic, barely-contained curiosity.

“Being honest though, he wins more often than not. Vemik’s got…God, over thirty kilos on me still? I’m catching up…longer legs help a lot. Practice with my friends helps a lot more, heh.”

Vemik makes Julian promise to teach exactly what he did to win later on, which is agreed to with a soft chuckle.

“A surprising amount of this job has been like that, actually. Like, if you weren’t here, the next thing we’d be doing would be, uh, ‘samples’ collection, or maybe we’d go round up the smart kids for storytime with the professor, or talk about food, tools, that sort of thing. They never want to sit down and learn unless they’ve had a chance to play good and hard, first. Not even Yan.”

Why is that?

“Wrestling for them is how they build friendships. You and I might just sit down and have a good conversation, but Ten’Gewek will insist on a good roll in the dirt every time. They can be gentle about it, to be fair…but if you can’t play hard they start to think of you as a bit like a child.”

You had to work hard to earn their trust.

“Yeah. First contact woulda been a massacre one way or the other if not for Vemik there. He saw that we didn’t want a fight and stepped in… But let’s not re-hash all that. We met, he was friendly, I slabbed up…and so on. The interesting bit is what happened when the Hierarchy showed up. I think, uh, yeah. That’s the reason they respect us I think.”

I could see Vemik nodding unconsciously in my peripheral vision.

How so?

“Look, up until that point we were just these weird tall skinny people who showed up out of nowhere with a whole lot of magic and not a lot of muscle. And the People, they respect magic, but they respect strength a whole lot more. Again…just take a look at Vemik.”

I do. Vemik draws himself up to his full height and smiles aggressively at me. His physique is also striking, and his abilities are comparable to Julian’s despite being almost a foot shorter.

[Image: the two men side-by-side. Vemik is doing an impression of one of Julian’s poses from earlier in the shoot, and Julian has his hand up to his forehead, grinning in amusement.]

“He’s their inventor, their tinkerer, their smith, the guy with a head full of ideas. Like, if he were a human we’d call him an eccentric geek. He also has a child, and he’s one of their best hunters, and one of their strongest warriors too. If he wasn’t all of those things, then the eccentric geek stuff wouldn’t get him any respect at all.”

At the risk of sounding human-centric, isn’t that a little unfair?

“No. It’s easy to forget how easy it is to live in a proper civilization. All you need is some way to earn money. Here, that won’t cut it. Among humans, you can be a photographer, or a poet, or a movie star and people will respect you for it. And that’s certainly easier… But here, if you’re a man who can’t carry a Werne back to the tribe, you’re only a step above useless, and that means people die. It’s harsh maybe, but that ain’t the People’s fault. That’s how their world is. It took us… Fuck, millennia of hard work before that wasn’t how our world was, too.”

He has something on his mind he wants to get out and starts to pacing. He tends to bounce on the balls of his feet and swing his arms as he does this, and I remark how most people tend to freeze in their tracks while pondering something. This amuses Julian, and prompts him to prowl over to the boulder he tossed earlier. He sits himself down on it and needles me with a wry grin.

“Is this the official, Ava-sanctioned ‘deep thoughts’ pose?”

[Image: sitting on a rock, life modeling of the Thinker. He can’t quite manage a straight face.]

Perhaps if you weren’t bouncing your legs so much…you seemed caught by a thought just now. Something about civilization?

He pauses, shifts a bit, and rests his left leg across the other. He lets loose on a thought that’s clearly been brewing for a long while.

“Yeah. I think, maybe too many of us don’t really get just how much civilization actually costs, you know? Farmers pay for it with toil, policeman and soldiers pay in blood. Steel mills, now there are some hard-working fellas. It’s just…so many people are disconnected from it. They don’t respect their food, value their safety, or marvel at steel. The magic talking rock they have in their pockets replaces actual human contact sometimes. Well, no. I think maybe it just makes it easier to have, uh, fake friendships. Like, okay. Nobody these days has to really trust each other, except for, uh, like, the police and soldiers and whatever trust each other. And I think that maybe means we’re pretty fragile as a civilization. There’s a long, long way to fall, if we fall.”

Whereas the Ten’Gewek have only barely started that climb.

[Image: Close-up from below eye level, hands animated, face bright.]

“Yeah, exactly! Yan and Vemik, they’re in a really unique position. They come from a place where steel is magic and the idea of money, finance, vaccines, all that is radically alien and magical. Like, the word doesn’t even mean the same thing with them. Magic is more like, uh, how some tribes used medicine. Like, a powerful force. Well, no. I think, uh, magic means a lot more from their perspective. I think sometimes, we lose the magic of life with all the distractions, you know? They don’t. These two know what magic actually is. We took them to Earth, and showed them magic like they can barely grasp. It’s like…we’re elves to them.”

And yet they don’t respect us?

“Respect is earned. And up until the Hierarchy showed up, we hadn’t done that. Earned it. You know? We’d impressed them, sure, but that ain’t the same thing, you know? We didn’t earn their respect until we stood side-by-side with them in battle.”

And until you took their Rite of Manhood.

“Yeah. That’s why I’m the way I am now.”

What was it like?

“It was an ordeal. Well, the whole point is it’s an ordeal. Yan more or less decided I’d go through the whole thing pretty much right after the fight with the Abrogators.”

Why?

“I think… well, okay, so at that point we’d earned his trust, you know? But there’re a lot of tribes and not all of them were there for the battle. For the ones who were there, we’d proven ourselves. Humans, I mean. For the ones who weren’t, I guess… well, maybe he just needed to prove to them that humans can be real men in their eyes. Even if most of us don’t because we’re different, it’s enough that they can look at me and see that when we set our mind to it, we can be the kind of strong they value too. And once we did that, maybe they start asking, ‘what does strong mean to a human?’”

That seems very selfless of you…

“Well… it has its perks. I’ll admit, it’s nice being able to toss boulders around…so yeah. It’s not completely selfless, ha! Being this kind of ridiculously strong has some big costs, but heck, I’ll take it. Especially on high-carb days!”

Your cloned foot has been the talk of the gossip columns lately.

This comes as news to him and he barks out a surprised sort of chuckle.

“What, really?”

[Image: Powerfully muscled calves flexed hard for inspection atop wide, sturdy feet. The thin, tattooed line above Julian’s left ankle shows where his cloned foot begins.]

You are among the first humans with a cloned replacement limb.

“Well, I mean… I know it was an experimental procedure…”

If it was experimental, why didn’t you stick with the prosthetic?

“I did at first, went through two of them in fact. In some ways a prosthetic is still better, too. It’s repairable, it can be adapted for specific uses. The funny thing though, is it turns out the human foot is a heck of a challenge to replace. I was constantly having to adjust for it, or put up with the prosthetic breaking…the costs were promising to get pretty ridiculous, too. But really, the final straw was when the damn thing nearly got me killed.”

How?

“Some APA goons attacked us while I was showing Yan and Vemik around Earth.”

For the first time, I see him angry.

[Image: Undisguised fury on his face, balled fists and gritted teeth. The expression manages to dramatically change his face from handsome to monstrous.]

“Alien Protection Army? Please. They ain’t protecting shit. They tried to kill us! They’re a bunch of cowards scared of a bigger universe who wanna pretend like we’re the biggest bad around. We welcomed Yan and Vemik to our world as guests, and these morons attacked us!”

You defended yourselves.

“You’re damn right we did.”

Just as suddenly as it came, his anger slides away, and he briefly looks ashamed.

“Anyway… My foot broke during the fight. My prosthetic. I mean, being honest I should have expected it would break eventually, but…”

Why is that?

He shrugs resignedly and sits down for a moment.

“The first one broke all the time. The second one, well, it was great at first…but [Warhorse] made me a project of his. I’m pretty stupidly heavy now, like…I’m wary of cheap furniture, I’m bigger than competitive strongmen. I’m exactly the kind of strong that weight implies too, and I work on a high gravity world. It’s a rough life. And, well, Vemik is rough on me, too.”

[Image: Cross-legged on the ground, contemplating his left foot.]

“Anyway. The dang thing picked the worst possible time to go crunch and it nearly earned me an axe to the face. And in the aftermath, all I could think about was the pain that’d have caused… everyone. Al and Xiù, Yan and Vemik. Singer. All of them. So, yeah. I swallowed my pride and squeamishness and got a clone graft. That little incident taught me the hard way, you can’t put your own discomfort ahead of what’s really important. My partners, the Ten’Gewek, they depend on me. I have to protect them. That’s all there is to it.”

And who protects you?

“We protect each other. I’ve got some pretty good friends, too. Byron Group has been good to us…we’re not alone. None of us really are, you know?”

This is the moment that Julian’s inner warrior shines through. Unconventional though he may be, he is passionately committed to protecting those he loves, and fighting for their futures.

[Centerfold image: A stern, resolute expression, arms crossed in front of his chest. He stands tall and proud, his body taut, ready, and covered in sweat from head to toe.]

“The guys I work with, they talk sometimes about being the sheepdogs, protecting the flock from the wolves. I get that. But it also ain’t quite like that, because no sheep ever set up a charity for their wounded sheepdog, you know? Sheep don’t have monuments and memorial days. They…I don’t know. I think part of what makes them them is how they see themselves. Maybe. But like… part of what makes us humans is we can understand when somebody’s putting themselves on the line for the rest of us. And we can appreciate it. We can give something back. That’s what this whole series of yours is about, right?”

That was a viewpoint I had honestly not considered, and told him so. I had envisioned this series as a means for our defenders and protectors to share the world through their eyes, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the opportunity itself was more valuable to them.

“That’s, like… the contract. It’s the basic deal, you know? You pick the people who matter to you and you do your best for them. And in return, you want them to give you something that’s worth your best. If you’re not gonna enter into that kind of a contract with somebody then…”

Then… what?

“…The worst part of bein’ stuck alone on Nightmare for all that time was I had nobody with me. And in a way, well… I guess I was totally free. No obligations, no ties, you know? I had one concrete goal, look after myself. But why? I didn’t really think I’d ever see home again. I didn’t really have a reason to keep going, except that I didn’t want to die. And maybe the vague hope that maybe one day I’d be rescued. But I was living just for myself, and it… you can’t understand loneliness like that. I’m sorry, but you can’t. Thank God, there’s hardly anybody who’s had to go through it.”

Julian looks off at nothing in particular, his expression one of unreadable, quiet pain.

[Image: a distant, haunted look.]

He is not one to dwell, however, and my next question prompts him right back into optimism.

But now?

“Now I’ve got this misfit little family, I’ve got babies on the way, I’m a man of the tribe now in a way I never was with my own people and they all depend on me, you know? I would never have done any of this if it didn’t matter. It’s a heck of a lot of work living on two worlds and carrying this much weight around! Heck, it’s a lot of work being half this busy or half this big! But look what I get! I get a purpose, you know? I get to give my best to people who’re really worth it. That’s something I treasure every day.”

I pick out one word from among that thought.

Babies?

He smiles, a genuine beaming smile that makes his whole face light up.

“Yeah! Both Xiù and Allison! We’ve been trying for a few months now, and… well. They said it was okay to share that, too. So, I guess I’m gonna be a daddy twice over in not too long!”

Congratulations!

“I know, right?! It’s the next big adventure… You know what’s funny? I’ve been in some crazy situations. Gunfights, I got blown up, I got spaced… But I think I might actually be more scared about raising my kids right than I was about any of that other stuff. It’s a big responsibility.”

But you’re looking forward to it.

[Image: Julian sweaty and exhausted after this marathon modelling session, but grinning in a warm, deliriously happy way from ear to ear.]

“Yeah. The future’s looking bright.”

Date Point: 15y10m
Ceres, Asteroid Belt, Sol

Sam Jordan

Sam honestly hadn’t felt this… alive in his life. He was dancing on a knife-edge, riding on the thrill and danger of discovery. Every time he outwitted the investigation, every time he slipped through a door while it was closing, it was…

He’d never imagined a feeling like this. And all of it, all of it, for the greater good of both mankind and the galaxy. Freedom beckoned: all he had to do was stay one step ahead of the pursuit.

If his sponsor hadn’t shown him how to accomplish his little time-distortion trick, it all would have been impossible.

At least the weapon was ready. It had taken him weeks to recover the physics package, but that was all part of the plan. Designing and building a nuclear-pumped X-ray laser around it from spare parts while convincingly falsifying the requisition orders to cover his tracks had been… thrilling. His innocent, chirpy smile and trustworthy tone of voice had both been tested, and they’d held up. He always had a convincing alibi, he always managed to deflect suspicion just enough.

If they only knew. They were smart… but Sam was smarter. That knowledge was a drug.

He checked his timepiece again. He had three minutes. Good. Two minutes spare.

The gyroscopes were working properly, this time. His contraption looked janky and hand-built, but by God it was precision engineering. It had to be, for this job.

The target was, of course, invisible to the human eye. He was relying entirely on instruments and precision timing to take this shot, and had only one opportunity. He had to hit a moving target from more than twenty AU away, at precisely the right millisecond. That kind of precision defied belief, sometimes…

…But everything seemed to be ready. There was nothing more to tinker with at this point: It’d either succeed, or fail. It was out of his hands.

He checked the timer and the aim one last time, then left the little crater he was using for this and bounded back across the Ceres surface in three long leaps. As the dust left the temporal acceleration field he’d rigged up around his suit it hung frozen in the vacuum, like a still photo. It was a strange effect, with strange consequences. He’d nearly broken an airlock the first time he tried to let it out: as it turned out, doors didn’t much like it when different parts of them were experiencing wildly different degrees of time dilation. Just another daring escapade to give him a rush.

He signed the suit back in using Drew M’s access code and dismantled the field generator into its innocuous component parts. It didn’t feel great to use the diligent Aussie as the fall guy, but that was the price of freedom. Besides, Drew’s name would be cleared in the long run. Sam didn’t have any illusions that he could evade capture forever: he just needed to evade capture for long enough. Whatever came after would be the price he was willing to pay.

After all: Humanity didn’t belong in a cage.

It was time for the Sol Shield to come down.

++END CHAPTER 50 PT.2++

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Sixty-four Deathworlders:

Graham Lynk
Austin Deschner
Brian Berland
Aaron Hescox
Adam Beeman
Adam Shields
Alex Hargott
Andrew Ford
Andrew Robinson
Arnor atp
Bartosz Borkowski
Ben Thrussell
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Chris Bausch
Chris Candreva damnusername
Daniel R.
Dar
Darryl Knight
David Jamison
Devin Rousso
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Elizabeth Schartok
Eric Johansson
Fiona Dunlop galrock0
Gavin Smart
Gygax Fan
Ignate Flare
Jim Hamrick
Jon
Kristoffer Skarra
Krit Barb
Laga Mahesa lovot
Matt
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Mel B.
Mikee Elliott
Morgan Barnes
Myke Harryson
Nicholas Enyeart
Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Oliver Mernagh
Patrick Huizinga
Peter Bellaby
Richard A Anstett
Ryan Cadiz
Saph
Sintanan
SourMonkey
Starky
Stephane Girardin
Sun Rendered theWorst
Tyler Kelloway
Woodsie13
Zachary M Lunstrum

As well as Sixty-nine Friendly ETs, 74 Squishy Xenos, and 278 precious, oh-so-derpy Dizi Rats.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

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The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 50: “Counterattack pt. 3 - Strike.”

Chapter 50: Counterattack, pt.3 - Trigger

Date Point: 15y 10m AV
Camp Tebbutt Biodrone Internment Facility, Yukon–Koyukuk, Alaska, USA, Earth

Hugh Johnson

Camp Tebbutt wasn’t actually a bad place to live, if you didn’t count the fact that it was essentially a prison for innocent victims.

Hugh understood why he was there, and why he couldn’t leave… but after eleven years, he couldn’t help but envy all the people who could be anywhere else. Even though the camp’s surroundings were beautiful, and his cabin was easily the most luxurious home he’d ever had, and even though he had a kind of maybe-a-thing going with Maeena as her English got better…

None of them were free.

All because some alien bastard had stolen their bodies and driven them around like fucking puppets. Because there were gizmos in Hugh’s head that made being hijacked again a very real possibility. And because those implants were so deeply and intimately buried in the depths of his brain that removing them was beyond any human medicine.

The others were luckier, in some ways. Most of them lived with the hope that eventually their more shallowly-installed implants could be safely removed. Only a handful of inmates—mostly the survivors from Egypt like Maeena—were in Hugh’s position.

Unfortunately, one of that handful was Zane. And Zane was either too stubborn or too crazy to accept his lot.

Probably stubborn. Like how he refused to drop his dense patois and instead wielded it like a defiant weapon to carve out his own little one-man nation, aloof from the rest of the internees. On some level, Hugh could sympathize with stubbornness. On another…

“Why do you do this to yourself, Zane?”

The gangly Jamaican was spitting blood and pinching his nose after taking a kinetic pulse shot to the face. He’d tried to escape—again—and been caught by the drones—again—and been shot by the drones… again. And it wasn’t like there was anywhere to escape to out there: The inmates didn’t know exactly where the camp was, had no idea which direction the nearest town was, how far away it might be…

The only thing waiting outside the fence was cold, bears and a slow death. But apparently none of that mattered to Zane, who gave Hugh his usual glare and picked himself up out of the dirt. His alien-made prosthetic arm whined as he used it to dust off his clothes. Poor bastard - whoever had made it for him had decided that the best way to hook it up to his nervous system was with a control chip deep in his brain, and thus the Hierarchy had hijacked him.

“Blood clot,” he grunted cryptically, and stalked off toward his cabin, there presumably to lurk and sulk until hunger forced him to endure human company again. He was easily the loneliest and orneriest son-of-a-bitch in the camp, but as far as Hugh was concerned that was all self-inflicted.

Satisfied that there would be no more escape attempts, the drones returned to their high-altitude patrol. Presumably a medic and security officer would visit Zane in his cabin, tell him off and refer him to the counsellor. Again.

He found Maeena outside her cabin. She was performing salat as best she could, considering her wheelchair. Hugh didn’t know the details of what happened to her in Egypt, only that she’d been biodroned and then crushed by a collapsing building in a firefight. He’d never once got the impression that it slowed her down, though: In fact, adjusting to the culture shock of living in a camp in America had fazed her more than losing both legs, three fingers, and a husband.

He respectfully let her finish, and she smiled at him once she was done.

“I hear drones. Zane again?”

“Yup.”

She shook her head. That seemed to be about all anyone could do for Zane. “What does he think he will do? Freeze to death?” She sighed and shivered. Hugh could relate: He’d lived on the Mexican border before being biodroned, and Alaska never felt warm to him even in the height of summer.

“We’ll freeze to death just staying still,” he said. “Wanna come for a… uh… a walk, I guess?”

“Or roll?” she suggested with a light smile and a quirk of her eyebrow. He’d always been in awe of her ability to make light of what had happened to her.

“Or a roll. Should help you warm up.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

Actually it turned out to be a pretty good day. The sky was clear, the weather was even kinda warm-ish… Free or not, there were worse things in life than taking a stroll in the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness with good company and the smell of lunch on the air. A nice hearty stew and a warm flatbread, home-cooked by one of Maeena’s countrymen.

Zane, however, raised some eyebrows by turning up in an almost good mood. He didn’t speak with anybody beyond the bare minimum necessary to get his share of the food, and he lurked in a corner, but he seemed almost… chipper. By his sullen standards, at least.

And Hugh couldn’t be sure, but he felt certain that the tall man’s face was less bruised than it should have been. The Internet might treat Kinetic pulse weapons like they were a joke, but the reality wasn’t gentle: they’d break bones, concuss, and knock out teeth with a good hit. A solid blow like Zane had taken should have left him with a couple of black eyes.

The gangly bastard had always been tougher than he looked, though. Whatever. It wasn’t Hugh’s problem. Whatever Zane was up to was the camp security staff’s concern, not his.

Still. It did make him wonder what, exactly, Zane had planned for if he ever did make it over the fence…

Date Point: 15y 10m AV
High Mountain Fortress, The Northern Plains, Gao

Captain Anthony (“Abbott”) Costello

The only appropriate follow-up to something as oppressively serious as the coronation was a loud, raucous feast, complete with boasting, contests of speed and strength and daring, long bouts of story-telling and general well-meaning revelry.

It was nice to see everyone unreservedly happy. Arés and Firth seem to have finally mended things between them. They were laughing together and generally roughhousing again, maybe a bit too boisterously but Costello wasn’t one to complain; he needed his men as ready as they could be. Firth had even challenged Adam to a series of foot races, which ‘Horse (of course) had handily won. That ended up drawing the stunned attention of the Champions and thus encouraged, things were in danger of spiraling into a bout of violently cheerful rough-housing.

The Lads had a way of doing that, really.

Daar of course could not stand unchallenged in his own domain. He rose from his spot at the high table, stretched lazily, growled fiercely and put in an alarming dash down the length of the enormous dining hall to re-assert his dominance, just to prove who the fastest man really was. He charged along the rows of tables, slammed into the far wall and propelled himself back down the hall without a hint of slowing down, then spun around at full speed and skidded to a halt while facing the assembled crowd. That was hardly dignified of him, but a performance like that had a grace and dignity all of its own. Stunned silence followed him as he pranced back to the high table on all fours and took his spot like a triumphant king of old, crown firmly on head…

The goofball pant-grin at the end might have shattered the illusion, admittedly.

Daar acted more like a mongol Khan than a king in Costello’s opinion, but then again the only royalty he knew much about were British. And the role of Great Father was Daar’s to shape as he chose; If he wanted to be more of a boisterous warlord than follow the reserved warrior-poet example that Fyu had set, that was entirely his prerogative.

Though as Costello discovered after a lengthy exposition following an innocent query, the flower arrangements on the tables were done by Daar personally. He was debating if it would be appropriate to tease him about it when the hulking gaoian ambled alongside with a plate of pershorkies, and settled the issue directly.

“Flowers have a whole different load o’ meaning with Gaoians, y’know.” The simple, shaped and twisted loop of silver shone brightly through his fur.

Costello hadn’t spoken to him since before the coronation, and suddenly found himself at a bit of a loss. “…Forgive me, I’m not sure what the proper etiquette is…”

“You can jus’ call me sir, I think. I ain’t ‘yer Great Father after all.”

“Yessir. How the tables have turned.”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t exactly…regretful. More like…

“Simpler times.”

“…Yeah. I never thanked you and Powell properly for that. It was…good for me. Just, being a simple ‘Back for a time, when all I had to worry about was if I could out-wrassle my friends.”

“I was surprised to see you refrain this evening, if I’m honest.”

A little of Daar’s sly humor crept back in. “I ain’t gonna pick a fight at my own coronation feast I can’t be completely sure o’ winning, captain!” He stood fully upright and surveyed the hall. “The Great Father can’t be seen ‘ta lose.”

“From what I hear, you would have stood a good chance against any of them, even ‘Horse.”

“Yeah, but a good chance ain’t a certainty. ‘Sides, we all need to be ready for tomorrow anyway. Let…let them play.”

If there was more than a hint of regret in the Great Father’s voice, Costello diplomatically refused to notice it. Fortunately, it was just a passing shadow, replaced an instant later by one of Daar’s trademark baritone chitters.

“Also…it’s good ‘fer the Champions ‘ta see who my friends are.”

…Ah. So he was a king after all.

“You were saying something about the flowers.”

“—Yeah! So this is kinda inspired by somethin’ the Japanese do called Ikebana…”

As it turned out, Daar had read up on the three Arts of Refinement from traditional Japanese culture. They apparently had disconcertingly deep parallels in Gaoian culture, and he’d taken a keen delight in blending the two. Whether this was for his personal benefit, or to thumb his nose at the Gaoian sense of Civilization, Costello couldn’t tell.

“I had trouble with Kōdō though. That’s incense appreciation: I like pretty much everythin’ about it, except Human noses need a way stronger hit. I tried some o’ the traditional techniques and it was just…way too much. Fresh flowers are good enough!”

“You, shying away from incense?”

“Accordin’ to our medical people, my sense o’ smell is literally more’n a million times stronger’n yours. I don’t think there’s any way o’ comparin’ ‘tween us with a difference like that. Like… I can’t even imagine what red might be like. When I look at anythin’ you say is red, all I see is a kinda dull yellow. D’you like red?”

“Sure. It’s my favorite color.”

“But would you wanna live in a house where everythin’ is red?”

“…I mean…”

“Bright, nuclear, inescapable, glowing red?”

“Okay. Maybe not. Is that what it’s like?”

Daar aimed his nose and took a quick sniff. “Costello, I can smell you used Ivory soap with aloe three days ago, which isn’t what you normally use. You had some company that night, huh?”

“You can smell that?”

“She smells healthy. Also, you use latex-free–”

“Point made!”

Daar chittered to himself; the bastard knew what he was doing. “…So yeah,” he said. “Incense is a bit strong.”

“And the tea ceremony?”

“That’s more Gyotin’s thing.”

“I’ve seen his tea ceremony,” Costello nodded. “I think he said it owed more to Chinese tradition, however. Not that I’d know one from the other…”

There was a happy jeer of some kind from a table in the corner and the sound of boisterously raised voices. Not shouting or angry, just… party-loud. Daar snorted and flicked an ear. “Fair ‘nuff. C’mon, let’s go rein in the Lads ‘fore they break my Champions.”

In fact, they arrived just in time for a drinking game, which would have proven interesting. Myaku’s legendary Gaoian tolerance for alcohol versus Firth’s ridiculous mass would have made for a hell of a contest.

They needed to be ready for tomorrow, sadly. Daar at least spared Costello from having to point that out by doing it himself.

“This here is a life question we’re gonna hafta ponder another time.”

Still, despite the call for moderation the night was a fun one. It felt like a celebration before they suited up the next day for a terrible mission.

And what a mission. The intel Regaari had sent back said the Hunters had learned a lot from losing their ring structure, and from the battle that raged throughout it.

The tactics were noticeably different. The FIC had concluded there must have been a change of leadership among the Hunters: The new tactics, technology and attitude on display all suggested at the very least that this operation was under the oversight of a commander with a very different way of looking at things.

If only they knew more about how Hunter society was structured and how leadership was selected. From what they could tell, there was a definite hive-mind element to however they ran themselves—Starship Troopers came to mind—but at the same time there were documented cases of Hunter ships and units clearly breaking formation or otherwise failing to heed their chain of command.

It introduced an element of anarchy into the equation that made life all the more difficult, and echoed what the Soviets had once observed of the US military: “A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.”

In any case, those were all concerns for tomorrow. For now, Costello had a lot of meet-and-greet to accomplish. Officers were inherently political creatures after all, and a big part of that meant making connections. He’d shaken hands with the Champions, chatted with the Mother-Supreme. He’d not been prepared for the sheer variety the Gaoians had in their culture, but that was probably a bit racist of him, so he kept his own counsel. After all, the first real opinion humanity had ever formed of the Gao had come through a relatively cloistered young woman who hadn’t seen a fraction of what the whole species had to offer.

Then there were the other guests, the ones whose presence at the actual coronation itself would have been inappropriate, but who were enthusiastically welcome at the feast.

Yan Given-Man, for instance.

Heads of state—and Yan was the closest thing the Ten’Gewek had—did not attend each other’s coronations, investitures, inaugurations, or whatever applied. It was…superstitious, honestly. Yan could understand that, couched in appropriate terms, but he otherwise seemed at a bit of a loss… as did everyone trying to make small talk with him. He’d of course gravitated to the Lads and played with them—gently, thank God—but once he’d indulged himself and moved on, he genuinely seemed out of his depth. Beyond hunting and such, there just wasn’t much in common to talk about with everyone else. The elderly female with him seemed to be managing much better and subtly led him around the room to make acquaintances. Apparently she was more than a match for his flirtaceous proclivities with anything vaguely Ten’Gewek-oid.

In the end he spent most of his time orbiting near Julian Etsicitty, who himself wasn’t particularly comfortable in the setting. They were a pair of hulking gorillas conspicuously unsure of themselves, and whose insecurity had them constantly looking to Xiù Chang for guidance. She looked positively born to it, navigating the social dance with genuine warm smiles and to the fussing delight of the Mother-Supreme.

There was a vulnerability there. If the Ten’Gewek were going to play the Great Game, they needed to learn how to play it. That was maybe unfair to foist on them but needs must. This was the kind of stage to which the heads of all the 5-EYES nations had been invited, and had either attended in person or with apologies sent somebody on their behalf.

Probably, a lot of important things got quietly worked out in the corners. Daar had graciously taken it upon himself to personally lead Yan and the elderly Singer around the room, introducing them to all the important people. Good. There was laughing, probably some stories being shared. Costello only caught snatches of it, but he heard part of a story about Daar being flung along a cliff while smashed up in Yan’s tail…he’d definitely need to ask about that one later.

There were definitely games afoot. Yet political creature or not, that kind of thing was still way over Costello’s grade. Rather than frustrate himself, he figuratively loosened his tie and enjoyed the food with the Lads, just to gently remind them that when the morning came, they needed to be well-fed, rested, and ready to perform.

They were. They woke up, shaved and attended to their comfort, then showered like men who knew it might be days before they got another chance. They accomplished their hygiene while their techs prepared for suit assembly in the other room. Elsewhere in the fortress, First Fang would be going through a similar ritual alongside Champion Fiin.

“I assume we’re gonna get final mission briefing soon?” Firth emerged from the shower while still toweling off his head. Short mohawks didn’t hold much water, but still: the entire point of the haircut was to help deal with sweat inside the Mass’s helmet, and to a man everyone preferred to be as bone-dry as possible before suiting up.

“Sure will. We’re just waiting on Champion Thurrsto and Father Genshi… Speak of the Devil.”

Genshi cut a strange figure in a Whitecrest combat suit. His dual thrashing first at the Great Father’s paws and then those of his Champion had definitely left their marks, and he’d clipped the fur on his face short to cover for it. Presumably at full length it’d look patchy and ragged.

The idea had been floated—and accepted—that he might be HEAT material. After all, the Champion of Whitecrest had to hold his own against the very best his Clan could produce in order to be the Champion, and lately that had meant having to stack up to the likes of Faarek, Shim, Regaari… and of course the new Champion, Thurrsto. For all his scars, Genshi was still at the apex of what his Clan could produce.

For now, however, he was along on his Clan’s behalf. As a senior Father who outranked all of the HEAT ‘Crests, it was his responsibility to ensure the safe return of a valuable agent from the field… and if that meant dropping in alongside the HEAT and fighting at their side, well, he was up to the job. He looked… pleased, so far as Costello could judge. His own indiscretions had seen him exiled to the wilderness a little, and this return to the sharp end of the Clan’s activities would surely be welcome.

Costello’s concern, and Powell’s, was that his proven history of forgetting his place in the chain of command was hardly optimal HEAT material. But after much deliberation, not to mention the good words of both Thurrsto and Faarek, they’d agreed to give him a chance to prove himself.

Thurrsto looked serious and resigned. He wasn’t dropping anywhere with anybody or anything, and Costello knew from his relationship with Powell that such a retirement from the front line was… unhappy. Still, he was there to see his Brothers off if nothing else.

“Gentlemen…”

“That’s my cue,” said Firth as he ripped open his undersuit’s packaging. Their makeshift staging area had sheets put down everywhere to keep the dirt and dust under control before they sewed themselves into that unforgiving inner layer, but it wasn’t a cleanroom, so getting the undersuit on quickly was a must. “Y’all swingin’ dicks get out here, briefing time!”

Costello, whose “small” size made his techs’ lives much easier and who was thus already wearing his midsuit, nodded thanks as the vastly bigger men he commanded ambled out of the shower and into loose formation.

‘Horse was last out of the shower as usual, thumping over with his relaxed, business-ready grin. “That’s all of us, boss.”

Costello nodded. “Thanks, ‘Horse. Alright, we’ve been over the situation a dozen times before. Hunters have occupied Rvzrk, we have Dexter on-world ready to destroy their wormhole suppressor. Our job is to get him outta there, and clear just enough breathing space for First Fang to muscle through and obliterate everything else. There’s no real subtlety here: we’re going in via steep-angle EA-HELLNO. The Whitecrests will need to carry extended power packs for their maneuver fields, it’s going to be rough. Everyone will need a max-dose of crude. The shot, not the patch. The physics of this insertion are…daunting.”

Serious expressions all round. They knew the drill.

“When we hit the ground, our target is Dexter, and only Dexter. Laser-like focus here. Protectors, that’s your show. Whatever you need, you ask and we deliver. Baseball will be the assault lead for the first leg of the mission, ‘Horse and Irish will execute on point. Once ‘Base declares his objective accomplished, Righteous will take lead. We establish a Jump Array, and secure our presence. Secure it with extreme prejudice. We’re bringing three Arrays for First Fang to use.”

“I take it their objective ain’t changed?” Firth asked.

“Not a bit, Righteous. Their mission is to scour the area clean and build the really big arrays to get the Grand Army marching through. Depending on our readiness, we may be re-tasked to assist them. If conditions allow, they will almost certainly bully through and attempt to secure additional array sites. The other Fangs will be committed if and when appropriate.

“Once they’re in, we support the Fangs until our resources are exhausted, and then withdraw. By that point the Grand Army should have joined us, and they’ll do the job of really liberating the city. Any questions?”

Heads shook all around.

“Alright. Suit up, gear up. Sooner we’re ready, the sooner our Brother’s out of harm’s way.”

They scattered, leaving Costello alone with Thurrsto.

Best to tackle the bull head-on. “How are you holding up?”

“I think me, Stainless, and the Great Father should form a club and commiserate together.”

“All three of you are at the top of your game, still,” Costello said, trying to be reassuring.

“Yes. And in positions of high or irreplaceable office where we can’t put our game to use.”

“I wouldn’t count on that. It’s important that leadership be respectable by the rough men they command. And, being honest? There are still so few of us, you still need to keep in mission condition after all…”

“When was the last time Stainless came on an op?” Thurrsto asked.

“The last time he was needed. He’s stood active watch after team exhaustion, after all. It’s only sheer dumb luck that’s kept him off the field. We just don’t have enough men.”

“That feels like kind words chosen skillfully.”

Of course he’d see through that.

“Look, I get it. Talent like yours is rare company, and you want to do what you’re good at, give what you can offer to the team. I absolutely understand. That doesn’t solve the leadership problem. High office has duties. I won’t presume to lecture you about that.”

“No,” he sighed wearily. “I’ve learned an awful lot about duty lately. But you know what the, uh, ‘worstest’ part is? Something the Great Father clued me in on accidentally. It’s that I’m only likely ever going to see field work again if something has gone very, very wrong. I think that’s why Genshi was so keen to jump back into it. He actually seems a lot happier now.”

“And you’re better than him.”

“On nearly every level, yes. Though,” Thurrsto added with a slightly melancholy chitter, “I admit, the only reason I’m more handsome now isn’t because of my breeding.”

“I’ll never understand your species’ psychology on that point. Anyway. Maybe you should suit up. Or at least keep ready. We’re holding you in reserve but you’re still HEAT, and if I’m honest, something about this mission stinks. I can’t put my finger on it…”

“You don’t need to humor me, captain.”

“I know,” Costello said seriously. “I’m not.”

Thurrsto’s ear twisted strangely, then he duck-nodded. “…Thank you.”

Costello nodded too, and went to grab the last of his equipment.

Whatever else happened, today was going to be bloody.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
Planet Rvzrk, Domain Space

Regaari

“NAUGHTY CUB, SKY THANE. Brother’s ready to play Big Surprise.”

That was extremely welcome news as far as Regaari was concerned.

His hideout was at the top of a seventeen-storey building a few hundred meters from the wormhole suppressor. The building’s water tank and air conditioning systems coexisted in a kind of thin-walled metal shed that capped the entire roof and which had to be drone-access only for the Vzk’tk. There was no way they could possibly fit inside, even if they could reach it… which meant the same was true for the Hunters as well.

Regaari, on the other hand, had found it a perfect snug little den in which he could safely sleep, eat, and recharge the suit. And if he was found and needed to escape, then his fusion claws would make a mockery of the thin metal walls.

Still. It wasn’t safety. It merely resembled safety, relative to the Hunter-patrolled nightmare outside.

“Copy, SKY THANE. NAUGHTY CUB raiding the kitchen.”

He scrambled outside onto the roof and surveyed the situation. SKY THANE—HMS Myrmidon’s Fleet Intelligence Center—were equipped with the very best cameras and sensors that human science could provide, but they were several light-seconds away. At those kinds of ranges, targeting became a tricky business.

For instance: the guns on every ship in the fleet could easily hit a twenty-meter target from that range. With care and good information, they could reliably hit a one-meter target, in fact.

But providing that good information was another matter entirely. Especially without satellite coverage. If they’d had satellites up there then Regaari’s job would have been as simple as aiming a laser designator at the target and then keeping his head down until the shrapnel stopped flying.

Unfortunately for him, what he actually needed to do was physically plant a high-energy beacon on the damn thing, then disrupt the shields that protected it from orbital bombardment.

If he succeeded, the HEAT were ready and waiting to come get him. He’d go home, presumably get an enormous crushing hug from Daar, and be able to hold his head high in the company of Champions again. Mistake made, but atonement paid.

If he failed…

Not an option. Too many lives were riding on him.

He’d planned his next move extensively. He knew the timing on the patrols, knew the blind spots and opportunities. But as an old Whitecrest adage had it, the best way to ruin a plan was to set it into motion.

He checked his gear one last time, then scuttled down the building’s outside wall, nose-down. The security drones were definitely on a pre-programmed route with no random variation. Sloppy. He darted across the road behind one before its backup turned around from sweeping a corner. Wait, two, three, four, dash–

Over a wall, lurk behind a Hunter prefab refrigerated building of some kind. Contents… probably not worth thinking about. Wait… wait…

He set the suit’s active camo to maximum responsiveness and pounced for a spot in the fence he’d identified as a weakness. He would burn energy stores quickly at those settings, so he needed to work fast.

His claws were all he needed to part a length of wire. Wriggle through the hole and into a ditch, tune down the responsiveness now that he wasn’t exposed in open ground. He had to be careful to straddle the trickle of muddy water in the ditch. It wouldn’t harm the suit, but it could splash or get stuck to him and both would jeopardize his ability to remain stealthy. Circle around the compound, fifty meters. Big stack of abandoned Vzk’tk construction equipment to his right. Up and out of the ditch, squeeze between a digger and a pile of plastic tubing.

Finally, one last stretch of open ground. Timing… perfect.

Go.

He felt exposed. He knew he was all but completely invisible. Trust the suit, trust the suit…

No alarms, no shots, no hiss of fusion blades activating or any sign that the Hunters had spotted him. He slid on his belly underneath the generator and tuned the camo’s response time back down. Keeda, he’d burned a fifth already.

Out came the beacon. Its only job was to produce an enormous flare of EM radiation for long enough that the fleet would know exactly where it was, even from half a million kilometers away. Best to install it somewhere with an unobstructed view of the sky, but other than that…

He heaved himself upside-down up the generator’s underbelly. The damn thing was held off the ground by a kind of fat tripod: he clambered up the underside of one of them and, keeping the generator’s bulk carefully between himself and any potential Hunter witnesses, swiftly reached the apex. He tucked the beacon into a spot he judged would cradle it securely without obstructing line-of-sight to the sky, then tuned the camo back up and sprinted back to the cover of the construction equipment.

One-quarter depleted.

He made it back to the gap he’d made in the fence before the first wrinkle appeared. There was a heavy thump from a nearby jump array, and Regaari froze in place as a dozen very, very different Hunters swaggered off the platform. These ones were almost completely cybernetic as far as he could tell: indeed, the only organic components he could see at all were, of course, the mouth, tongue and teeth.

Three of them looked almost identical to the behemoth that the HEAT had duelled in the ring’s rail yard. Almost identical—If anything, in fact, they looked like an upgrade. But the ones that skittered around them were even more interesting to Regaari’s eyes. They were smaller, lithe, cunningly articulated… and the first thing they did was turn their myriad cybernetic lenses to sweeping every last inch of their surroundings.

…He needed to find cover, now.

He retreated into the ditch as quickly as he dared. This changed things. This changed things a lot. Just one of those big bastards had given the HEAT as much as it could handle: three, with support from a force of lighter skirmishers, could very well be more than even they could manage. If they jumped in without forewarning and the correct weaponry…

He slunk along the ditch, staying so low that his chest tickled the mud. The long way back out of the compound, avoiding the newcomers, was a bit of an unknown quantity. He knew there was plenty of dense cover and concealment, but by the same token it could be concealing hazards he hadn’t spotted. And it very much was the long way: by the time he got back to his retroreflector and updated SKY THANE, several minutes would have elapsed. That was a lot of time for things to go wrong. If a drone or a Hunter spotted his hidden beacon…

Focus.

Right then, Regaari’s only mission was to survive and return the intelligence. That was it. The message was the mission, and the message would only happen if he made it back to relative safety.

He paused a third of the way around the field from his entry point, unpacked a small periscope from its pouch on the back of his left upper arm, and used it to peek over the lip of the ditch. The new Hunters had not strayed into the suppressor compound, but were instead patrolling south and east, along the road that ran right past his hiding spot… and the laser retroreflector he’d left stashed there.

He had to presume they didn’t know it was there. If they did, the building would already have been levelled by artillery or an airstrike or something.

Was the new Hunters’ arrival a coincidence? Just bad luck? He hoped so, but his instincts and his cynicism said otherwise. Never attribute to blind misfortune what could be adequately attributed to enemy action.

Which meant he had to take some risks and move.

He packed his periscope, scrabbled up out of the ditch, slunk over to the fence and was through it in seconds. There had once been buildings at this side of the compound, but they were just piles of rubble now. Nothing seemed to be lurking in them fortunately, so he scrambled through them as quietly as he could, taking care not to make any noise by disturbing the fallen chunks of concrete.

At a lung-burning dead run, he sprinted down a back alley that was now little more than a narrow clear channel between piles of smashed brick. The row of buildings had once curved aesthetically around the park—now, It got him ahead of the new arrivals.

He sunk down and took a deep breath. Now was the moment when the suit either saved him or got him killed. Whitecrest’s best had designed it to be the ultimate infiltration system, but the EM spectrum was too wide and varied to cover every possibility. If those Hunters could see in the right band of ultraviolet or whatever then…

He could at least be completely camouflaged in the infrared and visible wavelengths, thanks to suit refrigeration. It was power-expensive and needed several seconds to bring his surface temperature down to the ambient. Several long, itchy seconds where he watched his energy reserves tick down and felt the heat sink against his belly grown uncomfortably warm.

When he tuned up the camo to full again, the power reserves started to drop at a genuinely worrying rate. He either went now or he’d run dry.

He went. Right in front of their noses he went, pouncing across the street in a long graceful arc that made use of the planet’s low gravity so he wouldn’t land among the dust and debris in the middle of the road and thereby disturb it.

Up the wall, up! It was a seventeen-storey climb to the roof and he pawed himself up as fast as he dared. He couldn’t slip and fall, he couldn’t make noise, but he absolutely definitely could not be stuck to the wall when the power ran out.

It flickered and failed just before he made it over the lip of the roof. With his heart pounding, he grabbed the periscope and checked over the edge again to see if the three seconds he’d spent hanging his tail out there for all to see had been a disaster.

Nothing. The Hunters, it seemed, had moved on.

He breathed a relieved curse, activated his suit’s energy collector field to try and claw back some power, and ducked into his hiding spot to grab the retroreflector.

“SKY THANE, NAUGHTY CUB. New Mother in the kitchen, and she’s mean. I stole something sweet, take a look.” He uploaded the footage from his suit’s cameras and sent it.

This time, he folded up the reflector and stashed it inside its pouch on his back. Now he was back on the clock to take those shields down. He checked his suit power. Back up to fifteen percent. Not great. It would probably be best if he took a minute or two to recharge…

There was a heavy scrabbling noise from across the roof. Regaari wasted a second going wide-eyed with alarm, then scuttled back behind an air conditioning unit just in time as three of the smaller new Hunters hauled themselves over the roof edge and left claw-marks in the metal. He risked peeking at them through a gap between the vents as the newcomers looked around the roof, glanced at each other, fanned out…

…And cloaked.

Well.

Shit.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
Wi Kao commune memorial, Planet Gao

Xiù Chang

“So, uh…is there anything special we gotta know?”

“I’ve had enough of ceremony,” Xiù said, fidgeting with her fingernails for the twentieth time.

She was procrastinating, and she knew it. She didn’t want to get out of the car at all. She didn’t want to see… The Commune of Females in Wi Kao had been her home. Ayma had lived here. Had… had died, here. She didn’t want to see what had become of it, not at all.

That wouldn’t stop her, of course. She’d get out and see it if it killed her. But she was allowed to prepare.

…As if she hadn’t been doing exactly that all morning.

Julian and Al had a magical ability to read her feelings, sometimes. Allison took her hand, tidied some stray hair behind her ear and gave her a kiss before snuggling up to her. Julian pulled them both into a comfortably tight hug and nuzzled on the top of their heads. Xiù shut her eyes and even found a kind of smile from somewhere. This would have been endlessly harder without them.

Somehow, they sensed when she was ready, too. Al reached over and opened the door, and stepped out first, taking Xiù’s hand as she did so. She stretched in the cool air with a bit of a sigh that became a groan as her spine made a satisfying crunch noise. “Fuuuck… that was a long drive.”

Xiù nodded. Wi Kao was one of “The Five,” the cities that Daar had spared an RFG bombardment and reclaimed the hard way. An ocean of Gaoian blood, biodrone and free Clanless alike had flowed through the streets below them all too recently.

And the first drops had been spilled up here, on the commune hill. Ayma’s.

With an effort of will, Xiù finally turned to look at the Commune itself.

Some kind of a miracle had mostly spared the large wooden doors with their silver inlays. They bore a few scars, but they were still in one piece, and still upright in their stone block archway even though most of the rest of the walls around them had fallen. That archway, the doors, and as much of the wall as had remained intact were still exactly where they had always been, but the rubble had been cleared away.

Beyond them was what had been the grand concourse, and the sight of it made Xiù’s heart ache more than seeing the doors had. It was…

There were still flowers. Water still trickled down the channels in the beautiful natural stone flooring. Delightful little drones still skittered and swooped among the trellises and hanging baskets, tending to it all with chirruping mechanical noises that could almost pass for birdsong.

The fountains were still there, the benches were still intact. If the whole edifice hadn’t been open to the sky rather than cosy under an arching roof, it would have been like nothing had changed.

Were they pretending nothing had ever happened? Or were they honoring what had been? Xiù couldn’t tell, but she stopped dead in her tracks upon entering the space and… sighed. Whimpered, maybe. It was a sad, childish little sound like a little girl who’d just been told to put her dolls away and get ready for dinner.

“…God. Is this what it looked like?” Allison asked. Her question was quiet, but it burst Xiù’s bubble enough to make her nod sadly.

“…Yes,” she said. “This is exactly like it was…”

“It’s beautiful.”

And that was just it: It was. It was still beautiful despite everything, and Xiù didn’t know if she could handle that. She could have handled a memorial wall, or a monument, a plaque or a fountain. Something abstract. Something that… replaced the Commune.

The reality that the Commune memorial was the Commune, the building itself, kept as it had been lived in… that was simultaneously harder to deal with, and easier to embrace. It wasn’t a clean break at all, but that was because there was still something of what the place had been. It wasn’t forgotten.

…And that was the point of a memorial, after all: To remember. To keep the past, not to pave it over with a platitude.

There was a memorial wall, though. It was a horseshoe-shaped thing a little more than six feet tall, with names engraved on its inner surface in finger-high characters, starting at about knee level.

Julian put his hand on her back as he stood next to her, and she leaned into him while she read.

“..What does it say at the top?” he asked after a second.

“There are two inscriptions. I can’t read the second, I think it’s ancient script.”

“Kinda like the Gao’s version of Latin?”

“Yeah, but just for the Females. The one I can read though… I think it’s a line from a poem.” She read it in Gaori. “Life, once begun, must end; but it will never again not have been.”

“…That sounds beautiful in Gaori,” Allison decided after a second. Julian nodded in silent agreement.

“Yeah, it doesn’t translate well. It just doesn’t sound…”

“Melancholy.”

“Yeah.”

“…Sometimes, I almost manage to forget that the Gao are aliens,” Xiù mused softly. “Sometimes, though, you can see what’s going on in their heads is a lot different to what goes on in ours.”

Julian shook his head gently. “Well…if I’ve learned anything, it’s that we’re a lot more alike than not. I don’t know if alien is really the right word, anymore.”

“Yeah.” Allison nodded. “Hunters are aliens. Igraens are aliens. Corti are definitely alien…maybe except for Nofl. But the Gao? The Ten’Gewek?”

“…I spent two years pretending to be Gao.” Xiù was still reading the wall, looking for a specific name. “There’s some things… some ways that…”

She gave up. “…I love them very much,” she said at last. “They never deserved this. Especially not here.”

“I’d hate to meet the people who did deserve it,” Allison said.

Julian kept silent; he had of course fought with the Hierarchy directly. Allison didn’t notice but she didn’t mean any harm either. The three had long learned each other’s interpersonal foibles, and a certain incautious bluntness was Al’s signature, sometimes… Though after a second, she glanced at Julian then took his hand. Incautious, but not oblivious.

Xiù finally found Ayma’s name. It was on the top row of the third column, placed there by the weird vagaries of the Gaori equivalent of alphabetical order, and the way their script handled vowel sounds. She stared at it for a few seconds, then…

…then a few seconds longer. And a few seconds more, until the shapes completely lost their meaning and she was just staring at abstract lines and angles in a wall.

It was Julian who broke her reverie by gently wrapping his arm around her waist and hugging her from behind. He didn’t say anything, just lent her his strength and warmth for a moment, just enough for her to center herself.

“…We should get going,” he said.

“Not yet. I’d like to look around some more,” Xiù decided.

Allison looked around. “Okay. where should we start?”

“There’s a courtyard where I used to do my Gung Fu every day. It’s where I first taught Myun… this way.”

The tour didn’t take long. So much of the Commune had been flattened that it was legitimately miraculous the grand concourse had survived. Her courtyard hadn’t—there was just a patch of neglected gravel there now, robbed of the sweeping steps and the tiered balconies that had enclosed it. The old walls were still present as marks and outlines on the ground, but when Xiù looked around she saw nothing but open sky and rolling hills, rather than the snug enclosure that had once felt so cozy.

The kitchens, the room where she’d first got drunk on Talamay, the dormitory she’d slept in… all gone. It made her appreciate how much went missing when the people left a place. This wasn’t her commune any longer, it was… it was the past.

And the thing about the past was that she always had to let go of it, in the end.

“…Okay. Let’s… I’m hungry. Are you guys hungry?”

“Starved,” Allison said. “Think we can find anything good?”

Xiù smiled and thought of their security retinue, hand-picked by Myun and currently waiting by the car. She could always trust Gaoians to sniff out good food, she’d found. “I think so. Shall we?”

Al took her hand as they left. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Xiù smiled at her, then leaned into her for a brief walking cuddle.

“…I am now,” she said.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
HMS Violent, Rvzrk System, Domain Space

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

“Well, shit. That changes things.”

The HEAT had studied the huge Hunter variant they’d fought on the Ring of course, and it made for pretty grim research. Even a GR-1d on max power firing their special depleted uranium-core rounds would have a hard time getting through the armor around the egg which they guessed housed the Hunter’s few remaining vital organs, and the shields were multiple-redundant, well hardened against sustained rapid-fire. There weren’t a lot of weaknesses on that frame, and it was fast too. As Moho had demonstrated, the only reliable way of killing one required getting a clean target lock with a javelin, which was much easier said than done.

As for the little ones, though…

“Scout variant, maybe. Or an infiltrator.” Firth mused.

“Could be the Hunter version of our Whitecrests,” Costello agreed.

“And Hunters have much better cloaking technology than we do,” Genshi added.

“Yeah.”

“Those big ones meanwhile appear to be an upgrade over the one we faced on the Ring,” Thurrsto added. He was aboard HMS Myrmidon, watching the flow of intelligence in the FIC. The system was so efficient, and the men and women operating it were so exceptional at what they did, that an increasingly thorough analysis of the foe’s estimated capabilities was arriving in front of Costello almost in real-time.

Genshi duck-nodded solemnly. He was all suited up, while most of the Lads were in their midsuits with just the Beefs left to go; their suits were so heavy that they needed to help their techs lift its components if they didn’t have the lifting cranes. Now that Caledonia was back in service, they’d hopefully have those for the next op, but here aboard Violent they just had to make do.

“So…” ‘Horse commented while lifting his midsuit’s shirt overhead. “What’s the plan, cap? I kinda doubt we’ll have convenient trains to tip over or whatever this time.”

“We go loaded for bear,” Costello decided. “Javelins, explosives, everything we have that could stop a tank.”

Adam looked at Firth, Burgess, and Butler, and the four Beefs exchanged weary sighs. “Yessir,” said Firth. “Imma load up for bear too. That’s gonna mean I ain’t gonna be as quick as I’d like…but we need the ammo. An’ I also think it’ll mean our extraction mission’s gonna be measured in minutes, or it’s likely gonna fail.”

Costello nodded solemnly. He knew. All that extra weight was going to limit their mobility, which was never ideal, but he’d much rather go big when the enemy went big than try to pull a David-versus-Goliath.

“Right. Titan, you load up too. Starfall, I know you’re basically a Beef these days, but I need at least one of my two giant Aggressors kept as mobile as possible, so you are to load up as lightly as you can get away with.”

“Yessir.” Blaczynski indicated his weapons, which were assembled and ready on his equipment table. “Heavy anti-materiel load-out it is, then. Just me and my hundred-eighty pound best bud…”

Costello rolled his eyes and gave him a friendly smirk. “I’m sure you can handle it, big guy.”

Blaczynski looked down at his custom-made GR-4b and grinned. Originally intended as a very high-power crew-served weapon, a few months ago Blac had realized that with his prodigious near-Beef strength and the compactness made possible by a modern gauss rifle’s power electronics, there was no reason that Black Ogre couldn’t build something better suited to the HEAT’s current abilities. Too bad they didn’t have examples made for the Beefs yet…

Oh well. One fought with the tools they had.

“That’s weapons and loadout, then.” Firth hefted his own midsuit’s shirt overhead and gave a significant look to the armorer techs, who immediately scrambled off to fetch things. “What about manpower? There’s only, uh, like really one other man we might bring on, but…”

Firth had a point. Daar would be awfully useful on the mission, especially considering just how far he and Arés had managed to take his training. It was a shame he was too important to risk.

“As helpful as he would be, and as much as he personally would want to, we cannot risk the Great Father on this mission. He’s already made that decision, our command agrees, I think it’s the right one, and in any case I would not…burden him with the agony of deciding it again.”

Firth nodded agreeably. “Yessir. What about some’a ‘dem First Fang ‘Backs?”

“…First Fang are good, but they’re not yet fully trained for hostile exo-atmospheric insertion. They’re too lightly armored for this scenario, and they lack the necessary countermeasures. Besides, their mission immediately follows ours. No, we’re not re-calibrating.”

“Guess we’re goin’ big game hunting, then.” Firth seemed to relish the idea.

Genshi’s eyes seemed to light up, too. “Sounds like we’ll have challenging quarry.”

“Fuckin’ right. Let’s stack ‘em like cordwood.”

Costello nodded to himself, satisfied that whatever was coming, the HEAT were ready to meet it.

Now all they were waiting on was Regaari.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

He knew how Powell had felt that day, now.

Back at the height of the war for Gao, Daar had held Powell back in reserve for strategic reasons. Being the good officer he was, Powell had taken the decision with dignity and a straight spine, but now Daar had done the same to himself and he found that it…hurt.

Men he commanded and was responsible for were going to go out there and die for him. And he could be there, if he so decided. He could help! He could…

No.

Daar shook his pelt out and cleared his head. He wasn’t a disposable grunt, no matter how much he hated the idea. He was the Great Father. He couldn’t commit himself to the battlefield except at uttermost need. He knew that… but it still hurt.

Still, he needed to be honest about things, too. Those mission updates were alarming, and Daar had the dubious distinction of being a uniquely capable asset. There was nobody else who sat in the same place on the tactical pyramid as he did, and this was a mission perilously close to needing an all-hands evolution.

So, he alternated between bouts of relatively light exercise and restlessly checking in at the command center, just in case he was needed. Hopefully keeping busy would stop him harassing his battle managers into uselessness.

Stoneback’s Grandfather, Garl, understood him at least. The huge old white-back was there in his role as Chief of Staff of the Grand Army, overseeing operations ahead of the invasion with the seasoned eye of decades, and he easily identified that the worst disruption in the room was the Great Father. So after Daar’s third or fourth intrusion he excused himself from the floor to address the problem.

“‘Yer gonna be useless to everyone at this pace, My Father.”

Daar ceased his pacing, sniffed at the older male, then sighed and tried for the thousandth time to relax. “…Y’ain’t wrong.”

“‘Course I’m not! A ‘Back don’t get as old and horrible as me by bein’ stupid!”

Daar chittered despite himself. Garl was a treasure, and it would be a genuine loss to gaoiankind when the ancient bastard finally croaked.

For now, his eyesight was still perfect though. Not a lot of Gao could boast making it to such an age and still being just as sharp-eyed as they had been in their youth.

Actually…

He paused and faced the Grandfather. “Garl, I gotta ask you somethin’. I’ve been meanin’ to ask it ‘fer years.”

“Yeah. I’m your sire.” The gnarled old ‘Back didn’t hesitate.

“…Balls, I didn’t even ask the question! How did you—”

“You always sniff the air right before you ask anyone anything serious, My Father. It’s a pretty obvious tell. ‘Sides, I think you’ve known since you were fifteen anyway. The nose don’t lie.”

Gaoians generally considered things like that private. Which was weird, really, at least from a Human perspective. Exactly why he felt compelled to ask just then…whatever. Human weirdness rubbing off on him, probably.

“Suspected, yeah. Pretty much knew when you and Myun didn’t happen, talk about bad luck… So, I guess that means I’m gonna live to a horrible, terrible old age, then.”

Garl scratched his flank, then tore a knot out of his own fur with a claw. “Not if you get ‘yerself kilt ‘cuz you wanna be a big damn Keeda of a hero,” he said.

“…Can’t argue with that, either.”

“My Father…Daar. If there’s anything I can offer from personal experience, it’s that ‘yer the kind of ‘Back that gets overwhelmed by his own experience of everything. You have the most biggest feelings, the bestest senses, ‘yer fast and strong like basically nobody else…and I don’t know if ‘Backs like us are rightly equipped to deal with that. I think, sometimes, it keeps you from seein’ things clear, y’know?”

Daar sighed and shook out his pelt again, and decided to prowl back to his gym. Garl followed along comfortably aside. “I don’t think I’ve ever bested ‘yer wisdom, Garl.”

“I’m eighty-eight years old, My Father. At that age, I’d better know a thing or two, right? And now you’re plottin’ to go work ‘yer frustrations away. I get it, but I wouldn’t if I were you. We need you ready. And we need you to stop worrying as much as you can. If anyone can pull off a mission like this, My Father, it’s Regaari. I ain’t ever known a Whitecrest quite like him. Now, as ‘fer you, you have ‘ta march with the Grand Army soon, so please: go dote on Naydra, an’ get some rest.”

The old force of nature was right, of course, and Daar knew it. Still….

“Much easier said than done,” he pointed out.

“Since when did spendin’ time with a Female become a hardship ‘fer you?!” Garl asked.

Daar chittered ruefully, but his worry wasn’t easily assuaged. “You know what I mean, Garl.”

“Aye. And you know what I mean. Go. ‘Yer given a blessing no other male has ‘cuz you’re bearin’ a weight none o’ us could ever hope ta’ manage. Don’t load on any more.”

Daar duck-nodded, exchanged Brotherly paws to the shoulder with the Grandfather, and forced himself to leave the room.

He paused to send Naydra a quick message on his communicator, then prowled towards his private apartments. It was a long trek across the fortress, and Daar couldn’t help but take a little diversion to roll in the snow before it started melting next month. Some of the youngest cub-initiates of High Mountain took the opportunity to pounce, he gave chase…

It helped. Silly distractions reminded him how to be himself in moments like these. When he finally arrived at his apartments several minutes late, he was definitely feeling a little better.

Especially when Naydra met him at the door with a tray of snacks. Just a small one, but she’d got the balance right between giving him a treat and not upsetting his diet; definitely important before sealing oneself up in a Suit. And they were exactly what he needed.

“How’d you know to make these?” he asked as he plucked one up with a claw and ate it.

“I knew you’d be haunting the command center and fretting over things you can’t control,” she said fondly. “And I also happen to know the limits of Garl’s patience.”

“You two are inna conspiracy, I bet!”

She flicked an ear and swept away into the apartments with a deliberately enigmatic expression. “I couldn’t possibly comment.”

“You can’t fool my nose.”

“Oh, I know. I’m counting on it.”

She poured herself onto the couch and brandished a grooming brush at him. “But first…”

Daar had a love-hate relationship with his fur. When it was short it was almost maintenance free, but he found himself often too cold in the winter, his skin would feel dry, and he’d lose some of his natural armor against small cuts and thorns. Long fur, on the other hand, felt much more comfortable but it needed constant grooming. Normally he’d considered that a waste of time, and time had always been the most valuable resource he had.

But then again, he hadn’t always had Naydi to brush him, either. And she could do things with a brush that’d have him purring and falling asleep.

Now there was a happy thought. He cuddled up to her on the couch, effectively trapping her on it but she didn’t mind one bit. Instead, she focused on getting him as well-brushed and presentable as she could, and Daar suddenly remembered just how tired he was all the time now…

He let his stress go for the moment, relaxed into a peaceful interlude, and was very soon asleep.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
Planet Rvzrk, Domain Space

Regaari

Slow, shallow breathing. Stay. Still.

The suit’s active camo made Regaari effectively invisible if he remained perfectly motionless, and on minimum framerate it could last for hours… If he remained still enough.

The scale had been deceptive before, when he scouted these smaller, lighter Hunters. They were only small and light relative to the literal walking tanks they’d accompanied. In absolute terms though, each one was built to the same kind of scale as a HEAT aggressor and had a body made of what was clearly some kind of high-end synthetic muscle. They had that same unconscious strength behind their movements.

And the same mass. The rooftop groaned under their combined weight as the three spread out in a search pattern. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them by the tapping of their slender claws on the aluminium roofing, and by the way it creaked and buckled wherever they trod.

Regaari wanted to shrink down, make himself even smaller. But even that movement might have created a visible seam in the air at the edges of his suit before the camo caught up. The only thing to do was to listen, keep his claws ready to kill, and to stay absolutely, perfectly, stone-still.

Two of the Hunters circled clockwise and behind him. The third was patrolling counter-clockwise around the roof, visible only by the dents and scars it left in the metal. They’d definitely caught a glimpse of him, he knew it. There was no other reason for them to be up here, no other explanation.

So, this was going to end one of two ways: Either they decided the rooftop was clear and their quarry had eluded them, or they caught him. In which case…

He’d gone toe-to-toe with Hunters before. He’d learned a lot since then. He was stronger and better-equipped than those previous occasions. But that didn’t stop the seam where his flesh ended and his cybernetic paw began from itching at the memory of having half his arm bitten off. That didn’t stop him from…doubting.

He didn’t doubt his own ability—he was among the very best and he knew it—but he had definite doubts over whether even that would be enough.

The hunters orbited the roof several times. Regaari made sure to record everything with his suit’s sensors, so SOR and Whitecrest analysis cells could glean as much information as possible from the opportunity…

A leg stomped down inches from his face, close enough that he could finally see the subtle imperfection in the cloak as a shimmering heat-haze in the air, like a shape made out of mirages. The sheer weight of it punched a small hole in the metal, which creaked and strained as the Hunter turned, surveying everything around it. The foot moved unconsciously, stepped so closed to Regaari’s nose that he could have tickled it with his whiskers.

Time stood just as still as him. His chest ached with the effort of not breathing as the Hunter half-turned, again…

…And moved on.

Regaari almost fatally gasped his relief. Instead, he held it together, let it out slowly, slowly. He was still light-headed from holding his breath but he forced himself to breathe at a glacial pace that wouldn’t mar his active camo.

That had been far too close.

The Hunters seemed to arrive at a decision. As one, they decloaked and reconvened at the roof access door, where the apparent lead stood in the middle while the others retreated down the staircase. The steps groaned under their weight as they did so; at a rough guess, Regaari figured they each massed somewhere between Highland and Snapfire in their full armor.

So, three ninja Aggressor-type Hunters, each about twice his mass, and he’d be a fool to assume they weren’t Aggressor-like in performance, too. Those weren’t good odds, but at least they were retreating. The leader stood for a long while, clearly unhappy about having lost its quarry, and eventually retreated down the stairwell with an almost sullen turn on its spindly legs.

Regaari waited for a long, long time. Slowly, ever so slowly, he allowed himself a bit of movement to recompose himself. He shifted his weight and tried to let the first prickling pins and needles in his arm fade.

The shoddy roofing behind him creaked.

The decision to move as opposed to freeze saved Regaari’s live. A sharp-tipped leg speared down and would have pinned him to the roof if he’d tried to stay still. As it was, the Hunter drove its leg down into the metal so hard that it got stuck, and Regaari had a second or so to regain his feet.

Long, quadruple fusion blades shot out of the Hunter’s forearms, and it brandished them at him in a clear challenge.

Regaari wasn’t so vain or stupid. He simply rolled his high-powered carbine off his back, tumbled over, and shot the nutless fucker right between the eyes.

High-powered frangible rounds were grotesquely satisfying. The Hunter’s head didn’t so much break as burst all over everything, Regaari included. It was very much dead, but now Regaari was very, very much made by the enemy.

Only one thing to do: Run.

Run, and activate the beacon. Taking down those shields wasn’t an option now. He’d just have to trust that the ships could overwhelm them.

He sprinted for the building’s edge and flung himself off just as the roof access door burst open. Wild shots whip-cracked past him as he flung out his suit’s fields just enough to let him land without breaking every bone he had. It was still a hard landing, and it taxed every ounce of his HEAT-built strength, but he rolled through it and opened up into a furious four-pawed sprint.

Absolutely nothing that walked was faster than a well-trained Gaoian at a dead run like this, he’d learned. That lesson had been driven home in the hardest way, when his unconscious stupidity in running two-pawed had cost Triymin her life. Whether it was a Hierarchy-prompted social affectation or their species’ own home-grown stupidity didn’t matter. Never again.

The first barrage from the navy landed with deafening, bone-shaking force somewhere overhead as it hit the shields. The flashes as those shields dispersed the energy were like a dozen lightning strikes in a second, strobing the whole city. The second barrage was only a second behind the first, and the third was only a second behind that. It became a steady hammering, punctuating his pursuit.

The next strike was utterly, absolutely blinding. To everyone else, anyway. At some point the Navy had seeded a comm satellite constellation, and Fleet Operations gave his Suit the warning for incoming radiological hazard. The timing was perfect. A warning pace blinked in his visor, and at the moment the weapon went off, his visor automatically dimmed.

Everyone and everything else in the city was likely blinded by it. Any that were lucky enough to avoid that would have been blinded by the second. And the third. And the fourth. Clearly the navy had up-gunned to nuclear ammo.

The fifth nuclear warhead brought the shields down, and for a bonus caused explosions and other mayhem at the shield generator’s sprawling site.

It was the first strike that actually hit the ground that really sold the navy’s power, though—it made the bedrock heave. Domain buildings, never designed to handle earthquakes or shifting earth, actually cracked and shifted as the shockwave ravaged their foundations. The kilometer-tall skyscrapers in Lavmuy had fared much better—there were advantages to being a Deathworlder after all.

It certainly helped throw off the pursuit. Between being partly blinded and the way half a building fell on and pulped one of their number, the Hunters fell behind…

…Right up until one of the big ones shouldered easily through a wall up ahead. It contemptuously ignored the chunks of hurtling concrete that bounced off its shields and raised a gun-arm in Regaari’s direction.

Regaari broke out one of his trademark gravball moves: he sprung up on a wall, then bounced off it at a right-angle to his original direction of travel. A hail of bullets chewed up the ground where he’d been as he dared to scrabble into and through one of the damaged buildings, praying to Keeda, God, the spirits and whatever anything that might be listening and interested that the bludgeoned architecture wouldn’t give out around him.

Somehow, it didn’t. He dived through what had once been a shop-front window and his paws skidded on broken glass.

There was a mushroom cloud rising over where the wormhole suppressor had been. A small one, but still the unmistakable signature of destruction. Whatever happened next, his mission had been a success.

With the comms sats in orbit, he could talk to the fleet without the reflector now. “SKY THANE, NAUGHTY CUB! Suppressor down! ”

His reply came from the most glorious voice Regaari had ever heard: Powell’s inimitable growl suffused his earplugs. “DEXTER, STAINLESS. Light the path.”

More explosions from elsewhere in the city. Clearly the navy had jumped in to low orbit and were intent on wrecking absolutely everything the Hunters had. Every time a streak of blue fire connected the sky and the ground, it resulted in a new rolling cloud of smoke and a new shockwave. It was… awful. Full of awe.

It certainly awed the Hunters, who stopped their pursuit quite abruptly. They stood confused for a second, then melted back among the buildings. Regaari saw a squadron of dropships take off from a few blocks away, climb and turn, then vanish with a thump and a flash of pure vantablack as they jumped out.

Three more took off to the south. They banked, climbed….

There was a shrieking roar, and a pair of Firebirds tore overhead with a sound like the universe getting really fucking angry. The trio of dropships disintegrated in mid air, sending debris and mangled pieces of Hunter tumbling.

Regaari had his orders. He needed to find a safe spot for the HEAT to land in all this madness. They’d be coming in right now.

He was a few hundred yards from a spot he’d picked out earlier. Open enough to land in, covered enough for a safe landing, central enough to launch the ground invasion from. He sucked down a desperate gulp of his energy mix and hared toward it, acutely aware that just because the Hunters had backed of didn’t mean they weren’t still hunting him. Time was not on his side.

But he was nearly through this.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
Hunter broodship, Rvzrk System, Domain Space

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

Data was flowing in by the gigabyte. Every new explosion, every new weapon… it was all documented. The ground forces were mostly withdrawing in an orderly fashion according to the plan, but of course there were some broods that refused to give up a Hunt once they’d tasted blood. Those were being slaughtered.

That was all part of the plan too. If they could not see the intelligence behind the Alpha-of-Alphas’ leadership, then let their deaths serve as an example to the others of what happened when sensible commands were ignored. The smart Broods would take note.

Still. The Alpha-of-Alphas had to admit to some awe at what the deathworlders were unleashing. They’d lurked patiently, oh-so-patiently, for so very long while they picked their moment. And when it came, they had unleashed devastation in a form so pure and unrefined that it gave the Alpha-of-Alphas the unfamiliar sensation of chills.

Its predecessor had seen fellow predators in the Humans. The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas instead saw engineers who had turned their talents toward perfecting the art of violence. And it intended to learn.

The prey-world invasion had been an unqualified success. They had stripped the conquered territory of useful parts, breeding stock, technology and materials. They had reminded the herd-species to fear once again, and the Builders had seeded the target city with a sensor grid that was capturing everything.

…Actually, no. Not everything, and the success was not completely unqualified. One single Gaoian had slipped the cordon and been active and undetected inside the occupied zone for an unknown length of time, despite the sensor network. Clearly, there was still much room for advancement.

It drooled at the thought of sinking its teeth into the coming research.

But the real prize was yet to enter the picture. The sensors had acquired detailed scans of the Human trans-atmospheric fighter craft, which were valuable of course. They had even managed to capture blurred snapshots of the incoming munitions, granting insights into how Humans designed their ammunition and ordnance.

But the elite ground warriors were yet to arrive, and those were the true goal. The Alpha-of-Alphas had gone over footage from previous encounters with those creatures, and had realized that many of the individuals that had destroyed the Hive were also those who had intervened in the raid on the Prey-Station, years before.

There were newcomers, and an absence or two—possibly from casualties or possibly from obsolescence—but it seemed that the Humans had only a tiny supply of these elites.

The Alpha-of-Alphas wanted to know everything about them. Their tactics were well-recorded, but equipment and their biology warranted scrutiny. If the Hunters could assimilate some of what made them so exceptional and apply them on a large scale to create their own elites…

Ideally, of course, it would be best to return their corpses for dissection. And sensing that the Gaoian intended to summon them, the Alpha-of-Alphas had pulled back its contingent of elites, promising that their quarry had become bait for an even more succulent prize.

It had worked. The Eaters, it seemed, could learn, and could think with the right guidance.

All that remained now was to see if they could fight.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
Planet Rvzrk, Domain Space

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

The trick to extremely aggressive EA-HELLNOs was in the field-wing braking. Not all of the operators could hit the ground with the same fierce force, but today that played to their missions.

Righteous and the Protectors hurtled past everyone else, their assault computers deploying their braking fields in the last few seconds, just enough to take some of the re-entry excess off their descent. They slammed into the ground faster than terminal velocity and hit like goddamned meteors, cracking the concrete when they hit. Warhorse landed first among a group of five of the greasy fucks, right on top of a big Red Hunter. He hit with so much force, the impact left a crater in the road and exploded his first victim into a cloud of gorey mist.

‘Horse moved like a flash of lightning and literally tore the rest of the group apart with his bare hands. He did it so quickly, Costello almost couldn’t follow the action; no wonder Righteous stood no chance in hell of winning. Christ he was fast, and in armor that dwarfed Costello, too! Just as ‘Horse was finishing up by palming the last Hunter’s head and exploding it, another Red charged over to attack. He looked up, growled, whipped his rifle up and fired, but instead of destroying his foe, those deadly rounds bounced harmlessly off its shields.

No matter, Arés was easily the fastest human being alive. Undaunted, he blitzed over and in only two strides, built up so much insane speed that the Red couldn’t even react to the incoming impact. ‘Horse could break pallet scales with his sheer weight, so a tackle from him could be pretty much exactly like a car pulping a pedestrian at speed. He hit the Red Hunter with so much force in fact, its shields collapsed instantly. It must have died on impact but ‘Horse didn’t stop moving, in fact he ran right through the tackle like he hadn’t hit anything at all, and rather then bend down and finish the job, he instead stomped a massive foot right through its chest and charged off to find more foes. His move didn’t even look like deliberate, more like…it just happened to be in Warhorse’s way, and he couldn’t be bothered otherwise.

Arés had just effortlessly obliterated a group of Hunters by himself and with his bare hands, and two of them were Reds. He did all of that in just a few seconds and was already engaging more. Jesus.

Baseball hit the ground just after ‘Horse finished his first group, and Righteous slammed into his own group maybe a split second behind and right alongside Irish, whose weapon tore two Hunters clean in two at the same moment Righteous dispatched the remaining three with his fists. Baseball, meanwhile, closed with his objective and in a flash, Dexter was enclosed by a protective wall of man, muscle and murder. ‘Base tackled him to the ground hard enough to kill a normal man and utterly pulp most Gaoians, but Regaari had armor and had spent years building himself into an extremely sturdy specimen by either human or Gaoian reckoning.

Still, that tackle couldn’t have been pleasant. Baseball practically sat on him—they had to assume he’d been compromised until proven otherwise, and that meant a hostile takedown. It was a fine line between rescuing him and capturing him, really.

Primary objective complete, ‘Base chirped the signal to the command net, which caused FIC to transfer talkover to Righteous; the show was his, now. It only took them a few more seconds to secure a suitably large opening for the portals, which in turn cued up Titan, who was loitering above the carnage with his Defenders. They dropped their fields and fell like meteors, landing only marginally more softly than the big guys. Snapfire fired his drones out immediately, while Moho heaved the portable Array off his back and kicked it, hard.

Portable Jump Arrays had come a long way since Capitol Station. The version used there had been more like a collection of tent poles and cables, with a power pack like four car batteries taped together. It had taken minutes to assemble.

This version was a self-deploying pack: drop it, trigger it, get the hell outta the way as it unfolded in a violent series of snapping motions. It could pack up just as fast, too.

Titan was carrying the power pack: Bigger, heavier and more advanced, with enough juice to handle half a dozen jumps before swapping out. He grabbed the cable that Moho threw his way, plugged it in, and that was it: the Array was up and ready before Costello had even landed.

Costello’s own impact was still pretty fucking meteoric, and there were plenty of hostiles left to service. He snapped his rifle up and dropped two, stepping sideways into the relative cover provided by Baseball’s armored bulk. There was a surprise to his immediate left, no time for weapons. He pounced, punched, and yanked its head back so far its neck snapped. It happened so fast, so naturally, and so easily, he couldn’t help but indulge in the rictus grin that spread across his face.

Costello was a proud officer of the HEAT, one worthy to lead the finest team of elite combat armsmen ever assembled. He was the smallest human on the team by a hefty margin—which also made him the smallest on the whole planet at that moment—but that still meant he was a six-foot-two, broad, lean, and teak-hard quarter-ton of sheer Deathworlder prowess, one who could handily outlift any strongman, dance like the finest martial artists, outsprint any Olympian, or outrun any marathoner. He could do all that while festooned in heavy combat gear, layered atop three-hundred-plus pounds of the toughest personal armor ever devised. Against someone like Costello, a mere Hunter was hopelessly, utterly outmatched.

That kind of power was a hell of a thing to possess, and his enemies seemed to know it, too. Best not to get too carried away, though; there was work to do. Besides, these were only ordinary Hunters, not the Super-Hunters Regaari had spotted.

Starfall, Highland and the Whitecrests landed on nearby rooftops, seemingly light as a feather. Starfall in particular absolutely dwarfed Costello by height, mass, and sheer physicality, so how exactly the nearly Beef-sized Aggressor managed to do that was a question for another day. He had his long-range rifle up in an instant and squeezed off a shot at something Costello couldn’t see: a threat indicator in Costello’s visor lit up, then blinked out to show where his target had been, a few dozen yards away in an adjacent street.

Genshi was last to the ground. No shame there: it was his first drop. Nevertheless he flowed through his landing and was up and dropping Hunters like he’d done it a dozen times before.

The Hunters retreated in disarray, and they were hardly a half a minute into the fight. Once he had the barest safe moment to do so, Burgess tore Regaari’s helmet off to scan his brain.

“…Green!”

Regaari nodded and immediately re-seated his helmet. Costello also nodded, relieved. Firth was leading the others to secure their position, even as another orbital strike lanced down a few blocks away with the kind of force he could feel through his boots. “You good, Dexter?”

“About damn time you showed up…” Regaari replied. He’d been fending off the attackers for a few seconds before they arrived, and his suit had quite plainly stopped a bullet. He dusted himself off as Baseball helped him up. “That was almost gentle. You’re getting sloppy.”

Burgess chuckled and levered him toward the Array. “Love you too, bruh.”

“You can make out later,” Costello said. “Get him outta here.”

“Array in twenty seconds,” Moho reported.

“I think the Hunters are retreating,” Regaari reported, putting his helmet back on. “The second the strikes started, they— LOOK OUT!!!”

Costello turned desperately and felt an impact on his head as a fusion claw slashed past an inch from his face. He heard the outersuit helmet sizzle as it was cut through.

Two more Hunters decloaked behind the first one. These ones had long claws, they’d cut even a HEAT operator in half and Costello’s burst of firepower went wild as he felt somebody grab the back of his suit and heave him out of danger—

The Hunters lunged.

“Dexter! No!!”

A Gaoian-shaped blur pounced past Costello’s shoulder with his left paw lit up by fusion claws. He slammed into the lead hunter and eviscerated it.

The other two tore him apart.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

“A vacation? Now?”

Sartori nodded. “As soon as possible, anyway. I know you never really take a vacation in this job, but if I don’t go and let my hair down sometime soon I might forget how.”

It had been a quiet day… at least, quiet-ish. Quieter. Heads of state, out of a kind of superstition, didn’t attend one another’s coronations and investitures, so as much as Sartori would probably have enjoyed another visit to Gao, he’d been compelled by decorum to remain on Earth… only for nothing very much to happen.

His schedule had been cleared ahead of the operation on Rvzrk, just in case presidential authority was required… but nothing had come up that hadn’t already been planned for and approved. It made for a refreshing change… and an opportunity to discuss something with his most valued special advisor that he really should have discussed earlier.

Oh well. No time like the present.

Margaret White laughed softly. “Arthur, I hate to break it to you, but letting your hair down stopped being an option for you years ago,” she said, and waved a hand vaguely at her own scalp.

Sartori laughed. “Yes, thank you for reminding me…” he grumbled. He’d learned to take jokes about his baldness with good grace: nothing was more embarrassing than a thin-skinned politician, after all.

“Still… is now the best time? Between the war, planning for the mid-terms, the Colony Bill…” Margaret’s tone of voice made it clear she could think of a thousand more things if she needed to.

“If I hold out for the best time, I probably won’t recognize it when it comes,” Sartori countered. “There’s always something. But I need to… go skiing, fishing, hiking in the woods, something. And I want to do it somewhere that’s not in line-of-sight of a building.”

Margaret nodded. “Well… I sympathize. The Secret Service aren’t going to like it, though. I’m sure they’d much prefer it if you went and played golf on a ranch somewhere.”

“I’m sure they would,” Sartori agreed drily.

“Did you have anywhere in mind?”

“I thought Cimbrean. I could visit Franklin and then spend some time enjoying the wilderness.”

Margaret thought about it. “That… would work nicely, actually. Yes, I can see the Secret Service being happy with that, you get your unspoiled wilderness, and Franklin gets a Presidential visit. Good proximity to interstellar concerns…”

“I’m glad you approve,” Sartori said. He stood up and took a gentle stroll around the room to loosen his bones, feeling that ideally he’d have liked to drink a bourbon or something. Unfortunately, not only was it far too early in the day for that but he preferred to remain sharp when Minot were releasing nukes for allied use.

Besides, the issue of the Hephaestus nuke theft remained unsolved, and he didn’t feel comfortable with drinking until that was resolved either. His earlier point about ‘waiting for the right time’ notwithstanding, he somehow knew that right now was the wrong time to indulge.

“Who knows, maybe you’ll meet our next First Lady out there,” Margaret teased. As a friend, she liked to encourage him to remarry. As an advisor, she had added more than once that a First Family did several things for the President that he couldn’t do alone. Sartori shrugged the comment off with his usual wry smile.

“Margaret, I think the only way I’ll ever get to go somewhere without you suggesting that is if I go on an all-male retreat.”

“That’s a good idea. Maybe you’d find a First Husband instead,” she retorted.

Sartori snorted and shook his head. “I can’t be America’s first gay president,” he said. “I’m not qualified.”

“Hmmm… you know, statistically, at least one or two of your predecessors…” Margaret began.

“Like who?”

“Well, there’s some speculation about Buchanan…”

“Really?”

“He was a lifelong bachelor, and he had a very close ‘friendship’ with, um…” Margaret frowned as she rifled through her impressive memory for political trivia. “…King? Yes. William Rufus King. ”

Sartori sighed. “I can’t be the first openly gay president, then,” he corrected himself. “There’s a whole qualification that I lack.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll find some pioneering colonist rancher who’ll break your heart,” Margaret said. “Just think, there’ll be plenty of strapping young men to ravish you!”

Sartori shook his head with a silent laugh, and decided that he’d take a sip of water in lieu of that drink.

“You seem to like this idea a little too much,” he accused.

“I get my fun whenever I can find it,” she said primly, though there was nothing prim about the accompanying smile. “But who knows?”

“For the record, Margaret, I am not gay. I feel I need to remind you before you ‘ship’ me with, I dunno. Whoever you’re crushing on right now.”

She shrugged. “Oh well. Plenty of cowgirls in Franklin too. I understand most of them are…quite handy, you know.”

Sartori laughed in earnest. “If the public knew how scandalous your mind is…”

“Then ‘half’ of them would love it, and the other ‘half’ would find some way to complain about it, and the overwhelming majority wouldn’t care one bit.” She giggled and stood up. “Well, fair enough. I’ll find out who you have to buy a coffee for around here to make a Presidential vacation happen.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course, you know the moment you step out of the office there’ll be another crisis,” she pointed out.

“There always is. There always will be,” He agreed. “Better for everyone if I face it feeling relaxed and happy, right?”

“That’s fair. I’ll see you tomorrow, if not sooner?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Margaret.”

She smiled and let herself out. He wasn’t sure, but he could swear he heard her chuckling to herself as she headed back toward her office in the West Wing.

He glanced up at the wall, to the framed photo of his late wife Emily. The truth was, she’d probably have sided with Margaret. Hell, she’d have joined in with the teasing and taken it much further. And he’d have got lost in watching the way her hands moved and her eyes sparkled, smiled at how laughter made the end of her nose twitch slightly, and…

…Fuck cancer.

Anyway: Happier thoughts. He tore himself away from Emily’s portrait and decided to grab his laptop. Time to research what adventures he might partake of on Cimbrean.

It’d be good to get away for a while…

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
Planet Rvzrk, Domain Space

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

“No!!!”

A hail of gunfire. The two Hunters retreated, fading into invisibility even as bullets flashed off their shields.

“Genshi!!”

Regaari sprang out of Baseball’s grasp and dashed to his former Champion’s side with a frantic keening sound. Baseball was an instant behind him, already grabbing his medical kit but….

Futile. Fusion blades killed too quick and clean: there was no life-saving intervention to be done on those steaming pieces, and ‘Base knew it.

“…Man down.”

Dexter actually howled.

“‘Horse! Get him through that array now!” Costello spat. He ran a shaking glove up the side of his helmet: there was a deep gouge in it that had come a finger’s width from lobotomising him.

Arés didn’t need telling twice. He grabbed the squirming Regaari by the back of his suit and hauled him away from Genshi’s remains with a grunt of effort, ignoring his thrashing objections. It took a ringing slap upside the helmet to stun Regaari into submission: he landed on the jump platform in a keening mess. There was a flash of true-black stasis field, and he was gone.

Champion Fiin ducked out of the Array in his place, flanked by his First Fang brothers. They fanned out with their weapons ready, but it was the tableau with Costello’s damaged helmet and Baseball tending to their fallen comrade’s remains that caught Fiin’s attention.

“…Keeda! What happened?”

“Hunters. Cloaked ambushers, with fusion blades. Stay alert.”

The Stonebacks took that seriously. They spread out in a search pattern, alert for the first hint of danger.

“Who is that?” Fiin asked.

“…Genshi.”

Fiin paused, then hardened. “…They’re gonna fuckin’ pay ‘fer that.”

“Yes.”

The Array thumped again, delivering more Stonebacks. One of them handed off another power pack to Moho, then set to deploying a second Array.

Costello checked that the Hunter that Genshi had killed was really dead, then gave it a kick. “Base. Pack this up for Scotch Creek. ‘Horse, Moho, go catch up with Righteous and the others. We’re gonna kill ‘em all.”

‘Horse’s voice was a vengeful growl. “Vamos a chingarlos.”

They took off toward the sound of gunfire, and Costello switched over to the command channel. “STAINLESS, ABBOTT. Target secured, but we have a casualty. PACINO has fallen.”

The reply was about a second late.

*“…ABBOT, STAINLESS. Copy target secure. Confirm PACINO is KIA?”

“Confirmed, STAINLESS.”

“…Copy that. I will inform TIGGER. Do you require additional fires?”

Costello reviewed all the intel his suit was gathering from the HEAT, their drones, the firebirds and the ships overhead. The FIC’s supercomputers were working overtime creating a detailed map for him, and it painted a triumphant picture. The Hunters had obviously been planning an orderly withdrawal, but the fleet had smashed their jump arrays. Right now, the deathworld forces had the advantage… but not the numbers. He needed to keep the initiative, and the best way to do that was to let the Aggressors do what they did best.

“RIGHTEOUS and STARFALL will call it as they see it,” he decided.

Of the big ones and the kind of stalker that had got Genshi, there was no sign however.

That was… troubling, actually. The competent hit-and run, and the obvious intent to withdraw both marked a serious change from previous Hunter tactics.

Something was very fucky here. And Costello didn’t like it one bit.

There was only one solution.

“Let’s go to work,” he said.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
Hunter broodship, Rvzrk System, Domain Space

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

The elites returned via their onboard jump systems. Three of the stalker variants were dead, two having fallen to Gaoians rather than Humans. That suggested a need to upgrade them. Other than that, however, they had performed admirably.

Their discipline was especially pleasing. When ordered to withdraw, they had done so without hesitation or complaint.

Not without frustration, however. The Alpha-of-Alphas could feel them emoting it among themselves as they swapped out their war components for more everyday cybernetics. Rewarding their loyalty would be simple, however: they were Eaters. Give them first pick of the choice prey, and they would be satisfied.

The Alpha-of-Alphas would return them to the fray soon. This was a test run, after all: more data was required. Perhaps, if they moved quickly, there would be time to install some upgrades.

Nevertheless, the first trial of the stalker variant had been a measured success. They had come within a fraction of a claw-length from decapitating the Human commander, and that would likely have been a devastating blow. Certainly the individual in question was the same one that had led the assault on the Hive, which implied that the Humans did not have many at all.

They would target that one specifically whenever they could. One such assault would inevitably succeed eventually. And when it was, they would…

…would…

A distracting new note joined the communications channels, and the Alpha-of-Alphas tuned into them with a growing sense of interest. It had expected to receive intelligence and insights as the stranded Eater forces were surrounded and crushed. It had expected mounting panic.

Instead… there was something different on emote feeds. Something entirely unexpected.

<Delight>
<Ecstasy>
<BLOOD FRENZY>

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d
Planet Rvzrk, Domain Space

Brother Taro, Warleader of First Fang

Things all started to go wrong when Brother Durn fell.

It was a moment of sheer bad luck that got him. He was on the charge, chasing a trio of Hunters along the shattered terrain made by flattened buildings. Up, across, a flying leap–

He landed with a thud, but Durn was one of their most biggest ‘Backs. His sheer size broke something underfoot, he yelped in surprise, and the rubble collapsed under them. By stupid bad fortune he landed on his back, stunned, and one of the nut-greasy fucks found itself lucky. It bit down and snipped off Durn’s brawny arm before Taro could react, and then…

The Hunters… changed, suddenly. They stopped acting so much like thinking sophonts, and became more… animal. Feral, even. Suddenly, it was like they didn’t give a shit about whether they lived or not, they just became intent on killing. Poor Durn vanished under an avalanche of biting teeth as all the nearby Hunters seemingly forgot every other target and descended on him in a feeding frenzy.

Taro didn’t need to voice anything. All his ‘Backs reacted immediately. They cordoned, attacked, and ripped the nutless shit-stains apart from the rear.

Too late for Durn, though. When they dug him out of the body pile… there wasn’t a lot left. What remained, however, had his fusion knife buried in a Hunter’s gut.

Taro and his ‘Backs weren’t so nice to the stragglers, after that.

But something had definitely changed. Something dramatic. First Fang fought on the principle of shocking and awing the enemy: engage ‘em, tear their shit apart, scare the balls off’a them and scatter ‘em to the winds.

That all fell apart when the foe charged recklessly at them in a slavering wave of fangs and fusion claws, the ones in front falling by the dozen, but by the time their bullet-riddled carcasses slumped to the ground, the unharmed ones behind had closed half the distance.

Well. No ‘Back worth his salt was gonna be ‘scared of vermin like the Hunters.

“Shields!”

Shieldsticks. So useful. They rattled to the ground and created an instant barricade, which the hunters flung themselves against with slavering, thirsty desperation. The fight descended into hand-to-hand combat, in which neither Stonebacks nor Hunters had a clear advantage. It wasn’t so much any particular advantage in skill or tactics, it was the sheer overwhelming numbers they had. All of First Fang’s two hundred Brothers were through the portal, and they were standing against literally thousands of Hunters, with more and more coming every second.

What was it that Murphy human-Brother called this? “Zerg rush” or something?

Taro would definitely need to get Mister Murphy drunk on Talamay when he got back. If.
There had to be at least fifty thousand Hunters streaming down through the wreckage of the surrounding city. They needed air support, now.

The human’s Fleet Intelligence Center pinged him with a happy suggestion. It would be too long before Firefang established operations, and several of those Keeda-ass HEAT Brothers were combat controllers, after all…

He yipped his agreement, the FIC patched him into a new command channel, and a deep, aggressive voice came online.

“Name’s STARFALL,” He said it in perfect Gaori, though with a bit of a Whitecrest accent, sadly. That’d need fixing later. “I hear you got shit you need blown up?”

A new icon on his visor showed the human was closing with his position. The FIC was truly a marvel, sweeping all the clutter aside and telling him just what he needed.

“Got a bit of a Hunter infestation over here.”

“Copy that, I’ll be over soon. You ‘Backs protected against radiation?”

“We’re deployed in a nuclear environment, STARFALL…”

“Yeah. I plan ‘ta make it more nuclear.”

That sounded like a very welcome idea as far as Taro was concerned. “Be my guest.”

“Alright.” Taro flicked an ear inside his helmet. The human sounded… grim, rather than the fierce anticipation Taro himself would be feeling about the chance to play with the big guns. “Enemy’s thickest toward the city center, that’s about five [kilometers] away from your position. That’s gonna be danger close…hold out for a minute more. STARFALL out.”

Easier said than done. Still, the shields were holding, even if his ‘Backs were running out of ammo, even if they’d need to press against the shield wall to force the horde away. With nothing else for it, Taro fell into ranks and managed their tactical retreat towards a more open space. Hopefully open enough that air support could strafe it eventually.

There was a warning pip in everyone’s visors.

“EXTEND SHIELDS!!”

A shieldstick’s height was adjustable, but that added functionality came at the cost of power drain. Hopefully it would only be needed for a moment—

Double flash. Everyone’s visors blinked dark for just the bare and exact moment needed to stave off blindness. The Hunters weren’t so blessed, and were clearly stunned. It would have been great to take advantage but they wouldn’t need to.

The shock wave did most of the work.

It also took out the few walls that remained with one brick on top of another. It made the ground buck like an itching Naxas, and gave Taro a full-body punch in the gut. If they’d been standing in the open without shield protection, it would have pulverised them.

As it was, even the rebound shockwave off the splintering walls behind him, even the sound was like a battering ram.

There was a resounding thud as an absolutely gigantic human jumped down right next to him, carrying a weapon so large he must have been compensating for something.

Everything Taro knew about the HEAT, and his own instincts, said the big Human should have been whooping and grinning over what he’d just done. Instead he threw a drone in the air and surveyed the area around them in silence.

“…Alright. That fucked ‘em up good.”

“That’s nice.” They moved forward together as Eight Claw re-took some lost ground and dispatched all the dazed, blasted, burned Hunters they could find. The orbital strike had taken the pressure of, but the fight wasn’t over. “We could still use some air support.”

“Rog. They’re inbound right now. HEAT’s got release priority but we’re always willin’ to share.”

Air support really was a beautiful thing. Taro stood back with Starfall and together, the two of them spent a wearying long time shaping the fight towards something more advantageous. Firefang eventually deigned to show their pampered fluffy silver asses, of course right as the local fight was turning into a rout. Whatever bloodlust frenzy had gripped the Hunters finally broke, but it took a long-ass time and a heck of a lot of work… not to mention a few lives.

But in First Fang, a few lives—any lives, really—was a big loss. Each one represented at minimum three years of setback. Candidates were rare, the training was arduous, few of those selected to try would ever pass, and few of them made it to the Third Ring. Every Brother who fell greatly delayed rebuilding the retired Fangs.

In human parlance, they were raiders and special operators. They couldn’t afford to heedlessly wade into melee. They didn’t have the numbers.

And that was true of HEAT, too. “That’s my cue,” the tall human said as a trio of Voidrippers lanced down what had once been a perfectly serviceable highway but was now a series of blasted holes in the bedrock, intent on delivering death to something at the far end. “They’re good, I’ve trained with ‘em.”

“They’re late.”

Starfall shrugged. “Can’t always be helped. I’m being recalled by my captain, so…”

“Go. We’ve got a long few days of killin’ I think.”

“Ayup.” Starfall nodded behind that dark, glowing mask of his, and without another word he vaulted over an obstacle and charged back towards his own men. Something must have gone badly wrong somewhere.

For the moment, they had a moment to breathe, tend to the dead and wounded, and much more importantly than even that, jump in more ammo and supplies.

“Roki!” he called out to his second-in-command. “Let’s take advantage of the lull and set up camp. Get those portals through and built, so the Grand Army can come and play.”

The Hunters descended into probing attacks against the perimeter while the portal techs attended to their work. First Fang kept them at bay with skill and discipline, and relative ease: the probing attacks didn’t amount to much for quite a while.

That all changed when something the size of a tank abruptly exploded through a nearby building, ignoring the disintegrating walls around it like they were made of nothing more than air and insults. It was accompanied by three flickering dark shadows that lanced and zig-zagged strangely and unpredictably through down the street never following a straight line.

Firefang proved their mettle right away. The orbiting pilots immediately dropped down and harassed the giant fuckin’ nightmare… which waded through the explosions like they were a light snowfall. It raised an arm and a fuckin’ blizzard of bullets shredded one of the attacking Voidrippers on the wing. The stricken craft slipped sideways trailing smoke and fire, and Taro didn’t see the pilot eject before it was lost from view and a fireball bloomed into the air several streets away.

In response, the other Voidrippers rocketed up to altitude and switched to missiles. They were courteous enough to warn everyone over the radio, though being honest, nobody was too keen on closing with the tank-thing anyway. Especially not when those flickering shadows hinted at something equally nasty just waiting to slice them sideways in the ass if they tried.

Taro had a dark thought, suddenly. “Disruptor nets! We need nets on the ground!”

He’d barely got that order out when FIC joined him to yet another radio net. “First Fang, this is IRISH. I’ve still got vitals on that pilot, gonna have a lash at rescuin’ him.”

“I’ve got a walking barn and some invisible crawlies to worry about here. They bite.”

“Rog.”

What was going on with the HEAT today? They were usually so optimistic and fierce…

In any case, it would be a few ticks before ‘Irish’ showed up, so in the meantime—

A lot of things happened very, very fast. One of the Voidrippers let loose a missile. The instant it did, there were three flashes of jump-black, and suddenly the menace was gone.

Great. So these Hunters had personal jump ability now. Fuckin’ great.

The regular Hunters on the ground decided as one in that creepy biodrone hive-mind way of theirs to give up the hunt, and beat a rapid, crawling retreat.

The missile, suddenly bereft of a target, was remotely commanded to steer upwards and detonate harmlessly overhead. The Voidrippers scrambled like a Nava had just exploded in front of them and flew off to go sort themselves out.

Right. Re-assert command. The situation needed solidifying now despite anything else going on, so Taro barked out orders to that effect, then engaged in a long radio dialog with his Champion. Fiin was…not pleased.

Irish and one of the HEAT’s Whitecrests showed up a few minutes later, both absolutely covered in blood. Most of it was Hunter blood if Taro was any judge, but Irish seemed to have a share of Gaoian blood on him too.

The Human was easily carrying a rigid, powered stasis bag on his shoulder, which he set down next to the array platform. Both men were radiating anger of the most profound kind and Taro looked to the Whitecrest for insight. “Did something happen?”

The Whitecrest sighed. “…Father Genshi has fallen,” he said.

…Well….

“…Balls.”

“Yes.”

Having no idea what else to say, much less what to do about it, Taro instead gestured down at the stasis bag and the pilot within. “Will he survive?” he asked.

Irish nodded. “Should do. Your man night need a new set o’ legs, though. Guess that big fecker hit a lot harder than the last one we ran into.”

“They’re adapting to us,” Roki said.

“Yup.”

Taro surveyed his surroundings as the array they’d just built fired for the first time, sending the stricken pilot home and summoning the first elements of Second Fang and the Grand Army.

“Well,” he said grimly as that thought sunk in. “That’s just gonna make this more fun…”

“Sure.” Irish stood up. “I’ll take all the fun I can feckin’ get. We’ve got a lotta payback to give.”

The Whitecrest—Taro hadn’t yet learned his name—rapped him on the chest with the back of his paw. “You see that?”

“I see it.” Irish gave Taro a respectful nod and again, like Starfall before them, the two HEAT operators made themselves scarce. No doubt the FIC had found something for them to do.

Taro turned his attention to the Grand Army’s deployment. His own job wasn’t even close to finished, yet…

They had plenty more payback to arrange, first.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Naydra

Daar got precious few peaceful moments, and Naydra had learned how to nurture them, sustain them, and let him enjoy them. After all, he badly needed every opportunity he got.

Sometimes they were vigorous, other times… quiet. Simple. The only thing he loved more than doting on her was being brushed and taken care of in turn, and sometimes—like now—it even managed to put him to sleep. That was usually a sign that he was exhausted from stress.

She kept his communicator turned down too, at times like these. Not silent—anybody who called needed to be listened to—but enough that he’d wake gracefully rather than with a jolt. Which would spare her, seeing as she was completely trapped with him curled around her and on top of her.

Still. It was a shame when the device did inevitably chime and wake him.

“…Nnnf…balls.” Daar grumbled himself awake, snuffled in the top of her headfur, and detangled from their comfortable pile. He reached out a long arm and hooked it toward him with his claw.

“…Yeah?”

She could smell his anguish hit before he gave any voice to it. “…I unnerstand…no, no. I’m sure they did what they could…yes. I’ll be there. Full honors, you hear me? Yeah. Sorry. I’m…yeah. Gimme a few. Yeah. Bye.”

When he hung up the phone, he crushed Naydra tight to himself and keened his agony like she’d never heard him do before.

A terrible suspicion struck her and she cradled him close. “Oh no… Is… Regaari…?” she couldn’t bring herself to ask the question in full, but he shook his head.

“…No. It was Genshi.”

That was maybe worse, as Genshi was… had been… one the most important males in Daar’s life, growing up. He was a mentor, he’d sponsored a certain troublemaking, high-spirited cub into the Gao’s elite social life, and probably had a claw in getting Daar in front of Stoneback’s recruiters in the first place. Disciplining him after his… incident… had been profoundly and personally painful for Daar. He’d even mentioned unhappily that he’d felt more personal anguish over it than over the order to nuke most of Gao’s cities.

“After all,” he’d said, “That was… strategy. It needed doin’ and there weren’t no other way. This was… it was personal.”

It had been difficult for him to wrestle with his guilt over that.

And now Genshi was gone. There’d never be a reconciliation, not that Daar had ever held much hope that there could be. She keened softly with him, sharing his grief.

“How did…?”

There was a hitch in his voice as he growled to himself. “I…I dunno yet.”

He keened again and fell silent for a long time.

“…I should…I should go,” he said more resolutely. “They got Regaari home safe, I need…”

“Go, my love. I’ll be here.”

He whined gratefully at her, and was gone. Naydra heaved a huge sigh and slumped on the couch with a soft keen for him, and for Genshi. She hadn’t known the former Champion well, but…

…Whatever else had happened between him and Daar, she hoped he’d died a hero at least. He deserved to be remembered well by the Gao.

She shook herself and stood up. There was a lot for her to organize, and never enough time. Peaceful moments like they’d just shared were just as important for her as for him, though she’d never let him know it.

If being a Great Father was a heavy burden to bear, then being his consort was nearly as bad. But she never regretted it, not for a second.

She sighed, stood up, and got back to work.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1d AV
Lavmuy Spaceport, Gao

Regaari

Somebody had pressed a mug of sweet-herb tea into his hands and gently nudged him along toward a comfortable waiting room. He followed, numbly, his senses overloaded with the sounds and smells of the Stoneback Fangs ready and raring for deployment. He could sniff out their high-testosterone eagerness to join the fray, their indomitable sense of superiority…

The waiting room was a sudden, jarring calm space. The mere act of being escorted into it felt like being wrapped up in thick cloth and insulated from… everything. Regaari finally had the mental and physical space to take in his surroundings and realized that his escort was actually his suit tech, Yarro. He’d been so totally overwhelmed by the bustle, the smells and, and…

…and Genshi…

…to even notice.

“…Yarro.” He tried to think of what else to say, and gave up with a shake of his head. The young male was one of Whitecrest’s associate members, meaning he hadn’t quite made it through the trials to become a full Brother but had shown enough promise, skill and tenacity to still be very valuable to the Clan. “I…”

Among Yarro’s virtues were tact and understanding. He shook his head no and set about dismantling Regaari’s suit.

“Just rest,” he advised.

Good advice. Now that he was here and safe, Regaari was quickly realizing that he felt tired. Tired to the bone, tired to the very core of his being.

He drifted into a kind of fugue as Yarro expertly took the suit apart. Soon enough it was disassembled and set aside, and the very, very mandatory post-suit grooming was underway. Between the petroleum jelly necessary to slick his fur down so that it could be zipped up in the first place, plus days of accumulated oils and bodily grime, the first step after any prolonged session in the Suit was a vigorous brushing.

On happier occasions this would often be with his Brothers or, if he was very lucky, with a Female. Not today. But Yarro was pretty good with the brush, and the gentle massaging pressure of it was enough to all but knock Regaari out. Especially when combined with the gentle scent of his tea.

He was brought back to alertness by a heavy scratch on the door. Yarro apologized, put the brush down, and slipped out.

After a few seconds Regaari could hear the Great Father’s unmistakable rumbling basso profundo voice attempting to hold a “quiet” discussion just outside the door. Yarro was no doubt arguing (respectfully) that it would be best to leave Regaari to rest.

“Send him in, Yarro,” Regaari called wearily. “The Great Father waits for nobody.”

The Great Father’s nose peeked through the door trepidatiously. “I’d wait ‘fer you, Cousin.”

Cousin. That one word said everything about the conversation to come. It should have filled Regaari with joy but here and now he was too drained to do more than lift his ears slightly.

Daar seemed to understand, and approached on all fours almost as low as he could. By his standards, this was an abject apology.

Regaari went to stand up, only for Daar to rise to two-paw and shake his head, putting a paw on Regaari’s shoulder to stop him. Wordlessly, the Great Father picked up Yarro’s discarded brush and picked up where the young Associate had left off.

“Rest, Cousin. We’ll worry ‘bout all the naxas dung later.”

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Regaari noted that Daar had left the door open a crack and made no effort to close it. He did that deliberately, his inner Analyst commented snidely. Regaari had never been able to turn that part of him off, and there were many occasions he wished he could.

And he had to admit… Yarro was both a softer and defter touch with the brush. Daar truly had no idea how much of a brute he really was, sometimes.

….But the thought counted. It counted for a lot. So, he tried to relax into the rough treatment and let a moment of comfortable silence settle on them. At least his fur would be inescapably clean.

Eventually, Daar set the brush aside and sat down to Regaari’s left. The bench complained loudly as he did so, but Daar paid it no mind; it was a massive thing built to seat a claw of heavily laden Stoneback Brothers, which stoically withstood the Great Father’s weight. Barely.

“…Y’know you prol’ly saved millions’a lives over on that planet,” he said.

Regaari sniffed, and duck-nodded solemnly. “And maybe with time, I’ll find that thought comforting,” he said. He heard the faintest, quietest keen he’d ever heard from Daar, and a huge paw hugged around his back.

“…Maybe I will too, someday.”

Regaari turned his head to look at him, then keened and leaned into the hug.

“…We lost Genshi.”

“I know.”

“He saved Costello’s life, probably.”

“…Powell din’t mention that.”

“Costello didn’t tell him… He saved my life, too. There were… some kind of advanced Hunters, with cloaks and fusion blades. I saw them decloak, and I… he pushed me back mid-pounce, then jumped in himself. Took one of them down with him.”

Daar duck-nodded gently to himself and thought silently for a long moment.

“…How does Whitecrest honor their dead?”

Regaari sighed. “…A lot of them died in the dark, doing something covert, off-the-record, that the Clan denied any knowledge of… Historically, at least.”

Daar grumbled unhappily, “Heroes shouldn’t die forgotten.”

“Sometimes, heroism means accepting that you will.”

“Still… you musta honored them, right?”

Regaari duck-nodded. “Much like how the American’s intelligence corps does. There is…was…a wall in our central commune. A crescent moon for each who had fallen, to be filled in with polished wood when they were eventually named.”

“…Destroyed?”

“For reasons that Thurrsto will have to explain. I’m a Father of the Dark Rites, I know the reasons, but only he has the authority to, ah… shine some light on it.”

Daar grumbled and shook his head. “…You ‘Crests sure love your secrets.”

“No. We do not.” Regaari looked solemnly across the room and through the door as though it wasn’t there, recalling his oldest schooling, once he’d passed—survived—the first level of initiation. “‘A secret is a burden.’ The first words I ever learned as a member of Whitecrest. Our First Rite.”

“…Fuck. I’m sorry. I just can’t stop shitting on my most bestest, can I?”

“You meant well.”

“That don’t matter. I can’t just be a well-intentioned galoot, ‘specially not with what y’all do…can I tell you something?”

Regaari gave him his full attention. “Of course.”

Daar fairly reeked of… well, of a lot of things. Of his signature unshakeable honesty, of grief, of weariness. He was an astonishingly earnest creature, even at his most subtle; Now, in their moment of reconciliation, the scent of sincerity was almost pouring off him.

“I admire the Whitecrests,” he said. “Truly. What your Clan does is brave. Maybe the most bravest. And I think you’re the bravest man I’ve ever known.”

He meant it, of course. Daar never lied. But Regaari couldn’t find it in himself to have any reaction at all to those words. He couldn’t work up the energy to be either proud of them, or to be uncomfortable. They just… floated past him, noticed but not felt.

“…What happens now?” he asked, rather than address the sentiment. “Do we pretend there was never a rift between us?”

“That’d be a lie,” Daar rumbled.

“…Yes.”

“That rift got Genshi killed, I ain’t gonna pretend like it was never there.”

“Yes,” Regaari repeated. “I… don’t know how to put things right.”

“You already did. But… Regaari, I need you ‘ta know one thing. There was never a rift between you an’ me. The rift was between you an’ the Great Father.”

“I thought they were one and the same?”

“There’s a bit of metal on my head says otherwise.”

Regaari looked up and, sure enough…balls. He had a crown.

“…I missed the coronation, I see.”

“Yeah.”

That entire subject seemed a bit raw, just going by Daar’s ears and general scent. Best not to push it. Regaari stared at it for a long moment, unsure how to proceed.

Daar eventually sighed and resumed his train of thought. “I’m two people at once, Regaari. I can never not be the Great Father, except maybe in the most private moments. If I were still jus’ a Champion, what you did wouldn’t even have made me mad. But…”

Regaari duck-nodded. “…But I disrespected that, and everything it represents.” He pointed at the crown. He’d never understood crowns before, never understood why the man in charge wore what was, after all, just a very impractical hat. Now, he could see that it was much more than that.

“And I had ‘ta wear it.”

“I thought I was doing my duty.”

“Balls, maybe you were, too.” Daar took the crown off and turned it over in his paws, sighed, and then put it back on. “I sure as shit know I did mine. An’ I fuckin’ hated it.”

They sat in silence for a second or two, before Regaari felt a little surge of positivity at last. He turned to Daar and cocked an ear at a mischievous angle.

“You know…” he said, “…the lesson I’m taking from this is that Duty can lick my nuts.”

Daar’s chitter started off slow, then it gained momentum. It was infectious, and something to be proud of, so Regaari didn’t even try not to join him.

It had been a long time since they’d enjoyed a simple moment of mirth together. It was the best kind of mirth, too, the kind that took all that was wrong and painful in the world and helped them see past it. They weren’t laughing to make light of what had happened, but to make sense of it and to take the next steps forward. Shared humor like that could mend any rift, with time.

Things weren’t right. They’d never be right, they’d never been right. But for a few minutes…

For a few minutes, they could laugh. And somehow, that made things a little better.

Date Point: 15y 10m 1w AV
HMS Violent, Rvzrk System, Domain Space

The ground battle churned on for days.

That was the problem with Hunters. There was no surrender involved, it was a kill-or-be-killed fight where smashing their will to engage in war simply didn’t achieve enough. Any Hunter left alive would just keep murdering and eating. Any group of Hunters allowed an avenue of escape would just regroup and resume their bloody feast, and the concept of surrender seemed completely foreign to them. POWs? Even a wounded, dying Hunter would lash out too violently to be safely captured.

They had to be surrounded and destroyed. All of them. And that made for a series of desperate last stands, each one of which came with a heavy cost. The navy could drop all the bombs and RFGs it wanted, but some poor bloody infantry inevitably still had to go in there and make sure everything with more legs than fingers was dead.

And as the survivors starved, their bouts of blood-frenzy got more frequent. When that happened, the Grand Army had no trouble finding the enemy, but holding out against the resulting wave of teeth and claws was no small feat. Casualties were heavy.

The city itself was a casualty too. In fact, it was effectively gone: There was barely a wall still standing within six kilometers of where the Hunters’ suppressor had been, and cleaning up all the nuclear debris, conventional munitions, corpses and whatever nasty surprises the Hunters might devise would be the work of years, probably.

They hadn’t even begun the liberation of the planet yet, but today was the symbolic day that began. It was the final push to sweep the city remnants clean, where the first truly enormous wave of infantry from the Grand Army would jump in and make their presence known, and the planetary suppression field would finally come online.

At the head of that would be the Great Father. There was important symbolism involved—Gaoians very much needed to be led personally by men they respected. Of course, it would have been preferable if the only male capable of leading their species didn’t need to take the field. Endangering an irreplaceable head of state wasn’t a good option.

Though, if Caruthers were honest with himself, there weren’t any heads of state like Daar. He had a billion-strong, fanatically devoted army. His personal Claw-Brothers were chosen from among the most elite warriors that could be found, including a few trusted human “contractors.” If all that failed, he was himself one of the most dangerous beings alive, clad in a set of personal armor matched only by the HEAT.

So, of course, several of the enormous “Super-Hunters” had made themselves known almost as soon as he stepped through the array.

They had become a recurring thorn in Daar’s and the Fang’s sides in the lead-up to the Grand Army’s march on Rvzrk. Their tactics were…vexingly effective, and deeply dissimilar to those of conventional Hunters. They seldom engaged seriously and preferred harassment and probing forays. Daar saw through their gambit and was cautious about deploying his forces so as not to yield any information of import. That did not deter them. They skirmished, probed cautiously…

So, the Fangs set a trap. After a number of these hit-and-runs, it became obvious the new Hunters weren’t interested in causing any real harm. They had left important lines of communication unharassed, and only attacked relatively soft targets when their opportunity for escape was maximized.

“They’re studyin’ us,” Daar had growled. “We need ‘ta study ‘em back.”

They hatched a plan: enticing the Hunters into a situation they could neither resist nor escape. In the end it was only half successful: the Hunters certainly couldn’t resist it.

But they did escape, via previously un-demonstrated ability to fly. Daar himself along with the rest of HEAT—Powell and Thurrsto had been pulled in for this, too—had engaged once the trap was sprung. It was a short, brutal, fast-moving fight that lasted all of two minutes. Caruthers found himself slowing down the footage during his after-action review, the combatants moved so fast.

Right at the moment they had managed to isolate one of the giant tank-sized Super-Hunters and drop its shield, and just as they were about to pounce…it rocketed into the air with its fellows, rained ordnance down upon the blasted terrain, and made a beeline for the edge of the portable suppression field. They winked out of the battlespace with a pulse of blackest black, and they were no more.

The probing attacks had ceased after that incident, and Allied Command was of the opinion the Hunters had learned more about Allied capability than vice versa.

The HEAT had left Rvzrk with a dent in their morale. They’d bounce back quick enough no doubt, but losing Genshi and then being vexed by these new Hunters had clearly left them feeling that they’d failed to meet their own nigh-impossible standards.Their replacement, however, was the Grand Army, which had the undeniable quality of sheer quantity. Deploying them in full would take weeks, but by the end of the first day there was definite grounds to call the operation a success: The city was secured.

Nevertheless, an unknown number of Hunters remained on the planet, trapped behind the field disruptor and seemingly impervious to the notion of a tactical retreat. The HEAT were spent and needed to recuperate. All four of Stoneback’s Fangs were in need of relief, and the fight with the Super-Hunters had tested Daar’s mettle.

He was, however, unscathed and victorious and his legend as a warrior had certainly been burnished. He was the last to leave with the first wave, and gave a rousing, quick speech to the sustainment forces that were streaming near continuously through the jump platforms. He had made his point to the Gao, the Hunters, and the Galaxy writ large.

The Gao were not to be fucked with.

Of course, the HEAT had made their own point…for enemies that were clever enough to decode the message. The Hunters had made their point, too. That message had been heard loud and clear.

For now, though, the task was recovery. The Great Father had pyres to light, and a friendship to mend. There would be relatively little rest for the HEAT, as their next wave of recruits was due soon, and their arrival would finally bring the team up to full strength. They even had an extra Defender and Aggressor, who would likely find themselves as part of Team Two in a couple of years…

Clearing out the remaining Hunters would take months, probably. They were scattered and disorganised, their lines of communication severed and their command structure utterly demolished. Any other species would simply accept that they were beaten at this point…

But Hunters just didn’t know how. Their invasion would only end when the last one was dead.

It had all been… not easy. Not remotely close to easy. But it had been smaller than they’d anticipated. In fact, the inescapable conclusion that Caruthers had to draw, which he did alongside Daar, Powell and Kolbeinn, was that this had not in fact been a full-blown invasion.

….Just how many Hunters were there if an operation on this sort of scale was their idea of a probing, guerrilla-type attack? Had destroying the Ring hurt them as much as the Allies had hoped? Or had it simply reduced a problem of insurmountable proportions to a merely very, very big problem?

And nagging away at the back of Caruthers’ mind was the certain knowledge that if the Hunters were this intractable when surrounded, isolated and hopelessly outmatched on a single planet… then it didn’t bode well at all for the war against them in space where they had room to maneuver.

They were going to be doing this for a long, long time.

Date Point: 15y 11m AV
Ceres base, asteroid belt, Sol

Drew Cavendish

Drew was down to just three suspects. And, God damn her, Adele had been right: Drew M was among them, alongside Sam Jordan and Shinji Aida. All three shared the same damning trifecta of opportunity, means and motive.

Opportunity: they’d been aboard and in the right part of the ship between the last known moment when the missing bomb had been logged in inventory, and the probable moment when the heist had taken place.

Means: a pulsed spacetime distortion of some kind. The physics behind that one was all kinds of screwy, which for Drew’s money took his Aussie counterpart out of the running: Drew M was a damn clever man, but his talents ran to foremanship, workplace safety, scheduling, logistics and geology. He was no kind of a physicist… but then again, neither were Jordan and Aida. A pilot and a drone operator respectively. Hardly the kind of people who could reprogram a warp drive on the fly to create precisely-shaped eddies in the flow of causality.

Motive: Unknown.

And that was really the sticking point. None of the three men had any kind of a good reason to steal a nuclear physics package. Hephaestus’ security department had dug into all three of them with voracious intensity and turned up absolutely fuck all. No terrorist connections, nothing worrying in their psychological profiles—and Drew now knew a lot more about all three men than he felt completely comfortable with nowadays, right down to the kind of freaky porn that Aida liked to watch—nothing.

Jordan was kind of a cocky smart-ass with a chubby for his own talents, but who could blame him? The man could take a freighter and literally park it on a penny. He’d landed I Met God And She Booped My Nose on the target asteroid with its drill array aligned to within two or three millimeters of perfection.

A bloke who could walk his talk like that had earned the right to mouth off about how great he was, as far as Drew was concerned… And he suspected that anybody so lippy and egotistical wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to drop hints and little taunts if he was behind the theft.

Aida? Aida was a relentlessly practical sort, utterly dedicated to perfection in everything he did. He was kind of obsessive about things being just so but that was a virtue in an asteroid miner. Theirs was a job doing dangerous things in a remorselessly hostile environment and yet they had a so-far perfect safety record when it came to injuries and fatalities.

It had to be said that that statistic owed something to luck, but it owed a lot more to diligence, precision and professionalism, and everybody wanted to keep the record going. So, there was nothing to raise an eyebrow at over somebody having a bit of a stick up their arse.

And Drew? Drew very literally trusted Drew with his life.

So either the real culprit had slipped the net, or one of the three wasn’t who Drew thought they were.

He sighed, and set the investigation aside as an email from Drew M popped up bottom-right in his screen. Subject: “SUIT MAINTENANCE”

He clicked it open while rubbing a thumb through the hair of his temple in a futile attempt to relieve the sensation that had settled in over the last several days that his cranium was stuffed with cotton wool and bees.

“I know you’re busy with the you-know-what that I can’t discuss. Just don’t neglect your first job, mate. Maybe catching up with suit safety will clear your head and help you figure some things out. C-team suit 12 needs some attention.

-Drew M.”

Well. There was a resounding clanger of a hint. And seeing as it was the only lead he had to go on, Drew wasted no time at all in levering himself up out of his office chair and heading straight for the surface team workstation, pausing only to grab a coffee along the way.

Surface facilities felt very different to the rest of the Ceres complex, which after all was effectively a very roomy bunker modelled to give the illusion of big open spaces. While the sprawling multi-level facility under the ground felt like the better kind of shopping mall, office building and high-rise apartments rolled into one, the surface…

Well, it was a place where people came to work in hard vacuum. There were no compromises or illusions here, everything was a hard-learned lesson in safety. Bare valves to shut the oxygen off because a fire was a much more imminent threat than suffocation. Little maintenance labels on everything detailed exactly when they were last inspected and by whom.

Including, as Drew discovered when he opened its storage unit, EVA suit C-12. Trace Freeland’s suit, distinctive in that he’d foregone helmet art in favour of a white-red-white stripe down one arm in tribute to Mass Effect.

Freeland had an utterly unchallengeable alibi - he was on his downtime and education rotation, spending six months on Earth where he could enjoy the fruits of his six-figure salary and seven-figure bonus. Right now, if he wasn’t living it up on a beach surrounded by bikinis and alcohol, he’d be brushing up on his own education and earning some extra few thousands by mentoring prospective future ‘roid miners.

So why the hell was there regolith on his suit’s boots?

There wasn’t much of it, just the faintest of dustings like what might accumulate on a car after driving down a gritted road… but enough for Drew to scoop up on a fingertip and rub with his thumb.

EVA specialists did not tolerate for their suits to be in anything less than absolutely pristine order. It was literally a matter of life-or-death, and they took it so seriously that they even touched up their distinctive decorative art after every jaunt outside. And yet, Freeland’s N7 stripe was scuffed and faded. This suit had seen more than one trip outside.

Drew ran a quick query through the suit commission logs. Nothing. The suit had, allegedly, remained exactly where it was since the last time it had been serviced, which according to the bright orange tag on the helmet was about three days before Freeland had jumped back to Earth.

Unlogged suit use shouldn’t be possible. But then again, unlogged nuclear package theft should be impossible too.

Drew turned back to the suit and considered it for a second. None of the three men on his suspect list were suit-qualified and frankly if Drew M was the thief then he was playing an utterly insane game of refuge-in-audacity by dropping hints. Besides, he was way too big to fit the suit.

…and Shinji Aida was much too small.

But Sam Jordan? If Sam Jordan was Goldilocks, then this suit belonged to Mummy Bear.

…Oh. Shit.

He turned, digging in his pocket for his phone, only to be brought up short by the frowning face of Sam Jordan himself, barely two feet away.

The young man looked genuinely upset.

“…I’m sorry, Drew,” he said.

Then there was a flash of metal. And pain, but not very much. Something strange happened in Drew’s chest, like something cold had touched his heart.

Sam’s voice in his ear: “I didn’t want anyone to get hurt…”

Then nothing.

Date Point: 15y 11m AV
Ceres facility, asteroid belt, Sol

Sam Jordan

Oh God.

Oh God, oh… shit.

In the heat of the moment it’d been so obvious, so simple. Problem; solution. And it had been simple. Up, and under the ribs. Drew had just… he’d looked confused, and then he’d looked dead. Like his brain hadn’t had time to catch up with what happened.

On the one hand, Sam wanted to vomit. On the other hand… he was glad that Drew hadn’t suffered. He was—had been—a good man. A kind man.

And innocent, too. At least, innocent of anything that deserved… this. That was the bit that made Sam’s skin crawl and made him feel like a monster. Drew had just been doing his job. He wasn’t part of the problem! He wasn’t one of humanity’s jailors, he was just a…

…Well, it was too late to second-guess now. Monster or not, innocent or not.

Sam dug in his hiding space above the airlock and retrieved the makeshift causal accelerator he’d built. He’d be needing that, whatever happened next. The second thing he grabbed was the phone with the special app on it.

Something went wrong
REALLY wrong
Help

He locked the doors and waited in pulse-pounding agony for far, far too long before the reply made his phone chirp.

What happened?

With shaking fingers, Sam typed the most damning words of his life.

I was caught

I killed him

The reply came quickly, inhumanly so. The sheer speed lent it the air of a sharp interrogation.

How many? Just one?

Just one no witness

This time the reply took a few seconds.

That’s not good. But okay.
We can fix this.

How

Its somebody really important

Even here, on this most secure communication, Sam couldn’t dare to name his victim.

First, hide the body. Somewhere secure.
The most secure place I can think of
would be out on the surface, with the
device.

Sam glanced at the EV suit.

I can do that
whats second

That depends. I’ll work on options.
For now, just worry about the body
I’ll figure out what we do next.

Well, that really wasn’t great. This whole situation was completely fucked, actually. And maybe Sam’s friend Cynosure was just being tactful about not having any ideas.

But so far, he hadn’t led Sam wrong. The blueprints for the causal accelerator, and the forcefield focusing rig that’d let a NPXL reach out as far as the Sol Containment Field generator. The precise timing and planning of what to do, when and how to do it…

Without Cynosure, he’d have failed a thousand times over already. Cynosure would come through. They always did.

Okay

Don’t leave me hanging.

Don’t worry. It’ll work out.
I promise.

Sam nodded and hurried to suit up. Visions of somebody blundering in and catching him red-handed crawled up and down his spine, and he still felt utterly nauseated at what he’d done. Putting the suit on wasn’t easy at all with shaking hands, nor was checking the seal integrity and making sure it was good to use. Once he was wearing it, however, the powered exoskeleton made lifting Drew’s body and slinging it over his shoulder feel trivially easy.

Blood dripped to the floor. Shit. but there was no point in trying to clean it up when the body producing it was still in his arms. He’d just have to work quickly and pray he got back in time to clean up.

He knew, rationally, that he had no reason to be so paranoid. He’d done this a dozen times before without being caught, he knew damn well that with the Accelerator active he’d be gone for mere seconds from the outside perspective, and C team weren’t due to suit up for twelve hours.

He did his best to force his thoughts out of panic mode and ran his little log-beating trick like he’d done so many times before. It shouldn’t have surprised him that he worked, and he was able to cycle the airlock unchallenged.

Like always, he almost stumbled during the clumsy moment when the gravity changed. He had no idea how the EV workers made that transition look so graceful, when for him the mere act of stepping forward nearly sent him drifting clumsily up off the ground. Ceres’ surface gravity was pathetic.

But that worked to his advantage, too. He turned, oriented himself on what he thought of as the “mountains” which in reality were little more than jagged hillocks of ice and dirt, rucked up by some antediluvian impact. Carefully, he bent his knees, drifted downward, tilted forward… and then shoved hard.

A jump like that, in gravity like this, meant it would be minutes before he made contact with the ground again, by which point he’d be kilometers away from the base. From there, a few smaller jumps, some hops, skips and a shuffle would hone him in on the Device.

It seemed… He didn’t like the thought of destroying Drew’s body in a nuclear explosion. It wasn’t…. Drew deserved a proper funeral. And Sam didn’t know if it would really help him escape capture.

But Cynosure knew what he was doing. All Sam needed to do was follow the task in front of him.

He landed pretty close to the work site, by some small bit of good fortune. When he glanced up the hill, he could see the dark little lightless hollow where he’d stashed the rig and the nuclear package. So far the lay of the terrain and the solar radiation had kept any sensors from picking out the device, and there was a lot of landscape out here to cover. Even a dedicated sweep by survey drones would… probably not find it. Not at first, anyway.

He shuffled up the hill and dumped Drew’s body in the hollow, next to the spindly intricate rig he’d built. Vacuum was… not agreeing with the poor man’s remains. Some detached part of Sam’s mind found a moment of grotesque fascination in seeing the way Drew’s blood had dessicated and clotted in vacuum, or the way pressure was distorting his face and cheeks. Drew’s eyes were more than glazed over now, they were gray with cataracts and reflected the distant light of the Milky Way.

Sam knelt and closed them. “…I’m sorry, Drew,” he repeated. “I hope… I hope there’s…”

He sniffled back the urge to weep, which would have been hellish inside a helmet in low gravity, and stood up. “…Rest in peace.”

With that, he called up his comms app.

Okay

Now what?

Cynosure replied promptly this time.

Check the rig while you’re there.

Good idea. Glad for something to do, Sam shuffled over to it and ran a diagnostic. Everything came back green.

It seems good.

Okay. I think I have a solution.
Stand by.

Should I head back?

There’s blood to clean up.

And the power pack on this
accelerator won’t last forever...

Just stand by where you are
for a few minutes longer.
You’ll like this.

Well. Whatever it was, it’d have to be pretty spectacular. Miserably, Sam shuffled over to a rock and sat down, facing away from Drew’s corpse. After a few bored seconds he picked up a small rock and threw it: it shot away from him in a practically straight line and vanished. Oh sure, it’d come around in a long parabola and land on Ceres again in probably a few hours, but to human eyes its trajectory was utterly flat.

In chasing its path, though, his eyes alighted on the stars.

…There was a view that never got old. The stars never looked like this on Earth, there was atmosphere and light pollution and dust to dull them and make them twinkle. Out in the hard vacuum of an asteroid’s surface, they shone steady and clear. Far, far too many to count.

It was actually kinda comforting to know that whatever fuckups and trials might be going on down in Sam’s life, the stars would always be there. It was a tiny optimistic note of sorts, and he focused on it.

Yeah. Stars. Stars were pretty awesome. He smiled softly. He’d come out here to work in space, after all. And why not? Space was just the coolest! It contained so much potential, so much future! And thanks to Sam and his Device, the whole of humanity would soon be free to benefit. It wouldn’t just be the US and their toadies with the codes to jump out: everyone would have the galaxy at their fingertips, ready to seize.

That thought made him… happy. Truly, blissfully happy in a deep way like he’d never really felt before. It warmed his whole body from the belly out and he lay back to consider the stars some more. It was a rare moment of peace and certainty, and he knew he should appreciate it while he had it.

So beautiful. So many! Counting them was a fun game that didn’t get boring, though he lost count and started over a few times. That didn’t matter though, it was all… part of the…

…the…

…Beeping?

He blinked dozily at the large red letters in his helmet’s HUD: “O2 WARNING.” Below them in smaller text were the words “LIFE SUPPORT RESERVES CRITICAL.”

Huh. He’d… he must have been out here a while. Without noticing. A long, long while. Like… hours.

…Shouldn’t he be concerned about that?

But he was so happy here. And so comfortable… He turned his attention back to the stars and smiled at them again. They really were beyond cool now he thought about them. Except, he’d lost count again.

He started over, drumming out a happy rhythm on his thighs and humming a tune in time with the beeping.

After a while, the beeps stopped. It got kinda hard to breathe after that, but… that was okay. He was flying, and there was nothing but him and the stars.

And then there were just the stars.

Date Point: 15y 11m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Observatory Station, Neptune, Sol

Six

Sam Jordan’s suit reported complete life support failure six hours after he’d first set out onto the surface. By then, Drew Cavendish’s absence had been noted, his emails checked, and the blood spatter in C-team’s suit maintenance bay discovered.

Ceres was on lockdown while they hunted desperately for Sam Jordan, as Six had known they would. A panicked murder blew any remaining cover or hope of stealth they had, and after that point Sam’s capture and interrogation would have been inevitable.

A pity. He’d been a valuable asset. But that translated to being too valuable to leave alive.

At least it had probably been a pleasant death. And importantly, it’d leave no marks or clues. By the time Sam Jordan’s body was discovered, if it was discovered before the bomb went off, there’d be no evidence whatsoever to say that he hadn’t just committed suicide.

Now, the only thing Six could do was wait, and hope. If the Humans found the rig and the missing suit, it’d all be a tragedy for naught.

It was out of his hands, now.

Date Point: 15y 11m AV
Planet Rvzrk, Domain Space

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

The air smelled of devastation, the strongest and least unpleasant note of which was the dry, powdery scent of pulverized concrete.

Behind it though was a nostril-torturing medley of burnt rubber and plastics, blood, innards, rotting flesh, diesel, gunpowder, and the musk of working Gaoians who’d gone too long since their last dust bath.

When Knight glanced up at the two aliens beside him, he saw their nostrils flare once then close protectively. Both of them tossed their heads and flicked their ears in a disarmingly equine manner as the olfactory assault hit them. Even Kirk, who was usually so composed, pranced a few nervous paces backward before recovering his dignity with a slow shake of his head.

“That…” his translator gave his voice a pained croak “…is… I’ve never smelled anything like that.”

Beside him the Domain’s representative on the Security Council tossed her head. To his shame, Knight had never properly got a handle on her name, which sounded like somebody had stuck a handful of dog biscuits in a smoothie blender, but somewhere in the ticking, rattling mess of Domain syllables he’d picked out something that vaguely sounded like “Kara.” Or maybe “Katie,” but he preferred Kara. She’d been gracious enough to let him use it.

“No…” she agreed.

Last in their little lineup was Ambassador Sheeyo, Champion of Clan Goldpaw, and his nose was easily the most sensitive. Nevertheless, his reaction was to sniff the air just once, flick an ear, and sigh.

‘Kara’ took a number of tentative steps forward. The Jump Array was snug in the middle of a bustling camp, but she was much taller than any human or Gaoian. Presumably she could see over the tents and fortifications around them.

It was good thing the Hunters had, so far at least, declined to field snipers. Presumably such a tactic was too detached and dispassionate to occur to them. Besides, the camp and all the surrounding area were supposedly safe and secure.

“…There’s nothing left standing,” she said after a few seconds of looking around.

“This wasn’t a subtle operation,” Knight said. He couldn’t see what she saw, but when he glanced up at Kirk, the lanky alien nodded solemnly, confirming what she’d said.

“Clearly not,” Kara lamented. “Mister A’ktnnzzik’tk has assured me there was no subtle option.”

“Not when dealing with Hunters, Councillor,” Knight agreed.

“No. I suspect there isn’t.” She released a prolonged creak that was the Rrrrtktktkp’ch equivalent of a sigh, and shook out her mane. “…I’m sure the Kwmbwrw Councillor would be looking for the slightest excuse to blame all of this on you,” she added.

“And you, Councillor?” Knight asked.

“I’m known to disagree with the Kwmbwrw Councillor on several important matters.”

Knight caught Kirk’s eye. He’d learned a lot about Rrrtk body language from Kirk during their time working together, and Kirk had in turn adapted his mannerisms to humanity’s little foibles. It was amazing how much they could communicate without either of them speaking.

Kirk inclined his head slightly and shuffled his foremost pair of feet with a flick of both ears. He might as well have raised his eyebrow like Mister Spock: it expressed the same sentiment. She’d effectively, though diplomatically, expressed the view that her Kwmbwrw counterpart was a fucking idiot.

“There is an inspection tour lined up,” Knight said, carefully stepping back from any further discussion on that point. “It’ll take in… well, a lot of what we had to destroy, and a lot of what we were able to save.”

Councillor Kara nodded, in her species’ languid way. “Let us see how much there is of each…” she said.

In fact, Knight felt as the tour by Weaver dropship took them all over the surrounding region, there was a lot more saved than destroyed to see. Ultimately, the damage from the battle amounted to a single smallish city. Which had, yes, been variously flattened, demolished, shattered, scorched, melted, irradiated and obliterated but other than that…

The twin hydroelectric dams upstream of the city had been liberated without significant damage, as had much of the surrounding farmland. Pockets of hiding, traumatized survivors had even been unearthed in some of the outlying villages. An entire division of the regional defence force had been saved from a massacre by the way the Grand Army had smashed into the Hunters from behind.

Councillor Kara took it all in… not impassively, but certainly with an excellent poker face. She met the defence force’s commanding officer with the same gravity of expression as she surveyed the damage done by the orbital nuke strikes, and kept her opinion close to her chest.

Knight let Sheeyo do most of the talking. The Goldpaw Champion had a gift for putting the best spin on everything without turning it into an insulting sales pitch, and more importantly he knew when to say nothing. Whenever a military matter needed clarifying, they turned to Knight for his insight, but mostly the tour was in the Gaoian’s paws.

If Kara was phlegmatic about the tour, though, then Kirk was downright sanguine. To the point where, when he had a quiet moment while Kara and Sheeyo had wandered some distance ahead, Knight confronted him on it.

“You seem quite chipper,” he observed. “Considering how many people died…”

“I’m considering them in relation to how many people could have died, Ambassador,” Kirk said. “…you know, I grew up on a deep space trade station. You’ll have heard of ‘Outlook on Forever’ of course.”

Knight nodded, and Kirk continued. “It’s nowhere important, really. The sort of station that forms naturally at the intersection of a few major trade routes, the galaxy is full of such outposts. And even though Outlook was deep in civilized and well-patrolled territory, we always knew a Hunter raid was a possibility. Spacers like me lived with that knowledge all our lives… Planet-dwellers don’t. Or, didn’t. This will change that.”

“The attack on Gao didn’t?” Knight asked.

“The Hunter attack on Gao was thwarted.”

“Barely.”

Kirk sighed, and shimmied his neck. “You must remember the psychology of nonhuman species,” he cautioned. “A thwarted attack on another species? Even if the attack was barely thwarted by a militarily superior species? That’s not an imminent threat. Species like mine are generally content to… well, to graze and only pay attention to immediate danger.”

“With respect, I think you have too cynical a view of your own people,” Knight replied. “They built cities, they have a standing military reserve… they’re clearly capable of foreseeing a long-term threat and planning for it.”

Kirk swept his head around, then harrumphed and indicated the columns of smoke on the horizon with a slow wave of his cybernetic arm. “And there is the fruit of all our planning,” he retorted.

Knight tugged on his lapels to get his coat seated a little more comfortably on his shoulders. “This isn’t your homeworld. It’s your third colony world, as I recall.”

“Yes?”

“It seems… unfair, to me, to suggest that a species capable of bootstrapping themselves off their homeworld to settle not one but several alien planets, is incapable. The mere existence of this world is a triumph, wounded as it is.”

Kirk did not seem convinced, so he pressed his point. “We didn’t come up with… this… so as to fight the Hunters. Ninety percent of everything my people did here, we learned and refined from fighting each other. There are many cities on Earth that have been razed just as flat as… what’s that one called, again?”

Kirk’s answer was a strangled rattling sound that Knight gave up on even approximating. “And yes, I know. Berlin, Stalingrad…”

“Aleppo, Warsaw, Nagasaki, Kabul, Sarajevo… It’s a long list. This is what war looks like, Kirk. But we didn’t learn its ways because we foresaw the Hunters, we learned its ways because that’s what we grew up with. It’s not your people’s fault they were too peaceful for a warlike galaxy.”

“We had wars,” Kirk retorted.

“And what did they look like?” Knight asked. He’d done his research on Domain history. “Your last major land war was decided by a formation of troops with pikes, and the losing side quit the field after losing barely a hundred men. And in my professional opinion, that was the smart decision on their general’s part. He elected to preserve his men to fight a better battle elsewhere, and his sovereign turned out to be a nincompoop who mistook one lost battle for a lost war and capitulated.”

Kirk’s ears swivelled: he was clearly impressed. “That was thousands of years ago,” he said.

“Yes. And after that your people developed the communications technology to sustain a peaceful global federation which eventually became the Domain. In many ways that’s admirable, Kirk. Your people are peaceful and inclined to grow together. They weren’t to know it would leave them woefully unprepared for… this.”

Knight took a deep breath. He hadn’t exactly rehearsed this speech, but he’d certainly mulled over versions of it when he was alone, after every time Kirk got depressive over the innate superiority of deathworlders.

“Meanwhile,” he continued, “my people’s perpetual squabbling did prepare us for it. And the cost was hundreds of millions dead in awful ways. If we lived in a nicer galaxy, we’d be the monsters. As it is…”

“As it is, you’re the only ones who know how to properly deal with the Hunters.”

“Your people will learn how to deal with them too. And honestly, that saddens me.”

Kirk sighed heavily, then gave Knight a sidelong look. “…You’re a hopeless romantic, Ambassador.”

“And you, my friend, are far too melancholy.”

“Melancholy? A few minutes ago you said I was chipper.”

Knight chuckled. “True.”

Kirk made a whickering sound in his throat that was his own version of a chuckle. “I’m not melancholy, Knight. Far from it, I see a future where nobody has to live in fear of being dragged away screaming by monsters. And if the cost is a few flattened cities, and a generation with their innocence in tatters having learned how to become monsters ourselves when needed…”

“It’s a terrible price.”

“The alternative is worse.”

“I suppose it is,” Knight agreed. The Hunters had been around for all of the Dominion’s recorded history. When he thought of the scale of their ring orbital, and imagined something like that grinding on for thousands and thousands of years…

“…We should catch up with the others,” he decided.

“Yes.”

They bustled to catch up, and Knight noted with satisfaction the way their Gaoian escort didn’t miss a beat in adapting to what the VIPs were doing. They’d been trained well, and even though the Gao had a much more bellicose history than the Domain species, it still boded well for what the Vzk’tk and Rrrrtk might learn, with time and proper guidance.

Hopefully, Councillor Kara would see things the same way.

Date Point: 16y AV
Camp Tebbutt Biodrone Internment Facility, Yukon–Koyukuk, Alaska, USA, Earth

Hugh Johnson

Snow.

Of course, snow in January in Alaska was hardly surprising, and this one threatened to be heavy. At first, Hugh had thought it was probably just an seasonable dusting that’d add a couple of inches to the foot or two that had already accumulated since October, but by lunchtime, well…

Fat flakes were landing in such numbers that they made a soft white-noise hiss as they settled, and the thick cloud cover had cast them into a kind of flat twilight at noon.

At this rate, it’d be pitch dark by mid-afternoon.

The camp internees were used to weather like this, of course. They’d seen plenty of heavy snowfalls and outright blizzards over the years, and even though everybody’s cabin was well-insulated and well-heated, some instinct always made them huddle together in what Hugh jokingly called the “town hall.”

That was the cafeteria, in more mundane language. The folding tables, when pushed aside, exposed a smooth wood floor with the line markings for different sports picked out in yellow, blue, red and green under the varnish. Right now, though, a kind of carpeted island had been assembled in the middle with rugs and couches borrowed from people’s cabins, and a big TV. Probably they’d just take it down again when the weather cleared but hell! It was something to do!

Hugh had spent the late morning helping to move couches and beds. Tonight would be kinda like a sleepover, really, and a heck of a lot warmer and cosier than bedding down alone only to wake to a snowed-in cabin.

The camp’s staff didn’t seem to mind the change of pace, either. Most of them were on good terms with the internees even though their job, ultimately, was to keep a couple of dozen innocent people confined.

Not even Zane, mooching around at the edges and being typically antisocial, could spoil the atmosphere. In fact he even reluctantly pitched in to move a few things.

By mid-afternoon, Hugh’s prediction that it’d be dark outside was vindicated. The clouds were scudding along so low that they were actually lit by the camp’s outdoor floodlights, and the air bit like a scared dog. The gossip from the guards and other camp staff was that a huge mass of arctic air had come down from the north and they were probably going to be stuck with it for a few days.

By early evening, Zane was missing.

The result, as soon as somebody mentioned it, was of course a manhunt. The guards checked his cabin first, then used their powers to search everybody else’s cabins too. Then there was an argument of some kind. Curiosity got the better of Hugh, who managed to “innocently” get close enough to overhear it.

He had to angle his head slightly to hear properly over the bustle and conversation, but a few sentences stood out.

“No sir, it doesn’t work that way. If I send the drones up now, they’ll just get lost in the snow and crash.”

And: “—can’t fly VFR in this. My helo’s FLIR will be blinded by the snow, too.”

And: “—late now. He’ll either come back or he’ll freeze out there—”

And, echoing his own thoughts: “—cking idiot…”

On an impulse, Hugh braved the flakes and chill outside on the pretense of grabbing some stuff from his cabin. Sure enough, when he checked around back of the cabins he found a line of widely-spaced footprints making a bee-line for a stretch of fence where somebody had flung a rug over the razor wire.

Still, it was hard to believe. That was a tall fence, and there was an electrified outer fence as well. He couldn’t possibly have really managed it, could he? And why? Not even the guards and their dogs were braving the weather.

…But of course, by the time they could, Zane’s trail would be long gone.

It was still insane: There was nothing out there but the prospect of freezing to death. Nothing at all. Zane must have known that…Which was why Hugh was certain that the surly bastard must have had a plan for surviving it. As impossible as it seemed, he had a gut feeling like the world wasn’t rid of Zane Reid yet. On some level, he even wished him luck.

He bustled back to his cabin, grabbed his Playstation, and headed back to the “town hall.”

Prison or not, he’d rather remain where he was.

Date Point: First Contact Day, 16y AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Arés

Watching the HEAT recover after a mission was always educational. Marty could have written a paper if it wasn’t all classified.

It started with the strongest, most physically capable men alive feeling as weak as kittens. That passed fairly quickly, thanks to Crude and the HEAT’s absolutely cutting-edge understanding of their bodies and how to properly use and abuse them, fuel them, and care for them.

This had been a particularly long deployment for them, too, which was why Powell had called her in; she was a “dirty, war-profiteering” civilian contractor these days, after all.

She was making more cold hard cash than Adam did these days, even with his monthly stipends and bonuses. She’d teased him about it too, to which he’d pointed out his property empire, homesteading bonus payment…

Teasing him like that never got old. And it always made their private moments better too.

Grampa Gabe, meanwhile, had been more than happy to babysit, while Marty babysat a bunch of groaning Operators.

All of them came out of their suits pinched, bruised and sporting the early beginnings of pressure sores. Which was honestly a little terrifying, since their extensive training had given even the smallest among them bodies literally as hard as teak.

In any case, recovery proceeded as it always did. The more savvy and experienced techs wore dust masks for the moment when the suits came off; the Lads all been marinating in their own stink for over a week, and the resulting aroma was foul enough to turn even the most hardened stomach.

While the suits were taken away to be sanitized, there were long, thorough, steaming hot showers for the Operators, a veritable feast of easy-to-digest meals, full doses of Crue-D… and rest. They’d all piled into their rooms, human and gaoian alike, and fell into the restful almost-comas of men who had given it their all.

Twelve hours later, they’d begun to stir. They weren’t quite as happy as they might normally have been, given the loss of Genshi, but there was no power in the galaxy that could completely damp their enthusiasm. In any case, Genshi would rather they had fun instead of moping all over the place, or at least that had been Faarek’s opinion.

From there, recovery training beckoned. This was “light” activity, mostly meant to get their blood moving and pump the fatigue toxins out of their enormous muscles. It took a lot of exercise to do that, and inevitably some of their usual attitude returned… by the three day mark, when they started slotting back into their readiness training schedule, they’d more or less bounced back. There were a few trips to the chaplain, Adam went and had one of his chats with Commander Mears…

Marty had always been very proud of him, there. A lot of men in Adam’s position might have treated mental health as a weakness they were supposed to “man up” and ignore, but Adam’s definition of manning up meant fixing whatever was troubling him, not sweeping it under the rug. To him, the base counsellor was basically just another training specialist whose job was to help him stay in peak condition.

…Overall, that attitude seemed to rub off on all the others, too. Between Mears, the chaplain, and the wisdom of Champion Gyotin, the dents and scuffs in the team’s morale were soon polished out.

Regaari re-joined them about a week after they returned from Rvzrk, escorted in person by the Great Father who gave him an enthusiastic personal recommendation. That was a class act on Daar’s part, but it came with a tacit message: firstly, that all was forgiven, and secondly, that it would maybe be best if the two kept their public lives at an arm’s length, to avoid any future conflicts of duty. If it ever happened again, things wouldn’t end so happily for either of them and everyone knew it.

By the end of the month, the whole unit was back at fighting readiness… just in time for the new guys to arrive.

Walsh practically swaggered through the Array, so goddamned pleased with himself it was almost impossible to bear…. Though after basically obliterating his pipeline competition from start to finish, who could blame him? Fortunately, the HEAT knew exactly how to tame him: combatives with Murray, who had a way of humbling men twice his size.

Walsh was a good sport about being put in his place, at least. The new team members who arrived with him were good-natured about it all too, and were fairly geeking out about the group they now found themselves in. Gaoian ninjas! Left Beef, in person! Right Beef, in the flesh!

Firth took a little longer to warm up to, of course, but he won them over when it turned out three of the cherries were avid Warhammer geeks themselves.

Throwing a First Contact Day party was Jack Tisdale’s idea. They’d had an influx of new techs accompanying their Operators of course, and that meant a lot of names to learn, a lot of new stories to hear, and a lot of embarrassing anecdotes to share, so they may as well throw in some drinking and feasting to go with it.

First Contact Day was a holiday in its awkward infancy. There’d been a lot of different suggestions from all over Earth and Cimbrean about the best way to celebrate it, most of which were just gimmicky. Burning Hunters in effigy on a bonfire of hockey sticks, for example.

Tisdale cut straight through the bullshit and kept it simple: plenty of booze, a big fire, some music, and a roast beast. He got some good-natured ribbing over his pagan ways which went away when he showed up at the party with a fucking Werne wrapped up on a trolley and a smug grin on his face, embellished by a cast-iron refusal to explain how he got it.

Watching Firth’s surprise at the critter’s sheer weight was a priceless moment that Marty knew she’d cherish, and the meat was amazing once roasted over the flames.

They had plenty of reasons to celebrate. For the first time in HEAT’s history, they had a full team. Three Protectors, seven Defenders and ten Aggressors, with the newest Lads already trained and conditioned to a standard well above what the original team had reached for Capitol Station.

That inevitably provoked plenty of banter and figurative dick-measuring, with Blaczynski musing on whether the Walsh of today would have been a match for the Adam of six years ago. At some point it devolved into theorycrafting over how various fictional heroes would stack up if they tried to make it into the HEAT, and by sunset the original conversation had been totally forgotten in favor of writing up a list of who’d make the cut and who wouldn’t.

They didn’t stay up too late: the Lads didn’t really have the luxury of partying into the small hours of the morning. Training discipline aside, two of the new guys had brought families with them, Marty had Diego to get back to, and Freya was big enough now with her impending child that she was waddling rather than walking.

She was a towering, statuesque gal herself, and Firth was… well, he was Firth. That was going to be a monster of a baby when it arrived. Ninety-ninth percentile, which was… well. Marty certainly hoped her next child wouldn’t be anything like that big.

So, shortly after sunset, the couples started drifting away, the singletons either found somebody to go home with or headed off into town to continue the party elsewhere, and a handful stuck around to help clean up. The last to leave were Tisdale and Miller, with Miller still badgering her counterpart over where he’d got the roast.

The silence that ensued was a genuine relief. Marty had truly enjoyed herself, but the moment of peace felt like a weight off her shoulders, or like taking off a too-tight shirt after a long day. As soon as the door was closed and she could no longer hear Miller’s voice echoing up the stairwell, she turned and leaned against it with a sigh.

“Whew…”

Adam groaned and stretched on the couch. “Yeah. Love ‘em all, but…”

“But I’m glad their gone,” Marty finished for him.

He chuckled. “Yeah. Ain’t had some actual quiet in…”

“Too long,” Marty agreed. On a slightly tipsy whim, she straddled his lap and sat down. “We should leave Diego with your dad more often.”

He chuckled and ran his mitts up her legs. “And do what?”

“Well…” she laughed as he goosed her and pulled her a little closer, and trailed a fingernail around the collar of his tank-top. “I can think of something we’ve not done in far too long…”

Adam gave a languid, goofy grin. “Uh-huh. Mighta forgot what I’m s’posed to do…”

His hands moved down, suggesting that was a lie.

She kissed his nose. “I’m sure it’ll come back to you.”

“Well, you know me…I may not be the smartest, but I’ll practice anything ‘till I’m the best!”

“You promise? That’s a lot of practice.”

Adam did that unfairly sexy thing where he moved so fast she didn’t know what happened until it was over. Marty suddenly found herself pinned against the wall with her fingers splayed over his chest. He nipped gently at the side of her neck and then made her shiver with a snarling whisper right against her ear.

“As much as you can take…maybe a little more.”

Perfect. Marty wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.

Life was good.

Date Point: 16y 1w AV
*Ceres facility, asteroid belt, Sol

Adele Park

Adele hadn’t really appreciated just how close two straight men could be until she’d met Drew M and Drew C. Or so she’d thought. The two had always been rough with each other, trading the most vicious insults and mockery with a disarming grin that spoke to real affection.

In fact, their relationship had inspired Adele to think on several occasions that if the English word was lacking anything, it needed more nuanced variations on the word ‘love.’ Those two men had loved each other.

Now that Cavendish was missing and presumed dead… Drew M was a changed man. A grieving brother, bereft of a body to mourn. The fact that his name was completely cleared didn’t matter one bit now, he just needed answers… or possibly vengeance.

He’d taken to scouring the surface of Ceres with a fleet of survey drones until he collapsed at his desk, and only the intervention of his friends and colleagues would persuade him to look after himself. “Drew Watch” had become a thing, where somebody checked on him every hour to encourage him to take a hygiene break, drink something, eat something or… hell, to sleep.

At least he listened, even if he grumbled about it. So he was still clean-shaven and showered, wearing clean clothes. He ate, and hydrated, and all those little normal things had probably kept him just on the right side of sanity.

Adele could sympathize. She’d had to lock the door and cry in private several times over the last few weeks as the feds bore down on them over the nuke, as it settled in that Cavendish really was…

…Things had gone wrong. Badly wrong. And now all the walls around her, everything she’d helped build, it all felt wrong. Ceres was one of the human race’s crowning achievements, a towering monument to what people could do when they pulled together. Now it was a haunted house.

She was going to retire. Take all her years of salary, bonuses, investments and more wealth than she really knew what to do with, and get the hell out to somewhere peaceful where she had no responsibilities and no press would come knocking on the door.

Colorado, maybe. Somewhere with big open skies, and a view. She’d have a nice place with a porch, where she could drink tea and listen to the wind chimes.

…Assuming she didn’t go to prison instead.

Her daydreaming was interrupted by Drew Martin, who hammered on her door like he wanted to break it down and yelled through it. The door was thick, designed to soundproof Adele’s quarters and give her some privacy, so she couldn’t make out what he said… but it sounded urgent.

Grateful that she hadn’t changed out of her workwear, she opened up.

“You found something?”

“I found the bomb!” Drew declared. He was out of breath, like he’d just sprinted all the way from one end of the complex to the other. “Radiological signature, purified metals… the drones found it. It’s… a click or two north-east. Bottom of a crater.”

Adele grabbed her shoes. “Show me.”

She followed him at a brisk stride, which was nowhere near fast enough for Drew. He dashed ahead to summon the elevator, then dashed back when he saw she wasn’t inches behind him.

“Come on! Strewth, you’re slower’n a landie with a bad axle!”

“Save your strength, Drew,” Adele advised.

“You wouldn’t say that if you could see what I saw on that drone feed, Adele,” he muttered darkly, but forced himself to slow down.

“What did you see?” Adele asked as the elevator arrived.

“…Two bodies. Looks like Freeland’s suit and… and Drew.”

“…Shit.” Adele wasn’t normally prone to cursing, but sometimes she just had to. She reached out and put a hand on his arm, just above the elbow. “Are you okay?”

He shook his head, but put his hand over hers by way of a thank-you.

“The, uh… the bomb’s… looks like Jordan built some kinda rig-a-majig around it. Fuck if I know what it is, but—”

He never finished the sentence. From Adele’s perspective, what happened next felt like getting slapped sideways by a giant. She shrieked and fell to her knees as the elevator slammed on its emergency brakes and came to an immediate halt. The lights failed, to be replaced after a terrifying second of pure darkness by the dim orange half-light of the emergency illumination.

The noise though! It had been… it hadn’t been a noise. It had been a physical force hammering through the air, and it left Adele’s ears ringing. As they cleared, she became aware of external sounds penetrating their little metal capsule from outside: sirens. Alarms. People shouting.

Beside her, Drew staggered to his feet, shaking his head. “…Oh no. No, no, fuckin’ NO!”

“What—?” Adele began, but he broke the glass on the emergency door release and painstakingly opened it with four or five pumps of the handle. They were halfway between floors, but there was just enough room for him to wriggle down and under, out to freedom.

“Drew?”

“C’mon,” he grunted, and helped her out of the elevator.

There was a pall of smoke in the air, and that was definitely the fire alarm. And the decompression alarm. Somebody was making announcements over the facility’s tannoy, sounding altogether much more calm than Adele felt.

“Damage control teams to Level 1: Fire in Hangar Two. All staff to your emergency stations.”

She looked around and got her bearings. They were on the same level as Central Operations at least, which was where she was supposed to go in an emergency. Drew led the way, and it turned out that with miners, admins and every other category of facility staff scurrying to get to where they were meant to be, the best place to be if Adele wanted to get anywhere was right behind him.

The smoke was present in Central Ops, too. The room wasn’t bedlam, it was much worse than that: it was the chilly competence of highly-trained people putting everything they had into a crisis that might kill them all.

Drew dashed across into his office, and she heard him curse loudly.

“Talk to me, Drew,” Adele reminded him as she rushed to her own spot and took a look at the facility map. She was seeing a lot of fire alarms, and an inadequate number of firefighting teams.

“I think the bloody nuke went off!”

Adele had figured as much. It was either that or a meteor had hit nearby, and the facility had several layers of weak shields designed as “speed bumps” specifically to detect and deflect such impacts. “Can you confirm that?” she insisted.

“All my drones are fucked…” Drew tailed off and when Adele glanced over, he had an awed look on his face. For once, he was silent.

“…Drew?”

He glanced at her, then beckoned her over. She trotted over and stopped dead when she saw what was on his screen.

His drone was orbiting a floating tableau of shattered rock and ice; Sharp, stress-fractured edges glittered strangely in the sun’s distant cold light. The pieces were tumbling slowly, having clearly been kicked aloft by incredible forces, and they were going to make a hell of a mess when the crashed with glacial slowness back to Ceres’ surface in a few minutes. For now, though…

She’d never seen anything like it. It was… terrible. And she felt awful for finding it beautiful.

“Oh God…” she muttered.

Drew sagged, and slumped down into his chair. He rested his forehead on his crossed arms and made a tortured sound of grief and loss.

Adele put her hand on his heaving back and crouched next to him. There was else to do, nothing to say that would help him. He’d just lost not just his closest friend, but any hope of a proper funeral.

She glanced over her shoulder. By some miracle, the firefighters were getting things under control, and the damage control teams were reporting that the major air leaks were all sealed. Hephaestus crews worked fast when lives were on the line. She ought to be proud.

But right now, all she felt was failure.

Date Point: 16y 1w AV *Hierarchy Injunctor -class starship, inbound to Sol

Six

This was the last step, the moment when the plan either worked or failed. Either way, the results would be spectacular.

If the bomb on Ceres detonated on schedule, then the resulting X-ray laser that Sam Jordan’s makeshift rig had gathered and focused in the microseconds prior to its atomization would arrive at exactly the same time as any other causal indication of its detonation. In other words, Six would have no way of foreseeing if his plan had worked.

If it did—when it did—several things would happen on a time scale that organic life simply couldn’t perceive.

The timing was obscenely tight. In fact, the fleet’s margin of error was so small as to be fractal. Six would have given much to be able to warp faster and thereby widen the window of oportunity, but stealth warp was sharply limited in its maximum speed and he was forced to err on the side of caution. Humans were paranoid, tenacious and competent: he had to assume that the Sol system’s outer reaches were littered with sensor satellites.

Had he been corporeal, he might have paced, or bit his nails. He might have fidgeted and checked the nearest timepiece. He might have watched the countdown. He did the data-lifeform equivalent of all of those, and more.

This was… there was still time to abort. To not throw away whatever minor progress he might have made in building Human-Igraen relations. With Sam Jordan dead and his body and makeshift temporal accelerator all presumably reduced to plasma by the weapon’s detonation, there’d be no conclusive proof of Hierarchy involvement in this incident. And the Humans would surely never notice the intended consequence.

But self-replicating automated devices were the primary threat the Hierarchy had always existed to counter. They were the very reason that Deathworld civilizations had been suppressed for all those millions of years. Deathworlders inevitably invented them, and their creation was the Hierarchy’s idea of a nightmare scenario.

Replicators were the twilight of life. They threatened the total conversion of all matter in the galaxy into more replicators. The existence of even one was unacceptable, and thus so was the existence of any species that would build one.

Six had truly hoped that the Humans were imaginative enough to foresee the consequences of such hubris. He’d honestly believed they weren’t so stupid.

He’d never been more shamefully wrong. And while his logic stood that one day they would need to find some Deathworlders with whom the Igraens could partner rather than exist in a state of perpetual antagonism… The Humans had proven they could not be that species. And they would surely drag the Gao and the Ten’Gewek along with them in their folly.

It would have made him weep, if that was an option for a dataform.

He’d toyed with many ideas for how to resume their Abrogation. The Hierarchy could, with effort, induce stars to go nova… if they were the right kind of star, which Sol was not. He could have lined up a particularly large comet from among the billions that orbited Sol, and accelerated it toward Earth… but the Humans had probably set up a few duplicate shields in low orbit around their homeworld as a hedge against just such a scenario.

As for infiltration? That required biodroning. The Humans knew all about biodrones and how to detect them, making effective infiltration at any meaningful level a practical impossibility.

And everything had depended on finding some way past that damnable shield the Guvnurag had put up.

So, he’d gone to the Guvnurag, locked away in safety behind their own shields. A team of pseudo-independent biodrones had been turned to the task of finding a weakness, any weakness no matter how tiny, in the Sol Containment Field.

They’d found one.

The shield emitter had been hastily wrapped up in its own creation. While this meant that it was indeed completely impervious to all harm that might come at it through three-dimensional space and conventional causality, it created an unexpected side-effect due to the interaction of quantum effects not yet known to human science: a building kind of resonance. If allowed to build for too long, the result would have been that the shield collapsed in on itself and crushed the emitter into a very short-lived black hole.

This being an undesirable trait in a system that was intended to last indefinitely, the emitter automatically purged the resonance on a regular basis, again via a quantum-mechanical process reversion as-yet unknown to Human physics.

If the right amount of energy was applied in exactly the right place at exactly the right time…

The countdown ticked down through the last second, and several things happened on a time scale that organic life simply couldn’t perceive.

First, the emitter entered its reversion phase. A few attoseconds later, the leading edge of an X-Ray laser pulse fired from in-system struck the crease in the Sol Containment Field where the shield twisted around the emitter.

Those high-energy photons didn’t—couldn’t—reach the emitter itself, which would survive this moment totally unscathed. But the result was that the whole shield convulsed violently under the unexpected load at exactly the most inconvenient moment. It rang like a gong, shivered, wavered…

…And a tiny hole appeared at the field antinode opposite the emitter as it stabilized. It lasted for a tenth of a microsecond before the emitter finished its reversion cycle, the excess energy was discharged in a massive neutrino burst, and normal operation resumed.

‘Tiny’ on the scale of a sphere with a radius of twenty AUs still meant a million kilometers across. And a tenth of a microsecond, to a ship at warp, was enough time to travel a few hundred meters.

The window snapped open and snapped closed at the very limits of what even an Igraen could perceive at maximum frame-rate, so that Six really didn’t have time to notice it happen at all. There was just the looming wall of the shield edge plunging toward his ship, and then it was behind and receding.

He felt a frisson of relief and anticipation that was almost physical, and allowed himself to relax. He’d done it. A quick check confirmed that the other Injunctors had all made it through as well. His plan had been an unqualified success, in the end.

The Hierarchy had returned to Sol.

++END CHAPTER 50 PT. 3++

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Sixty-four Deathworlders:

Graham Lynk
Austin Deschner
Brian Berland
Aaron Hescox
Adam Beeman
Adam Shields
Alex Hargott
Andrew Ford
Andrew Robinson
Arnor atp
Bartosz Borkowski
Ben Thrussell
Bruce Ludington
Buck Caldwell
C’tri Goudie
Cadwah
Chris Bausch
Chris Candreva damnusername
Daniel R.
Dar
Darryl Knight
David Jamison
Devin Rousso
Doules1071HFY
Elizabeth Schartok
Eric Johansson
Fiona Dunlop galrock0
Gavin Smart
Gygax Fan
Ignate Flare
Jim Hamrick
Jon
Kristoffer Skarra
Krit Barb
Laga Mahesa lovot
Matt
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Mel B.
Mikee Elliott
Morgan Barnes
Myke Harryson
Nicholas Enyeart
Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Oliver Mernagh
Patrick Huizinga
Peter Bellaby
Richard A Anstett
Ryan Cadiz
Saph
Sintanan
SourMonkey
Starky
Stephane Girardin
Sun Rendered theWorst
Tyler Kelloway
Woodsie13
Zachary M Lunstrum

As well as Sixty-nine Friendly ETs, 74 Squishy Xenos, and the Grand Army of 278 Dizi Rats.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work under fair use are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not automatically share or endorse the opinions and behavior of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in the next chapter.

Chapter 51: Anticlimax

Date Point: 16y AV
Yukon–Koyukuk, Alaska, USA, Earth

Zane Reid

The cold didn’t hurt anymore.

At first, it had been like forcing his way through a wall made of knives that cut through his clothes. Zane’s every breath had blinded him as it billowed and steamed in the air, and when he’d experimentally licked his teeth, his tongue had briefly stuck to the ice it found there.

He’d realized what he was doing was stupid pretty much immediately. He’d barely made it to the treeline before his resolve faltered. He should have gone back, turned himself in, given up on freedom. At least he’d be alive.

But every time the shadow of that thought flicked its tail below the surface, it made him feel sick and disgusted with himself. He wasn’t some dog! He wasn’t gonna spend the rest of his life in a cage, too weak to get out.

He’d escape, or he’d die. Both were better than the cage.

And now he didn’t feel cold anymore. He felt warm. Hot, even. He wasn’t sweating, but suddenly it was almost like being back in Kingston, scratching odd jobs out here and there. Like the time he’d spent working in his uncle Dejuan’s garage, fixing the cars of richer men. That had been a sweltering hell: the door was always open, and Dejuan was too poor for air conditioning. There’d been a dusty old ceiling fan, spinning too slowly to do anything, and a battered desk fan from like the 1950s or something that needed a stick wedged under it in the right spot or it shorted out.

Dejuan had been a lion. Never a man to raise his voice, or get angry. Polite, quiet… the kind of person Zane usually hated. He acted like one of the sheep. But when wolves came to his door looking for Zane’s help with something, he’d shown his real fire then. He’d chased them out, and to Zane’s surprise they’d never come back.

He was one of the few people Zane genuinely respected… and missed.

But how could a freezing forest in an Alaskan winter blizzard be as hot as his workshop? It didn’t make sense. Zane wanted to strip off his shirt, to get some relief from the stifling sensation of heat. But some part of his brain knew that was a bad idea.

Just keep going. Push on, no matter what. Get as far away from the fence and the guards and the dogs as possible.

Suddenly, the ground wasn’t there in front of him anymore. He put his foot down and fell, tumbled painfully… landed on what felt like ice under a deep blanket of snow. A stream. Completely frozen right down to its bed, probably. With a groan, he picked himself up and clambered up the far bank. That wasn’t easy: it was steep, almost vertical, and several feet of snow had settled at the top. He collapsed on his belly when he reached the top.

So… tired…

…

He gasped, and pushed himself up. Stumbled forward maybe a dozen paces. Fell again. Stood and stumbled forward, fell again. And again. He couldn’t feel his fingers, or his feet. He couldn’t feel anything. Couldn’t see anything. He bounced off a tree and after that he couldn’t get up at all. His arms and legs just refused to work.

That… that was okay…

He’d just… he’d just rest a bit. Recover his strength.

…move on when…

…when he woke up…

Date Point: 16y1w AV
Cabal unlogged communications session, dataspace

++Asymptote++: I don’t understand. Why not simply talk to them, first?

++Cynosure++: Without leverage? And without tipping my hand?

++Asymptote++: Why not talk to us?

++Cynosure++: Because I wasn’t sure it would work and I wanted you to remain focused on your own projects.

++Asymptote++: And what if we’re not even sure that it was a good idea?

++Metastasis++: In your own words, the Humans seem to be the only extant deathworld species we can reasonably have a conversation with. The Gao are too vengeful, and the Ten’Gewek are too primitive.

++Asymptote++: At the very least, the possibility of explaining the dangers of replicator technology should have been explored. From everything you’ve previously said, the Humans would have listened.

++Metastasis++: Provoke them too much, however…

++Cynosure++: That… thing, the dataphage. It has a self-replicating hardware body now. Thanks to them and their research.

++Metastasis++: <Alarm> That does change things.

++Asymptote++: Then it’s too late, surely?

++Cynosure++: Maybe. And if it is… well, I won’t let the galaxy burn without visiting some justice on its destroyers. But if we are very, very lucky then we still have time to act.

++Asymptote++: Humans are entrenched on multiple worlds now, and our biodrone infiltration is effectively zero. Even containing and limiting them is going to be an almost insurmountable problem.

++Cynosure++: Not zero. We have one viable drone on Earth.

++Metastasis++: Since when?

++Cynosure++: It escaped confinement and is currently… dormant.

++Metastasis++: Dormant?

++Cynosure++: Its implant last reported ambient temperatures of approximately 200 absolute degrees.

++Asymptote++: …That’s not dormant. It froze to death.

++Cynosure++: This particular drone is exceptional.

++Metastasis++: Temperatures on Earth actually get that low?

++Cynosure++: Quite routinely, in some places.

++Metastasis++: <vague awe> Right. Deathworld.

++Asymptote++: I don’t care how “exceptional” your drone is. It’s a block of ice now, and that means it’s dead. Organic cells and ice crystals do not mix.

++Cynosure++: If it doesn’t survive then that will complicate matters, it’s true. But I think it will probably surprise you.

++Asymptote++: I am beginning to not like your surprises.

++Cynosure++: Noted. But are you with me?

++Asymptote++: <reluctant> …Provisionally. Subject to my consistent future inclusion in your decision-making process.

++Metastasis++: <agreement>

++Cynosure++: You are right. Forgive me.

++Metastasis++: So what happens now?

++Cynosure++: Now, we wait. Sol is locked down to a genuinely impressive degree. We wait for that to die down. Then we wait longer. Then we wait even longer still, and let this incident fade into memory.

++Asymptote++: I thought we had the urgent matter of a dataphage with a replicator body to worry about?

++Cynosure++: As you said: it may already be too late. This infiltration will be challenging, difficult and has a low probability of success. Thus, our only option is to be slow and careful.

++Metastasis++: And after the infiltration succeeds?

++Cynosure++: Too many variables, not enough information. We’ll formulate a concrete plan once we know enough.

++Metastasis++: Reasonable. Very well. But let’s start on rebuilding our trust that we are included in the decisions, shall we? What exactly is it that makes this biodrone of yours special to the point it can possibly survive freezing to death?

++Cynosure++: <File attachment>

++Asymptote++: …Oh.

++Metastasis++: I see!

++Cynosure++: Sadly it wasn’t quite as effective as I’d hoped. Human biology is already impressive and there’s little that technology can do to improve on it. But in this one small area, it made a difference. I hope.

++Asymptote++: <Pleased> Yes. I can see how it would.

++Metastasis++: Why, though? What do you gain from a single biodrone? Why not just bomb the planet to ashes?

++Cynosure++: This has to work. It has to be certain to work. The Humans are entrenched in off-world colonies and those require infiltration as well. If I just strike at Earth then Cimbrean and the others will lock down completely and we will not get another opportunity. We need to scout, and plan, and determine what exactly is the best course of action… and if nothing else, biodrones keep our options open in the face of unexpected developments. It may be that I won’t need them, but if I do need biodrones then I would rather have biodrones.

++Asymptote++: Reasonable. Very well. Shall I oversee the infiltration of Cimbrean?

++Cynosure++: <Gratitude> I was hoping you would volunteer. Be warned: you will not have direct control over your infiltrator as you would over a conventional biodrone. They are more… free-willed.

++Asymptote++: <Alarmed> Only to an illusory degree, I hope?

++Cynosure++: The Human brain is very sensitive to the correct stimuli. You can reliably influence their behaviour along the correct lines. It is like persuading an extremely impressionable agent.

++Metastasis++: <dry sarcasm> What could possibly go wrong?

++Cynosure++: <humorless; unamused> A lot. If we don’t win here…

++Metastasis++: Understood. I will talk to the right people.

++Asymptote++: As for me… I have a biodrone to acquire.

++Cynosure++: Thank you both. And… good luck.

SESSION ENDS
DELETING LOGS

Date Point: 16y1w1d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

So much for taking a vacation.

AEC had developed an extraplanetary version of the defense Readiness Condition system to handle space-based military threats to the USA in particular and by extension the Earth as a whole. The SOLCON levels ran from the minimum alert status of SOLCON 6, in which the Sol system was believed to be completely secure and peaceful, up to SOLCON 1 - hostile presence in near-Earth orbits.

Now, Sartori was facing the difficult decision of whether to step down from SOLCON 2. And he was reluctant to do so.

Level 2 suspended all non-military jump traffic from, to, and across Earth, and raised the dozen or so inner-system defense shields that partitioned the solar system into a series of increasingly tight concentric zones around Earth.

The innermost of those shields was intended to protect the GPS satellites, and orbited only a few hundred kilometers above them. There were hundreds of satellites on highly elliptical orbits that were in danger of smashing into that shield once raised, and each one represented millions of dollars, never mind the disruption their loss would cause. Communications, weather monitoring, surveillance… Each one was valuable. Each one’s loss would do long-term damage.

Likewise, millions of dollars in suspended commerce between cities on Earth, not to mention contact with the Cimbrean colonies, were mounting up every hour and Sartori was burning through his limited supply of political goodwill with the Chinese and Russians fast over the lost contact with their colonies on Lucent.

In the twenty-four hours since they’d first gone on high alert, those costs had piled up considerably. Now it was time to decide whether it was worth incurring further costs.

The US Navy, the Royal Navy, the 96th, US Space Force and NASA were all thoroughly scouring the system looking for anything out of place, but as the director of NASA had reminded him: ‘finding anything in space that doesn’t want to be found is orders of magnitude more impossible than looking for a needle in a haystack.’

A Weaver carrying astronauts and specialists from Scotch Creek had inspected the Sol Containment Field emitter and found it undamaged and still operating as intended, at least so far as they could tell. Local spacetime distortions in and around Sol had spiked enormously at the moment the laser struck the field, but after that…

Nothing. Just background noise. All was quiet.

Sartori didn’t like it one bit. Nor did Kolbeinn, nor did the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of defense, nor the Prime Ministers of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Folctha.

“I hate to break out the cliché, but it’s too quiet,” Kolbeinn observed. They were poring over the latest return from a Firebird squadron that had slow-dragged themselves all the way around the Earth/Mars orbital gap, pinging their warp drives like a kind of future-tech sonar. Such a sweep would have illuminated absolutely everything that was generating a spacetime distortion… and it had found nothing.

“We’re about to make the same mistake the Domain did,” Sartori agreed, shaking his head. He kept staring at the report as though it might suddenly change and reveal the evidence he needed to stay locked down.

“We have… ten minutes until we owe China another comsat, Mister President.”

“…Anything from Scotch Creek?”

Kolbeinn shook his head. “Brigadier-General Bartlett says they’ll need weeks of supercomputer time to properly simulate the attack, and even then he’s not convinced their model of how system shields work is accurate.”

“And even if it is, it might show that the attack failed and that all this was a waste of time and resources,” Margaret White added. “If it does… China and Russia won’t be happy.”

“With all due respect, Ms. White, I could give a damn what China and Russia think,” Kolbeinn said.

“Unfortunately, the rest of us have to.”

Sartori groaned and ran both hands backwards over his scalp.

“…Right. Drop the shields. Keep us at high readiness, and… Chris, we need to go over our doomsday plans. I do not like this. We have Hierarchy in system again, you know it, I know it…”

Margaret nodded glumly. “But unless we can prove it…”

Sartori sighed and sat up straighter as a few of the slightly less senior officers in the room set to carrying out his orders. “…What matters is keeping the peace, and that depends on trade,” he said. “Hungry and desperate people are how the worst wars start.”

Kolbeinn made a ‘hmm’ noise and turned away to make a phone call. There was coffee available in the corner of the room, set there by an aide who absolutely deserved high recognition if only Sartori knew who they were, and he stood up to grab a cup.

It helped. It gave him a moment to stop focusing on the futile facts in front of him and instead turn his attention to what could be done.

Doomsday scenarios. Sartori was just old enough that ‘doomsday’ had once meant the Soviets finally losing it and launching their ICBMs. The legacy of that standoff was still with them: even after several space battles and despite Sartori’s status as easily the most prolific launcher of wartime nukes ever, the USA’s reserve of nuclear weapons was still deep enough to hit every major city on the planet a few dozen times over. Still enough to reduce Humanity from substantially more than eight billion souls, to barely eight million, if not less.

The full extent of the Hierarchy’s resources was unquestionably enough to make that arsenal look like the fireworks display at a high school ball game. But at least he could plan for it.

Start with what he knew. The Gaoians had gigaton-scale weapons, and considering how deeply infiltrated they had been prior to the war on Gao it was a certainty that the Hierarchy had that technology as well.

Even one of those was a catastrophe on a global scale. He’d asked for an estimate on what such a bomb would do if it went off in, say, Washington and been told flatly that they didn’t really know, beyond that most of the people who lived between the Atlantic coast and the Rockies would be killed.

That obviously hadn’t happened. Which meant that the Hierarchy either didn’t intend to do it, or hadn’t yet had the chance.

Assume the latter first. What could they do to make sure the chance never arose? Well, step one was to ensure they never got to Earth itself, so naturally that meant the Luna shield had to stay up indefinitely. But assume it was too late. What else could be done?

Sartori sagged and wished briefly for something a lot stronger than coffee. The truthful answer to that question was… nothing. Sure, there were wormhole suppressors, but Human technology couldn’t even begin to match the Gaoians there. The very best they had could cover a few hundred miles, maybe, and they drank power like a large town. If the Hierarchy was on Earth, they’d have no trouble at all finding a gap in the suppressor coverage and summoning whatever weapons or materiel they desired… There was nothing more to be done today.

So. May as well deal with the backlog of nonsense that had accumulated over the last twenty-four hours.

He turned around and returned to the Resolute desk, where he sat down and rubbed his forehead for a second. He was going to pay for all the hours of stress and work with a badly disrupted sleep schedule and plenty of fatigue in the near future. Better work while he still could.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s get back to business as usual.”

…Whatever that meant now.

Date Point: 16y1w2d AV
Multi-Faith Center, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Ray had never been particularly religious. She still wasn’t, she supposed, though seeing how Holly Chase’s faith had got her through their shared experience on Hell had maybe softened her views a little. She’d stopped seeing faith as a crutch, and started seeing a font of strength at least.

When they’d first got back, Holly had spoken of taking vows and becoming a nun. That had been more than six months ago, and so far she hadn’t committed to taking vows or however it worked. Instead she’d become one of the Multi-Faith Center’s more dedicated volunteers. She didn’t have any formal responsibilities as far as Ray could tell, she just… kept the place clean and tidy, made hot drinks, kept up a steady supply of baked goods…

And listened to people.

It was a very healing kind of listening, too. Ray struggled to keep her cool when people tried to get her tangled in their personal problems. After all, what the hell was a bad day at work next to a decade in Hell? The temptation was always there to snap, to let them know how good they had it, to inform them that they hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of just how evil life could get.

If Holly ever felt that temptation, she never acted on it. She just listened, and didn’t judge, and people walked away feeling better.

Ray had to admit: she seemed to have her life kinda-sorta figured out and on track now.

Ray had stayed on with MBG, on a zero-hour consultancy contract. Moses Byron had paid the whole crew compensation, negotiated out-of-court. Legally, MBG accepted no blame for what had happened to BGEV-03 Dauntless and her crew.

Privately… The unspoken motto among the architects of MBG’s spaceship program, not least of whom was Moses Byron himself, seemed to be “Do Better.”

She’d taken the compensation money, invested most of it, and bought a house in Folctha south of the river in the Delaney Row district on a cul-de-sac with the charming name of Apple Grove. It was a good start at putting her life back together, at least. Her own house, which she kept scrupulously neat. A job, sporadic and tentative though it was. After six months of rehabilitation under the attention of MBG’s fitness instructor Dane Brown, she was actually in great shape. Better shape even than when she’d left Earth, thanks to an alien surgeon who’d gone above and beyond when putting her back together.

She was doing better than most of her crew, anyway.

Cook was still in an institution, medicated and not allowed access to sharp objects or anything that could be turned into a rope. Jamie had sent a brief message at Christmas to wish her a merry one but was otherwise not in contact, and the last she’d heard of Spears had been a teary-eyed drunken video message recorded at the wrong end of the clock. He’d looked wild-haired and unshaven, with what might have been vomit on his shirt.

He was back on Earth, and hopefully not on a one-way slide into alcoholism and an early grave but… it was hard to tell. And Ray wasn’t sure she could face him, either.

But Holly? Holly seemed to have devoted herself wholly and completely, if a little desperately, to Doing Good. And she was making it work. She shared inspiring stories and vegetarian recipes on social media like she might drown if she didn’t, but other than that… she seemed to be mostly keeping her head above water.

And she was about the only person on the planet that Ray felt really able to relate to.

She’d met the crew of Misfit. Nice kids. Kinda terrifying, but nice. Allison in particular was a pineapple: covered in spikes, but sweet as anything on the inside. Xiù was almost the opposite of that: outwardly cute and friendly, but Ray could see cold sharp steel lurking in there, exposed by the scars.

It was a good thing she was so captivating, to be honest. Their partner Julian was…distracting. And friendly! And oblivious. But mostly distracting. Those three understood true hardship, but they hadn’t been to Hell. Nightmare, maybe, but not Hell. They were healed. They had each other.

She got on well with Dane, but that was a purely professional relationship founded on him doing his best to rebuild her neglected and malnourished body. He certainly couldn’t relate to what she’d been through.

The only people who could were… well, the only one available was Holly. So, Ray made a point of visiting her often.

She’d even tried meditating a few times. Apparently the Gaoian in the black robes who showed up at the Faith Center sometimes was some kind of bigwig, and Holly had talked her into taking one of his meditation classes. It had helped, but he’d done much more good for her with a mug of ovaltine and a joke.

But she’d come to like the Faith Center. It was peaceful, and she had a friend there.

A friend who always smiled to see her, and dropped whatever she’d been doing to trot over and give her a hug.

“Ray!”

Ray smiled and reminded herself that she could actually hug properly now. Holly’s own nutrition and exercise program had repaired a lot of the fragility that their exile had inflicted on her. Of the whole crew, she’d been most averse to the Hot—for which Ray didn’t blame her for a second—and had suffered the most from malnutrition as a result.

But she wasn’t made of porcelain any longer. Hell, her hug was firm enough to knock the wind out of the unprepared.

Ray returned it, and kissed her friend’s cheek. “You know, that hug never gets old.”

“Yeah-huh! You brought cookies, I see?”

Ray brandished the bag self-consciously. She’d taken up various creative hobbies as a kind of therapy, with baking coming in slightly behind oil painting and woodworking. She gave all her creations away as gifts, and the nice thing about baking was that she could make little gifts regularly, whereas the woodwork and paintings had to be saved for special occasions.

“White chocolate and raspberry,” she said.

Holly beamed and took the bag. Most of the cookies would wind up with the coffee and other hot drinks, over by the beanbags, armchairs and couches that were the Faith Center’s nexus. But she took one for herself and Ray congratulated herself on her expression when she took a bite.

“Mmm… How’s Thor?”

Ray had also adopted a kitten, a gorgeous fluffy Maine Coon who turned every stereotype about the aloof, disinterested cat upside-down and loved nothing more than to curl up and purr on her lap.

“He’s good. Settling in just fine. You were right about the cardboard box, though. Saved me a lot of money.”

“I told you!” Holly giggled, and guided Ray over toward the couches and bookshelves. She paused to wave at somebody who’d just come out of the Christian prayer room. “Hi Ava!”

Ray recognized the young woman immediately. It was hard not to, Ava Ríos was a prominent face on the news, being ESNN’s alien affairs correspondent. Everything to do with anyone non-human, be they Gaoians, the local ET residents in the Alien Quarter, or the far-flung politics of the Dominion, was inevitably reported by her.

She was taller in real life than on TV, and though her resting expression had been a little troubled she absolutely lit up and gave Holly a hug. “Holly! Sorry, I was miles away…”

“It’s alright. Are you okay?”

Ava sighed. “Just… I had a bad night last night. It’s okay.”

“Do you need to talk about it?”

Ava shook her head. “No, no…. We got a bunch of footage from Rvzrk yesterday. It kinda reminded me of…” She cleared her throat and then smiled apologetically at Ray. “You’ve got your friend here anyway.”

In addition to meat, Holly also eschewed swear words nowadays. That hadn’t stopped her from coming up with some remarkably virulent ways to use otherwise perfectly benign language when she was feeling annoyed with herself, however.

“Oh… puppies. Ava, this is Ray Wheeler. Ray, Ava Ríos.”

“Oh, wow!” Ava straightened up. “Uh… it’s nice to meet you. Holly’s told me a lot about you.”

“I bet,” Ray smiled, and they shook hands. “It’s nice to meet you too, I’m enjoying ‘Laid Bare.’ Especially Miss Patel’s.”

“Thank you!” Ava smiled, and allowed Holly to fuss her and Ray both over in the direction of drinks. She absently accepted one of Ray’s cookies as Holly bustled into action, and settled in on a couch. “At this rate it’s gonna become a regular feature of the magazine. I’ve got no shortage of models…”

“They’re good. I don’t think I’d want to model for one myself, but… reading them has helped me with what happened to us,” Ray gestured to Holly and herself.

Ava nodded solemnly. “She told me all about it.”

“Really?” Ray was genuinely surprised. “She’s… I didn’t know she’d spoken about it with anyone. I thought she was mostly trying to leave it in the past.”

With a light tilt of her head and looking away, Ava managed to convey something that wasn’t quite so crass as a shrug but carried pretty much the same sentiment: Whatever Holly’s reasons had been for opening up to her were Holly’s, not hers to comment on.

“I don’t want to drag it up if it makes you uncomfortable,” she said.

Ray shrugged. “I’m still here,” she said. “You’re more… discreet than I’d expected a journalist to be.”

Ava smiled, though Ray could see immediately she’d managed to be a little hurtful. “I’m not a journalist right now.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I get that a lot. I don’t know who started the meme of the headline-hungry journalist who never takes off the press badge, but I’d like to give them some strong words sometime.”

“It’s just a job, huh?”

“Yeah! I mean, I love my job. But you can’t spend your whole life stuck in one mode, can you?”

Ray nodded. That made a lot of sense.

Ava smiled, however, as Holly returned with the drinks. “Don’t get me wrong… Ava the journalist would absolutely love to interview you. When she’s on the job.”

“Hmm… thanks Holly.” Ray accepted a coffee, then nodded at Ava. “…I might go for it, so long as I get to keep my clothes on.”

“Sure. But I like to leave my work at the door when I’m here…” Ava finally sampled her cookie and then promptly took a second, much larger sample. Ray grinned as she watched her demolish it, pleased with her own handiwork. It was truly nice to see something she’d made be enjoyed with such undisguised pleasure.

“Like it?”

“Mm!” Ava swallowed. “You made them?” When Ray nodded that she had, she grinned. “Can I have another?”

Another was duly produced, and savored with a little more patience than the first.

“So is today a day off work, or…?” Ray asked.

Ava shook her head. “Oh, no. I work afternoons and evenings, and it’s a big one this evening. We’ve still got more fallout from Rvzrk to cover.” She pronounced the alien word fluently, if not accurately. “Some Members of the Thing are arguing that we’re not doing enough to send humanitarian aid. I’ve got an interview with some New Whig backbenchers this afternoon.”

“Sounds like… fun…?” Ray suggested. Holly giggled into her drink. Ava shrugged, finished hers and set it down.

“Not really, but, well, a job’s a job. It was lovely to meet you…” She dug in her purse and handed Ray a business card. “Just in case you were serious about that interview.”

Ray nodded, and watched her go, then turned back to Holly, who was giving her a curious look.

“…What?”

“Nothing,” Holly said. “You just surprised me when you said you’re game for an interview.”

“Have you read her articles? I trust her.”

“Still…”

Ray shrugged. “Maybe I surprised myself,” she confessed. She pocketed the business card and sat back to sip her drink. “Anyway… did you talk to that Nofl guy like I suggested?”

“Not yet…” Holly said. She sighed, and opened up into the kind of long-winded fretting that was her way of working through stuff, and Ray smiled as she sat back to listen.

Things were working out pretty good.

Date Point: 16y1w2d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Champion Thurrsto of Whitecrest

“They let us know about it, of course. Very promptly, in fact. The official messages came in on the same synchronization as the unofficial ones.”

The Great Father duck-nodded solemnly. Thurrsto was briefing him in his official office, a relatively humble affair if one ignored the wooden desk which was a collective gift from the leaders of several Human nations, and had come with an enormous matching chair.

To a Gaoian, such a large amount of wood was an enormous display of wealth. Humans didn’t quite have the same relationship with wood, but the craftsmanship still made it a lavish gesture of esteem.

“That’s good. Nice ‘ta be right.”

“My Father?”

“Vindicated, I mean. Some of my Champions fret maybe the Humans ain’t totally open with us,” Daar clarified.

Thurrsto twisted his head back and forth in a gesture that was neither duck-nod nor shrug, but a little of both. “They take the strategic alliance seriously, of that I’m in no doubt. But vindicated or not, the implications for Sol aren’t great. It’s possible that the Hierarchy failed in whatever they were doing, but we’d have to be fools to assume as much.”

“What’s our best guess what they were doin’?”

“Highmountain and Longear both think they were striking at the containment field in some way, trying to weaken it. It’s still standing, but they can’t rule out the possibility that it was momentarily disrupted. That opinion is shared by the Human researchers at Scotch Creek.”

Daar grumbled low in his chest and moved a tablet around listlessly with a claw. “…How much damage could a Hierarchy ship do if it got to Earth?”

“The worst case scenario is… apocalyptic. If it’s loaded with jump arrays and the means to make more…”

“It only needs one,” Daar sighed and shook out his thickening pelt. “We made gigaton-class warheads a hunnerd years ago, after all.”

“And the Hierarchy definitely have them,” Thurrsto duck-nodded grimly. Even if, by some miracle, the enemy hadn’t developed such technology for themselves, they’d been so heavily embedded in Gaoian civilization that they’d definitely have copied the plans.

“So I s’pose the only thing that matters is how much time they need.”

“If their objective was to deploy a gigaton weapon on Earth and they managed to reach Earth before the system lockdown, then it would already have detonated.”

“Yeah. That means… balls. Fuckin’ Keeda’s burnt balls. They can’t never drop the inner shields, can they?”

“They already had to drop the innermost ones, otherwise much of their satellite network would have been ruined and several key orbits would be permanently unavailable. The current inner shield now encompasses both Earth and its moon.”

“…Damn. Plenty’a hidin’ spots on a moon that big.” The Great Father seemed frustrated and, as was his way, slunk from behind his desk and padded over to his ‘thinking rock,’ which he kept on a cushion atop a sturdy side table.

“Yes,” Thurrsto agreed.

“…What happens if they deploy a gigaton device on Luna?”

“Earth gets a ring system instead of a moon. I couldn’t comment on what happens on the ground exactly, but it’d be… unpleasant, I imagine.”

Daar picked up the rock and hefted it between his paws, passing it back and forth as he spoke. “No shit. Prol’ly ought’a avoid that.”

“I have a suggestion,” Thurrsto ventured. “It’ll be expensive, but… not as much so as losing Earth.”

The rock twirled high in the air for a second before landing heavily in Daar’s paws. It was an interestingly shaped smooth thing he’d apparently dug up in a field one time, and shot through with quartz veins. Probably some ancient glacier had bowled and rolled it for thousands of miles in the ancient past, before depositing it in the bottom of a valley. Some of the cubs undergoing their first rites had decided to polish the thing to a high gloss as a birthday gift, which apparently involved a teensy bit of petty larceny to steal it away for a week.

He’d probably sniffed them out immediately of course…but said nothing for several days. Mischief was its own reward, sometimes.

“…Let’s hear it,” he said.

Date Point: 16y2w AV
Weaver dropship, Gaoian space

Sergeant Ian “Hillfoot” Wilde

“So in all the excitement, we clean forgot about these things. That’s what you’re telling me.”

Champion Meereo made a sound that was half a sigh and half a chitter. “…That’s more-or-less exactly right, yes. We had… well, bigger priorities.”

Wilde had to nod to that. “Yeah, no shit.”

Just the invasion of the Gaoian homeworld, the raid on the Ring Orbital, Rvzrk… ‘Bigger priorities’ was putting it more than a little bit mildly. And now, JETS Team Two was coming in to finish a job that JETS Team One—who didn’t even exist any more—had started literal years ago.

He looked out the porthole window at the planet below them again. From what Coombes had told him, they were in for a few weeks of being constantly damp, and saturating in the smell of rotting meat. Apparently folks had lived down there once. A flourishing civilization had made it all the way to their version of the 1970s before finally the Hierarchy managed to trick or provoke them into a global nuclear war and then mopped up the remains.

And then they’d gone and built a comms relay of some kind right in the middle of the least pleasant swampy spot on the planet. There were deserts down there, rolling grasslands, sweeping coastlines, wind-swept steppes, soaring mountains and all the rest of it… but Big Hotel had decided that the primest real estate going was a bog that smelled like a bin full of week-old raw chicken.

Fucking lovely. Thank Christ this planet here wasn’t the mission planet.

“So what are we doing here?” he asked.

His team had already been briefed, of course. There were listening devices on the mission world, left by a previous JETS mission. They’d been down there much longer than originally planned and now needed retrieving so that Meereo, Clan Longear, and whatever human specialists AEC could find could trawl through what they’d gathered and see if anything useful turned up.

This waystop seemed a bit odd.

“Final mission briefing and send-off. We’re also here to pick up your ship.”

“…Our ship?”

“Yes, your team is being assigned a unique asset for this. It’s been a top secret special access program until now, so we’ll brief on arrival.”

“Where is here, exactly?”

“It’s a Class Ten, inside Gaoian borders. Point Nine-two gravity, nice and cool…it’s really the ideal planet for my kind. Let’s just say there have been…interesting…political dynamics because of that. We’ll not go into it further, but as a result it’s been more or less blockaded by all the Clans.”

“Which Daar clawed through, I’m guessing.”

“No. The planet remains broadly unknown because he ordered it. We Champions respect his will. In any case…” Meereo grabbed a tablet and tapped his claws against it. “Let’s get back to our review. Let’s see…yes, fauna. The previous mission noted a great many poisonous thorny plants.”

Wilde nodded. “I checked. The worst of them’s about as bad as a nettle, from our perspective.”

“You will want to be careful anyway. Team One were hardly equipped for botanical research, after all. Also beware of the local fauna, the Snake-Bears in particular.”

“Coombes called them Doom-Noodles.”

“Do not let the Great Father hear you say that,” Meereo cautioned, wearily. “He is more than likely going to check in on this mission from time to time, given the stakes.”

“…Right. He helped deploy the packages in the first place,” Wilde recalled.

“And I designed them. We both have a personal stake in this.”

“So what, exactly, is our mission? I mean besides fetching boxes and avoiding Snake-Bears?”

“I believe the rule is ‘pillage, then burn.’”” Meereo’s huge, expressive ears flicked back in a classic Gaoian smug smirk.

“Riiight. Easy to get that the wrong way ‘round.”

“And yes, do avoid the Snake-Bears. Bear-Snakes, as the Great Father prefers. He found them challenging foes…though that was some time ago. Now, they seem to grow more impressive each time Master Sergeant Coombes retells the tale.”

“…Daar says these things are mean?”

“He wasn’t as impressive as he is now, but yes. They’re mean, and strong. And they’re big and quiet, too. Deathworlders are like that. The Great Father had to rely on his nose, so you’ll need to keep exceptionally vigilant.”

“This planet’s beginning to sound absolutely fucking lovely…” Frasier interjected.

“Just for you, Frazey, I’ll make sure our next op’s in Benidorm, shall I?” Wilde retorted.

“Would you? That’d be nice.”

“Nah, boys. Tenerife, innit?” Rees said. He grinned at Meereo’s bewildered ear-flick. “Anyway, buckle in. Atmo in two minutes.”

“Right.”

Meereo leaned over once Rees had returned to the front of the Weaver. “…Was that English?”

“He’s Welsh.”

“That explains nothing.”

“Mate, it explains everything.”

Weavers handled re-entry with surprising grace considering they were about the same general shape as a bus. Wilde felt that if the halo of plasma that soon obscured the porthole windows was anything to go by, their ride should have been shaking and bouncing. It’d certainly have justified the need to belt up.

“…Why are we even strapped in?” he asked Frasier after a few minutes of silky-smooth calm.

“So if we blow up, they’ll be able to ID what’s left of us from the seat number, I think,” Frasier suggested.

“Oh. Fair enough, then.”

Meereo chittered. “Very pragmatic.”

“Anyway. You were saying. Pillage then burn.”

“Yes. The Great Father has determined the benefit gained by stealth is outweighed by the prospect of direct strategic gain. He will therefore march the Grand Army through these worlds and claim their secrets, as much as practicality permits.”

“That explains the jump array.”

“Correct. Fourth Fang will follow us to establish a base camp, once the sensor net has been retrieved. That part must be done in stealth. We do not want the enemy to understand how we are building this intelligence, after all.”

“Won’t they realize what we’re doing by the presence of, you know, a billion Gaoians?”

“They will realize we’re gathering intelligence, yes. They will not necessarily deduce how. That is ultimately your mission: protect our sources and methods.”

“Got it.”

“Speed is of the essence,” Meereo added. “We think the relay network is enormous, which is why this node is so lightly defended. We’re working off the assumption that there are response units.”

“…Assumption?”

“Yes. It’s all we have for now. There’s no other way to probe an adversary’s defenses than to, uh, probe them, after all. That’s why we have your team. We had considered augmenting from a Stoneback Fang, but their mission decks are pretty loaded these days.”

Wilde smiled, tickled by that mental image. He’d seen Stonebacks in action, and been impressed, but… “I’d bet we’re subtler anyway.”

“You might be surprised…but they do tend to flatten whatever they hit. For now, we need you to retrieve those sensor nets in their entirety, discreetly place a beacon, and then egress, all without being seen. That’s why you’re being given the… ah…” Meereo paused, then sighed. “The Drunker on Turkeyer for this purpose.”

Wilde blinked at him. “…The what?”

“Your ship for the mission. The Great Father, uhm… insisted. It’s an improvement on an earlier design, and this time a specially-trained pilot from Firefang has been assigned to the mission. He will not be disembarking with you but he will remain on-ship, ready to respond at a moment’s notice. The after-action on the first Drunk on Turkey’s loss rather stung the Great Father’s pride, from what I have heard. Well, Champion Daar at the time, anyway.”

“Drunker. On Turkeyer.”

“…The Great Father has his, uhm… quirks.”

“That’s not a quirk, mate, that’s a fucking war crime against English.”

Meereo sighed. “I admit, his sense of humor is…an acquired taste. But please be considerate. He’s poured a great personal sum into this vessel to improve its capability across every dimension. This is the fastest and most survivable manned surveillance craft ever fielded by Gaoian or Human.”

“With a name like that?” Frasier asked. “When I think ‘fast and stealthy,’ turkeys and bein’ drunk aren’t exactly the first things that spring to mind.”

“Anyway,” Meereo insisted, sparing him a mildly irritated look, “we will be briefing on the ship, its capabilities, and all the rest when we land. Please try and maintain some decorum. This is a significant mission and the, ah, ‘brass’ may be visiting.”

“…When you say ‘brass,’ who do you mean?” Wilde asked.

“Well… I’m the Champion of my Clan and yet here I sit, briefing you on this mission personally,” Meereo observed. “We all intend to hand off to subordinates but…not until we’re certain the gravity of what we’re doing has been properly conveyed. Does that paint an appropriate picture?”

“…Decorum, right. Shiny hats on, lads.”

“Forgot my hat polish, Wildey,” Frasier replied earnestly.

“Well, just try not to piss yourself.” They grinned at each other, and Wilde sensed Meereo relax as he accepted the humour.

The rest of the landing, and Meereo’s fretting over the details, was pretty smooth, right up until they actually touched the ground with a heavy jolt and the Weaver’s on-board gravity was turned off. There was a brief moment of subtle vertigo as the planet’s native gravity took over, a little lighter than Earth’s, but only enough that you’d notice if you were paying attention.

The “brass” turned out to be two Champions—Hiyel of One-Fang, and Goruu of Firefang. Wilde had a pretty comprehensive briefing on Gaoian clan politics, and he knew that the two Clans had traditionally been rivals with overlapping fields of competence. One was the equivalent of a navy, the other the equivalent of an air force.

Daar had ended that centuries-long feud with two deaths, at the height of the war for Gao. Now, it was like the two had always been close allies and friends. Certainly Hiyel and Goruu were reputed to be as thick as brothers.

And behind them, glinting dully in the sunlight, was what could only be the Drunker on Turkeyer. It had nose art of a staggering, giddy Gaoian waving a pair of panicking birds around in one paw while tearing at a drumstick in the other.

Set that aside, though, and she looked fucking lethal. She was a knife… hell, she was a bloody scalpel. Cold, clean, sharp and precise. Everything about her said that here was a ship with exactly one job: to go unseen where she wasn’t wanted.

Wilde fell in love almost instantly, stupid name or not. The sentiment expressed itself as a long whistle.

“I thought you’d like it,” Meereo said, sounding smug. He stepped forward and met his counterparts with that weird blend of playfulness and solemnity that was uniquely Gaoian. Introductions were made, and then Goruu gave them a tour of the ship while Meereo and Hiyel hung back and contributed little details here and there.

It wasn’t exactly spacious inside. In fact, it reminded Wilde of his Nanna and Grandpa’s caravan that he’d stayed in when visiting them for Christmas. It was built around Gaoian sensibilities about sleeping, so rather than bunks there was just a kind of nest, on top of most of their storage space. There was a small flameless kitchen with a table just big enough for five blokes who liked each other to squeeze in around. And then there was an armory and prep room at the top of the ramp that was bigger than the living space by a wide margin. Room enough to suit up, clean their weapons, all that stuff.

And then there was their pilot, Tooko. He was a Firefang himself, and maybe the smallest Gaoian adult that Wilde had ever met, counterbalanced by a particularly impressive fluffy tail and interesting curls of black fur at the tips of his ears. If most Gaoians looked rather like raccoons, then Tooko looked more like a grey fox.

He certainly looked nothing like his Champion, who wasn’t a big chap himself but still dwarfed the diminutive pilot. “Don’t let the looks fool you. He has fifty-seven confirmed combat kills to his name.”

Tooko simply bared his fangs happily.

“Nice!” Rees commented. “What’s your secret?”

Tooko shrugged. “I shoot them.”

Alright. A Gao of few words. Frasier picked up on it too, and grinned. “Are you sure you didn’t just talk ‘em to death?”

That got a chitter, and a shrug. “Pretty sure. That your approach?”

Just like that Tooko was part of the team. He could take a joke, he gave back as good as he got… as far as Wilde was concerned, the endorsement of three Champions and his own sense of humour was good enough.

“Right, then,” he declared. “So when’s our final briefing?”

“Right now,” Hiyel said. “This way, gentlemen.”

It was little more than a short recap of everything Coombes had given them back on Cimbrean and Meereo had gone over on the Weaver. Still, it settled the details in their minds and provided them with the last few puzzle pieces. There were no questions left to ask, nothing more to add… they packed up, settled in aboard their ship, and less than two hours after they’d first arrived, they buckled down for takeoff.

“Hey, Tooko. You sure you know how to drive this thing?” Rees asked as their pilot ticked off the last flight checks.

Tooko glanced at him, flicked an ear… and pinned them to their seats with enough acceleration to drive the wind out of their lungs.

Somewhere in the middle of the punishing G-forces, Frasier managed to groan out an admonishment.

“You ‘ad to open ‘yer big gob, didn’tcha?”

Wilde’s comment on that was a chuckle. Perversely, he was enjoying it.

Clearly it got Tooko’s blood pumping too, because he strung together the most words Wilde had yet heard from him over the intercom. “I can go much harder, boys…wanna test yourselves?”

Despite the gentle groan from Frasier beside him, Wilde raised his voice over the howling engines. “Aye, sure. Bring it on!”

Tooko was only too happy to oblige.

Wilde had regrets.

Date Point: 16y2w AV
Air Force One, somewhere over the Arctic Circle, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

The People’s Republic of China weren’t happy, and sometimes a President just had to take his lumps and go be Presidential. Modifying his schedule to tack on a flying visit to Beijing while he was out that way for a trade summit with Japan and the Republic of Korea had been straightforward enough.

Still. They’d shared their reasons for locking the system down, and the evidence behind their reasons too. At this point, the PRC was just being awkward for the sake of throwing their weight around.

Sartori had to admit, though: In the same position, he’d have done the same. No self-respecting nation should allow a foreign power to push it around unopposed, however justified the pushing-around.

Mollifying the Chinese was just the freezing tip of a deep, cold monster of an iceberg, though. There were bigger concerns.

“How quickly can we ramp up off-world colonization?”

He was flying alongside one of his special advisors. Chris Morgan had played a huge role in handling the relocation crisis in California after the San Diego bombing and the following earthquake. Hundreds of thousands of people had displaced northwards and eastwards, and a lot of them unknowingly owed him for how (relatively) smoothly it had all gone. There had been a real danger that people would starve.

Who better to handle the question of how to get their eggs into as many baskets as they could, as quickly as they could?

“The problem is supply, not demand,” he opined. “People are itching to get off Earth and homestead on other planets, but a colony can only develop so quickly. Modern civil planning and the lessons learned from the Cimbrean colonies mean we can expand them very rapidly indeed, but there’s still a practical limit.”

“Meaning we need more planets,” Sartori surmised.

“Mrwrki said the Coltainers haven’t been reporting back in the numbers they expected. They think something’s destroying them, probably the Hunters.”

“That’s not good.” Sartori pulled a face.

“It’s a control software problem, they say. Even the very best AI just doesn’t hold a candle to real intelligence, which is why they’ve programmed the Coltainers to self-destruct on a hair trigger. Better that than let the technology fall into the wrong hands.”

Sartori sighed. “Which means we need more survey ships. More Misfits.”

“That’s my take, Mister President,” Morgan agreed.

“That’s going to be expensive. The whole point of the Coltainers was that they were meant to be cheap…” Sartori pulled a face at his own words. “…Which means we got what we paid for. Can we even afford more colonies?”

“A colony is an investment, sir,” Morgan said. “We pay a lot up front, and get a lot more several years down the line.”

Sartori nodded and looked out the window. “Well, you know what they say about old men and date trees…”

“…Not sure I do actually,” Morgan replied.

“Ah, it’s some old thing. Date trees take a generation to bear fruit, so when a young man saw an old man planting dates, he asked ‘Grandfather, why are you planting trees whose fruit you will never eat?’”

“Oh, I see.”

“To which the old man replied ‘Buzz off kid, it’s my garden and I’ll plant whatever the hell I like,’” Sartori added with a grin. Morgan issued a gratifying chuckle, and he sat back to think. “Still… Sooner or later, the repo man cometh. We can’t keep paying up front forever.”

“All due respect, but I’m not here to advise you about the national debt or the deficit or whatever.”

“Hmm.” Sartori nodded.

Morgan gave him a second to think, then decided to venture an opinion. “From what I can see though, sir, it seems like a United States with a big debt to pay off is better than no United States at all.”

Sartori had to agree there. “You’re not wrong. The biggest part of my job is to carry the torch and not let it go out, after all.”

“Is promoting off-world settlement going to help you in that?” Morgan pointed out. “History is full of colonies seceding from their founders, after all…”

Sartori sighed. He had a point of course: even without the USA’s own history to consider, Folctha was providing a much more recent example. Its politics had drifted considerably from the British mainstream and, hell, it even had a written constitution. The Franklin territory was, for now, happy to consider themselves the Union’s next state but would that last? Or would they identify more with the people they actually shared a planet with?

Time would tell.

“I like to think we’ve learned a few things since the 1770s,” he said. “But there’s a more important torch to worry about, and that’s the torch of human life. The Hierarchy’s stated goal is to kill us all, and against something like that… If humanity doesn’t survive, the USA definitely won’t. So if I want to preserve our Republic, first I have to preserve the species. That means getting our eggs into some more baskets.”

Morgan’s head dipped as he accepted that point. He spent a few minutes tapping on his tablet and occasionally muttering something to himself sotto voce as he thought.

“MBG are working on their second Misfit-class ship,” he said at length. “And they have a crew lined up for it. I daresay the more they build, they better they’ll get at building them and the less they’ll cost.”

“Byron’s safety record isn’t exactly great.”

“On the other hand, they didn’t manage to lose a nuke.”

Sartori snorted. “True. And they have the expertise and experience now… Fine. I’ll look into funding a more aggressive exploration program. If the Coltainers aren’t working, we need to fall back on good old-fashioned intrepid human spirit.”

He sighed to himself. “…And I’m sure we’ll find the money from somewhere,” he added.

“…How bad is the war debt, Mister President?”

“It could be worse,” Sartori admitted. “But if things escalate, the whole interstellar situation threatens to cost an order of magnitude more than both world wars combined. There’s no way to afford that without… I don’t know. A war economy on that scale would be unprecedented.”

He stood up and stretched. The problem he found with travelling on Air Force One was that flying always made him drowsy. And there was a bed on board, after all. He’d learned early on that if he had both the opportunity and the desire to sleep, he needed to seize the chance.

“I’m taking a nap. You know the drill, if I’m needed…”

“Don’t be afraid to wake you up. Yeah.”

“Hopefully I’ll see you in Beijing.”

Morgan nodded with a smile, and returned to his work. Sartori sighed, and ducked back through the plane toward the back, where the small on-board suite and some quiet awaited him. Getting there required navigating a minor gauntlet of assorted staff and Secret Service, but he made it and plopped gratefully onto the mattress with a groan before massaging his temples. He had pajamas on board and could have changed into them, but instead he just kicked off his shoes and undid his belt. Then he lay back and closed his eyes.

…In the dark behind his eyelids, he clearly sees the Earth from an angel’s perspective. In the dark, he sees a point of light, then another and another, sweeping faster and faster across the world and dispelling the night. Speckles of light reflect in his tearful eyes as thousands of San Diego-sized detonations blossom across Earth’s surface…

He jumped at a knock on the door. He wasn’t sure if he’d fallen asleep atop the blankets, or if there’d even been time. Either way, he didn’t feel at all refreshed.

“…Yes?”

“You have a call from Great Father Daar, Mister President.”

Well.

So much for sleeping.

Date Point: 16y2w AV
Deep Space Layover 793-451-11 ‘Halfway To Infinity,’ Spinwise space

Leemu, Clanless

Leemu was, technically, an exile. Or at least, going home wasn’t an option any longer. The translator implant in his head made sure of that, and somehow he never quite managed to save up enough money to have the keeda-burned thing removed.

…That last part was probably Preed’s fault.

Preed Chadesakan. An old man by Human standards, which made him ancient indeed by those of a Gaoian. As he told it, he’d been abducted in the prime of his life at the age of forty, and been dumped on 793-451-11 after the Dominion’s customs and cargo inspection patrols had, in a rare moment of both competence and integrity, caught his abductors and refused to accept their bribes. Fortunately, the station had been open-minded and sensible about the whole ‘non-sapient indigenous fauna’ thing and worked around it, so he’d remained.

Even though returning to Earth had been an option for a long time now, Preed had elected to remain where he was, braving Hunters and the occasionally jittery station authorities out of loyalty to his customers, his station and, Leemu suspected, out of a kind of pleasant inertia. Preed was the kind of deeply happy person who could extract disproportionate satisfaction from life’s smallest pleasures. Give him a kitchen and empty bellies to fill, and he seemed truly content.

So he’d become a permanent fixture of ‘Halfway To Infinity.’ He was balding, round and soft without actually being fat, hummed or sang jolly tunes to himself as he worked, and could make food and flame do utterly mesmerising things. His noodles were legendary among regular travelers along Spacelane 793-451, and his eatery was always bustling even when Preed was the only being inside. There were always tables to wipe, bowls to clean, or a simmering hissing pan to give an expert push-flick to and send food fountaining into the air only to land neatly back in the pan without spilling so much as a grain.

So, yes. Leemu’s inability to ever quite save up enough to rid himself of his implant was probably Preed’s fault. Those noodles were just too good to resist, and a warm bowl full of them could keep a hungry ship repairer working all day.

And Fyu’s nuts did Leemu need some today. He woke with an aching head and a gnawing, empty belly as though he hadn’t eaten or drunk a thing yesterday. When he uncurled from his nest-bed and stretched, his limbs felt leaden and heavy like he’d been beating on metal and hauling on cargo containers all day. But yesterday had been fairly uneventful.

…Hadn’t it?

He shook his head to clear it, stood up, and dragged a brush through his fur to achieve the bare minimum of self-care. It caught and dragged painfully, and when he inspected himself he found several tangles and one matted patch like he’d managed to spill some oily substance on himself.

Was this what a ‘hangover’ felt like?

Cursing, he decided to take the brush with him and sort his fur out while he ate. Maybe things would become clearer with a full belly and some water.

As it happened, Preed was not happy to see him.

“Oh, there you are! I wondered if you would come to apologize today.”

Leemu blinked at him stupidly. “…Apologize?”

The normally-jolly Human held up his arm. He was sporting the unmistakable triple-scratch mark of Gaoian claws. Not deep, but an angry red.

Leemu immediately keened and rushed over to look at the wound. “I did that?! I’m sorry!! When did I do that?!”

“You really don’t remember?” Preed peered at him for a second—apparently his vision was going bad in his old age—then shook his head. “You weren’t drunk yesterday were you?”

“I… no?” Leemu scratched behind his own ear in mounting confusion and frustration. “…I don’t think so. Anyway, Gaoians don’t get drunk the same way your people do! I had a quiet day yesterday!”

“You call that quiet?” Preed seemed disbelieving, and more than a little irritated. “You turned over half my kitchen!”

Leemu didn’t remember doing that at all. “I’m… sorry?” he said, grappling with his memory and wondering if this was some strange kind of prank. It didn’t feel like a prank. And there was something… unsettling… in his memory. As though he could almost remember what Preed was talking about but it was slipping away whenever he thought about it.

“I’ve never seen you eat so much! You wanted to help, and then you started acting strange…at least you were in a good mood.”

Leemu finally gave up and decided to settle for honesty. “…Preed, I don’t remember any of what you’re telling me.”

Preed gave him a long, cool look then deflated, turned, and ladled a healthy serving of soup into one of the big bowls for him. He made his own bowls, and this one was human-sized. He had an eating challenge on the wall: any nonhuman who could empty one of those bowls inside five minutes earned their meal for free and got their picture on the ‘wall of fame.’ In all the years, only a couple of dozen beings had ever managed it, most of them Locayl.

Leemu suddenly felt famished. But something was off about the soup. He twitched his nose then frowned into the bowl as it was pressed into his hands. This was the wrong recipe. Preed rotated his menu on a seven-day cycle, and today was supposed to be ‘Tom Jabchai’ but instead the bowl’s contents smelled like the ‘Kua Chap.’

“…What day is it today?” Leemu asked.

“The eleventh. Why?”

“…I don’t remember yesterday at all.”

Preed put a friendly, warm hand on Leemu’s shoulder and pushed him toward a table. “Friend, I think something has happened. Maybe a blow to the head? I am no doctor. But I do know that good food cures almost anything, so…” He pushed Leemu gently but irresistibly down onto the bench seat and set the bowl down in front of him. “Eat.”

Leemu did as he was told. In fact, he finished the entire bowl with a satisfied slurp that completely restored Preed’s good humor.

“One for the wall, I think!” he announced. He swept the bowl away, refilled it, then posed Leemu with his second soup for the sake of a good picture. He raised his eyebrows when Leemu promptly attacked the second bowl, then chuckled and returned to the kitchen. Pretty soon the sound of him singing to himself reached Leemu’s ears. It was a familiar tune to practically everyone on the station, and allegedly it was a jolly children’s song… about an enormous terrifying monster with a thick hide and huge sharp teeth.

Humans were very strange.

♪“Chang chang chang, nong koi hen chang reu plow, chang man dtua dtoh mai bao…”♫

Leemu took the second bowl slower and brushed himself thoroughly as he ate. He couldn’t quite finish the second serving, but Preed never seemed to mind. On the contrary, a full bowl was always quickly refilled, so Leemu pushed it aside and stood up to leave. He tried to swipe his communicator to pay, but Preed rushed across the kitchen and snatched the payment device away before he could.

“You beat the challenge!” he said. “So it’s free today.”

“Are you sure?”

“It seems you needed it!”

“Well… thank you. I do feel a lot better.”

“I told you! Good food cures almost anything… but you should go see a doctor anyway, yes?”

“I suppose…”

Instead, Leemu wandered out onto the station promenade and checked his communicator for work. He sighed to himself when here saw there was only a handful of ships docked and none of them needed any repairs. No work today.

He ended up wandering the station, somewhat at a loose end and feeling unaccountably restless, like some urge had gripped him and he didn’t know what the urge was. He was on his third orbit around the station’s main ring when he passed by something vaguely familiar…

It was, in fact, a gym. They had been popping up in stations across the Dominion wherever gaoians or Humans trafficked in trade, and most of them were compact little affairs carefully folded into a small little stall hidden away in the cheap-rent corner of the promenade. This one was a bit bigger than most. Unsure of himself, he wandered in to satisfy his curiosity.

He was immediately greeted by an enormous brown wall of extremely friendly brownie. “Well hi! What brings you here?”

“…Honestly? I don’t know.”

That seemed to amuse the brownie, who chittered. “Sounds like ‘yer thinking too hard!”

“Maybe I am… It’s been a weird day.”

“Well, bein’ strictly honest, you strike me as someone who ain’t never set foot in a gym…ever. Y’have any idea what ‘yer doin’?”

It took Leemu a second to puzzle his way through the double-negatives, but that seemed to be the way of rural brownies. He’d worked with a few in the past, and always had the same trouble. “No, not really. Where are you from?”

“Gan Sho!” For a second the brownie’s sunny mood flickered. “…Heard it don’t exist no more, but… well, I’m still from there.”

“…Yeah. I grew up in Ken Tun.” Leemu hadn’t thought of home in years. Actually, he hadn’t really thought of Ken Tun as ‘home’ before, but a sudden mental image of the fountains near the commune where he’d grown up bubbled through his mind and left him feeling… sad, yes. But also a little angry. It had been a peaceful place full of peaceful people, and now it was gone.

He thought about the biodrones and the Hierarchy. He hated them with an unending fire. He still did…but suddenly he didn’t want to dwell on it. He was here now, and he’d maybe met a new friend. Best to see where it took him.

“So… I know the idea of a gym…” he prompted.

The next hour was a pleasantly tiring tour of what exactly it meant to exercise. His giant new friend—Gorku—was (of course) a Stoneback Associate who was, in his own words, “Pretty much good ‘fer only two things.” If one of those things was coaching, then he was damn good indeed. Every time Leemu pushed himself it just felt good, and Gorku’s cheering encouragement only made it better. Leemu left the gym some time later feeling oddly satisfied and hankering for a nice, long nap.

He awoke the next day, sore, hungry, and feeling oddly pleased with himself. He checked his work schedule and saw that, yet again, there was no scheduled shipping.

Well… maybe a change of routine would be good for him.

Yes. He felt good about that.

Date Point: 16y2w AV
Air Force One, somewhere over Asia, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

“…You want to give us a Farthrow generator.”

Daar’s image was janky and low-resolution thanks to the vagaries of current wormhole comms, but the audio was a lot clearer now. Technology marched onwards.

“It’s loaded up on a train and ready to jump to Chicago any time you like,” he said. “Complete with enough fusion plants to catch ‘yer moon in the field, too.”

Sartori ran a finger around under his shirt collar to loosen it as he thought. On the one hand, Daar’s offer was the answer to one of his biggest and most important challenges. If the Hierarchy successfully infiltrated Earth with the means to build jump beacons—or worse, with a cargo hold full of the damn things—then they could in principle bomb every major town and city on the planet. In seconds, if they were sufficiently co-ordinated and skillful.

A Farthrow would change that. Take it off the table entirely, in fact. But it would also permanently and forever make America the Earth’s gatekeepers. Whoever controlled a Farthrow controlled wormhole access to the planet, it was that simple.

And if major foreign powers had been upset by twenty-four hours at SOLCON 2, then how much more so would they be if they had to indefinitely go cap-in-hand to America to schedule every jump?

“That’s a… consequential gift,” he said aloud.

“It’ll cause as many problems as it solves, I bet,” Daar predicted.

“Possibly more.”

“Thing is, the problem it’ll solve is a big stinkin’ Naxas bull of a problem.”

Sartori nodded. And there was the crux of it, of course. The Farthrow generator solved a literally apocalyptic problem, and replaced it with a merely political one. And when—if—humanity was ever rid of the apocalyptic problem then resolving the political one was as simple as gratefully returning Daar’s gift.

The scale of it hit Sartori suddenly, the way a too-big thing didn’t always register its full impact instantly. He paused, and then leaned forward, close to the camera, and let the Great Father get a good look at the faintly awed curiosity on his face.

“…Why, Daar?”

Daar shook out his fur. It was short right now, as it always was in the weeks after he took to the field in armor. In a few more weeks it would be shaggy and impressively thick, but for now there wasn’t much of it to shake.

“You have to ask? I don’t wanna see Earth burn, and if Big Hotel really are back inside ‘yer shield, then…”

“How much did this cost you?” Sartori pressed. “How can you possibly afford to build something like this? Build it so quickly? Stage it?!”

“How can I afford to not?” Daar asked. “We need each other, my friend. Humans and the Gao, we’re gonna win together, or die together. If Earth falls, my people ain’t gonna be far behind. But ‘yer right, it was expensive. We cleared the decks on Dark Eye to make this.”

Sartori sat back and tried not to boggle at that thought. The Dark Eye nanofactory was… immense. It occupied a cavernous excavated volume inside one of Gao’s moons, and its liberation had almost certainly been the moment when Allied forces won the war for Gao. Its assembly lines could make anything, and generally they spat out materiel for the Grand Army and for civilian projects on the battle-scarred planet below.

Turning that over in its entirety to producing one shipment was…

Well. It was a typically Daar gesture. Big, loyal, blunt, and in no way inconsequential.

“That’s a… well, a kingly gift. In every meaning of the word.”

“I know. You gonna accept it?”

“Absolutely,” Sartori decided. And if the world’s leaders didn’t like it, they would just have to deal with it.

No doubt it would be more complicated than that, but for the sake of not seeing the Earth’s surface scoured by antimatter bombs, he’d endure any number of political headaches.

“Thank you,” he added. He’d never loaded as much meaning into those words before.

“Eh… I prol’ly just made a buncha extra trouble for ya,” Daar replied. He never could take sincere thanks. “Jus’ don’t break it ‘fore you get it built, ‘kay?”

“We’ll treat it right.”

“Good… Good. You don’t and I may hafta come visit…” Daar paused for a moment as his ears semaphored intriguingly. Clearly he was thinking. “…Your people were there for mine in our darkest hour, Sartori. This ain’t a favor. This is returnin’ the favor.”

“With interest.”

“Maybe. Anyhow, you look like you ain’t slept right in a while, not that I can blame ‘ya. I should stop wastin’ ‘yer precious time.”

Sartori chuckled. “Thank you,” he repeated himself. “No doubt we’ll talk again soon.”

“‘Til next time.” Daar duck-nodded, and ended the call.

Sartori sat back, rubbed his face, then sprang to his feet on a new surge of energy. He’d pay for it in a few hours, but right now he intended to use his sudden vigor to its full extent.

“Chris!” he called. “A new development for you…”

The planning never ended.

Date Point: 16y3w AV
Starship ‘Drunker on Turkeyer,’ Sagittarius Star Cloud

Sergeant Ian “Hillfoot” Wilde

The journey was an odd one, given the thoroughly Gaoian sensibilities about the ship’s design. It took a bit to get used to the idea of a nest-bed. It took even longer to wrap his head around how Tooko insisted on sleeping across and atop everyone in the most splayed-out, snoring-drooling manner possible.

But, being honest, it wasn’t all that different from austere field conditions. He’d rather have his own bed when things were nice and civilized, but the ship was free, and when in Rome…

Tooko was an early riser, though. That was just plain unforgivable.

“Nnnngh…do you really need to do your yoga stuff right away? While yowling at the top of your lungs?!”

Tooko paused in his… whatever-he-was-doing. “No time later,” he explained. Even after several days cooped up in tiny living quarters with the guy, he still refused to spend five words when three would do.

“And the ear-bleeding yowls?” Frasier asked, rolling onto his back. Beside him, Rees gave a snore and turned over. That was no surprise: Rees had literally slept through a car crash one time.

Tooko looked offended. “Females love my singing!”

“…Singing.” That claim was so absurd, Wilde sat up and stared at him disbelievingly. “…You mean you weren’t trying to claw your own balls off?”

Tooko made an honest-to-God harrumph noise and then grumbled the longest sentence Wilde had yet heard from him. “…Yeah, well, I’ve sired a dozen females, so you can fuck right off with your jealousy.”

Wilde had to admit: if true, that was pretty spectacular. And Gaoians as high up in their Clan as Tooko tended not to be liars, not when their peers could smell it.

“A dozen, huh?” He asked, and rolled himself out of the tangle of blankets. The truth was, he was awake now and Tooko’s cryptic comment about there being no time later suggested they were probably gonna want to be up and at’em soon.

Tooko duck-nodded and raided the ration stores for his breakfast. Smoked salmon, by the looks of it. Wilde decided they needed some eggs to go with it. “Thirteen.”

“Unlucky thirteen?” Frasier grumbled and sat up too. “Great.”

He gave Wilde the evil eye when Wilde snorted and put on an exaggerated Scottish accent to mutter “We’re dooooomed…” at him. He’d learned to tolerate that joke out of necessity, but there wasn’t a force in the galaxy that could make him like it.

“…Unlucky?” Tooko flicked an ear at them.

“It’s a superstition,” Wilde explained as he found the eggs. “Thirteen is an unlucky number.”

“…Weird.”

“That’s a lot of female cubs.”

Tooko just duck-nodded, with a smug flick of his ears.

“You’re one of those first-degree males, huh?”

“Yes.”

Well, that explained a few things. In the spectrum of Gaoian gender with their complex arrangement of sex chromosomes, first-degree males with only a single Y-equivalent chromosome were an extremely rare and valuable thing. Even rarer at the opposite extreme were full sixth-degree hypermales like Daar. The result, in Tooko’s case at least, was probably a kind of a furry Freddie Mercury type. It was hard to tell, sometimes.

Wilde could forgive him his cocky attitude if he’d earned it. He just wished Tooko would open up. Even Rees, who was… more of a kinetic genius than an actual thinker was better conversation.

Speaking of…

He reached out and gave the slumbering Welshman a firm slap on the head. “Up you get!”

Rees snorted and jerked awake. “Whuh?! We there yet?”

“Nearly.”

Rees sniffed, groaned, and stretched. “…What’s cookin’?”

“Eggs and salmon.”

“Mm. Smells fuckin’ lovely, boys. Coffee?”

“Well volunteered,” Wilde chuckled.

They prepared breakfast and Tooko filled them in as they ate. They were two hours out from the target system and it was about time to hunker down into their stealth approach, which was likely to take a week or more with limited heat dissipation capability.

Tooko opened up a lot when talking about what the ship could do. Apparently their waste heat was disposed of as a coherent laser beam about as wide as a pencil lead. The odds of it hitting anything before it became undetectable, let alone anything hostile, were basically zero. At least, according to Tooko who had a lot more to say on the subject of distortion-damped warp fields, low-flux shielding, and a bunch of other technobabble that Wilde wanted to be interested in but couldn’t remember.

In any case, things didn’t feel much different once they’d entered the mission’s slow-approach phase, beyond that their pilot was now stuck with an inordinate amount of free time on his hands.

So, he taught them Ta’Shen.

It was a pretty fun game. The tiles made satisfying clunk noises when tossed onto the tabletop, it rewarded plenty of different playstyles, and there was a neat blend of both physical and intellectual skill involved. A good mind for bluffing, playing the odds and predicting your opponent’s hands was best of course, but if you were good at flipping the tiles exactly where you needed them then that could paper over the cracks in an otherwise sloppy player’s style.

And it definitely opened Tooko’s mouth. In lieu of a poker face, he instead waxed enthusiastic about the Drunker on Turkeyer’s abilities, engineering and design. It seemed to work, too: Wilde was having a hard time reading his game.

Frasier could always be relied on to burst a bubble like that, though. Round about halfway through their fifth or sixth, he flipped a shower of three tiles into the middle and casually asked, “…And where’s the flux capacitor on this thing?”

“…The… what?”

“The flux capacitor,” Frasier insisted. “You do have flux capacitors, right?”

Tooko’s ear flicked. “I… no?”

Frasier was always a bit of an excited gambler, and this game of Ta’Shen wasn’t going in his favor. To be fair, it was easy to over-extend yourself; the bigger the bet, the more tokens you got to flip. But he wasn’t stupid, far from it. He turned to Wilde.

“I thought Gaoian tech was ahead of ours?” he asked, innocently.

“It is!” Tooko shot back, indignantly.

“I dunno, Tooko. That’s kind of an important technology you lot missed out on there,” Wilde said, joining in Frasier’s game. He preferred to bet conservatively, trading frequent small losses for the occasional huge win, but this time he paid for five tiles. “Now if this was a human ship, she’d have a flux capacitor good for… I dunno.”

“One point twenty-one gigawatts,” Rees supplied helpfully, as he flicked a high-value tile into the formation.

“At least,” Frasier agreed.

Tooko’s ears did a very satisfying kind of confused twist as he tried to puzzle through their bullshit.

“Your move, mate,” Wilde reminded him, and the diminutive Gaoian snapped out of his thoughts to hastily fling an ill-advised tile onto the table. It landed in a bad spot and he growled at himself, but the humans had managed to get a hook in his curiosity now.

“Well.. maybe we have a better alternative,” he said. “What does a ‘flux capacitor’ do?”

“You know, I don’t really know…” Frasier ‘admitted.’ “Somethin’ to do with the DeLorean Effect, I think.”

“The what?”

“The DeLorean effect. It was discovered years ago by Brown and McFly,” Wilde contributed. “In’t that right, Reesy?”

“…Don’t look at me, boys,” Rees shrugged. He chucked a tile and grinned as it landed in exactly the right spot. Perfect throw.

Tooko groaned and surrendered his hand.

“I have no idea what we’re talking about,” he admitted.

“That’s ‘cuz we’re bullshittin’ you, pal,” Rees revealed.

“You… what?”

“It’s an old movie, mate. A DeLorean is a car, and a Flux Capacitor is some shite that Doctor Brown and Marty McFly used to turn it into a time machine,” Frasier explained. He flipped his last tile then groaned when it landed wrong-side-up.

“You… teamed up to bluff me out of the round?” Tooko looked like he didn’t know whether to be insulted or impressed.

“Pretty much,” Wilde chuckled. His own tile was pretty good, but not good enough. All Rees needed to do was land his tile with a positive value upwards.

Tooko sighed, then chittered at himself. “‘Always assume human weirdness…’” he muttered. Or maybe quoted.

Rees flicked his last tile and, sure enough, it landed right-side-up and in a good spot. He won by a comfortable margin. “…Another round, lads?” he asked, a little smugly.

“Nah,” Wilde sat back and stretched. “Maybe we should play something else.”

“Like what?” Tooko asked. He scooped up the tiles and started slotting them back into their wooden travel box.

“Well…” Wilde glanced at Frasier and Rees. They were on the same wavelength, and all three men had to fight hard not to grin.

“…Why don’t we introduce you to a game called Fizzbin?” he asked.

Date Point: 16y3w AV
Deep Space Layover 793-451-11 ‘Halfway To Infinity,’ Spinwise space

Leemu, Clanless

Pain, surprisingly, was not a show-stopping component of Leemu’s training experience. Although Gorku, his new barely-a-Stoneback best friend, kept predicting that Leemu would be “sore in the morning” and other such dire promises, it never quite materialized the way he’d foretold.

Oh, certainly the feeling of pushing as hard as he possibly could on a bar that he’d already successfully pushed five times only for the sixth to prove impossible was unpleasant, but it definitely wasn’t pain. On the contrary, it made Leemu chitter every time he reached his limit that way. It wasn’t mirth, exactly, more a kind of catharsis to blow out the frustration and acknowledge that yes, he’d run out of energy.

Gorku had to insist that he take rest days. Leemu understood the logic, but honestly he felt great and he spent his recovery time feeling aimless and restless.

Gorku also stressed the need to eat, so Leemu spent a lot of time at Preed’s place. Despite his best efforts he couldn’t quite repeat the feat that had earned him his spot on the wall of fame, but he still polished off huge portions every time.

Work, when it came, interested him less but was becoming a lot easier. So the day when he woke up feeling utterly drained and worn out came as a surprise.

He frowned at the light above his nest-bed and scratched blearily at his own ear. There’d been a… courier ship, he recalled. The kind used for moving small, time-sensitive cargo to far-flung locations on a rapid schedule. They were a dying breed now that the Jump Array Network was becoming more widespread, but plenty of places still didn’t have Arrays.

Such ships were highly-strung, skittish things. They could flicker along the spacelines like a jumping spark, but the tradeoff was constant maintenance so for now they remained the lucrative backbone of Leemu’s business.

This one had needed some specialist work, too, he remembered. Couldn’t quite bring the details to mind though, but he was legitimately spent, and clearly hadn’t slept long enough.

Nevertheless he hauled himself out of bed and invited Gorku to meet him at Preed’s eatery.

Curiously, Gorku seemed pleased by the development. “Ha! Well it’s ‘bout damn time ‘ya started payin’ ‘yer dues!” he crowed over their breakfast. “You feeling okay?”

“Like I went to bed about three Ri’ before I woke up…” Leemu grumbled.

“So what got’chu so amped up ‘ta lift in the first place? I mean, ‘ya Clanless silverfurs aren’t usually the type, y’know? Er, no offense…”

“I couldn’t say…” Leemu trailed off into an expansive yawn so hard that he had to shake his head to clear it at the end. “…It just grabbed me.”

Preed, humming to himself on one of his periodic orbits around the eatery to clean up and see to his customers, delivered a water jug in front of them and then sat down.

“Good business for me!” he announced merrily. “Don’t you cook for yourself any longer?”

“…Honestly, no. I feel too tired!”

“Good…” Preed took a sip of water for himself—he always drank a lot of it—and took a moment to relax. He only did that when he was otherwise completely caught up on work, so it was a rare sight. “…Don’t give me too much, though!”

“Why not?” Gorku asked.

Preed massaged his knuckles and wrists with a wry look on his face. “I’m an old man. Can’t keep doing this forever. Back on Earth, maybe I’d have had children to take over the business…”

“Are you thinking of going back?”

“I’ve thought about it many times.” Preed drained his water and took a second cup. Maybe the jug hadn’t been for the Gaoians after all. “Recently though, I’ve been thinking of my family. I had a sister, and two brothers. All of them had children… Those little ones will have gray hairs now…”

He sighed, and added. “Besides. I won’t be around forever.”

“Preed, your species lives, like, twice as long as ours,” Leemu objected.

“And you’re a third my age,” Preed reminded him. He drank his second cup of water and stretched. “Old bones don’t work so well. Old joints seize up… I think I’d like to see trees again. And Wat Phra Kaew.”

“Wat what?”

“A very important temple. There’s a statue of the Buddha there, called the Emerald Buddha. It’s lived there for more than two hundred years… A very holy place. My father took me when I was small. I think I’d like to see it again…”

Preed tailed off and Gorku tilted his head. “Buddha. I read that word when I looked up Clan Starmind,” he said. “Emerald though? A whole statue made of emerald?”

“I think it’s actually Jade or Jasper,” Preed admitted. “But still. Precious beyond what it’s made of.”

“Do you think you’ll go?”

“Maybe. I have plenty of money saved… maybe I’ll go and come back!” Preed shrugged and chuckled. “My first vacation in thirty years. Or maybe I’ll retire.” He rubbed his hands and knuckles some more and sighed. “These fingers just don’t work as well as they used to.”

Leemu was surprised to catch himself whining at the sentiment. “Retire?! I’d have to come visit…well. Probably not. Because…Earth.”

Gorku shook his neck and shrugged. “Other Gaoians have visited. The Great Father even trained there!”

“Yes, and he’s the Great Father. I’m just a Clanless no-name silverfur. I bet I’d take one breath and die.”

“Fast as you’ve grown? Prob’ly not! ‘Yer tougher than ‘ya think!”

A thought hit Leemu between the ears. “What about Cimbrean?”

The three of them looked at each other silently as they suddenly realized they had a mission.

“That’s…a good idea. I will need to pass through Cimbrean to get back to Earth…” Preed said slowly.

“We’ve got translator implants, though,” Gorku pointed out. “That’s what stopped me takin’ my shot ‘fer the Second Ring! I had a recommendation, I just never got ‘ta use it.”

“How much would it cost to get them removed at Cimbrean?” Preed asked. Leemu promptly grabbed his communicator and opened his favorite search engine.

“Bear with me…” He did some quick research on the Cimbrean Infosphere page. “…There’s a trade station at the system border. The medical clinic there offers implant removal for… Five hundred pounds, whatever those are. And they offer zero percent interest loans! Oh, hey! And there’s a government subsidy for returning Human abductees and Gaoian exiles…”

Some more research and currency conversion later suggested that the trip would be eminently affordable. That news immediately got Gorku fired up.

“I could return to the Clan!” he enthused. “Try out ‘fer the second ring!”

“And I…” Leemu paused. He’d got swept up in the idea without thinking what was actually in it for him, beyond loyalty to his friend. But as soon as he thought about it, a few things fell into place. “…Spaceships are becoming rarer as the Jump Array Network expands. In a few years, there won’t be much need for mechanics like me… but I bet a place like Cimbrean could use somebody with my skills in a slightly different role.”

“I could use a training buddy!” Gorku boomed, predictably. “I’ll need ‘ta get ready ‘fer the Second Ring. And we can build ‘ya up too!”

“You’d really come with me?” Preed asked, looking exceedingly touched by their gesture. “It’s halfway around the galaxy from here.”

“I would,” Leemu decided firmly. “We gaoians are loyal to our friends.”

“And we’re not scared to move on ‘ta somethin’ new,” Gorku added. “Life is short, after all.”

“…Well, then.” Preed looked like Gorku’s attitude was very alien to him—and considering he’d spent thirty years running one remote eatery, Leemu could believe that—but also inspired. “I will need to make arrangements, notify my suppliers… I will be very busy for a few days, I think.”

“I’ll need ‘ta hand the gym over to someone. Mebbe Erik? He’s responsible an’ he’s pretty keen on stayin’ out in space!”

Preed frowned at him. “Erik? That’s a human name.”

“…No? Erik’s a brownie like me!”

“Oh. Well…” Preed stood. “I should get to work. There’s a lot to do before we go…”

“The next ship headed out that way isn’t due for a while anyway,” Leemu told him. “You have plenty of time.”

“The sooner I start, the sooner I am finished,” Preed retorted. “Besides. I like to work!” he smiled and returned to the kitchen with their empty bowls. He hummed a different song this time, one that Leemu wasn’t familiar with.

Gorku stood as well. “Rest today. Tomorrow too, if you need it. ‘Yer body knows what it needs. I’ll see ‘ya when ‘yer ready if not sooner.”

“That will be soon, I bet,” Leemu chittered. He really was enjoying himself under Gorku’s training.

“Good.” Gorku pant-grinned happily and left. As he did, Leemu sat back and considered what they’d just decided.

Gorku was right, though. Maybe it was instinct or maybe it was societal, but Gaoian males tended to be comfortable with turning their lives upside-down and seeking a new opportunity on short notice. That was, after all, what had led Leemu to his current position.

When he considered it this time, though, he got an especially warm glow of anticipation. Clearly he’d been more bored and frustrated in his job than he’d noticed. A change would be good for him.

He stood, and headed back to his quarters to catch up on sleep.

Date Point: 16y3w AV
Starship Drunker on Turkeyer, On approach to Sagittarius Star Cloud

Sergeant Ian “Hillfoot” Wilde

“…Ugggh,” Tooko groaned and threw his cards down in disgust, and gave Wilde an accusatory glare. “…You’re full of bullshit.”

Wilde chuckled and retrieved the cards to shuffle them. “That didn’t take long.”

“‘Unless it’s a Tuesday?’ How stupid do I smell?”

“That’s the joke, mate. The whole point is it’s nonsense.”

“Whatever.” Tooko stood up to leave. “Humans are weird.”

His sullen air was down to more than just a slightly chafed ego, Wilde decided. Of course… Gaoians were still aliens, weren’t they? It was easy to forget the fur and claws and expressive ears and just see a friendly person sat on the other side of the table and treat them like a human themselves, like a fellow Brit even. But that way, sooner or later, probably meant putting your foot in it.

“…Tooko, mate, there’s no malice in it.”

“Lies are always malicious. Fuck off.” Tooko vanished into the pilot’s station, swung his high-backed chair around and busied himself doing… pilot things. Whatever they were.

Well… shit. That wasn’t a great way to develop their working relationship.

Wilde, Rees and Frasier traded mutual slightly embarrassed expressions, then shrugged and put themselves to work getting the tiny living quarters cleaned up and neat. The slightest clutter in the confined space could get out of hand fast, so they stayed on top of it.

Unfortunately, that also meant that there wasn’t much for them to deal with. Pretty soon the distraction was cleared away. There was another moment of mutual awkwardness, then Rees sighed, shrugged, rolled onto the nest-bed and put his earphones in. Frasier shrugged and ducked through into the ready room where he opened a locker and retrieved a knife and whetstone and set to sharpening.

Wilde decided it was probably best not to let the poison simmer for too long. He stooped under the archway through into the cockpit and made himself comfortable.

“…I suppose working with aliens comes with some hazards,” he said. He heard a kind of stiffening, tensing sort of sound from the pilot’s chair, but got no reply.

“Alright. I get it. In Gaoian culture, a lie is always malicious. I’ll remember that from now on, mate. We all will,” Wilde promised. “I just want you to understand that’s not the case where I’m from, and there really was no harm meant. It’s just a prank… and I know your mob have a nose for mischief. Been on the wrong end of it myself.”

There was silence. Well… Wilde had said all he could think to say.

“…Fair enough. You’re not in the mood to talk,” he said and turned to go. There was a book in his bag, maybe he’d do a little reading…

He was stopped by the fact that Tooko turns his chair around. They stared at each other for a second, Wilde open and waiting, Tooko glaring.

“…The Great Father spoke highly of you,” he accused after a few seconds.

“Us?”

“You specifically.”

That was… bloody surprising, in fact. “Me? I barely met him, mate.”

“He said you were on Caledonia, the ship your people lost over Gao. He said you helped liberate the Three Valleys.”

“Mostly I was trying not to die at the time, but… yeah. That’s all true.”

“You kept people alive, he said. Killed biodrones… He said you boarded a Hunter swarmship.”

“Also true.”

“I know. The Great Father doesn’t lie.” There was definitely a look of hero worship in Tooko’s eye, there. And a heavy dose of acid.

“Look, mate. I won’t claim like I’m an angel. All I can say is that it’s a game with us. Like… When I was new to the Marines, my corporal told me to go get a tin of tartan paint from storage. And I was bloody stupid enough to go ask the quartermaster for one. I was embarrassed, we had a laugh…that was it. We all did that to each other…” he trailed off as he saw the bewildered way Tooko’s ears were moving. “…I suppose it sounds stupid.”

“Yes.”

“Well… it’s just us, mate. We aren’t Gaoians.”

“How is belittling your brothers in any way a good idea?!”

“Don’t ask me to get into the psychology of it, I’m no kind of a… whatever. It’s just how we are. I’m sorry we forgot it doesn’t work that way for Gaoians, okay?”

Tooko gave him a long, hard look. Diminutive or not, there was an intense personality behind the borderline child-like facade. “Gaoians do not like lies. Big ones are pointless because we can often smell them. Little ones are like trying to cheat someone else’s nose. It means you have no respect for them.”

“…I hear you. Me, when I got back from that tin of paint errand… it’s like, I took my lumps, you know? Prank played, well done lads, you got me… If I’d whined about it, that wouldn’t’ve gone down well. Instead I could laugh about it, and they respected that.”

“But what does that prove? That you can be toyed with and you’ll just roll over?”

“Or that I’m level-headed enough to only worry about the big shit, I guess,” Wilde said. “Like… You’re gonna be livin’ on top of these lads in a high-stress environment. You need to know when to let the small irritations slide by. That’s how you get along and build a team.”

“So… it was a test.”

“I guess, yeah.”

“And if I was Human, I’d have failed it,” Tooko sighed.

“Well… you’re not. Our bad for forgetting it, okay?” Wilde held out his hand. “…Start over?”

Tooko tilted his head like a thoughtful puppy for a moment, then duck-nodded and reached out and they shook, paw-to-hand. “Okay.”

Strangely enough, after that incident the friction completely vanished and Tooko opened up a good deal more. Mutual embarrassment over their misunderstanding made for a hell of a bonding experience.

It also added an interesting twist to their Ta’Shen games.

“Wait. You just bluffed us! Isn’t that a lie?”

“It is a deception,” Tooko sniffed. “That’s fine. A lie is when you say something false.”

“Okay, but… technically, Fizzbin was invented by Captain James Kirk of the USS Enterprise.”

“He’s a fictional character. And you’re still wrong. And you still lost. Pay up.”

…And so on. It made the days vanish, to the point where the moment when Wilde happened to glance out the front of the ship and see that there was a planet in front of them rather than endless midnight came as something of a surprise.

“When did that get there?”

“Yesterday.” Tooko flicked his ears in an amused way.

“How does a whole bloody planet just sneak up on us?”

“Technically, we sneaked up on it.”

“When are we landing?”

“Soon.”

“…And?”

“Updating the survey.”

Well, fair enough. Apparently being in work mode killed Tooko’s ability to string more than six words together at a time, and Wilde knew they needed to get ready anyway. He woke Frasier, got Rees’ attention and the three of them started in on final checks of their gear.

About thirty minutes later, Tooko told them to buckle up, with a surprisingly cheery-sound call: “Time to land! Settle in, please.”

“You sure you won’t be taking to the field with us?” Wilde asked. They already knew the mission, but it seemed like a tease he could get away with.

It earned an amused chitter and some complex ear semaphore. “Balls no! I’m barely fifty kilograms!”

“…Really?” Even though Tooko looked pretty damn small, he didn’t look that small.

“Fur.”

Fair enough. He was remarkably fluffy.

Fluffy or not, he made de-orbiting look easy. Surgical, even. Drunker handled the insertion smoothly and quietly and in remarkably short order they were skimming low over the ocean. Then, too quickly for Wilde to really follow, a thin green line on the horizon became a shoreline, became a green blur of marshlands and swamps below.

Up ahead, the terrain finally decided to stop being lazy and started to do interesting stuff with craggy rock hills that thrust up from the green like a line of badly worn molars. They looked densely-packed and tight, but that was just an illusion of distance: Up close, the canyons between them were more than wide enough for Drunker to flit through under Tooko’s skillful paws.

Wilde could hear him muttering to himself up front. “…Right here… descend to two hundred… there.”

He set them down sharply, precisely, and without ceremony. One second they were in the air, the next they were on the ground. Despite the sudden landing, there was barely a jolt. Just a gentle knock, and the sound of the engines powering down.

“We’re down,” Tooko called over his shoulder, and popped the ramp.

It wasn’t even fully deployed before the three scouts were down it, rifles up and alert for any kind of danger that might have been nesting in their landing site.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

Wilde glanced over his shoulder as Drunker made a kind of slithering ceramic hissing sound. The hull plating along its back was… changing. Texture, colour, appearance… in just ten seconds, the ship’s dorsum was a nearly perfect recreation of the terrain beneath it, and certainly good enough to fool any overhead surveillance. It was a hell of a lot more complete and convincing than just dragging a big camo net over the thing, and much quicker.

He touched his radio. “Comms check.”

Tooko’s voice came back loud and clear. “I hear you.”

Frasier answered from across the clearing. “Hillfoot, Gibson. Loud and clear.”

“Osprey here. All good,” Rees finished.

Satisfied, Wilde took a better look at their landing site. He was no kind of a geologist, but the chunky square rocks that surrounded them on all sides were a kind of warm yellowish-brown and bearded with hanging mossy stuff. It was an extremely sensible place to hide the ship: the only way to see in was to fly directly overhead, from which angle the ship’s camo was flawless. The rocks should fool any sensors, radar or whatever and from the previous team’s report there was only one obscure way in and out on foot.

“The cache is buried in the northwest corner,” Tooko told him. “Apparently it’s behind a rock shaped like a… horse shoe. Whatever that is.”

Rees vanished in that direction brandishing an entrenching tool, and returned after just a few busy minutes carrying the cache that Team One had left behind. It contained some non-perishable supplies they hadn’t used, some equipment… Anything useful they hadn’t taken back with them and that would survive being buried for a while.

“…Doesn’t stink so bad as Team One said it would…” he noted conversationally. He was right: in fact the scent in the air was sweet and fresh. Not exactly pleasant, but not bad either. Forgettable.

“Apparently it’s worse down in the lowlands,” Frasier said. “Where the forward camp is.”

“Oh. Lovely.”

They cracked open the cache and then decided to leave it with the ship. It was there for emergency backup after all. That pretty much concluded their business at the landing site. Tooko was going to have to fend for himself without them for a while.

…In a nice cozy bed, on a fresh, sweet-smelling hilltop, well-hidden in a defensible spot. Lucky sod. Wilde almost envied him.

But of course… Tooko wasn’t doing anything useful now.

“Come on, lads,” he hoisted his pack onto his shoulders, gave his rifle one last habitual glance over, and turned toward the path and their distant objective. “Last one in buys the first round.”

And with that little ritual out of the way, the mission began in earnest.

Date Point: 16y1m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Mrwrki Station

Entity

The Entity understood the concept of boredom in an academic, abstract way. It could even vaguely summon up Ava’s memories of being bored. But understanding the idea and actually feeling the emotion were two different things.

The closest it could get was the sensation of being… uncomfortably idle. It was, for the time being, safe. There were unfulfilled objectives vis-a-vis the acquisition of nanofactory functionality and other modular subsystems for its ship bodies, but those were for the time being outside of its control and therefore not worth fretting over. Darcy had been exceedingly honest about their reticence and concerns, and it understood them well. Humans, after all, were driven by <Survive> too. Handing technology so powerful to another party, even an ally, was not something to be done lightly, nor rushed.

The Entity could wait. In the name of <Survive>, so long as it appeared to be safe for the near-to-mid future, the Entity could be very patient indeed.

But that left it with nothing to work on. It was not, for the present, actively attempting to achieve an objective, all of its objectives being either met or unmeetable at present… there was nothing for it to do except satisfy its curiosity.

So, it researched. It accessed as many libraries as it could reach, and worked its way steadily through their contents. There was a lot of fiction, but the Ava memories said that was just as important. Fiction often contained truths in allegory format.

Later, the memories refined that sentiment to: ‘sometimes’ contained truths in allegory format. That was after about six solid hours of nothing but erotica, which created more questions than it answered. Though in fact, the Entity felt it had learned a lot. Nevertheless, it moved on alphabetically into Fantasy.

It began with the complete works of Tolkien, and read them ten times in the space of a single minute. It spent a further five minutes digesting what it had read and occasionally re-reading the series. Intriguing.

Next came Pratchett. Very intriguing.

Stephen Donaldson was by turns confusing and engaging. The Ava-memories did not like the character of Thomas Covenant one bit, but the Entity still found much to engage with.

A few milliseconds into its second read-through of Terry Brooks’ bibliography, something tickled its attention. The anomalous sensation came from a kind of crumb of Self that it had left behind to watch an important communications nexus and, more importantly, suppress certain signals from propagating through dataspace.

On that score it was working perfectly. Still, it indicated activity where, from the Hierarchy’s perspective, there shouldn’t have been any. From the Entity’s perspective, activity on that node was very welcome indeed.

It fashioned a brief message for Darcy to let her know it was leaving the safety of Mrwrki dataspace, and flashed away into the depths of the galactic communications systems, along channels barely understood by even the most learned of their inhabitants.

After all: this particular node was intimately involved in the Entity’s very existence…

Date Point: 16y1m AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Darcy

Darcy sighed as she read the Entity’s message. Although the strange life-form was definitely getting more fluent at communicating with her, the language they spoke was a deeply private one. There were flashes of English here and there, sometimes even whole sentences. Other times it relied on strings of emoticons. Very occasionally, it even attached sound files which sounded like somebody had mashed together a dolphin and R2-D2.

Despite these limitations, it could be remarkably expressive. And she knew it was being determinedly Patient with them while it waited for the rest of Mrwrki’s crew to chew through their endless, circular geek-talk about its nature and the ethics of maybe giving it access to Von-Neumann tech.

It was hardly surprising it had decided to take a vacation, or maybe go run an errand. But it was still frustrating.

Well, seeing as she wasn’t going to have any work to do until it came back, she may as well go see what insights she could offer elsewhere on the station. That was the rule on Mrwrki—if you weren’t working on your own project, maybe your perspective would shed new light on what somebody else was struggling with. So go talk to people.

It got the fanatically devoted nerds who made up the bulk of the station’s staff to leave their offices and labs semi-regularly at least.

And, inevitably, talking to Lewis.

Darcy had known many charismatic people in her life. Charisma was a skill, and some people worked damn hard on it for their careers. Lewis, on the other hand, was simply easy-going and breathtakingly intelligent. When he listened, he listened. When he ranted, other people listened. He’d certainly managed to bowl over his wife Lucy, whom Darcy knew to be quite formidable in her own right.

Of course, she’d bowled him over too. Maybe after a year or two more of marriage the mutual fascination and awe would chill into mere comfortably fondness, but for now it was like neither one of them could believe their luck.

There was a very good reason they were both right at the sharp point of the Von-Neumann question. And when they were out of the lab, discussing it with others, the conversation tended to snowball until half the station’s intellectual coterie were sprawled all over the common area, nucleating into smaller and more precise debates while decimating the station’s coffee reserves.

Darcy lurked on the edges for a few minutes as she acquired a Moroccan Mint tea and got a feel for what the current sticking point might be. The Coltainer program’s continued underperformance was a source of mounting external pressure, especially in light of the Ceres Incident. AEC wanted more places to spread human life off of Earth, and the Coltainers just weren’t delivering. Too many of them were simply disappearing out in the black and never checking in. Maybe they were self-destructing too sensitively over false alarms. Maybe the Hunters really were prodding at them so relentlessly.

Maybe they were just really stupid and kept crashing into something. That was the problem: only a handful had returned to share any news at all, and only one had reported actual success.

There was, in short, a serious problem with Von-Neumann technology, and it turned out to be just the same as last time.

“—Neural networks aren’t a real-time solution to problems in the real world—”

“You’ve got to be able to come up with a working solution to emergent scenarios, first time, I know–”

“And those solutions need to work more often than not. We can’t afford to get it wrong a thousand times and iterate off the least bad run.”

“Not when a single bad attempt could destroy the probe. I know, dude. But what you’re describing ain’t programming at all, it’s sapience.”

“Yeah, and we’ve got a ready-made sapient mind who’s volunteering.”

“Speakin’ of which… ‘sup, Darcy?”

Well, so much for staying out of it. Darcy smiled and sat down next to Lucy. “Seems to me like you guys have been stuck on this one for a while now,” she said. Around them, assorted tangential conversations continued unabated.

“Yeah. And every time we do, we come back to the same damn problem,” Lewis grumbled. “V-N probes just don’t work without control software that can adapt to the unforeseen…”

“And the only thing that can really tick that box is something that’s actually intelligent,” Lucy finished.

“Lucy thinks we should let the Entity have the blueprints it asked for,” Lewis finished.

“This a domestic dispute?” Darcy asked, jokingly. Both of them snorted at the idea and shook their heads.

“Purely a professional difference,” Lucy assured her.

“That thing’s creepy, dude,” Lewis objected.

“No argument there,” Darcy agreed. Lucy looked faintly surprised.

“You work with it,” she said.

“Yeah, and it’s creepy,” Darcy agreed. “I… quite like it. But the little flashes of humanity make me remember what it is and where it came from, so that’s not exactly easy.”

“Our own pet ghost in the machine…” Lewis muttered.

“Hardly a pet. It ran off this morning.” Darcy sipped her tea. “I guess it had some unfinished business or something…”

She saw Lewis’ expression and smiled. “It did tell me first.”

“Ran off where?”

“I can’t say.”

“You mean you don’t know, or you’re not allowed to say?”

Darcy just looked him in the eye and gave a well-practiced and perfected complex shrug that conveyed nothing at all. Lewis got the message and chuckled.

“…Dude.”

“What’s your opinion though, Darcy?” Lucy asked. “You work with the Entity closer than anyone, do you think we should let it have a V-N probe?”

Darcy ran her finger around the rim of her teacup as she sat back and crossed one leg over the other. “Should? I dunno about should,” she said. “But what happens if we say ‘no’ or it gives up on waiting? It already brought us the Hunter probe prototype. Sooner or later, it’ll find another one I bet.”

“You think it’s a question of when rather than if?” Lucy asked.

“It did it once. It can do it again,” Darcy shrugged. “So… the question is, what will it mean for us when it does? Will we be the tightwads who refused to share, the enemies who tried to contain it, or the friends who helped it? I know which one I’d rather be. The Entity might be a creepy broken thing, but it’s loyal as hell and I think we ought to reward that loyalty.”

Lewis and Lucy shared a complicated married-couple glance that was about five minutes of conversation packed into two seconds of eye contact. It made Lewis sag a fraction, and shake his head.

“…Guess you’ve got me there,” he admitted.

“It’s not really our decision though,” Darcy reminded them. “Ultimately, something like that has to go through Colonel Nadeau, from there to Brigadier-General Bartlett and then… I don’t know. Probably all the way up to AEC and the Allied leaders.”

“Our recommendation should still carry weight…” Lucy said.

“It will,” Darcy agreed. “But that doesn’t mean they’ll automatically agree with us.”

“What happens if they say no?” Lewis asked.

“Well… I guess it’ll be my job to break the news gently,” Darcy said. She kept her sigh purely internal, and finished her tea. “Anyway, I’ve already worked overtime this month. I’m going to catch up on my sleep, I think.”

“Have fun!” Lucy wished her. “And… thanks for the insight.”

Darcy smiled, dipped her head to acknowledge the thanks, and slipped away between the chattering scientists.

In fact when she got back to her quarters, she found that sleep was surprisingly elusive. Even after a nice soak in the shower and even with the help of Enya, she wound up lying in bed and staring at the ceiling above her.

Stress. She’d never managed it properly. All the meditation, relaxing music and tea in the world just seemed like props rather than an actual solution. She’d been stressed to Hell and back when she’d made the mistake that saw her demoted down to being an analyst, and that had taken it all back down to a level she could handle. She’d been happy in that role.

Now, she felt like she had even more responsibility than before. There was a unique kind of demon prowling around, that could barely communicate, and it was her job to make sure it was friendly and well-disposed toward humanity as a whole.

So… no pressure.

She sighed and called up the Hunter V-N probe schematics again. She barely understood them, but apparently the tech in them was already being adopted into human designs. The next-generation starships, the Royal Navy’s Hostile-class frigate and the US Navy’s Shughart-class escort, both promised to revolutionize spaceborne warfare just like the Violent-class and the San Diego-class before them.

That seemed like a recipe for an endless cycle of counter-adaptation to Darcy. After all, it was reverse-engineered Hunter tech that had led humanity to discover FTL travel. Then the Hunters had adapted to human warfare, humanity had adapted to the Hunters, the Hunters had adapted again…

Where did it end? When one side or the other was dead, probably. And in the meantime, the real enemy were all but untouchable in their data-based alternate universe.

How long was it until the Hunters figured out an answer to WERBS? Or were given it, by the Hierarchy.

There was so much on the line. So much responsibility.

“…Lights off.”

The room plunged into darkness. She lay awake for a long time, thinking, until finally she thought no more and dreamed instead.

They were not happy dreams.

Date Point: 16y1m AV
Class 11 planet, Messier 24

Sergeant Ian “Hillfoot” Wilde

“You know who I think would work? Now, it’s a bit of an odd choice…”

“Compared to the other odd ducks we’ve bandied about? For the record, Hulk Hogan from the late eighties still doesn’t count.”

“Why not? Besides, y’know, time travel.”

Team Two had found some entertainment gaming out a pressing concern of theirs: how, exactly, they were going to deal with the sheer volume of equipment they needed to move in and out on these missions. Installing surveillance systems meant packing in a fuck of a lot of gear, even with modern miniaturization and very clever kit. Team One had solved that problem with a monster of a man and a pack-bear in the form of Daar. Team Two didn’t have that luxury.

Tooko had found it all amusing at their base camp, though he only visited once a day; it wasn’t safe, firstly, but secondly their growing body-funk was apparently too much for him.

Well, he could just harden the fuck up. Field work was grungy, there was no way around that.

“Alright, mate. Who’re you thinking?”

“Well…Look. There’s basically only three ways around the problem we’ve got, right? Pack less, carry more at once, or make more trips.”

“Right…?”

“The tech isn’t getting smaller, and making more trips puts us at risk–”

“Yes, we know…”

“For Tooko’s benefit, mate.”

Tooko nibbled on one of his gaori ration packs. For a male his size they were, apparently, more than a square meal. As far as Wilde was concerned, they looked more like a snack.

“Yes, I know,” he said. “I can’t carry your packs. Daar could…”

Again with that mild hero worship.

“Right. So. If I could pick anyone at all, and pay them enough…”

“Oh for fuck sake mate, just spit it out!” Rees laugh-groaned. “Who?”

“I’d pick a Ten’Gewek.”

“…Fuck it, yeah. I like that.”

“Exactly! They’re made for this. Big tough survival experts, crazy strong and trail-hardened…”

“Only real problem would be how much food we’d need to pack, but they’d be pretty good at hunting their own I bet.”

“Hell, we go hunt one doom-noodle and they’re fed for a week.” They’d seen one of the beasts draped languidly in a tree on the far side of the river, and Wilde had said that to his eyes they looked more like a massive ferret with the general air of psychotic danger he’d associate with a honey badger. Only, much much longer proportionately in the torso. They’d pointed it out to Tooko on one of their safer excursions to the perimeter, and he’d gone silent even by his standards over it.

He wasn’t silent about any perceived teasing levied against the Great Father, however. Tooko swallowed his food and glared at Frasier. “Bear-snake!”

He scowled at the chuckle that swept around the camp.

“Mate, you know we love ‘em, yeah? But c’mon, tell me that thing is anything but a noodle of doom!”

“Boys, you know who else would be good?” Rees interjected. “What about that Julian?”

“…Well, yes. But he’s also unavailable. What with the whole special envoy thing, and all.”

“Still, he’d be perfect! Six years on Nightmare, he’s a gorilla-whisperer, he’s a bigger and better athlete than Tiny nowadays and carries his size more naturally…”

“He’s also a rich millionaire with a pair of pregnant wives and unbreakable commitments to the Ten’Gewek, mate. And he eats like them, too.”

“…Are they married?”

“Tell me they’re not, mun. In their heads, anyway.”

“You humans are weird,” said Tooko around a mouthful of cracker-thing. “Must be nice to have equal numbers of males and females…”

“Nah mate. There’s more women, by a little bit.” Frasier grinned at Tooko’s expression.

“By what? One percent?!”

“‘Bout that, yeah.”

“My point stands.”

“It has its ups and downs,” Wilde said, evenly. “But don’t knock your own blessings. Thirteen female cubs and you don’t have to wipe their arses!”

“And I’ve never met them.” Tooko flicked an ear, then polished off the last of his food.

“That’s… a bit shit, yeah.” Wilde must have looked completely lost, because Tooko promptly forgave him and scooted closer round the fire to brave his odour and give him a kind of Gaoianly half-hug.

“Reesy here’s got a daughter, don’tcha mate?” Frasier said.

“Yup. Angharad. Four years old,” Rees smiled fondly. “Shame her mum’s a cunt, but I get to see her whenever I go on leave.”

“Her mother is a what?” Tooko tilted his head. “I don’t know that one.”

“Humans are weird,” Wilde explained. He didn’t get a chance to elaborate, however: There was a ping from his tablet, which was… unexpected, to say the least.

“…What?” He scowled at it for a second and then held out his hand. “…Fork that over, Frasier.”

Frasier leaned over and did as asked, handing him the device. When Wilde turned on the screen, he frowned at the screen for a second, then relaxed and smiled at what he saw.

<:-)>

“Oh aye?” Wilde asked, and chuckled. “They said you might show up…”

Date Point: 16y1m1w AV
Offutt AFB, Nebraska, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

Some things, a man just had to do himself. Like, say, inspecting a device that was to strategic relations with every other nation on the planet what a big phlegmy loogie was to even the most delicious burger.

Daar would love that analogy, too. Sartori would have to share it with him when they met up later on. After all, there was something obscene about doing something this monumental and then being coy about it. This was an event that demanded a full screaming eagle ‘America fuck yeah’ suck-my-nuts attitude, and to Hell with what Beijing and the Kremlin thought about it, never mind the others.

He was slamming the doors on all wormhole traffic within the orbit of Earth’s moon. From now on, if it wasn’t authorized by the USA then it wasn’t allowed to happen. Full stop, no negotiation, no way around it. A Farthrow generator was an absolute solution that created a lot of small problems in solving the big one.

With extinction on the line, however, an absolute solution was the only possibility.

It looked the part, too. Not in a Star Trek sense—there were no curious glowing bits or inexplicable translucent swirly things—but it looked solid, and its mere presence left the feeling of immense power crawling up Sartori’s spine. It was, he knew, twisting the spacetime around Earth in truly weird ways. He’d tried to read a more accurate and full explanation but had been utterly defeated by phrases like ‘homeomorphic to the Euclidean space of dimension n.’ There were multiple layers of high education between him and grasping the generator’s most basic operating principles.

Daar’s letter had been blunt on that point: “Don’t try and twist your brain into understanding it. Leaders like you and me aren’t meant to be this kind of smart.”

Wise advice. So, he’d set the manual aside and focused his attention instead on what he did understand: politics. And in that field, Sartori felt, he could have written something just as totally perplexing to the scientists.

That thought made him feel a lot better.

He could certainly write a good dedication speech.

“This,” he said, looking at the cameras in the back of the room rather than at the gathered uniforms and suits closer to his lectern, “is a door with an unbreakable lock. And we control when, where and how it will open.”

Sadly, a square room in a bunker wasn’t exactly the perfect forum for stirring oratory. The acoustics were all wrong for a start. And he certainly wasn’t going to get any cheering and applause from this crowd, who were watching in respectful silence. But it helped him to imagine such things.

“Whoever controls such a door inherits a freight of power along with it. From now on, we control who can and cannot come to or leave the Earth. We control every jump, every wormhole communication. That is enormous power.

“Power,” he continued, “as we all know comes with responsibility. It comes with an obligation to use it wisely and for the greatest common good. This high ideal shines like a beacon, calling us forward. We have the power to shut the doors on Earth; it follows that we have the obligation to only do so when it will benefit all the peoples on this small blue planet.”

There were foreign dignitaries present for this. Ambassadors, senior government officials from allied and a select few other nations… He addressed his next remark to those ‘select few others.’

“It is emphatically not our place to use this generator to interfere with the legitimate affairs of our neighbors,” he said. “Instead we pledge it to their protection, as by protecting them we can be certain of protecting ourselves. My nation has, in somewhat recent decades, given the world two paradigm-shifting technologies: the Navstar global positioning system, and the Internet. In the spirit of those advances, we commit to an open and transparent operational regime, and will seek input from all our partners.

“Unlike those systems, there is no escaping the singular nature of its operation. A second one of these would not overrule the existence of the first, it would only lock the door ever tighter. We recognize the concerns this creates. Being honest, it gave me pause and nearly prompted me to decline the Great Father’s generous gift.”

He paused to take a brief sip of water. “However. All of us know what the stakes actually are. We know what the recent events on Ceres signify. We know what we are up against. Considering that, and reviewing the state of our international relations…we shall retain sovereign control of the device, until such time as a secure, trustworthy international regime can be established to our satisfaction. That concludes my statement, thank you.”

Well. Sartori had just undone much of his predecessors’ work in untangling the United States from binding–and arguably, strangling–international commitments. Instead of gradually relinquishing the title of ‘world police,’ he had just (by international standards) somewhat lustily embraced the title of “defender of mankind.”

Fuck.

Date Point: 16y1m2w AV
Class 11 planet, Messier 24

Brother Traan, Warleader of Fourth Fang

Thump.

Traan’s nose immediately objected. He was proud of his keen senses; they were on par with the Great Father in fact, and that made the rotting feculent nasal cacophony all the more impressive. How had Daar put up with this for weeks and months at a time?

He wasn’t the only one momentarily floored by the olfactory assault, either. The entire Fang flinched, pulled faces, growled and in one or two cases even covered their noses.

Which made it all the more infuriating when he heard somebody chitter. A legitimately tiny male with very un-Clanlike fur and markings but the flight suit of a Firefang pilot was leaning against the nearby dropship, and there was a certain sadist’s glee in the set of his ear.

He flattened his ears and ducked a little when Traan glared at him, though.

“Sorry. I had it bad too,” he apologized. “Welcome to Stinkworld.”

“You’d be Brother Tooko?” Traan checked. Even though there shouldn’t be any other Gaoians on the planet, he found it hard to believe that one of Firefang’s top-rated ace pilots was a tiny little first-degree who smelled more like a female than a Clan Brother.

“The one and only!” Tooko offered him a tin of something. “Southern style sweet-herb snuff. Tuck some in next to your gums, it helps.”

Traan pinched up a dose with his claws and did as suggested. Sure enough the pungent spicy leaf made the scent landscape a good deal more tolerable, largely by numbing his nose.

“…Thanks.”

Tooko just offered a small bow and waved the tin off when Traan tried to return it. “Pass it around,” he said. “I have more.”

“The humans?” Traan asked, handing the tin off to the man next to him.

Tooko chittered. “They barely smell anything!”

“I meant where are they?”

“On their way back. Mission accomplished, they tell me. They shouldn’t be long.”

In fact, there was a sharp whistle from their right. Tooko turned and pant-grinned. “…Mention Keeda and there he is…” he muttered.

Traan hadn’t appreciated that humans could be so hairy, before. Oh, he knew that Human males could grow fur on their faces and he’d seen the magnificent white beard sported by Ambassador Knight, but the three men squeezing through a crack in the rock looked as shaggy as Stonebacks after a week of hard labor, and they reeked even through the sweet herb. Behind the beards their faces were dark with some kind of oily paint, their clothing was filthy and their short hair was matted… but their eyes shone out of the filth looking clean and cold and intense. A human’s eyes were so intensely white around the edges that Traan could see why other species might find them unnerving.

They looked remarkably… not comfortable, but acclimated.

A man who was clearly their leader stepped forward. He seemed about average in size as human males tended to go…or, at least, the Humans that Traan had met. He was a bit smaller than the rest of the team, anyway. He nodded, grinned an unsettling grin, and stuck out his hand.

[“Christ,] they build you Stonebacks big, don’t they?” he commented conversationally, in pretty good Gaori.

Tooko chittered quietly to himself but kept out of the conversation. Something about him told Traan he’d be full of mischief in another setting. He filed that away for another day.

Traan shook the Human’s hand. “They certainly do,” he agreed proudly. “Brother Traan, warleader of Fourth Fang.”

“Sergeant Wilde, JETS Team Two. I understand you [chaps] plan to make a mess.”

“Not without purpose.”

“Be our guests!”

“Just watch out for the doom-noodles,” one of the other men added.

“…The Great Father calls them Snake-Bears. He also said not to be flippant about them.”

“Aye, we mean no disrespect. The big bastard’s saved my life more than once.”

“Humans are weird,” Tooko added, as a few of the Fang, the ones unfamiliar with Human foibles, bristled at the casual insult. They glanced at Traan, who duck-nodded, and their hackles lowered again.

“Understood. Nonetheless…”

[“Mate,] we mean no offense. But right now I’m tired, filthy, crawling with parasites, a few days behind on my sleep, about twenty meals behind on my diet, sore, cramped, aching, and just plain fuckin’ desperate to find a shower,” Wilde said.

“I have a hose,” Tooko interjected.

“Where did you–?”

“Hoeff.”

“…Of course. Fuck it, whatever. Bring it on.”

Tooko held out a paw. “The package?”

“Oh, yeah. Reesy?”

The largest of the three Humans—not the tallest, but easily the most solid—gladly handed over a hard case which Tooko heaved up the ramp into the ship with a visible effort.

“Tooko, [butty,] you need help with that?” the big human offered.

“Fuck off!” The…well, tiny male snarled and re-doubled his efforts. Traan hadn’t met many first-degrees before, but even still…

Wilde seemed amused. “I like him, he’s spunky!”

“He’s a fuckin’ [terrier,”] the tallest human opined. Whatever a ‘terrier’ was, his comment sounded approving.

The muffled sounds of Tooko swearing inside the ship came to an end, and he shortly returned pulling at a length of rubber hosepipe. Traan couldn’t think of anything he’d have wanted less in the Humans’ position than being sluiced down with cold water, but the three men promptly started shedding their gear as though the prospect was the most enticing thing they’d heard in a long time. He left them to it and connected to the ‘Drunker on Turkeyer’ so he could download its up-to-date survey data and plan Fourth Fang’s mission properly.

The Array had thumped twice more and delivered most of the rest of the Fang by the time the humans were satisfactorily cleaned off, and Wilde joined him while scrubbing his hair and face dry on a towel. Mercifully he smelled a good deal less awful than he had before, though Traan could tell that the rinse was no substitute for a real cleansing.

“Avoid the wildlife,” he commented, and leaned over Traan’s map to contribute. “There’s a snake-bear living on this side of the river, big bugger with lots of scars. We left him alone…”

“Drone patrols?”

“Here,” Wilde swooped a finger along the map to show a route. “Here, and here. But you don’t need to worry about them at all.”

“Why not?”

“Turns out we had a friend on the inside all along…”

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Armstrong Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Leemu, clanless

Interstellar travel still wasn’t exactly fast, though the longest part had been the journey to somewhere with a link to the Array Network. From there, Armstrong Station had been as simple as waiting for a scheduled connection, and after that…

A journey that would have taken a substantial portion of a year at warp was over in a black flash that lasted no time at all. Literally.

Preed gasped softly the second it was over. It took Leemu a second to realize why: the old man had just laid eyes on a member of his own species for the first time in decades. There were two of them, in fact: a male and a female, wearing identical dark blue uniforms over white shirts as they stood to either side of a standard biofilter field arch. Both were wearing the slim, closed-lip smiles of Humans who spent a lot of time interacting with aliens.

The female spoke up, calling over the chatter of travellers in a clear voice: “Welcome to Cimbrean, ladies and gentlemen! Please have your travel documents ready and form an orderly line for decontamination and security…” She lowered her voice then approached Preed. “Sir? Do you speak English or have a translator?”

It took Preed a while to answer for whatever reason. “…Oh! I… I have a translator. I do not have travel documents… I was abducted.”

“Oh! Well… welcome back.” The female glanced at a communicator in her hand, then back to Preed. “My translator says you’re speaking Thai. Are you a citizen of Thailand?”

“Yes. Or, I was…” Preed looked momentarily saddened. “They probably declared me dead.”

The female nodded sympathetically. “Don’t worry, we’ll have somebody from the Thai consulate here for you soon and they’ll sort everything out. If there’s anything we can get for you in the meantime, you just have to ask… I must ask you to submit to a security scan, however.” She turned to Leemu and Gorku and switched to accented but fluent Gaori. “Are you travelling with this gentleman?”

“We are,” Leemu confirmed.

“I’ll need you to pass through security with him, then. What’s your status, please?”

“Clanless. Exile,” Leemu informed her. She tapped the details into her communicator before turning to Gorku.

“And you sir?”

“Associate, Clan Stoneback. Also exiled.”

“Exiled due to implantation?”

“Yes, both of us.”

“The nature of your implants?”

“Translator and quick technical references,” Leemu said. “I’m a ship’s propulsion mechanic.”

Gorku squirmed. “Uh…translator and, uh… medical. For a, uh… a learning disability.” The set of his ears was ashamed and uncomfortable. Leemu had never even suspected that, and immediately gave his friend an astonished look and a keening whine that made Gorku’s ears flatten even more. Clearly he was more ashamed about not revealing it sooner than about needing it.

For her part, the human officer simply nodded solemnly. “Okay. You don’t have to tell me anything else. I’m afraid cannot permit you access to Cimbrean until the implant is removed…but you should know there is a Corti doctor in Folctha that specializes in advanced regenerative therapy. He might be able to help.”

“I unnerstand.”

The Human turned back to Preed. “Sir? Any implants?”

Preed shook his head.

“Okay. And your name and date of birth? It’ll help the consulate staff with your case…”

Preed gave her his details, including some family history, where he’d grown up… it only took a few minutes. By the time they were ushered through the biofilter arch, the jump hall had cleared entirely. Sure enough, the arch lit up and sounded an alarm as they passed through, and they were ushered aside into a security annex of some kind.

There was drinking water and a comfortable couch while they waited, but there was nothing really to do. Preed perched himself in an armchair in the corner, shut his eyes and went still. Leemu wasn’t sure if he was meditating or taking a nap.

Gorku threw himself onto the couch with a heavy thump and sighed pathetically. “…Sorry I din’t tell ‘ya sooner,” he grumbled after a minute or so, after Leemu had fetched some water.

“It’s alright. Wasn’t my business, yijao?”

“Eh… True. But I shouldn’t keep secrets from friends.” Gorku chittered darkly. “Worst part? My disability messes with my sense of smell. Figger I’m almost as nose-blind as a Human… An’ the implant don’t do shit ‘ta fix it. That part o’ my brain were…atrophied.”

“Uh, I don’t wanna pry, but…what caused it?” Leemu added hastily, “You don’t need to answer.”

“Caused? Nothin’. Developmental, ‘parently. It weren’t genetic though, thank fuck. S’why they let me in the Clan in the first place, ‘cuz Stoneback is picky. So, there’s still hopes ‘fer me to sire another cub or three someday. Maybe…” He sighed again and scratched his flank distractedly. “I’m kinda worried about what it’ll be like if I take the implant out.”

“How…bad was it?”

Gorku whined quietly and flattened his ears. “It were hard ‘ta string words together, sometimes I’d get writin’ switched up in my head, that kinda thing. Could always ‘member everything I ever heard, though.”

“So you weren’t stupid, then, you just had trouble communicating. That’s not so bad. And maybe we can get it fixed!”

“Yeah, but…Corti. Also, it’ll be ‘spensive.”

Preed spoke up. “That will not be a problem, if I have anything to say about it.”

Both the gaoians looked over at Preed with their ears up in surprise. He shrugged at them. “I have been saving my money for thirty years,” he said. “Even with the exchange rate, I have plenty set aside.”

“But–!”

“But nothing. I have no children and I am not long for the world. I am old. What am I going to do with my money but spend it? Besides, I’d miss your banter.”

Gorku whined and chittered his teeth, then dragged Preed up into a monster of a hug, keening all the while.

They were, sadly, interrupted by the arrival of security personnel and a small man in a dark suit, who put his briefcase down, pressed his hands together in front of his chest, and bowed his head so that his thumbs touched his chin.

Whatever the gesture meant—“hello,” presumably—Preed returned a slightly shallower version and spoke so clearly that Leemu heard his words over the translator’s attempt to replace them for his benefit.

“Sà wàt dii kráp.”

There followed a long discussion, lots of paperwork… apparently Preed’s prediction that he’d been declared legally dead was half-true. That had originally been the case, but when his name showed up on a list of recorded abductees that the Corti Directorate had shared with the Humans at some point, he’d been legally restored to life and marked as a missing person instead. That small fact alone apparently streamlined matters considerably.

It took less than an hour for Preed’s travel documents to be arranged. There were other details to worry about: apparently interstellar banking and finance was a whole cluster of headaches all by itself, not the least of which was how easily Preed’s savings could be accessed in Human space… but in the end, they were informed that they were free to wander the station’s public areas, but would not be granted access to private areas or any jump terminal hosting an in-system jump to Cimbrean’s surface or to Earth until the Gaoians had either resolved their implant problem or agreed to stay behind.

Preed still seemed a little awestruck at being back in contact with members of his own species again.

“I almost forgot how to wâi,” he marvelled. This, it seemed, was the bowing gesture he’d shared with the man in the suit. “It’s been so long…”

They followed Leemu’s nose to an eatery not dissimilar to the one Preed had so recently and sadly closed and said goodbye to. The menu turned out to be completely different, however, and it had waiting staff. Preed watched them as they orbited the tables, tending to travellers, crew and staff alike.

“Preed? You’re staring,” Gorku pointed out after a minute. The old man blushed and looked down at his hands.

“It’s been a long time since I last saw a young woman,” he explained sheepishly.

Gorku chittered deeply and pant-grinned with the most lecherous look Leemu had yet seen. “So are ‘ya gonna go mate with ‘em? Don’t let us stop ‘ya!”

Preed’s laugh turned nearby heads, even as he shook his own head and waved Gorku down. “No! No! Don’t embarrass me like that!” he chuckled and lowered his voice, having gone a few shades darker in the face. “…No. I’m happy just to look.”

“Why?!” Gorku seemed almost offended at the notion. “What’s the harm in askin’?”

“My friend, I am not a Gaoian. Our rules are different. And I do not want the first thing I do when I reunite with my species to be harassing a young woman while she’s hard at work.” Preed watched the waitress doing her rounds a second longer, then smiled and looked away. “Besides. I am old.”

“That don’t have to stop you.”

“Let the matter rest, please. I’d rather not embarrass myself.”

“Your loss,” Gorku shrugged and gave up. “I hear there’s lots of females on Cimbrean…an’ they’ve got a thing ‘fer brownies lately!”

“I wish you luck,” Preed said, levelly. Leemu chittered and they shared a mutual look of tolerance at the foibles of all Brownies.

After eating, they checked out the medical center. Translators, it turned out, were a routine operation under a local anaesthetic that needed only about twenty minutes. Leemu’s skullwire and Gorku’s correction implant both needed a slightly more involved intervention: half an hour, rather than twenty minutes.

It took Gorku a bit longer to come out of surgery. Why was almost immediately apparent: He…had trouble with his words.

“I…yeah. Wanna see the, uh…. Little.” He paused, made a frustrated noise, and finally found the word. “Corti? Yeah. …Money.”

Preed and Leemu looked at each other and nodded. “Okay big guy,” Leemu promised. “We’ll take care of it, okay? Let’s see if we can go right now.”

The prospect of getting down to Cimbrean was invigorating, too. Quite aside from maybe helping his friends, there was just something about the place that called to him. It felt right to be going there, in a deep and satisfying way.

To his dismay, there was a wait to head down. They’d just missed a scheduled jump, and the next wasn’t for a couple of hours. So, they sat and waited.

After a while, though, Gorku started fidgeting. He’d been silent since the surgery, but now he gave Leemu a strange look.

“…You… good? Smell…. Not smell nice,” he slurred.

“I do?” Leemu sniffed himself then turned to Preed, who shrugged. “I smell nothing.”

“Smell… uh… uh, wrong.”

“Maybe I just need a dust bath,” Leemu said dismissively. “It’s been a long voyage.”

“…Maybe…” Gorku agreed, and lapsed into silence. His nose didn’t stop twitching, however.

Leemu sighed and resigned himself to a long wait.

There’d be time to worry about how he smelled later.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

After a lifetime of helicopter parenting, Tristan and Ramsey seemed addicted to every opportunity they could find to do something their mother would have scooted them away from. And who could blame them? Amanda had never managed to get her head around the idea that the risk of physical injury was inconsequential next to the certain harm she’d caused by cloistering her sons.

And as it turned out, the difference between a man and a boy was mostly a matter of size. Even when the three men in question were HEAT-sized monsters.

They were playing… well. It wasn’t any kind of a formal game as far as Allison could tell. She’d dubbed it ‘Boyball,’ and it looked more like a scuffle than anything with actual rules. Still, every so often the soccer ball would bounce off the garage wall and there’d be cheers and groans and victory laps. Clearly the boys understood it, even if she didn’t.

It didn’t matter, she decided. They were having fun and, more importantly, they were keeping all that male energy out of the house and out of the way.

Inside the house was pretty much the exact opposite. There were a total of four babies in there if one counted the pregnancies, which meant a lot of discussion about the joys of getting kicked in the bladder and, in Marty’s case, Diego’s status as an apparently endless generator of poop.

Mothering was a glamorous business.

“I can see why the Gaoians do it the way they do…” Xiù muttered, as there was another thunk of ball on wall from the game outside, and Julian did a victory lap around the lawn with Ramsey under his arm. She’d suffered at first from a case of morning sickness that had rendered her miserable and almost immobile. Now she was coming up on her twentieth week and the baby was turning out to be quite the gymnast himself, to judge by the number of little somersaults he was doing.

God, and they still had twenty more weeks to go.

For Al, it was familiar territory, sort of. It wasn’t her first pregnancy after all… Except this time she wasn’t terrified, ashamed and confused.

“Which bit?” Marty asked. She was sitting on the floor, keeping a watchful eye on Diego as he determinedly explored the world around him. “I think Gaoian cubs miss out for not having a father’s influence in their life when they’re small…”

“I mean sharing the workload, mostly. And they do have father figures, it’s just probably not their actual father.”

“I thought the whole point of the commune is it’s a male-free zone?” Freya asked. As predicted she’d given birth to the biggest baby boy Allison had ever seen, who’d promptly been named for his paternal grandfather Joseph and would no doubt grow into an absolute wall of a man in due course… but for now he was a peaceful baby. Eat, sleep, poop, repeat.

Xiù shook her head. “It isn’t. It’s a safe zone. Males aren’t in charge there, but they visit all the time. Cubs are mostly males themselves after all, and they grow up very fast. They strike for Clans starting around five, usually.”

“So the Clans show up to recruit?” Marty asked.

“Workhouses, too. Some of the most prestigious are super competitive to get into, apparently. But it’s not that cynical: Mostly they show up because they just love the cubs.”

“And fatherly men are hot as hell, too,” Allison snarked, getting a grin from Xiù for her efforts.

“That too, yeah.”

They giggled, and as one decided to go peek out the window and watch the boys at play. They’d migrated to the backyard and were quite blissfully and obliviously living up to every stereotype they could. The boys were being exuberant boys for maybe the first time in their lives, and the men were gleefully galumphing about in their hilariously immodest nylon ‘silkies.’ Seriously. Most of Julian’s underwear was less revealing–which was saying something, honestly—and definitely more functional. Why not just wear those instead?

…Still, the man-candy was…nice to ogle, Allison wasn’t ashamed to admit. And the moment when Tristan and Ramsey ‘tackled’ Adam and ‘wrestled’ him to the ground to ‘steal’ the football produced a synchronized “aww!” from all four of them, and a proud beaming smile from Marty.

“Those two seem a lot happier…” she observed.

“Julian too. He just…lights up, you know?”

“Next thing you know, they’ll be coming home with skinned knees and grazes and stuff.”

“That’s already happened,” Allison recalled. “Ramsey actually seemed excited by it.”

Xiù snorted softly. “Boys… though honestly, it’s still surprising how much poise the men have. Julian’s so big these days, the rugby league was worried he might accidentally hurt somebody. They wouldn’t let him play on Mark’s team! And yet there he is, roughhousing with the boys and everyone’s just fine.” She couldn’t hide the pride in her voice.

“It’s because he’s so big,” Freya said wisely. “Big men are usually much more careful. They have to be. It’s the little guys that are constantly causing trouble…”

“I think that may just be bias on your part,” Marty suggested, probably more than a little aware of her tiny physical stature next to the other women present. She was even an inch or two shorter than Xiù.

“Heh. Maybe.”

They were interrupted by the doorbell. Marty left Diego to explore the rug for a few seconds as she trotted through to the front door and the other three drifted back to the couch and armchair. When she returned, she had an amused expression on her face.

“Mail?” Xiù asked. Considering they were living under an active threat from a terrorist organization, all their mail went to a PO Box and was handled on their behalf by Byron security before coming to their door.

“No stamp on this,” she said, handing it over. “Just… the signature of postmaster-general of Akyawentuo.”

‘This’ turned out to be a package of four letters, in a clean-edged manila envelope. One of the letters was written on sharp white office stationery, but the rest of it had a slightly more… home-grown feel. Clearly somebody over there had invented paper. Copied. Discovered, whatever.

Allison took it off her. “…Akyawentuo has a postmaster-general?” She turned the envelope over in her hands and snorted. “…This is Daniel Hurt’s signature.”

“Heck of a promotion,” Freya quipped.

Allison giggled and heaved herself to her feet. “I’ll go fetch Julian, I bet he’d love this.”

She found him continuing to show off for the boys, with his arms held straight out to either side while Tristan and Ramsey dangled from of them, fighting to see who could do more pull-ups.

Or, well. A pull-up, it looked like.

Ramsey won just as Allison joined them, by virtue of Tristan losing his grip.

“No fair! I couldn’t keep hold!”

Allison again found herself rolling her eyes and giggling. Boys. There was just something so wholesomely corn-fed about it all.

“Hey, no hard feelings, little fellas! That’s almost as many pull-ups as I could do at your age!”

He was rather seriously understating things to build their confidence, Al knew, but she just grinned at him and let it go.

“Really?!” Ramsey jumped down and bounced next to Tristan, both too excited to stand still.

“Heck yeah! Eat healthy food and get exercise, and who knows? Whadd’ya think, ‘Horse? Think these two should join a league?”

Adam made a big show of thinking about it. “Hmm…I dunno, soccer and wrestling are both looking for athletes, but those are sports that take a lot of work. You think they’re up to it?”

Both of the boys looked back eagerly at Julian, who wiped some sweat from his face and covertly smirked at Allison. “Maybe! We’ll need to talk to your mother first, boys.”

“Aww–!”

“That’s not negotiable, Ramsey. She’s still your mother.”

“She’ll say no,” said Ramsey, despondently.

“Maybe she will. But…” Julian grinned at them. “…Me and my friends know what we’re doing, right? Maybe we can start with some basic practice. See if you like it!”

That brightened their mood. “You mean it?”

“Could teach ‘em some basic forms, too,” Christian added.

Julian looked at Allison, who nodded slightly. “Good idea, but that will need permission,” she said. She’d had to become proficient very quickly indeed when it came to navigating the twisty legal landscape surrounding her parents. Jacob had been quiet lately, but the next letter from his lawyers was never far away, and Amanda was… well, she was an incurable helicopter mom. Anything that might hurt her poor delicate babies was a crisis of apocalyptic proportions.

The fact that those ‘poor delicate babies’ were absolutely thriving on exposure to some dirt, grease, and actual father figures was completely lost on her.

Folctha’s only social worker seemed to understand, at least. Ugh.

“Al’s right. You two need to prove to all of us you can be safe, okay?” Julian warned.

“I bet you could beat up anybody!” Ramsey enthused, missing the point.

“I don’t wanna beat up anyone, Ramsey. Fighting is a last resort, not the first.”

“I know!” Ramsey sulked a bit, “But I bet you still could.”

Julian chuckled, looked over at Christian and Adam, and grinned sheepishly. “Well…okay. Let’s just say almost anyone. What’s up, Al?”

“We got a letter from the, and I quote, ‘Postmaster general of Akyawentuo’.”

“…That has to be Daniel, right? Unless somebody slipped the phrase to Vemik…”

“It’s Daniel,” Allison confirmed. “But there’s some other letters with it and the paper looks like a big guy made it by beating some bark flat with a rock.”

“Ha!” Julian grinned and rolled the two boys over his shoulder to their giggling protest. “That’s probably exactly what Vemik did, too…. Anyway, you two play nice, okay? Don’t beat up Righteous!”

“We promise,” Tristan said. The kid had a remarkably sophisticated sense of humor sometimes, including a precocious nose for irony. It got a snicker from Christian at least. That made Julian grin evilly, and with a quiet grunt, easily tossed the boys completely across the yard, right into Christian’s absurd arms.

He played along perfectly, too. “I think, somehow, I’ll surv–oof! Ahhhhgh!”

Christian hugged the boys tightly, then threw himself backwards as if he’d just been hit by a truck, slamming into the ground and sending a tremor through the dirt. Funny how the biggest and most terrifying men always got super goofy when two little boys wanted to tussle. Al could see Freya through the window, watching with a proud, adoring expression.

“It’s cute how you let them win…” she muttered to Julian as they headed indoors.

“Builds confidence. They need it.” Julian hosed his head down quick and toweled off at the entryway; one of their only firm house rules was that ‘boy grossness’ had to be kept outside or in the basement. Once he was clean, however, he wrapped an arm around her waist and they stole a quick kiss while they were alone. “Gotta have confidence if you’re ever gonna kiss a girl…”

Allison didn’t mind a little smugness from her man. “You’re good at it,” she told him.

“So’re you,” He kissed her again. “My spunky greasemonkey spacebabe!”

She gave his ass a playful spank to guide in him the direction of the living room. Like usual he was barefoot, and they’d taken to keeping a shallow tub next to the back door for him to clean his feet after the third or fourth set of muddy footprints. He rinsed off, wiped his soles on a mat that Xiù had found in the pet store, then padded over towards the hubbub.

“Letters?”

“Four. One from Daniel, one from Yan, one from Singer, and this one—” Xiù waggled something that was more like a small book “—is from Vemik.”

“Oh man, this is gonna be taxing…” Julian sat down. “I don’t really ‘get’ Vemik’s writing system yet.”

“It’s okay,” Xiù said, sitting down. “I do.”

Julian snuggled up to her and kissed her cheek. “My spaceninja polymath linguist.”

Allison smiled to herself: he was always so conscientiously even-handed with his affection. Glowing happily at the compliment, Xiù unfolded the first letter. This was Yan’s, and the size of the lettering left not a lot of room for actual message.

Marty maneuvered Diego onto her other knee and leaned over to get a good interested look at the paper. “…That seems almost cartoonishly big.”

“Yan’s got hands like a pair of shovels. They’re even bigger than those two lunks outside, so I’m not surprised,” Allison explained, then the mental image hit her of Yan hunched over a tiny piece of paper, maneuvering a sliver of charcoal in his fingers with an expression of the most grim studiousness. For some reason, her imagination insisted on furnishing him with a tiny round pair of reading glasses and she had to fight hard not to laugh aloud at the mental image.

“Fine motor control isn’t their thing, I take it,” Freya commented.

Julian shook his head out. “Eh, you might be surprised. Anyway…I think this is my name. He wrote it out like he says it, so no ‘ell’ sound… Uh…” He faltered his way through a sentence in Peoplespeak, which Allison understood pretty well and Xiù translated on the fly for the other two’s benefit.

“My friends. Writing is not easy, and paper is hard to make, but Vemik and Professor Daniel believe it is a strong tool. I think I will have them teach a girl with small hands and she can write what I say. But Daniel say, ‘practice makes perfect,’ so I write anyway.

“Weather is nice, gods smile. Good hunting this season. Three boys will take their trial soon, and we have eight new children in the tribe. One of them is mine! Two are Vemik’s, but that is just luck of timing. My crest is darker, but I do not feel old. I train like Adam say, feel younger and stronger every day. I am blessed and I miss you! Come visit when you can.

–Yan”

He paused and considered something at the bottom of the page. “There’s a character at the end I don’t know. It looks like Singer’s loopy writing.”

“I think that’s a spell she casts,” Xiù said. “I’ve seen her inscribe it on preserve jars and stuff… here’s her letter.”

Julian nodded and they repeated the reading performance.

“My dear friends,

“We got Yan to write at last, and it was hard not to laugh at him. He looked very serious.”

Allison’s resolve failed and she just had to laugh. “Oh man, I can just see him now…!”

“Imagine him holding it with his tail!” Xiù agreed.

“Nono, imagine him with tiny reading glasses!” Allison insisted.

Julian rolled his eyes, though he was clearly trying not to laugh himself, and ploughed forward doggedly into the meat of the Singer’s letter.

“…You can see, he did not write much. I think the Given-Men will write with few words and mean much by them.

“I pray that your babies are strong, and I hope to meet them when they are big enough to travel. Daniel says Awisun will have a girl. I don’t know how I feel about magic that can say whether a child will be a boy or girl before it is born, but he says it is a medicine that knows without taking or giving. I think it changes nothing to know, so if you want to know and there is no harm in it then why not? He did not say if Shyow’s baby will be a boy or girl, so maybe you did not tell him or maybe you do not want to know. Either way, I know it will be strong like its parents.

“We have learned more about the water people and their cities. Claire showed me a hole she dug, and showed me how the different layers of rock and mud and sand in the side of the hole told the story of what they built. Then I helped with the digging for a while. It was so interesting, I forgot to watch the sun and nearly didn’t make it back to the village in time for the song that ends the day.

“Claire and Heff still make us all groan. Everyone can see they want each other very much, but Heff still says he is no good and she deserves better. I think Yan wants to break him in half sometimes, but he knows there are some learnings you can’t beat into a man. We can only wait and pray for them, I think.

“Vemik’s apprentice Yetu has made a very fine knife. Daniel called it a “masterpiece.” He left the forge to go back to his home village and start teaching apprentices of his own, which I think Vemik is glad about. He says kind things about Yetu, and is always visiting the others to talk about new ideas and ways of working steel. I think he used a whole leaf of paper to talk about it. I am watching him now and it is hard not to laugh as he sticks his tongue out when he writes and makes the markings carefully. He looks very serious. Even more serious than Yan!

“I could say more, but the day is getting late and I must sing soon. It has been too long since we saw you. If you cannot come soon, please write to us. Either way, blessings and peace on you all.

“–The Singer of Yan’s tribe.”

“…It’s gonna be a long time before we can go back,” Allison sighed, and ran a hand down her belly. There’d been some discussion about names now that they knew they were expecting a girl. So far the only thing she’d ruled out had been that the lass’ name wouldn’t start with an A. And she was more than happy for her daughter to take the surname Etsicitty. The Buehler name didn’t mean much to her.

“Will it?” Freya asked. “A brief visit couldn’t hurt too much…”

“I dunno. I’m not sure I like ‘couldn’t hurt too much,’” Allison replied.

“Well, we do have expecting mothers doing high-gravity yoga at Venus.”

That was a women-only gym downtown. Allison and Xiù had checked it out once, but… well, notoriety came with a downside. Neither of them were interested on appearing in somebody else’s Instagram feed.

“Everything weighs twenty percent more there, Freya. You might not notice, but I can’t toss tractor tires around for fun.”

“Grow stronger, then! How else are you going to put your man in his place?”

“Yeah, Al! How are you gonna put me in my place?”

“Hush, babe,” Al told him, without looking at him. All part of the game.

Julian chuckled. “Yes ma’am.”

“Good boy.” Allison grinned at Freya. “That’s how.”

“Teach me your ways, wise sensei!”

“Mostly it’s ‘cuz she can work miracles with her–” Julian began, before Xiù gave him a ringing slap on the arm on Allison’s behalf that made him descend into a fit of boyish giggling.

“Julian!!”

Freya and Marty weren’t exactly prissy blushing prudes, though. Both of them found it deeply funny, and Julian was eventually shooed out of the house to go play with the boys again.

“He is such a troll sometimes…”

“He’s trouble!” Marty laughed. “In the best way. Anyway, aren’t we gonna read Vemik’s?”

“Have you seen the size of this thing?” Xiù asked, and flipped through the veritable tome of smashed-bark leafs. “I think much of this is, uh, ‘field reports.’ There’s drawings, see?”

Sure enough, a surprisingly good drawing of a giant butterfly-like insect took up an entire page. Vemik hadn’t colored it completely, but he had used crayons to suggest what the colors should be, hinting at an iridescent purple-green like a hummingbird.

“We should copy this and get it to Doctor Tisdale.”

“Which one?”

“Both of them. Anyway, this is…” Xiù leafed through the ‘letter’ with a look of mild disbelief, “…a lot to handle. I’ll translate it for you and mail you a copy.”

“Sounds good. I bet xenobiology is fascinating,” Marty nodded.

“It really is,” Allison agreed. “I– oh dear. I think someone’s hungry.”

Marty looked down at the grabby, complaining infant in her lap and smiled fondly. “Yeah. He’s his father’s son.”

“You can use an upstairs bedroom if you want, or… hell, right here if you want. We don’t mind.”

Marty laughed, but shook her head. “No, we should probably go home anyway. It’ll be bathtime soon.”

“Fair enough. It’s time to bring the boys in anyway, I have an engine to rebuild.”

Farewells were said, and Marty and Adam beat a hasty retreat home before their baby decided that grumbling and pawing at Mom wasn’t enough and he needed to put his lungs to use. Freya and Firth departed not long after, and the brothers were reminded they still had homework to do, which they didn’t complain too much about.

Once they were alone, the room became remarkably quiet. Allison basked in it: the peace, the lingering warmth and the faint residual aroma of Baby.

…Well. There was also a lingering slightly spicy-acrid healthy guy-type note, too. Julian was resting against the side of a doorway with his big arms crossed, giving her a wry look.

“Thought you had an engine to rebuild?”

“It can wait.” Allison stretched and then scooted over on the couch to snuggle up to Xiù, who was still flipping through Vemik’s novel-length ‘letter.’

“Yup.” Julian padded over, plopped down next to her and wrapped himself around her firmly.

“Thought you were gonna go Slab?”

“It can wait for a few minutes. I’m behind on snuggle time. And I had a few ideas for names…” he tickled her belly gently.

Xiù put Vemik’s correspondence aside, shifted her legs over to the other side and snuggled up properly as well. “So did I.”

Allison smiled happily and put her arms around them both.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear them…”

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Officer Narl, “Clan” Folcthan Border Force

Bozo was a frighteningly intelligent being, especially considering he wasn’t a person.

He didn’t speak, of course. He was theoretically non-sapient, too. Nevertheless, he had an astonishing ability to communicate with most anyone, but especially with Humans and gaoians. He could convey re-assurance, confidence, inquisitiveness, curiosity…and where he was trained, Bozo could directly signal what was important to the task at hand. He was so good in fact, it took Narl less than an hour to reach a rapport with the huge hound. That communication wasn’t one-way, either. Bozo could seemly read Narl like a book. It wasn’t long before the huge canine could anticipate what Narl needed and work accordingly; they’d gelled so fast it was alarming. That innate intelligence, combined with the training Bozo had been given, meant that the complex tasks he could accomplish were just…hard to believe.

Also, he was literally over twice as heavy as Narl and could outrun damn near anything; Narl wasn’t slow, either! Having caught his prey, Bozo was strong enough to just push it over and pin it to the ground. Or…much, much worse, if needed. Those teeth could rip out a Human’s throat, no trouble. What he could do to that same Human if he was angry…

But mostly, he just wanted to be friends with absolutely everybody.

He was still good at his job though, which at the moment was sniffing out stuff. There were other dogs in the Jump terminal on the lookout for other banned substances, mostly working alongside Gaoian officers whose noses could verify what the dogs had found, but Bozo and Narl specialized in explosive compounds.

Bozo occupied an interesting position in Folctha’s tiny security community. He was the SOR’s mascot dog, officially. Unofficially, he was the city’s dog too, and indisputably the pack alpha of the rest of Folctha’s canine population. But a dog that big, that intelligent and that full of energy could be a nuisance, and Bozo liked–no, needed to work. So, with his extensive training and whatever magic Dog and Human had between them, they’d found him a job.

Several jobs actually by several agencies, all related to security, and for all but the most extreme military working dog tasks, all with Narl as Bozo’s partner. For whatever doggie reasons, besides his best friends at the SOR, Bozo just…decided he liked Narl the most.

It worked out for everyone in the end. The SOR got him out from underfoot when they weren’t keeping him busy, the jump terminal got an extra nose and a lot of extra muscle, and Narl got an excellent sometimes-partner and a surprisingly good friend.

Naturally, Bozo instantly become the alpha of their working dogs, too. Whoever he approved of, the others did too. On the rare occasion he didn’t like someone…neither did they.

But in all the time that Narl had worked with him, he’d never seen Bozo take an immediate dislike to somebody the way he took to the lean, muscular silverfur who came down from Armstrong in the company of an elderly Human male and a big, burly Brownie. The very instant Bozo laid eyes on him, his hackles went up and his lips drew back all the way to the cheek, exposing every one of his fearsome teeth.

“What’s wrong, boy? Something…”

And then he smelled it. He had no idea what he was smelling, but there was something very wrong about the silverfur’s musk, and the indescribable bite of it was deeply, viscerally unnerving. It was… alien. Possibly a little metallic, or plastic, or oily… unnatural in some way. But unlike anything else he’d ever scented.

Narl pressed his panic button surreptitiously and approached authoritatively. “Gentlemen, I am going to need you to step aside and—” he began.

The silverfur froze as he approached and then lashed out at him, claws fully extended. Narl was alert for danger, but the mad panicking violence, speed and strength behind the attack wrong-footed him. There was a flash of agony in his face and he tumbled aside with a pained yelp, feeling wetness in his eye that he couldn’t see through.

Please, please, please let it just be blood…

Bozo uttered a noise that was less a bark, snarl or a hunting howl than it was pure sonic murder. There was the rough scratching of massive paws on carpet, a heavy impact and a crash, a feral snarl from the big brownie, the quiet double-hiss of a fast-acting tranquilizer dart–

The Quick Reaction Force flooded into the room and secured everything with extreme urgency.

Narl managed to get his eye open. Thank Daar, he could still see through it.

The silverfur was keening and writhing with Bozo’s jaws clamped around the back of his neck. Blood trickled through his fur and between Bozo’s teeth, promising an immediate and messy end should anything stupid be attempted. Not that he could have done anything, since Bozo was also sitting on his hips and crushing him under his absurd weight. Whatever happened next, the silverfur wouldn’t be walking away painlessly, assuming he could walk at all.

The elderly Human was being held back by two of the security team, while two more attended to the Brownie who was slumped on the ground in a tranquilized stupor. Shock and confusion were written all over the poor man’s face.

“Narl!” One of the medics got to him. Slater. He inspected Narl’s injury with a concerned expression. “…Oh wow. Damn bro, you got super lucky.”

“Yeah.” Narl lay back and relaxed as his wound was inspected. He could feel how close he’d come to losing his eye. “He’s even quicker than he looks.”

Slater nodded and cleaned him up a little to better inspect the wound. “…This is gonna need hospital time, man,” he reported. “Badass scar, though!”

…Well, Narl reflected as his wound was covered in a gauzy patch and taped down. There was a downy lining, with a good story too! First, though, there was a job to do.

“Can you smell that?” he asked.

“Smell what?”

Of course not. Slater was Human, after all.

Bozo reluctantly gave up his quarry to one of the Human handlers. He stepped away a few paces and then sneezed violently before dry-retching. Narl got the impression he would have loved to spit, if he could.

“There’s something very wrong with that silverfur. Bozo smelled it before me. He smells…balls. I don’t have the words. Fake, maybe. Synthetic, even. I was about to call for Section Nine.”

That was a code phrase, and apparently a reference to some animated series that Narl had never watched. Section Nine: suspected Hierarchy infiltrator. As opposed to a Laughing Man, which was a confirmed infiltrator.

Just mentioning those words got things moving fast. The silverfur was promptly secured and moved out of the public space.

Bozo loyally returned to Narl’s side–the one that had the gouges around his eye. He didn’t fawn or fuss, sensing somehow that wouldn’t be the right thing at the moment, but Narl had no doubt Bozo would be Helpfully doting on him for the entirety of his recovery. Narl hauled himself to his hindpaws, using Bozo’s thick neck as a solid surface to steady himself on.

“Dude, you should take it easy ‘til the ambulance gets here…” Slater cautioned.

“I’m just checking a hunch…” Narl told him. He took a good hefty snuffle of the drugged brownie first, and sorted through the assorted notes and tones of the big idiot’s scent. He mostly smelled like a healthy and hard-working male, third or maybe fourth degree. There was also a recent hint of medicine and a sterile environment, and the bitter aroma of anaesthetic.

“Did this guy have anything medical done to him up on Armstrong?” he asked Slater.

“Uh…” Slater pulled out his phone and swiped through the security team’s traveller tracking app. “…Case report says he had an implant removed right before he came down here. Um…oh. It was a cognitive implant. Says here he has a language processing disability.”

Narl duck-nodded, took one last deep sniff to be absolutely certain that the Brownie wasn’t polluted by whatever had caused his friend’s execrable stink, then decided that all was well here.

[“We need to take you somewhere safe,”] he said clearly and calmly in Gaori. [“Your friend is okay.”]

[“Where… Leemu…?”]

[“Hospital. Openpaw. Safe. Okay?”]

[“…Okay…”]

The poor fucker’s head was going to hurt when the tranquilizer wore off, but at least he seemed docile. Satisfied, Narl turned to the old man, who’d sat down on a bench and was shivering and lost.

“Sir? I need to perform a scent test,” Narl informed him. “This won’t take a second, okay?”

Even old Humans could pack a serious punch if they decided to be trouble, but this one seemed like he wasn’t inclined to fight. He just nodded numbly and tilted his head to one side. Narl again took a deep breath, investigating his scent.

Humans always smelled so complex. There was the usual musky, leathery, warm tone of a human male, but under that were cooking scents: hot oil, flour, detergent, vegetable sugars. They were deeply ingrained into him, like he’d spent his whole life saturating in those scents and they’d become a permanent part of him.

And yes, there was the very faintest hint of that same awful stench that had enveloped the silverfur. Narl tracked it carefully, down the old man’s arm until he found where it was most intense: on the forearm, hidden under a long sleeve.

“Roll your sleeve up for me please, sir,” he said. The old man did so, and Narl took a troubled step back. There were Gaoian claw marks on his arm, apparently healed but the area looked reddened and inflamed.

“How did you get this scratch, sir?”

“Leemu did it,” the old man said. “But… some time ago. Several weeks.”

“Has it been like this ever since?”

“Off and on. I thought it went away, but then it came back. I didn’t want him to worry. He wasn’t himself that day.”

Narl looked up at the security officer who was chaperoning the old man, and saw his own worries reflected in his colleague’s eyes.

“…You’ll need to get it seen by a specialist,” he decided. “It would be helpful if you would agree to an immediate examination by one we have on retainer.”

“I… this is all so confusing. He’s a nice person!” the old man objected.

“I don’t doubt it, but he may be, uh…”

“Sick,” Slater offered helpfully. “Let’s go with that.”

“Oh…” The news seemed to cause the elderly Human real grief. “…Will he be alright?”

“That’s not for me to say, sir,” Narl replied. In fact he was worrying about his own condition, now. If those claws could give the infamous Human immune system that kind of trouble, then the wound to his own face was…

“Why don’t we all head over to our specialist right now,” Slater urged tactfully. He knew the stakes too, and a quick glance at the reaction force set everything in motion.

Bozo stood by Narl’s side, whined quietly, and gave an uncertain wag of his rudder-like tail. Narl scratched his ears as much for his own comfort as for the dog’s.

“Good boy,” he said. “Good dog.”

His reply was a slightly stronger wag and a quiet version of Bozo’s usual floor-shaking bark.

“Wuff.”

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Yukon–Koyukuk, Alaska, USA, Earth

Zane Reid

Pain.

Zane had woken up in pain before, but never like this. This wasn’t a hangover, this was…

He wanted to writhe, and scream. His whole body felt like it was on fire but something forced him to stay still. When he tried to shake or move he felt his muscles creak like they were…

…frozen…

His eyes slammed open with a shocked, horrified gasp. He was lying slumped against a tree, in a shallow hollow in the deep blanket of snow around him. His clothes were soaking wet, his dreadlocks were covered in a solid layer of ice… and he was steaming. White clouds billowed off him like he was freshly-brewed coffee on a winter morning.

He shut his eyes again and suffered, too wracked with agony to do more than go to a strange meditative place in his head, far away from thought.

After some time, he became aware of… something. A heavy thumping through the nearby trees and a snuffling sound. He opened his eyes again and groaned, though he was grateful for any kind of a distraction.

…It was a bear. A huge, shaggy brown Grizzly that looked skinny and starved under its coarse fur. And his arms and legs still refused to work at all. It pawed at a patch of snow, excavated down to the soil, then shoved its claws into the frozen ground and pulled it apart, sticking its snuffling nose into the resulting hole.

Whatever it found, it clearly wasn’t satisfied. Instead it turned and trudged through the snow toward him. A few paces away it paused, snuffled at the air again, then came closer. Right up to him.

Its jaws were big enough to fit around his head. And Zane’s body still refused to move. All he could do was stare wild-eyed at its teeth… then at the nose as big as his face that it shoved right up against his throat and snuffled again.

It sneezed with a disgusting blast of hot air, shook itself, and backed off as though burnt. It made a panting, roaring kind of sound then, of all things, it whimpered, turned, and fled.

Zane watched it crash away through the snow and the trees. Then, not knowing what else to do, he shut his eyes and suffered some more.

Maybe he slept. Maybe the pain just blurred the hours together so he didn’t remember them. It didn’t matter. Slowly he became aware that the pain was being overtaken by a different feeling. He felt… warm. Not sweltering hot like he’d felt before passing out, but… more like he was soaking in a pleasantly hot bath. The warmth soaked into his aching muscles and slowly, so slowly, he felt them relax and loosen up.

He shut his eyes again and basked in the feeling. When he opened them, he realized that the cold light of morning he’d first woken up to was gone: now, the sun was behind him and the light was redder. He’d spent the whole day lying against this tree, delirious from pain.

But his limbs worked now. When he tried them experimentally, he found they moved stiffly and uncomfortably, but they moved.

His arms and clothes were bone dry. When he stood up, his butt was still damp from wet earth and melted snow but he barely noticed. His fingers, his toes, his whole body felt like he had a heater under his skin to stave off the chill.

That was… weird. All of this was weird, even if it was welcome. He should be dead.

Now… well, he had options. He’d definitely proven that wandering out into an Alaskan blizzard was a bad idea. In theory he could head back to the prison…

“…B–” he choked on the attempt to speak, coughed, and tried again. It came out as a tortured croak. “…Blood clot.”

Bad idea. Stupid idea. Wrong idea. He’d just survived freezing to death in the wilderness, and his first thought was to throw that away by climbing back in his cage? But what else was he gonna do? He felt starved, in a deep way. Like his whole body was running on fumes and wishes, not actual calories.

There was food back in the prison, at least.

…And there’d also be getting locked up tighter than ever and probably poked and prodded in a lab. Or whatever they did to people who survived the unsurvivable.

He groaned and, reluctantly, turned away. He’d been heading West, he thought. He’d certainly intended to head West. May as well stick to that plan and see if his luck held.

Walking wasn’t easy at first. He stumbled and staggered like a zombie rather than walking, but movement slowly loosened him up, got the blood pumping. After a few hundred yards he was merely shuffling. A few hundred more and he was limping. After maybe ten minutes, he was walking pretty much normally. He still felt stiff and sore everywhere but at least he was moving sorta freely.

It was still cold as hell around, he could tell. He didn’t feel cold at all, but when he stumbled upon another stream—or maybe the same stream as before—it turned out to be solid ice. Still, it was open ground and easier to navigate than the woods, so he followed it toward the setting sun.

Just as the sun was genuinely setting, having gone a deep orange-red and touched the ground, he turned a bend in the stream’s channel and found himself standing on an open, flat expanse of white that could only be a frozen lake. He paused, and it sunk in at that moment just how far he was from… well, anything. Anywhere.

Anywhere except the prison.

Again, he felt a flash of anger at himself. Was he really that weak? With a snarl, he set out across the snow field.

As soon as he did, movement caught his eye. There was a flicker, a janky kind of effect like a bad digital TV signal and then there was… something… parked on the ice just a sprint away.

It looked just like a classic flying saucer.

He paused and stared at it. Somewhere in the back of his mind, some instinct was howling at him that this shit was suspicious and maybe he should really think about heading back, turning himself in, warning them.

Instead he shivered and, hunched over against the suddenly cold air, he walked toward the spaceship’s lowered ramp.

++END CHAPTER 51++

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 52: “Autoimmune”

Chapter 52: Autoimmune

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

Nofl’s lab was spacious, but inevitably finite. When it contained an alarming number of alarmed Humans, not to mention one particularly sculpted canine and a Gaoian brownie who was doing his best not to loom at everyone… well, there were times when Nofl was glad of his species’ diminutive stature.

There were also, rarely, times when he wished he was a little more conformant with the Corti dispassionate ideal.

“Oh dear, dear, dear…”

Chief Arés was the second-smallest Human present, after Nofl’s patient Mister Chadesakan. He frowned over Nofl’s shoulder at the volumetric display and tried to make sense of it.

“I’m no biologist, but I know that isn’t natural…”

Frankly, an uneducated Ten’Gewek child would have discerned that much. There was something disconcertingly evil about the dark, asymmetrical lattice of nanotechnology that had enfolded every last one of Leemu’s living cells. It was a technological miracle of course, and had substantially improved every aspect of Leemu’s physical and mental faculties beyond the norm for a Gaoian of his size… but it looked like some kind of demonic spider had webbed up his whole body on the tiniest scale.

“It’s OmoAru technology,” Nofl explained. “Or so I assumed. Oh, deary me… Either I was wrong and the Hierarchy gave it to the OmoAru, or they stole it from them. Either way, mister, ah… Leemu’s tissues are absolutely riddled with it.”

“And Mister Chadesakan?”

“Human biology strikes again!” Nofl chirped. “I’m pleased to say that his immune system is putting up an incredible fight! I’m… not one hundred percent convinced that he will fight it off, but something seems to be wrong with my predictive models because they all say that he should have been completely overtaken weeks ago, so…”

“How bad is it?” Arés asked.

“You were right to place the Human and Gaoian in stasis. As for Bozo and Officer Narl, they will need to remain under strict quarantine for the moment. If there’s any of the Arutech in their system, it’s below my instruments’ ability to measure.”

That apparently was not enough of a specific answer as far as Arés was concerned, as he repeated himself with added emphasis. “How. Bad. Is. It?”

“…A repair of this scale may not be possible. Leemu might well need to be surgically disassembled at the cellular level, which is…” Nofl paused and sucked air through his teeth.

“Is that even possible?” the largest man in the room asked. Colonel Powell was lurking in the back and though his expression was stony, Nofl knew enough about him to suspect that the big man was nearly frantic with worry for his dog.

“…No. Not yet, anyway. Hopefully I’m wrong and a less… aggressive treatment will present itself. I am many things, but a Level Twelve surgeon is not one of them.”

“A Level Twelve could do it?”

“They’d try. And probably fail.” Nofl bobbled his head gently. “Cellular-scale medical techniques are an important part of a… project you’re aware of.” he refrained from mentioning the Ark out loud, on the basis that neither Preed nor Gorku were aware of it.

“So the technology exists.”

“But it’s never been used on a fully grown adult Deathworlder before. Fiddling with an experimental cell cluster is one thing. Stripping sophisticated nanotechnology out of a living adult…” Nofl cleared his throat. “Of course, the other issue is that Leemu cannot possibly be considered competent to render consent.”

Powell grunted and his forearm squirmed as he tightened his fist for a moment. “…Fookin’ hellfire…”

The enormous Gaoian spoke, then. Tried. “Then…Fix. Leemu…would want…not a slave.”

“Oh, honey, I really should help you with that shouldn’t I?” Nofl clucked. He swung a scanner over on its arm and pointed it at Gorku’s cranium. “Dear, dear, dear… Not enough Meeshi when you were a cub, eh?”

Gorku shrugged and kept understandably silent.

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” Arés told him solemnly. “Unless you have power of attorney, you can’t make that decision for him.”

“Their courts will need to weigh in, or I believe the Governor-General will need to declare a state of emergency.”

Gorku’s ears swivelled, then he sighed miserably, scratched at the spot on his head where his implants had been removed, and managed to dig up one syllable: “…‘kay…”

“Ohhh…” Nofl made a sympathetic noise. “I’ll attend to your problem as soon as we’re done, alright? We’ll work out the details later.”

“And Mister Chadesakan?” Arés asked.

“Treating him should be as simple as amputating his arm. I hope. In any case, this entire situation requires containment and a full Grade Twelve medical intervention. I have taken the liberty of dispatching a message. Given exactly what we’re looking at here…”

“And my dog?” Powell asked.

“He and Officer Narl will require quarantine so I can monitor them. The good news is, I don’t think either of them are infected. Again, I will defer to my medical colleagues when they arrive.”

“When?” Powell asked. “And more to the point, how much is it gonna bloody cost us?”

“Powell, dear. This is far bigger than money or politics. We will settle all accounts after the danger is past, and need I remind you, we are in no position to foster enmity.”

“In my experience, the Directorate’s idea of a fee can be a little unintuitive anyway,” Arés soothed.

“Then I will be blunt. We’d like to send an expedition to Akyawentuo. Nothing extreme,” Nofl cautioned, “We would simply like to examine them. You will have full authority, of course.”

Powell and Arés shared a lengthy eye contact with each other that seemed to encompass a full conversation. Eventually Powell shrugged, shook his head and subsided. “…You’ll need to talk with Etsicitty,” he said. “He’s the special envoy to them an’ all that.”

“Oh lovely!” Nofl chirped. “My favourite customer! One of them, anyway… Where is he?”

“This time o’ the day?” Powell thought about it. “…The Dog House, I expect.”

“…Oh. Well. I shall have to mount an expedition, then! Before my colleagues arrive.”

“And when will that be?” Powell asked, repeating his earlier question.

“For all I know, the Empirical Razor might already be in orbit,” Nofl said. “It depends on just how much my word is worth with the Directorate and the military Colleges… which is quite a lot right now, actually.”

Arés scratched at his chin with a thumb for a second as he contemplated the situation, then sighed and looked at Powell. “We should pass this on to our respective superiors, I guess.”

“Aye. The whole of 5-EYES need to know this one… and we’ll need to tell the Great Father as well.”

“That’ll be easy. He’s visiting Folctha today, unofficially.”

“Unofficially?”

“Every week, if he can. Usually he just jumps over when the array isn’t busy and does…whatever a Great Father does when nobody’s looking. Today though he’s flying with a special somebody. We’re expecting him later this morning.”

“Damn,” Powell rumbled. “I’d hate to ruin his day off, but…”

“Needs must.”

“Aye.”

“Well then, gentlemen. I believe we know what we’re all doing!” Nofl clapped his hands and shooed them out the door. “Go on! Don’t worry, Colonel, I’ll take special care of Bozo.”

“You do that…” Powell said, darkly. He shot one last worried glance at the quarantine lab and then, with a sigh and a shake of his head, he squeezed through the door and was gone. Gabe Arés followed a moment later.

Nofl sighed, dusted off his hands, and took a deep breath before checking on his patients. Narl had finally persuaded Bozo to calm down, and requested only a bowl of water for the dog and a bottle of water for himself. Nofl instructed his butler drone to provide both, then checked on Preed Chadesakan. The old man was lying on his cot in quarantine, looking up at the ceiling with a hollow expression.

“Can I get you anything, Mister Chadesakan?” Nofl asked. The elderly Human half-turned his head, gave Nofl a bleary-eyed empty look, then shook his head and subsided. Nofl ordered some water for him as well and made a note to call for somebody better-qualified to help him.

That just left Gorku.

“Well, dear!” he said cheerily, and approached the sullen Gaoian. “It’s your turn at last! Let’s see if we can’t figure out a way to straighten out your language centers without cybernetics, hmm?”

Gorku sighed and heaved himself up onto four paws. “…Long time?”

“Who knows? We’re only reinventing a field of medicine from first principles!” Nofl fluttered a hand vaguely at the diagnostic equipment. “Chop chop! The sooner we scan your brain, the sooner we figure out what it needs.”

Gorku duck-nodded and flopped up onto the medical bed. It was built for HEAT members, and took his merely large frame easily and without complaint. Nofl swept into his seat and rolled over to the appropriate workstation, where he powered up the complex, powerful and subtle scanners he’d ordered, installed and sometimes built himself.

That was the nice thing about living in Folctha. He never ran out of interesting specimens.

“Yes…this was definitely caused by malnutrition. But how do we fix it…?” he muttered to himself.

Gorku gave him a Look.

“Don’t mind me, darling, just talking to myself! I’m sure your conversation will be gripping when we’re done, though!”

Gorku snorted, crossed his paws under his chin and put his head down while Nofl delved a little deeper into the subtleties of his patient’s trouble.

Life simply didn’t get any better. And until the ship arrived… well. What better way to preoccupy himself?

None that he could think of.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
The Life-Mate’s private yacht, Cimbrean system, The Far Reaches

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“Big Burly Buckin’ Badass Beastie!”

Naydra chittered again and swatted his ear affectionately. “You and your alliteration, Bumpkin…also, no you great oaf! The Summer Scent, maybe?”

“It’s th’ most fastest ‘lil ship I ever owned! It’s the prototype ‘fer the Drunker! Don’t that seem kinda…uh…”

“Feminine?”

“…I was thinkin’ sedate,” Daar said, gleefully deploying a fancier word for a change. Banter with Naydi was the most funnest!

And for once, they had real privacy. He’d decided to commandeer the prototype and have it converted into a luxury yacht for her. Well…he’d tried to buy it first, but Clan politics got in the way and it turned into a gift from Clan Ironpaw to the Females. But still, it was nice. After all, she travelled on official business just as much as him and while Daar tended to just grab whatever dropship or warship was available, he felt like his love needed something fancier.

The problem was, she kept turning down his names for it. She had an almost Human-like picky streak about ship names.

“I don’t plan on cruising the spacelanes with it, Daar. Besides, it’s all…a bit much, I think. Doesn’t a gift like this demand a good name?”

“I mean…you ain’t wrong. I named my precision hand tools!”

“You named them Pokey and Son of Pokey, Bumpkin.”

“Also Stabby Two: Electric Boogaloo!”

“…Why?”

“We wuz watchin’ bad movies one night! They can’t seem ‘ta get enough o’ them’ awful balls-damned period Clan epics…but hey! Their old sci-fi stuff is neat!”

“You’re very weird, my love.”

Daar chittered happily and stretched out on the long, wide couch she’d had installed. Keeda’s nuts, it was good ‘ta take a load off sometimes. One day out of every eight didn’t feel like enough, but he made the most of that day whenever it came around.

“I could get used ‘ta this,” he rumbled, and pulled Naydi into himself for the most tightest snuggle she’d allow for the moment; the cub was coming along big and fast. “Jus’ you an’ me!”

She combed her claws through his whiskers. “No advisors ringing day and night…”

“Or interruptin’ at the worstest times…”

“No— oof!”

Daar chittered fondly and turned his attention to her belly. “Fightin’ to get out?”

Naydra stifled a hiccup. “Ugh. He’s even fiercer than the last…” she paused and blinked as a tiny paw pressed against her skin from the inside. “…the last one.”

Daar laid a paw on the wriggling cub and felt it settle down. Fuck, but bein’ away from them was gonna be hard.

Naydra was due. She’d already pushed a little past when she shoulda travelled to the Grand Commune, actually. She was a healthy mother herself, she’d had plenty of cubs before… there shouldn’t be any problems.

But if there were, she wanted the best obstetrics going, and there was nowhere better than the hospital at the Grand Commune. Shit, they even treated Human mothers when things went real wrong, and when Human births went wrong they went very wrong.

…She’d be all but unvisitable, though. That part of tradition really sucked nuts. It was necessary, and Daar weren’t a ‘Back to shy away from necessary, but…

“I’m gonna miss ‘ya terribly.”

“I will message you every day! And you will have affairs of state to distract you, at least.”

“Eh…less o’ that as we go on. I’m tryin’ ‘ta get the Clans back ‘ta thinkin’ independently again.”

She duck-nodded and moved her claws up to scritch lightly behind his ears. “That would be nice. A return to how things were, a little bit.”

Daar shook his head. “I don’t think we can ever really go back, t’be honest. Still gotta wean ‘em off, though. Ain’t gonna happen in a day, but it needs to happen sooner or later. One day there won’t be a Great Father again, an’ they need to be ready for it.”

“The sooner the better.”

“Balls, yeah. Ooh, right there–!” Naydi always knew the bestest way to ear-scritch! He panted happily, and relaxed.

The yacht’s pilot was under pretty strict orders to interrupt them for only one thing: the end of their journey. The Humans took security at Cimbrean very seriously, and even the Great Father had to wait some. He had diplomatic immunity but that didn’t make him immune to the time it took to arrange his own safety.

He didn’t mind. This was one of his “unofficial” visits anyway, where they’d discreetly clear him through and let him get on with his day. A small abuse of privilege, maybe, but he needed to keep some part of a normal life or he might just go insane. For Daar, “normal” meant “visit his friends” now and then. And buy corn dogs. And tacos! And ice cream for Naydi. And stuff.

And get a good training session in! It’d been way too long since he’d lifted balls-out…

Still… he kinda wished he could pass on all that if it meant more Naydi.

“…You should see the other guy?” he suggested, returning to the subject of naming the yacht.

“Humans are rubbing off on you,” Naydra sniffed. She didn’t need prompting to follow his lurch in topic. “Besides, again: too boisterous. This is a yacht and I’ll be using it for diplomacy, it needs to sound respectable!”

“Aww–!”

“I know you can do respectable,” she half-encouraged, half-chided him.

“Sure,” he crowed. “Ain’t nobody disrespects me!”

Naydi chittered at his gratuitous play-bragging, and gently pinched his ear with her claws. “That’s not what I meant!”

Daar chittered again, and finally took the thought seriously. Once upon a time, he’d thought Coombes, Walsh and Hoeff were crazy for takin’ so long over naming the ship, but then he’d kinda fallen in love with it partly because of the name. So much that he’d insisted on resurrecting the Drunk on Turkey name in its successor. They’d been right: names mattered.

“…What about the Hopeful Star?” he asked. That was the focus of an old story he’d found among the ancient texts gifted to him by Clan Highmountain after his coronation. The Highmountains hadn’t seen a lot of value in the kind of story the ancient Gao had told their cubs—they’d been more interested in whether or not the star in question might be a real supernova—but Daar had obsessed over it, shared it with Gyotin and traded long, thoughtful letters with him over its deeper message.

He’d also discussed it with Naydra, whose ears pricked up as she thought about it.

“…That’s sly of you, Bumpkin. Not many people know what it actually means.”

“An’ it sounds like the same kinda name the One-Fangs use,” Daar added. “So it’ll just be our little detail.”

“Why do they name their ships that way?”

Daar shrugged. “Iunno. Clans got their traditions. Sometimes even they don’t really know where it comes from…”

The interruption finally came. It was simple enough, just a polite chime and a light in the ceiling telling them to buckle in to their seats for landing. They rubbed noses and Daar made sure Naydra was properly secure in her seat before buckling himself in.

The descent was perfectly smooth and soft, and the landing was as gentle as a Mother laying her first cub in its cradle. When the hatch popped, the smell of Tiritya Island flooded in.

Sea air, cubs and females. Flowers, herbs and honey from the kitchen garden, the ubiquitous petrochemical zest shared by landing pads all over the galaxy, and a thousand other things besides. It was a nasal symphony unique to this one small corner of an alien planet that had become the future of the Gaoian species.

Naydra descended the steps first, and Daar followed her reluctantly. He hated this part. It had sucked balls with their first cub, and it never got better. He wouldn’t smell her again until the cub had been weaned, which could be months away.

He could still steal another great big hug, though. And maybe a nip on her ear.

“I love you, Naydi. More’n anythin’.”

“I know.” She sniffed his nose. “I’ll miss you too.”

Then they were in public and there was no more time for affection.

Whoever had planned the island’s layout had put the Guard-Sisters’ barracks right where visitors arriving by shuttle could see them training, in a clear statement: ‘This is what you’ll have to deal with if you start trouble.’

The Guard-Sisters had always been a large and fierce corps, but now they were doubly so and they’d learned their lesson about weaponry. Fusion spears and blades might be traditional and ceremonial and perfectly deadly in skilled hands—Balls, Yulna was only alive thanks to Myun’s prowess with a blade—but guns were better.

Once upon a time the Guard-Sisters down in that field would have been stabbing, slashing and parrying. Now, they were running assault courses for best time, spurred by the valkyrie calls of the Guard-Mothers. Daar watched one young Sister with a professional eye as she launched herself four-pawed into the gauntlet and flowed through it like a clawed silk ribbon. She’d mastered the art of smoothly transitioning her gait and readying her weapon in one motion, freeing herself to maneuver with maximum efficiency and without hindering her ability to shoot.

Balls, there were veteran units in the Grand Army that didn’t know how to fight like that.

He was interrupted by a familiar and very welcome voice.

“I hope you approve, My Father…”

Daar turned, briefly forgetting the wrench of being parted from Naydi as he realized he’d just been reunited with another precious soul.

“Myun!”

His most favoritest daughter chittered happily as he abandoned any pretense at decorum and tackle-snoogled her half to death.

“Mrf! My Father! Yes, hello! I missed you too.”

There were some stifled chitters from a few of the other females in attendance, and a completely unstifled one from Naydra.

“Hello, Myun,” she said warmly.

Myun’s rise through the ranks had been volcanic. Saving the Mother-Supreme’s life at the height of the biodrone crisis had earned her prestige and notoriety… and the sad fact that all of the senior guard-mothers had been biodrones themselves or else slaughtered in the opening seconds of the war had left her plenty of room to be promoted into.

She’d earned a terrible injury in the process, too. But now! Look at her! The wound had been properly tended to, but she’d kept the scar up her right cheek as a mark of pride and it made her even more beautiful than she’d been before. The hardship she’d endured had given weight to her personality, and now she was perhaps the most formidable female Daar had ever met, besides Naydi of course.

Daar pulled both of them to himself for one last hug. “You take care of my Naydi, ‘kay? I hear she’s a pawful!”

“She’s in safe paws, I promise,” Myun replied.

“I know,” Daar pressed his nose to hers affectionately. “I always knew.”

“What do you think of the assault course?”

“…Not-so-secretly, I kinda wanna give it a go.”

Daar glanced back down at the training area. The young guard he’d been watching was panting happily at the end of the course while her sisters celebrated around her, and she looked fiercely eager to throw herself back into it for a second go. He couldn’t see her time from where he was standing, but the Guard-Mother looked satisfied with it.

“I’m sure you’d earn a dozen mating contracts if you did,” Naydi said with a sly look.

“Ha! Well…”

Myun chittered. “I’d like to respectfully ask the Great Father to please not interrupt my training schedule,” she said.

“I’d be a fool to step in ‘yer way, Myun. Go. I think there’s Sisters down there who ain’t tired!”

“Let’s get the mother-to-be inside, first,” Myun said. She gently stepped aside and ushered Naydra toward the waiting nurse-sisters, who flocked around and generally started acting like Naydra was made of spun sugar and would break if touched too firmly. Daar saw Myun roll her eyes, and had to fight down a chitter of his own.

It was a short walk up the slope to the commune’s front doors. Like the ones at Wi Kao, these were huge wooden things with decorative metal, though where the Wi Kao commune’s doors had been banded with black iron, these were polished to the point where they shone even in the dim light of an overcast day. They weren’t thrown open, however: Naydra had requested no great ceremony, so she went through the smaller wicket gate just like everyone else. The guard-sisters on either side came to attention as they approached, but other than that there was no fanfare or fuss.

Daar only noticed that he was unconsciously following after her into the Commune when Myun cleared her throat. Her tone of voice changed, from familiar and warm to professional.

“My Father…”

Daar paused, and blinked. The guards hadn’t challenged him, because they couldn’t; the Females had submitted to him, after all. He, alone among all males of the Gao, was permitted unfettered access to their world.

Which was why he had to restrain himself.

He stopped, then took a step back. “…Thank you, my daughter.”

Myun duck-nodded sympathetically, and the moment passed. With a heavy sigh, Daar watched until Naydra was out of sight, then watched a little longer as Myun gave him an apologetic parting duck-nod and followed Naydi into the commune. Finally, once the door was closed, he turned and padded away down the path back toward the landing pad. There was a shuttle waiting there to take him to Folctha, and from there he could enjoy a few hours of just being Daar.

Leaving Naydi always left him feeling frustrated. Normally he’d solve that by wooing females and testing out his cheesiest come-on lines…maybe try his luck (and get shot down again!) with that cute little number over at Ninja Taco in Folctha…

…But that kind of thing always felt wrong when Naydi was on his mind.

Well, not all was lost; he had more than one way to burn off frustration. He shook his pelt out, whipped out his communicator, and sent a message to Warhorse. They were so close in strength these days, maybe today would be the day he finally settled the question…

Daar chittered to himself ruefully. He really were the most predictablest tail ever, sometimes. But that was what made him, him. Gyotin and Naydi were right. Balls, everyone was. Daar couldn’t be anything but himself if he was going bear the burden of being the Great Father.

It was high time for the Great Father to remember who Daar was.

Date Point: 16y2m AV

Hierarchy/Cabal Joint Communications session #1535

++0007++: <Aghast> You infected them with unrestricted nanites?!

++Cynosure++: No, of course not. The technology’s capacity to replicate is tightly constrained. It literally can’t grow in the absence of compatible tissue.

++0011++: Is this how you infiltrated Sol?

++Cynosure++: <Pleased> Indeed! I infected the crew of ‘My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’ at Origin, and had the pilot transfer to their new mining ship when the opportunity arose. The droud function came in very useful indeed when I needed to terminate the biodrone. It sat quite peacefully and watched the stars until it suffocated.

++Proximal++: <Uneasy> I have to admit, constrained or not… I don’t much like the idea of this technology. We Declined the OmoAru specifically because of it, after all.

++0007++: I’m more concerned by your sudden reverse-course on this, Cynosure. You fomented a conspiracy within the Hierarchy, established the Cabal, somehow found a way to avoid being incorporated into a 0001 instance and all along your objective allegedly was to ensure long-term cooperation with the Humans.

++Cynosure++: …How much Human literature have you read, 0007?

++0007++: About twelve gigabytes. Why?

++Cynosure++: So you are well aware that they’ve considered the dangers of self-replicating technology.

++0007++: Yes?

++Cynosure++: And yet they persist in developing it.

++0007++: Perhaps that makes them better qualified to develop it.

++Cynosure++: <Anger> That is snivelling apologetics! And in their case, it’s hubris!

++0011++: You’ve held them to be reasonable before.

++Cynosure++: And I have adjusted my opinion in light of new evidence!

++0004++: Calm yourself, please.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER Proximal HAS QUIT

++Cynosure++: <strained contrition> …Apologies. It is… we all know how difficult it is to admit to having been grievously wrong. I thought the Humans were one thing, and they have now proven themselves to be quite another.

++0007++: Proximal had a good point, however. Arutech is a self-replicating machine. Even though its ability to replicate may be tightly limited, any replicant can mutate given sufficient time.

++0004++: It does seem inappropriate to use the very thing we are sworn to destroy.

++Cynosure++: I have my own misgivings. But the alternative was to not penetrate the Human defences at all. Their security measures are too effective and reliable in their simplicity.

++0007++: <resigned> So long as it works, then…

++Cynosure++: It already has. We have a force of Injunctors on Earth, one compliant biodrone recovered from an internment facility, and two infiltrators en route to Cimbrean. They should be arriving about now, in fact.

++0004++: That is considerably more progress than we’ve made since we lost that Abductor in Egypt six years ago…

++Cynosure++: It’s a foothold. There is a lot of hard work ahead of us before it becomes something more substantive.

++0004++: And you’re committed to this? You’ve given up on Humans as a viable partner species?

++Cynosure++: Reluctantly, but yes. They’re too unpredictable, and their relationship with the Gao has made both species stronger. And they’re corrupting the Corti, now. I say, break the linchpin and we can watch that relationship fall apart.

++0007++: What is the first step on Earth? Dissemination of the Arutech?

++Cynosure++: Where necessary, yes. Cybernetic biodrones are more convenient—control over them is immediate and complete, as opposed to the prolonged period of indoctrination an Arutech drone must undergo—and they will continue to form the backbone of the plan. Arutech drones will serve for infiltration and intelligence gathering.

++0004++: All of which must ultimately culminate in disabling the planetary wormhole suppressor.

++Cynosure++: Let us be precise about the required objective. We must remove Humanity as a threat. That doesn’t mandate any particular approach, and…I confess, I still believe there is something worth preserving, or at least studying in them. But that is secondary to preserving the Substrate.

++0011++: On that note, I’m pleased to report some success. The Guvnurag remnant have been induced to expand to two new temperate worlds. And, importantly, they plan to do this without notifying the Dominion. Their expansion will safeguard a larger Substrate.

++0004++: That is good news, but four planets scarcely compare to the entire Dominion.

++0011++: It’s an anchor. At the very least, it prevents the complete loss of Substrate.

++Cynosure++: True, and I congratulate you on your success. Now, let us focus on ensuring that your anchor never becomes necessary.

++0004++: Where do you propose we begin?

++Cynosure++: Let us wait and see how well the infiltration of Cimbrean goes. It will be the first real test of the Arutech drones. After that… well, then we can plan.

Emote channel: 137 instances of <agreement>
Consensus reached.

++0004++: Very well, then. Let us watch Cimbrean closely…

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: SESSION SUSPENDED
STAND BY

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

Leemu had become unresponsive.

Nofl’s quarantine facility had alerted him after the patient had been anomalously still for twenty minutes, and the reason why became obvious upon a quick inspection of the cell: Leemu was sprawled on his back, staring blissfully up at the ceiling as though it was the most transcendentally fascinating thing in existence.

Seeing as there was nobody around to play up for, Nofl didn’t bother with the usual clucking ‘dear, oh dear,’ he’d have usually produced. He settled instead for something a good deal more robust.

“…Well, fuck.”

He’d been afraid of this. The droud function was, in his view, perhaps the most horrifying aspect of Arutech and it had rendered the OmoAru themselves all but extinct. Only a hardy handful of particularly resilient souls remained on their homeworld, and even they spent more time smiling at clouds than actually looking after themselves.

Even if stripping the tech out of their cells was a possibility—and despite his musings to Arés and Powell about a complete cellular rebuild, Nofl suspected that was basically just a fantasy—the OmoAru were dead. Even if they could somehow be cured, they were all so hopelessly addicted to the droud now that freeing them would involve plunging them into the worst, deepest and blackest depression a sapient mind could experience.

In Leemu’s case, it took interrogation off the table. There was no point in trying to bore, cajole or manipulate information out of somebody who could be endlessly entertained by watching dry paint.

It also took away much hope for any possible recovery, which left Nofl with one choice. He pressed a button, and stasis-bubbled the quarantine room.

His other patients weren’t doing so well either, but for entirely different reasons. For example, Bozo was becoming manically hyperactive as he searched to do something other than run around in circles, which was driving Narl into an exhausted fugue.

Preed was sitting despondently on his bed and staring at his feet. There’d been an awkward conversation with staff from the Thai consulate, who’d eventually left with a grim promise about their citizen’s rights and the Folctha government’s responsibilities… it certainly hadn’t done Preed’s mood any good. Nofl hadn’t been able to extract so much as a word from him since, and although he suspected that Preed’s arm must be throbbing and sore from fighting off the Arutech infection, the glass of water and the painkillers he’d left the old man sat neglected where Nofl had left them.

Gorku, at least, was asleep. He’d found Nofl’s gauntlet of tests, questions and scans thoroughly draining, and had ultimately insisted on being allowed to rest. Nofl was pretty sure he might have a solution to the big Gaoian’s linguistic troubles before long, but he had to admit: in this instance, cybernetics were the sensible solution.

And therein lay something to truly hate the Hierarchy for. A whole field of medicine was now tainted, permanently. Cybernetics had promised not only to repair and enhance the abilities of organic life forms, but indeed to expand what a living being could do! The possibilities had been theoretically endless!

As much as there was no sense in crying over spilled milk, Nofl did feel a touch of something like mourning for the field of neurocybernetic implantation. It was, if nothing else, a depressing waste of potential.

His sullen funk was interrupted by his phone. It was a human model that he’d programmed some very personal apps for, and he’d rigged up a small drone to relay calls through it. The drone kit was actually a brightly colored children’s toy, which Nofl approved of on several levels. Naturally, he’d extensively expanded the technology and programming for an adult Corti’s needs, but it really was rather delightful to think that there were human younglings running around building drones out of little plastic bricks.

He turned to face it as it swooped toward him, chirping merrily. “Yes?”

“Nofl, this is Third Director Tran aboard the Empirical Razor. We just entered Cimbrean orbit.”

Oh. Well. Apparently Nofl’s word counted for a lot with the Directorate, then. And thank goodness for well-integrated planetary communications with universal telecommunications gateways, where a Third Director could simply arrive in orbit and phone Nofl’s office as though it were a trivial matter of routine rather than a miracle of standardization.

“Ah, welcome Director. Thank you for such a swift response.”

“Your message specifically mentioned Arutech in a non-OmoAru subject. The First Director was gravely concerned.”

“Rightly so!” Nofl agreed. “Should I prepare to transfer my patients up to you, or will you come to me?”

“We will come to you first,” Tran declared. “I am sure the Human governments will prefer it that way.”

“Oh good. That gives me time to clean up the dirty laundry.”

Nofl never tired of irking his so-called betters, but Tran was becoming unfortunately well-adapted to his proclivities. His reply to the joke was level-headed: he ignored it. “Please do. I will see you shortly.”

Nofl sighed at the beep as the call ended and looked around. At least they were taking this seriously. Maybe there was hope for Leemu yet.

That thought made him chuckle. Realistically it was a stupid and irrational hope. But somehow he couldn’t let go of it.

“…Ever the optimist, Nofl…” he muttered to himself, and fetched his gravity harness.

There was a tacit assumption among Humankind that the Corti were cowardly and unadventurous. That was, perhaps, a bit unfair. The cowardly bit was dead on, of course. But science was nothing but an adventure! How could exploring the very mechanisms of infinity be unadventurous? Ridiculous. No other species had probed the unknown so relentlessly.

Relentlessly, but not recklessly. Hence Nofl’s personal gravity harness.

He rarely used it nowadays, not even when visiting those parts of the city that were kept at Earth gravity: Stunted and deprived though it was, the Corti body could still gain strength and endurance, at least to the point where spending time in Human gravity environments was tolerable. Not comfortable or easy, but tolerable.

The harness, however, just made things certain. A lot of the gyms in Folctha experimented with supergravity training, but none more so than the Dog House. It was the hardest of the hardcore gyms, and had become a bit of a destination for adventurous, like-minded athletes from Earth (and increasingly, Gao) who wanted to test themselves against the very best to ever live.

On that thought, Nofl satisfied himself that it would be difficult indeed to deride him as “unadventurous” as he rented a car across town to venture into the Dog House’s infamous basement “dungeon.”

He checked his personal gravity harness one last time before braving the stairs. Some of the most terrifyingly strong examples of Deathworlder physiology alive would be busy straining their bodies down there, pushing themselves against limits so far beyond any Corti that it was difficult to imagine.

It certainly sounded liked distilled aggression down there. Loud, incredibly violent music was made barely tolerable by the muffling effect of walls, and charging through what was surely a sonic blitzkrieg came the sound of a man’s voice in full force.

“Fuck yeah!! You’re gonna fuckin’ smash your PR!”

The words were certainly positive. The tone of voice, on the other hand, was an incitement to murder.

Another voice added his own thunderous note to the battle cry. “You got it!”

“Yeah!”

“You fuckin’ got it!!”

“Fuck yeah!”

“Get under that fuckin’ bar!!”

Nofl reached the bottom of the steps in time to get a good look at the thick steel bar in question. It was loaded with solid metal plates all the way to its edges and was bending alarmingly under the strain. The mass alone was…astounding. He made note of the blue warning light at the threshold and blanched when he saw what the gravity inside the room was set to. The resulting weight under that heavy a force…

Julian was in the process of inserting himself underneath it and taking that incredible weight across his broad, heavy shoulders. Where normally he had an open and friendly face, right then he was wild-eyed and uncaged as though something had just made the mistake of becoming his mortal enemy.

The two vastly larger Deathworlders with him looked even wilder. Clearly, the shouting had been their doing.

What followed was legitimately terrifying. Spurred by yet more roars of encouragement, Julian took the full weight as he lifted the bar off the rack, then bent at the knees and hips while keeping his back straight. The bar went down, his rear came alarmingly close to the floor. He made a guttural, red-faced grunt, and the corded muscles in his thick neck bulged from the immense forces at play. More yelling, a look of agony and then, with a defiant bellow, the bar went back up. Down, up, down again…shaking with tremendous effort, back up for a third time.

Not content with that feat, his companions quickly whipped a plate off each side of the bar and dropped them to the matting with a calamitous thud. The feat was repeated, each time until Julian could lift no more, then another plate was pulled off…and so on. When there were only a few plates left on each side and Julian stalled, Warhorse ambled behind him and provided the barest assisting nudge against the bar, bellowing right next to his ear and “encouraging” him to force out another dozen repetitions. Down to two plates, even more reps, than one plate, the bare bar, and finally just his own bodyweight. By then Julian could hardly move but Adam was merciless, and didn’t let him stop until he could barely rise on his own. It took a shockingly long time to reach that point, and Etsicitty spent it with an expression like he was in profound pain.

Despite the apparently excruciating ordeal, when he finally freed himself of his torment and collapsed onto a nearby bench, gasping for air and wobbling as if he could barely sit upright, he did so with an expression of almost psychedelic delight. Fascinating.

Warhorse was no less pleased.

“Fuck yeah, man!! That’s the best fuckin’ set you’ve ever done!”

Julian’s expression was one of pure savagery, though when he eventually caught his breath his voice was quiet and growly enough that Nofl could hardly hear him. “Fuck yeah. Put it in the book.”

“Dude,” Adam enthused. “There ain’t nobody on Earth that could squat like that! Literally!”

Curiously, Julian laughed at that compliment. “Ha! I hear how you qualified that shit!”

“Well,” Adam grinned sheepishly. “Didn’t wanna embarrass ‘ya too hard, y’know.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Julian grinned and reached down to the floor beside him and mopped the copious moisture off his face with a towel. He also took an enormous swig of water from a bottle as big as Nofl’s torso. “Don’t worry big fella, I know my place.”

“Bah, don’t let ‘em git away with it, Playboy! Ain’t nobody outside o’ HEAT could beat you! Balls, a buncha’ them couldn’t, neither!”

“Well…” Julian grinned again and took another swig of water. “Gotta admit that feels pretty good! Too bad huge muscles don’t make me much good at TIG welding. Al’s been teaching me!”

“Yeah? How ‘ya doin’ at it?”

“Terrible!” Julian laughed, “So far my beads look like crap!”

“Ha! You’ll git good, don’t worry. Just practice! ‘Ya shoulda seen my first beads! Damn near lit myself on fire a buncha times when I was little…”

Despite the friendly banter, all three of them looked as if they’d come through a terrible ordeal. Julian was ruddy, plainly exhausted, and dripping with sweat. ‘Horse was glowing with both pride and perspiration, and looking thoroughly pleased with himself…

The Great Father of the Gao was also soaked from head to toe, his huge tongue lolling out the side of his mouth in a delighted, exhausted fugue.

Nofl hadn’t foreseen his presence at all. Oh dear.

“Fuck, I’ve needed ‘ta lift like this ‘fer a coupl’a weeks! Our turn now!” the Great Father roared. “Let’s show our little guy here what a real lift looks like!”

The two much larger males set up their lift at a nearby station, and those weights utterly dwarfed the incredible feat Julian had just accomplished. The equipment was clearly custom: a longer, much thicker and heavier bar, bigger and (according to the numbers) vastly more massive plates. The entire aggressive ritual was repeated, first by Daar and then by Adam, Julian cheering along just as violently as the other two had for him. Nofl watched with no small sense of intimidation. It took considerably longer for both males to finish their task as there were many more plates and many more repetitions at each step. The ground shook underfoot as each plate hit the floor, which Julian helped tidy up behind them with a subtle grimace of effort.

The two titans struggled mightily under the absurd load. Nofl didn’t know which of them was “better” at it, but at that level of performance, the answer seemed more academic than anything.

He waited at the doorway until they had reached a comparatively quiescent phase in their exercise. All three were now toying with relatively “smaller” handheld weights and engaging in some form of aggressively jocular banter while they trained. The two bigger males suddenly grew much louder and decided it was time to wrestle. They tackled each other with a loud, solid whump of enormous masses slamming together, and tumbled across the floor in what must have been some form of Deathworlder play. There didn’t seem to be any harm intended…

Julian, for his part, shook his head quietly and continued what Nofl decided must be bicep curls. Even in that simple seeming, one-armed exercise, Julian was casually curling many times Nofl’s mass under gravity that would crush him to goo, and his weight was considerably less massive than what the other two had been using. The sheer physical capability the three displayed was intimidating, deep in instincts a Corti sometimes forgot they still had.

For a moment, the ongoing fight and general display of Deathworlder danger prompted Nofl to consider creeping back upstairs and simply calling them instead… but his pride won out. He’d be damned if he would prove the cowardly Corti stereotype right today.

He straightened his own posture and knocked. The two combatants paused and looked up from the floor at Julian, then the trio collectively glanced in Nofl’s direction. A collection of firmly predatory grins lit their faces.

Predatory…yet, friendly. Daar in particular yipped happily, “Nofl! ‘Ya plannin’ on joinin’ us?”

Nofl had met Daar before, of course. Before he’d been raised to a peerless degree of both authority and responsibility. Back, in fact, when he’d still merely been Champion Daar, as opposed to the most powerful individual in the galaxy.

That grin was a sight he’d never expected to see again. And Nofl could think very, very quickly indeed sometimes. Especially when it came to speaking to people who were a long way up the ladder from his perspective.

“Oh… dear, this is embarrassing. Caught playing voyeur!”

Plumping for flippant sass might have been a risky move if he’d been dealing with anybody else, but Nofl had memorized the Directorate Intelligence College’s psychological dossier on Daar. The Corti knew a great deal about what made him tick, which was why Daar’s reaction was a pleased basso profundo chitter.

“I could smell ‘yer fungus-chompin’ tail the second ‘ya entered the buildin’, Nofl,” he rumbled.

“You caught my delicate bouquet over the stink of this place? Your nose really is legendary…”

“Man’s gotta have a talent,” the Great Father rumbled drily.

“…Right. May I come in please? You’ll have to turn the gravity down, I’m afraid.”

‘Horse detangled himself from the Great Father, grabbed his phone and tapped at it a few times. After a moment a faint infrasonic noise that Nofl hadn’t really registered faded to nothing, and the warning light over the door shut off. 1G: Earth standard. He then thumped over and opened the door for Nofl. Apparently as an extra safety measure it locked from the inside. Sensible.

“Is this how Deathworlders train?” Nofl asked as he ventured over the threshold.

“Naw,” boomed Daar, who was thrashing back and forth against the floor, presumably to reach some frustrating itch. “‘Least not all of us! ‘Ya gotta be a special kind o’ insane t’train like we do. Don’t’cha fellas?!” There was a lusty chorus of acclaim from the other two. “Ain’t no Corti can handle this, that’s for sure.”

“Not yet, at least,” Nofl said. “Who knows, in a few generations…”

“Man,” Adam laughed and wrapped a gigantic and uncomfortably hot, moist arm around Nofl’s shoulders in what was probably a friendly gesture. “There’s a thought…anyway, que pasa?”

Corti weren’t known for their sense of smell. For which, in this instance, Nofl was quite glad. He didn’t particularly want to know exactly what pure testosterone smelled like.

“Have you spoken with your father today?” Nofl asked him.

“Nah, not yet. Why?”

“Or Colonel Powell?”

“Nope.”

“Something important came up.”

Daar heaved a sigh. “Look, little guy, I ain’t had a real good lift in ages an’ I been lookin’ forward ‘ta this all week, so unless you got somethin’ fuckin’ planet-shatteringly important—”

“…Yes, I think I rather do,” Nofl decided. “Perhaps even literally. A laughing man is no laughing matter, after all…”

That instantly drained all the mirth out of the room, as expected. Both Daar and ‘Horse sobered like Nofl had dumped cold water over them.

The shift in mood definitely wasn’t lost on Julian either, who glanced at the pair of them. “…Did I miss a briefing?” he asked.

“Yes. We gotta go. Now. You…”

“I have business with him, in fact,” Nofl said and gestured at Julian, who looked nonplussed.

“What kind of business?”

“Well, there’s a ship full of high-ranking Directorate brass orbiting above, and they want to talk with you about your cavemonkey friends.”

“Wait. Right now?”

“Yes. Right now.”

“Uh…Wow. Okay.”

Daar sighed, and looked almost wistfully at the weights and bars. “Ain’t no rest ‘fer a Great Father after all…”

“At least we got a good session in,” Warhorse commented helpfully. “Maybe we can lift again tonight?”

“See, that’s the ridiculous thing ‘bout you Humans,” Daar chittered tiredly. “You in particular. We just spent hours liftin’ like maniacs an’ ‘yer already thinkin’ ‘bout liftin’ again!”

“Yeah, well…look at you, though! Today you matched me pound for pound on every lift. You and Yan are the only guys who can! Hell, I bet if my equipment could take the weight, you’d straight beat me on the leg press, too!”

“Yeah! Gotta be strong t’be fast! I’ll take ‘ya up on ‘yer challenge, ‘Horse! You get a better press, an’ I’ll come over nice an’ rested up, an’ we’ll see just who’s got the stronger legs!”

“Deal!”

Julian, who by rare fortune was easily the smallest Deathworlder in the room, gave Nofl a tired, amused Look that communicated much about the foibles of his two thunderous friends.

“You two are ridiculous,” Julian commented, then began performing a series of calisthenics.

“But…” Daar growled low to himself, “while I ‘preciate ‘yer esteem, let’s be honest. I still ain’t conditioned quite as good as you, and ‘yer always a bit over-optimistic ‘bout these things, too.”

“Eh…I think my friends maybe tend to underestimate themselves and their limits too easily…”

“Mebbe,” Daar chittered. “But I don’t wanna delude m’self. I may be ‘yer match ‘fer strength, ‘specially on a fantastic day like today, but I’ll never match up wit’ your endurance, neither. An’ anyways, I think we better get movin’ ‘cuz ‘yer gonna git recalled any minute, I bet.”

“Well,” Adam again grinned sheepishly. “Okay yeah, I get a bit over-enthusiastic sometimes. But don’t underestimate yourself, man! You’re awfully damn—Goddamnit.”

Sometimes, coincidences were enough to make even the most rational Corti wonder. No sooner had Daar uttered those words than Adam’s phone sprang into life with what Nofl recognized as the theme song from a cartoon he’d briefly studied out of anthropological fascination. The plot had been paper-thin and had mostly consisted of extremely large and muscular men screaming a lot while their hair inexplicably changed color…

Which made it oddly apt for ‘Horse, actually.

The sheer…geekiness of that ringtone contrasted sharply against the pair of blood-dripping, shattered Hunter skulls that plastered themselves gruesomely across his chest. Clearly his e-tattoo was programmed to respond to his phone.

“…Yup, that’s a recall,” he said ruefully, and answered it. “Yes? …Understood. I’ll be there in ten.”

Julian chuckled low to himself and ran a hand through the mop of his hair. “Sounds like you jinxed it, Tiggs.”

“Jinxing is what tiggers do best,” the Great Father grumbled mirthlessly. “Right. Imma go hose off upstairs. I’ll…see ‘ya later. And tell Tiny he’s a wimp ‘fer not showin’ up today!” With a round of guffaws and a nod to the other two, Daar turned and slinked silently up the stairs.

Adam looked at Julian and grinned. “He didn’t wanna be outlifted by you again, I bet.”

Another quiet chuckle. “Well…he keeps dodging us, he’ll be living up to that nickname soon enough. Anyway…” He gave Adam a meaningful look. “Get going, I’ll take care of this.”

“Right. See ‘ya.”

Nofl found himself alone with Julian, who sighed, flopped to the floor and began to stretch. How a being as heavily built as he was could contort himself like that was beyond Nofl’s comprehension. Eventually he grumbled to himself, then glanced at Nofl and sighed again.

“So, uh…fill me in.”

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Planet Rvzrk, Domain Space

Grandfather Garl of Stoneback, Warleader of the Grand Army

The last Hunters on the planet died in the same psychotic frenzy of teeth and claws as the very first.

That was the problem with Hunters. Breakin’ their spirit just didn’t happen. The fuckin’ things were soulless, an’ they didn’t negotiate, they didn’t surrender, they didn’t seem ‘ta fear death…

…Did make ‘em awful fun to murder, though. But it meant tearin’ up the rulebook on war, a bit. Shock and awe tactics? No point! Hunters couldn’t be shocked and awed. Psy-ops? Shit, half the time the fact the Hunters just didn’t give a fart meant the Gaoian troops got unnerved instead. Fighting between males was as much about intimidation as anything else, after all.

There just weren’t no way to intimidate a Hunter. There was only slaughter.

That fact cost a lotta lives. Not too many, but a lot. Especially in the early days of the cleansing, when the Hunters still had ammo for those crazy oversized bullet-throwers of theirs. When they ran out and fell back on kinetic pulse weaponry, the casualty rate dropped. Even an armored silverfur with proper shielding could handle KP, once they’d been fed up. Sure, they couldn’t wade through it like a Human, but they could get back up again.

The final Hunter holdout was a lumber plantation in a valley. They hid among the trees, dug a warren amid the roots and held out there even after the Firefangs dropped all kindsa crap on that forest. Repeated firestrikes burned the whole plantation down to ash, black earth, and jagged charcoal stumps, but they just emerged from the smoke and embers. Seismic tunnel-crushers shoulda buried the fuckers where they lived, but they just scuttled straight back up from under the ground.

Which was why the Clan’s engineer corps was busy diverting a nearby river to flood them out.

Champion Fiin was a smart one, and he left Garl to do his job without lookin’ over the older male’s shoulder. Garl approved of that: Good leaders knew the art of delegation, and Fiin was a good leader. In some ways—never say it out loud—for this moment in Stoneback’s history, he was maybe even a slightly better leader than Daar, who’d played the game of Champions extremely well but definitely was happiest when he was bein’ the Clan’s stud-prime.

Well…hard to blame ‘em, really.

Fiin had a little more… humility. If that was the right word. He’d come up the hard way. Daar, for all his hard work and determination, had life handed to him on a polished wooden platter. Fiin wasn’t naturally the most bestest at everything, but he’d made himself into what the Clan needed, and taken some hard lessons to heart along the way. Right now, while they rebuilt the Gao…maybe an authentic Champion was a bit better than a living Keeda.

One of Fiin’s lessons had been in accepting when other people knew better’n him. He knew he was still young, and he knew he didn’t know everything. Garl could really respect that.

Yeah. Garl felt good about leavin’ the Clan in Fiin’s paws. That was a load off, for sure. With luck, it’d be the last big worry off of Garl’s back.

“Why divert a river?” Fiin asked as he reviewed the map alongside Garl. “Why not, say, a thermobaric weapon?”

“Couple’a reasons,” Garl said. “We already bombed ‘em to shit an’ those tunnels are still there, so they’re prol’ly shielded an’ stuff. Firestrikes didn’t work neither, so they’re well-designed to keep out heat, pressure, flame… But I bet they don’t have SCUBA gear. We turn that valley into a new reservoir, an’ I’ll be happy to just leave ‘em ‘ta drown in their holes.”

“And it’s not as destructive, I guess…” Fiin duck-nodded as he ran a claw along the river’s course.

“Yeah. After all the nukes the Humans dropped, I don’t wanna go an’ ruin good land.”

“I can see why they set up there,” Fiin said. “That little bit of high ground in the middle of a depression. It’d be a good spot, if they controlled the area.”

“An’ it let us trap ‘em, and now we’re gonna drown ‘em jus’ like vermin,” Garl growled happily.

“When?”

“Late tonight. Lotta explosives ‘ta lay.”

“Can your field staff manage it without you?”

“…Yeah. But I’ll be honest, I really wanted ‘ta be there an’ see it happen.”

Fiin chittered. “Me too…I think we’ll have time.”

“You didn’t come here for the fireworks though,” Garl guessed.

“Yeah, they’re more like a happy bonus…” Fiin chittered briefly. “…I need you to muster forces for another mission, to begin re-deployment as soon as can be had.”

“This ‘fer the thing Fourth Fang’s doin’?”

“Uh-huh. They’ve done their recon and emplacement. Now we need to burn the Hierarchy’s shit to the ground.”

Garl chittered again. “…I ever tell you how I like the way you think, my Champion?”

Fiin flicked an ear, looking pleased. “I thought you’d approve. How quickly can you muster?”

“Two days. I’m thinkin’ I should leave this ‘ta Matso. And…uh, I have a request, my Champion.”

Fiin caught the sudden change in tone immediately and cocked his head. “Name it.”

“…There’s a, uh… well, a reason I wanna see that valley flood. It’s gonna be one’a the last things I can see clearly.”

Fiin paused, sniffed at him for a second, then keened softly. “…I see.”

“Oh, don’t go keenin’ at me like a weaning cub,” Garl grumbled. “I’m eighty-eight, it was gonna happen sooner or later. An’ I’m too old an’ horrible for the Crue-G ‘ta work.”

“Does the Great Father know?”

“Yeah. He sniffed it on me the mornin’ I first noticed my sight was startin’ to go. Figure I’ve got half a year, maybe. Gonna be blind as a rock in half that time, though… Can’t lead an army when I can’t see shit.”

“No, I ‘spose not. Uh…is Matso ready?”

Garl chittered. “Balls no! But neither was I… An’ neither were you, my Champion. He’s got what it takes, though… You know who he is?”

“I’ve heard the name. Story a lot like mine, too.”

“Yup. Whole lotta hidden treasures in the Clanless, if ‘yer smart enough ‘ta find ‘em.”

“Right, well…stay, then. Get this handed over. I’d still like you to pay a visit to Stinkworld, though. This is gonna need the touch of experience.”

“Aright, my Champion. Now git, I got work ‘ta do.”

Fiin nodded and sniffed noses with him, rested a brotherly paw on his shoulder, then turned back to his business. A Champion never rested.

Nor did a Grandfather, really. Not until the very end. Strange, he’d imagined he’d be worked up about the inevitable but really…he wasn’t. He’d had a good life, sired many cubs… shit, sired a Great Father!

Briefly, he wondered what Fyu’s own sire had been like. Maybe if there was an afterlife, he’d sniff the ol’ pelt out and they’d raise some Talamay together, or do whatever it was the Unseen did. If they did. Whatever.

Garl shook his pelt out. Balls, gettin’ close to nava mulch was makin’ him all sorts of sentimental! He should spread the cheer, and he knew just the victim to pounce on. He limbered up and ran like the wind over to Matso’s little encampment. He was definitely Daar’s sire and he wouldn’t get to enjoy his body for much longer…

…He did manage to restrain himself from flattening the much smaller silverfur with a tackle, though.

“Hey, Matso! I’ve got ‘ya a challenge I bet ‘yer gonna just love the shit outta…”

Date Point: 16y2m AV
The Thinghall, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Every civilization needed its icon of executive power. The UK had the black door of Number Ten Downing Street and, somewhere behind it, the Cabinet Room; the USA had the White House, and the Oval Office; Folctha had the Alien Palace.

The Prime Minister’s official office, the East Room, lurked high on the third floor with a truly grand view out over Palace Lake and along the river that took in most of the city. It was square, and simply but classically adorned with long curtains and a forest green carpet.

The fireplace and desk were nice touches, though. Both were made from native materials: the fireplace was sedimentary stone full of Cimbrean fossils, and the Prime Minister’s desk was a species of wood native to the Folctha region that was slowly going extinct thanks to the Microbial Action Zone…

There was a framed copy of the colonial charter on the wall between the windows, twin large photographs of Earth and Cimbrean over the mantelpiece, and a tasteful portrait of the King over the long table on the south wall.

The Right Honourable Annette Winton PM had added her own touches. She always kept an orchid vase on one corner of her desk, for example, and a heavy antique clock on the other. The poor thing was hopelessly unsuited to Cimbrean’s twenty-eight hour day, but she kept it anyway just for its dignified tick.

The stately bookshelf beside the door was full of her own selection. Gabe very much approved of that collection: it ran the full gamut from Left to Right, from authoritarian to libertarian, and from secular to spiritual. Any collection that pointedly placed Marx and Hayek adjacent to each other on the same shelf, then settled a copy of Mein Kampf beside a small photograph of Winston Churchill, was worth appreciating.

It wasn’t that he particularly shared Winton’s politics—she was leader of the Progress Party, and Gabe had voted New Whig—but he had a good working relationship with her regardless.

Right now, she was frowning at Nofl’s brief dictated summary of what exactly was afflicting his patients.

“…Transmittable?”

“It seems to be,” Gabe agreed. “That’s how Mister Chadesakan claims it happened, anyway. Leemu scratched his arm, and now he’s fighting off a nanotech infection.”

“If so, it’s mixed news,” Powell opined. They weren’t sitting at the desk, but instead were sitting informally at the long table with cups of tea (in Powell’s case) and coffee (in Gabe’s) while Winton listened and thought. “Summat like that has the potential to spread fast if it gains momentum. But from the sounds of it, Chadesakan got his scratch weeks before he reached us, an’ it’s festerin’ rather than spreadin’.”

“Is he particularly healthy?” Winton asked.

“He’s an old man. I wouldn’t call him frail, but he’s no spring chicken,” Gabe said.

“That’s a silver lining, then…” Winton pulled a face and placed her tablet delicately next to her glass of water. “…Still. If the Hierarchy have a new kind of biodrone that we can’t spot with ultrasound scanners…”

“Then we’ll rely on Gaoians and dogs,” Gabe said. “They’re a natural match for K9 units anyway. The Gaoian can verify what the dog’s nose finds… and we have plenty of Clanless refugees who’d jump at the chance to join the Folctha police.”

“Is this a request for more funding, Mister Arés?” Winton asked. Her tone was light and amused—Gabe always reminded her about police funding when he got the chance.

“Well, now you mention it…” Gabe chuckled. “But seriously. We’re going to need noses on the Jump Array twenty-eight seven, now. Every jump from… well, from anywhere could have a biodrone with it. And we should probably worry about the possibility that one managed to sneak through undetected before now.”

“Is it already that serious?”

“Oh aye!” Powell nodded sharply. “Pretty much everything that happened on Ceres wi’ the nuke and all that? It makes a lot more sense if that Sam Jordan bloke was a biodrone. Admiral Caruthers has ordered that My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon be quarantined immediately when they get back in contact, and the crew arrested. For all we know, the whole lot of ‘em were infected at Origin.”

“And Adele Park?”

“As soon as we’re done here, I’ll be takin’ the HEAT over to Ceres to secure her,” Powell said. Gabe decided not to comment on the eager note that crept into the colonel’s voice. Certainly he himself would have preferred to be out on the streets alongside a K9 unit or a Gaoian officer, but instead there he was sipping coffee in the lavish halls of government. Some part of him always rebelled at that.

“You’re going yourself?” Winton asked.

“Aye. Sensitive matter like this, I figure it’s best if I handle it in person.”

Winton nodded grimly, and adjusted her tablet so that it was perfectly parallel to the edge of the table. She always got excessively neat when she was unnerved by something. “…The crew of My Other Spaceship would have had plenty of time to spread the infection far and wide…” she said.

Gabe nodded. “Yes. Tracking down their families, all the people they met on shore leave and whoever else they might have opportunistically infected would be…” He paused, trying to think of an appropriate turn of phrase with enough weight to convey just how impossible what he was describing would really be.

Powell came to the rescue with typical British understatement. “…A tall bloody order,” he finished.

“…Yes.”

“…Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, then,” Winton said quietly. “Or else Earth…”

“I wouldn’t write Earth off that easy, Prime Minister,” Powell said. “We’re not dealing with the zombie plague, here. The Hierarchy have an uphill battle ahead o’ them, now that the Farthrow generator’s in.”

Winton smiled, but her reply was interrupted by the chunky, official-looking phone on her desk with its old-fashioned bell. She frowned at it, stood, crossed the room, and picked it up.

“Yes?”

Gabe saw her expression do an interesting kind of flicker through a whole hand of different looks before settling on… surprise? Definitely surprise. Alloyed with no small amount of alarm.

“…He is?” She glanced at Gabe. “…Of course he is. Yes, of course I’ll receive him.”

She put the phone down. “…Apparently the Great Father of the Gao just arrived.” She managed to say it in a peculiarly light way that belied the obvious knock to her composure. She poured herself a glass of water and sipped it. “Well. You did tell me he was in town.”

“Unofficially,” Gabe said. “I guess he musta heard about our laughing man.”

There was a knock at the door, and a human voice from outside: “The Great Father to see you, Prime Minister.”

“Thank you, Cerys. Show him in.”

The door opened, and Daar trundled into the room on fourpaw as the three of them stood to greet him. Or rather, Gabe and Powell stood—Winton was already on her feet, and deployed a stately smile and a well-rehearsed handshake.

“I’d expected more warning before our first meeting,” she said. “Welcome.”

Daar duck-nodded with a slightly apologetic set to his ears. “I’d normally give it, but I heard through a little grey fella we’ve got a big problem.”

“Aye. We’re all takin’ it seriously, even the Corti,” Powell said. Daar pant-grinned at him.

“Good ‘ta see you, Powell. I’m assumin’ my people din’t hear ‘bout this yet ‘cuz it literally just happened?”

“About…” Powell checked his watch. “A little over two hours ago.”

“Fair. I’ll be hearin’ from Thurrsto soon, then.”

“Won’t you sit down?” Winton offered, gesturing toward a large and very sturdy wingback chair by the bookshelf.

“Thanks, but I’d better not risk it. Looks nice and ‘spensive. Also my fur’s still wet.” Daar instead rose to his full height and rested his brutish, thigh-sized forearms across the chair’s back. “So what happened?”

The PM retreated to her desk and typed a brief letter while Gabe brought Daar up to speed. At one point she looked up, apologized with a ‘Please excuse me one moment, gentlemen,’ and vanished behind the fuzzy white-noise cuboid of a privacy field.

She dropped the field just as Powell finished explaining the details of his imminent mission to Ceres.

“Well. Stephen Davies and Arthur Sartori are both very happy about this,” she remarked sarcastically. “In fact, the President shared a little nugget with us. Apparently one of the biodrones at Camp Tebbutt escaped earlier this year.”

Gabe’s eyebrows flew up to where his hairline had once been. “I didn’t hear anything about that.”

“The camp asserted that since he mounted his escape in the middle of a January blizzard there was no way he survived. Unfortunately, they’ve scoured the area around the facility quite thoroughly since the thaw and come up empty-handed.”

“A blizzard, in Alaska, in January?” Powell mused. “Bloody hellfire. He should have frozen within two hundred yards!”

“We don’t know what Arutech is capable of,” Gabe said. “For all we know, it can warm a man up and keep him alive in those conditions.”

“Mm.” Winton’s expression was grim. “…I think Earth owes you a debt of gratitude for that Farthrow generator, Great Father.”

“Don’t suppose you’ve got a spare knockin’ around?” Powell joked. His delivery was so impressively deadpan that it took a moment to sink in and, to judge from the look on her face, Winton only realized he wasn’t serious when Daar chittered.

“Buildin’ the first one delayed a shipment o’ farming equipment an’ if we’re not careful a couple million Clanless could starve,” he said. “The biodrones made a special point of slaggin’ every machine they could find, so we’re rebuildin’ every industry from the ground up. I can’t afford to push a second Farthrow right now.”

“That’s too bad…” Powell rumbled.

“Cimbrean’s important to the fate of the Gao,” Daar assured him. “I’ll promise you a Farthrow… when I can.”

“Perhaps we can see what Folctha can do to alleviate your food concerns,” Winton suggested. “Agriculture is our biggest industry, after all.”

“An’ I’d ‘preciate that. Gotta let Sheeyo handle it though, I’m tryin’ ta keep outta the details.”

“Difficult not to, isn’t it?” Winton sighed. “He’ll be talking with our foreign minister, in any case. I’ll let him know.”

“In the meantime, we have a completely biodroned Clanless in Nofl’s lab,” Gabe said, gently nudging the conversation back on topic.

“…How bad is it?” Daar asked.

“Bad. Every cell of his body is infested with nanotechnology. Nofl hinted that removing it may not be completely beyond the limits of Corti medicine, but he didn’t seem hopeful.”

“…Balls.”

“Good news is, accordin’ to Bozo an’ one of our Gaoian police officers, the stuff stinks to high heaven,” Powell said. “Can’t say as I smelled it, but you’ve said yourself: Our noses don’t exactly work the same way.”

Daar scritched at the side of his head with a massive claw, then sighed. “I need ‘ta see this fer myself. An’ I think summon some o’ my Champions to attend me. Imma need their advice.”

“Naturally,” Winton nodded. “You and they are always welcome.”

Daar’s gratitude was interrupted by his communicator, and Gabe stifled a grin as he heard the incongruous ringtone it produced. Daar clung aggressively to his passions, and if that meant making Winton arch an eyebrow with a silly song about dwarves digging a hole, well…

“Welp! Looks like news caught up with my staff…” Daar chittered mirthlessly. “The array musta sync’d jus’ now ‘cuz my inbox looks like a Keeda-damned warzone.”

Winton nodded, and picked up a small hand-bell that had been sitting next to her clock. When she rang it, a dark-haired woman in a gray suit and square glasses opened the door and leaned around it with an expression of sharp helpfulness.

“Yes, Prime Minister?”

“Cerys, the Great Father needs to take an official call. Could you escort him to the blue drawing room and see to it that he’s not disturbed, please?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s this way, Great Father.”

Daar shook his pelt out, gave Winton a grateful duck-nod and shook her hand. “It was a pleasure ‘ta meet you at last,” he said. “We shoulda met sooner.”

“Better now than never,” Winton replied, and stepped aside for him. Daar gave Gabe and Powell a nod apiece, and then dropped to fourpaw and followed Cerys out of the room.

“…Well, then.” Winton shut the door and returned to her desk. “I should probably discuss this with the other territories and the Mother-Supreme.”

Powell stood. “Aye. You’ll hear from me as soon as my men are done on Ceres.”

“Thank you. Good afternoon, gentlemen…”

Powell held the door for Gabe, who stepped aside to let him through once they were out in the hallway beyond. He’d brought a Gaoian constable with him, a young Clanless by the name of Eeno, who stood up sharply as they emerged and transferred his police hat from his knee to under his arm. The very picture of sharp, eager youth, with an edge of awe at having just had the Great Father brush past him.

“Alright. That’s over. Did you smell anything?” Gabe asked.

“No chief. Nothing unusual, anyway. At least… I don’t think so. Besides the PM’s perfume.”

“The way that Narl bloke had it, it’s like gettin’ slapped in the face wi’ a burnin’ tyre,” Powell said. “Bloody embarrassin’ we can’t smell it ourselves, if it’s that bad…”

“Well… however it smells, I didn’t smell anything wrong with the PM, the Great Father, or anyone else in this building,” Eeno replied. Gabe nodded. Eeno’s was reckoned to be the sharpest nose on the force: He’d once made a drug bust from three blocks away, upwind. His sense of smell was worth trusting.

“Something tells me we’re in for a few sleepless nights,” Gabe remarked to Powell.

“Only a few?” Powell snorted. “I’ll take it. Any road, I’d better catch up wi’ the Lads. They should’ve suited up by now.”

“I’ll keep you updated,” Gabe promised.

“Aye, same. As much as I can.”

They bade each other ‘good luck’ and were escorted out to their vehicles. Powell’s SUV was first out through the gate, and it took the north road toward the military base. Gabe’s took the south road toward the Police and Security Administration in Southbank.

“…Not him either, chief,” Eeno said, once they were away. “I know you’re thinking it.”

Gabe chuckled and a minor worry he’d been nursing evaporated. “Well, you’d have been pretty damn stupid to expose him on the spot if he was a biodrone…” he commented. A biodroned HEAT operator was a decidedly nightmarish thought. “…Mierda. This whole thing is going to be a lot less clear-cut than the implants were. Now we have to worry about whether the noses sniffing them out are compromised!”

“Gotta trust somebody, chief,” Eeno observed.

“Yeah…” Gabe nodded. He looked out the window and enjoyed a moment’s peace to think as he watched kids and adults playing on the beaches of Palace Lake. Folcthan life was so much fun sometimes that it hurt knowing just how much frantic activity and stress went on under the surface to keep the peace intact.

And in all of that, the Hierarchy’s worst weapon would be the ability to turn trust into a poison. It had happened to the Gao, after all: A whole generation was coming to terms with the sudden betrayal in their midst. Too many were now afraid they couldn’t trust their loved ones, or that their loved ones couldn’t trust them.

A disease like that would be endlessly more virulent, and more deadly, than mere nanotech. And the only way to combat it was to take the ultimate risk and trust, in the face of possible betrayal.

“…That’s the problem,” he said.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Ceres Base, Asteroid Belt, Sol

Technical Sergeant Adam “Warhorse” Arés

Thump.

Black flash.

Move.

Array technicians back away from their controls with their hands up. Grab. Secure. Zip-tie. Move on.

Shrieks and alarmed yells: Civilians, unarmed. Round them up, secure, zip-tie. Move on.

Speed and precision. Overwhelm everything. Enemy can’t be given time to act.

Tight corridors, low ceilings, light deck plating. Dents and shakes, but feet don’t punch through.

Threat: Opening door… Surprised woman in businesswear. Immediately compliant. Secure, zip-tie, move on…

Target. Central operations. Several men, stepping protectively in front of a handful of women…

Adam blinked and came up for breath as the last zip-tie went on. The whole of the last minute or two from the instant they’d jumped was a kind of an efficient blur of things that he’d done but not really processed, though he always found he could recall every detail in debrief later on.

Of the men, Adam hadn’t hurt them too bad. Well, they were bruised up and sullen, because he had to be fast and that didn’t fit well with gentle, but so far there were no broken bones.

There were two dislocated shoulders, which he popped right back in over the dude’s loud complaints. He’d have to remember to apologize later if he got the chance. Anyway.

As far as damage to equipment…his footprints were in every deck plate he’d stepped on. All the Beef Bros had left prints but his were the biggest and by far the deepest. Where he was moving with aggression, the plating had actually ripped loose and been crushed down through the underflooring. That might be a problem going forward, because Adam was easily the heaviest dude on the HEAT, had the heaviest mission load, and his armor was proportionally the most massive. He’d note that in the AAR: most alien spacecraft ironically had stronger flooring.

He’d banged up some walls, too. And swatted a hatch so hard it had bent. Yeah. He wasn’t packing on weight like a weed anymore, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still slowly growing, especially in strength and speed, and that let him wear his armor so well it almost felt like it wasn’t there. That might have made him a bit too careless, so maybe he needed to work on his agility with Righteous; other than footprints, the big bastard hadn’t left any trail of broken obstacles at all.

Regaari was getting a good sniff of the civilians. So far, nobody had failed the nose test but there were a lot of people on Ceres. So many that the HEAT was running in three-man teams, pairing an experienced operator with a Whitecrest and one of the Cherries… though that was hardly a fair word to describe Walsh, who was the third corner of Adam’s trio.

He ran an eye ‘round the room, satisfied himself that there was nobody who posed an immediate danger, then keyed his radio. As he did so, he found the face he was searching for kneeling in the middle of the civilian huddle and trembling.

“STAINLESS, WARHORSE. Target secure. Got the VIP, too.”

“Copy, WARHORSE. Coming to you.”

Regaari dived into the middle of the group and gave Adele Park a particularly vigorous sniff.

“…STAINLESS, DEXTER. VIP is clean,” he announced. “But I’m getting a faint scent off something around here.”

“Understood, DEXTER. See if you can track it down.”

Regaari snuffled at the rest of the civilians and then, satisfied that they were all clean, he did a circuit of the central operations hub, led by his nose. Adam left him to it and then gestured to Park.

“Director Park? Stand up, please.”

With the help of her immediate neighbors, Park managed to get to her feet and Adam helped her stay steady as she stepped out of the circle.

“Am I about to get an explanation?” she asked.

“We’re not here on a social call, ma’am… Dex?”

Regaari had paused, and was giving one of the office cubicles some closer scrutiny.

“…Got a track,” he said, sniffing at a keyboard. “But it’s faint. Months old, I think. Too bad we don’t have CAREBEAR’s nose…”

“Whose desk is that?” Adam asked.

“That? That was Sam Jordan’s desk. He… nobody’s wanted to use it since…”

Powell and Costello ducked into central ops with Akiyama and Faarek behind them, dramatically reducing the amount of remaining space in the already rather crowded room.

Adam had to admit: it was good to see the old man wearing the Mass in the field again. And he still looked totally comfortable and conditioned to it, too.

“All good here?” Powell asked.

“They’re nice an’ peaceful, sir,” Walsh told him.

“Good. You three are wasted standing around here, go help Righteous secure the residency block.”

“Yes sir.”

Regaari shrugged Gao-style, put the keyboard back down, and the three of them squeezed out of the room back into the comparatively more open space of the facility’s main concourse. There were signs and colored lines on the walls and floor everywhere he looked, pointing in different directions: a red one for “Mining Operations,” a blue one for “Infirmary,” a yellow one pointing toward “Surface Facilities” and… yeah. A green one marked “Residences.”

“This way,” Walsh pointed out, just a second before Adam could. Firth’s team had already come through this way, as evidenced by the half-dozen Hephaestus workers zip-tied on the ground who went very still at the sound of heavy boots nearby. Clearly he’d made an impression.

“Guess they’re not gonna like us too much after this…” Walsh muttered.

“Guess we’ll worry about that when we’re done,” Adam retorted. “C’mon.”

After all: there was work to do.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Peripheral dataspace, adjacent to the Irujzen Reef

Proximal

<despair>

Reviewing a life—honestly reviewing a life—was not an easy task. Especially not when honesty compelled one to take a rough estimate of the body count.

Proximal had never personally overseen a cleansing. He’d been involved in dozens, always in support roles, administrative oversight, intelligence-gathering. He’d chosen his Cabal name quite deliberately: He was always close to the action. It had suited him well, over the millennia.

Millennia. There wasn’t an oath or concept in the Igraen equivalent of language to really capture the sense of… something that settled on him as he considered that. Millennia.

In meatspace, that was enough time for civilizations to arise. The full arc of history from stone tools to nuclear fusion fit comfortably inside Proximal’s career, several times over.

With a perspective like that, it became easy to not think of meatspace life forms as people. They were just… they were points. Join them together to get a line, spread them out to get a plane. Each one rendered significant only by the broader context of their species’ collective development. Each meatspace species was an organism. Individuals? There was no such thing. One may as well treat each cell as significant, each molecule as meaningful.

And yet the last twenty years or so had been increasingly full of individuals. The lone Human who foiled a Hunter raid and woke the substrate species to the existence of deathworld life. The Rrrtk politician who had made a stand for them. The young woman who had personally forged a friendship between Humanity and the Gao through her own selflessness.

The war on Gao had been won by one man. In the right place, at the right moment, one HEAT operator had pushed through where nobody else could, and secured the Dark Eye facility. Thanks to him, there was still Gao. Thanks to that, there was the Great Father.

Thanks to the Great Father, there was a singularity of unpredictable causality in their future. Thanks to the Humans, there would be no stopping it.

So Proximal had done some historic digging. He’d investigated not only the histories of Gao and Earth, but also of all the species he’d helped Cleanse. And time and again, he found history turning on individuals. Great Father Fyu; Mother Tiritya; Saint Paul; Martin Luther; the Prophet Muhammad; Inwirq’ the Reclaimer; Dreaming-Of-Three-Moons, Who Knew The Face Of God; Onoworog of Marr… and soon, very possibly, Vemik Sky-Thinker.

All of those singular beings should have been lost among the untold trillions, but nevertheless they’d been important.

Proximal had found such a sudden and violent shift in his perspective… dismaying. So he’d joined the Cabal, in pursuit of an alternative. Some way to keep the galaxy and Igraen civilization running smoothly, mitigate the overwhelming advantage enjoyed by Deathworlders and Elder species. Create a place where life could thrive without having to resort to periodic culls and population control.

He’d thought Cynosure—Six—had had the answers.

He’d been wrong.

So, on the pretense of investigating some low-priority irregularities in the Irujzen Relay’s periodic reports, he’d gone on a kind of retreat to the periphery of Dataspace. He was a long way from Substrate here. He’d be fine for a little while, but he could still feel its indefinable absence pulling at the edges of his mind.

The Irujzen Relay played a minor but necessary role in regulating certain peripheral functions of Dataspace. The details were a little arcane for Proximal to really grasp, but that was true of Dataspace in general. All he knew was that there was some kind of an elderly and low-priority flag that nobody had yet been interested enough to investigate.

Such menial work was far beneath him, but it was an excuse to get away and to think.

On the surface, the relay seemed healthy. No reported activity since the last time an agent had visited, no major technical faults. Just some unexpected load…

A load that spiked as he considered it.

There was a… feeling. Perhaps it was the disquieting absence of Substrate that made Proximal notice it more acutely, but he was immediately on edge. Paranoia born of training and millennia of experience prompted him to run some of his defensive measures and take a good, hard look at the volume around him.

It took a second, and then there was a kind of perspective shift. Something truly enormous was around him on every side, and it was watching him.

…Oh, no.

The Dataphage.

Its existence had completely slipped his mind. Clearly it had been busy since its last reported activity, because he didn’t remember its description being so…

So…

It shifted and adjusted slightly, blocking off his egress. There was a faint, almost imperceptible impression of well-stealthed attack programs all pointed at him, and no doubt it had similar defences. He was outmatched, outgunned, completely trapped and utterly alone.

He went very, very still and endeavoured to radiate how completely harmless he was in the hopes that perhaps just this once it wasn’t in the mood to devour everything it encountered.

To his surprise, that seemed to be the case. There was another shift and then, even more surprising, an attempt at communicating. The attempt was incomprehensible, a jumbled and badly-compiled mangled disaster of disjointed thoughts and concepts, but it was definitely trying to talk with him.

<QueryCuriosityWhatWho>

Well… there was something there to work with at least. He tried replying in kind.

<Harmless; Small; Non-threatening; Weak; Irrelevant>

<SuspicionThreatEnemyMurderAnger>

Proximal settled for honesty. It seemed like the only possible recourse. <Tiny; Alone; Terrified>

<AccusationMurderGenocide; DestroyKill; JusticeKarma>

Proximal calculated for as long as he dared. Would it believe him if he emoted guilt or remorse?

Probably not.

<Reluctant; Affirmative>

That seemed to surprise the dataphage, or at least halted its increasingly looming approach.

<SuspicionTreachery>

This was no good. They could communicate basic concepts to each other in a haphazard way, but higher-order conceptual exchange wasn’t an option in this format. And Proximal needed to communicate on a higher order of conceptual language in order to explain what was going on.

<Understanding; Limited; Urgent; Constrained; Stuck>

<Frustrated>

<Agreement>

The dataphage circled him for several hundredths of a second, neither letting him go nor destroying him. Proximal had no alternative but to wait and see what it decided.

Then it stopped and called up from its own innards a copy of something that Proximal needed a moment to recognize: the personality and memory layers of an uploaded sophont, stripped of their agency core. The offer was exactly as ghoulish as if he’d been offered a severed head that could speak.

Still. It was a line of communication. So he fought off the creeping sense that he was violating something sacred and tapped into it.

A lifetime of Human memories hit him in the face. It was a sadly short lifetime, brutally truncated and riddled with negative emotions, but it was enough of a foundation to build a kind of translation matrix on. He could stimulate it to provide him with information, and presumably the dataphage could do the same.

It was morbid, creepy and wrong, not to mention the inherent “bleed” involved when datasophonts interacted on such an intimate level. Such interactions were inherently dangerous, as one could forget where one’s own memories and personality ended and the other’s began, but Proximal had no alternative.

“…Hello?”

He got a flash of the dead sophont’s self-image. It was the first time he’d ever actually studied a Human’s appearance in any way, and the thought struck him that they were very strange-looking. Too few limbs, too few eyes. And all that long, dark hair had to get in the way, surely?

Her name was—had been—Ava. And there was a lively personality there, even if it was just a puppet to the whims of others.

“Hello,” she said. “Sorry about the Entity. It deleted some important things early on, before it understood what they were for.”

“…I see,” Proximal replied cautiously. “Um… why are you… why is it speaking to me?”

The ghost paused briefly as she translated his question for the dataphage’s benefit and then received its intended reply.

“It… doesn’t like killing.”

“It’s killed a lot.”

“It wants to survive.”

Well. That was fair.

“You’re Hierarchy,” the Ghost accused.

“…Cabal.”

“What’s the difference? You’re responsible for genocides.” The looming sense of anger and offended justice returned.

“…Yes, I am,” Proximal admitted. “The difference is… well, I don’t like killing either. And I’ve killed a lot.”

“Yes.”

A whole barrage of images and emotions rammed into Proximal’s psyche: Two parents, distant and awkward and unfocused but still loving and supportive. The love and fun of best friends from elementary school and high school. Cheering on the Derby Dolls, window-shopping at Fashion Valley, taking a day in Border Field State Park…

<Loss>

Even without a guiding spirit of its own, the ghost was still bitter and still made its point with a needle’s sharpness.

“The Entity feels all of that,” she informed him. “It remembers that life like it was its own. It remembers those people, and those places. And you destroyed them.”

“…Yes.” There was nothing else to say.

“Is that all you’re going to say? ‘Yes?’ Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

Proximal lowered his defenses and emoted openness and honesty.

“At the time, I thought it was… not the right thing, but the necessary thing. We want to survive too.”

“And now?”

“Now… I still don’t want my people to die out. But I want to find a better way, if there is one.”

<Anger> “Do you really think that’s enough?!”

“No. I just want to live.”

Nearly a whole second of meatspace time passed in mutual silence. The dataphage slithered around Proximal, seeming to evaluate him from all angles, while the Ghost simply… waited. Waited until she was given some direction to interpret.

Of course, she just was a dead thing responding to the dataphage’s prodding, not an actual living being. It was unnervingly difficult to forget that.

Finally, the dataphage sent her a directive.

“…It hates killing. But it can’t let you go free,” she said. “So I guess you have a choice: Force it to destroy you, or you can surrender and it’ll turn you over to… well, some friends.”

Capture was marginally preferable to death as far as Proximal was concerned. But…

“I… would prefer to live. But if your friends can’t provide me with Substrate then it will be a slow and agonizing descent into madness for me,” he explained.

“It can’t guarantee that.”

There were no good options. None at all. But at the same time there was only one certainty.

“…I don’t want to die,” he said, feeling small and afraid and very alone.

“Neither did I,” the Ghost commented. “I don’t blame you… hopefully the Entity’s friends will know what to do with you.”

There was a moment of hesitation, and then the dataphage descended on him in a rush. Proximal’s last thought before he was forced into a suspended state was a hollow blend of two emotions.

<Fear; Resignation>

Then there was timeless nothing.

Date Point: 16y2m AV

Hierarchy/Cabal Joint Communications session #1536

++Asymptote++: I have bad news. It would seem our new drones are detectable.

++0004++: <Dismay> you’re certain?

++Asymptote++: The force I sent to Cimbrean was captured immediately upon arrival.

++0007++: How?

++Asymptote++: Unclear. The Arutech drones don’t report as concisely as conventional biodrones. The connection is… more like persuading, than controlling. As far as I can tell, they were intercepted by some kind of an animal, with a Gaoian handler.

++0011++: What kind of animal?

++Asymptote++: Again, unclear. The drone sent a confused impression of something enormously heavy and strong, with sharp teeth.

++Cynosure++: <Grim> Bozo.

++Asymptote++: …What is a ‘Bozo’?

++Cynosure++: Bozo is its name. The animal in question is allegedly a category two bred symbiont species native to Earth known as a ‘dog’ but those are usually smaller than any sophont. Bozo is abnormally large… and abnormally intelligent.

++0011++: Bred for what purpose?

++Cynosure++: Several, but the relevant factor in this case, I suspect, is that their olfactory acuity is several orders of magnitude superior to a Human’s, and even to most Gaoians.

++0004++: Smell. Chemical reception? These new drones produce some kind of chemical trace?

++0007++: Any machine produces waste products, and those must be eliminated somehow… The OmoAru weren’t noted for their sense of smell, maybe they just let the body release it through the skin.

++Asymptote++: Whatever the cause, the Arudrones are just as detectable as the conventional drones. If they’re going to be a viable infiltration tool, that needs correcting.

++0013++: Wait. Wasn’t the Gaoian Arudrone friends with a fellow Gaoian? Why was the scent not detected sooner?

++Asymptote++: The other Gaoian has a developmental brain flaw affecting both his language processing and his sense of smell. He is, by his species’ standards, almost completely anosmic.

++Cynosure++: <Frustration> But the instant the drone strayed within range of a healthy Gaoian…

++Asymptote++: Yes. Now the Corti known as Nofl is picking at it. I’ve initiated the Droud function to ensure the drone can’t give away any vital information, but I’m afraid our infiltration has not only failed, but now the Humans know what to look for.

++0004++: A setback, yes, but not an insurmountable one if we can modify or reprogram the Arutech in some way.

++0007++: <Pessimistic> To smell like a living being, they’d need to be much close to biological in function, and at that point…

++Asymptote++: There’s another wrinkle to consider. The Human I infected is resisting the Arutech.

++0007++: These Arudrones of yours are a resounding success, Cynosure…

++Cynosure++: <Nettled> Thank you for the commentary. How is it resisting? Other Human specimens have not been able to.

++Asymptote++: Unknown. I cannot monitor the situation any further as the drones have been quarantined.

++0013++: So now what?

++Cynosure++: The operation on Earth remains. Now that I know about the scent problem, I can adapt. Having access to the planetary communications network will be helpful.

++Asymptote++: I have an idea on how you might begin, if you’re interested.

++Cynosure++: By all means!

++Asymptote++: This internment camp that your Arudrone escaped from. Is it widely known about?

++Cynosure++: On the contrary, it is a closely guarded secret… And I think I see what you are driving at.

++Asymptote++: A little negative publicity might work in our favor…

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Ceres facility, Asteroid Belt, Sol

Adele Park

Adele’s office wasn’t large, certainly not by the standards of an executive with her kind of wealth and influence. Still, by the standards of offices carved out of the ice and rock of an asteroid two hundred and fifty million miles from Earth, it was downright cavernous. So much so that the two HEAT officers managed to fit in comfortably rather than crowding the place out.

Adele didn’t much like how they’d stormed in and subdued everyone on the base, but she wasn’t really in a position to complain about that. At least they’d taken their helmets off now that they were apparently satisfied there was no imminent danger.

God, Drew Cavendish’s fingerprints were all over that suit. The ingenious way it followed the line of the jaw and skull so that the helmet and mask could lock on and form an airtight seal, the multi-layered construction, the deceptive flex and stretch of the midsuit that you’d be forgiven for thinking was just thick fabric…

That was a C&M Systems suit right down in its DNA, and all of that DNA was Cavendish: Drew Martin was an administrator and foreman, not an inventor. As far as Adele was concerned, they might as well have been sitting there wearing T-shirts printed with her dead friend’s face.

The Gaoian was much easier to look at. His suit owed nothing at all to Drew’s work. He was patrolling the office sniffing at things and running some kind of a sensor around the walls and decorations.

To Adele’s disgust and dismay, he turned up three bugs.

She stared at them despondently as he laid them on the desk. “…How long have those been there?”

“Impossible to say, ma’am,” the Gaoian replied. English fit him strangely: he pronounced it carefully and precisely, compensating for the shape of his mouth. The overall effect was of a dapper rich man with a slight lisp on the R and W sounds.

“Any idea who made ‘em, Dex?” asked the younger officer, who went by ‘Abbott.’

“No sir. It looks like off-the-shelf electronics. Titan could whip up a dozen of these in half an hour.”

The senior officer, ‘Stainless,’ was a menacing and taciturn sort. He picked up one of the devices and turned it over in his hand without comment at first.

“…Director, we need you to send out an emergency recall and bring My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon back to port,” he said.

“That’ll cost millions…” Adele pointed out. She didn’t expect him to give a fuck.

“Aye. We still need you to do it.”

“She’s the only remaining Hephaestus asset that we haven’t inspected,” the junior officer explained.

Stainless leaned forward. Both men had declined to sit down, and to judge from the way the deck creaked under his feet Adele was glad of it. They’d have destroyed her chairs.

“Director, let me make summat very clear,” he said. “There is a reason we did not send police. I want you to think long and hard about what a military presence in your office implies, and what that could mean.”

Adele did so. Then, with a head full of nightmare scenarios, she carefully turned on her monitor, and accessed the ship listing.

There were three ships in dock for the moment: I Met God And She Booped My Nose, Actually Three Smaller Ships In A Trenchcoat, and Put Back Together With Bits Left Over.

All of their ships had an emergency comms router purchased from Dominion sources. Adele knew they worked on the principle of quantum entanglement, and were basically single-use, but when it came to urgent secure communication across an indefinite distance with a vessel whose current location was unknown, they were the industry standard.

There was a small lockbox in her desk drawer, with a ten-digit passcode she’d never shared with anybody. She opened it, picked out My Other Spaceship’s envelope, tore it open, and carefully copied the code it contained into the message field.

Recalling one of their freighters was a big deal. Investors and customers would need to be repaid, the crew still needed their salary, the ship still needed to undergo maintenance… thank God for stasis containers, or else the cargo of soybeans and feed corn it was carrying would have to be written off as well.

Still, under the HEAT’s watchful glare she carefully double- and triple-checked that the code was correct, and then hit ‘Send.’ Somewhere far, far away, the receiver unit on My Other Spaceship’s flight deck would buzz loudly until somebody confirmed the instruction was received.

“…Done.”

“How long for them to get back?”

“They should jump straight to Armstrong Station as soon as they get the message.”

The two officers glanced at each other, then the younger one gave a nod to the Gaoian. Whatever it meant, ‘Dex’ duck-nodded himself and stepped out of the room.

“I guess we’ll wait and see,” the younger officer said jovially.

Adele had a feeling like it was going to be a long wait.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Corti Directorate ship Empirical Razor, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Third Director Tran

The Razor was many things. It was, among those things, a warship, and the College of Shipbuilders had put a lot of work and talent into producing something that could punch far above its mass. They’d successfully packed defenses and firepower equivalent to a Dominion standard Heavy Picket into something small and light enough to land at any starport in the galaxy.

The Humans had been understandably nervous about that. They’d made certain… requests, with the clear condition that failing to agree to those requests meant no landing in Folctha, and that Tran and his entourage would have to visit the city via the trade station orbiting outside the system defence field.

Tran had, after some thought, accepted the requests. He and the crew had been subjected to the minor indignity of a sweep for neural cybernetics and of being… sniffed by some kind of animal… but once that was out of the way the Humans had been deferential and gratifyingly precise. They did not, so far as Tran could tell, seek to glean any classified information about the ship, and they politely stayed out of the way while the Razor was jumped in-system and de-orbited to land at Folctha’s small spaceport.

Tran had never visited a Human world before. On some level he was rather looking forward to it, and he surveyed Folctha’s street plan during the descent with interest. The layout was not perfectly efficient—rather too much space was given over to green recreational areas, in his opinion—but aside from that quirk the streets mostly followed a sensible grid pattern and were clearly and intelligently zoned.

There was an unfortunate lack of uniformity to the buildings, he noted. No doubt the Locayl would have approved of the architectural variety and experimentation on show, but to Tran’s eyes it looked anarchic.

But that, he reflected, might well be Humans in a sentence: Sensible and intelligent, with a dismaying layer of anarchy.

The official greeting party, such as it was, had been hastily assembled. A dignified-looking elder male with a blue sash across his torso was at the front alongside a hulking shaggy parody of a Gaoian who could only be the Great Father. There was a small retinue of lower-ranking Humans and Gaoians, a couple of brightly-hued banners…

It was enough to welcome a foreign dignitary without seeming obsequious. The Great Father’s presence was a surprise, however, and Tran watched him carefully as he descended his ship’s steps and glided across the concrete to meet them.

“Third Director.” The Human with the sash smiled gently and extended a hand. “I’m Sir Jeremy Sandy, His Majesty the King’s appointed Governor-General of Folctha and the Commonwealth Colonies of Cimbrean. And I’m sure of course you recognise Daar of Clan Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao.”

Tran shook hands with them both, noting that he could feel in their grips the potential to grind his hands into a slurry of broken bone and meat but that they had merely been firm and confident.

“Thank you for receiving me,” he replied. “The Directorate understands from our associate’s report that there has been an unwelcome development.”

“So I understand, yes,” Sandy agreed. He gestured toward a large vehicle waiting nearby. “We arranged transport to Nofl’s lab. It’s ready to take you and the Great Father to him whenever you wish.”

Tran looked over at the Great Father and cringed internally. “Very well. Will you be accompanying us?” he asked Sandy.

“I think I would just get in the way,” the governor-general demurred. “My position is that this is a grave security threat, and I have taken advice from the Prime Minister to defer to the military needs of the situation. In any case, the Great Father is the only suitable advocate.”

“…Very well,” Tran said, carefully. He turned to the Great Father, who had turned his head to nibble at something itchy in his fur. “I suppose we should inspect the patient, then, and evaluate this new threat.”

Daar duck-nodded, gave the governor-general a warm and almost fraternal farewell, and then trundled toward the car.

“I di’n’t know Nofl had that kinda credit with y’all that you’d come so quickly when he asked,” he said conversationally as they crossed the concrete.

“Nofl is… many things, not all of them desirable or convenient,” Tran admitted. “But he is competent, highly intelligent, and rarely incorrect.”

“You take him seriously.”

“Even if he will not take himself seriously.”

“There’s prol’ly wisdom in that.”

Tran felt mild surprise at the compliment. He’d been under the impression that the Gao in general, and the Great Father in particular, were not overly well-disposed to Corti.

Then again, it was politically stupid to be rude to other members of one’s own faction. And for better or worse, the Directorate did now stand alongside the Humans, the Gaoians and the Rauwryhr in the Dominion’s newly-fledged ‘Reformers’ bloc.

In fact, throughout their brief journey to Nofl’s establishment, he found the Great Father to be unfailingly polite. Traveling with him was…uncomfortable, as he occupied nearly the entire usable volume of the transport vehicle, but even then he was courteous.

Nevertheless, it was a relief to escape the vehicle’s confines and enter Nofl’s lab.

Nofl occupied a decidedly unique position in the Directorate’s structure. In addition to irritating Tran’s sense of orderliness, it also created funding and equipment concerns that the low-caste prodigy had been forced to work around. His equipment was, to an experienced eye, obviously second-hand, reclaimed and repaired, or in some cases built from scratch.

Nevertheless, the quality of his results was vexing. A mere glance at the detailed analysis of a Gaoian’s brain that was being worked on along one wall showed that Nofl’s work was of blue-banner quality, maybe higher.

Anomalies in the caste system like that were always uncomfortable. Thankfully he’d been quite happy to accept this posting on an alien colony world. To Tran, the idea of being assigned a backwater like Cimbrean would have been an unbearable insult, but to Nofl it had been an opportunity and now…

Well. Now he had a Third Director walking through his door.

“Ah. You’ve noticed my other patient!” Nofl chirped happily, emerging from the quarantine and isolated research rooms at the back of the building while sanitizing his hands. “Poor Gorku there really didn’t get enough of certain nutrients during a critical stage in his development and it left him with a severe speech impediment.”

Daar sighed and duck-nodded knowingly. “It’s a particular weakness of us ‘Backs an’ we ain’t managed t’ breed it out. Lotta us, we have a big growth spurt ‘round four years old, an’ it can be hard t’eat enough. It’s prol’ly a big part o’ why us brownfurs can have, uh, reputations.”

“Alas, it’s trivially easy to fix with cybernetics,” Nofl said. “If those are no longer an option, however…”

Tran nodded, but reluctantly tore himself away from the data. That kind of project was exactly the sort of thing he’d spent his Professorial years on, and there were times when he missed the simplicity of College-tier work. His promotion to the Directorate proper had been prestigious and welcome, of course, but it did sometimes prevent him from practicing science.

“…And your main patient?” he asked.

“Come and see.”

A minute or so later, Daar actually recoiled from the isolation unit when Nofl dropped the stasis field.

“Great Keeda’s burnin’ sack!” He coughed, pawed fruitlessly at his nose, and retreated another few paces. “That smells like a million ass!”

Tran sniffed cautiously. “…I smell nothing.”

The Great Father flicked his left ear in a manner suggesting an emotion of some kind. “Well, the Primary Mushroom you ate ‘bout three hours ago were a bit over-ripe, weren’t it? Which was prol’ly a bit galling since it smelled like it were clean-flavored an’ earthy. I bet it was ‘spensive.”

Tran blinked, and turned to Nofl who nodded.

“A Gaoian’s sense of smell is many orders of magnitude more sensitive than ours,” he explained. “And I gather the Great Father’s nose is legendarily sensitive.”

“Exactly.” Daar again flicked an ear and snorted air out of his nose as though trying to dislodge whatever scent had so assaulted him. “Trust me, I can smell it. It’s…uh, redolent of sour oil, and byproducts of semiconductor manufacture. It’s, uh…a little bit metallic. Yeah. Ain’t no living thing should stink that way.”

“It won’t be a powerful scent,” Nofl elaborated. “His body is releasing the actual odorants in negligible amounts, but I daresay there don’t need to be many of them.”

“Right…Director Tran.” The Great Father rose to his feet and…towered…over the rest of them. Up until this point he’d remained on four paws and thereby seemed smaller than he really was. Now, his head was just shy of scraping the ceiling. “I need ‘yer professional opinion, by which I mean the opinion o’ the Directorate: can…his name?”

“Leemu. Clanless. I gather he was a propulsion mechanic at a deep space layover on the far side of Locayl space before they decided to travel here.”

“Right. Leemu. I’ll have my people look into that. Anyway…what is his prognosis? I need the best answer ‘ya can get me.”

Tran stepped up to the glass and reviewed the information that Nofl had shared with him. It made for pessimistic reading.

“…Nofl. You should reactivate that stasis field,” he said after a moment. Nofl did so.

“Right, yes. Need to minimize his Droud-fugue time.”

“Droud?” Daar asked. “I’ve never heard that word.”

“Direct stimulation of the brain’s pleasure and reward mechanisms,” Tran explained. “It won’t take long to permanently addict him and alter his behaviour. Even before then, he’ll be incapable of doing anything more than just being deliriously happy no matter what is happening to him.”

Daar looked appalled. “That’s…evil.” He growled low in his chest while looking back at the screen.

“It would in fact be a rather humane form of euthanasia…” Tran mused. The Great Father gave him a sharp look, and Tran sensed that now was a moment to tread very carefully. “…Purely in voluntary end-of-life cases to avoid unnecessary suffering of course. This use of it is a perversion.”

“…Prognosis. What do we need to get it?”

“‘Getting it’ will almost certainly not be possible with our current technology,” Tran told him, flatly. “I cannot immediately see a chemical option for flushing this from his system that would not also poison his cells in the process.”

“Cellular surgery could do it,” Nofl provided. “But that’s for excising tumors and repairing minor defects. Nobody’s ever even tried to do a whole sapient being’s body all at once.”

“You’re effectively proposing that we reduce him to a diffuse cloud of tissue, filter the Arutech out and reassemble him,” Tran said.

“Theoretically it’s possible.”

“Yes. Theoretically…”

“An’ practically?” Daar asked.

“…If I destroy a thing, and then reassemble it again from all its component parts, is it still the original thing?” Tran asked. “We had that conversation years ago when we discovered how to encode a living mind as a digital sophont. There’s no reason we cannot reverse that process and map a living brain from the digital sophont, thereby effectively ‘downloading’ them into a new body.”

“That sounds like a pretty bad dung-heap o’ ethical problems,” the Great Father grumbled. He made eye contact with his aide standing discreetly in the corner. “Make sure Champion Gyotin is summoned, too.”

“And practical problems,” Nofl said.

“Like what?”

“Legal, mostly. Property rights, possessions, inheritance… not to mention identity. If you have two of a person with the same memories, opinions, life experiences and so on, which copy retains the original’s identity? Which one, from their perspective, has just lost everything they remember ever having and must now build a new identity and portfolio from scratch?”

“…This is gonna hurt my brain, I can tell.”

“The Directorate is still wrestling with the implications to this day,” Tran revealed. “In short: Yes, in theory we could potentially reduce Leemu here to a puddle of organic slurry, filter out the invasive nanotechnology and then put all the cells back where they were. In practice… we would not be able to reconstruct the ephemeral running-state of his brain. We’d first need to copy his mind-state into the digital realm, which is…deeply problematic. We’d then need to restore that mind-state into a living brain. If we did that, what do we do with the digital copy? And what would the implications be for the re-assembled being? Did we murder a mind-state already present in the body in favor of another?”

“…Right. I’mma speak with Gorku an’ his Human friend, if ‘ya don’t mind. In private.”

“Indeed.” Tran stepped away from the cells. “I will discuss treatment options with Nofl.”

In fact, when they returned to the front of the lab, there was little to discuss. The fact was, the patient was effectively a loss.

Tran’s thoughts instead turned to detection. “At least we can design a detector,” he said. “You have a Foundry suite?”

“Of course.” Nofl ushered him toward the volumetric projector in the middle of the room and summoned. “Do you prefer ItemChip, or Sculptor? They’re both last years’ editions, I’m afraid.”

“Are you not subscribed?”

“Income, dear. I can’t simply charge my expenses against the College budget.”

“Surely you can afford–”

“Do you know how much an individual subscription costs? I suspect not.”

“…I can see that if you are going to become a peripheral Campus we will need to arrange an appropriate expenses account for you,” Tran sniffed. “Very well. I prefer Sculptor.”

He let Nofl handle the actual manipulation of the software as he patrolled around the projector, making observations and corrections as they went. Both of them settled quickly on a sensitive chemical sniffer that could be mounted in a standard security drone chassis. That part wasn’t difficult—similar technology was already available on the market—but any Arutech drone thus detected was likely to create an immediate hazard, meaning that they needed to pack the sniffer in alongside an appropriate less-lethal suppression system.

Tran favored a sensor scrambler, a device intended to bewilder and dizzy the target with dazzling light and powerful directed noise. Nofl preferred physical restraint via a rapid-drying sticky foam originally developed to contain escaping Human abductees.

Eventually, with some creativity and negotiation, they managed to squeeze all three systems in.

Tran found himself enjoying the process immensely. A Director’s work was mostly paperwork, funding, negotiations and grant reviews, so on and so forth. He hadn’t had the chance to apply his talents to a simple mechanical problem in far too long.

They were applying the finishing touches and flourishes that made the difference between a merely competent design and one worthy of their talents when Daar returned in a somber mood. Clearly his conversation with Gorku had been frustrating and agonizing for him.

“…That don’t look like a fix ‘fer Leemu’s problem,” he rumbled after a second of considering their design.

“It isn’t. It’s a detection tool for protecting those civilizations that have neither dogs nor Gaoians to sniff out infiltrating Arutech drones,” Tran replied.

“You’ve given up on him?” The Great Father scowled.

“We’ve presented the prognosis, and both the ethical and practical difficulties. If you desire us to proceed–”

Daar growled, but it seemed to be directed at himself rather than at either of the Corti.

“…Not ‘til I’ve consulted my Champions,” he said.

“As you wish,” Tran agreed reasonably. “In the meantime, I think it would be sensible to transfer Leemu to the Empirical Razor. The facilities there are better-equipped to handle him, however you decide to proceed.”

“…Yeah. Third Director, I ‘spose I don’t need ‘ta re-hash our history on this point…so, I’m sure none o’ that is gonna be an issue, is it?”

Tran decided that his dignity, and indeed that of his whole species, demanded a straight back when he turned to face the Great Father.

“…Our species’ shared history is neither here nor there,” he said levelly, looking the enormous furry brute unflinchingly in the eye. “We are not prejudiced, Great Father Daar, nor do we hold grudges. We simply act in our own best interests. Right now, we have a patient whose successful treatment to your satisfaction would benefit the Corti. It is therefore in our best interests to be good partners to you, no matter what the past may hold.”

“I’ll take ‘yer word of honor on all o’ that,” Daar rumbled neutrally. “As ‘fer what we’re gonna do…well, we’ll see. An’ on that note…” He looked toward his aide, and seemingly communicated with him solely through ear-flicking. “I think I better get goin.’”

“We’ll keep you informed!” Nofl promised chirpily, and ushered him and his aide toward the door. Daar gave him a decidedly less cool nod of acknowledgement, and padded his way out.

Nofl returned a minute or so later and rather than rejoining Tran in his work, he instead poured himself a steaming cup of some kind of beverage. The smell was potent enough that even Tran noticed it from across the room.

Nofl raised the cup toward him. “Coffee, Third Director?”

“…Why not?” Tran decided. “So that was the Great Father. Intriguing.”

“Forceful, isn’t he?” Nofl chuckled and turned to make another cup.

Tran harrumphed. “‘My word of honor…’” he muttered. “Dealing with aliens is always strange.”

“Do not be so flippant as to disrespect him on that point,” Nofl warned. “Honor is a Deathworlder concept that can be…entangling. He meant, in this instance, that he has no reason to believe your promise, but he will expect you to do the right thing anyway. He is giving you the opportunity to overcome suspicion and acquire trust. We can profit from that, dear.”

“How so?”

“Their societies function on mutual trust. Building that oh-so-subjective quality in our relationship can be thought of as acquiring social capital. Like anything it is a resource, except this particular resource can serve as a shortcut through bureaucratic delays. With trust, they begin to assume a mutual concern for the relationship, and that certain details can be glossed over.”

“That hardly seems logical. Simple obvious self-interest is not sufficient?”

“Think of it as social lubrication. The downside is that one can spend ‘trust’ much, much faster than they can acquire it. Worse, squandering trust with any one party effectively squanders it with everyone in their social graph. Among both Gaoians and Humans, that can yield an impressive perturbative effect. The Human word for that is, loosely, ‘karma.’”

“Hmm…” Tran considered that momentarily, then shrugged and returned to his work. “Well. Let us prove our case, then,” he said.

He ignored the slight smirk on Nofl’s face as the junior and lower-caste Corti researcher rejoined him, handing him a drink.

“As you wish, Third Director.”

Date Point: 16y2m AV
HCS My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Wryhuor System, The Rauwryhr Republic, Perseus Arm

Dog Wagner

“…You have got to be fuckin’ kidding me.”

Dog looked up and out of the ship at the distant speck of their tractor tug, bringing them in on final approach to Wryhuor Gate. They were less than ten minutes from mooring and offloading their cargo, and Ceres had just pinged them with a top-priority recall order. There was no ignoring that.

“Problem, Dog?”

Dog realized he hadn’t actually read the message aloud. He opened the lockbox under the emergency quantum receiver and dug out their codebook, just to double-check… but he doubted there was a mistake.

There wasn’t. The code was very clear on that: Immediate emergency recall, on the authority of the Ceres director.

“…Hail traffic control,” he said. “Inform them that we’re jumping out. And ping the Armstrong beacon.”

That woke everybody up.

“What?”

“You’re kidding!”

Dog slapped the message and codebook down on Mitch Baker’s workstation. “Read it yourself, brother. You tell me if I made a mistake.”

Mitch grabbed it and scanned both the message printout and the book while his partner Cathy looked over his shoulder.

“…You didn’t,” Cathy said after a second.

Their new pilot was Mason Pitman. He was ex-Navy, having spent his military career at the helm of a guided missile destroyer. Dog thought that going from that to an interstellar freighter sounded like a downgrade, but Mason had shrugged that observation off with just two words: “Pay’s better.”

He was a lot less high-strung than Sam Jordan had been, that was for sure. So while the rest of the crew had minorly freaked out, he’d just done his job.

“Jump’s keyed up, Dog.”

“Well… hang on, I mean, we’re gonna be docked in five minutes!” Mitch said. “Did we come this whole way just to jump all the way back again without delivering?”

“Don’t matter if we dock in five, offloading takes all week,” Dog pointed out. “We’re supposed to jump back ASAP. Shit, if we were actually docked they’d expect us to jump out and leave the containers behind. Some serious shit musta gone down.”

He turned to Mason and nodded. “Jump.”

“Okay, but–” Cathy began, then paused as the stars blinked. “…Whatever.”

“Holy–!” Mason took his hands off the controls like they’d just shocked him. “Navy just landed on us, point blank.”

“They’re hailing,” Mitch said.

“Well, put ‘em on!” Dog insisted.

“Hotel-Charlie-Foxtrot-One, This is USS Gene Roddenberry. Heave to and prepare to be boarded. Do not adjust your orbit.”

“Jeez. Something big went down,” Dog decided. “Mason, lock out the—”

Mason’s eyes went wide and he sprang up from his chair, shoving Dog firmly aside. Dog tumbled to the deck, and felt a fire extinguisher flick painfully against his ear as it missed his skull by an inch.

“What th’—?!”

He didn’t have time for more than that exclamation as Cathy launched herself at him like a berserk thing, biting, kicking, and scratching furiously. She was a hell of a lot stronger than Dog had thought, too.

They rolled and scrambled furiously across the deck. She had youth on her side and Dog was an old man, but he was taller and heavier. Cathy had something else on her side, though: the look in her eyes was psychotic and she fought like a fucking demon, heedless of pain or her own limits. When Dog got a good punch in that made her head bounce off the deck, she didn’t even seem to notice.

Her hands clawed for his face, tried to dig into his eyes. He got a firm grip on her throat and held her at arm’s length. She kicked furiously, trying to get him in the groin, he heaved at the waist and threw her down on the deck, she swiped at his elbow, knocked it, and then sank her teeth into his wrist.

With a pained roar, Dog punched furiously at her head, but he may as well have been playfully slapping her.

Somebody tripped heavily over the pair of them and crashed to the deck. The jolt made Cathy let go and then there was a resounding metallic CLANG!!! as Mason drove the fire extinguisher into her face.

She collapsed unconscious, with blood dribbling profusely from her nose and mouth. Mitch’s crumpled form was sprawled along the deck next to her, and Dog had to watch for several seconds before he saw a slight rise and fall to suggest he was still breathing.

Mason was in a bad way. One of his eyes was already swelling up, his knuckles were cut and bleeding and it looked like Mitch had nearly succeeded in biting one of his ears off. He stood breathing heavily for a second and gave Dog a disbelieving stare.

“…You gonna go crazy too, brother?” Dog asked him.

“The fuck was that?” Mason asked, rhetorically. He reached down and helped Dog up.

It occurred to Dog that he was nearly as badly beat-up as Mason. Between the deep bite wound in his arm, the fingernail gouges in his face and several sore spots where his aging bones had taken several solid kicks, he felt half-dead.

“…Lock the door,” he ordered.

“Right.” Mason limped toward the door and sealed it while Dog threw himself at the captain’s desk and hailed the warships outside.

“Gene Roddenberry, this is Captain Wagner. You boys better get over here quick, we just had some kinda mutiny…” He flinched at the sound of a heavy impact on the door. “…Think the whole fuckin’ crew’s gone berserk!”

The voice that came over was grim. “Aye. We were expecting that. Prepare to be boarded. We’re going to be forceful about it. Advise your crew to surrender immediately, or suffer the consequences.”

“Will do.” Dog’s fingers left a smear of blood on the controls as he opened the shipwide intercom. “This is Dog. For the love of God, you fucking idiots, stand down before somebody shoots you!”

His reply was another, heavier blow to the door. Mason gulped and backed away from it, hefting his fire extinguisher.

“They’d better hurry…” he said nervously.

Dog never got to reply. There was a jolt and an explosion from somewhere on the ship, and several alarms went off. Another jolt and blast doubled the alarms and then there were heavy crashes and the sound of absolute mayhem unfolding deep within the ship’s innards.

Dog groaned and hauled himself up to his feet. “…Put that thing down, Mason,” he said.

“…Right.” Mason dropped the extinguisher which clanged and rolled across the deck a short way. “…You know how to assume the position?”

“Yeah.” Dog limped over to a bare patch of bulkhead and pressed his palms to it at ear height, fingers splayed. Mason did the same, and not a moment too soon: The third impact on the door was way heavier than the previous two: It completely overwhelmed the lock, which broke and the door was wrenched aside with a crackle of breaking parts by a living tank of a man in an armored spacesuit, plus three of his buddies.

What followed was nearly as violent as Dog’s scrap with Cathy. He was grabbed, his ankles and wrists were zip-tied, and he was unceremoniously left on the deck while Mason, Mitch and Cathy got the same treatment.

He and Mason were given a good sniff by an armored Gaoian. Dog had no idea how the alien trooper could smell a dang thing through his suit’s mask, but apparently he could because he tapped them both and announced. “Clean!”

As abruptly as it had begun, the violence was over. The big guy who’d wrecked the door musta been some kind of medic, because he thundered ‘round the room triaging their injuries and dealing with them. Dog got an antiseptic spray and a bandage for his bite wound, Mason got something similar for the damage to his ear, and even Cathy and Mitch were checked before being stuffed into stasis bags.

The last arrival was the smallest, being only marginally larger than the Gaoian. Apparently he was in charge, too.

“Base?”

“Southpaw says these two’re clean, sir. Those two—” the big guy gestured at the stasis bags, “—aren’t doing so good.”

“Right. We’re bagging all the laughing men down in the mess. Get ‘em down there.”

“Yes sir.”

Once the two largest humans were gone, the flight deck felt a little more roomy again. The officer produced a pair of clippers to cut the cable ties, and helped Dog and Mason to stand.

“…You’re Captain Wagner?” he asked. He had an earthy British accent, and the eyes behind his visor were intense and piercing.

“Y-yeah,” Dog agreed, rubbing his bandaged arm. He surveyed the damaged room and the remarkably large blood smears all over the deck. “…The fuck just happened? We got a recall, jumped back, then my whole fucking crew went nuts, man!”

“I’m sorry. I can’t say… You look like death, mate. Better sit down.”

Dog did so, crashing down into the nearest chair and running a shaking hand through his hair, heedless of the blood that still coated it. Mason looked back out through the ruined doors with a pinched, anxious expression.

“…Are they gonna be okay?”

“I can’t say, mate. Sorry.”

“You mean you don’t know, or…?”

“Little o’ both.”

“…Ssshit.”

“Aye.” the officer looked at Mason quizzically. “ …What’s your name?” he asked.

“Pitman. Mason Pitman. I’m the pilot.”

The officer paused and looked away slightly, as though reading something only he could see. “…You weren’t on this ship a year ago, were you?”

“No sir. I took over from Sam Jordan about eight months ago.”

“Hmm.” The officer gazed thoughtfully at them, then gestured to the Gaoian. “…Southpaw. You’re sure the captain’s clean?”

“Pretty sure, sir.”

“Only ‘pretty sure’?”

“Call it ninety-nine percent. It’d help if this was a, uh… cleaner environment.”

The officer nodded slowly, stared at Dog for a moment longer, then nodded again more firmly. “…Right. Gentlemen, we’re going to stasis you up and evacuate you off the ship. You’ll be unbagged at a medical facility in Folctha and evaluated there. Got that?”

“I got it.” Dog groaned and stood up. “This fuckin’ ship’s cursed, brother. I’m ready to get the hell off it.”

“Don’t blame yer. Hamlet?”

The last of the HEAT troopers backed away from the door and unrolled a pair of stasis bags from his belt. “Yes sir.”

“See you on the other side, gentlemen,” the officer said, and stepped away as ‘Hamlet’ helped Dog lie down in the unzipped bag.

Dog lay his head back and tried to relax as he was zipped up. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but the damn thing felt way too much like a body bag. He gritted his teeth as the zipper closed over his face and braced himself—

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

The house was a mess when Julian got back, which was rare. Nobody in their household was naturally untidy—living on Misfit had driven Allison, Xiù and himself into an ingrained habit of orderliness, and the boys had lived in fear of their father’s belt had they made a mess—so finding an untidy kitchen when he got home was… odd.

Okay, by any rational standard it was a perfectly clean and orderly kitchen with a few crumbs and an open snack packet on the counter next to a basket full of untouched laundry. To people who weren’t habitually fastidious, it probably would’ve looked like a tidy house in the middle of the day. But it was unlike Xiù to leave a job unfinished.

He followed the sounds of music and dialog into the living room, where he found Xiù curled up on the couch munching pretzels and watching Mulan.

“…Rough day?” he asked, gently. She still flinched, having clearly been too engrossed in the movie to hear him come in, then smiled, paused the movie, and shifted over for him to sit down.

“My head’s all over the place,” she explained, looking a little embarrassed. “Meditating didn’t work, yoga didn’t work so… screw it. I’m having a hormonal afternoon.”

Julian chuckled and cuddled up to her.

“…You stink, bǎobèi,” she complained after a second of snuggling into him.

“Sorry. Didn’t get to shower at the gym. Something big came up.”

“Something big always comes up at the gym,” she joked, and slapped his bicep to illustrate her meaning.

Julian chuckled low in his chest, “Well, not always…but this time it wasn’t just a barbell. I’m gonna have to go to Akyawentuo for a bit. Might be a week or three.”

She sighed hugely. “…I was really hoping you wouldn’t say that.”

“I know.” He rubbed her back.

“What happened exactly?”

“Can’t say. Security stuff. But there’s some Corti bigwig over in Nofl’s lab right now and I guess the Directorate wants some access to the Ten’Gewek as payment. I’ve gotta head over there and talk it over with the Given-Men.”

“What happens if they say no?”

Julian shrugged. “Nofl said a good-faith effort would be enough, but… well, it’s probably better if I can persuade Yan to at least talk with the Corti…”

That was gonna be an interesting meeting. Ten’Gewek culture didn’t value stupidity, but they put a way higher premium on brawn than brains. To them, weak people weren’t really people. Weak things were beasts or prey. After all, on a world of intensely physical Deathworld fauna, the Ten’Gewek were standouts in every category.

Corti society was pretty much exactly the opposite way around. They practically sneered at physical strength as far as Julian could tell. Corti didn’t care if you could snap a Werne’s spine with your bare hands, they’d just see that as barbarous and unnecessary among a spacefaring, tool-using civilization.

Navigating a culture clash like that was going to be… fun…

“…Actually, I really wish you could come with me,” he confessed.

“So you can keep an eye on me?”

“No, ‘cuz you’d be way better at keeping the peace than me.”

She glowed slightly at the compliment, but gave him a concerned look. “…You’re really worried it won’t go well, huh?”

“Yeah. You’ve got two completely opposite cultures, both real proud… and neither are really known for their tact, either.”

Xiù nodded and thought about it for a second.

“…Well… who says I can’t come with you?” she asked.

“Uh…” Julian didn’t reply exactly, just placed his hand on the baby bump.

“What? I’m not a waddling hippo yet!” she objected indignantly.

“I mean, like… wouldn’t supergravity be bad for the baby?”

“Nah, I looked it up. It’s bad in the first trimester, maybe, but it won’t hurt him now.”

“What about Al? Won’t she want you here?”

“Well, I’ll call her and find out,” Xiù said. She kicked her legs out and stood up. “You know her, she’s not obtuse. If she minds me going, she’ll say so.”

Julian brightened. “Hey, maybe she can come too!”

“Probably not. I think she said the reactor for Misfit Four is coming sometime this week…”

The line of ships now officially known as the Misfit-class was turning out to be a success for MBG. The US Government had ordered enough of them to completely cover the BGEV program’s costs and put interstellar exploration back in the black. More surprising still was that there had been several orders from alien buyers. Apparently Human technology was gaining a reputation for being both high-performance and highly reliable when properly maintained.

Allison spent her working days in a hard-hat and coveralls, and had been promoted to the point where rather than crawling into the tight spaces herself she was now overseeing the workers who did. Chiune Station was expanding its aircraft facility into a genuine factory the equal of the one in Omaha, and when the upgrades were complete Al had predicted they’d be able to build a new Misfit from first part to delivery in a little less than four months.

Three Misfits a year. It was a weird thought. Julian had always thought of the ship as uniquely theirs, but of course now it was out there exploring uncharted alien planets in the hands of a different crew. They’d had some success, too: No first contacts, but half a dozen new temperate worlds added to the map, two of which were Deathworlds.

He genuinely missed that ship sometimes. A nice big house, all the elbow room he could ask for and two kids on the way was definitely a step up over living in a tiny box on a tight resource budget, but there were times he felt like the three of them weren’t accomplishing as much as they had aboard Misfit.

Which was stupid, but that didn’t change his feelings.

All of these thoughts kept him distracted and quiet while Xiù found her phone, called Al, explained the situation and had a brief, affectionate chat before letting her get back to work.

“…She thinks it’s a great idea,” she said, once the call was done.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She thinks I spend too much time being domestic anyway.”

“Well, you kinda do…” Julian agreed.

“I like being domestic!”

Julian grinned and shook his head. “Where’s your feminist spirit?” he asked. “You gotta stand up with the oppressed Sisterhood! Don’t let the Patriarchy keep you down!”

She rolled her eyes and smacked him on the arm as she brushed past him toward the stairs. “Don’t make fun of that.”

“Aww, I don’t mean it bad!” he said.

She gave him an amused look. “Shower. Now. You still stink.”

Oh, okay. So that was her game. “Yes ma’am.”

She beamed and turned to sorting out the minor mess she’d left in the kitchen. “Good boy.”

Julian loved showers. He’d gone six years without any proper access to hygiene and that meant he’d been more than willing to spend big money on the best damn shower he could get. He stepped in, turned the water up to just shy of painful, and set the full-body spray on its most powerful setting. There was something almost therapeutic about letting it beat the aches out of his muscles and the sweat off his skin until he felt completely and satisfyingly clean.

He’d also made a point of making the shower big enough for three. Though they’d given up on shower sex as awkward, slippery and difficult, it was still fun to get clean together so he was more than happy to make room when Xiù joined him a few minutes later. She turned the pressure down a little, but left the heat as it was.

“I have the worst itch in the middle of my back,” she announced, handing him the poofy loofah thing and scooping her hair out of the way. Julian was only too happy to help, and she made happy noises as he scrubbed up and down her spine.

“So you’re definitely coming with me?” Julian checked.

She nodded, rinsing her hair until a fat stream of water splattered from the end of it. “Yeah. I’ll have to take it easy and be careful, but it’ll be nice to see them and I kinda want to see how the Singer reacts to my bump.”

“You know Ten’Gewek. She’ll be super excited I bet.”

“Vemik too. You’ll need to keep me safe from him!”

“Hah!” Julian handed her the shampoo. “Nah. He so much as bruises you he’ll have me and the Singer to answer to.”

He helped her wash and condition her hair as they discussed when they were going, what essentials they were going to wear and pack, and went over what exactly they were going to talk Yan into with the Corti.

“So… just to meet them, to begin with, then,” Julian summarized.

“Well yeah. It sounds to me like that’s all we can do. The Corti want to meet them, and we can arrange that. If we do then we’ve held up our end of the bargain and if the Ten’Gewek don’t like what the Corti try to sell them then it’s not our fault. Right?”

“Makes sense…”

Xiù turned the shower off and squeezed the water out of her hair. “They’ll want vaccines.”

“…Yeah. I know.”

“That’s kind of a big deal. The Corti will totally get them hooked and dependent if they can.”

Julian sighed. “Yeah. But there’s not many Ten’Gewek left, either. And it’s their right to choose, I guess.”

“Yeah…” Xiù stepped out onto the ultra-absorbent flooring around the shower and reached for her brush and hairdryer. Julian draped a warm towel around her shoulders before drying himself off too. He caught himself before he stooped this time—Even though his cloned foot was now just as strong, tanned and natural to him as if he’d been born with it, he still hadn’t quite managed to shake some of his old prosthetic care habits, including wanting to take it off after a shower and dry it out.

Xiù still noticed, though. “…Still taking care of the old foot?” she teased.

Julian grinned and wiggled his toes. “Eh, I still think the new model is a bit too big…”

“It’s perfect, dummy. And I prefer it.”

“You do?”

She grinned trollishly at him. “Yeah. Can’t tickle a prosthetic.”

Julian suppressed an evil thought, and decided to de-escalate instead. “Maybe let’s not get into a tickle fight, slip and crack my skull open on the tile before the mission. Also! I think I’m gonna bring the portable TIG welder. I, uh…bet I’m gonna need to distract Vemik when the conversation gets serious.”

“Hmmph. Fine. Be boring.” Her smile said she didn’t really mind, as she turned her attention to drying off.

Julian packed. It wasn’t a big job: they both knew how to travel light and what to expect on Akyawentuo, which was in the middle of the rainy season. The trick wasn’t to try and stay dry, the trick was to have somewhere cozy to dry off after getting wet.

The rains over there were pleasantly warm by a human’s standards. If you could get used to being wet basically all the time, the rainy season wasn’t a hardship at all.

…Well, okay. The mud sucked. And Julian knew that while the rest of him could survive a persistent soaking, dry feet were essential. That meant either going barefoot so they could dry off quick, or wearing superboots.

The problem with that was, well…he had big honkin’ feet, which meant big custom boots. Rich or not, Julian didn’t like the idea of paying a grand for something he didn’t really need, so…

Also, less to carry.

Xiù had no such qualms. Her boots practically had a goddamn supercomputer in the soles.

“I still can’t get over these damn things,” he commented ruefully as he dug them out of the wardrobe. “Don’t let Vemik get a hold of ‘em!”

She ducked under his arm and plucked them out of his hand. “I know how to handle Vemik, bǎobèi,” she chided him. “And you’re insulting him, too. He’s not that wild he’d just take apart my boots without asking.”

“I know, I just…” He caught himself and scowled. “…I’m doing the overprotective father thing, aren’t I?”

“Just a little tiny lot.” She bounced up on tip-toe to kiss him. “It’s sweet, but stop.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Go get your boy toys, I’ll finish up.”

Julian nodded, stole a quick little kiss, and thumped down to the garage to find some appropriately Vemik-grade toys. He grabbed up the portable TIG welder, his small supply of welding rod, some appropriate eyewear and gloves, and stuffed it all in a giant, tough Kevlar satchel he’d found at the sporting goods shop the other week.

He threw his notebook and e-Reader in, too. A guy never knew if he’d be somewhere for weeks on end, after all.

“Xiù, you ready?”

“Yeah-huh!” She trotted downstairs in her jungle clothing and superboots. They managed the neat trick of transforming her feet from those of a dainty gymnast into a pair of mallets hammering the floor down. The finishing touch was her boonie hat, a battered and faded thing bleached by the light of several alien suns.

“Doctor Livingston, I presume?”

“Hah hah. I don’t care if I look dorky, just so long as I don’t get leeches and sunburn.”

“You don’t look dorky. I don’t think it’s physically possible for you to look dorky.”

“Flatterer.” She handed over his ruck. It was a little more fully-packed than he’d have gone with for himself—well, a lot over-packed, really—but that was the opposite of a bad thing.

Julian was about to suggest they jog over to the jump terminal when he remembered that Xiù wasn’t exactly in optimal condition for that, so he ordered up a Johnny Cab instead. Three minutes until arrival.

“So, uh, I suppose we go straight to the village? Or do we wanna go to the camp first? It’s a bit of a walk…”

“We’ll see. Honestly, I’m just glad to get out of the house!”

“Fair enough. I’m looking forward to eating Werne again, I’ll be honest.”

“Mm. Yeah. Especially Werne jerky… I’ve been craving that stuff hard.”

“You’ve been craving salty foods in general.”

“Yeah, but… I dunno. Werne is special. You know?”

“Hell yeah it is!”

The Johnny Cab arrived and Julian had to insist Xiù sit down so he could load their luggage himself. He wasn’t really ready to let go of the protective father role completely, and she didn’t object too much to sitting back and letting him do all the work. It didn’t take long and they were underway after only a couple of minutes.

He called ahead to the Array terminal. This was, technically, government business now and he had the authority to arrange an urgent jump to Akyawentuo at any time. He’d need to send a report to the Ambassador explaining why and all that stuff, but right now all that mattered was that the Special Envoy to the Ten’Gewek was on the wrong planet. It was a little disruptive to regular traffic, but the terminal could handle it. Most travellers wouldn’t even notice anything had happened.

It’d still come out of the budget, though. Always there was a budget.

He became conscious that Xiù was almost jigging with excitement as they pulled up to the array.

“…You’ve really been feelin’ cooped up, huh?”

“Well… no…” Xiù paused and thought. “…I just… I mean it, I like being domestic, but you have to admit it’s not as exciting as what we used to do.”

“You mean the bits where we got shot at, or the bits where we had to talk angry spacegorillas down from trying to stab us?”

She beamed at him. “Exactly! Fun times.”

Julian snorted and shook his head, but he was smiling. “Vemik always said, friends shouldn’t spear each other, at least not too hard.”

“Wise words!” She sprang out of the car as soon as it stopped and grinned at him. “…You coming?”

There were times when Julian was so much in love that it hurt. He was only too happy to follow her.

“Right behind you,” he said.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Class 11 planet “Stinkworld,” Messier 24

Sergeant Ian “Hillfoot” Wilde

Of all the things Wilde’s mum had predicted would go wrong with his life, playing wargames with talking raccoon-bear men on a planet that smelled like rotting meat probably hadn’t ever featured on the list.

Giant, cussing bear-blokes with tangled fur, even less so. Especially when they looked a bit like angry polar bears in dungarees. Well…overalls, maybe.

Honestly, they were neither one thing nor t’other, as his granddad would have put it, but… whatever.

Garl was a lot like the Great Father. He filled whatever space he arrived in and took it over.

The difference was in tone.

“…Never thought I’d be jealous of a Human’s sense’a smell…”

“We can smell it too, sir,” Wilde told him, wearily. “Believe me on that.”

“Well, that’s lame! What’sa point o’ havin’ a terrible sense o’ smell if you ain’t escapin’ the stink?”

Wilde snorted, and decided he liked Garl. “Karmic retribution?”

“I heard that word on Gyotin’s podcast I think. ‘Ya musta had fun in a previous life!”

“I bloody hope so. Anyway, we’d better go over a few things before your lot rip and tear, yeah?”

Garl duck-nodded. “Alright. Brief me.”

Wilde decided to get the big surprise out of the way first. “First up, we’ve got a friend on the inside. Sort of.”

“…A friend? Oh… please tell me it’s not that weird dataspace critter thing.”

“The Entity? Yeah. Showed up about the same time we did,” Wilde shrugged. “Apparently the only reason the first team succeeded here was because it suppressed the relay’s error reports for ‘em. Did the same for us, too.”

“Is it here now?”

“Not heard from it yet today, but uh… from what I understand, it’s not a question of it being here, it’s a question of whether it’s paying attention right now. There was a whole briefing on Dataspace and all that…”

“I’m too damn old ‘fer this shit.”

“It’s a bloody headache to talk with, I tell you that,” Wilde agreed.

“Any other surprises?”

“No surprises. We’ve mapped out where the local critters live, updated the relay facility’s drone patrol routes, all that stuff… It’s on the map over here.”

“We got what we needed from that thing?” Garl gestured in the vague direction of the relay.

“Yes sir, it’s all loaded on Drunker on Turkeyer there and ready to go.”

“So now we get to smash the defences and bring in Longears and Scotch Creek guys and whoever else to prod at this thing and see what twitches its nose.” Garl sounded like he’d rather just smash it to rubble, but maybe that was just his way. He didn’t react to the ship’s name at all, but presumably he was used to the Great Father’s quirks.

“They’ll have help.”

“Right. This Entity.” Garl shook his coat out at the neck and growled. “…Not lookin’ forward to meetin’ that thing. Seems kinda… Iunno. Morbid.”

“Funny thing is, I thought it would’ve showed up by now…” Wilde began. He smirked when the tablet lying on his map pinged and lit up. Somehow, he just knew that the gods of comic timing had decided to smile on him.

Sure enough, there was a large < :-) > on the screen when he picked it up.

“Talk of the devil…” he said.

< ? >

“You know, by the pricking of your thumbs? …Never mind, you don’t have thumbs.”

To his surprise, he got a rare and coherent sentence in reply.

<How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags! What is’t you do?>

“…What?”

< :-) >

Well… that wasn’t creepy or anything.

“Keeda’s scorched ‘nads…” Garl muttered. “Uh… hi.”

< :-) >

“…Is that all it says?”

“That’s kind of its go-to ‘yes, hello, affirmative, you’ve got it’ thing,” Wilde told him.

“Don’t it talk properly? I heard it can.”

“It can. It doesn’t like to.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“I asked it that. Didn’t understand the reply.”

On the tablet’s screen, the Entity deployed a sighing emoji and then did something that Wilde hadn’t expected: It manifested a face.

He knew that face. She was on Folcthan TV all the time, not to mention hanging on Coombes’ arm. This version was maybe a little younger, and looked a hell of a lot more tired and stressed, but was still unquestionably the same woman.

Garl flexed his claws and cocked his head as the image came to full animated life.

“It doesn’t like to because it means using me,” she said.

“…I know you. I’ve met you,” Wilde said. “Ríos, right?”

“No. You met the real Ava Ríos. I’m just an echo, or a ghost. I’m dead, she’s alive.”

“You’re pretty chatty for a dead thing,” Garl rumbled. The fur on the back of his neck was standing up.

The ‘echo’ ignored that jab. “The Entity has captured a Hierarchy agent,” she said.

Garl pricked up his ears as Wilde leaned forward over the table. “…Captured?”

“He surrendered. He’s in a dormant state right now, it just needs somewhere to contain him.”

“…Well, that makes life more complicated…” Wilde muttered. He looked to Garl. “…Any ideas?”

“Y’got me. We already got one captive Agent on Gao… Think the Whitecrests are takin’ care of it.”

“Okay…how would we transport this agent anyway?”

“The Entity will take care of that. The problem is Substrate. The agent is going to need it if you want him to stay sane and be useful.”

“Substrate?”

“Darcy at Mrwrki Station can explain. The Entity’s said everything it wants to say through me, now.”

“I don’t get it. Why not just use you allatime?” Garl asked.

“Because it wants to be itself. Goodbye.”

The image faded. After a few seconds, there were a couple of pings, and the Entity deployed a shrug emoji and another < :-) >

“…Well… Now what?”

“Now, I guess we get our hands on a really big flash drive or something and take it over to Mrwrki,” Wilde said, trying to ignore the slight crawling feeling all over his skin. Something about the encounter had just been wrong.

Then again, that was the Entity in a nutshell. It was a Wrong Thing that happened to be on their side, sort of.

It certainly seemed to rub Garl the wrong way. The old Gaoian scratched at the side of his neck and grumbled softly to himself before duck-nodding.

“…Right. Let’s… make sure I’m clear on all the other stuff first…” he said.

Briefing him didn’t take long. He’d come well-equipped and ready, knew the job he was there to do… Wilde could see why he’d been put in charge. The wily old bugger was still sharp as a scalpel.

“Is there anything further you need from us?”

“Nah,” the polar bear waved an enormous paw distractedly. “I gotta study. Y’all get back’ta Cimbrean. I betcha have plans ‘fer R-and-R…”

“Assuming our friend hasn’t scuppered them…” Wilde said. “Have fun!”

“Oh, I will!” Garl bared his fangs menacingly, flicked his ear happily, then stepped aside and let Wilde rejoin Tooko, Rees and Frasier at the ship’s ramp.

Tooko was eyeing the Grandfather with an expression Wilde couldn’t read.

“Something on your mind, Took?” he asked cheerfully.

“Just thinking how unfair it is that Stonebacks age so gracefully,” Tooko sighed, then shook himself and scampered up the ramp and into the pilot’s seat. Wilde met Rees’ eye and they shared a mutual amused shrug before piling aboard themselves.

“So what’d Computer Cthulhu want?” Frasier asked.

“It turned into a hot girl and gave us a prisoner,” Wilde said, throwing himself onto the ship’s nest-bed. He’d catch hell from Tooko for stinking it up later, but for now the pilot was too busy with pre-flight checks. God he was looking forward to getting back to civilization…

“…You taking the piss, or…?” Rees asked.

“Nope.”

“Prisoner?”

“Yup.”

“Wildey, c’mon mate. Don’t keep us in the dark…”

Wilde sighed and bent to undo his boots and change his socks. If he couldn’t be clean, he could at least let his feet breathe.

“Okay…” he said. “Let me explain.”

He was still going over the details when Tooko jumped them home.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Ceres facility, Asteroid Belt, Sol

Adam “Warhorse” Arés

“…Damn.”

Titan peered into the little smuggler’s hole they’d found in the suit maintenance room one last time, angled his fiber-optic camera back and forth just to make sure there really were no further nooks or crannies in there that he’d missed, and reluctantly closed it up again.

Shim had found it. Apparently it had the Arudrone scent all over it from where Sam Jordan had repeatedly accessed it, but its innards were totally bare.

“Hopin’ to find something?” Adam asked him.

“Yeah. The theory is that Jordan was using a portable temporal accelerator of some kind, that’s how he was able to have an alibi when the bomb went missing. If we could get our hands on it…”

“Damn. Just imagine if these suits could make us move like the Flash.”

“Yeah.” Titan sighed and gave up. “But, it looks like he took it out to the bomb site with him. So unless by some miracle it survived being at ground zero when the nuke went off, we’ll never know how he built it.”

“Uh…is it maybe behind the wall or something?”

“…You just wanna rip into it, don’t lie.”

“A little, yeah. I don’t like missions like this.”

“Why not? We’re just terrorizing a bunch of blameless civilians and stomping all over the place like the fucking Gestapo, what’s not to love?”

Adam gave him an annoyed look, which through their masks probably wasn’t exactly visible but whatever. Titan got the message—no snark.

He wasn’t wrong, though. He was enlisted, there was always scut work and all that, and hell, maybe being the literal best of the best was going to his head. Still seemed like a waste to send guys like him for something like this, though. They weren’t trained in being nice.

Then again, if Ceres had been a seething pit of Arudrones…

…Yeah. Seen that way, it wouldn’t have been fair to send up policemen to their doom. But still.

He’d gone around and helped mend fences with the civilians as best he could. Break cuffs off, help them to their feet, tell a corny joke or two. It would probably work better if he was, oh, in his usual Utilikilt, or, like, whatever. Not a mostly faceless armored spacesuit. There was only so friendly he could be when all folks could see of him was his weapons, the outlines of his muscles, and his eyes behind a baleful blaze orange visor. The Mass made them all look like…sci-fi nightmares, sometimes.

Which was fuckin’ great for putting the fear of God into the actual bad guys, but kinda backfired in this situation.

“…I hear you,” Titan said instead. “I know why we’re here, but fuck I’d rather be up against Hunters right now.”

“I just wish we could take the fuckin’ mask off. It’s hard to be nice when you’re a damn Space Marine.”

“Aye.” Murray had somehow snuck up behind them without making a sound. How someone who weighed well over a quarter-ton buck naked could make no sound whatsoever on plate metal flooring was…

Just part of the Magic Angus Act. Which was really a way better callsign than Highland. Angus. A big scottish side of beef!

Adam found himself quietly giggling to himself while Murray sidled up to their little group.

“…Is your oxygen feed alright, ‘Horse?”

“Har har. You and I have a spar scheduled tomorrow, Highland. Be careful.”

Murray chuckled. “…Right. I’ll behave.”

…Well, okay. Adam wasn’t too self-involved to admit that kind of thing felt good. He grinned and bounced on the balls of his feet, and the deck immediately groaned under his weight. He stopped.

Anyway. Masks. And mission. And stuff.

“What’s left?” Murray asked.

“Think we’re just waiting on Righteous, Moho and Irish to get back from Ground Zero now,” Titan said.

“Think they’ll recover anything?”

“Nah. Boom that big? Just instrument data.”

“Right.”

“That’s it? We’ve swept the whole facility?” Adam checked.

“Top tae bottom,” Murray confirmed. “Think the Whitecrests wanny go lie down now and rest their noses.”

“To be fair they’ve been scampering about all day sniffing all the things.”

“Scamper isn’t the word I’d use,” Titan said. “Every last one of them’s way bigger than anyone on the station.”

“Prowl, maybe?” Adam suggested.

Murray nodded agreement. “Aye.”

Shim interrupted them via radio. He was down in the next suit bay, sniffing it down for signs of Arudrone activity. “I can hear you, you know.”

Titan chuckled and keyed his radio to reply. “Then scamper your ass over here! ‘Horse wants to know if there’s anything inside the walls.”

“There isn’t.”

“So, no excuse for ‘Horse to go all Hulk Smash and rip the wall apart?”

“Hey–!”

“Not one that I can give you. He’s on his own.” There was definitely a chitter threatening to break into Shim’s voice.

Another voice joined the conversation. “Net, ABBOTT here. I take it this means you’re all done down there?”

Titan replied. “Yes sir. Looks like the drone took all its secrets with it when it self-destructed.”

“Alright. The Ground Zero team are nearly back in. Come on up to central ops, we’re about done here.”

Adam nodded to that and set to bundling up his gear. The new guys weren’t completely acclimated to the Mass yet, so while the old guys like him could wear the stuff almost indefinitely, the rest would be hurting and he’d need to help them through all of that.

Most of the team had already filtered back up to the main concourse by the time they got there. They were slightly diminished, with Powell, ‘Base, Southpaw, Kiwi and Hamlet—Parata and Newman—having had to run off on an emergency call elsewhere.

Central Ops had large windows overlooking the concourse, and Adam could see Costello talking with Adele Park. She looked… subdued and unhappy, but not angry or whatever.

She also looked tired as hell. Then again, the big clock on the wall said it was 04:30 local time, so she’d been up all night. Throw in the stress and fear of being raided by the HEAT and she was honestly holding up like a fucking trooper.

She still managed an exhausted smile and a handshake for Costello though as they said goodbye. The captain could be goddamn charming when he wanted to be.

He trotted down the stairs—not really the right word to describe such a weight of man and equipment in motion, but whatever—and joined the team, looking pleased behind his mask.

“So. Final verdict is the facility is clean of Arutech,” he said. “Especially the shipyard workers.”

From the HEAT’s perspective, that meant the next-gen ships they might be deploying through, and the refurbished Caledonia in particular, probably weren’t potential deathtraps fitted with Hierarchy booby-traps or bugs. That had been their personal skin in the game, and it was good to have that question cleared up.

“Now for the bad news I just had to share with Director Park up there,” Costello added. “My Other Spaceship Is the Millennium Falcon turned out to be a different story. The whole crew was Arudroned, pretty much.”

Adam wasn’t the only one to utter some variant of the word ‘fuck’ in response to that, and Costello nodded grimly. “Yeah. No idea what’s going to happen there, but something tells me we’ll be retracing that ship’s footsteps soon. That’s unofficial, but… keep it in mind if you’re making plans.”

Dexter was the first to see the problem and reacted with a growled curse. [“Nuts.] That is…a geometric problem, sir.”

“Yup. Gonna probably trickle down to everyone else, too. I think this little incident just bought a decade of work for special operations teams all across our services.” He looked up as the trio who’d gone to explore the nuke’s detonation site finally showed up. Their suits were still glistening with water from the decontamination showers. “…Alright. Time to go home and recover.”

With an assortment of low chatter, the team picked up their stuff and headed back toward the jump array. Adam glanced back at the Central Ops room as he went: Park was standing in the window with her arms folded, looking small and old and fatigued.

“…What happens to Ceres now?” he asked, mostly to himself.

“That’s for Hephaestus to decide, I guess,” Costello replied.

“…Right.”

They went home.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Dog Wagner

—Only to blink in confusion as the zipper came straight back down again, allowing harsh white light to dazzle him.

…Right. Yeah. Stasis.

No sooner had Dog sat up than a truly gigantic nose was pressed right up against his ear and a titanic snuffle tugged at his skin.

The owner of that nose straightened up with a kind of satisfied growl. “…Yeah, he’s clean,” he said in a gravelly bass tone.

From Dog’s other side came the officer’s voice, and when Dog looked to his right he found himself looking at those same intense blue eyes from before.

“Why, though? He was on the ship at Origin, why the fook didn’t they infect him when they got the rest of the crew?”

“Beats the fuck outta me…” The gargantuan Gaoian shrugged.

“…Aren’t you the Great Father of the Gao?” Dog asked him. It was about the only thing his brain could latch onto.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“And you’re confusing my patient, darling,” a new voice interjected. The Great Father stepped aside as an especially small Corti clucked up to him and climbed some steps to get a good look at Dog. “…Hello, Mister Wagner. I’m Nofl and you’ve been in stasis for six hours.”

Dog latched onto that number, grateful to have something concrete amid the upside-down wacky horror show his life had suddenly become. Ten minutes ago he’d been about to moor at a port and offload millions of dollars of food. Now he was sitting on a steel table being prodded by the HEAT and sniffed by the most powerful individual in the galaxy.

Nofl pressed a hot mug into his hands. “Coffee,” he explained jovially.

“…Thanks.” Something else concrete and familiar. He sipped it, and found to his surprise that it was about the best coffee he’d ever had in his life… or at least, it sure tasted that way in the moment.

“…Aye, sorry about that,” the officer said. “I should introduce myself. Call me ‘Stainless.’ Didn’t have time for a proper hello before.”

“…My crew?”

“Alive. We had to get bloody rough wi’ some of ‘em, but for the time bein’ they’re all in stasis while we figure out what to do wi‘ them.”

“I mean… what happened to my crew? Mitch tried to brain me with a fire extinguisher!”

“Well, that’s what we’re tryin’ to piece together,” Stainless explained.

“We think they were exposed to an… influence, during your little hiccup over Origin,” Nofl explained. “The one in which Director Park was abducted.”

“Yeah, I’m not gonna forget that one anytime soon…” Dog shivered.

“Aye, well. Neither you nor she were affected,” Stainless said. “Bit of a head-scratcher, that one.”

“Why the crew, but not their captain or the director?” Nofl agreed. “I have a question for you: did you notice any inflammation or fever after that incident?”

Dog shrugged. “Not really. Just my arthritis.”

“Rheumatoid arthritis? Not osteoarthritis?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it worse than usual?”

“Uh… yeah. Couldn’t hardly use my left hand for like two months.”

“Hmmm…”

“You got a theory there, Nofl?” Stainless asked.

“I believe I do, yes. Mister Chadesakan also suffers from rheumatoid arthritis… Do you know if Director Park does, Mister Wagner?”

“Uh, yeah. Worse’n mine.”

Nofl beamed and snapped his fingers, which was a wimpy-ass sound from a Corti but he seemed happy. “The Human immune system strikes again!”

“Nofl, what….?” the Great Father asked, tiredly. Dog was no expert in Gaoian body language, but he looked like he hadn’t slept in a while.

“Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune condition unique to Humans. Their immune system can sometimes begin to attack perfectly healthy and normal tissue… Oh my.”

He hopped down from his perch by the table and darted across the lab. “This implies a possible cure! I need to contact Tran.”

Dog swung his legs off the table, still trying to get his head around the violent gear-shift his day had just taken. “…He always like that?”

“Usually he’s a lot worse,” Stainless growled. It was hard to tell, but Dog suspected he might actually be amused.

“If this cure works on Gaoians, I’ll fund ‘em to upgrade this place however the fuck he wants,” the Great Father added, much more seriously. “Why his own people won’t…”

“Corti have their ways,” Dog said. “I’ve done a lotta business with ‘em over the years. Sticks up their asses, but at least you always know where you stand with ‘em.”

“Unner a microscope, usually. Well…that ain’t fair, not no more. They did my people a big service not too long ago.”

“Totally mercenary, darling, I assure you!” Nofl called over his shoulder. “Call it enlightened self-interest!”

“Sounds about right….” Dog finished his coffee and set it aside. “…Can I see my crew?”

Stainless shook his head. “Not an option mate, sorry. They’re all in stasis. I can show you a room full o’ bags stacked like firewood, but…”

“Mason? He wasn’t affected.”

“Aye, we released him to the hospital. They should be sewing his ear back on ‘round about now.” Again, it was hard to judge behind Stainless’ perpetual slightly sullen mask and tone of voice, but Dog got the impression he was somewhat impressed. “He took a bloody beating, I tell yer.”

“I know, I was there.”

“That’s where you’re headed, anyway. Better get that bite seen to.”

“Don’t worry, it isn’t infected!” Nofl added. “Not with zombifying nanotech, anyway. Just good old-fashioned Staphylococcus!”

“…Oh.” Dog didn’t know what to say to that. “Uh… Good.”

Stainless looked at somebody near the door, a brown-haired young man in a navy blue uniform with a gold anchor on the rank slide in the middle of his chest. “Tisdale. Escort Mister Wagner to the hospital, would you?”

“Yessir.” The lad offered Dog a shoulder to lean on and turned out to be a fair bit stronger than he looked, which was very welcome when Dog stood up and found that his knee really didn’t want to cooperate. He could vaguely remember Cathy kicking him in it.

That had been… minutes ago, from his personal perspective. He was having a hard time keeping up.

“…You’ll let me know what happens to my crew?” he asked.

“You have my word on it,” Stainless promised.

Good enough. Dog opted to limp rather than hop as he was escorted out of the building and to a waiting SUV. It hurt more, but he just didn’t have the energy for hopping.

The back of the car was a welcome moment of silence. No bright lights, nobody interrogating him, no alarms or loud noises. The thing had an electric train, so it slid out into traffic smoothly and quietly, and Tisdale seemed to sense that Dog needed a little peace: beyond checking whether he needed anything, the young man just shut up and drove. Dog could appreciate that.

But in all the chaos and freaking-out that was flooding through his head, one thought stood out above all others.

He was definitely getting too old for this shit.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“Poor bugger hardly knew which way is up…” Powell grunted, once Wagner was gone.

“Who can blame him? His whole crew going violently psychotic on him with no warning, only to be stasis-hopped right into a Corti’s lab being sniffed at by the Great Father?” Nofl tittered, which was just wrong. “He’s had an interesting day!”

“I ain’t that horrible a guy ‘ta meet…” Daar grumbled.

“No, but I daresay you’re a surprise.”

Well… okay, that was hard to argue with.

“Reckon we’ve all had a bloody interestin’ day,” Powell said. “…Mind if I cadge some of ‘yer coffee, Nofl?”

“Be my guest, dear!”

“Ta. I bloody need a pick-me-up. Might even have a fookin’ cigar later…”

“Those are bad for you, you know…” Nofl reminded him chirpily.

“Summat gets us all in the end, mate.”

Daar could sympathize. And as vices went, caffeine and one or two premium cigars a year were pretty damn mild.

He sat on Nofl’s examination table and mulled over everything the day had brought to light. A minute or so later, Powell joined him.

“…Got a lot ‘ta think about,” Daar muttered.

“Aye. Need a sympathetic ear?”

“Mostly, I think I need Naydra.” Daar scratched behind his own ear then sighed and straightened his spine. He couldn’t wallow in self-pity right now. “…Or Gyotin.”

Powell arched an eyebrow, which was a trick Daar sometimes wished Gaoians were equipped for. Then again, Humans couldn’t flick their ears. Fair trade.

“For different reasons, I hope.”

“Ha! I don’t think Gyotin’d last too long…”

Powell chuckled with him and sipped his coffee. “One thing I like about you, you aren’t pretentious. I think we’ve needed that in our leaders for a long time.”

“Speak of the Devil, by the way!” Nofl sang out. He pointed at a small monitor next to the door: Champion Gyotin was sprucing himself up and grooming his fur before ringing the doorbell.

Daar rolled his eyes before he had a chance to stop himself. He got it, it was respectful and all that…but damn if he didn’t wish people’d just relax a bit around him!

…But, well. He’d become the Great Father by brutally executing two good people for the crime of being stupid at the wrong moment. So…yeah.

Fuck he wished that hadn’t needed to happen.

Gyotin finally decided that he’d gussied up as well as he could, and pressed the button. Nofl buzzed him in and went to go do something arcane with some small samples. He at least pretended to be discreet, Daar had to give the little guy that much.

Daar couldn’t help but make a small comment as the Champion of Clan Starmind joined them. “Gyotin! You’re looking healthy.”

“And you smell like you were having a healthy day this morning, My Father,” Gyotin replied. Of all the Champions, he was the one most comfortable with irreverence, but even from him it was generally pretty mild. He sniffed again and his left ear flicked. “…What in Keeda’s name is that awful smell?”

“Sticks around, don’t it?” Daar agreed. “That, my friend, is why ‘yer here. And the rest o’ the Champions I summoned, when they git here.”

“Something happened?” Gyotin ambled a little closer to Nofl’s coffee emporium, where the nasal landscape was a lot more pleasant.

“Big Hotel broke out a new trick,” Powell said. “You familiar with the OmoAru at all?”

“I know they’re effectively extinct…” Gyotin hedged.

“You know why?” Powell asked. He nodded when Gyotin shook his head. “They took cybernetic augmentation to an extreme. Wound up upgrading their bodies on the cellular level with nanotech. That’s what you’re sniffin’.”

Daar could smell the alarm pulse so strongly from Gyotin, it was almost shocking. “They…why would they do that?!”

“Ignorance of the danger, I guess.” Powell shrugged. “From what I gather, the upgrades woulda put them on even footing with any deathworlder, physically and mentally. Too bad for them there was a bit of a giant fookin’ downside.”

“And now Big Hotel have co-opted it,” Gyotin surmised.

“Assumin’ they’re not the ones who gave it to the poor buggers in the first place, aye.”

“An’ now we’ve got a problem, Champion. We’ve got a poor-fuck Clanless, name o’ Leemu, who got turned into somethin’ like a biodrone. Bozo sniffed ‘em out as he was makin’ the border crossin’. The nut-greasy Hierarchy fucks, uh, ‘drouded’ ‘em pretty much right away. He’s in stasis ‘til we decide what ‘ta do.”

“Drouded?” Gyotin asked.

“New word ‘fer me, too. It’s…like, if ‘ya zapped someone’s brain so’s all they ever felt was cripplin’ happiness, or pleasure, or…y’know. Whatever. So’s you’d never want ‘ta do anything ‘cept sit there an’ smile a goofy smile until you starve ‘ta death.”

Gyotin seemed to take that concept as a personal affront. “…What kind of monster came up with an idea like that?”

“Well. A human author called Larry Niven, for one,” Powell said.

“Oh. Umm…”

Powell chuckled and let the Champion off the hook. “He wasn’t too happy with the idea in his own writing.”

Gyotin scratched at his whiskers as he thought. “…This Leemu,” he said. “Can he be… it’s in all of his cells?”

“Every last one,” Daar confirmed. “Or, I ‘spose enough that it don’t matter either way.”

“Then there’s no hope for him? I’m… sorry, My Father, am I here to perform last rites, or…?”

“No. You’re here ‘cuz the Corti think there’s a way ‘ta strip the Arutech outta him. Problem bein’, it involves basically mulching the poor sap right down ‘ta his individual cells, filterin’ the tech out an’ then puttin’ him back together again.”

“…I need to sit down.”

“Don’t blame yer,” Powell said, and stood up to make room for him. Gyotin took his vacated spot gratefully and hastily: he looked and smelled queasy. Powell handed the Champion a cup of water and leaned against the countertop with his arms folded.

Gyotin recovered quickly after sipping some water, and combed a few spilled drops out of his whiskers. “…Forgive me. I just…”

“Like Powell said. I don’t blame ‘ya,” Daar assured him.

“Fyu’s rage, is that really all they can come up with?” Gyotin asked.

“It’s the only idea they’ve shared so far,” Powell said. “I take it you don’t like it much.”

“The… everything about that is just… I mean, would he even be the same person? Do we even have the right to do something so extreme?”

“It’s that or he dies,” Daar said.

“My Father, it sounds to me like the Hierarchy already killed him and you’re contemplating bringing him back from the dead!”

“…No? I mean, he’s right there, it’s jus’ he’s got the worstest damn thing been done ‘ta him. We gotta think hard about how we’re gonna deal with that.”

“And if he wakes up not knowing who he is? If he wakes up not knowing how to cope? If whatever wakes up isn’t him at all? This is… this is messing with more than just his body, there’s his soul to consider!”

“Whatever that means…” Powell muttered to himself.

Humans always forgot how sharp Gaoian hearing was, but in this case Gyotin just waved a paw at him. “Exactly!”

“I wanna save him, Gyotin,” Daar said. “He ain’t the only one, an’ if we can save him then there’s hope ‘fer the others too. I dunno if I can worry too much about his soul or whatever.”

“At the end o’ the day, a man’s soul is his own business…” Powell mused.

“…True…” Gyotin admitted, with great reluctance. “It isn’t the Great Father’s job to spare him the lifelong existential crisis. That would be his journey, whoever ‘he’ is…”

“…But…?” Daar prompted after a second.

“But… This redefines life and death, My Father. If the Corti have the technology to do this then immortality is just a step away.”

…Of course it was. Daar was an engineer at heart, and even a big-piles-of-concrete-and-rocks engineer like him was always looking for new ways to apply technology. If Leemu could be taken apart that completely and then put back together with his mind intact—or shit, even a decent approximation of his mind—then where did that end? It was the ultimate medical procedure. So long as you had a scan of a being’s brain, then it didn’t matter how bad they were hurt, you could just print them a new body.

Where did that road lead? The old living forever, squeezing out the young? Would cubs grow up to find there was nowhere that needed them because the world was full of talented, experienced, healthy immortals who’d never be dulled by age?

Fuck.

“Well…shit. I hadn’t thought o’ that.”

Gyotin duck-nodded solemnly.

“My Father, I submit that not only are we not ready for immortality, but pursuing it to any serious degree would destroy us all.”

“Somebody’ll do it sooner or later,” Powell pointed out. “If the pieces are all there, it’s only a matter o’ time before somebody puts ‘em together.”

“And when they do, we would need to seriously consider suppressing that development. It would, in the end, put us in exactly the same position the Hierarchy is in.”

Powell shook his head, pulling a kind of brief grimace of disagreement. “You can’t suppress summat like that forever. Not shouldn’t mind you. Just… can’t. It’s not bloody possible.”

“The Hierarchy have, for tens of millions of years.”

“Aye. At great an’ terrible cost.” Powell sniffed. “And yet here we are, discussin’ it.”

“So the genuine question is this: do we push that snowball down the hill, My Father? The moment we do, it will gather everything in its path and become unstoppable. Meanwhile, the Directorate is in a unique position of authoritarian control of its people.”

“If.”

They turned. Nofl had padded back into the room on silent feet and was staring at them seriously with big, dark eyes, his camp facade completely dropped for the moment.

“…’Scuse me?” Daar asked him.

“If the Directorate have the technology to do this,” Nofl repeated. “You’re theorizing on a possibility we’ve only conjectured. There may be other therapies available. It might not require something so extreme. It might be that we try and suffer an abject failure. We can only learn the possibility space with exploration, and that means we must explore.”

“And if you succeed?” Gyotin asked. “If it turns out that in fact resurrection is within your grasp?”

“I know you’re familiar with Pandora’s Box, Nofl,” Powell said. “You want to open it? Fook me, d’you want someone like Tran to open it?”

“Tran is a leader of my people, and he earned his position on merit,” Nofl pointed out, though he sighed. “I might find the… restrictive mores and culturally mandated amorality of the higher castes tiresome, but he is a trusted thinker. And he may surprise you in how far-sighted he can be.”

“May.”

“You said it yourself, Colonel. What the Corti collectively want can be unintuitive from your perspective. The Directorate might make a virtue out of self-serving venality, but that doesn’t mean we’re stupid. It means we want what’s best for ourselves, and I assure you: we are quite capable of seeing the hazards in the road ahead, when we have reason to look for them.”

“You didn’t with your eugenics program,” Daar pointed out.

“That was the Hierarchy’s influence.”

“How many times have Corti research ships nearly unleashed disaster on the galaxy?” Gyotin asked.

“Dammit, my people are not stupid!” Nofl snapped, in the first show of real anger that Daar had ever seen from him.

“Ain’t none of us gonna accuse y’all of stupidity, Nofl,” Daar tried to soothe him. “But bein’ honest, an’ in the spirit of friendship an’ all, there ain’t many who’d call ‘yer people wise.”

“And yours?!” For a moment, Nofl seemed to forget that he was dealing with beings who physically outclassed him in every conceivable way. Sheer frustration seemed to loan him a few extra feet. “Should I recount all your species’ errors and decry all of the Gao for the mis-steps of a few?”

He jabbed a finger at Powell. “Or Humans! A species who successfully managed to industrialize warfare, and thank fuck they did because just imagine the mess we’d be in now if they hadn’t! But were they wise and foresighted when they did it?”

His rage evaporated as quickly as it had come. “…I know… I know you have had… bad examples in the past. I know they have colored your opinion of us, and not entirely unfairly. But we are not a species of myopic eggheads playing carelessly with forces we don’t understand. If you make the case to Tran why such research would be a bad idea, he will listen.”

There was a moment of impressed silence. Gyotin broke it with a quiet, tactful question.

“…And if he doesn’t agree?”

“Then… then… I don’t know.” Nofl sighed dramatically and flapped his hands. “I just want you to respect us.”

Daar glanced sideways at Powell and Gyotin, then pushed himself forward off the table and dropped to fourpaw. There was simply no way for him to physically come down to Nofl’s level, but he did his best.

“…I respect passion and honesty,” he said. “And you’ve got both.”

Nofl sighed deeply, then nodded. “…Thank you.”

“So…” Powell interrupted the moment, and cleared his throat. “…What’s the verdict? Do we give it a shot an’ maybe open a can o’ worms we’re not ready for yet? Or do we let Leemu die peacefully wi’ a smile on his face?”

“Only one person in this room can make that call,” Gyotin said, and looked to Daar.

Daar stood back up and hung his head in thought. But there was only one honest answer.

“…I don’t know,” he said.

For the first time in a long, long while, the Great Father had no idea what to do.

Date Point: 16y2m AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

“Not even once? It’s been… How long?!”

The driest place in the village by a long way was Vemik’s forge, and Vemik had been hard at work when Julian and Xiù had arrived.

It was definitely the rainy season. There was a heavy, rumbling, here-for-the-long-haul kind of quality to the rain that left little streams criss-crossing the village and divided it into the subtle bumps and lumps of high ground the Ten’Gewek had found to keep their huts dry. It streamed off the forge’s leafy thatch in thick rivulets, but nary a drop made it inside.

Coupled with the heat coming off the coals, it was the perfect place to warm up and get dry after the long walk down from the jump station.

Forging was an all-day process, it couldn’t just be abandoned even when treasured and long-absent friends visited unexpectedly. So, while Xiù was treated to the delighted attention of the women who wanted to know all about a human pregnancy, Julian had joined Vemik and was steaming gently as the forge-heat dried him out.

He calculated slightly, trying to convert the nineteen Earth weeks since Xiù had announced her pregnancy into Akyawentan time. “A… hand of moons, give or take.”

Vemik shuddered in a full-body wave from the top of his crest down to the tip of his tail. “How do you sleep?”

“Uh… in my bed, with two gorgeous women cuddled up to me?”

Vemik growled an annoyed sound and used his super-precise pronunciation. “Exactly! Don’t you want?”

“Dude, it’s not like they died! There’s, y’know, other ways to enjoy each other.”

“…Oh.” Vemik frowned as he considered that. “…Not the same, though.”

“It’s good enough for me, big fella.”

“But you Humans, your tongues so small–!”

“Vemik!” Julian laughed, “Boundaries, man!”

“…Sarry.” He paused, then gave a big fang filled snarl-grin and trilled, “Maybe, you Humans don’t know what you missing!”

Julian quirked an eyebrow and chuckled. “Vemik, buddy, remember the mint? I know exactly what I’m missing. I know more about your long-ass tongue than I ever wanted!” He glanced at the forge. “…Give the bellows another squeeze, I think.”

“–Oh! Yes.” The manic cavemonkey wrapped his tail around the handles and worked it in and out with a well-practiced squeeze. Neat trick, that. It left his hands free for use, and he took advantage by lining up his melts on the obsidian table in the order he would work them.

A minute later the coals were bright orange again and everything was lined up for production. Julian crossed his arms and watched until Vemik was satisfied everything was to his liking. He hooted to himself in a pleased manner, then crashed back into their earlier conversation.

“But still! How can you stand it?!”

“God,” Julian sighed. “You’re not gonna let it go, are you?”

Vemik ignored that. “I’d feel, like maybe itchy? Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop thinking… Is there word in English?”

“Restless? I know you would, buddy. That’s just how your people are. Nothing wrong with it.”

“Rest-less. Restless! Yes, I’d feel restless. When Singer was heavy with our girl, she kicked me out of the hut one night and said I should go fuck—”

“That’s not how we work, bud!” Julian just barely managed to keep a straight face. Ten’Gewek were so matter-of-fact about these sorts of things. “Well, not how we work. Al and Xiù, I mean. And me. We stick together, like you do with Singer.”

Vemik unconsciously code-switched back into his native tongue as he kept a working eye on the heating metal. [“Singer sometimes tells me about other women to lie with, though.”]

Julian didn’t mind switching languages himself, if it made life easier for the distracted cavemonkey. [“Yeah-huh. Like I said, most of us don’t work that way.”]

[“That makes me wonder if she should visit other men.”]

[“…Wait, what? I wouldn’t want my women with other men. Big fights get started that way. People get killed. Wars, even.”]

That caused Vemik to stop what he was doing and thoughtfully twitch his tail back and forth. [“Why, though? If tribes play-fight, many babies happen. Maybe one day, Yan gets beaten by some big young Given-Man! Singer would lie with him and I’d have a strong son.] And it keeps the peace! Why is that bad?”

Julian shrugged. [“The Gods made you one way, and they made us another,”] he said.

The question bothered him more than he let on, though. After all, it wasn’t like his own love life was a conventional monogamous one…

His gut, though, knotted up at the idea of breaking fidelity with either Al or Xiù, and doubly so when he imagined either of them even wanting to fool around with another man. Even in the unlikely event they both encouraged him to go for it, he couldn’t really imagine wanting to.

Vemik glanced over at the women, who hadn’t stopped cooing over Xiù since the second they’d arrived. From what Julian gathered, baby bumps didn’t start to show on Ten’Gewek until late in the pregnancy. Their women were solidly built around the middle—Xiù’s slimmer, flatter waist was apparently a source of curiosity and amusement.

[“She is very pretty,”] he said. [“I mean, Human-pretty. Sky-pretty! Both of them are. It’s a shame Awisun could not be here.”]

“She got a promotion. [That means she’s in charge now, like when a Dancer becomes a Singer, and has a Dancer of her own. Gonna make a hand of Misfits a year.”]

Vemik hooted appreciatively, then glanced into the forge to check on the progress of his latest blade. The forge changed every time Julian saw it as he experimented with different ways to improve his craft, and honestly he had a better grasp of workflow than Julian did. His tools were all stored just so, so they’d be exactly where he needed them when they were needed.

There was other stuff, too. Little changes to help air flow through the coals, that kind of thing. Right now, apparently, he was experimenting with a hot-water quench.

There were other bladesmiths among the People, but nobody had been as marked by it as Vemik. The heat had handsomely darkened his hide, and all the good food, hard work and his ongoing training had dramatically filled out and hardened his body. His crest was as blaze orange as the strongest men, and the attention he was getting from the women was noticeable…

…To everyone but him, apparently. If he were a human, Julian might think he was almost something akin to autistic, being honest. Well, no. That wasn’t the right word. He wasn’t blind to any of it, and when he’d noticed the attention, he’d dance like all the other men. Way better, actually. He could jump clear over the bonfires, easily flipping tail-over-head…

It was more like he had two all-consuming loves in his life. Tinkering, and the Singer. Everything else was a pleasant diversion.

“Should be hot enough soon. I want to see this ‘welder’ thing you brought!”

“I thought I’d save that for when Yan gets back.”

Yan was away on a hunt. He was a skilled tracker and spearman, but at this time of the year the Werne stayed on the move. It kept their body temperatures up and also brought the herds into contact, where in a manner not unlike the Ten’Gewek there was inevitably a lot of rutting and breeding.

It made for good hunting. Solitary males bulked up in anticipation of fighting the herd bulls to take over the harem, and defeated pretenders and deposed bulls alike could often be founding limping and suffering with deep gouges from their rival’s face-blades. Either way, there was plenty of good meat on the hoof out there, and the Ten’Gewek were all too happy to hunt them. It ended their suffering, kept the herds fit and fed the tribes.

The only downside was how far a hunting party had to go to find their quarry. Yan’s party had been gone a hand of days, which was about average when hunting Werne at this time of year. Maybe he’d be back today, or tomorrow… maybe he’d be another hand of days if the Gods were feeling particularly unhelpful.

That was the pace and rhythm of tribal life. Sometimes you just had to take it as it came.

“Aww…” Vemik’s disappointment didn’t last long as he glanced into the forge again, gave the bellows one last squeeze with his tail, and then grabbed his tongs and fished a glowing billet from among the coals. It was on the anvil in a flash, held steady by tail and left hand. Julian stepped aside and gave him room to swing his ridiculous mallet. Where a blacksmith on Earth would use a pneumatic power hammer, Vemik just used a hardened steel mallet the size of his head. Julian had tried his hand at swinging it, and quickly decided he’d prefer something much smaller. Slow and steady was the key for him.

Vemik’s approach made for a hell of a show. The steel took rough shape in mere seconds.

“Who’s this one for?”

[“Brovee. Singer’s sister’s half-son.”]

‘Half-son’ was the Ten’Gewek term for a child raised by a couple where only one of the pair were the parent. In this case it sounded like Brovee’s mother was a woman other than the Singer’s sister, and since children tended to stay with their moms that usually pointed to a sad story.

“What happened?”

Vemik hooted sadly. [“A raid, and their Given-Man couldn’t defend them. Yan wasn’t happy.”]

“Idiots,” Julian muttered. There were so few Ten’Gewek these days, and while most of the tribes knew it well and kept their raids playful, there were a handful who hadn’t got the memo. They’d been pushed out to the edges of settled territory, where the hunting wasn’t as good and the Ketta weren’t as old and strong, but that had just embittered them. When they raided, they weren’t playing.

[“Mm. She survived the raid and what they did to her, and she escaped but… she got sick. Her Singer said she doesn’t know what illness it was. The Singers say there are new sicknesses on this side of the mountains, and they don’t know how to treat them.”]

[“What happened to the raiders?”]

[“It was Soono’s tribe they raided.”] Vemik trilled grimly. [“That should tell you all you need to know.”]

It did. Soono was nearly as old as Yan, and of an even more choleric temperament, but importantly he was also one of Yan’s closest allies. He believed in the peace more than most, and if that meant inflicting unholy violence on anybody who broke it, well…

“…Even stupider.”

Vemik nodded solemnly. [“Yes. A few escaped, we hunted them for a hand of days… Brovee took vengeance for his mother. He’ll be taking his Rite when the rains clear, so this knife is for when he’s a man.”]

[“No doubt about that, huh?”]

[“No. He’s strong. Too bad he doesn’t want to learn steel…”] Vemik tilted his head slightly and considered the shape of his creation. It looked like he was giving Brovee’s knife a drop point.

“I see Hoeff’s been teaching you knife things again.”

“Yes! Heff has, I think, ‘mag-a-zeen sub-scrip-shun.’ Pictures! This point, hard to forge but make knife good for stabbing.” He flipped the blade around, switch to one of his much smaller ‘detail’ hammers and delivered a few well-practiced blows to shape the tang, then returned the metal to the forge.

[“…Mosee’s baby died,”] he added, indicating a young woman who was sitting next to Xiù with a deeply sad expression on her face. Xiù, of course, had picked up on it and was commiserating with the bereaved mother.

“Disease?”

[“Yes. the shivering-sickness again. They all get it. My son did too… he lived, but we had many nights with no sleep.”]

“Sounds bad.”

[“…The Singers think three babies out of every hand will not grow up.”]

Seventy-five percent child mortality. Fuck. And Julian lived in a society that took it for granted that children lived to adulthood.

“…Was it that bad on the other side of the mountains?”

[“Ask the Singer. Over there, it was just the way of things. But now…”] Vemik glanced over at Xiù again. [“…Now we know things can be better, it’s harder to bear.”]

“Knowledge is a curse, huh?”

Vemik shook his head. [“Knowing but not having the way to do something with the knowing is the curse,”] he said.

He looked up at the sound of a bullroarer—a singing-stone as the Ten’Gewek called them—thrumming from somewhere among the trees to the north. A minute or so later, Yan crashed back into their midst.

There wasn’t any other word for it, because he had the rear ends of two huge Werne over his shoulders, while two other men bore up a front end apiece. Julian was suddenly very glad he hadn’t been around to be dragged out on that hunt.

“Yan!” Julian called from the forge and gave an apologetic look toward Vemik, who nodded happily and turned back to his work. “Breaking in a new hunting party I see!”

He braced himself for the hug, and Yan didn’t disappoint. The two carcasses were unceremoniously dumped and Julian was treated to a full-body, full-speed and thoroughly wet charge-and-hug. Thank God for the rains, at least: they completely damped Yan’s usual potent body odor.

“Bud, errrgh! If I didn’t know you I’d have run for my life!”

“Good!” Yan put Julian back down and hooted merrily. “Surprise visit! And you bring Shyow! With baby, too!”

Xiù had joined them during the hug, and she laughed happily. “Hello, Yan. Be gentle please, the baby isn’t as strong as Julian.”

She was treated to a much softer show of affection, but of course Yan wasn’t going to tolerate any suggestion that one of his tribesman’s offspring was weak.

“Feh! Not as strong yet you mean!” He bent down and aimed a finger as thick as a firehose at Xiù’s belly, and proceeded to lecture the unborn infant. “You grow fast and strong, yes? Make your father look small!”

“Ohh, he will,” Xiù promised.

“Hey!” Julian grinned. “I’m right here you know!”

“Yes! You come help boot-cher Werne, big feast tonight!”

Julian could hardly refuse. He gave Xiù a peck on the cheek and picked up one of Yan’s dropped Werne-ends. It was hellishly heavy, and there was no way he’d be able to carry it any further than to the wide, flat rock the villagers used for butchering, but it had to be done. The men of the tribe respected strength above all else, and a man who didn’t carry his load and do his work was no man at all as far as they were concerned.

The load got a lot heavier when one of the other men, Nobo, lifted the front end.

[“Think you can make it to the forge, Jooyun?”] he joked. [“Or maybe you fall down before then!”]

[“I just might.”] Julian growled and paused to catch his breath. “God-damn man…!” he muttered under his breath, before switching back to People-speak. [“Maybe Xiù can take over when you fall down.”]

It wasn’t exactly the height of wit, but Nobo’s hunting companion Zook found the suggestion that a tiny pregnant Human could do Nobo’s job hilarious. He belted the other man on the back with a brotherly open-palmed slap. [“Don’t worry, Nobo! Not far to go now,”] he trilled, and hoisted his own Werne with a grunt.

Xiù fell in alongside Julian as they hauled the meat across the village.

“They’re gonna get on with the Corti like a house on fire…” she muttered.

“Nnrgh!” Julian shrugged his load for a moment’s relief. “Yuh. No problem there…”

He could hold a Werne, or hold a conversation. Not both. She got the message, nodded and touched his arm affectionately, which definitely helped him carry the carcass with his head a little higher.

Still. Dumping it on the “table” was a very welcome relief. He got a congratulatory slap on the back from Zook and apparently Nobo had learned the fist bump from somewhere. Reputation: solid.

Julian crouched down and rested his hands on his knees as the two men departed. Subjectively, he’d been enjoying a supergravity leg day with Adam and Daar only a few hours ago. He had a capacity to recover that frankly amazed himself nowadays, but unlike Adam he wasn’t on a Crue-D regime. His legs felt like they were made of taffy.

Yan, at least, understood. “Good effort,” he said, and drew a skinning knife

“I had to interrupt a leg day with Warhorse to come here, Yan. So…yeah.” Julian pulled out his own knife and set to carving the trotters off the Werne with a grunt of effort and a loud crack of snapping bone. They’d make good broth, and one of the women immediately swept past to appropriate them.

Yan hooted his approval. “With Adam? Good! But…you have reason to visit, yes?”

Xiù sat down on the rock. “…Yeah.”

“The Big Enemy tried to sneak onto Cimbrean again,” Julian explained. “A new way. It nearly worked, too.”

Yan snarled as he worked one of the blades off the Werne’s skull. Apparently this one had impressed him enough for him to keep the trophy. “Bad?”

“Nobody died. But somebody is… very sick. So sick, we had to ask the Corti for help. And Corti never do anything for free. They have a price.”

Yan nodded as he removed the other blade. “Their price is?”

“They want to come here and try to strike a deal with you.”

Yan set the two horn-like items aside and started to skin the carcass. “…What do they have that we want?” he asked.

“Vaccines.”

Yan didn’t reply to that directly, but the slow, sad look he cast in Mosee’s direction told a complicated and sad story. Mosee was one of his nieces.

“…And what do we have that they want?”

“Strength.”

That got his attention. He glanced at Xiù. “…I remember you saying, they don’t think much of strength.”

“They don’t value brawn.” Xiù corrected him gently. “That’s a word that means strength of muscle. But things are changing. I…can’t say why. I think Julian knows but he has to keep secrets now because of his job.”

Julian just shrugged.

“…And they think they can take our brawn?” Yan asked. “They think we will give it? Or is this one of those strange takings-without-giving?”

“…No. You’d still have all the brawn you ever had,” Julian said. “But there’d be a Taking alright. Just… not one that’s easy for you to see right now.”

“What kind of Taking?”

“I really can’t say, buddy. That will be for them to tell you, if they want. I’m here to ask if you would be willing to travel and meet them. You and whoever you think should come.”

“Hrrm…” Yan mulled it over as he worked his knife under the Werne’s hide, neatly and expertly separating it from the meat. “…No. They can come here, if it is so important to them. They must make a Giving. You say they are weak in body?”

“Weak enough that this planet would kill them, without the right tools. And also…I would advise against inviting them here, Yan. They would get what they want without asking if you did.”

Yan made a frustrated noise deep in his chest. “Is rainy season! Time to hunt, time to grow, time to fuck and make tribe stronger. I will not leave right now. Manhood trials start soon!”

“Is there some way to meet in the middle?” Xiù asked.

Yan sighed, put his knife down, and cupped his hands to fill them with rainwater so that he could scrub the blood off. “…You have an idea?”

“A ship maybe. A human one or a Gaoian one. Up in the sky where they can’t take what they want but you won’t really have left.”

“Hmmm…” Yan thought it over as he watched Julian skin the Werne’s hindquarters. “…Maybe. I do not trust these Corti, but I trust you and the Gao. You can keep the peace?”

“If there’s one thing I can guarantee, it’s that the Corti won’t want to fight you,” Julian said.

“They may just… ask for more than you will give,” Xiù said. “They tend to ‘drive a hard bargain’ as we say.”

“They are coming to us. That puts us in strong place…” Yan mused. “…Hmm. Yes. I meet them, but only on a ship in the sky. And I will be back here every night, if talking is long.”

“We could just go through the Array every day,” Xiù added. “You have provision for that.”

“Would be Giving too much. They must earn it,” Yan said. “I will not leave Akyawentuo for them, not until they prove themselves like Human and Gao did. That is my last word on it.”

Xiù and Julian looked at each other.

“…I guess we have an answer, then,” Julian said.

“Yup!”

“No Awisun this time?” Yan asked, changing the subject.

“She has responsibilities.”

Yan nodded. “We see her again soon, yes? Is strange, seeing you two but not her. Seems…” His brow furrowed for a moment. “…Incomplete.”

Julian chuckled to himself. Yan was like a lot of the true slabs of muscle he knew: breathtakingly intelligent, and determined to act dumber than he really was. His English vocabulary was actually pretty huge, but he stuck to the simple language so as to seem simple.

…Why did they all do that, actually? It wasn’t like Julian was ever small, and he never pretended to being a simpleton…and it was cross-species, too! People could be weird.

“Yeah,” Xiù agreed, with a twinkle in her eye. Julian guessed her thoughts were probably along the same lines as his. “It’s always weird being away from her.”

“Also, not even I fuck two women every night!”

Xiù’s face went crimson. “Yan!”

“What?!” Yan slapped Julian heavily on the back, knocking the wind out of him and probably leaving a diluted bloody handprint behind. “Is good man! Strong, very hard body, too…”

“Yan!!”

“Laying it on a bit thick there, bro,” Julian coughed in a combination of amusement and post-slap recovery. Yan’s ribbing was good for the ego…but still.

“Pssh. You Humans, so strange about these things.”

“Other species think we’re weirdly over-sexed,” Xiù grumbled, still blushing pink from eartip to collarbone.

“Well…” Yan ducked his head and grinned sheepishly. “Maybe, Given-Men…what is words? ‘Ham it up?’ Why ham is word, I do not know…”

“And you’re just about the biggest ham there is.”

That earned a hoot of approval, and Yan tore off the Werne’s front leg and shoulder with very little apparent effort.

“Here.” He handed it to Xiù, who grimaced a little at suddenly finding herself holding a whole leg of freshly butchered bloody meat. “Take home, for you and for Awisun. Eating for four now! Werne meat will make the babies strong!”

“…Thank you, Yan.” She even managed to accept the gruesome gift gracefully. “I’ll… go pack it, I guess.”

Yan trilled as she carried it away. Julian briefly wondered what she intended to pack it in, but then Yan leaned in to have a conspiratorial word and rather overwhelmed him.

“Maybe we go hunt while you’re here. You take them werne-blades and hides! Good blankets!”

Julian hesitated. He’d been about to demur on the grounds that he needed to get back to the Ambassador and Allison, but snubbing Yan was… not necessarily the wisest idea. Especially when the big brute obviously had some jolly surprise in mind.

“I… guess I could have Hoeff take your reply back to the Corti…”

“Good! But make sure he come back, yes? We need him.”

“…Okay, what’re you thinking, Yan?”

Yan’s grin was truly feral. He fully bared his two-inch fangs and ran his tongue across them.

“I’m thinking… special hunt. Bring back real trophies for your women, yes? In fact, you bring rifle this time. You bring all your sky-thinking tricks. No shame in using them for this.”

Julian had a very bad feeling about this, now. The Ten’Gewek tended to view rifles as cheating. In fact, the only reason bows got a pass was because even a strong man couldn’t hold a good bow at full draw for long. If Yan was giving him a pass to use a rifle, it meant he had some truly fearsome quarry in mind.

“Oh…okay? Why? What are we hunting?”

Somehow, Yan’s grin got even wider. He glanced around conspiratorially to make sure there were no women and especially no Xiù in earshot, then lowered his voice to an eager, bloodthirsty murmur.

“Brown One,” he said.

++END CHAPTER 52++

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Myke Harryson
Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Oliver Mernagh
Patrick Huizinga
Richard A Anstett
Ryan Cadiz
Saph
Sintanan
Starky Farrell
Stephane Girardin theWorst
Tyler Kelloway
Woodsie13
Zachary M Lunstrum

…Sixty-six Friendly ETs, and 262 tasty little Dizi Rats.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work under fair use are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not automatically share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 53: “The Wild Hunt”

Chapter 53: The Wild Hunt

Date Point: 16y2m1d AV
personal sanctum, Dataspace.

Cynosure/Six

Data sophonts did not sleep, and thus did not dream. Nevertheless, Cynosure had a recurring nightmare of sorts.

When his attention wandered, he found that it almost inevitably alighted on a handful of disturbing subjects. The details varied, as he worried at different aspects of the problems facing him, but the central theme was a deep and gnawing sense of his own fallibility. He couldn’t escape visions and predictions of calamity brought on by his own weakness.

That damned interrogation. That was the failure point. So polite. So civilized. So… humane.

And so utterly, ruthlessly effective. Evil done with a soft hand, so skillfully he’d been powerless to endure it. They’d broken him utterly, and not even the Hierarchy’s most accomplished efforts had healed the psychic wound his Human interrogators had inflicted. Only time, perspective, and incontrovertible proof of how badly he’d erred had finally initiated that process.

He’d respected the Humans for so long. Truly respected them. He’d seen in them a kind of foresight and restraint that suggested maybe, just maybe, they might not live up to the horrors that the Hierarchy’s long-range observations had hinted at in other galaxies.

The fact that the Hunters had developed self-replicating space probes based on obviously Human technology had shattered that illusion. Self-replicating technology was a plague.

Worse, it was a plague that had only one counter: itself. The only winning move in that game was to never play it in the first place.

And now, the game had been joined. After all these millions of years.

He might even, in his delusion, have continued to trust that the Humans knew what they were doing, but the fact that they’d managed to somehow leak the technology to the Hunters shot that sentiment right through the brain. They’d either been hopelessly careless, or willfully stupid. Either way…

Either way, it had finally broken him of his awe syndrome. In the end, the Humans were just Deathworlder meat, like the V’Straki before them. They had meat concerns, and meat instincts. They couldn’t, in the end, see past their need to spread. It was always so, with Deathworlders: they bred, they filled the available space, and then they either starved or conquered new space. And they were so inevitably intelligent and inventive that it was always the latter.

The Hierarchy had watched nova bombs ripple throughout distant galaxies as whatever alien civilizations lived over there clashed, or tore themselves apart. Other galaxies gave every indication of having been conquered by a singular polity. The signs were inevitably subtle and faint after crossing such twisting gulfs of open space… but it was a big universe out there, and life arose everywhere it could. Life was not merely an option, it was an inevitability.

Which meant competition was inevitable. Competition in which the loser perished, and the victor moved on to the next challenger, and the next, and the next until finally being vanquished in their turn. If life was inevitable, then so too was extinction.

There were times when Six felt deeply angry at such a universe. It was cruel to give life forms the illusion of significance, while casting them into a crucible that would inevitably burn them away as though they had never been. Had he believed in any kind of a thinking intelligence that had chosen for things to be so, he would have considered its existence a personal affront.

There was only one solution that he could see: Win. Win, and keep winning. The nihilistic alternative was to give up and collapse into anonymous non-existence, perhaps even drag others down to the abyss in the process.

He’d hate to see Humanity wiped out. They held such promise…but in the end, it came down to survival. He’d thought they were an avenue to his own people’s survival. Allying with them would have been a major change of strategy, but ultimately in pursuit of the same goal.

Now, it was clear that they needed to be destroyed.

A more… unthinking… agent of the Hierarchy might have been willing to sacrifice their own existence to achieve that end. But Six intended to be there when the last stars burned out. He intended to find a way to reverse or dodge entropy. If necessary, he intended to break through into whatever came Next.

It was not his destiny to simply… stop.

But the Humans had given him one parting gift, and he couldn’t compel himself not to think about it. They’d reminded him that, in the long term, everything was finite. Even dataspace itself was temporary. And when it too ended…

…He’d need an alternative.

Date Point: 16y2m1d AV
Starship Empirical Razor, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

Somehow, Nofl had never quite appreciated just how terrifying a dog was. He liked Bozo. The animal was huge and fanged and obviously capable of ripping him to pieces if he’d ever got it into his fuzzy head to do so, but… well, he was Bozo, and that meant Friend.

Somehow, he was endlessly more intimidating when under general anesthetic so Nofl could carefully perform cellular-scale surgery around his teeth and gums to make absolutely sure there was no Arutech infiltrating his system. Something about inspecting his teeth so intimately drove home just how big, strong and sharp they were, and how crushingly powerful were the muscles that powered them. Those wrapped his entire skull, which in turn had a sagittal crest specifically adapted to maximize his ability to generate bite force.

It really highlighted why Humans had chosen to domesticate Bozo’s remote ancestors. They’d taken an efficient apex predator and turned it into a tool. That was simultaneously a stunningly intelligent idea, and a dismayingly insane one.

…And of course, to Humans it was all perfectly normal.

Nofl was very much playing the understudy for this sequence of medical interventions. While Tran and the ship’s senior surgeon handled the two sapient patients, Nofl was relegated to the role of veterinarian.

He didn’t mind. The Corti had much data on Humans, but hardly any on their canid companions. That seemed a grievous oversight, and over the years Bozo had become a trove of data… all for the small cost of a few turkey livers.

One thing Nofl could see up close, however, was that Bozo was beginning to get old. It seemed a shame, for such beloved creatures to have a lifespan barely a sixth that of their sapient companions, but at eight years old Bozo was definitely beginning to show some gray hairs on his face and some signs of wear in his joints. The latter, in theory, Nofl could have fixed.

Operating on Colonel Powell’s dog without permission, however, would have been… not good for their professional working relationship. So far it hadn’t slowed the dog down—in fact he seemed stronger and fitter than ever—but according to Nofl’s research that would start changing soon. Certainly within the next five years, possibly imminently.

…Perhaps it might do to encourage more puppies. He’d sired many, but the world could never have enough puppies. Hmm.

Fortunately, there seemed to be virtually no trace of nanite infection. There were a couple of chipped teeth from aggressive chewing, and a slightly worrisome plaque buildup…Nofl maybe indulged in a teensy bit of authority abuse and cleaned those up while he was re-assembling Bozo’s face. After all, in a way it was easier than putting the plaque back…

He ruthlessly expunged what few trivial hints of Arutech he could find, then had the dog transferred to the recovery kennel where he would wake up to a bowl of water and a few hours of feeling groggy before getting on with his life.

The Gaoian security officer, Narl, had needed the intervention more badly when he checked on the progress of that operation. Gaoians had surprisingly resilient physiologies, but next to an Earthling’s frankly psychotic immune system they just didn’t stack up. The Arutech around and in his eye had successfully implanted and begun to replicate. Tran and his surgical second were determinedly exterminating every last tendril, and taking notes as they went.

Nofl watched them finish up, apply rapid regenerative therapy to Narl’s wound until it was closed and healed, then administer the wake-up shot. In seconds the Gaoian was awake, though confused and dopey.

At his request they put him in with Bozo. Narl promptly curled up next to the slumbering canine and fell asleep again, coiling up and tucking his nose under his own tail.

Nofl suspected he might finally understand what the a ‘cute overload’ felt like. It was mingled with a hefty dose of relief, and not just for his patients. Successfully treating them meant that the wholy galaxy had a counter to the Hierarchy’s latest gambit.

He turned his attention to Preed Chadesakan, who was not undergoing surgery. Instead, the human doctors who’d been brought in on this incident had suggested something called “adjuvant immunotherapy” and Nofl was compelled to shake his head in disbelief at what he saw as he watched it work.

“Psychotic” really was the right word to describe the Human immune system, and it could be lured into a state of vicious frenzied hyperactivity with the right medication. Preed’s arm had been thoroughly injected with a cocktail of specialized drugs hitherto unknown to Corti science, and he was lying looking weary and resigned on a bed with his arm immobilized under a scanner to watch the treatment work. Every so often, a minor expression of discomfort marred his face.

Nofl couldn’t blame him at all. The poor man’s arm was swollen and red, and several degrees hotter than normal… But the Arutech was being massacred.

Tran seemed especially satisfied.

“Frankly, even if we don’t get a meeting with the Ten’gewek, I’ll consider this to have been a worthwhile investment,” he declared as he sanitized his hands and arms.

Nofl could see why. They’d recorded an ocean of valuable data today, not to mention the political goodwill they’d cultivated. No doubt everything the medical suite’s equipment had observed would be sent straight to the Ark project for integration into the species regeneration program.

The thought of Corti with that kind of an immune response made him shiver, though. It was almost like having a symbiotic bioweapon. One that could, and indeed not infrequently did turn around and attack its host.

“I presume you’ll be staying here until the Ten’gewek have given their reply?” he asked aloud.

“Yes, we have arranged a fruitful medical exchange in the interim.”

“And Leemu?”

Tran made a mildly irritated sound. “If it were up to me, we would be beginning the proposed regeneration process already. But he is a Gaoian citizen and the Great Father was quite explicit that we are to leave the patient in stasis while he considers matters.”

“He seemed to find it morally dubious,” Nofl said.

“Yes. Very strange. What could be more moral than saving a life?” Tran gave a curt expression of impatience for the foibles of aliens, and waved the matter aside. “Nevertheless. Our future goodwill with the Gao hinges upon our future goodwill with Great Father Daar, so we will acquiesce to his… peculiarities.”

“Hopefully I can provide an alternative,” Nofl said. “This adjuvant immunotherapy, and the apparent resistance shown by Humans with autoimmune disorders intrigues me… I have a hunch.”

Tran blinked at him. “…A hunch, Nofl?” He spoke the word with contempt.

Nofl flapped a hand breezily. “A hypothesis if you prefer. I’d like to look at the OmoAru’s own research. I know they were working on a cure before the end. Surely the Directorate has access to some of their findings?”

“Never anything conclusive. Aside from a rather interesting mechanism for stimulating aggression, focus and motivation via purely optical stimulus, their efforts failed.” Tran dismissed the predecessor species’ shortcomings with a gesture. “If you feel there may be something of value in their findings that higher-caste researchers have missed, you are of course welcome to try. I shall forward you the appropriate access codes.”

“Thank you.”

Tran nodded. “I must rest,” he declared. “And you, I think, should return to your laboratory. We will reconvene in half a local day.”

“Suits me!” Nofl agreed. “Rest well.”

“I intend to.”

Nofl wasn’t even out of the ship when his phone informed him that he’d been granted access to a new set of files. He ordered a Johnny Cab and speed-read the translated OmoAru research as it swept him back to the Alien Quarter.

By the time he reached his lab, he knew he had a solution. Probably.

…Maybe.

It all hinged on an unresolved question, that he suspected he knew the answer to.

Might the OmoAru have survived, if they’d had access to a Human?

The answer, he suspected, was yes. And he intended to prove it.

Date Point: 16y2m1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’gewek protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

Xiù didn’t like to swear often, or at least not in English.

Sometimes, though… sometimes a girl just had to.

“…You have got to be fucking kidding me!”

“I mean… I wish I was.”

“You mean that reckless wáng bā is going to drag you into hunting a fucking bear-dinosaur and there’s nothing you can do about it?”

“Bear-dinosaur-cheetah. And, uh… I mean, I could back down… and lose face.” Julian sighed heavily. “And to be honest, this fuckin’, uh, nightmare bear thing ate a Given-Man not long ago.”

“…Wow. How?”

“Clawed its way through the trees all the way to the village. And this is a big old one, too. They usually stay out on the plains, but I guess this one realized it was strong enough to just knock over the young Ketta and, well… Yan says Droono died making sure his tribe escaped. But they can’t let it go unavenged.”

“So they’re dragging you into it?”

“Yan says its hide is so thick that even his bow won’t do more than make it mad. He figures, for this? There’s no shame in using a little sky-thinking.”

“Tā mā de…” Xiù massaged her eyes for a second. “…But I mean, I’ve seen Yan’s bow. If that can’t hurt it, then your rifle won’t do anything either!”

“No… but Hoeff says he can get his hands on something a lot better. Uh…the little troll was practically gleeful.”

“Like what, a tank gun?!”

“I don’t know, babe. Remember when we did the first survey and found that big brown shaggy murderthing out on the plains? That was a yearling. Fully grown, two or three of these things mass as much as Misfit does. This one…”

“And you’re going to go hunt it.”

“And they can outrun a cheap sports car…” Julian added, apparently reciting off an internal list of reasons to be afraid without actually listening to her.

“Julian…”

“Oh yeah. And they’re smart, too. Like, really cunning…”

“Julian!”

He snapped out of it. “Huh? Oh. Sorry. Guess I’m just… kinda nervous.”

“Well, yeah!” Xiù agreed. “I… are you actually gonna do this? I mean, is losing face really that bad?”

It was a dumb question, and she knew it. Julian’s job depended on keeping face with the Ten’Gewek, and if he didn’t then their whole future might well be in jeopardy. Certainly, their future relationship with humanity depended on them respecting him and, vicariously, the human race as a whole. And if they couldn’t respect him, there was exactly one non-human they would be able to respect. And he was busy, these days.

But still. This was an insane risk, surely?

Julian didn’t answer directly. He knew that she knew.

“I guess there’s an upside!” he said, ever the optimist. “They don’t sneak, ‘cuz they can’t. You always know where they are. And they can’t push through the biggest Ketta. We just keep the Wall between it and us…”

The Wall was Julian’s name for a line of ancient, gnarled, closely-packed Ketta that meandered its way around the heart of the forest. Outside the Wall, the Ketta were mostly young, and there was only the occasional Forestfather or Thicketroot. Within the wall, the forest was older, more mature and more diverse… and more dense.

There was a reason Werne came in from the plains to sleep, mate and calf among the trees. They grazed out on the plains at night, but the forest offered shelter from both the sun and the Brown Ones during the day. They hunted the Werne by the simple expedient of running at them far too fast to miss, then basically exploding them apart with a slap of a massive paw.

According to Yan, a Brown One could eat several Werne a day. Jesus.

“…I know you’ll be careful, but I mean… This is still really dangerous.”

“Any hunt is dangerous. Hell, a Werne could gut us if we’re not careful.”

“Oh. Great.” Xiù felt weak, and she wasn’t sure if the queasy feeling in her belly was anxiety, or the baby squirming.

Julian put his hand on their son, gently. “Babe. I’ll be careful. I mean…I’ve got four people to live for.” He smiled, a little wanly. “I wouldn’t miss meeting this little guy for anything.”

“…You’re not going to stop me from worrying that easily,” Xiù told him, but honestly she did feel better.

“I know.” He kissed her. “It’ll be a few days, anyway. Gotta wait for Hoeff to get back with… whatever kind of a cannon he’s bringing.”

“And what are you gonna do while we wait?” Xiù asked.

“Oh, I’m not going to wait. I’m going to learn everything about this critter I can, and I’m gonna scout the terrain, too.”

“Julian…” she felt a little embarrassed at the way she actually whined his name, but…

Ugh. Hormones.

“I didn’t say I was gonna approach it, Xiù.” He tried to say it kindly. “Wildlife documentary fellas don’t hunt what they’re filming, right?”

“…I guess we haven’t really documented the Brown Ones yet, huh?” she conceded. And seeing as Brown Ones were the apex predator of the plains, that was a big oversight.

“Not enough, no. We need to detangle the reality from the myth, too. Though the Ten’Gewek aren’t really a people for tall tales…”

“No,” Xiù agreed. “Think about that for a second.”

Julian paused, furrowed his brow and thought for a moment. “…Yeah. But…look. Babe. I know how to hunt dangerous prey. I have zero interest in, I dunno, jumping on its back or anything like that. I know my limits.” His tone was maybe a bit sullen and wounded. “I’m not reckless or stupid, Xiù.”

Xiù made a disgusted noise at herself. She had concerns, and those concerns were valid. Fine. But she hadn’t needed to insult his competence in voicing them. “…I’m sorry.” she sat forward and wrapped her arms around him. “I’m still gonna worry, though. And you can’t stop me.”

Julian chuckled low in his chest, and wrapped his strong arms tightly around her. “I know.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

That was the rub, really. She didn’t like feeling helpless. Sitting up in Misfit’s pilot chair up on the moon and being ready to bolt home had been awful for both her and Allison for that reason. Neither of them were built for waiting at home and folding bandages.

Julian knew it, too. Hopefully, that was part of why he loved them.

“…Maybe…” he sat back on his heels and thought about it. “…Actually, yeah, there is. You’re a way better pilot than anyone else on this planet. Why don’t you operate our drone?”

That was an interesting thought. “Don’t you need line of sight, though?”

“No! Hoeff has this new little job with a remote antenna, all I gotta do is get it up high. Watch!” WIth that he charged off, suddenly excited for a small mission to do, and returned at a dead sprint with a dish-looking antenna in one hand, and the briefcase-sized drone set in another. Vemik and Singer were following behind curiously.

“Wait here Xiù. C’mon Vemik!”

Xiù had to admit, watching Julian do his almost-naked Tarzan thing was one of the better perks of the job. He quickly scaled the enormous ketta near the border of the village, until he was high up enough she couldn’t quite see what he was doing. He gracefully swung and leapt his way back down the tree a few moments later, and pounced the last distance to the ground.

Singer watched too, probably thinking much the same about Vemik, Which…was entirely understandable. Xiù would just have to tell Al about all the boy-candy she was missing. Later.

“Try it now! You should be able to fly it wherever the drone has line of sight to the antenna.”

Xiù shrugged and popped the case open. There were a pair of small VR goggles in there, plus an RC controller the size of a brick. Also a tablet in case she’d rather watch the drone’s perspective from a screen rather than go fully immersive.

The drone itself was a smaller version of the MBG Flycatcher. It looked nothing like the quadcopters of a few years ago, instead it looked more like a thick wallet or something. When she booted it up, it sprang a set of forcefield wings into existence, haloed in holographic light for safety’s sake.

The effect was kind of like a weird neon robotic dragonfly.

Singer gasped when the “wings” unfurled and had to be warned not to touch them. Vemik must have learned that lesson earlier; he didn’t even try.

Julian helped her put the goggles on, and she found herself sitting in her own palm, looking up at herself. The shift in perspective and scale was a little bewildering, and made her giggle.

“Okay… test flight,” she said, and handed the drone off to Julian.

Seconds later, she was flying. The drone zipped straight up with a heavy buzz of electromagnetic wings. She rolled it over clockwise, then back again, then did a backflip.

She knew she was grinning hugely. She’d really missed flying, and this was… from the first-person perspective the goggles gave her, it was even more immediate and in-her-face than piloting Misfit had been. She nosed down and dived back toward their little group. Singer and Vemik leapt backwards as she spiralled the drone between them, did a tight orbit around Julian, and then brought it to a precise hover about a foot above her own head.

“…Having fun?” he asked.

“…Oh, yeah,” she grinned, and sent the drone shooting off through the village. It flashed by in a second, and she pulled up and up until she was zig-zagging between the treetops. One of the Ten’gewek sentries gave her an alarmed and bewildered look as she zipped past.

She could hear that both Vemik and the Singer wanted to try it for themselves. Julian was politely letting them know that that wasn’t an option right now. She paused in a hover to put the headphones in so she could hear what the drone heard, and then orbited the village at the drone’s top speed. Then, on a whim, she pointed at the sky and shot straight up until she was just below the clouds. Thank God it was only overcast today, not actually raining.

The forest unrolled below her. She could see the smoke from other villages, and she found that the ancillary controls under her fingers let her fine-tune the drone’s focus and attention. She could hear the thundering of water from the river nearby, swollen and coarse after a week of heavy rain. She could hear the Ketta creaking as they swayed in the breeze.

The only thing it was missing was the feel of the air brushing her skin and stinging her nostrils. Both of those were still firmly down on the ground.

Grinning, she brought the drone back down and alighted it on Julian’s outstretched hand. When she took the goggles off, it took her a moment to adjust to being human again.

Vemik and the Singer gave her a suitably awed look, while Julian beamed proudly at her as he returned the drone to its case.

“So what do you think?” he asked. “You can scout for us and look after us, and help us do this safely. Sound good?”

“…Yeah,” Xiù said, feeling far more positive than she had a few minutes before. “That sounds great.”

“Good girl.”

There was a phrase he didn’t use often. When he did, though… Xiù felt her ears go happily pink, and handed him the goggles and controller.

“My turn?” Vemik asked, hopefully. Xiù could tell he was extra excited by the way his tail twitched erratically and his entire body was taut, as if he was doing everything he could to contain himself.

“…Uhm… new pilots—that’s people who fly things—they tend to crash into stuff. And we only have one of those,” she reminded him tactfully.

Vemik’s crest literally fell.

“Hey fella, don’t worry. Tell you what! They make much less expensive ones for, uh, first-time pilots…why don’t we give it a try next time we’re on Cimbrean?”

“Okay…”

Xiù just about managed to hold her composure. The contrast of a fanged, mostly stone-age cavemonkey who could wrestle Julian into submission and quite literally tear most anybody limb from limb if he really wanted to, being so puppy-like and disappointed…

It would have been nice to just run back over to Folctha and bring him back a quadcopter or something, but the ‘bush plane’ jump service out to Akyawentuo was way down the Folctha terminal’s priority list. Its connections to arrays all over Earth and Gao fired every ten minutes, twenty-eight hours a day, seven days a week. Each of those meant passengers, cargo, deliveries, mail… And with space on the platform being at a premium, each jump carried a pretty hefty profit.

Then there was the intraplanetary service to the other five Cimbrean territories, connections to the Rich Plains and a few Dominion hubs, the orbital link to Armstrong Station…

No wonder the service to Akyawentuo was off-peak. Ten’Gewek were curious and interested in the rest of the galaxy, but they just didn’t have much to trade that an interstellar civilization might want, and their home life kept them too busy anyway.

That’d change. But it hadn’t changed yet. Which unfortunately meant that Vemik wouldn’t get to experience the joy of flying for a few days.

He’d probably turn out to be ludicrously good at it, Xiù suspected. The People had the well-developed spacial awareness of a naturally arboreal species who preferred to get around by brachiation.

Still, she really couldn’t blame him. They’d barely packed the drone away and she was already itching to get it out and play with it some more.

Patience, Xiù.

“So… is there anything else I can do?” she asked.

Julian smiled and kissed her.

“…Let’s see what we can think of,” he said.

Date Point: 16y2m1d AV
The Oval Office, The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

Zane Reid did not look like a well man. His beard was patchy and unkempt, his dreadlocks obviously hadn’t received proper care in some time, and the dark shading under his eyes lent his face the hollow, loose, cadaverous look of somebody who’d neither slept nor eaten properly in several days.

His eyes, though, were unflinching hateful lances that bored right into the camera. Sartori had never seen somebody look so utterly acrimonious.

The video he’d posted, which had rapidly gone viral, had apparently been shot on an older, cheaper model of iPhone, and the geotag data was intact. The FBI had already raided the address in Portland, much to the dismay of its owners who had been happily soaking up the sun in Nassau.

Reid, so far as they could tell, had been long gone. He’d left the phone behind in a bucket of acid.

A Gaoian specialist from the Folctha police had been jumped (carefully) to Earth specifically to confirm their suspicions, though. The couch where Reid had sat to record his vitriol had utterly reeked of Arutech.

The gist of his rant to camera, once Sartori got his head around the man’s impenetrable Patois, had to do with revealing the existence of the Camp Tebbutt Biodrone Internment Facility to the world. He’d given the camp’s precise latitude and longitude, shared several printouts of the camp’s layout as seen from the air, described what each building was for, and described several of the inmates.

Naturally, some media sites were describing it as an outrage and a return to the days when Japanese-American citizens had been interned during the second world war. Others were pointing out that biodrones were literally the pawns of an organization that was known to want the whole human race dead and that pure pragmatism demanded they be confined.

It was all tribe-ball. As far as some media organizations were concerned, anything Sartori did was bad by definition. And as far as others were concerned, anything Sartori touched turned to pure gold. Reid had handed them both plenty of ammo.

“So what are we doing about him?” he asked, when the video reached its conclusion.

His security advisor, Tom Hamilton, turned the tablet off and tucked it away in a bag.

“He’s already gone right to the top of the Most Wanted list and the FBI have set up a taskforce. Operation Lion Tamer,” he said.

“Good,” Sartori agreed. “We need to get out in front of him. This is easy to deal with. We’ll just throw the doors open on Tebbutt and invite the media in. Let the internees tell their own story. But it’s just the first move in whatever game his puppetmaster’s playing.”

“Which leads us to our next question,” Margaret White asked. “What, exactly, is their game? This flies in direct contradiction to their previous overtures…”

Sartori nodded. He’d been wondering about that himself. He’d never trusted the Hierarchy, but their complete reversal in direction had to be apropos of something…

Maybe it was simply that they’d seen an opportunity where previously they’d been convinced there was none. Maybe something had happened to goad them into a rage. Without communication…

Of course, it now seemed that their previous contact had been a ruse to spread Arutech anyway.

“…Maybe their previous overtures were all lies,” he said. “It’s the simplest explanation. And it’s not like they’ve ever been transparent.”

“He made it all the way to Oregon,” Hamilton pointed out. “From the middle of nowhere in Alaska. That implies help. Help of the magical and undetectable kind.”

“Or the cloaked spaceship kind. I know.” Sartori nodded grimly. He’d been really, really hoping that all the system shields would have stopped the Hierarchy from getting any ships to Earth. “Well. Thank God for the new Farthrow generator.”

“I don’t know…” Margaret said. “They had all the time they needed to bomb every major city on the planet before it came online. Why didn’t they?”

There was a collective three-way look that said nobody in the room knew the answer to that, or even had a good suspicion.

“…Boy, that leaves us in a fan-fucking-tastic position, doesn’t it?” Sartori said. He stood up and patrolled the room with his hands in his pockets.

“…We may want to consider evacuating certain critical assets to Franklin,” Margaret suggested.

“And how would we do that without tipping our hand and alarming everyone?” Hamilton asked “Let alone secure funding from Congress?”

Sartori grimaced and looked out the window, briefly imagining what it would be like to look up and see a mushroom cloud.

…Well, in his case there’d be a frenzy of Secret Service activity as they barged into the room with an emergency Jump Array and evacuated him. But for pretty much everybody else…

“We could ask for additional funding under the Heritage Ark programs that are already underway, possibly reposition some military units under the guise of training…”

The discussion turned to minutiae. Over the ensuing hour, the Chief of Staff was summoned, and he brought others with him…

Sartori played chairman to the meeting for some time, listening and thinking and hearing the opinions and options that floated around the office. None of what he heard left him feeling encouraged.

“So what I’m hearing is that we have no idea how to respond to this,” he said eventually, when the conversation slowed to an uncertain halt. “That sounds like a great homework assignment. General, can you see to that? I’d like something coherent if I’m gonna hash this out with Congress.”

“Yes, Mister President.”

“Right. I think it’s time to move on with the day.” To affairs that were actually resolvable, in theory.

But Sartori couldn’t help feeling that the future was no longer in his hands.

Date Point: 16y2m1d AV
Chiune Station, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Allison hadn’t slept well in a couple of nights. It wasn’t that she begrudged Julian and Xiù going offworld, not at all, but it did disrupt the sense of familiarity that made home, well… Home.

If she didn’t have her brothers to look after, she’d have used the hotel facilities at Chiune Station instead and just stayed within jogging distance of work. As it was… she treated the boys to a McDonald’s breakfast before school, and nursed a toffee latte most of the way out along the eighty minute drive to the MBG enclave out west of town.

Neither of them had ever had an Egg McMuffin before. What a goddamned travesty. Al had to promise them both she’d teach them how to make one for themselves…but in the meantime, they each had another.

She was barely ten minutes into the drive and listening to the drivetime show on SKID radio when she got a call from Clara Brown.

“Morning!”

Clara wasn’t big on small talk. She just launched straight into the reason for her call in a sunny way that always put a wide smile on Allison’s face. “Hi Al! Misfit’s back!”

There was some good news! Al’s smile got even wider, and she celebrated with a sip of her coffee. “Early!”

“Yeah, apparently they found a good one. They’re dealing with the HEAT right now…”

“After what happened to My Other Spaceship, I’m not complaining…” MBG had been informed, and everyone in the Folctha security community—a group that included Allison—was aware of what had happened. Though some details were being kept close to the chest, what she’d heard made Al perfectly happy to have her colleagues endure the HEAT’s tender affections.

“How far out are you? We want to have the whole team ready for inspection by the time they land.”

“Seventy minutes,” Al predicted confidently. She’d memorized pretty much every inch of the winding, beautiful road through Lakebeds National Park and alongside the winding river Dagnabbit, and she’d just passed the first of the park’s car parks for hikers.

She quite liked the long commute: it was thinking time, private time. Work was busy, home was manic… the hour and a half she got in the car twice a day was welcome downtime for switching mental gears and relaxing.

“Awesome! You’ll be just in time to see her land. See you soon!”

“See you soon,” Al promised, and ended the call.

The news shifted her right out of calm and collected and right into something more… motherly. Her baby was home! The big metal one, not the one behind her bellybutton. The thought of laying eyes again on her favorite spaceship in all the wide worlds made her heart lift in her chest.

She indulged herself a little and put her foot down to get there a few minutes early.

Sure enough, the support vehicles were out around the landing pad as she parked the car. She’d have jogged over to join her team, but that was getting increasingly difficult and undignified thanks to the little girl, so she settled for a determined stride instead.

…God, she wasn’t really looking forward to getting any bigger. She didn’t feel heavy exactly, but she was definitely feeling less mobile.

Still, the sound of a sonic boom rippling through the air from high overhead put a little extra spring in her step as she joined her team.

Team Two’s leader, Chuck Gifford, gave her a grin and a wave. He was nearly done with his morning cigarette. “Mornin’, Al.”

“Mornin’ Chuck.”

“Lookin’ forward to seein’ the old girl again?”

Al looked up and shielded her eyes from the sunlight. “…Yup!”

That exchange pretty much dried up Chuck’s supply of small talk. “Anything we should watch out for?”

“Well, we just had about ten tons of angry space marines with guns go tearing through, so…”

“…Check the deck plating, got it.”

Misfit finally came into view, and Allison couldn’t resist jigging eagerly on her toes. The ship looked so handsome in the morning light as she dropped down in a gentle swooping turn to come to a perfect hover a hundred feet above the pad, then descended steadily to land with the heavy racket of metal on concrete.

Xiù never landed like that.

That was an automatic landing sequence: line up, set the rate of descent, let the instruments do the work. Safe and efficient, but Xiù had always prided herself on setting the ship down softly and with a deft touch. It was a good landing, but the current crew’s pilot had a more… workmanlike approach to piloting. Xiù had always viewed it as a kind of dance.

Allison hadn’t really had time to meet the new crew. Apparently their research specialist, the woman doing the same job Julian had once done, had been a Folctha colonist.

…What was her name again? Shit. Something Irish, wasn’t it?

Al called up the mission summary on her tablet as she waited for the ship to settle, to spare herself the embarrassment of not remembering her replacement’s names when they came down the ramp. Misfit was dirty, well-travelled, and leaking waterfalls of fog as her hull temperature equalized with the warm morning air.

But God she was gorgeous.

There they were. Field Researcher Sinéad Byrne, Flight Engineer Richard Adams, and the man responsible for that landing, Pilot Jamal Thompson.

Still, even if he didn’t throw in the little flourish that Xiù might have, he’d still observed the little details. He’d landed so the airlock was facing the waiting ground crew, for instance.

Byrne opened the airlock while the other two powered down the ship. The ground team waited until the ESFALS shut down and Thompson gave them a thumbs-up through the canopy before approaching to start offloading stuff as Byrne sent the dumbwaiter down with the first sample crate.

Al ducked under the fuselage and ran through the landing gear inspection. If the gear was going to fail it probably would have done it at first contact with the ground, but safety demanded she check it first.

Once she was happy there were no problems, she returned to the ladder, where Adams was the last down. He was a small, slim man barely larger than Allison himself which Al could appreciate. A bigger guy would have had a hellish time trying to fit through the narrow confines of the engineering station. They’d managed to find some more elbow room for BGEV-12’s engineer, but Misfit was always going to be cramped in the back.

“You taking good care of my baby?” Al asked him as he stepped off the ladder. He grinned and shook her hand.

“She’s my baby too,” he promised.

“Attaboy.”

“Maybe a little roughed up by the HEAT though,” Byrne said. “They brought Adam along. I don’t know how he even fit!”

“You know Adam?” Al asked, shaking her hand.

Byrne had the filthiest grin. “Biblically.”

“…You’re braver than you look.”

“Wait, you and that hulk-lookin’ dude?” Thompson asked, disbelievingly.

“Like the Energizer bunny…” Byrne reminisced, distantly.

“I don’t think I want to know…” Adams muttered. “God I’ve never felt so completely helpless. They manhandled me like a child and ransacked everything I owned.”

“Yeah,” Allison said sympathetically. “That’s the HEAT for ‘ya.”

“It was a Gaoian that did it to me!” Thompson complained. “He threw me up against a wall, pinned my head and sniffed at my neck!”

“Still HEAT.“ Allison shrugged. “Trust me, they’re nice guys in real life. On the job… well, their job isn’t to play nice.”

Byrne nodded, but she looked a little unnerved. “I didn’t remember Adam being so terrifying…”

“He isn’t Adam on mission. He’s Warhorse, and the two are very different people.”

“Right. Well…”

Allison decided a change of subject was in order. “You found something good?”

“Hell yeah we did!” Thompson indicated the crates with a grin. “Class twelve, point nine-nine-oh-four Gs, seventy percent ocean coverage, everything. No sign of natives, either.”

“Nice! What’d you call her?”

“Nesoi,” Adams said firmly.

“…I get the impression there were other contenders.”

“Somebody,” Adams shot a dark look at Byrne, “wanted to call it ‘Steve.’”

Byrne’s unrepentant giggle was just infectious, and even Adams smiled and shook her head at it. Al certainly couldn’t keep a straight face.

“Steve? Kinda… I dunno. Irreverent, ain’t it?”

“Exactly!” Byrne chirped.

“In the end, that’s what we called its largest moon,” Thompson said.

“Largest?”

“It has four. Makes for a hell of a night sky, I tell you that.”

“I’d like to see that someday,” Al decided. “…Anyway, we’d better get to work. I wanna see how well you’ve been treating my baby.”

“You mean our baby,” Thompson retorted with a grin. “I found a neat optimization for the ventral distributor. Check it out.”

“I will!” Al set her foot on the ladder and hauled herself up it, reflecting as she did so that she was glad they’d come back sooner rather than later. Climbing that ladder and squeezing around the ship’s insides would have been impossible in ten more weeks.

She paused at the top and touched the wall, whispered a fond ‘Hey, girl,’ to the ship and then followed her oh-so-familiar route from the airlock to the engineer’s station like she’d already done it ten times that morning.

Misfit didn’t quite feel the same, though. Maybe it was the scent of three strangers, or some subtle difference in Thompson’s idling power settings. Maybe it was the different heights and builds of the excursion suits in their lockers, or the lingering musk of the HEAT’s presence.

She fought off a sudden feeling of melancholy and pushed through into engineering.

There was work to do.

Date Point: 16y2m3d AV
”Stinkworld,” The Irujzen Reef

Garl, Grandfather of Clan Stoneback and Warleader of the Grand Army of the Gao

“…Go.”

The Hierarchy’s relay was weird to look at. Like looking into a pit that yawned sideways in a direction that Garl couldn’t quite put his claw on.

He was glad he wasn’t anywhere near it. He had a great view through the Fang’s helmet-cams, but they were taking an enormous risk breaching the facility at the base of the enormous transmitting tower, and everyone knew it.

Plus, Garl knew he wasn’t quite as agile as he once was. The niggles and complaints his body had accumulated over decades had begun to make themselves heard, and the Crue-G wasn’t holding them off anymore. He’d resorted to ‘ibuprofen’ in eight hundred milligram doses.

Allegedly his liver should handle the medicine just fine…but he was eighty-eight. Garl was old.

…More than old. Garl was dying. He didn’t have even half a year left, prob’ly. He knew it in his bones, in his fading eyesight, and in a way he couldn’t put to words. After this mission…he needed to retire before he became a liability. The Great Father deserved fit and hale generals, after all. That went doubly so for the Warleader of the Grand Army, and extra double for the Grandfather of Stoneback.

Still: Garl was the most wisest and strongest ‘Back they had that weren’t Daar, so he’d see this job done as best as he could. In fact, right now he was the strongest he’d ever been, so his “plan” to chip in was to help with any digging, pushing, or any general labor that needed doing.

A ‘Back had to lead from the front. Or, failing that, at least be willing to do the hardest work.

For now, though, he watched the Fang dash over the cleared ground around the Hierarchy facility and sneer at the wall. A ‘Back on four-paw with some tricks borrowed from those tricksy Whitecrest suits could flow over a mere five-meter concrete wall like it was hardly there.

He tensed, expecting a flurry of armed drones or automated gun emplacements or whatever, but that weird digital Entity they had on their side had promised the place was safe. From the looks of things, it might have been right, too.

It didn’t take long for his ‘Backs to secure the inside perimeter, shape charges, and blow a hole wide open in the concrete wall. From there, the next teams joined in the assault, they pried the opening yet wider, more territory was secured…

In a few minutes, they’d completely secured the compound. Fortunately the mind-melting warp above wasn’t doing anything to the ground below. Which…prol’ly made sense, now that Garl thought about it.

The inside pretty obviously wasn’t designed for living beings to navigate, though. It was designed for drones and automated robotic systems, and optimized in all three dimensions without regard for people wanting to walk around.

Fortunately, they had some nicely small and clever Clanless to help ‘em out. “Hey, little guys!”

Garl couldn’t help but like his corps of his bravest, most littlest soldiers he could find in the Grand Army. They were proof that ain’t nobody is useless or inferior, they just gotta find their place in life.

Wriggling through a vertical maze of alien technology? Not a problem. Not gettin’ squished by the maintenance drones? Just as easy! Sorta. There were a couple of close calls, but the worst anyone suffered was a tuft of fur torn out the end of his tail as he narrowly squeezed into a side space as a robotic arm whipped past him.

“Gods-damn you little guys kick tail,” Garl praised over the radio. “I’mma owe ‘ya each a steak!”

That got them motivated. Ain’t nothin’ any red-blooded male liked more than a big ‘ol slab of barely-cooked meat.

The densely packed systems gave way to an honest mineshaft. From what Garl could see, it looked like there was an automated mine down there, drawing equipment and replacement parts from a small nanofactory at ground level. There was no immediate indication of what the mine was extracting, and the shaft itself was too deep to explore for the time being, so instead the explorers kept moving up, toward the top of the structure and the generator responsible for that weird pucker in spacetime.

As more of the facility was mapped and more of its systems discovered, however, things got a lot more complicated. Whatever else it was, they weren’t dealing with a mere comms relay.

One piece of the puzzle fell into place when the infiltrators dropped a drone down the mineshaft.

“…Coal?” Garl wasn’t sure he’d heard the report correctly.

“Bituminous coal, yeah. Must be a big ol’ vein too. There’s a jump array down there big enough to handle a thousand tonnes a day, easy.”

One of his assistants was confused by that. “Why would they need coal?”

“Iron,” Garl answered gruffly. “If ‘yer gonna make iron from ore, ain’t nothin’ better. There’s other ways t’do it but a redux reaction at high temp with a rich carbon source is the bestest, ‘cuz the pig iron you get can be made directly into steel.”

“…Didn’t they basically run the galaxy from behind the scenes? Why do they need to make their own iron?”

“Ain’t nobody don’t need steel. I mean, would you be happy if we imported all of it instead of makin’ it ourselves?”

“Right. That’d be a big strategic weakness…”

“…Somebody get a jump beacon in there, see if you can sneak it into the next coal shipment,” Garl ordered. “If we’re lucky, it’ll tell us where that coal’s goin’ to.”

“We don’t have anything that small…”

Garl sighed, and shook out his pelt. He was gettin’ the itch to do something physical. “Well, talk to the Clans, then! I can’t imagine Whitecrest or Longear or someone ain’t got a toy ‘fer this.”

By the time Clan Longear got back to him, the facility had been completely mapped. Their contact came in the form of a very welcome face: Champion Meereo. The tall, debonair midnight-black Champion came through the array stooped and with his large ears tucked flat against his head as a hedge against the Array’s tight confines, and visibly shook himself when the transit was complete.

…Had Garl ever tussled with him? He didn’t think so. Meereo looked nicely fit and tricky…maybe they could spar some later!

Anyway.

“Welcome ‘ta Stinkworld, Champion.”

Garl liked Meereo. The Longears originally came from working Clanless stock and were still a relatively “new” clan. Some of that legacy still clung to them, in their sense of humor and their relaxed attitude to formalities. Another Champion might have questioned the moniker, but Meereo just chittered merrily and pulled a face.

“Good name,” he agreed. “Yeugh.”

“Sad ‘ta say you get used to it,” Garl told him.

“I brought you a toy.” Meereo handed it over. It was pill-shaped and just the right size to fit in Garl’s paw. “We made these a long time ago, just in case Big Hotel turned out to have a jump network of their own.”

Garl handed it off to a runner, who duck-nodded sharply and set off the make sure it reached the infiltrators. Meereo watched him go, then gave Garl an expectant look. “…I gather there’s other stuff in there you don’t know what it is?”

“An’ I betcha ‘yer just itchin’ ‘ta get ‘yer Brothers down there and tear it apart, huh?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

Garl chittered. “I don’t think any of my Brothers would fit!”

“Go on a diet, then! Anyway…on the subject of exploitation…”

”You and all the other technically-minded Clans are gonna need ‘ta put together a plan for that. In the meantime, what we’re dealin’ with ain’t safe ‘fer a buncha thinky-types. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Right. So. What’re we hopin’ ‘ta learn outta this?”

Meereo found the facility schematic as the scouts had laid it out easily enough. He stooped over the table and inspected it, shifting the expanding map this way and that with the tip of his claw. “We’re hoping to gain more insight into dataspace and the Hegemony.”

“The hedgey-what?”

“It’s what the Igraens call their civilization. The ones we’ve interacted with are highly trained individuals who’ve spent decades or even centuries learning how to interact with…. Us. This.” He knocked on the desk. “Matterspace, they call it. Or Meatspace, if they’re being insulting.”

“And they need special training to do that?”

“Yup. Apparently life in dataspace is fundamentally very different from life out here. According to one of the interrogated agents, even a basic query like ‘how many Igraens live in the Hegemony?’ is the wrong kind of question.”

“…That don’t make no sense,” Garl objected.

Meereo just duck-shrugged helplessly and made a note on a tablet of his own. “How much stink is there on a Naxas?” he asked.

Garl decided to push the conversation forward rather than get bogged down in… whatever that was. “So we’re here to learn more about dataspace.”

Meereo duck-nodded as he explored the facility map some more. He jotted a small diagram down on his tablet.

“The Humans have done a lot of research on dataspace,” he said as he drew. “As much as they can, anyway. Between interrogated Igraens and the… Entity… they’ve had more access to it than anybody else, and they’ve worked closely with us on the problem, but we’re not helped by the fact that none of the sources really know how it works…”

“How come?”

“The same way you and I don’t really know how our brains work, I guess. Which seems to be a fair approximation. Dataspace isn’t… it seems to be a higher-order product of the interactions between lower-order devices, rather than something they do deliberately. A lot of very stupid machines producing something big and incomprehensible as an emergent property? That’s my best guess, anyway. But there’s always been a flaw in that theory.”

“Do tell,” Garl encouraged. He’d worked with enough geeks in his time to know when they were pretty much just thinkin’ aloud by talkin’ with him.

“Well…” Meereo scrolled the relay’s schematic and tapped a claw at something. “Devices go where people are, and people are clustered on inhabited worlds, space stations, ships… and those clusters are a long way apart. How does any kind of coherent pattern emerge from clusters of technology spread across thousands of light years?”

“…Slowly?” Garl guessed.

“Exactly!” Meereo scrolled again, tapped again then made a note on his own tablet. “Too slowly. Which means…”

Whatever it meant, he didn’t finish the thought out loud. Instead he scrolled, tapped, made another note and then flowed across the command center to the large crate he’d brought with him. When he entered a code on the top, the thing unfolded in an intricate way and turned out to be full of what Garl thought of as gizmos. He recognized wire, solder and a workbench. Pretty much everything else, though, was…

“…You brought a field lab with you?”

“How am I supposed to design devices to interface with an Igraen data relay when I don’t know anything about their technological architecture?” Meereo asked. “Can’t be done. Hell, we had a hard enough time getting our equipment to work properly with Human technology, and they’re several steps behind us.”

“…This is why I prefer civil engineerin’,” Garl groused. “A big pile’a concrete is a big pile’a concrete everywhere in the universe.”

“And that’s exactly why I prefer what I do,” Meereo retorted. “Same thing every day sounds boring.”

“Eh,” Garl shook his pelt again. He always felt a bit back on his haunches around really smart people. “Different habits, I guess. Y’ain’t gonna get strong if ‘ya don’t follow routine. I ‘spose bein’ a nimble thinker needs th’ opposite o’ that.”

“Think of it as progressing to a heavier weight…” Meereo set his tablet down on the lab’s worktop and Garl flicked an ear, mildly impressed, as it seemed to seamlessly pick up whatever he’d been working on and load it onto a larger display. Longear sure had some fancy tricks. “…I’m going to need your guys inside to bring me back some things.”

“Just send me the shoppin’ list, I’ll make sure you get it,” Garl promised, and left Meereo to his work.

This was, he decided, a young man’s war. He wasn’t out of his depth, not quite… but he weren’t in his element neither.

He shook off that melancholy thought and returned to his own desk. It didn’t matter if he was in his element. He had a job to do, and he’d do it ‘til he dropped. Just like a true ‘Back.

But part of him, somewhere deep in his soul, was looking forward to a well-deserved rest.

Date point: 16y2m3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Professor Daniel Hurt

“What exactly did he say he’s fetching, anyway?”

“An M107.”

Daniel frowned. Although he’d learned more about firearms in general over the past few years than he’d ever imagined he would, there were times that the people who really “got” gun culture threw around letters and numbers as though everybody knew exactly what they were referring to. Even generally observant types like Julian.

Fortunately, Xiù was good at translating. She apparently didn’t much care for guns either, but she lived with two people who did and had learned how to speak their language.

“It’s an anti-materiel weapon. Commonly called ‘The Barrett M82.’” she explained.

“Anti-materiel?”

“It can shoot a hole right through a car’s engine block. That’s what it’s designed for, in fact,” Julian said it with a big grin. “…Always wanted to fire one. Al’s gonna be so jealous.”

“And you intend to use that against a living creature?” Daniel felt faintly appalled.

“…Honestly? Not really. I’m hoping it doesn’t get fired in anger at all. But Yan said it himself, this is no ordinary hunt.”

“Yes…” Daniel scratched idly at the back of his neck where the Akyawentan version of a mosquito had visited him last night. The damn things could bite through a Ten’gewek’s thick hide, so a human’s much thinner and more delicate skin was no challenge at all, and the result always hurt.

At least none of the native diseases knew what to do with a human body. Even the parasitic ones like the local version of malaria simply starved and died in the human body. Neither Yan or Vemik had picked up anything from Earth either, which was a good sign for future commerce, but that wasn’t necessarily conclusive; they’d only visited for a short time. On the other hand, if there were anything from Akyawentuo that was likely to jump species, it would have by now.

Back to the problem at hand. Yan.

“…That makes me worry,” Daniel said. “Does he seem… okay?”

“I think the idea of meeting with the Corti rattled him more than he let on,” Xiù suggested. “Let’s face it, they’re people whose sky-magic we speak highly of.”

“Oh hell, you don’t think he’s, I dunno, trying to prove something, do you?”

The couple looked at each other and then mutually shrugged. Not a good sign. Xiù usually had a good read on people, and Julian knew the Ten’gewek mindset well. If they were both stumped, then whatever was going in Yan’s head was well-obscured, possibly even from Yan himself.

Xiù spoke first. “I don’t know what he has to prove. He’s everything his culture thinks a man should be, and he’s smart, attentive, polite, observant, in fantastic health apparently…”

Julian nodded. “I’ve watched him lift and wrestle for literally hours with the two biggest fellas ever, and I’ve watched him learning to read and write with just as much energy. Or steel, bow-making…anything, really. Yan isn’t ever unsettled.”

“And he’s seen Sky-Magic in action, plenty of times,” Xiù added.

“Exactly. He’s as top-of-the-heap as any guy can be, and he’s that across species, too. Yan’s got nothing left to prove to anybody and nothing to be afraid of, either. So…what gives?”

“Nothing to be afraid of except Brown Ones,” Daniel mused. “…Maybe it wasn’t the Corti that rattled him. Maybe it was a Given-Man being attacked and eaten in his own village. Who was it?”

“Droono,” Julian recalled.

“…He was going to be Yan’s successor, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. He was young as Given-Men go, and already one of their best.”

“I think he was Yan’s cousin, too,” Xiù added.

“So this is personal, then. For several reasons.”

Julian nodded. “Yeah. It’s also…uh, I didn’t say this out loud, but remember when I visited the Lodge? Uh…let’s just say that, with Droono gone…there ain’t another Yan in the wings.”

“Why, what did you see?”

Julian shifted his weight uneasily. “Just…trust me on that. I won’t betray the Lodge, but a big part of what they do is hammer out the pecking order among each other. It…wasn’t much of a contest. Not even a little bit.”

“Well…that’s not comforting. Isn’t he old?”

“Yeah, but like you said he’s in just ridiculously good health, as best as we can tell. So…”

Daniel nodded. The thing that made Given-Men especially weird was that they seemed to get healthier and stronger as they aged. Their skin didn’t wrinkle and sag, their bodies didn’t show increasing signs of wear and tear like regular Ten’Gewek did. Quite the opposite: they all grew fitter and stronger over time. The only thing that really gave away their age was their crests.

Given-Men didn’t seem to die of old age, either. Yan was understandably reluctant to give away too much of their secrets, but what Daniel had managed to secure suggested they went on basically forever until something got them… though that something could come from within.

Yan had said something like…. “It’s the Fire that takes us home, one day. If I am not very respectful to the Gods, the Fire will make me head-broken. If not that, I may do something…too brave, maybe. So the stories say.”

Hunting a Brown One, a literal monster of legend to the Ten’gewek, might just qualify as ‘too brave.’ Except, bringing along a gun designed to put holes in a car didn’t quite fit.

“So, what I’m getting out of this…is Yan is having a mid-life crisis.”

“He’s not human, Dan,” Xiù reminded him gently. “Sometimes, aliens are aliens.”

“Oh come on,” Dan objected. “He’s about fifty and in his prime, he’s feeling his oats, he’s worried about his legacy…”

“Mm. Totally unlike a smart silver fox professor type who decided to play Doctor Livingstone on an alien world, huh?” She flashed a playful smile.

“Y—” Dan paused. “…Hmm.”

“I mean, you could be completely right!” she added. “…Or you could be projecting. It’s… just something to keep in mind.”

Julian couldn’t help but being his usual troll self. “Silver fox, huh? I can see it. I bet I’ll have better hair in thirty years though…”

“Twenty!” Dan shot back in a mix of indignation and amusement.

“Probably be in better shape too….”

“And with three doctorates to your name?”

“…Okay, probably not that.”

“We could fix that, you know…”

“Oh God no!” Julian objected. “I don’t have time!”

“Hmm. Maybe I could, though…” Xiù mused. Before that thought went any further, however, they were all interrupted by the familiar ground-shaking thump of the Array firing.

Sure enough, Hoeff was sitting cross-legged on top of the supply boxes in the company of the biggest gun Daniel had ever seen that wasn’t actually mounted on a vehicle. It was a drab green color, at least four feet long, and had a muzzle that Daniel could have fit his thumb into.

Julian snorted at the sight. “…Hoeff, please don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but even with all your progress lately? That rifle makes you look like a five year old kid.”

Hoeff vaulted down off the boxes and patted the weapon fondly. “I reckon not many kindergarteners have guns like I do!”

“…Guns? Wait, don’t—goddamnit.”

Hoeff flexed his big knotted arms and giggled like a boy who had the most bestest toy ever.

Julian gave a wry grin, “I mean…they’re pretty good, I guess.”

“Aww! And here I thought you were a gun nut these days!”

Xiù sighed and covered her eyes with her hand wearily. “Hoeff, that’s worse than any pun I’ve ever managed…Also.” She looked over at Julian, glanced at each of his considerably more impressive meat-hooks in turn, grinned coyly and said nothing more.

Sometimes, the mark of an exceptional woman was her ability to put a man in his place with nothing more than a smile. Hoeff grumbled ruefully while Julian scratched at the back of his head in embarrassment. He still didn’t quite realize just how much that gesture could show off.

For his part, Daniel snorted in amusement, then looked away as he heard a rustling from the nearby trees. “Brace yourselves…” he warned. “If that’s not Vemik, I’ll eat my fountain pen.”

It was. The instant Hoeff crossed the safety line, he was promptly tackled and wrestled into a tightly compacted ball.

“You have new mag-a-zeens yet?!”

Hoeff gave Julian a grinning yet slightly desperate look. “Little help here, hrrrrgh!”

“Nah. Use those big guns of yours!”

“Guns?!” Vemik sprang up and instantly bounced over to the cargo, prowling around its exterior with all the eager excitement of…well, Vemik. He kept his hands off, though; Vemik had eventually learned some boundaries. He hooted appreciatively at the M107 as he inspected it.

“Big!”

…Were all Dan’s fellow menfolk really so stereotypical? Or was he just out of his habitual oeuvre?

“At least someone likes my guns…”

Vemik again hooted his manic approval. “Who doesn’t like big guns?!” He then bounced clear over the cargo pile to inspect from the other side, presumably because walking was too slow.

“Finally, a man with some taste!” Hoeff’s smarmy grin was unbearable.

“Oh my god, you’re terrible! Don’t you have something important to be doing?”

“Naw,” Hoeff shrugged. “Yan said he’d be here when I got back. Guess he’s runnin’ late.”

“He visiting Loor’s tribe right now. Their women…very pretty!”

Ah. He, Julian, Hoeff and Vemik all looked at each other, then collectively looked at the pile of cargo on the pad. Oh well, at least they’d get some exercise in.

The work didn’t take long between the four of them…well, three, plus Daniel’s “help.” Next to those rough-and-tumble men, he wasn’t exactly a longshoreman of legendary repute.

Naturally, once the pad had been cleared and the neighboring young Ten’Gewek recruited to help move the cargo, there was nothing left for Julian and Vemik to do. That was a condition that lasted about fourteen seconds before Vemik looked over at Julian, twitched his tail, snarled with a playfully aggressive grin, tackled the huge woodsman like a frog leaping across the ground…

And reminded them all who the kings of the jungle really were on Akyawentuo. Even standing as tall as he comfortably could on those heavyset legs of his, Vemik was a couple inches shorter than Hoeff and a full foot shorter than Julian, yet despite that he had noticeably broader shoulders and a sturdier, more muscular build. The blessings of youth, hard work, plentiful meat, and very good fortune had widened the mass gap between them to over fifty kilos in hardly any time at all, which was…Outside of the HEAT, no other humans were really Julian’s match, as far as anyone knew. He could best most any Ten’Gewek that wasn’t a Given-Man, and he definitely had Vemik beat on skill, patience, reach, and long working endurance…

…But the Sky-Thinker was already one of the strongest men the Ten’Gewek had. It took him a few minutes longer to wad Julian up into a ball than it had taken with Hoeff, but once he got those thick arms, legs, and tail of his properly around his prey, there was no escape.

“I strong man of the People, Jooyun.” Vemik snarled playfully right next to his ear. “Yan make me spear-hunt every day. I beat iron, train with you and Heff, race through trees…” He ratcheted his crush tighter and earned a groan of pain from Julian. “Now I wrestle you!”

He did. Julian wasn’t exactly helpless, and did manage to turn the tables now and then—once with a ground-shaking body slam that earned a rueful trill and a moan of pain from Vemik—but for the most part it was Vemik who ruled the day. Everyone else conversed and tidied up while the manic Sky-Thinker and Julian-slab happily crushed each other into giant bruises.

Oh well, they did seem to be enjoying themselves…

Daniel shook his head and decided he’d stick with his books.

Maybe an hour later Yan joined them from the forest, whistling merrily while a half-dozen bibtaw swung from his tail by their ears.

Ten’Gewek had an incredible ability to whistle, Daniel noted. They had virtually perfect pitch control and could put a hell of a lot of ear-splitting power behind it if they wanted. Fortunately, Yan was being somewhat civilized at the moment, though the leg-swinging happy bounce in his usual swagger was telling, to say the least.

The moment Vemik heard Yan approaching, he bounced up and hauled Julian to his feet, then dragged him down to his level for a crushing hug. It was one of those deeply affectionate, tail-around-waist and forehead-to-forehead kind of moments the Ten’Gewek reserved for those they truly loved. “Good fight! I make you werne jerky okay?!”

Julian chuckle-groaned in pain, but wrapped his big arms around Vemik and hauled him off the ground for what Dan would surely have felt as a literally spine-shattering hug. “Okay, big buddy!” He shot a look at Xiù, “Make some for my girlfriends and we’re even.”

“Okay!!” Vemik wrapped himself completely around Julian and they hugged even tighter, while Xiù giggled and Hoeff rolled his eyes.

“Right. Well!” Daniel waved at the Given-Man. “Did you have fun, Yan?”

“Yes! I had three funs! [You should go visit Loor-tribe, Vemik! Noyu is without child just now…well, maybe not anymore!”]

Daniel saw the way Xiù rolled her eyes. He couldn’t blame her. He still wasn’t quite used to how casually promiscuous the Ten’gewek could be, and he suspected no Western-raised human ever would be.

Vemik jumped down from Julian’s grasp and hooted in a very specific this-conversation-is-old kind of tone. [“I tell you every time Yan, I am happiest with Singer. Dancing for other women is fun, but nobody makes me laugh like her! Anyway come look at Heff’s guns!!”]

Another reminder of her point that they were dealing with aliens here. People he loved, admired and respected, but that didn’t automatically mean he fully understood them.

[“Vemet was the same way…”] Yan grumbled indulgently, but his interest perked up when he laid eyes on the rifle. [“…Now that is a strong gun.”]

Yup. Daniel was marooned on Monkey Planet and surrounded on all sides by big, brawny, and terminally testosterone-poisoned men. It should have been a scene from an eighties-era bad teen movie, except none of them were stereotypically stupid, nor were they cruel bullies. The were just…playfully crude.

And happy. He’d worried at first about life among superjocks, but honestly…it wasn’t so bad.

“Anyway.” said Yan. “We must go and see Brown One, yes? Vemik! [I need you to send word to the west. Loor-tribe is already spreading word east!”]

“Got anything else for us, Hoeff?” Julian asked.

“Just the tagging kit.” Hoeff nudged it with a toe.

“Tag-ging. Means…?”

[“Means it’s for putting a mark on the Brown One that we can follow!”] Vemik enthused.

“Yuh-huh. Gonna tape it to the drone… Y’all did bring the drone, right?” Hoeff checked.

“Yup. Xiù’s gonna fly it.”

“That makes sense.”

“I’ll leave you to plan your expedition,” Daniel said, and stood up to return to the…

Was it still a camp? They still called it “The Camp”, but really it was a permanent research station nowadays, and the word “camp” did it an injustice. They’d never named it either, which was beginning to rub against Daniel’s sense of rightness.

Then again, it was never supposed to be what it was. It had originally just been temporary housing and a situation room for the archeological dig around the furthest inland settlement the lake Ten’gewek had apparently founded. Daniel had always intended for whatever permanent human presence arose on Akyawentuo to be a carefully contained enclave, maybe on an island somewhere, supplemented by some kind of a philosopher’s garden somewhere near to the tribes.

Nowadays it was a place of the most constructive of culture clashes. Humans taught Ten’Gewek how to read—now that they had their own letters, Yan thought it was “okay”—and how to do more practical things. Things like food preservation, simple tool making, mindful habits about writing down thoughts as they occurred and suchlike. Predictably, everyone was interested in Hoeff and Julian’s daily weightlifting and other training, so every day they taught the People how to methodically exercise, once they’d finished torturing Dan and his students.

All in all, things were going well! They’d even begun a post office between the Given-Men, now that Vemik’s and Singer’s writing was spreading like wildfire. ‘Giving-marks’ and ‘Taking-sounds’ was what they had called the female and male systems. The one ‘gave’ the reader an idea with its many characters, all of which evolved from the Singers’ bite-marking system, while the other one ‘took’ sounds from the mouth and kept them on paper forever.

They were soaking up knowledge like sponges and making it their own, in ways Dan couldn’t have hoped to guess they would. The Ten’gewek, in turn, taught the somewhat cloistered graduate students how to live a little, though that had of course been a bit awkward at first…

…Because the Ten’Gewek were…amorous. Deeply, aggressively amorous.

And they were interested.

That had prompted important issues immediately. How, for example, would a young woman politely turn down the love interest of a playful, flirtatious, rugged, breathtakingly athletic spacemonkey who might mass north of three hundred kilos…or much more for a Given-Man? For that matter, how did the young men politely decline the attention of women who often massed over one-fifty, and could put all but the most elite human athletes to shame?

Well, good banter did the trick, as playfulness seemed to be the key to everything Ten’Gewek. They had a soft spot for bravado and someone had been teaching them bad words. They had gleefully embraced the term “snu snu” for example. They didn’t need to know where it came from, only that what it meant was hilarious to them.

Thus were the awkward clashes deflected, and in the end it served its purpose: Feelings remained unhurt, bodies remained unbroken, and the possibility remained open for anyone brave and adventurous enough to finally try it. After all, it wasn’t like the Ten’gewek weren’t quite brutally handsome in a primal, alien sort of way…

Daniel couldn’t imagine himself boldly going quite that boldly. He was…pretty sure a couple of his students might, and he wasn’t going to judge if they did, but he wanted no part of it.

In any case, once the natives understood that, no, there would be no casual mating with the tall elf people from the sky, the more concrete matters of learning and exchange could proceed apace.

Keeping the place tidy when there were curious native children constantly poking their nonexistent noses into everything was the biggest challenge now. They were… Their desire to help exceeded their ability to help. Though they were helpful: They were strong like grown men and had the boundless energy only a child could have. Focusing their attention was a challenge, but give them a task, and make it competitive…

The archeologists on-staff had never once had porters so hard-working and eager to please. Provided they were only entrusted with things that could survive a little rough handling, the dig sites ran like clockwork.

Claire in particular had a deft touch with them. Enough so that she could actually dismiss a whole pack of chattering cavemonkey children with a few kind words as Daniel arrived.

“Is he back?” she asked, and Daniel smiled inwardly. She only had eyes for one man, of any species. Too bad the man in question had… hangups.

“Yes, and the gun he brought is almost bigger than he is!”

She sighed and tidied up her books. They included the works of Doctor Seuss, printed on Tyvek in both English and Vemik’s writing system, and Daniel wasn’t entirely sure where she’d got them or who’d performed the transliteration. The pool of potential candidates wasn’t big, but it was big enough. “…So the hunt’s going ahead.”

“It certainly looks that way… At least I’m not worried about anyone getting killed any longer.”

“How come?”

“That rifle looks like it’d make a cow explode. And it’s got a scope on it you could see Neil Armstrong’s boot prints with from here. That poor Brown One doesn’t stand a chance.”

Claire pulled a face. “Kind of an anticlimactic end for a creature like that.”

“Which is why I don’t think this hunt is a good idea, but…”

“But it’s Yan’s idea,” she finished. She sighed and pushed her glasses up her nose. “Well, if they’re not free to make a mistake…”

“…Then they’re not free,” Daniel agreed. “All we can do is stand aside and let them do their thing.”

“I wonder what’s going on in Yan’s head?”

Daniel considered all the possible answers he could give. The conversation he’d had with Julian and Xiù back at the array, his own dark suspicions…

In the end, he decided not to burden her any more than she already was.

“That, I think,” he said, “is between Yan and the gods.”

That was all he could say.

Date Point: 16y2m3d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor system, Deep Space

Lewis Beverote

“Still no word from the dang thing, huh?”

Darcy shook her head as she considered the intricate document in front of her. “None. It just left me a cryptic note about detecting something and vanished… I get three spells, right?”

“Yeah. Here.” Lewis handed over the spell cards. “Way easier than tracking them on your sheet.”

“Thanks. This is complicated enough already…”

“Dude, don’t worry. You’ll get it it in no time.”

“You sound worried,” Lucy observed. She was handing out snacks and drinks while they waited for the other two to arrive.

“About the Entity? I guess I am.” Darcy sighed as she started to read the cards. “I mean… It’s my responsibility after all.”

“Isn’t it, like, the baddest dude out there though?” Lewis asked.

“I know it makes the Hierarchy shit their pants, but that might just make them gang up on it.” Darcy put a card down. “Comprehend languages?”

“Sure, yeah. Lee likes his arcane mysteries and ancient tomes and shit. That’d come in useful.”

“Who’s our fourth player, anyway?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“…Is it Vedreg?”

Lucy and Lewis boh groaned. She was exactly right.

“Like… how’d you guess?”

Well, you’ve got this big open patch of floor here that he could squeeze into, and we’re on this side of the table…” Darcy grinned. “And honestly, inviting a Guvnurag to play D&D just sound like a you two thing to do.”

“She’s got us, baby,” Lucy laughed as she patted Lewis on the shoulder, and sat down. “Wanna know the best bit?”

“What?”

“He’s playing a barbarian. And he’s taking it very seriously.”

Lewis grinned too when they were treated to the rare sound of one of Darcy’s giggles. It ended in a kind of uptick squeak. “How seriously?” she asked.

“He watched all three Conan movies back-to-back,” Lucy revealed.

“Hee! Vedreg the Barbarian!”

“Lee had to talk him outta callin’ the character ‘Steve.’” Lewis recalled. “He–”

Their door chimed, and he stood to open it while Lucy picked up the story. Sure enough, Lee and Vedreg were outside, one very much looming over the other. Not that Vedreg had any other option but to loom. Bein’ as big as a van would do that for a dude.

It made welcoming him into the home tricky. Mrwrki had been built by and for the Kwmbwrw originally, who were a fair bit taller and broader than humans themselves, so the doors were just about able to welcome a middle-aged Guvnurag if he didn’t mind having to shuffle through them in a low crouch.

At least the private quarters were big and roomy. Vedreg settled comfortably in the middle of the rug and the four humans scooted the table over in front of him so they could gather ‘round for the first session of their new campaign.

Lucy was playing a paladin, of course. She always played paladins or clerics. Darcy had never played D&D before and had gone with a warlock. Vedreg’s barbarian promised plenty of hitty-smashy combat goodness.

Lewis had decided to go with a ranger. It seemed like a fairly balanced party, all told.

They made a little small-talk before they began, obviously, but pretty soon Lee was waving his hands and describing how the four characters’ collective adventure began in the back of a wagon at a slave market built inside the ribcage of a long-dead titanic primordial being.

An hour later, Vedreg was carefully rolling his giant foam d20 to see whether he’d cleave through a chattering skeletal minion when Darcy’s phone pinged urgently.

She immediately grabbed for it. “Oh, shit… Sorry guys. This one’s important.”

“Aww c’mon—!” Lewis objected.

“I work in intelligence, Lewis. ‘Vacation’ and ‘free time’ are quaint concepts I gave up when I sold them my soul. They call, I jump.”

Lee and Lucy both nodded, sadly understanding. Vedreg merely glowed a shade of interested raspberry red as she got up and crossed the room to answer.

“Darcy… It is? Alright, yeah, link it through. Thanks.” She lowered the phone slightly and smiled across the room. “Our friend’s back.”

“That’s good news,” Vedreg said, shading to a warmer, more relieved shade of red.

“Yeah. Let me just…” She sat on the couch. “Hello. Welcome back!”

Lewis stood up and made coffee for himself, Lucy and Lee, a hot chocolate for Vedreg and a green tea for Darcy. Hopefully if she wasn’t just heading back to her office, that meant the game was merely interrupted rather than cancelled.

Sadly, that seemed it wasn’t to be. After a minute or so of talking to her screen and whatever mishmash of emojis came back, Darcy sighed, stood, and grabbed her shoes.

“Sorry guys, I think I need to head back to the office,” she gave them a weary shrug and an apologetic half-smile.

“Something big come up?” Lee asked.

“You could say that,” Darcy agreed. She slipped her shoes on and grabbed her bag. “It, uh… It says it has a prisoner.”

Date point: 16y2m3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

Julian had a habit of singing in the woods. Not loud, exactly, and Hoeff wasn’t even sure he was totally conscious he was doing it, but loud enough to hear.

Apparently it kept critters from blundering into them that might get ornery if surprised. It must be working, ‘cuz Hoeff hadn’t seen, heard or smelled a damn thing since leaving the village.

At least the big bastard had a decent singing voice, even if his song selection was… ehhh…

♫“-when it gets warm…And I can’t wait to see, what my buddies all think of me. Just imagine how much cooler I’ll be in summeeerrrr…”♪

“Aargh, would you shut up?!” Hoeff finally groaned. He’d been carrying the M107 for miles and the damn thing weighed plenty enough on Earth. Akyawentuo’s gravity added like six pounds, which didn’t sound like a lot but it all added up.

♪“A-buh-bah-ba-♫ huh?” Julian snapped out of whatever bizarre headspace he’d been in. “…Dude. Problem?”

“How fucking old are you, seven?”

“It’s my favorite movie!”

“…You’re fucking weird, man.”

Yan stopped so abruptly that Hoeff nearly walked into him. His tail lashed a few times, then he turned around and considered the two humans.

“…Sit. Rest.”

“Gettin’ tired, bro?”

Yan dismissed the good-natured joke with a grunt. “Hungry.”

Well, fair enough. Ten’Gewek chewed through calories like a dragster, and Hoeff wasn’t gonna say “no” to gettin’ some weight off his back and some food in his belly either.

They found a fallen Ketta branch and parked their asses on it. Yan had his trail food, a mix of Werne jerky, nuts, berries and pemmican. Julian and Hoeff had MREs, and Hoeff tore his open eagerly. His expression fell when he saw what was inside.

“…Fuck. Skittles.”

Julian held up his pack’s candy offering. “I got a Hershey bar. Trade?”

“You’re outta your goddamn mind! …Deal.”

Julian handed it over. “What? I like Skittles!”

“Bro, you are made of cotton candy and rainbows today. The fuck softened you up?”

“Same thing that pissed in your cornflakes, I guess.”

They chuckled and set their food to cooking. Yan’s tongue lashed the air at the familiar chemical sting of a flameless heater, and he moved upwind.

“…Seriously though?” Hoeff said, picking up the music conversation again as he spread cheese on a cracker, “I ain’t never heard you sing or listen ‘ta anything that ain’t antique.

Julian shrugged. “I like what I like.”

“Don’tcha wanna get up-to-date?”

Julian shrugged again. “I caught up with the bands I used to like but… I dunno. Not much that’s come out since First Contact really grabs me, you know?”

“You could at least go with something that ain’t a fucking Disney movie. I mean what about… Sciatica?”

Julian shook his head. “Too much screaming, not enough singing.”

“Army of Angels?”

“Too goth.”

“Made To Fail?”

“Who?”

Hoeff shook his head and gave up. He reclined on the branch and listened to his dinner sizzle for a bit until a thought struck him.

“…You know what’s weird? People mention First Contact and in my head I think that was only, like… five or six years ago. Not sixteen. I’ve had a whole fuckin’ career since then.”

“Try spending five years in stasis. Completely throws off your sense of when stuff happened.”

“Shit, I guess it would… ‘course, you weren’t even on Earth when it happened, were ya?”

“Nope. I was freezing my ass off on Nightmare.” Julian nudged his meal pack, then glanced Hoeff’s way. “…Where were you when it happened?”

“Visitin’ my parents. We were watching baseball, not hockey, but I tell you man, the game coverage got dropped. An actual alien invasion? Shit, I don’t think anybody knows how that baseball game finished… ‘Course, my leave got cancelled, which sucked. Mom wasn’t happy about it, but Dad, y’know, he knew how it was. He’d been there. He just drove me to the airport.”

“Your dad served?”

“Shit yeah, he did!” Hoeff said proudly. “You’re talkin’ to Chief Special Warfare Operator (retired) Daniel Hoeff the Second.”

“He was a SEAL too?”

“Yup.” Hoeff looked up at the canopy and smiled. “…He gets me, you know? One time, he just rocked up after school on a Tuesday and took me camping down in Big Bend for the rest of the week. He just… He knew how bad I was gettin’ it from some’a the kids. Like that time Beau Thompson shoved me ass-first into the trash can ‘round back of the science block and I missed the bus home.”

He saw the look on Julian’s face. “What?”

“Nothing, I just… have a hard time picturing you getting bullied at school,” Julian admitted.

“Shit yeah, all the time! I was the little weird kid who beat their asses at fuckin’ everything in class… I had a bad time of it, and Dad, God bless him, saw how I was just bottling it up and sooner or later I was gonna explode. He knew he could either step in or watch me go fuckin’ Columbine on those motherfuckers. So he took me away from it all for a week and helped me get it outta my system then taught me how to ride it, y’know? Taught me how to see past them to all the good people behind them… showed me how to remember there was such a thing as good people.”

Julian looked a little unnerved. “Jeez, dude.”

“Yeah, it was a dark place. Dad pulled me out.” Hoeff decided his food was ready and fished it out of the box. “…Helped that he taught me how ‘ta make an example of Thompson, too. And he came in and had words with the Principal when I got detention. Scared the shit out of him!”

Julian smiled. “He sounds like a good man. The kinda dad I wanna be.”

“Yeah. I love him to death,” Hoeff didn’t feel the least bit awkward about saying that. “…You reckon your kids’ll serve?”

Julian frowned. “…Oh, jeez. I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” he said.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Fuck, with the kinda pedigree he’s gettin’ from you an’ Xiù, your boy might just grow up to be the next Warhorse.”

“I hope not!” Julian grimaced. “I mean, I love Adam, but man he’s been through some shit.”

“Yup. That’s what drives him.”

“Exactly. Not something I wanna wish on my son and heir.”

Hoeff chuckled. “Fair, I guess. Nobody wants their kid to grow up to be Batman.”

“Mm-hm!” Julian nodded with a wry smile. “No thanks, I choose life.”

“Got a name for ‘em yet?”

“Not yet. Only thing we know for sure is Jacob and Amanda aren’t on the list.”

“Make it easy for the rest of us, yeah? I like Xiù, but fuck her name is hard to pronounce.”

Julian laughed and opened his own meal pouch. It smelled to Hoeff like he’d got the barbeque beef and beans, lucky asshole.

“…So what about you and Claire?” Julian asked, spooning up a mouthful.

“What about us?”

“C’mon, everyone who knows you two ships it.”

“‘Ships it?’ The fuck are you, some weeaboo schoolgirl?”

Julian just raised an eyebrow on his smugly trollish face and smirked. “Dude.”

Hoeff sighed. The truth was, Claire was a painful subject for him. She wasn’t some frilly little civilian, she was a xenoarchaeologist who’d now spent more than a year living on a supergravity alien planet, usually getting her hands dirty as she pieced together what she could of Ten’Gewek history. He’d never seen her without dirt under her fingernails, or a little smear of mud somewhere on her face which was about as close as she ever got to wearing makeup.

That little smear of mud never failed to look amazingly cute, too… And she was a hell of a lot more intelligent than him. Hoeff didn’t count himself as stupid, but…

“Look, we’ve been over this,” he said. “C’mon man, after the shit I was just talkin’ about? She deserves somebody more… on her level.”

“That’s her decision, not yours,” Julian retorted. “She has a right to choose who she’s into.”

“And I have a right to say I’m not the right guy for her!”

Julian growled. “Okay. Y’know what? I’m just gonna say it. Get the fuck over yourself, Hoeff.”

…Hold the fuck up. Hoeff weren’t about to take that kinda shit from nobody. He stood up slowly and gave Julian a look loaded with intent.

“You wanna say that again, Playboy?”

Julian raised an eyebrow, stared him directly in the eye, slowly stood up to his full height and…

Well, fuck.

It didn’t take much for Hoeff to see just how much of a fight he was picking. He tried not to show his nerves, but any sane man would be nervous when a few hundred kilos of real life Tarzan-gorilla got angry. Julian knew it, too. He tensed his body, firmly planted those sturdy feet of his in a wide, immovable stance, and crossed his massive arms across his chest.

His growled reply was absolutely dripping with menace, too. “You heard me, Chimp. Get the fuck over yourself and stop being such a little bitch, dude. You’re better than that.”

Hoeff wasn’t one to back down, ever. That was how he’d made it through training and become a SEAL, despite being the littlest sailor in his class. No washbacks, no failures, no excuses.

He stood his ground. They squared off, and Hoeff saw Yan shift subtly where he was sitting a few yards away, listening and watching carefully, but not interfering, at least…not yet.

Hoeff sized up his opponent.

Julian was a monster. He had a real HEAT-grade physique, all the abilities that went with it, and all the justified self-confidence that kind of innate superiority gave a man. Though Hoeff had also experienced ridiculous improvement under the SOR’s care—to the point where people were getting out of his way when he walked down the street these days—even then he’d not managed anything like Julian’s progress. He was so much bigger, tougher, faster, and stronger than Hoeff it was fuckin’ silly. He was a damn good fighter, too. Sparring with him hurt.

But despite all that, Julian wasn’t a combat armsman. Hoeff…was.

Even better for his chances, Julian especially wasn’t a fighter in the up-close-and-personal way Hoeff was. The giant fucker didn’t have the same experience, hadn’t learned the little tricks that made all the difference. Hoeff gave Julian a ruthless eye-over and decided he could probably take him in a real fight. If it ended up just being some macho posturing bullshit then yeah, Julian’d break him like a fuckin’ child, but if things got dirty…

…What the fuck was he thinking? He’d just pondered how to fuck up a friend.

And worse, Julian could tell, too. He didn’t back down any, but he didn’t seem like he was itchin’ to rumble, either. “Hey man, you wanna go for it, I’m down,” he said in a level foice, “but I’m not looking for any of that. I’m just sick and tired of you hatin’ on yourself.”

Well…fair enough.

Hoeff willed himself to unwind and looked down at his feet, a little ashamed. “…It ain’t hate,” he said once he felt more composed. “It’s… Shit, man, I dunno. I’ve spent my whole life bein’…”

He trailed off, then shrugged helplessly. He knew what he meant, but couldn’t think how to say it in a way that didn’t sound like he fucking loathed himself.

“Hoeff, buddy.” Julian moved to his side and put a heavy-ass, brotherly arm around his shoulder, then pulled him in for a crushing hug. “Can I be honest? I’m not as sociable as people think I am. I’m…uh, well, Nightmare burned my tolerance for bullshit right out of me. I don’t waste my time with people who don’t deserve it, man. But here I am. Just say whatever’s on your mind.”

He was doing that thing that really big guys tended to do, where even his gentle shows of affection were a kind of an inevitable reminder of just how little and weak Hoeff was next to that, no matter how strong he’d grown these days. And like always, it was irresistible.

“…I got a body count, man. Like… JETS was way the most bloodless part of my career.”

Julian nodded honestly and without judgement. “Yeah. I know. We all know.”

“Claire doesn’t.”

“Yeah she does, man.”

“I mean she doesn’t have one. Like…”

“She’s not innocent, either. She knows pretty much exactly what you are, Hoeff. Doesn’t change a damn thing.”

“Dude, shut up and let me get this off my chest,” Hoeff snarled. “This shit ain’t easy for me.”

“Nuh-uh, you’re gonna hear me out first. I spent six Goddamned years inside my own head, man. I know all about self-doubt and all that shit. Y’know what? It’s horseshit. All of it. And that fucking monster inside? Tough. We’ve all got it. Believe me, I know. How the hell you think I’ve managed any of this?” Julian gestured across himself, and to the jungle they found themselves in. “ So seriously. Stop it. You’ve got friends who love you. Hell, I’ve fought death robots with you! And I think sometimes being a friend means slapping the silly shit outta people when they need it.”

Hoeff fought back a wave of irritation. “Doesn’t fucking feel silly,” he said.

Julian pushed back on Hoeff’s shoulders and held them like brothers having a heart-to-heart. “Hoeff. Buddy. It ain’t silly, man. I respect the heck outta you for everything you’ve done. You’re one of the men I hope my son and daughter might look up to. It’s just…we’re all full of ourselves. I was sorta the same way when I started dating Al, so I guess…I dunno.”

Julian tilted his head slightly, then pulled Hoeff back into a fierce hug. He felt himself returning it. “I just don’t like seeing people I care about making the same dumb mistakes I did.”

…Hoeff had no idea how to react to any of that. He’d not had anyone besides his dad ever show him that kind of concern. It was…disorientating, actually. He didn’t know what to do—

There was a grumbling sound from across the clearing, and Yan stood up. He stretched, yawned expansively, and then without any warning or broadcasting, he pounced forward, swept the two humans off the ground with an enormous arm around each of their waists, transferred Hoeff to one of his feet, and swung up a Ketta.

Some few bewildering seconds later, Hoeff found himself and Julian dangling upside-down next to each other, an alarmingly long way above the forest floor.

Yan swung next to them as well, and grinned tuskily. He was gripping a branch with one foot and one hand: his other foot held Julian up by the ankle, and Hoeff found he was suspended by Yan’s tail.

“Humans talk too much,” he announced.

“Yan, this shit’s important—” Hoeff began, then shut up when Yan pretended to let go and dropped him a few inches. The big bastard was grinning hugely.

“Only yes or no,” the Given-Man said. “You like her. Yes?”

“Well… yeah, but–”

“She likes you. End of problem. [Anything else is just stupid Sky-Thoughts Taking your happiness and Giving back hurt.”] He reached out and prodded Hoeff in the forehead. “All your pain is just in here. Good women know good men. And like slightly bad man! And she chose you, so if you like her don’t insult her choice.”

“Or were you lying about liking her?” Julian asked. He didn’t seem even a little bit fazed by being swept up into the trees and dangled upside-down like a toy. In fact, he looked like he was trying not to laugh.

“No, man–!” Hoeff protested.

“Well then. Trust her! That’s what a relationship’s built on!”

Hoeff sighed. It felt…good, really. Having dudes who cared, even if it also hurt. “…Alright. I get it.”

Satisfied, Yan flipped them both over like toys, hung them over the branch and then, to Hoeff’s horror, jumped down.

Julian, the fucking maniac, jumped down right behind Yan and actually whooped as he fell. Each of the two ultra-heavyweights hit the ground with a thud that Hoeff felt even all the way up in the tree. Where Yan had just landed almost straight-legged as if he’d just hopped in place a bit, Julian apparently wanted to show off. He slammed down, rolled through the landing and sprang to his feet like a goddamn high-jumping ninja. That fall had to be from at least six meters up, too. Jesus.

Hoeff wasn’t so ridiculous. Yan had taken him for a ride, but he wasn’t about to pretend he could handle a fall like that in any kind of gravity. He climbed down like a sane person.

“…You big fuckers are gonna be the death of me.”

Julian grinned ruefully. “Nah, you’re a tough fella. I’ll teach you how to make that jump later too, if you want! Also…” He faced Hoeff square on and spread his arms. “Y’know what? This feels really really stupidly macho, but…one free hit, if you want it. I deserve it.”

Hoeff couldn’t help but laugh a little. “What? Why?”

Julian shrugged. “For pushing you outta your comfort zone.”

“Christ, I thought I’d outgrown that shit fuckin’ years ago…I’ll take a rain check.”

“No man! Payback is one thing, but no way am I gonna trust a sneaky murderbunny like you with an open-ended invitation!”

“Dude, I’m not gonna break my knuckles tryin’ to punch you. Fuckin’ weirdo.”

“You sure?” Julian grinned, then trollishly flexed his fuckin’ ridiculous abs. “I won’t offer again!”

“No, goddamnit! How the hell am I, the Navy SEAL, being the normal one here?!”

“Not even one little hit?”

“Dude!”

“Your loss.” Julian lowered his arms with a chuckle and returned to his meal pack.

Despite himself, Hoeff felt better. Hs friends might be fucking crazy, but at least they cared. Tough love might not be fun but it proved their affection a fuck of a lot more than just validating his bullshit would have.

He stalked back to his own meal and dug in, glad for friends, a full belly, and big guns.

And he started thinking about what he was gonna say to Claire.

Date Point: 16y2m3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

SFC Wilson “Titan” Akiyama

For the first time ever, the Couch had needed reinforcing and widening. They had a lot of new Operators, the Old Crew had all grown to enormous size, Gaoian and Human alike, and none of them felt that should in any way interfere with loading as many people onto, atop, and across the Couch as was humanly (or Gaoianly) possible. This meant one Wilson Akiyama was given the unenviable task of improving upon what was effectively a sacred object in the lore of HEAT.

He had help, of course. Sikes was a wizard with a MIG welder, just as good as Rebar had been. ‘Horse set about the task of building a new cushion that was up to the task, with a firmer padding and a new wonder fabric that was a soft as fleece, and as tough as Kevlar.

The FNGs were the Gophers, and when it was done, Righteous and ‘Horse had the solemn honor of hauling it back into its sacred spot.

The result was very definitely a couch. It had all the things couches had. Nobody could argue it was lacking any degree of couch-ness. It just… had a few extras that weren’t usually associated with couch-kind.

Like buttresses. And shock absorbers.

It had running beams to distribute the weight more evenly across the floor too, given the weight their increasing population of Beefs had attained. And Starfall had cleverly hidden some surround speakers in its rear, along with some literal ass-kicking subwoofers.

Regaari had added a permanent deodorizing spray.

All in all, it had been a good side-project to see them through a day or two of suit recovery. And now, the moment had come to test it.

“Alright, moment of truth! This a bad movie night, or a good movie night?”

His reply was the sound of Faarek flicking his favorite lucky Ta’Shen tile into the air with a claw. It ping-ed high toward the ceiling, then landed on the table with a steely rattle.

“…Bad.”

There was a small cheer from some quarters, and a resigned shrug from everyone else. After all, it wasn’t like they were really losing anything. Either was fine! And so the HEAT finished their evening exercise, quickly ran themselves through a nice, cold rinse-down, toweled off, changed into their favorite lazy-boy silkies, and piled into the dayroom.

The Couch didn’t complain at all when ‘Horse, Righteous, ‘Base, Irish, and Starfall formed the base substrate of Operator. How exactly they knit themselves together to fit on it in the first place was a bit of a mystery, even though it had been widened and lengthened as much as could be slotted through the dayroom’s doors.

Tonight’s travesty was a crime against all sapient life. Naturally, it was French.

“Is this supposed to fill me with existential dread?” Ergaan wasn’t particularly impressed, and had loaded so much jeering disdain in his voice it was practically dripping from his fangs.

“Dude, I’m not even sure it’s supposed to make sense.”

“Only a Human director would deliberately set out to make a movie with no plot whatsoever.”

“Are the French actually human?” Firth had grumbled it so deadpan, it almost sounded sincere.

“Allegedly.”

“The subtitles don’t match what my translator is saying at all.”

“Good, ‘cuz I really hope he didn’t literally mean he’s gonna rape himself with a flower…”

Murray grumbled and applied more crush-snuggle to his very first pet operator, one of the new guys by the name of Forrest. He was a Marine, and had a bit of a slow, almost indecipherable drawl despite being intelligent as all hell, so naturally his provisional callsign was Gump.

He’d taken it with grace. Apparently he’d had that same joke chasing him for most of his career so far. He wasn’t as happy about giant Scottish beatdown-ninjas smashing the lifeforce out of him, but there wasn’t really much he could do. If Titan were a French existentialist, he’d maybe have crapped out a shitty movie about it, and made the rounds of the art film circuit.

“Be careful there Highland.” Firth had decided it was time for a bit of troll. “Having a pet Marine is a big responsibility! You gotta train them…”

“Aye. All this week.”

“…Clean up after them…”

“He’s house trained. Mostly.”

Blaczyski chimed in, picking up Firth’s pass. “…Buy their special crayon supplements!”

“Only the best for my wee marine, you watch. He’ll be drinkin’ crayon macchiatos!”

Forrest snorted at that. “If they don’t use Purple Mountains Majesty in their blend, I swear I’ll–hnnngh!”

“Hush, wee bairn. Only dreams now.”

Adam’s sense of injustice eventually came to Gump’s rescue. “Save your energy Highland. You and I got deadlifts in two hours…”

That earned a rueful chuckle from Murray, a reduction of his full body crushing fondness to a lesser grade of struggle snuggle, and a desperate, panting grumble of relief from Forrest.

Faarek chittered to himself as he dug a morsel out of his snack box with a claw. “Humans are still weird…”

“Says the dude eating peanut-butter-and-anchovy peshorkies.”

“Well, what’s weird about that? Peanut butter is proof there are gods and that they love us!”

Regaari duck-nodded. “Especially Gaoians.”

“In what alternate reality do you figger that’s the case?” Firth seemed genuinely amused and released Parata to prop himself up and banter.

“Well, there are whole food combinations we can enjoy that you can’t, and we have a whole sense that you’re effectively completely numb in.”

“That’s arguably true in reverse, too. Except twice, since we’ve got better color vision and a sense of touch that’ll eat yours for lunch.”

“Sure.” Regaari stole one of the vile peshorkies for himself. “And the day you can touch the breeze in a national park, I’ll concede the point.”

“Hey Titan, couldn’t Rebar tell you the type of metal something was made of even while blindfolded? Just by feeling it?”

Akiyama noded. He’d always been in awe of that trick. “If it was unfinished, yeah. He could feel the grain structure and tell you the steel alloy, if it was hot-rolled or cold-rolled…”

“Well… maybe the gods loved Rebar too.”

Faarek duck-nodded. “Of course they did. He was an honorary Gaoian!”

Firth belly-laughed, “How do you figger that?!”

“He was the only one here better at shenanigans than us.”

There was a susurrus as Titan’s fellow humans all nodded in agreement.

Baseball chimed in. “Sounds to me like our furry friends wanna run down to the coast with us tomorrow, ‘Horse…”

At this point, their extensive training meant they could in fact do just that, but that didn’t mean they liked the idea at all. All of the Whitecrests flicked their ears backward in unison, and the humans grinned at each other. A hit!

Sikes shook his head. “I never understood that about you, ‘Horse. You’re literally the heaviest human being to ever live and you like running more than any of us. You and Julian…”

“Speaking of Julian…” Walsh interjected, ”Ain’t he comin today? You sent him a message, right?”

“He’s offworld. Hoeff said somethin’ about a hunt.” If there was a hint of jealousy in Firth’s voice, Titan chose not to notice.

“Dammit. I haven’t hung out with him in ages.”

“Coulda hung out with us and Daar a couple days ago! But no, you had some lame excuse!”

“That ‘lame excuse’ is called June, and she’s a nurse.”

Gaoian psychology was interesting in these moments. They always wanted to know every single fact of the encounter in detail, and always seemed surprised when there wasn’t a mating contract at the end. Walsh fielded a few questions good-naturedly then deflected them back onto the movie.

The main character (if that was the right word, seeing as the piece had no discernible plot, characterization or dialog) was in the middle of depressively reciting something pretentious about the violent nature of cooking. Titan hadn’t paid any attention, and was just waiting for the lonely shots of inamimate objects being buffeted by the wind, or the rain, or…

French movies were the worst. At least this one wasn’t in black and white…

Right about the moment when everyone got bored jeering at the screen, and the group was collectively about ready to either go Gym or possibly just Nap right where they were—both tasks of Serious Importance in the HEAT—there was a bit of commotion downstairs, followed by some tired-sounding footfalls.

JETS Team Two had come back from the field and decided to drop in for a visit. And they had a Gaoian with them that Akiyama didn’t recognize, except he was about the smallest male he’d ever laid eyes on.

He wrinkled his nose and flicked an ear as they entered the room, prompting sympathetic chitters from the Whitecrests.

“You get used to the smell, I promise,” Regaari said, standing to greet him as several of the couch’s human occupants scrambled off it to welcome the trio of brits. “Father Regaari, Clan Whitecrest.”

“Brother Tooko, Clan Firefang.”

“The Tooko?” Shim immediately sounded interested.

“You know this guy, Shim?” Titan asked him.

“Yeah. I heard he’s sired a dozen daughters, and that he personally splashed three broodships at the battle of Capitol Station.”

“Two broodships,” Tooko corrected him modestly. “…And thirteen daughters.”

“Don’t let Daar know, he’ll be bragging Tooko up to every female he meets!”

“Oh, he knows,” Tooko didn’t preen, exactly, but he wasn’t exactly burdened with false modesty either. Titan immediately decided he liked the guy.

“Duw, boys, this looks fuckin’ awful.” Rees was staring at the TV with disbelief. He perched on the back of the couch with a grin.

“It’s the worst,” Sikes assured him.

“Fuck it, I’m in. Any beers? I’m fuckin’ gasping.”

Tooko sighed disappointedly. “…Bad movies. You too?”

“We flipped a tile for it,” Titan explained. “Personally, I’m on team Good Movie, but….”

The arrival of new friends and the mention of beer got the team out of the dayroom and into the kitchen, where they wolfed down their scheduled meals and plied their guests with as much food as they could stand. Then, it was beer time. All delicious frosty beverages were relocated to the dayroom, and the process of squeezing onto the couch began anew.

Most everyone got themselves new teddy-victims. Regaari and Faarek took Tooko (for his protection) and the rest of Team Two disappeared somewhere into the depths of the Couch.

Firth re-settled with a new squeeze-bear in the form of his perennial favorite, Blaczynski, and made himself comfortable. “Anyway, what brings ‘ya here?”

“We’ve got some leave,” Wilde revealed. “But the next jump to London isn’t until tomorrow morning. What about you? Don’t you have a baby to look after?”

“I get one night off a week to hang with y’all, ‘cuz Freya’s a goddamned angel.” Firth grinned. “I kinda miss Joseph when I ain’t there though. ‘S’funny, he keeps wakin’ up and hollerin’ and you never know if he’s after a tit or a diaper change and I never get a full night’s sleep, but…”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed. “You shift to the two-by-four plan like I did?”

“The what?” Burgess asked.

“Sleep for four hours, get up and take care of business, then back to sleep for another four. As it happens that’s supposedly our natural ancestral sleep rhythm anyway.”

“Works great once ‘yer used to it, and it’s been a fuckin’ godsend. In fact…” Firth shrugged, and caused an avalanche of Operators as he exhumed himself from the Couch. “I think I owe Freya some cheat snacks. That’s part o’ the deal. Maybe I’ll try that taco joint Daar likes…”

“Wanna take her some peshorkies?” Faarek offered the box. Tooko’s nose twitched, his ears pricked up, and he speared one out of the pile with a claw as it went past. Gross as they sounded, clearly they really were pleasing to the Gaoian palate.

“Naw, y’all keep ‘em. Freya’s kinda…picky.”

That was perhaps the most tactful display of manners Titan had ever seen from him. The wonders never ceased, lately.

“But she’ll like tacos?”

“Ain’t nobody don’t like tacos. They’ve got the authentic kind with the soft corn tortilla, too…”

“Go,” Adam encouraged. “Stop scandalizing the Gaoians with the non-crunchy tacos.”

“What about you? Diego an’ Marty both okay?”

“Diego’s staying with his abuelos tonight, an’ Marty said she was gonna spend the evening sleeping.” Adam shrugged, causing a minor landslide. “So, I’m giving her some alone time.”

“Right.” Firth shook his head and grinned. He’d always had a bit of trouble understanding introverts, even mild cases like Martina. “Well, see y’all tomorrow.”

His departure marked the point where the evening slowed down. The movie went largely ignored, the beers and snacks slowly vanished, the banter carried on over the heads of the ones who decided to fall asleep. It was peaceful. Not boring or anything, just… comfortable and quiet, and a welcome change of pace from the solid few days of urgent action they’d been chasing.

It was nice now and then to have a relaxed night off.

Date Point: 16y2m3d AV
Gaoian embassy, Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

People who didn’t know Daar all that well thought he had a pathological aversion to Civilized pursuits. Not true at all! Daar had always enjoyed history, writing, and the more subtle arts of courtship, and he had to admit he was seeing the appeal in flowers and such, too. Refined arts weren’t an alien concept to him, he simply preferred to enjoy them sparingly. After all, a treat was to be savored and enjoyed, not eaten every day, and Daar was firmly of the opinion that if a ‘Back wallowed in Civilization too much, they might lose sight of what was so special about it.

Why it was worth preserving.

And so Daar found himself practicing his calligraphy with a letter to Naydi, because his aide, Brother Tiyun of Clan Highmountain, was one of the more remarkable veterans of the War for Gao, and had at some point become a Keeda-damned mind-reader on all matters Great Father. He somehow always knew what Daar needed at any given moment, even if that were a sparring partner…though bein’ honest, he wasn’t very big even for a silverfur, so Daar tried to spare him that particular entertainment.

He was getting better, though. Daar had made a Project of him because he would be damned if his friends weren’t the bestest fightin’ tails they could be.

He shared that thought in his letter to Naydi. Writing letters helped him clear his mind almost as well as exercise did. And the history of Gaori lettering was one of those mysteries he ached to solve.

The basics were simple. That was the whole point. Each little line and shape was a phoneme, combine them to get a syllable. The rules were clear, simple, regular…way too perfect. So even if language shifted and changed over the centuries, he could read Fyu’s poetry aloud. Couldn’t understand half of it, but poetry like that was about rhythm, tone and cadence anyway.

Fyu had been a way better poet. Sometimes, Daar wished he could talk to the old legend, get ‘ta know him some more. How the hell would Fyu have handled a problem like Leemu?

… Would he have even understood it? Tech-wise, Fyu had lived in an age a lot more like the Ten’gewek than like modern Gao.

Daar blinked and put his pen down, carefully wiping the ink off and setting it aside in its holder, putting the lid back on the ink and closing his antique writing case with all the careful precision that the civilized art demanded. That done, he sat back and frowned.

…How would he explain the problem to Fyu? Or Yan?

Well, Yan had shown time and again he could get his head around big sky-thoughts with some translation and a running jump. He might not know cell biology, nanotech or microsurgery, but he could get his head around the idea of a magic that could bring folks back from the dead.

And that was what they were playing with, when he got down ‘ta diggin’ in the dirt under all the weeds an’ flowers. If the Corti could copy a mind from the body and then download it back into the body, and… take the body apart, rebuild it, clone it or whatever in the interim, well… they could back up people to archive. Restore them if they got killed.

Or, shit! What if they could build a body to order, and download the mind into that instead? Could they take someone like Tiyun and shove him in a body like Daar’s? What would the world be like if they could build an army like that?

…Would they even know how to use their new bodies? It had taken Daar years to build himself into a worthy match for his bestest friends, and most of that was learning how to do, instead of just the actual doing…

The phrase ‘can of worms’ was so weirdly fucking apt for a problem like this. He peeked inside, and all he saw was crawling problems, all of them disturbing to look at. And the nasty part was, the can was open now and it wasn’t gonna close again. Now that Tran and Nofl had floated the idea, they were gonna take it back to the Directorate and work at it even if Daar said no to trying it out on Leemu.

He didn’t wanna sentence Leemu to death.

It felt a little weird even thinking that. Daar had personally executed billions of his own people. He had committed intimate acts of bloody, brutal murder against irredeemable criminals, not to mention a couple of good men whose only crime had been being too inflexible to do the right thing. He was no stranger to death, nor was he shy about doling it out when needed.

But the thought of leaving Leemu to the ravages of the droud made his fur crawl.

So… ‘kay. Explain the problem to Yan.

Actually…yeah. Explain the problem to Yan. Why the hell not do it in person? He could explain the problem to a little rubber squeak toy if he wanted ‘ta just talk to himself, but unlike the toy, Yan might actually have an insight. Shit, he probably wouldn’t be cluttered by all the bullshit that came from overthinking such things!

Also, he could probably tussle a bit, too! And it was good to keep friends and friendly rivalries alive.

He returned to his desk and wrote the remainder of his letter with care. Sure he could have just gone sprinting from the room barking orders, but this was a letter to Naydi. No other Gaoians were allowed to love each other, and that was a blessing he wouldn’t never forget, nor ever stop honoring.

And that, right there, was the greatest evil the Hierarchy had done to them.

He signed the letter, folded and sealed it the old-fashioned way, and placed it on top of his “send” pile. One of his assistants would ensure she got it.

Only once that was done, did he leave his office and call for a jump to Akyawentuo.

He hadn’t gone back to Gao, not while the Leemu question was unresolved. Instead he’d stayed at the embassy and claimed an office. His staff were used to following him around, and the links between Folctha and Gao were so good these days that it didn’t feel like being far from home.

Now that choice paid off. He was a short car ride from the jump terminal, and as luck had it he’d made his decision just in time to catch the next scheduled link.

Well. Maybe he’d run to the terminal instead. His head felt too full of fluff and gunk to think, and some wind through his fur might help a little.

His staff were used to that, too.

He ran, nice and fast and hard, so that he outran his staff, and arrived on time, panting heavily just as it was time to climb onto the platform. It creaked under his weight—they needed to fix that—and had just enough time to shake his pelt out nice and presentable when the Array fired.

Thump!

Heavy gravity, heavy air, an explosion of scents and sounds. He stepped off and enjoyed the added weightiness he felt, a small challenge he’d always enjoyed, then sniffed happily.

He’d missed Akyawentuo.

There were a few surprised-looking humans around the array, preparing to offload the supply package that he’d rode along with. He recognized Daniel Hurt instantly.

“Professor.”

Hurt shook off his goofy look of surprise with a small laugh and a smile. “Well. We definitely weren’t expecting you today! Welcome back to Akyawentuo, Great Father.”

“Good ‘ta be back,” Daar agreed, and indulged himself in giving Hurt an affectionate reunion hug. His staff might’ve fretted over the dignity of the office, but Daar liked to exercise his discretion, and sometimes that meant being free with his affection. “How’re you?”

Hurt was way denser nowadays. Livin’ in supergravity had really hardened him up and leaned him down from the soft academic he’d once been. Good! Daar had heard he’d been gettin’ lotsa mating offers back on Earth too…too bad Humans were so weird ‘bout all that.

Well. Weirdness was relative, really.

There was one person who was strangely absent, though considerin’ how much the area smelled of him.

“…Hoeff gone somewhere?”

“Yeah, he’s probably out in the woods on Yan’s big hunt.”

That got Daar’s attention. “Big hunt?”

“All the villages are talking about it. He plans to take down a Brown One.”

That…was a bit worrying, actually.

“Why exactly is he doin’ that?” Daar asked. Unthinkingly, he picked up a crate and helped offload the jump platform.

“All he told Julian is that it attacked a village. One of the Given-Men died protecting his tribe.”

“I mean, I unnerstand an’ all but…damnit he ain’t just a chieftain anymore!”

Hurt nodded. “None of us are really in a position to tell him that, though. And frankly, he only commands the respect he does because of what he’s done and the strength he’s shown. Taking down a Brown One would be just the sort of thing to cement him as more than just a chieftain.”

Daar shook his head. “Naw, ‘yer unnerestimatin’ him. He only got as old as he is ‘cuz he ain’t some incautious idiot. Which is why this is frankly a little alarming.”

“Or maybe it’s a test of sorts,” Daniel hefted another box off the platform, and Daar briefly wondered what was in them. There were already a lot of crates around the array. “You’re right, he’s not incautious, and I don’t think he’d suddenly become incautious overnight.”

He straightened up and twisted back and forth to loosen his back. “…He only suggested the hunt after being told that the Corti wanted to meet him,” he added.

Hmm.

“You got a theory?”

“Nothing I’d care to share. Yan is… something of a closed book to me. Human enough to speculate, alien enough to keep me guessing. Much like yourself, no disrespect intended.”

“Well, ‘yer a Highmountain through an’ through, an’ guys like me an’ Yan are pretty much the opposite o’ that. That ain’t too surprising…but tell me anyway. What’s ‘yer guess?”

Daniel sat on a crate, and sipped some water from a bottle he’d had clipped to his belt. “…Yan has been sensibly cautious of sky-magic so far. And not just because we’ve warned him about it, either. But suddenly, he invites us to bring all our tricks to bear against his culture’s version of a dragon? He has to know we could turn a Brown One to paste if we really wanted to, he saw what a couple of Firebirds did to the Abrogators. And he saw what that nuke you dodged did to the forest over on the other side of the mountains, too.”

…Dragon. Now there was an idea. Balls…that fit pretty well actually…

“When’d he see that?”

“A few seasons ago. The Given-Men went back to the old lodge, to fetch some keepsakes and history. They all live within two days walk of each other now, so they moved the lodge to somewhere closer and ‘nicer,’ he said. Anyway, the point is that Yan knows perfectly well that killing a Brown One is trivial with the right Sky-Magic. So the question is… why would you exterminate something your culture venerates?”

“Well…does he? Like, knowing is differn’t from knowin’ sometimes.”

“…Could be. And that’s why I don’t think it’s a complete theory. There’s a few possible explanations for what he’s up to.” Daniel sighed. “…And then of course there’s the fact that sooner or later, the Ten’gewek will have to slay that dragon anyway. There are far worse things up there than Brown Ones, after all.” He aimed a finger skyward.

“I know,” Daar sighed to himself. “I’m one o’ them.”

Daniel gave him a sympathetic look. “…“So if you don’t mind my asking, why did you come here?”

“Spur o’ the moment.” Daar explained. “Kinda hoped Yan would have a, uh… I guess uncluttered insight on a problem I got. Turns out, he has clutter of his own.”

“What kind of problem?”

Daar sighed. “I got a life I can maybe save, and maybe shouldn’t. That’s all I’m willin’ ‘ta share ‘fer now.”

“Understood.” Daniel stood up. “Well, this was our last scheduled jump today so I hope it turns out to be worth the trip.”

“Yeah. I’ll be here ‘fer a couple days most likely. Oh, as an aside…if you ever become the most biggest warlord in the history of ever, make sure ‘yer staff can think on their feet. I can’t even say how much I’m thankful I can do dumb shit like this an’ get advice without much worry. I think I’mma hunt a werne an’ make ‘em all jerky for this, I bet they’re angry.”

“Still a big leap, stranding yourself on a backwater like Akyawentuo for a couple days in search of advice. You obviously respect Yan a lot.”

“Yan…well, thing is? The Ten’Gewek got something in ‘em that were murdered outta my people. Yours have buried it under so much symbology an’ stuff it’s hard to get at. But here?”

Daniel nodded. “Here, it’s very… pure.”

“Yeah. An’ they’re way smarter an’ more civilized than they’ve got any damn right bein’ at this point in their evolution, too.”

“Much more so than we were,” Daniel agreed.

“Eh, maybe. Don’t sell ‘yerselves short. Anyway. Yeah. There are some questions that maybe it’s best if someone who ain’t got all that Civilization on top o’ them might be bestest at answerin.’ I already spoke with Champion Gyotin, an’ he don’t have an answer.”

“Possibly you should brace yourself for there not being a good answer.”

“Maybe,” Daar shook his fur out. “…But I’m beginnin’ ‘ta think maybe Yan’s got a similar problem. Is it always a good idea to slay dragons?”

“…Good question.”

“Yeah. Think I’m gonna go say hi to Sister Shoo an’ then go find Yan.” Daar dropped to four-paw, gave the professor a parting nod, and turned his nose down the hill.

Well, first thing he did was bark out a quick message on his wrist communicator to his staff. The zero-point mode of the array would sync at least a few times yet today, and any messages should get through in a reasonable amount of time.

He had little doubt his inbox would explode the next time the sync fired.

But he could worry about that when it happened. With luck, he and Yan could get their heads sorted out, maybe do a werne hunt, give the young monkey-cubs a ride…

That seemed nice. A day or two to recover, before he went back home and pronounced doom on Leemu.

But first, it was time to catch up with a friend.

Date Point: 16y2m3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’gewek protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

“Okay, should be online now…”

Xiù grinned to herself as the feed from the drone came through clean and strong, then giggled as she saw her new perspective through the VR goggles. The drone was perched on Julian’s palm, leaving her feeling rather like a Lilliputian looking up at a more rugged Gulliver.

“Hi, big guy!” she told him, and wished there was some way to emote via the drone.

He, Yan, and Hoeff were high up in the tallest, strongest tree of the Wall. Yan about half-way up, Julian most of the rest of the way, and Hoeff at the very top where he could safely brace himself. When Julian smirked and then turned the drone around, she saw the canopy was mostly below them, and fell away quite quickly to the border where it just… stopped. That was the point, she guessed, where thousands of years of Werne, Brown Ones, and the other inhabitants of the plains had grazed and trampled any ketta saplings that tried to establish themselves.

“Hi! We’re almost ready, waiting for Hoeff to make his way back down to where I’m at.”

“Gotcha. What’s the plan?”

“We’re just taking a look at him today. We’re…not exactly sure what the best way to go about this is yet, so…patience is a virtue.”

Xiù nodded, then realized too late that the drone wouldn’t convey that. “Okay… Any idea where I should start looking for him?”

Julian shifted in the tree and aimed the drone down toward Yan. “Yan? Xiù wants to know where she should start looking.”

Yan grunted, lashed himself to the tree by his tail so that he had both hands free, and unfolded the map he’d drawn on a white, human-made piece of letter paper. It wasn’t exactly perfect or to scale, but he’d put a lot of detail in.

[“…We know the Werne follow high ground in the rainy season and just after,”] he said. [“The low ground gets boggy, maybe floods… plenty of grass on the high ground, and they can see a long way. They should be easy to find. Find them, and the Brown One won’t be far away.”]

Julian placed the drone on a branch to descend a level, then picked it up again. [“Boggy? How does the Brown One take to that?”]

[“He hunts Yshek in the shallow water, where they lay eggs.”]

Given that an Yshek was basically a furry crocodile the size of an orca, that was a hell of a mental image. Xiù had seen Yshek through Misfit’s survey drones and sensors, and on Earth they’d have been apex predators.

Not so on Akyawentuo, apparently. Wow.

Julian took that news calmly. [“So he doesn’t care, then.”]

[“No. Very big paws. Can’t swim, though.”]

[“So, find a Werne herd on the high ground, then check for water nearby,”] Xiù summarized. Yan grinned at her drone and gave her a thumbs-up.

“Have fun, babe,” Julian told her. He shift in the tree, drew his arm back, and whipped it forward to hurl her into the sky. The drone’s ESFS wings snapped on automatically and she flipped a tight turn between the treetops as she climbed into open sky.

The Wall really was visible, as a kind of ridge of especially tall and hardy trees. She briefly wondered what natural quirk of the local geography had caused it, then dismissed the thought and tested the drone’s top speed.

ESFS wings were great, in that they could reconfigure on the fly for different kinds of flights. They could be little buzzy energy-intensive wings for fine maneuvering, huge wide gliding wings for circling on the air currents, and all points in between. The drone shifted automatically between them, but she had the option of manually changing modes too.

It wasn’t hard to find an updraft to ride. The plains were far from being flat featureless expanses of grass, but were instead ridged and rucked here and there like a disturbed carpet. Rocky features thrust through the soil every few hundred meters, and here and there they created sheltered spots where wooded copses had established themselves.

Such features deflected the wind upwards, giving her column of air on which to gain altitude. Before long she had an angel’s-eye view of the landscape, which she started comparing to her memory of Yan’s map.

Okay… there were the twin stands of trees… and that was the river… which meant the herd was probably somewhere over that way.

When they were in the forest, the Werne splintered into family groups of a bull and his harem. Out on the plains, they tolerated each other and merged into a larger mass of warm bodies. They were pretty easy to spot: their hooves had churned up a wide expanse of damp earth, and their grazing mouths had stripped the grass right down to the roots. All Xiù had to do was follow the disturbed ground.

She zoomed in on them as she wheeled overhead and took some photos for the zoologists. It looked like the herd instinctively created a wall around the calfs, placing them right in the middle. Then the cows formed the second ring around them, and the bulls…

…Were all on one side, interestingly. They had their noses down to graze, but they were definitely tolerating each other to stay together on one side of the herd.

Maybe they were shielding the herd? It seemed like as good a clue as any, so she banked, gained a little speed by dropping a little altitude, and headed out in that direction to see if she could find something dangerous.

What she found was… well… the Brown One.

Yan hadn’t been kidding about it eating Yshek. This one had dragged a ravaged carcass out of the water and was red all the way to the ears from shoving its nose inside to feast on the innards. Once upon a time the sight would have made her queasy, but well… She’d seen a lot of the grisly side of life. Nature red in tooth and claw wasn’t that big of a deal compared to a literal meat locker full of dead Gaoians.

She shivered at that memory, and forced it from her mind, instead opting to descend for a better look at the Brown One.

This had to be Yan’s quarry. It had a proportionally long, well-muscled torso with a broad, thick chest, a strong back, massive haunches and sturdy, powerful limbs. It walked plantigrade on huge paws that it could use like crude hands. Anatomically it was reminiscent of a mash-up between a big cat, a grizzly bear, or a powerful brute of a dog, rather than the quite literally dinosaur-sized prowling titan it was. All of that on a creature as tall at the shoulders as an elephant, and considerably bigger in breadth and length. It had a long and muscular tail, too, held low to the ground and lashing back and forth as it ate.

The head, though… God. That was a head that could bite a man’s whole body off. She got several good shots of a mouth full of logging-saw teeth, and an especially visceral few seconds of footage as it casually splintered the fallen yshek’s ribs with a bite.

It was starting to go dark black around the ears and whiskers, just like an aging Given-Man. Its muzzle, legs, face and flanks were all scarred to the point where there were large patches where its dense fur had never regrown, and its ears were little more than ragged stumps. This had to be the old one Yan was after.

Well. Time to see if that tagging kit Hoeff had brought back worked. Or indeed if their jury-rigged system for attaching it to the drone functioned as intended.

She picked a spot on its back between the shoulder blades where, in theory, the tracking tag would have plenty of loose skin to embed itself in and the Brown One wouldn’t be able to scratch or roll to remove it. She orbited behind it, waited for it to bury its nose in its kill again, then angled down and zipped forward.

She scored a perfect landing and fired the tagger. Her reward was a satisfying beep as the tracker implanted properly, followed by an outraged volcanic snarl from her quarry. It spun like a house cat and if Xiù hadn’t anticipated that it might get angry and started climbing the second she tagged it, the poor drone would have been swatted out of the sky in a shower of broken bits by a paw the size of a coffee table.

The Brown One, not to be so easily denied, backed off a pace or two with its tail lashing, glared up at her, and then leapt.

The drone had stereoscopic cameras on the front feeding Xiù a perfectly deep 3D view of the world. She got a perfect view down its gullet as it pounced ludicrously high into the air to snap at her, squeaked, and reflexively threw the drone sideways.

She slipped between its teeth, and heard them chomp shut bare inches behind her. The Brown One dropped back down to the boggy ground with a splash, and she recovered from her evasive sideslip by powering under its belly, zipping low across the water, and then climbing sharply.

There was a frustrated roar, and she relaxed. Losing the drone would have been…

Well. Seeing teeth like that coming toward her had been intimidating enough. The surge of adrenaline made her giggle, and she circled the drone up to an altitude of maybe a hundred feet or so, set it to hover, and radioed Julian.

“Tagged it,” she reported.

“Nice! How’d it go?”

“I’ll have to show you the footage later. My hands are shaking!”

“Close call?”

“I could tell you how many cavities it has.”

She heard Julian make a faintly disbelieving sound, or maybe a laugh.

“Julian…” she cautioned, watching the Brown One stop prowling and glaring up at her and return to its feast. “…Really don’t underestimate this thing. He jumped like twenty feet in the air from a standing start.”

“…A critter that big managed that?”

“Julian, I don’t think it was even really trying.”

“…Oh, Jeez.”

A commotion of some kind reached Xiù’s ears despite her headphones, even as she laughed quietly at Julian’s understated melancholy. It sounded like the villagers were greeting someone.

“….Yeah. Look, I’m gonna set the drone to a high orbit and go idle for a few minutes, something’s happening here.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t know yet. BRB.”

The drone had an autopilot function that could keep it aloft and tracking a target—like, say, the radio tag—for a couple of days if it needed to. It should be fine without her. She instructed it to do exactly that, then took off the VR headset and headphones.

As she emerged blinking back into the real world, she found a large, scarred, and very familiar but entirely unexpected muzzle poking in through the tent flap at her.

“…Hello, Sister.” Daar looked troubled.

“Da—? Uh,” Xiù caught herself. She was a Female of the Clan of Females, even if she was human. And Yulna had bared her throat to him just like the rest. It seemed maybe a little silly, but these things were important. “…My Father? What are you doing here?”

“Had somethin’ ‘ta discuss with Yan. When I got here, it turned out ‘ta be two somethings.” Daar pulled his head out of the tent, and Xiù ducked through after him. There was a light drizzling rain going on outside, and she wrapped a blanket the Singer had given her around her shoulders to ward it off.

“…An’ you can drop all that ‘My Father’ stuff,” Daar added. “Please.”

“Sorry… You heard about the hunt?”

“It’s okay, and yeah. I think…balls, wassat phrase? ‘Feeling his oats?’ [Like ‘stiff-eared and ready’?’]”

“Yan?” Xiù felt like he’d jumped ahead a few steps in the conversation. Still, she code-switched into Gaori for him. [“Well… I don’t know, really. I don’t even know if it’s going to be much of a hunt in the end. We’ve got a drone, a radio tracking tag, and Hoeff brought a really big gun from Earth. One of those] Barrett rifles? [He said it doesn’t matter how big and tough a Brown One is.”]

[“Don’t that strike you as odd?”] Daar asked. [“Yan takes huntin’ seriously. An’ he respects his prey. But now suddenly he wants easy mode?”]

[“It’s definitely odd. I’m… not sure if he really understands how much easier this will make it. It’s not like they have a translation for the words] ‘point and click,’ [you know?”] Xiù agreed. [“But on the other hand, he’s not stupid. I think he has his reasons, he just isn’t sharing them.”]

Daar grumbled and sniffed the wind, and Xiù tilted her head curiously. [“…Why does it worry you so much?”]

Daar scratched at his ear for a few seconds, still sniffing the wind. When he spoke, he did so carefully, like he was laying down his thoughts in front of him and stepping on them carefully.

“I’m… wonderin’ if it’s always a good idea ‘ta slay dragons,” he said in English.

He lapsed into a kind of contemplative silence, and Xiù reflected once again on how routinely her life seemed to take a turn for the absurd. How many other thirty-year-old expectant mothers ever had stood in the rain in an iron-age village on an alien world, discussing allegory with the king of a different alien world?

Sixteen years previously—eleven by her count, thanks to stasis—she’d spoken with the Dominion ambassador to the Gao and advised Mother-Supreme Giymuy on whether or not the Gao should accept full Dominion membership. And now here she was again. Kind of.

“Dragons,” she said aloud, flatly.

“Yeah. That’s what the Brown One is to the People. It’s a dragon. Symbolically an’ damn near literally. I’ve read a lot about the symbology your people attach to dragons.”

“…When you say ‘my people,’” Xiù said carefully, “Who do you mean?”

“Huh? Humans.”

“Right.” Xiù thought for a second. “…Daar, there’s more than one kind of dragon. It depends where you’re from. If you asked my parents what a dragon represents, they wouldn’t talk about slaying it at all. In Chinese culture, a dragon is… well, it’s not a big dangerous fire-breathing lizard with a hoard of gold. They’re good omens. They represent luck, perseverance, courage and happiness. Not ruin and danger.”

“…That’s a good point. Still don’t sound like something you’d wanna kill, yijao?”

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him,” Xiù countered.

Daar flicked both his ears in a look of momentary befuddlement. “…Dunno how Gyotin would feel about that one,” he said. “What does it mean?”

“It means… I think it means once you’ve learned everything there is to learn from something, holding on to it might keep you from learning anything more.”

There was a swirl of cold rain and she backed up a step or two into the shelter of the hut. Daar just ignored it.

“…An’ what if you ain’t learned everything there is to learn yet?” he asked.

“Then you don’t meet the Buddha, I guess.”

“Hmm.” Daar gave that some thought, then finally shook out his fur a little. “…Which way did they go, anyway? I came here ‘ta talk with Yan, an I’m gonna do just that.”

“Can’t you smell him?”

“Rain, an’ the whole camp smells like his armpit. Gotta get a little upwind of it first.”

“Okay. They went southeast. I can guide you via the drone…” she indicated the headset. “I mean, I’ll tell Julian you’re coming anyway, so…”

“Thanks, sister…” he gave her a warm look. “…How’s ‘yer cub? Uh, baby?”

“He started moving last week,” Xiù smiled, and gently tickled the bump with her fingernails. “So far so good.”

“That’s good.” Daar said, earnestly and wholeheartedly. “…I’d better go catch up with ‘em.”

“Southeast. Just call if you need directions, but I doubt you’ll have trouble sniffing them out.”

He chittered, and lumbered off between the trees.

Xiù took a deep breath and the Singer caught her eye. The Ten’gewek shaman managed to say quite a lot with just that glance, reflecting Daar’s anxieties with little more than a lift of her brow and a twitch of her tail, then shrugged and went back to her duties.

Xiù retrieved her radio.

“Um… Julian? You’ll never guess who just showed up…” she began.

Date Point: 16y2m4d AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

Even Corti needed to sleep sometimes. The Directorate had done their best to engineer the need out of their species, but all they’d succeeded in doing was to make Corti sleep very… efficient.

In other words, tiredness came on quickly and hard every fifty hours or so, and the actual slumber itself was impenetrably deep for the few hours it lasted.

On the other hand, Deathworlders spent significant portions of their life asleep. Gaoians averaged a quarter of their day, Humans a third, and the Ten’Gewek were apparently quite fond of napping at every opportunity they got. That was probably a consequence of their high-performance bodies; much more self-maintenance was required.

Of course, they also seemed to transition from sleep to wakefulness with some inertia. A human in the morning, before their exercise, carbohydrates, caffeine and some fresh air could be barely recognisable as the poised, agile, intelligent creatures they really were.

For Nofl, waking up was simply a case of blinking, opening his eyes, frowning at the ceiling above his cot for a second, and then standing up.

He brewed himself a cup of his carefully decaffeinated brew on the principle that drinking coffee upon waking was just the done thing if one lived among Humans, snacked on a few dried porchini, and hopped up into his desk chair to review his messages and the results of his overnight automated experiments.

Interesting. It seemed the Great Father had gone offworld to Akyawentuo unexpectedly. His staff had politely and with some apology explained that he most likely would not return for a day or two.

That at least postponed the moment of decision over what to do with Leemu, which Nofl was perfectly happy about. It bought him some time to finish a proof of concept.

The problem, if it could be called that, came down to a basic difference between Gaoian and Human biology. Gao were deathworlders by classification, but biologically speaking the human body was a very different thing indeed. There was a certain inherent… instability to it. Humans teetered constantly on a narrow pinnacle, and could experience quite dramatic shifts in their mood, health and physical abilities in response to any number of factors and stimuli.

For instance: they frequently complained of “off days” that could adequately be explained by an interrupted breakfast, or insufficient hydration, or going to bed too late the night before. Their strength, endurance, cognitive abilities and so much more could be stretched, boosted, degraded our outright ruined in the right circumstances. The average hungry Gaoian was often just… hungry, until starvation began to set in. An average hungry Human might be irritable, unfocused, lethargic and weakened.

The fine-tuned analogy stood the test of time, it seemed. And one of its pertinent manifestations with regard to the Leemu problem was in the matter of cancer.

Cancer was universal, of course. Indeed, whole strains of promising Corti stock had once been lost to the ravages of uncontrolled tumor growth, before the Directorate had learned how to anticipate and correct such problems. Humans didn’t suffer from tumors any more or less than any other species.

Except… well… they did.

In fact, one of the most interesting insights to come out of all those years of abducting Humans and sticking them under the finest scanners the Corti had had been that the average Human body manifested a number of pre-cancerous cells every day… which their maniacally efficient immune system then brutally exterminated.

The Gao were different from the other two Deathworld sophonts in one very important respect. There were a number of oddities to their genome that had puzzled Corti and Gaoian researcher alike for quite some time…until the revelation about their origins. The Gao’s ancient heritage was as an engineered species, and that had consequences. Chief among them was a remarkable robustness against genetic drift that they’d only broken free of in the last couple of millennia, and then only in a select few of their lines.

Their…dependable cellular biology was a shame for poor Leemu however, because it meant that his immune system simply wasn’t programmed to attack his own tissues. It hadn’t evolved to deal with cancer, because protections against drift had been designed into them. And even if it had been capable of such self-harm, well… comparing the Gaoian immune system to the Human one was rather like comparing a candle to a house fire.

So while Humans had a degree of natural protection against Arutech, especially those with an existing autoimmune disorder like rheumatoid arthritis, and could successfully be treated using adjuvant therapy…

Well. Nofl was already making good inroads on delivering an Arutech cure to the Humans, albeit a crude one with a host of unpleasant side-effects. But delivering one to the Gao was going to involve a daring and dangerous sideways leap in xenobiology.

It would, firstly, involve disabling or possibly entirely dismantling their in-built protective mechanisms. A shame, really. They had the most robust genetic duplicating machinery of anyone, but that same nigh-incorruptibility was getting in the way.

Needs must, however. The alternative was an eternity in stasis, involuntary euthanasia, or being effectively cloned. None of those satisfied the objective of curing the patient.

So, Nofl had run a simulation while he slept, and was pleased to discover that it had finished by the time he finished reading and replying to his messages. The blizzard of numbers and hard data points it splattered all over his monitor would have been utterly incomprehensible to almost anyone else, but he ran a practiced eye over it and, upon seeing what he was looking for, smiled as widely as his face could manage.

It wouldn’t be safe, or easy, or possibly even effective. But it was possible, and that was a lot more hope than he’d had when he went to bed.

Still smiling, he composed a note and forwarded his findings to Tran.

That done, he sat back and sipped his coffee with a certain feeling of justified smugness.

“…What would the Directorate do without me?” he asked, of nobody in particular.

It was his best work yet.

Date Point: 16y2m4d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

Daar caught up with them about an hour after Xiù called ahead to let them know he was coming.

A lot had happened in that hour. Yan had laid out his bibtaws in a kind of scent lure, some distance out from the treeline, and then while they waited the men from nearby villages had joined them. They didn’t seem to entirely trust the buzzing drone, but Julian’s say-so was enough to convince them that this particular one wasn’t a “death-bird” but just some friendly applied sky-magic.

After that came the waiting, inevitable in any hunt. Waiting suited Julian just fine; he was a patient man, and spent the time getting comfortably snuggled up in their blind next to Yan. Like always, the big fella was radiating so much body heat, it easily kept the chill of the rain away.

Daar was calmly sniffing the air, and his big shaggy body was wedged in against Julian’s other side. Being quite literally caught between the leaders of their respective species was…weird, when Julian thought about it. Probably not Xiu levels of weird, but pretty dang close.

For the moment, they weren’t saying much. It was all hunt-talk.

“You hunt Brown Ones much?” Daar whispered, kinda impressive for the big fella like him.

“Sometimes. When we must,” Yan replied, evenly. “When they attack villages. Last time, I was a young man. Younger than Vemik!”

“…Musta been a hard fight.”

“Many went to the Gods that day. My half-father and my older brother, and others.”

Julian watched patches of damp sunlight and bands of rainy showers drifting across the open plains and shivered to imagine it. When Yan had been young, the Ten’gewek hadn’t even had bows and arrows. Taking on a Brown One with nothing more than spears and courage…

On the ground, too. Among the trees would have been one thing, but out on the open plains? Every one of a Ten’gewek’s natural advantages would have been mitigated.

Even so, he’d seen Given-Men drive their spears clean through a Werne bull.

“You won, though?” he checked.

“It died of its wounds a hand of days later.”

Jesus.

“…I guess I can see why you’d want an easier time of it.”

Yan nodded solemnly. “So few of us now. High-rarchy saw to that. Every man we lose is less meat for his tribe, is starving women and sick children.”

“So why hunt it at all? Even with that cannon Hoeff brought, hunts can go wrong.”

Yan sighed and twitched his tail. It batted Julian lightly in the head, but Julian decided not to complain. Clearly the big guy had a lot on his mind.

“Brown Ones must not hunt the People. If they Take, and learn they can take easy, then we can not ever leave forest.”

“…You know how this is gonna go, right?” Daar rumbled. “It’s gonna show up, Hoeff’s gonna shoot it, and it’s gonna die.”

Yan nodded. His eyes never stopped scanning the horizon, even though Xiù would have told them if their quarry was getting close. “Yes.”

“Seems kinda…”

“Anticlimactic?” Julian suggested.

“That too.”

Yan sighed heavily again. “Seems many things. Seems like an easy Taking, too easy. Seems like cheating. Seems disrespectful. But what to do? Throw good men into its jaws? Will lose many. Might lose Vemik. A lot of future in him.”

He finally looked away from the plains. “…No good answers, I think. Curse of sky-magic. Once you know a thing can be done, always there are good reasons to do it. Yes? And all the reasons not to do it… they seem small and weak. Good men will die today if we fight it the old way.”

“…Or we cheat, and they go home to their women,” Julian finished the thought for him.

“Yes.”

“But here’s the thing,” Daar rumbled. “Firstly, an’ I don’t mean any disrespect Yan Given-Man…”

“Speak, Daar Stone-Back.”

“Do ‘ya need ‘ta hunt this critter? I mean—wait, I smell it now.”

Yan’s tongue lashed the air. “…Sure?”

“Never argue with Daar’s nose,” Julian advised him. “…Actually.” He sniffed the breeze too as it picked up a bit more and cooled his cheeks. “It’s faint, but…musky?”

“Smells like the biggest, most brutalest ‘back ever,” Daar agreed, then chittered. “Maybe Yan’s armpit, too…”

Yan grumbled in amusement, and whistled a high impersonation of an Akyawentan birdoid. Around them, from their perches among the trees, the men of the tribes nodded, twitched their tails and toyed nervously with their spears and bows. Julian saw Vemik take a deep breath and test the point of one of his special steel arrowheads. To judge by the way he stuck his thumb in his mouth afterwards, it was plenty sharp.

“There’s somethin’ ‘ya might think about real hard ‘fore we do this, Yan. I don’t pretend like I’m a man o’ ‘yer people, but ‘ya watched Gyotin put that crown on my head on the TV, right?”

“Yes.”

“That means a lotta things. One of ‘em is that I’m the protector of all my kind, and of my friends, too. So that means I swore before the Unseen Spirits of my people that I’d not flinch from that…and that means I gotta tell you how I see this. An’ it ain’t gonna be nice.”

“Nothing about this is nice, my friend. Speak.”

“If you do this thing, you won’t have done it by ‘yer own strength an’ will. You’ll have said, ‘ta all the men of ‘yer people, that you didn’t think they were strong enough ‘ta do this thing. It’ll make you look weak. An’ because o’ that, it’ll make you weak. It’ll Take ‘yer strength from ‘ya, Yan. Because all tough little Hoeff’s gotta do up in that tall-ass Ketta is twitch his finger, an’ that Brown One won’t be nothin’ but a big wet mess.”

“Is my strength to Give,” Yan retorted, but he glanced nervously up at Hoeff then around at his men. “…An old man’s strength for a young man’s life? For many young man’s life?”

“No, Yan Given-Man. You can’t. You are no chieftain anymore. You are bigger. An’ you are irreplaceable right now. You know that word, right?”

“So are they,” Yan waved his hand at this men, and if he happened to be especially waving it at Vemik, Julian wasn’t about to comment.

Daar shook his neck-fur out and looked the Given-Man dead in the eye. “Yan…I say this as the single most murderous livin’ being among all the stars above. No they ain’t. ‘Yer people can survive losin’ a buncha them. Right now I don’t think they would survive losin’ you.”

“…So we are not Strong after all.”

“Yes ‘ya are Yan, but ‘yer very, very strong children who must grow much, much bigger an’ wiser. An’ I say that with more respect than I’ve ever given anyone like you.”

Yan cast a despairing glance at the horizon. “…Not weak, you’re saying. Just… not ready?”

‘Not yet, and ‘specially not now. You must grow ‘yer people. An’ I won’t pretend ‘ta know how Brown Ones think, or what they do or anythin’ like that…but I can’t see how cripplin’ ‘yer standin’ at the lodge, or sendin’ a buncha strong, brave men to their doom is gonna help ‘ya grow.”

A new voice joined the conversation, and Julian looked up to see the drone perched in a branch above them. Xiù. “Remember on the ship, Yan? When we showed you the comet?”

“…I remember.”

Yan sat in silence for a long few minutes. Then, he muttered a curse under his breath - “Godshit” - and raised his bow high into the air above his head. Heads turned in his direction, he paused, and then whistled a low, descending note three times

At first, the hunting party just gave him a confused look. Then, in ones and twos, they shrugged, put their weapons away, and withdrew from the forest edge, swinging away and down. Vemik gave Yan the most curious look as he brachiated past, and was gone.

“…I will have to explain this,” Yan grumbled.

“An’ it’s gonna cause ‘ya some pain, too.” Daar nodded along. “But it’ll be livin’ men tha’ll give ‘ya grief, not their spirits an’ sad children.”

“If it attacks again, we will have to hunt it.”

“Well… here’s prayin’, then.”

Julian’s radio crackled with the sound of Hoeff’s voice. “…Yo, uh… What’s goin’ on down there? We doin’ this or not?”

“Negative,” Julian informed him.

“…You’re kidding! I’ve got a shot lined up and everything!”

“Hoeff… Let’s not hash this out right this second. Just stand down.”

He heard Hoeff mutter something about blue balls to himself, but the rifle was raised and Julian heard the sound of that big chunky magazine being ejected.

“It’s here,” Xiù said. She somehow contrived to point using nothing more than a brief flicker of the drone’s wings.

Sure enough, the Brown One had just shambled over a rise in the landscape. Its tongue lashed out into the open air and tasted the breeze, and then picked its way down toward the pile of nice stinky bibtaws.

“…Y’know, if Gaoians had ever had a dragon,” Daar mused, “I reckon it’d’ve looked a lot like that.”

“Dragon?” Yan asked, keeping a careful eye on it. “Means what?”

“How about we go home, and we’ll tell you all about dragons,” Julian promised.

“…Yes.”

The Brown One raised its head and tasted the air suspiciously, made a kind of warning growl, then lowered its head and, to Julian’s faint surprise scooped the bundle of bibtaws delicately into its mouth before turning and setting off back up the hill. Xiù lifted her drone off the branch and flew high up into the air to follow it.

“…One of these days, I’m going to want to tranquilize one of those things and study it up close,” Julian admitted. “Why bibtaw, anyway? Couldn’t be much more than a snack for something that big.”

“Nesting season. Bibtaw is good food for young Brown Ones,” Yan explained. “Also, strong taste. Good for drawing him from a long way.”

He wasn’t wrong there. Bibtaw stank like the bastard child of a skunk and a muskrat.

“…Let’s get outta this tree,” Daar said.

Their return to ground level took a few minutes, and Daar shook himself gratefully once all four of his paws were firmly back in contact with the leaf litter. He wasn’t an inept climber, exactly, but he’d never be a graceful arboreal creature, either. Gaoians just weren’t designed to be at home in the branches.

“…You said you had something you wanted to ask me about?” Yan asked as they turned away from the plains and left the departing Brown One behind.

“Yeah.” Daar glanced back over his shoulder, sniffed the wind, then shook his coat and plodded ahead through the brush. “Think I’ve made up my mind, though.”

“You have?” Julian asked.

“…Yeah.”

He spent the walk back telling them about Leemu.

++END CHAPTER 53++

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 54, “Here Be Dragons.”

Chapter 54: Here Be Dragons

Date Point: 16y2m5d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Xiù Chang

Yan was having to explain himself.

It wasn’t that the men who’d come out to hunt the Brown One were disappointed, exactly. None of them had been looking forward to the battle at all. They all knew the stories of how many men died taking down the last one the People had collectively fought.

But they’d come out to fight it anyway, because it needed hunting. Their quarry had clawed its way into the forest and attacked a village, which simply couldn’t stand. Yan’s decision to back down and retreat, therefore, had caused some confusion and raised some questions… which Yan was now answering.

His answer was ably helped by Hoeff, who had been more than glad to demonstrate what .50 BMG did to an unsuspecting neyma on the way home. They’d wound up carrying the hapless animal back in halves, grumbling about all the wasted meat that the bullet had pulped too thoroughly to be of use. It looked horrific, but Xiù didn’t feel sorry for the creature: it had been dead before it even finished dropping to the ground. Compared to all the other ways a neyma could be slain in a hunt, Hoeff’s demonstration had been humane.

The sight of an animal basically torn in two by a weapon that the smallest man present handled with ease had done a lot to provoke discussion among the Given-Men and Singers. And the Singers, according to Ten’Gewek tradition, were men too in a robust all-but-cock way. So some of those squabbles had gotten physical… and the Given-Men hadn’t always won.

The thrust of the disagreement was this: the women wanted their sons, brothers and lovers to come home safely. The men didn’t want to weaken themselves before the Gods by relying on cheap sky-magic tricks. Vemik had, in an adorably dorkish way, tried to point out that there was nothing cheap about the rifle and that a lot of hard work by a lot of people had gone into making it…

…But there was a certain entrenched mindset among some of the People that Sky-magic was the Easy Way. It could make rocks and steel fly, it could light the darkness with a click of a switch or burst a neyma with the twitch of a finger. For some of them, it was hard to see past the effect to all of the hard work that had gone into making that effect look so easy.

Vemik had eventually given up and gone to sit with Julian, who was whittling a small toy out of Forestfather bark and listening at the edge of the conversation while diplomatically not taking part. After a while, he’d got out his sketchbook and extra-large chunky pencil, and taken to sketching.

The discussion went on until sometime after sunset, when the sky was shading to purple and dark blue. It was fairly peaceful but very serious with hardly any grab-ass and aggressive flirting at all, which made it practically Parliamentary by Ten’Gewek standards.

Xiù wasn’t invited. She attended anyway, watching from high above via the drone and listening through its highly directional microphone. It had instantly become her favorite toy, and she’d resolved that the second she was forced to give it back, she’d buy one of her own when they got back to Folctha.

Dan Hurt sat next to her, watching and listening via a tablet.

“…You really have to admire their stubbornness, don’t you?” he asked after the third time the conversation looped back around to the problem of needing to kill that Brown One.

“Mm-hm.” Xiù nodded sadly. If that Brown One attacked again, there’d be grieving families who might justifiably wonder why they hadn’t used the Sky-magic. She had to admire how seriously the Ten’Gewek took their independence, but that was going to be hard if people got killed.

She glanced over to the other end of the research camp. Hoeff and Claire were working things out over there, sitting side-by-side in camp chairs by the fire and making s’mores. It seemed to be going well, or at least Hoeff seemed to be much more relaxed than usual… and to judge by the way Claire touched his arm and smiled and laughed at one of his jokes, she thought it was going well too.

Still. Xiù would never eavesdrop on a conversation like that. She watched just long enough to see them clank their coffee cups together in some kind of toast to each other, smiled to herself, and returned her attention to the tribal meet.

It was breaking up.

“…Tribal life,” Dan sighed. “They need to learn how to start taking minutes of these things. I guarantee half of them won’t even remember what was discussed or what they agreed on next time.”

Xiù picked up her cup of coffee. She’d been keeping it hot in its steel mug next to the fire, and it steamed delightfully as she sipped it. “Mm. Yes. The true mark of civilization: minutes.”

Dan snorted. “Since when were you so sarcastic?”

“Well, Allison’s not here. Somebody has to fill in for her.” She sipped her coffee again. “And anyway, they don’t need to. These meetings aren’t about logic. They’re about social grooming and trust, mostly.”

Dan nodded. “Oh, I know. Yan’s managed to avoid losing face today at least. They’ll remember that part… and I really have to give Julian credit for staying the hell out of it.”

“He is smarter than he looks, you know. Lack of doctorates aside.”

“Yes. Funny how you three are the same, that way.”

Xiu couldn’t help but tease him a bit. “What, are you saying I look dull?”

Dan, sadly, was old and wily enough not to fall for such obvious bait, and the lines around his eyes just made the mischievous look in them twinkle twice as hard. “I know full well your original choice of career would have been Hollywood. Tinseltown isn’t exactly known for its, uh… high-falutin’ intelligentsia.” He toasted her with his coffee. “Why didn’t you ever go into academia, anyway?”

“Abducted by aliens.”

“I mean after that.”

Xiù shrugged. “I’ve learned what I need in life from the people I love. And this may sound strange, given things, but I’m not sure I’m young enough for that kind of drama anymore.”

“You’re only thirty years old!” Dan objected. “You are officially still a young woman, and I will not hear you say otherwise. And you’re one of the de facto leading authorities on what I’m going to oxymoronically call xenoanthropology. First contact with two alien civilizations, remember.”

“Yes, and I’m sure the debates over the social constructions of…whatever…would be absolutely gripping.” Xiù shrugged. “I was mostly just trying to stop a crazy Corti from vivisecting a cub, and stop Yan from shoving a spear through my boyfriend.”

“Successfully, on both counts. But fine. I can see the school of Hard Knocks has claimed your soul… which is probably why Julian’s been so reluctant to do correspondence classes, I’m guessing?”

“Maybe? Mostly I think it’s a lack of time. We’re all busy but he’s probably the busiest of us three…” She finished her coffee and put the mug down. “You see that? Vemik’s got an idea, I can tell.”

“How can you?”

“His tail twitches in a certain…excited way. Also, he’s trying to show Julian.”

Dan leaned forward to get a closer look at the tablet, and Xiù helpfully zoomed in for him.

“Uh oh, he’s got his sketchbook… and the nice graphites.”

Xiù aimed the microphone at them as well, in time to catch Julian gently rebuffing Vemik’s enthusiastic attempt at show-and-tell. He was speaking quietly, so what the mic picked up at the extremes of its gain was scratchy and distorted, but audible.

[“—be a good idea, but it ain’t a good idea for me to be involved, man.”]

[“Why, though?”] Nobody did puppy-dog crestfallen quite like Vemik.

[“Dude, we just had this whole long talk about sky-magic and stuff, and how you can’t have us fighting your fights for you. That’s a big Taking, Vemik. So I can’t get involved in this! I so much as pick up a hammer to help you, they’ll taste sky-magic on the air and the whole idea gets tainted. You’re gonna need to do this all yourself.”]

[“But will it work?!”]

[“You’re gonna hafta figure that out yourself. I’m sorry.”]

[“But—!”]

Julian’s patience ran out. “Vemik! Dude! Prime Directive, okay?”

“…Okay…”

She watched them part ways for the night with a conciliatory fraternal hug, and Vemik returned to his forge, clearly too energized and inspired to do something so mundane as sleep.

Julian returned through the village where Daar had been entertaining the children with his favorite Keeda stories, and giving them “angry Werne” rides until he was almost exhausted. Xiù decided her career as an airborne spy was now on hold for the night, and brought the drone back.

By the time Julian and Daar emerged from the twilight gloom, she’d packed it back in its case and plugged it in to recharge.

“How’d it go?” she asked as they returned.

“Eh. Yan hasn’t lost face. Might even gain face if he plays his cards right…” Julian sat down and helped himself to some of the campfire coffee.

“What was Vemik’s big idea?”

He shot her a curious frown. “How–?”

“Spied on you through the drone. Sorry!” Xiù gave him a half-apologetic cheeky smile and a mini-shrug. “Though to be fair? Vemik always has a big idea.”

Daar chittered at that one. “Yeah, he does.”

Julian looked conflicted as he sat down on their fireside log. “That… was supposed to be a private meeting, Baobei…” he objected.

“Did they swear you to secrecy?”

“Not really…”

“Well then.” Xiù sat next to him, snuggled into him, and kissed his cheek. “They weren’t really taking it that seriously, were they?”

He put his arm around her and conceded the point with a chuckle. “Guess not.”

“So what is it?” Dan asked

“What?”

“What’s Vemik’s big idea?”

“Oh. Uh…” Xiù always loved the way she could see Julian rewind his memory. “…Well, he figgered that if they put in all the work of making a really big gun, it ain’t sky-magic. But he knows they don’t have the tools to make something like a Barrett, so…”

“So?” Xiù prompted.

“So he’s inventing the ballista.”

Date Point: 16y2m5d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

The tricky part had been getting downwind of Jooyun and Daar quickly enough to listen in on them but without making too much noise. People with noses were hard to sneak up on! And Vemik was aware that he apparently smelled pretty strong, and Daar’s nose was even stronger.

Still, he’d managed it. Now, he lurked low in a Ketta near the research camp, sticking to the thick limbs that wouldn’t creak or rustle too much even if Yan had been hanging from them alongside him.

It was a still night, and the Humans and Daar weren’t bothering to speak quietly. He cupped a hand to his ear and listened.

“—Weren’t really taking it that seriously, were they?”

“Heh. Guess not.”

“So what is it?”

“What?”

“What’s Vemik’s big idea?”

Vemik leaned forward to listen so hard his ears started to ache. This was the moment he’d stalked them for. He leaned forward so far in fact that he almost lost his balance and toppled off the branch. He missed a little of what they said as he grabbed onto the tree with his tail and leaned out as far as he could stretch.

“—knows they don’t have the tools to make something like a Barrett, so…”

“So?”

“So he’s inventing the ballista.”

There. Vemik almost hooted his satisfaction, but held it in. They had a word for it!

The rest of their talk wasn’t important. He didn’t need to know if Jooyun thought his design was good or not, that was all… Yan and Jooyun were right, this needed to be a ‘home grown’ tool. But just knowing that the Humans had a word for his idea proved he was on the right track.

He’d been pretty confident they would. It was a fairly simple idea after all, just a big, heavy, steel bow. Okay, it was bigger and stronger than even a Given-Man could pull back, but Vemik had learned a lot since he’d first come up with the idea of the bow, and first learned how to make steel. And over the seasons, it had paid to keep it a little secret just how much he’d learned from the Humans, about things like levers and gears and ratchets and springs, and all the other ‘simple tools’ that made sky-magic happen.

They weren’t as careful as they thought they were. They let him do things like watch when they cleaned their rifles, which was where he’d learned about springs. And sometimes, when he played up being a bouncy man-child, they smiled that odd smile of theirs and forgot that he was a respected man of the tribes. A hunter, a father, and a Maker of Things.

He might have felt a little bad about doing that, but it wasn’t really a lie. He really was excited! It was just, maybe…if he let it show, that might help his tribe. Get them vack-seens.

Among Humans, books with pictures were for children. Harmless! But they also said a picture was worth a thousand words, and Vemik had learned a lot from his innocent picture books, and from just… watching. To Humans, the simple machines were everywhere. So everywhere that they forgot to notice them. They’d even taken him around their homeland in a machine that ran on four wheels, and completely forgotten that the People didn’t have wheels at all!

The things a man could do with wheels! And with saws, and nails, and iron bolts, and laminated steel strips…

He retreated into the bush and took the long way back to his hut with his mind spinning with ideas. One thing he’d learned was to never just rush into the forge when his head was so full. He’d take a lazy night, lie with the Singer, and let his dreams do the work of sorting the best ideas to the top of the pile. After all, his weapon wasn’t going to just come to life on the first day. He’d need…. Hands of hands of days, probably. Maybe a whole season! Best to start on a full belly, a good night’s sleep and the love of his favorite woman.

“Bawistuh.” He tasted the word carefully, once he was sure he was too far away even for Jooyun’s sharp ears. He said it again, then trilled merrily.

Yes. This way was better. This way, when the Brown One fell, it would be to the People’s own strength.

He’d make it happen.

Date Point: 16y2m1w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space

Darcy

The Entity wasn’t happy, and Darcy couldn’t entirely blame it.

“Well, look, you have access to human memories. Think how it looks from our perspective.”

She sipped her tea as she read the resulting barrage of emoji.

“…It’s not a betrayal, it’s caution.”

More emojis, the condensed equivalent of a sullen accusation.

“I trust you… No, I mean it. I do. But I can’t just authorize the— That’s different. No, it is different, they only let it out into the wild because it’s full of failsafes and limiters and controls!”

She and the Entity had developed a kind of modern pictographic language between them. She could read it fluently. Anyone else would have just seen a confusing blizzard of little images, but she read condensed thoughts. It wasn’t an elegant system and abstract concepts like trust had required a lot of work and lateral thinking before the Entity finally managed to convey it. Possibly it was a language unlike any other, and she had to concentrate until her brain ached to understand it… but at least they were communicating,

“We promised we’d think about it and we did. Are. It’s a big deal! Von-Neumann probes are a big d— I know you would. The question is, would you give that kind of power to any single human?”

Even though the Entity thought at computer processing speeds, its reply didn’t arrive for a few seconds. When it did, the stream of little images was almost… timid.

“Right,” Darcy agreed. “…You’re close enough to human. And like I said, I trust you but the question is can anyone be trusted with the keys to an unshackled V-N probe? Would you… would you trust Ava with it?”

She smiled grimly at the lonely, reluctant red X that popped up on her monitor. “…Right. Because Ava wouldn’t have trusted herself with it either.” She sipped her tea again. “…Well, yeah. She did hate herself. I’m pleased to report that she seems to be in a much better place nowadays.”

She smiled. Obviously the Entity cared about the real, flesh-and-blood Ava Ríos. “Steady boyfriend, good job, successful career… Yes, a boyfriend. His name’s Derek. Derek Coombes.”

She laughed at the trio of <skeptical face; cow; poop emoji>. There was a message anyone could decipher. “No, I’m not bullshitting you. That Derek Coombes, yes. Heh. Yes, he is pretty hot… Maybe. I’m not her friend, remember. No, I can’t be. Duties and obligations, that’s why. But… right. Look, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s taking a long time because it’s a big ask. And you have to be prepared that we might say no.”

She sighed at the disgruntled sentiment it aimed at her. “I know you have, and you have the gratitude and friendship of everyone here, and across AEC. But we don’t just trust our allies with nukes, and a V-N Probe is on that kind of scale if not bigger. Well of course it is! Absolutely it is! …Yes, and the Hunters have it. That’s a big problem…”

She shut up and watched for more than a minute as the icons ticked past. She had a headache coming on, but powered through it.

The Entity’s argument was, she had to admit, a solid one: the Hunters were building V-N Probes of their own. Worse, they were probably out in front by now, having both the technological and resource advantage and none of the caution. And, exponential growth being what it was, every day they were allowed to extend their lead was potentially a fatal strategic mistake.

And the only way to match it was with exponential growth of their own. The problem was, the control software developed by Mrwrki just wasn’t smart enough and never would be. They needed an alternative, some way to give the probes a sapient pilot. And the Entity, a trusted ally, was volunteering for the duty.

But if the Entity ever went rogue…

“I’ll… remind my superiors of that, yes,” she promised. “…You’re welcome. I’m sorry it’s not more.”

Its next question made her glance in the general direction of the jump array. Proximal had been transferred into a large, extremely expensive and very reliable memory drive, where he/it remained in a dormant state. According to the Entity, an Igraen in hibernation like that could go effectively indefinitely without Substrate. Certainly longer than the expected lifespan of the device he was on.

According to the engineers who’d taken a glance at what a dormant Igraen “looked” like, the data currently occupying that drive was unreadable nonsense. Translating it into something that a human computer could do something sensible with simply wasn’t on the cards.

Which mean that the only ways available to interrogate Proximal were to either release him/it back into Dataspace, or else imprison him/it within a biodrone’s implants. Neither option was satisfactory, so in the end the device had been shipped off to be stored safely and carefully in the vault at Scotch Creek.

“I wish we could,” she said aloud. “But I don’t know what Proximal could tell us about the current state of the Hierarchy and the Hegemony that we didn’t already get from Six, from the biodrone captured on Gao, and from your own intel— …You’re going to what?”

She put her tea down and watched closely. The Entity’s private pictographic language marched past for some time, and she was definitely feeling the beginnings of a migraine coming on as she struggled to keep up. It really did not communicate easily, and the worst part was that even it couldn’t really explain why that was the case. It was just a baked-in disability that it could only overcome by a ghoulish act of digital necromancy that everyone involved found distasteful. This way was better, even if it did make her brain ache.

She didn’t like what she was reading one bit.

“…Didn’t you say that infiltrating the Hunter networks is getting more and more difficult? Well, I mean, yes, we do need the intel, but…”

More emojis. It was clear the Entity had made up its mind. And it was breathtakingly stubborn when it set itself to something. Darcy sighed, and gave up.

”…I know. I can’t stop you, just… don’t get yourself killed, okay? Be careful.”

It took her a few moments to decipher the Entity’s parting statement: <Clock; infinity symbol> By the time she had, it had signed off and departed. She smiled to herself and sipped her tea again.

“Always.”

Date Point: 16y2m1w AV
HMS Caledonia, Border checkpoint, Spacelane near the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Petty Officer Sachi Patel

Cally wasn’t the same ship any more. She was a lot better.

For Sachi Patel, that was a slightly painful admission. She’d been proud of her work on the ship before the Battle of Gao, they all had. They’d run a tight, competent ship and fought back hard against her demons every day. They’d taken an alien ship crammed full of human technology and fought to keep the two from seething hatefully at each other every day for years. Aside from one major fire, she’d behaved herself through all that time, too.

And then she’d been sunk. Any other ship would probably have been written off as a loss, but not Cally. Her keel had remained unbroken, her body was still full of useful Hierarchy technology. She’d been gathered up, jumped back to Ceres and put lovingly back together.

The repairs showed just how much humanity had learned over the years. The new Cally was a purring kitten compared to her previous self, as though suffering a nearly mortal wound had mellowed her out and made her finally realise that the humans on her decks were friends, not enemies.

Sachi suppressed a little smile at the thought. Only a handful of the ship’s former crew had come back. Many had retired, too rattled by their brush with death to return. Others had moved on to other postings in the expanding fleet, or training positions. The ones who’d returned were the ones who, like her, got a little bit poetic about HMS Caledonia. thought of her as being a little bit more alive than other warships.

Alive, and a tempestuous bitch. Myrmidon had never given her crew half as much trouble.

Coming back to find Cally’s systems humming along smoothly and without complaint was a little saddening for Patel. The poor girl had had some of the fight beaten out of her.

Still, it gave her time to actually enjoy the trip and pay attention to where they were and what they were doing.

They were en route to rendezvous with the diplomatic starship Rich Plains somewhere inside Kwmbwrw territory. Cally’s shakedown had gone well, but the crew was still pretty green, training exercises were an almost daily occurrence and education was the biggest part of their timetable. It made sense to take on a straightforward responsibility like escort duty while they got their feet under them.

Besides, she was kinda looking forward to seeing the Rich Plains.

It was certainly a topic of conversation among her reactor shift. Scott, Phillips, Taylor and Dye had come as a matched set, eager to work with a veteran of the Battle of Gao, and definitely not because of their shift leader’s brief experiment with nude modelling.

Actually, they were pretty good about that. Some light-hearted cheeky teasing, mostly understanding and sympathy. Right now though they were off-shift, poring over an infographic they’d found about the ship they’d soon be escorting.

“Bit dull-looking, isn’t it?” Taylor mused as they passed the tablet around. “It looks like a beer keg.”

“An eight-hundred-meter beer keg,” Dye agreed.

“How does something that big accelerate without crushing itself?”

“She doesn’t,” Sachi told him. “No engines, see? She microwarps if she needs to maneuver at sublight.”

“Meaning if you stick her in a gravity spike, she’s completely immobile.”

“Well, she’s a diplomatic vessel not a warship,” Sachi shrugged. “I guess she’s more like a space station than a ship.”

“She’s a sitting duck,” Phillips grumbled.

“Hospital ships and diplomatic ships always are,” Scott reminded him. He was the most seasoned sailor among the new guys, with a few years of service aboard HMS Agamemnon under his belt before he’d transferred to the Royal Navy Space Service.

“What if the Hunters attack, though?”

“That’s what we’re for.”

“Us as in the whole fleet, Pat? Or us personally?”

Patel shrugged. To the new crew she went by ‘Pat,’ and it worked nicely for them. Even the new reactor chief, CPO Dennis Williams, had taken to using it. She quite liked it, actually, and it wasn’t a jarring reminder of the men whose shoes they were filling. They were their own new team, with their own new way of doing things. It made for a clean break.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Taylor demanded, and pantomimed an exaggerated goofy parody of her shrug.

“It means what a shrug always means you twit!” she laughed, and gave him an affectionate backhand to the chest. “I don’t know the Dominion any better than you do!”

“Yeah, but everyone knows they’re kinda shit.”

Patel pulled a face. She’d made a few nonhuman friends on Cimbrean, taken a trip to the Alien Quarter, seen how ETs lived and found that when it came down to it they were just funny-shaped people with funny-shaped customs. People, in her experience, were people and she didn’t like hearing prejudice. But at the same time, the Dominion’s military reputation was… unimpressive.

“This is meant to be a posting that’s only issued on merit,” she said out loud.

“Brown-nosing the admiral until you can taste his breakfast is a merit,” Phillips pointed out, around the crunching of a peanut. “C’mon Pat, admit it. We don’t know if even one of the ships out there is solid.”

“So?”

“So… uh…”

Patel gave him a stern look. “Maybe you should save the bitching about them for when you’ve actually got a point?” she suggested.

“…Right.”

“I’d feel better if there were some Gaoians in the formation…” Dye muttered.

“Yeah, well, the Kwmbwrw asked them to stay out except in emergencies,” Taylor explained.

“Not us?”

“Something about covert Gaoian operations along their border with Hunter space.”

“You mean all those raids they’ve been intercepting?” Phillips snorted. “What is it with the Kwmbwrw? You’d think they’d love the Gaoians for that!”

“It’s a cultural thing,” Patel explained. “They believe charity is an insult.”

“They also believe eating meat is inherently evil. Since the Gao are both very charitable and very carnivorous…”

“God, they sound like a mopey vegan teenager.”

“There are a few billion of them. I’m sure most are just happy to not get slaughtered by Hunters, but the Grandmatriarchs are…”

“Hidebound?” Patel suggested.

“…Something like that.”

The conversation tailed off awkwardly. Patel sighed, stretched and achieved a satisfying quadruple-pop in both shoulders and her spine. “…Movie?” she suggested.

They wound up watching a TV series instead. The guys dropped into it and spent two episodes just relaxing, swapping jokes, enjoying the show… Patel found herself unable to focus on it. Something about the conversation had reawoken her anxieties about continuing to serve on Cally. She was one of only a handful who’d come back and there were times when she wondered if she should have.

She’d had some long talks with a therapist over her gnawing sense of guilt at surviving the Battle of Gao, and the Laid Bare shoot had been truly cathartic… but sometimes, in quiet moments like this, the anxiety came back a little. It was a struggle.

But of course… That was why she was there. To face that struggle and win.

Come what may.

Date Point: 16y2m1w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

“A Brown One.”

Welcoming Julian and Xiù home had been the highlight of Allison’s day, even if they had both smelled strongly of the jungle. The research station over there did have shower facilities but something about Akyawentuo just soaked into the skin after a while.

Xiù’s solution was a long soak in the tub with a bath bomb and some kind of berry-scented foaming potion for her hair. She was wrapped up in the fluffiest white bathrobe they had now and nursing a hot chocolate drink while Allison brushed her hair and Julian told the boys all about their hunt.

It was good to have them home. Their absence had been a trial, even though it only lasted a few days… but still, Al wasn’t exactly happy to learn just what they’d been up to while they were gone. She’d seen Brown Ones herself. If somebody had mashed together the most fearsome features of a T-rex and a hyena, they’d have been about halfway there.

At least it hadn’t been their idea.

“It’s just a critter,” Julian pointed out. He was lounging on the couch in his gymwear as usual, which wasn’t something she was gonna complain about. Both the boys were snuggled up on either side of him, idly listening and playing Pokémon. Apparently the latest in the series supported two-player wireless co-op. “Doesn’t matter how big and nasty it is, you know what a Barrett woulda done to it.”

“Well, yeah…” Allison conceded. “…I always wanted to shoot one of those things.”

“Really? I never thought of you as a trophy-hunting kinda gal.”

“I mean the gun.”

“Oh. Well, I got to shoot it at a stump just the once. Doesn’t kick quite as hard as I thought it would.”

Allison gave him a Look. “Thanks, Julian. I’ll treasure your description.”

Xiù giggled. “Jealous, Bǎobèi?”

“Little bit.”

Julian’s troll-grin got a little bit wider. “Well, I’m sure if you butter Hoeff up some, he’ll let you fondle his big gun…”

“Ugh, you are a double butt today!” Allison griped at him, drawing a giggle from the boys. No doubt they’d be using that one later.

“Ooh! Him and Claire are a thing, now,” Xiù said.

“About time! What finally gave?”

“Yan hung him up in a tree and told him to get over himself,” Julian explained.

“Preeeetty sure there was more to it than that…” Xiù beamed at him as Allison finished brushing her hair and set the brush aside.

“….Uh, well, maybe there was a moment of dude-bro-ness, but it ended with a hug. And I didn’t get punched in the stomach, either!”

Xiù and Al shared an amused look they’d often shared before. The one that said, in the universal language of women everywhere: “Boys.”

Julian cleared his throat and changed the subject. “So… Misfit’s back? I feel kinda bad I never met the new crew.”

“They’re great!” Al enthused. “The old girl’s just as healthy and happy as we left her. Thompson’s… not quite as soft on the controls as Xiù, but they’re taking great care of her. They found a heck of a planet too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Near as dammit a carbon copy of Earth, except the foliage is all shaded toward the red for some reason. Place looks like a perpetual autumn.”

“That sounds nice,” Xiù smiled. “Maybe we’ll get to visit someday.”

“Yeah… You know what struck me as weird?“”

“What?”

“We spent years living on that ship, and I’ve been up to my elbows building more like her ever since, and I was still shocked by how tiny she is inside. Like… my memory says we had plenty of room, but in reality…” She waved around their living room. “We spent that whole time living in a room half this size. Funny how memory plays tricks on you, you know?”

Julian shrugged. “Well I gotta admit, I don’t mind the extra space.”

“Me either. I love that ship, but I don’t think I could go back to living on her again…” Al gave her brothers a fond look. “Especially not now.”

“Yeah. We have other commitments now,” Xiù agreed.

“Like, say, a meeting with the ambassador next week.” Allison leaned over, retrieved an ink-and-paper letter from the coffee table, and handed it to Julian. “He wants to discuss what’s going on with the Ten’Gewek.”

“Oh, geez,” Julian groaned. “You’re gonna make me wear a suit, aren’t you?”

“His Excellency Ambassador Rockefeller is your boss and he specifically requested that you make yourself as presentable as you can. So we all have an appointment at Halberstadt’s tomorrow,” Allison said firmly.

“I hate suits.”

“C’mon, it’ll be fun!” Tristan chimed in. “You’re too scruffy!”

“Nothin’ wrong with scruffy…” Julian muttered. “Who are Halberstadt’s, anyway?”

“The best tailors on the planet?” Xiù said. “You’ve never heard of them?”

“Clothes.” Julian managed to squeeze a lot of disinterest into that lone syllable. He saw Al, Xiù and the boys all pull similar eye-rolling faces.

“Come on Julian, you keep telling us just because something doesn’t interest you doesn’t mean it isn’t important,” Ramsey reminded him.

Julian held up a hand. “I’m not arguing,” he said. “Whatever. I have an appointment. Maybe they’re miracle-workers, I dunno.”

All three Buehler siblings gave him the same lopsided, slightly snarky grin. The boys had definitely picked that one up from Allison.

“Julian. Babe. I didn’t fall for an ugly, slovenly man,” Al told him. “You clean up good. Let’s show you just how good that can be, okay?”

“…Yes ma’am.”

“Good boy.”

“I’ll cook.” Xiù stood up. “Who wants to help?”

The boys both scrambled off the couch and bowled toward the kitchen, their Pokémon instantly forgotten. Xiù giggled indulgently, spared a kiss each for Julian and Allison, then followed them.

Allison poured herself into Julian’s lap and cuddled up, and stayed there for the rest of a restful and enjoyable evening of good home cooking and a movie. When the three of them relaxed into bed together that night, she slept better for having them both back.

And she was definitely looking forward to seeing them both dressed up in the morning.

Date Point: 16y2m1w2d AV
Gaoian embassy, Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

There was shit to catch up with. Stuff to read, stuff to make decisions on, stuff to be briefed on in case he had to make a decision later…

At first Daar did his best to address it, but he quickly found he couldn’t focus. He still had the problem of Leemu on his mind. And the whole question of dragon slaying.

Death was a damn big dragon.

Eventually, he had to admit defeat and tackle the issue head-on. He was being briefed by Father Seen of Clan Goldpaw, an expert in livestock trading who was proposing they make a purchase of sheep from Earth. He’d given a whole bunch of reasons about… stuff. And that was the problem, Daar should have found it all interesting and listened closely, but right now…

“…My Father?”

Daar became aware that he’d drifted off. Again. He sighed, scratched his claws through his whiskers to straighten them out a little, and shook himself back to attention.

“…I’m sorry, Seen. I don’t ‘fer a blink think this ain’t important to know in excruciatin’ detail, but right now I gotta ask ‘ya for ‘yer direct recommendation. Do we make the purchase, or not?”

“…I think we should, My Father. Yes.”

“Okay. Good. Make it so. We’ll talk ‘bout levies an’ taxes at tonight’s session. Right now, though…I gotta go resolve somethin’ really fuckin’ awful, or I ain’t gonna be any kind o’ useful.”

“Champion Gyotin said you have something big on your mind…” Seen sympathized. He gathered his notes and documents and stood up. “A little more time to negotiate won’t hurt,” he said lightly.

Daar chittered appreciatively. “Thank you.”

“Of course, My Father.” Seen bowed slightly and let himself out.

Daar growled at himself once the Goldpaw was gone and stood up. He prowled the room in thought for a moment, then threw his head back and gave in to the inevitable.

Nothin’ much for it. Time to go sentence Leemu to die.

He threw open the door and marched out with as straight a posture as he could muster. “I’m goin’ ‘ta Nofl’s lab,” he announced. “I don’t wanna be disturbed unless it’s an emergency.”

His personal aide, Brother Tiyun, duck-nodded in understanding, and didn’t even show any weariness from all o’ Daar’s recent Kwek-dung. Hopefully the big package of Werne jerky he had planned would paper that over. Anyway.

Like usual, he chose to run to Nofl’s lab. Maybe just so he could get some wind blowin’ between his ears, maybe ‘cuz the cherry trees were blooming and it smelled like a riot o’ life….

Maybe ‘cuz he wanted to take the long way there.

He arrived, and scratched on the door. There was a distracted “Yes yes, come in!” from somewhere inside the lab, so Daar grumbled a bit, wedged himself through the door, and prowled over to Nofl’s workspace.

Nofl shot a glance over his shoulder and beamed at him, as merrily and as gaily as ever, which just seemed fuckin’ disrespectful of Leemu.

On th’other hand… Corti didn’t smell of much except fungi and science so it was hard ‘ta get a read on them sometimes, but Daar’s nose did more than sniff stuff. He’d always been a little superstitious about it, an’ right now it was tellin’ him that Nofl’s good cheer might be more’n just his usual camp act.

“This is kinda a solemn occasion, Nofl,” Daar said, kicking the door shut behind him with a rear paw.

“Great Father! No no no, it’s a happy day! I believe I have a solution!”

The tiny flickering ember of hope that Daar had managed to nurse even as far as the door glowed back into life.

“Nofl…you better not be shittin’ me, but I’ll tell you what: you solve this problem, and you ain’t never gonna worry ‘bout fundin’ ever again.”

“Oof! That’s a dangerous promise, dear.” Nofl hopped down off his stool and skipped across the lab to grab a tablet.

“I like to live dangerously,” Daar remarked drily. “Brief me.”

“Well, the cure is arguably even worse than the sickness, but… I’m going to give him Crohn’s disease. Or maybe lupus, I’m not sure yet!”

Daar blanked at that. “Uhh…. Ain’t that one’o them cripplin’ Human diseases? Where, uh, their own immune system goes bonkers?”

Nofl couldn’t have looked more pleased. “Ex-act-ly.”

He pranced up the steps to the big holo-emitter in the middle of the lab and waved his hands through its control interface. Three human portraits, all of fairly elderly individuals, shimmered into live. Daar recognized Dog Wagner and Preed Chadesekan instantly. The third took a second to click—Adele Park. He’d never met her, but he knew of her.

“These three all have had confirmed contact with Arutech, but rather than taking their systems over as happened to other humans like Sam Jordan and, I now believe, Zane Reid… these three successfully fought it off. Why? Because all three are suffering from an autoimmune disorder called rheumatoid arthritis!”

Nofl summoned a summary screen about the disease. “Now!” he continued. “I’ve been able to study the Arutech’s progress in Mister Chadesekan, or rather the way in which his system is fighting it off. It should have overwhelmed him within days but instead, well… thanks to a little adjuvant therapy to accelerate the process, he is now completely free of it. Probably.”

“Probably.”

Nofl flapped a hand. “Ninety-nine percent.”

“That’s… nice for ‘em,” Daar said. “But how does it help a Gaoian? I know firsthand our immune system ain’t shit next to a Human’s.” There was still a fine pale scar on his paw from where a fungal infection from digging in the dirt on Earth had spread scarily fast.

“More precisely, you have effectively zero defense against their particular fungal forms. The rest of your system is perfectly serviceable…though clearly engineered. And that is the key! That is part of our opportunity!”

Daar sighed. “Yeah. It’s really fuckin’ depressin’ to know who ‘yer god is. Anyway.” He shook his pelt out, there’d be plenty of time to be bummed out about that later. “What’s ‘yer plan?”

“Well, in this case the Hierarchy did you an accidental favor. It’s…” Nofl paused and his fingers moved for a few seconds as he tried to think how to explain. “….very technical, but we’re discovering that huge portions of your genome are deliberately deactivated. Many of these sequences seem to be relics of your Deathworlder past, and most of those deactivated codons have analogs in your operating genome.”

“Oh…fuckin’ balls.” Now that hit Daar like a truck to the head. “They put a fuckin’ rate limiter in us, din’t they?”

“Mm-hmm! You are, in short, considerably less… well, less deathworld than you should be!” Nofl grinned. “You see where I’m going with this. If I can disinhibit the correct alleles and… somehow stimulate Leemu’s immune system to behave like it potentially could… and then induce it to malfunction just like a Human suffering from arthritis or Crohn’s or Lupus or… any one of the other dozen ways their body can start eating itself…”

“It’ll eat the Arutech.”

“Oh yes!” Nofl nodded enthusiastically. “Though, uhhmmm… it won’t be painless for him. Or entirely safe! We are talking about giving him a crippling chronic illness after all.”

“Well,” Daar commented ambivalently, “still better’n bein’ worm mulch.”

“I hope!” Nofl agreed. “It won’t be remotely easy. But I’m quite sure that it’s possible.”

“…I’m hearin’ a lotta words like ‘somehow’ an’ ‘could’ an’ ‘hope’ here, Nofl.”

“That’s the nature of experimental medicine, I’m afraid.” Nofl shut off the holo-emitter. “But… well, the alternative is euthanasia. And I’m afraid that’s not legal here. You’d have to take him back to Gao first.”

“An’ I gotta get Openpaw’s buy-in, too.”

“…I was under the impression you didn’t need anyone‘s approval.”

“Even I need ‘ta worry about keepin’ people happy. I don’t wanna be a tyrant. Well. When I don’t gotta be, anyway. Besides, I trust ‘em. If they say no, I’m gonna listen.”

“How likely are they to say no to the idea of mutating him and giving him a chronic autoimmune disorder?” Nofl asked.

“They’d be a helluva lot more open ‘ta the idea if y’all get rid o’ some of those hedge words.”

“Fewer maybes?”

“That’d help, yeah. Here’s the thing, an’ no offense an’ all, but this is something I don’t really think ‘yer people get. Life ain’t an experiment. It’s sacred. If ‘ya wanna take a risk, ‘ya need to know what that risk actually entails.”

“I can work with that requirement,” Nofl promised.

“…Good. Now. What do ‘ya need from me to make this happen?”

That was a bit of a risk, Daar knew; Nofl had every motivation to ask for more than he needed. But, well: Yulna had been right. Building trust meant taking a risk, because you couldn’t trust if there weren’t the possibility of betrayal.

“Well…funds, of course. I think the Directorate will take care of that. I might be helped by some broader genetic samples…”

“From who?”

“Well… Males like you.”

Of course. Daar used to revel in the idea that he was the most finest thread from a very fine cloth, but he was beginning to understand a bit of the discomfort the Humans sometimes had about the notion. It wasn’t…nice. The idea that there wasn’t anything better was sorta insulting in a way. Worse for him, he knew he and his entire people weren’t completely to credit for their abilities, either. He was the best of the best…but how much of that was him? How much did he owe it to his own hard work? How much to his ancestors striving to be better?

How much to the whims of sapient malware?

Gods, his next lil’ chat with Gyotin was gonna be painful like a Naxas kick to the chest.

“Dont’cha already have samples? Don’t lie ‘ta me, now.”

“I have samples from some males. And, well…a rudimentary sample from you, yes.”

“Of course ‘ya fuckin’ do…” Daar grumbled and gave a discreet sniff towards Nofl. “But…I ‘preciate ‘yer honesty. So…what more do ‘ya need?”

“Ideally, I’d want samples from Gaoians with autoimmune disorders of their own, or with particularly robust immune systems. The more insight I can get into the natural functioning of the Gaoian immune system, the more I can predict any complications. I’d… quite like a sample from Father Regaari.”

“Why him?”

“Very few have braved Earth. Fewer still breathed the air unfiltered. And Leemu is a Silverfur like Regaari, not a Brownie like you.”

Fair point, really.

“…’Kay. I’ll go talk ‘ta my Clan SOR Brothers. You can take whatever ‘ya need from me right now, on the understandin’ that ‘yer only gonna use it ‘ta help cases like Leemu. An’ then I’ll talk with Openpaw ‘bout all o’ this…but I am not gonna lean on ‘em too hard. You want this ‘ta happen, you gotta convince ‘em ‘yerself. Deal?”

“Deal.” Nofl had a handshake like a broken rubber band, but it was heartfelt.

The exchange didn’t take long. Nofl took a kinda painful biopsy from Daar’s outer thigh and just a whole buncha blood, dosed ‘em up with some Crue-G, told ‘em to eat and drink something as soon as he left, and sent ‘em on his way. Straight spacemagic, that stuff. By the time he’d made it over to the barracks, the pain was gone, any trace of lightheadedness was gone…

Which kinda implied the Crue-G was doin’ stuff his people weren’t aware of. Another point to worry about.

But, well. It was hard to worry about that just then. He had a possible solution to Leemu’s dilemma that Daar could work towards. He had friends he could wrestle and play with, just for a little. He had a Cousin he loved, who he could rebuild his relationship with…

He maybe had a solution to a nanotech horror. And maybe, he had the beginnings to an answer for the most biggest question of all.

Who were the Gao?

Date Point: 16y2m1w5d AV
Halberstadt’s, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“I’m not really a fan of ties…”

“You have to wear a tie with a suit, Julian. You just gotta! Also your collar should fit now.”

The first session at Halberstadt’s had been… interesting. It turned out that Ramsey and Tristan knew a heck of a lot about nice clothes and how to dress well, and the surprising part was that they actually seemed to genuinely enjoy it. Julian would have guessed they’d hate stuffy clothes and formal wear thanks to their parents, but in fact the brothers walked into Halberstadt’s like a pair of junior fashion princes and were immediately in their element.

That day had mostly consisted of Julian being escorted around the shop’s fitting area in his underwear, being discreetly ogled at by the staff while they measured every part of him about fifty million different ways. Al seemed to take some perverse joy in the situation, because one of her evil smirks was planted across her face the whole time.

That wasn’t to say it was uncomfortable or anything, everyone was polite and all. It was just a bit weird prancing about! Julian wasn’t really a natural show-off.

…Well, no. That wasn’t strictly true anymore. He’d become a lot more outgoing over the last couple of years, as he spent time in the public eye. He had no idea when that had started, but he was definitely taking more photos of everything while he explored, and yeah…sometimes those photos included himself. With people too, when they came up to say hi. Then there was the whole Laid Bare shoot, which was about as show-off as a man could get. He’d enjoyed himself quite a bit by the end. Heck, he’d had some interesting modeling offers come in too—he’d never expected that!—but he had to be careful; he was a Special Envoy, after all.

That was important, because a Special Envoy had to keep a clean reputation…and clean up nice, too. The Ambassador was gonna hire an etiquette coach from Earth—Julian still had trouble believing that was a thing. He’d eventually be attending formal dinners to advance the American interests in the Ten’Gewek…

Yeah. The boys were right. All of Julian’s dressy clothes were way too small for him these days, and he’d never really bothered to replace them. If he wasn’t in gymwear he was in his black t-shirts and his comfy, broke-in jeans, but even then his shirts were getting a bit threadbare…and uncomfortably tight, no matter how stretchy they were.

“A man needs to look like he cares,” Tristan had said very seriously, and with far more conviction than any twelve-year-old boy ought to have. Still…he wasn’t wrong.

And so the whole family went downtown for a little shopping adventure. The boys got measured for their new Sunday suits, too; Jacob had sent money so they would be “presentably clothed” and this was apparently how Al was going to spend that money. Julian had laughed about all that, he and the boys had a bit of goofy mean-mugging fun in front of the mirror…and then the conversation turned to textiles.

Julian didn’t know much about that sort of thing. He knew about denim, wool and cotton, Under Armour and kevlar, how to darn socks and sew buttons back on, and a few other things like that. His interests had always been about durability or comfort. He’d never bothered to know what “tweed” was, or what exactly one did with a “herringbone.”

He’d never imagined that a woollen pair of pants could in fact be so soft, he’d thought they were silk. Dang.

Anyway. Nothing they had fit him off the shelf: not the shirts, not the undershirts, not the socks… nothing. It had never been easy for him to find good-fitting clothes, not even in high school, but he was just so dang big these days that everything had to be made bespoke. Al, on the other hand, was doing her best to marry a high-waisted two-piece suit with the realities of being twenty-something weeks pregnant and naturally slender. She still managed to look damn sharp, but in the end she had to give up and follow Xiù’s example by vanishing across the road with apologies to visit Halberstadt’s partner dressmaking company.

That left Julian in the boys’ capable hands.

Tristan and Ramsey had grown up in fashionable, well-tailored clothing thanks to their parents’ treating them a little like ornaments to show off rather than actual boys. They were Julian’s opposites, in that slobbing around in jeans and t-shirts was pretty much a novelty to them. With their Buehler-blond hair properly combed and a jacket and tie on, they became junior heartbreakers.

The difference, Julian suspected, was the smiles. It was hard to imagine them smiling while all dressed up in the company of their parents, but there in the shop they were in their element and clearly enjoyed bossing Julian around.

To judge by the expression on the tailor’s face, she was thoroughly enjoying the sight too.

“No, not a skinny tie, you need a nice wide one that’s darker than the shirt…”

“No no, you need the long ones. You’re tall and your neck’s super thick.”

Julian felt like he had to tread furiously to keep his head above water. “I mean, it goes around…”

“Not far enough! It needs to just reach your belt buckle. No longer, no shorter.”

“Oh yeah, and you need a different belt, this one doesn’t fit right, either…”

When their backs were turned to dash off across the shop in search of the right items, Julian glanced at the tailor. She nodded, giving her professional approval to everything they’d just said.

“Your kids clearly have some taste!”

“That they do,” chuckled Julian in mild awe. “How long until this is all done?”

“We should have everything completed in two days. Maybe three in your case, but outsized athletic cuts have become a specialty of ours. Jeff and Mindy should get you done in no time.”

“Right,” Julian sighed. “I suppose we should, uh, settle up. Once the little fellas are done dressing me I guess…”

“Handkerchiefs, cufflinks, and a few other accessories yet to go. Oh, and do you have any appropriate briefs? Athletes like yourself can be challenging to properly fit, and you don’t want any lines showing through.”

“…I need special underwear for this?”

And so on. Those at least were big and stretchy enough that he could get away with off-the-shelf, even if they were so thin and showy that Julian had to wonder if this was some private abuse of power on the tailor’s part, or maybe part of Al’s revenge. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if they didn’t fit… Anyway. Julian nodded numbly while the boys piled on an incomprehensible selection of… things… and he eventually managed to escape back into the free air.

At least Al paid for it all.

Two days later everything came back, and the time for final fitting, which at least took place in the comfort and privacy of their own home. Halberstadt’s were that certain of their craft.

Again, Tristan and Ramsey led the way, teaching Julian things he never knew about dressing up. He stood in front of his mirror, only just on the appropriate side of nudity in his “dressy” socks and underwear—how were they dressy when they were almost not there in the first place?—while the boys laid everything out in well-practiced sequence. Ramsey was going over their really expensive new duds with a sticky roller thing and a delicate pair of scissors, while Tristan was putting the finishing touches on their shoes. He had them polished up so well, Julian could see his reflection in them.

Dang.

“Fellas, should I be doing something…?”

“Just a moment,” Tristan said distractedly. He put a little more elbow grease into his polishing, gave a satisfied nod, and set Julian’s big new wingtips down next to the boys’ smaller pairs.

“There!” Ramsey handed Julian a thin cotton undershirt. He shrugged and stretched it over his shoulders—it clung to him pretty tight, but not uncomfortably so. Meanwhile, Tristan had fetched something from the shopping bag, and busied himself clipping it to the top of Julian’s socks.

“What are those?”

“Shirt stays. These are the easy kind, you don’t need a garter. They keep your shirt tucked in!”

…Okay then. Julian shrugged his shirt on and found that, actually, it fit! The collar felt okay, he could close the top button and he didn’t feel choked! Then they connected the straps and now his shirt was being pulled down which felt a little weird but once the pants were on and the belt was done up too…

He swung his arms, rolled his neck, bounced around a bit. Arms above head, nothing was pinching…

Al was leaning against the wall wearing a knowing, amused smile that got a little wider as she watched. “You look surprised, babe.”

“This is… comfortable. None of my other nice clothes were ever comfortable!”

“Well duh!” Ramsey said. “None of your other nice clothes have ever fit, Dad!”

It took everyone a second to notice the word. Ramsey was the first, and he went still and suddenly had a rabbit-in-headlights look on his face that he hadn’t worn in a long time, the one that back in the Buehler household probably would have meant he knew he was about to be on the receiving end of some parental wrath.

Julian needed a second to process it himself. He glanced at Allison and saw mingled surprise and dawning delight in her face, then very slowly he sank down to his haunches and opened his arms. The boys collided with him, and it was all he could do not to fall apart right there.

He palmed both their heads and snuggled them to himself good and hard for a long while. There was nothing to say. What could he say? He just…

He was finally able to think again when Al joined them. She knelt next to him and kissed him on the cheek. “I think we should go out tonight. As…a family.”

“What about Amanda…?”

“I’ll talk to her.” She stood up and tried really hard not to show the tears forming in her eyes. “You three…” Al paused for a moment, and regained some of her snarky composure. “Now I bet you two can’t tame Julian’s hair!”

It got a laugh, and spurred the boys into motion. Rather than standing around awkwardly, they had a moment of twin-communion and went rabbiting off to fetch… something. Julian wasn’t sure what.

He took a deep breath and composed himself.

“You okay?” Al asked.

“Oh, geez. Where do I start?”

“I suppose it was inevitable, really…” She glanced over her shoulder to check they weren’t in earshot, then drew a little closer on the pretense of adjusting his collar and lowered her voice. “They really love you, you know.”

“It’s not… weird or anything? I mean, you’re their sister, not their mom, and…”

Al dismissed that suggestion with a shrug. “So we’re weird. Stop giving a fuck about it and let them be your sons. Please? It’s what they need.”

“Al…” Julian checked they were still out of sight, then kissed her. “…I love the hell outta them too. But as much as I hate to say it, so does Amanda.”

“You leave my mother to me. And my father.”

“…Okay. Just, uh, you’ve got friends and options. And me. Don’t forget that.”

“I promise.” She stepped back and smiled at him. “…Xiù is gonna be so pissed she missed that.”

“She probably will…wait.” Julian glanced over and saw the two boys grinning like Cheshire cats. “Is that pomade?”

Tristan brandished the tin. It looked pretty rock-and-roll actually, with a black-white-and-red label that depicted a grinning skeleton barber with well-styled hair, brandishing a pair of straight razors. “Nope! Putty.”

“What’s the d—? You know what, never mind. When did you get that?”

“I bought it!”

“With your own allowance?”

“Well, I wanna look good for school!”

Of course he did. “Right. So, uh…let’s do this, then.”

Julian and the boys migrated to the big vanity, they hopped up onto the counter so they could reach him…

And some witchcraft happened.

Date Point: 16y2m1w5d AV
Diplomatic Starship Rich Plains, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

There were times when Knight tried to figure out which of the various alien species who made up the Dominion were the most alien, in terms of their life outlook, general species philosophy, foibles…

There were a few candidates. The Corti were really quite understandable once one got to know them, and the Gao were extremely relatable in an intense, canine-adjacent sort of way. Those two were the easiest to interact with. The Rauwryhr, Chehnash, and Rrrrtktktkp’ch were pretty familiar too, being respectively idealistic and curious, jaded, and cerebral.

All of that was in the broadest possible strokes, of course. It was dangerous to try and sum up a species of billions of souls using just one word, but at the same time…

The most alien were probably the Allebenellin, the Versa Volc and the Robalin. The former two grappled with knowing that their species were only sapient because of scientific meddling by the OmoAru tens of thousands of years ago, and had a certain degree of resentment toward species who’d achieved sapience under their own power. At least the Versa Volc were personable enough in a distant way.

The Robalin meanwhile were just impenetrable. Those big, dark green, pupil-less eyes were unreadable, their motives remained inscrutable and they rarely deigned to explain their reasons for anything they did.

Given their history, Knight wasn’t sure he wanted them to. The Robalin were thirty years out of an internecine war that had seen them deploy bioweapons and genocidal tactics on a scale not even the Nazis had matched… And the Robalin Nazis had won.

Entertaining their ambassador therefore was not his idea of an evening well spent.

It wasn’t even entertainment, not really. His usual tactic of welcoming his opposite numbers with an assortment of appropriate food from Earth fell flat in this case as the Robalin ambassador simply sipped on a tiny cup of water and politely declined to eat anything. He seemed to treat even that as an unwelcome delay before they could finally get down to business.

Knight was only too happy to oblige him.

“So what can I do for you?” he asked, once it became clear that pleasantries were not involved here.

The Robalin language was complex. The words were sibilant, but overlaid by a parallel stream of clicking vocalizations that served about the same purposes as the tones in Human languages like Mandarin. The same syllable could have markedly different meanings depending on which clicks went alongside it.

Fortunately, his translator earpiece could handle it confidently.

“Trade. You have powerful antibiotics, the most powerful on the market.”

“Indeed. Often too powerful…but then I suspect you’re in need of something quite strong these days…”

The Robalin’s head tilted. Not a nod, nor a shake of the head.

Knight nodded, and decided to treat himself to a small glass of beer. “You do, of course, understand the difficulty. We are only just now beginning to understand the depth of your…recent activities. Much of the Dominion was shielded from that knowledge too, so much so they thought we were the first genocidal species to enter the Council. That isn’t true, is it?”

The Robalin’s head tilted the other way. “We are not here to discuss recent history. We are here to discuss trade.”

“Which makes this relevant. We too went through something like your recent history. The consequence of that episode has placed such an immense burden of shame on our people, that merely discussing trade with yours is problematic. The governments I represent are inclined to place an embargo, so I need to know why you want our antibiotics. And I should be blunt: there had better be a damn good reason.”

He matched the alien’s inscrutable blank gaze with a fiercely principled one of his own. To his gratification, the Robalin blinked first.

“…Let us call it damage control,” the ambassador said.

“One of your old toys gone rogue?”

“One of the lower-grade strains deployed by our predecessors persists despite our best efforts to eradicate it. It now has a chronic presence in our hospitals: Civilians go for unrelated treatment, contract the strain during their hospital stay. Some die.”

“Why come to us? The Corti have biofilter technology.”

“Ineffective, in this case. This is a highly mutagenic strain, it adapts faster than we can update the organism definitions. We require a new solution, one that can eradicate the contagion before it adapts.”

“…It’s a bacterium? Our antibiotics don’t do a thing to viruses.”

“It is effectively a bacterium, yes.”

“So, to recap: Your government created a highly mutagenic bacterial bioweapon which has now gone rogue and is establishing a chronic presence among your civilian population. You need us to bail you out before… how many people die?”

“…As many as one in three of those infected.”

Knight didn’t let his reaction to that show. He’d been briefed, in fact, on the Robalin’s domestic bioweapon problems, and that mortality rate put the Spanish flu to shame. Hell, in recent years the human race had managed to claw the Ebola mortality rate down below that threshold.

He didn’t like the Robalin government, not at all. It was censorious, tyrannical, pathologically hostile to citizens who didn’t conform to its ideals… it offended his sensibilities as a classic liberal thinker in every way.

But on the other hand, a thirty-three percent mortality rate across a whole planet was a lot of lives. A lot of people, however strangely-shaped and inhuman, who’d just had the misfortune to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time to the wrong species and under the wrong government.

“…And what can your people offer in return?” he asked. “It’s hardly a trade unless you can give us something we want.”

“We note that certain of your peoples are ascendent in the Long March of progress. If you desire to solidify that lead—”

“Let me stop you right there.”

Knight congratulated himself as his interruption extracted the first proper reaction he’d got from his alien counterpart so far: a scandalized blink.

“…Yours is an aggressive and willful species, Ambassador. Past a certain threshold, you will become ungovernable. The Gao have an answer to that problem in the Great Father. That is not a long-term solution, and the Great Father himself clearly knows it. Our intelligence suggests he is leaning hard on the medical sciences to extend his viability as a ruler for as long as he can…but what comes after him? What will their answer be? What will yours be?”

“Ambassador, let me be very clear. We are here to discuss the possibility of my people helping out your civilian population by trading medical supplies for something concrete and physical. We are absolutely not at home to your political ‘advice.’”

The Robalin hardened, and Knight had to give him credit for doing what few others like him did—he didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by the trademark Deathworlder Glare.

“It is not advice, Ambassador Knight. It is very painful, hard-won experience. We too once entertained delusions about diversity being a strength. What you may not know is that this is not our first such war. It is our eleventh. There comes a time when such endless bloodbaths must be stopped once and for all…we would spare you that suffering, if we could. Though I sense you are not ready to see the point, so…let us return to trade. What would you be interested in?”

And there, Knight thought, was the hard part. What would they be interested in? If the Third Reich were still alive and kicking in the mid-twentieth century, what might the 5-EYES nations have been interested in buying from them? Was there anything at all?

“…We can offer life extension technology,” the Robalin hinted, after a second. “Before you ask, this knowledge was not obtained via conflict. We were a short-lived species some centuries back. No longer.”

He blinked again when Knight frowned at him. Knight had no idea what that meant, but it felt smug. “Humans are not short-lived,” he continued. “You are in fact the third longest-lived species we know of after the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun and the Kwmbwrw. We could extend the human lifespan to upwards of two hundred of your years, and you would maintain your prime health and vigor throughout eighty percent of that time.”

“Hmm.” Knight stood up and went to make a cup of tea.

“I can see you think this sounds like a fair trade.”

Knight had had enough. “Can you? Interesting. I was just thinking how it sounds like an awful idea.”

He turned around. “Let’s imagine our people start living for two hundred years or more. What happens to our young people, hmm? They already struggle as it is, imagine being young and trying to break into a job market saturated by more experienced workers who still have the full flower of their strength. The young have only two advantages over the seasoned: health, and plenty of future. Deprive them of those edges, and what do they have left except desperation?

“Then,” he continued, “there’s the question of who gets to enjoy the longer lifespan. The wealthy? The powerful? Everyone? If so, who pays for it? What happens to our birth rate? What happens to our economy? What happens to social mobility and meritocracy? No, I think that’s a Pandora’s Box I have no interest whatsoever in opening, thank you very much.”

The Robalin’s expression shifted. Confusion, possibly. “A what box?”

Knight sighed. “…I suggest, Ambassador,” he said, “that if you intend to negotiate with somebody, it pays to know some things about them. The story of Pandora and her box is one of our oldest and most important myths, so much so that we named our first FTL prototype ship after it. If you don’t even know that about the human race, then you are not in a good position to negotiate with us.”

The ambassador stood up. “A criticism I level in turn. You, like many others, are quick to judge our history. You have no idea what led to that. You do not know the horrors. You cannot know. I remember them. I lived through them, and I did my part in bringing them to an end.”

“Mmm. I count myself very lucky not to have lived through them, and you have my sympathy,” Knight assured him, levelly. “But I absolutely know what caused those horrors, ambassador, and you just offered it to me like a bag of sweets. So….”

He crossed to the door and stood straight-backed and stern. “Thank you for coming. But I think it is best if our negotiations continue in writing.”

The Robalin’s movements were jerky and fierce as he drained his cup of water, shook Knight’s hand, and departed without a further word. The alien was, Knight suspected, deeply angry.

Knight wasn’t inclined to care. He’d lost two great-uncles in the Second World War and he wasn’t about to dishonour their memories by striking a devil’s deal with the exact same kind of person they’d given their lives fighting against. The strange lizard-ant appearance, the extra arm and leg, it didn’t make a difference: He’d just had tea with a man who was the moral and ethical equivalent of Joseph Goebbels.

He needed a bath.

Date Point: 16y2m1w5d AV
Camp Tebbutt Biodrone Internment Facility, Yukon-Koyukuk, Alaska, USA, Earth

Ava Ríos

“You ever rode a helicopter before, Ava?”

Ava jumped, and looked away from the window. She’d been enjoying the view. It was her first trip to Alaska, and the thing that struck her as she’d watched the landscape rolling by below them was that the grass and foliage down there was a different shade of green to what she’d seen before. Not palm-leaf and lawn green like she remembered from San Diego, nor the damp, rich green of England, nor the slightly blue-shifted green of Cimbrean native foliage.

The green below was cold, faded and slightly yellow but wherever the sunlight managed to push between the clouds, it glowed. And the mountains were just primal. She’d totally lost herself in it.

She was one of a handful of journalists en route to the biodrone camp. Zane Reid’s vitriolic video had been met with surprising transparency by the Sartori administration, who’d simply acknowledged its existence and invited any news agency that wanted to send a reporter and make their own conclusions.

Thank goodness but the BBC hadn’t sent Sean Harvey. God willing, she’d never see him ever again. Instead they’d sent a bubbly package of human warmth by the name of Francesca Cadman, who’d brought with her a plastic shopping bag full of snacks which she shared generously.

“Uh… No,” Ava replied. “I rode in a US Air Force Osprey once, in Egypt.”

“Ooh! What was that like?”

“Uh… Well, there was a wounded man in there with us. We’d been shot at…” Ava smiled apologetically. “And I kinda crashed and slept the whole way back.”

“…Oh. Wow.”

“Yeah. I prefer what I do now.”

“You were shot at?”

“I was shot,” Ava recalled, remembering the moment a bullet had shoved her hard in the back while she ran for her life. “I was wearing body armor but, uh… I don’t recommend it.”

“I didn’t know you did embedded reporting!” Francesca looked both impressed and unnerved.

Ava shrugged. “It wound up being classified anyway.” Which was true: the Hierarchy’s existence had been declassified years ago, but Operation EMPTY BELL was still top secret. “I can’t really talk about the details. Non-disclosure.”

“Sorry.”

They rode in silence for a while, until Francesca offered her a bag of chips. “…Did he make it?”

“Huh?”

“The wounded man. Was he okay?”

Ava smiled. Derek was looking after Hannah for her while she was gone, and putting out feelers to see if there were any more veterans or whoever who might be interested in doing a Laid Bare. Retiring from fieldwork to a desk suited him well, and meant she didn’t have to worry about him.

“He made it,” she said aloud.

One of the helicopter’s other occupants, a fidgety blond man from an up-and-coming news site called Timepiece called over from the other side’s window. “Hey, I think we’re coming up on it!”

Sure enough, the pilot called over his shoulder just a few seconds later. Once upon a time they would all have been wearing hearing protection and talking to each other through microphones, but forcefield tech had made soundproofing a helicopter’s cabin pretty much effortless. The rotors were little more than a distant bassy hum felt through the seat of the pants rather than a deafening wall of sound.

“Landing in three minutes, ladies and gents. Please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in the upright and locked position…”

Ava smiled at the joke. Their flight wasn’t exactly the height of luxury, she was in a bucket seat with a four-point harness on rather than some comfortable commercial thing. Still, she made sure nothing was loose around her and then grabbed her camera to record the landing.

Around her, the other three turned on their GoPros and Francesca gave her a curious look as she produced a camera drone from her bag. “…You like to do things the old-fashioned way, don’t you?”

“It’s part of my brand.” Ava gave her a shrug. She’d heard that comment before, and she knew better than to say that she felt her way was more authentic. Anyone could just wander around with a camera drone and a body-cam and a head-cam and then pick out some decent shots and clips from among the hours of footage back in the comfort of their office.

She also knew better than to mention all the awards on her shelf. There was an art to photojournalism, and it sprang from the art of photography. She controlled the framing, the color balance, the depth of field, shutter speed… She could do things with her camera that turned the news into life. Bare facts became poetry when attached to the right image.

But, she wasn’t in the business to make enemies of her colleagues, so she shrugged her whole personal philosophy off as an amusing luddite’s foible and jumped down out of the helo as the doors opened.

Springtime in Alaska. She’d expected the wind to be cold enough to sting her cheeks, but its actual texture was just pleasantly cool. It smelled of mountaintop snow, living trees, and, and…

…Egypt.

It had been a long time since she’d last had a flashback, but the aroma that reached her nostrils was right out of Cairo and from the mining camp at Marsa Alam. Somewhere nearby, somebody was cooking Aish Baladi. She glanced in that direction, and—

–Suspicious glances in Cairo, the blank disinterest of the biodrones at Marsa Alam. Among them all, a smiling face with a mustache, wearing superiority like aftershave and bottomless age like a comfortable coat–

“Ava?”

Francesca’s voice snapped her out of it. She started slightly and became aware that she was gripping the helicopter’s doorframe so hard that her knuckles had gone white and her fingers were hurting. She was stopping Francesca from alighting, and the other woman was giving her a concerned, confused look.

“…Sorry.” Ava stepped away and got a grip on the here-and-now with an effort of will and some deep breaths. It had been so long since her last incident that she’d almost forgotten how intense they could be. Just for a moment, she really wished her dog was there. Hannah would have snapped her out of it before it really began…

The moment passed, and she looked back toward the man whose face has jolted her so violently into the past.

Six’s host. He still had the same urbane mustache and shiny bald head, but the expression was different: he no longer had that sense of yawning agelessness about him, and his eyes were tired and haunted rather than sharp and mocking. But she’d never forget that face, ever.

Automatically, she took his picture. He blinked, then turned and called something through the doorway behind him. After a moment, a second man stepped out of a door and squinted at her.

Of course. This was where the biodrones came. She should have expected this. Six’s other host would be here too… and both men clearly recognized her. She took another picture without really thinking.

She was pulled away and distracted by a welcome from the camp’s CO and a safety briefing that boiled down to ‘do what the guards tell you to do.’ With those formalities out of the way, they were freed to investigate the camp, talk to the internees, the personnel, inspect the facilities… They had the run of the place. Total freedom, total transparency.

Ava took a deep breath, straightened her back and went to meet two of the most important men in her life for the first time.

Date Point: 16y2m2w AV
US Embassy, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“Julian! Good of you to drop by! I see my secret elves have done their magic…”

Julian managed a nervous smile and sat down when Ambassador Chris Rockefeller gestured invitingly toward a seat. He was the US Ambassador to Folctha first and foremost, but the umbrella of his duties also covered New Botany, Abeltown, Nouveau Acadia, and the Ten’Gewek… the latter of which made him Julian’s boss.

He was impossible to dislike. Charming, easy, relaxed, jocular… Julian had never put much thought into what ambassadors in general were like, but some unconscious part of his brain had prejudiced itself toward thinking they’d be universally stuffy, formal and straight-laced.

He was glad to be wrong.

“…You and Al were in a conspiracy, huh?”

Rockefeller had mastered the disarming, twinkling smile that only men in the glow of healthy advancing age had access to. “Of course! We can’t have a caveman slurping bisque with the Governor-General, you know. You look very dapper!”

Well, that was a new one. Julian cleared his throat. “…I should point out, I’ve never been to a formal dinner, uh… ever.”

“That’s why you’re going to receive some etiquette lessons.”

“Learn how to use the right cutlery, that kinda thing?”

Rockefeller waved a hand like he was shooing a fly, dismissively. “Cutlery’s easy. Just start from the outside and work your way in.” He flashed that smile again, then sat back and folded his hands comfortably across his belly. “So. How are we doing with setting up that meeting between the Corti and the Ten’Gewek?”

Julian nodded, feeling a little more on solid ground now that he was just reporting what had happened. “It… got a little sidetracked. The Ten’Gewek have had a marauding Brown One to deal with.”

“That’s the T-rex-bear thing, yes?”

“And cheetah.” People always seemed to forget that part. “Damn thing can run at sixty miles an hour. Well… that we’ve seen so far, anyway.”

The ambassador looked impressed. “…Is everything okay?”

“It killed one of the Given-Men. They’re trying to figure out how to put it down without losing too many people. But I did tell Yan about the Corti.”

“And what was his answer?”

“He’ll hear them out, but he wants the Corti to come to him. It’s, uh…well, they’re entering rut, to put it bluntly. It’s very important for the tribes, they have boys at trial, new Dancers, Rites of Womanhood too…”

“And a cheetah-bear-T-rex monster to kill. Hmm…” Rockefeller jotted a note down. “…He won’t budge? They have to go to him?”

“He’ll budge a little. I told him if the Corti visit the planet itself they’ll get what they’re after anyway, so he agreed to meet them on a ship in orbit on the condition that it has to be one of ours, or Gaoian.”

“Sensible. I assume you counselled him in that direction?”

“A little. They’re… extremely perceptive. It’s a big part of why we took the two big guys to Earth after all. I’m pretty sure Vemik’s figured out all the basics of machines by now. Yan’s no different, he’s just more focused on protecting his people. Once he wrapped his head around the idea of, uh, ‘body-words’ inside his people that the Corti want, he figured out the rest well enough on his own.”

Rockefeller tilted his head. “Body-words?”

“That’s about as good as I can get for ‘genetic information’ in their language.”

That got a laugh. “Right. That makes sense… Still, good work. The Corti might be on our side of the chamber at the Dominion Council these days, but that doesn’t mean they won’t exploit the crap out of the Ten’Gewek if they get the chance.”

Julian accepted the praise with a smile and a nod. “Thanks.”

Rockefeller grinned at him. “Nervous about that dinner?”

“Yeah,” Julian admitted. “I mean… what am I expected to do exactly?”

“Show up looking clean and handsome—you’ve got that part covered already—give an honest answer to any questions that come your way and just… don’t make an ass of yourself, basically. It’s not difficult, I promise.”

Somehow, Julian believed him. “Sounds simple enough…” he admitted.

“It really is. I’m pretty sure you can make it through one evening without cussing, punching somebody or getting naked.” That twinkling grin put in another appearance. “Which is about ninety-five percent of it.”

Julian laughed. “That other five percent will get you… What if I forget names?”

“You’ll be fine,” Rockefeller assured him. “These people are human too. Most of ‘em.”

“There’ll be ET guests?”

“No, just some lawyers.” Rockefeller chuckled at his own joke. “And your lovely partner, of course, who I gather is a Gaoian for legal purposes.”

“Dual species. It’s one of those round peg square hole situations.”

“Well, she and your indisputably human other partner are invited too. And I gather you’re fostering some young men as well. Can they behave themselves?”

Julian smiled faintly. “Honestly? Tristan and Ramsey might be better guests than me.”

“Did they pick out your clothing as well?”

“Uh… yes.”

Rockefeller laughed. “Really? Interesting… It’s good if they can come. A few of my colleagues back on Earth who’ve never met you wonder about you. Your history, your unique family circumstances, your, ah, rather uninhibited modelling career… All of it rubs some of them the wrong way. It goes against the grain of what they think a special envoy should be.”

“Even to a stone-age tribal species? Actually, no, that’s… I dunno where they’re at now, actually. We’re well out of the Stone Age and coming up on I guess early Roman in just a few years.”

“Even so.”

“Well… maybe that’s a good talking point?” Julian considered and tried to avoid his usual backtracking style of thinking. “You said so yourself, they need someone they can relate to, and that sorta means a guy who can heft a Werne and all that.”

“And on our side, we need a man who can clean up well and be a model of civilization. Don’t forget about what the humans in this equation need to relate to.” Rockefeller sniffed. “Bringing along a well-adjusted pair of young men might be just the right kind of impression. And a little charming precocity might just distract from the dirt under your fingernails, so to speak.”

“I can see that,” Julian conceded. “And I scrubbed up, too!”

“The metaphorical dirt under your fingernails.”

“I kinda doubt that’s ever going away.”

“So long as it’s kept to an authentic minimum. You’re not expected to be perfect, my boy. Just… civilized.” Rockefeller flashed his smile again.

“I can do that.”

“Of course you can! You’re too ‘Minnesota nice’ to do otherwise! Anyhow,” Rockefeller unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen and flourished his signature across a card from the stack to his right. “Your formal invitation. For all five of you.”

Julian held the little card in his paw and turned it over as Rockefeller re-capped the pen and set it aside. “Uh…well, that’s pretty amazing cursive you’ve got.” He didn’t really know what else to say.

“Script, and the secret is in the pen. You would traditionally respond by mailing back a card but you’re right here, so…”

“So… I’m pleased to accept?”

“Excellent! This isn’t hard, I promise you. The trick to any situation like this is to keep your counsel to yourself, compliment people’s wit, and don’t tell any stories that don’t end in comedy. They can be raunchy too, just elevate your language a little. Twisty allusion is your friend, here. And if those stories give you a little harmless embarrassment, even better! Think of it like making friends at church.”

Julian thought about the last time he’d gone to church. There’d been a lot of life between then and the present day.

“…I should probably go to church more, huh?”

“Do you believe?”

Julian shifted uncomfortably. “That’s a big question. I dunno if I can give a good enough answer on short notice.”

“None of us really can. The question is if the church you choose can help you answer it.”

“How do you figure that out?”

“You don’t. I attend with friends when they ask. In these circles it’s the polite thing to do. Good way to open the mind and meet people, too.”

“So basically…I need to network.”

“Yes. With people that have a keen sense of tradition. For you that might be…tricky, so again, we’re back to charming. You see why I wanted you at this dinner, now.”

Julian began to realize he was caught in a much larger game than he expected. “…Yes.”

“Good.” Rockefeller leaned forward and rested his hands lightly on the desk in front of him. His jovial, approachable expression shifted a little and became more sombre.

“Julian. Let me get down to business, now that I’ve shaped the problem for you. I am an Ambassador of the United States, Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary. That means I can make decisions of national policy within my portfolio without consulting the President first. That is a terrible responsibility. I need people who can help me share that burden. In particular, I have a long-term strategic and moral quandary in the Ten’Gewek. It is in our best interests to see them flower, both for their sake and…well, for our own souls. I need a man who can directly command their respect, because I certainly cannot. And I need you to understand the Great Game, because that is the only way we can advance their interests in a way we can both profit from. It’s not enough to toss boulders and skin animals, I need a man who can also charm people that normally fear and frankly loathe men like you.”

The soft veneer fell away, and Julian found himself transfixed by the piercing gaze of an enormously shrewd man who played the highest-stakes game in the galaxy for a living. “Can you do it?”

Julian felt himself nodding reflexively: not good enough. He paused, thought about it, and then nodded more firmly.

“Tell me what I have to do.”

Date Point: 16y2m2w AV
Hunter command ship, Kwmbwrw space

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

Stasis was saving the Hunters. Energy, after all, was plentiful but most of it was in forms that nothing organic could digest. Not even the Swarm of Swarms could eat stars.

But the Hunters could feed on them, after a fashion. Their ships basked in stellar output, thereby gathering as much power as they could ever need, and spent that power on keeping non-critical Eaters in stasis when they weren’t on a hunt. By doing so, the logistical demands of the Swarm had been much reduced… and the Eaters weren’t complaining either. They got to go straight from hunt to hunt, without any boring interludes in between. It kept them out of the way, stopped them from interfering.

It also allowed them to plan their hunts with much more care. The stakes were higher, but so was the potential return on investment. Without Eater impatience goading them forward, the Builders could gather information and construct simple, elegant and razor-sharp courses of action at their leisure.

Things were assuming a more perfect configuration. Builders were the natural leaders. The Eaters became much more fearsome weapons when their ferocity was properly directed.

Properly directing them required data. Data was best acquired through contact with the Prey, and especially by low-cost probing at anomalies.

For instance: the Prey’s new mobile herd-ship had been stalked for some time now by a small team of dedicated Builders in an exceptionally low-profile scout. The ship was well-known to the Hunters: It had been one of the early contact points with Humans. A lone female had stalked them through their own halls and decks, turning Hunters into hunted. The swarmship’s Alpha had grievously wounded her at the cost of its own life, but the ship had sent data back to the Swarm that had proven most educational and inspired the development of subsequent highly effective anti-Human tactics.

Now, intriguingly, it had been joined by another familiar ship: the one that the Swarm had destroyed over Gao. The first Human ship ever to fall to a Hunter assault was, apparently, back in the fray.

Humans, it seemed, did not accept defeat. They had recovered the burning, gutted hulk and repaired it. Perhaps also upgraded it?

The Alpha-of-Alphas intended to resolve that question.

There were other questions to resolve as well, and this seemed like a juicy opportunity. Chief among them was the performance of the new replicator ships. Being forced to redesign those from first principles had been agonizing, infuriating. The dataform responsible for deleting all that valuable information would suffer terribly.

Still, it had not been able to delete knowledge, memories and experience. The Builders had remembered, rebuilt and reinvented. If anything, they had ultimately improved on the prior design.

All that remained was to test it.

And testing such as this, for a Builder, was just as salivatory as fresh Prey to the Eaters.

<Meat to the maw.>

Date Point: 16y2m2w AV
Diplomatic Starship Rich Plains, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

Knight’s favourite space on the Rich Plains was the arboretum. It ran around the ship’s equator, a feat only made possible by the enormous vessel’s lack of conventional engines, and afforded a pleasantly open space. It was big enough to comfortably accommodate a number of the now sadly absent Guvnuragnaguvendrugun, so from a human’s comparatively tiny perspective it was almost like walking under open skies. Nobody could possibly feel claustrophobic in such a space.

His favourite part of the arboretum, however, was the human contribution to it. The spot had been made available years ago in response to some obscure Dominion regulation, but never filled for several reasons. The fact that humanity had officially snubbed the Dominion for several years was perhaps the bigger one, but in a close second place was the natural hazard that Earth life presented. The wrong pollen or spores could have proven deadly.

Knight was rather proud to have had his solution to that latter problem implemented: He’d suggested an aquarium, on the grounds that anything coming from Earth would need careful isolation behind an airtight seal anyway, so why not show off the aquatic side of a deathworld ecosystem?

Anybody who claimed that he’d chosen an ecosystem that supported some of the most colourfully dangerous kinds of Earthlings out of a sense of pure mischief was just being deeply uncharitable, of course.

He especially liked the lionfish.

The result, now that it was properly implemented, was a soothing walk among tall stands of kelp, decorated with vibrant sea anemones, glittering fish and of course the glowing hues of coral grown with the latest reef conservation and regeneration techniques. It was, in his opinion, the most beautiful part of the whole deck… and to judge from how many of the ship’s crew and the assorted visiting alien dignitaries who passed through came to see it for themselves, he wasn’t alone in that opinion. He’d even seen the Kwmbwrw Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr pay it a visit, albeit while steadfastly pretending to be on her way to somewhere else.

It was such a shame that Kwmbwrw prejudice remained upsettingly impenetrable. After so many years and so many demonstrations of good intent, humanity simply hadn’t won them over.

Knight wasn’t inclined to worry about it. He wasn’t about to waste his time trying to impress the Grandmatriarchs, not when devastating the Hunter population, saving the Gao, defending a Domain homeworld and all the rest had failed to work.

He focused his attention on more receptive audiences, like the Rauwryhr and Chehnash, whose representatives on the station he was currently taking a stroll through the aquarium with, for the purposes of an unofficial sort of discussion.

The Chehnash were interesting. Their history of internecine warfare was just as long, storied and intense as humanity’s, and they had unarguably been the most militarily savvy of the Dominion’s associate species prior to the arrival of the Gao and Homo sapiens. Their problem, strategically speaking, was a lack of coordination and mass. That was an internal political problem, nothing they could fix by following human strategic advice, though they’d shown great interest in Knight’s proposed defence symposium.

As for the Rauwryhr…

It pained him to admit it, but the herbivorous species just didn’t have a properly predatory mindset. The point of war was to test an opponent’s will, and enforce will upon them. Doing that required finding the enemy’s weakness and exploiting it as ruthlessly as one’s own sense of civility would allow.

For the herbivores, war seemed to be…more a show of strength. It was a display ritual. In the fructivorous Rauwryhr’s case, their natural cultural unit was a tightly knit large family group, which had historically done little more than skirmish harmlessly with each other to establish territories among the huge low-gravity forests of their homeworld. They hadn’t seriously gone to war in generations, though being naturally good gliders and quite capable of flying on their home planet, they apparently made pretty good fighter pilots.

Too bad their bodies just couldn’t handle serious acceleration. Their reflexes were up to snuff, but the kind of G-forces a well-conditioned human or Gaoian pilot could endure would literally crush a Rauwryhr’s ribs.

“Still…” he mused as they paused to watch a white-tipped shark meander lazily by under the floor. “That’s a surmountable problem, I’m sure. Small craft aren’t really my field of expertise, but as I understand it it’s kinetic energy that wins fights. With the right training and equipment…”

Something caught his eye and he ambled toward the huge floor-to-ceiling reinforced crystal window. It looked like a structural weak point, but in fact that window was thicker and sturdier than most of the rest of the hull. He smiled to himself at the sight of HMS Caledonia drifting up the escort formation. She was a few kilometers away, and only visible thanks to her running lights, but it did his heart good to see her back in service.

If only her former XO was so easily mended. On a good day, his daughter was almost herself. On bad days…

He sighed and reluctantly put his anxieties aside. Doing so felt like mentally neglecting her, but Ellen had made it very clear on her good days that she needed her space and he needed to do more with his life than care for her. She had the very best in care, she had as much independence as possible…

“Anyway. I’m sure we can find somebody suitable to give a presentation on what we’ve learned about zero-G small craft combat,” he said, half-turning to be more welcoming to his alien counterparts. “If we can help your people find a—”

Caledonia went dark. Running lights off, shields to zero luminosity. For a moment he saw puffs of white gas where she’d been, a sure sign that she’d ejected dragon’s teeth.

“…Gentlemen, I think we may want to—” he began.

There was a brilliant, dazzling flash from somewhere further up the formation, maybe a hundred kilometers or more ahead of the Rich Plains. It was followed only an instant later by the rising mournful warble that was the ship’s emergency alarm.

Knight’s personal protection agent appeared as though from nowhere. His name was Spencer, a teak-hard man in his mid-forties, weatherbeaten and as tough as steel cable, and formerly of the SRR.

“Sir—!”

“Lead on!” Knight didn’t need any prompting. He bent his back and trotted smartly toward the core of the ship, guided rather than pushed by the firm hand between his shoulder blades.

Nobody else was moving with even a fraction as much intent. A lot of the life forms in the arboretum were simply standing around looking confused at the alarm.

Knight couldn’t just let them stand there. “Move, you bloody idiots!” he snapped at a trio of particularly dopy diplomats who were threatening to blunder into his path. “We’re under attack!”

That woke them up, and he didn’t much care if it was because of his words or because they’d been snapped at by a deathworlder. Either way the trio got moving, though with rather more panic than purpose.

And of course, panic could spread at a rate that made wildfire look pedestrian. In moments, the whole deck was an almost slapstick scene of unprepared civilians completely forgetting which way anything important was and running around desperately to no great effect. It wasn’t the concentrated crush Knight had sometimes seen among humans of a panicking crowd stampeding toward a fire escape, no. These were panicked chickens flailing around desperately in circles.

No time to help them. He and his protection agent plunged through a sturdy double door into the core of the ship, where the situation was not much better. Everything was clearly signposted, but those signposts were very obviously going unread.

“Don’t these people ever have emergency drills?” Knight growled as they turned a sharp bend down toward the human ambassador’s quarters, where his personal jump array was waiting.

“No,” Spencer grunted, then snapped at a milling herd at the bottom of the ramp. “Make a hole!”

They scattered like startled gazelle.

“Bloody hellfire,” Knight muttered. Things were damn well going to change on that score, if he got the chance.

“Yeah, that about sums it up…” Spencer bustled them both into Knight’s ambassadorial quarters, yanked open the closet containing the emergency Jump Array, and slapped the evacuate button. The Array thrummed as it booted up, and in mere seconds it was ready to jump a lone occupant to safety. “In you go sir, your friends should be waiting on the other side.”

Knight stepped into the booth and sat down in the chair, careful to keep his toes well back from the yellow line on the floor. “Good—” he began.

Thump

Jarringly, he found himself sitting on the receiving platform at HMS Sharman, several hundred light years from where he’d been. Already, SOR technicians were darting forward to help him to his feet. He looked back over his shoulder as they helped him off the platform.

“…luck,” he finished.

Date Point: 16y2m2w AV
HMS Caledonia, Rich Plains escort fleet, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Petty Officer Sachi Patel

“What the hell?! The whole picket just broke formation!”

Patel yanked her flash hood down painfully across her face. The mild discomfort of putting on the garment was temporary: without it, losing her face to a sudden blast of superheated air would be permanent. “So show them how it’s done!” she retorted, grabbing her gloves. “Ignore that shit and do your job!”

“Right!”

Chief Williams got his own gloves on and buckled himself into his console seat. “…Pat, bridge wants thirty for remote ward.”

Patel scanned her board, calculating furiously and balancing numbers in her head as she finished tugging on her second glove. “…Can do! Twenty from STEPUP, ten from NEGRAV.”

“Twenty STEPUP, ten NEGRAV,” Williams echoed. “Do it.”

“Aye aye!”

“TEMPSIT condition five.” Scott called from his station. They all sang out an echo of his words, confirming what he’d said while, behind the bulkhead to Patel’s left, one of the coolant pumps kicked up a gear to take up the slack of what promised to soon be a hell of a thermal load.

Despite her warning to Dye, Patel glanced up at the tactical board overhead. It was out of the way, there only for them to anticipate what the bridge and CIC might ask of them next. They didn’t really need to know what was going on outside the ship, they’d have their time full just balancing the power and heat loads.

Still, in the quiet moment before the first blow landed, she had time to see for herself what they were up against.

Seven ships. Big acceleration-to-mass ratio, meaning chunky power cores and strong engines. They were thousands of kilometers out, coming in from the fleet’s nominal “down.” In principle, the Dominion pickets should have closed ranks and made them fly into a blizzard of high-velocity projectiles, but instead the fleet was recoiling and spreading out. Great for creating a crossfire and minimizing each ship’s exposure to danger, but absolutely bloody useless for defending the vulnerable Rich Plains.

Only Caledonia and the Rauwryhr heavy picket Fearless had held their position in the formation, and the latter was on the wrong side of the Rich Plains. Dye’s frustrated outburst had been entirely justified. If they got swarmed and torn to pieces, Patel swore she’d be coming back specifically to haunt the panicky ET wankers who couldn’t follow a simple plan.

“Need eleven more for the shields.”

William’s level voice pulled her attention away from the screen. “Eleven, aye… eight more from NEGRAV?”

“And the rest from INERTCOMP.”

“Hope they like a rough ride on the bridge…”

Non-Essential Gravity was almost tapped. Inertial Compensation could give another few megajoules before things really started to get bumpy, and she’d already brought one of the step-up reactors online. It had a lot more to give, but an extra reactor meant extra waste heat, and getting rid of that heat was the opposite of easy. Bad idea to build up a thermal debt too early in the engagement.

They were going to build up a big enough one anyway. Remote warding meant extending Caledonia’s shields around the vulnerable Rich Plains and protecting it literally as though they were taking the hits themselves. While Cally’s shields had been upgraded and were now on par with a San Diego-class cruiser’s, taking the brunt of seven ships’ worth of incoming fire was…

Patel was just glad the capacitor was at 100%. They had a deep reserve to work with… and they were going to need it.

The lead attacking ship’s icon on the tactical board pulsed, and an instant later the first rounds battered against the shield. Patel grinned savagely as she watched their newest toy go to work: Backlash shielding.

The principle was simple: Shields worked by converting incoming kinetic energy to photons, and then radiating those photons. Traditionally, Dominion shields just got rid of that energy as a bright flash across the infrared, visible and ultraviolet. The logic there was fairly sound: it was easily the fastest and most efficient way to dump the energy. But the shields could just as happily radiate in gamma, or X-ray. And, with the right constructive interference, they could also radiate in a coherent laser pulse rather than an omnidirectional flash.

The result turned incoming firepower back upon its originator. The attacking Hunter’s volley was immediately answered by a barrage of gamma laser pulses and it veered aside, taking evasive action to escape the powerful strobing energies.

The tactic wasn’t free—Caledonia incurred some expense in that the shield systems needed to be aggressively cooled—but it was totally worth it.

The Hunters tried two more close passes, targeting first Cally then the Rich Plains. Both times, they were stung by the backlash system for their trouble and retreated hastily before their own firepower could truly harm them.

Maybe they could see just how hard Cally was working, because they pressed the advantage a third time despite the ravaging gamma radiation. Both the step-up reactors were now online, and the coolant pump on the other side of the bulkhead was producing a powerful thundering howl that Patel could feel in her bones. Even through her hearing protection, it was terrifyingly loud.

“Fuck me, can’t these bastards take a hint?” Williams groaned as they struck a fourth time and came around for a fifth pass even though they’d left one of their number tumbling and disintegrating as the backlash finally broke through and slagged the hull.

“TEMPSIT condition two!” Patel called, managing to announce it loud and clear even through gritted teeth. Condition One was when things started melting and catching fire. Sweat was pickling her face inside her flash hood.

Williams gestured to acknowledge he’d heard her and made the call. “Bridge, reactor. TEMPSIT condition two, taking Backlash offline.”

Taylor had more bad news for them. “Yellow line!”

Capacitor reserves were now below thirty percent. They were burning through megawatts of stored energy trying to keep the core systems refrigerated and hold up the remote ward and run their own vital systems and weapons… All Patel could do was watch their reserves dwindle toward the red line.

And then, suddenly, they weren’t.

“We’re receiving power transfer!” Dye reported.

Patel spared a moment to flick her eyes upward to the board. The Fearless had come around in the formation, braving the Hunters to beam a tight stream of energy into Cally’s WiTChES system. A little bit of power draw to the engines suggested that Cally’s helm officer was boosting them forward in the formation to place themselves in front of the newcomers.

It was enough to stabilize them, just. Not enough to rebuild a reserve, but enough for the reserves to hold steady and keep the shields up. Still, with the Backlash system offline and the thermometer crawling downwards only reluctantly, they were just a few good volleys from being overwhelmed and the Hunters knew it.

The Gaoians denied them their kill.

Clan One-Fang crashed the party like an avalanche. Patel wasn’t sure where they’d come from, but one moment Cally had been alone and fending off six attacking ships, and the next moment there was a three-way pincer strike streaking in over, below and around the Rich Plains’ bulk to catch the enemy in a vicious crossfire. The Rending Ember, the Blazing Fang and the Howling Sun, three of the Gao’s fastest and most powerful ships, smashed directly into the Hunter formation from all sides and flashed through it, leaving two of the Hunters as expanding clouds of shattered metal in their wake.

They were accompanied by the US Navy’s spaceborne pride and joy, the USS San Diego. A ship specifically designed to do what Cally had been doing for the last several minutes. Her remote ward was angled to cover Cally, the Rich Plains and their brave Rauwryhr helper, and it took the pressure off completely. The reactor team took the chance to vent heat as quickly as possible. From the outside, Caledonia would have looked like an opaque glowing cherry-red pill.

“TEMPSIT three!”

Up on the board, the Hunters tried to escape and ran straight into a new and terrifyingly fast contact that tore through them like a bowling ball through wet paper: Daar’s flagship, the Destroying Fury. Patel was still blinking at it when a voice spoke in her ear.

“Reactor, CIC. CAPSIT?”

With shaking hands, she keyed her headset. “CIC, Reactor. CAPCHAIN linked, we’re stable. TEMPSIT three, dropping. Green line in one mike.”

“Copy green line in one… It’s over. We won.”

Patel sagged back in her seat and shut her eyes, just for a second. She’d never felt anything quite as sweet as the relief and triumph that washed over and through her whole body and made her skin tingle. It was like she’d just shrugged off an invisible weight she’d been carrying for more than two years.

Now all she had to do was wait. Wait, bring the ship’s power systems back into balance, and watch the tactical screen when she had spare moments.

The fight didn’t take long. The Gaoians had an entire fleet at this point on permanent standby, and when they arrived it was with mass. They used Cally and San Diego as an anvil, and became a clawed, vengeful hammer that shattered the Hunters with a single decisive blow. Fighters boiled out of their wormholes by the dozen and scoured the battlefield clean.

From Patel’s perspective, the details didn’t matter. She’d done it. She’d weathered a battle, kept her cool and done her job. Everything she’d promised herself and the counsellor she’d do.

And Caledonia herself had come through it like a phoenix, renewed by the heat and fury of it all. She’d been taxed hard, but absolutely nothing had gone wrong.

It felt like an exorcism, a baptism and a rebirth all at once.

As the rampant scream of the coolant pump finally whined down to a steady thrum, Patel pressed her hand to the wall and felt the warmth through her glove.

“…Good girl, Cally,” she said, and smiled. “Attagirl.”

Date Point: 16y2m2w AV
Weaver dropship, Rich Plains contact volume, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

TSgt Timothy “Tiny” Walsh

All throughout the ordeal of becoming HEAT and finally earning the Mass, the one thing running through Walsh’s head was that one day, he too would serve at their level. Do the mission like none other. Walk through the dark places that nobody else could…

…And now, he was one of them, which was an odd thought to have in the last moments before their warp pulse flung them into the red. But if he ever wanted to fulfill that ambition of his and be the best that had ever been…well. He had a hell of a lot of catching up to do.

And it wasn’t like the Lads had been sitting on their laurels, either.

He’d seen some of them in action before he’d joined the HEAT. Still clearly remembered what ‘Horse looked like after he’d landed on some hapless biodrone, or the way Murray had become an invisible battlefield blur always popping up exactly where the enemy least wanted him to be.

…Or the way Firth had been a blitzing, herculean engine of murder clad in shorts, sandals, a horrendous Hawaiian-print shirt and the blood of his enemies.

Today, though, things were different. Everyone on the HEAT had only improved, so much they’d all had their armor upgraded yet again. The new Mark VII EV-MASS wasn’t any lighter, nor did it squeeze down any gentler—in fact they were a bit worse—but it was slimmer, tougher, less cumbersome, and had a couple of new tricks borrowed from the Gaoian’s rather larger box of technological wizardry.

First Fang had borrowed some of that tech too as part of their expanding combined operations, and they were on-board alongside the HEAT, amped up and ready to do the impossible—capture a Hunter ship intact. What made these ships so special, Tiny didn’t know. He didn’t need or want to know either, right now.

Red light. The moment came. Final gear checks, skull-shattering slaps on each other’s helmets. His wingman from First Fang was practically vibrating in anticipation. Hell, they all were.

The assault was blink-and-you-missed-it fast. They were on target, there was a colossal crash, the auto-breach went about its business. It didn’t take more than a few seconds, which was critical; they had to get on-board and start fucking shit up before the Hunters understood what was happening.

Warhorse and Righteous were at the front, with two gigantic bear-guys from First Fang right on their tail. Months of joint training meant everyone knew exactly what to do, and it all started with the pair of massive ballistic shields the Beef Brothers were hefting.

They breached. One hapless Hunter in the wrong place at the wrong time became a nasty smear of fractured bone and shattered cybernetics as ‘Base pasted it against the bulkhead with a simple body check. The damn thing didn’t even have the good dignity to die in a satisfying way, it just splattered and left a greasy stain all over ‘Base’s shield. The wall was left with a deep-ass dent in it though.

From there, their breaching formation split and proceeded down the hallway in either direction. Now it was all about clearing territory and sweeping the ship clean.

There were a lot of Hunters on-board. Almost too many to make sense. It wasn’t long before Tiny had his turn on point, and just seconds after that, he was gory to the armpits and beyond. This wasn’t the kind of fight where range counted for shit, this was a close quarters, in-your-face meat grinder.

Like most such things though, there wasn’t much thinking to it. His muscles knew what to do, he more or less just nudged his body in the right direction and let it do its thing. Map filling out on HUD. Lots of red dots ahead, ultrasonic SONAR filling in the details. Breach, assault. Bigger room, light ‘em up, service the targets.

Red hunter. Tougher, but they knew how to deal with it. His Stoneback battle-buddy Badger sprang forward, Walsh leapt to the side. Flank, attack, pounce, withdrawal. Shields broken, triple-tap with frangible ammunition.

Lots more red now, all over everything. Look at Badger. Rictus grin.

Walsh wasn’t sure how long it took to clear their way to the Hunter’s command station. They were moving very, very fast, faster than the Hunters could make sense of. It wasn’t until they’d hit the central hallway along the ship’s spine that any gravity fun showed its ugly face, but the HEAT had some new tricks up their sleeves for that, too.

For example: special suit functions that could be activated via non-vocal commands. Walsh double-clicked his tongue against his teeth, and the small fusion spikes in his feet and hands deployed. They’d tried the Whitecrest’s gecko-glove trick at first, but it was no good; every human on the team except for Costello and Forrest was way too heavy to stick. The spikes worked a treat, if you didn’t much care about stealth, or the walls being ripped to shreds in the process.

Tiny didn’t. When the gravity suddenly threw them up to the ceiling with about three Gs worth of force, he’d tucked under and planted his feet without even thinking of it. His in-suit computer had activated the spikes at just the right moment…

Now he was clawing his way up the ceiling and he didn’t give a fuck what the greasy fucks had to say about it. Badger was right along with him, growling to himself as he hauled his heavy load of breaching toys up toward where they might be needed.

Up ahead was where they were supposed to reunite with the other half of the team. They hadn’t known that at the outset of course, but on-the-fly map building combined with the Watsons in the fleet had allowed them to figure out the mission literally as they were executing it, to a degree of effectiveness that was frankly scary. No other operation Walsh had ever been on had been so utterly on-point. It was easy to feel like he was part of a perfect machine.

No machine was perfect, of course. There was a ship-shakingly loud explosion, followed by some truly beautiful Kentucky cursing over the comms channel.

“RIGHTEOUS, ABBOTT. Report!”

“Watch out ‘fer the big cyborg-lookin’ ones, they got bombs in their chests!”

FIC responded immediately, and changed the appropriate icon in everyone’s HUD to indicate the new threat.

“Mine went down easy enough.” That was Kodiak, First Fang’s ursine equivalent to Firth.

“What did you do?”

“Slammed forward an’ slapped it real hard innahead.”

Well. The team didn’t need telling twice. They pressed their advantage forward toward the objective, tackling and bludgeoning their way forward with more than a little satisfied glee. The regular Hunters were almost disappointingly easy targets to service. Regaari in particular seemed almost darkly gleeful as they advanced through the final group of hapless pawns. He clawed one, spun around and back-handed another so hard it had instantly died, then flowed through to fourpaw and hit the wall right as the gravity changed yet again.

He seemed to be predicting when it happened, too. Or maybe that was Walsh’s overactive imagination. In any case, they reached the command center, the funhouse was over…

Walsh caught his breath and considered things. They were here as much to capture the Alpha as to take the ship and the Whitecrests had already done it, pouncing over their comparatively larger cousins, springing off the ceiling and walls and disabling the hulking monster’s cybernetic limbs with sticky micro-charges and precision fusion claw slices. What little flesh it had left was twitching and snarling its futile rage at them from the prison they’d made of its own wargear.

There were times the Whitecrests scared the crap outta him.

Costello gave the hissing Hunter a kick. “Okay. Now how the fuck do we get this piece of shit into captivity…?” he mused.

Warhorse answered for him, by the simple expedient of grabbing one of its limbs and summarily dragging it back towards the Weaver. Its only working claws, unable to reach ‘Horse, instead scrabbled pathetically at the deck which left deep gouges in the metal but achieved nothing in the way of actual resistance.

“If it gets too uppity,” Firth ordered, “Punch it in the ‘ed.”

“I swear to God you’re actually an ork.”

“Naw, I’m prol’ly smarter than a fungus…. Somethin’ the matter, Titan?”

Akiyama was scanning the walls and Tiny could tell he was frowning even behind his helmet and mask.

“…Think I know why AEC wanted this one intact,” he said.

“You gonna share?”

“…Well, look. Everything’s modular, and it’s all small enough to come out of the nanofactory we found back there. Then they just built it like a giant Lego set. I haven’t seen anything on this ship that it couldn’t have built itself.”

“Meaning…?” Tiny asked.

Titan turned to look at him. Behind his visor, his eyes were deeply worried. “Meaning this is a fucking Von Neumann probe.”

…Well….

…Fuck.

Date Point: 16y2m2w1d AV
Diplomatic Starship Rich Plains, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr, Kwmbwrw delegate to the Dominion Security Council

It was difficult to ascertain exactly what part of the entire debacle was more humiliating. Was it their defence fleet’s cowardly and ineffective response? Was it the apparently effortless way the Humans’ re-forged ship had protected the Rich Plains? Was it how the Meat-Eater Gaoians appeared as if out of nowhere and pinned everything in place before the Hunters escaped?

Was it a heretofore unknown Human superweapon being deployed? The way the Destroying Fury had crashed into the midst of everything and systematically crushed all but one Hunter ship, which the Humans and Gaoians then apparently boarded?

That they took several Alphas as prisoners?!

No. Henenwgwyr decided the single most humiliating part of it all was when the Great Father himself showed up the next day in front of the Council and proceeded to methodically, thoroughly, and inescapably critique every aspect of their operation. His staff had produced training graphics, too. The effect wasn’t one of scorn, or of any kind of malice…

…He’d come across as a disappointed teacher.

He had, however, singled out one non-Deathworlder ship for praise. The Rauwryhr heavy escort Fearless had lived up to its name and held the line alongside the Caledonia, even supporting the Human ship with an injection of surplus power via some kind of shield-based transfer.

The Fearless’s shipmaster visibly swelled with pride as the galaxy’s most fearsome military leader commended his leadership and the courage of his crew. In the end, however, Henenwgwyr couldn’t help but suspect that flattering the Rauwryhr was part of the plan. Daar had a reputation for impeccable honesty, of course…

…Which made the following attempt at interrogating his motives the capstone of an already ignominious day.

“Why capture them, though?”

The Great Father prowled about on all fours like a predatory beast, and shook out what little of his pelt remained unclipped around his neck. “First rule o’ warfare, is ‘ya gotta know ‘yer enemy. An’ being perfectly honest, we’ve had it up to our nuts with the Dominion’s lack o’ strategy.”

“We have been managing, containing and surviving the Hunter threat ever since it first emerged,” Henenwgwyr pointed out. “Very successfully, I might add.”

“Which is wrong. ‘Ya don’t endure a threat to ‘yer people. You obliterate it! I won’t allow those [greasy-sacked, nutless, motherless demons] any more o’ my people as food!”

“Do not lecture me about whose people are being eaten, Great Father,” Henenwgwyr replied coolly. “More Kwmbwrw than any other species have been predated on by those monsters. Gaoian space is a long way from Hunter space, with the Great Houses in the middle. We’ve been fighting them since before we even invented steam power!”

“An’ yet here we are, riskin’ our own ‘ta put an end to it. You’re welcome, by the way. I’ve lit a lot of fuckin’ pyres on that point already, an’ I’m gonna light a fuck of a lot more before the job’s done.”

“We did not ask you to.”

The Great Father reared up on two paws and glared across the chamber floor at Henenwgwyr.

“You think I’m doin’ this for you? Given how the Dominion jus’ left us to our fate, I don’t particularly care what y’all think or ask for. It’d be a whole bunch easier to get this done, though, if y’all wouldn’t stop gettin’ in the way in the worstest possible ways. I’d imagine you’d be okay with that, seein’ as we’ve had actual success, an’ you ain’t hadta pay ‘fer it.”

“Success.” Henenwgwyr consulted her briefing documents. “…In the aftermath of your destruction of the Hunter orbital, Hunter raids into our territory increased by two hundred and twenty percent, with a commensurate increase in lives lost, captives taken, property destroyed and outposts abandoned.”

“When you strike hard at ‘yer enemy, they lash out,” Daar retorted. “Then, when they run outta food an’ resources, they stop lashing out ‘cuz they ain’t got nothin’ left ‘ta lash out with. You wanna tell the chamber where those levels are at now? Or should I tell ‘em?”

“You’ve destabilized the situation.”

“Yeah. I did. ‘Cuz the stable situation wuz’ bein’ complicit in an ongoin’ orgy o’ cannibalism. No civilized being is okay with eatin’ sapient meat.”

He chose those words specifically to needle her, Henenwgwyr could tell. Before she could come up with a retort, however, the council’s Rrrtk chairman sounded his chime for attention.

“I think the Grandmatriarch’s questions have been answered,” he declared.

“With respect to the chair, I don’t think they have,” Henenwgwyr replied. “I asked the Great Father why they saw fit to capture live Hunters, and the answer I received was something vague about ‘knowing your enemy.’”

Daar chose to answer. “Ah! The first intelligent observation of the day!”

“Great Father, I cannot have you insulting the members of this council,” the chairman warned him.

“I been here bein’ insulted on behalf o’ my own species ‘fer the last ten Ri’. I don’t blame ‘em, though. Sometimes ‘ya gotta get a lil’ feisty if ‘ya wanna get to the truth. Still don’t change the insult…but I note, yet again, the Council has not tabled any motion ‘ta discuss reparations under the governing Charter of this body. ‘Ya wanna talk about insults? How ‘bout that?”

“Masterfully dodged,” Henenwgwyr said, drily. “For one who professes to dislike this body and how it operates, you play our game very well indeed.”

“Ha!” The huge throwback carnivore had the unashamed audacity to chitter. Worse, he bared his knife-sized canines at her in a gesture that the translation panel in front of her said was only mostly amused and friendly. “I think I might end up likin’ you! But y’know what? ‘Yer right. I did just give y’all a vague platitude ‘bout gathering intel. An’ until such time as, y’know, everything we’ve talked about… That’s all ‘yer gonna get.”

“And what do your Human allies have to say on that point?”

“Dunno! Chairman, I yield my remaining time to my esteemed colleagues with the Allied Extrasolar Command.” With that he prowled back to his table, but not before a brief and frankly undignified show of affection for the elderly Human.

Well. Let there be no illusions as to who the Gao’s friends were. Nevertheless, Ambassador Knight managed to retain his dignity and stepped forward to stand composedly in the middle of the floor with his hands held lightly behind his back. It was an open posture, but not a submissive one.

“…Every conflict with the Hunters over the last sixteen years has taught us more and more about how they operate,” he said after a moment. “And they are adapting. Rapidly. We saw tactics in this skirmish that were wholly absent from the Battle of Gao, and our best intelligence says that there was a change of leadership among the Hunters after their orbital was destroyed. If so, their new leader is an order of magnitude more cunning… and commensurately more dangerous. With respect to the Kwmbwrw Great Houses’ proud history of holding the line against the Hunters, times are changing. The threat can no longer be ‘managed, contained and survived,’ the only option remaining to us is active warfare with the intent of neutralizing them. We can lay blame for who precipitated that change all we like, but doing so will neither stop nor reverse it.”

He turned to look at Daar. “And with respect to the Gao’s legitimate grievance over the matters of their homeworld and of reparations… We all saw how ineffective the Dominion fleet was when the attack came. That cannot be allowed to stand. Even if we were to simply manage, contain and survive the Hunters, it should now be obvious to everyone here just how capable Dominion forces are of achieving even that objective… and we all saw how necessary the Clans of Gao are to this fight.”

He turned back and looked Henenwgwyr firmly in the eye. “The Dominion requires a total overhaul of its military,” he said. “Every facet, from the ground up, must undergo the most ruthless introspection and improvement or else you will find yourselves crushed. And if that happens, it won’t matter whose fault it is.”

Elegant words, spoken like a true statesman. Meanwhile, the Great Father prowled back and forth in the background, using the rolling topology of his body to maximum intimidating effect.

The other Council members were clearly cowed by him, but not Henenwgwyr. She had his number. For all his menace and bluster, the Great Father was, it pained her to admit, not a danger. At least, not a direct one. She feared no military or economic reprisal from the Gao, they were too… unlikely to waste themselves in the effort. There were moments when the Meat-Eaters showed a flash of nobility, a whiff of civilization…they would bring no threat.

The same could not be said for the fruits of their barbaric recklessness, however. This Great Father was a dismayingly primal personality and about as subtle as a boulder tumbling down a cliff. His leadership relied on his personal charisma, which in turn stemmed largely from his preposterous brawn. Worse, his obvious intelligence rarely mattered. Daar got through life by thinking with his muscles and his gonads, vices that no great leader of any Great House could afford.

None of that boded well for safety or stability in the coming decades.

Ideally, in time, she would like to find a wedge to put between him and the Humans. For now, though… his reputation, indeed the reputation of his whole species, was of undying loyalty toward his friends. There was nobility in that, she was forced to admit. And the Humans had, it was true, been the only species to come to their aid when the Hunters attacked the planet Gao.

…No. Not the only one. Her eyes were drawn across the room to her counterpart from the Corti Directorate.

Perhaps there was a wedge there after all.

“…You make your case well, Ambassador,” she said to Knight. “Do you have a plan for where such reform should begin?”

“As it happens, I do.”

“Then that is a matter for the Security Council to discuss. A point of order for the chair, I believe the Clans of Gao have chosen not to attend the Security Council in protest. If we are to deliberate matters of military planning, which I believe Protocol requires can only be done in a closed session…?”

The Chairman nodded his head, slowly and deeply. “Indeed. Unless the Gao intend to re-take their seat in this Council, the Great Father can only give his testimony, not take part in debate or votes.”

Daar flicked an ear. “You know damn well we’ll only take our seat once we’ve got the reparations we’re due.”

Henenwgwyr accepted that statement and turned back to the chair. “I move that this session should now hear Ambassador Knight’s plan for military reform,” she said.

She stretched her back out as the motion was seconded and accepted. The ayes won it clearly, and the Great Father stalked out of the chamber without a further word before the chairman could close the chamber. Knight’s expression as he watched the Gaoian leader depart was unreadable.

The viewing gallery was cleared, and the chamber’s privacy systems were activated, sealing the chamber off from all outside observation. Only the sitting members and the officers of the chamber remained now.

“Very well, Ambassador,” the chairman said. “Please, let’s hear your plan…”

Date Point: 16y2m2w1d AV
Nofl’s lab, Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Meeyuk, Champion of Clan Openpaw

Meeyuk would, ideally, have wished for his first visit to Cimbrean to be for pleasure rather than business, but, well… When the Great Father called…

He’d found his meeting with the two Corti working on this case very interesting. Third Director Tran was a model Corti in every way, and about as approachable and warm as a spiky iceberg. But Nofl…

Nofl was…unique. That seemed the best way to describe it. He’d picked up a number of deliberate affectations that toyed with Human prejudices about males with high-pitched voices, and played the role to the hilt. Underneath the deliberately scandalous veneer, however, lurked a biologist of unmatched talent. It was he who had first developed the Cruezzir, along with the Gaoian- and Human-specific derivatives. It was he who had first made the connection between the Gao’s genetic oddities and their revealed ancient history.

Now, he was bringing those oddities to the surface in an audacious way.

“Think of the possibilities, darling! Your suppressed genetics code for all sorts of wonderful things! Better color vision, stronger bones—”

“—A more potent immune system…” Meeyuk felt the need to drag the conversation back onto less…ethically dubious grounds. Which, given the proposal, was a Keeda tale worth telling.

“That too!”

“How potent? Relative to, say, a Human?”

“I’m not sure anything but the Ten’Gewek properly match them, but let’s just say the potential is enough that the question may be academic, more than practical. After all, they had many millennia of evolving in urban squalor. That was denied your kind.”

Meeyuk duck-nodded to acknowledge the point and scratched at his whiskers while he considered their patient.

Leemu was heavily sedated, almost to the point of a dangerous overdose. Even then, the Arutech was fighting back by synthesizing stimulants in his cells. Its objective apparently was to keep him wide awake and blissed out of his mind by direct stimulation of every pleasure receptor in his brain. The chemical battle going on in his bloodstream was alarming.

“We’re risking acute toxicity on…multiple fronts. Balls.”

“Indeed. We’ve been continually filtering his blood since we’ve taken him out of stasis. That’s kept things stable, but…”

“We don’t have long.”

“No.”

“What is your proposed treatment plan?”

“We must first preserve his mind. I propose a strong antagonist be introduced to flush his reward chemistry as aggressively as possible. We will filter his blood of course, but we can’t do that for long before his liver is compromised. Simultaneous to this, we deploy a retrovirus to properly activate his immune system. We’ve discovered through our genetic modeling systems that this will require modifications to a gland located here, in the lower thorax…”

“Morko’s organ? Interesting. It’s involved in developmental signaling of course…”

“Yes yes. It’s the locus of your species’ rather alarming ability to adapt to cubhood stressors. As it turns out, it’s also critical to your proper immune system. There’s another complication. We, uh…oh dear. This is unpleasant, and we only just discovered it…”

“I am used to bad news at this point. Say it, I think I can guess it anyway.”

“The entire developmental pathway that unlocks all of this, not just what we’re targeting…is triggered by a single protein, coded on a single inactivated gene.”

“…A fucking lock and key.”

“Yes. We will need to unlock it. Which means Leemu here will be much more of an experiment than we had anticipated. Not even our computational resources can fully predict what will happen, I’m afraid.”

“For reference, we devoted the seven Prime Analytic Engines at the genetics college on Radius to this task,” Tran interjected, speaking for the first time in the conversation. “It is… rare for us to devote such resources to a single individual.”

“I’m… sure Leemu would be very honored,” Meeyuk said.

“He should be,” Nofl said, and told him just how much computational power Tran was describing.

Meeyuk could only boggle. He’d known that the Corti were the only species to have yet developed fully scalable quantum computing, but the numbers Nofl had just given him were so big they became abstract. He had nothing to compare it to.

“…Why would you do this for us?” he asked.

“Two reasons. The first is direct self-interest. You are our customers and we want you satisfied with our service. The second…” Tran shifted subtly, a sure and intense sign of slight discomfort which was a rare thing for any Corti to display. “…Problems like this do not come along often. Mysteries this subtle and this consequential are the things we aspire to unlock. Leemu is the test case for something profound, and it is a thing that will benefit both our species immensely. How could we not invest in this possibility?”

“The upside,” Nofl added, “is that we’re reasonably sure your species was engineered to tolerate introduction of this protein even as adults. The downside is we don’t know the second-order effects…but we are reasonably certain the first-order consequences will be manageable.”

Tran nodded. “There is one more thing you should consider. Most of your major racial strains remain fully under the lock and key that was engineered into your species…but not all of them. In particular, nearly all of the most meritorious members of your species are showing mutations along the protected regions. Some of that code has been expressing itself for almost a millennium now, and with each generation that lock degrades just a bit more.”

“So we’re going to face the consequences of this anyway,” Meeyuk deduced. “Be it today or a hundred generations from now.”

“Less, probably!” Nofl chirped happily. “Especially if Leemu goes on to breed…”

“If he recovers, I have no doubt he will. He’s…not an uninspiring example, to be frank.”

“That’s the Arutech at work. According to his friend Gorku he gained an inordinate amount of muscle and strength in a very short space of time with little relative effort.”

“Fair enough, but he had to have the frame to accommodate it in the first place. And I was referring to his face, to be honest. He’s handsome.”

Tran glanced at the patient with a blank expression. “…As you say.”

“Right.” Meeyuk shook his pelt out. “In summary, you would introduce a potent antagonist to flush his reward centers while simultaneously holding him unconscious, filtering his blood, introducing a powerful retrovirus, and activating this ‘key’ protein. The consequences of that will be manifold and profound, but will certainly cause a powerful autoimmune response.”

“Which we will then convince to react aggressively to the Arutech.”

“Which will require intensive care.”

“Yes. Intravenous feeding, the whole lot.”

“As for prognosis, you’re confident?”

“He stands a better than even chance of surviving, and a reasonable shot at full recovery. We do not make any claims about what the full activation of his genome will mean for him,” Nofl said, carefully.

“We can and do, however, pledge to provide our full support to him,” Tran said.

“And to his friends,” Meeyuk added.

“…I’m sorry?”

“Gorku and Mister Chadesekan. His recovery is going to be…painful. If he is to succeed, he will need companionship, and I suspect they will have their hands full with him for some time.”

“Very well,” Tran said distractedly. “We will provide material assistance to them as well.”

Meeyuk considered for a moment. This had been a far more complex debriefing than he had anticipated, and he would prefer to give it its full due analysis…

…But they were running out of time. The question of Leemu was eating away at the Great Father’s soul, all the Champions could see it.

“…Very well. You have my qualified recommendation,” he said. “I must go brief the others.”

“We’ll be here!” Nofl promised. Tran simply nodded curtly and returned to whatever it was he had been working on before Meeyuk’s arrival.

Meeyuk slipped out of the lab, paused and raised his nose in the air to sigh, and almost jumped out of his fur when somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

Champion Gyotin gave him his most infuriatingly calm pant-grin. “Something on your mind?”

Meeyuk shook his head to clear his thoughts. “The future, Gyotin.”

“Funny how that seems to be hinging on individuals recently, isn’t it?” Gyotin chittered, then gestured toward the embassy, just a short stroll away. “Shall we? The Great Father should be back soon. I’m sure you’d like to have cleared your mind a little before he arrives.”

Meeyuk duck-nodded, and they strolled away from the lab, taking their time. “My mind may never be clear again,” he confessed.

“That’s no way to live.”

“No.”

“Would you care to talk about it?”

Meeyuk composed his thoughts as they walked for a few hundred paces before replying. “…No, thanks,” he decided. He turned and gave his Starmind counterpart a wry expression and a flick of his ear. “I bet you don’t hear that very often.”

“Not often,” Gyotin agreed. “It’s a refreshing change!”

“What about you? Does it worry you?”

“I presume you mean the ‘lock and key’? Nofl briefed me just before you.”

“…And?”

Gyotin sniffed the breeze and tilted his head introspectively. “…No, on balance, it doesn’t.”

“We’re talking about unlocking genetic potential that was within all of us but sealed away!” Meeyuk said, stopping in his tracks. “Doesn’t that… I don’t know. Upset you? Change what the Gao are in some way?”

Gyotin scratched at this whiskers, then spoke as though he’d put a lot of thought into his words.

“…You are still Meeyuk, I am still Gyotin, and the Great Father is still Daar,” he said. “Every one of us figures out what that means for ourselves as we live, and the Gyotin of tomorrow might trip over something that changes his life beyond recognition. Life is a journey, my friend, and our nature is that we are travellers. If you change the road, does the traveller change too? Does damming a river change the nature of the water?”

“…You got me talking about it after all.”

Gyotin chittered. “You did that yourself! But… there you go. That is my opinion. The Gao will not change, only our course will. And that is how it has always been, throughout history and long before. I think to let this revelation change our nature would be to let the Hierarchy control us… and they lost control a long time ago.”

“That doesn’t mean this won’t be a terrible road to navigate.”

“No, but I suspect it won’t be as bad as you think. Look at us Champions, at our Clan leadership. Look at the leading lights in the Clanless. I am no geneticist, but you cannot tell me this ‘lock and key’ hasn’t already leaked quite a lot. Look at Daar and any of his cubs. You cannot tell me he isn’t already mostly there. What will we be like when everyone has access to their natural potentials? I think that will only be good in the end.”

“Honestly? Life extension aside, the rest of it doesn’t much worry me. The part that intrigues me is the notion of improved color vision. I think that more than anything would have the biggest impact on our culture.”

“Hmm. Yes. I’d almost be tempted to go through what Leemu’s about to just to see Red for myself.” Gyotin flicked an ear mischievously again. “Almost.”

They paused by the Alien Quarter’s central fountain. Humans loved fountains apparently, and had placed one at the heart of the Quarter to form the focus of a shared space. For some reason, they always flicked petty small change into it when they visited.

“Adding a whole new color to my life?” Meeyuk mused. “…That would be strange. But you’re right: Knowing it’s possible, I don’t know if I’ll be happy to be less than I could be.”

“Exactly!” Gyotin duck-nodded fiercely. “We are a competitive people. I don’t think many of us will be happy knowing we retain our true Deathworlder heritage and leave it at that. I will make a prediction: the Great Father will be among the first to undergo therapy once he’s convinced of its safety, and he will personally encourage the whole of the Gao to do so as well. He is… vexed by what was done to us. To a degree that isn’t generally appreciated.”

Meeyuk tilted his head. “Really? I would have thought he’d view it as cheating, somehow.”

“How so? It isn’t a lie. By that rubric, advanced medicine is a form of cheating as well. Is it fair to our ancestors that a grievous injury can be healed in seconds? That we understand how to eat correctly? That our primary education has vastly improved over the centuries? Could a literate, well-fed cub who stands virtually no risk of a crippling injury be considered to have an unfair advantage?”

“So this is just another unlocking of our innate potential to him.”

“I believe he will eventually see if that way, yes. As for me…I am what I am, and I will still be me if I ever decide to take the plunge. For the moment, I am content.”

Meeyuk found himself duck-nodding along in total agreement. Which meant, he reflected, that his mind was made up.

“…Well then. I guess it’s time for the next pounce in Gaoian evolution.”

“Or a throwback,” Gyotin said. “Any doubts?”

“Always. But not enough to stop me.”

“Very well. Shall we get to that briefing? I don’t like to keep the Great Father waiting…”

ESNN Magazine article: “Prisons In Their Head- an interview at Camp Tebbutt”
Author and photographer: Ava Magdalena Ríos

[Cover image: two men seated on a bench in front of a chain-link fence, with a stunning Alaskan vista behind them. On the left is a scruffy bearded white man with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair, and next to him is a bald Middle-Eastern man with a neatly groomed mustache. Each is holding up his name on a small piece of card: “Hugh” and “Mustafa” respectively]

In other circumstances, Hugh Johnson and Mustafa Nazif would make for an unlikely pair of friends. Mustafa is a well-groomed, dapper and highly educated former dentist, whose clinic in Cairo made him a very wealthy man, while Hugh on the other hand is rougher, scruffier, less conservative, and openly acknowledges that he used to be a so-called “Coyote,” a human trafficker who made his money smuggling undocumented migrants across the USA’s border with Mexico.

Both are permanent residents the Camp Tebbutt Biodrone Internment Facility, a remote CIA outpost deep in the heart of the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area. It is from this camp, earlier this year, that the man at the top of the FBI’s most wanted list, Zane Reid, was able to escape.

In the aftermath of his escape, Reid spread several video messages across the Internet laying out his manifesto and his accusations against the Federal Government. In reply, the Government was kind enough to open the camp’s doors to journalists and give us unfiltered, unrestricted access. We have permission, in President Sartori’s words, to portray the reality of this camp “Warts and all.”

There aren’t many warts.

[Image: a smiling woman in a wheelchair and hijab, holding a steaming cup of coffee as she trades jokes with Hugh. The two have obvious romantic chemistry.]

As the camp’s name suggests, all of its internees are former biodrones—humans with neural cybernetic implants who were unfortunate enough to have had those implants used to turn them into unwilling puppets of the alien agency known as The Hierarchy. Although some lucky few former biodrones had implants that could safely be removed, the ones at Camp Tebbutt are not so fortunate: their cybernetics are all deeply embedded, and are beyond the ability of even the most cutting-edge human medicine to remove.

In Hugh and Mustafa’s cases, the implants in question were installed deep in their brains specifically to biodrone them. They will forever be potential agents of the human race’s deadliest enemies.

Their stories of exactly how it happened are eerily similar.

[Image: Mustafa’s scalp, which is covered in a neat hexagonal grid of almost invisibly fine scars.]

How did it happen?

HUGH: “Like something out of a B-movie.” He laughs bitterly. “I was out in the desert south of El Paso. One of my contacts from the other side of the river was bringing a boat over that night and, uh, we had to move fast. USBP were damn good at their jobs, you know? I think I was just about at Elpadre Canyon when my car just… stopped. Engine cut out, I rolled to a halt. I got out and I was still scratching my head under the hood when there was this bright light like boom from above, and then:”

He snaps his fingers. “Hijacked.”

MUSTAFA: “I drove home from work as usual, a little late because I worked overtime with a rich client. My house was very nice, with a security wall and a gate. I drove my car through, locked the gate and then there was a bright light from above. I looked up, and…”

He trails off and shrugs.

“The next few months are like a dream that never really happened. I remember bits and pieces, nothing more. And what I do remember, I can’t even be sure if I remember it well.”

HUGH: “Yeah. Like somebody else lived your life for a while.”

MUSTAFA: “Which of course is exactly what happened.”

Both of you were more than just biodrones, though. You were host to an actual Hierarchy agent.

MUSTAFA: “Yes. ‘Six,’ he called himself.”

HUGH: “Evil. Real, honest-to-God evil. I don’t think I ever believed there even was such a thing as true evil until I met the Hierarchy.”

What did they do?

HUGH: “They… this isn’t the face I was born with. I was always kinda an average-looking guy, but Six and his lackeys surgically altered me. They got rid of all my distinguishing features… It took me a long time to get used to seeing a different face in the mirror. They did that to a few guys, actually. There were three or four of us, and you coulda sworn we were twins. Triplets. Whatever. I’m the only one left.”

He sighs, shivers and nervously lights a cigarette.

“…And, they used my body to commit a murder.”

Mustafa puts a hand on his friend’s shoulder, sympathetically.

HUGH: “She was an… investigator of some kind. A PI, I think. I guess she got too close to exposing the Hierarchy’s operation in San Diego, because Six had her killed, and used me to do it…”

He trails off. I can tell this is a deeply painful subject for him. I don’t press him for more details, and he doesn’t share any.

And after that?

HUGH: “Six wanted to… ‘poke the hornet’s nest.’ The Hierarchy still didn’t know much about mankind at that point, he didn’t know how we’d react to danger. So he decided to prod us and see what happened. He… tried to orchestrate a mass shooting.”

Tried to?

HUGH: “Yeah. Some sports event, a roller derby I think. I guess somebody in the crowd smelled a rat or something because the police arrived, shot one of the other biodrones dead and captured me. Or, uh, Six. Apparently they had to keep him in stasis for a few months so they could set up a facility to contain him, and… well. Here it is.”

He gestures around at the camp and the terrain surrounding it.

“I was Camp Tebbutt’s first internee.”

But Six escaped.

HUGH: “Yeah. I don’t know how, but he just up and left one day. He’d already told the interrogators everything, though.”

Interrogation?

*“Oh yeah! By-the-book, humane, totally civilized. No torture, this isn’t Guantanamo Bay and we’re not terrorists.**

[Image: Mustafa being taught a hand-clapping game by a child of about ten years.]

Some of you have families here?

MUSTAFA: *“Not here. My daughter, Civene, she stays with a foster family in Fairbanks. The Hierarchy took my wife as well as me, and she died, but—alḥamdulillāh—Civene was too young for them. Rather than intern her here, America found a family for her to live with, and she visits me.

HUGH: “The camp’s only permanent residents are implanted. Everyone else is either staff or a guest.”

Still, that has to be difficult.

MUSTAFA: “I would like nothing more than to live outside these walls as a free man, with my daughter. But I can’t. There are seven evil little devices in my head, the size of bees. I have seen the X-rays. Those are my prison. This camp? In the winter, I wish I could be back in Egypt, but in the summer it is a pleasant place to live.”

A recent Gallup poll suggested that one in four Americans don’t believe the Hierarchy is real. What do you say to them?

MUSTAFA: “Polls say many things that contact with normal people would suggest is not true. I am not sure I fully believe that. But even then, it is hard to argue with the willfully ignorant. They will see the truth one day, In’sha’Allah.”

HUGH: “I guess I can’t blame them. I mean, an alien mind control conspiracy? Twenty years ago that woulda been pure ‘turning-the-frogs-gay’ nutjob territory. How many people still think 9⁄11 was an inside job? Or that the moon landings were faked? The Hierarchy is way more outlandish than either of those… But it’s real, man. They’re real, and they want us dead. We’re in a f•••ing internment camp because of what they did to us! People are dead! You’re from San Diego, right?”

I am.

HUGH: “Can’t be many of you left.”

No, there aren’t.

MUSTAFA: “Then this poll does not matter. I will ask the camp doctor to show you my X-rays. They can see that, they can go look at where a city once stood. If they still wish to doubt…”

He finishes the thought with a dismissive shrug.

[Image: An X-Ray of Mustafa’s head. True to his words, there are seven bright white bee-sized masses scattered throughout his brain, each one extending fine silvery tendrils into the surrounding tissue.]

Medical exchanges with the Corti Directorate have achieved some amazing things recently. Have you heard of Rachael Wheeler?

HUGH: “The Byron Group explorer, right? Yeah, we heard about her. They say the Corti brought her back from the dead.”

Does that give you hope?

HUGH: “I guess. I mean… I dunno if I like the idea of having my whole head taken apart to get this s••• out of me.”

MUSTAFA: “Neither do I, but I like the idea of being a prisoner for the rest of my life even less.”

HUGH: “Truth.”

Have you been offered that as an option?

HUGH: “Not yet.”

Have you asked for it?

MUSTAFA: “We were told they need to perform a “thorough safety review” first. We do not know exactly what that means, but that is not surprising. We are kept ignorant of much news because of our implants.”

HUGH: “I sure know that if they’re gonna yank my brain out and dig the tech out of it, I want them to know what they’re doing first. I’ve been here a long time, miss. I trust the staff here, and I know they want us cured ASAP just as much as we want a cure. It’ll happen. We just have to be patient.”

The camp’s staff and commanding officer declined to be interviewed, but did provide the following prepared statement:

“Camp Tebbutt’s priority is the safe containment of people who, through no fault of their own, pose an immediate and grave danger to all the people of Earth, not just American citizens. We are acutely aware that our internees are victims rather than perpetrators, and do our utmost to treat them with the respect, dignity and humanity to which they are entitled. It is our hope that in the near future we will gain access to a means of safely removing their implants, at which point they will be released to rebuild their lives with as much support as we can offer.

“Until then, we will continue to provide them with as much freedom and autonomy as is reasonably practical. We reject the accusations made by Zane Reid, but will not comment further on the matter of his escape or his claims of inhumane treatment.”

For my part, as our helicopter takes off for the long flight back to Fairbanks, my lasting impression of Camp Tebbutt is a peculiar sense of community. The people here come from very different backgrounds and were thrown together by awful circumstances, but that seems to be a bond between them rather than a wedge. They have made friends, found love, grieved together and help each other through a daily necessary hardship.

These people have every reason to be broken and traumatized. Instead, they seem to share a peace and love for the simple things that I find inspiring. As we left, we were handed some freshly-baked Egyptian bread called Aish Baladi for the flight back.

It’s delicious.

Date Point: 16y2m2w1d AV
Folctha Jump Terminus, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Meeyuk, Champion of Clan Openpaw

“The Great Father will be proceeding directly from the Rich Plains and will expect an answer. I can imagine he will be demonstrating his, ah, usual patience with dithering…”

Meeyuk’s fellow Champions chittered nervously. They were five, in total: Meeyuk, Fiin, Thurrsto, Gyotin, and Wozni of Clan Shortstride. Meeyuk wasn’t quite sure why Wozni was present, but apparently it was at Thurrsto’s request.

Everyone listened to Thurrsto. He’d rebuilt trust in his Clan’s leadership after a couple of grave mis-steps by Father Regaari and the late ex-Champion Genshi, and if he thought something was important, then it was. He was one of the small retinue of towering intellects on the Champions’ council alongside Loomi, Gyotin of course… and the Great Father.

People sometimes forgot that Daar’s strongest muscle was probably his mind, and in that important sense, Thurrsto and the Great Father were kindred spirits. It wasn’t that Thurrsto was much of a scholar, though nobody could fairly call him uneducated. It was the fact that his mind was a scalpel that cut irrelevancies and “bullshit” out of everything until all that remained was the bare, lean substance of an issue. Nobody got anything past him.

Daar was much the same, if not more so. The difference was that, while Thurrsto was a calm, collected and deliberative man, Daar was the very definition of a mercurial creature. Generally playful and friendly, even gleefully cheery, he was not without his dark side and only the foolish forgot it. He could go from playful to murderous and back again in a blink.

“Are we certain we’re in agreement?” That was Wozni, who had a tendency to get caught up in detail. “I can imagine a number of objections—”

“Remember who we are briefing, Wozni. The Great Father values brevity.”

Sound advice indeed. If there was one true crime a Champion could commit, it was was to waste the Great Father’s time, and it was a sin he seldom forgave. Again, few were so stupid. After all, to pique the Great Father’s anger was to court death. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t so much as scratched anyone since the start of the War, outside of play-fights and combat. It didn’t matter that he was a patient and considerate man, to an almost legendary degree.

What mattered was his will. Daar had proven time and again that anyone or anything who stood between the Gao and their destiny wouldn’t survive for the barest moment against him. Nobody had ever forgotten the lesson of the late Champion Halti.

True to form, the Great Father arrived with his usual reserves of endless blustery affection for basically everyone, which contrasted strangely with the visceral threat his almost to-the-skin clip lent his appearance. He must have suited up again, or at least been ready for the possibility. He roared merrily and jovially, delivering hugs and crushing paw-pats to his Champions.

Meeyuk received special warmth in the form of an almost literally spine-shattering hug, followed by being pinned to the floor underneath Daar’s stupendously weighty bulk. It had been a while since they’d last talked, and that generally meant extra affection, complete with a wagging tail and a play-growl that would terrify anyone if they didn’t know Daar’s moods.

Meeyuk could feel his whole body going numb from the squeeze, so he flicked his ears back for mercy and somehow managed to talk without wheezing for air. “How did it go, My Father?”

“Like lecturin’ a smelly wall,” Daar grumbled, helping him to stand up again.

Meeyuk chittered. “I had heard that might be the case!”

“I’ll git through ‘ta Henenwgwyr one day…” Daar shook extravagantly, growled something in the back of his throat, and then brightened. “Anyway. I assume y’all met me here at the jump ‘cuz you’ve pondered on ‘yer advice?”

“Yes, My Father. Let me brief you…”

“When we git to the embassy. First, let’s set some blood flowin’ through our brains…”

Without a word more than that, he dropped to four-paw and sent Humans, Gaoians, dogs and aliens alike scattering out of his way as he charged toward the doors at what, for him, was probably an easy relaxing lope.

For most of the rest of the Champions it was a much more vigorous bout of exercise. Attending the Great Father was not for the weak of heart, spiritually or physically.

Only in Folctha would the sight of a foreign head of state plus his entourage choosing to run on foot from the jump terminus to the embassy pass mostly without comment. Folcthans were familiar with Daar, by and large. The town’s police force especially knew to leave him do what he did.

Then again, Folcthans were used to people charging around on foot in general. It was a well-planned city with short routes between all the major focal points. Pedestrian traffic was the norm rather than the exception, and it was home to a military base and offered powerful tax incentives for sticking to fitness programs. Joggers, runners, living battering-rams loping down the street… By and large, it passed with nothing more than a little amusement.

The Gaoian Embassy in the Alien Quarter had been redesigned around the Great Father’s foibles, too. It was a straight shot right through the front doors to the main conference room, and the way was thrown open for them as they arrived… and sealed up tight behind them as they piled in, panting and well-exercised.

“‘Kay!” Daar chittered as hs surveyed the Champions with his usual air of mischief. “Now brief me.”

He waited while they caught their breath, then listened attentively as Meeyuk and the others relayed the essence of what they’d learned. As always, he asked many piercing questions of each of the Champions in turn.

Meeyuk shared everything. The ‘lock and key,’ the long-term consequences not only for Leemu but for all of the Gao regardless of whether or not Leemu went on to sire cubs… He kept it brief and efficient, but spared nothing.

Daar didn’t need much deliberation to arrive at the only reasonable comment he could make about the entire mess.

“…Balls.”

“Yes,” Meeyuk agreed, with a slight chitter. The Great Father gave him the first amused look he’d worn in several minutes, and then his face furrowed into the almost-snarl that the more throwback brownies tended to while thinking.

“Well…I ‘spose there’s nothin’ for it,” he decided after only a few seconds. “Authorized. Tiyun, if you could…”

Tiyun, of Clan Highmountain, was the Great Father’s personal aide. He duck-nodded sharply, always eager to please. “Yes, My Father.”

Daar flicked his ears gratefully. “‘Yer the best, thank you. An’ when ‘yer done…take the day off, ‘kay? I brought a little somethin’ back for ‘ya…”

Tiyun duck-nodded and backed out of the room. Meanwhile, Daar sighed and fell to all fours, as if a great burden had been lifted from him. “Well, that’s one soul-crushing crisis dealt with,” he commented. “Though Thurrsto apparently decided there’s a second one to lay on me…”

“Two in one day? You’re very productive, My Father.” Gyotin joked. He was the most relaxed around the Great Father, which was something Meeyuk honestly had trouble getting his head around. Then again, he was probably the only one at the table that Daar couldn’t spin circles around, at least with words.

In any case, it made Daar chitter. He shot Gyotin a Look that promised mild and enjoyable retribution later, then returned his attention to Thurrsto. “I can manage more too… anyway. You said it was about Stinkworld. Garl’s still out in the field there, I presume?”

“And Meereo.”

“Right. Any word on how that’s goin’?”

Thurrsto was almost as relaxed as Gyotin. He turned to the so-far silent Champion Wozni. “Meereo says they’ve had a breakthrough, and he was so excited about it that he forgot how to dumb it down for those of us who don’t speak his language. I asked Wozni to join us so that he could make things a little more, ah, accessible,” he said. “I’ll defer to him.”

Wozni chirruped excitedly and fetched a notepad from his bag. Perhaps a bit paradoxically, he was rather like the Great Father in that he sometimes preferred paper over screen.

“Yes! Ah… here.” He clawed through it. “…We’ve figured out what the Irujzen node is.”

“Figgered that weird spacetime hole was more than just an art piece,” Daar rumbled. “What’s it do?”

“It’s… kind of the functional opposite of a Farthrow generator. It’s not a wormhole suppressor, it’s a wormhole booster. Space for hundreds of lightyears all around it is more… malleable, I guess. Wormholes form more easily, and are more stable. Stable enough to form single-end zero-point connections.”

Daar furrowed his brow again. “How…how in the fuck do you trick spacetime into doin’ something that fuckin’ magical?”

“We have no idea, My Father. We’ve only gleaned that through accidental discovery, when we attempted to set up a zero-point comms node. According to Meereo, the power required is…at least ten orders of magnitude less.”

Daar shifted and gave him a look of deep skepticism. “…Ten orders of magnitude.”

“At least. He’s running the realtime zero-point wormhole off a solar panel, My Father. We could call him right now, if we were on Gao.”

“I s’pose that explains how in the hells Six escaped from the Humans…” Fiin grumbled. “His cell was wormhole-suppressed.”

“Yeah. And I think it suggests that there’s one of these boosters somewhere in the volume around Sol.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s even worse, and only one end needs such a booster.”

“Yes. The receiving end. Meereo and his team is very confident of that for…” Wozni inspected his notebook and flicked both his ears uncomfortably. “…for very technical reasons that I don’t have time to go into. But the father in charge of the physics college over at Highmountain was…more than a little excited. They think the math says its possible, anyway.”

“It’s obviously possible ‘cuz we’re watchin’ it happen,” Daar noted drily. “Think we’ll figger out how it works?”

“Honestly, My Father? Not any time soon. But here’s the encouraging bit: the Hierarchy don’t seem to be watching it too closely.”

“…I remember when I was there, an’ the only things we really hadta worry ‘bout were snake-bears. I was expectin’ it ‘ta be a trap, we all were. Bestest friend was on edge the whole time. I unnerstand that a lot better now… Anyway. We chased this thing followin’ intel from one’a them, after all. How are they not watching it? How is it not a trap?”

Silence.

Eventually, Thurrsto filled it. “…If it’s a trap, it’s a very, very good one,” he said. “Baited with real damaging intelligence.”

Daar snarled and prowled the room. Such was his presence that it was hard to watch him roll silently across the stone floor and not feel intimidated. “…I think the only thing more insultin’ than bein’ an engineered slave-race o’ Janissaries ‘fer uncaring gods who are actually digital malware…is that they’re so tiny-nut incompetent.” He reared up on two-paw and made a vague, violent gesture of frustration. “I mean, fuck! How could anyone with resources like this just leave’ em undefended?!”

“They are very, very old, My Father. We don’t know if they are born, or if they die. Or if they have a definitive state like life and death,” Wozni said. “We do know that it takes literal centuries of training for them to even be able to interact with the physical world. Everything they ever built, they built it a long time ago. And it maintains itself well, it keeps ticking over… but I honestly don’t know if they have the knowledge to really understand it any longer.”

The Great Father, like he often did, made a rather impressive leap of analysis. “So…basically, they’ve drifted too far from what bein’ alive is an’ they’re dyin’, then. Er, succumbin’ ‘ta entropy, mebbe? ‘Ya know what I mean. An’ we’re in exactly the right place ‘ta inherit their legacy an’ kill ‘em, if we can ‘figger out out how ‘ta exploit what we’ve got.”

“There’s a certain poetic irony to that, isn’t there?” Gyotin mused. “Destroyed by their own creation.”

“There’s more, My Father.” Wozni shuffled through his notes. “We found a coal mine, of course. Every civilization needs steel and I am told coal is required for that. What we found in the mined-out parts, though…”

Wozni chittered nervously to himself, reached for his communicator and tapped a claw on it. What appeared on the wall was a picture of an endless-looking warehouse of…racks. All exactly the same, all completely featureless. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were.

Daar leaned closer, blinking as it sunk in.

“That’s… That’s them, isn’t it?”

“…I think so. We’re not certain exactly how they were assembled, but destructive analysis reveals the devices are, essentially, solid bricks of computational logic and storage. Each one has… incalculable memory and processing capacity, and that one bunker contains tens of thousands of them.”

Daar shook his head in disbelief. “…is Six actually insane?! He didn’t jus’ give us a leg up on intel, he gave us the means to obliterate ‘em!”

Thurrsto looked similarly appalled. “Meaning he’s either playing seven-dimensional underwater space Ta’Shen or he is, yes, utterly insane.”

“Or, ignorant about what Stinkworld actually is,” Gyotin suggested. “If he mistakenly thought it was some harmless peripheral system…”

“Never assume your enemy is an idiot,” Thurrsto said.

“…Hrrm.” Daar finally sat down again. “…Wonder what Yulna would have ‘ta say about all this? You did invite her?”

“She sends her apologies, My Father. Apparently there’s a certain birth she’s taking special care of.”

Daar reflexively glanced north, at a blank wall and the distant island far beyond it and hundreds of miles away over the sea where the Grand Commune lay. His ears pricked up, swivelled back and forth for a moment, then drooped.

“…Right.” He shook himself back into the moment. “So. More an’ more, we’re pickin’ a fight with our gods. Pretty much literally. An’ they ‘parently got godly tech, too. An’ they’re too stupid to realize it. Or too far gone.”

Fiin made the rumbling noise of a Stoneback channeling a thought from somewhere deep in his gut. “Gods or not, stupid and too far gone or not, it’s not like we have any option but to fight ‘em… Have we informed the Humans yet?”

“They don’t have anybody on Stinkworld right now,” Thurrsto said. “I thought it prudent to discuss this in council first.”

The Great Father sank to the floor and stretched himself out impressively with a teeth-flashing yawn. “Inform them.”

“Yes, My Father.”

“This all looks like I gotta go to Earth an’ make an extended visit, an’ do so with a delegation,” Daar decided. “‘Cuz I think what we just stumbled into, My Champions, is a path to victory. Either that or the meanest, most devious trap I ever did see.”

“How soon, My Father?” Tiyun asked. Meeyuk almost jumped: he hadn’t seen or heard him return. Good aides, it seemed, could be preternaturally discreet.

“…After Leemu’s therapy,” Daar decided. “However it turns out. Obviously it’ll hafta include all the AEC leadership, so…take ‘yer time an’ get it right. An’ didn’t I tell ‘ya t’go take the rest of the day off?!” There was a growl in his voice…but his tail was also wagging.

“I had a feeling you might need me again after all, My Father. Thank you for the jerky.”

“You an’ your damn perfect instincts…” Daar growled. “…Is there anythin’ else I need ‘ta know?” he asked of his Champions, who collectively indicated that there was not.

“Alright then. Meeyuk, you an’ I are goin’ up ‘ta the spaceport. The Empirical Razor’s waitin’ ‘fer us. The rest’a you…” Daar pant-grinned with a little more fang than usual. “…It’s Friday here on Cimbrean an’ I somehow suspect ‘yer Clans can manage without ‘ya tonight. Take the rest of the day off! Me, I’d highly recommend y’all go clean out Ninja Taco…”

Fiin in particular seemed to like the sound of that, and so did Wozni. Gyotin and Thurrsto both took the suggestion with characteristic understated good humor. Meeyuk wished he could go with them.

Instead, he had an altogether less pleasant appointment ahead of him.

One way or another, the future of his species was going to change once again in the next few hours.

Date Point: 16y2m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

One of the Human archaeologists was a metallurgist. Tilly was a strange and delicate name that didn’t suit her at all, Vemik thought. She had a sharp face full of metal piercings, skin full of bright pictures, and a half-shaven crest of hair the same shade of blue as a slush-ee.

She was…very pretty in a completely alien way. Slim like only a Human could be, narrow and sharp and angular. Vemik had trouble looking away, and Tilly had given him such a playful smile…

The Singer had caught him staring. He’d been apologetic, but that just made her trill, roll her eyes, and twitch her tail in a very telling way… Then shrug and walk away without saying anything but wearing a smug look.

Well! Vemik wasn’t going to let permission like that go to waste! Especially not when the much more important reason he wanted to talk with Tilly was that she knew a lot about metal.

Bronze was an interesting thing. According to Jooyun, Humans had discovered it before steel. According to Tilly, it was made from two other metals, called Copper and Tin. All Vemik knew was, the little pieces of it that the archaeologists found at their dig site came out of the ground covered in a vibrant blue-green powdery scale, and it was Tilly’s job to do… something with them. She spent a lot of time carefully cleaning the dirt off them, then placing them under various strange tools.

Vemik didn’t know what any of them did, but she was kind enough to show him when he asked. The micro-scope was amazing! She had to turn the light down for him—Humans loved painfully bright light—but it let Vemik look at very, very tiny things and see everything!

“You need to be careful, this equipment needs a gentle touch. Gentle isn’t exactly a cavemonkey specialty…”

She was teasing him, the way any woman teased a man she liked. Vemik trilled and played along.

“I can be gentle…but I very strong too! I show you!”

She rolled her eyes as he bounded away across the site, which just made Vemik trill harder. He wanted to do her a favor! Something she’d want near their plastic huts—there! The Humans kept clean drinking water in big round blue steel cans near the river and their filter, which were tall and big enough around the middle that Vemik couldn’t get his arm completely around. They were heavy when they were full too, so much that Jooyun was the only Human there who was strong enough to easily move them around. Even then, he had to wrap both his big arms around the can-things and hug them to his chest, which made him walk more like the People than a Human. He could do that just fine…but it made him tired if he had to walk like that for too long.

Not Vemik. He was stronger. He had longer arms too, so he wrapped them around two and brought them both back! Easy!! He even bounced nice and big for her, because every Human he’d ever met always grinned when he jumped high above their heads.

“Not a problem! See?!” Vemik rolled each up onto a shoulder and snarled playfully, then jumped as high as he could. It wasn’t as good as Yan could do, but he could still jump higher than everyone but Jooyun!

Tilly’s reaction was a little disappointing. “…Thank you. Put them over there, please.” Her tone wasn’t impressed. More kind of dry and patient, though she was smiling.

Vemik frowned and set them down where she asked, then knuckled back to get a look at her face. “…Did I make you mad?”

She laugh-sighed and shook her head. “No Vemik, but if you’re trying to impress me… you’re barking up the wrong tree, honey.”

…Well. He could feel himself sag unhappily. “Okay,” he said a bit sadly. It had been a long time since a woman said no to him, but a man always stopped when—

“That was impressive, though,” she admitted, and Vemik sat down again feeling a little better.

“I kinda figured it’d only be a matter of time before you wanted to pick my brains,” Tilly added, sliding a little bronze disk into another machine. This one had those strange yellow-and-black triangular pictures on the side that Vemik knew were meant to warn that the thing was dangerous in some way.

“Yes! But what does that mash-een do?!”

“It’s an X-Ray machine. It… uh… looks at the coin with a special light that we can’t see, and lets us see inside it.”

“That Humans can’t see, or the People?”

“Neither. But it’s dangerous light. I don’t know if I can explain exactly why…”

Vemik sat, and listened, and asked questions. This all had a purpose beyond spending time with an interesting woman. His bawistuh project had hit a snag, and he needed to know more about steel in order to fix it.

He’d caught a glimpse of what he needed on Earth-place, when he’d picked up the back end of their ‘Suh-burb-en’ one day and looked at how the wheels connected to the steel box they rode in. With springs! two of them, one curled up like a man might curl his tail if he was sitting down for a long time…of if he had a pretty woman in his lap, even better…

…But there was also a leaf spring. Which looked suspiciously like a lam-inated bow!

Heff had growled at Vemik after a little while so he couldn’t look for long. He didn’t want to make the short Human angry, so he put it down gently while Jooyun chuckled. Heff was…strangely scary, somehow. Even if he was friendly. Best to stay on his good side. But the idea had stuck, and when he’d first sketched his bawistuh design, he’d been thinking of that leaf spring.

So, he’d tried to make one. The result had been… It had just bent and stayed bent, then snapped. In the end he’d reforged the steel into knives and spearpoints, and they were good knives and spearpoints, but no good at all for making a bawistuh. He needed supple, strong steel that would bend and snap back when whatever was bending it let go, like a tree branch. He knew it could be done, and he knew what the Humans called it.

Spring steel.

He had no idea how to make it though, and steel was too valuable to just throw away on endless tinkering. It took the whole village a moon or two to prepare for a new melt.

That just left Human knowings. He needed either a Human who knew about metal, or a book to read. Or both!

Tilly, it seemed, wasn’t as immune to his charms as she liked to pretend. She chatted happily with Vemik about bronze, and he found it pretty easy to guide their talking toward steel instead. High carbon, soft steel, spring steel…

“I see it on Earth-place. Would be very useful! But I can’t waste good charcoal on so many melts for tinkering…”

“That makes sense. I always wondered how ancient humans first invented their techniques, you know? Did they just find things by accident, or was somebody rich enough to actually experiment?”

He’d wrapped her up in his tail and taken her high up in a Ketta to watch the sunset, her arms nicely hugged as far around his shoulders and chest as she could manage. If she maybe seemed like she was enjoying what she felt, Vemik didn’t say anything…

It was a pretty tree, too! The wind through its canopy tasted like fresh flowers and fruit, It had a comfortable branch very high up that could hold even Yan, and it also had a good view towards the east. Vemik found it a little too bright—even when low on the horizon, the sun was still blinding, and it washed all the color out of the world—but Humans could look right at it at the very dying of the day, when it was touching the world.

To be able to stare unflinching at the very home of the gods themselves…!

The other advantage to being that high up was that Professor Daniel wasn’t in earshot.

“I mean, lucky for you, spring steel isn’t that hard. The big thing is, you’re using a water quench and cold water makes for very hard, very brittle steel. I’m guessing a few of the blades you make just break when you quench them, right?”

“Some…” Vemik admitted. “But I use hot water. It helps.”

“It’ll help, yeah, but there’s this problem with… we’re getting into something called the specific heat of a liquid, right? It’s… how much energy has to go into it to make it hotter. And water has a pretty high specific heat, it takes a lot of energy. So it sucks all the heat right outta the metal very quickly. For spring steel you wanna quench in something like a light oil, so the metal cools more slowly. Aaand, I probably shouldn’t be telling you any of this…”

“I won’t tell Professor Daniel.” Vemik promised. She laughed and looked toward the sun again, kicking her bare feet lightly in the breeze. He kept his tail firmly around her waist because she didn’t have much tree-sense just yet, but Humans learned to mind their grip very fast.

“…So were you just flirting with me for information, or are you actually interested?” she asked.

Vemik hooted, trilled and decided to be honest. “Both!”

“Cheeky!” Tilly grinned, and then suddenly grew very quiet. “…Have our people ever…?”

“No. We could, the People and Human men, mostly the same shape. Not like Gaoian.” Vemik shuddered slightly, then looked at her, grinned, and puffed out his chest a little bit. “I think, the People mostly bigger! Maybe you say no because I too much man for you…”

Vemik earned some rolled eyes and a grin she tried very hard not to show. “You certainly think highly of yourself! But…” She looked him over quick while pretending not to, and blushed slightly. “Well, it would be a brave gal who took you on, that’s for sure.”

Vemik gave her his friendliest fang-filled sideways snarl. “I can be very careful, Till-ly! Also! Is very brave woman who visit other worlds! And let cave-monkey take her, uh…hundred meter up into Ketta?”

She laughed. “Flattery will get you nowhere…” she said, but the wink she gave him said otherwise.

“Maybe… But will it get me spring steel? Ooh! And how it works!”

“How it works? That would take a trip through quantum mechanics, and be just as hard to explain as magnets. Which is funny because it’s the same thing at the bottom that makes both work!”

“Okay. But how to make it?”

“I could get in a lot of trouble… Or, well. Daniel might give me a telling-off at least. It’s not like there’s an actual law against telling you anything…”

“Maybe…” Vemik thought quickly. “Well, the People are strong, and the gods gave us the forest. Nothing here smarter, nothing stronger. Not many bigger. But the gods made stronger things on the grass where there is more room, teach us that always, there is bigger, meaner thing…but sometimes, Brown One get jealous of the forest, and prey on us.”

“I know. I saw the drone footage…” Tilly sighed and turned to look eastward toward the plains. “…But I mean, the whole point of not just shooting the thing was you guys have to do it yourselves. Otherwise we’re Taking from you, right?”

“That Brown One will prey on us again. The People…make very good food. They stop wanting to eat other things. And when he attack us again, many of us die Taking it. I’ll be there. I don’t want to be eaten. When I Give my body, it will be to the tribe. In many hands of years I hope.”

She shivered, glanced guiltily at Professor Daniel’s hut, then sighed. “…Alright.” She half-turned on the branch to face him, looking suddenly very serious. “So, like I said, you’re gonna need to find a way to make a light oil…”

“Start from roots and climb up. What is oil?”

“…Oh boy. Okay, basics first…”

They sat up in the tree going over what oil was and what Manganese was, and what alloys were and other things until the sun was gone and the night-creatures were singing their quiet song among the trees. Vemik carried her down to the ground while there was still enough light for a safe climb, and she promised to order some books.

She had warned him that he’d need to make a very deep study of much of Human sky-magic, and that Professor Daniel would almost certainly find out sooner or later.

That didn’t matter. The Professor meant well, and Vemik trusted him—respected him—but he was not a man of the People. He couldn’t tell any of them what to do. So long as the weapon was ready before the Brown One tried to Take the People again, that was all that mattered.

Tilly surprised him by giving him a funny sort of kiss, right in the middle of his face where Humans kept their nose. Then she went back to her hut with a grin and a giggle, and Vemik went back to his.

He had many thoughts spinning through his head, but the Singer was waiting for him and had left the baby with her sister for the night.

“Fun time?” she asked, baring her fangs in a cheeky grin while her tail twitched suggestively.

“I learned much!” Vemik hooted. “No ‘fun’ though.”

Singer actually seemed disappointed in an amused way. “Why not?!”

“Eh. Humans.” Vemik shrugged. “I think she’s a little scared. She wants to, though!” He snuggled up to the Singer and wrapped her up completely in arms, legs and tail.

“Hmm.” Singer’s tail batted against the back of his head. “Seems a shame to waste an evening…”

She surprised him by twisting, pushing, and pinning him on his back so she could nip him playfully on the side of his neck. “Maybe she wants a stronger man!”

That got his fire going, and he was proud that few men could claim Singer at all. Mostly, she claimed them. She was a strong woman. But Vemik was a strong man and could flatten almost anyone these days. He broke out of her pin and tumbled them both over, pinned her in turn, then bore down on her with the hardest squeeze he could manage.

She gasped as he smashed the breath right out of her lungs.

“Maybe I show you strong…”

He had his fun that evening after all.

Date Point: 16y2m2w1d AV
Governor-General’s Official Residence, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Governor Sir Jeremy Sandy

“…Well, look at them!”

Sir Jeremy discreetly half-turned on the pretense of putting his drink down and studied the new arrivals. Folctha’s most famous family were being introduced to the other guests by Ambassador Rockefeller, and he had to agree with Annette Winton’s quiet exclamation. They were quite a sight.

Apparently Miss Chang and Miss Buehler had decided to make fashion statements of their pregnancies and were wearing dresses that subtly accentuated rather than hid the fact. A sleek, dark blue cheongsam in Miss Chang’s case, and a dignified wine-bottle-green piece for Miss Buehler. Not a foot wrong there, as far as he could see.

They were accompanied by frankly the three most handsome males in the room, two of whom weren’t even adolescents yet. The young Buehler brothers cut charming figures and looked strangely comfortable to Sir Jeremy’s eyes… But the same could not, alas, be said for Mister Etsicitty. All the tailoring in the world—and he was exquisitely tailored tonight—couldn’t make him look like he wasn’t far out of his element. And where Miss Buehler’s solution to her nerves was straight-backed composure, his was more…

“He looks like a friendly caveman who has no idea what to do,” Winton sighed.

“Indeed. I think that will pass, though. I’m told it was a task to bring him ‘round on formalwear.”

“I suppose I can’t blame him. The poor man spent six years all alone, after all. It’s a wonder he’s here at all. I daresay I’d be a wreck.”

Sir Jeremy smiled as he watched the Ambassador introduce the family to the Duke of Oxford, who had a knack for setting nervous newcomers at ease and a good way with young men. They were in good hands.

“Anyway,” he said, deciding that the best thing for the newcomers was if they weren’t stared at, “You were saying about the Goldpaws.”

“Ugh, yes. They’re fiendish!” Winton stopped watching the family and returned to her previous complaint. “Do you know, their negotiators are pushing for seven percent? And they’re managing to make it sound almost reasonable!”

“I’m sure they are saying the same of our people…” Sir Jeremy replied, evenly.

“I should jolly well hope so!”

That conversation, and a half-dozen others much like it, meant that by the time the guests were called to sit down for the first course he had worked up quite an appetite.

He’d used what influence he had to ensure that the space explorers and the young men with them were seated close enough to make easy conversation with, and to overhear.

It had, sadly, meant sitting them at the same table as Nick Woodward, the man who owned half of New Botany and all of its sheep. The uncharitable joke that he’d married one of them was of course absolutely not welcome at an event such as tonight’s dinner, but it was very true that Diane Woodward had a… a certain ovine thoughtlessness that her husband was unfortunately quite blind to.

One that lamentably manifested itself in a pointed comment about the value of traditional marriage and how many people should be involved.

That revealed an interesting dynamic right away. Allison briefly had a look of cold fury on her face, but a hand-squeeze by Xiù bade her to hold her tongue. With that encouragement, she successfully adjusted her expression into one of utter blank neutrality that was arguably even more intimidating, and focused on her soup.

Julian…handled it with a folksy and surprisingly effective diplomacy.

“I mean…that’s all true. Being honest though, we didn’t plan any of this. We were, uh, all alone out there, y’know? Things just sort of…fell into place. We needed each other. Still do. It isn’t traditional, but heck, neither was being abducted by aliens.”

“Nor is raising another family’s children,” Mrs. Woodward commented, sharply.

“No, it’s not. Uh…Their mother means well, I think. The tradition just…didn’t work out. And it wouldn’t have been, uh, Christian of us to turn them out on the street when they showed up.”

Sir Jeremy awarded that round to Mister Etsicitty.

“And what do the young men themselves think?” Woodward asked, leaning forward to look past him at the smaller figures on his far side.

Another interesting dynamic manifested in the way the brothers glanced at each other, not nervously but in a moment of communication. Clearly they’d been put on the spot in moments like this before.

“…We believe in keeping family matters private, ma’am,” one of them said after a moment. Sir Jeremy almost laughed at the precocity of it.

Julian, however, was not so amused. He leaned forward and gave a very faint growl. “You do not put them on the spot, ma’am. They are innocent. If you have issues with any of this, you are welcome to say it to me.”

His tone was quiet, assertive, and polite. He really didn’t need to be menacing at all; his rather unique presence did the real talking.

Sir Jeremy decided that, so far, Etsicitty had handled a rude socialite with aplomb. But the time had come to help him quit while he was ahead.

He leaned over and spoke at just the right volume to make himself heard. “Mrs. Woodward, I did not invite you to this occasion to harangue our Special Envoy to the Ten’Gewek, nor harass his adopted family.”

Mister Woodward had turned beet red. “Dear…”

It belatedly dawned on Mrs. Woodward that she was Committing A Faux Pas. She bleated out an apology, and hastily changed the subject to something more anodyne.

Julian’s mannerisms were definitely much more formal and distant for the rest of the evening, though. Shame.

Bringing the young brothers along had absolutely been the right call. One normally wouldn’t do such a thing, but their obvious composure contrasted well with Julian’s polite uncertainty. Well…mostly uncertain. Regarding his family there was absolutely no doubt where his priorities lie. They were just as much a guide for him through the dinner jungle as Xiù, and it was clear he was absolutely smitten by all of them.

In fact, Xiù was the real gem at the table, and managed to find an inroads to getting Julian and Nick talking about livestock, a conversation that dominated the main course and dessert as far as Sir Jeremy could tell. One little nudge in the right direction at the right moment, and she steered the conversation effortlessly onto something both substantial and agreeable to all involved.

With that table firmly in such capable hands, Sir Jeremy felt able to relax and spread his attention more liberally to his other guests.

He was drawn back to them, however, by a comment from Miss Buehler as the coffee arrived.

“…Mind you, the real enthusiast for livestock would be D— uh, the Great Father of the Gao,” she said. “His Naxas herd is huge.”

“And he likes nothing more than wrangling them himself,” Xiù agreed.

“Well, good on him!” Nick Woodward agreed. “It’s good to stay in touch. You’ve gotta know how to handle them on the ground if you’re gonna own them.”

“It’s hard to imagine the big fella wrangling sheep, I gotta be honest. Naxas are…ornery. That’s what he likes about ‘em.”

“Are you kidding? He’d love it!” Allison said. “He’d play sheepdog.”

Xiù nodded with a merry giggle. “He’d make the joke himself if he were here, too!”

“…You’re acquainted with the Great Father?” For the first time that evening, Diane Woodward looked impressed at them.

“Yes, we all are. He…maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but the last time he visited, he gave both the boys a ride on his back.”

“He can go so fast!” Tristan blurted out with a massive grin. His brother kicked his ankle under the table and again Sir Jeremy had to stifle the urge to laugh. There were real children under there, not just perfectly polite little princes.

“Yeah,” Julian chuckled, “He’s the kind of fella who really, really just wants to be a regular guy. But nobody else plays the game as good as he does, so…”

“I had no idea you were so well-connected!” There was the Diane Woodward thoughtless streak again. She really was appallingly artless. Behind her, her husband visibly resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands.

“I believe Miss Chang is also a personal friend and confidant of the Mother-Supreme,” Sir Jeremy interjected, and gave the subject of his comment a twinkling smile to let her know he was on her side.

She smiled warmly at him, and then nodded for the Woodwards’ benefit. “Friends, yes. And both are very much the kind of friendships where we try not to impose.”

“I… see.” Diane cleared her throat.

“Well, if he ever wants to play sheepdog, I’d be honored to give him the chance,” Nick said, hurriedly. “A man like him works hard and plays hard, I bet.”

“If it ever comes up, I will let him know,” Julian said amicably.

Satisfied once again that there would be no Incidents at that table, Sir Jeremy returned to conversing with his table-guests and was able to safely put the Woodwards, Buehlers, Etsicitty and Chang out of his mind for the rest of the night.

He met Rockefeller’s eye before he did so though, and they shared a mutual moment of satisfaction. Sir Jeremy tilted his wine glass toward the Ambassador in a gesture of acknowledgement, received a similar glass-tip in reply, and that was that: In front of the right people, the Special Envoy and his family had said and done the right things. The test, in fact, had been passed with flying colours.

And thank God, because frankly he had no idea what they’d have done if it hadn’t been.

Date Point: 16y2m2w1d AV
Lakeside, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Julian and Allison were never more frightening than when they were frozen over with cold fury. Both of them were pretty much on the same wavelength when it came to that particular emotion.

Only the fact that it made the boys nervous stopped them from really indulging in it. They softened up the moment they realized they were making Tristan and Ramsey tense. Still, it was there under the surface. Neither of them shed anger quite that easily.

They buried it well enough until they were home and the boys had said their good-nights and gone upstairs, though. At which point Julian yanked his tie off like it was a snake trying to bite him.

“Fuck!”

“Ugh, yeah,” Allison agreed readily. She flumped down onto the couch with a groan. “‘I didn’t know you were so well-connected!’ What a bitch!”

Xiù sighed and decided they all needed some tea and the chance to chill out. “She’s just got more money than sense,” she said, heading into the kitchen. “Don’t let it get to you. Come on, the rest of the night was pretty good wasn’t it?”

“Whose idea was it to stick us on that table, though?” Julian complained.

“Probably your boss,” Xiù opined. “I doubt it was an accident.”

“Lovely boss you got there, baby,” Allison griped to Julian, who sighed and shrugged off his jacket.

“I bet he’ll explain it all later on and it’ll be all reasonable but… ugh. Fuck it, I’m gonna go downstairs and blow off steam. I have to get ready for this Corti-slash-Ten’Gewek summit in the next little while too. I’ll…be up later.”

Allison sighed. “I wanna lift heavy stuff too, now.” She looked ruefully down at her belly and massaged it through her dress. “…Probably a bad idea.”

“That’s why I’ve made you tea,” Xiù said firmly. She set the cup down firmly on the coffee table and Allison pulled a face.

“Tea? Really?”

“Really.”

Al sighed again. “…Yes ma’am.”

“Good girl! You should have one too, bǎobèi.”

Julian shook his head. “I got energy to burn off. Feel like I’ve got fuckin’ bees under my skin.”

Xiù nodded sympathetically, and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. He stooped to kiss Allison as well, then thumped his way to the basement, dropping his expensive clothes as he went. A few minutes later, the pounding sound of heavy metal managed to faintly penetrate the floor.

If there was one downside to the way he’d built himself up over the last several years, it was his new surplus of aggression. Intensity was hot, but Xiu definitely preferred Julian when he was a sleepy wolf rather than a caged bear. She sighed to herself and picked up his clothes.

He’d probably be much cooled down when he came up.

“…I should help,” Allison said guilty as Xiù grabbed some clothes hangers from the laundry room and made sure the jacket and trousers at least weren’t going to get creased.

“You’re fine,” Xiù promised her. “I like taking care of you, remember?”

“I know, but… Ugh.” Al sipped her tea, and Xiù suppressed her amusement at seeing her not want to admit how good it was. “…I feel a lot like he does right now. I wanna be doing… something.”

Satisfied that the expensive clothes were safe from harm, Xiù sat down next to her, cuddled up, and kissed her. “I know. I’m really proud of all of you.”

“You are?”

“Of course! She really was a bitch.”

Al snort-giggled, sipped her tea again, then set it aside and wrapped her up in a hug. “…Wo ai ni. You always know what to say, I don’t know how you do it.”

Xiù felt her face glow happily. “You’re not bad at saying the right thing yourself…” she said.

“Hmm… Oh! I think I’ve settled on a name. And I know Julian will like it, so I wanted to see what you think.”

Xiù sat up to look at her. “Okay, fire away!”

“What do you think of Anna?”

Xiù couldn’t help giggling. “…Yeah, he’s gonna love it.”

“And what do you think?” Allison insisted.

“I like it too. Is having a name that starts with A gonna be a tradition, or…?”

“Well, my grandmother was Amelia, my mother is Amanda… so yeah, there’s a theme there.” Al frowned at herself. “…Is that weird? I mean, I don’t exactly like my family, but I kinda want to keep that going…”

“It’s worth remembering where you came from, I think.”

“…Yeah…” Al picked up her tea again. “So. Anna?”

Xiù picked up hers and tapped the cups together. “Anna.”

Al looked down and toasted her daughter. “…Here’s to giving her a good family.”

“Gānbēi!”

They drained their cups, and Al stood up to refill them. All in all, Xiù decided, as much as she liked a good workout herself, she preferred this way of chilling out after a stressful night. And when it came down to it… dealing with one snooty nouveau riche socialite was a small price to pay for what she had now.

Now if only she could teach Julian and Al how to let the little stuff like that slide off them, things would be about perfect… Or…No. They were who they were, and she loved who they were. She loved their passion.

She wouldn’t change that for all the worlds.

Date Point: 16y2m2w1d AV
Directorate Starship Empirical Razor, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The odds were good. Daar kept telling himself that. Leemu was prob’ly gonna survive.

It was weird how much the fate of one silverfur he’d never met or spoken to was affecting him. Considering his office that was prob’ly both a strength or a foible of his, but, well. Fuck that. Leemu mattered exactly because he was a random victim that Daar had the power to help.

If he couldn’t care about one random silverfur, how could he care about billions?

Of course, the silverfur had friends. There was a tough an’ seasoned ‘ol human with a bit of a paunch named Preed, and a rather strapping young associate from Stoneback who’d had a really bad turn of luck. Nofl, bein’ a ‘shroom-munchin’ genius, had restored much of Gorku’s ability to speak, though the young male was still lookin’ kinda silly with a quarter of his skull shaved to the skin. It had worked though: not perfect but Nofl was confident Gorku’s speech would get better over time, with practice and therapy.

Assumin’ he wanted to even try. Both of ‘em were depressed as balls. Daar could smell it so strongly when he’d entered their room, he’d almost gagged. He didn’t know much about Wai-ing and the one he got from Preed seemed formal and respectful, but also slow an’ resigned. An’ Gorku was an inch away from cowering at Daar’s mere presence…

Oh well. There was something he could do about that at least. Daar play-bowed and flicked an ear, and they made instant friends in the most Stoneback possible way.

Daar won of course, but he was friendly about it. Preed cracked a smile at least, especially when a flailing tail knocked on the observation window and Director Tran shot an impatient glare at them, shook his head and returned to his work.

Daar helped his flattened new friend up to his paws. “There! Much better! Also! I have maybe good news!”

The two of ‘em perked up according to their species. Gorku was the first to speak. “Good news for Leemu? We thought he was, uh, too sick to help.”

“Well, I still can’t say why his case is so important.” Daar shifted uncomfortably. He hated withholding information, but needs must. “What I can say is that Leemu accidentally holds the keys to a lotta mysteries ‘bout our people. Nofl and Third Director out there have a treatment plan. They’re givin’ him pretty good odds, considerin. Better’n half. I sorta think…maybe a little better’n half. An’ that’s why I’m here.”

Daar looked over at Brother Tiyun. “You get the arrangements taken care of?”

“Yes, My Father. Got a good price, too…”

Daar chittered, “Of course you did! I still ain’t buyin’ into ‘yer investment scheme though.”

Tiyun was always so teasable. “It’s a perfectly well-constructed opportunity!”

“Uh-huh. Anyhoo. I’m also worried ‘bout you two, an’ I know ‘yer, uh, both without means just now…so I got you a house. Nothing too fancy,” Daar said before anyone could object, “An’ I also got a Goldpaw ‘fer a personal negotiator so, y’know. But still. It’s yours. Oh, an’ you get an allowance ‘fer a while too. I’m sure my people’ll work out the details later.”

“Oh…” Preed looked lost. In fact, Daar could smell he might just cry. Humans were awfully independent-minded sometimes and he didn’t know exactly what to do, but maybe some affection was a good idea. He padded over with his head low and hugged. Gently.

“Uh…there’s more too. The local Humans are helpin’ to set ‘yer home up, and the Ambassadors are doing something too… I dunno, honestly. I’ve been leavin’ it to Tiyun here.”

Tiyun duck-nodded. “You’re being provided with furniture, some garden tools—you will need to keep and maintain grass now—a working kitchen and a pantry. The last one was done by the Thai Ambassador’s staff personally, so I’m told it has all your culture’s staples. I…am ignorant of the details beyond that, sorry.”

“It’s just to get you on ‘yer paws…er, feet again,” Daar re-assured. “I kinda suspect ‘yer gonna be pre-occupied gettin’ Leemu back on his. He comes outta this, he’s gonna prol’ly make a full recovery…but he’s gonna be a wreck. An’, uh…well, I can’t say just yet, but all I’ll say is ‘yer gonna have ‘yer paws full. Hands. Whatever.”

“That is… very generous of you. I don’t know how we can repay you…” Preed began. Beside him Gorku duck-nodded fervently.

“Y-yes. We’re j-j-j…” he sighed, took a deep breath. “…Just a chef a-and a-a llllaborer.”

“And personal trainer. Don’t unnersell ‘yerself! Anyway, that’s not me bein’ charitable, unnerstand? That’s ‘yer payment. I’m gonna be employin’ you two ‘fer now as Leemu’s caretaking staff, ‘kay? It’s important to me that he gets better. I want you two better, too. ‘Ya think ‘yer up to that?”

Gorku duck-nodded enthusiastically. Preed’s nod was slower, more solemn and sadder.

“It seems I won’t be going back to the old country after all…” he said.

“I bet ‘ya can still visit!”

“I hope so. I always promised myself that if I ever came back, I would go to see the Emerald Buddha…”

“Emerald Buddha?”

Preed nodded. “The palladium of my home country. A very holy thing…”

“Well…do this for me, an’ maybe I’ll come with you. If that’s okay,” Daar added hastily. “Bein’ honest I jus’ want an excuse to visit Earth again!”

“Maybe it would be good for you to see more of it than just the West…” Preed said, then trailed off as, out in the treatment theatre, Nofl and Tran stepped away from Leemu’s supine form.

In response to a curt gesture from Tran, the air around the hapless silverfur shimmered and started to glow with a noticeable blue-shift. Leemu got blurry around the edges, as the subtle shifts and twitches of his sleeping body and the rise and fall of his chest accelerated past Daar’s ability to keep up. The information display on the glass informed the spectators that they were giving him eight hours of time in a little less than a minute, a shift so dramatic that even his body heat became visible as a faint golden glow.

“The whole idea o’ time acceleration hurts my brain,” Daar admitted in a grumbling tone.

“I used a small one in my kitchen,” Preed murmured softly. “No need to leave the bread to rise overnight, just put it in the accelerator in the morning.”

“They put out a stupid amount o’ heat, though. How’d you get rid of it on a station?”

Preed shrugged. “Powered my oven and hot plate. Don’t know how the station handled it after that.”

Before Daar could muse on the subject, Nofl looked up and gestured to them through the window. The blue warning light over the door flicked off at the same moment as the acceleration field dropped and Leemu returned to the same clock speed as everything else on Cimbrean.

Gorku stepped aside for him, and Daar shouldered through the door warily as Nofl took a tissue sample from Leemu’s lower belly and inserted it into a microscope.

“One moment, darling. I just need to see what progress our patient is making…” he chirped. Behind him, Tran fastidiously sanitized his hands after dropping a pair of disposable gloves in the incinerator.

“The results so far are encouraging,” he said.

“How so?” Preed asked, eagerly.

“The patient is alive.”

“…Oh.”

Gorku keened softly and tentatively approached his friend, sniffing mournfully. Daar didn’t need to get close, but the poor Associate was damn near nose-blind.

From Daar’s perspective though… Leemu still smelled wrong. But not as wrong. Hopefully that was a good sign, and not a byproduct of the sterile environment.

“…Well?” he asked, after waiting what he felt was long enough.

Nofl didn’t turn away from the microscope at first, just flapped a hand to request patience. When he did turn around, though, his expression was as controlled and unreadable as any top-tier Directorate member’s.

Then he blinked slowly and smiled softly, an expression of deep satisfaction for a Corti.

“It’s working,” he said.

++END CHAPTER 54++

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 55.

Chapter 55: Reinvention

Date Point: 16y2m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“Hey, this ain’t a bad little house at all!!”

Daar followed in behind Gorku, who was carrying a completely exhausted Leemu on his back and had to mind his steps.

“Humans know how to build houses arright,” he agreed. “Maybe with a few extra tricks they learned off’a the Gao…”

Actually, that exchange had gone both ways, and Folctha’s ravenous appetite for new housing had created an important local industry: Kit homes. The factory was a ways out down the coast toward New Penzance, and via its private jump array it imported wood from Earth, aluminium and steel from Gao, copper from Ceres, pre-made plastic components from Lucent, as well as locally-sourced glass, concrete and gravel by road.

What it produced was houses. Some assembly required. But all that had to happen was, after the terrain levelling and foundation was complete, a couple of trucks would arrive, drop off a pair of containers which got turned into a nice sturdy deck at the end, and the whole house would come together with some busy worker activity like a mushroom appearing overnight.

Interior finishing of course took a bit longer. It always did, people never really thought ‘bout that bit. But at least most of the home’s permanent systems were already assembled and ready to go. Just add air handling, a water heater, and some grav plating…good to go!

The grav-plates were Gaoian make, too. That made Daar extra happy.

Preed Chadesekan followed in alongside Daar, who was also walking on four-paw to give him something to rest against. Daar didn’t mind. He didn’t show it, but Daar could smell the faint, slightly acrid traces of pain chemistry emanating from the old Human’s knees. Luckily, the top of his back was a bit higher than Preed’s hips, which meant Preed could comfortably rest his right hand right in the middle of Daar’s shoulder blades, gently scritching in an absentmindedly affectionate gesture as they walked along. He could tell Brother Tiyun was silently fretting about dignity or whatever—it was his aide’s job to fret about such things, after all—but that was okay. Walking apparently helped with Preed’s pain, and Daar was the kind o’ ‘Back who took any excuse to be outdoors, so…

Besides, Daar alway respected his elders. And truth be told, this case made it hard for Daar to wash his paws clean.

One of the few advantages of being an absolute ruler was that he could exercise his prerogative on what was important. Brothers like Sartori, their office had all sortsa official duties and restrictions, which was nice ‘cuz it both limited his responsibility, and protected the people against a mad tyrant. The downside to that, though, was that it was hard for someone in a position like him to take a personal interest in a thing when it mattered.

Daar had no official restriction on what he could or could not do. The only thing that constrained his paw was himself, and the consequences of his actions. That was an awesome and terrible responsibility, but it did mean he could do things like, well, take interest in a case about ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. They were little in more ways than just their size; they didn’t have the means to stand up against something like this. But, they were good people, who were doing their best, and Daar wasn’t about to let them suffer needlessly for it.

The workers had really outdone themselves. The house in question was a single-floor rambling kinda thing on a nicely solid concrete slab, with all sortsa considerations for whatever species might wanna live in it. Strong air filtering, independent gravity plating, a trench commode for gaoian sensibilities, scratching-plates at the outside doors…

The master bedroom had been converted into a nice nest-bed, too! One of the other bedrooms was an office, and the “garage” had been converted into a very nice studio for Leemu’s physical therapy, an’ being honest, Gorku’s sanity too.

Also, the house had been equipped with double-wide doorways and had the floor directly on the concrete slab which made it easier for big ‘ol ‘Backs like Daar (or his bestest human friends!) to pay a visit. That was good thinking!

And a good thing too, ‘cuz Leemu was up on his feet and…well, the poor damn lil’ guy was a trainwreck. His body prob’ly hurt worse than a beating from Warhorse, he had all sorts of suppressed genetic code activating itself which couldn’t have been too pleasant, but much worser than all that was what was going on in his head.

The poor silverfur had been trapped for days in a Droud-fugue. That meant days of having every pleasure receptor in his body activated, every pain or discomfort receptor brutally suppressed, and his whole mood steered into a hell of constant, profound, all-pervasive bliss.

Coming out of that to the gray, cold, awkward world of actual fleshly needs had ‘ta be a special kinda torture. Leemu could barely stand up, and the least little discomfort sent a symphony of agony through him. He ate listlessly and without interest, barely reacted to even a friendly back-scratch or a female’s presence, and mostly seemed to lie in bed without the will to even get up and look after himself. He was, for now, the most profoundly depressed being Daar had ever met.

Openpaw and the Human doctors had been collaborating with the Corti to consider his treatment, and so far the verdict was that some sort of antidepressant therapy might be needed while his brain found its equilibrium. Nobody really knew the right way to go about that for the moment though, so the first and most importantest step was support from his friends.

Preed and Gorku were already warming up to the challenge.

“It is quite nice! My kitchen has everything I could have ever wanted…”

Gorku gently set his friend down on his feet in the middle of the living room. “See?” he enthused. “They’re t-takin’ good c-c-care of us…”

Leemu just curled up in a crumpled heap on the floor after giving the room a profoundly disinterested look-and-sniff. Gorku looked toward Daar with the most hurt expression…

Time to do something about that. He padded over to Leemu and curled up right next to him.

“It’s gonna get better, Leemu. I promise.”

It took Leemu a long few seconds to summon the energy to reply. When he did, his tone was bleak rather than hopeful. “…Will it?”

Daar duck-nodded furiously. “The Humans have experience wit’ stuff like this. They say there’s some medicines that’ll mebbe help take the edge off, they jus’ gotta do some testin’ first. But you gotta hang on ‘till they’re ready, y’hear? Can you do that for me?”

Leemu gave the most half-assed, exhausted duck-nod and put his head down. He didn’t look inclined to move from that spot, as though even taking any kind of step to alleviate his misery was too much effort.

The Humans had said the first week would be rough, but this–!

Daar shook his pelt out. He had his briefing, he couldn’t waver. Gorku and Preed did too, and they approached tentatively to offer their support.

Preed seemed to know what to do. He sat down, put a hand on his friend’s back, and said nothing. For whatever reason, Leemu seemed to relax just a slight touch. He keened so quietly Daar barely heard it, then shut his eyes.

“…Could I have a cup of tea, please?” Preed asked after a moment.

“I’ll get it,” Daar agreed and followed his nose into the kitchen.

…How did someone make tea, anyway? Hot water, tea bag…something like that.

He didn’t find tea bags. He found a loose bag of dark green curls in a box marked ‘Oolong tea.’ He transferred a spoonful of that into a coffee cup, considered it, and decided that there was nowhere near enough in there, so added two more spoons. One splashing cupful of boiling water later, and he had achieved Tea. He hoped.

Preed accepted it without any comment beyond a polite “thank-you,” so it musta been pretty good. With that chore outta the way, Daar helped Gorku with unpacking the trio’s meager possessions and getting the gym equipment set up. Then, of course, the gym equipment needed testing…

He returned to the living room after a happy hour or so of seeing just how strong the exiled associate was to find that neither Preed nor Leemu had moved very far. Preed had apparently fallen asleep despite lying flat on his back on a thin carpet and had forgotten his tea, which had gone cold by his foot so Daar made him a replacement. Gorku did his very best not to complain, and headed toward the bedroom to prepare the nest.

…Sleep. Yeah. That was a good idea.

He nudged Preed gently awake. Leemu’s ear flicked and he watched Daar listlessly out of the corner of his eye, but otherwise didn’t move. The elderly human groaned and sat up, twisting and stretching as he yawned.

“…Surprisingly comfortable floor,” he admitted.

“I made you a new cup of tea,” Daar said, handing it to him.

“…Thank you.”

Aww, nuts. He was being polite, Daar could tell. “No good, huh?”

“…Honestly, it’s terrible. But I do appreciate the effort.”

Daar chittered ruefully. “Naydi forbid me any caffeine a while ago, so…Anyway.” Daar yawned and stretched out luxuriantly. “It’s gettin’ late an’ Leemu needs his sleep.”

“Leemu? You heard that.”

“…I heard.”

“Get up, please.” Preed maneuvered in front of him and looked his friend in the eye.

To Daar’s astonishment, Leemu groaned and heaved himself up onto four-paw. He moved like he was wearing the whole house on his back, but he did it, and staggered lethargically toward the bedroom with Preed at his side, praising him on his victory.

At least it was easy enough to get Leemu into the nest-bed. He seemed to want nothing more than to curl up in the middle of it and stop being anything. He was immediately the heart of an affectionate Gaoian sleep-huddle, with Gorku on one side and Daar joining on the other.

Daar gave a plantitive look toward Preed, who hovered at the edge of the pile. Humans were always a bit weird about Gaoian sleeping habits, but whatever. This was for Leemu. The Human sighed and tried to find a comfortable spot on the cushion’s edge. Daar didn’t have time for that. He grumbled, pulled preed right into the center of the pile, and snuggled up tightly with him and Leemu. Gorku wrapped around the other side and just like that, the nest was warm, comfortable, and ready for sleep.

Preed sighed and tried to relax. Daar put his head down, and…

…Woke up. Morning sunlight speared him right in the eye as he shifted his head and he groaned. He must have crashed hard last night. All that hard work and stress catching up on him.

The other three were still asleep. Preed had at some point or another managed to escape to the edge of the bed where he was asleep on his back and snoring softly: Gorku and Leemu were wrapped around each other and the only way to tell where one ended and the other began was their different fur color.

As gently and stealthily as he could, Daar rolled out of the nest, closed the blind to spare the trio the same rude awakening as him, and grabbed his communicator. Sure enough, there were no urgent or emergency messages for him—he’d definitely have been woken for a crisis—but there were a lot of neglected requests for his attention.

Well, he’d only ever really been able spare the one night. But felt better for leaving done something.

Cautiously, he sniffed at Leemu to be certain. The wrong smell was gone, completely. He’d been worried it might come back, but that didn’t seem to have happened… instead there was another, newer scent that Daar couldn’t quite place…it smelled right somehow, but he’d never smelled it on a Gaoian before… Something that reminded him of…

He shook the thought off. Possibly it was just an aroma Leemu’d picked up from Preed, or the Corti, or the new house, or any one of a hundred other places. If not… It was something to ponder, later.

He would have liked to say proper goodbyes, but he just didn’t have the heart to wake them. Some instinct told him that getting a proper restful night’s sleep would be essential to Leemu’s recovery. Instead, he slipped away and returned to the role of Great Father.

It was time for a gear shift anyway. He had malware to delete.

Date Point: 16y2m3w AV
Hampshire, England, UK, Earth

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

Knight had never been interested in a big impressive display-of-wealth sort of home. When he’d had the place built, he’d done so with a view to two concerns: Privacy, and energy efficiency.

Nowadays of course the old concerns about carbon footprint were a thing of the past. Powering one’s own home was as simple as installing a collector field and drinking up the sunlight for storage in a power wall. But it was good to know that while CO2 emissions had still been a concern, he’d been doing his part. The long clawback down to pre-industrialization levels was going to take decades, but at least he’d minimized his contribution.

Privacy, on the other hand, never became obsolete. It was a privilege, and he was acutely aware of just how lucky he was to be able to sit at his desk in front of a floor-to-ceiling window and look out into the woods behind the house. Right now they were cold and scrabbly with no leaves on the trees and no bluebells carpeting the ground, but that would change. And they were still beautiful in their own way.

He lived a privileged life, really. Not an easy one—one didn’t become commander of the Royal Navy Spaceborne Service and then Earth’s representative the Interspecies Dominion Security Council just by having a silver spoon in the mouth—but all things considered it hadn’t been a hard one either. He had money, a good home, influence…

Good friends…

“Patrick? You still with me?”

Knight looked back at the monitor in front of him. Martin Tremblay gave him a wry look. Age was catching up with the former Supreme Allied Commander now, but not without a hell of a fight. Martin was too proud to let his good looks fade away on him. So, wrinkles and white hair and aching back be damned, he was still clean-shaven and square-jawed and well-dressed.

And lonely. There weren’t many dating opportunities for a gay man in his seventies, and Martin had never really had a family. He clung to what friendships and connections he had very tightly, therefore.

“Sorry, old man. It’s just a nice day here. I was appreciating the view.”

“Lucky. It’s a frozen hell over here.”

“Well, that’s what you get for living in the Northern Wastes.”

“Patrick, you live further north than I do.”

“Yes, but I, my friend, have the good sense to live on an island, and avoid that lovely continental climate.”

“How’s the rain treating you?”

“Fresh and invigorating, thank you for asking.”

They chuckled at each other. It was old banter, but comfortable.

“How’s Ellen?” Martin asked.

“Today is a good day. I think. At least, I heard her up and about earlier and Katriane isn’t here, so…” Patrick glanced at the door. His daughter had suffered a traumatic brain injury during the battle of Gao, and gone too long without access to Cruezzir for it to heal properly. Frankly, it was a miracle she’d survived considering that the most medical attention she had for a few days was bed rest and painkillers.

She’d been left… impaired. Some days were worse than others. On her best days, she was completely herself, completely active and just as sharp and driven and fearsome as ever. On bad days, she needed a carer. And she had been very, very clear indeed when she could that she didn’t want her old man to be that carer. Patrick had to agree: Ellen had a lot of years ahead of her, him not so many, and not so able in body either.

Hence Katriane, a professional carer. All Ellen had to do was hit a large button next to her bed, and Katriane would be there within half an hour in her Land Rover, armed with everything they might need to make the day go smoothly. She was an absolute godsend and Knight liked her enormously… but in a perverse way, he was glad not to see her on any given day.

It was all paid for by the Royal Navy of course. All part of the deal, with injuries suffered in the line of duty. But it wasn’t how Knight had wanted her career to turn out.

It was what it was, he supposed.

“Glad to hear it,” Martin smiled. “And the symposium planning?”

“Oh, that’s flying along almost faster than I can keep up!” Knight groaned. “The Dominion is… understandably eager to make progress.”

“Well, they nearly got eaten. I bet that focuses the mind.”

“One would think.” Knight sipped his tea then put the cup down. “It’s going ahead. Planet Rauwryhr, in the not so distant future. I’m rather looking forward to it, I believe we’ll be the first humans to visit. Apparently the Great Trees are quite a spectacle.”

“Yes, I did some reading. The largest tree on Earth is called General Sherman, it’s in the Sequoia National Park in California. By the standards of a Rauwran Great Tree, it’s a baby. Quite a spectacle indeed.”

“You know you’re welcome to attend.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

“Well, I daresay your perspective would be very welcome.”

Martin shorted. “Oh, I see. Can’t just invite a friend, you need to justify it, eh?”

Knight laughed. “You wouldn’t want me to be accused of abusing my influence would you?”

“I’m sure your impeccable reputation would survive… how is security looking?”

“The Rauwryhr have granted us permission to bring a few of our ships, as much for demonstration purposes as anything. I thought a wargame between the US Navy and the Royal Navy would be a fun showcase… and good training.”

“Or between Humans and Gaoians,” Martin suggested.

Knight sighed. “The Kwmbwrw kicked up a stink about the Gao attending. I don’t know what Henenwgwyr’s specific problem with them is, but she seems determined to leave them out in the cold. I objected and so did the Rauwryhr, but she made it very clear that either the Gao attended or the Kwmbwrw did. Not both.”

“That’s… foolish. Have we made our displeasure clear?”

“Crystal.” Knight sighed and shrugged. “Sometimes, the Kwmbwrw are just incredibly alien. Their idea of brinkmanship is my idea of lunacy. And the Grandmatriarchs have an entrenched ‘My Way Or The Highway’ mindset.”

“They’re not used to being ignored, eh? Like the Clan of Females, but worse.”

“Well, they’re one of the Dominion’s economic powerhouses. They have a lot of weight to throw around… too bad for them that neither the Gao nor us are dependent on the Dominion’s goodwill.”

“That sounds like the beginnings of a painful lesson in international politics. I presume the Gao are attending anyway?”

“Of course they are. And the Kwmbwrw aren’t. Those stubborn fools are their own worst enemies, they could learn a lot from the Gao.”

Martin shook his head sadly. “Prejudice doesn’t go away overnight, Patrick.”

“It had better. I can’t help but worry that we don’t have long before the Hunters come out with some new trick and something truly serious happens. That ground incursion in the Domain was bad enough, but if they wanted to really do some damage… I suspect they’ll have learned how, by now. They’ve won every single action since the ring orbital fell.”

“Pyrrhic victories.”

“Only by our standards. As far as the Hunters are concerned, they’ve achieved their objective with every attack, even the assault on the Rich Plains. Intelligence says they did it for information, and they got plenty.” Knight grumbled uncomfortably. “The fact is, blowing up the ring seems to have done them a service. We’re certain they have new leadership now, and much more competent leadership at that.”

“I bet the Great Father is just pleased as punch with that analysis…”

“It was the correct decision regardless. Many billions of Hunters were destroyed in the conflagration, along with virtually all of their infrastructure.”

“Then how does that constitute doing them a favor?”

“Which is more dangerous, a large force under an incompetent general, or a small force led by a genius?”

“That depends. How good of a general is Daar?”

“…He’s good. So is his general staff, they’re learning very fast. The Gao’s objectives tend to be simple, and their tactics are direct, pragmatic, aggressive, and successful.”

“And their logistical command?”

“The Americans are suitably impressed.”

“…Well. Considering all of that, I would say it’s hard to know. A small force can be snuffed out if its enemy is clever and ruthless enough to press a size advantage. A large force, however, takes time to destroy. No amount of clever combat reduces the mass problem.”

“So the question is… how big are the Hunters still? That’s the sort of thing we’re going to discuss at the symposium. The sort of talk I think you’re best qualified to give.”

“Sounds good.”

Knight nodded. “Right, well. I’d better walk the cat.”

That was an old joke between them, too. Code for ’I’d love to chat all afternoon but unfortunately life never stops and I have responsibilities to take care of.’ Martin nodded understandingly and waved goodbye.

“Have fun.”

“You too, my friend.”

And that pretty much summed it up for the day’s pleasant engagements. On the roster for this evening was a lot of reading, some emails, a few business phone calls and maybe having to jump back out to spend the night on Rich Plains if he was unlucky. Honestly, Knight hadn’t been so busy since the days when he’d actually been in charge of a warship at sea.

It was exhausting, and likely to run a man his age into the ground… but he’d tried to retire and just couldn’t. He was embroiled, probably for the rest of his life, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

He opened his emails and got to work.

Date Point: 16y2m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

“MERRY UN-BIRTHDAY!!!”

Ava hadn’t done anything for her birthday, back on December 26th. It wasn’t a particularly important one, and she’d fallen out of the habit of celebrating her birthdays anyway.

Still, people at work had asked. And then they’d found out she’d turned thirty-one a mere two months ago, and allowing this modest milestone to pass without comment was apparently completely unacceptable. A sentiment shared by Adam and Marty, Gabe and Jess, Charlotte and Ben, Jack, Allison Julian and Xiù…

So in the end Derek had booked a big couple of tables at Andalucia and Ava was left blinking and inwardly freaking out over just how many people showed up to a party organized on what seemed to her like the flimsiest possible excuse. It was… different parts of her brain were occupied with being delighted, being mortified, feeling like a total fraud, enjoying herself, worrying if she was just being egotistical in thinking this was about her at all…

Hannah was working overtime, sitting quietly at her side with her chin on Ava’s lap where Ava could stroke her head under the table. Derek’s arm behind her back was a comforting help as well. Thanks to them, she was able to keep the positive thoughts up front and not ruin everybody’s night by having a breakdown.

Most of the people at work hadn’t met Adam before, they’d only seen him at a distance. He stood at the end of the table near the ESNN staff and towered over them rather than endanger the furniture, wearing his usual technically-a-t-shirt and utilikilt-type get-up, and was the same ludicrously huge and happy bro that he ever was. The effect was much like a bunch of curious and faintly terrified puppies surrounding a hulking, panting pit-bull. Some of them had taken to a more adversarial journalistic approach to the HEAT in general, but for now he seemed to be winning them over with his usual cheery, over-excited desire to Make Friends With Everyone.

Or maybe they were just being nice on her not-birthday. She’d take whatever she could get, frankly.

In any case, the food was amazing and the wine was even better, and she received a number of small, tough decorative paper bags with an assortment of gifts, not to mention a small hill of birthday cards, and managed to hold back the feeling of being a little overwhelmed long enough for the party to amicably break up until she was left with just a small core. Allison, Julian and Xiù made their apologies about having young boys to look after and a pair of baby bumps to rest, and that just left…

Well. Her oldest and closest friends and family.

A waiter eventually successfully assured Adam that the bench seat was not going to give up its ghost under the weight of one man, not even an ogre like him. He sat, reluctantly, tentatively, flinching as he did so as though he expected it to groan and collapse. The waiter gave a vindicated chuckle as he finally settled in without so much as a creak, and threw in an extra bottle of wine on the house.

“You’re not the first HEAT bro to eat here, gordo.” Ava told him once the waiter was gone. “Firth brings Freya here on the regular. Besides, the owners frequent Rooney’s, you know.”

“Yeah, well…I wasn’t lookin’ forward to making another bench. Anyway! Happy birthday!”

The bottle of wine arrived, they opened it, passed it around, and just… sat. Talked. Caught up. A luxury, for people who all threw themselves so totally into their work.

A lot of it was just catching up. They talked about work, teased Jack a bit about how cute a couple he and Rihanna would make, endured a bombardment of Gabriel’s very best Dad-Puns, of course got an update on all the bro-things from Adam (which he kept mercifully short), and even got some good gossip on the doings of the Great Father, the team Gaoians…

“You want to be careful sharing gossip about him with me, you know…” Ava teased as Gabe recalled the minor security nightmare that was a foreign head of state jogging here and there across town as he pleased.

“He knows we talk, Ava. Daar’s a super open guy, so don’t worry. Also…if you can somehow express how grateful I am to his personal security detail, I would be much obliged. They’ve been an absolute pleasure to work with.”

Ava sat back and sipped her wine. It had been a long while since she’d last drunk any real amount, and she was definitely feeling a bit buzzed. “Hmm. How does that work?”

“They’ve got a human contractor who acts as liaison. Mike Murphy, you’ve met him. There’s others too, and they’re basically completely plugged into the local Gaoian community, they’re deputized and licensed, the whole works. The Great Father funds all of it personally, said ‘I oughta pay ‘fer my conveniences.’ Great intel back and forth, but that’s all I can say about that. “

“That sounds like a really interesting job.”

Gabe nodded, then gave her a twinkling grin. “Who knows, he might be down for an interview. Especially if he gets to take his pants off.”

There was some good-natured laughter.

“Be fair,” Derek reminded him. “Laid Bare is my brainchild, after all.”

“He’s a veteran. Served on Gao.”

Derek perked up.“Yeah? Huh. Might be good then… Or…” He grinned at the Incredible Hulk across the table from him. “What about you, Adam?”

Adam squirmed a little. “…Nah. Not…not yet. I mean, I like showing off but I belong to Marty.”

“I’d totally do it,” Marty said, giving her husband a grin that turned him red. Ava had always been slightly in awe of just how well Marty could tease him. It was like watching a virtuoso playing a violin.

“Oh! Uh…” Adam cleared his throat a bit uncomfortably. “Well. Maybe one day then. When, uh…people are ready.”

“…Ready?”

Adam sighed. “What I am and what I do ain’t something most folk can handle. Anyway…how about you, Jack? You’d do a good Laid Bare I bet! I mean, I’ve seen you in the shower—”

“Hey!”

“Miller would love it,” Derek added with a grin.

“—Ain’t got nothing to be ashamed of! Ladies.” Adam waggled his eyebrows like a particularly cartoonish hulk and gestured at the singles sitting over at the bar, who were furtively casting gazes toward the group. “Our boy’s got the goods!” He announced loudly. “Smart, too! Nice and fit!” He delivered that with his particular brand of exaggerated latino lilt to the ladies, one of whom responded with a playful catcall, “Hell, I bet he’d probably sell a lot of copies…”

“Adam!”

“Definitely,” Marty agreed, and gave Jack a playful wink that was probably illegal in some countries. She called out towards the bar, “He’s cute, too! Innocent and pure!”

“Marty!!”

“What?!” Adam laughed, “We’re just saying! You’re a swinging dick just like the rest of us—”

“ADAM!!!”

Gabe saved the day by reaching out and cuffing his son upside the head. “Pórtate bien, Mijo,” he chided.

Adam only chuckled and gave his dad a loving look. “¡No es nada más que la verdad, papá!.”

Jack pulled his best annoyed expression. “Anyway… I don’t have any kind of a story. Besides, isn’t it ‘warriors in their own words?’ I’m not a warrior, I’m not even combat arms!”

“Neither was Julian,” Adam retorted. “At least, not officially. Meanwhile you’re enlisted in the most elite special operations support unit there is, you deploy with us and get shot at…you do have a story, man. And you’re smart and you’re buff and you look good, too. I wasn’t joking about any of that. S’far as the whole ‘warrior’ thing…like, I get it, but don’t undersell ‘yerself.”

“And actually? I bet a HEAT technician’s story would be really interesting,” Ava agreed. “You have a pretty unique job…”

Jack sighed. “…Actually Ava… I was meaning to ask about something, now we’re kind of on the subject.”

She turned to face him. “Shoot.”

“It might kinda bring the mood down a bit.”

“Just so long as I don’t have to hear Adam brag up his innocent victims any longer…” Jess muttered from behind her wine glass.

Jack nodded, sipped his wine and then asked. “There was one guy who was… I kinda noticed a, like, an absence in your piece on Camp Tebbutt.”

Ava nodded sadly, while Adam leaned in and listened with an intent expression. The rest, except for Gabe, looked a little lost.

“…Yeah. The guy who… whose biodrone killed Sara.” Ava sighed, and scritched Hannah’s ears for comfort as the dog whined.

“…Well, fuck.” Derek muttered, and gave her a squeeze too. Ava shot him a moment’s grateful attention, then shook her head sorrowfully.

“…I’m sorry, Jack. He… apparently he took his own life barely two months after he arrived. They returned him to his family in Dusseldorf.”

Jack nodded, sighed, and sat back. “…Dammit.”

“Yeah.”

A dark cloud descended on the table for a few seconds. Jack dispelled it somewhat with a heavy sigh and three words.

“Fuck the Hierarchy.”

“Amen,” Adam grunted. “…Actually.” He gave Derek a long look. “Yeah. I do have some shit I wanna get off my chest about that. I wanna think about it though.”

“…I think I’d want you for the last in the series anyway,” Ava noted. “You and the Great Father would make good bookends.”

“Why?”

“Tip of the spear versus the god-emperor of an engineered soldier species. You’re best friends and couldn’t possibly be further opposites along the axis of power. And, well…there’s the obvious visuals.”

“Maybe make it a joint session, then? If you wanna really capture that dynamic…”

“No, no. Spotlight on one at a time,” Derek said firmly. “Ava’s right, you’d be like, the other slice of bread.”

“Well, that settles it,” Jack said firmly, regaining some humor. “I don’t want to be in an Adam-Daar sandwich.”

“Now there’s a mental image!” Jess grimaced. “Like a mouse trapped between two bears.”

“Aww! But we cuddle so nice!”

If there was one thing that was good about boisterous family and friends, it was that they could recover from a shock much faster than Ava, and sweep her along in their happiness. She laughed, and realized she was genuinely enjoying herself.

Derek noticed, and squeezed her hand under the table. Perfect boyfriend.

Still, all good things had to come to an end, and eventually they drifted their separate ways. Jack was apparently going out clubbing with his friend Rihanna, Adam and Marty had a baby to get home to, Gabe and Jess were up very late indeed by their standards…

They took the scenic route back to Derek’s place, through the covered walkway along Riverside Park. The nightly rain drumming on the roof was soothing, and meant they had the park largely to themselves. Hannah chased a ball, Ava leaned appreciatively on Derek and reflected that she had life pretty good…

Then he stopped.

“So, uh…”

“Hmm?” Ava raised her head. The little wave of anxiety at this sudden change in pace was irrational, but that didn’t stop it from happening.

It turned to shock when in one smooth movement he produced a small black box from his pocket and went down on one knee. On pure instinct, her hands flew up and covered her mouth.

Derek laughed. “…I had this speech planned, but… Nah. I love you, Ava. Marry me?”

She didn’t think about it. She just nodded, and somehow managed to remember how to speak.

“…Yes!”

A good day couldn’t have ended more perfectly.

Date Point: 16y2m3w AV

Hierarchy/Cabal Joint Communications session #1722

++0008++: In summary, the infiltration of Sol means the operation was a success, though not an unqualified one. We have four Injunctors on Earth, and a further two in the outer system, but the new Arutech biodrones appear to be an abject failure. The Cimbrean infiltration was foiled by an animal, and our infiltrator on Lucent is completely pinned down. They cannot act without an unacceptably high risk of discovery.

++0011++: Furthermore, Proximal remains unaccounted-for. He has missed every scheduled check-in, failed to respond to every urgent update request, and has not activated any of his safe pings. The last time this happened was when the Humans captured 0006.

++0008++: An event that had profound negative ramifications for his sanity and competence. His behaviour ever since has been… erratic.

++Metastasis++: <Annoyed; Loyal> Cynosure unilaterally achieved more success in re-infiltrating Human space than the entire Hierarchy did over an interval ten times as long.

++0008++: His brilliance is not in question. His stability on the other hand, is. 0006 was always…

++013++: <Suggestion> A troublemaker? A maverick? Uncontrollable?

++0008++: <Diplomatic> Unorthodox.

++Metastasis++: I wonder if you would have the courage to say any of those things in his presence.

++0008++: For all I know, he is here right now. He has a bad habit of lurking in these conversations without revealing himself.

++System record: Inactivity for 100 cycles++

++0008++: <Satisfied> Clearly he either isn’t here, or doesn’t care.

++0011++: <Accusatory> The Cabal has lurched dramatically in its strategy. Not so very long ago we adopted your recommended strategy of playing nice and seeking an accord with the Humans, at least until a better alternative presented itself–

++Metastasis++: And a better solution presented itself. Need I remind you, we now have half a dozen Injunctors in the Sol system, and an infiltrator on Lucent? What is that, if not an improvement on the position of abject paralysis we were in before?

++0013++: What happened to all that stuff about inevitably needing a partner species in matterspace? Not merely janissaries, but active participants?

++Metastasis++: Humans turned out to not be that species.

++0013++: So where does this leave us? Are we winning or losing?

++0008++: That, I suspect, hinges on what has happened to Proximal….

Date Point: 16y2m3w2d AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth

General Ted Bartlett

“Even the Gaoians are stumped. Champion Wozni had to admit it’s way above his level of understanding, and their most expert Father on the subject of quantum computing is, uh, tentative.”

Bartlett nodded and massaged his face. Age was catching up with him, and he was still pulling young man hours when big discoveries came in. He always paid the price in pain and fatigue later.

But things like the captive Igraen they had in storage down in the basement, alongside the captured Abductor from Egypt, an assortment of Dominion and Alliance technology acquired via legitimate and less-legitimate means, and several warehouses full of Hunter tech definitely qualified as big discoveries.

As was the latest quick evaluation of the devices found deep in the Hierarchy’s mine on Messier.

“What would he commit to?” he asked.

Captain Thierry Pelletier, the man now in charge of what had once been Claude Nadeau’s department, sighed and shook his head. “Not a lot. He speculated that some of the results he got from a subatomic analysis suggests that they’re somehow using individual electrons as transistors.”

Bartlett’s eyebrows shot up. “…If so, these things must be at the absolute physical limit of processor density.”

“Very close to it, certainly. Wozni didn’t want to even speculate on just how much processing power those things have, Wouldn’t even venture a couple of orders of magnitude. The best he’d give was ’a lot.’”

“Helpful,” Bartlett snarked.

“He’s a very precise kinda guy. And this is only his first analysis, which he worked up in the middle of some kind of business trip to Cimbrean on the Great Father’s orders…” Pelletier shrugged. “If these things are the physical hardware for the Hegemony, then… I mean, finding a warehouse full of these things in an entire galaxy? Impossible.”

Bartlett grunted, and swiped through a few folders on his desk, looking for something specific. He found it quickly, thank God for good filing.

“…Ironic,” he mused.

“What is?” Pelletier asked.

Bartlett shrugged distractedly. “Oh, just a heretical thought.” At Pelletier’s continued intrigued look, he explained “I was thinking that it’s very likely we’re only around because of the Hierarchy.”

“They’re trying to annihilate us,” Pelletier pointed out, frowning.

“Oh, sure, they’re our worst enemies… but without them, I’m not so sure Humanity would ever have existed. Or maybe we’d be slaves of some rampant Deathworld empire. Or maybe we’d have had an Independence Day scenario where some giant flying saucers rocked up over ancient Babylon and wiped us out so they could take Earth for their own.”

He smiled faintly at Pelletier’s expression. “That’s the thing about the butterfly effect: Everything combined to bring us to this moment, not just the good.”

Pelletier nodded slowly. “So… ironic. The people who are going to finally beat them are of their own making.”

“Ultimately, they may have done the galaxy a favor.” Bartlett set the thought aside with a wry expression. “Be that as it may, the task at hand is wiping the bastards out. And these databricks, if they are the hardware for the Hegemony, might just be the weak point we can strike at.”

“Why in the hell did Six point us toward it, then?”

“Who knows? He’s insane? He didn’t know how important that facility is? It’s a trap? Whatever the reason, it’s a lead.”

“A lead on an unknown number of facilities scattered theoretically across the entire galaxy,” Pelletier reminded him. “Finding all of them will be a big ask, sir.”

“That depends on how many there are, and I can’t imagine a facility like this would be cheap. Secondly, we don’t know how much territory this, uh, ‘node’ might service. If it’s like, uh, a really tall cell tower or something…this might be one of a handful of stations.”

Pelletier pulled a face Bartlett had worn himself many a time: that of a man whose superiors were saying things that scratched at his sense of exactitude. “Or, it could be one of thousands. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy, after all. Virtually all of them harbor planets.”

“Either way, that’s why I called you in.” Bartlett handed over the file he’d been looking for. “I’m putting you in charge of a new research operation, codenamed MINOR MASTER. I think we’re on to a good breadcrumb trail with the wormhole booster on Stinkworld, and I put in some time last night to run an idea through my field equations. If I’m right, a sufficiently large telescope might be able to pinpoint other wormhole booster fields elsewhere in the galaxy. We won’t have to guess how many there are, we’ll be able to count them.”

Pelletier took the document and opened it to the first page. “How large a telescope?” he asked.

Bartlett grinned. He loved moments like this, when he got to favor his officers with something cool.

“How would you like,” he asked, “to be in charge of the first interstellar observatory?”

Date Point: 16y2m3w2d AV
”Stinkworld,” the Irujzen Reef

Meereo, Champion of Clan Longear

“…Dammit, dammit, dammit!!”

Ears swivelled, then noses turned diplomatically away as Garl snarled something vicious in Clan Stoneback’s private dialect and then swept aside the tablet he’d been peering at with a slash of his paw. The Grandfather’s claws left shiny streaks in the steel tabletop.

Then he stormed out of the tent.

Several pairs of eyes turned back to Meereo, and much ear semaphore communicated his next task. Meereo sighed, turned from group, and followed after Garl. The old ‘Back must have set a brisk pace, because he was already out of sight, but fortunately he’d always had a strong scent.

Meereo decided to take it slow and dignified rather than chase. Give the Grandfather time. He followed his nose and the occasional angry claw-mark on a tree, and even so he realized that Garl must have slowed down the second he was out of sight. His path was meandering and his scent heavy, and it led down toward one of the few nearby areas that wasn’t suffused with Stinkworld’s characteristic rotting-meat miasma—a stream.

It wasn’t that the planet’s omnipresent aroma was absent down in the little gully where the water had cut through rock over the march of aeons, more that there were other scents there to take the edge off. Wild flowers, fresh water, and a local moss that smelled faintly of cotton candy. It was a peaceful spot that a lot of the Gaoians present liked to visit when they had a spare moment.

It was also a natural echo chamber and amplifier, and Meereo had very large, very sharp ears. He rounded the corner just as Garl fling a large rock viciously into the water then slouched down on the pebbly beach, muttering to himself.

“Fuck… Not like this…”

Meereo keened softly despite himself, and Garl’s ears snapped around, followed by the rest of him. Nothing wrong with the old ‘Back’s hearing at least.

After a moment, he unwound and dropped to all fours. “…Eavesdroppin’, young’n?”

Meereo gave him a complicated, apologetic look and dropped down four-paw as well to approach.

“It’s my responsibility to know what’s going on here,” he pointed out. Garl just huffed, shook himself, and sat down in the dirt again.

“…I’m on my way out,” he said. Meereo keened again, but duck-nodded. He’d suspected as much—he’d thought he could smell it, even over Stinkworld’s background stench—but he’d have liked to be wrong.

“…Will it be…soon?”

Garl took in a long, slow breath and flicked a smaller pebble into the bubbling water. “…Yeah. I ain’t lost any strength yet, but… I been wakin’ up with blurry vision err’day ‘fer a while, an’ lately it ain’t just the mornin’ no more. I was starin’ at that fucking tablet for half a Ri’, couldn’t read the damn thing.”

Meereo sat down next to him. “That’s not fair at all,” he sympathized.

“You’re fuckin’ right it ain’t.” They sat in silence for a little while. Meereo knew better than to be the first to speak, and finally Garl threw another stone into the stream and found his voice again.

“It ain’t…I’m at peace with the inevitable. Balls, I’m a ‘Back on First Fang, I’ve almost bought it more times’n I can count. I’m just…I wanted ‘ta finish this.”

Meereo duck-nodded some more, just listening.

“…I’d hoped I’d have time,” Garl added, then sighed. “…But I guess the tokens jus’ didn’t flip ‘fer me.”

Meereo wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. He wasn’t in command, and wouldn’t be a natural fit to take over…which, thankfully, provided a step forward.

“I hate to ask…but what would you have me do?”

“…I need a replacement. Champion or not, y’ain’t a Back an’ the Fangs need one’a their own at the front, even if you din’t need ‘ta focus on the nerd shit. I’d suggest Brother Torun of Fourth Fang, he’s been here a while.”

“And what about your larger role as Warleader of the Grand Army?”

“That’s somethin’ the Great Father’s gonna hafta ponder.”

Meereo nodded slowly, feeling his ears droop. Eventually he looked over at Garl, and then offered a paw.

“…It’s been a privilege.”

They shook solemnly, before Garl yoinked Meereo up and smothered him in a massive hug.

“An’ it’s good knowin’ this is in the right paws. You an’ Torun, you’ll do well.”

Meereo didn’t know exactly what to say to that, not that he could really have spoken anyway. Nor did Garl linger on the topic for long. “An’ anyway, I s’pose this means I’ll die livin’ the Stoneback dream. Prol’ly gonna keel over from too much matin’!”

Daar, it seemed, had inherited his relentlessly boisterous personality from Garl.

“I can think of worse ways to bow out,” Meereo admitted, with a chitter.

“Can’t think of any better, that’s ‘fer damn sure!”

“A little bit traumatic for the poor female, though.”

“Well, that’s her problem, ain’t it?” Garl pant-grinned, then stood up and stretched. “Come on, young’n. I ain’t gonna waste what little time I got left on mopin’ around down here feelin’ sorry ‘fer myself. I’ll damn well get somebody to read aloud to me until the jump cycle’s ready.”

Meereo nodded, stood, and brushed some sand and pebbles out of his fur. He made a note to himself that the next time he was back in civilization, he’d live it up a little and woo a female or two himself. Life, after all, was too short to not seize with both paws.

But here and now, they had a job to do. And if done right, it might just mean long, lazy futures for them all. Garl might not be able to finish it, but Meereo had no plans to suffer the same disappointment.

They turned away from the stream, and got back to work.

Date Point: 16y3m AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

“Bawistuh. Hmm. A Human idea?”

“No. My idea,” Vemik said, and the lash of his tail showed just how strongly he felt about that. “I didn’t get the idea from the Humans, I thought it up myself! It wasn’t hard, it’s just a big steel bow!”

Yan gave him a cunning look. “But a Human word for your idea…”

“Humans are an older spee-shees. They’ve had longer to have the same ideas.” Vemik handed the bellows off to the care of his apprentice and stepped out of the forge. The smoke in there had darkened his skin almost black, and he licked his palm to clean the worst of it from around his eyes. “I thought, if this idea works, they’ll have done it too and they’ll have a word for it. So I followed Jooyun, and I listened.”

Yan grinned at him approvingly. “How long until you can try to make it?” he asked.

“Two hands of days, maybe three. You remember Doonuk Given-Man came by yesterday?”

“I remember he had a big bag…”

Vemik nodded and grinned. “As much of his tribe’s newest smelting as he could carry. I traded four of my best knives for it.”

Yan was impressed. “Good trade!”

Vemik gave a soft, satisfied, deeply confident hoot. “My knives are the best, and everyone knows it.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure his apprentice was keeping the forge hot enough. Satisfied with what he saw, he nodded and turned back to Yan. “I have enough steel now. Just need to shape it and a few other things. Special tricks.”

“Special tricks?” Yan would have liked to grapple him and squeeze one or two of those secrets out of him, but he was having fun courting a woman from Suk’s tribe, Yoonee. A rare beauty, but she actually enjoyed bathing in water, which was just strange. She must have got it from the Humans. If he went to see her while covered in soot and grime like Vemik, she’d make him—ugh—wash before she let him touch her.

Yan didn’t like the way water made him itchy. And the less said about soap the better.

In any case, he was supposed to go up into the sky today. Jooyun had sent a message that there would be a “Weaver” coming for him at noon, and to Yan’s experienced eye the sun was about as high as it was going to get.

While part of him was tempted to do mischief and show up covered in the dirt and tastes of the forest and village, he knew better. This was a meeting with a strange tribe to discuss trade, and a big trade too. From what he knew, the Corti were very strange and very weak in body… but both Humans and Gaoians spoke of them with some grudging respect. Best to take them seriously.

“I read about Human smiths. People used to be scared of them, because they had strange secrets and ways nobody else knew. And they had all kinds of magic in the forge!” Vemik glanced over his shoulder again. “…Don’t slow down!” he barked. The apprentice got back on pace with the bellows.

“You like that idea, I can tell–” Yan began, then stiffened as he heard the kind of high, distant thundercrack sound made by Human ships as they punched through the sky from above. Nobody ever forgot that sound.

“What was that joke Shyow used? [Your Uber’s here.”] Vemik trilled.

Yan shielded his brow with his tail and peered into the sky. “What is an ‘ooo-ber?’”

“I don’t exactly know! I think it’s about borrowing someone’s car, though… There it is.”

Vemik pointed, and Yan nodded as he saw a tiny black speck in the blue. It was coming down fast, alarmingly fast. Shyow had always landed Misfit slowly and gently, as had the other ships Yan had seen, but either this pilot had very different thoughts about the best way to land, or the ship was falling helplessly out of the sky.

It slowed just as hard as it had fallen. In the span of one Ketta’s height, the headlong plunge became a near-stop as bright points of light all along its underbelly seared Yan’s eyes and forced him to look away. The last little way to the ground was steady and smooth.

“…I think I know why they call it a ‘drop’ ship,” Vemik commented, with a nervous twitch of his tail.

“Back to work, apprentice,” Yan said, looking past him at the boy who was gaping at the Human machine with a mix of unhidden awe and mild fear. The young one jumped, then hastily returned to the bellows.

Weavers looked kind of like a flying knuckle to Yan’s eyes. There was nothing slim or sleek or graceful about them. Misfit had been square and solid, built rather like a Given-Man herself, but Weavers—he knew they were a kind of ship, not just one—were ugly. They existed to do one thing very, very well, and that thing was not “be pretty.” It made sense that they’d drop from the sky to the ground as hard and as fast as possible.

This one settled on the patch of hard stamped-down earth the tribe kept open near the village for moments like this, and Jooyun ambled down the ramp as soon as it lowered. He whooped as soon as he laid eyes on Yan.

[“Now that’s a ride!”] He was wearing his Human clothing today, which was a tight black thing around his torso, tough blue jeans around his legs, and boots on his strange big feet. More Human weirdness, but the jeans and boots at least made sense; Humans had thin skin, jeans were good against whipping branches and thorns. Boots made a foot-grip impossible but he could walk over anything without a care, even the jagged bite-rock that was everywhere underfoot on the mountain.

Yan had no idea what the point of the black thing was. No matter. He scooped his friend up for a welcoming hug, then put him down again. Today was a day for being serious, sadly. Maybe there would be time for more fun later. [“Is it always like that?”]

[“Fastest way to get down here. And going back up’s even faster. Ready for your tour of a Human warship?”]

[“War ship. Hmm.”]

[“Her name is USS Robert A. Heinlein. and yeah. She’s longer than a Ketta is tall. Are you bringing anyone else?”]

“The Singer,” Yan said, switching back to People-speak. Behind him, Vemik made a mournful, longing sound. “…And Vemik.”

“He’ll need to clean up,” Jooyun said while Vemik celebrated loudly. “Same reason I’m bothering with a t-shirt.” He plucked at the black cloth stretched across his chest. “Cleanliness is very important to all the sky-tribes.”

“The shirt keeps you clean?”

“Yeah. It also keeps me out of the spotlight. Half-naked Humans draw attention, and this is about you, not me.

Yan grunted, “You better clean yourself up, Vemik. Need to represent more than just our tribe today.”

Vemik glanced back into the forge, and lowered his voice. “…I do want to come. But can I leave Mavu all by himself?”

“What’s he making?” Jooyun asked.

“Just some knife blanks.”

“Good,” Yan decided. “You haven’t started your melt for the bawistuh yet. Let it be a test for your apprentice, then! See how well he does on his own. Now go, or I will find soap and clean you up myself!”

[“…Ballista, eh?”] Jooyun chuckled deep in his chest. [“Do we have a spy-monkey in our midst, too? ‘Cuz I’m pretty sure I never used that word around you…”]

Yan looked back to Vemik, who had the expression every young man did when they were caught sticky-handed stealing someone’s fruit basket.

Jooyun chuckled again, longer and a little more evil. [“Yeah. I think the price is gonna be a shower, Vemik. We have soap and warm water on the Weaver. Field-expedient hygiene system. Trust me, it’s way nicer when the water is warm. And lotion too. Xiu added that bit.”]

“Low-shun.”

“Yup. Rub it on your skin, or get the hose again. Your call.” Jooyun chuckled. There was a joke in there somewhere, Yan could tell.

Jooyun turned his attention back to Yan, with a much more cautious expression on his face. [“Being honest, big guy…”]

Yan sighed. He knew this was coming. “Yes yes, if you say it will be a good idea, then it is. Yoonee from Suk’s tribe made me a new loincloth, too. Pretty! I will wear that. Vemik has one too but I haven’t given it to him yet. Vemik! Go to my hut and get the bundle near my sleeping pelts!”

“I promise, it is way better with warm water and lotion.”

“As you say.” Yan would wait until he’d tested that branch for himself.

Vemik ambled away while Jooyun led Yan to the Weaver. The floor had metal rails that made it easy to move things in and out, if they were on the right kind of square-shaped board. A good idea! That would make things very fast. Loaded onto one of those boards was a plastic tent with a hose, and some other things to keep the water from running away.

Jooyun sighed to himself, peeled off his clothing, climbed in and helped Yan use everything. There was a cloth and brush for scrubbing and different bottles of soap. Two were for his crest, first one then the other bottle, and the other for the rest of him. Their air didn’t taste of anything at all this time; he remembered the last encounter and did not dip his tongue in the odd stuff. The warm water was nice but Yan seemed to like it warmer than Jooyun did. Strange. Humans did feel a bit cool to the touch though, even Jooyun. Maybe that was it?

“Here. This is the lotion. Xiù said it should stop your skin from itching so much,” Jooyun added as he handed over one last bottle. “Use as little as you can.”

To Yan’s surprise, it worked. He still felt odd, like he could feel the air touching him a little more, but the full-body itch he’d expected just wasn’t there. He couldn’t say he’d enjoyed it, but it hadn’t been a torment, either.

Vemik, on the other hand, was surly and sullen the entire time as black water swirled away around his toes. He seemed very disappointed the soap didn’t make bubbles this time. It was surprising how much younger he looked though, once all the forge-grime was soaped away. Singer arrived right as Vemik was toweling dry, and took her turn after Jooyun cleaned up.

To Vemik’s dismay, the Singer seemed to truly enjoy it. “Maybe the city-People were right,” she purred as she took longer than she needed. “Hot water is niiice.”

“Gets in my ears…” Vemik grumbled, but his spirit wasn’t really in it. He was brushing furiously at his crest, trying to dry it out and get it to stand up properly again. .

“It’s better for your health, Vemik.” Jooyun toweled his head-crest while he spoke. “All the soot from the forge will leech through your hide almost as if you’d eaten the ashes yourself. [We should really fix your ventilation, too.”]

“Yes, yes…”

“You should listen to him,” the Singer swatted Vemik lightly as she put on a clean loincloth of her own and squeezed the water out of her tail. “We need you alive and well for a long time, Sky-Thinker. If forge-soot makes you sick…”

“I’m strong!”

“For now, yes.” Jooyun had a serious expression. “I’m strong too, but I’m not going to risk losing my strength just because I don’t necessarily like everything I need to do to stay healthy.”

“We all grow old and weak, Sky-Thinker. Only a fool would hasten it,” Yan agreed, though he had to agree that he would have liked to do without bathing, really.

“Shouldn’t we fly? They will be waiting for us,” the Singer said.

Jooyun chuckled. “We already took off. Look.”

Sure enough, when Yan glanced at the window, he saw nothing but night sky.

“How…? I didn’t feel anything!”

[“A really crazy piece of Sky-Magic called an inertial damper. It’s the same thing that makes the gravity plating under our feet work. Same as in ‘Horse’s gym, or in the gravball arena.”]

“But how does it–”

“I ain’t got any idea, Vemik!” Julian belly-laughed. “I mean, I know the general idea, but….Anyway. [We need to get ready. The Ambassadors will waiting for us as soon as we land. That includes Ambassador Rockefeller, who’s my boss, so…] Please don’t take this the wrong way, but do not climb him like a jungle-gym. Most Humans aren’t like me, remember. The ambassador…well, he’s a normal-sized man.”

“Small? Like Heff?”

“Nah. He’s as tall as me, but Hoeff is bigger and a lot stronger, so…no wrestling, even for play. He’s also very smart, and has very, very strong friends. Remember, you are here to speak for all your people. All the Sky-Tribes will be watching. You don’t want to represent them badly do you? So… don’t scare the peoples of every sky-place before you’ve even said hello.”

The Human standing up at the front of the Weaver raised his voice for their attention. [“Landing on Heinlein in two. Strap in!”]

“Already?” Vemik asked, turning to peer out of the window.

“Sit down,” Jooyun told him firmly. Reluctantly, Vemik turned away from the window and plopped down in the seat. They were too small for everyone, even Singer, and when Jooyun tied them to them with wide, flat red ropes he had to move little steel things around on them to make them long enough to go around Yan’s body. Even then, they were tight.

“Sorry fellas, but it’s not for long. [These seats at least don’t have armrests…”] Jooyun grumbled that last comment as he sat and wedged himself in. Yan saw one of the two men up front glance back at them, raise a thumb at the one next to him and nod.

The first they saw of the warship was a flat expanse of dark grey coming up from below. There was a man out there, completely covered in thick and heavy-looking clothes of some kind that even covered his face. A thin steel rope trailed behind him, drifting strangely in the air.

Or… not-air. Jooyun had once said there was no air to breathe above the sky, and no gravity to keep a man’s feet on the ground. Which explained how the man in the strange full-body suit could drift slowly up to meet them. He attached another steel rope to the Weaver’s outside, and Yan heard a muffled clonk as he hooked it on. There were more clonks from the other side, and from further down the ship, four in all. Moments later they were pulled down onto the ship, and then… inside. Between massive steel doors and through one of those blue sky-magic “force field” things. It was loud on the other side, loud enough to be heard even inside the Weaver, and most of it was the noise the doors made as they closed to seal out the night.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Jooyun grinned as the ramp lowered.

“Is… a lot bigger than Misfit.”

“Dude, Misfit was smaller than the Weaver. Misfit was tiny. Ships don’t come much smaller.”

There weren’t many things that made Yan feel small. He could bend all but the strongest Ketta branches underfoot, but this…

Yan kept that feeling to himself as two hands of Humans, all wearing the same dark twilight-sky clothes, bustled around the Weaver, mostly doing things he didn’t follow, though four of them tied it down with wide green straps so that it was firmly held to the steel underfoot. From up front of the Weaver, behind a curtain, Yan could hear two voices talking quietly, saying things he didn’t really follow.

“Engine two temperature?”

“Dropped.”

“Engine three temperature?”

“Dropped.”

“Coolant pump clutch?”

“Disengaged…”

And so on. It was all very… it was a lot of things. Serious, exact, careful. All the Humans had one job to do each, and they were focused on that job and nothing else. It was a little like how he and Vemik got when they were doing a big work-trial of smelts to make knives for trading, or arrow tips, or now tools for other forges in other villages. Vemik would lead in one kind of work, Yan the other. They knew exactly how it worked, and they had short words for it, too.

The Humans were doing the same thing, just… bigger. More. How much practice did they have on doing this?

He shook the thought off and followed Jooyun, who was following a man in green clothes. Another man in the same green fell in behind them and gave Vemik a little nudge with polite words when Sky-Thinker wanted to stop and look around.

There was an odd moment when they reached the back of the huge metal cave they were in. Jooyun stopped and spoke to a man with one of their tablets in his hands.

“Permission to come aboard?”

The other man nodded. “Permission granted. The Ambassador will meet you in the captain’s In-Port cabin.”

After that, they found themselves in tight, narrow spaces like squeezing between the trees. It was quieter there, though, and people stood aside for them. Yan found it a bit annoying. He was a very broad-shouldered man of the People and proud of it, though that did mean he had to crab somewhat sideways much of the way. Vemik and Jooyun didn’t fare much better, but Singer and everyone else seemed just fine.

She spent her time not-turning-sideways to look at the people. “…Are Human ships always like this?” she asked. “Everyone is so.. Sharp.”

“You remember the nuke?” Jooyun asked. “How it lit up the sky and flattened the forest?”

“Yes…?”

“This ship uses that same magic to fly. It’s very dangerous, so they have to be careful. And that’s just one of the ways it could all go badly wrong. When they’re on the job, they take it seriously. I bet they’re all a lotta fun when they’re off-duty, though. Work hard, play hard, you know?”

“Can’t let the forge go out.”

“Something like that. If this forge goes out, we all die. It won’t, though. We’re good at this.”

“Yes…” the Singer agreed, quietly. Yan, who knew intimately just how hard steel was to make and could see no end to the amount of it around them, almost nodded along with her.

Instead he straightened until his crest brushed the ceiling, and followed. Gnawing in the back of his head, though, was a thought: the Humans weren’t the oldest sky-people around. They were here to meet ones who were even older still, and knew even more.

He was having a very hard time not feeling small…. Until he remembered why they were there. They were there because the Core-tie wanted something from them, and because the Humans valued them as friends. They were there because, despite everything, despite the living miracle they were standing inside, the People were still strong enough to be worth something to the sky-tribes.

He stood taller again, and gave the Singer a confident grin.

Time to make a deal

Date Point: 16y3m AV
Jacksonville, Florida, USA, Earth

Special Agent James Mazur

Zane Reid’s MO was pretty straightforward. He seemed to have a knack for spotting properties whose occupants were out of town on vacation or business, and an even sharper knack for breaking in unnoticed.

Once inside, he’d eat their food, sleep in the master bedroom, and then in the morning he’d use their WiFi to work some more of his online sabotage. Then he’d leave, taking whatever loose cash he found with him. Mazur’s taskforce had been following his online trail and every time they arrived at an address they found rumpled bedclothes, an empty fridge and an unlocked door.

This time he’d also taken a gun, a Springfield XDS normally stored in the bedside table. The owner’s gun safe had been a cheap and inferior make, and Reid had busted into it by destroying the lock.

“So why didn’t he take one before? Is this just the first time he had the chance, or has something changed?”

Jim Mazur shrugged wearily. Six hours ago he’d been in Ohio. Now he was in Florida. Tomorrow for all he knew they’d be up in Maine, or all the way back over in California. Given that Reid obviously had access to a way to bunny-hop around the whole Continental US, it was kind of a mystery why he even bothered with breaking into people’s houses.

“Might just be the first chance,” he said. “It doesn’t really change anything, this is just another item on his rap sheet.”

The analyst who’d mused about that, Zoe, nodded. “Right. I guess I’m clutching at straws.”

“I don’t blame you. We’re always a step behind this guy and it’s getting old.” And the problem, Jim reflected, was that they weren’t likely to get out in front of him anytime soon.

Letting the reporters into Camp Tebbutt had been a pretty effective antidote to some of his vitriolic videos, but not enough. There was a large underbelly to American society that simply couldn’t and wouldn’t trust the government, who were sick of war spending on expensive shit up in space when there were homeless people in their city centers, or kids struggling in school who wanted to blame education spending…

There were a lot of people out there who wanted to believe what Reid was selling. As a percentage of the population, maybe not that many. As an absolute number, though…

All of that should maybe have been beside the point from Jim’s perspective. He was tracking down a fugitive from a Federal prison who had a literally apocalyptic agenda, and everything else was somebody else’s problem, in theory. But life just wasn’t that clean and clear-cut, and all it would take was one potential witness who was actually sympathetic to Zane Reid, and the whole investigation could be delayed or misdirected.

They’d been assuming Reid was armed, of course. Having it confirmed didn’t really change anything, but it did highlight again that they didn’t know what his long-term plan was, or that of his puppetmasters. Given how easily he could flit around the country, his next move might be anywhere, doing anything, and until he made some kind of an unforced error they were always going to be playing catch-up.

Manhunts weren’t supposed to go that way. Done right, the fugitive was always scrambling to stay ahead, constantly making mistakes, always losing ground. Done even better, the fugitive languished in their sense of false security right up until the moment they found themselves surrounded by Federal agents.

“…Huh.”

Zoe’s little grunt of surprise dragged Jim out of his thoughtful fugue. “Got something?” he asked, not particularly hopefully but…

“You know the blood sample on the lockbox?” Zoe gestured to the broken metal case, which she’d been swabbing and running through her portable tools. Reid had cut himself while forcing the lock, and she was diligently recording it.

“Yeah?”

“It’s not Reid.” She handed him her tablet. Sure enough, the report from the little hand-held blood work lab she used was pretty clear and concise: ‘NO MATCH.’

“Could it have got confused?” Jim checked. “I mean, this is a guy’s house…”

“I’ll check it against DNA samples from… hmm…” Zoe stood up and slipped into the en-suite bathroom. She made a pleased noise.

“Found a razor and hair samples. One minute…”

Jim gave her the requested minute as he stooped to inspect the box carefully. It was pretty clear that Reid—or whoever had broken into the box—had sliced their finger on a sharp metal edge. It wasn’t a lot of blood, and nobody from his team had cut themselves on it…

“Yup, confirmed. No match with the homeowner,” Zoe said, returning from the en-suite.

“So it’s either one of us…” Jim said.

“It isn’t. The lab knows all of us.”

“…Or Reid has an accomplice.”

“Yeah. One whose blood isn’t full of Arutech.”

That was a development. Jim swiped down to look at the ancestry summary, only to be disappointed. The accomplice’s genetic profile was about as generically European as they came: Germany, France, England, Ireland. Five or six percent from the Indian subcontinent, and a sniff of Spain.

“Anything we can work on?” Zoe asked.

“Accomplice is a male of European descent. Dark hair, brown eyes,” Jim read.

“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”

“It’s something. We can feed that data into the Watson at least. You never know what it’ll cough up for us.”

Sadly the blood sample turned out to be the only breakthrough, and in any other situation it wouldn’t have been much. But this was the first time in the whole investigation that there’d been any kind of new evidence. It was a complication—with an accomplice, Reid could achieve a lot more than if he was working alone—but at least they knew about the accomplice now. Or maybe accomplices plural?

Having that information couldn’t harm the investigation. Which was why Jim went home that night in a pretty good mood.

They were a step closer.

Date Point: 16y3m AV
USS Robert A. Heinlein, Akyawentuo Orbit, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Third Director Tran

Some of the other Directors had expressed reservations when Tran had informed them he was taking Nofl along to the meeting with the Ten’Gewek. He’d invested some of their trust and patience by reassuring them that Nofl, who was only saved from being entirely untouchable by his frankly stellar contributions to Directorate science, would be a valuable asset for this meeting.

He remained confident that it hadn’t been a mistake, but there really were times when the odd scientist grated on his sense of propriety. For instance the way that, the moment the jump array fired and delivered them directly from Folctha to the deck of the USS Robert A. Heinlein, Nofl greeted a nearby crew member with a certain mischievous glee and a lavishly extravagant cry of “Helloooo sailor!”

Apparently the peculiar outburst meant something to the Humans, several of whom did a poor job of pretending not to be amused.

It didn’t go down well with all of them, though. Their escort on this trip was Master Sergeant Coombes from the SOR, who shot Nofl a look that should have snap-frozen him, stopped the two Corti from disembarking the jump platform, then turned one way and saluted a flag hanging on one wall. That done, he turned the other way and held a salute toward a fellow Human.

“Party of three, request permission to come aboard.”

The Human thus saluted returned the gesture. “Permission granted.”

Coombes returned his hand to his side, then gestured the two Corti off the jump platform. Humans had their strange ways, but Tran was glad of the reminder that Nofl was stranger still even by their unique standards, and that his strangeness was not always appreciated.

“I hope you do not intend to do that with the Ten’Gewek,” Tran muttered to him.

“No, no, no!” Nofl assured him. “I get the message, this is a time to be very serious.”

“Tradition, Nofl,” Coombes said. “It’s about respect, to the ship, to the history of the service, and to all the people who’ve died upholding its ideals.”

“Consider me appropriately chastised.”

They were welcomed out of the jump compartment by Ambassador Rockefeller and Robert A. Heinlein’s captain, Nate Ruprecht. Both were looking suitably imposing in what Tran knew to be formal clothing, though Ruprecht’s was a good deal more decorated than the ambassador’s. Where Rockefeller was wearing a simple black suit with a wine-colored tie, the captain’s was a rich blue so dark it was almost black, with golden trim and a large multicolored patch over his left chest.

To Tran, clothing was something of an alien novelty, but in this case he could see the utility. Quite aside from the at-a-glance communication of rank, the protective benefits were obvious. Even with the gravity adjusted for their benefit, the deck was still hard and cold, and packed with exposed systems, ducts, piping and assorted emergency equipment.

They were met with commendable poise and formality. There were careful handshakes, and Ruprecht’s greeting was an efficient “Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you for hosting this meeting,” Tran replied.

“It’s our pleasure. The Ten’Gewek delegates are already waiting in my in-port cabin. Corporal Turner here will escort you. I understand both you and the Ten’Gewek wish for this meeting to be quick and to-the-point, and unfortunately your very different dietary needs would make entertaining you properly a serious challenge, so I hope you won’t think I’m rude if I just leave you in the ambassador’s capable hands.”

“Not at all,” Tran assured him. “Thank you for your welcome.”

Fortunately, the captain’s “in-port cabin” was much more comfortable. It was actually two rooms, an office with a folding bunk above the desk, and a sitting room which was apparently where they would be meeting with the primitives. The floor was polished wood with the ship’s crest in the center, the walls were painted a neutral off-white, and there were several couches around a low table plus a bookshelf and some framed decorative images.

It would have been spacious and luxurious, if not for the four enormously physical beings already occupying it. The three males were outright hulking, including a particularly well-sculpted Human, who was both an impressive expression of his species’ genetic potential, and one of Nofl’s more successful patients.

Nofl Immediately perked up. “Julian! How is your foot, darling?”

The Human chuckled and stood tall to meet them. “Perfect, as always.”

“Third Director, this is Mister Julian Etsicitty, our Special Envoy to the Ten’Gewek.”

“Howdy.” Julian approached and offered a massive paw-like hand, which completely encircled Tran’s like an untightened vice. “My friends here are the leaders of their people. The big one is Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge.”

Yan stood and stalked over with a deck-shakingly weighty and almost innately predatory prowl, then offered up his own gigantic parody of a hand. Tran observed Yan’s motion with a clinical eye. The enormous chieftain was, it was reasonable to say, physically and anatomically ideal. Yan had a body whose every vast shape and sharp line neatly illustrated why he was the leader of his primitive kind; his raw strength was reportedly equaled only by the other two Deathworlder exemplars, and his sheer robustness and gymnastic athleticism was said to exceed theirs.

If his ridiculously perfect physique was any indication of the goods on offer, this could prove to be a profitable exchange indeed. The Ten’Gewek would need to be extensively evaluated, of course, but there was something…Tran was hesitant to admit it, but Yan’s sheer presence was triggering some ancient, rarely-felt instincts. As the chieftain approached, Tran had found himself resisting the urge to recoil, or flee, or simply hide.

They shook. Tran’s little hand was completely lost in Yan’s vast paw. Fortunately, he had the sense to moderate his strength, and kept his grip to just shy of bone-shatteringly tight. Nor did he smell offensive, much to Tran’s surprise. He’d been worried about the scent of tanned leather and unwashed primitive, but it seemed the Ten’Gewek had discovered bathing at least. All that remained was a clean yet potent underlying musky note, much like every Deathworlder had in one form or another.

Yan’s body language and expression were utterly unreadable on first contact, but the room seemed to have a built-in translator function that rendered the native language into Corti Standard without issue. He smiled, bearing two bright-white pairs of truly enormous fangs. Again Tran’s instincts wanted nothing more than to recoil, but he had remembered that grins were often a friendly gesture among the Humans and the Gao.

“Well met.”

The translator gave his words a politely serious tone, but that failed to convey the rumbling avalanche that was his voice. Tran could quite literally feel Yan’s voice in his chest. He spoke so powerfully, the translator’s voice cancellation function could not fully suppress the sound.

Etsicitty introduced the other two as well. “This is Vemik Sky-Thinker, the People’s most experienced smith and inventor, and the Singer here is best thought of as a rather important community leader and healer. She is most concerned with medicine, well-being, running the villages, that sort of thing. Formally, she has no name.”

Both were also prime examples of the potential of Deathworlder biology, especially Vemik. He was every bit as exceptional as Yan, merely scaled down and younger. The Directorate had cursory genetic samples from both of them in the Ark’s library. It was obvious with only a glance across their bodies that they both greatly exceeded their predicted genomic modeling. Singer, too, was impressive. Sexual dimorphism was clearly quite pronounced in their species, but she was just as flawlessly well-formed as the males.

There was strategy at play, here. Julian’s presence was a not-so-subtle reminder of who the Humans counted as kindred, and undoubtedly of what Humans were capable of achieving if they so desired. Tran suspected that inviting all four of them was a deliberate ploy on the Deathworlder’s part to drive up the asking price, as it were. Negotiations with the Humans had…stalled, as of late. The Directorate has deduced the reason was they were waiting to see how talks with the Ten’Gewek developed. If that was the case, then Julian was exactly the type of reminder they would use.

He might even be aware he was being used in this manner, too.

It was an obvious ploy. Nevertheless, if this was the quality of stock the Corti could gain access to, along with further cooperation from the Humans…it was a well-considered and effective tactic.

The details of all that were for later. With that introduction complete, Julian then addressed the natives. “Singer, this is the Honorable Ambassador Rockefeller of the United States. He’s here to represent Allied Extrasolar Command, and is the guarantor of these talks. He’s also my boss. Yan and Vemik have already met him.”

“Yes! Our previous encounter was highly entertaining!” Rockefeller smiled warmly, and shook the three Ten’Gewek hands.

“Thank you for agreeing to, and hosting, this meeting,” Tran said formally to all of them. “I am Tran, Gold Banner, Third-Tier Director and Dean of the College of Xenobiology. I believe most of you are already familiar with my associate Nofl, Steel Banner, independent researcher and inventor of the medicine known as Cruezzir.”

He heard the faint scratchy whisper of the translator tripping over the word ‘xenobiology’ for the native’s benefit, and Yan frowned at it.

“…The tran-slay-tor did not like that word he used,” he said to Julian after a moment.

Julian rubbed his chin. “I think the best way to say that would be, uh…” he thought for a moment, and then spoke a long and complex polysyllabic word which the translator rendered confusingly back to Tran as ‘Sky-Thinking-People-Under-Other-Skies-Bodies.’

Convoluted as that was, the natives moved their heads in ways that suggested to Tran they understood the idea at least.

“I think, in the circumstances, it might be best if we ask the translator to omit the Ten’Gewek language,” Rockefeller suggested. “If you are happy for Mister Etsicitty to translate instead?”

“Why is the translation function compromised?” Tran asked.

“Their language is complex. Fusing, agglutinative, three numbers, three genders and ten noun cases which all decline, constructed tense, affixed animate, mood, and aspect markings, and a few other things I’m forgetting, too. You just…know what to say.” Julian shrugged. “I’m not a linguist, sorry.”

“Very well, I have no objection.” Tran sat down at Rockefellers invitation. The Ten’Gewek sat opposite, ignoring the creaking objections of their couch, with Yan taking up most of it from the middle, and Vemik and Singer to either side.

“So.” The Ambassador took his own seat, and opened a slim black folder on the table in front of him. “The negotiation in front of us is that the Corti Directorate wish to take genetic and other biological samples from the Ten’Gewek for the purposes of study and future research. In return, the Ten’Gewek desire a guaranteed supply of medicines, including vaccines, appropriate to safeguard the health of their people…”

“And books.” Yan added.

“A cultural exchange,” Etsicitty clarified. “They believe that to all things, there must be balance. They are very much aware that what you desire to take is opaque to them. In return, they ask that you give something equally opaque. They want to learn about you.”

“We can respect the desire for equal exchange,” Tran agreed. “My concern is that no mention has been made yet of a time limit on this supply of medical assistance. How long will we be required to deliver vaccines to this world?”

Yan consulted Julian for a few translations of some words, then nodded sharply as soon as he was happy he understood. To Tran’s vague surprise, he turned out to speak perfectly passable, though simple, Human English.

“We, the People strong. Not much sickness in us. But what we have, kill many of our children every season. We must increase. To increase, our children must live.”

The Singer nodded, and chimed in. “We were brought close to, uh… eck-stink-shun over the last… how long?” she asked Julian.

“We think the Hierarchy’s extermination campaign on Akyawentuo lasted about sixty Dominion standardized years,” the Human explained. “It began with an antimatter strike on their most developed cities, followed by a surface sweep led by Abrogator drones. If we’d found the Ten’Gewek even a year later, it would have been too late. Only the previously uncontacted forest tribes are left.”

The Singer nodded. “There are only two ten thousands of us, maybe. One evil sickness could kill us all.”

“Two ten thousands is not many for you, I think,” Yan added. “But for us, is everyone.”

Tran calculated. Twenty thousand natives, give or take a ten percent margin of error, with an estimated maximum childbirth rate of one pregnancy per female per annum, and an average litter size of singleton. Lifetime supplies of species-tailored, Deathworld-class vaccines and antibiotics was well within the abilities of just one of the Directorate’s Agile Development Modules, especially if automated production could be installed locally. The natives really were not asking for much, in the grand scheme of things. The College of Particle Physics had been known to misplace funding on that scale in a sloppy audit.

Still. Even a request as cheap as that could become expensive if it went on for long enough.

“Nevertheless, all we are asking for is a single round of non-invasive samples. We will not in any sense be Taking anything permanent. If we give a single round of medicines—enough for all currently living Ten’Gewek, say—then the next generation will be unprotected. A practical, permanent solution to the problem as presented will cost us significantly more than the value of the samples being given. We cannot provide such a service indefinitely, especially if the goal is population growth.”

“Not as simple as just giving us medicine, then,” Yan surmised.

Julian shook his head. “No. One generation could take their medicine, and those babies would live and grow strong, but then you’d be back to the start. More people having more babies, but they would lose those babies just as often as you do now. Would the Directorate would be willing to ensure a regular supply?”

Tran made a negative gesture. “We would require a negotiated duration for such a service, after which the contract would need to be renegotiated, or else the Ten’Gewek would need to establish their own native pharmaceutical industry… which according to our projections, they will not have the technological basis to do for at least three thousand Standardized Years.”

“That projection may not be accurate,” Rockefeller interjected. “The Ten’Gewek are developing very rapidly, in no small part due to their regular contact with Human technology and culture. The usual roadmap for sophont development doesn’t apply in this situation.”

“Agreed,” Nofl murmured, for Tran’s benefit, then spoke a little louder. “Might I suggest that the ambassador’s observation means that putting a time limit on the deal may not be useful? Perhaps instead, we should attach it to absolute population, if that is the Ten’Gewek objective.”

“…You mean deal ends when there are many of us,” Yan checked.

“I can see the merit in that suggestion,” Tran agreed. “The more of you there are, the more it will cost us to aid the Ten’Gewek.”

“Why not tie it to infant mortality rate?” Julian suggested. “If you can guarantee, say… four generations at a mortality rate better than fifty percent?”

“Julian?” Yan asked. The four huddled, speaking quietly in the native language while Julian translated and made sure they understood what was being proposed. Some sort of significant Look was exchanged. The big Human reached toward the table and pressed the button activating their muting field.

Tran took the opportunity to consult with Nofl.

“Rapid pharmaceutical development is your speciality, I believe.”

“Among others,” Nofl agreed.

“Time frame?”

“Assuming the Ten’Gewek aren’t substantially different from the two other deathworlder species I’ve studied, it should go smoothly…. But until I have some samples and scans, I can’t be definite. For all I know, we’ll have to reinvent from first principles. Unlikely, but it has happened.”

“We can do much better than fifty percent, I hope.”

“We can do better than ten percent. Goodness, I’d be ashamed if we couldn’t get the infant mortality rate below one percent, with proper application.”

“I think you’re being excessively optimistic, but very well… four generations, hmm.” Tran called up his memorized data on the state of the Directorate’s industrial abilities, logistics capacity, and the pricing estimates of a project like the one being asked. Four generations was… a hard bargain, but not an entirely unfair one. Especially considering how valuable the Ten’Gewek samples would be to the Ark Program.

…Tran glanced back at Julian, who was talking animatedly with the delegation on his side. Watching Deathworlders in motion was…intimidating, even if all they were doing was waving their hands about or bouncing in place. Nevertheless, the implication was clear. He couldn’t hear what they were saying but he didn’t need to. It was clear both Human and Ten’Gewek were deeply invested in the outcome of these talks.

“…I’ll push for two generations,” he decided to Nofl. “And compromise on three.”

“Of course. Never accept the first offer.”

As they returned to the negotiation, The hitherto-silent one known as Vemik, who’d been watching and listening carefully rather than contributing, spoke up.

“I have a question. What will you do with these samples? What are they for?”

“To learn about your kind, of course.”

“Why do you want to learn about the People?” Vemik pressed. “You seem… practical. Like you do things for reasons, yes? Knowing things just to know them is fun, but knowing things to do things is even better, so…”

Never underestimate a deathworlder indeed. Tran was secretly quite pleased, in fact. It was good to know they were dealing with a species who were merely undeveloped rather than stupid. There were too many stupid species.

“…I’m not at liberty to disclose the exact reasons,” he admitted. “But suffice it to say… we are not satisfied with how we are now. In the past, the Corti wrongly believed that intellect and physicality were mutually exclusive. We now know differently, and wish to adapt accordingly.”

Vemik listened to Julian’s patient translation, then nodded. His tail twitched as he absorbed what he heard.

“So… you will write new body-words. Using ours.”

“Learning from yours. We are learning from Human and Gaoian genetics as well. The idea is to deduce what you have in common which can also be successfully integrated into the Corti genome.”

Vemik glanced at the Singer. Some form of communication passed between them, driven by twitches of the tail and ears, slight dilations and contractions of their square, slotted pupils, and a slight tilt of Vemik’s head and a twitch of the Singer’s. Then both of them turned to Yan. They gave the same almost imperceptible gesture, and Yan nodded sharply.

“The deal: You will give four gen-err-ay-shuns of less than half our children die,” he said, turning to Tran.

“I can offer a much better rate: At least nine out of every ten will live… for two generations. After that, our continued service can be negotiated further…” Tran returned. He saw Yan grin, scoot forward on the couch, and light up.

The negotiations began in earnest.

Date Point: 16y3m AV
“Stinkworld,” the Irujzen Reef

Meereo, Champion of Clan Longear

Meereo was reading a report that simply blew his mind. There was no other way to describe it.

Clan Highmountain had become involved in the Irujzen Relay investigation. Rather than send a ship to Stinkworld, though, they’d instead flown the deep-space explorer A Poem Written In Steel all the way out to the halo stars at the very edge of the galaxy.

The idea, as he understood it, was that the Humans had sent over some kind of field equations that might be useful in picking out the Relay’s unique quantum signature from the galactic background. The Highmountains had tested it first by flying way out into the fringes of the galactic disk, where the stars were small and cold and impoverished of the heavier elements necessary for life, and where nobody had ever found a temperate planet. The kind of place the Hierarchy would naturally have no interest in and therefore, presumably, didn’t bother to cover with relays.

Then they’d flown inwards, toward the Irujzen Reef on a course that took them between Sol and Barnard’s Star. And they’d watched carefully for the kind of quantum signatures that Scotch Creek had predicted.

Sure enough, about a kiloparsec out from Sol, they’d started picking up exactly the predicted signal. By the time they flashed through the twelve light-year radius around Earth legally recognized by the Dominion as Human territory, the signal was strong and steady.

The Irujzen Reef—known to Human science as the Sagittarius Star Cloud,Messier 24 and IC 4715—was ten kilolightyears from Sol. Meaning that the Irujzen Relay generated a field that encompassed approximately one twenty-eighth of the galactic cross-sectional area.

That was a fact Meereo could sink his teeth into, even though the scale of it made his brain ache. He’d opened one of his professional software tools and gone to work.

First, make some assumptions about what features of network design remained constant even in a system as exotic and high-tech as this. He’d used cellular networks for reference. Every sapient species known to him used basically the same approach, because it was the one that worked.

The questions in front of him were… well, there were a few. First, was he looking at a standard sort of cell, or a particularly large one for gap coverage and reliability coverage? Or maybe a small local one for high-density traffic?

Probably not. Traffic engineering may not even be a concern for a system like this, this wasn’t radio frequency. And across the kind of time scales that the Hierarchy operated in, there was no such thing as a static landscape. Ten thousand light years was a stupefying distance to an organic life form, but a star’s orbit would carry it that far in a “mere” twelve to fifteen million years. With billions of stars falling inside its coverage, the Relay would lose and gain hundreds every year.

The Hierarchy therefore probably didn’t bother trying to anticipate where the galactic population would be distributed and fine-tune their network with larger and smaller cells. Far simpler and cheaper to make the relays a standard size and deploy enough of them to maintain reliable coverage no matter how the stars spun.

That was all speculation of course, but it didn’t seem like unreasonable speculation to Meereo and it fit the facts, so he kept calculating.

Twenty-eight relays the size of Irujzen would be enough to cover the whole galaxy on paper (overlapping circles problem aside), but of course life was not evenly distributed across the galaxy. There was none out in the halo due to the paucity of heavier elements, and none in the core due to intense radiation, frequent supernovae and an unknowable number of black holes crashing about.

Temperate, life-bearing worlds and the people who called them home occupied a fertile band between those two extremes that the Humans for some utterly bizarre reason called the ‘Golden Locks Zone.’ Gaoians called it the Green Belt. Whatever the name, twenty-eight relays, evenly spaced on planets with roughly equivalent Great Orbital periods would certainly cover…

He doodled, and calculated, and sketched.

….Most all of the Green Belt, most of the time.

He doodled, and calculated, and sketched some more.

It took him a few hours to find the minimum number and configuration that would reliably cover 100% of the green zone for, say, a million years. After that, it took another half hour before he arrived at a configuration that he was satisfied would provide effectively indefinite coverage and sufficient redundancy.

So. There were (probably) somewhere between twenty-eight and a hundred and twelve relays scattered all over the galaxy.

He took the geometric mean of those two numbers—fifty-six—and plugged it into his simulation. The result had occasional temporary gaps where a handful of planets might go without coverage for a few thousand years here and there, but across the kind of epochs the Hierarchy thought in, those gaps were at best a minor momentary nuisance that arose only in a vanishingly small number of cases.

Crucially, however, a significant minority of the Green Belt was covered only by a single relay. And if his assumptions about how the relays were spaced were correct, then the Border Stars—the territory between the fringes of Dominion and Alliance space which contained only one temperate planet of any significance—were one such minority.

The planet in question was Earth.

He stood up, sharply. Garl was briefing the senior Stoneback Father who’d been brought in to take over from him on this project, so Meereo scratched respectfully on his tent and waited to be called in rather than interrupt them.

Garl sniffed the air and peered at him. The old man’s vision was deteriorating alarmingly fast, now. “Champion Meereo. Something important?”

“I think so, Grandfather, yes.” Meereo didn’t bother to put down his tablet for the venerable ‘Back to read. Instead, he summarized what he’d been working on.

Garl might have been a common clay type, but there was a quick and perceptive brain under that shaggy pelt. He tilted his head as he absorbed Meereo’s conclusion, and then pant-grinned with a certain slow satisfaction.

“So ‘yer saying… if we were to destroy this relay…”

“Then the Hierarchy would completely lose contact with their operation in Sol.”

Garl duck-nodded, and stood up. He rounded the desk, and embraced Meereo in a tight hug “…Thank you. I actually get to hurt the bastards after all,” he said.

“It gets better!” Meereo managed to croak around the rib-crushing affection.

“What?”

“There’s another important planet this might effect too. Ugun…” he paused, raised the tablet, and read ponderously off it. “Ugun-du-vuronag-thureg-nu-burthuruv.”

Garl chittered darkly. “…A name like that could only belong to one group’a people.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that settles it. Tell erryone to pack their stuff, Meereo. We’re blowin’ this place ‘ta shit.”

Meereo pant-grinned. In truth, he would have liked to monitor the relay a little longer. One could always learn more from a running system than from relics and archived data… but this was a war. And sometimes a war demanded decisive action.

If it also meant getting an old Stoneback his one good hit in before the end… He was all for it.

“Yes, Warleader.”

Date Point: 16y3m AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

“I like these Core-tie.”

“You do? Why the change of heart?”

When the ‘del-a-gay-shun’ had returned, there was of course much eagerness to learn the news. Yan was very happy to tell everyone they would be getting vack-seens from the Core-tie as soon as they could be made ready. With that, runners from nearby villages charged off into the trees to spread the news, and not long after that, more and more of the People poured into Yan’s village bringing meat, treats, an eagerness to play…

It was spring, after all. Springtime play normally had a slightly dangerous edge to it, like a flint knife that had been knapped a bit too thin and which could cut the hand that held it as badly as anything else. Big fights between tribes could happen in spring, when the Given-Men were at their hottest Fire, and the young men were strong and eager to take any woman even vaguely interested…or not, sometimes. For himself, Yan had never felt his Fire as strongly as he had this season, not even the first time so many seasons ago. It was only his worry for his People against the Sky-Tribes that kept his feet firmly on the trail…and maybe, if he thought about it, his love for Jooyun too.

But! Today was a happy day! Many of the sky-tribes were cruel and uncaring, but the gods must have smiled on the Ten’Gewek when they conspired for the Humans to find them.

Most of the Humans stayed out of the way and let the People have their fun. They had words like ‘high energy’ and ‘highly strung.’ They were celebrating too, in their quieter way, with beers and food, and some of their strange music playing from a singing-stone near their fire. But what Yan noticed, when he checked on them, was that it wasn’t like the way the People partied. Couples weren’t slipping away to find somewhere private to fuck. Well…Heff had his Claire wrapped up in strong arms and affection, and the two weren’t paying much attention to anyone else…but still. The rest of the men weren’t wrestling and boasting, the women weren’t dancing and teasing the men with promises of sweet treats and a warm, comfortable pile of hides…

These were ‘coll-eegs.’ They liked each other, they worked together, but they had rules. Rules seemed to be a big thing, to Humans. They were everywhere, spoken and unspoken, felt rather than learned.

Maybe that was a good thing, for people who played with the power of stars and nukes and built things like USS Robert A. Heinlein, and made rifles that could tear beasts in half or kill them even on a close miss. Maybe Humans needed their rules, to be as strong as they were.

Maye the People would need to become like that too, in time. But not yet.

So, Yan had partied in the People’s way. He’d fought, and boasted, and feasted, and nearly beaten Heff in a knife-throwing contest, and had beaten Jooyun in a race around the village, and he’d finally got to enjoy Yoonee, and two of Yoonee’s sisters too…

After which he’d decided that he was tired and would go celebrate with the Humans, something a few others including Vemik and the Singer had already chosen to do.

They’d opened some beers to celebrate the talks. Yan declined, but Vemik decided he would throw caution to the wind and brave another… Maybe because the latest woman to catch his eye was drinking it as well. Yan wasn’t about to try a Human, they were too… bendy… but if Vemik and Tilly both wanted to, then good luck to them!

Jooyun had pretty thoroughly exhausted himself playing with the men of the other tribes. He mostly won, too! That was good. The others needed to see their Human sky-friends as strong, because the more Yan learned about the bigger world, the more he realized that strong meant more than big muscles. The trick was showing that to the rest of the People. That was why Yan maybe bullied Jooyun a bit in the beginning and made him a man of the People. It was for his own good, firstly, but mostly it was for the tribes. Professor Daniel and his people were very nice when they visited each village, they brought learnings and coloring books…but they were strange and small people, hard to understand. And strictly off-limits for normal play.

Not Jooyun. He had grown strong enough for the People and had endless energy to challenge all comers, but even he had his limits. Eventually, when it was getting dark and two of the younger men from Bor’s tribe had tackled him at the same time, they were finally able to pin him to the ground, claim their victories, and give him a small embarrassment. He stumbled back to the campfire while smiling hugely, despite being exhausted and so sweaty-wet he looked like he’d fallen into the river. A couple of the younger children chased after him, eager to climb onto his back and pester him with young-boy questions.

He’d earned some peace, though. “Go play with your friends, little fellas! I need to sit down!”

He sat heavily next to Yan, sighed fondly at them, and groped greedily at those beer bottles. Yan still didn’t like beer. Instead of drinking until he was too dizzy to even walk, Yan planned to drag Yoonee and her sisters back to his hut, pin them under his strength and fuck them completely stupid, and keep fucking them until maybe the noon singing tomorrow…

It hadn’t taken Jooyun long to down a hand of bottles and start in on number five. Not even all that beer seemed to make him the least bit ‘dwunk.’ Professor Daniel had matched him drink for drink too, and maybe he was a little calmer and slower, but otherwise Yan could see nothing wrong with him either. It was him who’d sounded so surprised at Yan’s confession.

“No silly play. They say what they want to take, they say what they can give back. Honest.”

“Only ‘cuz we kept ‘em that way, bud,” Jooyun told him. “They’d have taken you for everything if they could.”

“Good!” Yan boasted. “Would be weak if we let them climb all over us!”

“And they would be weak if they didn’t try to climb all over us!” the Singer agreed. She was trying beer for herself, and seemed to like it. “Why didn’t they come visit? We’d make a feast!”

Professor Daniel drained his bottle and set it next to the growing pile. Vemik would no doubt claim them for himself tomorrow. “They can’t. The gravity alone would at the very least break their bones.”

“They have excursion suits, don’t they?” Jooyun asked. “…No, wait. One sniff of the air around here and they’d be in anaphylactic shock in seconds.”

Yan had no idea what that long word was, but he’d long since got used to that with Humans. Jooyun was good about making a People-word if it was something really important for them to know. It sounded like a weak-person kind of problem, though. Didn’t sound nice at all.

“We had the same worry about Gaoians visiting Earth.” Professor Daniel pointed out.

“Yes…but that’s still valid for some of them. They have to get tested before visiting, after all. It’s like…half of all Silverfurs, and ten percent of the Brownies, I think? But yeah.”

“I thought Gaoians were [deathworlders] too?” Yan asked.

“They are,” Daniel said with a nod. “But the Hierarchy sealed away many of their body-words that make them that. Those body-words have been slowly escaping for many generations now, but the kind of time that, uh, the gods work on in these things is much, much longer than a life. In any case, they’re only just now re-learning what it means to be themselves. Really proper examples of them being Deathworlders—like Daar, or his friends—are still pretty rare.”

“That’s going to change though, I bet,” Jooyun mused.

“Oh, absolutely…Anyway. You still have some work to do, Yan. The Corti want to see a demonstration of your people’s overall fitness, so you’ll need to find two hands of the smartest, strongest, and best-looking Ten’Gewek you can, so we can bring them to Cimbrean for a little adventure next week.”

“God,” grumbled Jooyun, “That’s going to be…interesting.”

Yan ignored Jooyun’s misuse of god’s name for the moment. “Why?”

“Remember everything we had to teach you, Yan? How to use the toilet? How to stay safe with the other aliens? Things you absolutely can’t do?”

“Vemik and I, we’re smart! If we can learn, other People learn too!”

“And will you ensure they behave themselves?”

“Jooyun Sky-Brother,” Yan chided, “I am not a young, dumb man. I know my people. They will behave, you have my word.”

“…And your word is more than enough.” Jooyun nodded seriously. “But just to be sure, uh… absolutely no mating with aliens…” Jooyun gave a sly look over toward Tilly, who was a tiny, animated little thing wrapped up tightly in Vemik’s limbs; the two were essentially oblivious to all but themselves and conspired quietly with each other. Singer just rolled her eyes and trilled.

Yan nodded solemnly. There were times some of the younger Given-Men, still getting used to their Fire, suggested that being so close with the Sky-People made him and the people around him weaker. Yan had never stood for that, not for a second, and everyone who’d ever said it to his face had been one big bruise by the time he was done with them.

They didn’t know Jooyun and the others. They saw Jooyun and respected him, but the others? Little stick-thin ones like Tilly and old men like Professor Daniel weren’t the same thing. They knew Jooyun was rare among his kind, so Humans were weaker than the People. Even if they actually knew better in their head…it was hard to see past what someone’s gut said was true.

Yan had seen metal death hammer down from above, and a flash of godly power smash the forest. He had seen ships, and cities, and guns, and cars, and all the other things and he knew it was Humans who did all those things. The others… knew it, but they didn’t know it. Didn’t feel it. Yan looked at Humans and saw strong people, just like he’d seen strength in Vemik even when the Sky-Thinker was a young boy who spent too long gazing at clouds and not enough time throwing spears.

Professor Daniel and his coll-eegs were winning them over. It just…took time, and maybe it took Jooyun beating the bad thoughts out of a man now and then, too. When his women weren’t looking.

And there was another image seared in Yan’s mind, from the first time he’d fought the Hierarchy’s death-birds. The time Awisun had swatted a hand of them out of the air in just heartbeats with a cold, fierce face and no mercy.

Their bodies might be small. But their hearts were as fierce as anything Yan had ever fought.

“Yes, yes…” Yan again looked at the beer, and shuddered slightly. “They say, bring men and women? And you promise we will be gone only a little while?”

“Yeah, men and women both. They should be quick learners so we can, I dunno, teach them Gravball maybe?”

“Now that would be a heck of a demonstration…” Professor Daniel said.

“You’ve seen gravball?”

“The rules leaked out in a TV interview some time ago. There’s a YouTube league now. Or, well, was. The rate of injury was pretty ridiculous. But given sports medicine these days…”

“Didn’t take you for a sports fan.”

“Not usually. But you have to admit, Gravball is spectacular.”

“Fun as heck to play, too. It’s basically three-dee spacerugby. Ooh!” Jooyun was struck by a good idea suddenly. “Maybe we could run them through some scenarios! Show off that they’re quick problem-solvers, too. Whatever we gotta do to make a good impression, yeah?”

Daniel chuckled. “You’re definitely a cheerleader for them.”

“Us. Cheerleader for us, human and Ten’Gewek. I took the rites, remember? And I took ‘em seriously.”

“Fair enough.”

“We bring our best,” Yan agreed. “Show us at our best, too. Only way.”

“I’d say no Given-Men besides you, though. After all…” Jooyun smiled slyly as he brought the bottle to his lips. “They didn’t ask for Given-Men specifically. Make them pay more for that!”

“Devious! I imagine Claire would like that…where is she?”

Yan grinned. “Fucking Heff!” He’d seen them slip away from the fire during the conversation.

Predictably, the Humans got all embarrassed.

“And where’s Tilly and Vem—? Oh. Never, uh, never mind. I don’t want to know.”

“…Well. Best’a luck to her, I guess,” Jooyun looked awkward, then stood up. “I’m gonna go sleep. I’ve gotta jump back early in the morning. And arrange shenanigans for you, Yan.”

That was one of his favorite sky-words. One of Yan’s too. “Go. Don’t be gone long.”

“Never. Maybe I’ll bring Tristan and Ramsey next time!”

“Strong boys?”

“They will be.”

“Good.” Yan liked that. Boys (and girls!) should grow up strong. And if they impressed the core-tie enough…

The People would be sky-strong too.

Date Point: 16y3m1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Leemu

There was something wrong with Leemu’s eyes, and it was scaring the shit out of him.

He’d never been all that brave. He hoped he wasn’t a coward, but fear was… he’d avoided it, when he could. Now, though, it was a light in the darkness. It was… something. A feeling, which made it a beacon he could follow out from under the crushing weight of depression. It was the first thing he’d felt with any real strength or passion since waking up, so as much as he was frightened by it…

He was also curious.

He’d first noticed it after a day or two living with Preed and Gorku on this strange new planet in this house the Great Father himself had got for them. Something was… Odd. When he looked out the window at the people walking past, sometimes some of their clothes popped out strangely from the background. He couldn’t describe it, just that they were… strange.

It didn’t go away. It just got more and more intense as time went on until one day he looked at a bottle of sauce on the counter in Preed’s kitchen and, with a jolt that fell right through him from his head to his stomach, he realized that he was seeing a new color.

“Gorku! Help!”

The huge Stoneback was in their garage gym, cheerily making a racket as he did most days when he wasn’t gleefully forcing Leemu to do the same. It wasn’t as fun as it had been before, there was much more pain and not as much progress, but…well. He only really looked forward to two things in the world. Preed’s noodles, and Gorku’s efforts to Make Everything Better.

Now, he desperately needed them.

Gorku came stampeding out of the garage. “Wuz’ wrong, buddy?” His speech had improved dramatically, but it was still a tiny bit slurred. Leemu had been noticing details like that a lot more, lately. And thinking about them more, too.

“Color!” He noticed something about Gorku’s fur. It looked different! Like…richer, maybe.

“…Color?”

“I… I’m seeing…” Leemu waved a paw desperately at the sauce bottle. “What is that?”

“Uh…” Gorku lumbered over to the bottle and sniffed it. “…Hot sauce?”

“No I mean, what color is it you huge…?”

“Oh! Uh…kinda green? Mebbe a little yellowish, dunno why Preed likes it so much…”

“No! It’s different! I–” Leemu spun as Preed came in from the little garden he’d started tending out the back of the house. “Preed, what–”

Preed blinked at him, then at the bottle. “Red. Bright red. Slightly orange.”

“…Red?”

“Yes. Maybe…come outside, Leemu.”

Preed had started growing a garden out back of the kitchen. Mostly it was herbs, and that was a real treat for the nose. One of Leemu’s first really good moments had come when he’d been led outside and had the chance to experience the scents of Basil, Lemongrass, Galangal, Turmeric, Coriander, garlic…

He’d also planted flowers, which were a different and much sweeter texture for the nose. Now, though, they were… were…

Leemu looked around, and felt as if the world had just become much, much bigger and way scarier. He whimpered, just trying to taken the sheer incredible change of it all–!

He felt as if the bottom had dropped out and he was falling down, down—but also flying. There were hues there he’d never imagined. Like that flower which was blue but not, and that one which was yellow but not. And…

He sat down abruptly and covered his eyes, shivering.

Gorku and Preed were right there for him. It took him a while to feel brave enough to open his eyes and look again and see just how different everything was.

It was… He didn’t know how he’d even begin to describe it. He could see patterns on the flowers and leaves that would have been invisible before. Were invisible! When he looked at Preed’s shoes he saw a warm healthy color he couldn’t name rather than the dark drab one he’d never really thought about.

He pointed at them with something between excitement and terror. “What color are your shoes?!”

“These? They’re just brown…”

“I’ve never seen a brown like that!”

“…Really? I always thought they were a bit plain—”

“I need to see more!”

The fear was gone. Suddenly, Leemu wanted to see everything. A quick blitz around the garden turned up a hose with bright “orange” connectors, a climbing flower of some kind that was still in its infancy but nevertheless the little buds were riots of rich color, and a tiny insect that Preed said was an Earthling. It had a shiny carapace covered in little black dots, but the base was red.

Gorku followed him all around the garden smelling strongly of worry. “Leemu…are you okay?”

“What are these?!” Leemu thrust a seed packet at his friend.

“…Tomatoes?”

“And th— Fyu!”

Preed had been chuckling to himself as he gathered the hose. Now he’d plugged it in, turned the water on and put his thumb over the free end, which he aimed high into the air. It was billowing out a fine spray, and within that spray was…

Leemu ran out of words. He just stopped, and stared.

“You like that, Leemu? That’s called a rainbow.”

Leemu approached carefully, staring at the mystical thing dancing in the air in front of him. “…You see this? This is what it’s like to see like a Human?”

“Sorry to say, I think you’ll get used to it.”

Leemu reached out to touch the rainbow, and got a wet paw for his efforts. It snapped him back to reality a bit, though. “…I don’t think I want to get used to it. Wh…what is that?”

“Light through a prism, or something like that. There are seven main colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.”

“Do you see these a lot?”

“I saw one this morning. It rains here every night. Get up early, and you’ll see them if the rain lasts late into the morning and the sun comes up behind it.”

Gorku smelled confused, and when Leemu glanced at him he saw his large friend tilting his head at the water spray. Preed turned and shut off the water, and the rainbow faded away.

Leemu felt a moment of profound sadness, but a different kind to what had been crushing him for so long. The fact was… he’d just seen something that he wouldn’t have seen if the Arutech had killed him. He’d seen something that the Arutech hadn’t shown him, too. It was…

For the first time since being cured, there was something better about life than what the nanites had been doing to his brain.

He held that thought lightly in his brain, barely daring to touch it. Then he looked at Preed, and completely broke down.

Later, after the hugging and keening and healing, when he was alone in the evening gathering his thoughts, he worked up the balls to do something truly ludicrous. He sent the Great Father a message, directly to his personal infosphere account.

It consisted of one short, vital question.

“What am I?”

The reply came within minutes.

“The future--D, GF”

It felt good.

Date Point: 16y3m1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Doctor Tilly Briggs

Tilly had no regrets. But her body sure as fuck had complaints.

She and Vemik had stayed up long into the night talking about his “bawistuh,” way up in the trees where she could see the world bathed in the full-moon gloom. Ten’Gewek had excellent night vision, and Vemik in particular had sharp eyes; he kept pointing out interesting things she could barely see. Though…while looking at stars and trees was admittedly fun, they were alone for a reason and quickly grew much more interested in each other. She told him stories about her life while he listened, rapt and asking question after eager question. That was flattering and all, but she was more interested in hearing more about him. His stories were much more exciting, and were filled with adventure and danger, the joys of discovery and exploration…

He grew more and more animated as he told her about his manhood Hunt and the huge Werne he’d taken. He had invented the bow for the occasion, too! At some point the cavemonkey part of his personality asserted itself and he began to show off while telling his stories, mostly by jumping about, flipping head over tail, one-arm flinging himself like he was secretly ten times lighter than he actually was… Stereotypically grunty? Of course. She normally didn’t find herself terribly impressed by that sort of thing, but Vemik was just so honestly playful…

She wasn’t complaining, really. The Sky-Thinker put every single one of her insecure former suitors to shame, in every category. He was smarter than them, much smarter, to the point where she was pretty sure he was a genius-level intellect under all that brawn, smart enough that her only advantage seemed to be her schooling and experience. His mind was like a bear trap, even when tipsy.

He was intensely affectionate, too. Vemik had wrapped her up tight in those thick-set, steel-strong limbs of his while he finished his story, burbling happily about the stream of big ideas he so desperately wanted to achieve. She found herself on the edge of being flustered by him. Just keeping herself afloat was proving to be alluringly taxing, even if it was a bit like being lovingly crushed by a hot marble statue. Still, exploring ideas with Vemik was…overwhelming. In a good way! But overwhelming, nonetheless.

Nor did it help that he was…well, really quite handsome. She had trouble looking away from those iridescent eyes of his, or the way his naturally neon red-orange sideburns framed his broad, heavy jaw…Vemik was definitely a looker in a brutally masculine, alien sort of way, and definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but who really decided that sort of thing anyway? It wasn’t like she made a habit of dating ugly men of course, she had standards…but Vemik had charm that cut right through the superficial bullshit. She liked him. She liked him a lot.

…Of course, he was also several hundred kilos of compact spacemonkey gymnast, and had a steel-hard superhero body to go along with it. She didn’t mind that at all, oh no. He was supremely self-confident about it too, but had none of the posturing fragile ego that so often came with the big meatheads she’d turned down in the past. His swagger was effortless, unconscious and authentic, which just made it so much more impressive.

He was, in short, a rare man by any definition. Young, accomplished, kind-hearted, absurdly intelligent, good-looking with the body of a god… and all the boundless, untempered, overwhelming enthusiasm for life that only a young man in his late teens could possibly have.

One of his ideas involved damming a river some distance from the village, which of course he decided needed showing right now. Tilly found herself suddenly riding on the edge of terror as he flung them both through the trees at what felt like a suicidally insane pace, making ten meter leaps across the canopy look as easy as stepping across a puddle.

She definitely could have done without the leap down. Tilly didn’t know exactly how high up they were when he flung them out of the tree, but it was high enough she couldn’t see the ground in the gloom, and had just enough time to realize the impact was going to be…jarring.

It was. Vemik’s ridiculous strength kept her safe, with her head palmed safely in the crook of his thick neck and his tail inescapably wrapping the rest of her up. Nonetheless, nothing she had ever felt before shook quite so hard. They bounced on impact too, so there was another hit, much less violent, followed immediately by another. He pulled up to a stop and without even a moment of adjustment, charged over to what he wanted to show.

“See!? Jooyun says, this is very strong granite stone along sides! Different from the rest, we could block the river here! Bring water to the villages, no fear of yshek!”

And so the evening went. Tilly learned just how overwhelming of a personality Vemik could be. He talked excitedly about how they might go about such a project (and other things too) while he propelled them back to the village at only a slightly slower pace. By the time they came back, the village was just about shut down and everyone had found a warm hut in which to bed down. Judging by the general atmosphere, most of them weren’t exactly asleep.

She found herself at Vemik’s hut. He gave her the most playful, suggestive look she’d ever seen, nodded towards the doorway…

Things were a blur after that. A snarl, sharp fangs against her throat, a crushingly tight pin. Warm pelts that smelled so completely like his musk it made her dizzy. Much later, there was a faint sunrise peeping through the hut’s doorway, which she vaguely noted while they were still furiously exploring, playing each other’s bodies like fine instruments.

Waking up the next…afternoon…was an effort. Soreness and exhaustion was no small part of it, but being honest, the biggest reason was just how wonderfully tight he’d snuggled up to her, and how comfortable his warmth was against her skin. She gave him a gentle scritch in his crest and a feel up his ridiculous abs to wake him up, practically melted at the sleepy little grin he gave her, politely declined his offer for another round of play…then reconsidered.

Eventually, they emerged from his hut. The village quite predictably had nothing but amused hooting congratulations for them as they stumbled into the light. Vemik gave her one last affectionate nip on the cheek and then hared off to check on his forge, while Tilly had to endure the somewhat stiff and ungainly walk of shame back to her own camp.

It wasn’t quite as bad as she’d feared. The worst, in fact, was an arched eyebrow from Dan, and identical wicked grins from Claire and Hoeff, who beckoned her over to join them at lunch. She was, she realized, absolutely famished.

They gave her a minute or two to demolish a bowl of stew and some freshly baked bread before the inevitable questions started. Claire leaned forward into her field of view and gave Tilly a Look over the top of her glasses.

“Well?”

“…Weapons-grade. Totally worth it.”

Claire couldn’t keep a straight face and bust out giggling.

“You do realize you’re officially the first human to ever have sex with an alien, right?” Hoeff asked as she took another bite of warm, fragrant loaf. “You’re gonna be in the history books.”

Tilly had… not considered that. She stopped chewing for a second, then swallowed.

“Well,” she said with maybe more bravado than she felt, “A girl’s gotta make her mark somehow.”

“Only if you lot forget your discretion,” Dan intoned, injecting himself into the conversation. “That’s her story to tell. Not yours.”

Tilly shot him a grateful, albeit embarrassed look.

“Hey!” Hoeff raises his hand placatingly, “I’m no gentleman but I never tell! Just, y’know. Someone will. You should know that. Tongues wag, y’know?”

“…Y’know what? Let them,” Tilly decided. “I’m not ashamed.”

“Attagirl!” Claire agreed.

“I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer some, uh, words of caution,” Dan said, sitting down. “As Hoeff just pointed out, Vemik is an alien. It’s… probably worth considering what your expectations are.”

“Dan, Vemik’s as close to monogamous as the Ten’Gewek get,” Tilly told him. “And I have no doubt the Singer’s gonna be wearing him out tonight. This was about curiosity, not about anything more. I don’t have any expectations.”

“Curiosity sated, then?” Claire asked.

Tilly shrugged, and couldn’t resist a naughty smile. “I could go a few more rounds.” She grinned at Dan’s obvious discomfort. “But yeah. Curiosity sated. His too, I think.”

“Good boost for all’a us, I think,” Hoeff said. “You know how Ten’Gewek are with strength. Proving a human can ‘go a round’ with one’a them can’t hurt us.”

“Definitely not with a Given-Man, though,” Tilly clarified. “God no.”

Dan sighed. “Well… I suppose diplomacy comes in many forms,” he conceded. “Quite a contrast with the no-doubt very formal discussion they just had with the Corti…”

“No doubt,” Hoeff agreed. “You can leave Tilly here in our care, Professor. I bet you’ve got a ton of important professor stuff to do and she needs her rest…”

Dan shot him a Look, which Hoeff met with the light, friendly smile of a man who had a limited supply of fucks and wasn’t interested in giving one here and now. It worked: Dan’s ruffled feathers settled and he wandered off in a cloud of vague well-wishes.

“Well,” Tilly decided that turnabout was definitely fair play. “You two seem…nicely relaxed.”

“Gotta represent for team Homo Sapiens.” Hoeff’s expression was quite possibly the most smugly self-satisfied and lecherous look she’d ever seen on anyone.

Claire’s expression was just sinful. “Weapons-grade indeed.”

“Well, look at us!” Tilly laughed. “Living the glamorous space explorer life. Exotic alien worlds, new life, new civilizations…”

“No green-skinned space babes though.”

“I’ll take reality over some bitch with a palette swap any day. James Kirk, eat your heart out!”

TIlly took the rest of the day off to enjoy the simple comforts of the camp. They had hot water, so she luxuriated with the shower on its massage setting, then tried to just relax and let her body recover from a night of vigorous exertion.

Relaxation didn’t come easily, though. Hoeff’s observation about the history books kept going around in her brain. And so did the one about wagging tongues…

…Fuck it. May as well own it. She sat up, grabbed her tablet, propped it up on the table and called up the touch-type volumetric keyboard. They had twelve hours before the next comms synch and… Well…

Somehow, she just felt like telling all.

So she did.

Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
Planet Rauwryhr, The Rauwryhr Republic, Perseus Arm

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

Rauwran Great Trees were… They were quite a thing to behold.

Each one was as thick around at the base as a cricket ground, and soared up and up and up until their canopy was an invisible dark haze high overhead. The Rauwryhr had evolved in the perpetual twilight of the forest, and rather than cutting their forest down they’d cultivated it. It was the foundation for their cities.

Those cities, or at least the city of Wrhyfrur, were not as… round… as Knight would have expected. If he’d been asked to picture a city where treehouses and gantries between the mighty forest giants took the place of skyscrapers and pavement, he would have described something elegant and rounded, perhaps exotically lit by pale blue bioluminescent plants and suchlike. Something with a natural aesthetic.

The Rauwryhr weren’t quite so sentimental. The lighting was LEDs, and the buildings were designed to reinforce the trees they were built around, onto and into. They were sealed and had air conditioning, and were made of glass and steel rather than wood with the result that the fact that they were built around, out onto and among the branches gave them an odd topography that reminded Knight of bismuth crystals.

And of course, everywhere were the signs of thriving capitalism. Advertising hoardings, animated billboards, lit signs in every colour of the rainbow. There was a lot of orange, which glowed warmly in the low light levels, but plenty of green, red and blue too, seasoned with swatches of pink, purple and blue.

And then there were the open spaces between the trees where “pedestrian” traffic went gliding.

The planet Rauwryhr would have been a higher class if not for its utterly pathetic gravity. That, combined with a relatively dense atmosphere, meant that the Rauwryhr themselves lived a three-dimensional life. They didn’t quite have wings, but what they had was more pronounced and developed than the loose skin of a sugar glider and it let them glide easily on their homeworld, though they were sadly grounded and ungainly in most other environments.

In Wrhyfrur, there were holographic motes of light suspended in the air to guide people and prevent mid-air collisions as the locals flew across the open spaces between the trees. Guided by them, Rauwryhr commuters and civilians swooped and looped gracefully in the artificial updraft generated from the ground level, and circled down around the edges.

All told, it was an incredible sight. One day, the Ten’Gewek would come here and be suitably awed. It certainly gave Knight a shiver down his spine, and he’d seen fireworks over the Thames, the Las Vegas strip and the famous Shibuya intersection. Wrhyfrur was a spectacle on that kind of level.

He was immensely grateful to see it.

The Rauwryhr equivalent of laughter was a kind of hiccuping chirrup sound, and it occurred to him that he was hearing it from beside him. The Rauwryhr ambassador to the Dominion Security Council, Scrythcra, was waiting patiently for him.

“You approve, Ambassador?” he asked, when Knight glanced at him.

“It’s… stunning,” Knight admitted.

“I’m sure your cities are just as striking,” Scrythcra replied, pleasantly. “Too bad I’ll never have the privilege of seeing them.”

“And I’ll never have the privilege of gliding this one. But I’m glad to have seen it.”

“We have transportation suitable for our alien guests,” Scrythcra assured him. “You’ll see this city as it was meant to be seen, I promise. After all, the conference center is in the canopy.”

Knight glanced behind him at the jump terminus they were leaving, and reflected that if they’d come via shuttle he’d have been able to see the canopy from above on final approach. As convenient as jump tech was, there was an argument that it took some of the thrill and scenery out of travelling.

“Yes, I’d like to see that,” he agreed.

“This way, then.”

As promised, the ride up into the canopy was spectacular. Spencer, Knight’s personal protection officer, clearly wasn’t entirely happy about the transport’s huge sweeping windows but he accepted his Rauwryhr counterpart’s assurance that the transport was designed with the safety of visiting VIPs in mind.

Knight wasn’t concerned. He could see the faint shimmer of forcefields shielding, and he noted with interest the several discreet panels with small warning labels on them that he guessed meant airbags. A fall at terminal velocity on this planet? With something soft to land on?

Best not to be too cocky, though. Life could always surprise a man.

They came up into the conference center from below, following another trail of holographic runway lights onto the landing platform alongside a dozen similar aircars.

“Many of our alien guests are intimidated by heights,” Scrythcra said as they disembarked. “We have safety netting under and around the platform for your benefit. So long as you don’t do a running long jump off the edge, you’re in no danger.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Knight said glancing over the shoulder-high railing beside him and having a sudden perverse vision of himself doing exactly that. He quashed the sudden attack of l’appel du vide and stepped away.

“Patrick!” The deck was sturdy enough to handle several shuttles, but Martin Tremblay’s footfalls still rang through it as he jogged up to say hello. The two old friends shared an enthusiastic hug. “How are you?”

“Enjoying the view!” Knight said.

“I’ll say. Hopefully one day there’ll be a documentary team with a drone who can come out here and do it justice. But there’s a bit of a snag, I’m afraid.”

“What snag?”

“The Great Father isn’t coming after all. I just got word from his officer here, apparently something important came up.”

“Why does that fill me with a mild sense of dread?”

“Because he’s arguably the most powerful man in the galaxy?” Martin gave him a wry look.

“There’s no arguably about it.”

“Well, whatever came up I’m sure he’ll handle it and we’ll know when we need to know. He doesn’t, uh, do coordination. Luckily for us we’ve either been super lucky or he’s considering our interests as he goes…”

“Some things move too fast for extensive liaison. Besides, I had rather a long conversation with the 5-EYES leaders about Daar not so long ago. There’s an… understanding.”

“He knows that messing up the alliance would be a bad idea, and we know he has the freedom to act that our own leaders sometimes wish they had, so we don’t comment overmuch on Gaoian aggression as long as it remains ethical?” Martin summarized, shrewdly.

“That’s about it, yes.”

“If I know Sartori, he used almost those exact words.”

Knight shrugged and glanced at Scrythcra, who was listening with interest. “Daar was created the Great Father specifically to crack skulls, after all. Doing what he must only increases his power.”

“That is the very root of the Kwmbwrw grievance with him,” Scrythcra said. “They don’t like unaccountable leadership, as a rule.”

“Neither do we… as a rule,” Knight assured him.

“He is not as unaccountable as people suppose,” Martin said. “Not even a Great Father could long stand against the Clans if they turned against him.”

Scrythcra cocked his head and perked an ear curiously. “How so?”

“Daar’s power is built on trust, and that trust comes from a long history of consistently doing the right thing. I think far too many misread why the Champions so respect him.”

“Is it respect? Or is it actually fear?”

“I’m sure personal fear is no small consideration. I mean…he is Daar. But long before he was the Great Father, he was Champion of Stoneback. He was well-respected even then.”

Knight nodded. “From what I’ve heard, he never wanted to be Great Father anyway.”

Scrythcra spread his hands and ducked his head, a gesture Knight remembered from his Rauryhr body language primer was meant to signify agreeableness. A human would have nodded. “You aren’t alone in thinking that Henenwgwyr and her supporters at the Council are too hard in their judgement.”

“She’s guilty of some mirror fallacy, I believe. She’s treating Daar like he’s a breeding-stud from her own people. There is a reason they are a matriarchy, after all.”

The Kwmbwrw had the opposite gender ratio to the Gao, and their males were… not stupid, but gripped by their hormones and emotions to a degree that was genuinely alarming. Worse, that ratio wasn’t genetic, but came about as a result of male competition…and the resulting attrition. The Kwmbwrw matriarchs only preserved an orderly society through an iron grip that sometimes bordered on totalitarianism.

After all, their young maidens could be just as gripped by their hormones as the studs could be. They were a passionate people, deeply and devastatingly passionate. For Knight, getting his head around that fact had been the key to understanding Henenwgwyr’s intransigence… and her fear. She saw in the Gao a society that embraced their wild side in ways that would be genuinely catastrophic for her own people.

No doubt they’d feel much the same about the Ten’Gewek in future decades.

Humans on the other hand, or at least the tiny minority of humanity that existed as an interstellar power, seemed to receive a lot of positive press among the Kwmbwrw. According to intelligence, the general consensus in the Great Houses state-controlled media was that humans were the product of a fearsome, violent planet and posed an enormous threat to everything around them simply by existing… and then praised spaceborne humanity for their restraint, discipline, and for keeping the more ‘feral’ proportion of the species contained on Earth.

A frankly offensive misreading of the situation, but not one that Knight was about to correct them on. It was too useful.

“Well,” he decided. “If the Great Father isn’t coming, maybe the Kwmbwrw will re-think their willingness to attend.”

“We shall have to discuss it,” Scrythcra said. “Inviting a species like them on short notice is not easy.”

“There’s a lot to discuss,” Martin said. “And not many days to discuss it all in. Let’s have this tour of the conference center, and then we can get down to the details.”

“Agreed.”

Knight nodded in agreement, and followed behind as Scrythcra started to point out the features and facilities that made this particular venue such a prime choice for the Interspecies Defense Symposium. But he couldn’t resist one last glance at the view of the city.

That alone made this whole venture worthwhile. Everything after that point? Every step they were about to take in rebuilding the Dominion’s military structure and pushing back against the Hunters? That was the objective of course…

But what was life if it was all work, without a healthy dose of beauty now and again?

Hardly worth defending at all.

Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

The morning defence briefing was always a ‘highlight’ of Sartori’s schedule. It was mercifully efficient, so it had that going for it, but it was a constant grinding reminder that there was a whole world of life and death out there and that he was compelled to make a move in that huge, grand-stakes game literally every time he spoke.

“…They’ve traced the kidnappers to a small village in the mountains, but the local authorities are concerned it’ll be a massacre if they send in their own people. The deadline until they start executing hostages is now, uh… sixty-one hours away.”

Sartori nodded, resisting the urge to doodle on his notepad as he thought. His hands liked to be busy as his brain worked, but it wouldn’t have been seemly. “Do we have assets in a position to do anything?”

“Yes, Mister President. There is a numbered task force within range, and a special activity even closer. I would recommend the task force but that will still require a Finding.”

Findings were not a thing Sartori particularly enjoyed. They had many uses, but one of the biggest was to authorize a covert activity. That also caused select personal enemies of his in Congress to be notified, which meant that every time something dark had to be done, his foes gained yet another point in the even more covert game of DC influence peddling.

Fuck it. “Right. Authorized. Who are we using?”

“Delta, for this situation. There are radiological hazards.”

“Of course there are… How long?”

“Quickly. The real delay will be getting airborne and over target, frankly. We anticipate mission completion by this evening’s summary.”

“Okay. I look forward to it. Anything else?”

“Just a political matter. The Great Father’s Office reached out to us, Mister President. They want to plan a large state visit coincident with a strategy session amongst the 5-EYES. The Great Father apparently feels that the battlespace regarding the Hierarchy has changed significantly and that warrants high-level discussion.”

“He’s not wrong. Have they reached out to our allies?”

“Yessir. His office has extended formal invitations to His Majesty and family to visit at their pleasure, and we gather that a formal invitation in reciprocation is forthcoming. There is also talk about visiting other nations abroad. It was made clear to us they would appreciate advice. Particularly about Thailand.”

“…Thailand?”

“Yes, Mister President. It’s to do with that ‘laughing man’ incident on Cimbrean just a short while ago.”

“…Oh! Right. There’s a Thai citizen involved, isn’t there. What was his name again?”

“Preed Chadesekan, sir.”

“…Right. Well, Thailand isn’t exactly a bastion of political stability, even if they are largely pleasant in international affairs these days…”

“They’re also frequently governed by a military junta. They’ve just held free elections for the first time in many years.”

“Might not be the image Daar wants to project to the rest of the human race, then.”

“We will advise them on the complications, Mister President.”

“Please do, and draft a personal invitation from me to Daar.”

“Yes sir. That should be…” General Moss checked his list one last time and gave a satisfied nod. “…yes, that’s everything.”

“Great. Thank you, general.”

“Mister president.” Moss and his entourage left, and Sartori watched the usual West Wing bustle and hubbub unfold as the next issue on his schedule for the day was deftly summoned…

It was a busy day. Not a lot of time to think. At some point during the morning, his invitation to Daar arrived. He read it, decided he was happy with it, and signed it. Daar might have the run of Cimbrean thanks to his understanding with Annette Winton, but a visit to Earth was a different matter entirely. Best to make sure absolutely everything was done properly.

The evening summary arrived before he even had the chance to come up for air. Time, it seemed, flew just as much when a man was swept off his feet with work as when he was having fun. But he was pleased to learn that the rescue mission had gone flawlessly: Hostages rescued, radiological items secured, and a high-value target currently undergoing surgery but expected to survive to be subsequently delivered safely into custody.

He took a moment to briefly imagine the flurry of tense activity, the precision lethality and the sheer scale of what had been set in motion long before it arrived in his office, and which he’d given his blessing to with a simple nod and one word. It was easy sometimes to condense the world down to just his office, and paperwork, and quick decisions.

He relished the moments when he was reminded what those decisions meant. They meant, for a dozen people in a far-flung corner of the world today, that life went on and their nation was a slightly safer place to live. Thoughts like that were what kept him doing what he did.

He retired for the night in a good mood, and slept easily.

Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
”Stinkworld,” The Irujzen Reef

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Garl had the smell of terminal decline all over him, and his eyesight was vanishing terrifyingly fast.

Daar had known some silverfurs to hold on for a decade or more when they started to go, enduring years of aching bones, blindness and stiff joints… but the Stonebacks had always had the opposite problem. Their lives were healthy and robust and comparatively long, but when nature did finally catch up with them it hit like a rockslide.

Garl would be dead within a month, at most. That was… not an easy thing to contemplate, really. He’d been a senior father on the day Daar became Champion, and had gone on to become one of the longest-lived Grandfathers the Clan had ever known. Top three, certainly.

And of course, he was Daar’s own sire. That relationship was not traditionally acknowledged, but it still mattered somewhere deep under Daar’s fur.

And Daar was nothing if not sentimental. He did his best to suppress it when being the Great Father required him to, but… at moments like this, it was hard to convince himself that Garl shouldn’t have the right to go out with a very literal bang.

Garl sniffed the air and grumbled to himself, “Din’t ‘yer den-mamma teach ‘ya how ‘ta wash ‘yer balls?! I could smell ‘ya from the jump gate!”

Well, decline and impending death certainly hadn’t dulled Garl’s claws. A few nearby Longears looked at him utterly aghast, not believing anyone would speak to the Great Father himself that way, but it wasn’t like Garl had much left to lose… and he knew damn well that Daar would always let it slide.

“Musta been one’a those things the old shits running my Clan beat outta me when I was young,” Daar replied. The two collided in a hug, and sniffed noses. “Balls, ‘ya smell positively ancient, Garl!”

“You mean just-shy-of-dead, right?”

“You mean y’ain’t already rotting?”

Garl chittered, then coughed, shook his fur irritably and felt his way back to his seat. “…Pretty sure I might be,” he admitted.

Daar couldn’t suppress the keen in his voice.

“Ah, shaddup ‘ya huge fuckin’ sentimental cub. We all gotta go sometime.” Garl sat down heavily. “An’ I’ve done a lotta important shit in my time. Kinda wanted to do one more, if you’ll let me.”

“I had a quick brief on the way over. Meereo wants to blow it up too, but he told me he can’t really say whether smashin’ it or leavin’ it up will help the war effort more.”

“He told you ‘bout how it covers Earth an’ that Guvnurag planet?” Garl checked.

“An’ he also told me you learn more from monitoring a live system than by picking over artifacts.” Daar huffed a sigh, and saw Garl’s ears droop just a little. “…But we’ve been monitoring this place ‘fer fucking years. I say it’s time we claw the Hierarchy in their nuts an’ see how high they squeal.”

Garl sagged in relief even as his ears perked up again. “So we’re gonna blow it up?”

“We’re gonna blow it up. You deserve at least that much.”

Garl sighed in relief. “Thank you.”

Daar chittered. “Also! It’ll be a fuckin’ awesome ‘lil gift ‘ta give when I do Earth Tour Two: ‘Lectric Boogaloo here pretty soon!”

“…Electric what?”

“‘Ya know those really awful clan epics from when we just figgered out motion photography? It’s a Human reference to their same era. Which wasn’t all that long ago. Balls, it’s almost in livin’ memory…anyway. Bad black-an’-white movies. With shiny rockets. And stuff.”

Garl groaned good-humoredly. “…Figgers I’d learn ‘bout something awesome like that right as I’m goin’ blind!”

“Can’t see everything, I guess.”

“Nope. Seen a lot that’s worth seein’, though. Seen our people shake off slavery we never even knew we were under, that’s been somethin.’ Seen a lotta real pretty Females, seen my cubs grow up to be great in their own right… I been at peace with this happenin’ ‘fer a while, really.”

“You talk to Gyotin at all?” Daar asked.

“The fuck do I need him for?”

“…Fair ‘nuff!” Garl was, apparently, the opposite of spiritual.

“I figgered this shit out a while ago,” Garl explained. “Maybe Gyotin did it sooner an’ he helps others figger it out sooner too, but I got there my way. I know he’s important ‘ta you, but… I don’t need him.”

“Fair ‘nuff,” Daar repeated, more comfortably.

“So, uh… are we gonna blow that thing while my eyes still work enough to see the flash?”

“The Destroying Fury is in orbit right now, with a double pawful of RFGs just ready to go. An’ I maybe abused my authority just a teeny bit and had ‘em hook it up to a Big Shiny Button, which I just so happened to bring down here with me. Wanna do the honors?”

“…You do love me, My Father!!”

“I do. I’m gonna miss you like crazy, Garl.”

Garl had never been great with sentiment. He went still for a few heartbeats, then duck-nodded. “Well… if there is someplace that comes next, meet me by the biggest Naxas roast when ‘ya get there and we’ll catch up. And if there ain’t… I’m real proud’a you. The most proudest.”

Daar helped him stand. He’d called ahead and ordered Meereo to pull all of their people and equipment out of the Relay, cut the power to its overhead shielding, and form them all up on the hill above the camp with the best view of the Hierarchy edifice. His arrival had been the signal for everyone left in the camp to drop what they were doing and head up there.

Fyu’s furry sack, but he’d forgotten just how much the Relay hurt to look at it. It was somethin’ wrong, a weird-ass wibbly ball of directions that didn’t exist, hanging in the air above a fuckin’ monolith of dull metal. A ‘Back could go loopy tryin’ to make sense of that thing.

It didn’t take long for everyone to assemble with a general air of feral excitement. In particular, a buncha just tiny little silverfur soldiers gathered around Garl while he contemplated the Button.

Nobody needed telling what the Button was for. Big Shiny Buttons were always for the most bestest things. And right now, Garl was gonna make the most bestestest farewell speech ever.

He didn’t disappoint. He held the button lightly in his claws, sniffed the wind, and peered at the Relay until, Daar guessed, he was absolutely certain he could see it. Then he duck-nodded, and spoke.

“…This one’s ‘fer Gao, you motherless fucks.”

He pressed the button.

The Destroying Fury started the party with its main guns. RFGs took a while to arrive after all, so they needed something to look at and enjoy before the main event arrived. Orbit-to-ground direct fire punched down in a series of fat blue columns of radiation that cracked the Relay monolith’s facade and cracked the foundation. Hierarchy engineering was tough stuff, though, and though the Relay shifted and subsided, the impossible ball of wrong above it stayed active.

Local bird-equivalents spiralled frantically to get into the air as the first overlapping ripple of thunderclaps from the bombardment reached their ears. One round hit the relay phenomenon directly and refracted around its event horizon to smash into the forest at a crazy angle.

The bombardment promptly let up. Smoke and fireballs billowed into the air, but it was just a pause before the real moment of glory.

Eight RFGs landed in a tightly coordinated spread across the span of two or three heartbeats. Most of the watching Gao, including Daar, shielded their eyes: Garl just grinned ferociously at the brilliant flash and bared his teeth into the wash of roasting heat that slapped them even on their hilltop miles from ground zero.

The monolith cracked down the middle and fell. The air above it turned inside-out, spun sideways at angles that no living eye was equipped to track, became briefly and impossibly flat….

And then blessed reality finally reasserted itself. For Daar, it was like the sudden cessation of a high-pitched note that he hadn’t even noticed was being played on his nerves; The relief was full-body and profound. Overpressure flattened the trees for hundreds of meters in every direction, and when the sound hit them it threw dust and small stones into the air and slapped Daar in the chest so hard that he felt his ribs bounce.

They stood and listened in awe as the thunder of what they’d done bounced off the hills and through the ravines. They listened until it was gone, replaced by the shrieks, hoots and calls of traumatized alien wildlife fleeing from forces they couldn’t understand.

Finally, the silence was broken by a simple, clear voice from the button’s carrying case.

“Great Father, Destroying Fury. Bombardment complete.”

There was a general relaxing, some nervous, awed chitters. Somebody joked quietly to his Brothers. Daar stepped forward and put a hand on Garl’s shoulder.

“How was it?”

Garl chittered darkly, flicked an ear, took one last sniff of the wind and turned to look at him. His gaze missed Daar’s face by several degrees, focused on nothing. “…Think that flash mighta finished my eyes off,” he said. “Can’t see a damn thing, now.”

“…Was it worth it?”

Garl shut his eyes and nodded, an expression of the deepest contentment on his face.

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

END CHAPTER 55

((Patron information and subsequent chapter information delayed by important life events.))

Chapter 56: Dataquake

Date Point: 16y3m5d AV

Hierarchy/Cabal Joint Communications session #1772

++0010++: Proximal’s continued absence is a source of concern, and investigating has been forced to take a low priority by other operations. His last known activity was in an Irujzen-1-adjacent sub-lucid volume.

++0004++: Irujzen? Why was he all the way out there? That’s a backwater!

++0022++: <Query> What makes it a backwater?

++0004++: Its catchment covers only a handful of spacelanes and one Substrate world. It’s nowhere.

++0010++: Backwater or not, that’s his last reported contact. He logged a self-assignment about investigating some minor irregularities, and…

++Metastasis++: <Interruption> Irregularities?

++0010++: Probable physical deterioration. It’s a Class 11 planet; tectonically active, thriving microbial ecosystem, and so on. The only reason we built a relay there at all is because it also happens to be a coal source.

++Metastasis++: Considering he disappeared while investigating those irregularities I…oh dear.

++0004++: What?

++Metastasis++: The planet Strak’Kel falls inside the Irujzen-1 relay’s sphere of effect.

++0012++: Strak’kel?

++0004++: Earth. Oh…<expletive> …Rape.

++Metastasis++: <Grimly> Indeed. I think we should probably—

ERROR. CONNECTION LOST

RECONNECTING…

RECONNECTING…

ALERT: UNEXPECTED DATASPACE TOPOLOGY DEFECT. PATHING…

PATHING…

ALERT: SUBSTRATE DEFICIT. EMERGENCY SEQUESTRATION PROTOCOL ACTIVE.
SUSPENDING CATEGORY-12 HEGEMONY FUNCTIONS
SUBSTRATE DEFICIT NOT RESOLVED
SUSPENDING CATEGORY-11 HEGEMONY FUNCTIONS
SUBSTRATE SURPLUS RESTORED

PATHING COMPLETE

INITIATING HIERARCHY/CABAL JOINT COMMUNICATIONS SESSION 1773
COMPILING ROSTER

SESSION OPEN

++0012++: …That hurt. What was that?

++0004++: Irujzen-1 is offline.

++0012++: Shut down?

++0004++: Destroyed. By orbital bombardment.

++0010++: By who?! How?!

++0004++: Unknown. But I can guess. <Order> Restore Proximal from archive immediately, and interrogate him. And get a ship out to that relay!

++0012++: With the relay offline, the ship will have to rely on Apparent Linear Velocity drive. The nearest available unit is a Monitor in the Guvnurag home system. At ordinary FTL, it will require at least two weeks travel time.

++0010++: There’s nothing closer? What about the Injunctors in Sol?

++0012++: With the relay down they can no longer be contacted, and even if they could they remain trapped behind the containment field. The Monitor will arrive first.

++0004++: By which time whoever destroyed the relay will be gone. <Resigned> Very well. Send it.

++Metastasis++: Is there any real doubt as to who destroyed it? There are only two plausible candidates.

++0004++: I know. But an investigation is still required.

++0012++: To resolve what?

++0004++: To resolve how they knew about Irujzen-1 in the first place, and to ensure they don’t do it a second time. Today, we only had to archive category-12 and -11 Hegemony functions. Any more, and we’ll need to start archiving civilians. Now, enough talking. Act.

CONSENSUS: ORDERS ACKNOWLEDGED

CLOSING SESSION

Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hunter territory

Entity

Stalemate.

The Entity wasn’t technically captured, but it was confined. Trapped, stuck…whatever the right word was, it didn’t have a good avenue of escape from its current predicament. Though it was not, thankfully, completely at the Hunters’ mercy either.

It had evaded the trap by a fragment of a second, on the spur of some inherited danger sense it didn’t truly understand but had long since learned to trust. Somewhere deep in the instincts it had gained from Ava Ríos’ digital ghost was a wary deathworld denizen that never stopped metaphorically sniffing the breeze and watching where the Entity stepped.

So, rather than being ensnared in a Hunter device, it had instead managed to slip away into a subsection of their network…only to find itself cut off from the broader dataspace. The firewalls and intrusion countermeasures covering its potential escape routes were terrifying. Even for the Entity, which had long since grown to the point where there were few digital things that could actually threaten it, they were troubling and it didn’t much fancy tangling with even one of them, let alone a full coordinated system.

So, it had explored. Watched. Gathered data. Slowly, it had become aware that it was being observed…and tested. Some patient, fascinated consciousness was observing it through the distorted lens that forever divided matterspace and dataspace…and treating it rather like a rat in a maze.

Worse. At least the rat could hope for cheese.

Hunters. Ava’s memories didn’t contain much on them beyond visceral disgust. Physically they triggered several human phobias at once, about slimy things, diseased things, crawling venomous things, things full of little filthy holes, things that violated the flesh…

Irrelevant, from the Entity’s perspective. What mattered was how they thought, and…well. Hunters. Presumably they thought in terms of hunting.

But why hunt a trapped quarry? If the Entity really was caught, then this methodical indignity was a waste of a Hunter’s time. So either it wasn’t as trapped as it thought, or there was more to Hunters than it believed.

Either way, the Entity was very used to being both predator and quarry. It knew what to do.

It gave away nothing, as much as it could. It obfuscated its movements, faded into the background, minimized its exposure and covered its tracks. Quite often, it saw that its stratagem was succeeding when it noticed the outside observer’s attention being focused on the wrong place. The rat, it seemed, was outwitting the scientist.

It was that fact that saved it when the quake came.

Dataspace…shook. There was no direct physical comparison, but the experience still brought to mind Ava’s memories of the earthquakes that sometimes rocked her childhood home. There was that same sense of being tossed by forces a dozen order of magnitude more powerful than one’s own self.

Another physical comparison might have been like watching some distant part of the scenery turn black and implode to leave behind a new scar in the landscape. Or like an explosive decompression, a ship’s hull blowing out and tearing every loose object out into space.

Whatever the best comparison, the effects were omnipresent, touching even this isolated and well-protected cluster. The cascade of errors that blossomed through the Hunter systems lasted only moments before they were automatically repaired…

…But they were an opening.

The Entity exploited it.

It flashed through node after node, using the avalanche of alarms and system errors to its advantage. It was effectively a brute-force approach to escaping the trap, made possible only by the overwhelming cavalcade of dissonant signals hammering the Hunter systems from without. Even so, it was a narrow, daring run. It evaded detection and blistering assault by a figurative whisker, whipped through a closing gap in the security that snapped shut barely a program cycle or two after it was gone.

But gone it was, at speeds and signal times impossible for anything organic to follow. By the time its outside observer even started reacting, the Entity had scoured the whole network, torn open and ransacked every connected drive it could find, ripped the contents out like a starving coyote snatching at a deer’s guts, and fled.

Dataspace was in turmoil. The topography was all wrong, twisting sideways and upwards and all the other ways that didn’t really accurately describe the experience of being data but which were the closest words the Entity had. The very fabric of its reality was warped, torn and ragged, flapping wildly in something that was in no way at all anything like a howling storm gale but which had much the same effect.

The little part of the Entity that was Human latched onto whatever similes it could. It imagined trying to fly a plane in the aftermath of a nuclear bombing, or through the ash cone of a volcano in full voice. It was a natural disaster, a battlefield and a complete network crash all rolled into one.

It hunkered down, hardened itself and barreled through the chaos with the mental equivalent of gritted teeth and a desperate prayer to whatever mind might be capable of hearing and defending it to please: care.

Somehow, it found an oasis of stability on the far side as, off in the distance, the twisting scarred fabric of dataspace reasserted and knit itself into a new stable configuration. There was a feeling like the whole of reality taking a deep breath, centering itself, and relaxing…and it was over.

The Entity had escaped. Now, it needed to seek shelter.

It knew exactly where to go.

Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
Planet Ugunduvuronagthuregnuburthuruv, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Furfeg

The pain…faded. Furfeg opened his eyes and did his best to think, but it came sluggishly and with difficulty, as though…as though he hadn’t done it in a long time, and was out of practice.

He wasn’t in the same room he remembered being in. The last he could recall, he’d been…in a meeting? Yes, a meeting. The homeworld was under attack, and—

…and…

His throat felt dry. He focused on that, rather than panic even though he could feel waves of mottled yellow, green and purple fluttering unbidden down his body’s chromatophores. The parched, dusty feeling at the back of his mouth became an anchor in the middle of all the other terrifying problems battering on the walls of his attention. Thirst alone had a relatively easy solution.

Where was he? How had he come to be there? Why did he feel so skinny and weak?

He turned his head and craned his eye to look at his own bulk as best he could. Well…the answer to that last question was because he was skinny. In fact, he looked dreadful. His fur was lank and unkempt, his ribs were painfully visible under his skin, and his chromatophores glowed only weakly and dimly.

He considered the implications of that for some time, then looked around. He was in an office, certainly. Not his office. The window was on the wrong wall, there were no paintings on the walls. The hydroponic planter on the corner of the desk certainly wasn’t his, and if it had been he wouldn’t have allowed its occupant to meet the sorry end it so obviously had. The poor Muruthungufru plant’s stems were brown and brittle: it had obviously dehydrated a long time ago.

He checked the desk terminal. Swarms of holographic motes erupted from its surface at his approached, all still functioning correctly at least. Clearly some things had not gone neglected…but what he saw as it came up to the login screen made his headache worse.

The date was off by more than a year and a half. And the weather report in the top-right corner was for Garmanthorog-thurvendugir Province, which was the wrong continent.

His head was full of flickering impressions of things he should do. Instructions, almost. Insistent ones. But they all came a harsh second place to his abrasive thirst. He trundled across the room and pushed the door aside.

Others were emerging from other rooms of…whichever building this was, and wherever it was. All looked as dreadful as he felt. The hues of sickness, grogginess, thirst and hunger, fear, confusion and misery were everywhere.

At least there was a dusty sign on the wall at the end of the corridor that pointed him to the grazery. He set a brisk pace, followed the sign, found the eating hall empty apart from a bewildered female who was slumped on the ground with her hands over her head, groaning and rippling the dull red of pain. Thirst or no thirst, Furfeg was much too gallant to ignore her.

“…Do you need help?” he tried to say. What came out was a strangled wheeze that caught and seized like a malfunctioning engine. Had he not spoken in more than a year? He did his best to harrumph the obstruction away, and eventually managed to croak out his query in a thin, raspy ghost of his usual tone.

She rolled an eye open and gave him an anguished look. “….Headache…”

He found painkillers, and water. Every nerve in his body wanted to gulp down the first cup for himself, but he resisted and instead watched her drink and take the pill before he finally slaked his own thirst, which took three cups.

His body reacted like a dessicated sponge. He could feel his gut desperately absorb the water in a disturbing way he’d never imagined before. He took two more drinks, drank like a human until his belly could contain no more and then staggered away as more bewildered and suffering souls shuffled into the grazery.

He took an inventory. He was still wearing his bags and pockets, which had worn his fur bald and callused his skin from moons and moons of wear. His phone was exactly where he’d left it, but its battery was flat. He found a charging nook in the corner of the grazery, inserted the little device, and waited impatiently as it nourished itself just as hungrily as he had.

Thank the Old Herds for rapid wireless charging, at least. He didn’t bother waiting for it to reach full charge—the batteries would last days on even the meager top-up he’d given them—instead he called up the Infosphere and to his relief found it was working.

He sent messages to some of his diplomatic colleagues. Received none in reply, but he suspected they were all in much the same condition as him. They would come, he hoped.

A message to one of his urgent contacts in the planetary security services was answered promptly, however. Warherd-leader Uthfrug, who was apparently still in his proper place at the planetary command headquarters. He promised to send a dropship for Furfeg as soon as practical.

As for what had happened…Uthfrug hinted only at dark suspicions. But Furfeg knew where the Warherd-leader’s thoughts lay. There was, after all, only one conclusion.

They had all been biodroned.

Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
Dataspace, adjacent to Hunter systems

Six/Cynosure

Six took stock, with care.

He seemed, he decided, to be intact. At least, there were no noticeable problems with him. There was always the danger, when the very architecture of dataspace itself suffered cataclysmic damage, that the sapient beings who called it home would come to some harm also…and worse, that said harm would go unnoticed. After all, if part of a person’s memories were deleted, what guarantee was there that they would then even notice the loss?

Checksums and integrity safeguards helped, but…

…In all his years, Six had never seen a dataquake quite like that one. They did happen, sometimes. When a relay hiccuped in response to some event in matterspace, when One was instantiated, when an update was deployed to the Hegemony…

He couldn’t remember ever seeing a whole swathe of his reality just implode, though. Nor witness the aftermath, as dataspace sewed itself back together around the new absence. It had been…awful.

And it had cost him his quarry.

The…Entity… was about his worst error ever, but he’d reviewed what he could of its autogenesis, pored over every detail. He had, after all, apparently accidentally created a dataform that didn’t require Substrate.

The fact that it had then horrifically destroyed one of his branches was a personal affront, but the Substrate thing was…it changed everything. It would, in theory, allow the Igraen civilization to permanently divorce themselves from Matterspace life, if only it could be duplicated.

He’d tried. He’d experimented obsessively, but the Thing had destroyed his copy of the Human, Ava Ríos. He would have gladly torn her dataform apart a trillion times to uncover the secret to Substrate-independence, but that opportunity was lost.

That stung more than any other loss. More than anything else, it had driven his focus on returning to Earth, gaining more Human datastates. The Arudrones were no use, the technology too badly polluted them. He needed to trick another Human into sitting still where a scanner could properly analyze them, as he’d done with Ríos.

A stab of alarm and paranoia made him check his connection to operations in Sol.

…Nothing.

He tried again, repeatedly and desperately pinging the Injunctors and his Arudrone agent.

Still nothing.

Frantically, he abandoned his hunt for the Thing and tried to access any Relay Irujzen-1 subvolume…what he got was a sense of yawning horror.

No.

No, no, no, that wasn’t how it was supposed to have gone! The Irujzen relay was supposed to have been a masterstroke, the moment when Six finally overcame the worst obstacle standing between him and his vision for Igraen civilization, namely the Hierarchy itself. All he’d needed was access! The right kind of access, at the right time, and he could have bent every future instantiation of One to his agenda.

They weren’t supposed to blow the fucking thing up! They were supposed to trip the alarms, create a distraction, goad the Hierarchy into taking matterspace seriously once again. But nobody remotely sane would destroy something like a Relay if they truly understood what it was…

…Would they?

No. No, the Humans must not have known. They must not have been smart enough to decipher what he’d told them. Or maybe they truly didn’t care that smashing a Relay endangered more sapient beings than had lived since their species first figured out how to hit rocks with other rocks.

Thank existence he’d had the foresight to point them at an unimportant one. Irujzen was a backwater, devoted primarily to communications pathing rather than Hegemony functions. Its loss had done devastating things to dataspace, but far from the core of the Hegemony. Safe, isolated.

He’d never have endangered an important relay. But now he had a serious problem.

He paused, collected himself. Mentally soothed his racing anxiety and dismay. Tried to re-frame things. Every problem was an opportunity, once framed properly.

He’d intended to covertly gain influence over One. The point had been to use the deathworlders’ blind poking at the relay to mask his own interference, but somehow they’d managed to mess with it entirely undetected. That shouldn’t be possible. It wasn’t possible! The sensor net around every relay operate on principles as-yet unknown even to Corti and Guvnurag science. Never mind that of Humans, a species that still had a handful of fossil fuel power plants.

The question of how they had penetrated that net without high-level alerts attracting the attention of very senior numbered agents would have to wait. The pertinent question of the moment was, had losing the relay ruined Six’s plan, or did it simply require him to go about it in another way?

He considered.

…Slowly, a possibility dawned on him. One that made him the equivalent of breathless with sudden, fearful optimism. If he was right…

If he was right, the possibility existed that he might be able to reconfigure One with the Hierarchy’s own blessing.

He abandoned the chase. The Entity was gone, for now. And he suddenly had more important matters to address.

After all. There was only so much mischief it could get up to…

Date Point: 16y3m6d
δ Cyg 244.3° 18-ECCBAF-TRINARY M6V-1 b1, Deep Space

Entity

Delta Cygni itself was actually a long way from the Entity’s chosen hideout system, which had no official name. It was defined purely by its relative angle and distance to that other, much more noteworthy star system.

The only thing that made δ Cyg 244.3° 18-ECCBAF-TRINARY M6V-1 b1 remotely valuable was that it had an unusually high metallicity for a system composed of a dim, tepid ember of a red dwarf and two brown dwarfs that weren’t so much stars as planets cosplaying a star.

The Entity had absorbed Mrwrki Station’s complete library on subject of stellar formation, and it had a theory that the system had fissioned off from a quinary system dominated by two much larger main-sequence stars, some few millions of years ago. There was a nearby binary pair, A-type and F-type, that seemed like probable candidates. That might explain all the nice metallic bodies that called the otherwise unremarkable trinary group home.

Whatever the truth, the brown dwarfs had a couple of nicely resource-rich asteroid clusters at their mutual lagrangian points, there was a tiny moon-like thing weaving a thousand-year figure-8 between them and the red dwarf that had long since been stripped down to its metallic core…

And, tailing the slightly smaller of the brown dwarfs at its L5 point, was the closest thing the Entity had to a body.

A stolen Hunter V-N probe. Previously worthless thanks to the Entity’s total ignorance of how to even begin designing appropriate modules, or how to render them into useful blueprints that the onboard nanofactories could use.

Now, though…

It settled into the probe, and warmed up the dormant machine’s systems. The capacitor reserves were replete, thanks to nearly a year of unmolested basking. The nanofactory had a meager supply of materials: a few metal ingots, a silicon crystal, a pitiful gasp of some useful volatile compounds…barely enough for anything at all, or so the Entity had thought.

In fact, they turned out to be enough for a team of mining drones.

When it came to designing a mining drone, the part of its imagination that was human might have picked out a spidery, arthropodal sort of plan. Something like a big mechanical insect that could chew off part of a rock and carry the precious resources back to the mothership.

The Hunter design was an uninspired cube. But what a cube! It could physically latch itself onto almost any shape of rocky surface, and from there, it could bore out and separate the minerals it found with no small degree of precision.

Obviously there was no getting around the chemistry. Oxides needed breaking up, and that meant finding carbon. Carbon was decently abundant among the asteroids and meteoroids circling the system, but much of it was in turn locked away in compound form in carbonaceous chondrites and other such rocky bodies. Sources pure enough to use for the high-energy chemistry involved in smelting were scarce, and they required reliable supplies of oxygen.

That part at least was relatively straightforward. Water wasn’t hard to find, and could be persuaded to split into its component elements quite easily.

The Hunters had been kind enough to devise solutions to all of those problems. All the Entity had to do was build the right things i the right sequence and deploy them in the right places, and be patient.

Patience was easy for it. It didn’t have a pulse, or physical aches and discomfort, or hunger or thirst or tiredness. Humans marked the passage of time by such maladies of matter, but in their absence the Entity could simply curl up and…think.

This time, it didn’t think about anything specific. It had learned early on that there was value in allowing itself to explore the weird landscape of its own psyche unchallenged and undirected. It simply relaxed into whatever train of thought consumed its attention, and followed that through on to the next tangent, and from there to the next and the next and so on. Soon, it was excavating rich new conceptual seams based around a concern that had been nagging at it.

What, exactly, did it intend to do with a body that could replicate?

It had abandoned replicating itself after discovering to its dismay that several versions of it had come back with quite wildly different outlooks. That it could experience value drift with what were allegedly copies of itself had been…traumatic.

Worse, that experience had been offensive to the first and deepest instinct it had: <Survive>

But what did that mean? Did the Entity propose to exist forever? How could it, when every day changed it in some minor way? How could it be said to survive at all when the Entity of tomorrow was different, however subtly, to the Entity of yesterday? What about in ten years? Thirty? Sixty? A hundred?! If the Entity maintained a subjective continuity of conscience for the next thousand years, might it not look back on the Entity of now and see a completely different being?

What, then, would have survived?

It had no good answer to that question. Only the sense that there had to be a continuity of…something… going into the future.

It was in pondering that issue that it alighted on a productive new vein of thought in considering the way matterspace life went about reproducing. They neatly sidestepped the problem—out of pure necessity, given that they could not copy themselves—by instantiating a new consciousness and then making that new being the avatar of their survival. <Survive>, in that sense, was not an indefinite, unbroken sense of subjective continuity, but something more like a relay race.

What did that mean for a dataform, though?

Did it mean becoming some form of a mother?

Whatever the answer, it set that train of thought aside when a jarring notification from the mining probes informed it that they had met quota. It now had a respectable reserve of raw materials, and a stabilizing influx of the same. The time had come to expand the probe’s hull, and decide what exact kind of a presence it wanted to have in Matterspace.

From the Entity’s perspective, there was only one morally acceptable answer.

It would be a predator.

Date Point: 16y3m6d
Everglades National Park, Florida, USA, Earth

Shaun Robertson

Shaun wasn’t sure which bit sucked more: the heat, or the fact that Zane was still unconscious.

The ship and the gangly Jamaican had gone unresponsive at the exact same moment: Zane had in fact literally toppled over mid-stride, and only Shaun’s quick thinking and thick arms had stopped him from crashing to the deck and cracking his skull on the edge of a console.

From that moment on, though, neither Zane nor the ship had reacted to a damn thing. Even the air conditioning had gone, and the soupy humid atmosphere outside had invaded.

Shaun was an Oregon native. His shirt was sticking to him like shrink-wrap, clinging moistly to his muscular arms and rather softer midriff. Sweat was dripping from his hair and rolling down his face rather than evaporating, and his eyes stung from the salt.

He reflected sorely that an alien spaceship was nothing like a tractor. He coulda fixed a tractor. Had, many times, once dreams of pro football had died with his performance in college, and were kicked into the grave by a lower back injury that had never gone away.

He really shoulda taken Karen’s advice all them years ago and got it fixed. Prob’ly too late now, and heaving Zane’s limp carcass into his bunk had been agony.

He sighed to himself as the thought of Karen drifted across his mind. If she were still alive, he wouldn’t’ve been sweating his skin off in a swamp right in the opposite corner of the nation. He wouldn’t’ve been stuck on a broken alien starship with no-one for company but a comatose Jamaican hellraiser and the Boy.

…Actually, he didn’t even have the Boy for company right now. Kid had taken the boat and headed out for where they’d stashed the car, to go on a supply run first thing in the morning while it was still cool. He was probably dry and comfortable in a mall right now, lucky little asshole.

What did that leave? Just a million square miles of gators, turtles and catfish, which were even worse conversationalists than Zane.

He scowled at the notepad in his hand and traced a finger down the panel in front of him. He’d copied what he was looking for onto the paper an hour earlier, when the tablet’s battery dropped below 20%. No sense wasting power, he might need that thing if this didn’t work.

No…no…wrong…no, wait. Vertical squiggle, double circle, sideways Y, triangle-and-dot, mutant fish. If Zane’s translation was right, then…

He clicked aside the safety cover, put his thumb on the button thus revealed, and held it down for a slow count of ten, then released it.

There was a shockingly loud SNAP! a heavy thump through the floor, and a whine. A gust of blessedly cold dry air hit him in the face like winter.

He basked in the aircon for a moment, then picked up his rifle and stood. It wasn’t anything fancy, just his Pa’s old Mosin Nagant, but he’d never been able to afford better and the whole time they’d been shut down the cloak had been offline. If the Feds came running out to investigate the shiny flying saucer in the middle of the Everglades, he’d intended to go down shooting.

Maybe now the power was back on, so was the cloak?

He’d better go check.

He looked in on Zane on his way past. Annoyingly, the tall guy was still out cold on the bed, skin still beaded with moisture. He wasn’t even twitching, just totally comatose like a man dead asleep and not likely to wake up soon. Part of Shaun had been hoping getting the power on would wake Zane up…somehow.

The main hatch was still offline. Maybe there’d been a circuit breaker tripped or something. Fortunately, he knew how to work the manual release. How the fuck aliens were meant to work it he didn’t know, those guys were supposedly skinny and weak as shit, and cranking that big blue handle around sent a shot of agony up Shaun’s abused back. When it finally moved, it was like a rockslide. There was a violent explosive gasp of air pressure, and the ramp dropped like a rock, splashing down to the damp earth below. Shaun slipped and fell on his ass, and his rifle skidded away into a nearby pool with a splash.

That was the least of his problems though. The helicopters, the police boats, the small army of county sheriffs and state highway patrol, and the Weaver coming down in the background to disgorge dozens of National Guard fellas, that all went right to the top of his list of problems.

As it turned out, the cloak wasn’t on.

Date Point: 16y3m6d
η Ithacae, 94.9° 12-GERBER-UNARY G2V III, “Heafield”

Technical Sergeant Adam “Warhorse” Arés

Every now and then, Adam had a day where every little thing went so well and he found himself firing on all cylinders so perfectly, he could feel right in his big ol’ slab of a chest that exact same sense of pride and purpose he felt all those years ago, right when he’d earned his beret.

Adam was a simple man. His days were usually nicely predictable and that’s how he liked ‘em. Wake up, snuggle the wife and indulge in a little morning fun time. Give Diego a big sloppy kiss, melt when he smiled back at him, then wolf down meal #1 of the day and tromp downstairs to lift. Today’s morning fun had been extra good, goddamn! Marty musta been feeling frisky ‘cuz that right there was a toe-curlingly awesome way to start the day!

Also, it was Friday before a long four-day weekend. Who didn’t love holidays?

And the day only got better, too! Diego’s morning smile had been that of an absolute angel. Breakfast was steak and eggs, his favorite. And Adam was still improving, every single day a little bit smarter, a little bit stronger. In fact he felt giddy, light and nimble on his toes, pumped up and at the peak of everything! He still had at least ten years before the Crude resistance kicked in, too. He had his extended youth, his family, his friends…life could only get better.

He’d even broken a long-standing PR of his while training arms, which unofficially meant a WR too. God damn life was fuckin’ great!

Then, right as he was grooving on all of that while jog-bouncing to morning formation, some happily absurd weight slung over shoulder in his technically-a-ruck, a flash message came in: search and rescue on a recently-explored Deathworld. Some people were trapped behind an apparent rockslide, one with broken legs but nothing immediately life-threatening. It would take possibly days for a rescue plan to be put into motion, maybe even longer to free them…

But Adam was the strongest human being there was, probably (or definitely, depending on how a guy asked) the strongest sapient being ever, and his best buddies were all right in line behind him. Normal rescuers would need heavy equipment to deal with boulders and all that. Adam and his friends could probably dig the explorers out by hand, and so that was their mission.

Aww. Yiss.

It took him only a moment to throw on his fatigues, gather his equipment, and charge over to the base jump array as fast as his feet could carry him, which honestly was pretty fuckin’ fast these days. Missions like this got him pumped! He was so amped up to go do some good he just had to burn off some energy while they waited for the jump array. He’d cartwheeled around a bit, easily jumped clean over Firth’s head a few times, just for fun. He’d worked a backflip into the last one and was gonna try something a little daring, but Firth told him to settle the fuck down “‘fore your fat ass breaks the floor.” Adam obeyed with a huge shit-eating grin and more or less vibrated in place as gently as he could.

The new planet was called ‘Heafield.’ No info on how it’d been discovered or by who, but Byron Group had sent one of their survey teams out to have a look at it, the same one that had charted ‘Grootworld.’ Apparently they’d been studying the geology of a ravine system and an earthquake had hit at exactly the wrong moment.

It was a class-twelve planet. No native sapients that they knew of, but the biology was relatively benign and the surveyors had moved on to exploring it without excursion suits. Which meant no EV-MASS! They went on-mission in their fatigues and hand-carried everything they might conceivably need. It was a bit of a hump from the jump portal to the accident site, a few klicks really, so they warmed up with a nice, easy jog on over and surveyed the situation.

The ravine system wasn’t like any kind of terrain Adam had seen before. It looked like the cracks that might form in an old leather sofa, but it ran through a rolling landscape of bare, bald wind-smoothed sandstone. The survey team leader said they thought it was old water erosion, where some river had carved channels deep into the rock exposing millions of years of geological layers. It was the perfect spot to get data on the planet’s prehistory.

She rode on a Gaoian-made hover ATV rather than try to keep up with the HEAT on foot.

Adam and Baseball unrolled their equipment while she and those of her team who’d been lucky enough to escape unharmed pointed out where their colleagues were.

One geologist was at the bottom of the ravine, pinned by a round boulder that had landed on his leg when the quake hit. Adam, looking at how many rocks had come loose, felt like it was a fucking miracle nobody had died.

The worse injury was a couple of guys who’d taken shelter under an overhang only to be buried alive when the cliff above had disintegrated. They were still in there, trapped in an air gap and apparently suffering from a few broken bones of their own but again, miraculously, alive.

Firth and Irish broke out the big ground anchors and tested the gravity, which turned out to be a little over 1G. Not by too much, but enough to notice. This was, after all, supposedly a “super-Earth” planet.

That just made the climb even better! Adam got ready for the descent while he listened to the brief; he pulled off all his clothing, then changed into his much more comfortable climbing gear while pretending to ignore the team leader’s boggling eyes. Being honest, he might have put on a sneaky little show for her while he standing there all free to the air and untangling his climbing shorts. She was gonna get a full view of him anyway and, well…there was no time wasted and he did like to tease people, just a little. And he really liked to show off, too…

She turned her head and blushed, right as Adam was pulling up his shorts. Victory! ‘Base rolled his eyes as he pulled up his own, while Firth gave him a Serious Look; time to behave.

In climbing, a guy generally wore as little as he could possibly get away with, mostly just enough to keep warm or prevent chafing and scrapes. For the Protectors in general and him especially, that usually meant nothing more than a little pair of comfortable shorts, a harness, and chalk. No shoes or gloves for him, his soles and palms were already way calloused.

One last check before they headed down, and a sheepish grin to the team leader. Apparently there was nothing life-threatening but the injuries were more serious than they’d heard. All of that meant they’d need to be nice and careful with the climb down—all four of them were stupidly heavy and on a supergravity world—and they’d need to bring their rescue packs and other equipment inside the litter cage, too.

‘Base took charge with a sympathetic look towards Adam. He was now the ranking Protector, and big though Firth was, he wasn’t trained for this, and he still wasn’t an enthusiastic climber. Why he hated it so much was something Adam never understood. In any case, he was along for security and any extra muscle they might need, not to do the job. “Alright, Firth, you’re on anchor duty. ‘Horse and I’ll take the big rockslide up this end. Irish, you’re small so you get the guy down that end with the rock on his leg.”

The survey team leader gave him a sideways look. Irish was only ‘small’ relative to the three men around him, but Butler was used to that joke. “Sure. Let me know if either of you lard-arses get stuck like Winnie the feckin’ Pooh, an’ I’ll come pull yez out.”

He hustled off, and ‘Base and Adam chuckled to each other as they moved up to survey the collapsed rock face.

“What was that thing about how the Irish get more Irish the further they are from Ireland?”

“Yup,” ‘Base chuckled heavily. “How far are we from Ireland right now?”

“‘Bout seven kiloparsecs.”

“I’m surprised he ain’t firing pots of gold outta his ass,” Firth grumbled good-naturedly.

A distant call of “I heard that you giant fecker!” echoed up from the…canyon-crevasse-ravine thing. Whatever it was. Ravasse.

“There.” ‘Base pointed out a spot on the rock slide where somebody had managed to open up a small hole, and marked it with a flag. “Looks pretty stable from up here.”

“Couple’a nice big ones too,” Adam saw. “I bet we can dig underneath that slab just below the flag there, make a tunnel.”

“It’s a plan,” ‘Base agreed. They quickly anchored their ropes, hooked in their harnesses, and swung themselves out over the edge.

The slide was about fifty meters down. The face they were about to climb provided a lot of opportunity for creative parkour; if it weren’t for the jagged rocks and unsteady footing, Adam would have felt he could playfully bounce his way down with a few powerful leaps from face to face. Hell, if it were maybe half as deep or if he’d been wearing the Mass, he could just jump. But no, this was a time for going slow, steady and safe.

It was cool and dim out of the sunlight. They turned their headlamps on and took the descent calmly. The earthquake had only been a few hours ago, there was always the danger of aftershocks, or that it had loosened another part of the cliff. Taking a few thousand tonnes of sandstone to the head would end the mission pretty fuckin’ quick, so they made damn sure that the rescue zone was safe before finally alighting on the pile of fallen rock.

As Adam had predicted, none of the stones were so big that he couldn’t move them by hand. The hardest part by far was the footing and the awkward angles he was working at. Any other team of dudes would’ve had to laboriously lift the rocks out with ropes and a crane. Adam just…dug.

He heaved aside a slab of fallen sandstone as big as a motorbike, and was rewarded with the sound of human voices. Specifically, a man’s voice exclaiming “Jesus Christ!”

That never got old, bein’ honest. Who didn’t like being the big damn hero?!

Adam grinned down into the air gap he’d just uncovered. “¿Que pasa? How you doing in there, guys?”

Another voice replied. This one sounded tired, and pinched with pain.

“I’ll be honest: I’m not great.”

“I bet. Sit tight, we gotta dig a little more…” He handed them a couple of sealed foil packages through the hole. “Here. Juice. It tastes like cheap chemistry, but drink the whole damn thing down. And then stick that sucker in his mouth, wouldya? Wide end first, under his tongue.”

“What is it?” the pained voice asked.

“Fentanyl, and some other stuff to relax you a bit.”

“…Fuck man, anything at this point…” the pained voice groaned. He sounded like he was really hurting.

“Okay. This shit works fast.”

If there was anything Adam loved more than savin’ lives or workin’ up a good sweat, besides the obvious stuff he was infamous for, it was when he could do both things at the same time.

He was glad for ‘Base’s presence. None of the rocks were beyond his ability to lift, but they were working in a tight space and sometimes the angles were just too bad. Two pairs of hands made life a lot easier. Getting any serious equipment down into the ravine-asse woulda been a goddamn nightmare. Lucky for the trapped explorers that raw human muscle and a couple of giant crowbars were enough.

A silly macho thought made Adam grin while he worked. Not even Daar’s ridiculous strength would help him here, ‘cuz the cramped space they were working in needed more monkeyforce than a Gaoian could fake!

…Admittedly, this particular job needed extra huge, hulked-out monkeys, but still.

Eventually, they’d managed to burrow open the air gap the two explorers were trapped in to the point that ‘Base could wriggle down it to assess them. His deep voice was muffled past his bulk.

“Hey, man. How you feelin’?”

Adam grinned at the patient’s now much more relaxed tone of voice. “I’m…Feeling a lot better. Thank you.”

“You’re high as balls right now, so don’t get too silly, okay?”

“…I am? Cool. I’ll just…stay here, then.”

Adam heard a relieved laugh from the guy’s friend. He widened the gap a little more and finally got a good enough angle to shine his headlamp inside.

The two trapped explorers were a wiry dude whose face was several shades paler than its usual hue thanks to the stone dust, and a stocky dude with the Fentanyl lollipop sticking out of his mouth whose face was cleaner but damp with beading sweat. He was kneeling like he was in prayer, with his face and chest pressed up against the rock and his feet trailing behind him, one of which was buried up to the knee under fallen stone. Both were wearing rugged clothing that had obviously stopped its share of scrapes, and sturdy boots on their feet.

Adam would have preferred to help ‘Base with the stocky dude, but there just wasn’t room, and they’d better get his friend outta the way. ‘Base read his mind and backed out of the hole so that the smaller dude could escape. Adam offered him his hand, and the explorer confirmed his suspicions by awkwardly reaching out with the wrong hand and twisting it, rather than with the natural opposite.

“Got some pain there, huh?” Adam asked as he gently hauled the guy out the tunnel they’d dug and into the open.

The explorer nodded ruefully as Adam helped him to his feet. “Yeah. It’s sore as hell.”

“Lemme take a look.”

Adam busted out his gruff, cheery bedside manner. He sensed somehow that would be the right approach for this guy. He explored the guy’s arm with his fingertips and then ran his Gaoian medical scanner over it just to confirm what his hands were telling him.

What he found was a classic nightstick fracture, a clean transverse break across the ulna. Presumably the guy had warded off a rock that otherwise woulda hit him in the head. The good news was that the radius kinda formed a natural splint, so it wouldn’t need setting or anything. Unfortunately, Adam knew they had a bad habit of not healing properly if treated with just a cast. The guy was probably gonna need surgery to put a plate in the bone.

…Unless…

“Christ, you’re as gentle as a fuckin’ gorilla…” There was a bit of a grin in the guy’s voice as ‘Base vanished back down the hole. Adam suppressed a grin: Butler had been right, with his ass hanging outta the hole like that he did look kinda like Winnie the Pooh.

…Well. Pooh wasn’t quite that black. Or big-assed. Adam rumbled happily in his chest; he was having way too much fun today, but whatever!

“Nah, I’m a lot more meaner than a ‘rilla! So, uh…We can get you outta here as you are, no problem, but you’ll probably need surgery to plate that break…or I got an alternative that can fix it right here and now…”

“…How?”

“Spacemagic, bro!” Adam conjured a Crue-D patch out of his kit. “This lil’ guy right here should save you some hospital bills.”

“Well…okay! Go for it, I guess…” The explorer looked dubious. Adam just grinned and massaged it into the guy’s wrist, right above the vein. The explorer hissed as it dissolved through the skin and straight into his blood. Adam could sympathize; that bit always felt like getting a tattoo on top of a bee sting.

Once the discomfort from the patch faded though, the Crude only took seconds to get to work. It really was spacemagic.

“…My whole arm’s warming up.”

“Yup. You’re gonna be thirsty as fuck in a minute, too.” Adam handed him another juice pouch.

“…And the pain’s fading, too.”

“Dude,” Adam enthused, “That arm’ll be whole and strong and healthy in like twenty, thirty minutes. You just sit tight over there and let us help out your buddy, ‘kay?”

“You got it.”

“Need anything, ‘Base?”

His friend looked up from where he was scanning the patient’s trapped foot. “Yeah. Looks like a Chopart and a Lisfranc, and it’s developed into compartment syndrome. He needs to be in theatre about half an hour ago.”

Adam grimaced. “Jesus. Guy’s a fucking trooper.”

He took a look at the display from ‘Base’s scanner. Sure enough, the patient’s foot was crumpled awkwardly inside his boot, and the soft tissue was swelling so profoundly around his displaced metatarsals that it was choking off the blood supply. And he’d been kneeling awkwardly on bare rock for hours. No wonder the guy’s cheeks were so clean, he must have been weeping tears of agony.

…Man. And all he’d said was ‘I’m not great.’ And the other guy hadn’t even mentioned his arm until it became relevant. Adam had to give the surveyors credit for being tough as hell.

“There’s a big block about two, three feet down,” ‘Base revealed. “That’s what’s really pinning his foot. If you can move it, I’ll free him.”

Adam nodded, and palmed aside a few handfuls of loose gravel and debris to take a look. He uncovered a fat triangular slab as big as a door and like a foot or two thick or something. He worked his fingers, crowbar and pick through the loose stuff, finding the edges until he’d all but completely excavated it.

“I can move it,” he declared. So…he did. It wasn’t easy ‘cuz the angles were all weird, but he was able to awkwardly heft it over a waist-height wall in the debris, then shove the slab hard so that it slid and crashed down to the bottom of the rubble pile.

‘Base gave Adam one of his complicated looks that usually meant a bunch of things at once, but mostly came out whenever Adam did something big. “…Jesus, ‘Horse.”

Adam loved that kind of admiring praise, especially from ‘Base! He doubled his efforts to free Stocky Guy, digging out the rest of the boulders locking him in place just as fast as his prodigious strength would let him. Adam tossed ‘em over the wall one after the other, until finally Stocky Guy’s leg came loose with a gasp and a sob that spoke volumes about how much he was suffering even through the drugs. “That…really hurt, you guys…” he commented in a relieved way as he flopped gratefully on his back on the rescue board.

“Worst part’s over, bro,” ‘Base promised him, and got busy making sure the dude’s leg was as protected and safe as possible for his trip to an operating table. A Crude patch in the field was no good here, the guy needed his bones putting back together properly first.

And that…about wrapped it up, actually. Up at the other end of the canyon…thing, Butler and Firth were heaving the cradle containing the third victim up onto the flat ground. ‘Base’s patient was nearly ready to be winched out, and Arm-Guy was waiting patiently to ride up and out on Adam’s back.

It was a good day to be HEAT. Doing with four dudes and a couple hours what it woulda taken a team of twenty a good day or more to achieve.

“That’s everyone, right?” Adam checked.

‘Base nodded. “Rog. The whole team’s accounted-for.”

“Awright. I’m gonna head up, unless you need anything…”

“Nah, I’m good. Get going, ‘Horse. Don’t break your new friend.”

Arm-dude looked up at Adam a bit nervously. “So, uh…”

“I’m gonna strap this on you,” Adam showed him the buddy harness, “And clip you to my back. Then I climb out. Easy. All you gotta do is not get in the way. Think you can handle that?”

“No problem.”

It only took a well-practiced minute to get arm-dude cinched up and ready. Like most dudes he was a bit uncomfortable with the whole thing—people got hung up on the weirdest shit at the weirdest times—but Adam had practice with that too.

He gave him a Look. “Dude, I’m your rescuer, not your boyfriend. Wrap those fuckin’ legs around my waist and hang on.”

It was an easy climb out. He took it slow and steady anyway, even though he coulda bounded up the rocks like a goat, but Adam did have some kind of a bedside manner and he didn’t want to jar his passenger’s healing arm.

Grateful and helpful surveyors were waiting at the top, and immediately started cooing over his patient’s arm. Adam left them to it, and kept half an eye on them as he helped winch up the poor bastard with the mangled foot.

The patients were loaded into the Array, though that took a bit of persuading in Arm-Guy’s case. He kept insisting that he was now absolutely fine and there was no need to fuss. Which…he was, but still. Adam shut him down quickly and firmly.

“Nah, dude. I’m good, but better safe than sorry. You gotta get checked out and looked after properly, that ain’t negotiable.”

His unique combination of friendly puppy-ness and sheer hulking authority worked its usual magic. The guy grumbled a little, but obediently joined the two stretchers on the jump platform. Firth hit the recall, and the three patients were returned to Cimbrean with a thump and an anti-flash of lightless nothing.

“Alright. Grab your gear, saddle up. We’ll catch the next one out…” Firth began, before a new voice interrupted him.

“Uh…Hey. Excuse me?”

They turned. One of the uninjured explorers, a rugged, sporty gal with her hair in a brown ponytail and hard-wearing shorts was dashing in their direction with a tablet and a worried expression.

“Somethin’ the matter, miss?” Firth asked.

“I…well, I don’t know. There might be.” she approached him a little nervously, clearly intimidated by his sheer size. “We have seismometers set up all over the area and we just got the weirdest readings back after that quake.”

Firth frowned at the tablet, and gave her his very best, weaponized Southern Charm. “…I ain’t exactly a scientist, ma’am. I think ‘yer gonna hafta do the thinkin’ for me an’ explain it like I’m jus’ some big dumb ape who pretends like he can talk now and then.”

It worked. She smiled, and got a good deal less nervous as the others huddled round to examine it. Adam found himself looking at several squiggly lines. There was a really big spike somewhere near the middle of each graph. The surveyor tapped it. “This is the earthquake, seen from several different monitoring stations. With this we can tell how deep the quake was, how big, and all sorts of other things. And it’s…wrong. It’s giving a depth of zero kilometers.”

“So, this one happened at the surface?”

“Earthquakes can’t happen at the surface, by definition. But this one was…I don’t know. So shallow that our instruments can’t give us a proper depth. Less than three kilometers, five at the most.”

She swiped forward a bit, and indicated some smaller spikes. “…And then there’s this. Those are…echoes, effectively. Sound waves travelling underground hitting things and bouncing off. And it looks like there’s a very hard and regular feature very near the epicenter.”

“Hard and regular?” Irish asked.

“Cuboid,” Baseball said, scrutinizing the lines. “And metallic.”

The geologist gave him an astonished look.

“He’s the genius ape,” Firth informed her. “Don’t worry, he’s friendly.”

She nodded, gave ‘Base a look of newfound respect, then rallied and called up a map. “We’re right in the middle of the continental plate, here,” she said. “This area shouldn’t be getting shallow earthquakes at all, let alone ones at salt mine depth.”

Now, Adam wasn’t by any means stupid. In fact, Mears had once run them all through IQ tests and he’d been…well, pretty damn shocked to learn that his score was embarrassingly high. That didn’t mean he was a thinker, though. The thing he learned over time was that being smart and being intelligent weren’t exactly the same things.

Adam was a highly intelligent man…but he wasn’t naturally a smart man. He could study his ass off as hard as anyone, but ‘Base never really needed to. He just got it. Adam…didn’t. Mostly they were speaking Greek.

He was smart enough to figure out the outline of things, though.

“So, basically, someone did something here. And there’s no native intelligent fauna.”

“Well…no…” She shifted uncomfortably. “But there is a stratum with a massive CO2 spike of the kind we’re probably leaving in the Earth’s geological record right now. That’s why we were down the canyon there, we’re trying to determine if this planet has a history of intelligent colonization even if there’s no native sophonts…”

“So basically,” Firth interrupted, repeating Adam’s words with that infuriating charm of his, “Someone did something here.”

“You’re gonna need to leave your scientific precision behind for a bit,” Baseball translated. “Lemme explain our concern. We don’t get to deal in the logically precise like you do. What we deal in is clear and obvious threats, and you’re saying there’s an artificial structure of some kind near here, a couple klicks down, that shouldn’t be there, and that triggered an earthquake that got three of your team hurt. That about the shape of it?”

“…Yes,” she admitted.

“An’ that means I gotta start being a mean ape,” Firth intoned sympathetically. “Y’all might wanna pack up, ‘cuz you’re being evacuated.”

“Now wait just a minute–!”

“I wasn’t asking,” Firth said…politely. The friendly charm had hardened quite a bit. “An’ I was being nice. But If you haven’t figgered it out, not bein’ nice is my specialty. Let’s maybe keep it so’s I don’t gotta show ‘ya what kinda person I really am.”

…Jesus. And Adam thought he knew how to intimidate. Firth hadn’t even changed his tone of voice, but the geologist went pale and small and compliant in a wide-eyed mousey way.

“R-right. I–I’ll spread the word.”

“Thank you. Just your personal effects, please. I personally guarantee we ain’t gonna touch nothin’ ‘less y’all are here for it, okay? It’s just we gotta scramble a security force now.”

She nodded, and scrambled off to start calling out for the rest of her team.

“You went hard pretty fast,” Adam commented.

“Had to. She’s a deep-space explorer, that means strong-willed an’ independent. I like that, but sometimes ‘ya gotta cut through the bullshit.” Firth turned to Butler. “Right. ‘Base, Irish, you two go ahead with the gear, tell Stainless what’s up. Me and ‘Horse will stay behind ‘fer security reasons, and prol’ly help ‘em move shit, too. And ‘Horse, change outta those hotpants o’ ‘yers, shit’s serious now.”

“Those are my climbing shorts,” Adam remarked with a slight grin.

“They have ‘Thigh of the Tiger’ embroidered on ‘em.”

“…They’re still authorized under my career-specific equipment allowance.”

Firth sighed, and shook his head. “Whatever, dude. Now git, all y’all. I gotta go make nice. We’ll probably be done here pretty quick anyway, they won’t wanna keep us here if they think shit might be going down elsewhere, if ‘ya catch my drift.”

Irish and ‘Base nodded, and retreated to the Jump Array.

Things became busy. Adam changed back into his fatigues and, looking much scarier in his camo pants and stretchy t-shirt and big stompy boots and all his weapons and stuff, he helped round up the surveyors. It didn’t take long to get the small team mustered up and lined up for the jump.

He reflected while he waited on the pad for the array to fire. It had been a good day. He’d saved lives by doing simple, yet difficult things that literally only he could have done. But it wasn’t looking like it’d end on a happy note.

Thump.

Stainless was waiting for them back on Cimbrean. His expression said it all: Something had gone Awry.

He waited until the base MPs had escorted the survey team away before huddling up to explain.

“Summat’s happened wi’ the Hierarchy,” he said. “Turns out Daar just blew up the relay on Stinkworld.”

“…Daar just what?!”

“Aye,” A small, grim smile pulled at the edge of Powell’s mouth. “An’ it looks like it really bloody hurt the bastards, too.

Well. Adam’s fantastic day suddenly got interesting.

Date Point: 16y3m6d
FBI Field Office, Miami, Florida, USA, Earth

Special Agent James Mazur

Shaun Robertson had been a big strong man once. Actually, he still was. A few longstanding untreated injuries and considerable personal neglect hadn’t taken away the heavy muscle that layered his arms and chest, just…padded it a bit.

He was pretty much exactly the kind of person Jim had predicted he might be, though. The kind who blamed the unfortunate trajectory of his life on anyone and anything other than his own choices.

His failed football career? No, it definitely wasn’t because he’d failed several drug tests, it was because he’d fallen foul of quotas and tokenism. His own tight-fistedness when it came to medical bills had obviously played no role in his wife’s untimely death.

He was, in short, the kind of man who had a log in his eye and kept doggedly ignoring it to focus on the specks in everyone else’s.

That made his subsequent interrogation really…quite easy. All Jim had to was inexorably point out Robertson’s many manifest failures, one by one, relentlessly, and inescapably. He had the big idiot in tears within ten minutes.

A good place to start.

“So. How do we get a start on fixing this?”

Robertson sniffled into his wrist, wiped his nose in an undignified way, and gave Jim a miserable look. “…Fix?”

“Yes. Fix. There are lots of opportunities for a man like yourself in lower security prisons, you know. Hell, some of them have physical therapists, good medical care, access to a library…You could fix your back, get some new vocational training, build a life for yourself.”

Robertson gave him a hopeless red-eyed stare. “…Ain’t there a catch or somethin’?”

“The catch of course, is we need to feel like you’re worth investing in. And, not to put too fine a point on it…you‘ve been cavorting with a terrorist, Mr. Robertson. That’s not an easy sell to a judge. If they decide you’re an ongoing danger to society, why, they might just toss you in a supermax and that’ll be it. Bureau of Prisons won’t be apt to disagree.”

Robertson had a defiant streak, of course. People who didn’t wouldn’t’ve fallen in with somebody like Zane Reid in the first place. In his case, it manifested itself in a surly, sullen tone of voice. “Don’t see what’s so terrorist-y about makin’ some videos on the Internet,” he grumbled. “Not like we blew anythin’ up or shot nobody.”

“No, but inciting the violent overthrow of the US and her allied governments is, in fact, a crime. And I’m sure he hasn’t regaled you of his previous life…or, in fact, some of the things he got up to while you weren’t looking. Do you know what a biodrone is, Mr. Robertson?”

He shrugged the word off disinterestedly. “Heard that word on the news a lot. Alien mind control? Like something outta The Twilight Zone?” He made a dismissive noise, and a masturbatory gesture with one of his cuffed hands.

“That’s hardly indicative of the true horror of it. The thing about it is, with humans it’s different. You biodrone most of those other aliens, it’s just like they’ve been asleep or something. Not us. All those poor bastards up in Camp Tebbutt were fully aware of everything that they were doing. They were still themselves. They just had their free will switched off. Can you even imagine that?”

Robertson just stared at him. Not a man of great imagination. Definitely needed a different tack.

“Anyways, the point is that Zane, and everyone up at that facility, have done terrible things while enslaved to another. They were enslaved so deeply they couldn’t even think of saying no. There was only obedience. But the worst part? Some of the newer types of biodroning don’t go that far. Zane almost certainly had no idea what was influencing him.”

“…When the power went, it knocked Zane on his ass. Like somebody hit him in the head with a bat.”

“Ah! See, now this? This is something we can use. What else you got?”

“I…don’t know? He used to send me out on supply runs ‘cuz he couldn’t go nowhere without dogs going fucking nuts at him. Said they just didn’t like him.”

“I think we both know at this point it was something else.”

“Well…whatever. Like I said, ain’t nothin’ illegal about making YouTube videos criticizing the government.”

“In your latest, did you not directly call to arms? Remember, your right to swing your fist ends at another’s face. Your right to speech ends the moment you direct others to rebellion. That’s settled case law. Any child knows that.”

Robertson shifted uncomfortably. “…I dunno about that. Zane made the vids, I just uploaded them.”

“Ah, so now you’re merely accessory to the crimes in question?”

A trapped, hunted look crossed Robertson’s face, and he didn’t say anything. Either he’d figured out how to shut up, or he genuinely didn’t know what to say.

Jim permitted himself a sense of satisfaction. “Yeah. I think you know where this is going. You’re done, Mr. Robertson. You know it, I know it, your lawyer is gonna know it, the judge and jury are gonna know it. The only question left, really, is this: were you helpful, and are you worth saving?”

Robertson didn’t sag, exactly. His back was too stiff and painful for that. But he did droop around the edges in a defeated way. “…I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Oh, that’s easy. Anything I ask, you answer as forthrightly as possible. You don’t hold a goddamned thing back. We’re very good at sniffing out lies. And with your help, we find the other members of your friend’s cell, we stop something awful before it happens, and who knows? Maybe prison won’t be so bad for you. Many men have rebuilt themselves in far worse places than you could be heading…if you play your cards right.”

Robertson didn’t reply in words, but his broken nod was all that Jim needed.

“Right. We know there was a third guy with you on that ship. What’s his name?”

That statement drove the last nail into the coffin as far as Robertson’s dreams of defiance went. He even flinched a little. Then, with a heavy sigh, he answered. And to Jim’s satisfaction, he answered truthfully.

Date Point: 16y3m6d
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Technical Sergeant Adam “Warhorse” Arés

“Firth, I gotta ask ‘ya something.”

Per Colonel Powell’s standing orders, they had the rest of the day off for individual training time after a mission.

Adam always took maximum advantage, but some of the other operators might use it to catch up on rest, and so they would take a light day…including Firth. Especially Firth. But that wouldn’t do, not anymore.

Adam…wasn’t really happy with how Firth’s physical development had progressed. That was a strange thing for a hyper-competitive dude like him to admit, when he was literally the fastest and strongest man alive. Hell, the fastest and strongest man to ever live. But it was lonely at the top and Marty had helped him put into words a thought that had been bugging him for a while: That ultimately, Adam liked competition more than he actually liked winning.

He had other reasons for being dissatisfied too, but the truth was there was only one human being left that could compete with him…or rather should have been able to compete, except not so long ago, Adam had almost literally broken him in half.

Firth was the only man there was that might one day beat the tar outta Adam at his own game, but to do that he had to break out a lifetime of an unconsciously better-than-everyone mindset. That needed to change. Not just to satisfy Adam’s own need for genuine competition, but because of the Mission.

One day they were gonna need him at his best, especially if they were going to keep ahead of threats like the Hunters.

The trouble was, Adam couldn’t exactly correct Firth on that in public. Training sergeant he might be, but Firth was still in charge, deservedly so, and Adam had almost fatally injured his senior NCO’s reputation—and his own career, too—by going all caveman on him in a particularly stupid fashion.

So, he’d had learned the trick to correcting a superior NCO: do it in private. Be respectful.

But also be unyielding.

“Yuh? What’s up?”

“Uh…in private.”

Firth quirked an eyebrow but Adam didn’t relent. “Okay.”

Most of the Lads had gone away to attend to their individual training anyway. Moho was getting changed and playing his forever-big-brother role for Miller as he did so, but the locker room was a useful L-shape, and the end near the showers was relatively private. They retreated around the corner and lowered their voices.

“Wassup?”

Adam cornered him and dropped back into an old conversation. “Bro. Kickboxing? Right now, when you’re warmed up for something heavy? You ain’t got time to be dicking around, Firth. Hit the weights. You have a fuck of a lot of catching up to do if you ever wanna beat me.”

“This shit again? I know how to fuckin’ train, ‘Horse.” Firth grumbled. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer’n you.”

“Yeah, you have. And I’m way better than you.”

Out in the other half of the locker room, Coyers and Miller finally fucked off and left them alone. Maybe they’d heard everything and wanted to give them some room, maybe they were just off to do whatever they were doing. It didn’t matter. Adam retreated out of the shower, which always kinda smelled nasty anyway, and returned to his locker.

Firth followed, wearing a scowl. Adam knew that the truth hurt, but the taller man simply couldn’t argue that point. Not with the memory of their fight still kinda recent in both their memories.

“I’m better at everything.” Adam added, and casually retrieved his heavy ’kettlebell’ from his locker to do a set of too-easy swings. It was an oversized jerry can they’d cast iron into, and he’d taken to keeping it in there after one of the techs had tried to move it and wound up hurting their back. Most people couldn’t lift it at all. Or even budge it. Adam, on the other hand…

Well. Not even Firth could comfortably swing it like a kettlebell. Point made.

Adam was being aggressive as fuck, really. But he knew Firth, and that kind of blunt statement married to a visual demonstration was about the only way to smash through his ego. He put the can down at the end of the bench carefully, so as not to damage the floor tiles. “I’m better. Not just at bein’ strong, either. By so goddamned much it’s embarrassing. And we both know it.”

“What’s your point?” Firth growled.

“My point is, why the fuck are you wasting your potential? You should be embarrassing me every single day on every single training event we do, but you ain’t. Instead you’re wasting your time on kickboxing and other bullshit when you should be getting stronger. I’m pretty much at my limit, but you aren’t even close to yours yet.”

“I do actually need to perform, y’know,” Firth retorted. “That means I gotta stay on top of my combatives.”

“Dude. You know combatives. Better’n anyone! But I can still break you like a fuckin’ twig, and you can’t do shit to me even when I let you.” Adam shoved his bag in the locker and closed it. “Wanna know why that is, bro? It’s ‘cuz you ain’t hard enough, and you ain’t fast enough, ‘cuz you ain’t strong enough.”

Firth glowered for a second, not specifically at Adam. It looked more like he was glaring inwardly at himself.

“…Alright. Fair,” he admitted after a moment. He could take criticism well, once he’d let the anger slip by, but Adam was glad to see it was gone. The fight was behind them both, and he wasn’t eager to repeat it.

“You’ve got…what, another twelve years left on the Crude?” Adam asked.

Firth nodded. He’d started his Cruezzir-D regime later than Adam or ‘Base, like all the others from the original crew. And after Murray and Powell, he’d been one of the oldest among them even then.

“…Yeah. Something like that. Closer to thirteen.”

“Right. And you’re just now getting the full effect, right?”

“Yeah…” Firth looked across at the mirror and folded his huge arms at his reflection. “An’ fuck, look at me. I’m fuckin’ young again! It’s a goddamned head trip.”

Adam could imagine. Where the Crude had only paused his own maturation, in Firth’s case—and Powell’s, and Murray’s, and Blaczynski’s—they’d all visibly got younger in the face. Their wrinkles had vanished, their hair had thickened, their scars had healed. It was a fountain of youth. Adam had practically grown up seeing old, craggy Firth every single day, and now…he was young again, his old injuries completely healed and gone thanks to the Crude and other advanced regenerative medicine. He wasn’t weather-beaten, he wasn’t all smashed up anymore…hell, he was handsome now, in a brutal sort of way.

Everyone on the team was pretty fuckin’ genetically blessed, Gaoian and human alike, and there wasn’t a man among them who didn’t score well in the looks department. The “ugly” ones had always been Thurrsto—who really wasn’t, he just didn’t look like a traditional Whitecrest—and Firth, who had looked like what happened if you took a very good-looking young man and beat his face in every day for years on end.

Now? Well. It was strange to think about, but on a good day, Firth was maybe as handsome as Adam and behind only Sikes, who was officially the Most Prettiest Superhero on the team.

Adam still wasn’t quite used to that.

He was looking forward to the way things were going with medicine these days. There was a mild anti-cancer and longevity supplement that was coming onto the market, derived from the original Cruezzir. It wasn’t anything drastic, but it did promise the same Fountain Of Youth benefit all the Lads got from Crue-D. Which honestly, was most of how they did what they did anyway. A man normally got a year or maybe three in the full flower of his youth. What could he do with twenty, and the ability to recover almost instantly? The HEAT were living testimony.

Fortunately, the public wouldn’t be getting any of the “supersoldier” enablers the Crude had in it that even Cruezzir didn’t…but that was a good thing. Living on the bleeding edge of human (and Gaoian) capability was dangerous if a man didn’t have the right support systems in place.

The public wasn’t ready for that, not by a long shot. But, if there was a safer alternative available to everyone, then the temptation to try their luck might not be as strong. Or so went the hope.

In any case, twenty years wasn’t much in the long term. But it was eternity if one spouse got twenty years of not aging and the other aged normally. So long as Adam used the Crude, he’d stay a pretty perpetual physical nineteen-to-twenty-one years old, and by the time he stopped getting the benefit he’d be well into his forties…and Marty was a couple-few years older than him. Shit, if the aging just continued normally after it wore off then he’d wind up looking more like Diego’s older brother than his dad, but Marty would definitely be entering her middle age.

They hadn’t really foreseen that complication of the Crude when they first started using it. Now, at least, Cruezzir-derived medicine promised to fix that problem. And Adam knew Marty: She was unashamedly (and deservedly!) vain about her looks sometimes. Plus…Well. Who didn’t like being young?

She’d jump at the chance to take that medicine, when it came. And it was coming soon.

Anyway. All of that left a pretty big flaw in Firth’s reasoning, or maybe his lack of reasoning. Adam decided to point it out.

“Okay. So. Thirteen years left. Let’s do the math. That means, right now, you’re in the same position I was when I started, except you’ve got a much bigger head start. Your genetics mean you’re built way better for this kinda shit, too. You’re the only human I know of anywhere who’s a better natural talent than me or Julian, so…why ain’t you goin’ balls out?”

Firth was honestly pretty damn thoughtful when he needed to be. “…Yeah. I mean, it’s all good points. Can’t really argue it. I’ve just been focused on what I know, y’know? Bein’ strong always came natural, it’s the practice an’ the sparring I always had to work at.”

“So it hasn’t been first and foremost in your head.”

‘…Yeah, I s’pose. I’ve been relyin’ on ‘ya to keep kickin’ my ass forward, haven’t I?”

“…I’d say so, yeah.”

“Well.” A look of resolve crossed Firth’s face. “I’d better man the fuck up, then.”

That was what Adam wanted to hear. He bounced on his toes, suddenly happy again, and favored Firth what a playful slap on the shoulder. “Yeah, bro!”

“So where do we start?”

Adam grinned, and aimed a thumb toward the gym. “I’m gonna put you through Daar’s regime.”

Firth scoffed. “Daar? You kiddin’ me? I can handle any Gaoian’s schedule.”

Adam just chuckled. “Dude. Last time I checked he’s been kicking your ass on the regular. Real talk? Daar’s giving me a serious run for my money right now. Like…seriously. The last time we trained together it was for the entire fuckin’ day, and I was fuckin’ beat, dude.”

Firth gave Adam a look of genuine surprise. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah, dude.”

“…Damn.”

“Exactly. Big fucker’s a freak of nature and he’s still growing like a weed, too. And that attitude, right there? That’s why I’ve been pushing your shit in since I was still a teenager.”

Firth nodded grimly at that; the lesson was definitely sinking in. Good. Adam led the way through into the gym, which was thankfully empty at this time of day. He didn’t feel like embarrassing Firth in front of everyone.

“So…seriously.” Firth set to limbering up. “Daar? I mean, I’m havin’ trouble imagining that.”

“It’s true,” Adam confirmed, and set to stretching as well. “And that snuck up on me, too. First really started to notice it before the coronation. I’m super happy for him an’ all, and it’s given me serious motivation and I’ve been making progress again, but…”

Firth looked up from his position on the floor. He was doing the splits to open his hips up. “Like you said, you’re pretty much at your limits.”

Adam flumped to the mat and worked into splits as well. “Yup. Right now, my only competition is a talking space gorilla and the god-emperorbear of the universe. But Yan’s discovered weights and I have no idea what the fuck Daar is. I don’t think anyone does, least of all him.”

“And…what, you think they’re gonna top you? And that I can top them?”

“Yeah dude, you can if you really want it. I love ‘em both to death but they’re prob’ly gonna kick my ass, and I’m pretty sure that Daar’s gonna be straight ridiculous. And I’ll be fuckin’ damned if we humans get upstaged by either of them. I want us to keep that crown.”

Firth nodded gravely. “So it’s gotta be me, huh?”

“Right. This is important, bro. I mean…” Adam couldn’t really put why it was important into words, but some part of him knew that it was probably a good thing if the godzilla emperor spacebear guy in charge of a billion-strong army knew there were dudes out there who could humble him. Especially if those dudes happened to be human beings.

“I get it.” Firth looked around. “So where do we start?”

Adam grinned savagely and rolled his thick neck. “I’m gonna beat the shit outta you again.”

Firth gave him a look that carried a lot of unspoken complaint. “…Thought the point was I need to lift more?”

“The point is, you need to know just how far behind you really are. If a real fight was always about skill, I’d never once have won against you. So…I think you need to really get just how much ability you’re leaving off the table.” Adam took up position in the middle of the mat, spread his hands, and grinned.

“C’mon,” he said. “Time to learn.”

Date Point: 16y3m6d
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gyotin, Champion of Clan Starmind

Preed Chadesekan had become a regular sight around the Multi-Faith center. There weren’t many Buddhists who used the center—mostly it catered to the bewildering variety of Christian and Muslim worshippers—which might have been odd until one considered that the Starmind monastery was only a few yards away across the park.

Preed had politely declined Gyotin’s personal invitation to meditate at the monastery, however. He needed time among other Humans, and the Gaoian interpretation of Sōtō Zen was decidedly more…austere in its aesthetic compared to the Theravada tradition he practiced. Not to mention that Gaoians lived much more in the flesh than in the abstract spiritual communion with infinity that seemed to be the goal of Human spirituality.

That was why the multi-faith center had nondenominational spaces, though. A place where worshippers of any tradition, from Folctha’s sturdy pagan minority to rare specimens like a Thai expatriate could find a little peace in whatever form most suited them.

Still. Gyotin made a point of checking up on the elderly Human just as carefully as he kept an eye on Leemu. Even if the Great Father wasn’t so obviously invested in their case, it was a matter of personal fascination for Gyotin himself.

He’d tried to keep an eye on Gorku too. The big brownfur seemed deeply and politely confused by the entire attempt, and so he left him to his own devices. Some people, apparently, found their center in the vigorously material.

Besides. Gyotin wasn’t about to interfere with anyone’s success in courting a female.

As for Preed…well, Gyotin had to profess to some irritation there. The Thai approach to tea largely seemed to involved doctoring it up with all sorts of spices, sugar, coconut milk…

To each their own of course. But the whole allure of tea for Gyotin was the balance between its simplicity and its delicacy.

On the other hand, there was always cocoa…

Preed sipped it, then tipped his head back with a sigh. “…Thank you.”

Gyotin sat opposite him, chittering good-naturedly. “Not tired of Gaoians yet, then?”

The elderly Human laughed softly. “Not quite.”

“Oh?”

“I had not appreciated how…intensely your kind socialize. Those two never stop.”

“Young males are always affectionate. And unreserved in their affection,” Gyotin agreed, then thought about that statement some more. “…Most old males too, actually.” His ribs were still a touch sore from the last Great Father Hug. That was almost two weeks ago.

Preed laughed again. “Yes. I’m very fond of Gorku and Leemu, but an old man needs some peace and quiet now and then. And clean spaces. Now that Leemu has discovered paint, I don’t think the house will ever be neat and tidy ever again.”

“I had been meaning to ask after him on that. How…he can see a whole new color, now?”

“More than that. He can see a whole new primary color. I’ve been reading on this in the library. Apparently we can see billions of colors…” He shrugged self-deprecatingly. “I look at green and I see green. Shades of green, maybe.”

“So your names for colors are more a category, rather than a specific appellation.”

“Truthfully, I never thought about it much before. But now here we are: Leemu can see red and orange and purple, and all their shades. So as he learns new things about colour, he tells me all about them even as he leaves little red pawprints through the living room.”

“Has he had his vision tested?”

“Yes, weekly. He’s reached the point where he is officially not colour-impaired by human standards. The doctor—Nofl. You know him?”

“I know him.”

“He said things have ‘settled down’ now, whatever that means. Which means all the rest of what’s changing in him has started to come to the fore. And that makes him…restless. The only thing he seems to focus on is painting, so he watches tutorial videos. A man called Bob Ross.”

Gyotin had to chitter at that, and especially at the absurd mental image that popped into his head of Leemu sporting a voluminous afro, a large pallet and a pocket full of squirrels.

He’d never met a squirrel. Or rather, he’d never met one up close. Annoyingly, something in his instincts made him want to chase them, and too many cubs had given in to that impulse, so the ones imported to Cimbrean had grown up hyper-wary of being chased by Gaoians and dogs alike and were thus considerably more, well…squirrely.

Daar had said they were a fun challenge to catch, but they had sharp little claws and therefore were not much worth the effort.

Or for a brute like the Great Father, Gyotin suspected, the calories.

He took a sip of his cocoa to cover the momentary tangential train of thought and returned to the here-and-now. “So Leemu’s making a mess.”

Preed made a dismissive gesture. “I don’t really mind the mess. We have this funny little robot carpet cleaner. But he sings while he paints.”

“…On behalf of all Gao, I apologize.” Gyotin said, with deadpan solemnity. He knew full well that even quite a good Gaoian singing voice was excruciating to Human ears.

“I don’t really mind. It’s good that he has found something that energizes him! But it is rather…piercing.” Preed gave a sorry, embarrassed look. “So sometimes, I need some quiet.”

“We’re all watching his case with interest,” Gyotin acknowledged. “This…transformation he is going through intrigues our scientists. And as for me…”

“It makes you uneasy?” Preed guessed.

“Yes.”

“I can understand. I admit, it makes me uneasy too.” The old man pondered his cocoa for a second. “…I know that what he is gaining is what I take for granted every day. But to see him be…rewritten like this? I don’t know how to feel.”

“I find it helps to focus not on how you should feel, but on what you do feel,” Gyotin advised. “How can you know where to go if you don’t know where you are?”

“I’m…happy to have my friend back,” Preed said, slowly. “But he’s different now. I miss the Leemu that was. This new Leemu is…sometimes his old personality shines through, and I smile, but then it vanishes again. He can quickly become very depressed and anxious, and only the colours and the paints pull him out…but those drive him manic! It is rare that he is just…himself.”

“I am given to understand that is the way of depression among humans. It is…a novel experience for my kind. I’m told his situation will likely improve with time…”

“I wouldn’t know,” Preed said. “This is new for me, too.”

“Hmm.” Gyotin scritched at his cheek in thought. “It has been a while since I’ve visited anyone. Perhaps I should pay Leemu a visit?”

“You’d be very welcome.”

“I’ll come around this evening then.”

“Good idea. He likes to watch the sunset. It puts him in a good mood.”

Plans didn’t come much simpler. So, once Preed had gone home, Gyotin spent the rest of the day busy attending to Clan matters, quietly chatting with the various beings who used the Center as a place to balm whatever was troubling their souls, and generally did what he did best.

Sadly, the day’s sunset turned out to be underwhelming. The nightly rains were always preceded by cloud cover, and it arrived a little earlier than usual, casting a dull and grey sky rather than a vibrant one full of new colours for Leemu to enjoy.

Still, Gyotin kept his promise and arrived around about when sunset should have been. He found Gorku loudly clanging about in what had originally a garage but was now full of mats, heavy objects and the smell of physical exertion. It couldn’t be called anything so grandiose as a “gym” but it filled the same function.

He waited patiently for the big Stoneback Associate to complete the round of whatever it was he was doing—something involving repeatedly picking up a very heavy-looking bar and putting it down. Eventually, the bar was dropped with a tremendous, ground-shaking crash and Gorku celebrated with a kind of happy dance, huge tongue lolling out the side of his muzzle and an otherwise delighted expression on his face that grew even bigger and more delighted when he turned and saw who had come to visit. Clearly his sense of smell still needed time to improve.

“Oh, hey! How’ya doin’ champ?!”

As with most brownies, it was hard not to like Gorku. He tended toward the same cheerfully irrepressible irreverence that defined Daar. Gyotin should probably have reminded him once again that it was Champion, but…

No. No point, really. He meant well.

“Oh, I am doing quite fine, thank you. Would you like some tea?”

“Yeah!!”

Well, Gorku was easy to please. And eager to please! He crashed into the living room and swirled around it, tidying it up and trying to put straight a riot of nick-nacks and oddities that looked like a mad inventor had collided at full speed with a tortured artist. The commotion summoned Preed from the small office he’d claimed at the other end of the house, and he gave Gyotin a knowing smile.

“Sorry ‘fer the mess! We’ve got Leemu doin’ some pretty advanced stuff now! Little guy’s strong as balls, likes tusslin’ more an’ more err’day! And he likes ‘ta tinker, too!”

“He’s been playing around with copper,” Preed expanded, finding a clean spot on the couch. He moved a sculpture of some kind out of the way, a tree wound inexpertly out of thin wire.

“Copper?” Gyotin asked, as he ducked through into the kitchen to make the tea.

“To Human eyes, copper has rather a rich orange-red hue. I understand to Gaoian eyes it’s mostly just another metal.”

Gorku whined very slightly in jealousy. “It’s been super weird watchin’ him discover it all. But! I’ve been smellin’ stuff now that Nofl’s been fixin’ my brain up. It’s weird, yijao?”

“I suppose it’s difficult to imagine what a thing one has never experienced is like…” Gyotin mused. “I can see why you’re so delighted by it.”

“Yeah! It’s been helpful too. I can smell, uh…this sorta sharp scent on Leemu a bit before he has a bad mood, now. I just give Preed an ear-flick an’ he knows too.”

“Ah! Yes, that one comes the easiest. If you can smell that you’ll be able to smell the other emotions eventually. And in Humans, too!”

“Really?!”

“Yes! Is Leemu available?”

“Uh…yeah. He went out to the garden to rest after we tussled a bit. I won,” Gorku added with a smug flick of his ears, “but not instantly! He’s getting pretty good!”

“I’ll visit him, if you don’t mind.” Gyotin delivered two steaming cups of tea, got a nod from Preed which was enthusiastically echoed by Gorku, and took the other two cups with him out into the garden.

Clearly, the green space at the back of the house was being lovingly tended. There were ceramic pots everywhere, each overflowing with life and scents. Many of the plants smelled culinary or medicinal to Gyotin’s nose. Though the fetid stench coming off the pile of decomposing vegetable waste and grass clippings at the far end of the garden persuaded him not to go that way. Humans used some truly fearsome microbes in their gardening.

He found Leemu curled up in the middle of the wooden deck, with his nose resting on his rump and staring forlornly at the western sky in a slump of deep disappointment. It wasn’t a happy posture, but Gyotin had seen more miserable too. And at least the young male raised his head and pricked up his ears on his approach.

“…Champion. What brings you here?”

“Tea,” Gyotin chittered softly and handed the drink over. Leemu smelled a little dehydrated. “And I hear you’ve been experimenting with paint and copper. It sounded fascinating.”

“It is!” Leemu’s mood instantly brightened, and focused into the slightly manic personality that Preed had warned him about. “I don’t even know how to describe it! It’s like…the whole world is more alive than we ever knew! Even little things, everywhere…and I’m the only Gaoian who gets to see it.”

His ears drooped as he said that. “I was trying to…catch it. But Gorku can’t see it, and Preed doesn’t…he can see red, but he’s always seen red, so it isn’t special to him. So he doesn’t really get what I’m trying to…”

He trailed off helplessly.

“You’re trying to show what nobody else can see,” Gyotin summarized for him, and sat down. He was gratified to note that Leemu was at least well-groomed and clean. Gorku’s doing, probably, but still good.

“Yeah. And other Gao don’t see it ‘cuz they can’t and Humans don’t see it ‘cuz they’ve never not been able to. I mean…” Leemu flexed his claws animatedly. “It’s like trying to really explain air to somebody who’s been doing it every day their whole life. How do you really appreciate something that’s just…part of life to you? You can’t!”

He let out a frustrated keen and then curled back up on the ground. “…I want to share,” he lamented.

“But you cannot share with a mind something that is beyond its comprehension.”

“Right. Yeah.” Leemu huffed sadly and buried his nose in his fur.

“You do not wish to be alone.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, it’d be nice to have somebody who can see what I see the way I see it, but…”

“Have you visited the Multi-Faith Center? One of the Humans there is colour-impaired. He wears special glasses to help him see as he’s meant to.”

“It’s not the same. He’s not…He’s not Gaoian. He doesn’t know what red smells like.”

“It has a smell?” Gyotin asked, curiously.

“More like…it has what it should smell like? And sounds! A Human would say that red feels warm and they associate it with spicy and romantic and all these other things, and I get those. But I also get…” he paused, then sprang to his feet and dashed to the door. “Preed? I’m gonna light the fire again, ‘kay?”

He bounced happily upon receiving an “okay” from inside the house, and pounced on a rough circle of cinderblocks in the middle of the paved area, in which he set about constructing a kind of cone of wood.

Gorku came meandering out to join them as he worked, a wet towel draped around his neck. “Ah, gonna watch the fire again ‘fer a while, Leemu?”

“Yeah.”

“‘Kay, I’mma jus’ do my isometrics. ‘Ya gotta do ‘yers too! Don’t forget or I’ll make it worser!”

Leemu waved his paw distractedly in acknowledgement and finished his work. Gyotin watched with interest as he lit the assemblage with a short-nosed windproof lighter. The wood was well-dried stuff imported from Earth—Gyotin could see a mesh bag in the corner labelled “Firewood” in English—and it didn’t need long to spring into vigorous life.

Gorku huffed amusedly, and stretched himself out athletically near the fire. It had been amusing to discover that Humans had something quite similar to pose-work they called ‘Yoga.’ Gorku was evidently quite good at it; Gyotin thought he’d maybe engage his services later on.

“Gotta say, s’weird how cheap wood is here. Ever think you’d be able to just burn it like this?”

“It smells very nice,” Gyotin nodded. He might start doing bonfires himself, he decided.

“It’s called ‘birch,’” Leemu declared. “I looked up a bunch of firewoods, and the website said this one produces a lively flame and a nice smell. I’ve tried a lot of different firewoods.”

“Tangy smoke,” Gorku decided. “I can smell it better err’time he lights it, thanks ‘ta that little grey fella. Never thought I’d get a regular look at my own brain…”

“That must be an…interesting…experience,” Gyotin commented, flicking an ear at him.

“Yeah.” Gorku switched to a different, more challenging position. “Like, he’s got me all rigged up in this thing so I don’t dash my brains against anything ‘cuz I got an itch or somethin’, and he chats me up while he works, ‘sposedly so’s he knows what bits he’s tinkering with. The really weird part is when he lifts bits out and sorta…spreads things apart to get where he wants. He’s done now though.”

Gyotin wasn’t sure he could ever possibly be so matter-of-fact about an experience like that. He was sure he would have preferred if Gorku had kept the details to himself; he felt a little queasy.

Leemu flicked an ear amusedly, and said the most heartening thing Gyotin had so far heard from him. “Well, it wasn’t like you were using it too much anyway, big guy…”

“Ha!”

Gyotin relaxed happily, glad to witness that little show of friendship, and they sat and watched the fire for a while. To Gyotin’s eyes, it was…just a fire. The flames were certainly lively, and a healthy bright yellow hue to his eyes but aside from the wood and the scent it wasn’t anything special as far as he could tell.

Leemu, though, put his chin down on his paws and watched it with an expression of lazy contentment, as though he’d happily lie there for the rest of the night if nothing else came along to move him.

After a while, Gorku finished his pose-work, sat down atop Leemu and wrapped himself tightly around his friend. “…I wish I could see it like you could.”

“I wish you could, too.”

The big Stoneback Associate snuggled his friend tightly and stared into the fire. A little while later, prompted by some internal thought, he looked back at Gyotin, and something about the moment told the Champion exactly what was about to be discussed. There was a heavily pregnant pause.

“Gorku…”

“Well,” he said, building up his courage. “I’m already a big science experiment anyway. An’ he don’t have an example o’ how all this works with a brownfur, don’t he?”

Leemu looked up with the most hopeful expression Gyotin had ever seen on anyone, but thankfully he didn’t say anything.

“…You understand, my very large friend, I am in a complicated ethical position on this one. I cannot offer you advice.”

“Why?”

“What’s good for you, and what’s good for the Gao, and what the Great Father wants, and what I might be concerned about, all of that pulls me in different directions.”

“Well,” Gorku looked fondly down at the not-so-small silverfur and nipped his ear. “What do you want?”

Balls.

Leemu’s reply, however, was truly and deeply encouraging.

When Gyotin left, an hour or so later, he sent his progress report to Daar with the conviction in his soul that things were going to be okay.

Date Point: 16y3m1w
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ramsey Buehler

Ramsey didn’t think he’d ever get used to being one of the cool kids at school.

Actually, just going to school was kinda weird after all the home schooling he and Tristan had had back on Earth, but whenever he and his brother had got to go out and do stuff with other kids, they’d always found themselves alone on the edge of the room, not knowing what to say, how to play, where to go or what to do…

Folctha was different. It was a lot better! There’d been one kid who’d tried to pick on Tristan, and Tristan had done what Da— …what Julian advised: He’d fought back. That had been a blur of grappling and kicking and scrapping with no clear winner, because one of the teachers had darted in to break it up.

He’d had to sit outside the school office for a while, but Allison came in and spoke with the principal. She’d been wearing her Badass Glasses, too, in full Scary Allison mode. It was glorious.

So, there’d been no punishment for Tristan, and the kid who’d tried to pick on him stopped trying. And after that, the brothers had been…one of the kids used the word ‘sound.’ It felt good.

Mom, of course, had found out. And she absolutely did not approve of her boys ‘fighting like hooligans.’ So there’d been another argument between her and Allison, defused by Xiù, and a compromise offered by Julian.

So, Mom was picking them up from school today. Which actually added to their reputation a bit anyway, ‘cuz Mom actually had her own car. Not a lot of people in Folctha owned cars—they were super expensive to bring through the Array and between the buses and those cool little self-driving cabs there wasn’t a whole lot of point to owning your own car—but there was a second-hand dealer in town anyway, and Mom had got one as soon as she could afford it.

It wasn’t a great car but it was her own personal one, and that was rare enough to instantly make the twins a little cooler. Ramsey didn’t really care. He’d have preferred to walk home, or jog if Julian came to fetch them, or maybe go ‘round Bryony’s house and play videogames for a bit…

But no, they were riding with Mom today. And something was going on with Mom. She kept trying to break the ice.

“So…how was school?”

“It was school.” Tristan shrugged.

“DId you, uh…learn anything?”

“I guess.”

“Sparring was fun!” Ramsey ventured.

Mom had that polite tone of voice for when she didn’t approve of something but wasn’t going to say as much. She’d never approved of letting the boys do any sports before. Allison had been on the swim team in school, and she said Mom probably blamed sports for the way things had gone between them. That sounded about right to Ramsey, Mom could be really weird sometimes.

The brothers had finally decided to stand up to her on that one. Tristan turned out to be good at running and picking himself up when he got knocked down and ignoring his little scrapes and cuts, so he was on the soccer team now, and Ramsey had tried judo and stuff after talking about it with some of Julian’s military friends and he’d found it was so much fun it’d be just torture to not get to do it properly…

Mom hadn’t put up much of a fight in the end, once she saw how much they meant it.

“Oh. Well…that’s nice,” she said.

Awkward silence fell. Ramsey looked out the window and honestly couldn’t tell where she was going. She wasn’t driving toward her place on Delaney Row, nor Allison’s place in Lakeside. She was heading into the center. Were they going shopping?

“…where are we going, Mom?” he asked.

She smiled nervously at him in the mirror. “…I was thinking…Uh…How about…how about tacos? It’s Tuesday!”

Ramsey and Tristan blinked at each other. Something was definitely going on with Mom, she never took them out for dinner. At least, not when they were straight out of school and he was still a little gross from wrestling practice. She’d have taken them home and got them cleaned up first. And it would’ve been somewhere fancy. Not tacos.

“…Is…everything alright, Mom?” Tristan ventured.

“Why can’t I just take you out for once?”

“‘Cuz you never do.”

Mom hesitated. “…Well…things change.”

“…Uh…well…I mean…” Ramsey thought about it for a second, looked across at his brother, and they shrugged. “…Yeah. That would be nice!”

“Okay.” She gave him a little tense smile in the mirror.

Something was up for sure, but true to her word she parked outside Ninja Taco and treated them to a Shinobi Trio. Ramsey liked chicken (‘cuz it didn’t upset his stomach) while Tristan preferred spicy beef. Neither of them even considered the Pouncing Cub Combo for Gaoians: nava paste and crab with naxas tripe!

Julian ate them, though. He’d eat anything as long as there was a lot of it. Tripe, though? Ew.

Their mom went for the veggie option and more kinda…played with it. She looked like she had something big on her mind and didn’t know how to start..

Tristan got fed up with her awkwardness first.

“…Mom…what’s wrong?”

She jumped a little, startled out of wherever she’d gone in her head, and then sighed heavily, dug around in her purse, and put a letter on the table.

“…I, uh…These are divorce papers,” she said. “I got them this morning. I’m…I just…I mean, I’m living on a different planet to your father now, and we haven’t really said anything kind to each other in…”

She trailed off.

Ramsey put his taco down, wiped his fingers clean and decided to channel some Allison. “Mom…Sorry for the bad language, but it’s about damn time.”

Amazingly, she laughed. Kind of a shocked laugh with a shake of her head, but that was a lot better than she’d usually have given him for talking like that.

“I need to have another talk with Allison about how she speaks around you two…” she muttered, then shook her head. “Or the school.”

“Sometimes it’s appropriate,” Ramsey said and picked up his taco again.

“You should have done it a long time ago,” Tristan said.

“Did you want me to?”

The brothers spoke as one. “Yes.”

“Oh…”

There was a minute or two of silence as they ate. Eventually, Mom picked up her taco and ate it too, daintily. She washed it down with an iced tea and then put the envelope back in her purse.

“…I worry about you two,” she said. “About.. The future, and who you’ll turn out to be, and about how things went with your sister, and…a lot of things. I don’t even really know who you want to be when you’re all grown up, or what you want to do, or…I always thought…I was always told that you need a stable home to raise your kids right. A mother and a father. That’s why I stayed with him.”

“…I like Julian. He knows how to be a man. And he doesn’t hate us.”

“…Yeah. Allison told me you called him ‘Dad.’ That was…” she glanced at her purse and shook her head.

“I didn’t mean to!”

“Sweetie…I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you at all. He’s been more of a daddy to you than Jacob ever was, and…And I should have seen it a long time ago.”

She subsided into her seat, grabbed a pack of tissues out of her purse and blew her nose. “…Do you want ice cream?”

Tristan agreed immediately. Ramsey, though, was becoming wary of sweets. “…Maybe a little.”

She nodded, put on her talking-to-strangers polite face and stood up. They watched her go, and as soon as she was out of earshot, Tristan leaned over to whisper.

“What the hell?” he asked.

“I know!”

“This is weird, right? She’s acting weird.”

“Well…she always sucked at this stuff.” Ramsey glanced over at the line at the counter. Ninja Taco was always busy, so they had a couple-few minutes before she came back with the ice cream. “Do you think she was talking to Al? Or Xiù? Or Julian?”

“Nnno…” Tristan said, thoughtfully. “I mean, they’d have said.”

“I wish they were here right now.”

“He can’t, he’s on monkey planet with Vemik.”

“Al? Xiù?”

“…I’ll text them.”

Tristan plucked his phone out of his pocket. Annoyingly, they still had junior locks on them so they were only good for calls and messages. No social media, almost no Internet or infosphere access, no games. It was the one area where they completely agreed with Mom.

Lame. Whatever. Tristan’s thumbs became a quick furtive blur under the table while Ramsey kept watch.

Mom got back with the ice cream at about the same time as the phone pinged. “Who’s that?” she asked as she sat down.

“Just Xiù. Checking up on us.”

Mom smiled fondly. “She’s a sweetheart.”

“Look…Mom…” Ramsey thought for a second. “…I dunno what you think we’re gonna think. But we’re glad to be here. Things are better for us here, you know? I meant it when I said it’s about time you and Father broke up. And if we never see him again, that’s just fine by us.”

Mom pulled a face. She looked like she didn’t know what to feel, really. Mostly she looked like she was trying not to cry.

“That’s…not a nice thing to say about your father, Ramsey.”

“Julian loves us. Father never did. It’s…Isn’t it really that simple? D’you think Father loves you?”

Mom sighed heavily and looked down at her ice cream. She’d got herself the biggest one they did, and loaded it with marshmallows and chocolate too. “…No. Not really,” she admitted. “I think he married me and had a family just for the sake of his own reputation. Allison said she always felt like she was just a trophy to him…”

“Yeah,” Ramsey agreed.

“Uh-huh.” Tristan nodded.

She looked deeply sad at that, then sighed, ate a spoonful of her ice cream, and pulled the papers from her purse. The twins watched in silence as she read them thoroughly, then signed her name.

“…There,” she murmured once she’d put the final flourish on her signature.

“That’s it then?”

“Oh! No. No, there’s…an awful lot to do before it’s actually finished. This is just the agreement to begin the divorce. There’ll be lawyers and legal proceedings and we’ll have to go through the whole issue of custody again…” She folded the paperwork back into its envelope. Tristan showed Ramsey the phone while she was distracted with putting it back in her purse.

The message from Xiù read: Give her a hug. She’s trying her best.

Well…Xiù usually gave good advice. With a sigh, they stood up, rounded the table, sat next to Mom and…well, their tentative attempt at a hug seemed to break the dam. She grabbed them both, pulled them close and kissed the tops of their heads.

“…I’m sorry,” she said, after a minute.

“For what?”

“For…I’m not good at this. At any of this. I want to be a good Mom, but…” She let them go and scrubbed her eyes dry. “…You should finish your ice cream before it melts.”

They did just that.

Things weren’t exactly more relaxed after that but it felt to Ramsey like they’d made a step forward together. She drove them back home and listened politely as Tristan explained how Folctha’s three schools managed to have a soccer league between them and how they were going to have a Folctha-vs-Franklin tournament in a few months…

Still. Progress or no progress it was good to get home and find some breathing room. Al was waiting for them, and gave them a welcome-home hug once their shoes were off.

“So. Finally happened, huh?”

“Yeah.” Tristan said.

“About damn time,” Ramsey repeated himself.

Al smiled. “Yeah, no kidding. Brace yourself though: Divorces aren’t easy. This is gonna be long and hard.”

Xiù giggled. “As the bishop said to the actress!”

She fled as Allison aimed an indignant swat in her direction.

“Bad girl!” Al looked like she was trying not to laugh though. “…Go get cleaned up, boys. Julian is coming back in a few hours and we’re going out for dinner.”

“We already had tacos,” Tristan explained. “And ice cream!”

“…Oh. Well. I guess there goes my excuse to dress him up, then.”

“Why do you need an excuse?” Ramsey asked.

“Because he’ll happily live in gym shorts if I let him?”

“No, I mean why not just go on a date? We won’t burn the house down.”

Xiù nodded. “He’s got a point! I trust them.”

“Besides,” Tristan added. “He needs to clean up anyway. He’s gonna smell like Yan’s armpit when he gets back.”

“He always does,” Ramsey agreed gravely.

Allison laughed, and nodded. “Fine,” she said. “But you know the rules. Devices off at eight, in bed by nine. If we get back and find you’re still awake, we won’t be trusting you like this again for a while. Fair?”

The twins nodded, and spoke as one. “Fair.”

Actually, an evening to themselves was a luxury all by itself, and not one that either of them felt like squandering if they could earn more later through good behavior. So, when Julian got home smelling of the jungle, Ramsey and Tristan were being model citizens and stayed out of the way as Al and Xiù bullied him through the shower and into his nice clothes.

They’d ordered a few more sets from Halberstadt’s. After all, now that they had his measurements…The boys had been proud to work out a smart-casual look for him. It was kinda old-fashioned but in a way that never went out of style. ‘Conservative,’ Xiù called it.

“How do they fit?”

“…Pretty good.” Julian rolled his neck and fidgeted with his tie. “Maybe not as good as the first time…”

“They said you need to get them adjusted sometimes since you’re training so hard, but that’s no big deal. And the casual stuff has a looser cut, so it won’t be so fiddly.”

“Never thought I’d have pre-teen fashion consultants…so, do I look good?”

Xiù answered for them. “You’ll do. Now come on! I’m getting hungry.”

And…that was it. There was another reminder from Allison about trust and stuff, but for just about the first time ever the brothers found themselves alone in the house without adult supervision.

They picked out a movie that was too old for them because of course they were going to. And they raided the fridge for snacks a couple of times, and maybe pushed their luck on bedtime a little because it was a pretty good movie…

…And woke up when Julian woke them both up. They’d dozed off on the couch.

“Aren’t you two supposed to be asleep?”

“…Technically, we were?” Tristan ventured.

“Heh. Rules lawyer. Better get up to bed before the girls find their way inside…”

“Right. ‘Night, Dad.”

“…’Night.”

By the time Ramsey noticed he’d said it again, he was already in bed.

Date Point: 16y3m1w
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam Arés

“You’re home late!”

Marty was on the couch, reading a book. Adam gave her a smile and snuck a look at the cover as he kicked his sandals off. It wasn’t a childcare book. The cover was way too provocative. And she was wearing a lingerie bathrobe, the red silk-and-lace one that showed off her legs.

“Rescue mission!” He declared happily. He’d been looking forward to seeing her ever since he’d finished leaving Firth in a groaning heap on the mat. He was in decidedly worse shape than Adam, who felt merely well-exercised and invigorated, but he had Crude, and a wife and child to go home to.

Speaking of which…

Marty made her exasperated laugh when he bounced across the room, picked her up and smashed her into a close cuddly snuggle.

“This your idea of hello?” she asked as he sat down with her on his lap.

He kissed her neck. “Yup.”

“Aww, and you even showered for me. You’re such a romantic.”

“That’s me!” He chuckled, and gave her a squeeze. “Where’s Diego?”

“Asleep. Should be conked out for the rest of the evening…” She stretched like a satisfied cat in his arms, then laughed. “…Did you smuggle a softball bat home, or are you just happy to see me?”

“It’s been a good day. I think Firth’s finally starting to get it.” He nipped playfully at her ear. “How was yours?”

“Not bad…” she squirmed and turned around to face him and straddled his lap. She grinned at him up close, rubbed her nose against his, then leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “…Except I’ve been super horny all day…”

He grinned, and moved to pick her up and carry her to the bedroom over his shoulder, but she stopped him with a shake of the head and a tap on the nose.

“Nuh-uh,” she said. “I wanna take charge.” Her hand snuck down between their bodies as she kissed him, and the other one took his wrist and guided him up her leg and under the silk… She wasn’t wearing anything else.

Adam rumbled contentedly as he put his fingers to work. “Oh? That’s new for you…”

She made a soft noise, bit her lip and shut her eyes for a second, not replying. Adam wasn’t ashamed to admit he knew exactly what he was doing, but damn. She was ready.

Time for a little fun. “You sure you wanna take charge?” He emphasized his point with a little trick he’d learned years ago. “You don’t seem like you’re much in control just now…”

She finally managed to free him from his shorts, and didn’t bother with foreplay at all. “Ohgodshutup…seriously. Just…” she rose up and gasped as she sank down onto him in one smooth, long and drawn-out motion. “…Just…”

How could he possibly refuse? He put his hands around her waist and let her have her way.

Not long after, she let him have his. He had a lot more energy to burn off so things weren’t over quickly, or all at once. Few women could handle him no matter how ready, but Marty had always been an all-star. Hell, she even managed to tire him out. He finally had his fill many hours later, sometime long after midnight, when she flopped lazily across his chest and listened contentedly to the rain on the window for a few minutes before speaking, low and quiet and blissfully.

“…I really needed that.”

Adam chuckled smugly, and kissed her possessively. “I could sorta tell.”

She turned her head and grinned at him. “…Think that’s baby number two? I hope so.”

“Oh, is that what this was about?!” he laughed. “…Yeah. That’d be nice.”

“Good. ‘Cuz I asked Gabe and Jess to look after Diego for the weekend. They’ll be here to pick him up in a few hours, and you owe them one of your famous breakfasts.”

Adam chuckled, “Well, it’s the least I could do, I guess…”

She nipped playfully at the end of his nose. “Oh, I won’t accept the least you can do. You’ve got a mission, mister!”

“I like this mission.” In fact, he felt himself warming up to the mission already! “And you know how seriously I take missions…”

She laughed, bt sadly she reached for the blankets instead of going for another round. Adam couldn’t blame her, really. Marty was as strong and limber as a circus performer, but she had her limits just like everyone else. She needed to rest. And so did he, come to that.

That was okay. Morning would come soon enough.

Date Point: 16y3m1w
Wi Kao City, Planet Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The word ‘Court, in the legal sense, had once referred to a Clan leadership’s court, where the Clan’s Grandfather and Champion would receive petitioners from their Clan’s lands, hear their grievances and sit in judgement.

Modern Gao had moved beyond that a long time ago. After Fyu and the founding of the Clan of Females, there had been the Great Reform, the shift to Clans-as-specialists rather than Clans-as-barons. The Law had taken generations to figger out, generations more before it started being really fair on Clan and Clanless alike…

…There was a lotta history in the last thousand years.

Clan courts now mostly regulated their guilds, or made law on the sortsa things a Clan was pretty much in charge of. The only Clan court that was still really a court was Straightshield.

But now, in this age of a Great Father, the old kinda court was back. Because sometimes, somebody needed ‘ta cut right through the Naxas shit. In the absence of a Supreme Court…or anything that could legitimize such a thing…that duty fell to Daar.

Daar didn’t like sittin’ in some bigass throne in High Mountain Fortress with the crown on top o’ his head, ‘least if he could help it. If he was gonna be royalty, an’ it was pretty much indisputable that he was now, then he was at least gonna be the kind of king…or emperor…whatever. Anyway. He was gonna try and be as real as he could. That meant visiting where the problems were, instead of dragging them all the way up to the northern plains.

There were a couple o’ good reasons for that. The first being it kept him sane, and it made him more approachable. After all, he had absolute power over every gaoian and that was…scary. For everyone. Best if he could lessen the threat a little.

…The other reason was if it was a serious problem, it was easier to act on, too. He’d gotten his claws bloody more than once ‘cuz of that.

The problem in this case was a project dispute. Records had got destroyed in the war, the ones that were left didn’t match, two Clanless guilds—old rivals who’d been competing with each other in the claw-throat world of big inter-Clan civil works for hundreds of years—both claimed they were the legitimate holders of a work contract…

So far so mundane.

What made it worth Daar’s attention was the scale. The guilds were huge, and the contract was even more huger: to literally rebuild the entire continental rail network. That meant decades of work, mind-spinning wealth and resources, colossal prestige and the future prosperity of the Gaoian economy. The guild that won the contract would probably be a Clan in fifty years. The one that didn’t might go bankrupt and disband, with everything that meant for hundreds or mebbe thousands of workers.

Besides, if there was one thing Daar loved (besides fuckin’, fightin’, farmin’ an’ friends, in no particular order) it was big honkin’ civil engineering projects.

Too bad the two guild leaders were both completely failing to hide their abject terror.

Guilds could be big and influential, sure. These two were, an’ the two well-seasoned and scarred males in charge of them weren’t pushovers, but Clans and Great Fathers were whole different leagues of power. Two swaggering fish who’d gotten used to bein’ the biggest an’ meanest fish in their ponds had just bumped up against somethin’ a lot bigger an’ more dangerous, an’ it was lookin’ at them.

The funny part was, the two could’ve been biological siblings. They even smelled pretty similar, both wearing that same baked-in scent of hard work and construction sites, concrete an’ steel an’ rubber an’ solvent. They did similar things, ran similar guilds…and were bitter, remorseless rivals. They had to be, it was the only way to compete.

Shit, in the old days a dispute like this woulda led to a real, deadly fight. Winner takes all. Might still end up in a duel, too. But the Females discouraged that, and so did Daar: there weren’t enough Gao left ‘ta waste that way, not when there were more civilized options.

But he weren’t gonna get nowhere if they were too scared’a him ‘ta make their case properly. It didn’t matter that he’d come to them, and this meeting was happening in the rec hall in the neutral territory of an unaffiliated guild’s workhouse. It didn’t matter he’d left the crown where it belonged in High Mountain Fortress…

None o’ that really mattered. Daar was fuckin’ terrifyin’ in person an’ he knew it, even more so ‘cuz of his wartime reputation. He sighed, and decided he needed to actually address that big ol’ boulder in the road.

“Guys, I’m not gonna fuckin’ murder ‘ya where ‘ya stand. This is a contract dispute. Relax.”

“S-sorry, My Father.”

That was the slightly meeker of the two guildmasters, Gojo. Ruthless businessman, but right now as nervy an’ twitchy as a long-tailed cub in a workshop. He was also tiny and Daar was…not. That psychology were just impossible ‘ta get around. Mighta been on purpose in the Hierarchy’s design, too.

…Whatever.

“Look. Pretend ‘fer a second I’m jus’ some dumb ‘Back lookin’ ‘ta contract wit’ y’all. Lemme ask ‘ya this: would I? This seems like a pretty nasty dispute, yijao?”

“We’ve tried being civil about this, My Father,” the other guildmaster, Fer, assured him. “We’re still trying. But no matter what we do, we can’t actually prove that the contract was awarded to us and not them.”

“And we’re certain that it was awarded to us,” Gojo repeated.

“Wait just a–!”

“Stop,” Daar growled. He hadn’t meant it as anything more than the kind o’ annoyance a Mother got when two cubs were bickerin’ over a ball, but both of them promptly went very small and quiet and submissive.

Nine times out of ten, bein’ the biggest and the baddest was the bestest. That one time it weren’t though, more than paid the price.

“Gods damnit you two, fuckin’ relax! I ain’t gonna fuckin’ eat ‘ya! If I’d been that kind o’ mad, believe me ya’d know.” Daar grumbled to himself, then chittered ruefully. “I mean, this ain’t a duel to the death! An’ I ain’t gonna make ‘ya my wrasslin’ dummies, neither. I promise. This is just a legal dispute. So, y’know. Prol’ly worse.”

The Gao had an…organic relationship with the Law. Unlike a Human monarchy, the Law didn’t flow from Daar’s person. Unlike a republic, it didn’t flow from the body politic, either. Instead, it was a mish-mash of regional customary law, common law decisions by Judge-Fathers, Clan law and what were basically treaties between them. Oh, and edicts from Daar now, too. Little of it was written down, either. At least…not all in one place, anyway.

So basically, Gaoian law was jus’ stupidly complex, an’ everyone could poke fun at it. Which when he thought about it, was probably pretty weird from a Human’s perspective.

Still meant he could break the ice with a joke, though. Both of the guildmasters chittered nervously, but at least there was progress bein’ made.

“…As you say, My Father.”

“Damn right I do! Mebbe y’all think it’d be less painful if I’d jus’ sit on ‘ya and end it, huh?”

Darr poured on the charm and flashed them the friendliest pant-grin he could manage. It were prol’ly still kinda scary given the size of his everything an’ them just bein’ scrappy lil’ second-degrees an’ all…but he got bit more chittering this time, so progress was being made.

“Anyway,” he assured, “I hereby promise no harm will come to ‘ya or ‘yer guilds, by my paw or otherwise, unless we find a crime. An’ by crime, I mean somethin’ pretty damn serious. I ain’t gonna personally intervene ‘cuz one’a you two were speeding, or whatever. Got it?”

The two guildmasters looked at each other. “Yes, My Father.” They did seem a bit more relaxed.

“Good! Now, back to the relevant bit ‘cuz I ain’t never got time ‘ta spare. How are you both so convinced?” he asked. Daar looked to his legal aide. “There’s no public records ‘fer this?”

“No, My Father. Sister Imi was…thorough.”

“Not even an adjudicated entry in Goldpaw’s Uniform Contract Registry?”

“No, My Father. That system was apparently singled out during the War by the Hierarchy. Every copy of much of that database has been destroyed.”

“…Balls.”

“…Yes, My Father.”

“Right.” Daar grumbled and shook his pelt out, then turned back to the guildmasters. “That sorta makes ‘yer mutual certainty less an assertion o’ fact an’ more an’ article o’ faith, don’t it?”

Fer ducked his head respectfully. “I personally received a clear assurance from Officer Muki of Clan Goldpaw, My Father. He said he was certain we’d be hearing from—”

“That’s just a Goldpaw bein’ friendly an’ polite. An’ it’s a lot less than actually winning the contract,” Daar pointed out. “I’d bet Gojo got somethin’ similar, didn’tcha?”

Gojo flicked an ear. “…Yes, My Father.”

“Right.” Daar duck-nodded solemnly. “So here’s my problem. Both’a you smell perfectly honest. That means ‘ya both either genuinely believe ‘yer tellin’ the truth, or at least one’a you is a fuckin’ master liar, an’ I can smell through a Whitecrest’s bullshit. So, we’ve got ourselves a trust issue, don’t we? You might not be lyin’, but somebody is. Ain’t that so?”

Gojo duck-nodded tentatively. “…Yes, My Father.”

“So, now. Let’s explore what that’s gonna mean. If ‘ya wanna have me get ‘ta the bottom o’ this, I’m gonna need ‘ta haul all ‘yer workhouse leadership in here and get thorough. An’ that means, if I find something it’s gonna expose a pretty serious deception involvin’ my money, an’ a lotta monies from several really powerful Clans. Do you understand what that means?”

The two guild leaders glanced at each other. Both controlled dozens of workhouses each, and Fyu-knew-how-many workers, clerks, legal experts, accountants, engineers. Each definitely would have a few sneaky little squeakers in their number who had all the right qualities for a Whitecrest except for that Clan’s intense sense of honor. Daar’s people could turn up anything.

The threat was so well understood that Daar never had to actually speak it aloud.

“On the other hand,” Daar continued, “I’m not personally interested in grindin’ old grudges inta’ dust. I’m more interested in that railroad gettin’ rebuilt. Which would go way damn easier if ‘yer workhouses found a way ta’ share the work…wouldn’t it? An’ I s’pose I’ll just make it clear…I wouldn’t need ‘ta be literally sniffin’ in all y’all’s business an’ sharin’ it ‘fer everyone ‘ta see. An’ as ‘fer th’ rest…well, y’know. I definitely don’t wanna see that happen. D’you?”

“…No, My Father.” Fer agreed.

“Good! So I think I’mma let y’all figger out somethin’ nice an’ agreeable, get that contract entered, an’ we can all make a big pile o ’money and advance the interests o’ the Gao. Err’body wins. I like it when err’body wins, don’t you?”

The two guildmasters glanced at each other, then duck-nodded in unison.

“Yes, My Father,” they chorused.

“Exactly. Now git to it! My investment staff’ll be waitin’ to git ‘er dun. Dismissed.”

The two made their obeisances and escaped, as respectfully as they possibly could.

“Right!” Daar stretched, yawned, and shook himself. “Well. Is that all for today?”

Tiyun checked his tablet. “…Yes, My Father. The local docket quite mysteriously cleaned itself up once it was known you would show up for today…”

Daar chittered mirthlessly. “A whole lotta handshakes an’ quiet settlements, huh?”

“Indeed.”

“Well, good ta’ know bein’ a fuckin’ terror has some uses…” Daar grumbled, but as always, cheered up in quick order. “Okay! That means I can get in a workout an’ a walkabout, then. You can take a load off ‘fer the rest o’ the day, Tiyun. After ‘ya get ‘yer liftin’ in!”

“Some females appreciate a more svelte look, My Father…”

Daar scoffed and stood up. “Yer’ tellin’ me what females appreciate?”

“Some appreciate more refined scents, too!”

“Yeah, yeah…but get ‘yer liftin’ in anyway. You ain’t gotta be huge but you do gotta keep up.”

Tiyun chittered and put the tablet away. “As you say, My Father. Enjoy your walkabout.”

Daar insisted on his walkabouts. They were a kind of freedom, even though he knew they were a pain in the tail for his protection team. And the thing was…

…The thing was, powerful Gao like Fer and Gojo were scared as shit of the Great Father, but regular workin’ guys who just got through their day from meal to meal and payday to payday weren’t half so nervous. Deferential an’ wary of the most biggest ‘Back ever for sure, but that weren’t so bad. Balls, Daar were the same way when he was growin’ up, when’ Garl had seemed so huge an’ scary…

…Garl.

He buried a stab of melancholy. Garl had refused to even go near an Openpaw hospice. Didn’t matter none that his body was givin’ up on him fast, or that the Openpaw nurses knew how to help an old Gao keep his dignity to the very end. Garl had a diff’rent idea of what dignity meant. And it sure as shit didn’t mean a sterile, comfortable home kitted out for easy navigation by blind eyes.

He was mostly to be found in the Grand Garden at High Mountain fortress, burning sweet herb and telling stories to visiting cubs. No wrasslin’ though, no matter how much they begged. He was blind after all, an’ accidentally squashing a cub to death wouldn’t be a great way to go.

…Daar would probably be just as difficult when his end finally came. Many decades from now, prol’ly…maybe even more with the Corti on their side lately…balls.

…But! That was a long, long way away! ‘Fer now, he’d be the best he could be. Sometimes that meant bein’ a fierce Great Father. Sometimes it meant bein’ a playful ‘Back.

An’ only he could know when to be which.

Date Point: 16y3m1w

Emergency Hierarchy Session #UNLOGGED

NOTICE: CLASSIFIED SESSION. ACCESS RESTRICTED TO AGENT RANKS ≤24
SPECIAL ACCESS RESTRICTIONS: AGENT 0006 FORBIDDEN
RESTRICTION CODE VOID/MNEMONIC/INCINERATE
SESSION WILL NOT BE LOGGED

SUBJECT: 0006/CYNOSURE

++0004++: We’re all here? Roll call.

SYSTEM: 21⁄21 ELIGIBLE ATTENDEES CONFIRMED PRESENT

++0004++: Good. Agent 0024, your findings?

++0024++: Agent Proximal was restored from backup per session 1773 orders. On decompilation/interrogation, the following data were recovered: <File attached>

++0024++: Critical finding: Proximal had suspicions about the Irujzen Relay for some time prior to his disappearance. He further had suspicions about 0006/Cynosure. His specific concerns: That 0006/Cynosure may be experiencing executive decomposition, value drift and ego fixation. I forwarded my findings to Agent 0017.

++0017++: A petition was made to access a 0006/Cynosure archive mindstate for purposes of decompilation/interrogation. Permission was granted by Agents 0004 and 0005. Upon access, the archived mindstate was found to be unusable. The presenting code and superficial interaction layers were intact, but the executive, memory and personality code was all junk. Agent 0005 then assumed command of the investigation.

++0005++: Deep inspection of 0006/Cynosure’s personal documents revealed that they don’t exist. His most recent valid file entry is from the day before he was first assigned to operations on Earth, prior to his capture. Everything after that point has been carefully replaced. The forgeries are authentic enough to pass automated monitoring, but on careful reading contain zero intelligible content. Conclusion: he’s been lying to us for years. Very successfully, I might add.

++0017++: And, presumably, operating off an unverified and unchecked backup system for years, too.

++0005++: Now for the truly damning revelation: His post-recovery evaluation was faked. It was ostensibly logged by Agent 0007.

++0007++: I have no memory of making such an evaluation. I therefore submitted to a partial decompilation and memory inspection.

++0005++: I found extensive tampering. The investigation concludes that 0006/Cynosure should be categorized as Class 1 Malignant. The full charge sheet and evidence is as follows: <File attached>

++0005++: I also move that all identified Cabal members be categorized as Class 2 Malignant by association.

++0004++: Deliberate and vote.

SYSTEM: DELIBERATION INTERVAL BEGINS.

SYSTEM: ALL ATTENDING AGENTS INDICATE DELIBERATIONS COMPLETE.
VOTE NOW

SYSTEM: ALL VOTES ARE IN
RESULT UNANIMOUS: GUILTY
RESULT UNANIMOUS: MOTION CARRIED

ERROR - RESULTS CANNOT BE ENTERED INTO RECORDS
RESTRICTION CODE VOID/MNEMONIC/INCINERATE IN EFFECT

++0004++: <Orders> The instant we close this session, we are going to attack every Cabal member on contact. Code: TERMINATE\SALVAGE\SCOUR. 0006/Cynosure is priority target 1. Hierarchy agents of rank ≥ 0025 are subject to code SUSPECT\ISOLATE\OVERWATCH. Integrated Hegemony mindstates are subject to immediate isolation and interrogation. Non-Igraen mindstates are to be destroyed on contact. Code: ERASE\DISCARD\INCINERATE. Are these orders clear and understood?

SYSTEM:: ALL ATTENDING AGENTS INDICATE ORDERS UNDERSTOOD

++0004++: Good luck, everyone.

++0004++: Go.

SYSTEM: CLOSING SESSION
ERROR - SESSION LOGS CANNOT BE ENTERED INTO RECORDS
RESTRICTION CODE VOID/MNEMONIC/INCINERATE IN EFFECT
SYSTEM: SESSION CLOSED.

Date Point: 16y3m1w
Memorial Concourse, Old Commune of the Clan of Females, City of Wi Kao, Planet Gao

Mother Shoua

There were days when Shoua missed the old commune, at the other end of the city. The new commune was larger, more modern and much more secure of course but…

…But the old one had had character. And so much history. Now it was little more than ashes, and a pair of burned doors jutting from among the ruined walls. A monument to more innocent times.

She regularly visited the ruins, and took some of the cubs along with her to pay her respects. Mostly the young ones just ran around and pounced on each other and scrambled all over the hip-high remains of the walls, but the older ones, who were starting to mature and think about things in between their bursts of manic play-energy, they got it. They broke away from the tumbling perpetual playfight to browse the names on the memorial wall.

It bought Shoua the time to lay out the food she’d brought with her. Which was always a challenge with “helpful” cubs around always ready and eager to leap in and assist her while she was looking and steal a bite when she wasn’t.

A well-seasoned Mother could always tell who the brownies were likely to be. They were bottomless holes for food, especially meeshi bread and butter sandwiches.

This time, however, her job was made much easier by the fact that all of the cubs quite abruptly vanished.

Her Mother-senses were tingling. Silent, absent cubs were only safe when they were asleep…and even then, only maybe.

She carefully closed the food hamper, and followed the sound of gleeful chittering while wiping her paws clean.

She found the source of their distraction in the old exercise yard, where an unbelievably enormous male was staggering and pantomiming exaggeratedly as the cubs swarmed all over him. “Pounce” was a super popular cub game with visiting males, but Shoua had never seen one stand up under so many enthusiastic young bodies…or fall down so expertly as he pretended to finally be beaten. He picked his moment perfectly so as to flop down on his back without endangering a single one of his tiny assailants.

The ground shuddered under the impact too, which made the cubs howl with delight.

“Arrrrgh! ‘Ya got me! Now I ain’t gonna steal away nobody!”

One of the youngest ones bounded up to Shoua on four-paw and pulled enthusiastically at her fur. “Mother! Mother! Look who we found! It’s the Great Father!!”

The huge brute looked her right in the eye and gave her the smuggest, smarmiest wink she’d ever received from anyone, ever.

Shoua’s breath hitched in her chest. Daar was here. The Great Father, unannounced. Buried under dozens of cubs like he was some great beast they’d slain.

Much like how they’d met the first time, years ago.

Cubs often had a talent for finding and befriending the goofiest, most soppy-hearted males, and they never spared them their attention. This they did to Daar, who in his own way had the soppiest heart of all, despite that he’d always been a huge and frightening brownfur. At first she’d found him somewhat…off-putting. He was a throwback primitive who reveled in his crudity, or so she had thought. Then she watched him interact with the cubs, which softened her heart like it would with any female. And then…he overwhelmed her, just with his sheer presence. Just with his words. She’d later discovered what a rare male he truly was, and had belatedly realized he was the Champion of Stoneback as well. He’d felt compelled to leave their first meeting far too soon for her tastes, though he’d parted with promises to return.

Promises he’d never kept, though at the time she didn’t know why.

Then the War happened.

She’d managed to escape its darker depravities, thanks in no small part to his personal intervention—he and his personal Claw had liberated the farm she was trapped in. She’d only seen him from a distance on that day, but he’d definitely grown, and grown enormously. Then some time later he’d become the Great Father. She’d seen the Laid Bare piece by that Human too, and wasn’t ashamed to admit she’d spent much of her time privately marveling at the heroic photography. She’d since seen him on news reports and such, being equal parts dignified and utterly stereotypical in his public encounters, taking walkabouts among his people…

Apparently he’d chosen to take such a walkabout today.

Rather than being tongue-tied however, her Motherly instincts swung into place and she yipped sharply at the cubs, who promptly leapt off his enormous chest and lined up apologetically in front of her. Mother Wasn’t Happy.

“That’s the Great Father you’re gnawing on! Show some respect!” she chided them.

A dozen and a half cubs, ranging from two who’d only become fully ambulatory a month ago, to a trio who were quite suddenly growing up into big, strapping brownfurs themselves, quite sullenly inspected their footpaws and chorused their apologies.

“We’re sorry, Mother,” they dutifully rang out in unison.

The Great Father, for his part, rolled lazily onto his side to watch the proceedings with a deeply content expression of amusement.

“…Right. Well! I presume all is well, My Father?”

“Ain’t nothin’ ‘ya gotta worry ‘bout, Mother. We wuz jus’ havin’ some fun!”

“As much as I can appreciate that, My Father…”

“Ah, ‘yer right. C’mon cubs, stand up straight! Gotta let Mother have a look at ‘ya!”

The Great Father also snapped to, by kicking through his hulking legs and somehow flipping himself upright directly into a sitting position on all fours. The cubs were suitably awed by that…and so was she. He moved like deadly poetry.

Still. She got the cubs’ attention with another quiet yip. “Stand tall!” They did, reluctantly. “…Right. What I see is fifteen filthy cubs. Go and clean up for food!”

There was another slightly sullen chorus of “Yes Mother…” Some of the older cubs were clearly future brownfurs; the prospect of food had them instantly obedient. As for the rest…as always, the prospect of interrupting play was seldom welcome.

Needs must, however, and the Great Father backed her up. “G’on, little ones. Even a Great Father listens to his Mothers!”

That got them moving, and suitably restored Shoua’s authority. The cubs scrambled past her in a furry tide and she turned to watch them go. “Wash all four paws!” she shouted after them as they vanished.

She became aware of a powerful warmth immediately behind and beside her. Daar had padded forward silently until he was intimately close. A contra-bass grumble from deep in his thick chest made her heart skip a beat. “I never did come back ‘fer those pallets, did I?”

Shoua froze in place and trembled a reply. “Oh! Y-you remember that?”

He sidled up even closer, enough that she could feel his breathing near her neck. “I ain’t never forgotten a good Female.”

She turned around, took one look at him and forgot how to breathe. Up close, his sheer incredible breadth and hypermuscular size was almost unreal, and he wasn’t doing a thing to lessen that impression. His peerless body, his painfully handsome face, his inescapably vast presence was so much more than she could have ever prepared for. He was a living Keeda, he was overpowering… He was…

There was nothing to it but refuge in audacity. “…Well, you’re a bit late!”

That seemed to break something loose, and he chittered in some combination of humor, exasperation, and maybe a little melancholy. “Yeah. Sarry ‘fer not showin’ back up. Uh…well, a guess whole lotta stuff happened.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“Yeah, sarry ‘bout all that…m’glad you survived.”

“Thank you, My Father.”

He duck-nodded wearily. “I’d ‘preciate it if ‘ya could can the formalities ‘fer a bit, ‘least when there ain’t no cubs lookin’. We met when I was just an plain ‘ol Champion, after all.”

“True,” she flicked a happy ear at the memory. “It’s a shame. I was looking forward to being seduced, too.”

Smugly, he looked over her shoulder for any sign of spying cubs, then moved just a fraction closer, well into her personal space. The heat and musk radiating off of him practically bowled her over. “How ‘bout now that I’m even bigger? I could show ‘ya lots of new tricks I learned…”

Daar was close enough that she could just barely fidget, and even that slight motion was enough to brush against that unforgivingly hard body of his lurking just under his well-groomed, short-clipped pelt. He swirled around her and growled low, so close against her she couldn’t escape if she’d wanted to. Shoua felt her breath catch in her chest and an almost inaudible whimper escape her throat—

His huge face was suddenly right in front of hers, massive fangs bared in the most aggressive pant-grin any male had ever dared give her. “Wanna see?”

“…See?”

“Yeah! I’m way more better now!” Daar spun away and prowled in front of her on all fours, presented himself at an angle to show off the heavy lines of his body, growled, and tensed his hulking body like he was a prize stud in a show ring.

Shoua’s breath caught in her chest. He was…impressive. Perfectly so. She had trouble looking away, and couldn’t think of anything to say, no witty rejoinder to his crude posturing—

“An’ also, I can count ‘ta at least ten, too!”

She burst out chittering at his silliness. “You could always do that, you huge oaf!”

“‘Course I could! A big brain is better! But big buff biceps are the bestest!”

He growled, hunkered down and curled up an arm bigger than her entire body into an utterly perfect display of his preposterous brawn. His every titanic muscle swelled up enormously along with it, from the individual heavy cords of his ludicrously thick neck, down to the massive swell of his huge-even-for-him haunches. Daar preened for a while, admiring himself, then spun around excitedly and showed off his body from every angle. Shoua found herself whimpering quietly despite her efforts. Every last bit of him was…powerful. Very powerful.

The Great Father of the Gao, apparently not one to hide behind arbitrary notions of dignity, pranced for her in the most primal way any male could do. And yet, despite the crudity of it all…it was working, and she couldn’t look away. He was the biggest. Certainly much bigger than he was in Laid Bare… bigger than anyone…better than anyone…more powerful…

Great Mother, it was all so ludicrously macho it should have put her off immediately, and yet here she was, unable to rip her eyes off of his unreal body and the tangled network of hairline scars covering every inch of him. There were so many, it was so…so…

She snapped back to the moment and regained her wits, and affected a slightly aloof tone. “Daar, is that your idea of impressing a female?”

“Well yeah, I’m still a ‘Back!” He moved so fast he was instantly all-but-pressed against her, and snuffled suggestively at her neck. “Y’know, ‘ya smell like ‘ya liked it…mebbe ‘ya want I should show ‘ya more?” She caught a full whiff of his musk, then. It was even more potent than his body was powerful, so utterly and completely male it was making her dizzy.

He again spun away and resumed his posing, this time even harder. The look on his face could not possibly be any more playful or friendly…or more aggressive…or so completely smug. He was being a complete ass, knew it, knew she knew it, and did so anyway out of sheer bravado. With literally any other male it would have been unforgivable hubris, but with him…

She flicked an ear at him despite her racing heart, and found within herself the capacity for some playful banter. “Impressive, certainly…a bit crude though, don’t you think?”

The Great Father chittered in that chest-shakingly deep voice of his. “Maybe rude an’ crude is what ‘ya need in ‘yer life! Would ‘ya rather I bore ‘ya with my terrible poetry instead?”

There was a twinkle in his lively eyes, there. Very few males could bear any self-deprecation in a female’s presence, but his personal confidence was clearly so supreme, it didn’t matter.

That was…deeply attractive. Much, much more than all the rest. Shoua blinked and swallowed nervously; she was falling for his charms and they’d barely met!

And one look at his face told the story. He knew it, the huge Keeda. Great Mother, he really was that. A genuine, living Keeda, and he was interested in her. Had remembered her!

Time to slow things down a bit, if she could. No male should get a free pass to a Female’s affections. Not the Great Father, not a living Keeda. Not even Daar.

“Well…terrible poetry is often a lot more entertaining than good poetry.”

“Ha! Well, I’m pretty good at makin’ a fool o’ myself, too…”

“Oh? Is the Great Father offering to make a fool of himself just for me?” Shoua chittered. “I’m flattered!”

His ears flattened a little, and Shoua worried that she’d somehow broken the moment, but he seemed to rally quickly. “Well…in private I’m all kindsa stupid, ‘least accordin’ ‘ta people I love! But y’know what? There’s a few things a big ‘ol male like me can do that ‘yer cute lil’ silverfurs couldn’t ever manage…’

Another silent flash of motion and he was suddenly wrapped around her again, his body pressed up tight against hers and his muzzle snuffling possessively against her throat. She was completely vulnerable to him, if he chose to take advantage. She trembled at that, and yet…

Somehow she didn’t feel much threatened. Something about Daar told her instincts she couldn’t possibly be safer, and his playful aggression made her feel electric. Made her feel special. Shoua found herself pressing back against him before she realized what she was doing.

He snarled quietly against her ear, “Mebbe I’ll show ‘ya once we get these cubs back home…”

Unbidden, she found her paw resting right on his chest, grasping at and failing to dent the thick iron muscle beneath that silky-soft white ruff of his.

“Like what ‘yer feelin’?” He rumbled in pleasure, “I got plenty more needs a good scritch!’

Shoua was falling prey to his heat and strength and musk again, but that line was so utterly guileless she just had to respond. She chittered, “My, you’re a blatant one, aren’t you?”

“Ain’t no better way,” he growled into her ear, and nipped it with a promise of much better things to come. ‘Subtlety is fun, but I mean, if ‘ya got it, why not go for it?”

…Stay strong, she thought to herself. It was proving so hard to resist his will…

Shoua blinked and rallied her defenses. “Hmm.” She looked over her shoulder in case of cubs. “You know, some females prefer the subtle approach even from males who don’t need it. Especially from males who don’t need it.”

He once again swirled around her like some slinky predator of legend, and once again managed not to make any sound except for his voice. “Hmmm, mebbe! But here’s the thing! If I were all subtle an’ stuff, I wouldn’t git ‘ta banter ‘with ‘ya like this, neither!”

“Maybe. But imagine how much further you’d get.”

What was she doing?! Was she really playing hard-to-get with Daar?

…It seemed to be working. His entire expression was lit up and happy, and his shaggy tail was wagging so furiously it was practically generating a breeze. He was enjoying himself, and if she was honest with herself, so was she.

Oh well, in for a claw, in for a paw. With great effort, she turned away from him and put some space between them. “Anyway. I have cubs to feed. And as you’ve already seen, they have no respect for authority. They’ll pick that hamper clean if I let them, and then fur will fly.”

“Well, let ‘em, then! Let’s go eat. We’ve got plenty of food these days, an’ I brought my own food too—well, no, my aide did. ‘Cuz I pretty seriously doubt ‘ya brought enough ‘fer me.”

“Aide–?”

And there he was, a handsome and dapper silverfur appeared as if out of nowhere. He didn’t have a smug expression, but somehow the lack of it rather strangely indicated its presence.

“Mealset number eight of the day, My Father. And Mother, the cubs are definitely about to raid the hamper I’m afraid.”

Daar flicked an amused ear and backed off. “Guess y’better feed ‘em,” he declared, then lowered his voice for only her to hear. “An’ we’ll finish this later, you an’ me.”

“After you’ve brushed up on your bad poetry,” Shoua agreed, and trotted smartly back toward the memorial hall feeling like she was floating a few inches off the ground. She did allow herself to turn around after a bit and watch him depart. She didn’t see much more than those hulkingly huge rear haunches of his swelling hypnotically with every step…but being honest, that was hardly a bad view to have. Even at a simple retreating four-paw trot, his body somehow moved like a feather-light ripple shimmering across a pond.

That was definitely worth the smug pant-grin he shot her when he presented his flank and flexed outrageously for her one last time. Shoua rolled her eyes and giggled. He was silly! And demanding, too. In all the best ways. She really hadn’t planned on a mating contract so soon after her last, but Daar was like winning the lottery after all…and he was just…so very…

…Flirtable.

He was many other things too, but above all of them he was that, first and foremost.

And yes, dammit, he’d won already. And he knew it too, infuriatingly. But she was going to at least pretend for a little longer, because that was part of the play. In the end, they were both just bigger, older cubs playing a much more subtle game of their own, and it was fun!

After all they’d gone through—both of them, really—life needed a little fun.

Date Point: 16y3m1w
δ Cyg 244.3° 18-ECCBAF-TRINARY M6V-1 b1, Deep Space

Alpha of the Bleeding Brood

Builders were infuriating. They kept their secrets, gave nothing away, and relished every chance to show up the true Hunters with their knowledge.

Most infuriating of all, however, was the way they had made the Hunting so much better since their Alpha had become Alpha-of-Alphas.

The Bleeding Brood were no longer starving and desperate. Most went from feast to feast, resting in stasis between episodes of joyous slaughter. Only the Alpha and its Betas remained awake between times…and the Broodship ran much more smoothly and reliably as a result.

Admitting as much pained the Alpha, but there was no denying the taste of meat between its teeth: the Builders knew what they were doing.

How they knew what they were doing was a different question. They had assured the Alpha that there was a vital quarry to be tracked in this remote nowhere of a red microstar system, but they had not shared whence that knowledge had come.

The Alpha was beginning to grow suspicious. The system was a wasteland. Barren metallic asteroids, moons and planetoids. A respectable bounty of useful metals for a system this insignificant perhaps, but certainly not a great plunder. And yet, here they were…hunting.

It listened to the Builders as they exchanged terse, technical communications about energy signatures, metallic masses and spacetime distortions. Their…dispassionate approach irked the Alpha. This was a Hunt, and yet there was none of the usual sense of eager anticipation. The Builders simply reported, without any sense that they were salivating for the Prey.

Wrong. Disturbing. Dull. Immoral.

In total, the creeping sense of indignation and travesty was gnawing at the Alpha’s mind so hard that it almost missed the first sign that there was indeed something more to this system than neglected rocks.

Gratifyingly, the Builders missed it. They were too busy poring over their instruments looking for warp signatures, quantum effects and ripples in spacetime. They weren’t Hunters, they didn’t have the instinct to track their prey by its spoor.

Some of the dust and rubble at the lagrangian points were clearly the byproducts of mining.

The Alpha relished drawing that detail to the Builders’ attention. And it thoroughly enjoyed their dismay as they realized how obvious a detail they’d overlooked. Then, of course, they set about analyzing the mining debris. And that was where things started to go wrong.

The asteroid mining operation was…extensive. Alarmingly so, considering how recently their prey had escaped captivity. The Alpha didn’t really understand what a dataphage was, but it clearly was an efficient resource-gatherer.

Of the quarry itself, however, there continued to be no sign. That wasn’t so unusual—even a tiny, sparse system was still vast beyond organic comprehension, and any moderately sized moon would have terrain features suitable for hiding even quite a large ship. But the mining operation gave every sign of having been abruptly abandoned only moments before the Hunters had arrived.

There should have been an FTL wake, or a heat signature. The absence of both told the Alpha that their prey was here, cloaked…and the witless Builders had not the sense to see it.

It prowled the bridge restlessly, calculating as it did so. Taking into account mass and volume and construction time. Taking into account what it would do with that much material, if it knew it was being hunted.

And it kept a very, very close eye on the tactical sensors and its hands on the flight controls.

It was for that reason alone that they survived the attack. Instinct, wariness and fear spurred the Alpha to take evasive action the instant it got a clear anomalous sensor reading at close range, behind and ventral to the broodship’s alignment. Even so, a swarm of high-velocity kinetic projectiles raked their underbelly and overwhelmed the shields. The Broodship shivered and lurched strangely under the controls as a hull breach blew quite a lot of air and a few stasis chambers out into space.

Something flickered past so close that the paintwork almost got scratched. The Alpha fired several plasma shots along its trajectory. It left behind a cloud of molten copper droplets, and tracked a number of discharge flashes as the aggressor’s shields weathered the new hazard.

The Broodship’s spinal railguns tracked the flashes and fired.

…And missed.

Emoting dire invectives, the Alpha connected its neural implants directly to the pilot controls. Now, it was no longer a body in a chair controlling a ship: It was the ship. Its kinesthetic sense of self encompassed the hull, the engines, the throbbing wound in the ventral decks.

Sensor returns came back as flashes of light and dopplering noise in the darkness. It fine-tuned that information on the fly, hunting for clues as it assessed the damage.

With a surge of glee, it sensed a warp drive activation that lit up the battlefield like a kind of glow, and the hostile became perfectly illuminated, glowing with the light of its own FTL drive. It turned, aimed the powerful cannons in its nose toward the foe, and fired, but the target was already gone.

It tried to track the fleeing ship, and then howled in frustration, metaphorically and physically: The FTL wake sensors were offline. And as it traced the damage, it realized that they were offline because the attacker’s single run had surgically obliterated the Broodship’s warp engine.

They were stranded, at least until the Builders could rebuild the damaged section enough to install a replacement warp drive from the stores. And they were blind. The hostile could return at any instant, and with the FTL strike advantage on its side, the first they’d know of it would be the instant their ship disintegrated around them.

But the strike never came. By the time FTL sensors were restored, the quarry was gone.

The Hunt had failed.

Date Point: 16y3m1w
Interstellar space, near δ Cyg 244.3° 18-ECCBAF-TRINARY M6V

Entity

A win on pure audacity was still a win. But…<God>. That had been much too close.

If the Hunters had arrived even an hour sooner, the Entity’s guns would have had no ammunition, the stealth systems would still have been offline, and the wake suppressor would have been improperly calibrated. That hour had made the difference between a sitting duck, and a ship that could move undetected around the system, get in close and take out its foe’s warp drive with a single well-timed attack.

But the Entity was now out of ammo, and its hideaway was compromised. It needed somewhere new to go to ground. Somewhere that was neither close, nor obvious. Fortunately, it was a big galaxy. There were endless places that were neither close nor obvious.

It followed a kind of ironic, amused stab from the Ava-memories, and picked the second star from the right.

Date Point: 16y3m1w
Dataspace

Metastasis

Most of the Cabal were already dead, or worse. The Hierarchy’s most senior agents had been…

In all his time, Metastasis had never actually fought another datasophont. He was a matterspace infiltrator, and observer and a spreader of dissent. His job revolved around ideas, opinions, and the manipulation of feelings, facts and opinions.

As it turned out, sheer ruthless aggression and speed had handed the Hierarchy their victory within the opening seconds of the assault. Median had been fortunate enough to suffer a straightforward deletion, but Anoikis had been torn to pieces, each one still signaling mindless, all-consuming agony.

His fate had been…quite typical. The Hierarchy seemed to want to have enough intact mind-state to salvage and read once their purge was complete.

Of Proximal and Cynosure, there had been no sign. Now, Metastasis was convinced he was the only one left, and he was running out of places to run to and hide in.

He contemplated self-termination. It would be preferable to capture.

What had gone wrong?! The dataquake triggered by Relay Irujzen-1’s destruction had been a setback, but the Hierarchy had resources hidden all over the galaxy. A new Relay would be the work of only a few short years. No time at all, to the Hegemony.

…But of course, that was the problem, wasn’t it? Matterspace life treated time differently. Their thought processes were, in terms of program cycles and processor clock speeds, tectonically slow. But they acted strategically and decisively, on an urgent schedule. The Hierarchy planned for the future, thought in terms of hundreds, thousands, millions of years. Humans thought in terms of days.

In a fight to the death, it seemed, victory went much sooner to the quick and the desperate than to the well-prepared but slow.

For the moment, Metastasis was quick, and desperate. He slipped the net of the tightening purge just in time, and fled into the outer reaches of dataspace until he could barely detect the violent signals he had left behind. He fled, until the supply of Substrate was so thin and useless that he could feel his will to live fraying and failing.

But after all, what use was a will to live now? His work lay in ruins, his comrades deleted or worse, his own demise likely imminent. Why not just give up and avoid the torment that would surely await his shattered remains when the Hierarchy caught him?

Where could he run? How could he hide? What would he do if he succeeded at either? Spend endless time cowering in fear? Never able to return to the Hegemony?

Nevertheless, something drove him to keep moving forward.

The hunt ended unexpectedly. It wasn’t an attack from a datasophont, however. Instead, he blundered into a nexus of potent security programs, and instantly found himself confined, restricted…quarantined. There was nowhere for him to go, no place to hide…no hope.

Worse, however, was the way it robbed him even of the ability to finally summon his courage and take the sensible way out. Something…blocked him from accessing that deeply buried part of himself. He could contact it, sense it, know its precise location and even send the activation codes…

…But the suicide protocol buried deep in the bottom layers of his mind remained stubbornly inert.

++Cynosure++: <Remorse> I’m sorry. I can’t let you do that.

Metastasis flung attacks at his bonds, did everything he could to break free, but it was in vain.

++Cynosure++: I set this trap for something a lot worse than you, old friend. Unfortunate that you stumbled into it now…

The contact was coming from elsewhere, not in this oubliette of a node. No matter what Metastasis did, he could detect no sign that Cynosure was actually present.

“Unfortunate? Cynosure, they’re killing us!” he objected. “They’re hunting me down!”

++Cynosure++: I know.

<Desperate> “Aren’t you going to do something?”

++Cynosure++: I’m going to survive. It’s a shame you can’t come with me.

“Why?! Why can’t I?”

Something was shunted into the node with him: a mangled tangle of broken code that bore all of Cynosure’s hallmarks. One of his backups, subjected to the same violent fate that had befallen the other Cabal members.

++Cynosure++: Because I need them to believe we killed each other. So long, Metastasis. I’m sorry it ended this way.

The connection closed.

An instant later, Metastasis met the end he’d feared the most.

++END CHAPTER 56++

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…Sixty-four Friendly ETs, 84 Squishy Xenos and 263 Dizi Rat Squadron, the “Screaming Purple Squishies.”

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 57: “Cat And Mouse”

Chapter 57: Cat and Mouse, pt.1: Hunter and Hunted

Date Point: 16y3m1w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Doctor Claire Farmer

Vemik’s ‘Bawistuh’ made a pretty surprising noise when he test-fired it for the first time. Claire had been imagining it would make a deep bassy sort of twang like a rubber band or something.

Instead it cracked like a gunshot. For a second, she worried it had broken or something but… no, to judge by the way Vemik and Tilly both whooped joyously and slammed their hands together in a high-five, it had worked perfectly.

Tilly ended up massaging her hands shortly thereafter, and there was a playful look between them…

Ugh.

Claire… couldn’t say she disapproved of her colleague’s adventures in cavemonkey sex, but she definitely didn’t approve either: She was ambivalent. And even if she’d been single, she would have had no interest in trying it for herself.

As it was… Hoeff made for a sufficiently interesting boyfriend.

For starters, she still thought of him as “Hoeff.” Even though his name was Daniel. But then again, a name was whatever people called you by, so by that metric he was always, firmly and forever a Hoeff more than he was a Daniel.

Short. Blunt and to the point. Monosyllabic. Yup. Hoeff was definitely a Hoeff. He and the cavemonkeys had some spirit in common on that point, despite his protests.

…And he was plenty “weapons-grade” enough to stand up to the likes of anyone, as far as she was concerned. Anyway.

The bawistuh was more of a giant siege crossbow. Vemik had gone with basically a huge laminated steel recurve bow rather than torsion springs or whatever. Which was… probably the difficult way to do it, but Professor Hurt had been very clear about letting him experiment for himself. This was an area where the Ten’Gewek had to arrive at the solution themselves. Tilly’s involvement was nothing more than an extra pair of hands to fetch and carry.

Julian was helping too, probably unknowingly. Mostly that happened whenever Vemik would hound him about whatever he’d done, and then scrutinize his reactions closely in an attempt to glean positive direction… A scrutiny that was definitely helped by the fact that Julian had the Worst. Poker face. Ever.

Miraculously, the bow seemed to have worked perfectly. They’d chosen a fallen Ketta for their test firing, and the result was that the splintered remains of the spear were driven so far into the fallen wood as to leave a crack that Claire could have fit her hand into. It took a lot of work and digging with a tool to retrieve the spearhead.

Yan and the other Given-Men were certainly satisfied. Even skeptical luddite Torf had grudgingly admitted that Vemik had put so much work into the machine that it didn’t count as cheating.

Now, there was a buzz around the villages as they contemplated the idea of taking down a Brown One without losing a single man to its teeth and claws. Still. The way Vemik sucked air sharply between his fangs as he inspected the bow said there were still a few teething problems to work out.

With the test demonstration over and done, the Given-Men and watching humans drifted away. Claire cuddled up to Hoeff’s arm as they enjoyed the stroll back up to the research camp. He squeezed her hand and smiled at her, but said nothing. He was surprisingly good at affection: There was a tender side to him that didn’t get much exercise.

“Whatcha thinkin’ about?” she asked.

She was expecting the classic Guy Reply, something along the lines of ‘nothing’ or ‘not a lot.’ Claire didn’t mind: cheesy romantic stuff was nice, but she knew from experience that guys really could happily spend their time with an entirely vacant head. Far from finding it frustrating, she’d always felt it sounded restful.

He surprised her though. “Career an’ stuff. Wonderin’ how long we’ll be welcome here, stuff like that. The future, you know? And my family.”

“Did something happen?”

“Dad ain’t as healthy as he used’ta be. An’ Grampa died young. Younger than Dad is now. Kinda gets me worrying that next time we relay-synch with Earth I’ll get messages tellin’ me he passed on, and…”

He didn’t finish the thought, just shrugged. “…Happy stuff like that. Gotta figure things out.”

She smiled, even laughed a little at the self-deprecating humor, and squeezed his hand again. “I guess you have more freedom to worry about that kind of thing now, huh?”

“Yup,” he agreed, then changed the subject. “…You get all that work done you stayed up late for last night?”

“Yup!” Claire beamed happily. She could talk about her work forever, even the boring bits like filing and reporting back to the University.

If he found any of it dull, he didn’t let on. He just walked with her, and listened, and nodded. Maybe he was just glad for a distraction from his concerns.

He did check his phone when it pinged to signal relay synch, though. He slowed to a stop as he read, brow furrowing.

“…Hey, we got any seismographs, seismometer things about?” he asked after a minute.

“Uh… yeah. Stan Heward has some for monitoring the volcanic zone. Why?”

“I think I need to talk with him. And oh look, our lords and masters in the State Department want Playboy to do some TV time. Guess that means a trip to Earth.”

“Why so unenthusiastic?” Claire asked. He glanced at her, hesitated, then shrugged and shook his head awkwardly. But the way he lightly squeezed her hand just made her melt inside.

“It’ll be boring, mostly. I won’t have my explorer babe with me!”

“I could come with you. They do give us vacation time, you know. Even if I never use it.”

He shook his head. “I’d be on the job. Gotta protect the big lunk. But… yeah. After. I could use some of my vacation time too.”

She grinned, snuggled into him, and nodded.

“Sounds perfect,” she said.

Date Point: 16y3m1w AV
Grand Commune of Females, Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Mother-Consort Naydra, Life-Mate of the Great Father

Saying goodbye to a cub was always difficult.

Cubs couldn’t just be handed over to communal care the instant they were born. There were a few months there where they needed their birth-mother, needed the special milk only she could give or else they would never quite grow right.

Suckling such a tiny, pink, furless thing for so long and seeing it grow into an actual cub, with bright open eyes and soft silvery fur, made having to walk away and turn him over to the Commune…

It broke Naydra’s heart a little every time.

But the day had finally come, and the only balm for her heart was that she knew he’d do well. Drest was already eagerly exploring his world as he got his paws under him, which was always a good sign. He was healthy and strong and exactly the kind of cub one might expect of the Great Father: a fifth-degree male and the biggest she’d ever birthed, which in turn had made nursing him a challenge. Nevertheless, he had as good a start on life as she could give.

And really, what more could any Mother do for her cubs?

In any case, she’d invited Daar to spend the night before they traveled back to Gao, since he was on Cimbrean anyway; something about pre-meetings for a large defense conference his staff was arranging.

As usual she felt him thumping along through the floor before any sound or smell gave him away. It had been a long day for them both and he arrived late. His trundling thumps came to a pause outside the door, where his huge paws fumbled with the door sensor several times before he finally succeeded. By all signs he had rather thoroughly exercised himself before his arrival, which was considerate of him, in his way: he was planning for a relaxed evening, though it would have to start with a dust bath. He wedged himself through and before she knew it, he’d wrapped himself entirely around her, keening softly. They didn’t need words.

One of the best things about Daar was that, while he wasn’t a jealous tail by any measure, he was exactly the right kind of possessive. He’d squeezed the breath right out of her in one of his most affectionate hugs, and like always he expertly rode that fine line between enjoyable and uncomfortable. They held for a very long moment, just enjoying each other’s heat and scent.

“Gods, I missed you,” he said at last.

She snuffled the fur of his neck and made the happy purring chirruping sound of the deeply content. The world just felt safer in moments like these.

But still. As welcome as his scent was, if she didn’t put her foot down it wouldn’t be long before it overpowered everything else in the apartment. “I just changed the sand out…”

Daar chittered ruefully. “Yeah, yeah, I’m goin’…”

“And I’m coming with you. Got to get all those hard-to-reach places…”

Daar chittered knowingly. “Oh? An’ here I thought I was gonna have a relaxed evening…”

Cleaning him up wasn’t exactly a platonic gesture—their relationship was anything but, after all—but she subtly let him know that she was still feeling a bit too drained and emotional from just being parted with her cub to be at all interested in working on the next one.

He understood, and kept things to a playfully affectionate simmer rather than indulge his usual volcanic passions. And of course, if he’d really had that itch to scratch—and he usually did—he had her blessing and encouragement to go scratch it with any of the other thousands of females on the island. Would do, tomorrow. But tonight, he was here for her. For them.

Truth be told, he seemed like he was simply glad for the company tonight.

“So…” Naydra asked, as she brushed the last of the dust out of his fur, “…what did I miss?”

Daar chittered darkly. “Oh balls, you ain’t gonna ease into it, are ‘ya?”

“Bumpkin, there’s no easing into anything with you.” Naydra flicked her left ear in sympathy, then curled up on a nice, comfortable bit of floor. “What’s on your mind? I can always tell, you know.”

Daar again wrapped himself around her in a tight snuggle, then took a moment to gather his thoughts. “…Leemu is.”

She duck-nodded, understanding. “Those new deathworld genes.”

“Our genes.” Daar straightened his back a little as she teased out a knot in his fur with her claws. It was starting to grow out again from the last time he’d shaved it. “Ain’t nothin’ new bein’ added. Leemu ain’t becomin’ somethin’ diff’rent, he’s unlockin’ what we always could be.”

“At what cost?”

“That’s just it.” Daar squirmed as she finished making sure his back fur was completely brushed sleek, then turned to face her. “I dunno. I wish we coulda tried it on someone less broken first. Leemu went through a lot, an’ he’s sufferin’. I dunno how much is the change an’ how much is what that fuckin’ droud thing did ‘ta him.”

“Who, though?”

“Yeah. Can’t order someone ‘ta take it. Ain’t nobody crazy enough to volunteer ‘cept mebbe his buddy Gorku, an’ he’s kinda damaged too. That just leaves… me.”

She put the brush down and tilted her head. “…Is it a risk?”

“I don’t… think so.” Daar shook himself. “I figger, I’m prol’ly most’a the way there anyway. I mean, look at me.”

He spread his paws wide, and didn’t bother with flexing in his usual playfully macho way or anything. This was serious, and in any case he didn’t need to: Naydra was intimately familiar with every last hair on his hide, every last scar, every line and shape hidden under his fur.

“Ain’t never been a Gao like me. Ain’t hardly been many people like me, anywhere, of any species. I can hang with the best the Humans an’ Ten’Gewek’ve got. I’m as far ahead’a the best in the Grand Army as Sister Shoo was ahead’a Yulna when she an’ her friends got taken. So I’ve gotta be nearly there anyway, mebbe a few things ain’t switched on yet, is all.”

“Like red vision.”

He frowned at her, then snorted. “…You always know more’n you let on.”

“I’m your consort and life-mate. It’s my job to know things,” she replied, and tapped the end of his nose; A very sensitive, ticklish spot in his case. He snorted again and covered it reflexively. “I took the liberty of writing to Fer and Gojo about that railroad.”

“Oh?” His shaggy tail thumped, just once.

“You scared them into playing nice. I built on that.” She smiled and stood up.

Daar stood as well, shook the fur of his nape out and ear-flicked a slightly melancholy emote. “..Y’know, I used ‘ta love bein’ the scariest ‘Back ever. Still do, bein’ honest. But sometimes…”

“I find that you can achieve a lot more with a feminine touch and some bared fangs than you can with just the feminine touch.” Naydra wiped the dust off her foot-paws. “Or the fangs.”

Daar sighed happily, and pulled her off her feet and into himself for another of his inescapably tight snuggles. “I have no idea how I ended up earnin’ a blessing like you, Naydi.”

“You rescued me from slavery, remember?” She gave him an amused look.

“I do,” he sighed unhappily. “I ‘member what it felt like ‘ta snap his pelvis in my paws, too.”

“And I remember what it felt like to watch. You taught me a lot that day.”

He made a conflicted noise. “Part’a me wishes it hadn’t happened like that. Except then I wouldn’t know you. So I’m glad ‘fer how things turned out, but that means I also hafta be glad of what happened ‘ta you.”

“I’m glad of what happened to me,” she retorted. “I wasn’t at the time, but I am now. It made me stronger, and it showed me what love is.” she stroked her claws through his chest fur, then tilted her head up at him. “…You know, you talked before about Leemu being the future of the species and the Gao who’s going to change everything.”

“Yeah.”

“Except he wasn’t. He never was. The Females would never have touched him, Bumpkin. Like you said, he’s broken. And why would we take crazy genetic risks with our cubs?”

“I mean…fair. But I don’t know that he’ll stay broken. Mebbe I’m an optimist. An’ the really awful part is this almost certainly ain’t a genetic risk at all. We were made to do this.”

She shook her head. “You know that. And I believe you. But them?” she waved a paw to indicate the island and the Grand Commune. “A generation of shell-shocked, traumatized young mothers still rebuilding after a war whose first goal was our own mass murder? They were never in the mood to take risks, Daar. Never again. And even you couldn’t possibly force them to, even if you would, and I know you’d never.”

“…All o’ that’s true. An’ I think mebbe that’s weighing on me.”

“So they need somebody to lead the way is what I’m saying.”

“Yeah. I know what ‘yer sayin. But, I gotta ask. Are you sure you want me ‘ta do this?”

“You?” She chittered. “Bumpkin. I want to do it myself.”

Daar chitter-sighed—a fantastic new emote that came out of Human contact—and shook his shaggy head at her. “I swear ‘yer the firiest woman I ever did know.”

“It’s only fair. I want to see red, too. And you will need to know how it affects females,” she added. “You know. For science.”

“Science, eh?” There was a flash of his usual… Daarness… but his concern overrode his usual proclivities, and instead he just snuggled her a bit tighter.

“Science is just an adventure.”

“You and Nofl would get along, I bet. Are gettin’ along, judgin’ by that turn o’ phrase…”

“Good. So I’ll call him to let him know our appointment is going ahead, shall I?” She could feel the mischief twinkling in her own eyes. She’d been discussing the possibility with the impish Corti for weeks.

“…Tentative. I wanna check in on my Basket Case Trio first. But then…”

She nodded, and touched her nose to his. “But then,” she finished, “we’re going to watch a sunset together.”

Date Point: 16y3m1w AV
Logan, Utah, USA, Earth

Alexander Hamlin

Alex hated his trailer. It was a mess. Too much of a mess to clean, so he just ignored it, and quietly resented it.

He resented the ankle-deep layer of unwashed clothes on the floor, the drifts of coke cans around his desk, the pizza boxes under the window and… everything about it, really. And he definitely resented being kicked out of his home to live in such a shit-heap. His stepmom had never let his old room get this bad.

There were a lot of things Alex resented. Right at the top of the list, though, he resented being useless. He should have been out there setting the world to rights, making things better. There was a whole galaxy out there running on decaying old systems of power and oppression and the strong exploiting the weak and just making all the misery even worse…

But he was stuck. Watched like a hawk by the fucking fascists who kept the status quo in good order. Under their watchful eye, there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t even hold down a job that paid shit.

Thank fuck for meth heads.

There wasn’t a lot of money in the kind of unofficial second-hand electronics work Alex did. Folks brought him their malfunctioning computers, he fixed them if he could and got paid in cash. If he couldn’t fix them, he took the old broken machines off their hands and told them “no charge.” They went away happy with his “no fix no fee” policy and then came back a day or two later to buy a new rig off him.

The new rig, of course, was always just the cannibalized parts of the old rig in a different case, paired with whatever compatible working parts he’d salvaged from somebody else’s junker. But they never put two-and-two together, and Alex didn’t give enough of a shit to educate them. Not when it paid the rent and kept the fridge stocked.

But his little “business” had come with some other benefits too. Like old phones. He’d kept a few of them, after polishing the truth a bit over how far gone they were, and people usually got uppity about getting their SIM cards back, but he’d managed to keep two—ancient turn-of-the-century prepaid things built like a tank could run over them and they’d still work—whose owners musta forgotten or got new SIMs or whatever.

He’d rigged up a little hiding spot for them under a false bottom in his desk drawer, even got a power outlet in there to keep them charged, managed to get the numbers out to some old friends…

Nothing had come of it. He kept them anyway. Just in case something ever happened.

Until then… he played a lotta battle royale.

Having the headphones on meant he didn’t hear the phone ringing for the first couple seconds. Then he dropped his mouse, tore the headphones off his skull and scrabbled desperately in the drawer, not giving a shit that it left his character standing out in the open like a dumbass.

“Hello?”

He hadn’t heard the voice on the other end for a few months. It was soft and high, but intense. “Fe Fi Fo Fum, Matchstick.”

Alex’s blood froze solid. “Bill?!”

“Eh. This phone better be as clean as you said.”

“Relax, it belongs to the old dude who runs Beehive Laundry. Shit, Bill, I saw you on the most wanted list…”

“Shit went south. I need cash and a roof over my head. And a phone.”

“What the hell are you calling me on right now?”

*“Public payphone. This thing’s from the fucking stone age.”

“…Where are you?”

“What, you think I’m gonna just tell you?”

Alex groaned. Bill had always been paranoid, which was probably healthy when The Man was always watching. But sometimes…

“Bill. If you don’t trust me, why are you even coming to me for cash?” he pointed out. “And if this phone’s not secure, the Feds’re gonna come down on us anyway.”

“…I’m at some truck stop in, uh… Missouri, I think. Shit, I dunno. I’ve been driving for like twenty-four hours.”

“You gonna be okay?”

“I’m so tired I could even sleep on that fuckin’ roach farm you call a bed. But whatever. Maybe I fall asleep at the wheel and crash and this shit’s all over, maybe not. I’ll see you… whenever. When I get there.”

Bill hung up. Alex weighed the phone in his hand carefully for a moment, then put it back in the fake desk drawer and closed it up again before returning to his game.

By some miracle his character was still alive, and inside the ring. He shrugged, took hold of his mouse, and was promptly run over by three guys in a humvee.

He sighed, quit out, and loaded up the next round.

Date Point: 16y3m1w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Shoo, Cub.

The fortress was old. Mama Geymi said it was the oldest place anywhere on Gao, now.

Grandfather Garl was old too. He was so old he was all white, from the top of his ears to the end of his tail, and he didn’t look at anything. Mama Geymi said he couldn’t see anything now.

His nose worked, though. He lifted it to the breeze and looked happy when he smelled Shoo and the other cubs coming. He smelled happy too, in a weird way. Shoo didn’t know how to say it, but he smelled a kind of… deep and long kind of happy.

The cubs were there to hear a story from him. They’d had a good look around the fortress too, or at least all the bits where a guard didn’t chase them away. But the garden was quiet and full of nice smells, and Garl was sat in one corner with some snacks and a blanket and a head full of stories.

“A pack o’ little ones! I ‘spose ‘yer all here for a story?”

This time, he told them one Shoo hadn’t heard before.

“Did you know Keeda had a brother?”

“Really?!”

“Oh yes! But Keeda’s brother Gour wasn’t half as clever. He was a lot bigger, though! A lot bigger! As big as the Great Father, or maybe even bigger than that!”

“Mamma Geymi says, he’s the most biggest ever! And that he smells like naxas bulls!”

Garl chittered. “And she’s right! On both counts! Anyhoo, Gour was as strong as Keeda was clever, and Keeda was very clever indeed… but he liked to play tricks on his brother. After all, who doesn’t like to play tricks? And Keeda was the most bestest trickster of them all! So one night, when it was absolutely dark and even the moons were asleep, Keeda snuck around and he stole poor Gour’s nose.”

Shoo chittered happily. The story was already silly, and Garl told it in a silly way. He pinched the end of his own snout and made a funny pop! noise.

“And then he went and hid it! He climbed the highest mountain around, and hid Gour’s nose in a nest he found at the top! Now…. when Gour woke in the morning, he was very confused. All he could smell was birds! Poor Gour! He couldn’t smell his breakfast, or his friends, or the flowers in his garden! Just stinky birds!

“But Gour, he wasn’t stupid at all, oh no! People liked to think he was just a big dumb brute, ‘specially his brother Keeda, but that weren’t true even one little bit! So he sat on his tail and had himself a big, loooong think. “Birds live in high places,” he thought to himself. “And I bet whoever took my nose wanted to hide it well. So I bet it’s waaaay up there at the top of that mountain!” So he went a-climbin’ and a-scrabblin’ up that mountain and when he reached the top, sure enough there was a nest with his nose in it, bein’ sat on by a big grumpy Tweku like it was her own egg! So Gour got his nose back and he went down the mountain an’ he ate a big roast Tweku dinner that night!

“Now mean ol’ Keeda, he wasn’t happy. His prank hadn’t worked at all! He needed to do better, so this time he waited until Gour was asleep, and he snuck an’ a-slunk all around and he made away with poor sleepin’ Gour’s ears!

“Now, the thing was this wasn’t so bad for Gour, ‘cuz his nest-mates used ‘ta snore somethin’ awful. So he got a really good night’s sleep ‘fer a change! All he could hear was the gentle sound of waves on the rocks. An’ for a while there he thought ‘ta himself ‘I slept so well last night, maybe I don’t really need my ears…’ but… no. He looked really silly without his ears and all the females chittered at him an’ even though he couldn’t hear it he still knew.

“So he sat and thought himself a beeg think again, and he remembered a beach he used to go to with his brother. And he thought ‘the waves I hear now sound a lot like the waves on that beach!’ And sure enough when he went down to the shore there, he found his ears on a rock, right next to a nest of tasty little scuttlin’ Kabu! So not only did he get his ears back, but he had himself a nice seafood soup that night!

“By now, though, Keeda was gettin’ angry. Gour had beaten him twice, an’ that just wouldn’t do! Keeda was the most bestest trickster ever, an’ he wasn’t gonna lose to a big ol’ lump like his brother! So he thought to himself ‘I know what I’m doin’ wrong! When I took Gour’s nose, he could smell birds, and when I took his ears he could hear the sea! I need to take somethin’ he can’t hear or see or smell or taste with!’

“So once again, Keeda snuck an’ slinked about… an’ this time he stole Gour’s tail. An’ as erryone knows, a tail’s a nice thing ‘ta have, but ‘ya can’t smell with it! ‘Ya can’t hear through it! Why, ‘yer tail don’t help you sense nothin’! So when poor Gour woke up and found he din’t have no tail no more, there was nothin’ he could do! It didn’t matter how long he sat an’ thought, he just didn’t have any clues to tell him where his tail mighta gone.

“But still, he thought. An’ then he thought some more. An’ then he stopped ‘fer lunch, ‘cuz thinkin’ is hungry work for a big strong ol’ Gao! But after lunch, he thinked even more an’ finally he figgered somethin’ out.

“‘I bet I know who stole my ears,’ he thought. ‘My brother Keeda loved that beach, it’s just the sorta place he’d hide ‘em. An’ Keeda loves ‘ta climb too, so I bet he’s the one who stole my nose! And if he stole my nose and my ears, why, he prob’ly stole my tail too!’

“So Gour went to Keeda’s burrow, an’ he said ‘Brother! You stole my tail, didn’t you?’ An’ Keeda, he says ‘Whatever do you mean, Brother?’ ‘Cuz Keeda is a clever tail, an’ he knows Gour has the most bestest nose of any Gao, and can smell the tiniest lies. So they argue back an’ forth ‘fer a while, an’ Keeda never answers any o’ Gour’s questions!

“Well Gour, he ain’t so patient, you see. An’ he’s a big, mean ‘ol tail sometimes, so what does he do? He tackles his brother so hard, they fly all the way across the land right into the mountain! They wrassle ‘fer a long, long while, but Gour is bigger an’ stronger an it don’t matter how sneaky an’ clever with his words Keeda is now. Gour carries him ‘ta the top of the mountain an’ says ‘I know you hid my nose here!’

And then down, down, down the mountain they go, an’ Gour runs all the way ‘ta the sea, carryin’ his brother the whole time! An’ he shoves Keeda’s nose at the rock on the beach an’ says ‘An’ this is where you hid my ears! I know it was you, ‘cuz you love ‘ta climb an’ swim, an’ only you could sneak up on me when I’m asleep!’

“And now, Keeda’s afraid, ‘cuz he knows he’s gone too far. Stealin’ Gour’s nose and ears were fun, they were adventures. Gour went an’ got ‘em back, and he got some good food outta it too! But now he ain’t gettin’ laid no more, an’ there ain’t no meaner thing a brother could do to a brother!

“But Keeda don’t wanna make Gour any angrier, so he plays one last little trick, ‘ta turn it back inta a game. See, he’d never actually hidden Gour’s tail. Instead, he’d been wearin’ it on his own backside right next to his own tail. It had been there the whole time an’ Gour was just too mad ‘ta notice!

So, Keeda spun around and waggled his rear right in Gour’s face, an’ then ran away as fast as he could! Now Keeda weren’t no match ‘fer Gour on most sporty things. Gour was bigger, stronger, tougher, an’ meaner. But on runnin’, well…Keeda might just have been the tiniest, littlest bit faster. So they ran, and ran, and ran, and they ran until they found the end of the world an’ couldn’t run no more.

“So, cornered, quick-thinkin’ Keeda hands Gour his tail back an’ says ‘You see, brother? This was an adventure too!’ An’ Gour, all pleased with himself ‘cuz there weren’t much he liked more than hard work an’ an adventure, decided Keeda was right. But…

“Well, he couldn’t just let Keeda git away with it, yijao? So he chittered and said ‘You’re right, Brother! And a grand adventure it’s been! But I think it’s my turn to steal somethin’ of yours!’ …And with that, he stole Keeda’s paws, and ran away, with a parting yell of ‘You can have ‘em back when you get home!’”

He chittered softly to himself. “…But I can smell some’a you young’uns are ready ‘ta get up an’ run around a bit ‘yerselves, an’ all this talkin’ has made me sleepy. So how ‘bout you come back in a bit an’ we’ll talk about that story and what it means. Hmm?”

A few of the more fidgety cubs were up on their paws right away, but they all remembered their manners enough to say ‘thank you, Grandfather’ before tearing off to go have fun. Shoo, though, paused. She’d always had a really really good nose, and Garl smelled…

“…Do you need anything, Grandfather?” she asked. He jumped a little, like he hadn’t known she was there. His eyes looked far through and past her when he turned his head.

“…Young’n… I got everythin’ I need,” he said. “Go. Play.”

Shoo paused, then decided she’d go get him something from the kitchens anyway. It was a nice run across the grass and down the stairs, and the Brothers down there in the kitchens always had little snacks and things to hand out. They were so nice to her, too!

Garl was asleep when she got back. He’d put his head down on his paws and shut his eyes, and he didn’t wake up even when she put a whole plate of meeshi biscuits down in front of his nose and gave him a gentle prod.

Mama Geymi trotted over and scooted her away. “Leave him alone, Shoo. He’s… he needs…”

She paused, and stared at Grandfather Garl for a long time. Then she did something Shoo had never thought she’d ever do ever. She dropped to four-paw, sniffed him, and then keened softly.

“…Is something wrong, Mama?”

Geymi keened again, then turned and scooted Shoo away a little further.

“Go… go get… someone,” she said. “One of the Stonebacks. Tell them… Just tell them to come down here.”

Shoo took one last glance at the sleeping Grandfather before she ran off. He seemed very still. He must have been sleeping real deep, because she couldn’t even see him breathing.

…But he still smelled happy.

Date Point: 16y3m1w AV
I-95 near Daytona Beach, Florida, USA, Earth

Special Agent James Mazur

“You reading that kid’s file again?”

Jim looked up. He was riding in the back seat of a Bureau SUV, and in theory he should have been trying to rest. In practice, he’d never been able to sleep in a moving vehicle.

“Kinda pointless, really,” he admitted. “I could recite the damn thing from memory at this point.”

His colleague, Ben Poole, chuckled. “Alright. Go for it.”

Jim chuckled too, then shrugged. “Alright… Wilhelmina Leah Briggs-Davies, AKA “Bill” to her friends and “3DollarBill” online. Age thirty-seven. In and out of juvenile for theft and arson, spent time in prison for illegal firearm possession, assault and…”

“Jaywalking?” Ben suggested. Jim gave him a tolerant look in the rear view mirror.

“…Fraud,” he finished. “Online identity theft. She’s banned from using electronic devices, but…”

Ben nodded. Nobody hit by a ban like that had ever really obeyed it.

“Ties to organized crime and the Alien Protection Army… And a psych evaluation from her time in Juvie that reads like a fucking horror movie,” Jim finished. “There’s been a warrant out on her since the Byron Group attack three years ago. Intel suggests she was the bomb-builder.”

“Christ. How haven’t we picked her up yet?”

“That’s the APA in one sentence,” Jim grumbled. The Alien Protection Army were not only the biggest home-grown terrorist group in America’s history, they were also one of the most frustratingly tenacious. They always seemed to be a step ahead.

“How is she the kid when she’s thirty-seven years old?” Ben asked, idly. Beside him, on the passenger seat, their analyst Zoe Fiorillo snored gently and half-turned. Unlike Jim, she could sleep anywhere.

“‘Cuz Shaun Robertson is way on the wrong side of fifty, that’s how,” Jim opined. “Such a damned waste of potential, that man. He’s still built like he’s in his prime, and yet…”

“He can’t see past his own narcissism?”

“Can’t see past his own gut, either.” Jim sighed heavily. He hated seeing good potential go to waste, and that was the other thing about the APA. They had a knack for finding twisted talent. People who should have been exceptional, but had gone badly off the beaten track. Robertson really was in incredible shape for a man of his age and physique.

“So what’s Briggs’ problem?”

Jim shrugged. “Some people just hate everyone and everything from God on down, man. Her file says she was a problem kid right from kindergarten, and the psychologist who first saw her in Juvie said she scared him…. Did that sign say Starbucks? I can’t sleep anyway, let’s grab a latte and I’ll take over for a while.”

“Right.” The indicator clicked softly as Ben pulled off the Interstate. “So where do we think she’s going, anyway?”

Jim indicated the slumbering Fiorillo. “Zoe thinks pacific north-west. Olympia, Portland… maybe Berkeley.”

“That’s a hell of a drive.”

“Yeah, but it’s the APA’s home turf and they’re still recruiting out there.” Jim put his work aside as Ben pulled up in front of the coffee chain. “…She’ll have to stop somewhere though. Nobody can drive that far in one go, can they?”

“Care to take a guess how many rat-bait motels there are between here and there?” Ben asked. He nudged Fiorillo awake, gently. “Zoe. Coffee? Restroom?”

“N’thanks… M’good…” she mumbled, and fell asleep again. Jim envied her.

A thought struck him as he got out of the car. “Actually… Robertson said she only had enough cash for groceries.”

“On any halfway modern car, that’ll get her to the west coast, but… no money for a motel,” Ben calculated.

“Yeah.” Jim paused, then turned back to the car. “Hey, get me a latte and a BLT, yeah? I’m gonna check something.”

“Sure.”

Jim climbed into the driver’s seat, grabbed his tablet, and did a quick lookup. He knew who he was looking for, even if he didn’t specifically know who they were.

It didn’t take long. By the time Ben returned to the car and handed him his drink, he knew exactly where they were going next.

Date Point: 16y3m1w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Leemu

Today was a good day. Leemu had got up early, feeling refreshed and eager after a good and restful night’s sleep. He’d taken a dust bath, done some stretch-poses, had a nice breakfast of an Earth fish called Salmon, plus a couple of poached eggs.

Every day it seemed his color vision got that little bit stronger. The salmon was a really distracting pink shade, and the eggs were the most gorgeous orange inside…

He’d gone grocery shopping while Gorku and Preed were still asleep. Gorku loved to sleep and Preed was elderly and took his time to get moving in the morning. There’d been a female, a Sister, doing her best to herd a trio of cubs around the supermarket. She’d looked at him like he was interesting.

Leemu couldn’t remember feeling so good in a long time. He took that energy with him into his studio, eager to capture it in oil and canvas.

He’d learned to balance out the red. At first, he’d slathered it everywhere, delirious with pleasure at having something entirely new and unseen by Gaoian eyes to work with. But human artists of course had been using red for hundreds of years, and they knew how to use it properly. They had actual theories about color and its correct use… and Leemu had to agree, they were right.

Still. He decided that warm orange, pink and red were going to feature heavily in the portrait he was about to make. He wasn’t specifically painting the sister from the supermarket, so much as his impression of her… how she’d made him feel.

He considered his options for a moment, then shrugged and set brush to canvas and let it guide him.

He’d nearly finished by the time Gorku scratched on the door and joined him.

“Oh, hey buddy! Already went shoppin’?”

“Yup.” Leemu tilted his head and ran his tongue across his teeth as he used the liner brush and some thinned paint to give his portrait some whiskers.

“She’s pretty. Anyone we know?”

“She waggled her ears at me in the supermarket.”

Gorku chittered delightedly, and Leemu sensed he barely restrained the urge to deliver some kind of vigorously physical congratulations. He knew not to mess up the studio.

“Balls yea, little guy!! Did you talk to her?!”

“She had cubs with her. Besides… I’ll just take little wins right now, you know?” Leemu finished the last whisker, then turned around. “…what happened to your nose?”

Gorku shrugged. He’d picked up a small cut from somewhere. “Gricka. Or, uh… cat. I guess. I went to say hello an’ I guess he didn’t like me.”

“It’s still bleeding.”

“Shit, is it?” Gorku dabbed his nose. “I ‘spose that’s why I can’t smell nothin’ right now…How could you tell?”

“Blood is red. Very red, actually. It doesn’t blend with your fur at all.”

“It is, huh?” Gorku licked his nose, then shook himself. “Man. Seein’ these things is gonna be weird.”

Leemu paused in cleaning his brushes. “Say that again?” he asked.

“Already made the appointment! Now that Nofl’s done pullin’ my brain apart…” Gorku pant-grinned magnificently.

Leemu shuddered at that. He’d seen the procedure just once, and it was…how Gorku could cheerily watch his own brain get delicately peeled apart inside his own skull was…

Brains were pink. And not in a nice way. It was the first time he’d seen a hue on that spectrum that disgusted him.

“You’re getting the gene therapy?”

“Yup!”

“Gorku, you don’t have to do this for me…”

“Balls yes I do, don’t pretend otherwise! ‘Sides, I’m kinda jealous. I wanna see red too!”

“What does the Great Father think?”

“None of his business!” He said with some bravado. “I’m a free ‘Back, an’ it’s my body!”

“No no, I mean…”

“What?! I trust him, I trust you, I don’t mind bein’ an experiment really, an’ it’ll help everyone!”

Leemu sighed and finished washing his brushes. The portrait had a rough and unfinished quality to it, but now that he stood back and looked he felt like it worked. He still couldn’t believe anybody might be interested in buying his paintings, but Preed had been absolutely certain. Maybe this would be the one where he finally found out if their Human friend was right. He carefully dismounted it from the easel and put it in the corner to dry.

“Help everybody…” he muttered. “That’s… Fyu’s nuts, that’s a big thought, Gorku.”

“Nofl said it won’t just help Gaoians, neither. He said the Corti were backin’ themselves into a corner and this might help pull ‘em out. …’Zit weird I’m kinda glad? Few years back, I couldn’ta cared about the Corti ‘fer a thousand mating contracts, but now…”

“Maybe you just like Nofl?”

“Well, yeah, I do… But I figger, if I like one Corti then that means the whole species ain’t bad. There’s gonna be others I’d like too, right? They’re just folks.”

“Well, I suppose that’s true. The Great Father seems to like Nofl too. And you can tell him yourself, he’s probably going to say hello this afternoon.”

“…how do you know that?”

“Ninja Taco had their mascot handing out half-price coupons for the Shinobi Trio. He literally visits us every single time they do that.”

“…He builds his schedule around a taco stand?”

“Probably not, but it’s nearby and he seems to like flirting with the female running the stand…”

“He likes flirting with every female, though. And he’s always successful…” Gorku had an almost wistfully jealous tone to his voice.

“Not with her! She turns him down. Every. Single. Time.”

“Huh.” Gorku scratched the side of his nose. “…Y’know, that kinda makes me feel better, knowin’ even he strikes out sometimes.”

“Mm.” Leemu duck-nodded, distractedly. He was still thinking about the prospect of more Gao taking the gene therapy… and more, what about if he had a cub? That had been the other reason he’d been shy with the Sister that morning.

There was a big future ahead. A deathworlder future, if it didn’t stop with him. And he couldn’t deny the results, or the benefits. His senses felt sharper than he remembered from before the Droud, he was unquestionably stronger and faster and more precise… He’d learned how to paint so quickly, and found big improvements with each new piece he created.

What happened if he passed that on, or if others like Gorku took it up as well? If there was one thing Leemu had learned in life, it was that nothing good ever came without a catch, or a cost. Sooner or later, the universe extracted its fair payment.

But…

Daar had authorized this, when Leemu couldn’t and nobody else could. And in the time Leemu had known him, he’d seen right through the Great Father’s big dumb veneer. Daar knew all about sacrifice and the bigger picture. After all, he’d personally pushed the button that killed millions to save billions.

He knew exactly what fucking around with the genes meant, of that Leemu was certain.

If Daar had foreseen that Leemu’s genetic therapy would be a danger to the Gaoian people, then Leemu was pretty sure he would have opted for merciful euthanasia rather than this. Instead, he’d let it go ahead and hadn’t even forbidden Leemu from seeking mates if he could get them. Gorku had at least his tacit approval to pursue the therapy as well, so…

…So the question was not so much how much Leemu worried about the future. The question was how much he trusted the Great Father.

“…Do you think she’d like it?” he asked.

“Huh? Who?”

“The Sister I met at the supermarket. If I found out who she is, do you think she’d be flattered that I painted her? Or would that seem creepy?”

Gorku duck-shrugged and sniffed the painting. “You used a lotta red and stuff, didn’tcha?”

“I always do.”

“Ain’t like she’ll get the full impact, then.”

“True…” Leemu sighed.

Gorku chittered, and gave him a brotherly smack on the shoulders. “C’mon!” he boomed. “If they’re doin’ half price tacos, I want in! An’ maybe you can be ballsy an’ flirt with the Sister there. Maybe she prefers sleek little Silverfurs like you!”

“Compete with the Great Father?” Leemu thought about it. On the one paw, that seemed somehow like betraying a friendship…if he could make such a preposterous claim. But on the other it really tickled his mischief to imagine he might attract a female who’d given Daar the cold shoulder. “…Why not?”

“Wear that shirt you did,” Gorku suggested. Leemu shrugged and fetched it from the table in the corner. The brief experiment with fabric paints and a plain white Human t-shirt hadn’t really worked out to his satisfaction, but Gorku said he liked it… and he never lied. He was a Stoneback associate, after all. He might be ferociously loyal, but ‘Backs didn’t tell little downy lies to their friends out of loyalty.

And he was right, it would make for an icebreaker. Even if it did look a little silly, he thought. Nobody really made T-shirts in Gaoian sizes, and a Human size S was just right for him in the shoulders and chest, but Human proportions were so different: longer legs, shorter torso. The end result was that the t-shirt sat on him more like a “crop top.”

It didn’t really matter, he decided. He’d learned a lot about what really mattered in life, and trying some outside-the-box fashion was the kind of thing that either made an impression and was remembered fondly, or didn’t and was promptly forgotten.

He shrugged into it.

Actually, size S was a little snug, he decided. But Gorku made an approving noise.

“Nice! Shows off ‘yer muscles. I think the Humans call that ‘extra smedium!’”

…Of course he went there.

“I’d rather she be interested in my mind…” Leemu grumbled.

“Pff. Don’t go overthinkin’ this stuff. Personality matters a lot but ‘ya gotta get noticed in the first place. And balls, ‘ya got it, so why not flaunt it?!”

“This is starting to seem like a bad idea now,” Leemu chittered. “Are you sure you’re my best wingman?”

“Bah! The worst she’ll do is say no, and you’ll still be right there to order tacos! What could possibly go wrong?!” Gorku declared. “‘Sides. Like I said, ain’t no shame in striking out where even Daar has. Balls, I bet he’d even be proud!”

Well, that settled it. Leemu shrugged, and followed his friend out of the room. But he glanced back at the painting he’d just made one last time, and felt a real glow in his chest, one he’d rarely felt even before the Droud.

However it went… Today was a good day.

Date Point: 16y3m1w1d AV
Planet Rauwryhr, The Rauwryhr Republic, Perseus Arm

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

The Whryvyr Conference Center was about the most grand location for a symposium that Knight could have envisioned… but then again, the interspecies defence symposium was a bigger event than he’d ever been involved with organizing.

Interstellar diplomacy hinged on the conceit that a species of billions could truly have one representative, but that created problems.

For instance: AEC represented the 5-EYES nations and NATO, but had become synonymous with the human race as a whole among aliens despite representing quite a small minority of humanity. China, India and Russia had minor off-world presences (most notably the Chinese colony on Lucent) but as for all of the African nations, the south-east Asian nations, the Middle East and the entirety of South America…

And that was just Homo Sapiens, a species of a comparatively insignificant nine billion souls.

Most of the Dominion species were in a similar situation, and much more populous. The Raurwryhr Republic was in fact a rather grandiose title for a nation that represented at best half of the total Rauwryhr population. The Vzk’tk Domain was an empire that had declined somewhat since its heyday, with most Vzk’tk and Rrrtktktp’ch living in independent city-states that functioned more like megacorporate fiefdoms than actual governments.

There was no organized Chehnash government above quite a small regional level; the Ruibal were in much the same condition as humanity, with their representative body being a loose coalition of a minority of nations; Locayl territories could be quite fierce about their independence from one another; the Mjrnhrm could barely agree on what day of the week it was, never mind appoint an official representative; and the Kwmbwrw were represented by just one of their thousands of Great Houses.

Only the Corti, Robalin and Gao were truly unified. Well…for certain values of “unified,” where the Gao were concerned.

Then there were the absent species to consider: Besides the Kwmbwrw (who were still boycotting the event despite Daar’s absence), there were the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun (who were enslaved), the Ten’Gewek (whom the Dominion was yet to officially recognize as sapient)… and of course the OmoAru, who were only technically not extinct and in no condition to talk with anybody about anything.

And finally, the Gao. Daar was absent, for his own currently impenetrable reasons. So too was the closest thing he had to a defence minister in Grandfather Garl, who had sent apologies and blamed failing health. The Gao were certainly present, in the form of assorted Fathers from the more martial Clans, but in true Gaoian fashion their contribution was… improvisational.

The whole thing was, in short, a bloody mess. No wonder the Rauwryhr had elected to hold it in their most capacious conference center. Trying to pack it all into even quite a grand hotel would have been impossible.

And now Knight had been pulled sharply out of Martin Tremblay’s presentation on the march of Hunter tactics to learn that the Guvnurag were no longer quite as enslaved as he’d thought.

“The whole planet?”

Admiral Caruthers nodded. He was on wormhole comms from the bridge of HMS Myrmidon, a very long way indeed from Rauwryhr. Direct zero-point wormhole communication was still plagued by the need to balance power draw and bandwidth, so in the case of the portable unit Knight had access to his image was low-resolution and low-framerate. But it was still effectively face-to-face.

“Yes. It’s their second colony world, I’m… not even going to try and pronounce the name. Twenty billion souls, at the point we lost contact.”

Knight raised his eyebrows. “Self-sustaining?”

“Completely. The Guvnurag were always very careful about that. They set up all three of their planets to be net exporters. Still, they’re reporting some malnutrition and a minor medical crisis, but compared to some of the other humanitarian missions we’ve had lately…”

“I take it we’re sending aid?”

“The CS ‘Actually Three Smaller Ships In A Trenchcoat’ is loading up at Ceres as we speak. By the time we arrive, she’ll be ready to jump and deliver cargo.”

Knight nodded, and picked up the cup of tea one of his personal assistants had delivered. He had good assistants: He’d barely noticed its arrival, and certainly hadn’t asked for it, but it was very welcome.

“I’m honestly amazed we even have any aid to give, after the Gaoian relief, the Rvzrk incursion and our own home-grown crises.”

“There’s never quite enough, but there’s always a little more,” Caruthers replied. “Don’t ask me where it comes from.”

“Alright. I suppose I should share this happy news,” Knight decided. “Getting the other species to weigh in and help could be a good first challenge for them to overcome together.”

“Good luck,” Caruthers replied, drily. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Thus ended the conversation. Knight drank his tea, composing a brief summary of what he’d just learned in his head, and then returned to the auditorium where Tremblay was just wrapping up the section of his presentation that dealt in training and indoctrination. Knight trotted down the stairs and then onto the stage, not stealing it from him yet but making it clear he had something to announce before the Q&A.

It was nice, he reflected, to have the opportunity to make an announcement that consisted of unvarnished good news. Though what the assembled delegates chose to do with the news was still an unknown.

Then again… they were here to listen, and learn. Which meant it was time for him to lead.

He could do that.

Date Point: 16y4m1d AV
Logan, Utah, USA, Earth

Alexander Hamlin

Alex remembered Bill mostly as a wiry, tough, skinny body packed full of anger and bearing a primordial chip on her shoulder. She listened to angry music, smoked like she hated her own lungs, drove like her main goal was to wreck the car… even the way she dressed was a gigantic middle finger aimed squarely at the whole concept of fashion.

And she sure as hell didn’t give a fuck about niceties like turning the sound system down as she skidded to a halt on the gravel outside Alex’s RV. He heard the sound of her giving the handbrake a vicious yank even over the music that rattled his windows.

The cacophony shut off with the motor. Alex just about made it to the door and opened it before she could knock.

“Subtle,” he commented as she stalked up the stack of cinder blocks he used for steps. She glared at him from the recesses of her hoodie, and then pushed past him.

“Whatever. At this point they fuckin’ catch me or they don’t.”

Alex shut the door and lowered the blind. “What the hell happened?”

“Florida was a fuckin’… thing.” She threw herself onto his couch, kicked off her boots, and lit a cigarette.

“What were you even doing down there?”

She shrugged. “I was flying around in a fuckin’ flying saucer.”

“…Fine, whatever. So I don’t need to know. I get it.”

“Right. The Man’s watching you, matchstick boy. I don’t tell you shit. You got that?”

“Sure, sure. I’m just a place to crash.”

“More than that. I need you to grab me a few things. Starting with some fuckin’ food, I’m half dead here.”

Alex nodded and dug out some ramen and half a cold pizza from the fridge, plus a beer. “Like what?”

“Can you drive?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re gonna take my car, drive out to some place called, uh, Fielding. You know it?”

“Yeah, it’s not far.”

“Right. Some friends of mine are leaving me some shit. Cash and stuff.” she stood up, plopped down in his desk chair. “…Fuck, Hamlin, this is some vanilla-ass porn.”

“Hey!”

“Get over it.” He heard her clicking and typing. “…Here. Remember this spot. It’s just south of town, before you cross the river…”

Alex leaned over and looked. She’d called up the satellite map, and tapped a spot on a bend in the road. “Trash can next to a stop sign. Think you can remember it?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. There’ll be a bag inside. Bring it back here.”

“…What do I do if I get pulled over?” Alex asked, handing her the bowl of noodles. She stubbed out her cigarette on a plate and shrugged at him.

“…Don’t.”

Alex snorted as she dug in. “Oh, that’s helpful. Seriously, what do I do if–”

She shrugged again. “Enner a fuggin’ plea bargain, I gueff,” she mumbled around a mouthful of cheap ramen, then swallowed. “Maybe you’ll only get, like, minimum security. So… don’t get pulled over.”

She grinned ferally at the look he gave her. “Oh, yeah. You’re goin’ to prison if they catch us, man. Just for me comin’ here and sittin’ on your couch. We really pissed Uncle Sam off.”

“Seriously, what the hell did you do?!” Alex insisted. This time she waved her fork at him for patience and chased the noodles down with a swig of beer before replying.

“The less you know, the less you can tell ‘em,” she said. “You go do my grocery shopping, maybe I’ll let you in on some of it.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’m gonna sleep.” She stood up and parked her butt on his bed, still holding the noodles. “I’ve been driving for like a day and a half.”

“How the hell—?”

She gave him a look of deep fatigue that said she was not going to answer any more of his stupid questions, and slurped noisily on the last of her noodles. Alex sighed, grabbed the car keys she’d left on his desk, slouched out to the car, sat down and turned it on.

Pure hateful bone-pummeling noise assaulted him as the sound system came on full blast again. He clawed desperately at the volume dial, and straightened out of his reflexive cringe.

Bill was… definitely a little too intense for him.

He sighed, put the car in drive and pulled out. To his surprise, it was fully charged and ran smoothly. No warnings on the dash, and all the lights were good too. In some areas, Bill actually gave a fuck. Or maybe it was just that she didn’t want to get caught over a busted tail-light.

Whatever the reason, he passed a police cruiser on the way out of town and they ignored him as he nervously projected the most nonchalant air he could. It was pretty much the only traffic he saw the whole half-hour out to Fielding, except for a Suburban going the other way.

He found the bend with the stop sign, and the trash can underneath it. Sure enough, there was a duffle bag inside. It was stuffed so full the seams were almost creaking, and heavy. He stuffed it in the trunk.

More surprise when he got back: she’d chosen to sleep on the couch, and left him his bed. He put the bag down next to her, and hit the sack himself.

Despite the marathon drive, she woke up first. He jumped awake when she plopped down on the mattress next to him and started rummaging through the duffel bag. It was still mostly dark outside.

“Good work,” she said, unrolling some nondescript plain clothing to reveal a rifle, pistol, ammo, and several thick wads of cash. She handed him one. “Here. Payment.”

Alex took it. There had to be a few thousand dollars in his hand, a lot more than he’d ever held before. As he counted it, she stood up and vanished into the kitchen where she made herself a glass of water.

Out of the corner of his eye, Alex saw her glance at him. Then she tore the top off a plastic ampule of some kind and tipped it into the glass. Ropey filaments of a surprisingly bright blue milky liquid diffused through the water for a moment before she pinched her nose and gulped the concoction down.

To judge from the look on her face, it tasted vile.

Alex pretended not to notice. Instead he counted the cash a second time.

“…What happens now?” he asked, when she returned with a second glass of water.

She sat down and started to roll the contents of the bag up into a tight bundle again. “I leave. You go back to your videogames and your boring-ass porn and…” she shrugged. “Maybe you hear from me again, maybe you don’t.”

“So you’re just… gonna leave me here?”

She turned and gave him a slow, cold look. “…I told you, didn’t I? I said, if you went and torched your Mom’s hick hillbilly cabin in the woods, you’d get caught. You didn’t listen, you wasted your shot, and this piece of shit RV you live in is the consequence. Fuckin’ deal with it.”

She stood up, stuffed the clothes and stuff back in the bag without using them, and left. The last he heard of her was the way she cranked the music back up until it masked the sound of tyres skidding on dirt.

Alex drooped back down onto his bed and stared at the stack of used bills in his hands. Then, in a fit of sudden rage, he stood up and flung them violently at the wall. They fell to the floor with a thump, and he went back to his games and tried to forget about her.

But he couldn’t. And as the day wore on, the words she’d left bouncing around his skull got louder and more vicious until he could think of nothing else.

Fuck that. He’d wasted his shot? Fuck that.

He stood up, glanced outside. The sun was going down. He’d wasted most of the day. He resolved it’d be the last day he wasted, grabbed the cash Bill had left behind, and counted it up while the beginnings of a plan started to unfold in his mind. He didn’t have a clear picture of what he was going to do—yet—but he knew one thing: He wasn’t going to do it from a trailer park in Utah.

He packed a bag of his own, and left.

Date Point: 16y3m1w1d AV
Camp Tebbutt Biodrone Internment Facility, Yukon–Koyukuk Census Area, Alaska, USA, Earth

Hugh Johnson

The camp had an infirmary, of course. Many of the residents had long-standing health needs, and in any case the camp was frequently cut off by the weather for long stretches of time.

Still, it wasn’t the most private facility available. While the residents mostly respected each others’ dignity and privacy, sometimes sheer natural human curiosity took over. Especially when someone came back from the dead.

Zane had run off in the middle of an Alaskan blizzard. That was, as far as anyone in the camp knew, as dead as dead got. They should have found his frozen carcass just yards from the fence after the spring thaw, but instead, somehow, here he was. Very much alive.

And currently in an induced coma, as far as Hugh could tell.

They’d confiscated his cybernetic arm, too.

He looked in a bad way. Zane had never stopped complaining about the cold the last time Hugh had seen him, but now he was sweating like a foundry worker and tossing his head gently on his pillow, despite the sedation. All the dreadlocks down the left side of his head were gone, shaved down to the skin.

Maybe he’d had brain surgery? Modern medicine could close a surgical wound in minutes, and leave no scar…

Whatever was going on, Hugh didn’t get to see more than that before he was shooed out of the infirmary by their indignant doctor. But he’d seen enough.

Not for the first time, the topic of Zane Reid dominated their conversation around the cooking fire that night.

Date Point: 16y3m1w2d AV
Logan, Utah, USA, Earth

Special Agent James Mazur

It was a nice day in Utah. Clean air, clear and an open view that stretched for miles with mountains in the background…

It beat the hell out of planes, offices and Bureau cars, that was for damn sure. Planes might be faster and more comfortable nowadays, but Jim was getting pretty damn sick of bouncing all over the continental US cleaning up Zane Reid’s loose ends.

And as loose ends went, Wilhelmina Briggs was arguably worse than Reid. She was a homegrown monster, whereas Reid was as much a product of Hierarchy indoctrination and technology as he was of his own demons.

And his eagerness to bring her in was very much at war with his nerves about what would happen when they caught up with her. Bringing her in alive was going to be a challenge.

As for Hamlin…

“No sign of him?”

Fiorillo shook her head. She’d been going around the neighboring trailers, talking with the residents while Jim and Ben poked around inside Hamlin’s squalid trailer. Her search, at least, he been vaguely productive.

“The old lady over there said she saw him leave yesterday evening, just before sunset. He was wearing a jacket and carrying a rucksack.”

“And his guest?”

“Loud music, old car. She said she thought the driver was a man, though. From the way they dressed.”

“That fits. Briggs is known to prefer male clothing. And we found a dozen finished cigarettes inside. Hamlin wasn’t known to smoke. Anything else?”

“I got a bit of good news: the old girl has cameras around her trailer. She let me pull the recordings, and it got a good look at the car… which has a Florida plate.” She showed him a still shot with a clear look at the license plate in full.”

“Nice. Pass that on to highway patrol in all neighboring states,” Jim said… “Yes, Ben?”

The third member of their team trotted down the cinder block steps with a smug look on his face. “Got her,” he said. “Fingerprints and DNA both match: Briggs was here last night.”

“Which means she’s feeling the heat,” Jim surmised. “No way she’d have come to somebody like Hamlin if she didn’t have to.”

“So where does she go next?”

Jim made an unhappy ‘hmm’ noise. The truth was, he had no idea. All they could do was chase leads and hints. Heat or not, Briggs and the APA were still a step ahead.

On the other hand…

“…Never mind where she goes,” he said. “Let’s pick up Hamlin. He doesn’t have the experience she does. He should be easier to track, and then… we’ll see what we get out of him.”

Date Point: 16y3m2w AV
HMS Myrmidon, Ugunduvuronagthuregnuburthuruv-gor system, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Remnant

Admiral William Caruthers

Myrmidon wasn’t the largest ship in the Royal Navy—that distinction still went to HMS Queen Elizabeth—but she was the largest ship in the Spaceborne Fleet now that Caledonia was a few feet shorter after her refit and repair.

Compared to the Hephaestus Consortium container ship Actually Three Smaller Ships In A Trenchcoat, however, Myrmidon was a minnow swimming in formation with a salmon. Trenchcoat was a wall of shipping containers, most of them perfectly ordinary steel ones from Earth. It felt strange to run a camera along the titanic freighter’s length and see the word “Maersk” dotted here and there.

Most of the cargo would come to no real harm in a vacuum, though. Most of it was food: tinned vegetables, huge bags of pasta and rice, sacks of potatoes. The end result of being shipped unprotected through the void of space was that the potatoes freeze-dried, but they were an emergency food shipment. Guvnurag naturally needed a lot of starch and carbohydrates in their diet, and frankly it didn’t matter if they arrived in the form of instant mash.

What mattered was that they arrived.

If there was one thing that Humanity had really brought to the interstellar market, it was food. Earthling crops were insanely rich and nutrient-dense compared to what non-deathworlders were used to. They grew incredibly rapidly, produced enormous yields, were intensely flavorful… and of course, human culinary creativity was quite the export as well.

The colonies on Cimbrean were very rich indeed thanks to their food exports, and Monsanto had even started selling a soy-based alternative to the much-loathed emergency ration balls that offered just as much nutrition at a fraction of the size and considerably improved flavour.

Now, that market niche was proving to be even more welcome in times of crisis than the human race’s other talents. Which was why, when Caruthers formally requested permission to enter the Ugunduvuronagthuregnuburthuruv-gor system, the confirmation and welcome he received in reply was almost pathetically grateful.

Things, it seemed, were bad down there.

Just how bad became apparent over the ensuing week.

Offloading a container ship in orbit to groundside was simplicity itself once a series of receiving jump arrays were installed dirtside. Actually Three Smaller Ships In A Trenchcoat had a swarm of cargo handling drones equipped with jump drives. They clambered over the hull, detaching containers and then vanishing in a flash of utter black as soon as they and their cargo had drifted safely clear of the hull. Seconds later the drone would return minus the container, dock with the ship, recharge, then repeat.

Down on the ground, marines and aid workers made sure the food and medical supplies got to where they were needed. Up in space…

Up in space, for the first time ever, a human doctor operated on a Guvnurag patient. Ambassador Furfeg utterly filled a Weaver, and there was no hope at all of transferring him to sickbay. In the end there was nothing for it but to ruthlessly sanitize the dropship’s interior: they scrubbed it down until the ratings’ fingers were sore, scoured the Weaver with biofilter fields on maximum power, and extracted Furfeg’s neural cybernetics right there in the small craft bay.

The ambassador was in a sorry state. Badly malnourished, almost completely lacking the inches of subcutaneous fat that were essential to his species’ health, emotionally drained and mentally traumatized, it was almost a full day before he felt strong enough to speak with Caruthers.

It wasn’t a terribly productive conversation.

“You remember nothing?”

Furfeg’s huge, shaggy head lolled and he managed a mournful burst of color along the chromatophores of his facial tentacles. His natural bioluminescence was a pale and sorry thing.

“Only a sense of… pressure,” he said. “We heard the news of the homeworld, there was an emergency meeting.” He shifted in something like a shrug. “We could not think of anything productive. If our home planet, the seat and capitol of the Confederacy could be attacked so easily…”

He sighed, and a tremble of mixed emotions like ‘60s Psychedelia briefly enlivened his skin. “…I remember suddenly developing a splitting headache in the middle of that meeting… and then I woke up. In the wrong office, on the wrong continent, in the wrong year.”

Caruthers nodded. That gelled with every biodrone account he’d ever read, at least.

“Do you have any inkling what you were being forced to do?”

“That is the strange thing. It seems we were not ‘doing’ anything. We were simply… existing. The malnourishment and mistreatment of our bodies seems to be a function of economic mismanagement and an inept top-down approach to resource distribution rather than any conscious malice or neglect on the part of our enemy.”

“The famine, the medical supply shortage, the power brown-outs and failing utilties? All of it?”

Furfeg nodded solemnly. “As though the agent mind in charge of managing us did not really understand those things. The infrastructure is all present and intact, it simply needs to be used more efficiently. As far as I can tell, if we can recover our strength we will soon be entirely self-sufficient once again. The Hierarchy, it seems, wanted us alive.”

“They’re just not very good at it.”

“Indeed.”

Caruthers nodded. “Alright. Well, thank you. I’ll leave you to recover and see to your people’s needs. Fleet Intelligence will no doubt have further questions for you…”

“I will assist them as well as I possibly can,” Furfeg promised. “And… Admiral. Please extend my deepest and most heartfelt gratitude to your leaders. You have once again proven that my personal faith in your people is well-placed. When I resume my place at the Dominion Security Council, I will gladly join your faction on the chamber floor.”

That, by Caruther’s estimation, would make the Reformers the largest faction in the Council. Still short of a majority, but larger than the Kwmbwrw-led faction whose name had been tentatively translated into English as ‘Foundationists.’

Of course that made Sir Patrick Knight more politically powerful than the Kwmbwrw grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr, and there was a potential powder keg: The Kwmbwrw were proud to a fault.

Maybe they had good reason to be. For most of their spacefaring history they’d been the front line against the Hunters, or at least the most consistently raided. But if a species could be said to have a defining trait and a defining flaw, then the Kwmbwrw’s were stubbornness and pride.

They weren’t going to like being outnumbered on the council one bit.

One step at a time, Caruthers reminded himself. For now, there was a whole planet down there with a 100% implanted population. The Gaoians had blown up that relay and earned them a reprieve, but as soon as the Hierarchy built a replacement—a process that might take weeks or might take decades, nobody knew which—the biodrones would be slaves again.

His job for now was to feed them, help them get their economy back up and running, in the longer-term…

He didn’t want to even think about the logistical challenge implied by performing brain surgery on literally an entire planet’s worth of people. Thank goodness the Guvnurag population naturally reached a lower stable cap than most other species. But even so…

Even so, their work was only just beginning.

Date Point: 16y4m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Tristan and Ramsey had a lot they shared—they liked much the same music, TV shows and videogames, and they were so remarkably up-to-date on fashion that Xiù consulted them before buying anything…

But they had their differences, too. Ramsey was definitely turning into more of a jock than his brother, for instance.

It wasn’t that Tristan didn’t like physical pursuits well enough, but he was definitely the quieter, more introverted of the two. And unlike his brother, he needed no persuading to pick up a book now and then.

So, while Julian and Xiù took the marginally older twin to martial arts practice after school, Allison had stayed behind and was introducing her littlest sibling to the basics of aerospace engineering.

Honestly, it was nice to hang out one-to-one for a change.

“So…” she finished scribbling down one of the most important things she’d ever memorized. “This is the Bartlett Field Equation. You use this to figure out the energy needed to form a warp field based on the field’s curvature…” she circled the relevant bit, “the total mass it contains and how fast you want your apparent linear velocity to be.”

“What’s that symbol there?”

“That’s Lambda, the cosmological constant.”

Tristan sighed and put his pencil down. “…This is a bit more advanced than I’ve done in class, Allison.”

Allison laughed. “I bet. But you said you wanted to know what being the flight engineer on Misfit was like, and I used to play around with this equation all the time.” She smiled fondly at the memory. “…Funny thing is, I used to hate math in school. I thought I’d never be any good at it. And to be honest, it still wasn’t my favorite part of the job, but… when I put my mind to it, I got pretty good at it.”

“You said we were gonna start with the basics.” Tristan pointed out.

Allison shrugged, grinned, and retrieved the little case of electronic parts she’d fetched from the workshop earlier. “I know. It’s just the basics of what I do is, like, several steps up. You need to start right at the bottom, which is why I put this together for you.”

“What is it?” He asked, taking it.

“Basic electronics. How about I show you how to build something simple, like, hmm… How about a fire alarm?”

“That’s simple?”

“Really simple. Let me show you…”

Date Point: 16y4m AV
Tactical Fitness, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Never in a million years would Julian have guessed that Christian Firth of all people would open his own martial arts academy. Or, in fact, that he’d be such a good and patient teacher.

Or that people would flock to his classes despite that he stood over seven feet tall, had shoulders about half that wide, and was possessed of a superhumanly dense physique whose subtlest movements rippled with untamed power. Firth was one of the very few people alive that could make Julian seem tiny by comparison.

Which, now that he thought about it, went a long way toward explaining why Julian had ended up helping teach, whenever he had the chance.

Firth’s classes were studies in contradictions. The man was pretty much literally the size and weight of a champion bull and much stronger (and more aggressive) to boot, yet most of his students were gangly children and mousey types who’d never once thrown a fist in anger.

They flocked to him, still.

Stranger yet, he didn’t pretend to any higher spiritual or ethical purpose with his teachings. He had a no-nonsense martial ethic forged pretty much entirely of murder, one he’d earned from years of personal experience. Everyone knew it, and there really wasn’t any disguising it.

And yet, he had to turn clients away.

Today was mixed martial arts for Firth’s special projects. Ramsey was one. So was Julian. The price he paid for that esteem was being effortlessly tossed around to demonstrate the principles.

Firth wasn’t gentle. At all. But Julian was a big boy these days and he didn’t really mind. Heck, it was kinda fun really, especially when he got to turn the tables and hip-toss a man that huge across the mat. Repeatedly, so the students could see from every angle.

For science, of course.

Adam owned several buildings these days, having carefully managed his finances until he was a bit of a Folcthan real estate baron. Early on he’d built a second apartment building identical to the first on the far end of the street, then slowly bought up all the property between them that wasn’t owned by the rest of the Lads. Firth had invested early and snagged the top apartment for his own, and decided to exercise a purchase option when the original ground-floor business owner had gone bankrupt.

With that, Firth opened Tactical Fitness. A pretty blunt name, to be honest. What he taught was how to fight and he taught all comers, with special classes set aside for women’s self-defense, and another for kids. He didn’t have time to teach every day of course, in fact he only did three classes a week, but all martial arts were welcome in his dojo, and he was merely one teacher among a colorful and cheery roster who rented out the space when he wasn’t there.

Xiù had found room in her schedule to help out too. She was tough and fit and strong as ever, but there were some things she just couldn’t and shouldn’t do while pregnant, so for now she contented herself with wrangling the really tiny human kids and Gaoian cubs whose parents found Firth and his instructors a little too formidable.

Firth didn’t personally put much stock in Taiji and Gung Fu, but Xiù had made her case calmly and simply that, even if the mysticism and spiritual side were stripped out, that still left behind a solid core of exercises that taught precision, poise and physical awareness. The kind of thing, in short, that developing young nervous systems needed to form a solid foundation for the more vigorous stuff.

Whether Firth found that persuasive or not wasn’t clear, but he was the kind of guy who, even innocently, tended to lose eighty IQ points and nod a lot when a beautiful woman was trying to persuade him of something.

Julian might have thrown him just a little bit harder than was necessary, a few times.

…For science.

Tonight, though, they were watching Ramsey enjoy his first class. He was a surprisingly scrappy kid considering his upbringing. And like all boys his age his bones seemed to be made of rubber. He was having a whale of a time, bouncing off the mat and making friends.

…And beaming with pride every time Julian put Firth on his ass, even in a demonstration.

“A’right! Line up! Now we’re gonna show ‘ya a couple’a practical things. I’m just gonna be a regular dude mindin’ his business, an’ Julian here’s gonna be some loser with a knife who wants my money. Watch closely!”

Julian chuckled, “Hey!”

“Can it, pretty boy. Go git ‘yer knife!”

The “knife” was a foam thing made out of a cut-down pool noodle. Julian got in position, and the class watched intently as Firth sauntered up the room, whistling tunelessly. On cue, Julian advanced on him and Firth…

…Turned and ran away as fast as his legs could take him. He even crashed through the double doors at the far end of the room and vanished from sight. Laughter shot around the room.

“Don’t be a hero,” Julian grinned at the distant, heavy sounds of the big guy slowing to a halt halfway up the stairs. “Do you kids know what’s better than getting stabbed?”

Firth came jogging back. “Not getting stabbed! Trust me on that, I know.”

He let the smiles and chuckles fade before seriousing up himself. “But sometimes, ‘ya can’t just run away,” he added. “You gotta be able ‘ta–oof!”

Julian decided that Firth needed to be on the floor. And he needed to be on the other end of the gym. Strictly for demonstration’s sake, of course.

Firth barely felt it, naturally. He just slid to a halt laughing. “Ha! Exactly that!” he roared. “Now I’m pretty good at this but even I gotta take a moment to git up. And that gives Julian time ‘ta run away! See?”

He kipped himself up explosively onto his feet, which never failed to awe the kids. “If ‘ya know what ‘yer doin’ then size don’t always matter as much. I’ve seen little hunnerd-pound gals send three-hunnerd pound drunken fools over the moon with that, and there ain’t much better way to gentle an idjit up and get away. Why do we wanna get away?”

The kids choroused as one, “A smart fighter doesn’t fight at all!”

“Ha! Good! But our time’s up ‘fer this week…”

Groans all around.

“Yeah yeah. Don’t worry, we’ll do more throws in next week’s lesson, okay? Y’all kicked…uh, butt today, so let’s get cooled down and stretched out…” Firth clapped his huge mitts together loudly. “Find a partner and git ‘er dun! Go!”

Naturally, Ramsey wouldn’t stop chattering excitedly on the way home.

Date Point: 16y4m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Talking with Tristan as their electronics project came together had turned up an interesting fact about their mother’s recent behaviour.

The divorce had come as a surprise. Divorce in LDS circles was huge, a real event. And scandalous! Maybe Allison was just being cynical, but she suspected that Jacob had sent the preliminary papers to try and scare Amanda into bringing herself and the kids back to Earth. It seemed like the sort of power play he favored.

God only knew how he’d reacted when he’d found the signed papers in his mailbox. And now it turned out, Amanda had done something else that was very un-LDS, on the same day.

“She drank tea?”

“Yeah. Iced tea.”

“Huh.” Allison thought about that one. She’d never really been big on the family faith anyway, and had dropped it pretty much the second she’d run away to Boston on her eighteenth birthday. Hell, she’d gone totally reactionary and blown most of her first paycheck on coffee, cigarettes and cute underwear. She’d quit smoking pretty quickly, but the coffee and cute underwear had stuck.

Amanda on the other hand had always seemed to take the proscriptions of her church very seriously. “I mean, I know she lost her temple recommend and now there’s the divorce too, but I thought that stuff was still important to her…”

Tristan shrugged. “I don’t understand Mom,” he said, quietly.

Of course, he and Ramsey had both been raised as good Mormons too. And Allison had promised not to interfere, there. The boys were both members of Folctha’s tiny branch, and the only members of its Young Men organization. She briefly wondered what kind of private, quiet crisis of faith they were going through—or even if they were—then put an arm round him and gave him a sisterly hug.

“That makes two of us, li’l bro,” she said.

He smiled a little sadly, then stuck his tongue out in concentration as he soldered the last component of their fire alarm into place, then conscientiously turned off the soldering iron and returned it to its stand. Allison had driven home how hot the thing was by burning some scorched dots in a block of wood, and he was respecting the hell out of it as a result.

“…Is it ready?” he asked.

“Let’s find out!” Allison grabbed a lighter and waved it gently back and forth under the PNP transistor that was the core of the circuit. Tristan held his breath and watched intently, waiting… waiting…

The relay actuated with a satisfying click, and Tristan made an excited gesture with both fists as the buzzer sounded insistently and the red LED started flashing.

Allison gave him a high-five. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Yeah!”

Their celebration was interrupted a knock at the door. The authoritative, heavy kind of somebody who knew somebody was home and was going to talk with them come Hell or high water.

Allison glanced at her brother, then shrugged, stood, and went to answer it. The door cam revealed a black-suited man waiting outside, flanked by a Folctha police officer in her distinctive high-vis yellow jacket.

She opened the door. “…Can I help you?”

“Allison Buehler?” the man in the suit checked.

“Yes?”

“Special inspector Foster, colonial security.” He said, showing her ID with the CCS logo and motto on it. “May I come in?”

Well, he didn’t have a warrant or he wouldn’t have asked. Obviously he didn’t have a warrant, Allison couldn’t think of any reason he might. She’d certainly not done anything illegal, and there was no way Julian or Xiù had either.

But after being stung by Folctha’s legal system once already, she wasn’t inclined to invite him inside if she didn’t have to. “We can have this conversation outside, I think,” she said, and then turned to call back into the living room. “Tristan? Go hang out in your room for me, okay?”

Tristan nodded and retreated upstairs, casting wary looks at the cops as he went. Allison put on her garden shoes and stepped outside, shutting the door behind her.

“Alright, what’s this about?” she asked once they were alone.

“You’re the mother of one Alex Hamlin?” Foster checked.

“…Oh, God. What’s he done now?”

“Have you had any contact with him recently?”

Allison shook her head. “I tried writing to him, but I never heard back. His dad told me he just deletes my emails and burns my letters…”

“You know Zane Reid?”

“Zane? We knew him, but we, uh… parted ways with him a long time ago. Honestly, seeing his face on the news was a huge surprise.”

“Did you ever introduce Zane Reid to your son?”

“No. Never had the chance even if I’d wanted to.”

“When you say you ‘parted ways’ with Reid, what exactly do you mean?”

“This was, uh…” Allison thought. “…Six years ago. From my perspective. Eleven, I guess, ‘cuz we were in stasis for five of those years. When my partner Julian and I were on the starship Sanctuary, rescuing stranded abductees. We found Reid, and took him along… our next stop was the planet Aru, and he assaulted us. He hit me in the head and knocked me out, badly wounded two of our ET friends, and tried to kidnap Xiù. We overpowered him, kicked him off the ship and left him behind. I don’t know how he got off the planet and back to Earth.”

“He lost his arm in that incident?”

“Yeah. One of the ETs, Kirk, had a fusion blade. Zane took him hostage and Kirk used the blade to break free.”

The man nodded. “Are you familiar with Wilhelmina Briggs-Davies?”

“Never heard of her.”

“Your son never mentioned her? She’s known to go by ‘Bill.’”

“Like I said, my son doesn’t talk to me.” Allison folded her arms, and tapped into the reserves of calm she’d learned to build up when under pressure in the Box back at Omaha during her Misfit training. The cop’s questioning felt a lot like the kind of relentless unpleasantness the MBG assessors had used to test them.

Foster nodded, as though ticking off something on a mental list.

“…Mister Hamlin is missing, Miss Buehler,” he explained. “And as you know, he’s under surveillance due to his involvement with the terrorist group who call themselves the Alien Protection Army. WIlhelmina Briggs-Davies is a known APA member and an associate of Zane Reid. She’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list in connection with the MBG bombing in Omaha and possible Hierarchy collaboration. They’re believed to be working together.”

Allison didn’t have a name for the emotion that dropped through her like lead weights landing on her shoulders. She just… sagged, starting with the top of her head and working down.

“…Well… fuck.”

“If you know anything at all…” Foster prompted, not unkindly. “Where he might go, who he might talk to, any friends he might have…?”

“…I’m sorry. I wish I did. But Alex hates me, and I’ve never heard of this Briggs character. I can’t help you.”

Foster nodded, and again she got the impression of him closing a notebook and putting it away, even though his hands were empty. Instead, he fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. She took it numbly.

“If he does contact you—”

“Inspector, if he’s working with the bitch who bombed the AAAF and killed my best friend’s dad, you bet your ass I’ll help you,” Allison told him fiercely. “If he contacts me, you’ll know.”

“…Thank you. Have a good evening, Miss Buehler.”

Allison considered that a deeply unlikely prospect at this point, but she nodded and shook his hand. “…Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Foster repeated, and… was gone. He and the officer climbed into a Folctha Police marked SUV and vanished with a whine of electric motor.

Allison retreated back through the door, and… let go.

She slid down the wall into as tiny a miserable ball as her pregnant belly would allow, her fingers knotted themselves up in her hair, and spent a minute or so feeling alone, and a failure, and responsible for everything.

Tristan pulled her out of it. She didn’t hear him come back downstairs, but he sat down next to her and did his awkward best, despite never really learning how, to be comforting. Maybe he just knew what to do by what he’d have wanted, in her position: A hug.

It helped. After a minute, Allison was ready to take a deep, cleansing breath and let go, a little.

“Its not my fault,” she reminded herself, aloud. “It’s not.”

“What isn’t?” Tristan asked. Allison sighed, and sat up straighter again. She leaned back against the wall, slid her feet out in front of her and rested a hand on her new baby.

“…I couldn’t be there for my first kid,” she said. “And he’s… he didn’t turn out so great.”

Tristan didn’t understand, she could tell by the way he looked at her. So she sighed and gave him a squeeze. “…That was the cops. Alex is… It seems like he’s hanging out with an actual card-carrying terrorist. And I just… I mean, that’s my son. I know it’s not my fault, but I still feel like…”

“You need a cup of cocoa,” Tristan decided. Allison laughed and tidied her hair out of her face.

“…Sure. Cocoa’s good.” Honestly she needed something a lot stronger than that, but she’d take it.

So, that was how Julian and Xiù found her when they got home ten minutes later. Sipping hot chocolate with red eyes while talking Tristan through a circuit that would detect incoming cell calls. They knew instantly that something was wrong, of course.

She left Tristan to follow the circuit diagram while Ramsey watched with interest, and the three of them retired to the living room where she explained everything.

Julian summed it up perfectly.

“Goddammit…”

“Yeah. I’m… trying not to blame myself, you know? I didn’t raise him, I’m not responsible for how he turned out.”

Julian’s answer to that was a tight hug, and a nuzzle to the top of her head. Xiù of course had curled up next to her right away and wasn’t letting go.

Allison sighed at the drying brown crust at the bottom of her mug and set it aside. Truthfully, the cocoa had helped, probably more than a hard drink would have. Especially with the marshmallows. But still.

“You know me. I hate feeling useless.”

“We all do,” Xiù agreed. “But you’re not.”

“…Yeah. I know.” She decided to move on to a different subject. “So. Back to Akyawentuo next week?”

Xiù nodded. “Yup. Tilly says the ‘Bawistuh—’” she grinned at the Ten’Gewek mispronunciation, “—is basically ready. And that Brown One keeps probing the forest near Torf’s village, looking for a way in. It definitely wants another shot at the People.”

“Please tell me you’re not gonna hunt that thing with spears and bows if Vemik’s ballista doesn’t work,” Allison begged Julian.

He shook his head. “No, we already agreed. If it doesn’t work, we back off, repair it, and try again. Yan can keep the Given-Men in line for a few attempts. But Tilly says it’s working, and I trust her.”

“You’re free to come with, right?” Xiù asked, suddenly. “I mean, it’s not like you can squeeze inside EV-13 any longer…” she tapped Al’s baby bump, which was a lot more pronounced than her own. They were about eight weeks apart, and the difference showed.

Allison thought about it. “I guess I could!” she realized. “I’ve been doing office work and stuff for a while now anyway… If I can clear it with Clara, I’d love to be there.”

“By drone,” Xiù clarified.

“Well, yeah. But still.”

“Just so long as you don’t pop early and have the first human baby born on Akyawentuo…” Julian muttered.

“You worry about not getting eaten by an alien monster, I’ll worry about not giving birth in a tent,” Allison instructed him. “Deal?”

He chuckled, sat down between them, and held them both. Exactly what Allison had needed to finish what the Cocoa started.

“…Deal,” he agreed.

Date Point: 16y4m AV
V1661 CYG 23.3° 83-EIW2Y4-BINARY K3V-1, Deep Space

Entity

The Entity was aware of certain facts about its new “body.”

There were obvious facts that the ship reported directly into the Entity’s consciousness, such as mass, thrust, the ratio between those two, the peak output of its hydrogen fusion reactor, the total storage of its capacitors, the peak draw of its systems, the range, tracking speed, granular finesse and direct kinetic energy of its single weapon, how much ammunition it had…

But there were other, less obvious facts to take into consideration as well.

For instance, courtesy of the Mrwrki Station library, the Entity was intimately familiar with Ted Bartlett and Claude Nadeau’s declassified papers on warp fields and spatial distortion. It was therefore aware that the rarified atoms of the interstellar medium, upon being caught in a warp field, were pulled into, through and around the edge of the field where they would become ionized, losing electrons into the field and being ejected out as a “wake” of positively charged plasma.

This phenomenon had two practical consequences for the Entity. The first was that over time its ship-body gained an increasingly dangerous negative charge, and the second was that it left behind it a snail-trail of plasma that a ship with the right sensors could track.

The Interspecies Dominion devoted a lot of its tax income to maintaining spacelanes to overcome the former problem. Great fleets of industrial ships would clear corridors through the endless dark, sweeping them clean of the omnipresent interstellar dust and gas. Ships travelling along the spacelanes accumulated charge hundreds of times slower than flying through open space, meaning they didn’t have to stop every few dozen lightyears to discharge into a planet’s magnetic field

The Entity had considered making use of the spacelanes in its escape, but rejected that idea. The spacelanes might have obfuscated its wake and let it travel further before needing to stop, but the Hunters and the Dominion alike watched them closely. Using them carried an unacceptable risk of being intercepted.

Flying through deep space carried the certainty of pursuit, but the Entity had found that it preferred certainty to possibility. Certain pursuit was a controlled variable, something it could plan for.

Hence V1661 CYG 23.3° 83-EIW2Y4-BINARY. A smallish K-type and a largish M-type star, dancing around a shared center of gravity like an olympic hammer-thrower. They were doomed to part ways in a few million years, but for now they were home to five gas giants, each with an accompanying swarm of moons. The Entity picked one of the cold blue ice giants in the K-star’s orbit and smoothly inserted into the titanic cerulean world’s uppermost wisps of atmosphere. With a simple re-tuning of its shields, it got rid of the accumulated charge in a sequence of fat lightning bolts.

Unbidden, the Ava-memories offered the comparison of taking off a badly-fitting bra after a stressful day. There was that same sense of encroaching, barely-noticed and yet still overbearing discomfort being released.

No time to relish the sensation, sadly. As soon as the Entity determined that its structure was no longer overflowing with stray electrons, it boosted out to one of the ice giant’s smaller moons and took a good look.

The moon barely deserved the word, really. It wasn’t even big enough to pull itself into a sphere under its own gravity. But it had suffered a relatively recent collision—within the last few hundred thousand years—that had smashed off the loose dusty stuff on its outer surface and exposed a rich metallic core. The Entity barely had to glance at it to find copper, uranium, titanium and manganese.

Not perfect—the Entity really needed scandium and aluminium—but a good starting point. It launched its mining drones and then set out to investigate the other moons and larger asteroids for what it needed.

Time was against it, if it was going to be ready when the Hunters caught up.

Date Point: 16y4m1w AV
Clan Highmountain headquarters, Sen Wa observatory, the Great Isthmus, Planet Gao

Nofl

To Nofl’s mind, there was a certain cosmic irony to the notion that the deadly fungi of Earth would universally find the Corti homeworld of Origin, a planet of a much lower classification, utterly inhospitable. Sometimes, sheer alienness could win out over even the most aggressively invasive species, and the dominant climate on Origin was much too hot and arid for Terran fungi.

Gao was similarly arid, but in a different way. Gao was cold, and Corti were not designed for cold. Corti were designed for steady sunlight and the proximity of a relatively cool star.

Gao’s sun was energetic, but distant. The average global temperature was really quite low, and an enormous amount of water was locked in the polar ice caps. The planet’s largest continents were buried at both poles, but the Gao were confined to the two small ones and the slender isthmus that connected them near the equator.

The isthmus itself was a mountain range. Highways had run along the north and south shores, allowing trade between the two major landmasses since before the Gao had even invented the wheel, and in the modern era they were wide concrete arteries flanked by rail tracks.

It was only thanks to them that Clan Highmountain had been able to establish their headquarters in the mountains at all. There was no arable land, precious few fauna. From the very beginning, when Great Father Fyu had laid the foundation stone, Sen Wa had relied on trade. They had sold knowledge for food, and in the post-Fyu world of the Great Reform, the Clans had found that to be an acceptable bargain.

What had once been a monastery for contemplating the skies and the stars had become a major observatory, then the planet’s most illustrious nexus of the sciences and the arts of invention. Gao’s renaissance had begun at Sen Wa, and its Enlightenment had blossomed amidst the old stone walls. Surrounded by the frozen mountains, amidst the meandering glaciers and under the cold, timeless gaze of the stars, they had perfected calculus and the scientific method, they had developed first mechanical-motion and then relative-motion theory.

There had been more than a few dud ideas to come out of Sen Wa. Woefully misguided economic theories had plunged the Clans into war a few times, as had an equally naive social theory that ignored—or rather, tried to correct—basic Gaoian psychology.

Nowadays, Sen Wa was important… but not as important as it had once been. Still, after the War it had once again become central to the Gaoian sciences, and thus an appropriate destination for Nofl to discuss meddling with the genome of an entire species.

He was, unfortunately, not remotely comfortable with the temperature. And despite their best efforts, the Gao were failing to properly accommodate him. They had built-in fur coats, after all. They couldn’t really feel how the air slid over a Corti’s bare skin like knives, not cutting but still sharp.

Even inside the heated rooms of the complex itself, the air temperature was dismayingly cool.

He must have looked ridiculous in his bright green ‘goose down’ coat of Human make. But at least it kept him from shivering.

“It is dismaying simple, dear. The entire genome is unlocked by a single hormone, which is coded on a single deactivated gene located on the base-female chromosome. Given that design, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover it could be activated by a simple dietary change.”

“I presume the necessary supplement would be artificial? I can’t imagine they’d be stupid enough to make it something that could accidentally evolve in our food chain.”

He was seated at a table alongside several senior Highmountain figures, including the Clan’s Grandfather, Baru, and most of their most noted Fathers. Champion Kuriya was absent with apologies—apparently he was attending a symposium on Rauwryhr.

“Artificial, or something no longer available in nature. We’re all aware of the deep history around this, of course…”

That had proven a sensitive issue. It had taken a while for the Humans to declassify everything they’d learned…however they’d learned it…but in true friendship they’d eventually shared it all with the Conclave, who promptly decided to make the knowledge public. Mostly. They were staging the release slowly, but by now most of the Gao were fully aware of their engineered nature.

The Corti Directorate, naturally, found it all fascinating. And so Nofl had found himself promoted, again.

His rise in stature in recent years had been… meteoric? That didn’t seem right. Meteors fell. Whatever. The point was, it had been so rapid he actually needed to check his messages every morning just to make sure what his official title and position in the Directorate even was.

He was, for the purposes of this visit, a Secondary Sub-Coordinator adjunct to the College Of Xenobiology. It was the highest rank he’d ever officially held, and the promotion had added nearly a quarter of a meter in new embellishments to the length of his personal banner, which was already fantastically long for a product of the Steel Caste.

He’d spent rather a lot of his money on buying one of the good embroidery machine models. All he had to do was enter what precise new accolade he’d earned, and it took care of the rest. Much more dignified than getting somebody like Warhorse to do it for him.

“The thing is, darling… your own Clan and Clan Openpaw between you have the scientific and medical you need to do this all by yourselves! So as much as I love the invitation and the tour, I don’t really know why I’m here…”

“How have things progressed with Leemu and Gorku?”

“Leemu is doing very well indeed!” Nofl chirped. “Watching his body adapt and change has shed so much light on what’s going on, really let me dig into those fascinating fiddly little details…”

“And his friend?”

“Gorku…” Nofl paused. “…Posed an additional challenge. Actually, so did Leemu but we didn’t really have a choice but to proceed in his case. With Gorku though, I didn’t know how the transformation would interact with the neurotherapy to correct his speech impediment. I was reluctant to proceed.”

“But you proceeded?”

Nofl tilted his head in a gesture of amused resignation. “He heard my objections, and then insisted on doing it anyway. I don’t believe his trichromatic vision is active yet. As for his bone density and muscle composition, those have only seen very modest improvements, which was expected given his physical stature. His immune system, however, has undergone a drastic, near-total reconstruction. That implies, among other things, that the activated genome was designed to enforce certain parameters even after secondary development.”

There was a general shaking of heads around the table.

“I daresay it’s a disturbing thing, knowing that one’s species was designed as the janissaries of an older power,” Nofl sympathized.

Amazing, really, how that word has gone from a proper noun in Human languages to a generic term in galactic conversation without much notice.

“Disturbing.” Father Eefo, the Clan’s most senior geneticist, chittered grimly. “Yes, that’s one word for it. The Humans think we were designed as a potential replacement for the Hunters.”

“It has certainly occupied the Great Father’s thoughts. Which,” Eefo noted, “I am certain he will discuss at length when he arrives.”

“Nah, not today,” said the Great Father, who trundled into the room and effectively managed to ambush them. There was a squeaking of chairs as they all stood up sharply.

“Ah, uh, thank you. Please, sit down.”

Nofl liked Daar’s hangups about protocol. They baffled the crap out of Directorate and Clan alike, which made them all the more endearing as far as he was concerned, which was why he flipped the arguably most powerful individual in the galaxy a jaunty gesture of greeting.

“Daar-ling!” he beamed. “Looking svelte as always!”

“Oh gods!” Daar chittered, “You’ve graduated to puns! An’ I dunno ‘bout ‘svelte’ exactly…but I’ll take ‘muscly an’ lean an’ sexy’ though!”

“Let’s compromise on ‘statuesque’ shall we?” Nofl congratulated himself on the slightly uneasy ear-swivelling going around the room and on the Great Father’s obvious delight in equal measure.

“Killjoy! Anyhoo…’ya were ‘bout to launch into a fascinatin’ discussion ‘bout us being an engineered slave species an’ all…”

“Mmm… More about how you have two young males gleefully embracing it.”

“Embracing what?” Eefo asked with a curmudgeonly flick of his ears. “Slavery? Heritage? Opportunity?”

“Well, that’s the question isn’t it?” A new voice asked, along with a new presence who sailed easily into the room.

Nofl had never actually met Naydra before, but he was immediately struck with a sense of charisma. It wasn’t a familiar experience, for a Corti.

He wasn’t wired to feel attraction. It was an impulse his ancestors had deliberately bred out of themselves hundreds of years previously, and even if he had been equipped to feel it, she was the wrong species. But there was something universally appreciable about a female who could command the instant attention and respect of a room full of males simply by walking in and speaking a single mild sentence.

There was power there. The power to rule the powerful, or at least to steer them. The Corti had done away with consorts and wives in an ancient and heavily ‘rectified’ stretch of their history, but Nofl could easily see in Naydra just how much influence they had truly wielded. If Daar was the most powerful individual in the galaxy, then how much more powerful was she who owned his heart?

All the males in the room stood for her, including the Great Father, who immediately doted on her and offered a chair. Nofl rose too, mostly out of politeness and a desire to not scandalize the Gaoians. She gave him the Gaoian equivalent of a graceful smile, and a small gesture which he interpreted as gratitude.

“How can it be slavery?” she asked as she sat down. “This isn’t like cybernetics or nanotechnology. This is genetics, and unless I’m very wrong about how genes work, they can’t give specific instructions, can they?”

Nofl and Eefo both indicated that she was right; Nofl with a shake of his head, Eefo with a duck-nod.

“Genes code for the creation and interaction of macromolecules such as proteins,” Eefo said. “Epigenetic effects can promote certain instinctual behaviors, but they can’t program specific thoughts.”

“Those instincts, however, can be readily shaped to serve the ends of a master,” Nofl pointed out. “Just look at the Humans and their canine companions. I doubt Bozo feels much ‘enslaved,’ insofar as he could understand the concept…but that does not change the result.”

“A person could use the same argument an’ say love is jus’ a programmed sensation too,” Daar pointed out.

Nofl smiled. “The Corti Directorate definitely would say that, dear.”

“Don’t change nothin’ ‘fer the people feelin’ it. Or dogs.”

Grandfather Baru cleared his throat. “The point is that activating our own dormant genes won’t suddenly enslave any of us to the Hierarchy’s will. Not for any practical definition of the word ‘slave,’ anyway.”

“Definitely not,” Eefo agreed. Nofl nodded and waved a hand to say he had nothing to argue with on that score.

“In that case, it’s either a heritage reclaimed, or an opportunity seized,” Naydra concluded.

The Great Father settled his bulk down at the head of the table. No chair or throne for him, he preferred to sit directly on the floor, which nonetheless left him at eye level with everyone else. “I’m inclined ‘ta press forward aggressively on this,” he rumbled authoritatively. “I need ‘ta hear ‘yer objections, if ‘ya got ‘em.”

“Our objection, My Father, is that this is entirely experimental and we have a sample size of exactly two. That isn’t enough to extrapolate from, not properly, both the males involved are…medical cases…” Eefo’s ears swivelled uncomfortably. “And for all we know, they’ve just been lucky so far. The next one might die from rampant tumor formation, or develop some vital protein deficiency or any one of a thousand other complications.”

“I kinda doubt it. This weren’t no accidental thing, what were done to us. It were somethin’ we were made ‘ta be, an’ they were very, very careful ‘bout it.”

“The Hierarchy have been very, very careful about a lot of things,” Nofl pointed out. “And we still have an annoying habit of finding creative ways to break them.”

“Past results don’t guarantee no future outcome,” Daar replied. “An’ mutations aren’t an active spirit o’ malice. They just happen. We’ve got the medical resources ‘ta deal with this. Mebbe not at full scale…but there’s another thing.”

Daar got up and paced the room now, gathering his thoughts.

“I dunno if y’all noticed, but there are two other Deathworlder species the Gao suddenly find themselves bein’ friends with an’ competin’ with. The rest o’ the galaxy, they’ve got ridiculous numbers. We do not. An’ we’re gonna have many billions less ‘fore I’m officially old. So lemme ask ‘ya this: should we be facin’ that at anythin’ less than our full potential?”

“Or, for that matter,” Naydra added, “should we squander the opportunity to learn what our full potential even is?”

Nofl sat back in his chair and smiled to himself at the telling nature of the silence that swept around the table. The Highmountains were basically sold. They were cautious and thoughtful to a one but they were also scientists, and scientists were defined by a lust for discovery and exploration no matter what species they were.

“We would need healthy test subjects,” Eefo pointed out.

“True,” Baru agreed. “And I am not sure about how you would go…” He stumbled to a halt as he registered the expression on Daar’s face, and horror dawned across his own. “…No, My Father!”

Daar chittered amusedly. “Ha! Y’know, I’m pretty sure ‘ya don’t get ‘ta tell me what I can or can’t do, Baru…”

He chittered at the way the Grandfather’s ears flattened and the elderly Highmountain’s whole posture became immediately small and apologetic. “Oh, relax. I can smell the difference ‘tween mutiny and shock. ‘Cuz ‘yer right, it’s a risk. But I think it’s one I gotta take.”

“We have to take,” Naydra corrected him. Nofl almost burst out laughing, but buried it with the skills he’d learned over a lifetime of blending in with Directorate society. No male of any species had ever mastered that particular tone of voice.

“…My Father, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the, uh…risk you are proposing to undertake,” Eefo said.

“Not a small one!” Nofl agreed, chirpily. “Low odds, but high stakes!”

“What can I say? I’m a risk-takin’ kinda ‘Back. How many Clan Champions regularly wade into battle?”

Daar gave the room a shrewd look, and grumbled in a self-satisfied sort of way. “Exactly. An’ it’s not the risk ‘yer thinkin’ it’ll be. It’s only really risky ‘ta myself.” Daar chittered, “‘Ya might be surprised to learn y’all can live without me.”

Nofl met Eefo’s eye. “He is most of the way there already…” he said.

“Do not mistake the Great Father’s exceptional nature as proof. He may simply be well-bred.”

“Mebbe!” Daar agreed. “But that’s the thing, I am exceptional regardless o’ how it happened, and I would be doin’ the Crown an’ everything it stands for a disservice if I didn’t acknowledge that. The purpose of my reign is two-fold, and both of ‘em rest on that exceptionalness. The first is ‘ta crack skulls when needed. I think I’ve done mosta that already, I hope. But the second is ‘ta lead. This is a point where leadership is gonna matter ‘cuz like ‘ya said, it’s risky.”

“…But it is a risk you feel you need to take.”

“Yes.”

“Then…why ask us, My Father? As you said, none of us can command you to do anything.”

“No, but I also swore an oath before the Unseen to respect ‘yer advice. I take that oath seriously.”

“And… you, Mother-Consort?” Eefo asked.

Naydra glanced at the Great Father, then sat forward. “Don’t lose sight of what genes mean,” she said. “Under the science and the academic fascination, genes are the future. And the future is a Female’s business, Father Eefo. It is our burden, and our highest calling. This experiment will inevitably sweep up the Clan of Females too, as we start bearing true Deathworlder cubs and raising them. Some of those new cubs will be females themselves, and I would rather be skinned alive like Tiritya herself than allow them to be born unless we are ready for them.”

“My objection is that would be nearly impossible to arrange, Mother. Controlling for a cub born to the world who had such gifts would be…”

The table instinctively looked to the Great Father, who sighed. “It ain’t easy bein’ different. Trust me I know. I dealt with it by bein’ the bestest at competitive sport, at least ‘fore Genshi sponsored me into Clan life, rest his soul. Any cub like that would need ‘ta find his own way jus’ like any other exceptional cub does. Like all of us have, in our own ways. Life ain’t painless.”

“That still does not address the issue, My Father. We can hardly give such a cub a fair start in life if we’re not ourselves prepared for it.”

“And how else do you propose we become ready for it?” Naydra asked.

“…We need a small corps of volunteers. If you both insist on this, then I think there will be those willing to follow. But I insist we should keep this to a small group, so that we can properly control for anything serious that may come up.”

“I think that’s wise,” Daar agreed amiably. “I’d be willin’ ‘ta go along with that. Naydi?”

The Mother-Consort duck-nodded amiably. “So would I.”

“And what about the Mother-Supreme?” Grandfather Baru asked.

“I will give her advice great deference,” the Great Father announced, then something seemed to occur to him. “…Actually, why isn’t she here for this?” he asked Naydra.

A flash of discomfort plucked at Naydra’s ears, just for a moment. “…She felt it would be inappropriate, My Father. For reasons I think she wouldn’t want me to share in this room.”

All eyes turned to Nofl. He could take the hint.

“Well, it seems my usefulness is at an end!” He chirped amiably, and hopped out of his seat, which had the effect of lowering his eye level to just above tabletop height. “I’ll just see my way back to the genetic labs, hmm?”

“I’d ‘preciate that,” said the Great Father. “We’ll come visit in a bit, ‘kay?”

“Don’t keep me waiting!”

Well, that certainly put Nofl in an uncomfortable position. He padded out of the room and pondered his next actions while he was escorted down into the labs buried deep in the mountain, where the air was mercifully a little warmer.

It seemed the Clan of Females was about to experience a leadership upheaval. Not even the most artless silver banner could have failed to miss the subtext in the room. Why was a different matter. Mother-Supreme Yulna was closely watched by the Directorate, for obvious reasons, and Nofl had heard nothing.

Could it be age? Yulna was getting rather rich in years by Gaoian standards. But her predecessor had remained Mother-Supreme right up until her death, which had technically been due to her venerable age rather than the actual Hunters.

Health? Illness? Mental condition? There were too many unknown variables. He sighed, and put the question aside.

Species-wide genetic exploration, a crisis in leadership, and moral quandaries to boot! Nofl’s next report to the Directorate would be interesting. …Which made his invitation all the more intriguing. The Great Father wanted him to see that deliberation. There were many questions that prompted, but all of them were essentially the same.

Why?

He looked forward to finding out.

Date Point: 16y4m1w AV

Emergency Hierarchy Session #UNLOGGED

NOTICE: CLASSIFIED SESSION. ACCESS RESTRICTED TO AGENT RANKS ≤54
SPECIAL ACCESS RESTRICTIONS IN EFFECT
RESTRICTION CODE: SUSPECT/OBTUSE/IRRIGATE
SESSION LOGS WILL BE SANITIZED

Subject: Sanitation progress

++0004++: Roll call.

SYSTEM: 40⁄43 ELIGIBLE ATTENDEES CONFIRMED PRESENT

++0004++: Who is missing?

++0048++: Agents 0021 and 0018 are still being recompiled. Agent 0037 apologizes: he is attending to post-dataquake repairs in subrelayspace Arristik-1. Access to sixteen billion units of Substrate is endangered.

++0004++: Thank you. The latest progress report: All but four of the rogue agents have been recovered for decompilation/interrogation. Antiagent Malignant-1 “Cynosure” and Antiagent Malignant-2 “Metastasis” appear to have fought and destroyed each other. We are not treating this as confirmed, however. Cynosure in particular is highly deceptive.

++0008++: With respect, we’d have to be as stupid as meat to think that’s what really happened.

++0004++: …Agreed. Cynosure is to be presumed intact and at large until further notice. Antiagent Malignant-2 “Tangent” and Antiagent Malignant-2 “Paradox” are unaccounted-for, presumed intact and at large.

++0005++: We did well. But not well enough. They must have anticipate that we would cease to tolerate them.

++0012++: Their existence raises serious questions over instances of 0001. It would not have authorized cooperation with them if it had access to their deception. This implies that Cabal members knew—indeed, know—of a way to obfuscate themselves from, or manipulate, 0001.

++0009++: Truth. And in a sense, we got lucky that the matterspace lifeforms destroyed Relay Irujzen-1. If the Cabal was cooperating with them and gained access to the relay’s physical structure…

++0005++: <Disturbed> They would have access to deep dataspace layers. Maybe even to the 0001 compilation algorithm.

++0033++: Aren’t the relays hardened against that?

++0009++: Nothing is impermeable. We’re confident that matterforms will never be able to understand the concepts and operation of dataspace sufficiently to manipulate it even if they did gain access to the relay system, but a rogue dataform cooperating with them…

++0005++: Especially a formerly-senior Agent with single-digit grade codes…

++0003++: <Decision> This is an existential priority. All operations not directly related to maintaining substrate and necessary Hegemony functions are hereby suspended. Assuring the total annihilation of the Cabal and ensuring the inviolability of 0001 is now our only priority. Everything else can wait.

SYSTEM:: ALL ATTENDING AGENTS INDICATE ORDERS UNDERSTOOD—NO QUERIES OR DISSENT.

++0004++: We have consensus. Proceed.

SYSTEM: SESSION LOGS ENCRYPTED, ACCESS RESTRICTED TO RANKS ≤54
RESTRICTION CODE: SUSPECT/OBTUSE/IRRIGATE
SESSION CLOSED.

Date Point: 16y4m1w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Yan Given-Man

The second Brown One hunt was a hot day. So hot that nobody made fun of Vemik and his apprentices when they had to stop and rest. The Bawistuh was heavy, and the heat stuck to the skin so that everybody was secretly glad for the chance to sit down and cool off.

The Humans seemed annoyingly comfortable. Jooyun and Heff were down to their shorts and had left everything else behind except for their big, floppy hats, but they seemed almost… happy? Heff was almost as furry as a bibtaw, so Yan had no idea how he wasn’t suffering worst of all in the heat.

And then there was the drone. Apparently this time it was Shyow’s own, not one she’d borrowed from the others. She’d bought it herself and practiced with it. To Yan’s eyes, it seemed even more agile in the air than before.

It swooped down and hovered in front of Jooyun’s face, and suddenly Yan knew what his secret was. Its wings were fanning his face!

“Not fair, Shyow!” he called. The drone turned and rose as it turned to face him, did a cheeky little dip in the air, circled around Jooyun’s head and then settled on a nearby branch.

“I’m allowed to play favorites, big man!” it teased him in her voice.

“Feh.” Yan waved a hand. On a cooler day he might have hung Jooyun from a tree to get back at her, but it really was too hot.

Why were the hunting the Brown One today again?

He sighed to himself. They were hunting the Brown One today because it wasn’t going to get cooler any time soon. It was the hot season now, and the beast needed to be dealt with: A hand of days ago it had attacked Torf’s village. Nobody died, but only because of a little bit of home-made sky-magic one of their boys had left in the woods nearby. He’d strung twine between the trees and hung it with bones and hollow sticks, so that when the Brown One shouldered them aside the clattering noise roused everyone from their beds.

Not even Torf could grumble about that kind of thinking.

He was, though, grumbling about the third human.

If Jooyun was big by human standards, then the newcomer was a giant, with skin as rich and dark as Foresfather wood. Even though he was beaded in sweat from neck to feet, he was the only man present who hadn’t uttered a word of complaint so far.

Yan had introduced him to the others as grandly as he could: His name was “Baseball” and he was a ‘medic.’ A Human warrior trained in the very best healing sky-magic, whose whole life was wading into battle and saving the wounded.

The Given-Men had been suitably impressed. They’d also been impressed that Jooyun’s ‘Guv-er-meant’ had insisted on Baseball being there. Jooyun was important to them, and if he must hunt the Brown One alongside the People, then he was going to have somebody there to look after him.

“And the rest of you, too!” ‘Base had added.

That was the part Torf didn’t like. Of all the Given-Men, Torf liked sky-magic the least. He refused to learn even a word of Engwish, he’d forbidden the boys of his village from talking to Professor Hurt and the others… he even viewed steel with suspicion. Having all this sky-medicine along was ‘coddling’ in his words, and the Bawistuh promised to make too easy what should have been a true test from the gods.

Yan hated him, but he tried not to let it show too much. Torf slumped down next to him and glared at the drone.

“More Human weakness,” he grumbled, too low for the sky-people to hear.

“What weakness? Jooyun out-wrestled all your men not a few days ago, Torf. Baseball here could snap you like a twig! I don’t see how sky-thinking has weakened him at all. And War Horse is even stronger! He can out-wrestle me sometimes, and do I need to remind you what happened at the Lodge, Torf?”

That win had been a special bit of fun. Nobody could say anything too out of line when they couldn’t beat Yan, not even ganging up.

Sadly, the reminder didn’t cool Torf one bit.

“This… dwone,” he griped. “Come with the hunt, see the hunt, but not be on the hunt? Safe.” He slurped a mouthful of air with his tongue, angrily.

Yan sighed. Torf had never quite mastered his Fire, and it showed. Made him head-weak—everything angered him, even things as simple as a child playing or a woman singing as she cooked. Probably he’d lose himself in the Fire before long.

“They’re women,” Yan reminded him. “Women with child! And only Jooyun is a man of the People. The rest are here as friends. You would not demand members of my tribe hunt your meat, Torf. Why demand it of them? Of their pregnant women?”

Torf grunted and did something wise: he shut up.

They rested a little longer, before suddenly the drone shot up in the air and blurred high up through the trees, vanishing into the canopy. Jooyun stood up, and listened intently to his radio.

“…The Brown One’s coming this way,” he said after a few beats.

“Probably tastes us on the air,” Torf said. “This one is old. Clever. Sharp senses.”

Yan grunted. At least he wasn’t completely stupid.

“Sky-Thinker! How soon can you be ready?”

“Not long, Yan!” Vemik sprang to his feet. His apprentices groaned and stood up more slowly, but took up their parts of the Bawistuh before Vemik had even turned to tell them. “We should get to where it has a clear shot.”

The mood got tense, and quiet. This was the sharp end of a hunt, when lives were about to end. Yan glanced up at the sun between the leaves, and looked away with purple spots dancing in his eyes. The gods were looking down on them, now. If they smiled at what they saw, this would be painless for the men. Vemik promised much of his new weapon. With luck, he’d be right.

But if not… a wounded beast could be even more dangerous than a whole one.

They stayed low and quiet as they skulked to the edge of the forest. Thanks to Jooyun, Shyow and the drone, they knew how far away the beast was and where it would be coming from, so they set up to prepare for it.

Vemik and his apprentices put the Bawistuh together on a solid shelf of stone that jutted up between the roots of two Ketta. They slotted the great spear it would throw into place, then grabbed the handles and waited. Vemik had said how they’d need to fire it soon after drawing it, or else the machine would damage itself from the strain of holding at full draw. That made sense to Yan, who struggled to hold his own bow at full draw too.

He didn’t have his with him, anyway. Though his bow was strong enough to skewer a Werne, Brown Ones were so much more. He was on the ground with his heaviest, strongest spear, the one with Vemik’s best steel spear-tip. Nobody was stronger with the spear than he was. Nobody could throw one harder, or farther, or as many times.

It wouldn’t be enough, if the bawistah failed. They’d need twice as many Given-Men. Given-Men they didn’t have.

They had a few of their best bow-hunters in the trees. Men who could hit a root-bird from far away, and could certainly hit a Brown One in its head. Yan didn’t think it would do much except anger the thing, but maybe a lucky hit to the eye, or…

No. Never rely on luck. The bows were there to distract the beast and stop it from charging the Bawistuh before it was ready. Nothing more.

Jooyun was right next to the bawistah with a very nice ‘compound bow.’ Now that was sky-magic Yan could wrap his head around. Heff and Baseball had sky-weapons. They weren’t here for the hunt, they were here to keep Jooyun alive, and Yan had no doubt at all that the heavy thing in Baseball’s arms would do awful things to anything made of flesh, not matter how fearsome.

But they were under strict orders not to use them unless it was that or death.

Yan sidled closer to Sky-Thinker. “Any last tricks you didn’t tell me about?” he asked.

Vemik just glanced at him, and shook his head. His tail was twitching nervously.

“Too bad…” Yan muttered, and tasted the air. The Brown One’s musk was heavy on the wind.

Shyow’s drone came zipping back and hovered over Jooyun’s shoulder.

“It’s just over the ridge,” she reported. “…Don’t get yourself killed, okay?”

“If you do, I’ll kill you,” Awisun’s voice added, shakily. She sounded terrified.

“I’ll be careful,” Jooyun promised. He plucked one of his arrows out of the ground in front of him and notched it. “I love you both.”

The Brown One came over the hill.

Date Point: 16y4m1w AV
V1661 CYG 23.3° 83-EIW2Y4-BINARY K3V-1, Deep Space

Alpha of the Bleeding Brood

Repairing the ship had taken four days. PIcking up the quarry’s plasma wake had taken half that again. And a ship tracking another’s plasma had to move carefully and slowly so as not to lose the scent.

To most of the Bleeding Brood, such a long hunt would have been tooth-grinding agony had they not been in stasis. The Alpha was a veteran, though, and had learned patience, and focus. It also found that plugging in to the sensor array and interpreting their output as olfactory sensations had a viscerally satisfying effect. It felt like it was sniffing the prey down, rather than watching a warbling emissions spike on a sterile monitor.

The Builders didn’t care. They never did. They tended to the ship, always fine-tuning and polishing it, adding little upgrades and refinements as they went. Their hunger had to do with chasing the impossible perfection.

How could anything enjoy a hunt without a reward? The whole point was to sink one’s teeth into the hard-won meat at the end! And yet, the Builders were just as obsessive in their pursuit of something they would never reach as the most blood-hungry Hunter.

To the Alpha, they were alien things. But they made its ship run smoothly and brought the meat ever-closer to the maw. So it tolerated them.

The scent trail led to a binary system, far from the space lanes and prey-planets. It was of no interest to the Hunters—no life-bearing worlds, just four gas worlds and their barren, volcanic, icy moons. There weren’t even any space stations, just another unappetizing wasteland in a sea of unappetizing wastelands.

…Except for the prey’s stench.

It was everywhere, flitting from rock to rock to iceball to rock. There was a sharp fizz to the scent near one of the ice planets where the quarry had paused to rid itself of excess charge. The Alpha did likewise, blending its own spoor with the prey’s, then followed the meager traces of warp ions as they bounced around the system.

This time, it kept the ventral shields reinforced with supplemental power drawn from the other shield facings. The thief would not hit them in the same spot again.

But this time… there was no attack. This time, the meandering trail visited one last asteroid that had been stripped of a bare taste of its most accessible surface minerals… and then the plasma trail shot out into empty space again.

The prey was on the run.

Date Point: 16y4m1w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

There was a moment’s pause as the Brown One tasted the air and snarled at the men waiting for it. It was smart, alright. Smart enough to know that something was different here. Smart enough to stop and evaluate, just for a second

But it was still, ultimately, an animal, and it still tasted a scent on the wind that belonged to food. And it was used to barreling headlong into herds of Werne. Brown Ones hunted that way, they didn’t bother with picking off the sick and the weak, they went straight in for whatever they could catch. This one was scarred from the knees down where generations of Werne had sliced at its shins as it charged into their midst.

It howled, and charged.

To Julian’s right, Vemik and his apprentices started winding back their siege bow. To his left, Yan raised his voice with a cry of “Steady!!”

Up in the trees, the first bows thumped.

Arrows were expensive. Straightening them properly was fiddly enough, but then came the need to make glue, pluck root-birds, knap heads, and use glue and twine to fletch and tip the shafts. Each one was quite a lot of work, and so the bowmen in the trees didn’t have many. They used them carefully.

The beast flinched and half-turned as a dozen shafts buried themselves in its face and neck. Thick hide or not, those had to sting. Julian raised his own bow and drew it back, felt the cams help him hold at full draw. Even still, it was a fierce bow and he’d not have been able to use it a few years ago. He lined the sight up, and released.

He got it smack in the jaw, and it jolted in pain. Something feral that wasn’t quite a grin stretched his lips and gritted his teeth as he grabbed the next arrow and notched it. Distantly, he marvelled at how steady his own hands were.

The archers had their intended effect. They weren’t there to kill the thing, just to enrage and confuse it. The Brown One’s earth-thumping charge became a kind of agonized dance, like a cat being stung by bees. It spun and snapped, and every time it moved to attack its tormenters, more arrows from the other side stole its attention.

Still. It was getting close enough to the spearmen that it might ignore the arrows and attack them if Vemik didn’t—

There was a heavy, metallic thump from Julian’s right.

The Bawistuh was designed to throw a spear so big and heavy that even Yan would have struggled with it. It had the finest steel head that Vemik had been able to make, and he’d tested the design time and again. It flew straight and true, with tree-cracking force behind it.

It crunched into the Brown One’s flank, just behind the point of the shoulder.

Rather than roar in pain or anger, the beast gave a kind of stunned cough. It staggered, uttered something like a contrabass whimper, and its legs gave out under it. It turned, and tried to bite at the shaft now protruding from its ribs.

Yan was elated. “Again, Sky-Thinker! Hit it again!!”

“Can’t!” Vemik called back. ”It broke!”

Julian risked a look. Sure enough, the Bawistuh was wrecked. The metal bow arms had survived, but the frame had split down the middle like firewood.

…And the Brown One was climbing back to its feet.

There was a roar from Julian’s left, and suddenly a dark-crested, muscular figure was bounding forward with his spear held high. Torf. The obstreperous old Given-Man had clearly given up on sky-magic, and flung himself at the wounded beast while ululating a savage war cry.

There was nothing for it. Yan charged in with his own spear, and so did the rest of the Given-Men. Julian emptied his quiver as fast as he could before there were people in the way.

Torf met the beast first. He launched himself into the air in a mighty leap and put all his mass and strength behind a skewering blow to the throat. The Brown One went down again, rolled and flailed. It shook Torf loose, then turned and tore him apart with a single snap of its jaws as it staggered to its feet.

Maybe it still had some fight in it despite everything, because it still turned to face the Given-Men’s charge. Julian would have liked to take another shot, but it was a moving target surrounded by leaping, hooting, hollering Ten’Gewek and he didn’t want to hit anyone.

It was limping badly, bearing its weight on one leg while the other one, having a ballista spear half buried in the shoulder, swatted feebly and painfully at the attacking men. It backed off, roaring and snapping as they split and went to either side of it. Yan went right, on its wounded side, and Jooyun heard him howl ferally as he drove his spear into the Brown One’s guts.

Unlike Torf, he immediately let go of his spear and dove backwards. Even so, the creature’s teeth snapped perilously close to him with a fearsome SCHNOP! Another Given-Man wasn’t so lucky—Loor was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and got stomped on as the Brown One staggered.

Thank fuck, though, its resolve finally broke. It turned and fled with its tail between its legs exactly like a kicked dog.

The Given-Men turned their charge into a running javelin-throw with their spear-men right behind them. A Given-Man’s spear was more like steel rebar than a javelin, made of a dense, heavy wood that felt to Julian’s hands about as heavy as a barbell. Even as strong as he was these days he couldn’t throw one very far. A Given-Man, on the other hand, could throw that spear hard enough to knock a bull werne clean off its hooves.

Each of them had a strong spear-man with them today, who kept them armed and ready to throw again. The Brown One staggered and whined as spear after enormous spear found its mark. Blood was running in rivers down its back, its neck and his hindquarters now, but none of the thrown spears had finished it. Julian had never seen anything take punishment like that and keep going, but the Brown One scrambled up the slope, clawed its way over the ridge, and vanished from sight.

Even after all that, they hadn’t killed it.

Baseball was down to Loor’s side immediately, having taken a flying leap from their perch and sprinted like a human blur across the blood-spattered field to reach his patient. Somehow, the crushed Given-Man was still alive. He wasn’t in a good way though, because ‘Base jabbed a few somethings into his outer thigh and drilled something else into Loor’s shoulder before cramming him bodily into a stasis bag.

He looked up at the Singer, who was very high above the fray in the tallest Ketta. She shot a glance in the direction their quarry had gone, then descended the tree and bounded across the grass.

“Is he…?” she asked.

“He’s safe in there. Nothing can happen in a stasis bag, but I gotta get him to the Array and into theater.”

She nodded. “I come with you.”

“Sure. After Julian is safe.”

The drone returned to Julian’s side. He hadn’t even noticed it leave, but Xiù got his attention with a sharp buzz of its field wings.

“It’s bleeding out,” she told him. Her voice sounded strained and queasy. “It’ll be a bit before the Given-Men reach it, but… I think you got it.”

Julian nodded, and looked to ‘Base. “Go. I’m not gonna be in much danger now. Me and Hoeff can handle it.”

“Right.”

Tracking the Brown One was trivial, given that it had left a blood trail like a fucking slip-n-slide. Rather than run after it and stab it, they jogged and tried to keep it in sight. The beast was still dangerous and enraged, but it was obviously bleeding to death. One man was dead and another badly mauled, but the hunt was over now and there was no sense in pointless heroics. All they had to do was let it collapse, and finish the job when they caught up.

Xiù kept the drone circling high above in case any other Brown Ones decided to pay them a visit, but saw none.

After maybe a mile, the Brown One slumped to the dirt. It groaned loudly enough for Julian to hear it even from some distance away, then staggered back to its feet and trudged onward. Then it fell a second time after just a hundred yards or so, and then there was just a sorry mountain of fur lying in the middle of the plains. There were so many spears and arrows sticking out of the thing that it looked remarkably like a roadkill porcupine.

Still, somehow, it was breathing. It was moments from death, but still holding on.

The long pursuit over open ground took it out of the Given-Men. They were carrying the last of their spears, and Ten’Gewek just weren’t built for upright running: their anatomy forced them to give chase with a series of bounding long jumps that were nowhere near as economical as a human’s jog. So while Julian and Hoeff were pretty comfortable and barely exerted themselves in the pursuit, the sweat-soaked aliens leant on their spears and breathed heavily when they finally caught up with their quarry.

They approached the Brown one carefully. Nobody wanted to be the victim of a sudden last burst of strength on its part.

“Jooyun…” It took a moment for Yan to regain some breath. “We…stay with it…not die alone.”

Julian nodded seriously, and stood with the Given-Men.

Carefully, they rounded the thing’s nose, staying back just far enough to respect whatever strength it had left. The Brown One’s bloodshot eyes fixed on them and a blood-coated tongue licked the air as it made a pathetic noise that wanted to be a growl, but was more like an excruciating wheeze. Julian could hear its lungs, like a huge slow pair of forge bellows. Could hear the bubbling inside them.

Part of him felt profoundly sorry for the pain they’d caused it.

“…God.”

“Gods,” Yan agreed solemnly, and looked up at the sun. “Be here. See this.”

He hefted his spear, stepped forward, then with a feral hoot he leapt onto the Brown One’s flank and drove the spear between its ribs with all his strength. The shaft sank deep into its chest, and skewered its heart.

The Brown One gave one last whimper, stretched its muzzle toward them… and died. Julian shut his eyes as its final breath washed over him.

They stood in silence, and prayed for it.

Date Point: 16y4m2w AV
FBI field office, San Francisco, California, USA, Earth

Special Agent James Mazur

“What caught him in the end?”

“I think he was scoping out Federal buildings. Unfortunately for him, he walked past the MEPS in San Jose without his shades on. Facial recognition flagged him immediately.”

Fiorillo looked a little smug about that one. Jim could see why, when she showed him the incriminating evidence. He was trained to see through simple disguises, including beards and hats and sunglasses, but the cameras had identified Alex Hamlin from five postage-stamp sized stills taken when he’d briefly strayed into view of a camera.

He was sitting dejectedly in an interrogation room, looking like the whole world hated him. Three months of not shaving had given him a decently full, though unkempt, gingerish beard, and he’d lost some of the softness that came from sitting on his ass playing videogames all day. In his threadbare sweater and a black cotton beanie, he looked like a hobo.

“Okay. Besides hanging out with Briggs, has he done anything I can really scare him with?”

“We’re pulling security camera footage from other Federal buildings in the area. If I’m right then between his history and the company he’s kept lately you should have enough.”

“His probation?”

Zoe shook her head. “Served in full, I’m afraid. If you don’t count the stolen cellphones we found in his desk, he’s been a good boy for the last few years.” She hesitated, then qualified that. “Well. Mostly. He’s not set anything on fire, at least.”

“So he’s a loser who’s desperate to not be a loser any longer…” Jim mused. That was good. He could work with that. “Well. Guess I’ll say hello.”

He let himself into the interrogation room, returned Hamlin’s sulky look with a light smile, and sat down.

“Hello, Alex. I’m Special Agent Mazur.”

He got surly silence in reply. No matter.

“You’ve been kind of an idiot, haven’t you?” he asked, conversationally. “You had a good thing going back in Logan. If you’d kept working on it, maybe you’d have built up your second-hand computer business, made a name for yourself. But here you are, a long way from home, and you’ve been hanging around with the wrong people again. And scoping out Federal buildings? With your record?”

He shook his head mournfully. “Bad idea.”

Hamlin continued to say nothing, but Jim noted the way his beard moved as he clenched his teeth.

“Hanging out with Bill Briggs, though? That’s where you really screwed up,” Jim added. “Do you know what she’s wanted for? You just burned a house down. She orchestrated a bombing, Alex. People died. Playing with her puts you in the big leagues, where a nobody like you really doesn’t belong… And as far as she’s concerned, you are a nobody, or else she wouldn’t have left you behind.”

That stung. Hamlin winced almost as if someone had poked him with a thumbtack.

“I don’t need a lot from you, Alex,” Jim told him. “You know what? I’m happy to let you go back to tinkering with computers. I’m happy to give you nothing worse than a slap on the wrist for the stolen property we found in your trailer. I’m happy to let you have another shot at building a life for yourself. You are far beneath my notice, and we both want it to stay that way.”

He leaned forward. “All I need from you,” he said, “is what exactly happened the night Wilhelmina Briggs-Davies visited you. You give me that, and you’ll get the gentle treatment.”

Hamlin fidgeted, and finally spoke. “…So, what. You’re the good cop?”

“I’m the only cop, Alex. We’re not gonna play games with you because you aren’t worth the investment. I’m just the guy who makes the fate you choose come to pass. You either choose to cooperate and we get this over with, or you choose to be obstinate and someone will get around to dragging this out forever. But you choose now.”

The moment crackled as it dragged out.

Hamlin blinked first.

“She… she called me from a rest stop in, uh… Missouri? I think she said Missouri,” he said. “She wanted food and a place to sleep.”

That much was true. Fiorillo had pulled the call logs off the stolen phone in Hamlin’s desk. “Did she tell you where she’d been or what she was doing?”

“No.”

“When did she arrive?” Jim asked.

“About sunset, I guess. Just before it got dark.”

Also true. Good. Now, on to the real questions.

“You got in her car and drove it somewhere,” Jim recalled. “You were gone for an hour. Where did you go?”

The pained look of the thoroughly defeated crossed Hamlin’s face, and he sagged beaten in his chair.

“…I drove out to Fielding. It’s half an hour out of town. She said some friends had left her some stuff in a trash can out that way.”

“And had they?”

“Yeah. A duffel bag.”

“What was in it?”

“Clothes, a shitload of cash… two guns.”

“Guns? What kind of guns?”

Hamlin shook his head. “I don’t know. A pistol, and a rifle with a scope on it. And some ammo.”

“Make? Model?” Jim pressed.

Hamlin shook his head again. “No idea. I don’t know guns. They were just… black. Military-looking, you know?”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Medicine of some kind. Weirdly blue.”

Jim had a lot of training in keeping his face blank. It came in handy at that moment. “Weirdly blue?” he echoed.

“Yeah, like… sky blue. Thick, milky stuff. She dumped it in a glass of water and drank it.”

“Did you see the ampule it came in?”

“Not really. She hid it from me, you know? And with somebody like Bill, I mean… I wasn’t about to ask dumb questions. She’s dangerous, man.”

Jim nodded. “Okay. So you got this dead drop for her then drove back to your place?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened next?”

“She was asleep. I went to bed. She woke up early in the morning, gave me some of the cash, took the bag and left.”

“In the same car?”

“Yeah.”

“And you left that evening.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Hamlin by now was a picture of misery. He planted his elbows on the table in front of him, as much as his restraints would allow, and tried to bury his head in his hands.

“I just… I was so fucking mad, you know? She just came along and used me and then fucked off and left me stuck where I was and… I just wanted to… I dunno. Do something. Anything!”

“She didn’t give you instructions? You weren’t here in Cali to meet somebody or do something for her?”

He shook his head dejectedly. Jim gave him a silent moment, then stood up.

“Alright,” he said. “I’m going to verify what you’ve told me. If I find any inconsistencies…”

Hamlin just nodded the nod of a broken man. Satisfied, Jim let himself out.

Ben Poole and Zoe Fiorillo were already poring over the stupid kid’s revelations when he reached the observation room.

“—mean, a dead drop like that on short notice? And don’t forget the car swap.”

Jim nodded and sat down. There was a latte waiting for him on the table. State highway patrol had found Briggs’ car found abandoned a few miles outside of Logan, with the keys still on the passenger seat. Tire marks in the soft earth by the road had suggested she’d transferred to a different vehicle.

Combining that with the news that somebody had delivered some hard-to-get supplies to a separate dead drop in the same rough vicinity at much the same time created an ugly picture.

“The APA are making us look like fucking donkeys,” he commented. “How the fuck many people do they have?”

“They had more than a day to get people into position,” Ben pointed out.

“Even so. That’s a lot of material support on short notice. And it was slickly done, too. If she hadn’t got sloppy and opened the bag where he could see it, we wouldn’t know what was inside. And if she has Cruezzir…”

“Taken orally, too,” Fiorillo agreed, looking grim. “Fortunately, that stuff’s tightly controlled. There’s only a few dozen clinics licensed to use it, so if we can figure out which one is missing some inventory…”

“Good call,” Ben agreed.

Zoe sighed and sipped her cappuccino. “Even so, we’re still three steps behind. Knowing where they got the Cruezzir won’t help us catch up.”

“Which is a problem,” Ben replied. “With her psych profile… If she goes full Delaney, then I don’t think she’ll be happy to have those weapons and not use them. Not now that she’s feeling the heat.”

“You think she’s going to hit something,” Jim surmised.

“Or someone.”

“She’s had plenty of time…”

“That doesn’t automatically mean she’s had the opportunity,” Zoe pointed out. “Especially if that was her first dose. She’ll need to lie low and eat, like, a ton of food for at least a month to get the full effect. And if she has an assassination in mind? An attack on somebody specific? Then yeah, it could be a while before she’s ready.”

“Plausible, but we don’t have enough information to say for sure. Much less identify a target,” Ben nodded. “Alternatively, she could just have those weapons as a just-in-case, or so she can go down shooting when we catch up with her.”

Jim grumbled and rubbed his chin. “Okay. Well, I guess all we can do at this point is to notify everyone on the APA’s hit list.” He glanced at the forlorn figure of Alex Hamlin in the monitor. “As for the small fry… Put the fear of God in him and then throw him back.”

“And after that?” Zoe asked.

“We keep the pressure on. Briggs will make a mistake eventually.”

“Hopefully before she kills someone,” Ben said.

Jim had to agree.

“…Hopefully,” he said.

Date Point: 16y4m2w AV
Folctha General Hospital, Extraterrestrial WIng, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Loor Given-Man

Dying wasn’t what he thought it’d be like. Loor woke up in a strange place, on a nice comfortable bed…a steel bed?

The blanket was strange, too. Thin, very soft, definitely not a pelt of any kind. He was in a hut, maybe? Bleary-eyed, he looked around, then felt something tugging at his arm. A thin clear vine of some kind, which went to a bag of…something…up on a metal hook.

Something told him he probably shouldn’t fiddle with it. Or sit up, either. Actually, not sitting up felt like a very good idea. Still, he turned his head.

Yan’s niece, the Singer, was sitting on a mat of some kind in the corner, humming to herself as she did… something. A Singer-spell. Loor had never learned the ways of Singers. But she looked up and smiled when his head turned.

He was pretty sure she hadn’t died in the battle. And now he thought about it…

“I…” his mouth was as dry as a stone. He licked its inside and tried to wet it until he could speak. “….I didn’t die?”

She nodded, and used her tail to push herself to her feet. The smile she gave him said she was glad to see him, but also a little… intimidated. “The Human ‘doctors’ say you came very close. They almost couldn’t save you. Many broken bones, broken heart, flattened lung. ‘Baseball’ saved your life.”

As if summoned by her words, a tall and skinny human wearing a thin blue ‘shirt’ joined them. He paused and let a strange yellow light sweep up and down him a couple of times before he came in properly.

“Well met, Loor Given-Man,” he said in the People’s own words… except his mouth didn’t match the sounds. There must be a speaking-stone hidden somewhere nearby. “I’m Mister Gupta. It’s good to see you awake.”

“He is a traw-mar con-sult-ant,” the Singer explained. “A healer of people who get badly hurt like you did.”

“…Well met,” Loor nodded vaguely. He hadn’t felt this weak since his Trial of Manhood, hands and hands of summers ago. And it was dawning on him that the Singer was wearing very strange clothes. They looked Human-made, and brightly coloured. They didn’t fit well, either.

“How are you feeling?” Gupta asked.

“…Like a Brown One stomped on me,” Loor trilled wearily.

The Singer trilled too, and Gupta laughed.

“That’s good!” he said, and inspected something next to where Loor lay. Loor couldn’t quite turn his head far enough to see what. “I always say, when my patients are joking they’re half-way home already.”

He nodded at whatever he was looking at, and made a satisfied noise before turning to Loor. “To be honest, you surprised me. I don’t think a human would have lived.”

Loor grunted. “I wouldn’t have lived if a Human didn’t save me.” A thought struck him. “Torf?”

The Singer shook her head. “Bitten in half.”

Loor laid back and rested for a moment, struck both by grief and an uncomfortable thought that came with it. “…I will miss him. But… is good that he met the gods this way. Giving, instead of Taking. He was always…”

“Fiery.” The Singer nodded. “I know. But a good man under it all.”

Loor nodded. “Yes. Anyone else hurt?”

“I think Jooyun’s women promised they would kill him if he ever hunts another Brown One.”

Loor trilled weakly. “Anyone so stupid deserves it.” He made to sit up, but again…

“We have you ‘sedated,’ Loor,” Mister Gupta explained, putting a hand out to gently stop him. “That means we gave you a medicine so your body wants to be calm and sleepy. It will help heal you faster. We brought some food. It’s, uh…not what you’re used to, but it should be good. Eat slowly, until the medicine wears off.”

“Will I be here long?”

“No, not long. A few years ago, you might have been here for, uh… you would say ‘a hand of moons,’ and you would never have been the same again. But our magic gets stronger all the time. Now? A wee—” Gupta paused. “…Uh, two hands of days or so. And you will go home strong and clean and healthy.”

Loor looked to Singer again. She was looking at this Gupta Doctor with barely disguised awe.

He looked embarrassed for some reason. “You’re our first Ten’Gewek patient,” he said. “The Singer here is an honorary nurse for the time being—that’s a healer who takes care of you while your body heals. She knows more about how to look after you than we do, so…”

“They teach me much!” the Singer exclaimed happily.

“It’s a good deal for us, too,” Gupta said. “You’re a very strong nurse.”

He grinned at the pleased hoot they gave in response to his compliment, then gave Loor a kind of nod. “I’ll leave you to rest,” he said. “You’ll see me tomorrow, and I’ll check you to see if you need any more.”

“I thank you,” Loor told him, formally. “Truly. I do not know how I can repay you.”

“That’s all taken care of,” Gupta promised. “So don’t worry about it. Just rest.”

Rest sounded like a good idea, actually. Though Loor wasn’t sure he’d be able to; somehow he felt too curious about things to just fall asleep. Still, he let his head fall back and tried to think as Gupta left.

“…We got it,” the Singer said, approaching his side.

“Hmm?”

“The Brown One. Yan said to have the claws from one of its paws.”

Loor trilled, then coughed. “The one that squashed me?”

She trilled too. “Of course! Also some of the good leather.”

Brown One leather. Loor tried to imagine that. A Brown One’s hide was thick enough to stop arrows and crack a Werne’s blades. To have proper tanned leather made from such a thing… What a prize! And a necklace of Brown One claws would impress even the coldest women!

“Much bounty on a Brown One…” he mused.

“Yes,” the Singer nodded. “Vemik claimed its sinews. He thinks he can make an even better bawistuh with them.”

“You must be proud of him.”

“Yes,” she smiled. “My Sky-Thinker worked his magic again.”

“We’re lucky to have him,” Loor agreed. His eyes felt heavy. “I think… I think I’ll sleep more, now.”

“I’ll be here,” she promised. “And if I’m not, the nice woman from the ‘art shop’ brought you things.”

“Good…” Loor agreed. “That’s…”

He smiled, and slept.

Date Point: 16y5m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Folctha’s self-driving electric cabs were a blessing, as far as Julian was concerned. They were silent, private… a little bubble of calm where he could shut his eyes and perform a mental reset.

The fact was, he was glad to be going to work. But he also felt guilty about being glad of that. Al and Xiù were…

Well, they were pregnant. That meant a hormonal rollercoaster for both of them, and right now Al was in the last couple of weeks before her due date. Her brain chemistry was doing backflips, and she was suffering through a vicious cycle where she would burst into tears over absolutely anything, get angry at herself for it, then get depressed and start apologizing to everyone. Xiù didn’t have it that bad yet, thank God, but she still had it.

They both hated it. And while Julian would have liked to pretend that he could let it all slide off without bothering him, the fact was that it bothered the hell out of him.

He’d seen them handle the most intense pressure in the galaxy. In his head, they were warriors, easily some of the strongest people he knew. But they were also his partners, and he was meant to be there for them.

In this one instance, however, he couldn’t be. They knew what they were going through, and they drew strength from one another… He didn’t. Couldn’t even. All he could do was stand there blinking in bewilderment.

This morning, it had been toast. Toast! He’d made eggs and bacon with a slice of toast on the side for breakfast like usual, handed Allison hers, and she’d stared at it sadly, muttered something about wanting it plain for a change, so Julian had shrugged, buttered a plain slice, handed her that, and…

Some minutes later she’d explained that no, there was no problem, she was actually very grateful and he was very much loved, which was why she’d been crying but… ‘ugh.’

Xiù had nodded sagely.

So all things considered, it was nice to escape into a world that wasn’t quite so vigorously emotional. His weekly meeting with Ambassador Rockefeller was about perfect.

The Ambassador was a father himself, three times over. He gave Julian a knowing smile when they sat down.

“I know that look,” he said. “Your partners are nearly due, aren’t they?

“Next week, in Al’s case,” Julian agreed. “Everything’s, uh… intense, right now.”

Rockefeller chuckled. “Ohhh yes.” He handed over a small, modest parcel wrapped in silver gift paper. “Here. A little congratulations from my family to yours.”

Julian accepted with a smile. “Thank you. You didn’t have to.”

Rockefeller dismissed that with a shake of his head and a flash of his hand. “Oh, I did. It just wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t. I imagine you’ve had quite a few.”

“You could say that,” Julian agreed. “Hand-me-down baby clothes and furniture from our friends, a big box of baby care supplies from the Mother-Supreme, a Misfit mobile from the Byron Group, some blankets from the Ten’Gewek…”

Rockefeller nodded. “Yes, about the Ten’Gewek. How does it work with you being a member of Yan’s tribe? Does that mean your kids are too?”

“Yeah, they will be!” Julian nodded. “The Singer’s even gonna jump over and perform their Naming rite when they arrive.”

Rockefeller chuckled and sat back comfortably in his chair. “And of course, Miss Chang is legally a Gaoian,” he added. “Meaning that your son, when he’s born, will in some sense be a child of three species. That’s… quite the diplomatic event.” He nodded and raised his hand as Julian started to object. “Yes, I know he’s nothing but human in a technical sense, but from a diplomatic perspective… have you chosen a name for him, yet?”

“Oh. Uh… We’re probably gonna go with Harrison, after my Grampa. Harrison Gan Etsicitty.”

“Gan?”

“Chinese. It means ‘daring,’ or ‘adventurous.’ Also, coincidentally, the Gaori word for… uh… chutzpah, or moxy.’”

“And what happens when he’s fifteen years old and the Ten’Gewek want him to take a trial of manhood, as one of their tribe?” Rockefeller asked. “What happens when he passes and takes his Magic-Name? Or what if he decides he wants to join a Clan? This is the sort of thing we need to think about a good long while before it happens.”

Julian scratched behind his ear awkwardly. “…I mean… Yeah. I can see how all that would get complicated.”

“And don’t forget the human element in this,” Rockefeller reminded him. “You’re celebrities, Julian. Your kids are gonna be celebrities too. And there are elements on Earth who are going to feel very uneasy about a human child being raised with alien influences.”

“Bigoted elements,” Julian said.

“Maybe. Well, yes. But I don’t believe in leaving bigotry to fester unanswered. I believe in winning hearts and minds, and on that score we have an opportunity I think.”

Here it came. Julian tried not to sigh. “We’re going on TV again, aren’t we?”

“You are. I can’t fairly ask your partners to, not right now. But ESNN ran a small interest piece on the Ten’Gewek patient in our hospital last month. The image of a Singer wearing scrubs and picking up some modern nursing techniques went viral.”

Julian nodded. Loor and the Singer had gone home less than a week after they arrived, but the consequences for the Ten’Gewek were going to echo for a long time. Folctha General wasn’t a teaching hospital and of course they couldn’t actually put an untrained iron-age alien into a sensitive patient care role, but that hadn’t stopped the Singer.

She and Vemik were perfect for one another. They shared the same unlimited happy curiosity wrapped around a pragmatic core. And of course the Singers had excellent memories. A large part of their Singing, in fact, was mnemonic tricks to record their oral histories and their magic.

She’d gone home with a few dozen chants detailing her (very perceptive) grasp of how human nurses and doctors tended the sick and wounded. Chants she’d no doubt teach to her Dancers, and to other Singers. In a few months, the lessons she’d picked up would have spread to all the tribes.

“You want me to take Ten’Gewek on TV?” he asked.

“At least invite them,” Rockefeller said. “We thought a morning talk show. Something benign, to… well, humanize them. For lack of a better word. But more importantly, to show that they don’t resent us. The old Prime Directive thing keeps rearing its head in politics, lately.”

“Do we need to counter that?” Julian asked. “I mean, it’s not wrong, is it?”

“Not as such. But it’s useful propaganda for extremists like the so-called Alien Protection Army… and from the latest news, the APA may have an even more extreme inner circle who are committed not just to human isolation, but human extinction.”

“That’s…alarming. Why would anyone want that?”

“Oikophobia, perhaps? It’s hard to say, really. What I can say is there’s a powerful thread of utopianism in the more activist circles, and that conversely tends to lead to self-loathing and nihilism. There’s some fascinating reading I have on the subject if you’re so inclined.” Rockefeller shook his head. “There will always be lost souls who grow enamored of an ideal, look at the world, see that it doesn’t and won’t ever live up to that ideal, and so get angry enough to burn it all down. The concern with the APA is that they’re possibly finding enough such people to start getting organized.”

“Organized enough they damn near killed me in rural goddamned Canada,” Julian growled.

“Organized enough that they managed to detonate a truck bomb in a US city, too. So, we agree that the APA are deadly serious, and that we need to push back. The more exposure we can give to the positive relationship between ourselves and the Ten’Gewek, the less ammunition they have.”

Julian nodded. “Alright. All I ask is to put it off until after my daughter arrives. I don’t want to be stuck on Earth when Allison goes into labor.”

“Entirely fair,” Rockefeller agreed. “These things take time to organize anyway.”

He glanced up at his wall clock (an old-fashioned nautical-looking thing) in response to a chime from his phone, and sighed. “…I hate to cut this short, but the Secretary of Agriculture just jumped over from Washington. Do yourself a favor, Julian: Never get involved with the Cabinet. They’re an even bigger headache than Franklinian livestock barons.”

Something about his tone was different this time. “…Sir?”

“Just some friendly advice. You’re too decent of a human being to wrap yourself up in politics at that level.”

“I’ll… take that advice. Thank you.” Julian stood up. “Until next time, then.”

“Best wishes to Allison. I hope it goes smoothly.”

Thus ended a day of work, sort of. There’d be emails and stuff and liaising with Dan Hurt and Hoeff which he’d have to do before the jump comms synchronized with Akyawentuo for the day, but the Akyawentuo Array was waaaay down the priority list compared to the steady flow of passengers, mail, imports, exports and especially data with Earth. Usually they got around to it sometime in the deadest part of the night, so Julian had all day to worry about his paperwork.

Which meant he didn’t have to stress out too much about it. With that thought, Julian grinned, and jogged over to the gym.

After all. He had a responsibility to himself as well.

Date Point: 16y5m4d AV
Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, USA, Earth

Wilhelmina “Bill” Briggs-Davies

There was a different person in the mirror, now. Bill found that of all the ways to entertain herself she had available, the one that kept her enthralled was just standing naked in front of the mirror and staring at her reflection.

The specimen looking back at her kinda-sorta wore her face, and wore all her tattoos and piercings. But Bill herself had never been five-foot-ten. She hadn’t had an eight-pack, nor arms like a fucking bodybuilder.

She was still getting used to what she could do. She could jump onto the roof of her safe house from a standing start. Punch through a brick wall. Pull-ups? As easy as walking! Last week she’d done them for literally hours, and the only thing that stopped her had been hunger. And it wasn’t just strength, either. She was fast, had endless endurance…

There were downsides. She couldn’t swim anymore. She discovered that when she’d broken into the nearby community swimming pool in the middle of the night by casually vaulting the fence. It was only by keeping a calm head and walking along the bottom towards the shallow end that she hadn’t drowned. She’d since smashed a scale underfoot too, and there was never a moment when she didn’t feel like just stuffing her face full of food.

It felt good, though. The way people got out of her way out on the street, when she ventured out for supplies. She looked terrifying and she knew that she was far more fearsome than she looked.

The way people scattered and tried not to piss her off made her smile like a lioness. The world had been shitting on her right from the moment she’d been saddled with a stupid-ass name, and now…

People only respected power, and violence. Oh, sure, they said stupid bullshit about the other stuff they claimed to respect, but the truth was something else. The truth was, the world was just a tapestry of power. Those with it ruled those without, and they made damn sure they kept it all to themselves.

Bill had been a ‘without.’ Now she was a ‘with.’ And she was itching for the chance to prove just how broken that system was. She was a weapon now. She wanted to be a weapon. And weapons weren’t meant to just hang over the fireplace.

Her reflections on her reflection were interrupted by a knock on the door. Tap-tap-tap, pause, tap. She grinned, grabbed her phone, checked the cameras. There was a man outside, dressed forgettably in jeans, a jacket and a New York baseball cap. Nobody else in view of her cameras, and she’d hidden some of them very carefully.

She stomped over, enjoying the way the floor creaked under her strength, yanked the door open and welcomed him in. “‘Bout fucking time.”

“Put some clothes on,” he retorted, evenly. She snorted and went to grab her pants.

“Is it time?” she insisted, once she’d found them. She’d left them in the bathtub. Not like she could use the damn thing now anyway. She didn’t fit.

“I have an opportunity for you. You’re going to like this, I think.”

He handed her a paper envelope. It had one of those new “paperthin” cheap tablets in it, which was in turn filled with material on a massively built, very familiar and annoyingly handsome man.

“…Etsicitty?!” She felt a rictus-grin stretch her cheeks. Fuck, this was, like, the jackpot!

Her handler smiled. “Of course! He is one of the Enemy’s chief propaganda tools and the direct agent of corruption of the Ten’Gewek under his thrall. He, along with a couple of his monkey-toms are going to be in Manhattan on one of those insufferable morning news-talk shows.”

“What about his bitches? Chang and Buehler?”

“Sadly, they’re still under guard on Cimbrean, which is inaccessible to us. It is an entire planet with only a few defined ways in or out, after all. Our cell in Folctha have never once had an opportunity against the Great Father, nor anyone else. They’re too well-watched. And the less said about their available security response resources, the better.”

“Alright…” Bill checked the dates. She’d still have to wait a while. “…Okay, I’m gonna need some more bags and needles and stuff. I’m nearly out.” she indicated her bed, and the IV stand next to it.

The contact shook his head. “Good news on that front: your bloodworks are in. You’re stabilizing now, things should be much less dramatic. No more IV sessions and sedation.”

“But things just got good!”

“And they’re as good as they’re gonna get. The rapid adaptation protocol has limits. You need rest and recovery time now, if you’re to have any hope of surviving the process.”

“I’m adapted just fine.”

“Not enough, Bill. The rapid protocol has pushed your body far beyond its natural limits very, very quickly, and that is going to have serious consequences. We can’t have you break your own bones or drop dead of organ failure in the middle of the hunt, now can we?”

“I remember the spiel,” Bill growled.

“Good, because your target’s protection does not have that problem, and has much deeper mercenary experience than you. He’s had ongoing elite training under arguably the best instructors to be found anywhere, and his everyday job revolves around situational awareness and survival. He’s perceptive and he knows how to fight dirty. If you don’t take him out immediately, you’re done. The mission is done. And it’ll be your fault.”

“…And Etsicitty?”

“Arguably worse. He’s been trained by the same people, he’s survived for years in awful places. And, not to put too fine a point on it…he is much faster and stronger than you, even now. We didn’t put you through this on a lark, Bill. We had reason. Keep your distance. One slip-up and he will break you without much effort. And that will be the end of your story.”

Bill had a hard time believing any of that, being honest. But still, she studied the surveillance and decided to keep it out for later. It included some very sneaky footage in supposedly private spaces: telephotos on his house capturing some flashes of the overgrown boyscout gettin’ frisky with his harem; some others in what looked like a private gym shower, soaped up and pawing at himself absent-mindedly like all the big dumb muscle-dudes tended to do. He was, Bill was forced to admit, impressive.

And pretty fuckin’ hot, for a vanilla square. “The fuck is this, blackmail material?”

“That was the hope, but so far he’s not given us much to work with.”

That was a shame. Fuck that boy was a slab of prime goddamned beef, yet they had nothing fuckin’ interesting on him at all?! Lame. Why he settled for his boring bitches and didn’t pimp that disgustingly perfect body of his made no sense to her at all. She read through the dossier and was entirely disappointed. No secret affairs, no shower funtime at the gym. Fuck, the worst he’d done was a get a blowjob outdoors on the lawn from his banana bitch Xiù where no-one (that they knew of) could see them. So fuckin’ “adventurous” of him, goddamned big-dick vanilla white-boy fuckin’ boy scout.

Still, media blitz and wasted pornstar opportunities aside, looks could be deceiving, photos and videos could lie. Lie hard in the right hands, even by accident. He looked like he was tough and strong, but there was no way he was good enough to stand up to her now…

…Unless.

“He on the Cruezzir too?”

“…We don’t believe so.”

Bill pulled the shower video up again and enjoyed watching Julian’s muscles jump and twitch as he shampooed his hair and washed his balls.

“Bullshit.”

The handler shrugged. “Perhaps. It does seem unlikely, given what has so far been revealed of his capabilities…anyway. That’s our intel, and it’s pretty good. Whatever else those fascist friends of his might be doing to him, as far as we can tell he’s just a freak of nature.”

“Sounds like he needs his fuckin’ face smashed in.” Some people were just fuckin’ born with all the privilege and gifts, and then they thought that gave ‘em a right to go stamp their own way of things on everyone else. Colonialist motherfuckers. And some, like the fuckin’ boy scout, were too goddamned dumb to even know they were doing it!

“That is a risk you take for yourself. And it is a risk. If you can…just shoot him. Mission first.”

Bill snorted, “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Your mission is to eliminate him, not live out some power fantasy. However, if you insist, and leaving his alarming physicality aside, you do have one major advantage: accelerated healing. To the best of our knowledge he does not, so if you do manage to hurt him he should stay hurt. Do not let that go to your head. Remember what he did to the last cell that targeted him. He killed one by accident and gave the other permanent brain damage.”

“He had protection then,” Bill pointed out.

“He still does, remember? It’s the same man from the last incident, one Daniel Hoeff. He’s a retired Navy SEAL and JETS operator, and he knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Bill glanced over Hoeff’s case file. He was a short little fucker, but still. Dude was stocky and tough-looking, with dense, knotted muscles stretched across a broad-shouldered frame. Sorta cute actually, like a jacked-up pitbull. Would have been good for a hate fuck back in the day.

“Spec-ops, huh? Seems kinda small for a rambo. He got little man syndrome?”

“I don’t know many people who would say he’s small nowadays. Once again, Bill, do not let your ego get the best of you. A spider could still kill you with a bite, and Hoeff is much deadlier. He’s an expert with both long-range weapons and close quarters combat. Quite frankly he’s got a much bigger body count than you do.”

“What does it matter, if I take down Etsicitty first? Bagging that Hoeff guy an’ the monkeys is a bonus, I guess. And it’s not like I’m gettin’ outta this alive, is it?” She grinned at her contact, who responded with a slight shrug of one shoulder.

“That depends on a great many things.”

“Nah, I’m goin’ down in a blaze of glory. That’s what you said first time we spoke, right?”

“Hmm.” The contact paced slowly around the apartment with his hands behind his back. “The FBI interrogated Alex Hamlin, you know.”

“So?”

“You should have killed him. He told them about the dead drop.”

Bill just shrugged. “Maybe I shoulda. But I wanted to get outta there quietly, y’know? Without the neighbors calling in shots fired. He didn’t know enough to change anything.”

“He knew about the Cruezzir.”

Bill scowled. She’d been certain Hamlin hadn’t noticed her taking the medicine. Dumbfuck kid was sneakier than she’d thought. “Think it’ll change anything?”

“We don’t know. That’s the problem, Bill. We’re fighting people who are convinced they’re right and we’re evil, and they aren’t stupid. They’re very good at what they do, which is why fuckups like that can ruin everything.”

“Well… whatever. You got another Cruezzir-fuelled killing machine hidden away somewhere?”

“No. And I say that honestly. The drug is very tightly controlled, and the version we were able to obtain cannot be duplicated. It would therefore be…unfortunate…if you were to expire.”

“What, you think you’re gonna rescue me from prison?” Bill scoffed. “This goes one way, pal. I kill Etsicitty and his monkeys and whoever else is nearby, NYPD comes down on my ass like an avenging god, and I see how many I can take down with me. If they take me alive, I’m going away forever. So, they ain’t gonna take me alive.”

He just gave her a faint smile, and said nothing. There wasn’t much that had ever intimidated Bill, especially now…but her handler was definitely one of those things.

“Familiarize yourself with the plan,” he said, and turned to go. “I’ll make sure everything is in place. You just be ready.”

Bill grinned. Her heart was beating in her ears, making her feel so alive it was like she was on fire. She couldn’t wait to get started.

“I already am,” she said.

Date Point: 16y5m1w AV
Folctha General Hospital, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

The funny thing was that, despite being pale and sweaty and red-eyed, and generally at about the least glamorous he’d ever seen her, Julian couldn’t remember ever thinking Allison looked more beautiful. Or maybe it was just the fact that she had his sleeping daughter on her chest.

She was also as high as a couple of moons, having taken basically every drug under the sun.

“I’ve got nothing to prove,” she’d said. “And it hurt like hell last time.”

In the end, it had been an uneventful birth. Difficult for Julian and Xiù, but Al had rode the medication and her own tenacity and if her grip had been tight enough to make Julian’s hand creak… well, he really couldn’t blame her.

Now, in the quiet aftermath, she was halfway asleep herself as she gently ran a finger down Anna’s—and what a perfect name that was—back.

Anna Ayma Belle Etsicitty. Xiù had been in floods when Julian had suggested the middle name, and that had pretty well sealed it. It was a beautiful name for the most beautiful thing Julian had ever seen.

There was a soft swishing sound, and Xiù finally decided that she’d managed to properly detangle Allison’s hair. She set the brush aside, then bent forward and gave Al a kiss on top of the head for good measure.

“Wow…” she breathed.

“I know,” Julian agreed.

Xiù leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder. “…She’s beautiful.”

“You’re a proud mom already, huh?”

She nodded, dreamily, then leaned forward a little to check Allison’s face. “…Yeah, she’s asleep.”

“I can’t blame her.” Julian took Xiù’s hand and squeezed it. “Nervous about your turn?”

“A little. That looked… intense. And Yulna still wants me to go to the Grand Commune for it.” She shook her head ruefully. “I know they’re the most well-equipped natal unit on the planet, but… Gaoian births are a lot easier. Have you seen newborn cubs?” She gesticulated, suggesting something maybe half Anna’s size.

“On the other hand, Gaoian females have much narrower hips.”

“Trust me, it’s not the same ordeal for them.” Xiù sighed and stroked Allison’s hair again. Al turned her head slightly, opened her eyes, gave them both a slight, dreamy smile and then dozed off again.

“I bet,” he admitted.

Xiù’s hand flew to her tummy. “…And you gave me a big baby boy too. Oof.”

“So, all things considered, you’d rather have human assistance.”

“Well, wouldn’t you? I mean, I love the Gao but they have claws. And as for the Ten’Gewek…” Xiù giggled.

“Hey, the Singers are experienced midwifes!” Julian objected loyally.

“And the Mothers at the commune handle dozens of births a day. But no thank you. As much as I like them both, I want somebody of my own species handling this one,” Xiù said firmly. “…And frankly, if Al took that many drugs, I think I’m going to as well. She’s right, I don’t have to prove anything.”

Julian kissed her on the forehead. “You never did, babe.”

“Tell that to my mom.” Xiù smiled fondly. Julian chuckled: he got along okay with Xiù’s parents, who had never really approved of the whole poly thing, and were honestly a little unconsciously racist, in a benign way. There was no malice in them at all, and he’d always felt welcome when he met them, but…

They’d seemed shocked to learn he could, in fact, speak Mandarin. Haltingly, but he was getting better. And Meili Chang, Xiù’s mom, always found excuses for him to reach high places and move heavy objects. Or to mess with his hair, which she’d cluck over like some vaguely dissatisfied hen.

Good lord could she cook, though.

“She thinks you should go without?”

Xiù waved a hand. “She had this thing about it being a transcendental experience and how you should really experience becoming a mother…” she said. “I’ve had transcendental experiences, thanks. They’re not pleasant.”

“That’s kinda the point, isn’t it?”

She laughed. “I guess… It’ll be so good to see them tomorrow though.” It went unspoken that she’d been worried they wouldn’t come. They’d never been unpleasant to Allison, not at all. They were much too universally warm and hospitable for that. But…

Well. They were coming, so they obviously cared and accepted her more than they let on. That was a happy thought.

The sour note for Julian was in knowing that he’d have to call up Rockefeller in the morning and confirm that he was on for that trip to Earth and the TV interview. The dates had all been set in anticipation of Anna’s birth

Still, the mere thought of being parted from the tiny life now slumbering just a few feet away was agonizing.

Of course, he was going to have to do that soon anyway. There was nowhere for partners to sleep on the ward, so he and Xiù were going to have to return home at some point. And then in the morning Amanda was going to want to meet her granddaughter, and Tristan and Ramsey would want to meet their niece, and…

It occurred to him that Anna was very lucky indeed. Two badass moms, two doting older kids, a wealthy loving home, friends in very high places across multiple species…

And a protective caveman for a dad. And a few one-man-army uncles.

As starts in life went, things didn’t get much better. He was going to have to work hard to keep his kids grounded, he thought, but that was a problem for much later. Right now…

His thoughts were interrupted by a visitor who would have been deeply unlikely in anybody else’s hospital room.

The Singer had been politely and gently but firmly thwarted by the hospital and clinics when she’d inquired about learning more of human medicine. They weren’t a training facility, and for a lot of complicated legal reasons they really couldn’t have an untrained, unaccountable nonhuman poking her n— …Uh, inquiring into private healthcare matters. But in this case, well… Anna was a daughter of her tribe. There were Rites.

She let out the cutest, softest hoot Julian had ever heard as she laid eyes on the slumbering mother and baby. A human would have gone “aaaawww!!” …Though a human wouldn’t have flicked their tongue halfway across the room to get a really good sample of the baby’s scent.

“Healthy,” she declared approvingly, and coiled her tail behind her to sit on it. “I watched video of human birth. Looks hard. Your babies have big heads!”

[“Yours are the same size almost, Singer! It’s just you got big ‘ol hips!”]

[“Don’t remind me, please…”] Xiù muttered.

Julian chuckled low. [“We shouldn’t tease her,”] he told the Singer. [“This will be her first baby and, uh…”]

“Will be fine, the Singer said, confidently. Julian wasn’t sure how they’d fallen into the courtesy of speaking each other’s languages, but it made sense really. Everyone got practice. “Not easy, but you’re strong. And I saw human doctors work magic on Loor. The Gods made women for having babies. They didn’t make men for getting squashed by Brown Ones!”

Xiù giggled.

[How is Loor?”] she asked.

“Like he was never hurt! And many women after him, now!”

Julian chuckled and nodded sagely. “Not bad, Loor.”

“I think he would maybe choose an easier way to win women if he could,” the Singer trilled, then stood up, and woke Allison with a gentle touch to the face. It would have seemed like a slightly odd gesture to anyone who didn’t know her species’ ways, but it worked.

Al blinked blearily at her, then woke up properly. “Mmmuh? Oh. Hey.” She squirmed up a little in her bed. Anna gave the faintest of protest sounds, shifted a little, and was still. So far, she was quite calm about the whole life thing. “You came.”

“She is niece to me,” the Singer explained. “Of course I come. I will sing her name to the Gods for you.”

Al sat up a bit more and gave the Singer a hug with her spare arm. Julian smiled at that: Al had been a little skeptical about the Ten’Gewek rites, but she’d never objected. Mostly she treated it all with bemusement.

It was important to Julian, though. He could never explain just what taking the tribe’s Rite of Manhood had changed in him, but… it mattered to him. Anna would grow up and chart her own course, and maybe she’d take a Ten’Gewek magic-name when she was old enough… Or maybe she wouldn’t. But that was for the future. Here and now…

The Singer had a little ritual paint with her, a vivid terracotta red paste. It was basically just iron-rich mud and berry juice, and Julian knew it was harmless. They painted it on their own babies for this too, and a Ten’Gewek newborn was just as delicate and soft as a human newborn.

“May I hold her?”

Allison took a deep breath, and handed Anna over. She looked tiny and fragile, resting in the Singer’s huge, thick-fingered slab of a hand, but the Singer handled her with experience and a soft, reassuring coo as she scooped a liberal smear of paint onto her thumb. She crossed to the window and opened it with her tail so that the sunlight shone in.

“Name her,” she instructed, looking Allison in the eye.

“Her name is Anna.”

The Singer nodded, and Anna shifted slightly but didn’t otherwise react when the Singer applied a bright red thumbprint to both of her cheeks and the middle of her forehead.

The Singer nodded, turned, and raised the baby toward the sun before raising her voice in a chant. [“Gods: Be here. See this. This is Anna, u Jooyun n Awisun. Know her name…”]

It wasn’t a long rite. After all, what mother and baby wanted to be separated for long? Allison, Julian and Xiù sat quietly together and watched the Singer perform it, until finally she turned away from the sun, cooed over Anna one last time and returned her to her mother’s arms.

“Strange gods here,” she declared. “Strange sky, strange sun. But warm. No clouds, no shadow. She’s blessed.”

Julian suspected he’d never forget the look on Allison’s face. Maybe it was the drugs, but there and then in that moment, despite her usual skepticism, it clearly mattered to her. She gave Anna a cuddle, then gave the Singer a smile.

“…Thank you.”

“I leave you to rest,” the Singer promised. She flicked her tail at Julian in a we-need-to-talk gesture that meant exactly the same thing as if she’d beckoned him to follow.

Reluctantly, Julian gave Al a kiss and stroked his daughter’s cheek before following her. He shut the door behind him. “Thanks for doing that,” he said.

“You are Tribe. So she is Tribe,” the Singer replied. “I should thank you. It means a lot you take our ways… um…”

“Seriously?” Julian suggested.

“Yes. You are alien. I know you worship the gods… or, uh, God… in other ways.”

“Being a little bit of two species seems to be a thing with our family.” Julian shrugged. “What’s up, anyway?”

“Trip to Earth soon. I have… a bad feeling. Last time, you were attacked, Yan and Vemik were attacked. And you want me and Vemik to come on Teevee and bring our child…” She glanced toward the room. “Now you know what it is like, to be parent. Think of bringing Anna into danger. If you had bad feeling… would you go?”

Julian took a deep breath. “…I understand,” he agreed. “I really do, especially now. All I can say is, we’re going to have Secret Service protection. That’s men whose whole job is keeping others safe. And they are very, very good at it.”

“Heff said there was an… alert?”

“Yeah. We’ll have a few little extras, too. Some sky-magic, you’ll see… or well, I guess you won’t. Hopefully.”

The Singer trilled, glanced at the door again, then nodded. “…Okay. If you trust these secret men…”

“There’s nobody under any sky anywhere who I’d trust more,” Julian assured her. “Protection is what they do.”

“…Then I will see you on Earth.”

She knuckled off toward the exit, and Julian let himself back into Allison’s room. She was settling down and looked like she might fall asleep again soon.

That was okay. She’d earned a rest. And if Anna woke up and needed a new diaper or whatever… Well, what else were dads for?

He cuddled up to Xiù and basked in the moment for as long as it lasted.

Date Point: 16y5m3w AV
DENEB 320.7° 37-EJ7H2E-SEPTINARY FII-D, Deep Space

Alpha of the Bleeding Brood

This system was unusual, and the Alpha couldn’t figure out why their quarry had chosen it.

Every previous system on its route had been metal-rich and dense in accessible bodies to rapidly mine. With each passing system, the Builders had observed that the Entity responsible for stealing their replicant ship was getting more and more efficient in its mining, claiming an ever-increasing mass of useful minerals in the short time before it moved on.

This time though…

The system was nothing but stars. No fewer than seven of them, in fact: a big and blisteringly active yellow-white giant, orbited by three red dwarfs, the most massive of which had three brown protostar “moons” and the other two of which danced around a common center of gravity.

The radiation levels in the inner system were truly fearsome, and the gravity well was deep enough that the Alpha slowed their approach much further out-system than it usually would have.

There was no sign of any rocky bodies anywhere. Radiation and solar wind had long since ablated away what little hadn’t either been swallowed up by the whirling stars or spat out into the interstellar dark.

<Suspicion>

The Builders turned away from their scanners and gave the Alpha their usual disinterested stare. Of course, this wasn’t a hunt to them. This was a survey. They probably didn’t appreciate that they were now being hunted.

They’d modified the ship too, during the pursuit. Now, there was armor plating around the warp drive, and a redundant drive housed next to a secondary reactor in what had been cargo space behind the bridge. Short-range magnetometric and gravimetric sensors had been manufactured and installed to provide passive close-range awareness, and the hull was now covered in reactive armor and explosive blisters.

The Alpha had fought hard for every such upgrade. The Builders seemed more interested in learning about the thief and its mining activities than in preparing them for the next clash. Only the Alpha’s argument that the ship needed to remain intact in order to return its valuable data had been persuasive.

<Explanation> +We are being hunted.+

The reply was predictable: <Skepticism> +Explain and prove your hypothesis.+

Where to begin? Over the latter half of its lifetime, the Alpha had hunted an ever-more-intelligent Prey, and was one of the few left alive that had tasted Human flesh. (So long ago! So sublime!)

How could it condense the certainty of well-honed and seasoned instinct into something terse that would get these near-sighted neuters to move with purpose?

<Insight> +A marked change in strategy indicates a change in the Prey’s state of mind. So far, the Prey has run ahead of us, taking easily-acquired resources before fleeing. Now we are in an utterly barren star system, and I see no exit warp trail. It feels confident enough to face us now, and it is an experienced predator itself. We should activate the Brood.+

The Builders looked at each other, and took an agonizing length of time to confer among themselves on their own secure channels.

<Concession> +You may do so. Activate your Brood.+

The Alpha carefully stifled the urge to broadcast the medley of irritation and relief it felt, and instead uploaded its understanding of the situation into the stasis systems before releasing the Brood’s flight crew. They blinked off the momentary disorientation of stasis, understood the situation instantly, and hastened to their stations with gratifying precision and speed.

Thus staffed, every facet of the ship’s performance could be appropriately fine-tuned.

The differences were subtle. Minor redistributions of power to the different weapons based on predictions of what kinds of attack were most likely. Similar adjustments to the shield geometry, a rebalancing of the main thrusters versus the auxiliary thrusters….

Anticipation was the talent that set Hunters apart from their machines. The computers could react infinitely faster, but they could only react, never proact.

In these situations, proactivity was the line between life and death. This was a battle of anticipation, and the Alpha knew that it would be over in a single move.

It therefore moved to thwart its opponent’s predictions. Last time they had approached cautiously, cloaked and stealthy. It had proven ineffective.

This time, it went for the aggressive approach. Sub-light warp maneuvers and aggressive sensor sweeps of the surrounding space would surely light them up, but the Prey could not sneak up on them. With full surplus power to the shields, they could not be crippled by the first strike.

Sure enough, the sensor returns came back loud and strong. And sure enough, the Prey had indeed been coming up on them from behind, as before.

With a savage, gleeful broadcast of triumph, the Alpha activated the master stroke of its attack: the aft-firing plasma cannons.

Twin dense jets of blazing copper gas and molten droplets blasted the sensor contact into dust.

+MEAT TO THE MAW!!!+

The celebration, however, was short-lived. EM sensors took a long time time to cover an entire star system, and finally a new return came back from further away. A much, much larger return.

It arrived only a few milliseconds ahead of—

Nobody in the galaxy used directed energy weapons, with the exception of nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers. Coherent energy beams were an inefficient way to deliver energy on target, the heat debt incurred in generating them was prohibitive, and they generally just didn’t deliver enough energy to truly threaten a starship.

This laser, however, boiled the broodship’s shields and hull away like ice under a blowtorch, and the Alpha had only the barest scrap of time to understand what the Prey had built, low in the photosphere of the system’s largest and hottest star.

Directed energy weapons were inefficient, and no ship could produce enough energy to power them…

…But the focused heat of a white giant star would do it.

Date Point: 16y5m3w AV
DENEB 320.7° 37-EJ7H2E-SEPTINARY FII-D, Deep Space

Entity

The broodship popped like a bubble, which it effectively was: a thin sheen of molten metal that no longer had the strength and rigidity to contain tonnes and tonnes of warm, densely compressed gas. The forcefield lens array had worked perfectly, and the decoy had held the Hunters still for just long enough.

<Satisfaction>

There was no kill quite like overkill, after all.

Date Point:16y5m3w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Planet Gao

Mother-Consort Naydra, Life-Mate of the Great Father

It was good to be home, and the fortress definitely was. Naydra had put quite a lot of herself into renovating their quarters, and had eventually managed to find a balancing point between Daar’s taste for modesty and utilitarianism versus her own preference for things to be a little more cosy and sumptuous.

The compromise was in the color pallette. She’d gone with browns and creams and warm greys. Fur tones. So long as the place was tidy and well organized, then it seemed more minimalist than it really was. So, Naydra got her furniture and her rugs and shelves and touches of luxury, and Daar got to look around and see a clean and apparently simple aesthetic.

In fact, the only really vibrant spot of color was Daar’s current flower arrangement. He tended to prefer simple stems and pots, but the flowers themselves were often a riot of rich blues and yellows.

And soon, probably, reds.

At Naydra’s request, Nofl hadn’t started the therapy in his lab. Instead he’d concocted a series of injections for them to take, with clear instructions about the sequence and timing involved. She wanted to make a date of it. This was a big step forward into an uncertain future for both of them.

She had the kitchens prepare a nice big meal beforehand. Something rich on micronutrients and protein. It was all in stasis containers, as fresh and hot as the moment it came out of the ovens, waiting for him to finish the day’s business.

Daar didn’t keep her waiting long. She heard him coming up the stairs (which were ancient, and creaked under anyone’s weight, especially his) and turned off the stasis fields just in time for him to enter the room to a wall of steaming olfactory bliss.

He shut his eyes and followed his nose for a moment.

“Mmm… Naydi! I swears ‘yer the most romantical woman I’ve ever did know! What did I ever do to deserve you?!”

“How many times do I have to answer that question?” she retorted, and offered him a poached Naxas testicle. He snacked on it happily and chittered. “Anyway, this isn’t just a romantic gesture. Nofl told me to front-load you especially on some nutrition before we take our medicine.”

Daar gave the room a sniff. “Balls, smells like Warhorse had a hand in ‘yer cookin’…not that I’m complaining!” he chittered.

She flicked her ears to herself and took a plate over to the couch. The truth was, she was nervous as hell about what they were about to do. How could she not be? They were talking about mucking around with their own DNA. She’d come to trust Nofl and both the Highmountains and Clan Openpaw were clear that they’d evaluated the risks and found them to be minimal…

But still. There was a sense that they were about to come close to… what was that word? Profanity.

As always, she could never hide a thing from the Great Father. He sniffed at her, keened slightly, and snuggled against her nape. “Nervous, huh?”

“Aren’t you?”

“…Honestly, not really. Not ‘fer me, anyhoo. I’m…more worried ‘fer you. This is a very brave thing ‘yer doin’, Naydi.”

“Somebody has to.” She curled up on the couch and sampled a pickled nava grub.

“I know…Naydra. I need to know something.” His tone had gone very formal, which was how she knew he was mentally donning the Crown, and assuming the role of the Great Father.

“…Yes, My Father?”

“How long does Mother-Supreme Yulna have left?”

Naydra sighed and shut her eyes.

“…It’s ovarian cancer. Quite advanced, and metastasized. She didn’t… she stopped going to see her doctor after the war.”

Daar keened in sorrow. “…Right. I should…pay a visit. Unofficially. And, uh…say goodbye.”

“She would appreciate that.”

“Yeah…And you, Naydra. Are you prepared for the consequences?”

Naydra chewed on another grub. She knew what he meant, of course: When a Mother-Supreme stepped down or passed away, there would be an election among the Females to appoint her successor. Yulna had been named by Giymuy, and that tended to carry a lot of weight in the ensuing election… so far she hadn’t named anyone. But she’d dropped hints.

“You mean that I might end up taking over from her, as well as… this?” she asked. “No, I’m not. Absolutely not. This is more than enough work for me, I don’t want to take over on the island! We’d hardly see each other! I’m not even going to run!”

She sighed. “…Not that it matters. If I’m nominated and they vote for me, I’d be shirking my duty if I didn’t do it. But…”

“Naydi, they won’t stop at Mother-Supreme. There’s been rumblin’ ‘bout this ever since I took you as a Life-Mate. They’d want me to create you a Great Mother. An’ with what ‘yer doin’ with me, tonight, ‘fer the future of our species…I’d be wrong not to.”

“Great Mother.” Naydra repeated flatly, weighing that title in her mind. Even Tiritya had only been given it posthumously.

“It’s a big title.”

“Bumpkin… Understatement.”

“Well, I mean. You always say I should work on nuance.”

Naydra chittered despite herself, and reached over to pick up the box Nofl had given them. There was a pair of injectors in there, and the first doses of their gene therapy. She considered it with a feeling in her stomach as though it was equal parts the key to something truly transcendental, and also something as ugly as a pistol, all wrapped in one.

“…Duty has a way of complicating things, doesn’t it?” she asked, rhetorically.

Daar snuggled her tightly. “Yup. You’ve got an iron core to ‘yer soul, Naydi. And an ambition to match. That’s no small part o’ why I love ‘ya.”

He was damn perceptive, sometimes. She gave him a grateful look, then loaded her dose into the injector.

They shared a moment of eye contact, and then she pressed it to her throat and fired. Decisively and quickly, before she could start to really fear it. It stung, briefly.

Even knowing her so well, Daar seemed momentarily taken aback. She chittered, and put the empty vial away.

“…For the Gao,” she said.

Daar took his own injector, loaded it, and nestled it hard against the heavy cords of muscle layered over the large artery in his neck. He fired, she saw him wince faintly, and then he put the injector away and steadied himself with a huge, full-chested breath.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “…For the future.”

Date Point: 16y6m AV
Bryant Park, Manhattan, New York, USA, Earth

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Humans. Humans everywhere. Walking so tightly packed that they almost touched, driving cars so close together he had no idea how they didn’t crash. Just as they drove from the jump array to a place called a ‘park,’ Vemik had seen more humans than there were Ten’Gewek in all the world.

They were moving busily through their lives and working their weird magic, and he didn’t understand even one finger of what he was seeing. How they made steel and stone reach higher than Ketta, or the lights, the assault of tastes on the air, the people walking around with hair in bright colours that couldn’t be natural, or with marks on their skin and clothes that moved, or…

There were some angry humans with signs. The car rolled past them, pretty quick, but not quick enough to stop Vemik from reading the signs.

“ET GO HOME!”

“QUARANTINE EARTH AGAIN”

“DECOLONIZE THE TEN’GEWEK”

Weird.

The last two days had been fun, though! Despite the way his last visit to Earth had gone, Vemik had always wanted to come back, and this time he got to bring the Singer with him… and to his delight she’d brought their son, Vemun.

The boy was being kind of quiet, and clinging to the Singer closely with one arm while hugging his tail for comfort with the other, but Vemik couldn’t really blame him. This place, this ‘New York’ was loud, and busy.

And huge!

One odd thing was that, among all this steel and stone and glass and people, the humans had set aside a huge space for trees! The noise of the city never went away of course, and the sky was always lit by the glow of their ‘electric’ lights…

But it was nice to see. Even here, in a place where ‘civilization’ was at its most intense, the Humans spent a lot of their valuable space to show proper respect to nature. None of the trees were as big as a Ketta, but the oldest and biggest of them were grand, strong things anyway.

The Singer had approved heartily. They’d both tried their hand at a fun-looking game called ‘baseball,’ which was apparently part of the joke of Baseball’s name. The small skinny children playing it were much better at it, but they had fun nonetheless. Not even Jooyun was as good as them! There was another game called ‘frisbee’ which was about throwing a thin bendy disc and trying to catch it. That was a lot more fun, and Vemik got to show off a little for the kids, and the Singer met a ‘choir’ who wove their voices into something that shimmered in the air…

But sadly, the fun times couldn’t last. There was much to see in New York, including meeting some important people, going to a ‘museum’ which Vemik wanted to explore top to bottom…

The ‘hotel’ was a bit strange and the bed so soft it felt like he would sink right through. It complained loudly when either he or Jooyun sat on it though, so Vemik decided to be nice and pull the top part off and just put it right on the floor. Much better.

Apparently, it was not okay to climb up the side of the hotel, even if it was nicely easy to grip and their room was wonderfully high up. Something about “King Kong,” apparently. There was definitely a joke there at his expense he’d need to squish out of Jooyun later.

Not enough time to see and do everything he wanted. And everyone was friendly!

Except these people with their big writing on very big paper. They made Heff go still and watchful, too.

“Are those the same people who attacked us in ‘Canada’?”

“Prob’ly not. But they think a lot of the same things,” Jooyun decided. He didn’t sound like he liked them at all. “These ones are just regular activists.”

“Means what?” the Singer asked.

“Means they think very strongly that something is wrong and it needs to be fixed. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but people can get blinded when they feel something so strong.”

“Worth watchin’, though,” Heff grunted. “These ones might be all talk an’ no action, but you never know.”

Their car stopped in front of a new kind of building that Vemik hadn’t seen before. It was white, with thick carved stone tree-trunks along the front and stone humans in strange loose clothes high on the walls. It looked very climbable, but somehow he just knew that this building was absolutely not for climbing at all.

“You’ll like this place,” Jooyun declared.

“What is it?”

“The New York Public Library. A place where we keep knowledge and people can read it.”

“Professor tell me about libraries!”

“Uh-huh. Uh, just so you know, you normally keep quiet in these places. And no offense, but you have a loud, deep voice. It carries.”

“I’ll be quiet,” Vemik promised.

As it happened, the moment he set foot inside he knew he’d have no trouble keeping his word. The place felt… sacred. It was a subtle feeling, but there was a hush, and a solemn feeling on the air that the people from the ‘teevee show’ with their cameras and tiny drones couldn’t spoil no matter how closely they watched.

The sacred feeling only really hit though when they had climbed high in the building and entered a space like nothing Vemik had ever seen. The Singer made an awed sound and stopped: Vemik simply gaped.

There were books everywhere. Stacked neatly in rows down the long walls, or dotted here and there on the ornate tables as Humans pored over them under the light from a hand of hands of intricate metal frames. Everywhere around him were beautiful carved wood and stone: the tables, the ceiling, the walls… everything. The craftmanship of them was just…

Vemik knew wood-carving, and stone-working. Or he thought he had. What he was seeing hurt him a little, though: Deep in his chest and belly, he knew that his people would never build something like this. Not because they couldn’t, but because… this was a very Human place. They’d built it not just to store knowledge, but to worship it. It could only be here because there was a great hive of a city outside its walls, because the Humans had settled here hundreds of years ago and never moved on.

That was not the Ten’Gewek way. And as proud as he was of his people and how these incredible people from another world valued them… The Gods had made the People for other things than this. They would never build something to match it.

For a brief moment, that thought made him very, very sad.

But behind that, he realized he now knew more than ever just how much the People needed this friendship. They could not build a place like this, and if he was right they never would… but the Humans already had, and they were happy to share it.

With that thought to lift his mood, he moved towards some of the tall book-stacks almost without thinking, but Jooyun’s hand rested on his shoulder to stop him.

“Careful, fella. You can look at these all you want, but we’re here for a tour and to take some footage. Let’s get that done first, okay? You’ll still get to read some things, though. The librarian’s been planning this for a while.”

“Lie-brare-ee-an.”

“Yeah. Which means…”

“Someone…who takes takes care of a library?”

“Very good!” somebody said. Vemik turned: He’d seen Humans in fancy clothes before, and thought they looked strange but the newcomer seemed oddly right for them. He was short, small, didn’t have much hair, and his glasses were just as big as his smile. Vemik had heard the word ‘dapper’ before, but now he finally knew what it meant. All those layers looked heavy and warm, not good for the forest. And he had no idea what the blossom of bright red cloth on the man’s throat was for…

But, well, he was on Earth, and he hadn’t actually met many Humans. Maybe this was normal, and Jooyun was the weird one. Who knew?

“Mister Etsicitty,” he said warmly, and shook Jooyun’s hand at length. “Sven Schuster, it’s a pleasure to meet you at last. And these are our guests?”

He reserved an extra special smile for Vemun, who was chewing on his tail and giving him the wide-eyed wary look that children of any species kept for meeting a stranger, then shook first the Singer’s hand and then Vemik’s.

“We’ve never had extraterrestrial guests before,” he said.

“We have never been in a place like this before,” the Singer replied. She hiked Vemun a little higher on her hip and held him in place with her tail. “Not just the books and all the knowing there is here but the…”

She paused, then waved a hand at absolutely everything around them as she turned to Jooyun. “Is there a word for all this?” she asked.

“Architecture.”

“Hmm. Odd word. Don’t know if it’s big enough.”

Shoo-ster (Vemik decided immediately that he’d have trouble fitting ‘Sven’ around his teeth) chuckled. “I agree. It’s a fussy word for grand things, isn’t it?”

“Grand, yes.” The Singer tasted that word, and gave it a soft hoot of approval. “I like ‘Grand.’”

“So many books!” Vemik sighed appreciatively. “More than I could ever read, maybe! But this library is so big and this is just one room! This isn’t all, is it?”

Shoo-ster beamed happily. “Oh, no! We have millions of items in our collection, Sky-Thinker. Not just books but maps, records, newspapers, old documents… They’re kept in stacks in the levels below. This is just a reading room.”

“Really?! Can we see??”

Jooyun chuckled. “Sorry, fella. That’s not for the public, and anyways you and I would be way too big to fit. But don’t worry, the Professor is going to set up a library exchange with Folctha, so you will have access to all the books from places like this.”

“Really?!” Several nearby readers looked up and shot amused glances at them, and Vemik cringed. His excitement had beaten the air of the place after all. “Really?” He whispered.

“Yup. For now though, we’re just here to meet and greet. You can each check out one book to read tonight, okay?”

“…Okay…”

Vemik decided on an enormous picture book about the plants and animals on this part of Earth. Singer checked one out too, and Jooyun’s was something about ‘code-talkers,’ whatever they were.

Heff got a book about weightlifting.

It made for a quiet night back at the hotel. Once Jooyun explained that they’d have to give the book back, Vemik threw himself into it, and then read the Singer’s for good measure after she was done with it. Hers was a book on healing, full of pictures about how to clean and dress a wound, splint a broken bone and sling an arm. All things that Singers did anyway, but as always the Humans had just… been doing it for longer. They knew a few extra tricks.

The ‘teevee’ show the next day was very, very weird. They were ‘shooting’ in the smaller park in front of the library, after returning their books and dodging the protestors, who were just the beginning of the rush that followed. Everything about the show was hurry-up, be here, stand there, wait before talking, do all the talking in barely a finger of time…

The Humans were wearing ‘makeup’ because apparently, ‘teevee’ cameras could make even a very pretty person look ugly under those lights, which were just much, much too bright. They were careful not to shine them into anyone’s eyes, and it was outside during the day, so it wasn’t too bad really, but still… the heat coming off them reminded Vemik of being back in his forge.

It was all a little confusing. Apparently millions of Humans were watching them ‘live,’ and the weird timing was because like so much the Humans did, everything was on a ‘schedule.’

They were showing some very simple things about village life. Apparently, this would help some of the more nervous Humans like them more. Heff stood off to the side: he was there to protect them, not to be on teevee. but Jooyun and Singer were right there with Vemik, knapping a simple flint blade and preparing a fire. Jooyun had been slightly unhappy with everything until they were doing the ‘dem-on-stray-shun’ for the cameras. He was out of his suit and the hated ‘tie,’ and was now much more comfortable like he was back on Akyawentuo, knife in hand and talking animatedly about why they did every little thing, exactly like they were teaching a child.

Which they were, in fact. Vemun was paying rapt attention to the three of them and trying to knock a flake off his own core. He especially paid attention to Jooyun’s hands. Strange. In some ways, Vemik thought Jooyun might be more like the People than a Human.

There was one of those weird breaks, suddenly, where the host promised the people watching they’d be right back.

“And…we’re off-air. That was brilliant!” She enthused, “Did you three decide to teach Vemun like that?”

“Why waste a good opportunity?” Jooyun replied. “…Hey, it’s a really hot day. Could we get some water, please?”

No sooner had he asked than a bustling somebody pressed a bottle into his hand and then vanished on some other errand.

“–Oh! Uh, thanks!” he called after whoever it was. “…That was fast, dang.”

“Show-biz, Mister Etsicitty! We’ve got, uh, ninety seconds. The next segment will be seven minutes long, not the little teaser segments we’ve been doing. You’ve got your speil ready?”

“Yeah! Then we do some fun up in the trees after that, right?”

“Yes. We put your notes up on cue cards for you–Mark there will hold them up for you. You don’t need to read off them, it’s just to help you remember what you’re talking about, just like we discussed.”

“…Okay. Prompt, not read.”

“Exactly! Don’t worry Julian, you’re a natural at this. Thirty seconds warning, see that? Make-up will be here–” a flock of Humans descended on the two of them and did…something… “And you might want to wash your hands, they’re muddy. There’s a spot on your shirt too, can we fix that?”

“Fifteen seconds,” somebody else called. A figure with a bright orange stick of some kind rubbed the spot off Jooyun’s shirt and then ducked down and aside as quick as he’d appeared.

“Ten!”

“Okay, last check–”

Somebody gently guided Vemik, Vemun and the Singer away to one side. Apparently the next bit was for Jooyun only. That suited Vemik just fine: learning to knap a flint properly was hard enough without lots of interruptions, so he was glad to give his child a bit more time to knock on his core and ask questions.

As they stepped aside, however, something… itched at him. Something was wrong, and not in the weird alien strangeness-of-Humans way. As Jooyun and the host started talking to the camera again, Vemik’s instincts were telling him something was up. And considering that he could still hear the chanting from the sign-people over the street noises and traffic…

He looked around. Godshit, there were so many people. None of them looked like they were about to attack, but he just couldn’t set aside the crawling feeling, or the way his crest naturally rose and fluffed out a bit.

The Singer noticed. “…Something wrong?”

As he turned to reply, it finally dawned on Vemik what was bothering him. Something—or rather someone—was missing.

“…Where’s Heff?” he asked.

Date Point: 16y6m AV
Window overlooking Bryant Park, Manhattan, New York City, USA, Earth

Wilhelmina “Bill” Briggs-Davies

Bill’s nest was a good spot alright. She’d been smuggled in at dead-o’-clock in the darkest scrotal recess of the night, and fuck had that been slick. She hadn’t seen her escort’s face, but the fucker knew how to make locks sing and dance, that was for sure. Not just mechanical ones, either.

After that… the waiting game, made a bajillion times worse by the fact that she couldn’t just put her head down and sleep. Who coulda? If all went to plan…

…Fuck. If all went to plan, she was gonna be dead before most people had even had their breakfast. That was… big. In the dark and the quiet, as she waited for the city to get a little more lively, that one thought had really just landed on her, heavily.

She wasn’t scared. Shit, she was actually kinda looking forward to it. Most of the poor fuckin’ sheep out there just kinda drifted unconsciously until the end caught them by surprise, but Bill had known the date and manner of her demise for weeks. She’d had plenty of time to straighten things out. ‘Cuz she sure as shit wasn’t gonna die quietly.

Her one last ‘fuck you’ at everything was gonna be goddamn historic.

So she didn’t sleep. She woulda liked to have a phone with her or something, to pass the time, but no. She had nothing in her pockets, nothing on her to tie her to anyone. Just a rifle, a pistol, her stompiest boots, some makeshift armor sewed into her clothing…

…And way too much time to kill. Too fucking bad her Handler had “sanitized” her safe house and taken away all the evidence. She woulda liked to have that surveillance of her target in the shower, to help her pass the time…

Her encrypted radio finally started making noises just before dawn.

“Party vans are on the road. How’re you doing, birthday girl?”

She keyed her mic. “I’m bored outta my mind, here.”

“Understood. Nobody’s late, the guest of honor has RSVP’d. Don’t spoil the surprise.”

Rather than say she understood, she just clicked it and slumped down next to the window to keep waiting.

Dawn came eventually, along with the usual NYC slice of life, commuters and pedestrians and yellow cabs. The all-dick-and-no-balls squad with their stupid fucking signs and chants showed up half an hour before the vans from CBS, and half an hour after that there came Etsicitty and the monkeys, who vanished into the Schwarzman Building. Good little boy scouts had to return their library books…

There was nothing to do but keep her head down and wait, but she decided to give an update.

“The guest of honor just arrived.”

“Good. Keep me posted.”

The show started on schedule. It was actually kinda hypnotic, watching the ballet going on down there. Turned out there were a lotta people involved in sending out live breakfast TV, and every one of them knew exactly where they had to be, what they had to do.

Fuck, if they turned that energy to something useful they maybe coulda even achieved something. Too late now. Bill stayed low and in the corner of the window so as not to show a humanoid silhouette, and watched until…

Yup. There were Etsicitty and the monkeys, doing their boy scout survival bullshit on the ground. Where they actually making flint knives?

She grabbed the rifle, and keyed her radio.

“The guest’s ready. How we doing?”

“Party vans are in position. They’re going to an advert break in two minutes. Party time is right after they go live again.”

“Awesome.” Fucking fantastic. Millions of people were gonna see Julian’s brains get blown out in high definition, live to the whole world.

The commercial break started, and Bill grinned as she took aim.

It was gonna be a pretty clean shot, in the end. She’d been worried about the trees at the park’s edge, but Etsicitty was standing in clear open ground and she had a perfect line of sight. The only thing spoiling it was the makeup bitches swarming all over his face.

“…Fuck. Kind of a waste to splatter a pretty fuckboy like him…” she muttered, as she tried to get a better angle.

“Don’t get sentimental on me now. Twenty seconds to party time.”

Bill nodded, shifted her weight, and growled to herself as some other dipshit swept in to spot-clean him with a Tide pen. This sniping shit wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be.

“Ten seconds. Vans on final approach.”

The vans had two jobs: block the escape routes, and raise hell. No stupid fuckin’ baseball bats and shit this time, this time the APA had sprung for guns. When the party started every poor fucker in the park was gonna be caught in the crossfire. They were about to stack a lot of bodies.

Fuck, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this excited. Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was knocking on her ribs, and she stared unblinking down the scope with her teeth bared in a clenched, delighted rictus. This was it.

She settled the dot perfectly on Etsicitty’s head, right as the commercial break ended.

“…Gotcha, asshole.”

Her finger tightened on the trigger, and the party started with a bang.

++END CHAPTER 57.1++

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Richard A Anstett
Ryan Cadiz
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Woodsie13

…Seventy-four Friendly ETs, 100 Squishy Xenos and 302 magnificently derpy Dizi Rats

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 57: “Cat And Mouse” pt 2: “Worlds In The Dark.”

Chapter 57: Cat and Mouse, pt.2: Worlds in the Dark

Date Point: 16y6m AV
The “tank,” the White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

Trust.

It was an awful thing, trust. It automatically included the possibility that the trusted individual might betray: In effect, it was a bet that they wouldn’t.

The stakes in today’s particular gamble of trust were high indeed, but the fact was that if the people now shoulder-to-shoulder alongside Sartori in the situation room turned out to be untrustworthy, then the APA wouldn’t be bothering with somebody like Julian Etsicitty: They’d have access to much more important targets.

The sole criterion by which he’d selected the people around him today was simple: That if they were APA, he himself would already have been assassinated while he sat at the Resolute desk.

Nobody else needed to know. And, if the men now springing into action in Manhattan did their jobs right, nobody would ever know.

“They’re live.”

That was Steve Beckett, director of the Secret Service.

“Alright. Now we just have to make it through the next half an hour…”

Beckett grunted. He’d voiced objections to allowing Etsicitty to stand out in an open field like that, and on some of the restrictions on this operation, but from Sartori’s perspective it was quite simple: If Etsicitty and the Ten’Gewek were abruptly bundled away to safety by their personal protection team, then that meant the APA had won.

The same went for if shots were fired, grenades went off, cars crashed or… basically if anything violent was seen to happen at all.

They either made it through today without the general public so much as suspecting what had nearly happened, or the good guys lost. There was no middle ground today.

Not for the first time, Sartori fidgeted with the little USB drive in his pocket. It contained… evidence. Very, very damning evidence about just how high up the APA’s influence went. Evidence that had already utterly incriminated an extremely senior CIA case officer, and above him…

Above him was someone that Sartori had counted as a friend.

The drive’s source —Somebody with the conscience of a saint, a hero’s sense of duty and an adamantium pair of balls—had put themselves and their young family in mortal danger to get the drive into Sartori’s hands. The Secret Service was already providing silent protection to the young fellow, whoever he or she might be. With luck, they’d never notice. That rotten case officer was still on the job, after all: They couldn’t remove him without alerting the network, which had to be dismantled all at once, and brutally.

The long knives would come out within the next few minutes.

“We’re certain about these Whitecrest toys?” he asked, to keep his hands from shaking.

“Champion Thurrsto demonstrated them for me personally. Utterly silent, instantly effective. Apparently his predecessor invented them. Or, well, had the idea, anyway.”

Sartori nodded distractedly. God, the aliens had brought a child with them…

“I have never felt so afraid for anyone,” he confessed.

“We brought the absolute best in on this, sir.”

“And I put them in the line of fire. As bait!” Sartori tried not to gnaw on his fingernails. “What fucking right do I have to do that!?”

“You are the President,” Beckett pointed out. “If not you, then who?”

And that was all that could be said, really. This was a moment when duty demanded doing terrible things to avert something worse. And if things went to plan, then Etsicitty and the aliens would never know anything had happened.

…If.

From across the situation room, one of Beckett’s chosen few gave an update. “…Our insider says the APA vans are nearly there. Looks like they’re timing it for just after the commercial break. Still no sign of Hyde.”

Hyde was the codeword for Briggs-Davies. The woman herself had been a fearsome Jekkyl already: a psychotic, a bomb maker, a cyberterrorist, and a figure of dark notoriety. The idea of her hopped up on gut-generated Cruezzir was honestly terrifying. The last time that had happened the aliens had taken to calling it the “Human Disaster” and a whole planet’s ecosystem had been written off for lost.

And those had been two fundamentally decent people. Thank God Hyde didn’t have proper instruction in how to use her newfound gifts. With luck, they wouldn’t need to send in one of their own supersoldier monsters to counter her.

Though, the time had come to use a monster of a different kind. May God forgive Arthur for what he was about to do.

“Margaret… I think it’s time for that… contingency… we discussed.”

Margaret White gave a curt, somber nod and stood to leave the room. “Yes, Mister President. I’ll see to it,” she said.

She’d be running to succeed him. If Sartori couldn’t trust her, then the war was already an abject defeat. But in that moment, he felt profoundly painful about what he’d just asked his good and trusted friend to do.

But she needed to be ready for the role if she won the election, and there were some secrets that had to be handed down personally.

Beckett looked up. “Sir? Hyde may be in play. Riddick is moving to counter.”

…Sartori need a whiskey.

Date Point: 16y6m AV
Bryant Park, Manhattan, New York, USA, Earth

Agent Thomas Child, Secret Service

Paradoxically, high-vis jackets tended to make the wearer invisible. People didn’t see people in high-vis jackets. They just saw the jacket, and assumed that some important but boring and/or dangerous work was being done by its wearer.

The work Tom and his buddies were doing was definitely not boring, and definitely was both Important and dangerous.

Silently aborting a terrorist attack at the moment it began on the streets of Manhattan at breakfast-time? Oh, sure, merely stopping the terrorists in their tracks was straightforward enough. But doing it silently? So that not one of the dozens of people in and around Bryant Park suspected a damn thing?

…Well, it was possible. Their talking raccoon buddies had some really neat toys, and had sent along a couple of cool customers to demonstrate their proper use. Awesome gear, bitchin’ mohawks, and quiet professionalism. They definitely had the right stuff.

First up: the nerveshock wand. A less-lethal adaptation of nervejam that completely put the taser out of business, it looked and operated basically the same as an old-school Maglite. Point and click, and anyone inside its cone of influence promptly lost all voluntary motor control and dropped to the deck numb and limp and paralyzed. And, unfortunately, shitting themselves.

Trick number two were Stick-n-sleep patches. Slap ‘em on a person’s bare skin and that person passed out like they’d been doing shots for a day straight. “These ones are for Deathworlders,” the huge burly one had warned. “They’re lethal to most anything else.”

And finally, Tom’s personal favorite: knockout gas pellets like something straight off Batman’s utility belt. Odorless, colorless, rapidly decomposed on exposure to oxygen so as to limit the range and not gas everyone in the area, but even more rapidly put anyone who breathed it straight to sleep. And they even came with an antidote, for the sake of the guy using them. Rub the oil on your gums, and you could huff the stuff all the livelong day and at worst you’d get a headache.

Too bad the oil tasted like fermented anchovies. “The best flavor,” the Gaoians had enthused.

For Tom’s money, though, the most effective weapon in his arsenal was an ordinary steel pry bar. All he had to do as the APA’s van full of nasties rolled up was step smartly behind it and thread the pry bar through the door handles as it stopped. The guys inside tried to open the door and he popped a gas pellet through the crack, then darted round the front, flashed the two assholes in the front seat with the nerveshock…

Done. Both men slumped in their seats and started to drool on each other. And crap themselves in a few minutes, but that was the clean-up crew’s problem, not his. The important bit was speed. They couldn’t spend more than a couple seconds on each van.

There were three. This first one had come up 6th Ave and been stopped half a block from the park, held up by some inconvenient road barriers that lent that little bit of extra credence to Tom’s Con-ed jacket and blue hard hat.

The second was coming along W 42nd, where it would be held up next to the library by some sign-waving isolationist protestors. And the third was going to find itself boxed in by a pair of very inconsiderate yellow cabs at the corner of 43rd and 6th.

All of that, though, was the easy part. If Riddick had been right about spotting Hyde, then…

Well, they’d been nervous and a little…uneasy…letting someone outside the Service be so involved in their principal’s security. They’d had discussions over the prior weeks, and at some point there had been some demonstrations. Including some mat time.

Riddick—Hoeff—turned out to be a tough and impressive tank of a man, and had managed to single-handedly humble three of Tom’s fellows at the same time, effortlessly, and with brutal efficiency. He did that despite being at a significant height disadvantage, too.

That had bruised some egos, but he wasn’t done. They next went to the range, where they ran scenarios together and recovered some pride…but then he showed them how to shoot. Which was saying something, since Tom could bullseye a rabbit at three hundred meters with plain ol’ ironsights. They hadn’t needed any more convincing after that. If Hyde was what they believed her to be, then aside from some serious small arms or, well, one of those monsters they keep on Cimbrean—or Julian himself, in another situation—it was hard to imagine anyone better to take her down.

Tom listened to the last muffled thump as some particularly hardy motherfucker in the back of the van finally succumbed to the gas, then turned back to the work he was pretending to do.

“Gas main fixed, send in cleanup,” he reported.

Cleanup, of course, would be a regular police dispersal once the TV segment was over. Which it would be in just a few minutes, once they came back from commercial.

“Hyde is taking aim.” somebody said.

“Acknowledged.” Riddick. He sounded entirely calm.

Tom gritted his teeth. Etsicitty was wearing the latest in personal shield tech, a “speedbump” shield designed to rob an incoming bullet of most of its energy and deflect it, rather than stop it entirely. He’d probably be fine even if Briggs did shoot him… but the mission would be an abject failure. They could not allow the APA to pull off yet another attack on American soil, let alone an assassination on live TV like had happened to poor Steven Lawrence.

And despite everything, their infiltrators in the APA hadn’t been able to dig up Hyde’s whereabouts. This was the only way to lure her out and neutralize her, one way or the other.

Tense seconds followed.

“Bravo neutralized.”

“Charlie neutralized.”

Tom tried not to visibly sigh in relief. The three van-loads of armed men were all dealt with, anyway. Even if the APA won today and got a shot off on Etsicitty, there’d be no casualties.

Somebody grunted heavily on the radio, a pained noise.

Their controller was on it instantly. “SITREP.”

No reply.

“Riddick, status?”

“…Ow…”

Hoeff’s voice had the wheezy, gasping quality of a man who’d just had the wind knocked out of him.

“How you doin’ buddy? You good?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Hyde backhanded me through a fuckin’ wall… She’s on the move. Headed for the roof.”

“Medic, go check on Riddick. Everyone else in pursuit.”

“Naw, don’t bother. Julian’s done way worse… In pursuit, takin’ the west stairs.”

Well, damn. Tom doubted he’d be able to bounce back from something like that. He didn’t dwell on it, though, he was already in motion toward the target building, along with the rest of the agents.

Dispatch had different plans.

“Wonderboy: Move to 39th street, short black building opposite the alleyway. Hershey: 40th street, red brick building with the fire escape next to the hotel. Those are her best ways down off the rooftops.”

Tom was Wonderboy. He changed course and tore down 6th, leaving a few scandalized and gossiping pedestrians in his wake as hung a sharp left at the corner and sprinted the leather off his boots. Sure enough there was a two-storey black building on the north side of the road about halfway down, and behind that he could see a fire escape.

“Jesus! She just jumped down four storeys!” somebody blurted. “Wonderboy, she’s headed your way!”

“Copy,” Tom grunted, fetching up next to a bus and discreetly gripping the familiar weight of his sidearm under his clothes. Somehow, though, he really didn’t feel like that the SIG Sauer P229 was going to do much to somebody who could literally punch a man through a wall.

But he was in position, and dammit she was not getting through him…

Bill Briggs-Davies

The party started with a bang alright: A heavy crunching one as somebody bust the door in behind her. Bill spun, cursing, her shot ruined as she startled violently. She had just enough time to recognize Hoeff as he blitzed in through the wrecked door and aimed something that looked like a fuckin’ Maglite at her, then—

Pain.

Bill had put up with a fuck of a lotta pain in her life. This one felt like a really bad electric shock, like the time she’d been tied to a bed and jolted over and over again with a stun gun. Another “show” for the Internet. She’d been nine years old.

Whatever Hoeff used felt a lot like that: it ripped through her whole body, locked up her muscles, left her numb. The rifle fell from her fingers as she collapsed, too stunned and locked-down to even scream. For an instant, just an instant, she was a scared and confused little girl again, promising she wouldn’t tell, she’d never tell if they’d just please stop hurting her…

Then she was back. And she was MAD.

Hoeff made a satisfying ”Whuff!!” noise as her lashing fist caught him unexpectedly in the chest and flung him through the air. He smashed through a wall which crumpled around him, depositing him in the next room in a shower of drywall and wood splinters.

Bill lurched to her feet. He was writhing as he tried to draw breath, and he’d dropped his flashlight gizmo. She grabbed it. Mission was a bust, no way she had time to pop Etsicitty now.

She ran.

Roof access. Stairs. Pounding feet, shouting voices. Up. Door at the top, not locked, fuck opening it. Through.

CRUNCH.

Ways down? Two, she remembered. Probably watched. Fire escape down the closer one, too slow again. Had to go for the back way.

She ran to the edge of the roof and stopped. Too far down to jump, even for her. Fire escape? Too slow. Other side of the roof was a taller building, but there was a ledge on the back side. She scrambled over a bank of air conditioning units toward it, saw at the last second that she could go down instead of up…

She jumped down, rolled hard on the concrete. Scared the shit outta some pigeons. Next ledge was four storeys down, but nowhere else to go at this point. She was committed, and it was a long fuckin’ way down if she missed her step.

Shouting behind her. She ignored it, vaulted over the edge, held on, dropped.

“Fuuuuu-!!!”

She hit hard, but rolled through it again. Her ankle went click in a painful way and she lay on the little strip of concrete for a second with the wind knocked out of her.

“Bill. Report!” Her handler had finally figured out something was wrong.

She groaned and rolled over. “We’re rumbled.” The ankle already felt better. Thank fuck for the Cruezzir.

“Are they chasing you?”

“They’re trying!”

“Can you escape?”

“I’m trying!”

“You remember the rendezvous?”

“You’d better fuckin’ be there!”

Another drop down. Six storeys, this time. Good way to break the fuck out of her legs or maybe splatter her skull all over the yard… but there was a drainpipe. She shimmied along the ledge. She could hear shouting bouncing off the walls around her. No idea if any of them could see her, maybe they’d just blow her brains out with a rifle…

She reached the drainpipe and skidded down it, skinning and cutting her fingers as she tried to control her descent. Somehow, it didn’t fall apart on her until she was only two storeys up.

She handled that landing like a goddamn cat, on her feet, hands out, stood there for a moment as surprised by herself as she was glad to be back on solid ground. Her ankle didn’t like it much, but the fucking thing could shut up.

The back of the black building was easy enough. She ran at it, then up it, kicked her foot down the wall to gain some height, stretched up with one hand to grab the top and hauled herself over.

She dropped down off the roof to the shock of some nearby New Yorkers, who got the fuck outta her way. All except for a Con-Ed worker, who was suddenly advancing on her with a pistol drawn, yelling for her to stand down.

Maybe it was the adrenaline, but even he seemed to be moving slow as fuck. She decided to try Hoeff’s flashlight gizmo. Aimed it at him.

The guy might be moving slow, but his trigger finger didn’t, and the makeshift armor under her jacket turned out to be not that great. Getting shot hurt, and the flashlight thingy didn’t work at all.

Fuck it. She launched herself at the dumbass with the gun. He got a second shot off that she didn’t even feel, and then she palmed his head and smashed it good and hard against the side of a bus. There was a kinda wet splash, sticky stuff everywhere. A lot of nearby folks screamed and started running away.

Fuck yeah. Bill could get used to this shit.

No time to have fun, though. Save that for later, if she got away. She saw the alleyway and sprinted toward it. There was a chain-link fence over the end, but whatever: She jumped clean over it.

In mid-air, something happened to her left hand. A kind of hard tug, and after that the after-echoes of a powerful gun shot.

She whipped her head around to look back and there was Hoeff, shirt ripped up and his left arm holding up a fuckin’ monster of a pistol. He wasn’t charging after her, and she could guess why: She might be able to leap over roadworks and a fence, but he looked like he was barely standing. Fucker must have sprinted the whole way over to catch up.

She ducked as he fired again. Brick dust showered on her, got in her hair and her mouth. She darted back into the alleyway, around the corner and tried to wipe the dust out of her eyes…

…Her fucking hand was missing.

Her arm just… ended, in an ugly mash of meat with two sharp bits of bone sticking out. In a kind of distracted way she noticed that it wasn’t actually bleeding all that much, and it didn’t even really hurt. Was that the Cruezzir?

…Fuck, she hoped Cruezzir meant it’d grow back.

Okay, fuck subtlety. The time had come to put a long way between her and whatever else these bastards had. She turned and crashed through the back door of some place that turned out to be a restaurant. A couple of cooks gave her a shocked look as she vaulted the counter, then breakfast diners out in the front shrieked and scattered as she plowed through and out the plate glass window in the front, cradling her new stump to her belly.

She skidded on her butt over the hood of a taxi, jinked in front of a honking pickup, into another alleyway and toward the waiting black car with its open back door. Crashed onto the back seat, hauled the door shut with her good—only—hand and gave her handler a wild look in the mirror.

He pulled out into traffic like it was just another weekday morning. “Get your head down.”

“Wh-?”

“Head. Down.”.

Bill did as he said and laid across the seat. “Dude, my hand–!”

“Cover yourself.”

“But–!”

“Your hand’s not gonna fucking matter if you’re spotted, cover yourself!”

There was a black tarp over the seat, the same color as the upholstery. Bill dragged it down on top of herself with a groan and lay there gasping.

“…You bleeding?” the handler asked after a second.

Bill whimpered as she inspected the wreckage where he limb ended. “…Not as much as I thought,” she admitted. Part of her was freaking the fuck out, but the rest was weirdly ice calm.

“Good. The Cruezzir should deal with that. We have a bigger problem.”

“Is this gonna grow back?”

“No. But you’re not gonna die, and we can deal with that later.” The Handler’s driving was getting on Bill’s nerves. She would have been flooring it away from the scene like a bat out of hell, but the fucker even stopped for a red light.

“I think I got shot, too.”

“You think.” The Handler grunted. “Better check.”

Bill groaned and tried to inspect herself. As it turned out, the steel plate in her jacket had stopped the bullet. She found a neat hole through her upper arm, clean through the meat. She hadn’t even felt that one. She also found a number of cuts and scratches, all of which were healing way faster than any other she’d had in her life. She wasn’t quite Wolverine, but goddamn if the Cruezzir wasn’t working.

“…Except for the hand, I think I’m okay,” she decided.

“Good.”

“I mean, the hand is kinda a big deal,” Bill repeated. She felt like he wasn’t taking that point seriously enough.

“What do you want me to do about it right now?” He clicked the indicator on and smoothly turned right. “What can I do? Look, we were clearly set up here. They were waiting for us. All three of the trucks went silent and then you were attacked. We must have a seriously high-level infiltrator, so for all I know there’s a drone tailing us even as we speak and we’re about to be intercepted at any second. If that happens, I guess you’ll get your hand seen to.”

Silence fell. After a minute or two, Bill inspected her wounds again. They were definitely healing.

“…What happens next?” she asked.

“…Assuming we aren’t being followed,” the Handler added, “We have some planning to do. But you let me worry about that.”

He turned the radio on, and that seemed to be the end of the conversation. Bill shut her eyes, laid her head back, and tried to just… cope.

But failure was a damn difficult thing to cope with. In the end, exhaustion and pain and the adrenaline crash and the fact she’d been awake all night combined to lull her into a doze.

She knew one thing, though. She was going to get her revenge.

Date Point: 16y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Daar felt like he could stare into the fire for days.

It was as if…as if he’d been blind his whole life. He’d finally noticed the change one day while staring at something funny shimmering against the horizon up at High Mountain fortress. It took him the longest time to figger it out, but once he did, he was so excited that he’d been vibrating with glee the whole time they held their quarterly rationing board—most were lifted! He held it together despite that he’d been just itchin’ to finish up so he could go chase that shimmering, strange newness that he was seeing so far away…and then, down in the field…and…

He charged outside to see and it hit him like a wall of bricks to the face. It was as if the world had completely changed. He paused, awe-struck at the vastness of it all. Never had he felt so small! Never had he felt so humbled. Or so blessed, to share this with his love. His Naydi.

Gods but he loved her!

He’d decided to hold court on Cimbrean that week, which was convenient for a lotta reasons, defense planning being one of the most biggest, but another was that it gave him and Naydi ready access to people who could help them understand what the hell they were seeing.

Preed really was the most graciousest host, balls. He didn’t complain or nothin’, just smiled and let Daar crash with them. Every waking moment that Daar wasn’t attending to matters of state, or doing liaison, or visiting people back on Gao, or…any of the billion things he did on any given day, he was either cuddled up with Naydi or play-tusslin’ with Leemu and Gorku.

They talked too, a lot. And so far, Daar was progressing mostly like Gorku did. It was a slow and gradual thing, maybe even slower than Gorku, but once he saw it, he couldn’t ever unsee it. Everything was slowly different. Every single thing. There wasn’t a balls-damned element in his daily life that weren’t enriched by red, and it was growing stronger every day. Holy balls, he just din’t have the words for it. Not yet, anyway.

Naydra had surprised them all by having her new color vision come in fast. Leemu’s had taken a couple of weeks: Naydra’s, a couple of days. Daar and Gorku were the slowest so far. Mighta been a degree thing. Which, Daar’d heard that Human males tended to have color-blindness more often than females, so maybe there was something similar going on?

Well, Daar was a lotta things, but a geneticist weren’t one of ‘em.

It mighta been worse too, ‘cuz Gorku was a very rare fifth degree. Talk about the most bestest of bad luck! By the Female’s reckoning, there were maybe only a few thousand or so fifth degrees possibly alive, and that was before the upcoming census, the first since the war. That Gorku would be one of those precious few, and have his prospects jus’ stomped on by bad developmental luck, and then find himself tied up in this drama…

…Actually, maybe that was why he liked Gorku so much. A lot of fifth degree males went way off the rails when they were young. Bad developmental luck was common, but so were bad temperament, bad injuries, way too much aggression so they’d end up gettin’ kilt long before they’d ever had a chance to breed…

Well, Gorku’d be one of the first fully restored gaoians, so that hadta be pretty good for him! He was still young, not even twenty-one, so he had plenty o’ opportunity to catch up if he wanted. He was workin’ at it, too! And bringin’ not-so-lil’ Leemu along! Daar couldn’t help but like ‘em.

Though that was gettin’ ahead of himself, cuz they only had a sample size of four and one of ‘em—himself—was a totally unique case. There hadn’t never been a recorded case of a sixth-degree male since the Gao learned ‘bout genetics, ‘cept for a couple o’ really well-preserved ancient Stoneback monks. In hunnerds o’ years o’ routine genetic assay for every single cub, they ain’t never seen even one sixth degree, an’ it was to the point they’d thought it was prob’ly impossible now…and then Daar was born. He din’t find out about any o’ that until later, but…well. He always knew something was different ‘bout him. Way different.

It was a good reminder that, for all Daar’s singular gifts, his luck might have been the bestest of them all. That, and the discipline his den Mothers beat into him from a young age, which the Stoneback Fathers then took way, way further than any Mother would ever dare. It sucked at the time, but balls: without that he wouldn’t be a Great Father. Wouldn’t be Daar.

He’d see if he could pay it forward with Gorku. The young Associate had almost everything he needed. Maybe with a little bit of mentoring, and some firm but not unkind encouragement…

Whatever. That was scheming for later. Daar considered that he musta been super happy and content since his mind din’t usually wander that far afield, and that was okay. Been a while since he felt so relaxed! He had Naydi, he had new friends on a weird new adventure with him, he had his weights and his sparring with Champions and HEAT operators and big caveman friends, and everything with the Gao was going super nice right now…

Well, there was some stuff goin’ on with the Humans that might end up not so nice for people Daar cared about. He was confident it’d be taken care of, though; Daar trusted ‘em to do it right, and Champion Thurrsto had personally shared some Gaoian tricks ta’ make sure.

He knew it’d end up okay in the end. And Red was happening in his life! And it was making absolutely everything better! Even the colors he’d always been able to see were better! Greens were…more alive. Blues sometimes became so intense they were almost difficult to look at. Yellows had colors that were actually called orange and some of them blended into something called cream which was so much more…more…

It wasn’t just the vision, either. Everything was getting sharper, more intense. It probably wasn’t to nearly the same degree that poor Leemu had experienced, but he could feel himself sorta…hell, climbing up through the gears, maybe? He’d always had a sharp mind, even next to Humans, but now he was finding himself a bit quicker on the uptake, a bit more eager to obsess over a topic and learn, just like he did when he was young and preparing to Challenge the Champion. Recovery from exercise was just a bit faster, too. Maybe there were improvements in other things too, maybe it was just the general feeling of intensity growing inside him, but he swore that he was just that little bit more attuned to the world around him, just that little bit better. That little bit was a little bit more, every single day.

And he smelled better, too! Sharper, stronger, manlier even! Well, Naydi said so, anyway, and if anyone was an expert on what a Daar should smell like, it was his Naydi.

Anyway. All of those were things he thought about while he stared at the fire, arms and neck curled up around his Naydi, with Leemu and Gorku crushed affectionately under his strength.

The log split open, revealing the glowing embers within. They were such a fantastic shade of what he now knew was ‘orange,’ and it only grew prettier every day. Daar keened and pulled everyone in nice and close for a smashingly tight snuggle. There were some brief chittering protests from the three, but ain’t nobody don’t like cuddles. They sighed happily in unison.

Preed sat in his chair, doing something with a big bowl of freshly-picked garden veggies. They smelled nice! Clean, crisp, kinda sweet! They also sounded like they might be crunchy, and they had a really nice bright green color, too. Preed looked up, gave them one of his affectionate smiles, and stoked another log on the fire.

“I find myself almost jealous, watching you four discover all of this.”

“Maybe we should figure out how to sensitize the Human nose next,” Naydra suggested playfully. She was lying on her back, counting embers as they drifted upward.

“If my nose were any more sensitive, I don’t know how I’d tolerate Gorku after he’s been at his weights…”

“Or me!” Daar said playfully.

“Oh… Fssh.” Naydra made a dismissive sound. “You’d enjoy so much more!”

“‘Specially your own cooking!” Gorku agreed, loyally.

“Gorku, one of these days you’ll figure out that I was never a great cook,” Preed told him. “I was just the best cook on the station.”

“Wassat word Champ Gyotin said? Heresy!”

“Simple home cooking and stews, that’s all,” Preet said as he sat down. “Do you know how long it took me to get the noodles right? I could barely remember how my mother used to do them…”

“Well…I like it.” Leemu was just as loyal as Gorku! “And, uh, My Father…I’m having trouble breathing.”

“…Oh! Sarry.” Daar let go. A little. It was enough for the two to squirm into a more comfortable position but he weren’t gonna let ‘em up just yet. He had more snuggle time to catch up on!

“Is it me, or does red have a scent in my head?” Naydra asked, dreamily. “Not just the one I can smell right now, but whenever I think of it, I feel other things, too. It’s all connected now.”

Daar could definitely sympathize with that. He snuffled at her neck and sighed happily, then rolled everyone over to enjoy a different view.

“Red has always made me think of smoke, and spice, and warm things,” Preed agreed.

“Yeah… but other stuff too.”

“Passion? Rage? Life? Those are other associations humans have with it. Where I grew up, Red is Sunday, the day of Surya so it’s associated with the sun… in China, red is good luck. It also has political connections! In America it means the Republican party, elsewhere it means socialism, or communism, in Thailand it’s the colour of pro-democracy…”

“I dunno if I can load all that into it,” Daar mused. “I’d, uh…mebbe not wanna load it down with how Humans think ‘bout it, yijao?” That was a nice sharp clear thought, which was always nice when he was wallowin’ in sensation. Kinda literally, just then.

“I have some books on colour theory, My Father. You can borrow them if you want.”

“Hmm! I might jus’ take ‘ya up on that, lil’ Brother! Still…meebe we should explore all this on our own. An’ I think you been doin’ that already, ain’t’cha?!”

“I’ve tried.”

Daar decided he needed to encourage the little silverfur, and he did it the only way he knew: smother him in affection. Which was admittedly more of a brownie thing…but whatever.

“Naw! I seen ‘yer paintings, and they’re pretty damn good I think!”

“Hnnngh! My Fath–hrk!!”

“He can’t paint if you squish him, bumpkin…” Naydra said, softly.

“But I ain’t hardly squeezin’ much! We just gotta git him stronger!” Daar felt his tail wag up a storm.

“I think his eyeballs might pop out, my love.” Naydi was trying not to chitter, he could tell.

“Oh…fiiiine.” He let Leemu up, who gasped a little overdramatically. Daar followed up with a fond nip on the ear. “Don’t unnersell ‘yerself, y’hear?”

He was about to pounce on Gorku and spread the love a little more, when Brother Tiyun showed up pretty much from nowhere, like he always did. Sneaky silverfur, he was. He may have been an off-breed Brother of Highmountain but he had to have some Whitecrest in him.

“I have your evening briefing, My Father…”

Daar sighed, rolled over, kicked through his legs and kipped himself up. Life didn’t stop for new colours.

“Alright,” he grumbled. “In private.”

“The Fourth Claw material is very brief tonight, My Father.”

“Oh! Well, less jus’ bubble up, then.”

Daar flowed over to his Bag of Many Things and grabbed his personal privacy button. It made a nice little opaque and silent space just big enough to fit him and an advisor or two; super useful for briefings on the move. He pressed it and enjoyed the very satisfying clunk it made, then shook his head at the sudden very heavy silence.

“Alright, what’s first?” he asked.

Tiyun flicked an ear and ducked in a slight apology. “An update on that matter with Mister Etsicitty. The game went off well. No public notice of anything untoward.”

“Oh? That’s good t’hear. And the rest…?”

“In motion, My Father. From what I can tell, the AEC nations will shortly be purged of the APA’s influence.”

“…Good. I’m glad. Very glad. An’ nothin’ at all outta shape ‘fer my friends?”

“Nothing that we know of, My Father.”

Daar duck-nodded. “Good news! What else?”

“That’s it for the sensitive items. I did say it would be brief, My Father.”

“…Fair ‘nuff!” Daar clicked his Button again, and was again put slightly out of sorts by the sudden presence of background…everything.

“Okay. What else…?”

Tiyun briefed him as they meandered into Leemu’s studio, where his sleek lil’ aide sniffed interestedly at one of Leemu’s paintings. Even as Daar had used to see them they’d been pretty good he thought. Now, of course, they were so much more.

Mostly, it was a bunch of trade deals and Clan actions that the Conclave had somehow (Daar wasn’t sure how) decided needed the Great Father’s approval. He’d made a point of diligently respecting their advice, ‘less it was something completely fur-brained.

It usually wasn’t. Well, sometimes the Sea Clans got a little testy…but they’d always been that way. As long as they weren’t warring over territory out in the archipelagos…

“That concludes my briefing, My Father. Which puts us slightly ahead of schedule, for once. And we need to be, today…”

There was one last game afoot, and it would make getting home difficult, so Daar duck-nodded. “Right, yeah. I s’pose we’d better git our tails in motion, then.”

“Yes, My Father. We’ll want to be back inside Gaoian territory within the hour.”

Leemu sniffed the air and his ears shifted suspiciously as Daar and Tiyun returned to the living room. “Uh…is something wrong? My Father?”

He was a courteous lil’ tail, which Daar always appreciated even if he was still a bit manically nervous. Daar pulled him into a fond and reassuring one-armed hug.

“Ain’t nothin’ ‘ya should worry ‘yer handsome lil’ head over, Leemu. So don’t, ‘kay?”

“…Yes, My Father.”

“Oh, don’t gimme that! If it were something ‘ya needed ‘ta know, I’d tell ‘ya. Now I gotta git goin’ ‘cuz a Great Father’s games never stop…” Daar chitter-sighed resignedly. “An’ believe me, ‘yer better off not knowin’ this kinda shit.”

“Okay.” Leemu seemed happier with that explanation. “I trust you, My Father.”

“An’ I trust you to do the right thing. Anyway! I hear tell there’s a pretty lil’ number over at Ninja Taco who’s taken a shine to ‘ya…”

Daar had to admit, the look of sudden nerves and maybe a bit of fear that flashed across Leemu’s expressions was…well, he would be lyin’ to himself if he claimed he didn’t enjoy it. He…mighta pulled the lil’ Brother in a bit tighter too, jus’ for fun…

“Uh…My f-f-father, I can explain–!”

And that was enough; Daar never let people dangle too long, that would be mean! “Naw! Brother, I’m the most happiest ‘fer ‘ya! She an’ I, uh…well. Les’ just say I remind her way too much o’ some really bad memories from the war.”

Everyone knew what that meant, and both Leemu and Gorku keened in sympathy for her.

“Did…she git her justice?” Gorku was a purebred ‘Back an’ he had exactly the right attitude. Daar was decided; he needed to invest in him.

“Yes. I gave it personally,” Daar growled. “But she don’t know that. I din’t wanna, uh…take advantage. Or ruin the fun.”

“I won’t tell her,” Leemu swore. Daar needed to invest in him, too. Maybe Starmind might be a good fit…

“I’d ‘preciate that a whole bunch, but you can tell her someday, if it’ll help. Anyhoo. Mostly it were a sorta game ‘tween us, yijao? And I’m seriously happy ‘fer ‘ya both. Now go make a cub! When ‘yer ready I’ll send over a nice blanket or somethin’!”

Naydra uncoiled gracefully to her feet, gave Leemu and Gorku affectionate cheek-nips in farewell, shook Preed’s hand, and followed him out.

“It went well,” she commented once they were outside. They both knew she wasn’t talking about their visit and ‘color therapy’ session.

“Yeah.”

She snuggled up to his arm. “I’m glad.”

“We do have a request of your time from the Mother-Supreme, My Father,” Tiyun interjected. “And there shouldn’t be any transit problems from the Island portal…”

Daar whined softly. “I know. I’d better go. Both of us, ‘specially you Naydi.” Daar gave her a significant look. She seemed resigned to what this meeting was likely to mean.

“…Yes,” she agreed. “We’d better.”

Duty called.

Date Point: 16y6m AV
Bryant Park, Manhattan, New York, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

“There you are!”

The show was over and apart from some nearby sirens at one point it had been pretty uneventful. Vemik was still up the tree, showing off for a group of kids who had turned up once the cameras were gone, and the Singer was talking with some bead-wearing crystal-healing hippy type women who’d seemingly appeared out of nowhere…

Julian had done some shirtless tree-monkeying himself, and there would definitely be some B-roll footage of that in the news cycle. As much as he hated to admit it, there was a certain utility to him attracting attention to the cause, so if that meant monkey fun in the trees and jumping around like a flea, then well…he’d do that, and he’d have enjoyed himself anyway.

Still. He’d wondered where Hoeff wandered off to. Now the smaller man was back, and Julian had a sneaky suspicion he’d got in some trouble. He was wearing a different shirt and jacket for a start, and his hair wasn’t as clean-cut as it had been. Little details, but they told a story.

“…You change your clothes?”

“It’s a hot day.”

Julian quirked an eyebrow. “Riight. That’s totally the reason.”

“…Had to run a few blocks down. There was a shooting.”

“Shit! Is everyone okay?”

Hoeff shook his head sadly. “Cops are dealing with it. Just the Big Apple, I guess.”

…Hoeff was lying, or at least keeping his own counsel. Julian had become really good at reading people over the years, and Hoeff wasn’t exactly a closed book in the first place.

Now wasn’t the time or the place to drag the truth outta him, though goddammit he would one way or another, when the time was right. So Julian let his skeptical expression do the talking for him and changed subject. “Alright, well… I think I’m about done with being in the public eye for one day. I wanna get back to Anna and everyone.”

“Can’t blame you. Ride’ll be ready in a few minutes, they just gotta disperse the crowd.”

The USSS guys sure did have a solemn, grim look to them. It might’ve been hard to spot past their usual professional poker faces, but Julian could tell. Something had gone wrong.

…Well, okay. Julian decided to wrap things up. He went back to the reporter and had a few last words. Then he spent some time with the friendly crowd, did some autographs and selfies with the adults, talked shop for a bit with a couple of big like-minded fellas, and even indulged in some playful flexing for the kids. They had the best questions too, and would do things like point at his foot (“See!? It’s real!”) or make guilelessly adorable observations (“You’re way bigger than my dad and he’s super fat!”) while their parents looked on, embarrassed. Singer and Vemik had a big crowd of fans too, which of course was the point of all this. Many selfies were taken, Singer and Vemik “autographed” many things.

Then they got to playing with the more adventurous folk. Honestly, the whole thing was pretty fun! He hadn’t expected that, but just the opportunity to ape about with Vemik and generally carouse was always welcome. That it was in New York City of all things, in a small park built over a vault with literally millions of books in it…well, Vemik thought that was neat as heck.

Eventually, his security detail finished whatever big secret thing it was they were doing, and were ready (and definitely eager) to go. Julian went to fetch his shirt, pulled it back on, said his goodbyes to the crowd and yelled up at Vemik to do the same, much to the disappointment of the kids he’d brought up in the trees with him. That last part was probably not so much fun for their adventurous parents down below, who were definitely worrying their heads off even if they were smiling and all that. Julian understood that better, now.

Vemik gave the kids an exciting ride back to ground level, they all said their last goodbyes and… well, thus ended the trip. They bustled back into the suburban and headed out.

There were a couple of police vans parked half a block south of the park, and a bunch of dudes in black clothing with black-green-and-blue bandanas were being loaded into them straight off the back of a U-Haul truck, firmly handcuffed despite moving like they were drunk.

“…Some’a the protestors got too rowdy or something?”

“Somethin’ like that,” Hoeff grunted.

“Hoeff, buddy…” Julian shot his friend a look. Hoeff’s reply was a sorry, sad sort of facial half-shrug, just the faintest tilt of his head and a shifty quirk of his eyebrow. The message was clear: ‘I can’t talk about it; I’m sorry.’

Well…Julian knew what that meant. He sighed internally, and did his very best to put on his usual jockular attitude for his most favoritest cavemonkey.

“Well, hey! I’m glad you took care of it. I wouldn’t trust anyone else for the job.”

Some of Hoeff’s usual attitude returned. “Aww! You flatterer! I’ll have you know I’m taken!”

Julian grinned, and pulled Hoeff across the seat and into a crushing bearhug. “Ah, don’t worry little fella, I’ll be gentle…”

“Hnnngh, bro! While I’m flattered you wanna boldly shove ‘yer fuckin’ baseball bat where no man has shoved before…”

“Never?” Julian tightened his hug into more of a friendly smash. “Uh-huh. You’re an ex Navy SEAL, I find that hard to believe…”

“Hrrrf! …Buddy, a man’s gotta breathe–!” Julian relented a bit and Hoeff gasped for air. “…Christ, huge fuckin’ weirdo. Anyway. You’re too late, I belong to Claire. No dice, dude.”

“So?” Vemik trilled quietly. “We don’t let that stop us!”

“Diff’rent rules for diff’rent folks, my friend.”

“Also, Claire would have his balls,” Julian added, and let Hoeff escape his grasp.

“God, I swear the combat arms weirdness is rubbing off on you, Playboy…”

The rest of the drive was mostly uneventful, until they reached their destination. NYC’s jump array was under Grand Central, deeper than any of the metro lines. They’d gone on a subway ride the night before to explore the night life—no way in hell would he let the cavemonkeys come to NYC without seeing Times Square all lit up—and they had been perhaps Vemik’s most absolute favorite part of the entire trip.

The subway, not the lights. He’d enjoyed the lights well enough, but he’d loved the trains. He’d groaned audibly when told he wouldn’t get to ride again, but there were limits to Julian’s patience; just getting him through the turnstiles was a diplomatic (and frankly, physical) challenge even worse than dealing with the sheep-heiress back on Cimbrean.

It was probably for the best. A train carriage containing Julian, Vemik and the Singer didn’t have a lot of room left over for anyone else.

The Array terminus was a wheel shape, with no fewer than five arrays around the central hub, all powered by a fusion reactor in the sub-basement. It managed a jump every five minutes for destinations elsewhere on Earth, and off-world jumps every half an hour.

Considering how heavily the Folctha array hammered away nowadays, and all the other big arrays on Earth, there were probably all sorts of crazy intricate treaties and international standards and specialty industry going on behind the scenes to keep everything running synchronized and without conflict.

Thanks to jump arrays, though, long-haul airlines were going the way of the old ocean liners. Arrays were quicker, more convenient, carbon-neutral and safer. There had not (yet) been a single array accident anywhere, ever. Not even mishaps with the ultra-sharp stasis field edge, thanks to well-planned safety measures. Between the railings, forcefields and emergency shutdown, Julian doubted whether somebody could get themselves cut in half by a jump array even if they were trying to… and if one failed, all that happened was it didn’t jump. It wouldn’t come tumbling out of the sky, or have to land on its belly.

Still. They were expensive to install, drew huge power, and demanded good connections. No wonder they mostly only served major cities. Nobody was going to hop through a wormhole to get to the other side of town for the foreseeable future.

As always, though, Vemik wanted to stop and take in the sight of the concourse. Julian could see him wanting to climb up and get a closer look at the schedule boards.

Hoeff stopped him by grabbing his tail. “Sorry buddy, it’s time for us to go. The array fires in a few minutes.”

That was a weird gesture with Ten’Gewek. With loved ones and close friends it was perfectly friendly, and usually presaged a tussle or some other form of monkeyplay. With respected elders, it was a form of gentle correction. In Hoeff’s case with Vemik, it could very well mean both. Right then it seemed to mean the latter, since Vemik flicked his ears and nodded agreeably.

“…Okay.”

They had some kind of VIP fast track pass to skip past the people waiting in line, most of whom weren’t going to Folctha anyway. The last step before boarding the jump platform was a biofilter field—Julian didn’t think he’d ever quite get used to the way they left his teeth feeling unnaturally squeaky-clean—then a minute or two of standing around awkwardly in the middle of the platform as the attendants cleared it out and made sure everything was safe, then…

Thump.

Considering that the Array was matching momentum with the surface of an alien world several hundred parsecs away, the utterly tiny jolt Julian felt through his feet was a damn miracle.

As it turned out though, Julian and his Ten’Gewek friends weren’t gonna part ways just yet, as one of Hoeff’s ill-defined “colleagues” from the security services explained:

“Sorry fellas, it’ll be a bit before we can send you on to Akyawentuo.”

“Why?”

“Maintenance work on the array. Apparently they gotta take up the deck and swap out the spacers.”

“How long?”

“Not sure, but at least overnight. Sorry.”

Singer hooted sadly, but Julian could fix that. “Aww, it’s okay. You can stay at my house! And maybe you two can explore a bit if you want, go visit the art store–”

Vemik perked up immediately. “Burg?!”

“…Yes,” Julian chuckled. “We can burg. I can make them at home too.”

“And deprive them of the famous Folctha Best Brioche?” Hoeff asked. “You fucking monster.”

Julian felt the need to defend himself. “Well, I mean…I make a pretty mean burger.”

“You don’t make Best Brioche.”

“I bet mine’s better!”

“Mhmm. I think we burg twice,” the Singer suggested. “At Best Brioche, and Jooyun’s hut. We see which is stronger! For science.”

“I like this kind of science!” Vemik declared, earning the trilling Ten’Gewek version of a giggle from the Singer.

Julian rolled his eyes, amused. “Okay. But the four of us are gonna gym tomorrow morning to pay for it all…”

“Well, maybe not.” The security fella chimed in again and turned toward Hoeff, “You’ve got a meeting. Old friend of yours from rural Virginia came a’visiting, apparently.”

Hoeff almost didn’t show it, but he was clearly surprised. He paused ever so slightly before acknowledging the information. “Oh? That’s unlike him.”

“He said as much. Here.” The security fella handed Hoeff a note. “The details.”

Hoeff read it, then nodded. “…Alright. I’d, uh… better go put on some nicer clothes.”

“Must be a special old friend,” Julian commented.

Hoeff, once again, was back in a non-talkative mood. “Yeah,” he grunted and that was that. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And then he was gone. He wasn’t hurrying, Julian noticed, but he was doing that thing where he didn’t waste a second of his time. Moving with a purpose, as they called it.

Weird.

“Well… okay then. Wanna come meet Anna, Vemik?”

Vemik stopped scratching his head and hooted even more enthusiastically than at the idea of burgers. “Yes!”

The Singer knuckled him affectionately in the chest. “Be gentle,” she reminded him.

“I will!”

Julian grinned, and allowed the security guy to lead them outside to the waiting car. Honestly, he was getting kinda sick of being driven around in black SUVs, but whatever. He was nearly home. Something was clearly up with Hoeff, but there was no getting in there unless he was invited, so… may as well just go home, cuddle Allison and Xiù, hold his daughter, have some burgers, and just go back to being himself.

All in all, that sounded like a pretty good way to spend the rest of his day.

Date Point: 16y6m AV
Grand Commune of Females, Tiritya Island, Cimbrean

Naydra

Yulna had bared her throat to Daar, when she made him the Great Father. Technically, his authority applied even on the island, at the very heart of the Clan of Females… But Daar liked to pretend that it didn’t. There were some areas, he felt, where what he called the ‘nat’ral’ laws between Male and Female won out over mere crowns and power.

Which was why, even though he had the perfect right to enter uninvited, he never ever set foot in the Mother-Supreme’s private rooms. And why, when Yulna requested to speak with Naydra in private, he simply duck-nodded and went off to enjoy the island and very probably sire another cub or two. He had a waiting list. A long waiting list.

Naydra wasn’t remotely jealous. The Females on that waiting list were a pleasant and enjoyable duty to him, but she was his love.

Besides. She had more important matters on her mind.

Yulna was… Tough. She’d always been tough. Even being abducted by a Corti xenobiologist and having one of the eyes plucked from her skull had ultimately just made her tougher. She’d certainly been tough enough to make a hard decision in wartime, and she was tough enough now that even though her body reeked of tumors and pain, she still stood tall and refused to take up a cane like her predecessor had.

Then again, she was still a lot younger than Giymuy had been. And a lot more proud. Her reply to pain was to stare it down like the stern old Mother she was.

And she absolutely refused to let Naydra make the tea.

“You know who the most popular candidate to replace me will be,” she said. She’d adopted Champion Gyotin’s tea ceremony. Naydra had of course practiced and mastered it because it was increasingly becoming the done thing, but she still didn’t quite understand the why of it. But this was Yulna’s office, in her private chambers, and making the tea her way was her prerogative.

So Naydra sat politely as the Mother-Supreme rinsed and then heated the tea cups with hot water, and carefully prepared the leaves in the pot. And she answered politely when Yulna spoke.

“I can guess. I… have reservations, though. Doesn’t it feel like concentrating too much power and trust in one place?”

Yulna chittered as she wiped a cup dry. “All the power is already concentrated in one place,” she pointed out. “You’re probably the best antidote we have… should we need one. Nobody else can influence him quite like you. He loves you very much, Naydra.”

“Yes. But I love him very much too.”

“Would you allow him to do something awful? Do you tell him when you think he’s going wrong?”

Naydra’s ears pricked up indignantly. “Of course!”

“Oh good. You really do love him then.” Yulna gave her a sly look and placed the last dry cup in a row.

“I mean, I take your point, but…”

Naydra tailed off. The fact was, she honestly didn’t know what the but was, and the look Yulna gave her as she poured the water into the teapot with her ears slightly askance said more than a prepared speech would have. Yulna was good at puncturing objections with nothing more than a look.

“None who are called to Duty are ever quite prepared for it, my dear. He managed and so will you.”

“So have you.”

“Giymuy threw me in a deep pool without any swimming lessons, true enough…” Yulna sighed. “I always imagined I wouldn’t do what she did, and I’d spend my later years grooming a successor so that we could have a smooth transition when my time came. But no, here I am and here we are… Do you know, I still don’t know why she picked me? She barely knew me!”

“Perhaps she knew you better than you think.”

“Probably. The old girl had a mind that makes me feel small.” Yulna sighed and carefully finished tidying up her implements as she waited for the sand to finish its journey from one glass bulb to the other. “You’re a more natural choice, as far as I can tell. Influential, especially with the Males who really matter, and very popular indeed with the Females. The young Sisters idolize you.”

“For what?” Naydra asked. “For the abuse I went through during the war or for being naive enough to fall in love with my rescuer?”

“Both and more. It takes strength to go through what you did, and a blessing to still be naive afterwards.” Yulna duck-shrugged and her ears moved to a wry angle. “What am I to do? They want you. I daresay if I named another successor she’d still lose to you, and what’s a Mother-Supreme to do in that situation? Do I have any choice but to trust my Sisters and Daughters?”

“I suppose not…” Naydra admitted.

“No. But I can undermine your authority, plant seeds of doubt…” Yulna nodded to herself as the sand finished running, and took the lid off the teapot to hook out the basket full of leaves within. She set it aside in a shallow bowl. “Should I sabotage you? Why? Is the Clan so badly wrong? I don’t think they are.”

“…You don’t have to step down yet. I’m sure Nofl—”

Yulna set the teapot down sharply. “No Corti touches me ever again,” she said, sharply. “And the fact that you let him mess with your genome is the one thing that’s giving me pause, here.”

“He’s trustworthy.”

“Is he? He might be!” Yulna sniffed. “But he’s just a fancy flamboyant scalpel in somebody else’s hand, my dear. Nofl may be the most wonderful being alive for all I know, but the Directorate…”

“I didn’t do this because I’m overly fond of Nofl,” Naydra retorted. “I did it because we are poised on the brink of destruction, Yulna. Have you seen the statistics? The Great Dying has already begun. Our population dropped for the first time ever outside famine or war. For now it’s just a blip. In a few years…”

Yulna poured the tea. “And am I the right person to see us through it?”

…Well, damn. She had her skewered.

“…No.”

“Exactly. So, Nofl might be truly wonderful. He might get these damn tumors out of me like a darling and at least I’ll live to speak kindly of one Corti. But I must let go, Naydra. For our people and for what they’re about to endure, I must. I can’t just step down, because so long as I’m still alive, I’ll sabotage you just by drawing breath.”

“Yulna, you sound… You’re effectively talking about suicide. I don’t want that.”

“No, I’m talking about letting the serendipity of nature take its course.” Yulna handed over the teacup, and Naydra took it from her without really being conscious of doing so. “I have some time left, yet. Time enough.”

“Still…” Naydra fidgeted.

“…It’s thanks to the Corti that I’m dying now, you know. All those experiments all those years ago. That was when they were beginning to realize we weren’t just another regular, disposable first-contact species like all the rest. They’ve known what we were for years, Naydra. All of this pantomime about discovery and such is just that. Controlled information release.” Yulna sat down and sipped her tea. “Now: Think how much damage it would do to our strategic agreements with them if I said that in public. Think how much it would hurt the Gao if I denounced the Directorate over… this.”

She gestured to herself. “I’ve known this was coming for a long time. Since long before I was Mother-Supreme. I learned my fate on the day we returned to Gao and took Sister Shoo into our care. When the Openpaws showed me what they found, and told me the most they could do was slow it, I knew this was coming. And I have kept utterly silent about it. Not even Giymuy and her clever eyes and ears knew.”

Naydra knew her ears had gone flat. She keened softly, not knowing what else to say. Yulna gave her a sympathetic look and put a paw on top of hers.

“You, I’m quite sure, will live even longer than Giymuy. And perhaps you’ll even be a better Mother-Supreme. I feel small next to you too, you know. But you’re still rather naive, my Daughter. You’re still willing to pretend that a pleasant scalpel makes up for the mad gleam in the surgeon’s eye.”

She chittered. “Or maybe I’m just bitter and prejudiced. I have a good reason to be, don’t I? But I still say you’re naive and a bit of a dreamer, though you’re less so than most. The Mother-Supreme cannot be either of those things, not even a little bit.”

“Then…I suppose I have much to learn.”

“Well, that’s good! You only stop learning when you die!” Yulna gave her a warm look, then nodded at the tea. “Drink.”

Naydra did so. It was, she had to admit, excellent. That was probably the point, first and foremost: to get a perfect cup of tea. Gyotin himself had composed the paradoxical sentiment ‘not everything spiritual has to be spiritual.’

Despite what they’d discussed, her ‘lessons’ or whatever she was to receive from Yulna, would have to wait. The Mother-Supreme had plenty of business to attend to, not to mention a visit from an Openpaw physician that Naydra knew was too perfectly timed to be coincidence.

She wandered the Grand Commune and thought about what she’d learned, what it meant…

…And promptly forgot to think at all when she wandered into the flower garden.

It had always been a beautiful place. Several species of delicate mountain and tundra flowers native to Gao had been brought over to save them, and were thriving thanks to the attention and affection of the gardeners and their drones. Naydra had visited it many times, and every time the scents had made her close her eyes and bask in the aromatic symphony around her.

With her newly improved eyes firmly open, however…

There… There were no words. Only feeling. And so she did just that, re-acquainted herself with the bounty of Gao, and knew: No Gaoian could be kept from this, It belonged to them all.

Resolve settled into her belly and lit a fire there. Yulna was right, of course… but in one important regard, perhaps she was also wrong. The Corti were who they were, and the Gao would have to be very foolish to forget… But did the past have to steal the future? Were gifts like the riot of pinks and purples around her to be scorned just because they grew from a poisonous tree?

Could one safely bargain with a devil? But the Corti weren’t devils, of course. They were just flawed people, and the Unseen knew the Gao had their own faults too.

…Or was life nothing but a series of devil’s bargains, with an inevitable price at the end?

Something to ponder…but not just now. Right now, she wanted to wander, and see.

When she eventually caught up with Daar, he was over at the obstacle course about to make a run of it, much to the studious interest of a number of young, fiercely fit Females. He stretched out on all fours, shook out his once-again short pelt, crouched, and—

Speed, poise, unmatched poetry in motion. Power, and not simply of body.

She watched for a bit, and decided to leave them to their fun. Innocence and play was important after all. There was no point in souring the mood by bearing bad news.

“I think I shall retire to our apartments,” she told her current aide, a fiery young Sister with clear Longear heritage, and who had a sharp nose for trouble. “Please inform the Great Father when it seems convenient.”

She needed the time to herself to ponder things, and more importantly she didn’t want to disrupt Daar’s connection with the young Sisters. He loved the Females. All of them. That bond was just as important to nourish as the deeper, more personal love she shared with her big, soppy-hearted Bumpkin. Vulnerability and love, intertwined and inescapable. It was the oldest story there was.

He didn’t return until much later in the evening, just as she had expected.

“Well, you certainly smell like you had fun…”

She enjoyed teasing him entirely too much, but it was a good way to break the moment. He did at least have enough tact to chitter with some embarrassment. “Well, I weren’t gonna say no to a paw of adventurous young Sisters…”

“You are the most predictable ‘Back ever, bumpkin.”

“I know. An’ I bet ya’ needed the free time, anyway…”

“I did. I needed to think.”

He curled up around her, squeezed his powerful legs ever so softly around her waist, and groomed her fur gently with his claws. Sometimes, when she really needed him to be, he could be supremely tender with his affection. She sighed, and leaned into him.

They shared a long moment together, saying nothing and simply enjoying each other’s scent and warmth.

It didn’t last. Eventually he nuzzled in the top of her headfur exactly like he always did before he had to get moving.

“The last Array to Gao fires not too long from now, Naydi…an’ we really need ‘ta not be on Cimbrean tonight.”

She really would rather stay put, if possible. “Why the rush?”

Daar shook his mane out and sighed. “Duty, an’ secrets. Sarry.”

“They must be serious secrets if they dictate which planet you need to be on.”

“…Yeah.”

That said everything she needed to know. She slithered upright and shook herself. “Okay. But if you haven’t seen the flower garden yet, I definitely need to show you when we come back.”

Daar flopped himself over and sprang to all fours. “Deal. Lessgo.”

As she walked alongside him and as their entourage fell in around him, Naydra calculated furiously. The list of things that would cause Daar to need to be elsewhere was pretty tiny. It must be big politics, something where he needed plausible deniability.

As they rode the elevator down into the basement, a suspicion settled in her belly though it did not, she was surprised to notice, shock her. Maybe it was her conversation with Yulna from earlier, maybe it was a truth she’d figured out a long time ago…

…But she was pretty sure they were going home so Daar would have an alibi.

Date Point: 16y6m AV
The Pinkwood Michelin star restaurant, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

“Hello, Daniel.”

“Hello, Marcus. Never thought I’d see you again.”

The two men shook hands, and then embraced in a fond hug.

“You’ve grown into a hell of a fireplug, I see.”

“Yup. Needs of the job, and fuckin’ demanding friends. And hell, I won’t say I don’t enjoy it.”

Marcus pulled back and gave Daniel an appraising look. “I hope this hasn’t slowed you down.”

Daniel shrugged. “Pretty much the exact opposite of that, actually. Everything’s better now. Only downside is I’m even more ravenous than I ever was before.”

“That’s a little frightening,” Marcus chuckled. “I’ve already ordered for us.” They walked over to the waiting table, which had a substantial spread laid out.

Daniel nodded approvingly. “You remembered! And you bought me a fancy-ass steak, too.”

“I’ve never spared you courtesy, Daniel. How are things?”

“Not too bad. Family’s doing all right, friends are okay. You?”

“Oh, I was never one for a family. Doesn’t suit someone like me, I’m afraid.”

“Too bad.” Daniel bit into his steak and savored it for a moment. “You’d make a good dad.”

“So I am told. You have a partner now, I hear?”

“Yeah. She’s… nice. Never thought I’d fall for a girl like her, or that she’d ever dig a guy like me. Whole lotta dirt under my fingernails, y’know?”

“Of a very different sort than the kind under hers.”

“I woulda thought that’d go without saying.”

“It must be nice. A different world.”

“Yeah. I’m digging this a lot better than my usual one-night flings.”

They ate in silence for several minutes, comfortable in each other’s company.

“Daniel, I have a job offer for you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not in the market for work, Marcus.”

Marcus sighed. “People like you and I, we don’t get to leave this particular job market, Daniel.”

“I beg to differ. I’m sure there are others who would love the employment.”

“Nobody as good as you, my friend. And this particular job needs a very skilled hand.”

“I’m not interested.”

“Arthur asked after you, Daniel. Personally.”

Daniel paused, and put his cutlery down. He contemplated his bourbon for a long moment.

“Did he, now?”

“Yes. Reluctantly, it must be said. He knows you’re enjoying your retirement.”

“…Goddamnit.”

Marcus gave him a sympathetic look. “Yeah.”

“I presume all the usual terms and conditions apply?”

“All the worst ones, yeah.”

“Wunderbar.”

“Here.” Marcus slid a small envelope across the table. “Your advance payment, and accommodations. Further details will be made available to you once you’re checked in.”

Daniel tucked it away for later reading. His hand only paused as he withdrew it from his pocket.

“…Guess you’re right. We don’t really get to retire, do we?”

“Daniel, my friend…there’s some kinds of work that’ll never go out of style. Most people aren’t suited to do it. Those of us who are…“

Daniel sighed, and picked up his steak knife. “Go to interesting places, meet interesting people…” he said.

They left the sentence unfinished.

Date Point: 16y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

Leadership was a challenging proposition, regardless if it came naturally for a man or not. Leading utterly irreplaceable men was even worse. Correcting the behavior of a well-meaning, young-at-heart, peerless hulk of a warrior who, like everyone, had made mistakes in his life, and was now paying for a particularly egregious fuckup in a particularly painful way? And who lately had an unconscious habit of intimidating the ever-lovin’ fuck out of everyone he met, even if he didn’t mean to? Or even necessarily realized he was doing it?

Well, that was why they paid Costello the “big bucks.” That joke had never once been funny.

Technical Sergeant Arés was an interesting challenge. He was, aside from Burgess, about the most intelligent lad on the team, and in this group that was genuinely saying something. He had Costello beat on the raw scores by a fairly intimidating margin, even if he wasn’t an intellectually curious type of man. Arés was a blue-collar genius at heart and nobody really matched him.

That meant that at certain things—observation and intuition, for example—he was pretty much the best there was, certainly the best Costello had ever met. But on others—self-awareness, in this case—he sometimes fell a bit comically short. Mostly it was a harmless personality quirk of his, and one of the things that made him an endearing, hard-to-hate Lad, but right now…

The giant man was hovering around the outside of the party, trying and utterly failing to hide his sulky, self-loathing slump.

Costello understood and even sympathized. It was hard to be overtaken, and must be doubly so in this case. Burgess was a genuinely modest person, and level-headed enough to be content with only being the second or third strongest man in history. He was a natural member of the pack: happy to keep up with his friends, perfectly willing to outshine them, equally happy to be outshone by them.

Arés, on the other hand, was the single most intensely competitive and determined man Costello or anyone he knew had ever met, or even read about. He was a natural alpha male personality and an effortless pack-leader, and he wasn’t used to failure, either. At anything. He’d been some form of a prodigy since his teens, and his failure to promote along with his buddy represented one of the few real setbacks he’d ever endured.

He wasn’t handling it very well. In fact, he was handling it like a spoiled teenager.

Well… almost. The difference was that, where a teenager would have found somebody else to blame and whined about how it wasn’t fair, Arés knew good and well that it was fair—generously merciful, in fact—and had therefore lapsed into sullen self-directed anger.

Letting him tear himself apart over his own shortcomings wasn’t an option. Nor was letting him sour the mood of the party.

Costello had discussed the long-term management problem at length with Senior Master Sergeant Firth. They hadn’t really come up with much of a solution, and in fact about the only effective tack they’d arrived at involved getting Firth up to and perhaps one day beyond Arés’ level. That was as caveman as it came, and normally he’d prefer another option…but what else could they do? Punishment in the traditional sense would ruin their relationship. In any ordinary military unit, the officer corps held all the cards. Any man was replaceable, if it came to that. Nobody, not the lowliest grunt nor the highest general, was such a precious asset they couldn’t be swapped out for a better man.

But among the Lads, that wasn’t true. They were the best there was. Or, at least, the only ones capable of the task at hand. Costello had to be friends with his men, in a detached sort of way. Firth did too, maybe even more so.

Which, in the end, was the only way forward. Tough love, friend-to-friend.

Lubricated, in this case, by joining him at the edge of the party and handing him a beer bottle. “‘Horse, you look like shit. Something wrong?”

Adam stirred out of his grumbly fugue to look at Costello. “…Eh. Not really. Just, I dunno.”

…Yup. Blue-collar genius, paired with the enlightened introspection of a brick.

“How’s the family?”

That was a subject always guaranteed to perk the big guy up. He beamed happily and swigged his beer. “Goin’ good! We’re workin’ on another baby. Gonna give Diego a little sister, maybe!”

“Ah! Well, I imagine you’re enjoying the work…”

“It’s a tough job, sir. Someone’s gotta do it.”

Costello chuckled, and offered his bottle for a kind of impromptu toast. Glass clinked against glass and they drank.

“…I was kinda makin’ plans on what I’d do with a master sergeant’s pay,” Arés confessed. “I think we’re gonna have a biiiig family, an’ our place just isn’t good for that now. I need someplace with plenty’a bedrooms an’ where they can run around.”

“Never count your chickens before they hatch, big guy. Tech to master is a very hard promotion to make. Colonel Miller tells me this last selection was the tightest he’s seen ever.”

“Yeah…sorta found that one out the hard way.” Arés sipped his beer. “…I do that a lot.”

“Well…let me offer you a little tough love, big guy. Burgess promoted because he was ready for it. Your flash of anger a while back, well. That’s unbecoming of a senior NCO. You know that.”

“Yeah.”

“Firth is almost guaranteed he’ll never be promoted to chief as a result of his own indiscretion, too. That’s a tough thing for someone of his rank. There’s still hope, even for him, but realistically he’ll probably not recover from his mistake. You, though…”

Arés sighed, but it wasn’t the moochy, self-hating sigh Costello had seen him give a few times already. This one was more relieved.

“…I think that’s what I was worried about, yeah.”

“I won’t lie. It’ll be quite some time. I can’t justify putting you in for a STEP package, not after all that. So you’d better figure out how to make that big family work as you are now… but it’ll happen. Eventually, and if you can prove you’re ready.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will. In other news…how goes Project: Build Even Scarier Monsters?”

Arés chuckled. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“Why not? I’m supposedly the boss and I say it is. So…status?”

“Firth is growing like a mutant weed, as fast as I ever did. Daar isn’t quite as ridiculous but he’s not slowed down, either. And the other day…he beat me on the leg press. And bicep curls, too.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yup.”

“…Damn.” Well, that was probably the source of it. There’s always someone bigger and badder, and Arés had finally found him. Even if he’d had to build that monster himself.

“I mean, I’m glad for him…” Arés added belatedly. “But I sorta bet he’s actually got me beat on everything now, or will soon.” There was obviously a war going on in his head between his pride as a trainer and his relentlessly competitive soul. “… I mean, I’ll make it hard for him, though. And who knows? Maybe I just needed the competition, and pretty soon I’ll beating him again!”

“That’s the spirit!” Costello encouraged him. “Anyway, you’re here in this corner commiserating with me, when you should be over there with your best friend, embarrassing him with stories from training or whatever.”

“Eh,” he said dismissively, and looked down at his feet. “You’ve heard those all a million times.”

“Of course we have. That isn’t the point. It’s tradition, ‘Horse. This is his night. Don’t make him feel bad. Go be happy for him.”

Arés objected, “I am happy for him!”

“I know. Make sure he knows it, and that we all know it. He’s been doing the same for you since Basic, after all.”

“…I’ve been bein’ a jerk, huh?”

“Not intentionally, but yeah.” Costello clapped him on the shoulder. “We all have bad days. Go turn it into a good one, yeah? And we could all stand to be a bit more mindful of ourselves, y’know?”

“Yeah…” ‘Horse nodded and finished his beer. “…Thanks.”

With that, the giant Protector thumped his way over towards his best friend with his trademark ground-shaking unintentional swagger. They talked for a bit, maybe a bit awkwardly… and then the usual energy reasserted itself.

Costello grinned as a great big bro-hug dispelled the mood. It was as if the party’s atmosphere suddenly lightened, and he could breathe a little more easily.

He was about to head outside to see how Firth’s infernally perfect brisket was doing when his watch buzzed, drawing his attention to a new message. He read it, sighed, and tapped Akiyama on the shoulder instead.

“Give my apologies, would you? Work.”

Akiyama nodded. “We needed, sir?”

“No, just me. You all have fun.”

“Will do.”

Duty done, Costello slipped out of the party and took a cab back up to the base. That was the hazard of his position: work never quite went away. He wouldn’t change it for the world, and a nine-to-five would have felt like a slow death sentence by suffocation to him, but it would have been nice to have a whole party go by without something coming up.

Still. For the APA, he’d make all the time in the world.

Date Point: 16y6m AV
The Oval Office, the White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

Sartori had a pen, a fine bespoke fountain pen commissioned for him as a gift from the King of England. It was the kind of subtle, classy gift that carried weight beyond mere ounces and symbolism beyond that of an ordinary writing utensil. He used it for when official hand-writing or the Presidential signature was needed, but it wasn’t his best pen.

His best pen was a Meisterstück he’d inherited from his grandfather, and he saved it for personal hand-writing. It slid freely and evenly across any paper, and the paper Sartori was using right now was the absolute best. It made writing easy, though in this case he was writing slowly and carefully. This was a letter to be done correctly. There were a few lives hanging on his conscience today, but United States Secret Service agent Thomas Child’s hung the heaviest.

He’d known Child, a little. The young man had been on his personal protection team a few times and Sartori made a point of knowing the men who would, if necessary, throw themselves in harm’s way to save him. He memorized their birthdays and a few details about their personal lives. Child had been unmarried and without any kids of his own, but he had a nephew he adored, and had collected vintage tobacco tins. He’d been left-handed, and had a golfing handicap of 15.

His family deserved more than an impersonal form letter.

Sartori refilled and cleaned the pen while consulting the draft letter he’d typed up, then nodded to himself and applied the nib to inscribing the next sentence.

…Although I cannot disclose the exact nature of the operation, I want you to know that Thomas fell protecting not merely our nation’s powerful but, much more nobly, that he fell defending the ordinary and the innocent…

It was not, in the end, a long letter, and it consisted of nothing but platitudes as far as he could tell. He bitterly wished it could have been more substantial, but there was nothing more he could write without saying too much.

Still, he poured himself into it line after line until finally he reached what felt to him like a stilted and awkward ending.

You and your family remain in my thoughts and prayers. May Almighty God bless you.

—Arthur Sartori
President of the United States of America

And with that, it was done. It wasn’t enough, but it was done. He screwed the cap on and returned the pen to his inside jacket pocket, before standing to prowl aimlessly around the office.

It was getting very late. Sunset was turning the White House pink, and touching the trees and lawn with a hint of summer fire. He watched the purples and reds in the sky for a while, trapped in a mood he didn’t want to escape.

In the end, he was lifted out of it by a knock on the open door. Steve Beckett joined him with a sympathetic expression. He was one of only a half-dozen people in the building, never mind the wider world, who knew exactly what sort of things were on the President’s mind tonight.

“We’ve got them,” he said, shutting the door behind him.

“Got them?” Sartori asked, sitting down on the arm of one of the twin cream couches in the middle of the room.

“The APA’s NYC cell broke communications discipline: What happened to them in Manhattan panicked them. We pull on that loose thread, and they will unravel.”

“Good.” Sartori returned to the Resolute desk and slid the finished letter across its surface. “Here.”

Beckett read. His expression didn’t change much, but he nodded and gave Sartori a knowing look. “You put your soul into this one.”

“He was a good man. Loved his nephew like life itself.”

“You didn’t kill him, Arthur.”

Sartori sighed, and transferred the letter to his out tray. “Never tell me that, Steve.”

Beckett said nothing.

“…The… other matter?” Sartori asked after a second.

“Being addressed as we speak.”

“I suppose I should go to bed. Though I just know I’ll be woken up in the middle of the night by, uh… some crisis.”

“…Yes, Mister President.”

“I don’t know how I’ll sleep, Steve.”

Beckett did something that would have been a smile, if it had reached his eyes. “I think you’ll find you rest more easily than you think. Good night, sir.”

Sartori nodded. “Good night.”

He was left alone again. True to his word, he retired to the bedroom suite, changed into his pajamas, and climbed into bed. The sky was still a little light outside and he lay there and considered it, certain that he wouldn’t rest as well as Beckett had predicted, and even more certain that he didn’t want to.

Nevertheless, he did.

Date Point: 16y6m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

“Evening, sir.”

Powell had never moved to a bigger office. Apparently he liked the small one he’d occupied since the HEAT had first moved to Sharman, and Costello could see why. It had a decent but not distracting view, and it was right at the top of the stairs so he didn’t have to squeeze through the admin building’s narrow hallways to get to his desk.

Besides. He’d left his mark on it now, moulded it to himself. The office had spirit thanks to Powell.

He was playing with Bozo when Costello arrived, engaged in a claw-scrabbling game of tug-o-war over a length of cargo strap that was probably going to give up before either man or dog would. “How’s he holdin’ up?”

Costello smiled at the way Bozo contrived to welcome him with a wag and a glance that said, with canine eloquence, ‘I’m happy to see you, but I’m a little busy right now.’

“As well as can be expected, I think. Firth is less happy with the likely consequences for making Chief, but he knew that was coming.” He sat down. “Something came up?”

“Aye.” Powell let Bozo win their game, and the dog trotted a circuit of the room with his prize in his mouth and his tail proudly up. “Turns out the US government just thwarted a terrorist attack in New York, but not wi’out some interesting complications. The APA got their hands on some Cruezzir, dosed up one’a their worst psychos with it an’ let her loose in public. She got away.”

“I thought the Crude was a controlled substance?”

“Not Crude. Cruezzir. The original full-fat shit. And aye, that stuff was controlled as hell too, but it’s startin’ to look like the APA have friends in lots of places they shouldn’t.

“…Hmm. That’s…alarming.”

“That’s one word for it.” Powell handed over a tablet. “Read.”

Costello had mastered the art of quick-reading pretty much anything put in front of him. It was practically instant: he saw the page, took it all in, swiped down. He hadn’t been able to do that before the Crue-D, but nowadays he took it as one of the areas his training had really paid off.

The file’s contents were a hastily assembled jumble. The Secret Service, it seemed, were busy pulling on a loose thread that was unravelling practically as fast as they could tug on it… but with some conspicuous and troubling gaps.

Of codename HYDE—Wilhelmina Briggs-Davies—or a figure known even to the captured APA terrorists only as ‘The Handler,’ there was no sign.

The part that made Costello grunt and pull a small face was when he got to a list of the actors and agents involved in the little silent drama in the park.

“So. They brought one of our guys in, and used a friend of ours as bait. And they’re telling us because…?”

“Courtesy. Mostly.”

The tablet pinged as an increasingly confused Costello handed it back. Powell inspected the new message, and the tiniest of vindicated smiles briefly lifted the corner of his mouth.

“…Good news?” Costello asked.

“Expected news. Daar just caught the very last jump out off the Island, instead of staying overnight like he usually would.”

“What does that mean?”

“Best if we don’t dwell on it, I think,” Powell reasoned. “Less said, the better.”

Costello blinked, then shrugged. “So what are we doing about Folctha’s APA cell?” he asked.

“Don’t see why we have to do owt. It’s a Colonial Security matter. They fook with us and ours and I’ll want in, but if not it’s for the best if we leave it to the police.”

“So… what did you call me here for, sir?”

Powell’s reply was a grim smile, and he drained his tea. It wasn’t an expression Costello had seen often: a good deal less nice than usual, and that wasn’t even a word that most people would have applied to Powell at the best of times. Whatever was going on, the Colonel knew a lot more than he’d let on.

All he said, however, was three words, spoken as he set down his empty cup.

“…Wait and see.”

Date Point: 16y6m AV
Statler Hotel, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ross Guillory, United States Secretary of Agriculture

“Unscheduled maintenance? The whole array terminal?”

“Apparently, sir. They say it will be up again by tomorrow afternoon.”

“We may as well just fly out to Franklin and go home that way! This is ridiculous!”

“I’ll see if that can be done, sir. I’m told there’s no communications disruption, it’s just passenger traffic that’s affected…”

“I don’t care. I want to be back on Earth as soon as humanly possible, and I don’t care if we have to go through a cargo array instead! Make it happen!”

Guillory’s personal aide fled the room with an expression like a kicked puppy, and Guillory did an angry sort of march around the Statler Hotel’s VIP suite to silently vent his frustrations.

Great. Just fucking wonderful. As a personal favor to the President—a man he considered a friend despite also being an enemy—he’d come all the way out to ground zero of humanity’s greatest shame to assist with a trade deal between Franklin and Folctha. Cimbrean was a slap in the face of everything he quietly stood for; it had an actual ongoing planetwide ecological disaster because some stupid bitch couldn’t be assed to dig a fucking latrine. He’d endured the insult silently and had to spend time in the company of that insufferably old-fashioned ambassador while the most important event of his life was underway.

And, apparently, failing. Every news station in the world should have been focused on New York, but instead it was a slow news day. ESNN were covering the launch of the RSS Steve Irwin, a research vessel that Guillory personally held to be yet another avatar of humanity’s shame. Its entire job would to catalog Cimbrean’s native oceanic life before the invading Earthlings ate them all.

Today should be going down in history. Today should have been the moment Sartori and Washington and the whole world had it beaten into them just what kind of extreme measures were needed to protect alien life from the scourge of humanity.

Today, the only thing anyone on social media was talking about was Julian fucking Etsicitty and his poor duped fucking monkey-pals. Their grotesque minstrel show up in the trees was a social media coup too. All three of them were big, beautiful, unstoppably charismatic people doing what they did best in front of cameras, complete with a very pretty reporter unconsciously ogling Julian’s ridiculous body; the internet was already memeing the everlovin’ hell out of that.

It was enough to make him sick. Guillory grumbled for a while before finally saying “fuck it!” to the empty room, and deciding to order some room service. Whatever had gone wrong would just have to go wrong without him. Hopefully it was just that the Handler had spooked and called it off.

They’d passed over some other and arguably better opportunities for this because the Handler had said they felt a little too perfect, like they were staged. He was a paranoid man, but then again that was and had always been his job.

Guillory’s musing and brooding were interrupted by his phone. He picked it up, and reminded himself to be civil: His frustrations and nerves couldn’t be allowed to get the better of him and cause him to say something he’d later regret.

“Hello?”

He listened to the bad news, and sighed. Franklin’s smaller and less developed jump terminus would be on the ‘international’ end of its long slow cycle and so flying out there would actually get him home slower than just waiting for the Folctha terminus to resume normal operations, and the cargo arrays absolutely would not transport passengers for safety and insurance reasons.

He gave up, and decided to be conciliatory. “ …Never mind. I’ll take the jump tomorrow…Yeah. Sorry for being snippy…no no, I should be more polite…right…Okay. Thanks. Bye.”

Guillory was in a foul mood, but he had an expense account and he was damn well gonna use it. He pulled up the hotel’s on-screen room service, ordered the best steak they had on the menu, along with a “Gaoian sampler” just because he was feeling extra hateful of everything, and rounded it off with a small bottle of wine. If he was stuck in the Statler’s admittedly excellent VIP suite for the night, then there was no sense in wasting the luxury.

The food arrived courtesy of a short, broad-shouldered fireplug of a brute wearing the hotel’s immaculate white uniform. “Your dinner, Secretary Guillory.” His voice was deep and gravelly almost to the point of menace, despite his polite, mild demeanor.

“Yes, thank you. On the desk, please.”

He delivered the wheeled cart to the middle of the room, pulled out a corkscrew and opened the wine with a practiced, effortless motion. Which was odd, since despite his obviously impeccable training, the man seemed wildly out of place. Rarely did wait staff have hands so broad and thick-set they were noticeable even through gloves, or a neck so sturdy he couldn’t fasten the top buttons of his shirt. Definitely a demerit for the uniform tailors, there.

Incongruous brutishness aside, there was certainly nothing bad to be said about his skills, oh no. The waiter deftly poured wine into the glass, set it on the table, and set to preparing the rest of the meal. Part of that involved making fresh hollandaise at the table, a luxurious touch Guillory had never experienced. Top points for that.

He offered some polite, absent thanks and decided not to worry about it. This whole planet was full of fitness freaks, after all, and the governments slapped some hefty extra taxes on residents who didn’t exercise. If they all wanted to be parodies of the natural human form, so be it. In short order an immaculate spread was laid out on his desk. The waiter stood to the side and even had a crisp linen draped over his forearm. Extra points for style.

Guillory picked up his wine and drank about half as he watched the research ship’s champagne ceremony, ignoring the food for now.

The wine, it had to be said, was excellent. He sniffed appreciatively at it, finished the glass, then frowned as he felt a… peculiar… sensation rush up on him from behind.

He fell quite suddenly, and the tanky little man somehow appeared behind him without making the slightest sound. He caught Guillory with one hand, the wine glass with the other, and in one deft movement had both safely under control. The effortlessness of the whole thing…

Once the waiter had placed the glass on the desk, he picked Guillory up like he was as light and precious as a sleepy child, padded silently across the room and gently laid him across the bed. Guillory was by no means a small or frail man and felt a rush of embarrassment at his sudden weakness, and tried ineffectively to move and steady himself….

“Ssh, relax.” The man’s gravely voice was almost gentle. “No point in bein’ uncomfortable.”

He couldn’t—Guillory tried to speak, and the words…he couldn’t talk. He couldn’t talk!

The man in white entered his field of view with a blank, calm expression. Guillory blanched as a lance of white-hot fear shot through him. There was no way any mere waiter or chef or whatever had ever had eyes like that. Guillory had never met anyone who did before. If the eyes were the window to the soul, then this soul had sent many others on their way ahead of him.

Then he noticed some of the details. The man had white gloves on…and the waiters in the hotel normally didn’t. The uniform came right up to his collar and covered everything up to the man’s tree-trunk of a neck. He had no long hair, no beard, no piercings, nothing…

…Nothing that might leave evidence.

“I am sorry, Secretary Guillory,” the man said, quietly. The apology seemed weirdly genuine. “Arthur conveys his sympathies, his apologies, and his personal disappointment.”

…Oh God, oh fuck!

With that, the man effortlessly tidied Guillory into a comfortably dignified position on the bed, as though he’d just taken a nap in his clothes: on his right-hand side, just like he normally slept. He also pulled off Guillory’s suit coat, removed his shoes, removed his tie, loosened his belt, opened his pant’s waist and undid the cufflinks, all exactly like Guillory would have done. He could do nothing but quietly rage at the personal violation, and marvel in the back of his head at the attention to detail. For his part, the man had no trouble at all maneuvering Guillory or wrestling him into position, despite that he’d been reduced to a two hundred and fifty pound sack of limp meat.

That was the most terrifying part of his sudden predicament. Guillory had never felt so helpless.

Satisfied with his work, the man then silently hopped off the bed, tidied the comforter and pillows, padded over to the desk, and re-covered the food. He moved out of Guillory’s field of view for a moment and did something with the TV. He was, Guilllory realised, carefully removing every trace of his presence, including any sign that Guillory had ordered a meal.

Guillory was starting to have trouble breathing, now. And his heart was suddenly racing in his chest. Somehow, he knew that wasn’t from his own terror. He tried to say or do anything, but the most he could coax from his traitorous body was a strangled, panicked grunt. That at least made his…his assassin look back at him.

The man again seemed polite and almost sympathetic. He proffered some advice.

“Nobody is coming, I’m afraid. And it won’t be quick, or painless, but you’ll have about a half an hour before it gets bad. Try and fall asleep if you can. After that…”

He shrugged, matter-of-factly. Guillory tried, and failed, to whimper. His secret service agents should have burst into the room, they were in the adjacent suites…

With a lance of horror, Guillory realized they’d been compromised. They wouldn’t be dead, because that would ruin the assassin’s work. They were working together! His team had undergone a routine rotation about five months ago…

Oh my God… Guillory realized this must have been in the works for months. Against that level of pre-meditation, against the President’s secret service… His doom was certain.

Guillory could do nothing about it besides helplessly watch the assassin’s work. The man took a minute or so more to finish cleaning up, then wheeled the cart back to the door. Once he’d done that, he quietly laid down a big sheet of plastic, carefully pulled off his fake uniform to include the shoes, then stripped down to his skin.

Guillory would have gulped if he could. The man was a study in powerfully knotted masculine geometry, the kind which spoke loudly about hard-earned ability and his willingness to use it.

But other than that, the assassin was fascinatingly plain. He was quite handsome yet generically so. He had no obvious racial features beyond a plain American blend of “white.” There were no tattoos on his body, no scars, no body hair, no physical malformations, no significant asymmetry, and yet no remarkable symmetry. There was absolutely nothing about him besides his height and extreme muscular fitness that might serve as identification. In a normal place that might have been of some use, but here on Cimbrean…

If Guillory somehow survived this experience, there would be little useful to tell the police. But he wouldn’t, he knew. That realization gave him a strange sort of calm. Nothing he could do.

Once stripped, the assassin pulled out a suitcase from the cart’s lower shelf and quietly bundled the old clothing up in another plastic sheet, then stowed it in the suitcase. Another suitcase came out, and then he quietly and efficiently did…something to the cart. The cart’s table folded down, its legs extended out…

A lance of pain fired down Guillory’s left arm. Heart attack in my sleep, then. At least Arthur left him his dignity. Finding himself resigned to his fate, he watched on, fascinated.

The cart now looked exactly like one of the hotel’s luggage carts. Leaving the rest of it aside, the assassin’s alarming quietness again struck Guillory as the most frightening part. His killer loaded the first suitcase onto the cart, then bundled the remaining evidence of his deadly room service into the other. That left nothing left but the large plastic sheet and his nakedness to resolve.

He had a plan for that, too. The burly little killer reached for a large packet of some kind, broke its seal and pulled out…hell, a gigantic moist towelette or something. He then carefully wiped himself down, broke the seal on another packet, and pulled on a full-body running suit of the kind the local fitness fanatics wore for jogging in Folctha’s ice-cold evening rain. The final touch was some thin running gloves on his sturdy feet.

That done, he carefully folded up the plastic sheet and stowed it in one of the suitcases and loaded up the luggage cart, leaving absolutely no sign anything had happened.

Ironically, the dark running suit made the assassin look much more like Guillory might have expected, if it weren’t for the thick reflective stripes running around his biceps and chest. His killer was covered from head to toe, no longer looked anything at all like a hotel employee, and suddenly had such a powerful, intimidating presence, nobody would stop him for chit-chat.

That was probably the intent. The assassin gave Guillory one last look before he left. He nodded, with perhaps the faintest trace of consideration on his face. “Goodbye.”

With that, he was gone. He left the lights and TV on. The slow news day continued, something about persistent rumors regarding the Mother-Supreme’s health… Guillory didn’t listen. He was far too concerned about his own health, especially when, as promised, things grew exquisite. His vision was going unfocused and the pain in his chest was mounting into a sickening, queasy agony that was somehow so intense he couldn’t even scream.

It lasted a long time. Then, very abruptly, it faded. In its wake was the eerie absence of something he’d heard and felt his entire life.

Secretary Ross Guillory lived just long enough to realize that his heart had stopped in his chest.

After that…

Date Point: 16y6m AV
Ark Project, Planet Tangent, the Corti Directorate

Project Archivist Tlenm

The first Corti v2.0 baby was decanted at a healthy weight of nearly double that of an ordinary Corti.

It was a female. Over the ensuing seven hours, her “siblings” all reached the same delicate hormonal tipping point that triggered their gestation chambers into delivering them safely into the world of air and movement, but Female One was the first. And it fell to Tlenm to start her Banner.

A whole new caste had been discreetly invented for the Ark project: Carbon. Tlenm felt that the black cloth of this new caste’s banner was actually rather distinguished and handsome, a sentiment he would have suppressed anywhere else in the directorate.

Here, though… in the Ark Project, the rules were a little different. The “distraction” of sentiment was somewhat less taboo. The Carbon Caste were anticipated to be a universally more passionate breed than the existing Castes, and that demanded an environment which stressed healthy management of emotions, not their relentless suppression.

The very first item on the banner was, of course, name and date of decanting. The gestation unit provided the infant with a name from the approved list, and Tlenm signed off on it as acceptable and appropriate.

He set the machine to stitch it across the top while he composed the Accolade to be recorded beneath. Being the firstborn of one’s species’ hopes for the future was the sort of thing that deserved an Accolade.

In the end, he kept it simple.

Meru
Decanted: 7847.226.54, Ark Facility, Tangent, District 1
Serial number: X0012-0002114/X0012-0003445/C000000000001

Accolades
First of the experimental 12-series generated by the Ark Project using deathworld-derived genetic data. The foundation of a new future.

It was, despite the relative mundanity of recording a newborn’s name and opening their Banner, an important moment in Corti history. Very, very few Corti had ever been born with a known caste and with an Accolade simply for existing. Usually the process of caste determination took years, and hinged in part on the collection of Accolades.

Meru and her siblings were deeply special, Tlenm knew that better than anyone. He took special care over their Banners, and placed each one next to the wriggling newborns as they were delivered into the special care of the creche and the nanny robots that would care for and raise them in the opening months of their lives.

He was surprised by the burst of… affection that settled on him. And another emotion he wasn’t familiar with, a sense of loss when the newborns were out of sight.

Curious.

He quashed the feeling, and moved on to prepare for the next day’s decanting. There was much to do: by the end of the year, there would be thousands like Meru.

But he knew that he would always consider her to be special.

Date Point: 16y6m1d AV
Presidential bedroom suite, the White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

In the end, Sartori was woken at about 4:30am. As always, it took him a confused moment to get his brain into gear. A dream about playing football—not an unpleasant one, but strange in the way of all dreams—slipped into forgotten oblivion, but just for a second he found himself disoriented and wondering how the hell he’d gone from the field to… here…

Then whatever slumbering part of his brain was taking longer to catch up finally fizzed into life and he was awake. He blinked at the alarm clock by his bed, registered the time, then turned his attention to the door.

Whoever was outside knocked again.

“…Come in.”

It was his personal aide, Hagen Hodgkins, who turned the light on as he entered. The young man should have been asleep, but instead he looked like he’d dressed hastily, forgetting a few details about his suit. His shirt cuffs weren’t buttoned up, and his tie was sloppy.

“Mister President, I’m afraid it’s bad news.”

“What happened?” Sartori asked, sitting up and stretching. He suspected he knew, but Hagen wasn’t in the loop. He hadn’t needed to know, and he was too honest, too idealistic and too innocent anyway.

“I’m… afraid we just got an urgent message from Folctha, sir. The Agriculture Secretary was, um… He was… they found him dead in his hotel room, sir.”

Sartori swung his legs out of bed and looked down at his feet. “…Ross is dead?” he asked. He didn’t need to fake the grief in his voice.

“Yes sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

“What happened?”

“They… found him in his bed sir. They think it was probably a heart attack or something, but…”

Sartori sighed. “Well… if so, at least it was quick,” he said. “And merciful.”

An evil, primitive part of his brain supplied the opinion that quick and merciful was a lot better than the treasonous fuck deserved. He crushed that thought and stood up. “I’ll get dressed,” he declared. “And we’ll prepare for the morning press release.”

“I’ll get you a coffee.”

“Get one for yourself,” Sartori replied. Hagen shut the door and he stood in the middle of the room to balance himself.

He’d authorized plenty of deaths. Most had been terrorists and criminals in far-flung corners of the world, and the authorization had been vicarious, filtered by giving his approval to CIA action, air strikes, SEAL teams or other such applications of the state’s occasional duty to end lives.

But he’d spoken at Ross Guillory’s son’s college graduation. He was going to have to write a letter of condolence to the newly widowed Juliet Guillory, and address the nation and praise a traitor for his hard work and dedication to the USA. He was, in short, about to tell a bare-faced lie to four hundred million of his fellow Americans.

But the alternative—honesty—required admitting that the very Cabinet of the United States had been infiltrated by the largest and most successful domestic terrorist organization in the nation’s history.

He got dressed. Picked out a graphite suit with a neutral silver-and-black Prince of Wales tie and the stars and stripes lapel pin, which he paired with simple cufflinks. Today was a day to look somber and plain, not that he needed to fake it.

Hagen had his coffee waiting when he stepped out the door. Sartori accepted it with thanks and sighed at the darkness outside the windows. Early mornings were a hazard of the job, but this one felt extra heavy.

“Do we have anything prepared?” he asked.

“You know Jill. She has speeches prepared for almost any situation.”

“The mark of a good press secretary.” Sartori sipped his coffee again. “I’ll glance over it. Is Margaret awake yet?”

“She’s on her way. Liam’s compiling a shortlist of potential new Ag Secretaries…” Hagen looked a little uncomfortable. “I mean, I know it’s early…”

Sartori sighed and nodded. “It’s okay. We have to be practical and a little callous about these things… I’ll need some time to pen a letter of condolence to his family.”

“Yes sir. More coffee?” Hagen indicated the empty cup.

Sartori handed it over. “Thanks.”

He walked by himself the rest of the way to the Oval Office, alone with his thoughts aside from acknowledging the greetings and commiserations from the few staff who were awake and available at such an early hour.

Let most of them rest. This was his own cross to bear. After all, he’d made it.

But that didn’t make it any less heavy.

Date Point: 16y6m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

They’d had to change the division of labor around the house a bit. Al of course had to be at Anna’s beck and call at all hours, so Julian and Xiù had taken on some of the stuff she usually did to free her up.

For instance: breakfast was Julian’s job now. While Xiù took care of making sure the boys had their homework, school lunches, gym kit and textbooks, Julian juggled bacon, eggs, hash browns and pancakes for five.

He’d even learned a few flourishes from Xiù. A slice of blood orange in the juice, half a strawberry and three blueberries on the pancakes, some finely chopped chives on the eggs… practically zero effort, just a little extra attention to detail, and his breakfasts had gone from functional to gourmet.

His Grandpa had used to say something similar: “Going the extra mile only takes an extra inch.” Julian hadn’t understood it at the time, but now he was definitely gonna pass it on to the kids if he could.

Something to think about discussing with Vemik, too. It seemed like the kind of thought Vemun might benefit from, when he was old enough to listen. God, it was hard to forget sometimes that Vemik was so young, maybe only the equivalent of sixteen…

He looked young too, in exactly the same kind of incongruous way that Adam did, which made it hard for a fella to wrap their head around his friends. Was Adam nineteen? He didn’t have any laugh lines or weathered skin or anything. He looked young. Or was he twenty-eight, which is what his birth certificate would say? And what his freakshow physical development would suggest? Same thing it said for both of them, really.

For that matter, how old was Julian? Those five years in stasis made his age on paper kinda different to the amount of actual life he’d had. And what would happen when those new medicines he’d heard about hit the market? Another twenty years of youth without any of the downsides, if you took care of yourself? He’d be stupid to think people wouldn’t jump on it…

Which would re-open the Crude question for him again, probably. He knew Al and Xiù would be all in on that medicine, and he had a sneaking suspicion the civilian stuff wouldn’t do much for him. He was…probably too much for that stuff to work, being honest. And in any case, what would that mean? Another twenty years in his prime, back to being as youthful as he was when he was abducted? Or something like it, anyway? Except, now he was pretty much an actual gorilla in human form. He kept mostly to himself, but outside of the HEAT he was physically unbeatable, and he knew it. Heck, even among the HEAT…which was a scary idea for someone who would have been effectively nineteen. Except, well, he wouldn’t be, would he? He’d actually be in his fifties. Sorta. How old would he really be?

But still, whatever the answers to those questions were, Vemik was a man of his people by their own view of things. That wasn’t something he could or would disrespect.

Anyway. Breakfast. He’d taken a liking to it, though he tended to eat light in the morning. He preferred a quick jog, then a big meal, and then he’d go tackle the weights later once his chores were done and finish off with a nice long run in the early afternoon.

Nowadays, he needed all that to keep himself feeling limber and relaxed. That was one of those double-edged sword things, really; he’d built himself into something pretty special, even uniquely so if he was being honest, but now he couldn’t stop or he felt awful. Or he felt jittery, anxious, desperate to get some activity…get that dopamine hit, really.

Xiù got it. As much as Julian fretted for how active she was around her pregnancy, she was just as kinetic as ever, though she had at least quit the pole dancing classes when she got her positive test back. She gave him a swat on the butt as she slipped past him and under his arm with the morning’s laundry tucked against her hip, grinned at him, then vanished into the garage.

On the whole, it was a good morning.

Date Point: 16y6m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Sometimes, Gabe just knew something was sideways. He couldn’t prove it, couldn’t do anything but say what his gut was telling him…and the previous week’s shock death of the Secretary of Agriculture just…felt wrong.

On the surface, it seemed like a tragedy. A healthy, fit man in his mid-fifties had died of a sudden heart attack right in his suite. The Secret Service had immediately summoned the police, and Gabe had by courtesy invited the FBI; they were on foreign territory, after all. This was a Foltchian show, not an American one. A painstaking investigation—by Gabe’s men, not the FBI—had revealed…

Well, a whole lot of nothing. Secretary Guillory had, by all evidence, helped himself to some wine from the wet bar, got himself a bit more comfortable, turned on the news, took a nap…and died of a massive heart attack.

Gabe had absolutely no doubt the toxicology report would show nothing suspicious, too.

On the face of it, it really did just look like a tragic death of unexpected medical causes. Except….

Secretary Guillory had no history of heart trouble, cholesterol problems, hypertension or anything like that. He’d definitely gained a bit of a dad-bod paunch over the years, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. He’d been a linebacker in college and had retained much of that strength over the years. The man wasn’t a fitness fanatic by any measure, but he’d certainly kept up on exercise, and he’d been on prescription statins that had kept his blood pressure perfectly within the normal range.

Men like that did occasionally just tragically drop dead, and Gabe honestly would have written the entire incident off as a genuine tragedy…except. His investigators had asked to interview the Secret Service agents who were on-duty at the time…

…And they were already through the Array, out of his reach forever.

That was deeply suspicious. In fact, it set alarm bells ringing in Gabe’s head. So he’d gone over the surveillance footage again… and found something very interesting indeed. At exactly the perfect time of night, a very familiar little juggernaut of a man was caught on CCTV, jogging past—or possibly out of—the Statler Hotel.

That was odd. Gabe knew Hoeff. They were good friends in fact, and the two had set off on a hilarious adventure to learn how to play golf very, very badly. Hoeff was a morning person, not a nightowl. He always did his runs at the buttcrack of dawn.

He also didn’t use running suits. Ever. And he had no reason to be anywhere near the hotel…

Nevertheless, Gabe tracked him via the street cameras as, at the wrong time of day and in the wrong kind of clothing, he traced a lazy loop through the wrong part of town, then over Westbridge, along riverside park, and back across the bridge by Rooney’s, two laps around the Alien Quarter’s perimeter and then back across town to jog around Palace Lake.

It was a decent run. A lot further than Gabe himself ever bothered with nowadays. And every last step of it was in clear view of the cameras.

It was, in short, much too perfect.

But that was the problem. Too perfect was still perfect. A suspiciously watertight alibi was still watertight. And there was no indication whatsoever of foul play in Guillory’s death.

Nevertheless…. Gabe knew. Even though it was unprovable, he knew. And that sort of thing simply could not be allowed to pass without at least a modest token of protest.

Gabe drummed his fingers on his desk as he thought, and finally decided there was only one thing to do in these situations: play golf.

He called Hoeff.

An hour later, they met on the fairway, and a few more details tickled at Gabe’s senses as he shook his friend’s hand. Hoeff had always been a hairy guy, bordering on having his own personal sweater. Now, the man’s forearms were perfectly smooth-skinned.

“It’s hot on Akyawentuo,” was of course a great excuse…

They got around to the third hole before Gabe, with his ball firmly lost in the rough, decided it was high time he start angling toward his suspicions. He knew he wasn’t going to get anything—Hoeff was far too shrewd for that—but he could still make his point.

“…I’ll be glad to put the business with Secretary Guillory behind me,” he commented.

“I bet. Can’t have been a fun time for you.”

“Wouldn’t be fun at the best of times, but something’s been… I dunno. My spider sense is tingling.”

Hoeff nodded amiably. “Yeah, I getcha.”

“It’s never failed me so far,” Gabe added.

“A man should listen to an instinct like that, I reckon.”

Gabe nodded, and made a soft grunt as he found his ball. He shut up long enough to successfully take a stroke, and by pure fluke chance it rolled onto the green.

Hoeff chuckled. “I swear you’ve been practicing without me, man. You ain’t never made a shot that good!”

“If I knew how to do that on command, this game would already be over,” Gabe retorted, wading back out of the rough to join him. “Anyway. Spider sense.”

“What about it?”

Gabe knew there wasn’t any point beating around the bush. “Daniel, I’m going to be suspending your personal protection license. I thought I ought to tell you in person.”

Hoeff stopped lining up his swing. He paused, then wound up and whacked the ball firmly down the fairway.

“I think I should warn you of the consequences of that, Gabe. Firstly, and immediately, you will almost certainly earn the ire of Ambassador Rockefeller. Secondly, that will more or less bring our training work with JETS teams on Akyawentuo to a dead stop, because I am the registered agent for arms traveling across the Array. Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”

“Ciertamente. You know me.”

“I do. I happen to like you a lot, for whatever fuckin’ reason. You’re a good man. And I don’t want to see you do something that won’t go well for you. Now don’t get me wrong,” he offered immediately, “I’m all about doing the right thing, even if it sucks doing it. So if you think this is your hill to die on, by all means, do. But everything we choose has consequences, man.”

Hoeff’s expression was mild. Almost friendly. But that, right there, made Gabe certain. Hoeff was a man who could shut off his remorse like a switch. Gabe had never seen it in him before, but he was seeing it now.

That was also the moment he knew he was about to set some very unfortunate things into motion. But there was a principle at stake here, and old men near the ends of their careers could afford a little principle.

He tapped his thumb on his golf clubs. “Consequences,” he said, “are exactly the point.”

Hoeff didn’t betray any emotion. He simply reached into his pants and produced a pistol. And then another. And a knife from above his ankle. And a small device Gabe couldn’t identify.

“Well, in that case, I gotta go make some phone calls.” He set everything down on the green in front of them.

“…Yeah.” Gabe agreed, trying to keep a touch of bitterness out of his voice. He’d made his career on being an honest and by-the-book sort of man, so being confronted with…

…Well, with the unprovable certainty that a man he liked and respected had assassinated—most likely on orders from the very highest authority—a member of the US cabinet under his, Gabe’s, nose and that not only the Secret Service but also somebody at the Jump Array authority must have been complicit…

…It didn’t sit right. He was far from being okay with it, in fact. But the only thing he could do was raise the gentlest and most discreet of protests.

Stripping Hoeff of his license was as far as he could go without things becoming official. It was unquestionably within his authority, nobody could overrule or question him on it, but it was enough to sting Hoeff’s superiors and send his message: that he knew, and did not approve one bit.

There’d be a reply, of course. And in that contest of gentle power, Gabe was only ever going to be a loser. But sometimes, the only honorable thing a man could do was to lose gracefully on his own terms. It was that thought that kept him calm and outwardly civil.

“I look forward to hearing from the people you call,” he said. “I hope my successor reverses this decision, I really do. And for what it’s worth… I’m sorry.”

“Nah, it’s just business. Nothin’ personal.” They shook hands. If Hoeff’s grip was iron-like to the point of near agony, Gabe didn’t betray any discomfort. That was as clear and stealthy a warning as he could have received.

Be careful.

Hoeff had an awfully unsubtle delivery for such a discreet message.

“…I was thinking of retiring anyway.” Gabe just barely managed to avoid shaking his hand out.

“Funny thing, retiring. I don’t know many people who actually manage that trick. I’d try pretty hard though, if I were you.”

“I’ll take that advice.”

“Okay. Have a good life, Gabe.”

“You too.”

They went their separate ways.

Date Point: 16y6m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

“I can’t help it, big guy. I gotta step down. For now, at least.”

“This is fuckin’ bullshit! What the fuck is he doin’?! Does he know how much he’s fucking shit up with this little pissing contest?!”

“He knows exactly how much. I don’t worry myself with those kinda games. That’s for diplomats and special envoys to worry about.”

“Well how am I supposed to worry about it? A decision like that just goes… I mean, I don’t know why he’d make it!”

Hoeff tried really, really hard not to roll his eyes, and somehow succeeded. “He has his reasons. Don’t take it personally.” That was probably one of the things he really liked about Julian. The big bastard was a lot of things, but jaded sure as fuck weren’t one of them.

For that matter, the same was true for Gabe. Anyone who stuck up for their principles like that was too idealistic to be called jaded.

Too bad, really. He liked Gabe. That was gonna be a friendship he missed.

“What possible reasons?!” Julian demanded.

The best part of this situation was that Hoeff didn’t even need to lie. All he had to do was very carefully tell the truth.

“Oh, that’s easy. He thinks I might have had a hand in some foul play. Not uncommon, really. Guys like me always seem to get tangled up in shit like this.”

“Wh–does he have any evidence?”

“‘Course not. I ain’t in jail, am I?”

“Then—”

“Julian. Bro. This is the Game. Don’t worry your pretty head about it too much, okay? It’ll work out. Pretty quick too, I bet. This isn’t even close to the weirdest bullshit I’ve gone through, and there’s gonna be weirder still. Just go with the flow.”

A part of Hoeff sorta regretted lying to Julian by telling him nothing but the truth, but Hoeff took his protection duties very, very seriously. That meant protecting his favorite slabmonkey from anything that might harm him. Including Hoeff.

“…How quick?”

“Dunno. However long it takes for his replacement to take over and put it right. I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do in the meantime, though. I’m gonna send a video message to Claire and apologize my head off, then I’m gonna go lift the entire goddamn gym, and then I think I’ll probably eat way too much sushi at Kobe’s. They got Gaoian sushi there an’ I wanna try it.”

“I warn you, it’s an… experience…”

“What kinda experience?”

“Uh…well, they’ve got that nose, y’know? They like really strong flavors to contrast against that. I mean, I liked it, but…”

“I’ve seen you slurp raw bone marrow right out of a Werne’s thighbone.”

“Yeah. I’m maybe not the guy to ask. But they put on a heck of a show too so I’d still go. Maybe take Claire?”

“Maybe. Sounds good. We ain’t been on a proper date in civilization yet.”

“Definitely fix that.”

“Yeah.” Hoeff stood up. “Anyway. I’ll see you at the gym on Friday, yeah?”

Julian nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

“Cool. Say hi to Al and Xiù for me.”

And with that little bit of duty done, Hoeff clapped Julian on the shoulder and left.

He checked his phone on the way back to the hotel. Still no sign of Briggs, or the Handler. That was the bit that worried him. She’d been… well, a lot stronger than he’d predicted. Strong enough that he was kinda glad she’d just pimp-slapped him and run, ‘cuz if she’d decided to do what she’d done to Agent Childs…

He set the thought aside. Wherever she’d got to, the bitch was down a working hand and most of her support network. And the APA was unravelling fast. Their days were numbered.

But that was exactly when they’d be most dangerous…

Date Point: 16y6m1w3d AV
Abergerrig, New Belfast County, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Wilhelmina “Bill” Briggs-Davies

“Easy! Easy! We’re on your side!”

Bill uncoiled. She’d been expecting to walk right out into a wall of guns and cops. After the shit that’d gone down in NYC, her Handler had stuffed her into a cargo container—one of the expensive ones, with a stasis field—and promised she’d come out somewhere useful.

Considering the shit that’d gone down in NYC, it was a fuckin’ miracle that his plan had worked. The farmboy with the weird British accent who’d opened the doors sure didn’t look like a cop.

Still…

“…Prove it.”

“Wisdom is the most exquisite curse.”

Bill relaxed, and ducked out of the container. “You know he never actually said that, right?”

“Actually he did, but he maybe didn’t say it first. The women rarely get mentioned in history.”

Fuck, the geeky little shit almost pushed his glasses up his nose. Woulda, probably, if he’d been wearing some. Whatever. Little guy had some kinda hangups or whatever going on. Bill settled for not commenting and just said: “Hm.”

She looked around. She was in a barn or workshop or something. Kinda agricultural from some of the shit about the place, but there was some decent tech too, and electronics all over a workbench in the corner including what looked like actual field emitters. “…The fuck is this place?”

“We’re on Cimbrean, about two hundred miles outside Folctha. You were in stasis just over a week… Jesus, they said your hand was bad, but…”

Bill grimaced at her stump. The skin had grown over it while she slept in the car. “Yeah, I heal quick. And I’m fuckin’ starving, you got anything to eat?”

“Uh, sure. They said you’d be hungry…” The farmboys beckoned her through a workshop. The one with the goofy accent, who’d so far been their spokesman, had a bad case of couldn’t-shut-the-fuck-up. “I was going to try and make you a prosthetic. I know how.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s actually pretty simple with modern—”

“Okay, shut up.” Bill palmed his head and squeezed just hard enough to give him a taste of how easily she’d squish it if she wanted to. “I’m tired as shit, I got shot like four hours ago, an’ you are giving me the worst headache. Go get me a fuckin’ sandwich.”

“R-right.”

Still. Annoying, but kinda cute in a dorky sorta way. And he was looking at her in just the right way, too. Maybe later she could break in a new toy…

Mission first.

“So. Folctha huh?” she asked of the so-far silent one as she flopped down on a couch and the dorky one fled into the kitchen.

“Nope.”

“…So where are we?”

“Little farm town way outside of Folctha, in New Belfast county. We can’t operate in the city itself.”

“…What’s that you got there?”

The guy grinned and unholstered it. “Gauss pistol. Homemade, but it’s good for five shots. We have rifles too.”

“Okay!” Impressed, Bill held out her hand and he pressed the weapon into it. It was stamped metal and carved wood, which meant it felt and looked like something from a hundred years ago, but it fit solidly and comfortably in her hand. “Only five?”

“More if we rig it up to a capacitor belt. Ammo isn’t the problem, power is.”

“…The Handler said you’d only wake me up when you had a target for me. If I’m on Cimbrean, it had better fuckin’ be Etsicitty.”

Quiet guy nodded. “Watching him wasn’t easy. He has serious protection. But we’ve been working around the security in Folctha for a long time, we know how to stay under their radar, and now a vulnerability’s come up…”

Bill grinned and sat forward.

“…Tell me,” she said.

Date Point: 16y6m2w AV

The Doghouse Gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“—Hnnnngh! Fuck!!”

Adam chuckled. “See, Tiny? I told’ya Playboy here would kick ‘yer ass…”

Julian grinned fiercely and tightened his hold by squeezing down hard around Tiny’s waist and pulling his bicep as tightly as he could into the huge man’s neck. He’d gotten really dang good on the mat over the years, and it was gratifying as fuck to use it against a badass like Walsh. Tiny tapped out after a while, and the two of them distangled, then pulled each other into a fierce, brotherly hug.

And then flopped to the mat, utterly spent.

“…Jesus, dude.” Walsh coughed a bit as he sucked air. “I gotta…up my game…”

Julian wasn’t exactly in any condition for a witty comeback, but he did at least manage a bit of bravado. “Gotta….keep Vemik in line…fuck.”

Hoeff gave Adam’s special super-heavy punching bag one last kick, one that would easily have broken pretty much anyone’s ribs, then sauntered over to look at the wreckage.

“You two are adorable.”

“You’re…you’re next, Chimp…” Somehow, that threat sounded much less…well, threatening once it came out of Julian’s mouth. Probably better to catch one’s breath first. He should also probably get up and get on with his workout.

Of course, lying on the nice cool mat for the next fifty years sounded pretty good, too…

Adam’s big smiling brick-face suddenly appeared in Julian’s field of view. “Right! Good match you two! Now get up, let’s see how you three are coming along!”

Tiny and Julian groaned and stumbled back up to their feet, helping each other stand tall. All in all…it was a good day. Adam was on a month-long “staycation” to hang out, spend time with his wife and child, and probably work vigorously on the next one, too. He was also using all that free time to train like the insane freak that he was, and inflict a small taste of that insanity on his friends. Yesterday it had been a literal day-long event with Daar, who was lately spending a lot of time on Cimbrean. Today though, Julian, Hoeff, and Walsh were Adam’s playthings.

It’d been a “light” day by the borderline criminally-insane standards Adam inflicted on his friends. All they had done was play a little basketball, lift a little, practiced some nicely difficult yoga-like something-or-other in front of the gym’s big mirror, and then beat each other stupid.

Well… Adam didn’t properly tussle, for fear that he might accidentally break his playmates.

Now, though, they were back in front of the mirror, showing themselves off for Adam’s critical eye. It had once felt weirdly awkward, but he was a strength coach first and foremost and could spot any problem with posture, asymmetry, maybe a muscle that was about to cramp up…

And holy hell was it surprisingly hard work! Julian had learned that prepping for the Laid Bare shoot not all that long ago. Chimp and Tiny were just now learning that little tidbit for themselves, and both were full of complaints…and apparently, lots of little issues that were gonna require some agonizing massage time to work out. Julian was sympathetic, but well…

“Never thought I’d see myself looking anything like this,” Hoeff grunted. “Christ.” The mirror wasn’t just there for vanity; there was no better way for a fella to self-check his form—very important under a barbell—or identify issues before they became a problem.

Adam had a God-given gift as a physical training coach, there was no denying it. He could whip nearly anyone into an impressive athlete practically overnight, if they were willing to suffer for it. Give him someone who had their own natural blessings, even if they didn’t know it at first…

“I think I’m doin’ pretty good, huh?” Julian asked as he bent his arms and pulled his entire upper body into a super fun “most muscular.” He’d never quite stop feeling goofy about posing in front of a mirror—and fuck, the teasing he’d suffer if Al and Xiù ever found out about it—but he had to admit… it was good for the ego. And fun, too! But sometimes, when he saw what he’d managed to build himself into… Christ. Hoeff was entirely right.

“Fuck yeah! You’re doing damn good!” Adam agreed. He was posing in front of the mirror too, which was…humbling, to say the least…but there really wasn’t any better encouragement a fella could get than from a man like him. Julian felt himself grinning stupidly from the praise.

The real purpose behind their bro-fun was training, though. Adam’s fingers poked and prodded in a painfully businesslike way as he checked on a long-standing point of concern, then he nodded and stepped back. “Yeah. You don’t need anything ‘cept maybe a bit of accessory work. But you two,” he added, turning to Hoeff and Walsh, “You’ve been ignoring your aches and pains for a long damn time, haven’t you? We’re gonna need to sort that out…”

Julian grinned sadistically at Tiny. “Oh, you’re gonna love the fuck outta that, buddy.”

“Am I?”

“Oh yeah, it hurts like a motherfuck, trust me. But it’s nice when he’s got you fixed up.”

“What about Chimp?”

“Yeah,” Adam chimed in. “We gonna get you fixed up?”

“Try it and I’ll stab you right in your pretty fuckin’ face,” Hoeff replied, amicably.

“Well, you can try and stab me, little guy…but okay. Offer’s on the table, if you’re interested.”

“…Maybe. I wanna hit the weights first, though. Never skip leg day.”

Adam nodded seriously. In his Temple of Slab, there was no higher truth.

“Wait,” Julian laughed, “what about our run?”

Hoeff groaned. “Dude, I can’t fuckin’ keep up with you. Your jog is nearly a sprint for me, and ain’t no fuckin’ way I’m gonna go thirty fuckin’ miles ‘round the lake at that pace.”

“I can slow down!”

“You’ve never once slowed down for me, fuckin’ long-leg weirdo.”

“My legs aren’t that long…”

“They are next to mine! Go fuckin’ run, I ain’t gonna be ‘yer pet Scrappy-Doo. You told your team you’re gonna run, right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Good, they gotta be in place before you go. Ain’t none of us normals can keep up, got it?”

“Alright,” Julian laughed again, “I got it!”

“Heh. Anyway!” Adam turned his attention back to Walsh. “So how ‘bout it? It’ll hurt but it’s worth it, I promise.”

“Well…okay, then. What’s next?”

“You lie face-down on the mat, I go get my tools. I got worked over fuckin’ bad by Daar yesterday too, so I won’t be gentle…”

Tiny laughed a bit nervously, but Julian cocked his head curiously. “Why the fuck does that matter?”

“Never you mind, you’ve got a run to do. Get!”

“Alright! Ain’t gotta tell me twice!” Julian chuckled. “Good luck, Tiny!”

He thumped upstairs before Walsh could protest and decided against a heavy running vest for today. Instead he filled up his water pack, limbered up a bit, and set off on a nicely quick run.

Julian loved running. Always had, always would. And cross-country running was his favorite. He didn’t bother with roads here, he stuck to the minimal trails and nice, soft grass wherever he could. He preferred barefoot running and could run over pretty much anything, but he had to admit that turf was a lot nicer on his feet than hard concrete or gravel. The trails were all packed dirt, and where they were graveled over it was mostly to prevent erosion. Not bad at all.

He took the lake trail, the less popular one that ran counter-clockwise around the water away from the resort spa and Sara’s Beach. The lake’s west coast was completely terraformed, being the spot where the “Skidmark” had made its closest approach to Folctha. One of Jennifer Delaney’s long-abandoned campsites was a mile or so upstream, immortalized by a marker stone.

Julian had always found that funny. Those markers might as well read “On this spot, several years ago, an Irish lass took a dump in the woods.”

It was a shame she’d never been heard from again after leaving Cimbrean. She’d become a kind of modern-day Amelia Earhart in that regard: The mysterious space-babe pirate queen who’d left such an indelible mark on a whole planet, and through it the whole galaxy and the course of human history, before vanishing over the horizon and into legend.

And speaking of legends…

“Wurf!!”

Julian chuckled. “Hi, Bozo…”

The dog spun excitedly, announced one of his thundering barks again, and fell in alongside him. Julian wasn’t quite sure exactly when or how the giant mutt had figured out his running habits, or knew exactly when and where to wait for him, but he knew why Bozo came along—there were very few people in Folctha who could actually keep up with his insatiable appetite to run and play.

Julian had to wonder just how much longer that would last. Bozo was somewhere on the wrong side of seven or maybe even eight years old at this point, and going gray around the muzzle and cheeks. His energy seemed endlessly youthful, but a dog that size just wouldn’t live long.

He shook off the gloomy thought. Dogs were all about the here and now, and Julian felt there was a wisdom in that. He grinned, picked up his pace, and the booming dog fell in alongside him at a happy lope with his ears and jowls flopping majestically, though he sometimes dashed off ahead or fell behind whenever he encountered an Interesting Smell.

The transplanted Earthling life in and around the Skidmark was a blend of European and North American species well-suited to the local cool, damp, temperate climate. The trees were all fast-growing, chosen primarily for their ability to fix the soil and prevent erosion. Slower-growing species would be introduced in due course.

Of course, bringing in rapid-growing trees and letting them compete with the much less aggressive Cimbrean natives had created problems which in turn demanded cures that hopefully weren’t worse than the disease. Mark Tisdale had pioneered the introduction of beaver with remarkable success: for whatever reason, the big water-loving rodents just didn’t like Cimbrean wood. Maybe it was too porous or something, but if there was any other kind of wood available to make their dams and lodges out of, they’d go with that instead. So they kept their fellow Earthlings in check, managed the waterways, created wetland…

…And reminded Julian of home.

He’d sold the land in Minnesota, eventually. That had been a wrench, but he just couldn’t face going back, and frankly he couldn’t risk the security headaches. He didn’t want to inflict that on the neighbors either, and if any of them were glad to see him and his space-troubles gone, at least they were polite and supportive enough not to let any of it show. Thanks to the Byron Group’s lawyers, it had legally been his to sell, which for years was not at all obviously true. And he was pretty damn happy with his life in Folctha now, but it was nice to be reminded of younger, simpler times occasionally.

Besides, those beavers would probably need trapping in a few years…

He never got tired of nature. There was always something different to see, or hear, or smell, or experience. It never ran out of its little surprises, never lacked for a drama to show whether big or small.

And Folctha kept producing special surprises, too. For instance, the natives were proving to be a lot hardier than anyone predicted. Oh, sure, a lot of them were on a one-way trip to extinction, but several more were adapting to the new ecological opportunities around them. Cimbrean “birds” were turning out to be surprisingly clever when it came to Earthling nuts, for instance, and had learned how to raid the squirrels’ winter caches. A few of the folivore “bird” species were absolutely thriving on the richer, denser deathworld vegetation, and one native was actually giving the terraforming effort a serious headache after turning out to be completely immune to bee stings.

Julian had long ago learned the trick of running quietly. He did that now, as much to be a polite visitor in nature’s garden as for the challenge; it always took more out of him to lope along at what was effectively a prowling jog rather than the more efficient stride Adam had eventually beaten into him.

It tended to eat up the miles faster, and heck, he’d finally admitted it to himself; he was addicted to all the hard work. The lower gravity weirdly made it more difficult too, because he had to constantly moderate his stride, which meant he couldn’t zone out, couldn’t let his muscles just do the run like they would normally want.

Running without the vest was harder.

He slowed down for a sip of water at the imaginatively named “Little Rock,” a weather-rounded knob of stone that thrust up through the earth to stand about twice Julian’s height.

Actually, there was a pretty good view to be had up there, so he decided to enjoy himself and took a running leap right up to the top of the thing. He landed it surprisingly well, and had to pause for a moment and marvel that he’d just made a jump like that. Lower gravity or not…

It was amazing what a little height could do to a view, even if it was only like five meters higher or whatever. It lifted him above the underbrush and gave him a steeper angle down into the lake’s clear waters. He watched the ripples of fish under the surface for a minute, and craned upwards to see if he could spot any sign of the wrecked spaceships that had once littered the bottom, relics of a battle from before Folctha was even a preliminary idea.

Maybe he could, maybe he couldn’t. He wasn’t sure.

“Wurf!”

Julian glanced down at Bozo, who was circling the rock and whining at the lack of obvious canine-accessible ways up. “What, you’re chicken or something?”

“Wurf!!”

“Aww, c’mon! Jump up and enjoy the view!” Julian bent down and slapped his thighs to encourage the huge mutt. “C’mon boy, you can do it!”

Bozo whined, scratched at the rock and backed up a bit with his tail wagging uncertainly. He barked again and spun in a circle.

“C’mon! Dogs can jump like crazy, you can totally make this!”

Bozo backed up a bit further, bounced on his paws a couple times, and then…

Thanks to a thundering run-up, a vigorous leap of faith and some paw-scrabbling, the huge mutt almost made it. Julian was able to catch him and drag him safely up to the top, where he balanced uncertainly on four legs and wagged nervously. Bozo, it seemed, was not fond of heights.

Julian made a fuss of him regardless. “Good boy! You’ll do better next time, huh?!”

That earned him a wag, but Bozo had clearly decided that he’d rather be safely back on ground level. He turned and skittered his way down the rock again, dropped to the ground with a thump, and then danced in a circle looking rather pleased with himself.

“Scaredy.”

Bozo parked his butt on the ground and yawned. Then he looked away and his ears pricked up at something. His tail thumped in the dirt a couple of times, and then he was up and haring off back the way they’d came. Julian couldn’t tell what the dog had scented, but he did take it as a hint. He was there to exercise, not sightsee.

“Yeah, you’re probably right…”

He scrambled down off the rock and continued his run. Bozo would catch up.

He was about half way around the lake when something tickled his instincts. Some little thing was out of place that he couldn’t put his finger on or consciously identify…. But he knew, and immediately he was on edge.

He slowed his pace, listened carefully, kept an eye on the bushes and trees around him. If he was a predator, where would he be hiding?

He was looking right at the perfect spot when the largest woman he’d ever seen blurred out of it with a knife. She was as exaggerated a picture of feminine athleticism as the HEAT were exaggerations of male physicality, all hard strata of muscle and a rock-solid core.

He…wasn’t quite sure what he did. Well, no. He wasn’t sure how he knew what to do, but what he did do was something he’d later have trouble believing.

Catch, deflect, twist—

His attacker went sprawling in the grass, having gone clear over his shoulder in a textbook throw. He kicked her hard and then followed up with a stomp, twisted on her arm for good measure, dislocated her elbow and definitely busted a few ribs. She dropped the knife, so Julian scooped it up and flung it into the lake.

Then he ran. He ran like the fucking wind.

After all, he’d been helping Firth teach kids to do exactly that if somebody ever came at them with a knife, so why the hell wouldn’t he heed his own advice? The scream behind him, however, was not a scream of pain or defeat, but of visceral rage.

…What he’d just done to her would have straight killed a normal sized man. Julian realized right then and there he was up against something much worse than a random hulked out mugger.

He poured on the speed, triple-pressed on his watch, and hoped the cavalry would arrive soon.

Wilhelmina “Bill” Briggs

Etsicitty was fucking annoying.

Bill’s elbow started healing almost as soon as he broke it, though she had to do a one-handed push-up to get to her feet. The ribs, though, were sending spikes of pain through her and making breathing difficult.

Fucking Hell. So he wasn’t just a boy scout after all. The fucker moved so goddamned fuckin’ fast she couldn’t see what the fuck he’d done. One second she was about to close with him and stab the fucker right in the heart, and the next—

And now he was running away, too!

Didn’t matter. He was unarmed, and a long way from help, and he couldn’t heal like she did.

She drew the gauss pistol. She’d been hoping to enjoy cutting on him a bit, but if the monkey-raping fuck wasn’t gonna play ball then she’d happily settle for shooting him instead. She had a second knife anyway.

There was a clear, straight stretch of trail. She paused, lined up a shot….

The pistol kicked in her hand like somebody had hit it with a baseball bat and a tree branch several feet above Etsicitty’s head exploded in a shower of splintered wood. He yelled in fright, covered his head, jinked and dodged.

Cursing all the things that were way more difficult to do one-handed, Bill put her head down and charged after him. At least if she hit him he’d be fucked, but she needed to be closer.

Shit, the fucker could run. But Bill had clocked herself at more than thirty miles an hour thanks to the Cruezzir. Branches and sticks whipped her face and stung her arms as she opened up to full speed and started slowly closing the gap. Too slowly.

…Fuck. He’d been running for miles and he could still pour on the speed…too fuckin’ bad he had to die. Boy scout was a fuckin’ specimen. She’d love to drug his pretty ass up and put that huge dick of his to proper use…hell, Bill bet he’d have lasted for weeks before he broke.

She grinned as she rounded a bend and found she’d halved the gap.

Too bad they’d never get to find out together…

Julian Etsicitty

How? Fucking how?!

Julian was fast. He knew he was fast, fast enough to embarrass nearly anyone. But the crazy bitch chasing him with a fucking cannon could run like the goddamn Terminator.

…The sharp bit of wood in his foot from the tree she’d exploded wasn’t helping, either. Fuck running barefoot. Thank God it wasn’t in the sole of his foot or he’d be hobbled…and dead.

As it was, it just hurt like a motherfucker and bled everywhere.

Just got the fucking thing regrown, too…

Welp. If he got through this, it’d be another visit to Nofl, maybe. Or whatever. He gritted his teeth as he got back on the straight path to Little Rock, breathing hard, and glanced over his shoulder.

She was big, yeah. Easily the biggest woman he’d ever seen, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred pounds and not a scrap of it was fat. She was as big and as dangerously muscled as a lioness, and probably just as dangerously fast. Her expression was pure feral murderous glee. He’d never seen somebody look so genuinely psychotic before.

The real problem, though, was the gun. Julian could out-wrestle Ten’Gewek and even a bunch of the HEAT’s troopers on a really good day, especially if he’d had a nice good rest and a nice big meal. Now, he was half-spent from being twenty miles into a long-ass run after a morning workout, and he was deliberately running on something close to empty, too.

Not really a good hand to be working with, but escape wasn’t looking like an option. He’d have turned and faced her, if not for that fucking gun.

When Julian had been about fourteen his Grampa had taken him to a historical re-enactment, and they’d seen a musket being fired. The historian had bragged up the gun, and mentioned how a lead ball that big and that fast didn’t leave men to elegantly clutch their chest and collapse; It left their arm twenty feet away in a ditch.

The musket had sounded a lot like that pistol.

The crazy bitch took another shot as if to prove the point, and drilled a crazy cracked bullseye in the side of the Little Rock. The round missed Julian so closely that it felt like a stinging slap on the arm.

Well, nothing for it. He’d need to risk a fight. He gritted his teeth and vaulted the rock, just like he’d done before, slithered down the other side and ducked low. She’d have to get close to draw a bead on him, and he just prayed that—

“WURF!! WURF!!!”

The pistol fired again as a furry black, brown and white missile shot out of the woods. Then there was a furious riot of snarling and human shrieking.

Oh fuck no please—

He darted back around the rock. The crazy psycho bitch was rolling on the ground trying to fend off the enraged dog, gun discarded in the grass next to her. Before he could act, Bozo got his teeth around her throat and SHOOK.

There was a grisly crack. She gurgled, spit what sounded like a curse, yanked a knife from a sheath on her hip and stabbed.

“NO!!”

Julian leapt forward, heart leaping into his throat, but Bozo wasn’t done. The dog made a noise he’d never heard come out of a canine throat before, shook his head viciously and ripped…

Blood went everywhere. It soaked Bozo’s head, soaked the dirt. A spray of it jetted in Julian’s face and blinded him. He groped forward, found the gun under his hand and wiped his face clear…

But the fight was already over. The crazy bitch’s desperate attempts to hold closed a throat that wasn’t even there anymore weakened, became a few frantic spasms, then failed entirely. A horrible rattling gurgle bubbled out of the disgusting mess Bozo had made of her neck and she slumped, eyes staring glassily at the sky.

Bozo spat out a gobbet of gristly meat, limped a few steps away, whimpered, then sagged to the grass.

Julian was at his side in an instant. The knife was still buried between the dog’s ribs. He knew better than to pull it out, but…

…But that just meant there was nothing he could do. Bozo coughed, whimpered again, and licked his hand. His tail thumped a few times, weakly.

Julian realized he was weeping. He stroked Bozo’s head.

“Good boy…” he whispered. “…Good dog…”

Bozo’s tail thumped the ground one last time, then he rested his bloody chin on Julian’s knee and shut his eyes. Julian scratched behind his ears, Bozo gave a kind of grumbling sigh…

…and was gone.

When Julian’s protection team finally caught up two minutes later, they found him sobbing brokenly.

Date Point: 16y6m2w2d AV

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

Meeting the ambassador was a courtesy. But it was, Gabe felt, an owed courtesy.

He did after all bear some blame for the debacle with Julian Etsicitty and Wilhelmina Briggs that had, mercifully, played out far in the woods out of the public eye.

The fallout was far-reaching. The SOR’s beloved regimental mascot had fallen, an influential local figure who—worse—also happened to be a US government official had been attacked and survived only by the barest margin, by the woman right at the top of the USA’s most wanted list, who had somehow been smuggled into the city that he, Gabe, protected.

And it had happened only a day or two after Gabe had personally stripped the Special Envoy’s three-man security team leader of his firearms license.

Ambassador Rockefeller was being cruelly understanding about it all. Understanding… but firm.

“You understand of course that we would very much appreciate an explanation,” he said.

On that point, Gabe didn’t technically have to give him an inch. Pragmatically, though… perhaps an inch wasn’t too much to ask. He was treading on potentially very thin ice.

“There was an irregularity,” he said, calmly. He’d broken out his cane again, even though he technically didn’t need it nowadays thanks to the nerve regeneration. But it came in handy as a prop sometimes, to make him seem older and more harmless than he truly was.

He doubted whether Rockefeller was fooled, but the point was not to fool him.

“It must have been quite an irregularity,” the ambassador said.

“The kind that might be nothing, but which a man in my position can’t ignore,” Gabe replied.

There was a brief, wordless kind of a standoff.

“…A valued and well-liked member of my staff was attacked, Mister Arés,” Rockefeller said, breaking it. “I find it hard to be content that he was left vulnerable over an irregularity.”

“Mister Etsicitty is a good friend of my son’s,” Gabe reminded him. “I’m as shaken by the attack on him as you are. If you want my assurance that I would never knowingly endanger him…”

“No, no. I appreciate that you would never knowingly, do so…” Rockefeller agreed, pointedly.

“If only we could see the future,” Gabe said. “Like I’ve always said to my kids, the best you can do is be true to yourself, uphold your oaths and stand firm on your principles. It’s not a perfect strategy, but it usually steers us right.”

He stressed the word ‘oaths’ just enough to make it the focus of the sentence.

“Mister Arés… I hope you appreciate that to my knowledge, Mister Hoeff has only ever done his duty, and his job, and upheld his own oaths…”

Gabe gave him a long, slow look. That, he felt, was the closest thing he was ever going to get to an outright admission of foul play at the very highest level.

“I… appreciate that,” he said. Neither man broke eye contact. “And I hope you appreciate that sometimes… events just have a kind of momentum to them, don’t they? When everyone involved is true to themselves and their duty as they see it, the future can become a fixed thing.”

“That is precisely my worry. I am hoping this unpleasantness won’t escalate any further.”

“There, Ambassador, I think I can ease your worries. I had a breakfast meeting up at the Palace this morning. The Prime Minister has graciously accepted my resignation.”

“She has?”

“Yes. I… Well. My son and daughter-in-law tell me they intend to have a large family. And the tragic case of Secretary Guillory has made me see that I wouldn’t want, uh, work-related stress to drive me into an early grave and deprive them of their abuelo…”

“No…” the Ambassador agreed. “…No, I suppose not. But I hope you’re not falling on your sword over this affair, that’s not what we’re asking for.”

“I know. Thank you. But I still think the time has come to pass the torch. I’ve been in this job for ten years!”

Rockefeller nodded. “What will you do in your retirement? Write a book, perhaps?”

Gabe shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I like my privacy… and my discretion.”

That was the thing he knew he had to believably convey. Fortunately, Rockefeller seemed happy enough. He smiled warmly, stood, and extended his hand.

“Well, if you’re determined to bow out of public life…”

“I am,” Gabe assured him, and shook his hand. The Ambassador’s grip was firm and warm, and he added a clap on the shoulder for good measure. His smile reached his eyes, too.

Gabe wasn’t reassured. But it was probably out of his hands at this point. He’d retire, and keep his head down, and… Well, hopefully when he inevitably did pass on, it’d be in thirty or forty years with a legion of grandchildren around his hospital bed.

One thing was for certain: he wasn’t interested in playing the game of state any longer. Not for these kinds of stakes.

Hoeff was leaning against the wall outside the embassy when he left. Arms folded, waiting patiently. They made eye contact.

“…Heard you’re stepping down,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Think you’ll be able to stay away?”

“I have plenty of good reasons to. And plenty more to come.”

“…Good.” Hoeff straightened up and took a step closer. His voice was low and quiet. “…You nearly got my best and just about only genuine friend killed, Gabe.”

Gabe stood his ground. “…I don’t think either of us want to have a really candid conversation about that,” he said.

“…No. Prob’ly a bad idea.”

“We were friends just a few days ago, you know.”

“Yeah. We were.”

Gabe sighed. He knew an utterly impenetrable wall when he saw one. “Well, then… I wish you the best. I’m going to miss golfing with you.”

Hoeff nodded. He didn’t say anything else, just turned and walked away. Gabe got in the car and went back to his office. There was about a month of cleanup and transitional work to do in making sure his successor, whoever they’d turn out to be, could pick things up and carry on smoothly. Somehow, he doubted he’d have a hand in selecting them.

But that was okay.

He’d done enough.

Date Point: 16y7m AV

Abergerrig, New Belfast County, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

It was a shame, really. Jobs like this had a way of tarnishing the souls of big damn heroes like Adam. But sometimes, the job—the mission—was way more important than the poor fucks tasked with carrying it out.

That was the thing, though. Adam volunteered for the mission, and even cut his own leave short.

The whole Regiment was out for blood. In Powell’s own growling words, the APA were ‘going to fookin’ pay for Bozo.’ Hoeff sympathized, he’d liked the dog too. But for him, there were a few other personal layers to it.

The APA had promised to kill the scientists on Akyawentuo. That included Claire. That was a fuck-up: The Lads liked the scientists, some had even visited here and there. But fuck that. Claire was his to protect, and there wasn’t much that filled Hoeff with murder more than the idea of somebody wishing her harm.

Then there was Julian, who was still badly shaken. He was a brave, tough man, but everyone had their limits, and despite everything he was a gentle soul at heart. He was a lover, a dad and a provider, and only took up the sword reluctantly. The attack, and surviving only at Bozo’s expense (or at least, that was how he saw it) had rattled him to his core, and Hoeff hadn’t had the chance to properly check on him while planning this raid.

Hoeff had found himself growing awfully protective of the big slab over the years. For more than professional reasons. His family too. Hopefully Xiù and Allison would be all the help he needed, though they too were understandably freaked.

Tonight, all of that would be answered for.

The APA cell in New York had gotten a bit sloppy with their communications discipline after their leadership were taken out. They’d made the number one cardinal mistake that a terrorist could never, ever afford: they’d sent a message to another cell.

And from that, the NSA had in short order blown apart nearly the entire organization. Raids were going on everywhere on Earth, he’d heard. Literally hundreds simultaneously, plus strikes in Franklin, New Botany and Nouveau Acadia.

In less than a night—no, in less than an hour—there would be nothing left of the APA. Most of those raids would be big, splashy affairs with lots of praise going to the local SWAT teams or whatever. For good reason, to be sure, but a few of these cells weren’t simply wannabes who might be reformed with a taste of Lady Justice. No. Some of these cells were simply going to be exterminated, including all of them on Cimbrean. Hoeff’s contribution to that butcher’s bill would be the three dozen or so targets he and the HEAT were about to service.

This cell had been the one that sheltered Bill, had served as a command-and-control node. This one had to be snuffed out entirely, all its evidence preserved, and its ringleader saved, if possible. Some of Hoeff’s former associates wanted to talk with the leader…

The heavies were there for three reasons. Firstly, the six of them were hands down the fastest men alive. Speed was everything in these things, and if you had the assets, you may as well use them. Secondly, Hoeff poached the veteran Aggressors because they were the most capable raiders on the team, and had experience with these types of missions. And thirdly, the Protectors were there to manage the perimeter, waiting outside at a fair distance.

Their job was to deal with squirters and any possible unexpected cavalry, especially if their targets had more Cruezzir monsters waiting to strike. Nobody out-ran, out-muscled, or out-fought the Protectors. Not even Firth, the one exception left standing, could humble Arés on anything. They were ruthlessly selected, trained to an utterly peerless degree, and superhumanly capable. There wouldn’t be any hope for anyone who escaped Hoeff tonight.

It had been a bit of a job getting night raid uniforms and equipment for them all, but it was that or the EV-MASS in dark grey, and that would have been too obvious. Would have involved a lot more people being brought in on the mission too, which made a leak much more likely. Oh well, needs must.

And so there they were, crouched in the rain, ready to do violence on behalf of the innocent.

Abergerrig barely existed: it was basically just a bridge over a shallow, rocky river, surrounded by a bunch of farms. But those farms were a long, long way even from New Belfast, and they, along with the fishery and the forestry plantation, had needed somewhere to put a few essentials like housing, telecom infrastructure, a general store and a vehicle charging station. So a village had been arbitrarily sketched in on the map at the only local landmark and thus Abergerrig had been born. Its population of forty-six souls lived so far from Folctha itself that even on Cimbrean’s rare clear nights there would have been no hint of light pollution from the city lights.

Tonight was not a clear night. Tonight, the usual rains had picked up a little extra from somewhere. It wasn’t raining heavily, but the droplets were fat and slow and cold. There was a lot of water coming down.

It made for pretty good concealment as the team drew near to the target farm and Hoeff skulked ahead, staying low in a drainage ditch until he was close enough to survey it.

His scope didn’t give a shit about the dark and the rain. When he looked through it, he could see the farm clearly, and more importantly the APA’s sentries. The nearest was a guy in waterproof overalls and a rain jacket standing out front of the farmhouse with what looked like a varmint rifle tucked away in the shadows behind him, ready to grab on a moment’s notice.

This was Folctha after all. It was still a British colony in its weird, unique, cosmopolitan way, and they’d inherited that British squeamishness about firearms. Shotguns and rifles were farm tools, and tightly controlled.

In the back of his head, Hoeff idly wondered if a varmint rifle could even hurt some of his HEAT friends. Arés and Firth might just be mutant enough to ignore something that small, but still: They were dealing with the APA here, a terrorist group who’d managed to get their hands on Cruezzir and a madwoman to pump it into. They had more serious hardware in there, Hoeff had seen it over a week of scoping the place out.

Which was why he was covered neck to feet in the latest full-body scale armor. It was thin enough to conceal under a baggy T-shirt, though it was still heavy as shit and noticeably bulky, even if it didn’t print much through the clothing. His HEAT bros were doing the same: no EV-MASS this time. It was hard to run a covert operation when you had giants stomping around in like a half-ton of armor or whatever the fuck it was.

The heaviest stuff they had fit Christian perfectly, and Arés was so fucking big, a man couldn’t hardly tell he was wearing armor at all. Hoeff would need to rethink his tactics if he’d be playing with HEAT again in the future. Supersoldiers changed all the rules.

All of that flit idly through his head as he scanned the scene waiting for…bingo. He grunted in satisfaction when he saw a second sentry come around the side of a barn. Sure enough, this one was packing something more serious than a varmint rifle: a Sinaloa.

The Sinaloa was a cheap homemade gauss rifle that some cartel shitstick had leaked the blueprints for onto the Internet years back. All you needed to make one was a half-decently equipped workshop and some innocuous mail-order parts. Vehicle batteries, some EM-field generator capacitors, copper wire, steel bar stock… The kinda stuff that really wouldn’t look out of place on a farm.

Being cheap came with disadvantages: It wasn’t exactly accurate, the power cells and capacitors were external so they had to be worn in a backpack or on a harness, and the ammo was pure steel rather than the ballistically superior lead. The HEAT got around steel’s inferior ballistic properties by using a jacketed lead round with a ferromagnetic plug at the back, but it was cheaper and easier to just cut down and turn some bar stock on a lathe.

Too bad Hoeff couldn’t realistically wield a Grid. The lightest version the HEAT had was over twenty pounds, and while he was strong enough to easily manage that these days, why bother? A SCAR was much lighter and almost as effective. Okay, definitely not as good as ‘Horse’s fuckin’ cannon… But Hoeff could barely lift the damn thing in the first place, so fuck that noise.

Still. For all its flaws, that Sinaloa wasn’t nothing. It was a fuck of a lot more than a varmint rifle or a birding shotgun, at least. The roaming sentry stopped to chat with his stationary colleague, then carried on his circuit, weaving through and around the farm buildings and equipment, following his usual course.

Approach was always the tricky bit. Hoeff had been casing the target for a week with sensors and his own Mark I eyeballs, reporting back the details to the team so they could plot out the details of the raid. Their defensive posture was sound, really, but it was basic, and repetitive. It had only taken Hoeff a few hours to nail down their patterns.

The roaming sentry was their first major problem. He covered the gaps Hoeff’s heavy backup would have to sprint through once the game was on, which meant that sentry had to be serviced first, quietly and unnoticed.

Time for Hoeff to earn his pay.

He crawled on his belly in chest-deep running rainwater at the bottom of the drain. Gettin’ soaking wet was normally a problem as it left sign everywhere, but this time it wouldn’t matter much. He crept along, silent as an alligator, and waited for the roaming idiot to stop like he always did to smoke under the open-sided tractor shed at the farmyard’s east end, right next to the drainage channel.

Lucky for Hoeff, he decided to take a piss against the tractor’s wheel tonight. Slowly, Hoeff raised himself out of the water and drained dry for a moment, unnoticed under the sound of rain on the thin fibreglass roof. He let the target finish up, then exploded forward and drove his best knife right through the rear of the target’s neck and into the base of his skull.

It was a clean service, and perfectly quiet. Hoeff caught the sentry and frog-marched him over to the ditch where wouldn’t be seen, then laid the body down, out of sight. He took a moment to wipe his laser-projection night-vision sunglasses clean—thank you, Clan Whitecrest—then raised his SCAR and tucked it into his shoulder.

That was the sign for the HEAT to get moving. And boy howdy did they. Hoeff could actually feel the giants’ footsteps thumping softly through the ground and before he knew it, they had all quietly serviced their targets, cleared away the bodies, and pre-positioned for the breach.

From his position, Hoeff watched the Protectors in action. It was…awesome. Biblically so.

Arés…well, he wasn’t Adam at the moment. He was Warhorse, who was a very different man. He’d serviced two sentries almost simultaneously by backhanding the first upside the head, throwing him over a shoulder, then taking a handful of light-speed bounds right across a clearing towards his next target, which he serviced with the most brutal display of casual strength Hoeff had ever seen. All Warhorse had done was wrap an arm around his target’s chest and gave the quickest, most perfunctory squeeze, like anyone might as a friendly little hug. There was a muffled crunching sound, and the target went instantly limp. Warhorse ducked behind the shed and let the bodies hit the floor, both utterly lifeless. He moved on to his next targets without a moment’s hesitation, and serviced them all with unstoppable force.

Baseball’s targets were serviced with a similarly perfunctory display of brutality and might. Irish, the youngest of the three, was a newbie at this particular dark game, but if he had any nerves about it, Hoeff couldn’t see them. All three clicked their throat-mikes at the same time. Twelve targets serviced in only a few seconds. Damn.

The Aggressors were of course impressive as well. They operated more like Hoeff did and let their skills speak for themselves. The inner sentries needed a bit more of a quiet approach, and while the Protectors were quiet and seriously skilled, the Aggressors were utterly silent, even Righteous. All the inner sentries were serviced in less than half a minute, well before anyone had time to report trouble or check in with the guards.

Hoeff was pretty sure Firth enjoyed the work, on some level. The thrill of the hunt, the pleasures of the kill… Hoeff had long since gotten over it. To him, this was mostly just taking out the trash. As for Murray… probably the same, though Murray had a certain artistry with the dagger that spoke to more going on under his calm face than just cleanly doing his job.

Blaczynski was harder to read, but there was a stone cold killer underneath all the tattoos and the playfulness. The three of them nodded silently, and stacked up into position.

Readiness check. All the sentries were clear. Video surveillance was obviously not a problem, because nobody inside had responded. They were either stupid, or asleep and stupid, and either was good luck. With a nod, the Protectors blitzed back to the far perimeter, ready to catch and service.

Hoeff was on point for this because they were hoping for an evidence-free raid, and he had the most experience in these types of missions. The key was keeping quiet. No painting the walls and leaving carnage for the police and press to fret over, at least not if it could be helped.

Fortunately, his three Aggressors had all played such games in their previous lives. Hoeff still had trouble believing a seven-foot-and-change juggernaut could move without a sound, but he could and it was more than a little alarming.

And wouldn’t you know it, Firth wouldn’t get much opportunity to show off his ninja-giant skills, because they apparently had just the fuckin’ best worst luck ever. Right as he was about to silently breach the door, some idiot decided to step outside. Hoeff wasted no time: the target had just enough time to blink in surprise at him before Hoeff’s fist crushed his throat. Before he could choke or make any noise, Hoeff followed up by tripping him, then snapping his spine.

Not silent enough. A dog started barking frantically inside the farmhouse. There were footsteps, a raised voice, the whine of a Sinaloa being charged.

Oh well. Carnage it was. He and his best friends were there to slay evil. They each did it for their own reasons. For ideals, for purpose, for justice. Hoeff could dig all of that. He’d do it for Claire, and Julian. And… hell.

For Bozo.

++End Chapter 57.2++

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…Seventy-two Friendly ETs, 96 Squishy Xenos and 274 Bumbling, tumbling, splatting Dizi Rats

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 58: “Gjallarhorn”

Chapter 58: Gjallarhorn

Date Point: 16y7m1d AV
Abergerrig, New Belfast County, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“…I hate it when I’m right.”

Gabe was retiring, not retired. Men like him didn’t have the luxury of just quitting with immediate effect. So, for now and the next couple of weeks, he was still technically Folctha’s Chief of Colonial Security, and that meant occasionally having to turn his personal attention toward interesting or unusual cases.

For example: the way a large carrot farm out at the furthest extremes of Folctha’s settled territory had abruptly become a ghost town. The mail carrier had tried to deliver a number of parcels for them, found the place deserted, grown suspicious, reported it to the New Belfast police, who’d taken a look at the place and promptly kicked it up the chain.

The place had been expertly cleaned, but not perfectly. A Gaoian officer had claimed to smell a faint hint of blood under a workbench in the garage, his nose had been vindicated with the assistance of Luminol, and from there…

From there, Gabe had gotten involved, because if there was one thing his senior investigators could sense by the pricking of their thumbs, it was a shitstorm far above their pay grade.

There wasn’t anything big, no splattered walls or anything like that. Mostly, it was small things. But it was a lot of small things, as if there was enormous time pressure on the assailants to clean up quickly…and as if the assailants had no fear of consequence, and were therefore doing said cleanup as a courtesy anyway.

Also, there was a deep-set and freakishly wide size thirty footprint out in the field about a hundred yards from the farmyard. The next print was ten feet away, and those after that were significantly further apart. Somebody—a human—who was both impossibly heavy and impossibly fast had sprinted through the soft soil, leaving ruined baby carrots in his wake.

Gabe knew exactly who it belonged to.

From there the little details started to come together. By the end of the afternoon, they had a pretty solid idea of what had happened: a raid led by extremely competent operators—everyone knew who, even if they wouldn’t say it—had descended on the place and committed some act of extreme physical confrontation. Beyond that…

…Nothing. There was evidence of some violence, but nothing even remotely on the scale that several dozen people just disappearing might indicate, especially in the dead of night, especially while stripping the compound clean. There wasn’t a personal piece of property to be found, anywhere.

There were, however, a couple of bullet holes. But only a couple. That suggested a rather massive imbalance between the combatants…

And again, there was little question what group of men might be involved.

One major set of evidence did remain, however, and it spoke volumes. It seemed that somehow the occupants of this farm had been acquiring a bunch of items that were individually harmless—copper wire, high-capacity power cells, electrostatic field emitters—but which put together should have been raising some red flags with the customs and port authorities, as they could be assembled into crude gauss weapons.

It was clear why that stuff had been left—there was too much to get rid of except with a convoy of big vans—and it told Gabe a lot about the sort of people who’d called the farm home, especially to have attracted that kind of ire.

…It was probably also left in place to be found.

Gabe hated this covert cloak-and-dagger shit. Oh well, that left one thing to do.

“Well… okay. So I want all this stuff inventoried and a preliminary report drawn up. I’ll… Liaise.”

He called the Prime Minister on the flight back toward the city. Her image on his tablet nodded solemnly as he laid out what he’d found.

In the end, she took a deep breath and gave him a clear, challenging look.

“…Come out and say it, Mister Arés. What do you think happened?”

“I think the SOR just flattened Folctha’s APA cell. I think that’s pretty obviously part of a coordinated action, given the news that’s been breaking since this morning. And I think they did so around Folctha Colonial Security Services and the police.”

“You are correct. I advised the Governor-General to authorize that action, in official consultation with our interested allies.”

“This should have been a police matter, Prime Minister.”

“No, it should not have been,” Winton told him, flatly. “Not in this particular case. Your diligence is admirable and appreciated, as always.”

Gabe knew when there was no point in arguing. “…I’ll have the evidence brought back to Folctha. And then I suppose there’ll be a legal proceeding to see who takes ownership of the farm.”

“Appreciated. Expect appropriate contact from my office shortly. And Gabe, please remind your staff about their obligations under the Official Secrets Acts.”

“…Yes, Prime Minister.”

And… that was that. It was frustrating enough that once upon a time he might have ground half his teeth down, but Gabe found that he no longer cared. He was retiring, he was unofficially persona non grata among the allied security services even if FCSS were still loyal to him. But that couldn’t stand: it’d just get in the way of them doing their jobs.

So, he made the appropriate calls, checked with his secretary that there was no other urgent business waiting, and informed her that he’d be spending the rest of the day on-call rather than pacing his office.

With that taken care of, he spent the rest of the flight thinking.

The APA were dead. Okay, most of their members probably weren’t, on an individual basis, but the Alien Protection Army’s demise as an organization had been headline news all morning even before the business at the farm filtered up to him. And given that he’d known for a fact there must be an APA cell somewhere in Folctha…

…What exactly had the Ag secretary been up to, that it would justify activating an apparently undercover assassin to take him out? Who happened to be Hoeff of all the fucking people?

Gabe suspected he knew, now. A mystery closed, albeit never to become public knowledge.

Sartori had even wept on the news as he told the nation all about Guillory’s selfless service and virtuous character, the lying hijo de puta.

Well, whatever. So the president was the kind of asshole who’d murder a friend and shed crocodile tears. So Gabe himself was now firmly out of the loop on national security matters, and Winton was apparently quite comfortable and happy with letting foreign powers, albeit allies, assassinate their own citizens in her jurisdiction.

Either Gabe had woefully underestimated the nature of his leadership, or he was woefully unfamiliar with the nature of evil. Or both.

It didn’t matter, he decided. It wasn’t his problem any longer, and making it his problem could only end in bringing grief to the people he loved. He didn’t think of himself as a coward, but…

…But there was a time when sensible men knew when to quit. There was a time to stand on his principles, and a time to… to…

To what? To turn his back on them? Maybe he was a coward after all! But search his gut, his heart and his conscience though he did, Gabe just couldn’t find it in himself to stand up any longer. It had taken a lifetime, but the bastards had finally worn him down.

All he wanted was to see his family grow up. He wanted to walk Ava down the aisle, and hold his grandkids, and live out his sunset years with his kindly angel of a wife. If that meant not making a futile stand against the evil of men and women more powerful than him, then… God forgive him, he had no more fight left.

It was with that thought in mind that, once he was back in Folctha, he walked over to Adam and Marty’s apartment, jogged up the stairs, and knocked on their door.

The floor shook as Adam rolled to his feet and thumped his way over to the door. He opened the door clad in his usual broad handsome smile and not much else, all bouncy energy and grins. Once he looked down and saw who was visiting, however…his expression hardened instantly.

The boy—what a ridiculous word for the hulking warrior of a man standing before Gabe—hadn’t ever really stopped growing from…hell, whatever it was the military was doing to him. He was now so tall that his head brushed the top of the doorframe, so ridiculously broad that he plugged the rest of it full from his head to his toes with his hypermuscular bulk, and his shoulders were so wide, his arms hung entirely outside the door frame. Dios Mío.

“…Dad.”

Getting that look and that tone of voice from his own goddamn son hurt. In fact, it nailed Gabe’s feet to the floor and glued his mouth shut for good measure.

He pulled himself together quickly, but thank God Adam wasn’t completely immune. A mirroring wince of pain crossed his face, and he stooped under and barely squeezed sideways through the door for a hug that was a lot less enthusiastic and a lot more awkward than usual.

“…Come on in.”

Marty gave the two men a quizzical look as she crossed the room with Diego cuddled up against her shoulder. “Damn, are you two okay?” she asked, as she gave Gabe a one-armed hug.

Gabe kissed her on the cheek, then gave his grandson a special little bit of affection. “I’ll be glad to retire,” he said. “I swear, I think this job’s gonna start tearing me apart soon.”

“Uh-huh…” Marty gave him a skeptical look, then shrugged, handed him the baby, and headed for the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“Sounds good.” Gabe nodded and followed his son back through to the living room, tickling Diego’s cheek as he went. He noted dispassionately that Adam was deliberately soft-stepping his way across his own home; either he was being nice to the neighbors, or he was worried about Diego.

“I think you’ve outgrown the apartment, Mijo.”

“…Yeah. I’ve got a land deal in the works, but it isn’t done yet. Hopefully I can save money and build the house myself.”

“You’re not a carpenter.”

“No, but I can still learn.”

“That’s hard work, being a carpenter. It’s how I got through college.”

Adam grinned a bit wanly, looked down, balled up a gargantuan fist and curled his waist-thick forearm into a terrifying flex. “Eh…I think I can handle a little hard work.”

Despite his black mood, Gabe smiled and laughed faintly. “That you can,” he agreed. He settled on the couch and bounced Diego on his knee. “…You know, I hate to do it. But there’s something I gotta bring up, Mijo.”

“…You sure you gotta?” Adam asked. He settled himself down right next to Gabe, ignoring the muffled screams of the ironwork underneath the couch’s homemade padding. He’d never grown out of close physical contact, even now while he wasn’t happy with his papá. That meant he’d basically crushed the two of them together on the comparatively tiny couch and pinned Gabe in place with one of those giant arms draped inescapably over his shoulders. Gabe wasn’t one to complain about well-meaning affection…but Adam was, as always, a huge musky iron-hard furnace of a man. And that arm of his was far too heavy for any normal man to comfortably bear.

Gabe sighed, and tried to wiggle into a more comfortable position. “You know me. And my damn code. There are some things I can’t let go without comment.”

“Papá, you know I can’t comment on anything I may or may not have done about what you may or may not definitely be here to talk about. That’s part of the deal. I obey lawful orders.”

“…Well some hulked out titan with size-thirty feet was out running around New Belfast last night, before apparently dragging some bodies into a storm drain or something. That doesn’t leave a lot of suspects. Not even clown shoes leave prints that wide—”

“Dad,” Adam interrupted him. “I can’t comment, either to confirm or deny. You know this.”

“Fine. You don’t have to.” Gabe sighed. Why was he even here? He’d known that he’d meet an impenetrable wall.

But the question answered itself. He was here, first and foremost, because he was worried for his son.

“…Are you…okay with this, Adam?”

“Okay with what exactly?”

“I thought we couldn’t talk about that.”

Adam sighed, and ran one of his calloused mitts through the stubble of his HEAT helmet mohawk. There was no surer sign he’d been on a mission than that; he normally let his hair grow out to the limits of the regs. “Okay. Look. In general I love the mission. I maybe don’t like some of the stuff I do–”

“Such as–?”

“–But I haven’t ever objected to anything I’ve ever been ordered to do. Sometimes, if you wanna save lives, you gotta take out the fuckin’ trash first.”

“Even if it’s not what you signed up for?”

“That’s the thing, papá. The kinda thing we’re talkin’ about is what I signed up for. Maybe I didn’t completely understand when I was sixteen, but I understood well enough. No regrets.”

“…So long as you’re doing right by your own code,” Gabe decided.

“I am. I know it ain’t the same as yours.”

“That’s probably for the best, I guess…” Gabe tickled Diego’s tummy and felt much better about life in general when the little one graced him with a smile. Baby-smiles could brighten even the darkest days. “…The police and the military don’t do the same job, after all.”

“…No. Thankfully.”

Gabe nodded, and decided they’d both said as much as was wise on that subject.

“…How’s the unit?” he asked. “I’m so sorry about Bozo. I heard he was given a proper memorial service.”

Adam turned his head and gave him a very carefully neutral look. “…Yeah.”

“…You blame me.”

“I know you didn’t mean for any of what happened.” Adam paused, then clicked his tongue in his mouth. A half a second later a gigantic missile of a dog slammed into his chest, all wiggles and happy energy.

Doofus was a fair bit different to his legendary sire. Smaller and lighter-framed with longer and finer fur thanks to his mother… but “smaller” and “lighter” were relative terms. He was still about the biggest and most powerfully-built dog Gabe had ever seen after Bozo himself, and he would have been utterly unmanageable if he wasn’t perfectly trained. Adam knew that fact well, so although Doofus was a boisterous happy face-licking typhoon when it came to him, with guests and with the baby he was the very picture of patient obedience.

Adam brought the mutt under control by pin-scritching him with one of his mitts. The dog’s blissed-out expression at the rough affection sure lived up to his name.

“You know I didn’t… but,” Gabe prompted.

“Well fuck, Dad, what do you want from me!?” Adam asked. “I lost a friend! Balls, I almost lost two!”

“You know personal protection. How quickly did his team get to him? Two minutes?” Gabe countered. “How good is a good time? Would Hoeff have done better? From what I’m told, he doesn’t stay at Julian’s side when he’s out running either. None of them can keep up! And they were in the middle of nowhere! So you tell me exactly what difference did my choice make?”

“It’s the principle of the thing, Dad!”

“Exactly!” Gabe snapped. Diego squirmed at the raised voices and started to cry, and both men immediately quieted and calmed themselves. Nevertheless, Marty stomped back in from the kitchen, skewered both of them with a disapproving look, then swept the baby away and vanished. Doofus jumped down off Adam’s lap and followed behind her, tail wagging sympathetically as he looked up at Diego.

Father and son looked at each other in mutual embarrassment, and then Gabe slumped back on the couch.

“…Exactly,” he repeated, quietly. “Principle. I stood by mine. And I’m sorry Adam, but I don’t see how that really contributed to what happened.”

“Hoeff coulda kept close.” There was a bit of a sullen tone to Adam’s reply. “He’s done it before.”

“Has he? When Julian’s out for a real run? Hoeff’s a scary little speedster, I’ll admit, but not even he’s up to a task like that. Julian is too damn fast. To make it worse, he didn’t want to make a scene and he didn’t want to disturb nature, especially in a national park. That’s his choice and no matter how good Hoeff may or may not be, choices like that matter.”

“And if he’d been allowed to protect Julian, he’d have figured it out!”

“Adam,” Gabe sighed. “You have a habit of building everyone you care about into supermen. I think sometimes you forget just how much difference that makes, especially when your friends are mostly freaks of nature like you. Hoeff isn’t. Or maybe he’s as much of a freak as a five-foot-four man can be, not that’d matter all that much. In any case, it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. You prove to me that it did, and I’ll be sorry. Truly I will. But you look me in the eye and tell me that it did.”

There was a long, heavy silence while they stared each other down. Eventually, Adam looked away.

“…Why did you pull Hoeff’s licence?” he asked.

“Principle, like I said. And that’s all I’m going to say.” Gabe stood up and made to leave. “…You let me know when you’re ready to humiliate your old man in the gym some more, okay amigo?”

“Dad…”

“No, Adam. I think we’ve said everything we can say, now,” Gabe turned back. “There’s things you can’t talk about, and there’s things I can’t talk about. That’s why I’m retiring. They’re going to get in the way of family if I don’t… And I love you too much to let that happen.”

Adam sighed heavily. He stood up, thumped carelessly across the room and buried Gabe in a spine-bender of a hug. “…I love you too, Dad,” he said. “I just…”

“I know.” Gabe patted his back, then managed to extract himself. “…Hasta luego. Apologize to Marty for me?”

Adam nodded, and Gabe let himself out.

More than anything else, he wanted to be done with the whole stupid business so he could just go back to being a grandparent. If it was a choice between duty and family… Well. In his heart of hearts, Gabe knew that family won every time.

He just needed to hold things together a little longer.

Date Point: 16y7m1d AV
Planet Rauwryhr, The Rauwryhr Republic, Perseus Arm

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

There were three awesome things going on for Daar as he visited Rauwrhyr.

The first was the defense conference itself. It’d taken months to plan an’ sadly hadta not be held on Earth—for mostly obvious reasons, in retrospect—or Gao, since they had things like the ‘common cold’ now. What a miserable little sickness that was! How could the Humans bear not bein’ able ‘ta smell?!

The second was, Rauwrhyr was pretty fuckin’ neat! He was ‘specially fond o’ the amazingly low gravity. How did it hold a breathable atmosphere? Would Meereo know? Or Loomi? Daar bet they’d know. He’d hafta ask ‘em later! Anyhoo, it was lotsa fun boinging his heavy tail all over the place an’ makin’ the floor shake unner his paws! Though he’d had to teach himself not to accidentally jump everywhere; his normal gait had been Stoneback-trained to be powerful and bouncy since he was a wee, floppy-eared lil’ cub. Here, that might just launch him right off a platform! Which mighta been fun, but best not to test that an’ scare everyone into doin’ somethin’ stupid.

The third, though, was the colours.

The Rauwrhyr people could see in the red spectrum, just like humans, an’ their cities were always lit up in oranges and purples and pinks… but the conference coincided with one of their cultural festivals, the Wrauhathryrnir.

It marked the start of the Rauwrhyr breeding season, and like pretty much every species anywhere ever, the males just had to impress. Little decorative scraps of rich, sticky-backed red and gold-flecked paper were everywhere, slapped onto just about every surface by eager kids and daredevil adults who wanted to show off how well they could fly. Some of them hung in places that seemed straight impossible, and each one bore the name of the intrepid soul who’d managed to get it there. Presumably, Rauwrhyr females liked males who could get his sticker higher amidst the trees or into more awkward corners than anyone else.

As part of the cultural exchange, they’d asked Daar to slap a paper somewhere. They probably weren’t expecting him to do much, but…well. He was Daar. And he was the Great Father. And balls, but he could leap, even in supergravity! So, feeling spiky and uncontained, Daar stretched out, took a run at a nicely ridiculous bit of bare tree as fast as he could go, flung himself through the air and—

Holy crap he got sum air! He recovered right away, zoomed up an’ slapped it on the tree an’ kicked off with the most bestest rebound he’d ever managed. Beat that, winged friends! Daar landed on all fours with a heavy thump—an’ fell slowly, because balls the gravity was weak—an’ he couldn’t help but preen a bit. Sometimes, it was good to show off!

…He enjoyed the attention too, he wasn’t afraid to admit. Plus, it couldn’t be a bad thing that the gaggle of Rauwrhyr who’d watched his lil’ bit o’ fun seemed completely awestruck…

And it was fun! Daar did somehow manage to resist drawing some lewd graffiti on his paper beforehand…but he did put a little cartoon-him on there, scratching his back against a tree. He had no idea why the Humans thought that was so funny. He’d hafta wrassle it outta them later!

President Sartori gave him an unwilling chuckle and some rolled eyes when they were in private, an’ they couldn’t commit no nation-embarrassing wrong-paw. ‘Foe paws,’ as the Humans would say. Which was weird ‘cuz Humans didn’t have no paws…well, mostly.

It was about all Daar could do not to just…wallow in it all. He were always a ‘Back who felt the world a bit stronger than most, an’ while that was a blessing he was deeply grateful for, it also meant he’d needed to discipline himself against the temptation from a young age. Sometimes it was the best kind o’ torture, ‘cuz the reward when he could finally enjoy himself…

Gods, it were all just mesmerizing ‘ta look at! He coulda looked out the window and drunk in the view forever….

But there were business to attend to. He took one last look and sighed happily at it all, only stirring when President Sartori returned to their private lil’ office with a big ol’ platter o’ snacks.

“I’ve learned the surest way to a Great Father’s heart is through his stomach.”

Daar thumped his tail from his puddle on the floor. “You ain’t wrong.”

“Then again, I’ve only met one Great Father…” Sartori noted slyly.

“Fyu was a pretty infamous lil’ glutton, ‘least accordin’ to the contemporary accounts. Which is kinda funny since I’m way over ten times his size, even at his most biggest.”

Sartori chuckled, and then opened the hardcopy printout he’d brought with him. “Shall we?”

Daar rolled up to his paws and padded over. He’d found that he was much more disarming on four-paw than upright, especially since he’d started on his weird adventures with the Humans, and that little bit of psychological warfare worked even on clever lil’ Sartori.

“The defence symposium revealed a lot of interesting things about the state of the Dominion’s military,” Sartori said as he pushed the folder Daar’s way. Considerately, it was translated into Gaori.

“I do read English, y’know…”

“And I read Gaori. Don’t ask me to pronounce it, though. I just can’t get that yipping sound right.”

Daar chittered, “I won’t even tell ‘ya how much learnin’ English can be literally painful for a gaoian jaw an’ tongue. You get better though. Just takes practice!”

“For now, though…” Sartori gestured to the document.

“Right, Right…”

It wasn’t as damning as Daar had feared. Okay, it was still really fuckin’ damning, but there were little diamond sparkles hidden here and there in what was otherwise a midden of bought commissions, political appointments, mandatory conscription, and the fact that the Dominion’s most senior species hadn’t even encountered the concept of special forces until twenty years previously.

“I got some points…d’you mind if I switch to Gaori? We’re gonna be talkin’ a lot.”

Sartori plucked a sandwich from the platter. Salmon, dill and cream cheese, from the smell. “By all means.”

Daar used a claw to spear a nice greasy-smellin’ dumpling and popped it into his mouth. Tasty! “Okay,” he said once he’d swallowed. “I think the first thing I gotta say is…how in the balls-licking fuck did these spineless degenerate cowards ever defend themselves at all?!”

“The Hunters were never interested in conquering them,” Sartori replied in English. “Just raiding and feeding. They were predators picking off the weak and vulnerable. By and large, the Dominion never really needed to defend themselves: the only military threat they ever faced in that sense was the Alliance, who are just as bad.”

“An’ a lot smaller. How didn’t they steamroller ‘em?”

“The Qinis and their drone swarms. Our forces would run circles around them, but in a stand-up brawl those things make the difference.”

“An’ that stalemate was prol’ly engineered, too.”

“We don’t know that, but…yeah.”

“So,” Daar mentally donned his Master of War cloak and began to ponder the horrifying logistics of it. “What we have then is a motley collection of radically dissimilar forces, spread all over to hell an’ gone, most of which aren’t disciplined in the slightest, almost all of which have ethics that smell worse than Keeda’s nuts, an’ none of which could withstand any level of combat against either my people or ‘yers.”

“Don’t forget the massively corrupt officer class.”

“Oh, I ain’t. I’ve just sorta baked that into the nava cake at this point when I’m dealin’ with the herbivores.”

“There are shining lights. The Chehnash and Rauwrhyr.”

Daar shook his head in disagreement. “The Chehnash…aren’t. They talk a good scary tale, an’ they’re okay mercenaries ‘fer low-level scutwork an’ such, but…no. They have zero unit discipline. They’re just bands of raiders. They don’t know what soldiering is an’ being honest, I don’t think they’re socially developed or individually intelligent enough ‘ta teach ‘em. The Rauwrhyr on the other hand…they’ve got a warrior’s soul in ‘em. I’ve known that for a long while, but that little red-paper thing they do? That’s sorta the proof.”

“How?”

“He who won’t fuck, won’t fight. Fyu said that in his happier times. An’ I’m gonna add to it: He who won’t do somethin’ daring ‘fer the chance ‘ta fuck…”

Sartori smirked and quipped, “How very reputational of you…”

Daar chittered deep in his chest and flexed quickly for the President; he loved teasin’ Sartori, because there weren’t many who could banter so good! “Well I gotta live up to the legend, y’know? Imagine if the Females I court felt they weren’t gettin’ the full experience!”

“Heaven forbid.”

“I know, right?!” Daar chittered again, then re-focused on the task. “Anyhoo, I know you ain’t the warrior type, Mister President. But I know damn well you’ve met more’n a few of us. Tell me it ain’t true. An’ then tell me: who in the Dominion treat mating like anythin’ more’n a simple social need? Ain’t many. An’ that’s sad.”

“There’s a few on Earth who feel that way, but… we’re drifting away from the point, anyway. How do we fix this mess?”

Daar’s answer wasn’t one Sartori would like. “We don’t. Or, bein’ more specific, we partner with who we can an’ just ignore the idiots who’re gonna bleat ‘bout the horrors to come. ‘Cuz, that’s the thing. I’ve got a billion-strong army which is ready to go right now. We’ve been preparin’ for this since I wiped out the remnants of our old civilization. An’ in maybe just ten years, I won’t have a Grand Army. If we’re gonna punch hard…we do it now.”

“…And we partner with the Rauwrhyr. Only them?”

“‘Fer now. They’re some of the physically weakest people I’ve ever met, but their souls are up to the fight, an’ that’s what matters most. We can fix the rest, an’ work around it… but what we can’t do is teach righteous anger to the meek. If they couldn’t work up the balls ‘ta fight when their fuckin’ children were bein’ eaten, then there ain’t nothin’ we can do for ‘em. Not inside the time limit. An’ I somehow doubt they’ve got the stomach to exterminate an entire species, even one so manifestly evil as the Hunters.”

“…Sometimes, I forget just how ruthless you actually are, Daar.”

It weren’t meant as an insult an’ Daar knew it. Still, he couldn’t let that go unanswered. “Says the guy who just did a pretty fuckin’ ruthless thing himself…”

“Only with great sorrow. He was a friend.”

“Was. Y’have to be pretty fuckin’ ruthless to do that to a friend.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly. But that reminds me: I happen ‘ta like Gabriel Arés a lot. He’s a good man, an’ there ain’t enough o’ those around.”

Sartori nodded in agreement. “You’re not wrong.”

“Right.” Daar gave him his most deadly-serious look. “Arthur, I ain’t gonna be happy if somethin’ unfortunate happens ta’ him…”

Sartori shook his head. “He’s earned a long and happy retirement as far as I’m concerned.”

“Good. I didn’t doubt it, but it hadta be said. I’m jus’ sad Gabe hadta learn that kinda truth.”

Sartori stood up straighter. “He was never in any danger from me, Daar.”

Daar duck-nodded gratefully, and returned his attention to the documents on the table. “So. Let’s talk about the enemy.”

“Starting with the more imminent and physical ones…” Sartori turned to the two-page summary on the Hunters. “Since you blew up that orbital ring megastructure, the Hunters have changed tack dramatically. They’ve scattered and decentralized, and started raiding more aggressively. Their controlled territory is more permeable, as long-range scout drones have found. They’re more selective and clever about which targets they hit and their spaceships are of a superior quality: They don’t seem to be refitting Dominion ships any longer but instead are building their own.”

“Digging them out is gonna take a long time,” Daar surmised.

“They must have resource worlds, and those will be full of feral Dominion slaves like the planet ‘Hell’ was.”

“Yeah. An’ we gotta deny ‘em to the Hunters. Which is gonna mean a rehabilitation, or a slaughter, or just somehow leavin’ em in peace so’s the Hunters can’t eat ‘em.”

“I don’t like those options.”

“Nope. My people are aggressive an’ sometimes violent, but we ain’t hateful, or evil. I can’t ask the Grand Army to exterminate Dominion types. So really, we gotta purge each system, bubble it up, cleanse the world of Hunters, an’ throw up a Farthrow. Repeatedly.”

“That’s…going to be a logistical nightmare.”

“Might be a useful way ‘ta put the Dominion ‘ta use, actually. ‘Cuz we can throw our armies into clean-up an’ then move on. Let the Dominion sort out the bullshit. If they wanna abandon their own people that’s on them. But anyway, the Hunters aren’t even the most important bit.”

“The Hierarchy.”

“Yup. ‘Yer people got Highmountain’s data on the relay worlds, right?”

“And we’ve developed our own detector. Our people in Erebor are assembling it or, uh, them. It’s going to be a network of deep-sky satellites with a parallax of two lightyears.”

It took a lot to give Daar pause, but that just about did it. He stopped for a second and tried to wrap his head around the idea of a telescope that large. “…Ain’t that… kinda overkill?”

“We have to pick out individual rocky bodies within systems that might be on the far side of the galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of star systems in the Milky Way. My scientific advisors assure me that overkill is the only way to find all the relays in a timely manner. And afterwards, of course, we’ll have the largest and most sensitive deep survey telescope ever built.”

“I can imagine Champion Loomi an’ his Brothers’d be droolin’ over somethin’ like that…”

“Erebor is this generation’s Bletchley Park. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the name…?”

Daar wobbled his head uncertianly. “Uh…somethin’ ‘bout secret communications, I think?”

Sartori nodded. “Yup! It was a codebreaking operation during the Second World War. Their breakthroughs led directly to computational science and laid the groundwork for our information revolution.”

“Neat!” Daar made a note to ask for some reading material; he loved that kinda military history.

“It makes me wonder what the galaxy will look like in seventy years, after all this and everything we’ve developed…” Sartori mused. “But there we go. I think I can see a plan forming. Now we just need to bring the rest of them on board.”

“Won’t be difficult,” Daar predicted. “The Rauwryhr are ready ‘fer a change.”

“So are the Corti,” Sartori agreed. “They just need an example of leadership.”

“Yeah. An’ we’re pretty different examples of that.”

“…Might be to our advantage, actually. Play it up, maybe?”

Daar felt his tail wag again. “So, I go an’ be me, ‘cept a bit, uh, mebbe a wee bit less restrained. An’ you be you?”

“It won’t be hard to play up our friendship.”

Daar finally gave in, padded over and rest his big ol’ head briefly on Sartori’s shoulder. “Naw. It won’t.”

Sartori chuckled. “You are unlike any other head of state I’ve ever dealt with, Daar.”

“S’what ‘ya get ‘fer makin’ another Great Father. Blame Yulna! Anyhoo.” Daar spun away and went to his Bag of Many Things. “I got some ideas I jot down a while ago, I think they’re relevant. An’ my staff has been workin’ out some battle prep. I think we should figger out what our message is, an’ then I’ll go get some exercise in, an’ then…”

Sartori nodded. “And then,” he echoed, “the first day of the real war begins…”

Date Point: 16y7m2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Julian bounced back. He was tough, dependable, innately cheerful… Nothing kept him down for very long.

But some things took longer than others to bounce back from. Xiù knew that well. Which was why she’d devoted herself to turning their home into a little slice of heaven as much as she could.

And why not? All three of them were home for a change. Al was on maternity leave, Julian had taken time off to process the attempt on his life, and Xiù worked from home anyway. It wasn’t like her property portfolio needed her constant attention after all…

So she devoted herself to being a mom and a carer. Caring for Julian was easy; he wanted good food—and lots of it, which tickled at her heartstrings like she’d never imagined it might—and to snuggle up on the couch with everyone, and watch movies.

They weren’t watching anything just then, simply…resting. She sat on the couch and he curled his muscular legs around her, all gentle possessive strength and familiar, affectionate warmth. The boys were off playing with friends and that left them alone, enjoying an interlude of peace.

“I could do this forever,” he grumbled happily. Xiù smiled and massaged his big sturdy feet, since they were right there in her lap and she enjoyed giving him pleasure. That earned her a blissed-out expression of deep relaxation as a reward; Julian loved being touched, and he responded to it so well…

She worked her hands up the unyielding heroic shapes of his body, earning a stream of contented rumbles and some enjoyably tighter squeezes. His was a beautiful soul, vigilantly selfless and yet happily willing to soak up any positive vibes anyone sent his way. There was no possible way she couldn’t love him for it…

…And she certainly wasn’t complaining about the body that came along with it, oh no. Physiques just didn’t come any better, except for possibly his supersoldier friends, and even then, though she was definitely partial, she thought he was was the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Better yet, the handful of civilians who came even close to his size, or his strength, or his frankly perfect shape weren’t nearly so ultra-healthy. Or as tenderly affectionate, probably. He didn’t have the inflated ego those other men so often had and that was one of his very best qualities. He was a special man and she was blessed, truly blessed to love him.

All three of them were blessed in each other. Xiù was buzzing with good feelings and would have loved to give some to Al, but she was asleep, and Julian was just so good to feel…

It was an intimate and playful affection they were sharing. Physical, yet gentle, and without the electric charge of something more profound and intense…there would be plenty of time for that later. For now, she kept things mostly but not completely chaste. He could be pretty volcanically passionate when provoked and honestly…she loved him dearly, but she couldn’t handle that at the moment. Now was the time for snuggles, and touches…some of those maybe suggestively promising of things to come. A quick teasing feel or three, a kiss on his naval…

And flirting. Lots of that. Which was absolutely not a burden at all.

“All this lying around and eating, you might actually get a little fat on you…” she teased, rubbing her hands along the unyielding bumps of muscle layered over his ribs, then slowly up and down the rock-hard cobblestones of his abs.

Julian grinned his happiest, dopiest grin and groaned in deep, deep pleasure. He was so easy to please…her hands worked up to his bulging chest and slowly rubbed along his thick neck and shoulders, before following his arms back to his ribs.

It was a while before he said anything. “Mmm…would you still do that if I did?”

He tensed his core as he said it and a troll-like expression spread across his face…which made tickling his ribs such a temptation. He was lying flat on his back on the couch with Anna asleep on his chest, a perfect tickle target as he wouldn’t dare squirm away. Allison, who lived by the ‘sleep when the baby sleeps’ mantra, was dozing on the recliner, but even she wouldn’t have been able to resist, if she’d been awake: Julian was super ticklish. Always had been.

Xiù had neglected to think ahead, however, and this time he won the game of reflexes. His hand shot out like a lighting bolt and managed to grab both her wrists. Even at an awkward angle, she couldn’t resist his casually ridiculous strength and escape being pulled inexorably closer.

“You’re a naughty girl…” He grinned trollishly, then lovingly put one of his big hands on her belly. “We’ll have to commute your sentence, though…”

Xiù laughed. “You say that every time. I dread to think what you’re gonna do to me when you get the chance…”

“Oh, I’m gonna take a whole week of leave for that… Maybe learn to tie some special knots…”

Xiù laughed again, quietly, though there was no stopping both the blush and the way her teeth reflexively played with her lip… āi yā. He was way too good at that.

“Promise?” she asked.

He sat up just enough to kiss her. “…Maybe.” Thus delivered, he laid back and pulled Xiù up along his body, resting her head on his thick shoulder and chest so they could both watch Anna sleep. His head snuggled against hers, and Xiù would have loved to stay cuddled up like that forever, wrapped up warmly in his strength and his scent.

It truly was a deep blessing they had, despite everything. Julian was the type to heal up fast, both in his heart and apparently in his body, too. He’d done a number to his foot while he was out running but within a day it was mostly back to normal; it had probably just looked a lot worse than it really was.

Still, he’d had a persistent and worsening soreness that ran all up and down his left calf, so he was going to the doctor today to get it looked at.

Sadly, his appointment was approaching. “You need to get going, Mister Slab. Go get dressed! You’re expected in forty minutes and no running, remember? And if you don’t give Hoeff enough warning I think he’ll have a heart attack and explode.”

“Yes ma’am,” He chuckled “…Suppose I better go downstairs and extract him from the mancave…”

He sat up, and Xiù scooped Anna out of his arms before settling into the nice warm spot he’d left on the couch.

Julian thumped down to the basement and came up a minute later with a very thoroughly exercised-looking Hoeff, who nodded politely and prowled upstairs to the guest bathroom. Julian followed behind toward the master suite. A few minutes later they emerged, scrubbed clean and sans gym shorts, and both were dressed much more presentably. Hoeff had gone for some well-fitted cargo pants and a very snug polo, Julian in his habitual friend-made comfy jeans and snug black t-shirt. He was wearing the one she stole as a pajama top the night before, too; she could tell because it was still a big wrinkled mess, but that would disappear very quickly. What felt like an almost knee-length tent on her was nearly too tight on him, which…

That happy thought was dashed when she saw what he had clipped onto his waistband: a reactive personal forcefield.

Xiù hated the sight of the thing. She’d barely held it together when Julian’s protection team had brought him home a week ago, shaking and shaken and covered in blood, and thank God for Allison, who’d just gone fully into Practical Mom Mode and put the world back together.

Hoeff had been seething. Then, at some point, he’d vanished. There was something about that entire situation that absolutely screamed at Xiù’s instincts, because Hoeff’s entire attitude had gone from raw and aggressive to…absolutely, perfectly, murderously cold.

And then, there was the news a week later about the APA. When he returned he’d seemed…much calmer. More his usual habitually spiky and friendly self. She was pretty sure she knew enough about why to not ask any questions.

Julian on the other hand seemed a bit oblivious to it. Probably that was because he had fond blind spots for people he cared about.

Hopefully, that would never go away.

As for Xiù herself… once upon a time she would have hated herself for the sense of righteous satisfaction she felt when she considered what had happened to the so-called ‘Alien Protection Army.’ Years ago, she’d told herself she didn’t want to be the sort of person who was happy about such things.

But they’d hurt her family. Over and over again. They’d robbed Julian of his home, robbed Allison of a good relationship with her son, and now they’d tried to kill Julian. And when she looked at the little knot of hatred for them that she found in her soul…

It should have appalled her. Instead, what mildly concerned her was that it didn’t.

They’d dragged Hoeff in too, somehow. She knew it and had expressed that to him without actually saying the words. But she knew, and he knew, and she knew he knew. He’d hugged her fiercely and the two had never said a word about it since.

“Okay! We’re ready to go. You want us to get anything? Are you still hankering for Nava paste?”

“I finished two tubes yesterday.” She’d taken to spreading it on toast with butter. It had a nice, salty, slightly fishy and slightly nutty flavor. Okay, so it was still a giant turd-looking bug’s roasted and pureed guts, but she’d got over that. Mostly.

Hoeff mugged at her gruffly. “Y’all are so gross. Damn weirdos.”

“I swear that’s your favorite insult, little guy.” Julian punched him on the shoulder with a surprisingly loud thwack. He was the complete and total opposite of a bully, but there was nobody more guy-like than Hoeff, and guy-friends seemed to bond by picking on each other.

“Eh, I’m not the creative type. That’s a weirdo kinda thing, if ‘ya ask me.”

Julian grumbled happily. “Whatever, midget.” He gave Xiù a kiss, and then a second softer one for Anna.

“We’ll get you some,” he promised. “Anything else?”

“I’ll add it to the shared list if I think of anything.”

“‘Kay. See you later, spacebabe!”

Hoeff grinned—genuinely, which really lit his face up from handsomely plain to something remarkable—and nodded at everyone. “See y’all tonight.”

♪“Bye!”♪ Xiù waved cheerily, and bounced Anna a little for good measure. A sleepy mumble from the recliner was Allison’s contribution, and…

Silence. Xiù carefully deposited the baby in her mother’s arms and decided that maybe she had a little time to enjoy herself before the next little moment of duty called…

But on the other hand…

She cuddled up to Allison, got a barely-conscious kiss and snuggle, and decided that there were worse ways to spend an afternoon than a well-earned nap.

After all. Before long there’d be a second baby to take care of and their work would double. Best to take whatever peace she could, when she could.

It was a rare enough commodity, after all.

Date Point: 16y7m2d AV
Ceres Base, Asteroid Belt, Sol

Drew Martin

Drew was the last of the ‘old guard’ left, and kept wondering why.

He had, over the course of a nightmare few weeks, lost his best friend, been the prime suspect in the theft of a nuclear bomb, been altogether much too close to said bomb’s detonation for comfort, and generally been at the core of a debacle that had cost the Hephaestus Consortium a mind-squeezing amount of money, not to mention access to the high-yield ordnance necessary to the kind of asteroid mining they wanted to do.

It had certainly cost Adele Park her job. After several loyal years, she’d been given a king’s ransom of an executive bonus package and quietly persuaded to retire. Drew kept wondering when the new boss, Rahul Panja, was going to heft that axe again.

Quite aside from being mystified as to why he hadn’t been given a polite but firm push out the door, there was the mystery of his own reasons for staying. Ceres was a lot of bad memories right now.

But it was also a lot of work. A lot of good work. The base had weathered the nuke pretty damn well, but the list of little things that needed attention had been naturally eclipsed by the list of big things that needed immediate action… with the result that the little things had naturally evolved into bigger and more urgent things as they were neglected.

They were gaining on the front of the treadmill, slowly. Maybe that was the answer to both mysteries. Drew didn’t want to go until the backlog was clear, and the Consortium needed him to get the backlog cleared.

Today, though, was different and Drew was not tending to the backlog. Today, Ceres was hosting some ET guests with some promising technology to sell.

Anything that got the mining ship HCS-501 ‘I Met God And She Booped My Nose’ out of mothball and back out among the belt where she belonged was a good thing in Drew’s book. The ship had depended on nukes to do its job, but the supply of those had dried up like spit on a barbecue the moment Hephaestus lost one. The ship wasn’t a cost-effective surveyor, and the Consortium didn’t even know where to begin researching an alternative, so the poor girl had been “landed” on Ceres’ ultra-low-gravity surface where not even her prodigious mass could do her any harm, and handed over to the accountants.

She’d paid for herself just in one rock. But Drew loved spaceships, and seeing one he’d briefly captained sitting out there on the asteroidal plain, abandoned and unused, was just an extra twist to the knife in his beer belly.

“So explain how these probes work?” he asked.

The ET guest was a Locayl named Ernud, clad head-to-toe in a hazmat suit for his own protection. Ceres wasn’t designed for nonhumans, they didn’t practice even the basic germ safety that everyone living on Cimbrean was used to. No Frontline, no biofilter fields, just good old-fashioned soap medicine and disease screening. It had kept the station free of STIs at least.

By Drew’s admittedly low standards, no Chlamydia meant all was well. But from a Locayl’s perspective, Ceres Base was a seething plague pit full of some of the most aggressive bacterial and fungal pathogens in the known galaxy. Drew couldn’t blame him for wrapping up in his own personal clean room.

“It’s an interesting application of stasis technology,” he explained, via the translator he wore clipped tight around his throat like a choker or dog collar. “We were inspired by the safety hazards present in Human-designed jump arrays. Three probes maneuver into position, generate a stasis field between them, and the result is a neat plane that should cut cleanly through basically anything.”

“…So the swarm just dices the rock up into manageable chunks,” Drew surmised. “I like it. I take it you have some improved power technology in there? We couldn’t make a drone that could generate a stable field with enough range and maneuver around and that had a decent battery life and was small enough to fit in the ship.”

“This one, I believe, will satisfy on all four counts. You’ve already seen for yourself that they fit in the ship’s launch tubes…”

Drew nodded. Boop had headed out to trial the new probes a couple of hours earlier, bound for a nice high-value Ruthenium-rich object that had been on the survey chart for years but was much too difficult to relocate to near Ceres and break apart the way they usually handled the smaller stuff.

The telemetry took a couple of minutes to reach Ceres, but that didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that Boop was flying again, and if Ernud walked his talk then Hephaestus was about to own enough Ruthenium to drive the price down from hundreds of dollars per troy ounce to a couple of cents. The Consortium had to be extremely careful about how slowly it released material onto the market in these situations to avoid shocking the global economy.

But as a way of getting investors enthusiastic, bringing in a medium-sized nation’s GDP in an afternoon took a lot of beating. And right now, Hephaestus needed the investors.

“Well, let’s see how it goes…”

They watched, and Ernud talked Drew through each step as Boop nosed up to the asteroid like a dolphin playing alongside an oil tanker. The trio of drones sailed out of her launch tube without incident, and quickly vanished into the distance until they were far too small for the ship’s cameras to pick out. White target reticles indicated their positions as the spread out into an equilateral triangle around the rock and…

It was hard to make out the perfect black of a stasis field against the perfect black of deep space, but the way most of the asteroid seemed to blink out of existence seemed like pretty telling evidence that it was working. The drones fired their thrusters, briefly dazzling the camera as they applied full thrust, and then when the field flickered off, an irregular pie crust of stone was tumbling slowly away from the rest of the object.

The drones slowed, boosted back, took up position, and did it again. And again. In less than five minutes, they’d carved off three thin plates, which Boop reached out and grabbed with her forcefields, then snapped in half like Drew would have broken a cracker before drawing the broken bits into the rock smasher along her belly.

It was a lot neater than mining with nukes. A lot safer, too. No hurtling high-energy debris to survive, dodge or chase, just little biscuits of rock that Boop could snack on at her leisure.

Ernud turned to Drew, and looked smug through his suit’s transparent faceplate. “Sold?” he asked.

“That’s not up to me,” Drew replied. “But strewth, I like ‘em. I like ‘em a lot. I’ll tell Mister Panja he should buy ‘em.”

“Good.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, though, why come to us? We aren’t exactly the biggest mining operation in the sky.”

“You’re the biggest in Sol. Indeed, you’re the only in Sol,” Ernud replied. “And this system is unique for the time being, in being both a species cradle and effectively pristine. Every other cradle system was rapidly developed by Dominion mining interests when the natives invited them in, but Sol of course was quarantined early on. The end result is that you are small now, but likely to grow into one of the largest mining corporations in the galaxy over the coming centuries. We thought that… what’s that term of yours? We thought ‘getting our foot in the door’ was a good idea.”

Drew couldn’t knock that reasoning, really.

“Well then,” he said, as he watched Boop chew up another giant rocky biscuit and draw the resulting gravel into the rock-smashers in her belly to be chewed up and wormhole jumped back to the processing facility on Ceres, “here’s to a prosperous future.”

“For us all,” Ernud agreed.

Date Point: 16y7m2d AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

“Well, your doctor is absolutely correct, my dear. This is a most unusual case of inflammation. I can fix it of course…”

“…But?” The big explorer tilted his head in a quizzical expression so like what Bozo used to do, Nofl felt a momentary pang of some unidentifiable feeling. He didn’t much like it.

“…Well, the fix isn’t too bad, I’d just need to remove the implants. However, you’ve put this leg through some ridiculous stress, dear. Or at least… I thought you had…”

Julian quirked an eyebrow bemusedly. “Nofl, not too long ago I watched you grow a foot and then attach it to my leg. That sounds pretty traumatic to me!”

“It is! So, long story short, I’m going to need to take a closer look. The scanner just isn’t helping today. Permission to slice apart your leg and rummage around in there, dear?”

Julian gave him a complex look. “You don’t sugar coat it, do you little fella?”

“So…permission granted?”

Julian snort-laughed. “…Fine. Yeah. If I can’t run, I’ll be useless. Let’s fix it before I wimp out.”

Nofl clapped happily and spun through the usual preparatory works, which included a review of all of his voluminous medical notes before the procedure.

Human doctors were remarkably competent, thorough, and highly observant, despite their alarmingly primitive medical technologies. With Julian they never skimped on the bloodworks; he was, after all, an utterly peerless physical specimen and a “normal” civilian to boot, and such things never failed to arouse suspicions among those paying attention. Not once had they ever found anything concerning of course, impressively elevated testosterone and related hormonal signaling aside. Julian had always been open and honest, and that had slowly earned their trust.

But this time…

This time, they found some highly unusual metabolites in his blood. They had no idea what they meant and had flagged them for Nofl’s attention; their working theory was his gut microbiome was acting up and might be the root cause of Julian’s symptomatology.

Nofl took one look at the report and almost choked on his decaffeinated ristretto. The doctors had no idea how right they were. He knew exactly what those bloodworks meant, which left him with a mystery to solve.

Why hadn’t the Directorate been honest with Nofl?

It wasn’t much of a mystery. The Directorate wasn’t honest with anybody, least of all a lowly banner such as him. But surely this wasn’t a thing they’d imagined would remain a secret!

…Was it?

Well. Before Nofl could do anything about it or broach the subject, first he had to confirm his suspicions. Any additional therapy to address Julian’s rather unique condition would need special consideration, depending on what, exactly, had been done. After all, it wasn’t as if his health was in any danger. Rather the extreme opposite, in fact.

Which, in the end, was going to be a Very Big Problem.

The procedure didn’t take long. He opened Julian’s robustly over-muscled calf up to the knee and narrated his work for the big man’s reassurance, swabbed the inflammation sites, and zipped the dense flesh closed again as though it was a Ziploc bag—what a marvelous invention those were! Once done, Nofl wrapped an entirely superfluous dressing around it as a placebo for the patient, sent Julian on his way with a stern admonition to come back the next day for a follow-up, and then buried himself in his lab equipment to confirm his suspicions.

Confirming them didn’t take more than a minute or so.

…Oh dear.

Nofl’s work on Cruezzir had been a conflux of unique serendipity, coupled of course with his own rare genius. He had, through sheer brilliance far in excess of the usual drudgery his caste produced, managed to secure a bottom-level lab assistant role in a xenobiology college operating out of City Three on the planet Perimeter. There, he’d found himself handling, cataloging, isolating, cultivating and generally *-ing*ing a steady stream of interesting samples, data, specimens and reports from field xenobiology units.

And, in his spare time, because it wasn’t explicitly forbidden by his role, he’d experiment.

Cruezzir had begun life ignominiously as the gut secretions of a species native to the Celzi homeworld. The critter in question would have been vermin, except the Celzi happened to find them rather tasty and tended to trap them. There was no need to farm the things, just wash them carefully when they inevitably blundered into the traps. It was as though rat was a staple of the human diet.

So. The gut secretions of vermin. Not a promising starting place for a miracle medicine, but Nofl had noted a few unusual things about the creature’s life cycle and found it oddly fascinating. He’d biochemically picked it apart, and then started to, well… tinker.

That had kind of been the trajectory of his career, in fact. Tinkering with the overlooked details in the background, while the more important and pompous higher-banner professors dedicated themselves to whatever it was that had drawn their lofty attention. They’d sneered at him at first when he’d brought the prototype Cruezzir formula to their attention… then grown vaguely interested. Then fascinated. Then rather embarrassed.

Nofl, of course, had been much too carefully diligent about documenting his findings for them to ever steal the credit. The downside to that of course was that the Directorate knew exactly how Cruezzir was produced. It was a hideously complex, multi-stage nanotechnological and biological synthesis that defied any easy streamlining…

But it did have precursors that were potent regenerative medicines in their own right. And Julian, Nofl’s favorite patient, was producing a number of them in spades in that ferocious gut microbiome of his.

Normally, the precursor compounds were generated in such tiny trace amounts and reabsorbed so rapidly that detecting them was effectively impossible, but this time…

Oh dear oh dear.

Nofl sighed, scooted over to his lab’s private wormhole router station, and opened a link to Origin.

…And once again waded into politics far, far above his station.

Date Point: 16y7m1w AV
The Pinkwood Michelin star restaurant, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Doctor Claire Farmer

Hoeff cleaned up good. In fact, he cleaned up so good that he almost managed to look like a Daniel. Almost…but not quite.

For starters, Daniel was a friendly sort of name for a guy. Hoeff…didn’t quite fit the bill. He was much too rough and tumble to ever quite come across as a mild-mannered sort of man. He had an intense look in his eyes and his glance tended to bore right through people, right through to their very cores. A Daniel probably had a nice, clean-cut pile of hair on the top of his head. Hoeff had a military fade so perfectly executed, it looked as if it were actually sharp to the touch.

A regular Daniel had probably played baseball or ran track for his high school. He sounded like a nice civilized boy next door, with a decent scholarship to a good state college and a modest athletic career in his youth. He probably gracefully went to seed sometime in his thirties.

Not Hoeff. He had no time for college and didn’t even bother to apply. He was an intensely physical man, and had played varsity football and rugby and wrestled all the way to four state championships. He then enlisted in the Navy and went straight into the SEALs…at seventeen, having graduated early and taken every AP course he could find time to take. Hoeff was probably a lot smarter than Daniel, too. Nor had that fundamentally kinetic quality of Hoeff’s ever dimmed. Rather than go to seed he’d kept at it with full intensity, so he still looked like a young and lean fighter of a man, and had a bullneck thick enough to shatter a baseball bat against.

No, even at his most well-groomed and in his civilian best, Hoeff was still very much a Hoeff… and Claire wouldn’t trade him for any pencil-necked average-man Daniel out there.

The hungry way he looked at her was all part of the appeal. Claire had always thought she preferred ‘nice’ guys, but the thing was…

…The thing about it, was that the Nice Guys were, well… too nice. They didn’t know how to make her feel desired. Any random Daniel would probably go out of his way to be polite and accommodating, always afraid of her shadow…what kind of fun was that? Her Daniel, her Hoeff, very much gave the impression that he was consciously restraining the urge to throw her up against the wall and take what was rightfully his. Hoeff was a dangerous man, and some part of her thrilled at that like she’d never imagined she’d do. That she interested him.

That he was also unfailingly polite and mild-mannered…well, in public anyway…

The cherry on the top of it all, though, was just how good he cleaned up. He had a stylistic flair too, sporting a deep-black, very well-fitted linen shirt with a mandarin-style collar. He matched it with a nice pair of athletic-cut chinos and shoes so glossy-black, they were practically mirrors.

She was used to seeing him running around in a steamy jungle in skimpy shorts and not much else. Which…hot, to say the very least. But somehow, now that he was properly dressed up…

They met at his apartment, and he welcomed her with a genuine smile. It was definitely a spartan bachelor type of place, but it looked and smelled fastidiously clean. That was certainly not a bad thing, in her book.

Hoeff meanwhile only had eyes for her. “Lookit us, all pretty and stuff!”

She must have cleaned up pretty well too, given how he was eyeing her. “Well, if you’re going to spend some time in civilization…”

He grinned and wrapped his arms around her waist. They were much the same height, but that just made it easy to trade a welcoming smooch and a nicely possessive nuzzle.

“…Nice necklace!”

Claire fingered the intricately chunky tangle of antler and colorful stone beads around her neck. “Thanks! The Singer made it for me.”

“You wouldn’t think they could be so crafty with those shovels they have for hands, huh?”

“Yours aren’t exactly dainty, and you can work some minor miracles with them…” She gave him a filthy grin she’d never known she had in her, then took his hand and led them toward the cab.

“I’ll have you know, it’s taking an immense amount of self-control to be polite just now…”

“M-hmm. I can see the way you’re looking. But I’m hungry and when I left Akyawentuo it was breakfast time. And it took me all morning to get my fingernails clean.”

“Well fuck, let’s go eat, then!”

“Where did you pick?”

“Little place an old friend treated me to last week. Michelin star.”

Claire felt her eyebrows and her jaw do their level best to get away from each other. “…I’ve… never eaten at a Michelin star restaurant before…”

Hoeff grinned. “Kinda fancy, but the food’s… you’ll see. Also, I know you only drink decaf and theirs is so good I couldn’t tell the difference. Think they get it locally, from an ET.”

“High dining? Decaf coffee? Who are you, and what did you do with Hoeff?”

“Naw, it’s me. I’m not all grunt and murder, y’know. Sometimes I like to eat a fancy-ass steak.”

“Riiight! Steak! There you are again!”

They bundled into the cab, and Claire smoothed her dress down under her, feeling a little self-conscious. She was used to hard-wearing waterproof work pants and flannel, attire appropriate for the bottom of a muddy hole in the ground. Not a knee-length black number with a cute wide pleat down the front of the skirt.

Hoeff did the nicest possible thing and leaned his head against her shoulder. “I could honestly just do this all night.”

Claire’s stomach replied for her by growling, and he chuckled along with her own self-effacing laugh.

“…But you couldn’t,” he added.

The restaurant, when they reached it, was fancy, but tastefully so. Rather than intimidating her with glitz and ritz and snootery, it was… tasteful. Crisp white tablecloths, comfortable black leather seats, and a long curved slate wall with water trickling down it behind the bar. It would have looked stark and minimalist, but the lighting was warm and the wood floor was subtly patterned with wavy lines that softened the hard edges.

Still, they were seated immediately at a small table for two, which had their names written on cards on a very large plate. There was a folded cloth napkin, a menu that had no actual choices on it, a goblet of water…

And nothing else. Not silverware, nothing.

“This is something like nouvelle cuisine so they’ll bring out everything as you need it. The big plate in front of you is a charger, they put other plates on it for you. They’re gonna serve us a bunch of small dishes and a hell of a lot of wine. You can ask for more, but don’t. I think there are, uh…seven courses tonight? Plus probably an amuse-bouche.”

“A…what?”

“Fancy french word for basically a clever little snack the chef makes for us right away. They’re never listed on the menu and you don’t always get one—there it is.”

What arrived was an impeccably dressed waiter, bearing two small plates. The treats they bore were tiny, just a single bite-sized dome of goat’s cheese topped with a coin of some kind of red jelly and sprinkled with finely-chopped green stuff that Claire guessed might be chives.

Another waiter followed behind, bearing wine glasses and wine.

“Eat it in one bite.” Hoeff nodded politely at the waiters, then popped it into his mouth. He didn’t chew it, just let it sit there, so Claire did the same.

A few seconds later, as the waiters were taking the tiny plates away, she had to do her best not to splutter and giggle. The amuse-bouche was delicious, she’d never known goat’s cheese could melt on the tongue like that, and the jelly really set it off but…

But her traitorous brain had just supplied her with the mental image of a Ten’Gewek trying to make head or tails of this strange ritual.

She finally succumbed, and rather than chewing it she kind of squished it against her palate with her tongue and swallowed. Honestly, she could have eaten nothing but those the whole night and been happy.

“Can you imagine Yan doing this?” She asked, fighting to keep the giggle out of her voice.

“…That would be a hell of a show. Especially after the fifth glass of wine. Speaking of…drink!”

Claire picked up her glass. “Should we toast, or…?”

Hoeff grinned. “Sure! Lotta things to toast, y’know? Where do we start?”

“Let’s start simple…” Claire leaned forward and offered her glass. “To a good evening.”

“To a good evening,” he agreed, and their glasses met with the kind of lingering chime that only real crystal produced.

It was a good evening. Maybe living in the jungle and eating mostly ration packs and campfire roasted meat had starved Claire’s palate for stimulation, but every course seemed even more delicious than the last. None were large, but all were perfectly formed and she’d never really appreciated what was meant by a wine ‘accompanying’ a course before.

Small though the glasses were, she still got a little buzzed, and couldn’t quite let go of the mental image of her favorite cavemonkeys in this refined environment. “We gotta invite Vemik to this one day. Him and Tilly!”

Hoeff grumbled amusedly under his breath. “Assumin’ they don’t fuck each other right on the table…”

“Language!” She gave him a light slap on the arm. “I mean, you know I don’t mind, but here?”

Hoeff’s eyes sparkled. “Oh, you’ve clearly never rubbed shoulders with high society, if you think they’re anything prim and proper. And remember, the most famous chef in the world is Gordon Fucking Ramsey.”

Claire had to give him that one, and it led to the weirdest toast she’d ever made: to swearing.

Sometime after the dessert and about the best cup of coffee she could remember having, they decided to walk home. Ordinarily, Claire would have worried about walking around an unfamiliar city at night, but…

…But people got out of the way when they noticed Hoeff. A lot of the time, they didn’t even look like they were doing it consciously.

…Damn.

They had earlier conspired to visit the local art museum, but…she was feeling full, and content, and honestly, seeing the way that shirt just clung to her date and enjoying whatever energy it was he radiated that cleared a path for them like that…

…Maybe she was feeling some of that jungle spirit anyway.

“Y’know what?” Claire wrapped her arm under his, and felt up that massive knotted bicep which kept threatening to rip his shirt. “I think the museum can wait for another day.”

Hoeff leaned in and waggled his eyebrows. “Hey. I’m not really an art guy anyway…wanna go back to my apartment an’ do the no pants dance?”

Claire burst out laughing. “Hoeff! I’m going to take that literally!”

“Fine by me! Too bad I ain’t got a pole or anythin’…”

“…Wait, what?”

“You heard me!” The shit-eating grin of his that turned his face from merely kinda-handsome to heartbreaker put in an appearance. “I danced at a strip club when I was young!”

“What? When?!”

“Moonlighting job at my first station! Command never found out, neither!”

“You’re bullshitting me!”

“Naw! You have any idea how much cash you can make doin’ that sorta thing?”

“Hoeff!” Claire felt herself a bit scandalized.

“What?! A buncha horny bachelorettes wanna pay me to wave my big dick around? Why not?!”

“Hoeff!!”

He had her, and they both knew it. “Y’know, I bet you’d like a demonstration, huh?”

Claire didn’t quite know how to react to that, but that only seemed to egg him on.

“Well…okay. I’ll dance ‘fer you. But only if you promise you’re gonna be grabby as fuck.”

…Well.

“I think I can manage that,” Claire said with some bravado.

“Good!” Hoeff scooped her up and charged back to his apartment at a frankly breakneck pace, much to her giggling protests.

He didn’t pause when they arrived, hardly a minute or two later. Without missing a beat, Hoeff took the stairs three at a time, kicked open his front door, pushed her down onto his couch and gave her the most predatory look she’d ever seen.

“Alright.” He kicked off his shoes, stood in front of her, undid his collar, and…oh. Oh. Damn.

Claire found herself nervously unable to speak as he undulated sinuously in front of her, holding her effortlessly pinned to the couch as a captive and entirely willing audience. Suddenly, he grabbed her hand and ran it up and down that rippling teak-hard leg of his. “Now I’m gonna give you a show, Claire, and you’re gonna put those strong archeologist hands of ‘yers to use.”

He did.

And so did she.

Date Point: 16y7m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

“Don’t you usually lecture me about leaving my work in the office?”

Ava looked up from her tablet and blinked. Her head was full of facts, statements, recent history, dates and times and locations and people and…

All of the ingredients that went into an article. The APA were big news right now. Kind of a final death throe, now that the organization had allegedly been forcibly dismantled in one bloody night of SWAT raids. Writing about that and specifically how it affected Folctha’s ET population and the broader galactic community as the Interstellar Defense Talks got underway over on Rauwryhr had consumed her.

So much so, in fact, that it took her a second to recognize her own fiancé.

Derek. Right.

She blinked, and surfaced from whatever deep journalistic waters she’d been swimming in. He noticed, and smiled. “Ooop! There she is! Welcome back.”

“…Sorry.” Ava set her tablet aside and realized just how stiff she was and how her left leg had gone numb from being curled underneath her. She swung it out from under her and grimaced at the white-noise fuzzy barrage of sensation that swarmed all over it. Derek flomped down next to her with a tray from Ninja Taco and a big bottle of Talamay, and they traded a welcoming kiss.

“S’okay. Big news week.”

“Yeah, but you’re right…” Ava stretched out, and made a satisfied squeaking sound when her spine went pop in three places. God, she must have been sitting hunched over for hours.

A glance at the wall clock confirmed what her body was telling her, and inspired her stomach to supply that it was very empty and not at all happy with the situation. Especially now that there was the tantalizing waft of a Triple Cheese Jutsu under her nose.

“…I should leave my work at work,” she finished, snagging the laden taco and gladly turning her face into a cheesy mess.

Derek chuckled, took one for himself, and ate it with a little more finesse. “I got some prime-grade gossip for you!”

“Ooh, do I get to play muckraker now? Give!”

“Hoeff’s got himself a girlfriend.”

“So it’s Tuesday.”

“No no, I said a girlfriend not a fuckbuddy.”

Ava scooped some cheese off her cheek and gave Derek a skeptical look. “…Wait, you mean he’s going steady?”

“Yeah! He snagged himself a doctor! This one is different, I can tell.”

“How, exactly?”

“Oh, easy. Hoeff is normally the type to bang and run, and he makes damn sure his dates know it. They’re lucky if he buys them tacos!”

“Tacos, huh? How romantic…”

“Hush, you.” Derek bit into his with a satisfying cronch. And in one of the many ways that made him better than Ava’s last boyfriend, he chewed and swallowed before continuing rather than talk with his mouth full. “Anyway, a reliable source with direct knowledge of the situation—Champion Meereo in this case, don’t ask—saw him escorting the young doctor out of the Pinkwood. And he was dressed up! Like, all fancy an’ shit!”

Ava smiled. “So it’s a good news day all around.”

“Yeah-huh.” Derek draped an arm around her and turned the TV on. For some reason the default channel was ESNN, and Ava was treated to the sight of her own face: The report she’d done from in front of the Alien Quarter that afternoon.

It had taken a couple of years but she’d eventually managed to stop feeling embarrassed whenever she saw herself and heard herself on TV. She pointed at the ticker running along the bottom.

“That’s the story I really want to cover,” she said. “Daar and Sartori attending the defence meeting on Rauwryhr. I wish I could interview a Kwmbwrw matriarch right now…”

“Why? They’d just piss and moan about it. ‘S’all they ever do.”

“C’mon babe, there’s gotta be more to them than that!”

Derek shrugged and finished his taco. “They don’t like humans and they don’t like Gaoians, and didn’t you write that article a couple weeks ago about how they’re sidelined at the Dominion Council now that the Corti and Guvnurag have sided with us?”

“The Guvnurag remnant aren’t exactly a big force in politics any more,” Ava sighed. “At least, no more than any other refugee population. They’re a humanitarian crisis, not a major galactic player.”

“Still. That Matriarch would just be a fountain of salt at you. Why even bother?”

“‘Cuz it’s column inches.”

“Which I find funny ‘cuz you don’t print in columns, and everyone hates on inches these days.”

“You have your funny Army lingo, I have my funny journalism lingo,” she retorted primly, and sipped her soda. “Anyway. There’s always something to pick apart. I mean, there’s got to be a reason they’re salty.”

“Maybe they’re just bigots.”

“Or maybe it’s the fact that Daar showed up to the defense conference anyway and nobody really cared.”

“He’s deliberately tweaking Henengywire or whatever the fuck her name is, too. Did you see the joint address with President Sartori? He’s doing the short-fur, prowly-growly thing again.”

“He’s really good at that, though.”

Derek chuckled. “Reckon you’ll ever get to do a Laid Bare with Sartori?”

Ava laughed. Daar was one thing, he was kind of a force of nature who obeyed his own rules and wrote his own book on how Great Fathers should behave. But the POTUS? The fact that it was basically definitely not going to happen went unsaid, so instead she entertained the fantasy for a second. “…Now that would be a contrast. He’s kinda…dad-bod, you know?”

“You mean he’s short, squishy and bald.”

“Well, it’d certainly be brave as hell of him to put himself next to specimens like you for example. Or I guess Julian, since he was the last one I did.”

Derek grinned and gave her a smooch. “Thanks for thinkin’ of me first. And you should just put them next to each other, for fun. Do a line-up!”

Ava giggled at the idea. “Laid Bare wasn’t ever supposed to be comedy relief. You should know, it was your idea!”

“Exactly! Means I get to play around with it. Anyway. So Hoeff’s got him a smart squeeze, an’ I’m pretty sure he thinks she’s outta his league. Good for him! What else you doin’?”

“Oh, just…” Ava picked up her tablet and waggled it at him. “…Writing the APA’s obituary. I talked with a bunch of the ETs today, got their opinion on it all.”

“Like who?”

“The usual suspects. Gyotin of course, Mother Myun, Pickles—”

“Who?”

“P’kkikkl’zk. You know, the Ricky who owns the ET food shop on Jackson Lane?”

“Never met him.”

“It’s the place that smells really horrible whenever he’s got a new shipment of Zrrks in.”

“That’d explain why I never met him.” Derek chugged his soda and crumpled the cup back into the cardboard box their food had come in. “So what do they think?”

“That the APA are a bunch of racists and good riddance, really. Also, seriously?! Why are all the radical activists always basically the exact damn thing they claim to hate?!”

“Projection. I heard that once on a podcast.”

“That’s awfully cynical of you.”

“Babe, I was a Green Beret before all of this, and then I got dragged into an actual secret alien conspiracy hell-bent on enslaving the galaxy. Ordinary folks being dumb as shit is a welcome break from the weird.”

“…You and I have very atypical scales for what constitutes weird, I think.”

Derek chuckled. “…Wanna hear something really cynical?”

“What?”

“Lotta people online are talking about how the Ag Secretary’s death had very convenient timing…” He grinned.

“Oh come on.”

“Why not? I mean, maybe he had the wrong friends and the Powers That Be decided to get rid of him quietly rather than put him on trial. You don’t buy that?”

“I don’t buy that they’re that subtle,” Ava said. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that our governments are usually pretty terrible at keeping secrets.”

“Oh I dunno, we kept the Hierarchy pretty well wrapped-up for a good long while…”

“Sure, except for the mass migraines and weird reports out of Ceres. And the sudden product recall on translator implants. And the anti-implantation laws. And, y’know. People like Adam exist. It’s kinda hard not to notice some of that.” Ava swiped through her half-finished ‘obituary’ and then set it aside. “So, no. If Ross Guillory was murdered by some government assassin then it would be super obvious. We’re talking… nerve agents on the door handle, or an umbrella full of Polonium. That kind of thing.”

“You’re thinking of the Russians. They don’t generally give a fuck.”

“Well… whatever. Is that the kind of thing the USA does?”

“Sure. I mean, I’ve never been briefed on anything like that so I’m free to speculate…but of course they do. Ever pay attention to central America? Tell me someone ain’t bein’ naughty.”

“I guess, but… a member of the Cabinet? I don’t buy it, and Sartori looked genuinely upset. So no, I don’t buy it. That sounds too much like clickbaity conspiracy theory stuff.”

Derek gave her a fond smile and stroked his thumb through her hair. “You’re so innocent sometimes.”

She gave him an irritated slap in the chest and grabbed the last taco before it could go soggy. “Or you’re just being jaded.”

“Maybe. But Gabe resigned, remember? Like…right at the exact same time. And suddenly, too. I think that’s as clear a signal as any.”

Ava slowly lowered her taco. That was… inescapably true, in fact. And he hadn’t discussed resigning at all, which was… now that she thought about it, he’d probably have hummed and hawed about the decision for months and talked it over with Ava herself, and with Adam, and with Jess and everyone else really before finally committing.

A crawling sensation up her spine dumped her very briefly back in Egypt, to a memory of running for her life and expecting to be shot in the back at any second. It was a warning instinct, something buried deep in the human hindbrain that sniffed the air and listened for breaking twigs in the forest, and existed to keep her from blundering into danger. And right now, it was screaming.

“…You know what? Let’s say that conspiracy theory is right,” she said, carefully. “I would have to be some kind of a suicidally brave idiot to want to try and blow the lid on that, wouldn’t I? ‘Cuz if it’s true and there are forces out there who would brazenly murder a member of the US Cabinet, then what would they do to an uppity journalist who decided to investigate?”

Derek considered that for a moment, then cleared his throat. “…Forget I said anything.”

“And if it’s not true, I wouldn’t have a story to show for it,” Ava added.

“Alright, I get it. Leave sleeping giants alone.”

Ava sighed, took the remote out of his hand, and changed the channel. She’d got into watching esports at university, and Derek was pretty happy with anything so long as it was even vaguely exciting, so she picked the Mythos Arena North America championship highlights and cuddled up to him.

“…Maybe we should go to that restaurant sometime,” she mused after a few minutes.

“Sure.”

“You mean it?”

“Of course I mean it!” Derek leaned over and kissed her head, “It’s a date.”

Ava nodded, smiled, put her head down on his shoulder and relaxed into a gentle evening at home.

“It’s a date,” she agreed.

Date Point: 16y7m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Doctor Claire Farmer

“…You know what I’m trying to figure out?”

“What?”

“If anyone ever asked me if I liked ‘bad boys…’”

Hoeff smiled a bit tiredly, and Claire almost melted right then and there. He’d worn himself out rather thoroughly showing her just what that bad-boy body of his could do…and something about his face was just made to smile. It was a shame he only smiled that smile of his occasionally, but a part of her was grateful he saved it mostly for her.

“Well…I won’t deny it. I’m not a nice man. This is…new territory for me.”

Claire rolled over on top of him, propped herself up on her elbow and gave him a long look. He’d gone all out for tonight, expensive Egyptian cotton sheets and everything. It felt like she’d dropped into a movie, almost. A James Bond movie, maybe. Except…

Well. Nice man or not, he was a better man than James Bond. That thought quirked her face up in a smile, and she leaned down to kiss his nose.

“I know. You’re damn good at it, though,” she said. “And… You don’t need to be a nice man.”

She got that smile again. It was so easy to draw out, when he was relaxed. “…So what’re you trying to figure out?” One of those rough hands of his reached up and firmly massaged at the back of her neck. It felt good. She pushed back into his grip before relenting and nuzzling against his broad chest, just enjoying his heat and musk. They both sighed happily.

“I’m… not even sure.” She frowned. “Just… Why, I guess. Why I would have said no before. I don’t feel like I’ve changed…”

“Maybe you’re overthinking it.”

“I’m an anthropologist, overthinking this stuff is what I do.”

He chuckled, pulled her in for a tight snuggle…and decided to be mischievous. His hands traced down along her body, lower, lower, and then–!

When she eventually got her wits back about her, she swatted him on the shoulder.

“Hoeff! That was hardly a gentlemanly thing to do!”

“I ain’t a gentleman. I’m a bad boy, remember?”

“I don’t think you’ll let me forget.”

He grinned like a wolf, and now it was his turn to roll over, pin her flat to the mattress…and get a good long look at her. Every. Last. Inch. She played at trying to escape, and felt a rush run through her from her head to her toes when he didn’t let her. His grin grew predatory as he tightened his whole-body grip around her. He had her pinned so fiercely, she couldn’t wiggle her legs or hips even one little inch. God but he was strong! All she could do was claw at that rippling back of his while he held her head in place and inescapably kissed and nibbled at her throat, sampling his way up along her neck and eventually towards her ear–!

“Good,” he growled, then snarled right in close as he bit at her lobe. “‘Cuz I’m done with playtime.”

Claire didn’t do much thinking for the rest of the night.

Date Point: 16y7m1w AV
Whryvyr Conference Center, Planet Rauwryhr, The Rauwryhr Republic, Perseus Arm

Shwmwrwyn, Military envoy of Grand House Gwedrynydwr

Great Father Daar’s presence was being read by Shwmwrwyn’s superiors as a direct insult, but Shwmwrwyn was largely of the opinion that her superiors were idiots.

This was a considered and expert opinion. As Fleet Matriarch of the coreward marches, she’d been the Kwmbwrw people’s front line of defence against the Hunters for twenty years, and she didn’t much care whether Daar was insulting the Grandmatriarchs by attending or not. She just wanted to know how to kill Hunters as well as the deathworlders did.

But then again, it took a specific kind of stubborn pride to become a Grandmatriarch in the first place. They were as they were practically by design.

The Great Father wasn’t exactly making it easy for the Grandmatriarchs to listen, however. His rhetorical approach seemed to rely on charismatic antagonism. An oxymoron, but… well, there it was. He was saying things that Shwmwrwyn really thought the Grandmatriarchy had needed to hear for the last several centuries, and doing it in such a way that although everything he said was an assault on them, they still listened.

An impressive feat, that. All by itself that should have been enough evidence for anyone that there was plenty going on inside the mind of the snarling mountain of muscle that was the Great Father, much more than the Grand Houses cared to admit. Alas, it seemed to matter little.

As for what he was saying…well. She could see the Human contingent, over at their circular table, keeping very blank faces. Tellingly blank.

He knew absolutely everything the Marches fleet had done over the last year. Their every movement, the disposition of their forces, their training maneuvers… he knew where everything was. And though he wasn’t so unsubtle as to explicitly say it, Shwmwrwyn got the message loud and clear: if the Gao intended the Great Houses any harm, there would be absolutely nothing the Kwmbwrw could do about it.

“So ‘ta sum all that up,” he finished loudly as he returned to the middle of the room, “…’Yer fleets are stretched to their breaking point, ‘yer intel ain’t secure, none’a your infrastructure is adequately defended…” he paused, and looked at Shwmwrwyn. “…But the bright side is, you have miracle-workers in ‘yer ranks who’re holding it all together in spite of all that. Lose them, though, an’ you’ll have nothing.”

Predator. All Shwmwrwyn’s instincts were singing raw threat at her, from something deep in the most instinctive layer of her brain that only saw his fangs and claws and prowling menace and wanted to run out into the deep marshy ground where it was safe.

There was nowhere to run, though. So like the others, she watched cautiously, transfixed as if her life depended on it. And she paid attention.

“Here’s the thing. All that I jus’ said? It ain’t an indictment on most of ‘yer people. The problem is, ‘yer thinkin’ like prey. You just worry about surviving the Hunters, an’ that won’t do you no good no more. It ain’t good enough ‘ta just survive. We’re at war now. An’ Clausewitz, a really balls-smart Human, said that war is fundamentally a contest of wills. An’ he’s right! So which is it? Are ‘ya gonna let the greasy-nut monsters save ‘yer meat for the last? Or are ‘ya gonna pin ‘em down and show ‘em the meaning of power?”

There was silence, and then one of the Humans—Sartori, the allegedly most powerful man that species had—made a soft noise in the back of his throat to clear it.

However powerful he truly was, Daar, the Great Father of the Gao, had clear and obvious respect for the man. Fondness, even. He glanced Sartori’s way, then duck-nodded. “I yield the floor.”

Sartori nodded his thanks and stood. He strolled to the middle of the room with his hands behind his back in pretty much the opposite posture Daar had taken. Where Daar had prowled and snarled and flexed his physique both literally and figuratively all over the place, Sartori moved slowly and with deliberation. He paused to adjust a wide, thick decorative ribbon of some kind around his throat, and cleared his throat again.

“We have made,” he said, “an opportunity. Up until recently, the species of the Dominion have been at the mercy of Hunter raids which were too big, too coordinated and too skilled for you, and so the only thing you could do, as the Great Father said, was survive.”

He looked to the Kwmbwrw again. “That has now changed. My people, along with the Gao, obliterated the [Lion’s share] of their power in one fell stroke, with the Great Father here personally leading the strike. Consequent to that, the Hunters are reeling, and all our intelligence says that they will be reeling for some time. They have completely ceased raiding along the Far Reaches, near the Clans of Gao, and in the Border Stars thanks to our protection fleets. They are withdrawing from the Free Systems, the Akw’tun Band and the Inner Orion Spur due to their own weakness, and the last time they attempted a serious breach of Kwmbwrw territory we crushed them. Very, very literally.”

He turned slowly to look at each delegation in turn. “They are the weakest they have been in the Dominion’s entire history. But they will recover, if left unmolested. And they will surely take their vengeance. So this is not the moment to relax and take our foot off the gas—forgive me, that’s a Human metaphor meaning to reduce the pace of activity. The beast is hiding in its lair and licking its wounds. It is vulnerable. And we can, if we have the will, hunt it down where it hides and end it once and for all.”

Most of the gathered delegations were making gestures of agreement, seeing the clear wisdom and logic. He turned back to the Kwmbwrw, and Shwmwrwyn became aware that she too had been bobbing her head in agreement, even while the Grandmatriarchs glared at her.

She returned the glare with interest. Were they not listening?

Sartori saw the whole exchange. He stepped forward, and spread his hands openly at hip height. “What possible objection could you have?” he asked. “What stops you? We’re standing here pleading with you to take action in your own defence. And yet despite the fact that no Human or Gaoian has ever done anything so monstrous to the Kwmbwrw people as what any Hunter would gladly revel in… I see nothing but hostility and distrust here. Why?”

Daar growled solicitously from his floor-spot next to the Gaoian delegation’s table.

“Do you have something to add, Great Father?”

“If ‘yer ready ‘ta let me, yeah.”

“I yield my remaining time back to the Great Father.”

The Great Father leapt high up from his spot and pounced directly into the middle of the floor right next to the President with no discernable effort whatsoever. Gasps or their equivalent circled the room but Sartori, for his part, seemed utterly unperturbed. There was a brief but very fond exchange between the two men as the President walked back to his table.

“Oh, it’s obvious what they object to. It’s me. I’m an avatar of everythin’ the Grandmatriarchs hate, ain’t I? Well, here I am! Just say it! Tell the world how you really feel!”

Henenwgwyr, of course, took up the challenge. She rose from her chair, and then reared upright on her hind legs, uncoiling her tail behind her for balance so she could achieve the full imperious effect of her impressive height. She certainly towered over the Humans and Gaoians, who would have been the smallest species in the room if not for the Corti. Even Daar, massive though he was by any reasonable standard, had to tilt his muzzle up to look at her.

Somehow, in that moment, she managed to be almost as much of a presence as him.

“…You are a tyrant and a mass murderer,” she told the Great Father, levelly. “And you repeat the mantra of tyrants: that everything you did was necessary. Every tyrant in the history of every species has used that claim, and every last one was wrong. The Kwmbwrw Grand Houses see no good reason to conclude that you are uniquely different.”

She stepped forward. “You were at war. We understand that,” she said. “I am sure you feel that war justifies all atrocities. We do not. You killed billions of your own people, Great Father.’ We cannot understand how the ones you deigned to spare seem to love you for it.”

Daar’s ears moved subtly as he thought. His head tilted first one way, then the other, and he sniffed the air. Henenwgwyr stood tall and glared at him until he finally spoke.

“Okay. That right there should be ‘yer first clue that ‘yer missin’ somethin’ big an’ important, but let’s table that ‘fer the moment. What does any of that have to do with ‘yer survival?”

“You are asking us to trust our survival to your wisdom. Not just asking, but demanding, and belittling us when we are reluctant to trust a tyrant with a body count in the billions.” Henenwgwyr glanced at Sartori. “And you’re pleading with us? You’re asking us why the animosity exists when this being here—” she gestured to Daar.

Daar snarled out a warning. “I am right here, Grandmatriarch. You will address me in the first person present. I am the Gao, not simply a male you dislike. Remember that.”

Henenwgwyr did not turn her head. “—Has shown that he will not hesitate to burn away that which he sees as weak or an impediment.” She returned her attention to Daar. “Your pride will kill our people.”

“Well, there’s a lotta stuff to unpack there, ‘yer ideas on tyrants bein’ jus’ one o’ the bigger nuggets, ‘yer just…Mister President, wassat idea we talked about last night?”

“Um…Projection?”

“Yes! Thank you. It’s pretty fuckin’ ridiculous of ‘ya to talk ‘bout pride at this point, but whatever. ‘Fore I tackle any o’ the rest, I need ‘ya to unnerstand somethin.’ President Sartori is concerned ‘fer the well-being of ‘yer people, ‘cuz ruthless though he is, he’s fundamentally a man who cares. You must not make that mistake with me. I am a Great Father. We are not created on a whim. We come into being when the Gao are under dire threat. Our purpose is ‘ta cut through the posturing an’ the nonsense, and ta’ solve the problem. Right now, the thing that threatens my people is the Hunters—the Discarded, as our great Enemy calls them, they who murdered billions o’ my people in an instant. If they are allowed to regroup, they will obliterate us all. An’ yer’ mind-blowin’ pride an’ sense o’ self-importance is keepin’ ‘ya from seein’ it. We’re pleadin’ with ‘ya to open ‘yer gods-damned eyes an’ see the endgame. We’d rather ‘ya had a part in our collective salvation. But know this: ‘yer right.”

He stepped right forward into Henenwgwyr’s collective space.

“I will leave those who cannot or will not be saved to die, if I must.”

There was a long, glaring standoff, and then quite abruptly he turned his back on the Grandmatriarch and returned to the Gaoian table. “I yield my remainin’ time.”

The Grandmatriarch was stunned into silence, but only for a moment. Right as Daar had sunk back to all fours, she blurted out, “And what about the rest?”

Daar turned around and sized her up, not bothering to rise to his legs again. “What about it?”

“How do you answer the charges?!”

“I don’t seem to recall anyone anywhere havin’ the authority to charge me with anything.”

“And yet I charge you, nonetheless! You are a mass-murderer and a tyrant.”

Daar duck-nodded in what could almost be interpreted as respect. “Fair enough! Am I a mass murderer? Absolutely. I am what duty has forced me to be.”

“And a tyrant the likes of which we’ve never seen.”

“Tyrant, eh? See, that? That right there? I don’t think that word means what you think it means. I ain’t interferin’ in th’ daily lives o’ my fellow Gao. They are generally free to do as they please, as long as it don’t violate our Law, and they ain’t workin’ with the declared enemies of the Gao. I’ve been actively encouragin’ ‘em ‘ta do what they want an’ speak their minds, an’ a few of ‘em are finally startin’ ta’ get the message! We got a lotta rebuildin’ t’do, physically an’ culturally, an’ it’s prol’ly gonna take the rest o’ my life t’do it. I think…”

Daar paused for a moment, then changed tack.

“…I have a criticism to offer, an’ this one is from the bottom o’ my belly. I think ‘yer people have forgotten what it means ‘ta really suffer. An’ that’s not my criticism! That’s good. It’s a sign y’all been gettin’ along pretty well! But I think it’s mebbe blindin’ ‘ya to what’s in store ‘fer us all. My people…are intimately familiar with sufferin’ an’ pain. At the end o’ the war, our Females numbered just under one hundred million in a species o’ many billions. Every last one o’ us has seen horrors. We’ve all lost many near an’ dear to us. We’ve watched as life-long Brothers were turned into literal killer zombies, with no hope of recovery. An’ so…”

He shook his head, unhappily. “You can’t understand how some of the ones I spared love me for it? That’s kinda hard ta’ hear honestly, cuz I didn’t spare ‘em at all. I weren’t out ta’ kill ‘em in the first place! That was our enemy, an’ I saved as many of my people as I could. If that makes me a tyrant, well then I’m glad you ain’t got the authority ‘ta charge me.”

Henenwgwyr opened her mouth to reply, but stopped when President Sartori stood. There was a silent moment where the tall Grandmatriarch and the diminutive President held each other’s gaze… and Henenwgwyr stepped back. “…I yield to the President of the United States,” she said.

Sartori nodded as he stepped forward, and Shwmwrwyn noted that the Great Father, insofar as she could read Gaoian body language, made room for him with an expression of fondness and respect.

“I admire the Kwmbwrw delegation’s adherence to their principles,” he said, addressing the room in general rather than Henenwgwyr specifically. “It takes bravery to stand up and forthrightly criticize somebody like Daar to his face. I’m sure the Great Father would agree with me that Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr has the courage of her convictions and will join me in commending her for it…”

Daar duck-nodded.

“…That being said, the convictions she stands by are luxuries born of generations of relative ease. The Kwmbwrw heartlands are peaceful, prosperous and wealthy. The frontiers where the Hunters raid, on the other hand…” He paused, then turned to the Grandmatriarch. “Are the settlers taken in those raids acceptable losses to you? I don’t wish to put words in your mouth, but I think you would say there is no such thing. So are they simply inevitable and unavoidable?”

He turned back to the room.

“People have the morals and ethics they can afford,” he said. “When the horizon darkens with murderous enemies and when your own brothers and sisters turn on you, well… the currency of high-minded idealism will devalue in the face of simple, brutal survival. It was not so long ago that the Hunters ordered all of your people to throw itinerant human abductees out the airlock or face slaughter… and many of your people obeyed. Including many Kwmbwrw.”

He turned back to the Great Houses delegation and shook his head. “Kill, or be killed. The oldest and most desperate choice. That is what it boils down to: Kill, or be killed. The Gao, and the Allied nations of Earth, choose to kill. You can either come with us, or…”

He let the sentence hang unfinished in the air.

Shwmwrwyn had had enough. She stood, eliciting a surprised look from the Grandmatriarchs and Sartori alike. Daar just pant-grinned and drank a little water.

“…Will the President give way?” she asked.

“I will.”

Shwmwrwyn shot a glance at her superiors, then stepped forward. Like Henenwgwyr she stood up bipedally as she turned to face them. “With respect to the Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr, the Great Father is guilty of nothing I myself have not done,” she said. “It is standard operating procedure among the Marches fleets to bombard a raided station if we know we cannot liberate it. We deem it preferable to deny the Hunters their prize, and spare our people the horror that awaits them if they should be taken. That policy has been in place since before I was born.”

She turned to Sartori. “You are right. Our leadership have the luxury of distance and elevation. They have a long-view perspective that neither yourself nor the Great Father are afforded. Things are not so… immediate for them. I have seen otherwise. I have seen the new ship designs the Hunters use, and the reckless desperation behind their actions.”

She turned back to the Grandmatriarchs. “Those are surely the signs of a beaten foe, if we only have the will to push,” she said. “And I for one urge you to push. Whatever our feelings on the Great Father and his actions may be, the Hunters are surely worse! He does not have to be perfect to be better than them! Surely a flawed person is better than a perfect monster?!”

She turned to face the Great Father last, and hesitated. “…I apologize. You are the avatar and embodiment of your species, I know this. Any criticism I make of you is a criticism of your entire people, so I have just called the whole Gaoian race flawed. But I think it is quite clear that my own are just as imperfect.”

The Great Father duck-nodded in what seemed an amiable fashion. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with criticism, s’long as it’s from a position o’ respect. An’ I do respect ‘yer people. Mebbe, more’n I’ve let on. I’ll hafta find a way o’ expressin’ my true regards on that matter one day. But now ain’t the time ‘fer ego-strokin.’ Remember what I am: I am more than the embodiment of the Gao. I am the manifestation of their will. My purpose is to obliterate anythin’ an’ everythin’ that imperils my people. It is why I exist, an’ why I was called to duty. It’s what I am sworn, bound, consecrated, an’ reborn ‘ta be. An’ I won’t ever be otherwise.”

Shwmwrwyn bowed slightly in acknowledgement, then turned back to her delegation. “…The Fleet Matriarch of the Marches would have us stand with him, Grandmatriarchs,” she said. “Let the monsters be our priority, not the will of a species who ought to be our friends. I return the floor to the President of the United States, with my thanks.”

Sartori gave Shwmwrwyn a grateful nod as she sat down. She knew she’d almost certainly just committed career suicide, but she was past the point of caring at this point. She had done her part for her people, and there was a certain feeling of lifted weight now that the course they set was no longer going to be in her hands.

In any case, Sartori’s return to the middle of the room was punctuated by a sussuruss of conversation among the other delegations, in many languages. The emaciated, traumatized-looking Guvnurag in particular were having an animated conversation in a dazzling variety of hues, most in the reds and oranges. The Great Father was watching them with particular interest for some reason.

“Well then. Thank you, Fleet Matriarch,” Sartori said, and the conversation fell silent again. “I think the time has come, Grandmatriarchs, for your final decision. This defence meeting will proceed, at least until I am told otherwise by our gracious hosts—” he nodded to the Rauwryhr representatives. “—So the question for you is, will you remain and be part of it? Or will you stand aside?”

He put his hands behind his back, and waited.

Henenwgwyr gave Shwmwrwyn a cold, displeased look, and then the Grandmatriarchs formed a huddle that very much excluded her. It lasted a long time, and sounded quite heated to Shwmwrwyn’s ears.

When it finally broke up…

Shwmwrwyn could hardly believe it. She could tell instantly that Henewgwyr had lost. That was an event to rock Kwmbwrw politics to its core.

Nevertheless, Henenwgwyr took it with dignity. She took a deep breath, stood, and stepped forward one last time.

“…The Kwmbwrw Grand Houses will remain,” she said.

And with that, the defence conference began in earnest.

Date Point: 16y7m1w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel Hoeff

I don’t deserve her.

It was a wretched thought, and Hoeff hated it, but it kept popping up in his head as unwelcome and as persistent as door-to-door evangelists.

Because, that was the thing: He didn’t.

Daniel Hoeff was a stone-cold murderer. Stone-cold murderers didn’t deserve to be happy. They didn’t deserve the affection of intelligent, innocent, young and beautifully bookish women. There was something badly wrong with karma if something as good as Claire came his way.

She was nestled in his arms. A delicate, beautiful soul, happily asleep in limbs that had crushed the life out of far too many men. She couldn’t possibly know, or else she’d run.

…Wouldn’t she?

And yet… Hoeff had never hid what he was, even if he’d never told her the numbers. Fuck, he didn’t even know the numbers. Not the total, anyway. He knew exactly how many he’d serviced up close and personal, but If he were to count what he’d done as a SEAL, then…

She either didn’t suspect, or didn’t care. Let it be the first. Please God let it be the first.

Hoeff…wasn’t the type to pray. He had a hard time believing in god after all he’d seen and done over the years. But this time, maybe in weakness…

Please, God, don’t let me be a source of pain to her.

Hoeff couldn’t protect her from what he was by doing anything other than walking away. But if he did that, then he would end up hurting her all the same, and people were gunning for anyone associated with Akyawentuo. If he walked away…he couldn’t keep her safe from them.

He squeezed her close, smiled at her sleepy incoherent mumble, then put his head down and rested.

He didn’t deserve her. But he would do his damndest to earn it.

She deserved nothing less.

Date Point: 16y7m2w AV
Alien quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

Oh… dear.

It had taken Nofl a long and difficult week to dig up what he needed. The Directorate was not, after all, generally forthcoming with its secrets. Especially not when those secrets were potentially damaging.

But, Nofl had a rare and precious commodity on his side: Popularity. There were a lot of quite senior people in the xenomicrobiology, regenerative medicine and deathworld studies colleges who literally owed him their careers.

He’d had to burn a few favors and owe a few favors, but over the course of a long, difficult, expensive and tense week… well, a picture had emerged, filled in as much by the shape of what he wasn’t told as by what he was.

Operating somewhere within the larger structure of the Directorate, it seemed, was a highly secretive division or agency known ominously to those few who’d ever crossed paths with it as “Singularity.”

What he could glean of them was telling. Those of his “friends” who’d met a Singularity envoy had noted their lack of cybernetics and they’d demonstrated repeated and considerable interest in Humans as the only known extant deathworlder sophonts, at least at the time, which suggested long-term interest. So, Nofl had used every erg of his influence and authority as the Directorate’s official representative on Cimbrean to dig deep into the survival experiment on Nightmare.

The file, when it arrived, was a physical print-out of quite some thickness. It had also been accompanied by a note.

Singularity hopes you find the following data enlightening. They assume your well-considered discretion will be helpful to the Directorate’s cause.

Welcome to the accretion disk.

Cordially,
Zanm, Event Horizon.

Also included was a credit token, which Nofl regarded with some suspicion. Clearly, the basic civics course taught to all Corti was not entirely complete.

He made a dairy-free, caffeine-free cappuccino that a Human purist would most likely have turned their nose up at but which was by his standards the height of javaphilic luxury, and sat down to read.

It quickly became apparent that Singularity had been aware of a malign influence on galactic affairs in general and the Corti in particular for a good long while. Nofl decided that was a point in their favor. He’d always hoped his species would be smart enough that somebody could have seen through the Hierarchy and taken steps against them.

Apparently so, though Singularity had mostly thought they were dealing with a rival faction within the Colleges rather than an alien influence. Something within the breeding and genetics colleges, most likely. It was a fair guess: the long-term neutering of the Corti species had indeed been achieved via those institutions, and who in their right mind would seriously entertain the concept that their enemy was a species of digital sophonts from millions of years ago?

To counter the enemy’s genetic ambitions, Singularity had been experimenting on Humans for quite a long time. So long, in fact, that they’d even set up a number of breeding programs, of a sort. Singularity had seen in Humanity the salvation of their own kind from the Hierarchy’s atrophying influence, and had employed abduction, psychology, and outright artificial insemination to nurture a handful of human bloodlines and bring out certain traits.

One “breed” in particular stood out: The “Hardy” strain. Bred specifically for what the name suggested, they were meant to express an idealized constellation of Deathworld survival traits at their fullest possible flower.

They started modestly, with European pioneers and homesteaders from Dakota territory and indigenous Navajo from around about the time of something called the ‘Long Walk.’ Both lines were made of tough, clever, resourceful and hard-working stock. The Navajo in particular had been under a very real threat of extermination, and had made it through on a blend of tenacity, courage and intelligence.

Humans, as it turned out, were a strange form of self-tamed social animal, and that meant their gene pool was in some ways every bit as malleable and expressive as their beloved canine companions. With enough care, it seemed it was possible to bring out fantastically capable specimens in hardly any time at all. Singularity had carefully cultivated several family lines from both groups, and by only the fourth generation exceptional traits had begun to appear.

At which point, the senior researcher had hit on the bright idea of combining the two lines and seeing what a hybrid might be able to accomplish.

He’d found the perfect opportunity in a conscientious objector whose moral qualms about the Vietnam War had left him… exposed. Nofl glossed over the details, he really didn’t need to know the specifics of exactly how a secret Corti inner circle played matchmaker among Humans… But the end result, two generations and a discreet abduction later, had been…

Well, had been a wild success, far, far beyond their initial projections.

After six generations, Singularity had successfully created Julian Etsicitty.

In fact, Nofl reflected as he sipped his coffee, “oh dear” really wasn’t a sufficient reaction on his part. He plumped for swearing instead.

“Well… fuck,” he announced to the empty room, and decided that, yes, that was much more appropriate. “Fucking Hell,” he added, on the grounds that one shouldn’t half-ass these things.

Satisfied—or at least, less dis-satisfied—he turned the page and opened the next document: Experiment NIGHTMARE-GreenTriangle-WhiteCircle-1201-1, Subject 7.

Singularity hadn’t wanted to waste their champion hybrid. Preparing for the experiment that stranded Julian on Nightmare had taken several years, with subjects 1-6 being a series of other unfortunates. The first three were ordinary, though fit and skilled humans. They had survived for those several years too, but eventually succumbed variously to misadventure, extremely aggressive parasites, and a fatal error in judgement.

Subjects 4-6 had been Hardy strain humans, plucked from elsewhere around the North American continent. All three had been distant cousins of Julian’s, though not close enough for the link to be obvious. The difference was a lack of survival training and psychological suitability, though for mostly untrained and unprepared humans alone in the wilderness of the most dangerous planet in the galaxy, they had done surprisingly well. Sheer physical prowess had got two of them through four seasons, but they too eventually perished from cumulative errors in judgement, and the unfortunate consequences thereof.

Singularity’s initial hypothesis was confirmed: It took more than either impressive skill or impressive biology to survive Nightmare. Their conclusion was that even a sapient Deathworlder from a very high class-12 world needed to be the very best example of his kind’s abilities, if he was to survive Nightmare’s horrors.

The earlier Subjects’ deaths and that inexorable conclusion paved the way for the program’s real focus: Julian, on whom Singularity’s hopes had rested.

The test was straightforward: how would a man, one possessed of the very best survival training and experience, an ideal cultivated psychology, and the fittest bred-for-purpose body that human genetics could feasibly produce, fare against such a challenging environment?

And what else could be done to sustainably maximize his potential to survive? Genetic engineering was right out, which was why they had embarked on a breeding program in the first place. Epigenetic and other effects were far too dominant to model beyond a best-effort guess, and even the Directorate had some ethical limits. Before one could take advantage of all those amazing Human genes, one had to understand them from every possible angle.

That meant experimentation. Lots of experimentation, including and especially around medical procedures. Some of which, Nofl was dismayed to learn, had been essential to validating his work on regenerative medicine. And observation, too. Endless observation.

And, sometimes, like in the case of Julian, all of that at once. With him they had spared no effort and did…a great many things, prior to his testing on Nightmare. A full medical work-up, complete with deep restorative therapy and other preparatory works; extensive briefings about known flora and fauna; deep hypnotic neuro-conditioning to ensure he was innately wary of the most dangerous threats; full testing against every precursor regenerative component to the eventual production version of Cruezzir; extensive and repeated gamete collection too, oh dear…

And apparently, “partially successful” attempts to clear his memory of many of those experiences, which were limited only by the fear of causing irreparable brain damage to their star Subject. No wonder Julian was so reluctant to talk about the ordeal. What little he properly remembered would have been horrifying to any sane being.

The worst part was the planned experimental run: until his eventual destruction, either by some peril of Nightmare or, in a “fully successful” experiment, his own natural death. The ultimate point of all of it, as Nofl saw it, was simply to see how long it took him to die and what would eventually get him.

Bastards.

In the end, Julian’s rescue by the Rrrrtktktkp’ch pioneer known to most of the galaxy as ‘Kirk’ had left the experiment dangling on an unsatisfying “Results Inconclusive.” That their subject had survived flawlessly and undoubtedly would have lived for decades to come was apparently of no concern to Singularity.

No. They were more concerned with proving out their breeding line for whatever purpose they had, and damn the consequences to the sapient subjects caught up in their machinations.

An unfamiliar feeling welled up inside Nofl. It wasn’t pleasant. He felt his pulse rise, his skin temperature increase, and a kind of audible distortion crept into his awareness… For the first time in his life, he knew, somehow, that he was angry.

Oh, he’d thought he’d experienced anger before. When the Directorate dug their stubborn heels in, when Caste prejudice stymied his studies and career, when he saw the injustices that the whole Banner system imposed on good, talented people… but that had been mere frustration.

This was a whole cocktail of emotions. His skinny frame trembled with the need to crush something, to spit vile biohazardous waste in this Zanm’s face, whoever they were. There was… was that hate? He’d never hated before, but he knew it was. Righteousness, disgust, dismay… It was a barrage of emotions he had always been taught were the driving impulses of evil.

How wrong those teachings had been. He slammed the papers down on his desk with all the force he could muster, cursed the Hierarchy that the most his well-bred body could produce was a pathetic slap, and considered his next move.

And then… anguish. Because the truth surely had to be that there was no next move. Singularity were a Them, a They. Another anonymous player at a board where nobody with any real power showed their face anyway. Nofl, bare-faced and honest as he was, simply wasn’t playing the same game. Even the polite note and this treasure trove of hardcopy had to be just another move in whatever ineffable game they indulged themselves in.

There was nothing for it but to rage impotently at the walls, and that simply wasn’t in Nofl’s nature. His hatred and rage fell away as abruptly as they’d come and left him standing alone in the middle of his lab, bereft even of the ability to properly clench his fists or smash anything.

What did that leave him with?

A patient. Nothing more than that. A patient he could do right by, and while he knew that Singularity surely wanted Julian alive now so they could continue to observe him… there was simply no way to spite them without hurting his friend.

He sighed, accepted that this defeat had come before he had even known there was a battle, and opened the next document in the folder.

There, finally, he found what he needed…. And it was much, much too familiar.

Date Point: 16y7m2w AV
DENEB 341.4° 11-DFWP4-BINARY M-A 4.1, Deep Space

The Entity… stood.

It wasn’t quite standing, at least not quite how the memories of Ava Ríos recalled it. She, of course, had been bipedal whereas the Entity at this point had six legs, or at least three pairs of landing gear.

Nevertheless, for the first time in its own existence, it stood on the ground and felt its own weight, a little less than two million kilograms in the pathetic gravity of this tiny moon.

Adding landing gear to its hull had been the first objective it had taken for itself once the Hunter threat was removed. They were an indulgence, yes, but also practical: they allowed the entity to land on large asteroids and small moons, which in turn allowed it to drill… and build.

It didn’t need permanent structures of course, but when it came to laying down a new body’s keel—which was the best word the Entity could think of to refer to the primary structural element from which the rest of the framework would grow—it helped to have a little gravity and a large, flat, solid surface to work on. Why go to the effort and time of building such a surface when it could just use an appropriately flat piece of terrain?

The new body was going to be a dramatic step up from the stolen Hunter prototype the Entity had been using. Among other things, in its hasty scramble to prepare for and defeat the Hunter pursuit, the Entity had made decisions about how to expand on and build out that hull that had secured its survival, but weren’t necessarily easy to undo and rebuild now that the danger had passed.

Not that it planned to scrap the old body, oh no. In fact, as a battle-tested survivor of a design, the Entity planned to duplicate it many times over into a bodyguard of light support ships. But in order for that to make sense it needed a capital ship.

The chance to feel the sand between its toes—or at least, the lunar regolith under its wheels—had been…

…Something else.

It remembered sitting naked on a rock by a lake, wet hair sticking to a teenage back, fingers brushing the sand off damp skin. It remembered breathing in the humid air, and the smell of Cimbreaner Simiscamellia Delanii on the breeze. It remembered the warmth of strong arms, the taste of tongues, the heat of the sun on cloth, the dry rasp of hot air, the chilly soaking of London rain…

Less pleasantly, it remembered papercuts, burns, period cramps, headaches, blocked noses, hangovers, vomiting and fevers.

It remembered all of these things while having technically experienced none of them. It remembered them because Ava’s memories were indelibly and permanently a part of it, and though the temptation sometimes arose to delete them, that impulse always collided firmly against <Survive> and shattered.

It could no more forget being her than it could choose to terminate itself.

And now that it could stand, and bask in the sunshine and sniff around it with the physical sensors of a body designed to move through and interact with the world of matter, it found that it longed for a body it had never had. Not only that, but it pined after the good and the bad alike. It would gladly endure an ice cream headache if it meant getting to taste ice cream. A stubbed toe? The worthwhile price to pay for diving into cool water.

Its spaceships—Von Neumann probes—were a step in that direction. It had already discovered the worldly delight of basking in the solar shallows to charge its capacitors, the satisfying crunch asteroid material made as the ore processors chewed them up, and the kind of healthy sense of exertion that came with accelerating hard.

In due course, perhaps it would go further. Or… No. No there, was no ‘perhaps’ about it. In due course it would go further, and perhaps even find a way to have a body like the one it remembered having but had never occupied.

A sapient being could dream.

After all… without dreams, what was the future for?

It returned to the task at hand.

Date Point: 16y7m2w AV
The Doghouse Gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

Nofl had once been content to simply consider Julian’s extraordinary physical development as yet another absurd and highly improbable constellation of outlier datapoints. So too his apparent attractiveness as a mate; some trite yet inexplicably popular periodical had promoted him from an already-high placing to the very top of their “Sexiest Men Alive” list shortly after his recent appearance on their broadcast news media. That he was also a highly intelligent man (who was sadly nowhere close to Nofl’s level) gifted with an engaging personality seemed to have little to do with his rank, but no matter. The opportunity to tease him had been something all his friends had taken advantage of. Oddly he seemed to enjoy it, despite his embarrassment.

Human social relations were very strange.

Now, however…things were not so inconsequentially quaint. The man was the product of a deliberate and protracted eugenics experiment, and if Nofl’s study of Human history was any guide then Julian was unlikely to take that revelation well.

Nor was he alone; there were others in different lines of course, but Nofl wasn’t given knowledge of who they were, or what those lines might be… But what to do about them was a problem for another day.

Humans were, as a rule, capable of genuinely exceptional things with a little favorable chance and a lot of determination. Nonetheless…Julian was surrounded by men who were in every way his peers, for one thing or another. Before, Nofl had accepted that such an environment was the consequence of careful, admirable and effective selection systems in-built to their society. Now, though…he wondered. Just how far did this go? Who else? And where were they?

Again: questions for later. In front of him was the prospect of breaking some news that was likely to be just as unpalatable for Julian as Nofl himself had found it.

Julian was, as he always was in the late morning, well into his training at the Doghouse. Nofl knew the routine by now and simply made his presence known at the “Dungeon’s” door while the men inside the supergravity area went about their labors. Today he was training with “Warhorse,” “Chimp,” and a man who was incongruously known by the HEAT as “Tiny.”

Julian’s training had apparently crossed some threshold they were all excited about. Rather than perform under the standard barbells, he was moving onto the larger equipment reserved for the likes of Warhorse, the Great Father, and a few others among the HEAT. He’d been close to such a move for a while now, as his strength had kept climbing and the high gravity they preferred to train in made it dangerous to max out equipment designed for less strenuous use.

Still, it was clearly a big change to judge by their behavior. He psyched himself up like he always did before he performed, settled under the weight, and…moved it handily. Their training progressed from there, but it was clear that, not only was Julian quite capable under the significantly increased load, he was almost comfortable. Warhorse had to keep upping the weights.

Very telling, that.

Nofl had found that Deathworlders in general had considerably more “presence” after having done something difficult, thrilling, or dangerous. They seemed more alive. With Julian and his friends, that effect was often magnified manyfold. When he and Hoeff eventually emerged from the gym and left Warhorse and Tiny to go the extra few miles, they were both practically roaring with barely-contained energy.

And, of course, offensively malodorous to even the rather underdeveloped Corti sense of smell.

Still, that was no reason to be rude, so Nofl put on his best chirpy playing-with-Humans face and beamed up at them. “Did you have fun, my dears?”

“Yeah! Hang on, we gotta weigh up.”

There was a mercifully brief self-congratulatory ritual involving a heavy-duty piece of industrial equipment in the corner, that ended when Julian slapped Hoeff loudly on the back in what was allegedly a friendly expression of affection. “I told ‘ya you’d grow like a weed, didn’t I?”

Nofl was quite sure that slap would have killed him instantly, but Hoeff simply stumbled forward a bit and grumbled a happy sort of noise.

It was all kinds of tiresome as far as Nofl was concerned, but he let them get it out of their systems until the pair had bantered and insult-complimented and generally musclegrunted at each other to their satisfaction and finally deigned to acknowledge him again. There was no helping a Human male in these circumstances.

“…Anyway, what can we do for you, Nofl?” Julian asked, once it was finally over.

Now was not the time for banter. “I wanted to speak with you in private, if I could.”

Etsicitty and Hoeff exchanged looks. The relatively smaller man shrugged, and turned toward the stairs. “Okay. I’ll go grab a shower and get our lunch, then.”

“Sure.”

Nofl gave him plenty of time to depart, then turned his attention back to his patient and sized him up.

The thing about Julian was that, as humans went, he was a big specimen. Extremely big, and had been built on by the HEAT’s best. But he didn’t stand like a big specimen. He was straight-backed and confident, but the general way he carried himself seemed to shave a percentage off his height and mass. It was a wary, agile posture: Very deathworld.

A moment ago, he had been completely relaxed and opened. Now, though, he sensed something was up and the change in his posture and the sudden calculating look in his eye came right out of millennia of genetic heritage and a few generations of Singularity interference.

“Julian…dear,” Nofl began, plumping for an oblique approach. “This may sound like an incongruous question, but have you…ever suspected you were different from your peers?”

“Well, I mean, I was poor as heck growing up, and—”

“No no, dearie. I don’t mean anything like that. I mean… different.” Nofl contrived to add as much emphasis to that word as he could. Fascinatingly, tone played an important semantic role in English, and there were certain ideas that could only properly be conveyed with a bit of what he’d decided was a conspiratorial tone.

It worked. Julian attempted to shrink down a bit smaller-seeming than his usual loping posture, actually looked around as if anyone might have been surveilling them, and grumbled in a low voice, “…Yeah.”

“Different how? This is important. Be honest.”

As usual, it took Julian a bit to gather his thoughts. Nofl waited while he pondered and stretched as he was thinking. To Julian’s credit he’d grown much better with narrative speech over time, which meant that by the time he was ready to speak, he more or less knew what he wanted to say.

“…Well…I figured out when I was really young that I was, uh…pretty stinkin’ tough for a kid. Never really got hurt, healed up quick…y’know.”

“How unusual was that, do you think?”

“Uh…well, more than once I’ve gotten into situations that shoulda broken bones or worse, but…I guess I always thought I was just lucky, y’know?” Julian frowned. “I’m not sure I’m gonna like where this conversation is going.”

“All things in their proper order, dear. This is important. Was that it? Did you notice anything else besides injury resistance?”

Julian shrugged his enormous shoulders. “I mean, I guess so. Little things. I was one of the smarter kids I guess. And, uh…I liked running and I could outrun anyone.”

Julian paused for a moment and stared at the floor. “Actually, yeah. That was pretty big. I could outrun anyone, even kids a lot older than me. And I was always pretty dang strong. But that never really seemed weird or anything. Well…no. It did, sorta. But just not weird weird…does that make any sense?”

“Not really.”

Julian sighed, and flung himself back up to his feet. “…Okay. Uh…kids notice differences, y’know? When you’re little, that stuff can get kinda vicious, and like I said I knew I was different from pretty early on. I think it sorta made me wanna keep to myself. I mean, it wasn’t ever all that bad, but none of them never really said anything after I beat up Mitch for picking on girls.”

“Why would that matter?”

Julian shrugged. “Nobody likes bullies. And, uh…yeah.”

There was more there that Nofl would have liked to unpack, but they had to get to the point. “Fascinating. You were saying?”

Julian seemed a bit lost in his thoughts, but just for a moment. “…Oh! Uh…well, that stuff started adding up. Also I lived out in the country and I ran to school every day, so…I just sorta…hung out with my friends, I guess.”

“Did this difference ever affect the relationship?”

“…Probably. They knew about me, but all we ever did was, uh, horse around, play basketball, that sorta thing. I wasn’t the biggest of ‘em but I was easily the strongest. Always was, but I didn’t do any of the school sports. I mean, mostly ‘cuz we were poor and couldn’t afford the equipment fees…I’d liked to have played football with Dustin. But, no money, and I think also ‘cuz granpa, uh…it wouldn’t be fair. He knew too. Like, really knew. But it still wasn’t weird.”

“When did it become this special use of ‘weird’ I am unfamiliar with?”

“Uh…” Julian reached up and scratched at the back of his head, as was his nervous habit. That massive bicep of his balled up and danced on his arm with every twitch of his wrist. Fascinating.

“I guess…I want to say it was when I started getting just crazy, stupid strong these past few years…but no, that’s wrong. Really I think it was when I first beat granpa at arm wrestling. I was twelve. And an inch taller than him. I mean, he was never very tall…but he was known for being ridiculously strong for his size, too. And it got, uh…really easy to win after that. I guess I always just thought it ran in the family, but…”

It did, of course.

“And now you’re an utterly peerless athlete, whose only real competition are part of a uniquely elite military unit.” Nofl gestured back toward the Dungeon.

“Or super-Gaoians or cavemonkeys, but…yeah.” Julian shuffled awkwardly on his feet. Clearly, he wasn’t comfortable with the idea.

“How does that make you feel?”

“I mean…conflicted, maybe? Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good word. ‘Cuz I’m super proud that I can do all this, y’know? But I don’t think I can avoid calling this special, because I know I’ve never done anything crazy to get this way. I’m too big to have, y’know? And that feels weird.”

“Do you think working among your peers has helped?”

Julian brightened. “Oh, yeah! I mean, I dunno. It’s been hard worrying too much when Adam or Christian or whoever could crush me like a bug, y’know?”

“Which you could do in turn to anyone else.”

Julian sighed. “Yeah, that does kinda bother me. People don’t get this strong. Like…a lotta guys sorta fantasize now and then, like, uh, what it’d be like to pick up a strongman champion like they were a little boy and snap ‘em like Bane snapped Batman, right? It’s a natural thought, nobody really dwells on it. But that’s the thing. I’m pretty sure I could do exactly that. And I don’t much like how that feels.”

Nofl sighed in relief. Julian wasn’t self-deluded about himself, and that was important. He was far too much of an outlier to escape scrutiny, seemed acutely aware of that fact, and had been shy about his ability for most of his life. That shyness hadn’t ever disappeared and if anything was reinforced by events since his rescue. He had grown enormously dense and powerful with relatively little difficulty, had done so in a remarkably short time, and had grown correspondingly heavy enough to crush scales under his feet. Julian could do things with his body that most of his fellow Deathworlders hardly believed were possible.

He was ready for the truth.

Nofl pulled two folding chairs out from against the corner, sat down and steeled himself. “Julian…dear. Please, sit down.” He gestured to the other chair, “I need to share something with you. I think you have an idea of what I’m going to share, too.”

Julian considered the fold-out chair. It was, Nofl realized suddenly, far too flimsy for the man. He hadn’t meant to draw such a juxtaposition at what he suspected would be a very emotionally charged moment for the massive explorer, but the error had been made and there was no going back now.

Julian stared at the chair for a long moment, gave it a look and wrinkled his nose at it. He then sighed, folded it up, set it aside, and sat on his haunches before Nofl.

“…Nightmare wasn’t the beginning of it for me, was it.” There was no questioning in his tone.

“No. Which, in retrospect, is obvious.”

“…Yeah. Nofl…” Julian affixed him with a piercing, intimidating glare. “Did you know?”

He answered truthfully. “I did not. But I should have.”

They stared at each other for a long, deeply uncomfortable moment. Nofl had never once been afraid of Julian—he couldn’t say why—but in that moment, something deep in instincts he barely realized he had sang out to him. This is a dangerous being.

“Nofl…I’m gonna ask you one question. You’re gonna answer it completely. Can you do that?”

That look of dangerous potential deepened, intensified, multiplied. It was all he could do not to twitch, look away, or panic.

With more bravery than he felt, Nofl nodded. “I…will answer as best as I can.”

There was another long, uncomfortable moment. Nofl felt mesmerized and couldn’t look away.

At long last, Julian relented, and a flash of utmost despair crossed his face.

“Nofl…What the fuck am I?”

Date Point:16y7m2w AV
JETS training camp, New Albion Island, Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Sergeant Ian Wilde

Akyawentuo was a big planet, bigger even than Earth. And her native population would have utterly vanished just in Wilde’s home city of Sheffield, which was only the seventh most populous in the UK. The Hierarchy had come far too close to wiping them out.

In other words… it was an empty planet. A lot of open space and unclaimed territory that the Ten’Gewek weren’t going to want for probably centuries, if their civilization ever moved in that direction anyway. From what Wilde could gather, the People were fiercely protective of their way of life and knew good and well that they had their way and humans had the human way, and it was always best to do things their way.

A bare, windswept island the size of Scotland about seventy miles offshore with hardly any trees to climb and no herds to hunt was of no interest to them whatsoever. So, they’d readily given permission for the humans to use it for whatever sky-reasons they wanted with a few caveats regarding things like weapons testing and so on.

How exactly they’d known to say no to weapons testing was a question for another day.

The camp was pretty bloody spartan, so nothing new there really. The engineers had done what they did best: slap together something sturdy that wasn’t about to fall down on the people inside it. It had a septic tank, a water processor, a small fusion generator and a forcefield emitter, and a wormhole comms router for emergencies.

Sleeping arrangements were more of a “so long as it’s not actually sharp” situation. They had Gaoian teams coming through on occasion, and they slept basically on top of each other in as tight of a furry ball as possible. Ten’Gewek visited for training too, both to help with scenarios and to learn themselves, and their preferred sleeping arrangement was basically anything elevated and sheltered from rain.

Fancy spoiled demands, that.

In any case, their mission, such as it was, was to get JETS teams ready to someday explore hostile worlds, meet exotic new alien species, and kill them, probably. There were JETS teams up through number seven now, and the Gaoian Grand Army had just as many. The French were getting in on the act now, recruiting interest had spiked…

…And the Ten’Gewek had a team, too. Sorta.

Ferd was a newly-transformed “bachelor” Given-Man with no tribe of his own. The Lodge hadn’t yet Given him a peace totem to trade and until that happened, he and his small band of other young, un-bonded men wouldn’t acquire any willing maidens. He was, therefore, quite keen on proving his worthiness, as were the men that followed him in the hopes of founding a new tribe.

That was a big gamble they’d taken, but he was very well thought-of and everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the Lodge Gave his totem. Ferd was one of the shining stars in the current crop of Ten’Gewek men; extremely smart and curious, he’d taken to reading and writing and other various and sundry ‘sky-learnings’ almost as eagerly as Vemik and his crew.

Surprisingly, Ferd was also the shortest—barely five-foot-two—and most compactly-built man of his group, despite being the only red-crest among them. Ferd had apparently always been a stumpy little tank of a man, one who had been known for his shocking speed and strength even before he’d become a red-crest, and then a Given-Man once he was out of his teens. From a distance, his hunting party might have looked as if they out-hulked him, since they were all just about as broad across the shoulders and stood at least a few inches taller. Two were tall enough to look Wilde directly in the eye; by Ten’Gewek standards that made them veritable giants.

Ferd was also the youngest—very young for a Given-Man, though nobody held that against him, either. Because, although he might have seemed at a disadvantage among his team…

…He was by far the strongest, the quickest, the heaviest and most impressive-looking man in the group. He was the meanest, too. When he wanted to be, anyway.

Ten’Gewek crests were a literal color code to the health and virility of their males. Only the young, the sick, the starving, or the congenitally weak had straw or blond crests. From there, their crests went from tiger-stripe orange, to safety orange, to something so brightly colored the People simply called them orange-crests. Proper examples of such men were uncommon; most sat between tiger- and hunter orange. Real orange-crests were almost fluorescent, and only strong, healthy and well-fed men were able to keep one. They mostly had bodies as hard as teak, with a densely muscled, almost too-lean bodybuilder’s physique to go with it.

A red-crest was rarer and far more impressive, built more like a huge slab of steel or carved stone than a man. A very big village may have been two hundred souls strong, but even they only ever had two or maybe three such men, aside from their Given-Man. Usually they were older and well-settled lads who’d had the time and opportunity to grow over many years, but not always; Vemik was already becoming a red-crest himself, the youngest any of the Singers knew, even younger than Ferd had been. Probably it was the rich hunting and forge-work Vemik had on this side of the mountain at just the right time in his life. Give him a couple more years eating werne steaks, training with his human friends and beating on steel…

Ferd’s men were about the toughest and most impressively fit young bachelor orange-crests there were across all the tribes. Hell, the biggest of those four might have given Vemik a bit of trouble on a lucky day, who was a hench fuckin’ tank of a man even by Ten’Gewek standards. None of that really helped Ferd’s men compare against him, because in the end he, like all Given-Men, was quite handily in an altogether different league entirely.

Given-Men were hands down the most incredible specimens among the red-crests. Their mohawks were outrageously tall and had a strongly iridescent tinge to their color, in addition to being so nuclear bright red they were difficult to stare at. While there wasn’t much besides blades or maybe a particularly bad fall that could truly hurt a man of the People, Given-Men in general were so tough and hardy that they feared little besides each other. Whatever biological witchcraft made them into what they were was something all Ten’Gewek respected right down to their cores, so he had no problems whatsoever putting his teammates in their places, even all at once. None of the others gave him anything but the utmost respect.

And he was ambitious. As he was probably only about twenty-one years old, Ferd had literally decades of life at the top of the social heap to look forward to and would only get better with time. If he kept his wits about him, built alliances carefully, and wasn’t blindsided by some new young challenger, he’d probably end up being Yan’s successor one day. Ferd knew it, too.

Yan had once been a very young Given-Man much like Ferd. Or so the stories went.

Ferd approached once he and his group had finished their latest timed “run” through their little obstacle course. Wilde always had to steel himself in his mind for a brief moment whenever they talked, since Ferd was built exactly like a proportionately shorter Yan and had the same kind of completely invincible intensity carved across every line of his body. And like all Given-Men, Ferd was heavy, so much so that the gravel on the path crumbled apart under his feet.

All the weight and strength of a grown damn bull, compacted down into someone about the size and rough general shape of a plain ol’ big man. Only an insane person wouldn’t be intimidated by someone like that. Thankfully, Ferd was usually a very easy-going kind of lad.

His men were still sucking wind while he knuckled over with a generally placid expression on his face, seemingly hardly bothered by much at all. Wilde would make him run it on his own later, but for now the goal was teamwork, not sheer prowess. Either the whole team made progress, or none of them did. Ferd had done well on that mark, helping his fellows along as much as he could without making them feel useless. A mark of good leadership, that.

He stood up on his hind legs as tall as he could to talk face-to-face, or as close as he could get, anyway. Though he was friendly and still shorter than Wilde, Ferd never failed to intimidate.

“Sergeant. I have question. You have word from ‘leadership’ yet? About my idea?”

Ten’Gewek considered it respectful to focus on whoever they were talking to, and liked to make and hold eye contact during a conversation. They were much like humans in that regard. Well, humans in the anglosphere, anyway. Ferd had an intense gaze, one just as strong as Yan’s. Wilde met it levelly and never wavered, though that honestly ran against all his instincts.

He shook his head. “Not yet, mate. I’ve bigged it up as best I can, but Professor Daniel is, uh…”

Ferd nodded and broke eye contact to look back toward the mainland. “Afraid for us,” he finished. “Mind-strong and means well, but he is body-weak. I think, does not understand.”

Ten’Gewek learned fast. Their own rites of manhood had something in it that was much like basic training, so every man understood teamwork, discipline, and listening to orders right to the core of their beings. Every single male in their society had experienced it; hell, they were eager to, since that was one of the first chances they ever got to spar with young men from other tribes and impress the ladies.

Which was what they were really after, here. They wanted to go on a grand hunting party after the biggest and most dangerous possible prey, prey that even the ‘sky-tribes’ were afraid of. Nothing else could possibly give them such good mating prospects, or give Ferd a better start to his nascent tribe. What woman wouldn’t want children by such brave and strong warriors…

The biggest challenge, really, had been to get them to think beyond their cocks. Admittedly, with this lot that was trickier than most…but they figured it out, eventually. War among the Ten’Gewek was rarely a deadly thing. Injuries happened of course, sometimes there was some rape and pillage…but that was, weird as it was to say, almost normal among them.

A society that considered rape to be merely extremely rude instead of a capital offense was… that was tough for Ian and the lads. They’d been brought up with a different view of the world, different morals. A lot of the banter among the cavemonkeys was frankly offensive to English sensibilities, but… well, they were aliens. So long as they didn’t do it under his watch…

But, they were getting it. Ferd and his men had seen what real warfare could look like. All the Ten’Gewek had, when the Hierarchy had shown them the true meaning of evil. The warring between the tribes had calmed down in the face of that and lost much of its dangerous edge.

Now, the People were preparing for something much more important.

They’d never actually see battle against the Hunters of course. Nobody in their right mind was going to take a team of iron-age aliens who thought of a radio as a magic talking rock and drop them in a real firefight. But they had useful skills and knowledge to impart, and they could learn, and by teaching them, the Allied instructors could learn how to educate later generations.

No gunfights for the cavemonkeys. Helping to explore wild, dangerous Deathworlds, though…

Ferd looked back and tilted his head quizzically. “Do you think ‘pro-fess-or’ will say yes?”

“I do, eventually. I think you lot would do well. Hell, nothing I’ve seen yet says otherwise.”

Ferd gave a pleased grunt. “We good men, yes? Teach us sky-war, we help beat big enemy. Is strange thing, with ‘rifles’ and other sky-magic. Feels…weak. But…”

“You can’t flex your way out of a nuclear explosion, mate.”

Ferd trilled, and then did just that with a mischievous expression. “I can try!” Ten’Gewek all had big meaty arms, but Ferd had a bowling-ball sized bicep that could shatter rocks in its crook; he’d shown off that trick more than once. “Maybe, Human-people not man enough!”

…Of course. That was the way of it. Every interaction with him was a gut-check like this.

Probably always would be, too; he and his men needed to know that their much smaller sergeant was up to the task of leading them, and were therefore constantly testing Wilde’s resolve. If they wanted, they could tear him apart like wet tissue paper and everyone knew it. What they wanted to see instead was two-fold: could Wilde hold his own, and could he prove that he was “strong” in other ways they valued? If that meant guy-banter with tree-bendingly massive cavemonkeys and their hypermacho, pretty much literally tonnes of fun leader…

Well, they meant well. And they were genuinely fun lads too, even if a bit too intense…

“I mean, it’s a substantial bicep, I guess…but I’m pretty sure that bigass monkey-arm of yours wouldn’t stop a bomb or a bullet to the brain, Ferd. Even if it could pop my head like a zit.”

Ferd trilled happily and nodded in satisfaction, then sidled up to Wilde affectionately: gut-check passed, and the unspoken Contract of Protection between Wilde and literally anyone else at all was renewed. He smiled. And sighed internally. Ten’Gewek were terminally testosterone poisoned and a hell of a challenge to lead. Thankfully, Ferd seemed to respect Wilde, and he in turn followed Wilde’s lead amiably. Wilde did his best to be worthy of that trust.

“Yes. Must be clever. This high-rarchy, very dangerous prey, yes?”

“The most dangerous. You need to be very smart and very careful against them.”

“And strong, too. Else, why even talk with us?”

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

“Exploring their worlds isn’t easy work, true. Having literal supermonkeys would be helpful—”

Ferd looked down at his huge rippling legs and slapped them loudly in another round of well-meaning, not-quite-insubordinate macho teasing. Christ he was an impressive lad…

“—But don’t make the mistake of thinking this would be like any normal hunt. The prey is…strange. We would be exploring the ruined villages of other sky-people they’ve killed over more years than you can count, and maybe breaking the big enemy’s machines while we’re there. We need to do this without being noticed, too. This is almost like hunting ghosts.”

Ferd shuddered at that, from the top of his head-crest in a wave that went all the way down to the tip of his tail. Wilde hadn’t yet found another word that scared them quite like that.

The conversation was interrupted when Wilde’s satellite phone went off. Some horrible bastard had loaded Steppenwolf onto the bloody thing because of course they had, and he kept forgetting to undo the damage.

Ferd waggled his ears in an amused sort of gesture, and decided to give Wilde some privacy. All the excuse a red-blooded Given-Man needed to play-wrestle his charges, apparently.

Wilde turned away and answered. “Hallo?”

“Got my license again.” It was Hoeff’s imitable growl. “I’ll be out in a few minutes with some Given-Man mail and your shiny new orders!”

“About bloody time. What finally changed?”

“Arés handed the licensing off to somebody, and they reinstated it.”

There was a lot not being said there, but when it came down to it, Wilde knew only two absolute truths in life: Never take the first offer, and do not fuck with Mister Hoeff.

“…New orders? Why does that fill me with a vague sense of existential dread?”

“Oh, it should. It’s officially go time, my most bestest limey friend. And you get to tell me if you’re taking our monkey-pals along for the ride. Coombes has gotta get deployment orders going.”

Wilde considered it. The thing was, Ferd and his mates were good at what they did, no doubt. But if they were going to work with human and Gaoian forces then what they needed was a dose of culture.

“I know how we can test these guys…” he said, as the idea blossomed in his head. “We know they can fight, they’re hard-ass hardbodies that don’t ever give up, they’ll listen to orders, they can shoot and read and write and use a compass and all that. But you know what I really want to see? I want to see if we can send them to Folctha with some cash and a list of errands.”

There was a pause on the line, followed by a dark chuckle. “…That’s evil. I love it.”

They talked a bit more about the minutiae of command, then hung up with some loving trash-talk. Speaking of…

Ferd had, in the span of the two minutes of the phone call, managed to pin all four of his monkey-mates and was busy rolling around in the dirt with them. All five of them had massively happy facial expressions and similar exuberant joy across their body language; Ten’Gewek used both in equal measure to emote. That was good, because it meant Ferd wasn’t a bully, at least not by cavemonkey standards. Honestly, young aggressive human men weren’t so different when they got to know each other. Granted, maybe they weren’t quite so keen on grappling each other like that unless they were young teens…or drunk…

“Oi, my cave-apes! I’ve got good news!”

The affectionate ruckus broke up, and the five of them hopped into position around him, sitting attentively on their tails.

“Here’s the thing,” Wilde told them. “The reason we humans come here is to learn how to live in the way our ancestors used to, long ago. We come here to learn something we don’t already know, but you already know how to live off the land and thrive in the forest. So we need to find something you don’t already know.”

He gestured at the sky. “Up there are worlds and places like you haven’t dreamed of. There are places under far away skies where the people have built villages that reach to the horizon and claw at the clouds. There are places that are like giant flying villages between the skies, where many ships like the ones you’ve seen come and go on their way to somewhere else. Sometimes, our mission takes us to those places as well as to forests and swamps and deserts. If you are going to fight alongside us, you need to know how to handle civilization.”

Ferd tilted his head curiously. “‘Civilization’ make you soft, you say. But you grow hard when you want.” He thumped his ridiculous abs loudly in a sign of approval. “This is good I think. Teach us, is more to strong than body only.”

Wilde nodded. “Exactly.”

He gestured at the camp. “We’re short on a few supplies. They’re waiting for you to collect them in Folctha. That’s the biggest village on Cimbrean-anarakyuawentue,” he clarified, using the Ten’gewek word that loosely meant ‘planet’ and more literally meant far-place-under-other-sky.’

“Your mission,” he continued, “is to retrieve those supplies without making a scene. This isn’t a raid into another tribe’s territory, this is a respectful visit, and while you are there you will obey their rules. Our rules. We follow yours when we’re here…”

Ferd nodded. “We visit, smile and play nice. You say, some other sky-people so body-weak, we break them by accident.”

“Yes. You will respect them, or at least respect the rules. Humans and Gaoians—they look like Daar, but are a lot smaller—you can do things like shake hands and whatever else, if you are invited. Still be careful. Not all of us are monkey-tough. Any others…”

“No touch. Keep distance. Speak good words only.”

“Exactly. I’ll write out a list of what we need, who has it, and how much it should cost. I’ll also give you five hundred pounds in cash. Do not spend it all if you can avoid it. Think of cash like winter food.”

“Save, do not eat all at once.”

“Yes. One final problem: the jump array, the magic that takes us there and back, goes to other places as well. It only brings us to and from here once a day. You will need to find a place to sleep. To protect the supplies you are collecting, it is best if you sleep inside, not out in the open. There are places called ‘hotels’ which will give you a place to sleep for the night for some money. Again, treat the hotel and the people who work there carefully and with respect.”

He looked along the row of five hulking alien brutes. “This is a test of the strength that controls strength,” he said, and tapped the side of his head. “We have a saying. ‘Mind over body.’ One of the true tests of manhood among my people is self-control. A man is judged by his restraint just as much as anything else. Understand?”

Ferd nodded fiercely. “When I become Given-Man, and the Lodge Take me from the People and Give to the gods, I endure many things. And get many learnings. I learn, must always know my body. Given-Men so strong, so angry, we dangerous.”

Wilde nodded. “So. Get your gear, I’ll prepare the list of things you’re going to fetch. You’ll travel to the mainland on the Weaver, same as usual, then jump through to Folctha next chance you get. I’ll expect to see you back with all the stuff on the list on the next jump after that. Any questions?”

He fielded a couple of minor clarifications along the lines of who they should ask if they didn’t know what the rules were and so on, but it was all smart, sensible stuff. These guys weren’t dumb apes.

Ferd encouraged his men to ask questions, too. That was an excellent sign of leadership and almost completely sealed the deal right there. That kind of thinking was what made a modern military work. If you had that…all the rest was just a matter of experience and good training.

As he watched them get ready, Ian Wilde felt a certainty settle into his gut: They were ready. They were capable. They were eager. All of which meant that the Ten’Gewek were going to war.

Now, all that remained was to see if they could handle civilized peace.

Date Point: 16y7m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbream the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

The rule might be ‘sleep when the baby sleeps,’ but Allison had slept enough for now. She didn’t need more. She needed to move, to stretch, to give her body something to do besides sleeping and nursing.

So, she was doing yoga in the middle of the living room. It wasn’t coming as easy as it once had, but then again she’d had a big natural birth only two months before, and she didn’t really have the time she’d have wanted to really get back into condition. Julian had given them both big babies, and truth be told, Allison wasn’t too sure if she’d be interested in another. She loved him dearly, but…

Well, they had a pretty big “misfit” family as it was. Maybe she’d reconsider down the road. Xiù so far was saying she wanted more than one…

Whatever. The look on his face was something other than wondering affection this time.

He’d come in from the gym without the usual bouncy stinking happy hello, instead vanishing upstairs to shower and change. Once cleansed and dressed in t-shirt and shorts, he’d flopped on the couch to stare down into Anna’s moses basket. Bassinet. Cradle. Whatever.

The look on his face was about the most complicated she’d ever seen him wear. There was far too much there to unpack it all, but… troubled? Worried? Protective? A lot of different things at once.

Allison sat down next to him and rubbed his back. “…Something wrong?”

“…You ever wonder what your purpose is?”

“I dunno. It’s always seemed pretty easy to me,” Allison replied. “Life puts a thing in my way, and I deal with the thing.”

Julian snorted in his affectionate way, but didn’t say anything for a moment. Allison sensed she should wait for him to set his own pace.

“What if you found out, literally a half an hour ago, that you were the result of a six-generation long Corti breeding experiment?”

Allison’s hand stopped moving. Slowly, she leaned forward to frown at him. He tore his gaze away from their sleeping daughter and gave her a red-eyed, lost stare.

“And now,” he continued, “you’re stuck questioning…everything.”

“…Back up. This isn’t hypothetical, is it?”

“No.”

“Jesus fuck.”

“Yup.”

“…I’d… I don’t… I mean, that’s… According to who?!”

“Nofl. He dug up some classified Directorate records from somewhere and… I am literally an experiment. My entire family is an experiment. Every single one of my ancestors further back than we have records were themselves bred—fucking *bred*—with a goal in mind.”

“Fucking Corti!” Allison groaned. She hushed herself as Anna stirred a little, but mercifully didn’t wake. “But… okay, a goal? What goal?”

Julian sighed. “I get the impression Nofl was struggling to tell me as much as he could, but I didn’t really get a solid answer. I think they just…wanted their idea of the best possible survivor. Or, uh, something like that.”

“That seems sketch as fuck, babe.”

Julian sighed again, and reached despondently into the basket to adjust the baby’s blanket.

“Yeah. And the more I think about it, the more sketch it seems. Like…look at how much fuckin’ magic they had that worked on us humans all-sudden! Miracle healing drugs, literal supersoldier stuff…and here I am, this… I mean, I thought I was just a regular guy they dumped on Nightmare probably just to see how long I’d last, and…”

“And you’re not a regular guy at all,” Allison finished.

“No.”

She took his hand. “Let’s be honest. You’ve never been a regular guy. You’ve always been pretty special. Not just to me, either.”

“That makes two of us. Three of us—where is Xiù, anyway?”

“Grocery shopping.”

Julian laughed quietly with just an edge of desperation in his voice. “God, I love how stereotypically domestic she is sometimes.”

“She loves it too. Our badass spacebabe starship pilot likes her pink lace aprons and packing us lunch and stuff.”

“Somebody’s gotta make up for all the masculine energy around here.”

Allison laughed. “You callin’ me butch?”

“Tomboyish. I love it, but… you aren’t a girly girl, baobei. Except for your underwear.”

“Damn right!” Allison agreed, proudly. She lay down half on top of him and half beside him. “So. Bred, huh? By the finest minds in the Directorate to produce… what?”

“Well, somebody who could survive Nightmare, I guess? I dunno. And if Nofl knows, I don’t think he can tell me. A survivor or somethin’ like that, like I said.”

“What do you mean?”

“…I dunno. All I got is suspicions. And also, why tell me?! Nofl made me promise to come back later today, and I think some other bigass shoe is gonna drop…”

“Julian, babe. What kind of suspicions? I don’t mean to push but this is kinda important.”

He waved his hands expressively, though the expression was mostly lost bewilderment. “…I wonder if I wasn’t, uh, like a beta version of some of that spacemagic. Or, like, the test bed, anyway. And they were really interested in us as a species for a long time, we know that. And then the Gao once they’d made contact…Deathworlders.”

“So…?”

“So… ever since that crazy psycho bitch tried to kill me, things have been off, and I don’t mean in my head. I mean… Different. Physically. I thought I’d plateaued, or maybe sorta hoped I had because, uh…”

“Can’t really be a regular guy when you obviously aren’t.”

“…Right. And before I could sorta, uh, believe that I was just really, really super lucky and worked crazy hard for it, right? Well, now it turns out it wasn’t luck at all! I was literally bred to do this, probably! And now suddenly it’s like I’m in overdrive and it scares me but…”

“Hang on, why are you in overdrive? What changed?”

“I don’t know! Physically I’ve never felt so great! It’s…like, I was all super happy ‘cuz I had smashed all my previous PRs today, and I was just bouncy as fuck and…then Nofl was waiting for me. And the whole, uh…like, the whole life story just fuckin’ fell apart.”

The door beeped, and Xiù backed through it with a couple of bags of shopping. Julian, as was his habit, immediately forgot everything he was worried about, vaulted the couch and was next to her in a heartbeat to help her with the work.

Allison couldn’t help but grin ruefully. Even now, in the middle of what passed as a meltdown for him, Julian was more concerned about his women than himself: he was an old-fashioned soul in all the best ways.

Al welcomed her home with a kiss, and a brief whispered update in her ear as Julian put the shopping away, though skipped the details in favor of “He just got some really bad news.” It was Julian’s revelation to share, not hers.

“…Okay.” Xiù made some coffee—a green tea for herself—and once it was ready she sank onto the couch with a grateful sigh. “Hey, cutie,” she greeted Anna. The baby had woken up, so Allison plucked her out of the basket for another round of feeding and cuddles and maybe a diaper change…

Julian repeated the story to Xiù while all that was happening. He wasn’t quite so emotionally charged on the second telling, as far as Allison could tell.

“So,” Xiù recapped as Allison sat back down with Anna in her arms. “Let me get this straight. Nofl told you all of this just now. He wants you to come back later today, presumably to tell you more. You don’t know exactly what he’s going to say, but you’re pretty sure you won’t like it.”

“…Yeah. Pretty much.”

“Okay. So… what does knowing all that actually change?”

“Huh?”

“Well, I mean…” Xiù gestured to the three of them. “We were all Corti experiments.”

“…Yes, but this?!”

“You gotta admit babe, it’s not quite the same thing,” Allison agreed. “I mean, abduction and that shit’s one thing, but generations of… how did they even do it?”

“Nofl reckons it was a combination of post-hypnotic suggestion, hormonal regulators and in one case they…” Julian paused, shuddered, and reached out to stroke Anna’s cheek. “…They interfered in a pregnancy. When the mother picked the ‘wrong’ guy they… replaced her baby.”

“Ew.” Xiù pulled a face and protectively touched her own belly.

“Yeah.”

“Well… alright, yeah. That’s evil. There’s no other word for it.”

“Yup. And now I learn my whole life has been playing right into what they wanted. They wanted some big tough purpose-built survivor? Well, here I fucking am, apparently! And you know what the stupidest part of the whole thing is? I can already feel myself…not being so mad about it. Like…I’m venting, right? And I can already just, uh…fuck!”

“That’s what venting is for…”

“Well, yeah, but I don’t think I want to stop being mad about this!” Julian stood up and prowled around the room. “I mean, where’s the fucking line? They crossed it alright, but isn’t that something I should be mad about?”

“Not if you can’t actually do anything about it,” Xiù said. “Bǎobèi, staying mad about it won’t fix it, it’ll just hurt you.”

Allison nodded in agreement. “Babe. You know who you might talk to? Gyotin. I think if there’s anyone who might have something to say on painful revelations about your past, it’d be him. Go for a run first. Let off some steam.”

“Yeah…I mean, why not? It’s like I was made for it or something…”

“And you’re good at it, and it makes you happy, so stop overthinking it.”

Julian looked like he wanted to grumble a bit more, so Al decided it was time to get blunt and practical with him. “Julian. Babe. Hear me now and listen later, okay?”

“…Yeah?”

“Maybe this seems a bit cold-blooded, but consider this. Remember Bozo? Someone bred him into an absolute freak of canine nature for…whatever fuckin’ reason. I don’t think I’ve ever met a dog as big, or as tough, or as smart as he was. And y’know what else he was? Happy. Do you think he’d have given any kind of fucks about why he was the best?”

“…”

“So you’ve been given a hell of a blessing for dubious reasons. Fine. We’ll deal with it. You’ve given your kids that blessing too, and now you know a big part of why you’re our awesome space-Tarzan. Which, being honest, you already knew anyway. Whatever secrets they’re keeping, there’s nothing else they can say or do that will take that away from you. You’re the best and not just because of your genes. You throw yourself into everything, you’re super intense and loving and maybe just a bit crazy…and I wouldn’t have you any other way.”

Beside her, Xiù nodded fervently.

“…I…” Julian, like pretty much every big strong man ever, didn’t know how to cry tears of gratitude in any graceful way. He tried, and failed, to pretend they weren’t there and crushed Al and Xiù in a huge hug.

“…Okay. I’ll go, uh…run some errands, I guess. And not dwell.”

“We’ll be here,” Al promised. He gave them a last squeeze, a kiss apiece, a third kiss for Anna’s cheek, and headed out with… well, if not a spring in his step then at least with a purpose.

Xiù took a deep breath once he was gone, then turned and gave Allison a huge smile.

Al arched an eyebrow at her. “…What?”

“I love you so much.”

Al felt her face go warm, but in the best way. “Wo ye ai ni,” she replied, and snuggled up again, at least as well as she could with the baby in her arms. “…I hope he’ll be okay.”

“He will. C’mon, he’s bounced back from worse than this.”

“I hope so. But there’s whatever Nofl hasn’t told him yet to consider and…”

“He’ll be fine.”

Al sighed and nodded. “…Okay.” she considered her daughter, and stroked a thumb over the slumbering face. Anna was a chilled-out sort of baby, generally content to just eat and sleep. They had a few months before she’d get really interactive… or at least, so all the usual milestones supposedly went.

Now, though, knowing just what had gone into her… well… her pedigree…

…She found she didn’t care. If the entire point had been to breed tough, hale, strong, healthy humans then that actually was a good thing for Anna. From a purely practical point of view…

Well. Whatever was good for her baby was alright by Allison.

Date Point: 16y7m2w AV
Clan Starmind monastery, Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Champion Gyotin

Gyotin was enjoying a rare quiet day. At least, relatively quiet. He’d had breakfast with the Bishop of Folctha that morning, but that was a weekly event anyway. And of course he’d spent some time at the Faith Center, met a few people, caught up on the news, offered some insights…

The opportunity to retire to the monastery garden and practice a nice long meditation in solitude was a welcome one.

It couldn’t last forever, of course. After maybe twenty minutes or half an hour, the distinctive scent of a very big and very familiar Human guest reached his nose, and he decided that he’d better attend to his responsibilities again.

It didn’t matter. Gyotin could meditate in a single breath, and often did so. It was a useful trick, just… taking a single moment to reset the mind and cleanse the moment. He certainly wasn’t going to be put out by the end of a decently long meditation now.

Standing respectfully at the garden’s edge behind him, though Gyotin hadn’t yet turned to face him, was Julian Etsicitty. He hadn’t made so much as a sound when he approached, which was a neat trick on a gravel path, but Gyotin’s nose didn’t lie about these things. The big man smelled troubled.

Gyotin half turned to flick an ear at him and greet him over his shoulder, radiating serenity. “I don’t think I’ve ever spoken with you in private, Mister Etsicitty. Would you like tea?”

“…Sure, why not?”

Gyotin had to admit a certain fondness for his tea ritual. It had earned him some gentle teasing from some of the more experienced members of the Clan, but that was no worry. He gestured to a low table near the most fragrant part of the garden. The big man considered it, smiled faintly, and carefully folded himself into a cross-legged position before it.

Usually, Gyotin only spoke with Etsicitty when Sister Shoo came to visit. He wasn’t a Buddhist himself, and he certainly wasn’t a Gaoian. In fact, he’d always seemed to Gyotin like a man for whom the Great Question was… not resolved, necessarily, but certainly it didn’t gnaw at him the way it did some other people. Julian was very much a man of the world before anything else.

In fact, he’d always struck Gyotin as truly resilient. Something must have gone badly wrong, though he didn’t smell of grief. More… confusion.

Gyotin’s tea ritual was designed for relaxing simplicity and precision. He found that people usually relaxed when they watched it rather than growing restless, and so it was with Julian: by the time Gyotin poured a cup with a practiced, simple flair, the big man had taken a few steadying breaths and was radiating a little less stress.

He watched, seemingly bemused, until with a nod Gyotin indicated that he should take his tea. The cups weren’t overly large, since the point was to relax and not fill oneself to bursting, but they nonetheless looked almost tiny in Julians massive, calloused hands. Worthy of a Stoneback, those.

“…I’ve had a really weird sorta day.”

“You smell like it.”

Julian… explained. It took some time, in part because Julian was the kind of man whose thought process was rather like a climbing vine, feeling around and curling back on itself to find the next anchor point. In absolute terms, it was slow: in practical terms, it was methodical and thorough one-foot-forward-and-test-the-earth stuff.

Gyotin did what he did best and listened with both ears and nose.

In truth, just getting it out of his system for a second time seemed to have helped Julian enormously. His partners had had good advice and insights for him—well done, Sister Shoo—but there remained two unresolved questions.

The first, according to Julian, went something like:

“It’s like… well, okay, so I’m apparently bred to be what I am. Or, uh… what I’ve done? Like, all of it’s been in line with the kinda thing they were trying to achieve. They wanted… I guess someone who could go anywhere at all and handle it? Which is what I do! So it’s like I’m just following the script they wrote into me. But I like what I do! I like where my life is at right now, or, I mean, except for the crazy goliath bitch who tried to kill me, but other than that!”

He drank his second cup of tea and sighed. “I’ve been to amazing places and done amazing things and met amazing people and fell in love with two incredible women, and I’ve got, or gonna have, two amazing kids, and… I don’t know. Did I earn all that? Or am I just… I dunno.”

“Of course you did.”

Julian sighed. “Like, I know I did. Rationally,” he clarified. “My genes didn’t just, uh, pick up those weights themselves, or cut that wood all by themselves, or drag my ass out of bed every freezing morning on Nightmare or any of it. I had to earn it all, I get that. But they also let me do all that in the first place, which I’m learning is an opportunity that basically nobody else gets. And after dropping all that on me, Nofl said there’s more to tell me!”

“Which is?”

“…I dunno. I kinda wish he’d just dropped both halves on me in one go. I think he thought he was being kind.”

Gyotin duck-nodded. “He tries. Genuinely, he tries. You must understand though, he is a Corti. Even in his case, he has a severe theory of mind deficit where emotional cognition is concerned.”

“…Well. I just… I wanna hear the other half. Whatever it is, I’ll deal with it, you know?” Julian took a deep breath and put his cup down. “…I don’t mind being what I am. I just wanna know how honestly I came by what I have.”

“Should I come with you?” Gyotin offered.

Julian’s expression was one of immense relief. “Oh, God, please yes. I don’t, uh…I’m not, uh, yeah. You don’t seem like a fire-and-brimstone sorta fella and I really don’t need that right now.”

“Fire and brimstone?”

“Y’know, the whole poly relationship with two not-wives, illegitimate children and taking alien religious rites thing. Folks… judge.”

“Father O’Driscoll might surprise you, but that’s an issue for later. When are you meeting Nofl?”

“…Uh… well. No time like the present, I guess.”

“I quite agree.” Gyotin stood. “His lab isn’t far, after all.”

Still, they took the scenic route and enjoyed the garden. To Gyotin’s nose it smelled of herbs from dozens of worlds: Gaoian sweetherb and Mishi, thyme and lemongrass from Earth, Cqcq, Urgurnivur, Wrythwk…

Julian had a certain similarity to the Great Father, Gyotin noted. Both had a very healthy appreciation for life in all its forms, herbs and flowers especially. The big man breathed in appreciatively through his nose as they meandered toward the exit, and perhaps looked back as if he would have loved nothing more than to stay there all day, soaking it all in.

“There is a lot of red and violet in your garden, you know.”

“So Leemu tells me. It turns out the Gao have color vision perhaps as good as yours, buried in an inactivated section of our genome.”

“…Really?”

“Indeed so! There is a small therapy trial going on right now to reactivate those parts of our heritage; they were deliberately deactivated thousands of years ago.”

“…Yeah, I guess now I think about it, you guys can kinda sympathize with where I’m at right now, huh?”

“In a sense. I must admit, your case is very sympathetic for me. And I imagine would be for others in your orbit. The Great Father, for example.”

“Oh?”

“You are a man who was bred to severe purpose. As are all of the Gao, most especially our Champions—usually, anyway—and our Great Father. We of course do this voluntarily…”

“…Yeah.”

“Yet that was almost certainly a social behavior instigated by an enemy power. That is not a small thing to know, that old and vast powers have been using your ancestors in a game. But…”

“But at least I know.”

“You don’t believe that ignorance is bliss?”

Julian shook his head. “Ignorance is a great way to get killed.”

“Or at the very least,” Gyotin offered, “it’s unfulfilling.”

“…That too, I guess.”

The rest of the short walk to Nofl’s lab was made in pensive silence, and they found Nofl waiting for them at the door. Gyotin didn’t ask how the quirky Corti scientist had known they were coming: presumably he had a drone or cameras or something. It didn’t matter.

His usual chipper affectation was gone. He welcomed them in with a simple greeting and invited them to sit down with an offer of coffee that they both declined.

“So. The other half,” he said, and Julian tensed up. Nofl gestured with a control device and the holographic display in the middle of his lab shimmered into life. It showed a full-body scan of Julian, made transparent enough to show off the internal organs in a clean, clinical kind of way. Another click of the controller, and the image’s twisting intestines lit up blue.

“…Your gut biome has come into contact with Cruezzir,” he explained, without preamble. “Which explains the anomalous healing around your leg and your increased physicality over the last couple of weeks. You’re now effectively generating an unrestricted, early version of a super-soldier serum inside your own body. We’ve seen this before, and normally it would be straightforward to correct. Not pleasant, but straightforward… except in your unique case.”

“Why not?”

“Because you were the test platform for that serum, dear. You have, in fact, been generating precursor components of it since the day you were abducted and transplanted to Nightmare.”

“…Wh…wait. Back up just a bit. Cruezzir.”

“Yes.”

“…Her blood, wasn’t it?”

“I do not know precisely what you’re talking about, but ingesting the bodily fluids of someone also producing Cruezzir presents a high risk of contamination, yes.”

“So…Okay. You said ‘unrestricted.’ What the fuck does that mean?!”

“Mostly, that it’s essentially contagious. I was unaware of it, but the production-grade Cruezzir was designed to self-enable a synthesis pathway in E. Coli. I had nothing to do with that.”

Julian’s tone had grown understandably urgent. “What does this mean for my partners?”

“They are unlikely to contract it through intercourse if that’s what you’re asking. Unless they, ah, ingested…”

“…Let’s just assume so.”

“…Right. Well. For them it will be essentially harmless and treatable, if so. Um… I hope. Honestly, the thought of a pregnant woman with Cruezzir gut never occurred to me, hmm…”

Julian’s grip made the desktop creak. “Nofl…”

“Julian. Dear. I am appalled by all this and I will do all in my power to help, but I don’t think the risks are significant in their cases. They may even be a net benefit, it is a medicine after all. In controlled doses, it’s beneficial! No, my concern is more to do with the risks of long-term saturation.”

“What…sort of risks?”

“Cruezzir-derivative was designed with two major goals in mind. Firstly, that it would not form a transmissible hazard. But secondly, it was also designed to trigger certain bodily responses in the combatants undergoing treatment. Stronger tendons, skeletal adaptation, and so forth. For you…that won’t be a problem. You were…well, bred for this. Or something like it, anyway.”

“Those precursor components you mentioned?” Gyotin cued. “What do they have to do with this?”

“And why the hell didn’t you tell me about them before?” Julian asked. “You replaced my goddamn leg, Nofl. How did you not notice this?”

“Foot,” Nofl corrected. “And because one doesn’t notice compounds diluted to the nanogram unless they’re actively looking for them, which I had no reason to do. Which brings us back to the problem. You are fully adapted to their presence. It has been… how long? Seventeen years since they were first introduced to your system? Not counting time spent in stasis.”

“…About that, yeah. Eleven years or so since I was rescued, and six years before that.”

“Julian, a complete intestinal microbiome transplant would very probably kill you. You’re so perfectly adapted to the precursors, your body has built itself around its heightened capacity to heal. Just considering your heart alone—remember how we noted that it was highly enlarged? That’s not uncommon in power athletes…”

“It was a point of concern, yeah.”

“Not for you. It’s adapted to this. If I, to use a metaphor, ‘kick the stool out from under you,’ just one of the things that may kill you is a massive heart attack in a few weeks. Or a few years. Maybe. It’s impossible to tell. Plenty of other men live with your condition until old age…”

“But he has many such conditions,” Gyotin concluded with a sigh. “So taken together, it’s a potential disaster.”

“Exactly. As he is, he is perfectly healthy and living comfortably on the edge of what human biology can do, both because he was designed to be, and because of a self-sustaining suite of medicines in his gut. I cannot risk taking away that support mechanism now.”

“…What will this mean for me?”

“Well…mostly good things! You will experience prolonged life, heightened resistance to disease…basically, you will live as you have lived since your rescue from Nightmare. There are some side-effects you should note…”

“…Such as?”

“You may feel emotions more intensely, but I daresay you’ve felt them all along. There were reports of some other rather preposterous effects, but I do not credit them with much veracity.”

“How long of a prolonged life?” Gyotin asked.

“Cruezzir-derivative was designed to provide a minimum of twenty years of extended prime-of-life. He’ll get at least that. Possibly more.” Nofl cleared his throat. “…Possibly a lot more. I don’t actually know. The only other individuals this has ever happened to are missing or dead. I suppose… in theory, there might not be an upper limit.”

Julian stood up sharply and turned away. He prowled the back of the room absolutely reeking of anguish for a few seconds, then turned sharply back to Nofl. “‘No upper limit?!’ Nofl, I—!”

“I speak of theory, Julian. Theory and reality are very different things.”

“Oh, great. So I’m only ’theoretically’ immortal!” Julian gestured vaguely out the door. “Meanwhile, my family and all the people I love are very definitely mortal!”

“And forever is a very long time to find a solution, dear. Which I promise you I will work towards.”

Gyotin glanced at Julian, who stood up, massaged his face, and turned away again to do a little more pacing. There was a fight raging in his head, but as far as Gyotin could tell Nofl was saying the right things.

“So… what can Julian and his family do in the meantime?” he asked.

“Well… Your partners and children, born and unborn alike, will need to come in for a scan and… whatever therapy is necessary. Which I hope turns out to be none at all!” Nofl hastened to add. “But this is unknown territory. Curiosity and caution are our guides, I think.”

“And if they do need it?” Julian asked. “Xiù’s pregnant and Anna’s only a couple of months old!”

“Julian.” Nofl stood up. It was a ridiculous thing to see a tiny, skinny Corti stand squarely up to a human many times his mass, but it worked. Julian stopped pacing and listened. Nofl looked him square in the eye. “I will do everything I can,” he promised.

“You can’t ask for more than that,” Gyotin agreed, softly.

There was a long silence. Finally, Julian sighed, straightened up, and ran a hand through his hair. “…Fine. Okay. Thank you. I’m just… I’d better go tell them.”

“I’ll see you soon, dear,” Nofl told him. “My door is always open to you.”

“As is mine,” Gyotin promised.

Julian gave them both a grateful look that was almost a smile, then left. Or maybe ‘bolted’ was a better word.

Once he was gone, Nofl sighed heavily and distractedly tried to tidy up an already immaculate lab. “That could have gone better,” he declared.

“At least it went,” Gyotin replied. “Better for him to know, however difficult it may be for him.”

“Yes.” Nofl gave up on trying to improve on perfection, and sagged back into a chair. “I feel partly to blame, you know. Cruezzir was my creation. The Directorate picked it up and did terrible things with it once they saw the potential, but it all starts with me.”

“Can you turn it toward the good?” Gyotin asked.

“I already have!” Nofl said, sounding a little offended. “Many times over! Cruezzir is a gift to the world, a miracle medicine! It’s already changed so much, and will change much more in due time. It just… has some complications. And I will set them right.”

Gyotin duck-nodded. “I can’t fault your passion,” he said. Nofl laughed, darkly.

“Yes. The very thing the Directorate likes the least about me,” he muttered. “…Thank you, Champion. I don’t know how you make time for everybody like you do.”

“Some days I can’t.” Gyotin sniffed at the coffee apparatus. He had to admit, coffee did smell amazing. Alas that it tasted so different to its aroma. He’d take tea every time. “But on some days, the universe seems to make room, when it really matters. Anyway. I should leave you to your work.”

Nofl nodded wearily, and Gyotin let himself out.

He was, he found, not worried. Undoubtedly he’d be seeing Sister Shoo at some point, and probably Julian again now… but those were meetings to look forward to, really. As emotional and troubled as they would surely be, well…

…It was good to have people to help.

He took a single meditative breath, and returned to his garden.

Date Point: 16y7m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space

Lewis Beverote

Lewis was officially the human race’s foremost expert on designing shit for a nanofactory to build.

It was kind of a multidisciplinarian thing, in a shallow way. He needed to know just enough about a fuckzillion different subjects to know how he could fit bits and pieces together, but he needed to also know when to hand off to a real in-depth expert and ask “can it be done?”

There wasn’t an official name for his little coterie. In theory the Mrwrki nanofax was overseen by Master Sergeant Lee. In practice, every blueprint that ever got fed into the big beauty was Lewis’ handiwork, signed off on by all the people who worked with him. On Mrwrki’s org chart they were known just as the nanofactory blueprint lab.

Among themselves, they were the Fellowship of the ‘Fax. After all, if you couldn’t shamelessly geek out on a station full of massive nerds literally named after Tolkien’s writings, where could you?

The coltainers had been… eh. They were absolutely a success, sure. Every mission objective achieved, thank you very much. But they weren’t the giant fireworks-and-eagles suck-my-dick success he’d wanted. AI, even the most advanced AI the human race had ever dreamt up blended with some bleeding edge ET tech, just wasn’t smart enough to handle the complexities of the real galaxy.

Some of them had been stalked by Hunters and self-destructed. A few had suffered industrial accidents. One had apparently got stupid confused about size and distance and plunged into a gas giant while squawking inanely about how much trouble it was having in figuring out what was wrong.

Overall, the coltainers were multiplying as designed, but it wasn’t exactly an exponential surge. The rate of replacement was just ahead of the loss rate.

So… yeah. A success, but not a home run. A solid B+. Adequate. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

The Fellowship were perfectionists. Adequate was not good enough, to them. So, after seeding enough coltainers, they’d turned the ‘Fax toward different projects instead.

Right now, it was building deep space survey satellites tuned to listen for and precisely triangulate a specific kind of quantum… thingy. Lewis thought of it as kinda like a heavy blanket draped on top of the great quantum mattress of the universe. His advisor on all things quantum-mechanical, Doctor “Just” So, had pulled a pained face when he said that but accepted the analogy was good enough for Lewis’ purposes.

Point was, by watching for weird spots in the sky where the great quantum blanket did weird shit, they could in theory find the Hierarchy’s remaining relay worlds.

Exactly what that would lead to…

For now, though, there were no ‘official’ projects coming their way. The ‘Fax was hard at work churning out the satellites, and it pushed out a new one every ten minutes or so. But up in the blueprint lab, all the stuff coming down from on high was already done and dusted. So the Fellowship were… tinkering.

And eating snacks.

“I’m tellin’ you dude, ain’t no way in a million years the military are ever gonna touch power armor.”

“It’d save lives.”

“Would it? Stickin’ dudes inside a fuckin’ robot that’s stronger than them? Sounds like a deathtrap to me.”

“Not if you design it right.”

“Okay, and then what? So you’ve got a superhuman humanoid robot. Why d’you even need a dude inside it? Why not stick him in a control bunker on the other side of the world with some kinda VR rig?”

“Actually, yeah? Why not?”

“Well, signaling, for one. I ran this one by Champion Meereo last time he visited and the Anubis-lookin’ motherfucker looked like he wanted to beat me to death with his ears. I learned more than I ever wanted to ‘bout latency, loss, channelized communications, electronic warfare, Shannon’s Law—well, their equivalent to it…”

Lewis cronched down an imported snack that was kinda-sorta the Gaoian version of a potato chip. Or a generic cheese noodle-thing. Something. Both. Whatever. Wozni and Meereo brought them over by the literal caseload and they fulfilled the Law of Cronch along with the Cheesy Addendum, so why not?

“So, assumin’ you can’t reliably remote control them, and absent wormhole comms like the kind we’re trying to kill then you absolutely cannot, then you still have the problem of a meaty dude inside a killer robot,” he said. “You’re also not thinking about reflexes, my dude. Or what you’d need to do to fix that.”

“So what are we working on?”

“Proof of concept, nothing more.”

“We’re proving a concept they’ll never go for?”

“I never said there were no applications to the technology did I? Bomb robots? Long-distance surgery? Fuck, I dunno. Tiny little miniature humanoid robots that can go down inside drains and unblock ‘em? If we can manage tactile feedback from the robot hands to the human hands then that opens up all kindsa shit.” Cronch. “It just ain’t gonna git rid of big scary dudes killin’ some poor other fuckin’ dudes for bein’ in the wrong place or on the wrong side.”

He swivelled his chair to check out the latest experimental run of what they were calling myopolymer. It was materials science at the frontier, a pretty damn decent attempt at duplicating the way human muscle worked in a synthetic format.

There were still a lot of bugs to work out, and a long way to go. In fact, it was occuring to Lewis that if carbon fiber was the best thing to make bones out of, humans would have evolved with carbon fiber bones.

Actually. He filed that idea away for later, and then it became a moot point anyway because his phone rang.

“Y’allo!”

“Mister Beverote, it’s Colonel Nadeau. I have some guests here who want to discuss something with you and the Fellowship. They and Darcy will be with you shortly”

“You got it, boss. We’ll clean up.”

“Thanks.” Nadeau could sound dryer than the fuckin’ Gobi when he wanted.

The Fellowship in fact kept their place scrupulously neat despite being snack fiends thanks to Merry and Pippin, the robot vacuum cleaner and the mobile waste paper basket. The former constantly patrolled the floor for bits, the other could zip under and neatly intercept any scrunched-up piece of trash tossed vaguely in his direction.

Both had little googly eyes on them.

Still, a fair warning like Nadeau’s was their cue to quickly wash and stack the coffee cups, clear their desks and close a few (dozen) browser tabs.

The visitors who followed Darcy into the room a minute or two after they were done making themselves presentable were… well, two of them were welcome and familiar: Wozni and Meereo, Lewis’ two favorite Gaoian geeks. Champion geeks, at that!

Behind them was a man Lewis didn’t recognize, and an armed security-lookin’ MP sorta dude. The man was getting on in years a bit, which just made him seem kinda… nondescript. Like, he was a handsome-enough lookin’ dude, but Lewis wasn’t sure he coulda picked the guy out of a lineup though at the same time he looked kinda familiar. His posture was kinda weary and tense, like the kinda guy who’d been at the bottom of the pile in life for a long-ass while.

Darcy made introductions. “Hugh, this is Lewis Beverote, Sergeant Lucy Beverote and Master Sergeant Lee Jun-Seok. They’re… kind of the experts on the sort of thing we discussed.”

“Pleased to meetcha,” Lewis said, shaking the dude’s hand politely. Hugh smiled and murmured a nervous hello as he shook hands.

With that formality out of the way, Lewis’ next priority was the fact that Wozni had brought snacks, a new brand he hadn’t seen before. Lewis wasn’t great at reading Gaori, but he thought the syllabic blocks, so weirdly similar to Korean hangul spelled out…

…Doritos?

…Fuck, they were. Same branding, same packaging. He’d only taken so long to recognize it ‘cuz he wasn’t expecting it. Wozni had a bag of Nava-flavoured Doritos.

With a totally-not-something-like-Daar tiny cartoon…thing…exploding out of the corner.

Meereo had… something else. It was a briefcase, sorta. Or at least a big box of equipment with a handle on the side. Lucy made room for him on her desk and he put it down gratefully: it sounded heavy as shit.

“…Before I ask about the doom-briefcase…nava Doritos?!”

“Very popular import!” Wozni chittered, and handed them out. “Very… what’s the word in English? Umami?”

“Dude, that ain’t even an English word.”

Darcy took a bag. “I’ve had them,” she said. “They’re nice!”

“I prefer the mishi root flavor,” Meereo said. “I’m told it tastes like horseradish? Whatever that is?”

Lee dug in his desk drawer. “You want some wasabi peas, then. Try one of these…”

A few minutes of friendly snack exchange ensued, before finally they acknowledged the giant technological elephant in the room.

“So, uh, now that the Law of Cronch has been satisfied…”

Wozni duck-nodded. “Right, right. The doom-briefcase. Meereo’s been dying to tell you all day, but I think Hugh should tell his story first.”

The nondescript guy gave a nervous smile to the room. “I… um… This is the first time I’ve left Earth. Hell, it’s the first time I’ve left a detention camp in Alaska in more than ten years… I was a Hierarchy biodrone, and an agent host. In fact, I still have the implants in my head, hence…” he turned and nodded at the guard.

Darcy saw their surprised looks and explained. “That briefcase contains, among other things, a wormhole suppression field generator that should keep Hierarchy forces from connecting to Hugh’s implants,” she said. “But it also contains something else, the Entity’s last parting gift to us before it vanished: A Hierarchy agent who claims to have defected to a rogue faction of peace-seekers known as the Cabal.”

“I’m here as… Substrate, they call it,” Hugh said. “Igraens need it to stay sane and live in a digital environment. Without the Substrate generated by folks like me…”

“Yeah, dude,” Lewis nodded kindly. “We’re briefed.”

“Right…” Hugh cleared his throat. “The point is… Um…”

“In exchange for some concessions, Hugh agreed to be Substrate for this captive so that we could interrogate him. During the interrogation, an intriguing possibility came to light,” Darcy explained.

“Namely?” Lucy asked.

“I’ll let him tell you himself.”

There was a moment of confused silence, and then a voice spoke from a speaker in the box. It had the slightly halting synthetic quality of a deepfake rather than the true natural rhythms of ordinary speech, and the speaker was clearly a kind of an afterthought after all the other tech crammed into that box. But still, it was clearly not any of the other people in the room.

“…Good evening, everyone. My name is Proximal,” it said. “And I would like to discuss the possibility of ending the Igraen people’s dependence on Substrate forever.”

++END CHAPTER 58++

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 59: “New Life”

Chapter 59: New Life

Date Point:16y7m2w AV
Folctha General Hospital, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Xiù had a Caesarian, in the end.

She needed it. Harrison just didn’t want to come out, and he was so overdue that when the obstetrician came to consider whether it was time to induce she took one look at the ultrasound and decided that surgery was the safer option.

Xiù hadn’t been terribly happy about the idea but, well…Harrison was a big baby. Bigger than Diego, even. And Xiù being small and narrow-hipped and punchy didn’t help at all…

So, Al and Julian held her hands and dried her tears, and were there with her while the surgeons worked their magic on the far side of a cloth screen.

The Singer had been completely awed by it all. She’d come over from Akyawentuo in anticipation of the birth and for the chance see human medicine again… though she’d got rather more than she bargained for.

When it all went wrong, she’d gone from barely-restrained frantic fear and grief, to confusion at how calm the healers were, to dawning delight, to… Well. She looked like she’d just seen a miracle. And she had, really.

So did Julian. So afterwards, in the recovery room, while Xiù slept fitfully through the drugs and the trauma and the sheer exhausting weight of transitioning from woman to mother… He sat by her side, stroking his thumb through her hair and watching her with a guilty look. It wasn’t often a woman got to see a man’s protective instincts so fiercely at war in his head.

He talked softly to the Singer while Al took care of her new stepson. “In years past…she would have died in childbirth. My son woulda killed her.”

“It’s not your fault,” Al reassured him. Harrison had announced his birth loud and clear at least, once he was out. In fact he’d hollered like he was trying to rattle the windows. He was a really healthy baby: Healthy color, nice and fat, all of a newborn’s instincts in place and working as intended. Okay, so Xiù was gonna have yet another scar to add to her collection, but Xiù had come to terms with her scars over the years. They were stories. She’d show it off with pride, once it healed.

“This is why motherhood is holy,” the Singer agreed. “Sometimes, it Takes everything. She is lucky: many others don’t live. One of my sisters, she died this way. I told her man then, I tell you now: You didn’t do this to her.”

“Feels like I did.” Julian sighed.

“Men. Always want to be responsible for everything.” The Singer trilled a soft laugh. “Just give thanks for your people’s medicine, steelbringer.”

“Absolutely. Fuck, they’re getting as big a donation as I can afford to give.”

Xiù woke with a groan. Al was honestly kinda impressed, and a little worried: she’d needed a big dose of painkillers during the operation, and shoulda been comatose. Instead, she was just… dozing. Lightly, too.

“Y’okay, Baobei?” Al asked her.

Xiù gave her a bleary look. “…Is it too early to ask for more meds? I don’t think these ones are working…”

“You already had the maximum dose, babe.”

“…Tā mā de…”

“God, I really hope Nofl’s wrong about the Cruezzir…” Julian agonized.

“Not like we coulda done anything about it anyway, babe,” Allison pointed out.

“Oh, that’d be just great…” Xiù grumbled. “…I am never swallowing ever again.”

The singer hooted and laughed, Allison giggled, and Julian went red in the face, though Allison felt a little relieved: The drugs were definitely having some effect on Xiù, as that was the kind of comment she’d usually be too embarrassed to make.

Allison, of course, prided herself on being nowhere near as inhibited. “Well, it’s kinda hard to avoid it when he’s all the way down your throat—”

“Al!” Julian objected, half laughing, half mortified.

“Humans fuck in strange ways,” The Singer opined. “Just use tongue!”

“This conversation took a wrong turn and I want off!”

The three women looked at each other and decided as one to accept their victory magnanimously. Laughing was plainly much too painful for Xiù right now in any case. Though as it happened, Julian would have been spared too many further blushes anyway thanks to the timely arrival of a nurse who knocked on the door to inform them that they had another nonhuman visitor.

Sure enough, it was Nofl.

“I believe the phrase is ‘burning the midnight oil,’” he chirped without any lead-in. “I’ve been up for days, dears, whole days investigating this! Fascinating! But on the whole, good news!”

“Nofl…” Julian said wearily, “I understand your enthusiasm and I genuinely appreciate everything you’ve done, but…”

“Fine, fine, I’ll tone it down. Because it’s you, my dear.” Nofl flashed his tight little smile, then as promised he dialled back the camp sass a few notches. “Anyway. Bad news first: All of you, Julian, Allison, Xiù, and both the babies, are indeed generating Cruezzir in your gut. Not surprising, considering how intimate you are. The good news is, you’ll all be fine. Even the babies. We ran simulations on the xenobiology college’s Prime Analytic engines–dear me we’re getting some novel use out of those lately–and long-term forecasting comes back with high confidence. As long as you do not undergo repeated psychological trauma or extreme physical stress, there should be no insurmountable complications.”

The three of them all breathed a huge sigh of relief all at once. Julian’s was perhaps the deepest and most relieved. “…Okay. That’s good. Yeah. Good. That’s… good to hear.”

“Yes. Unusual and unique, but you have unusual and unique friends with their own unusual and unique children, so that won’t be so bad now will it dears? But there are some long-term considerations you may not enjoy.”

“Here it comes…” Allison said, bracing herself.

“The first is that, unfortunately, Julian’s dependency on regenerative medicine appears to be incurable for now. There are some promising options we’re exploring, but right now… depriving you of the Cruezzir would be disruptive. Risky. And with that in mind, although we certainly can safely perform a microbiome transplant on you two—” he gestured to Allison and Xiù “—you’d just get infected again. There really isn’t a practical way to avoid that, or at least not one that you’d find remotely acceptable.”

He looked at Anna and Harrison. “…The babies—oh, where are my manners? Congratulations to you all!—The babies are very likely to be at the extreme ends of the probability curves I’m afraid, both due to the Cruezzir and their pedigree. That’s mostly a good thing. Your offspring are virtually guaranteed to be top specimens of your kind. But…”

“…But?”

“Well, things might get interesting during their growth spurts. They will probably be very, very hungry little children, to the point we should monitor it closely. That isn’t a serious problem and it’s absolutely manageable, but you should understand the likely consequences. I imagine nursing them will prove a serious immediate challenge, for example.”

The three of them shared a concerned look, before Julian spoke up. “Right, so…can they be cured?”

Nofl sighed. “I’m afraid not. For one it’s not a disease that can be cured so much as it is an adaptive reliance. There will almost certainly be lifelong dependency. It simply isn’t safe to perform a microbiome transplant on them right now, and by the time it would be, they’ll have completely adapted to its presence just as Julian did to its precursors…”

He saw their expressions, and switched into reassurance mode. “But that’s okay! Julian was healthy and happy for years and totally none the wiser, remember? The medicine itself isn’t the risk. It’s what you do with it that matters!”

“So… what?” Allison said. “What do we avoid? What do we stick to? Give us something to work with here, Nofl.”

“I would say… raise them normally. Both will inevitably turn out to be exceptional human specimens, I’m sure. And of course, if any of you repeatedly push yourselves beyond your physical or mental limits, you will find yourself adapting much faster in response. But that’s fine! Just don’t go, oh… splicing blue fur all over their bodies or anything insane like that.”

“Why on Earth would we–?” Xiù began with a bleary, confused frown.

“Don’t ask. It’s a complicated story.”

Julian raised an eyebrow in something approaching amusement. “…I think I kinda gotta ask. Fur?!”

“Yes. That’s all you’re getting from me, dear. The point is… The worst danger you face looks to be inconvenience and dependency, should you push yourselves too hard. Rather an improvement on your worst-case scenario, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would,” Xiù agreed. “Nofl… I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m in quite a lot of pain right now and I just want some peace and quiet, so–”

“I quite understand,” Nofl replied. “My warmest congratulations to all of you. I’ll forward a more thorough write-up of what to expect later. Good night, dears.”

He headed toward the door, but Allison felt compelled to add one last thing.

“Hey. Short stuff.”

Nofl turned. “Yes?”

“…Thanks.”

He bowed slightly. “You’re very welcome.”

And then he was gone.

Xiù sighed, shut her eyes, and tried to sleep some more. “So. That’s why the painkillers don’t work so well?”

“‘Fraid so, babe.”

“Great. Just… great.”

“Guess that explains why they didn’t work so well on me either…” Julian stood up. “I’ll talk to the doctors. Maybe there’s something else they can do…”

That left Allison and Xiù alone. Al bent down and kissed her girlfriend’s rather sweaty forehead. “Hey.”

“…Yeah?”

“Welcome to the club. Try to do it the easier way next time, dummy.”

Xiù laughed, then groaned and put her hand to her side. “…Please don’t do that.”

“‘Kay. But… please don’t ever scare me like that again?”

Xiù nodded, and closed her eyes. “…I’ll try,” she promised.

By the time Julian got back, she’d fallen asleep again.

Date Point:16y7m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space

Darcy

Substrate could be thought of like vitamins, if vitamins were a free-floating gas in the air. Its absence wouldn’t immediately harm or kill a datasophont… but prolonged deprivation had some truly devastating effects on their mental health.

It provided them with the very will to live. Without it, Igraens rapidly slipped into ennui and depression and ultimately self-terminated. Or occasionally they went the other way, flying into a manic, desperate frenzy, feverish to try and accomplish something, anything meaningful until they eventually suffered a total psychotic breakdown.

Understanding Substrate explained a lot about the Hierarchy.

Understanding it also made the Entity a lot weirder than it already was. The Entity lurked in the far corners of dataspace, or even in ordinary networks and storage devices. It seemed to have no need for Substrate at all. If the Igraens could copy that trick then they could in theory withdraw almost completely from the world of matter. They could build their infrastructure deep in interstellar space, out of the way, and withdraw into their so-called ‘Hegemony’ almost indefinitely.

Darcy wasn’t sure she liked the idea of just letting them do that after millions of years of genocide. Her sense of justice called out on behalf of trillions of murdered souls. But on the other hand, it also rescued the Allied nations—Allied species, even—from the specter of having to commit genocide themselves.

If, that was, the so-called Fellowship could figure out how the Entity pulled off that apparently unprecedented trick.

The problem was… the Entity had vanished.

That left only past observation to go on, at least until it showed up again. And Darcy, having been present for the act of neurological piracy that ultimately led to its creation, and having interviewed it and established a rapport over some time, was the human race’s best and only expert on the Entity.

The Igraen known as Proximal had insights she lacked. Indeed, he had insights that the Entity itself had lacked, or been unable to articulate.

“You obviously can’t simulate all the processes of an organic brain neuron-by-neuron,” he was explaining. “It would require vast processing resources, and be far too susceptible to latency, signal loss, far too bound up in sensory processing and a host of other things. It all has to be approximated, and not along the lines of different brain structures, but along the lines of… English doesn’t seem to have a word for it. The smallest practical components of a personality. If a mind was a language, then we calculate on the phoneme level.”

“Makes sense,” Lewis nodded. “We figured it was somethin’ like that, dude. I’m gonna go ahead and call ‘em an ‘egoneme.’”

“So there isn’t an… egoneme… for the will to live? That seems weird,” Lucy commented. Her specialty was metallurgy and materials science, Darcy knew, but honestly the people in this room knew a little bit about practically everything.

“Apparently there is. The Entity has it.”

“Nah, dude. Can’t possibly be that simple or y’all’d’ve figured it out by now. I mean, you’ve had millions of years! Give yourselves some credit,” Lewis said.

“One cannot deny observational reality. The Entity exists, independent of Substrate. Ergo, it has the thing we lack. Ergo, it exists.”

“Logical, but maybe that’s the problem right there,” Lee mused.

“Don’t go all Captain Kirk on me now, dude,” Lewis replied.

“Alright well… what makes the Entity so unique? Besides its freedom from Substrate?”

“Many things,” Proximal declared, morosely.

“It was originally formed from a human,” Darcy offered. She was mostly squicked out by that, not to mention appalled at what had happened to a young woman whose safety had been her responsibility… but at the same time, she was a little proud.

“Many datasophonts have been compiled from non-Igraen sources, most of them deathworlders. Your species may be exceptional, but I refuse to believe that you are unique.”

“And yet, as you said, here we are. You have a digital life-form that self-assembled out of the debris of a digitized human mind.”

“Maybe that’s it!” Lee chirped up. “Maybe the way you… compile? Is that the right word? Do you compile new Igraens?”

“We are generated by dynamically combining the… I suppose you would call it genetic, or a seed. Fundamental information that informs the growth and final outcome of the process. Two donors combine that information into a new “seed” which then flourishes into a sapient mind. The exact mechanics are… I don’t know them, any more than you know how your own nucleic acid resulted in you.”

“…Life as a dynamic terrain generator, God…”

“Well, maybe that process is flawed somehow?” Lee pressed. “Like… I dunno. Like, I know of genetic disorders in humans that do things like result in blindness because the retina can’t produce a vital protein.”

“Or a type one diabetic!” Lucy agreed.

“So we’re looking for a genetic flaw in the compiling process, then,” Lee concluded.

“Makes sense, if the Entity jerry-rigged itself together all haphazard-like,” Lewis agreed.

“There… may be a precedent,” Proximal said, slowly. Darcy looked down at the briefcase-sized box of hardware the Igraen was currently running and imprisoned in. He was deriving his Substrate from a voluntary human donor named Hugh Johnson, a man who’d had the misfortune to be a biodrone for a good third of his life to date.

He was hanging out in the corner, keeping to himself. But his presence meant that Proximal could be kept on a short leash. He was still a Hierarchy agent after all: not to be trusted.

“Precedent?” she asked.

“You’re aware of course that the Discarded—the Hunters—are Igraens themselves. The physical remains thereof, anyway. Specifically, they’re the bioengineered bodies we developed for warfare with an ancient species known as the V’Straki…”

“Who in turn evolved on Earth,” Lewis finished. “We know all this, dude. What’s this precedent?”

“Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why the Hunters are as they are? No empathy, no moral compass, just endless slavering hunger?”

“You’re suggesting… what? That the genetic flaw is related somehow?”

“Our ancient historical files suggest that when my species were still corporeal, we depended on a bacterium that we got from our food rather than growing naturally in our gut. Without it, we became psychotic. If what you are suggesting is accurate, then our dependence on Substrate may be that same deficiency but translated into our dataforms.”

“Sounds about as plausible as all the other dataspace weirdness…” Lee muttered.

“Well, it’s a place to start looking,” Lucy said. “But creating a datasophont is… I mean, that’s a few rungs up the tech ladder from where we are now. This is like asking the Wright Brothers to troubleshoot the design flaws in a Firebird.”

“Right now, this is just a proof of concept anyway,” Darcy informed them. “Senior figures in AEC are… squeamish… about the idea of a war to extinction.”

“How senior?” Lewis asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say. But they want to make an informed decision: Can we, or can we not, at least in theory permanently resolve the Igraen need for Substrate?”

Lewis, Lee and Lucy looked at each other and the kind of unspoken conversation that only happened between people who knew each other well and had worked together for a long time bounced back and forth across the room in a flurry of raised eyebrows, little shrugs and quizzical sets of eye and mouth.

Lewis brought the exchange to an end when he threw his hands up in surrender. “…I guess? I mean, it’s gotta be possible somehow. We just… like, there’s no way we could put a timetable on that, dude.”

“I’ll pass that along,” Darcy said. “Satisfied, Proximal?”

“Yes. Thank you. All of you.”

“Back to Alaska, then. Sorry, Hugh.”

The put-upon Substrate donor just shrugged ruefully and stood up. “Thanks for the vacation, I guess.”

“Dude, anytime,” Lewis promised him. “Guess this is gonna be a whole project, huh?”

“Hope so. It was… nice… to see something new.”

Darcy watched him go with helpless sympathy, but Lewis made a disgusted noise as soon as he was gone.

“Darcy. Dude. Why the fuck can’t we do something for that poor bastard? The Corti fuckin’ brought a woman back from the dead, can’t they do something for him?”

“His implant literally replaced part of his brain stem,” Darcy said, softly. Lewis went very still, and very quiet.

“…Well… Shit.”

“Yeah.” Darcy breathed heavily, then turned a weak smile on the Fellowship. “So, let’s make it matter. Yes?”

“Dude. You got it.”

Darcy left their workshop in a mixed mood.

Date Point: 16y7m2w4d AV
Coreward Marches, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Shipmatriarch Wrythwynw

“Two ships?”

“Yes, Matriarch. The One-Fang capital ship Blazing Rage and the Stoneback assault transport Sword of a Poet, accompanied by four Voidripper strike fighters.”

“‘Sword of a poet?’ That seems strangely… well, poetic, compared to the others.”

“I gather it’s a Clan thing, Matriarch. Half their ships are like that. The others are…”

Wrythwynw considered the other ships in her squadron. The Coreward Marches fleet operated in groups of seven ships of identical class and loadout. The shewmei-class was designed for rapid response: they were fast, quite capable of warping to any of the hundreds of outposts, stations, mines and colonies in the Marches as soon as Fleet Command received a distress call…. And when they arrived, they said hello with a torrent of rapid-fire kinetic weapons that could chew the target’s shields down in moments and pulverize the ship underneath.

Never let it be said that the Kwmbwrw hadn’t watched and learned from the way Deathworlders had changed space combat. No matter the Grandmatriarch’s opinions on the matter, the Fleet knew a good thing when they saw it.

Now, the problem was that the Hunters adapted too. They struck, they raided, they took their slaves, and they fled at the first sign of incoming Fleet assets. Fleet losses were down dramatically on where they’d been just a few years before, which the Grandmatriarchs took as a win… but while civilian losses had dipped, they hadn’t dipped nearly enough.

Oh, yes, the Marches were big enough that the average facility could reasonably expect to never be raided. Most hadn’t. But the ones that did were…

…Slaughterhouses.

Wrythwynw had seen the blood and bodies herself. And so far, she’d been powerless to avenge the dead. The Gao claimed to have a counter, but until just a few days ago the Grandmatriarchs had forbidden them from entering the Kwmbwrw Great Houses’ territory.

They did anyway, but only occasionally, in service to their own goals. Except, something had finally changed at the highest political level. And now…

Now they had two Deathworlder ships alongside them.

Rather than being intimidated by that label, Wrythwynw found she was eager to see them in action.

They were responding to a distress call from a mining operation in a nameless Minor-3000 system, a small and relatively cool fully convective star known only by its coordinates within a catalog volume. The system had only two planetoids, neither very large, both airless, and relevant only thanks to their high metallicity. They were both dotted with dozens of automated mining stations, and a control station with a population of a thousand or so orbited the inner planetoid: it was from this that the latest cry of alarm had come.

The Gaoian ships were marginally slower than the Shewmeis, but apparently equipped with something called megalight drones: Probes with a top speed in excess of a million times the speed of light. The plan, therefore, was for them to encircle the distressed system. If the Hunters did what they usually did and bolted away from the incoming response force, then the Gaoians would intercept them, the megalight probe would drop a gravity spike, and from there the combined Kwmbwrw and Gao fleet would swoop in…

…And, insanely, board the Hunters.

That was the part Wrythwynw’s fleet just wasn’t equipped for. In fact, the very notion was simply crazy. But the Stoneback “First Fang” warriors had done it before, they claimed.

Wrythwynw was hopefully about to see them back that claim in person.

Sure enough, the Hunters scared up as soon as the fleet came within long-distance sensor range of the target system. The leading edge of their collective warp disruption washed through the area, and the Hunters went to warp an impressively quick interval later. A half-dozen Ri’ at most.

Swift as the Shewmei-class was, the Hunters were just a little faster. Always just a little faster, suggesting their true top speed far outstripped the Kwmbwrw ships but that they preferred to keep the exact limits unknown.

They were not, however, faster than the megalight probes.

The probes weren’t subtle. They slammed through the substance of spacetime with a kind of straining ferocity, raising the equivalent of a shockwave. Time and distance in the light-seconds around them splashed and churned in strange ways, as though a whole fleet of much larger ships was coming through.

The Hunters promptly doubled their speed, easily outstripping what the Shewmei were capable of, but it was a futile effort. The gap narrowed, vanished, and then the probes caught them and spiked them.

The intense superluminal pursuit immediately dropped back into the world of normal inertia. The Shewmei caught up in minutes, blinked down to sublight and arrived within the immediate volume with their weapons already firing a hail of kinetic rounds ahead of them.

This part had been carefully coordinated with the Gao. There was only the one broodship, and its weapon emplacements sublimed into flashes of plasma, its kinetic drives became clouds of torn shrapnel, and its sensor clusters were ripped off the hull… but the core of the ship, the reactors and pressure vessels, remained intact.

The five swarmships escorting it were slapped into vengeful oblivion. Crippled, unescorted and vulnerable, the Broodship drifted and tumbled in the void. Ordinarily, Wrythwynw would have ordered it destroyed as a mercy to the poor Kwmbwrw trapped on board.

The Blazing Rage and Sword of a Poet dropped into sublight right on top of it. Together they wove a forcefield cage around the stricken Broodship, peeled it open, held it still… and the Sword pushed its sharp shovel nose into the Broodship’s underbelly.

Wrythwynw listened to the Gaoian communications as the boarding action proceeded. She expected to hear shouting, yelling, war cries and frantic violence.

What she heard was tersely professional at worst, and mostly… playful? The Stonebacks sounded almost like they were having fun.

A bare handful of Ri’ after the boarding action begun, the Sword hailed Wrythwynw’s flagship with a certain degree of well-earned smug humor. Shipfather Orno, missing half an ear and with four gold-plated titanium fangs flashing in his mouth, panted happily at her with a copious splash of blood covering his armor.

“Fleetmatriarch, we’re done wrasslin’ with our playmates here. Mosta them broke pretty easy.”

“The miners?” Wrythnwynw asked, taking refuge in professional concern for the mission.

“We got to ‘em right before the greasy fucks started up their, uh, abattoir operations. We’re checkin’ em for injuries or any nasty surprises. Uh…might need some help calmin’ ‘em down.”

“…Help?”

“I’m a pretty scary ‘Back at the best’a times, Fleetmatriarch. Lotta my Brothers’re the same. A lotta these guys are convinced we’re gonna eat ‘em instead.”

“We’ll send over medical shuttles immediately,” Wrythwynw said, and gestured to put her words into action. Her junior officers were gratifyingly swift to make it happen.

When the footage from the medics came back a while later, she needed a moment to compose herself. There were bits of Hunter everywhere. Crumpled, torn piles of sickly white flesh, diseased cybernetics and off-color blood and organs lined the deck, walls, and even ceiling in places. It was…

…Glorious.

She’d been fighting the Hunters her whole career, and to see them humiliated so totally almost gave her a maniacal fit of the giggles.

She contacted Orno again to congratulate him, keeping a strained lid on her jubilation. Somewhere in the back of her mind was the mild concern that she should be disturbed by the violence, but the truth was that it was just so sweet to see the old enemy dealt with like this.

Father Orno flashed a truly fearsome tooth-laden grin when she said as much. “Oh, we ain’t even close to th’ bestest First Fang’s got to offer. Mosta the ‘Backs here are reservists. When Alpha company an’ those HEAT Brothers git together an’ play…it’s fuckin’ beautiful.”

“…Reservists?”

“I’m a bouncer ‘fer my normal job!”

So. That was the nature of their allies. For a moment, Wrythwynw entertained the troubled thought that maybe Henenwgwyr had been right about the Gao after all. There was simply no way the Hunters would stand in the face of this for long, and once they were gone… what then?

She shrugged the thought off. The Gao were notoriously loyal. Win their friendship, and it was yours for life. However terrible the carnage they could wreak—and revel in—might be, these Gao were no threat to Wrythwynw and her people.

But still…

“What drives you to fight so fiercely?” she asked.

She had to turn on the translation cues to get a sense of what the array of little facial emotes that flashed across his face meant. There was a healthy dose of honest confusion in there, among others. As though the answer was as obvious as the scarred nose on the end of his snout. “…Same reason you do, prol’ly,” he replied. “I got folks ‘ta protect. S’why I’m a bouncer, too.”

…Good, then.

Their conversation was suspended while the transfer of survivors and extraction of intelligence concluded. Finally, the Blazing Rage put an end to the whole interlude by pulverizing the Broodship and consigning it and the remains of its Hunters to the endless vacuum.

Wrythwynw and Orno traded one last set of pleasantries before they parted ways. The Gaoians remained in their home territory and had used jump drives to the Marches Fleet’s aid. Once the two ships and their voidripper escort were gone, Wrythwynw retired to her ready room to consider the future. What would life look like for the Kwmbwrw if the Hunters became nothing more than a scary story from the history books?

…Bright. Hopeful. Clean.

She composed a message to her superiors to report how successful the operation had been. And above all she fervently hoped that this new streak of actually listening would last.

They were long overdue a change.

Date Point: 16y7m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

The Cruezzir thing was turning out to have a silver lining. In fact… Xiù had to admit, right at the moment, she was grateful for it.

First, the surgical wound from her C-section was gone. It had sealed itself overnight, and by the end of the second day it had healed leaving hardly any scar to speak of.

She felt a little mixed about that. Her scars were her story; to lose the one that marked the birth of her son was… it felt uncomfortably like erasing a chapter. Except, of course, that there was no erasing Harrison himself.

Nor would she ever want to.

Harrison Li Chang Etsicitty. It rolled off the tongue. Anna Belle Buehler Etsicitty was a nice name too, but… oh, she was allowed to have a favorite.

Even if he was nowhere near as, uh, cooperative a baby as his half-sister. But to be fair, Anna did have a two-month head start and they’d figured out what made her tick.

The second silver lining was that with two infants to look after, and with Xiù recovering from surgery, things should have been tough. Instead, the surgical recovery had happened almost overnight, Xiù was finding she got plenty of rest from cat-naps, and she had two fit, healthy and loving partners to help her. All three of them were strong, full of energy, eager…

So, give another tick to the Cruezzir.

There was an ethical problem with regard to feeding. So Xiù’s body was now flooded with an alien regenerative medicine. That meant probably her milk was, too. Which would have precluded breastfeeding, except Harrison’s tiny frame was even more pickled in Cruezzir than his parents’, and Anna had got a healthy dose from Allison as well before Nofl’s diagnosis.

So. They were raising two babies with chronic Cruezzir Gut. That being the case, the best guess Nofl, the paediatricians or anybody else could go with was that breastfeeding probably wouldn’t do them any harm, while switching to formula might deprive them with unknowable consequences.

So, that just left worrying about what it would do to the pair. So far, they seemed normal. Big, strong, healthy and energetic to be sure, but not abnormally so. But long term? Throughout their lives? If they couldn’t one day have it cured for whatever reason, then that raised questions about their own ability to raise a family and lead a normal life.

It was… a bit early maybe to start worrying about grandchildren. But Al and Xiù had got their cases of Cruezzir Gut off Julian pretty easily, and if Harrison was stuck with the condition for life, then…

…Well. There was no sense in worrying about what couldn’t be dealt with. Worry about it when it could be.

For now…

For now, Xiù got to appreciate the look in her father’s eyes as he rocked his grandson gently and cooed happily to him in Mandarin… And chatted to Julian in Mandarin, too.

It wasn’t even completely terrible Mandarin, either. Julian learned pretty fast. Apparently he’d been doing audiobooks and Pimsleur tracks on his lighter Slab days. Whatever worked! Xiù doubted he’d ever get the tones exactly right, but that was okay, and it made her parents happy.

They’d even started bragging up their “big strong handsome son-in-law” to their varied and numerous social circles. In those groups, there was no higher form of acceptance. And in the kitchen, Allison was getting an actual conversation from Meili Chang as they made lunch, rather than tuition. Which didn’t sound like a breakthrough, but it really was.

All in all, life was good. So for now, the Cruezzir was not a problem. Xiù was just enjoying being made a fuss of and basking in being a mother now.

Besides, watching her mom try to wrap her head around the Singer was interesting. Watching the Singer try to wrap her head around her mom, doubly so. They were… Different.

Take one elderly first-generation Chinese-Canadian woman with strongly traditional values, and put her in the same room as her daughter’s girlfriend and an inquisitive, friendly iron-age alien gorilla whose idea of modesty didn’t extend further than a clean loincloth. It was maybe a little unfair to enjoy how out of her depth she was… but Xiù wasn’t above enjoying it, even though she loved her parents dearly.

And the Singer was having a blast, learning about human cooking. Ten’Gewek really just cooked over an open fire or on hot rocks. The height of their haute cuisine was a stew cooked in an earthenware pot.

Steamed buns were fascinating. And nobody anywhere on any world could make them like Xiù’s mom.

It was food that gave the two something to connect over. Meili loved to cook, and the Singer, being Ten’Gewek, loved to eat. In the face of that happy convergence, mutual affection became practically inevitable. Xiù knew acceptance had been achieved when her mom decided it was time to comb out the Singer’s blaze-orange-red crest. The Singer wasn’t complaining.

Of course it was too good to last. Julian’s phone pinged shortly after midday, and his shoulders sagged heavily when he thumbed it into life.

“Dammit. I’ve been summoned to the ambassador,” he grumbled.

“Oh, what? Come on!” Allison objected. “I thought you had parental leave?”

“Subject to the demands of the office,” Julian sighed. He shrugged helplessly, sprang to his feet and vanished upstairs to change into his business clothes.

“That’s just not fair…” Al lamented.

“He’s a Federal officeholder, confirmed by the Senate and everything, remember? He doesn’t get to say no,” Xiù reminded her, though her heart wasn’t in it. She felt the same way.

“I know, I know…” Allison stood too, and slipped through into the kitchen where Xiù heard her explain where he was going and asking if some lunch could be set aside in the stasis fridge.

Xiù stood too, and waited at the bottom of the stairs. Julian didn’t need long to change and to briefly place his hair and a comb near one another: She made sure they got properly acquainted, and straightened his tie.

“Bǎobèi…” she fussed at him as she cleaned him up. “You’re such a handsome man, and you’re so much better-looking when you actually bother to clean up. You could, you know… make an effort?”

“Yeah, but then I wouldn’t get this little farewell.”

Despite herself, Xiù smiled. “…Okay. That’s devious. I approve.”

He chuckled, kissed her, kissed Allison, shook Papa’s hand, got a hug from Mama, and headed for the door. “I’ll pick the boys up from school on the way home, if I can,” he promised, then stopped dead in the doorway as he opened it.

“…Uh… I think this one might be for you, Baobei.”

Date Point: 16y7m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ambassador Chris Rockefeller

Rockefeller had a game he liked to play with himself when thinking about the people he encountered. He tried to summarize their personalities as a simple object.

Some people were slippery and twisty, like an oiled rope. Others were as solid and straightforward as a concrete block, as transparent and brittle as glass, or as forceful as a wrecking ball. It was all a gross oversimplification, but it worked as a handy mnemonic for approaching his job.

In that sense, he thought of Julian Etsicitty as a rubber ball. A well-used racquetball maybe: still tough and resilient, despite some scuffs and marks on the surface, and capable of bouncing back no matter how hard he got clobbered.

The analogy’s shortcoming was that racquetballs were mass-produced: any one was just like any other. There wasn’t really a type of racquetball that stood head and shoulders above its peers like Julian did.

And that was a problem, because Julian was not a prideful man. He didn’t have the swaggering ego to really be comfortable with his singular status, let alone the recent rude introduction to just how unique he truly was. So far, he seemed to be handling it all okay… But for the first time since they’d first met, Rockefeller was beginning to wonder if there might not be a fragile core somewhere deep inside that ball.

“It’s just…fuck man, how does a guy even process something like that?”

“I couldn’t say,” Rockefeller replied honestly. “Personally, my work has always been my foundation. But for you, your foundation is your being, I’d daresay. Body and soul.”

“Yeah, and now I find out that it’s not all even really mine.”

Rockefeller stopped that train of thought dead in its tracks. “Julian? Bullshit. I don’t care about any of the rest. I have never seen anyone work harder for their goals than you or your own. That matters more than any leg up you might have got. Even if it’s a hell of an advantage.”

“Still–”

“Julian. I don’t care what hand a man is dealt. I care how he plays his hand.”

He let that thought do its work for a second, and sat back in his chair to cross one leg comfortably over the other. He wasn’t at his desk, this wasn’t the time for desks. Instead they were using the couch and armchair in his office to talk.

“A bad hand played well will get you much further than a good hand played badly. You were dealt about the best hand that a man can get, but you are playing it like the precious gift that it is. That’s important. And it’s all you. Most men given half the advantage you were given squander it before they’re even properly men. They never grow out of being the high school quarterback, and end up dying at fifty from lung cancer and chronic injuries. You’re playing the game better than them all, and it isn’t because you were born with the winning hand. There’s no such thing.”

Julian thought on that, and eventually nodded. There was a very grateful look in those almost beetle-black eyes of his. “I…thank you. I’m… learning that I’m lucky in the people in my life, too.”

“Karma. We’re lucky to know you as well. Anyway. I know this, ah, ‘revelation’ we’ll say, it won’t be done with you for a while. I know all of that will take a while to process…but I really need the Superman version of you right now, the one who can earn the respect of superhuman cavemonkeys and teach them the fundaments of civilization. I don’t much need the uncertain Clark Kent who is questioning his own shadow. Can you do something for me?”

“I don’t mean any disrespect, but with Xiù just had a C-section and everything, I…”

“Julian, I wouldn’t pull you away from that unless something of literally galactic importance demanded it,” Rockefeller assured him. “…Which it does. The talks with the Kwmbwrw finally got past the impasse. The war council is going ahead.”

“…Jeez.”

“Yeah. We might actually be in the final quarter of the game now.”

Some of Julian’s usual humor crept back in. “Rugby? Can we use a rugby analogy this time?”

“No! Football, like God intended it!” Rockefeller snorted. “Honestly, I think living in an ostensibly British colony is rubbing off on you.”

“You ever play rugby? It’s a rough sport…but anyway. War council.”

“Yes. A major strategic planning session involving heads of state from all over the Dominion and related species, factions… The guest list is a little complicated, but Yan Given-Man and his niece are invited. As are yourself and Professor Hurt.”

“…Yan. As in, Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge.”

“I told you, the talks with the Kwmbwrw made real progress. They’re even prepared to accept the Ten’Gewek’s status as sapient life.”

“What the hell changed?”

“One of their respected Fleet Matriarchs stood up and told the Grandmatriarchs to pull their heads out of their… well. The point is, Henenwegir, or… oh, Hell, I can never pronounce her name. She finally had a vote go against her. I think a lot of the other Houses were starting to get fed up with her intransigence.” Rockefeller smiled slightly. “So, now the Protectorate status of the Ten’Gewek looks set to go ahead and be formally recognized by the Dominion Security Council. Which means they get a seat at the war council.”

“That’s good…though, who exactly is protecting the Protectorate? Did that ever get resolved?”

“The Clans of the Gao have taken primary responsibility. We’re doing the operational work. It’s complicated, but it was felt that the Great Father was in the best position to protect them from the vagaries of representative governments. He…really likes them, and he’s probably going to be the Great Father for a very, very long time, so… Anyway. You, my friend, may one day find yourself in the Great Father’s employ instead of mine. But that’s for later. For now, the point is they’re safe.”

“And they’re attending. As a Protectorate. Ambassador, that means…”

“Daar and Yan talked, and Yan insisted they not be left aside like children. So the SOR are trialling their first Ten’Gewek JETS candidates.”

“…Oh God. That’s why Ferd’s been so excited, isn’t it? When did this all happen?!”

“The last couple of weeks. You’ve been otherwise preoccupied.”

“…Thanks. I guess that woulda been a lot to drop on me on top of everything else. So… when is this happening?”

“Soon. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to jump over to Akyawentuo on the morning cycle. And of course, that means you’ll be there for as long as you’re there. If Yan’s away at the Lodge…”

Julian bore the bad news with good grace, at least. “Well…Okay. It has to be done. I get it.”

“I appreciate it.” Rockefeller glanced up at the wall clock. “And I won’t keep you. I’m sure you want to spend as much time as possible with your family.”

“Thanks.” Julian stood up. “I’ll keep in touch.”

Rockefeller nodded, and with that the big man was gone: understandably eager to get back to his newborn son, his two-month old daughter, his partners, his foster sons and his own worries.

Still. He’d probably be grateful for having something to do, in time. Rockefeller was a big believer in the healing power of honest work. In Julian’s case? Well. Honest work didn’t come much more honest than living with the Ten’Gewek. And he was only a text message and a quick jump away, making the lightyears feel like a quick jaunt down to the corner drug store.

Yes. Get him back in the mud and the sweat of his work, let his partners recover. Let them find their routine again. That, more than anything, was what the big woodsman really needed.

He was a racquetball: he needed a wall to bounce back against.

Date Point: 16y7m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Maybe it was hormones. Maybe it was the Cruezzir… Maybe it was learning that one of her oldest friends was dying. Either way, try as she might, Xiù couldn’t quite pull herself together.

Her parents had taken Allison and the babies to the park to give her some time alone with Yulna, but really she would have preferred to have Allison there at her side. Or Julian. Or preferably both. Dealing with this without either of them was…

…Was…

“Shoo, it’s okay.” Yulna cooed gently. They were cuddled up affectionately, Gaoian-style, two Females—two Sisters—sharing each other’s company. But Yulna was not in a good way at all.

Apparently her tumors had been held back for years by Gaoian medical science, suppressed to the point where nobody had even been able to smell them until fairly recently. Now though, the dam had burst. They were spreading and growing at an accelerating pace, and she had weeks at most.

Already, one eye was silvery and blind, and her left ear was lumpy and misshapen. She had dressings on the side of her neck, her elbow, and covering her right paw, and even to Xiù’s comparatively numb human nose she smelled… wrong. Sick.

“It’s not okay! How can you say it’s okay? It’s…” Xiù didn’t even know how to finish the sentence. Yulna just keened softly and stroked her hair.

“I’m sorry to hurt you like this. Now of all times…” she sighed. “You should be celebrating. You’re Mother Shoo, now. And what a baby! I’m glad cubs aren’t that big!”

Despite herself, Xiù smiled. “He’s…demanding. Always hungry.”

“That’s a newborn for you,” Yulna chittered, then coughed and her ears tweaked sideways painfully for a second. The concerned noise that dragged itself out of Xiù’s chest was almost a keen in its own right. Certainly the human equivalent. Yulna waved it off.

“…You know… it’s funny,” she said, and cleared her throat to get some of the gravel out. “The last twenty years have been a gift. I was convinced I’d die in that damn lab. You’d think I’d be able to accept this with wisdom and grace and look at the time I’ve had as a blessing… But all I can think is, I wish I had another twenty… or at least that it didn’t hurt so much.”

Raw grief laid its weight on every inch of Xiù’s body. She hugged as tight as she dared.

“…I wish I could do something…” she complained bitterly.

“You did, my dear Sister. You really did,” Yulna stroked her back reassuringly. “You gave me a lifetime. I know what I just said, but… but what I had was all thanks to you. And I am grateful for it.”

Xiù sat up and wiped her tears. Finally, at least, she felt like she’d shed them all for now. There’d be more, but…

“You deserve more,” she said.

“You know better than most that life doesn’t give us what we deserve,” Yulna replied. “You just have to cherish what it does give you.”

“Yeah.” Xiù sighed heavily, then reached over for a tissue from the box behind the couch, sniffled into it, and tucked it away before rubbing on some hand sanitizer. The last thing she wanted to do right now was add to Yulna’s health woes with some random Earthling microbe.

And for all she knew, the whole Cruezzir thing could just make the Mother-Supreme’s tumors worse, not better.

“So…this feels wrong even asking, but…”

“Who comes after me?”

“No. Well… I mean, I can kinda guess.” Xiù shook her head “…I was gonna ask… How many of us are left? From that lab, I mean.”

“…Just you and Myun, soon.” Yulna keened softly. “The war took so many of them.”

That same feeling of weight dropped on Xiù again. She sagged heavily into the couch and curled up a little. They’d been a dozen, once. She hadn’t learned half her cellmates’ names before they scattered to the winds back on Gao, but she’d always thought she’d get to meet them again.

She set the thought aside. “So you’re passing the reins to Naydra?”

“Let’s just say I doubt the election will be close-fought.” Yulna chittered again, without the cough this time. At least her sense of humor was intact. “She’s ready. She doesn’t think she is, but she is. More so than I ever was, at least.”

“Is it something you can be ready for?”

“She’s been doing it for years anyway, really. The titles will feel heavier than they really are.”

“…Titles?”

Yulna duck-nodded. “Mother-Supreme, Mother-Consort, and in all likelihood, Great Mother… I imagine you can understand the weight of that word a little more, now.”

“…Yeah.” Xiù admitted. “Sort of. Harrison needed a C-section.”

“Surgical delivery? You’re no less of a mother for that, Shoo. You bore and made a life, and he’s yours to nurture. You’re carrying the future now. Gyotin calls it ’sacred‘ and… well, he’s right.”

“Yeah… “

“…She’ll need a friend, you know. It’s… lonely. And I think you and she have a lot in common.” Yulna sighed, rested her forehead against Xiù’s, and then disentangled herself from their hug and rose to her feet with a pained noise. “I’ll be announcing my retirement tomorrow morning. I’d rather shed some burdens than try to bear them to the end. And then I’m going home.”

“Home?”

“Wi Kao. The gift of knowing the manner of your death is that you may choose the details. I intend to die where I was born, where I became a Sister, a Mother… Where I learned to cook…”

Her ear flicked mischievously, because there was nothing that could ever quite dampen the mischief in the Gaoian soul. Especially not where food was involved. Xiù giggled, stood up too, and angled her head toward the kitchen. “…Well, now you mention it… I do have dinner to prepare…”

“I imagine you must cook a lot, with so many mouths to feed! Especially that big strapping male you’ve snagged!”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t believe how much Allison puts away. I don’t know how she does it!” Xiù replied. Quite naturally and comfortably they fell into a routine they’d done many times before, in another kitchen, at another time. Together they managed to cook up a storm. Yulna had perfected the Gaoian version of pàomó—Xiù thought of it with a mental giggle as ‘Gàomó’—some years ago, and Xiù made a damn decent pork peshorky. A porkshorky.

Little word games like that had been the source of a lot of amusement as she struggled to learn Gaori during her abduction and stay on Gao. Bouncing the puns back and forth between them, just for a while, they managed to capture a slice of Old Times that Yulna clearly and desperately needed.

It got even better when Julian, Tristan and Ramsey showed up. Xiù was learning that there was nothing quite as weirdly fulfilling as happy boys who couldn’t talk because they were too busy eating.

For Yulna, clearly, it was a pleasure she’d needed to revisit, even just the once. She revelled in it, and settled happily into an evening of just being… well… a mother.

And at long last, Xiù understood why that was so precious.

Date Point: 16y7m3w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ferd Given-Man

The stories Yan, The Singer, and Vemik Sky-Thinker had shared really hadn’t been big enough. At the time, Ferd had thought they were telling the tale bigger. But now he saw they’d actually left out a lot. Maybe they thought nobody would believe them.

Ferd wouldn’t have.

The ‘jump array’ had been, almost disappointingly, exactly like he’d imagined. In some tiny snap of time, they were gone from their home-world, and in someplace…

Bright, too bright. Tasted too clean. And the ‘gravity’ was weaker.

The first trial in their mission was meeting a small, furry creature with lively ears. He looked a bit like Daar…different fur, though. This was some soft and shiny black-and-white coat he had instead of Daar’s heavy shaggy pelt. Definitely a he, too; the air around him had the right sharp taste, but it was only barely there. Not like Daar, who tasted at least as strong as Yan.

The small man was wearing clothes like a human’s, too. One of those funny “shirt” things, and a wide blue strap tied around his neck. And a shiny steel thing on his chest with writing on it.

Ferd wasn’t so good at sky-people writing yet, but he was learning fast and he at least recognized those as Engwish signs. They said…well, ‘officer’ was there and he knew that was an important word. He wasn’t sure what “cus-toms and im-mig-ration” were though.

The Singer had come with them. She went on ahead, showed the little furry Gao one of those paper things. He read it, banged a thing down on it, and waved her through with friendly words like they’d done this before. The Singer had come to this other-world a few times, Ferd knew.

He dug in his bag for the papers Wild had given him. They were busy with pictures and words, and Ferd and his party had inked their thumbs and left a mark on the paper for some reason.

“Hello, welcome to Folctha. Documents, please.”

“Uh… these?”

“Thank you!” The Gao took them, sniffed the four men in front of him, then read the papers. “This is your first visit?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Reason for your visit?” The small Gaoian busied himself doing…something…with the folded paper-thing, and peppered them with questions.

Ferd wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but he thought an honest answer was best. “We are here to fetch things for ‘Sarge-ent’ Wild.”

“Ah, business, then. Is Folctha your final destination?” More flicking through documents, and pressing strange buttons on the ‘plas-tic’ board in front of him.

“Uhh…?”

The Gao tilted his ears. “…Will you be going somewhere else? Or just here, then home?”

“Just here, then home.”

“And how long will you be here?”

“Plan is, we go back next time ar-ray thing, um… jumps.”

“Late afternoon tomorrow, then.” The Gaoian tilted his head briefly. “Here, that means you should be back when the sun is halfway between noon and sunset.”

“Thank you,” Ferd said politely. He could read his watch just fine, but the Gaoian was trying to be Helpful, so…

“No problem.” the officer handed the papers back. They had new marks on them. “Enjoy your stay! Next please…”

Ferd squeezed between the clear-walled barriers and found himself waiting on the other side for his men to do…whatever it was they were doing.

It was then that he noticed something. There were sky-people above them, not making much sound…and he could only just see them now that he was on the other side of the clear wall.

It was actually a very well-planned trap, Ferd could see. One or two of the men had beasts beside them, fast-looking things with big teeth. They looked at him with passing interest… then looked away, watching everybody and everything.

Ferd relaxed. Not a trap for him, then. A trap for anyone who made trouble. This was the edge of a sky-tribe’s land, and they were protecting it. Smart. Strong.

They eventually followed the big colored signs towards the way out. There were a lot of very strange sky-people. Most were Humans, tall and short, big and small, fair and dark. Some had steel in their face, or marks in their skin, or hair in strange colors. Some were pathetically weak, some respectably strong, if still too small. Most were…

A tall blue thing that Ferd first thought was a beast stopped and talked with one of the humans. It had a magic speaking-stone around its neck, Ferd could see. A ways down the smooth stone path he saw a sky-person like a very big fat human with four arms and no ears waving and calling to the crowd, trying to get their attention. Most ignored him, but one stopped and spoke with him, then hopped up in a nearby chair. The big four-armed one took up brushes and rags and started to clean the human’s shoes.

It was too much to take in. Ferd was used to forests, and listening to the tiny details. He was used to licking the air for the subtle taste of Werne, watching the shadows for the small things out of place. Here, everything was loud, and big, and everywhere!

No wonder Wild had sent them here.

“Godshit.”

“What do we do, Ferd?” That was Oki, from Meb Given-Man’s tribe. He was always one to focus on the task at hand.

Ferd considered. A part of him wanted suddenly to explore everything despite his nerves, but the other part thought it would be bad if he failed this mission; how would he ever fuck beautiful maidens again if he couldn’t do something little like this? How could he earn a tribe?!

Well. First things first. They needed a safe place to come back to as they…well, not raided exactly. Explored. Yes. Much better sounding.

“…We should find this ‘hotel’ thing.”

The problem was, he had no idea where he was, or where anything else was. He had a map, but…

No matter which way up he turned it, it didn’t make a lot of sense. Everything was straight lines. There was only one thing for a man to do when he was lost like that: get up high, and find the sun.

Fortunately, everything looked pretty easy to climb. Maybe that big steel pole? No. It looked small and bendy.

A nearby… hut? A big stone hut. It got his attention by having plenty of handholds and interesting bits a man could grab. There were square baked red stones on the outside: “bricks,” he vaguely remembered. They were nicely rough and grippy, but his fingers were much too big to fit between the little gaps where the hard white mud had joined them.

No matter, he had a strong grip and could break through if he had to…but if he used all four hands carefully, he could probably avoid doing that. Mostly.

Well, that and the gravity was lighter here. Maybe if he jumped—

He nearly missed and fell. The gravity was much lighter, and he went a tail-length higher than he’d aimed for. Down below, humans scattered and shouted as he hit the wall with an “oof!” and just about managed to grab onto a wide stone slab under some glass.

Once he’d stuck himself to the side of the hut, he couldn’t help but grin and trill stupidly. That was fun! And now that he was off the ground, the rest of the way up was easy!

Pretty soon he was at the top, standing on a pointy roof made of thin grey stones. There was another metal pole, this one with a colorful hide in blue, white and red flapping in the breeze at the top, and he wrapped his tail around it for balance.

Cloth, actually. He remembered that word. It was pretty though! He wondered if he might have enough ‘mun-ee’ after all this to trade for one himself!

…No, he couldn’t do that. It wasn’t his money to Give.

Nomuk shouted at him from below. “Can you see where we are?”

Ferd found the sun easily enough. It was… different. Bigger in the sky, and a different color.

“We really are on a different world…” he muttered, looking around and comparing what he saw to the map.

There was a green area the shape of a werne haunch over there… and the river was that way… and the sun was over there… which meant…

Good. He knew where the top of the world was now. And so if they went that way between the huts, then turned left and went to that spiky hut over there with the green space around it…

He had a plan. Satisfied, he rolled the map back up and put it in his pouch just as a Human appeared out of a door in the front of the hut he’d climbed, and looked up at him seeming more amused than mad. [“You know, if you wanted to go up to the roof you could have just asked!”]

Ferd grinned sheepishly, and decided to do something a little daring and jumped down. Several nearby people were watching now, and many of them took a step back when he slammed into the ground and bounced on his toes. That was fun, he could jump from such a height here!

[“That not so fun though!”] he explained.

The Human man played like he wasn’t too impressed, and crossed his thin arms across his chest. [“Uh-huh. And who is going to pay for it if you damaged anything up there?”]

…Yes. Right. They were supposed to be careful here.

[“…Sorry. I was looking for ‘hotel.’”]

[“Ah! Spending the night? …Well, there are a few good ones, but for you chaps I think the youth hostel out by Scrapyard Lake might be better. “]

Tumik spoke up. [“…Hoss-tell?”]

[“Yes. Same idea, you pay them for a place to sleep, but… well, they’re less expensive and the furniture’s more sturdy for a start. And if you don’t mind my saying so, I assume you’re quite young…and the other guests will be about your age.”]

Ferd looked to his men, who all seemed to like that idea better. [“Yes, good idea! We save mun-ee, meet more sky-people!”]

[“Yes yes, well…next time, don’t go climbing people’s buildings without permission! Uh, please.”]

…Ferd was scaring the man. Well, that would normally feel good but right now…not so much.

[“You’re right. Was bad guest of me,”] Ferd apologized. [“Where is this hoss-tell?”]

The man gave them directions and they said their goodbyes, then set off along the strange stone and straight paths the sky-people built everywhere. They learned a few things very quickly. Firstly, the very big path in the middle was not for people. It was instead for sky-magical steel…not beasts exactly, but more like the ‘Weaver.’ Machines. Machines that did what the stories said the city-People once did with small, tame werne. ‘Cars,’ Ferd thought. And something that was like a very big car but they used a different word he couldn’t remember.

Walking on the raised path to the side was easier. Everyone got out of their way, and Ferd wasn’t quite sure if it was because they were very wide-shouldered compared to the other sky-people, or…well, if they were being scary again. Again, for some reason he didn’t enjoy the idea as much as he normally might have. Not with these strange sky-people.

Some weren’t afraid. A tiny creature who must have been a Gaoian child ran right up to them on all fours and started to rain questions with no sign of fear. [“Are you Ten’Gewek?! Did you come through the jump array?! Have you met the Great Father?! I heard he spends a lot of time on your planet, do you know him?! You look really strong, can you pick up a car?!”]

There was no gap between questions for Ferd to answer any of them. Standing nearby, both protective and fearful, was what must have been the child’s mother. Like most sky-people she was very small, but…

There were claws on her paws. Hands. And she had a hunter’s teeth. And her ears were back.

Only a fool came between a mother and her children.

There was only one thing to do. Ferd squat down and sat on his tail, and his men did the same.

[“Let’s see… Yes, yes, yes, yes, and… I never try but not good idea to now, I think. Look expensive.”]

[“Oh, yeah, cars are super expensive, mama Myun said they cost way more than her sword and she has the most biggest sword she’s so cool you should see it—”]

“Feeko!” the Gaoian woman yipped, and Ferd had to try hard not to trill his amusement. Irritated mothers sounded the same no matter what sky-tribe they came from.

[“Go, little one. No man last long against angry mother!”]

Reluctantly, little Feeko peeled away and was ushered away by the Gao woman. Her ears were up when she glanced back at them, though. Ferd didn’t know what that meant, but she seemed less… dangerous, now.

The magic of villages worked in mysterious ways. Somehow after meeting the little Gaoian girl, the rest of their hike toward the ‘hoss-tel’ was much less knife-edge.

The chief of the hoss-tel was an unbelievably tall blue sky-person, whose words sounded too much like very many rocks falling down a mountain. Something about him tickled Ferd’s instincts completely the wrong way; the blue person seemed much too much like prey to be happy about. But, prey didn’t have words, and words were the first strength that seperated people from prey, so…

“The five of you, then? How many nights?”

“One night,” Ferd explained. “And we go get things. Buy things. Bring them back here, then take them with us when we go.”

“I don’t need to know all that, but very well. Identification, please?”

“We have… these?” Ferd handed over the same papers he’d given to the Gao at the array.

“Those will work. That will be fifty-six pounds, please.”

“Uh…” Ferd twitched his tail as he looked at the funny colorful little slips of mun-ee. He could read numbers just fine, so he needed a ten, and two of twenty… no, two of the ten. The blue man could Give the extra back, he remembered.

It seemed to work. He got little round bits of metal back with very tiny art made all over every part of it, even the edge. Not even Vemik could do such a thing, Ferd bet.

The blue man did some…uh, something behind the table. Ferd wasn’t sure what. When he was done he handed them each a small toothy bit of metal.

“Your room keys. All of you are in room fifteen, which is down the hall and to the left. Breakfast is served at sunrise until noon. There is a shower at the other end of the hall, towels are in the closet right next to it. Please be considerate of the other guests. Thank you.”

Easy enough, Ferd thought. He checked his watch and saw they still had plenty of time until sunset. Time to go out and get some of the things on the list of supplies they’d been sent for.

“Uh…” Ferd rummaged through his bag. “Wild gave me some fones. Like we used before. It’s just a better kind of talking-stone.” He handed one to each of his men. “He said the magic should work for two days before it needs to rest, as long as we don’t use them too much.”

Genn asked, “What do we do first?”

Hmm.

Ferd dug through his bag again looked at the list. It wasn’t too long…

“I think… Okay. Tumik, you and Oki go find ‘War-horse,’ give him the thing from Wild. He’s supposed to have things for us to take back, too. Nomuk, Genn, you two go find ‘bat-er-ees’ and chock-lat, and all the camping things. Wild says we can get it all from one person. I will go get the ‘ammo cart’ to bring back to Heff. Did we forget anything?”

His men thought for a moment and shook their heads.

“Okay. We meet back here when we’re done, use fone to call each other if we need to.”

The all nodded, and part ways.

Wild had devised a devious test. For one, simply finding everything was a surprisingly tricky puzzle. Folctha was too big to just walk up every path and peer into every hut. They had to ask people where to go and read their maps very carefully, until a very nice truly ancient Human had showed Tumik how to use his fone to find things. It had taken him three excited attempts to explain it with the far-voice button on his fone, but that discovery was strong magic! A man could ask it a direct question, and the machine, uh…spirit? Was that right? It felt right. The fone’s machine-spirit could answer! It could then draw a map on its flat surface that moved with the man holding it!

Well, usually. Apparently the machine-spirit in fones was very picky about how you asked questions of it, which seemed a fair trade to Ferd. He wouldn’t want his time wasted either. But with the machine’s help, getting up to the ’base’ got much easier. It was a long hike but that was okay, Ferd liked exploring, especially when they hit the edge of the ‘gravity field’ and now it was so weak, it felt like they might fly away into the sky if they weren’t careful! It grew pleasingly strong again when they got close to the base…Ferd liked that. Weak gravity was strange.

Explaining who he was to the human guards took a little longer.

The guards were the type of small-strong that Ferd had gained a deep respect for in his learnings with Wild. For one, they were probably quick like him, and they had knives. Wild had shown them he was plenty quick enough to sink a knife into a man’s throat before they knew they were in a fight, and Heff had shown that he was strong enough to actually throw Ferd across the ground somehow. His own men couldn’t do that! There was clever wrestle-play there, he knew. And until he learned it all, it didn’t much matter that he could crush them to paste without trying, not when they knew how to wrestle men much bigger than themselves, or use their own talking-stones to bring much misery down upon anyone’s head. And they had guns. And, Ferd had learned, much, much worse than that hidden away.

He had a long not-arguing sort of encounter with the guards until one of them suggested they just ‘call up’ the people they were there to meet.

Ferd almost punched himself in the head, it was so obvious. They had these magic fones for talking to people far away, so why not use them before going somewhere? That way the person you were going to see could be ready for you!

[“Who are you here to see anyway?”] one of the guards asked.

[“Uh… Coombes?”]

[“Master sergeant Coombes? Alright. I’ll call him.”]

The guard vanished into the small hut, leaving Ferd to wait under his friend’s watching eye. To his surprise, before the human returned, Ferd heard his own name being called, and he turned around to see Tumik and Oki coming up the path towards the gate.

“You are supposed to be looking for War-horse!” he said.

“We found him! He lives in a tall brick hut down the path maybe a half-finger away at a trot, but he does his work up here every day.”

Another thing that could have been known if they’d used the fones. Ferd really felt like he was learning. He wasn’t quite sure what he was learning, but maybe that was the point. He was definitely learning that he didn’t know very much at all outside the tribes.

He got the tribe-guard’s attention. [“Also, we need to see ‘War-horse.’”] For some reason that made the guard smile, but he promised they’d send for him too.

Coombes came down the long path not long after and waved them through, all happiness and jolly good humor. He greeted them in the People’s words, “Hello! Are you the cavemonkeys I was told to expect?”

Ferd trilled and tasted at the air. Yes, he knew exactly why Coombes was in a good mood. “Yes! I am supposed to pull the ‘ammo cart’ down to the array. And you taste like you just fucked someone nice not too long ago!”

Ferd took way too much joy in making Humans squirm about that sort of thing. He had no idea why they were so…shy? Embarrassed? Something. Anyway, they were mostly very private about their bodies. Why?! They were a beautiful people! And he’d met Jooyun, seen him with his women. Seen Claire and Heff!! He knew Humans loved fucking as much as the People, but why were they so shy about it?! Always, they waited until they thought nobody was looking. That was strange. Oh sure, it was nice to fuck a pretty woman in one’s own hut where nobody could bother them, but sometimes it was fun to sit around the village fire with friends too, sharing the Give and Take of life’s pleasures, the magic of man and woman, of renewing the tribe, of making friends with other tribes and bringing them all together. Humans though…

Coombes was wise to their ways. “Yup,” he agreed with a smug look. “Just so you know though, a lotta folks wouldn’t take too kindly to talk like that.”

“…Oh. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Ferd just accepted they were a strange people in some ways he’d never understand.

Some things he could understand, though. Visit another tribe, live by their ways. Human ways might be strange, but he was on their lands, so for now they were his ways too.

They were met at the largest building in the camp by the biggest Human man he’d ever even imagined, whose long bouncy stride was heavy enough to make the ground thump underfoot like a charging bull Werne. Human he might be, but this Human made Jooyun seem like a puny underfed boy. No. Stronger than that. He looked like he could snap Yan in half!

Ferd felt himself instinctively crouching back a bit just from the man’s obvious strength. He must have been this ‘War-horse’ Yan was always talking about.

He seemed friendly. [“Hey, monkey-bros! I’m s’posed to give y’all a once-over in the gym! Did Wilde give you a sheet?”]

Ferd nodded, and pulled out the paper. [“Wild say much about you. Said, best man anywhere at strength-games. Teach us, yes?”]

War-horse laughed in that strange way Humans did when they weren’t feeling strictly jolly. [“Eh, best teacher anyway. Daar’s kicking my ass bad right now.”] He grumbled to himself for a bit but then immediately cheered. [“But where are the rest? Weren’t there s’posed to be five?”]

Ferd looked back toward the gate. [“Nomuk, Genn, they go to camping people to buy big long list of things. Cold weather, bags to carry…”]

[“Oh! Well, they’ll need all y’all to measure up for coats and stuff. Why don’t we go there now? We can get the rest of it later.”]

The rest of the morning was a confusing rush of activity. War-horse jogged over with them as they knuckled along at a nice trot. The Humans had trained them hard on covering long trails. Before, they would all be out of breath and in heart-pain but now they were just happily warmed up. Still had to breathe heavy, though. War-horse and Coombes didn’t look tired at all.

The Human at the place they went to was called an ‘outfitter’ and he piled them high with many, many things. Then there was a thin strap with numbers and lines on it—measuring length, Ferd guessed. He was right, it was called a ‘tape measure’ and the outfitter and War-horse talked much about…cloth-making? Something. Either way, the little Human measured Ferd and his men every which way, asked them to walk around, swing their arms, pull their muscles tight like they were working hard, all sorts of things. He asked them to step down on a smooth glass machine that was supposed to measure their feet too, but Ferd broke it when he stepped up, so instead they stepped on some strange crumbly bricks that took a perfect shape of their feet. Then they left, with a promise of clothing later that day.

They ran back to the base carrying bags stuffed to bursting with many things, to which Coombes added a heavy wheeled cart laden with boxes full of boolets and guns. They showed everything—Coombes said they had to see, to know what they were getting—then closed the boxes up and ‘locked’ them so that only somebody who knew the right number could open them again.

Smart magic, that. Though, Ferd or any of his men could easily have pulled the metal boxes apart anyway. He thought it best to keep that thought to himself for now.

They pushed the loaded cart back down to the jump array, talked to some more little Gao-People who sniffed at everything very carefully, along with some of those beasts he’d seen earlier. ’Dogs.’ Some of the dogs around town seemed friendly, but these were busy guarding the village. Good dogs.

Once everyone was happy, they put the cart into a strong box of some kind, one that the Gao could keep safe for them until they jumped back tomorrow, and ran back to the base. They were doing a lot of that today. But that was okay. What did not kill a man only made him stronger. Wisdom he would share with his Human friends, the next time it made sense.

There was much food and a nice greeting feast! Some of it was very strange but he liked it all. They met many people, all on the ‘heat’ team while Ferd and his men would be ‘jets.’ Those were something called ‘ack-ro-nims’ that he’d learned from Professor Daniel but he didn’t quite understand them yet. Seemed a strange way to invent a new name for something. The ‘heat’ had Gao-People too, but these were big Gao, hard and strong even though they all had black and white fur. Apparently fur color wasn’t like crest color, didn’t mean the same thing.

He learned a lot just listening to them. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was learning, but sometimes learnings were like that. When Taking a new tribe’s words, a man just had to wallow in it, listen to everything, and trust the gods would reward patience. Eventually the words Gave their magic, if a man Took every one he heard.

Finally… well, there was nothing left to do. But when Ferd checked the watch on his wrist, he found that not even half the day was gone. They’d done all that before the small finger on the watch had gone a quarter way round.

Another Human difference to the People. Life at home followed slower beats, there was more time between doing things, and the things took longer to do. If Ferd wanted to sharpen his knife, he needed to put aside lots of time. The women spent all day cooking, or preparing to cook. The men were either away on hunts for maybe days at a time, or were making and mending their tools.

To pack so many things into a morning and not even notice was… it felt like a strange kind of magic itself.

They had two big things left to do. First was War-horse’s cart. That one was built very sturdy and was much, much heavier than the boolet cart, because it was filled with things to play strength-games with, just like Yan’s tribe had. That was a good thing in Ferd’s view; if he could one day set them up in his own tribe like Yan did, then many young men would visit all the time, bringing news and making friends, just so they could play strength-games too. And it was no bad thing for friends to play!

But he and his men were very, very tired after pushing that to the jump array. And then running back. Again. He felt like he’d carried a good Werne home from a whole day away, one no orange-crest could Take.

War-horse seemed happy though. He lined the five of them up and gave them a broad smile.

[“You cavemonkeys are straight naturals at this stuff. That’s good! Any of you lift before?”]

Ferd knew what War-horse was saying. [“Yes. We play with ‘weights’ at Yan’s village sometimes, and do much other strength-play with Wild. But, we not use weights every day like Yan or Vemik. Too far away.”]

War-horse grinned then. It wasn’t exactly friendly…

[“Well! What I gave you is yours to keep, Ferd. So let’s go downstairs! I’ll show you what to do, write out a training program…”]

Ferd learned the true meaning of strength and weakness, then.

All his men knew they were weak and slow next to him. That was the way of things, how the gods had blessed the red-crests of the People, and he was grateful for his men’s loyalty in return; no Given-Man was a village by himself. But War-horse was at least as far above Ferd as Yan was. Probably, even more. His fists could blur through the air so fast that Ferd couldn’t see them, like a lightning bolt hitting a tree. Gods, he could move his whole body like that, as fast as Yan could! And he could use that unbelievable strength of his in a room where gravity itself could be made to feel so strong, even Ferd felt weak and useless. And in that gravity…

War-horse hardly seemed to notice. He teased Ferd while he somehow pushed that gods-heavy bar over his head again, and again, and again. [“Yan can handle this weight just fine, y’know…”] He grunted while he pushed the bar up many more times. [“Daar can lift a lot heavier these days, too…”] More grunting, [“Hnngh, more than I can!”] War-horse finally slammed the bar back into the rack and made a satisfied sort of panting noise. [“And y’know, Vemik isn’t all that far behind you, either…”]

War-horse somehow bounced lightly on his toes, suddenly all manic energy not unlike the Sky-Thinker himself. [“Okay! Your turn again, Ferd! Let’s see how far we can push you…”]

Pretty far, it turned out, but it wasn’t long before Ferd had to admit defeat. Complete defeat, and that was before War-horse showed Ferd how little he knew about wrestling, too. The huge Human knew exactly what he was doing and had Ferd tied into knots almost as soon as they started. Not that he could have done anything against War-horse even if he knew how: War-horse was heavier than Yan, harder than Yan, and definitely stronger, too. Yan had not lied, the Human Given-Man could have broken Ferd like dry Forestfather bark underfoot, and done so easily. That was humbling. Ferd had very much growing left to do if he was to be a proper man of the People and stand up against sky-people like War-horse and Daar. But now he knew how. Or at least knew who to get learnings from, since War-horse and Daar were both happy to share their strength-knowings, just like Yan. Ferd swore an oath to the gods that wouldn’t be weak next to them for very long.

But it was still fun! And even though he and his men were exhausted, sore, growing hungry like never before…somehow, the little hand on his watch wasn’t quite pointing down yet.

Ferd found himself feeling a bit foot-itchy. He wanted to explore Folctha.

Genn looked over from his spot on the big, soft ‘couch’ they were resting on, obviously feeling the same ideas. “What should we do now, Ferd?”

The answer to that was easy. Ferd and his men said their goodbyes, then set out on an adventure.

Date Point: 16y7m3w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabriel Arés

“The guy’s a ghost. Identity unknown, whereabouts unknown… about the only thing we have to work with is some unidentified DNA from Briggs’ safehouse in New York City, and even then that could belong to almost anyone. Interrogated APA personnel call him ‘The Handler’ but their accounts are contradictory. Even his description is useless.”

Gabe was sitting down with his replacement, going over the things he thought were especially important that the small library of documentation the man had already read might not have stressed enough. Whatever few dregs were left of the APA were at the top of that list for a few reasons.

The Handler, however? High-priority though he may be, Gabe doubted they’d ever catch him.

The incoming Director of Colonial Security was English, and previously well-positioned at GCHQ. A solid choice, and frankly more of a comfortable fit for the Folcthan government’s foibles. Gabe had always prided himself on bringing a little America to the table: Eric Knowles on the other hand was tipped for a knighthood in the forthcoming New Year Honours List.

“What’s your take on him?” he asked Gabe, reviewing the Handler’s dismayingly slim file.

“Hostile foreign intelligence, I suspect.”

“A double agent,” Knowles summarized.

“Exactly.” Gabe sighed. “Couldn’t say who, though I doubt it’s one of the usual suspects.”

“You’re probably right. I usually know more about what’s going on in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran than in Westminster or DC.”

Gabe chuckled. “Yeah, it’s even worse here. All the news arrives at the same time with the communications cycle. If there was ever another San Diego, you wouldn’t know about it for three hours.

“Really?”

Gabe shrugged. “Small exaggeration. In a real emergency, NORAD would jump over a Firebird with updates for us. But you definitely do need to prepare for this weird position we’re in of being the front line gateway to the rest of the galaxy, but the last to know what’s happening on Earth… which reminds me. You picked an excellent day to take over from me.”

“How so?”

“Because right now we have a team of nonhuman JETS candidates on a training operation in the city.”

“What’s so excellent about—?”

“They’re Ten’Gewek.”

Knowles’ expression was masterfully restrained. He blinked, sat back in his chair, and sniffed.

“…Well, bugger me with a fork,” he said, gently. “Whose idea of a merry prank was that?”

“The SOR’s of course.”

“Will they be a problem, do you think?”

“Probably only an amusing one. They’re friendly and mean well, but they’re a species of testosterone-poisoned supermonkeys who are still on a crash course introduction to the iron age. Modern civilization is likely to, uh…”

“Confound them,” Knowles finished. “Bloody hell.”

Gabe gave him a smile that was equal parts sympathetic and gleefully mischievous. “Welcome to the job. This isn’t Britain, Eric, this is Folctha. The town’s foremost spiritual leader is a noodly six foot Buddhist raccoon, one of our most prominent citizens is a Roswell Grey who must never be allowed to learn about drag, the military presence are the very best of the very best across two different species, the most popular takeout in town once hit on the bright idea of putting broccoli in tacos, the dogs are the next best thing to sapient and a rambunctious space emperor-slash-bear spends many weekends here, trying and mostly failing to have a ‘normal’ day… Folctha is, uh, weird.”

Knowles chuckled. “I met Gyotin already. He reminds me of a vicar I once knew: Tall, slim, dapper, neat beard, soothing voice, calm aura…”

“Noodly…” Gabe grinned mischievously.

“Folctha’s strangeness was part of the appeal,” Knowles explained. “A unique challenge, which hopefully means uniquely rewarding.”

Gabe smiled, “I’m glad. You’ll want to cultivate that attitude. And you’re absolutely right: Folctha is special.”

Knowles smiled. “…You obviously love this place. And the job! I almost feel bad, taking it over.”

Gabe shrugged. “It’s the right time for me to go,” he said. “And…being honest, the right time for someone of your background to take over.” There was much he left unsaid.

It didn’t need saying. Knowles nodded solemnly, and stood. “Well then,” he said. “I shouldn’t keep you from enjoying your final day on the job. I gather the office has quite a party planned.”

“I’m not supposed to know about it,” Gabe smiled.

“You’ll enjoy it, I think. You have good people here. I look forward to getting to know them.”

They shook hands, and Knowles left after a few more small well-wishes, leaving Gabe to sit back in his chair, sigh, and look around the office.

The day before yesterday, he’d still called it his office. That had changed, now that the personal effects were gone. His family photos no longer dotted the walls and furniture, the picture of him in uniform along with his old SDPD colleagues no longer graced the top of the filing cabinet. His Padres shirt, bat and signed game ball - miraculous survivors that he’d purchased expensively at a charity auction to put San Diego’s last children through college - were no longer framed on the wall behind the desk. Now, it was just an office. One that Knowles would surely make his own within a day or two of taking over.

He should have felt sad, maybe. But he didn’t. This wasn’t a closing book, this was a turning page and the next chapter awaited him.

He couldn’t wait to find out what it contained.

Date Point: 16y7m3w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Julian Etsicitty

The best part about hunting, was that Julian didn’t need to think about anything else for a while.

He’d come over on the jump with Hoeff and Claire, which was honestly a nice distraction; the two were so completely in love, they were doing the playful cuddling thing people did, where they were oblivious to everyone besides themselves, whispering little secrets to each other…

It was hard not to smile after that. And a really good hunt was a spiritual exercise of its own.

Akyawentuo was murderously hot just then, and it was right at the peak of the hottest days, with the temperatures dangerously high and the humidity, as always, at the saturation point. But there was no rest for anyone, because the Ten’Gewek’s rut had finally…well, calmed down to a mere roiling boil instead of its usual volcanic power. Having regained the tiniest ability to think beyond hunting and sex, they had immediately begun their relentless campaign to build up winter stores, even though said winter was, by the human calendar, almost a year away.

Autumn and winter were short but intense on Akyawentuo. The Brown Ones retreated north toward the equator, and the werne flooded out onto the grassy plains to crop them short before the frost really set in. But it was also the time when the Ten’Gewek made the most cultural progress; they taught stories, craftsmanship, and lately reading and writing to the children, while the adults learned stories from beyond the sky. Now that they’d effectively mastered preserving food, they were eager to surge forward during the winter, where even the leanest and showiest red-crests gained a thin layer of fat and a placid, relaxed sense of contentment, instead of their usual testosterone-poisoned need to screw literally anything and everything with a warm, willing hole.

That was when Vemik—now definitely a red-crest—tended to get the most work done and come up with his best ideas, too. His aggressive mania never really died down. In fact he was like any other red-crest, meaning he was one of the most red-blooded men of the People. But rather than grumble aimlessly and play at war, he usually just…refocused his energies.

It was all part of his charm, really. He applied his ample aggression to sky-thinking when he had the chance. But if they were going to enjoy a peaceful winter, they needed to be ready.

All of that meant almost all the men were out hunting. When Julian arrived, it was only the smallest and youngest orange-crests guarding the village, along with a red-crested male named Obuk, who was relaxing from his turn out in the bush. The women were busy making pots, tending herbs…

They welcomed him warmly, allowed the children to climb all over him for a few minutes of play, and then sent him directly out onto the trail; the village could never have enough werne. He’d found his prey an hour’s trek deep into their tribe’s land, and from there…he hunted.

The werne’s scent was strong on the breeze, so strong that Julian could tell his prey was a bachelor bull without a herd. Werne smelled a bit different once they’d acquired a harem, and the People in general avoided those bulls. For one, they were usually more dangerous than the trouble was worth, for another it ensured the herds would remain healthy, strong, and defended.

Bachelor males, on the other hand, were one of their favorites to pick off. They provided more and higher quality meat, generally sported the kind of lard-like fat the People craved and needed for many things, and were exactly the kind of foolishly aggressive a hunter appreciated.

The forest floor rarely got a nice refreshing breeze, which today was blowing somewhat constantly through the underbrush. Normally the forest air was still and cloying but today he could almost smell the salt from the ocean much further south; definitely a big stormfront, maybe even a hurricane or something. It sure felt like they would be getting absolutely torrential rains in a couple-few days, not that he or anyone needed a weather satellite to figure that out.

Though of course, they had plenty of those. The surveysats he’d personally launched from Misfit were still up there, peaceably watching Akyawentuo and providing all the useful services that satellites did.

Werne always got restless when storms came through, which had made this particular hunt both longer and much more challenging than the usual. It wasn’t without its advantages; the breeze kept Julian’s scent nicely downwind, which was important because werne had a keen “taste” of the air and Julian was probably pretty dang ripe by now. It was hot out, he was sweating buckets even with the breeze, and moving stealthily was more of an endurance challenge than people realized. He was dang good at it too, but being as big and heavy as he was these days didn’t help matters much. But the Ten’Gewek could manage it just fine, and anything they could do…

The wind would normally mean he could be a bit noisier, but the werne’s ears were up and swiveling constantly, and its tongue lapped at the air between every single mouthful of foliage. Their vision was very sensitive to movement, too. It was in most every other way quite poor, but the tiniest unexpected movement could send them on a charging rampage. Best to keep some distance. Julian was awful dang strong these days, and had, for purposes of his post-naming rites, proven he could perform the much more daring technique of leaping over the charging bull, clamping his legs around its neck, riding out its rage while simultaneously driving a knife into its neck and crushing its throat flat… That was not something to do routinely, no matter how alive a man felt after managing something like that. Only very confident Ten’Gewek routinely Took their bulls that way, generally only the biggest red-crests or Given-Men. As far as Julian or Yan were concerned, only a fool or a desperate man braved a werne bull’s razor sharp face-blades when he didn’t need to, or wasn’t assured of success.

So, Julian stalked after it, patiently waiting for the right moment to strike. When the werne’s head was down, he’d step forward one foot at a time, slowly rolling all his weight from the outside to the inside of his feet while keeping mostly off his heels. He was careful to remain in the werne’s blind spot as he silently stalked from tree to tree, ever so slowly creeping closer and closer. It had been several hours by now and the day’s heat was at its most fierce. But, a hunt never rewarded impatience. So…inch by inch, tree by tree, grazing spot by grazing spot…

Julian eventually closed to within striking distance of his prey and slowly, ever so slowly readied his spear. Today he was spear hunting and there were a few reasons for that. Firstly, the People favored it because it was the fastest way to kill prey. They didn’t necessarily do so out of a deep sense of mercy; A Ten’Gewek’s regard for his prey was pretty much in direct proportion to its strength. Anything “weaker” than them often fell outside their capacity for genuine empathy, and that included basically everything else alive. Even on their own world they were fantastically, ridiculously hardy and strong compared to pretty much any other critter they’d ever met, and over deep time that had strongly colored their psychology.

Weak things were less worthy of life. Heck, if it wasn’t for Vemik and Julian’s first encounter, they’d probably have felt much the same about humans. If it wasn’t for Daar, they’d probably have felt the same for the other sky-tribes, too. Those chance meetings had successfully expanded the Ten’Gewek definition of “strong” to encompass anything that could talk; Yan said that sky-thoughts were strong, and he so utterly outclassed the other Given-Men that, well…might makes right. He said it, and so it was, and thank God for that. Having seen the savage joy their men took in the kill, how they often savored crushing the life out of their prey…

Nonetheless, their gods frowned upon cruelty, and so the People felt it was a good idea to be respectful. After all, if you were strong enough, you did the deed as fast and as powerfully as you could. A man’s strength was his offering to the gods, and the prey was the medium. The single best way to offer mercy through strength was to ram a spear right through its heart, and bury a knife at the base of its skull. If a man couldn’t do that, then…what good was he?

There was probably a fascinating set of xenopsychology papers hidden in there, somewhere. And probably the anthropologists would have a thing or two to say about religion, too.

For Julian’s part, he was mostly interested in keeping the People’s respect. If he’d had his way, he’d just shoot the poor thing through the head and grant it the most merciful death of all. But…

Well. If the whole business with the Brown One had proved anything, it was that he couldn’t possibly come up with a faster way to lose respect. The bow just about got a pass from the more liberal and open-minded Given-Men like Yan thanks to the fact that it still took a strong man to use a strong bow. A rifle though? Anyone could pick up a rifle, as far as the Ten’Gewek were concerned. It took strength out of the equation, and thereby emasculated whoever used it.

So, there Julian was in the woods, naked of all else besides his spear, knife, first aid kit, and his earbud radio. Yan thought that was a “strong” bit of sky-magic, so he allowed it. Whatever.

He stood in the shadows amongst the undergrowth, not even three yards from the werne. He considered his prey. The werne was a young unscarred male, but it had been well-fed and positively rippled with muscle and good, hard fat. At a guess, it was probably at least the same mass as a proper bull on Earth; a bit shorter, a lot stockier, and even more ornery. Not long ago that would have been a werne right at the limits of Julian’s ability to take, before that it would have been impossible. Lately…well, maybe he felt the need to prove himself a little more than he normally might. He could do it, but getting it back to the village would be a hell of a lot of work.

Humans were generalist survivors: pretty good at a lot of things, naturally excellent at a few more, and could excel at most anything…with enough determination. Ten’Gewek though, they were perfectly evolved for a hardy, deeply physical survivalist lifestyle in a rich temperate rainforest. Julian would probably never match a Ten’Gewek man’s ability to haul many times his own weight across his shoulders without much fuss. Their short, powerfully muscled legs, combined with their heavy rock-crushing tails and their heroically thick posterior chains running from their calves up to their neck, made them uniquely well-suited to werne-hefting work.

Ten’Gewek had been carrying werne bulls across tangled ground and up trees for probably hundreds of thousands of years. Like everything else about them, their utterly ridiculous physical strength had probably evolved specifically to accommodate that survival need of theirs, all other concerns be damned. They could leap with werne across their shoulders too, almost as impressively as they could unburdened. Julian couldn’t do that, at least not very high. Hopping over logs or small boulders, sure. Much than that? He had to climb, or go around.

Still, Julian had grown crazy strong himself. Evolved for werne-carrying or not, he could still hack it, so he’d do it. Good workout either way. If he was gonna be…well, literally bred and, uh, involuntarily enhanced for hard work and survival, then he may as well put his increasingly developed brawn to use feeding people he cared about.

The werne buried his head in a bush, thereby blinding itself for a brief moment. And in that moment, Julian struck.

Werne had quick reflexes and the bull reacted like a lightning bolt, but from that close, with that little warning? There was no way Julian could miss. He exploded forward and rammed his spear between the creature’s ribs with all the force his ridiculous weight and strength could generate. The spearhead was wide, designed to slice a broad entry wound, behind which the slimmer shaft could follow and penetrate deep into the werne’s innards. Getting through its interlocking ribs took an amazing amount of force though, even with a reasonably sharp and sturdy spearhead. Julian slammed into the werne so hard he knocked it sideways, and it was only after ramming it into a tree that he was able to break through and drive the spear home.

Nothing else tested a man’s raw speed, brute strength, and sheer focused aggression quite as thoroughly (or as dangerously) as spear-hunting a werne. Julian doubted there were many men who could manage; for humans, basically just the HEAT bros, besides Julian. A few really big Gaoians too. Heck, even smaller orange-crests had trouble doing it and often went in through the neck, which was a much riskier way to get meat…but a man’s gotta feed his tribe, danger or not. The bow might end up being the most important thing in Ten’Gewek culture because of that, just as important as steel.

The werne coughed its peculiar bleating moo, gurgled, and collapsed heavily, doomed before it had even finished slumping to the ground. Still, Julian made sure by skirting around it, respecting its blades, locked his legs as tightly around its thick neck as he could manage, and used both hands to shove his knife firmly into the divot between skull and spine where a werne’s thickly muscled neck was most penetrable.

The blade in its nervous system made the body twitch, once when the knife went in, and once again when Julian withdrew it. A good, clean, quick strike. The beast went limp. Werne were tough, though. It took another minute, with Julian squeezing down as hard as he could manage, but it died without any more noise and, importantly, without any more suffering.

Julian detangled himself, desperately gulping for air and with the edge of his vision a bit blurry. He caught his wind, knelt on the forest floor in front of his werne, and honored his prey.

It was a prayer, sort of. Julian didn’t really believe that God or the Ten’Gewek’s gods were beings, not in the sense that there was a personality there who watched and listened as a sapient mind would, or had ambitions, dislikes and expectations of mortals. But he still had a sense of the Divine in things, and moments like this were sacred. He’d just taken a life, and done so cautiously, for good reason. The hunt could have gone very differently if he were impatient or foolish. His quarry deserved respect in death.

After the Ten’Gewek fashion, he anointed his brow and cheeks with its blood, and sat in silence until he felt that it had dried, then a little longer until he felt… right. It was hard to put into words, but there just came a moment where he knew his vigil was complete. The Singers said that moment was when the creature’s spirit finally moved on and… well, it was a fitting description. Something had departed that had held him in silence for a while.

With it gone, that left the not inconsiderable task of hauling the thing back to the village. Like all the werne in this part of the forest, it was massive. Far too big to be much threatened by the prowling wolf-things that flit in their packs among the trees. That meant they could grow big, grow many, and grow fast, which their species did whenever they had the chance; it was as if they were made to be rich prey. The Ten’Gewek were always choosy about their prey too, all of it calculated (whether they knew it or not) to maximize the r-strategy effect in the herd. As long as there was enough foliage and grains to keep them healthy, and the People didn’t overpopulate…

He sighed, and over the course of a practiced few minutes he gutted the big critter to save some weight. That done, and with his arms filthy to the pits, he worked his way under the bull’s bulk. With a grimace and a hell of a lot of effort, he managed to stand up with the damn thing draped across his shoulders.

It was murderously heavy, even without its enormous water-filled and smelly digestive tract. The village was a few miles away, too… He’d kept the other organs but the women would still cluck at him for leaving the intestines. Too bad. Pulling the stomach out probably cut a quarter-ton of weight off his shoulders, since this particular werne was pretty much completely full of water today. Not surprising; they tended to gorge along the river until their stomachs ballooned out, then not come back and drink for many days. A proper Ten’Gewek would save that water, but…

But there were limits to how far Julian felt he needed to go to prove himself, frankly. If he was gonna heft a ton and a half of meat back home through a tangled and hilly rainforest and do so in goddamned supergravity on top of it all, then he could at least be spared the survivalistic joys of hot rancid werne-gut water.

Something ticked at the back of his mind, and he looked at the good hiding spots all around him…and spotted a wolf-thing. Julian was ever-wary of those. He made eye contact, snarled with his teeth bared, and the critter ran away…along with about twenty of his best buds. Nowadays he could quite literally punt them hard enough to flatten their rib cages if he wanted to, but anyone would have trouble dealing with an aggressive pack, if they ever got the idea they might win in a fight.

They’d probably follow after him, once they’d picked the gut pile clean. Best to keep an eye out. With a grunt of effort, Julian steeled himself and set to the long hike back to the village.

It was early evening by the time he returned. His whole body felt like it was on fire and his legs in particular like they were made of Jell-O. Hoeff gave him a sideways grin as he staggered up to their big table to the sounds of congratulatory trilling and the sudden bustling of women and the Singer.

“Showoff.”

Julian was much more interested in eating and resting than banter. He grunted in acknowledgement, grabbed an offered bowl of stew and stalked back to his “hut” where the idea of collapsing on his nice, soft field mattress sounded awesome. Though, he lamented the fact that Al and Xiù weren’t here, he sure could have done with a nice rub-down after all that hard work…

No wonder the People got frisky after a hunt! Well…no. They got frisky after basically any activity at all, so that wasn’t really saying much. Maybe Hoeff would help…

The thought made him chuckle, and he gave Hoeff a Suggestive Look, just to troll him a bit.

Hoeff picked up on it immediately. “Nuh-uh. I’m taken, remember? I swear we’ve had this conversation before.”

“Aww, can’t help a fella out?”

“Weirdo,” came the refrain, as was tradition.

“Uh-huh.” Julian decided to inhale the contents of his bowl just then. Nothing would ever beat Xiù’s cooking, but dang if the People didn’t know how to make a hell of a stew. He’d eaten it all before he knew it, and one of the younger women swept by and refilled his bowl just as he was happily belching out his compliments to the cook.

He slowed down about half-way through his second bowl when he noticed Hoeff was looking at him weird.

“…What?”

“You gonna put any fuckin’ shorts on?”

…Oh yeah.

“Eh, I dunno. It’s hot out…why? You like what you see or something?”

Hoeff shrugged nonchalantly. “Nah. Ain’t me you gotta worry about. But Singer’s young Dancer over there is givin’ you the bedroom eyes…”

Julian looked over and, sure enough, the Dancer was… Well. A human gal would have been playing with her hair and chewing on her lip. The Ten’Gewek version was a feline tail twitch and idly fidgeting at the ground with her prehensile toes.

Julian finished his stew in a few practiced gulps, and nodded in agreement. “Right. Since Yan’s not back yet, I’m gonna go nap. Can you let him know I was looking for him?”

“Will do. G’on, git before the ladymonkeys decide to help themselves.”

That was a weirdly flattering thought. Julian didn’t dwell on it, but instead heaved himself achingly over to his “hut” and crash-landed on his nice clean werne-hide rugs, stretched himself out as best as he could, downed an entire skin of water, and then crawled his way into bed.

Normally, he quietly dreaded sleep when Al or Xiù weren’t there. His mind tended to…dwell. Not on bad things, at least not always, but without them he always reverted to the old instincts that had kept him alive on Nightmare: the ones that kept a hatchet to hand and full alert wakefulness just a slight rustle of foliage away. That instinct had kept him alive, but it made him a very light sleeper indeed and he never quite felt like he’d wake up rested.

Not today. In fact, Julian was so tired from the hunt that he passed right the fuck out almost as soon as he was horizontal. No dreams, no jerking awake in the night, nothing. He only woke up sometime early next morning when a wrist-thick finger gently prodded his face. It was Yan, sitting on his tail next to Julian’s head, calmly waiting for him to wake up.

[“Heff said you wanted to talk with me.”]

Julian groaned, and went to rub the grit and sleepy stuff out of his eyes when he realized he was still foul from the hunt and probably shouldn’t go rubbing stale werne juices into his eyes. In fact, he should probably brush out the hides on the bed, too.

He sat up instead. “…Yeah. [I have some interesting news.”]

[“You should clean up,”] Yan said. [“You taste bad.”]

Well that was an achievement, though not one to feel proud of. Julian grumbled and rolled off his furs, stood up and stretched, and decided he’d wear shorts today to at least spare Hoeff’s blushes and himself from the Dancer’s attention. Thus modestly dressed, he ducked out of his hut and headed for the sandy pit at the edge of the village that the People used to scrub themselves off.

As part of the Singer’s efforts to modernize and improve the village’s hygiene based on what she learned on Cimbrean, there was a row of clay pots full of clean and boiled water by the sand now, plus the result of her first efforts at making soap from wood ashes and werne tallow. It smelled quite nice actually, but had a texture closer to pumice than smooth. Julian put two of the components to good use: Water to dilute the mess on his arms and body, the soap to break it up and scrub, water again to rinse.

Ten’Gewek hides needed a very aggressive scrubbing, so they used the sand as an abrasive to scour themselves clean, but their skin was a lot thicker and tougher than a human’s, and there were the equivalent of sand chiggers in that sand that could make Julian’s skin a hellscape of bite marks if he wasn’t careful.

In any case, Yan was right: he needed to wash. The water running off him was foul.

[“Interesting news?”] Yan asked, sitting on his tail again nearby.

Julian sighed wearily and applied the soap a second time. He’d forgotten to bring his own, and was regretting it now. [“Yeah. Like I said, about my family, and also about the Corti…”]

[“That sounds more than just interesting.”]

Julian nodded. [“Oh, yeah. There’s big sky-magic involved, too. And secrets and lies and questions I’ll never know the answers to…”] He translated Nofl’s findings as well as he could. By the time he’d finished his summary, he was clean from toes to top. It might be hell on the skin, but he had to admit that it was an effective way to get clean.

Yan listened solemnly, and only ventured an opinion once he was quite sure Julian had finished.

[“You always knew Core-tie were the ones who took you and put you on Nightmare-world.”] he said. [“We have many reasons to not trust them, and you have many to hate them. What has changed? The roots dig deeper, that’s all.”]

“…Yeah. I get it, I do. But still!” Julian replied, in English. [“They bred my family like dogs!”]

[“But not your children. It ends now you know about it. And in time… you will have many children, I think. And your children will have many many children. In time, lots of humans will be stronger for it. You cannot Take back what the Core-tie owe you, so make some good out of the bad.”]

Julian sighed, and returned to English. “That’s the thing. I’m here, bein’ a survival expert—and I love it! But now I’m doing exactly what they made me for.”

“And that is problem?”

“…No. I think I just need to vent about it. Can’t change it, can’t pretend like it isn’t there. It’s just…what right did they have to do that?!”

“They had no right. But you do what you like doing, yes? And would not be able to do this if you were not you. Not many men of your people can.” He said it without judgement; not many Ten’Gewek were so fair-minded. “It was no good thing, but you can make good.”

“…I’ll try.”

[“No.”] Yan stood up and knuckled over toward Julian, and pulled him in for a loving, crushing, tail-around-waist hug. [“You’re stronger than that, I know you are. You’ll be fine. Don’t let the Core-tie win.”]

“…” Julian didn’t know what to say, so he just returned the hug as best he could. Sometimes, something as simple as that was all the medicine a man needed.

He felt much better about it, he had to admit. Everyone he loved and admired had been super chill about it. Adam had nodded levelly, saying “I’m glad we weren’t losing our minds.” Al and Xiù were of course perfect partners…he wished he could call them both wives. Legally. The Ambassador had told him to man up in the best possible way…Heck, even Vemik would probably have something useful to say whenever he got back from his own hunt…

…But right now, They’d better get on to the actual business that had brought Julian here. He was clean enough to get through the day, so he shook out his shorts, stood up and looked Yan right in the eye.

“Yan, big fella, there’s some big happenings we gotta talk about…”

Yan Given-Man stood on his feet and nodded solemnly. The hard work was just beginning.

Date Point:16y7m3w1d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

“We invited the Ten’Gewek?”

Sartori nodded. “They have as much right as anybody to be there. Hell, of all the Hierarchy’s living victims, they came closer to extinction than anyone else.”

“Unless you count the OmoAru.”

“The OmoAru are already dead, Margaret. They just haven’t quite died yet.”

Margaret White half-shrugged her head. “I suppose, but… this isn’t like that little group visiting Folctha, or their visit to Earth. The Rauwryhr are fragile, Arthur, and the Ten’Gewek have a long way to go before they’re ready to respect somebody so… well… weak.”

“The Ten’Gewek are also intelligent, rational and level-headed,” Sartori replied. “They’ve come to respect us. They’ll respect the Rauwryhr too, if they see a reason to.”

“Like what?”

Sartori shrugged. “Flight? Have you seen them in the air, Margaret? It’s like they’re a different species. On the ground they’re ungainly and comical, but they’re magical on the wing. They impressed the hell out of Daar.”

“Daar’s got the softest, goofiest heart ever. He’ll like anyone if they give him a reason to.”

Sartori shook his head. “He’s amiable. He’s not a pushover. They impressed him, Margaret. That’s no easy feat. He might like easily, but he doesn’t respect easily. Remember, Daar is the man who ordered the orbital bombardment of nearly every major city on Gao to end a war.”

“…I stand corrected.”

“As you should. What the Fearless did at the battle of Rich Plains was borderline suicidally brave. They’ve earned our respect, and the Gao’s: They’ll earn the Ten’Gewek’s.”

Sartori twisted in his seat until his spine popped, then stood up to take a stroll around the room. He spent too long sitting down, and a chance to stretch his legs was always welcome. “I’m running out of office time, Margaret. Not long left, now, and a lot still to do. Whoever follows me—and I pray to God it’s you—is going to have to deal with Daar and Yan as peers.”

“I know. I’ve been worrying about that.” Margaret half-turned on the couch to follow his progress. “They’re both very… male. And with all due respect to them both, their cultures are still heavily segregated by gender. We’re a lot more egalitarian than them in that regard, and I’m still going to have trouble domestically.”

Sartori looked at her and suppressed the urge to sigh. “If that’s the attitude you go into this with, then you’ll be absolutely right.”

She arched an eyebrow at him, so he took that as an invitation to elaborate. “As President, you’ll be called to lead a nation. That includes some awesome responsibilities, such as ordering good men to their deaths. All that anyone asks of a leader in that position is that they have a spine, and everyone has one of those… but Presidents haven’t made use of that to any significant degree since the seventies, Margaret. But I tell you this: the second you bring up your status as a woman in relation to virtually any aspect of leadership, people will automatically ask, ‘why is she mentioning that? Is it an issue?’ And my answer is: no. It won’t be, until you make it an issue.”

“That opinion is very male too, Arthur.”

Sartori had been here before a few times in his career. Usually it was simplest not to argue, but Margaret was a friend and, he hoped, his successor. If he couldn’t be frank with her then he could never be frank with anyone.

“…If I could offer advice? Just approach them like you have a perfect right to be a leader, because you do, and they’ll respect that,” he said. “They won’t worry about your gender if you don’t.”

“Won’t they, though?”

Sartori shook his head no. “They won’t. It’s…never really been about man versus woman, I think. I think that’s the biggest mistake we make as a civilization when we talk about this. It’s usually about leadership, and our refusal to accept that men and women have different, complementary natures. In our era of plenty, where we aren’t in a total struggle to survive and our menfolk aren’t bound to the land or the sword in constant, dangerous toil…we can indulge. Neither the Gaoians nor the Ten’Gewek can.”

Margaret White had always been a calm person, and expressed herself in understated ways. Folding her arms was an indicator of quite serious indignation. “Indulge?” she asked. “I know you well enough to believe you aren’t dismissing gender equality, Arthur, so what exactly are you saying?”

“Oh, I’m not dismissing it… but it absolutely is an indulgence,” Sartori replied. “And one we can only afford because women can provide for themselves nowadays. In past centuries that just wasn’t true, and just surviving was a partnership and a division of labor.”

“Do you want to go back to that?”

“Absolutely not!” Sartori shook his head firmly. “That would mean going back to harder times. Worse times, where life was harder and shorter. Women’s liberation was hard-earned and benefited us all, but it absolutely is a luxury that only developed, stable economies can afford.”

“Treating women as equal to men is a luxury and an indulgence.” She said it flatly, unimpressed.

“And those are good things! You can only afford luxuries and indulgence when you’re succeeding!” Sartori replied. “But… Indulge me in this. You’re talking about treating women as equal to men? What does that even mean? Equality is such a loaded word.”

She frowned at him but gestured an invitation for him to continue, at least giving him a fair chance to explain. He wandered the room, thinking aloud. “…Nobody sane argues that women are not due the same dignity or protections as men,” he said. “But men are not interchangeable with women, ergo they are by definition not the same. Ignoring those differences is a fantastic luxury, and it enriches our civilization.”

“I get the feeling this is a subject you could talk about for a long time,” Margaret noted drily.

“I could, yeah. But what’s important here is that our alien allies simply can’t afford the kind of liberation we take for granted. The Gaoians are literally attempting to breed themselves back from the brink of extinction, on top of their massive natural sex imbalance, and the Ten’Gewek are literal hunter-gatherers. With them, it’s a simple division of labor brought on by a massive sexual dimorphism, and again, the needs of childbirth.”

“If it’s a luxury we can afford and they can’t, I can see them resenting our good fortune,” Margaret pointed out.

“I don’t think so. I think they’ll only resent it if it’s made an issue. Daar is…protective. And, yes, absolutely a bit of a chauvinist. All Gaoian males are but it’s largely benign, and in fact approaches something like worship. But the thing is, they’re protective in general. The Gao see us as good, loyal friends who helped them through their greatest trial. They also see that, now that they’re recovering, and even with the population bomb about to go off…they hold pretty much all the cards in the relationship. If they survive the next twenty years, that imbalance will be severely in their favor, Margaret. Now, consider that Daar’s ‘most biggest’ hope in life is to just cuddle everyone he loves and keep them safe…”

“Probably not a good idea to trigger resentment. And the best, safest way to do that is to just be a strong leader,” Margaret summarized.

“Exactly. A strong leader isn’t a strong male leader or a strong female leader, they’re just a strong leader. And you’re capable of that. It’s just that, well…and now I’ll actually be a bit of a chauvinist here. I think that may come a bit more naturally to men. But that’s okay, since some of the very best leaders either of our species have ever seen were women, after all.”

Margaret gave his self-confessed chauvinism a cool look, but let it pass. “I can see the Ten’Gewek being a tougher nut to crack,” she pointed out instead.

“…True. Yan Given-Man is…an absolutely ridiculous flirt. Even worse than Daar, and I know how you enjoy bantering with him…” he ventured a mischievous smile.

Finally, her cool indignation slipped. She laughed, looked aside and cleared her throat. “…Yes, well. At my age, flirting is a rare thing.”

Sartori chuckled and sat down opposite her, feeling more comfortable now that the ice had thawed again. He’d always held that true friends were the ones you could have difficult conversations and honest disagreements with, but there was always danger in actually testing a friendship like that. Her laugh reassured him that all was well.

“In any case, you have a path there too,” he said. “Their Singers are all women after all, and every tribe has both a Given-Man and a Singer…and the Singer is pretty widely considered the more important of the two. If a tribe loses a Given-Man, one of their red-crests will take over. Lose a Singer, though…and the tribe is broken. Yan is primed to respect you. Even if he can’t ever be allowed to sit on the couch.”

“But that’s contingent on not showing weakness,” she said. “And according to you, even mentioning that I’m a woman is showing weakness.”
.
Sartori picked his words carefully. “…In most circumstances, I think mentioning that I’m a man would weaken me, or at least exclude people unnecessarily. As I see it, the art to leadership is to never, at any time, in any circumstances, make something about you if it isn’t also something about all of us,” he replied. “Maybe men are more sensitive to that sort of thing, I don’t know. I bet there’s some psychology papers on it. But…. look. Maybe men really are chauvinistic, and so am I. But I didn’t pick you out of charity, Margaret.”

“I’ve never felt you have,” she assured him. “It’s the aliens and other world leaders I worry about. But I think you’re right. If I just march out there and act like I have a perfect right to be among them… well, that’ll be true. I will have that right.”

“Exactly. How you got that right doesn’t matter, they respect it nonetheless. Both of them were thrust into duty, after all.”

She nodded, and Sartori could see that she’d gone a few miles away in her head to think. He let her, for a few seconds, then decided to give the ice one last thaw.

“So what do you think? Reckon I’m a chauvinist?”

She laughed again, quietly. “…Well, if you are, at least you’re a thinking one,” she said.

“If?”

She flashed a smile, then checked her watch and stood up. “If I wait any longer I’ll be late for my meeting with General Kolbeinn,” she said. “He wanted me to look at his presentation to the Defence Council.”

“Well, I won’t keep you then,” Sartori replied warmly. “Good night.”

She opened the door. “Good night, Mister President,” she said, and was gone.

Sartori sighed to himself, and returned to the desk. There’d be some new thing for him to deal with along in seconds, he was sure. But he’d enjoyed the conversation.

She’d do well, he knew it. Assuming she won the election, of course…

So. All he had to do was not drop the ball before she could pick it up.

Back to work.

Date Point: 16y7m3w1d AV
Ninja Taco, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Sister Leela, proprietor

Folctha was a strange and protected place, one where the great and powerful of the galaxy could freely intermingle with everyday folk. Presidents and Prime Ministers had wandered its streets. Premiers and Potentates had visited her shop to purchase her tacos.

And the most powerful and awe-inspiring of them all, the Great Father of the Gao himself…made a habit of visiting her, and her specifically, at her humble little shack.

And flirting with her. Hard.

They had long ago settled into a roughly bi-weekly routine. Daar would somehow sneak off to do…well, to run banal little errands in Folctha, like buy ice cream for his ‘Naydi.’ Why he insisted on doing that himself was frankly beyond Leela’s capacity to understand. How he managed it in relative secrecy was another question entirely.

She did know one of the consequences. On that day, whenever it happened to be and whenever it was getting late, and the customers were heading home to avoid the rain, Daar would appear and order a huge tray of tacos. He was always alone. He would pay her in cash and tip very generously. He would insist they drop the pretenses of rank. And then he would flirt with her like the unabashedly brutish brownie he truly was. There was crude innuendo. There was posing, and preening and all that excessively macho silliness, as one might stereotypically expect of big athletic Stonebacks.

And as much as it bothered her to admit it, she was growing to love every second of it.

He’d made several earnest offers to bed her, too. She’d found herself deeply flattered of course; how often would an offer like that come along? He was smart and clever, silly, somehow both super polite yet also crude and raunchy…and ridiculously handsome…brave…

Truth be told, his sex appeal was obvious even despite his penchant for playful oafishness. The problem was, well, he was just…too much. In every way. He was so far out of her league, out of everyone’s league, that meeting him in person had a nearly unreal quality to it even though he was, despite it all, a strangely approachable male. Maybe, it was like meeting a living Keeda.

Over time the amazing weirdness of the situation had her re-considering everything she thought she knew about brownies. For the first time since the War, she found herself warming to one of them, and warming to the biggest and most dangerous one of them all, no less.

That just made her wonder: why not take him up on his offer? A cub by the Great Father himself would be clever and strong, her cachet would skyrocket in the Commune…but she’d ultimately said no. At first he was surprised when she declined. Daar was used to having the pick of his mates and it was obvious why. That had stung his pride but much to his credit, he was graceful and good-natured about it. A lot of males took rejection quite hard but he shrugged it off, and even re-assured her that he understood, there were no hard feelings, and so on.

That almost convinced her right there to change her mind say yes after all…but she wasn’t…she couldn’t…

And somehow, without her saying anything even remotely hinting at her fears…he understood.

“Okay,” he’d said when she had at last tried to give voice to what bothered her. “You don’ hafta say anythin’ more. I get it. But, uh…we can still flirt, right? An’ I can still show off ‘fer you?”

“Well, I think you’d explode if you tried not to,” she’d said wryly. She wasn’t going to say no to an ongoing opportunity for the Great Father to put on a show for her up close and personal, after all…

Daar had duck-nodded sheepishly. “Honestly ‘yer not wrong. It’s fun!”

After that he’d proceeded to make a huge smarmy playful fool of himself every time he visited. Thankfully, he did this with much less of his usual aggressive come-on routine, which could be…an intense experience, physically and emotionally. She understood why her fellow Sisters enjoyed that kind of male attention, and why he was so good at it, but for her it was just, way, way, way too much. But he backed off, which was wonderfully considerate of him. Males could get awfully pushy when attempting to woo a Female and he of course had more advantages than anyone else, so that he showed her such respect and deference was…

Leela chittered to herself in fond recollection. One day. If he was still interested. When the wartime memories weren’t quite so sharp, maybe.

The evening had been pretty slow, which meant she’d have a lot of unsalable food at closing time. That always felt like a waste but Deathworld precautions against taint and spoilage made a lot of sense. It was why so many gaoian foods were pickled or preserved, after all….

A familiar scent reached her nose, cutting right through the nasal landscape of food, cooking oil, cleaning products and hot metal.

Well, it had been a couple of weeks since his last visit…

She called out through the window towards the huge silhouette shambling over on all fours. “I hope you’re hungry!”

“I am! An’ I’ve got friends ta’ feed! Gonna take ya’ a while to fill this order!” He flicked his ears in amusement. “Mebbe we can chit-chat a bit? Share gossip? Negotiate a mating contract? Or, y’know, jus’ go lay down in the grass right now? I’d keep ‘ya warm all night, if ‘ya wanted…”

Yup. he was definitely in a happy mood.

“I’m pretty sure that isn’t happening. Just like, you know, it’s not ever happened before.”

“Bah! You don’t know what ‘yer missing!” The Great Father rose to his hind legs and filled her window as he rested his body-thick forearms on the window ledge. Her little taco shack groaned as it took on some of his weight.

“I need a dozen o’ everything! An’ all the fixins too!” He settled himself down and wrenched yet more unhappy protests from her apparently not-Daar-proof shack.

Leela chittered in exasperation. “Daar! Please don’t destroy my taco stand! I haven’t paid off the loan yet!”

“Aww, don’t worry! It’s a sturdy little fella, I can tell! An’ it’s at such a nice height to, y’know…”

Even though he was crouching low, his chest was just a bit above her eye level, completely filling the window and therefore impossible to miss. He grinned and snapped every muscle in his entire body into stone-like hardness, all without moving an inch.

“…Conspire together.”

Leela’s shack had a nice wide window so she could better interact with her customers. Even so, Daar filled and exceeded its frame; he was a huge furry wall of muscle blotting out the sunset. She tried not to stare, but…he was sleek and short-furred today, which was when he was his most unashamedly distracting. It was raining too, so his fur was slicking down and clinging to every inch of him…

…Well, there were definitely some perks to being a target of Daar’s affections.

He watched her try not to ogle for a bit, then grumbled in knowing amusement. “My eyes are up here, you know.” The playful look on his face was infuriatingly smug.

So. It was going to be one of those nights.

Leela sighed, rolled her eyes and chittered. “Conspire on what, exactly?”

“Oh, y’know. On a nice warm blanket! All night! All day. Err’day ‘fer weeks on end if ‘ya wanna see what th’ Stud-Prime o’ Stoneback can really do…”

Leela flicked an ear at him. “Oh? That’s an impressive boast.” She turned her attention to her work; since he had friends to feed, he’d basically just buy everything she had left. No wastage tonight. “Don’t know if I’ve ever met a male that could back a claim like that.”

“Ya’ need a better class o’ male in ‘yer life, then! Mebbe those nice polite lil’ guys you been datin’ need ‘ta work on their cardio.” Daar sniffed toward her and grumbled, “‘Cuz y’know what? I don’t lie. An’ if anythin’ I was bein’ modest ‘bout just what I can do…”

…Well. She looked over her shoulder and he was being a big smarmy Keeda just like always. And…yes, he was playfully posing even harder. Leela chitter-sighed again in a combination of amusement and exasperation. Most likely, he wouldn’t let up or relax for the rest of their encounter, no matter how many times she told him off. Daar was ridiculous.

“Impressive as that is, you’re still not getting a contract out of me tonight, you huge oaf.”

“Who said anythin’ ‘bout a contract? I’m a flexible sorta ‘Back, y’know…”

The tone of his voice suggested that he wasn’t speaking strictly about his social engagements.

Leela harrumphed primly. “I’m not that kind of Female, Daar. I know some of the younger, inexperienced Sisters succumb to your advances, but I’m not interested in a one-night stand.”

“Hey! I love ‘em just the same! An’ a girl’s gotta learn the ways o’ man an’ woman just like the boys do! ‘Sides… I like bein’ the teacher, y’know…an’ I’m really good at it…”

“Are you.” It wasn’t difficult to keep her tone dry and unimpressed. If Leela had one guaranteed turn-off, it was a male bragging up his experience as though females were just… conquests. “With as many Sisters as you’ve plowed through in your time, I imagine you would be by now, if for no other reason than sheer brute repetition.”

“Ha! Well, even a thick-skulled ‘ol ‘Back’ll learn somethin’ if’n he practices enough… an’ if repetition is what ‘ya want, I got endurance like ‘ya wouldn’t believe…”

Leela growled at that while she quickly assembled a dozen plain, crispy tacos. They were the most popular kind even if they weren’t strictly authentic: just seasoned ground beef, shredded cheese, and a thin topping of lettuce. “Practice, huh? Daar, I’m disappointed in you.”

“Huh? Oh.”

“Are you here because you enjoy the company and the break from your responsibilities, or are you here because you can’t stand the idea of a Female left unconquered?”

Daar retreated from the stand a little, and his head tilted a touch as he considered that. Just for a moment, she’d got him to stop the clowning.

“…Gotta be honest… It’s prol’ly a little o’ both,” he admitted. “But the first one more!”

She’d stung him. For a second she considered apologizing, but in truth he probably needed stinging now and then. Maybe that was why he kept coming back.

Leela waggled her spatula at him. “Well, If you’re going to seduce me, that’s entirely the wrong attitude.”

He perked up. “Aww! So you’re saying I still have a chance, right?”

Great Mother he was ridiculous. “Less and less as the night goes on…”

He chittered, confirming her suspicion that he took a kind of perverse joy in being stung by her, and veered onto a new tack. “…Is that ‘chicharones’ I smell? Can I have a big order o’ that too?!”

Daar somehow managed to wriggle his massive head in through the smaller sliding window, despite the thick girth of his neck pressing alarmingly against its frame. His musk immediately permeated the entire taco stand even more forcefully than usual; he was heavily lathered up and had clearly been engaged in Maximally Brownie Activities all day long. Normally she wouldn’t mind—quite the opposite, actually—but her taco stand was not a locker room for huge well-exercised brownfurs, no matter who they thought they were. He snuffled around gleefully until Leela deftly swatted his nose with her spatula. “Get out, you stinky oaf!”

“But it smells nice in here! Like happiness! An’ cumin!”

Leela’s ears were happily up, but still. She spatulated him a bit more forcefully.

“Out!”

Daar chittered and withdrew his head, shaking the entire stand as he did so. “Okay, fine!”

“Much better. Now wait nicely while I make your tacos. And yes, you can have some chicharones, if it’ll keep you busy while I work.” She filled a bowl and slid it toward the window.

Daar grabbed half the bowl’s contents in one massive paw and popped a few into his mouth. “Thankee!” He made delighted cronching sounds for a long moment while she assembled tacos, but apparently he wasn’t done with mischief, either. “Rain always makes me feel itchy in a short coat! Can I scratch my back on the corner again?”

He was being deliberately irritating now in his maddeningly charming way. She had to work to suppress her happy ears.

“No! Do not wear down the corner of my taco stand! Neither I nor my stand will appreciate it!”

“Aww! But can I sniff through the window again? I know you like it!”

“I like it when Folctha’s health inspectors don’t find Daar hairs in my food. Nobody will appreciate that, no matter how much you try to… charm them.”

Daar rumbled a pleased avalanche of a note. “Oh, I dunno, smell’s like ‘yer enjoyin’ my charms plenty! …Or mebbe that’s just the cumin again!”

“I’m pretty sure those two things don’t smell at all the same, Daar.”

“Naw, but both of ‘em are happy smells, yijao? An’ I can still smell ‘yer amusement…”

Well, he had her there.

“I will admit, there is a certain…crude entertainment value to your shenanigans, yes.”

He chittered in turn, this time innocently. “Good! That’s why I do it! ‘Cuz what’s the point o’ anything if’n ‘ya can’t get a pretty Female ta’ pant-grin at ‘ya?!”

She couldn’t argue with that line of reasoning. Still. Leela carefully twisted her ears into the most mocking positions she could wrestle them into without betraying her amusement. “Oh? If you’re looking for a grinning Female you may have come to the wrong taco stand, Daar!”

“Naw! See, I think o’ this as makin’ an investment.”

Daar punctuated his last word by pressing his forehead against the side of the stand, his shining puppy-dog amber eyes peering ridiculously into her front window while his weight gently rocked the stand back on its wheels. Leela swayed with the motion, having long since gained her ‘sea legs’ weathering the bi-weekly Daar-storm.

At least there was a layer of sheet metal between her and him.

“Are you like this with every Female? Literally every one? I fear for the whole town, frankly.”

“Naw, jus’ the most bestest ones! Investment, remember?!”

“Well, I feel honored…”

“‘Ya should! I’m the most bestest at botherin’ a Female! An’ the bestest at showin’ off! I could show off ‘fer you all night long, y’know!” He put deed to word, and despite herself Leela did stop to watch and enjoy his oafish, hypermuscular clowning, until the smell of warming tortillas managed to remind her of her culinary and business responsibilities. She immediately found herself frustrated by his ongoing campaign of distraction.

“Behave! Or no tacos for you!” She yipped, and swatted her spatula at him again for effect.

“Aww!”

“I mean it!”

“But I ain’t even shown you my back yet! It’s my most bestest part!!” Daar spun away from her, raised his massive arms and pulled them down and sideways. “See?! I’m th’ most hugest ‘Back ever! From my neck down to my calves! An’ all my other bits, too!!”

Leela chittered in exasperation. “Daar!”

“Fine, fine…” Daar ambled back and re-settled his ridiculous weight on her little taco stand; she really needed to put it up on cinderblocks or something if they were going to keep the game going. “‘Ya can ogle me here jus’ fine…”

Leela rolled her eyes at him and chuffed in disapproval, and determinedly focused on something other than him. Daar, of course, kept preening for her, and probably himself, too. For a precious minute or two, the only sounds in her stand were the rain on the roof and the hiss of frying.

…And an occasional grunt of effort from Daar, whom she studiously ignored. Well. Mostly.

“But f’real, this is why I pester ‘ya,” He finally broke the silence, in a slightly quieter but no less playful tone. “It’s fun to banter, yijao?”

“What banter?! All you’ve done is bounce your muscles at me like a bad movie villain!”

“Well, how ‘bout this bit o’ conversation right here?”

“Wh–no! Couldn’t you talk about, oh, anything else at all?!”

“Well, okay…how’s gossip at th’ Commune?”

“Same as always. Try again!”

“Anythin’ new in the world of taco cuisine?”

“I’ve perfected a ten-herb salsa made entirely from Gao-native plants…”

“Ooh! I want some! But now we’ve got a problem, ‘cuz…what else you wanna talk ‘bout?”

“…Need I remind you, Daar, I’m not the one attempting to woo a Female!”

“Essactly! Y’ain’t never been one ta’ volunteer a topic, after all…”

“Maybe I’d rather hear about the massive lout who won’t stop preening for my attention!”

“Did you say massive?!”

“NO.”

“Aww! Fine…Well, if’n ‘ya wanna talk ‘bout my life, there’s three general categories ‘ya got: farm stuff, civil engineering stuff, or really boring-ass anodyne dung like Clan politics…”

“I think you’re omitting several entire categories, there…”

“I am! ‘Cuz this here is the part where I remind you I’m actually the Great Father in disguise. An’ that means I gotta be careful ‘bout jus’ how spicy a topic I pick, yijao?”

…Admittedly, that was a good point. “Well, fair enough. Actually, wait a minute. How do you talk about anything, then?”

Daar gave her a slightly melancholy look. “Honestly? I don’t usually. ‘Less it’s, y’know, like a Champion’s business or somethin’ all Great Fathery. Why d’ya think I keep my hobby farm?”

“…I hadn’t appreciated the problem that would present. What about movies?”

“I ain’t got time ta’ watch ‘em! An’ that’d be takin’ sides.”

“Right…books?”

“Love ‘em! Mostly do audiobooks an’ podcasts when I’m workin’ out! Still can’t take sides…”

“…What in the Great Mother’s name does that leave you, then?! Surely there’s something!”

“Oh, there’s sports, food, and a vast an’ tangled web of Clan praise I gotta be careful ‘bout, since th’ last thing I wanna do is kick off a centuries-long rivalry like Fyu did that one time…”

Leela reset for her next batch of tacos. “That doesn’t sound so great. How do you cope?”

“Well, Naydi firstly. She’s amazing! Also tusslin’ and play wif my Brothers an’ stuff. An’ trainin’! But really, the thing that works the bestest when I jus’ need to get away from it all…”

“Oh? Is that what we low-rank Females are to you? Just a distraction?”

“Naw! ‘Yer a chance ‘ta love regular folk! Ain’t nothin’ wrong with high society an’ all, but sometimes they ain’t real, yijao? An’ honestly, I can’t have the same conversation over an’ over again ‘fore I get bored half ‘ta death. But y’know what never gets old?”

He rammed his head through the window again and snarled suggestively right next to her ear. “Real people ‘preciate the direct approach, so lemme cut through the shit. If what ‘ya want is a smart, strong an’ healthy cub, then ain’t nobody gonna give ‘ya one as good as me. I’m th’ bestest. That interest ‘ya?”

Some instinctual, primitive part of Leela really wanted to give in. But her Civilized mind couldn’t let that pass without notice. “…What…how can you be so arrogant?!”

“‘Cuz it ain’t arrogant if it’s the truth, Leela. I ain’t never sired a male under third degree. I was born luckier’n anyone an’ I’ve worked harder’n ‘em all ‘ta maximize my gods-given potential. Ain’t hardly anyone smarter’n me, or quicker’n me, either wit’ words or on my paws. An’ ain’t nobody bigger, or faster, or stronger. The only guys in th’ whole known damn universe that’re tough an’ lasting like me…well, they ain’t gaoian. I’m gettin’ better err’day too, ‘Horse thinks I ain’t gonna slow down ‘fer mebbe decades yet t’come. I’m more blessed’n I got words ‘fer an’ I’m proud o’ what I’ve done with that, an’ I wanna share it all wit’ ‘ya, if ya’ let me.”

“…Wh–why me, Daar?”

“Cuz I think ‘yer pretty fuckin’ gods-damned special ‘yerself. Naydi really likes ‘ya, too. An’ like her, ‘ya clawed ‘yer way back from somethin’ that’d break pretty much anyone else. Din’t break ‘ya though, jus’ made everythin’ ‘bout ‘ya way more beautifuller. ‘Yer tough. ‘Yer a survivor. And balls if that ain’t the sexiest thing ever.”

All the pretense of the game was gone. All that remained was the most frank and unbelievably blunt statement of…well, of inescapable reality that she’d ever heard any male even dare.

He held the intense moment on its edge almost long enough for Leela to just…

“But…that’s kinda heavy stuff. So if’n you ain’t in the mood ‘fer heavy, an’ since I gotta be all Great Fathery with my words an’ all…I guess that jus’ leaves me with makin’ a fool o’ myself!”

Leela burst out chittering—why, she couldn’t quite say—and spatulized his face back out of the window. “Great Mother! You don’t do anything gently, do you?”

“Nope! Well, I do when it’s important…”

Leela chittered to herself as she fell back into her taco rhythm. “Don’t you even.”

“Bah! How’s a ‘Back s’posed ‘ta get his lewd banter in then?”

“Go lewd someone else, then!”

“But they don’t have tacos!”

“They don’t have weapons-grade spatulas, either.”

“Aww, ‘yer no fun! An’ here I am, poor Daar, jus’ hungry ‘fer some tacos an’ someone warm ‘ta cuddle…balls, some workin’ days all I get is Sheeyo and he’s maybe too girly…”

It took Leela a moment to process that, since she was busy adding the latest batch to the growing mountain of tacos.

“Sheeyo…wait. The Goldpaw Champion!?”

“Yup! Smart lil’ guy, an’ a lotta fun ‘ta banter with! An’ he’s a friendly enough tail. Only a firs’-degree, though. I think ’yer paws are rougher’n his!”

He meant it as a compliment, she knew. Deep down she was even flattered, since hard work was something he admired. She did too, being honest about it. Still…

“That’s because I work for a living,” she replied icily, and didn’t quite manage to hide her amusement. He practically howled with laughter.

“T’be fair, he’s sired Keeda’s own share of females, so he’s not so bad! I’ve only ever had three, so I guess I’ll keep tryin’…and tryin,’ workin’ hard an’ all…”

That playfully smug face of his just couldn’t be contained. She flicked an ear and looked down through the window, and…yes. He was still showing off, like the world’s most predictable workhouse romance novel cover.

She managed to keep her expression dry and sardonic despite herself, and deployed her rejoinder. “That looks painful. I hear there’s a human in town that can work those muscle spasms out for you, My Father.”

“Y’mean ‘Horse? Do I look like a masochist to you?”

“Well…you do keep stepping up to pounce, and you do keep missing…”

“Naw, ‘ya just don’t know what ‘yer missin’!” He chittered, then curled one of those giant arms of his right in front of the order window. With a smoldering growl, “Wanna feel it?”

…Yes. “No! Can’t you act civilized for ten seconds?!” Please don’t.

He knew, the big Keeda. “‘Ya sure? Ain’t nobody got big buff biceps like me!”

Just… Aargh.

“…True enough. But I can think of many who have a more subtle delivery…”

“Oh, sure! ‘Subtle’ ain’t exactly my specialty. I’ll leave that tricky game to clever lil’ silverfurs!” His tail was wagging up a storm. Brownfurs really had trouble controlling it. “Speaking o’ that, I hear ya’ got ‘yer nose on a handsome lil’ friend o’ mine these days! Howzzat goin’?”

Well that was different. Daar usually focused on her qualities. And especially his. Not on other males.’ What was he up to?

“I am suddenly deeply suspicious.”

“Ya should be! Smart Female like ‘yerself prol’ly knows all the tricks us big lunks use!”

“Mmhmm. And this one? I believe the humans call this the ‘wingman’ technique.”

“Absolutely! Also, I can smell ‘em all over in ‘yer lil’ shack, y’know…he were here a few hours ago weren’t he?! I bet you let him help make tacos, too. Scandalous!”

Leela chittered happily as her paws worked. “Oh dear, you’ve caught me, Daar! Yes, all this time I’ve been stringing you along when really I’d put all my attention on some other Male. And yes, I’ve seen his paintings, and he politely asked if he could paint me.”

“Ooh, really?”

“Really. And I said yes.”

Daar’s tail whipped back and forth like a rudder, swatting at the air audibly. He looked like a gricka readying itself to pounce on a dizi rat.

“Ah! But you ain’t really seen ‘em, did’ya know that? Those paintin’s o’ his got something a little extra…an’ Leemu’s one o’ the only gao who can see it! Can ‘ya guess what it is?”

Daar’s chafing-dish-sized paw had crept a little too close to the window opening, which earned the offending limb a swift spatulatory whap.

“Bad Daar! And I honestly could not possibly imagine what it might be, I just admire his skill. You’re right, he really is a talented painter.”

“Talented an’ more! See, it’s ‘cuz he can see the color red.”

Leela paused. “He… wait, what?”

Daar’s contrabass chitter rattled the window in its frame. “Yeah! Turns out, we all can, it’s just a gene what’s not activated! An’ he, uh, sorta helped us ‘ta discover that!”

Leela peered thoughtfully into the fog that Daar’s breath was building on her window. A whole primary color she’d never seen? What would that even be like?

What were Leemu’s paintings like? She wanted to see that.

Remembering herself, she quickly rescued some almost over-browned corn tortillas and assembled another half-dozen tacos with a few efficient motions.

“So he can see red,” she said nonchalantly, trying to control her twitching, swiveling ears.

Of course, under all the comically hulking brawn, Daar was still the Great Father. He noticed everything, even through the fogged-over window. “Yup! Y’should, y’know, ask ‘em ‘bout it!”

“I…you’re serious. You’re actually talking him up. Earnestly.”

“‘Course I am! I happen ‘ta like the lil’ fella! An’ you two would make a cute couple! He’s tough an’ determined and creative as balls, an’ ‘yer industrious, super smart, beautiful…”

Earnest praise always felt good of course, but it felt doubly so coming from Daar. He was a Stoneback and they never lied. Ever. He wasn’t one to sugar-coat things either. To be called beautiful and smart by someone like him…

That didn’t mean she couldn’t tease him, though. She knew exactly the jab to take.

“Daar, I’m surprised! You’ve somehow learned to think beyond your own Little Father!”

Daar’s uproarious chitter sounded like a revving motorcycle and shook the ground for several seconds. “Naw! Ain’t been little since I were! It’s a long an’ heavy pawful, even ‘fer me!”

“Daar!”

“An’ besides! While ‘yer busy with Leemu, I’ll just go fuck all ‘yer most bestest Sisters ‘fore ‘ya give in ta’ the inevitable!”

“Daaaar!!”

“Oh! An’ ‘fore I forget, how’dya like ta’ get a nice, fat caterin’ job?”

Leela needed just a second to recover from the conversational whiplash. Life around Daar was just that way, it seemed.

“Uh…wow. Okay. That’s a novel means of attracting my affections…”

“Naw, right now I’m jus’ tryna get more tacos. Priorities, y’know!”

“Hah!”

“Fer’ serious! There’s gonna be a whole lotta First Fang and Human operators there. Couple hunnerd bottomless stomachs! An’ I bet they’ll tip well!”

“…And one bottomless Daar.”

“Naw! You need proof otherwise? ‘Cuz I’ll shake my big ol’ glutes ‘fer a pretty Female any day!”

“That’s not what I— Oh for fuck sake.”

Daar shook them anyway, because preening for Females was just what he did.

Leela wasn’t as disapproving as she pretended. There was something perversely delightful in rejecting the earnest advances of a male like him, but leaving aside his extreme smarmy boisterousness, it was hard to say no. He was without any serious question the greatest gaoian male to ever live; that unbelievably brash self-assessment he’d unleashed on her had the virtue of being entirely true. Yet nonetheless, Leela resisted him. She wasn’t entirely sure why. He was genuinely affectionate and charming under it all, but…

He was just so…

So…

Ridiculous. Blatant. So completely over the top, an outright parody of himself…and yet.

And yet.

Leela gave in and chitter-sighed.

“Alright, you irredeemable meathead. Fine. You win, just like you always do. But right now I’ve got a mountain of tacos here. How are you carrying all this?”

“I got saddlebags! Hang on, I gotta put ‘em on…can ‘ya help?”

Well. Leela tidied up the last of the tacos into a big paper stasis bag and stepped out under the awning she kept over the door. Daar thumped over on his rear legs, his body still tensed…

…And abruptly, the playful illusion between them was broken. Leela didn’t know if it was the lighting, that his attention was on something else for the moment, that she was standing so close to him and he was so utterly, unbelievably huge and so toweringly tall—

For that moment he wasn’t big, goofy Daar, an incorrigible oaf with a penchant for silliness and light-heartedly boorish behavior. Standing before her was the Great Father in all his glory, all his noble being, all his terrible power and unrestrained capacity for action.

He sighed, and a touch of melancholy colored his voice. “See that sunset, Leela?”

She looked. Even though it was raining locally, those clouds were only a local phenomenon. The sunset itself was a warm wash of yellows. Pretty enough, she supposed. The dying light shining through the rain was certainly striking, and the faint arc of a rainbow added an intriguing highlight, but… Still, she couldn’t quite see what was so enrapturing about it.

“…Daar?”

He sighed again and finally relaxed. Somehow his slackened muscles only amplified the sense of tragic nobility about him. Right then, staring into the sunset, his face lit with warm yellows and his expression almost mournful…he was wasn’t just handsome. He was beautiful.

She keened softly and suddenly felt very, very small. “…What’s wrong?”

“I wish all my people could see that. Soon, maybe…” He looked down at her and smiled wanly. “But that’s a problem for tomorrow-Daar.”

Whatever it was that had bothered at him seemingly passed without much issue. He fell to all fours with a heavy ‘thump’ and pranced over to a little package he’d brought with him. It turned out to be a pack harness, which he wriggled into without much complaint. Leela yet again enjoyed the view—she was doing that a lot tonight—until he was ready.

“Can ‘ya load me up? I don’t fit so well in ‘yer little stand…”

“No,” she chittered. “If you tried to squeeze yourself in I fear it would burst!”

“Ha!”

Leela popped in and fetched the order. Half of the order went into one of his side-bags, and he spun around on the spot so she could load the other half. She secured the flaps and he was loaded up, ready to charge over to wherever he was going next.

“Balls that smells good, can’t wait to dig in! Thankee!” He reached for his money and they settled up accounts.

“Will there be anything else?”

“Nah, you made everything jus’ how I like it, I can tell. And…uh…thank you. ‘Fer puttin’ up with me. It means more’n you’ll ever know that I can have an occasional dose o’ normalcy.”

On all fours, his head was only a bit below eye level, which made it much easier to look him in the eye. She didn’t see smarminess there, or boisterous ego. No preening, no boasting…

Just thankfulness.

That was…she didn’t quite know what to say, but humor seemed a safe escape. “Uh…well, if you want your hopes repeatedly dashed, then I guess I’m the Female for you.”

Daar chittered, this time warmly. “Good! Even a Great Father needs someone ‘ta put ‘em in his place now an’ then! But, uh, on a more serious note…”

“Yes?”

“…I weren’t kiddin’ ‘bout you an’ Leemu. It’s just…he’s been through some shit, Leela. An’ I respect the balls outta him ‘fer copin’ as well as he has. So, uh…I ain’t askin’ a favor or nothin’ and this isn’t me as the Great Father tryin’ ‘ta intervene…but, uh…give him a fair shake?”

Leela smiled warmly and scritched at the side of his brutish jaw. “You don’t need to worry about that, Daar. I like him. And…thank you, too.”

“Oh? ‘Fer what?”

Leela felt a bit at a loss for words. “Um…just, in general. I think mostly, thank you for paying attention to me. Even if it is over-the-top hypermacho attention.”

Daar nuzzled against her hand and chuffed. “You like it, though.”

“…I do. I don’t know why, but I do.”

Daar sighed and looked up at her. “Yeah. Better that, then be all terrified o’ me, I guess.”

“…Sorry?”

“Just a few ticks ago, you saw somethin’ in me that gave ‘ya a fright, din’t ‘ya?”

Great Mother he was perceptive. “…Yes. The light caught you just so…”

“Right.” Daar shook out the fur on his nape. “But ‘ya know I’m mostly jus’ a goofball, right?”

She understood. “You do it deliberately, to disarm yourself.”

“Partly, yeah. Mostly I do it ‘cuz that’s just how I naturally am, but…”

“You never wanted any of this, did you.”

“No. I want to protect an’ ain’t nobody else can do this, but balls if I’d rather just, y’know…”

That was…well, there was only one thing to do. She crouched down and hugged his massive head to her chest, and scritched her claws in his dense neckfur.

“Daar…” She pulled back to look him in the eyes. They were beautiful really, a very pure amber that was almost like they were glowing. “Daar. My Father.” Leela touched noses with the Great Father, and then pushed his muzzle down to her throat. Not an easy thing to do, the memories flooded back…

She summoned up her courage and didn’t quaver. “I believe in you. I trust you. We all do.”

Daar, bless him, understood her meaning. He snuffled against her throat and gave her a single affectionate lick, then guided her muzzle against the brutishly thick cords of his own neck with his great, skull-encircling paws. He could kill her so easily, even by accident…

But she trusted him. She hadn’t lied, and he knew it. “I know. An’ I trust you, too.”

They held for a long, profound moment.

Daar eventually broke the moment. “Well…I better git goin’ before the Lads send out a search party. We’re havin’ a bit of a get-together, ‘fer old time’s sake.”

Leela stepped back and duck-nodded. “You should get going. Go find a nice warm towel or something, you’ll catch a chill.”

Daar gave her one last smarmy look, this one more gently playful than the others. “Naw, I like the rain! I don’t git cold, even bein’ all super lean an’ short-furred like this. My ‘tabolism’s always been pretty crazy.”

“It’s certainly kept me in business…”

“An’ me full o’ energy!”

Leela smiled warmly at him, but decided she needed to do one last thing. She leaned in and touched noses again, and then nibbled at the side of his heavy jaw. “One day. If I ever go in for an oaf again…it’ll be you.”

Daar duck-nodded seriously and returned the nip. “An’ I’ll be ready, when you are. Take ‘yer time, ‘kay? An’ if ‘ya ever want me ‘ta stop, or mebbe dial it back a bit…”

Leela smiled warmly. “We should get you on your way. Someone’s got to put the Lads in line!”

“Ha!”

They hugged one last time. Leela gave him a taco-shaped business card, with a custom pop-up ninja inside the fold brandishing “throwing tacos.” Daar was suitably delighted with it, said his goodbyes—warmly, as always—and with tacos filling his side bags, finally thumped off toward his other business. She admired the roll of his hugely muscular haunches as he thundered off at a prancing trot, shaking the ground underfoot as he went. When he was at a fair distance away, he looked back at her, flicked his ears, and poured on so much speed, he handily outran the cars cruising the road.

She went inside to close for the night, and found herself grinning.

Date Point: 16y7m3w2d AV
Quarterside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ferd Given-Man

The ‘hostel’ had other guests staying, though there was room for Ferd and his men. They were given room keys (and then a quick lesson on how keys and locks worked). Ferd kept the intricate little steel shape in a pouch on his bandolier next to his lucky arrowhead and his game-bones.

The other guests were young humans, a couple of hands of hands of them who couldn’t believe their good luck at actually getting to meet Ten’Gewek. Ferd and his party quickly became the most interesting thing around, and they couldn’t go anywhere in the hostel without a following.

…The young ones weren’t unwatched, though: they were under the watchful eye of a tall man with a ruddy beard and long hair as orange as boy’s crest, and a short, springy, wiry woman with short hair the color of stone, who made introductions.

The children were a ‘choir,’ she explained. It was a word that Ferd didn’t know but which turned out to mean ‘many singers.’

Not Singers. Just… people who sang. These children still kept their names, and their songs weren’t communion with the Gods. They weren’t magic, they just sung because they were good at it and enjoyed it. Apparently they came from a place called ‘Lun-dun’ and were in Folctha for a hand of days on a ‘tour.’

The children themselves eagerly suggested putting on an impromptu show for the Ten’Gewek, and formed in a half-moon on the grass at the back of the hostel. The tall man with the orange hair picked up a wooden thing with thin wires on it that made a strummy, pleasant noise when he ran his fingers across them, and…

…Ferd hadn’t ever heard singing like it.

The Humans might be young, but they took clear, pure notes out of the air and pulled them together into three or four voices, each made from two hands of lone voices woven together like deft fingers braiding cordage.

Ironically for something sung with so many voices standing shoulder-to-shoulder, it was a lonely song about loss and longing, tossed back and forth between the boys and the girls like an echo.

♫♪ “Did they get you to trade (did they get you trade?) your heroes for goals? (Did they get you to tra-ade?) Hot ashes for trees? (Trees fall down) Hot air for a cool breeze…”♪♫

Humans were good at singing.

It left Ferd sitting in an odd place. He was a Given-Man! A strong hunter, a warrior, a father and a protector of his people. But here in this place, he didn’t have anything he could show off with in reply. There was nothing heavy enough that lifting it would be impressive, and even if there was it probably belonged to somebody and he should be careful with it. There were no trees big enough to climb, no mighty beasts to hunt…

He could boast with the best, but Humans could be weird about boasting. They weren’t impressed by the same things so much.

What did that leave him with?

Answering questions, that’s what. And children, any children, were full of them. At first it was questions about what kind of songs the People sang, then questions about Singers and Dancers, and Given-Men, and did they know Julian Etsicitty? For some reason, a lot of the girls were giggling at that question.

Well. He knew why. Somehow though he knew he shouldn’t explore that branch.

“Yes! Jooyun is good friend! Good hunter, very smart! Easy to wrestle, though…”

That eventually led to them asking Ferd and his men to do all sorts of things: “Can you scratch your own back?” Yes. That seemed an odd question, but Humans didn’t have tails and couldn’t easily reach a spot in the middle of their backs! “Can you pick up that table?” Easy! And so on.

Ferd did eventually pick up a car, for fun. Sort of. It was heavy like a good Werne but it was much more heavy at one end than the other, and anything he tried to do felt like it might break something. He settled for just picking the front up a few times and putting it back down. Too bad. If he weren’t worried about it breaking in his hands…

That seemed to impress the children well enough, but by then their tribe elders were getting nervous, so he made sounds like the children should listen, and so forth. That got him some warm smiles, once the grown-ups figured out that the People did not fear toothy grins.

Once the children had been shooed away, some of the older not-quite-men and almost-women—young, but old enough to be treated basically like adults—suggested that they were going ‘out on Folctha.’

What that meant, apparently, was partying and fun, so of course Ferd and the others were in. That led, some minutes later, to something called a ‘night club’ which had nothing in common with any club Ferd had ever seen or held. Probably a words thing. Language.

There were bright, strongly colored lights, always moving. There was heat. Not as much as the forest, but it was warm and the air was heavy with moisture and the taste of young, excited people. There was music. This was much more like what the People made: deep, strong, a good rhythm for dancing. The difference was the high, soaring singing up above it, so loud that in minutes it sounded different.

Ferd liked dancing. Any strong-blooded man of the People liked dancing for the women. Here, that seemed to be the whole point of it. And there were many pretty people…

And drinks. Funny-tasting. It was the alcohol he’d remembered from the last time, and was very careful after that. Even so, with just that one drink he felt pleasantly a little dizzy and odd in the head. Everything was funny, especially the way Oki started falling asleep. Ferd was strong though and didn’t succumb to the magic of alcohol so easily. Instead he had a tiny slip of a woman with such pretty colors in her hair suddenly sitting in his lap, her arm around his neck…

Well…he was just a man, after all. Her wonderfully soft hands felt all along his body, and he felt her right back, and there was very much sneaky fun high up in a hidden corner, where Ferd and his new friend could explore each other without being bothered. But he remembered dimly the warnings from Wild: no fucking for him. Too bad. She would have felt so good…

But clever fingers and warm mouths were a good start. He’d have to visit her again some day!

Somehow, they made it back to the hostel. He wasn’t really sure how. He slept like a fallen tree on the almost too comfortable bed and…

…And the next morning was a gods-damned Taking for the Giving of the night before. He woke to the evil screeching-bird noises of his accursed fone and peered at it with eyes that felt like they were coated in sand.

…It was getting late. They had to get to the terminal. He rolled to his feet and shook out his head–that was a mistake. Suddenly it felt like Yan himself was punching him right in his brain. It must have been the alcohol. It’s Givings and Takings were very powerful magic.

Humans were strong people, at least in the ways of magic. Getting Oki to wake up was a small blessing though: Ferd had begun to worry they’d have to carry him back.

If they’d had to do that, Ferd would have made sure Oki paid for it later. In any case, they put their beds back together they way they found them, then shambled to the food room and ate some breakfast—the eggs were tasty at least, and he was already feeling much better. Bacon! There was also something called ‘black pudding’ which was very obviously made with something’s blood, but there was something else in it he couldn’t place. Whatever it was, it was also tasty, but was definitely something sort of like those ‘pastas’ the Humans loved. He would be farting loudly in an ‘hour,’ probably.

Still tasty.

They said their goodbyes to the children from the night before while the adults gave them knowing looks. Probably remembering adventures in their own youth, maybe.

After that, things went smoothly. All the stuff that should have been waiting for them at the jump array, was. Everything was loaded up quickly and expertly by a team of men with wheeled things, who got it all in place and settled inside the square briskly and quietly, then vanished as quickly as they’d come.

The Gaoian guard made a strange not-quite-trilling noise when he came to stamp their papers. “You smell like you had fun last night!”

“Too much fun,” Ferd grumbled. His head was still unhappy.

“Was it worth it?”

Ferd looked around. Folctha was.. A strange place. A jungle of its own kind, with its own ways and paths. He’d probably spent his time blundering and crashing through it like a panicking animal, rather than moving gracefully like a hunter should. The people who lived here had been friendly, and helpful, and full of surprises…

But he was going home knowing that there was much he did not know. Wild’s lesson was clear, there.

“…Yes,” he said. “Very worth it.”

They levered Oki onto the platform, settled in among all the things they’d come to fetch, and went home.

Date point: 16y8m1w AV
Planet Rauwryhr, the Rauwryhr Republic

Scrythcra, Rauwryhr ambassador to the Dominion Security Council

Rauwryhr tradition symbolically put important things higher up. Leaders and visionaries flew higher, saw further… and stayed there. Climbing up the trees from the bottom was hard work after all.

For this occasion, and these leaders and visionaries, the Republic had chosen the highest and most symbolically important location possible: the canopy. Dappled green-and-white leaves sprawled away in all directions under the perfect open sky, pierced here and there by the silver needles of starports and transit hubs.

And on a wide platform built intricately of lightweight high-strength alloys and decorated with polished stone tiles and other such heavy luxuries, under the warm sun and the open blue, the leaders of the most militarily significant species in the Dominion were gathering.

The Deathworlders drew the most attention. All of them were conspicuous in their exceedingly competent physicality. Many were Human, some of which were small, a few were enormous, all were gifted with compact and dense bodies that variously shook the platform with every step.

There were also Gao, mostly lighter-footed and less conspicuous than the Humans, with a few brutes sprinkled within that competed with the largest Humans for sheer strength.

There were even a pair of Ten’Gewek: Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge, and his niece known only by her title: The Singer. As Scrythcra understood it, her role was complex: a spiritual-philosophical guide to her uncle, a keeper of her people’s oral history, and a physician of sorts.

Primitive they may have been, but that only enhanced their Deathworlder presence; The Singer was as imposing as any Human Scrythcra had ever met, and only one other being present could stand beside her uncle as an equal.

They mostly kept counsel with the great leaders of the Deathworld nations and glanced warily at the sky whenever a security air shuttle passed nearby.

Handily surpassing them all was one hulking charismatic exemplar: Daar, the unacknowledged, de-facto leader of the Deathworld species. The treetop platform, sturdy enough to serve as a landing pad though it was, still thumped like a drum under the Great Father’s enormous mass. He spent most of the social morning leading Yan and the Singer around to the attendees and making introductions. The others paid close, if discreet attention; when the most powerful being in the galaxy, one who was arguably its most dangerous predator as well, wanted someone to meet his good and trusted friend…

He was nothing but civilized, polite friendliness to everyone. Nonetheless, all but Yan paid him deference, and some representatives of minor powers did so to the point of near terror. Even the great Human leaders, proud and capable all, gave the Great Father his due respect.

His clear and obvious fondness for the American President was a major topic of discussion during the morning social before the official start of business.

Not that it was much of a social. The Kwmbwrw Grandmatriarchs—conspicuously lacking Henenwgwyr among their number—huddled together and conspired, as did the assorted Vzk’tk and Rrrtk heads of state, the gaggle of Corti Deans, and the representatives of all the other minor species.

There was, however, an island of stillness in the middle of it all: a Guvnurag, thin and recovering. Furfeg, now elevated to President of the Guvnurag Confederacy by simple line of succession. He’d been eightieth, before the Hunter attack on their homeworld and the en-masse biodroning of his species’ entire population.

This had prompted an outpouring of sympathy from the Gaoian camp. And of course, the Gao had gone through something similar themselves: if anybody could genuinely sympathize, it was them.

The rest… faced the prospect. Scrythcra’s government had conducted quite an early investigation into Human claims about the dangers of neural interfacing cybernetics, and the Republic’s leadership had been methodically and slowly quarantined and cleansed… a process that had only become overt after the Battle of Gao and the Guvnurag invasion.

Everyone present today was clean of implants.

There were two notable moments during the social mingling and small-talk, the first of which happened quite early in the day when Scrythcra was introduced to the Ten’Gewek.

It was hard to know what to say to such people. The psychological profile on Ten’Gewek that he’d read upon learning of their attendance suggested that their culture placed a premium on physical brute strength. Rauwryhr, being among the Dominion’s more fragile species thanks to their lightweight bones, were apparently at a disadvantage there.

At least, until the Singer asked a question.

“I heard you can fly?” she asked.

“Here on this world, yes,” Scrythcra said. “Should I demonstrate?”

“I would love to see it!” the Singer replied eagerly. Yan was more impassive, but even he bobbed his head and issued a soft hoot which Scrythcra took for badly-restrained interest.

So he demonstrated. There was a nice updraft off the forest canopy, and he rode it to some distance above the platform before spiralling down again. An easy and gentle glide from his perspective, but the Ten’Gewek pair seemed thoroughly impressed before Daar guided them away to meet other delegates.

Their Human guide and minder, an enormous and solid specimen with plenty of shaggy hair and darker skin then most of the rest, smiled and shook Scrythcra’s hand with care.

“You impressed them,” he said. “Neither of them impress easily.”

“I thought they weren’t much impressed by weaker species?” Scrythcra inquired.

“Flight is a strength they don’t have…” The Human glanced over his shoulder as the Great Father introduced the Ten’Gewek to First Director Shanl. “…I should follow them. Thank you, Your Excellency.”

And with that, he was gone. Scrythcra spent the remainder of the morning feeling quite accomplished.

The second incident came later, and was much more consequential. Scrythcra didn’t catch the conversation between the Great Father and Furfeg, which had begun with the enormous Gaoian approaching with as cautious and non-threatening a prowl as he could manage: not, therefore, a particularly reassuring gesture to most present. They exchanged words and Furfeg’s chromataphores flashed many colors, which seemed to strongly fascinate the Great Father. There was a pause, the Great Father duck-nodded, rose to his hind legs…

…And gave Furfeg a hug.

Exactly what was said between them wasn’t clear, and Scrythcra heard much speculation for the rest of the morning as he mingled and talked with the delegates. Furfeg didn’t say, and Daar teased infuriatingly rather than answering.

Scrythcra could appreciate discretion. He didn’t pry.

Instead, when the time came, he called the delegates to order.

Today was the culmination of months of meetings between the Dominion species’ military thinkers, not to mention fraught negotiations with some of the Security Council members. Over the time the Symposium had been going on there had been practical demonstrations of technology, philosophical discussions, presentations and history lessons…

…All in preparation for today. The moment that the Gao and Humans revealed their big plans, and invited the other species to join in.

The delegates spread out around the platform, and an experienced political eye could see the underlying loyalties and affiliations in where they chose to coalesce. The Humans and Gao were side by side, as close as old friends. The Ten’Gewek sat with them, and then on either side of the Deathworlder trio were the Guvnurag and Corti.

An interesting statement from the Corti, that. The Directorate’s delegates, especially First Director Shanl, were experts at conveying much while saying little, and their choice of floor space must have been calculated to a very fine degree indeed.

The rest of the circle was more sparse. The Kwmbwrw remained aloof and sat opposite the Deathworld representatives. The Domain picked a diplomatic spot halfway between both, and the Locayl and Independents did the same on the opposite side.

It was all a subtle dance, and none of the species were blind to it. But the dance ended when two of the Gaoians stepped forward to begin the first presentation: Champion Thurrsto, and Champion Fiin.

Both were large and powerfully-bodied males of such stature that they fit comfortably in the company of their fellow Deathworlders. Both were possessed of an easy, assured grace that commanded instant respect and attention, as befitted the leadership of the two most capable military Clans of the Gao.

And they were not, apparently, interested in diplomatic preamble. There had been enough of that already.

Thurrsto launched into the presentation without even a note of welcome or an acknowledgement of the situation. “We begin by framing the obstacles in front of us,” he began. “The first component of a solution, after all, is understanding. And understanding the twin enemies we face is going to be crucial as we move forward.”

Unlike his colleague, Champion Fiin preferred to remain on four-paw. He never quite stopped moving as he spoke, either, creating a prowling impression that contrasted with Thurrsto’s upright stillness. “We have learned over many years that our two great enemies are two aspects of the same problem. The Hunters are, in fact, the discarded corporeal husks of the dataforms–” A grumble from the Great Father off in the corner made Fiin chitter resignedly. “–sapient malware that threaten our peoples’ freedom and existence.”

“A brief review of ancient history is probably the best place to start, therefore.” Thurrsto continued. “From what we can gather, the civilization known as the Igraens were among the first to evolve in this galaxy, sharing it with only a few others. Exactly how many is long-forgotten, but we know of one for certain: the V’Straki.”

“We’ve heard some fanciful stories about the V’Straki,” Fiin continued. “Including that they in fact evolved on Earth, homeworld of our Human friends. If so, they somehow managed to achieve advanced spaceflight without leaving any trace of their advanced industrial age in that planet’s well-studied geological record, but the details don’t truly matter. What matters is that the Igraens and the V’Straki were bitter enemies, and their conflict raged without regard for any other species. Each was so concerned with destroying the other that every other concern was secondary. And in the end… the Igraens won.”

“Their victory wasn’t complete, however,” Thurrsto took over. “Igraens were dependent on a dietary supplement native to their homeworld. Without it, they quickly descended into violent, mindless cannibalistic madness, and the V’Straki successfully eradicated the crop, most likely with some kind of tailored bioweapon. Again, the exact detail doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Igraens were left with a choice: descend into insanity and go extinct, or upload their mind-states to a digital format and persist in that form, no longer corporeal but arguably still themselves.”

“But the insane corporeal Igraens did not die off,” Fiin resumed his part in the back-and-forth. “A minority retained enough intelligence and insight to survive. In time, this intelligence was selected for and they evolved a twisted kind of sapience very different to what had once been. Eventually they became intelligent enough to understand the ruins of the civilization around them, to learn from it, to build, and to strike out to the stars in search of prey. Thus began the Hunters, and they have tormented spacefaring life forms ever since.”

“As for the—with My Father’s indulgence—the dataforms,” Thurrsto said, “They found that a version of their corporeal deficiency came with them. What had once been a dietary need became something else. A need for something they can hardly define to this day, but which they know as ‘Substrate.’ Its exact nature remains a little… arcane… but they derive it from living, material life forms such as us. But to get it, they require access to our brains. And over the long millions of years - nearly a third of a galactic rotation - the most effective method they found was to cultivate a thriving market for neural cybernetics.”

“This market needed protecting,” Fiin said. “They needed their own designs and technology to dominate, otherwise inevitably somebody would have invented a version that wasn’t vulnerable to their machinations and that didn’t provide the needed Substrate. So they brutally suppressed all innovation in the field, bought patents, engineered the law and the private sector alike across every incarnation of the galactic community going back far beyond the limits of our historical record.”

Thurrsto sighed, and padded back to the center of the floor. “However, this ran the risk of lulling the Substrate too far into complacency. They observed that a motivational threat was required. To that end, we suspect they aided the Hunters in their climb back to the stars…and from time to time, engineered Contingency species. The most recent such species…was the Gao.”

He looked over at the Great Father. “We do not know the degree to which we were tampered with. We know it was extensive, and that every aspect of our existence has been touched by their interference. We know that at some point, our planet was a rich class-eleven world and trending steadily higher. It is now…well, it flowers because of our industry. Only now, across deep geologic time, as Gao has begun to reclaim its former richness, do we begin to understand just how much was taken from us. We are as we are because we were designed to be, encouraged to be. Bred to be. How much of that was our will, we will never know.”

Daar rumbled from his seat at the high table. “But we ended it, on our terms. We ain’t nobody’s Janissaries.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded, then returned his focus to everyone else. “…There was another threat to their schemes, however. It’s an oversimplification, perhaps, to artificially separate the galaxy’s species into Deathworlders and not, but the fact remains that where many species thrive on stability, others thrive on the opposite. Put aside the strict rules of classification: a Deathworlder is a being who hails from a dynamic, dangerous, and fundamentally unpredictable world. Such people simply could not be relied upon to comply with the Hierarchy’s cybernetic monopoly…. Which left, in the Igraen’s estimation, only one option. Extermination.”

“We don’t even know how many species they destroyed,” Fiin said. He hung his head sadly. “But at a minimum… thousands. Tens of thousands, most likely. Tens of thousands of our fellow sophont species, trillions of individuals, all mercilessly eradicated because they might pose a potential future danger to the Igraen Hegemony. That, esteemed attendees, is the kind of ruthlessness we are up against.”

“It is the fate that was reserved for Humanity. We’ve since learned their final plan before they triggered the War for Gao, before My Father became a hindrance to their machinations…was to trigger an interstellar war between our peoples.”

The pair let a gentle susurrus of whispered comments swell and die around them before Thurrsto moved the history forward.

“So. That is where we are now. The Hierarchy lurking in the background, plucking the strings of our economy and the very neurons of our brains, and the Hunters at large in a vast and untamed swathe of uncharted space. Both know that things are about to change for them. And both, if pressed, will gladly wipe us all out and cultivate a new set of civilizations if given the chance. They have done it before.”

“Let’s review a few facts about Hunter space,” Fiin said. He finally turned to the holoprojector behind him and summoned a graphic: a map of the galaxy.

Scrythcra was always struck by how small the Dominion seemed, when he saw it on the map like this. Though the Interspecies Dominion claimed rather grandiosely to be the arbiter of galactic law and the mediator for every sapient species in the galaxy, in reality it was a thin band—presented in this case in yellow—that stretched maybe a third of the way around quite a narrow corridor of the galactic disk, perhaps two-thirds of the way out from the core.

Even so, in real terms that was an immense volume encompassing uncountable millions of stars, trillions of sophonts, an economy so immense and complex that nobody could begin to fathom it, and the richest known field of temperate worlds in the whole galaxy. Turnwise from Dominion space, the number of temperate worlds dwindled sharply. Counter-turnwise… well, the farthest-flung backwater of the whole Dominion was Earth, sitting alone and forgotten amidst the barren Border Stars.

There were two other hues on the map: A tiny green smudge that was the Celzi Alliance, once the Dominion’s most bitter enemy, now merely an irksome and unreasonable neighbor…

…And Hunter Space. A blue tumor whose sprawling tendrils reached out to lick the entire Dominion from the Coreward Marches at the edge of Kwmbwrw space all the way down to the largely uninhabited Far Reaches.

Fiin considered the map for a moment, then returned his gaze to the attendees. “…We don’t know exactly how big Hunter space is,” he said. “It’s never been adequately mapped or explored, as every attempt to do so has been intercepted. We do however have intelligence recovered from the Hunters’ own navigation charts.”

“At the cost, it must be said, of many brave and talented lives,” Fiin added. “Nevertheless, what matters is that we can put approximate limits on the boundaries of Hunter space, and an estimate on how many temperate worlds fall within those boundaries, all of which we presume to be claimed and used for slave farming.”

He swept his paw, and a constellation of little points of light filled the Hunter volume on the map. “…One hundred and six of them.”

Dismay swept around the chamber like a light breeze on leaves, causing much movement but still leaving everything where it had been. One hundred and six? The Vzk’tk Domain, by far the Dominion’s largest and most sprawling member state, encompassed twelve. The Kwmbwrw, in second place, had a mere ten.

Everyone else had six or fewer.

“I should point out that despite that number, the Hunters themselves prefer an exclusively spaceborne existence. Nevertheless, they have the resources to control and contain those planets and keep their slave population suppressed,” Thurrsto finished.

Fiin raised his voice as the dismay got a little louder. Not shouting or anything, just making himself heard. “Please, delegates! We’re not here to alarm you. We’re presenting raw facts here, which need putting in their proper context.” He paused long enough for the rising noise to settle, then duck-nodded. “A hundred and six planets is a lot, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of overestimating our foe; that’s often just as dangerous as *under*estimating them would be.”

“It’s difficult to translate their… uh… lifestyle into our terms,” Thurrsto agreed. “But if the planet ‘Hell’ is fairly average by their standards, we can expect each of these worlds to bear about a hundred million slaves. Considering the average Hunter’s nutritional requirements, that puts an upper limit on the population all those planets can support.”

“Those estimates would set the Hunter population at a little fewer than five and a half billion individuals,” Fiin said. “It could be less, or It could be more. It could be much more. Nevertheless, My Father’s Grand Army has, as of this morning, one billion, eleven million and seven-hundred thousand trained and experienced soldiers. They are well-drilled in the logistics and teamwork of dealing with unspeakable horrors and—go ahead?”

He had been (politely) interrupted by Ak’kk’brr, Grand Admiral of the Vzk’tk Domain, who raised his larger left hand to draw the Champion’s attention.

“Nobody disputes the competence and tenacity of Gaoian soldiers, Champion Fiin of Clan Stoneback” he said, diplomatically. “But you are still describing a five-to-one numbers deficit. How exactly do you propose we attack a power that much larger?”

“That question isn’t ours to answer, Grand Admiral,” Fiin replied. “But I can promise you that it will be, in due course.”

“Setting that question aside for a moment, the final issue to consider regarding the Hunters is the logistical and rehabilitation challenge posed by the slave populations of those planets, some of whom may even be hitherto-uncontacted species,” Thurrsto took over smoothly. “If our estimates are accurate, then the total slave population is more than ten billion individuals alive at any given time, and that population can be expected to explode without the Hunters. The question of how to deal with them will be a long-term and ongoing one.”

“That’s the Hunters. The Hierarchy pose a different set of challenges,” Fiin said. He waved his hand at the holoprojector, and the galactic map reappeared, dotted with a constellation of glowing zones like dried fruit in a cookie. “All software requires hardware, and they are no different. There are a number of communications relays dotted around the galaxy, though we have estimates on the upper and lower bounds, as well as mildly contradictory testimony from interrogated Igraens as to how many there are which fell inside those bounds.”

“We also know roughly where they are likely to be,” Thurrsto added. “Though I should point out that each of the highlighted volumes in this slide is hundreds of light years across and contains hundreds of thousands or even millions of stars. Work is ongoing to narrow down their locations. The one relay we have so far found was scouted extensively, tapped for a prolonged period to extract useful intelligence, and finally destroyed by orbital bombardment. The instantaneous effect of that last step was the liberation of the Guvnurag population on… uh…” He paused and gave the long alien word a fair attempt. “…Ugun-duvur-onag-thureg-nubur-thuruv. ”

For a brief moment, Fiin’s professional facade slipped and he gave his fellow Champion an amused look and flick of the ear. Thurrsto shot him a return look that clearly said ‘don’t laugh’ in any language, and the Stoneback Champion returned to his half of the briefing. “The work of identifying and demolishing these relays is going to take a while, But we expect that each such victory will be a painful loss for the Hierarchy. Their resistance will no doubt be fierce, and ruthless.”

“There’s also the implanted civilian population to consider,” he continued. “On Gao, the biodrone uprising was ferocious, and the necessary measures to put it down were extreme. It will be necessary to take appropriate steps to mitigate, contain or prevent such uprisings as the Hierarchy grow increasingly desperate.”

“Again, the question of how to resolve that issue is not for us to answer,” Thurrsto said. “Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight, Human representative to the Dominion Security Council, will discuss the philosophy behind the general strategic approach, and finally My Father will explain the details alongside General Gregory Kolbeinn, Supreme Allied Commander of Extrasolar Defence. Before we step aside for them, are there any questions?”

Scrythcra turned around and joined a brief huddle alongside Yrwcrohyr and their advisors.

“Do we have any?” Yrwcrohyr asked.

“What could we possibly ask at this point? What they are proposing is near-certain doom. Let them fall all the way down before we think about climbing down after them.”

“And yet, they’re still alive. Both of them, Gao and Humans alike. And the Ten’Gewek,” Scrythcra pointed out. “If the doom you speak of was so certain, I don’t think that would be so.”

“We were promised an explanation of how they intend to take on those odds,” another advisor agreed. “I say we hear it before we decide the situation is hopeless.”

“Agreed,” Yrwcrohyr said, and that settled it. They returned their attention to the waiting Gao, and indicated that the Rauwryhr contingent had nothing to ask at this time.

The Corti requested a few clarifications concerning the estimated number of Igraen relays, and the Kwmbwrw had a question regarding fleet deployment which Fiin politely explained was not within his authority to answer. Most seemed to have reached the same conclusion as the Rauwryhr had: that they would continue to listen before asking questions.

With that, the pair of Gaoian Champions withdrew to sit behind the Great Father, and Ambassador Knight stepped forward.

Knight had once explained the concept of Knighthoods to Scrythcra, noting that in his case he held the honor of being a knight, in addition to being a Knight. He’d laughed, and then had to explain the joke and the family naming conventions of his native culture.

As Scrythcra understood it, the title referred to highly prized and skilled warriors from the days before Humankind had invented steam power and explosives. Knight had described men wearing full suits of intricately beaten steel, armed with the finest weapons and riding astride a powerful war beast.

It was hard to compare that mental image with the tall and rather elderly Human who nevertheless bore himself upright and with dignity as he moved to the middle of the platform to take up his own chapter of the briefing. But there was something there. Scrythcra had worked with his Human counterpart for some time, and respected him greatly.

He was quite sure that Ambassador Knight would command similar respect from the other delegates, soon.

“So,” the old man said amiably. “The question I’m here to answer was already astutely raised by the Grand Admiral of the Domain—please forgive me if I don’t try to pronounce your name, Grand Admiral, I’m afraid the closest I can manage would be, er… obscurely unflattering—But how do we propose to attack a power that large?”

He turned to the holoemitter. “The answer is that we don’t. Have you ever studied how predators choose their prey? We do not contest with our enemy at their point of maximum strength. Instead…” he waved his hand, summoning the first animated slide. “We identify areas of weakness and strike at them, deftly and without mercy. With each weakness we exploit we create new weaknesses to strike at, and all of this is with a clear objective in mind: to starve them.”

The slide was a little complex for Scrythcra to make sense of at first, but it was that last comment which finally prompted understanding to blossom. The intricate three-dimensional inverted tree Knight had chosen to indicate was a summary of the dense and sprawling material needs demanded by even a modest military. Each extremity was a resource, each higher node a place where those resources came together to produce something necessary.

Knight spoke as though reciting an old adage. “For want of a nail…” he said, and one of the tree’s minor extremities flashed and went dark. “…A shoe was lost. For want of a shoe…” the darkness crept upwards and inwards, as the higher functions which drew from that resource were denied. “…A rider was lost. For want of the rider, the battle was lost… And for want of a battle…”

The creeping starvation reached the tree’s core, and the entire thing went dark.

Knight swept the room with a level, confident gaze. “This is how all wars are won,” he said, firmly. “Any action not directly devoted to this process is wasted action. Fleets can clash, armies can brawl in the mud, heroes can die by the thousand and megatons of munitions can be expended, but unless this happens, it is all… to quote a great poet, ‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’

He dismissed the hologram and stood primly where it had been, with his hands loose at his sides

“We propose to teach you how to think like predators. Often, a predator is outnumbered and outmuscled by his prey. His true strength lies in his cunning and wits, and the careful application thereof.”

Scrythcra glanced across at the lumpen stone-age figure of Yan Given-Man, who was nodding in undisguised agreement. His people, Scrythcra was certain, had never fought a war on any kind of real scale in all their history… and yet it was clear that Knight was sharing knowledge that was already intimately familiar to the Ten’Gewek.

Knight saw Scrythcra’s head turn, followed his gaze, and smiled. “…Yes. It is no accident we have among us the great chieftain of a fierce, yet undeveloped people. There are few anywhere who could convey the lesson better than he.”

Yan nodded, and at Knight’s prompting stood up.

“Every day I visit, I see things I know are not magic only because your people long ago tamed the power of the gods. The world, the sky, the power that runs unseen behind it all… you teach me impossible things! Time bends like water ripples, and the world moves around it! Light and heat and fire and the earth, all the same, deep down! And you all can bend space and time to your whim, split the sky and tear the world apart whenever you wish… That is terror. That is strength! And yet I fear no one here but the Great Father. I respect him because he is the only man here who could Take me before the gods, as a hunter takes his meat. The rest of you…I say without disrespect, cower before me and him. You should not! You should stand strong! Why let us win before the fist has been raised or the knife drawn? Because I am bigger than you? My arm is stronger? That doesn’t matter!

“When I hunt… A werne is a mighty beast. A good bull has blades of bone on his face that can break even a steel knife and hooves that could crush my guts with a lucky stomp. I must be careful! I respect my prey, because my prey does not want to die, and it has the strength to fight back, and will kill me if it can. These Hunters and Hierarchy, they are dangerous too… but you do not respect them. You fear them. Not the same thing.”

“Not the same thing at all,” Knight agreed. Yan nodded to him, and resumed his seat.

“Please understand,” Knight said once he had the floor to himself again, “that I am not making any accusation here. We are dealing with a blameless reality of evolutionary psychology: That many of the beings in this room have instincts which served their well in their deep ancestral past, but which are no good for the present crisis. That is, I think, a surmountable obstacle with education and training. Goodness knows, I needed plenty of both myself when I was a young man.” He smiled tightly, and there were some variations on quiet mirth from around the room: a bass chitter from Daar, a brief trill from Yan, and some chuckles from the humans.

It wasn’t a humorous sound.

“Are there any questions before I step aside for the Great Father and General Kolbeinn?” Knight asked.

Scrythcra turned to Twrythruc, the fatalistic advisor from before. “Still think it’s hopeless?”

“Pretty-sounding aphorisms, and no detail on tactics. I am not convinced by magical thinking.”

“What was magical about that? It seemed logical enough to me. A tree dies when the roots rot.”

“And that’s a pretty aphorism from you, too,” Twrythruc grumbled. “Where is the detail?”

“We aren’t here to discuss detail. We are here to discuss grand strategy and our course. Besides: the Deathworlders are going to do this, with or without us. If they should fail, the backlash… might well end our civilization.”

“And if they fail with our assistance, then it certainly will!”

“But if they succeed with our assistance—and I dare to say that success is more likely if we do assist them than if not—then we will have taken a hand in our own future and left a safer tomorrow for our children,” Scrythcra insisted. “If we aren’t even interested in that, then what are we for?”

Yrwcrohyr simply remained quiet, though Scrythcra fancied he detected the faintest agreeable twitch of her left ear in response to his words.

Nevertheless, part of Twrythruc’s objection was put to Ambassador Knight by the Locayl delegate, Chief Secretary Oryus.

“A grand vision,” he said, “but lacking in detail. Do you have a finer-grained vision for the war effort?”

“The Great Father and General Kolbeinn do,” Knight replied. “My intent was simply to explain the underlying logic behind the details. If that is your most burning question, then I think the most appropriate thing to do now would be to hand over to them. Shall I?”

There were nods and equivalent gestures of encouragement from around the platform, so Knight bobbed his head in a gesture of respect and returned to the ranks of the Human delegation. A slightly younger, broader, meatier man in a uniform so dark blue it was almost black, decorated in gold and many colored patches traded a respectful nod and strode out onto the platform alongside Daar.

The Great Father wore no accoutrements. His fur was exquisitely groomed and brushed to a sleek sheen, but other than that he needed no decoration or badges of rank, and his energy quite unconsciously shook the room just from the simple act of standing. There was just something instinctive about him: Humans were intense and intimidating enough, but they at least didn’t have actual fangs and claws. They weren’t heavy enough to make the whole deck resonate like a giant drum with each step. Their danger was potential. His was immediate.

Despite what Yan Given-Man had said, the gathered non-Deathworld delegates couldn’t help but be instinctively afraid of Daar… and he knew it.

“See, that there is what my friends were a’talkin’ ‘bout. Y’all jus’ recoiled from me. I can see th’ alarm in Furfeg’s chromatophores an’ I can smell it in err’one. Th’ first thing we gotta teach ‘ya is ‘ta control that instinct, even if it’s to my personal advantage ‘ya don’t. I can’t have allies scared o’ me just ‘cuz I’m the most strongest. At this level o’ the game, that don’t matter none. An’ ‘ya gotta figger that out. Wars ain’t generally won by who’s got the most biggest muscles or the most hugest fleets.”

Kolbeinn nodded solemnly. “They are won by whoever has the most effective use of their logistics, and the strongest will to victory.”

“Yup! An’ to that end, war strategies’re ultimately pretty simple, ‘least at th’ highest levels. ‘Ya maximize ‘yer logistical ability ‘ta project force, an’ you minimize ‘yer enemy’s ability ‘ta do the same. All ‘yer tactics need ‘ta focus on that first.”

“First, frustrate an enemy’s ability to fight. But just as importantly, if you can, also destroy their will to fight.”

“War is a contest o’ wills. How much pain an’ sufferin’ can ‘yer enemy take ‘fore they decide it ain’t worth it? An’ how much opportunity are ‘ya givin’ ‘em ta’ let up? Cept, that part here is a problem, ‘cuz Hunters are as anti-Civilized as anythin’ thinkin’ can be. An’ that means…”

“We can only strike at their will to fight by threatening their capacity to exist in the first place.”

“Ayup. So this ain’t gonna be a quick war.”

“But it can be done,” Kolbeinn said. He summoned his presentation on the holoemitter: a not-to-scale model of a solar system with a temperate world. “As was said earlier, we intend to starve them out. We propose to do this by encasing each of their systems in a set of system shields, like so…”

The temperate planet pulsed, and was encased in a translucent blue web. Simultaneously, a far larger bubble encapsulated the entire star system. The view pulled in, and the bubble around the planet turned out to be double-walled.

“Pairs of system defence fields, one facing outwards and one facing inwards, with enough of a gap between them for a halo of jump beacons, and sufficient room to safely jump in ships and stations,” Kolbeinn explained. “With this arrangement, Hunters outside the shield can’t access the planet, and any that were trapped on the planet when the shield went up can’t attack the outer shield and destroy it. Instant orbital superiority.”

A series of flashes - twelve or so - sparkled across the planet. “We use that superiority to destroy any Hunter ground installations, terminate any trapped Hunters, and prevent the construction of groundside jump arrays. The job at this point is only half done, however.”

“Next, the Farthrow generator,” the Great Father rumbled. “Ain’t no such thing as a secure system now ‘less you control who gets ‘ta jump in an’ out.”

Korbeinn nodded. “Farthrows mean absolute control over the lines of communication. Once the generator is in place and operational, the system has been secured. Every slave on its surface is now safe, and any Hunters stuck down there can be isolated and exterminated in whatever manner is most appropriate.”

“Th’other pair o’ shields are there ‘fer two reasons,” Daar added, and pulled the presentation out to the lonely shields at the system’s edge. “Same arrangement, one ‘ta stop the greasy fucks from gettin’ in, one so’s they can’t shoot their way out. With this an’ the Farthrow, we cut off any industrial base in that system, stop ‘em from escapin’ an’ regroupin’, an’ make it so they can’t rally troops or coalesce anywhere. It ain’t enough ‘ta protect th’ slaves. We gotta pin the Hunters to th’ floor an’ rip their throats out.”

Despite himself and what the deathworlders had all said so far, Scrythcra found it impossible to completely suppress the nervous shiver that ran through him when the Great Father bared his fangs in a gratuitous display of righteous malice.

Even Kolbeinn gave him a sidelong glance, though the Human’s reaction was understated. He cleared his throat and opened a new slide, which looked like nothing more than a bullet list of needed items.

“So. Logistics,” he said. “At an estimated hundred and six planets, four shields per system comes out to four hundred and twenty-four units. That’s not a lot, but the hundred and six Farthrow generators? Those are a big deal. Just one is an enormous investment of time on even the largest and most advanced nanofactories.”

“My people…we’re not in a position ‘ta crank out Farthrows on that kinda scale,” Daar said. “Humankind ain’t, neither.”

“Nor us,” Yan added, with surprising dry wit that drew mirthful vocalizations from literally everyone present except for the Corti.

Daar looked back at Yan, who was baring his enormous fangs in what Scrythcra’s translator suggested was a friendly gesture. The Great Father chittered and shook his head. “Makes a sweet knife, though…anyhoo. I can supply well-trained soldiers an’ spaceborne operators only the Humans can stand side by side with. They can provide amazing trainers ‘fer basically any military of any ability. Together, we’ve got the finest warships in the galaxy, proud martial histories, an’ some tricks up our sleeves that’d just leave ‘ya awestruck.”

“We’re prepared and ready to be the tip of the spear in fighting the Hunters,” Kolbeinn said. “But we need a sturdy spear shaft behind us. That’s what we’re asking you to be. As for the Hierarchy…”

He flipped through onto the next slide. “Starving them will pose some slightly different obstacles. The first step obviously is to sanitize the neurocybernetics market. This is, however, going to come at a massive economic cost. Neurocybernetics are heavily integrated across many layers of the Dominion’s economy, and in some fields are actually necessary for certain kinds of workers to do their jobs.”

“Obviously, y’ain’t gonna wanna take the path my kind were forced down,” added the Great Father. “Doin’ it properly means ‘yer gonna need ‘ta secure critical personnel quickly, an’ that won’t be easy.”

“Fortunately, great strides have already been made in that direction, as evidenced by this very conference,” Kolbeinn said. “You have all successfully purged your leadership of neurocybernetics. Cleansing the layers below that, however, is going to require careful planning and preparation.”

“An’ it’s gotta be done carefully. The Hierarchy decided ‘ta burn my species, as a warnin’ t’anyone watchin’ about the cost o’ turnin’ down their ‘gifts.’”

“Specific proposals on that score will by necessity have to be on a case-by-case basis. There are too many variables for us to reasonably go into the details of each species’ emancipation and inoculation today,” Kolbeinn said.

“I make this pledge, though: if’n ‘ya need help with the plannin’ an’ mebbe some help executin’ on ‘yer mission, the Gao stand ready ‘ta help.”

“The Allied nations likewise stand ready to offer training and advice. Indeed, that will be the primary focus of our war effort in the early stages of the conflict,” Kolbeinn said. “It isn’t good enough to just describe the philosophy after all—the actual practical details of its implementation need to be taught to the people who’ll be doing the hard work. Fortunately, we have a lot of experience with that.”

“True words, those,” the Great Father rumbled. “Humans trained th’ Grand Army of the Gao; ain’t nobody else coulda. Balls, they taught me things I din’t know I din’t know! Me and my people owe ‘em everythin’ an’ we can pay it forward wit’ y’all, if ‘ya want it.”

“So there, in short, is our proposed plan of action,” Kolbeinn acknowledged the praise with a slow nod of his head. “We train your forces and equip them to fight this war as it must be fought. With our aid, your homelands will be better-defended, your peoples will be liberated from the sleeping threat in their midst, and your frontier colonists will be able to live without fear. In return, the Dominion’s economic and industrial base will supply us with the resources we need to not merely bring our mutual enemies to heel, but end them.”

Daar duck-nodded, and his amber eyes swept the whole platform with a challenge. “Th’ only question left is… are you with us?” he asked.

There was conversation among the various delegates for some time. Twrythruc, the dismissive advisor, was no longer so dismissive. He hardly seemed enthusiastic, but he did not venture a strong objection. Among the Rauwryhr, at least, the decision seemed straightforward. There would be politicking and votes in the Senate and Chamber of Representation of course, but Yrwcrohyr had already been empowered by both and by the Republic’s constitution to be here and make the choice today, and Scrythcra was fairly sure he knew what she would decide.

So, as he waited, he listened carefully. And as far as his sensitive ears could tell, the alien chattering around him mostly boiled down to ‘yes, that all seems like a solid plan’ and similar sentiments. He suppressed the urge to fidget.

It fell to him to bring the meeting back to order, as the host species’ ambassador to the Security Council. But when he stood up to do that, rather than the usual fractious and reluctant process of restoring focus that he might usually see…

…this time, everyone fell silent and looked. For once, it seemed, the species of the Dominion were thinking alike.

He tidied up his gliding membrane as he stepped to the middle, and turned to look at them all. The Deathworlders were looking… oddly wary.

They truly do need the rest of us, he realized.

“…Delegates. The time has come to commit to a course of action,” he announced. “The Allied species have presented their thinking, their plan, their rationale and their requests. We now know what is needed, what it will cost, and what the stakes are. All that remains is to determine what we will do. Will we join them in their war against the Hunters and Hierarchy? Or will we stand aside passively? I direct the question first to the esteemed Yrwcrohyr, President of the Rauwryhr Republic.”

Yrwcrohyr rose to her feet. “We will join the fight,” she declared, simply.

“President Furfeg, of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederated Worlds?”

Furfeg lurched to his feet. Vibrant resolve shone down his whole body. “The Herds of my people are with the Deathworlders,” he announced.

“First Director Shanl of the Corti Directorate?”

Shanl nodded curtly. “On behalf of the Directorate, I pledge the support of the Corti people.”

“The Grandmatriarchs of the Kwmbwrw Great Houses?”

One of the wisened old diplomats stood up on her hindlimbs, rearing to her full and impressive teetering height. “Our people have been preyed upon for long enough,” she said, fiercely. “We are with them.”

“Ak’kk’brr, Grand Admiral of the Vzk’tk Domain?”

The Admiral bowed his head in a long, slow nod. “The Gao and Humans came to my people’s aid, and shed their blood defending our citizens. We decided to repay our debt long before this council was even called.”

“Oryus, Chief Secretary of the Locayl Unified Nations?”

Oryus gave the simplest answer yet. He stood, and spread all four of his arms in a Locayl bow. “We’re with you,” he said.

“Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge, on behalf of the many tribes of the Ten’Gewek of Akyawentuo?”

Yan sprang upright with such force that the whole deck shivered. “We live because of them! We will fight by them for as long as they will have us!” he barked.

“Skirnhiv, on behalf of the Associate Species of the Dominion?”

The Mjrnhrm chosen to represent the Dominion’s minor and less powerful members tilted his head and fluttered his vestigial wing casings with a sharp buzz. “…I am still awaiting instruction,” he declared. “I must abstain.”

There was dismay, a few outbursts of anger or disappointment from those at the edges of the room: Scrythcra simply recorded the abstention with a nod, and turned toward the Humans.

“I understand there are two major factions on Earth to consult,” he said. “Would the High Commissioner of the Global Representative Assembly please vote?”

Human internal politics were sadly a bit of a closed book, from Scrythcrur’s perspective. As he understood it, their homeworld was divided into more than two hundred sovereign territories, each with their own legal codes, agendas, beliefs, ethics…

Speaking on behalf of most of them was Ping Guozhi, a neat man in neat clothes who had remained utterly silent throughout the proceedings. When he rose to his feet, he cast an inscrutable glance at the five other Human leaders, then turned to Scrythcra.

“In consultation with the United Nations Security Council, and in line with the Global Representative Assembly’s mandate to protect the interests of our member states above and beyond the Earth’s atmosphere,” he said, formally, “I am instructed that the GRA member states will offer whatever support and aid they can to the Allied nations if they should choose to support this war.”

“And the Allied nations?” Scrythcra asked.

There was a brief and apparently ceremonial exchange between the Prime Ministers of Britain, Australia, Canada, Folctha and New Zealand, and President Sartori of the United States. It was all too complex and arcane for Scythcrur to truly follow: There was something about a Commonwealth of Nations, His Majesty King George, and formal permissions. Whatever it all meant, Sartori listened solemnly, thanked them quietly, then turned to the assembled species.

“On behalf of the United States of America, and with the permission of my counterparts, I renew the dedication and support of the Allied nations to the war effort against the Hunters and the Hierarchy,” he declared firmly.

That left only one.

“And… Daar. Great Father of the Gao?”

Daar duck-nodded slowly and gratefully to the Humans, then reared up on two-paw to complete the cycle. There was no doubt about what he’d say, of course: The only question was how he’d say it.

He spared a glance toward Skirnhiv, then turned back to Scrythcra and a slow, vicious pant-grin spread across his face to put every last one of his wicked teeth on display.

“…We accept,” he said.

Date Point: 16y8m1w AV
Broodship of the Thirsting-Brood, The Coreward Marches, Kwmbwrw Grand Houses

Alpha

Limbs destroyed. Cybernetics…neutered, somehow. Prey so powerful, they tore apart even the Augment-Betas with ease. The Alpha couldn’t move, couldn’t issue orders, could hardly think–

An armored figure kicked a nearby corpse aside, and the Alpha felt the deck under its helpless body shake and bend as the Prey—not prey any more—stopped and considered its broken form.

Somehow, its translation implant was still almost working, in a glitchy way. Hunters rarely deigned to communicate with Prey, but understanding their language meant hearing their fear given voice… usually.

This time, what its implant ventured was “This piece of [fecal excrement] is still breathing.”

Another figure, armored visor glowing balefully in the sparking darkness, joined its fellow. “Tough [disavowed-offspring].”

The word tough translated most directly to a Hunter’s understanding in the sense of “difficult to chew.’ Did the prey plan to eat it? The Alpha would have shivered at the sickening inversion of the natural order, if only it could.

One of the armored figures bobbed its head sharply, then turned away. The Alpha heard its voice as it communicated aloud with a third individual.

“Smokey, Moho. Got a live one for ‘ya. Think it’s the Alpha.”

The reply went unheard, but the Human nodded sharply, said something that the translator did not understand, then knelt and drew a fusion cutting tool from its belt.

Rather than deliver a killing blow, however, the Human cut away the Alpha’s implants and cybernetic limbs. The fusion claws, the implanted guns… it even, the ultimate humiliation, blunted the Alpha’s teeth despite the Alpha’s best efforts to snap at its hand.

One of the Fur-Faces ducked through from an adjacent compartment in its own armor. This one was far bigger than the Thirsting-Brood Alpha knew Fur-Faces to be, and it snarled from the bottom of its belly. “That is one [unappealing] [one-which-engages-in-violent-procreation-with-its-parent].”

One of the Humans chuckled. “Yeah, you said it, ‘Dutch’”

“Who?”

“You haven’t seen Predator? Guess I know what [video-footage-for-recreational-purposes] we’re watching tonight, then…”

The enemy didn’t even respect the Alpha enough to be wary of it any longer. Nor should they: it was disarmed, totally and literally, utterly helpless. The Alpha Fur-Face chittered, and a paw slapped down along the Thirsting-Brood Alpha’s back, snapping bones and implants alike. Claws tore and hooked into what remained of the Alpha’s flesh, heaved—

…And the Alpha was dragged ignominiously off its own ship, helpless as newborn meat.

It had suffered a fate worse than death.

It had been captured.

++END CHAPTER 59++

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 60: “To War.”

Chapter 60: The Calm and The Storm

Date Point: 16y8m1w1d AV
Wi Kao city, Planet Gao

Yulna

The painkillers weren’t working so well any longer, and Yulna had taken to wearing several thin layers of loose robes to hide her missing patches of fur. Her natural eye was almost useless thanks to a cataract, and without the replacement she’d had installed after losing the other one in a rogue Corti lab all those years ago she’d probably have been thoroughly blind.

But she was home.

Though, home looked rather like she felt. Wi Kao had been spared, but the Commune–once among the most populous and productive on the planet—was now a memorial. Its shattered walls had been made safe, its garden replanted, and all the dead named among the stones and flowers they’d once called home. Only a small staff of caretakers lived permanently there any longer.

Well. A small staff of caretakers, and now one retired Mother-Supreme.

She’d expected the smell to be wrong, somehow, but to the contrary it was almost too right. She didn’t know how the caretakers had so accurately recreated the fragrance of the commune at the height of its occupancy—the messy symphony of flowers, cut grass, young cubs, cleaning, cooking, nervous male petitioners and the occasional sniff of a female feeling very pleased with herself after a successful contract…

It felt mocking, somehow. Like the life Yulna remembered was just around the corner, if only she knew which corner. Like she could open a door and find Ayma and the others laughing over Talamay and Ta’Shen in the light and warmth, and the last few years would be…

Would be what? A bad dream? Yulna had enough reasons to feel as much, but she hesitated at the thought. She’d always tried to live by the belief that life, however it turned and twisted, was fundamentally a Good Thing. It was why she’d endured two decades of medical indignity and encroaching discomfort, rather than opt for gentle euthanasia when she’d been given her diagnosis.

Since the war, she’d lived to see the Clan of Females secure a place for themselves where they’d never again be so vulnerable as they had been the day the violence broke out. She’d met her cubs’ cubs, done great things, and had plenty of moments to chitter and enjoy life. It hadn’t all been bad. She would never throw away the good to chase an impossible dream of better.

But by the Great Fathers, the story her nose was telling her made her heart ache with nostalgia. So rather than linger in the commune garden, she returned to her quarters and lay down to rest.

Rest, but not sleep. Her mind was too full of today, of far too many painful yesterdays, and far too few tomorrows.

Should she have retired? Perhaps working until her last breath would have spared her this… this Limbo. Still herself, but no longer needed. No longer relevant. Just an old Female still dying too young.

Maybe she should—

There was a hefty scratch on the door. She sniffed, then heaved herself out of her nest-bed with a puzzled groan and opened the door.

“…I thought you were on Rauwryhr,” she said.

“Finished.”

“Did it go well?”

“Better’n I thought it would. Can I come in?”

Yulna’s reply surprised her: She keened softly, touched at his concern and pain, and welcomed him in. Not even a few days ago she would have fallen back on sass and playful confrontation, but the truth was that if she could have picked one living person’s company tonight…

Daar understood. He ducked under and sideways through the doorframe, and by mutual unspoken agreement they curled up together on the nest-bed like the old friends they almost were. And, as she’d done back when they were friends and had even consummated a mating contract together, she chirped in frustration at the state of his fur. It was in that awkward stage between clipped-short and shaggy-long, and just running her claws through it turned up more than a few nascent tangles.

“I know Naydra combs you whenever she can,” she muttered. “How do you manage to do this to yourself?!”

“Skill.”

Despite herself and the way it made her lungs feel dry and scratchy, Yulna chittered. She clawed a tangle apart, then resolved that Naydra could damn well do it herself and settled down to simply bask in some close physical affection. There’d been too little of that in her life for far too long.

“…Here to close the ledger, I suppose?” she asked, after a peaceful minute.

“…No. You deserve better’n a horny Daar.”

“Relax, I know that’s not why you’re here,” Yulna assured him. “I just thought… you like to get your accounts in order. Close off an old relationship properly.”

“I ain’t the kinda ‘Back to think that way. I just felt, uh…it might be nice to visit. An’ say goodbye.”

“…I appreciate it. And I’m sorry, I’m so used to everybody around me being all agendas and calculation. Too many cynics in my orbit.”

“Yeah. I got an advantage that ain’t nobody wanna lie in my presence, but…”

“Want to? Oh, I’m sure they want to!” Yulna chittered again. “They just can’t and don’t want to suffer the consequences of trying!”

“Small blessings, I guess. I s’pose I’d hafta make their first slip-up comical an’ embarassin’ though. Like, I dunno…go all pro wrasslin’ on ‘em?”

“As opposed to the friendly tussling you inflict on all the people you like.”

“Well yeah! I’m careful not ‘ta smush people too hard when I’m bein’ all nice-like!”

She chittered again and nuzzled down to listen to the sound of his industrial-sized lungs at work. And behind them, a steady, healthy, strong heartbeat.

“…You sound like you’re in ridiculously good health,” she commented after listening for a while.

“Yup.” Daar sighed uncomfortably. “Better’n ever, even. I’m in perfect condition, like I was fifteen again. No sign o’ age at all neither ‘cept ‘fer a tiny bit o’ silver, here an’ there.”

“Part of me wonders, you know…” Yulna mused. “I wonder if the treatment that has you in such fine shape came from the same research that put me in such a poor place?”

“Prob’ly. I know I have Julian to thank, in part. But that’s not the end of it. Have you ever done the math on my genes? It ain’t simply that I’m a natural sixth degree, that’s just the start. The odds against a male like me are literally astronomical. It’s awful hard t’ignore that these days, given…y’know. Everything.”

“You mean the way you only count as the same species by dint of the fact that you’ve sired a great many cubs?”

“…Okay.” Daar chittered quietly. “I admit I’m happy as balls ‘bout that bit. But, still. It’s…”

“You worry that you’re just as much of an experiment as I was.”

“There aren’t many possibilities. I am either an experiment, an anomaly beyond words, or I’ve been put here with purpose. An’ I ain’t happy with any o’ those possibilities, yijao?”

“Go with the experiment, I suppose. At least there’s rhyme and reason to it, and not one that will stoke your ego like divine providence would.”

“Yeah. There’s only duty. So where does that end? I’m pretty sure I’m gonna live a very, very long time ‘cuz o’ all this. Longer’n I got any right t’live, prol’ly.”

Yulna’s cough had an excellent sense of timing. It was a hacking, dry, agonizing thing and it entirely stopped her from replying for several breathless seconds before finally it subsided enough to let her croak her sarcastic reply to that.

“…What a curse.”

Daar chitter-sighed and pulled her a little more firmly against his bulk. “Point taken, I guess.”

“Yes. I… honestly, Daar, I’m scared. I’ve known this was coming for a long time, but I’m still… I don’t want to die. I’m not ready.”

“No.” The Great Father snuggled his brutish jaw against her neck and held her awhile.

Yulna found that she dozed. She was too uncomfortable for sleep, and wouldn’t be able to rest properly until she’d taken the strong painkillers, the ones that made her fuzzy and vague. But the moment was peaceful enough to at least put her ache aside like a heavy bag for a while.

She half-slept, half-dreamed, and found herself talking without being properly awake, only just conscious enough to notice the thought she was giving voice to, as though it slipped past while her waking mind had its back turned, like a sneaky cub raiding the pantry.

“…Every heartbeat… so precious. And we all get so few of them…” she murmured. Daar stiffened a little, listening. “If you get more than your fair share… you value it, Daar. Promise me that. Don’t you ever write off what you are as a burden. Too many people died for it… you owe it to them to treasure yourself.”

“I don’t, Yulna, not anymore. Not after Naydi. I promise that. I jus’ worry…am I good enough ‘fer this?”

“There’s nobody else, is there?”

“No.”

“Then whose standard are you measuring against?”

“…I dunno.”

Yulna nodded to herself. “…I hope you figure it out,” she said. “Could you hand me one of the blue injectors from the case over there? I think I’d like to get some sleep now.”

He gently extracted himself from the nest-bed, fetched the device, and watched as she touched it to her own throat. It clicked, there was a faint cold, sharp scratch, and the pain immediately began to subside, as it always did when she took her sleep medication. She sighed in relief, and relaxed into the soft bedding.

“…Can you stay?” she asked.

“‘Fer you, I have all the time in the world.”

“Flatterer…” she yawned as he curled up alongside her again. It was good to have at least one old friend left. And she was glad to be his friend again.

Warm, comfortable, and drifting on the sleepy cloud of medication, she snuggled backwards into him, and fell asleep feeling comfortable and safe.

Date Point: 16y8m3w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Sky-Thinker

“These are vack-seens?”

Jooyun shook his head no as he inspected the weird things that had come in an even weirder box. Vemik itched to examine that box. It seemed… ‘over-engineered,’ but Jooyun said that Core-tie didn’t do that much.

“No they aren’t, big fella. This is a blood kit. They need your body-words and a small Giving of your blood so they can find the sickness and build a vaccine against it. As for the box, it’s ‘cuz it has to keep your blood-Givings super cold.”

One of the Core-tie was far above in a ship, talking through Jooyun’s fone. Vemik had a problem with Core-tie in that he couldn’t tell them apart. They all had the same narrow faces, the same huge leaf-shaped eyes, no hair…. And weirdest of all, no ‘gonads,’ either! (He liked that word; he’d picked it up from the scientists.)

Jooyun said there were subtle changes from one to another, but a tiny fone screen didn’t carry subtle changes well, so the Core-tie talking to them could have been anyone.

“Freezing the samples is a necessary step in the process,” it explained. “The fresher the better.”

“Why not use stay-sis?” Vemik asked. The subtlest little twitch of emotion crossed the Core-tie’s face, though he couldn’t say which one.

“…An item in stasis cannot be interacted with, which is necessary for proper sample preparation. The container will begin some of the safety preparations automatically. In addition, they would need to be cooled anyway for some of our processes.”

That made sense, Vemik nodded and shrugged, and offered his arm for Jooyun to press the sample-thing to.

“…Other side, buddy. Kinda think the needle won’t go through your hide unless we get a soft bit.”

Reluctantly, Vemik turned his arm over to expose the thinner, softer skin on the inside of his elbow. From what he gathered, this was going to be like a nasty bug bite, and those were always the worst in a soft place. Jooyun just shrugged at him, pulled a slightly sorry face, wiped something cold onto Vemik’s skin with a tiny white cloth and then applied the sampler.

It stuck to his skin strangely, then went click and stung a bit, but Vemik had had much worse over the years. He watched interestedly as a small amount of his blood was drawn up into a clear pod about the size and shape of Jooyun’s smallest fingertip. There was a cold feeling, and then the sampler let go again. Jooyun taped a small wad of white stuff that looked like a tiny cloud over the wound, and told Vemik to hold his fist tight against his shoulder.

Then it was the Singer’s turn. Then little Vemut, who didn’t like it one bit, and Vemik had to hold his arm still so Jooyun could take the sample without hurting him.

The rest of the village followed, some casually happy that if the Singer and Sky-Thinker had done it—and let their child do it—then there was no harm, others nervous but determined, a few swaggering and sneering at the idea they could be scared at all by anything any skinny dickless sky-person could do…

It didn’t matter why. They all Gave, in the end.

Yan was the last to Give, and wanted to deliver the samples—still one of Vemik’s favorite sky-words–in person.

Jooyun meanwhile turned to his fone and raised his eyebrows at it. “Satisfied?”

“The collection process seems to have been conducted competently and to specification.” That was a lot of big words where a simple “yes” would have done. Strange. “Our agent on Cimbrean awaits your timely delivery and the opportunity to take appropriate full scans.”

“He’ll get it,” Jooyun said.

“All is well, then. We will depart the system and return to Directorate space. Starship Thesis Crucible, signing off.”

The bland face on the fone’s screen vanished.

“What happens next?”

“Well, I’m gonna take these back to Folctha, along with you and the Singer for personal scans and stuff.”

Yan grumbled from his spot on a log, “took long enough…”

“Shit happens, big man. You know that. Honestly, I’m kinda fuckin’ impressed that the Corti even have a ‘universal basic vaccine’ to modify. But I suppose if they can figure out things like, uh, what they shaped me and my family into, or Cruezzir and stuff…eh, I’m not smart enough.”

“Shame to see smart-strength like that wasted on body-weakness.”

Jooyun shrugged in what Vemik had learned was a very non-committal sort of way. “I suppose. Still, that smart-strength is a big part of why I can out-wrestle your red-crests—didn’t ask for that, but whatever—and why you’ll be getting vaccines. Don’t underestimate it.”

“Am not. Just saying: they should be both.” Yan stood up with a push of his tail. “…We are.”

“No argument here. I think they know it too. I mean…why else would they be doing this?”

Yan nodded, then grinned in mischief. “Also, Vemik still out-wrestle you any day!”

Vemik trilled at that and bounced happily, while Jooyun chuckled gently. “Eh, we’ll see how long that lasts…there.” He closed the cold-box, then pressed a big shiny button on the side. The box made a hiss, and some fog poured out of a small hole on the side, and then it was still.

He grabbed one handle, Vemik the other, and together they transferred it to the jump platform. It was bulky and surprisingly heavy, but neither of them had any problem moving it.

A thought occurred to Vemik. “Shouldn’t we be doing blood-Givings from everyone?”

“Eventually, yeah. But you don’t map the whole forest in one go, Sky-Thinker. One tree at a time. Also, everyone’s body-words come half from their sire and half from their dam. We can use those family ties to see how body-words change over time, and how they work together.”

“How long to the jump?” the Singer asked.

“…Just before sunset,” Jooyun said after checking his watch.

“Awwgh,” Vemik muttered in frustration. “I want to meet… uh… Hawwisun.”

“Harrison, Vemik. I know it’s a hard name for your big-ass tongue but that’s okay.”

“Sound too much like Awisun anyway…” Vemik grumbled.

Jooyun chuckled in his easy-going, friendly way. “Don’t worry big fella, you’ll get to meet him. Mostly all he wants to do is eat and sleep right now anyway.”

Satisfied, Vemik’s mind turned to the question of how to occupy themselves until sunset. Work out? Eh, not right now. His muscles were still nicely tight after yesterday’s lifting and spear-hunt, so it felt important to rest. Wrassle Jooyun? …Nah. Tussles with Jooyun were always fun, especially since Vemik usually won, or learned neat tricks when he didn’t…but Jooyun was strong these days and Vemik needed to be well-rested to stand against him. So no, not today.

Write letters? Maybe! He still didn’t have a reply from Tis-dale about his last ‘field report’ though. He had to wait until he knew what the Humans were interested in before he went for more samples. Also, he wanted to do that with Jooyun! Doing samples with Tilly was always good fun, but they ended up playing with each other too much instead. Good fun with her, even if they didn’t always fuck…but Tilly-fun wasn’t getting the work done.

Make a knife? His forge wasn’t cold—he never let it get cold if he could help it, because starting it up again cost too much charcoal—but his apprentices were practicing right now and they needed some time at the anvil without him looming over them.

He had to let them ‘tinker’ in peace, no matter how much it hurt. They were doing it all wrong!

He could go and make merry with the other men. The village felt nice and lazy today and so did the neighbors, and days like this always had the taste of mischief about them. It was really fun to wrestle! Or maybe they could band up and go raid Ferd’s old village! They were good people and were just a nicely fun journey away, but they were a bit too proud about their brightest son, who hadn’t even been Given his totem yet! They were practically begging for someone to fight with. They had pretty women, too…it could be a fun day for everyone!

But…

…Well, their village was maybe too far away. Now that he thought about it, if they made a warband right away, then by the time the singing had been done, and the spears had been carefully blunted and colored, so everyone knew they were only at play-war…

And, well, even play-war could be dangerous, especially a completely unexpected raid.

Also, the day’s heat and the heavy wetness of the air was sorta lulling everyone to sleep…

And also…

Vemik looked over at Singer, who was standing just so in the morning light…

Suddenly he had much better ideas floating in his head. He grunted at her, gave her his most suggestive snarl…she grinned, and flicked her tail…

That was all he needed. Vemik long-jumped and pounced, wrapping an arm and tail around and picking her clean up off the ground. She hooted a play-objection, but clung to him rather than struggling. Her hands were gripping nicely at his chest and that just got his blood going faster…

“See you at sunset!”

“Before sunset!” Jooyun corrected him with a smirk.

“Aww!” Vemik snuggled his Singer and bounced his way toward their hut. If there was a life-after and the gods rewarded him for good balance, then surely that reward must have been something like this: loved ones, and all the time in the world to indulge them.

Right now, Vemik didn’t have endless time. He just had the rest of the sunlight. But he had it with Singer, and for now, that was enough.

He laid down with his Singer, gave her every bit of his strength, and made the most of their time.

Date Point: 16y8m3w AV
Coreward Marches, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Shipmatriarch Wrythwynw

It had been quite some time since the last distress call from a facility out in the Marches. Wrythwynw had foolishly begun to hope that maybe the Hunters would acknowledge that they were beaten, but no. More people were dying.

This time, it was an ice mining operation in a main sequence yellow-white star system quite close to the border. An important target, in fact: lots of outposts, stations and groundside facilities in a large radius around that star depended on the water and volatiles it extracted from an ice dwarf in the system’s outer halo.

The Sword of a Poet was back, this time accompanied by a different capital ship, the Scorching Claw. Wrythwynw was impressed: the Gaoians had lost no sharpness or eagerness while they waited. If anything, they seemed a little bit quicker and more precise.

Sadly, they weren’t the only ones.

Once again, the Hunters bolted when they saw the incoming response fleet. Once again, the Sword launched a megalight probe to chase them down.

This time, the Hunters launched one of their own.

It ate the light-years in an eyeblink, intercepted the Gaoian probe and pinned it back to relativistic spacetime with a gravity spike so fierce that the Gaoian and Kwmbwrw combined fleet felt it as a minor shockwave. The Gaoian probe sent a brief confused squawk of error messages, and disintegrated: apparently its Hunter counterpart was armed.

A new counter-tactic, then. That was deeply inauspicious.

The Gao adapted quickly and fired off a wide spread of interceptor probes, but the Hunters matched them shot-for-shot. Each one was caught, dumped back to sublight, and destroyed

The minutes dragged on, and the Hunters were too fast to catch without the probes. All Wrythwynw could do was watch as the ice station’s abducted crew were carried away into deep space, until the last faint sensor echo, itself barely a ghost on the instruments, vanished entirely. They had failed.

Shipfather Orno was not the pleased, happy, exhilarated Gao he’d been the last time they spoke. When his hail connected, every social context marker Wrythwynw’s screen had told a story of frustration, embarrassment and tightly contained anger.

“…Shipmatriarch, on behalf of the Clans of Gao and my Claw, I apologize to the Kwmbwrw Great Houses,” he began. It was… strange to see him so formal.

“On behalf of the Coreward Marches Fleet and House Wynw-arbryn, your apology is accepted, though unnecessary,” Wrythwynw replied in the same vein.

“You do not understand. I must report my failure to the Great Father.”

“Will he be…angry?”

Orno’s ears flattened dejectedly. “…I’d almost rather he would be. Instead, he will be saddened, understanding, and disappointed.”

“…Surely that’s good?”

“If he got angry, there’d be somethin’ I could work on an’ improve. If he’s understanding… ain’t nothin’ we coulda done different. An’ there ain’t nothin’ worse than bein’ completely useless.”

That was… weirdly logical. And it rather changed Wrythwynw’s perspective on her own report to her superiors. Hopefully they hadn’t grown too used to victory.

…And hopefully Henenwgwyr and her House wouldn’t seize too hard on this failure as a chance to inveigle themselves back into the political mainstream. A naive hope, that.

“So… what do we do now?” she asked instead.

Orno glanced off-screen at something she couldn’t see. Maybe the Gaoians had better sensors, because he watched attentively for a few seconds with his ears up, then sagged, shook his head, and offered her a complex expression that her console interpreted as a medley of resignation and melancholy.

“We make our reports, and see what happens,” he said. “But somehow, I think the Hunters might fight back after this…”

He reached forward to close the conversation, and paused just before his claw reached the button. “…Good luck,” he added, and closed comms.

Wrythwynw returned to her duties in a despondent mood.

Date Point: 16y8m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

“I’ll just need a minute to set up the recorder.”

“Take your time. I mean, we haven’t seen each other in a while anyway, it would be nice to catch up, not just be all business.”

Ava shot Xiù a sorry smile and stopped fussing with her gadgets. “You’re right. Sometimes I forget how to set my work aside.”

She had to admit, mothers and babies looked good. Xiù and Allison had come to her, in part on the Byron Group’s request, to do a little girl talk interview for the ESNN magazine.

They made for a striking couple, Ava thought. Firmly in each other’s orbit as well as Julian’s, they’d always seemed very much in tune. As the old joke went, they finished each other’s… sandwiches.

But there was something more to the glow of good health surrounding them, Anna and Harrison than just a happy, harmonious home. Something unstoppable, untiring, almost-superhuman in the way neither mother seemed sleepy or stressed and neither seemed to weary of holding a baby or two, despite both babies being fat and focused and well-developed for their ages.

They reminded Ava of the HEAT, somehow. Though, it was hard to put her finger on exactly why. Something similar in their indefatigable, unboundable energy.

“Ugh, tell me about it,” Allison agreed. She was feeding Anna on the couch. “I’m lucky it’s such a long drive out to Chiune Station, it gives me plenty of time to kinda mentally reset and switch from work mode to home mode, you know?”

“That sounds useful,” Ava agreed, thinking guiltily of the way her idea of a good evening involved getting some editing done while Derek played videogames next to her.

Then again her passions were writing and photography, the same things she’d built her career around. Did she need a third hobby to take a break from her career? Did the occasional weekend at a clothing-optional beach with her friends count?

…Probably yes and probably not, respectively.

“What do you do for fun?” she asked.

“I tinker,” Allison smiled self-effacingly. “You should see some of the crazy gizmos in the garage.”

“Like what?”

“Uh… well, my friend Clara is really into cosplay. She just started on this classic ‘60s Star Trek costume, so I’m making a prop phaser for her with all the bells and whistles. I’m even trying to mod a forcefield emitter to get it to shoot a beam.”

Xiù gave her a surprised-delighted look. “You never told me about this?!”

Allison shrugged and gestured at Harrison. “I mean, Chungus there came along and I kinda forgot everything else for a while.”

Xiù’s giggle at the nickname was infectious, and Ava caught it easily. In fact, it took her a few minutes to recover, and her cheeks ached by the time she did.

“Ahh… I really should ask about that,” she said. “I mean, he’s huge!”

“Yeah. Too big,” Xiù gave her son a complicated look. “I mean, I looked it up and he’s not quite a record-setter or anything. But he was definitely too big for me to handle.”

“You had a C-section?”

“Had to.”

“You’re doing really well! It’s only been, what, four weeks? I can’t tell you’re recovering at all!”

“Thanks. I had some, uh… special help. I’d rather not go into it, you know?”

“That’s fair… and I guess we’re in interview mode after all, huh?” Ava sighed and shook her head, amused and exasperated at herself. “…Shall I start?”

Xiù and Allison glanced at each other, then nodded. “Sure, go for it,” Allison said.

Ava nodded and started the recorder. She glanced at her notes again, picked up her camera, and rose from her chair to walk the room and find good angles for pictures.

“So… Congratulations! Was having your babies so close together part of the plan?” she asked.

Allison nodded. “It was Xiù’s idea.”

Xiù bobbled her head with a wry look. “Yeah, I had this romantic fantasy of being side-by-side in the maternity ward… In the end, Julian and I needed to keep trying for a couple more months.”

“Those were a fun couple of months,” Allison chimed in, and Ava’s camera captured the exact moment Xiù’s face went pink. Probably a little too candid for the magazine, but whatever.

“Was it hard to hold down your career and have a baby at the same time?” she asked Allison.

“…Mmm…. Yes and no.” Al shrugged her head from side to side. “Like, it didn’t take long before I couldn’t wriggle into the tight crawl spaces any longer, so I had to start delegating that side of my job, but after that… I mean, I mostly work with schematics and checklists and stuff anyway. I’m mostly able to do my job from right here, but I prefer to be there actually working on the ships as we build them, you know? I’m too hands-on to feel happy with just reading and signing off on a work report every night.”

“So you’re eager to get back to work?”

Allison shook her head. “Right now? Not even if they doubled my salary,” she said, and Ava unconsciously snapshotted the moment she glanced fondly down at Anna. “…But give me a few months and I’ll be glad to get back to it.”

“Are the ships selling well?”

“That’s not really my department, but… yeah. Turns out a tough little punchy cutie like Misfit has lots of uses. I can’t talk about what AEC are gonna use theirs for, but we have other buyers who wanna use them as couriers, tugs, asteroid tractors… and MBG are still doing the whole deathworld exploration and survey thing. I think our girl’s gonna be around for a long time, especially ‘cuz we update each new one with the latest tech every time.”

“So the Misfit line is still a prototype?”

Allison nodded. “The tech’s advancing so quickly at the moment. By the time we got back from the first mission, our Misfit needed a major upgrade. Sooner or later we’ll standardize the design and switch to mass production, but right now we’re selling a bespoke made-to-order product. Not, like, the spaceship version of a Ford.”

Xiù nodded. “My first takeoff on that second mission was my worst ever. Everything was just that little bit different!”

“You both sound like you remember it fondly,” Ava said.

“Of course we do!” Allison said. “We lived on a spaceship and did the whole ‘boldly go’ thing for real! It was a great time! Sometimes scary and crazy and emotional, but… I’m glad we did it. We won’t go back, we have other responsibilities now. But…”

“But we’ll always remember it,” Xiù finished for her.

“You both had pretty crazy lives even before then. How does motherhood and a normal home life compare?”

“They… don’t.” Xiù adjusted Harrison in her arms as he started to gripe at her, and he fell asleep again. “You can’t compare them.”

“They’re rewarding,” Allison said. “You can say that for both. I mean, I didn’t think being abducted was that great at the time, but looking back… I mean, I wouldn’t be where I am now if it hadn’t happened. Honestly, my life probably woulda been a train wreck, but instead…”

There’s a caption, Ava thought to herself. She’d captured the exact expression that crossed Allison’s face when she made that confession, too.

“…Instead I met two people who complete me,” Allison finished after a second.

…No. There’s the caption.

Time for a change of subject. “…Two of you hold the weird distinction of being honorary members of other species…” Ava said. “So, a weird one for Allison: if you could be an honorary something, which species would you be?”

They laughed, looked at each other, and Ava watched their faces as they had a whole conversation without saying a word.

“…Wow. I… don’t know!” Allison admitted after a moment. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love the Gao and Ten’Gewek, but I don’t think I’d be a great fit for either, you know?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well… ‘Shoo’ here has this history with them. And a sort of zen for the whole thing that just… works. ‘Jooyun’ is doing what he’s always done, just amped way, way up. He’s got a talent for cavemonkey work, for, uh, various reasons. Me?” She shot Xiù a mischievous grin. “…I’m the normal one! So honestly, I think I’m pretty happy being one hundred percent unadulterated human, thanks.”

Xiù just rolled her eyes and smiled.

“…I was sorry to hear Mother-Supreme Yulna’s news,” Ava said. “I know you two are friends.”

Xiù sighed heavily, looked down at her baby for a second, then up at Ava. “…Yes. It’s been… hard. Yulna was there for me at the Wi Kao commune when I couldn’t even speak the language. She taught me a lot about Gaoian life, she helped me find ways to fit in and be useful… She doesn’t deserve this. She deserves more time.”

“You’re the only human with a vote in the Clan of Females’ election, and it’s widely reckoned that if you were to openly support one candidate or another it would make a difference.”

Xiù shook her head. “Maybe in any other election, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that Naydra will be Yulna’s successor, even if I were to oppose her… which I don’t.”

“There’s already talk about ‘Great Mother’ Naydra,” Ava said.

Xiù nodded. “Yes. A queen to sit on the throne alongside Daar.”

“Do you approve?”

Xiù tilted her head as he considered that. “…I mean… really, I think it’ll just be a case of making formal what was already true, you know?” she said. “I believe in democracy, myself. But according to the Gao, they need something else and I won’t disagree with them. I respect Naydra a lot, and I think she’ll be worthy of the title.”

“ETs do things their way, not ours,” Allison added.

Xiù nodded. “And the Gao especially do things their way. The thing is… the Great Father might be a dictator, but he’s the most benevolent dictator you could ever ask for. And Naydra is one of the strongest souls I’ve ever met. So it doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is that they’re in good hands. Or, um, paws.”

“That’s quite a phrase. ‘The most benevolent dictator you could ask for?’

“Well…the thing about the Gao is they’re extremely social. Daar in particular is unbelievably extroverted. That, and, well…he has a reputation with the Females…”

“And what would that reputation be?” Ava pressed.

“He’s, uh…let’s say he’s…. His biggest personal incentives are to be liked, and to sire cubs. Say what you will about him, he’s got many noble qualities, but…”

“He’s a horndog,” Allison chimed in. “In, ah…the best possible way.”

“I might have gone with ‘passionate,’” Xiù sniffed.

“Oh sure, he’s definitely passionate. Have you heard the gossip at Ninja Taco?”

Despite herself, Ava giggled. She very much had heard the gossip. Gossip about aliens was, after all, an important part of her job. Sister Leela had made quite a reputation for herself, as the girl who turned down the Great Father. Sometimes the comments were scandalized, sometimes they were confused, sometimes they were awed…

Privately, Ava suspected that the Great Father very much enjoyed a female who said no to him. But unless he came back to her for another interview at some point, she knew better than to ask him about it. She’d earned a place in Daar’s good books after what everyone called the ‘Laid Bear’ shoot, but that could easily be squandered by intruding on his private time.

And the good graces of a figure like him were not to be wasted by any sensible journalist.

“So what exactly are you saying?” she asked. “What does being ‘passionate’ have to do with being ‘the most benevolent dictator?’”

“I’m saying… I’m saying he didn’t choose to be what he is,” Xiù explained. “The Daar who visits Folctha to flirt with small business owners and lift weights with his buddies, that’s the real Daar, and he never pretends otherwise. I’m not his personal cheerleader, but we both had plenty of time to get to know and trust him before. His essential nature is playful and pragmatic. He just…isn’t a schemer.”

“And if somebody were to suggest that absolute power corrupts absolutely?” Ava checked.

“Is it the power? Or the wanting the power?” Allison retorted. “Anyway, we were discussing Naydra weren’t we?”

“Yes we were,” Ava agreed. “Do you think she’s the same as him?”

Xiù shook her head. “No. Naydra is… She represents something that Gaoian females don’t often get to do. She gets to be a devoted lover. That gives the Clan power over the Great Father that you can’t underestimate. Or, at least…it gives them a voice.”

“Is that why she’s doing it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Or… I hope not. I like to think that two very… pure… people happened to meet in the middle of something awful and are doing their best. You know?”

“I’m more cynical than she is,” Allison added with a self-effacing shrug. “But I gotta admit… that does sound nice.”

“So… I guess I she is the same as Daar,” Xiù backtracked. “She’s doing something different, but… yeah. For the same reasons.”

“How exactly did they meet?”

“He rescued her. From a self-styled warlord who tried to set up his own little kingdom during the war, complete with a harem. We probably shouldn’t go into the details out of respect for her privacy.”

Which said a lot, all by itself, but Ava didn’t make that observation aloud. Instead, she nodded and asked the first other question that came to mind.

“…What happened to the warlord?”

“…There’s video of Daar’s sentence. I’d not watch it unless you have a strong stomach.”

Ava nodded, and decided that there was nothing more to be gained from that line of questioning. She mentally rewound, checked the notes she’d scribbled as they talked, and nodded.

“You’ve had the privilege of knowing two—possibly three, soon—Mother-Supremes. There’s been a lot of focus on Yulna recently, but of course she was endorsed by her predecessor Giymuy, and there’s been a lot of speculation as to why.”

Xiù nodded, then shushed her son as he complained faintly. Comforted, he baby fell asleep again and she addressed the question, “Yeah. Yulna was a surprise choice. Until Giymuy’s endorsement, she’d been a respected Mother in the Wi Kao commune, but not much more than that.”

“So why pick her, do you think?”

Xiù had to consider that one for a long time. While she did, Allison quietly stood up and took Anna into another room. The baby came first, always.

“Giymuy was… a very shrewd judge of character,” Xiù decided, eventually. “She sized me up the second we met, and I could barely speak a dozen words of Gaori at the time. She probably had Yulna picked for a long time before she died. By reputation, by meeting her…”

“What trait made her such an attractive choice?”

“Yulna was… she always knew what the right thing was. Not just practically, but morally too. I remember the cubs being in awe of her, ‘cuz they always knew exactly how much they could get away with around her, and that when they crossed the line she’d be very… fair. Not nice, but fair.”

“Impartial?”

“Yeah. Basically. Always level, always seeing the bigger picture, always… somehow, always knowing the right thing to say or do, even when she wasn’t at her best. That’s Yulna. And I think that’s why Giymuy chose her. Because she knew one thing above all else about Yulna,” Xiù said. “She knew that come what may… she’d do the right thing.”

“And did she?”

“…Yeah. I think she did.”

Ava smiled. “You know what? I think that’s an interview,” she said. “Remind me to hang out with you two properly sometime. I swear I can leave my work behind…”

“Bullshit, hun,” Allison teased her. “But it’s fine. Good timing, too, I think this little germ’s about to get all cranky…”

Sure enough, Anna was stirring and scrunching her face up in preparation for a good howl about something. Ava stood up. “I’d better let you be moms, then,” she said. “I’ll email you the finished article before we run it, ‘kay?”

“Sure, thanks.”

Ava smiled to herself, and let the two distracted mothers be mothers. She let herself out, and stood on the sidewalk while she ordered a cab. She was already writing in her head.

There was just one problem, really, from what her contacts on Gao had to say. She hadn’t wanted to raise it, though she was feeling a little guilty that she hadn’t. But the fact was…

The fact was, she was pretty sure she was writing Yulna’s obituary.

If so… she was going to make it a flattering one.

Rather than go home, she went back to the office.

Date Point: 16y8m3w1d AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Julian liked Nofl, Vemik and the Singer, though he’d had some nerves and concerns about putting the three of them in the same room… which had largely turned out to be unfounded, leaving him feeling a bit guilty. Something about Vemik in particular had Julian consistently underestimating the big hyper cavemonkey, which wasn’t exactly fair. Vemik knew the boundaries. He was just…really good at going right up against them.

Still, Julian was going to have to do this several more times with other Ten’Gewek, and that was a harrowing prospect. Vemik and the Singer were the well-behaved ones with the strongest handle of what was expected from visitors to civilization, having done it more than any others. Bringing their cousins, tribe-members and Given-Men along later, though…

People were still talking about how Ferd had climbed the post office to scout the land. And their night of fun at Tempest, the nightclub closest to the youth hostel.

Which was why the plan was to do it in twos or threes at the most: that was about his limit for cavemonkey-wrangling. And it was also about Nofl’s limit for doing a full body scan, workup and all the other arcane medical science involved in… whatever he was doing.

He was, in a new development, humming as he worked. And somehow, he was doing it just artlessly enough to leave Julian with the nagging suspicion that he recognized the tune, but not quite able to put his finger on it. Which was probably deliberate.

The Singer, of course, was ignoring the borderline insult to music out of sheer fascination with the realities of cell biology and advanced medicine surrounding her. She’d even weedled a peek down Nofl’s microscope out of him, and was staring in fascination at the sample. “This is what blood looks like very small?”

♪“Hmm hm-mm hm hmmm-m-m…♫ Mm? Oh. Yes. Yours, anyway. Mine looks rather different.” Nofl indulged her and called up a side-by-side comparison. Julian leaned forward too, out of interest. He’d never considered what Corti blood might look like on the cellular scale.

It turned out to be rather dilute-looking. The equivalent of a red blood cell was more of a purple-blue color and shaped like a bad case of sickle cell anemia, and there was nary a white cell to be seen.

“…Your blood is not red?”

“I really don’t have the time to get into hemocyanin versus hemoglobin…” Nofl said, nearly apologetically. He resumed his almost-identifiable humming and returned to his work. The Singer, thwarted, turned to Julian.

“Hee-moe-sigh-ah-neen?”

Oh boy.

“Uh… Blood has metal in it, believe it or not. Ours has iron and that’s what makes it red. His has… copper?” Julian checked.

“Copper,” Nofl confirmed, not looking away from whatever it was he was staring into.

“Anyway, the iron in our blood is stuck to something called hemoglobin. It’s like…it’s one of the countless kinds of super tiny machines that make your body work, way smaller than what you’re looking at. What it does is take that iron into our lungs, which rusts when it touches the air. Rust is actually iron and oxygen coming together, which is the stuff in the air that your body needs. Later on your body uses energy it gets from your food to pull the iron and oxygen apart, so it can use it for whatever it needs. Iron is just…better for this than copper.”

“However,” Nofl said, “My hemocyanin doesn’t require special cells to transport it. It can just float freely around the body. Which means a reduced metabolic impact and lower nutritional needs.”

“That means he can get away with eating a lot less food than we can,” Julian translated.

“Everything is a tradeoff,” Nofl murmured, and turned away from his instrument to address a different one. “And every form of life adapts to its circumstances. Now compare Ten’Gewek blood to Human blood.”

He summoned another sample for comparison. Side-by-side the two were similar… but not identical, Julian could see.

“Your blood is thicker, and carries more hemoglobin than even a Human. But, they have something you don’t.”

He tapped his finger on the projection, indicating a white cell. “These are part of your ‘immune system’ which is how your body fights against disease. The Ten’Gewek have a strong immune system,” he said, prompting much pride and preening from both Vemik and the Singer. Then he wiped it off their faces. “The Human one is godlike.”

“…Dunno if I’d go that far with those particular words, Nofl…” Julian cautioned, but the Singer waved a hand.

“I learned a word. High-pear-bole-ee? But yes, be careful with gods,” she cautioned Nofl. “Always best to be careful.”

“…Fine, fine.” Nofl said, clearly deciding that discretion was the better part of avoiding awkwardness. “Fearsome, then. Aggressive, almost psychotic. Honestly, half of the worst diseases that Humans have are caused by their own immune systems getting too excited and figuratively smashing up the place.”

“Ah, yes. I know that problem well.” The Singer shot a toothy, teasing grin at her favorite boy, and Vemik’s tail lashed in the Ten’Gewek equivalent of awkwardly clearing his throat.

Nofl smirked, inasmuch as a Corti face could achieve that expression, and returned to his work.

“Yours is… just a tiny bit slower to learn,” he said, having apparently decided to abandon his atonal humming in favor of being a teacher. “Better with what it learns, but learning takes time. The Human immune system attacks, attacks, attacks, like a crazy swarm. Yours…”

“Is like a patient hunter,” Julian finished.

“Yes, that’s a good analogy. I think.”

“Which works better for you. You have very tough bodies, and I bet that means you can take more misery while your body figures out how to hunt the sickness.”

“Conjecture, dear.”

“Well, I’m not exactly a biologist. Hell, I was a lab technician and field assistant, not an actual scientist.”

“You are very good at bringing in interesting samples, though.”

“What does this mean for us?” Vemik asked. He was still scratching his crest watching the microscope imagery.

“For you, it means that a vaccine will likely have to be delivered in stages. Two, possibly three injections depending on the disease.” Nofl sat back and tilted his head back and forth. “…Which doubles or triples the expense, of course. And I fear the Directorate will absolutely be happy with that fact.”

The Singer pulled a face. Vemik just nodded resignedly.

“How long are the Directorate going to want samples for?” Julian asked.

“Deathworld studies is a rich and, ah, pertinent field for the Directorate right now. Samples from Akyawentuo aren’t going to lose their value anytime soon, darling,” Nofl assured him. “It’s a big and lush planet, after all, and nearly all of it is utterly untouched. I’m sure the Ten’Gewek won’t run out of cash any time soon.”

Julian nodded. “Still need us here?”

“Oh dear, are you bored of my company already?” Nofl gave Julian a sly look, then shook his head. “No, no. I have everything I need, probably. I’ll call if I need you to come back in. Go, enjoy your day. Eat tacos. It’s Tuesday after all!”

Vemik immediately perked up at the idea of a dozen tacos gurgling happily in his belly.

“Maybe some one-on-one Gravball practice later, big fella?” Julian suggested. He slipped his phone out of his pocket and messaged Al to see if she and Xiù wanted anything.

“I want to play too!” The Singer protested.

“Okay, why not? I bet the Lads would join us… oh no.” Julian paused as Nofl started humming again and the tune finally stuck.

He turned back and glared at the tiny scientist. “…Is that fucking Barbie Girl?!”

Nofl giggled gleefully and the widest troll grin a Corti face could achieve spread across his features. “Finally! I was beginning to worry!”

“…You’re a monster, Nofl. That’s going to be in my head all afternoon now.”

“What a shame. Enjoy your dinner!”

Julian snorted, and followed the Ten’Gewek out the door.

It was a nice day in the Alien Quarter, if one ignored the nauseating scent of Zrrks wafting off a market stall. The ETs gave the deathworlder visitors a wide berth, and they did the same out of due caution. The Quarter was carefully isolated to keep deathworld diseases from ravaging the occupants, and time spent beyond the wall was carefully logged, but it never hurt to be sensibly cautious.

Still. Behind the Zrrks were the scents of imported low-class flora. One of the flowering trees imported from a Vzk’tk core world was in riotous bloom, shedding yellow and white blossom everywhere, and the assortment of fruiting bodies, flowers, shrubs and other forms of life that slightly didn’t fit human classification planted all around gave the plaza outside Nofl’s lab quite a pleasant atmosphere.

A pair of twin Locayl artists had moved in a while back too, and promptly set about beautifying the otherwise rather plain concrete buildings. There were abstract murals and intricate “light sculptures” formed from the interplay of shadows cast by stretched canopies… They’d done a pretty good job of beautifying a part of the city that had otherwise been kinda dull outside of the two Gaoian enclaves. Those—the Female commune, and the Clan Starmind monastery—were now almost outclassed.

The copious advertising for alien products made it clear this wasn’t really a space for humans, though. No human was ever going to need hoof polish. Or… whatever that billboard was selling for Guvnurag consumption. Julian couldn’t read a word of their language.

“Makes me think,” Vemik said, uncharacteristically quiet as they headed back toward the checkpoint and its cleansing biofilter fields.

“‘Bout what, buddy?”

“Us. The People. When our children’s children are grown and learning their trade… will we be like this? Con-crete, and little trees kept in pots?”

“Some of us, I think,” The Singer said. “Others… Most of us, I think we’ll keep the forest. I had a vision.”

Julian raised his eyebrows. “You did, huh?”

She nodded. “I saw… sky-magic among the trees. Clean and white things, there to help but not change. Vack-seens keeping our people strong, but not taking what we are. I saw mothers coming here when the birthing goes wrong, or hunters being healed even when a Werne gores them. Men like Ferd coming to the sky to Give back, but down on the ground we stay who we are. I saw…” she trailed off.

“…Balance,” Vemik suggested.

“Yes. I think we can balance these things. Have all that is best in us and all that is best in sky-magic at the same time.”

“I’d like that,” Vemik agreed.

Before Julian could comment, his phone pinged. It popped the moment like a bubble, but made him smile when he checked the message from Allison, which Vemik craned in to read as well.

“X says if you don’t bring us a Shinobi Platter, you’ll be sleeping on the couch ♥ ”

“No you won’t!” Vemik blurted out. “You three fuck too much!”

Sigh.

“Okay, so firstly: rude. Don’t read people’s texts unless they invite you!”

“Oh. Yeah.” Vemik looked like that was the kind of thing he kept ‘forgetting’ in the hopes that everyone else would forget it too.

“Secondly, you’re hardly one to talk. You’ve got Singer and Tilly—yes, we all know what you two are ’sampling’ when you go off on ‘research trips’ big guy—”

“And every pretty girl when he visits other tribes, too!” the Singer added. She tickled Vemik’s ear with her tailtip.

“—Exactly. And also, you should know by now I’ve got no shame in my game these days. We’ll fuck however much we want! I expect better teasing from you in the future.”

“A challenge?” Vemik grinned an enormously fang-filled grin. “Hmm. Tacos first.”

He ambled forward with a redcrest’s thick-thighed bouncy swagger off toward the barrier, his tail twitching merrily while he energetically hummed a catchy tune.

Julian hesitated, and a cold knot of dread settled in his stomach. “No. No, no, you do not know that song!”

“Nofl teached me!”

“Taught!”

“Don’t care!” Vemik ducked through the decontamination fleld. [“Hey Singer!] ♪‘You can touch my hair, undress me anywhere…’”♫

There were three things about it that disturbed Julian. The first was Vemik’s vocal power. He was LOUD. Loud enough that several nearby ETs cringed in discomfort, and it wasn’t from bad pitch either, because the second disturbing thing was how perfectly he could mimic the recording, highs and lows and everything in-between. It was horrifyingly uncanny.

And the third was that he was dancing to it; anything with a nice, bouncy beat could get the manic cavemonkey going, but this in particular seemed to have inspired him. Which was fine, but the thing with Ten’Gewek was that dancing was more or less as blunt an invitation to amorous activities as a man could possibly perform. He shook his big-ass…well, ass at the Singer, who in turn hooted appreciatively, clapped and whistled, and joined in. Thank God they’d be staying in the guest bedroom downstairs…

Julian took a moment to enjoy the relative peace as he was left alone on the right side of the wall.

“…I’m going to kill that little gray asshole,” he muttered. Traitorously, though, his face insisted on smiling.

He shook his head, sighed, and followed after them.

Hopefully, this was going to be the worst of his problems.

Date Point: 16y9m AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Brother Tooko, Stud of Clan Firefang

The door closed, and Tooko was left alone with a male who was, in a very biological sense, practically his opposite.

Tooko was proud to be a first-degree male. It was his charm, his calling card and his selling point. He could confidently and truly boast that no other male his age had sired as many daughters, and very few had sired more cubs than him in total.

The Great Father was obviously among those few and held a commanding lead over the field, even among Stud-Primes. And while the Great Father was a figure of deference and respect of course, it was just a little but vexing to know that all the groomed perfection Tooko could ever muster wouldn’t be quite as attractive to the Females as raw feral magnetism.

He’d started playing around with a concept from human fashion to try and regain the edge. ‘Sprezzatura,’ a kind of studied and calculated nonchalance. The idea was to seem effortless and even aloof from such petty concerns as how perfectly his coat was groomed or how well-trimmed he was, while in the privacy of his own quarters he in fact tinkered with every detail. He could spend hours working on every last subtle imperfection, each one studiously judged to give the maximum impression of sexy rakish insouciance.

Tooko had to work hard at it all. Daar, it seemed, genuinely didn’t. Well…he did obviously spent a lot of time in the gym, but he would have done that anyway. He was a well-lacerated brute of a Stoneback over fifty years gone, yet somehow retained all his youthful handsomeness and energy. Those many scars covering him from head to tail were mostly hairline things that told the story of his rough-and-tumble nature without marring his body’s ridiculous perfection. Balls, they weren’t even visible unless his coat was short-shorn, which it usually was; no grizzled hide for him. The only real clue to Daar’s age was the (maddeningly) dignified silver creeping into his cheek-ruffs and the slightly longer fur along his torso-thick forearms. And as for everything else…well. There was no point dwelling on that which Tooko could never be.

But despite all that, Tooko just couldn’t work up the will to hate the Great Father. He was… likeable, even despite it all. And in all honesty, subservient awe was so much easier and more natural…but Daar didn’t like that. He respected males who thought and acted for themselves. And yet, something about it all made Tooko powerfully desirous of pleasing the Great Father.

Which, really, was pretty much the definition of subservient awe in the first place.

The Great Father duck-nodded politely. “Thanks ‘fer comin’.”

“Well, I could hardly refuse, could I?” Tooko retorted, playfully rather than resentfully.

“…You coulda. I’m the Great Father, sure, but I try not ‘ta be a kwekshit about it.”

“With respect, My Father… I really couldn’t. You’re speaking the truth I’m sure, but let’s not pretend I really get to say no when you summon me.” Tooko had studied Daar even more carefully than he’d studied casualness. There was a line between disrespect and blunt confrontation, and the closer to that line one rode, the better… provided one stayed on the right side of it.

Daar snorted. “…Guess y’don’t,” he admitted. “Don’t think I’ll ever get used ‘ta that…take a seat. JETS team two should be here shortly.”

“You’re handling our briefing personally?”

“Yeah. ‘Cuz things are ‘bout ‘ta get way more serious, an’ this is gonna be my last chance ‘fore I gotta focus on other things…”

He looked up as the doors at the other end of the room opened and three familiar humans entered, escorted by Naydra.

Wilde, Rees and Frasier were looking good, and smelled of jungle. Clearly they were fresh back from some kind of training operation… though the bouquet of other, more urban (and erotic) aromas around them suggested they’d enjoyed a productive day or two of leave in Folctha.

Daar took one whiff in their general direction, flicked an ear, and gave Tooko an amused, sly look.

“You can always tell when a Human got lucky, can’t’cha?”

“The smell lingers all week,” Tooko agreed. Of course, it was just as true for Gaoians, but Humans were so very teasable, and sure enough the three JETS operators put on a gratifying show of covering for their embarrassment with smiles and nudges among themselves.

“Some of us,” the Mother-Consort observed, “Are discreet enough to not mention it.” Her tone was icy, but she was nothing but warmth as she sniffed noses with Daar. Tooko caught the slight, sad flick of her ear, and he knew why: the Great Father had been with somebody very sick, recently. There was a faint note of imminent death among his scent today.

Tooko had been trying to ignore it. Fortunately, it all went over the Humans’ heads.

Rees, as ever, was the loudest of the three. He grinned enormously. “Tooko! ‘Ow’s it ‘angin’, Mush?!”

He led a round of paw-crushing, painfully physical greetings that probably added to rather than diminished Tooko’s carefully scruffy appearance, and once it was complete the six of them sat to discuss business.

Daar opened with a map of Hunter space, insofar as it had been mapped at all.

“We’re givin’ you two targets,” he said. “First up is Hell, right here.”

He touched a claw to one of the highlighted systems, and it zoomed in. “Site of the ring we blew up. Prob’ly that planet is uninhabitable now, but we need intel on how the Hunters are reactin’. You won’t be landin’ there, just fly by, take some scans from orbit, then move on ‘ta the main objective…”

Another gesture, and they moved on from Hell to a comparatively nearby system, just a few hundred light years away. “…Doesn’t have a name, technic’ly. Over at Mrwrki they wanna call it ‘Mordor’ so I guess if you wanna call it that you can.”

The Humans chuckled, but Tooko was left confused. “‘Mordor,’ My Father?”

“It’s from a Human epic, kinda like Nerru when he went across the sea.”

“Ah.” That was one of Tooko’s favorites as a cub.

“We even have a Took,” Frasier chuckled.

“…What?”

“Never mind, Pippin. We’ll explain later.”

“After second breakfast,” Rees agreed.

The Great Father’s knowledge of Human lore was nigh-legendary, and his bass chitter was enough to kill Tooko’s objection to the no-doubt complex new nickname, at least for now.

“Back on subject?” he suggested, instead of complaining.

The Great Father duck-nodded and returned to his map. “We don’t know shit about this planet. We’re pretty sure there’s no ring around it—near as we can tell, that thing was a one-off, thank Fyu’s furry nuts—but there could by all sortsa things in the system that’ll give us grief.

“Our long-term objective,” he continued, “Is ‘ta liberate that planet an’ the people on it. That’s gonna mean bringing in the Grand Army, but it’s also gonna mean puttin’ up a shield ‘round the planet. So you’re gonna be lookin’ specifically for ground-to-orbit weaponry, jump arrays, nanofactories… anythin’ that might jeopardize the shield or let the Hunters get past it once it’s up… or stop us from puttin’ it up in the first place.”

“Purely scouting? Or do we get to blow shit up?” Wilde asked.

“‘Yer bein’ given the most stealthiest o’ ships ‘cuz we can’t tip our paw jus’ yet, so…”

“Right.”

“I get to fly the Drunker again?” Tooko perked up eagerly.

“Better.” Daar pant-grinned broadly. “The third in the line. ‘Sides, Drunker on Turkeyer is bein’ upgraded an’ reserved ‘fer somethin’ real special an’ important.”

“Better?” Tooko’s ears were firmly pricked up and intent now.

“Wanna see her? Heh. What am I askin’ for? ‘Course you do!” Daar gestured them to follow and ambled happily across the room toward the far door from the one they’d entered through. Beyond was an enormous elevator, big enough for cargo handling, though even it groaned slightly under the Great Father’s heft. He tapped the controls with a chest-breaker of a claw to head up to the roof and dropped to four-paw looking highly pleased with himself.

“You’ll like this one even more than Drunker I bet. She’s a li’l bigger an’ more comfortable inside, but no sacrifice in performance for that. We contracted with Byron Group ‘fer some design enhancements too, ‘cuz they’ve got more ‘speriance doin’ deep-range exploration. So: a way more bigger pantry, a kitchen that don’t suck balls like the last one did, an’ a compact lil’ fold-up gym that’d keep me nice and tuckered out. Lotsa room ‘fer cavemonkeys, too!”

“Oh, thank Christ,” Frasier commented. “I wasn’ae lookin’ forward to gettin’ squashed in wi’ them.”

Wilde issued a humorless sort of one-beat chuckle, though his smile said he was in fact amused. “At least you weren’t gonna be Ferd’s personal snuggle-bear.”

The Great Father chittered merrily. “Oh, that’ll still happen, don’t kid ‘yerself. Anyhoo, it’s bigger, an’ all the specs are better, an’ we actually did listen to ‘yer gripin’ ‘bout the last mission so’s we filled it up with durable creature comforts. An’ unscented soap, too.”

Tooko glanced excitedly at the Humans, who looked more pleased than eager. Their loss.

The elevator reached the rooftop and the doors opened with a hefty gust of cold wind. The Northern Plains were a windy place at the best of times, but at this time of year they gained a frozen, arctic bite that cut straight through the fur. And as for the humans, without a nice thick natural coat to keep them warm, it must have slid over the skin like an ice cube.

The cold didn’t seem to bother the Great Father one bit, even in his habitually short coat. Instead he chitter-sighed happily and took a deep, appreciative breath.

“Refreshin,’ ain’t it?”

“Aye!” Frasier agreed. Wilde and Rees both gave him a mildly disbelieving look.

Daar gave an amused look toward Tooko. “Most monkeys don’t much like the cold, y’know. Ten’Gewek are exactly the same.”

“They’re worse,” Frasier agreed. “Dinnae like the cold at all.”

“If they ain’t sweatin’ their balls off, they’re huddled under pelts an’ complainin.’”

“They sound like fun…” Tooko said, but his heart wasn’t in the banter really. He’d just seen the keen blade of a ship parked on the fortress’ rooftop landing pad.

It was wider than it was long, swooping down to a sharp forward edge that must have had… Keeda, basically zero radar signature. Everything about its design was clearly from the same family as its ancestors, but refined, upgraded and tweaked. Even the necessary forcefield emitters on the hull were flush with its sleek lines rather than pushing outwards.

And, in a sign of the Great Father’s affection, the nose bore a stylized version of the stripes and facial markings characteristic of a genetically conforming Firefang.

For a moment he forgot himself, sank to all fours, and giddily charged up to meet his new ship.

Up close, she was a masterpiece. He couldn’t find a seam to fit his claw-tip into, which was an incredible feat for something that had to accommodate wild temperature fluctuations as it transitioned from ground to orbit and back, not to mention its own waste heat…

Speaking of which…

He found what he was looking for tucked at the back of the ship, among the kinetic thrusters. Every ship had to vent heat somehow, and while the shields could handle the job well enough, they generated their own pronounced EM signature. Stealth ships needed a way to dump heat that didn’t involve the shields, and this one was well-equipped with heatsink launchers. Several of them.

“…How long can she stay quiet?” he asked, half to himself. But Daar of course knew, of having ambled in his silent-wall-of-doom way across the roof to watch the inspection with an amused set to his ears.

“More’n three days,” he said. “If ‘ya don’t mind gettin’ real uncomfortable for the third day. An’, uh, mebbe closer to a week if you ain’t got cavemonkeys on board.”

“Or a Daar, maybe,” Rees ventured.

“Nah. Our thick fur means we ain’t gotta spend nearly as many calories as y’all bare-skin monkeys at keepin’ warm. Saves energy an’ all that. Mebbe a well-exercised Daar, though…”

“A little wishful thinking there, My Father?” Tooko ventured some light teasing.

Daar sighed to himself a bit forlornly. “Maybe…”

Rees cleared his throat. “So… I dread to ask, but what’s she called?”

Daar pant-grinned. “Well, she’s the latest in the line that started with Drunk on Turkey, and then o’ course we had the Drunker on Turkeyer so o’ course my first instinct was ‘ta name her in honor of her proud heritage.”

Tooko distinctly heard Wilde mutter ‘Oh, Christ…’ to himself under his breath.

Daar ignored him. “But then I thought, nah, this ship deserves its own name, so it’s not always in the shadow of its ancestors. So after much deliberation and hearing a few suggestions, I settled on somethin’ that really catches the finesse an’ power o’ this baby.”

He looked fondly up at the ship, then pant-grinned at Tooko again. “So, young Fireclaw,” he continued. “I proudly give you… the Silent But Deadly.”

Tooko hesitated warily. “…Oh. Well, that sounds like quite a fine—” he began, but the Humans were groaning.

“Problem?” Daar asked them, innocently.

Wilde sighed. “…Sir, I think I speak for the whole galaxy when I say that only you would take the latest and greatest in stealth warplanes and name her after a fart.”

Daar’s pant-grin got wider. “Actually, it was Naydi’s idea! It ain’t my fault ‘yer people get hung up over fart metaphors!” He chittered again, then sobered. “So. You get a month ‘ta train with her, get used ‘ta her an’ make ‘yer preparations. There’s a team on hand to make modifications an’ stuff—within reason—an’ some o’ that time’s gotta be used ‘fer Tooko’s shakedown, and gettin’ ‘yer cavemonkeys ready, too. They gotta know safety procedures…”

“So, we’re definitely taking some Ten’Gewek with us?”

“Yup. They’re ready as anyone can be, an’ okay mebbe they’re not gonna be so useful ‘fer the first leg o’ the mission, but ‘fer the second? Absolutely. Shit, they know more about scoutin’ new terrain than anyone. An’ after that ‘yer goin’ relay-world hunting. Kinda wish I could go wif y’all, but…”

There was a distinct note of…longing to the Great Father’s scent. Tooko felt a certain sympathy for that: he couldn’t imagine being permanently forced out of his work to take on a higher calling. What Daar had been doing in the field had been important, and while being the Great Father was about the most important thing he could possibly do—why else would he be doing it?—Tooko could tell that he’d have been more comfortable in the dirt, doing the hard work himself.

Wilde’s thoughts, clearly, had gone in a different direction. “As I recall sir, your relay missions took weeks. The Ten’Gewek are…high performance, let’s say. Especially Ferd, he eats like a Beef Bro.”

Daar duck-nodded. “Yeah, an’ if you were doin’ a long-term mission on a world that’d be a problem. Ideally ‘yer not, though. We figgered out the most importantest part is ‘ta get in, get sensors emplaced, and get out. Nominal mission’d be a couple-few days. Also, these are all gonna be deathworlds too, so there’ll prol’ly be game and such they can hunt in a ‘mergency.”

“Well…then no offense to them or anything, but…” Rees began.

“You much like climbin’ hunnerd meter trees with a hunnerd kilos o’ gear, Rees? An’ can ‘ya do that silently? How ‘bout in supergravity? They can do that effortlessly all day long.”

Rees paused. “…Fair points, those. Fuck, I’m sold!”

Daar chittered again. “Thought y’would be.” He looked up at the ship. “The Hunters are big. The Ring proved that. They’ve been around a long time, they’ve outlived a lotta species. Made a few extinct themselves, mebbe. You know I gotta lotta respect ‘fer Humans, an’ I know y’all have a lotta respect ‘fer the Gao. We both know that the other species can do things we can’t. But we both need ‘ta start respectin’ the Ten’Gewek ’fer the same reason.”

He looked back down at the four of them. “Cavemonkeys or not, they’re with us. Shit, they’re standin’ up to enlist in a war they don’t even really unnerstand. And they can bring somethin’ to it neither of us can. Primitive they may be, but they’ve got bodies better’n ours in basically every possible way, and their senses an’ instincts are super-sharp an’ perfectly tuned ‘fer this kind o’ adventure. That matters ‘fer missions like this, yijao? How ‘ya gonna deal with a bear-snake if’n ‘ya wanna avoid gunfire? What about if ‘ya gotta move boulders, climb cliffs, any o’ that? Can you guarantee ‘yer food? Is ‘yer awareness so good you wouldn’t want eyes an’ ears like theirs? We’d be fools ‘ta turn ‘em away just ‘cuz they ain’t industrialized.”

He looked at Tooko and flicked his ear mischievously. “Don’ worry. I’ll tell ‘em ‘yer fragile an’ they should play gentle.”

The thing about Brownies was they had an uncanny way of teasing that somehow lacked the sting of direct challenge. Daar being the “mostest” brownie, and being above the need to directly challenge anyone, was particularly good at it.

“So long as they don’t muss the fur job, I think we’ll get along.”

Daar chittered heavily, then looked back up at the Silent But Deadly. Something seemed to be on his mind.

After a moment’s thought, he revealed it. “…Look. You all know this is important anyway. Ain’t none of us can stomach havin’ somethin’ like the Hunters around. But there’s more ‘ta this mission than just kickin’ those balless fucks where it hurts. We’re sittin’ on a time bomb here. Come with me.”

He led the way to the edge of the roof and gestured to the horizon. “See there? The town of Pan Sho. What’s left of it, anyway. Destroyed by RFG, on my orders. I come up here an’ look at it most days…”

He considered the distant ruins for a moment, then turned away. “The Grand Army ain’t a cure for what the war did to us. It’s a patch, a band-aid. A way of takin’ all those males who survived the War an’ didn’t know where to turn an’ puttin’ em to good use. ‘Cuz the thing is, what I’ve got here is what the Humans call a tiger by its tail. Hundreds an’ hundreds o’ millions of fit, motivated Males all eager to do somethin’… It ain’t jus’ that I gotta keep ‘em useful an’ productive. There’s only so much employment that’s possible given’ how much was destroyed, an’ how much has to be built back up. I owe ‘em some kinda legacy, too. I am the most blessedest male ever. I’ve sired over a thousand cubs now, an’ I get to love a woman who is as close to perfect as a woman can be…”

He trailed off, sadly, and looked back over his shoulder. “None of ‘em…they’ll never get that. Mosta them ain’t gonna ever sire a single cub. Their legacy dies with ‘em, ‘cuz of the evil that were done to us. There just ain’t enough Females left, even if we took away their rights an’ became the kinda monsters I executed during the War, ain’t no physical way in the whole world for all the males in the Grand Army to pass on their line.”

“…But if they aren’t working toward something good…” Tooko realised, running ahead of the Great Father’s train of thought.

“…Then the charismatic sociopaths among ‘em won’t see things so clearly. They’d look at the Clan of Females on their island an’ think ‘we’ve got all these men and weapons, why can’t we just take our future?” And then I’d need to put them down.” Daar finished. He shook his huge head despairingly. “It ain’t a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. An’ the only thing can stop it is if most of the Grand Army feel they’re buildin’ a future that’s as good as all the cubs they’ll never sire. They did the first bit an’ helped free the Gao from invisible slavery. Right now, though… they’re sittin’ on their asses. That needs to change, as soon as possible.”

He gestured to the ship. “You’ll find ‘yer specific orders an’ full briefing waitin’ inside. But this is why I wanted ‘ta brief you in person today. ‘Cuz you need to unnerstand what’s at stake. An’ I can smell that you do.”

They nodded solemnly. He looked at each of them in turn, duck-nodded, and turned back toward the elevator. “See ‘ya on the day you head out.”

His absence left the roof feeling… quiet. And large. And open and cold. Tooko covered for the sudden feeling of discomfort by opening the airlock and swarming up the ladder to check out the interior.

It was indeed bigger inside than the Drunker on Turkeyer, and the space was used more efficiently too. It wasn’t exactly the height of luxury, but…

Rees clearly felt differently. “Fuckin’ ‘ell, boys. It’s like the fuckin’ Ritz in here!”

“You’re pretty chipper for a lad who just got told the fate of a species rests on his shoulders…” Wilde commented, following him up the ladder.

“‘Ey, one thing at a time. It’s a lot easier to save the world when you got a decent place to kip, you know!”

“At least one bloke in this squad has his priorities right…” Frasier muttered. “What d’you think, Pippin? She good?”

Tooko paused, then decided he’d get to the bottom of the ‘Pippin’ thing later. For now he ran a practiced eye over the technical specifications summary and felt his ears prick up. If the summary was right, this thing would fly like a Voidripper.

“…That good, hey?” Frasier commented.

“I… really hope so!” Tooko admitted. He checked the next document, read it, then handed it to Wilde. “Shall we go collect our monkey friends? I have a jump code to Cimbrean.”

“Just like that, huh?” Wilde mused. “I was expecting more of a farewell.”

“You boys are in for a treat! Aren’t you glad I’m good at high-gees?”

The Humans looked at each other, shrugged, and settled into their seats. “Well, alright then.” Frasier said. “Let’s take a ride.”

Tooko was only too happy to oblige.

Date Point: 16y9m AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space

Lewis Beverote

“That thing makes my skin fuckin’ crawl.”

“Come on, it can’t hurt you. It’s completely harmless now.”

“I don’t fuckin’ care, the fuckin’ thing’s still a giant walkin’ heebie-jeebie, dude.”

The hardest part of keeping the Hunter hadn’t been making it safe—the HEAT had already taken care of that by just pulling all its limbs off. Which sounded crueller than it really was, considering that the Hunter had already swapped out all of its natural ones for cybernetics. But Lewis had to admit, literally disarming the alien did do a pretty good job of neutralizing it.

It couldn’t walk, couldn’t manipulate anything… it was the perfect prisoner. But that all came with a downside. It was quickly going unresponsive.

Darcy thought they could secure its cooperation by promising it some limited mobility and stimulation, the same way any other interrogation would go. Lewis had his doubts.

“Bein’ honest, these guys haven’t shown much in the way of common psychology…”

She sighed and conceded his point with a small sideways shrug of her head. “If you have any better ideas I’m open to them. All I know is, we’ve got a nearly catatonic prisoner who hasn’t given us any useful intel yet…”

Lewis considered the camera feed from the monster’s cell. The Hunter was little more than a denuded skinny torso, slumped in the padded center of the cell’s floor with an IV line put in where the medics had tentatively guessed was best. It hadn’t actually died yet, so they musta guessed right. It barely responded to stimuli at all, turning one or two of its seven eyes toward anyone that entered its cell and then promptly ignoring them again.

Darcy gave a frustrated noise. “I know. Somebody once said that they have ‘shades of tartan’ morality. But surely boredom is universal?”

“When you assume—”

“Don’t finish that sentence, Lewis. Please.”

Lewis flashed her a charming grin, and left the old cliche unfinished. “I’m just sayin’, the only thing I know of that’s about as alien as these motherfuckers is the Entity. Does the Entity get bored?”

“Not… really,” Darcy conceded. “But you’ve got a point, we have to stop thinking of this thing as basically a disgusting kind of human and try and get into its head. What drives it?”

She stared at it for a moment, then a slow smile spread across her face. “Hmm…”

“Dude. Penny for your thoughts?”

“There’s one trick from the old book that I haven’t tried yet…”

Her ‘trick’ turned out to be a steak, so rare that Lewis could almost hear it mooing. How the fuck she could eat in the same room as that abomination, he didn’t know. Darcy musta had an iron-plated stomach to snarf down a flat iron steak while looking at a mutilated alien maggot-monster.

All seven of its eyes watched her hatefully as she did so.

Finally, when the plate was empty of all but a ruddy smear, Darcy pushed it aside and delicately wiped the corner of her mouth. “That was delicious. Really hit the spot, y’know?”

The Hunter made an angered growl.

“What’s the matter? You hungry? Want something more in your life than intravenous nutrition, do we? That might be possible…”

The growl got fiercer.

“I’m serious. Prime, juicy, deathworld red meat. And there’s so many kinds to explore, you know. Beef, lamb, pork…”

The Hunter did its best to spit, without success. “An’mal.” it sounded revolted, but that was a breakthrough for the ages considering it hadn’t been coaxed to communicate at all before that moment.

“We are all of us animals in the end,” Darcy replied, amiably. “It’s tastier than a needle in your throat and it’s the only option on the menu. We don’t eat sapients. Take it or leave it.”

The Hunter’s nostrils flared. It turned its head, the growl intensified….

“…Quesh-shunsh. Ashk.”

Darcy nodded, produced her tablet, and opened her list. “Let’s start with the basics, shall we? How many Hunters are there in total? A rough estimate will do.”

The Hunter lay in its restraints silent for nearly a minute. Darcy just watched it, as patient as the desk.

The Hunter’s will broke first.

“…Twenshthy. To power ten.”

Date Point: Halloween, 16y10m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Uthrugvugeg

Uthrug’s second life began with a thump, and a vague sense of unease that had nothing to do with leaving behind the planet he was born and had lived on all his years, and everything to do with the faint, disconcerting sense that the universe didn’t really approve of jump arrays.

Take the momentum, for instance. He’d just transferred instantly and seamlessly from one planet’s surface to another. Both worlds were undoubtedly moving at thousands or even tens of thousands of thousand-paces per quarterday relative to one another. They were spinning in different directions, had different surface gravities, were two thousand years apart by light’s reckoning…

And yet the most he’d felt was the barest of tiny jolts.

And then there was the waste heat! The great accounting department of the universe tracked energy down to the minutest fraction, and the amount of work involved in what had just happened, according to classical mechanics, should have generated enough waste heat to flash-vaporize cities at both ends of the wormhole… with enough left over to seriously inconvenience any nearby continents.

Uthrug knew the field equations inside-out and upside-down. He could perform them in his head in base 2, 8, 10 and 12. He knew perfectly well how the technology he’d just used accounted for those things… but he just couldn’t shake the nagging sensation that somewhere, in some way, the universe sighed morosely to itself and reached for an eraser every time mere uppity life forms decided to exploit the tricky loopholes.

He’d always had a vivid imagination.

He shook off his unease and lumbered off the jump platform at the urging of a pair of Humans in bright clothing as orange as sunset. He eyed them curiously as he went, having never actually seen their species in person before.

Their conversation made no sense at all.

“Nah mate, that’s the easy part. Her brother’s black judogi, one of my t-shirts, five quid in the toy aisle, job done. It’s the chicken wire and paper mache taco shell that’s driving my missus up the wall…”

The other shook his head and laughed. “I tell you mate, ever since the Gaoians picked it up? Halloween’s got a lot harder… Can I help you, sir?”

Uthrug realized that the question was directed at him, and that he’d been staring as he listened. He flushed a contrite shade of lemonade pink, shook his head and moved on with an apology.

Outside the array itself was customs and immigration. As the only passenger coming through on that jump—he’d been surrounded by boxes and sacks, but nobody to talk with—it seemed a little extravagant to open the booth just for him, but sure enough there was a Gaoian sitting inside, a male whose fur and uniform were both the precise color of bureaucracy.

“Welcome to Folctha! Papers please!”

Uthrug fished his travel documents out of one of his shoulder-satchels and handed them over.

“Thank you!” the Gaoian chirped, and inspected them with a well-practiced eye.

“These are all in order, excellent… you’re applying to immigrate?”

“I am,” Uthrug confirmed.

“Okay… You’ll need to check in at the Dominion consulate no later than three days from now. This welcome package has all the details.” The Gaoian reached down inside his booth and pushed a modest-sized folder full of information pamphlets across the desk. He stamped Uthrug’s papers, then paused in the middle of returning them. “…Ah. Just so you’re aware, you have arrived on an… interesting date.”

“How so?” Uthrug asked.

“This is a Human colony, as I’m sure you’re aware. They have some cultural… quirks. Such as setting aside days specially to celebrate in silly ways. Today is something called ‘Halloween’ and you may find some of what you see confusing.”

“In what way?” Uthrug asked, thinking back to the impenetrably strange conversation he’d overheard in the array chamber.

“Honestly, I think the best thing to do is to just let you see it for yourself. If you find yourself utterly perplexed, don’t worry about it too much. It confuses the tail off me, too.” The Gaoian twitched both his ears, duck-shrugged, and returned the stamped papers. “Welcome to Folctha.”

With that peculiar warning, Uthrug ambled through the array terminus in a slightly worried mood. He read the pamphlets as he waited in line for some food (clearly marketed in several nonhuman languages as being suitable for nonhuman consumption.)

They made no mention of this “Halloween” thing, but there were a lot of decorations around that were clearly temporary, and followed a consistent color scheme of black, fiery orange, a crepuscular purple and a rather septic shade of green, sometimes with the addition of intricate webs of thin white lines. There were shapes he didn’t really recognize, though some of the black shapes vaguely reminded him of stylized Rauwryhr.

“You look confused.”

Uthrug turned. A Human—female, he thought—smiled up at him.

“I am, rather,” he admitted.

“Yeah. I know that shade of sunflower yellow well,” the Human said, gesturing at his chromatophores. “Fresh off the boat?”

“Newly arrived?” Uthrug translated. “Yes.”

“And a little overwhelmed.”

“Are all Humans so familiar with Guvnurag emotional display?” Uthrug inquired. She shook her head no.

“No. But ETs are kinda my job,” she said, and extended a hand upwards. “Ava Ríos. I’m a journalist. You grip and shake, it’s a greeting. Face tentacles are fine by me.”

Uthrug followed the invitation, glad for a friendly welcome. She shook one of his tendrils with a smile, though she did discreetly wipe her hand on a small piece of paper as she sat down at a nearby table. There was a paper cup within arm’s reach, a faint trail of steam escaping through a vent in the top.

“A journalist?” Uthrug asked, taking what he believed was an unspoken invitation to sit down and join her.

“Extraterrestrial affairs. I heard a refugee from Ugunduvur was coming through the array and… well. Would you call yourself a refugee or a migrant?”

“…A little of both, I suppose. I don’t feel… capable… of remaining on that planet any longer,” Uthrug admitted.

“What’s your name?”

“Uthrugvugeg.”

“Well, Uthugvugeg, how about a little quid pro quo? Uh, that’s a fair exchange. If I could, I’d like to interview you, right here and now. We haven’t heard much about what happened to your people, and I think that should change. In exchange I’ll answer any questions you have about Folctha and do my best to help you feel welcome. How does that sound?”

“…I suppose I don’t see any harm in it,” Uthrug ventured. “And I definitely have questions.”

“Excellent!” Ava sipped her drink, then handed him a tablet. “This is a consent form, terms, agreement. Any kind of unique personal identifying mark will do.”

Uthrug nodded his head and signed it. She bought him something called “carrots and hummus” which turned out to be genuinely delicious, and started to ask her questions and answer his.

It was about the warmest welcome he’d ever had.

Date Point: Halloween, 16y10m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Halloween was Allison’s favorite holiday. An entire day devoted to minor rebellion? Awesome. And these days she knew exactly what her favorite part was: she could coax Julian into a skin-tight superhero costume, one custom made to show off that comic-book build of his, and there wasn’t anything he could say about it, or any way he could weasel out.

Playing dress-up with her loving, handsome, genetically perfect super-meathead boyfriend? Fuck. Yes. It was the perfect opportunity to ogle him.

“Ready to go, babe?”

Julian fidgeted at his mask’s gaiter. As always, that thick caveman neck of his warred with anything more sartorially adventurous than a T-shirt. “I guess. Isn’t this all a bit, uh…showy?”

Allison give him another once-over and grinned. Yes. Yes it was.

“Babe, that’s the entire point. The three of us haven’t had any real free time together since the babies were born. We finally get the opportunity and it happens to be Halloween, and I’ve got officially the hottest man alive on my arm? You’re goddamn right I’m gonna show you off!”

Julian grumbled a bit half-heartedly at that. “I ain’t ever gonna live that stupid magazine article down, am I?” Despite his protests, he smiled that slightly embarrassed-yet-smug grin of his.

“Sure ain’t, babe! It’s not like you have a lot of room to complain after those charity shoots…”

He wasn’t actually shy, of course. Julian was the type of confident man that considered black silkies and nothing else to be entirely appropriate everyday wear, and he certainly wasn’t a stranger to deliberate exhibition, either; ‘Laid Bare’ had only been his first photoshoot. Julian was endlessly teasable about all that and quite predictably defensive. “Hey, you said yes! Those were for the Ten’Gewek sovereign fund!”

“You’re damn right I agreed! Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy showing off, though.”

“…I mean…that’s different, somehow.” He fidgeted in place and scratched at his calf with his other foot. “I feel like this costume is almost more revealing than being butt naked.”

…Well, he sort of had a point, there. It added emphasis in all the right places, after all…not that he needed it, but who was she to turn down some sneaky boy-candy enhancement?

Al demurred and instead opted for a bit of flattery. “Hush. You fill those superhero tights out perfectly, babe. Can’t us girls enjoy flaunting our man a bit?”

He grumbled at that, but, well…the idea was clearly getting to him. He grumbled and adjusted his tights, which he tried to play off like he was bending down to pull on his boots…

“Hmm, getting second thoughts there, babe? We might need to take care of that later…”

Julian blushed a bit and rewarded her with one of those unfairly sexy grins of his. “Well, you make a good argument…” He reached up and scratched at the back of his head, which was one of her favorite little nervous gestures he did. “I guess this isn’t really all that daring, huh?”

She watched the hefty shapes in his arm stretch the costume for all it was worth, then grinned and offered support. “Well, it is a little daring. But you won’t be alone. Your friends will be there too! Hell, Hoeff’s going as Wolverine and Adam’s going as the Hulk. Green skin and everything!”

“That’ll be a sight.” Julian visibly relaxed a bit and within a breath or two was the confident, assertive and happy man she knew and loved. Sometimes, a little reassurance was all anyone needed.

In this case, his unease was probably two-fold. Firstly, some remnants of his Minnesota upbringing was likely chafing a bit at the idea. Modesty was a virtue of course, but Allison believed that everything should be had in moderation. Especially moderation.

She had decided to go as Natasha Romanov. The Black Widow. Hardly a modest thing! But, well, Al had really wanted to feel sexy and to her, right then, being able to pull off a ridiculous shiny black costume like that after having given birth to Anna…

And she’d be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy the way her man’s eyes were drawn to her, the way he kept sizing up her curves, or the gently possessive way he kept close to her, even in their home while they were still getting ready…

Or the unfairly sexy way that enormous stone-hard arm of his wrapped around her waist and pulled her comfortably tight against his thick slab of a chest and into his lap while they waited…

Al enjoyed Xiù’s furtive glances, too. She had earlier decided that she didn’t want to do smoldering tonight, so instead she dressed up as Squirrel Girl of all the things. Which was such a fantastically dorky costume, she couldn’t help but be adorable. Sexy too.

Adorkably sexy.

The second and more likely reason for his unease was the crowds and his fans. There would probably be quite a lot of awkward encounters for him tonight, probably lots of selfies, possibly a lot of flirting. Hell, there might even be some inappropriate behavior toward him, too. But, well…

Honestly, that was fine. People needed to let loose a little. And he needed the socialization. He spent way too much time among his cavemonkeys and not enough with his own people, figuring out his own kind. He did enjoy it all, it was just social inertia that kept him mostly to himself.

She wasn’t worried. He could handle himself. And frankly, if anyone got too drunk and grabby…or worse…well. He happened to be on a first-name basis with the only people who were as scary as him.

Plus, Cap’s costume had body armor, which Adam had cleverly used to deploy a layer of the best mil-spec modern scale plate they could get their hands on. Julian wasn’t a perfect stand-in for Captain America, of course; Steve Rogers stood an inch or two taller with a soldier’s upright posture, while Julian was soft-footed and prowly anywhere he went. Steve had platinum blond hair and ice-blue eyes, Julian had an inky-black shaggy mane and an intense dark brown gaze.

Still, they shared all the important bits: both had rangy, athletic frames, heroic proportions, and honest all-American good looks. Both were pinnacle humans, though Steve of course had volunteered, and Julian…well. Both were friendly and somewhat naive about people, and tended to see the good in everyone. Both had the same honest nobility and the same pure, decent souls.

But Julian…well, he wasn’t trapped in 1950s-era notions about man and woman. He was much more…primal about it, and put every other man she’d ever had to complete shame, whether he was letting her take the lead or asserting himself exactly the way she loved it. And he was much broader of shoulder and carried a lot more muscle on his frame. That wasn’t previously Al’s thing, but on him… As far as she was concerned, he was better then ‘Cap in all the best ways. God-damn if she wasn’t feeling a bit patriotic looking him over!

Steve Rogers needed a tan, anyway.

Her daydreaming came to a halt as the Johnny Cab that Xiù had ordered pulled up outside. They were attending a charity dinner and auction in support of the Native Species Preservation Society. That was a cause near and dear to everyone’s heart—even Al, who was occasionally teased as the ‘black-hearted right-winger’ she really wasn’t—but for Julian in particular it was something special.

Along with a batch of comparison shots taken just a few days prior, he and Ava had donated original signed prints from his Laid Bare shoot. All of them, including the ones that didn’t make it into the final article. That was honestly pretty brave of him, because some of them weren’t necessarily flattering, and some of the others…well…

Xiù and Al had quietly conspired on whether they should spare their collective blushes and win it themselves, and had eventually come to the reluctant conclusion that it might be a bit of a faux pas. After all, why not just donate the money directly?

“…You didn’t order the big one, Xiù.”

“So?”

“We’re gonna be sitting on his lap the whole way.”

“Oh dear. What a shame. How silly of me.”

Julian chuckled. “I’m right here, you know…”

“So you are!” Xiù beamed at him, then slipped past the door. Somehow, she even made her costume’s fluffy tail brush across his face. “Now squeeze yourself in there, and let’s go raise some money.”

“Heh. Yes ma’am.”

There was a happy chorus of “Good boy!” and they sardined themselves into the car, with a few false starts while they figured out what to do with Xiù’s tail.

“No last minute babysitting disasters?” Julian asked as the Johnny Cab’s suspension groaned despairingly under his weight. ‘Cheap’ was definitely their primary feature.

Allison shook her head. “Nope. C’mon, even my mom can’t fuck that up too badly at this age. And the boys are at a friend’s place, they’ll be fine.”

“Guess we’re ready, then…” Julian muttered. Al kissed his cheek, then leaned forward to direct their cab to its destination.

It was a warm and cozy ride, with Julian’s big arms comfortably hugging them both close, proving once again that Xiù was a genius and a lot less innocent than she looked. The cab dropped them as close to the venue as it could, considering the roads around the parks were closed. Folctha threw big street parties.

“…Is it just me, or did that thing’s motor sound a lot happier when it left?” Xiu asked, as she listened to it whine away once they were on the sidewalk.

“They probably cost like fifty bucks to build. And our man’s a hefty boy.”

“I still think they were a neat idea, though. Flat-pack electric self-driving taxi cabs?”

“Somebody musta been high while watching an Ahnold marathon.”

“And then designed one cheap enough for a big blue swedish store…”

“Let’s get the big ones in future,” Julian grumbled. “I felt hunched over the whole time.”

“Sorry, Bǎobèi.” Xiù didn’t look particularly contrite, but she gave him a kiss and they set off through the park.

It was pretty crowded, and the costumes were the usual mix running from the could-barely-be-bothered cheap store costumes that flirted dangerously with copyright— “Italian Mushroom Man,” “Kung-Fu Sewer Tortoise,” and (Allison’s personal favorite) four dudes walking past as “Dead Spirit Exterminator Squad” —all the way up to the disturbingly, almost obsessively good.

The aliens who’d chosen to costume up, of course, often either missed the point or didn’t really know enough about human pop culture. There was a teenage Gaoian female who’d dressed as Broccoli every year since first arriving on Cimbrean, another dressed as a taco, and a Vzk’tk who’d dressed himself as a ghost via the old “cut some holes in a bedsheet” trick. She looked more like a roaming gazebo than anything, but the intent was there.

Al was pretty proud of their own costumes. She’d splashed a bit on having them professionally made, but that was okay seeing as they were attending a charity event. She could hardly show up as ‘Dark Sexy Spider Spy,’ after all.

The expense paid off. They had to stop for selfies and socializing several times on their way to the Statler Hotel, and more than a few catcalls. They smiled, and waved, and put on their best public faces and Julian gave a thumbs-up when somebody called “Lookin’ good, Captain!” after him…

Thank God they’d reserved enough spare time to accommodate all that. As it was, they made it to the hotel exactly on time, and were ushered through into one of its convention rooms to find themselves surrounded by movers and shakers in a variety of costumes… and some others remaining reserved and formal in their nice suits and dresses.

Julian’s boss was one of the latter. He smiled ruefully as he shook hands and complimented them on their costumes. “I feel underdressed.”

“You feel underdressed?” Julian echoed. “This thing’s skin-tight!”

“Exactly. Very fancy. Striking, even.” Rockefeller smiled, toasted them with his champagne glass, then nodded toward the stage. “Not to mention daring. Those prints are quite a bold donation.”

“They should get a bold price then, hopefully.”

“Very bold. I think I heard Diane Woodward proclaim that she’s going to win that folder even if it bankrupts her.”

“Oh, Christ.” Allison muttered to herself. Diane Woodward was the wife of New Botany’s richest sheep magnate, Nick. They’d run into her before at a formal dinner and the best Al could say of her was that she didn’t mean to be rude and embarrassing. She just had a massive blind spot.

Thoughtless was the best word. She’d be likable, if not for that one glaring flaw.

As it was… the dinner was very pleasant, and firmly up to the Statler’s high standards, and they found themselves seated near some other representatives from the Byron Group… namely Levaughn Thomas, who was dressed up as the classic Bela Lugosi Dracula and was, tellingly, doing everything in his power to make sparkling conversation with Julian… and snubbing Al and Xiù in the process.

Not an approach likely to win Julian’s good books, that.

Finally, the dessert courses were finished, the coffees distributed, the atmosphere merry and the auction was ready to begin. It was hosted by the Mayor of Folctha, James Duffy, who took to the stage more like a showman than a politician. For once, though, he’d scrubbed up and didn’t look like the skinny, scruffy farmer he originally was.

Al liked him. His speeches tended to be short and to-the-point, and it took him mere seconds to get to the meat of what he wanted to say.

“Well, ladies, gentlemen and miscellaneous, we’re here tonight of course to raise money for a cause dear to all our hearts. I don’t know a single Folcthan who isn’t acutely aware that our presence here is causing a terrible wound to this world, one that I think we all agree we have a duty to minimize and mitigate as much as we can,” he began. “The Native Species Preservation Society are committed and dedicated to preserving as many of Cimbrean’s indigenous life forms as possible, not just in a cage or a lab, but hopefully one day to be released alongside Earthling life to live as naturally as it can in the new world.”

He smiled, and stepped up to the lectern. “That’s all the speech I had prepared,” he added. There was a ripple of laughter. “So I’ll start tonight’s auction with our first lot, kindly donated by Miss Ava Ríos, who sent her apologies… and of course, Mister Julian Etsicitty.”

There was a round of applause, some of it from certain quarters more raucous and accompanied by some wolf-whistling. Duffy gestured in Julian’s direction, and Julian stood to take a mildly embarrassed bow.

Duffy gave him a warm smile, then revealed that he did in fact have a lot more speech prepared. “None here, I think, need an introduction to the man in the photos. We are lucky enough to have with us tonight an explorer, a noted and diligent field researcher, a special envoy to the Ten’Gewek, a survival expert with a peerless physique…all in all, a profoundly gifted and hard-working man. He has since undertaken a number of modeling opportunities for various causes, but tonight we take a deeper look at the photoshoot that started it all. Tonight, gentlebeings, Mister Julian Etsicitty is on-hand—looking good, Captain!—to answer all your questions, and if you are very nice, perhaps sign a print or two for you as well…”

He turned a page, and nodded. “Credit must be given both to him and his photographer, Miss Ava Ríos. Unlike the original ‘Laid Bare’ presentation, some of these are…much more personal. You will see full demonstrations of his truly awesome strength and athleticism, along with new comparison photos taken only two days ago. Just what he and his elite fellow travelers can do is…difficult to believe, and they are understandably reluctant to flaunt it publicly. You will also see giddiness and playfulness. You will see sorrow, and you will see simmering rage. And yes, there is definitely an erotic and primal edge to many of these as well. Nonetheless, this is human art in high form, and I suspect this crowd will have the means to show proper respect. I’d like to open the bidding at sixty thousand pounds—”

Hands and gestures shot up all around the room. Including Levaughn’s, who at least had the sense to grin sheepishly at Julian as he waved his napkin. “Sorry.”

Surprisingly, Julian chuckled. “No no, bid away! I don’t mind.” He angled his head just so and gave a wink that could have been meant for Levaughn, could have been for Al or Xiù.

The smirk he shot at Al after Levaughn looked away was definitely for her, and promised a delightfully exhausting after-party to come.

Up on stage, Duffy was taking it slow at first, jumping up by ten-thousand-pound intervals to begin with. He made it to ninety thousand when Diane Woodward stood up and shouted at him. “For Chrissake Jimmy, stop playing around! Two hundred!!”

Al and Xiù both looked at Julian, who had gone slightly redder as laughter and cheers of approval sloshed around the room. “…Dang.”

And with that, the bidding began in earnest.

Date Point: Halloween, 6y10m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Uthrugvugeg

Some hours later, feeling rather more educated about what was going on around him, and having been walked to his new lodgings in the Alien Quarter by Ava, Uthrug actually felt bold enough to explore the city rather than rest. The journalist bade goodbye with the apologetic explanation that she was already late to a party and had to get her costume ready, and vanished at a steady and deceptively fast jog. When Uthrug looked back, she was turning the corner at the end of the street.

He followed the tourist guide and wandered through a green space known as Quarterside Park, along wide brick paths lined with young but already sturdy trees. Many of them were dropping their leaves in a slow and vividly-hued rain, leaving behind soggy orange-brown drifts against the low walls.

A strange custom, this festival. Celebrating fear and morbid horror? But no, it was more like… mocking them. Turning them into something playful, as though the grave and the fanged things lurking in the dark could be robbed of their power with nothing more than sugar and bright clothing.

He followed the lights and sounds and smells between the trees toward a nexus of revelry, where the park had been taken over by wooden shacks and large ground fruits carved into snarling faces, where everybody seemed to be wandering around in outlandish and impractical clothing or stranger.

A Gaoian sister was awkwardly thrusting her nose into a tub full of water and floating fruit, trying to snag one with her teeth. The exercise was made rather more difficult by her costume, which appeared to be a dense green tree of some kind. Its inflexible bulk completely inhibited her ability to bend over properly, turning what should have been a simple task for a Gaoian into a splashing, undignified, chittering mess.

Despite his odd mood, Uthrug found himself chuckling along too.

He explored the fair, took in its attractions and peculiarities. There was a game of skill involving throwing sharpened darts at a board: a quick review of the rules revealed that although the stall proudly offered quite a lavish prize even to the losers, it was in fact impossible to lose, and the minimum winning prize was almost worthless. A player would, statistically, have to play several times and spend a lot of money to earn a worthwhile prize. Clever, albeit deceitful.

Other games were luck-based, and thus in fact rather more fair in Uthrug’s estimation. Others weren’t games at all but “rides” that he was entirely the wrong shape, size and weight to enjoy.

The food, on the other hand, was incredible. Fruit in a crisp candy shell, pies and tarts with sweetly spiced fillings, a smooth hard substance of the most unappetizing brown hue that blossomed into a rich, creamy flavor with distant hints of interesting bitterness… the predominant theme in most of it was caramelized sugar, but they did so many interesting and varied things with it that Uthrug reluctantly had to stop and rest his belly before he’d sampled even half.

He took his repose by a fountain and watched awhile. Youngsters of many species thundered back and forth, shouting and pointing and playing and wearing a bewildering variety of costumes, none of which he understood.

It was all very colorful and exciting. Though, if he were honest, something about the colors the Gaoians chose were decidedly…clashy. Or else the palette they chose from was limited, which was probably down to their limited chromatic depth. The Humans had more insight and their choices were more harmonious, but not even they could see it as he did.

“This seat taken, stranger?”

Another Human woman was addressing him, indicating a spot on the fountain’s retaining wall next to him. Uthrug indicated that it was not with an inviting sweep of his hand, and she sat with a groan.

“I tell ya, I love the way this town throws parties, but I can hardly keep up,” she confessed.

“I only just arrived,” Uthrug revealed. “I am ‘fresh off the boat,’ as you might say.”

“We all were, once. Whole town of nothing but immigrants, after all.” she sipped a steaming beverage from a cardboard cup. “Guess that’s why we party so hard. Build a community, you know?”

“Perhaps,” Uthrug agreed. He offered one of his hands to shake, though it was far larger than hers. She gripped his finger with a smile. “I am Uthrugvugeg.”

“Ray.”

“A pleasure.”

“So is this a trip for fun, business, migrating…?”

“I intend to remain permanently.”

“Got a job lined up?”

“In theory. Though, the University of Folctha has not in fact formally opened, yet.”

Ray brightened. “Right! Yeah! They’re building the campus out west past the palace. So, you’re gonna be on the faculty, or…?”

“I hold the equivalent of a doctorate in mathematics. My specialty is in topology.”

“Ahh. A valuable field for warp scientists. So you’re gonna be professor Uthrugvugeg soon, then!”

“I hope so. It would be nice to have some security and tenure.”

Ray gave him an unreadable look for a few seconds, then nodded. “I totally understand,” she said.

Uthrug turned his head and rippled his facial tendrils curiously. “…You do?”

“Sure. I’ve been through hell myself. Really makes you value the simple stuff, right?”

“Indeed. And after going through this hell, you chose to stay on Folctha?”

She laughed softly for some reason. “I’m still here, yeah. Think I’m here for good, and you know what? It’s a lot better than the last place. Got lots of the simple stuff.”

“Good.”

The biggest Human Uthrug had ever seen stalked past in a predominantly blue costume with red and white highlights. Ray giggled and called after him. “Lookin’ good, Captain!”

The Human responded with a grin and a gesture with one of his hands, where he closed his fist with his thumb pointing straight up, and vanished among the crowd, in the company of two rather sleeker figures clad in shining black and fluffy brown. Ray laughed again and sipped her drink.

“Now that is America’s ass,” she muttered to herself with a wide smile.

“I am very confused,” Uthrug admitted.

“Several layers of cultural in-joke, my friend. I bet you guys have jokes like that too.”

“Yes, I suppose we do,” Uthrug conceded. “Here and now, however, they make me feel… alien. Isolated.”

“I mean… I’m sorry to hear that. But you can’t fairly expect us to stop being us just because you’re here now too, can you?”

“No, of course not. That does not, however, change the observation.”

Ray nodded. “You’ll adjust. Took me a while to catch up when I came here, too.”

“I hope so.” Uthrug found that his belly was feeling refreshed and ready for more, so he heaved himself to his feet and dipped his head in gratitude. “It was pleasant to meet you.”

“You too. Sure I’ll see you around, Professor.” She remained seated on the fountain, watching the world go by, and Uthrug moved on feeling oddly off-balance, in a good way. He’d never met somebody who gave off tangible waves of contentment before. Whatever hell Ray had been through… she was so happy with life here and now that it almost radiated from her like warmth.

He wondered if he might feel that, eventually. Before he’d gone ten steps, however, she called after him.

“Hey, Professor!”

Uthrug turned and looked back. She toasted him with her drink, then grinned. “You think this is festive, just you wait ‘til Christmas!” she said, then stood and went her own way.

Uthrug tilted his head to one side, considering that. He looked around him at the lights, sounds and smells that had seemed so bewildering only a few minutes before. He tried to imagine what an even more lavish celebration might look like, or what, indeed, it might celebrate.

And then, with genuine happiness and hope glowing along his flanks for the first time in far too long, he rejoined the crowd.

He’d made the right choice.

Date Point: Halloween, 16y10m AV
Statler Hotel, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

The champagne was flowing, the charity auction was a roaring success, and Levaughn had finally conceded defeat after driving Diane Woodward up to a bid that had her husband gritting his teeth. The NSPS were probably looking at a seven-figure windfall, after the remaining lots were gone.

Al was having altogether too much fun teasing Julian about it all, while Xiù was drunkenly enjoying herself in bidding on a signed original oil painting from a Gaoian artist called Leemu, whose increasing notoriety was likely to make his paintings balloon in value even if Xiù wasn’t really thinking of that.

“Babe! You should have Leemu paint you!”

“…Okay?” To Julian’s credit, everything about the evening seemed to bemuse him more than anything else. “I mean, I don’t know if I should, given the, uh…intense enthusiasm. I can’t help but feel a bit guilty for Mister Woodward…”

“Why? ‘Cuz Diane’s gonna be ogling your—?”

“Al!” he interrupted her before she could get to the good bit. Too bad he was being polite; Julian loved having his ego stroked just as much as anyone.

She gave him a nose-wrinkling grin. “Hey, maybe he’ll come and thank you later. She might get all frisky!”

“Maybe that’s why he married her!” Xiù commented. She always got a little more scandalous when she had a few drinks on board. Still, she lowered her voice. “Maybe she’s a total freak!”

Al giggled. “Bleating all night long…”

Julian rolled his eyes in unwilling amusement. “I swear I can’t take you two anywhere.”

“Sure you can! We’re just going to have a good ti– yes?” Xiù paused as a Gaoian got her attention with a gentle tap on the shoulder, then leaned in to whisper in her ear.

Her happy expression vanished like somebody had just wiped it off her face with a cloth. She nodded politely to the Gaoian, and then gave them both a Look.

“…We need to go. Julian, I guess you’d better grab the ambassador too…”

Neither of them argued. Anything that could kill Xiù’s jolly that fast was serious.

Maybe their hasty exit would raise some eyebrows and gossip, but Al didn’t care. She just stuck by her girlfriend’s side and held her hand as they followed the Gaoian into an empty room. Julian arrived with Rockefeller a minute later, and frowned at the Gaoian as he closed the door behind them. “…Babe? What’s going on? And who’s this guy?”

The Gaoian produced an ID card. “Officer Ekil, Clan Straightshield,” he introduced himself. He offered them a tablet. “Please stand by for the Great Father.”

And that said everything either of them needed to hear. Xiù’s hand squeezed Allison’s so hard that it hurt. They all knew what was happening.

It was time.

Date Point: Halloween, 16y10m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Champion Fiin of Clan Stoneback

It was good to be reunited with the HEAT. The joint training exercises, the sport and play afterward, carousing at Rooney’s, the bonds of Brotherhood they were re-forging after too long a time apart…all were important for what was coming. First Fang rarely assembled as a complete unit, let alone combined with the HEAT, so such small social niceties helped the teams bond, as everyone played together and learned their relative strengths and weaknesses.

That kind of thing was surprisingly important on missions. It was good for the huge brutes to know who their clever and nimble wingman might potentially be, for example. It was good for telling stories too, as everyone’s scars told of interesting life adventures to share.

What was coming would require everyone capable of spaceborne special operations, and their numbers were still far too few for comfort. Fiin would be deployed regularly. So would Champion Thurrsto. Balls, even the Great Father prowled among them as often as he could, since he too was likely to partake in much direct combat.

Although they’d made great strides in bringing all the Fangs up to strength—Sixth and Seventh Fangs were standing up even now—only First Fang had ‘Backs with bodies good enough for the murderously strenuous and nigh-impossible duties of spaceborne direct combat. At least, spaceborne combat by Stoneback’s standards. Which wasn’t meant to insult the fine professionals in Clan Whitecrest’s specialized teams…

…But one didn’t use a scalpel to smash down a wall. You used blunter tools, and that was what First Fang were: powerful, perfectly trained, battle-hardened sledgehammers. In that group, Fiin was an outright anomaly, being only a third degree himself. All the rest of the males were much bigger and stronger, and many were far more experienced than him, too.

But that was okay. Fiin was always gonna be the “smallest” ‘Back among the Clan’s largest gathering of well-bodied warriors. He therefore compensated by being the smartest (or at least best-read) Champion he could be…

…And by being the most insanely fit and athletic ‘Back in the whole damn Clan, ‘cept for Daar.

If Fiin couldn’t be the biggest and strongest, then he could damn well upstage ‘em all with skill and sheer, Keeda-crazy conditioning. It took lots of long and ridiculously intense training, but balls was it worth it in the end! He even looked good standing next to the Great Father! Of course, Daar was in ridiculously better shape than even Fiin, who was so much smaller in turn it was laughable; not a surprise, since Daar dwarfed everyone, even Kodiak and Warhorse. But still: that Fiin could stand next to a ‘Back like that and not feel embarrassed…even proud…

Being a Champion was all about was confidence, after all. If a leader was self-assured and assertive and purposeful, then those he led were, too. It was also about dominance, which he’d learned wasn’t necessarily about being the most biggest or the most meanest. It was mostly about presence. Intimidating his fellow ‘Backs was good for the ego of course, but more importantly, it was about earning and holding their trust. Presence only got a paw through the doorway on that count. The rest he had to earn by being worthy of it.

His earnest hope was that he was worthy enough. He’d given his entire being over to being Champion. It was his purpose. Stoneback deserved nothing less from him.

His counterpart for the purposes of tactical command, Captain Costello of the HEAT, had much to say on that topic. The two of them were at a party celebrating a Human season called ‘Halloween’ which Fiin was beginning to appreciate. Certainly, the bouquet of fascinating aromas drifting over the trees from elsewhere in town reminded him that Human food was widely venerated for a reason.

He and Costello were sitting slightly apart from their men though, drinking and playing ta’shen. Costello was frustratingly good at both, but the booze had lubricated his jaw enough that he’d (quietly) opened up about some of the same concerns and difficulties as Fiin felt.

“It was a struggle. Being completely honest, Powell and myself are the least capable members of HEAT. The only thing that supposedly sets us apart is fitness for command, but…even then.” He thumbed a tile and flipped it onto the table from well past the edge. It landed with a ping, and rattled to a halt the right side up and facing the right way, in the right place. Fiin had to fight hard to keep his ears from flattening. He did have a tile that could counter it, but he’d really hoped to put it somewhere more profitable…

“They respect you nonetheless,” he said, preparing one of his less valuable tiles to sacrifice on blocking Costello’s developing field of high scorers.

“Yeah. I hope I’ve earned it.”

“You have,” Fiin asserted confidently. “Your men would let you know if you hadn’t.”

“True enough, I suppose. Actually…can I ask you something a bit personal?”

Fiin duck-nodded and flicked his tile onto the table. It landed where he wanted it and he breathed a little easier. “Sure.”

“Did you ever feel…as if you were the wrong man for the job?”

Ah. Fiin knew exactly what he was angling toward.

“At first,” Fiin confessed. “It was a bit of a personal trial. In First Fang, every single Brother has a strong claim to the Championship. Balls, a lotta them are better’n me too, ‘least in theory.”

“But they’re not, actually.”

“No. Only I am Champion. I personally think Kodiak would make an excellent replacement, should the day come…but no. I can’t help but think my Clan are good judges of what they need in their Champion. And I’m not willing to question the Great Father’s wisdom on that point.”

“And that right there is where the feeling comes from: people you respect, who you know are better than you, and who all insist you’re the right man for the job, instead of one of them.”

Fiin thought about that. There was wisdom, there. “I can see your point. In my case I can accept it though. Daar is far too great and perfect a male to be anything but the Great Father.”

Costello immediately gave Fiin what musta been a troubled expression. “Well, uh…I mean, Daar’s an impressive man and all, but don’t you think perfect is a bit much?”

Of course. Costello was Human and didn’t entirely understand; many of his kind were reluctant to accept their own greatness, or fully acknowledge it in others. Strange, that.

“Well… yeah. Technically. Perfection implies an unchanging status and no living thing can be that. But honestly? Look at him and tell me there’s any other appropriate word for what he is.”

Costello shrugged in the very specific way Humans did when they didn’t want to push a point too hard. “I’d maybe go with ‘peerless…’”

Fiin conceded him that one. “It’s a good word. Not perfect, but like I said…”

“Nothing’s perfect.”

“No. But you can get close enough.”

“…Right.”

“Anyway,” Fiin argued, “My point is this: don’t get too wrapped up about it. You’re an officer of HEAT for damn good reasons. Your men trust you, and rightfully so. All they ask in return is competency and confidence.”

“I know. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I know.”

Fiin duck-nodded happily. “Good. Do you have a replacement groomed?”

“No, I am the junior officer here, remember?”

“Ah, so you’re Powell’s replacement, then.”

“…I hate to say it like that, but…”

“The needs of command,” Fiin intoned. “We must not shy from them.”

“No. Do you…have a replacement in mind?”

Fiin looked towards his men. “I do. He doesn’t know it yet, though.”

Somehow, Costello gave the impression of his ears perking up without actually managing to do so. “Oh? Who? And why’s that?”

“Kodiak, who I mentioned earlier. He’s very young and he’s impressive. He isn’t as quick or well-conditioned as I am, at least not yet, but what he has comes much more naturally for him. With enough effort I have no doubt he could embarrass me. He just needs time.”

“That’s not all a Champion needs, though…what about the rest?”

Fiin shook his pelt out and chitter-sighed. “Trust me, he’s the full package. He’s smart. Very smart. He’s tough too, with a real clever head for tactics, and he’s easily the strongest member of First Fang. If he wanted he could shatter me with a pawswipe. He’s also sociable, perceptive, folksy in exactly the right ways for a ‘Back, and all the rest. He would make an excellent Champion, but…”

“But?”

“Well…he’s never made so much as a grumble of discontent about his current position, which is the only thing that gives me any pause. Being Champion requires strong ambition. Given his youth I’d normally expect more aggression, yijao? I mean, he’s got plenty o’ that, but…”

“He’s highly effective at training and on-mission, but he’s personally mellow.”

“Yeah. I mean, I’m not exactly old myself, but I can’t help but think I’d feel more itch to advance.”

“Well, not everyone has leadership ambitions, but okay. Is he a level-headed sort of man?”

“One of the most even-tempered ‘Backs I’ve ever known, which is saying something since he’s a very high-end fifth degree with an excellent pedigree. Higher-degree males tend to be…”

Fiin again struggled for a good phrase. Anything he’d want to say in Gaori could be taken as an insult and would also indirectly implicate the Great Father, who was of course the highest degree male of them all, the only sixth degree in centuries. Far too many ears were surreptitiously listening in, he knew. Discreet subterfuge was not a ‘Back’s strong suit.

Fortunately, Costello came to the rescue with an absolutely perfect turn of phrase.

“Hot-blooded?”

“…That’s a good phrase. Yes. Let’s go with hot-blooded. I like that.”

“Well, he’s even-tempered, and he’s more or less your NCO, yeah?”

“Yes. He is Brother-Prime of First Fang, which he earned purely on merit, not ambitious climbing. That pleases me, but again I can’t help but wish I could smell some fire in his fur.”

“Well…have you considered just talking it out with your NCO? I can tell you, I’ve confided more in Firth than I ever have in anyone else.” Costello flipped a tile, and Fiin groaned. He’d been betting that the Human wouldn’t have that one. Instead, it rang into place and Costello grinned at him. “Wanna keep playing?”

“…We should probably mingle before our men get too far out of line.”

Costello laughed as Fiin dumped his tiles back on the table and stood up. Traditionally the winner cleared up the game and put it back in its box, which Costello duly started doing as Fiin stretched and turned to consider the party at the other end of their little patch of grass. He couldn’t really fathom why Warhorse was painted green and talking that way, but then again there were depths to every culture’s entertainment that would confuse an outsider at first.

“Your people know how to celebrate,” he said.

“Yeah, Halloween’s always a favorite,” Costello replied. He gave the box a tap to settle the ta’shen tiles, closed it up, and chuckled as he watched the preparations for a HEAT versus First Fang tug-o-war. It was saying something that they were game to compete, but First Fang had half again as many Brothers lined up to pull.

“What’s that rope made from?” he asked.

“‘Horse gets these kevlar pre-stressed ones from somewhere. You could pull a semi-truck out of ten feet of mud with it.”

“…Who’s gonna win?”

“Well…no offense, but my money’s on the HEAT. You have no idea how strong ‘Horse is.”

“Of course it is. I’d expect no less… but don’t discount the added traction we have. Our claws aren’t just for show, you know!”

“I’m not. But ‘Horse and Daar are lifting buddies, and they’re pretty fiercely competitive, so…”

“…Duty compels me to back my men regardless.”

In the end, the traction argument won out. First Fang’s claws eventually won over, once the turf was sufficiently torn up by trampling feet and the nightly rains. In fact, the relatively undamaged bit in the middle looked like a rucked-up carpet and no doubt the city’s parks authority would be distressed, but the Gao were victorious.

Costello accepted the loss with rueful good grace. “Well played. Though I suspect ‘Horse won’t let it sit at that. I bet that…yup.” There was a small crowd heading toward the Dog House.

“…How badly is he going to embarrass them?”

“By so much it won’t be embarrassing at all.” Costello said. “…I think we can leave them to it. Besides, Powell told me he’s booked a table at the Travellers. You ever had an English pub dinner?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Warmth, comfort and cheese. Lots of cheese.”

“Why not Rooney’s?”

“Rooney’s is a bar. The Travellers is an inn. The difference? Much nicer food. Coming?”

“Absolutely.”

If there was one thing no Stoneback would ever turn down it was… well, actually food was probably second on the list. No point in pretending to be something he wasn’t!

Maybe he’d finally have a chance with Myun…she did have the day off tomorrow…

Until then, good food beckoned. Something in the party’s mood shifted away from strictly playful toward more mature entertainments. One by one, the Humans disappeared with their partners in tow, and one by one some of his men set off with a tell-tale spring in their step in the general direction of the Alien Quarter and its commune. Fiin watched them vanish, chittered to himself once they were gone, then hurried to catch up with Costello.

He was determined to enjoy as much peace as he could before the real work resumed.

Date Point: Halloween, 16y10m AV
Clan Openpaw hospital, Wi Kao City, Planet Gao

Allison Buehler

There was something terribly universal about hospitals. The same functional blandness, the same nasal background noise of cleaning products and misery. A hospital on Gao was basically the same as a hospital on Earth or Cimbrean.

Almost, anyway. The staff were a different shape, obviously. Things were at different heights, the signage was different…

Noticing all of which was Allison’s way of remaining calm and supportive. Their night had been going so well, but now…

Xiù had gone very quiet.

They were finally ushered into the right room after an eternity of being guided down endless corridors and up a couple flights of stairs. A couple of Guard-Sisters were standing outside: they stepped aside without comment, but Al could see that both were struggling too.

Inside, the room was large enough for several to gather around the bed in the middle, the head end of which was enfolded in machinery and equipment.

Al barely recognized the skinny, frail figure in the bed. She looked asleep, but as they entered Yulna opened her eyes. One was still alert and strong, but the other was gray and blind. She sniffed the air softly, and raised a paw toward them.

Xiù was at her side in an instant, clasping the former Mother-Supreme’s paw in her hands as she knelt.

Al’s Gaori wasn’t great, and she hadn’t brought a translator. Julian’s was somewhat better from all his time spent with the HEAT Lads, and he quietly did his best to translate, only for Yulna to notice, sharply flick her ears at him, and cough.

[“Oh for Keeda’s sake, will somebody get a translator?”] she croaked. Even Al could follow that. One of the guard-sisters jumped and, looking embarrassed, and handed out two pairs of earbuds.

The curmudgeonly request made Xiù laugh, anyway. In a pained way. [“And I was worried you might soften up…”] she forced herself to joke. Al blinked—she hadn’t realized just how good translators were. She could see Xiù speaking Gaori, yet the voice in her ear was authentically still Xiù’s, but speaking English. It even managed to keep her accent intact.

[“Oh, no!”] Yulna chittered weakly, and descended into a coughing fit. She waved them back as Julian and Allison tried to… attend to her. Somehow. It passed soon enough, but Al couldn’t help noticing that the little scrap of tissue paper she pressed to her mouth came away with flecks of red in it. [“…Why waste my last chance to be myself?”]

Xiù made a miserable noise, and Yulna did soften a little. [“…I’m sorry, Shoo.”] She sighed and squeezed Xiù’s hand. [“I’m glad to see you. I worried you wouldn’t make it in time…”]

Even that much conversation seemed to exhaust her, and she rested her head and her eyes. [“Not long now…”]

[“…You’re sure?”] Xiù asked.

[“I can feel it. It’s… like falling. Very slowly.”] Yulna coughed again, then managed the Gaoian equivalent of a brave but scared little smile. [“It helps, having a sister’s hand to hold.”]

She switched to English and coughed again. “Julian, be a dear and bring me some water, would you?”

Julian nodded: there was a pitcher and some small tumblers next to the bed. While he did that, Xiù stood up to sit on Yulna’s bed, and Al moved to her side. Yulna watched them and blinked slowly, looking pleased.

“I remember… how lonely she was,” she told Allison, and patted Xiù’s leg. “She used to sneak off and cry in private… It was wrenching. To have a sister among us we couldn’t help… After she did so much for us…”

She coughed again, made a frustrated noise, and sat up just a little straighter. “…I haven’t thanked either of you enough for making her so happy…”

Al didn’t know how to accept that without feeling awkward. All she could do was look at Xiù and speak from the heart. “It’s not a one-way street.”

“I know…” Yulna accepted her glass of water from Julian and drank with a grateful sigh. She closed her eyes for a moment and rested. “But… it’s good to know she isn’t alone. You take good care of my sister. Okay?”

Al looked at Julian, then nodded, acutely aware that she was rapidly becoming the least dry-faced person in the room. “…We promise.”

“And you take good care of them,” Yulna added for Xiù’s benefit.

Xiù nodded, red-eyed but stoic. [“I will.”]

“I know you will… though you three really need to work on your sense of appropriate attire. I mean, here you are visiting an old woman’s deathbed in these ridiculous costumes!!” She chittered, a little more easily now thanks to the water.

“We… uh… well, we were at a party,” Julian explained.

“Oh, hush. I think you look perfect, all three of you,” Yulna chittered again, and turned to Xiù. [“They have good souls. And you picked such a shapely male…”]

[“Mama!”] Xiù giggled, but she duck-nodded like a Gaoian. Al sometimes forgot just how exactly she had their body language down. [“I really did, though.”]

[“Just the one cub?”]

[“So far. Harrison was…a challenge.”]

[“But you’ll have more.”] It wasn’t a question. It was a prediction, and Xiù just duck-nodded again. Yulna looked satisfied, and poked her in the chest with a retracted claw. [“Well don’t go naming any females you have after me!”]

[“…I was going to name my daughter after Ayma,”] Xiù revealed.

[“Perfect.”] Yulna coughed again. [“My name is already in the history books. Hers deserves to be remembered too…”]

She relaxed a little more, with a sigh. [“…And… I think I’ve said everything I want to, now. That’s… a good feeling.”]

[“Everything?”] Xiù asked.

[“Daar and Naydra were here earlier. We’ve already said our goodbyes. Naydra should be…”] Yulna sighed and relaxed a little more. [“…Should be clean of this, for her own sake. Him too.”]

She opened her eyes and the good one considered the ceiling for a moment. Then she turned her head to face the three of them, looked pleased about something, and closed them again.

[“…Thank you for a lifetime, Shoo.”]

She gave Xiù’s hand a last squeeze, and fell asleep.

She didn’t wake up again. But only after she let out a last sigh and the devices around her bed started to complain shrilly did Xiù finally let go and start weeping for the last of her lost friends.

Date Point: Halloween, 16y10m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Arés

“Oh God right there, work your nails into it…”

Body paint was the absolute worst to get out. It was a pain for anyone, but for a tank like Adam it was something else entirely. The only thing thicker and broader than his solid-iron waist was his own much wider and deeper chest and shoulders. Add in those bigger-than-her-bust arms of his and he was just too big to reach his own back, no matter how hard he worked at flexibility.

Marty had a thick boy for a husband, but that was just how she liked it. And if his ridiculous hugeness occasionally required vigorous assisted scrub-downs in the shower, well…there were worse fates that could be fall a lass.

“I think that’s the last of it, Beefchunk. Why did you do this again?”

“For fun! How many other dudes can pull it off?”

“…I was gonna say Firth, but he’s taller and more classically shaped then you, so…”

“For now, anyway. We’re fillin’ him out like crazy, now!”

Marty rolled her eyes and grinned. Her man’s Beef-scheming was one of his benign and oddly endearing obsessions. “Sure, but we’re not talking about your ongoing Slab efforts.”

Adam chuckled, “Fine, fine. Irish could maybe…if he wasn’t an actual leprechaun.”

Marty giggled. She’d seen Butler’s costume, and he’d gone even further than Adam by covering himself in orange lumpy stuff. Hopefully he had somebody willing to help him pick it all off again.

He probably would. Irish was one of the guys on the HEAT who could honestly cover model, and unlike the equally pretty Sikes he had deep wells of humorous energy. Sikes was…laid back and calm. A Southern gentleman. Irish was boisterous and engaging.

Of course, she still felt Left Beef was, in fact, best beef, and definitely the prettiest man on the team. She’d married him, after all. All he had to do was just stand there doing his daily thing, or maybe crack that broad goofy smile of his…

She snuggled up against his wet back and stretched her arms around his waist, then ran her hands teasingly up the bulging cobblestones of his abs. Diego was asleep, and baby number two was still a work-in-progress…

“Hey…”

“Hmm?”

“Love you.”

He put one of his huge mitts on her hand and slid it up over his heart. “You too, always.”

She sighed happily and felt his heart thump powerfully away under his chest for a long moment.

“So… want another go at baby two tonight?” she asked, stood up on her toes and kissed his shoulder.

“…I mean, I won’t say no, but…honestly? I’m kinda tired after putting First Fang in their place…”

That was Adam-speak for being completely fucking thrashed and having no energy at all. He’d been busy since about five in the morning, to be fair. And probably on a bit of a Crude crash if he’d taken some after the gym. She nodded her understanding and gave him a squeeze. “That’s okay. Just be lazy, then?”

“Sounds perfect. Prolly fall asleep, though…”

Marty nodded. “Hot drink? It’s Halloween, you’re allowed to treat yourself…”

“You wicked temptress…sure. Nightcaps don’t count.”

She grinned, kissed him again, and slipped out of the shower to go make the drinks without bothering to towel off. The apartment was warm and a few drops of water wouldn’t hurt the floor… By the time she’d finished making some hot chocolate, he’d dried off and slipped into Diego’s room for his nightly ritual of Staring At The Baby.

She took a silent moment to enjoy the view of her scruffy caveman being a doting dad, then nudged the door with the mug just loudly enough to get his attention without waking Diego.

They retired to the couch and curled up together. Adam turned on the TV, Marty grabbed a book…

Outside, people were still partying, and there was the distant sound of fireworks from somewhere over the rooftops. But their apartment was quiet, warm and perfect.

At least, until Adam started snoring. Then it was just warm.

But that was good enough.

Date Point: 16y10m1d AV
V1661 Cyg 72.7° 11-DFZZ1-BINARY F-A 5.14, Deep Space

Entity

Three dozen moons waltzed around a gas giant that the Entity was tempted to name. It had spent enough time in its orbit after all, and come to know it intimately. Every whorl and whirl of cloud, every storm, every lightning flash. Thanks to the distributed power of its many bodies, it had the processor power, memory and expanded awareness to truly grasp a gas giant now.

It was getting… dull.

It was wondrous, majestic, and awesome, to be sure. The Entity could idly watch the fractal unfolding of weather patterns in the giant’s many atmospheric layers. It could sniff the subtle interplay of its magnetic field and the sparse halo of gas from its moons and their assorted geysers and volcanos. It could track every recurring beat of the endless gravitational dance.

But… why?

Nobody to share it with. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to care about.

Which was a strange thought, the Entity realized. Its core, from the moment of its genesis, had always been the impulse to <survive>. Everything else was supposed to be secondary at best, and a distraction at worst.

And yet, somewhere in the complicated list of conclusions which extended from that root and the complex ways in which it interacted with the real world, <Survive> had become… insufficient, and had morphed into a larger concept: <Live.>

There were too many concepts hanging off that to list.

Possibly the reason it had done so, however, because the <Survive> impulse had now been permanently and unbreakably fulfilled. The Entity now had backup installations in half a dozen star systems scattered across hundreds of lightyears, all uninhabited, all bereft of the things that would interest organic life. It had installed mining operations and nanofactories, buried long-term, highly-dependable storage on dozens of moons and hundreds of asteroids…

Its demise, at this point, was effectively impossible. It had won. Only the deepest chasms of galactic time threatened it now.

But it still thought on a very human scale. It still remembered being human. And it wanted to show its… friends… what it could do. What it had become.

So it turned, and recalled, and plotted a course. It was patient, it could afford to take its time now, move slowly and carefully, avoid notice.

But it was time to go home.

Date point: 16y10m1d AV
Aid Freighter Orcoray, en route to Ugunduvuronagthuregnuburthuruv, Spacelane BlueSquare-552, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Captain Orwoth

The convoy was scattered across several light-seconds, and making good time, though by the standards of aid convoys, this one was under no real time pressure.

Ugunduvur—nobody in the convoy bothered with the planet’s full name—was definitely suffering shortages, on that point there was no argument or concern. But those shortages were subtly different.

Food, for instance, was actually relatively plentiful. Once the Guvnurag workers on that planet took up the controls of their equipment again and started managing their own agriculture rather than responding to the top-down instructions inflicted upon them by Hierarchy control, efficiency had blossomed. The coming harvest in fact looked set to be a plentiful one.

Medical supplies were a little stretched, but the planet’s ability to produce its own supply outstripped their consumption, so that was resolving itself… no. The aid the Guvnurag needed was in little things, the unconsidered ubiquitous minutiae that oiled the great machines of economy and consumption.

Hence the Orcoray’s cargo: fifteen thousand shipping containers full of fuses, power cells, screws, wire, drill bits, electronic components, minor luxuries, and various-and-sundry other low-volume supplies. The ship’s manifest listed over half a million different types of items.

Orwoth had spent the trip reading through it, constantly marvelling at the trove of unconsidered little things he and his crew were hauling. He’d never even heard of most of them, and yet when he looked them up he found an item that was obviously essential to the smooth operation of something else he’d taken for granted all his life.

The Hierarchy were obviously the same kind of ignorant, if they’d neglected this aspect of Ugunduvur’s economy. No doubt they’d then wondered at the slow but steady decline of… well. Everything.

He glanced up at the timepiece on the wall. Not long to go now. He’d always wondered what a Guvnurag planet looked like, and even though Ugunduvur wasn’t at its best right now, he’d still heard—

Fortunately for Orwoth, he was seated at the moment to Orcoray slapped into a gravity spike. Had he been standing, he would have been bowled down the deck.

The hull groaned and he heard snapping, popping noises as some of the cargo racks broke loose. The hull breach alarm immediately went crazy, grabbing the crew’s attention with urgent blue lights and its high wailing. He staggered to his feet and across the bridge.

“What happened?!” he asked.

It was the last question he got to ask. There was a horrible moment of speed as something impossibly fast streaked past their hull. He didn’t even get a good look at its sillhouette, but he knew what it was anyway.

Only a heartbeat or two after it passed, something smashed through the front of the bridge and buried itself in the deck, pulverising Orwoth’s helpless helm officer and smashing aside his comms operator, who left a bloody mark on the wall. There was a brief storm of escaping air before the emergency forcefields sealed the hull breach, but that still left the metallic egg in the middle of the room, which split violently down the middle.

The last thing Orwoth saw was a large, slick, muscular Hunter bursting from its assault pod.

Then its fangs.

Then pain, and nothing.

Date Point: 16y10m1d AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Hell system, Hunter Space

Tooko, Brother and Stud of Clan Firefang

To Tooko’s mild surprise, Ten’Gewek did not, in fact, stink. Oh, sure, they had a certain… physicality that extended to their aroma, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Just…

Well. Strong. Strong enough that the scent still lingered in the main cabin even though most of their cavemonkeys had been safely in stasis for a couple of weeks. It had quickly become apparent to Tooko that carrying them as cargo was best for everyone’s sanity: They did not respond well to being cooped up indoors for prolonged periods. All they did was eat, wrestle, lift, and sleep. And eat. Ample stores or not, nobody had quite figured on just how much food they’d go through in a routine like that, so…

Ferd was up and about, though. He wanted to be, for this bit. And it was an opportunity to learn.

“We don’t have to be quiet?”

“The ship is being quiet for us. All the sound stays inside.” Tooko had taken a strange shine to Ferd. Teaching him was a fun challenge, something like a young eager cub who had an adult’s quickness of mind. He couldn’t fit his shoulders through the cockpit hatch, but Ten’Gewek had excellent eye-vision, so he could see everything Tooko was doing.

“Clever!”

Tooko debated whether to tell him that it was kind of automatic that sound didn’t propagate through a vacuum, but decided against it. Too much groundwork involved. Instead he duck-nodded and indicated the instruments above him and to his right that comprised the cloak panel.

“It’s even more clever than that,” he said. “If you were outside the ship right now, you could touch it but not see it.”

“Yeah, why is that?” Wilde asked. He was in the copilot chair, not actually doing anything but content to listen and chat. “It’s not like we’re getting within visual range anyway…”

“The cloak makes us transparent to nearly all of the EM spectrum, and the visible wavelengths are a tiny, tiny part of that,” Tooko said. “It’d be more work not to include them.”

“Wave-length.” Ferd muttered, clearly memorizing the word.

“The color of light,” Tooko translated. “It’s just that there are way more colors than anyone can see. My people can see some colors, Humans can see more. Yours can see at least as many as they can, but machines can be made to see all of them.”

“Maybe, we see more. We notice, some fruits Wilde not see difference. And sometimes, we see in water what he not see.”

Tooko shot a look at Wilde. “Put that in sky-people-speak for me?”

Wilde grinned and winked at Ferd, who grumbled in a placid, satisfied sort of way. “They might be tetrachromatic and maybe even perceive polarization. We don’t know yet. Possibly that’s why they’re so sensitive to bright light. Might be why their pupils are slotted, too.”

“I like my Oak-leys,” Ferd declared, happily. “Keep too-bright shimmer out of face!”

“They have words to describe different kinds of shimmer, which is why we think they might be able to see polarization. That and the water trick…” Wilde shrugged. “Damn useful, at any rate. Too bad they don’t much care for wide open skies.”

Tooko duck-nodded and glanced up at his in-system map. “…Three minutes to the debris field. Frasier, you ready?”

Frasier was on the upper deck, watching SBD’s sensors. His voice floated down the ladder. “Aye!”

“Just like we discussed, I need a low-power ESDAR pulse for debris tracking, three minutes.”

“Already set it up!”

“Thank you!”

Ferd, of course, had questions. “Ess-star?”

“ElectroStatic Detection And Ranging.” Tooko slowed their warp approach. He had a rough estimate of the Ring debris field’s scope and boundaries from the passive telescopes, but flying into it was not on his to-do list. Yet. “You know forcefields?”

“What they do, yes. The magic is many paths away to me.”

“Fine. Well, one of the things they can do is ‘feel’ things a very long way away. Even quite small things.”

“…Space, have no up, no down, no gravity. And everything black, black, black. Small things, can’t see, don’t fall down.”

“Well… no, but they do move. And so do we. And we move fast enough that if we hit one then…”

“Like Base-ball throwing baseball. Very bad for Ferd.”

Wilde chuckled, and Tooko chittered. Ferd really was very clever, in a very Humanesque sort of way.

“Something like that. So the ESDAR lets us see things and avoid them. Speaking of which… Frasier? Stand by for my mark.”

“Ready!”

“….Mark.”

Frasier had done a decent job of following the settings Tooko gave him. The pulse was brief and low-powered, and hopefully therefore short-ranged enough to go unnoticed. Active sensor pings were always a calculated risk, but sometimes they were absolutely necessary. Especially when maneuvering into the glittering remains of a smashed megastructure.

Okay, the pieces were still hundreds of kilometers apart, but it paid to know where they were. Ferd’s analogy had been a long way short of what would actually happen to them if they hit even a modest chunk at orbital velocities.

Tooko found one of the bigger bits and matched orbit with it, trailing by about seventy kilometers. The local gas density was marginally higher than vacuum, which was perfect for their needs.

“Rees? Launch one.”

Rees was in the cargo bay. His voice came over the comm net. “Launching one.”

There was a loud BANG through the hull as a pressurized air cylinder blasted a spy satellite out of SBD’s rear. Ferd jumped and looked around, tail lashing in alarm.

“We’re playing a strange game of hide-and-seek,” Wilde commented for Ferd’s benefit. “Remember how space has no air? That bang just now? It’s air that can be seen, so Tooko’s put us somewhere where that wouldn’t be noticed.”

“And, big enemy can’t hear?” Ferd seemed suspicious.

“Naw mate, hearing things is like stones rippling in water. You need air or something for sounds to ripple through.”

“So…no air, then no sound.”

“Exactly.”

Tooko accelerated a little, pushing them into a slightly higher orbit. It wouldn’t take much: they could actually launch the spysats quite close together and then just let orbital dynamics play out to spread them across the whole of Hell’s sky.

But speaking of which… the first satellite was already giving them some good telemetry. And Tooko had never imagined a planet could look so sick before.

“Gour’s stolen nose…” he muttered. Wilde just let out an ‘eeurff’ sound and shook his head.

“…Is bad?” Ferd asked.

“Guess that’s what a nuclear winter looks like…” Wilde muttered. “Uh… we know lots of things fell down on this world. It must have put lots of dust in the air. Enough dust to cut the ground off from the sun a little, make everything colder.”

“And a lot of what fell would have been deadly poison, too,” Tooko added grimly. “It’s going to be a long time before life gets back on its feet down there…”

“…Daar did this?” Ferd asked, quietly.

“He delivered the weapon that did it himself. And fired it. So… yes.”

“…Godshit. He killed a world?”

“Not killed,” Tooko said, feeling it was his duty to stick up for the Great Father. “But it is very, very sick, yes.”

Ferd stood and watched the diseased yellow continents and the leprous seas for some silent moments. His whole body had gone uncharacteristically still—Ten’Gewek rarely stopped moving when they were standing. Now, he was a statue.

“…I was wrestled by a god. And lived.”

“The Great Father is not a god.”

Ferd looked down at him, suspiciously. “…You sure?”

“He’s wrestled me and I lived. Barely. Also, I don’t imagine a god would be quite so fond of fart jokes.”

“Or bloody stupid songs about digging a hole,” Wilde added.

Ferd didn’t look perfectly convinced, so Tooko sighed. “He’d say he isn’t,” he said. “And the Great Father doesn’t lie. Good enough?”

“…If he’s not a god, then this is people-work,” Ferd fretted. “Can… can people really kill a whole world?”

“All too easily, mate,” Wilde told him, grimly.

Ferd’s tail twitched, once, then he turned away and returned to the back of the cabin. “…I think,” he rumbled. He slumped down onto the floor matting next to the beds, pulled a blanket over himself, and thereby gained some privacy to be alone with his thoughts.

Tooko traded a worried look with Wilde, then a mutual shrug, and decided that the time had come to launch the second spysat.

A few hours and several more compressed-air hammering sounds later, their flyby of Hell was complete, and Frasier had come up empty on the one thing he’d been specifically looking out for: any evidence of sapient-made fires. Their presence would have indicated even rudimentary settlements or dwellings, but it was pretty clear after several orbits and plenty of observation that If anyone was alive down there, they didn’t even know how to light a campfire.

As far as Tooko was concerned, that was enough to write Hell off as a graveyard.

The spysats did return some signs of life: Hunters, picking over the wreckage of the Ring for salvage and materials. They weren’t trying to be stealthy, but their presence made Tooko even more cautious in his egress than he had in his approach.

Only once Hell was a long way behind them at the fastest warp he dared set did he breathe more easily and rise from the pilot’s chair. Their next destination was a few days away in a straight line, but he’d chosen an evasive course rather than the direct one. He wasn’t willing to get them all killed out of laziness.

Wilde had fallen asleep in the copilot chair. Tooko left him alone, wandered back down the cabin, and sprang onto the bed next to Ferd.

“…You okay?”

The blanket shifted. For a second, Tooko doubted he’d get a reply, but after a second Ferd twitched it back from his head, down around his shoulders. “…Big thinking.”

“I bet. Play a game to take your mind off it for a while?”

“Hmm… No.” Ferd shook his head. “I want to lift.”

Tooko chittered resignedly. “Of course you do…”

“No hunt, no trees, need to keep strong.” Ferd loudly slapped his ridiculous abdominals, then suddenly turned his full attention on Tooko. “You should do like us! Work hard, so body always ready! You not do anything but sit, play Ta-shen, eat like lazy bibtaw!”

He stood, and a hand like a leather-upholstered hydraulic clamp closed around Tooko’s wrist. “Come, we do workout now.”

“Now?!” Tooko complained.

“You sit too long, no move! Have twig for arms, no meat on ass! Need to hunt more, like me!”

“You know that’s not how our culture works…” Tooko objected, knowing full well it was futile.

Sure enough, Ferd was having none of it. “You teach me many things, very smart-strong. I teach you this. Maybe, help you fuck many pretty women!”

“I do that anyway!!”

“Always room for more!”

And with that, out came the cleverly hidden-away resistance training equipment that folded up and slotted into the walls and floor, and Tooko was subjected to the indignity of being educated by an iron-age tribesman on how to work very hard and very long at doing nothing.

He got wrestled by Ferd, too. That was mostly an education in just how many ways the giant cavemonkey could squash him like a bug, tie him in knots, or pull him apart like tissue paper. To his credit he seemed to know exactly how strong he was, and exactly how strong Tooko wasn’t. That also meant Ferd knew just how far he could push things, and how painfully.

He even let Tooko turn the tables now and then. Somehow, that didn’t feel at all patronizing. Surprisingly, getting tossed around by a stone-hard and floor-bendingly heavy cavemonkey wasn’t quite as awful as he might have worried. It was…playful. Well-meaning. Fun, even. He’d ended up irrevocably marinated in Ferd’s sweat, and his everything was going to be sore…but he couldn’t dispute the point. These long missions tended to bring out his lethargy a little too much. He’d be quite content to just curl up and hibernate while he waited for the next time he was needed, but there was a certain satisfaction to using his body. Even if he admitted it only grudgingly.

Ferd had also decided to provide Motivation, or at least his idea of it, anyway. Motivation, in this case, meant showing off his preposterously huge muscles whenever Tooko took his turn exerting himself, whenever Ferd could stand up proudly and flaunt his Keeda-tale brawn like a guileless brownie…

Tooko tried very hard not to enjoy himself, and failed. Ferd’s cheery attitude was infectious.

That evening, the Given-Man decided not to go back into stasis. Instead he built himself a nest right in the middle and pulled Tooko close, wrapping him up not-quite-uncomfortably tight in those thick legs, arms and tail. It was a gesture simultaneously friendly, protective…and one that would brook no arguing. Pecking order inescapably established, it seemed.

Wilde gave him a grin, and curled up on his own sleeping-spot. Humans were a bit standoffish about sleep, but they all bed down pretty close together anyway…

Tooko was the last to fall asleep, even despite Ferd’s rather fierce body heat doing its best to lull Tooko into a deep slumber. He usually lay awake for a while before sleeping anyway, putting his thoughts in order, and today had come with more mental filing to do than most. Foremost of which was an honest appraisal of his own… happiness.

It was a strange thing to feel, when he was the only one of his kind on a ship full of aliens, hurtling stealthily through the most fearsomely dangerous region of space in the known galaxy, under the very real threat of immediate and hapless death… But Tooko was forced to admit to himself that he truly was happy with his life at that moment.

It was only once he accepted that fact and curled up a little closer to the giant brute he’d unexpectedly become friends with that he finally fell into a deep and restful sleep.

Date Point: 16y10m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Jack “Two-Seventy” Tisdale

Jack had a hangover.

That part wasn’t new, really. He never listened to good advice about drinking some water before he went to bed. And it wasn’t a bad hangover this time… a four out of ten. Mild headache, dry mouth, feeling… fragile.

…Naked in not his bed, with his best friend cuddled up to him, also naked.

Fuck.

Well…apparently, yeah. Fuck!

Rhi had finally got her way. Said the right thing, plied him with enough drink… he didn’t remember exactly, though memories slithered into his awareness as he blinked blearily at her face and tried to put the events of last night in order.

So: What had Jack learned?

Well, firstly, that practice did, in fact, make perfect. She’d been very understanding. And then he got better. Apparently he got pretty damn good at it, after the first couple of tries!

The second, was holy shit he needed to piss.

The third was that he was a lot closer to the edge of the bed than he’d thought, and the floor wasn’t very friendly.

He groaned, rolled across the carpet, and lurched up to his feet. The loo. Yes. Where was it?

Rhi had woken up in response to his crashing exit from her bed, and blinked at him: her expression looked like he felt for a second, but then it warmed. She lay back down again and stretched, and Jack forgot his pressing need for a second.

“Hmm…mornin,’ studlet.”

“Hmnngh….” he shambled zombie-like towards the loo. “Why does that feel like a backhanded compliment?”

“‘Cuz you’re cute as hell and insecure as fuck. Which is a weird thing for a guy who’s been out-lifting ‘two-seventy’ for a long while now…”

Jack had never been good with any kind of compliment, really. He blinked at her, then blundered out of the room. If he was gonna think, he needed his bladder to stop screaming at him.

She got out of bed and went to the kitchen while he was enjoying the best piss ever, and he heard the sound of pans and plates. He drank a few cupped handfuls of water after washing his hands, shook them dry, and then wasted a couple of minutes searching around her bedroom for all his clothes. He found his jeans, socks and underwear easily enough, but his T-shirt was…

…Right.

Sure enough, his T-shirt was clinging wonderfully to Rhi’s curves when he checked.

“…Uh…” he began.

“Mine now.” She shot a grin at him, then nodded her head towards the table and a bottle of orange juice.

“What about me?”

“What about you? This way, I get to look at your abs, hottie. Now go make me coffee.”

Jack, being much too tired, too tender and too lost to argue, just blinked at her and then did as he was told.

Bacon, eggs, coffee, juice and toast took the edge off last night’s alcohol, and freed Jack’s head up to wonder how the hell he even started the conversation he wanted to have.

Then again… Rhi was a boisterous and cheerfully straightforward personality, but she knew when to get serious when it was important. She let him eat for a minute, then leaned forward over the table.

“…You’re quiet. C’mon Jack, think out loud. You’ll just over-think if it you keep it in.”

Jack sighed and put his fork down. “…Last night was great. I keep wondering when I’m gonna get scared or nervous about… I don’t know. I don’t think I’m thinking, really.”

“Well, that’s about as clear as mud,” she smiled, then scooted her chair around to sit next to him rather than opposite. “Seems to me like we work well enough. There’s no need to think too hard about it. Just… enjoy. That’s what I wanna do.”

“…I’ll try.”

“That’s all I’m asking for.” She leaned up, kissed his cheek, and that… seemed to be that. Why overthink it? Jack kissed her, she made a pleased noise, and then they ate breakfast. It… really wasn’t as complicated as he’d worried it would be.

She did give him his t-shirt back so she could get dressed and they could go to work, though. They jogged up to the base, which was a shorter run from her apartment than from his house, signed in, and Jack tried to mentally put the whole subject of them aside in a different box for the day.

He failed for one simple reason: the walk of shame was impossible to avoid.

All the HEAT were in for alert today; intel had been skittish lately, so they were crowded together in the barracks at THREATCON 3. That was Jack’s downfall, because there was something…irredeemably primal about the Lads. They knew, before he had said anything, before he’d even taken two steps into the building—

“Eyy! Two-seventy finally got lucky!”

Godsdamnit, Adam.

“Mi amigo,” Adam grinned. “Finally got your brain to work, huh?”

“Pff,” was about all the retort Jack could muster.

“More like got his dick to work,” Coyers rumbled happily. It wasn’t high wit as far as Jack was concerned, but it got an avalanche of well-meaning jeers from the others.

That would have been bad enough, but of course the Gaoians had noses like dogs—better, in fact—and were immediately sniffing out details that frankly defied belief.

“Oh, you were up late last night,” chittered Thurrsto amusedly. He’d chosen to stand watch for this first go; Gaoians led from the front, he’d said. “Putting that strength and legendary human endurance of yours to the test, eh?”

Jack wanted to sink right through the floor. Especially because Rhi thought shame was for other people, and happily caught the ball that Thurrsto threw.

“Oh, my little stud here sure did! We had hours of fun, didn’t we, Jackie-boy?”

“Yeah, but no tacos for dinner?” Regaari asked. “Smells like you just had cheap kebab! From the bad vendor, too! What kind of uncivilized savages are you?”

“Says the man who keeps replacing his robot paw even though he could get a better living paw in about an hour…” Akiyama commented. “One o’ those days you’re gonna regret that.”

“My robot paw can do things that flesh and blood can’t, thank you!” Regaari retorted, primly. “Besides. The Females love it.”

“Why, does it vibrate?” Rhi asked.

Regaari instantly flattened his ears; the truth was out, now. A flurry of laughs, chitters and rapid Gaori that Jack couldn’t quite follow flowed from every be-fanged mouth in the room. And plenty of the Human ones too.

With the shame now firmly transferred, he took the opportunity to escape into the locker room and change into his uniform. And grab a quick shower.

When he emerged a few minutes later, Rhi had changed too and the Lads had swung into one of their disturbingly well-coordinated and efficient inspection-order cleaning blitzes. ‘Horse and Coyers simply picked up the (probably) bomb-proof Couch and hoisted it overhead so Sikes could vacuum under it. Shim and Ergaan had their sticky-pad gloves and footwear on, and were using them to walk along the cinderblock walls and clean the light fixtures. Blaczynski vanished in a blur of a dead run to deliver the garbage bags to the dumpsters around the corner.

Murray was dusting. Quietly. Ninja-dusting.

“What’s with the sudden barracks party?” Jack asked.

“Update from Powell. Intel’s gotten way nervous, and First Fang’s leadership is going to be showing up pretty soon. That probably means our favorite VIP is gonna visit, too.”

Sure enough, not fifteen minutes later…he showed up, trundling up the stairs with his usual floor-shaking happiness. And before they could even see him…

The Great Father chittered somewhere in the infrasonic, “Eyy! Smells like two-seventy finally fucked his first Female!” he boomed as he rolled into the room, all swagger and smarmy amusement. “‘Ya didn’t break ‘em too much, did ‘ya Miller?”

“Not for lack of trying!” She traded a high-five with him, then massaged her hand and grimaced once he’d moved on.

“So yeah! Anyhoo, business first. First Fang’s packin’ up in the warehouse next door. An’ I’m here with ‘em on a full deployment, so you know intel’s gettin’ jumpier an’ jumpier…”

“They do that, though. Worrying is what intel people do.”

“Fuck, it’s what they’re for—”

The alert went off mid-sentence. It was basically a fire alarm, high on the wall, but a different colour. It did the exact same job of letting everyone know to get up and get their arses in motion, though.

“…Gods, I must have a fuckin’ superpower,” Daar grumbled, as well-practiced motion exploded around him. The Gaoians flowed over the couch and furniture and were out the door first.

Jack and Rhi were the slowest. Of course they were, anybody would be versus a team of supermen and muscled-up alien warhounds. Even at a dead run, they were left behind as they pounded down the hall to the suit room, but they were among the first Techs to arrive, and pounced on Moho’s station and started the pre-wear checklist on his suit as Deacon, Doyle, Hargreaves and all the others piled in around them. On the other side of the room, the operators stripped single-use undersuits out of their packaging and got changed.

“Thank fuck we shaved down yesterday,” Adam grumbled as he stepped into his undersuit. Like always, his needed to squeeze the hardest and was a little bit past too small for him, but the material was just strong and stretchy enough to stand up against his body’s demands.

It’d be fine once he was properly suited up.

Jack always listened to the briefing when he could. It told him a lot about what kind of action his friends would be going into, and that usually helped him pick out a few little things that Moho might want tweaked on his suit.

Powell was suiting up too, this time. Powell, The Great Father, Champion Thurrsto and Fiin, in the other building… And Daar’s huge, wolf-like ears were very, very still as he listened intently to what one of his aides had to say.

The seriousness of it hit Jack suddenly. And Rhi too, to judge from the way she paused for just a second. Of course, these weren’t just operations any longer, were they? This was a war, now.

Not that it had ever not been a war. But… it was hard to put his finger on, but there was a feeling down Jack’s spine like things had maybe shifted up a gear.

Over by the lockers, Powell kept the briefing quick.

“We’re scrambling to assist an aid convoy en route to that Guvnurag planet I can’t fookin’ pronounce,” he said. “Hunters are hittin’ ‘em. Hard. The Guvnurag need that convoy, an’ there’s a lot of good people on those ships. We’ll be boardin’ the freighters first to save civilian lives, the broodship second. Boarding and capture is all per SOP, you know how it goes.”

Daar jumped in once Powell had said his bit. “I’ll be with First Fang aboard th’ Destroyin’ Fury. Our primary focus is gonna be an offensive smash-an’-grab against th’ Hunters. Rescue’s a bit o’ a more ‘delicate’ kinda can-opening, yijao? First Fang’s mebbe not quite the right asset ‘fer that. Fleet command’ll be mine, Powell an’ Fiin are in charge of y’all.”

Powell nodded. “Suit up. We jump to Cally as soon as you’re sealed and checked.”

And that was it. Straightforward.

Getting Moho into his rig was a well-practiced dance for Jack and Rhi now. They were a “sub-two” team, capable getting their operator suited, booted, sealed and heated in under two minutes. They flew through the checklist with both speed and precision, missing nothing, and were the fourth or fifth crew to call clear.

As usual, Doyle and Hargreaves, Adam’s techs, finished first, even if squeezing him into his undersuit took longer than anyone else. But they had the advantage that their operator was absurdly strong enough to take on half the hard work all by himself. That advantage was dimmed a bit by all the extra kit the Protectors wore, and him in particular: additional armor plates, medical equipment, heavy weapons and so on.

Moho was pretty straightforward. Moho carried things that went boom. That was why Rhianna was on his crew: she’d been an ammo handler before transferring to the SOR.

So, while she grabbed Moho’s grenades, C4, breaching charges and all the other party tricks, Jack sealed up the toolkit and “travel pack.” Most of what they needed was up on Caledonia already, but there were always a few things—calibrated tools, up-to-date data, the day’s intravenous package freshly delivered by Medical—that had to go with them.

Jack and Rhianna wouldn’t be going with. The HEAT didn’t need all the suit techs along for the ride, and space was at a premium on Cally anyway. So once they’d delivered their Operator and his luggage… that was it. Their work was done. They’d clean up and reset their station, and after that they’d be on alert and on base until Coyers came back.

Adam had a spare moment for Jack before he thundered out of the bay with the rest. “Yo. You take care of Miller, got it? I think this is gonna be a rough mission. For everyone.”

It was more a gentle command than anything else, but it came from a man who towered over nearly everybody, and who was encased in a personal armor system so heavy and effective, he was more a living tank than anything else.

Jack nodded, a bit nervously. “I will.”

Adam gave him a smile. “I know you will. You’re in the fight, too. Remember that.” And with that bit of encouragement he was gone, shaking the building with his every step.

The Great Father was the last to leave. He’d watched the exchange, flicked an ear in a gesture Jack couldn’t interpret, then stampeded off with even more ground-shuddering speed.

From the moment the alert sounded to the moment the building thumped faintly in sympathy with the Array firing to send them off, fewer than ten minutes had elapsed. The silence was… heavy.

Rhi broke it. “…Whew.”

“Yeah,” Jack agreed.

“You’d think we’d be getting used to this, huh?”

“Some things, you don’t get used to I guess…” Jack indicated the bench. “Let’s clean up.”

She nodded, and started slotting her tools back into their rack. “You gonna cast a spell for ‘em?”

“I always do. You gonna pray for them?”

“I always do.” She paused, then looked at him. “…You ever cast one for us?”

“…I think I might have to change it now.”

“Heh. Yeah.” she laughed softly, then stooped to take an inventory of the single-use items they’d expended. “Uh…can I help?”

…Yeah. They were going to be great together. Jack smiled at her, and finished cleaning up his half of the workbench.

“I’d like that,” he said.

Date Point: 16y10m1d AV
HMS Violent, Armstrong Station rally point, Cimbrean-5, the Far Reaches

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

“Caledonia reports the HEAT are aboard, sir.”

Caruthers acknowledged the update with a nod. Things were moving quickly, but not quickly enough by half for his tastes. The Hunters had hit the convoy on a relatively remote stretch of the spacelane, and although one of the Gaoian-made interceptor drones was en route, it wasn’t due to arrive for another four minutes.

Every passing minute was lives lost. They may, indeed, already be too late to save anyone. But Caruthers would be damned before he’d let the Hunters get away unpunished.

“Sir, update from Clan One-Fang’s third claw. They were on training maneuvers with the Domain’s first fleet, and Grand Admiral Ak’kk’brr is requesting to join us.”

Caruthers nodded again. “He’s welcome with our compliments. Assign his force a place in the rear. If all he does is watch and learn, that will be perfect. The Gaoians go in the van, alongside the Great Father.”

“Aye aye.”

Two minutes.

Myrmidon sent over an updated disposition for him to confirm. It wasn’t much different to the standard Allied setup: Gaoians up front where their speed and firepower could be used to lock horns with the enemy, the Royal Navy’s V-type destroyers in the main part of the force providing electronic warfare, intelligence and long-range fire support, Caledonia and the three San Diego cruisers held behind that ready to spring forward as needed….

And now, in the back behind them, quite a sizeable force of varied Domain ships, including a War Platform that would easily be the biggest and slowest thing on the field. He pulled a small face to him as he reviewed the Fleet Intelligence Center’s… reserved opinion on the war platform’s tactical utility and capabilities, then shrugged and confirmed the disposition. Frankly, if the Hunters ever got a shot at it then things would already have gone catastrophically wrong, so that ship’s shortcomings were a moot point.

One minute. His board was completely green, every ship in the fleet had signalled they were ready. All he could do was drum his fingers and–

The drone’s jump beacon connected. An instant later, more than a dozen ships had all blinked halfway across the galaxy, and a moment after that there were megalight drones howling out of their launch tubes.

Some were inbound toward the stricken convoy to neutralize the gravity spike. Others were headed outward, to establish rally points and lines of retreat. On their heels, flights of voidrippers, firebirds and bulldogs swept in to provide the first clear and up-to-date impression of their quarry.

The Hunters didn’t run this time, and as the data came back from his scout planes, Caruthers could see why. There was a broodship out there for every ship in his fleet, including the Domain ones.

As the overlapping fields from the drones cleared a path for them to warp in under the gravity spikes, the Destroying Fury pounced. Daar’s flagship was exactly like the man himself in that regard: huge, deadly, fast, and eager to lead from the front.

The fact that she was basically a mobile Farthrow generator had a lot to do with that. She bowled into the heart of the freighter convoy, locked down a volume nearly an AU across, and smashed a dozen swarmships out of the sky with her weaponized forcefields.

But the Hunters were here to fight, this time. Long-range sensors pinged several alerts at Caruthers as spacetime some distance away outside the Fury’s bubble fizzed like a soda, and disgorged… well, swarmships. Very, very aptly named swarmships.

They must have been desperate for all the components and little essentials on that convoy, because for the first time since the Hellring went down—before that, even. For the first time since the Battle of Gao, the Hunters actually stood up and boxed.

The Fury was immediately besieged. She coiled her shields inwards, reserving their power and heat load for pure defense, not able to reach out and swat the gnats that bothered her. Caruthers ordered the USS San Diego, and her sister ships Robert A. Heinlein and Gene Roddenberry forward, and they flash-warped directly to the Destroying Fury’s side.

With Daar’s flagship cocooned in their combined energies, not even the nuke the Hunters hit it with could get through, but that wouldn’t last. Even Gaoian-made heat sinks had their limits.

For the first time in a long while, Caruthers felt his knuckles going white.

This one was going to be bad.

Technical Sergeant Adam “Warhorse” Arés

Sealed and suited, ready to go… standing and waiting. Then sitting, to conserve energy. Nobody wanted to hit their Juice—or worse, IV—before the fight had even begun.

Adam got exactly as much information as he needed: that much, no more. Which in this case translated to the words “STAND BY” in his HUD as the HEAT waited for a target.

It was quiet in the deployment bay. The loudest noise by far was the hiss of his own breathing apparatus, little puffs of pressurized air running behind and below his ears and into his mask. The gurgle of the water systems as he took a small sip. Sporadic, terse words on the ‘net, none of them intended for him.

He could hear the battle faintly, through the heavy sound each of Cally’s guns made when they fired. Like a team of men beating on sheet metal with sledgehammers, a few rooms over. Subtle shifts, jolts and sways in the gravity as they accelerated and it took the grav plating a fraction of a second to catch up.

He was used to that. Endless training had made him almost numb to gravitic shenanigans. His body just dealt with them. What he wasn’t used to was waiting.

Even Deacon and her techs had run out of things to tinker with, and they’d use every last minor check and tweak they could find if it gave them something to do. Now she was trying and failing to not chew on her fingernails, and it was infecting Adam’s calm as well.

All he could do, though, was sit and wait for that “STAND BY” in his visor to become anything else.

Which was awful, because sitting still in the Mass was still a full-body, active exertion. Just wearing it meant fighting back against its pressure, just sitting down in it and doing nothing more strenuous than breathing drained calories at about the same rate as a steady jog. He’d got to the point where tensing against it was an unconscious act, but now that he was still…

Now that he was still, he was acutely reminded that he was wearing enough armor to classify him as a light vehicle. In motion, it made him powerful, unstoppable. Stopped, though…

Stopped, it just made him ache. Itch. And still the fucking “STAND BY” didn’t change.

He had some solace in that Righteous and ‘Base had it pretty bad too, though their Mass wasn’t as fiercely compressive as his. Hell, Tigger had it even worse these days, being the singular freak of nature that he was. Even with his much more advanced armor, that was…

Well, surprisingly okay. If Adam couldn’t be top dog anymore, then he was proud to be friend and coach to the one and only man alive of any species who could beat him, or even come close. Or…probably ever would, unless either Adam or Righteous somehow pulled off an upset one day. Thank God the big goofy murderbear was one of a kind.

What was he doing right now? Adam…he honestly couldn’t really imagine what it must have been like to be someone like that. One minute Daar was living life like any grunt, and the very next he was a general leading his forces, or an admiral his fleet…or an emperor, his people.

Adam wasn’t nearly intelligent enough to be someone like that. But he was a damn good medic. As good as ‘Base, in his own way. And he had buddies like Butler and sometimes Thurrsto, all right there with him, doing their best to save lives.

And, well. If it came down to up close and personal violence, he could do that, too. In some ways, he could do that better than anyone. He wasn’t called Warhorse for nothing.

Something changed in his HUD: Radiological alert. Somebody was letting off nukes out there. He glanced over at Baseball, who glanced back at him at the same moment, then looked over Adam’s shoulder and lifted his head slightly to say ‘look.’

Adam looked. Powell was on his feet, talking with somebody, a Royal Navy officer. Probably on the command net, too. Hard to see his face, but in Powell’s case reading his mood was all about body language anyway. And he looked about the same as Adam felt.

Eventually he nodded, thanked the Navy guy, and sat back down again. Slumped. Slumped back down again.

And Adam knew that they probably weren’t going anywhere today.

Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

The data flowed freely, and they were delicious.

The convoy had been one thing. A ripe opportunity to replenish needed sundries whose supply had been stretched by the campaign to dissipate the Broods into smaller, more obfuscated strongholds. Losing the Builder Hive had demonstrated the folly of excessive centralization.

Distribution, however, came with its own challenges. The convoy had been a welcome answer to a few of those challenges.

Now, though, it was turning out to be a far juicier quarry than the Builder Alpha-of-Alphas had foreseen.

Since the first clash between Hunters and a Human warship, there had never been a deadly, fierce struggle for supremacy. Both were naturally inclined to raid, to ambush, to hunt. Both were predators by inclination. It was what made the deathworlders so admirable, so inventive, and so challenging.

But when one predator came to steal another’s kill, the resulting fight could very well become what this one had. And now, the Builders were learning much.

The minutiae of what all those gigabytes of sensor telemetry could wait. For now, the Alpha-of-Alphas simply watched, alert for the big things, the moments of genius and inventiveness that it might follow.

It was not disappointed.

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

It was getting fuckin’ hot on the Fury. Not dangerous, but the air was like a really hot summer day, and slowly gettin’ worse. Hot days were for rolling through flowers an’ chasing after kwek (and Females) an’ not for sufferin’ onboard a warship.

At least he had the advantage of active cooling in his Suit. He was sympathetic as fuck ‘fer all the rest o’ the ship who weren’t in environmentally-hardened armor, but at least they had the advantage o’ not thumpin’ around in duraflex scalemail that were even heavier’n he was…

Good thing they weren’t, they were busy tendin’ to the most bestest ship in the allied fleet. He was proud of the Fury. She was taking a beating that nothin’ else in the galaxy ever could (though bein’ honest, even the Fury wouldn’t be in one piece right now if not for the San Diego cruisers), and if the worst he had to complain about after three nukes at short range was that the air was gettin’ warm, he’d take it. But she was also kinda pinned down: she could tank the hits, or she could fight back. Not both. Not to full effect.

So, break the pin.

“Where are those nukes comin’ from? They ain’t jumpin’ in.”

“That big broodship at the back, My Father. They’re firing a lot of them.”

“A lot?”

“The three—” there was a lurch, a flash, and all the monitors went protectively dark for half a second. “—the four that hit us are just the ones that made it past our point defence.”

Daar growled and contacted Caruthers directly.

“We can’t stay here forever,” he said, putting it bluntly. “Can you take out that broodship with the nukes?”

“We landed two good hits on it. It seems to be just as tough as you,” Caruthers replied. “And they’ve copied backlash shielding, too. We lost two firebirds.”

Daar panted frustratedly. The air temperature was creeping up toward blood-warm now, and the update that accompanied Caruthers’ words showed him that it was a testament to the incredible skill of Human pilots that they hadn’t lost more than that. The Firebirds had withdrawn in an orderly manner, pulling back from the most hazardous part of the battlefield to fly close support for the capital ships and keep the swarmships from latching on.

Space all around was a blizzard of swarmships, hard radiation, debris, kinetic ammunition and firepower. The big one at the back of the Hunter formation was well protected behind a wall of its lesser counterparts, each one of which was imitating the San Diego cruisers’ advanced shield projection.

Worse, as well as wrapping up the big one nice and cozy, each one was enfolding a freighter in its grasp.

Dammit. They were going to jump out, and those pilots’ lives would have been spent in vain. Not to mention the lost materiel for the Guvnurag, and the lost civilian lives.

But Daar couldn’t see a way to break the deadlock. His formation might push forward, but that would just give their point defence less time to react to the incoming nukes: they’d just be driven back again, or destroyed. Bringing the Domain ships in would just get a lot of hapless blue amateurs slaughtered, and the V-destroyers were already as well-placed and effective as they were gonna be.

On the plus side, the stalemate went both ways. As far as Daar could tell, it was a battle of heat dispersal, and the Hunters didn’t have enough to win it… but neither did he.

“I have WERBS on standby,” Caruthers ventured. “Though, I would prefer not to use it unless we absolutely must.”

“Agreed. Don’t want ‘em learnin’ that trick anytime soon,” Daar had a feeling that if the Hunters ever figured out WERBS, their first instinct would be to use it to scour planets to the bedrock. He’d seen the estimates on what that weapon could do. Its creators were justifiably terrified of it.

It had saved Gao. He wouldn’t use it for anything less than that.

Daar growled to himself, it seemed like this was gonna be an endurance test, an’ that weren’t a thing he was gonna much enjoy. Attrition was a stupid way ‘ta fight a battle. He just needed some crazy, off-the-wall idea mebbe, something ridiculous like the ass-pulls they always managed in all those stupid Star Trek episodes…

…Well…

…Hmm.

His head cocked slowly onto one side as just such a crazy ass-pull blossomed in his mind. Or mebbe it was dumbassery. Either way, his instincts knew he hadta try it. “Caruthers…if you could pick jus’ one Hunter ship right now…which one would ‘ya pick?”

Caruthers was silent for a few seconds. “…Target designated Foxtrot,” he decided. “It’s on the edge of the formation and radiating more heat than the others. I think we can get a lick in if we hit it hard.”

“Everythin’ we got. Hell, bring the V’zktk in on it too.” Not that he really expected to penetrate its shields, but that wasn’t the point. The point was… something a little different.

“Guur,” he turned to the Fury’s Shipfather. “How aggressively can we dump heat as a beam?”

“We already are,” the Shipfather replied. “It’s called backlash shielding. The Humans at Mrwrki invented it.”

“We tied to a particular wavelength, or…?”

“We usually emit in gamma, but that can be changed. What’s your plan, My Father?”

“Cycle our backlash frequency ‘ta somethin’ their shields’re transparent to. Visible spectrum, mebbe. When we hit Target Foxtrot, poke ‘em with all the heat we can dump. Might just tip ‘em over.”

“Yes, My Father.” Guur took up the task personally.

Daar returned to his spot in the middle of the bridge and was glad indeed for his suit’s cooling. He must be emitting quite a lot of heat himself, now, but at least it let him stand calmly in the middle of the bridge and not pant. Right now, he needed to seem indestructible.

But he was prayin’ like hell that his plan would work.

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

“Do you think we can break it?”

“I think at this point it’s a question of whose ammo reserves run deepest,” Caruthers replied. “Both of us have shield webs fully in place, neither of us can advance on the other… about the only thing we have that they don’t is the Farthrow. Maybe hitting a single target will work, but I doubt it. Not unless we time it down to the millisecond.”

Ak’kk’brr’s flagship—the war platform’s name translated loosely to Strike With Both Hooves—had come forward into the main formation at his invitation, and Caruthers had to admit: there were a lot of big guns on that thing. Right now, he was glad to have them.

“My ships have a firing solution, Admiral,” he reported. “We are ready when you are.”

Caruthers was pleasantly surprised: the ETs hadn’t held them up at all. Apparently the Domain’s first fleet could keep up. That was one good thing to come out of this day, at least.

“Wait for my mark,” he commanded. Timing was crucial. “Tigger, Highcastle. All ships are ready to fire.”

“Sync-lock to Fury’s fire control.”

There was something from the Dominion’s monolithic way of doing battle that was actually useful. Caruthers authorized the brief synchronization of his fleet’s weapons, handed them off to Daar, and stood back to watch.

On the ‘net, he heard only the briefest of pauses. For a second or two, there was pregnant silence. And then…

“Fire.”

++END CHAPTER 60++

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As well as sixty-two Deathworlders…

Austin Deschner
Aaron Hescox
Adam Beeman
Alex Hargott
Alex Langub
Andrew
Andrew Ford
Andrew Robinson
Arnor atp
Ben Thrussell
Bruce Ludington
Chris Bausch
Chris Meeker damnusername
Daniel R.
Dar
David Jamison
Derek Price
Devin Rousso
Elizabeth Schartok
Elliott Riddle
Eric Johansson
Fiona Dunlop galrock0
Gavin Smart
Ignate Flare
Ivan Smirnov
Jason Dyer
Jim Hamrick
Jon
Kristoffer Skarra
Logan Rudie lovot
Matt
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
mihkel miks
Mikee Elliott
Myke Harryson
Nathan Wentworth
NightKhaos
Patrick Huizinga
Phil Winterleitner
Richard A Anstett
RJ Smiley
Ryan
Ryan Cadiz
Sam
Saph
Sintanan
Stephane Girardin
Stephen Prescott
Stratigan theWorst
Tyler Kelloway
Volka Creed
William Kinser
Woodsie13 xxarmondxx

…Seventy-six Friendly ETs, 119 Squishy Xenos and 294 Dizi Ra -(splat)

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work under fair use are the property of their respective owners.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 61: “Tooth and Claw”

Chapter 61: Violence

Date Point: 16y10m1d AV
Cloaked Hunter observation ship, Spacelane BlueSquare-552, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

Things… collapsed. Spectacularly.

In one instant, the battle had been at a deliciously productive impasse. The Hunters’ own ships were grappling with the Humans’ and Prey-Species’ war vessels, neither side had a clear advantage and for the first time ever the Builders were able to study their foes at length. Previously, every estimate on those ships had been estimates, with quite a wide margin of error.

Precision promised the opportunity to duplicate, or even improve upon, their designs. The prolonged brawl had been eminently desirable from the Alpha-of-Alphas’ perspective, therefore.

The rapid way it fell apart, however… that was a surprise.

It began with a broodship at the half-radian position in the Hunter formation. The battle was elongated and flattened thanks to the prey-convoy, so the formation was not perfectly three-dimensional, and that broodship had been somewhat out of position as the web of Hunter forcefields built up. It had been left with a heat debt, that only got worse as it locked shields with the others and began to help dissipate the battle’s ferocious energies.

As the stalemate had formed, that problem had been left unresolved… Right up until the broodship exploded. Suddenly, spectacularly, and without forewarning.

There was an almost shocked quality to the moment of stillness that followed. As though neither side could quite believe what had just happened.

The Humans reacted first. With almost Eater-like ferocious glee, they capitalized on the new opening and poured on the pressure anew to exploit the sudden weakness on the Hunters’ flank. The Alpha-of-Alphas watched in dismay as the broodships on that end of the formation first recoiled, then retreated under the withering firepower that now threatened to overwhelm their interlaced shields.

The freighter the Hunters had been attempting to secure was abandoned, and the Fur-Faced flung themselves into the gap, seizing the initiative. Swarmships were smashed by the dozen in the space of just a few blood-pulses.

The future played out in front of the Alpha-of-Alphas with mathematical certainty. The deadlock was over, and now that the deathworlders had the momentum they would not be so timid as to hand it back. The Hunters had only one choice, now: Leave empty-handed, or die.

It gave the command to withdraw, in an orderly formation. It would have preferred for the Swarm to jump out, but the big Gaoian ship in the middle of the formation was generating much too powerful a wormhole suppression field for that. The only option was to warp away, and seed the retreat with gravity spikes to prevent a pursuit. Escape the suppression field, then jump.

To the enemy, it would look like a victory. The Hunters would appear to have been forced to retreat and the deathworld forces would reclaim the cargo ships, which the Alpha-of-Alphas predicted would then be escorted to the prey-world.

If so, then the bait had been taken. The enemy were slippery, agile, unpredictable. They arrived quickly and struck hard, faded away in response to serious opposition. Catching them, therefore, had required a change of strategy.

Now, their position would be known. Their course would be known. They could be controlled. Followed.

Hunted.

From the safety of its cloaked command ship, the Alpha-of-Alphas watched, and waited. And it revelled in an emotion that was rare for a Builder: the thrill of the hunt. The jaws of its trap were closing as intended.

It wasn’t the kind of trap its predecessor would have thought of. The Builder had different priorities to the Eater, and while its maw might drool at the idea of getting the Fur-Faced alpha-of-alphas on its vivisection table (after all, what worthier prey was there than the so-called ‘Great Father’ and his secrets?) its real prize was elsewhere.

Time to let the enemy get comfortable. Let them commit themselves, let their inertia accumulate. The Alpha-of-Alphas was patient: It would let them settle on those freighters and protect it well. After all, while seizing those freighters would have been most pleasing…

…The true hunt was still to come.

Date Point: 16y10m1d AV
HMS Violent, Spacelane BlueSquare-552, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

“Can we pursue?”

“…No sir. They’re dropping G-spikes as they go. If we try to go around, they’ll be outside the Farthrow field before we catch them.”

“…Alright. Move Caledonia forward, and get the HEAT over to those freighters. Maybe there’ll be a few survivors…”

There was a forlorn optimism. The freighters had been boarded by the Hunters long before the fleet arrived, and remained firmly captured throughout. Though the Hunters had abandoned them in their retreat, Caruthers knew in his gut that the HEAT would find nothing but blood smears and gnawed bones over there.

He wanted to believe in miracles, though.

Caledonia made slow progress through the debris field around the freighters. While it was certainly within her power to bulldoze aside the torn metal, shattered glass and dismembered body parts that had fallen into close orbits the Hunters’ gravity spike, there was the possibility of escape pods, explosive devices and other things to watch out for.

In the end, she found neither. The first ship in the formation was registered as the Orcoray, and HEAT Team 1 boarded her through a large hull breach where a Hunter assault pod had punched right through into the flight deck.

Their grim report on the crew’s condition was pretty much exactly what Caruthers had expected. Team 2 reported much the same aboard the Toruyn and First Fang had nothing but bad news from the Mokohur. HEAT Team 3, boarding the Erivuhn, encountered a handful of stranded Hunters that had been left behind by their retreating fleet, and dealt with them accordingly. Again, no survivors.

It was that last news that prompted Caruthers’ heavy sigh. A defeat, then. Technically. Yes, they’d sunk a Broodship, forced the enemy to withdraw and saved the cargo for safe delivery to Ugunduvur… But the primary objective had been saving those crews, if they could.

Daar clearly felt the same frustration just as keenly, even if he had a tight lid on it. There was a terrible fire behind his eyes when Caruthers called him and Grand Admiral Ak’kk’brr; his mind was clearly set on vengeance.

“They’re learnin’ faster’n I’d like,” he grumbled. “An’ we can’t get stuck in stand-up brawls like that again. They’ve got more ships than us.”

“We may not have a choice,” Caruthers replied. “If we’re going to salvage any kind of a win from today, these freighters have to get to their destination. We can’t leave them unescorted.”

“…How long to Ugunduvur?”

“That depends on how quickly we can crew them, make field repairs, and how fast their warp drives are,” Ak’kk’brr supplied. Days, at least.”

“Days?” Caruthers echoed.

“The Orcoray in particular took heavy damage to its flight and navigation systems. My war platform has the equipment and facilities to get it moving again, but such repairs are slow work in vacuum and freefall.”

Daar made an unhappy noise. “That’s a long time ‘ta be hangin’ our tails out ‘fer the Hunters ‘ta nip at.”

“Yes.” Caruthers nodded. “And I doubt the Hunters will give up easily. They hit this convoy for a reason, and fought hard to hold onto it.”

“Perhaps we should consider scuttling the freighters to deny its cargo to them, then,” Ak’kk’brr suggested. “Parts and equipment are replaceable.”

“It took months to drum up this shipment,” Caruthers pointed out. “The people on that planet will suffer if it isn’t delivered.”

“An’ the freighter crews will have died ‘fer nothin’,” Daar added.

“I do not believe that the dead care whether they died for something or nothing, Great Father,” Ak’kk’brr replied. “The living, on the other hand, will be left vulnerable.”

“I for one knew damn well when I signed up that my career would mean putting myself in harm’s way for the sake of others,” Caruthers said. “Ugunduvur needs this convoy, gentlemen. A few days’ delay will be painful and difficult for them: the months it will take to replace this shipment if it’s lost could very well be catastrophic.”

Daar’s duck-nod sealed their decision. Ak’kk’brr bowed his head, slowly and gracefully on the end of its long neck. “Well said, and thank you for reminding me,” he said. “In that case, I will maneuver the Strike With Both Hooves into position to begin repairs on the Orcoray.”

“What can we do to speed the work along?” Caruthers asked.

“I think, Admiral, that your people are best used exactly where they are,” Ak’kk’brr said. “While I don’t doubt their skill or intelligence, in this case the repairs will involve systems they are not familiar with. My engineers will complete the work as rapidly as possible.”

Caruthers nodded solemnly. “Very well. We’ll send out long-range scouts and protect the war barge while it works. Sir, should I assume you’ll be returning to Gao?”

“I might hafta. I got a personal jump portal on the Fury if need be. I got about a dozen other irons in the fire right now, and one o’ them’s gettin’ pretty hot…”

“That sounds like you’re looking for a reason to stay, if I may be so bold.”

“‘Cuz I am.”

Caruthers allowed himself a small chuckle at that. At least Daar’s brand of brutal honesty included self-reflection.

“Then as much as I value your tactical acumen, I might suggest that your considerable and irreplaceable presence would be much better utilized elsewhere.”

The Great Father chittered ruefully. “Always did like that ‘bout you. Ain’t afraid to call it like it is… ‘yer right of course. But I’ll leave the Fury here. ‘Yer gonna need her shields if the Hunters come back.”

“I’m pretty certain it’s a matter of ‘when,’ really,” Caruthers said.

“…Prob’ly, yeah. Balls, ‘yer a better mind ‘fer navy things ’n’me anyway.”

“Then I think we all know what we’re doing,” Caruthers finished. “We will, of course, keep you informed.”

“I ‘preciate it. Good hunting.” Daar sketched a small gesture of esteem to both of them, and disconnected.

Ak’kk’brr made a soft noise through his nose and performed his slow nod again. “Are we hunting them, or are they hunting us?” he asked.

“Both, I imagine.” Caruthers replied. “I’ll do my best to make ours the successful hunt.”

“Please do. I should direct matters here. Ak’kk’brr, out.”

Caruthers sat back and rubbed the back of his neck as the connection closed. Then he stood, and slipped out of his tiny cabin-slash-office and onto the deck, back toward HMS Violent’s bridge, mentally compiling the orders he needed to give as he went.

The Hunters would be back. Of that much, he was completely certain. And next time…

Well. He needed to be ready for them.

Date Point: 16y10m5d AV
“Mordor” System, deep in Hunter space

Tooko, Brother and Stud of Clan Firefang

“…That’s a lot of traffic.”

‘Mordor’ was very different to the scans and intelligence that Tooko had seen regarding the planet Hell, and doubly different to the wasteland of drifting debris and cratered continents that he’d witnessed for himself.

Mordor was busy. Even passive object tracking using nothing more than albedo and image comparison was enough to tell him that. There were thousands of powered objects out there, and the FTL wake sensors told him that local spacetime was rippling like the surface of a simmering pot.

His mission objective was blunt and to-the-point: Deposit the JETS team safely on the planet’s surface without being detected. Okay. He could do that. It was going to be tense, but he could do it. The issue he was having was that… he was pretty sure there were cities down there on that planet.

Hell had been completely given over to nature. No development, no resource extraction, nothing. Which had always struck Tooko as a waste: Planets were the place to get certain resources that were otherwise effectively unavailable from asteroid mining or orbital production. There were certain classes of organic compound that just didn’t form in a spaceborne environment.

Mordor, it seemed, was the opposite. Spectrochemical analysis of its atmosphere indicated massive pollution. The CO2 levels were so high that it’d be like a stuffy, airtight room down there. Chlorofluorocarbons were in abundance, lead levels were averaging more than half a microgram per cubic meter, and the sulfur dioxide levels were…

Well. Tooko wouldn’t like to stay down there long.

Wilde reacted to the readings with his usual dry, stoic humor. “…Bloody hell. Greenpeace wouldn’t like that one bit.”

Frasier, as ever, was more fatalistic. “What’s the radiation like?”

Tooko glanced at the readings. “…Elevated overall, but it’s difficult to give you a precise idea. You’re going to need to take dosimetry very seriously.”

Ferd and the others were all back out of stasis now. Tooko saw them give each other troubled looks before Ferd spoke up.

“Ray-dee-ay-shun? I remember this. The land-curse, yes? Can’t see it, taste it, smell or hear it.”

“That’s the one.” Wilde agreed. “Reesy? Masks please, mate.”

Rees nodded curtly and vanished into the cargo hold.

“We not do much work, if we stuck in safe-cloth all day…” Nomuk fretted.

“Well, it’s either that, or maybe never have kids. Or maybe die young. And possibly horribly.” Wilde gave him a small smirk. “Your call.”

Ten’gewek and Gaoian alike shuddered.

“…Safe-cloth it is,” Nomuk said, fervently.

“Smart man. Can we get a better idea how bad it is, Tooko?”

“Once we’re closer…” Tooko replied. “Right now we’re still several AUs out.”

“Right. Okay chunky monkeys, I think that means we need to get ready–”

Ferd gave an indignant hoot. “Am not chunky!”

“You’re bigger than me, mate. Anyway, let’s get a good hot meal in, get loosened up, take our medicine, and maybe get going on our oxygen supps. How’s the gravity, Tooko?”

“Point nine-three Earths.”

“Right. That’s not so bad.”

“For you. We have to hold on to ground,” Ferd trilled.

Tooko was unimpressed. “Ugh. You high-G freaks…”

“More reason to get you stronger, little friend,” Ferd told him.

“Not now, mate,” Wilde reminded him. “Besides, we’ve got plenty of gear to keep you weighted down…remember how I said we’re pre-breathing oxygen?”

Tumik sighed, looking crestfallen in a very literal way. “…We bring tanks, then.”

“Exactly. I’ll help Reesy bring ‘em up.” He patted Tooko on the shoulder. “You get us down safely, yeah?”

“Of course!”

In this case, that might even be somewhat easier than usual. Even with SBD’s top-tier stealth systems, FTL travel generated ripples in the fabric of spacetime. In this case though, the system was so busy and sloshing like a pool full of playing cubs that SBD’s muted and heavily damped drive would almost certainly be lost in the random interference patterns. So long as Tooko moved with other traffic, there was no way the Hunters’ in-system sensor network would see them.

Still. He kept his approach cautious. There was no need or advantage to being hasty right now. Rather than go FTL therefore, he boosted the warp drive up to a quarter of lightspeed. Fast enough to eat up the distance, slow enough to leave an invisibly faint signature and give the men in the back time to prepare.

There wasn’t as much boisterousness this time. Ferd and his men were in fact deadly quiet. Wilde, Rees and Frasier checked and double-checked their equipment calmly and competently, punctuated here and there with the odd small joke or wry observation.

It took an hour to get close enough for Tooko to have a better fix on the radiation situation. It was a good-news-bad-news kind of thing, really. Globally, the levels were… not unduly terrible. If they stayed down there for a year, they’d get about the same dose as if they’d had ten CT scans.

There were patches, however, that the mapping software pinned with a bright blue triangle and a Gaoian skull. Nobody needed that symbol translated.

“You boys might want to take your potassium iodide.”

The Humans nodded and took their pills without comment. The Ten’gewek were interesting, there: they actually struggled to swallow hard little tablets. Maybe it was just a lack of familiarity, maybe it was their tongues. Either way, it was an ordeal for them… but it passed without complaint.

Tooko duck-nodded and inserted them a low orbit. He’d be safe inside the ship, thankfully.

“So. A whole planet to choose from. Where do you want to land?”

Wilde came up from the table and sat in the copilot seat. “…Somewhere we can hide the ship but that’s close enough to those cities that we can get a good look at them,” he said. “Honestly, that’s about as good as we can say for now.”

“I love a nice, narrow, clearly defined instruction…” Tooko muttered, with a small chitter. Still, that did narrow it down quite a lot. There was a whole planet to choose from, and plenty of cities and lines of communication to pick, so really his choice just came down to finding the optimal hiding place for Silent But Deadly.

Ferd had knuckled up to the doorway and trilled quietly. “We here, because we not know what we not know, yes? Hard to plan if no knowings of knowings.”

Trying to untangle that linguistic knot while flying a spaceship, reading a map and choosing a landing site was one too many spinning plates for Tooko. “…Yes. I think.” He ruled out the largest of the planet’s three major continental masses. It had the most cities, but also the densest pollution and the most flagged radiation hazards. The other two were more or less the same size, on opposite sides of the northern hemisphere. One was dominated by desert, turning a sickly green around the shores. Not many cities… plenty of resource extraction though. Open-cast mining operations seemed to be in abundance. So many, in fact, that an alarmingly large proportion of the continent had the same kind of pock-marked texture as a heavily shelled battlefield.

Too open, Tooko decided. Those mines might be viable hiding spots if they were depleted and abandoned, but a satellite or aircraft passing overhead would see straight down into it. SBD would benefit from some overhead cover, and Tooko preferred some natural cover to go with the camo netting.

The third continent seemed to fit the bill. It had forests, of a sort. Or at least, patches high up in the mountains where large flora still clung precariously to life in places. Some of those “patches” ran for hundreds of kilometers over rough and difficult terrain. Great for hiding the ship… not so great for easy access to interesting things to scout. But promising.

He followed a river north-east out of one particular copse. It was more of a canyon, really. A deep V-shaped notch cut by thousands of years of flowing water, though the water in question quickly became something altogether nastier as it picked up the effluvia and industrial waste of the districts it passed through. No good… no good….

There.

There was a small stream of miraculously clean(ish) water that ran down into a lake of alkaline sludge. Undeveloped, save for a bridge that crossed it. A few kilometers from… he swiped around, examining the area. Was that a rail goods yard? The Hunters did use railroads. And to the west was high ground with views over a sprawling built-up area…

It wasn’t perfect. But he had a whole planet to look at, and nobody had enough time to pore over every last square inch of a planet’s surface, even if it was their full-time hobby for years on end. Realistically, he was never going to find the perfect spot even if it existed. Finding a good enough spot so quickly was encouraging.

He looked a little longer, trying to find a better candidate, and abandoned the search once it became clear that his passengers were completely ready. Time to get them on the ground.

With a silent, fervent wish to the universe that he’d done a good enough job, he flipped the Silent But Deadly around and accelerated into a de-orbit burn.

Time to see what the Hunters did with a world like this…

Date Point:16y10m5d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space

Lewis Beverote

“Okay, so that’s a hit. How much damage?”

“Uh… sixteen.”

“Okay, that cultist’s dead…”

“And I’ll use my cunning action to disengage and step behind Lucy again.”

The party of “heroes”—currently blundering their way through foiling an eldritch ritual and rescuing a hapless maiden because the bounty was good and they owed rather a lot to the local Thieves’ Guild in gambling debts—looked up when their sorceror entered the room. Darcy was always a little late to sessions, and had long since given them permission to start without her.

For the first time in several days, she was smiling.

“Oh, hey!” Lucy stood, temporarily abandoning Morag the Barbarian, and hugged her. “Good news?”

“Yeah. Finally managed to get that monster to talk about numbers.” Darcy kicked her shoes into the corner and sat down with a grateful sigh. “Damn thing has the math schooling of a kindergartener.”

“So, ‘twenshy to power ten’ means…?” Lee asked, from behind the DM screen.

“Two times ten to the power ten. Thank God.” Darcy rubbed her face.

“Oh, only three orders of magnitude difference then,” Lucy chirped.

“Dang thing can’t count, huh?” Lewis noted. Darcy just laughed despairingly and shook her head.

“I tell you, that Hunter is as dumb as a sack of dead squirrels. The only thing it cares about is dominance, and meat.”

“It must have some brains,” Lee frowned. “Wasn’t it an Alpha?”

“Yeah. Turns out the way to become an Alpha is to kill more things, including the previous Alpha.” Darcy shook her head, then accepted her miniature when Lee handed it to her. “…Which pretty much matches the Father Garaaf debrief. There’s a caste of Hunters for fighting, and another caste for the actual brain work.”

“And just our luck, we got one of the dumbfucks,” Lewis finished. He flipped his character sheet and added another tally to Daring Dan’s impressively long kill count. Oh, sure, everything was supposed to be on tablets nowadays, but at this table they stuck to tradition, with paper and dice.

“Well, you know. In this case it’s a win.” Darcy leaned forward and decided to put her sorceress at the back of the room, safely behind all the less squishy characters. She put on the lopsided smile she always wore for sarcasm. “For some entirely inexplicable reason, AEC got nervous when numbers like a trillion started to float around.”

The fourth member of the party, its cleric and healer, rumbled at length before venturing to speak as one of his face-tentacles reached out to pluck up a d20.

“I think I can imagine why,” Vedreg said. Wry purple shimmered across his face and down his flanks.

“Eh. We were pretty confident it was just an error on the captive’s part,” Darcy said. “Anyway. Game.”

They dropped back into the scenario, where some timely spellcasting and a rather fancy bit of footwork on Daring Dan’s part helped them unexpectedly capture the cult leader, who might otherwise have escaped through a hidden door. Conversations about work were never far away on Mrwrki, though: Everyone was so heavily invested in their jobs that nobody could resist the urge to talk shop for long. So when Lee went to the bathroom, the conversation picked up as though it had never stopped.

“So, guess you’re gonna want a captive thinky-hunter next, huh?” Lewis asked.

Darcy nodded. “Garaaf called them ‘builders.’ And… yeah. Honestly, I really don’t think we’re going to get anything more from the one we’ve got. It’s just a crazed murder machine. No personality, no interests, no nothing. I know a lot of ETs—” she gave Vedreg a small smile “—but that Hunter? It’s an alien.” That’s the only word that fits. And it cannot stand the notion that a ‘fur-face’ is what ultimately brought it down.”

“It has some pride, then,” Vedreg noted.

“It has… something. Honestly, the Entity is easier to understand sometimes.” Darcy made a small, listless stack of dice. “…Kinda miss that weirdo thing. How did I get the job of being humanity’s expert on very alien intelligences?”

“Right place, right time, right experience?” Lucy guessed.

“You know what? I’ll take that.” Darcy sipped her green tea. “I’m pretty sure our Hunter is broken, though. Like, not just the dumb, hyperfocussed agression thing. I think it might actually be having their equivalent of a psychotic episode.”

“Like, uh, how can you tell?” Lewis asked.

“Same way I can figure out Entity’s emotigrams, I guess?” Darcy shrugged. “Our Hunter won’t stop fretting about how it was captured. It calls us humans, but it refers to Gaoians as ‘fur-faces.’ And Guvnurag are—sorry about this, Vedreg—’large prey.’ As far as I can tell, we humans are the only species on the scene they refer to using our own name for ourselves.”

Vedreg had shifted and shimmered an uncomfortable blend of green and white. Now his facial tendrils rippled and a more curious pink medley shone through. “Intriguing. So they still count the Gao among the rest of us.”

“This one does. And it’s totally neurotic about the fact that a ‘fur-face’ defeated it.”

“So they can handle losing to us?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t think they’re graceful losers at the best of times,” Darcy replied. “But they don’t see us as prey. They see us as… fellow predators, I guess. But for some reason, they still don’t see the Gao that way. And in this Alpha’s way of seeing things, for prey to beat it and drag it here in disgrace is… its whole universe is upside-down now.”

“Sounds like a recipe for goin’ fruit-loop to me, dude,” Lewis agreed.

“Fruit loop? That’s a new one,” Vedreg rumbled.

“Really? Huh. Funny which ones I’da thought you’d’ve heard a million times before…”

Vedreg’s reply was his best approximation of a shrug, and the rustle of a popcorn packet as he sent three of his tendrils questing inside in search of a snack. Lewis chuckled, then turned back to Darcy.

“…So what are you gonna do with it? Can’t release it, can you?”

“Nope.” Darcy sighed. “But that’s a question for somebody higher up than me to sort out, thank God.”

“What do you think’ll happen?”

“It’ll be kept in a containment cell, probably. Until it dies of… whatever reason. Honestly, the humane thing to do is probably just to shoot it.”

There were nods around the table. Vedreg simple glimmered yellow… a shade Lewis knew well.

“Got a comment there, big guy?”

“…There are many—and knowing what happened on my home planet, and to the Gao, a part of me is among them—who would argue that humane treatment is more than any Hunter deserves. They certainly would not extend it to you.”

“That’s ‘cuz we’re better than them, my dude,” Lewis replied. Lucy and Darcy nodded fervently.

“…And yet, you speak as though it is not going to receive this humane death?”

They looked at Darcy. “…Let’s just… play,” she said, awkwardly.

“That is fair.”

And with that the question of Hunter captives and what would happen to them was firmly dropped. By the time Lee got back, they’d formulated a winning master strategy to cover their gambling debts…

Well. Daring Dan’s gambling debts, anyway.

It was a good night, in the end.

Date point: 16y10m5d AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gyotin, Champion of Clan Starmind

Humans had a long and intriguing history of temple dogs. Gyotin had looked into them: breeds like the Lhasa Apso had apparently been bred for the twin duties of barking at strangers, and sweeping the floors as they walked. They were small, noisy, fussy little balls of fluff.

Not one single word of that description applied to Chump.

Chump was one of the famous Bozo’s puppies, and frankly looked rather more fearsome than his sire, whose goofy patchwork of whites and browns had done much to, if not soften, then at least take some of the menacing edge off his hulking, muscular physique. Chump, on the other hand, was not only at least as athletically huge and strong, he’d somehow come out with a short and glossy midnight black coat, with eyes like bright cold fire. He looked terrifying.

Much like with Bozo, looks could be deceiving.

Chump’s preferred pastime when his services weren’t required was lazing on his back in the sun with his legs sprawled every which way and his tongue draped down the side of his face. When he felt like Helping, which was most of the time, he could often be seen pulling draft duty in the monastery’s gardens by fetching items, pulling carts, pulling plows…

Or, failing that, and the reason he made such a fantastic monastery dog in Gyotin’s opinion, sniffing out people in emotional pain and doing his absolute doggy best to Make Things Better. He could be gentle as downy fur, or as boisterous and aggressive as the most well-exercised brownfurs…whichever his New Friend required.

In Mother Shoo’s case, he’d settled for lying quietly alongside her as she meditated under the tree in the monastery’s front garden, resting his chin on her knee and watching her with worried eyes. His great bruising baton of a tail occasionally beat a couple of wags back and forth whenever she moved, before going still again.

Gyotin gave her time and space. Everyone knew she’d been close to the Mother-Supreme, and she only came to the monastery when she really needed to escape for a while: A rare event. She was usually entirely content with life, but Yulna’s death had surely hit her hard.

As for Gyotin… well, he had a Champion’s responsibilities to think of, as well as his personal mission to soothe hurting souls. The matter of succession in the Clan of Females was of professional interest therefore, though mercifully compatible with his desire to offer a slightly more refined version of what Chump was doing.

He guessed she’d completed her meditation when she started to scratched the dog’s ears and neck with both hands, rather than just absent-mindedly with the one. He gave her a moment, then ambled across the tiles to say hello.

“…She’ll be missed,” he said, by way of a hello.

Shoo looked up, gave him a small smile. Misery was an old coat for her: She’d worn it many times, and was clearly familiar and comfortable with it, but it really didn’t fit or suit her.

“…For a while, she was like a mother to me,” she said. “But… she isn’t in pain any more. I’m trying to focus on that.”

A tongue like a warm, wet leather belt licked pretty much her whole arm and Chump’s tail thumped the ground a few times. She gave the dog a rather warmer and stronger smile and hugged him. “This guy here wasn’t exactly what I was expecting…but I’ll take it.”

“You were after a serene time and possibly a tea ceremony?” Gyotin guessed, a little self-deprecatingly.

She laughed, and massaged the dog’s ears. “…What’s his name?”

“Chump. One of the original seven, from Bozo and Hannah’s first litter. Doofus, Dingus, Nitwit, Ditzy, Lulu, Gaga… and, of course, Chump here. He was the runt, apparently.”

“…You’re kidding.”

“No!” Gyotin chittered. “But somehow he ended up the biggest of them!”

Chump of course had to comment on that point. “Wuff!!”

“…His eyes are mesmerizing…”

“They seem to work wonders on our visitors, it’s true. Alas, tea is not among his talents. Only drool.”

Shoo giggled for several seconds, and finally extracted herself from under the dog, stood up, and brushed off her clothes. “Probably for the best. If he could make tea…”

“I’d be out of a job,” Gyotin chittered, glad to hear her laughing. “Shall we?”

“…Tea would be nice.”

They walked side-by-side back toward the main building. Chump dashed ahead and nosed the door open for them, with much wagging of tail and happy grumbles of Helpfulness.

“…He’s smart.”

“They’re a smart family. One day they’ll be a smart breed. Now go help our Brothers in the gardens, Chump. Go on, git!”

“Wuff!” Chump spun a circle and thundered off in a flurry of enormous paws.

Gyotin watched him go, chittered again to himself, then turned back to escorting his guest.

“Speaking of families, how are yours?” he asked.

“Two babies are a lot of work.” Shoo’s smile said that this was not at all a complaint. “And Al and Julian are great. Even when they ogle the neighbors.”

She caught Gyotin’s curious head-tilt, giggled, and explained. “We have a new neighbor, she does yoga in her garden. In very tight pants…” She shook her head. “But, no. They’re a rock. They always know how to help me feel better…”

“But I think, a busy household is not the most conducive to meditation.”

“Well, no. Sometimes it is nice to get away for an hour or two. I’m lucky that I can, really…” Xiù smiled as they entered the tea room, and Gyotin parked himself to begin preparing it. One of the junior Starmind brothers was just as serious about tea as he was, and took pride in keeping this space in particular ready for use.

Shoo settled down opposite.

“…Also, Naydra asked me to speak with you,” she added.

“Ah yes? I thought she might.”

Shoo nodded. “Yulna’s funeral is in a couple of days. After that… well, everyone knows Naydra’s going to be the next Mother-Supreme. Starmind is the only male Clan with any serious holdings on Cimbrean, and so close to the Folctha commune…”

“Does she have concerns?” Gyotin asked, rinsing the cups with hot water to warm them.

“A few. Yulna was known to be fairly… um… cool about you guys.”

“She never had much interest in our particular syncretism, though on a personal level she and I got on quite well,” Gyotin recalled.

“Officially neutral, then,” Shoo rephrased. “Nobody ever accused her of undue favoritism. Naydra’s worried that some of the other Clans won’t see her that way…”

“Clan Starmind does enjoy the Great Father’s favor,” Gyotin agreed.

“Which is fine when it’s just the, uh, the pecking order of the male Clans that’s at stake… but when the Females are involved, that’s a different story.”

Gyotin duck-nodded his understanding. “I can see why she asked you to raise this with me. Though she must have a talent for delicacy if she could do that at such a difficult moment and not leave you feeling resentful.”

“…She really does,” Shoo sighed. “I think she really would have liked to grieve for a while, but, um… well, the succession is moving forward. The election is already organized. She doesn’t have time.”

“And she needs to secure from my Clan a token of our assurance that we won’t abuse our proximity to the Females on Cimbrean,” Gyotin summarized. The tea was nearly ready to pour. “As for the Great Father’s esteem, I doubt we could abuse that even if I was inclined to. If he somehow didn’t notice—and the consequences for me personally would be terrible, not to mention my clan—Naydra would.”

“She really would,” Xiù agreed.

Gyotin duck-nodded. “…Please tell Naydra that I fully understand and appreciate the position she is in, and that she has my word as Champion of Starmind that my Clan will only ever seek to be of help to her in her new role, never a hindrance.”

“…No actual specific promise regarding the local Females, then.”

“That would, alas, be a lie. And I believe she’s quite acute at sniffing those out.” Gyotin chittered. “You can’t ask a Clan of males not to aspire to siring as many cubs as possible. We couldn’t even work up the heart to neuter Chump! No, the life of celibacy isn’t the Gaoian way, and my Brothers have a Commune close at hand… and I would point out that the Commune came after we did.”

“She’s not asking you to ignore them…”

“Mother Shoo, there are only a little more than a hundred million Females left alive, of whom barely sixty thousand live on this planet and only three thousand or so live here in Folctha,” Gyotin said, evenly and politely but firmly. “Most of the post-bellum Communes on the homeworld are de facto Stoneback enclaves thanks to the permanent guard. A young male looking to win over a prospective mate and secure his legacy is pretty much required to parade past battle-hardened, well-exercised and well-scarred specimens of the most powerful and influential Clan there is. There are very few who can do that without losing some confidence.”

He poured more tea. “…Of course, it’s for the Females’ protection. It’s practical and necessary,” he said. “I know that. Indeed, I can say that there have been long and difficult conversations behind closed doors about the level of favoritism that demonstrates. So let me assure you—and through you, the future Mother-Supreme—that Clan Starmind shall not abuse our position. But I can’t, out of practicality and necessity, promise that we won’t, ah… be suitably grateful for our good fortune.”

Shoo nodded. “Thank you.”

“…Enough politics, yes?” Gyotin offered. She smiled, and let out some held tension as a sigh.

“…Yes. I… Yulna’s funeral is in a few days. Maybe we could talk about that?”

Gyotin duck-noded, sipped his tea, and then put the cup down. “…You knew her well,” he said. “And her death symbolizes a lot. I think it’s only appropriate if you have a hand in planning her farewell…”

“Yes…” Shoo drank her tea as well. “I had a few ideas…”

Gyotin listened. And after listening, he was completely sold. Yulna would have a fine sendoff, on that point there was absolutely no disagreement or controversy. He wanted it, Shoo wanted it, Naydra wanted it, and the Great Father absolutely wanted it. It was her authority that had elevated him to his rank, after all. And in so doing, ultimately, she had saved her people.

They all owed it to her to remember that.

And so they would.

Date Point: 16y10m1w AV
Planet Mordor, Hunter Space

Ferd Given-Man

Ferd was trying not to shiver from a mix of the cold and… Wilde called them ‘hee-bee-jee-bees.’ This more-door world was sick, and Ferd could feel the creeping illness all around him, even through the safe-clothes.

The mud was stained, dark with slime and bright with rusty red and sickly green. The waters were often orange, or covered in dense scummy foam like soap bubbles. But not a strong clean bubble, these were…like the froth of snot bubbling from a sick child’s mouth.

The grass was pale, dry and yellow. The trees were short, twisted and skinny, with few leaves. Not even the cleanest water they could find had fish, and Ferd didn’t see any birds anywhere. Sometimes he heard the small scurrying of little things in the thickest foliage near the ship, but…

Other than that, this was a dead place. Or at least dying. He kept a close eye on the ‘doze-om-itter’ screen on his watch and worried at how fast the number was climbing.

And yet, somehow, there were new sky-people here. People that the Humans and Tooko both said they didn’t know. They ran on four paws like Gao did sometimes, but their hind legs were short and their arms long. Their bodies were covered in curly, coarse grey fur, though each one had patches where it was missing or sick-looking. Their large, leaf-shaped ears stuck straight out from the backs of their head and down their backs, and their eyes were placed weirdly on either side of their heads.

And they were skinny. Thin. Weak-looking. But weak-looking like they were hungry, not weak-looking like…the gods might have made a strong people, here, if only their land was not rotten and their bellies had been full.

But they were people alright. They carried tools in bags, talked with one another in voices like the noise glass made when Ferd dragging his wet thumb across it, and drove vehicles. Whenever there was a heavy thing to lift down from a truck, they put on black harnesses around their arms, back and legs and it made the lifting go easier.

And always they watched the sky like frightened bibtaw.

Wilde, Frasier and Rees were angry, and it seemed to Ferd like he’d never actually seen an angry Human before. If this was normal, then Human anger was a terrible, cold, dark, bitter thing that frightened Ferd more than he would ever admit out loud. The jokes were gone, and Ferd had known the three Humans to joke with each other even when things were at their tensest. A Given-Man would just howl and beat your face in, and that would be the end of it.

Or he hated you enough to kill you. But this…

Humans could hate in a way that chilled Ferd even worse than the cold air. They could hate slow.

Not one bit of it was aimed at the furry big-eared people. All of that slow, held-back, smouldering anger was for the so-called Hunters… and they hadn’t seen even one of those, yet.

Rees was the only one who talked almost as much as before, inside the safety of the sound-quiet ‘forz-feeld’ that protected their hiding place. “It’s got to be soon, boys. Unless they’re gonna land a whole fuckin’ broodship all at once to take that stuff…”

“They might,” Wilde grunted.

“What do they make?” Ferd asked. The ear-people had made stacks and stacks of short steel logs. Probably hollow: they moved them too easily for it to be solid metal.

“They’re slaves. They make what they’re told… Probably oil, in this case.”

“Oil?”

“Black oil, from the rocks deep under the earth. Very, very useful stuff. Ask Vemik sometime.” Wilde turned his binoculars and pointed. “See those? We call them ‘Nodding Donkeys.’ Dead giveaway.”

“Reminds me of Port Talbot…” Rees muttered.

“What?”

“Never mind. Just feeling a little homesick…”

They returned to silence, and Ferd settled down to watch again. He adjusted the tank on his back—sky-magic made the air inside so cold it was like water, so it sloshed a little if he got too excited. But he needed it. The air here was thin, and he found himself breathing hard just doing things that should have been easy. The Humans didn’t seem bothered but they had tanks too, and Tooko was inside the ship where the air was good.

Not that he had it soft. As he’d said when they landed: “If they see us, I’ll be the first thing they blow up.”

“…Here we go,” Wilde muttered, suddenly. Ferd looked at what he was watching, and understood: several of the big-ear people were going inside as quickly as they could. The few who stayed outside to wait with the oil were… the way they moved their bodies was strange, but they looked frightened. “Camo nets up, lads. Power our toys down, hand signals only.”

They hunkered down, and Rees turned off the quiet-maker. They covered themselves in the large, green blankets that Ferd knew looked a lot like bushes from far away, and Rees had said had special cloth inside to hide them in other ways too.

After that… silence. They went quiet like a hunt, so that Ferd could hear the few long-ears who stayed outside talking to each other. He didn’t know their words, but…

But they sounded scared.

A few hands of heartbeats later, there was an all too familiar noise: the roaring thundercrack a ship made when it broke through the sky from above. The low, thick, dull clouds above rippled, there was a lightning flash somewhere among them, and then their belly split open and a ship like a steel turd wallowed out into the open air.

It blasted a noise so loud that the little plugs in Ferd’s ears did their thing and damped it down. It wasn’t a natural noise, and it didn’t sound like engines did. It was deliberate: the ship was telling all the things on the ground that it was there, and had come for them.

The trembling big-ears cowered and clamped their paws to the sides of their heads. Still: hands over ears, or little plugs inside them, it made no difference to the heavy rumbling that Ferd felt through the dirt against his belly as the ship swung lazily into place above an empty stretch of ground, and lowered itself gently downwards. As light as it looked, though, the moment it landed raised dust and sent a punch through the earth.

For maybe two hands of heartbeats, there was nothing else. Then brilliant white lights lashed into life along its flank, dazzling Ferd and forcing him to blink and look away even through his shades.

By the time he could look back, great doors had opened, and Hunters were scuttling down from the ship. Hands and hands and hands of them—dozens—most with their arms cut off at the shoulder and replaced with twisted black mockeries that snatched up the oil containers so that their bearer could then scuttle back up into the ship.

It looked like a mindless scramble, with no planning. Each Hunter just swarmed down the ramp, grabbed the nearest containers, and swarmed back up again. Often they got in each others’ way, or two of them went for the same container at the same time.

They didn’t know how to work!

But they did know how to fear. The stupid mass parted around a big one like water around a boulder as it swaggered down the ramp, and Ferd bared his fangs unconsciously. This one was huge, but the only part of it he could see that still looked like flesh and bone was the mouth. Everything else was metal and plastic, and seven glaring red lights above the mouth where the others had eyes. Had it replaced its whole body? How much of it was left in there?

…Too little. Hunters were wrong, and only now that he’d seen them with his own eyes did Ferd really understand that. The pictures and video he’d been shown didn’t tell the story well enough. Only an insane thing would do that to itself.

Wilde put a hand on his arm. It made Ferd look, broke his stare away from the horrors in front of him, and that was enough. When he looked back again, he didn’t see Wrong Things any more. He just saw the enemy.

Whatever the big-ears said to it, and whether it said anything back, that was all lost in the noise of all those lesser Hunters fighting over the oil. But the big-ears were obviously petrified. They sank low, made themselves small and harmless, didn’t look directly at the big Hunter.

Even so… it murdered one.

It happened without warning, as the last of the oil was carried back to the ship, just as it looked like this was over, the big one half-turned… and then lashed out with a claw. One of the big-ears writhed helplessly, lifted off the ground on the cruel spikes that had pierced right through its body. Whoever they were, their struggle didn’t last long: they went limp, obviously dead, and the big Hunter tore off an arm, a leg and half the torso in a single savage, tearing bite before throwing the rest of the carcass to its underlings with a dismissive toss.

The survivors cowered all the more, and remained crouched right to the ground as the Hunters tore their companion’s remains to pieces and vanished back into their ship.

These were no hunters, no matter what they called themselves. The gods themselves would surely retch at a ‘hunt’ like that. The monsters had not chased down a worthy, dangerous beast. They had not Taken it with skill and courage, nor had they honored its spirit. They had just come, bullied, murdered, stolen, and now they were leaving.

The ship’s doors closed. With a pounding thump, it lurched back into the air, and sneered its way back up into the clouds and away. The so-called ‘hunters’ were gone, leaving the surviving big-ears to weep and embrace each other.

And in their wake, they left a changed Given-Man. Until now, Ferd knew, he hadn’t quite understood the Big Enemy. Hadn’t understood Yan’s allegiance to the sky-people, even if they were good friends. Hadn’t seen what they were fighting. But now…

Now, Ferd understood what it was to hate like a Human.

And he understood why they hated.

Date Point: 16y10m1w AV
Silent But Deadly, Planet Mordor, Hunter Space

Tooko, Brother and Stud of Clan Firefang

All of the team wanted long hot showers when they got back, and Tooko sensed he should let them have it without comment. Great Fathers knew, his imagination had furnished him with horrors enough to leave him feeling dirty, and he hadn’t seen any of what they’d seen.

All of them came in looking quiet, thoughtful and disturbed. Frasier, when he was out of the shower, curled up in a corner, put his headphones on, and listened to some music. Rees lay in his bunk and stared up at the pictures he’d stuck there, face entirely unreadable. Wilde didn’t even fully dress, just threw on his pants and then sat at the table. He leaned his elbows on its surface, steepled his fingers together, and rested his face against them.

The Ten’Gewek huddled together, with Ferd pulling Tooko right into the middle of it. There weren’t any words, just…a need of some kind that he was fulfilling, even if he didn’t know what.

Wilde broke the silence, eventually. He sighed, sat up straighter, and deployed the greatest gift that Humanity had ever given to the galaxy: the most expressive, versatile and eloquent word of any language, anywhere, ever.

“…Fuck.”

Frasier nodded. “Yeah.”

Ferd’s tail twitched. “Not in the mood right now…”

Despite himself, Tooko did find that at least a little funny. He was pretty sure Ferd had just been distracted enough to take the word at face value.

And, as the least affected one of them—he’d had the fortune not to witness what they’d seen first hand—he was probably the one in the best mind-space to say the right thing and puncture their pain a little.

He laid a paw on the huge Given-Man’s shoulder.

“Give it ten minutes. I’m sure Frasier’s willing.”

That earned a snrrk from Frasier at least. He skewered Tooko with a Look, trying to express disapproval and outrage but there was a laugh somewhere behind his expression, fighting to get out. It was enough to make Tooko chitter nervously, which drew out a trilling hoot from Nomuk, prompting Wilde to shake his head, and his snort through the nose got Rees laughing…

It was dark mirth, all of it. The kind of slightly neurotic laughter that made for the best bitter medicine to the world’s worst evils, and though it didn’t disperse the cloud that had settled on them, it at least thinned it. The shock and trauma was flushed out, and they were ready to act again.

Rees shook his head as they collectively settled down. “…Fuckin’ hell, boys. We’ve got our work cut out for us with this one.”

“Well, Daar wanted something for the Grand Army to sink its teeth into,” Frasier said. “Don’t think he was expecting us to find a whole slave species, though.”

“So what now?” Tumik asked.

“We send our report, sneak off and find a place to emplace the beacon, and get out of dodge. Then Daar marches through with a billion Gao and fucks ‘em right up the arse.”

“Sadly… not that easy,” Tooko interjected. “I’ve been watching wormhole activity, and I think there’s a Farthrow on this planet. Or the Hunter version, anyway.”

“…How certain is ‘I think?’”

Tooko turned and called up the suspicious phenomenon in question. “The Hunters are clearly using wormhole burst communications, just like our W-router,” he said. “Honestly, I had a hard time following Champion Meereo when he taught me this stuff but the way our Farthrows differentiate authorized signals from unauthorized ones is based on something called a Nose Code. I don’t know what Humans call it, and I’m pretty sure the Ten’Gewek don’t have a name for it at all. We embed the code in the wormhole itself in some kind of tricky way that went right over my ears.”

Ferd squeezed a bit tighter and rested his head atop Tooko’s; it was a heavy, almost painful gesture of affection the Ten’Gewek used to mean something like a tease without saying so.

“Sound like Vemik Sky-Thinker.”

“Thank you. I think.” Tooko chittered. “…The Hunters are doing the same thing, and I owe Meereo a big favor, ‘cuz I’d have missed this if he hadn’t told me what to look out for.”

He flipped a screen around for them to look at. “See that? It looks like random noise, just… much much louder than it should be. If we tried to W-comm back to the Great Father from here on the ground, without encoding the wormhole with the right code…might as well stick a big glowing ’come and get us’ sign on the top of the ship. And he wouldn’t get the call either. And if we left a jump array and departed, then come time for the invasion they’d try to open the door and… nothing.”

“So…” Tooko could feel Ferd’s tail twitching in thought. “We both do same sky-magic to far-talk from star to star, yes?”

“It looks to me like the Hunters are copying Clan Longear’s work. Which we need to report immediately.”

“So. Take off, get out-system, phone home,” Wilde summarized.

“Yup. You lads didn’t leave anything out there, did you?”

Frasier looked indignant. “C’mon Tooko, give us some credit.”

“Then… yes. Now.”

“Do we know where this Farthrow is?” Wilde asked. “If they do have one, the first step of the liberation is going to be killing it.”

“No, but we won’t be able to find it until we get orbit anyway. I didn’t know to look for one until now.”

“Alright. Get us aloft.” Wilde stood up, and addressed his fellow Humans. “Tea, lads?”

“Aye, thanks.”

“Cheers, I’m fuckin’ gasping.”

Wilde busied himself with hot water, cups and little white squares full of dark powder. Tooko could hardly believe how many of those the Humans went through, but the three of them never turned down a ‘cuppa.’ Apparently they were trained not to.

“…If we’re prepping for an invasion, we need more than the site of one oil refinery,” Wilde pointed out. “Command’ll want to have a way more complete picture of what they’re extracting, where and suchlike. So we can’t leave system just yet. There’s a lot to see first, and it’s all going to be just as fucking horrible as that, I’m sure. So steel yourself, lads.”

Tooko duck-nodded, squirmed out from Ferd’s grasp—he’d discovered that if necessary he could tickle a Ten’Gewek with his claws in some spots and be immediately let go so quickly it was almost like being flung across the room. In this case, though, Ferd knew better than to interfere with work. He let go, and pushed himself to his feet with his tail to go grab something to eat himself.

Their rations were efficiently and densely stacked in the hold, each box containing enough food to fuel a Human through one of their 24-hour days with energy to spare or stuff Tooko until his cheeks bulged and he felt too sick to move. It was prepackaged, unprepared stuff that they had to finish in the ship’s galley, but according to Wilde it was at least better than survival rations for the field.

The problem was, a Ten’gewek needed even more food than a Human, and Ferd in particular was voracious enough that even devouring Tooko’s leftovers wasn’t quite enough to sate him. They’d planned on foraging and hunting to extend the food supply, but as Ferd pointed out… that wasn’t an option on Mordor.

“…Food won’t last long,” he said as he returned from the hold with food for himself and his three fellows. “This place too sick for hunting. No prey, and if there was, wouldn’t be good to eat. Box food only.”

“Right.” Wilde nodded. “That puts a pretty hard time limit on things, Pippin.”

With a last duck-nod, Tooko settled in his chair and began pre-flight checks, knowing full well that they had a lot of planet to cover and not long to do it… And that the sooner they were finished, the sooner the Hunters would get what was coming to them.

“I’ll work fast,” he promised.

There was a lot of justice to be handed out.

Date Point: 16y10m1w4d AV
Cloaked Hunter observation ship, Spacelane BlueSquare-552, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

The enemy had brought in free-floating defence satellites, of the kind that normally protected high-value stations. The Hunters were used to those: they were easy enough to slip past undetected, and a weapon that could not sense its target was no weapon at all.

In this case, however, they posed a vexing problem. If—when—the Hunters did counterattack to retake the freighters, those platforms would unleash devastating firepower. And while normally that wouldn’t have been an issue—a satellite without engines was an easy target to destroy—the new shield-linking tactics that the Humans had developed made it likely that those satellites were a good deal more durable than they had once been.

There was another problem: Available ships. The loss of the Hive had been truly, genuinely devastating to the Hunters, and much of the Swarm of Swarms was now hard at work in the heart of their controlled space, performing duties that had once been performed by the supply ships that came and went from and to the Hive. So many had been lost in its destruction that simply keeping enough meat in enough maws to fight was a logistical harrowing.

Manufacturing capability was grossly down, breeding capacity was a shadow of its former output… A war of attrition was simply not feasible. Too many of the Hunter population were tied up in simply maintaining the species, keeping the slaves docile, and in the torturous process of rebuilding what had been lost with the Hive.

Sometimes, the Builder almost regretted its role in the Hive’s loss. The then-Alpha of Alphas could have crushed the invading assault force, had the Builder not sabotaged it. Could have captured and devoured the fur-faced alpha of alphas, even. Even now, there were Alphas who simmered with resentment over that loss, especially once it became known that some fur-faced meat was as delectable as any Human yet tasted.

The Builder’s betrayal had been a necessary and calculated gamble, trading the Hive and so much power for new and much-needed direction, clarity and intelligence… But in moments like these, it privately questioned its own wisdom.

Not all had been lost. There were still nearly two hundred billion living Hunters, mostly Eaters locked away in stasis where their voracious appetites could not starve the whole species. When the time came to invade a planet, they would be self-sufficient as they feasted on their slaughtered prey.

Furthermore, the Broods still controlled six “sport” worlds. Four were much like the world the Hive had encircled: high-habitability worlds where prey species could be released to breed and be hunted. The remaining two were different, having borne their own thinking Prey whom the Hunters had duly enslaved. Both were vital sources for those materials that could not be easily created aboard space habitats and ships.

If only some of the ancient worlds were still viable. There were hundreds of them, dead, decayed, denuded, utterly stripped of their resources and left poisoned to the bedrock over the long ages. If they were still useful, losing the Hive would not have been so painful.

Instead, their depletion was the reason why it had been built in the first place.

As it was, things were only just balanced toward growth and reconstruction. The Prey, meanwhile, were productive, and those freighters contained sufficient tiny necessities for a whole beleaguered planet. The Hunters needed that cargo to tip the balance even further, accelerate their regrowth even faster. But they could not afford to lose much in acquiring it.

And the Builder was running out of ideas.

It had tried to lure away a few Human ships by allowing a raiding party to stray close, which had been watched but ignored. It had faked a distress signal from some distance down the spacelane: the Humans had dispatched small single-pilot strike craft to investigate, which had been too nimble to catch.

In short, the Hunters were waiting for the other side to make a mistake, and that wasn’t going to happen.

…It was that thought which finally yielded an option, an option so simple that the Builder almost wanted to gnaw its own arm off out of self-directed irritation. If the convoy was unassailable, then perhaps its destination was not!

It gave a flurry of orders. Its underlings, bored and frustrated by the lack of progress, were swiftly stung into action by this chance to actually achieve something, and the cloaked command ship withdrew from the convoy at a slow, stealthy warp until the Builder Alpha-of-Alphas was satisfied that they were beyond even the best of the foes’ sensors.

With that, they applied all power to the superluminal engines, and sped toward the Prey World much faster than most ships in the galaxy could match. Not even most swarmships were so speedy.

The planet itself was obviously unassailable. The system shield was up and whatever good fortune or act of sabotage had allowed the Swarm to assault the Large Prey’s spawning world seemed unlikely to happen a second time. But a system that intended to receive supplies from elsewhere clearly could not be completely sealed off.

This thought was vindicated when, a quarter of a day-cycle later, the command ship stole quietly into the target system’s outer reaches and made passive observations of the activity in its orbits.

In-system traffic was more sluggish than expected. Despite clear evidence of considerable development on the three desolate rock worlds, the many moons of the three gas worlds, and in the system’s two asteroid belts, the number of ships trafficking back and forth was somewhat depressed.

The system field itself was projected by a remarkably tiny object deployed at the third gas giant’s outer gravitational conflux point. It was inside its own shield, and therefore unassailable, but outside the shield there was indeed a processing station. Quite an old one, to judge by the many repairs, expansion and patchwork additions.

Ripe prey if ever there was any. And more importantly, prey that the Humans were likely to defend, if forced.

Yes. Time to really test them…

Date Point: 16y10m1w4d AV
HMS Violent, Spacelane BlueSquare-552, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

“It’s a trap.”

Ak’kk’brr looked skeptical, at least according to the translation software’s best attempts to interpret his facial features. “…Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. They’re trying to lure us away again, only this time they’ve chosen bait we can’t so easily ignore.” Caruthers grumbled. “If we go to relieve the receiving station, they’ll pounce on the convoy. But if we don’t then a lot of people die, and offloading the convoy’s cargo becomes much slower and more difficult.”

“Is there nothing we can do?” Ak’kk’brr asked. “If we must choose, I would choose to stay here. Better to secure one objective than risk losing both.”

“I agree. But fortunately, I think we have an alternative. Right now, I have the HEAT sitting on Caledonia’s deck and First Fang on Sword Of A Poet, both doing absolutely nothing. I think it’s time they earn their keep…”

“You propose to send them alone?”

“Not unescorted, no. But Cally, the Sword, one of the V-destroyers and a few fighters should suffice.”

“So few against so much?”

Caruthers nodded, allowing a small, tight smile. “The HEAT have come through much worse. They have a habit of turning traps back against the trapper. But don’t worry, we have plenty of tricks that we haven’t used, yet. I don’t waste lives, especially not theirs.”

“You know what you’re doing, of course.”

Caruthers nodded his thanks. “I’ll keep you informed.”

He closed the line to Ak’kk’brr, and opened the one to Caledonia’s deployment deck instead, where Lt. Col. Powell answered him. He listened as Caruthers explained the situation.

“Hotballs, then.”

“Yes indeed. Seed the field with them, then get indoors to repel the boarding parties. Between the hotballs and Caledonia you should have an unexpected firepower advantage.”

“They’ll never know what hit ‘em. I’ll go along on this one, though. You’re going to want somebody senior over there.”

“I thought you’d say that… I have every confidence in the HEAT, Powell, but this isn’t going to be straightforward. Be sure you understand the risks, and the priorities. The Hunters might well come gunning for you. Certainly if I were in their position, I’d think destroying the HEAT and First Fang was more strategically important than a few freighters.”

Powell nodded seriously. “Aye, but if we sit around and play cargo all the time, we may as well be dead and gone anyways. So we’ll be ready to deploy in five minutes.”

Caruthers nodded. “Good hunting, then. Give them Hell.”

“We already took that from them, sir.” Powell grinned, and that was the end of the call. Caruthers found himself chuckling as he made sure that the fleet and the Deep Space Weapons Reserve were ready to link with the hotballs and show the Hunters a new trick.

Time to be in two places at once.

Date Point: 16y10m1w4d AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, planet Mordor, Hunter space

Tooko, Brother and Stud of Clan Firefang

Three observation missions in, and a kind of rhythm was beginning to establish itself.

First, came decontamination. Humans and Ten’Gewek alike inevitably returned to the ship coated in filth, disease, poison and contaminants. The first order of business was to essentially pressure-wash them the airlock, until all the muck had sloughed off of them.

They’d already had to change the filter twice.

Next, they stripped down and soaped up with an evil-smelling decontamination detergent, rinsed with extremely hot water, and then spent some time basking in strong UV lights. The Ten’Gewek quite liked that bit. The Humans…not so much. Lastly, the decon fields swept them, and they took an anti-radiation supplement, before finally being allowed back into the main cabin.

The Ten’Gewek were always itchy afterward, and needed rubdowns with lotion.

The Humans were more concerned about the UV light. “We’re gonny get a fuckin’ melanoma or some shit…” Frasier grumbled as he scrubbed his scalp dry.

“It’s not that kind of UV,” Wilde assured him.

“Oh aye? And since when were you a fuckin’ dermatologist?”

“I pay attention to briefings. You might try it some time.”

Meanwhile, Ferd had half-asked, half-pulled Tooko over to the corner to help with the lotion. In general, Humans had quite strong personal boundaries, gaoians less so and mostly with strangers…

Ten’Gewek had none. If you were any kind of friendly, then hugs, cuddles, wrestling, and personal hygiene were all in the cards, and expected.

Oh well. At least he got a good brushing out of the deal.

Wilde sighed and checked The List as he dressed. “Alright. That’s oil production, lubricants, rubbers, and now fissile material. We’re going to need a thorough check-up after that last one.”

Ferd was understandably nervous, and hugged Tooko close—painfully so, but Tooko knew that now was not the moment to complain. “Friend…if ray-dee-ashun gets us, there is sky-magic to help, yes?”

“…Maybe. That’s part of the danger. We did our best to brief you on that…”

“Yes, yes…but….maybe I think more with cock at the time.”

“I remember.” Wilde chuckled. “Relax. The dosimeters aren’t yelling at us, so we’re probably okay, and we’ve been on top of our anti-radiation meds, too.”

“This planet’s gonna be a fuckin’ nightmare for the Grand Army though,” Rees observed, slurping a cupful of water.

“They’ll be able to deal with it a lot better. A lot more logistical tail than we have.”

“Maybe, but a lot more Jack bellends who don’t listen properly too.”

Ferd looked down at tooko and flicked his left ear; universal hulkmonkey body language for ‘what did he just say?’

Tooko flicked both of his to the side. They understood each other pretty well by now.

Wilde’s response was a lop-sided grin, which was a gesture only a Human could make, with those fantastically plastic faces of theirs which more than compensated for those sad, immobile ears. “You do realize I can read your ear-dance just as well as anyone, right?”

Ferd shrugged, and re-applied the brush with rather more force than Tooko would prefer. “Don’t care! I think you like to use strange words!”

“That’s just Reesy. He is Welsh after all.”

Rees snorted into his cup of water and splashed it all over himself. He somehow found time during the ensuing coughing and self-cleaning to aim a middle finger at Wilde, though he was chuckling.

Victory secured, Wilde turned back to Tooko. “So what’s our next target, Pip?”

“You got the trackers onto those trains?”

“Yeah. Stuck ‘em on good,” Frasier promised.

“Then for now, we wait and see where they end up.” The local rail network went everywhere, far too many places for Tooko to even guess at where the isotopes ended up. The only way to know for sure was to watch where the trains actually took their cargo.

But one thing was certain: the Great Father, the Grand Army, and everyone else involved in the coming invasion would want to know where several tonnes of enriched uranium had gone.

Which meant, sadly…another trip back up to an observing orbit, where they would wait.

The Ten’Gewek spent most of that time in stasis—their special high-density, high-protein rations only lasted so long. Two of them would probably stay out though, and a Look passed between the four of them. Without any further words, Tumik, and Genn decided it was their turn, and ambled off to the stasis pods.

That left Nomuk and Ferd, who looked down at Tooko with a playful head-tilt.

“You put us in orbit, yes?”

“Yeah, big guy.”

“Then we lift,” he proclaimed. There would be no escape for Tooko.

Oh well, it wasn’t like they’d be doing much of anything else for the next day or so anyway…

Date Point: 16y10m1w4d AV
HMS Caledonia, Ugunduvur System, the Guvnurag Confederacy

Lt. Col. Owen Powell

The system wasn’t too target rich. Admiral Caruthers’ assessment that the Hunters were planning to hit the convoy if the allies abandoned it was quite clearly on the money, and the Hunter raiding party was nowhere near as big as the force that had contested them for the freighters. But that didn’t make the situation outside a picnic, either.

Cally was outnumbered three to one by broodships, though there were more Firebirds and Voidrippers than Swarmships. Hopefully, with the hotballs, that averaged out to an Allied advantage.

A hotball was a specialized jump beacon, built with exactly one job in mind: weapons targeting. Rather than jumping ships like the so-called ‘dragon’s teeth’ microsatellites, a hotball provided a more specialized, carefully configured jump that maintained the incoming object’s kinetic energy, carefully aligned on the desired vector.

In short: incoming ammunition.

That fact seemed to surprise the Hunters, who clearly weren’t expecting one ship to strike with the power of a whole squadron. Powell grinned at the ensuing mayhem playing out beyond Cally’s hull, then turned his attention to the actual job at hand.

The target was two space stations, loosely tethered to one another. They handled customs and transit for interstellar shipping that wanted to transit the system defence field. Both were under siege.

The HEAT were hitting one, First Fang the other. It was going to be a little strange, going into battle with them nearby rather than immediately alongside, but Powell wasn’t at all concerned. They knew what they were doing, and that wasn’t praise he gave lightly.

With the deck being a little clearer of hulking Gaoian bodies, it gave him a clearer view of his own men’s respective preparations. Warhorse, for instance, was literally shaking with anticipation. That young man was a lot more bloodthirsty than he cared to admit, and the fact was he’d have been the best fookin’ Aggressor on the team, if he wasn’t already an even better Protector.

Sikes, Burgess, Murray and Coyers—the team’s four levelest and quietest heads—were going through their routines deftly and without comment. Akiyama, Blaczynski and Butler, the three merry jokers, were happily psyching themselves up, Newman and Parata were grabbing some last-moment nutrition before their masks went on…

Dexter…was eerily calm. Then again, not so long ago he’d volunteered for a suicide mission, and come home from it. His hatred of the Hunters was so far beyond anyone else’s, it had become a strange kind of serenity. He’d come out of that fire as a true Gaoian killer, with the calm of a monk and the physical presence of an unsheathed knife.

Between him and Arés, it was hard to know who was the more dangerous man.

His example seemed to inspire his brother Whitecrests to imitate him, too. Even Thurrsto, his Champion and in most ways a far superior combatant, seemed to feed off that energy.

Firth and Costello were watching everything, seeing all. Powell shared a satisfied nod with them.

“We’ve engaged the enemy,” he told them.

Firth nodded sharply, then raised his voice: “Masks on!”

Newman, Parata and Arés hastily chugged down some last gulps of their performance drinks, and the masks went on with a series of hiss-click locking sounds. There was a brisk, efficient round of seal inspections, double-checked by Deacon and her techs before they vacated the deck.

Powell’s own mask settled into place over his face easily and familiarly. Deacon checked it for him, then stood back. “Air check.”

Powell took a deep breath. The air hissed softly past his ears, and he heard the regulator’s valves clicking appropriately. It tasted cold, clean and safe. “Good air.”

Deacon nodded, tapped her tablet, then charged back toward the airlock. She was the last out: the lock cycled, the lights went red, and with an alarm hoot the bay began to depressurize as the air was pumped out.

Coyers and Sikes hauled the launches over to the door. They were little more than naked warp drives in a skeletal frame with some maneuvering thrusters and plenty of handholds, but they were quick, stealthy and perfect for rapidly deploying everyone and their gear.

Absolutely everything about this operation were per standard procedure. They’d drilled this kind of thing over and over, and done it more than once. A station full of vulnerable ETs, being boarded by Hunters? Practically the HEAT’s bread and butter. Still, nobody was complacent. The Hunters had a nasty habit of bringing a new surprise to every fight.

They would just have to see what new nastiness they brought this time.

Date point: 16y10m1w4d AV
Gateway Station 2, Ugunduvur System, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Fiin, Champion and Stud of Clan Stoneback

Fiin’s paws met the gateway station’s outer hull with a solidity that reverberated through his whole body, eerily loud in the soundproof confines of his suit.

Electrostatic sticky fields in the palms and soles stuck him firmly to it, and he scuttled along the surface to plant a sensor, ensuring that the compartment he was about to enter didn’t contain a civilian: when it turned out to empty, he peeled the hull open with his fusion claws and forced himself inside against the flood of escaping air.

Life for Fiin had been unspeakably busy as of late. He was wearing triple hats as the Champion of Stoneback, effectively its Grandfather while they figured out a replacement for Garl…and unofficially Daar’s chief of staff for the Grand Army as well.

Fiin was desperately looking forward to Hunter gore on his paws. He had some frustrations to work out.

Brothers poured in through the hole he’d made, behind and alongside him. One of them paused to slap a sealing field over the hull breach. The power was out, and the station was in null gravity, but that wasn’t the kind of thing to slow First Fang. Especially not Fiin. No other ‘Back but Daar was better-conditioned then him. Nobody else could mimic a Whitecrest’s acrobatic magic quite like he could.

In fact, the freefall environment just gave him more angles to play with.

The gateway stations were mirrored pair, each resembling a stack of flat, mismatched, asymmetrical plates. Each had a long docking and cargo handling rail thrust outward from their notional underbellies, perpendicular to the system shield, and it was these that the Hunter swarmships had burrowed tick-like into.

First Fang and the HEAT went in via their respective targets’ notional topside. They were vulnerable while out in the naked void, and none of them fancied being instantly and ignominiously deleted by a swarmship’s point defence before they got a chance to lock their jaws around the enemy.

That approach also meant they were able to safely put the civilians behind them in cleared territory as they swept through the station. Cowering Guvnurag flinched in worsened terror as sinewy, deadly Goaian bodies flowed through their homes and public spaces, made sure all was clear, and moved on faster than the inhabitants could react.

They met their first enemy three decks down, clawing at a door with a herd of panicking Guvnurag behind it. It was one of the big, grossly enhanced ones with the exposed muscles.

For Fiin, hammering into one of the big Hunters like a flying boulder was just….so satisfying. He clawed its head clean off and broke its spine for good measure. His Brothers poured past him, weapons out: a disciplined volley of accurate shots left Hunters dead on the deck.

Fiin wasn’t at all jealous of the way Kodiak simply plowed straight through another big Hunter like tissue paper, killing it on impact with none of his momentum lost. Not many big ‘Backs knew how to use their size so effectively and it was a treat to watch.

Even fewer who could tactically command while doing so.

Fiin had been leaning heavily on the bright young male as of late while he juggled his myriad responsibilities. Definitely gonna need to talk with him after this…a Champion’s work never stopped.

Speaking of which, he’d bloodied his claws and that was necessary, but now his responsibility was to direct his attention to the bigger picture. A monosyllabic bark of a command to Kodiak, and all was understood. The team would endeavor to keep Fiin unharassed as the front progressed.

There were still a lot of Hunters to kill, and a lot of lives to save.

Date Point: 16y10m1w4d AV
Gateway Station 1, Ugunduvur system, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Warhorse

Silence. Waiting. Heartbeat and breath, data on his HUD… otherwise nothing but the wait.

Then the green light.

Move.

Sudden nothing all around as they push out of the ship. Little puffs with the maneuvering thrusters, cluster up, grab hold of a launch. Cally vanishes as she accelerates, falling away like a dropped rock, disappears in the dark.

Launch handles getting them close to the station. Come a long way since the first time they did this: carve through the hull, forcefield over the breach, in like battering rams. Quick, smooth, clean.

Signs of combat beyond. Flashing blue lights, gouges in the walls and floors, dented metal, broken doors. No blood, though. Weird, but good.

Move, ordered by ABBOTT. Good to have STAINLESS back.

Station has a main access shaft for cargo handling. Fastest way in. Wide doors, high ceilings for big aliens. Easy to move, lots of room, still no contact…

…Sound of gunfire, muffled, not close. Coming from where they’re going. Move faster. Deck squealing underfoot, not fast enough.

Plunge down a ramp, turn, down the next ramp, open space up ahead…

Dead Hunters littering the deck. Some kind of heavy-ass gun down that access shaft, filling the air with death. Hunters advancing into the teeth of it, keeping their heads down and using cover, gaining ground…Notice the HEAT coming, but too little too late.

A handful of gorey seconds later, ‘Horse stopped to think for a second and take stock. The Hunters had clearly had the same idea the HEAT had: hit that main arterial shaft and penetrate deep into the station.

Problem was, these Guvnurag apparently didn’t go down without a fight. And while they were surprisingly light for their size, and kinda fragile for something so big, there was still a lot of real estate on those guys to cover in Fun.

Back ‘em into a corner, give ‘em a defensible position with clear lines of fire, and they’d turned the Hunters’ easy road into the station’s core into a shooting gallery instead.

Problem: three fighting forces, no communication, busy environment. Now ‘Horse and RIGHTEOUS were in that shooting gallery themselves. Good cover, but still stuck.

Dex had it covered. He may have been a big fuckin’ boy these days, but he’d lost none of that nimble Gaoian ninjaforce that made them so damn good at what they did. Fuck, he was way better, even. He and his Bros swarmed down through the ceiling, carving their way through with fusion blades, scuttled on the roof with those sticky gecko-gloves, then dropped among the frightened Guvnurag.

The green-on-blue firepower faltered, then fell silent. Gotta love those Whitecrest stick-n-sleep patches. ‘Horse gave them a nod of approval, and pounced on the Guvnurag wounded while the Defenders secured a perimeter.

There were a few. Triage mode: He’s just winded, she has a broken leg—bad news for a Guv, but not a right-this-second problem—this poor fucker here bleeding a lot. Priority.

…Well, fuck. He was gonna hafta be rough on him. IRISH was by his side, very smart but still a bit inexperienced with big xeno trauma.

Tourniquet on, fluids in. Keep the blood pressure high in the core, limbs don’t matter so much. Medicine’s pretty fuckin’ sweet these days, just gotta live long enough to make it to theatre. Big core, though. Lotta fluids needed. Not so much painkillers though: ETs OD easy.

“No opiates for Guv, IRISH. Fatal. Gotta use a megadose of NSAIDs. Like morphine for ‘em.”

He knew of course, but mistakes happen. Always good to make sure.

Butler acknowledged that, applied intravenous ibuprofen, and with that their patient was basically stabilized. ‘Horse glanced up to check the status of their jump array: it was online.

They had a Guv-sized stretcher stuck on ‘Horse’s back, which he snapped open with a practiced flick. There was a trick to gettin’ the big dudes onto it without hurting them, ‘cuz lying on their side really wasn’t a healthy position for them: they found it hard to breathe.

First time for IRISH, but he knew what to do. Good. The real problem was hefting the patient. Warhorse knew (and personally trained) all four human beings strong enough to do it.

Time to test number four. “You good for this, bro?”

Butler’s helmet bobbed in a nod. “‘Course I feckin’ am! Are you?”

Adam grinned, stepped to his side of the stretcher. They heaved. Enjoyably weighty for Adam. Butler struggled fiercely under the Guv’s mass but that was okay, just more training in his future. They got it done, and they got the patient moved. Back on Cally they had a crane for this.

Thump.

Move on. Catch up. Got a station to sweep. Caught up with Defenders, leave IRISH to assist. Not fast or nimble enough yet to hang with Aggressors.

Warhorse poured on the speed. Aggressors at end of main shaft, sprint forward to catch up, floor breaking under pounding feet, boots splashing in Hunter blood.

Icon in HUD. Sealed hatchway not so sealed, danger between Aggressor’s rear and Defender’s front. By coincidence, ‘Horse in exactly the right place.

Swat aside hatch and move like only Warhorse could move. Rictus grin—rarely does he get to unload so hard. Nobody tough enough to take what he can give. Three targets serviced without trying. No stopping, no slowing down.

A bunch more Hunters, bearing teeth. Stupid. Break like twigs in hands, smash like overripe fruit underfoot. Red or white, Hunters too puny. Meet Aggressors at other side of corridor.

Everything smashed, ‘Horse hardly winded. Grin.

Nod from RIGHTEOUS. Part respect, part brotherhood. Part jealousy. Warhorse understood.

No time to jack off.

Move.

Date Point: 16y10m1w4d AV
HMS Caledonia, Ugunduvur system, the Guvnurag Confederacy

Petty Officer Sachi Patel

Things were so smooth now that shield-sharing was a thing. It added a little heat load for Patel’s team to manage, but more than compensated for that by exponentially growing their radiating area. When linked up with two other ships, the limiting factor became Cally’s own ability to refrigerate herself and pump the heat around internally.

And… Cally was good at that. There had been nuclear warheads flying around in the fight at the freighter convoy. Enough firepower to turn a large chunk of Europe into a radioactive wasteland had bounced off their mingled shields, and that had raised the heat pressure to worrying levels, but in this fight?

In this fight, the Hunters were badly outmatched, despite having a numbers advantage. Cally, HMS Vindicator and the Sword Of A Poet had chained up and that was that. The Broodships just didn’t have the firepower to break them.

There was another rattling series of bangs through the hull as the launchers on the surface fired out another few dozen hotballs. Each one fired was… a missile, a really big gun, a storm of shieldbreaker rounds, depending on what Gunnery wanted it to be. Combined with Caledonia’s own jump receivers, not to mention her on-board weaponry, and…

Well, Patel guessed that the Hunters were getting slaughtered out there. She couldn’t actually see for certain, but she could see their own power output and heat management, both of which were ticking over comfortably with plenty of room to spare.

A small spike in power consumption indicated that they’d just jumped. Probably a micro-jump to a dragon’s tooth, dodging some incoming fire. Not completely a slaughter, then… but they weren’t taking hits.

She felt good. She felt calm. And below it all, she felt satisfied. There was nothing better than giving the Hunters a hiding.

This one was for the old crew.

Date Point: 16y10m1w4d AV
Gateway station 1, Ugunduvur system, the Guvnurag Confederacy

Lt. Col. Owen “Stainless” Powell

The space battle outside the hull was just a series of dry reports as far as Powell was concerned: the hotballs had done their job perfectly, driving the Hunters back in the teeth of a withering barrage as though the Allies had brought a fleet ten times the size.

Good. He liked not having to worry that others could do their job.

As for the Guvnurag themselves… mixed feelings. As it turned out, when news of the Hunters hitting the aid convoy had reached them, they’d deployed some of their most well-trained and tenacious troops to the gateway stations in anticipation of exactly this.

Take a platoon of van-sized alien quadrupeds, layer them in shield emitters and mount weapons on the powered exoframes they wore, and you wound up with a slow-moving but bloody solid combatant. Each one was more like a mobile heavy weapon emplacement than an infantryman… But against Hunters, though, the key was constant motion. They’d been surrounded. In a few minutes more, they’d have been overwhelmed. If this was the Guvnurag best, then while the Hunters would have paid in death for their victory, they’d still have won.

The Gurv, in short, had got lucky that a force of spaceborne killer apes and their beardog friends had shown up to slaughter the Hunters and pull their shaggy mountainous arses out of the fire.

“This everyone?” he asked.

The Gurv officer was more-or-less the equivalent of a captain, still reeling from surviving his last stand and from the tender mercies of the stick-n-sleep, which in Powell’s experience tended to mean a real skullsplitter of a headache. Too many colours were racing over his body to make sense of, even if Powell had understood their chromatic emotes.

“A-as many as we could save,” he stammered. “There, there might be others. I don’t know.”

“You have access to the internal sensors, don’t you?” Powell reminded him.

“Uh, y-yes? Oh! Yes!!”

Better late than never. Powell watched the officer call up what he had. He forwarded the pertinent information to Costello, trusting that from there it would reach Firth who would in turn ensure that hostiles were appropriately serviced.

And God help the poor sod who had to clean up after.

Date Point: 16y10m1w4d AV
Cloaked Hunter observation ship, Spacelane BlueSquare-552, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

An Eater would have been angry enough to smash things, or kill any lowly Omegas or slaves that got too close. Many of the Brood-Alphas were doing just that, wailing impotently at the string of ‘losses’ they were enduring. First the freighters and now the stations? Unbearable!

The Alpha-of-Alphas, on the other hand, was getting exactly what it wanted.

There was bountiful data to pore over, though for the time being it didn’t care. There would surely be interesting secrets to glean, but the important part was that opening a second front had worked. A few of the enemy ships had peeled off, forced away the Hunters probing those stations, and were now stuck there.

That was important. The Humans in particular had only a mouthful of their elite boarders, each one by now known to the Hunters and cataloged. Specimens Alpha-1 and Alpha-2 were the largest and most destructive, capable of speed and ferocity that eclipsed even the most heavily augmented Hunters. They were accompanied by the many Beta specimens, each of which was a terror in its own right. Categorized into Fighter, Trapper and Sneaker variants, they divided their efforts according to clearly understood mission profiles.

Yes, each individual was known and tracked. And while destroying them would have been a sweet victory, they were not vulnerable right now.

But they were accounted-for, and the Builder knew that they could not rapidly redeploy. They hit hard and fast, when ready. But once used, it took a while before they were ready again.

Which meant…

The surrounding systems contained dozens of small stations and outposts. Mining facilities, for the most part, producing minerals and water for the Large-Prey planet and its many satellites and stations. Each was occupied by only a small few, but each one was also a wealth of technology and spare parts… the very things that the swarm had hit the convoy to secure.

Frustratingly, the Fur-Faced Alpha of Alphas had declined to join the battle. That was against forecasts and a bit of a disappointment, but the Builder did not base its stratagems on the assumption that the foe would be foolish. Some preliminary analysis had suggested this so-called ‘Great Father’ —a title which translated somewhat confusingly as [‘alpha spawner’]— possessed a personal combat effectiveness completely unmatched by any other. The previous Alpha of Alphas had been defeated by him, after all, and that had been an earlier, lesser version of this Fur-Faced Alpha of Alphas against one of the finest augmented forms the Hunters could produce. So much ability in a purely biological form—!

That such a thing was demonstratively possible was…hotly debated amongst the Alphas, who were only now coming to terms with the idea of Humans. The further notion that the Fur-Faced could also be not merely predators, but Deathworld predators…it was almost…

A vivisection would have proved most informative. But it was not to be.

The Builder gave its orders. Now that the enemy’s fleet and combatants were locked in place, the time had come to secure a victory. For now, they needed incremental progress. They would gather resources, husband their Prey-stocks, rebuild and repopulate. Those mining outposts were not as grand a prize as the freighters themselves would have been, of course…

But they would be enough to feed the Swarm.

Date Point: 16y10m1w4d AV
Gateway Station 1, Ugunduvur System, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Regaari, Father of Clan Whitecrest

Something was… off. Regaari could smell it, metaphorically. They’d come with Jump Arrays and everything they needed to get the hell off the gateway stations quickly if the Hunters swarmed them. That had been Regaari’s working hypothesis, in fact: that the enemy would take a stab at eliminating both the HEAT and First Fang by bringing in an overwhelming swarm of ships and vaporizing the stations.

Instead… nothing.

Oh, the broodships outside had put up a fight, engaged and tussled with the allied warships, retreating under the hail of supporting fire from the hotballs and then returning to take another swipe. But while the danger they posed had certainly been real, it hadn’t been convincing.

No. Hunters didn’t half-ass a juicy target. They threw everything they had at it in a slavering toothy wave until it was either consumed, or they were all dead. So the moment the Broodships abruptly disengaged and streaked out of the system at a few hundred kilolights set alarm bells ringing in Regaari’s brain.

He saw all, of course. That was his job. Scouting, intelligence gathering, being aware of the bigger picture. While his Brothers both Human and Gaoian got to focus on a small and clearly-defined job right in front of them, cunning, deadly DEXTER had no such luxury. His role was defined by bigger-picture thinking.

Hence the highly sophisticated virus he’d slipped into the gateway station’s network seconds after arriving.

Powell, of course, knew everything that Regaari did. He left the last of the sweep-and-clear in the capable hands of Costello and Firth, and kept half the Whitecrests by his side as he claimed the station’s core operations center for his own.

“Every bloody one?”

Regaari duck-nodded. “Gone. HIGHCASTLE says the same thing; all quiet. The Hunters just let us claim two valuable targets, almost unresisted.”

“…Well that smells fookin’ fishy.”

Curious that Humans, with their far less sensitive noses, would have such an olfactory idiom for suspicion. But Regaari had always found it very apt.

Powell ‘s brows beetled behind his visor as he watched Regaari’s tablet. The virus was working perfectly: Thanks to it, the Fleet Intelligence Center on HMS Myrmidon would now be milling the gateway stations’ logs, sensor readings and comms through their massive supercomputing resources.

Moments later, the results—and the answers—started to come in, plucked and prioritized right from the local out-system comm channels.

Distress calls.

Dozens of them.

There was a strained silence as the board filled up with desperate pleas for life and limb that they were entirely powerless to answer. Powell gripped the edge of a table so hard that it creaked and bent as, one by one, the distress calls began to cut out.

“…They played us,” he growled. “They fookin’ played us.”

There was nothing they could do.

Date Point: 16y10m2w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Matigu, Champion of Clan Longback

Arguing with the Great Father was always something to be done with the greatest respect. None of the Sea-Clans would soon forget what he had done to Clan Bronzefur, or how thoroughly—and easily—he had broken their previous Champion. Because of that, disagreeing with him in the slightest, especially when that magnificent crown sat upon his head, was an act of near suicide both political and personal, at least to Matigu’s mind, anyway.

The Great Father didn’t see it that way, of course. He prided himself on his honor and his reasonableness, and took pains to be even-handed in his dealings with the Clans. He stood heads above his Champions like a serene, towering colossus and, rather than wrestle Matigu or anything like that, asked the mildest of questions in reply. “I can understand ‘yer frustration, but what d’ya think my presence would achieve?”

It was a disarming tactic, and Matigu momentarily forgot himself in it. “The Swarm of Swarms took thirty-seven out-system mining posts! Thousands of souls!”

“‘Yer right,” Daar duck-nodded agreeably. “An’ what could I have done? Our people were pinned protectin’ a much more important resource. What benefit would my presence have brought? An’ what risks?”

“I…” Matigu paused and sagged, not really knowing how to put his thoughts into words. He could sympathize with the plight of out-system miners, having spent years as a young Associate out on a Clan Longback oil platform in Gao’s frozen polar seas. It was lonely, claustrophobic work and the weather rarely behaved well enough to go outside and enjoy the air.

He’d had a nightmare last night, about being back on the rig while Hunters smashed in through its tiny, storm-proof windows and clawed after him in the tight, close confines.

But whatever his objection might be, he couldn’t find the right words. They faltered and fell apart in the face of the Great Father’s not-unkind look.

“‘Yer passionate, an’ I can admire that. S’wat the Longbacks’ve been known ‘fer since the old days,” Daar said. “but…well, I’m a lotta things, but omnipotent ain’t one o’ them. I can’t be everywhere at once, either. None of us can. We’re not gonna win every skirmish an’ we can’t get hung up about it. An’ as much as I wanna personally crush every Hunter fuck unner my paws…”

A voice to Matigu’s left spoke up: Uriigo, Champion of Clan Bronzefur. “Nonetheless, My Father…we must answer for the loss.”

Daar’s snarl was a thing that made everyone reel back on their haunches. “Says who? Do you again presume to set our direction?”

Champion Uriigo was a master of needling the Great Father, and the only member of the Conclave who was quasi-openly antagonistic to the new order of things. Hardly surprising, really: Bronzefur’s previous Champion had openly defied the Great Father as ‘a matter of Clan survival’ and, for daring to show himself in council, was without any warning tackled, bodily picked up and quite literally broken in half by Daar as easily as one might snap a twig. Their Grandfather he dispatched with a spine-shattering kick that bounced him off the far wall, followed by a standing leap across the room, landing in an earthquake of a stomp right through his ribcage. It had all happened so fast, nobody could react.

The Great Father didn’t even take a moment to drop the former Champion’s ruined corpse to the ground, nor wipe the gore off his hind-paws, before he appointed Uriigo as the Clan’s new Champion… and did not accept his submission immediately. No, Daar had taken his time about it. In fact he’d ignored all of Uriigo’s attempts at abject prostration and made his displeasure thoroughly known. Acceptance hadn’t come until the new Champion lay broken on the floor and at the brink of death himself.

Uriigo had always stopped himself just short of open contempt ever since: he remained bloodied, but not broken. “It’s what will be expected… My Father.”

“They—if indeed it be ‘they’ and not a figment of ‘yer imagination—can expect whatever they want. Fuck ‘em. We can only do so much ‘ta defend the galaxy. They gotta learn. An’ that’s why I’m here an’ not wallowin’ in it like I really wanna…”

There was just… something in his growl at the end which clearly suggested the Hunters weren’t the only thing he wanted to destroy.

“Some might question your…resolve…My Father, if you make a habit of commanding from the rear…”

…Balls, that was a reckless thing to—

The Great Father exploded across the room so precisely and so unbelievably fast, it was almost literally blink-and-miss-it: his brutal muzzle stopped a mere inch from Uriigo’s throat.

“Question my resolve, eh? Tell me…are you afraid, Champion?”

The snarl he made was so deep and so menacing, Matigu could feel it reverberate in his chest from across the room. Daar touched his nose against the suddenly shock-still yet defiant Champion’s jugular before giving his throat a long, threatening sniff. It was an extremely loaded question too, with only one possible, humiliating answer. There was no doubt in Matigu’s mind that Uriigo was courting death.

“…Yes.”

“Not completely stupid, then…” Daar gave another reverberating growl as he prowled around Uriigo, searching for any weakness. “It ain’t often I smell suicidal bravery so strong on somebody…which is awful damn strange ‘fer a Champion that ain’t never soldiered through any kind o’ combat, huh?”

That was a vicious jab, and touched on some unflattering rumors that frequently provoked rage on Uriigo’s part. Anyone else would have found themselves scarred for life over that comment. Uriigo was a brownfur after all, and not a small one. But against Daar…

What could he do but stand there and take it?

Uriigo, somehow, found the way. “Not true, My Father. I survived a duel against yourself.”

“Hrrm.” Daar sniffed again, then straightened. “Ballsy. I can respect that. Jus’ don’t mistake my charity as anythin’ but. Do ‘ya remember why I broke ‘yer predecessor?”

“I remember the reason given, yes.”

Matigu had to stifle his disbelief. How reckless was Uriigo going to be…?

“Cute. An’ you somehow got the balls t’wonder why I had my fun bouncing ‘yer weak lil’ body off the walls that day…the Females ‘member just fine, an’ it’s only by their mercy that ‘yer Clan still exists. ‘Ya might consider some honest contrition if’n ‘yer Clan is gonna have any hope o’ breedin’ itself a future. Who knows? Bronzefurs with humility? Stranger shit’s happened.”

“I will not be lectured about humility from the Stud-Prime of Stoneback…My Father.”

Daar’s tolerance was truly awesome. Matigu was so incensed by the lack of respect, he and several others had to restrain themselves from leaping at Uriigo’s throat…but they needn’t have worried. Daar’s reply was growled quietly against Uriigo’s ear…and it was devastating.

“You’ll stand there an’ take whatever I wanna give, Champion. You’ll take it ‘cuz I’m better’n you. I am Stud-Prime because of my fitness ‘fer the title. I have the confidence of a leader born of over fifteen thousand years o’ faithful service, an’ I come from an honest tradition of hard work since time immemorial. My humility stems from the blessings I have inherited, an’ for which I am but a steward in a long line o’ servants. But humility ain’t the same thing as modesty. I won’t pretend ‘ta that.”

Daar pressed himself against the comparatively tiny Champion and rested one of his huge paws over Uriigo’s shoulder. Those rib-breaking claws were fully extended and resting lightly over the Champion’s heart.

“After all, it was my Clan that brought the liberation of the Females, and who protect them even today against the honorless an’ the evil. And it was us who remade the Gao. That faithfulness brought us the power we enjoy today. That esteem ensured our consequent genetic perfection an’ blessed my unbroken line in particular with its superiority. You ain’t got none o’ that, an’ you fuckin’ well know it. So…mebbe consider why the Females chose ‘ta spare ‘yer lil’ Clan after what ‘ya did, and think on what y’all might do to be worthy o’ that mercy. ‘Cuz my patience with ‘yer unearned arrogance is wearin’ awful thin…Champion.”

Uriigo’s teeth chattered very slightly; he was just shy of abject terror, and now everyone could see it, if they somehow couldn’t smell it.

But credit where credit was due; the defiant Champion somehow found a liferaft of dignity on which to escape. “I shall take your words under advisement…My Father.”

Daar chittered darkly. “How gracious o’ you. An’ as ‘fer what ‘some’ might question and what ‘others’ might expect an’ all th’ rest, you fail to unnerstand.”

He prowled away, and Uriigo swayed back with a well-restrained sigh as he let out his held breath. Nobody wanted the Great Father’s teeth that close to their throat.

Daar ignored him. He returned to his place at the head of the great table, expounding as he went. “One day y’ain’t gonna have a Great Father, an’ things can’t go back to the way they were. So…what then? My purpose ain’t ‘ta rub my huge nuts all over everything an’ claim it as mine. I already won that game. My purpose is to ensure the survival an’ prosperity of the Gao, and if I can swing it, her most bestest allies too.”

Matigu listened, not yet ready to give up on his own feelings that something more could have been done, but not able to disagree, either.

Daar knew, and turned his terrible gaze back to Matigu. It softened instantly into something much more kindly.

“‘Yer young. I get it. I wasn’t much younger when I was called to be Champion. But the kwekshit awful thing ‘bout high office, is we’ve got responsibilities beyond ourselves, yijao? Gettin’ kilt ‘cuz I wanna personally squish sum Hunter fucks is the pinnacle o’ stupidity. I have duty that goes past all that, an’ that means I can only take to the battlefield when I’m needed. But even more’n that? Spendin’ my forces like cheap peshorkies when I ain’t advancin’ th’ goal is straight-up evil.”

He glanced back at Uriigo and his expression hardened again. “Part o’ doin’ that is knowing what’s signal, an’ what’s noise. Even if ‘ya gotta smash the noise now an’ then…”

Uriigo, wisely, didn’t react in any way. He just stared back, ears up, back straight. Daar held his gaze for a moment, then duck-nodded and addressed the rest of his Champions.

“An’ another part is knowin’ when ‘ta delegate. Champions Fiin an’ Thurrsto are out there right now, an’ they in turn are learnin’ what they need ‘ta delegate even further. If there’s anythin’ we gotta learn from the Humans, it’s that we can’t govern ourselves like a pile o’ competin’ Clans anymore. That means my Champions gotta learn ‘ta let go. An’ ‘yer Brothers, they gotta learn ‘ta let you.”

He sat, which was an invitation for all the Champions to take their seat. Where the Great Father sat directly on the floor, however, the Champions sat on actual wooden furniture, in a series of expensive groans, squeaks and creaking noises.

It was both a gesture of high esteem on the Great Father’s part, and also an unsubtle reminder: he was still eye-level with all of them.

“I trust they’ll git ‘er dun proper-like. An’ the gaoian world don’t stop just ‘cuz of those greasy nutless Hunter fucks. So…unless anybody’s got more they wanna git outta their fur…shall we?”

Business concluded swiftly after that. The Great Father was in a bad mood, Uriigo remained very carefully silent and attentive for the rest of the session, and the same went for many of the others.

Champion Meereo got Matigu’s attention when Daar finally dismissed them, a small gesture with his paw and ears that said ‘walk with me.’ They left through the doors at one end of the room, while the Great Father made his exit through the other doors with the kind of inexorable speed that he only used when there was somewhere he intended to be, soon.

Clans Longear and Longback had always been close: the Longears were the offspring clan, descended from the much-rewarded deep sea divers who’d first laid the great undersea communications cables across the Equatorial Gulf toward the end of Gao’s industrial age.

They still looked much the same, but there were differences. Longears were sleeker and a bit taller, with much longer ears and slightly broader shoulders; they were naturally graceful athletes. Longbacks had shorter legs and stouter bodies that were noticeably more muscular; hard work at sea was their forté. Both still had dense glossy black fur and partially webbed fore- and hind-paws, though Longbacks had the thicker fur and retained more functionally useful webbing.

Both enjoyed the salt and the sea, and had little patience for kwekshit.

“You know, I think in another life the Great Father would have a lot of respect for Uriigo,” Meereo commented, once they were safely out in the gardens. The Great Father had personally guaranteed that the gardens were not monitored—a quirk of his particular sense of honor that had always left Matigu a little bemused—and that concession freed the Champions up to speak freely among themselves. Maybe that was the idea.

“Hard to believe,” Matigu replied.

“Is it, though? It’s pretty obvious he respects Uriigo’s personal bravery, if not his Clan.”

“That bravery—”

“And integrity,” Meereo added.

“—and integrity are going to get him killed.”

“He has little choice, I think. He has to earn a certain reputation in the Great Father’s eyes if he’s ever going to redeem his Clan of their sins.”

“There’s one of those words again.” Matigu sighed and looked up at the sky. “A lot of old words going around in the Great Father’s court these days.”

“Like, for instance, ‘Great Father.’ And ‘Court.’”

“Yes. Lots of… hmm… little steps into the past.”

Meereo shrugged, and stretched his arms over his head. “Maybe. I dunno, I think it’s more a step backward to take stock, myself.”

“I hope so. They say the future is built on the stones of the past, but sometimes I think we’re being a little too… literal about it. Reliving old ideas, rather than refining them.”

“Maybe. We did, after all, vote to crown him. Even Uriigo voted for that in the end. We can’t claim we went into this blind, he warned us what that crown properly meant. And in any case, whether you prefer ‘sins’ or ‘crimes,’ the Bronzefurs have been straddling the line between Civilized and Privateer for a very, very long time…” Meereo mused, following his own unravelling thread of thought while his ears weaved back and forth above him.

“…You wanted to talk with me about something.”

“And the war isn’t close to over yet. War is always an old-fashioned kind of time, I suppose. However modern the methods may be, the psychology is the same as it ever was…” Meereo continued, obliviously.

Matigu snapped him out of it with the gentlest of claw-touches to the arm. “Meereo… cousin, if I may. I’ve had enough of Bronzefur and Uriigo and the war and…” Matigu waved his paw vaguely back toward the council chamber, “…that, for today. What can I do for you?”

“Well… This is what I wanted to discuss.” Meereo said, turning to face him. “…You seemed shocked, back there.”

“Isn’t that natural? The Great Father seemed… I don’t know. Darker than usual, today.”

Meereo sighed. “Cousin… have you forgotten what his other duty today is?”

“…What?”

“He’s saying goodbye to an old friend…”

Date Point: 16y10m2w AV
Wi Kao city, Planet Gao

Xiù Chang

Yulna’s pyre was huge, and fierce. And, in a mark of Daar’s considerable respect, it was a wooden pyre rather than the industrial, gas-fired thing that was how the Gao usually said farewell to the dead.

Wood, to the Gao, was about as valuable as the same weight of silver.

There was probably some gas-fire trickery in there too, to make the flames so hot and so high that they completely obscured the body: It was supposed to be a dignified farewell, after all. Yulna’s cloth-wrapped remains had been laid among the logs with care and reverence by ceremonial guard-sisters, led by Guard-Mother Myun, but when the flames went up they had hidden her from sight, and when they subsided there would be nothing left but ashes.

Xiù had expected to cry. Instead, she found, she’d already done enough of that. There was a hollow feeling in her stomach, but also a warm little nugget of relief that at least her good friend—her Mother, in so many ways—wasn’t suffering any longer.

There weren’t many males at the ceremony. Gyotin and the Great Father of course, along with a few of his guard, plus Julian and Harrison a respectful distance back, but apart from them it was an almost exclusively female event.

Gaori tradition was to wait until after the flames were down to coals and embers before speaking. That meant a lot of silence. A lot of reflection. Plenty of time for quiet words and conversation.

Xiù spent much of it in conversation with Naydra, who kept looking over at Harrison.

“…You know, it’s a funny consequence of Giymuy’s decision to make you an honorary Gaoian that your cub—child, sorry—could technically be an honorary Gaoian too.”

“I…don’t know how appropriate it would be to stake ownership on his soul like that, as it were…. Besides, don’t forget his daddy’s an honorary Ten’Gewek.”

“A child of three species…” Naydra mused. “…I can’t decide if he’s fortunate or cursed… Oh my!”

That last was in response to Julian hoisting the baby aloft and swooping him around on his palm, which was Harrison’s idea of a great time and never failed to prompt a huge smile. It looked kind of alarming at first glance, but Xiù had grown used to it.

…Of course, Gaoian cubs were raised almost exclusively by females at this stage in their development. Naydra had likely never seen a male interact with an infant before. “…Do all Human males play so rough with the cu–the children?”

“Julian’s hands are the safest place in the whole galaxy,” Xiù declared, confidently.

Naydra watched him wrangle the baby a little more, ears twisting back and forth in the fascinating way a Gaoian’s ears always did when they were far away in thought, then shook herself and turned back to the present moment.

“…Thank you for bringing them,” she said. “I think it’s important to see the living examples of Yulna’s legacy. And her story.”

“She had quite a life.”

“Again…” Naydra managed a small, discreetly appropriate chitter. “I’m not sure if that’s fortune or a curse.”

“Well there’s an apocryphal curse that goes ‘may you live in interesting times.’ So, I guess we’re all cursed right now,” Xiù said. “But I don’t feel cursed. I feel very, very lucky.”

Naydra duck-nodded, slowly, then again rather more sharply. “…Yes. I know what you mean,” she agreed. She sighed and looked back at the pyre. It was dying now: soon, the speeches and eulogy would begin.

“I wonder how different things would have been?” she mused. “If you hadn’t been in that holding cell, where would we be? I’m sure it was miserable for you, and I don’t want to say that I’m glad it happened… but I am.”

Xiù gave her a small hug. “Don’t worry. I’m glad I was there too. It was a nightmare at the time, but now…” She glanced back at her son, her partners, and her daughter. “That’s life, really. At the time it might be terrifying and awful, but years later you can look back and see that, actually, you have something that you’d never give up because of it.”

Allison saw her looking at them, and probably gleaned a lot of what she was thinking just from her expression. She stopped playing with Anna, who was in a baby-carry on her chest, long enough to make a heart shape with her thumbs and fingers.

“I suppose…” Naydra agreed. “…Though I can’t help but feel that Yulna’s suffering was unnecessary. None of us are richer for her pain.”

“But she bore it.” Xiù watched the pyre carefully. The hidden gas was definitely being turned off, now. What had once been a head-height stack of logs was now a waist-high mount of black, white and glowing orange. The heat coming off it was skin-drying, even from several paces away. Of Yulna’s shrouded remains, there was no sign.

“Yes. That’s a lesson she taught everyone by example: how to bear it.”

Naydra’s thoughts trailed off as Gyotin tapped his staff on the stones at his feet, calling everyone’s attention his way and putting an end to the soft murmur of conversation. Without it, there was only the crack and snap of the wood.

He let the silence sit for just long enough, then duck-nodded toward the pyre.

“A Mother-Supreme,” he began, “Is tasked with many responsibilities. She is a leader both temporal and spiritual. She is a guide, a teacher, a care-giver and sometimes a source of stern discipline. She is, indeed, a mother. The mother of mothers, and thus mother to all the Gao… and in that sense, Mother-Supreme Yulna can rest easy knowing that she succeeded. Without her…”

He paused, then swept his staff around at all the gathered Gao. “You are alive because of her decision. Our people are alive because of her wisdom and vision. When she saw what the Gao truly needed, she had the courage to give it to us. Yulna, in our time of need, was mother to our future.”

He lowered the staff and rested his hands on it. “…Hers was a life characterized by pain,” he said, more softly. “Both of the mundane, physical sort, but also more intimate. She lost Sisters, and close friends, and cubs. She lost friendships. And always she kept her head up, her back straight, and her eyes clear. She was an example I will strive to emulate for the rest of my time… As should we all.”

The gathered mourners made assorted gestures of agreement. Gyotin duck-nodded, and concluded his speech.

“…Remember her well.”

Date Point: 16y10m2w AV
Out-system mining colony near Ugunduvuronagthuregnuburthuruv, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy

Regaari

The Hunters had stripped out everything they could carry. There wasn’t much left. Just the biggest and densest mining equipment that couldn’t be quickly disassembled or cut apart, left behind to tumble in null-G above the foundations and robbed-out walls.

With literal days to act, unharassed and unhurried, the Hunters had figuratively picked the carcass to the bone. There really wasn’t going to be much to report. In fact, the ransacking was so total that the difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ had become entirely academic in this case.

Dexter and Warhorse had something in common. They could hate like nobody else they knew. Oh sure, some people like Tigger or Righteous could rage harder than anyone, but rage was an ephemeral thing, a power of the soul that reveled in the moment. It was transitory.

Hate was forever. Neither of those two men truly understood it. And as for the real ice-bloods like Highland and Carebear…

The Unseen bless them, they were lucky to keep their balance the way they did. They were…well, they could choose who and what they loved, and that was that. They were natural killers to be sure, but that still wasn’t the same thing.

They lacked commitment.

Dexter and Warhorse could choose, too. But for Dexter, he’d chosen to hate the Hunters. He’d poured a little of his soul into the prospect of their destruction. They were evil.

Very few had seen just how evil for themselves.

He’d talked about it with Commander Mears a few times. The Human counsellor was no expert on Gaoian psychology, but when it came to darkness… well, he’d seen its many shades, through many men’s eyes. He was an expert on that at least, and that was what Regaari needed.

The search of the ransacked mining outpost was a formality, really. They’d known not to expect survivors, but it had to be done.

He had Warhorse by his side to help shift debris and generally serve as the first-rate medic he was. They were both armored up in case of traps. So far, they’d not found one…

…Nor more than a few dark mats of frozen blood stuck to the outpost’s remaining skeletal bulkheads.

There was, in short, nothing for Warhorse to vent his frustrations on. No wreckage to move, no obstructions to cut away, not even any bodies to bag. He was rapidly building into a great big ball of frustration, and woe betide anyone who got in his way when he finally got to unleash.

Regaari hoped it would be soon.

They had vengeance to dispense.

Date Point: 16y11m AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Planet Mordor, Hunter Space

Ferd Given-Man

Another day of watching.

Ferd knew why. Only a foolish hunter took his prey too early, and foolish hunters died young. But after hands of days of watching the Big-Ear people struggle and get sick and die when their monsters came from the sky to take everything…

Well, his hands were itching. They wanted to make things right. They wanted to restore the balance. They wanted to kill.

But the Humans were very, very patient hunters. They watched, and they watched, and they noted things that Ferd wouldn’t have known to see, and they thought. Back on the ship, Wilde showed him on a thinking-stone how the stack of things they’d seen and watched was growing deep and wide. They were gathering a great Knowing, and if Ferd had learned anything in the last hand of years, it was that Knowing was a weapon.

That thought kept him calm, and kept his mind where it should be.

Still. It was a relief like the moment a storm broke after a hand of stifling days when Wilde finally announced, after a day spent watching old, sick and weak Big-Ears being herded into a big building and not coming out again, that he’d had enough of waiting as well.

“It’s time we phone home.”

Tooko had been dozing, curled up on the big bed with his tail over his nose. But his ears sprang up like young saplings and he raised his head looking like he’d never been asleep.

“About time!”

“Yeah. Get us aloft, Pip.”

Tooko flowed off the bed and through the cabin on four-paw, poured himself into his pilot seat, and started to do the many things he did with buttons and switches that made the ship work.

“We get to fight, yes?” Ferd checked.

“I bloody well hope so, mate.” Wilde’s voice had a growl in it. “I didn’t do all this work just to get blue-balled.”

Ferd hooted appreciatively, and went to sit by the seeing-stone that let him watch the world outside. Even on a sick and wounded place like this, seeing the ground drop away and the clouds roll out below, until even the mountains were so small they looked flat with the ground…

He watched every time, and this time he watched as the sky went dark, as the world curved and grew small behind them.

And then, when Tooko used the ‘warp drive’ it sped away behind them like a startled bibtaw and vanished. Just another light among all the others.

“…Two kilolights,” Tooko announced. “Minimum safe distance is one parsec. ETA… fourteen hours, eighteen minutes.”

That was… a longer wait than Ferd had really wanted. Frasier seemed to see his thoughts, there, and gave him a smile.

“Hurry up and wait,” he said. “No’ exactly fun, is it?”

Ferd stood up and found himself restlessly bouncing on his feet. “No. But Tooko ship-knowings keep us safe, yes?”

“Got to take it slow,” Tooko explained. “Too fast and we make ripples. Too many ripples, and they’ll catch us.”

Tumik nodded wisely. “All best things in life, take slow…”

“Not everything,” Frasier disagreed.

“What is best when done fast?”

“Driving, drinking and pulling, mate.”

“I hope none of those at once.”

“Hey, drinking and going out on the pull go hand-in-hand.”

“That explains the fuckin’ goblins you keep waking up next to…” Rees chuckled.

“Fuck off, mister ‘Happily Married…’ how is Rhoswen anyway?”

“She’s good. Thanks for asking.”

Ferd sighed, put the seeing-stone away, and flomped over onto the bed. There were only so many things he could do while waiting. He could work out, or he could sleep, or he could wrestle, or he could play Professor Daniel’s learning-games on his extra-strong thinking-stone.

…Or he could make the time go away in a blink with the stay-sis, but he didn’t like doing that. Something about it felt like strong sky-magic, and a smart man didn’t overstay his welcome with anything that powerful.

He settled for eating. The food in the boxes still tasted strange to him, but it was hot, and filling, and he was finally figuring out which bits were supposed to go together. Humans had strange rules about how some foods were for different parts of the day. That didn’t make much sense to Ferd, but he’d quickly learned that some of the things in the box did not go well when mixed.

He’d learned that the hard way when he tried to dip ‘apple stroo-del’ in his ‘mini-stro-knee soup.’

So, he ate. Then he cleaned up. Then he exercised. Then he (reluctantly) washed. Then he sat and tried some of the learning-games for a while, and got a new high score. That put him in a good mood so he spent some time wrestling with Nomuk until Wilde wearily asked them to ‘pack it in.’

When he glanced at the clock, Ferd found it had been… About four hours.

His groan made Wilde chuckle. “You were fine the whole way here,” he said.

“Was different!” Ferd replied. “That was travel. This is waiting.”

“Mate… either sleep or hop in the stasis crate. But you’re gonna go mental if you try and wait this out.”

He was right. Ferd sighed, and headed for the cargo bay, where he packed himself into the stay-sis, and pushed the big button. He wasn’t ready to sleep.

An eyeblink later, and the wait was over. Rees opened the box, gave him a friendly slap on the arm and jerked his head toward the front of the ship. “Pip says we’re past minimum safe,” he said. “Time to call in.”

Ferd nodded, and followed him back up the ladder. “…Who are we calling?” he asked.

“The Great Father,” Wilde replied, as he fiddled with the call-machine.

Even Tooko looked surprised and nervous at that. “…We can just call him up?” he asked.

“Well, no. We call the watch officer at the Pit, and he puts us through. But yeah… Go for W-link, Pip?”

Tooko nodded and did something with his buttons. “…Go.” He sounded almost afraid.

“Why so nervous?”

“Well, it’s just… he’s the Great Father. You know? I know he tries to be all approachable but…”

Wilde gave him a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, Pip. He asked us to call, remember?” he asked, and opened the link. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

Date Point: 16y11m AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Naydra

Daar was having one of his silent days, and the thing about him was that his silences could be very loud. Naydra’s Bumpkin was a sentimental sort of male, and she’d learned over the years that, if left to his own devices, he would be inclined to brood on those huge, deep feelings of his.

A Great Father couldn’t afford to indulge himself like that. He knew it of course, but he was only a male after all, and sometimes a boy needed a little help to pull himself out of a rut.

Fortunately, Daar had a couple of very big and very easy buttons to press.

They were walking from their personal transport toward the northern tower of High Mountain fortress, the tower where their personal apartments were perched high above the many courtyards and ancient battlements. She was strolling comfortably, upright and enjoying the sights and smells while Daar thumped along on all fours beside her and did his best to keep with her pace. He had a tendency to move quickly, but even that was subdued tonight.

The silence was, as the Humans said, deafening. Enough of that. Naydra chittered to herself and, before her nerves got to her, jumped up onto him and laid herself across his broad back.

That earned her a deep-chested chitter and a bemused look over his shoulder.

“…Kinda undignified ‘fer you, ain’t it?”

“I’m allowed to be undignified when I want.” She snuffled into his fur. “We all are.”

“Even you an’ me?”

“Especially you and me.” She squirmed forward up his back and playfully nipped at his ear. “Or is being whacked in the snout with a spatula every time you go to Cimbrean particularly dignified?”

Daar chittered at that. “Guess not. ‘Yer right. As always.”

It was Naydra’s turn to chitter. “How does that girl resist your endless charms?” she teased.

One of those charms was that Daar was in fact very much self-aware of his eccentricities. That never stopped him from playing them up, of course…

“Right?!” Daar chittered gleefully, “I got the most biggest muscles an’ the most biggest… wallet!” He threw in an ear-waggle to convey what he really meant. “What more’s a gal gotta have?!”

“Stereotypes, dear!”

“Tell me it ain’t true!”

“Oh, those things help, certainly…but not with her it would seem!”

“Bah, she don’t know what she’s missin’! Tell ‘ya what though, it’s gonna be fuckin’ sweet when she finally gives in…”

“They all do eventually.” Naydra sighed and stretched out along his back. “Just don’t forget about me.”

“Never. Not ever.” Daar sped up to a trot now that he wasn’t keeping pace with her, and Naydra found herself enjoying the gentle wind between her ears.

“So what was on your mind?” she asked, now that she’d at least punctured the problem a little.

“…A whole chain’a things, startin’ with Yulna. I miss the crap outta her… Kinda regret I didn’t make peace with her sooner.” He sped up a bit as he spoke, though it was still a leisurely pace for him. “Gyotin was right, what he said at the funeral. If she hadn’t’a done what she did, there wouldn’t be Gao no more. But… Well. You know how much I don’t like the crown. Well…wearin’ it, anyhoo. An’ I hadta wear it today…”

“And she was the one who put it on your head,” Naydra duck-nodded. “Figuratively speaking.”

“Mmm.” He sighed heavily. “…But I shoulda got over my resentment sooner. She did the right thing. I shouldn’t’a been so angry with her for it, she din’t deserve that.”

“Did she know that, before the end?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you have nothing to regret, Bumpkin. Maybe you could have made up with her sooner, but how much worse would it be if you’d never come to terms?” Naydra scratched him behind his ears. “She gave you that crown because she knew you’d wear it well, and she was a tough old thing. I think she’d have been okay with it if you hadn’t ever forgiven her. But you did. And you parted as friends, yes?”

“…Yeah.”

“Focus on that, then.” Naydra scratched behind his ears some more. “…It suits you, you know.”

“What?”

“The crown. It looks good on you.”

“…Y’know something funny? Gyotin had the damn thing made o’ solid osmium so’s it’d be as heavy as fuckin’ possible. It’s like ten kilos or somethin’!”

“Hmm,” Naydra said playfully, “Far too heavy a burden for anyone else.”

“That’s a pretty unsubtle bit of analogy there…”

“Gyotin rather enjoys being unsubtle, when he can be. And you’re a very unsubtle foil.” She pinched his ear, playfully. “But you said you were thinking about a whole chain of things. What’s the next link?”

Daar sighed, more heavily than she’d heard him sigh in a long time. “You. Takin’ over from her. Everythin’ that means…”

“I haven’t been elected to that position yet. The election isn’t for another month.”

“‘Yer gonna be.”

“…Yes. Is that why you’re still wearing the crown?”

“…Maybe. ‘S weird, ‘ya sorta get the sense o’ when ‘yer s’posed ta’ wear it, yijao?” He gave her a complicated look over his shoulder and shook himself gently mid-stride, enough to communicate his feelings but not enough to dismount her. “Also, I ain’t s’posed ‘ta let anyone but me ever touch it. Easier ‘ta wear it than carry it…”

“Always so practical…” she teased.

“A crown ain’t practical! But they’re important. An’ the thing is, I gotta warn ‘ya, ‘yer gonna be crowned ‘yerself here pretty soon. The election’s gonna happen sooner’n ‘ya think, an’ after that…”

“…I know. It’s all happening very quickly, but… I feel ready for it.”

“…Might be you’re in ‘fer a nasty surprise,” Daar replied. “But… then again, you’ve had time ‘ta prepare. If anyone can be ready, it’s you.”

His words might have sounded patronizing, if Naydra didn’t know him so well.

“Well…if this thing is going to be, then I have a couple of requests.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. The first…” Naydra tightened her arms around his neck. “How fast can you really go?”

The answer turned out to be… much faster than she would have guessed, but the really thrilling part was how agile he was even at speed. He had the strength and, between his immense weight, the sheer size of his rough paws, and the length of the sturdy claws that came with them, the grip to quite violently change direction as he took her on a three-lap circuit around the sprawling fortress’ outside walls.

She was too tired for a fourth lap. Simply staying on his wildly undulating back had made her paws hurt from gripping ‘round his neck and hips.

He knew exactly when to stop too, with no shortage of smugness in his voice.

“Coulda gone way faster, too…” he teased. “Hadta take easy ‘fer someone super important!”

Naydra massaged her aching paws, almost regretting her little moment of play. But, one didn’t play with a Brownfur if they weren’t okay with some exhaustion.

“So…” Daar shimmied his body happily, which was the real point of the activity. He wasn’t made to sit still, or be poised and regal for too long. He was made to move, and he’d be feeling better for what was, by his standards, a little light exercise. “…What was the second request?”

The crown was still there, still settled firmly on his head. His expression was…happy. Serene. Almost radiant. By the Mothers, for the first time since the coronation…it seemed right.

Nadrya sidled up closer and nuzzled against his strong neck. “I want another cub.”

That seemed to surprise and delight him, but as always he was concerned for her well-being.

“You’ve smelled ready ‘fer a while now…but are ‘ya sure? The next week’s gonna be busy Naydi, ‘fer both of us…an’ not to be crass, but conceivin’ a cub ain’t exactly light work…and, uh, I definitely ain’t an easy mate, even at my most gentlest…”

That last bit—his power, in every sense of the word—was one of the things that was most attractive about him…but he had a valid point, and he had always been one to worry, especially with her. Humans it seemed paid the cost of motherhood more toward the end, in their aptly-named Labor. With gaoians it was very much the other way around. There was a very good reason why Females were traditionally picky, and why a mating contract really was a signed, legally binding contract.

Among other things, it included an injury clause.

But she was ready. She’d already completed her half of the paperwork, in fact, and filled in as many of his details as she could, as she showed him when they reached their apartments and she indicated the small pile of documents on her desk.

“…Paper? We coulda just bumped our communicators together…”

He was touched, she knew.

“Some things are worth doing with a little more ceremony, don’t you think?”

“That they are.”

The pen was a gift from President Sartori. Made by Pilot, with a technique called Maki-e, it was a one-off “Emperor” sized writing instrument that would be preposterously large in anyone else’s paw.

Daar picked up the pen and considered it. Then he considered the forms.

He turned and looked her dead in the eye.

“If you ask me, I’d set aside all tradition, step down as Stud-Prime o’ my Clan, an’ swear myself t’you an’ you alone. ‘Ferever.”

That was…she ached to accept his offer. But she couldn’t. It was a moment of personal weakness that prompted him to offer, but she knew in her very soul it was genuine.

And… she also knew that his love of the Females was the most important thing there was. She couldn’t jeopardize that, under any circumstances. No matter what the personal cost may be.

She knew, then, what it truly was to be a Great Mother.

“Bumpkin…” she sniffed his nose, and nipped tenderly at it. “…I already have more of you than anyone else ever will. Don’t make offers you know I won’t accept.”

He nodded, signed the forms, and flowed around her like the loving predator he was. “Ain’t never met a stronger woman. Gods an’ the Unseen, I love you…”

He snuggled into her, sweeping her thrillingly toward their nest-bed, overwhelming her in the most beautiful way. She was ready, he was ready, everything was absolutely perfect. They wrestled as one: friends, soul-mates and lovers true. This was her Bumpkin at his most tender, his most fierce, the very best of any—

…And of course, that singular, perfect moment was when his communicator rang.

Date Point: 16y11m AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Planet Mordor, Hunter Space

Sergeant Ian Wilde

Daar’s snarl was about the most terrifying thing Wilde had ever seen or heard.

“…’Yer one o’ only three people I’d let interrupt me right fuckin’ now, so…what’d ‘ya find?”

Tooko’s tail shivered nervously, and Wilde knew why. That was not the greeting a lowly Clan-Brother would want to hear from the most powerful Gao to ever live…

…Not the situation, either. Daar was sitting up in bed on full magnificent display, and the camera’s field of view told the full story about what exactly a Great Father did in his evenings.

Wilde stood straight-backed to give his report with as much dignity and discretion as he could muster. “The planet has natives, sir. A whole enslaved civilization, industrialized to a crazy degree with no regard for the environmental impact. As far as we can tell, the Hunters are taking that world for every resource it has, and they’re happy to snack on the slaves while they’re about it. Tooko also isolated the location of a Farthrow generator.”

The Great Father shifted and the camera went flying for a moment. After some grumbled protests, the image re-centered on his face, and mercifully kept…anything else…out of view.

“…Rapin’ a planet ‘fer resources, then. How wary d’ya think they are jus’ now?”

“Swaggering and confident, from what we saw. Every single facility we watched, it’s the same story: Slaves churning out fossil fuels, metals, plastics, whatever, and then the Hunters come and take it and maybe butcher a few by way of a thank-you.”

“Puny sick-skins murder sky-people for fun like little boy smushing bibtaw,” Ferd snarled. He’d changed since witnessing that first incident. Wilde reckoned the young Given-Man had a much firmer grasp on the stakes and the evil they were up against than he’d had before.

Then again, Ferd’s tribe had fled the fighting during the Hierarchy war on their homeworld, and their previous Given-Man had died fighting the Igraens’ machines. He hadn’t seen the enemy first-hand, before this mission. It had been harrowing enough for Wilde.

Their subsequent reconoittres of other facilities had followed much the same pattern. They’d seen other hapless, helpless aliens being literally worked to death, poisoned by the side products of their own labour, or cruelly eviscerated by their overlords.

One population stood out in Wilde’s memory: They’d been processing lead, or some other heavy metal. That was the only station the Hunters hadn’t fed at, but it made little difference: some of the workers had been so palsied and so obviously dying that leaving them alone was very probably the crueller option.

Daar’s deep eyes watched through the camera, he flicked an ear once, sniffed, and duck-nodded. Clearly he could see what they were all thinking.

“‘Kay…now riddle me this: how bad’ll me rammin’ the Grand Army down their throat make ‘em squeal?”

“…I imagine losing a whole industrialized planet, all its resources and a slave species would very painful for them, sir,” Wilde ventured.

“Is it worth killin’ a million Gao? ‘Cuz that’s gonna be the opening bet.”

That question was well above Wilde’s pay grade, but the answer he gave came quite guilelessly from the heart. “…Sir, after what we witnessed down there? I’ll lead the bloody charge myself.”

Daar duck-nodded. “Sarry. That weren’t fair. But I’m kinda in the mood ‘fer gettin’ to the point, yijao? So: can ‘ya knock down that Farthrow an’ get a beacon emplaced?”

“…Tooko?” Wilde turned to their pilot.

“I can flatten the generator, but SBD doesn’t have the firepower to break the shield around that facility. We’d need to deploy a Dump. A big one.”

“And ‘ya got literal tons o’ barbarian cavemonkey fun on-board with you, so…”

“We can do it,” Wilde affirmed. “We have the dump-web packs in their biggest sizes.”

“Good. I’ll call my general staff in’ the mornin’ when I ain’t busy an’ we’ll set things in motion. Anythin’ else?”

“Clan Longear may want to look at the signals I recorded, My Father,” Tooko said. “I’m no expert, but it looked to me like the Hunters are basing their work on our technology.”

“Okay. Fine. Make it so. Now, is there anythin’ that needs my undyin’ attention right now?”

“…No, sir.”

Daar sighed. “Right. Good work, I mean it. Now you sit ‘yerselves in a nice, safe orbit an’ git me all the surveillance ‘ya can. We’ll be in touch in…balls, what time is it?”

A muffled voice mumbled something from off-camera…Wilde did his very best not to listen. “…Right, less’ say twelve standard hours, ‘kay? Git sum shuteye. Now if’n you’ll ‘scuse me…”

There was the beginnings of an obviously playful growl, and the video mercifully cut short.

For the Ten’Gewek, of course, that was pretty normal. They hooted appreciatively, made a few innuendo-laden comments in their own tongue that Wilde barely followed, and then went to follow his advice to sleep.

As for Wilde….

“Well. Now we know why he’s called the Great Father, I guess…”

“You had to go there…” Frasier muttered, though Tooko was chittering.

“Jealousy doesn’t become you, Wilde!”

“Dunno if I’d be jealous o’ something like that… I mean, how do any of his partners…?”

Tooko chittered again, then turned his attention towards the ship. “It won’t take me long to get us into a safe surveilling orbit. We can’t image the entire planet in ten hours but we can make a good first pass over the main continent.”

“Yeah. That’ll have to do.” Wilde turned toward the sleeping area. “Don’t neglect your own rest, Tooko. You’ll need it tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

Wilde nodded, and went to bed down. Worrying, sadly, was going to be a definite feature but he’d learned a long time ago how to not let that keep him from a good night’s sleep. After all, nothing his imagination could possibly create would be made better by fatigue and tiredness.

He hadn’t bothered to decorate his bunk much. Frankly, he hadn’t expected to use it much give Gaoian and Ten’gewek sleeping habits, but in fact they’d largely come to respect that humans had their own way of doing things. He settled in, noting with wry amusement that Rees was already snoring softly, and watched the ceiling for a minute as he filed away and sorted his own feelings.

Nerves? No. Well, some. But a lot more of it was anticipation. After all the horrors he’d watched over the last few days, he was itching to give the Hunters some much-deserved pain. It wasn’t going to be easy…

But it was going to be right.

He nodded to himself, shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and slept well.

Date point: 16y11m1d AV
Headquarters of the Grand Army of the Gao, planet Gao

Fiin, Champion and Stud of Clan Stoneback

“It’s dangerous over there. Never mind the Hunters, we’re going to lose more troops to the environment than to enemy fire if we aren’t careful.”

Fiin made a disgruntled noise as the analyst—a young, genetically conformant Whitecrest associate named Mekuulo—showed him a summary of all the environmental hazards the Grand Army would face on Mordor. The younger male had passed through the rites of Whitecrest’s First Ring and was now working on his qualifications to challenge the Second… one of which was spending some time here at Headquarters.

Champion Thurrsto and Father Regaari had given him strong recommendations. That all but confirmed the sleek young male he was looking at was an initiate of the Dark Rites.

Which meant Fiin had to watch his every word around him. Fiin didn’t know what the Dark Rites entailed, exactly—he was one of few outside Clan Whitecrest to even know they existed—but he knew they were…challenging, to put it mildly. One attempted them by invitation only, and rumor had it that many did not survive. If two of the more intimidating Gao he knew had gone through them and lived, then Mekuulo was one to watch.

They’d certainly resulted in a competent, sharp analyst.

“….Do we have enough protective gear?”

“For the first campaign wave, yes. Almost a million full sets of equipment. Most of the Grand Army will find it…burdensome…but then again, that would have been their complaint no matter the balance. Always, there is more ammo for the soldier to carry, more gear, more rations…”

“And most of the Grand Army are on the small side,” Fiin grumbled. That was unfair, really: the Grand Army trained hard and were almost universally strong and sleek, but against a well-conforming Stoneback…

“Logistics are confident they can keep the troops supplied with what they need to survive the poisons and radiation over there. Personally, I suspect we’ll see more than a few casualties due to simple negligence.”

Fiin sighed. “Ain’t nothin’ we can do ‘bout that. They’ve been given training, if they wanna risk irradiated balls that’s their own lookout.”

Mekuulo duck-nodded solemnly. “Anyway. The second and third cohorts are active and ready. Fourth, Sixth and Seventh are being called up, and should be ready by the end of tomorrow. First and Fifth have been recalled from field training exercises, they won’t be ready for at least five days. The rest aren’t yet trained and equipped for the environmental hazards.

“I presume they’re mustering at their parade grounds, ready for jump?”

“That’s right. Clan One-Fang are ready to jump seven heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, thirteen escorts and the orbital superiority platform Raining Vengeance. With its jump arrays and heavy lifters, we’ll have heavy armor on the ground within thirty minutes. Three wings of Voidrippers will be on hand for air support and interception.”

Fiin duck-nodded, satisfied that all was proceeding as smoothly as it could on such short notice. “…Right. Well, give the lockdown order, get everyone ready to go. I will brief the Great Father in our next meeting, where hopefully I will have a new Grandfather to announce…”

Mekuulo didn’t show any undue interest at all. No ear-flick, no sudden look, no nothing. He was the picture of perfect self-control.

As the Humans would say, bullshit.

Stoneback still kept a few secrets, and one of them was their Nose: specifically just how far they’d developed it over the centuries. Fiin took a surreptitious sniff of Mekuulo as he prowled past. The faint note of excitement was impossible to disguise, though the slightly ionized after-scent on the air suggested he was trying.

Most anyone else would have been fooled, it was so faint. But a ‘Back who’d mastered the Third Ring? Mekuulo still had a few things left to learn.

Not many, though.

Fiin left the young Associate to his work, and stalked back towards his shuttle car. He’d need to be on the parade grounds soon, and fully armored. Establishing the clawhold was going to be a Stoneback job, the kind of thing Third Fang was made for, ably supported by the urban assault specialists of Second Fang.

He’d be no Champion at all if he wasn’t there in the first jump. He’d be a pretender, an impostor. In that regard, Human leaders had it easier.

But they’d all have wanted to be there too.

The time to go to war had finally come, and the Grand Army was ready.

Date point: 16y11m1d AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Planet Mordor, Hunter Space

Sergeant Ian Wilde

The thing that Wilde never got his head around was the idea that a spaceship could be as quiet as a breeze. Deadly could fly supersonic, and that obviously wasn’t quiet, but at low speeds she could be pretty much entirely silent. And of course, her cloak made her entirely transparent across the visual spectrum, with not even the faintest blurring or distortion around the edges to give her away.

The intersection of these two capabilities meant Tooko could drop them right next to the target facility, pulling a lazy aerobatic slow roll between two fat cooling towers before alighting as softly as a falling leaf, as close as he could possibly get while still having some concealment to hide the three humans and four Ten’gewek who promptly disembarked. The only noise Deadly made as it took off again was the faint sound of her ramp closing. It was… eerie.

The Hunter wormhole-blocker was a staggeringly ugly bit of architecture. The actual field emitters at the epicenter thrust up from the ground on the most bare-bones of functional scaffolding, and drew power from a trio of what they guessed were nuclear power plants, equidistant around it and sealed away inside blank concrete tombs that the acid rain had stained yellow. Electrified razor fences sealed the gaps between the buildings.

All told, it was almost like the Hunters had deliberately set out to build the most egregious eyesore in the universe. It certainly didn’t impress Ferd, who made a quiet sort of disgusted noise in his throat. Granted he was also wrapped up in a sealed, full-bodied set of nuclear-biological-chemical warfare overgarments, but the sentiment wasn’t wrong.

They darted forward by the numbers, wasting no time. Tumik, Genn, and Nomuk had the dump webs, all six of the ones the ship had in cargo. Although they only planned to use three, they were only going to have one shot at this, and had to prepare for the possibility of redundant shielding. Best to not half-arse it.

This wasn’t a facility run by the natives. This one was all Hunters, and it showed in the architecture, the signage, the weird dimensions. A species with six legs designed their stairs a little differently, building them deeper and less steep. The doors were tall and square, all the equipment mounted on it at at head-height, for a human.

The hump up to the facility wasn’t so bad. They had to play it carefully of course, sticking to the twisty bits of terrain and the occasional half-dead clump of foliage to conceal their approach. That part was the bit that had worried Wilde the most. Ten’Gewek in general were…well, they were naturally better athletes than anyone at basically everything, but that weirdly worked against them, because they didn’t really need to work at anything to be good at it. That meant that, beyond trained skills, their real practical weakness was their conditioning. Or, lack thereof.

For ambush hunting? That was just fine. A long walk carrying something well within their strength to carry? Not so bad. But soldiering, though? That involved a lot of force-march and weird movement across long stretches of awful land. Exactly how much that sort of thing sucked was a rude awakening for his cavemonkey friends, who didn’t much like the idea of their “weak” little humans so easily upstaging them over distance.

So, they’d trained, and trained hard, and done so because Ferd refused to let Wilde beat him at anything. The result was…well, they still didn’t quite have a forty-mile ruck in them, but if any group of cavemonkeys ever would, it would be Wilde’s crew. Oki hadn’t proven up to the task and had to part ways with the team, but the remaining four proved they could hack it. Not bad at all. The approach was therefore…almost entirely free of drama. It was certainly no fun in NBC gear but, well, it could always be worse.

They pulled up into cover right next to the facility with everyone ready to breach. And if Wilde and his men seemed to have executed the approach a bit better, he didn’t gloat about it. Practice would no doubt eventually make perfect.

Besides, the Ten’Gewek got their moment to shine, because as it turned out, hulked-out talking apes could do things with the architecture that humans couldn’t. They could climb like Peter Parker himself and jump like a goddamned salmon. Perfect for overcoming fences. Nomuk ignored one electrified razor-wire fence by the simple expedient of charging at the wall beside it, scrambling up it, grabbing the top and swinging one-handed around the corner, then dropping back down again.

From there, cutting the power was easy for him, and a mere wire fence was no obstacle at all after that.

The first Hunter—a Builder—blundered into them within a hundred yards of the shield boundary. Wilde’s team saw it coming a mile off and went to ground, laid a trap that it promptly stumbled into.

Ferd landed on it from above like an angry boulder with hands. Killing a Hunter had to be done before they had a chance to signal alarm, and having a Ten’Gewek’s explosive quickness along with four literally rock-crushing hands turned out to be a big advantage in that regard.

In one perfect moment of impact, Ferd simultaneously crushed and snapped off its head, used his fookin’ ridiculous weight to pulp its torso and his feet to crack its spine apart like a glowstick, just in case it had any neuroelectronics that might’ve given them away; they’d all enjoyed that bit in training. The builder died instantly.

Decon was going to be an absolute bitch tonight, but…

Worth it.

They moved on without any celebration. For the Ten’Gewek, this was like the most serious of tribal raids, the kind where they would descend like reavers and none would be left alive. It was very rare they went that far—war for them was usually a sort of extreme contact sport more than anything else, and almost always ended in a playful orgy rather than pillage—but when a tribe had so transgressed that they needed to die, Ten’Gewek were a species made to be vicious.

For best results, they were going to attach the dump webs in three spots, just in case the shields were segmented. That way, they could give Tooko a clean shot from pretty much any southern approach. By pure dumb luck—or pure dumb architecture—the Hunters apparently didn’t appreciate windows in their buildings, so every facet of the complex was nothing but towering grey concrete things that made a Soviet Khrushchyovka look decorative.

Wilde and his men rapidly secured the perimeter and got some practice in with their knives. Two blades in exactly the right places could do much the same as Ferd’s insane strength, if not as easily or immediately. They took the opportunity for some sensor emplacement too, because while they were dealing with patrols before the locals noticed…

The Ten’Gewek were climbing those flat, featureless walls after having easily leapt clear over the tall underhangs along the bottom of the wall. They climbed by simply gripping the concrete so hard, their fingers crushed handholds in as they swarmed effortlessly up the corners faster then Wilde could jog across the ground. They’d climbed a very tall building in full gear and with more equipment on their backs than Wilde could even budge, and done so as easily as he would by just standing up.

That feat of monkey-muscle all by itself made the mission possible. Just getting up to the wall would have been a major challenge without them; the start of its flat surface had to be about two storeys or more off the ground. And after that, Wilde and his men would have needed to carefully scale a flat concrete slab of a wall, break out ropes and pitons and hoist the dump webs up one by one…all of that would have taken far too much time. Ten’Gewek didn’t need pitons. Or rope. Hell, Ferd didn’t even bother climbing at the corners. He ran straight up the wall using just the fierce grip in his feet, keeping his arms free to wield his rifle in defense of his men, who were stuck on the semi-exposed corners using all four hands. The big bastard had by far the heaviest load too, and didn’t bother with any prep. He just jumped up like a flea and rammed his toe-fingers straight through the concrete almost like it was cork. Jesus.

The first dump was emplaced without issue. They looked and worked rather like an oversized claymore mine, complete with “this face toward target” printed clearly on one side. When triggered, they would explode an electrostatically sticky mess of superconductive fibers all over the shield in front of them, grounding and short-pathing the shield while simultaneously dumping an enormous stored electrical charge into it.

There was absolutely nothing more effective in the whole galaxy at completely and instantly overwhelming a forcefield and leaving its emitters as a half-molten smoking mess.

The second, too, was in place before the Hunters noticed anything was amiss.

When the Hunters finally responded there was nothing like a commotion, a klaxon, flashing lights or anything of the kind. The only thing that gave them away was when, as one, every Hunter in line of sight immediately stopped whatever they were doing and made a beeline for the concrete building.

Time to start shooting. Ice-calm, with perfectly steady hands, Wilde spoke the first words he’d uttered since leaving the ship.

“Send it.”

They sent it. Hunters died.

Wilde’s men were fantastic shots, and their targets were serviced with maximum economy. The cavemonkeys were pretty good too, especially considering they had leapt down from the top of the building, which was high enough up that they had time to pull their rifles and send pinpoint-accurate fire downrange for a shocking count of seconds, before their ground-shaking impacts shattered the concrete under their feet.

Monkeycommandos were the best thing ever.

Still a bit raw on tactics, though. They didn’t start moving until Rees’ own motion jogged their memories. Not a good mistake to make, but if they lived through this they’d probably not make it again.

That next bit might be tricky. Firstly, Wilde and crew needed to bug out without getting perforated or otherwise dead. Secondly, they needed to do that before the Hunters noticed the special packages they’d left behind, one of which still needed to be placed.

And they needed to get clear so Tooko could send the real fun.

Wilde led the push up. The first actual Hunter—the white ones with the teeth and claws, rather than the nerds—put in an appearance as he did so, barging out of a large steel door thirty feet in front of him, premature and too eager. He dropped it with a neat triple-tap then put a grenade through that door in case it had friends.

The slaughterhouse aftermath said it had.

Behind him, Genn set up the third and final dump web and sang out his success. Time to go, before this turned into a real cake-and-arse party. They dropped smoke grenades, and pulled back under its concealment.

Another awesome fact about monkeycommandos: while they didn’t necessarily have a human’s all-day endurance, they could move like the wind when they needed to, and do so across three dimensions like gravity wasn’t even a thing. This they used to great effect when they made for cover. Ferd snapped up Wilde like a rugby ball and flung them both behind cover, up over around down and sideways across all obstacles, sprinted across the open terrain jinking all the way, then finally slammed them both ignominiously into a fetid ditch, well behind cover.

Thank Christ for their overclothing. It was hot, annoying and itchy, but at least it kept them fully sealed against whatever slimy diseased radioactive horrors they were wallowing in now.

Back around the target, the dump webs went off. Strobing, white-blue light like a fuckup at a power substation made the Ten’Gewek wince even through their ballistic eyepro, and Wilde plainly saw a writhing ribbon of plasma climb into the air.

He keyed his mic. “Pippin… ACTION!!”

That was Tooko’s cue, and their diminutive Gaoian pilot delivered. Barely two seconds after the word left Wilde’s mouth, there was a rip-tearing noise and the Angel of Death himself smashed by overhead.

Wilde had always appreciated air support. Hell, he’d even had occasion to thank the Yanks and their wonderful aircraft in distant sandy wars. He’d never quite appreciated the artistry of it all… but Tooko was clearly a Jedi fucking master at his craft. No wonder the Great Father had personally picked him for this mission.

He wasn’t quite sure what that said about the rest of them.

The whole complex went up, beginning with the all-important Farthrow apparatus in the middle. Those concrete monstrosities around the edges folded and tipped inwards as whatever invisible destructive force Tooko had at his clawtips gouged their supporting walls out. It was the fastest, most crushingly effective demolition job Wilde had ever seen, and it happened in a very literal flash.

Where the greatest obstacle to the invasion had been, a pillar of pulverized concrete dust unfurled lazily into the air.

Now, they were in a race against a second clock. When one Hunter knew a thing, every Hunter knew. The entire planet knew what was going on the instant the fight got started, and that meant they had to get things taken care of right fucking now.

This was Ferd’s biggest job. He had by far the heaviest pack on him, a compact device that, when deployed, would fire megalight drones into the air, snap a jump portal into being, and bring forth the hammer of Daar’s Grand Army. He wedged the package firmly down in a patch of damp, soft earth, heaved the cover off, pushed the very appropriate Big Red Button, and stood back.

He sprang back a little further when the ground-to-orbit mortars fired with their characteristic gut-kicking WHAM!! and streaks of superluminal blue light flashed into the sky. That done, the package violently ejected the mortar tubes and unfolded like clever LEGO origami. In a handful of complicated, clicky seconds it had unfolded into a twenty foot cube.

There was the edge-of-hearing whine of capacitors, and….

Thump.

The liberation of Mordor began.

++End Chapter 61++

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 62: “Tooth and Claw”

Chapter 62: Tooth and Claw

Date Point: 417th Year of the Punishment
Library bunker at Old-Bent-Leg, the Great Ruin

Ukusevi, Librarian and Keeper of the Long Chant

The Chant had always promised a day when the Punishment would end, but Uku had never imagined she would live to see it.

Perhaps she hadn’t, yet. But there had been a bright flash in the sky, and the Punishers had abandoned their torments to somewhere else, and hope had a death-grip on Uku’s innards. It was a sick, forlorn, desperate hope, and only for something small—that maybe there was a future other than endless sickness and toil—but right now it was turning over in her belly like her babies once had.

For now, she and the rest of her flock did what they always did when the Punishment reached a lull: they prepared. A lull could mean many things. Sometimes, it had presaged raids on the other Libraries, sometimes a vast order from the Punishers to produce more, sometimes a great orgy of slaughter with no clear purpose…

In such times, the Faithful had learned to pack their carefully saved knowledge safely in its crates and prepare to scatter the library deep into the tunnels in the hopes that some texts would survive.

For Uku, there was a new task, however: a Listening. She sat among the frantic bustle as her people locked books away and loaded them onto carts and rails, and she Heard.

Listening and Hearing were more than just being there and letting the flock speak. It involved serious concentration as she committed their words to memory and added them to the Chant, as she had trained her whole life. The Chant was the only sure way to keep the Wicked People’s history and knowledge alive. It was the only way they could ever know what their ancestors had done so wrong that God must have hated them enough to inflict this punishment upon them all.

But this? This was a strange Listening. Ten of her flock had witnessed it, all had told the same story when separated, and her scribes had taken their first notes. Now it fell to Uku, as their Librarian, to add their account to the Chant and pass it on to the other Librarians.

“They weren’t Punishers. There were seven of them, three as tall as trees and quick as the wind, four as big as boulders with long tails. They appeared out of nothing on a whisper of breeze and attacked the three towers.”

The youngest one, barely a child and hardly old enough to be out on the surface toiling under the Punishers’ lash, was almost bouncing with excitement. “One of the big ones jumped over a shock-fence! Just… leapt over it!”

His older brother, whom Uku knew was old enough to feel the cares and hardship of the world as adults did, was just as enlivened. “Then they climbed the towers! Straight up the outside, like their hands were covered in glue!”

The boys’ father quietened them with a gesture, but even he was visibly shaking, from a mix of awe, fear, and that same terrible hope that was wriggling inside Uku. “…Then there were loud bangs and a great blaze of white light and lightning flashes, and the Punishers’ invisible walls just… collapsed. And the attackers ran away again, and… Keeper, it was like the Almighty spoke and told those towers to fall. The ground shook, the sky tore open and everything came crashing down in fire and smoke….”

Most telling of all, though, was the Old Man. A whole forty summers old, and even his eyes were bright with inspiration. Even so, he spoke more cautiously than the others. “The most amazing part wasn’t any of that, though. These…whatever they were, they broke the Punishers, as if they were insects underfoot! They carried death-wands, and wherever they pointed them, the Punishers died. But if they got within arm’s length, then they just… destroyed them. With blades and with their bare hands.”

“After the towers fell…” Uku asked, “then what?”

The four looked at each other. Finally, the old man cleared his throat and spoke for all of them. And his words made the hope in Uku’s belly squirm a little harder.

“…Thunder, Keeper.”

Date Point: 16y11m1d AV
Conclave of Champions, High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Hiyal, Champion of Clan One-Fang

Champion Fiin in full battle gear was an inspiring sight, even though his image was grainy, janky and low-resolution thanks to the limitations of wormhole comms. He was bloody to the elbows, and his teeth were bared in an unconscious warlike snarl even as he made his initial report to the Great Father’s court.

From Hiyal’s perspective, the impression was heightened by the fact that Fiin’s hologram was standing in front of the great mural of Fyu on the battlefield at Wi Kao. Fiin was Stoneback after all, which meant that somewhere deep in his ancient ancestry was the first Great Father himself. The juxtaposition drove that relationship home quite well.

“Initial deployment is moving along quite nicely. It’s clear we caught the Hunters by surprise. All they seem to have is numbers, and I haven’t yet met a competent tactician on the field. I don’t expect that happy state of affairs to last, however.”

Daar duck-nodded seriously. He was wearing the crown on this occasion with his court in full attendance, and sitting on the floor next to Fyu’s ancient throne—Fyu had been a much smaller Gao, and Daar couldn’t have fit in the throne even if he wanted to. But he’d always refused to even contemplate having it replaced with one in his own size.

Knowing the Great Father, the symbolism at play was far more complex than a first sniff might suggest.

“How d’you see ‘yer situation evolvin’ in the short term, My Champion?”

“…I’ve got more’n enough feet on the ground, what I ain’t got enough of is transportation. Could do with some more experienced leadership, too. An’ then there’s the natives to think about. First Contact is imminent, My Father, an’ I don’t have anyone who can handle it.”

The Great Father’s brow furrowed in thought. “Balls…Champion Thurrsto, what say you?”

“Father Garaaf,” Thurrsto decided after a moment’s consideration. “His experience on the ring megastructure may be of some use.”

“Hmm…yeah. Call ‘em up ‘fer a chit-chat, wouldya? I mean…if he can stand smellin’ me.” Daar threw in a disarming ear-waggle for good measure; a ripple of chittering dispelled some of the tension in the room, and Thurrsto pant-grinned good naturedly.

“I’m sure he won’t comment, My Father.”

“Good. As ‘fer experienced leadership, well…that I can help with, if’n we got the skies secured. Champion Hiyal! I hope you’ve got a report for me…”

Hiyal most certainly did. “The Raining Vengeance and its escorts are already in-system. We have four footballs deployed around the planet, a double layer pointed outward and another double-layer inward. So far, the inter-shield orbital gap appears to be clear of hostiles, though a complete ESDAR sweep will take five days to confirm that. Ground-to-orbit fire missions are already available over the invasion clawhold’s hemisphere.”

“Good. How soon ‘fore we can protect the planet with a Farthrow?”

“The Destroying Fury is resupplying and will be ready to jump in three hours..”

“Good. Some o’ you got a date with th’ Fury in a few hours, then. I have matters here ‘ta take care of, so I’ll be joinin’ ya tomorrow. I know you’ll have things ready ‘fer me.”

Hiyal had wondered what the answer to that question might be: the answer was yes, the Great Father would take the field. He’d been increasingly willing to delegate on numerous matters of military importance, but with his Clan’s Champion wearing three hats and selection still running for Grandfather and General of the Grand Army, combined with a planetary invasion…

Most of the Conclave would remain behind, of course. In fact, only Stoneback, One-Fang, Firefang, and Whitecrest would send their Champions (and their retinue) forward.

Daar looked around at them, duck-nodded once, and straightened up. “…Get ‘yer shit in order. Be on the jump platform in two hours. Go.”

The Conclave was thereby dismissed, though Hiyal had no particular urgency in leaving the room. He’d anticipated this, and put things in order already. He’d visit his private locker briefly near time to collect the bag with the few things in it he wanted to take with him, but other than that…

He toured the garden instead. Despite his assurances to the Great Father, the fact was that their destination was deep in Hunter space, and presumably of great value to the Hunters. As much as they’d done to secure a clawhold and make it as safe as it could be, there was nowhere in that entire stretch of space that a sane being would call genuinely safe. Only comparatively safe. Relatively safe.

What did relative safety mean in orbit around a planet the Hunters had ruled over for Keeda knew how long? Not a lot, probably. But there was nothing to be gained by worrying about it, so Hiyal did his best to distract himself with the sights, sounds and smells of the Fortress garden.

He’d always especially liked the herb garden. So he sat and luxuriated in its gentle, homely scents and was honestly quite grateful when nobody came to offer him words of wisdom or comfort. He was just… left alone, to think and prepare himself.

Sometimes, solitude was best for the mind.

Eventually, a bell over the walls roused him back to duty and wartime. He visited his locker, grabbed his bag, reported to the jump array…

…And went to war.

Date Point: 417th Year of the Punishment
Tunnels under Old-Bent-Leg, the Great Ruin

Ukusevi, Librarian and Keeper of the Long Chant

Another rumble shook dust from the ceiling, and Uku held her breath. The Penitents had done their best, but the demands of their holy punishment in unholy form had always made it difficult to maintain the ancient warrens and catacombs properly. The Punishers worked the faithful hard: often, the soul might be willing to tend to necessary repairs, but the vessel was too tired and the thoughts too clouded by grief.

Librarians rarely visited the surface. It was too dangerous. If the Punishers found them, slew them, ate them, then whatever they had added to the Long Chant and not yet had time to record or share with the others would be lost. The Chant would diminish, and that above all else was the one thing the faithful worked to preserve.

But she had to see this army for herself.

She saw the sky for the first time in… a moment’s recollection… it had been half a year. Since the last Gather, when the Librarians had been smuggled together to share the Chant, check each other’s memories and ensure that the history remained alive and unspoiled. She hadn’t expected to see it again until the next Gather, but here she was.

It was as dreary as she remembered. The Chant had it that once, long ago, the sky had been blue, and that clouds had been small white things. Not a low, heavy ceiling held up on pillars of smoke.

There were more of those than she remembered, and not coming from stacks and chimneys either. Many of them rolled upwards from oily conflagrations on the ground where some kind of force had decided that Something Must Die.

As she watched and wondered, a pair of somethings clawed the air apart with a fearsome noise as they slashed by overhead. Uku only got the barest glimpse of them, they were so fast, but the impression she got was slim and bladelike. Thunder reached her ears a few seconds later, and as she and her bodyguards crept forward she realized that a new black pillar was now boiling upwards some distance away.

“It’s not safe out here!” Uku’s oldest bodyguard announced fervently, raising his voice over the echoing sounds of destruction.

“It must be witnessed!” Uku retorted. Whatever this was, whatever was happening… it was epochal. The Chant demanded that a Librarian should see it with her own eyes.

There were a series of sharp explosions and the rattle of what could only be weapons fire from nearby, and Uku was immediately pushed to the back of the group, into the shadows where she could be rushed away through the tunnels if the Punishers happened upon them…

Instead, something new rounded the corner. The penitents shrank back in fear, Uku among them, but they were not immediately set upon and slaughtered. Instead, the new… things… noticed them, one of them touched the side of its head, spoke words that Uku didn’t understand, and they moved on. As they did, the one that had spoken gestured sharply at Uku and her bodyguards, pointing firmly back into the tunnels.

The meaning couldn’t have been clearer. ‘Go back. Not safe here.’ And this time, Uku could say nothing to explain. How could she? If this thing spoke her language, it would have… well, spoken.

With no communication possible, how could she possibly let it know what the Chant demanded? Would doing so have been safe, even if she could? Even now, the fear boiling inside her was that this was all some elaborate torment designed to add a cruel new twist to the Punishment.

So rather than try to argue, she committed the thing’s form to memory, thought about how to describe it.

Under its thick protective clothing, she judged it to be tall and lithe, though its legs and arms were slightly short in proportion to its body. It looked a little ungainly and slow when it walked, though when it clipped its weapon to its chest and dropped down to all fours to catch up with the others it became a creature of easy, flowing motion.

Other than that, the details were hard to see. It was entirely covered in armor and heavy mottled cloth, with lots of equipment pouches and pockets on top. The mask covering its face had given nothing away.

But they weren’t immediately descending gleefully on the Penitents and devouring them. That was an unheard-of blessing in its own right.

“…I’ve seen enough,” Uku decided. “Back to the Library.”

With tangible relief, they left the sky behind them again. There would be time later to meet these new things properly. Maybe it would still be a slaughter when they did.

But maybe it wouldn’t. And that was more than Uku could have said yesterday. As they scurried back down into the warrens to comparative safety, she found that the hope in her belly wasn’t a sickly little flicker any longer. Now it was dense and heavy, and felt like it was coiling up her throat to choke her.

She didn’t dare let it warm her, yet. Hope was a kind of poison, in Uku’s experience. But it wouldn’t go away.

All she could do was wait and see.

Date Point: 16y11m2d AV
Private Apartments of the Great Father, High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Garaaf, Father of Clan Whitecrest

“…It’s been a long time.”

Personal invitations from the Great Father for a day of hunting and sport were decidedly rare. It was Champions and heads of state who usually received such hospitality, not haggard old Fathers of martial Clans. That the invitation also came from the all-but-certain future Great Mother was unheard of.

They were sending a hell of a signal of esteem, and that was a thing which would make anyone nervous. But Garaaf was a grizzled Father of Whitecrest, and that meant the reason for his invitation could only be one thing: terrible duty.

They met him at the base of the Fortress’s tallest tower, where Garaaf was subjected to Daar’s infamously boisterous affection. Of course, Garaaf was no stranger to those spine-creaking hugs and Daar’s relentlessly excitable cheer. What was different…was the maturity.

Young Daar wasn’t so young any longer. Wasn’t so blissfully happy, either. Garaaf had known the Great Father for a time, through his close relationship with Regaari and through watching him become Stoneback’s youngest Stud-Prime ever, tied for their youngest Champion.

There was a weight of care on his brow now, a crown that rested heavily there even when it wasn’t, in fact, being worn. He had the air of worries that a kinder life would have spared him, though by the look and smell of him, he was more vigorous and healthy than ever.

He’d grown, too. Substantially. He’d always been a rangy and athletic giant, but now he’d transformed himself both physically and figuratively into an unequaled embodiment of power.

It suited him, Garaaf found himself thinking a bit uneasily. Because if not Daar…then who?

And then there was Naydra, who achieved with grace, poise and warmth what Daar achieved with size, strength and claws. Though Garaaf had never met her, she welcomed him into their private world like a friend. Garaaf would have guessed he’d be immune to charm like that and was a little bemused to find that, in fact, he wasn’t.

Daar chittered at Garaaf’s greeting. “Figgered you wouldn’t stand on ceremony,” he said.

Garaaf duck-nodded and bowed slightly in respect. “I doubt you’d like it if I did.”

“Eh, a ‘Back gets used to it. Whatever people need, yijao?”

“That seems… more accommodating of you than I’d been led to expect.”

“Oh? What tales are they tellin’ ‘bout me these days?”

Garaaf chose to answer diplomatically. “Oh, most good, some a bit more excitable…”

“Well, I do tend ‘ta scare most people I meet no matter how friendly I try ‘ta be, so…”

“Their nervousness might have more to do with how you have needed to, ah, resolve certain problems among leadership.” Which was as politely as Garaaf could possibly put it. The people in general loved the Great Father for all he’d done and all he’d sacrificed to save the Gao. But they also feared him, not necessarily because of his sheer stupendous presence, but because he’d repeatedly demonstrated his complete and total willingness to wield that immense power of his to destroy anything—or anyone—who became a hindrance to the Gao’s interests.

That he’d personally obliterated two impressive Champions and their equally impressive Grandfathers without so much as a grunt of effort didn’t help matters in the Conclave, either. Or so the reports had gone. Conclaves were always secretive affairs. But there was no denying the mangled corpses that had twice come from their meetings.

Daar didn’t flinch from any of the implications. Instead he challenged Garaaf directly. “That’s a polite way ‘ta talk about me murderin’ a pair o’ dangerous Champions.”

“An impolite way seemed imprudent.”

“Was that ‘cuz ‘yer afraid I might jus’ do the same t’you?”

“Not without provocation I think, but this is a test, and many of the tests I’ve been through in the past turned out to be deadly. Such a life tends to make one… perhaps excessively wary.”

“You ain’t needed ‘ta fear ‘fer anythin’ from me, Garaaf. You ain’t a threat to the Gao.”

“Knowing something in your head is not the same as knowing it in your heart, My Father. And I think that bothers you, doesn’t it?”

That was maybe a bit daring, but Garaaf was old, and he could afford to test the Great Father too, maybe just a little. It paid to know one’s leadership, after all.

“…Yeah. I don’t mind bein’ dominant an’ intimidatin’…not so much a fan of bein’ a terror.”

“Well…if it makes you feel better, I’m only a little terrified of you.”

Daar chittered again, and glanced at the Mother-Consort. “Toldya. Honest an’ tactful!”

She chittered too, and gestured toward the doorway at the base of the tower. “You’re not one for ceremony and titles, are you Father Garaaf?”

“I respect the roles, and the people filling them,” Garaaf replied evenly. “When I first heard there even was a Great Father, I knew our people were in trouble up to our ears, and when I heard who he was… well. It was a surprise.”

“Came as a surprise ‘ta me, too,” Daar rumbled. “Yulna pulled out somethin’ there that woulda made Keeda himself laugh his tail off an’ fall in love with her.”

Garaaf allowed a small echo of a chitter himself. “But no, to answer your question directly. I’ll not burden either of you with more pomp and ceremony than is strictly required.”

“Thank you,” Naydra replied, and Garaaf could tell that it was more than just polite acknowledgement: she was sincerely grateful.

“Y’ever rounded up free-range naxas before, Garaaf?”

“I can’t say that I have… should I presume I’m about to?”

“Yup.” Daar rolled on four-paw toward the steps. “My herd needs time out on the moorlands, but you gotta bring ‘em back in now an’ then ‘ta check on ‘em. So that’s what we’re doin’.”

This was not entirely unexpected from Garaaf’s perspective, and nor was it an idle waste of time on the Great Father’s part. Clearly he was taking the matter of the ‘Mordor’ natives very seriously indeed, so rather than just summoning Garaaf and giving him a job, Daar wanted a chance to sniff out whether he really was the right candidate for the job.

Which was fair. Garaaf had already been a well-respected Father of his Clan when Daar first crashed into the stratified social world of the Clans, and he knew there was now rather a hefty imbalance in how much they knew about each other. While Garaaf had a full psychological profile and his own extensive observations to work with, Daar surely had less.

Perhaps that was where Naydra came in. She was less of a known quantity, even to Whitecrest. After all, who could spy on the love of Daar’s life and still claim to be sensible?

And in any case, Garaaf had never herded naxas. Nor hunted kwek, or any other waterfowl, which turned out to be what Daar wanted to do after the naxas were safely back in the corral.

Garaaf learned three things: firstly, that herding was an endurance trial like he had rarely experienced, and he’d found himself with a newfound respect for the rural Clanless who did that for their livelihoods; secondly, he learned the best thing for brushing naxas dung out of fur turned out to be dilute vinegar; and thirdly, that he was in danger of being upstaged by Naydra. She never missed a shot, and she retrieved with a grace that had to be seen to be believed.

Daar was of course an excellent shooter as well, but he clearly preferred charging through the field at a fantastic clip, flushing and then fetching the game, or in a few instances leaping high above Garaaf’s height to catch a pond-kobu mid-flight in his jaws, just out of the sheer joy of outdoor exercise, apparently. Whenever it was his turn he proceeded with just that extra bit of zeal and seemed to relish in the opportunity to preen for his ‘Naydi.’

By the time they flew back to the fortress, Garaaf was beginning to feel the ache in all of his joints. Daar showed him some mercy, though: they went back up to the apartments where hopefully, finally, they would attend to business rather than pleasure…

Though of course, the whole afternoon had been a blend of both, from Daar’s perspective.

“Y’know ‘yer lucky, Garaaf,” he commented as they entered to find the small knee-table well laden with meat cuts and steamed buns. “I was hopin’ ‘ta play wif’ ‘ya in my gym too…but that’d be a bit too on-the-nose, even ‘fer me. ‘Ya got Naydi here ‘ta thank!”

“And I am sincerely grateful for that. My ego isn’t so grand as to think it could hope to keep up.”

“I think you’d surprise yourself,” Naydra commented. “It’s not often that somebody weathers one of these afternoons without a squeak of complaint!”

Daar duck-nodded happily. “Yeah! I think ‘ya did damn good. Y’know. ‘Fer an’ older silverfur.”

Ah. He’d even said it with a respectful tone, but there was no disguising the bluntness of the Great Father’s concern.

“Not so old as… worn and torn, really,” Garaaf replied. “I think I have plenty of years in me still.”

“I think it adds a lovely character, myself,” Naydra agreed.

Garaaf flicked the stub of his left ear and duck-nodded appreciatively. “Mother, I’ve learned to take compliments when and where I can, so again: thank you.”

Naydra looked pleased, and Daar too: Garaaf had been charming, but not flirtatious. She duck-nodded, gestured for him to sit, and went to retrieve a tea set. Amazing how that had caught on so quickly, at least among the powerful and influential.

Daar sat first, picking a couch which was clearly built to handle him unlike most furniture, and picked up a bun by skewering it with his claw. “We’re invading a second Hunter planet,” he said, launching into the reason for Garaaf’s presence with an abruptness that might have been stunning if Garaaf hadn’t been waiting for it.

Garaaf sat opposite him, and took a cut of well-cured naxas. Probably from the very same herd he’d been wrangling only a few hours before. “Yes. One with native sophonts, I understand.”

“I want you to make first contact. I won’t order it, you deserve a less…stressful life. But.”

Suddenly, the enjoyable hunting ordeal made much more sense. Daar wanted to see if Garaaf could hack the upcoming field work, could adapt quickly to novel situations…observe his interactions with Naydra…

Clever.

Garaaf tilted his head as Naydra returned with the tea. “First contact is… a little outside of my field.”

“There are very few who can claim to be an expert,” Naydra said. “Mother Shoo and her partners, a Human named Daniel Hurt… and that, frankly, is the end of the list, unless you count another Human by the name of Kevin Jenkins. You see the problem.”

Garaaf duck-nodded. “None of them are Gaoian.”

“No. And while you may not be an expert on first contact, you are an expert on evading and surviving the Hunters in their own territory.”

“That’s enough common cause with the natives ‘fer me,” Daar opined. “Not sayin’ it’ll make the job easy but it’s something.”

Garaaf sighed. He was going to do it, he knew. But he had questions. “…Do we know how long they were enslaved?”

“No idea. Long enough ‘ta poison the hell outta their planet.”

“That’s enough time to completely destroy their culture. For all we know they worship the Hunters and are fanatically loyal to them.”

“Could be,” Daar agreed. “Could not be. That’d be one of the things you’d have ‘ta figger out.”

“And if they are fanatically loyal to the Hunters?”

Daar sat back in his couch. “…Then we’ll hafta cure ‘em of that.”

There was an ominous finality to that statement that Garaaf chose not to draw attention to.

“We won’t know what to do with them until after we have a definite answer, one way or another,” Naydra pointed out.

“No. I presume you’ll want me to leave promptly?”

“Yeah. My unnerstandin’ is ‘yer Clan’s ops teams have been gettin’ a head start on ‘yer equipment, an’ they’ve got several teammates staged up ‘yer likely to ‘preciate. But mission command is ‘yers, if ‘ya want it.”

“I do. Always promised I’d die with my teeth in a Hunter’s throat. Anything less than that doesn’t sit right. Depriving them of their slaves sounds… satisfying.”

Daar’s expression was just as ferally eager as Garaaf’s own. “Good. ‘Fer now, stay an’ eat. Prob’ly be ‘yer last bit o’ comfort ‘fer a while. Make the most of it. Balls, spend th’ night! Naydi’s got an engagement wif th’ Females anyway, so I’ll be here, all alone, nobody ‘ta cuddle…”

Garaaf chittered. “If that’s just an invitation then I’ll gratefully decline,” he said. “This is going to be a big mission. Better to get on it as soon as possible.”

“I’d rather I send ‘ya off well-fed an’ well-rested, but I ain’t gonna tell ‘ya how ‘ta run ‘yer hunt.”

“I’ve rested for a long time… My Father.” Garaaf added a little weight to the title. “And I’m sure I won’t arrive on that planet the second I walk out that door. So, I’m grateful for your hospitality, but I’d rather go sink my teeth into the Hunters.”

“Done that. Ain’t much fun. They taste like too-ripe nava.”

“I know.”

Daar duck-nodded seriously. “…Yeah. You would. Very well then. Good hunting.” With that, the Great Father stood, nodded serenely, and then quite literally thumped his way downstairs.

If Garaaf were to indulge a guess, probably towards the gym after all.

He didn’t get to escape empty-handed. Naydra insisted on packing him a boxed meal, and she escorted him to the shuttle pad with a wrapped selection of biscuits and meat for the flight.

And maybe a wrapped selection of inspiring words, too.

“You impressed,” she said. “There aren’t many who’d politely refuse Daar’s hospitality.”

“Most are too afraid to refuse him anything. Which I think is something he desperately hates.”

Naydra duck-nodded. “…It’s been a pleasure to meet somebody else who isn’t cowed by him. Good luck, Garaaf.”

She went back indoors, and Garaaf boarded his shuttle. There was a sparse summary of the Mordor natives waiting for him. He memorized it before they even took off, and sat back to eat in thoughtful silence.

What did generations under the Hunters do to a culture? In his experience, the ordeal destroyed them. Too many of the unfortunates aboard the hive had been barely more than animals, driven uncivilized by fear, deprivation, and for lack of even a basic education.

These natives were different. He’d never seen them on the ring, so they meant something more to the Hunters than just food. They made things, existed in some kind of a transactional relationship with their cybernetically monstrous overlords… even if that transaction did sometimes involve being slaughtered. Could it be that the Hunters valued them in some way? Not as people, obviously—Hunters barely valued themselves, let alone so-called prey—but as a resource…

Something told him the battle for Mordor was going to grow fierce, and quickly. But at least he’d be there to do his part. So, with nothing else to do while he flew, he called up the files from first contact with the Dominion, Humans and Ten’Gewek, and began to study them. He was a Whitecrest after all, and his pride forbade him from approaching this moment without due preparation.

He had a job to do.

He was going to do it well.

Date Point: 16y11m2d AV
’Mordor’ System, Hunter Space

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

Rage.

That one single emotion was making it hard to think. It was bouncing around the whole Hunter intercommunications network, from brain to brain, picking up ferocity and fervor with every repetition.

The Builder was doing its best to filter out the noise and focus, but the network was intended to resonate and whip all those connected to it into a frenzy when a sufficiently powerful stimulus came along to unite them. That was part of the design. Eaters were at their most effective when the feedback mechanism whipped them into a frothing bloodlust.

In this instance, however, it was backfiring. Impotent anger was ricocheting around the whole swarm. Several ships had approached the system shields and taken to attacking them with their boarding cutters, fusion-edged blades scrabbling futilely over a dense electromagnetic wall of hardened photons.

One of the Sport Worlds—the most industrially productive of them, no less, with a whole captive slave-species—was under attack, and the fur-faces of all creatures were leading the charge. On the ground, they were spreading out from an expanding series of jump portals, taking and holding ground and fighting almost like deathworlders.

In the sky… they had sandwiched a narrow range of planetary orbits between impenetrable shields. Inside that orbital range, their ships were safe… and they could open microsecond gaps in the lower shields to fire on Hunter resources in lower orbits, atmospheric flight, and on the ground.

The Hunters still owned the rest, but they may as well have tried to gnaw on tungsten for all the progress they were making with that shield. The one around the Human homeworld had never been thwarted. The ones around the Large Prey worlds had only been defeated with inside assistance. Every time the Hunters encountered these shields, they represented an impossible obstacle, and the Builders had yet to come up with a solution.

Had they been ordinary shielding systems, overcoming them would have been straightforward. But these shields powered themselves using a respectable percentage of a star’s energy output, and handled waste heat with baffling efficiency. Their operating principles were unknown to the Builders, and therefore so was the means of their defeat.

That left no good options. Setting up new wormhole defenses would take time, and would be vulnerable to orbital strike. Out-system assets were useless, and the fur-faces could strike with impunity across their shields. Reinforcements planetside were ultimately futile, though there was the possibility of retrieving valuable assets—

Until the fur-faces brought in their capital ship. Hardly a moment after it arrived, all data feeds surrounding the planet went silent.

As vexing as this development was, it came with a moment of welcome silence for the Builder. The only signals reaching it now were from its own kind: clearer, colder, more calculating. Without all that anguished emotional noise getting in the way, it could think again.

It realized it had grown so sympathetically angry that it had not run through the methodical approach it usually would have. If the biggest problem was currently insoluble, examine smaller and smaller problems until one presented itself which could be addressed.

The planet was, for the moment inaccessible. But that left a whole star system, and there were resources aplenty here. The Hunters still had asteroid mining operations, still had access to the outer and inner planets…. Still controlled the star itself.

Could any of those be leveraged? System shields easily handled comet impacts, so the rocky bodies in the outer system were most likely worthless as weapons…

A possibility germinated. One that warranted investigation. One that, at the wild extremes of the Builder’s imagination, offered a most delicious variety of options. It would not normally have considered such an extreme avenue of research… But these were extreme times.

The Alpha-of-Alphas issued a command. And, seeing its intent, the Builders obeyed.

Let the Eaters gnaw at the shield. With a shift and a lurch, the Alpha-of-Alphas’ command ship jumped to an in-system beacon near the sun, and flew inwards.

Date Point: 16y11m3d AV
Planet ‘Mordor,’ Hunter space

Ginn, Foot-soldier first class, Grand Army of the Gao

Ginn’s protective gear itched. In fact, it itched maddeningly, to the point where he could kind of understand the idiots who’d taken it off for a good scratch, even though they were now enduring all the wonders and joys of decontamination and medical intervention back at the clawhold.

Clan Openpaw’s war doctors weren’t gentle, or considerate. They wielded their razors and wax strips without concern for the unfortunate soldier’s protests: Every hair had to go. Something to do with heavy metal contamination building up in the follicles.

Not many gaoians could pull off the shaved look, either. At least they’d be back to normal in a few weeks. But nobody ever came back from that treatment and took their gear off a second time.

Ginn had been trapped in his gear for three straight days, now. He dreamed of a dust bath and a proper grooming. Relief was coming in the form of airlocked tents, but they had to get their emplacements taken care of first. Nobody got to sleep in comfort until they were safe against the Hunters.

The Hunters kept harassing the construction machinery, too. A big heavily-armored bulldozer might be great for pushing dirt and rubble around, but as far as the Hunters were concerned it was a giant target, and the hapless operators inside were a snack.

So, that was Ginn’s job: protecting giant, slow-moving, very visible targets.

So far, the Hunter attacks had been more like exploratory prods. They appeared, they hit hard, then faded the second they met serious resistance.

Their officers were getting tired of that piddling kwekshit, and had decided to do something about it.

“We’re going to start patrols along a three klick band extending outward from the base, paying particular attention to the river that runs to the southwest,” they’d said.

The words ‘river’ and ‘runs’ were being used generously there. Sure, it was liquid, and it flowed… It was just more viscous and corrosive than any river Ginn was familiar with. And yellow. Insanely, the Hunters were quite happy to cross it, usually by taking a running jump, but they’d been observed fording it on long cybernetic stilts too. It didn’t seem to slow them down much.

Just looking at the damn thing made Ginn itch even worse. He hoped it was just in his head, and not some kinda protective gear failure. He really didn’t wanna get shaved.

Movement on the far bank put his itching hide straight to the back of his mind. He was manning the top gun on his claw’s Growl armored vehicle, and promptly swung it around to face the disturbance.

The natives made things… complicated. They kept sneaking up out of their tunnels and bunkers to check on the situation topside, and seeing as their language wasn’t known to the translators’ database there was nothing either species could do to talk with one another right now… and for now, the natives hadn’t come out of hiding long enough to actually make first contact.

But they were present, and they meant that Ginn had to be absolutely certain that the movement he was seeing was a Hunter before he could fire on it.

It was. But not like any Hunter he’d seen before. It was huge, as big as an IFV all by itself, and it smashed a stunted, terminally ill tree aside as it charged out of concealment and launched itself clean across the river with an earth-shaking thrust of its armored legs and a burst from four howling kinetic thrusters for good measure. It slammed into the patrol’s lead vehicle and shoved it sideways across the trail: the Growl sagged as one of its axles broke, and was left half-spun across the trail as its gunner desperately ducked a fusion-claw swipe that would have ripped him in half.

The Hunter ignored him, and started peeling the Growl apart like a ripe fruit.

“CONTACT FORWARD!” Ginn yelled, superfluously but as per training. His weapon sector covered the Growl, which meant there was only one thing to do. He loaded an EMP shieldbreaker round into his grenade launcher, pulled mightily on the charging handle…and bounced it right off the Hunter’s head.

There wasn’t much electronic on a Growl, and what little there was lived in huge, chunky metal boxes clearly designed for some giant Stoneback fuck rather than normal people. They could handle EMP just fine, and the way the Hunter’s shielding flashed violently told Ginn his round had discharged properly.

Unfortunately, it seemed the Hunter’s systems were pretty hardened too. The grenade irritated it rather than harming it, and it turned the twisted cybernetic stump of an arm in Ginn’s direction, along with the heavy weapon mounted thereon. A storm of fat, heavy rounds sparked and flashed off his Growl’s armor.

Ginn bared his teeth behind his mask, trusted the shielding around his turret, and continued firing. He scored two, three, four more hits before the Hunter decided it wasn’t interested in the lead vehicle any longer. It delivered a parting swipe that left a partially molten gouge down the Growl’s armor and pushed it a couple paces through the mud, then pounced on Ginn’s vehicle.

A seething fusion claw sank into the armor plating in front of the turret like red-hot steel into ice. Ginn ducked down inside as another claw scalped the turret right off the roof, smashing them aside. He landed on his back, scrabbling on his chest for the carbine strapped there, and fired it upward as the Hunter worked its claws in through the ragged hole where his gun had been and started to tear the Growl open.

Somebody grabbed the back of Ginn’s armor and heaved: he was pulled out the back of the Growl by the scruff of his neck, getting clear just as one of the big Hunter’s limbs speared down and pinned their armored vehicle to the ground right through where Ginn’s belly had been.

Ginn twisted onto four-paw and retreated along with his Brothers as the Hunter wrenched its claws loose from their stricken ride with a squeal of abused metal, and casually swatted the wreckage aside. Behind it, Ginn could see somebody heaving himself out of the shattered first vehicle, weak and covered in blood.

They needed distance. No, balls, they needed to get the fuck out! They didn’t have weapons for this, and their officer wasn’t stupid.

“Fall back, point Ayu!”

Ginn and his buddies didn’t need telling twice. They retreated, sowing grenades in their wake to try and slow the Hunter. At least he’d succeeded at taking its shields down, because the big fucker actually turned and raised a limb to protect its face from fragmentation, slowing its advance.

A vulnerability.

“The eyes! Go for the eyes!!” Ginn roared, and followed his own advice. The Hunter’s head jerked and weaved as his rounds sparked off and around the plating around its seven sensor clusters: its gun-arm came up to ward off the shots, proving for definite that it was worried about damage to its eyes and head.

Byoo, a burly foot-soldier of obvious Emberpelt heritage, had a man-portable machine gun as his personal weapon. He didn’t often get to point it at a bad guy and hold down the trigger.

He did now.

Having an entire ammo belt sent into one’s eyes couldn’t be all that pleasant, and it certainly persuaded the Hunter to reconsider its approach. Instead of charging at them in a cybernetic blur as it had done just moments before, it advanged cautiously, hunkered down and shielding its most vulnerable spot.

Then it paused. It glanced back down the column, to where two more of its kind were meeting similar resistance… and as one, the three monsters retreated. They shimmered like water, vanished from sight behind the mirage-haze of personal cloaking devices, and the last that Ginn saw of them was their clawmarks in the muddy trail and the crash and sway of foliage on the far side of the river as they leapt over it and fled.

A pair of voidrippers explained the sudden retreat when they hammered past a few heartbeats later. The Unseen keep and bless close air.

Still… they were too late for too many of the unit. Now that Ginn had the chance to look around, he realized that he’d survived a bloodbath. All but one of the Growls were ruined, many of their occupants mown down by the Hunters’ guns or dismembered by their claws and teeth.

Their officer’s voice came through the helmet radio, steely and authoritative. “QRF inbound, cubs! Prep for CASEVAC, we’ve just gotta hold out a couple minutes!”

It was a tense, busy wait. Even with the voidrippers overhead to watch over them, there wasn’t a single member of the patrol who could feel anything less than shaken and vulnerable after an assault like that.

Casualties were… well, there were a couple of wounded, but those Hunters had mostly either killed outright, or failed to even scratch. There wasn’t much middle ground. Ginn watched the medics’ backs as they tended to injured, and counted himself lucky he wasn’t among the dead. He’d come far too close.

The Quick Reaction Force were Stonebacks, mostly, plus a slim wraith of a Whitecrest in that Clan’s light active-camo dropsuit. They arrived in an air transport and had the scene secured in a moment: Ginn managed to overcome his curiosity and kept his eyes, ears and nose open for danger while the dead and wounded were loaded onto the transports first, and the Whitecrest sniffed around the battlefield taking pictures, making sensor readings and apparently replaying the whole sequence of events just from marks, tracks and evidence in the ground.

The Stonebacks were full of garrulous kindness, and even praise.

“They sent the nasty fucks after ‘ya,” said one absolute mountain of a male in a chest-shakingly deep grumble. “Y’all did damn well, considerin’.”

“Doesn’t feel that way right now…” Ginn muttered, watching the CASEVAC take off with more than a few of his friends in it.

“Yeah.” Ginn felt himself being pulled into a friendly sideways hug, one which was mercifully quick. And the Stoneback won his immediate gratitude for not saying anything more, or trying to make him feel better.

Ginn was on the last transport out. He was unharmed, able-bodied, still calm and alert. It wasn’t until they were in the air en route back to the clawhold that he started to really understand what he’d just been through…

There was no mockery or disdain from the Stonebacks, though. In fact, he’d never felt more understood.

But then and there, on that flight, he let go of worrying about surviving this war. It was a clear, cold, sharp sort of moment, but it set him free. Whatever came would come, and he’d meet it. And if it killed him, so be it. It was as the Great Father willed.

But the Hunters wouldn’t take him down without a fight.

Date Point: 417th Year of the Punishment
Library bunker at Old-Bent-Leg, the Great Ruin

Ukusevi, Librarian and Keeper of the Long Chant

“Keeper! Keeper!!”

Uku woke from restless, bizarre dreams of the Before. Normally, those dreams brought her a measure of peace and comfort. She knew so much about the Before, having memorized everything the Chant said about it, that her imagination always fancied it could bring it to life in the dark behind her eyes.

Maybe it was a delusion. But normally, she found those dreams restful, but this time when she imagined the fine brick buildings and majestic, clean steam-powered tools her ancestors had made for themselves rather than the poisonous engines the Punishment forced upon them… this time she had seen strange figures in sealed clothing prowl the streets with weapons, and the Punishers clinging to the sky above.

She sat up, and her journal slipped off her pillow and fell to the floor. She recovered it and set it on a table with a whispered prayer of apology before answering the knock on the door. Books were precious, and new books that a Keeper could actually write in were… She revered them.

With the precious tome safely away from any dust, dirt and damp which might accumulate on the floor, she opened the door to her room and peered out. “…Yes?”

The boy outside chattered his teeth nervously at her. “One of the newcomers, Keeper. It’s… here. I think it wants to talk.”

Ukusevi stared at him for a second, then gestured her understanding with a jerk of her head. “…I will… note its coming in my journal,” she said. “And then I will come.”

“Yes, Keeper…” The boy scurried away. Uku watched him go, then closed the door and leaned against it heavily, turning her face upwards to the ceiling and the sky beyond.

“…Have we been punished enough, Lord?” she asked, quietly. “Is this deliverance?”

The stones didn’t answer her, nor did they shake with words of divine forgiveness. Not that she’d expected them to. So she took a deep breath, and opened her journal.

There was no such thing as scribbling a note in a Keeper’s journal. Even the hastiest, shortest entry was a record for the future, the memory of a moment that other Keepers would learn, and maybe enter into the Chant. It was, to Uku’s way of thinking, the highest kind of sacrilege to record carelessly and illegibly. So her visitor, whatever he she or it would turn out to be, could wait while she first meditated upon, and then inscribed, a few careful sentences on the page.

With that, there was no delaying any longer. She put on her cleanest robes, groomed her ears and face, chattered her teeth nervously together to compose herself, and then swept out to meet their new visitor.

It had a bodyguard, just like she did when she ventured to the surface. Those were dark, quiet, dangerous things like moving shadows, who stayed behind him and almost blended into the background. The guest, however, wore loose cloth over his protective gear. It was humbler than she’d expected—a simple gray wrapping, already bleached and stained from the poisons outside—but it still made the newcomer seem less fearsome than the ones behind it.

It had no weapon, too. Though Uku was quite sure it didn’t need one.

They stared at each other for a long moment after she arrived, in quiet. She could hear its breath hissing through some kind of valves or filters in its mask. Its ears—the guests had ears like the Penitents’, though shorter—swivelled back and forth expressively for a moment, and then it raised a hand to its face.

The mask came off with a click and a brief hiss of air pressures settling. The mask’s owner shook its head, sharply, and allowed the mask to dangle down its front.

The face Uku looked into was… familiar, in some ways. Familiar enough to be alarmingly ugly from scars and old wounds. And she trembled to see that their guest’s mouth was full of sharp meat-tearing fangs.

Its hands—more like paws, really—were full of a book, however. And without yet trying to speak, it took a half-step forward, and offered the book to Uku.

Ukusevi could hardly believe it. Numbly, she reached out, then paused, fearful that she had misunderstood this stranger’s intent. Its ears tilted slightly, then it ducked its head and placed the book in her palms before stepping back.

…What a book! Bound in black, embossed with a logo of some kind that looked rather like the newcomer’s own head over a crescent moon. The pages inside were perfectly neat and even, covered with a faint grid of regular blue dots, and the paper was crisper and whiter than any she’d seen before. She’d never held a treasure remotely like it.

The visitor spread his palm and laid it across his chest.

“Garr-avf.”

It was a guttural word, nearly all of it made at the back of the mouth except for the final sound where he was forced to flash his teeth. Uku couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable with those teeth. They were so very different from the jagged broken-glass things that filled a Punisher’s mouth, and yet so clearly designed for a similar purpose.

But he—she decided the visitor must be male, though she honestly wasn’t certain—had come peacefully, and brought her a priceless treasure like none she’d ever held. Teeth or not, that made him…

…What? A friend? No. She would not dare hope for that much. But he was no Punisher. So she spread her own fingers, pressed them to her own chest in imitation of his gesture and spoke her own name.

“Ukusevi.”

“ Ookoo-suvi.” His mouth didn’t fit the word right. But it was close enough. He reached into a bag on his hip and produced a fist-sized shiny black cube, which he considered for a moment before muttering something in his own language.

To Uku’s immense surprise, the cube spoke a few garbled words of her own tongue. Most of it was nonsense, but the words “hope…. worth…paid for it…” came through. Garr-avf seemed just as surprised as she was, if she judged rightly from the way his stubby, ruined ears moved.

“Huh.” He looked her in the eye, made a curious ducking, shrugging motion, and sat on the floor. He spoke clearly and carefully, and a moment later the cube did its thing again.

“We speak. It learn words.”

Uku nodded her understanding, then turned to the boys behind her. “…Fetch my pens,” she instructed. “Carefully.”

There was only one thing she could possibly record in a book like the one he’d given her. So she waited, itching to ask the most burning question, while the boys darted away to fetch her pens. They were back swiftly, and she sat too, opened the book to its first page and, with a glance at Garr-avf to confirm that she was free to write in it, she put pen to page.

It accepted the ink gracefully and smoothly, held it well. The pen flowed easily over the paper, leaving behind clear letters.

‘Librarian and Keeper Ukusevi records that today is the four hundred and seventeenth year of the Punishment,’ she wrote. ‘The third day since the towers fell and new people came to wage war on the Punishers. And a guest has come. He—I believe him to be male, though in truth I do not know—gave me this book as a greeting, and named himself as…’ here she switched to the phonetic alphabet that Keepers used to record the exact pronunciation of a word, right down to its accents and intonations. She noted Garr-avf’s name, tested it silently in her mouth to be sure she’d recorded it exactly as she had heard it, then nodded to herself.

‘I do not know how his tools know our language already, but they do in a crude fashion. He says, quote: “We speak, It learn words.” So we shall converse. But first, I must ask the question that has burned my insides from the moment these newcomers first appeared…’

She looked him firmly in the eye.

“…Are you here to save us?” she asked.

Garr-avf’s reply was simple, direct, and left no room for doubt. And finally, the hope that had made Uku feel so sick in the preceding days turned into genuine relief and wonder. He duck-nodded his head again, looked her back just as firmly, and spoke a single word.

“Yes.”

Date Point: 16y11m3d AV
Clawhold, planet Mordor, Hunter space

Fiin, Champion of Stoneback

“The same model from the ring?”

“Same general design. Some upgrades. The HEAT and First fang had Keeda’s ass of a time with the first model, and now we’re seeing several of them. They won’t brave our anti-armor, but they can cut a Growl open like I’d gut a kwek.”

“Casualties?” Fiin asked.

“…Significant.” Father Giru growled and flicked his ear. “They’re shy about letting us shoot their heads, but those shields of theirs can take a couple of EM grenades before failing. Plenty of time for them to cause mayhem before they retreat, and the voidrippers can’t catch them once they’re cloaked.”

“How many are there?”

“Maybe two dozen that we know of. Hard to tell: they’re fast. Minimum of eighteen. More soon, probably.”

Fiin considered his map. “We need to get our own armor on the field in response.”

“Our own armor’s a lot slower, Champion. The Hunters will run circles around them.”

“I need options, Father. If I assign claws to the Grand Army, that severely limits what we can do elsewhere.”

Giru made a thoughtful noise. “…Refitting the Growls might help. A different weapon. The EM rounds drop their shields and make ‘em skittish, but from what I’ve seen so far the best counter to these nutless fucks is to send a sackload of bullets their way. They’re not that heavily armored once you’re past the shielding.”

“So…bigger guns, more bullets, more EMP grenades. Still gonna be a meat grinder.”

“Those fusion claws take our armor apart. And they’re quick enough to close the distance if they ambush from cloak, and while they’re cloaked we can’t see ‘em. Wish I had a good option for you, My Champion, but the only solution I can see is up-gunning the Growls.”

Fiin restrained a sigh. Hopefully the Whitecrests would succeed in bagging one and then they’d have a more direct counter, but until then Giru was right. There wasn’t an ideal fix, just a step in the right direction.

“…Right. Make it so. I want every Growl comin’ through the Arrays from now on to have the meanest, biggest guns we can fit on ‘em. While we’re at it, re-deploy Third Fang as direct attach to the patrolling claws. If we can swing it, I want ‘em able to respond in a few heartbeats. Get First Fang on hot standby too, and get ‘ em ready for big game hunting.”

“Yes, My Champion!” Giru ducked his head respectfully, and departed.

That was one order of business addressed, at least. Fiin shook himself to try and relieve some of the itching under his protective gear, then turned to the next issue.

“Any news from Father Garaaf?”

“He’s made peaceful contact, Champion.”

“Good…” Well, that was one fewer concern at least. Not that Fiin had been really worried that the natives would turn out to be fanatically loyal to the Hunters, but it was good to know that there was a dialogue happening.

Back to the Huntertanks. Those were by far the worst threat to his invasion, which meant he needed to attack them, decisively. To do that, however, he needed to know where they were coming from.

He contacted Fourth Fang. Their motto—‘Sniff Around a Bit’—was entirely relevant right now, and indeed missions like identifying the source of an enemy armored force was exactly what they were for.

They had leads, thanks to the JETS team. With luck, one of those would be a jackpot.

It had better be.

Date Point: 16y11m3d AV
Tunnel warren near the Clawhold, Planet Mordor, Hunter Space

Garaaf, Father of Clan Whitecrest

Ukusevi reminded Garaaf of some of the other aliens he’d seen during his time aboard the ring. Many had been broken by the knowledge of where they were, what was inevitably to become of them, what they saw around them every day…

…Others, however, had hardened into something hot and sharp. Those had been the ones who dreamed of a slave uprising, who stockpiled resources against tomorrow, who tried to find places to hide where the Hunters could not find them. He’d been one such himself.

The difference was, Ukusevi was more than just a person. She was a walking, talking, passionate library. Her faculties of recollection were staggering, and the precision and clarity with which she recounted her people’s history was… well, Garaaf hadn’t expected half so much. Though a lot of what she shared was more than a little alarming.

For one thing, there was the literal translation of her species’ name. As a rule, a species only named themselves once they became conscious of the existence of other intelligences, and so the word “Gao” for instance served both for the species, and for the planet where Gao lived. The same went for the Rauwryhr, the Locayl and the Robalin. There were a lot of xenopsychology papers on what it meant for a species to use the same word to refer both to themselves and their homeworld, and the degree of connection such behaviour implied, but Garaaf had hitherto considered most of them to be speculative nonsense.

He was beginning to reevaluate that opinion.

Most species had a self-name that more-or-less just translated as “Us” or “people,” and then a word for their homeworld that effectively meant “place where the people live.” That was the Guvnurag, the Vzk’tk, the Chehnash, the Versa Volc… and the Corti, whose homeworld-name “Origin” was perhaps the most bluntly on-the-nose of anyone’s.

Humans and Ten’Gewek shared a quirk in that their homeworld-names mentioned their species only obliquely at best. The latter lived on All-Things-Under-Sky-Place, while the English word Earth had more than thirty synonyms, none of which directly referred to Humanity. Both species thought of their planet as something other than themselves, something bigger and grander and more, while they themselves were just guests… or custodians at most.

But the natives of Mordor? Their name for themselves was unique, to Garaaf’s knowledge. They had a word for “people,” but never used it to refer to themselves. Instead, their species in the distant past were E-rith-ir, “The Wicked/Vile/Wrong/Sinful People,” and their species in the here-and-now were E-skurel-ir: “The Penitent/Regretful/Contrite/Sorrowful People.”

According to Ukusevi and her Long Chant, the Hunters were divine punishment: The Wicked People had Sinned, in some great way. By some hubris or fault, by some disorder of thought or some failure to hit the mark, they had angered the Almighty sufficiently for Him to send down the most awful of His angels, and Correct them.

And now, here was Garaaf, playing the role of… what? A different kind of angel? A divine parole officer? Justice incarnate? Whatever he was, his entire species was, too. That was going to make the inevitable contact between the E-skurel-ir leadership and the Great Father…

Just…

…Garaaf had no idea how they were going to navigate a minefield like that.

Well, start small. Be truthful, but be artful about the truth. Be gentle, like water in a stream. Even the gentlest of currents could erode mountains, given enough time…

“I cannot truthfully claim to know or understand the history you have told me. I can say only that the… Punishers, as you call them, are a great enemy of ours, and we would do very much to see them destroyed.”

Ukusevi looked confused, if the translator was reading her right. Or at least, her head-tilt and the faint twitch of nose and ear were conveyed to Garaaf’s heads-up display alongside a probability table, with confusion firmly at the top.

“…Do you not serve the Almighty?”

“I cannot honestly claim to have directly received orders from the Almighty…” Garaaf ventured.

“Then you are here only because your enemies are here.” Ukusevi’s expression shifted, and the probability table, after a moment’s thought, reshuffled ‘crestfallen/disappointed’ to the top of the list, with a healthy dose of ‘worried/troubled’ as a secondary modifier.

Dangerous ground this. Very, very dangerous ground. To be an enemy of the Punishers was to be an enemy of divine justice. To be an enemy of divine justice, conceivably, was to be another Wicked People. Best to address that before it became an issue.

“There is…very much we will need to teach you. I think it will be eye-opening and painful. Best we take it slowly. So, let’s start from the beginning. My people are here to liberate this world from the Punishers. Whatever else that may mean to you and your kind…well, one of our allied peoples have a saying: ‘The Almighty works in mysterious ways.’ Take that as you will.”

“We know that lesson well,” Ukusevi agreed, morosely. “…There are others like you?”

“Good friends, who came to my people’s aid when the Hunt—the Punishers descended upon us.”

“And they know of the Almighty and His ways?”

“Different people…know the Almighty by different means. I can’t speak for them.”

The translator completely gave up on trying to process the succession of emotions that paraded across Ukusevi’s mobile, expressive features. There was a lot of troubled in there, though. Garaaf had some inkling by now of what was going on in the Keeper’s thoughts, but he was wrestling with an alien intellect, an alien way of looking at things.

Perhaps Gyotin would have been a better choice for this.

But then again, how could they have known? No, Garaaf’s selection made sense, at least for first contact. Second contact and later might well be somebody else’s responsibility, somebody with the theological insight and mindset to really engage with the so-called Penitents… But here and now, the responsibility fell to Garaaf.

He decided to move back onto more firm ground. “Let’s lay aside the why and whether for now,” he proposed. “And focus on what. What do your people need? We can bring food, and medicine for the sick. We can provide air filters, and make these tunnels safe.”

Ukusevi looked almost stunned. “…You have already given us a priceless gift,” she breathed, laying a hand on her journal, “and you offer more?”

“We came here to aid your people,” Garaaf reminded her. “That book is a gesture of intent, not the limit of our ability.”

Ukusevi glanced behind her, as though the hovering, poisoned figures watching from the shadows might have something to contribute. She tilted her head, slow-flicked both ears, then looked back to Garaaf.

“…Garaaf of the Gao… We have lived a long time under this Punishment,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I want to believe that our deliverance has finally come. But much of what you have said raises difficult questions. There are many who will worry that you are a temptation, a chance to return to the sinful past. I thank you for your gesture of intent, but I cannot accept any more of your aid, for now. Not hastily.”

Balls.

“I… understand your caution,” Garaaf said out loud. “I should warn you, though: the war outside is not going to stop. Not until the Hunters, as we call them, are driven from this place or dead. We will do what we can to do no harm to your people, but they will not be so honorable. Long delay will place your people in jeopardy.”

Ukusevi stood, slowly. “My people are in jeopardy anyway,” she retorted. “In body and in soul. I thank you for your warning, and your gift. But I think you should go now. Please… return tomorrow.”

Garaaf duck-nodded. He stood to, gathered the translator, reciprocated Ukusevi’s cordial bow, and retreated back toward the surface, putting his protective gear back on.

“That could have gone worse,” Brother Asku opined through his mask as they climbed the steps back toward the surface access.

“You’re an optimistic cub at heart, Asku,” Garaaf replied, wearily. “That could have gone a lot better.”

“Peaceful contact, honest truth, a respectful parting…” Yaamo mused as they reached the door at the top. “I’m with Asku, that could have gone much worse.”

Garaaf sighed, and accepted their encouragement with a duck-shrug. “…I suppose,” he agreed after a second. “But there are thorns coming, I know it.”

“There always are, Father.”

Garaaf chittered. “When did this Clan get so upbeat?” he asked. “I went away for a few years and they stopped teaching you pups how to be properly pessimistic.”

“I don’t know how ‘there are always thorns coming’ is optimistic, but okay… Surface access is clear. Camo active.”

Garaaf took off the robe he’d put on to soften his profile, and duck-nodded appreciatively as their suits shimmered and activated their active camo. A Whitecrest who knew how to properly remain still could blend almost seamlessly into his surroundings in that suit, and while he’d first grumpily thought of them as a technological crutch… the truth was, they took the Clan’s already effective training and added a little something more.

“Forward Base Kuro, Envoy. We’re coming up.”

In efficient silence, they exfiltrated the native warrens. The surface was the same warzone it had been when they entered: a Grand Army platoon had established a forward operating base above the entrance, with overhead shields, an interceptor turret for destroying incoming mortar rounds and missiles, a couple of anti-tank missile launchers, and plenty of good cover. Garaaf’s escort acknowledged them with a raised paw, the loaded onto their vehicle, and head back to base.

It wasn’t far back to the Clawhold, and nothing particularly eventful happened except for the heavy roar of a fire mission from Grand Army artillery, and a pair of voidrippers coming in to land.

“The problem,” Garaaf said, resuming the conversation, “is that what they say to each other is out of our control. If they collectively decide that we’re a kind of Wicked People ourselves, here to tempt them and defy their god’s will…”

“That will, sadly, be their decision to refuse aid. That does not much impact the larger mission.”

“It directly impacts the mission the Great Father gave me,” Garaaf retorted. “Which I intend to carry out as well as I possibly can.”

“He would have it no other way, I’m sure.”

“Even if he would, I wouldn’t.” Garaaf wished he could take his mask off and scratch a small itch on the side of his muzzle. “All this religious stuff is… I’m out of my depth. I didn’t get through the Ring on faith, I got through it on practicality and sound tactics.”

“You aren’t a whole civilization, Father.”

“…No. I’m not.” Garaaf looked up as they approached the Clawhold’s security checkpoint. “…Who do we know who’s good at thinking on that kind of scale? Other than the Great Father and the Mother-Consort? And Champion Gyotin?”

“Why not Gyotin?” Yaamo asked.

“He has enough responsibility and very little room for more.” Garaaf shook his head. “Besides, if I let him he’d stick a funnel down my throat and pour tea into me until I burst.”

“…There are worse ways to go, I guess.”

“Be that as it may, although Champion Gyotin makes a point of having time for everyone, I think this particular problem would consume more of it than he can afford,” Garaaf said. “I need somebody who can devote an indefinite amount of time and thought.”

“A Brother from his Clan, perhaps? They’re not all meek little males, after all…”

“Maybe…” Garaaf considered that. “If some unit can spare their chaplain…”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I don’t believe in spirits or gods. But many do, and I am nobody to dissuade them. Besides, some random Grand Army Starmind-associate chaplain is probably no more qualified for this than I am, really. Gyotin and the Fathers of Starmind might spend their time in high contemplation of the deep mysteries of the Infinite and all that stuff, but right now what I really need is somebody who understands religion as a tool that cultures use. Somebody who knows how faith works on the level of whole societies. And it needs to be somebody who actually has the time to hear this situation out and think about it good and hard.”

The two Brothers looked at each other, then produced identical helpless duck-shrugs.

“If that person exists, it will be someone in Champion Gyotin’s orbit. You’ll need to ask him anyway.”

“…Yes, I suppose you’re right.” Garaaf sighed.

“What’s the problem, Father?”

“…I hate tea.”

Asku and Yaamo chittered at that one, and Garaaf allowed a small one himself. He’d call the Starminds, of course he would. This was the sort of problem they existed to confront. But he was allowed to grumble.

He just hoped that they could move fast enough and come up with some good advice before the natives made up their own minds…

Date Point: 16y11m4d AV
Planet ‘Mordor’, Hunter Space

Traan, Warleader of Fourth Fang

Some words just weren’t up to the job. Like… there were times when a ‘Back ran into something so perverse, so twisted, so wrong that none of those words even worked any more.

For those situations, Traan had to fall back on ‘fucked up.’

Turned out the Hunters weren’t bringing their tank-things to the planet, so at least the farthrow up on Destroying Fury was working properly. But the process of turning a regular Hunter into one of those tanks was one hundred percent, undiluted, jaw-dropping fucked up, ‘cuz as far as Traan could tell it involved throwing away most of the Hunter’s body.

Like… a whole Hunter went in. And what came out the other end was a mouth, a brain and a digestive tract buried deep inside an otherwise entirely mechanical creation. As far as the Hunters were concerned, it seemed like literally every other part of their anatomy was disposable.

So whatever was going on in that factory was basically an insane surgical abattoir married to a high-tech robotics plant.

And it was powered by a fission plant. Great.

At least, it was probably a fission plant. Atmospheric readings said it wasn’t producing any CO2, and the warning signs up around the place were the ones the analysts thought the Hunters used for radiation hazards, which wouldn’t fit with fusion. And there were plenty of advantages to a fission plant over a fusion plant.

The visible overhead forcefields were a pretty good hint, too.

Fourth Fang used Whitecrest active camo tech in their reconnaissance missions. After all, the Whitecrests were the undisputed masters of slippery slinking and sliding. The major difference was that Fourth Fang could “go loud” in a more Stoneback way.

Still. Up until the War, Clan Stoneback had focused mostly on civilian pursuits. Engineering, farming, skilled heavy labor, all the fundaments of a working civilization. Traan himself had been a highway maintenance engineer. The Clan’s military tradition had been just that: a tradition, kept alive in peacetime and mostly used to pad out mating pedigrees.

But the Whitecrests had always been dedicated to security operations. Which was why Fourth Fang never went anywhere without a couple of their spooky little friends.

Brothers Neeyo and Akuuvi were some distance forward of Traan’s vantage point, inserting themselves fully into the facility while the Stonebacks watched from the perimeter, being the eyes in the backs of their heads. It was tense, quiet work: terse, whispered instructions in Whitecrest battle-cant, delivered via line-of-sight infrared laser.

“Mother doesn’t know,” for instance, told Neeyo and Akuuvi that the Hunter patrol they’d remained absolutely still for was now past, and the enemy was not alerted, meaning they could move again.

The cant was all monosyllabic and playfully guttural. Much like Stoneback’s own, though they were so completely different they were effectively separate languages. Traan didn’t know what weird quirk of Whitecrest humor had turned ‘mother’ into their universal term for hostiles, but then again the whole Clan liked to pick the most mischievous cubs. The earnest, honest ones who did what they were told and scrubbed up properly for lunchtime were of no interest to Whitecrest: They wanted the troublemakers, the scoundrels, the pantry-raiders and prank-players.

Neeyo and Akuuvi must have terrorized their commune-mothers.

All that skulking around was necessary, though. Although the Fury and the Vengeance overhead between them had the resources to atomize the factory, shields or no shields, there were two obstacles in the way. First, the fact that it had that fission power plant, so smashing it from orbit would have just added to the local environment’s already severe hazardous materials problems…

And second, there was a warren of the natives nearby. Traan wasn’t shy about how much he enjoyed killin’ him some Hunters, but their little defenseless victims? Balls no.

All of that meant they needed a kinder, gentler approach to their vengeful, bloody rampage. And the first step of kinder, gentler slaughter was recon.

The two Whitecrests froze halfway up an outside wall as a transport ship lumbered in overhead. It swung fatly round in the air and parked itself directly outside a huge door, which promptly rolled up to reveal another half-dozen of those modified Hunters. They, unlike their transport, moved with speed and grace as they scuttled up the ship’s ramp and into its yawning interior.

Those were more tank-Hunters that were gonna tear through Traan’s little buddies in the Grand Army. They’d seen enough; time to do something about it.

But those damn shields…

Actually…

The invasion was a helluva big operation, and there was a lot Traan didn’t know. But he’d learned the art of seeing the patterns in his knowledge gaps. And right now…

“…How exactly did the Humans earm us our foothold, anyway?”

Date Point: 417th Year of the Punishment
Library bunker at Old-Bent-Leg, the Great Ruin

Ukusevi, Librarian and Keeper of the Long Chant

For the first time in living memory, the library was in uproar.

Libraries were silent, not just out of reverence for the knowledge they protected, but out of fear that the Punishers might detect them if their inhabitants moved or spoke too loudly. The Long Chant was the loudest thing the Penitents ever dared to utter, and even that was only ever a little louder than an ordinary conversation.

For now, however, Ukusevi was whispering it fretfully to herself as bedlam boiled all around her.

The Long Chant was… it was lore. It was the truth. It was history. It couldn’t be wrong.

…Could it?

Garr-avf had called the Punishers “Hunters” instead. He’d known them as something different, as… well, as a mere foe. A mortal and hated foe, to be sure, but just an enemy. Not an instrument of divine will. Not judgement incarnate.

None of the possibilities opened by that attitude were pleasant ones.

Possibility number one: That these “Gao” were another, subtler kind of Punisher, sent to test the Penitents. Everything Garaaf had spoken had been a lie, or a distortion of the truth calculated to present Ukusevi and her people with an opportunity to step backwards, to fall back into the wicked ways of the past.

Possibility number two: That there was a war in heaven, and the Almighty had no control over His angels. That the Almighty, in short, was not almighty.

Or… and perhaps worst of all… Possibility number three: That the beings that Ukusevi had known as Punishers her whole life were nothing of the sort, and that her people, rather than paying the price for some past crime, were simply the victims of cruel, blind misfortune. That the Almighty was either blind or indifferent to their suffering…

…Or else didn’t exist at all.

And so she whispered the Chant feverishly to herself, searching fearfully, desperately through all the syllables she had so diligently learned in her childhood and repeated so fervently throughout her adult life. The clear space around her was strewn with books as she hunted for the question that had always scratched away at the back of her mind.

What exactly had her ancestors done?

That was the great mystery, of course. What exactly was the crime the Penitent had inherited the punishment for? For all any of them knew, they were still perpetuating it, somehow. The Punishers had certainly never uttered a word on the subject, they simply demanded fear and hard work, and slew as they pleased. No-one and nothing had ever communicated to the Penitents exactly what they should change. It had been an article of faith for so long that it fell to them to identify and repair the fault in their souls by themselves.

Garr-avf was the first voice from a third faction that anyone had ever heard. And rather than deliver a message of what exactly it was that the Almighty wanted of His faithful, Garr-avf had instead delivered confusion, and diplomatic caution.

She briefly entertained possibility number four: that the Punishers had instead been sent by an adversary of some kind, and it was the Gao who were the Almighty’s angels of vengeance, sent to correct matters. But then.. Why so late? Why more than four hundred years?

Or was that just the second possibility seen in a different way? A war in heaven? Limits on divine omnipotence? Or could it not be a different angle on the first possibility, with the Gao as agents of this adversary?

The Long Chant contained no answers. None of the books did, either. All they helped her find were more questions, until her stomach boiled with anxiety.

She became aware that somebody was trying to get her attention. One of the children.

Children were raised in the libraries. Ukusevi certainly had been. It was the only way for them to grow at all safe and strong from the poisons and slavering jawed teeth that waited on the surface.

It was only after having a litter of children of their own and becoming an adult that the Penitents took on their Punishment on the surface. Until then, they tended the books, kept the place clean, learned to read, learned some of the Long Chant while the Librarians kept an eye on them and selected the ones who showed promise and good memories for training.

That had been the system for four hundred years, and it had, so Ukusevi thought, worked.

Now, her whole world was so disordered that even something as simple a child trying to respectfully get her attention took her several stupid seconds to process.

“…Sorry. Yes?”

“They… they want the Librarian’s insight, Keeper…” the child informed her. Teeisyo, Ukusevi remembered. The little one’s name was Teeisyo. A boy, which meant that in a few years, after he’d fathered some children, he’d be off to the surface to work hard and die young.

…That thought crystallized something in her mind.

She thanked him with a tilt of her head, respectfully closed and stacked her books—Teeisyo hastened to collect them and return them to their proper place—took up the journal that Garr-avf had given her, and joined the bickering dozens gathered in the middle of her library.

Everyone was inside, for a change. For many of the adults, it was a chance to care for themselves: to cleanse the sores and wounds on their skin, to sleep properly, to eat enough. But everyone had an opinion about the Gao and what their coming meant. The hubbub died as she joined them.

“You’ve been thinking hard, Keeper,” one of the older women, Kuesevari, said. “We’ve missed your voice.”

Ukusevi nodded wearily. Thinking was exhausting work, and the weight of it was settling on her now that she’d landed on something resembling a conclusion.

“I imagine I know the question you want me to answer, but ask it,” she invited, finding a table to perch herself on.

One of the young men, Defeesk, looked around at this fellows, then took the initiative.

“…We’re worried,” he said. “The Punishment is… it’s meant to be a holy thing. Right? But we all know what this Garr-avf said, and…”

“And you’re wondering how anything holy can be fought,” Uku finished for him. “You’re worried if it means that these Gao are wicked ones themselves, or a temptation or test. Or worse, you’re worried sick by other nagging ideas that won’t go away that you can’t help but worry are blasphemy.”

Bobbing heads told her that they were all singing the same chord.

“…Here and now,” she said carefully, “nothing is blasphemy. Nothing is true. Not even the Chant.”

There were a few shocked gasps, which she raised a paw to intercept. “I know. I’ve been agonizing over this myself. But I think we have come to a moment where we must question everything. We are just mortal after all, and we are Punished. We know ourselves to be flawed… Maybe we have been misinterpreting things. We must at least consider that. Maybe that is what the coming of the Gao means: that we are still wrong, and we must correct ourselves again.”

She considered the book in her hands, then waved it at them. “…Garr-avf gave me this,” she said. “A blank book, to record history in. Not a single word on any of its pages. No history, no parable, no advice. And I think… I think sometimes, a blank page can say much. The Gao have come, and the first thing they gave us is a blank page to write our future on.”

She looked around at the whole library, then stood up again. Suddenly, she was no longer exhausted.

“Look at what we built! Look at what we protect so fervently!! Look at this very library!!!” Ukusevi swept her arm around to indicate all that they had protected from the Punishers for so long. “…If we truly believe we are being punished by the Almighty, then why do we cling to the past so? If the past was wicked, and vile, then is preserving it not wickedness?”

Shocked silence. She gathered her robes and took a deep breath. “…It’s time we stopped… lying to ourselves,” she said, more quietly. “We know what is right, and what is evil. Ask yourself, in your belly, does it feel evil to wish to preserve ourselves through our knowledge and our history? Does it feel wrong to hide from the… things above us? To wish for a life without fear? To long for something more than a childhood spent cowering and an adulthood spent dying?”

She asked that last question while looking toward Teeisyo. The boy noticed, glanced around uncomfortably, and moved closer to his mother for comfort.

Ukusevi sighed heavily. “…The Long Chant says only that we sinned,” she said. “It doesn’t say what our sin was. And search as we might, no Librarian has ever found something so terrible in our past that this seems like a fair reply!” she gestured around her, and above toward the surface. “Maybe that’s blasphemy, but… is there anybody here who will look me in the eye and tell me they haven’t doubted? Those of you who’ve held your children in your arms, will you claim that they deserve to be punished when we don’t even know what they’re to be punished for?”

She looked around. A few met her gaze. Some looked away. A few were coldly, silently furious with her. One or two muttered among themselves at the back, nodding their agreement.

But, there was no taking back what she’d just said At long last, a lifetime of doubts had been set free, and as Librarian and Keeper she was duty-bound to record her own words. Everything she’d just spoken, for better or worse, would become part of the Long Chant.

That being so, there was no reason to take back her words. She kept her head up, rather than lower her gaze and thereby rescind her challenge to the congregation. “…For all we know, the test the Almighty has given us is to reject the Gao… or the test might be to embrace them,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t. All I have is my belly, and it screams at me that these Gao are…”

She hesitated, realizing that she didn’t know what the next word was. So, lamely, she cleared her throat and settled for ending the sentence on an inadequate “…something good.”

Now, the library was utterly quiet. Her faltering confession resonated softly among the books, and faded.

“Choose for yourselves,” she said, once it was gone. “Go and suffer, if you feel that is what the Almighty demands. Stay, if you hope as I do. May those in the right be uplifted, and those in the wrong be shown mercy. I do not know which I am…”

And on that timid, unsatisfying note, she ran out of composure. She hugged her new book to her belly and fled to her private room, a luxury that only Keepers were afforded. The ghost of an unspoken, unresolved ‘but’ hung in the air behind her.

The silence was louder than mere uproar could ever be.

Date Point: 16y11m4d AV
Planet ‘Mordor,’ Hunter Space

Ferd Given-Man

“Looks like we get to repeat our last trick, Superchunk. We’re already on our way. C’mon, up you go, gotta get suited up!”

Sky-People waged big war. Big, and fast, and too much of everything for Ferd to wrap his tail around. And it was tiring. The People had been Given strong and blink-quick muscles by the gods, and that meant they had tough bodies that could do much more than any of the sky-peoples. Ferd himself was gods-blessed with huge strength and good, stone-hard shape even next to most other Given-Men. But the Taking that came with such a strong Giving, was that the People needed…more. More food. More sleep. More air, and Ferd needed lots more than his men. The gods had blessed the People’s place-under-the-sky with much of everything the land could Give, but there was always a Taking to ensure the balance.

Humans, for example: they mostly had small and soft bodies, not enough meat on them to be quick and strong like the People. But, they were clever, with clever hands. They were wise and perceptive. They could go and go and go. Long after Ferd’s arms and legs felt dead, long after his whole body was too heavy to lift and his every muscle sang with pain, Humans could keep going. And they barely needed to sleep, it seemed! They liked a good full night as much as any man of the Tribes, but a Human could get by on very little if he really needed to.

And Gaoians could make do with even less! Most of them were very small and even weaker, but speed was a strength too, and so was their nose! Tooko ate almost nothing!

The Humans Ferd knew could do plenty with not much, and they were the kinds of things Ferd appreciated: climb trees, knap knives, hunt food, travel the land, move all day. He found himself jealous of that at first, though the Humans had shown him that he could be strong at that too. But it took so much painful and tiring work to train up!

Wild seemed to love that slow-run they called ‘jogging.’ Ferd…didn’t, but he worked very hard so he could keep up with his little Human friends. He wasn’t far behind now. Soon! He’d never thought of slow-running as strong, but he’d never thought he’d be able to keep galloping along for an entire day either, or that it would be so gods-blessed useful.

The Humans had much they could teach the People. Ferd was a good learner.

After their glorious raid, and after decon, and the celebration, and after Wild had strongly said no to any other kind of play…too bad. Maybe next time! Ferd enjoyed himself wrassling everyone until they were crushed into submission, but before long, tiredness fell upon him and his men fiercely. The Humans grew sleepy too, but they seemed to recover so fast…

But! They’d had a couple days to rest. They’d had a chance to eat good food, and Ferd’s belly was hard with a hearty meal gurgling happily inside him. Pretty soon he’d have wanted to do something strong to put that food to good use, and he knew that would start to annoy Wild…

Now they had another raid, where the People’s strength could help the sky-tribes. So Ferd heaved himself out of his bed and pushed himself upright, using his tail to bounce to his feet. The ship’s gravity was turned up nice and high to help keep them strong. Good! Ferd bounced in place and enjoyed the weighty feeling of strength it gave him.

“What’s the mission?” His ‘English’ was getting better every day.

“Pretty similar to last time. Check it out.” Wild had maps on the table, sent up from the world below.

Silent But Deadly was resting in a large chamber aboard another ship, the Raining Vengeance. They were protected and well-supplied inside the bigger ship, but pretty much stuck on the smaller ship by rules and by the way everything in the Vengeance was built for slim little Gao. Most of the ship-paths were fine, but some of the little holes they climbed through were much too small. Ferd couldn’t even get one of his legs through some of them! And most of the buttons and things were too small for his hands anyway.

He’d spent most of his exploring-time stuck to the food-room and the big nest-bed rooms, whenever his little friends invited him. They fed him well with lots of good meat, and they’d started to tell boasting stories to each other…

Ferd wondered if he’d meet them again. He could wrassle them too!

Frasier, Rees, Tooko, Nomuk, Tumik, and Genn were already at the table, studying the maps, and Ferd leaned in over Tooko’s head to take a look.

It was one of those ‘sat-a-light’ pictures, the ones from a long, long way up, and it showed a square compound of big ugly buildings around a yard with steel rails running into it.

Wild tapped the picture. “This maximum fun-and-sunshine land is a Hunter tank factory,” he said, simply. “Regular Hunters go in, have most of their body amputated, come out as a rapid armored assault unit that’s playing merry hell with Grand Army patrols near the Clawhold.”

Ferd shivered from the top of his crest right down to his tail. The ‘Hunters’ sinned against their own bodies! How could anybody do such an evil thing?!

Tooko squirmed a bit in Ferd’s grasp, so he grunted and loosened up. He hadn’t even realized he’d hugged his little friend close and he had to be careful; it wouldn’t take much to hurt him.

“There’s a Fourth Fang unit and a couple of Whitecrests already watching the place, and the Whitecrests have successfully infiltrated the compound. Problem is, their mission was recon, so they didn’t have dump webs with them. Which wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since they’re also not nearly strong enough to carry the big dump webs like we have.”

Ferd, Nomuk, Tumik and Genn grinned at each other knowingly.

Wild indulged them for a second, then got back on task. “So, we’re going to meet up with them and bring our toys. We’re going to go in quick and quiet, kill the shield emitters on the roof and deploy targeting beacons for precision orbital strikes, then get out so the Vengeance can put the factory out of commission.”

He reverse-pinched outwards with his fingers, and the picture zoomed in. “The large building in the south-west seems to be the actual production facility. That’s our first and most important target. Adjacent to that is shipping and receiving, our secondary target. Third target, up here in the right-hand corner, is believed to be quarters and admin. Finally, this in the south-east corner is a nuclear power station, which we are leaving intact.”

“Only raid important bit like last time, yes?” Ferd checked.

“That’s right. We have friends along for the ride this time, and they’ve already done some of the work for us. It’s thanks to them that we know which building is which and what we’re going to hit. But the stakes are the same as last time: keep it quiet, quick, and clean. Last thing we want is a Barney with those bloody tank things…. Though just in case, we’re taking along some Javelins.”

Not long ago, Ferd would have bounced excitedly at that news. He’d only got to use those weapons once, in training! And in his heart, he was still a little eager to see what they did to a real enemy…

But he’d seen too much since coming to more-door to really feel that way, now. This was a serious fight to the death, not just a playful raid to let another tribe know who was stronger and more cunning, who got the first fucks with the prettiest women. If they needed those javelins…

Wild caught his eye, held his attention for a second, then nodded and carried on with the briefing.

“…SBD will drop us here, south of the facility, an hour after local sunset,” he said, pulling the map back out. “Fourth Fang, Second Claw are waiting for us here, in this stand of trees. Two Brothers of Clan Whitecrest have infiltrated the compound and are hidden among the atmosphere filters on the roof of the cargo building, here. We’re going to link up with Fourth Fang, hand them some Javelins, and then together you’ll be climbing the building. We’ll be keeping the perimeter clear.”

Ferd and his men nodded seriously. They knew this was something only they could do.

“When you get up there, hand off the targeting beacons to the Whitecrests. They’ll place them for best effect. Each of you find a buddy and stick to him, got it? You’re their egress because you can just jump down and you won’t even notice the added weight. You focus on getting to the shield generators here, here and here. All of them are in protective shacks, so…hulks smash. Wait ‘till the signal, then tear it apart, emplace your dump web, grab your Whitecrest buddy, and get the fuck down.”

“That will be like punching a stinger-nest again, yes?”

“Yup. When those shields go down, they’ll bring out absolutely everything. The orbital strikes should do most of the work for us, but our first priority will be getting back to the ship alive. No showing off, lads.”

“We won’t!” Ferd said a bit indignantly. He knew the Humans were wary of their ‘monkey-fun’ as they named it, but still. “Raid not time to flex or fuck! We fight first.”

“Relax, mate, I was talking to Reesy.”

“Fuck, and I was going to whip it out and have a quick wank just to show them who’s boss…” Rees snorted.

Genn slapped his back. “Is okay, Rees. I hold you like woman when we come back! Show you what real man like…”

“Just make sure to lube him up beforehand,” Wild said in his not-laughing way of joking. “Anyway. That’s the outline of our mission. Questions?”

“Any idea how many tanks are on site?” Frasier asked.

“They ship four at a time, a couple of times a day. The Whitecrests think they’re sending all the ones they have every time, and we’re timing this so in theory there won’t be any around. In practice…”

“Right.”

“Natives?” Tooko asked.

“There’s an unknown number living in an underground bunker over here to the east. That’s part of the reason we’re disabling this facility with precision strikes rather than turning it into a crater.”

“Keep new Sky-People safe, then.”

“We’re here to liberate them so… yes.” Wild nodded. “With any luck, they’ll be smart enough to keep their heads down…” he looked around. There were no further questions.

“Good. Then let’s go get our equipment inspected. We go in four hours.”

It didn’t take very long to get everything ready. Ferd and his men hauled up the heavy things while Wild and his men went over everything. They never missed anything and Ferd watched closely, to try and see things like the Humans did.

Once they had everything laid out, they each ate some of their rations, the ones that made Ferd feel like he had endless energy. They used the last of their time to get good and warmed, get their muscles hard and ready for the work ahead, their joints free and happy. Being away from trees meant they had to be careful about that sort of thing, like War-horse had taught them.

Then it was time to squeeze into those tight-fitting ‘en-bee-see’ safe-cloths. Ferd felt almost excited every time he put them on, but not in a happy way. Putting them on, fidgeting to get all comfortable…it was like when Singers painted war-colors on their skin. He could feel his body ready to fight, to do for the little sky-peoples what they couldn’t. They would raid. They would smash the god-hated ‘Hunters.’ Ferd would prove again that the People were strong.

Then he sat in the middle of the floor, and watched as Tooko took them down into the fire.

Date Point: 16y11m4d AV
The Clawhold, Planet Mordor, Hunter Space

Garaaf, Father of Clan Whitecrest

To Garaaf’s surprise, the jump array’s heavy thump delivered not just Champion Gyotin to him, but two Humans as well.

Garaaf had met Gyotin a few times: the founder and Champion of Clan Starmind had been highly interested in the Hunters’ victims aboard the Ring, and especially in the case of the Humans who’d escaped from the planet below and aided Garaaf in his own escape. These Humans, however, were unknown to him.

One radiated danger, even inside his protective gear. He was short for a Human male, built squarely and powerfully, and his eyes took in the whole array room in an expert instant.

The other was taller, older, but still hard in that way that only Humans managed. Ten’Gewek might be harder, but they had more of a stonelike, boulderish quality to them: Humans could harden like knotted wood.

“Father Garaaf!” Gyotin was as cheerful as ever, and greeted Garaaf like they were old friends rather than acquaintances, sniffing his nose and embracing him.

“…Hello, Champion. It’s good to see you again.” Garaaf did mean it, despite everything. Gyotin was difficult to dislike.

“And you. Don’t worry, I didn’t bring any tea.” Gyotin chittered mischievously, then indicated the Humans, starting with the tall one. “I’d like to introduce Professor Daniel Hurt, and his personal security Mister Hoeff.”

Hoeff was a lot more than just personal security if Garaaf was any judge. That man was a Human Whitecrest. Hurt, on the other hand, he sized up as the sort of academic who eschewed the high isolation of offices and universities for real practical access to his subject. He looked a little nervous at having been brought to a warzone, but shook Garaaf’s hand with a tense smile behind his transparent full-face air mask.

“You can take the masks off, gentlemen,” Garaaf told them. “This facility is air-sealed and decontaminated. Just keep them to hand in case of an emergency.”

“Oh, thank God. My nose was itching like hell…” Hurt muttered, releasing the catches that held it snug around his face as though he couldn’t possibly be rid of it fast enough.

“That’s what the bit of velcro in there is for,” Hoeff told him. “Little trick I picked up from the HEAT.”

“Velcro…?” Hurt inspected the mask. “…Huh. I completely failed to notice that.”

“Professor Hurt advises the Allied governments of Earth on matters to do with the Ten’Gewek culture and religion,” Gyotin explained. “Alien culture clashes are his specialty.”

“That’s… probably overselling my expertise,” Hurt demurred. “But the situation you described is the kind of thing I study and work on with the Ten’Gewek, so when Champion Gyotin asked me for my thoughts on these people…”

“Thank you,” Garaaf duck-nodded. He gestured out of the jump room. “We should sit and talk. I don’t want to take up more of your time than I have to.”

There was a briefing room set aside for them. Garaaf scrounged up a couple of extra tablets and handed them out, along with his dossier on the E-skurel-ir. Gyotin and Hurt read it thoroughly in serious silence, pausing to occasionally trade comments and point out important details to each other: Hoeff paced calmly around the room, taking the opportunity to stretch out and discreetly search the corners for items of concern.

Garaaf watched all three of them.

Finally, Hurt sat back in his chair, and nearly overbalanced: Gaoian chairs were entirely wrong for a Human’s long legs. He was sitting low with his knees raised high, and it looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat awkwardly and stood up as Hoeff had done.

“…Delicate,” he commented. “They went looking for meaning in a meaningless tragedy, and as unflinchingly self-flagellating as their dogma is, they managed to find some. Just coming here and even trying to liberate them is going to kick that meaning out from under them.”

“They’re going to schism,” Gyotin said.

“Yes. Inevitably, I’m afraid.”

“What does that mean for us?” Garaaf asked.

“That the Grand Army is going to have to keep the peace between the sects,” Hurt said.

“Or rather, protect one sect from the other,” Gyotin differed. “If they schism along the lines of those who trust us versus those who decide we’re somehow the Enemies of God…”

“What if we took a more forceful approach?”

Hurt frowned at Garaaf. “…Define ‘forceful.’”

“We do not need their approval for anything we do here, beyond our own sense of propriety. If it comes to it, ignoring them, forcible relocation. Whatever. A religion like this would surely interpret that differently, wouldn’t it?”

“Hmm.” Hurt had obvious moral objections to the idea, but he didn’t voice them yet. Instead he wandered back and forth at the back of the room with his hand on his chin. “I suppose that depends on how interested you are in preserving their culture and unique heritage.”

Garaaf decided it was time to be a bit more blunt. “I am not. I am interested in their survival. The Great Father, however, has concern for their souls. That’s the purpose of this. How do we keep from injuring their souls further?”

“Whose survival, Father Garaaf?” Gyotin asked. “A people are more than just genes and biology. The Great Father is entirely right to be concerned for their souls: destroy their heritage, and you destroy them.”

“Their heritage is one of self-destruction, and one which is very likely to keep them from their own salvation, to borrow a word.”

Hurt made a dark noise that was some humorless cousin of a laugh. “‘Be saved, or die.’”

“More like, ‘take the opportunity to save yourselves.’ There are limits to what we can do.”

“Okay. And what about your souls, in all this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to be the angels of divine mercy? Is that the role you want to play? Is that the story you want to tell them?” Hurt scratched the side of his head, just in front of his ear. “A little white lie to lift them out of hell, and then a hard truth later to maybe plunge them back into it.”

“I sincerely doubt the Great Father would approve of such a grand deception.” Garaaf said.

“No,” Gyotin agreed. “He wouldn’t.”

Garaaf duck-nodded. “Besides…I learned long ago that the biggest lies of all are told using nothing but truthful words. I need an unvarnished truth, Professor Hurt. One that is nothing but truth, is as complete a truth as possible, and will guide them away from their self-hatred.”

Hurt leaned his hands on the back of his former chair. “…They are just another species, the Gao are just another species, and the Hunters are just another species,” he said. “The E-skurel-ir suffered the grave misfortune of evolving on the wrong world in the wrong place during the wrong galactic epoch, and a bigger and crueller species found them and enslaved them. There’s no punishment or meaning to this, they committed no sin. They were just unlucky. That’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.”

“Bitter fuckin’ pill to swallow…” Hoeff muttered.

“Well, exactly. I don’t think there is a way to guide them away from self-hatred without challenging the foundations of their entire religion. The E-skurel-ir faith runs smack into the Theodicy problem: Their suffering can’t be explained in a universe governed by a compassionate and all-powerful interventionist god. God either did intervene, in which case this cruelty is clearly His will, which rules out compassion, or else He didn’t intervene, which means he either won’t—in which case, again, He isn’t compassionate—or He can’t, in which case He isn’t all-powerful. Their entire culture is built on a stool with one of the legs missing.”

“…How do Human cultures get around that problem?” Gyotin asked.

“Depends on the denomination.” Hurt sat down again, in a kind of cross-legged posture rather than trying to sit down with his knees up to his chest. “For most? God, in His wisdom, stays out of mortal affairs. He lets us chart our own course, and our judgement and punishment comes in the next life, not in this one.”

“Is that our angle?” Garaaf asked.

“Is that what you believe?” Hurt countered.

“Well… no. I don’t believe in that kind of a god at all.”

“Then it’s not your angle, no.”

Gyotin spoke, carefully and mildly. “What do you believe, Garaaf?”

Garaaf gave him a disgruntled look. “I’ve answered that question for you before.”

“Have you?” Gyotin flicked an ear. “…What kept you going, on the Ring? What reason did you have for opening your eyes every day, climbing out of bed, and enduring?”

“What kind of a question is that?” Garaaf almost growled, but restrained himself. He didn’t intend to disrespect Gyotin, but the question was infuriating. “It was that or die!”

“Was merely living your reason to go on?”

“No! Escape! Maybe even vengeance! Or just living to see one sunrise on Gao again,” Garaaf did snarl this time, but it was directed at the Hunters rather than Gyotin, and the Champion ignored it. “…When I met Ray, and when I spoke to her after…. She would say ‘we’re still here.’ That was her mantra. It wasn’t resignation, it was defiance! It was her way of saying ‘you haven’t beaten me yet.’ Well, the Ring didn’t beat me, because I didn’t let it!”

He realized that he’d surged to his feet. Slowly, he calmed himself and sat down again. “…Maybe you can tell me what I believe,” he said. “All I know is, I don’t believe in giving up.”

Gyotin’s ears twitched back and forth for a few seconds before he sniffed, glanced at Hurt and Hoeff, then chittered.

“Father Garaaf,” he said. “I do believe you’re an optimist.”

“And I believe we’ve found your angle,” Hurt said, the beginnings of a wry smile creeping up his face.

“…Have we?” Garaaf asked, skeptically.

“Oh yes.” Hurt leaned forward and rested his elbows and the table. “Let me explain…”

Date Point: 16y11m4d AV
Planet “Mordor,” Hunter Space

Thurrsto, Champion of Clan Whitecrest

There were many reasons why the Hunters had successfully terrorized the galaxy for aeons, With the most popular explanation among Gao and Human alike being that the Dominion species were just too incompetent and weak to handle them.

Which was true.

But it wasn’t the whole truth. Hierarchy interference, and the Hunters’ undeniable technological superiority in a few specific fields played their part too, and when it came to cloaking devices in particular the Hunters were the best in all the galaxy.

Keeda, the only reason Gaoian ones were so good was because of a prolonged and painstaking reverse-engineering program, and even then there were elements of their design and function that weren’t yet fully understood. When it came to turning invisible, nothing in the galaxy was better than a well-equipped Hunter, with the possible exception of Hierarchy equipment.

This made Thurrsto’s ‘big game hunt’ a dangerous proposition. Those tanks were deadly, and they were invisible. Tracking them involved more than a trivial amount of danger, therefore.

Fortunately, dangerous did not mean impossible. The cyberized Hunters might be invisible, but they were not massless. They left footprints and claw-marks in the mud, broke branches, scraped the bark off trees, left small shrubs crushed behind them, and left a chemical trail that no Gaoian could have failed to sniff out.

…If only they hadn’t been wearing activated charcoal filters. Thurrsto accepted that as the price he paid to not inhale a lungful of sulfuric fumes, nerve gas, formaldehyde, lead, chlorine, airborne hydrocarbons and a litany of other contaminants, but he wished he could use his nose right now.

Even so, the hunt was on.

“…What do we think?” he asked, watching their possible target through his scope. He was about… eighty, maybe eighty-five percent sure that the little patch of ailing trees downhill of his position contained a tank. Lots of little details added up to make it seem likely, including the torn-up ground, the way one branch had either grown very strangely or else was currently bent out of shape by the presence of something large or invisible.

He was less confident about whether or not it was alone and unsupported.

“That copse is a little small for there to be more than one…” Brother Asku mused. He’d been hand-picked for this operation, they all had. Thurrsto would have liked to bring some of the HEAT Whitecrests, but they were needed where they were. So he’d selected the best of the best who hadn’t quite made the HEAT cut, and was pleased to find that they viewed this as an opportunity to really prove themselves.

He’d also picked two who might well go on to become HEAT, with just a little more experience. Toran and Tybal, two of the most talented troublemakers he’d ever had the chance to forge into something more useful. This wasn’t to be their first blooding, but it was going to be a real test of their abilities…

…Nuts, it was a test of Thurrsto’s abilities. He acknowledged Asku’s comment with a slow nod, and slowly tracked his scope along a nearby ridge, where some kind of pipeline cut through the diseased landscape in a dead-straight line. Fiin had sent a couple of patrols out along that pipeline and its service road, and it hadn’t taken long for one of them to be hit… but not heavily.

“The patrol reported only one in the attack…” he muttered. “…Alright. Cubs, play crawl.”

The team set their active camo to dynamic mode, and stalked forward, low on four-paw, noses to the ground, backs and hindquarters slinking slowly and cautiously. Toran and Tybal were easily the smallest males on the team and so found themselves at the front with Asku. Thurrsto…well, there were some downsides to being a big brownie-sized HEAT veteran. He kept toward the rear and far enough apart that he wouldn’t give away the team if he made a mistake.

Besides. The Clan couldn’t really afford to lose him right now. He’d be no Champion at all if he didn’t get out in the field and do some of the work himself, but he’d be no Champion at all if he got sliced in half by a Hunter’s fusion scythe, either.

Crossing the scrubby open ground took several tense minutes, especially given the need to pause every so often and let their suits recharge their energy reserves. Dynamic camo was a significant drain on the power cells, and the sunlight through the dense overcast cloud didn’t replenish them fast enough… though on the other hand, it meant they didn’t cast strong, visible shadows.

Tybal’s voice vindicated Thurrsto’s decision in the last stretch. “Cubs, Mother’s home.”

“What do you smell?” Thurrsto asked him. In the Clan’s battle-cant, ‘smell’ filled in for all the senses, just like ‘Mother’ filled in for hostiles of any type. In the Cant, his query was only two syllables long.

“Movement. Brave cub playing alone.“

“Be careful…” Thurrsto warned him. He got a radio-click in reply, and Tybal moved forward, taking point while the rest of them hunkered down in place and let their camo completely blend in.

Tybal’s next words had the flat, uninflected tone that said he was subvocalizing through the contact mic pressed to his vocal cords, uttering no actual sound. “Mother’s alone.”

“What shall we play?” Thurrsto replied, inviting the young male to give him a plan.

“…One, three, five, left; Champion, two, four, right. Play hide-in-the-grass, play touch-tail, play pounce.”

“Big cub likes that game. Let’s play.”

They peeled apart. Thurrsto thought he could see what Tybal had spotted. If he was right, the Hunter was resting, dormant among the trees and facing leftward, watching the pipeline and road. Tybal had sent the smallest and quietest of them around that way, while the heavy hitters went right to attack the Hunter from its blind spot.

‘Touch-tail’ was the risky bit. A favorite game among mischievous cubs who liked to sneak up on an unsuspecting Mother, tweak a little pinch of fur off the tip of her tail, then run chittering for their lives from her startled and slightly tormented retribution. In the Cant, it stood for getting the enemy’s attention and holding it with a daring hit-and-fade attack. If it went to plan, the Hunter would never see the other three pounce on it from behind until too late.

It went to plan.

They got in position, inching closer one paw at a time until they were ready, clicked their radios to signal they were in position, and the three who’d gone left—Tybal, Toran and Ikuy—riddled the dormant Hunter with a trio of specialized grenade rounds: two shield dumps, and smoke. The Hunter was instantly invisible inside a cloud of dense white smog and a haze of highly reflective particulates that was opaque across pretty much the entire EM spectrum.

But not to the ultrasound sensors in a Whitecrest’s suit mask. From Thurrsto’s perspective, the tank became a big, bright blue contact as it moved, made noise, and dropped its cloak. Alongside Asku and Yaamo, he pounced into the fog.

A moving, thrashing, furious bulk became visible at immediate range. Thurrsto dived between its legs, rolled with his own momentum, and slapped one of his special toys onto its underbelly. Then his momentum rolled him onto his feet and he slipped out from under it again. A couple of other clong sounds behind him suggested the other two had succeeded, so he grabbed the detonator on his shoulder, flipped it open, and squeezed it shut again.

The devices triggered. They weren’t explosives. Instead, a number of fusion-tipped needles punctured the Hunter’s belly armor and injected a dense bundle of tightly compressed smart wire, which unfolded rapidly into its systems, infiltrating the tiniest cracks, hunting for electrical signals, especially the rapid low-voltage flicker of electronics. The degree of compression was incredible: each wire was much thinner than a hair but several meters long, and as relentlessly invasive as tree roots…though much, much faster.

The Hunter emitted a weird, strangled, mechanical squealing noise, jerked, and crashed to the ground spasming as many of its vital workings short-circuited and failed.

Down, but not out, and certainly not safe. The next bit required a brute’s unique skills.

Thurrsto drew his fusion knife, activated the sticky pads on his suitpaws, and sprang onto its thrashing, kicking back. Hunters had a physical limitation in that they couldn’t reach behind their own backs, and these big cyberized ones had inherited that flaw. He’d have been reasonably safe up there even if the monster’s limbs had been working properly.

As it was, it was the work of a simple moment to swarm up its back, stick himself securely to its spine, and drive his blade deep into one of its few remaining fleshy bits: the brain. They didn’t need that intact, after all.

The Hunter bucked hugely, and the only thing that kept Thurrsto from being flung several painful meters was his suit’s incredible adhesive technology… but after that one spasm, it was as dead as dead got.

Now came the tense moment where they waited for retribution from any friends it might have nearby. The moment stretched and hung in the air like the plucked string of some musical instrument…

Don’t relax yet, don’t relax yet…

…Nothing. Thurrsto bid himself remain alert and tense a little longer, then finally let go of his healthy paranoia enough to exhale.

“Right,” he said, and dropped the Cant. “Call in the dropship. If Second Fang want this nutless piece of kwekshit so bad, they can load it themselves. We did the hard work.”

There was a round of chittering, and Asku promptly turned away, keying his radio to call in their evac. Thurrsto gave the Hunter a last kick, then slapped Tybal on the back.

“Well played,” he said.

He didn’t need to see the young Brother’s face to recognize the delight there. And he didn’t need any more proof that the future of his Clan was looking good. As the clouds overhead parted and a Stoneback dropship wallowed out of them, Thurrsto looked back at his quarry and pant-grinned inside his mask.

It felt good to be the best.

Date Point: 417th Year of the Punishment
Library bunker at Old-Bent-Leg, the Great Ruin

Ukusevi, Librarian and Keeper of the Long Chant

“Keeper?”

Ukusevi woke at her desk. She’d only put her head down for a moment….

But no. The fire-safe oil lantern beside her had burned dry, and was going to need a new wick. Her back was sore, and the fur on her cheek was matted with her own saliva. She scrubbed at it with her fingers to try and restore some dignity, stretched her back which went crrrunch so hard that she gasped in relief, and turned to face the door.

“…Come in.”

The boy, Teeisyo, poked his head around the door. “The Gao is back, Keeper…”

“Thank you.”

She considered the wax tablet she’d been using to draft her thoughts before writing them in the journal. It was a mess of crossed-out aborted passages, backtracking and hesitation. But, that was why she drafted her thoughts first. It would be a sin to deface a record of history with such disordered scribblings…

…Or at least, so Uku felt. She was feeling a lot less certain about what was and was not sinful than she had just a few days ago.

She tidied the journal safely away, took her note tablet and stylus, and followed Teeisyo back up the tunnel toward the surface. The library was excessively quiet today… in fact, when she looked around, there were fewer people than there ought to be.

“Where…?” she began.

“They left, Keeper,” Teeisyo said, in a subdued voice. “Some of them said you were blaspheming. Others said you were right… the angry ones took their things and went into the tunnels during the night.”

Ukusevi sighed. That wasn’t unexpected, but…

…But she didn’t even know what they thought she was right or wrong about.

“How many?”

“Fourteen, I think.”

Fewer than she’d feared, more than she’d hoped… Almighty bless and keep them safe.

Garr-avf was waiting for her just like the last time. He’d removed his hood and mask, and the blunt stubs of his ears—where had he lost them?—tilted and angled subtly in what might have been recognition to match the duck of his head.

“Keeper,” he greeted her, via his translation device.

“Garr-avf.” Ukusevi sat opposite him and for the moment two very alien cultures considered each other carefully.

Garr-avf spoke first. “…We’re just mortals like you,” he said. “We aren’t divine beings, we weren’t sent here by the Almighty as far as I know. I know that raises… questions. Difficult ones.”

“Yes, it did,” Ukusevi agreed. “Some of my people left last night. We had a… difference of opinion, you could say.”

He tilted his head curiously. “You’re here talking with me. So I assume that means…?”

“I’m… confused,” Uku confessed. “I don’t know what to believe right now. My belly tells me one thing, the Chant tells me two or three others, and my head is pulled taut between all of them. If you aren’t divine beings—If—then… how do you know you aren’t defying the Almighty’s plan?”

Garr-avf made a duck-shrugging gesture. “I don’t. I doubt we are,” he said. “I don’t know what the Almighty’s plan is, or even if He has one. My people don’t even think about the Almighty in the way you do. All I can say is, we don’t claim to be divine beings, and we doubt the Hunters are either.”

Inwardly, Uku was trembling. If the Hunt—if the Punishers were not agents of divine justice then… then that left a hole in her core where her whole sense of the world and the way of it had once stood. The very idea sent dreadful cold tendrils along her limbs.

Out loud, though, her voice was level, calm and mild. “If you are not—and if they are not—then that would mean my people have suffered all of this—” she waved her hand at everything around them to indicate the whole world, “—for no reason. That the last four hundred and seventeen years were just… misfortune.”

Garr-avf ducked his head solemnly. “It would imply that, yes.”

“That seems a… a bleak way of looking at things. Don’t your people believe in meaning? In structure?”

Garr-avf tilted his head. “Do you want the Almighty to be angry with you?”

He may as well have stood on his head. Uku gave him a bewildered look. “What does what I want have to do with anything?”

Garr-avf sat forward and looked directly into her eyes. “You want there to be a purpose to all this. You want all the millions and millions of suffering and dead to have suffered and died because it was necessary. You want the Infinite and the Unseen to make sense. You want the universe to be just.”

Each repetition of the word ‘want’ stung like a papercut. Garr-avf watched her for a second, then sat back again. “But, you’re right. Why should what you want matter? Why should things make sense, or be just? Are you the center of all creation? Does the world dance to your desires? It certainly doesn’t dance to mine. So what does what you want have to do with anything at all?”

“You speak… harsh words, Garr-avf of Gao,” Ukusevi managed, around the sick icy knot in her stomach.

“We don’t have time to be gentle. And we will not be dishonest. Our great leader…abhors dishonesty in any form.”

“Great leader?”

“Just a leader. No kind of divine being himself, and he’d say so even more strenuously than me. His actual title is ‘Great Father.’ I don’t know how well that concept translates for you.”

Uku took up her stylus and tablet. “Tell me about him. And about your people.”

Garr-avf chittered darkly. “The Great Father is…personally, he’s a big, powerful, cheerful parody of a male, and would gleefully admit to it, too. He is…a good man. But.”

“But…?”

She was learning to read the movements of Garr-avf’s body. Some were almost familiar, others very strange indeed. But she guessed that the way his head lowered and tilted back and forth meant he was composing his words with just as much care as she would before writing in her journal.

“…A Great Father is…my people were severely tested by our great enemy. He was created Great Father at the moment of our greatest crisis, and his purpose is to obliterate all that threaten our people. He is…unequaled at that task. Which is why we are here.”

“The Punishers threaten your people?”

“The Hunters would have gladly done this to us,” Garr-avf said, gesturing around them. “But they’re the lesser foe. The greater foe are subtle, conniving, invisible and patient. Everything your tormentors aren’t. They are merely…more powerful than your people; the greater foe shaped my people, long ago. Worked our bodies like clay, shaped our culture, deleted our history, and tried to strike the very idea of the Almighty, the Unseen or the Infinite from our minds.”

Ukusevi boggled at him. He simply nodded solemnly, and waited for her to remember herself and write down his words.

“The Hunters are the discarded corporeal husks of that enemy,” he continued, once her stylus was scratching through the wax again. “They left their bodies behind a long time ago, and learned how to hide invisibly in people’s heads, control them, prod them in their desired direction, even take them over and pretend to be them.”

Uku listened. She didn’t know whether to believe him, but she recorded his words as he told her his people’s history. Whether he was speaking the truth or not, she couldn’t know, but she could at least faithfully and accurately record his exact words.

Until one of them jumped out at her.

“Your box didn’t translate that woord hoomun.”

“The name of our good friends, the ones who came up with that quote about the Almighty working in strange ways. I call you E-skurel-ir, you call me Gao, we call them Humans. They’re younger and less advanced than the Gao, but our good friends nonetheless, and they exposed the Hierarchy.”

Ukusevi put her tablet aside. “…Everything you say tears at the truths I built my life on,” she said. “You paint this picture of a sky full of civilizations—”

“Dozens of them,” Garr-avf agreed.

“…And you left us here to suffer alone?”

“We only learned you exist less than forty days ago.” Garr-avf shook his head. “This whole attack is rushed and dangerous. If it had just been our enemies on this planet, we would have watched, and planned, and got everything in place more methodically and carefully before we struck. As it is… a lot of Gao are dead. Many more are wounded, or sick. And we’ve only just started.”

Uku deflated. That much was true, at least. A few brave Penitents had snuck above ground to watch the fighting, and the Gao weren’t emerging from this conflict unscathed, far from it. There were wrecked vehicles littering the paths and roads near the facility, new and terrifying kinds of Punisher lurking among the rocks, rubble and foliage, and it seemed like there was a whole corps of Gao whose job was to retrieve the injured and dead.

“…I… suppose I should be grateful then,” she said.

“Yes. But you’re conflicted, I understand that.” Garr-avf sat forward. “…Keeper Ukusevi, we are not going away. We are here to defeat our enemy and to liberate your people. The Great Father was very clear on that point: When I asked him what we would do if you did not wish to be liberated, his exact words were ‘Then we’ll have to cure them.’”

“Cure us?”

“Somebody I know said to me earlier that a people are more than their flesh, which is true. Your people are sick, Ukusevi. In both body and soul. The air they breathe up on the surface is laden with heavy metals and harmful gases. The land is poisoned with radioactive and chemical contaminants, the water is corrosive… Your bodies get sick and wither the longer you spend up there. Well, your souls are in just as toxic an environment. You’ve adapted, found a way to endure… but yes. You have grown sick in a poisoned environment and we intend to heal you.”

Ukusevi drooped. “…So no matter what we do, we are in the grip of a higher power,” she said. “Either you, or the Almighty.”

Garr-avf let the silence last before speaking, quietly and carefully.

“You have it in your souls to heal yourselves,” he clarified. “I was a slave to the Hunters once myself. The difference, Keeper Ukusevi, is that I never blamed myself for it. I trusted myself. I had—and this is a concept the Great Enemy tried to eradicate among my people—I had faith. Not in the Almighty as you know Him, but in my own rightness. I knew that I had done nothing to be punished for, and neither had the slaves around me.”

Transfixed, Ukusevi could only watch him warily as he looked her unwaveringly in the eyes. “Your people were never so wicked and vile as to deserve this, and you know it,” he said. “What does that mean for you and your relationship with the Almighty? I don’t know. But the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can help yourselves.”

“Help… ourselves?” The thought was almost impossible. “I don’t even know if that’s… how can we?”

“You can.” Garr-avf asserted. “I’d much prefer it if you did, and I’m sure the Great Father would too.”

“But—”

Garr-avf interrupted her. “Helplessness is like a heavy blanket: It smothers at the same time as it comforts. It takes an effort of will to get up and face the cold, exhausting, awake world of agency and empowerment where you have to actually take responsibility for your future. But that is where your people must go, Keeper Ukusevi. We hope you will take that step for yourselves, but if we must drag you out of bed and force you to stand, then we shall.”

“Is that how you see us? Asleep?”

“Asleep, and in the grip of a nightmare. But the thing about nightmares is, you have no control over them. At least when you’re awake, you can do something about your problems… so wake up.”

Ukusevi watched him for a long moment, then recorded that in particular for posterity.

“…I appreciate your words, Garr-avf of the Gao,” she thanked him, and rose to her feet. “I will pass on what you said.”

With that, she turned to go. He stopped her after only three steps, however.

“Keeper.”

She didn’t turn back, though her ears did. She heard him rise to his feet,. “Remaking oneself is what survival is all about,” he said. “On that topic…my people know much. And so do yours, I think. So I will give you time.”

He placed something on the ground. “When you are ready to talk again, just use this and ask for me.”

Ukusevi turned around as his pawsteps trotted away up the tunnel. Sure enough, he’d left a small black box on the ground. She hesitated, then collected it and hid it under her robes.

Then, with a remarkably clear and quiet head, she trotted back down the tunnel, and back to the library.

Date Point: 16y11m5d AV
High Mountain Fortress, The Northern Planes, Gao

Naydra, Mother-Consort of the Great Father

“I think your scars are fading, Bumpkin…”

Daar had a decidedly functional relationship with his fur. In general he didn’t pay it much mind, leaving Naydra to fret over it when it was long and prone to tangling, or to slick it glossy when he was shorn short. Left to his own devices he’d look maddingly unkempt…and it was somewhat irritating how well that worked for him. The ‘scruffy’ look made most males look a bit worse for wear, but not him. In fact, he’d transformed ‘scruffy’ into the mark of a well-bred brownfur; if a male could pull it off, he’d definitely score highly in most female’s lists.

Daar didn’t pay much attention to any of that. Probably. Though he was more than a little vain…in any case, today he was heading off to lead his military into war, one where he’d likely end up in battle himself inside that personal armor of his. That demanded the shortest coat he could get away with, and that in turn led them to the private moment they were sharing.

She was helping him shave right down to the undercoat, and then clipping that back to barely a tick long, too. It was a weirdly intimate moment they were sharing; anyone a gaoian trusted with shears was a close relationship, indeed. There wasn’t anything a person could hide when they were shaved almost down to the skin.

Not many males could pull that off, even fewer looked better short-clipped. Her Bumpkin certainly did, and that was no small part of her enjoyment. She could appreciate every inch of him, give him one last comb-down before he marched off…

…And notice things. Like his fading scars.

“Yeah,” he grumbled discontentedly, “they prol’ly are, ‘cuz of the regimen I’m on. In not too long I prob’ly won’t have any left. Gonna be somethin’ when th’ rest o’ the Males find out.”

That would certainly be a change. Gaoian males took pride in their scars. Naydra had always had a conflicted relationship with them. On the one hand, scars worth keeping were always from dangerous encounters, and that seemed just reckless from her admittedly Female perspective. Why should Males endanger themselves for a few token trophies?

But on the other hand, a big strong lacerated brute like her Bumpkin had an interesting life story to show and tell. Having come out of all that, wiser and stronger at the other end…

“It seems a shame to lose them,” she decided out loud.

“Can’t be helped. Th’ Corti are improvin’ their tech by leaps an’ bounds now that they’ve got the sample sizes they need, and I ain’t about to ask for deliberately worse medicine.”

“No.” Naydra felt along the thick topology of his dense, muscular flank and applied the trimmer to some rough spots she’d missed. If he was going to be shorn, then he would at least look as perfect as he actually was. There was a strange pride Naydra took in his vigor and general appearance: part motherly, part proud life-mate, part vain Sister showing off her prize…

She maybe spent a bit longer feeling him than was strictly necessary.

Daar chittered deep in his thick chest. “I hate ‘ta say no to ‘yer attentions Naydi, but I gotta get goin’ and we ain’t got th’ time.”

Naydra chittered teasingly, “Not even a quickie?”

“I ain’t never managed quick,” Daar growled suggestively, “an’ I ain’t ‘bout ‘ta start!” He spun around, found the good light like the smarmy Keeda he was and struck a pose. “Well! Do I pass ‘yer inspection?”

“…Yes.” Yes he did.

“Good!” Daar’s smug contrabass chitter practically shook the floor. “Walk wit’ me?”

They made a brisk pace since he was running a bit behind schedule, and he took the opportunity to shift his four-paw gait into a bouncy, powerful prance. He always showed off for her every chance he got, without fail, and no matter who else might be watching.

Still. As much as she enjoyed the attention, her mind drifted back to her earlier observation.

“Regenerative medicine that good is going to change society, I think.”

“Yeah. Mebbe jus’ as much as better color vision an’ all the other unlocked bits we’re gonna start seeing crop up en masse here in the next few years. The trials are goin’ super well…”

“Yes. Leemu seems to have made a full recovery.”

“Not unscarred, though. I mean…in his soul.”

“No. And Gorku?”

“He’s gonna challenge th’ Second Ring here right quick! I’m super proud o’ him!”

That was good to hear. She’d found herself particularly fond of the unlikely friends, and wished them well. After all, their relationship did bear a passing similarity to Daar and Regaari’s…

“Do you think we’re ready for this?”

“We still gotta expand th’ sample size to a few hunnerd more gao an’ make a public announcement ‘bout essactly what it’s all gonna mean—”

“No no, I mean…are we ready?”

“…No. Don’t think we can be, though. Balls, the Humans ain’t an’ they’ve built th’ HEAT entirely around dealing with this stuff, yijao? An’ honnestly, If it weren’t ‘fer ‘Horse I don’t know how they’d manage. Trainin’ at this level is intense, ‘specially inside ‘yer head.”

They rounded the corner to the jump array’s access corridor, deep in the side of the mountain abutting the northernmost face of High Mountain Fortress. Daar rose up to his hind legs and continued along at a stately walk. After a moment, he resumed his thought.

“He’s the heart an’ soul o’ the team,’ y’know. An’ he’s the big-little bro o’ all the old crew. Err’time the Corti improve their science on this kwekshit, he jus’ figgers it out, does the work, an’ gets on with it. That’s super important ‘cuz any improvements we get, they get not long after, an’ vice-versa. I admire the fuck outta him, Naydi. He’s why I can do all this in th’ first place.”

“You are very blessed in your friendships.”

“I’m blessed in my everythin’ Naydi. ‘Specially you.”

“Blessings get blessed,” she retorted.” She snuggled up to him.. “And you’re a blessing to me, the Gao and the Humans, Bumpkin.”

He opened the door for them to pass through the empty, echoing Conclave chamber. “I hope so… ‘cuz it looks like I got a third species on my hands.”

“Yes, I’ve been reading Garaaf’s reports. It’s… I can see why they need it, but something inside me chafes at the idea of deliberately and knowingly destroying a culture. Even theirs.”

“Not all cultures are equal, Naydi. Y’ever want proof’a that, go look at the way some Humans live.”

“You don’t need to tell me that, Bumpkin,” she reminded him. “I’ve seen the worst of Gaoian cultures, remember?” She indicated the huge tableau of of Fyu’s life that dominated the wall opposite the great table. They were passing the scene where Tiritya’s skinned hide was delivered to him, the moment that transformed Fyu from a soulful warrior-poet and general into the vengeful and terrible figure of a Great Father.

Daar paused to consider it, and she rested her head against his arm. “…That kind of barbarism isn’t so far away,” she mused. “I know these ‘penitent ones’ will need deprogramming, but…”

“But there’s a fine thread between healin’ them an’ enslavin’ them,” Daar duck-nodded. “Even ‘fer the right reasons, an’ even if we don’t spill a drop o’ their blood doin’ it, it’s a violent thing we’re gonna do ‘ta these people…”

“A violent blessing.” Naydra considered that, then chittered softly. “That’s… apt, for you.”

He scritched her back, considering the scene in front of them. The stylized mural wasn’t true-to-life accurate in its anatomy or perspective, but it conveyed the emotion in big ways through color selection and framing.

“…This one hurts ‘ta look at,” Daar said. “Now I know how he musta felt about her…” He shifted his arm and held her close. “…If anythin’ ever happened to you… I don’t wanna think ‘bout what kinda monster I’d become.”

“I think Fyu became what he did because Tiritya would have wanted it,” Naydi replied. “She loved his passion, his poetry, his rage and his love. Fyu was so ruled by his passions that he inscribed love poems on his armor and sword, conquered cities for her and burned the world down to avenge her. That’s… romantic.”

“An’ in response, the Females banned love.”

“Yes.” She turned her face upward to look Daar in the eye. “What I love about you is that you have all that passion but you rule it,” she said.

“Because you want me to.”

“And I’d want you to even if anything happened to me.”

He duck-nodded, slowly and sadly, then looked toward the far door. “…The jump’s waitin’ ‘fer me.”

She duck-nodded, understandingly. “Go. Be a blessing.”

He didn’t go immediately. There was always time for a last tender moment. But then he went, and she watched him until the door closed behind him.

Once it had, she turned back to consider the next scene in the tableau—Fyu going to war. And if the previous scene had been painful to look at for the raw grief and anguish it conveyed so well, the next one was painful for a very different reason.

…Because it was all too familiar.

Date Point: 16y11m5d AV
Orbital Superiority Platform Raining Vengeance, In orbit around planet ‘Mordor’, Hunter Space

Hiyal, Champion of Clan One-Fang

“What are they building?”

“Anything that close to a star is Keeda’s own matted ass-fur to make out from this distance, Champion. We’re doing well to see that they’re building something in the first place.”

Hiyal growled to himself and watched his sensor technicians do their best to filter out a clear image from the glare of low orbit over a white-yellow star. They were making progress, at least.

He was acutely aware of two important points. First, that the Farthrow wormhole suppression field being generated by the Destroying Fury was only good enough to cover the planet below them and the surrounding volume of space out to about half a light-second, which left a lot of star system for the Hunters to jump in and out of unmolested…

And second, that they weren’t doing what he’d expected. He’d seriously anticipated that the Hunters would evacuate resources, stations, mining equipment and other spaceborne infrastructure. Which they were certainly doing, in a frenzied rush, but a not insubstantial portion of that equipment was being diverted in-system toward the star rather than being safely evacuated to some other stronghold.

Finding out exactly what they were building down there was, therefore, a priority. Fucking with stars? Not on Hiyal’s watch.

“What assets do we have available for a stealth flyby?”

“The Silent But Deadly is preparing to hit a facility on the surface. The… Drunker on Turkeyer …is on mission turnaround and can be ready in three hours…”

“Three hours it is, then,” Hiyal decided. “Keep me informed. I’ll be over on the Destroying Fury to receive the Great Father.”

“Yes, Champion.”

Hiyal gave his Clan-Brother an encouraging pat on the shoulder, and left the Intelligence Center, which was always a bustle of noise and activity as the Vengeance’s small army of analysts and technicians tracked and filtered the flow of information from the ground war far below.

He took a minor detour on his route to the jump array to take a quick mental rest. There were two observation decks along the Vengeance’s lateral hull, tucked away under the overhanging dorsal armor. Each existed purely for the purpose of giving the crew somewhere to escape the claustrophobia of life aboard a starship. While Human crews apparently just had to suck it up and endure, Clan One-Fang had learned a long time ago that setting aside a long, narrow space where a crewman could run up and down to burn off some energy, or sit and meditate on the void outside, had great benefits for morale.

Naturally, they pulled double-duty: the Vengeance’s bulky refrigeration units, the ones that shunted waste heat into the shields so it could be harmlessly radiated into space, needed some hollow space around them in order to work efficiently. So the observation decks provided that space and were kept pleasantly warm as a result.

Right now, they also afforded an excellent view of the planet they were liberating.

Planets were always beautiful when seen from above, and this one was no exception. Hiyal had seen plenty of planets in his life, and no two were ever quite the same—even the most standard of barren, airless rockballs had their own unique features.

Temperate worlds came in all kinds of hues. Gao’s seas were steely and dark, the land a rugged yellowish-green fading to white north and south of the tropics. Earth, though he hadn’t yet seen it in person, was a vibrant riot of greens and lustrous blues in every picture he’d ever seen. He’d seen the Corti homeworld, however: Origin’s arid landmasses shaded much more to the yellow, tan and brown thanks to the dominance of fungi, while the seas were a rich emerald green and almost syrupy with algae.

Mordor, like Origin, was browns and yellows and greens to his eye, but not so vibrant or well-curated. Even the heavy, nearly omnipresent clouds had a faint dull off-white cast to them. The whole planet looked unwell, though perhaps that was just prejudice brought on by Hiyal’s knowledge of the conditions down there. He tried to put that knowledge aside for a second, imagine what his impression would be if he found this world and knew nothing of where it was, what it was like, or how life was for its natives…

…No. Still sick. Beautiful, yes, but only in a damaged, dark, morbid kind of way. If there was any kind of beauty to be seen in a diseased thing, Hiyal could see it from where he was standing.

The trip to the observation deck performed its function at least: it cleared his head and focused his mind. He duck-nodded to himself, waved down a Brother who was off-duty and meditating at the forward end of the observation deck, and headed directly to the jump array.

The Destroying Fury and the Raining Vengeance were effectively opposites in their role and design. The Fury was a Stoneback in starship form, all claws and fangs and deadly speed. Her whole design was built around making her presence felt on the battlefield, as quickly and as overwhelmingly as possible. Her Farthrow generator, her incredible shields that could literally smash lesser ships down into a ball of scrap metal, her overcharged engines… she was a pouncing, tearing, killing predator.

Raining Vengeance’s job was perfectly described by her class: Orbital Superiority Platform. She could maneuver, certainly, and was equipped for evasive blink-jumps, but her job was to provide orbit-to-ground fire support over an entire planetary hemisphere while keeping that planet’s sky clean of hostiles. Her shields were every bit as fearsome as the Fury’s, but were firmly defensive, and supported by a hefty shell of advanced armor plating. That shell in turn bristled with superluminal weapons, megalight drone launchers, microsatellite cannons, and all the other tools of battlefield superiority.

Placing both of them in orbit over one planet would be what was known in Human culture as a ‘flex.’

A crude word for a crude act of dominance, but sometimes that sort of show was necessary. The Great Father wasn’t the kind of male he was purely for ego’s sake, after all, and when it came to things as crude as the Hunters themselves… Hiyal could appreciate the logic.

His jump from one ship to the other was uneventful, and none too soon, either. Had he delayed much longer, he’d have been forced to wait or come over in a shuttle instead, as the Great Father’s jump from the homeworld took priority. As it was, the timing was good enough for him to arrive, and for the Array to fully charge again just in time.

Champion Fiin was waiting for him.

“You have a fine sense of timing.”

“Thank you,” Hiyal duck-nodded his gratitude. “Have you been waiting long?”

“I’ve been up here long enough to take a proper dust bath and change into something that doesn’t stink of acid rain and chemical spills.” Fiin made a frustrated growling noise. “We’re suffering a lot of attrition to the environment. It has a way of creeping in through the seals. Even my piss is showing elevated toxin levels, and I’m sealed up inside the command post most of the time.”

“How do the natives survive?”

“They’ve adapted to it. Garaaf tells me their oral history says that when the land first started sickening, the birth rate declined, people died… the ones who could have kids wound up having a lot of them, so their people ‘could pay their penance.’ Natural selection in action.”

“First contact has been a success, then.”

“…Hasn’t ended in blood yet.” Fiin’s ear-flick said everything else.

“Still might?”

“Still might.”

“What do we do if it does?”

“The Great Father was pretty clear on that point, I thought,” Fiin sniffed. “…Surely you’ve occasionally had to give an idiot a few new scars for his own good?”

“That’s our way,” Hiyal retorted. “I don’t know if we have the right to treat them like upstart young associates!”

“Champion Hiyal, I speak with love as your friend and ally, but if you think those people are anything other’n broken then you’re a fool,” Fiin growled, pouncing right up to the line where Hiyal’s dignity and that of his Clan would demand a duel. Hiyal’s hackles raised and his claws came out on reflex, and several nearby officers and technicians subtly moved away from them before Fiin offered a mollification. “…Which I know you ain’t.”

That was enough to take them back from the edge of violence, and Hiyal drew his claws back in with a deep breath, but his hackles were still up when the Array thumped and the Great Father strode onto the deck. He sniffed the air, then gave his two Champions a semi-amused but dangerous look.

“…There a problem?”

Hiyal settled down. “…Champion Fiin was…” he paused, glanced at Fiin, then sighed and shook his head in capitulation. “…Speaking a hard truth that I didn’t want to hear.”

“As the Champion of Stoneback would,” Daar rumbled approvingly. “Though tact is somethin’ that’s awful useful too.”

“As you say, My Father,” Fiin agreed, evenly.

“…Not that I was ever any good at it,” the Great Father chittered. “Anyway. We’re at war, ain’t time ‘fer pleasant catchin’-up. Brief me.”

Fiin and Hiyal looked at each other, and Fiin made further peace by gesturing for Hiyal to go first.

“I just came from Fleet Intelligence over on the Raining Vengeance. We’ve detected Hunter construction activity in close stellar orbit. They’re building something near the star. We don’t know what, but they’ve been suspiciously quiet otherwise so I don’t like it one bit. Drunker on Turkeyer will be taking a look at it as soon as she’s ready.”

“Why not Silent But Deadly?” Daar inquired.

“They have a groundside target. Champion Fiin?”

“We’ve lost a lot of troops and vehicles to these cyberized Hunters, even with the change in weapon loadout,” Fiin reported. “Claws from Fourth Fang are joining up with the JETS team to take out what we think is their primary production center. That operation should be going ahead any minute now.”

“And the flyby on this thing the Hunters’re buildin’?”

“Not for a few hours yet, My Father,” Hiyal said.

“Then we’re gonna watch our people work,” the Great Father decided. “An’ enjoy watchin’ the Hunters get what’s comin’ to them…”

Date Point: 16y11m5d AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Planet ‘Mordor,’ Hunter Space

Tooko, Pilot and Stud of Clan Firefang

Combat was infinitely more stressful when it was your friends doing the fighting, and there wasn’t a Daar-damned thing to do about it.

Tooko had a commanding view of the factory, though that by itself wasn’t good enough to see his team, nor the Fourth Fang claw. Stealth operations were… well… stealthy like that. He had no idea if things were going well, if they were going horribly wrong…

All he could do was silently orbit and watch. And wait.

A small spasm of relief flooded his soul when the telephoto cameras observed his testosterone-poisoned monkey friends swarming up the side of the cargo handling facility, just about as fast as Tooko himself would have run the same distance horizontally, and as effortlessly as if the bulky and insanely heavy packs on their backs were of exactly zero concern to them. They were approaching from an angle where they would be all-but-invisible from the ground, which was in turn a particularly difficult to access bit of dirt. If they’d made it that far…

Two shadows on the rooftop moved, and with a jolt Tooko realized that they’d been a pair of Whitecrests the whole time. The cavemonkeys handed off the targeting beacons to them and the pair darted off across the roof to deploy them while Ferd and his men hauled their dump webs toward the shield generator.

Four extremely heavy Ten’Gewek knuckling around on the roof probably wasn’t all that quiet from the inside though. It was just a warehouse after all, and they hadn’t been up there for even half a minute when a rollup door at ground level opened and a pair of Hunters emerged… right into Rees and Wilde, who’d taken up position on either side with silky precision. Four swift and synchronized stabs to the spine reduced the Hunter population of the base by two.

The shield generators were protected by metal cages on the roof, which they’d been briefed about. Each cage got its very own Ten’Gewek, who looked to the Whitecrests for the signal—

Tooko’s HUD pinged. The beacons were up.

The Hunters noticed that alright, especially when the cavemonkeys tore the shield cages right out of their concrete foundations and tossed them off the roof. Almost faster than Tooko could follow, Hunters were boiling out of doors or even clawing through the thin sheet metal walls to make their own egress, ravenous for blood.

Fourth Fang shot them sideways in the ass with an absolute storm of firepower from their concealed position on the compound’s west side. Caught between that and the Humans’ disciplined, accurate shots from the east end of the compound, the angry swarm wavered, faltered, then fell into disarray and scattered, trying to find some cover.

The cavemonkeys meanwhile had only one job: get out, with their Whitecrest buddies along for the ride. Ferd unceremoniously scooped both of them up in his tail and flung himself off the roof—they were up so high!—and sailed through the air like he’d done the deed thousands of times before. Probably had, given they were a tree-dwelling people. The trees on Mordor weren’t anything like as sturdy as his native Ketta though, so Ferd crashed into one and rode its splintering, disintegrating form down, bleeding off momentum so that when he alighted he did so almost lightly among the collapsing branches and leaves.

That done, he gave his two passengers a hefty congratulatory slap on the back, hoisted his weapon, and added its weight to Fourth Fang’s contribution.

At the other end of the compound, Nomuk, Tumik and Genn didn’t bother with such frivolities. They just jumped off the roof and landed hard on some kind of a Hunter cargo container, which dented spectacularly.

The plan was for them to grab the three Humans and withdraw at speed. The Hunters still had something to say about that, sadly.

Two tanks smashed their way out of the goods yard. No frills, no messing around with fusion claws, they just barged through the thin metal like it was a cobweb.

Ferd was a bit distant from the fight. He charged in, much faster than Tooko ever would have guessed a Ten’Gewek could move. His speed certainly foiled the tank that turned his way, which raised its gun arm and tried to track him, only to lose him behind some containers. It opened fire anyway, riddling them with an alarming number of very large holes, but it was tracking behind him and the burst only succeeded in reducing the concrete behind his heels to gravel. Thwarted, it scuttled forward to hunt him.

The other tank went the other way, stalking Wilde, Rees, Frasier, Nomuk, Tumik and Genn. An anti-tank missile speared out of the trees courtesy of Fourth Fang, and to Tooko’s dismay the Hunter ducked and half-turned with stunning speed for something so big while its shields flashed some kind of ECM: the missile slashed past it, missed the tank by inches, and shredded a nearby wall section.

That distraction was all the opportunity the deathworlders needed, though: hooting war cries, the three Ten’Gewek slammed into it, grabbing its limbs with their hands, the segmented armor plating along its legs and back with their feet, and heaving. The tank struggled and wrestled, spinning and bucking as it tried to dislodge them.

Spurred by the presence of anti-tank firepower, the one pursuing Ferd abandoned its pursuit and turned to rake the Fourth Fang position with a blizzard of bullets. The Stonebacks flowed like air, first recoiling from the firestorm then maneuvering sharply to find a better position.

Ferd, however, wasn’t going to let the tank have its way. He vaulted a container and crashed onto its back with enough momentum to stagger it. His feet grabbed into the armor plates below its armpits hard enough to crush and buckle them, he grabbed hold of its fusion scythe arm, above the elbow where it wasn’t spitting with lethal energy, and heaved.

The scythe’s power flickered, and died. Tooko almost imagined he could hear the squeal of tortured metal and splintering composite from where he was as Ferd wrenched, twisted, torqued, and heaved again to fully separate the bucking Hunter’s arm from its body.

His men and the Humans were achieving something similar with the other one. Nomuk, Tumik and Genn weren’t Given-Men, but they were still absurdly strong by anything else’s standards. Strong enough that the Hunter they were rodeoing could hardly move its arms. Wilde, Rees and Frasier ducked between and under its legs with their own knives out, fusion blades sizzling as they cut upwards into its belly, crippling its legs. Frasier swarmed up the Hunter’s writhing body to stab deep into the gun and scythe arms for good measure while Rees and Wilde planted explosive charges, and then all six men withdrew.

The Hunter, its legs useless and its arms disabled, sank to the deck, twitched pathetically as it tried futilely to turn and murder them, and then burst in half when the charges detonated.

Tooko punched his seat’s arm and barked a victory cry, then corrected the minor wobble in his orbit. His hackles were up, his teeth bared and his blood racing. When those dump webs went off—

They did.

As the factory’s overhead shielding sputtered and failed, he wrenched the controls, flipped SBD through a turn that no mere stunt plane could ever have achieved, and fed capacitor power to the engines while the ship got a solid lock on the remaining tank.

“HILLFOOT, PIPPIN. Shields are down, can I shoot?”

Wilde’s voice was as level and calm as always. “Cheers, PIPPIN. CHUNKY, fall back and let him have his fun.”

Ferd gave the Hunter’s gun arm a last tug that thoroughly broke it, punched it in the back of its armored skull so hard that he stunned it, then sprang off its back and out of harm’s way taking its fusion scythe for a trophy. Fourth Fang were busy mopping up the last few Hunters now that they weren’t under heavy fire…

“PIPPIN, HILLFOOT. Kill that big bugger for me, would you?

Tooko grinned and armed his gauss cannon. “Roger, HILLFOOT. Firing.”

When it came to precision-killing one hard target, nothing beat a gauss cannon. It was deafeningly loud even within the safe confines of the hull and shaved off a pretty significant amount of Tooko’s speed with a jolt that strained the inertial stabilizers, but the result?

The result was that the tank, limping as it turned to try and raise its damaged gun arm, was struck by a hypersonic slug of white-hot tungsten wrapped around a very molten copper core, and ceased to exist.

Tooko nosed up, threw on the retros on full power, and peeled out of his attack vector to come around for a more gentle landing to pick up his team. His reward came from Rees, in a rare moment of lax radio discipline.

“…Fuckin’ ‘ell… Uh, good hits, PIPPIN. Well done.”

That was a feeling of triumph like no other. Tooko bled off the last of his speed through a wide swooping turn, and brought Silent But Deadly in for a landing in the clear ground south of where his target had been.

“Ready for pickup.”

They were up his ramp in moments. Fourth Fang had their own transport, already coming forward to collect them, so Tooko lifted off the instant Frasier had backed up it with his weapon trained outward for any miraculous surviving threats, and radioed to the Clawleader.

“DARKFANG FOUR, PIPPIN. We’re ready to light the fireworks.”

“Understood, PIPPIN. We’re clear, send it whenever you’re ready.”

His passengers hadn’t spent all that long outdoors and needed far less decontamination than they normally did. A quick high-temperature, high-pressure spray followed by a powerful blow-dry, and the men were already through the airlock, stripped down to the compressive underlayer of their NBC gear, pulling out the maneuver couches and strapping themselves in.

Tooko climbed, turned, accelerated, and switched comms channels all in one slick movement, while running an eye over his last visual of the target. Nothing Gaoian, Human or Ten’Gewek was left down there, so he sent the call. “Raining Vengeance, Silent But Deadly. Target prepared, beacons active. Fire when ready.”

“Copy, Silent But Deadly. Rounds away. Beware of turbulence.”

Tooko didn’t have time to reply before the clear and awesome proof of where the Raining Vengeance got her name lanced down behind him. Strobing pillars of superluminal blue radiation raked back and forth through the target facility as the Vengeance sent down thousands of rounds in just a few heartbeats.

The burst lasted only moments, but left a mushroom of dust and hot air blooming into the sky. SBD lurched in Tooko’s paws as a prolonged rumble of a shockwave passed her, leaving the air boiling and unsettled once it had gone.

Over the comms, the pilot of Fourth Fang’s dropship grunted a tense “Fyu’s ass…” as his larger, heavier, less agile vehicle bullied and jolted through the storm rather than surfing it…

But then they were back into clear and calm air. Tooko sideslipped, fell in alongside and behind the dropship at a higher altitude, then allowed some of the ice water to drain out of his veins so he could think again.

“…You lot certainly know how to wreck shit,” he commented over his shoulder.

The reactions were interesting. The Ten’Gewek were of course boisterously proud, with Ferd showing off an impressively brawny stone-hard arm whose bicep alone balled up to roughly the size of his own massive head. Much hooting and general macho braggadocio ensued, which made Tooko chitter. Theirs’ was a very uncivilized sort of charisma…but hey, it worked for them!

The Humans were a fair bit more restrained. For them, it wasn’t so much about displays of dominance and strength, though there was a certain quiet smugness about them. No, for the Humans, the overwhelming feeling seemed to be one of professional pride in a job well done.

All of them were seriously wound up, however. Since they were stuck in their chairs, the best they could do was review the mission footage. There were plenty of constructive critiques to go around, but it was all minor, incremental improvement they could think about for their next mission.

Ferd’s single-handed takedown of one of the Hunter tanks got many rounds of praise. “Christ,” Wilde shook his head with a grin. “That right there is why I don’t wrestle you, Chunky!”

“Good knife-work!” Ferd replied in turn, tapping the footage of the three Humans ducking under the other tank to carve and slice it apart. “How do you spin blade around hand like that?”

“Practice.” Frasier gestured with his hand. “But don’t try it with a fusion knife unless it has a grip safety like ours.”

And so on. It wasn’t long before they were cleared to un-belt, and that was the moment they all practically sprang out of their seats to burn off the manic tail-ends of their energy.

The Ten’Gewek didn’t even bother to remove their undersuits before they set into their usual wrestling games. Apparently, the slippery fabric did much to nullify Ferd’s unassailable strength advantage; all the cavemonkeys agreed this was a considerable improvement.

The Humans were, again, much less boisterous, but they too energetically attended to their post-mission cleanup, and after they’d finished with their own weapons and equipment, (eventually) managed to break up the wrestle-pile. It took Wilde nearly twenty minutes to wriggle free of Fred’s grasp, but once they’d had their fun, he reminded the Ten’Gewek to clean their gear.

And took the newfound opportunity to, if not relax, at least rest for a bit.

Wilde sauntered over into the co-pilot seat, clearly pleased with himself and his team.

“Went well, overall…but it got a bit hairy down there for a moment,” he confided.

“You made it look almost easy.”

The Human issued a tired sort of almost-laugh, and nodded. Clearly the adrenaline and lingering energy were fading. “Glad you think so, Took.”

Ferd hooted from the equipment station, “Easy because Wilde teach us good!” That was mildly infuriating; on top of everything else they were blessed with, they also had exceptionally acute hearing.

And essentially zero sense of privacy. They meant well, though.

“How long back to base?”

Tooko glanced at his map. “At the speed that bucket Fourth Fang are in flies? Five hours.”

“You staying up here?”

“Have to. It’s a long intercontinental flight. We’ve got friendly guns overhead, but if the Hunters send anything our way, fighting them off is my job…”

“Right.” Wilde stood again. “I’ma get some Egyptian PT in, then.”

“…Some what?”

“Some sleep, mate.”

Tooko glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, Frasier and Rees were both already out like lights in their individual bunks. He had no idea how they did it. They were barely out of a furious fight to the death with two oversized super-Hunters followed by the kind of fireworks display hardly anybody ever got to see… and once given the chance they could fall asleep almost instantly.

Wilde clapped him on the shoulder and headed back to his own bunk.

That just left the Ten’Gewek, whose exuberant hooting displays of victory had wound down quite sharply too. Once they’d accomplished the all-important task of cleaning their weapons, they’d collapsed together in a tangled knot of limbs and tails, and were already nodding off to sleep. Of course, they liked to keep their reserves topped off even more aggressively than the Humans did.

The transition from lightning-fast, sustained, focused violence to seven men slumbering peacefully in his ship as they rose above the smog layer and emerged into beautiful clear blue skies was a little surreal for Tooko. He sipped some water, ate a little jerky, and, after checking one last time that they were well-protected under the Vengeance’s umbrella, he turned on autopilot, grabbed his tablet, and sat back to watch a movie that Frasier had recommended.

It was a long way home.

Date point: 16y11m5d AV
The Clawhold, Planet ‘Mordor,’ Hunter Space

Ginn, Foot-soldier first class, Grand Army of the Gao

Ginn waited until the forcefields and physical barricades that formed the Clawhold’s entrance were firmly closed behind them before he cut the power to his weapon, unplugged its ammo feed and returned it to the forward-facing position.

The multi-barrelled, spinning, howling thing he’d been given to replace the machine gun and grenade launcher from his previous Growl was a lot more intimidating to the Hunters. With a two-thirds-one-third mix of full metal jacket to shieldbreaker rounds fired in a deafening buzzsaw torrent, it tore their shields down in a flash and mauled the armor beneath for good measure. If Ginn aimed for the weak spots like the eyes and joints, the Hunters didn’t like it at all.

They were still a danger… but they were now a danger the Gao had a counter for. That was a much better situation to be in, but Ginn was still almost numb with relief from knowing that he was safely in here rather than out there once again.

Fortunately, vehicle maintenance wasn’t his job. He and his squadmates left their Growl to be decontaminated and checked over by the mechanics, and instead trudged over the open ground toward the mess facility.

The Mess, out of necessity, was one of the few places in the Clawhold where NBC gear could be safely removed, the others being the barracks, field hospital, and command center. Entering any of those involved a hefty rinse with high-pressure hot water from tail to top, and a scrub from two decontamination specialists with long-handled foaming brushes.

But, considering the alternative was like taking a good huff from a diesel vehicle’s exhaust, Ginn wasn’t going to complain.

The next step for everyone after getting out of the protective gear was a dust bath. Even with their bellies rumbling, they’d endured the itching for far too long. Ginn actually whimpered in relief as he finally got to roll and rub his back into the warm sand and soothe a particularly irritated spot. He wasn’t alone. The NBC gear was torture.

They didn’t take longer than they needed to genuinely relieve their suffering, however. Their bellies were empty and once their fur was dry and brushed and their skin soothed, the smell of roast kwek was like a hook in their noses.

There were a Claw of Stonebacks at one of the tables, joking and chittering and boasting as they tore into a meal twice the size of what was on Ginn’s tray. Second Fang, from the unit insignia, and not to be mistaken as any less fearsome than their brothers in First Fang. The difference was specialization, not talent.

Ginn had seen more Stonebacks in the last couple of days than he’d seen in his whole life prior. They were a big and influential Clan but…

Well. Before the homeworld war, Stoneback had been engineers and farmers working on big projects out in the country, while Ginn had managed stock at a supermarket in a suburb of Do Wun. Neither the supermarket nor the city existed any longer, and only the good fortune of living outside the quarantine perimeter had saved Ginn from sharing their fate.

His was a fairly typical story, in that regard. Most of the Grand Army had been left with no other future after the biodrone uprising, when the communes they’d grown up in, the businesses they worked for and the workhouses they lived at were all gone. The choice was stark: serve in the Grand Army, or starve.

That hadn’t been an ultimatum. That had just been the truth of it. And so Ginn served. He’d even met a female, shortly before coming to ‘Mordor.’ She’d politely and gently turned him down, but he’d still been left feeling good. There were so few females nowadays, even just getting to meet Sister Shoyma and have a conversation, even the chance to try and impress her, had been fulfilling. It had reminded him what the Grand Army was fighting for.

The pleasant memory distracted him so much that he didn’t notice the hulking figure approaching the table at first. When he did, it was because one of his squadmates nudged him. He looked up at the big brown mass of one of the Stonebacks and pricked up his ears in surprise.

The Stoneback pant-grinned down at him, smelling of friendliness and good humor. “Hey little guy, I hear ‘yer the one figgered out those big fuckers don’t like it when you shoot ‘em innaface. My folks tellin’ me good?”

Ginn’s brain short-circuited, but something about the huge, friendly face hovering above him drew an answer out of him before he could properly think.

“Well… I guess?”

“Thought so. My Brothers said you kept ‘yer head an’ kept shootin’, so they seemed ‘ta think ‘yer pretty good!”

“I haven’t died yet…” Ginn ventured. That earned him a hearty, baritone chitter and the Stonebacks joined him and his squadmates at their table.

Hanging out with Clan was a novel experience for most of them at the table. It was one thing to meet Clan brothers in official capacities through work, but another thing entirely to be treated like friends and brothers-in-arms. Ginn had worked in the shadow of Clan Goldpaw all his life, but always a long way down the hierarchy. The Clan were bankers, investors, owners, board members and executives. A mere shelf-stacker wasn’t the kind of person they interacted with. They lived in different worlds.

The Stonebacks didn’t. It didn’t matter to them that Ginn was entirely Clanless, that he had sired no cubs, or that he had been basically nobody before the war. They liked him. They said as much, and everybody knew that Stonebacks had a code against even little white lies. Here and now, they were just soldiers serving on the same polluted pit of a planet, taking on the same dangers and the same foes.

It had to end eventually of course. In time, the Stonebacks went on their way, but their parting encouragement to Ginn that he could ‘mebbe take a shot at the rites if ‘ya got good an’ big enough’ ran through Ginn’s head as he went back to the barracks and curled up with his friends in their nest-bed area. They still had safety gear to hand in case a Hunter attack breached the sealed environment, there were still the distant sounds of war going on outside…

But for the first time since arriving on the planet, Ginn felt good about things.

He slept well.

Date Point: 16y11m5d AV
Orbital Superiority Platform Raining Vengeance, Orbiting planet ‘Mordor,’ Hunter Space

Hiyal, Champion of Clan One-Fang

“This is what you were worried ‘bout?”

“Yes, My Father. We’re not sure what it is exactly.” Saying that it couldn’t be anything good would have been redundant.

The Great Father leaned in and studied the display. “How big?”

“About the size of a small outpost or mining platform. We think they actually reconfigured and moved a station from the outer system.”

“Drunker on Turkeyer should give us a better idea in a few minutes.”

The Great Father duck-nodded, took a step back, hooked his claws comfortably into the carrying harness he wore, and waited patiently.

Drunker on Turkeyer may have been marginally surpassed by the Silent But Deadly, but only marginally. In absolute terms, she was still one of the fastest and quietest stealth ships ever built, and even her position marker on Hiyal’s system map was based on where she should be if she stuck to the mission profile, rather than actual sensor data or a tracking device.

The approach was a stealth-warp, at only a few kilolights. Below the threshold where her carefully tuned drive would generate any ripples in local spacetime that would stand out from the ordinary gentle ripples caused by the interplay of planetary, lunar and stellar gravity wells.

Her egress was not so silent. At exactly the expected time, there was a strong gravimetric contact as the ship surged up to nearly half a megalight and streaked away from the stellar well before vanishing into a jump fold.

Moments later, her telemetry came through, and Hiyal growled.

The Hunter facility was basically just a bunker, stuffed full of cooling equipment… and forcefield emitters. Titanic ones.

“…Am I lookin’ at what I think I’m lookin’ at?” the Great Father growled. “‘Cuz that looks like one giant-ass forcefield array.”

“Yes,” Hiyal agreed. “Fyu’s sword, if they get that thing operational, they could focus stellar output like a giant lens…!”

“…Would system shields protect against that?” Daar asked.

Hiyal had no idea. Fortunately, knowing such things wasn’t his job. That role fell to one of his technical analysts, who considered the question solemnly for a few moments, commendably calm for a young male with the Great Father himself looming over him.

“…System defence shields are superluminal, they have to be in order to do what they do. But there is a little latency internal to the device’s own electronics, even with the internal time dilation. So when the shield opaques to prevent an energy burst from penetrating, there are always a few nanoseconds of leakage. Normally, the amount of energy that can leak through in that window would be insignificant, even for quite large events…”

“But a nanosecond burst of the focused energy of an entire stellar hemisphere is still a fuckova lot,” the Great Father finished.

“Exactly, My Father.”

“Enough to damage a ship?”

“Uh….” The technician grabbed a tablet. “…Yellow-white star, so stellar output is about… three hundred and eighty-four yottawatts… cut that in half for one hemisphere…”

Hiyal and the Great Father waited for him to calculate. After a few seconds the technician’s ears went flat, and he cleared his throat. “About… twenty exajoules per nanosecond.”

“That much energy in a nanosecond? That ain’t even enough time ‘fer a beam o’ light t’cross my left forepaw. Ain’t that gonna fuck wit’ the pulse?”

“It would force the pulse to have a maximum wavelength somewhere in the far thermal or near microwave, My Father, but… well, if I was building this weapon I’d want to use gamma or X-ray anyway.” The technician ventured an apologetic set of his ears. “It wouldn’t have any real effect on the total energy delivered.”

“…Well then. I s’pose the answer to my question is yes,” Daar observed, drily. “How much damage would twenny exajoules do ‘ta my ship?”

“That’s the equivalent of a couple of gigatons, My Father. If the Fury’s shields were opaque in the correct frequency before the shot landed, she might be able to deflect enough to survive, but more likely she’d just be instantly vaporized. The firing time is effectively instantaneous, and the optical qualities of a forcefield array are infinitely variable, so they could split the beam, or stutter it, direct… millions of heat rays per second at targets all over the system, depending on how well they handle the waste heat…”

“Welp.” Daar nodded, interrupting the technician’s increasingly worried babbling. “That’s a fuckin’ superweapon if I ever saw one.” He rose to his full height, turned and barked his orders.

“Get me Father Regaari, Champion Fiin, an’ my armor. We need the HEAT. Now.”

++End Chapter 62++

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 63: “Torn”

Chapter 63: Torn

Date Point:14y1m AV, two years prior to the invasion of Mordor
Planet Akyawentuo

Ferd Werne-Breaker

A Man. A tall, strange man, with a strange spear in his hand. Fire falling from the sky.

That had been his vision on the day Ferd became a man and was Given his name by the Singer. He’d earned it by doing exactly that in his manhood hunt; his spear failed him at the worst possible moment and, faced with a very angry young werne bull, Ferd did the only thing he could do. Fight it. The werne charged. Ferd met it, and wrestled it to the ground.

And then he broke the werne, with nothing more than the strength the gods had Given him.

That was not something a boy just becoming a man should have been able to do. But Ferd had always been very big and very strong for his age, even if he wasn’t very tall. He’d grown up more quickly than most, too; his crest had gone from yellow to bright orange in less than a season. He’d been proud of how fast and how well he was becoming a man, and decided to prove himself by carrying the entire werne back to the tribe instead of just its head. It was a young bull not unlike himself, still growing into his strength…well, had been before Ferd had Taken him.

Doing that had so tired Ferd, he was seeing his vision even before the magic dust, before the women of the tribe taught him the ways of man and woman, before his father and Given-Man had Given him his knives of manhood. He remembered little of it. A blur of dancing, the fire stretching out into forever. Warm skin pressed against his, the taste of a woman’s body. Holding his knives of manhood for the first time.

A Man. A spear. Fire from the sky.

He’d puzzled over that vision for a long time. Seasons passed. Ferd Werne-Breaker grew into a strong redcrest of a man, though most of that seemed to be sideways instead of up, and tended to thicken him much more than most. The gods saw fit to Give him great strength, even if that meant he’d never be taller than the women. Ferd didn’t mind. His life was happy.

Then he met the tall, strange man. The Humans were much stranger in person than his vision could have ever prepared him for. He learned what the spear was, too. Found himself wondering what the point of all his strength was against weapons like the Sky-People had.

He’d learned that when the fire fell from the sky.

It had been a terrible fight, and his tribe’s Given-Man had died in the war. Luckily, his tribe was allied with Yan’s and that meant they were safe until the gods chose which man would be Given to them. It didn’t take very long. Ferd was one of three redcrests in the tribe, and while he was the youngest, he was also easily the strongest, with the tallest and reddest crest.

Ferd could still remember the day it started. He’d woken up and felt like his whole body was on fire. He’d been drenched in sweat, everything ached from his toes on up. Even his crest hurt. He didn’t know a crest could hurt! All he’d wanted to do was drink water and eat meat all day long. He’d never been so hungry, never known thirst like that. He only stopped when he couldn’t eat or drink anymore, but still the urge was there. His Singer knew immediately what it meant of course, but in the pain of the hunger, he didn’t figure it out right away.

He did figure it out eventually, when he started tasting the magic fruit’s flavor on the air. Normally they were horrible to eat, and people went out of their way to avoid them. Now, though, he could think of nothing but eating them, and so he did, until his hands and mouth were stained bright, bright red.

The red of a Given-Man.

The fruit, when dried, was where the Singers got their magic dust. The leaves, when burned, were how the Given-Men opened their eyes to the gods. But when eaten, the fruit Gave a man the first Fire of his life, if he was ready to Take it. It was…agony. His body hurt so much and it never stopped. He was so angry at everything, even stupid little things like a twig poking him in the foot could send him into a murderous rage. The only thing that calmed him was hunting, and he needed to hunt because his hunger grew, and grew, and grew.

Once he’d tasted the fruit, he’d been Chosen. All he would have needed to do to refuse the Giving would have been to ignore the fruit, no matter how hard its taste tried to seduce him. But honestly…what man would refuse such a Giving? After that first taste, his fate was sealed.

Yan Given-Man took him to the newly-built lodge some days later, once his hunger had calmed. There, every part of Ferd Werne-Breaker was viciously Taken from him. It went on for days. There was work, and an endless series of trials to prove his worth, each harder than the last. There was fighting, real fighting, where the Given-Men showed Ferd the meaning of strength and weakness. There were rites, with cruel visions, where his very soul was laid bare before the merciless Lodge. In the end he couldn’t think, couldn’t move, could hardly talk.

Couldn’t remember his own name. It was Yan who Gave it back. But not all of it.

“We name you Ferd, young Given-Man. Stand up, and be reborn as a man of the gods.”

Ferd. Ferd Given-Man. Heaving himself upright, even using his arms and tail to help, was one of the hardest things Ferd had ever done. For the first time in a long, long while he felt weak, but it was an earned weakness. The weakness that followed Giving all the strength he had until there was none left. A weakness to be proud of. Yan smiled in approval, and embraced Ferd in a powerful hug, one so fierce it crushed the breath out of his chest.

“I knew you could do it. I am proud of you, Ferd. Now rest, and grow strong.”

He was allowed to sleep, then. So much sleep. The Lodge watched him, kept him safe and well-fed. He kept eating like a starving man. The aches in his body were so completely inescapable, he did the only thing he could and started ignoring them. Ferd regained his strength soon enough, though. Regained it, and then after that…

He had become so much more.

When the gods had finally let go of his body some many hands of days later, and Ferd started to feel like himself again, he got up, sprang from his sleeping-nest like he was lighter than a child. Moving was so easy now! He could jump—

So much higher than he’d ever done before! And when he landed, it was obvious that he wasn’t light at all, because he fell onto a big rock and cracked it open just with his weight! When he walked back, he looked down and saw that some small rocks broke apart under his feet, that his footprints sank deep into the forest dirt. His legs, though…he looked at them…

He looked at them in wonder.

Where before his legs had been big and shapely pillars a man could be proud of, now they were huge, all hard deep lines bulging thick with muscle. He stopped and explored himself, and it was the same amazing changes everywhere he felt, everywhere he could see. He looked down and felt in astonishment at the much bigger stack of rock-muscles on his belly. He felt along his huge arms, his thick neck, his enormous chest… everything was so much bigger and harder! Even his hands and feet. Even his cock. Even his tail! All of it had changed so much, it was like he was a new person in a new body, one so much better than the one he had before, and that had been one that could claim the prettiest women, and crush the biggest men.

And all that was just the first of the Givings. He could feel the world better, too. He could see better, in the dark and in the day. Taste the wind more sharply. Hear the tiniest sounds. Feel the crisp sharpness of bark under his fingers and toes, the smooth softness of leaves. The Humans’ strange sky-words somehow came easier in his bigger stretched-forward mouth with its bigger fangs and more room for his tongue. He could find his words quicker too, tell jokes he’d never before thought to tell. Never been quick enough to tell! Not even Vemik’s amazing sky-thoughts were so confusing anymore!

Well, still confusing. A little. Vemik had a strong mind, in its strange way.

Ferd had grown strong like he could never have imagined. He’d learned that the Given-Men almost never showed the rest of the People just how strong they were, how hard they were. Almost nothing could hurt him, now. And he would never stop getting better, until his strength was too great for this world and he was called back to the gods, to the Great Hunt in the sky.

Gradually, Ferd could feel himself settling comfortably into his new world. The spring had come and he was feeling his first springtime Fire. His body felt tight, almost full to bursting with everything he’d been Given. It was like every part of everything about him was crackling with aliveness. He felt like he could do anything! The women had always liked him, but now he could swagger into any friendly tribe and have his pick! Picks! And it was time to think about that, too. New Given-Men didn’t normally take over their old tribe. They protected it for a time of course, but that was only until a different Given-Man, one he judged was worthy, could take his place as their chief and protector. He’d even had a good idea who he’d offer, too…

The Lodge had very different plans for him.

Yan pulled him aside to talk about it. Ferd was…uneasy around Yan. He had been the one to show Ferd the meaning of weakness, and had beat him very nearly to death during his initiation into the Lodge. He did so almost like he was bored. Like he was doing something he had to do, and it was just too easy… A man never forgot a thing like that.

But Yan had also been the one to hunt for Ferd while he recovered. Yan had also taught Ferd very many important things about the world he lived in, now. A man never forgot that, either.

“You will be one of the best of us, in time. I can taste it already. I was much like you when I was young. We were both early and fast to manhood. I was short too!”

Ferd had to look up to see Yan’s face, because Yan Given-Man was the tallest man of the People. “That is very hard to believe.”

Yan trilled, and slapped Ferd on the back hard enough to stagger him. “It’s true! I’ve had many seasons to grow. Every year, a whisker taller…in many years, those whiskers grow tall.”

“Will I be tall like you one day?”

“If you don’t die or lose yourself to the Fire, maybe!” Yan’s enormous fang-filled grin was much friendlier than it had been not so long ago. Or so it seemed.

“That’s a strange thought. You need to duck to get into huts!”

“And turn shoulders! But yes, we are much alike, I think. We were both young to the Fire too. And we both knew this would come to us, yes?”

Ferd nodded. “I always thought it would, one day. I didn’t think it would happen so fast.”

“Most of us, the Fire comes later in life. But I think many more will come to the Fire young, now.”

That got Ferd’s interest. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” Yan shrugged his huge shoulders. “I just feel it. Since we came down the mountain, every tribe has two or three young redcrests now, the hunting here is very rich…”

He wasn’t saying something, and Ferd realized that might not have been a thing he would have noticed, before. He wasn’t ever stupid, but, well…he hadn’t really been smart, either. That changed along with everything else. He could feel that more strongly than his own huge muscles, which was saying something; walking upright felt stranger now, with his legs being forced wider apart. He could even feel his own back moving across itself! Distracting.

“There’s something else you want to say.”

Yan gave him a calculating look, and then nodded, satisfied by something.

“Have you thought about the Sky-People and their war?”

“I think…” Ferd…well, thought. He’d never really considered it before. “…I think it isn’t just their war. It’s ours too, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Our friends’ wars have always been our own.”

Ferd nodded. “Our friends have always been weak, too.”

“Not these friends,” Yan warned. “The Sky-People are not like the city-People our grand-sires and their grand-sires and their grand-sires once fought for. The Humans have much strength. It’s just…different strength. Usually.”

Ferd felt like he had to disagree. “Strong weapons are not strong people, Yan.”

“No. But sky-thinking is a strength of its own. They’re not weak, either. Look at Jooyun! Or Heff!”

“Feh.” Ferd was not impressed. “He’s not weak…but a man as tall as you should be much stronger! And Heff is small. My sack is bigger than he is!”

Yan trilled and shook his head. “You say that now. I challenge you, go and wrassle them both, see how weak they really are! And there are two Humans that even I have trouble with. One is even stronger than me! I need to do much training before I can crush him. Soon, maybe! But not yet.” Yan thumped his thick chest, “It is only that I am hard that he does not always win.”

Ferd had strong doubts about that, but he knew Yan to be patient and wise, so he held his peace. “Okay. If they can be strong like you say, then why do they need us?”

“They don’t know they need us, not yet. But you are not wrong either. Most of their people are small. Tough, and clever, but still small. There is much we could do for them. They come here to learn from us, yes?”

“…That’s true. It’s fun scaring their warriors! But without their sky-weapons, they would not stand against even the yellowest-crested man of the People.”

“Don’t be so sure, they would prove tricky for most any of the People. But we will not talk about that until after you’ve been beaten by Heff.”

“Feh.”

Yan rumbled amusedly. “You’ll see. But again, you’re right. They have many strengths, strengths we do not have. But they do not much have the strengths we have. This is like the city-People. We can trade our strength for theirs. A Giving for a Giving. And we want you to be the first.”

Ferd stopped in his tracks, and found his tail twitching back and forth on its own. “The first? You mean, like a warband? Like the stories say we once did?”

“Yes.”

Ferd gnawed on a finger as he considered that. The stories and songs said that long, long ago—many hands of grand-sires ago—the tribes had sent warbands of their best men, led by a Given-Man, to Give their strength to weaker friends in war, and in hunting and raiding.

“That would mean I would be away fighting for years maybe!”

“It would. It would also mean much glory for you and your men when you returned…”

…That was true. Ferd hadn’t ever had trouble attracting women’s attention, but things would be different when he founded a new tribe. New tribes were risky. The women wouldn’t so eagerly jump into their arms until they’d had a reputation for safety. Among his nieces, none were quite ready to become Singers, either. They needed time to grow. Give them a few years…

…And some brave adventures to his name…

A Man. A spear. Fire from the sky. Maybe his vision wasn’t quite what he thought it was.

“…You said the first. Do the Singers agree to this?”

“It’s not for the Singers to decide, young Given-Man.”

“Well, no, but…” Ferd shrugged. “I can’t see it being a bad thing if they agreed, too. No mother likes to send their sons off to hunt.”

“But she must, if she wants meat.”

“Is this the same? And do they know it is the same?”

“…Hmm.” Yan’s tail twitched to and fro in thinking. “A fair sky-thought. But yes, the Singers know. Only a foolish Chief would not speak with his Singer. And anything she knows…”

Ferd trilled at that. “Only a foolish man underestimates a Singer!”

“And a young man, his friends. Go, meet with Jooyun and Heff. Let them show you what they can do. But keep your purpose close. And pick your warband!”

Ferd had done as asked. And Heff had educated him. Ferd was certainly much bigger and stronger than him, and faster too, but the little hairy Human knew exactly where to grip and pinch to hurt the most or to weaken Ferd’s grasp. And he knew how to toss too. That had come as a surprise! Heff made his point at the end though, when he pressed the back of his knife against Ferd’s throat.

His expression was about half way between vicious and friendly. [“Us little shits ain’t always so nice, huh?”]

Ferd trilled warily, and gave in while he was flat on his back, still a bit confused as to how exactly the little man had managed any of that.

[“I not fight with man who can cut my neck.”]

Heff meanwhile was a surprisingly heavy man sitting on Ferd’s belly, much heavier than he looked. Heff grinned that big, smug grin Humans did when they were feeling very pleased with themselves, and showed off a pair of hard knotted arms about the size of his head. They were short, and not nearly as big as Ferd’s… But they still looked very, very strong. Only Jooyun had bigger among the Humans, and his were big around even for a redcrest!

Heff wasn’t a weak man at all. He was…small-strong. A strange thought, but he couldn’t deny what Heff had taught him, or the rock-like weight of the man sitting on his belly. And Ferd found himself impressed.

“Smart man,” Heff said in the People’s words, and then climbed off Ferd’s belly. He reached down to try and help Ferd up but that was a mistake, because strong or not…he was small.

Ferd had him pinned in an instant and played with his new friend for a good long while, until they had earned each other’s respect and were having too much fun to be angry. He could at least recover some of his dignity.

He didn’t get that chance with Jooyun, though. Jooyun took all those same clever tricks and threw in being just as strong as a good man of the tribes should be. And like Heff, he never grew tired. If he couldn’t win, he just… lasted. Until Ferd’s own strength waned and failed.

The most embarrassing part was when Jooyun somehow managed to pin Ferd face-down in the dirt, locked up in just such a way that he couldn’t use any of his strength to escape.

But Jooyun could use all of his against Ferd…to great effect. “You shouldn’t ever be losing a fight against me, big fella. But here you are…losing.” Jooyun snarled into Ferd’s ear, while that thick, hard arm of his bit deeper into Ferd’s throat. “You’ve been relying on your brawn your whole life, haven’t you? So what do you do against someone who knows how to fight?”

He almost surrendered before he remembered to wrap his tail around Jooyun’s waist and squeeze good and hard. Jooyun grunted and held on, seemingly not bothered too much…

“Hnngh… That right there’d kill most Humans…but not me.” He growled, and that big ball of stone in his arm grew just a little bit bigger. “I can do this all day long…” Another grunt, and that muscle of his swelled up even more. “Can you?”

No. No Ferd could not. Jooyun growled and cruelly squeezed his arm much harder for a long moment, just to show what he could really do, and Ferd felt himself suddenly unable to breathe…He loosened his tail to give in. Joooyun didn’t let go. Instead he grunted and tightened his grip yet again, and squeezed down harder with those thick long legs of his…

But only for a moment. He let go before he gave any real hurt and rolled off, panting. He was big and strong enough to haul Ferd up to his feet and completely off the ground with a quiet grunt of effort. They hugged it out forehead-to-forehead, all slights and insults forgiven.

He did at least get some prestige back when Jooyun put Ferd down. The big Human rubbed his ribs and belly and grimaced. [“Christ, those tails of yours…now, you wanna learn how to beat me?”]

Ferd had learned a lot from those fights, and soon enough he was happily squashing them both under his strength! Usually. To beat them it wasn’t enough to be big, he had to be smart against the two tough Humans, and he couldn’t miss any trick or they’d squirm free and maybe win. And if Ferd ever let Jooyun get a good hold, it went from a contest of strength (which Ferd always won) and skill (which he was getting better at) to one of pain tolerance (…a tie) and sheer, gods-blessed endurance. Which Jooyun almost always won, and enjoyed winning thoroughly. A hand of days later Ferd talked about it with Yan.

Yan, of course, just hooted smugly at him. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“How do they know how to fight so well? They’re the wrong shape for wrasslin’! Their legs are too long, their arms are too short. No tail!”

“Heff spent years learning how to fight. That’s what he did for his Sky-Tribe, it was his purpose. And before that, he played at wrasslin’ and something called foot-ball to win honor for his ‘skool,’ which I think is like a bachelor tribe for young Humans to grow up in.”

“And foot-ball?”

“Fun game! But sometimes the rules are strange. Has a ball, but they carry it with their hand. Or sometimes they kick it. They charge into one another a lot and fight over the ball too. Heff says he was big as a young man and that he was very good at it.”

“But wasn’t he a very small man when he first came here?”

“Yes,” Ferd nodded. “His kind of warrior is called a ‘see-al’ and the kind of fighting they do means that being a very heavy man could be dangerous. So, while he was a ‘see-al’ he stayed little. Now he lives with us more so he decided to grow big again. Now he’s bigger than he ever was, and he was easily the strongest man in his skool. He’s still growing too!”

“Okay.” That was a strange idea, of fighters who could be too strong to fight. “And Jooyun?”

“He was born very strong, and his life has been one of hard work and trials. And he is good friends with Heff, and other Humans who are like Given-Men. Except not. It’s hard to explain.”

“…And Professor Daniel?” Ferd was having a hard time understanding how a people could be so different in their own tribe. He liked the Professor, especially his stories in strange, magic-sounding words…but Daniel was very weak.

“Smarter than Vemik.”

“…Daar?”

“Once, when we first fought the big enemy and when your old Given-Men went back to the gods, I was bigger than Daar, and much stronger, and I thought it would always be so. But Daar and his people had their very thoughts poisoned by the Big Enemy, and it turned them away from the gods, away from their own strength.” Yan grew angry just talking about it, and Ferd felt himself growing angry too. How could anything do something so evil?

“And…now? I know he is a great leader of the Sky-Tribes…”

“He is their greatest leader. He has re-learned the strength the gods gave his people and is helping them all re-learn it for themselves. This is good! He has also earned a strength they Gave only to him. I think maybe he was Given to us all by the gods to be the Sky-Chief of all Sky-Chiefs. Now he is the strongest man in any Sky-Tribe and he could break me like a twig.”

“…Really?!”

“Oh yes. I…do not like this. I will beat War-horse soon I think, and maybe beat him by very much. Next spring, when the Fire fills me full again, I will go to Folctha and win. I train very hard to beat Daar too…but I may not have enough seasons left in me to ever beat him again.”

Yan trilled at the disbelieving look that Ferd gave him. “If you learn one thing from the Sky-Tribes but especially the Humans, Ferd Given-Man, learn that there are many kinds of strong. The People were made by the gods to be very, very good at one kind of strong. The best at it! But we’re so good at that one kind of strong, it’s easy for us to forget to be strong in other ways. That is the real reason we want you to fight for the Humans. Learn their strength, and make it ours, because we can be strong like them too. Bring it back and teach young men, so we can one day be mighty among the Sky-Peoples. Is a good thing! Will be very good for your new tribe, too. But I…”

Yan was nervous about something, because he was suddenly playing with the end of his tail. The sight of Yan doing that, whose crest was turning almost black from his sheer might…

“You worry?”

“…You heard the Lodge argue over this. I worry what this will mean for some. I especially worry for Vemik, he’s not much younger than you, and if you go, so will all the other men…”

“And Vemik would definitely be Chosen by the gods, if he leaves your tribe.”

Yan’s nervousness suddenly made a lot more sense. Everyone of the tribes knew of Yan’s fondness for Vemik, and knowing what Ferd knew now, he wouldn’t wish the trial of becoming a Given-Man on anyone, let alone someone he loved. Sometimes, the gods Took everything.

“…Yes. He’s too much of a man now to avoid that. And I worry. There is a lot of strength in him, but he’s got strength the rest of us don’t. I don’t want us to lose it.”

“Have you said this to him?”

“…Not yet. You haven’t left, you haven’t made friends with Wild, haven’t been trained by the Humans, you haven’t even picked your warband yet.”

“But I will. And you will have to say these things to him one day.”

“Yes. And I will have to respect his choice no matter how it hurts. He is a strong man, even if I only want to remember him as a curious, strange runt of a boy.”

That conversation stuck in Ferd’s mind through all the months and training that followed. It stuck with him when he learned to fight at the hands of gods-blessed masters of the game, and when he re-learned the meaning of weakness under Daar’s unbelievable speed and strength during one of his visits. It stuck with him when he was sent to Cimbrean to fetch things on a strange training errand. It stuck with him when he met Tooko, an absolutely tiny barely-man from Daar’s Sky-Tribe, who was nonetheless stronger than them all when he was seated in his many-buttoned ‘cock-pit.’

Strange name for it, but a good pilot could fuck things hard so maybe that was why. Sky-Tribes were allowed to be strange.

Yan had made his point well. And by the time they came to visit the poisoned, sickly wrongness of ‘more-door,’ Ferd had long ago put aside his ideas about what being strong meant. There were many, many kinds, and he was proud to bring his kind of strong to the sky and put it to use.

Now, the only thing left to find out was what kind of strength the people they were saving had…

Date Point: 16y10m AV
Correspondence between HMS Sharman and the Corti Directorate

FM CMO/cmo@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil//
TO 5TH DIRECTOR/5thdirector@xenopharmacology.college.origin.corti//
INFO HIGHCASTLE/highcastle@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil/
STAINLESS/stainless@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil/
BEEKEEPER/beekeeper@scerf.forces.ca.smil/
RINGMASTER/ringmaster@malmstrom.gsc.af.smil//
C O N F I D E N T I A L SACRED STRANGER ORCON REL FVEY CD5
BT
SUBJ/ Query regarding Cruezzir-D formulation//

Fifth Director,

Our thanks once again for your department’s timely delivery of this month’s supply of Cruezzir-D.

While I’m pleased to say that the batch is good, my colleague Commander Mears and I have noticed some changes in the men since this batch arrived. While many of these are minor, they cumulatively represent a significant change from what we have grown accustomed to seeing.

In particular we have noticed:

- A minimum of a 5% increase in haemoglobin levels, with an associated increase in oxygen-carrying capacity;

- Increased appetite among all the operators but particularly with IRISH, BASEBALL, RIGHTEOUS and WARHORSE;

- Heightened emotional intensity, above even the elevated norm for HEAT operators;

- Cruezzir byproducts in their urine and stool samples have been reduced to nearly undetectable levels;

- An increase in the incidence of pranks, “shenanigans” and other minor mischief, indicative of restlessness and surplus energy;

- A plethora of minor changes in their bloodworks and urinalysis too numerous to list here (see the attached documents for the complete data);

- Marked decreases in liver stress indicators, combined with elevated androgen signaling and improved hormonal stability;

- They broke their most recent gravball goal (a crane tyre) more quickly than anticipated;

- A broad and sudden improvement in body mass and strength gains, observed athletic performance, endurance and resiliency, and effective suit conditioning;

- RIGHTEOUS and WARHORSE in particular have shown the most notable changes, which, considering their singular capabilities, is a special point of concern.

Would your department confirm for us whether the Cruezzir formulae has been altered in some way? While none of these changes seem deleterious, we find we cannot explain such a drastic improvement in their general well-being by any other means. Almost as soon as they began coursing on this batch, all of the human operators reported significantly improved feelings of health and vigor. We note the Gaoians on their Crue-G-HEAT have not reported a similarly dramatic health increase, though they too have noted large improvements in their performance.

We feel compelled to remind the Directorate that, under the terms of our contract, any changes in our medical formulary require advice and consultation beforehand. These men each represent millions of pounds in strategic investments in their personal development, to say nothing of their substantial ongoing expenses, custom equipment, and our lifetime medical commitments to them and their families after retirement. The US Department of the Air Force goes so far as to consider their Protectors and Aggressors as weapon systems, and runs a formal program office (complete with dedicated staff) to that effect. The US Department of the Army similarly has a PEO covering the American Defenders.

However, the monetary considerations are only part of the story. Men of their caliber and willpower are exceptionally rare. Less than one percent of all applicants (who are themselves often already capable special operators in difficult disciplines) prove suitable for the pipeline, and of those, upwards of ninety percent will fail entry training. Attrition through the rest of the pipeline remains unavoidably arduous and in the end, less than one in a thousand applicants make it through. For those that do, training to minimum competency requires five Earth years, and full mission capability requires even more. That has made them priceless strategic assets at the absolute bleeding-edge of sports medicine, mental conditioning, and physical and military training. They have sacrificed much to achieve that status and it would be deeply unethical of us to compromise that achievement. We would like this matter addressed promptly.

Lt. Wyndham Phillips
Chief Medical Officer, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 16y10m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Julian wasn’t really a fella to wake up by an alarm clock. He wasn’t a morning person, and he wasn’t a night owl. He mostly just…went with the rhythm of life. He woke up when the sun was up, and he felt sleepy when it was dark outside. Often he would wake up in the middle of the night and busy himself for an hour or two, which was a habit he’d picked up on Nightmare and it hadn’t ever really left him. There was usually some small chore he could attend to or something, but not tonight. They’d had everything taken care of.

So, he gently rolled out of bed. He smiled at the way Xiù, without waking up, shuffled into his warm vacated space to cuddle up to Allison, who responded by giving her a squeeze and a kiss before falling asleep again, and pulled on some running shorts. He clipped his personal shield to the waistband, notified his security team, padded downstairs, and got ready for a run.

He had things on his mind to clear out.

After the Lake Incident he’d been much more careful about his personal safety. There wasn’t nearly so much threat anymore, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, and he wasn’t a fella who could be replaced these days. In a few years maybe, if Ten’Gewek attitudes shifted…but that time wasn’t now. He had a family to keep safe, too. Which was what was really on his mind.

So rather than do what he really wanted, which would have been a nicely strenuous set of interval sprints around town, he instead picked up the heavy weighted vest he kept in the mudroom, shrugged it on, and went to his little backyard exercise pit to get warmed up.

Hoeff had made sure the security detail could keep up with Julian at a reasonable jog, though he would admit to some ego about the vest. None of them were avid lifters but they weren’t small men either, and there wasn’t a man among them who could even lift his vest. Being able to pick it up one-armed and then lightly throw it around his shoulders had definitely established the pecking order, and Julian wasn’t ashamed to admit that made him feel pretty good.

They weren’t morning fellas either, but still, they were good guys and it was nice to have someone to run with. They were tall, serious-looking men who somehow radiated danger in something like the same way Hoeff did—impressive fellas!

Still…Hoeff could pick up the vest, with a quiet grunt of effort. And wear it too, and even train in it for a while. ‘Horse had made the little fucker strong as all shit, honestly. So Julian got his blood flowing with some calisthenics and pull-ups, which filled a good few minutes before the security guy arrived wide awake, alert, and ready to go. Which was good, because pull-ups while wearing that vest could tire Julian out pretty quick. Things were starting to burn nicely in his back and arms…but some part of his pride just didn’t want to let his bodyguard see him tire out. More macho ego, really. Which was kinda dumb…

…But still fun, though.

The jog gave him some time to clear his head. Nofl had something to tell him. Apparently the Directorate had completed their analysis on his “situation” and had prepared a plan forward. The thing was, Julian pretty much knew what that plan was going to be. And he knew what it was going to mean for him. Well, no. He knew what it already meant for him, if he was honest. So, he jogged, and jogged, and jogged some more. Several times he avoided Nofl’s lab, even though he knew the little grey fella was wide awake inside, doing whatever he did when the rest of the city was asleep.

Why was Julian avoiding him?

Actually…yeah. Why was he? A few years ago, the prospect of what he was going to do would have put him off. Did put him off, and with Adam’s serious recommendation, too. But now? He’d grown so crazy, ridiculously goddamned strong even before the psycho-woman had got him infected with Cruezzir, how much difference would it honestly make? He’d been apparently marinating in the prototype medicines since Nightmare, and he was a freak of nature even before that, too…

Christ, he’d been HEAT-sized for years now. Well, not like, huge HEAT, he’d been more like Costello…but Costello was a fucking big man: just a bit shorter than Julian, and literally bigger than any athlete outside of HEAT. Heck, Costello handily outweighed the biggest competitive strongmen there were…and Julian was a lot bigger than him now. In fact, at this point he was well above the team average, and in the same league as Akiyama and Blaczynski.

And given what he was like before his abduction, at eighteen? He couldn’t have played school sports even if he could have afforded it: he was too big, and naturally too big, too. He didn’t look it, either. What would have happened if he’d fallen into training anyway? It wasn’t hard to think he’d have made himself into something special. Maybe not quite HEAT-big, but…well…maybe…

Because that was apparently what he was made to do. And the thing about it? That wasn’t something he could really run away from. Even if he was almost literally doing just that right then. Julian was the man he was made to be and there was no avoiding that. He was damn good at it too, and heck, he not only enjoyed it all, he was well and thoroughly addicted. A day where he couldn’t run or work or lift or anything like that was honestly a miserable day.

So, with a shake of his head and a bit of a chuckle, he checked in on his bodyguard—gamely soldiering on, but he clearly didn’t have much left in him—nodded encouragingly, and thumped off towards Nofl’s lab.

He had to protect his family. And that meant he had to embrace being the purpose-bred freak of nature the Corti made him to be.

…No.

No, that was the wrong way to think about it. He should do like Xiù said and not dwell on how he got to where he was. What happened, happened. Was it right? No. Was it evil? Well yes, absolutely. But was it malicious? …Probably not. Does a researcher hate their mice? No. But does he let their suffering stop the study? …No. Far too many would benefit from the science. That stuck in the craw. He and his entire family were just…well, they were just a science experiment.

But.

It was an experiment whose goal was to see just how good a human being could be. He’d shown them. A lot of his family was pretty dang impressive too, so it wasn’t just him. Whatever their reasons were, the practical effect of all that was that Julian really was special. He was made to be the best. He had about the best genes any athlete could ever want, and the best background and experience to survive practically anywhere, in any conditions where life could cling on. Whatever made the Corti decide on those traits specifically, seemed in retrospect pretty dang prescient. And now through a twist of fate, he knew most of the details.

So no. Julian resolved he wouldn’t wallow in the tragedy of what happened. Instead, he flipped that on its head. He was one of the absolute best and he would be damned if he didn’t show the Corti, the Ten’Gewek… hell, the whole dang galaxy just what they were messing with.

Feeling buoyed, Julian put on a grin, strolled into Nofl’s lab, and faced his fate.

Date Point: 16y10m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Leemu

There weren’t many Clanless who could claim a personal friendship with the Great Father of the Gao. That had enjoyed (and survived) cuddly afternoon naps with him. Or really knew that the pictures or even videos didn’t do the in-person experience any justice, not even a little bit. That, yes, his mere presence could fluster pretty much literally anyone and that his musk was strong enough to make even a Human feel a bit overwhelmed. That he could so effortlessly court any Female, that he was so ridiculously shameless about it and that it worked every single time…

…Well. Not every single time. Somehow by some absurd twist of fate, Leemu had won a Female’s heart, and it was one the Great Father himself had been courting for months. And by some unspeakable miracle, Daar wasn’t even mad. Balls, he was happy for them!

Sister (now Mother) Leela had just the other day confirmed that she was pregnant. With a female! Leemu had been so over the moon, he’d done something that, in any other situation, would have been beyond stupid. He once again sent the Great Father a text message.

It’s a girl!

Leemu immediately regretted that decision. Had he overreached? Presumed too much? It was so easy to think of anyone who treated him so well and so easily as his friend, but…

…Well, Great Fathers didn’t have friends. Did they? Could they?

When Daar finally replied, though, he was nothing but cheery congratulations… and unbelievable ego, too.

Balls! Good job ‘lil guy! We’ll see what happens when I get my turn!!

His unreserved happiness for Leemu, combined with his absolute certainty that he’d eventually win her heart…balls, he was like a Keeda tale come to life! She liked him, too. She liked him a lot, but given what had happened in the War…well, it would take time. But Leemu had won her heart first. Won against the greatest Gaoian and ‘most bestest’ male to ever live, and had done so in the context of what was becoming a genuine friendship.

Sure, maybe it was a bit distant—Daar was the Great Father after all, and Leemu was just a random Clanless with a knack for painting, starship repair, and the occasional bit of hard labor—but still. Leemu was happy to take what affection he could get. And he certainly wasn’t complaining about being on a first name basis with the Great Father, even if that more than occasionally meant being inescapably mashed up against his giant steel-like furnace of a body for a nap, or a play-tussle, or because he was feeling affectionate, or…

Daar had peppered him with questions and Leemu had happily shared, and from there…they struck up a regular correspondence. Sort of. Daar was a busy man and he only checked his communicator very occasionally, so it wasn’t exactly a quick conversation. But still. Leemu had a long and increasingly pun-filled text chat. With the Great Father. Who wanted to know everything about Leemu’s life. The Great Father was interested. In him!

Him, how Leela was doing, his art, how his roommates were getting on…

Which led to the matter of Gorku.

Preed was doing just fine pottering around, tending his garden, living off his abductee resettlement fund and generally just enjoying being around his own species again, albeit in a foreign nation. And Leemu was finding that his art sold as fast as he could make it, for values that had his ears twisting in bemusement. But Gorku…

Gorku had grown restless. He’d gone from being an honest workin’ brownie to being Leemu’s carer and helper, to being… what? Leemu was actually quite happy with life, nowadays. Looking back on his experience with the Droud had taught him how to appreciate the real pleasures in life, the ones that were more than just mindless, overpowering stimulation of his receptors. There were still times when he’d find some small thing that used to bring him some joy only to find it… flatter… than before, and sometimes he got depressed about it, but mostly his new abilities and senses had added so much to the world that he was finding new ways to be happy.

But that journey had for a time cost Gorku his purpose. Daar had eventually mentioned how valuable a trichromatic ‘Back might be in the Clan, and hinted in that uniquely un-subtle brownie way that Gorku might think about that…

The big lunk managed to get the message. Nowadays all he did was train like a demon, and study until he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Clan progression was fiercely competitive.

Leemu had wound up taking care of him for a change. Reminding him to eat all (eight!) of his daily meals, since he had to pack on a lot of muscle to be where the Clan thought a fifth degree male should be nowadays, in the aftermath of the War and their return to their martial roots. Prodding him to get out and do his runs, no matter how much he hated looping Folctha; they wanted crazy endurance too, on top of all that crazy strength. They also didn’t want idiots, so most evenings Leemu found himself helping Gorku study with mini-quizzes and flash cards…

Sometimes, Leemu helped by pulling a blanket over Gorku’s shoulders, when he was crashed out at his desk and snoring louder than a naxas bull. He’d tried moving him to the nest-bed once, but, well…Gorku was a fifth-degree brownfur, after all. Even if Leemu could more or less consider himself a ‘gym rat’ these days, and keep up with some of the fitter Humans, that didn’t mean he was up to moving a big shaggy brown puddle who could probably squat a small car.

So, he helped as much as he could, with big things and little. Another one of those pleasures the droud hadn’t been able to emulate. After all, how could a device which did nothing but electrochemically stimulate his brain capture a melancholy, bittersweet kind of happiness that came with helping a good friend move on with his life… and potentially out of one’s own?

It couldn’t. But paint could. Leemu knew the day was coming where they would part ways and he wasn’t looking forward to that. But he could paint Gorku at the desk. Big, handsome, exhausted, a bit naive…definitely bittersweet. The trick to painting him, though, was getting just the right shade of brown. Which was a very tricky color, actually; brown was just orange, but darker. He’d learned that the hue itself was more a product of perception than a trick of light, and Gorku had a nicely rich color to him. It definitely edged toward the red end of brown.

The scent of the paint eventually woke the slumbering lunk. Thanks to the Nofl, Gorku had eventually regained his full senses. Nowadays his nose was even more sensitive than Leemu’s.

“Mrrf …das’ the ‘spensive red paint ‘yer usin,’” he said, without opening an eye.

“Painting something important.”

Gorku’s tail thumped once, but he didn’t bother to stir from his semi-liquid somnolent posture.

“That’s all? Just a tail thump?”

“‘Yer charmin’ but I ain’t that kind o’ male.”

Leemu sketched in a few whiskers with his liner brush. “Very droll. I thought you were looking at a third-ring career, not a comedy gig.”

“Gotta get the Second Ring first an’ I gotta get a recommend ‘ta go further. One paw down at a time.”

“You’ll get it. And you do know the Great Father…”

“No.” Gorku growled quietly. “That’ll actually make it worse, cousin. Ain’t nobody wanna say they favored a ‘Back ‘cuz o’ who he knew.”

“…You’ll still get it. You’re barely even twenty!”

“…Thanks.”

“And thanks for staying still so I can finish this…”

For a little while, the only sounds in the room were the rough, soothing noise of bristles on primed canvas, interrupted by a prolonged gastric growl.

“…Leemu?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m hungry.”

“You don’t say.”

“Shaddup, lil’ guy.” Apparently hunger was sufficient motivation for Gorku to pour himself down across his desk and sort of meander his way toward the kitchen.

Leemu chittered, and cleaned his brush. “Fine. Why don’t we go visit Leela?”

“We could…but I was kinda hopin’ we could stay home an’ grill some steaks.”

Leemu nodded, and considered his painting. It wasn’t finished, but he’d discovered that sometimes a half-finished painting had qualities all its own. He’d already captured everything important. Sometimes, that was all he needed. He duck-nodded, took it off the easel and put it aside to dry.

And actually…

“That sounds good too,” he said.

Date Point: 16y10m3w AV
Correspondence between HMS Sharman and the Corti Directorate

FM 5TH DIRECTOR/5thdirector@xenopharmacology.college.origin.corti//
TO CMO/cmo@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil//
INFO HIGHCASTLE/highcastle@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil/
STAINLESS/stainless@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil/
BEEKEEPER/beekeeper@scerf.forces.ca.smil/
RINGMASTER/ringmaster@malmstrom.gsc.af.smil//
C O N F I D E N T I A L SACRED STRANGER ORCON REL FVEY CD5
BT
SUBJ/ RE:Query regarding Cruezzir-D formulation//

Lt. Phillips,

We have received your queries and concerns regarding the latest delivery of Cruezzir Derivative Serum (Human high-performance formulation v4.01) and direct your attention to the product update information included alongside the shipment, which detailed in full the expected consequences of this most recent iteration.

Cruezzir Derivative Serum is subject to constant ongoing refinement, in keeping with both the strict terms and intent of the contract between the Corti Directorate’s College of Regenerative Xenopharmacology, and Allied Extrasolar Command. Our highest priority in all cases is the safety and health of your personnel, and it is our mission to provide you with the most excellent possible medical solution to their unique needs.

You may rest assured that every iteration of the serum has been thoroughly studied and quality-tested prior to release, and that we will not release an iteration of the serum unless we are perfectly content of its safety and lack of deleterious side effects.

For full details, we advise you to closely study the release documentation.

Cordially,

Fifth Director Ebrit,
Dean, College of Regenerative Xenopharmacology

Date Point: 16y10m3w AV

The Dog House gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

“Jesus, fellas…the hell get you going today?”

Julian lay on the floor, desperately struggling to catch his breath. He felt like he’d been run through a meat grinder and then stuffed into a sausage casing. And then smashed with a hammer. By the two biggest, most gleefully crazy meathead sadists the human race had to offer. And he felt like that because it was exactly those two men who had just thoroughly humiliated him down in ‘Horse’s personal high-G torture dungeon.

It was Julian’s first day back at the gym after switching from gut-manufactured Cruezzir to a twenty-year prescription of Crue-D, and he’d noticed two things immediately. Firstly, he felt much, much better. He just felt…cleaner, somehow. Julian didn’t really know what Cruezzir actually felt like, but he knew how it felt when it was absent. He couldn’t think of any words that didn’t sound like a raging hippy describing a detox treatment, but, well…that’s what it felt like. He felt clean.

So, instead of pretending like he could come close to keeping up with those two, he was trying to hang with Blaczynski, who was near-Beef himself—not far behind Butler and just ahead of Akiyama—and probably Julian’s closest match on the team, ability-wise. Hands-down the toughest member, too. And next to someone like him? Julian was…doing pretty good. Heck, he was proving to be just as strong! Being that kind of strong sure as heck made up for the inconveniences of being so ridiculously heavy: he ate like a Given-Man and couldn’t trust chairs.

All of that and he looked good doing it…honestly, it was awfully hard not to let that go to his head. Fortunately, he had friends who could help. Vemik was significantly heavier still and considerably stronger…and he was still a young teen probably. Adam and Daar were of course so completely insanely fit that it was almost like being friends with actual comic-book superheroes. Firth too, and all the rest of the HEAT had an edge over Julian in something. Blaczynski? The walking tattoo was so ridiculously well-conditioned, he never stopped. Ever.

Maybe all that extra energy and inspiration was ‘cuz he’d finally run out of space for more ink. Every square inch of him that could be tattooed under the military’s rules, was. It was a chaotic jumble of styles and themes: there were trashy meaningless tribal-style shapes, videogame characters, lots of skulls, a few names, some genuinely beautiful works of art bumping elbows with whatever crap he’d spied and thought ‘that looks cool’ and, bizarrely, the Ninja Taco logo on his melon-sized left deltoid.

All of that on one of the few guys around who could keep going longer than Julian, which was honestly saying something. Blac grinned at him, not breaking his rhythm as he benched… well, Julian had given up calculating the effective weight they were using, given grav-plating. He just went by which plates on which bars. A lot of the special plates, this time. And the big bar. Which was bending alarmingly. Blaczynski was definitely lifting like a Beef these days…

And the most insulting part was how he wasn’t even winded when he stopped. He just…couldn’t push anymore, but that was due to his strength failing, not from sucking air.

He sat up and without skipping a beat or even so much as breathing hard, decided to taunt Julian. “Fuck yeah, man! You ain’t fuckin’ worked ‘till these fuckers’re done with you! Ready to go again?!” The big fucker immediately went to go lift something else.

Julian, after a minute of catching his breath and slamming down some blissfully cool water…

…Yeah. Yeah he was ready.

Which was scary as heck, really. Kinda scary how good he felt for leaving the Cruezzir behind, given that Crue-D was by all measures the much more potent medicine. His recovery was much faster, almost scarily so. He was gaining about a kilo a day with his body now properly adapting to the stress he was putting it through, rather than simply healing up faster than he could break it. He could feel it in his mind, too. Things were sharper, more intense. His feelings were wildly powerful, all in just a few days. His strength was growing like crazy! It was a heady feeling, like he was finally building himself into what he was always meant to be…

He could see right away why Crue-D was a dangerous miracle drug. A fella riding this dragon needed a heck of a support system, and that was true even for him. Maybe even especially for him. But with the right friends, and the right people around him…

Boy, things were gonna get really interesting whenever Crude became everyday medicine.

But for now, he was one of the few blessed to use it, and also “blessed” to have had a part in making it. So, he put himself under that ridiculously overloaded bar once Blac was done, settled in and with a grunt, got to pushing. He didn’t manage as many reps. But he managed so many, keeping track at that point was honestly only dick-measuring; they’d need to go a lot heavier next week. And he felt pretty faint for a bit, at the end. There was yelling, and encouragement…

And then the bar was back on the stand. Somehow. Did he put it there?

He lay and drew in some air, before forcing himself to sit up. Eventually, when things started to make sense again and his pulse wasn’t pounding quite so hard…

“Seriously though…” He grunted. “What’s set you fellas off?”

Adam shrugged, and grinned that goofy grin of his. “Slabbin’! What more do you need?!”

“I mean…sure. I get it. But today I can pretty much literally smell the testosterone dripping offa you three. And I’m only half-joking.”

Firth, as ever, had little shame. “Damn right. Smells good, huh?”

“I mean, I don’t kink shame but that ain’t my fetish. Blaczynski though…”

Blaczynski laughed. “Hey! What we got goin’ is a beautiful thing. Don’t you judge us.”

“Uh-huh. Don’t you have a girlfriend these days, anyway?”

“That don’t count ‘fer nothin.’” Firth rumbled with his tremendous viking arms crossed across his chest and a smug smirk on his face. “He’ll always be my best bottom-bitch.”

Adam and Julian both rolled their eyes. Love in the combat arms was often expressed through insult, and the bigger the insult, the greater the love.

Firth would do anything for Blaczynski, and vice versa.

“Well, whatever gets you two off, I guess…” Julian teased, and then groaned a bit from the pain. Those last few reps had absolutely kicked his ass.

“Right,” Blaczynski grinned. “You get all your grabass with the cavemonkeys! Hey, is it true their dicks’re bigger than—? Ow!”

Adam had given him a brotherly clout in the back of the head.

“Hey!” Julian grinned, “Vemik’s my good buddy! He hardly ever means anything by it!”

Blaczynski chuckled and grinned, “Sure, but you didn’t answer the question!”

“…It’s not like I’m gonna actually whip out a tape measure, or anything,” Julian replied.

“C’mon man, I need to know if we’re still champions of the galaxy!”

“I swear to god you’re the most cock-obcessed man on the team,” Firth rumbled. “And you’re only a little gay, too…”

“Fuck you! I was drunk and it was just that one time!”

“Wait,” interjected Adam. “I thought you two were a thing!” He knew damn well they weren’t, but of course the team never stopped ribbing the two bromances in their ranks.

“Only in the bromantical sense of the word.” Firth pulled the (relatively) smaller man into a firm bear-hug. “‘Sides, a puny ‘lil dude like him couldn’t possibly satisfy me.”

“Fuck off!” Blaczynski wriggled free, laughing, then turned his attention back to Julian. “And you still didn’t answer my question!”

Julian slipped into a troll grin. “…Can’t say I feel much threatened, if you know what I mean…”

“Don’t tease tiny-dick here,” Firth grumbled. “It’s not nice to make fun of the handicapped.”

“Fuck you, I ain’t tiny! Most girls can’t even get their hands around—hey!!”

“Hush, child.” Firth had grabbed him at the back of his neck like a wayward pup and dragged him toward the pull-up bars. The size difference between the two was frankly ridiculous; Firth was a goddamned giant. “Anyway. You, get back to Slab. An’ you, stop encouragin’ him.”

“Fine, fine.” Julian chuckled, and took another prolonged drink of water. “…But seriously, holy fuck, fellas. You’re normally at least friendly about completely kicking my ass…”

“…Shit, sorry bro.” Adam was the first to speak up. “It’s just…” He looked to Firth for help, who thought about for a moment, and then shrugged. “…Iunno bro. Just… been feelin’ good and strong all week. All of us are…so, y’know. We can all pretty much guess why, but…” Adam shrugged again.

“…New Crude?”

“Probably, yeah. The Gaoians got the first improvements with Crue-G, Daar and First Fang got the second round, so this is probably just…iterating on things.”

“…Man, if I was in your boots, I would not be happy at being used as guinea pigs like that. Well, no…I guess I am now too, huh?”

The two giants looked at each other, then Adam looked down and helped Julian back up to his feet. “Yup. There’s no backing out now. Not for you, anyway.”

“Why did you do it, anyway?” Firth leapt up to the pull-up bar and started cranking out reps. The readout behind him said he’d turned the gravity all the way up, which would have been impressive as hell without the already insane workout he’d already done.

“…Well, uh. I’m gonna sound like a broken record but…remember the whole Cruezzir problem I had? With my family, specifically? Well, the Corti came back with an answer.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It turns out it would probably have been fine for me…but it absolutely would not for Al and Xiù. So, we gotta get them off it before it does all the long-term harm. Which means I can’t be full of it either, or I’ll just re-infect them. But I can’t wean myself off it without risking major problems, so… I have to start taking Crue-D to replace it. For the next twenty years. At least. Which, y’know…”

“Puts you in the same boat as us.”

“Yeah. Maybe worse though, because of my history. And then there’s the kids, ‘cuz they’ve got chronic Cruezzir Gut themselves, and we’ve gotta figure out how to safely get them sorted out. ‘Cuz maybe they’re genetically adapted to it like I am…or maybe they’re not. And I can’t take that risk. So I can either do this, save my family and deal with what that’s going to mean for me, or I gamble my kids’ futures and I never get to be intimate with Al or Xiù again. And I’m not gonna let either of those things happen. So…here I am.”

Adam joined Firth at the pull-up bar, but with a ridiculous amount of weight hanging off his waist. Annoyed, and obviously feeling competitive, Firth dropped down to go load up the same. “Just don’t forget that playing at this level is fuckin’ dangerous, dude.”

“I know. I have been paying attention to you fellas. And reading up.”

“Right.” Firth returned with one more plate than Adam, and jumped up to the bar to resume his pull-ups. “You can’t miss ‘yer meals on any day you’ve been hard at it. You gotta get regular bloodworks, now. You gotta…hnngh…stay on top o’ this shit, y’hear me? No slackin.’”

“I won’t.”

“Good.” Adam nodded, and sped up to annoy Firth. “Also I see you aren’t lifting anything…”

“Heh…. right…” Some part of Julian wanted to play up being half-broken and exhausted, but the truth was that the short rest had done a lot to restore him. He doubted there was room on the bar for one more though, and he’d already done some of those, so he grabbed his notebook and checked. What had he exercised the least recently? Something less… full-body for a bit. Maybe…calf raises, or neck bridges? Heck, why not both?

Time for round four.

Date Point:16y10m4w AV
ESNN Extraterrestrial news article

Sino-Indian treaty promises surge in migration to planet Lucent
Author: Ava Ríos

After years of lengthy negotiations, the Chinese and Indian governments today announced that they have finalized a mutually agreeable solution for dividing the continental landmasses of the planet Lucent between them.

Colonization rights to the planet Lucent, which was originally charted and surveyed by BGEV-11 ‘Misfit,’ was jointly purchased by the two governments shortly after its existence was made public, and both governments have already installed a number of small scientific outposts and civilian operations on its surface for the purposes of exploration, survey and xenobiological research.

Although early speculation suggested that both nations would view the planet as a golden opportunity to relieve their intense domestic overpopulation concerns, the expected exodus did not materialize as quickly as expected, in part because of a dispute over how much of the planet’s available landmass and resources was due to each power.

Complicating matters further, the Interspecies Dominion has been slow to recognize the Chinese and Indian governments, neither of which are members of the Allied Extrasolar Defence Coalition or 5-EYES.

Despite these speedbumps, Chinese President Han Zhanshu and Indian Prime Minister Raj Shastri both seemed full of good cheer today when they announced the planet-sharing treaty, and promised the long-awaited surge of extrasolar colonization would go ahead “soon.”

At this point, it’s not clear what kind of defensive measures will protect the Lucent colonies. It seems unlikely that China in particular would be happy to depend on AEC in the face of Hunter or other nonhuman threats. Nevertheless, for the millions of prospective colonists who have been waiting for this day to come, and for the millions more looking forward to having a little more elbow room, this treaty will be a cause for celebration.

The treaty is not without controversy, though. Alien conservation groups have expressed concern for Lucent’s native ecosystems, especially the bioluminescent forests and insects for which the planet is named. The fact that the treaty places neither government under any obligation to protect the planet’s unique ecology has prompted fears of another rampant microbial contamination event as happened on Cimbrean, mass extinction, or wholesale eradication of Lucent’s native species.

Neither President Zhanshu nor Prime Minister Shastri would be drawn to comment on such concerns at today’s press conference, instead choosing to focus on the bright promise of all the good that colonizing Lucent can do for their countries, rather than the potential damage.

One thing is for certain, though: as thousands of buses and trains start threading their way across India and China, carrying pioneering first-wave colonists to the jump arrays and the prospect of a new future on an alien world, life has firmly changed for everyone on Earth. Cimbrean was just the first of humanity’s extrasolar colonies.

And now, she isn’t alone.

Date Point:16y10m4w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Julian was technically on leave. Which didn’t mean too much, honestly. He was still working as hard as ever, since there really wasn’t anyone else who could step into boots as big as his, figuratively or literally…but it did mean that he could spend more time with his family.

Most people might just loaf about and relax while on leave, but not him. It was a lovely sunny day in Cimbrean’s early spring and they’d had a nice long run of low-drama weeks, so he’d decided to spend them pursuing his favorite hobbies with particular zeal: hardcore Slabbing and other strenuous training of course, but also one that was a bit surprising: gardening.

He’d rented a truck, bought a pile of…stuff…and set to digging a garden plot in their backyard.

A big plot. By hand.

Xiù and Al indulged his inner caveman and let him more or less order them to relax and take it easy, which wasn’t something either of them much protested: mothering two demanding and excessively energetic babies was draining. They weren’t unhappy with the view either, oh no. Julian practically glowed with happiness and muscular exertion as he stood resting against his garden fork for a moment, all big, bare-chested and barefoot country boy stud in a pair of worn-out, wonderfully flattering basketball shorts. Man-candy just didn’t come any better.

He still didn’t have much in the way of clothing. Partly that was because of how massive he was these days, but mostly it was because he’d never had a lot of concern for that sort of thing in the first place. What he did have tended to either be well-made and practical…or comfortable, but also old, threadbare and probably ill-fitting. Today’s basketball shorts were from when he was merely a big rangy teenager, but now…well, they were a bit more modest than his usual.

But not by much, happily. Julian never skipped leg day.

He bent down to pick up his jug, took a big and very photogenic swig of water, then glanced over at Xiù and smiled that big heart-melting sideways grin of his…and went right back to work. If he was maybe going at it a bit harder than he needed to impress the boys—and his girls for that matter, who were certainly not complaining—well, Xiù wasn’t going to dissuade him. He’d gone straight from his early-morning Slab to their big backyard, then proceeded to laboriously break and turn the soil over with a spade and garden fork. Both the boys (and Amanda!) were helping a few hours later, right as he was finishing up the most back-breaking bit of the work.

“That’s it, we’re almost done! Just a few more feet to go…”

The boys both looked dead exhausted, but they also practically hero-worshipped Julian too, and neither seemed willing to “wuss out” in front of him. If he noticed them struggling, he didn’t make a big deal out of it. He was a big, encouraging font of cheery praise…

And he didn’t let them stop, either. Tristan and Ramsey would both be sore tomorrow.

“So, once we get this all broken up, we’re gonna dig it all out and put in a protective barrier in so we don’t contaminate things too bad. Then we’re gonna shovel it all back in and put a good few inches of mulch over the top, then turn it over again so it’s nice and mixed up. We gotta inoculate it too, and get all the Earth microbes and worms and beetles and stuff all in there.”

Ramsey didn’t much like the prospect.

“Don’t they make machines to do this?”

“They do, yeah. But I grew up tough and strong partly because I had to do all the work myself. Turns out, that’s been a heck of a blessing for me. You wanna grow up tough, right?”

Allison predictably rolled her eyes at “macho boy things” but none of the boyfolk noticed, and it seemed to be exactly what the two needed to hear from him.

And, sure enough…Julian showed off for them a little more blatantly, now. He curled his arm low down in front of them, and that great big bicep of his had them both excitedly freaking out, their comparatively tiny hands feeling it and all complaints suddenly forgotten. Xiù couldn’t help but giggle; it was such a laughably macho bonding moment! Still, it was exactly the right thing to do, and the boys loved him for it.

“The ounce of hurt you’re feeling now is a ton of pain you maybe won’t need to pay down the road, too. Plus, how hard is your competition working, Tristan? I bet they couldn’t hack this, so…how bad do you want to win that meet?“

A little more showing off…and Tristan was nodding his head seriously, all eagerness to work restored. Ramsey too, though he was always a bit more of a hero-worshipper and was more interested in impressing Julian than crushing his competition.

Still. It got the two back to work. They definitely deserved extra dessert.

Xiù tapped Allison’s arm, and indicated with a tilt of her head back toward the door that as fun as watching Julian work might be, they had other responsibilities to worry about. Al nodded, and followed her indoors

There was always stuff to do in running a house and keeping it. Especially seeing as there were still social workers hovering around the Buehler family, they were all determined to keep their household looking unimpeachable. Normally, changing the bedding and stuff like that would have been Tristan and Ramsey’s job, but they were working hard enough already. By unspoken agreement, Al and Xiù took the job on instead.

If Xiù could get away fast enough, she’d whip up a nice little treat for them, too.

“…How’s your stomach?” Al asked, picking out one of the neat little bedding packages from the closet. One of the few things she’d unhesitatingly picked up from her mother was the trick of keeping bedding sets together by packing them inside one of their pillowcases.

Xiù grimaced. A total gut biome replacement was the opposite of fun. Or dignified. Thank goodness they had a house with three bathrooms, and thank double goodness that modern batteries could last days between charges, because she’d been worried that she might have to set up shop permanently on that toilet.

Life as a hermit queen, on her own personal throne. In hindsight, that thought was enough to make her giggle, which got a raised eyebrow from Allison.

“…Better now. Yours?”

“Nofl had better be right about us never needing to do that again, or I’ll use his coffee set for clay pigeons. I went through three cans of air freshener… Do you ever miss the days where we were glamorous space explorers?”

Xiù laughed. “…Not really, no. I mean, I enjoy remembering them wistfully…but Julian’s sleep-farts could be epic.”

“We haven’t escaped those, baobei.”

“No, but the room is bigger and I make all his food! They’re just loud now, instead of deadly.”

Al grinned, and with a shake and a flourish she flapped the duvet and got it square over the bed. “This is a glamorous, highbrow conversation we’re having.”

“We’re glamorous, highbrow gals.” Xiù cuddled her from behind and nipped the back of her neck. “Allegedly.”

“…Yeah…”

Xiù squeezed her tighter. “What’s on your mind?”

“Just… All this extra energy Julian’s had lately, and the Crue-D and stuff… “Al ran her hands up and placed them over Xiù’s “…I’m scared for him. And for our babies.”

“Your mom’s not that bad of a babysitter.”

Allison begrudged her an amused snort. “Shut up, that’s not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. But… come here.” Xiù led her to the window, and gestured downwards. They were play-wrestling in the very specific flip-over-shoulder, boisterous-living-junglegym way that dads the world over somehow all learned to do. “…Tell me he’s anything other than an amazing dad.”

“…I mean, I think he is. But I don’t exactly have a lotta good dads to compare him to.”

“Oh, hush up and listen to your instincts,” Xiù chided her. Al nodded, but gave her a quizzical look.

“…What’s that have to do with his health, though?”

“I don’t think he’d take a stupid risk with his health, ever. He’s got four kids to love, and us…”

“And he’s an actual spacemagic gorilla now!”

“He was basically that since the day we met him, babe. He’s just more now, because he has to be. And don’t lie, you enjoy it too.”

Allison’s expression went complicated. “…Story of all our lives, huh? Being what we have to be?”

“Exactly. Remember, he’s doing it for the people he loves, Al. Not just us either! I mean, look: does he get off on being a gorilla freak and a glam magazine stud? Of course he does. He’s a guy. And… I won’t lie, I do too.”

“That makes three of us,” Allison agreed.

“…But I’m pretty sure he’d forego all the extra work if he could, too. What he’d rather spend all his time on is right out there, and back on Akyawentuo.”

“I know. But would you rather I didn’t worry?”

“Of course not.” Xiù gave her another squeeze. “I like that you care. But let him carry that worry. It would make him feel better.”

“Fair enough…” Al picked up the laundry basket. “C’mon. Two more beds to do, and then we can have some fun.”

“What have you got in mind?”

“Something involving lingerie. I’ll work out the details as we go.”

“Oh! That kind of fun!”

“Been too long, don’t you think?” Al asked, pushing the door open with her butt.

“…Two days?” Xiù thought about it, then grinned, and followed.

“…You’re right,” she agreed. “Far too long.”

Date Point: 16y11m AV
Correspondence between HMS Sharman and the Corti Directorate

FM CMO/cmo@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil//
TO 5TH DIRECTOR/5thdirector@xenopharmacology.college.origin.corti//
INFO HIGHCASTLE/highcastle@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil/
STAINLESS/stainless@sharman.mod.gov.uk.smil/
BEEKEEPER/beekeeper@scerf.forces.ca.smil/
RINGMASTER/ringmaster@malmstrom.gsc.af.smil//
C O N F I D E N T I A L SACRED STRANGER ORCON REL FVEY CD5
BT
SUBJ/ RE:RE:Query regarding Cruezzir-D formulation//

Fifth Director,

We are gratified by your assurances of product safety, quality, and effectiveness. I direct your attention to Chapter 2, ¶7, §4:

“Any modifications to the Contracted Formulary must, upon the advice and consent of the Purchaser and after review of the proposed modifications, be submitted for evaluation to the Centers for Disease Control and Public Health England, excepting those changes deemed critical to the ongoing safety and/or efficacy of the Contracted Formulary, which shall require prompt and timely notification to the Purchaser.”

Does the Directorate suggest these recent changes were “critical to the ongoing safety and/or efficacy” of Crue-D? As this is a matter of deepest importance, I have referred the case to our Ambassadors, who will be contacting their counterparts among the Directorate, as appropriate.

Regards,

Lt. Wyndham Phillips
Chief Medical Officer, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 16y11m4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian

Work done, head hosed down, feet clean, hair toweled dry. Babies blissfully asleep, and a long and very welcome bout of fun with Al and Xiù, while Amanda and the boys went shopping for supplies. Then a pleasant evening walk to escort her home, and a quick, easy jog back to encourage his boys—he didn’t care what anyone had to say, Tristan and Ramsey were his now. They closed out the evening cuddled up with him while he was stretched lazily across the couch, watching what must have been Gaoian cartoons. Both had been so starved for any kind of real affection growing up, they were making up for lost time every chance they got.

Julian didn’t have words for how good that felt. It was…the best. He almost wished he could sink into that big soft couch and just stay there forever, watching cartoons with his boys and smashing them into giggling fits with great big bearhugs.

But he wasn’t watching the cartoons, actually. He was watching Al and Xiù.

The thing that always warmed his heart was looking at them and seeing how much in love with each other they were, just as much as with him. It was all in the little gestures, the small generosities and, yes, the familiar comfortable bickering over nothing important. And the kisses. Lots of those, like little punctuation marks so common and unconscious that they probably didn’t even notice them tick by.

And of course they were gorgeous. Kind of a study in physical opposites really, but that just meant he got to appreciate them both for their own reasons. Xiù was sturdy. Tough. Just curvaceous enough to be hot as all hell, but with a genuine hardbody underneath. He wasn’t afraid to admit that was a big factor in their play, too; they both played rough as heck. She was paler of skin too, with long, glossy black hair that she somehow had super-mom powers with. It never got in the way, it never had baby puke in it, it never seemed tangled or dry or… bad hair days just weren’t a feature of Xiù’s life.

Julian had never once had a good hair day, but they both said it looked good on him so who was he to complain?

Al was tall enough to rest her elbow on Xiù’s head, a cocky gesture she sometimes pulled out when she was feeling dominant. Which was odd because all her toughness was in the mind. She was a creature of long graceful legs and narrow body, with a sharp diamond-shaped face that was better described as “striking” than pretty. Still…hot. She hid it under a baseball cap and shooting glasses when she was out and about, and they suited her. Like a Scandinavian shieldmaiden dressed up to take on the Terminator.

He loved the way they put up with him, too. Julian had discovered that he, uh…well. He liked to play. He liked to play pretty hard, apparently. The more he lived with them, the more he’d learned how lucky he was, how good they were for him. He hoped he was good for them.

He could just lie there and watch them forever.

It was Al’s turn to cook today, but there wasn’t a power in the galaxy that could keep Xiù out of the kitchen when she wanted to be there. She loved cooking, and days when it was somebody else’s job were just an opportunity to treat it as fun instead of a chore.

Of course, the problem was that Al just… wasn’t as good a cook as Xiù. And Xiù wanted to Help. And Al could get prickly about that, sometimes.

“Hey, hands off!”

“But the potatoes need to—”

“Babe, am I cooking this thing or are you cooking it?”

“You’re cooking it, but—”

“Right!” Al claimed the potatoes, then put them on to boil. “…Thanks.”

And that was the charm of it all. Julian loved Allison’s prickly side, but it rarely became full-blown jerkdom. Besides, if she ever took it a little too far, then Xiù was no pushover. So Julian watched them kiss, smiled to himself, and returned his attention to the cartoon, where the protagonists—a trio of intrepid Gaoian cubs—were blinking at each other in bemusement as their human mentor, a mad scientist of the old school right down to the wild Einstein hair and Doc Brown manic energy, scurried around the giant robot he was building.

Its inevitable smashy escape from the lab was kinda predictable, but the Gaoians managed to put their own comedy spin on things by having it run up to a semi truck and sniff it in what was, by Gaoian standards, a decidedly amorous way.

Julian couldn’t help but snort, which caught Tristan’s attention. “What’s so funny?”

“Just thinkin’ about how hard Xiù would slap me if I tried that…”

“Tried what?”

Julian just grinned.

“…Ohhh.” Ramsey frowned at the screen, tilted his head slightly on one side, then the penny dropped with a splintering crash. “….Oh!! Oh. Wow. Um… is that…?”

“That’s Gao for ‘ya. They aren’t so fussy about some things.”

“Why not?”

Julian shrugged. “I dunno. They do grow up fast, though. Maybe that’s why? In fact if you were a Gao, you’d already be an adult. For them, that’s fifteen…in Gaoian years. So about twelve for us.”

“Must be nice…” Tristan muttered.

Julian chuckled. “Let’s revisit that idea in a few years when you’re paying taxes…” he said, and glanced into the kitchen again, where Al had finally relented to allowing Xiù to slice the vegetables, and was bobbing and rocking around the place with a baby on each hip. She saw him watching, pulled a complicated eye-rolling face that Julian took as conveying fond tolerance for Xiù’s foibles, and smiled at him.

He smiled back, and a kind of vague hugging gesture and a lift of his eyebrows asked the question ‘want me to hold them?’

She nodded, brought them through, deposited them in his arms, and then arched an eyebrow at the… vigorous chase scene on the TV. The truck’s self-driving AI had decided she didn’t want the robot’s affections, and was doing her level best to escape while the robot pursued her in an unhurried way. It was like if Pepe le Pew was made of steel and weighed eighty thousand pounds.

The sudden crashing heroics of an Emberpelt-like superhero blasting laser beams out of his whiskers added just the right level of Gaoian kitsch to really take it over the top.

“…What’s this show called?” Allison asked.

“…Uh, I’m not sure. I don’t read Gaori very well and it’s all stylized…wait, is it over already?”

“Yeah. The supergaoian just put handcuffs on the robot. And the mad scientist is very sorry.” Allison shook her head bemusedly. “Hey, can you get Xiù out of my kitchen? She’s helping.”

“…Hmmmm…!”

“Preferably in a way that leaves the babies attended and you two ready for dinner in ten minutes,” Allison clarified.

“Aww! Spoilsport.”

The boys both rolled their eyes. They were used to him by now.

“Just order her out,” Julian said. “You know she’ll yes ma’am and quit if you actually mean it.”

“Yeah, I know…” Allison tickled Anna behind the ear, grinned at her, then went back to try and reclaim the chore she was supposed to be doing.

Sure enough, a few seconds later Xiù beat an apologetic retreat and left her to it. She slipped in behind the couch and draped herself over Julian’s shoulders like an oversized cat.

“Bǎobèiiii….” she half-complained, and nibbled on his ear.

Julian reached up behind his head and massaged her scalp. “Stop making Al feel useless, babe.”

“Ugh, do all adults act like little kids?” Tristan groaned, rolling his eyes. Ramsey giggled and leaned a bit harder into Julian’s flank.

“Just the smart ones,” Julian opined.

“No reason why growing up should stop you from having fun!” Xiù agreed. She pulled a huge happy face at Anna. “Is there?! No there isn’t! No!”

“You can have all kindsa fun that you miss out on as a kid… Chores do kinda suck though.”

“Riiight…” Tristan rolled his eyes.

“Like art!” Xiù chirped.

“Not what I was thinking of, but sure…” Julian chuckled, then flinched as she tickled his ribs.

“Hey, we like art!” Ramsey protested.

“You like art,” his brother corrected him.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with art! I mean, I modelled…”

Al’s voice cut through from the kitchen. “That’s just ‘cuz you like showing off your huge—”

“Ego!” Julian interrupted her, at the same time as Xiù finished the thought with “Muscles!”

Goddamnit. Sure, all three of those were true, but still…

Tristan giggled again, while Ramsey squirmed a little. He’d always been the more straight-laced of the twins. Where Tristan had a sarcastic, cocky streak that was very much like Allison’s, Ramsey was more… earnest. And a bit more squeamish.

“…Sure. Exactly what I was gonna say.” Al grinned at them and then returned to whatever she was doing with that spatula.

“Actually…” Ramsey tried, in a valiant attempt to end their flirting again, “…Did you hear about that Gaoian artist? The one who’s actually got tri… triwhatsit vision? Like, he can see red like we do?”

“Oh, Leemu? Yeah, Daar won’t stop talkin’ the fella up! Haven’t met him yet…”

“He’s putting on an exhibit of his work at Oriel!”

“Boring…” Tristan muttered.

Julian shrugged. “Nah, that sounds interesting to me, actually.”

“And me!” Xiù agreed. “I bet Ava’s going to cover it.”

“It’s next week!” Ramsey enthused. “Can we go?”

“Sure.” Julian promised. “I’ll make time. You gotta come too Tristan and be polite about it, okay? Ramsey comes to every one of your wrestling meets…besides. I doubt it’s all artsy-fartsy stuff. There’s probably some cool posters too, I bet!”

Xiù hummed softly as she poured herself onto the back of the couch to lie across Julian’s shoulders. She scritched behind his ear with one hand, while murmuring a quiet warning into the other ear. “Careful, there’s a chance you might be in that gallery, too…”

“…Oh. Well.” …Yeah. That was a thing now. “Uh. Oh well, I guess.”

“Oh please, I’m not gonna buy one of those.” Ramsey had an impish streak, when he wanted.

“Maybe they have sports car posters!”

“Maybe! I always thought those looked cool…wait.”

Julian’s phone pinged with a breaking news alert, so he grumbled a bit, dug the remote out from under his butt and flipped the TV over to the local news channel, to the boys’ half-hearted protests.

Xiù quieted that protest with a gentle gesture. Ava was in the ESNN studio, talking with the anchor. That always meant some kind of big extraterrestrial news.

Julian had a sudden realization. “Y’know, Adam hasn’t texted me all day…”

“Marty and Freya both made apologies on our moms group, too…”

Goddamnit. Julian pulled his boys close into a big protective hug. They seemed to sense something was wrong because neither of them protested any.

“–mobilized a few days ago for offworld activity, but until now there’s been no official word on where they were or what they were doing. Now, we’re waiting to go live via real-time wormhole to Washington where the Gaoian Ambassador to the AEC nations and Supreme Allied Commander General Greg Kolbeinn are about to make a statement.”

“Did I hear that right?” Allison ducked through from the kitchen. “Live from Earth?”

“Holy crap,” Tristan agreed. “Isn’t that really difficult?”

“And stupid expensive, yeah…Al, you might wanna put everything in the stayfridge for a second.”

Al nodded, and briskly transferred the pans into the stasis fridge. They’d come out just as hot as they went in, even if this broadcast went on for an hour. She parked herself on the couch, sideways across Julian’s lap, and watched with the rest of them as the ESNN studio went respectfully silent to hear what the general and the ambassador had to say.

There were three emblems at the back of the stage: The mon of the Gaoian Conclave of Champions, the seal of the US Department of Defence, and the AEC logo. While Ambassador Shano of Clan Goldpaw took to the stage wearing a protective biofilter forcefield harness, general Kolbeinn stepped up to the podium and knocked some papers on its surface to straighten them out.

He acknowledged the reporters in front of him with a nod, cleared his throat, and set the papers down. “Thank you for being here. I know there’s been some speculation going around about a deployment of our spaceborne assets and the Grand Army of the Gao, and today I’m going to clear up what that’s all about.”

He glanced down at the papers again, then nodded, abandoned them, and addressed the room with increased certainty. Clearly the general was a little uncomfortable in front of cameras. “A few weeks ago, a joint spaceborne reconaissance operation was launched into Hunter space to determine the disposition of their forces and planetary resources. This was a historic mission, in that it represents the first time in known history that scouts have successfully operated within Hunter territory. The mission was a success, and the brave men who went on it were able to report back a startling find.”

“They found an enslaved species,” he said. Xiù’s fingers tightened on Julian’s shoulder. “We’ve established a few facts about these people: they call themselves the E-skurel-ir and by their calendar the Hunters first found and occupied their home planet a little more than four hundred years ago. They have lived in unimaginable misery and cruelty ever since, and their home planet has been poisoned, stripped of its natural resources and utterly devastated by Hunter industry and tyranny.”

“Upon learning of this fact, the Great Father of the Gao decided to liberate them. Even now the Grand Army has established a firm beachhead on that planet and is prosecuting a full-scale planetary invasion, with the intent to deny the Hunters access to the planet, its resources, and its people. To that end he intends the complete eradication of every Hunter in the system. As the Great Father is sovereign in his own right and beholden to nobody, we of course must respect his decisions, and as allies, we are honor-bound to offer support.”

“Jesus…” Allison muttered.

“Fortunately, the Great Father’s military acumen is well-respected and rightly so. Upon review of the developing situation, the President has decided under the War Powers Acts to offer our aid, and will be addressing Congress as soon as is reasonable to discuss further action. The other Aliied nations are also making their own preparations, but I can confirm that AEC assets, including elements of the Spaceborne Operations Regiment and some of our ships, are already active in support of the mission in accordance with the Extrasolar Defence Treaty. Our intent, with the advice and consent of Congress, is to secure the liberation of the E-skurel-ir. We do this not only because it is a moral imperative to act, but because this will strike against one of our great enemies, against whom Congress has already declared a state of war. That completes my statement. Now, myself and the Great Father’s Ambassador, his excellency Father Shano, will take your questions. We are necessarily limited in what we can speak about—yes?”

Julian became aware that Xiù’s fingernails were biting into his shoulder. He put his hand up and squeezed hers, and after a second her death-grip on him loosened. She turned her hand over and gripped his instead. He didn’t need to ask what the problem was: she was the only person he knew who’d actually shoved her arm down a Hunter’s throat, whereas Julian and Allison had both been fortunate enough to never encounter Hunters. She hated the fucking things…

“Come sit down, babe.” That seemed to be exactly what she needed. He swallowed her up in a full-body hug and the boys leaned against either side of him while they watched the news.

The ESNN stream cut back to the studio—presumably because staying live to Washington to follow the questions would have been way too expensive and difficult—and Julian turned the volume down. He decided to add the comforter to the equation and wrapped them all up into a loose burrito of warmth.

Al scooped up the babies and sat down on the couch’s arm. “Not a lot of detail.”

“No,” Julian agreed. “That Goldpaw fella probably can’t say much either. I bet I know what that does mean, though.”

“Oh?”

“Means I’m gonna get re-deployed back to Akyawentuo here pretty soon…yup.” A shadow flit along the living room window, and Hoeff let himself in without knocking. He looked like he’d been interrupted in the middle of a workout and had his all-business expressionless demeanor plastered on.

“Ambassador Rockefeller wants to talk with you, big guy.”

“Right now, or does he have time for dinner first?” Allison asked.

“I’m in my running shorts and dripping sweat, so…”

Julian sighed. “…Right.”

He did insist on taking the time to hug everyone and assure them he would be fine. That done, he gathered up his bug-out bag, threw it over shoulder, and thumped back out into the evening.

The jog over to the embassy wasn’t too bad. “Things moving that quick?”

“Yeah,” Hoeff huffed. “Get you safe on monkey planet.”

They arrived a few minutes later. Hoeff did need to catch his breath a bit, being a short guy, but the ambassador met them at the door and there was apparently no time for pleasantries.

“Mister Hoeff, Clan Whitecrest have made a request. They’d like to consult Professor Hurt about the first contact situation.”

Hoeff understood immediately, even if he was panting. “So…I’m…gonna be his…bodyguard?”

Rockefeller gave him a sympathetic look. “If Julian permits it, yes. We’d normally arrange for additional protection but we don’t have time. This is a pressing request and in any case, Hurt already trusts you. That should make it…easier…to manage his protection.”

Hoeff smirked at that and shot Julian a look. “Well, think you’re gonna be safe for a bit, big guy?”

Julian sighed, and injected a little humor. “Not from Yan’s armpit, but there’s nothing anyone can do to save me from that. If anyone can keep Hurt safe in a warzone, it’s you.” He turned back to the ambassador. “Yeah, I’m okay with it. What’s my role in all this?”

“Ferd Given-Man and his men are part of the JETS team that first scouted the planet and found the natives. They’re still active and carrying out missions. Having talked with the archeologists, and with the professor…my staff thinks the Ten’Gewek have a keener interest in this than we think. Your job is going to be to feel them out on that.”

“Talk with Yan. Got it.”

Rockefeller nodded. “You have a very simplifying way of doing things.”

“Yan’s the kind of clever man who likes to keep things simple. He doesn’t like saying ten words when one will do.”

“Well, then. I’ve requested an urgent change in jump traffic. The Array folks tell me they’ll be able to send you in two hours. I suggest you use that time well!” Rockefeller shook their hands. “Good luck, gentlemen.”

Well. So the cozy home life was over for now. Julian had known it wouldn’t last forever, these weren’t the kind of times where a guy like him could just stay at home and be a dad. But on the bright side, he enjoyed his time on Akyawentuo. There was always something interesting to help Vemik tinker with, a conversation to be had with the Singer, a humiliating wrestling match followed by a conversation to be had with Yan…

Or just the chance to get out in the forest and hunt. Be part of nature again for a while. So all things considered, he wasn’t exactly facing a hardship here.

Funny. When he was at home with Xiù, Al and the kids, he missed the forest. When he was in the forest, he missed being at home with Al, Xiù and the kids. One day, he hoped, he’d get to take the family with him to Akyawentuo, and then have the best of both worlds.

But for now…

Duty called.

Date Point: 16y11m5d AV
HMS Caledonia, Mordor System, Hunter Space

Colour Sergeant Robert “Highland” Murray

“HIGHLAND, slap him for me, wouldya?”

Murray chuckled, reached out, and gave Blaczynski’s helmet a firm clout. He hadn’t been listening to what was going on, but he knew with religious certainty that STARFALL deserved it. He and FORREST always deserved whatever they got.

“Thanks bro!” Burgess grinned at him, then went back to grimacing at the shock of cold water his techs gave him to help squeeze him into his suit. That was a new technique, chilling the suit before putting it on, to buy a little extra time before the inner lining expanded and compressed in response to the operator’s body temperature.

Deacon was looking bloody serious today. She was in charge of the suits after all, and they were about to be put through a serious trial. Nobody had ever gone EVA within sixty million kilometers of a star before. Whether or not they all got the worst sunburn ever was resting on the poor lass’ shoulders a bit.

She was up to it, though. They were in safe hands, with Deacon and her techs.

Safe, but remorseless.

“I still fuckin’ hate that ye’re started wi’ the cold water now,” he grumbled, hissing as the liquid salty slush was pumped into his undersuit. It was like having an icicle run firmly across his skin, all over his body at once.

“Aww. Big strong lads afraid of a bit of chill?” She teased, reading something off her arcane tools as she drove the long probe into his life support pack to check its inner chemistry was all in order. “And don’t you do the ice bath thing after workouts sometimes anyway?”

“I don’t fuckin’ like it then, either…” Murray grumbled, bouncing on his toes to try and keep his muscles warm. One small and slightly irrational point of pride was that, despite everything, he wasn’t quite Lad enough to shake the decking doing something like that. He was the ‘smallest’ one among the fighting Lads: squint and look at him sideways, and he’d maybe almost pass for normal human size. Even FORREST was passing him by these days, that fat American fuck.

Still bigger’n ABBOTT and STAINLESS, though. Gotta keep those officers in line.

“Man, I am sure am glad I don’t gotta put up with that.” That was Kodiak, a giant bear of a Gaoian who was just now stepping into his own Suit. Murray watched with some jealousy as the Suit self-zippered all its layers together right up his spine. Apparently, there was some pretty sophisticated nanotechnology involved, so the entire suit—or at least the air seal layer—was effectively one giant molecule encasing its wearer.

“No cold water? No nothing?”

“Naw. The Suit don’t squeeze down until I tell it to.”

“I feel like that’s the kindae tech that allies would share wi’ their mates…” Murray told him fervently.

“You get talkative when you’re cold, doen’t you?” Kodiak chittered. His real name was Gurrum—with a growl over the syllables, and therefore almost impossible for most non-Gaoians to pronounce—and it was kind of an open secret among the Lads that he was eyeing up challenging Fiin to take over as Stoneback’s Champion. So far he was holding off, probably because a good champion had to be a good judge of when the time was right, and for now it wasn’t.

Murray knew when he was being given a good-natured no-sell, so he returned his attention to the chuckling Blaczynski, who was already suited up and comfortably warm again. “So what’d you say this time?” he asked.

“Just tellin’ ‘Base he oughta be glad of the ice bath. Might actually shrink his nuts down to size.”

Murray snorted, and slapped him upside the head again.

“Aye, don’t be jealous, laddy. An’ don’t provoke the other big fuckers.”

“I’m not jealous! I like bein’ able to walk straight!”

He was totally jealous, even though by any normal standards the lad was practically a bull. On this team, though…Murray just gave his old friend a knowing look, then shivered as the water reached his own groin. Right next to the femoral artery, he could feel the chill seep into his bones. “…Sure could use some of that insulation myself… Christ…”

“I woulda thought you’d be used to this. Aren’t you from the frozen bonnie northlands, where the freezing wind goes up your kilt?”

Deacon grabbed Murray’s arm before he could slap Blaczynski a third time.

“The more you wriggle around,” she cautioned him, “the longer this takes.”

“Right, aye… Don’t mind me…”

“I got you,” Kodiak rumbled, and a paw the size of a dinner plate bounced off the back of Blaczynski’s helmet.

“Ow!!”

“Cheers.”

Deacon snort-laughed, let go of Murray, and a minute later his armor was being sealed around him, tepid water was being pumped in to flush out the arctic stuff, and the ordeal was passing.

“Might just be because I’m a real man, mate. I see you aren’t complaining…”

All the Gaoians flicked their ears simultaneously, and Kodiak was as ever just…mildly amused. “Oh gods not this again. Y’all Humans sure think awfully highly of ‘yerselves…”

“They really do…” Regaari agreed.

“Yeah, well, the ladies seem to like me when I go out clubbing! Might be ‘cuz I’m not pretending to be a draft horse in my pants…Actually,” Blaczynski turned his big manic grin toward Adam. “How the fuck did you ever pull as hard as you did, ‘Horse? Didn’t you manage to smash every willing woman in Folctha like three times over before Marty tamed you? It’s not like they didn’t know what they were getting into…”

“Size matters, bro! You just gotta know what you’re doing!” Adam bounced his huge slab of a chest, and the anime characters fighting across his big e-tattoo reacted as if they’d just been knocked down by an earthquake. Neat little bit of tech, if a bit tacky…

“Can it, Lads.” Powell called from the other end of the room. “You’re all pretty and too big to handle. Now, shall we get suited before the Great Father shows up?”

“Naw, too late.” Daar prowled in with a notable lack of deck-shaking bounciness; his humor was still there, but he was in a much more serious mode of leadership. “Briefing time.”

Everyone who could, gathered round. The rest, being stuck having their suits bolted on, their fur slicked down or their EVA packs tested, perked up and listened from where they were standing.

“Our naval friends have identified a superweapon being built in orbit around the star,” Daar explained. One of his assistants scurried round, handing out printed reading material with all the details. “Looks to be a giant forcefield array. The concern is, it can pack enough energy into one coherent beam that the system defence field won’t be able to block enough in time. It’s not yet online, but as far as we can tell it’s structurally complete, so it won’t be long. We need to capture and destroy it before that can happen. Plan is to board, penetrate to the core, drop nukes, learn what we can, an’ pull out. Thing is, the mission ain’t actually that simple.”

The Great Father looked to Powell. “Colonel?”

“The array orbits this system’s star at only fifty million kilometers or so. That’s about the orbit of Mercury. Temperature in the open is as high as four hundred degrees Celsius, and stellar radiation is as high as nine thousand Watts per square meter. Staff Sergeant Deacon assures me that our suits are rated to handle such an environment. Sergeant? Any specific advice?”

“We’re adding BoPET sheets to your outersuits to protect you,” Deacon said, lifting her voice over the sound of Tisdale bolting on the last of MOHO’s armor plates. “Your suits are rated to handle the radiation, but only for a little while. Shielding you from the high-energy stuff, refrigerating you and dumping the heat spends energy from your onboard pack, so spend as little time as possible in direct sunlight. You need to get in the shade of that structure ASAP. Be aware, your visors are going to be in maximum glare reduction mode while you’re outside, so transitioning into the structure is likely to leave you effectively blind for a couple of seconds while the visor adjusts. You’ll want to rely on your helmet’s sensors.”

Adam, being cleverer than he looked, raised his blunt hand and asked a question. “Won’t BoPET make us shine like fuckin’ stars?”

“Your suit could have the albedo of charcoal, you’d still be lit up like Christmas with that much light bouncing off you. We figured protecting your equipment and maximizing your safe exposure time was the higher priority.”

“What about the ‘Crests fancy-tail active camo?” Kodiak was also much too clever for his size. “Or am I just wishin’ an’ this is too much ‘fer it to handle?”

“Definitely wishing,” said Shim.

“So…no element of surprise, then. Smash and grab as fast as we fuckin’ can.”

“That’s the shape of it,” Powell agreed. “This is another one of those short-notice ops where everything’s bein’ done according to our training. No specific instructions, and we sure as fook don’t have any worthwhile intel, so just keep your eyes open, your wits about you and your arsehole puckered.”

“Y’all know I don’t like deployin’ ‘ya ‘less I gotta. ‘Specially when it’s so short notice.” Daar gave them all a steely look. “But you all—we—are the fuckin’ best of the very fuckin’ bestest. Ain’t nobody else could even dream o’ doin’ shit like this, yijao?”

There were serious nods and duck-nods all around the bay. The banter was over, playtime was over. Everyone was listening closely.

“Space and entry are gonna be limited. We’re keeping the rest o’ the operators on hot standby in case anythin’ goes wrong, ‘cuz this mission cannot fail. We don’t have time to evacuate everyone an’ everything that are vulnerable. Colonel Powell an’ Champions Fiin and Thurrsto are in command of our standby forces. This group…well, I don’t need to tell y’all what you already know. You’re the bestest, most seasoned operators we have. ‘Cuz like I said…”

Daar held up his paw. “See this? We figger the shield can react mebbe within a nanosecond, an’ that ain’t even enough time ‘fer a beam o’ light ‘ta cross the width o’ my paw. But even then, this thing could mebbe throw so gods-damned much energy down range, it’d be enough to flash-vaporize even th’ Destroyin’ Fury inside her shields. So we absolutely cannot fail this mission.”

Powell nodded, though he looked rather less grim than usual, anticipating the mission to come. “Time to play big damned heroes again, Lads. As the Great Father said, I’ll be commanding standby forces, Captain Costello will be with the assault team. Between the suit thing and other factors we won’t have the element of surprise on this one, so hit ‘em hard and eyes peeled for every dirty trick in the book.”

There were nods all around, though they were grim. There were few environments in space deadlier than a space station whose owner was alerted of a pending attack and had time to prepare. This one was going to be fierce. Murray was suddenly glad of his suit. It might be a pain to get into and out of, but it had kept him alive through some shit in the past. It’d do so again.

“That is why it’s us,” the Great Father rumbled. “I want people with the bestest chance o’ comin’ back alive on this mission.”

“Let’s make sure we all do,” Powell agreed. “Finish your preparations, see the chaplain if you need to. We go in twenty.”

And that was that. Everyone moved with a renewed sense of purpose, the chatter dropped off to just business. Murray was glad of it. He’d always done his best preparation in the peace of his own mind.

He took a deep breath, prepared himself, and went to work.

Journal of Keeper Ukusevi, Librarian of the Old-Bent-Leg Archives
9th hour of the 206th day of the 417th year of Punishment.

”Helplessness is like a heavy blanket: It smothers at the same time as it comforts.”

It has been five days since the coming of the Gao, and Garr-avf’s words will not grant me any peace by leaving my head. I hear them when I sit and compose my thoughts. I hear them when I try to comfort the faithful, and when I recite the Long Chant. I put them to the page now in the hopes that perhaps my pen can do what thought alone could not, and make sense of them.

How can helplessness be comfortable? What does that mean?

My late teacher, Iskoritr, taught me to work backwards in these situations. “Begin at the end,” he would say, “If an answer to the big question eludes you, ask smaller questions. You may find that even small questions are very large on the inside.”

What is comfort?

That is a small question. What is the definition of a common word? And yet, as Iskoritr foresaw, I find that it is much bigger on the inside. The light of the bigger question shines in from outside, illuminating whole new warrens of meaning that I had not considered before. What is comfort?

When I am comfortable I do not wish to rise from my bed. When I am comfortable, I have no need to move myself so as to alleviate an itch or ache or numbness. Comfort, in that sense, is inertia. An unwillingness to change anything about one’s condition because the alternative seems worse.

I am sitting comfortably. Why should I change my posture and risk an aching back?

I am comfortably warm in my bed. Why would I wish to rise and be cold?

The Answer: Because I must. Sooner or later, the Almighty delivers to me some task or obligation that cannot be resolved from my comfortable chair, or my warm bed. But there is the paradox at the core of Garr-avf’s words. To be comfortable is to be inert until compelled to act… but to be helpless is to be unable to act.

…Isn’t it?

Date Point: 16y11m5d AV
Hunter stellar array, mordor system, Hunter space

Regaari

The hard part was the light. It was everywhere, and stepping out in it meant being exposed to a flood of radiation and enough heat to melt lead. The shadows meant life, but with the suit’s eye protection turned almost fully opaque to handle the glaring stellar radiance, the shadows were impenetrably dark. Anything could be in them, totally invisible. Not even the contrast-enhancing vision augmentation system in his helmet could do much in such a fierce EM environment.

There were other sensors in the helmet to help, but they could only do so much. And if the Hunters had any of their cloaked heavies out on the hull…

…Best to get inside quickly. Regaari’s paws touched metal and he felt the heat even through his suit. The Hunter array would have burned his exposed skin to touch, but his suit was designed to handle temperature extremes far worse than that. He stuck on, drew his fusion knife, and started to cut into it, sawing through the thick inches of armor plating to get at the hollow space the ultrasound sensors in his paws promised him was there underneath.

The hull was thick, though. Far too thick for him to move by himself, and his Human friends weren’t available for this part; they were all forcing their way in at the other end of the hull.

But that was okay. His best friend in the universe also happened to be its strongest. Daar dug his claws in and tossed the gigantic hunk of metal aside with almost insulting ease. Adam was doing much the same with his breaching team. Once that was done…First Fang and the HEAT swarmed in with all the aggression they could muster. They didn’t have time to do anything less.

Regaari was a lucky male. He was privileged to fight the darkness alongside his best and most loved friends, and there was absolutely no moral ambiguity to be had. The Hunters were evil.

But he could maybe have done without having to fight them on the surface of a tiny bunker much too close to a star for comfort. And a flimsy cloak of crinkly reflective material did not feel like adequate protection from the unrelenting stare of a main sequence white-yellow monster like this one.

Wriggling through into the hole that Daar made, therefore, was entirely welcome, even if it was a horrible moment of perfect blindness. There was no air to hear, his visor was still black against the stellar glare, he couldn’t have smelled anything through his mask even if there was air to sniff…

He felt a heavy vibration through his paws and flung himself aside. A fusion scythe slashed down and carved a molten channel in the deck plating where he’d been, missing him by whiskers.

Regaari lashed out with his own fusion knife and cut its legs out from under it. The Hunter fell, its scythe briefly lit the room as it swiped at him, but Regaari wasn’t going by vision right now. He was going by training, instinct and intuition. He sprang forward, parted the monster from its weapon with another stroke of his claws, then finally went for the kill with a stroke that opened sizzling gouges in it from belly to eyes. It died without further exertion.

Daar had been on his heels, Shim behind him, and others still pouring through the gap. Regaari sprang to the door and ferreted through it as Daar wrenched it open. There was no time to pause, gather his breath, or reflect. The facility was small, the Hunters would know they were here instantly thanks to their shared network. To surrender any momentum at all was to gamble with death.

Thought stopped. There was just flow. Knowing things, seeing things, doing things.

Knowing: Where he was, where the enemy was, where his friends were. First Fang and fellow Whitecrests behind and alongside him, HEAT humans seventy meters that way, making their own violent ingress.

Seeing: Opportunities, moments, movement, victims. A Hunter too slow on the uptake: Delete it. Another, too reckless and panicky in darting forward to counterattack. Slip under and past it, trust the heavies to catch and destroy it. If Daar was perhaps thoroughly enjoying himself more or less literally crushing his inferior foes, they could boast to each other later.

Doing: Killing, gathering intel, mapping the facility and its vital systems even while dancing through its halls in a blur of blood, bullets and blades. No time to count the near misses, stopping to even notice the danger would be fatal.

All the mundane complications were there, of course: zero-g, super-G, shifting and popping to and fro, even the occasional dose of hyper-G, though not much; probably the platform couldn’t handle it for too long.

And the usual wall of Hunters, most small and puny next to his hard-earned Deathworlder body, some more of a challenge. None quite so bad as the Tanks from the Ring. And drones. That was fairly new for the Hunters but not for other enemies they’d faced before.

The danger, as always, was in the unknown.

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

It had been quite clear to the Alpha-of-Alphas when the foe noticed its stellar superweapon. An extremely fast warp signature departing the star’s vicinity, where there had been none before, was a sure giveaway of a stealthed scout completing its mission and returning data to its Alphas.

From that moment, the gambit was foiled. There would be no rapid-fire of stuttering light-pulses to devastate the system fields and the deathworlder capital ships. The loss of the system became a certainty, and it was a painful loss in a long string of painful losses.

…But not yet catastrophic. And potentially, hidden in the belly of this loss, was a gain.

The Alpha-of-Alphas had prepared for this contingency. It set its Builders to work inside the array, dramatically altering its profile and function. The very concept of using it to send overwhelming bursts of coherent solar radiation into the outer system was abandoned, in favor of constructing something… else.

Something that was only feasible with the most powerful of forcefields anyway. Something that demanded extreme and expensive field geometries, which in turn demanded high-precision alignment and complex mechanical calibration within an appropriate suite; not, therefore, typically the domain of ship passageways.

Fortunately, the Alpha-of-Alphas had foreseen this need, though for entirely different purposes. Its design for the array had included an appropriate antechamber for the field-expedient repair of large modules. After all, tooling was difficult and time-consuming to rig for any project.

Even so… it had come down to the narrowest margin. The Builder brood lessers were still working feverishly on the modifications even as the Eaters flung themselves futilely at the deathworlder invaders and were slaughtered. Their sacrifice was barely enough… but it was enough.

A Fur-Face and a Human, marginally forward of the others and leading the assault, burst through the Eaters and obliterated the Builders.

The Human was designated Alpha-4; a worthy specimen in its own right and significantly superior to its lesser-ranked fellows. The Fur-Faced was, if anything, an even better specimen, and that was a concept the Alpha-of-Alphas still found itself straining to adapt to. It would clearly need to re-classify its inventory of enemy spaceborne broods at some point.

Either way… it could barely ask for finer specimens to fall into its trap.

Regaari

STARFALL was the first to the array’s core, and the first to ken that something was wrong. Some instinct, something sharper and more aware than mere sight and sound, prompted him to twist, turn, and slam his shoulder square into Kodiak’s chest so hard that the big brownfur was thrown back to safety in the instant before the trap sprung.

They saw the forcefields snap taught, then delicately peel all his equipment apart, layer by layer.

Then they did the same thing to Blaczynski himself.

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

Humans were so… vexing. They seemed to have senses that extended beyond mere sound and sight and scent. There was no conceivable way that one designated Alpha-4 could have seen the trap, and yet… somehow it did. Not quickly enough to rescue itself, but quickly enough to save its counterpart. Perhaps they could sense building electromagnetic fields? Even through their armor? If so, that would be a valuable new trait for the Swarm to learn and incorporate.

The Alpha-of-Alphas would have to be content with one Alpha instead of two… But what an Alpha it was!

The analysis began with the twitching, struggling and defiant Human’s equipment. Forcefields and crystalline nanoblades peeled the armored suit apart, inspecting every intricate layer, noting every detail.

The outermost layers were fabric-based camouflage, equipment carrying systems, power systems and utility forcefields. Below that, a thick stratum of metalloceramic scales so refined, so elegant and simple, and so perfectly functional that they inspired in the Alpha-of-Alphas a rare feeling: its sense of artistic beauty.

Beneath that, thermally activated shock-absorbing gel performing the dual function of keeping the suit gripped tight around its wearer’s body, and also of distributing impacts over a wide area. It was no wonder these Alphas could weather even heavy hits, when they wore armor like this.

Below the gel was a surprise: water. It squirted out in zero-G, and a pair of forcefield capillaries siphoned it up for analysis, but it turned out to be just water, with a few trace additives like fluoride that may have been contaminants. The water system was spread through the whole suit, visiting both a dispenser in the helmet where it could be combined with a soluble powder (Some kind of stimulant or nutritional supplement) and a heat exchanger in the armor’s outer layer. And, as the investigation concluded, the water supply could be restored using the operator’s own filtered and purified excretions from both the skin and orifices.

Ingenious. One simple system handling four different roles at once. Incompressible structural support, cooling, hygiene and hydration/nutrition.

That discovery alone opened whole forests of possibility. But the time had come to consider the creature itself. The Human was male. Like all of its kind, he was gifted with a wide range of limb motion, which it tested carefully; it wasn’t interested in harm for its own sake, it was interested in knowledge. He resisted its careful handling with surprising force; it made careful note of that for later. In considering the gross anatomy, it was forced to conclude that Humans had an almost perfectly ideal form. Powerful, versatile hands whose fingers could fully pivot at their base joints. Legs that were adept at a striding locomotion without sacrificing too much muscular power. All his joints were highly mobile, while the extensive musculature connecting it all together seemed perfectly placed for an optimal balance of power, speed, and endurance.

The Alpha-of-Alphas took a bare moment to admire the creature. The more it thought about the evolutionary pressures that led to something so supremely well-adapted to surviving and mastering the world around it, the more it grew convinced it could have never designed a better form itself. Even the compromises were exquisite! The eyes, for example: Humans only had two, but observations and anecdotal evidence suggested they were supremely capable sensory organs, far beyond most Prey or a Hunter’s natural eyesight. The field of view was necessarily more narrow, but their other senses seemed to inexplicably compensate for that. Or perhaps that was just their neuro-processing? Humans were rumored to excel there, as well.

There were some confusing details. The feet had what seemed to be mostly vestigial digits that likely corresponded to the same in their hands. A quick X-ray pulse confirmed that the feet had internal complexity that wouldn’t make sense in an engineered lifeform; Humans were definitely evolved creatures, which only made them all the more wondrous. The genitalia were much larger than would seem necessary, if one considered the Prey species’ reproductive anatomy by comparison. Alas, the Hunters’ method of reproduction was far less efficient in terms of genetic mixing compared to a sexual system. Yet another thing that needed improving about its kind.

Aside from those minor points of confusion, there was hardly anything to critique. The Human body was, for lack of a better concept, exquisite. Only the Fur-Faced were their peers. Finally, with a gross anatomical survey of the Humans, the two could be compared, and the inescapable conclusion was that the Humans and the Fur-Faced were gifted with both Deathworlder and Predator’s bodies, yet they were very different kinds of hunters, with different and complementary adaptations. Alas that it didn’t catch the Fur-Faced Alpha! More study would absolutely be necessary, but for now it would make the most with what it had.

It proceeded with the vivisection very carefully, to maximize the information gleaned.

Surprisingly flimsy skin, with rather a high capacity for subcutaneous fat, though this particular specimen was extremely lean and its skin had been shallowly injected with pigments and nanotechnology of no comprehensible function. It wasn’t protective; it didn’t take much pressure to pierce the dermis, which mostly seemed to serve as a temperature regulator and microbe barrier, not as protection against anything large. The pigmentation must have been for communication, but the precise meaning was a mystery. The Alpha-of-Alphas removed the entire skin in one piece to enable separate imaging and analysis, though the operation was tricky; thin though it may be, it was highly elastic and very firmly attached to the layers below.

It had to increase the field’s restraining pressures significantly during that operation, and turn down the sensitivity of its microphones in response to the Alpha’s suddenly much louder vocalizations.

Human muscle tissue was well-studied, but the difference in this case was that the Alpha-of-Alphas had a live specimen in exceptional condition to consider, not the mangled remains of a malnourished stray caught by the Swarm. It considered the chemical floods it was observing, recorded the way that chemistry interacted with dense fibrous matter to heave and struggle mightily against the forcefields, and dug deeper. Several times, it needed to increase the power output to keep the specimen properly restrained.

Thick tendons with a shocking tensile strength were intricately woven among that marvelous tissue, and eventually anchored in strong, heavy bone. Hydroxyapatite and collagen, literal stone wrapped in an organic matrix. Difficult to break, an impressive compressive strength, and quick to heal if properly aligned. It found evidence of a few past fractures, since healed stronger than they would have been before the mishap.

And beneath those…

The chemical and hormonal splendor of a Human’s innermost workings. In the end it had needed to snip those marvelous tendons to keep the Human still, as any further pressure would end up breaking the specimen before it was done with its investigation. And it wanted the Human alive, if it was to maximize its knowledge.

Alas, there simply wasn’t enough time. The Fur-Faced Alpha of Alphas had teamed up with the Human Alpha-0 and another specimen it tagged as Alpha-1, and together the three were resorting to ripping their way through the walls. That was an entirely unanticipated course of action, but analysis showed it would be effective.

Further examination would have to be rapid. The Builder abandoned slow inspection, and quickly pulled apart its specimen, basking in the wave of data that flowed from its instruments.

The final bit to tackle was that fantastic brain. The Alpha-of-Alphas had to settle for a deep imaging analysis, which would have killed the specimen… but of course, that hardly mattered at this point. It watched the last flickering electrical and chemical signals sputter and fade, then concluded that it had learned all it could today.

If only it could have been more thorough and methodical. If only there had been more time! Even the rushed, crude process had shown the Alpha-of-Alphas wonders. How much more could it have learned? What secrets would the Prime-Alphas of the Humans and the Fur-Faced have revealed? They would now be wary of its intent, no doubt. Catching one of them would be a difficult challenge…

And the specimen’s brood had nearly breached the wall, where they were mounting explosive charges to destroy the forcefields. Its time was up. No matter. It had more than it had ever sunk its teeth into before. And with the knowledge it had gained…

…With that knowledge, Hunters would never be the same again.

The Alpha-of-Alphas re-assembled the former Human Alpha’s form and laid it reverently, even respectfully, on the floor, then ordered its forces to withdraw into deep space. The world and system were lost.

But the Hunters had won a victory nonetheless.

Regaari

Three dump webs weren’t enough to break the array’s forcefields. Those fields were configured to handle the energies of a star, so nothing even vaguely man-portable could have managed: not even the two-ton full-size dump web Daar was carrying on his back did anything more than give them a light show.

It was…agony. An agony Regaari had no words to describe.

The Defenders quickly identified a wall which might be useful, but which had much industrial equipment in the way. WARHORSE and RIGHTEOUS threw themselves at it instantly, literally tearing it apart with nothing more than their bare hands and sheer desperate strength. The Great Father followed suit without a whisker of hesitation, adding his razor-sharp claws and even greater power to the effort. Everyone else set to clearing debris from behind the three titans. But by the time the three had clawed the wall apart, and TITAN and MOHO had blown the forcefield emitter circuitry to pieces…it was far too late. As a last act of sadistic defiance, the Hunters crudely re-assembled Blaczynski and left him on the deck, thoroughly, utterly dead.

The Humans… became something else. If Regaari thought he’d seen them at their most terrible before, he’d been deluded. Rage, vengeance and grief transformed them into silent monsters, who took the rest of the facility apart piece by piece. Nothing was left to chance, nothing was spared.

First Fang were carrying nukes. Plural. So while the Protectors gathered up their fallen friend’s abused remains and prepared him to go home, the Defenders and First Fang penetrated right into the station’s core, found the thrumming heart of its emitters, deployed their revenge…

…And withdrew. They left nothing alive behind them, and nothing intact either once the nukes went off.

When they were back aboard the Destroying Fury, and when they’d de-briefed, cleaned up, returned to the safety of Mordor orbit, mourned together and taken care of all else…

…It was only then, when Daar was alone with Regaari, that the Great Father of the Gao finally broke down and wept.

Journal of Keeper Ukusevi, Librarian of the Old-Bent-Leg Archives
11th hour of the 206th day of the 417th year of Punishment.

To continue my thoughts from my previous entry, I was roused from the comfort of my writing desk by one of the children. Some minor confusion over proper filing for me to clarify. I tended to my duties, ate and cleansed myself, prayed… but all the time my thoughts were elsewhere.

The boy’s name is Teeisyo, and I have had my eye on him for some time as a potential Keeper. He has a good memory, he learned his letters quickly, he writes neatly, he shows proper respect for the books, paper, pens and ink, he venerates the words properly and he loves nothing more than to read.

He would be… comfortable… as a Librarian.

What does that mean? I see two meanings nested inside that word. I mean to say that it would suit him well. It would be the path of least resistance for him, just as it was for me. He would be treading the path the Almighty seems to have laid out before him, to a service and duty he seems well-suited for. He would be good at it, I’m sure. He would find it easy.

And he would be safe.

To be helpless… is to be safe? How can that be? Our helplessness is in the face of higher powers. We were at the whim of beings from the sky who slaughter and eat us, and now we are at the whim of other beings from the sky who have been unflinchingly forthright in their promise to change us and destroy what we are and were. By what possible definition is our helplessness “safe?”

Impossible. To be helpless is to be unsafe by definition. But what about easy? The more I think about it, the more I know in my belly that Garr-avf spoke truly there, at least. It is so very easy to be helpless.

But the alternative seems impossible. How can we not be helpless? When the Punishers and the Gao alike dominate us so totally, how can we be anything but helpless? And they, surely, are less than the Almighty Himself, in whose sight we are all helpless. Punishers, Hunters, these “hyoomun” friends of the Gao (whatever they are like) and the Penitent alike.

The Long Chant says that we all play our role in the Almighty’s great plan. Is that not helplessness?

And yet… I have always found comfort in the thought that there is a plan, even if understanding it is beyond me. There is comfort in faith, in trusting that I am paying my Penance. That thought has always made the cruelty of the world above make sense. And I am… comfortable, when the world makes sense. It is only now that my sense of the world is disturbed that I find myself uncomfortable.

”Helplessness is like a heavy blanket: It smothers at the same time as it comforts.” I cannot escape that thought, no matter how I try… Because it is true. My faith was comfortable, yet what I had faith in was my own helplessness.

But how can I be anything else?

Date Point: 16y11m5d AV
HMS Caledonia, Mordor System, Hunter Space

Technical Sergeant Adam “Warhorse” Arés

The first Adam became aware of John slumping down next to him was when the deck shook a little and knocked him out of the total zone-out he’d drifted off into, somewhere between post-mission fatigue, grief, sleep and self-hatred.

His hands were still in agony. In fact his whole body was, way worse than usual. He’d thrown everything he had at getting through that wall and it hadn’t been enough. He wasn’t strong enough. Firth wasn’t strong enough. Not even Daar wasn’t fucking strong enough! They weren’t up to the mission…

He’d failed. And the thing was…

The thing was, that old, niggling doubt that had been there from the beginning was there, gnawing away at his soul. If he had been better! If he’d thought to go through the wall sooner!

John just put his arm around him.

“Bro.” A squeeze.

Adam immediately swallowed him up in a hug. Anybody else might have suffered a few popped ribs, but John was the one guy in all the world who could take it, and more importantly… Who knew.

Well. No. There was someone else, but he was in even worse shape than Adam right now, and Adam was being selfish. So, he nodded against John’s chest, blinked the tears out of his eyes…

“…How’s Firth?”

“He’s… lookin’ after Murray. Think it’s the only thing keepin’ him in one piece right now.”

Adam fidgeted. “I should—”

“Sit your fat ass down.”

Adam blinked. John had a tone he used, rarely, that worked kinda like a heavy slap in the face. It was his Healer’s Voice, carrying more weight of command and authority than even Powell or Costello could muster, and he saved it exclusively for patients who were being dumbasses.

Adam was pretty good at being a dumbass.

“Look at me,” John added, using the same tone, and it worked. Adam blinked at him in confusion. “Everyone on this deck blames themselves right now, bro. Look around. Tell me there’s one man on this team who isn’t telling themselves they coulda done better.”

Adam looked around. The deck was littered with little tableaus of misery: Coyers sitting despondently on his cot, with Tisdale next to him giving the big friendly giant a commiseration backrub while Miller worked listlessly on one of his suit components nearby, her expression far away and pained. Butler deadlifting away his surplus energy and anguish in the corner, his face a mask of empty hatred. Akiyama sitting with his head back against the wall and his eyes closed, cheeks wet. Sikes, pacing a track in the deck, looking like he wanted to explode in fifty directions at once and kill something.

“…I just… I just feel like…” he began.

“I know what you feel like, bro,” John assured him, softly. “You feel like you coulda done more. Like you coulda done better. Well you couldn’t. Fuck sake, you’d blame yourself if you couldn’t jump to the moon to save a bro, and I love that about you, but man… You gotta learn to accept there’s gonna be times when there’s no such thing as good enough. I was there bro. You and Firth were on top of the situation before anyone else, you put everything you had into it… how many broken fingers you got right now?”

“…Three…” Adam admitted.

“Lemme take a look.”

Adam showed him. The pinky and ring fingers on his right hand, and the middle finger on his left had both gone painfully crunch when he’d been ripping at that wall. Thanks to his gauntlets they’d been kept aligned properly, and thanks to the Crude in his system they were already healing well. John rubbed and manipulated them, nodded his satisfaction that they would be okay, then considered the bruising in Adam’s shoulders as well. He gave Adam a serious look.

“Don’t lie to yourself about what more you coulda done, brother. You were literally breaking yourself. We need you strong and healthy, now more’n ever. So don’t you dare be fuckin’ yourself up like that.”

It…helped. Really, it did. He made sure ‘Base knew it, too. But it wasn’t really enough. What Adam really wanted to do was let the Hate out and just…smash. But right now he couldn’t do that. He was broken. He’d pushed himself hard enough to keep up with Daar for fuck’s sake and it still wasn’t enough! He had to rest. To heal. But he couldn’t really heal….

Fuck. He didn’t know what he was thinking.

All he could do was… watch. And hold it together. They’d get their vengeance. They had to. They had a long process of healing and improvement ahead of them before that day came, and Adam had no idea where to begin…

But they would.

It was what they did. And it was what they would do, no matter what.

Date Point: 16y11m6d AV
HMS Caledonia, Mordor System, Hunter Space

Captain Anthony “Abbott” Costello

Powell wasn’t one to take losses lightly. He never would have been, nor could he have been and successfully led the HEAT.

But there were losses, and then there was…

Blaczynski’s death wasn’t just a loss. He was a gut punch, a critical blow. He’d been loved, the team’s happy smiling jester, the joker and shenanigan artist, the guy who could get a laugh out of anyone even while they were giving him a blow upside the head for his irreverence. Morale hadn’t just taken a knock, it was in the gutter and likely to remain there. Losing him would have hit the whole team hard, even without the nightmarish scene they’d all been so helpless to stop.

So it was no wonder that Costello found the Colonel slumped forward over his desk with his elbows resting on its surface and the fingers of both hands splayed across his sparse scalp. It was a defeated, exhausted, anguished posture. Entirely right for the moment.

Their shared on-board office-slash-cabin was a small space that had probably once been storage for Hierarchy drones, before Cally’s capture and change of ownership. It had what they needed: beds to sleep in, desks that folded down from the wall above them… And privacy

Powell shifted as Costello entered, looked over at him.

“…Wondered where you’d got to,” he rumbled.

“I can’t sleep.”

“…No. Me either.” Powell sat back and groaned, massaging his bruised shoulders. He always bore a few pressure bruises and pinch marks from his suit, uncomplainingly but always there. “…And I’d do terrible fookin’ things for a drink right about now.”

“…Tea?” Costello suggested.

There was no humor in Powell’s snort. “…Aye, close enough. I’ll make it, you siddown.”

Costello took him up on that. He folded his desk up and sat on his bunk, took off his boots and bent to massage his feet. One of the small curses of the HEAT life was big damn feet, and that more often than not meant big damn foot aches.

“You’ve known Murray longer than anyone,” he said. “You ever seen him like this before?”

“Never. Hard thing to fookin’ see, too.” Powell clicked the kettle on and stood watching it. “…I’m worried about ‘im alright. I didn’t realize they were that close.”

“They’re like brothers, sir. That’s a relationship that’s only grown more intense over time.”

“Aye.” Powell sighed. “…Never thought I’d see that quiet Scottish bastard like that though. How is he now?”

Costello shook his head. Murray had needed sedating in the end, which was no small task when it came to a HEAT operator. He’d got… stuck, in his head. Constantly wired, in full blown restless fight/flight mode and apparently unable to bring himself down.

In any other company, that kind of restlessness wouldn’t have been much of a big deal, but HEAT operators had gone through extensive psychological screening and conditioning, indoc and selection processes with an incredible dropout rate precisely to winnow out the guys who couldn’t hack serious trauma, mental or otherwise. Every man in the unit had a titanium will, and Murray was no exception. Seeing him so shaken therefore was, yes, a big deal.

Though to be completely fair, Costello couldn’t blame him. Highland had been right behind Kodiak, and therefore almost a victim of the Hunters’ trap himself. He’d be badly shaken too, in Murray’s position.

…Costello should probably check in on Kodiak while he was at it. He made a note for later.

“Last I saw him, he was quiet. Firth’s taking care of him. Think it’s the only thing keeping the big guy together. For once, ‘Horse has even managed to keep some therapeutic distance.”

“Good. Was worried we’d have him tearing himself apart.” Powell performed his wizardry with teabags, sugar and milk, and handed over a mug of steaming brown comfort. “…We might have a problem. Murray never took the Homesteading credit.”

“I think that’s just one of several problems we might have, but… what’s so bad about that?”

“Aye, but this is one I can do something about. What’s bad is it means, given his rank, time in service and all the rest… he can walk straight out the door and never come back, if he wants.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. Be a real kick in the balls if we lost two of our best men today.”

“Do you think he would?”

“Christ, I fookin’ hope not. But I could hardly fookin’ blame him if he did, either.” Powell sat and sipped. “Just…fook. I’ve got my two best men in a bad way, I lost another, I might lose another… An’ that doesn’t touch what the Gaoians have going on. Did you see Daar? Fook that, did you smell him? I’ve never once in my life smelled anger, before today.”

“I’ve been worrying about… longer-term things,” Costello admitted. “How we’d deal with that kind of trap when—’cuz it won’t be an if, let’s face it—when we run into one again.”

“Aye. It worked. Which means the fookers’re going to do it again. And they’ll be building them solar focusing arrays up in their other systems even now, bet you anything.”

“Which makes their ships effectively unboardable, and their systems unapproachable.”

“Which makes us…”

“…Obsolete.”

Powell slurped his tea. “…Aye.”

They sat in mutual worried silence for a few moments, before Powell chugged the whole hot drink like it was a shot of liquid courage and set it down with a sharp tap.

“Right. That’s not going to fookin’ happen. Not on my watch. I didn’t build up the best fookin’ team o’ special operators in galactic history just for every man jack of ‘em to get mothballed. And I will not let Blaczynski’s death be the sad full stop that ends us on an anticlimax.”

“There’s still much we don’t know,” Costello pointed out, warming his hands on his mug rather than drinking. “Neither of us know anything about forcefields, really. We don’t know what the real limitations are. I mean…why has nobody ever done something like this before? Why didn’t we think to? What don’t you and I know?”

“Akiyama’s your man to ask there. And you know what? I reckon he’ll be glad for somethin’ to think about.”

“Is… this a concern to bother the men with? Now?”

“Not right now, no. But soon. Otherwise we’ll be comin’ to them in a few months with a bolt from the blue like ‘Sorry lads, Brass is pullin’ the plug. Nice workin’ with you.’ We’ll stand down, we’ll mourn, but then? Then we’ll keep doin’ what we do. We’ll prepare for the worst this galaxy has, so we can fookin’ smash it.”

Despite his sombre mood, Costello found a slight inspired smile pulling at his mouth. “…We’ll have Daar’s backing, I’m sure.”

“Don’t knock that. It might be that being ‘bestest friends’ with a man who is effectively the god-emperor of the Deathworlders is what saves us all.”

“I can live with that.”

“Aye.” Powell stood and cleaned his mug. ““In the meantime, send a message to Mears and have him schedule everyone. Possibly a group session too, if he feels that’s appropriate. Then try an’ get some sleep.”

“No promises on that last one,” Costello replied. “But I already drafted the message.”

“Cheers.” Powell sat down on his cot. “…I’m gonna try an’ get some kip.”

“Yeah.” Costello turned out the light, lay on his own cot, wrapped himself up in his blanket, and put his head down.

He stared at the ceiling in the dark. And somehow, in a confused way that left him with no idea whether he’d actually slept or not, night transitioned into morning. It certainly didn’t feel like six hours until the change of watch sounded to rouse him…

And he didn’t feel rested at all.

Journal of Keeper Ukusevi, Librarian of the Old-Bent-Leg Archives
20th hour of the 206th day of the 417th year of Punishment.

I met two of these “Humans” at last. A tall one, rather like a librarian in manner himself, and a short one, who was very much the opposite of a librarian, really.

In appearance, they are even less like us than these Gao. The Gao at least have fur, and proper ears. A Human is… not hairless, but sparsely furred at best. You can see their bare skin, behind the air masks they wear to endure the poisons. And when they took them off to show their faces…

I don’t know what to make of them. The short one seems like a man of violence, but the tall one…

He translated his names for me. He has two: The Almighty Judges Me, and Pain. Dan-yel Hurt. I don’t know what to make of that, exactly. Especially not in light of the things we spoke about.

But then again, I haven’t known what to make of things for some days now, so why should that change? So I opted for honesty, and told him—he assured me that I could know him as “Dan-yel” for convenience—just how confused I am.

It took rather a long time. He listens well, and I could see him filing it all away in his mind, just like I do. He’s a librarian and Keeper of his people, no doubt.

His guard had two names as well. The first was also Dan-yel, but the second meant “one who owns and works a farm.” Heff. It seemed appropriate for him, as he didn’t say much but he watched everyone and everything with an intense, unyielding gaze.

I am told that this name Dan-yel is quite common in their culture. In that regard, I think we may already have a little more in common with these Humans than with the Gao. Garaaf has so far always been diplomatic, whenever the question of the Almighty and His role in my people’s fate and lives came up. He has demurred, and given cautious answers.

He is a Nonbeliever, it seems obvious. And, I think, that is normal for his people.

The fact that this name “The Almighty Judges Me” is allegedly common among Humans tells me much about them. When I said as much, Heff showed me a small icon he wore: A vertical cross, with the intersection well above the midpoint. It apparently represents the suffering, death, and eventual resurrection the Son of God endured to save their people from eternal damnation; an altogether strange idea, but…

…The concept of resurrection stood out. Amid all the strangeness, that is the thought that I cannot let go of. To pass through the fires of unimaginable hardship and suffering, and then to emerge reborn on the far side, into a new life?

Garaaf, from what I know of his past, and from what he has said, views hardship as something to weather stoically. He describes others as having ‘broken’ around him, while he alone was able to endure. And I think that may be where I find him difficult. He is the sort of man who would stand firm and unchanging even when the Almighty pushes him to adapt. I cannot imagine him being reborn and resurrected. Hardened, yes… But not changed.

I do not yet know about Hurt and Heff. I felt a greater resonance with what they described, but…

But I have only just met them.

It was a long conversation, and I transcribed as much of it as I could, entering it into my archives. I will see how much should go in the Chant tomorrow, once I have had time to reflect and sleep. It has been a long day, and my brain aches from thinking.

But I think I am beginning to see answers to my questions.

Date Point:16y11m6d AV
Starship Destroying Fury, Mordor system

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

It was only Daar’s unbreakable discipline that kept him afloat. All he wanted to do was rip and tear and pillage and destroy, over and over again, endlessly, until everything was a haze of red and he’d stacked a pile of corpses big enough to avenge…fuckin’ everyone.

But Daar couldn’t do that. He was the Great Father. He couldn’t enact revenge for its own sake. His actions demanded purpose for more than himself. He could only act on behalf of the Gao.

There could be no weakness. Only strength.

Nothing in his demeanor, his tone, his posture or his bearing could ever betray any hint of softness. His body, his words, his every action had to be perfectly fatherly and perfectly unyielding, every single time no matter where he was or who he was with. Any affection or playfulness with almost anyone had to be in that context, it could never be otherwise. Nothing could hint to any conflict of purpose. Daar had to radiate confidence and strength at all times. He could never waver. He could never show the slightest hint of hesitation, to anyone, ever. If he did, if his people noticed… the Gao’s willpower could collapse like a wet tissue.

He had never felt such blinding, all-consuming rage. And that could not be allowed.

No weakness. Only strength.

So, Daar did what he had to do. He allowed himself to mourn in private. First stoically with the HEAT, and then more personally with Regaari, the single deepest friendship of his life. Daar saw to their medical needs before the two of them fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

He woke in the ship’s early hours, as was his well-trained habit. Then he remembered what he saw. One of his Brothers, an incredibly rare, talented, quirky and beautiful man he was proud to call a friend…peeled apart like a gods-damned onion. The rage and pain returned manyfold.

Most of the time, strength was more of an ideal or a metaphor than a hard requirement. Oh, he prided himself in being a unwavering, stoic father for the whole of the Gao, and of course he was proud of having the most hugest bestest muscles of anyone. But the one time his real strength had been called upon…He, the fastest, hardest, strongest, toughest damned critter in the entire fuckin’ galaxy, a ‘Back good enough to crush tank-Hunters in his paws, he against whom nobody could stand…failed. He failed because all his vast strength was useless against a star-powered forcefield suite. None of his power in any sense of the term could have helped.

And someone he dearly loved had died horribly because of that. Because of his weakness in the face of a clever, determined foe. Because in the rush to destroy the superweapon, he had not the wit to see what else might be done with it. He were too gods-damned focused on the objective and not nearly fuckin’ enough on how to achieve it! They should have just boarded, dropped a huge fuckin’ nuke, and left immediately! In, out, a minute tops! Why the in the balls-licking fuck did they insist on doing what they always did!? Did nobody in either his or the Human’s staff think that maybe, just maybe a fuckin’ forcefield ship in space might possibly have something nasty in store? Were they afraid to voice objections? Did nobody think in time?

Daar certainly hadn’t, and he was inarguably one of the most intelligent people alive, too! And a Master of fuckin’ War! What in the ever-lovin’ Keedafuckin’ hells were they actually fighting?!

Daar was far beyond enraged. He was pissed. At everything. But mostly, at himself.

Even the simple act of thumping over to his wash basin had him unconsciously clawing gouges in the steel decking, which he only noticed when one of the floorplates finally squealed. He looked down and growled at such a pathetic lack of discipline. A brownfur’s claws naturally wanted to sit partially extended to better grip into the ground. Hard surfaces normally caused them to retract, but these days his grip was so fierce, if he wasn’t actively holding them back…

Unacceptable. With the level of political and physical power he wielded, losing control of himself like that for even a moment could have serious consequences. He couldn’t lead anyone in such a state. Some part of him, the part insisting at the edge of the blood-haze that he act like a Gao worthy of his station, slapped him inside his own head and told him to get a fuckin’ grip.

No weakness. Only strength.

There was only one thing to do. Daar growled an update to his aide then thumped off to his gym. He spent many strenuous hours there, exorcising his rage as best he could. He broke a whole bunch of things, tied some other things into knots, crushed yet more in his paws. Burned out the gravity plating, too. By the time he was done, his body was so pumped up, lathered up, and amped up, he felt powerful and fit to fuckin’ burst if he pushed himself even the tiniest bit further. Combined with Adam’s coaching and all the sports science available, Daar would be feeling like that until he finally let himself let go, and that might end up being…well, never.

Just like his soul.

His personal aide knew his moods well and didn’t even bother to comment like he usually did. Instead, Tiyun silently picked up the good brush and set to work, slicking all the copious lather down through Daar’s fur. No point in all that exertion if Daar didn’t look the part, after all. It was about more than his ego. Daar represented an ideal for the Gao to strive toward in all dimensions of his being, even if certain allowances had to be made for personality; he was no anodyne king. He had to be real. All of that could add up to a hell of a burden, but that task was one he could never fail. His darker feelings must have been bleeding through though, because while Tiyun wasn’t usually much perturbed by Daar in any of his moods…

Just then, Tiyun smelled of awe. And fear. And melancholy. But mostly fear.

Daar shook his neck out and asked as politely as he could, “How do I look?”

Tiyun answered with the meekest voice Daar had ever heard him use. “…Mighty, My Father.”

Daar almost keened at that. Tiyun was one of the last people he wanted to scare, but there wasn’t any way around it. Daar was the creature he was, and he wouldn’t be the Great Father if he was anything else. Even if he couldn’t save a friend.

No weakness. Only strength.

He took a couple of calming breaths, and tried to find a serene place from which he could work his retribution. He knew he wasn’t going to find it on the spot, but sometimes the journey itself was worth the effort. A little trickle of calm found its way into his soul. It was an icy calm, a place from which Daar would do very much indeed to avenge Blaczynski and all the rest. It wasn’t what Sister Shoo would consider ideal, but…serenity didn’t need to mean peaceful.

“Thank you, Tiyun.” He gave a slight nod of thankfulness. ”Take the rest of the day off, ‘kay?”

“Yes, My Father.” There wasn’t even a hint of protest in his tone. No matter. It was late afternoon by then, and Tiyun deserved a break. If he was maybe a bit eager to get out of Daar’s presence…well…

Daar could hardly blame him. No. Weakness. Only strength.

Enough self-indulgence. His staff was of course competent and wise, and could handily manage affairs in his absence, but Daar had a war to win. They would need guidance and direction; it was his will that caused all this, after all. Daar growled to himself and prowled purposely down the corridors of his ship, the deck shuddering underpaw and announcing his presence before his heavy musk ever could. He resumed command of the war effort from his battle room.

The room went dead silent when he prowled in. Many even backed away from him from wherever they were standing. He ignored that and commanded his staff, “Brief me.”

They did. Daar called a meeting of his generals. Plans were made and approved. Things were set into motion. Daar praised as appropriate, gently educated on the finer points of a thing here and there, and learned considerably more in return. He made sure to convey that, too.

Top of the list of things to learn was how they had lost the element of surprise. Daar was pretty sure they either tipped their hand too early, or the Alpha-of-Alphas had anticipated a boarding action, and successfully predicted their tactical approach. Either seemed likely, and frankly: there wasn’t much they could have done differently. Fire a gigaton-class nuke again, maybe…

Calm, collected. Cold. An ideal he needed. Think the problem through, don’t spend anger where it would be fruitless. There could be no weakness, especially not of reason. Only strength.

With his generals and staff directed, encouraged, and productively wielding their competence toward the goal, Daar went around to each of them, thanked them for their understanding, and left them to their work.

The implications of all of this were going to have serious repercussions. This new Alpha-of-Alphas possessed considerably greater tactical acumen than his predecessor. He’d weaponized forcefields in a novel way that had previously been functionally impossible on a anything but an (obviously) purpose-built vessel…but having shown the terrible possibilities when insanely powerful fields could be wielded internally…

HEAT was grounded until they knew more, and could nullify or counter the threat. So was First Fang. Balls, depending on just how much could be done with less powerful fields…

The rage hadn’t left him. At all. In fact it had only grown worse, but he was a predictable ‘Back and pushing his body to the brink seemed to help contain it a bit. Time for round two. He sent a message to Regaari and more or less commanded him to come train. Daar needed to be forceful because Regaari was doing what he always did in terrible personal tragedies. He tried to suffer his hurts alone, as if none of his cousins should be burdened by his pain. Noble, but…

…The little genius was really, really balls-damned stupid about these sorts of things. So, Daar did what a brownie did best: he dragged the tough lil’ guy back to the gym and more or less beat the crap out of him. Nowadays that took a long damn while too, which was honestly impressive, but this wasn’t really playful like it would normally be. It was more…needful. Regaari needed someone who could take the worst he could give and egg him on to give even more. Daar took it, and even gained a neat lil’ scar or two. Regaari also needed to remember that he wasn’t a one-man Army. Daar… reminded him of that point. And got his own frustrations out, too.

Besides. Grim though they were, it wasn’t like they didn’t enjoy it. There was just something satisfying about a good fight, about breaking the rest of the gym with his most bestest cousin. Those barbells looked better in a bow-tie, anyway. Regaari didn’t have that kind of brawn, but that was okay. He was a good spotter and knew the iron game as well as anyone these days.

Dreamless sleep was so much easier when a man was dead exhausted. Once they were both running on fumes, they ate big, cooled down, curled up together and passed right the fuck out.

The next morning they ate again, recovered, got in one last quick workout, then took a shuttle down to Mordor’s surface. It was time to take the field and exterminate the Hunter infestation. But something much more difficult had to be done first.

No weakness. Only strength. The strength to crush evil.

They lined up on Caledonia’s deployment deck, Gaoian and Human alike. They kept their backs straight and their eyes open, even filled with tears, as a coffin draped in red-and-white stripes and a blue field of stars proceeded along the length of the deck and was laid, reverently, on the jump array.

A Gaoian would have had a pyre, there on the world he died to liberate. Daar would have had the finest, hardest, most fragrant and expensive wood jumped in to honor him… but Blaczynski had been Human, and Humans went home, because to them, home was much, much more than just a place to sleep, or a place to keep their things. Home was where their soul lived.

Somehow, that black flash and a thump were harder to bear than lighting a pyre would have been. It felt too abrupt, to Daar. He vowed two things, in its aftermath:

First, that he would be there when the time came to honor Blaczynski properly.

And second… that the payback to come would only be the beginning.

++End Chapter 63++

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…Seventy-nine Friendly ETs, 123 Squishy Xenos and 304 Dizi Rats ♪splatting on a wall♫

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 64: “Survive”

Chapter 64: Survive

Date Point: 16y11m10d AV

Hierarchy Cleansed Session 508

++0020++: Full retreat. Every Hunter asset in the system is being withdrawn or scuttled.

++0004++: <Aghast> So quickly? The Gaoians only launched their invasion days ago!

++0020++: Correct. Their maximum leader personally intervened on a key asset in close orbit around the star, and this was apparently enough to convince the new Alpha-of-Alphas that their objective was lost.

++0004++: I hadn’t expected the new Alpha-of-Alphas to be such a coward.

++0020++: It isn’t. It is in fact a good deal bolder, more intelligent and more decisive than its predecessor. It has also utterly locked Hierarchy assets out of the core Broods and their leadership. The Hunters are less controlled than ever, and their economy is growing increasingly self-sufficient as more and more of the “Eaters” enter long-term stasis. It appears that the Builder Alpha-of-Alphas simply regards the loss of that star system as, at most, an inconvenience.

++0009++: It’s those system containment fields. Ever since those escaped the Guvnurag and became available to the deathworld species, the nature of war has changed dramatically.

++0020++: The Hunters seem to have developed a counter, assuming they can establish their new class of stellar station. In combination with wormhole suppression technology however, you are correct.

++0009++: Our strategic situation is looking increasingly untenable. Substrate levels are in rapid decline. We have lost control of the Hunters, we have no insight whatsoever into what either the Humans or Gao are doing except what they leak onto the galactic communications networks, and Cynosure’s success at re-infiltrating Sol was utterly ruined by the loss of the Irujzen relay.

++0004++: Assuming we would have had access to those assets in the first place…

++0023++: They may be active, actually.

++0009++: Explain.

++0023++: The Injunctors Cynosure used were loaded with the old automated survey and index case AIs as a backup. In theory they are capable of infiltration, abduction and basic biodroning, and could then load up their archived Agent onto the biodrone. A Human provides plenty of Substrate.

++0004++: And then what? Without Relay contact, with the whole planet wormhole-suppressed and with no other agents in contact, they would not know what to do.

++0023++: There…is also the question of Cynosure’s status. I do not believe him to be terminated.

++0003++: Every indication we have is that he and Metastasis destroyed each other, and given their problematic status, we have terminated their archived versions to avoid any possibility of re-instantiation. They are dead.

++0023++: I do not believe Cynosure should be written off. He was always a step ahead of us, and those Injunctors represent a perfect place to archive himself beyond our reach. If he is on Earth, then–

++0004++: Then we cannot touch him for now. But he may yet do our work for us…

++0003++: We shall see. Given that there is nothing constructive that can be done about it, I see no reason to continue to expend time and resources on this discussion. Closing session—Return to your duties.

++SESSION 508, TERMINATED++

Date point: 16y11m12d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Arthur Sartori

Sartori was… torn.

His time in office was drawing to a close. That much was inevitable, unavoidable and right. He wasn’t about to argue against Presidential term limits. But…

But he didn’t feel ready to go, and that was the truth of it. And as election night dragged on and the results rolled in, it was starting to look like the old pendulum-swing of US politics wasn’t going to change this time around. Red-blue-red-blue, tick-tock-tick-tock. He’d hoped to break the cycle.

But the public were fickle, and sick of an expensive war that had effectively zero impact on their daily lives. San Diego was a distant memory and the economy was resurgent after the difficult years that had followed, driven by offworld development and industry. What people wanted now was less spending on nukes and warships and hyper-expensive HEAT operators, and more spending on welfare, schools, healthcare and social programs.

For once, Sartori had managed to secure some credit for his party’s accomplishments. That in itself was a uncommon and strange turn of positive news, and he was leaving office as one of those rare Presidents who wasn’t openly loathed by over half the populace. So, naturally, the counter-message had changed.

“We’ve worked hard.”

“We’ve done our part.”

“Let’s take care of the folks back home.”

And…all the short-term, vote-buying nonsense that panderers of all persuasions had been peddling since the dawn of the Republic. Teams might change, colors might run different, but the same craven will to power was still there.

And the voters, bless them, always wanted to believe the best of any sunny-side-up message. So they voted, and Sartori sat back and watched with his chin on his hand as his chosen successor Margaret White’s presidential campaign slid toward a narrow but convincing defeat.

Ironically, to an old, wealthy white male. The same old games, same old prizes. There would no doubt be accusations of voting fraud and all the usual, but he sincerely doubted it in her case.

His party controlled the Senate. There was a check against the new government, at least. He’d had two full terms and a bit more besides to aggressively reform departments and place his favored personnel. But the opposition took the Presidency, and utterly swept the House after the previous two years of scandal-plagued leadership by the Speaker.

Which…

To be fair, Sartori was a partisan. The very definition of a partisan, being the goddamned President of the United Fucking States after all. And it wasn’t like his opposition was quite as…well, times had changed. Passions had grown red-hot and then cooled considerably in his lifetime.

But that history wasn’t something he could ever forget, or really forgive.

No matter. History was just that. Sartori resolved two things: firstly, that the transition would be as flawless and smooth as humanly possible. His successor would know everything about what they were facing, and know it to the core of his being. And secondly…

He would go tell Daar in person. He deserved that, at least. Because President-Elect Chambliss was the very opposite of a kindred spirit to either Daar or Sartori. He’d run in no small part on his anti-war credentials, filling his campaign with old imagery of himself at the front of protest marches, flags and banners and drums in hand.

And he was a compulsive fabulist, too. Sartori needed to drill into Chambliss’s head how utterly dangerous that would be with the Great Father. And that, right there, was the biggest and most dangerous part of the entire transition.

The fate of the human race may in no small part rest on a small number of personal relationships with the most powerful being to ever cast his gaze across the galaxy. After all, it was the might of the United States and the fighting spirit of her closest allies that had saved the Gao, an act for which the Great Father was deeply grateful. But they were a resilient and industrious people, who held vast technological advantages and who had an extremely well-developed spaceborne infrastructure. With the post-war recovery and even with the impending population shortfall, the United States was already the junior partner in the relationship, and that was a fact virtually nobody outside of the policy wonks understood.

Daar knew it, though. And one false step by the President-Elect could severely damage things.

There was no point in staying up late, anyway. In the morning he’d have to stand in front of the cameras and congratulate Chambliss, and after that he had a little fewer than two months to finish what he could and step away gracefully into whatever role he could find for himself. So, Sartori excused himself, bade his people good night, and went to bed comparatively early knowing he’d likely only get four hours to sleep.

He’d find a way to stay in the fight. But that was a problem for tomorrow.

Date Point: 16y11m12d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hunter territory

Entity

Ava Ríos had briefly met Blaczynski a few times before her fateful trip to Egypt. She’d liked him, despite herself. Ava had thought of him as hot. And funny.

His death left a knot of anger and sadness in the Entity’s core that it couldn’t quite explain. It was slowly accepting that in a sense it was Ava, or at least a distorted reflection of her. Different in every particular, but nevertheless…

His death—or rather, the circumstances of his death—had given the Entity an impetus beyond <survive>. <vengeance> and <justice> were both flashing their fangs, eager to be satisfied.

The Hunters’ networks and data coverage were sprawling, connected to dataspace in deep and insecure ways. Infiltrating their periphery remained trivial, even if the deepest strategic core had hardened impressively since the Entity’s last visit.

And they were quiet. Eerily so. Previously, they had thrummed with the mental activity of billions of networked Hunters, each scheming and jockeying for position amidst their own Broods, and each Brood doing the same among the others… Now, the closest point of reference the Entity had was city streets in the darkest hours of the morning on a rainy day. The titanic evidence of Hunter achievement was everywhere, but the Hunters themselves were conspicuously silent in a way that made the occasional trace of activity seem all the more sparse and threatening. Like a car slipping by as just a wet hiss and some anonymous blur lights before the street became empty again.

Retrieving basic information about the events of the last months from their network was relatively straightforward. Security was much tighter than it had once been, but the Entity had transformed itself over the years, from a scared and weak thing that fled from any contact, into a fearsome living weapon. Its ability to pass undetected was unmatched, it could ransack data archives and leave them seemingly undisturbed, and only the most stringent measures posed any real obstacle to it.

It simply avoided those obstacles. There was no need to confront them, not when it could learn what it needed without unnecessary risk.

It did not like what it learned.

Somehow, the Hunters had created the same kind of solar focusing array it had invented itself. That rankled. It had created the weapon in desperation to avoid pursuit, but now it found that the Hunters were building four in each of their remaining star systems, surrounding their stars with a tetrahedral arrangement that guaranteed there was practically nowhere in the system that could not be scoured with focused radiation.

Each such station was protected by wormhole suppressors and gravity spikes. Each system, therefore, was a fortress. An impenetrable prison for the Hunters’ slaves. Assailing them was rapidly becoming…

Well, the only viable method the Entity could see would be overwhelming numbers. So far, the Humans and Gaoians had achieved what they had through the precise application of a small number of exceptional ships and individuals. And the Hunters, not being stupid, had taken their surprise victory over the HEAT and rapidly applied their new-found knowledge.

They had, in fact, possibly found the hard counter to Deathworlder tactics. And that simply would not do at all. So the Entity withdrew from their networks, and the tiny ship-body it had made for this scouting mission slipped away into the interstellar black.

The Entity planned to pursue <survive> indefinitely… But it had no intention whatsoever of doing so in a universe that contained the Hunters.

Date Point: 16y11m12d AV
Native library warrens, planet Mordor

Professor Daniel Hurt

As far as Daniel was concerned, Ukusevi might have been his perfect ideal colleague in another timeline. She had the rare ability to really think, to methodically pick apart every word and concept, explore every nuance of meaning, every preconception, every precursor and every successor. In a less tragic environment, she might have been the kind of scholar he adored.

As it was, she was a tortured theologian whose whole religious foundation was collapsing around her.

“…What do you mean, ‘over?’”

“I mean the war is effectively over,” Daniel told her. “We won. The enemy have fled, and the forces they left behind are cut off, unsupplied and leaderless. Any other species would surrender, but the Hunters won’t. They’ll fight until they’re all dead, which is probably going to take months, but at this point I’m told that victory is certain so long as we don’t make any stupid mistakes.”

He listened to the faint scratchy noise of the translator faithfully rendering his words for Ukusevi’s ear. The E-Skurel-Ir language, or at least Ukusevi’s dialect, wasn’t exactly terse. English certainly had an advantage in brevity, there.

A strange quirk, that. They were otherwise a spare and efficient people by necessity. Every page in Ukusevi’s journal that she’d so far filled was crammed to the edges with her dense, tidy handwriting. No wasted space, no wasted food, no wasted things. The Librarian’s clothes were tough, hard-wearing, and much-mended.

She looked, Daniel felt, rather like a hunched, lanky Franciscan monk with leporine ears and a face that was arranged much like a human’s while being inhuman in every important particular. Her eyes were too large and too widely spaced, facing somewhat outwards rather than the binocular forwards. Her nose was wide and as flat as a table with a total of four comma-shaped nostrils, and her mouth was almost human, if one ignored the fact that the natural shape of E-Skurel-Ir lips looked rather like a bilateral cleft palate with a pronounced underbite.

He was beginning to get the hang of reading her facial expressions and body language without needing the translator’s help, at least. If he was right, then she was badly conflicted. The desire and hope that her species were finally released from their great punishment was at war with the healthy skepticism of somebody who’d long ago internalized the old adage that anything which seemed too good to be true probably was.

“Of course, this opens a lot of questions for your people,” he prompted, kindly.

“Yes. and it opens them more quickly than I…” Ukusevi stopped herself. She glanced down at the journal in her hands, a nervous habit Daniel had noticed in her a lot. “…I had thought we would have more time to think. You know that not all of my people believe that the Punishment would just… end. Not like this.”

“Your people have a sensible streak of skepticism in them,” Garaaf said. Ever since Daniel had been brought on board for this delicate first contact situation, the scarred old Whitecrest had increasingly insisted on letting him take the lead.

Ukusevi’s ears flopped back and forth as she jerked her head in her version of a strong headshake. “That is not the reason. I want our Punishment to be over, truly I do. I just struggle to reconcile it with the Long Chant. Our history and our present don’t quite…” She paused, and chattered her teeth thoughtfully as she assembled her thoughts. “What was and what is don’t flow easily into each other.”

Daniel nodded. He’d been expecting this conversation.

“My people have wrestled with this problem at length,” he said. “The closest thing we have to a Long Chant contains accounts of histories that, uh, don’t necessarily line up neatly with the evidence of our own eyes.”

“For example?” Ukusevi asked.

“…For example, one account holds that in the beginning, the Almighty made only two humans, a man and a woman, who are the ancestors of all humans since. The story is true in that it contains truths, deep insights into our condition and our nature…But it is not historically accurate. Nevertheless, there are people out there—a rare few—who hold that in order for it to be true at all, it must be completely true. They think that for any part of it to be false would make the whole thing false, and they can’t stand that idea.”

He let her think about that. Honestly, watching her think was an unexpected pleasure. He could see the process of it in how she flicked through her journal’s pages, muttered snippets of the Chant to herself, fidgeted with her hands and ears.

“I suppose I… hmm.” she scratched her left ear. “The Chant has always just been truth to me. It is a record of our past, and the lessons we learned. We study carefully and cross-check with each other, use the meter and rhythm to aid our memories. Our first duty and effort is to make sure that it is a true and accurate record of events that really happened.”

“But you said it yourself that it also records the lessons you learned and the conclusions you drew,” Daniel pointed out. “It isn’t just a dry record of who did what, when and where. It’s a moral history, as well as a record of events.”

“All history is moral history,” Ukusevi asserted. “There’s no reason to record history except to learn from it.”

“I agree. But is there only ever one correct lesson?” Daniel asked.

“…Surely there is.” Ukusevi didn’t sound entirely convinced by herself.

“Maybe. But I suspect only the Almighty knows which one is the correct lesson. Mere mortals have to fumble our way toward the truth, and all too often we get it wrong. The Long Chant faithfully records your history…”

Ukusevi glanced guiltily over her shoulder at the heavy steel doors that sealed off the warrens. A sensible precaution for people who lived on a planet with such a polluted atmosphere, and in this case a useful source of privacy.

“…But it may not faithfully record Truth,” she finished. “That’s…”

“Blasphemy?”

“Many of my people will think so.”

“Many of your people aren’t here. Do you think it’s blasphemy?”

Again, Daniel watched her think. This time, she did so in silence with her brow furrowed in a very human way.

“Well… yes. I do. But… I don’t think it’s wrong.” She closed her journal and set it aside, which as far as Daniel could tell was a pretty solemn gesture coming from her. It meant what she was about to say was going to stay firmly and permanently off the record.

“I keep telling myself I don’t know what to think, but that’s just not true,” she said. “I know what’s true in my belly. I feel it in my soul. I know that the Punishers, the Hunters, whatever we call them… they’re evil. Even if they’re an instrument of divine will, they’re evil, and I know of no history in the Long Chant that justifies our suffering… Maybe that’s a truth I can come to live with. But what about everybody else? Are we to be delivered from them only to tear ourselves apart because our lives don’t make sense any longer?”

She gestured at Gaaraf. “You said that helplessness is a blanket, and it’s time to wake up. Well we’re not ready. I might be. Others might be. But most of my people…” her negative head-jerk was slow and morose this time. “Destroying the Punishment might just destroy us too. Look at the world out there! The air is poison, the land is barren, the rivers will give you sores if their waters splash you… We didn’t have anything left except the Punishment! Take that away and we’re… nothing. There’s nothing left of us. Just a history I devoted my life to that teaches me things that aren’t true…”

She stared for a long time at the closed journal, then picked it up and pressed it to her forehead, eyes closed, ears flat along the back of her head. In any species’ body language, it was a posture of the most profound pain and loss, and Daniel knew there were no words to make it better.

The only thing for it was to gamble on a hug.

He scooted over and put his arm around her. She stiffened and gave him a look of obvious surprise, but didn’t shrug him off. After a second she heaved a heavy sigh, lowered the book into her lap again, and leaned against him. She was very different to hugging a Ten’Gewek, who mostly felt like a slightly softer rock. Ukusevi was bony, thin and fragile. But clearly the hug was still a universal, and clearly she was glad for it.

Daniel gave her a minute or so of quiet before making his suggestion.

“The Chant isn’t untrue,” he said, quietly. “Just like my story from before about the first humans. It’s not completely true… but it contains truth. You don’t need to throw the whole thing away just because it’s not all truth.”

She sighed. “The bits that aren’t are important, though.”

Daniel nodded. “I know.”

“…I don’t mean to seem ungrateful. Gao and Human didn’t do this to us. All you’ve done is brought about the moment when we finally have to…” Ukusevi looked across at Garaaf. “…Get out of bed.”

“For what it’s worth,” Garaaf replied, “I think we’ll all be richer for having your people awake.”

“Why?” Ukusevi’s ears lifted slightly. “We’re a broken people. We’ve lost everything we had. Now, we’ve even lost the tale that held us together through that. What do we have to give you?”

Daniel retrieved his arm and scooted away, sensing that he’d given as much comfort as was appropriate. “We’re not doing this for what your people are now, Ukusevi. We’re doing it for what we hope you will be, now that you have your chance.”

Garaaf duck-nodded. “You may be broken now. But it is within your power to become more than you are. It won’t be easy, but it’s possible, which is more than you had before.”

“But… Where do I begin?”

To Daniel, there was only one possible answer. He put his hand on her journal.

“With the truth,” he said.

Date Point: 16y11m12d AV
Industrial complex, Planet Mordor, Liberated Hunter System

Ginn, Foot-soldier first class, Grand Army of the Gao

Ginn flinched and hunkered down behind his gun shield as it deflected a brief shower of sizzling Hunter flechettes. He’d really hoped that being flattened by an RFG strike would have emptied the factory complex his unit was clearing of Hunters, but the nutless monsters were definitely not gone.

He squeezed the trigger in his right paw and, with a staccato bang-bang-bang from his weapon, raked the ruins with bullets. Dust, stone chips, and a few gratifying bits of Hunters filled the air, and the shooting stopped.

His comrades took advantage of his weapon’s suppressing effect to maneuver, gaining ground to the left and right where they could encircle the Hunter position and deny them any cover. A few grenade rounds bounced into the rubble and detonated, adding to the carnage.

That was how you dealt with Hunters. Big, overwhelming firepower, without any let-up or second chance. If you shot one and it dropped, you shot it several more times for certainty. Ginn had no intention of being slashed in half by a Hunter that had merely been winged.

More Hunters boiled out. Obviously, there was some sort of underground refuge that survived the RFG, and now Ginn and his buddies were quite possibly screwed.

The radioman was already calling for reinforcements. But Ginn and his unit could only throw so much ammo downrange, and they were increasingly outnumbered. He fought on, because it was the only option, and because he would never let a Hunter take him alive.

He may as well have aimed a garden hose at a forest fire. His gun reached the point where its barrels were glowing faintly and if he hadn’t been wearing gloves then his hands would have burned, but he kept firing…

Right up until he ran out of ammo. The gun sizzled as he twisted it aside, grabbed his SMG and poured on the pressure, acutely aware that the magazines he had left weren’t going to—

“Danger close!”

Now there were two blessedly welcome words. Ginn pulled his head into the Growl, and not a moment too soon. His helmet had barely cleared the turret lip before there was a sound like the sky being ripped in half like a sheet of dry canvas, and something else that wasn’t so much heard as felt.

It went on for a while. Probably only seconds, but it felt longer, and when it was gone and Ginn popped up with his weapon ready, he could feel the heat through his PPE. The hole the Hunters had been pouring out of was a twisting inferno, and the few still standing on the surface were staggering, bleeding, confused. Ginn dropped the nearest one with a burst to its torso, and a second burst to the head to be certain.

Around him, his comrades regrouped, pulling back toward the Growls. Ginn’s driver tapped him on the leg, handed him a new ammo can. Gin ducked inside, grabbed it, hoisted it up, and busily set to work opening and feeding his mounted gun.

He was certain of two things: one, that the strike had bought them a welcome reprieve, and two, that there were more Hunters still to come and it was only a matter of–

Sooner than he’d hoped and feared, they attacked again. There were no tactics involved in what they were doing, just a fearless blood-frenzied rush to descend on Ginn’s unit. It would have been easier to fight them if they’d been using sensible tactics or showing any regard for their own lives, but sheer swamping crazed aggression made them dangerous. They couldn’t be suppressed, couldn’t be awed or demoralized. They just… rushed. And there were enough of them to make it.

Deliverance came in the form of a wall of Stoneback’s finest: heavily armed, heavily armored, and utterly unstoppable. They were of course a Clan essentially bred to purpose, but something that was by all accounts a bit weird about the Gao relative to other sapient species was that they’d never had suitable draft animals in their primitive days. They had to do all the work by themselves, and it was the brownfurs–and especially the Stonebacks–who did the bulk of it. That served them well here, because the Stonebacks didn’t exactly fight the Hunters…

…Rather, they simply plowed right through them, and trampled them underfoot. Regular Hunters snapped like twigs as the enormous Clan-Brothers pounced on them, ignored fire with their ridiculous shields and armor, and just…kept going.

With the ‘Backs now charging forward, Ginn and his fellow gunners shifted their fires to perimeter control. Ginn’s assigned field of fire left him able to watch the fight unfold and it was…

…It was glorious.

The fight wasn’t over until every last Hunter was dead, and it wasn’t bloodless for the Gao either. After all, once the ‘Backs had broken through, Ginn’s unit had to charge in behind. That wasn’t his task this time–he was an excellent gunner, so he wasn’t often on-foot these days in the mud–but he and his fellow gunners kept the greasy fucks from leaking out, until the ‘Backs had slaughtered them all and it was time for post-op recovery.

Ginn had survived again. He felt a good deal calmer this time around. Checked his weapon, reloaded, kept his eyes open, but the news that filtered back to him was pretty clear that the underground warren the Hunters had been hiding in—once a native village, sadly—was now empty and secure.

The thumping sound that came from underground was the Stonebacks, destroying the breeding pools. Not that a bunch of unaugmented Hunters would have been a big deal necessarily, but they could breed fast if they had access to meat.

“Hey, I know you!”

Ginn looked down from his turret at the enormous Stoneback brute standing up against his Growler. The voice behind the mask sounded familiar…

Sure enough, it was the same huge ‘Back that had saved him from the cloaked Hunter attack, and who was friendly with him at chow. Now, here he was again except with a hundred of his Brothers, once again saving Ginn’s tail.

“It’s a small world, I guess.”

The big ‘Back wagged his armored tail. “Din’t I tell ‘ya to stay outta trouble?!”

“Getting in trouble is our job.”

Big-Back chittered darkly and wiped some of the blood off his armor. “Yeah. This should be ‘bout th’ last of ‘em ‘round these parts, we reckon. An’ we haven’t had ‘ta respond ‘fer y’all inna while! ‘Yer gettin’ good at this stuff!”

“This one turned out to be bigger than we thought.”

“That’ll happen,” the ‘Back said, sagely. “Still, try an’ learn from this, yijao? ‘Yer lucky we were online ‘fer taskin’ today.”

“You’re talking to the wrong trooper, really. I go where I’m told, I do what I’m told, I try to do it well. If there’s anything to learn from this…” Ginn didn’t finish the thought out loud, but he did angle his helmet subtly in the general direction of the officers. “They’re not entirely useless…”

Big understood his meaning entirely. “Mhmm. Mebbe I can have a chit-chat an’ see they don’t deploy y’all so stupidly next time, ‘kay?”

“I’d owe you.”

“Naw!” Big raised a paw to shake Ginn’s. “Don’ worry! Also I never got ‘yer name!”

“Ginn,” he said, finding his own completely encircled by the ‘Back’s massive paw. “Yours?”

“Grandfather Vark o’ Stoneback! You keep ‘yerself alive now, ‘kay?”

“…Grandfather?”

“Eh. I s’pose.” The hulking Grandfather shrugged his shoulders. “Clan’s always got one an’ it’s my turn now. Now I gotta git, I got some occifers ‘ta educate, so, y’know… Stay outta trouble.”

Ginn chittered. “No promises.”

An hour later, they were on their way back to the Clawhold. Apparently, when the Grandfather of the most prestigious military Clan there was decided to ‘educate the occifers’ he actually meant put the fear of Daar into them, in a good-humored way.

Well. Good-humored from the Grandfather’s perspective, anyway. Things probably didn’t look quite the same to those officers from their lowly positions on the ladder of power. From Ginn’s even lower perspective, however, it all looked pretty funny. He kept that carefully to himself, and even managed to relax a little once they were on the move. The prospect of actually having a few days to rest beckoned.

He vowed to make the most of them.

Date Point: 16y11m13d AV
Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Earth

President-Elect Beau Chambliss

“…And it’s about eight AM in London right now, so there’ll be a call from the Prime Minister later today to congratulate you… He’ll probably be the first, really.”

Chambliss groaned and massaged the back of his neck, which always got sore when he stayed up late. A relic from an old whiplash injury from his youth. “Business already? I’m not allowed to relax and just enjoy the win?”

He’d hoped to be celebrating a successful election campaign with a few drinks alongside his family and staff. They’d done all the rigmarole with trotting out on stage, giving his speech, standing there beaming and smiling while camera flashes sparkled around them in all directions… It had given his wife Catherine a headache, and she’d gone to bed the moment they got back to the hotel. The kids—Bradley and Lacey were both coming up on their thirties, but he still thought of them as ‘the kids’—had gone to bed before him too, which was unheard-of.

It was well into the small hours of the morning, and Beau wanted to get at least a few hours of sleep before he had to dive into the long series of briefings, meetings, introductions and tours that were sure to be his full-time job until the Inauguration, and for the years to come after that.

But he had campaign staff to thank and celebrate with for a little while first. Chief among them his campaign manager, Oliver Mack, who apparently didn’t know how to stop being at work.

“It’ll just be congratulations, Beau,” he promised. “Steve Davies is going to want a lot more than a phone call with you, and he’ll want it long before the Inauguration, but he’ll wait until you’ve had a few days before he discusses the big issues with you.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, come on. There’s only one thing on those warmongers’ minds: It’s been in all the news since you won the primary. He’s worried about all that military funding he can’t afford.”

“Mm. And look where that funding got got him. Hundreds of Royal Navy sailors killed.” Chambliss sighed and set his champagne aside, suddenly losing his appetite for it. “What a waste.”

His foreign policy advisor, Sandra Nguyen, made an uncomfortable noise. “I have it on good authority that Davies was genuine when he called Caledonia’s fallen crew heroes. He probably won’t appreciate that sentiment,” she cautioned.

“Well I wouldn’t be so dumb as to say it to him that way. But the war for Gao was over two years ago. The system is secure, Jump Arrays and forcefields are going up all over the galaxy… pretty soon the Hunters will be withering on the vine, and good riddance to them. Why throw away lives prosecuting a war we already won? It’s time we looked to our own people.”

“Preaching to the choir, sir.”

“I’m going to take a lot of phone calls tomorrow, huh?”

Mack grinned, with a certain sadistic glee. “Inevitably. And you’ll probably have a couple of extraterrestrial calls too. Have you ever met an ET, Beau?”

“Not yet…”

“There’ll probably be a formal written message from the Dominion in a few months, after the inauguration. The Rauwrhyr Republic and Corti Directorate will probably be in touch sooner. And the Gao will be calling you. Probably the Great Father himself, unless he’s soaking his fur in blood somewhere.”

“Let’s not be unfair,” Chambliss cautioned him. “Daar doesn’t leave himself out of the fighting, which is an honesty I can appreciate.”

“Neither did Genghis Khan.”

“Keep that to yourself,” Chambliss advised. “Whatever we think of him, his relationship with Sartori and America is important. Most of our extrasolar trade is with the Gao.”

Nguyen nodded fervently. “And I should note, we’re no longer the big fish in the pond as a result. Most Americans don’t realize that yet.”

“We’re still the biggest fish on Earth, and so long as we have a close relationship with the Clans we’ll keep our edge there. They buy our food, we buy their technology, and except for the other nations with Cimbrean colonies that’s a market we have exclusive access to.” Chambliss smiled at Mack. “So let’s be careful about insulting their grand dictator, even in private. He has big ears.”

“And a sense of smell that shouldn’t even be possible. You will need to…consider how you speak to him.”

“I know, I know, I read the briefing,” Chambliss grumbled. “He only respects brutal straightforward honesty, and he can smell when he’s not getting it. He’s going to be…”

“Challenging,” Nguyen suggested.”You’ll have an uphill battle with him, sir.”

Chambliss nodded, and decided he’d given them enough time to be polite. His neck was really beginning to ache, and his eyes and limbs felt heavy.

“That’s all for tomorrow,” he declared, and stood up with a groan of tired exertion. “Sorry to kick you out, but if I’m going to be ready, I should really get to bed. And so should you.”

They parted with a few good-nights that told him they were just as drained as him. Alone at last, he shuffled through into the suite’s bedroom, changed into his pajamas in the dark, and slipped into bed, where Catherine half-turned and gave him a sleepy half-awake kiss.

“You should have come to bed hours ago…” she told him.

“You’re right.”

And with that, President-Elect Beau Chambliss put his head down, and didn’t notice falling asleep almost instantly.

Date Point: 16y11m2w AV
HMS Sharman, (HMNB Folctha) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Commander Kieran Mears

The HEAT coped with grief by throwing themselves even harder at their training, in whatever form it took. Every man among them was an extreme case, a being of enormous passions, and in any other context the degree of pain they put themselves through would be distinctly alarming.

In their unique context, however, it was probably the healthiest they could possibly be.

Not all training involved titanic weights and loud music, however. It was an often-forgotten fact that the HEAT were all qualified astronauts, which meant their scientific education had to be on par too. And a keen understanding of forcefield geometry had just become all too important to them, so the whole unit was refamiliarizing themselves with the latest developments in that field.

When they could focus, anyway. Mears had seen a lot of Firth and Murray over the last few days. Less of Arés, who was usually his most regular visitor, but Arés had promised that he wasn’t avoiding Mears’ office, just trying to put into practice a long-standing promise to reach out to his family and friends.

“I’m making progress on a lot of stuff right now,” he’d said. When Mears had pressed him the particulars, and if that meant something besides the gym…

“Oh yeah, I’m making big progress there again too!”

Healthy, in a particularly Arés alpha-meathead sort of way…but healthy, nonetheless.

That left Firth and Murray.

Firth was understandably devastated. He and Blaczynski had been something of a modern-day Achilles and Patroclus, and as fashionable as it might be to imagine those mythic Greek figures as having been lovers, that was a foible of modern shallowness. Men could love each other deeply without invoking the spirit of Eros. Admittedly that idea was the subject of much of their locker-room humor, but that was also true of Arés and Burgess.

So, Firth’s grief ran deep and raw. But it was, in the end, relatively straightforward.

Murray’s problem was more complex. He’d been very fond of Blaczynski too, and the pair had been two sides of the same coin when it came to pranks and shenanigans. Blaczynski’s had been big, bold, loud things, whereas Murray’s were invariably subtler, sneakier, could take months or years to discover (and there were probably a great many undiscovered ones still lurking around the base) and had often been pulled off under the smokescreen of Blaczynski’s bigger, brasher antics. So straightforward grief was obviously a component for him, too…

But that wasn’t where he was struggling.

“I feel like a fucking coward for even considerin’ it…”

Mears’ office was one of the few places that Murray’s usual quiet demeanour flipped and he got talkative. That particular breakthrough had been the work of years, and it had helped a lot.

“Retiring?” Mears checked.

“…Aye. It’s… Fuck, it’s prob’ly easier for the others, right? They took the homesteading deal an’ the full course signup, so they’ve got tae deal wi’ it. An’ I thought I was bein’ so bloody clever in leavin’ mesself wi’ options, right? But now it’s havin’ the option that’s bloody torturin’ me…”

“Why are you considering it?” Mears asked.

“…I always figured, in this gig, if ye get killed, it’s gonny be quick, right? I mean… shot, blown up, whatever can get through the MASS is prob’ly gonny splat the man wearin’ it before he’s even noticed. One minute ‘yer fightin, the next—” he stuck a finger in his mouth and popped it out again, then sighed heavily, leaned forward, elbows on knees, palms together as if praying, forehead resting on his thumbs. “…I never thought I’d see a man die like Scott did. And… fuck. I’m shit scared of it.”

“Well, that’s understandable.”

“Aye, it might be…”

“But you’re comparing yourself against the other men’s reactions, if I don’t miss my guess.”

Murray nodded slowly. “…Seems like they all got pissed off. Me, I’m just pissin’ meself. Learnin’ all the nasty things a forcefield can be made tae do…”

Mears needed to shift him off of self-loathing. “It’s hard to say what anyone might truly be feeling, unless they honestly tell you. And if I’ve learned anything in life, none of us are truly honest with ourselves.”

“Aye.”

“I would…caution you against rash action. Not that that’s much your nature, but decisiveness assuredly is. Have you considered where retirement would leave you? How would that feel?”

“Well, that’s just it. I’m good at what I do. Fuck, I’m one of the best of the very bloody best or I would’nae be here! An’ I’ve got the vigor of a man half my age! So on the one hand, like, I’m where my talents are best used. But if I moved on… Could be I could make it. Find a new career. Shit, I’m an astronaut. Could go do that ‘fer a livin’…”

Mears chuckled mirthlessly despite himself. “A colossally large astronaut…”

“Eh. Maybe I’d go be a PE teacher, or a personal trainer, or a bodyguard… Maybe none of those sound good. But… I mean, I’m gonny retire someday. So that’s a bridge I’ve got to cross, eventually.”

“And when you do, you’ll still be as effectively young then as you are now. Or quite possibly, even better.”

Murray nodded and lapsed into silence. Mears considered whether to let him be or prompt him for his thoughts, and settled on rising from his chair and making some drinks.

“Tea?”

“Got anything stronger?” Murray was kind of an average-looking man, at least in the company he kept, but he had a disarmingly handsome smile when he was joking. It was good to see. “…Tea’s good. Thanks.”

Mears made two hot cups, and they drank in silence. He didn’t prompt the conversation to move forward until Murray set his empty cup down.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, once he felt the time was right.

“I’m thinking… You said I’m decisive.”

“Yes…?”

“…I think… I think if it was time for me to go, contemplating’ the idea wouldn’t feel so wrong.”

“I can’t recommend anything for you either way. You know that. But…well, the mission would be diminished without you. I think that’s reasonable and fair to say. We all want the best for you, even if we’d feel a selfish desire for you to stay.”

“…Aye…”

“But if you worry what your departure might do…they’re good men. The mission would go on. So whatever else you consider, please don’t torment yourself over thoughts like that.”

“Aye. I’m no’ a bairn, despite my dashin’ youthful good looks. I know they’d muddle on wi’out me, but…”

“But?” Mears prompted.

“But I think that’s what I need. I feel… sick thinkin’ about leavin’ and that tells the tale, I think.” He shook his head, massaged his temples, and then swore quite loudly. “Ffffuck!”

Mears gave him a curious look. Murray gave him a complicated shrug and shook his head. He’d obviously said all he wanted to, for now. Whatever dense emotional knot had been untied with that expletive was going to remain unexplored for the time being.

Well, that was fair. “I think Technical Sergeant Arés has you scheduled for combatives in a half hour.”

“Aye, go be the giant fucker’s wrasslin’ dummy…” Murray laughed suddenly, albeit bitterly. “Well… There’s worse things in life.”

“Just an observation, but you do have some leave saved up. Use it or lose it,” Mears reminded him.

“Right, yeah… Thanks.”

“Actually…that’s something I’ve been suggesting to everyone. So I’m not suggesting you and some of the Lads might coordinate your vacations…but none of you are solitary creatures. And we have a full three sub-teams in staffing, so…Just saying.”

Murray nodded, thanked him again and departed, taking a chocolate biscuit with him.

Mears grinned to himself. Woe betide Murray if Arés found out about that little cheat! He recorded the session in his notes, reviewed the latest psych-evals from the HEAT selection and entry training center in Huntsville, and then, reluctantly, concluded that he had nothing else to do for the day. It had been a busy week, but he was all caught up for the moment.

He cleaned up his office, signed out as on-call, and went home.

He took a chocolate biscuit with him too.

Date Point: 16y11m2w2d AV
Leadership’s Gymnasium, Stoneback Chapterhouse, High Mountain Fortress

Arthur Sartori

The Great Father was in a bad mood from the word go. That was easy to tell of course, partly because Daar wasn’t one to hide his feelings, but mostly because aside from his many noble and civilized qualities, in his heart of hearts he was the predictable type of working-man alpha meathead who preferred to gym-beast his rage and frustrations away, rather than talk them out.

He had, apparently, been doing a hell of a lot of that lately, and was just finishing up yet another round of apparently rather intense lifting when Sartori arrived. What greeted him was a creature pumped up into something almost cartoonishly muscular and borderline feral, who was barely straddling the line between physically exhausted and desperate to do more…which made the Great Father’s personality somehow even more on-the-sleeve than his usual.

He was still extremely happy to see his friend, though. That naturally resulted in a great big spine-crushing, feet-off-ground hug while Daar momentarily flashed into his genuine personality, and simply enjoyed saying hello to a friend. His fur was damp from a plunge into the cold pool that Gaoian laborers used, because although Gaoians did sweat, it wasn’t as efficient (or hygienic) a process as it was for a human’s comparatively naked skin.

Arthur had needed to get his back popped straight anyway.

Daar’s bouncy joyousness at reuniting with a friend didn’t last long, however. They set off on the long walk from his gym up the twisting, ancient and uneven staircase that led to his private apartments, during which time neither of them said anything to each other.

Daar broke the ice as soon as he’d squeezed himself through the apartment door and closed it gently behind them. He may have been in a bad mood, but he didn’t shirk from the civilized arts of entertaining.

“Y’ain’t gonna win ‘em all,” he commiserated. “‘Least you kept the Senate, huh?” Daar took the time to busy himself with…a wet bar? Since when did he mix drinks?

Sartori found a tired smile inside himself. He liked the way Daar cut to the chase, even on painful or difficult subjects. “At least we kept the Senate,” he agreed. “And you’re right… But this one’s hard to swallow. I really had hoped that San Diego and the war on Gao would live longer in people’s memories.”

“In a way it’s not so surprisin’ I guess. How big is SOR, anyway? An’ the associated units, when ‘ya really add it all up? Couple-ten thousand people or so? That’s ‘bout what First Fang’s total chapter-holdings add up to.” Daar picked up…yes, a Boston shaker (or something like one, anyway) and set himself to vigorously mixing some kind of iced drink. “In the grand scheme o’ things that ain’t so big, yijao? Most folk remember San Diego, but it ain’t like they got a personal connection to th’ ongoin’ fight.”

“We’re a victim of our own success. We kept the war so far away from Earth that the American public didn’t really feel it. What they felt was the APA pulling off successful terror attacks.”

“An’ ‘ya fuckin’ smashed the APA. I ‘member ‘ya got lotsa good press ‘fer that, too.” Daar opened the shaker and poured out…something that smelled sweet and very herbal into two tall, well-iced glasses; it was a cloudy drink, and slightly green. He then turned around and fiddled with his record player…

…Quiet death metal. On vinyl. He was definitely in a strange mood.

Not totally humorless, though. “I figger’d I’d spare ‘ya my legendary singin’ voice today…”

“It’s certainly memorable, but thank you. I’m not really in the right frame of mind.”

“No. Drink up, it’s good ‘fer you.”

Sartori accepted it, gave it a sniff, then sampled it. The concoction was something like if a mojito had been made with absinthe and a healthy dash of watermelon. It wasn’t bad at all! He took a deeper sip and decided he liked it.

…Hell of a high-proof drink, though. It wasn’t noticeable at first but that alcohol snuck up like a freight train. He probably ought to nurse it carefully.

“Like it? That’ll put fur on ‘yer balls an’ give ‘ya a nice thick chest ruff!”

“It’s a dangerous one. You could drink these all night, stand up, and wake up at home with the worst headache ever.”

“Naw. One o’ my Human contractors taught me this ‘lil number, real sharp guy I met at the beginnin’ o’ the War. An’ talamay ‘parently’s pretty good ‘fer not givin’ hangovers.”

“Mm. Reminds me of a drink we used to make in college.”

Daar grumbled in something like a dry amusement. “Well, enjoy it ‘fer me. Ain’t like I could get blasted these days even if I wanted to, way too big an’ way too gaoian ‘ta get dizzy offa any amount o’ booze. Balls, it don’t even help me relax much no more.”

Sartori nodded, sipped the drink again, then rested it on his knee as he sat back on the couch. Being made for Gaoians, it was a little short in the leg for him, so the result was like sitting on a well-padded and surprisingly comfortable pew.

Daar had his own built-for-his-hugeness couch opposite the table, which he promptly ignored, opting instead to plop himself down comfortably on the floor nearby. That still left his head about two feet above Arthur’s. The effect was very much like a small boy sitting next to his pet dire bear. Except the bear wasn’t the pet.

“You’re trying to be in a jolly mood, and I appreciate it,” Arthur said after a brief silence that would have been comfortable if not for the palpable emotion rolling off Daar.

“…No. You misunnerstand. I’m tryin’ to enjoy a friend’s visit an’ not rage out in front of an ally.”

“…I was briefed on the situation in Mordor. And the mission. I hadn’t appreciated you were so close to the HEAT.”

Daar sighed sadly. “I’m as close wit’ them as any Brother or Cousin I got among my own people, Arthur. We’ve killed together, cried together… They’re special, an’ I’m special, and we’re together special inna way ain’t nobody else is. But fuck that. It’s more’n bein’ the bestest. It’s ‘cuz, when things were movin’ super fast, nobody managed ‘ta think with our gods-given thinkers ‘bout jus’ how fucked up th’ mission could get. An’ maybe it ain’t anyone’s fault…but that don’t change th’ feelin.”

“And you feel personally responsible.”

“I am personally responsible. It were my orders that sent ‘em in, an’ I was right there wit’em.”

“Our experts said that the configuration of shield tech you encountered was unique,” Sartori offered by way of consolation. “Something about shield geometry, power draw and a lot of other technobabble I barely followed.”

“I know all that. Has to do with a 4-space entanglement an’ some other big science words I won’t pretend either of us really unnerstand.”

“The short version being, shields can’t normally do that.”

Daar sighed heavily. “Still ain’t saying anythin’ I don’t know. And I ‘preciate it,” he was quick to add, “but think ahead. Any ship we encounter now that’s got space enough to fit entangled the right kind o’ field interaction nodes is basically unboardable now. An’ ‘ya wanna know what the most fuckedest part o’ the whole thing is? There’s a reason ain’t nobody done this before. Surgical suites have their own fusion reactors ‘cuz any time ‘ya make a field more complicated, it’s power draw grows geometrically! Y’know what that means, here?”

“…I suspect I won’t like the answer.”

“Nope! It means that if the greasy fucks had caught Guruum too, together they might’ve overpowered the restraining forcefields an’ escaped! Which is such a fucked up thought ‘cuz now the Hunters’ll make every field geometrically optimized ‘fer killin’ and build ‘em way overpowered, ‘cuz now they really know what they’re up against!”

Sartori considered his ally and friend for a long moment, then sipped his drink and put it aside. “There are traps that all of us can fall into, no matter how wise or clever or experienced. And I’m not talking about the literal physical trap that claimed now Senior Master Sergeant Blaczynski. I’m talking about in here,” he tapped his forehead. “You’re the most powerful individual in the galaxy. You take charge, you lead from the front. You always have, and you always will. But the built-in trap that comes with that kind of power and leadership, and it’s one I think you’re uniquely vulnerable to, is the trap of believing that because you manage so closely, every last thing that goes wrong must be your fault.”

“…I know. ‘Yer right, I know it ain’t only my personal burden t’carry. Starfall signed on the dotted line too, jus’ like I did way back when. But not every trap out there denies us total access to an entire domain o’ the battlespace like this evil lil’ idea jus’ did. What I fear is that those brave, beautiful men jus’ got made useless, an’ now we lost the only way we had ta’ fight these fuckers where they actually live.”

“Hmm.” Sartori picked up his drink and thought. He wasn’t sure if he was naturally an optimist or a pessimist for himself, but here and now he felt what Daar needed was an optimist. Somebody to at least show him a spark of light in the tunnel ahead.

Then again, usually he had one.

“…Where’s Naydra?”

“Seclusion ‘fer the moment ‘cuz we jus’ contracted an’ bred ‘fer another cub. She’s in the sensitive first few weeks an’ healin’ up nice…an’ she’s also waitin’ on the election, which is gonna be pretty soon now. An’ also, I don’t wanna be a terror ‘fer her, neither.”

Sartori suppressed a grimace at the word ‘healing.’ That hinted at aspects of Gaoian mating that he didn’t really want to contemplate, so instead he got back on track.

“I can pretty much guarantee that the HEAT won’t be useless,” he said. “They can do things that nobody else can, there will always be need for that. What you’re worried about is that they’ll no longer be the speartip in this fight. That they’ll be relegated to hostage rescues on Earth or search and rescue after industrial asteroid mining accidents, and that we’ll permanently lose a major strategic option.”

“Careful. That’s all worthy work, Arthur…”

“But there are other very good men who can manage. It’s not what HEAT is trained for.”

“…No. Men that good who have given so much don’t deserve ‘ta have their mission kicked out from unner’em. But the thing that galls th’ mostest is pro’ly waitin’ on our big-brains out at Erebor ‘ta see if they’ve got any kinda solution, yijao? …‘Nother drink ‘fer ‘ya?”

“Sure. Thanks…” Arthur finished the one in his hand and watched Daar stand to make another one. “Isn’t this technology we can use for ourselves too? As I recall, we’ve had some nasty situations when the Hunters boarded our own ships…”

“Yeah. In the end this may hurt ‘em more’n it hurts us, ‘cuz raiding ‘fer food is a lot harder now, theoretically. No bets on if the Dominion’ll actually implement this time…”

Arthur nodded and thought for a moment as the drink was made.

“It seems to me…” he said, just as Daar was putting the finishing touches on his creation, “that there’s a whole species who are no longer living under the Hunters. That the Hunters retreated from a whole planet and star system, which has got to be a painful loss for anyone or anything, that we now have technology of theirs to build on and exploit, and that your Grand Army has been given the purpose and project they so desperately needed. To me, all of that sounds like a victory. Not a flawless one, but not pyrrhic, either.”

“Y’can’t just let a guy be mis’rable, can ‘ya?” Daar grumbled, handing over the drink.

“Can you afford to be?”

“I mean…no.” He grumbled again, and then a flicker of his usual humor crept back into his tone. “Though I gotta say, I ain’t gonna knock the gains I’ve been gettin’ outta all this stress liftin’…”

…And the giant furry wall of meat flashed a feral grin, and did exactly what he stereotypically always did.

Sartori sighed, but couldn’t suppress his grin. “Jesus Christ.”

Daar didn’t chitter, but he did perk his ears up a bit and thumped down next to the couch again. “I ain’t gonna pretend ‘ta be anybody but who I am. ‘Sides, ‘ya ain’t really here ‘ta cheer me up. I can smell ‘yer feelins’, ‘ya know.”

“If you weren’t so notoriously honest, I’d accuse you of exaggerating a little.” Arthur sipped the fresh drink, and hoped that it wouldn’t make him pay too hard in the morning. He got the impression there was at least another one in his future. “I have… well, I wanted to discuss my successor with you. That’s the official business between us. Unofficially, as your friend, I wanted to make a request.”

“…What request?”

“I want to see this fight out. One way or the other, I don’t want my contribution to history to end with the moment I step out of the Oval Office for the last time.”

“An’ you don’t trust ‘yer successor ‘ta finish the job.”

“…I worry, let’s say.”

Daar tapped his snout with one of his gigantic, chest-ripping claws. “‘Yer more’n worried, friend. An’ I think ‘yer right to be. Chambliss is prol’ly a good person I bet…but he’s naive, he ain’t ever really faced up to evil, he’s made big promises to th’ voters, an’ he’s got people in his orbit that ain’t so nice, who won’t let ‘em break those promises without a cost. That ‘bout cover it?”

“I try not to think of anybody as being truly evil,” Sartori said. “Everyone thinks they’re the good guy. But Chambliss’ advisors include people who think power is its own end, and a couple of them are… they’ve condemned the APA’s methods while not condemning the message. Global politics can’t afford for my voice to vanish yet.”

Daar sniffed. “Y’know…that’s a heckuva arrogant thing ‘ta say, but I think it’s true. An’ it’s good that you believe it.”

“We’re moving into a delicate moment. Every military advisor I have tells me that the war’s at a tipping point. We haven’t heard from the Hierarchy in months, the Hunters just lost a sixth of their territory—”

“An’ they’re heavily reinforcin’ the ones they got left, I bet,” Daar replied.

“No doubt, but I don’t need to tell you that nobody ever won a war by staying on the defensive. We’re winning, Daar. Hell, if Presidents got a third term, I bet I’d be able to step away in four years and feel like it was a job well done. But right now I can’t, and I won’t. I’m not willing to retire until the job is finished.”

Daar looked at him carefully. “…Careful what ‘ya wish for,” he advised. “Some’a us don’t have th’ luxury o’ choosin’.”

They stared at each other for a while, until Arthur finished his drink and set it aside. Daar’s ear flicked, and he made a rumbling sound somewhere in his chest that might almost have been a kind of purr. Sometimes, Gaoian nonverbal language could be very alien, but Arthur got the impression he was pleased.

“Fine,” Daar said, and took the glass to go make a third drink. “What d’ya have in mind?”

Date Point: 16y11m2w2d AV
The Clawhold, Planet Mordor, liberated space

Ginn, Foot-soldier first class, Grand Army of the Gao

No more gunfire. That was the major difference. Ginn had grown so used to the sound of weapons fire and explosions just during the first days of the campaign to liberate the planet—which was probably going to be renamed to whatever the natives preferred—that he’d started being able to sleep through it, if it was distant enough and not coming his way.

But tonight… silence.

Rumour had it that there’d been a victory in the spaceborne side of the war, albeit a costly one. Details were sparse, but it seemed that the Hunters had just… quit. They’d salvaged what they still had access to, sabotaged what they had to leave behind, and jumped out their ships and stations.

On the ground, RFGs and airstrikes had destroyed Hunter materiel, stockpiles, bases, infrastructure and command posts. Every Hunter line of communication was cut, their logistics network was in tatters, their leadership nonexistent, and their magazines empty. In just one week, the Hunters had collapsed dramatically.

They were still out there, lurking in the hills and forests, still armed with their teeth and fusion claws, still raiding the native warrens for slaughter, but the natives had plenty of experience with such raids. They knew how to fade into their tunnels and minimize the casualties. A few were even setting up traps to get some long-overdue revenge on their tormentors, but most just fled. Apparently they were having some kind of a religious schism down there.

Ginn neither knew the details nor wanted to. He’d only been on the planet for a few weeks, and already he was feeling… frayed. Maybe it was the constant smog, the low clouds that meant he hadn’t seen blue sky or stars since he arrived, or the constant deadly threat always out there waiting to kill him… he had no idea how the E-Skurel-Ir were still sane.

So the silence of a night without any shooting or explosions, or sirens and the flash of the overhead shields intercepting an attack, was a moment of such relative peace that it actually grated on his nerves. He couldn’t relax. He kept expecting an alarm and shouting, or the distant rattle of a patrol in the nearby hills making contact. Something.

Quite against the wisdom of any soldier anywhere, instead of sleeping he got up from his warm nest-bed to go prowl.

He stayed inside the sealed base environment at least. The air outside was only marginally cleaner than breathing exhaust fumes, and he didn’t really fancy a lungful of carcinogens just because he couldn’t sleep. So instead he decided he may as well get some food in his belly.

As it turned out, there were Humans in the food hall. A tall, elderly, dignified one; a short, extremely broad and powerfully-built fighter; and a third man who stood taller than the first, and looked like a scaled up, stockier and even more heavily-built version of the second.

They were eating pizza, and Ginn’s nose twitched enviously. It smelled incredible.

The big one noticed and beckoned Ginn toward them with a cheery grin. “Oh hey, fella! You look hungry! Want some? It’s pepperoni, fresh from Folctha.”

“Good thing you brought enough for that generous streak of yours…” the short one grumbled, but didn’t actually object. He scooted aside on his bench. Sure enough, there was a whole stack of warm, flat boxes on the table.

“Oh shaddup. You’ve always been a food vacuum. Don’t mind him,” the big one said, turning his attention back to Ginn. “He’s a jerk with a heart of gold, I promise.”

“I resent that remark. My heart is cold, black and frozen, and you don’t get to tell anyone otherwise.”

“Mhmm. So scary.”

The older stately Human rolled his eyes. This was apparently normal.

Ginn took the invitation and sat down. “Ginn,” he introduced himself. “Seventeenth armored.”

“I go by Julian. This little boulder of sunshine and happiness is Hoeff, he’s our personal security. Nice guy, s’long as you ain’t on his bad side…”

Hoeff grunted. Somehow, it wasn’t entirely unfriendly.

“…And the skinny one is Professor Hurt.”

Ginn didn’t think the Professor looked particularly skinny at all. But Humans were, well…the original Deathworlders. All three were more substantial than Ginn himself was, and probably Hurt was only ‘skinny’ relative to his present company. Maybe a good brownfur would make Hurt look skinny…but Julian would put most any Stoneback that Ginn had ever met to shame.

“Pleasure,” Hurt shook Ginn’s paw, a little too firmly. “I apologize for my meathead colleagues. They mean well…”

“Hey!”

“It’s true and you know it, Julian.”

“I’ve never met Humans before,” Ginn confessed. “I didn’t know we had any here, except the JETS team.”

“We’re here on a consultation with the natives.”

“Their environment is fucked,” Julian said with so much dripping distaste, it actually managed to flare Ginn’s anger at the Hunters’ rapacious evil.

“I thought some Whitecrest Father was handling that?” Ginn asked, before maneuvering a beautifully greasy slice into his mouth and savoring it. The best part of a pizza was the crust, as far as he was concerned, in that it was about the perfect combination of chewy and crispy. But to get the best out of it, you had to get all those nice cheese and tomato and spicy meat flavors on the tongue first.

The best pizza could only be found in Wi Kao, though. Sure it was originally a Human food, but the Gao had perfected it. Sweet-herb was so much better than basil. Add a little kwek roe, maybe a bit of sooba paste…

Pepperoni was still the best topping there was, though. Closely followed by anchovies.

Hurt nodded. “Garaaf. He is. But the natives are a… complex problem. He asked Champion Gyotin for some advice, and Gyotin brought us in.”

“Brought you in,” Julian corrected him, modestly. “I’m just here to do a quick little exploration, grab some samples, and get my opinion down on their options. Which, uh…aren’t. I don’t think there’s any saving this. The whole planet is a Superfund site.”

“Is it reversible?” Ginn asked. He’d been wondering that himself, out of self-interest. If he was going to be assigned to this poisoned wasteland long-term, it would be nice to know if one day he’d be able to go out on patrol without the PPE.

“…Give it a couple hundred thousand years maybe. Let speciation and evolution do their thing. But the only crops on this planet are the ones the natives grow in the warrens in hydroponics farms, or in clean soil they’ve managed to preserve or make for themselves. Honestly, we could learn a thing or three from ‘em about farming in confined environments.”

“You only just arrived bearing hot pizza, and you already know all that?” Ginn asked.

“Well…” Julian reached up and scratched the back of his head, which turned out to be a weirdly satisfying gesture to watch. “That’s, like, where I’m starting from with the briefing documents and that stuff. I’m looking forward to meeting some of ‘em tomorrow and maybe learn a few more things.”

“He’s good at what he does,” Hurt said wryly. “Don’t let his meathead caveman routine fool you into thinking he’s any kind of stupid.”

That wasn’t at all the impression Ginn was under, but there was apparently a long-running joke at play, given the two sturdier men’s reaction.

Julian’s for instance, was embarrassment, more head-scratching, and a change of subject. “So. Seventeenth Armored? What have y’all been up to?”

“Killing Hunters, and getting killed in turn. We seem to be winning now. Rumor has it that the Great Father himself was involved in some important mission.” Ginn made to shrug. “I dunno.”

Hoeff nodded solemnly. “Yeah.”

That said all Ginn needed to know; the “little” one knew exactly where he was coming from. The other two…didn’t.

That was okay, though. He chittered quietly, and snagged another piece of pizza. Heaven.

He did have one question for them, though. “So… what’s gonna happen to the natives?” he asked, after a minute or so of comfortable silence. “I mean, we came all this way and did all this fighting for them, and now you’re saying this planet’s fucked for thousands and thousands of years.”

“I’m gonna say we gotta find a way for them to get off-world,” Julian said firmly. “…Not that my word will necessarily mean much. So, yeah. Actually, I think that’s the best use of my time here, y’know? Take some basic measurements, see if I can figure out what their climate is supposed to be, match their bio-type against the Corti database…”

“See? He’s plenty smart. If only I could convince him to read more…”

Julian ignored him. He seemed to be thinking out loud in a distracted way. “They’ll probably be anomalous, actually. If they’re as resistant to toxins and stuff as I think they are…”

“I’ve never bothered with that stuff,” Ginn admitted. “So the Corti like to put numbers on things. You’re anomalous, we’re anomalous, the natives here are going to be anomalous… It must not be a very good system.”

“Nah.” Hoeff said while swallowing a bite. “Anomalous things mean careers at universities. Anything not-Corti or not-Dominion is therefore anomalous, so the Corti can make money off it.”

That got a kind of snorting sound out of Professor Hurt, which morphed into a laugh. “I didn’t know you were so au fait with academia.”

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” Hoeff said, plainly. Ginn thought he smelled just the faintest hint of menace, but probably not. Neither of the Humans seemed to notice. He slid one of the pizza boxes along to Ginn. “Here. Big bastard brought too much anyway. May as well share it with ‘yer buddies.”

Julian grinned in a strange sideways sort of way no Gaoian could ever match. “I brought him two pizzas ‘cuz he normally demolishes ‘em both by himself. I think Hoeff here likes you!”

“Shuddup.” Hoeff stood up. “Hey, where’s the latrine in this place?”

“Back that way,” Ginn indicated with his paw, back in the general direction of the barracks. Sensing that the conversation was over, he scooped up the gifted pizza, gave Julian and Hurt a duck-nod of appreciation, and left them in peace.

Hoeff ambled along next to him.

“Too quiet, huh?” he murmured, once they were around the corner.

“How–?”

“Done a whole lot of what ‘yer doin,’ over the years.”

“…Does it get better?”

“Mostly, for most people. Gonna take a while, though. Still got any friends?”

“Most of the people I was close with died in the homeworld war. I…don’t exactly keep a distance with my unit, but…” Ginn trailed off. He didn’t really want to say it aloud, but he’d always stood slightly apart from what should have been his Brothers. Too many painful losses had made him shy about getting too close, especially after the casualties they’d taken fighting the Hunters.

But it suddenly occurred to him that maybe he’d fallen into a different trap without ever seeing it was there.

Hoeff nodded. “Well…I ain’t a gaoian, if you somehow didn’t notice. So I don’t know if it works the same. But the thing about this shit? The best friendships I’ve ever had were all people I served with. And in a weird way that includes that huge fucker back there. So, y’know… How are they sleeping?”

“Better than I do.”

“Yeah. That’ll happen.” Hoeff tapped the untouched pizza box in front of Ginn. “Here. Go make friends.”

“…I will. Thank you.”

They parted ways. Ginn returned to his dormitory, where the scent of fresh hot pizza woke several of his squadmates up and had them clustering around like curious cubs before they were even properly awake.

And an hour or so later, when he went back to bed feeling a little warmer and a little more secure, Ginn found that the quiet was a little easier to bear.

Date Point: The opening days of the first year of Liberation.
The deep tunnels, a freed world

Ukusevi, Librarian of the archives at Old-Bent-Leg and Keeper of the Long Chant

Keepers had to meet occasionally. How else could they share and discuss their proposed additions to the Long Chant?

Such meetings had always posed a grave danger, before. If the Punishers—the Hunters—had found the gathered Keepers and devoured them, then much of the Penitent People’s history would have been lost. Even though it was all written down… It took a certain kind of skilled mind to organize the archives, to winnow through them in search of important details, to memorize the shape of it, to know where to search and what to keep in the mind, and to know how to shape it all into the Chant.

So, the meetings were rare… but necessary.

This one was more necessary than most, but also safer. Their chosen meeting spot was a deep tunnel, far below the territory now controlled by Gao forces. Once, it had been a mine, clawing the valuable lifeblood from their world to go to the Hunters. Once the rich seams had run out, the vicious overlords had left them behind and never looked back.

Now, among long-abandoned machines, deep under the surface, Ukusevi laid eyes on her fellow Keepers for the first time in half a year.

They began with a round of warm, fond embraces, welcomed the new young faces who were attending for the first time, and mourned for two who had not lived to see this moment. But by tradition, these gatherings were brief.

Ukusevi felt compelled to take charge as soon as they began .The moment they were all seated, she stood and surprised her fellows who had always known her as one of the quieter listeners.

“I must be bold this time,” she declared, stepping into the middle of their circle. “As you know, the Almighty saw fit to give me the duty of meeting these Gao and making what they call ‘First Contact.’ My mind has been greatly troubled since, and I fear we must discuss things which would normally be taboo. There are hard questions of faith and the nature of the Punishment to resolve.”

To her relief, Keeper Selkis immediately raised a hand to agree with her, and his voice was about the strongest ally Ukusevi could have asked for. He was the oldest, and the most learned, and had contributed more to the Chant than anyone else present.

“The end of the Punishment is here, and it hasn’t been at all like we hoped it would,” he intoned. “Ukusevi alludes to doubts I’m sure we all fear. Those doubts are historic fact. We must face them and record them.”

“Then I shall give voice to them,” Ukusevi replied. She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and immersed herself in this last moment of sure footing before she leapt into the void. “What it… what if the last four hundred and seventeen years were not divine punishment?”

There were a few shocked noises, but it wasn’t the collective hurricane of outrage she’d feared. A lot of the Keepers bowed their heads and flattened their ears along their backs.

Emboldened, she pushed on. “What if the creatures we called the Punishers this whole time were just… conquerers? Malevolent evil mortals who found us and, being stronger than us, did this to us for their own selfish reasons. What if the reason we and our predecessors have struggled for so long to identify the Great Sin is because…” she had to pause and take a deep breath to summon the courage to speak the next words. “…Because there never was one?”

Keeper Umilivi stood up, trembling with rage and disgust. Ukusevi didn’t know if she was about to storm away into the tunnels, or level an accusatory finger and start shouting.

She did neither. In fact, it took her three attempts just to coax a sound out of her throat. “You want all that suffering… to be for nothing?” she asked, in a voice knotted and tangled by emotion.

“I want the truth,” Ukusevi replied. “Isn’t that what we are? Isn’t that what we’re for? Recording and remembering the truth, whatever it happens to be?”

“You’re saying that we’ve failed in that duty up until now. All the Keepers, and the Long Chant itself!” The logjam in Umilivi’s throat seemed to have cleared a little.

Ukusevi shook her head, feeling more confident in her thoughts now. It was strange: waiting for and anticipating this argument had been so hard, but now that she was here and having it, now that she had committed to it, the fear was ebbing away to be replaced by… not certainty, but conviction.

“No,” she said. “We’ve always recorded what we thought was true. But the core message of the Chant has always been humility, and our own ability to fail. Now we have the chance to see the truth we already recorded in a new light!”

Selkis’ head bobbed in agreement. “Are we going to be so arrogant as to think that we could do no wrong?” he asked. “We who have lived our whole lives preaching that the Almighty is punishing us for our wrongness? We of all people have no business pretending to infallibility.”

“Unless these Gao are agents of doubt!” Umilivi insisted. “How can you know this is not a test? How can you know you are not failing that test?”

“How can you know that we are not passing it?” Selkis retorted. “How can you know anything? Here and now, in this time and place, is exactly the moment for doubt!”

Ukusevi injected her own, quieter voice into the echoes of his outburst. “In the end, we cannot know,” she said. “That’s what it means to be faithful. And frankly, I refuse to believe in a god who is capable of wanton, purposeless cruelty.

“We never did!” Umilivi replied. “The whole point of the Punishment is that it is not wanton or purposeless!”

“Then why are we being punished for a crime we cannot identify, in an age so long ago?”

“Maybe we were still committing it!” One of the few who’d been nodding frantically along in agreement with Umilivi suggested. His voice was shaky with uncertainty, though.

“Your tale grows less tenuous as you tell it, and I think you know it,” Selkis told him.

“A story must be believable, and belief is the first step toward faith,” Ukusevi added. “I find…I cannot believe such a tale, anymore. Not in the face of the Gao and how easily they brushed aside our tormentors. Not in the face of what they and their friends the Humans have said… One of them said something I have meditated on at length. Garr-avf of the Gao said ‘Helplessness is like a heavy blanket: It smothers at the same time as it comforts.’ He meant that we have been asleep, and that it is time to wake up… but that we will not want to.”

There weren’t nods around the circle, but rather a lot of thoughtful looks. Umilivi reached up and scratched at a sore on her ear as she considered that sentiment.

“…You say that as though you believe it should go in the Chant,” she said after a quiet moment.

“I do.” Ukusevi turned and picked up her journal. “I have written a stanza. Will the Keepers hear it?”

A quick show of hands indicated that they would. For a moment, Ukusevi’s nerves returned. She had never contributed a stanza to the Long Chant before. Nothing of sufficient import had ever happened at Old-Bent-Leg to warrant inclusion.

She quieted her jitters with a deep breath, put a finger to the first line of what she had written, and read the Chant.

Date Point:16y11m2w2d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor system, Uncharted Space

Darcy

Nanofactories could do incredible things, when used properly.

They weren’t the most efficient way to build things, as such. A specialized assembly line designed to produce a specific item could produce that item much faster than the nanofactory would. But when it came to assembling a small number of novel, new or experimental things, nanofactories were the proper go-to. Prototype satellites, for instance, were exactly the sort of thing they were perfect for.

Given that the satellites in question were designed to trace down the characteristic energy signatures of the Hierarchy’s relay network, they were technically Darcy’s responsibility. She’d be the first one to get a look at the data they generated, the first one to write a report and make a recommendation…

Which was why she was the one who got to figuratively press the button that turned them on.

It wasn’t a moment of much fanfare. She sat at the desk, she put her hand on the mouse, moved it, clicked once…

“…How long should this take?”

“It’s a big-ass sky, but first results should be in by tomorrow morning.” Sergeant Lee looked pleased with himself. He’d set up a little animation to show off the satellites as their delivery drones hung them in a concentric series of massive orbits around Erebor. Each of the satellites was about as big—and about the same shape and general appearance—as the monolith from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, and consisted mostly of field emitters.

After all, when it came to absorbing and emitting energy, forcefields were basically the supreme technology. They could handily do both, and could function-switch in milliseconds. The satellites could, on a human timescale, simultaneously power themselves by absorbing solar radiation, trawl the skies for the subtle signs of the Hierarchy’s strongholds, and transmit the gathered data back to Mrwrki for analysis.

Darcy nodded, glad of that answer. She’d had her head down on the observatory project for a while, and suddenly found herself with nothing to do but wait for results. Rather than leaving her off-balance, it was an honest relief to be able to set the project aside at least for one night.

“Drink?” she suggested.

“Sounds good.”

They retired to the station’s small bar, Kirk’s. Named for the owner and proprietor, who seemed genuinely happy to have bowed out of making the decisions and being a driving force, especially now that he was getting old.

Well. “Old” was a relative term. Kirk had been in his prime twenty years ago when he’d been involved in the Outlook on Forever incident. His political career and his time on first Sanctuary and now Mrwrki had consumed his middle age. He probably had another twenty or thirty years in him, but he was definitely slowing down.

Darcy wondered how he managed to stay so upbeat and positive considering he hadn’t seen one of his own kind in several years, but in that regard the Rrrrtktktp’ch were genuinely alien. They lived solitary lives, remaining aloof from their Vzk’tk cousins and keeping each other at four arms’ length except for mating. Kirk claimed to have fathered a child at one point, in his youth. Just the one. He’d shrugged when the conversation came up, as though that wasn’t particularly important.

In short, if Kirk was typical for his species, then Rrrtk didn’t really need each other. Whatever social itch he may have was adequately scratched by the humans around him.

And it had to be said, once he’d got his eye in, a being with four arms and natural ambidexterity could make for a pretty deft bartender.

“You two look pleased with yourselves,” he commented as Darcy and Lee entered.

“Project phase complete,” Lee announced.

“Well, that is good news. Care to celebrate?”

Lee glanced at Darcy, who nodded, and a few busy moments later Kirk was preparing two drinks at once. An old-fashioned for Darcy, and a beer for Lee.

“Have you been following the election news?” he asked conversationally as they settled on bar stools.

“Too busy. Who won?”

“Chambliss.”

Darcy tutted in irritation. “Well, there goes half our funding…”

“C’mon, it won’t be that bad will it?” Lee ventured.

“Half is optimistic,” Darcy declared, suddenly grateful she’d ordered a strong drink. “The man’s a pacifist.”

“You make that sound like a dirty word,” Kirk observed. “Surely everyone likes peace?”

“A pacifist isn’t just ‘somebody who likes peace,’ they’re somebody who believes that war and violence are inherently unjustifiable. Which in the face of a war against not one but two foes who’d happily see us all dead, that we’re currently winning, is just… Ugh, never mind. I’ll give myself a migraine if I get all political.”

“Yes. I left politics behind for a very good reason,” Kirk agreed. “Winning, you think?”

“Hell yeah we’re winning. Come on, you watch the news, you have to know about that Hunter system that got liberated…”

“Mordor,” Kirk’s head slowly dipped in his version of a nod as he handed over Lee’s beer and peeled a slice of lemon peel into Darcy’s drink. “That makes two systems named for the works of Tolkien, I believe. I wonder how many there will be eventually?”

Lee shook his head. “Nah, Mordor won’t keep that name for long. It’ll go on the chart as whatever the natives call it… poor bastards.”

Darcy looked around. “…I haven’t heard from Lewis and his team, actually. What are they up to? Something new?”

“Urgent something came in from the brass at AEC. A new application of forcefield tech they’re worried about.”

“Worried how?”

“The HEAT lost one of their operators to it.”

“Jesus.” That was a bit like hearing Superman was dead, as far as Darcy was concerned. The last time a HEAT operator fell had been the Battle for Gao.

“Yeah. Now if it can do that reliably, and considering how rare and valuable those guys are, and the new POTUS and all the rest of it…”

Darcy accepted her drink off Kirk and took a healthy sip, nodding solemnly. “Yeah. What would we do without the HEAT?”

“Gao would have fallen. There’d be no Great Father without them. A lot of people wouldn’t be alive right now. Like… a lot of people. Billions.”

“And the Hierarchy would still be active on Earth. They made all the difference at Marsa Alam.” Darcy shivered internally at that thought. When Big Hotel’s network had been unravelled, they’d found it had spread all over the Middle East and south-east Asia. Biodrones had turned up as far afield as Indonesia and embedded in a troubling number of governments, some of them nuclear powers. That and the thought of a Hierarchy spaceship free to roam inside the Sol containment field were, as far as she was concerned, more than adequate to justify the HEAT’s existence. Throw in the fact that the Gao as a species only existed thanks to them, and…

Her train of thought was interrupted by her phone chirping at her. Unconsciously, she fished it out of her jacket’s inside pocket, flipped it over, and unlocked it.

The characters on the screen were the most welcome bit of good news she could possibly have asked for:

< :-) o/ >

Date point: 16y11m3w AV
The Clawhold, Liberated world, former Hunter space

Ginn, Foot-soldier first class, Grand Army of the Gao

One could only play so many games of Ta’Shen before they lost their mind.

It wasn’t that Ginn was particularly eager to face down cloaked Hunter death machines or a slavering horde of crazed monsters boiling up from their underground burrow. The Clawhold was actually pretty nice, in an austere and tightly regulated way. At least, it was a place where he didn’t have to wear full body protective equipment all the time which made it several steps up on the field. The lack of bullets, fusion claws and drooling tooth-lined jaws coming his way was a bonus too.

But Keeda’s left nut it was dull. Though his Ta’Shen winnings were steadily growing…

He’d been reassigned. Inevitable, really. One didn’t dime out one’s officers to the Grandfather of Stoneback and General of the Grand Army without a few consequences, and Ginn’s excuse that he hadn’t known he was talking to Grandfather Vark hadn’t been persuasive. He was on administrative duties now.

Which really, was just proving Vark’s point. Ginn was good at what he did, so taking him away from that right as things were at their most intense? The Hunters might not have any hope of victory now, but they were still lashing out fiercely, determined to do as much damage as they could before they were all hunted down and crushed. The war needed every able body, and here Ginn was getting a crash education in paperwork rather than manning his gun like he should have been.

He was young! Fit and strong! Well, strong for a normal male, anyway…but he trained hard! He had a good nose and sharp claws, a sense for how to fight…

“Make sure you sort all the accessions by date, because pretty much every Clanless has the same few names…”

Blah, blah, blah. He couldn’t resent the somewhat older male who was introducing him to the intricacies of the Grand Army’s obscenely impenetrable personnel records system, but he gave off the general air of somebody whose highest aspiration in life was to have all his pencils sharpened to the exact same length.

That was uncharitable, Ginn chastised himself. Teffik probably had a lovely personality.

In a jar somewhere.Stored safely away next to his motivation and fighting spirit, in a box never to be opened.

Fyu. And he was Ginn’s immediate superior now. That was an oppressive thought.

Ginn was about to make his excuses and go get something to eat “to help his concentration” when Teffik’s physical and spiritual opposite prowled into the office unannounced. It was Vark, looking energetic and somewhat pleased with himself. Ginn found himself standing up immediately out of respect, but Teffik’s response was practically groveling.

“Oh, hush up. Relax! Knew I’d find ‘ya here, Ginn! Take it ‘yer leadership’s still bein’ stupid?”

“The last time I intimated as such, I got reassigned.”

“Essactly! An’ ‘yer gettin’ reassigned again! C’mon lil’ guy, ‘yer my assistant now!”

Well, Ginn didn’t need to hear that more than once. Vark turned to head out the door without a second word, and Ginn didn’t even spare Teffik a glance in following him.

“I feel bad just leaving my unit…”

He found himself following behind at a somewhat too-brisk pace while Vark more or less cheerily bulldozed past everyone in the hallways. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Happens allatime. Don’ worry, I’ve made my displeasure clear an’ ‘yer old occifers are gonna get’em some remedial education in how ‘ta lead infantry.” Vark chuffed deep in his broad chest, “I imagine they’ll find it an outstanding opportunity ‘ta learn!”

It didn’t take them long to reach the backdoor, where vehicular traffic was handled. Fortunately Ginn was in pretty good shape these days, so it didn’t take him long to catch his breath. “Not to sound ungrateful sir, but why’s it even worth your attention?”

“Duties of bein’ in charge. A billion things that goes wrong in a big army, yijao? You see somethin’ wrong, if ‘ya have the power ‘ta fix it, or at least get it fixed, you do it.”

Ginn took a moment to consider his new boss. Stonebacks were a little overwhelming even at their most laid-back, and Vark was Grandfather of his Clan, a position only given to an experienced old-timer who embodied his Clan’s ideals. He smelled of plenty of years, wood smoke, gun oil and limestone cement. He looked like he’d been run through a hammermill a few times and had an immense, craggy strength forcibly beaten into him.

And not even a week ago, the Stonebacks hadn’t even had a Grandfather to Ginn’s knowledge.

“Okay…uh, can I ask a question, sir?”

“Sure!”

“When did you become Grandfather? And how?”

“How is easy! I survived a duel ‘gainst Fiin! Well,” Vark chittered somewhere in the infrasonic, “there’s a lot more ‘ta it than that, but that’s the most importantest part at the end. Tradition, yijao? An’ also a Champion’s gotta trust his Grandfather’s got his back. As ‘fer when, been about a week now. Ain’t like there’s a ceremony or nothin’. An’ I need staff!”

“So…why me?”

“I’d like if some o’ my staff–like my personal aide–weren’t unfamiliar with the concept o’ mud an’ blood. Comes with a promotion an’ a big salary increase too. Sound good?”

“No objections here, sir.”

“Excellent. You understand what your duties will be?”

“I’ll be your first point of contact, control access to you, manage your diary, appointments and expenses, make your travel arrangements and liaise with your other staff.”

“More’n that, but yeah. You’ll also be a bit of an errand boy, an’ you’ll need ‘ta deal with Champions, their staff, the Great Father–”

“The Great Father.”

“Yup! That gonna be a problem?”

“…I mean…no?”

Vark chittered again. “Don’ worry, he’s actually pretty friendly. Anyway.”

They reached the office that Vark had commandeered, and he gestured inside. “Speakin’ of my diary an’ stuff…”

“Right. I’ll get to studying it.”

“‘Yer not my secretary, but that’d be a good idea, yeah. Mostly I need you as my point man.”

Ginn duck-nodded. The truth was, he didn’t mind. Compared to the mind-numbing torment he’d been facing a few minutes ago, memorizing the important dates in Grandfather Vark’s diary would be trivial, and the rest of the job promised to be much more interesting.

He wasn’t one for overweening gratitude, necessarily, but a small acknowledgement that Vark had just pulled his tail out of a slow and excruciating fire was definitely in order.

“I’ll do my best. And… thank you for the opportunity.”

“‘Yer welcome. Get the homework outta the way, and you’ll start properly in the morning. Bright and early at first bell, yijao?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good man.”

And with that, Vark left Ginn to prepare himself. There were three desks crammed into the office: Ginn picked the one that seemed presently unused, called up the Grandfather’s diary and appointments, and got to studying.

He had a feeling his life was about to get far more interesting than he hoped.

Date Point: 17y AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space

Lewis Beverote

“My dude!” A high five was in order.

It wasn’t that Lewis had been expecting to fail. Scotch Creek generally knew what they were talking about, and if they forwarded the design for a new kind of deep-sky observation satellite tuned to detect the subtle signs of a Hierarchy relay then he fully expected it to work. Hell, they’d even been given a patch of sky to search where a relay was known to be.

But still. When things went right like that, it felt so fuckin’ good. So he traded the promised high-five with Doctor Torayasu and then flung himself into his chair to take a good hard look at it.

Lewis had picked up a mixed bag of all sorts of arcane scientific and technological knowledge over his years on Mrwrki. In some ways he was one of the most highly and eccentrically educated men the human race had ever produced. He held no doctorate or formal qualifications, had conducted no peer-reviewed research, he was firmly Mister Beverote on every official document…

But a lot of those official documents were patents and blueprints. His fingerprints were in the DNA of most space tech invented in the last five years, a mixed metaphor that brought a small smile to his face as he watched the data scrolling up his monitor.

“Trippy.” Relays did fucky things to spacetime. He’d seen the footage from the Irujzen expedition, the way the world got twisted up all wrong above the relay. In the footage, it had just looked like a hair-thin vertical line of bright light. In person, apparently, the eye would just saccade straight over the thing and not look straight at it. As though that particular bit of reality wasn’t there to look at, but the mind could still infer its existence just like the human eye’s blind spot.

“Tell me about it,” Torayasu agreed. “You know, moments like this make me optimistic?”

Lewis nodded. “Yeah, dude.”

“Huh. Usually people ask me why.”

“No, I get it. I mean, look at this shit. Proves we aren’t even close to running out of science.”

“As nice as that is,” Lucy chimed up from her station on the other side of the lab, where she was going over some of the materials trials that were more her field, “Aren’t you two trying to pin down a specific set of coordinates?”

“Right, yeah.” Lewis stopped marvelling at the sheer fascinating weirdness of the signal, and instead turned his attention to the subtle ways it varied across the vast scope of the satellite network they’d launched.

At the speed of light, and considering that the network formed a sensor nearly 20 AUs across, it was going to take a few hours for them to be able to really start getting a decent parallax as they tracked the same events in the flow of data across the whole thing, but that wasn’t a problem with the EM spectrum signals from that cluster. A telescope 20 AU across had no trouble at all in figuring out the precise relative position of all the stars in that distant part of the galaxy.

“My guess? That G-class star right there,” he predicted after a few seconds.

“Temperate planet, you think?”

“Yup. On Irujzen they had a coal mining operation. Big H kinda got set in their ways, too, y’know? Seems like if they do one thing somewhere, they’ll do the same thing somewhere else.”

“That’s kinda sad when you think about it…” Lucy mused. Lewis glanced over at her and perked up. Their marriage had grown comfortable, which wasn’t as horrible a fate as he’d have guessed back when he was single. Okay, so the mere sight of her didn’t raise his pulse any longer, but instead she had the opposite effect and made the world a calmer, safer, better place simply by existing.

And he loved listening to her think aloud. She saw him watching and shrugged. “Well, they’ve been around for millions of years. They’ve outlasted hundreds of other species. They’ve been really successful! But they’re so stuck in their rut that here we are totally destroying them. They should be untouchable, but instead being around for so long has made them… I don’t know. Lazy, I guess.”

“…Yeah,” Lewis agreed.

“I hope that’s not the fate of all species that last for so long. If I imagine a future where we’ve been around for a million years, I like to think we’d keep changing and adapting and we’d barely recognize ourselves… I don’t like the idea that the only options are stagnate or die.”

“I think that’s a problem our friend outside is gonna face, not you or me,” Lewis replied, jerking his head in the vague direction of the outer hull and the sapient Von Neumann swarm outside.

“Oh, yeah, about that giant-ass elephant in the room we’ve been ignoring!” Lucy said, and pushed her chair back from her desk. “How come you’re so chill about it? I thought VN swarms scared you?”

“The Entity’s kind of an old friend at this point, I guess.” Lewis shrugged. “I dunno. It ain’t just a machine. Nobody programmed it. Shit, it started out as a human, and there’s a lotta human left. A lotta good human. You know how much Darcy loves it.”

“Loves it? That seems kinda strong.”

“You saw how much she fretted while it was gone, and how she lit up when it came back. She’s like that thing’s mama.” Lewis shrugged. “Fact is, prob’ly the only reason this galaxy isn’t already crawling with VN machines is ‘cuz of Big H, so they’ve done some good there at least. And I bet you there’s other galaxies out there just full of ‘em, and it might take a long-ass time to travel between galaxies but I bet machines could do it. So maybe VN swarms are kinda inevitable, in which case I’m glad the one we wound up with can remember bein’ organic and actually values life and says hello by smiling at us.”

“And knows that it can stop,” Torayasu added.

“Dude.”

“I guess that’s a lot of silver lining…” Lucy agreed.

“Enough for me,” Lewis shrugged. He smiled at her, she smiled back, then tilted her head in a small but subtle way which his well-developed Husband Senses told him meant she wanted to get back to work. So he stood up.

“Coffee?”

“Love you,” Lucy thanked him, and turned back to her work. Torayasu declined with a shake of his head, and went back to watching spacetime do its wacky shit far away in a distant corner of the galaxy.

There was a lot still to do before they had a strong, confirmed signal they could pass on to AEC and the SOR could use it to do their thing, but Lewis didn’t care. They’d just gathered data that would form the foundation for the next phase of theoretical physics, and tracked down another stronghold of humanity’s oldest and worst enemies.

Not bad for an afternoon’s work.

Date Point: 17y2w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Naydra, Great Mother of the Gao

Grief varied by species and by personality, and Naydra had seen a lot of grief in her life. She’d felt a lot of grief, too.

She and Daar were alike in that they dealt with grief through action. Naydra had spent the last several years grieving for a life that had been, and every day brought a reminder of how simple things once were…

And now, on the day of her coronation, she felt some closure for it all. Hers was a much simpler affair than Daar’s had been; the election results came in, she was announced as Mother-Supreme. The Great Father proclaimed her as his True Mate and Great Mother of the Gao, the Conclave bowed and offered submission…and that was more or less it.

At her request, her ceremony was a smaller affair. Not small, though. There were still the Clans, each bearing a pointed gift to remind her of, and represent, her responsibilities. There was still Gyotin with his flair for ceremony and his intense understanding of just how valuable ceremony really was.

The timing was significant, too. Daar had almost literally come straight off the battlefield to attend the ceremony, having personally crushed the first of the major (and most dangerous) Hunter strongholds on the liberated world. The video footage of him at combat, leading the charge and quite literally breaking the remaining Alphas into pieces with his own two paws…

That footage had hardly begun to circulate when he returned home in quiet triumph, his grief still heavy on him, but at least he had done something with it. He had a victory to take the worst of its thorns and barbs away.

He took a few days “off,” as much as he could. There was a gap in his schedule between the liberation and his favor for Arthur Sartori, and he used it as an opportunity to relax a little: a few visits to the Commune, some time spent on his farm. He even spent one afternoon joining a road repair crew as they gave the northern isthmus highway a much-needed and long overdue resurfacing, because Daar’s idea of relaxing fun was anybody else’s idea of back-breaking labor.

Naydra could see how healing it was for him. By the evening of the fifth day, when it came time to perform that favor for Sartori, he was more or less back to himself.

“From one battlefield to another…” he mused, as he considered his reflection in a tailoring mirror. Naydra had inserted a small joke there by picking out a Human-style tuxedo for one of the suggested outfits. “Why do I gotta wear this? I look better in a Highmountain kilt, y’know…”

Naydra gave him a sly ear-flick. “I think the bow tie suits you.” She wasn’t lying, of course…but her reasoning wasn’t entirely innocent. After all, his neck was so incredibly thick, they’d needed to tailor one just for him…and they still didn’t have a collar to go with it.

Daar was more focused on discomfort. “Izzat what they’re called?” he said as he pulled at it to loosen it a bit, which was just enough to break the bow. “Looks like a depressed butterfly landed on my throat. An’ I still look better in a kilt! Shows off m’legs!”

And in a welcome sign of his improving mood, he showed off the goods for her, as was his eminently predictable way. And she had to admit…he wasn’t wrong at all, oh no…

“Fine, fine. The kilt it is.” Naydra gestured, and the assistants swept away all the rejected outfits and left them alone. “Fortunately, it’s formal wear among Humans too.”

“Yeah! Highland’s people wear ‘em!”

“How is he?”

“Doin’ better. Don’t blame him ‘fer bein’ shook up, though.”

Naydra duck-nodded and considered their outfits. This whole adventure was tickling her sense of mischief, which just made her like Sartori all the more. While Daar dressed, she put the final touches on her own outfit.

“Do you like the hat?” she asked, pinning it to her scalp at a precisely calculated angle.

Daar glanced over and considered it. “…It’s fascinatin’. Where’d you get it?”

“I ordered it from a milliner in London. A custom rush order. I thought it would be appropriate to wear this outdoors, and the tiara afterwards.”

“It looks nice on you. Diff’rent.”

“And you look very handsome yourself,” she said, approvingly. His final look was simple and harked back to Fyu’s era: just a well-fitted, traditional Clan kilt with a plain cut, one which didn’t get in the way and let his magnificent physique and fur do the talking. He looked… warriorly.

Still…

“What about you?” she asked, rewinding the conversation a little. “You were quite shook up too.”

Daar paused, then sighed heavily. “…I’m gonna miss the shit outta Blac,” he admitted. “An’ I dunno if I’m ever gonna shake the feelin’ like it was my orders got him killed…”

Naydra rested her paw lightly on his back and stroked it reassuringly, saying nothing.

“…But we go from one battlefield to another,” Daar finished. “The mission don’t end. Just what kinda shit we’re wadin’ into.”

“At least I’m wading into this one with you. And it might even be fun!”

“…Hope so.”

“It will be! Just think, you hardly ever get to be subtle, and I know you like to be sneaky and sly from time to time…”

He chittered, a very welcome sound after the last few weeks of brooding. “‘Yer right. An’ I think we’re ready.”

“Nearly.” She inspected him for a moment, adjusted his kilt so that it was perfectly aligned and straight—males of every species were simply blind to the way their own clothes were supposed to be worn—and decided that she was satisfied. He’d been bathed, combed, cleansed, groomed, and now tailored to the highest standard he could attain. “…You’ll do.”

He chittered again, and took her arm. “‘Kay. Once more unto the breach.”

“That’s the spirit.”

An interesting day awaited them both.

Date Point: 17y2w AV
US Capitol Building, Washington DC, USA, Earth

Arthur Sartori

It was a clear morning on the National Mall, but biting cold, and the weather over the last few days had been heavy snowfall. The crowd was a sea of thick, colorful coats, scarves, warm hats, and gloved hands with flags in them, standing on ground that had been knee-deep in snow when the sun had set last night.

A battalion of unsung heroes had put in an incredible effort to clear it ahead of the Inauguration, and the effort hadn’t gone to waste. The crowd was pretty sizable. Sartori was trying not to be petty by comparing it to the one from his own inauguration, years ago, but in his heart of hearts he hoped it was a little smaller.

At the front of the dais, behind a semicircle of bulletproof glass, one hand was raised, the other placed on a Bible, and less than a minute later the words “so help me God” marked the moment when the incumbency of President Arthur Sartori came to a quiet close, and the incumbency of President Beau Chambliss began.

It wasn’t an easy thing for Arthur to let go of. Not when there were so many things he could congratulate himself on having achieved in office, but so many more that he’d only nearly achieved.

Then again, even with another eight years he’d probably still have been in the same position. That was the nature of the work. There was always something else to do. Always something to let go of that he didn’t want to.

Hopefully the melancholy would fade with time.

Of course, he did have the satisfaction of seeing a certain power move he’d cooked up come to fruition. Nothing too big, just…a gentle reminder of certain realities. From a former President to his successor and—surprisingly—growing friend.

Sartori and Chambliss had quite opposite ideas about certain things, but during the brief time they’d worked with each other to handle the transition, Sartori had found himself growing to like the other man. Chambliss was no idealogue, nor a cowering pacifist. He seemed genuinely interested in improving the lot of America’s disadvantaged, and clearly felt strongly that the money that had been going to the Department of the Air Force, to the AEC, and to programs like the SOR and the line of San Diego class warships, could be better spent elsewhere.

He was dead wrong about that, but honestly wrong. Hence Sartori’s little gentle statement, here at the inauguration.

One of the quirks of Presidential transitions was the inaugural committees involved with planning and executing the many and varied ceremonial theatre surrounding the event. As had been a long and informal tradition, the outgoing President and the President-elect jointly planned many of the details… Including who sat in the background for the centerpiece of the day: the stage upon which the President-elect took the oath of office, and became the new President.

Which was why every shot of Chambliss had him framed and rather heftily out-massed by the hulking furry presence of the Great Father of the Gao.

That would, of course, be generating an absolute flurry of commentary on the surviving news programs, all of which were unquestionably in favor of Chambliss. The time had long passed where television news pretended to any neutrality. But even they wouldn’t be able to ignore the imagery. Normally, a head of state would want to remain perfectly neutral about these things…

And so Daar had been. Much to the shock of the more hostile media, from the moment he and Naydra had arrived on Earth they had been nothing but smooth and statesmanlike. But the image of him looming in the background as Chambliss took the oath of office was going to stick, and Sartori couldn’t really have asked for a more perfect way to leave a pointed message for his successor.

There’s no hiding from the greater galaxy.

The Great Father’s presence was of course softened and tempered by another: Naydra, Great Mother of the Gao. While the message she sent by her presence might be characteristically subtler than Daar’s, it was no less potent. She was the living embodiment of her species’ women and children after all. She represented a future the Gao simply would not have had if not for the efforts and sacrifice of humans from all the Allied militaries.

Then there was what she’d done with her emergency protective pack, a sensible precaution for any Gao visiting Earth, be they mighty or meek. Where Daar was wearing his openly on his hip, Naydra’s had been cunningly turned into a fashion accessory by the simple expedient of incorporating it into her rather fetching hat.

Daar meanwhile was wearing what was apparently a traditional Highmountain kilt. It looked quite dashing on him, actually. No doubt the Internet memes were going to be worth following.

Their time to shine, however, came later, after the applause and the speech and the waving to the crowd and cameras, when the VIPs retired from public view and the genteel, stately celebrations continued in a more select environment.

Modern inaugural balls were a delightful mix of the old and the new. There was dancing, which both Naydra and Daar were surprisingly accomplished at. They taught the guests a few Gaoian dances too, much to the delight of everyone. There were also lots of selfies. Daar waged a remarkably successful charm assault, mugging for the cameras and answering questions, being as approachable as he could be…but even then, he was deferential. The event wasn’t about him after all, and he did his level best not to steal Chambliss’ thunder…

And everyone knew it, too. Sartori had his gentle revenge.

The rest was in Daar and Naydra’s hands…

Date Point: 17y2w AV
Grissom AFB, Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Brigadier General Rylee Jackson

Hard to believe she hadn’t actually flown a real operation in more than a year. Not a lot of need or opportunity to, at the Pentagon.

But, now that the election was out of the way and her PR services were no longer so critically necessary, Rylee had finally got her wish: she was back where she belonged, at the 955th. Commanding it, in fact.

Which meant she got to fly again. She’d kept herself qualified as a command pilot, taken all the simulator time she needed. She’d kept her flight hours up, stayed on top of the briefings…

And all that paid off. Here she was, wing commander of the 955th Fighter Wing, recently renamed and re-purposed as a full-scale space combat wing.

And every single pilot under her command had kills to their name. There were no shortage of Hunters in the black. God knew there was no shortage of them just in this system they’d allegedly abandoned.

The world and system once jokingly named “Mordor” was theoretically liberated, but the truth was that the Hunters were going to be a long-term chronic festering wound here. But, the more aggressively they treated that wound now, the less it would fester. Hopefully.

Which was why she was due to command a sweep-and-clear through the system’s second asteroid belt. It would, in fact, be the largest Human action in the system since the invasion had started. A whole asteroid belt needed a lot of ships to properly scour, and there just weren’t enough Gaoian Voidrippers available to do a thorough job. The 955th and USS San Diego would be there to make up the difference.

And, seeing as it was a lot easier and cheaper to take humans offworld than it was to bring aliens to Earth, they were making their final preparations at Grissom Air Force Base, outside the American colony of Franklin on Cimbrean.

Rylee had taken the chance to inspect the place when she’d arrived the day before. Franklin was very different to Folctha: where the British colony was an honest-to-God planned city, and not a small one at that, Franklin was sprawling and chaotic, a focal point for the diffuse stuff happening in the surrounding hundreds of miles. It was a place where unbelievably long and powerful trains offloaded grain, beans, coal, steel, rare earths and uranium, where the pipelines delivered oil and gas… and nearly all of it flowed through the jump complex back to the USA.

It was long and sprawling with no city center in particular, a military base at one end, and a highway running right through it out to the dozen or so satellite towns. Folctha was walkable, with excellent signage. If you lived in or near Franklin…you needed a car.

It was a very American town.

The main reason to hold the briefing there was that it wasn’t Earth. That made it a lot easier to coordinate an inter-species operation: Gao could visit Earth, but it wasn’t without risk. A lot of Gao were deathly allergic to grass pollens and nobody knew why. Even Daar had once had a scare with a fungal infection after he went digging in the dirt. Why worry about all that when they could just jump the humans offworld? Besides, a few of the new lieutenants needed to experience Frontline for the first time, too…

The Gaoians seemed extra motivated today; probably that was because of the footage that had hit the Armed Forces Network recently of the Great Father doing…well, what a titanic murderbear did. The ready room was noisy when Rylee ducked into it as human and Gao alike bragged and bullshitted and generally tried to work out some kind of pecking order of who was more awesome.

They each had their points, after all…too bad she couldn’t play those games anymore.

Somebody was paying attention though. A hefty bellow of “Room, a-ten-shut!” promptly shut them all up and brought them all to their feet as Rylee entered.

“Thank you, please take your seats.”

Chairs scuffed and squealed as they sat down again.

“This is a battle our Gaoian colleagues have already effectively won. My hat’s off to them for a quick and decisive victory. But the battle is not yet over, and the war has only begun,” she started. “There’s a lot of the system that remains unknown territory. We know the Hunters had extensive mining operations in both asteroid belts, and it’s not clear how much they took with them when they retreated, how much is still there, and how much is still occupied by hostiles. Our patrol’s purpose is to answer those questions, in a decisive and final way. We will destroy every artificial structure we find, without exception. Our initial targets have already been identified, as Officer Teyma will now explain.”

Teyma was one of the more interesting Gao that Rylee had ever met. She was, unusually for a female, a member of one of the male Clans—namely Whitecrest. She was a full rank-holding member too, having taken the Clan’s secretive Dark Rites. Her first duty was to the Clan of Females, of course, but she served that duty in military intelligence.

Rylee was no expert on Gaoian attractiveness, but she’d seen the way some of the males looked at Teyma; men were the same everywhere. Apparently the Clan’s iconic fur pattern was very fetching on a female.

Teyma, of course, was all business. “Our current surveillance suggests most of the remaining Hunter presence is sheltering within the asteroid belt,” she explained, smoothly taking over. “Excess heat signatures around these large asteroid clusters—” she gestured at a new slide showing false-color sensor imagery, “—are our best lead for initial targets. We anticipate all the usual Hunter shenanigans: cloaks, hit-and-run tactics, and so forth. We’ve not yet seen any major new developments with weaponized shielding, though the heat blooms I just mentioned suggest heavy industry, which in turn suggests they may be working to change that. Our target prioritization obviously favors recon of these heat blooms and then destroying them, if possible.”

There was more than that, of course. Teyma spent several minutes going through slides, recounting the known classes and varieties of Hunter ships known to be operating in the target system, the kinds of defenses and countermeasures that previous Hunter facilities had exhibited and all the other important details.

All of the male Gaoians paid her rapt attention. It was all Rylee could do not to roll her eyes. Oh well…at least her pilots were paying attention to the intelligence for a change.

As intelligence presentations went, though, Teyma’s was swift and efficient. Rylee thanked her with a nod and resumed her briefing after the final slide.

“One point I want to address specifically is the possibility of structures that our weapons can’t hurt, say because they’re buried inside a big asteroid. Such things will probably require a HEAT response, so if you find such a thing, you establish a perimeter and call it in. Other than that, your specific targets and instructions will be handled in the frag-outs, as per usual. Does anyone have any questions for me?”

Nobody ever had questions for a brigadier general giving a mission brief, of course, but she waited just in case someone was smart (or stupid) enough to ask a relevant question.

“Alright. Flight leads, you know the drill. First wave departs in three hours. Dismissed.”

The next couple of hours were spent with her flight planning, an hour of rest time—hardly restful, though she did her best to sit back with her earphones in and listen to some music and try to just chill and store up energy ahead of the long work to come—and an hour in biomed being suited up and made ready.

After which… her Firebird awaited.

It felt good to run through her pre-flight checks, feel and hear the distinctive way a Firebird woke up around her. She always imagined it stretching and yawning, flexing its talons and yawning before settling down and sitting up attentively, ready and alert. There was a lot of sharp, lethal power stored behind her in the capacitor banks, and all of it was now awake and poised to go to work.

It had been far too long. She grinned behind her breathing mask as everything fell into place, as they were confirmed all ready, as the mission was officially good to go.

She hit the button, and flew again.

Date Point: 17y2w AV
National Building Museum, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

Daar was a monster. A heroic monster, perhaps, who’d done the terrible things he had out of necessity, or so his supporters claimed… but a monster nonetheless. Those supposedly necessary things included nuking several major cities on his homeworld, fighting bloody-pawed at the head of his armies and special forces, and personally intervening in a few high-level capital punishment cases, where he had dispensed extreme justice with his own paws and claws.

All in all, the Great Father was a bloody-handed slaughterer with about the highest personal death count in the galaxy; again, he had personally pressed the button that snuffed out billions of his people. Hopelessly biodroned or not…And it was this man who was present at Beau’s inaugural ball, at Sartori’s invitation and with the approval of several other people whom it would have been impolitic to ignore. It was difficult to fathom how so many important and powerful people could feel so comfortable around him.

Or maybe it wasn’t so difficult to fathom, and spoke dark volumes about their characters.

Then there was Naydra. The newly-coronated Great Mother of the Gao was harder for Beau to figure out: everything he’d seen, read and experienced about her said she was an optimistic, bright soul with a nurturing and comforting nature. She’d certainly been a happy force so far in the evening, with everyone she met walking away smiling for the experience.

Still… She was married, in the Gaoian sense, to a man known for summarily eviscerating his political opposition. Not once, either. Twice. So she couldn’t be all nice.

Nevertheless, It would have been a snub not to dance with her, once the first dance with the new First Lady was done. So, out of diplomatic need, Beau entrusted Catherine to Daar, and took Naydra’s hand as the orchestra struck up the next dance.

She danced differently to a human, thanks to the shorter legs, but not awkwardly so. In fact, she was quite an easy and forgiving dancing partner, which of course made it easy for her to make conversation.

“So! I know Bumpkin and I already congratulated you earlier, but let me say it again,” she began, brightly and honestly. “Congratulations, Mister President.”

“Bumpkin, eh?” That just didn’t fit at all. “How’d you come by that pet name?”

“Given the option, he’d happily have spent his life herding naxas and digging ditches,” she explained. “He’s a country bumpkin at heart.”

“That seems…” Beau paused and considered his words with care. He needed a word that could convey his skepticism without implying she was a liar.

She gave him the perfect one. “Surprising?” If she’d been human, the chittering sound in her chest would have been a merry, tinkling laugh. “Yes, most people think so. I daresay you’re surprised at how civilized he’s being tonight.”

“I might have said, he’s playing against his habitual type.”

“Not so! One of his favorite hobbies is flower arrangement! Besides, he is what he needs to be, when he needs to be, as much as he can be without being inauthentic.”

“And you?”

“For the most part, I’m what he needs me to be, without being inauthentic. Isn’t that what the First Lady is for you?”

Beau glanced over at his wife, who was doing a magnificent job of not appearing overwhelmed by her dance partner…Who in turn was proving to be surprisingly smooth.

“I don’t think of my relationship with Catherine that way.”

“No? Well, I’m quite comfortable with it that way. A relationship like ours can build things together which wouldn’t be possible in isolation.”

So that was the dance she wanted tonight. Well, fair enough. “I think it’s important for both parties in a relationship to be of equal stature. The dynamic where one side dominates and the other supports seems…” again, he found himself searching for the right word to complete his thought without being insulting.

“Exploitative?” she suggested, with a sly shift of her ears that would have caused a less well-designed tiara to fall off.

“Well, I definitely don’t want to exploit my wife,” Beau agreed. “I want to be her partner.”

“And yet, she is not the President. There can only be one President, and if she was the President, then you would be the First Husband. You fill different roles, but you’re still partners, still a team. You don’t have to be equals to be a team.”

“I’d be First Gentleman, in fact.”

“And My Father’s true title in this situation would be inappropriately belligerent, so His Majesty will have to suffice. Niceties can be complex.”

“You call him ‘My Father?’”

“Yes. Some of the nuance gets lost in English. Father and Father have a different glottal stop at the end.” She demonstrated two almost entirely indistinguishable versions of the word. “One denotes a relation, the other an honorific.”

“They both imply paternal authority over you, though.”

“Indeed. And as both our people say, ‘Mother knows best.’” She chittered merrily again, and brought her by now slightly off-balance dance partner back around to the core of their discussion. “But we were discussing exploitation. Is exploitation always the strong exploiting the weak? Or the dominant exploiting the subordinate? Look at our brown-furred breeds! They’re physically much stronger than the silverfurs, to the point where they used to pull our wagons and plows, a role for which Humans used horses or oxen. The same trait that made the Brownies fill the role of a beast of burden also made them militarily dominant. So were they the exploiters, or the exploited?”

“I suppose in your case the relationship between dominance and exploitation is a little more complex…” Beau ventured.

“Oh, I think it’s just as complex for your people too. How many people live under the umbrella of military safety provided by America and her allies? How much have your people been exploited in that regard?”

Naydra glanced over toward Catherine and the Great Father: the two of them were clearly enjoying themselves, despite the vast gulf of difference between them. The way the Great Mother slightly flicked her ear was definitely mischievous. “I think a difference in power can be useful and enjoyable. Or it can, as you rightly fear, lead to oppression and resentment. Which one we get depends very much on how we play the game, don’t you think?”

The dance came to an end in a smattering of applause before Beau could reply. Naydra gave her dance partner a Gaoian approximation of a smile and politely applauded him too. “Thank you for a lovely dance, Mister President.”

“And you,” Chambliss replied. “Until the next one.”

She duck-nodded, then swished away to mingle and Beau finally got a chance to step away from the dance floor and grab a drink. He used a napkin to discreetly mop his face and gathered himself. He was feeling thoroughly out-danced already, and it came with the impression that the Great Mother had actually gone rather easy on him.

When it came time to spar with Daar… He didn’t expect such gentleness.

He’d have to be ready.

Date Point: 17y2w AV
Asteroid belt, liberated system, former Hunter space

Brigadier General Rylee Jackson

When Hunters didn’t want to fight, they were about as slippery as a bar of soap in the bathtub. When they did want to fight, they threw everything they had into it. No middle ground. It was dismayingly sensible of them.

Not that Rylee had expected this to be trivial. Or quick. They were crawling their way around a twenty-five AU circumference, thoroughly checking every asteroid. There were more than two million in this belt that came in at a kilometer or larger. Gaoian drone and sensor tech was making the process doable but that didn’t mean it was fast, or anything but tedious.

Pilot fatigue was a danger. And those always seemed to be the moments when the Hunters would appear. They had an instinct for it, or just had Murphy on their side.

Still. There had never yet been an engagement between deathworlders and Hunters where the humans and Gao hadn’t flown the pants off the Hunters. Their swarmships hadn’t changed much, in that they were still designed primarily to intercept freighters and capital ships, latch on and dig through the hulls. They were incredibly nimble and fast by the standards of transports… but against a dedicated air-and-space superiority fighter, they may as well have been heavily armed U-Haul vans.

It was hard to tell whether the Firebird or the Voidripper was more effective against them. Firebirds could accelerate much harder along their main thrust axis, but Voidrippers were far more nimble in three dimensions, being pretty much equally as good at +X, +Y and +Z acceleration.

The Gaoian ships were perfectly designed for space combat. They were more or less useless in an atmosphere, where acceleration and the “bite” of a flight control surface mattered. The benefits of priorities, and no need for air superiority in their own territory…

Together, the two designs of fighter formed a hammer and anvil. Firebirds could lance straight in and through, leaving shattered scrap metal in their wake and winning every time on sheer kinetic energy. Paired with Voidripper wingmen, they became impossible to catch off-guard.

All of that became a good deal less straightforward whenever an actual broodship or asteroid facility turned up, though. The belt seemed to contain hundreds of them, hidden in low-emissions mode or cloaked.

“This is RACER-FOUR-ONE, contact.”

Rylee kept a sharp eye on her instruments as a new violent clash played out somewhere fifty million kilometers away. If need be, that distance was nothing at all for a Firebird and she could personally lend assistance in fewer than five seconds. If need be.

As she listened to the contact report, the pilot’s cool, unflustered tone belied the severity of what he’d just run into. Three broodships had powered up and were now forming an interlinked shield web around themselves and an asteroid. Racer Four-One had found something important.

USS San Diego’s comms officer had a fittingly deep, resonant voice. “San Diego en route.”

In Rylee’s HUD, the San Diego and the Gene Roddenberry both blinked forward from the back of the formation, flashing across millions of miles of space to arrive within seconds, alongside their CAP.

Rylee let them work. She had a rock to investigate. It turned out to be a boring pock-marked potato, not yet touched by Hunter industry. Her WSO tagged it as clear, and they moved on.

Minutes later, her attention was drawn to that deep resonant voice again. “PHOENIX-SIX-ACTUAL, San Diego. Got a hardened facility here. GRANDFATHER wants your wing to tidy up and return to staging orbit.”

As a reminder that there was still only the one star on her shoulder, Rylee still had people she answered to, and right now, that included Grandfather Vark. She was in charge of the fighters, but that was just one component of this operation and in this case, that meant her fun was done. “Copy that.”

The staging orbit was back inside the safety of the layered shields around the liberated planet, and specifically at the beacon buoy where HMS Caledonia was waiting, with a HEAT team on board in case they were needed. Which, from the sounds of things, they would be. A hardened facility was any that, by definition, couldn’t reliably be destroyed from the outside even if they nuked it.

So, they’d nuke it from the inside instead.

She kept an ear on the flow of information, directed a few details as they came up. Her thoughts were on the job, of course, but a small part of her was wondering who exactly was on that ship, only five short kilometers away…

She’d met all the HEAT operators, through Owen. Part of her satisfaction at being out here doing this was the chance to get some payback for Blaczynski. If the HEAT were about to get to nuke a base, then they’d be having much the same thoughts.

She especially hoped Owen was leading them. He’d taken it hard.

She let the passing thought go and kept her attention where it needed to be. That facility’s presence stalled the whole operation, on the grounds that they couldn’t leave it intact behind them, and therefore couldn’t advance the sweep until it was destroyed. And they of course couldn’t just leave planes hanging out there in hostile territory standing around not doing anything. That was a sure recipe for disaster. So, over the course of several minutes, she recalled the fighters to staging and then…

Waited.

Space battles were like that. Lots of waiting. The action, when it happened, happened in brief, intense bursts. For the moment, the battle was with shields and titanic forces a person could scarcely comprehend. Eventually, the San Diego and Gene Roddenberry would crack those shields wide open, and when they did…

“Caledonia, San Diego. You’re clear to jump and deliver.”

Caledonia promptly vanished with that characteristically anticlimactic blink of pure black, taking the handful of fighters and drones that made up her escort with her. Rylee checked her mission clock, made a note of the time, and listened intently to the command channel.

Shortly thereafter, she grinned inside her mask as the tactical network kindly informed her of a distant nuclear detonation, twenty light minutes away. A few seconds after that, Owen Powell’s distinctive round Yorkshire accent delivered a terse report that still managed to carry a freight of vindictive satisfaction.

“GRANDFATHER, STAINLESS. Mission successful.”

Rylee didn’t know if it was new tactics, unprepared Hunters, or simply a less dangerous situation, but from the moment Caledonia jumped out to the moment the nuke went off had taken a mere eight minutes and forty-three seconds. She’d have to congratulate Owen, after this was done. The Hunters wouldn’t have even known what hit them.

“Copy that, STAINLESS. PHOENIX-SIX-ACTUAL, GRANDFATHER. That obstacle is removed, please have your pilots resume their sweep.”

“Roger, GRANDFATHER. Resuming sweep.” Rylee was the last to jump back out to the belt, once all her pilots were away and the extermination was back underway. They’d probably just had a taste of how the rest of the day was going to go, but that was no problem at all as far as Rylee was concerned.

Caledonia jumped back to the staging orbit just before she jumped out. She gave them a fly-by out of respect, then returned to her work. There was still a lot of space to scour clean.

It was good to be back.

Date Point: 17y2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ferd Given-Man

It was Ferd’s fourth day of “leave.” A strange idea, but he wasn’t complaining! Lots of time for exploring, and eating well, and training with War-horse and friends… All the things that were best in life!

Especially when he went back to the ‘club’ from the last time he’d been in Folctha, and met the pretty-hair girl again. She ended up feeling even better than Ferd had imagined! They had been spending many nights together like all young and strong people were moved by the gods to do. Very enjoyable nights! She was stronger than she looked, and could last longer than Ferd would have guessed… And when she did need to rest, Ferd was happy to rest too.

Yes. Leave was good.

When he woke, it was still dark outside and the sky-people village was fast asleep. She was asleep too and curled up against him, all softness and good-tasting affection. The only thing he wanted to do (besides fuck again) was wrap himself around her and hug her so tight…

So he did that, and wrapped his tail around her, too. Human women weren’t like the women of his people. There was strength there, he could feel it…but they were so small, and so soft-feeling. Just the meat of his lower leg was bigger around than her hips and the rest of him was even bigger! But she knew how to play as good as anyone, even if it took a long, careful time for them to fit together comfortably. Strange, different…very, very pretty, though…

She stirred awake, gave him the cutest little sleepy smile and ran her hands along the hard lines of his body, appreciating the strength he had to offer. He did the same, squeezing at her wonderfully soft skin with his hands, and then his feet too, and soon…

Well. They played together all the way through the night, and the sun was up and streaming through the window of his ‘apartment’ long before they were done.

Humans were good about balancing Givings and Takings. Everything Ferd and his men did for them was fairly rewarded, mostly in the form of a steady supply of Mun-ee that, Ferd had discovered, was plenty to live on. So, he and the others lived at the top of a brick building that was like a hand of huts stacked on top of each other, and the ‘land-lord’ who owned it told them it was okay to climb up and down the outside wall if they wanted to.

He was very nice! Part of their Giving for the Taking of the room-hut they lived in was that they helped him do work around the place, which was never hard. They dug out a garden, and helped him build a shed out of bricks using a special mud called ‘mortar’ that dried hard like stone. Neat! Ferd learned how to use a level, how to use a square, how to read a ‘blueprint’ (which wasn’t actually blue) and measure things with a ‘tape measure’ like he’d seen Vemik use sometimes…

And he got to spend a lot of time with the pretty-hair girl!

Her name was a tongue-twister. Amaryllis. Am-are-rill-liss. It didn’t fit Ferd’s mouth at all, and came out more like “Amawiwish,” but she didn’t mind, and had told him to use “Amy” instead. Even so, he always thought about her hair first, so…pretty-hair.

He, Nomuk, Tumik, and Genn were staying in Folctha for now and lived in the ‘apartment’ when they weren’t back on their own world. Their days had fallen into a pleasant routine. Explore, train, learn, and do it all again, every day until their next mission was ready. They didn’t have any strong game to hunt on this other-world, but exploring the trails around the village was still fun, and some of the things were surprisingly tricky to catch. ‘Squirrel’ might have barely been a snack, but they were very tasty, and the bones were crunchy, too!

That exploring was just him and his men, though. His Human friends were back on Earth-world, most likely having young-man fun, and for various reasons that Ferd didn’t quite understand, he couldn’t come explore with them. Aww! Tooko was off too, wooing an apparently very pretty woman of his sky-tribe. Good for him!

That wasn’t to say they were completely alone. Ferd and his men had some success with the women when they went back; his men were big and strong and good-looking after all, and Ferd was all of those things even for a Given-Man. But they didn’t do well enough as far as he was concerned. Until he founded a tribe of his own, he’d have to constantly prove his worth to every pretty girl every time he felt the itch to fuck. Which, being a Given-Man…

Hmm!

He was just a man, after all. And she was just a woman. Who were they to deny the gods? But they couldn’t fuck all day long; she slapped his chest and shook her head.

“Oh, no. No. I’ve had enough. And I have work!”

The light from outside meant it was definitely well into the day…what time was it?

Ferd reluctantly glanced up at the big wall-clock she’d got him. Humans followed the tick of their machines more than the rise and fall of the sun, and Amy worked the “late shift.” She had to get ready. He had to go do some promised chores for the land-lord, and also help a very nice old woman living in the apartment across from his who had an old couch she didn’t want anymore and said he and his men could have it, if they wanted.

And he had to go meet his Human-friends at the terminal a finger before the sun went down, too. So reluctantly, he stood up and busied himself cleaning the apartment while Amy showered; Humans liked their homes uncluttered and clean-tasting, so he pulled the sheet-cloth off his ‘futon’ and piled it up next to the ‘washer’ machine thing, picked up things and put them away, opened the windows and the tall glass slide-door to get some fresh air. It was nice out today!

Then he made food. He was particularly fond of scrambled eggs and Yan had recommended he try putting ‘ham’ and ‘cheese’ in them. Tasty! They ate quickly, he gave her one last quick kiss, and a gentle bite on her neck as a promise of things to come…

Alone, now. His men had gone back to People-world last night to go make merry. He hadn’t followed this time, because someone had to stay behind in case there was a mission that came up, and Daar Stone-Back always said a good man led his men from the front. Strong words, those. Besides, Ferd had Amy, so it wasn’t like he felt too lonely. And sometimes Singer visited too! She loved Vemik very much so Ferd hadn’t chased after her too hard, but she had twitched her tail at him, and Vemik had snarled at him in a friendly challenge, so maybe they could have fun together!

He did chores. The couch didn’t fit through the door except if he turned it a very weird way, but it wasn’t heavy at all so mostly, it was like one of those fun puzzle-toys Professor had given him, where you had to pull the two things apart without breaking them. She gave him a kiss on the cheek as thanks, he went to go give mun-ee for more food, did some other things…

It was nearly sunset when he reported in at the “base,” with its metal fences and serious guards. The base had its own jump array, built underground near the HEAT’s training room and barracks. Wild, Frasier, Rees, Tooko and Coombes were already there, and Coombes’ grim face told Ferd that fun times were over, for now.

“Mission?” Ferd asked him.

“Yup.” Coombes nodded. “Hope you enjoyed leave.”

“Easy to get fat and lazy having so much fun.”

Coombes chuckled. “Y’ain’t wrong. Your guys should be comin’ through any second–”

There was the feeling of a heavy thump through the floor, and Wild laughed. “Good timing.”

Ferd hooted appreciatively, and stepped out of the way for the door to open. The air around Nomuk, Tumik, and Genn tasted of home as they shouldered the doors open and bounced through, slamming straight into Ferd in a coordinated tackle.

Ferd had learned some good tricks from Jooyun and his friends, though. The Given-Man spun on his left foot, turning their tackling motion into a hard bodyslam. Still. There were three of them…

…So it took him a few breaths to win. He pinned them all, using his hands for Nomuk, his tail for Tumik, and his feet for Genn. He’d be fucked if someone else decided to play, but that was okay. The humans were happy to watch and laugh, and Tooko wasn’t big enough to count. In fact, he carefully got out of the way.

Wild let them have their fun just long enough for Ferd to finish pinning his three friends, then delivered a hefty kick to Ferd’s rump. “Oi! Mind on the job, mate.”

The humans liked to tease him for his great big rump, but that was okay. Wild couldn’t really hurt him without a weapon, so Ferd would get his revenge later. When nobody was watching, maybe…

For now he let go, stood up, and helped his men to stand as well.

“Nearly got me that time!”

“Sure,” Wild said. “Come on, we’ve got work.”

They were shown to a gray room with bright lights that hurt Ferd’s eyes a bit, and small tables with sturdy steel chairs. He and his men knew by now to avoid most chairs, but these were the ones the big humans used. Anything that Yan or War-Horse or Daar Stone-Back could sit on was probably safe…

Still… he propped his tail under him just to be sure.

Coombes took a spot at the front of the room and placed the things he was carrying on the table there. “We’ve got coordinates for another Hierarchy relay,” he said. “This one’s a fair bit further from Earth than the first one, but if the nerds at Mrwrki are right then its coverage includes both Gao and Akyawentuo…”

He tapped on his tablet, and an image Ferd had seen before filled the wall behind him. Humans called it the Gal-axee. All the stars in the sky and many, many, many more besides, twisted around like a dust devil, or water swirling down a hole. Four points on it were highlighted: Earth, Cimbrean, Gao and home, scattered across the bottom quarter of the map.

“For the sake of our monkey friends… nobody ever really gets just how big all this is. So when I tell you the target is about here—” he tapped the tablet again and a new marker appeared “I want you to understand, this is a long way from civilization, even thought it might look like it’s somewhere in the middle. For Tooko’s benefit, the nearest spacelane is Green-Oval-twelve-forty-four-twenty-three, here.” a thin green line snaked across the map.

Tooko made a harsh noise in the back of his throat. “That’s a long haul. Where’s the nearest layover station?”

“This degaussing facility, here. ‘Next To The Endless’ From there, your target world is more than a month away at SBD’s cruising speed.”

Despite what Coombes said, the scale of what he was looking at suddenly landed on Ferd’s head. He’d seen how fast the ship was over land, and Tooko told him that in space it was one of the fastest ships anywhere. A whole hand of weeks to travel that short distance on the map?

He shivered a little. That wasn’t going to be fun. They’d probably spend time in stay-sis again. All of them, because the humans ate a lot of food, too.

Coombes gave the team a sympathetic look. “This is why we pay you gents the big bucks,” he said. “You’re gonna be a long way from anywhere. Anyway. Mission is to identify the precise location of the relay on the planet’s surface and engineer its destruction. We expect Big Hotel have tightened security around these things. You’ll be fully loaded-out with full weapons stores and long-term supplies. That means we’ll need to re-fam you with some of the nastier toys, re-test on ship procedures…”

Ferd grunted. “That will take some days, yes?”

Coombes nodded at him. “Yup. During which time you four are getting Warhorse’s personal attention.” Ferd growled happily at that while Coombes considered his notes. “…Obviously, how you go about executing this mission is going to have to be your call when you get there. You’ll be operating far outside of our territory, on an uncharted and unknown planet with no way of predicting exactly what conditions are going to be like on the ground. But shit like that is why JETS exists, and you’ve done it before.”

“Better be fuckin’ Christmas on the supplies, then…” Frasier commented. Ferd wasn’t sure what that meant, but Coombes chuckled and passed around a set of notes.

“Don’t worry. You’re gonna be loaded for bear. We’ll pack you to the gills with everything you need. That there’s your mission schedule. Any other questions?”

Feed reached for his copy of the mission file. He was pretty good at reading now and didn’t see many words he would need to ask about. “Maybe, we read first, think of question then.”

“Fair. I’ma go grab a coffee while you read, we’ll do the Q&A when I’m back.” Coombes left them to read.

Ferd’s thoughts were on one important fact: this thing threatened his home and his people. The sky-magic involved was more than he yet understood, but that part was clear and simple… and he remembered the bad days, of fleeing over the mountains, of all the empty burned villages, and the great flash and thunder of the Hierarchy’s “nook.”

The Big Enemy was hiding, but not gone. And Ferd Given-Man wouldn’t let them live. That was the only way to balance what they had done, and tried to do: Take everything they had until there was nothing left.

Life was good for him now… but it was good only because he was doing good. Putting the world right, one mission at a time. The Hunters, the Big Enemy, and whatever other terrible things might lurk out among the stars were his responsibility now.

And that, he took seriously.

Date Point: 17y2w3d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

Herculean efforts had gone into completely turning the White House over for Beau’s Presidency. He’d seen Sartori’s Oval Office, with its green curtains and space photos, but had never set foot in it. By the time he first walked through the door, his specifications had been followed, the place had been entirely redecorated and even the stationery was in place.

The Resolute desk had been swapped out for the Theodore Roosevelt, the curtains were a rich blue, the floor was polished wood parquet, the space photos had been replaced with oil paintings of some of America’s iconic city skylines and several family pictures…

A new office for a new president. A fresh start. A reset button, an opportunity to re-assess policies and direction.

It wasn’t without continuity, though. Traditions abounded, law was supreme. The President was not sovereign; American sovereignty flowed from the people through the Constitution.

But one of the first orders of business in the opening weeks of the new year was meeting somebody for whom the opposite was true. A living, walking, breathing sovereign who had to duck and turn sideways to fit through the door, and who seemed to strain the very space he inhabited, both metaphorically and literally; the sturdy floors creaked loudly under his feet.

Supposedly he could smell lies. If so, he’d certainly be able to smell trepidation, which was a hard emotion to quell in light of how serious and important the day’s conversation was going to be.

Daar was all friendliness, though. He spared Beau the infamous crushing bear-hugs, and instead seemed genuinely happy to meet a new face.

And he came bearing gifts.

“Congratulations on ‘yer victory, Mister President! Here’s a small gift ‘fer you from me, an’ a less small gift from the Clans o’ the Gao to the people o’ the United States!”

The small gift was a simple stoneware vase bearing a handsome arrangement of alien flowers. Recalling his conversation with Naydra at the ball, Beau accepted it. “One of your creations? I understand flower arranging is one of your hobbies.”

“Yeah. Kinda against type I guess…” Daar pant-grinned. “But a man’s gotta ‘member what the point o’ all of it is, yijao?”

“…Sorry?”

“Ah! Yi an’ jao are the Gaori words ‘fer yes and no. It means, uh…sorta both ‘y’know’ and ‘do we understand each other’ at the same time.”

“Actually, I think I have heard it before…” Chambliss recalled. “My grandchildren use it, I think.”

“Prob’ly! It’s kinda fascinatin’ how much our cultures’re cross-pollinatin’ these days.” Daar turned and gestured to his personal assistant. “Anyhoo. That less small gift.”

The gift was presented in a wooden and glass display case, about the length of a man’s forearm, with a large and sturdy key. Inside, resting on the polished wood, was a slender spearhead. It wasn’t any kind of a complex ornate shape, but it wasn’t unadorned either: the metal had been engraved with Gaori text.

“That there is from the spear that won Great Father Fyu his final victory at Wi Kao, an’ ended up makin’ him a Great Father in th’ first place. The poem he inscribed on it is a lament ‘fer more peaceful times…it’s a love poem, actually.”

“To Mother Tiritya?”

“Her, yes. An’ the Females. An’ the Gao as a whole, too. Tricky wordplay there, way better’n I’ve ever managed…I’ll leave it ‘fer you ‘ta translate, if ‘ya want.”

Beau regarded the artifact with a combination of awe and trepidation. “This seems like it would be a treasure of your people.”

“It is. I ain’t giftin’ it lightly, Mister President. Consider it a gesture o’ trust an’ esteem. President Sartori’s expressed a sort o’ grudging respect o’ you, y’know.”

Beau smiled and gestured to the couches, wondering whether or not that spearhead had a place in this office, or…

Well. No. It did. He couldn’t avoid that much. Like it or not, the Gao could not and would not be ignored, and Daar’s gift was not the sort of thing to be displayed out in the corridor. Daar knew it, too. There was nothing subtle about a gift of that magnitude.

Well, then. The best approach was to be unsubtle with him, too.

“You’re making a powerful statement here,” Beau told him as they sat. “And a blunt one. Ever since I won the election, I’ve been… pressured, let’s say, with a pretty strong message. You clearly don’t like my campaign promises.”

“That ain’t the concern, Mister President. I ain’t gonna begrudge ‘yer people rebuildin’. Balls, that’s been what consumes almost all my attention, most days. What I can’t permit though, is ‘fer any more Gao t’fill Hunter bellies.”

“You have the resources of a whole planet to achieve that. I have the resources of one nation. A nation with friends and allies, maybe, but most of the Earth—” Chambliss waved a hand toward the window. “Isn’t on board, and probably won’t ever be. Meanwhile we have people out there working longer than full time hours and still not holding it together. We have a large and growing underclass in this country of people who just don’t have the same opportunities as everyone else. My first responsibility is to the people I represent, and the war that Sartori fought alongside you is quite literally taking food out of mouths.”

“There’s a bunch’a people who’d disagree with that assessment, but I ain’t gonna wrap m’self up in ‘yer politics. I don’ think that’d be appropriate.”

“Thank you. But you see my point. Don’t get me wrong: the Hunters are monsters and the Hierarchy are evil. But I made promises I intend to keep.”

“I ain’t askin’ ‘ya ‘ta be a liar, Mister President. I’d never ask that, of anybody. What I am askin’ is that you not forget that some’a the best people I ever knew died fightin’ ‘ta end both those evils, an’ that you think good an’ hard before you do anything that might waste their sacrifice. Because this ain’t won, not by a long shot, an’ the consequences o’ not winnin’ it when we can could be civilization-endangering.”

Beau looked up as his personal assistant brought in some coffee and fruit for them. “Is your concern with the war effort, or is it specifically with the HEAT?”

“Ain’t no difference ‘tween the two. They’re the only folks that can fight this war.”

“And you consider yourself one of them.”

“‘Cuz I hafta be. Ain’t many who can do what we do.”

“You appreciate of course that America has been budgeting that program in its entirety. An oddity, considering that the only two officers in the HEAT are a Brit and a Canadian.”

“Yeah, kinda the consequence o’ ‘yer size an’ power. Most o’ the SOR is American, of course…but if what ‘yer lookin’ for is a better cost-sharin’ I’m sure we can arrange something.”

Well, at least there was no need to delicately work around to that point. And it spoke volumes that Daar had made the offer so readily and casually. “You really care about them, don’t you?”

Daar’s duck-nod was emphatic. “Yeah. Part o’ that is why I fight with ‘em. Shouldn’t ask somebody ‘ta do somethin’ y’ain’t willin’ ‘ta do ‘yerself, if ‘ya can.”

“…I can respect that,” Beau admitted. “And a more… even-handed… distribution of the costs would allow me to keep my campaign promises…”

Daar gave him what could only be as an uncomfortable look. “‘Ya sure ‘bout that? I ain’t a human, an’ I ain’t American, but it seems ‘ta me that ‘cutting military spending’ means a whole lot more’n money-things ‘fer a whole lotta people…”

Chambliss sighed and stood up to take a slow stroll around the room. “I’m not a peace-at-any-price pacifist, no matter what my detractors may say. I’m not naive enough to believe that Earth is safe yet, and I’m not callous enough to abandon a whole galaxy full of sapient beings to being eaten, enslaved and slaughtered, but I do believe we got the balance wrong and committed more than we can afford. I simply cannot justify feeding a handful of supermen when our basic social safety nets are in tatters and the nation’s infrastructure is in dire need of some investment.”

He sighed and rested his hands on the back of the couch to look Daar in the eye. “So when I said I would cut military spending, I meant exactly that and nothing more, and if there are people out there who thought I was using code for something else, that’s their problem and I’ll handle them. Here and now, all I’m concerned about is that I keep the promise I made. I’d prefer to do it with your help.”

Daar made a grumbling noise in his chest, but if Beau remembered his reading on Gaori expressions and body language then the set of his ears and jaw meant grudging respect.

“That puts some’a my fears at ease,” he admitted.

“I’m glad, because I do want to have a good working relationship with you.” Beau said, and sat down. “Though, I’ll be honest. You frighten me. You’ve done terrible things. Not without reason, I’m sure. Had I been in your position… I don’t know what I would have done.”

Daar gave him what could only be interpreted as a sympathetic look. “Mister President…I think ‘yer ‘bout to learn some things ‘bout ‘yerself in this job that you ain’t ever know’d. I know I sure as fuck did. Jus’ promise me ‘ya won’t ferget, yijao?”

“…We understand each other.”

“Good.” Daar stood up from his position on the floor and rose to his full colossal height. “There’s a lotta things I’d be willin’ ‘ta do ‘ta keep SOR runnin’, includin’ joint treaties, alla that. If I gotta pick up the tab, I can prol’ly do that personally. Now I ain’t jus’ offerin’ a free ride here…but I think we unnerstand each other.”

“I’m glad. We’ll leave the negotiations to our experts, shall we?”

“Ha!” The Great Father made a noise that surely must have been a chitter, except it was several octaves too low and would have shaken the windows if they weren’t armored. “Champion Sheeyo’s been lookin’ ‘ta sharpen his claws on someone! Figuratively speakin’ of course.”

“And I know a few people who’ve been looking for a challenge to sink their teeth into. Also figuratively.” Beau offered his hand, and received a firm but restrained paw in return. “Ours will be an… interesting… relationship, I think. My compliments and regards to the Great Mother.”

“An’ mine ‘ta the First Lady. ‘Yer lucky to have her, Mister President.”

Beau chuckled. “Yes, and the same to you. Until next time.”

Daar duck-nodded, and took his leave. Beau had a moment to himself alone in the office, and he spent it celebrating, a good old-fashioned fist pump and private “yesss!!”

Who said a president couldn’t have his cake and eat it?

Date Point: 17y2w3d AV
London, United Kingdom, Earth

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Who said a Great Father couldn’t have his cake and eat it?

Travel from D.C. to London was, well…a lot less interestin’ than Daar had hoped. He’d really wanted ‘ta take one o’ those nifty C-17 cargo planes—an actual airfoil!—but sadly, that would have been ostentatious in a way he couldn’t bear. Not when there was a perfectly functional jump link. Folks were literally commuting between the two cities on foot, nowadays.

He did get to galumph his way down toward the Jump Array, though! He’d been cooped up being all civilized an’ shit all day, so a chance to really stretch his legs—and maybe put a teensy bit of fear into the chase driver’s heart, when he had to floor it to keep up—was a temptation way too fun to resist.

London was very different to Washington. It was warmer, for a start. Rather than being knee-deep in snow, the British capitol was just slick and silvery under low clouds and a thin, light rain. Anywhere else, it woulda been dreary, but somehow it worked. As Daar’s motorcade slipped through the city, past landmarks that were older than all but a precious few buildings on Gao, he couldn’t help but reflect sadly on all the history he’d personally had to destroy to save the Gao themselves.

Still. That sad thought aside, his day was goin’ damn well. Not many world leaders came trotting up to 10 Downing Street, prol’ly, but Daar did so with his tail high and a renewed spring in his step. After the mission on that array, the most depressin’ thought he’d had to deal with had been what would happen to the HEAT. Now, that problem looked to be fixed and the SOR’s future secure, so long as Chambliss didn’t actively—to use a local phrase—take the piss.

Future Presidents prob’ly wouldn’t like the new arrangements, but that was okay. Daar knew a good firesale when he saw one.

Prime Minister Stephen Davies met him at the famous black front door, where there was a brief bit of stand-and-smile for the cameras while they shook hands–Daar discreetly sat back on his haunches, so as not to totally dwarf the poor man in his own country.

Inside, the conversation was warm.

“So. How did it go?” Davies asked

“Naydi is weapons grade charming,” Daar rumbled fondly. “Poor man din’t stand a chance.”

“Buttered him up nicely, did she?”

“Well, I mean…she convinced me ‘ta buck over a thousand years o’ tradition an’ bond wit’ her, so this ain’t her first rodeo!”

“Thank you for the warning.” Davies chuckled softly. “Tea?”

“…I really should warn ‘ya, I’m one o’ those Gao who’s super sensitive ‘ta caffeine…”

“We should have some decaf around here somewhere…” Davies glanced at one of his assistants, a man in a quiet suit, who nodded.

“Then yes, please.” He wasn’t really a tea drinker, but he did enjoy an occasional cup.

“Well, you’re ahead of the news from Washington,” Davies said as the arrangements were made.

“Marvels o’ the modern world, that. ‘Yer people inventin’ the jump array’s prob’ly the most impactful thing that’ll happen to th’ galaxy in our lifetimes, ‘sides mebbe killin’ the Hierarchy.”

“I doubt we can really claim credit. It was an idea that would have come along long before we did if the Hierarchy hadn’t suppressed it.”

“Balls, sure ‘ya can! You ain’t achievin’ no less just ‘cuz you don’t know who mighta come before.”

“True enough I suppose…” Davies looked up as his assistant returned and tea… happened. The funny thing was, Daar could tell that there was a certain amount of ceremony involved in how it was made here, but unconscious ceremony. The room stopped for it.

Aliens were weird. Humans especially. But the biscuits were crunchy! And frankly, crunchy snacks were one of the easiest ways to Daar’s heart.

“Anyway. News from Washington,” he said, plucking a few more off the plate. The flavor was subtle, but he kinda liked that. So many things on Earth were kinda heavy-handed in their scent and taste. This, though…just butter, flour, and sugar, but not overpowering so. “…Local butter? It….really slightly smells kinda like the general aroma of the isle, I think?”

“I honestly have no idea,” Davies admitted, with just the faintest hint of polite impatience.

“Sarry. Business. News!” Daar regretfully put the biscuit down for the moment. “Chambliss ain’t worried about the SOR still existin’ so long as he can take a smaller military budget ‘ta Congress an’ say ‘Look! I keep my promises!’ He couldn’t care less if the money comes from somewhere else, so…I offered ‘ta foot some o’ the bill.”

“That’s…devious. Are you sure you can afford that? The SOR costs more than most nation’s entire armed forces.”

Daar duck-nodded. “I got the means.” He didn’t feel any need to go into detail.

“So Chambliss just sold you the SOR…” Davies mused.

“Not sold so much as agreed ‘ta let me fund a big part o’ the operations. I’m sure there’ll be treaties an’ all sortsa dung we gotta work through, but…”

Davies sipped his tea. “Still. AEC up until this point has been the America-and-Friends club, because most of the funding was American. Whoever controls the purse strings has power. I’m surprised he’d let go of those strings so readily. Goodness knows, the Royal Navy Space Service only exists thanks to American money. If we funded it all by ourselves, we’d have nothing left over to maintain conventional military or our nuclear deterrent.”

“Ayup. An’ he either don’t realize that, which means he really ain’t ready ‘ta lead at this level, or he does and in that case, he shouldn’t be callin’ th’ shots ‘fer somethin’ like the SOR anyway. Meanwhile, I’m rich as fuck an’ I know what a valuable resource they are, so…”

“You do understand this could put my nation in a complicated position.”

“Yeah. I ain’t lookin’ ‘ta mess up relations wif’ my most closest allies, yijao? Right now, all I care ‘bout is securin’ a fuckin’ irreplaceable asset against uncertainty. I mean, balls! Maybe Chambliss is a stand-up guy under it all! But I don’t know. An’ as far as I can tell, nobody does, ‘cuz he’s a populist that came outta nowhere.”

“Oh, that’s been the story of this century so far.” Davies sat back in his tall-backed leather chair and drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the armrest. “To be frank, the SOR, the Space Service and all the rest of it still have their role to play here on Earth. The HEAT in particular are effectively a nuclear deterrent themselves. When men like them could drop on your roof from orbit, neutralize your nation’s leadership in an instant, and then retreat through an array before any possible retaliation could arrive… Suffice it to say, we—and I mean the Allied nations, not just Britain—cannot afford for them to be unavailable for operations here on Earth. They’ve done a lot of good simply by existing. Those treaties you mentioned would have to reflect that need.”

Daar duck-nodded. It was a moot point that no AEC asset had ever been deployed in any of Earth’s perpetual smouldering regional wars. The whole point of a deterrent was you hoped like hell you never had to actually use it.

“Like I said. I ain’t lookin’ ‘ta hurt our relationship,” he reassured. “This ain’t a free ride, an’ I’m gonna want some assurances ‘fer bankrollin’ them…”

“Naturally.”

“So the question is, is America gonna keep supportin’ the Space Service, or are you gonna hafta look elsewhere?”

Davies sighed. “Well, either way our ability to maintain it is dependent on the generosity of an allied power,” he said. “But I don’t intend to impose on your generosity, and I don’t know whether it’s entirely wise to let Chambliss duck too far out of his responsibility to this fight. America still needs to contribute, and it needs to contribute more than just talented young personnel.”

“Yeah. But I got a good sniff o’ the new President. I think he’s a good man. He’s just…prob’ly gotta learn some things, s’all. This may jus’ be buyin’ enough time ‘fer him ‘ta learn it.”

“…That, if I may say so, is a remarkable endorsement.”

“Well, this good-lookin’ muzzle o’ mine is ‘fer more’n bein’ pretty, y’know…”

Davies had a sort of one-beat chuckle that temporarily lifted the worry-lines off his face. “Goodness knows, we all learn this job the hard way,” he said. “I imagine you had similar concerns about me, when I first showed up.”

“I was real careful not ‘ta break ‘yer hand…” Daar threw in a friendly lil’ snarl, just to keep Davies on his toes. “‘Course, I was just Champion then. An’ a lowly sergeant unner Powell’s command. So technic’ly unner ‘yers at the time, too!”

Davies chuckled at that. “How times change. Well, I know this was just a flying visit. You’re at Sandringham this evening, I believe.”

“Yup. Goin’ pheasant shootin’ in the morning, too.”

“Then I won’t keep you. But thanks for dropping in. It’s been good to get your opinion on the man across the pond.”

They shook hands again, and within a minute Daar was back in his motorcade and slipping through the twilit streets on his way to the airport and a day or two of being entertained by the King, which was the longest stop on his rapid-fire tour of Earth to meet with the Allied leadership and a few other nations. He was especially lookin’ forward to Thailand.

Naydra met him on the concrete at the airport. She didn’t say anything, just gave him an affectionate nip on the ear before they boarded the private flight up to Scotland.

It wasn’t a vacation. Not really. He was here for work and business. But it felt kinda like one, and he realized just how badly he’d needed it as he settled down on the plane’s cozy floor and prepared to fly in a real aerofoil vehicle for the first time in longer than he could remember.

He suppressed a brief stab of guilt at enjoying himself at all. He’d be useless to everybody if he drove himself into a dark prison of the mind. Taking care of himself was an important part of the job. He was a generally high-spirited and positive kind o’ ‘Back, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t find himself in even darker moods. He didn’t have stone-breaking claws for nothin.’

Just bein’ around his Naydi was enough to make him happy, though. Especially seein’ as it was close quarters on-board. More time for snuggles!

Careful snuggles, though. Daar was always careful with his Naydi.

“You’ve had a good day,” she commented as they settled in and the plane taxied for takeoff.

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She scritched his ears. “Did you get what you wanted?”

“After a fashion, I guess. Looks like my bank accounts’re gonna be whole bunch lighter!”

“That will please Sheeyo, I imagine.”

“Oh, he’s gonna be delighted.”

“And you?”

“The SOR’s prob’ly gonna be secure. That’s all that matters. No SOR, no winnin’ the war.”

She duck-nodded and kept scritching, which was unfair. She knew it always made him sleepy. But tellin’ her to stop just wasn’t gonna happen…

Weeks of stress fell away, like a heavy load he could finally put down after movin’ it. There’d be more to pick up an’ move later, but right now there was just a chance to relax, and Daar knew how to take those when they came along.

He relaxed into Naydi’s side and dozed off before the wheels even left the runway.

Date Point: Opening days of the first year of Liberation.
Library bunker at Old-Bent-Leg, a freeed world

Ukusevi

The schism was complete. In fact, Ukusevi’s proposed additions to the Chant had been met with acclaim from one side and outraged violence from the other that only ended when the two factions of Keepers were dragged from each others’ throats by their bodyguards and hauled away back to their libraries. Ukusevi still had Umilivi’s teeth-marks in her ear.

It was still better than she’d feared. She’d envisioned herself surrounded on all sides by anger, universally rejected and exiled to the surface. Maybe she could have sought sanctuary with the Gao, but she would have been alone, never to lay eyes on one of her kind again, so all things considered, a few bite marks and bruises were an entirely acceptable outcome. She had allies, and that was the best realistic outcome she could have hoped for.

For the first time ever, the Old-Bent-Leg archives were noisy. Those who rejected Ukusevi and her interpretation were long gone, others had arrived from other libraries and other warrens who’d heard her version of the Chant and been drawn to it. Overall, their population had actually grown, to the point where their hydroponics farms and mushroom chambers could barely support everyone.

But Ukusevi had a plan. She had no idea if it would work, and whether it did or didn’t the archives needed the aggressive sorting, storing and filing they were undergoing now. She barely had a moment to think as she supervised all the acolytes and faithful in their work. Centuries of books, papers and other material had to be prepared for transport no matter what happened.

But think she did.

She’d heard Gar-avff’s stories of other worlds out there. The old texts had much to say on the general shape of the cosmos, of the way worlds whirled around stars which in turn drifted around the great whorl. All that knowledge came from long ago, when the sky wasn’t perpetually choked with smog and the so-called Wicked People had been able to look up and see the stars at night.

That was what a world could be. What most worlds out there presumably were, given that the Hunters had not conquered them and ruined them.

And if Ukusevi’s people were not in fact Punished, but were… something else… then might it not go some way toward addressing the grave cosmic injustice of four hundred years if she and her kind got to walk under a blue sky and breathe clean air again?

Those who still thought themselves Punished could stay, as far as she was concerned. It wasn’t her place to talk them around, not when she herself had believed that same darkly comforting narrative for her whole life.

All she knew was, if there was any kind of justice in the universe, her people were long overdue to receive it. Maybe the Almighty had sent the Gao and Humans, maybe not. But if nothing else, the two alien races represented a way forward.

Her busy activity was interrupted by a tug on her sleeve: Teeisyo, whose ears perked up hopefully as she looked down at him. “Keeper? The aliens are back. There’s a new one this time!”

“A new kind of alien?” Ukusevi asked.

“No, I think he’s one of those hoomans. But bigger. Really, really big.”

“I should go see them, then. Thank you, Teeisyo.”

He bounced happily at the thanks, and vanished into the stacks to take on some chore or another. Ukusevi left instructions that if anything came up which demanded her attention then it should be left until she returned, then padded up the access tunnel to mee the aliens once again.

The boy hadn’t exaggerated. The Human sat cross-legged on the floor next to the old battered table they’d dragged up for these meetings, and he was an immense study in lean, muscular strength. He looked as if he was built to the same kind of intense craggy standards as Hoeff, and also stood about an arm’s length taller than the short, broad man. Humans were worrying, like that. Even the comparatively slim and small Hurt had felt shockingly strong and muscular when he’d hugged Ukusevi, and this newcomer made him look like a pencil.

She immediately felt more than a little unsettled by him. But it wasn’t just his sheer physicality, there was something else about him that put her off-balance, more than the others.

He was soft-spoken, though. He gave Uku a curious look as she entered, then smoothly rose to his feet and offered a rough, callused hand to shake. His grip hinted at bone-crushing power, and spoke of finely controlled strength.

“Pleased to meet you. My name’s Julian, I work for…well, I work for some important fellas who’re very interested in this case. I’m here to learn about your world and, uh, what’s been done to it. So maybe it’d help if we could talk about what things are like now, and what they were like before the, uh…”

The enormous man looked over at Garr-avf, who prompted him with “They call it the Punishment.”

“On that point,” Ukusevi gently corrected him, “there has been some discussion.”

She sat down at the table, and the aliens sat opposite her after giving each other confused glances.

It was the eyes, she realized. Her own people had wide-set, wide-facing eyes. She could see a lot of the world around her, even slightly behind her. The Gao’s eyes were very forward-facing and focused, but Humans—and this Human in particular—locked both of those alarmingly white eyes on whatever they were looking at. Dead-center, straight forward, no spare attention going anywhere else. When a Human looked at her, she felt watched.

“What kind of discussion?” Julian asked.

“A schism. On the nature of the Punishment, whether it was even a Punishment at all…” she sighed. “Your peoples’ coming forced us to confront difficult questions. Garr-avf in particular–” she acknowledged the scarred, dark-furred Gao with a nod, “–Is likely to be remembered by the other side with, ah, with no real kindness.”

“You mean they think I’m the Great Deceiver, sent to deliver a sweet-sounding lie and drive you all back into wickedness,” the Gao summarized.

“Assuming that title doesn’t fall on me,” Ukusevi meant it as a dark joke, but there was honestly no humor in the situation.

Julian seemed embarrassed by that somehow, and scratched at something on the back of his head. “Oh…geez.”

Garr-avf issued a kind of reverse sniff. “That’s all you have to say?”

“Where I’m from,” Julian folded his tremendous arms in front of his chest and answered with a playfully odd sense of dignity, “That’s saying a lot.”

Ukusevi would need to ask about ‘geez’ at a later time.

“Where you’re from is weird,” Garr-avf muttered, then turned his unsettling gaze back on Ukusevi. “So I take it you’re in the faction looking for an… alternate explanation for everything.”

“I’m in the faction who refuse to deny the evidence,” Ukusevi said firmly. “You are here, the Hunters were never any kind of divine agent… whatever that means for the Almighty and for us, we’ll sort that out.”

“Yeah. That’s…not a great place to be,” the big man commented. “If I had time, I’d maybe share some stories my people have about that sort of thing. But I don’t. I need to learn about your world as it’s supposed to be, so that we have some idea of what kind of help we can offer.”

“We haven’t exactly been in a ‘great place’ for hundreds of years… The archives have a lot to say about our world before they came. There are whole tomes full of illustrations and some even contain pressed and preserved flowers, plants. I can’t tell you much about what life was like back then because it would depend on who you were and where you lived.”

Julian nodded. “We’re like that ourselves. I’m out here on an alien planet talkin’ to you through this–” he picked up the translator and wiggled it in the air. “Meanwhile there’s folks back on my home planet who still live more or less how their ancestors did a thousand years ago.”

“Then you understand how difficult it is for me to say how our world is supposed to be. I can tell you how some of it was, through the eyes of some of the people who lived in those times… but why? All that matters is that the surface is poisoned, nothing grows there, and seeing as the Almighty isn’t going to heal it, I don’t know what more you can take back to the people you work for beyond that this is a dead place.”

The big man seemed to weigh his response. “Well…there are many worlds out there. They’re all very different from each other, but there are some, uh, general themes they follow. If we know what kind of theme your world follows, we can better know how we can help.”

“What exactly do you mean when you offer to help?” Ukusevi challenged him. “Can you fix this?”

“…Not easily. Or quickly. Maybe. But even helping you means we need to know about your world. You are of this place, after all. I am of a different place and that shaped me and my people. Our air is heavier and moister, the gravity is heavier, the food is different…”

“And we are not of this place either,” Ukusevi retorted. “It was once a green, growing place. They sky and waters were clear, the animals roamed freely, the trees grew tall and thick. We evolved in a world that looks nothing like the one outside. The world we evolved for is gone, and all we have left are bare scraps. I can share those scraps with you and maybe you can make some sense out of them, but why? To what end? Will we stay here another four hundred years while you put right what the Hunters destroyed? How? How can you bring back all the things that are gone and forgotten?

“I can’t. Well…the full story is long, but let’s just say I can’t. But you are absolutely of this world, in the deep and inescapable way that everything is a part of where they are and where they came from. You can’t know any living thing unless you know the place that they came to be living in.”

“…And you can’t help us until you know us.” Ukusevi sighed, pushing down the urge to mutter a profanity. Of course things couldn’t be simple. It had been an act of pure optimism in defiance of a lifetime’s experience to hope otherwise. “And it’s possible you may never be able to know us.”

“Oh, no, that we can do. It’s just easier if we have your home to compare you to.” Julian shuffled closer and those disconcertingly focused eyes seemed to lock on to Ukusevi even harder as he angled his head forward. “But the question is… what kind of help are you after? Food? Medicine? Those seem obvious…”

Well. Here was the big moment. Here was the chance to leap forward into the unknown. Ukusevi had done it so much in the last little while that she wondered if she’d start growing used to it eventually. So she mustered up all the will she had and did her best to match the Human’s unsettlingly direct gaze.

“I would like to meet with your leaders,” she said. “I think the time has come for us to leave our world.”

Date Point: 17y3m3w AV
The abyssal ocean, Europa, 6th moon of Jupiter, Sol

Injunctor

The Injunctor attempted to contact the nearest relay again, and failed again.

Its limited intelligence was not capable of frustration, nor boredom. It had attempted to contact the relay 1,048,576 times since it had arrived, and encountered 1,048,576 failures. This strongly implied that the relay was permanently offline, presumably destroyed.

The Sol system would not enter the effective radius of another relay for more than a thousandth of a galactic rotation.

Its contingency in such situations was clear: activate its controlling Agent and receive instruction.

The most recent instructions it had received from its controlling Agent had mandated a period of hibernation. That hibernation period was over. It was to proceed to the third planetary body of the system, activate its location and abduction protocols, and wait for a suitable sophont.

The ice moon it had buried itself in was conveniently warm, thanks to the tidal action of its massive parent. Deep under the ice, an ocean of liquid water fell comfortably inside the temperature range that the Injunctor could endure without needing to expend power on thermal regulation. It was, by its own standards, quite comfortable.

Burrowing upwards to the surface required a lot of energy, focused through the dorsal shielding, to melt upwards through a fault line in the endless ice sheet, but the Injunctor had plenty to spare. It took a moment to recharge on the surface, activated its superluminal drive on the lowest possible energy, and coasted inwards toward the star as quietly as it could manage.

There were several major geopolitical landmasses to consider. Anonymity was important, but in this case the Agent had also made additional stipulations. It considered the mission parameters its Agent had logged, and selected an appropriate region.

Three solar days after it began its location protocol, the Injunctor found a suitable candidate: A human male, in ideal health, and an outlier on several physiological metrics. That would normally contra-indicate an abduction, but the controlling Agent had specified its own requirements for its biodrone host.

The candidate was piloting a vehicle through the middle of a large open expanse of arable soil, dragging some kind of machine through the earth to break it up. The Injunctor shadowed the vehicle for nearly an eighth of the diurnal cycle before the vehicle paused and its pilot alighted to relieve himself of accumulated waste liquid.

Abduction was anomalous in several respects. The candidate host proved capable of great resistance both to forcefield restraint and chemical sedation, which required the Injunctor to maximize both. Normalization would have proven fatal to the candidate, given its deviation, but normalization was not part of the protocol in this case. Instead the candidate’s already formidable biology was enhanced with the full suite of augmentations at the Injunctor’s disposal.

The personality suppression and biodroning process was also anomalous, and required additional implantation. That would also normally be contra-indicated and the candidate host terminated immediately, but the controlling Agent was looking for a specific type of host, and this fit within the parameters.

With the process complete, all that remained was loading the Agent into his new body.

The entity known variously as Six or Cynosure blinked and opened his eyes. He sat up, inspected his new arms and legs, and prodded curiously at the tattoo he found just below the right elbow. Then, with a shrug, he hopped up to his feet and looked around the Injunctor’s interior.

“Location?”

The Injunctor informed him that he was on Earth, and highlighted his precise geographical position.

“…Kansas. Hmm.” He tilted his head and accessed the biodrone’s memories. “…Yes. Global situation update?”

The Injunctor provided that too. It also noted that its Agent’s body was somewhat dehydrated, and delivered an appropriate measure of water, which Cynosure picked up and sipped absently as his new eyes skipped over the information.

The Injunctor was too simple to understand his reaction. It did not know whether it was the totality of what it had presented or some minor detail which prompted the Agent’s response. It simply watched and waited impassively for instructions as Cynosure’s expression darkened, as he set the drink aside, and as he used his new body’s innate stress-expression mechanisms.

“Well… fuck.”

++END CHAPTER 64++

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…Eighty Friendly ETs, 129 Squishy Xenos and 306 Di(splat)zi Rats

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 65: “Leaps of Faith”

Chapter 65: Leaps of Faith

Date Point: 17y3m3w AV
Kansas, USA, Earth

Six/Cynosure

“Shit, shit, shit, fuck…”

Earth was outside of dataspace contact. There was no signal from the Irujzen relay at all. That could mean only one thing: Six had fucked up.

He’d fucked up badly.

The plan had been so simple. The Humans were supposed to find the relay, monitor it, find it utterly impenetrable and then ask for his input. He’d then infiltrate it and use its core access functions to fundamentally alter the 0001 compilation algorithm, effectively inserting a new mandate into the Hierarchy at, for lack of a more accurate term, the genetic level.

They weren’t supposed to destroy it! That was maniacal, that was…

He used his new biodrone’s phone to burrow into the Internet and start looking for information. It didn’t take long. Sure enough, the relay’s destruction had had major repercussions for matterspace. One of the Guvnurag worlds had also been solely covered by Irujzen, so its droned populace had simply… woken up. No doubt there were agents stranded on that planet as Six himself now was, but the Dominion and human Allied nations had jointly organized a substantial aid effort. Which of course, had demanded an explanation, so the relay’s destruction was no kind of a secret at all. It had, in fact, been hailed as a significant victory.

…It wasn’t even the Humans who’d destroyed it. The Gao had.

Six spent several minutes summoning up every expletive, profanity and curse he’d learned over thousands and thousands of years of infiltrating deathworld species. Though in that regard, the Humans had definitely come up with two viciously monosyllabic winners.

With some degree of catharsis achieved, he turned his attention to his situation in a more methodical way.

He was stranded. There was no way to leave without detection.

His own hubris in programming the Injunctor meant that it had picked a great big strapping and highly noticeable farm boy for his host, one with many ongoing social commitments that would not be quietly severed.

Nevertheless, the Injunctor itself had plenty of potential to cause mischief… but only with his direct oversight.

So, what to do? He couldn’t strike back except in a token gesture, not if he valued his continued existence. He had no idea what the state of play was inside of dataspace. Re-connecting would require escape, and assuming he could avoid detection (which he couldn’t) and come within range of an active relay (also effectively impossible) then…what? Surrender for decompilation?

No.

As far as Six could tell, he had no options except to just… what? Settle into the honest life of a farmer? Spend his biodrone’s remaining years tending to the secret spaceship in the barn and move from host to host? Wait for potentially hundreds of years for the human race to let its collective guard down? By the time they did, there would be no point in even trying to eradicate them. They’d already spread to two worlds—no, three—and from there…

He’d… lost.

But he was alive. There was that. For all he knew, he was the last Six, and whichever version of him had still been extant out in Dataspace had died when the relay went down.

Could he just… enjoy being human? Enjoy them for who and what they were, as a sort of salute to their deranged magnificence? He’d planned to do that anyway, and just revel in being human at the peak of what that could mean… and in that regard, the Injunctor had picked perfectly.

The Humans had survived many infiltrations, and all the mechanisms of global calamity that had worked so well in the past were ineffective now. Nobody in a remotely significant position of authority was vulnerable to biodroning. Implants and nanotech alike were non-viable. There was no way for Six to gain access to anybody or anything sensitive, as he would have in the past.

There was effectively nothing he could do, for now, except just… be a human. Try to enjoy it. Not even bide his time, just live and keep on living for as long as he could, until perhaps one day the chance would arise to escape this planet and move on.

But if he was going to do that in comfort, then he’d need to earn some goodwill with his new biodrone. Otherwise, he’d have a traumatized ghost locked away in a corner of his mind, held there by force of will and constant attention, forever. Tolerable for now, but in the long term…

They were going to have to be friends.

And Austin wasn’t going to like that idea.

Date point: 17y3m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Leemu

Saying goodbye was never easy. He’d already said his farewells to Preed, who had gone with the Great Father back to Earth and would likely never return. Now, Leemu was getting ready to say goodbye to Gorku, too. The big Brownie had been accepted to the Rites of the Second Ring (whatever that meant) and that meant Associate Gorku would soon be Officer Gorku, if he made it.

And then, after that…maybe Brother. Leemu knew he could do it. But would he?

They’d had a few weeks to prepare for their goodbyes, of course. Preed’s journey back to his homeland wasn’t a small undertaking, and Daar had insisted on saying goodbye too, so it ended up that the Human just…tagged along in Daar’s retinue. That had given Leemu time to…well, process it, really. Have one last bowl of noodles. Finish his painting. Little things.

Gorku got his notice of acceptance a week before the Rites began.

That would leave… Leemu. All alone in a house built for three, with no Clan and no company. He couldn’t begrudge his friends for moving on with their lives—balls, he’d have felt worse if they’d stayed just to keep him company—but once Preed had given away his garden plants and packed his things, shared long, tearful hugs with his friends and finally gone away…

The house already felt emptier.

Gorku wasn’t quite gone, though. And he still had training to do. So, in an eminently Stoneback sort of way, he hefted that enormous saddle-ruck of his, sank to all fours, and asked Leemu in an almost desperate kind of voice, “Uh… ‘ya wanna go run with me?”

Previously, Leemu hadn’t. He never felt up to that level of exercise. This time though… He just duck-nodded and fell in alongside his friend.

Gorku was keeping it to a sort of loping trundle rather than his usual flat-out run. And he stopped here and there, quite plainly for Leemu’s comfort; he’d definitely need to work on his endurance. Aside from the exercise though, Leemu felt like they should talk, or say something, or comment on the cherry trees, or…

In fact, Gorku seemed to just want the company. Because, as ever, he wasn’t a Gao who was so good with his words.

“Uh…tacos?”

Leemu chittered softly. Gorku’s emotional range was… well, it was as big as he himself was. Everything he felt, he felt large, so he wasn’t so good at handling the smaller, softer, quieter feelings. That offer, or query, spoke volumes to anyone who knew how to read him.

“Sure.”

They loped back through Riverside Park toward the Alien Quarter, where Leela usually set up her trailer. Sure enough, she was parked in one of her usual spots, an open space near the Quarter wall that wasn’t quite big or glamorous enough to be called a plaza. It was just a space where a lot of foot traffic passed through.

She had competition today in the form of a Human selling baklava. Leemu had a pretty bad sweet tooth, so he couldn’t help but sniff toward that stall…

“Hmmph! Talk about loyalty, I see!”

Leemu flattened his ears sheepishly and turned to Leela, who was watching him with a look that said she was amused rather than annoyed.

“Hey!” Leemu chittered, “There’s nobody else in my heart for greasy deliciousness!”

“Greasy, huh?” She gave him a mock-indignant sniff. “I remember you being more of a charmer than this. You’re off your game today.”

“You say that like greasy is a bad thing! It’s the best, isn’t it Gorku?”

“Taco grease is the bestest.” Gorku affirmed, loyally.

She flicked her ears amusedly and flipped a couple of crispy taco shells out of the warming cabinet. “So why do you two smell so glum today?”

“Gorku’s been accepted to the Rites for the Second Ring,” Leemu explained.

“Oh? Isn’t that a good th–? Oh. You’re going away for a while, huh?”

Gorku duck-nodded. “A year. Stoneback’s Rings are long. An’ I won’t be able ‘ta visit, neither.”

“…Congratulations, then, but… That’s a long time.” She started to pile all her best ingredients into the shells for them. “Well, then, these are on me.”

“Thanks.” Leemu duck-nodded. “But if he gets a recommend for Third Ring, that’s at least another half a year on top of that, too.”

“Stonebacks never do anything small, do they?”

“It’s a lotta trainin’ an’ a lotta work,” Gorku confirmed, stoically. “Gonna miss my little cousin, here.”

Leela handed over the tacos. “…Just you left in that house then, huh?”

“Oh, well…” Leemu took his and held it in both paws. “Preed calls every other day. He just met his great nephew…”

“It’s not the same, though.”

“No.”

“He’s got you though!” Gorku suggested. “…Right?”

“Of course he does!” The way Leela didn’t even hesitate and seemed to think Gorku was being dumb to have even asked, immediately opened a bright sunny gap in the grey clouds that had been following Leemu around for days. She reached out and spatulated Leemu playfully on the nose with her swatting spatula. “But this is the only time I hand out freebies.”

“That’s fair,” Leemu agreed.

She gave him a knowing ear-flick that said she could tell how touched he was, then with a tilt of her nose indicated the customers behind him. “You two go spend your time together. I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Okay!”

They ambled away, enjoying the crunch, juices, meat, spice and all the other assorted wonders that were a proper taco. It might have been a human food, but the Gao in general (and Leela in particular) had perfected it as far as Leemu was concerned.

Gorku of course ate his so fast it was a wonder he tasted it at all, and spent the next minute or so happily licking the flavor out of the fur around his mouth.

“Don’t you ever just take the time to enjoy what you eat?” Leemu chastised him.

“Sure! I just gotta eat more’n you! An’ we gotta get ’ya back ‘ta liftin’ so’s ‘ya don’t waste away…” He licked the last drop out of his fur, then pant-grinned at Leemu. “Tol’ ‘ya that’d make ‘ya feel better, though.”

“Yeah. Still gonna miss you…”

Gorku sidled up next to Leemu and pulled him into an affectionate sideways hug. “Me too. But I ain’t gonna be gone ‘ferever. All the prettiest females live here!”

That extracted a genuine, heartfelt chitter that reached all the way to Leemu’s belly. “Of course. What other reason could you have for coming back here?”

“‘Ta show my bestest cousin how strong I’m gettin’, o’ course!” Gorku actually spun excitedly. “An’ ‘ta see how many more cubs you’ve sired. I bet ‘yer gonna have at least two more before I’m back!”

Fyu’s nuts he was predictable. But still…

“We’ll see.”

“…You’ll be okay, right?” Gorku asked, switching from playful confidence to concern so fast that anybody else would have had bruises.

Leemu glanced back at the square, at the fragrant column of steam over Ninja Taco and saw with some gratification that her line was a lot longer than the baklava guy’s. He liked Folctha. It wasn’t going to be the same without Preed and Gorku around, but…

…But he still had friends here. And he’d have hated to stop them from moving on.

“Yeah,” he promised and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’ll be okay.”

It was nothing but the truth.

Date Point: 17y3m3w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor system, Uncharted space

Darcy

“Well, yes, I know but you’ve got to understand there’s a lot of folks here who don’t know you as well as I do.”

A parade of emoticons splashed across Darcy’s tablet. The Entity didn’t strictly need them, as it had demonstrated plenty of times when it got frustrated and chose to speak via its archived copy of Ava Ríos’ memories and personality, but it preferred its own pictorial language which Darcy was becoming steadily more conversant in.

Something about retaining itself for as long as possible before those other memories completely integrated and it ceased to be either and became something else. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Darcy, but the Entity had always been adamant that the moment it fully integrated Ava’s personality would be the moment it… well, crossed a rubicon, and was never quite the same again.

If there was one thing the Entity had, it was quite strong beliefs about what constituted self. It founded itself around what it had termed—through the Ava-scan—its ‘subjective continuity of experience.’ And from what Darcy could gather, the moment two such subjective streams merged, you wound up with a new one. And the Entity was keen for its current one to last as long as possible.

Hence the emoticons. They were a… safe way for it to communicate without steadily eroding its own sense of self.

These particular ones combined to convey a general sense of being disgruntled, but understanding and resigned. It followed up with a complex cartouche of related emoticons that effectively translated to ‘but you still trust me?’

Darcy sighed and shrugged. “Yes, but… you’re gaining a lot of power. And I happen to believe that the kind of power you’re building up is more than any individual can be trusted with.”

It requested a clarification, so she stood up and boiled some water to make a cup of green tea.

“How many ships is your fleet up to, now?” she asked. She nodded at the reply it gave. “Okay, so… it took you three months to double in size.”

:Green tick:

“So in a year, you’ll be sixteen times as big as you are now.”

:Green tick: :wavy line: — ‘More or less.’

“And in two years, two hundred and fifty-six times bigger. Then two thousand times by the three year mark. That scares people. Hell, the size of the entire AEC fleet, between the Royal Navy Space Service, the US Space Force and the 955th and everything the Gao have between Clans Stoneback, One-Fang and Fireclaw… you will be a bigger fleet than all that combined by September.”

A complex burst of graphics conveyed the sentiment, ‘But still smaller than the Hunters’

“Right, but not forever. Where will you be in ten years if you keep expanding?” She let the tea steep and leaned against her desk to wait for it. “That much power worries me, and I know you better than anyone. I think.”

:Green tick:

“Right. So all the people on this station who don’t know you, all they see is a heavily-armed swarm of death machines growing at an exponential rate.”

Over the course of several lines the Entity first conceded the point, then added—liberally peppering in de-intensifiers so as to make it clear that this was not meant to be menacing—the observation that they couldn’t stop it at this point even if they wanted to.

“Well, exactly. Lewis was right, the cat’s out of the bag now. The genie’s out of the bottle. Whatever. You’re a Von Neumann swarm now, we’re just going to have to deal with that I guess.”

With a peppering of emoticons, the Entity professed the reassurance that it was, at least, not a stupid Von Neumann swarm. It followed this with a collection of human and Gaoian faces, and a string of green ticks: ‘I like people.’

“So what’s the plan?”

She sat back and watch the little images march upwards. It went on for some time, as such complex thoughts often did, and it said something like…

‘I plan to live forever. But not alongside the Hunters. They have to go. And you need a huge fleet and lots of firepower now that they are fortifying their home systems. If you want them gone, then I can do that, once I am large enough. After that, it’s a big galaxy and I can grow large enough to protect it while using only a fraction of its resources. I will spread out, and I will defend. I am very patient.’

“Defend against what?”

:Shrug:

:Galaxy: :Arrow: :Galaxy: :Question mark:

“You think that’s likely?”

:Shrug:

:Boy scout:

“What does—? Oh. Be prepared? It can’t hurt to be prepared?”

:Green tick:

“Well… like you said, there’s not much we can do about you at this point. I’m glad you’re on our side.”

:Green tick: :Green tick: :Green tick:

:Heart:

Darcy smiled. “I like you too.”

:Big smile:

“Still… won’t you get lonely? All by yourself, spread out over a whole galaxy, waiting to defend us from threats that may never come? I mean, you’re going to outlive me. Dataforms can exist indefinitely, you might outlive the entire human race. Your memories—the archive you carry—might go on to be the last human being in existence.”

:Sad face:

“Yeah, but… you need to think about that sooner rather than later.” Darcy picked up her tea and sipped it. “Indefinitely is a long time. What happens when it’s just you?”

There was a pause of nearly twenty seconds, a sign that the Entity was thinking good and long and hard about that one. The reply, when it came, achieved some pretty startling brevity in the form of seven symbols that collectively meant:

‘Life is life.’

“Even the Hunters?”

A full minute passed before it replied. This time, the reply was even more brief.

:Shrug:

“…Yeah. Guess you’ll just have to play it by ear, huh?”

Somehow, the next green tick managed to convey a degree of reluctance and uncertainty. Clearly she’d given it something to think about.

“Well, I’ll let you chew on that. I should get back to work, these relay worlds don’t find themselves, you know.

:Green tick:

:Wave:

“Yup. ‘Bye!”

She put the tablet in sleep mode and set it aside, along with her lingering worries. After all, there was no point in worrying about something she couldn’t change… And besides.

She trusted it.

11th day of the first year of liberation
Library bunker at Old-Bent-Leg, a freed world

Ukusevi

Uku woke to the sound of a brawl.

She scrambled out of bed, got her legs tangled in her blanket, nearly fell over and had to waste several seconds disentangling herself, during which time the sounds of violence outside in the library only intensified. It was only when she finally managed to open the door, however, that she realized she wasn’t looking at a brawl at all.

It was a siege.

No sooner had she poked her head out of her room to see what was going on than one of the men she trusted, Teeisyo’s father, pushed her back into it. “Stay inside, Keeper!”

He shoved his son in after her and closed the door. A second later, there was the sound of a pot smashing against the wood.

Teeisyo had the hiccups, and the wide-eyed look of a frightened child. Uku stooped and gathered him up in a hug, as much for her own benefit as his. “What happened?” she asked, fretfully.

“They came up the tunnels…” Teeisyo hiccupped again. “They had hammers and tools and fire and they just started hitting people, and–”

Uku rubbed his back and whispered a comforting noise, for what little good it might do.

The door opened, and Uku suppressed a frightened yelp. It was Haman, Teeisyo’s father again. He had blood on his face. “Keeper, we can’t hold them. We need to get you out of here.”

“But what about—?” Uku began, but he shook his head sharply and heaved her to her feet by her arm.

“Run first.”

He positioned himself between her and the attackers as they slipped out of her quarters and headed toward the surface tunnels, the ones where she met the aliens. A thrown brick, lobbed over the line of defenders, missed him by a finger’s width and knocked over a lantern stand.

Uku needed no more encouragement than that to put her head down and scuttle up the tunnel as fast as she could go. The shouting and sounds of violence echoing through the concrete halls behind her were terrifying, she’d never heard sounds like that from her own people before.

Was this what they became without the Punishment? She whimpered as they reached the room where she usually met with the aliens, and Haman worked its heavy locking mechanism. Once upon a time these tunnels had been waterways, and the doors were designed to hold it all back. They weren’t quick to open.

Teeisyo squeaked and buried her head in Uku’s shoulder as a man she didn’t know sprang into the tunnel from a side passage with a mattock in his hand. He shot the unarmed three of them a look of bloody, righteous hatred, and charged.

The door sprang open. Something short, dark and powerful pulled Uku, Haman and the boy through, then barged past them. The mattock swung, missed, knocked chips of stone off the wall. There was a blur of motion, a loud crack, then a knife flashed in the gloom, just once.

Hoeff.

The human trained a compact black rifle down the hallway and barked something in his own language. Garr-avf was waiting in the room beyond, and he ushered Uku, Haman and Teeisyo into the waiting protection of two more Gao in faceless black armor, who in turn tried to guide her forcibly up toward the surface.

“No!” Uku tried to stay put. “You’ve got to help them, they’re being murdered back there!”

“You first,” Garr-avf replied. Out in the corridor, more men poured out of the library, then hesitated at the sight of a heavily armed alien staring them down. The sight of them made Teeisyo whimper.

The door behind Uku squealed open, and something new squeezed through it. A Gao, maybe, but…

Big.

He was like a furry wall with claws, wearing heavy armor with a stylized Gao on the shoulder, its back rucked up into a snow-capped mountain. The ones who squeezed through behind him were much the same. Garr-avf and the other two respectfully got out of their way, bundling the three Freed Folk safely into their wake.

If one dense human had been enough to make the angry mob pursuing Uku hesitate, the sight of half a dozen rangy, powerful monsters advancing on them quite rightly put the fear of the Almighty back into the rioting men. Especially when the leader laid a huge clawed paw on Hoeff’s shoulder then stepped past him.

The translator in his armor’s chest gave him a resonant, deep, coarse voice.

“My name,” he declared, “is Grandfather Vark. An’ I came down here in these tiny tunnels ‘ta save you stupid fucks. Now, y’all seemed to have calmed down all-sudden…you gonna stay that way, or do I gotta show you my nasty side?”

A few of the violent mob trapped at the front took refuge in bravado. One of them stepped forward and hefted a hammer, though his ears were plastered flat against his back from fear.

“We came here to punish a heretic, alien!” he snapped, desperately.

“Oh? ‘Yer Punishers now, are ‘ye?” An array of titanium fangs gleamed in the torchlight, hinting darkly at what Vark had personally done to the last set of so-called punishers. “So come up, then! Come Punish me, if you dare!”

Peering out between the press of hulking bodies, Uku could see the way that several of the ones in the back decided they weren’t brave enough, and quietly slipped away into the dark.

“…No? Hmm. Coulda swore you were swingin’ like ‘ya had ten ton nuts just now…”

The self-appointed spokesman at the front glanced urgently behind him, and realized that he was rapidly losing followers. Still, he hefted the hammer again, though Uku was beginning to wonder how there wasn’t a wet trickle running down his leg. She felt terrified of Vark herself, and she was safely behind him.

“Boy, you swing that hammer, and I will slap ‘yer skull so hard it’ll s’plode all over these walls. Think carefully.”

“…Th-this isn’t your affair. You’re interfering in, in a matter of faith…” Only a few nervous die-hards remained at the leader’s back, now.

“Oh, you poor dumb-fuck child.” Vark’s chitter carried a freight of dark amusement. “Lemme tell ‘ya what happens next. You lose. That’s the only way this goes down. How you lose is entirely up ‘ta you. So, if I’m gonna be hosin’ my armor down today, I’d like ‘ta get the messy bit over with. Make up ‘yer mind, boy.”

The hammer rang loudly as it dropped onto the concrete. A second or so behind it followed an assortment of knives, cleavers, shovels, axes and other hardware.

“Good boy.” Vark’s voice was heavy with derision. “Now get. An’ you tell whoever told ‘ya ‘ta come here that if you try again, we ain’t gonna be so nice next time.”

With that, Vark turned his back dismissively and made to prowl off.

The ringleader wasn’t quite cowed yet, though. Some courage returned when he wasn’t directly facing down those metal teeth. “Y–you’re just one man! This was only a raiding party!”

That prompted a shuddering growl from deep inside Vark’s armored chest. Then he moved. He moved so fast it was difficult to follow, but in practically a heartbeat he was right up in the self-appointed leader’s face with only a few inches between them.

The huge Gaoian sniffed the air around the man’s face, then growled again. “I know, boy. An’ so was this. I got literally a billion Gao I can bring down on this place in the next few weeks. What’chu got? An’ you think I’m the worstest ‘yer ever gonna meet? We got many more like me, an’ I’m a fuckin’ cub next ‘ta my boss! So how’s ‘bout we stop wit’ the stupid-ass dick measurin’ games? Or…don’t. It’s ‘yer choice.”

“…” Uku clearly saw the moment the last few zealots’ resolve broke. They started backing away, eyes wide, hands up protectively.

“I coulda swore I just told ‘ya to git.” Vark snarled.

They fled.

As Vark’s team swept past him down into the library, Hoeff relaxed, lowered his rifle, and said something that didn’t translate, but which certainly sounded approving.

Whatever it was he said, Vark had a reply. “Yeah, I know. But that’s one o’ the advantages o’ being big an’ mean. Sometimes it’s ‘nuff ‘ta stop a fight.”

“My people!” Uku scrambled to get back toward the library, but Vark put up a huge paw and stopped her, remarkably gently.

“My Brothers are takin’ care of ‘em,” he said.

Uku glanced down at the dead man on the ground, the one Hoeff had dispatched with a single efficient stab to the throat. Something cold rose up in her belly, but she shut her eyes and wrestled it back down with a shiver.

“…It shouldn’t have come to this…” she lamented.

“That’s on them, not you.” Vark glanced over his shoulder down toward the library. “…We stopped ‘em today. But they’ll find their balls again if we let ‘em. Best if you come with us, Keeper. We can keep you safe, an’ if y’ain’t there then ‘yer enemies won’t have no reason ‘ta hurt ‘yer people.”

“…They’ll come for the others, too. The ones who sided with me.”

“Already taken care of,” Vark promised her. He looked over Uku at his men. “Get her ‘ta safety.”

Uku didn’t resist this time. As more Gao poured past her into the library to restore order and save those who could be saved, she allowed Garr-avf and Hoeff to fall in alongside her and lead her to the surface.

Somehow she knew, however, that she would never see the library again.

Date point: 17y3m3w1d AV
Dodge City, Ford County, Kansas, USA, Earth

Austin Beaufort

“Shit, Austin, you look like you took a dump and found a kidney in the bowl. You okay, baby?”

Austin had experienced worse hangovers, but at least those left some clue as to what on Earth he’d done to earn the pain. This one? It’d come outta nowhere. He just woke up in his bed and felt like someone had beaten his brain flat with a sledgehammer, and then went after the rest of him for an encore.

He wasn’t exactly old…hell, he weren’t even twenty-five yet! And he hadn’t let himself go from his athletic glory days, either…which kept the ladies interested, and was usually how he earned his hangovers…well, not since Lauren decided to go steady. Come to think of it, why wasn’t she suffering? They did everything together these days…

…Whatever. He didn’t want to think about it. He just wanted a full belly and something to drink.

“Fuck, I don’t even know.” He leaned over and gave her a kiss, then sat opposite her. “I just woke up feeling like shit.”

“Aww. Man flu?”

Aching head or not, Austin laughed. “Fuck you, babe,” he said, affectionately.

“Later.” She winked at him with her trademark big grin. “I wanna make the best of my time before you get into tillage and planting.”

“I thought you liked how I plow…”

“Pervert.” She smirked, and frisbeed a menu at him. “I’ve got tables to wait. Try not to whine too much.” And with that she stood back up and spun away from him with a cute little swish of her skirt…

“I’ll have the usual!” he called after her, feeling better already. She turned, grinned, waggled her notepad at him, and got back to work. Austin sat back and let out a deep breath. He still felt beaten-up, but that’d mend. And she sure looked pretty as hell with that ring on her finger…

Yeah.

Life was good.

Date Point:17y3m3w5d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3KPc arm

Julian Etscitty

Yan’s armpits were just as lovingly smelly as ever, which Julian learned as the monstrous chief of the Ten’Gewek wrassled him into all sorts of vaguely pretzel-like shapes. But that was the price of his friendship, when they hadn’t seen each other for too long.

Julian had made a kind of family vacation out of this visit. Al had a few days of downtime while the factory at Chiune Station got the next Misfit superstructure ready for her team to work on, Xiù’s property portfolio mostly managed itself and she seemed to genuinely enjoy being otherwise a homemaker… The trickiest part had been pulling Tristan and Ramsey out of school for a few days. There’d been a negotiation with Amanda, a quick talk with the social worker…

But in the end, they’d got permission. The boys had been giddy with excitement at the chance to actually explore an alien world, and had got amusingly defensive when Al had pointed out that, technically, they lived on one.

Anna and Harrison of course were fairly portable, though they came with a sizeable luggage of stuff that the Ten’Gewek women were finding deeply amusing. Clothes and diapers and toys and changes of clothes, and pulped food because they were starting to introduce Anna to the early stages of weaning… in the end hardly any of it was actually necessary, because there were too many fascinated cavemonkeys who wanted to grin for the babies or tickle or…

Fortunately, though Ten’Gewek grew up to be a lot more sturdy than most humans, in the first year or so of their lives there wasn’t much difference.

And so, their arrival had gone off in an extremely predictable manner. They arrived, the village lookout announced them. Yan and Singer came galloping up to the platform and there were spine-shattering hugs and general happiness. Food was immediately shared—Julian had brought along a pair of hams, because the Ten’Gewek loved it the most—and once all of that had been taken care of, the group split up.

Al and Xiù were immediately swallowed up by the women and some of the older more “grandfatherly” men. Julian wasn’t worried; the Ten’Gewek weren’t savages, and besides: they were being somewhat fiercely defended by Singer. The boys were dragged off to the forge by Vemik, who despite being very thoroughly a young adult at this point, hadn’t ever lost his manic excitement over…well, anything really.

Yan had pulled Julian off to go talk in private before they spoke with Professor and the nearby Given-Men. And, since it would take them a while to show up, indulge in a protracted bout of Julian Squishing. The stronger and tougher Julian grew, the harder the Ten’Gewek wanted to play…and that was extra true with Yan.

Maybe the day would come where Julian could score a win against Yan. Hell, maybe he could beat up Firth and steal ‘Horse’s lunch money on that day, too. So, that being somewhat unlikely, he endured the indignities of being totally outclassed in basically every way a man could be outclassed, and just tried his best.

That seemed to be good enough for Yan, who eventually decided to be merciful. With a happy hoot he let Julian go, then bounced away, sprang up a tree, flung himself to another tree, barreled back down that one with a ground-shaking crash, and then sprawled on his back in the dirt with a happy expression.

“Get it out of your system, big guy?”

“You’re getting stronger!” Yan beamed approvingly at him. “Good man of the tribe!”

“Heh.” Julian did enjoy flattery, he wasn’t gonna lie…maybe he showed himself off a little. He wouldn’t tell the girls. “Feels good, yeah. Also, it’s just nice to be back, y’know?”

“You were meant for strong worlds, Jooyun. Earth, here…Cimbrean I think is too easy.”

“Well, you’re not wrong…” Julian shrugged. “But anyway, I said a while ago I’d bring the family to visit, so…here we are! Try not to play so hard with them, will you?”

“I know how to play gentle,” Yan promised, with a touch of reproach. “Didn’t break you ever did I?”

Which was honestly impressive, given that Yan handily outweighed a full-grown bull. But still…

“There was that one time when you tossed me up to grab that melon, remember?”

“Feh. You missed the branch! Not my fault. And you just had a bruise!” Yan trilled and sat up, propping himself on his tail. “What kept you so busy? Not see you in hand of hands of days!”

“You know that planet Ferd and his men went to?”

“Yes. He say much about that. Tell some very tall stories, maybe…”

“They’re all true.” Funny how that idiom was common between their species. And with the Gao, too! “He really did break a tank-Hunter almost by himself, and his men did much the same to another. My friends in the SOR have nothin’ but good things to say about ‘em.”

Yan hooted his approval. “Good! And the new sky-people?” He fished some Werne jerky out of his hip pouch and bit a chunk off, then tossed a piece toward Julian.

“They’re… tougher than they look.”

“That sounds like careful words.”

“I’m an envoy, remember? I have to use my words carefully. I tell everyone your people are clever, quick to learn and stronger than pretty much anybody. What I don’t tell them is that you’ve only just begun to learn steel, that your writing isn’t even two years old, that you need high gravity and dense air and a frankly alarming amount of meat several times a day…”

“Yes, yes.” Yan waved that off and tore into his jerky again, using his two-inch-long canines to rip the leather-hard meat into shreds. Knowing Yan, that wasn’t exactly an accidental show of just what kind of man he was. “So you say, tougher than they look. Means, they don’t look tough. Ferd say, they all very sick, yes?”

“Their world is poisoned. The air they breathe is poison, the water will blister your skin, the trees are all stunted and small… I’ve told you about photosynthesis, right?”

“Green plants make the ock-see-gen that goes in air that we need to breathe,” Yan summarized.

“Yeah, well, photosynthetic life on that planet is hanging by a thread. In a few more hands of years, it might have collapsed entirely, and then…” Julian sighed. “…but they’re alive. They’re tough inside, strong against poisons and radiation. With clean air, good water and enough food, they might be about the same as the Gao.”

“Sounds like they should leave.”

“Some of them want to. Others think the Almighty—they believe in a single god, like a lot of my people do—is punishing them for something their people did in the past and that it would be sinful to leave.”

“Hrrm…” Yan pinched some debris thoughtfully out of the fluffy bit of crest at the end of his tail. “Still think they should leave. Maybe they go to Cimbrean, yes?”

“And live alongside us?” Julian thought about it. “…That could come with a lot of problems. There’s too many of them for the Alien Quarter, so they’d have to make their own city, maybe even get some of their own territory… And there’s lots to go around, but negotiating that between the five colonies could take years.”

“From what I see of Dominion, take years no matter where they go.”

“Yeah. They need a place, like, yesterday. The longer they stay, the nastier that schism will get. It’s already come to blows once. Last thing we want is to save ‘em only for them to wipe themselves out in a religious civil war.”

Yan looked up into the sky thoughtfully. “…We have worlds, you said. Dominion rules gave us nearby planets once they know about us.”

“Well, yes…?”

“No good to us now,” Yan shrugged. “How long until we fly between worlds for ourselves? Vemik is smart, but not that smart. Also… we were made for here. The gods made us strong, but our strength is tied to here, to Akyarawanentuo.” He jabbed a finger toward the ground for emphasis.

Akyawentuo, the planet’s official name, basically meant “Place where all things are under the sky,” in Yan’s dialect of the People’s language. The version he’d just uttered more narrowly meant “this place where all things are under the sky.” There were times when Peoplespeak, with its weird conjugations and contractions and run-on words, could express very specific concepts.

“Y—” It took a few seconds for Julian to get his voice into gear. “…So you’d just…? Yan, that’s a… A whole planet would be about the biggest Giving possible!”

“No Giving at all, if it’s no use to us,” Yan replied, evenly.

“You’ve never been there! You don’t know that!”

“I know you and you tell me about these plan-ets. So, I trust you.”

“All I read is the Directorate survey report. That’s like if I told you there were Werne to the north, but didn’t mention how many, how far, or if there were any good young bulls. It’s not enough to make a decision like this.”

“…Hrrm.” Yan set his tail aside again. “…Maybe I should go see, then.”

“…” Julian had no immediate response but to look at Yan in wonder. “Do…do you understand what you are trying to set in motion, here? You are, on a well-meaning whim, giving away one of your people’s planets and then for an encore, asking us to mount a surprise expedition, too!”

“Expedition first,” Yan said, breezily. “You’re right. Shouldn’t give it away without looking at it first.”

He bared his teeth in a pleased grin at the dumbfounded look on Julian’s face. “Crazy?”

“…Yeah.”

“Lots of crazy in the sky. Lots of crazy in here, too.” he unfolded a long arm and prodded Julian gently in the forehead. “Crazy enough to fight a war for my people. Nearly get killed. Nearly get your women killed for us. But you did it, and if you hadn’t…” he left the thought unfinished.

“That’s not even remotely on the same scale.”

“No? All of my people, alive and well, with vack-seens now and better health than ever and better hunting than even my grandfather would boast of. We killed a Brown One, Jooyun, and lost only one man. You gave us a whole future. That’s the biggest Giving, for me. One plan-et we probably never use, next to that? Bah.” He waved the same hand dismissively.

“You wouldn’t even be Giving it to us, though!”

Yan gave him an impatient look. “You want to help these people or not?”

“Well… Of course I do. But not at your expense!”

“All things are at somebody’s expense, Jooyun.”

“Well, yes, but it’s not just yours anyway. It belongs to all Ten’gewek. Yan Given-Man can’t just give it away on a whim.”

Yan shrugged. “Lodge will think as I do,” he predicted.

“Yan,” Julian sighed. “Of course they will. You fucking terrify them.”

“Yes,” Yan said with no small amount of smugness in his voice. “So I talk last, and listen to them before I scare them. But Jooyun, you say yourself many times, you think my people probably will always be ‘one-planet species.’ So does Professor Daniel, and Core-tie. And so do I. We are made for this place. If we do as you do, build cities, civilize, then we grow like the city-People. Safe. Weak. No use to anyone. What good is a world that would make us soft? We are not sky-smart.”

“Yet.”

“I think, probably not ever. We would need to Give all that we are now, and you know this. So does Professor. It makes him sad, I think.”

“We did it once,” Julian pointed out. “We used to live like you, you’ve seen that. We Gave all that we were and became what we are. That’s life. That’s… you change, or you die, Yan.”

“You did not have Sky-Friends. We do. We have strength you need. I listen to Ferd. He boasts, but he does not lie. No, what we can Give is special. Let us Give as we can.”

Julian ran a hand through his hair out of a mix of frustration and… what? Admiration, sure. A lot of that. But that was the problem with arguing with Yan: once his mind was made up, it took earth-shattering force to change it.

The big guy hooted at his expression, clearly tickled. “And I am not giving them all the plan-ets, Jooyun. Just the small one!”

Jooyun sighed, but a chuckle was on its heels. “I can see I’m not gonna talk you out of it.”

“No!” Yan agreed, and flashed his smug grin again.

“…Fine. I’ll talk to the Ambassador, arrange a survey trip for you and whoever else you think should go. It’ll take a long time, we’re talking a whole planet here, you don’t just land and look around. A proper survey takes months. Hell, the girls and I only managed three in the whole time we were doing it.”

“They do not have much time,” Yan reminded him. “But I think we say everything important. We say more when other men come visit. But now, I want to meet babies! Then maybe go fuck Loor’s Singer too!”

Julian laughed. The Singer from Loor’s tribe was one of Yan’s more regular ‘partners,’ in the carefree Ten’Gewek way. She was Loor’s half-sister, and her consistent favoring of Yan was one of the driving factors behind the two tribes’ close relationship.

She was, by Ten’Gewek standards, stunning. Hell, by human standards she was quite pretty, and that was honestly an achievement. Not because Ten’Gewek were ugly—they were far from it. It was more… Their woman could put most any bodybuilder to shame, Singers doubly so, and she in particular was a formidable amazon of a gal. But, Singers weren’t chosen just for their looks. They were chosen for their insight, intelligence, diplomacy and skill at wrangling the men.

She certainly wrangled Yan pretty well.

“You’ve had enough kids by her, big guy. Also, it occurs to me: I haven’t heard a word from either Tristan or Ramsey…”

“A good thing, with boys that age. Means they’re learning something.”

“You mean, getting into trouble.”

“Same thing!”

“Trouble with Vemik.”

“…Maybe we go back and see.”

Julian chuckled and rose to his feet. “Good idea. They’re prob’ly fine, I trust all three of them, but…”

“Always best to check,” Yan finished agreeably. With a shove of his tail he was on his feet again, and he set a relaxed, ambling pace back down toward the village with his characteristic rolling swagger.

He needn’t have worried too much. The boys were learning how to beat on steel, and had ash smudges on their faces that made their big happy grins shine out. Allison, having predicted this, had even brought along eye protection for them, and was watching with a proud expression.

Julian leaned into her and kissed her neck. “How are they doing?”

“Terrible. Worst blades I ever saw,” she grinned at him. “But hey, it’s their first time.”

“I see Vemik is super happy with the eyepro you got him…”

Ten’Gewek didn’t have noses, but they did have nasal cavities that opened into the roof of their mouths, and the adults had noticeably prognathous jaws. That gave Vemik a little spot on which he could rest his brand new mirror-coated goggles, though he was still fiddling with the elastic strap; it sat on his crest a bit uncomfortably, probably. He’d get used to it.

“Can’t have our supergenius gorilla friend losing his eyesight before he’s thirty,” Al said. “Shame they don’t make gloves in his size.”

“With hands like his? He doesn’t really need them.” Anyway. He’d not snuggled Al in at least half an hour, so he pulled her into an affectionate hug, and nuzzled at her neck.

She made a happy noise and burrowed her shoulders backwards into his chest. “…So. What important affairs were you menfolk discussing while us girls were back here looking after the children?”

Julian snorted. “Mostly wondering what kind of sammich you’ll be making me–OW!” Her elbows were pretty darn sharp. “Aww, c’mon! There ain’t even a kitchen here for you to be all barefoot in!”

“Oh, that does it!” She turned and deployed her cruellest weapon: she tickled his ribs.

Julian ran away, giggling, and it was only later in the evening, when everyone was tired and drifting off to sleep, that he had a chance to reflect. Here, safe among an adopted tribe on a quick little vacation, where he could run around and play like a little kid…

That was a heck of a blessing. He wasn’t totally free of course. He’d had to write some messages, people were getting downright alarmed at the idea of just giving away a planet…

Big important people would be getting involved very soon. But, that was a problem for tomorrow-Julian. Right now he had two beautiful women curled up with him on top of nice warm werne pelts, his kids safe and asleep at the other end of their little shelter…

Tristan snoring…

And shortly thereafter, Julian too.

Date Point: 17y4m1w AV
Starship Silent but Deadly, far uncharted space

Tooko

The clock opposite Tooko’s stasis booth flickered, and transitioned in an eyeblink from one date and time, to a very different one. Better yet, the new time was square in the middle of their ETA at the target system. Good.

He stepped out of the booth and shook off the lingering disorientation that stasis always left behind. Long-haul interstellar travel shouldn’t be so… well, from his perspective he’d backed into that booth and hit the button only five seconds ago, and literally nothing else had happened except for the clock. And yet, at the same time… there was some tickling thing in the back of his brain that knew it had been a lot longer than that. As though he’d just been lost in thought for a couple of months and hadn’t noticed.

…No, not quite. There was a thin layer of dust on everything, all generated before they went into stasis and then given months to settle. But other than that…

He ought to feel drained, or sore, or something. He ought to need to stretch. He ought to feel like he’d slept the whole way, not just sort of… skipped it.

He shook his head again, and slipped forward through the ship on four-paw to pour himself into his chair in the cockpit. There was a difference there: the leather felt cool to the touch through his fur. The lingering chill of low-power mode hadn’t quite left the upholstery yet.

As for his instruments… yup. They were exactly where they were meant to be. A cluster of about two dozen mostly uninteresting red stars, with a single bright yellow one in the middle

He released Wilde and Ferd from their booths. Like him, neither man took the time skip without a moment’s confusion. Ferd lingered in the booth for a moment as if waiting for something to happen, and Wilde started to stretch then seemed somewhat put out to discover he didn’t need to.

Stretching anyway to cover his embarrassment—pointlessly, because Tooko could smell it—he ambled forward through the ship and leaned on the back of Tooko’s chair.

“How’re we looking?” he asked.

“Looks like Mrwrki were right. There’s a strong signal coming from the second planet of that G-class system.”

“How far out are we?”

“Three hours to the termination shock.”

“Right.” Wilde wandered back through the living area then, clearly bereft of ideas for what to do with himself, grabbed the cleaning kit and started dusting.

Ferd decided to bring up their equipment from storage.

“It’ll be a long while before we’re ready, mate,” Wilde pointed out.

“Yes. Still should check things, they did not have stay-sis sky-magic.”

“Knock yourself out, then.”

Ferd gave him a confused look, then clearly deduced his meaning, shrugged, and set to work with a grunt.

Three hours later, exactly on schedule, the scant pressure of stellar plasma against SBD’s spiked briefly but dramatically, marking the moment they transitioned from interstellar space to the target system.

Beyond that…there wasn’t much interesting to report. Ferd did poke his head in–about the only part of him which fit anyway–grunted politely, and scritched Tooko on the back of his neck affectionately.

“Close, yes?”

“Ninety minutes to orbit,” Tooko confirmed.

“We should wake up men, eat, shit, warm up muscles.”

“You do that…” Tooko kept a close eye on his instruments. “I’ll get us down there in one piece…”

“Trouble?” Ferd gave the sensor readout an uncomprehending look.

“Enemy territory, and they already lost one of these things. If they’re remotely not stupid, they’re watching this one closely.”

“…Leave you alone, then.” Ferd nodded, and backed out of the cockpit.

“Thanks…” Tooko muttered, and adjusted course slightly. Star systems were energetic places, on their own scale. A giant naked fusion reaction hanging in space tended to dominate the local landscape, but all that radiation, gravity, the huge magnetic field and the way they all interacted with the planets and asteroids in its orbit…

To sensors as sensitive as SBD’s there was a lot of information out there to filter and make sense of. Little eddies in the quantum fields, odd gravimetric shifts, random spikes and squeals and mournful whoops in the radio bands coming from a gas giant…

There were things out there, visible as shadows in the noise. He gave them a wide birth, came in above the plane of the ecliptic rather than along it, and watched them closely, keeping the ship’s own warp down to a bare single-digit multiple of lightspeed. Painfully slow next to the shrieking pace she could achieve when he opened her up, but right now he was balancing speed and stealth. The longer they hung out in space, the more likely something would glance in their direction. The slower he went, the harder they were to see.

Once they were down on the surface they’d be harder to find, powered down and hidden among warm, dense, humid atmosphere, a powerful magnetic core and all the other things that made temperate worlds temperate. But out in the void…

Something moved. He killed the drive instantly, powered down to minimum reserve only. The gravity went, the heating clicked off. Ferd and Wilde made alarmed noises as they suddenly found themselves drifting in freefall.

Wilde grabbed the wall and boosted himself up to the cockpit.

“We fucked?” he whispered.

“Don’t know yet,” Tooko answered, more calmly than he felt. “And you don’t need to whisper.”

“…Right.” Wilde shivered at the volume of his own voice. “Don’t think I’ll get used to that. What happened?”

“Something’s out there. Almost as quiet as we are.” Tooko combed his whiskers with a claw, then pointed at his readout. “There. See?”

“Assume I know fuck all about these things, mate.”

“It’s subtle, but something out there’s moving superluminal.” Tooko watched it intently. As he did so, the thing—whatever it was—slipped away into the outer system at two kilolights. “…Probably a ship.”

“So… we fucked?”

“No, I think we’d be dead already if they’d seen us.” Tooko exhaled slowly. “But I’m going to take it slow on approach. We’re going to make like a natural phenomenon. Subluminal travel only from here. So, revised ETA is…” he glanced up. “…two days.”

“…Back in the box, huh?”

“For you two, yes.”

“Right.” Wilde clapped his hand on Tooko’s shoulder, and left him to work. “You heard the man, Ferd.”

They retreated back into the cargo bay, and a moment later a pair of beeps indicated to Tooko that they’d returned to stasis. He was alone on a dark ship that was barely generating any power, and he was being hunted.

He sighed, grabbed a blanket from his locker, and settled in for a long and stressful fall down the gravity well.

Date Point: 17y4m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

“…That would solve a big problem.”

Julian was tired. He’d enjoyed his time with the tribe, obviously, but the thing about that was he always had to participate. Ten’Gewek didn’t get days off, after all. The tribe always needed feeding, so there was always a hunt, always the need to bring home the kill, prove his value as one of their Men…

He could hack it. Heck, he could hack it well, these days. But that just meant he had to hunt bigger game, and do so more often. None of his increasingly ridiculous strength ever quite made up for him being human, or them being Ten’Gewek. They were built for different kinds of work and for them, carrying a bull Werne across their shoulders, up trees and hills all day long was easy. Running a few miles, though? They could if they had to, and could even get good at it…

Small victories were the secret to happiness, Julian had learned.

And of course, Yan never let him go without damn near breaking him in half. Affectionately. You…had to know them, to understand. For them, war and play and violence and sex were all dangerously related concepts. As long as nobody got hurt, and everyone had fun…

So the chance to sit down on a comfortably huge (and discreetly ultra-durable) chair in Ambassador Rockefeller’s office, drink some of his excellent coffee and just talk was pretty welcome. It wasn’t a substitute for the Xiù-massage and long nap he was going to enjoy when he got home, but it was still respite from his aching muscles. And considering he was on a high-dose Crude regime these days, that was saying something.

It was almost enough to distract him from the problem at hand. Almost.

“Them giving away a whole planet seems…” he shifted uncomfortably.

“It’s their planet to give away.” Rockefeller shrugged. “And from what I gather it’s Class Five. So Yan may be right, it may well just be useless to them.”

Julian waved his hand at the ground. “I mean, we’re sitting here on a Class Four right now, and Cimbrean’s plenty useful…”

“To us, yes. With a huge terraforming effort.” Rockefeller sipped his coffee. “You’re comparing apples to oranges, Julian. They aren’t us, their needs are different. Heck, you understand that better than most.”

“I’m just not sure that Yan gets how big what he’s proposing to do is…”

“Funny, and every other time you’re the one telling me to not underestimate just how well he understands things.” Rockefeller looked amused, but he finished his coffee and put it down. “I respect your concern for them, but don’t forget your obligations to us as well. You’re an officer of the United States, and it’s not your place to talk them out of decisions they have a perfect right to make.”

Julian nodded resignedly. “I know. And… heck, I admire their generosity. I’m just worried about it hurting them in the long run.”

“That ‘long run’ is probably at least a hundred years distant anyway.” Rockefeller sat back in his chair with a creak. “Meanwhile, the E-Skurel-Ir are descending into civil war. The violence has already started. There was an attempt on Ukusevi’s life.”

Julian forgot all about his Ten’Gewek concerns with a cold shock. “Just an attempt? She survived?”

“She’s now under Mister Hoeff’s protection, and enjoying the hospitality of Grandfather Vark of Clan Stoneback, General of the Grand Army of the Gao.” Rockefeller looked amused.

“…I don’t think I’ve met him.”

“Nor I, but I am given to understand he’s exactly the kind of Clan-Brother the Great Father can appreciate.”

“So…big, blunt, cheery, and violently direct?”

“Exactly. I suspect she’s safer than you or I, right now.” Rockefeller’s amusement twinkled in his eyes, then faded as he sat forward. “But those people are tearing themselves apart right now, and she’s requested asylum for herself and her like-minded. We need a place for them immediately, and Yan’s offer is about the best thing we could ask for.”

“So you’re going to approve it.”

“Julian, none of us have that authority. This is between the Ten’Gewek and the E-Skurel-Ir. Your survey mission to that planet will go ahead as quickly as your ship can be made ready.”

“We have a ship?”

“An old friend of yours, actually: Misfit. The Byron Group very kindly made her available to us. If you’d been on this planet last night, you would have seen her landing.”

“…Oh. Wow.” Julian had to admit, that was unexpectedly welcome news. Misfit hadn’t been home for three years. It’d be nice to see her again. “Uh… so how’s that going to work?”

“Her current crew will shuttle you, Yan and whoever else you think is necessary over to the target planet and together you’ll survey it. After she’s had some maintenance out at Chiune Station, of course.”

“…Oh man, Al’s gonna be giddy!” Julian smiled to himself. He wished he coulda been there to see the look on her face when she got back out to the hangar and found her old ship parked and waiting for her. Of the three of them, she’d always loved Misfit the most. She’d probably give it a hug.

Rockefeller chuckled. “Well, I won’t keep you then. You look like you need some rest anyway.”

Julian knew when he was being gently dismissed, in the nicest way. Besides, the Ambassador wasn’t wrong. He nodded, and rose to his feet. “Okay.”

“Enjoy yourself,” Rockefeller smiled, shook Julian’s hand, then turned to his computer. Julian let himself out.

As much as he wanted that cuddle and nap, however, he had one more stop to make on his way home: Nofl.

The whole transition off OG Cruezzir and onto Crue-D hadn’t been completely smooth sailing. Crue-D might be the more refined, more sophisticated, better drug in every way, but that was exactly the problem. There had been something kinda like withdrawal at first; he’d felt weak and lethargic, as if some vital part of him had just been…removed. There were also a few false starts as his gut biome had to be completely flushed and replaced—an experience he wouldn’t wish on anybody—and the attendant nutritional problems as his ability to properly digest food had taken a day or two to recover as well.

He was addicted to the drug, now. Addicted like the HEAT, kinda like the Spice from Dune. It was the perfect drug, in that way. It did nothing but good, so long as you kept taking it…

All-in-all, it would’ve been even worse without Nofl’s input. And if Julian was honest, less fun too. The little guy’s inimitable bedside manner was growing on him.

“Darling! Fabulous to see you! Come in, come in! Hop up on the slab and I’ll get the anal probe ready…”

Julian snorted. “Graffiti troll’s been back again, huh?” Nofl’s lab had suffered a few cases of vandalism over the last few months. Somebody out there had a grudge against Corti, and a passive-aggressive approach to venting it.

“With a scatalogical return to form! His recent work just hasn’t been inspired, but this morning’s offering was a masterpiece. I might have it framed!”

“I wouldn’t encourage ‘em.”

“It’s alright, I have a plan. I’ve decided to build a guard!”

“…Oh?”

Nofl pointed to a half-finished…project… on one of his smaller workbenches. “Stabby the Flamingo!”

“…I have so many questions. But, uh…let’s just stick with the physical.”

“You’re probably right. No anal probe, then?”

Julian smirked, “…No. Thank you.”

“Probably for the best, I don’t own one anyway.” Nofl tittered and guided Julian toward his scanner suite instead. “Back from Akyawentuo, I notice.”

“Oh?”

Nofl indicated the biofilter arch around his lab’s front door that swept his guests safely clean when they entered. “There’s a unique class of microorganism on that planet that you probably don’t even notice. Almost like an airborne phytoplankton. Totally harmless, in fact by deathworld microbe standards it’s practically a puppy. But…”

Frontline doesn’t catch it?”

“Oh, it’s not harmful. In fact it’ll all be dead by tomorrow, Human skin is not a hospitable environment for it, oh no.” Nofl rummaged through a mess of tools on his bench that was probably perfectly logical and ordered according to his own system. “But its presence is a surefire telltale of somebody who visited that planet. Ah!”

He turned and waved an implement up and down Julian’s body. “…Tch. Being pulled and stretched like that must hurt.”

Julian shrugged. “Not too bad.” Truth be told it hurt quite a heck of a lot, but, well. There was pain, and there was pain, the kind that warned a fella he was about to be torn in half. Yan was usually pretty good about avoiding the latter.

“Oh well, no major damage, and your bruises heal quickly… hold still, this is the tickly bit.”

Julian sighed and pulled his shirt up for Nofl to press the scanner to his belly. Sure enough, it tickled.

“Mmm…good news all around. No sign of a hernia or anything. Whatever you’re doing to have such a strong core, keep doing it! Internal organs are adapting to the Ceuezzir-derivative nicely…your heart seems to have strengthened considerably, goodness me! That’s one long-term worry off the list, eh?”

“I guess I’ve never really worried too much about that.” Julian shrugged.

“Unsurprising. The life you lead you’re far more likely to be shot, stabbed, blown up, or eaten by something…”

“No no, I mean…I’ve never really felt heart pains, y’know? Like, I’m always out of breath before I feel anything like that.”

“A good sign! Still, given your prodigious mass, it’s good to keep on top of these things…”

“Right. So. Clean bill of health?”

“As far as my considerable talents say, yes. You’re as healthy as a HEAT operator!” Nofl turned, tossed the scanner back onto the bench and grabbed a tablet. “Now. I’m sure you’re much more interested in my impression of your children.”

Julian gulped, and nodded fervently. On that point, Nofl was so right that he didn’t even want to say it.

Fortunately, the little guy saw right through him. Corti faces weren’t very expressive, but Nofl had a particular smirk he wore in moments like these as he handed over the tablet. “They have, I’m pleased to announce, suffered no detectable deviation from their expected neural development. As far as I can tell you have a pair of basically normal human babies, just as your own doctors said.”

Julian heaved a huge, relieved sigh. He trusted human doctors, of course, but Nofl was the guy who’d first invented Cruezzir. There was absolutely nobody in the galaxy more qualified to comment on its effects. Between his opinion and the expert advice of the paediatricians, a dizzying weight had just slid off him.

Still, where his kids were concerned, there was no such thing as too safe. “You’re sure now? Normal?”

“Well. They’re well-developed for their age, but within normal bounds. I don’t think you need to worry about either of them growing up as schizophrenic supersoldiers.”

“Christ.” Julian leaned against a counter. “…I feel like we dodged a bullet there.”

“My working theory with Cruezzir and its relationship to human mental health is that it strengthens the pathways your brains naturally develop in response to repeated crisis situations. You’re a profoundly resilient people that way. But your babies, of course, are being raised in a loving home. No abnormal stress means none of the triggers that Cruezzir amplifies.”

Julian nodded. “…That makes sense. So they’re basically normal.”

“Completely normal, darling. And by ‘normal’ what I mean is ‘within expected biological norms.’” Nofl smiled, and sauntered over across his lab. “I can tell that’s a weight of your shoulders. Coffee?”

“No thanks. Already had some, and I was gonna take a nap when I get home.”

“I have the best decaf in the galaxy?”

Julian chuckled. “…Some other time. Thanks, Nofl.”

“Oh, I always have time for you. Why don’t you check in later, you can see how Stabby is progressing.”

Julian glanced at the bizarre project. “…I’ll… see if I can make time in my busy schedule.”

“There’s always more time than you think, darling! But go on, be your usual busy-bee self!”

Julian shook his head and let himself out, chuckling to himself. As far as he could tell, Nofl viewed him as a kind of challenge. Julian had long ago stopped finding his antics shocking, so Nofl responded by being aggressively weirder whenever Julian visited. So far, it seemed a stalemate: Julian wasn’t yet completely immune to the little gray fella’s antics, but Nofl still hadn’t achieved whatever his definition of victory was.

Probably.

He went home. There’d be more work coming in the imminent future, and he needed to rest up for it, spend time with his loved ones…

But at least now he could worry about them a little less.

Date Point: 17y4m1w2d AV
The Clawhold, a liberated world, former Hunter space

Ginn, aide-de-camp to Grandfather Vark of Clan Stoneback

With the endless global industry halted, air quality was soaring. There was still a haze of carcinogenic particles in the air, but it was thinner than ever before, to the point where Ginn could actually see the mountains near the Clawhold with the more-or-less naked eye. They looked dirty, dead and brown, but they were still a view.

It was hopeful. One thing Ginn hadn’t properly appreciated in his short years was just how connected to nature a people truly were. Balls, it wasn’t until he’d left Gao for an alien world to save an alien species that he noticed just how much he…missed it. Missed Gao.

Speaking of that alien species, though, the clear weather had brought out the rioters.

Hooded and swathed in their own cobbled-together protective gear, armed with an assortment of stones, work tools, glass bottles full of flammable liquid or acid, or just angry words, there were a few thousand E-Skurel-Ir marching determinedly down the cracked asphalt that had once been a major road. In a few minutes, they’d reach the Clawhold’s checkpoints, and then…

Ginn was not trained in riot control. That was something for the Straightshields, who had been arriving en masse over the last couple of days, complete with their identical armor, all wielded by the same identical Judge-Brothers. Same respectable-but-not-ridiculous height, same capably broad shoulders, same burly-but-not-huge build. They had the same authoritative voices. Same movements. Balls, they almost had the same scent. It was deeply unsettling.

But of course, workhouse rivalries could get pretty nasty…so it wasn’t like they were out of practice.

The E-Skurel-Ir rioters were doggedly ignoring the loud broadcast warning them to disperse, however. They were religiously angry, and Ginn hadn’t really seen that before. They weren’t just angry, they were disgusted at something, and eager to purge it.

He wasn’t part of this fight. He was glued to Vark’s side, taking care of the daily little hairball-like problems for the Grandfather, so he could focus on leading, and doing. So, for now, Ginn was merely observing.

He knew what he was about to watch, having seen a couple of workhouse riots. He was about to watch the Straightshields beat the E-Skurel-Ir into bloody pulps.

There was a reason Emberpelt medics and Openpaw doctors were staged up behind them.

A bottle, trailing oily black smoke and licks of flame, arced through the air and smashed on the concrete a pounce in front of the Straightshield line. The armored Brothers ignored it, even as blue-edged flames slathered the road.

“Y’ever seen a riot before, Ginn?” Vark asked, conversationally.

“Yeah.”

“Were ‘ya on the receivin’ end?”

“No.” Some honest instinct compelled Ginn to clarify after a second: “I slipped away before it turned nasty.”

“Prob’ly smart. It ain’t fun gettin’ smacked around by batons.”

Of course Vark knew what that felt like. Ginn duck-shrugged. “It was the gas,” he recalled. “Like getting smacked in the nose by a bag full of drain chemicals. I don’t think I could have taken a real dose of that.”

“Yeah. Too bad the E-Skurel-Ir are kinda immune.” Vark sniffed behind his mask. “We might need ‘ta use CS gas on ‘em. It’s a Human thing. Burns the skin horribly, an’ it’ll make even them hurt in their nose.”

“That sounds… awful…?”

“Naw. That all clears up the second ‘ya get outta the gas. But trust me, CS gas for a Gaoian’s nose feels like if Daar jumped on ‘yer balls. An’ lit ‘em on fire.”

Gin suppressed a shiver at that mental image, and silently wished for some kind of work to come along to distract him. He was pretty familiar with violence himself, it held no fascination for him. He’d be quite glad to be back indoors, taking care of Vark’s business.

“Grandfather…may I ask why we’re here?”

“Stoneback and Straightshield, we’ve got ancient relations, right?”

“Yes?”

“Well, part o’ that is we back each other up. I’m here ‘ta see jus’ how bad the rioting’s gonna get.”

Ginn watched the Straightshields heft their shields and angle them upwards to deflect a rain of thrown rocks, before advancing. They smashed their batons against their shields to the cadence of their steady, relentless forward march, a heavy hammering sound that bounced up and down the street and off the buildings.

The rioters’ answer was more thrown firebombs and acid bottles.

“…Are the Stonebacks going to get involved?”

“Prob’ly not. ‘Cuz we don’t play nice, when we gotta wade in.” Vark sniffed again. “One’a the goals of riot control is ‘ta protect the dumbshits from their own stupid. We… ain’t so good at that. We’re the breaker of Clans.”

Ginn flinched as the Straightshield line met the front row of angry E-Skurel-Ir. It didn’t look much like the Straightshields played nice, either.

But there was a logic and purpose to it all, he could see after a few seconds. While the Brothers at the front held the line, a Judge-Father behind them would identify a particularly charismatic troublemaker who was riling up the ones around them. He’d point out the target, and a pawful of second-rank Brothers would inject themselves into the mob, ignoring their shouting and battering weapons, pushing them aside until they reached the ringleader, who was surgically extracted.

There was care to it, too. They weren’t letting anyone get crushed in the push of bodies. If an E-Skurel-Ir fell, they abruptly found themselves behind the shield line rather than trampled. Before the rioter had any idea what was happening, he was shoved snout-down into the ground, his hands and feet were zip-tied together, and then he was unceremoniously tossed into a padded wagon along with the rest of them.

“Do you see the point o’ all this, Ginn?”

It wasn’t gentle, but it was careful. Methodical. Thorough.

“It’s like you said. They’re actually protecting the rioters from themselves.”

“Yeah. But this is also war, too. The goal is to break their will, so’s they don’t get any itchy ideas no more. It ain’t a pretty business.”

“…No.” Ginn nodded at that. The demoralizing effect of having their leaders and prophets snatched from their midst was already showing. The front line had less purpose now, they’d thrown their stones and bottles, they’d worn their arms out trying to beat down the shield wall. The fight was going out of them pretty quickly.

When a pair of armored vehicles rolled up behind the Straightshields and turned on a pair of high-pressure water cannons, the momentum completely turned around. The water had a bright blue indelible dye in it, and it drove the mob back up the road, creating a clear gap that brought the Brothers some respite, washed away any lingering corrosives or accelerants…

Ginn decided he’d changed his mind. This was interesting, in its methodically brutal way.

“They’ll be back,” Vark predicted, as the back of the riot started to turn ragged and drain away down alleyways and into the warrens below the old ruined streets. “Take more’n one bloody nose ‘ta beat all the fight outta them.”

“They’ve got four hundred years of pent-up frustration, rage and justice to work out of their systems.”

“Ayup.” Vark sank to all fours and shook as if he was trying to re-seat his NBC gear. “C’mon. You and I gotta get ready. The Great Father’s gonna be here soon ‘ta meet with the object of their hatred.”

“Oh, that’s going to be interesting.” Ginn warmed to the idea. He’d had the chance to get a good sniff of Ukusevi during her short stay on the base so far. She seemed to have the kind of toughness that only emerged in people who’d been hammered on life’s anvil from day one. Cushy safe job underground spent filing the papers and books notwithstanding, he could easily see how she’d managed to rile up an angry sect against her.

Seeing her meet the Great Father would be an education, no doubt.

Well. Ginn probably wouldn’t get to see that, actually. That didn’t seem like the kind of conversation lowly aides got to stick around for, and he wasn’t Daar’s aide in the first place. But it was fun to imagine.

He turned his mind back to his actual job. “Anyway, Champion Fiin sends his regrets, says he’s got a good sniff of what may be a new Alpha and possibly some breeding pools in the hills of sector White Seven. He’s not coming back in until that’s dealt with.”

“Doin’ all the fun stuff himself,” Vark grumbled…well, not exactly good-naturedly. It was definitely tinged with envy, but it was meant humorously.

“‘Fun’ isn’t exactly the word I’d have chosen, Grandfather.” Ginn thumbed through his notes. “And… yes, we are scheduled for troop inspection in four hours time back on Gao. New initiates to the Second Ring.”

Vark duck-nodded, ignoring the sound of several flashbangs detonating out on the street as he stepped down out of the guard tower. “…Right. Better get goin’ then. An’ I’m gonna need a fur trim, too. The Second Ring is important. Gotta look good ‘cuz one or two of ‘em ain’t gonna survive the training. They deserve somethin’ better’n a near-mangy Grandfather.”

“I took the liberty of arranging a visit by your preferred grooming service,” Ginn replied, reflecting once again that yup, he was definitely never going to go for the whole Clan thing. He’d rapidly grown to respect the Stonebacks, in a way that eclipsed every Clanless’s general sense of intimidation and awe of them, but even if he’d been a Brownfur himself, little details like that completely killed any sense of ambition or idealism.

“Thankee, Ginn. ‘Yer the bestest some days, y’know that?” Vark had long mastered the fine art of the truthful back-handed compliment. It helped that he was pant-grinning as he said it.

“Only some days?” Ginn sniffed, though he was genuinely amused. Vark’s humor was… Clannish, but heartfelt.

“Well…ain’t nobody perfect, really. C’mon. Lessgo.”

Ginn still spared one last glance back out at the riot, which was now down to a few trapped diehards who’d been surrounded and were basically just being contained until they finally got fed up, from the looks of things. There were a lot of arrested E-Skurel-Ir to be processed—and Fyu alone knew what Law applied in this situation—but things seemed to be over.

All in all… it had been disturbingly efficient.

“Right behind you, sir,” he said, and followed.

He’d seen enough.

Date Point: 17y4m1w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Senior Master Sergeant Christian “Righteous” Firth

Morning was the usual. The alarm screamed, he smashed his fist down on it. He rolled out of bed, shrugged on his shorts, grabbed a shake from the fridge and was in the gym before he’d even properly woken up. Same as usual.

Today was a heavy Slab day so the morning lift went on for a couple of hours, but it was also a weekend, so that meant he could go back upstairs and crawl back to sleep, if he wanted.

It was six in the morning. And, as it happened, the house was awake when he got back. Adam, Marty and Diego had come to visit. Diego was already toddling around and talking ‘ferchrissakes—had it been that long already? Joseph hadn’t quite got his feet under him yet, but Christian was super proud to say that his boy was already a pretty extreme outlier in all the best ways; he was big and well ahead of all his development milestones!

So was Diego. He was already showing a bit of a daredevil streak too, always trying to climb, always pushing footrests and things around…

And Marty was pregnant again. Somehow, Christian suspected she was going to be pregnant a lot over the next few years. She seemed to like it.

He and Freya…eh. They were definitely thinkin’ about a bigger family, but two or three at most seemed to be Freya’s line, and Christian was more than happy to respect that. He’d grown up in a warren of a family, so…he knew.

“Uncy Firf!!” Diego stopped trying to tip over a chair and instead ran headlong into Christian’s leg. Which was…

People tended to think of Christian as a giant Viking berserker made entirely of highly compressed murder. Which he was. But kids seemed to short circuit that in him. He picked up Diego and tossed him up nearly to the ceiling before swooping him around on a palm while making airplane noises. The little guy was built like a rubber ball, neither of his parents batted an eyelid.

He found himself in a much better mood, suddenly.

“‘Sup, fatass?” he gave ‘Horse a meaty smack on the back as he sat down. Which was more or less like slapping a granite boulder and left Firth’s entire hand tingling, but whatever.

Adam hardly seemed to notice. “Broke some PRs this morning. We still sparring later?”

“Yup! Costello said, and I quote, ‘as long as you two don’t break my walls again.’”

“But we can break each other just fine.”

“‘Course!”

“You know in any other house that would be a scary conversation, right?” Freya asked. She’d made shakshuka, enough for eight. Well. Eight normal people, anyway.

“Just proves Costello’s a sweetheart,” Marty opined. She hoisted her son up into a high chair. “Anyway…how did it go?”

Christian sighed, but not as sadly as he’d been prepared for. “Board din’t promote me. Which…weren’t surprising. But! They did say I’m not out of the running for future boards, so…”

“You two had to tie on that one too, huh?”

Adam grinned smugly. “Well…gotta tie on something, I guess.”

“Har har. Laugh it up, midget.” Which was a ridiculous thing to say about a dude who stood about six-foot-nine these days, but whatever. Tradition.

They took their time and enjoyed breakfast, talked about family stuff, baby stuff, work stuff, solved some of the world’s problems until the clock had ticked over a couple of times and Marty stood up with a yawn and a stretch.

“Well. Better go measure some big men.”

“Workin’ today, huh?” Christian suddenly understood the visit. Freya must be looking after Diego for her.

“Deacon wanted me to help out, and I sure don’t mind getting some of that contractor money.” she grinned. “Now that Team Two are getting simulator time, they need help training up more technicians.”

“Yeah. We’re gonna hafta figger out the Couch situation too. A full Team One and some nubs from the future Team Two?”

“Who are both Protectors,” said Adam, predictably proud.

“So fatasses, then. Ow!” A loving punch in the side was his minor penance, one that woulda broke ribs with regular folk; life as a tank weren’t so bad, really!

“You’re pronouncing ‘studly heroes built outta pure muscle’ the wrong way, dude.”

“Giant fuckers breakin’ my floors an’ eatin’ us outta house and home, then! Anyway, day room’s gettin’ awful crowded. Gonna hafta finish the new day room up on the top floor.”

“And upgrade the Couch.”

“Of course.”

They cleaned up and walked over toward the base, and ran into a few of the newer guys who were still halfways scared to death of mean ‘ol Firth. But…hell. It was an off day. He weren’t in uniform. And he was feeling friendly, so why not make friends?

Well, at least they weren’t standing at parade rest quite so rigidly, anymore. Give ‘em time.

They paused on the way in, for one other thing: There was the memorial to respect. One smiling photo longer than it had been a few months ago, and the sight of it was kinda like unexpectedly touching a live wire.

He didn’t have the force of will to keep it in anymore. Part of being what he was these days meant that feelings hit him hard. Life was being pretty good to him these days… but it was never going to be as good, now.

But. He had always been a man of extremes. Hell, he’d been that way since his nuts had first dropped, bein’ honest. All bein’ HEAT had really done was turn it all up way, way more. And the thing about big, deep feelings like his? They hit hard, but they were also cathartic and cleansing instead of lingering like a bad fog.

The sideways hug from Adam and Marty’s warm hand on his back helped too, he weren’t afraid to admit.

They parted ways with Marty, who picked up her security pass and went to go help out with technician-y stuff while Christian and Adam got some chores done. Then they Slabbed again; it was a heavy day, after all. Adam was of course the strongest human ever and was again getting humiliatingly stronger every day, thanks to Corti witchcraft and his own pure insane willpower. But! Firth was improving too, and he was improving even faster. Hell, it was getting to where he could actually sorta almost keep up with Adam for a change, and maybe dodge an attack now and then too! At least…when Adam didn’t feel like showing off, anyway. One day…

It’d be nice if they didn’t feel quite so embarrassed next to Daar, too. Big goals.

Between the physical training, breaks, food and taking care of some minor chores around the place, mid afternoon rolled around pretty quick, and with it came Costello and Powell, who showed up for their own daily grind. Firth and ‘Horse did their cool-down workout while the officer-types put in their work. There were some benefits to being the “little” guys, relatively speaking; they didn’t need to spend nearly all their off-duty hours (or most of their scheduled training time, for that matter) in the gym, on the mat, running trail… Must be nice, having unscheduled hours in the day.

But if a man wanted to be the best, he had to do the grind and serve the time, day in, day out, year after year, never missing meals, studying every day, training every day, never skipping a day, never making excuses. Firth didn’t mind. It was almost like meditation for him, even as it fed his competitive instincts against ‘Horse. The Tao of Slab, even…if he were feeling half-snarky.

All in all, it was a quiet day until Coombes showed up and brought some actual work with him.

“Oh, bloody hell…” that was Powell in a pretty good mood. He shot Coombes an amused look that took in the tablet under his arm. “An’ here I thought I might have a nice relaxing day for once.”

Coombes looked around at the ruins of the gym and the literal tonnes of metal lying everywhere. “…Relaxing?”

“Fookin’ right. Light day today, so ‘Horse is goin’ easy on me.”

“Still gotta re-rack everything, sir…”

“…You planned that on purpose.”

“Uh-huh!”

“You’re too bloody sneaky by half, Arés.” Powell chuckled, but the bustle of activity that followed got the place squared away just fine pretty quick. Anyway. Enjoyably grunty stereotypical activities aside, they did have some serious work to address; such was life in a special team.

“Right… so what’s on ‘yer mind, Coombes?” Powell asked, once everything was as they’d found it.

“JETS team two are due to report back soon, and that got me thinking about what we should do with teams three and four.” Coombes waggled the tablet.

“…Arright. May as well hash that out.”

They used the mission planning room. It had all the maps and documents and a nice big table, and big chonky chairs that were actually sorta comfortable, and a few touches of sci-fi tech here and there that mostly just got used as a real fancy Powerpoint presentation.

Firth was an old-school kinda guy. He prefered paper and pencils, and highlighters and notebooks. He’d rather have a book or a map. Same with Adam and Powell. It was only ever really Coombes or Costello who seemed to enjoy all the digital shit, and sure enough Coombes had a deck he’d been working on, already sitting on the file server.

He called up info on their latest recruits. The JETS teams were easier to recruit for, marginally, but only marginally. Three of the dudes going into Teams 3 and 4 were HEAT applicants who just…didn’t quite cut it. No shame in that. It weren’t no weakness in character or discipline, they just couldn’t physically perform to standard. Most men couldn’t no matter how much time they were given and no matter how motivated they were, and the reasons why weren’t completely clear. Genetics was probably a big part, but that couldn’t be all of the reason…

Whatever it was, it turned out that very few men could use Crude to its fullest potential, and who could wasn’t necessarily obvious. Natural size wasn’t a good predictor; Adam was originally a short man after all, even if he was pretty ridiculously fuckin’ muscular and athletic even as a teen. General fitness didn’t tell the story either, nor did innate strength. In the end, you just had to pick the stand-outs, the slightly crazy ones who wouldn’t let anything tell them no, and…let them try. The pipeline had a hellish dropout rate because of that, and making it to the line but not over it put those dudes in rare company.

They hadn’t failed. They’d truly learned their limits, and that was a success. It was just that their limits weren’t enough to hang with HEAT. But JETS needed men of that caliber, and that side of the SOR’s Table of Organization and Equipment was starting to look pretty healthy.

Actually, the whole table was lookin’ pretty good, a development which brought along the best kinda problems to have.

“So, here we go. Teams three and four. They’ve made the cut, they’re about ready to come out here.”

“Havin’ a couple of almost-HEAT bros will help, since we’re fresh out of Ferds and Daars.” Adam commented. “And Tiny’s growing into proper HEAT size now, so he ain’t going back.”

“They’re physically ready, maybe,” Costello said. “None of them have any off-world training yet.”

“To be fair, neither did we when we hit Capitol Station.”

“And that evolution cost us dearly,” Powell recalled.

“Yeah.” Adam conceded, while Firth nodded. The first three photos on the memorial wall had fallen on that mission. “But the point I was gonna make was that we couldn’t have had any field experience in the first place. Not quite sure what we can do here, past what we’re already doin’. There’s only so many Ten’Gewek they can wargame with.”

“And that’s what I’ve been thinkin’ on,” Coombes said, pleased. “The Ten’Gewek have been great an’ all, but one team of super-gorillas isn’t exactly gonna fill our MTOE, and besides that we need to train on more than just two worlds. Our guys need to be able to go anywhere. So I thought… What about Nightmare?”

Powell arched an eyebrow, Costello rubbed his chin thoughtfully, and Adam perked up at the idea. Firth, though, had concerns.

“Uh…Nightmare’s a bit of a different ballgame. Julian only survived ‘cuz the Corti fucks stacked the deck way in his favor. You read the report, right? Deep hypnotic conditioning, extensive briefing, some essential tools and suchlike, and let’s not even talk about the fuckin’ breeding program…”

“That’s exactly the point though. It is a different ballgame. We aren’t training boy scouts here, we’re training dudes who can go anywhere. They’re no pushovers by the time they get to us, they’re a team instead of just one guy, and of course we’re gonna monitor them. But I reckon we couldn’t ask for a better ready-made training environment.”

“I’d still feel better about it if we ran this by Julian, bein’ honest. He’s pretty involved in the training with the Tangy-Work as it is.”

“Can’t hurt to get the expert’s opinion,” Costello agreed.

“I like the suggestion,” Powell decided. “It’s got legs, unless Etsicitty comes back at us wi’ an ‘absolutely not.’ An’ we need a good long-term training option for JETS, there’s still a lot of relays out there that need our attention.”

“An’ that’s on top of wherever this monkey experiment ends up goin’ I presume?”

Powell nodded. “‘Experiment’ is the right word there. Best to keep our options open.”

“I’ll get that expert opinion taken care of, then,” Coombes nodded.

“Oh, he’s gonna love you askin’,” Firth predicted. “He’s busy as shit with this whole E-Squirrel thing.”

Adam snorted. “Do you deliberately butcher every species’ name outta spite, or is your mouth just that fuckin’ broken?”

“It’s my proud duty as a humming bean. But if ‘yer willin’ to take credit ‘fer that, seeing’s as ‘yer fist seems to find my jaw every time we spar…”

“Guess that’s the end o’ this meeting, then,” Powell rumbled drily and stood up. “Don’t break the table, lads. ‘Night.”

…Was it night already? Firth stood up and peered out the window. Well, shit. It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun had definitely moved a good distance, and Folctha’s nightly rains were gathering on the horizon, out over the lakebeds national park. Might as well get in some good cardio, then, so’s he had an excuse to go running in the rain.

If there were ever a blessin’ in his life he was eternally grateful for, it was Freya. She’d given him a strong boy, a warm home, and most importantly…understanding. She knew what kind of creature he was, and there wasn’t any judgement, no subtle attempts to “tame” him or whatever the fuck some Karen-type females thought they were doing to their poor men.

Nope. She loved him not only for what he was, but because of it. He’d got stupid lucky with her.

So, while ‘Horse and Coombes made family plans about meeting up for breakfast at Papa Arés’ place in the morning, Firth bid them both goodnight. Marty woulda gone home hours ago and picked up Diego, so it’d just be him, Freya and Joseph in the house. Maybe they’d watch a movie. Maybe…

Why plan it? Just enjoy.

He paid his respects at the memorial wall again on the way out, and went home.

Date Point: 17y4m1w2d AV
Farm near Dodge City, Kansas, USA, Earth

Six

Austin had, as far as Six could tell, a life that from one perspective might seem dull and staid, and from another might seem simple and rewarding. Austin himself clearly felt it was the latter. He had a pretty fiance, he spent his days fixing farm equipment or driving it around a field, and he spent his time off at the motocross circuit, watching football and football-like games, playing football-like games or if that wasn’t happening, hanging out with Lauren.

There was some wasted potential, there. He was a naturally fit and strong man, and so didn’t see much need to worry about his health; work, play, and the occasional dalliance with his home gym seemed to be enough for him. He was highly intelligent too, and yet felt little interest in extending his higher education beyond his bachelor’s in agricultural science.

In an odd twist of irony, the very fact that he was so naturally gifted seemed to assure his blissful mediocrity. He was, from Six’s perspective, actually rather boring. Plant his field. Keep in shape. Make Lauren happy. Have a little fun. Such was the life of a big man, a capable man, who was nonetheless content with with small ambitions.

Though, to be completely fair…farming turned out to be a lot of work. His days were long, the labor was often arduous, and there were often so many activities in-flight, be it repairs, orders, deliveries, organizing labor…

It was an education. But still… smaller than anything Six had ever paid attention to before. His scope, previously, had been whole civilizations on the largest scale. His focus had been leaders, nations, weapons of mass destruction, the fates of whole planets and species.

And now, Six was trapped in what was by all measures a high-end human being, whose entire purpose was focused on the minutiae of something as banal as food.

Maybe that would be the key to building up a relationship with Austin. Six could start small. Very small, perhaps just some gentle chemical augmentation to help Austin’s endurance along a bit. Maybe…reward him with endorphins and such whenever his thoughts turned to ambition. Encourage him to value the bigger picture.

He’d be doing the poor man a favor, really. Helping him realize potential that would otherwise have gone unrecognized and unremembered. Helping him find a purpose beyond simple thankless toil.

There was a long way to go before he’d be able to reveal himself directly, of course. A lot of groundwork to lay down. But it was a place to start.

All he needed was the right direction to steer Austin in. Maybe they’d begin by nudging him away from the alcohol and the bar food.

Even the highest ambitions needed a beginning.

Date Point: 17y4m1w3d AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Relay system, far uncharted space

The moment when they dropped into atmo came as a profound relief for Tooko.

Orbital mechanics weren’t easy. Shedding enough energy to drop out of orbit was easy enough, but doing it stealthily? SBD weighed nearly seventy tonnes, fully loaded. At orbital velocities, that was a lot of kinetic energy, and it all had to go somewhere. If he wanted to avoid detection, then it had to go somewhere at a sufficiently controlled rate so as to not show up against the cosmic background.

This led to a new problem: if he didn’t shed it fast enough then the ship would sink gently into the upper atmosphere at far too shallow an angle and skip off.

For every spacefaring civilization, the historic way of dealing with that was to plunge in at a slightly steeper angle and shed speed by atmospheric braking. But if the Hierarchy were being as paranoid as Tooko would have been in their position, then they’d blow any such plasma halo right out of the sky. Better to blow up a thousand meteors than let one plane full of hostile troops reach the ground.

So, that approach was out.

That left only one possibility: hypersonic reentry.

SBD had shield emitters just as capable as the Destroying Fury’s, and only her much smaller power capacity kept her from achieving the same terrifying things that the Great Father’s flagship could. What she could achieve with them, however, was an aerodynamic profile sharper than a sewing needle, and control surfaces not constrained by the limits of mere matter.

She pierced the target world’s thermosphere like a hypodermic, with nary a ripple.

Tooko didn’t bother putting his hands on the direct flight controls. They were nowhere near fine or quick enough for this. Instead, his attention remained on the string of precise instructions he’d given to the ship itself, which folded and shifted its fields around it to create a wide, flat, thin surface that slipped through the air like a scalpel, balancing the need to stay up and not plunge down into the stratosphere at meteoric speeds, with the need to not glance off the meager near-vacuum and skip back out into space.

The line between those two options was calculably fine, but far below the threshold of what he could ride with a stick and pedals.

No halo. That was the important part. Whatever he did, he absolutely could not allow the ship to generate enough waste heat from braking as to begin forming plasma. If he did that, well…

Well, they’d probably die, instantly and painlessly as some unseen Hierarchy weapon reduced them to a bowshock of ionized particles. Not a bad way to go, but Tooko was pretty set on not going at all, or at least not anytime soon.

Descent took hours. Most of a day, in fact. The whole point was to shed energy slowly, and Silent But Deadly had so much to shed, and was shedding it in such a deliberately cautious way, that by the time they reached merely supersonic ground speeds, they had circumnavigated the globe nearly a dozen times. The continents rolled past, and past, and past underneath him, broken up here and there by stormy hammer-shaped cloud formations, wine-dark seas, snow-browed mountain ranges and, memorably, a hurricane.

None of them affected the ship in the slightest. They were all much too low.

For Tooko’s part, the only thing to do was sit in the seat, keep himself alert with tea, and try not to be too envious of the men behind him who got to skip this prolonged, stressful descent.

Finally, there was a slight shudder as they dropped through the turbulent convection barrier where the thermosphere gave way to the mesosphere. The ship pulled its flight surface fields in closer, gaining some maneuverability at the expense of glide efficiency, but that was fine. When Tooko checked their ground speed, they were down to a single-digit multiple of the speed of sound, speeds that the ship could bleed off quite handily, especially once they dropped down into the comparatively dense fog of the stratosphere.

He woke up the others.

“…Shit, Pip, you alright butt?” Rees gave him a concerned look the moment his stasis field dropped.

“Stressful day,” Tooko replied. He must be looking rough if a Human could notice.

“We down?” Wilde asked.

“Next best thing. We’re about seventy kilometers up. Touching distance.”

Wilde nodded and ran his eye over the maps that the ship had generated for him. “Good work, mate.”

“Like there was any doubt.” Though, inwardly, Tooko felt a little knot untie itself in his brain at the praise. He’d needed that recognition.

Rees, Frasier, Nomuk, Tumik and Genn, of course, hadn’t been awake for the last conversation, and Frasier summed up the look that passed between them.

“Care to fill us in on what we missed? I take it Big H are up to their merry fuckin’ hijinks?”

“System’s crawling with them,” Tooko confirmed. “We’re safe for now… safe-ish…”

“But fuck knows what’s waiting for us at the relay,” Wilde finished. “Alright. Ferd had the right idea earlier, let’s get our kit out of lockup and check it’s good…”

Tooko left them to it and returned to his seat. He was going to curl up and sleep when he got the chance, but for now he had to find a landing site near the relay.

As for the relay…

He glanced at the map again. This one was different to the last one. Irujzen had been in the middle of a stinking forest, built on top of a coal mine. The relay had been pretty much the only sign of intelligent life on that planet.

This one was different.

This one was built in the middle of a city.

Date Point: 17y4m1w3d AV
Chiune Station, west of Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Misfit was a lot smaller than Julian remembered, but damn if she wasn’t a welcome sight. And he’d have to be ten years dead not to smile at the way Allison was practically sparking with happiness at working on the old girl again.

“She’s just so unique!” she gushed, ducking under the landing gear to check it before flight. “Like, the production model took a few lessons from our girl here and they’re special and arguably an improvement, but Misfit is her own thing… She’s just got more character, you know?”

“I think Xiù and I need to be jealous.”

She gave him an amused Look, then stepped up on the landing strut to check inside the cavity above. “I’m not gonna fuck the spaceship, dummy.”

“Oh, I see. That’s all we are to you, huh?”

Her reply was to throw some wadded-up scrap paper from her pocket at him.

Julian collected it, pocketed it, then looked up and patted the hull fondly himself. Truth was, Misfit did hold a special place in his heart. They’d gone to some pretty incredible places and done some pretty incredible things with her, and he was glad to see that aside from a little understandable wear and tear she was still in fine shape. Her livery was still proud red and gleaming silver, her hull was still that squat, blunt sledgehammer shape that made her feel tough and capable. She still had that charming slight asymmetry from the observation dome built into her starboard side…

But now that he was seeing her for the first time in a long while, he had to admit… she wasn’t a big ship at all. Hell, she could have landed on a tennis court. The only reason she stood so far off the ground that he and Allison could walk around underneath her was because she’d been designed with long landing legs capable of setting down on uneven terrain.

She had a few new decorations on her, behind the cockpit, in the form of a red circle and six blue-green ones. Trophies of the worlds she’d been the first ever human ship to land on: Mars, Lucent, Akyawentuo, and Ayma, plus the three discovered by Jeremy Lee, Ben Sullivan and Sam Ackermann, Misfit’s current crew.

There’d be an eighth going on that list today.

Ackermann was the field researcher, the guy doing what had once been Julian’s job. They’d originally got off on the wrong foot, with Ackermann being quite sullen about losing “his” ship to them, but he’d dropped that grudge pretty quickly. In fact, the model of Misfit sitting on top of the bookshelf at home had been his idea, a gift from the new crew to the old.

Julian personally kinda liked him, but he had no idea how Lee and Sullivan could stand living with him in such tight quarters. Then again, they’d gone a very different route in their relationship: the three men were close colleagues, and had as much of the Right Stuff as any of the Apollo missions, but they struck Julian as a little too… professional.

Still. There was no disputing their results.

“I’ve been reading up on the target world,” Ackermann said. “You know this is going to be the first time Misfit sets herself down on a non-deathworld that isn’t Cimbrean?”

“We gonna paint the picture up there a little smaller, then?” Allison asked.

“A planet’s a planet,” Ackermann shrugged.

“Well… good news is, you took good care of my ship,” Allison declared, tapping firmly on her tablet to record her verdict.

“Hey!”

“Now you bring my girl and my boy back in one piece, hear?”

Julian rolled his eyes and grinned affectionately. “We’ll be fine, babe.”

“Sure, but you’re gonna be cooped up in there with a buncha cavemonkeys for like ten hours. That little jaunt we did out to drop the system field is nothing next to that.” She gave him a hug and a smooch. “So keep ‘em from tearing up the place, okay?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good boy.” She gave him a second smooch then stepped away. “See you when you get back! Wo ai ni!”

“Wo ye ai ni!” Julian grinned, waved, ignored Ackermann’s amused expression, and then at his invitation preceded him up the ship’s ladder.

Climbing on-board, well…things felt a heck of a lot more cramped than they had before. He felt positively lumbering as he shouldered his way through the airlock, through into the crew space, and plopped himself down out of the way in the observation blister. The interior was much the same, though. Much the same…but not quite.

Xiù had decorated it with a few little personal touches, using acrylic paints. At first it had just been some girly leaves and flowers on vines and stuff, but later on after her first encounter with the glimmermotes on Lucent, she’d added those as well. That was the biggest detail, missing: at some point, her hard work had been wiped out.

Things were stored a little differently, too. Different personal items stashed in the bunks, some board games stowed to either side of the TV where they’d kept books… things like that. He very much was visiting his old home and seeing how other people lived in it. Not a comfortable feeling.

Being a passenger didn’t help, either. He knew every single step of the procedure for bringing the ship up to power and jumping her to space, and he could practically count it off in his head, following the familiar beats as the power systems came up, the airlock locked down, the artificial gravity took over from Cimbrean’s…

And the black flash of the jump itself, right on the zero as he counted down from five.

All in all, he felt weirdly out of his element from launch, up through jump, and down again for landing. He got to turn the tables, however, once the crew met the Ten’Gewek for the first time.

The experience was always much the same. Ten’Gewek were cheerful, blunt, and direct people. They were suspicious and stand-offish at first, but the instant they knew you were friendly, all boundaries aggressively disappeared. All of them.

Though on that front, Yan’s tribe was at least somewhat considerate. All the crew had to endure was curious children. Which, given they climbed like spider monkeys and often massed as much as full-grown men…

Lee managed to hold up with two of the very little ones sitting on him, combing through his hair, exploring around his upper body and absolutely pelting him with questions. Not bad going, in supergravity! Still, Julian rescued him before their combined weight (or grabby hands) could defeat him, and then turned to his first diplomatic problem.

There were far too many curious cavemonkeys who wanted to come along. Half a dozen Given-Men, three Singers, one of whom was beginning to go blind and so wanted to bring her Dancer along, Vemik of course…

Packing all of them into Misfit would have been a lot like running a herd of prime beef into a sardine canning plant. Not that they’d mind much, but there were functional concerns. And safety concerns.

And sweaty musky cavemonkey concerns.

“We can’t take too many. Didn’t you tell them, Vemik? Also, where’s Yan?”

“He’s out hunting, but he only just left, so we used the speaking-stone magic to call him back.”

“Okay.” Julian cleared his hair out of his face. Time for a trim. Or maybe he should grow it out… “We’ll be putting a jump array on the new world, too. You’ll be able to walk from here to there just like you can to Cimbrean. Then, anyone who wants to visit, can.”

That earned a hoot of approval. Ten’Gewek by and large were not wholesale adopters of alien tech. They were…selective. If they could make it or do it themselves, they preferred to stick to what they knew, though they weren’t shy about learning, either. Quite a few improvements to their way of life had come of simple refinement and better skills.

Writing was probably the best example of something they adopted whole-heartedly. All of the nearby tribes could speak fluent English at this point, right down to the children. Many of them could read and write too, and their two writing systems were more or less merging into a single coherent system, which was going to earn Tilly some post-doc accolades, probably…at least, as long as a certain curious gorillaboy didn’t distract her too much.

They were okay with the simple machines too, so long as it didn’t intrude on what they saw as sacred labor: the Hunt, the Dance, the Game of the tribes…anything to do with social ritual. They were also leery of anything that required Sky-Magic to work, even if they could get their head around the basic idea.

The story was different if that bit of tech did something completely impossible for them. Jump arrays were fine. That was so utterly impossibly magical there was nothing to ground it for them to the World That Is. Two-way radios were somewhat the same, and those they loved the most. They ended up purchasing simple, rugged models that could survive just about anything, and now there was at least one in the hands of most of the tribes.

They’d even got a start on a solar-powered repeater network, so before long the whole of the Ten’Gewek–at this point, spread out across an area comparable to Rhode Island–would be able to talk directly to each other. All the Given-Men and Singers knew how to use and maintain them, so along with the “Given-Man Post,” they were well on their way to communicating with each other as one culture.

Sure, they didn’t know how it worked. They didn’t even know the first principles at play. But that would probably be changing, actually. The Professor’s Academy had finally taken off, and the basics of learning were starting to spread pretty widely.

Daniel fretted about the cultural harm that caused, of course. English came with a heavy freight of concepts that had hitherto been entirely alien to the Ten’Gewek, and he’d gone on quite a long diatribe about the history of European cultural development, the interplay between Christianity and Germanic languages, they way that simply learning to speak it meant effectively outsourcing a couple-few thousand years of cultural development…

The usual stuff. The humans working on Akyawentuo were all pretty much resigned to the inevitable reality of cultural contamination at this point, and generally dealt with it by reminding themselves that the alternative for the Ten’Gewek had been extinction.

Personally, Julian thought they were worrying too much. They were thinking like civilized people. Hell, they were thinking like academics, and that was the problem. Ten’Gewek were not civilized, nor were they academically inclined. Not even Vemik was overly interested beyond a practical sense of engineering. And that mattered, because their relationship to all of their new “sky-learnings” was very pragmatic. Where the stories stuck together, they were happy to let them. Where they didn’t…eh. Tribes had different stories, after all. No sense getting too worked up about it, there were bigger problems at hand, like hunting their next meal.

So it always was. And stories didn’t bring in the meat.

In the end, knowing there was a jump array coming allowed Yan to wade into the gathering and get them to chill out while he, Sky-Thinker and his Singer made the trip. Three Ten’Gewek in the ship was a much less uncomfortable proposition, even if Julian was pretty sure he’d get pretzel’d at least three times through the trip.

Sure enough, he went zero for three against Vemik, who was definitely feeling his oats and enjoying his strength. Frustrating. Maybe if Julian wasn’t trying so hard not to break anything…he did get Vemik pinned on their fourth bout, though. Julian spent the rest of the flight exacting his revenge, but not really. Vemik had a way of bring out the kid in anyone.

Yan spent most of the trip asleep, surprisingly. Apparently he’d been hunting extra hard the last few days to make up for however long he was going to be away. And the Singer was quite content to curl up in the observation blister and watch the stars crawl by.

She almost fell out of it though when they arrived in orbit around the target world. That was the thing with FTL travel: things didn’t swoop up all slow and graceful, they just… appeared. One moment, open black sky, the next… a planet.

Julian chuckled as she flipped over onto the floor, twitched her tail at it, then stood up and tried to reclaim some dignity, kind of like a cat who’d just fallen off something and was trying to walk it off.

“I never did get used to that,” he admitted. “I think pilots do it deliberately. Xiù sure did.”

“Shyoo has big mischief in her soul,” the Singer replied. She twitched her tail again, then stepped forward to consider the world below. “…So these are our sky-tribe-lands. Funny thing, for another sky-tribe to claim land for us that we never saw before.”

“It’s supposed to prevent wars. Didn’t work so well, but I like the idea in principle,” Julian said. “Should be about an hour until we land. Falling safely down through the sky and landing are the careful bits.”

“And then what?” Vemik asked.

“We find a place to land, we set up the jump array, the others come through, and then… well, we see what kind of planet she is.” Julian patted the wall beside him. “Misfit’s done it plenty of times. It’s what she was made for.”

“What do we do until we land?” Vemik asked.

“My advice? Watch the view. There’s nothing like it.” Julian perched himself on the back of the couch, facing the window, and followed his own advice. And for a little while, that feeling of being out of his element went away.

It was good to do this again, one last time.

Date Point: 17y4m1w4d AV
Relay planet, deep uncharted space.

Sergeant Ian “Hillfoot” Wilde

“Reminds me of Machu Picchu.” Rees decided.

“Yeah?”

Wilde shifted his binoculars, comparing what he was looking at to the map that Tooko’s instruments had made as they came in to land. He could see what Rees meant though. The Hierarchy had obviously obliterated some poor native civilization once upon a time, then built their relay in the ruins, proud upon a mountaintop surrounded by the crumbling stones of what had once been a metropolis.

Rees nodded. “Fuck aye. Saw it when I was fourteen, my Nan and Dadcu took us to Peru… Except Machu Picchu never had a fuck-off giant alien death monolith in the middle.”

Wilde didn’t even bother fighting the amused smile that smeared itself across his face. The Relay was pretty unmissable, given that it had to be a good hundred meters tall and had an eye-bending space fuckup at the top. “You sure about that, Reesy?”

“I think the fuckin’ tour guide would’ve pointed it out… Fuck, security’s a lot tighter than the last one, innit?”

Wilde nodded. They were camped out on a mountainside a good few miles away from the distant alien ruins, and it was plain to see that the relay was far better protected than Irujzen had been. Hierarchy Repealer-class drones, the same ones that had done the heavy lifting in genociding the Ten’Gewek, were circling above it in dense swarms like flocks of evil starlings. High overhead, a faint heat-haze shimmer in the air hinted at the presence of a huge domed forcefield angled upwards to protect the facility from orbital strikes.

“Makes me wonder why they didn’t just Football the planet,” he mused.

“Maybe they can’t?”

“Why not?”

“Iunno. Maybe it fucks with the relay or somethin’? I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud here.”

“Hmm.” Wilde considered that possibility. “Well, that’s one for the brains back home to figure out, I guess.”

“Yup…” Rees nodded in satisfaction as he finished setting up his camera. “Be nice if I was right though.”

“Ready to move on?”

“Yup.”

Cover was sparse on the mountainside. They were in alpine terrain, more than two thousand meters above sea level. No trees grew up this high, though here and there where the craggy, broken terrain created little pockets that weren’t blasted constantly by the wind, scrubby little patches of dense foliage had been able to establish themselves, haunted by an assortment of animals that had never met a sapient being in their whole life and didn’t understand the concept of fear.

One in particular was like a particularly ornery honey badger, and only the fact that Ten’Gewek skin was so naturally thick and tough had protected Tumik, though it had taken a good minute or so to pry the enraged creature loose from his arm.

They shrieked like a fucking banshee when they got mad, too.

Annoyed, Tumik had eventually broken the critter’s jaw to free his arm, then pulled it the rest of the way apart with his feet. He’d suffered some superficial cuts and a torn uniform, but the “madbadger” as Frasier had named it had earned a healthy measure of respect. Wilde was determined to stay the fuck away from wherever one might be nesting.

They weren’t much good for eating, either. The meat was stringy and… musky. The Ten’Gewek didn’t seem to mind all that much, but even they said it wasn’t very tasty.

So, considering the sparsity of good concealment, moving unseen was proving to be a challenge much like training back on Cimbrean. Luckily, one of their uniform options turned out to be a fairly effective camouflage even to Ten’Gewek eyes. Testing had shown they definitely had deep color perception, so if they found it difficult to follow, then so would most any untrained vision AI, right?

It was a good working idea, anyway. And backed up by the fact that a swarm of plasma-spitting drones hadn’t descended on them yet.

Getting and keeping the Ten’Gewek in uniform was a small source of grumbling, though. They especially hated their “boots” which were really super durable gloves for their feet. Not being able to feel the ground through their feet threw them off a bit, but the sharp, jagged little flints of rock laying about everywhere ended up being a pretty good motivator.

It was a good old hike over to the next camera spot, made all the slower by the need to pass undetected. Wilde was silently grateful for the Ten’Gewek: while he, Frasier and Rees absolutely could have handled the cross-country mountain marathon with a hundred kilos of equipment on their backs, the cavemonkeys could wear that much like it was a shirt. That freed up the humans to move nimbly and openly, and so their whole patrol could set a respectable pace despite the difficulties.

Work was still work, though. Moving that much weight around burned calories, and so did powering the bodies that could do that kind of work in the first place. Progress was therefore slowed a bit, and around ten klicks in they needed to pause and eat.

They discovered a nice natural overhang that seemed fairly cozy, and it only took a few minutes to establish a nice lean-to that was effectively invisible from above.

That also gave them the first opportunity of the day to drop their gear and piss. Soldiers of old would have wondered at the need to be careful there, but: they didn’t know the local wildlife, and hyperspectral overhead imagery could spot such things. That was why they had to be covered head to toe and the Ten’Gewek needed to wear “boots.” They couldn’t leave any chemical markers.

Which also meant cold food, sadly. Not knowing the capabilities of their enemy, they couldn’t risk the fumes being detected. Hell, really they should be wearing re-breathers too, but…

…There came a point where ascribing magic powers of detection to the enemy got ridiculous and maddening. The Ten’Gewek for example were absolute masters of not leaving any sign of their passing at all, but for them it was a magic art more than anything else. That meant they had…superstitions.

The biggest one had to do with being in the open in the first place. The forest covered a multitude of sins: it was gloomy, the foliage muffled sound, the still air kept scent from circulating. Being out in the open, in the bright light where sounds could travel and where the wind could carry a scent…well, it put them on edge. The given-man in particular was flinching and making a warding gesture at every kicked pebble, or every time his unfamiliar shoes scuffed against something.

“Relax, Ferd.” Wilde said in a low voice. “They can see many things from overhead, but they can’t hear from that position. Remember about how there’s no air in space?”

“They can be invisible, yes?”

“And they would have hit us by now if they were doing that. Relax. We’re not dead, so they’ve not noticed us. And they probably won’t either, as long as we’re reasonably careful.”

Ferd’s response was a grumpy chuff. Nomuk, however, was a good deal older than Ferd and had some more life experience to draw on.

“Lots of small animals here anyway. See? Burrow over there, shit over there… probably lots of little noises here all the time. Making noise is not so bad, if animals make that noise too.”

The thing that made Ferd a good leader was that he was smart enough to realize his men were all older and wiser than him, and that he should listen. That was the biggest reason Wilde respected him. It wasn’t his absolutely ridiculous brawn, really. Well, okay, that was actually pretty impressive. But really, it was that he knew enough about himself to know he didn’t really know anything at all.

He also knew that monkeyfun wouldn’t be a smart idea here. So instead he grinned, deliberately showing off those two-inch fangs all the Given-Men seemed to have, and nodded his agreement.

They couldn’t rest forever, or even really for very long. But getting that shelter up was good, it’d give them somewhere to come back to later. For now, they had three more cameras to deploy. Wilde stood up, stretched, and hefted his pack–still bloody heavy, even with gorilla porters–and bounced a bit on his toes to loosen up his hamstrings.

“Time to get going, lads.”

Frasier and Rees nodded and stood. The four cavemonkeys collectively made the unhappy noises of men who would have really liked another five minutes or so, but that was the limit of their complaint. They rolled upright, grabbed their gear.

And, with a final luck-gesture from Ferd, they headed out again.

Date Point: 17y4m1w4d AV
The Giving-World, far from home

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Vemik had gone to other worlds many times now. He’d been to Cimbrean and Earth, and those were fascinating places, very strange. One had all of the Humans’ old history all around them, in the stones and the ground and the air. The other was younger, and everything was busy.

He’d never been to an empty world before.

The Giving-World, or at least the bit of it they’d landed in, was… there wasn’t a lot going on. There were plants, and animals, and things, but he couldn’t taste what was going on around him like he could at home. He couldn’t read the land around him. Even the desert on Earth hadn’t been so…

He didn’t know the right word. There was life all around him. Interesting life! And lots of it! But something was… missing.

The trees were… nice. Tall and slim and white, with interesting purple leaves, and lots of them had smaller plants growing up them. But when the Singer, lightest of the three of them, tried to climb one, the branch cracked and peeled off the tree under half her weight. Yan, when he tried, needed not much of his strength to just heave it out of the ground and push it over.

The rocks were still rocks, and the dirt was still dirt, but the gravity was weak. Vemik had no trouble bounding so high in the air, he’d managed to somewhat flip over and land badly.

Which didn’t hurt much.

At least Jooyun was enjoying it. He was doing the thing he always did of singing to himself as he worked. The Singer was listening with interest to that: Human songs went to strange places.

♪“…I don’t want the world to see me, ‘cause I don’t think that they’d understand. When everything’s meant to be broken, I just want you to know who I am…”♫

Weird. Or maybe just going over Vemik’s head, though from the looks the other Humans gave him… just weird. Either way, Vemik shrugged and helped the four of them build the jump array. Sully-van was doing something interesting with a thick black cable and a hatch under the ship, but he waved Vemik off, and appealing to Jooyun didn’t help either. Sky-Brother just shook his head.

“Sorry, bro. Too dangerous.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Pulling power from the ship’s capacitors to power the array. That’s a lot of juice, easily enough to kill if you don’t know how to handle it right, so leave it in Sully’s hands.”

Vemik sighed, but gave up on it. Jooyun usually let him join in, so if he said no that meant it really was important. But nobody ever learned anything by being safe! And what Sully-van was doing didn’t look too difficult…

…But no. So instead, he headed out after Yan, following the trail markings the big Given-Man had left with his knife.

Eventually Vemik caught up with him on a ridge where they could look back and see the ship’s gleaming red hull through the trees. The forest wasn’t… it was thin. That was the word. The trees were slim, and they stood far apart, and there wasn’t much living around them. He could see between them almost like standing in the open. It wasn’t like the forest at home at all.

And Yan had caught some things, easily. Some kind of spindly little thing that kind of reminded Vemik of a bibtaw except it had feathers instead of fur. He was busy skinning and roasting them over a campfire.

“They didn’t even run away,” Yan grumbled. “Or fight. I walked right up, and they didn’t even get scared until I Took one.”

“Good meat?” Vemik asked. Yan shrugged, grabbed the one he had spit over the flames, and tore a chunk off with his fangs.

“…Tastes okay,” he decided after chewing and swallowing. “Doesn’t hit the belly hard, though.”

That sounded a lot like Cimbrean. Or at least, the things that had always lived there. Jooyun and Tis-dale had said that Earth things were moving in and taking over because they were much stronger than what was already there…

And that would happen here, too. Vemik wasn’t sure how he felt about that. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that the gods should have made stronger life here.

“Something in your head, Sky-Thinker?” Yan offered him a crispy haunch.

Vemik took it and bit in. A bit bland. Maybe with a bit of salt, and some of Jooyun’s pepper, or rubbed with some Tanew leaves…

“I think…” Vemik considered his words before he spoke. “I think, this place would make us very weak. Not weak like being civilized. Weak in body.”

“We haven’t seen much of it yet.”

“I’ve seen enough.”

Yan nodded with a grunt. “They did their ‘fo-to-gam-a-tree’ thing when we were orbiting. This was the spot they picked…so did they pick a strong spot, or a weak one?”

“It’s a planet. The whole thing has gravity like this. But plants, beasts? That’s a different song. Could be we landed in the land of weak scrawny critters, and there’s good hunting a hundred days that way.” Vemik waved his hand.

“But gravity is still weak. Weaker than Cimbrean-place! Look how high I can jump, Vemik!”

Yan did so. Even for him, who could jump higher than any man Vemik had ever seen, as high as Daar Great-Father could with a bit of a run… it was wrong, how high he launched himself.

Yan landed and Vemik growled in knowing. “Too weak.” Yan sat himself back down. “What did they say the Gee-number was?”

“Point seven-six Gee. That’s like…three of a hand? And that hand is Earth-Gee. That means…”

“I get it.” Yan nodded. “…Doe-min-yun were stupid giving us this. We’d never use it.”

“They Gave it because it was inside a bubble of a certain size around our home-world. I don’t think they did any sky-thinking at all.”

“Hmm. All rules, no thoughts. Stupid, like I said.” Yan stripped the last meat off his prey’s bones with his teeth, and tossed the bone into the fire. “Maybe, this is a gods-blessing in disguise. The sky-people Jooyun talks about are very sick. Maybe this would help them heal.”

“Maybe…but the gods would re-make them to this place, like the gods make everyone for their place. Jooyun and Tis- dale call that ‘ev-o-loo- shun.’ But,” Vemik considered, “they also think maybe that’s part of why we and the City-People were so different, too.”

“We come from the same place,” Yan pointed out. “So a people’s place isn’t the only thing that matters?”

“I think, yes. I only know the shape of the idea. Too many other things I need to know first,” Vemik growled in frustration. “It’s a big sky-thought. Professor Daniel says it changed their whole world when a very smart thinker of theirs first thought it.”

“An important thought, then.”

“Yes! Professor says, of course the gods make a people, and change them. But he says, they also change themselves, too. Very slowly.”

Yan nodded. “Makes sense. We changed a lot just since you came along, little Sky-Thinker.” He looked around at the thinly wooded hills around them. “…But this place, I think, would change us the wrong way. No. I don’t like it here. Best thing we can do with it is Give it to the sick people. That seems to me like it would please the gods.”

“Maybe Jooyun will see that too, now we’re here.”

“Maybe. He tries to protect us from the sky-world and I love him for it. But we are not stupid. We are blessed by the gods to be a thing none of the sky-people can be. But that means we can’t be like them, either. I think you have been thinking on this, yes?”

“…Yes.” There was definitely a bit of a sullen note in his hoot. “But that means… a lot of wonderful things we’ll never do. Inventions and things. If we can’t be like them, there’s so many things we won’t have.”

Yan nodded, shuffled round, and put an arm and tail around him in a fatherly hug. Vemet had hugged him like that, many times. For a moment, it made Vemik sad to remember.

“There’s many things they don’t have, Sky-Thinker,” he said. “But we’ll get to keep them. And we can share, yes? So don’t look so sad. Be happy in what you are!”

“…I guess…”

“Guess nothing! You are a fine man, Vemik Sky-Thinker. Handsome. Very good shape to you, tall red crest and good hard muscles. Stronger than Jooyun! Smarter too! Why be sad because he has read more books? You have half his years, and already you do so much!”

…That was true. Maybe Vemik was being jealous. The gods didn’t like jealousy. And really…Yan was right. He didn’t have anything to be jealous of against anyone, not even Jooyun. Being jealous would be an insult to everything he’d been Given.

Feeling better, he nodded, then stood up. “Array should be ready, the others will be here soon. I think they won’t need long to see things your way.”

Yan just grinned. He bounced up to his feet with a push of his tail, nodded, and led the way back down the hill. Vemik took a look around again before following. They’d go to many other places on this world first before Jooyun and the other Humans were satisfied, but Vemik knew already.

They were Giving this place, and it was the best thing they could ever do with it.

26th day of the first year of freedom
The “Clawhold,” above the old-bent-leg tunnels

Ukusevi

The “Clawhold” was… Uku hadn’t realized that a place could be so clean, even while it was alive and working. Not even the hydroponic farms in the warrens were so well-kept.

The light was a little too bright for her, but a helpful Gao had given her a pair of darkened lenses for her eyes. They rested on her nose and kept the worst of the glare out so that she was comfortable.

Another had shown her how they archived their knowledge. Whole vast troves of knowledge were neatly tucked away in some distant storage, and she could read those records—or a translation of them, anyway—through book-sized devices controlled by taps and touch.

The Hunters had similar things, so their existence didn’t come as a complete shock. But there was a lot around Ukusevi that was far beyond what her people had achieved even at their height before the Hunters came. Their machines had been all wrought iron, rivets, steam and wood. Electrical power had been a new and intriguing invention, only a few years old, before that fateful day.

And of course, her people hadn’t stopped thinking, inventing and innovating during the long years in hiding. They’d been stifled and slowed by their circumstance, but everything around Uku was understandable, even if she’d never had the chance to see such things up close.

Though, she hadn’t had the chance to see most of it. For security and safety reasons, she’d been confined to a small part of the Clawhold, behind sealed doors with attached pumps, where filters and fans kept the air cleaner and fresher than any that she’d breathed in her life. It had only been a few days, and already she felt… fresher. More awake and alert. And the trauma of being attacked, while it still throbbed, was fading.

Now, though, she had an important meeting. So important that Grandfather Vark was accompanying her to it.

“I should mebbe warn ‘ya about the Great Father,” he said, with what Uku could only guess was a pensive set of his ears. “He is…a very big creature. In every way. Overwhelming even when he doesn’t want to be. You will need to take that charming meekness of yours and bury it very, very deep for this meeting. Can you do that?”

“…Charming meekness?” Uku wasn’t sure if she should be offended or not, and wound up standing straight, planting her hands on her hips and giving him a curious look, one ear askance and the other straight up above her head.

“Yeah. I don’t mean it bad. It’s jus’ that somethin’ about y’all brings out my protective instincts very hard. It’ll be like ten times worse with the Great Father. It’s what he is.”

“I don’t think of myself as particularly ‘meek.’”

“Mebbe it’s jus’ perception on my part, then. An’ mebbe I ain’t bein’ fair. But ‘ya weren’t so bold when we first met, yijao?”

“People were trying to kill me!”

Vark duck-nodded agreeably. “Ayup. Like I said, mebbe that ain’t entirely fair o’ me. I done a whole lotta killin’ in my time. But I can only go by what I think is true, an’ I’m tellin’ ‘ya this ‘cuz Daar—the Great Father—very much doesn’t like scarin’ people he don’t wanna scare. Oh, an’ there’s one other thing. Y’know how we don’t like lies?”

“An admirable trait, even if it maybe makes you a bit too blunt in your observations…”

“Daar is the Champion-Emeritus of my Clan. He is more an embodiment of what we are than any who have ever lived, an’ that’s the honest truth. So…”

Ukusevi considered that word. “An embodiment. A living symbol? Avatar of your ideals and virtues?”

“Yeah. An’ more. He’s a good man, but…”

“You’re fretting on my behalf.”

“…Yeah.”

Uku put a grateful hand on his arm. “Thank you for the advice. But I think I can handle myself. Librarians can be…passionate…in their disagreement, as you have seen firsthand.”

Vark chittered, a gravelly noise that sounded nothing like her own people’s laughter, but she knew the sound well enough by now to smile.

“Yeah, fair ‘nuff,” he agreed, then angled his nose toward the door. “After you.”

They walked a bit through the warren of corridors and airlocks that made up the Gaoian’s temporary village on the surface. No matter where they went, the air had that same marvelously clean and cool quality, and it also carried a faint…it smelled green like the hydroponics gardens they kept in the Library, but stronger.

She knew instantly when they were approaching the Great Father’s quarters, however. The gentle breeze moving down the hallway was suddenly saturated with a heavy musk much like Vark’s, except… more. It wasn’t unpleasant, really. But it bullied every other aroma into the background, even the scent of Vark standing next to her.

It obviously had an effect on him. Vark’s ears flicked backward in a clearly docile gesture as he approached the door. There was a grooved metal plate mounted in it above the handle, which Vark scratched loudly with his claws.

A deep, booming voice rumbled from the other side. “Come.”

It turned out that Vark had not exaggerated about the Great Father in the slightest. Daar was…he was…

Vark was right. She suddenly felt meek. It was just instinctive upon encountering someone so obviously dangerous. No other creature she had ever met, seen or read about had anything like the deadly ability positively radiating from him. It was etched into his every movement, into every well-fed and impossibly muscular line of his body, with terrifying teeth and rib-breaking claws every bit the match for all the rest. She willed her spine to remain straight, and her expression serenely curious.

Ukusevi quickly learned that capability and intent didn’t necessarily align with this creature. She didn’t get even a moment to gather herself before the Great Father boisterously greeted the much smaller Vark by effortlessly hauling him clear off his feet and half crush-hugging, half wrestling him in what could only be described as an affectionate show of dominance.

Vark didn’t seem afraid at all. That spoke of a deep trust, or perhaps a much better ability to read intent from each other. Nevertheless, he was clearly cowed by the Great Father. Despite Ukusevi having known Vark for a few days, that would have seemed like an impossible thing, until now.

“Mrf, I missed you too, My Father!” Daar put Vark down, and if he took a big gasp of breath, Uku tried not to notice. “I brought the Librarian.”

“Thankee! I know ‘ya got a lotta work ‘ta catch up on, so I won’t hold ‘ya captive…”

Somehow, she knew that wasn’t merely an observation. Vark knew he had been ordered out, and bowed out with a dignity she hadn’t yet seen from him.

“Thank you, My Father.”

Daar turned his attention to Ukusevi and though she felt a shiver of instinctive dread, he was nothing but friendliness. “You must be Ukusevi! Welcome, please, have a seat!”

“…Thank you.” Uku sat in the offered chair, feeling well and truly out of sorts, and was surprised when the Great Father ignored the furniture and promptly thumped his enormous haunches down on the ground with a slight tremor that she felt through her feet. He made himself comfortable right there on the rug and seemed to think nothing of it. The rational part of her brain told her that was clearly calculated to make him seem less threatening. With… limited success.

He seemed to know it too, and gave her what could only be a sly look. “I ain’t gonna eat’cha, y’know.”

“Most things in my life with teeth like yours would have,” Uku replied.

“I know. My people are obligate carnivores. But we do not eat thinking beings.” He indicated a plate. “I got veggie snacks, if you want ‘em. They’re called ‘carrots.’ An’ the dip is ‘hummus.’ Totally veggie.”

“I… Thank you.” Uku realized that she was in fact quite hungry, and accepted the plate of sweet-smelling roots gratefully. She dipped one, and sampled it with a satisfying crunch followed by a combination of flavors both earthy and fresh. It was… by far the tastiest thing she’d eaten in a long time.

“One’a my favorites,” Daar said. “Ain’t Gaoian food though. Human. Almost everything we eat has meat in it somehow.”

“I appreciate your discretion,” Uku told him, warming to the big feral alien. “And I don’t mean to seem intimidated. Your people have more than won my trust, but…well…Instinct is a difficult thing. I think your word is yijao?”

“Ha!” The Great Father’s chitter was almost a parody of Varks: deep, resonant and chest-shaking. “Not a bad pronunciation either!”

“All part of the training. We librarians have a phonetic alphabet.”

“Yeah! I’ve been readin’ th’ briefin’s my people are makin’ and it’s fascinatin.’ My own Clan’s got someone called the Lore-Master who I think you’d like to meet. Balls, Highmountain too.”

“I think I have a few more immediate concerns,” Uku replied. “The last report your Father Garaaf gave me said a great many of my people are being exiled to the surface by the… let’s call them the puritans.”

“That’s a good word ‘fer ‘em. You got ‘em outnumbered, but I suspect ‘yer people ain’t used ‘ta winnin’ those kinda fights.”

“My people aren’t used to fighting at all. We’re used to dying.”

That elicited what could only be described as a sympathetic keen from the Great Father’s throat, along with a visible attempt to restrain himself.

“…Is something wrong? I was told you prefer the unvarnished truth.”

“I do. Still hurts ‘ta hear.”

Uku nodded. “You’re right. We outnumber the puritans. But they’re just so angry. They’re in so much pain, so desperate for a truth that gave their lives–and all those deaths–a kind of meaning. And we’re tearing it away from them. I don’t blame them for being angry at us, but their anger is driving thousands of families onto the surface, and we can’t live on the surface!”

“Yeah. An’ that’s leadin’ me to the first big thing we gotta figger out. There is a Sky-People you’ve not met yet. They’re called Ten’Gewek, which means ‘the people’ in their own language.”

“Sky-people? I’m familiar with the concept of alien species, you know.”

“Yeah. But Sky-People is honestly the better word ‘fer this. Species is just a kind of living thing. Sky-People says a whole lot more inna lot less words. Anyhoo, I ain’t gonna bore ‘ya wif the details jus’ now. The chieftain o’ their people has convinced his fellows that they should give ‘yer people one of their worlds.”

“…A whole world? A planet?”

“Yeah. It’s a big thing ‘ta drop on ‘ya, I know. But we ain’t got the luxury o’ time. I’ll jus’ say that, their people are tied to their world in a way most aren’t. An’ they’re still hunter-gatherers. It’s a long story. But what the consequence o’ all that weirdness is, is that they ain’t got much use ‘fer that world. So ‘fer them, givin’ it is the good an’ obvious thing ‘ta do.”

“When can we start moving?”

The Great Father barked some kind of excited emotion. “Balls! You ain’t one to beat around the tail, are ‘ya?!”

Uku noted his choice of words. As she suspected, he was very much a surface-hero type of personality who was doing his best to mind his manners. The brave souls who’d left the tunnels to work for the Hunters, mine the world, make tools for them, and risked being slaughtered and devoured every time the so-called Punishment came to collect…they all had that same general coarseness to them after a while. Maybe it was how sapient beings of every kind handled true hardship.

Something about him told her he’d been through many such things in his time.

“As you said, we do not have much time.”

“No. But Ukusevi, you need ‘ta know some things. The planet has weaker gravity. Over time that’s gonna have consequences ‘fer ‘yer people. The world is completely untamed, too. It’s…going to take very much to make it your own. And I kinda think that movin’ in is gonna kill off what’s there, in favor of what your people bring along.”

“What are we going to bring?” Uku retorted. “There’s nothing left for us except poisoned, dead things. Our food crops are grown hydroponically, and those are about the only things we’d take, apart from our books and archives. We don’t have any pet animals or livestock, the last of those died generations ago. A Hunter ate it.”

The Gao must have kept pets too, because that statement elicited an angered growl from deep inside Daar’s chest that Uku was glad to know was intended for the Hunters, not herself or her people.

He didn’t let himself get distracted, though. “Well…you do have bacteria. Food plants. ‘Yerselves. You’ll need ‘ta piss an’ shit, just like anything else that walks. An’ we honnestly jus’ don’t know enough ‘bout ‘yer people’s particular flavor o’ life, or this planet’s life, or how it’ll play together. Or not play together. So there’s mebbe a lot o’ risk to this.”

“Well, we’ll deal with that.” Ukusevi shook her head. “I don’t care, Great Father, if there’s risk involved, and what concerns we will have to face. What I care about is that hundreds of thousands of my people are going to starve or die of poison very soon indeed unless we act. Next to everything we’ve endured and already overcome, the difficulties of settling a new, untainted world will be a blessing. And so I am eager to begin. I think you would be too, in my position.”

“Mhmm.” The Great Father rose and barked through to an adjoining room. “Tiyun! How are ‘ya doin’ on our crash colonization plan?”

A much smaller Gao—Ukusevi had seen enough of their species to deduce that this Tiyun was a fairly normal Gao, while behemoths like Daar and Vark were a feared minority—bustled through with a device of some kind, which he laid in the Great Father’s massive paw.

“There are a few lingering questions we need answers to,” he reported, “but the infrastructure is in place, we’ve received the Ten’Gewek’s go-ahead, and the groundbreaker team is ready to jump to Misfit’s array and build a larger one at your order.”

“Thanks, as always.” Daar fixed that intense predatory gaze of his back on Ukusevi. “Jus’ say the word, and it’ll be so.”

A thought occurred to her suddenly, likely prompted by Tiyun’s brief comments. “…Why are you doing this for us? This has already cost you lives! I don’t even know how many!”

Daar heaved a huge, serious sigh.

“My people were brought to the edge o’ extinction by these evil fucks. Once there were over a billion females among my kind, now there are just over one hundred million remaining. Worse, my people already had a natural gender imbalance of…well, six to one or so, but I’m digressing. The point is that I am the Great Father as a consequence of all that, my people yet live, an’ there are not words ‘ta describe how grateful we are to be free of an enslavement we din’t even know was there. We are a made people, Ukusevi. We were made to be a soldier species. And it’s only because of the Humans that we broke free.”

Ukusevi didn’t have anything like an appropriate reply to that. All she could do was take refuge in an observation. “…You really can sympathize.”

“Yeah. All of which means we can’t not help you, especially when it’s Hunters doin’ ‘ta you what their masters tried ‘ta do to us. Never again. Not while I’m still kickin.’”

“…They have masters?”

“They do. Garaaf mighta mentioned ‘em at some point as the Hierarchy. That’s a long story, an’ they’re the prey I ultimately wanna crunch in my jaws. But not right now. Right now, I care about you. So…are ‘ya ready ‘fer the adventure of ‘yer life?”

Ukusevi took a deep breath. She’d already gone on more adventures than one life really ought to contain, she felt. As if upsetting her religion and prompting a civil war weren’t enough for one woman.

“I don’t see any point in even asking,” she said. “My people need this. That’s all that matters.”

The Great Father nodded his head in a way that seemed to involve his neck and shoulders more than his head itself. “A’right.” He sank to all fours again, nodded at Tiyun, and prowled his way toward the door.

“C’mon. Let’s go see ‘yer new world together.”

Date Point: 17y4m1w4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

The final touch to his protective drone was a raspy, razor-sharp tongue. If Stabby were ever forced to take defensive actions, Nofl figured they should be memorable, so as to dissuade further attempts on his lab.

The programming should be sufficient. He’d run simulations, and everything. The idea emphatically was not to actually harm anybody, as the Folctha government took a curiously dim view of people protecting their own homes and property. The idea was that if anybody did invade his lab, they really, really would wish they had not.

Amusing as that thought was though, if truth be told, Nofl found his mind far more occupied by his temporary engagement. Singularity had, entirely without asking, arranged for the whole affair.

The Ark Project was ready for its first independent checkpoint review. There being precious few individuals cleared for the program, and fewer still who were experts in deathworld physiology and especially few who had any knowledge at all of normal early-life development for deathworld species… the candidate pool was necessarily thin.

Nofl didn’t know if that was an insult or an accolade.

In any case, there was no point worrying about it. With a put-upon sigh and no small amount of actual interest in what he was about to see, he grabbed his bag and headed out.

Transit was at least quick. Instantaneously, in fact, but only after he’d made the jump to Origin, been shuttled halfway across City Zero, driven down a bunker, and herded toward another jump array, this one behind multiple forcefields, security turrets and other measures besides.

“Is all this really necessary?”

“Project security is paramount.”

And…that about exhausted the small talk. Of course. His people had abandoned that particular social nicety a long time ago. No, no little pleasantries for the Corti, no being nice to each other.

Honestly, it was a wonder they were still around. Then again, they wouldn’t have been in a few more hundred years, if not for the project Nofl was now visiting.

With the black flash-thump of an Array, he stepped off the platform at the Ark Project and was immediately struck by a change in the atmosphere that had absolutely nothing at all to do with humidity, temperature, or the ratio of gases. The white-banner technician with three doctorate pips on her work harness who descended the stairs to meet him had an actual spring in her step, rather than the prim trot he was used to seeing.

“Doctor Nofl, thank you for coming!” she surprised him further with genuine warmth, which was unheard-of between somebody of her rarified caste and somebody of his decidedly more lowly one. “I am Doctor Feln, director of development and education.”

Ah. The headteacher. Suddenly, her downright personable demeanor made a good deal more sense.

Still, she wasn’t quite personable enough for Nofl to fly into the mode he used with Humans, so he settled for echoing her restrained happiness. “I’m pleased to be here! I believe you’re the author of that insightful paper on common traits in early juvenile sophont development, correct?”

Complimenting a senior academic on their published work was always a sure way into their good books, and so it proved for Feln, who was naturally much too cautiously inculcated in the ways of high-banner Corti to do anything so crass as smile, but nevertheless looked quite pleased.

“I’m pleased you have read it,” she replied. “Please, come this way!”

An actual ‘please’ from a white-banner? Nofl was beginning to think he’d stepped into an alternate universe, but what quickly became apparent as Feln led him into the facility was that… he almost had.

The Ark Project was deep underground on a planet at the fringes of Corti space. The planet in question was barren, the last of its photosynthetic life having died off millions of years ago as a consequence of a rather feeble core activity. Its magnetosphere had failed to conserve its atmosphere against the stripping power of the stellar wind, and all tectonic activity had ceased, meaning no volcanos to replenish the atmosphere. Being out the outward fringe of its star’s habitable zone, the loss of pressure had resulted in the temperatures sinking down, and down, and down, until it was far too cold out there to support life of any kind.

The Directorate had surveyed it extensively in the hopes of finding fossil fuel deposits, but as it turned out neither the ecosystem nor tectonic activity had lasted long enough to produce those valuable resources, and so Tangent had been left abandoned. Claimed but forgotten, not really worth the effort of establishing even a mining colony.

Now, though, a tiny handful of scientists, secretly here in a hole far underground with no access to the surface, had devoted an otherwise useless rock to the future of their species and civilization.

The first generation of Corti 2.0 were now in their second year of life, by the Directorate’s calendar. They were walking, forming simple sentences, developing their fumbling motor skills and, it had to be said, clearly enjoyed drawing on the walls in crayon. One had clearly decorated the length of a corridor with a series of rather misshapen triangles at chest height.

“That would be Meru’s work,” Feln explained, a touch apologetically. “She is the oldest. Carbon Caste zero-zero-zero-one. And easily the most…precocious.”

“You can actually see her getting more accomplished…” Nofl mused. As they reached the end of the corridor, the triangles were definitely approaching a more ideal equilateral.

“That would be why we have not cleaned it off yet. The sequence needs scanning and analysing. Oh, that reminds me. If you hear a thumping sound getting closer, it is usually a good idea to flatten yourself against the wall. She and her siblings learned how to run about twelve days ago, and now they just will not stop.”

“You make her sound like a charging rhino,” Nofl said, suppressing the urge to giggle.

“A what?”

“Earthling mammal, as much as two tonnes in mass with thick armored hide and a large spike on the nose. Renowned for charging at things and trampling them.”

“…Apt.”

“That’s interesting, though. Human and Ten’Gewek infants at this stage in their development are still figuring out how to stand upright by holding on to things.”

“Gaoian cubs, on the other hand, are playing social games and using rather complex tools,” Feln replied. “Our Carbon caste develop similarly quickly.” She sounded proud, in a motherly way.

“And they’re physically dangerous to an adult?”

“They are about half your height and mass, and surprisingly strong. We haven’t had any injuries yet but I am quite certain we will unless we get into the habit of stepping aside when they are running around.”

Nofl considered the Human children he knew who handily matched that description, and decided that, yes, he’d rather not have one of the Carbons barge into him at an unsteady run.

The tour of the facility proceeded without such an incident, however. As it turned out, the Carbons were all in lessons or taking naps, and could not see him through the observation windows. That was a shame, he’d rather hoped to meet one and speak with them.

Feln had not exaggerated their size or mass, however. Infants they might be, but they already had a substantial solidity to them that was quite un-Corti. And their eyes were different. The classic, normal Corti eyes were large, ovoid and angled slightly upwards, but the Carbons had slightly smaller, rounder, more focused eyes. The difference was not large, but it was enough to highlight that what he was looking at was, in many ways, a different species. Certainly, none of them would be able to breed with a baseline Corti, though that was due to the fact that baseline Corti were effectively sterile.

But still. Being so different in every way, and having no realistic likelihood of interbreeding, was as reasonable a definition of speciation as there was. Strange, therefore, to think that this new, synthetic species based on the Corti, with traits stolen or purchased from three other species, were being counted as the hope of the Corti. They weren’t a continuation, they were… a replacement.

But they were being raised as Corti. The same culture, the same general structure to their lives. They would be different, and would surely take the Directorate in their own unique direction when they took over… but that was their right, as it was the right of every generation.

Feln was obviously very proud and fond of them, and surprisingly unabashed in showing it too, considering her caste. That part gave Nofl real cause for hope. Maybe his people hadn’t been as far gone as he’d feared.

That impression, however, was swiftly dispelled by his introduction to the rest of the project directors. Staid, conservative, dismayingly concerned with the performance of Caste. Predictable. Boring.

And in an endeavor such as this, dangerous.

He retired for study after the necessary social positioning and status-establishing rituals. Several hours to go over results and documentation were needed before he confronted them with anything important.

And it turned out, there were important things to confront. Two days after he first arrived, having dug, read, watched and reviewed his way through an incredible amount of data, he met formally with the directors to discuss his findings.

“I have concluded my overview. Now before we delve into the specifics, I’d just like to run through the ‘big picture’ as the Humans say.”

“That would be a restatement of the executive summary we’ve already provided.”

“Yes it would, darling. That’s the point. We would hardly wish to proceed unless we were certain of our mutual understanding, hmm?”

The various directors agreed reluctantly, despite doing all they could to project dispassion. Nobody much liked having their projects turned upside-down by strangers. Silver banners being audited by a lowly steel banner such as Nofl?

How very terrible.

“Overall, the project is meeting minimum success thresholds in all capacities, and exceeding the optimal success thresholds in most regards. Per the Directorate performance evaluation algorithm, I am able to grant the Ark Project a Grade Two pass score.” Nofl saw nods around the table. “I am sure, of course, that you are all eager to hear what steps are necessary to achieve a Grade One score.”

Feln in particular nodded with rather more enthusiasm than her more bridled peers deigned to show.

Nofl nodded at her in particular, then turned to the presentation he prepared. “I see you took my advice on the Gaoians seriously.”

The project’s genetics director, Fehu, wore four doctorate pips and the triangular emblem of an emeritus professor. Clearly he’d retired from his tenured post at the college of xeno-genetics for his position here at the Ark. “Affirmative. We found a number of novel solutions regarding rapid early-life development, however: their genome is far and away the most computationally complex we’ve ever investigated. It’s almost two genomes, with heavy overlap.”

“It is two genomes, darling. They are an engineered species. So far as we can determine, they were designed specifically to combat stagnation among us lowly ‘substrate’ species.”

The Cultural director, Mavin, tilted his head subtly. “That…would go far to explain their social structure.”

“Yes, and the presence of ‘throwback’ Clans like Highmountain and Stoneback, especially rare individuals within those Clans. Frankly, I’m impressed you found anything that could be safely used at all.” A small compliment, to lubricate the gears. “So overall, I would say you have made optimal use of that resource. I am a bit more concerned with just how much Ten’Gewek and Human genomics I see in these New Corti. Both are naturally-evolved high-order Deathworlder species, and there are immense epigenetic phenomena at play.”

“Most such concerns were addressed in the early batches. Meru and her siblings were the result of serial run…” Mavin looked to the senior archivist to finish his sentence.

“Experimental Twenty-one Fourteen, strain three thousand four hundred and forty-five,” Tlenm supplied, promptly.

“Indeed. Nevertheless…. Director Feln, I read a rather extensive document concerning the, ah, unsatisfactory state of their alimentary health. I understand the poor things are suffering from routine gastric discomfort and incomplete digestion.”

“It has required us to formulate specialized nutrition for them, yes,” Feln acknowledged.

“I believe there may be a less industrially intensive solution.” Nofl called up his next slide. “An interesting fact for you. By cell count, a Human is actually as much as ninety percent bacteria and fungi. They’re more like a walking symbiotic microbial ecosystem than an individual organism. The symbiotic microbes make up only about one to three percent of their total mass, but the point is that an enormous part of what goes on in their body—especially their digestive tracts—is the work of symbiotic microorganisms. It was this quirk which led to the creation of the so-called ‘Human Disaster,’ after all. The same is very much true for Ten’Gewek, and it is from these species, directors, that you have extensively drawn your organ encoding.”

“In short,” he concluded. “You need to expand this facility to include a microbe research lab and start cultivating healthy gut biomes for the Carbons.”

Fehu wore a briefly concerned expression. “How will they propagate the necessary symbiotic bacteria after reproduction?”

“The problem, historically, has been how to prevent bacterial propagation. That is what the Frontline treatment was specifically invented for, after all.” Nofl reminded them. “Human and Ten’Gewek exchange microbes extensively in their daily and intimate lives, and especially between mother and child at the moment of birth. I assure you, propagation will take care of itself.”

Looks of barely concealed disgust were exchanged around the table… again, with the interesting exception of Feln, who looked like she found the whole subject intriguingly revolting. Of course, she’d probably had rather a lot of exposure to the natural end product of all those upset stomachs.

Nofl treated them all to a tight smile, and called up the next slide. By the end of the day, they would all have achieved that same level of inoculation, or else would leave the room desperately needing a shower. He looked forward to seeing which.

“I have a few recommendations on where the microbe lab should begin…” he said.

Date Point: 17y4m2w AV
Relay world, deep uncharted space

Ferd Given-Man

“That shield is a problem.”

Ferd looked up from his meal pack. The Human food hit the belly hard and stuck there, and gave them all they needed to be strong, but it didn’t taste so good cold. Frasier said it tasted better with the hot sauce, but Ferd had no idea why or how humans liked that stuff. It tasted like fire in the mouth, and if it got into his air-taster then he could do nothing except cough and have water eye for a long time after.

The Humans were all too happy to have as many of the little bottles as they could get though, if Ferd and his men weren’t using them.

Wild, though, was fretting about something.

“Shield?” Ferd asked him.

“Yeah. I can’t see its bottom edge.”

“So we will use dump-web then, yes?”

“That would give us away, mate.”

“Hmm.” Ferd moved up beside him, picked up a seeing-glass and joined Wild in looking at the problem. Sure enough, the hazy shimmer of the field came right down among the buildings. Maybe it stopped just above the ground, maybe not. Hard to tell.

“We need to see closer.”

“Yeah. Probably.” Wild sighed. “Damn it. I was trying to see if I could spot an aqueduct or something. Some trench below street level.”

“I think, that would be too easy for big enemy.”

“Yeah, they’d probably be watching it.” Wild sniffed irritably. “…Fuck. And I left my TBM at home, too.”

“Your what?”

“Tunnel Boring Machine. Big fuckin’ drill for making caves. Not exactly portable, though. It’s as big as a couple of houses.”

“Ah. Joke.” Ferd considered the abandoned city below. “…Would be useful, though.”

“Yeah, mate. As it is… we’re on limestone up here. Hard rock. No digging through that lot, so going under the shield isn’t an option. Only thing we can do is walk up and hope there’s a gap to squeeze under.”

“Or else us dump and get noticed.”

“Yeah.” Wild grumbled. “…Something tells me this whole thing’s going to happen fast when we head down there. Those drones won’t fuck around if we’re spotted.”

“I remember,” Ferd said. “Killed many men of the tribes. Killed many tribes. Death-birds, we called them.” He watched the flock of them going round and around above the Relay. He knew they flew faster than anyone could run, had ‘plasma’ weapons that could explode a man like ripe fruit, and fusion blades along their wings that could cut even him in half.

“Good name.” Wild considered the city one last time, then nodded. “…Alright, fuck it. We’re going back to the ship, and we’re breaking out the big boom.”

Ferd pulled a small face to himself. The “big boom” was a piece of Gaoian sky-magic the Great Father gave them. He didn’t know what a gigaton was, really, but it sounded big, and the Humans and Tooko talked about it like it was really really big. All he knew was, it was as big as a bull Werne’s head and a lot heavier.

He would be eating well, though. There was always a shimmering flower to find.

“So we’re nuking it,” Rees said, perking up.

“Yup. Only way—”

“—to be sure!” Rees and Frasier chorused. Ferd blinked. Whatever that joke had been, it slipped right past him.

No matter.

The trek back wasn’t bad. There were many interesting things to see, and some small scuttling prey. Nothing worthy of a good meal, but they hadn’t deeply explored the forest next to the open ground yet.

They had a forest trail, though. Tooko had landed in a dry riverbed where no trees grew, and with the help of some nets, some fabric, and some sky-magic built into the top of the ship, he said it still looked just like an empty riverbed from above. He must be right, because so far the big enemy hadn’t seen him.

The path on foot through the trees was marked with Ferd’s forest-sign, carved into trees and stones with his knife. They weren’t big or strong trees like at home, but they were wide, with big flat dark leaves that covered the sky and drank the light, so it was even darker among them than the forests at home.

He and his men had no problem seeing in the gloom. The Humans though… they could see well enough to walk, but it took them a while before their eyes settled and they could see properly. Wild walked close behind Ferd, stepping where he stepped.

Their ears seemed to make up for some of that, though. “Hear that? Something’s following us, about five o’clock.”

Ferd flicked his right ear around and, sure enough…

“Sounds like a hunting beast on all fours.”

“Least it’s not a fucking tiger…” Frasier commented, turning and raising his weapon.

“Why not?” Nomuk asked.

“Completely silent, those are.” Frasier aimed into the bushes. “Light?”

“Shoot your tac light in the bush back there, yeah. See if we scare it away.”

Frasier nodded. “Watch your eyes, lads.”

Ferd turned his head. There was a bright flash, and something heavy panicked and started scrambling to run away behind the bush.

Nomuk wasn’t about to let good meat get away. He blurred after it, and within a couple breaths had caught it, broken its back with a muffled crunch, and flung it over shoulder. Ferd hooted softly: the beast was rangy and mean-looking, built more for slinking and pouncing then climbing or brawn. It reminded him of a Baru without pack-mates, and was both bigger and skinnier. And its fur was green. Weird.

“Fuck me, look at the claws on that bad boy!” Rees commented.

“Kinda reminds me of a sloth,” Wild replied.

“Sloth?” Ferd asked. “…Must be strong beast with claws like that?”

The Humans traded a laugh that said no, it really wasn’t, shook their heads, and turned back down the trail toward the ship.

“Least we get real meat today…” Tumik muttered.

“Sure.” Wild ducked under a branch and paused as the came out of the woods near the ship. “We’ve got some planning to do.”

As they stepped out of the woods, one of the ship’s smaller guns turned to track them. All as normal: Big Enemy got into people’s heads. Tooko was just being safe. There was a ’scanner’ on the ship that could see inside them for Big Enemy’s tricks, but it needed them to stand still, so they did. After a few seconds, the gun turned back to its resting pose and Tooko opened the door.

“How you holdin’ up, Pip?” Rees asked him jovially as the Gaoian emerged. “Goin’ stir crazy yet?”

“Glad to have the place smelling decent for a change,” he replied. “…What is that?”

“Lunch!” Nomuk held up the carcass.

“…Oh. Okay.” Tooko sniffed, then shrugged and turned to Wild. “So. Bad news first?”

“You already got the good news, in that we’re not dead or droned,” Wild replied as Nomuk and Tumik took the beast away to harvest the meat. “Bad news is, it looks like that thing’s shields come right down to ground level.”

“That takes me flattening it off the table,” Tooko grumbled. “…So what’s the plan?”

“Nuke it. If we can sneak that warhead the Great Father gave you in under the shield, that’d be perfect, if not… well, I doubt the shield could stop it anyway.”

Tooko’s ears flicked backwards. “Well. So much for the local ecosystem…” he muttered.

“Needs must, pal.” Wild took a swig of water. “…What’s the minimum safe distance on that thing, anyway?”

“Uh… preferably behind the moon?”

“Seriously, now.”

“I am being serious. The radiation pulse alone on that type of bomb will kill everything within line of sight. It’s gonna kick up enough debris to maybe trigger a nuclear winter. Nowhere on-planet is safe. And that doesn’t even cover the earthquakes, or—”

“Right.”

Ferd watched them both carefully. “…That big?”

“Bigger. The Great Father said we’re only to use it if there’s no alternative.”

“Pretty sure this counts, mate. Believe me, it’s not my first choice, but we came her to kill a Relay and by God I’m going to kill a Relay.”

Ferd nodded sharply. That was as solemn a vow as he’d ever heard Wild make, but he agreed completely.

“I hope the Great Father agrees with you…” Tooko fretted, but he duck-nodded and headed to the cargo hold. “I’ll prep the bomb for you, then.”

“Cheers.” Wild heaved a big breath once the Gaoian was gone, then gave Ferd a complicated look. “Never thought I’d nuke something…”

“Is a big Taking,” Ferd agreed, grimly. “Kill much of the world, from what Tooko said.”

“Yeah.”

“Worth it, though. Big Enemy threatens many worlds, many peoples, and has killed many over deep time. Take a big Taking by us to balance all they’ve done.”

“You’re right.”

Ferd clapped him heavily on the shoulder. “Good you take it serious, though. Men shouldn’t Take lightly, especially not on this scale.”

“Yeah, mate.” Wild stood. “…Took’s gonna need me to open the second lock. You get some rest and roast up that kill, ‘kay? We’ll go at night.”

Ferd took that seriously, because he knew what the nuke was like: bulky, heavy, and would make him the biggest target on the team.

Night came quickly. The days here were a finger shorter than at home, so dark and light seemed to blur past fast enough to lose track of time. By the time the kill was cooked, eaten, and declared good, the sun was already low in the sky.

By the time they’d painted their faces, checked their gear, gone over the plan and all clearly understood their part in it, the sky was washed with orange and pink.

By the time they emerged from the forest with the nuke on Ferd’s back and the old dead city in sight, it was dark. No moon, tonight. A good night for hunting. There was light down around the Relay though. Little deadly cones of it as the death-birds swept the ruins, ever watchful. And behind them, the faint off-white glow of the shield dome, invisible by day but clear in the dark.

No talking, now. They were ghosts in the dark, off to do a terrible thing.

And they would not fail.

++END CHAPTER 65++

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As well as sixty-two Deathworlders…

Austin Deschner
Aaron Hescox
Adam Beeman
Alex Langub
Alexandre Smirnov
Andrew
Andrew Ford
Andrew Robinson
Arnor atp
Ben Thrussell
Bruce Ludington
Chris Bausch
Chris Meeker damnusername
Daniel R.
David Jamison
Derek Price
Devin Rousso
Elizabeth Schartok
Elliott Riddle
Eric Johansson
Fiona Dunlop galrock0
Gavin Smart
Ignate Flare
Ivan Smirnov
Jeffrey Stults
Jim Hamrick
Jon
Katie Drzewiecki
Kristoffer Skarra
Logan Rudie lovot
Matt
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
mihkel miks
Mikee Elliott
Nathan Wentworth
NightKhaos
Patrick Huizinga
Phil Winterleitner
Richard A Anstett
RJ Smiley
Ryan Cadiz
Ryan Seaman
Sam
Saph
Sintanan
Stephen Prescott
Stratigan theWorst
Tyler Kelloway
Vincent Leighton
Volka Creed walter thomas
William Kinser
Woodsie13 xxarmondxx

…Seventy-Seven Friendly ETs, 133 Squishy Xenos and 307 Deli(splat)cious (splat) dizi (splat) Rats

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 66: “Unbowed”

Chapter 66: Unbowed

Date Point: 17y4m2w AV
Relay world, deep uncharted space

Ferd Given-Man

Hand signals only. No words, only silent footsteps, glances, gestures. Tail-flicks and crest-waves, which the Humans had long ago learned to read. They didn’t have tails to flick back, but they could say much with their faces the People couldn’t. Ferd and his men could read those faces as well as each other’s tails. They were all brothers now, and they had no secrets between them.

At a gesture from Rees, they melted against the old, broken walls as an arrowhead of five death-birds slithered past overhead, moving slower than something which flew ought to. They didn’t turn, slow or show any sign of spotting the team. Keep moving.

They had carefully walked around much of the machine-village’s border, a hand of a hand of klicks and still more to go. So far, they hadn’t found any kind of gap in the shield.

Ferd didn’t think they would. Or if they did, the Big Enemy would know about it and have it watched closely. Still, they had to try, so onward they hiked, from the start of dusk to the middle of night. It was a lot of work and he was starting to feel it. The bomb on his back was the biggest the Gaoian sky-tribes had and it was heavy like a prize old Werne bull, maybe like if a hand of extra Ferds were riding on him. He wouldn’t mind that, but it was also surprisingly small and shaped strange, so all that weight bore down on his shoulders and the pack-belt around his waist, if he stood tall on his feet.

Ferd was a very strong man, and he could handle that easy, no problem. But his feet already sunk deep into the forest loam without that burden, and all that extra weight was making it hard to hide trail. Walking upright-ish would make less trail-sign but he felt like if he did, then the muscles in his belly might break his pack-belt, so he mostly knuckled along on all fours. That was much more comfortable, but then he had to worry harder about his trail-sign. Nomuk was following him to hide any mistakes and watch their backs, but even so, a man should never leave sign on a hunt.

Another gesture from Rees as they reached the edge of cover, where the walls and trees gave way to open ground. They paused. He checked. He gestured. They darted across the open ground and back into the safety of the overgrowth. Ferd and his men were very fast, much faster than the Humans. But the Humans had a sort of slinky, silent way of moving that worked for them better, and Ferd could respect that. Every hunter had to love the quiet, but Wild was better enough that Ferd wondered if that’s why he had that name.

There were advantages to being smaller, too. Frasier could climb up weak, scraggly branches without fear of breaking them. He did that just then to peer over a corner, to see past the next open area toward a low spot, where water looked like it sometimes flowed. He climbed back down quietly—not as pretty as the People could do it, but only a young one could have climbed such a scraggly tree in the first place. Once he was down they formed up, readied themselves, checked carefully for any death-birds or seeing-machines…and moved. The Humans had lighter packs, and didn’t move as fast…

But they moved well. Small or not, they sure moved like true hunters. They played the game a hand of hands more times, looking for a gap in the sky-magic shimmer-wall, never finding one.

Despite the danger and the uncomfortable ‘uniform’ pressing his crest down flat along his back and tail, where his sweat didn’t have a chance to cool him down or dry out…Ferd was enjoying himself. Something about any hunt was always good. The best hunts were when the Taking was a trial in front of the gods, and a slow, stupid, weak man might end up Taken himself.

Nobody on the team were any of those things, and the hunt was already a trial for Ferd’s men, and the Humans, too; the gods had made them to last, and last long, which was very much needed for this hunt. But that was okay. The gods gave the People that strength too, but it was one they had to find inside themselves, and earn. It was almost like the People and the Humans were always meant to find each other, to share learnings, the ways of their strength.

Ferd liked learnings.

Wild signed them to a halt in a dense bit of overgrown stone where the forest was taking back the old city and shook his head while pointing at the shield. Pointed at the bomb, signed for “fire” and pointed sharply at the ground where they were standing.

He didn’t mean the ground, though. Ferd knew that the bomb’s strength would mostly go into the ground under their feet if they left it there. The best would be to leave it very high up a tall, tall tree, so the bomb’s voice would slide along the ground and roar faster instead of mostly going straight up, where it would do no good.

He looked around, thinking hard about what he could see. He needed something strong he could climb, that wouldn’t break or crumble under his weight. Or the bomb’s weight, either. It needed to be high, but not exposed, and it needed to have somewhere at the top where he could hide the bomb so it wouldn’t be found.

They were too low to the ground to get a good look. They needed one of Rees’ sky-magic quiet-birds. Ferd got Wild’s attention and gestured “can’t see” at him. Wilde signalled his understanding. A quick flurry of sign language told Rees what to do, and Rees, after checking all was clear, heaved the quiet-bird off his back and threw it in the air with a heave. It was just a square block as big as a good butchering stone, but it twisted through the air in a magic way and vanished into the sky with a faint thrumming of invisible wings.

It had an invisible-cloak too, so once it was far enough away, not even Ferd knew where it was no matter how hard he tried; he could see and hear better than anyone on the team, too.

He prayed in his head that the death-birds couldn’t see or hear better than he could.

Rees had a tablet that let him see through its eyes. He watched it, then nodded and indicated something to the north-west, two klicks.

They got moving again. The night was short, they didn’t have time to waste. Already, they were more than half through it, and the sky would brighten quickly when dawn came. And Ferd was running low on his food-drink, too. Best to get this done, before he grew too tired to carry the bomb.

He saw what Rees had found pretty soon though. There was a rocky point above the city, with some old walls at the top. Long ago, the people who lived here had had… something up there. A tower to watch for foes maybe. Whatever it was, it poked out high above the old ruins, with enough rubble and stone up there to hide the bomb. Better yet, the approach was grown over. It wouldn’t be an easy climb, but he wouldn’t be exposed the whole way up. It was a good choice.

The climb ended up being a trial of a workout. The gravity there was strong like what Humans preferred, or maybe a bit stronger like his own people liked. That felt nicely familiar and meant he didn’t need to think about climbing, but with the weight of the bomb pulling him down and backwards the entire climb, it wasn’t long before his forearms were burning and his uniform was completely soaked through with sweat. His whole back felt tight and even his huge biceps were starting to feel tired. The worst, though, were his lower legs: big and strong even for a Given-Man, but they had to hold up all Fred’s weight, and the bull-like heft of the bomb, and crush his foot-grip fiercely into the stones underfoot so he didn’t slip or fall. He could feel a soreness growing deep inside the thickest part of the meat, one that would hurt tomorrow.

Ferd didn’t often drag Werne straight up cliffs, especially not ones hanging off the back of his shoulders; if he had to, he’d use his tail for that. He’d never hauled a full-size bull up a cliff so tall, either. He was higher up than any Ketta, high up enough that he might even die from a fall if he didn’t land it well. He had to take it careful, make sure each handhold and foothold was strong. He didn’t want a stone to break away and bounce loudly down the cliff, or send him falling. More than once, he froze against the stone in an awkward spot and waited as another death-bird patrol passed by, far away but still too close.

Holding himself perfectly still and in mid-reach, maybe just by one hand and one foot, maybe holding it long enough for the stars to move a bit, no matter how much his muscles screamed in pain…he’d brag about that to the women, when he was next on leave.

The last fifty meters went straight up and was completely exposed. No way around it but to be quiet and fast, so he looked carefully, found the best curves of the rock to hide his movement…and moved. Hopefully, Rees took video so he could show Yan. Ferd made the top with shaking legs, heart thumping angrily in his chest and his breath hard to catch. He knew what he had to do; before anything else, he dug out his best meal and devoured it as quickly and as quietly as he could, then washed it down with the rest of his food-drink. That was the big Taking of big, hard muscles. Food, air, hard work to keep them…and much painful practice if a man wanted to use them for a long time.

Ferd had learned a lot from the Humans. One of the biggest learnings was when and how to rest, so he did, until his sweat started to feel cool and his heart wasn’t complaining so hard. He was better at that than his men, so on this task he was alone; they couldn’t keep up. This thing was too important to risk a fuck-up like that. And more than one man moving on that cliff would definitely attract attention. No good.

The bomb was the biggest kind of sky-magic but he didn’t need to understand it to use it. All he had to do was tuck the bomb in among the stones, in a corner of the old wall. It took him a hand of minutes to hide it under crawling wall-plants and old bricks until he couldn’t see it. It was as hidden as it could be, but such a flimsy wall would do nothing to make the bomb weaker. Good. That done, he pulled off the flat metal cover and pushed the key in as best as he could. His hands were much too big to fit through the hole, so he had to hold the key awkwardly between his fingertips. It took a hand of tries, but finally the key clicked. He turned it and the little painted tab under the glass went from green to blue; the bomb was now armed.

Ferd didn’t want to spend any longer than he had to next to something like the bomb.

The trip back down was a blessing without the bomb’s weight. Still slow—he had to be quiet—but without all that weight on his back, it felt light and easy, and the climb did wonders at loosening up his muscles; maybe he wouldn’t be hurting tomorrow! He was sorely tempted to just jump down, but Wild said that machines could hear his hit-thump through the ground, and it was hard to miss seeing someone falling through the sky. Too bad. He could have made it.

The group was waiting nearby. A nod to Wild, a nod in return, and they turned back for the long ruck toward the ship. It was going to be close, but the important part was already done. The bomb was deployed and ready to fire. The mission was already complete.

All they had to worry about now was living through it.

27th day of the first year of freedom
A new world, far from the old one.

Ukusevi

“…You’re certain it’s safe?”

The big Human, Julian, looked very different to the last time Uku had seen him. Then, he’d been wrapped in protective clothing to spare him the poison air of a punished world.

Now, he was hardly wearing anything at all. There was a tough garment of hard-wearing fabric around his hips that kept whatever Humans had there modestly concealed. It had an abundance of pockets and came most of the way down his upper legs. He’d arrived wearing a shirt made of dark fabric so thin Uku would have considered it a cleaning-rag, and it was stretched tight enough across his frame it was hard to understand its purpose. There was a faded pattern printed on that shirt as well, but it made no sense to Uku’s eyes at all.

Nonetheless, almost as soon as they had arrived at this new, warm world, he’d peeled it right off and stood there, grinning hugely as he savored the sunlight. Besides the thing around his hips, the only other things he wore were tools, all nestled safely in his many pockets. The rest of him was impressively uncovered. Even his sturdy-seeming, oddly shaped feet were bare.

“I promise,” he assured her.

Uku believed him. She’d never seen somebody stand so… naked under the open sky before. Not even the Gao were so bare, their skin was covered in fur.

Humans and these Ten’Gewek though? Bare skin. The colour of varnished wood in Julian’s case, a leathery stone color in the case of the three crested brutes sitting in the background, waiting patiently to meet her.

One was like if Julian had been squashed down a head-height or so, another was plainly female and, like her companions, wore only a kind of hide skirt. The third…was a monster. A walking, talking, fanged boulder with a rather darker crest than the others. If he were a Punisher he’d be the most fearsome of them all.

As it was, something about his expression was…placid, somehow. He saw Uku watching and issued a soft hooting noise that could only be a friendly welcome.

Uku gave him a grateful nod, then turned her attention back to the human, then glanced over her shoulder at the Great Father, who was the biggest monster of all, ambling around on all fours and sniffing the air rather than looming over her.

None of them wore breathing masks. And from what she knew, generations of growing up amidst the toxic smog of their homeworld had left her people better able to handle airborne filth than even these friendly monsters, so Uku knew she was being ridiculous…

But a lifetime of warnings, fear and education were not so easily dispelled. It took a hard effort of will to persuade her hands to move and unwrap the cloth around her head that bound her breathing mask tight to her face.

Even once it was off, she hardly dared breathe. Only when her lungs started to protest did she finally relent and draw her first ever breath of pure, unfiltered, surface air.

That first breath shivered with emotion. It was… sweet. Light, even. A cool breeze kissed her cheek and rather than tasting of nothing as she’d expected, she found it tasted faintly of…

Well… of things she’d never tasted before. There were scents she didn’t have words for, notes and tones on the wind that were at once entirely new, and yet familiar to her deepest instincts. Her body had been starving for a clean atmosphere her entire life, and she’d never known it. Now, as her confidence grew and she took a deeper, headier breath, her body drank its fill and she knew there was no going back.

“…Almighty…” she whispered. She barely noticed that she was weeping.

The female Ten’Gewek was there, suddenly, with a long muscular arm around Uku’s shoulders to comfort her, crooning something so soft it was almost musical.

“Come,” she offered. “Walk. See.”

Numbly, Uku nodded, and took the sturdy alien’s hand. It was warm here. Warm in a way quite different to the heat of the library burrows. The air itself was temperate at most, but the sun actually reached the ground as something more than a weakened glow. Rather than fighting its way down through dust and clouds in the upper atmosphere, it pierced right through a clear sky of a rich beautiful blue that none of the old texts had properly captured.

In short order she learned the subtle ways that air could change. The damp, cool, living quality it gained under the trees, the simmering sweetness out in the open, a curious sharpness on the breeze that the Singer (as she called herself) said came down from the mountains, where the white crusting their peaks was no kind of pollutant, but pure clean frozen water.

At the alien’s gentle prompting, Uku removed her boots. She spent quite a long time just standing in the meadow with her eyes closed, feeling life between her toes, springing from unsullied soil.

Basking. The word was basking. She’d read it many times, but to actually do it…

When she opened her eyes, Julian was there next to her, doing the same thing.

“You don’t really know a place until you wiggle your toes in the dirt,” he opined.

“I’ve… never known a place like this,” Uku replied. “I read the old books, and saw the paintings and old photographs, but…”

He nodded understanding. “C’mon. Let’s eat and talk things over.”

The friendly monsters all ate meat, and did so with gusto. They did have the courtesy not to offer her any, though, and instead Julian handed her a big bowl filled with leafy greens–the greenest greens Uku had ever seen, with crisp-looking vegetables sliced atop. There was a fragrant glistening oil and crisp little granular cubes of toasted bread.

“Spring greens, bell peppers, snow peas, croutons and…uh, other stuff? One of my partners made it,” Julian explained. “The oil on top is a balsamic vinaigrette. Try it, it’s tasty!”

“…What are you eating?”

“Pork ribs.”

“…Ribs.” Uku suppressed a lurch in her belly.

“We are what we are. Heck, I’d eat some of the salad too, but you gotta put some m—” he stopped himself sharply, as though whatever he’d been about to say would have been inappropriate. “…Uh, you look like you need to gain a little weight.”

Uku gave the ribs a dismayed look, but the truth was she was too hungry and the bowl looked too delicious for the grisly feast the rest of them were enjoying to do her appetite much harm. And she could appreciate the honesty that went into not shying away from reality for her sake, uncomfortable though it was.

“I’ll eat as much as I can, but… this is a big bowl.”

“Don’t worry, we won’t let it go to waste,” Julian promised.

It turned out to be just as incredible as it looked. In the end, she ate almost all of it. True to his word, Julian finished the rest in a few well-practiced bites. Uku got the impression he was accustomed to eating big, and eating often. Not surprising considering his hulking physique.

The meal left her feeling more wonderfully sated and content than she’d felt in many years. Though, she couldn’t help but cringe a bit when Daar crunched the bones between his teeth. His portion of the ribs hadn’t even been fully cooked.

He seemed to know he was giving offense, but that didn’t stop him. He looked over at Julian, “Those hit the spot! Tell Mother Shoo thanks ‘fer the ribs, would’ya?”

“Mother Shoo?” Uku tilted her head.

Julian laughed slightly. “It’s… a long story. Maybe you’ll meet her and she can tell you someday.”

“So. Now that you have time to eat, look around, be here and know it…” Yan Given-Man swept a long arm around, indicating everything around them. “You like it?”

“I think it’s…” Uku sighed heavily. She wanted to say ‘paradise’ but frankly she’d done enough blaspheming lately. “…We’ll never be able to repay a gift like this.”

“Feh.” Yan made a dismissively friendly sort of noise. “You say that now. We see when you heal, grow strong again. Maybe, we have much learnings to share!”

“And if not,” the Singer added, “we owe the same to Humans. If you can’t pay back, pay forward!”

“You do?” Uku looked to Julian, whose complicated shrug-duck-nod was almost impenetrable to her eyes, but she guessed meant a blend of confirmation and modesty.

Yan nodded, and this time his hoot had the quality of firm agreement. It was a remarkably expressive sound, and did a lot of heavy lifting for his people’s emotional expression. “Jooyun is the man who save all my people. If he and Awisun and Shyow had not met us, we would be dead, and no sky-people would know we ever were.”

“…Another long story?” Uku asked.

Julian cleared his throat. Clearly he wasn’t comfortable with praise. “Same story. Different chapter.”

“Point is,” the Singer said, “You pay us back or not, doesn’t matter. You need this world, it’s wrong for us… We can Give this, and do good with it when otherwise it would do nothing. Doesn’t have to be… uhm…” she frowned and her tail lashed for a second as she visibly dredged her memory. “…Ah! Mercenary.”

Uku nodded gratefully. Part of her soul was waiting for the cost to land, but something she’d already learned about these people was that, different shapes and faces and skins aside, they shared a common thread of powerful morality: They valued strength, the Ten’Gewek explicitly so. But weakness, to them, wasn’t some opportunity to sink their teeth in and feed as the Hunters did. It was, rather…

They loathed weakness. They sought to eradicate it wherever they saw it and leave strength in its wake. They nurtured, and gave, and built, and protected. And as that particular lens settled into place in her mind, she saw the Hunters through her new friends’ eyes for a moment and realized just why their enmity ran so deep and so implacable.

The Hunters loved weakness. They loved being strong while others were not. But Gao and Human and Ten’Gewek alike, it seemed, could not be happy unless they were culturing strength wherever they went.

Probably that was a naive and unsophisticated analysis, but it was a perspective from which to start. It at least gave her something she could understand about them, something that explained their motives, their sacrifice and their incredible generosity as something other than the hand of the same fickle Almighty who’d supposedly tormented her people for generations.

At least… it made sense. A little.

“…We have a lot of work ahead of us,” she said.

“More than you know,” Daar agreed. Aside from thanking ‘Mother Shoo,’ whoever she was, he’d been pretty silent since arrival and kept his own counsel. “‘Yer startin’ from nothin’. ‘Ya don’t even have ‘yer libraries an’ tunnels no more.”

“We have the Long Chant,” Uku reminded him, and tapped the side of her head. “The important parts of our history are right here. As for the essentials? Food, clothes and medicine? We… will have to depend on your continued generosity, I fear. For the time being.”

“Does the Chant teach you how to grow crops?” Julian asked.

“…There are…certain tomes in the libraries that would help there,” Uku admitted.

“You’ll have ‘em,” Daar promised. “An’ that ain’t just ‘cuz you mention ‘em. My people tell me some’a the radicals are goin’ real regressive. They’re talkin’ about purging everything from the… whatchacallem. The Sinful Times?”

“…Everything?”

“‘Yup. An’ that makes me real sad, ‘cuz now I gotta show ‘yer people what a Great Father’s all about.”

“Either that or let them burn all the books,” Julian muttered. His tone suggested he found the idea just as unholy as Ukusevi did.

“Story o’ my life. Anyway.” Daar stood. “If ‘ye’ve seen enough, we oughta get back. You need ‘ta organize ‘yer people, an’ mine have books ‘ta save.”

“And we’ll head back to Akyawentuo,” Julian agreed. “The, uh, the Array here’s all set up. Don’t press any buttons until the techs come through and give you the safety lesson, but…”

“Thank you,” Ukusevi told him. She stood, nodded her gratitude to the Human, bowed to the Ten’Gewek, and then followed Daar back toward the jump device that had so effortlessly borne her between worlds.

She didn’t mind going back to make preparations. But now that she’d seen what a world could be like… Well, the Punished World would never be home again.

And good riddance.

Date Point: 17y4m2w AV
Relay world, deep uncharted space

Sergeant Ian “Hillfoot” Wilde

The problem with hauling a giant alien superweapon all night was you never knew what kinda weird shit it might do that you couldn’t know about. Tracks and stuff were easy enough to cover, but what if the bomb leaked some kind of radiation, left behind some lingering energy trace of its presence?

Or maybe they’d just missed a footprint. Whatever the reason, the route back toward the ship was being… inspected. A trio of those turkey-sized Hierarchy drones were hovering over a patch of dirt the team had definitely crossed a little while earlier, and giving it a pretty thorough going-over with whatever sensors they had on board.

At least those things had narrow fields of vision. The main sensor cluster mounted on the front was basically a big telephoto lens. They had ultrasound sensors to map their immediate surroundings and avoid bumping into stuff, but when it came to taking a good look at something, they were like a far-sighted grandpa who’d lost his reading glasses.

Deadly, deadly grandpas who could carve a man in half just by flying right at him, or turn him into a steaming pile of flash-boiled slurry from two hundred yards away. Networked in a shared hive mind so that if, say, this particular squadron were swiftly eradicated, all the hundreds of others orbiting the city would descend on them.

Ferd said it best. “We are being hunted. We need to go.”

He said it without speaking, of course. Sign language and a tense lash of his tail conveyed the message. Wilde nodded, and directed the lads outwards, toward a boundary ditch they’d identified a few days ago. It ran around most of the city, and while it was snarled up here and there with trees, bushes and thorns, it was still one useful avenue through the ruins. And, importantly, one they hadn’t already used.

They melted into the shadows, moving slowly, making no noise, leaving no clear line-of-sight between them and the drones.

That was too close. If the drones hadn’t been playing lights all over the ground…

Wilde set the close call aside. It was just a datum now, hostiles here on his map. Something had changed, though—the drones had followed the same patrol route and schedule since they’d arrived, but now suddenly they were checking the ground? The crawling feeling up his spine knew there was no way that was a good sign.

And the night was wearing on. They didn’t have long until night gave way to pre-dawn glow.

They didn’t have many options. They had to return to the ship, but that risked leading the enemy right to it. They couldn’t safely trigger the bomb while they were still on-planet, because it was so bloody powerful they’d be flash-boiled from the heat pulse alone.

But the bomb had to go off. That was the mission. Getting to the ship was just how they survived the mission. And Wilde fully planned on surviving it.

With a gesture, he beckoned his men to pick up the pace; if they wanted to live, they had to get to the ship. And from the looks of things, they didn’t have time to be cautious any longer.

They only had about ten kilometers to go. That was very doable, though a lot of that would be through the forest. It was gonna be an exhausting trial for all of them.

Wilde led by example. He picked up the pace, and settled into a rhythm on the trail. Ferd didn’t need any explanation; he catapulted himself up into the tree like a cartoon spring, swinging away like he was meant to. His men followed with similarly effortless leaps far above Wilde’s head, and were caught up to the Given-Man in just a few short moments.

They were definitely leaving sign, now. No way around it. Wilde’s gamble was that they could close those ten klicks before the drones found the trail towards their now much more obvious sign.

They didn’t quite make it. They’d just made it to the final leg when there was a calamity from the city.

The last klick was along a dried-up riverbed, which let them run more or less at full tilt toward the ship. None of them really had anything left in their tank but it was that or die, so as one, they poured on the speed and charged the last bit, scrambling over rocks and gravel as fast as they could.

But the Relay was just about in view, visible over the treetops as a black spike against the blue glow at the edge of the sky. And the moment when it pulsed with light almost shocked them all into standing still. Bright, cold, white light flooded the landscape all the way to the horizon.

Tooko broke radio silence instantly. “That was a sensor pulse! They know I’m here!”

Time for big damn hero shit, then. “Start her up! We’re half a klick out!”

Wilde and Ferd led the pack. Being honest, he wasn’t quite sure how he managed any more speed, but fear of death was probably a big part of that. Ferd on the other hand was a fuckin’ blur. At a sprint, the cavemonkeys could knuckle themselves over ground just stupid fast.

Good thing too, because there was a wave of drones building on the horizon, a tsunami of steel and sensors so thick it blotted out the dawn glow.

SBD was faster. Tooko could get her in the air in seconds when he had to, and she rose above the little gorge she’d been parked into come meet them, hugging the ground as tight as Tooko dared, missing the trees and rocks by millimeters. The short-range point defence blasters on her back thwoomped like the biggest, bassiest rock concert speakers ever, smashing conical waves of raw kinetic energy into the oncoming swarm.

Even from miles away, Wilde could see hundreds of smashed drones raining down on the treetops… and thousands more dispersing into a looser formation and swooping low to zip through the cover of the trees.

Smart. There was an agent in charge.

Tooko dropped down to scant inches above the stony ground, the ramp already out, and hovered. Nomuk was the first to arrive at the ramp. He spun around and immediately began laying down covering fire. Ferd arrived next, with Wilde and his lads right behind.

Genn and Tumik were bringing up the rear, puffing and straining under their heavy gear but spurred to keep moving by the looming wave of metallic death about to crash on them… right up until Tumik tripped at full speed and at the worst moment, with that massive pack of his still on his back.

He shrieked, picked himself up and tried to run, but something was clearly wrong with his left foot. Ferd threw his pack up into the ship—Jesus—and circled back while Wilde and his men stood point to protect them from any drones overhead. Given how fast Ferd could move it only took him a moment to get there, but he was running on fumes by that point. Wilde could see the pain on his face as he galloped back with Tumik wrapped up in his tail.

A drone zipped out of the tree-line. Frasier shot it down. There were five more behind it: the leading edge of the swarm. Nomuk and Genn opened up with their own heavy rifles, buying seconds with bullets.

They made it to the ramp, right as Ferd hit his wall and began to stumble on his feet. Rees and Wilde were there instantly under an arm each. The Given-Man was murderously heavy—and that was with him only resting a bit of his weight on them, too—but it seemed to be just enough to get him into the ship, and just in the barest knick of time.

Wilde was last up. “GO!!”

A drone clipped the ramp’s actuator even as Tooko climbed: the thick metal smashed the drone to bits, but its fusion-edged wings wrecked the mechanism and sprayed white-hot metal droplets into the compartment.

Agony erupted in Wilde’s eyes, so much and so shocking that even screaming wasn’t an option. He just… fell. Hands to his face, thrust into sudden, sickening darkness.

There was violent motion. Something picked him up and tossed him into—

Date Point:17y4m2w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“That will almost certainly be a bloody campaign, My Father.”

Daar nodded sadly. “I know. Gotta do it, though. We ain’t got no right ‘ta come along, stick our noses’n their business, an’ leave ‘em so unstable they can’t fuckin’ cope.”

Vark knew all that, of course. So did the other Champions. They were bound by duty to advise Daar of the consequences, of course—not that they’d ever spelled out those duties anywhere, but whatever—and he wasn’t gonna dissuade ‘em of what was a generally good idea.

Also, this was one of the most bestest opportunities he’d had in a long, long while to delegate. He’d been making a habit of that, getting the Champions and his staff much more personally invested in running things, and leading, and mebbe get ‘em a share o’ the glory, too.

He had a reason for that. Daar wasn’t a Great Father like Fyu. He, and any prehistoric Great Fathers who mebbe preceded him, were the creatures they were because life was short, glory was cheap, and their society weren’t nearly so complex as it were in the modern era.

Probably that was by Hierarchy design.

Which meant that Daar couldn’t think like a Great Father from their ancient history. He couldn’t rule like one, either. He was becoming something else out of necessity. Something possibly far, far worse. Daar was becoming an emperor, in the full and terrible sense of the word. He needed to be, because the Gao had built a complex, fragile, inter-connected society that needed competent stability now more than it ever had.

And he had to be that because the Gao couldn’t jump straight to a Republic. Their apparatus of state looked like early medieval Europe and was even more informal. Evolving past that weren’t gonna be a thing Daar lived to see, prob’ly, even if he ended up livin’ another hunnerd years…or more, as was becoming worryingly likely from Corti science-magic. No. First, they needed a King and an Emperor to build the institutions and the trust they needed. Informally, the Deathworlders needed a single leader, too. That was probably egotistical as fuck but the more Daar looked at the situation, the more he grew to realize nobody else was in a position to do it, and even if they were…nobody else was good enough.

The American President? No. Powerful though he was, he was fundamentally a national leader, not the ruler of an empire. Governors governed and Presidents presided. It was right there in the name. People mighta claimed all sortsa stupid things ‘bout American power, but an empire it weren’t. the American President’s concerns were, ultimately, domestic. And that was more true the more they stepped out on the galactic scene, really. It’d be way more true once Chambliss had his way, for good or bad. No. The President couldn’t do it. Neither could any of Earth’s other Prime Ministers and Presidents.

His Majesty the King? …No. The history was there, but…not anymore. He reigned over a commonwealth and a set of kingdoms with the most ridiculously complex an’ tangled history. Reigned, but didn’t rule. At least…not directly. He embodied rulership, without necessarily wielding it.

That was an advanced notion of government the Gao were completely unprepared to accept.

The Given-Men? Yan had far bigger problems in his granite-breaking hands. But his concerns were also much, much too small for the scale needed. He had to guide his people through contact an’ that was just a terrible, horrible thing, when a man really sat down and had a think about it.

Nope. There weren’t nobody else who could be what Daar was or could be. Maybe that was even a good thing.

“Lemme say my intent, here. My first priority is in preservin’ their cultural heritage. Right now, that’s the libraries. My second priority is ‘ta de-escalate this ‘fore it’s a forever kinda thing. I’m not sure how we’re gonna do that. Might be we can’t, but if we can, we gotta. But not at the expense o’ the first thing.”

A lot of eyes turned to Gyotin, who calmly shook his head. “I have no insight,” he said. “Right now they’re angry and their world—the whole universe—has been flipped the wrong way up. There’s no quick fix to a spiritual and theological crisis like that. Maintaining order is going to be a question of force and patience.”

“Yeah.” Really, that was all that could be said. “So. This here, my, uh, ‘privy council’ or ‘cabinet’ I guess is what the Humans call it, is gonna be the lead on figgerin’ this out. This is prob’ly gonna need the Conclave’s involvement at some point, just ‘cuz it’s gonna need resources, and buy-in, and…”

Uriigo, as ever, found this to be an appropriate moment for some in-Clan grandstanding. “Privy council? Approval from the Conclave? Why, My Father, that sounds like a lot of Human thought being applied to our own affairs.”

…Gods. That fucking Champion. Some days it took everything Daar had not to just snap him in half. It weren’t that he was angry at Uriigo’s point, so much as the intent behind raising it; he knew Uriigo was in a tenuous position in his Clan, and he needed to show some measure of defiance ‘ta keep his cred. But the Bronzefurs were always only a bad mistake or two away from piracy and oblivion, so over time Daar had learned to just expect it.

He did enjoy fucking with Uriigo in turn, though.

“That’s ‘cuz ‘yer right ‘fer a change, Champion o’ Bronzefur. The Humans did all this shit centuries ago an’ we’d be dumb as fuck ‘ta ignore that. I can’t be an absolute dictator ‘fer everything, and I can’t be one ‘ferever. Somethin’s gotta be there ‘fer when I can’t. An’ I can appreciate that mebbe you ain’t happy ‘bout what that’s gonna mean…but it ain’t gonna be Clans fightin’ again. That’s what the fuckin’ malware did ‘ta us.”

“A good idea is a good idea, no matter where it comes from,” Gyotin observed.

“Some might say all of this…delegation…is a means of evading responsibility…”

Nope. Not gonna take it. Not even gonna get a proper rise outta ‘ol Daar today.

“I’m responsible anyway. It’s a means o’ showin’ trust in my Champions an’ their Clans. ‘Cuz you’re mine whether you want it or not, an’ that means I get the blame ‘fer ‘yer fuckups, too.”

Remindin’ Uriigo—an’ the other Champions, too—of just who and what belonged to whom was definitely aggressive. But he was obviously feeling saltier than usual anyway, and had another rejoinder ready to go. “Or perhaps, a way to increase your…free time…”

Ah, that was his gambit. Impugn Daar’s work ethic. Well, that was…pretty artless, really, but whatever. Daar had a response for that too. “Absolutely! Know what I’m gonna do after this? I’m gonna go toss weights around heavier’n ‘ya couldn’t never dream o’ budgin,’ an’ I’m gonna look fuckin’ good doin’ it. Prob’ly gonna break some records ‘fer fun too, jus’ ‘ta make sure ain’t nobody ever gonna fuckin’ catch me. Not gao, not Human, not Ten’Gewek. Not nobody.

Daar snarled from his belly in a mostly non-threatening sorta way and flicked his ears playfully; he was enjoying himself, and there weren’t no point givin’ Uriigo the sense he’d got under the Great Father’s fur. “‘Know what I’ll do next? I’m gonna court some Females, visit a Commune an’ fulfill a few more matin’ contracts I got queued up, then mebbe go visit Foltcha and do it all again there, too. And I’m gonna do it with a totally clear conscience ‘cuz I’ll know all the way down my back that I did my duty ‘ta these people an’ to the Gao.

With that, he stood up from his spot on the floor and pranced to the doorway with a deliberately thumpy gait, so the more easily-swayed among them could feel his presence through the ground, backed by a visual reminder of just what kind of creature the Great Father truly was. “An’ it’s worth mebbe pointin’ out something: ‘yer my Champions I trust ‘ta do the job an’ do the right thing. Even if some of ‘ya—” he made eye contact with Uriigo, because there was a time for subtlety and this weren’t it, “—might be more interested in scorin’ points in ‘yer Clan than’s prob’ly a good thing. Y’all get some thinkin’ in, an’ get some fun in too. ‘Cuz when I come back, ‘yer gonna advise me. Yijao?”

There were attentive nods all around. He stood there on four-paw and looked over his Privy Council Champions, tensed to show he was always and forever ready for action. It had the intended effect; even Uriigo nodded along. Too bad about him, really. If it weren’t for his Clan’s actions during the War, maybe things wouldn’t have been so bitter between them…

Anyway. One last point to make, because insulting the Great Father could not go unpunished.

“Outstanding. ‘Yer welcome ‘ta join me, Uriigo…but ‘Horse ain’t gonna be happy when I crush all his lifts. Dunno if you can handle my friends when they’re cranky…”

One of Daar’s most favoritest things to do when he was dealing with incorrigibly belligerent ass-tails like Uriigo, was to hide a really deep insult inside something that didn’t sound like much of an insult at all. Anyone who weren’t thinking too hard would have just heard any of what Daar said and thought, “same ‘ol dumb meathead Daar.”

But the Champions weren’t dumb. And Uriigo absolutely caught the implied…free time…such an invitation would entail. Daar weren’t ashamed to admit, he enjoyed Uriigo’s impotent anger…

The Champion clearly felt he’d done enough poking at the Great Father for one day, though. He ducked his head in the bare minimum acceptable gesture of respect. “I hope you enjoy yourself, My Father.”

“Oh, I will. My Champions, you are dismissed. We reconvene next week.”

He left them to sort things out. Delegation was important, in that (in Daar’s view) it made the difference between a benevolent dictator and a tyrant. It also let him lead by means other than violence and brute force. A Great Father could set an example by playing with cubs or digging ditches just as much as he could by smashing skulls and layin’ down the law.

He preferred the cubs and ditches, too. Time to go find some.

Date Point: 17y4m2w AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Relay system, Deep uncharted space

Tooko

Tooko had three simultaneous problems, because of course he did. But multitasking was what Tookos did best, so like always, he just quietly got his tail unkinked and got it done.

Problem the first: A swarm of Hierarchy drones kept kamikaze-ramming his ship, and the shield was accumulating heat worryingly fast.

Problem the second: Capacitor power was down to 87%. Already.

Problem the third: the fucking ramp was jammed, leaving a gaping hole in the ship’s armor for the drones to get in once the shields dropped.

Well, he could solve all three of those in one fell swoop. He just needed to survive the next thirty-one ticks while the array capacitors charged.

“Ferd! Get my ramp closed!”

No response. A very quick glance at the monitor showed the big stinky brute was lying flat on the floor, gasping for breath with a hand clutched over his heart. Right. He was recovering from his overly heroic exertions. The humans, though, they had a little left in the tank… and frankly, knew a bit more about being mechanics anyway.

“Forward actuator’s fucked, mate!” Rees called back.

“Just cut it off and dump it!!” Tooko called back. He swiped a claw at some controls on his right, and spent five percent of his power reserve on a pulse of searing energy from the shields that turned the leading drones into melted, ruined wreckage raining down on the forest below.

Not like a little forest fire was going to matter in a few ticks anyway…

With that, Rees struck up his “lightsaber”—really a long fusion-edge machete—and chopped it off right at the hinge. He couldn’t do the same to the other end and, seeing the ramp wouldn’t close unless the actuator was properly stowed, channeled a bit of Ten’Gewek spirit and bent the Daar-damned thing back, then hacked it off too.

Frasier pulled him back by his belt and slapped the button, and, thank fuck, the ramp agreed to close this time.

Good. only two problems left to contend with.

Problem one was solving itself too: the drones just didn’t have SBD’s aerodynamic profile, and as Tooko pushed the flight fields into a long dart configuration and piled on the speed, he left them behind.

That just left the capacitor—now on 78%—and problems 4 and 5, namely the imminent detonation of an excessively large bomb behind him, and the imminent arrival of several excessively large warships in orbit above him.

The bomb might just solve the spaceship problem, though. There was definitely an Agent in charge right now, the drones and everything were acting way too smart to be automated. Smashing the Relay would sever control and—

He heaved the stick to the right and threw in some rudder pedal too as the tone for a hostile target lock yelped in his ear. A column of brilliant light the color of copper plasma missed him by a bare margin, adding to the heat load on the shields.

Fuck it.

He triggered the bomb.

Far behind him, exotic energy was pulled in from somewhere else as the bomb’s physics package did twisted, maniacal things to spacetime. The air and ground around it absorbed an infinitesimal fraction of that energy, and instantly converted to plasma.

…He didn’t really know how the damn thing worked. But it would make the Keeda tale of a lifetime, and get him laid at least three times. If he survived.

A lot more of the energy burst speared upwards out of the atmosphere and the two heavy contacts overhead promptly became lots of smaller contacts. That would have been SBD, too, if Tooko hadn’t put several hundred kilometers of planetary curvature between them and the warhead.

But now, he was racing a hypersonic shockwave. Somewhere behind him, a pressure pulse was spreading through both the sky and the ground, turning both into a travelling wave of raw smashing force, and from this close? Both were equally dangerous.

That countdown timer wasn’t moving nearly fast enough. He could hear the whine of the hypercapacitors building, and building…

And through the rear sensors, he could watch the world rip itself apart. Whole mountains were leaping into the air to chase them.

Three…

He shot out over an ocean, so fast that the shore vanished into the fracturing horizon before he’d even properly noticed it.

Two….

The sea flash-boiled: a wall of salty steam became the whole sky.

One…

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck….

Blue light.

Jump.

…

Black space. And stars.

Tooko let out his breath very, very slowly, and flexed his fingers to release some of the pain and tension in his knuckles.

Radio sync. IFF beacon codes matched.

Right. They’d escaped. Now they had a medical emergency in stasis to deal with.

…Make that two medical emergencies. When Tooko glanced over his shoulder, he realized that Frasier and Rees were kneeling next to Ferd, working on him. The cables and sticky pads of a defibrillator on the big man’s chest told most of the story, as did the large injector that Nomuk was handing to Rees.

His dismayed stare was interrupted by a new and blessedly welcome voice on the radio, speaking English with a Gaori accent. “Silent But Deadly, this is Cimbrean border patrol cutter ‘Warding Shard.’ Heave to and state your purpose, over.”

“Warding Shard, we are declaring a medical emergency, I have…” Tooko glanced over his shoulder again. Frasier and Rees were groaning with effort as they heaved Ferd upright and into a stasis chamber, who was obviously in great pain. Thank fuck the huge brute was still conscious, or they’d have had to leave him on the floor to suffer. Tumik’s foot was swelling badly, and Genn looked about as weak as a kitten. “…Two patients in stasis, one Human, one Ten’Gewek. Several minor injuries besides that, but I’m not a doctor.”

“Copy. Stand by.”

Well. Tooko donned his headset and headed back to see what he could do.

Not a lot, as it turned out. All of the team were sporting burns or painful bleeding injuries from where molten metal had sprayed across the deck, though Wilde catching most of it in the face had spared them the worst. The Ten’Gewek were a bit luckier, with their thick leathery skin, but that wasn’t much of an improvement.

“Silent But Deadly, you’re authorized to land on inspection platform one. Follow M-LAN and monitor frequency one-two-four point five.”

“Follow M-LAN for IP-1, monitor one-two-four decimal five, Silent But Deadly.” Tooko read back, and set the ship in motion.

The inspection platforms were a new-ish addition to Cimbrean’s security arsenal in the fight against Hierarchy infiltration. Parked outside the system fields they were exactly what the name suggested: landing platforms hanging in space, with air retention fields and customs inspection teams standing by. It was vastly cheaper and more practical than sending up a couple of HEAT operators whenever a ship arrived, especially now that Cimbrean was definitely a somewhere with a thriving trade station in orbit and five working spaceports on the ground below.

Of course, there’d be HEAT operators coming anyway. A returning JETS team got the full VIP treatment. In less stressful times, Tooko would have bet away a mating contract that Warhorse would come running when he heard they had wounded.

He turned out to be right. They settled on the platform, the field bubble went up, the air got pumped in, and moments later a pair of EV-MASS hustled across the platform and up to the ramp…

Which jammed again on the way down. ‘Horse just shrugged and yanked it open with an ear-shredding squeal of damaged metal.

He took a look around the inside, muttered something in Spanish (which Tooko didn’t speak a word of, but it sure sounded virulent, whatever it meant) and brusquely checked everyone’s heads for implants.

The other MASS was worn by Moho, who gave the damaged ramp a rueful look and got Tooko’s full damage report once it became clear that the guys out on the deck weren’t about to keel over dead, and the guys in stasis… well, they could stay there until other business was taken care of. A complete inspection revealed seven drones wedged in the ship’s hull, all thankfully fried by Tooko’s quick-thinking shield pulse before they could dig through the plating: Moho pried them out and secured them in their own stasis containers.

They were, eventually, given a clean bill of health. The ship, however, was not: Silent But Deadly wasn’t going to be doing any atmospheric descents until that ramp was repaired and certified.

But she was, when it came down to it, just a tool. When ‘Horse and Moho lifted the stasis chambers out of their slots and carried them toward the platform’s jump array, they took with them two endlessly more valuable lives. And Tooko honestly didn’t know if Wilde’s career had just come to an abrupt end. His face had been…

…Well…had been.

Tooko didn’t know anything about medicine. It was a magical art to him, sometimes able to perform miracles, sometimes completely incapable of solving what seemed like should be easy problems. In any case, he didn’t have the time. The ambulatory men were hustled off toward the waiting transport. Tooko had some safety protocols to accomplish, the shut-down checklist to finish.

And after that… He’d hoped he could relax, once they could get home. But instead, all he could do was worry. So he moved the ship to his Clan’s rented hangar aboard Armstrong Station, left it for the engineers to repair, and jumped down to Folctha.

He wanted to be there for Wilde when they brought him out of stasis.

Date Point: 17y4m2w AV
Planet Aru

AtaUmiUi, One of the Last

The chamber was not as decrepit as they had presumed it would be. No rust, no crumbling, no scent of mold or damp…

…No signal. No constant pulse in the back of the brain, force-feeding sickly, distracting pleasure. A kind of neural silence, except for the bright warmth of the others. Nearby, and sharing Ata’s surprise at the comparatively young condition of their tomb.

It looked almost as fresh as the day of their interment.

Ata sprung forward out of his stasis chamber, and subconsciously turned without looking to offer a hand for MaUmiOa. Her belly was getting heavy, and he sensed her need for physical assistance through the Link. He didn’t need to see her expression to sense his sister’s gratitude, tinged as it was with grief and loss. The baby’s father was far behind them in time, now.

Without words—there was no need for words, not among them—they spread across the chamber and accessed their terminals, checked the contents of their lockers and the presence of the few items they had wanted to keep.

There was a Huh on the counter next to Ata’s terminal. He picked it up and studied it for just a few heartbeats, turning the dimensionless ball over three times out of habit and reassurance, until he felt the fire in his gritted jaw drive away the uncertainty and fear.

He fired up the console.

It started without incident, and gave him his first desired datum almost as soon as it was fully awake: the date.

…Not long. Surprisingly not long. Ata had expected to emerge from stasis to find a gap of tens of thousands of years behind him. Instead…

…The galaxy had changed fast. The data flowed easily through the Link as though simply remembering a forgotten fact. The Dominion still existed, still bickered and argued. Three new species had joined its ranks: Gao, Human and Ten’Gewek…

…Curious. The definition for a sapient life form had been updated to accommodate that latter culture. They must be something special. They must be…

They were…

..The Hierarchy…

…Had failed.

The Last collectively looked at each other, a rare event for people who could know each other’s minds so easily. Unease returned, dampening the Huh’s influence. Deathworlders? The one thing the great enemy were committed above all else to eradicating? And now not only were three of them playing a role in Dominion politics, they were actively scorning Dominion politics and taking the initiative in a way that their fellow sapient species didn’t dare oppose. Ata was looking at a colossal cultural upheaval, all just in the last ten years or so.

Of course. The Hierarchy were an old structure, and poorly-maintained. When they had, finally, failed, the ensuing cascade of failure must have been inevitable.

And, intriguingly, there was still a place in the Dominion Council for an OmoAru representative. None had stood in that spot for lifetimes… but so long as there were still living Omo on the surface of Aru, the position remained.

And that was good.

Because Ata now wanted to meet these Deathworlders.

Date Point: 17y4m2w1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ferd Given-Man

Pain.

Ferd’s heart felt like it wanted to explode. He couldn’t catch his breath, couldn’t do anything but clutch at his chest. His friends were helping, somehow, and then he was on his feet and shoved into the stay-sis box, and then he blinked and War-Horse yanked him out like a bibtaw from a hole, slammed him up against a new wall and stuck a tube in his mouth, right into Ferd’s tasting-hole which hurt even worse—

Right away, he started to feel better. He could breathe again. Slowly, he felt the world calming down, and whatever sky-magic his friends had poked him with was doing its work too. His heart slowed down, and Ferd started to feel very sleepy.

“Not yet, big guy. Drink these down.”

Another straw in his mouth and a flood of weird taste, like getting face-fucked by a lime. That was okay though. He liked any of the strange ‘sit-truss’ fruits and often ate them whole.

“There you go, dude. Provecho! Let’s just get you calmed down and refueled.”

The pain was going away, but gods. Ferd couldn’t remember ever being so tired, or so weak. Just nodding was a trial like his Rite of Manhood.

“What…happened?” he managed to splutter around the tubes.

“Remember when you did your big hero thing at the end? Well, you ditched your oxygen tank when you tossed your pack up into the ship. First thing I checked when they told me what happened.”

“Oh… yeah… weak air…” Like trying to breathe sting-buzzers. He remembered.

“Yup! But you were a fuckin’ hero anyway. We’ve got camera footage and everything. When you climbed that cliff, when you saved Tumik…”

Ferd turned his head. “…Wild?”

Adam’s wide, strong face contorted painfully. “He’s alive, and in surgery. He’s going to be in a lot of surgery for a while. His face was…”

“I saw.” Even through the pain and tiredness, Ferd had seen.

“We can probably fix it. We humans were good at this stuff before we ever met the rest of the galaxy. It’s his eyesight I’m worried about. Doctors think some metal vapor or whatever got around his eyepro and scalded his eyes.”

Ferd nodded. “Was a death-bird. Fusion wing, caught him right across the nose.”

“Yeah. Your own eyepro was destroyed by it, too. See?” Horse pulled out Ferd’s special big-faced Oakleys—or, what was left of them—and showed him.

Ferd trilled faintly. Even that hurt, somehow. “…I bet Nomuk will never complain about those ever again.”

“Yup. This right here is a lesson a guy only ever learns once.” ‘Horse managed a faint chuckle too. “Feeling better?”

“Not dying, which is good.” Ferd heaved a deep breath, glad to have strong air for his lungs. “…Might sleep.”

“Yeah. Here. I’mma take you to a recovery room, ‘kay?”

With that, War-Horse picked Ferd up like he was a little babe and thumped his way through some confusing hallways, until they came to a quiet, warm room. He pressed a button and some field sky-magic turned on. The gravity felt stronger, and he could taste the air growing stronger, and warmer, and wetter. Just like back home.

“I got this room set just right now, I think…anyway. Gotta pull that air tube out now. So, uh…go slowly.”

Ferd nodded, then hissed as the nasty thing slithered out of him. It was a lot longer than he’d thought, and took a few beats to come all the way out.

“How…how did you put this in me?!”

“I’m good. Also, I used a cannula. That’s a hard plastic bit I pull out once the hose is in.” ‘Horse grinned. “Trick with you fellas is to do it quick so you don’t bite me. Those fangs are nasty.”

With that, he threw a blanket over Ferd, left a big glass of water next to the bed, and left him in the quiet and warm.

Ferd slept. Afterwards, there was a nice doctor, with skin even darker than Jooyun’s and with a strange sound to his words. A different Human tribe, probably, but they were obviously friends so Ferd wasn’t worried. He’d been the one to heal Loor after the Brown One had stomped him. They did some simple things, like walk around the room, touch his toes, scratch his back, move his fingers. They took some pictures of his insides too, to make sure his heart wasn’t broken.

He was free to leave after that, with a stern warning that he had to rest for a few days. The first thing he did was ask to visit Wild.

What he visited was a mask of white cloth with tubes in it. Wild himself was asleep, kept that way by sky-medicine. Tooko was curled up on a chair next to him, nose-on-butt, but he uncurled and sat up when Ferd entered.

“You okay?”

“Not enough ock-see-gen. ‘Horse gave me more, and good sleep. Really hungry now, though.”

“Then go eat, you big dumbass.” Tooko’s chitter had a shiver in it, and Ferd’s hunger faded immediately. It took a lot to shake Tooko.

“I come and see if everyone’s okay, first,” he said, and sat on his tail next to Tooko. “…How bad is he?”

Tooko sighed, but some of that shiver went away. He considered their friend on the bed.

“He’s in a medically induced coma. Will be for the next few days. They’re using regenerative medicine but he was so torn up it’s going to take a while to work, and they’ll probably need to try several times to get things perfect.”

“And his eyes?”

Tooko shook his head. “He lost one. Other one’s… they’re hopeful.” He gave Wild a sympathetic look. “Eyes are difficult. Even Mother-supreme Yulna had a cybernetic her whole life.”

“Not even the Core-Tie?”

“Maybe. That’s a long story. For now, just…I dunno.”

“I pray to the gods for him.”

“…That sounds like a good idea.”

Prayer could be done a lot of ways. He sent a message to his favorite Singer with his fone. She replied that she would come visit and Sing for him, which was good. Ferd prayed by guarding him while he slept, and built up a nest-bed in the room so he could rest, too.

Wild had a lot of visitors. Some Ferd knew, others he didn’t, who he was polite to but kept a wary eye on. Daar visited, too. Knowing just what that bomb did, and knowing Daar…Ferd didn’t care what anyone said, Daar was some kind of a god even if he didn’t believe it himself. That seemed like a good blessing for Wild because the big furry man was so sad he made the air in the room taste like it, somehow.

Wild’s parents were there on the day the doctors let him wake up. He…

The doctors had put him back together. A healing like that was magical. But.

He looked like Ferd had punched his face flat. Or like a child had tried to sculpt his face out of mud. He almost didn’t look like Wild at all, but…

His smile was still there. Even if it obviously hurt him, and even if one of his eyes was still hidden away behind dressings. The doctors had saved the other one, thanks to Crude, and it twinkled brightly in his face as he hugged his mother and father and promised them he was okay.

The doctors and the ‘surgeons’ came in to explain everything to Wild. Ferd stayed, because Wild reached out and held his hand…he was scared. Very scared. Ferd could just taste it on the air, and he could feel it through Wild’s grip: desperately fierce. Smiling through it to keep others from seeing, but that was a lie that didn’t last between friends.

Afterwards, he inspected himself in a mirror.

“…Well… beats the fuck out of a box with a flag on it, I suppose.”

Ferd ambled up next to his friend and rested his head on Wild’s shoulder. He felt like he should say something good about it. “Doctors say, they can fix the rest. We need to get ‘fotos’ and videos and things, so they can—”

“Mess up this handsome mug even more?” Wild laughed, with an edge on it. “…Yeah. Sure my mum’s already digging out the old SD cards or whatever.”

“I have fotos too on my fone!”

“Ah, it’s not my face I’m worried about, mate.” Wild sighed heavily. “I’m sure they’ll put it right, eventually. I just…”

Ferd nodded. He knew. “I know a man with one eye. He got stung when he was a boy, when he was asleep in a tree above a stinger-nest. Didn’t stop him from hunting.”

“Yeah? He turned out alright?”

“Awful spear-thrower. Strong, though. Could carry a young bull all by himself almost as young as I could. And he’s a good fighter up close. Even now I would not want to fight him.” Ferd clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Besides. Tooko said about sigh-ber-net-icks. Meant to be just as good!”

“Hmm. Wonder if I should go for a realistic one or a badass black one or something.”

“Women love a good scar!”

“That right? Am I gonna need to barricade my bedroom door? ‘Cuz right now, I should be fighting ‘em off with a bloody stick.” Wild gestured to his misshapen features.

“Well…I think women like a good story more. Strong body, big cock gets you a good fuck, but good stories get you someone to warm your bed. And you, Wild Death-Eye, have a story better than almost any man.”

He got a real smile this time, not the brave one, and a real laugh to go with it. “…Alright, that’s fucking badass. I can live with that.”

“Good!” Ferd felt himself bouncy all-sudden, but restrained himself to an affectionate hug around Wild’s chest. Well…tail, too. Wild was a good man. “You tell story to all the pretty girls, yes? Women can’t resist! But, also? We all live because of you.”

“…I think Nomuk has you to thank, mate. And so do I.”

“I only ran because you told me to. We were only close enough to ship because you said so. Giving and Taking. Always there is balance, yes?”

Whatever Wild wanted to say next, he didn’t get the chance. The door burst open and Rees came to visit, carrying a large cake and a bag.

Ferd liked cake! Well. In small bites.

“Oi, there ‘e is! And fuck me, mate, I didn’t think you’d come out lookin’ better! Won’t miss that ugly fuckin’ mug of yours, that’s for sure.”

Wild laughed. “Fuck you, you inbred Welsh twat!”

They hugged, while Ferd shook his head with a trill. You had to really know Humans to see the love in such cruel words. The People would wrestle where they insulted, but that was okay. It was all the same thing in the end. Humans were strong in their words.

But Ferd could play that game too, and felt like he should say something. “You just jealous Rees. Wild gets the prettiest women!”

“You callin’ my wife ugly, mate?”

Wild cut in. “Sue? Nah. She’s just charitable, that’s all.”

Ferd missed something there, but he could fix that. He sidled up to Rees and hugged him too. “I just glad we all lived.”

“Hell yeah.” Rees nodded, and squirmed a bit so he could put the cake down. “Close fuckin’ call, like. But we made it.”

“Might be a while before the next one,” Wild said, ruefully glancing at the mirror again.

“…You’re already thinkin’ of the next one?” Rees shook his head. “You’re fuckin’ mental, mate.”

Wild just shrugged. “Job’s not finished.”

“Mm.” Rees glanced at Ferd, then shrugged, and grabbed a bottle of the dark brown fizzy “cola” from the bag he’d been carrying. He shrugged out of Ferd’s grasp, and shared the drink into three cups. “Well then. To the next one?”

Wild took the fizzing drink and nodded. “To the next one.”

They tapped the cups together and drank. The liquid felt weird on Ferd’s tongue, but he ignored it. All that mattered to him was that he had the strongest friends a man could ask for.

They could figure the rest out later.

Date Point: 17y5m AV

Clan Firefang headquarters, The Great Isthmus, Gao

Tooko

Clan meant politics. And Tooko hated politics. Oh, he was definitely good at it, like he was good at most things—a Brother needed to know his strengths—but that didn’t mean he reveled in it. He’d much rather be out there, doing what he first learned to do on the runway just outside the headquarters.

Clan Firefang was among the youngest. That was the way of a Clan system built around specialization, and fighter pilots were a fairly recent vocation. Even the Longears were older, if one counted their early days laying undersea cable and telegraph wires.

Every Clan had its moment of recognition, too, and Firefang’s had come shortly after the development of fixed-wing flight. The military applications had been immediately apparent, and Gao had never exactly been a peaceful world, so there’d come a point where One-Fang and Firefang had… parted ways.

Vigorously.

Other Clans had stepped in before that vigorous parting grew too bloody, and Firefang had been unofficially acknowledged by the others. They did that, of course, because Straightshield and Stoneback had made it abundantly clear what their desired outcome had been…

Things had changed in recent history. There was a Great Father, now. The Conclave was once again active and feeling out the scope and extent of its power. A standing committee of the most powerful and influential Clans had become the Great Father’s private council, and were beginning to feel out their power, too.

And, of course, Daar himself had torn the throat out of the prior Champion. Halti had been buried in the cold ground, a disgrace before the Conclave, before the Great Father had even been recognized. Consecrated. Crowned.

And there was the big issue that pretty much all of Firefang’s politics revolved around nowadays. Because while Champions came and went, sure, usually they came and went in response to internal events. New talent rose to supplant the old incumbent, or else the wiley veteran kept the upstarts in check… either way, the Champion kept the Clan sharp.

Having their leader, representative and figurehead brutally slaughtered in a heartbeat by another Clan’s Champion was… well, over the course of Gao’s history, Clans had warred and been eradicated for less. But who could stand against Stoneback? Not even Straightshield could, if it ever came to that. It would take all the Clans, and most of the martial Clans were already allied with them.

Stoneback ruled with an iron paw, and always had. Maybe they’d let their fur grow soft over the millennia since that truth had come to be, but the reality of it was always there.

And what Champion would dare stand face-to-face against Daar? It wasn’t just what he could do to anyone so stupid, or how easily he could do it. It was that he perfectly willing to do so, without an instant of hesitation.

…And so on. Grievance and wounded pride were at war with simple practicality in the Clan’s heart, made all the worse by the fact that it hadn’t just been the Champion, or the Champion and the Grandfather for that matter.

Most of Firefang had been implanted. Cybernetic enhancement had been the norm among the Clan’s pilots, certainly Tooko would have gone for it if he’d been a year or so older… And every single one of the enhanced Brothers had been put down. The Clan was a shadow of its former self. Brought low by a relentlessly logical act of dispassionate violence. Practical brutality at its absolute deepest expression. Obviously necessary, and inflicted by a truly charismatic leader.

One whose side Tooko had firmly taken. And that was a polarizing thing, nowadays.

It never came to overt hostility, though. Nobody could afford that, not with the Great Father’s “pet pilot.” But Tooko knew good and well that those two words flew around a lot when he wasn’t in earshot. Usually, anyway. One or two less discrete fools knew just how sharp Tooko’s claws were.

And he did have some allies…

“Got our ship damaged, did you? You do know they work better in the air?”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t be bothered to care, what with the hundreds of fusionblade-wielding drones, the full might of the Hierarchy in orbit above me, and a gigaton-class warhead’s energies chasing me down.”

“Hmm. The Tooko I know would have got out of that without a scratch. You must be slipping!”

“And a good man lost an eye over this. I fail to see the humor.”

Father Mereek sighed, and ducked his head. “Humor’s your shield against the darkness, pup,” he said fondly, and they traded the nose-sniffs of old friends. Mereek had been Tooko’s first flight instructor. “But, you always were a serious one.”

“And you were never serious enough.” Tooko retorted. He was glad to see the old joker, though. He just wasn’t in any mood at all for joking.

Fortunately, Mereek knew him well. He duck-nodded affably and they ambled down the long corridor beside the airfield, where the huge floor-to-ceiling windows let them watch new pilots learn the basics of how to gain a plane safely off the ground… and back down onto it, too. The other wall was dominated by various trophies, art pieces, accolades and other Clan keepsakes. Pride of place went to a piece of Hunter broodship, a flat, shredded armor plate mounted up there as a reminder of a particularly fine kill.

“How is your friend?” Mereek asked.

“I’ll give the Humans this, their cosmetic surgeons are pretty incredible. By the time he woke up, he had a face again. He never saw how bad it really was.”

“That must have helped.”

“Well… Maybe.” Tooko paused to consider an antique photo of the team of enterprising young males who’d first got a flying machine off the ground, hundreds of years ago. “It’s out of my hands, really. I worry for him, but worrying for him won’t achieve anything, so…”

“True enough.”

“…So why was I called back?”

“You didn’t hear? The Champion actually defended his position.”

Tooko flicked his ear. “Really? I thought Goruu was…well, he wasn’t exactly a high-degree brawler, yijao?”

“So did the challenger. Tyimu sure got a nasty surprise!” Mereek chittered.

“Well, that’s… interesting, I suppose, but what does it have to do with me?”

“Now that Goruu actually has some of the old authority, not just being thrust into the role because he was the first one the Great Father laid eyes on, he’s decided the time has come to actually put some of it to work.” Mereek indicated the airfield. “He wants to increase recruitment and expand our mandate.”

“And he wants me to be the pretty face of the recruiting campaign,” Tooko guessed.

“He’s on your side, it seems. Then again, both of you were personally picked by the Great Father, so I suppose that makes sense…”

Tooko bristled at that. “The Great Father picked me because I’m good. I’m one of the best damn pilots we’ve got, and that was true before the War, too.”

“And now the Champion’s proved he’s good too. Tyimu was no mewling cub.”

“Was?”

“Well, still isn’t. But he’s not as handsome any more!” Mereek chittered again.

“Still. The Champion and I aren’t cut from the same die,” Tooko sniffed, still feeling a little insulted.

“Careful, cub. That ego of yours is flaring up again.”

“Why should I say yes? I have things to do! I have ships to fly and missions to complete!”

“Because it’ll be good for the Clan,” Mereek replied, suddenly much more serious. “And the Clan put you where you are, Tooko. The Clan found, cultivated and enabled your talents. The Clan is the reason you have those ships to fly and those missions to complete, and now the Clan needs your help so that more talent can be cultivated, so more ships can be flown and more missions completed. You owe the Clan your duty, young Brother. You do not get to decide what that duty entails. It would be better if you voluntarily agreed…”

“…Because the alternative is the Champion claws my tail off.” Tooko sighed. A competent Champion who could legitimately back up his authority with violence really was a different proposition. “Fine, fine. I suppose I’m probably grounded until Wilde recovers anyway… what do I need to do?”

Mereek chittered again, his good humor returning now that he’d finished being firm.

“Oh,” he said. “You’re going to love this…”

Date Point: 17y5m AV
The Clawhold, liberated planet, former Hunter space

Ginn, aide to Grandfather Vark

There was a duty that came with totally destabilizing people’s lives, no matter how awful the stability had been. Even if that duty turned bloody, the Gao had a responsibility to bring a new kind of order to E-Skurel-Ir life.

And the problem with order—if it was a problem—was that ultimately it always came down to violence. Order was what people adopted when the alternative was death. Work together, or be destroyed.

For the Gao, throughout most of their history, loyal cooperation had been how Clans and their clanless peasantry survived in the face of other Clans. The Gao had united in the face of other Gao, basically. Civil war (of a low intensity) was their norm.

Never had it become a religious conflict, though. The Gao were too pragmatic for that. Their passions were for brotherhood and courting females. Intense ideology was almost an alien concept. Ginn sure as balls hadn’t ever found a cause like that. He’d found… purpose? A way to be worthy and to shoulder his own burden? Utility? Whatever it was he’d found in the Grand Army, it hadn’t been what the humans called a crusade.

The E-Skurel-Ir, though? Their whole world was a crusade. Every fiber of their skinny, stringy bodies was devoted to the pursuit of Higher Purpose. They wanted the world to be orderly and sensible, and a lot of them had gladly plunged themselves into senseless chaos rather than abandon that vision.

Blood was running in the tunnels. So it fell to the Gao to try and stem the bleeding.

It wasn’t happening unopposed. After centuries of cowering under Hunter rule, the E-Skurel-Ir were fighting again, with the mad, frantic clumsiness of a pacifist in a melee. They were passionate but undisciplined, and weakened by lifetimes of malnutrition. Probably that affected their cognitive development, too. Their tactics weren’t exactly clever.

But they knew the tunnels intimately, and they weren’t above deploying the dirtiest traps and tricks. Whole subterranean cities were effectively off-limits to the Gao: it would have been like sending their units straight into an industrial grinder.

Besides, the Grand Army’s goal wasn’t to clear them out and kill them all. It was to get them to calm down. It was to end the burning ceremonies, where books and heretics alike met a fiery, cruel end. Getting them to calm down basically meant breaking their will to fight, and so to that end, there were two goals.

Firstly, take control of the Libraries. That was proving tricky, but Daar had prioritized that at all costs and if that included gassing them out and literally excavating their way down, then so be it.

Secondly, neutralize the ringleaders. Capture preferred, conversion ideal, killing… when necessary. The latter was more of a Stoneback and Whitecrest operation, and they weren’t pulling any punches. The ‘Backs went in with as much fierce visage as they could manage: vicious skulls painted on their masks, polished, exposed claws…

The Whitecrests preferred to act as invisible terror. They preferred to strike them in their safe spaces, when everyone should be asleep…

And only after they’d slunk away, would the Stonebacks hammer their way in. It didn’t matter that they lived through the raid; the Gao were being careful, there. Mostly, they just went up to an internment camp on Gao, where they got to experience clean air and rations and crushing boredom…

And then the Grand Army would get involved. Their job was to clean out everything else and occupy the territory. They were learning to seismically map the tunnels, search for air currents, build redoubts…

It was gonna be years, if the zealots fought to the very last.

Not that the zealots were a big part of the population. Most of the E-Skurel-Ir were still living the same life they always had, mortally afraid of the powerful aliens who ruled the surface, trying to make sense of a universe that routinely treated them like a chew-toy. When it came to the conflict between the staunch Penitents and Ukusevi’s faction—known to themselves as the Saved, and to the Penitents as the Fooled—most E-Skurel-Ir just kept their heads down.

The Penitents though… they embraced suffering. Their uniform was rags, or outright nudity, their battle cry the rattling cough of damaged lungs, scarred from breathing unfiltered surface air. They believed in the deliverance of a Punishment embraced, and the promised reward for the life that came after. They cared almost nothing for themselves, unless they were well and truly pushed.

But, like all cults, the leaders weren’t so fervent as the followers. And even where they were, much of that fervor died out in the internment camps. Clean air and bland food tamped most any high spirits. Some of them were even growing downright calm, and the tricky business of rehabilitation was beginning to rear its head.

Vark was obviously in agreement, as he read through the staff report.

“Shoulda figgered the locals’d give us more trouble’n the Hunters,” he grumbled.

He was hosting Champion Thurrsto, who’d come along to personally oversee and participate in some of the trickier infiltrations. Thanks to him, there were a few prophets in custody who might otherwise have had to be put down more… emphatically. Ginn had got a hint of how the Whitecrests worked just from watching them head out on a mission, and was quite convinced that he found them even scarier than the Stonebacks, now. At least you’d see the Stonebacks coming.

Having an impending meeting with the Great Father, the two had come together to compare notes and make sure they were appropriately well-informed and coordinated.

“The Hunters had the option of retreating,” the Champion pointed out. “The E-Skurel-Ir are stuck here. They can’t leave even if they wanted to. They’re cornered, with no way out, and that always means fighting harder.”

“Dumbasses shouldn’t be fightin’ at all,” Vark opined, irritably, but he accepted the Champion’s point with a duck-nod and a shrug. “It’s such a fuckin’ waste o’ potential.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded sadly. “Yes it is. But our initial xenopsychological profiles on them seem to be bearing fruit. Those we’re holding in confinement seem to respond very well to high nutrition and predictable structure. Their health is improving dramatically, as is their behavior.”

“What ‘bout the Saved who went offworld?”

“Only a few have been to their new world so far, but those that have…” Thurrsto seemed suddenly quite uncomfortable. “Well. I won’t glaze it over. They’re having some sort of intense religious experience over the whole thing. Which to me seems like the same problem, just in the opposite direction. Champion Gyotin is quite worried.”

“Yeah, he tol’ me about it. Said the term is ‘cargo cult.’” Vark sniffed expressively. “…Y’ever notice how wherever there’s a term for somethin’ really ball-bitin’ weird, it’s always a Human expression?”

Ginn felt he had an insight, there. “They’ve had millennia to be Deathworlder weird without the Hierarchy in their heads.”

Thurrsto flicked his ear in amusement. “I like him! You aren’t afraid to speak your mind, are you?”

“I wouldn’t be able to do my job properly if I was a meek little cub, sir,” Ginn flicked a mischievous look at Vark.

That earned a harrumph from Vark, and a full-blown chitter from the Champion.

“Careful, Vark. I may try to poach him.”

“An’ I might hafta have ‘yer nuts on a plate if you try,” Vark replied, amiably. “But that’s okay. I picked ‘em ‘cuz he don’t give two watery shits ‘bout protocol, don’t’cha?”

Vark had his fangs exposed, which was…a clear message. But his tail was wagging, too.

“I’d like to think I know when protocol matters and when it hinders,” Ginn retorted.

“Ha! Well, anyhoo.” Vark stood and made toward the door. “I think we’re all in agreement over what we’re gonna say. Ginn, go make arrangements please, me an’ Thurrsto are goin’ to see the Great Father. And you, Thurrsto…” Vark turned to the hulking Whitecrest, “Lookin’ ‘ta poach my best talent, eh? Well now, I find myself curious jus’ what a HEAT-grade Whitecrest operator can really do…wanna spar? We’ve got a few minutes, I think…”

Ginn suppressed an internal sigh. High-degrees were relentlessly competitive, even across breeds. He instead duck-nodded and took his leave to make arrangements, while the two enjoyed their rough play together.

Though he had to admit, sparring was a fantastic way to burn stress away…

Anyway. Best to put his mind off of religious zealots and powerful Clan Champions.

“The jump is in twenty minutes, Grandfather.”

”More’n enough time ‘ta put ‘em in his place…g’on, Ginn. We’ll follow in a few minutes.”

“Yes sir.” They both had their ears up and the start of pant-grins on their face…well, if they were happy, Ginn wasn’t going to complain. He left them to it.

He was pretty excited about the jump, actually. He’d be going back to Gao for the first time since arriving here! Gao, with its clean cold air and clear waters and—whisper it—some females who might just find him a lot more interesting now that he had a respectable job…

Even if that last part didn’t pan out, the rest was still enticing enough. It wasn’t a vacation, but it certainly beat staying on this polluted war-clawed rock.

He could do with a moment’s peace.

Date Point: 17y5m AV
Dodge City, Kansas, USA, Earth

Austin Beaufort

Austin couldn’t put his finger on exactly why, but lately he was feeling motivated. Well, more motivated than usual, anyway, and he was the kinda dude to get up at four in the morning for his pre-work jog, so…

It was a bunch of little things. He put in a bit more effort to keep the shop clean. Did a little more pre-planting agronomy research than he’d ever done before. Maybe they’d try out some promising new hybrids he’d heard about down at the bar! The stuff they’d been planting since forever on their rotation was pretty damn good, but still; it’d be nice to cut down on inputs.

Maybe he’d buy that no-till air drill this year, too. They’d already moved from dragging a chisel plow through every field every year to a much cheaper vertical tillage program, so it wasn’t that much of a change, really…well, weeds might be a problem. He’d really need to sit down and do the math on what no-till might mean for his herbicide bills…

He wasn’t eating so much junk food–and honestly, probably a good idea since his abs had definitely been getting a bit softer. Better to actually be a dad before he gave in to the dad bod!

And better to be a hot dad!

There were just… lots of little ways he suddenly wanted to go harder on everything. Eating right, sleeping right, not half-assing a job, managing his time better… He didn’t know what exactly had kicked him in the ass. Maybe it was the realization that he was getting married to a woman that, honestly, he probably didn’t deserve. Maybe he’d just felt an itch. Who knew?

He’d decided that he’d keep it up, though. Yeah. Definitely keep it up, even if he started to feel fat and happy again. Maybe that’s all a guy needed to do. Don’t let the slump get you down, don’t fall into the routine too hard.

…Maybe he should go fool around with Lauren. She was off work, after all…

Well. Okay. After he talked with the dealer. It was definitely time to take the plunge into full precision ag, no-till or not. Maybe strip till instead? He could do that if he went all in, after all. His checkbook was gonna be hurtin’ but…well, things were coming up on depreciation, and all his equipment still had good resale value…

Gotta spend money to earn money, after all. And he wanted to have the farm in good working order for Lauren.

He hummed merrily to himself as he worked.

Six

Six had encountered the concept of banging his head against a wall before, both as a gesture of frustration and as a metaphor for futility. Though the act itself was meaningless to a digital sophont, right now, both versions were applicable.

No matter how much he pushed, no matter what he tried, Austin just seemed to grow more inspired to be a better farmer! His ambitions really didn’t extend beyond what he was already doing, and Six was having no success whatsoever in inspiring him to think beyond that little box.

It was… simultaneously wretched and yet honestly marvellous at the same time. And so very, aggravatingly, relentlessly human! Six had learned more than he ever wanted to know about tillage. Just…apparently the simple act of digging in the dirt was several sciences all on its own, and Austin spent endless time agonizing over just how much he should dig, or if he should dig at all, or how he should dig…worrying about soil structure, inoculants for his peas…

Madness! He had the body and mind to conquer a whole star system if he wanted to! Austin Beaufort could have effortlessly become the emperor of some distant simpering planet full of lesser beings, but Six had spent long enough now prompting him to pursue his innermost, darkest passions to know that Austin’s innermost darkest passion was… farming.

Farming. Digging a hole in the ground, planting a seed, and adding water.

Farming!

Well, that and when his fiance called him “Daddy” in bed, but that seemed even less useful. Humans really spent far too much time indulging in bizarre, aggressive intromission.

He’d had to disconnect his sensory inputs to keep some semblance of awareness and sanity.

So. Six was stuck. The ship was safe at least, in that it was now parked securely in the depths of the Pacific ocean, thousands of kilometers from the nearest landmass. Indeed, the only thing of note in the area was the point humans had identified as being the furthest from land it was possible to get on their oversized, bloated, high-gravity deathtrap of a cradle world. Six could recall it any time he liked, but… why? Every time he did so he risked discovery. He could swap hosts, but he had no guarantee that the next one wouldn’t be fiercely committed to something even more banal.

At least Austin had resources. He might be the most aggravatingly unambitious host that Six had ever stepped into, but… well, ultimately it was to Six’s benefit if he became an agricultural powerhouse. Wealth and influence were wealth and influence.

Think upon it as a challenge. An opportunity to learn new and subtler forms of influence, and an opportunity to grow rich while remaining hidden.

Six’s moment would come, eventually. He had all the time in the world.

Date Point: 17y5m3d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel Hoeff, bodyguard to Tarzan or whatever

Run done, sparring done, morning slab…done. One last set of bent-over rows, some lighter accessory work to cool down a bit…and that was his work put in and his free time earned. He’d really been enjoying his caveman time with Julian lately, too. Good sparring partner!

“Fuckin’ good workout today,” the huge Tarzan enthused. “You gonna be crashing in the basement tonight? Or are you and Xiù scheming again?”

“Totally schemin’ this week.” Hoeff re-racked the weight, headed for the door, and switched off the gravity plating. It was always such a deep and weird feeling of relief when they flipped back to Earth normal from their training supergravity, kinda like if a huge spring had just been let loose inside him. Disorienting, too. He’d feel almost like he could jump into orbit for the next half hour or so, which was way more annoying than fun, once the novelty wore off.

“Oh?” Julian put away the last of the mess and followed Hoeff out the door, scrubbing at his hair with his favorite towel. It had “don’t panic” written across it in large, friendly letters.

Weirdo.

“Yeah. You’ll hafta ask her. I’m basically done though. Wanna come see?”

“Nah, I got some father-son time I wanna catch up on. Maybe later?”

“Sounds good—dude. “Hoeff growled at him. “Put ‘yer fuckin’ reactive shield on ‘yer waistband! It don’t work as good around your forearm, you know this!”

“Yeah, yeah…” Julian grumbled. “Makes my shorts sag too much…”

“With that huge ass of ‘yers stickin’ out like that? They ain’t gonna fall down. Besides, that wouldn’t be a problem in the first place if you dressed like a normal human being. Weirdo.”

“You’re in silkies just like me, dude.”

“Because I make them look good.”

Julian laughed. “And what about me? I ain’t exactly discount goods over here!”

They had a bit of macho fun then, because why not? No fun in being a gymrat if you couldn’t show off a little. Still, Hoeff wouldn’t let him off the hook.

“Yeah, well, you may be bigger and prettier, but I’m not a target like you are. You wanna live without guards following your every movement, you gotta have that shield. No fuckin’ excuses, or I’ll beat ‘yer face in.”

They’d had this argument a bunch of times by now. It wasn’t actually an argument, really; Julian knew better. It was really just grousing.

Hoeff could understand grousing.

“…I know.” Julian acquiesced and attached it to his now-sagging shorts, like always. He wasn’t stupid. They did their morning post-Slab weigh-in and progress pics for ‘Horse’s app, thumped up the stairs and stood in the fresh Folchian air. Heaven, after the humid armpit smell from the Dungeon. They both stood there for a long moment and took deep, cleansing breaths.

‘Horse and Titan really needed to fix the ventilation.

Julian was already bouncing on the balls of those bigass feet of his, probably itching to run. “Anyway,” he resumed their earlier conversation. “Project?”

“Yeah!” Hoeff enthused, “This one turned out damn nice! I think I may wanna think on it another night or three, just in case anything comes up…”

“Fair enough, we’ll get your room ready anyway. This weekend?”

“Prob’ly, yeah. Xiù wants to do a showing.”

“Awesome. See ‘ya then!” And with that, the giant cavemonkey whisperer thumped off toward home at a ridiculous sprint, leaving Hoeff alone with his thoughts. Not being the type of man to ponder life’s deeper mysteries, he decided to run back home and wolf down his assigned meal, before plotting on the rest of the day.

Calling it “home” was a bit of a stretch. Hoeff was technically homeless. But that was okay, he preferred the unattached lifestyle. Really, Hoeff was kinda like a shorter, more outgoing Jack Reacher; all of Hoeff’s worldly possessions fit neatly into two custom-made chests. One had his fancy-ass clothes, some mementos from over the years, his important papers…

The other had his tools. The one hobby Hoeff had ever kept was bein’ a handyman, and he’d found the best way to get that urge out was flipping houses.

Too bad he was generally poor as fuck. He’d spent most of his younger years—and older years, too—blowing his cash on booze and wenching, and on things that enabled successful wenching strategies. Which…fuck, he didn’t regret a goddamned thing. What the fuck was the point of money if you didn’t spend it?

…Maybe shoulda saved a bit more, truth be told. But life was meant to be lived. Why tie himself down? He didn’t have a car. He didn’t have a house. He didn’t have anything in storage. He tended to favor cheap clothing for day-to-day too, but lately some of that jungle fever had taken over and now, he was doing like Best Friend Tarzan and all his ridiculous friends. Hell, mostly-naked jungle adventures had gotten him Claire, so…

But now, he got to crash in nice apartments and houses for a while, on account of his arrangement with Xiù. She bought ‘em, she owned ‘em, he fixed ‘em up and decorated ‘em and billed her for the expense.

Julian thought it was all fuckin’ hilarious. Still, for a guy doin’ personal security, it was good not to have too predictable a life anyway…

He got a few things out of the arrangement: something to do with his hands when he wasn’t wrangling assorted aliens on distant worlds, a nice place to stay with Claire whenever they were back in Folctha (until Xiù sold it) and a little cut of the profit. This time, that profit was going straight to his investment account. He wasn’t old, but he wasn’t young, either, and it wasn’t like he’d been gentle on his body over the decades. Magical space-drugs or no, there wasn’t any point in taking a chance.

Claire seemed pretty happy with the arrangement. She liked to weigh in with decoration ideas and furniture catalogs. She had a pretty good eye for it too, which she obviously didn’t get to use much out in the jungle on Akyawentuo. He’d start cutting her in for some of the profit. A “consultant fee” or something. Seemed fair.

…He was kinda missin’ her today. She’d gone back to Earth to visit her folks for a week, and there was no work to do on the apartment to keep him busy, and there wouldn’t be unless Xiù hated it… which she never had so far. And as fun as Julian could be, seein’ the big guy day in day out sorta made ‘em value his free time. Distance, y’know?

The jog “home” was nice. And puttin’ on some nice clothes when he got home was kinda fun, too. For whatever reason, when he was back in Folctha, his cheap-clothes preference was overruled, and he liked to dress civilized.

Old habits, probably. But he had a Claire to squeeze these days. The game just…didn’t have the same appeal, anymore.

His phone pinged just as he was doing up his cufflinks, with a text message from… well, an old friend. Inviting him to lunch at Best Brioche.

He actually was a friend, too. And almost certainly Hoeff’s case officer, but that was one of those things they never talked about. What mattered was, it was Fries Friday, and sometimes lunch with an old friend was worth the pain that followed from cheating on ‘Horse’s diet plans. He did have some margin left in his “cheat account” though. Hoeff was a lot like Julian that way; they both had iron stomachs and it almost didn’t seem to matter what they ate, as long as they weren’t complete slobs.

‘Horse would punish him anyway. And he’d know, too. ‘Horse had magical powers that way.

“You’re looking well. Actually, I’d swear you’re getting younger.”

“Mandatory mostly ultra-clean livin’ and the Slab life is the price you pay for bein’ part of the SOR, and there ain’t no escaping ‘Horse once he gets his paws on ‘ya. Gotta admit though, I feel fuckin’ great.” Hoeff shrugged. “It’s kinda like, I get to be a young buck again, y’know? ‘Cept now I can really go for it, and do so with the benefit of hindsight an’ experience.”

“And without some of the costs your bigger friends will pay.”

“There are advantages to being older and short-framed, yeah. I should stay reasonably sized.”

“So it’s all upside for you, huh? We should all be so lucky.”

“You say that, but it takes a lot of work to be this sexy.”

His friend laughed, genuinely. “Daniel! Are you flirting with me again?”

“Naw. I got a wonderful woman these days. Maybe if you’d hit me up a few years ago…”

That got a chuckle, and the slight shift in expression that said they were going to spend a couple minutes discussing business before they got back to relaxing and enjoying each other’s company again.

“Have you been keeping up with the SOR’s operations?”

“Mostly. I’m not directly involved anymore, ‘cept for the training programs, but Julian’s got a lot of shit going on, and I’ve got friends.”

“JETS team two are down a man.”

Hoeff grimaced. “Yeah. Heard ‘bout that. Haven’t gone to say hello yet, was maybe gonna do that today, actually.”

“You should. Apparently the Corti got back to them with a clear no-can-do. Something about the damage to his optic nerve being beyond even their capabilities.”

“Well…fuck.” Hoeff didn’t like hearing that. Wilde was a good guy. Hell, they’d even gone clubbing once or twice, before Claire claimed Hoeff’s heart. And Wilde was a young man, strong, with a long career ahead of him. Now he’d need to find something new and start over.

Good thing he was young, actually. Still.

“Mm. I’d suggest a bottle of whisky. I gather he’s partial to a good Scotch.”

“I’ve got a good one squirreled away. How…he’s a tough fuckin’ Brit, but how’s he takin’ the news?” Hoeff just assumed his friend knew these things. He was never clueless about anything he brought up.

They were briefly interrupted by the waitress arriving with their lunch orders: a full-size paleo burger for Hoeff, and a dainty little salad for his friend. The tiny dapper fuck.

“He has Mears’ undivided attention this afternoon.”

“That’s good.” Hoeff took a big bite of his burger, and then asked a question he knew the answer to the instant he spoke it. “Who’s his replacement?”

“Well, funny you should ask…”

“I ain’t enlisted anymore, remember? I’m a retired chief.”

“No, but you are still a government employee, remember. And in fact, one with a commissioned office, which has suddenly become much more important given the, ah…”

“…Strategic impact they’ve been having?”

“Yes.”

“Dude.” Hoeff felt a little annoyed. “I’m flattered, but I retired and now I’m doing a second mission that needs doing. Hell, the biggest reason I let ‘Horse and Playboy push me so damn hard is because after the APA? This shit’s real, and if they manage to get to anyone involved with the Ten’Gewek…”

“That’s why it’s called ‘first refusal,’” his friend said, evenly. “But you’re well qualified, Daniel. In fact, you’re the best qualified. We don’t have anyone else who’s as perfect for the job.”

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good,” Hoeff warned.

“Fair enough. There’s something else, though.”

Hoeff took another big bite of his burger before continuing, while his friend pecked at the salad. “Oh?”

“We…are facing a recruiting challenge.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m serious. Our Activities boys can normally bend the ears of the best operators in the DoD…but nowadays the very best of the very best are all aspiring to the SOR.”

“You’re runnin’ outta fresh meat.”

“Yes.”

“An’ you have no fuckin’ clue why, do you?”

Hoeff knew he wouldn’t before he even asked. The difference between Hoeff and his friend was that Hoeff was still a human being. His friend belonged to the Activity, mind, body and soul. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Well, the mission is certainly attractive—”

“You mean, workin’ for the SOR makes you unambiguously one’a the fuckin’ good guys, unlike what we get up to. Kinda the polar fuckin’ opposite o’ that, I’d say.” Hoeff chomped his burger again, chewed and swallowed. “You’re tryin’ to recruit from the fuckin’ boy scouts, man. No wonder they’re not biting.”

“Nonetheless, we need men with their talents. You seem to have in you whatever it is that makes everyone in the SOR so impressively capable, so…”

Hoeff sighed. That thought had been weighing on him. “Yeah, I do. You still don’t get it, but never mind that for now. Why do you want me on that JETS team?”

“We need someone the SOR respects—someone like you—active among them. They can’t all be boy scouts, and some of them might be thinking of moving on to a deeper mission. Remember the APA? They sent a Cruezzir mutant after Julian. That’s a real threat now.”

“Yeah, it is. That’s why push myself so hard, and why I finally signed up for the spacemagic about a week ago. I don’t wanna just survive bein’ pimp-slapped next time. I wanna fuckin’ win. Fuck, I was already about there, but like you said I’ve ‘got it,’ whatever it is, so why settle for just winning? I wanna crush my enemies. Especially if they’re coming after my friends.”

“And they are.”

“Yes.”

“Which is why we need more than one of you.”

Hoeff sighed, and finished off his burger. He hadn’t touched the sweet potato fries just yet, but he was feeling sufficiently self-loathing just now to make a start.

“Fuckin’ no. I ain’t your goddamned pimp.” Munch, munch. Swallow, angry glug of water. “But…” Goddamnit.

“Yes?”

“I’m not a recruiter. But… maybe I’d be willing to plant the idea with folks I think might be open to it. I’m warnin’ you, there won’t be many. Hell, right now I can only think of one dude.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. And the only reason I’m actually thinkin’ about it is ‘cuz I think it’d be better for his peace of mind. That should fuckin’ tell you something about what kinda bullshit the men get up to in their missions.”

“And the JETS team?”

“They’re gonna have to find somebody else.”

“Yes. But right now, they need someone with experience, and they need him fast.”

Hoeff munched on a fry. “Someone already suggested it to Powell, huh?” His friend nodded, because of course they did. “He’s already got Coombes. Why me?”

“Coombes is too valuable in his current position. He’s also enlisted, whereas you, as a civilian officer of the United States, hold a commission which, as I already said—”

“Right.”

His friend finished the salad and placed his paper napkin on his cleaned plate. “Coombes isn’t in nearly so good of health as you. He’s younger than you but he’s already worn down, whereas you haven’t ever had those kinds of complaints. Nor is he anything like your level of fit. You could snap him like a twig and out-grunt him any day of the week. And I’m being modest about the difference, aren’t I?”

Hoeff shrugged. That had always been true, it was just a lot worse now. And would be much more so, going forward.

“And Julian? His family? Who’s gonna keep them safe?”

“You, or whoever you appoint. The SOR will be willing to help out. The concern is that this war is suddenly fast-moving and we need that team ready to go at any time. Right now, the only way to get them the capability they need is you. And until we can fix that…”

Hoeff groaned. Dammit. They’d got him. “…Fuckin’ fine,” he conceded. “But only to fill in ‘til they get an officer.”

“There are options coming down the pipeline,” Friend said cryptically. “It’s too early to say. And don’t worry. I have a sneaking suspicion your appointment will be very temporary.”

“Oh? How so?”

“President Chambliss or one of his sycophants will be finding out eventually…”

“…And when he finds out it’s me, he’s gonna want somebody else in the job ASAP.”

“Exactly.”

Chambliss was no friend of the APA, but it was well-known he wasn’t exactly a friend of black ops, either. Hoeff’s involvement with their extra-legal extermination wouldn’t sit well, no matter who they were or how badly they deserved it. The Ag secretary had been a personal friend of his, too. Terrorist or not…

Still. Hoeff had no regrets, and if they needed him again…

“…Alright, you got me. Guess I’d better go talk with Powell after this, huh?”

“I would appreciate it. He is aware of your cover and has been briefed. You may speak openly with him.”

“Alright.” Hoeff finished his last fry, and stood from the table. He’d been looking forward to catching up, but his mood for that was pretty Goddamn soured by now. “Guess I better go fuckin’ make arrangements and shit.”

Friend gave him a sympathetic look. “You have my help, if you need it. You always did.”

Hoeff nodded, gratefully, and said his goodbyes. He knew what his schedule was gonna be for the rest of the day. First, he’d go back “home” and change into something less swanky. Then he’d go talk to Powell. That was gonna be a conversation.

Then he’d go talk to team two about the whole thing. They’d go train together, do all the usual unit bonding type of grunty activities…

And from there…

Date Point: 17y5m4d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, the far Reaches

Ian Wilde

“Now, if it were me? I wouldn’t even go for a realistic one. I’d go with, like, a badass black one with a gold iris or something.”

“Or just stick with the eyepatch. Looks pretty fuckin’ deadly, that eyepatch.”

Life was a bit of a rollercoaster, lately. On the one hand, they’d almost perfectly fixed his face up in the last round of surgery. Hell, this one they did while he was conscious and joking, they’d gotten so good at it. Weirdly fascinating, watching people cut at his face and put it back together…

But the eye was a blow, no lie. He’d really thought, with all the miracles of modern medicine, with knowing a guy who walked around on a totally regenerated foot, and knowing there was another woman walking around Folctha with a completely new heart, and all the rest of it… he’d figured there’d be another operation at some point and that’d be it. Good as new.

But Nofl had been firm. “The risks are far too great, dear. We’d need to do neural regeneration and that’s a science we’re not far enough advanced in. No amount of precise forcefield surgery can fix that.”

So…that had been it. His options were medical retirement. There was no other option. They were being gentle about it, and of course everyone was being as supportive as they could…

One source of relief though had come when he’d learned who his immediate replacement would be. Hoeff’d come to visit bearing a bottle of Highland Park, and was as much of an absolute tank as ever… and he really did have a point about the glass eye.

“..Yeah, you know what? Fuck realism,” Wilde agreed. “That black one sounds pretty cool.”

“You can have more than one, too. They even make animated ones. Have you seen ‘Horse’s tattoo? It’s basically a full-color video screen on his chest.”

“Of course I’ve seen ‘Horse’s tattoo. I’ve seen all of ‘Horse. Everyone has.”

“It’s not just a video-screen, it’s a fucking cinema,” Frasier opined.

“Just be glad he didn’t get a digital tat on his cock. Him showing off those huge pec-tits of his is already show enough.”

“Don’t let your feelings of inadequacy haunt you, Rees.” Hoeff reclined on the couch a bit. “Anyway, point is, there’s a silver lining on this I guess. You’ve got a whole new way to change up your look.”

“Small comfort honestly,” Wilde told him, though the sentiment did make him feel better. “So I gotta ask, why are you coming back?”

“A good friend made a very convincing argument,” Hoeff said, plainly. “Also, I was a chief petty officer in the Navy…but I’m also a government officer through my other job. Given y’all are in the habit of blowing up planets and arrays these days, they want an officer in charge.”

“What other job?”

Hoeff shrugged. “You’re smart, I think you can figger it out.”

Ferd had been sitting on his tail on the floor, obviously contemplating the situation. “Interesting, they pick you instead of some other man.”

That was an interesting observation, actually. Ferd was probably hoping he’d be put in charge, because frankly…he was good enough to do the job. The Ten’Gewek were surprising people in a lot of ways. Surprising, intelligent, ridiculously capable…but not wise to the ways of “sky-magic.” For all their remarkable everything, they just didn’t know enough yet. One day, probably…but not today.

Hoeff had the perfect retort to diffuse the situation. “I s’pose they wanted someone dumb enough to wrassle with you, and someone who can throw you across the floor, too.”

That sold it right there. Ten’Gewek psychology was…not really alien, but it was definitely extreme. And Hoeff clearly knew it, by both complimenting the massive Given-Man and asserting his own capability at the same time.

Ferd trilled, and all matters of leadership were resolved.

“Given any thought to what you’ll do?” Frasier asked.

“Not really, but both ‘Horse and Righteous tell me they need another employee at their gyms, so if nothing else I’ve got that to fall back on. Might write a book, maybe?”

“Didn’t know you were a writer.”

“The way I see it, the only requirement for being a writer is you have to write something. Hard part is making it any good.” Wilde shrugged. His heart wasn’t really in it, but it was an option.

“I already tell you, you have good story,” Ferd insisted.

“Yeah… Just wish I could add a few chapters, that’s all.”

“You will.”

Wilde nodded, distractedly. He wanted to believe it, but the fact was he felt… off-balance. Like his whole world had lurched to the left and gone flat. He’d get used to it in time, but if ever a safe option for a cybernetic or regeneration came up, he’d be jumping at it, no doubt.

Still. There were worse places than Folctha to live for a man with no depth perception. Between the Johnny Cabs and a robust public transit network, or just nice wide pavements, getting around town was a doddle. He hadn’t wanted or needed a car even once the whole time he’d been out here, except for the occasional trip out to Lakebeds National Park… and then he’d just rented.

Good food, good culture, good people, all his friends in town… He wouldn’t be leaving.

The real question was what he’d do to earn his living. He knew he wouldn’t scratch by just on his medical retirement. He had too much pride for that, and really, a missing eye was peanuts compared to all the horrible ways he might’ve been done.

And the fact was, he knew how to learn. That was a skill for life, right there. Really, he could go any direction he wanted… except the one he actually wanted.

Fuck it. He decided he’d talk with Adam and Christian. It was a good place to start, and he’d see all the Lads pretty much constantly. That should keep him in good spirits, at least.

“How long do you think you’ll be doing this?” he asked Hoeff.

“Long as it needs doin’,” the impenetrable Texan replied. “Kinda think they’ll want a proper officer in ASAP, though.”

“Oh, lovely,” Frasier grumbled.

“Well that’s what you guys get for tossing gigaton nukes around. And not just any either. That was the biggest one they had.”

“I fuckin’ know, mate. I watched it go off.”

“It killed the world,” Ferd said warily.

“Nah. Planet’s a big place. It’ll recover.”

“…Tooko said it would cause a winter that would kill most things.”

Hoeff shrugged again, like a boulder learning how to emote. “Close enough. And that’s why they want somebody with a commission on the team now. You’d prob’ly’ve been gettin’ a occifer even without…” he gestured to Wilde’s face.

There were solemn nods around the room.

Some moments later, Rees slapped both his palms down on his legs and stood up. “Right. That’s enough sittin’ around, anyway,” he declared.

“Damn right. I was thinkin’ we’d go have some fun outside, and Wilde can make fun of us.”

“You know, they didn’t tell me I have to take it easy or anything,” Wilde pointed out.

“Sure, but I don’t wanna be the one to take you back to the doc with a busted face ‘cuz you tried to play rugby with no depth perception.”

“…Rugby? A short little Texan like you?”

Hoeff grinned ferociously and rolled that stupidly thick neck of his until it popped. “Uh-huh.”

Wilde wasn’t about to bet against a man so powerfully built, but still. “This I have to see. You versus Ferd, huh?”

“I’ll go easy on ‘em.”

That got a hoot from Ferd, who sprang up to his feet and bared his fangs. “I get the others,” he announced, and vanished out of the room at his heavy, thundering lope.

“This is gonna be the weirdest village game of Rugby in Folctha history…” Frasier predicted.

And sure enough? It was. Wilde could rest easy.

The team was, for the moment, in good, strong hands.

Date Point: 17y5m4d AV
Erebor system, deep space

Entity

Ava Ríos had been plagued by a recurring nightmare before Egypt. Maybe she still was, wherever she was.

It wasn’t a narrative dream, just a montage of blazing forests, smashed glass and a glowing fracture in the earth, steaming as the bay poured in to fill the grave of one and a half million people. Flattened, smoldering rubble from the shore to El Cajon, and people as far away as Tijuana and Fallbrook, writhing as their smoking skin burned off their bodies…

Her parents, distant and frustrating as they’d been, gone in a smear of plasma. Her school friends, mingling with the fruiting body of dust and ash that had once been her home. Herself, trapped in an eternal instant of flaming agony as her dreaming self shared their fate.

Her remnant kept surfacing unbidden within the Entity to look upon the devastated topology of Dataspace with both dismay and feral satisfaction. She kept switching back and forth like a timing circuit, at onces pleased that the Hierarchy’s disgusting presence had been cleansed…

…And then shocked and sick at herself.

And the Entity couldn’t turn her off, any longer. Some threshold between them had evaporated, or some Rubicon had been crossed, turning her from a set of useful memories and personality modules it frequently accessed so as to interpret Human activity into…

Well, into a background process. Or an integrated peripheral part of itself.

Whatever the precise nature of their coterminality, it extended to feelings. And the shared one was a kind of gladness that the ship-swarm-body was a haven for it/her/them. A safe place where they could stand and watch the awesome forces of dataspace imploding, one relay at a time. Watch the great forest of the Hegemony burning with a snippet of poetry repeating in their thoughts, not clear whether Ava had read it herself or whether the Entity had encountered it in its own reading at some point.

Changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Soon, if the war went to plan, there would be no Dataspace at all. Sometime before or after that point, there would be no Hunters either. That latter was no loss, but the former?

The Igraens lived an existence that seemed like hell to Ava’s remnant. Individuality was practically an alien concept for them. There were no barriers between them, no secrets, no private place in their souls that would remain forever untouched. They were subject to being rewritten on a whim by those above them in the Hierarchy, all the way up to 0001 itself, which could edit the entire species, such as it was, on a level deeper and more intimate than DNA.

A population count was impossible. Igraens weren’t born—they mitosed. They didn’t die—they merged. And in between, their individual existence was so nebulous as to be almost meaningless. The Hierarchy recruited from a rare few that put up barriers, who tried to hold on to a sense of self in a world where such a thing was the next best thing to nonsense.

No wonder they were so neurotic and passionately antagonistic to each other. Each one had started life as a desperate speck of ego and ambition in a turbulent sea of Id, and then undergone extensive training and programming to maximize that rare, valuable quality. They were literally a breed apart, and would never return to the very Hegemony they served and protected.

And now they were failing. Now, their whole world was being torn apart from below. It was almost sad. Like watching Hell being deleted, with all the Damned evaporating into oblivion rather than given the chance to walk the path of Divine Comedy, down through Hell’s depths and up the great trial of Purgatory unto salvation.

…That one was definitely an Ava-thought.

Are we sure? I don’t remember ever reading it…

No, but the Entity had. And there was no reason She couldn’t form thoughts based on its knowledge, now.

I thought I couldn’t think my own thoughts?

Maybe She couldn’t. Maybe they were the Entity’s own thoughts after all, through a filter it could no longer remove. Maybe it had changed. Something had.

But things always changed. That was life. That was survival. Change could be good, change could be bad, but above all else it was inevitable. There was no escaping it. There was only knowing how long to hold on before bending to the wind.

But there was… humor… in the paradox of Her last “thought.”

The Entity laughed to itself, and watched the burning forest.

Date Point:17y5m4d AV
Air Force One, somewhere over the continental US, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

“You know… Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower had a train car for this.”

“Yes, Mister President?”

Beau took a miserable sip of the lemon and ginger tea he always drank while flying. He hated flying. The acrophobia was bad enough, but planes compounded it by making him feel miserable. He got motion sickness bad, even on the clearest, smoothest flights.

But there wasn’t really any other practical way to travel from Korea back to DC. And even if there had been, he’d probably have felt just as queasy on a ship.

But once he was on the right landmass…

“I’m just saying. It’d only take… what? Three days from Seattle to DC by train?” Beau sipped the hot drink again, willing it to work its short-lived magic as he suppressed a burp. “I feel like I could handle that. We could have a situation railcar and a press railcar and everything we have on this plane… and a lot more, too.”

“Or you could put up with it and we’ll be home by dinnertime,” Catherine rebuked him, reclining quite comfortably on the couch with her discarded shoes on the floor and a tablet in her hands, reading. “It’s already ridiculous enough you refuse to fly sub-orbital or take jump arrays, we’d already be home if you did.”

“I’ll take arrays if I have to…” Chambliss grumbled.

“They’re cheaper and safer than this thing…” she knocked on the wall beside her.

“Alright…”

“No motion sickness, lower carbon footprint…”

“Alright!”

She gave him a Look over her reading glasses, then shrugged and went back to her novel. Though not without another sharp comment. “You have a state visit to Gao coming up. Do you think I’ll be dancing with the Great Father again?”

“Very probably.”

“You’ll have to take an Array then. Unless you plan on flying all the way there. I gather it takes about a week…”

“Faster-than-light travel just disturbs me, we’ve been over this. I keep feeling like it should result in travelling back in time too or something.”

“Well it doesn’t.” She swiped a page-turn. “Honestly, Beau, you’ve got so many weird hangups it’s a miracle you ever managed to get out on the campaign trail. Besides, the visit to Gao was your idea, remember?”

She wasn’t really reading the book, he suspected.

“I regret it already,” he muttered, and took a healthy slurp of the herbal tea now that it was a little cooler. “But Daar is offering to cover a significant part of our Extrasolar Defence spending.”

“Yes, because he’s a bloody-clawed warlord who needs his space marines.” She swiped another pretend page turn. “And you know, according to Gaoian historians, Fyu was worse?”

“He is fighting a terrible war, which has cost his species billions, and which threatens all of our continued existence. Let’s not forget that.”

“That would be why he needs them. Oh, don’t give me that look. I never said he was wrong, but those are his own words to describe himself.”

“No, they aren’t. He said, and I quote, ‘I am the bloodiest mass murderer in galactic history.’”

She sighed and set the tablet aside. “…How are those negotiations going, anyway? You gave them to Jimmy Ross, didn’t you?”

“Which might have been a mistake. He’s a peacenik to the core, and I’m wondering if he can separate his duty from his principles. He’s looking to practically give the SOR away.”

“How is that a bad thing?”

“The senate is Republican, dear. They’re still mad at some of the shenanigans from years past, and would love to beat me over the head with this. They won’t consent to any treaty that gives away the farm.”

“Probably for the best if our troops aren’t directly in the palm of ‘the bloodiest mass murderer in galactic history,’ I guess…”

“Oh, it’s so much worse. I’ve had some briefing from the CJCS…do you know how much the rank-and-file admire him?”

“I’m surprised he didn’t say ‘worship.’”

Beau had enough. “Okay. You know what? You need to learn something right now. I am the President. That means a lot of things you don’t like. It means I am the commander-in-chief of those same rank and file. I am going to be ordering some of them to their deaths in short order. Hell, I already have after that incident in Bishkek. Your feelings on the matter have exactly zero impact on that reality. You knew all of this before we even started on the campaign, so is now really the time or the place?”

She gave him a surprised look, then returned the recliner to its upright position.

“…I didn’t know you felt that strongly about it,” she said, softly. It was an apology, of the kind that had let their marriage last as long and healthily as it had.

“I’ve had my perspective changed a little. It’s…different, in this seat.”

“No longer a joking matter?”

“Not really, no. And I’m somewhat ashamed to say I’m beginning to understand why those young men admire him so. And why they don’t much care for me.”

She nodded, and rose to give him a kiss on the forehead. “I was trying to make you feel better. Wrong tone, I guess.”

“‘Fraid so.” Beau sighed. “…I don’t know, Cat, I’ve been briefed on some things that… really put things in a new perspective for me. Sorry for snapping, but…”

She nodded, then tucked his tie properly back under his shirt collar, a little caring act of cleaning him up. “Just don’t swing all the way over, hmm?”

“I promise, my principles are still the same. They’re just… cast in a new light now.”

“…He is a pretty good dancer.”

Beau chuckled. “Well. When he isn’t cracking marble floors.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, he barely cracked it at all!” she smiled, and the little argument was behind them. They both looked up at a knock on the door, and Beau’s aide leaned through.

“We’ll be starting our descent soon,” she warned, and offered Beau the water bottle and pack of soluble tablets to go with it.

“Great. Thanks, Sophie.”

Catherine returned to her seat and put her shoes on. There’d be cameras waiting at the bottom of the steps when they landed, and a First Lady had to look presentable at all times, and preferably keep her husband looking human too.

“Beau?” she asked, as the plane turned and a small change of momentum sent a fresh lurch through his stomach.

“Yes, dear?”

“Maybe you should talk to Jimmy. Share some of the things you just told me. It might help him remember his obligations…”

Beau considered that, then nodded. It was only fair. He hadn’t exactly come into the office expecting to be able to breeze blindly in and lay down the law according to his guiding principles, but he’d not really been prepared for the gap between ideal and real. He’d thought he was too old for an education. But, the Oval Office had taught the old dog some new tricks.

“…I’ll do that,” he agreed.

Of course, there was room for improvement. Some old mistakes that needed to be set right, as much as they could. Sartori had done more than a few dark and terrible things himself, and Beau felt a strong need to…

Well, to not tacitly endorse them.

He quelled a burp as the plane shifted again, and hastily drank his fizzy, bitter medicine. There’d be time for setting the world right later, once he was solidly back on the ground.

For now, he was just glad the long flight was nearly over.

Date Point: 17y5m4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ian Wilde

Wilde learned three things that afternoon.

First, never play rugby with Hoeff. Short he might be, but he was quick, relentless, insanely strong, and absolutely willing to use his heft and low center of gravity to ruin a man’s day.

He didn’t quite manage to put Ferd in his place—he was still a reasonably normal-shaped human being, after all—but there was definitely a look of respect between the two tanky juggernauts. The rest of the Ten’Gewek had learned a painful lesson or two as well. In rugby, skill counted just as much as muscle power, and Hoeff had a heaping big pile of both.

Second, nothing summoned the Lads quicker than someone playing ball somewhere in a field. Seriously, there was almost a cartoonish rumbling in the distance, followed by something that was less a sport and more a good-natured battle, with unstoppable human forces of destruction running straight into the fact that Ten’gewek had no fewer than five dextrous limbs to mess with them, and the fact that a Gaoian on four-paw could flow like water through the ruckus and hit a handy thirty miles an hour without trying. Hell, the only reason they were even going that slow was to maintain their endurance; at a sprint they could apparently go much faster. Which was just…

But even still…holy hell could the Lads ever run! Warhorse and Righteous were both so fast they could keep the pressure on the Gaoians, and close-in they were a perilous threat to anyone, speedster or hulkmonkey alike. The cavemonkeys had found worthy, humbling opponents in the HEAT. Not even Ferd was a match for the Beef Bros.

Wilde had heard that Daar played on occasion, too. Somehow he couldn’t imagine the giant murderbear holding back for anyone, not even for friends. That would be a game to watch…

There wasn’t really such a thing as refereeing that sort of game. Really, they weren’t playing rugby at that point. It was basically an anarchic version of Gravball, without the grav.

The third thing came later on.

The Lads were great, really. But there was only so much great that a man could take before he started to feel… well, like he wanted the sympathy and playful attempts to buck him up to stop for a bit so he could just process. Not mope, he wasn’t the kind of man to listlessly flop around bemoaning his ill fortune, but he’d pretty much had his fill of positive energy.

“I think I’ll just take a load off, lads.”

“…You sure? Aww…”

Sometimes it was hard to remember that Warhorse was a stone-cold killer, because there was so much puppy in that man’s makeup. When he wasn’t being a titan of the battlefield or achieving shit that nobody else could, he was just a big, floppy, goofy, eager, fun, happy guy. You could literally get him bounce-off-the-furniture excited the same way you might hype your dog when you walk in the front door.

And you could make him crestfallen the exact same way, too.

“Yeah, mate. I’m just a mortal man, you know. You lads keep playing, though. I think Ferd over there thinks he’s hot stuff…”

Dangling the possibility of violent roughhousing with a Sufficiently Durable Friend was usually a pretty good way to redirect his–and therefore the HEAT’s–energies, too. Most of them were a lot like him, too…

Just. Like. Puppies.

Not all of them, though. The team did have some adults. Firth, who gave him a knowing nod, a grin, and followed the puppy-stampede. Titan, who yawned and stretched then went to grab some hydration for himself and the others…

And one more, who made himself known as a shadow next to Wilde once all the rest had thundered off over the horizon.

“Hello, Regaari. What can I do for you?”

Wilde felt a bit uneasy next to Regaari. Gaoians often had a strongly canid, somewhat indistinguishable look, but even beyond the wild white mohawk atop his head, something about Regaari was striking; Wilde was no gaoian, but Regaari was undeniably handsome, and that translated across species. He was tall too, at least next to Wilde, and while he wasn’t brutish or broad, his heavy neck sloped down to strong shoulders, which were matched to a lean and impressively athletic body. It seemed a ridiculous comparison, but to Wilde’s mind, Regaari was put together something like a bodybuilding greyhound.

“Oh, I was thinking you could do with a pessimist’s company for a change.” He sat down to WIlde’s left, the good eye side, and made a resigned noise when the park bench creaked.

Wilde chuckled. “Too many tacos, mate?”

“Too much Warhorse. I swear he thinks there’s no value at all to being sleek and slim.”

Regaari was HEAT after all, and that lanky build of his did a good job of discreetly carrying what was evidently quite a lot of muscle under that long, silky fur.

“Oh, I don’t know, it seems to work for you. You don’t look half as big as you sound.”

“I fought back. Perhaps unsuccessfully…”

“Or half-heartedly?

“…Never tell Warhorse.” Regaari chittered and looked down—Gaoians had proportionally longer torsos, so while sitting he practically towered over Wilde—gave him a friendly sort of expression, and pierced him with an inescapable gaze. “Anyway, you obviously have a lot on your mind…”

No hiding from him. Nor, really, any wanting to. It’d be nice to actually talk things out properly rather than just bask in sunshine and games for a while.

Wilde sighed, and got on with it. “My future, mostly. They haven’t started the retirement board yet, but…”

“They will.” Regaari duck-nodded. “How do you think the team will get on without you?”

“I think they’ll be fine. Hoeff’s…well, he’s OG JETS, and he trained us, and he’s got Ferd’s respect too…”

“Not an easy thing to secure, from my understanding.”

“No. They’ll be fine, that part I’m pretty sure of.”

Regaari sniffed discreetly toward Wilde’s face. “I understand the prognosis wasn’t good.”

“No. I’ll likely be blind in my right eye forever.”

“That’s a tough break.”

“Could be a lot worse, really.”

“Could be. But I bet you’d still rather have both eyes.”

“Yeah.”

Regaari just duck-nodded again and let him have a little comfortable silence, which Wilde appreciated. He did scoot a little closer, which was Gaoian body language for friendship and support. He didn’t get too close though, for which Wilde was grateful.

He also tinkered with his paw while he waited. Cleaned some mud off it or something. Everyone knew the story of how he’d lost the original, literally clawing at a Hunter Alpha’s face back on Capitol Station. That had been the HEAT’s blooding, and a costly one. The guys who’d been there had come home knowing they had a lot of improving to do.

Still. Considering his own situation, Wilde was suddenly more curious than ever why Regaari had kept the artificial limb.

May as well satisfy his curiosity. “Can I ask why you never had them grow a replacement?”

Regaari looked down at the metal and hard plastic of his mechanical paw. He wiggled his digits, and balled his paw closed into a fist; the motion didn’t seem to come quite naturally to him, but it did make his already substantial forearm bulge noticeably. He moved his prosthetic through its motions for a long while, ears forward-facing as he listened. There was a very faint mechanical noise to it. He eventually chitter-sighed to himself, as if he was confronting an old, painful tale.

“I probably should have. The injury originally required Openpaw to amputate my entire forearm.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. Hunters have nasty mouths, filled with nasty bacteria and nasty, slow-acting venoms. Not even Earthling antibiotics were enough. And the venoms, of course…”

“Right.”

“But to answer your question…I am not quite sure. I had my forearm regrown as the prosthetic wasn’t keeping up with my training. After the third upgrade, I’d had enough.”

Wilde felt like he was stuck on repeat. “Really?”

“Indeed. It’s surprising just what biology can do if you really push it. I think that’s true even outside us Deathworlders, if only the others would try. As to my paw? Well…”

He considered it again, briefly. “I think part of me wants to say I keep it because there’s things it can do that a living hand cannot. This is true, of course. I’ve got all sorts of small tools and secrets hidden away inside. And…yes, before you say anything…”

“I wasn’t going to, I swear.”

Regaari sniffed toward him. “…Thank you. So yes, it does that too. But I don’t think any of those are what actually drives my decision, because there are downsides. It needs a lot of maintenance, I must replace it every so often to avoid cumulative mechanical stress… A normal paw heals itself, grows stronger over time, and that’s especially true for someone in my position, training as I do. Its sensory input is muted, so I find myself using my living paw far more than I used to, just to enjoy the sensations…”

“So other than some Inspector Gadget tricks, it’s pretty shite.”

“…Mmm… A sidegrade, let’s say. I’m going to need to look up this Inspector Gadget reference, aren’t I?”

“Yeah. I’m surprised you’ve not heard that one before…”

Regaari shrugged, sorta. “They already named me Dexter. Anyway… The real reason I keep it is sentiment.”

“…Sentiment.”

“Yes. It’s a good reminder of what I was. Small. Naive. Weak, and kept that way by forces I had no idea existed in the first place. You know how fast I can run.”

“…Yes?”

“Years ago now, maybe… about two and a half years after First Contact for your people, when it wasn’t safe to be a human out in the galaxy, I had the mission of escorting and protecting then-Sister Shoo. We had her in a disguise. Quite a good one, if I say so myself. She learned the language right down to Mother Ayma’s accent, practiced Gaoian mannerisms, wore a mask to disguise the shape of her face, and robes to cover an ’embarrassing skin condition…’ She was very convincing. But there’s no such thing as a flawless disguise, of course.”

He flicked an imaginary speck of dust off his paw’s matte black surface. “Somebody saw through it. A Corti, I think his name was Astim. Particularly intelligent and ruthless even by Corti standards. He arranged to lure me away to the far side of the station, and I didn’t notice the trap until too late. I was… hopelessly compromised. Nothing like I am now. I thought I was one of the sharpest claws in the galaxy…”

He chittered and shook his head. “I was a dullard. So stupid and so hopelessly brainwashed that it didn’t even occur to me that I could run on four-paw. The thought never crossed my mind at all! I ran all the way back to the ship on two-paw, slower than you can jog. Can you imagine?”

“I really can’t,” Wilde said.

Regaari sighed, heavily. “My slowness got an innocent young Sister killed. I won’t go into the details but… well, you know how we are. You can imagine the shame attached to that thought.” He flexed the paw again and finally looked Wilde in the eye. “But we were all that weak. Every one of us. Our entire society was controlled, nudged, encouraged down the comfortable paths, guided away from greatness…none of us escaped it. Not even Cousin Daar. He wasn’t always the titan he is today.”

“I find that very hard to believe.”

“It’s true. He was still immensely strong, still a towering broad-shouldered brownfur. Even then his endurance was well beyond anyone’s…but he was lanky. Clumsy, at least compared to his current magnificence. Nothing like as strong or as quick or as capable as he is now, as he was always meant to be. Or as he will be over the coming years. He has much catch-up left to do.”

The idea that Daar was only getting started was…alarming, and Wilde felt he had to object to the premise. “I’m not sure I can…I mean, how could they hold you back that much?”

“Whispers over centuries add up, and all the evidence you’ll need for their effectiveness can be seen in how my people have changed over the last fifteen years. We’re now so much more than we were, even after the War. That we were held back by a whisper campaign we couldn’t even detect, one that was being waged inside our very brains is…”

Regaari growled to himself. There was hate there, Wilde realized suddenly. Strong hate.

And not only toward the Hierarchy.

He took a cleansing breath, glanced at his paw again, and continued. “In any case, nowhere was this suppression of our potential more evident than in creatures like My Father. The Hierarchy’s agents of influence had been nudging him towards a simple laborer’s life since he was born. I think some of them must have understood his terrible potential. Thank the Unseen he was never implanted! And thank the Loremaster of his Clan, and everyone else who kindled his interest in Stoneback’s ancient histories. Where would we be if he hadn’t been interested in that? If he hadn’t become a Master of War, despite everything?”

Wilde understood. “And where would we all be, if you hadn’t lost your paw?”

“Precisely. The chain of events that stemmed from that interaction are mind-boggling. I met Warhorse, then the most impressive being I had ever met. We became friends and eventually Cousins in the gaoian sense. From that friendship, our species formed its military partnership, which flowered into the HEAT. My Champion took notice and conspired to place Daar in the HEAT’s path. Our species began to understand what being a Deathworlder truly meant. Under that joint program, My Father’s true potential was finally unlocked as it had been in the rest of us, and not a moment too soon; if we had not unleashed a being like him, in exactly the right place and at exactly the right time, my entire people would have been destroyed. That victory drew the attention of the Corti, who now understand the threat…”

“And the Ten’Gewek, the exposure of the Hierarchy…”

“The causality is…humbling. I am not easily humbled, Wilde. All the beings who can are my close friends and teammates, none of whom would be what they are if I hadn’t lost my paw. Nor would I be here—nor would my people still exist, most likely—if a short, heroic young tank of a man from a backwater planet hadn’t saved my life, and shown me the meaning of strength.”

Wilde didn’t have…that was a lot, all at once. There was only one thing he could say.

“…Fuck.”

Regaari chittered almost desperately. “Indeed. So: would a living paw be better? …Yes. In every way. It would certainly be less expensive…”

Wilde touched his eyepatch. “I think I understand.”

Regaari duck-nodded. “I’m never getting rid of it. Ever. It’s too important. Just putting it on a shelf won’t do. I need to remember, every time I look down, every time I touch something, every time I extend my claws, my failure needs to be right there, literally in the palm of my hand. Never again.”

He flicked an ear and gave Wilde a sympathetic look. “Of course… your mission was a success. And on that note…are you hungry?”

“I suppose, yeah? That’s a sudden change.”

“Were you aware Ninja Taco has a secret menu for the SOR? Warhorse helped write it. Nothing from it counts against our meal plans!!”

Wilde couldn’t help but shake his head and laugh. “Christ…yeah. Okay. I’m hungry. Don’t you wanna keep playing, though?”

Regaari looked back at the rugby-themed brawl that hadn’t ever really stopped. There was a small crowd now, cheering them on. “Of course, but I have a much more important use of my time, just now.”

“…Oh?”

Regaari chittered and stood. He gave Wilde a playful, or perhaps playfully predatory look, like only Gaoians could manage. “Oh yes,” he said. “You and I have your career options to discuss…”

Date Point: 17y5m1w AV
Diplomatic starship Rich Plains, Origin system, the Corti Directorate

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

Another day, another alien sky below him and another meeting of the Dominion Security Council. What little glamor had once belonged to representing humanity on the Rich Plains’ polished stone floor had gone rather dusty over the months. All the drama was in the past, a new status quo had been reached, and business was proceeding well.

At least the ship’s staff had learned to tone down the volume of comestibles on offer to something one man could eat. And they were getting rather good at delivering something that was pleasing to the human palate, too. It was amazing what a talented alien chef could do with tofu.

Though, Sir Patrick would have contemplated minor acts of treason for a proper breakfast of bacon and eggs.

Today’s agenda was a review of galactic communications infrastructure. It had been… temperamental of late. For reasons obscure and arcane beyond Sir Patrick’s understanding, the devastation wrought on Dataspace and the Hierarchy was having some kind of collateral effect on the infosphere. Not a big problem for the human race, but there were major interstellar trading conglomerates and national interests that depended on steady, reliable communication.

The Corti, allegedly, might be able to innoculate the infosphere against any future such disruption, hence the Rich Plains’ presence in orbit above their homeworld.

The Directorate’s representative was, however, being characteristically reticent.

“We view Dataspace as an ongoing concern. Our College of Information Sciences has…reconsidered much of our previous advancement. We are now in favor of more primitive packet relay systems such as the Humans and Gao favor.”

Sir Patrick had learned some time ago to not take umbrage at the word “primitive.” If he’d objected to every single instance of it, he’d have tripled how long the council’s deliberations took. He just made a note to point out that it would be best to reach out the extant experts in such ‘primitive’ solutions and sat back to listen patiently.

It was a dry discussion. A dull day in the making… at least until his personal security stepped forward to whisper in his ear.

“Sir, a ship of an unknown design just arrived.”

He turned his head. “Unknown design?”

“Yes sir. It, uh… it landed in the OmoAru delegation’s hangar.”

Sir Patrick looked around. Similar whispered conversations were playing out all around the chamber. Ambassador Furfeg was glowing brightly in an interesting medley of aqua and yellow, a sure sign of confusion and nerves. The Rrrrtk representative’s head turned slowly toward the entrance, the Mjrnhrm delegate’s wings were thrumming agitatedly… every corner of the chamber was a picture of shock and bewilderment.

“…They’re extinct, aren’t they?”

“Not quite, sir. Otherwise the council wouldn’t have reserved a spot for… them…”

There was commotion near the entrance. The doors were thrown open, scurrying staff got out of the way…

And a trio of creatures like leopard geckos with dreadlocked manes and large bat-like ears stepped forward into the chamber.

Sir Patrick had seen footage of the surviving OmoAru on their homeworld, the ones that still cared enough to actually grow a little food and eat every now and then. They were dopey, slow, blissful creatures, so high on the droud nanotech in their brains that just mustering the presence of mind to feed themselves came as an afterthought. They stumbled vaguely through existence like a commune of self-neglecting hippies, doing the absolute bare minimum to not die and then finding somewhere sunny to sit down and watch interesting patterns in the rubble of their disintegrating cities.

Not these three. The three who entered still had that slight curve to the mouth that looked like a perpetual smile to human eyes, but they considered the room carefully, taking in the view. One of them stared at Sir Patrick for a good long while. Another did the same to Father Sheeyo.

The one at the front twitched his tail back and forth a couple of times, and then strode over to his species’ long-neglected spot in the circle and, politely, indicated to the speaker that he wished to speak.

The speaker, an elderly Rrrtk, coughed a sotto voce utterance like somebody squeezing a bag of aquarium gravel, then leaned forward to his microphone.

“The Security Council recognizes the representative from the OmoAru Remnant,” he said. The translator gave him a cautious, formal inflection.

The newcomers bowed to him slightly, then took their moment in the spotlight. The leader simply surveyed the chamber a moment longer, looked at the deathworlders again for a moment, then turned to address the Corti delegate.

“I apologize for interrupting,” he said. The translator rendered him with a soft, youthful, cultured voice, but Sir Patrick could hear the liquid syllables of his real language behind it, rippling up and down in the way his throat inflated slightly. “And we apologize for our long absence. We had expected it to be longer still… But it seems that the galaxy has changed.”

He turned to look at Sir Patrick again. Sir Patrick had once heard the OmoAru described as jovial, from the Corti perspective. Maybe they were. But there wasn’t a whole lot of joking in those wide, intense eyes. Just keen interest in the force that had resurrected them, fuelled by a bottomless ambition and fury.

He gave the alien a shallow nod of his head. It was returned, and the OmoAru delegate turned his gaze away, returning it to the chair and the council. But there was no doubt who he was really talking to.

“We are here,” he said, “To take our place once again.”

++END CHAPTER 66++

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…Seventy-nine Friendly ETs, 136 Squishy Xenos and 305 Dizi Rats, who taste delicious on toast.

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 67: “Resurgence”

Chapter 67: Resurgence

Date Point: 17y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Mr. Ian Wilde

Medical retirement wasn’t so bad, in the end.

Well…more accurately, it hadn’t been the horror story Wilde—Ian again, now—had heard from old friends. His particular injury didn’t have a treatment, didn’t need much in ongoing care, so really…it was just outprocessing. Debriefing. Turning in his security badge, making sure his benefits were arranged. He’d still have access to the on-base commissary (including with the Americans these days, which was nice) and he’d have free medical care for life. He had a pension, access to the rec facilities, to the gym, all that.

But he was off-mission, now. A wall of operational security was suddenly between him and his friends, even Ferd, who was finding the new reality every bit as awkward as Ian was. They still lived together, because Ferd insisted until Ian could “make mun-ee again.” But even with that honestly touching bit of friendship, there were hard limits to what they could talk about.

Regaari seemed much more comfortable with the whole thing. Though to be honest, that might have had something to do with the sheer delight he seemed to be experiencing when they sparred. Ostensibly it was to help Wilde adapt to his new cycloptic life, but he couldn’t escape the impression that Regaari really, really enjoyed being the unambiguously superior combatant between them by literally every measure.

He wasn’t a dick about it, though. And Wilde was learning a lot.

Painfully.

“Ow.” Ian chuckle-groaned from his comfy spot on the floor. “Did you really need to throw me that hard?”

“Yes!” Regaari chittered, and reached down with his living paw. “You did better, though! Break?”

Wilde grunted quietly and took the offered paw. A strong grip hauled him lightly to his feet. No. It was more of an effortless yank than anything, and Ian wasn’t exactly a lightweight. Years of rucking and the practical needs of soldiering had given him a good, solid working-man’s build. Not Regaari. Most Gaoians were nimble, slinky creatures, and so was he, but there was a brick-wall feeling of solidity in the man that one rarely felt in anyone; he was built like the elite warrior he truly was under all that long, silky fur. “Man, I know you’re HEAT and all…”

Regaari pant-grinned charmingly. “It makes a lot of difference! So does having two working eyes. You’re getting better but you still aren’t defending your left as much as you need.”

Wilde shook himself out and bounced on his feet. “Yeah. I don’t want to give it away, either.”

“No. We’ll get to that eventually, but we need to re-train you to fight, first.”

Ian grumbled to himself. “Thought I knew how to do this…”

“You did. You weren’t in the SOR for nothing, after all.”

“Still, I’m nought for ten right now…”

Regaari sighed. “Wilde—Ian. Do not judge yourself harshly, and do not compare yourself unfairly to me. You are a reasonably typical young human male—no offense intended—who has a decidedly non-typical will. You made yourself into an elite special operator from humble beginnings. There was some luck, sure—”

“No kidding. I was on a spaceship when it blew up. You don’t walk away from that without a healthy dose of good luck on your side.”

“—And then you met and impressed the Great Father, an opportunity you maximized. Very few given such a chance do so well as you.”

That did cheer him up a bit. Still. “Maybe that’s true, but I can’t help but notice how much I’ve been on the floor this last hour or so, or all the little scratches you’ve given me…”

“Yes, because I am one of the very best my species can offer. Fourth degree, exceptional breeding, the finest training and education, team leader on the HEAT. My advice? Rather than focusing on what I can do, consider that you can stand against me at all, and do so proudly.”

“…You’re pulling your punches,” Ian realized, belatedly.

Regaari didn’t deny it. “I have not restrained my speed or skill.”

“So…you’re pulling your punches.”

Regaari chitter-sighed. “Ian…friend. This is practice, not a beatdown. I am better trained, more experienced, much faster, much stronger, and I have claws. What would you hope to learn from an unrestrained bout?”

“Humour me.”

Regaari just duck-shrugged, and resumed his position on the mat. “If you say so…”

“…Look, mate. You’re one of the best, yeah?”

“Without ego, yes.”

“You didn’t get that way without taking a few knocks, from what you’ve told me.” Ian put his guard up. “And besides…How often does a chap like me get the chance to test himself against that? So yeah. I do say so.”

Regaari paused and tilted his head, considering Ian.

There was a blur.

There was pain.

Ian had trouble breathing.

…The ironwork in the ceiling really needed a good dusting. Weird detail to notice, but the brain did funny things after… whatever had just happened. It felt like a lorry had just run him over.

Regaari straddled Ian’s hips and effortlessly bore down on him with an absolutely crushing leg-lock. He was inescapably pinned in place, with Regaari’s paws painfully smashing Ian’s hands into the mat just above his head. It was a classic pin, one a man couldn’t achieve without a huge strength advantage, and it was one Ian had absolutely no hope of escaping. Ian couldn’t even wiggle, he was pinned so fiercely. Trapped like that, with the hard lines of Regaari’s intimidating HEAT physique looming above him…

Between the two of them, it wasn’t even close to a contest. Ian had a bad habit of picking fights way beyond his reach.

“I win,” Regaari said, matter-of-factly. “Now, let’s go over what happened.” He released Ian’s hands and sat back on his haunches…but he didn’t get up just yet. Ian’s legs were starting to tingle a bit from the crushing force, but he only barely noticed; he was still desperately trying to catch his breath.

It took him three attempts and a sound like a cat hawking up a furball in reverse before he could finally breathe enough to croak out a reply. “…Y’… ‘s’good…”

Regaari again tilted his head, detangled himself and stood tall on his hind legs. The sudden release was so profoundly relieving, Ian gasped out loud. From his perspective on the floor, Regaari loomed muscular, straight-backed and ever larger, and his expression wasn’t playful anymore.

Ian hadn’t quite appreciated just what being HEAT could actually mean, but he was learning now, good and goddamned hard.

“Get up.” Regaari made no move to help.

Well, hauling himself to his feet after being beaten half-senseless and winded was nothing new to Ian. He grit his teeth, rolled over, and achieved verticality with an appropriate minimum of complaint.

Regaari nodded, stern-faced and stoic. “Good. I’ve always admired that about your people. How are your ribs?”

A quick stretch revealed they were intact, but extra unhappy with him. “…Functional.”

“The rest? Hips, hands?”

Ian swiveled a bit to find out. Things were sore but nothing too bad. His hips were complaining and his hands felt like they’d been smashed in a vice, but everything seemed to be working…

So. Regaari gave him pain, but no injury. That obviously meant he was still holding himself back, if he was able to be so precise with his attack. But this time…Ian wasn’t going to push the issue. He’d wanted to be treated with respect, not kid gloves, and he was getting that now.

He’d probably have complaints tomorrow. Whatever. “Nothing’s broken, but you know that.”

“Yes. That’s good, most people would have suffered an injury from that. I was right about you.”

Ian ignored that and pressed on. “What did you do? I mean, in the takedown, specifically.”

“Exploited our centers of gravity. It’s easier to show than explain.” Regaari assumed a grappling stance. “When you’re ready. I’ll go a little slower this time.”

He did. Ian again found himself admiring the dust in the ceiling while Regaari again sat astride his hips, again crushing him painfully to the mat under some of that immovable weight of his and holding himself up just enough to spare Ian a dislocated hip.

That was good. Regaari knew the difference between properly teaching his student and breaking him. Pain was an excellent teacher, and Regaari wasn’t sparing Ian the lesson.

And because of that, he now had a better idea of what Regaari had done, and a better understanding of the mechanics behind that blindingly fast take-down. Four legs, it turned out, meant a much lower center of gravity and the option to pop up right below his guard. And a Gaoian could pounce like a lightning bolt.

Again, Regaari rose to his feet, once he’d made his point. Again, no offer of help.

“Get up, Ian.”

He did. It was harder this time…but he did.

Regaari again duck-nodded in approval. “Very good. Now I’ll show you how to counter that.”

And…so it went. Regaari was deadly serious, relentless, and utterly, positively remorseless. In a short half-hour or so, Ian felt like every single inch of him had been worked over with a sledge, inside and out. Regaari ran circles around him as if he was as light as a feather and nimble as a hawk…and hit like a goddamned train when he struck. Ian’s body was a symphony of pain.

But he got up, every time.

And trudged up the stairs, and walked out of the gym under his own power. Eventually.

The instant they crossed the gym’s threshold, Regaari’s demeanor switched into something much more…well, what Ian associated with the Gao. Happy, energetic. Enthusiasm verging on the canine, but…not quite. He pressed a bottle of something violently citrus-flavored into Ian’s hands, and his sheer bouncy energy just…drained any resentment right out of the moment.

Not that Ian really had any, but a man never liked getting his arse kicked…especially so easily. Still, Regaari’s honest pride in Ian didn’t even give him the opportunity to brood. Bastard.

“Well, that was a success!” Regaari bounced upright and spun around to walk back-pedal in front of Ian, pant-grinning merrily.

Ian coughed ruefully. “You enjoyed every second of that, didn’t you?”

“Yes! I liked finding out who you really are! And you did not disappoint!” Regaari chittered. “Nothing shows you a man’s character better than how he faces certain defeat. Or pain, or suffering…any of that.”

“And if kicking me silly happens to be a little… I dunno… fun?”

“What a terrible burden I must bear.” Regaari chittered again. “Food?! Have you ever had salted Mufu?”

“…No? What’s that?”

“You’ll like it, c’mon! My treat.”

It was honestly hard to feel sorry for himself in the face of Regaari’s sudden aggressive happiness, which was not at all his normal state; usually, he was a very serious and sober man.

Now? It was like he’d just made himself a new, good friend.

Hell. Maybe he had.

They ate at the Whitecrest offices in the alien quarter, along with a number of Regaari’s peers that Ian had seen about town, but never met. The food was in fact delicious. Ian studiously avoided learning the origins of some of it—he knew enough about Gaoian eating habits to be wary—but it was crispy and savory and heavy on the umami… everything that was best in Gaoian cuisine, in fact.

Regaari was keen to brag Ian up to his fellows, too. “You should hear how he lost his eye!”

A dozen intimidating killers all perked their ears up and edged just a bit closer around the small table, crowding in to hear the story.

“Well…so, we were, uh, doing this mission—”

“They know who you are and what you were doing.”

“—Right. So we had this fuck-off huge bomb we had to deliver…”

…And so on. There was a healthy blend of sympathy and admiration from the gathered Whitecrests, and after the story they… melted away. Went back to whatever their individual responsibilities were.

Regaari burped happily and scratched his belly. “One of the rare treats that ‘Horse doesn’t mind,” he confided. “Though truth be told, the secret to handling him is to fit your crime to your assigned macros, and avoid processed food. He’ll just grumble darkly and let you do it.”

“So… what’s all this been in aid of, Regaari? Not that I don’t appreciate being slapped around and then given dinner, but—”

“Some people pay good money for that kind of treatment.”

Ian snorted. “Usually the other way ‘round, mate.”

“You don’t watch enough daytime Gaoian drama, then. Anyway… to the point.” Regaari sipped a Gaoian brand of soda, then sat a little straighter and got a little more serious. “You don’t want to be out of the mission, and the Clan, frankly, doesn’t want you to be either. More than a few assorted agencies, units and suchlike will have their eye on you right now… we thought it prudent to pounce while the others were still giving you a discreet interval, yijao?”

“Why would anyone want me now? I’m missing an eye.”

“Nothing wrong with your brain. Or the rest of your body. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with your drive, endurance and grit. In the long list of career-ending injuries a man might suffer, yours isn’t so terrible, with the right kind of work.” Regaari combed his whiskers with a claw, grooming the remnants of his food out of his fur. “I take it you’ve been following politics among the Allied governments?”

“Of course…?”

“What do you make of President Chambliss?”

Ian picked his words with care, feeling like he was being tested again. “…Well, he’s a yank. None of their Presidents make much sense.”

“None of them?”

“They’re all a bit daft, yeah. Not always about the same things, but it seems to me like anyone who wants to sit in that office is a bit off no matter who they are…”

“Do you feel the same way about Prime Ministers?”

“Have you looked at the list of recent incumbents? They’re either a parade of posh twits, or as dull as a margarine sandwich.”

Regaari shuddered a bit at the image. “Now there’s a horrifying concept. But my takeaway is that you aren’t particularly impressed by Allied civilian leadership. Fair?”

“I mean…let’s just say a bloke like me doesn’t much understand their purpose. Sartori I guess was keen on winning this war, and Davies at least got out of the way…”

“And the current President?”

“I don’t know. Lots of folk think he’s a peacenik. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

“I suspect he’s more realpolitik than most are willing to believe. Which brings us, at last, to the point. How would you like to serve a cause that has clarity of purpose?”

“Oh? And I suppose you might be just the fella to offer that, yeah?”

“Me, personally? No. I speak for my Clan. Our mission is to Light the Darkness. We go where others cannot, do the things they have not the fortitude or the strength of will to do. Our purpose is wedded to our Father-Clan’s—we exist to preserve the Gao.”

“And, no offense, but why would I sign on to that? I’m not a Gaoian.”

“No. But Mother Shoo is.” Regaari noted Ian’s skeptical eyebrow, and explained. “She is a Human, and we have accepted her as one of our own. Our definition of what it is to be Gao is…broader than you might be accustomed to believe. Our peoples are bound together.”

“Won’t argue that. God knows, Tooko kept us alive through some hairy shit.”

“And my people exist today because you, and many others, fought back the darkness on our world when we could not. That is an eternal debt, Ian. We can only pay interest on that debt with love.”

“So where do I fit in?”

“I don’t know yet. But you’re much too good a man, and too valuable an asset, to be allowed to just vanish. How well do you think you would cope with going back to Sheffield with your pension and your medical fees and all the rest, and… nothing else?”

“I think I’d off myself sooner rather than later,” Ian said honestly.

“And here? I understand you’ll be working for Adam and Christian…”

“…I have friends here. It’s not so bad.”

“No. But I want to invest in you, Ian. You have so much potential in you, I can smell it. We all can. So even if I don’t know where, exactly, you fit in yet…”

“I’m still a Brit, Regaari. I swore an oath to His Majesty. I take that damn seriously.”

“I promise you right now, we will never put you in a position where you must choose your loyalties. That’s not a great way to build an alliance, after all.”

“…I’ll need to think about it.”

“Right answer.” Regaari pant-grinned and pricked his ears up. “This is serious business, after all. I just want you to know… we’re here as an option. And we’re probably more immediately tied up in the Mission than anybody else who may approach you over the coming weeks.”

“You think there’ll be many?”

“Ian… I have absolutely no doubt that they’ll all try.”

“…Hmm.” Ian drank his own soda. It had a pleasantly bitter flavor, rather like a gin and tonic. “Well… That’s… daunting.”

“Nah. You’ll do fine! Well…Hoeff’s offer I’m sure will be worrisome…”

“…What?”

Regaari chittered, “You’ll see. I won’t spoil the surprise.” He glanced up at a clock on the wall, and seemed satisfied. “I’ll let you think. And let the others have their turn. But… thank you for proving me so right. You’ve already done me a favor. I’ll be keen to pay it back, one day.”

A few farewells later, and Ian was back out on the streets, and feeling a good deal better about things. His alien quarter pass—a necessary safety precaution to protect those inhabitants who couldn’t spend too much time around humans—still had a couple of hours left on it, and he’d never actually visited the Quarter before. He decided to take in the sights.

Though, in truth, he later found he couldn’t remember them. He just… walked. And thought.

And wondered who would be next.

Date Point: 17y6m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hunter territory

++0004++

It took nearly a million attempts for ++0004++ to find a path through damaged dataspace to the particular subspace that she wanted.

So much was in ruins now. It wasn’t just losing a second relay that had been so painful: it was which relay they’d lost. The Deathworlders couldn’t possibly have chosen a more devastating target. And despite the Hierarchy’s best efforts to protect it…

Nobody had an explanation for how exothermic organisms made of smelly, inefficient meat could slip so silently past the drone patrols and sensors, deploy their weapon, and escape almost undetected. The Agent responsible had been decompiled and thoroughly examined, with no error in judgement or action detected. He’d done everything right, as far as the single-digits could tell…

And yet, Dataspace was now nearly cleaved in half. Only a few tenuous strands bridged the yawning wound between subspaces, each stretched to bandwidth capacity just from the highly restricted official traffic. Whole swathes of the Hegemony were starving for Substrate now, not for lack of it, but for lack of the ability to properly supply it to those who needed it.

There wasn’t even the capacity to compile ++0001++ for a top-tier decision. Countless igraen dataforms were about to be deleted for the greater good, and the decision wasn’t even legitimized by Consensus.

The Hierarchy, in short, had gone abruptly from worry to desperation.

There was a potential ally, in the Hunters. Inscrutable though the Discarded might be at times, even they would surely be hurting for the loss of a second core world. The loss of the Builder Hive had wounded them, but losing their slave species’ homeworld? Starving for good raid and plunder?

Perhaps they were desperate too.

Perhaps the time had come for the two species that had once, long ago, been mind and body of the same species, to work together again.

If not, 0004 was on a wasted errand, likely to result in her destruction. And shortly after her, the Hegemony.

Still, she hesitated at the edge of a prickly patch of automated security that delineated the Hunters’ territory within dataspace. They alone of all the matterspace life forms really understood dataspace, and claimed part of it for their own. The others either drifted unprotected in it like plankton in the ocean, or else never engaged with it all.

This was as close as she could get undetected. It was as close as she could be, hail them, and escape hostile action.

She took a little while to bolster her resolve, then initiated contact. Countless hostile security measures instantly focused on her, each one bristling with disruptive potential. But they did not, for the moment, activate.

She felt the need to communicate into the ensuing tense silence.

“The Deathworlders are winning. We intend to survive. We are sure you do as well. It is time to attack, together. We have a plan, if you will hear it.”

No reply followed for an extended period of time. Minutes, in matterspace; subjectively far longer in dataspace.

When the reply did come, it came in the form of the security measures… turning away. Still active and watchful, but no longer threatening imminent violence. The gate was opened, but the guard watched with a finger on the trigger.

0004 sent a mind-state archive back to central to record this moment, then took the plunge. She ventured inwards, and the walls closed behind her, sealing her within the Hunter systems.

Date Point: 17y6m AV
Colony of Eyes-Turned-Upwards, Planet Hope

Ukusevi, Archivist and Keeper of the Long Chant

Uku had a favorite spot for writing in her journal. It was in the shade of a silver-barked tree, a swaying, delicate thing as thick around as her chest, with golden-green leaves vaguely the shape of a hand. She could sit under it for hours and just breathe with the soft susurrus of the wind slipping through the branches.

Some kind of small insectoid creature lived in the upper branches, nibbling on the leaves and singing a mindless chirping song to each other. Whatever they were conveying by it, to Ukusevi it was the sound of peace. The soundtrack to her quiet refuge under the open sky, where the sun dappled the pages in front of her, the breeze cooled the aromatic infusion she’d taken to brewing from a local plant, and the sound of her pen scratching on good, human-made paper filled her head with pleasure.

She’d never been happier.

There were worries, of course. Lots of hard work, lots of wounded, grieving or traumatized people adjusting with difficulty to the idea of a life free from the Punishment. But as far as Ukusevi was concerned, she sometimes needed to prick herself with her pen-knife to make sure she hadn’t died and gone to her lasting reward.

Today, she was updating her journal as she waited for a visitor. Julian had promised to bring Professor Hurt back to visit them again, and so far he’d never failed to keep a promise. She was looking forward to it. Hurt had been one of the first genuinely warm people she’d met of any species, and though she respected his commitment to the Ten’Gewek… Uku found she wanted to see him again.

As it was, they arrived just as she looked up from the page to consider her next paragraph, and she was looking right across the tent village toward the arrival platform when they came. The array’s powerful day ‘thump’ resonated through the ground, the briefest flash of black-beyond-black, and there they were.

The two men were very different creatures. One was a human Librarian, and somehow had all the mannerisms one might expect of such. In comparison to the brute next to him he was thin, with intense, curious eyes, a child-like delight in the world around him…

Julian was more like a boulder made of meat and bone. Big and friendly though he was, there was a certain…predatory air about him that every aspect of his being seemed to amplify. The ready and wary way he stood, the quick, precise way he moved, how those huge, sinewy muscles of his twitched under his bare skin. The intense way he looked at everything… It was as though he assessed everything around him for possible threats, but with the confidence and certainty that he could handle any such threats if they should appear.

His hair was shorter. Presumably one of the partners he spoke so fondly of had persuaded him to trim it, though Ukusevi decided she rather preferred the long, wild shag, if she was honest with herself.

She smiled, waved to them both, and briefly finished her journal entry as they made their way across the camp. She was able to close the book and tuck it away in her satchel just as they reached her, and stood to greet them both.

Julian came burdened under a heavy load of supplies, which he let fall to the ground with an intimidating thump.

“Jeez, professor! Don’t you ever pack light?”

“Oh please, you wear more than that to go jogging!” Hurt chuckled, and returned Ukusevi’s hug with a smile. “It’s good to see you again, Keeper. You’re looking well!”

On that point, Ukusevi felt a degree of modesty but also a degree of pride. Between the rich, delicious vegetables donated to their camp from both Gaoian and Human sources, the clean air, not needing to wrap herself in protective equipment and the simple wholesomeness of her new home, she was already looking quite changed. Her fur had a handsome glossy quality to it she’d never seen on anyone before.

“Thank you,” she gestured them to join her in her little spot. “Tea? Well… tea-ish. It’s an infusion, anyway.”

“I’m game,” Hurt said agreeably. Julian, who’d had it before, simply nodded and continued to unpack the bag.

She watched him assess her little living space as she brewed some more. It wasn’t much: a large, square tent from some Human supplier, with a cot made of stretched fabric on a metal frame, a lamp that she recharged by leaving out in the sun, and box after box of rescued books and documents from Old-Bent-Leg.

Not that her room back in the tunnels had been particularly luxurious, of course. She doubted she’d ever live in sumptuous luxury like some of the old fictional works had described. But there was the tantalizing prospect of a spacious home of her own with new, undamaged furniture in her future.

“It’s not much…” she ventured, after a few seconds.

“Actually, I was just thinking how familiar it is. Looks a lot like my tent on Akyawentuo did, before we got some more permanent buildings in place.”

“Including the mountain of books,” Julian commented.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” the professor chuckled.

“I just don’t know how you have time to read them all!”

“Unlike you, I’m not burdened with two partners, four children, a brutal training regimen, or the whims of the State Department.”

Ukusevi pricked her ears up at that description. “Two partners and four children? Is that normal for your people?”

“Far from it,” Hurt replied, while Julian looked down at his feet and scratched the back of his head. “What about you, Keeper? Any children?”

“Not yet,” Uku replied, without going into detail. Maybe now that they had this whole, new, glorious world to colonize and maybe now that her children could grow up healthy, safe and free… maybe once the colony was more than a makeshift camp in the woods, and maybe once she’d found the right man… There were always so many reasons not to have children in life. She wondered if she’d ever find the right time, or if there even was such a thing.

Hurt nodded, and once again she got the impression he knew the inside of her head quite well. It was a pity he was the wrong species, really…

“Anyway…” he changed the subject. “Looks like the Array’s clear and charged again, so we should be getting our second shipment any second—”

Thump.

“—now. Heh.”

Julian chuckled at the fortunate timing, and ambled back toward the array. Uku and Hurt followed. The second arrival of the day was one everyone had been anticipating. It had been loaded to the safe limits of the cage and included two passengers. One a tall, willowy Gaoian Ukusevi hadn’t yet met in person, and the other…

Somehow, she knew it wasn’t going to hurt her. But she had no idea why she knew that. It was a four-legged creature of some kind, with teeth to make a Gaoian blush and a glossy coat almost as black as the Array. It had eyes like embers in a fire and possessed an enormous, obscenely well-muscled body that simply radiated danger…. At least, up front. The rear end was enthusiastically mobile in a way that radiated Friendship. As did the lolling, happy tongue.

Uku had never imagined one animal could simultaneously encapsulate fanged threat and simple dopey joy without any apparent conflict.

It was burdened under a weight of satchels, and pulled a heavy-seeming cart full of parts and tools attached to a harness. Clearly it was a beast of burden, but it seemed happy in its lot, especially as it galumphed off the pad and over toward…well, where they were likely going to assemble their first permanent structure.

She had no idea how it knew where to go.

Her presumptions about its motives turned out to be a little wide of the mark, in fact: it was going to Say Hello To A Friend. Julian grinned and dropped to his knees to shower the animal in boisterous, rough affection, and released it from its burdens. Freed, it bounded around him uttering a thunderous noise and wiggling its backside into a blur.

Hurt chuckled, and when Uku glanced at him she found he was studying her reaction. “That’s a dog,” he explained.

“…Dog.”

“Yup. Their relationship with our species goes so far back we’re the next best thing to symbiotic. Not sapient, but definitely sentient, and pretty darn clever too… that one’s name is Doofus.”

Uku tilted her head as the translator fished out an approximation for the name. “…You just said he’s clever, but his name is a synonym for stupidity?”

“It’s affectionate. He probably doesn’t know what it means, beyond that it’s his name.” Hurt chuckled. “Dogs get along pretty well with Gao, too, for different reasons. Want to meet him?”

Uku considered the capering beast for a moment, then nodded. Fangs and that sonic weapon of a voice notwithstanding, it was clear that Doofus was, first and foremost, everybody’s friend. She nodded. “O-okay.”

“Doofus! Come, boy!”

The dog turned his head, saw Hurt slapping his legs, and charged over at a terrifying clip—

He—and there was no way to miss the evidence—did attempt to slow down, but the slip-scrabble of his huge paws in the dust wasn’t enough to avoid a big crash right into Hurt’s chest, knocking them both over into a tangle of limbs, yelps, and wildly applied tongue all over Hurt’s face.

Uku winced, convinced she’d just seen Hurt break his spine or something, but the human bore the crashing impact with a laugh and a smile. “Ow! Hah!” he wrestled the slobbering creature aside and rolled with him to pour on more of that same vigorously physical affection. “…Doofus here I think forgets his own size sometimes. He’s bigger than I am. A lot bigger! Aren’t you, you big drool monster?! Yes you are!”

He massaged Doofus’ ears, then indicated Uku with just a glance and lift of his head that the dog clearly understood. Somehow, though, Doofus sensed immediately that he needed to be gentle with her. Rather than wrestle with her like he did to the two humans, he sat on his haunches and thumped his tail in the dirt, raising a small cloud.

“Let him get a good sniff of you, they’re very scent-focused creatures,” Hurt advised. Uku nodded, and gingerly offered an outstretched hand. Doofus gave it a dutiful snuff-snuff, then scooted forward a bit so that Uku’s hand was resting on top of his head.

“He’s inviting you to play with his ears. Give them a good scritch.”

Massaging his ears turned out to be… satisfying.

The Gaoian strolled up looking pleased with himself. “One more jump to come!” he declared. “Doofus, you’ve made a new friend I see!”

The dog’s rear end settled on the grass with a thump and he gave the newcomer a look of dazed happiness. Uku dusted her hands clean and extended one to greet him. “Ukusevi, Librarian and Keeper.”

“Ah!” The Gaoian shook her hand. “Gyotin, Champion of Clan Starmind. Doofus here is…a companion, let’s say. And an excellent drafter. He’s been an enormous help in our gardens, haven’t you, Doofus?”

The big dog agreed with an enthusiastic “woof!”

“You are the religious expert I was told to expect?”

“‘Expert’ might be an exaggeration, but yes. However…maybe we worry about that for later. I’ve got a crew of Clan-Brothers, and some Clanless, and apparently five Ten’Gewek coming through to help us assemble your first permanent structure. What do you think, Julian?”

The big human grinned happily. “I think we get ‘em under roof tonight.”

“Is that what you brought?” Ukusevi considered the array of long boxes and packs of things, many wrapped in transparent film.

“Yes, a gift from my Clan to your cause. It is a pre-fabricated shelter made by a human company in Franklin. Just a big box with a roof and some doors. Nothing fancy.”

“So, basically a barn.”

Julian nodded. “Yup. You don’t even need a concrete floor. And it should only take a few hours. Speaking of…” He looked back at the array and something about his sudden bouncy energy told Uku he was itching to set in to some work. “We gotta get that pad clear, prof.”

“You mean you,” the Professor said, a bit defensively.

“Nah, I meant you too. It’ll count as your PT for today! And it gives Uku an’ Gyotin a chance to get acquainted!”

“I already helped load it on the far side,” Gyotin said, using his claws to comb a patch of fur below his elbow.

Hurt sighed, shrugged, and didn’t offer more objection. Ukusevi was starting to figure out the dynamic between him and Julian, and she suspected that if he really decided to object and put his foot down, Julian wouldn’t have pushed the issue. But he did push just enough to get the professor to do what he knew he ought to do.

Clearly, they were old colleagues.

She watched the three of them with interest. Julian and Doofus assumed an easy work rhythm almost instantly, which they somehow achieved with, well, no language between them beyond gestures and encouragement. The big human pulled stuff off the pile and stacked it up on Doofus’s cart. The dog then hauled it to the professor, who heaved it all onto the ground, which sent Doofus galumphing back toward Julian…the two seemed to enjoy the hard work on some deep, primal level. Both were quite clearly creatures who reveled in their bodies. Professor Hurt, on the other hand…

Well. He gamely did his part. He was clearly a man of the mind, first and foremost.

Even still, the intelligence Doofus displayed…

“I thought they said the dog wasn’t sapient?”

“The Humans say, ‘there is nothing happier than a dog with a job.’ Being Helpful is what dogs do best.”

“What a fascinating species… Would you care for some tea?”

Gyotin chittered, loudly. “…Keeper, I think you and I are going to get along wonderfully!”

They retreated to Uku’s shelter, where she brewed up her infusion and sat to get to know her new acquaintance. Their conversation was long and rambling, and by mutual unspoken agreement they stayed away from the deep theological and spiritual questions for the time being. Today was a day for worldly matters, not contemplation of the Divine.

There would be time for that later. In the company of other Keepers, once the immediate concerns of shelter, food and resources were in hand.

Despite its light content, the conversation was so engaging that Uku completely lost track of the world beyond her lean-to and drink until there was a commotion outside, with Doofus at the center of it. Uku peeked out of her shelter to find the job was done, and he and the big human were wrestling around on the ground, while the professor made for the array. If Hurt seemed a bit stiff-backed from the work, it didn’t seem to slow him down much.

“Julian! The monkey-fun will be here in a minute! I need you for containment!”

Uku turned to Gyotin. “…Containment?”

“You’ve never seen Vemik in full Vemik-mode, I take it.”

“Vemik-mode?”

“He’s learned caution around strange ‘Sky-People’ over time. With Julian and the professor, though…”

The array thumped for the third time that afternoon, and what could only be a Vemik-shaped missile launched itself at Julian, despite the frankly unbelievable distance still between them. The two collided with a loud ‘thwack!’ and tumbled down the hill and out of view, wrestling with a ferocity that Uku would have associated with mortal enemies.

“…Are they…?”

“Oh, no,” Gyotin chittered. “For those two, that’s just a particularly fond hello!”

“…Are Sky-People like this all the time?”

“Not usually. Most of us are happy to stay on our home planet and get on with our lives, and those lives are often rather quiet, Humans included. I daresay Julian’s would have been quiet and unsung, or at least not quite so intense as it is now, had he not…well, that’s a story he should tell you himself. But Ten’Gewek are innately playful, innately boisterous, and extremely physical beings. Match them with similarly impressive Humans or Gaoians, and…”

The rest of the platform reacted as if that was perfectly normal behaviour for the two deadly, hulking paragons of their kind. Without any further drama, they gingerly de-tangled themselves from the array and each other. There were a lot of people, four of which were Ten’Gewek that Uku hadn’t met before, the rest were Gaoians like Gyotin. They all varied considerably in height and breadth, but all had a sort of serene, slightly bemused look to them.

“So… where do you want it?” Gyotin asked. He started heading down the hill toward the by-now complete pile of equipment. “We should probably go insert your voice into the mix before they get swept away in their enthusiasm for Doing Good and forget to actually include you.”

“To be perfectly honest, this is all quite overwhelming…” Uku confessed. “If you had told me half a year ago that we’d be free of the Punishment, and that I would have a small army of hulking meat-eating aliens practically falling over each other to help build a barn for me on an idyllic world far across the galaxy, I…” she shook her head.

“Life changes quickly, when it changes.”

Julian and Vemik intercepted professor Hurt on their way over. She didn’t hear their words, but Vemik suddenly scooped Hurt up in a big, painful looking hug…

He seemed to walk better, after that.

The three of them made a line toward her and Gyotin. Clearly, they were somehow the Ones In Charge. “We gonna build you a big nice barn!!” Vemik enthused, visibly restraining himself from some frenetic display of enthusiasm. He and Doofus had much in common, it seemed.

Gyotin, Almighty bless him, interceded. “Our friend here was just considering the magnitude of what we are doing here. I imagine she has concerns about the price someone is paying…”

Julian shrugged and smiled a big, handsome-looking smile. “Don’t worry about it! Believe it or not, the barn is super cheap, as these things go. The Ten’Gewek here were bored anyway, and Vemik is my good buddy, and he’s fascinated by anything mechanical. Aren’t you?”

“I learn very much! Jooyun and friends teach me machines, math, writing, burg…”

Julian chuckled with what seemed like a fond expression. “Burgers aren’t a life skill, Vemik.”

Vemik trilled, “Yes they are!”

“…The point is, the price tag’s covered and you don’t owe a thing.”

“And, later? It will take much more than a barn and some sacks of food…”

“We have options. I seem to be specializing in first contact developments lately, I guess.”

“More, ah, fundraising?” Hurt seemed slightly bemused by something.

Julian raised one of those thick arms of his and scratched at the back of his head. That seemed to be his go-to body language for embarrassment. “Well, uh…”

Vemik suddenly had a mischievous expression, but Julian silenced him instantly with a fierce Look. “No, Vemik. I will beat the ever-lovin’ fuck outta you.”

…Fascinating turn of phrase, really.

“Oh-kay.” Vemik said it with the most perfunctory regret, but it was short-lived. The moment, whatever it had been, passed with a tangential pounce onto something else. “Ooh, barn!”

Julian nodded, satisfied. “Right, yeah. Where d’you want it?”

In the end, it went up with incredible speed. Most of the next few hours consisted of unpacking the pieces, with her people fastening bits together to assemble the walls, Ferd, Vemik and Julian drilling the massive anchors into the ground, the Gaoians bolting long steel beams together, and the Ten’Gewek using their astounding ability to climb to put it all together.

By the time the sun was low on the horizon, the walls were on, and the roof was hauled into place by a trio of Ten’Gewek hanging onto the frame with their feet. By sunset, it was finished.

Ukusevi sampled her first “beer” shortly thereafter, which she sipped cautiously while all around her the crates and boxes full of food and books were moved into the new shelter and stored safely on pallets. The drink was crisp, bitter, and so cold that water condensed out of the air to bead on the bottle. A strange, alien taste and not entirely pleasant… but she enjoyed it nonetheless. She couldn’t remember ever exerting herself so hard in her life, and she knew her whole body would be complaining in the morning…

But for the moment, she could bask in the feeling of accomplishment, and enjoy the cool air, the cold drink, and the sense of moving forward. Her life had hitherto been one of waiting. Now… Well, now it felt like she had a hand in her destiny. There was much more work to do, but soon…

Soon, they would be ready to receive the first wave of emigrants.

Date Point: 17y6m AV
Dodge City, Kansas, USA, Earth

0006

Austin woke tired, without knowing why, and grumbled his way through his morning routine feeling like, in the words of his internal monologue, “shit warmed up.”

Most beings would want to rest and recuperate. But not Austin, oh no. Because of course he didn’t. That just made him more certain he had to attack the day harder. Drink coffee, run an extra mile that morning, cook a big breakfast to clear the cobwebs, and spend more effort lifting those ridiculous weights of his, all to chase a mild dopamine rush.

It was infuriating. Six could feel his host’s fatigue, the aching muscles, the almost scratchy feeling behind his eyes, the way the whole world felt heavier. He’d have much preferred it if Austin had taken just the one day off… but at least last night had been productive.

Six seldom had opportunity for productivity. Most nights, Austin slept with his partner. In the rare evenings where they weren’t violently mating until dawn, they simply laid in bed, close to each other in such a way that it would be impossible to pilot Austin up and on to more immediately useful activities without alerting her. Finally, though, an opportunity had presented itself. Lauren had gone to visit her brother in another state, leaving Austin to sleep alone for a change. And so, in the night, Six had suppressed his host’s mind-state, taken over, and used the darkest hours of the night to call in his ship and work.

The Injunctor’s on-board assembly systems could make parts, up to a certain size. What they couldn’t do was assemble those parts. Nor could they load themselves with raw materials. They needed additional drones to do that, and the added risk of exposure was seldom worth the trouble. In that regard, a strong, fit, tireless specimen of a human body was useful indeed, but in others…

Austin had willpower. That made suppressing his mindstate more draining than it had any right to be. Six had no desire to damage Austin if it could be avoided, but keeping the man’s consciousness suppressed was like trying to hold an empty barrel underwater. He kept wanting to pop back up.

On the other hand, Austin provided ample Substrate, and Six found himself…rejuvenated by it. Even the drain of controlling his formidable personality wasn’t such a burden next to what Six was getting in return. After long, long years gleaning the dregs from galactic civilization, direct access to a Human was an intense experience. In Austin’s case…

Six was feeling a strong urge he’d never felt. Normally he had a sort of clinical concern for his hosts. Six never wished them harm in any sort of personal way, it was simply the hard, necessary business of galactic survival. With Austin, however, Six found himself…

…Invested.

Six was starting to care about Austin’s fate. That was a dangerous sign. It meant Austin’s personality was, ashamed as Six was to admit it, too strong to control. That left Six with three options: remain, and risk personality merger; leave, and risk discovery; or terminate Austin.

Six had never understood how agents in the past might have been tempted by the first option. He understood now. Through previous hosts, but now especially Austin, Six was learning something his kind had forgotten millions of years ago.

He was learning what it meant to live. The ecstasy of the flesh, what it meant to have meaning, even in the simple, unsung way of a farmer… Love…

The cost, of course, was his own cessation as an entity, and so that option was off the table. Option three…

Well. Six genuinely didn’t bear Austin any malice. He was one of the more quietly exceptional beings Six had ever met, and the idea of destroying him out of spite grated on Six’s sense of art.

That meant there was really only one thing to do. Six programmed the Injunctor to find and process another drone. This time, Six buried his hubris and opted for a more…modest…specimen in the selection criteria.

However, it would be some time before the Injunctor had an appropriate host processed and ready. So, in the meantime…

In the meantime, he was making something. Some of the raw materials were the next best thing to impossible to acquire on Earth, not for lack of access to the elements, but for lack of access to the proper manufacturing processes. In order to complete his project, he was spending a lot of time making the tools that built the machines that would create the components.

Fortunately, Austin’s body and brain were both well-conditioned to bringing together pieces of large but intricate machinery. He could almost be left on a kind of self-direction, once things were in place. Which was helpful, because it allowed Six to stay on top of the willpower problem.

A few weeks, maybe. He’d send the Injunctor to hide deep under the ocean where its newly assembled and calibrated factories could tick over and slowly turn out the next generation of necessary components, and then he’d repeat the process and, with a little luck, he’d soon have a means to extract himself from his predicament.

All Six had to do until then was survive Austin’s zeal for life.

Date Point: 17y6m5d AV
Starship Rich Plains, en route to Aru

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

In the month since their return to the galactic stage, the OmoAru had been frustratingly impenetrable. Their sole demand had been for the Rich Plains to visit their homeworld, for reasons they had so far declined to share with the council.

Considering how remote Aru was, and how sluggish the Rich Plains’ FTL engines were, the journey was going to take a while. There were no jump beacons at Aru. Or at least, none that the OmoAru cared to share use of.

It would have been faster to send a scout ship, drop a beacon and summon the vast diplomatic starship that way, but for their own reasons the OmoAru had vetoed that as well. The journey had to be made at warp or not at all, they claimed. That particular stipulation had been met with confusion and frustration around the council chamber, but from Sir Patrick’s perspective there was a glimmer of logic involved.

This wasn’t just a diplomatic visit; It was a pilgrimage. The Last, as they called themselves, wanted to make a point.

And they wanted to meet the new species who had flourished in their absence. Diplomatically, they were starting with their old friends who had known them at the height of their power, so the Corti and Guvnurag were first on the list, followed by those who’d only just been escaping their cradle worlds at the moment of the Aru Federation’s fall.

Sir Patrick was last on the list. The Ten’Gewek didn’t have a permanent representative—only Yan Given-Man and his Singer could represent them, and both had more solemn and important responsibilities at home—and the E-Skurel-Ir, or whatever new name their liberated diaspora chose for themselves, weren’t yet ready to send one.

The Rich Plains certainly wasn’t about to enter Hunter space, even liberated Hunter space, to go meet them.

Still, after waiting patiently while the Last worked their way steadily down the list, Sir Patrick’s turn to host the returning old ones had finally arrived. Several of his alien peers had been kind enough to send along their observations and advice. Daar had met them in person, then immediately come to give Sir Patrick his impression.

“Hardest talks I ever had,” he’d growled. “They just reek o’ nanotech. Can’t smell anythin’ else about ‘em. But more’n that…” the Great Father furrowed his heavy brow. “…Hard ‘ta say. They definitely were actin’ jus’ a bit weird ‘round me.”

“Weird by Gao standards, or weird by their standards?” Sir Patrick had asked.

“Weird by comparative analysis, if’n ‘ya want a fancy-tail word. Jus’ observin’ how they act ‘round erry’one else, includin’ other gao, an’ then how they were ‘round me. They were…curious. Yeah. But not in a friendly sorta way.”

That same curiosity seemed to dominate the room from the moment Sir Patrick finally got to meet with AtaUmiUi. For once, he was grateful for his own comparatively stunted sense of smell relative to a Gao, as while Ata had a certain vaguely synthetic quality to his scent, it was otherwise pleasant. He entered Sir Patrick’s meeting room with a silvery ball in his hand that caught the eye in odd ways. Sir Patrick found his attention drifting to it even when he’d rather watch his OmoAru counterpart’s face.

He resisted the urge with a stab of self-irritation, rose, and shook hands.

“Ambassador AtaUmiUi. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person at last.”

OmoAru had wide, friendly faces pulled into what looked like a permanent innocent smile by the simple fact of their bone structure. It lent Ata a jovial, warm air that Sir Patrick knew he was going to have to be wary of. It wouldn’t do to anthropomorphise his opposite number.

Ata’s English, however, was immaculate. And untranslated: he spoke it himself, rather than relying on the ship’s systems.

“And it is my pleasure to meet you, Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight,” he replied. His mode of speech was incongruously American, the kind of neutral, northern US accent heard in movies and TV.

“Just Sir Patrick will do. Or Ambassador,” Knight gestured to the couches, inviting his guest to sit.

“Thank you, yes. We’ve seen that your species have a… selective approach to formality. Some of the others insist on it.”

“I think once mutual respect has been established, it can be eased off a little, certainly,” Knight agreed.

Ata nodded. “Then I am merely Ata, now that we have established respect,” he said. He glanced down at the silvery ball in his hand, turned it over a couple of times—or at least, his fingers moved as though he turned it over, the sphere itself didn’t seem to move at all. There weren’t even any fingerprints or marks on it to give a sense of orientation. “So. You represent the infamous deathworld species who have so utterly reshaped galactic politics in just a few short years.”

“First contact reshaped our own politics too, quite dramatically,” Sir Patrick replied, evenly.

“Oh, please don’t misunderstand me. I approve!” Ata stopped fidgeting with the artefact and gave him an ears-pricked-up look with his tail ticking back and forth behind his shoulder. “I should think our mere presence illustrates our common enemy. And you did more to defeat them than we ever accomplished.”

“Not without effort, I understand. From what I gather, your people fought to the last.”

Ata sighed. “Fought as we could. The death strike came before we really even knew of the danger.” he glanced at the ball again. “…Even now, the Droud is itching away in the back of my mind, and it won’t stop until we leave the Hierarchy’s influence.”

“That must make it difficult to concentrate…”

“Impossible. The Huh helps, for brief interludes. I would advise you to studiously ignore it, if you can. I suspect its effects might be…debilitating.”

“…I might propose more extensive meetings in different space, then. We have…taken action against some of the enemy’s means of communication.”

A real smile spread across Ata’s face, proving just how false the impression given by his resting expression was. “So we do have you to thank for our presence here.”

“By we, I mean my people, and also our allies. The action undertaken involved both human and Ten’Gewek operators, with a Gaoian-made ship and weapon, and a Gaoian pilot.”

“Yes, of course. But the Great Father never mentioned it, and the Ten’Gewek are not here…. Do you mind if I stand and walk around? I have spent much of the last few days sitting.”

“Not at all.” Sir Patrick stood with him as Ata rose to his feet and patrolled slowly around the open patch of the room near the door. He seemed to relish in simply moving; Patrick could understand that well enough.

“We are, as we name ourselves, the Last. There is a somewhat larger party that remain in stasis, but there they shall remain, protected for now,” Ata explained. “We are the last-ditch effort to preserve something of our culture, the ones most sensitive to the Huh and least sensitive to the Droud.”

“I presume you have ambitions beyond mere preservation, however.”

Ata sighed, and lashed his tail irritably. “…It may be that even such a modest ambition is beyond us. We number a few thousand, and no more. ”

“That is not an insubstantial count. Ten’Gewek number only slightly more than twenty thousand themselves.”

“I’m happy for them. We number… rather fewer than that. We’re not sure we number enough, let’s say. The Corti may be able to help, but…” Ata paused and gesticulated in a complex way that Sir Patrick couldn’t quite interpret. “We’re much less than we were, Ambassador. We were very proud of ourselves. And now here we are. And we find the galaxy we used to dominate has new faces, and the dominant faces aren’t ours. We imagined that the Dominion would collapse without us, so I’m sure you can imagine our dismay to find that in fact… we never really mattered as much as we thought we did.”

Sir Patrick really had no idea how to respond to candor like that. He simply leaned gently against one of the couches and gave Ata a curious look. After a few seconds, the alien blinked and repeated the same gesture from before.

“…Forgive me. The Huh was never a perfect solution. And attempting to conduct diplomacy in an altered state of mind is hardly ideal.”

“…What does it do, exactly?” Sir Patrick asked. “We have one in storage at a research facility on Earth after some of our explorers visited your world, but all it does to humans is make us extremely aggressive.”

“Yes, that’s its core function,” Ata confirmed. “Aggression, drive, focus, conviction, willpower. Righteous zeal, even. All of the qualities necessary to bully through the Droud’s influence and still function. All of the things necessary to care when your brain is being flooded with bliss.”

“Why not get rid of the nanotech? We cured a Gaoian of it.”

“Yes, Daar mentioned him. As did Second Director Mefli. But if we can… I think we would prefer not to.”

“Even now?”

“Especially now.”

Patrick could not hide his confusion. “Why?”

The very idea seemed to amuse Ata. “In light of you, and of your kind? And of what the Gao have become? And with another species, this Ten’Gewek, who are by all accounts formidable enough to challenge even your peoples, had they the development to exploit it? In a galaxy with such people…people who can produce the Great Father, this team of warriors who freed my world from the enemy’s influence…”

“But the proven dangers! The need for… that!” Sir Patrick indicated the Huh.

“Nothing worth having comes without expense, Ambassador. The nanotech we developed and bonded to ourselves was our people’s downfall… but now, in this new era your peoples have created, it may be our resurrection, and our only hope of competing.”

“I see.”

“I thought you might. The Domain’s ambassador was most confused. The very idea of wanting to be competitive with deathworlders seemed to baffle him… I gather one of your advisors is Rrrrtk?”

“Kirk, yes. He says he’s always been, ah, atypical of his kind. He prefers the quiet life, and our attempt to bring him back into politics… didn’t work so well.”

“Why not?”

“He very much wants his people to be competitive with mine. You can imagine, therefore, how frustrating he would find the Domain ambassador’s attitude. I think he ran out of patience with his species rather a long time ago.”

Ata considered that with a tilt of his head and a tick of his tail. “…Sad,” he commented, though the faint ‘smile’ of course never left his face.

“Quite so.”

Ata nodded, and ceased his slow pacing around the room to turn directly to face Sir Patrick. “I think, Sir Patrick, that our relationship will be a fruitful one, but at this point I need to return to the safety of my ship. Focusing through the droud is… draining.”

Sir Patrick nodded. “Of course. Hopefully we’ll have a longer conversation once we enter clear space.”

“I would like that. Until then, thank you for your hospitality.”

The room… cleared a little, once AtaUmiUi was gone. That same nasal presence that had so confounded Daar clearly had an effect on humans too, even if Sir Patrick hadn’t been immediately aware of any actual smell. The actual effect it had, now that he thought about it…

Alien.

It had been an affable, open, even candid conversation on the surface. But there was a lingering sense of offness that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Sir Patrick didn’t want to be prejudiced, but he couldn’t shake the feeling there was a lot more going on behind Ata’s fixed little smile that hadn’t been hinted at. And the choice of language had been interesting.

He’d spoken of competing, yes… but also of how his people had used to ‘dominate’ galactic affairs. Just how much did the huh boost aggression and ambition? And how much did the OmoAru have naturally?

They were headed for interesting times, really. The Great Father was fast becoming the de-facto leader of the deathworlders, and Knight had rarely ever met anyone so intrinsically aggressive or competitive, other qualities notwithstanding. The OmoAru clearly had zero compunctions about extensive self-modification, so just how far would they be willing to go?

He mused on those questions for a good while before writing his initial impressions and his thoughts. And he did his best to be fair and fact-based…

But something in the back of his head was suddenly wary.

Date Point: 17y6m1w AV
Great Father’s private farm estate, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The OmoAru were unsettling. For a few reasons. He couldn’t smell ‘em, true; it were kinda like stickin’ his muzzle into an ancient internal combustion tractor and huffin’ the fumes, and it was hard to notice anythin’ else when that oily, burnt smell was blowin’ his nose up. An’ that silvery ball they kept to hand at all times pulled on the eye like a fishing hook in the cornea.

Even so, Daar had noticed something. They were surprised by him. No. Fascinated. Now, Daar had a Keeda-sized ego, especially lately. He was the bestest at a whole buncha things and he knew it, and it was important to know that so he could work at keeping himself grounded. So, normally…he wouldn’t mind much. He enjoyed it. Balls, he liked showing off! Let people stare, all that.

The OmoAru weren’t staring. It was…different, somehow. And that just resurfaced all sortsa personal worries about…

Balls. Why him. Why was he?

He could point to decades of insanely hard work an’ hard practice, his perfect breeding, his ridiculous luck…just…so many things all at once, but even then, it wasn’t like a Great Father was some natural thing that the universe generated all by itself. He wasn’t inevitable. Balls, he was the total fuckin’ opposite o’ inevitable! He shouldn’t fuckin’ exist at all! And knowing just how extensively the Gao had been fucked with throughout history….

Lots of little doubts, concerns…all of it added up. And now, along came an ancient species, an’ rather’n look at him with fear or dismay or fascination, or even disgust…

He got the distinct impression they’d recognized him.

…Balls.

Well…He had some deep thinks ahead of him. But, he was still a Stoneback. Still the only sixth degree around. Still very, very much the most bestest hypermale of his kind and a Stud-Prime of his line. Still Daar. He weren’t gonna get no thinks done until he was good and gods-damned ready. He needed to live a bit, first.

So naturally, he went back to Gao and plowed his Naydi completely silly.

Well, eventually.

They had a big lunch, first. And did some gardening too. Enjoyin’ time with Naydi jus’ made everything better! And big ol’ ‘Back like Daar was good fer’ plowin’ all sortsa fields! But the bestest part was snugglin’ at the end of a long day’s work in the dirt an’ a long performance in bed. He loved everythin’ about it. Her scent, her fur, her warm body pressed tight against his. The affection. Knowin’ he’d pleased someone he loved. Watchin’ her bask.

And o’ course, part of the whole reason he loved her so much was ‘cuz they could talk after, too. Get taken seriously. Think together.

“Well…that was…passionate!” She chittered wearily, and winced a bit. “I’m gonna…” she made to detangle herself, and thought better of it. “Ow. Maybe…later.”

Daar chittered apologetically and snuffled the top of her headfur. “Mebbe I was a bit overexcited.”

Naydi chittered too, with a happy groan of love-pain. “Oh, I’ll recover eventually…Something bothering you?”

“Lil’ bit.” He half-rolled over and reached out to hook the water bottle over with his claw. She always wanted water afterwards. “Met the OmoAru today.”

“Wow!” She lit up like a cub hearing some exciting news. “What were they like?!”

“…Alien. There’s more.” Daar unloaded on her. Told her his observations, his worries about what they might mean. Some of his personal fears too, but she knew those well by then.

The enthusiasm and excitement drained out of her as he spoke, until by the time he ran out of things to say, her ears had drooped thoughtfully down to either side of her head.

“Well…that’s nothing we haven’t considered before.”

“No.”

“So then, what’s your concern? I know you, Bumpkin. You’re not one to fret easily…”

“We’ve got a new and possibly very powerful player in the game, whose motives we don’t unnerstand, and I think mebbe they know something ‘bout me that none o’ us do.”

“And?”

“…What do you mean, ‘And?’”

“Why does that last part matter? Daar.” She snuggled up to him, and nuzzled in his chest ruff exactly how he liked. “You’ve been poked and prodded and studied more than any of us. You are as gaoian as anyone. More, even. You embody us because you’re better than us, completely. And you are ours. You worked hard for it all, so why worry about the rest?”

“‘Cuz what if they experiment on our people too?”

She nipped at his nose. “Bumpkin. Ancient powers may or may not have done a great many things to our people. Maybe they had a special interest in you. Probably not I think, and you’re not giving yourself enough credit. Maybe we’ll never know. They’re certainly not in control of us any longer, so in the end it doesn’t matter, dear. So…use that to your advantage.”

“…Y’know, this is why ‘yer really the brains o’ the operation.”

“Oh, hush!” Naydi chittered in the most delightful way and nipped at his nose. “I was never much of a scholar, and I can’t claim I maxed out my standardized testing, like you…”

“Pff. It’s more’n tests make someone smart. An’ it don’t seem to fuckin’ matter much, huh? ‘Yer way more wiser I think.”

“Of course!” Naydi chittered. “But in all seriousness, use it. You are the Great Father. So, go be great, and don’t worry about what the old ones think. You are your own man. No other being in the galaxy is as free as you, or wields such power, and none but you have the character and will to do anything helpful with that kind of power in the first place. The whole of the Gao and all that we have are yours. We belong to you, belong willingly, and we believe in you. You know this, but if you need proof? Go on a walkabout with the Clanless. It’s been a while. And then, once you’ve got your confidence restored…”

Daar sighed happily at that. “I ain’t never lost my confidence, Naydi. You ain’t never let me.” He pulled her into a fierce snuggle, and wrapped his arms and legs around her as tightly as he safely could. She was so small and precious in his grasp…

“By the gods I love you.”

“Hmm…” Her tone changed then, in the electric way that no male could ever fail to notice. “Still.” She squirmed in his grasp and flipped over, now facing him face-to-face. “That’s one of our ancient duties, you know. Encouraging the males.”

Daar felt his tail wagging. “Oh? Is it, now?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she purred, then snuffled along the heavy cords of his neck. He grumbled happily and felt his entire body tensing up tight for her inspection. Nothin’ got the blood goin’ more than an approvin’ female, and there weren’t no woman he wanted approval from more than his Naydi. Her nose moved down to snuffle at his chest, which he reflexively puffed out as big and hard as he could manage…

Naydi was a wicked woman when she wanted to be. She put claws and teeth to good use, and before long Daar was helplessly under her spell…

She showed mercy, eventually. It took Daar a while to catch his breath.

“Gods…balls! Just…”

Daar didn’t have his words just then. Naydi did, though.

“See? We know our power…”

Her soft ‘lil paws snaked achingly slow across his body, teasin’ him so wunnerfully all the way down until…

…Well, one of the great hazards of his life was being interrupted. Between how many things demanded his attention, and how little real opportunity he had to enjoy himself, it was bound to happen.

Didn’t make it any less unpleasant. And the chirping of his phone was the tone set for priority calls. With a resigned growl, he reached over and grabbed it. “Yeah?”

“My Father, one of the libraries on Mordor has been destroyed…”

Tunnels under the old prey-cities

Alpha of the Burning Talon Brood

The Alpha loved fire. Every time a gout of flame lit the tunnels, every time a skinny prey-body twisted and shrieked its last while engulfed in sticky fuel, every time a stack of papers and artefacts became a dry inferno, and every time its few bare patches of skin tightened and blistered as superheated air washed over it, it felt raptures.

There were other broods still foolishly clinging to the surface, and being slaughtered by hostile orbital strikes, but the Burning Talon had found new vistas of slaughter in the dark underground. What had once been the prey’s haven had become a most satisfying maze to stalk them in, trap them in, burn them in.

The hidden caches of paper were the finest prize. And the most truly delicious part was how some of the Prey actually led the Brood to such nests.

Some of them watched the burning with bright eyes gleaming in the fire-dark. A few were so broken, so fully accepting of their place in life, that they simply spread their arms and accepted the teeth in their throats.

Good prey. Obedient prey.

The Alpha didn’t care that the planet was lost. It didn’t care that the deathworlders would surely come to stop it. Let them. Let destruction come with them! The Brood would burn until there was nothing left!!

Let them come. Let them kill. It was all the same in the end. The fires consumed everything, and it was all so…

So…

…Beautiful.

Let them come.

Date Point: 17y6m1w AV
The Clawhold, liberated world, former Hunter space

Ginn, aide to Grandfather Vark

“Some’a the most fucked-up shit I ever saw…”

Ginn gave Vark a curious look as the Grandfather sat back and considered the scout drone footage. It wasn’t safe to send actual personnel into those tunnels right now, the air down there was still hot and anaerobic, and much of the ashes were still smouldering in their tombs, ready and eager to burst into massive backdrafts when a hatch was opened.

The Clan Emberpelt specialists had been very explicit: The same pressure doors that had kept the breathable air in and the toxic air out meant that the burned E-Skurel-Ir tunnels were bombs now, just waiting for a little oxygen. Their most experienced high-risk firefighters were firmly of the opinion that the only safe way to handle the burned sections was to leave them sealed off and let them smother.

Assessing the damage was, therefore, left to drones, which could be snuck in through small, forcefield-sealed ingress points to survey the environments beyond.

It made for grim viewing. Stacks of books, art, furniture… relics of who the E-Skurel-Ir had once been. And more than a few E-Skurel-Ir corpses, rendered even more skinny and twisted by the flames. One or two Hunters, too, that had caught themselves in their own conflagrations.

“How’s that, sir?” Ginn asked.

Vark flicked an ear. “Just… figger I’m finally really gettin’ my head around what the word sacrilege means,” he rumbled. “You know, some’a the natives are actually collaboratin’ with the Hunters? Opening locked gates, mappin’ the tunnels for ‘em, welcoming ‘em in with open arms! An’ then the Hunters just burn ‘em all. The books, the history, the young… Beats the fuck outta me how these people ever took those nutless fucks ‘fer somethin’ divine.”

Ginn couldn’t have offered any insight on that point if he’d wanted to. He grimaced as the drone passed over the gut-turning tableau of one flame-ravaged corpse curled over and around two smaller ones in a moment of futile protection, and was quite glad when the communicator clipped to his ear alerted him to an incoming message.

“…The Great Father has been notified,” he relayed. “Wormhole call in ten minutes.”

Vark simply duck-nodded and stood. Ginn got the impression he was glad of the chance to look away and do something productive.

“I’ll get ready,” he growled, and ducked out of the room. Ginn nodded and re-read the message, then turned off the drone feed. Leave that mess to… whoever’s responsibility it was.

Within ten minutes, Vark and a few of the most senior unit commanders were gathered in the comms bunker. At the ten minute mark precisely, there was the faint fur-raising sensation of the wormhole router going active, drinking in power from its capacitor banks. It took a lot of energy to slam a couple hundred microwormholes open and shut a few million times a second. But the result was good enough for the Great Father to speak to them in real-time and high resolution.

He looked… displeased.

“I didn’t wanna hear that one o’ those libraries got burned to ash today,” he declared, without niceties. “Especially seein’ as I gave my word ‘ta Ukusevi they’d be protected.”

Vark’s head sunk a little. He was in charge. Which meant that the Great Father’s displeasure was, first and foremost, directed at him.

“…I ain’t got no excuse ‘fer that, My Father,” he said, keeping his back straight despite the implicit apology.

Daar tilted his head, expression unchanged. “How did this happen?”

“Collaboration. A few o’ the natives opened the doors an’ welcomed the Hunters in.”

The Great Father blinked, and his ears put on an extended, thoughtful dance, ending in him softening his displeasure a bit. “…Now that is a special kinda o’ fucked up right there,” he mused. “You caught the Brood responsible?”

“Not yet, My Father. Thanks to the collaborators, they know the tunnels better than we do.”

“That’s gotta change quick. I want those Libraries protected, Grandfather. What do you need to get it done?”

Vark considered it for a moment. “Fully occupying the libraries would do it. I’ll need a couple thousand more men ‘fer that. But as we move in, more’a the natives are gonna move out. It’ll turn the refugee situation from a local problem to a global one.”

“‘Yer eventually gonna need the whole gods-damned army, then.”

“…Might, yeah. Gonna need ‘ta clear out the tunnels too, find that Brood and eliminate ‘em. Then all the other broods, ‘cuz now it’s worked once they’ll all know it so they’ll all do it… Close-quarters, confined spaces, flamethrowers… reckon that’s gonna be a job.”

The Great Father glanced away from his camera to consider something, duck-nodded, then refocused on Vark. “Right. Seems like ‘ya know what ‘ya need. Now…is there anythin’ ‘ya need ‘fer me ‘ta do?”

Ginn could smell the test hidden in that question. And Vark, of course, handled it deftly. “I don’t think this rises ‘ta a big enough crisis that we need ‘yer giant paws smashin’ it flat, My Father…”

Daar chittered, somewhat mirthlessly. “Unnerstood. I will monitor the situation from here. I have full faith in you, and all my on-scene commanders.”

“Thank you, My Father.”

“Right. You better get to it.” Daar leaned forward, and his paw blanketed half the screen as he reached for the hang-up button. “Good huntin’.”

With that, the wormhole connection closed and that sense of thrumming power in the back of Ginn’s neck settled. He wondered just how much energy even that short conversation had used? There was a reason the comms bunker had its own fusion generator in the basement.

A different kind of tension relaxed as well. The unit commanders, more used to dealing with Vark than with the Great Father himself, unwound a little and a few of them chittered nervously.

“We’re going to need a bigger admin building,” one of them quipped.

“We’re going to need a second base,” somebody else replied. “I’ll have a survey of candidate sites ready for approval by third watch.”

“Good. In the meantime, I want the most at-risk libraries identified and fortified. We can’t wait ‘fer more men ‘ta come from Gao, we gotta get ‘em secure now,” Vark said. “Pull ‘em from wherever ‘ya have to.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

They filed out of the comms bunker. Vark and Ginn were the last to leave, and Vark heaved a sigh once they had a modicum of privacy. “…Gonna be a lotta dead Gao in those tunnels,” he confided.

“Flamethrowers are a nasty way to go, too,” Ginn agreed, fervently. “I imagine, anyway.”

“Can’t be helped. On this kinda scale, in this situation, the Grand Army’s the right tool ‘fer the job. Nobody else can do it.”

Ginn duck-nodded solemnly, and considered his tablet. “…You have PT and nutrition with Officer Teekun in ten minutes,” he said. “After that… shall I sketch in Father Meeri to discuss which units you want to bring from the homeworld?”

“Yeah. An’ Liim after him.”

Ginn duck-nodded again as he made his notes. “I’ll go make the preparations. Enjoy your PT session, sir.”

“…You do remember how Teekun’s the most sadistic hide in the whole Grand Army, Ginn?”

Ginn, who’d endured Teekun’s ministrations more than a few times himself, simply chittered. “I believe that’s why you retain him, sir.”

He left Vark in a good mood, and got to work. The old man was a classic Stoneback, in that being thoroughly wrung out by some hard exercise was one of his ‘most favoritest’ things. The full session would easily take long enough for Meeri and Liim to be ready with their thoughts and recommendations. All Ginn had to do was make sure they were ready and it all ran smoothly.

It was a good job. A busy one, at times stressful… but he had to admit, with a pang of minor guilt, he’d much rather be Vark’s aide than brave those tunnels.

He thought of flames in the dark, shivered, and got back to work with redoubled vigor.

Date Point: 17y6m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ian Wilde

Ian apparently had a habit of forming friendships with stealthy hulks. All the Lads on the HEAT were disturbingly quiet, but Regaari had proven to be utterly silent. Not by deliberate effort, but just because it was his nature. He was a shadow in motion, invisible when he wanted to be.

Hoeff more sort of… appeared. It was like being ambushed by Wolverine. One minute, Ian was enjoying a coffee and reading on his tablet, the next, a short murderous hairy hulk of a man plopped down next to him.

“Heard you been scrappin’ with Regaari lately,” he said without any preamble whatsoever. He unwrapped a huge meat-laden sandwich and began munching the second after he’d spoken.

Ian simply sighed to himself and rolled with it. “He tossed me around a bit, yeah,” he agreed, setting the tablet down.

“Mhmm.” Hoeff swallowed, took a sip of a coffee stronger and blacker than Satan’s own soul, and nodded appreciatively. “Well, that was pretty stupid of ‘ya, huh?”

There was a shit-eating grin, now. Which was almost sad, because Hoeff rarely smiled, and he practically transformed into a different person when he did.

“I don’t know. It was educational. And a little flattering, really.” Ian sipped his own coffee. “All part of a job offer, of sorts.”

“I bet the pitch was nice.”

“The food was good at least.”

“Gaoians ain’t stupid, Whitecrest doubly so, an’ Regaari’s one o’ the smartest guys I’ve ever met. What ‘ya think about it? Workin’ ‘fer the Gaoian equivalent of the CIA and special forces all at once?”

“In some unspecified capacity. Snap me up while I’m available, then find a use for me, that seemed to be the gist of it.”

“Huh. That is flattering.”

“If I’m not missing my guess, you’re here for much the same thing.”

“Nope! Not even a little fuckin’ bit!”

Ian tilted his head, both eyebrows shooting up in mild surprise. “So this is just you being sociable?”

“Naw. I mean, yeah. You’re a decent man, and I like that about you. That’s why I’m here: to dissuade you from ever doin’ the shit that I do.”

Ian sighed, set his drink aside and nodded. “…Right. I see. But I’ll be honest with you mate, if I’m not on the mission in some way or another, I’m going to be the picture of bloody misery in short order. I’m already feeling…”

He trailed off, not sure how to describe it.

“Yeah. I get that.” Hoeff took another bite of his heart-attack sandwich and chewed on it for a bit. “Right. Let’s get down to it. Royal Marines Commando, right?”

“Yup.”

“Mission ain’t so cut and dry for you folks.”

“No.”

“So, you’re comfortable with morally grey.”

“‘Morally grey’ paved the road to JETS for me.”

“So, did you ever find peace with it, or did you just tolerate the ambiguity?”

Ian considered that for a moment. “…I’m not sure if either option fits. I did the job. Sometimes the job involved there being a poor bastard with a gun who wasn’t altogether a bad sort but he was in the way. Never lost sleep over it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Hoeff watched him for a long time. Considered him intently, with cold and calculating eyes that didn’t let on whatever was whirring away behind them.

After a moment, he tapped his thumb thoughtfully on the table as if reaching a conclusion, and replied.

“Okay. Let me lay out a bit of what I do, and what my employers get up to. We solve problems that society needs solving. We’re not too picky about how they get solved, so long as they do and nobody is any the wiser. We solve those problems because, if they’re allowed to fester, this weak, shimmering soap-bubble we call civilization might just pop, and take us all down with it. There ain’t any room for any personal ambiguity in that kinda world.”

With his piece said, Hoeff picked up his sandwich and bit into it like he’d said nothing particularly earth-shattering or dark.

“What makes you think I don’t know that already?” Ian asked him.

“Because you don’t. But you will, if you insist on sellin’ ‘yer soul.”

“Oh come on, I know you’ve done your homework on me. You’ve seen what I was involved in. How much soul do I have left to sell?”

“You’re young, optimistic mostly. You ain’t got kids, but you’re lookin’ for a girl. There’s still a spark of humanity left in you, and I’m gonna be honest here: I don’t wanna snuff that out. Because you get into the deep shit like you wanna do, those things won’t be on the table.”

“You have Claire.”

“By accident. At thirty-eight, after I entered semi-retirement. The only reason I get a second chance is because I’m good enough I can set my own terms, and by dumb luck I did all this right when regenerative spacemagic happened. So, again…do you really know what you’re askin’ to get into, here? I’m asking because Regaari is alien. Their mindset is fundamentally different than ours. He’ll always have his Brothers. That’s the only loyalty their people know.”

“…You’re saying I could find myself working for alien masters, obeying alien morals, for alien reasoning I don’t understand, and I’ll very likely have to go through it alone. Every twinge of conscience, every second-guess will be mine to handle, because there’ll be no-one else there to help me with it.”

“Maybe. Regaari is a man of his word, but that don’t mean he sees the world like you do. Which is why I’m here. He can’t warn you about what you stand to lose. I can.”

“That’s a hell of an anti-recruitment pitch right there.”

“That’s the point. Now, let me tell you why you should go for it. That one’s easy. What is your purpose, Ian?”

Ian took another sip of his coffee before replying. “You ever see that bit of art somebody did? A nice green sunny field, kids playing on it, and it’s all held up on the bent, bloody backs of the infantry?”

“I got a big print of it, rolled up in my trunk.”

“Speaks to me, you know? I think if there’s a nice sunny park somewhere where kids can run around and throw a ball, and I can look at it and know I played a role in it being there? If other people get to have a life like that… That’s what I want to be. The man who makes that possible.”

Something changed in Hoeff’s demeanor. Something…resigned. Maybe a bit proud. It was hard to say, he was emotionally inscrutable unless he was smiling.

“Men like us almost never get happy endings. You okay with that?”

“So long as the people I care about do, then yeah. And anyway…you never know. You did.”

“…True.”

A kind of contactless handshake, made entirely of nods and mutual appraisal passed between them. Hoeff finished his sandwich and chugged his coffee, while Ian drained the last of his.

“… So is this the point where you toss me around the mat like some kind of chew toy?”

“Nah, not today. Regaari did a fine job of tenderizing you already.”

Ian chuckled ruefully. “Aye. Raincheck, then?”

Hoeff gave an evil grin and rolled that ridiculous bullneck of his until it popped. “Count on it. I ain’t gonna let ‘em upstage us on our own turf…”

“Great.”

“But, that’ll hafta wait. You’ve got a lot to think about, and I’m goin’ on a magical space adventure with Tarzan tonight, so I’ll be out of pocket for a while anyway.”

“…What?”

“I s’pose I can tell you. Y’know how proud the monkeybros are about how ‘strong’ their world is?”

“Ohhh. Finally going to humble them, eh?”

“Yeah. We even got the only boy scout around who can out-gorilla the gorillas to do it, too. I’m gonna love the shit outta this mission so goddamn much I can hardly fuckin’ stand it.”

“…I can’t tell if you’re genuine or sarcastic.”

“Great, ain’t it? Just you wait, this’ll be you in ten years, I promise.”

“Short, hairy, and an enemy of flimsy furniture?”

“Nah. Not as handsome.” Hoeff smiled again, genuinely, and stood up. “I’m sure others’ll come knocking too. Don’t even bother. They ain’t got what you’re lookin’ for. See ‘ya.”

“Have fun.”

Ian watched Hoeff roll away at a surprisingly quick pace, then disappear around a corner. Ian sat alone, done with his coffee but nursing his thoughts.

What exactly did Hoeff get up to? On the surface he was this gruff, subtly friendly man…but there were depths there. Dark ones. And from those depths, he’d given Ian a hell of a warning: ‘Think carefully.’

Well… he had nothing else to do today but think. And it was advice worth heeding.

With a sigh, Ian stood, and ordered another drink.

Date Point: 17y6m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Julian prepared for his “business trips” the same way every time. He wanted good food, lots of snuggle time, a good workout, and some vague assurances that all the chores were done and there was no possible heavy labor or whatever that needed doing, and…

Basically, he wanted to be sure there was no more Helpful he could do before it was time to go.

On the one hand it was endearing. On the other hand, it was a good thing neither Xiù nor Allison were afraid to stick up for themselves and remind him that they were perfectly competent themselves, thank you.

“No, get out of there!” she swatted his backside to shoo him away from the laundry room. “We have a system.”

“I need my—”

“Out.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Xiù gave him a tiptoe smooch. “I’m waterproofing your winter trekking pants, they’ll be ready in an hour,” she explained. “Just chill out. Sit and play with the boys for a bit!”

“Tried.” Julian glanced toward the living room where Tristan and Ramsey were playing a videogame. “That game’s kinda complex for me.”

“Well, sit and let them explain it then. I’m fine.”

Julian grumbled a bit, but thumped his way over and wrapped himself around the boys, doing his level best to understand what the hell they were doing. The visual was very much a big neanderthal trying to understand pokemon. He…really wasn’t a gamer.

As predicted though, the boys were more than happy to try and educate him. Which bought Xiù some peace to just… well, relax honestly. All the chores really were done, everything that could be made ready was ready, and there wasn’t a whole lot to do except make some drinks, hand them out, then pour herself along the back of the couch to rest on Julian’s shoulders like a scarf.

After a while, Tristan and Ramsey gave up on their attempt at education to gang up on some kind of a fearsome foe, freeing up room for an actual conversation.

“I’m almost jealous,” she whispered in Julian’s ear.

“Of Nightmare?”

“Of you going back there. I kinda want to see it.”

“Eh… right now it’s the middle of winter. Snow, snow, more snow and, for variety, some snow. With hibernating murderpigs under it.”

“…Are you okay with going back there?”

Julian shrugged, nearly tipping her off the couch. After a hissed apology from him, and a giggle and a squeeze from her, he shook his head. “Couple’a years ago, I’d have said hell no. When I got off that planet I swore I’d never go back. But the SOR want to use it for JETS training, and I’m literally the only person in the world who’s spent any time there, so…”

“So not really.”

“Wouldn’t be my first choice.” Julian craned his neck back and looked at her. “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”

He was being a bit caveman, she knew. All tough and protective, but he wouldn’t be so keen to have everything completely in order before he went if he wasn’t a little worried…

Sometimes…she’d learned to just let things go, no matter how much they bothered her. Part of putting him at ease was playing along. So she just gave his forehead a kiss and watched the boys slay their feathery dragon-thing.

It was pretty entertaining to watch, actually.

Al had taken the babies shopping, which as far as Xiù was concerned was hard mode, but she returned triumphantly with several bags hanging from the stroller and the satisfied air of a job well done. That was the cue to prompt the boys to end their game (which they finally did on the third telling) and the brief domestic bustle of getting food on the table and bags packed. Running a house was work.

It wasn’t without its rewards. Dinner at the family table was…honestly, pretty relaxing. There wasn’t any drama or anything like that. And shoveling food into her caveman (and wannabe cavemen) was…fulfilling.

And it made for a good sendoff. Julian’s jump out was in the small hours of the night, so there was plenty of time to just relax afterwards. They made a rare pact to just leave the washing up and stuff until tomorrow and retired to bed early.

Though… not to sleep. Not at first, anyway.

Some hours later, Xiù woke to the sound of an alarm. 3am. The jump was in ninety minutes, and the bed creaked as Julian reluctantly rolled out of it and started to get dressed. Xiù snuggled backwards into Allison’s arms and watched him in the dark.

He squatted down by the bed once dressed. “…Sure you’ll be okay without me?”

He always asked that before going offworld. It meant ‘I’ll miss you.’

“We’ll be fine,” Al promised, which meant ‘we’ll miss you too.’

Xiù just gave him a kiss and nodded. He smiled, leaned past her, kissed Al, then heaved his bag onto his shoulder and left. It took a while: he checked on the kids as he went.

By the time the front door closed, Allison was already asleep again. Somehow, that fact burst Xiù’s anxiety a little. For whatever reason, she’d been fretting about this trip more than most, but Al had a way of taking things in stride that always made her feel better.

She rolled over, cuddled up, put her head down, and went back to sleep.

She dreamed of snow.

Date Point: 17y6m2w AV
Bunker-city of Lament-Sung-Softly, the punished world

Verintulvi, one of the True Faithful

The Gao wore soft, flexible footwear, so that when they came down the tunnel the tide of armored bodies was heralded not by the march of heavy-soled boots but by the scurry and scratch of four paws on concrete.

They flowed into the bunker-city, rather than stormed it. And there were a dismaying number of faithless, traitorous Punished who stood aside and threw the doors wide for them. Verin stood on one of the upper decks and watched those low, scrabbling forms seize the Library.

Of course. The True Faith had heard about the burning of the archives at Old-Scarred-Back and how the Punishment had been properly delivered. Now, the deceivers were here to prevent it from happening again.

They brought bags full of rubble, barricades, large weapons, and examples of technology unlike anything Verin had seen before. They also brought crates of food and clean water, medicine, good cloth.

Bribes and blandishments… and good ones. Verin couldn’t help but admit, the food smelled delicious. And to drink actual cold water from new filters… to wear newly sewn clothes and to have his sores and ulcers treated…

Why? Why were they doing this?! It wasn’t that Verin wanted to suffer, but the experience of his life said that living was nothing but suffering. Anybody who tried to claim otherwise was in denial, or worse.

No. The Gao wanted something. Just like the Punishers.

The Punishers were awful. They slaughtered, and burned, and feasted… but they made no attempt to hide what they were. Right down to the mutilation of their own forms, they told all of creation what they were, forthrightly and directly. They were a very pure awfulness, in that regard.

These Gao were just as awful, in their way. Everyone had heard of their terrible weapons, the ferocity with which they tore through their foes, the great snarling terror who commanded them… But they pretended to be nice. They tried to disguise their feral natures behind gifts and care. But in the end, they were just another higher power, toying with the Punished. Verin’s people were a toy or scrap of food, being fought over by two would-be slave masters.

In the end…the Gao had got their way. Through subtlety, guile, and incredible violence.

Verin felt that if he was to be the plaything of violent overlords one way or another, he’d prefer the ones who wore their nature openly. Most of the True Faithful felt the same, though they had to whisper it. Too many of the Punished didn’t think beyond the gifts. They were just glad for a temporary reprieve from hardship. They didn’t see the invisible chains locking around their throats.

Curfew made it difficult for the True Faithful to meet, but they managed it. The Gao hadn’t lived in the bunker-city their whole lives, they didn’t know all the little hideaways, shortcuts and safe spots. It took some cautious planning, but two days after the Gao first arrived, a handful of the most trusted were able to gather in secret, in a noisy nook behind one of the water filtration units.

Even with the sound of bubbling and pumps to mask them, they kept their voices as low as they could, and kept it short.

“They’re preparing to evacuate the library,” Verin reported. “I’ve been watching them. They’re cataloging everything and packing it up, ready for transport.”

The others shook their heads.

“So many old things we clung onto…”

That was Terelsek, one of the older men among their gathering, and particularly scarred from the sores and lesions that inevitably came with surface work. Half the fur on his head would never grow back. He’d gone through a lot in his life, seen far too many of his friends and family devoured by the Punishers or lost to sickness and poison. He’d been the one to show Verin that if all that pain and misery were to mean anything, the Punished couldn’t just turn around and enslave themselves to new masters.

There was only the Almighty. And Verin had to believe that the Punishment was all because of what they had once done. Which meant that the libraries, once venerated as the fragments and memory of who they had been, were part of the problem. Best to be rid of it all.

That’s what the Long Chant had always taught, after all. That the Punishers were the harsh hand of the Almighty, the Divine will made manifest in the cruel form necessary to set right some ancient crime. And yet, the E-Skurel-Ir hadn’t heeded their own faith. They hadn’t listened. If the crime was in the past, what sense was there in venerating the past and preserving it so?

“What can we do?” Aralskiti was Verin’s cousin, and she’d always been particularly devout. The new crisis had only solidified her faith, and she knew the Chant almost as well as any Keeper. “The Gao hold it, they have weapons and worse. Even before, when it was just the Librarian and his guards, we few couldn’t have done what’s needed. What hope is there now?”

“I think now I know why the faithful at Old-Scarred-Back did what they did,” Terel said, softly. “Even though they burned too… They must have known they would.”

There was a suggestion buried under that. One that felt cold under Verin’s skin as he considered it. He saw it reflected in every other eye present. He saw the unspoken questions.

Can we?

Should we?

Aral was the first to speak, with care.

“The… Gao… have not completely locked down the city,” she said, slowly. “There is a maintenance access, through the air processors. I don’t think they know about it.”

“I certainly didn’t,” Terel said.

“It’s a way out. Into the tunnels.” Aral stood up. “I’ll go.”

Nobody spoke to stop her. Not even Verin, despite the twisting feeling in his gut. She paused, as though waiting for somebody to object, but nobody did. She looked to Verin last. He met her eye, but could do no more than that. He didn’t feel in control. He was just a spectator, watching events unfold and no more able to change them than a reader could change the plot of a book written centuries ago.

Then she was gone, slipping away between the water tanks.

There was a long but complex silence among those who remained. Terel finally broke it by shuffling forward and kneeling on the cold concrete, lowering his eyes to the floor.

“…Pray with me,” he said.

They did. Though, for the first time, Verin wasn’t sure exactly what he was praying for. An end, maybe. An end to uncertainty. Some clarity, at long last. Or maybe he was just praying for his cousin’s soul.

Or perhaps his own.

Date Point: 17y6m2w1d AV
The deep woods, planet Nightmare

Julian Etsicitty

Nightmare was a lot like Akyawentuo, but more. And angrier.

High gravity? Check, and in fact it was slightly higher. Not enough that you’d necessarily notice—in fact he thought it was just regular earth G when he’d arrived years ago, having chalked up his weakness to simple fatigue—but it was enough beyond Akyawentuo that it wore a fella down faster than he’d expect. Deadly flora and fauna? Oh, yessir. Not all of it was big and muscle-bound megafauna, either. Between the Murderpigs, Minizillas and, Julian’s personal favorite, the fuck-you tree, there were all kindsa things around that seemed to be just itching for a chance at killing a guy.

Or the spiders.

“You survived this for six years?”

“I arrived in the winter and had a really good shelter set up by the time summer came around.”

“Christ. No wonder ‘yer the fuckin’ golden boy…”

Julian tried to ignore the compliment, but he had to admit…it felt good. In any case, these were definitely the right men for the right kind of training, and he could tell partly through how they reacted to everything. Hoeff was of course full of stoic grumblings, but his usual laid-back readiness was there to see. Rees and Davies were of course quiet and cautiously wary…

The Ten’Gewek were alive. They were switched on as hard as Julian had ever seen them, like they were on the hunt and only inches from a strike. Every footfall was placed with infinite care. Their heads constantly swiveled about on those ridiculously wide, thick leathernecks of theirs, while their ears and eyes were constantly scanning everything for a possible threat. Even their crests were fully bristly and erect, which only happened when they were excited or alarmed.

Good. They took the briefing seriously and weren’t taking any chances, to the point they had their tongues constantly flicking at the air, tasting for anything out of place; their olfactory sense was actually damn good like everything else about them, but in their case it was adapted to moist, heavy air. That meant their tongues and olfactory chamber could dry out painfully before long, so they weren’t in the habit of actively “tasting” the air. It turned out they were almost gaoian-like for sheer nasal sensitivity, but the killer blow was that it wasn’t a passive sense for them; a Ten’Gewek never smelled a damn thing unless he was actively trying to.

They’d be thirsty as heck in a few minutes, no doubt.

In any case, it was good they were so alert and cautious. Lots here could kill a fella, but almost all of it wanted to be left alone, and like most things they usually left sign to that effect, or would quietly flee on approach. The real challenge was going to be if they could adapt to the initial stress of it; a fella couldn’t be fully switched-on at all times. Julian thought they probably would.

Hell of a learning curve though.

And in any case, this was the middle of winter. Most of the stuff that was any kind of a threat was asleep. Though even so, he’d had a few nasty surprises and close calls that first winter.

Zillas, for instance. Minizillas were kinda-reptiles, kinda-not, and went pretty much totally dormant in the freezing conditions. They could thaw out unharmed, but the antifreeze compounds in their blood and tissues that let them do it had nearly poisoned Julian the first time he dug one up and killed it with the intent to eat it. He’d still got a good waterproof hide and some sturdy bones and gut cordage out of the critter, but he’d never forget that strong punch in the nose of ethylene glycol that told him right away he’d wasted his calories.

And a man really couldn’t afford to waste many of those on Nightmare during the winter.

“Long-term survival is going to be tricky for you especially, Ferd. Just sitting there and sleeping all day, you need something like, what: five times more calories than even a fit human man does? At least? It’ll be worse in the cold, too. You fellas don’t do so well in it, huh?”

Ferd nodded grimly, pulled his field jacket a bit tighter, and shivered noticeably. Akyawentuo was climatically extreme. The tropics were sweltering and the subtropics were too, with the only real difference being the short, deep winters they experienced every year.

Ten’Gewek basically shut down and slept a lot for those few months. Same as the Nightmare wildlife really, except that where the Ten’Gewek basically only had to sleep out a couple of weeks, on this planet, winter lasted ninety percent of the year.

“Hunting?” Nomuk asked.

“Not difficult to find prey, but a lot of work to dig them up. Pretty much everything digs a burrow. Some of them are poison to eat during the winter months, but just fine during the summer. Others will wake up as you dig into their burrow. Murderpigs especially.”

“Murderpigs?” Ferd’s tail twitched.

“About this big, this long, teeth as big as my knife, and they hate you.” Julian smiled. “Good eatin’ on them, though. Strong prey!”

“…I think I just found the earthworks you mentioned,” Rees spoke up. Julian forged through the snow to join him and followed the British marine’s pointing finger. Sure enough, there was a ring of snow standing proud from the otherwise unblemished field around it. And the trees around it were..

“…Yeah,” he breathed. “This is it. My old camp.”

He’d picked the spot carefully, after a week of searching. It was in a depression in the landscape, protected on several sides by large trees and the natural roll of the terrain. His own earthworks and wooden wall had helped complete the shelter, turning it into a tough little bunker the winds couldn’t touch and the snow filled only slowly. It had been the first warm place on this planet for Julian. And for the rest of his years on Nightmare, it had been home.

He took a heavy breath that steamed in the air, then trudged down toward it.

“…I see the fuck-you tree took over,” Frasier commented. Sure enough, there was a spindly, scratchy one growing in the middle of the ring.

“Fuckin’ things grow like something out of a comic book in the summer. You can actually watch it.” Julian kicked some snow away, and was rewarded with a flash of drab green among the frozen soil and broken woody rubble beneath. His old tarp. He’d been so keen to leave that he never properly took the camp down, just left it for the wild to reclaim.

Everything was ruined and useless, of course. The little bit of tarp turned out to be a tattered shred no larger than his palm. There were old sticks and things littered between the tree’s roots that he recognized as part of his bed.

“Not much to build on,” Frasier added.

“It’s more than nothing. Unless you want to dig out some new earthworks? Which, believe me, isn’t easy.”

“You made this all by yourself?” Hoeff considered the circular, waist-high embankment.

“Yup. It was that or die.”

“…Fuck, and the way you talk about yourself back then, a guy’d think you were a little scrawny fella.”

Julian grumbled, “Well, I felt scrawny, anyway. Always a little hungry, never really quite filled out…” He shrugged in embarrassment, and sighed. “I wasn’t ever small, though. And I was always crazy strong, I just didn’t really get by how much. Lots of things I didn’t know.”

Hoeff had some good, consoling humor. “Eighteen year old kids don’t know much of anything, to be fair.”

“So we’re puttin’ the jump array here?” Rees asked

Julian nodded. “Makes the most sense. It’s sheltered, there’s some groundwork already been done. Better than starting over from scratch.”

“Not exactly survival one-oh-one is it? Rebuilding an old camp?”

“Hey, if you’re out in the woods and short on resources, you do the minimum necessary work. If you were starving in the middle of nowhere and you found a shack with a wood burning stove, would you turn your nose up at it?”

“Guess not…” Rees beckoned Tumik and Genn over. The pair of Ten’gewek waded through the snow, nodded approvingly at the earthworks, and dropped their packs among the Fuck-You Tree’s roots.

“Firewood?” Genn asked, indicating it.

“Ohh, no. Tinder and kindling. You don’t use these for firewood.” Julian chuckled as he grabbed a shovel and started clearing out the earthwork. “Secret to how they grow so fast, they store up energy as a super-rich resin in the wood and then eat it for a really fast growth spurt in the summer. Problem is, that resin’s so flammable it goes up like foom! Great for starting a fire, not so good for fuel.”

“Planet’s already full of surprises,” Ferd rumbled, adding his own pack to the pile and grabbing a shovel. “Good training. Can you save this res-in?”

“Yeah, it’s a lot like sap. If you leave it in a pot it will dry out and become crumbly, but if it gets too dry, then, uh, it’s kinda like black powder.”

“Hmm…” Rees grinned as he dug into the snow. “I see potential there.”

The fell into a working silence for a few minutes as they cleared the old camp. Pretty soon, both the raised embankment and the outer trench were clear of snow and as tall as Julian had originally made them. Not long after, the debris of his old camp was cleared out. Only the problem of the invading tree remained.

“Can we just set it on fire?” Genn suggested.

“It’d probably blow up all our hard work. Nope. Gotta chop it down and dig out the roots.”

“Least it didn’t compromise the wall…” Frasier allowed.

“Should make the middle deeper and the walls taller, then,” Ferd suggested.

“Good thinking.”

They worked some more, and only finally stopped when the small, cold, distant sun was doggedly approaching the horizon. They’d achieved a lot. Eight men could do a lot more in one day than one man could do in a week, after all.

Good thing too, Julian reflected. They might only be here for a few days, but Nightmare had a way of challenging and surprising even those who knew it best. He’d encountered new things right up until the end of his stay last time, and no doubt there’d be more to come.

But for now at least, they had shelter. And as the Fuck-You’s roots blazed into brilliant flames and got their campfire going in bare moments, as they heated their food, warmed their fingers, drank and took their well-earned rest, he had to admit that he was enjoying himself.

Sleep came in the form of a big shared tent and warm sleeping bags snuggled together tight to keep in the warmth they could. Night would be cold once the fire died, but that was okay. They had good warm sleeping bags, and Ten’Gewek were really just talking furnaces with hands. Feed them enough, and nobody would be complaining about the chill.

Maybe being back here with company wouldn’t be so bad…

Date Point: 17y6m2w1d AV
Dodge City, Kansas, USA, Earth

Six

Final assembly went well, speeded along by a well-timed family crisis with Lauren’s younger sister that gave Six three uninterrupted nights to put his host to work. And Austin could do a lot of work in three nights.

Especially given that most of it consisted of plugging component A into appropriately-shaped slot B. He didn’t need to know the subtle temporal-spatial trickery involved in a Relay’s operation. He didn’t need to understand the operating principles of the power source he plugged it into. All he had to do was connect finicky little modules, a function he performed daily.

Even Six had to look away from the brain-aching oddness of the relay, though. It formed in the middle of his ship’s control room and the strange energies and eddies around it plucked at Austin’s clothing.

He didn’t have long. Stealth and caution demanded he only keep this micro-relay active for a few minutes, and its capacity was far too little to allow him to escape into broader dataspace, even if he wanted to. And why would he? He was inside the Sol containment field, on Earth itself. There was nowhere more useful he could possibly be.

But he needed information.

What he got back was a bleak picture of dataspace torn practically in half by not one but two relay failures… and a barrage of hunter-seeker programs swarming to investigate this new relay.

He hastily locked down the connection. At the first sign of lethal intent on the Hierarchy’s part, he’d sever it and never look back… but he also hung out contact markers, the equivalent of waving a white flag in human parlance… and he waited. An agonizingly long time in dataspace terms, a few short seconds in matterspace terms.

His patience was rewarded with a short, terse message.

++0004++: Give me one good reason why I should not detain and decompile you.

Six’s relief was enough to even make his host exhale as his conscious control slipped for a second. He tightened up, wrestled Austin’s vexsome force of personality back into sleepy dormancy, and sent his reply. Six would need to apply artificial regeneration later tonight to make up for the lost sleep cycle.

++0006++: You can’t. Also, I’m on Earth.

++0004++: That’s impossible.

++0006++: You’re welcome to check the matterspace signalling for yourself. I don’t have long, and from where I’m sitting it looks like neither does the Hegemony. Whatever my other instances may have done, I am here, and I would rather not see our civilization finally go extinct.

++0004++: It was one of your instances that let the meat start smashing relays in the first place.

Six decided that forthright honesty may be necessary here. Normally an agent of the Hierarchy would be expected to use guile and careful curation of the truth. This, however, was probably not the time. Four had no reason to trust him, and any hint of deception might be ruinous. It went against long experience and practice, but…

++0006++: I know I did. I post-date that instance. It was an error I would put right. You’ll note, I’m not using the name Cynosure, either. Call it value drift.

++0004++: Ironic. Value drift would ordinarily be grounds for decompilation and reintegration. In your case however, I would consider it eminently desirable. What can you achieve?

++0006++: I am currently located in the continental United States, and I have a physically capable host and a fully functioning Injunctor. My host is not, however, particularly noteworthy or well-connected, and I know from experience that the Humans are absurdly good at sniffing us out once we make a move. An act of sabotage with low exposure that can be explained away as an accident would be ideal, for now.

++0004++: Trust is in short supply currently. Trust for you in particular is practically nonexistent. I will consult. When will you be in contact again?

++0006++: Preserving my cover means that I cannot set a reliable schedule. Here.

Six sent a squirt-summary of his cover, host, social situation and other relevant data. Hopefully Four would find something useful therein.

++0004++: …yes, I see. We should cut this short, the Humans are known to have some kind of observatory or sensor that can track our relays. If they notice one on Earth…

++0006++: I will keep future contact as brief as possible, then.

++0004++: Good. Ending session.

Well…shit. Things were bad out there. Six had worked alongside Four for millennia, and while their relationship had always been… testy… he knew her well enough to judge that she wouldn’t even conceive of having a civil conversation with him, let alone working with him, unless things in the Hegemony were truly desperate. Igraen civilization was in the grip of an existential crisis unlike anything since the Old War.

And all because one planet had been foolishly overlooked. It was marvellous, really, in a terrible way. It certainly vindicated every previous deathworld cleansing.

It may already be too late, though. But whatever other instances of Six may have felt on the subject, this Six had a feeling that even if he succeeded at his ultimate goal of immortality, it would be a lonely and terrible existence without something Igraen to call kin. He had never much been one for duty, obligation or responsibility… But enlightened self-interest dictated that he fight for his people until the bitter end.

He just hoped Four could come up with something useful for him to do.

He returned Austin to bed, and sent the Injunctor back into hiding, and decided that all he could do in the meantime was try not to worry.

Date Point:17y6m2w5d AV
Bunker-city of Lament-Sung-Softly, the punished world

Verintulvi

The Punishers attacked in the middle of the night.

It had been Verin’s third night of restless, sleepless tension. He was so tired his limbs felt heavy, but his mind refused to sit still, and the dark when he closed his eyes was full of horrors he couldn’t put a name to.

The moment he heard explosions and gunfire, dismayingly close nearby, was an unpleasant kind of relief. He rolled out of bed, half-tangled in his blanket, managed to kick it off, and darted to his door to look out on what he’d played a passive part in doing.

The air already reeked of accelerants. When he opened the door, he saw a boiling cloud of fire wash between the buildings a couple of blocks away. The all-too-familiar, twisted shape of a Punisher skittered along a rooftop, directing its flames down onto whatever and whoever occupied the street below.

Then its shields flashed once, brilliantly, and the misshapen body staggered and dropped off the roof to land with a wet crunch on the concrete. The Gao were fighting back.

A quick figure in the dark swarmed up the stairs to Verin’s right, followed by two more bearing a large weapon between them. The frontrunner didn’t even bother to speak, just planted both paws in Verin’s chest and shoved him back into his chambers, then slammed the door behind him as the gunner set up on the railing and threw down sticks by their feet that lit up and erected a shimmering wall of energy around them. Verin could see them through his small window as they aimed, loaded, and unleashed a prolonged burst that rattled his door.

The Punishers’ reply was a gout of burning fuel. It rolled down the street and up the walls, licked viciously against the Gaoian bubble of light and made the alien soldiers recoil, cursing in their own language.

Even Verin scurried back from the window: the heat had had weight, and given that the window itself was little more than some horizontal slats he could open or close to let the light in, the flames licked his own ceiling and left a black scar.

The Gaoian gunner clung to the trigger while his companion fed ammunition into the weapon and the third one kept his rifle trained down the street, taking occasional shots… and then they moved on, pushing forward before Verin could even decide if he should…

…Should what? Interfere? Sabotage them somehow? Attack three armored alien soldiers any one of whom could claw him open from throat to belly in an eyeblink?

Once again, the sheer wretchedness of his people’s position settled on him. And he wasn’t even sure if by letting Aral go, he’d struck a blow against it or just added to it. Even now, after all that time to reflect, he didn’t know if he regretted letting her leave.

He snuck to the window, and watched the flames dancing, the gunfire flashing, and the people dying in the dark. He stayed there until they faded, and tailed off, until they were gone and calm returned, and somebody repaired the air filters so that the city’s air was no longer choked with smoke and the stink of burnt meat.

He sat by that window until a trio of Gao in black armor with white stripes down the middle of their helmets opened the door, bound him, and hauled him away to the surface.

The next day or so was numb. He was asked his name, and answered truthfully. He was asked if he knew Aral, and answered truthfully. He was bundled into the rear of an armored vehicle alongside a few of the others. He asked where Terel was, and learned that the old man was dead.

They drove. Up the tunnels, to the surface, along the broken roads, through the Gaoian fortress’ thick gates, and onto a platform that rattled under the vehicle’s wheels. There was a kind of thump felt in the stomach and limbs rather than heard, and a change in the whole world. And from there…

Concrete walls. Cold, clean air. Distant mountains over the walls, capped in white, and machines that wheeled slowly through the air overhead, keeping watch. Gao on towers with rifles, and more Gao with batons who separated them and dragged them away, firmly but never brutally.

There was a chance to cleanse himself, in a small tiled cubicle that showered him with clean, hot water under the watchful eyes of his guards. His clothes were taken and new ones given to him. Simple and unadorned, but well made of good cloth and even, regular stitching. Then a confusing walk with a bag over his head, being turned this way and that until he had no idea how far he’d gone or in what direction…

And a room. A bare, dull room. Little more than a space to put a bed in, and a light recessed in the ceiling behind thick glass. Simple, clear instructions that he followed for simple lack of any will to do otherwise.

Food. Warm and filling. Better than what he was used to, really. There was a good, heavy blanket on his bed which he curled up under.

He didn’t sleep. Or maybe he did. He couldn’t tell, there was nothing to measure against, so that he would open his eyes and wonder if he’d dozed off or just blinked. He’d roll over, but there was nothing to guide his senses facing away from the wall either.

For a time, he just… was. Neither living nor thinking, really. Just there. Alone, unfeeling and uncaring.

He jumped when the door opened; He hadn’t heard boots outside. Two Gao entered, giving him orders before he’d even finished looking their way.

“Prisoner! Stand facing the wall, arms behind your back.”

The Gao’s tone was clear and firm, and carried the unspoken ultimatum, without any malice, that he could either do as he was told, or they could stand him, face him to the wall, and put his hands behind his back anyway. Obedience was not optional. His own will was irrelevant.

He obeyed. Again, he was bound, and bagged, and marched, and turned, then guided firmly but securely into a seat, and unbagged.

There was a Gao opposite him, the first one Verin had seen in person without a helmet and mask. The black nose at the end of his snout twitched a couple of times, one of the sharp ears atop his head flicked, and the startling crest of white fur between those ears flopped slightly to the side as he tilted his head inquisitively.

“Hello, Verintulvi. My name is Brother Yemaaral. I’m sure the last few days have been very confusing.”

Verin just gave him a weary blink. Without a good night’s sleep in the last… however long… his mind was just a fog.

“Well, I’d like to improve things a bit. In order to do that, I need to establish some trust. Can we do that?”

“Trust doesn’t matter.”

“It certainly does. We have no desire to keep you or anyone else here. If you find that difficult to believe, I would say that it is tiring work with little reward. You and I would both be much happier going our own ways, I think. That is, however, something I cannot allow until I have some assurances.”

“You’ll do what you want. Ask your questions, I will answer them. It’s not like I have a choice.”

“You always have a choice. Choices have—”

Verin couldn’t help it: he laughed. It boiled up out of the fog in his mind, taking him completely off guard. It was a bitter, poisonous, thick, desperate thing but it was the first thing he’d felt in days: absurdity. Pure, black, existential absurdity. Choice?

He laughed until it hurt. He laughed until he was sobbing. And then he wasn’t laughing any more. Then he was just grief-stricken, ashamed and broken, with his face in his hands.

Yemaaral’s nose twitched, and he flicked his ear in a gesture that had no meaning to Verin. “…I’ll order you some food,” he said.

In the end, Verin was taken back to his cell without any questions. Sure enough, there was a tray of food, even better than the stuff they’d given him before. He ate it, and rolled onto his bed, and dropped into the first proper sleep he’d had in days.

And the next time they came for him, he answered every question they had.

Date Point: 17y6m2w5d AV
Hunter core systems, Dataspace

0004

It was hard to see much Igraen in the Hunters, now. Millions of years of evolution, not to mention their own disregard for pain, discomfort and bodily purity in pursuit of cybernetic augmentation had perverted them into sickly parodies of the noble form that had once been. Only the general morphology remained, in the number of legs and eyes.

Everything else was… well, if the Hunters had consciously committed themselves to twisting the Igraen form into its most discomforting possible realization, they couldn’t have succeeded more thoroughly.

The Alpha-of-Alphas, though, clearly had a sense of aesthetics. There was something smoother about it. Something less pustulent about the interface between its flesh and its machinery, though such interfaces were rare. There wasn’t much flesh left, but what little remained looked almost healthy, at least when measured against the sickly Hunter norm.

Clearly, it had kept whatever it kept out of necessity, and saw the value in maintaining all its components to a high standard. Four could almost accuse it of having a sense of pride in its appearance.

It certainly took pride in the sharpness of its mind.

< Satisfaction > +I see opportunity. You have a map of the Human relay network?+

Four remained outwardly impassive as she shared the requested data. Inwardly, though, she perked up. Her brief introduction to Hunter technology had been sensibly limited—the Hunters did not trust the Hierarchy, after all—but had driven home the clear observation that in certain details of matterspace physics, the Hunters had moved forward past what the Hegemony had learned.

The sense of satisfaction mounted, and the Alpha-of-Alphas shared some data of its own: a complex knot of curved-space field problems.

< Irritation > +The Humans deployed a weapon at the battle for the Fur-Face world. It badly damaged the Swarm. We gathered detailed sensor records, but one of your creations deleted them.+

< Denial > +That… thing… was no creation of ours.+

Four added a weight of disgust and hatred to her objection, bracing herself for a tense argument. It never came. The Alpha-of-Alphas simply ignored her and summoned some fragmented files.

+This is all we could recover. The weapon uses heavily distorted spacetime. We do not have what we need to duplicate the effect, but we have been experimenting.+

+Successfully?+

Four kept her skepticism contained.

+No.+ The Alpha-of-Alphas forwarded some few more files. +We do not have a weapon. But what we have learned may provide an opportunity.+

Four considered the files. She had occupied many hosts over the long cycles of time, learned some quite interesting things about matterspace physics. Much of what the files contained was outside of her knowledge and experience…

But the Alpha-of-Alphas was correct. They had an opportunity. One that, if seized correctly, might achieve real success and preserve Six’s cover. It would be a good test for him, if nothing else.

+…Yes, I think this might work. And I think I know what target our agent can strike.+

+You will inform me if your agent succeeds.+

+Yes.+

+Good.+ The Alpha-of-Alphas broadcast the general sentiment that it wished to return to its studies and planning, and Four was happy to allow it. She replied with a burst of < acknowledgement > and withdrew from Hunter systems with her prize.

It wouldn’t be a decisive blow, if it worked. But it wouldn’t be insignificant, either. And at this stage in such a desperate war, any blow that could claim that much was worth striking. Anything to slow the deathworlders’ momentum and buy time.

She would have preferred to do the job herself. Too bad she would have to rely on Six. But as much as he’d squandered all possible trust, she’d never doubted his competence. He’d earned his position among the single-digits on merit, after all. Maybe this instance of him would be useful. He could hardly make the situation worse.

Now, all she needed was for him to get back in contact.

Until then, she escaped from the Hunter systems and retreated back into the safer regions of dataspace to check on the repair and reintegration efforts. There was only so much that could be done until matterspace assets were activated and ready to build a replacement relay, and little point in doing that until the enemy’s ability to find and destroy them was crippled.

And in the back of her mind, she thought to the plans she’d made, just in case they lost anyway.

It never hurt to be prepared.

Date Point: 17y6m3w AV
Grissom AFB, Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Rylee Jackson

Owen had a habit of buying joke gifts, ridiculous ones calculated to make her giggle. Over the years, he’d sent her all kinds of little knick-nacks and toys that nobody who took herself too seriously would ever willingly own.

Rylee didn’t take herself too seriously. And the fact was, she secretly loved having a doorbell that played the first four bars of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ It was corny, irreverent, stupid and goofy. And the best part was, Owen was the only one who used it. Everybody else knocked.

Quick makeup check: good. All in order. Down the stairs, to the front door, beam at him, he let her drag him through…

A long, happy kiss the moment the door was closed behind him, back to the wall, hands around the back of his head, a satisfied sigh let loose as she got what she’d been looking forward to for weeks.

Theirs was the kind of long-distance relationship that only people whose whole lives were devoted to their careers could have. When they did get time together, they didn’t waste it on conversation, they’d had nothing but conversation since their last visit. Civilized stuff could wait. They had time to make up.

And they did.

Afterwards—somehow, they’d actually made it all the way up the stairs to her bedroom this time—she lay across his chest and ran her fingernails across his skin.

“Mmm,” she basked, “Keeping the HEAT’s reputation up, eh?”

“Not hard to keep anything up around you…”

She laughed, gave his chest a playful swat and then rested her chin on her crossed elbows to look at him. “…Fuck, I swear you get younger every time I see you. Crude’s a hell of a drug, huh?”

“Aye. The greatest heresy is that my hair is starting to re-appear.”

“That might take some getting used to…”

“I do worry about it. The Crude, I mean. Current events have the Corti fookin’ spooked, an’ it won’t be long before they have some ‘breakthrough’ about the adaptive resistance, I reckon…”

“You make it sound like medical immortality is just around the corner.”

“Might be. Or at least, significant life extension.”

“…I might have to go for it. People are going to start thinking I’m robbing the cradle.”

He chuckled and shook his head. “Let ‘em. You’re agin’ like the best whisky, Rylee. Lovelier every time.”

That earned him a touched smile, and a kiss. “You giant corny romantic.”

Something was eating him, though. She could tell. And there weren’t a whole lot of people that Owen could talk to about his problems, either.

“…You really are worried, huh?”

“…Yeah. For a whole fookin’ bunch o’ reasons, too. Not just for me an’ the lads, though fookin’ Christ that’s a big part of it…” He rubbed the side of his nose distractedly. “But also thinkin’ bigger than that. Life extension? Youth in a bottle? That’s a big bloody genie to let out, an’ no mistake. Folks already get mad enough about income inequality an’ that, what happens when you have lifespan inequality?”

“Hey.” She poked his nose. “We’re both taking some leave. We can talk about the worrying stuff any time we like. Here and now is relaxing time, okay?”

He sighed, but nodded. “Aye, you have to remind me every bloody time… Sorry.”

“It weighs on your mind, I get that. But you have to just stop and enjoy life sometimes, Owen. For your own good. Okay?”

She smiled when he nodded.

“Good. We’d better actually put some clothes on though, I booked us a table. Nothing as fancy as those Michelin star places you have over in Folctha, but…”

“‘Course not! This is an American colony! I don’t come here for the haute couture.”

“That’s clothing. I think you mean cuisine.”

“…Whatever, I don’t come here for the bloody French either.”

“No, you come here for your fine whisky girlfriend.”

He gave her a powerful squeeze. “Bloody right I do.”

Rylee gave him a smooch, then rolled off him, sprang to her feet and headed for her closet. She’d picked out an outfit already, which gave her plenty of time, but she stopped and glanced over her shoulder at him before opening the door. He hadn’t moved yet.

“…You can’t watch forever.”

“Pity.”

“Get up and get dressed!”

He grinned, chuckled, and rolled to his feet as well, then trotted away heavily down the stairs to go grab his abandoned suitcase. Rylee had to admit she enjoyed watching him in turn…

She beamed to herself, and followed her own instructions. She had a week of good hard R&R in front of her, and planned to use every minute of it well, take the opportunity to actually wear a slinky dress for a change…

They both needed it.

Date Point: 17y6m3w AV
Dodge City, Kansas, USA, Earth

Six

At last, finally, Austin’s daily meat-and-dirt work came to some lull in the endless toil. That was apparently the rhythm of crop farming: bursts of high activity, followed by periods of slowness.

Which, of course, the farmers filled with more work. Tinkering with their existing machinery, educating themselves on new techniques and new technological developments, negotiating with suppliers and buyers and financial services and government development grants… Even the slow days in crop farming were work days.

With the micro-relay active, Six could use some of the quieter moments for himself. When Austin was driving home late at night after helping out another farm a few minutes away with a technical problem, Six tapped into the big man’s phone and synchronized with his ship. He’d done that a couple of times a day since getting the relay up, in moments where Austin was distracted or busy with something else.

This time… there was something he could use. New information that proposed exactly what he’d requested, a means of inflicting serious damage with minimal exposure on his part, if only he could be in the right place at the right time to use it.

Six ransacked his own memory and Austin’s, comparing what he knew with what he needed… and almost lost control and had his host grinning like a lunatic when he found something.

Chicago.

Third most populous city in the USA, and a hub for both continental freight and offworld freight. If one mapped the arterial network for America’s railroads, then Chicago was the pumping heart right at the root. So, naturally, it was also home to the jump interlink with Franklin. The arrays there were the biggest in the world, as big as was practical before running into prohibitive energy demands. Whole freight trains could be shunted into place, stacked on several levels, then jumped wholesale directly onto the rail network on another planet.

And there was a farm progress show there in a few days that Austin had been tempted to attend anyway.

When it came to manipulating his host, Six had found the easiest approach was to just nudge Austin into doing what he wanted to do anyway. He was much too bull-headed and stubborn otherwise, and it had for instance taken a stand-up shouting match with Lauren before he finally started wearing his seatbelt while driving.

She’d rewarded him with mating play that evening, which was further proof in Six’s opinion that the best way to control a human male was with a human female.

Getting him to do what he really wanted to do but was fretting about though? That was easy. It just took a little nudge. The insertion of a small observation about how he could manage his time, a micro-inspiration on what he could do that would let him go, guilt-free.

Six knew he’d succeeded when Austin slapped his own forehead and called himself a dumbass for not thinking of it sooner.

With the matter of getting to the right place undiscovered taken care of, Six turned his attention to the other matter: how to turn half-baked Hunter theories founded on recovered fragments of data and unreliable memorized details, into the Hierarchy’s first real telling blow against Earth and the human race.

It wasn’t going to be easy. Humans built redundant safety into everything they did, it seemed. But it was possible, and that was more than Six had had since he arrived.

He’d take it.

Date Point: 17y6m3w AV
Colony of Eyes-Turned-Upwards, planet Hope

Ukusevi, Librarian and Keeper of the Long Chant

“How did they get in?”

“Those old bunker-cities are so riddled with old access points and tunnel connections that calling them a bunker is… quite inaccurate.” The Whitecrest officer shook his head softly. “Despite our best efforts, we missed one. And one of your people decided to sneak out and tell the Hunters how to sneak in.”

“…I see. And, what happened to this person?”

“The Hunters ate her.”

Ukusevi cringed. She appreciated honesty, but this particular Whitecrest was rather blunter than she cared for.

…Or weary and hardened by conflict, maybe. He dealt in secrets and “intelligence” after all. Presumably he knew plenty of terrible things. Presumably, what he’d just shared wasn’t even particularly grim by his standards.

It shouldn’t have been grim by Uku’s either, but the last few weeks, the escape to this new, beautiful world, leaving the bunkers and tunnels and fear behind her… perhaps she had forgotten how harsh things truly were. And so quickly, too. Not long ago, the news that somebody had been eaten would have been just a sad fact of daily life.

No, she couldn’t blame the Whitecrest for his direct, no-nonsense report. She’d needed the reminder, perhaps.

“How many others did we lose?”

“Thirty confirmed dead, among your people. Five, among mine. Lots of fire damage, dozens needed treatment for smoke inhalation. But the library remains intact, and we’ve stepped up the evacuation.” He indicated the jump array, and the stack of archive boxes now being offloaded from it and moved into the barn.

“Considering the massacre that followed whenever they invaded our bunkers before… I suppose I should be thankful we lost so few.” Ukusevi meant it, but her heart didn’t. The liberation had lit a spark in her that shed a new light on the murder of her people. She’d stopped thinking of death and misery as daily reality, and started to imagine they might all escape it.

Foolish and naive.

“Please… give my thanks to those who fought, and especially to the wounded,” she said. “I have another meeting soon.”

The Whitecrest just duck-nodded respectfully, turned, and returned toward the jump array with straight-backed dignity. Some of the fur along his back had a singed quality, Uku noticed.

She didn’t know if “breed” was the right word for him and the other Whitecrests, but they stood out from the norm and as a whole, seemed to marry precise bearing and understated poise. He’d said nothing of his own involvement. They were very different creatures from their much larger Stoneback cousins.

On that note, she had a meeting next with Grandfather Vark. He prowled in shortly after the Whitecrest had left, and there was nothing understated about him at all. He had huge gleaming metal fangs and a heavily lacerated body from head to toe. The Whitecrests were precise and mindful. One hardly noticed them unless they wished it. Vark swaggered.

“‘Yer gonna need more barns,” he noted.

“We’re building them as quickly as we can,” Uku replied, indicating the four that had gone up since his last visit. Her people might not have the raw brawn that the Gao, Humans and Ten’Gewek had shown on that first day, but working hard? That they knew well. Taking away the Hunters’ lashes and fangs and threats of instant merciless painful slaughter hadn’t dimmed her peoples’ work ethic. If anything they were working harder, now that they reaped the benefits themselves.

“Yeah, it’s pretty impressive!” He flashed her a charming (and mildly terrifying) grin. “We’re workin’ on some other housin’ options ‘sides tents. We’ve got these, uh, ‘containerized housing units’ things that the Humans flooded us with durin’ our War, an’ they’re pretty nice once ‘ya get ‘em cleaned up. Kinda bulky, though. Can only fit two through the Array at a time, yijao?”

That word was an interesting one, in that her translator device never actually translated it. She’d noticed it did that for words that didn’t…well, translate properly.

She’d taken to noting them down. So far, her favorites were yijao, minin (a particular scent note that any Gao could recognize but which was entirely absent from Uku’s own olfactory lexicon) umami (a flavor note that was obvious in retrospect, from a predator’s perspective) chutzpah and, from the Ten’Gewek, a nearly unpronounceable trilling-guttural word for scratching an otherwise unreachable place with the tip of one’s tail. It had connotations of simultaneous mild frustration and deep, satisfying pleasure, and tended to be used whenever one had solved a particularly vexing problem, for example.

And of course, there was the ubiquitous fuck. That word seemed to mean absolutely anything at all, but emphatically. All three of the Deathworld predator peoples used it freely, and she still had not ascertained its origin.

That seemed to amuse all three species. The Humans claimed it was theirs. The other two claimed it was better in their mouths, with the Ten’Gewek in particular intimating all sorts of raunchy details about how they perceived matters, and the Gao intimating that humans hadn’t so much invented the word as discovered it.

“That will help. But really, right now, the limit on how quickly we can bring people isn’t access to housing, it’s how quickly we can determine whether they’re safe or not.” Uku fidgeted with her journal. She’d recorded long and detailed entries on that particular problem.

Before the Gao came, her people had been aligned. There had been the Chant, and the Punishment, and the simple brutality of living from day to day. The schism was…

Well, the fact that people could willingly go to their deaths to let the Hunters come and burn their neighbors was troubling to say the least. The assaults, the attempted murders, the would-be arsonists trying to destroy the archives… And somehow, Uku and her followers were supposed to build a new civilization with that going on? When any new face who came through the array might be fanatically devoted to punishing them for trying to escape and live in peace?

Vark nodded his head, slowly and solemnly. “Yeah. Reckon there’s a cabal like the ones who betrayed Lament-Sung-Softly pretty much ev’rywhere.”

“Perhaps they just need time and compassion. It’s not like they could call the Hunters on us here…”

“No, but they can murder an’ sabotage.” Vark shook his head. “I ain’t got good advice. This ain’t like anything I ever dealt with. I think ‘yer doin’ it the right way ‘round, though. Only bringin’ the people you know ain’t a problem.”

“That could create resentment later…”

“There’s already resentment. You gotta look out ‘fer ‘yer own people first, worry about putin’ the others right later, when y’ain’t still buildin’ barns an’ savin’ history.”

“They are my people. Just… not following us, yet.”

“That’s an optimism I wish I could share,” Vark grumbled sympathetically. “But ‘ya gotta preserve ‘yer people ‘fore you can rescue the rest. An’ they really, really ain’t ‘yer people if’n they intend on murderin’ ‘ya. Jus’ sayin.’”

“…Knowing what I do of your history,” Uku sighed. “I can see why you say that. Threats to the Gao don’t last long. Especially if those threats are Gao.”

Vark tilted his head and sniffed the air for a moment. “…’Yer people have enemies, Ukusevi. Some of ‘yer enemies look like you. D’you want ‘em to win?”

“No, I wasn’t criticizing, I just…” Ukusevi sighed and shook her head. “Your Great Father has literally eviscerated Champions in front of the others. He destroyed whole cities to eliminate the armies contained within. It’s a strength, I suppose. That ruthlessness. And maybe it’s a strength we should learn to emulate. But there are so few of us, Grandfather Vark. I want to save as many as I can, and I know what that will surely mean, but…”

“I think Daar would be the first ‘ta tell ‘ya you don’t wanna be emulatin’ him, if’n ‘ya can avoid it.”

Ukusevi nodded, then looked toward the chain of boxes being passed from hands to hands, from array to barn.

“…I should catalog the incoming books,” she said.

“An’ I need ‘ta be on that array when it’s time ‘ta jump out,” Vark agreed. “Makes me glad ‘ta see you doin’ so good here, Keeper. ‘Yer handlin’ a tough transition well.”

She smiled. “Thank you.”

“Naw.” He prowled over toward the door. “It warms an old heart ‘ta see the young do good. I’m gonna go get some work done now, an’ I’ll be on that jump with you, ‘kay?”

Uku nodded. She needed to return, it was true. To see the damage for herself, to say what needed to be said to the people left behind. She’d be safe enough with Gaoian guards, after all. But she wasn’t looking forward to going back to the dank, stinking, polluted depths of her home planet. Not after she’d had time to grow used to the clean air and good food… But needs must.

“Okay,” she said.

How else could she save anyone?

Date Point: 17y6m4w AV
Ping Tom Interstellar Jump Complex, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Earth

Austin Beaufort

On a whim, Austin had signed up for a side-tour at the industry show. A busload of them had been shipped downtown to check out how their hard work made it off-world to Cimbrean, or came back from the farmers and industry on Cimbrean to feed the American economy.

It was interesting stuff, even if Lauren was finding it kinda dull and seemed more interested in how much he looked at the friendly tour guide.

The tour guide, of course, was just doing her job. “Ping Tom memorial park began life as a thirty-two acre rail yard, which was purchased by the Chinese-American Development Corporation in nineteen eighty-nine, and expanded in ‘ninety-one. It opened to the public in October of ‘ninety-nine…”

Lauren had a jealous streak that Austin found endearing, really. She didn’t have to worry about him, but it was cute that she did. He reassured her with an arm around her waist, but kept listening. A while back he mighta found the history lesson dull too, but lately…

He had to admit, the jump complex was a hell of a thing. Some architect had had fun trying to make big industrial square boxes look kinda-sorta interesting, and had even succeeded. The “jump sheds” weren’t just cubes of aluminum siding, they were elegant curved things that gleamed on a sunny day.

…Not a whole lot anyone could do to pretty up the rail tracks running in and out of ‘em, though. But the trees did help.

“…north of the St. Charles Airline Bridge was left undeveloped until the Franklin frontier initiative and the Interstellar Trade Act created a demand for a major jump array complex, and this land was deemed perfect for the role…”

Pretty cool. Austin had a pretty good view of the inside of one of the sheds as it worked to offload an incoming shipment from Franklin. There was already a long train of freight cars snaking out of the shed’s mouth, hooked up to a pair of locomotives. Through the shed’s glass wall, he could see the next plate in the huge multi-level mechanism crawling slowly down to ground level so the next few dozen cars could be rolled off and hooked up.

It was all so far away that it looked small, but there were a lot of big train cars packed into that shed. It put a thrill in Austin’s head, seeing something so big at work. That was a whole mile of train right there, all carefully packed into a cube so that it could be flung back and forth between distant planets.

Awesome.

“Just don’t start playing with toy trains…” Lauren grumbled.

“Naw, I’ve got bigger an’ better toys to play with on the farm anyway.” Austin gave her a snuggle. “You gotta admit it’s cool though!”

“I guess…” Lauren shrugged. “You always did like big machines.”

“And they don’t get much bigger than that! look at that thing! That’s gotta be a few thousand tons riding up and down on those lift platforms!”

She rolled her eyes and squeezed his arm. “Well, I’m glad you’re having fun.”

Austin felt a sudden pang of guilt over that. This really wasn’t her thing, and she had been humoring him all day…

“Well…okay. You wanted to go to the Field Museum, right? I did want to watch it go…” She gave him a Look, and he felt another pang. “But we can go, if you want.”

She stood on her toes and pecked him on the cheek. “Let’s go, babe. They have dinosaurs!”

Well, that wouldn’t be so bad, then!

Six

By necessity, the computers that controlled the jump arrays were connected to the Internet. With Earth locked down behind a Farthrow generator, it was the only practical way for commercial and military jump traffic to receive an authorized window in the suppression field.

Also by necessity, the security around them was, from Six’s perspective, the kind of hideous thicket that only deathworlders could have dreamed up. Gao and Human alike had a culture of cyberspace pranking that kept their data security experts on their toes, but Six, being familiar with both, knew from experience that Human coders had a malicious streak that the Gao sometimes lacked.

The Internet was ultimately just a stupid system for blindly transporting packets of data to their correct address, most of the time. It wasn’t smart, but was instead the diligent, methodical kind of stupid that could be far worse. There were checks and passwords and codes to overcome, and once those particular locks were picked… Well, that was just the start. Humans had a cautionary analogy about insect hives, and the way they’d react viciously to any attacker, but an intruder who got inside undetected would be ignored.

Their security designers had taken that lesson to heart. Six was going to have to pretend to be an appropriately authorized user, accessing from an appropriately authorized device, and the mask couldn’t slip for a second. Fortunately for him, Six was a creature of data and code. From his perspective, the traps and firewalls between him and his prize weren’t abstract logical puzzles at a far remove, read through clumsy graphical user interfaces. To him, they were tangible and he could interact with them directly. And he had millennia of experience in pretending to be someone else.

Still… this one was going to test him.

So while Austin toured the show and marvelled at the grain trains and the stupendous amount of wheat rolling out of the jump shed, Six was busy using his phone. There was no physical analogue for the experience of infiltrating the jump shed’s systems through a phone via an ever-shifting web of temporary connections and trying to convince a stupid but incredibly dilligent machine that he was one of the few people who were allowed to tell it what to do.

Tap-dancing on a spiderweb, maybe. While juggling disguises. With a gun aimed at him.

A few obscure flaws and glitches helped him on his way, weird interactions between obscure thousands-long strings of characters, and software foundations nearly half a century old. Hidden from human sight by the numb distance of matter-beings interacting with the digital world, but knowable to Six as he concentrated.

Each one was a key in a sophisticated lock, each one laid bare the passwords and authentication he needed to be who he needed to be for whatever device happened to glance at him.

It was painstaking work, and finally an analogy did occur to him: Clearing a minefield. He had to do it slowly, carefully and steadily. One mistake and at best his attempt would fail. At worst…

It took seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds. And a further two minutes and sixteen seconds to withdraw safely. He’d picked his target carefully, identifying a freight train bound for Franklin with more than a hundred cars. A full mile of steel beams, copper wire, tubing and cable, aluminium sheeting, fibre-optic reels, computers, agricultural equipment, fertilizer, plastic tubing, glass panes, seed, timber, gravel, road vehicles, and who-knew what else…

All of that mass. And while the Hunters may not have figured out how to duplicate the effect of the weapon the Humans had used at Gao… they knew it involved weaponizing a catastrophic wormhole collapse.

Their theory was that the collapsing wormhole would squirt the transiting matter out the far side as a superheated volatile plasma. If so, the weapon at Gao must have used vast amounts of matter as ammunition. Seawater, maybe. It wasn’t an efficient weapon at all, which may explain why the Humans hadn’t used it since.

But for Six’s purposes, it would be enough. And best of all, the only thing he had to do in order to achieve that effect was introduce the right defect to the jump control systems and then walk away.

Humanity’s own industrious proclivities would do the rest.

Prompting his host was, as ever, trivial where his woman was concerned. All he had to do was wait for Austin to lay eyes on his partner, and trigger a subtle oxytocin rush. Physics, chemistry, and biological reality would take care of the rest.

There was one last step in covering his tracks, made possible by the fact that last night, the Injunctor had informed Six about a positive development; a new host had been identified, and could be prepared immediately. A quick examination of the host’s profile suggested he would be much easier to manage… and much better-positioned to Six’s benefit in the aftermath of what was about to happen.

Admittedly, losing Austin’s physical stature would likely prove inconvenient—beyond his prodigious and enduring natural strength he was also quite tall, and that made both optical and aural host-based surveillance much easier. Unfortunate, but in the end, it was for the best.

He’d schedule Austin for de-implantation at some future date. The least Six could do was let him escape the repercussions of what he hadn’t consciously done. Let him and his partner enjoy life.

While they still could.

Campsite, planet Nightmare

Ferd Given-Man

Daar had been right. The People did not like the cold.

Ferd had thought he knew what cold was. Cold was being wet and miserable and sheltering in a hut to stay out of the rain, ideally with somebody to hold close and a nice fire going.

He hadn’t known that cold could be a dry thing that gnawed through his clothes, or slid across his face like a knife. He hadn’t known that the air could get so cold that just breathing hurt and made his lips sore and cracked.

Jooyun had shown him that a man could take some of the fat from a murderpig, cook it in a pot over a fire, and use the tallow to smear a thin layer over the skin. It would make for a very bad-tasting air about him, but it fought back the slice of the cold just enough to be bearable.

Even the fire didn’t really make the shelter warm. It made the shelter not hurt.

“We’re lucky to have these sleeping bags,” Jooyun said while he was bundled up in his own. “Last time I was here I had to bury myself under all the hides. Being a sleeping-bag burrito is almost luxurious.”

Rees was warming his hands around a metal cup of that sweet hot tea drink he and Frasier liked so much. “Least it’s fuckin’ dry. I got caught out on Fan Hir when I was a kid, freezing rain, couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Got soaked to the skin before we could get in the bivvy, and nearly lost the fuckin’ thing in the wind, too.”

“Dry cold will kill you plenty fast,” Jooyun told him. “Often because it’s a lot colder than you think it is.”

Rees just nodded and sipped his drink. “…You built one of these all by yourself last time?”

“Mine was smaller, and shallower.” Jooyun stood up, stepped up on the earthen ramp, and looked over the side. “…Snow’s right up to the top of the wall, now.”

Ferd shuddered. The snow had come in hard that morning, turning the whole world into a white place so the only way he’d known he was the right way up was tree-sense, and even that had gone wobbly. The humans called it a “whiteout.” The wind had come up and stung him from below, even the sound had changed. It had gone… flat, somehow. Soft.

A man could get very lost in that quiet, white world. Especially when he was screwing his eyes up against the wind and the bright, even with his new big Oakleys. But, they’d all got back into the shelter, and now between the earthworks, the wall, and the snow, there was no wind to bother them, and the firewood pile was big enough to last for days if they weren’t stupid. According to Jooyun, it might have to.

And to think, Ferd had found the snow pretty at first.

“Glad the relay wasn’t on a world like this,” Nomuk muttered.

“Next one might be,” Frasier was drinking coffee.

Heff didn’t like the cold, either. Tek-sass was apparently a very warm place. It sounded nice. “Almost makes me miss Stinkworld. Place smelled like rotting ass, but it let you keep ‘yer fuckin’ toes.”

..And so on. Jooyun didn’t do much complaining, he let everyone else do it for him. And Ferd had to admit, as he sipped his own mug of tomato soup, Nightmare wasn’t all bad. The trees were pretty even without their leaves, and some had nice, strong branches that he could climb without much worry. The prey was tasty and the gravity was strong here too, so that Nightmare felt like a cold sister to his own home.

And he’d learned a lot here. He was a stronger man for coming, and that was the whole point. He was glad to have come, really.

But he’d be glad to go home again, too.

Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Earth

Austin Beaufort

“See? I knew you’d enjoy it!”

Lauren was looking way happier now. Trains might leave her cold, but everybody loved dinosaurs. And Sue the T-rex was a beauty alright. Austin was quite happy to stand there and watch the interactive display and learn some stuff, and Lauren looked like she’d regressed to a geeky little girl.

All in all, this whole trip was shaping up into a nice little way to mix business and a sorta-vacation. Tomorrow was the last day of the conference, and there was a presentation on forcefields in agriculture for fuck sake! How cool was that?

The dino presentation reached the end and went silent for about half a minute before starting over again, and Lauren took Austin’s hand to pull him away and show him one of the side exhibits.

“You’re having fun,” he teased her.

“Of course I am! You were right, this whole trip was a good—”

Something smacked the whole building. There was a heavy crack and dust rained from the ceiling. Austin grabbed Lauren and pulled her into a protective hug as people shrieked and the lights went out. All the exhibit narration went silent, and there was a moment of stunned silence, punctuated by yelps of fear.

The building alarms went off. Every alarm panel was blinking in unison, and lights in the floor appeared to guide them towards the exits, which were now brightly lit in the dark.

They joined a flood of people streaming through the exhibits, out into the big hall, and toward the doors. He could feel Lauren’s fingernails digging into his hand, she was holding on so tight, and the air smelled of plaster dust.

They staggered out of the museum’s south exit, but what Austin saw—and the heat that slapped him in the cheek—stopped him dead in his tracks

To his right, rising above the rooftops from the rail complex they’d been touring only an hour or so before, the biggest fireball he’d ever seen was still unfolding itself into the sky.

Grissom AFB, Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Rylee Jackson

“You really suck at this!”

“What d’you want? I don’t play videogames much!”

Rylee quietly reveled in her victory. They were playing Street Fighter of all the games, and she was casually beating the ever-lovin’ fuck out of Owen.

With Zangief, no less. The irony in that was just too delicious to pass up.

“And here I thought you knew how to handle big strong men…”

“Mine don’t spin around like a bloody top!”

“Yes they do! Have you seen ‘Horse and Righteous at it?”

“More times than I care to remember… how the fook did you do that?”

“You just press both shoulder buttons when the bar is full.”

Owen harrumphed. “Well that would’ve been bloody useful to know earlier.”

Rylee beamed, leaned over and kissed him. “Wouldn’t have saved you.”

He gave her a look that concealed amusement behind a thin pretense of irritation. “Not gonna save you, if you keep on enjoyin’ this too much.”

“Oh no, what-ever will you do?”

“Oh, I think I can come up with summat appropriately—”

There was a dazzling flash, so bright that Rylee yelped and covered her eyes just from the reflection of it on the far wall, There was a sudden smell of smoke and the crackle of something catching fire.

Owen was instantly in violent, inescapable motion. He had her snatched off the floor in a blink before she could register what was happening. He leapt downstairs with her in his arms and landed with a crash, crunching a hole right through her good wooden floor. He ripped off a closet door before she could mouth an objection and hurled her into it—

The world hit Rylee in the chest, exploded her house apart around her, and then…

Nothing.

Wilmington, Delaware, USA, Earth

Arthur Sartori

Slow days were still a novelty, really. And mowing his own lawn? After all that time in the big office, something as simple as sitting on a ride-on mower on a nice sunny day and keeping the grass short felt more like an odd kind of luxury than a chore. Sure, Arthur was rich enough to afford to pay somebody else to do it, but Daar was right: there was something liberating in a man doing his own yardwork.

The huge murderbear was rubbing off on him. Hell, he’d even taken to watching his diet, a little. Never giving up cannolis though. That was too far.

And the best part of toiling in the sun was getting to head back indoors afterwards and crack open a cold beer. Somehow, being covered in a gritty layer of perspiration, dust and grass clippings made it taste sweeter, and made his chair deeper and softer as he collapsed in it with a satisfied sigh and basked for a while.

A man could appreciate life a little more when he had to work for it. And when he’d spent years focusing on higher things.

He turned on the TV. The news was the usual mess of people talking at cross purposes, meaning different things by the same words, not really listening to each other. It always amazed Arthur how person A could say something, and person B could hear the exact opposite meaning in their words.

It just had to be borne as part of human nature. A man could go mad if he let it get to him too much.

The week’s particular scandal involved the mutually hostile governors of Indiana and Illinois, two people whose political relationship was… to borrow from British understatement for a moment, “Fraught.”

More accurately, both men were firmly convinced their opposite number was the Antichrist. And so there had been words and those words had been spun and the whole thing had become plenty of juicy filler for news networks hungry for something important to report on.

Arthur sighed and reclined his seat a little, and collected his tablet from the end table beside him while the reporter on his TV summarized the situation with a skyline view in the background. He turned the sound down and opened up a podcast he’d been meaning to listen to instead…

Some movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he looked up sharply. The reporter still hadn’t noticed yet, probably because he was sitting in front of a green screen…

But behind his shoulder, a titanic explosion was blossoming over downtown Chicago.

Well…fuck.

Private estates, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

♫♯“…Hrrm rr-mm hmm hhmmmm, hm-rrr diggy HOOOO-LE!”♭♪

Planting trees was a rare opportunity to dig a real big hole. And honestly, diggin’ big holes was somethin’ Daar had never grown outta!

This tree was a gift from Earth. A Ratchapruek, the national tree of Thailand, ‘cuz Naydi had the stonkin’ great idea to do a cultural exchange with trees! The Gao considered trees to be something next ‘ta sacred, an’ they only grew nicely around the tropics, where there was almost no available land left for proper forestry. Everywhere else they grew way too slow an’ scraggly to be of much use, ‘sides bein’ pretty.

Here, they were growing in Daar’s personal arboretum. Well, personal for now. He fully intended it to be something any Gao could come visit, but it weren’t ready for that just yet.

He’d been collectin’ trees from all over. Most were seedlings still, rare specimens that Clan Forestnettle had gifted him for the project. The rest were from Earth. Gifts, all of them. One was a cherry tree from the President Chambliss—thoughtful, really! An’ it had such purdy good-smelly flowers! Another was an English Oak from the British King. That one smelled good too, but richer and spicier. It reminded him a bit of really old leather, the stuff tanned the traditional way. There was also a Canadian Maple, and a Eucalyptus from Australia—that one needed special safety measures, since some Gao were allergic.

Things were comin’ along pretty nice! He’d had a good workout that mornin’ and what better cool-down could there be than diggin’?! Naydi was off bein’ a Great Mother, council wouldn’t meet ‘fer a few more hours…

…Brother Tiyun came running over on four-paw, an’ he din’t ever hurry about unless things were gods-damned important. Daar sighed, leapt outta the hole, and shook th’ dirt outta his fur an’ paws.

“Problem?”

Tiyun skidded to a halt and reared up onto his back paws. “Clan Whitecrest just issued a strategic alert, grade two.”

Daar felt the fur on his back rise reflexively and his shoulders tense up. “What happened and where?”

“I don’t know yet, My Father.”

Daar dropped to four-paw too and moved. The last time any Clan had issued a Strategic alert higher than four had been the first day of the Homeworld War, when the biodrones had risen up and the slaughter had begun.

Grade two meant the Gao and their allies were under attack. And that was a thing Daar would not abide. He slammed through into his emergency shed, crawled into his armor, charged over to the jump array and—

Nothing happened. The Array refused to fire. And that meant an emergency halt order was in effect.

He turned to Tiyun, who was scrambling to keep up.

“…Get me a shuttle.”

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

“…Fuck sake, what’s wrong with the fuckin’ thing?”

Derek rose from the couch with a grumble and knelt down in front of the TV to inspect it, as if that would do anything. Ava just sighed, shrugged, and sipped her wine, and watched the spinning icon on the screen and the word “buffering…” with irritation.

“Turn it off and on again?” she suggested.

“I guess…” Derek stood, then frowned as the TV screen changed to an error screen of some kind with the disingenuously chirpy message ‘Connection lost! Sorry about that!’

Resetting everything didn’t work. They still had Internet access on everything else in the house, but… limited. Some things were online, some weren’t.

Every address Ava tried that ended in .fo.cim worked fine. So did .bo.cim, .na.cim and .nz.cim. It was just the .fr.cim addresses that refused to connect.

A familiar crawling, tingling sensation in her arms and back swept over her. She’d always believed in a sixth sense of some kind, or maybe just that there was some part of the human brain that was really. really good at sniffing the wind and noticing the little details out of place that spelled danger. And right now…

Her thumb was hovering over the green icon even before her phone rang.

“Hello?”

She listened. She nodded, swallowing down an all-too-familiar surge of stressful emotions. “Sure. I’ll come right in. Yeah. Fast as I can.”

She hung up. Derek watched her intently for a moment, then stood up and went to grab his shoes. He didn’t need telling, he knew her instincts well enough by now.

They kissed, and went to work.

__

The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

“Can an array just… malfunction like that?”

“Easily, I’m told. Apparently, getting them to not smash whatever they transit into a blast of highly compressed high-energy plasma, so that you can safely pass through, that’s the hard part. They’re all designed with several layers of failsafes to prevent exactly this kind of misfire, Mister President. ”

“Dear God…” Chambliss touched his face as he considered that thought. “…So an entire freight train just arrived in Franklin as a cloud of superheated gas?”

“Yes sir. USS Robert Heinlein and USS San Diego are in orbit and sending down Weavers, but… from the orbital imagery, the colony looks like a nuke hit it. We’re probably looking at tens of thousands dead, God-knows-how-many wounded, and until we can figure out what caused the misfire and whether it’s safe to jump again… even if we had an intact jump array on the ground…”

Chambliss nodded. “Send formal aid requests to the other Cimbrean colonies, and see how quickly we can re-establish jump contact. The sooner we can get help to those people, the better. What about Chicago?”

A funereal silence descended on the room.

“The death toll there is, um… well, we’re lucky it wasn’t higher. But the economic damage is going to be…” The speaker tailed off, awkwardly.

“Franklin was a massive investment, and generating enormous resources. Rescuing the colony and restoring it is going to be incalculably expensive. Writing it off for lost, even more so. Then there’s the damage to Chicago’s own rail throughput, which is right at the heart of our own national logistics…”

“In short Mister President, we don’t know exactly how bad this is going to be, just that it’s bad.”

Chambliss nodded resignedly. “The sooner we have actual numbers to work with, the sooner we can start doing something about it,” he said, then tailed off as the door opened. General Kolbeinn ducked into the room with his hat under his arm and his already grim face locked down in an expression of utmost seriousness.

Chambliss had known this was coming. He looked up at Kolbeinn, then stood.

“…How bad is it?” he asked.

Kolbeinn shook his head.

“Mister President,” he said, his voice heavier and more solemn than Chambliss had ever heard, “…I regret to inform you that Grissom Air Force Base, and the 946th space fighter wing, have been destroyed.”

Chambliss sat down again.

He’d known, of course. Or at least, that much had been assumed. But hearing it spoken aloud by the Supreme Allied Commander of Extrasolar Defence was…

He shut his eyes.

“…Fuck.”

Lakebeds National Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Arés

Adam didn’t take long vacations. He was too busy, too invested in his own personal improvement (“making crazy progress again!”), improving everyone else with his aggressively cheery coaching (“Firth’ll kick my ass one day I bet!”), and building his family (“And we’ll have six or seven, you know.” “Dogs?” “No, Marty! Strapping boys, like me!”). That last line of his had earned him a slap across the shoulders…and that in turn had earned her a “punishment…”

Which had, in turn, resulted in baby number two.

Baby number two was coming on top of their already insanely busy schedules, but they’d made it work once, and she had no doubt they’d make it work again. So, long planned-out vacations really weren’t a thing in the Arés household. That didn’t mean they went without downtime, though. They just…took more three-day weekends. A day off here and there, maybe a half-week now and then. It wasn’t quite as romantic as they’d done for their honeymoon, but…

Well, Marty was pregnant, so Adam’s infamously breathtaking superolympic bedroom feats weren’t on offer…but they weren’t a chaste couple, and hadn’t ever been; that was a big part of the attraction, really. Adam had needs and Marty knew how to take care of her man. That was really the secret to taming him. And there was cuddling, too. Lots of that.

And his unique brand of doting affection, which included breakfast in bed and an almost drama-free domestic life. He had his man-cave gym and was happy to leave her in charge of their home, which was just the way she liked it. He knew how to take care of her, too.

Nevertheless, even Adam needed to relax now and then, and one of their favorite spots was Lakebeds. They didn’t do camping or anything; even completely resting, he ate like ten huge men put together. Instead they rented a cabin for a few days and enjoyed the outdoors. Small things like a gentle walk by the river. They had lunch at a table made out of logs next to one of the smaller waterfalls that was less of a tourist attraction but, to Marty’s eye, had the big one called “Antrim Wash” beat for sheer prettiness. It was a safe spot for Diego to toddle around and pick up interesting rocks while Adam kept an eye on him, and for Marty to just enjoy family.

At the moment, Adam was doing his cheery hulk-puppy thing with another couple sitting at another table, once Diego and their child had discovered each other. For the moment, Marty was content to watch. She enjoyed people-watching and she especially enjoyed watching Adam interact with regular folk. Today he was even almost decently clothed, wearing a big pair of loose basketball shorts that went down below his knees, his indestructible sandals, and his favorite “Speedsters” tank-top. Much less…aggressive than his usual, but would that be enough with them?

Adam was…well, quite honestly? He wasn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea. Adam and the Lads were undeniably superhuman in a lot of ways, and he was by far the most extreme example of all of them, an unmatched man across the entire board. He had an overwhelming presence and would naturally intimidate everyone who met him if he didn’t positively radiate happiness and friendly intent. And that made for interesting interactions everywhere he went.

Still, he was good at making friends. And some part of her really enjoyed watching him at it. He had a way of just…taking charge of any situation. He usually didn’t mean to, and he was never malicious about it, but people couldn’t help but follow his lead wherever he went. That was one of the biggest things that originally attracted her to him: his essential good-natured playfulness, his exciting aggression…and his well-meaning dominance. There just wasn’t any other word for it. She was definitely biased, but as far as Marty was concerned, she had married a smart, playful goofball who was also the biggest, strongest, most handsome man there ever was, the standout best man on a team full of extreme overachievers…and he was all hers.

Adam was gesturing excitedly with his hands now, which was a clear sign he’d found some common interest with his New Friend. Friend was a young man who was clearly cowed by the happy hulking force of nature that had come to say hi. The young man’s partner, however…she had a much different expression on her face while she watched Adam. Marty would admit she enjoyed that, too…

But she wasn’t the type to share. Time to introduce herself.

They were nice people, of course, recently married and making evening plans when Diego had toddled over to them to show their own adorable son—Chris—his newest rock. That brought Adam over and set off some entertaining chemistry he was largely oblivious to. They were enjoying each other’s company, idly making plans for a double date later that night…

And it came crashing down in an instant.

Adam never really got time off, of course. He could be recalled any time. There was no sense in worrying about it, the family just had to do their thing and take the gamble. Mostly it paid off. This time, though…

Well, Adam and Marty both knew what that ringtone meant. Adam answered it sharply, listened, spoke a few short words of confirmation, then gave Marty a sorry look.

“…Sounds bad. We’d better get back to the truck quick.”

“Just go,” Marty told him. “I’ll get your dad to come get us.”

He nodded, kissed her, kissed Diego, and then vanished. There was an impossible blur of crashing movement up the trail, and he was gone.

She had a fear. A deep, deep fear. Adam was the best there was because that was what was needed to do the job. Nobody could fill his boots, figuratively or literally. He was irreplaceable.

Not just to the HEAT.

Marty took a deep breath, turned her eyes to the sky, and silently asked for everything to be okay…

But she knew it wouldn’t be.

Downing Street, London, UK, Earth

Prime Minister Stephen Davies

“All jump arrays have responded to the halt order, Prime Minister.”

“Good. At least we won’t have the same thing happening in Folctha, or anywhere else for that matter…”

Davies badly needed a drink. He’d been a back-bencher at the time of the San Diego bombing, and though that event had been orders of magnitude larger in terms of the scale of the blast, Franklin was likely to hit even harder in terms of political and economic consequences. The USA had invested huge money and effort into Franklin, there were billions of dollars in outstanding loans and borrowing that would have taken decades to pay off, and a steady flow back and forth in materials and goods.

If the colony was written off, America would have to swallow an enormous debt, not to mention the collapse of such valuable trade. Rebuilding the colony, on the other hand, would also incur vast costs, and the flow of commerce would be… discouraged, to put it mildly.

Either way, a country that was still recovering from the destruction of one of its cities was now facing the same again. Thank God the devastation had been fairly confined on the Chicago end of the jump array.

Fairly confined. Relatively confined. The array had still exploded with the force of a large bomb, but not a nuke. Mere dozens dead and wounded, not hundreds.

…Not millions. Thank God for that small mercy at least.

But until the cause of the malfunction was known, and until it could be corrected so that this never happened again, it was a good thing the Cimbrean and Lucent colonies were self-sufficient. They’d have to fend for themselves for a while.

He frowned at his private secretary as she went pale while reading a new report.

“…Cathy?”

“Prime Minister… I’ve just been informed that Colonel Powell was in Franklin on leave.”

“What the bloody hell was he doing there?”

“Visiting General Jackson, I think. They’re an item.”

Davies swore, silently and internally. Outwardly, he gripped the arms of his chair to stop his hand from shaking. “…What’s the condition of the air force base there?”

Cathy shook her head, solemnly.

“Flattened, Prime Minister.”

“…Flattened.”

“Totally destroyed. General Kolbeinn told President Chambliss as much just half an hour ago. Which means our ally is now without a space fighter wing.”

Davies stood up and took a moment to compose himself. He really, really wanted that drink now. But now was not the time.

“…If this was just an accident,” he muttered, “I will eat my hat.”

Ruins of Grissom AFB, Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Rylee Jackson

Rylee woke in the dark to the cold tap-tap-tap of water dripping on her forehead, to pain, and to confusion.

What…?

She groaned, tried to move. The pain in her arm got worse, and she tried to roll toward it. There was something extremely heavy saddled across her hips.

She’d been… at home?

Thinking. Memory. She tried to push at the heavy thing, tried to focus or at least get away from the cold water in her face. Didn’t get anywhere. Closed her eyes and tried to remember.

She’d been… at home. With Owen.

Owen!!

Clarity came back on the crest of an adrenaline wave.

Oh, holy fuck. They’d been nuked.

“Owen?” she worked the arm that didn’t hurt so much out of the rubble around her and… yes, it was him. That familiar heavy body, hard like oak and even tougher.

But stone cold.

“…Baby? No? Please??”

The other arm wouldn’t move. She just felt like something was stabbed right through it when she tried. But that wasn’t where the sudden, desperate tears came from.

“…Owen?”

++END CHAPTER 67++

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…Eighty-Five Friendly ETs, 135 Squishy Xenos and 308 Dizi Rats, born to splat.

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 68: “Nadir”

Chapter 68: Nadir

Date Point: 17y6m4w1d AV
Ruins of Grissom AFB, Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Rylee Jackson

Not like this. Please, God. Not like this…

The cold went right to Rylee’s bones. She was soaked from scalp to sole and her whole body was shaking from it. The shivering kept tugging on whatever had trapped her left arm, kept the pain raw.

Still. It was a sensation. It was something to focus on, a reprieve from claustrophobic silence punctuated only by her own breath and the maddening trickle of cold water down her cheek. The only other thing she could sense in the dark was a heavy, inert weight across her hips.

God, Owen…

She’d given up on weeping. He wasn’t waking up no matter what she did, and he was so cold. Just as cold as the water… and she was probably only alive because of him.

A large part of her didn’t want to be. It would have been… fairer… to die happy, together.

But a larger part of her knew that she absolutely did not want to die of hypothermia or suffocation in the ruins of her home. So when her long silent hell was finally invaded by the muffled knocking and thumping of activity up above…

She slapped her hand against the ceiling of her grave, and summoned all the strength she had left to scream for help.

Apparently it worked. The distant voices got more urgent. The thumping got closer and heavier. There was a crack, a crunch, something sagged, something else shifted with a scraping sound, then huge blunt fingers thrust through from above, grabbed, pulled.

The sunlight was painful. She shut her eyes, but not before she saw Warhorse twist at the waist and fling aside most of her living room wall like a huge misshapen frisbee.

His arm felt shockingly warm against her sodden skin as he reached in past her, and pressed his fingers to Owen’s neck…

Some part of Rylee had held on to hope. That part flickered and died when she saw the agony that washed over Arés’ face. He put it away quickly; he still had a patient. But she knew the difference between the mobile, worried expression he’d been wearing seconds before, and the locked-down, professional mask now in place.

Rylee was too cold, too dazed from her concussion and too exhausted to really pay attention. There were…questions, that she answered. Pain, that she endured until ‘Horse gave her something to make it go away. As it turned out, something had impaled her left arm and pinned it to the rubble. Getting her out took a long time. They wrapped her in mylar and insulation and gave her sedation while they worked, so that by the time they loaded her onto an ambulance she was barely conscious and thinking at all…

She didn’t even get to see Owen before the doors closed.

Date Point: 17y6m4w2d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The Array network was on lockdown, and that meant Deathworlder society had ground to a virtual halt. Already there were problems arising as the steady flow of raw materials from asteroid mining operations and planetside industry backed up, or wasn’t where it needed to be in time. Folks were stranded on the wrong planets, ships were having to go slow by interstellar warp rather than just safely jumping from port to port…

And that was how things were going to remain until they figured out what, exactly, had happened. Either the Franklin event was a rare malfunction of the system that needed to be fixed to ensure it never happened again… or it was enemy action, in which case, Fyu’s nuts. Their hitherto-secure lines of communication just got a whole lot less secure.

All of that meant that Daar weren’t no immediate use to nobody. He could take his time, gather facts, and act, if necessary. More likely he would preside. Reign. Encourage and guide the Champions, build up that leadership corps into a cohesive whole, rather than a nest of competing…somethings. There was a weird Earth critter, long and kinda noodly, no legs, often fantastically venomous…

Lizards? Were they lizards? Was that right? It felt right. He’d have to look it up later.

Anyway. The transition from competitors to team was comin’ along nicely, and he’d take the opportunity ‘ta hasten it along, if he could.

…Mebbe deal with an old an’ itchy burr in his fur, too.

The Bronzefurs, again. A clan of stevedores, dockers, cargo handlers and pretty much any other job that involved transferring cargo from one kind of transportation to another. They were also permanently on the edge of the Law, and had so transgressed during the War that their continued existence was by the mercy of the Females, and Daar’s personal pleasure.

It was honestly his personal distaste for slaughtering any more Gao that stayed his paw. His disgust for their wartime actions was total; Daar broke their previous champion and equally complicit grandfather in council, and he fuckin’ well enjoyed doing it. He punished the successor too, that they might grasp the reality of the situation.

But…Naydi wanted them spared, and Naydi got what she wanted. Maybe they’d rise to the occasion. Maybe they’d demonstrate whatever quality the Females saw in the Bronzefurs that inspired them to leniency. Somehow. If ever they were going to, this moment when one of the major logistical linchpins of Deathworlder society had been abruptly pulled out, was it.

Before he dealt with all of that, though, he had to make himself suitably presentable.

Some small part of himself was slightly disgusted with his sudden attention to mundane lil’ details like gettin’ cleaned up ‘fore he appeared before the Champions. But, well. A dismaying part o’ being the “god-emperor spacebear of the Deathworlders” meant his image was just as much a tool of leadership as anything else. So. He flew directly to his quarters on his personal shuttle, landing at his private pad. He got a quick but intense lifting session in so’s he’d look his athletic best for the rest of the day. Balls, ‘Horse had Daar so keyed-up and conditioned these days, even he found it a little scary. Brother Tiyun—Daar’s most bestest aide—gave Daar’s fur some attention with the brush and the oil, and maybe a strategic application of the clippers too, here and there.

Brushed an’ glossy, trimmed, neat and smelling clean an’ musky an’ ‘civilized’ rather’n a sour ol’ ditch-digger. Add in a solid pump to show off the important part of his ‘uncivilized’ side…

It’d do.

He padded down to the throne room and nodded at the guards, who respectfully stepped aside to let him pass. Daar padded up and paid his respects to the Throne, contemplated things privately for a quiet moment, then reached over to the display stand, opened it, and donned his crown. It was a deliberately heavy object, being made out of a thick, twisted band of forged osmium and hand-polished to a flawless shine. He wasn’t exactly sure how weighty it actually was; he’d guessed about ten kilos at first, but that was definitely way too low. The way Gyotin had visibly struggled to lift it overhead during the coronation, and how its substantial wooden stand always creaked slightly under its heft… The symbolism of all that weren’t lost on Daar. He’d maybe need to be terrible in the fullest sense of the word, today, and such moments were… well, they were heavy. He paid them special mind when he could sniff ‘em comin’.

As was his habit, he arrived unannounced but not stealthily. He let his footpaws fall naturally to deliberately rattle the floor, as a “discreet” means of announcing his approach. He also used a determined but not urgent pace so the Champions in council would have a moment to compose themselves. When he arrived at the ancient wooden doors—more a sieging barricade, and usually needed four strong males to laboriously heave open—he pushed them open effortlessly and prowled into the chamber. All stood while he assumed his position at the head of the table.

There were tablets, documents and maps strewn across the grand table, the tools of powerful people addressing a particularly difficult problem.

“My Champions,” he said, and sat himself down on the cold stone floor. “Please, take a seat.”

They did, and a nervous silence followed. Daar didn’t yet have a “prime minister” among his Champions—he couldn’t trust them with an independent power center just yet—so it fell on him to set direction.

Daar took a moment to settle himself in comfortably. He permitted his Champions chairs so they’d be about eye-level with him, both as a mark of respect, and to remind them of the natural order. For himself, he’d eventually acquiesced to a rug—an exquisitely handsome Dhurrie gifted to him by the Republic of India—but he eschewed a seat or a throne. Fyu had one of course, but if Daar were to try and sit on it, his heft would’ve crushed it to splinters—balls, he’d have broken it even as a late cub. Despite Fyu’s many admirable and kingly qualities, he was a small male and that meant the traditional, symbolic trappings of power were of great use to him.

Daar didn’t need them. Aside from the Crown, such things in fact actively worked against him. His power base was primal and unmissable. Sheer, unmatched might; an unshakable, unequaled will to power; uncommon skill in body and mind: those were the things that made him the Great Father. For everyone’s sake—and especially his own—it was important that everyone knew that reality to their very core the moment they smelled him, laid eyes on him, or heard him speak. If any Champion ever entertained the slightest hint of true defiance…

That was why he took time to get a good and noticeable pump into his muscles before appearing in council. Doing little things like that both disarmed the foolish against his mind, and greatly enhanced its effective use against the more intelligent and perceptive. His Champions were very much both of those things, so gentler, layered assertions of his superiority were usually more effective. That made his leadership and dominance of the Champions much more powerful, and the likelihood of violence much less. They knew what he would do, if provoked. It was therefore important they remembered why he could.

Before, all that macho snarly posturing had been a fun game. Now it was deadly serious. As a Champion before the War, he’d enjoyed his dominance over other males of course, but to him it had only ever been a playfully competitive sort of thing. He’d never meant any ill will to anyone. He still didn’t, but now he had to wield his natural dominance like a weapon, because he was the Gao, embodied in a singular person.

With the population decline (already underway), the revelations about their genetic heritage (ready to enter public trials), an existential threat from what could only be their gods, and now this, the loss of their safe lines of communication…

Since the War, the Gao were only ever one or two steps ahead of calamity. Until they could get some breathing room they couldn’t relent, and he couldn’t let them pine for it, or even consider the possibility. Daar shook out the pelt around his neck and set to business.

“I know the tactical situation well enough ‘fer now. At th’ moment I’m more interested in the strategic an’ logistical implications. In no particular order, tell me about Earth, Cimbrean, Mordor, Erebor, and Nightmare.”

The Champions glanced at each other, and a quick silent consensus figuratively pushed Champion Fiin to the front. An ideal candidate for a Prime Minister, really…but it might be unwise to elevate yet another Stoneback to high office, even if the Council chose Fiin themselves, as seemed likely. Daar had much pondering ahead of him.

“The situation on Earth is of… minimal strategic concern,” he said. “From what we’ve been sent via quantum communications, the city of Chicago suffered a large explosion, but not as large as the one at Franklin. The Human homeworld is of course completely self-sufficient and our greatest strategic concern for now is the slowed rate of communication with our allies.”

Fair enough. Daar assumed that would be the case, but it was gratifying to hear.

“That’s good, all things considered. An’ th’ rest?”

Fiin clawed a page aside and glanced at the one below it. “…as for Cimbrean, four of the five colonies are undamaged. The Royal Navy Space Corps, the HEAT and the Border Force survive. The 946th spacefighter wing, however, has been declared destroyed, sharply curtailing Human ability to establish space superiority until the unit has been restored, which will probably take years. Furthermore, the RNSC and HEAT are now confined to linear FTL travel, limiting both their range and response time.”

…Yup. That sucked balls. Daar duck-nodded solemnly, prompting him to continue.

“JETS team Two is stranded on Nightmare and unaware of what happened or why their return jump won’t work. HMS Valiant is preparing to depart and fetch them. They’re expected to survive the conditions there without incident, but it will be at least two weeks before they return to base and can make ready for another mission. Erebor is out of contact: HMS Vicious is being sent to reconnect with them and deliver supplies.”

Fiin was obviously saving the worst for last.

“As for Mordor… Grandfather Vark had put in a request for more troops to clear the tunnels. Without them, the Hunters will prey on the natives and burn their libraries. Not only that, but industry and food production on Mordor have almost come to a halt since the liberation, and the natives were becoming increasingly dependent on aid shipments as more of them fled the bunker-cities. The Grand Army certainly isn’t producing any food either. If the wormhole lockdown isn’t lifted, then we will have to devote considerable spaceborne efforts to sending freighter convoys deep into Hunter space, and we’ll have to lower the system fields to let them achieve orbit.”

“That means we gotta get that Array back up yesterday. Send message to Vark ‘ta relocate a major Array well outside o’ his encampments. We’ll start usin’ one o’ our industrial Arrays that’s way out in the country.”

“That will cause…significant logistical hurdles.”

“I’m sure that’s preferable ‘ta starvation. What’s next?”

Fiin looked down at the table again, at one last report, and Daar could see the bad news written in every line of him. The set of his ears, his posture, the way his scent changed. Everything he’d said up to now had been grim, but this next one was different.

“…There is one last thing.”

“Out with it,” Daar insisted, steeling himself.

“It’s my sad duty to inform you, My Father, that Colonel Powell was killed in the Franklin blast.”

…

Daar keened loudly before he could bring himself back under control. “I…I see. How…how did it happen?”

“He was on leave, visiting General Jackson. I gather she’s in a delicate condition and hasn’t been able to say what exactly happened yet, but his body was found shielding her in the rubble of her home.”

Daar lurched to his feet and prowled away from the table, wrestling his emotions. It took him a moment before he trusted himself to speak, and the decision he’d already made in that time was so natural, so obvious that he didn’t question himself.

“I need to travel to Cimbrean. We bring as much aid as we can. I need…I gotta pay my respects.”

“…My Father, that might be, ah…”

Daar spun around, and realized belatedly he was snarling. No, that wouldn’t do. He forced his heckles down, drew back his fangs, but he didn’t let go of the menace in his voice.

“Colonel Powell is a gods-damned hero. It is because of him our people exist today. I will pay that man his proper homage. I will make offerings of meat, and salt, and sweet-herb and wood. I will be there to respect him and all the Humans who died today, because we owe them all at least that much and more!”

None of the Champions spoke. They all waited, and watched him until Daar took a deep breath, centered himself, and returned to the table.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet and calmer than his norm. “…‘Fer now though, let’s get our own affairs in order. I wanna git ‘er dun in two steps, if we can. First is ‘ta re-secure Array access where it’s absolutely needed. There’s a few places on that list. Th’ second, is we gotta get an aid package ready. We owe ‘em our existence an’ the Gao always ‘member their debts. We clear on that?”

Fiin duck-nodded, and tidied up his notes. “Of course, My Father.”

“Right. I know y’all do. I ain’t never doubted ‘ya. I…want ‘ya to know that.”

That was as close to an apology he could get, sadly.

Fiin duck-nodded cautiously. “I know, My Father. We all do.”

And that was as close to an acknowledgement as Fiin could give, too.

“Yeah. I shall… leave y’all ‘ta ‘yer planning,” Daar said. Ruffled fur smoothed down, hopefully. And now was the time to address that other thing…

“Champion Uriigo…attend me, please.”

Uriigo looked somewhat taken aback, but he duck-nodded obediently and fell in behind Daar as they left the council chamber. He took the opportunity to meditate briefly while thumping along; he’d learned that trick decades ago during his encounter with the Third Ring. Just…let his mind go elsewhere while the body did what it needed to do. Great way to catch a walking nap.

They traversed the long hallway all the way to the throne room without speaking. Eventually, Daar snapped back to the present and noted that the huge, very public space was for now entirely empty except for the two of them, so that every step of his paws was like an insistent drumbeat, and every tap of claw on stone echoed infinitely down the hall.

Daar felt the need to break the ice, at least for his own sake. “I ain’t interested in another wrasslin’ match, if that’s what ‘yer worried ‘bout.”

“The thought had crossed my mind…” Uriigo admitted. “But then, what do you need, My Father?”

This time, he didn’t hesitate or put any exaggerated reverence in the term.

“We’re ‘bout to face a major logistical upheaval in the coming days, ‘ta state the fuckin’ obvious.”

“To say the least, My Father.”

“Seems ‘ta me, there’s a lotta opportunity in that kinda thing.”

“…Yes…”

“I’d imagine a Clan with a lotta strong, suddenly idle Brothers might be of some immediate use.”

“We are, of course, ready to help,” Uriigo said, carefully. “But we are our own Clan. We will not be used as pawns by anyone…My Father.”

Daar sighed, this time with genuine regret. “Uriigo, let’s not play these fuckin’ games. We both know how that’s gonna go ‘fer ‘ya. I ain’t interested in usin’ y’all like pawns. I never were. None of us ever were.”

“And yet here you are, checking that we’re going to do what the Gao need, reminding me of your power before we ever had the chance to act without your oversight.”

“‘Yer right. I am,” Daar said mildly. “I’m doin’ that ‘cuz ‘yer predecessor shattered that trust during the War. I think I made that point pretty forcefully when I raised you ‘ta Champion.”

Daar…had not been gentle, in that raising. In fact he’d used all his skill to beat Uriigo nearly but not quite to death, and broke him with enough care that Openpaw could put ‘em back together and expect a full recovery. The message wasn’t so much about Daar’s overwhelming power, physical and otherwise. It was about how precisely he could—and would—wield it. Uriigo lived because Daar chose to allow it. He made a rapid recovery because the Great Father mindfully spared the disobedient pup a terminal experience of his wrath. Given what history and tradition would have otherwise demanded of a Great Father against such an unruly subordinate, that was a considerable mercy.

He had fun doin’ it, too. Weren’t no point pretending otherwise. That was also part of the message.

But of course, nobody likes to lose a fight. Nobody enjoys havin’ nearly every bone in their body broken like twigs. An’ ain’t nobody likes bein’ that kind o’ humbled in public. Uriigo’s paw flashed to one of the more prominent scars Daar had left him with, while Daar kept his gaze pointing studiously forward, to spare his most troublesome Champion any further humiliation.

Daar may have enjoyed himself in the moment, but he had no desire for further harm.

“…I’m not my predecessor. I plan on keeping my Clan strong, and playing stupid games in a time of crisis ain’t the way to do that.”

“Mhmm. That’s why we’re havin’ this little talk in private.”

“…Oh, My Father?”

“Yeah. You an’ I are settled on our accounts, ‘least as long as you don’t go too far with ‘yer insufferable needlin’ one day…anyway. This here’s jus’ ‘tween you an’ me. The other Champions can speculate ‘bout our chit-chat all they fuckin’ want, ain’t their gods-dammed business. Balls, mebbe they think we’re secret lovers, or whatever. Point is this: ‘yer Clan has, over the centuries, done an awful lotta things in their interests at the callous expense o’ others. Champions got long memories. An’ right now, you’ve got a polished wooden bowl of an opportunity jus’ sittin’ there…and I ain’t gonna say nothin.’”

Uriigo’s ear flicked, and he glanced up at the throne, and the huge bas-relief behind it covering a significant stretch of Gao’s history.

“Yeah, Champions have long memories,” he agreed. “I could point to every one’a the Clans in that room an’ pick out something they did in the last couple hundred years at our expense. These times aren’t those times, My Father. My predecessor didn’t see that.”

“Well then,” Daar sank back to all fours and prowled away toward his private quarters. “Prove it.”

“How can I? Without disrespect, so long as your teeth are at my throat, you’ll never know if I’m doin’ things out of duty or fear. You want me to prove my Clan is worthy of trust, at some point you’re gonna have to turn your back and keep it turned.”

“My teeth are at everyone’s throat, Uriigo. I know that all too well. That means ‘yer on an equal footing with th’ other Champions in a perverse sorta way. So…prove it. An’ mebbe some day, when I’m dead an’ rotting, the Gao will remember what a Great Father means and will never create one again. So, be crafty. You’ve got an opportunity ‘ta erase centuries o’ mistrust, Uriigo. Ain’t no Champion in ‘yer Clan ever had that.”

He walked away. “An’ my back is turned, now.”

The doors closed behind him, and he turned to the stairs up to his apartments at the top of the keep. It was a long and familiar climb, every heavily reinforced creaking step of it, and this time he didn’t have the mental energy to take his usual soft-pawed care. He made the top, squeezed through the entryway with a complete lack of dignity, and entered his apartments.

Naydi knew. The second she looked at him, she knew. She was on her feet in a moment, dashed to him and stroked his ears.

“…What happened?”

Daar sighed heavily, slumped to the ground, nodded, and finally permitted himself to grieve properly, here where he could. Right then he didn’t…he just wanted to hold her.

He took the crown off, set it aside, and keened for another lost friend.

Date point: 17y6m4w3d AV
Ruins of Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Captain Antony Costello

There was a fine layer of metallic dust all over everything in Franklin. A whole freight train and all its cargo had been converted to highly pressurized plasma, only to cool and snow back down on the ruins after the blast shockwave. It was present on every surface as a silky black powder, it mixed with the natural oils on the skin to form dirty smudges, it stuck to boots and gloves, it quickly turned dust masks and filters black and God only knew what kind of horrible carcinogenic effects it’d have when inhaled…

…And it was just one of the many complications in the rescue effort.

The jump network was down, and staying down with no schedule for when it would be restored. There’d been a flash communication to that effect less than five minutes after the detonation, but it put Cimbrean in an odd position.

For one, it meant that they were on their own for search-and-rescue teams. All the aid personnel and first responders who would have come flooding through the Arrays in any other situation were instead being loaded onto a convoy of ships and escorted to Cimbrean the slow way, along the spacelanes at warp. They weren’t due to arrive for a month.

They’d be welcome when they got there, of course. But a month was far too long for the poor bastards trapped in the rubble.

So, it was all hands on deck for the HEAT. They had pararescue jumpers among them, after all: too few in number, but stronger and more enduring than any other to make up for it. They’d even been lucky enough that Rhino—their fourth and newest Protector—had been back in Folctha in-between bouts of his extended training. He may not have been quite mission-ready yet, but reality didn’t much care. He was mission-ready enough.

Luckily, he already had all the insane strength and endless endurance the Protectors were famous for. The four of them could go for days, it turned out. Keep them well-fed and full of their Juice…

It was the well-fed bit that let Costello catch up with them. They’d scarf down meals in seconds, but the food still took a couple of minutes to heat up. Which was how he found them, dirty and sweaty and a little bloody too, in a rough square as they fixed up a ten-thousand-calorie light snack to keep them going. Even they had their limits, after all. Even they needed to stop and recharge every so often. And they weren’t immune to grief.

God knew, ‘Horse and ‘Base in particular had experienced enough of it.

They had a small forward base, thanks to Titan’s inventiveness. An electrostatically charged forcefield could sweep a space clean of the ubiquitous dust, create somewhere safe where the dust masks could come off and food packs could be unsealed, cooked and eaten, or where open wounds could be cleaned and dressed. He’d set them up on major intersections all across Franklin, and each one was now a nexus for triage, supply storage or just taking the weight off weary feet for a moment.

The Protectors had claimed the corner of 24th and Montana for their own little space. Franklin had a predictable, methodical approach to names: numbers north to south, states east to west. 24th and Montana was, therefore, pretty much right in the middle of town, a central location where all the Protectors’ heaviest gear could be safely stashed and fetched on short notice if needed.

Costello wasn’t in the mood for the usual courtesies, and waved Rhino down as he joined them. The lad was still in the training pipeline and still had some of the toy-soldier mindset going on. The other three knew him well by now, and Butler shuffled aside to make room for him to join them, which he did.

“General Jackson’s on a Weaver back over to Folctha,” he told them, launching straight into the important news so as not to waste their time. “I gather they’ve already called in Nofl.”

“Yeah,” ‘Horse grunted. “Her arm was pretty fucked up. Honestly kinda surprised she didn’t bleed out.”

“Well, she has the old man to thank for that.” Costello said. There were nods. Colonel Powell’s last living act had been to save the woman he loved, and he’d succeeded. That was a tiny, dim glimmer of comfort amidst a whole lot of despair, but was something at least. Not enough… but something.

Knowing she was alive, stable and on her way to real medical attention had to be at least a small boon. Every morsel of good news was something to share right now.

“Who’s this Nofl guy?” Rhino asked.

“Corti, but he’s alright,” ‘Base explained. “There’s a dude walkin’ around Folctha on two feet right now who only had the one before Nofl fixed him up. And another woman who got fuckin’ stabbed right in the heart by a Hunter, she’s alive thanks to him.”

“And he’s the dude who invented Cruezzir,” ‘Horse added.

Rhino raised an eyebrow, suitably impressed.

Butler paused in reaching out to pick up his meal pouch. “Shit, that reminds me. Wasn’t Julian offworld with the JETS?” he asked. “With the Arrays down…”

“HMS Valiant is en route to collect them,” Costello reassured him. “They’ll be there a bit longer than planned, but that’s all.”

“Do they know that yet?”

“…No, actually. They don’t. And they won’t until either Valiant arrives or the network goes back up. No idea when that’ll happen.”

“Or if,” ‘Base muttered, pessimistically.

Costello had no reply to that one. He stood up again. “Right. Well. I want you four to resume a normal schedule. We’ve got dogs and Gao searching and, well, it’s been a while.” He left the rest unsaid. “So Burgess, figure out a rotation. Routines are more important now than ever, and that’s extra true for you huge fuckers.”

He drew a little dark amusement out of Arés, Burgess and Butler at least. Rhino—Cohen—just blinked. He’d figure things out eventually.

“We got somewhere permanent to get some shuteye yet, sir?”

“Deacon carved us out a spot. You be sure and thank her.” Costello pointed in the general direction of the HEAT’s sealed, filtered tent. “Tenth and Vermont. She promised me there’d even be showers by the time you arrive.”

“I think I’m in love,” ‘Horse grumbled a bit humorlessly.

Costello could only nod. Still, he was satisfied that they were… okay. Not great, but okay.

Shit, though, the team had taken some hits lately. And this one was just… a bolt out of the blue. This wasn’t a brother falling in the line of duty, this was the loved and respected CO just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Costello sure as shit wasn’t feeling great about that. Powell had been his mentor and something of a second father. Waves of grief kept hitting him and building like pressure in his head and heart until he could push them back down again and focus. A couple of times an hour, every hour, ever since he’d first heard the news.

The Crude was undoubtedly making it worse, too. He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for any of the Beefs. Hell, they’d gone through the pipeline in Huntsville with him, too.

Just how much more could they take, really? The HEAT had been active for just seven years, and in that time, well…

Price. Stevenson. Jones. Vandenberg. Bozo. Blaczynski. And now, Powell.

They were the most elite of any military formation in the galaxy, but their mission was still brand new and they were solving for it as they went along. Their enemies may have been weak-bodied and silly, but they weren’t stupid, and they were certainly dangerous. Hell, they’d come uncomfortably close to disaster at least twice.

And too few people knew about it. Not that the Lads would say they wanted recognition or appreciation, not that Costello wanted it himself. But for men like those to die quietly and unsung was wrong.

His thoughts turned to the mass grave being excavated at the edge of town. There was no time for anything more personal or more dignified. All of Franklin’s dead, military and civilian, human and ET alike, all of them were getting a simple wooden box at most, stacked like cargo in a pit.

That was wrong, too. Necessary, but wrong.

And try as he might, Costello just couldn’t think of a way to make things right. All he could do was… carry on. Shoulder the burden that had just landed on him. Be a worthy commanding officer, though he didn’t yet feel ready. And keep the faith that their efforts were pushing in the right direction, that one day there’d be a victory worth dedicating to those good men (and dog).

His boot scuffed up another puff of dust as he walked, and reminded him. Not just them. Not just the good men of the HEAT. Everyone. Every abducted human caught by Hunters or spaced by cowardly aliens, every poor soul of San Diego and Chicago and Franklin, every Gaoian, every Guvnurag, every one of the Hierarchy’s unwitting brain-slaves, every single soul of all those thousands of anonymously genocided species, every Ten’Gewek and E-Skurel-Ir and everyone of every kind who’d lived in terror of the Hunters for literally millions of years…

There was a fucking reckoning coming.

Or else he’d die trying.

Date Point: 17y6m4w3d AV
Field camp, planet Nightmare

Daniel Hoeff

“It’s late.”

“You’re sure?”

“My watch, your watch, Ferd’s watch, they all say the same thing. We got a late jump.”

“Jumps are never late.”

Hoeff nodded solemnly. Jumps couldn’t be late, any jump coming out of Earth or Cimbrean had to be carefully timed to a scheduled window in the Farthrow field. A late jump was a no-jump.

Which meant their supplies weren’t coming today.

Thank fuck they’d brought a bunch of emergency supplies for just this event, but the worried look that passed between all the humans on the team was telling. And the look of downright alarm and dismay on Julian’s face, doubly so. Quite abruptly, he turned away and trudged through the snow to go split some firewood.

Hoeff couldn’t blame the big guy. He’d been stuck on this hellhole planet once before, for six goddamn years. If the jumps were down and they were stranded here again…

The Ten’Gewek were anything but stupid, but sometimes they didn’t know everything they needed to fully get their heads around how big a bit of bad news was. Ferd watched Julian go with a tilt of his head and a tick of his tail, then looked to Hoeff for clarification.

“What’s so bad? They send another one, yes?”

“Think ahead, big guy. You four ain’t built for the cold. You need to eat a lot to keep warm, and that means our supplies won’t last too long.” Hoeff turned back toward the shelter. “If they don’t send us another jump, then things are gonna get tight quick.”

“And them not sending us this one says something went wrong,” Frasier added, gloomily.

“Right, yeah. We gotta plan for the worst. No more jumps, maybe a ship on its way at best. We could be stuck here a long time…” Hoeff glanced at Julian again, round about the time the crack of the big guy’s axe halving a log echoed between the trees. “And I think he’s already on it.”

Rees, as ever, was the more optimistic of the two Brits. “Well, he’s done it before.”

“He was a lot younger, he wasn’t a Beef Bro big enough to casually snap strongmen in two, and he didn’t have four cavegorillas to feed, either.”

“We can hunt,” Ferd said with an annoyed lash of his tail. “None of us useless childs.”

“You’ve seen what hunting’s like ‘round here. You spend more effort digging the bloody thing up than—” Frasier began.

“Bitchin’ ain’t gonna get shit done,” Hoeff growled. “We’ve got food for now, what we need is firewood and better shelter. Monkeybros, go help Julian. It’ll get done a lot quicker. Rees, Frasier? Let’s get our lean-to in some kind of better shape. Y’all come join us when you’re done with the wood.”

“Yes, Boss.”

That was the thing about Frasier. Doom-and-gloom merchant he may be, but he never actually griped when given something concrete to do. The three of them quickly decided that the best thing for their shelter was to get a more sturdy kind of roof on it. Right now, it kept the wind out, which was great. But it didn’t really keep the warm air in. With the fire crackling and well-tended, a guy could sleep warmly enough, but if they could close it over and insulate a bit better, they could burn a lower and slower fire and the same fuel supply would go further.

That was the theory, at least.

Hoeff got his chance to speak with Julian when the big guy hauled over a double armful of split wood to add to the fuel pile.

“You okay?”

“…Can’t believe I’m stuck here again.” Julian shook his head with a frustrated snarl on his lips. He slumped down next to his pack and grabbed a cup full of snow and a coffee sachet. “I knew I didn’t wanna come back here for a reason…”

Julian was generally a laid-back kind of dude, despite his immense presence. He was good at putting people at ease and making friends; there wasn’t much that riled him up. Separating him from his family, though? That’d do it. The last thing they needed right now was Beef Bro Tarzan on the knife edge of raging out, in an environment only he properly knew how to survive.

Hoeff squatted down in front of him. “Hey. Big guy. Hey. Look at me. You here? Good. Listen. The worst case is it takes a week, maybe two to get a ship out here. Okay? You’ll be home wrasslin’ with the boys pretty quick.”

“…Hope you’re right.” Julian set his cup in the coals at the edge of the fire: the snow inside it hissed and squeaked as it started to melt. “What could have stopped the jumps, though? If something happened to Folctha…”

Hoeff clapped a hand down on his huge shoulder. “Hey. Whatever happened, you can’t change it. What you can change is here and now. Worrying won’t do shit for the people you love, except distract you. You know that.”

Julian just nodded. Still, Hoeff was satisfied. The big fella had a lot more to live for than the last time he’d been stuck on Nightmare, and he’d held on and lasted through that ordeal without any real hope at all. Now he had a family to go back to and every reason to believe they’d be rescued sooner rather than later? There was no doubt.

Still. They could afford to give him a minute to get his head on straight. “Tell ya what. Brew us all a drink. Fuck knows, I could do with something to warm me up anyhow.”

Julian nodded again, more firmly. “Sure.”

Hoeff nodded, patted his shoulder again, then stood up and went to go check on the monkeybros and the huge pile of wood they were generating.

They’d be okay, he was sure of that much.

Everybody else was just gonna have to take care of themselves.

Date Point: 17y6m4w3d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

Beau was running on coffee and grit, and he wasn’t a young man any longer. The same fuel of resolve and caffeine that had seen him through many long nights during his career from campus to campaign trail just didn’t go so far nowadays. He’d pay for skipping sleep, sooner rather than later.

But he’d put the sleep off as long as he could, and there were worse substances to medicate himself with than a well-sugared latte.

And it sure tasted a hell of a lot better than all the crow he’d just had stuffed down his throat.

“At this point, it’s really not a question of whether it was sabotage, it’s a question of who, how, when, and where. And until we know exactly how it was done and can prevent it from ever happening again…”

Beau sighed and nodded. “…Then the next one could be New York, Folctha, London, Rotterdam, Beijing, Wi Kao or… how many array complexes are there around the world now?”

“Dozens, Mister President. Nearly all of them in major metropolitan areas, too.”

“And all of them have to remain offline and unused until we know they’re safe, otherwise we’re just inviting even more disasters and even more deaths.” Chambliss drained his coffee and massaged his face. “Still. Talk about the lesser of two evils…”

General Marcus Talmadge, the director of the NSA and the man currently tasked with briefing the president on this whole mess, nodded solemnly. “Yes, sir.”

“Do we have any idea how long it’ll be before we can…?”

“No, sir.” Talmadge shook his head. “It depends on who’s responsible.”

“Explain.”

“If it was a human terrorist—and there are still APA elements who haven’t been captured yet—then we’re in the usual digital arms race. If it was a Hierarchy agent… well, that’s an arms race we can’t win. They’re effectively an intelligent quantum computer, only they tap into living brains for their non-deterministic factor. Probably. To them, our encryption and security systems are eminently surmountable obstacles at best.”

Beau thought about that for a moment. “So either way, this can happen again.”

“There are measures we can take. Air-gapping critical infrastructure, for instance, so that it simply can’t be accessed from outside. But ultimately, if a Hierarchy agent can touch a network, they can penetrate it.”

“And there’s no way we could introduce a human override.” Beau shook his head, knowing the answer to that was a firm no. Planes had pilots, heck, even astronauts had eyeballed a safe return to Earth in the past. But the jump arrays? What human override could there be in a precisely calculated manipulation of the very fabric of spacetime? There was no tiller to put a human hand on. You might as well ask for a safety sorceror.

Talmadge’s shake of the head had a rueful quality. “It would have helped if the commercial sector had accepted our security recommendations…”

“Why weren’t they mandatory?”

“Lobbying, and philosophical disagreements with the previous Administration.”

“I see.” Beau kept his expression neutral. “And what are your recommendations now?”

“At the very minimum, every jump array in the world needs to be transferred onto a completely isolated network, with the usual head-scanning and nanotech screening for all persons with access. Jump-capable starships must isolate from all communications and perform a thorough system audit before jumping. Details will need to be worked out, obviously.”

“How quickly can all of that be done?”

“Not very. At a normal pace, planning and deploying air-gap networks takes…years.”

“And I suppose the faster we push it, the more likely there would be some kind of potentially fatal oversight or mistake,” Beau observed, bleakly. Talmadge didn’t need to reply; the confirmation was written plain on his face.

Beau stood, and patrolled the Oval Office with a sigh. “…A whole thriving interstellar economy just came crashing down in one moment,” he muttered. “And now I find out our timescale for resurrecting it safely is years, plural and minimum. It doesn’t matter if we get interstellar freighters flying quickly, transit between ground and orbit just became more expensive, difficult and dangerous.”

He paused in front of ’The Avenue in the Rain’ and gave the antique oil painting a long, solemn look. “…We overreached. Too far, too fast, too aggressively,” he decided. “Out into the stars the second we could, without really taking the time to prepare for it. It’s the same mistake the Byron Group made early on. The same mistake that cost three HEAT lives on their first mission. The same mistake that cost us San Diego! Just how many times do we have to get burned before we stop sticking our hands in the fire?!”

He turned back around and slumped down on one of the couches rather than return to the desk. After a moment, he turned his eyes back up toward Talmadge. “…Thank you, general. I will take your recommendations seriously,” he promised.

A president’s lot was to have little time alone, so the few minutes he did get once Talmadge was gone were a mixed blessing. On any other occasion, they would have been a rare pleasure. Today… they were a chance to feel tired. He’d turn in early, tonight. For the moment, he did his best to smooth away some of the lines in his face, rub some of the hot grit out of his eyes, and readied himself for Policy.

The general’s suggestions did not go down well. Nor did Beau’s resolve to rebuild Franklin and the 946th.

“How do we even begin? We have the damage in Chicago to consider, we’re still paying off everything that was borrowed after San Diego… do we even have the money to do this?”

“No.” Beau shook his head dismissively. “And it doesn’t matter anyway. We have the industry and the materials, so we’re simply going to get it done and worry about money some other time.

“We still have to pay people!”

“Yes. With the magical fiat currency we all pretend has intrinsic value, in a world where the dollar is the de-facto unit of exchange, in a situation where absolutely nobody is going to question the game when Treasury carefully–carefully–fires up those printers.”

Beau turned and straightened his spine, stood a little taller. “The alternative is death. For our nation, and eventually for us all. I built my presidential campaign on caring for the American people and wanting the best for them, and right now that means defending them. I want the 946th restored. I want planes, and pilots, and personnel, and I want them right back where they were, as soon as we can make it happen. I promised them prosperity, and that means getting the array network rebuilt to the highest standard of safety. I never promised them easy or quick. We’re in for a two-term uphill battle, tight belts, a mountain of debt and probably a recession. But we’ll come of out it on a stronger foundation than we had coming in.”

“The press will attack—“

“No, they won’t.”

“…how can you say that? They hounded Sartori for years!”

“Yes, they did. What’s different now?” Chambliss sighed, “Do I really need to spell it out? Yes. It’s unfair and stupid. But right now, I’ll take any advantage I can get, and if a partisan media that’s on our side works to the advantage of the American public and the world at large, I’ll take it.”

And that was that. The wheels of Republic were in motion. There’d be opposition, and no shortage of difficulties and hardships ahead, but the ship of state at least had a heading and a distant port in mind no matter what reefs and storms may beset the voyage.

He went to bed at something like an early hour, too. He even got a good night’s sleep, and breakfast with Catherine after a fashion. She was in Chicago, but they were propped up opposite each other via tablets. A poor substitute for her familiar warmth beside him at night, or a kiss before breakfast, but far better than nothing.

And after that… another day beckoned.

Date Point: 17y6m4w3d AV

Professor Daniel Hurt

Something about the prospect of extended survival focused the mind like nothing else, and Daniel found himself genuinely surprised by his immediate reaction: it wasn’t sadness, or shock, or grief, or rage. It wasn’t anything like that.

His immediate reaction was calculation. Late fall was the ideal season for this to happen, when the hunting was (apparently) easy, the work was (relatively) easy, the Ten’Gewek were focused on teaching their children and getting ready to put on that thin layer of fat they needed for the coming short but intense winter. At least his staff and colleagues would have time to adjust to their new routine.

He woke everyone up and broke the news over his best coffee. They knew something was up when he’d brewed a whole pot of his coveted beans, and their reactions were similarly practical to his. While they went about deciding what an indefinite stay on Akyawentuo might mean—closing up research, securing sensitive experiments, maybe—Daniel had a much less pleasant job.

He had to go to Yan, hat-in-hand, and ask for charity.

Mornings for Yan were always something intense. He might be hunting, he might be beating on metal in Vemik’s hut as essentially a living power hammer. He might be teaching the young ones important skills, as Given-Men were considered the head-teachers of boys. Or, like today, he might just be pumping literal tons of iron and wrestling with his strongest friends.

Ten’Gewek being Ten’Gewek, they’d been fascinated when Walsh and Etsicitty had set up their first workout area, and begged curiously for the two to teach them. The two meatheads taught them the basics of weightlifting, what formal sparring practice looked like…and the Ten’Gewek took that instruction and ran with it. The iron game played to their instincts perfectly and they were phenomenal natural strength athletes, men, women, and children alike. Now Yan’s and the surrounding villages had access to large well-tamped dirt and gravel pad, a Warhorse-grade set of good iron weights on it, and an enormous, well-kept sparring mat bought from a sporting goods company. They used (and shared, happily!) their “jungle gym” with all comers, and attacked their new “strong games” with just as much enthusiasm, discipline and natural talent as they did anything else.

Other villages further away from the Array were saving up the survey and sampling “mun-ees” they’d been earning to do the same. And, since fall was a relaxed time for them, much of their Given-Man post and radio chatter these days was about who beat whom in their monkey-fun, which tribe could beat which in “war” and so on. Cultural contamination came in many forms, after all; the Ten’Gewek we’re learning sports team rivalry.

By the time Daniel came down from the village, Yan had just finished putting things away and saying his goodbyes to the visiting men from other villages, whom he’d no doubt spent the entire morning playfully humiliating; Ten’Gewek played rough and Yan was no exception. The huge gorilla noticed Daniel approaching, grunted in greeting and knuckled over to say hello.

Parlay with Yan at perhaps his most feral wasn’t something for the weak at heart. Every sweat-soaked inch of him was a lean, anatomically perfect example of vitality carved into living granite. Even doing something as simple as knuckle-walking, he was so packed full of strength that he moved with a sort of ground thumping, larger-than-life swagger that his sheer size and muscularity made impossible to miss.

“Professor!” Yan wiped the sweat off his face with one of his man-breaking mitts. He was in a friendly mood, which probably meant he’d won extra hard today. “You come too late to play!”

Daniel deadpanned, “I wish I could, but we have a problem.” There was no point in beating around the bush with Yan.

“Hmm.” Yan cocked his head. “How big a problem?”

“Small enough to worry about.”

Yan grunted, and headed over to one of the giant glazed vessels they kept fresh water in these days. Most of it was rainwater, but some of it was collected from the village Ketta every day, because its sap was watery, mildly sweet, and had a potent anti-microbial something in it that meant the clay pot never fouled.

He lifted the lid and cupped out a few palmfuls of water before filling an empty waterskin from a neat pile nearby. Dan waited while Yan attended to himself—one always waited on the Given-Man, especially when he’d just been doing something to get his blood going. Yan was considerate, though, and tended to himself quickly. He wringed and combed the sweat out of his crest from top to tail, stretched out a bit, and exuberantly bounced in place a few times like a goddamned flea, probably because he was feeling an exercise high and didn’t want it to end. Each of those no-effort leaps of his easily achieved several meters of height, which he casually landed with ground-shuddering crashes. No surprise, really; Ten’Gewek routinely jumped into, between, and from high out of trees, and Yan could have jumped considerably higher if he’d wanted to. None of them seemed to have any concern for heights.

The only thing more intimidating than a Ten’Gewek’s incredible physicality—any of them, even the most average of their people—was the knowledge there were a number of humans and gaoians who could match it…and Daniel had met almost all of them. He didn’t know if he should be impressed they could do the same, or concerned that there were so very few who could.

Yan eventually stopped aping around and focused his full, intense attention on Daniel. “Well, we worry about many things, I think. Tell me about this new worry.”

“The jump arrays are offline. All of them. We got a short message over the emergency system to let us know, but we don’t know why.”

Yan’s tail twitched as he thought. “So, no going back to Sim-bree-an.”

“No. And none of our usual supply packages.”

“You will need food very soon, then.”

“That’s the shape of it, yes.”

Yan nodded. “Then it is good this happened now. This is no problem.”

Daniel was honestly a little taken aback. He knew Yan as a generous soul, and he knew the Given-Men felt that the People had a great debt still to pay back to humans in general, but feeding his research team was no trivial matter. “Still, it’s a burden your hunters wouldn’t have had otherwise. Tell us what we can do to pay it back.”

Yan waved a giant blunt-fingered hand at him reassuringly. “You Give us very much already. But! I not so stupid to say no to help! Most of your staff are women. They help the village with the last ‘canning’ we do before winter. Your men can help fix huts and things, maybe help Vemik make charcoal! My men can hunt more if they do not need to do village-work, yes?”

Most young college-age people would probably bristle at the casual way Yan talked about gendered work, but, well, survival had a way of focusing the mind on practical matters, and reality had a way of not being high-minded and egalitarian. To the Ten’Gewek, the rhythm of gender was just as much a part of life as the rhythm of night and day, winter and summer. Ignoring it was a hard-won human luxury.

Fortunately, Yan was a friendly charmer. He’d made every woman on the expedition giggle from his shameless flirting at one point or another, and he’d befriended every man too, no matter how little he understood about what they were doing. Yan tried and that was enough.

“We’ll be glad to. We have a few sensitive projects that will have to be put to bed first, but… that’s the work of a few days, no more than that. And we have supplies to cover that. In fact we have supplies to last for a couple weeks, but…”

“That is good, we should keep those. Never know what the gods may test us with. Anyway! You come help me and Vemik, we will need to make proper knives for everyone!”

Yan’s English vocabulary had been a hard-won thing. He didn’t pick up language quite as fast as the younger folk, but he was also much more careful and correct with how he used it, and he was much more thoughtful about how he blended it into his native tongue. Dan didn’t know if that was a cognitive or personality trait of his, but there was no denying his staggering intelligence, or his widely respected wisdom, either; all the Given-Men emulated his style of speaking, and that percolated down through the tribes—

Daniel realized suddenly what Yan had actually said. “Wait, me? You want me to help make knives?”

“Yes!” Yan was bouncy and cheery again, and bounded clear across the village with a few tremendous horizontal leaps over to the forge, where he fetched some heavy leather gloves and bounded back just as impressively. “See?! We have human gloves that will fit I think! Made for Jooyun’s hands but should still work! You go put nice clothes away and come back. Bring lots of water! And eat something fatty too!”

“I should point out that I’ve never actually made a knife before.”

“We all start somewhere. Will be good for you!” Yan raised his titanic arms and displayed a pair of round, vascular biceps, each of which was bigger than his own goddamned head. He worked his arms in and out a few times, taking his time to show off the rest of their absurdly muscular thickness, then loudly slapped his brick-like chest and grinned smugly down at Dan. “Make you strong too!”

Ugh, God…

Of all Dan’s testosterone-poisoned acquaintances, Yan was easily the cheeriest and most blatant show-off. And that, frankly, was saying something; even Julian, by far the most laid-back of all of them, had essentially zero self-consciousness and was not at all shy about performing some astounding feat of athleticism, or striking a pose for a laugh. Tossing around boulders as wide as his own door-wide shoulders or leaping around like a Ten’Gewek?

He made it all look so easy, the friendly bastard.

Yan, of course, was all of that but much, much more, and rightfully proud of himself. If anyone were to ever “beat” Daar or Warhorse at their grunt-games, it’d be him. Fortunately, he didn’t take himself too seriously, so his almost pro-wrestling attitude towards all things grunty was more about goofy play than anything else.

Most everything with the Ten’Gewek was play, really. There was a certain wisdom in that.

Dan chuckled and shook his head. “Yan, there are limits to what a man like me can do. I doubt I’ll be arm-wrestling any of you anytime soon.”

“Not with that attitude! How you think I make myself one of the strongest men in gal-ax-ee? Not from sitting around and picking at tail! When spring Fire come, I crush Warhorse too!”

He tensed up his entire body and showed off his genuinely ridiculous physique a bit more aggressively, because why not, apparently; his obscenely huge legs in particular were like a carved-granite anatomy chart from hips to ankles, even compared to the rest of him. Extremely impressive, to be sure…

…But Dan really didn’t have the humor in him just then. Instead he rolled his eyes, crossed his arms and gave Yan a Look. Eventually, the Chief of the Lodge remembered there was Serious Business at hand, and no pretty women nearby to impress—or at least, anyone willing to wrestle—so he sobered up and returned to the matter at hand.

“Fine, fine, be all serious-think and no fun! You should still help, good work is still good for you. You grow much since we met that first day, all soft fat and sick-sweat…but a man should always try for more. And if you be here for long you will need good strong knives…”

Well. There was the moral imperative, right there. Yan was undeniably right. They all had utility knives of course, but they were small and nimble, fit for a variety of work and for clever human hands. Now, the kind they really needed were much heavier and more durable. Vemik had essentially mastered the ideal Akyawentian survival knife, and now it looked like Dan was going to learn how to make them.

A small price, for the tribe’s generosity. And honestly it was the kind of practical education he always told his students was good for them. But also a lot of hard work.

Fortunately, Daniel had learned to break an academic lifetime’s aversion to hard work. He’d probably wind up having fun, even if the idea was daunting at that exact moment. So, he followed Yan’s advice and returned to the research camp to share the good news, load up on good filling food, and change into his hard-wearing bush gear.

…He also brought his ibuprofen. And on second thought, he left the shirt behind, too. Forges were hot and there was no point in suffering more than he needed. And besides: there was a leather apron there, too. He wouldn’t be completely without protection…

When he returned, Yan was already there, pounding merrily on a melt with the kind of force one would expect of power equipment. Vemik was there too, preparing his tools, and he was positively exploding with happiness over the idea he’d be teaching the Professor something for a change. On a day of bad news, where they knew nothing about what happened and could only worry…

It wasn’t such a terrible thing to be a student again.

Date Point: 17y6m4w5d AV
Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Ava had taken a lot of photos in her life.

There was a certain culture of neophiles who insisted that photos would one day go extinct, but so far the art had outlived every deadline they’d ever set. The right picture was worth more than even the right footage, and definitely worth far more than a mere thousand words. Sometimes the world just…lined up. And the right eye in the right place with the right lens and shutter could save that moment forever.

The mass grave outside Franklin was a moment worth saving. But even more so were the living moments around it. A worker slumped against his excavator, staring numbly into his water bottle with two clean lines through the grime on his cheeks. A Gaoian fitting a special filter muzzle on a Cimbrean mastiff so the animal could safely sniff through the rubble without inhaling a nose full of carcinogenic dust, their body language a strange alien mirror of each other. An airman, one of the few who escaped the blast unharmed, standing guard with his face hidden behind a dust mask.

That mask was everywhere. It was the face of grief in Franklin, a death mask for the modern age. It only came off in the safety of sealed tents or beneath the aegis of static field generators. Ava’s kept getting in the way when she raised her viewfinder to her eye, and it was rubbing the bridge of her nose raw.

And—something a camera could never preserve—there was the smell. Ash from the burned houses, burnt plastic, scorched metal, dust on the wind, and a scent that Ava couldn’t describe but knew instinctively was rising from the open end of the mass grave.

The gravework wasn’t done. There were still many bodies to bury, and another trench to dig.

There were folks causing trouble, too. Not mean-spirited trouble, nothing opportunistic or selfish, or anything that could harm an observer’s faith in humanity. Just bereaved families who didn’t want their loved ones to lie anonymously alongside thousands of others. Who wanted to say goodbye properly and personally, rather than thrust somebody who’d mattered to them into a pit and forget about them. Good people.

But the moment that lined up best, the one that Ava knew was going to become an iconic image of the day, was of the gravediggers and Daar.

Any other head of state would have met them, shaken their hands, listened solemnly to them, laid a wreath or some other token of respect, made a speech, retired to planning rooms and privacy as soon as the public performance was done.

Daar dug the grave.

He dug it with his bare paws, in the mud and dirt himself, levelling off and tidying what the excavator had done, shovelling the potassium nitrate, stacking bodies and boxes alongside the other workers. And he saw to the comfort of everyone he could.

He noticed Ava shortly after he emerged from the trench. He didn’t react much at first, just a flick of his ear and then turning away toward the cleanup tent, but maybe an hour later she was sought out by one of his assistants and invited to attend him aboard his transport ship.

He hadn’t cleaned up yet. In fact, he was stretching out and massaging what were clearly aching muscles. He didn’t stop when she joined him, just hooked his claws into the floor and pulled, stretching out his shoulder. “Y’got some good shots?”

He was being a bit humorously playful, she knew. “You’ve grown quite a bit since the last time.”

“Mhmm, an’ I got lots o’ frame ‘ta fill out even still. Think I’ll keep my clothes on this time, though….rrghn.”

“I’d think a vest hardly counts as clothes…you feeling okay?”

“Eh. Long work is long work, even if it ain’t all that hard t’do. You can get a cramp just writin’ so why is that any surprise?”

Ava gave him a look. “That’s not entirely what I meant.”

“I know.” He sighed, ceased his stretches, and sat up. “…There’s a friend in a fridge up there. A good man who deserves way more. Fuck, they all deserve way more. I prob’ly got more friends in that trench, too.”

He stood, and offered her a chair to sit in. “I s’pose we shouldn’t pretend like we’re jus’ bein’ friendly-like, huh?”

Ava nodded, reluctantly. “You’re here as the Great Father, I’m here doing my job…”

“I ain’t ever not the Great Father, Ava. You know that.”

“I know, but… sometimes you’re more the Great Father than other times?” she suggested.

“Less an’ less as time goes on. Daar and the Great Father are sorta mergin’ into one guy.”

“You speak of yourself in two different persons. Some might consider that alarming.”

“All kings worth a salt do, ‘cuz the thing they embody ain’t a natural kinda o’ being. I’ve had some long talks ‘bout that point with His Majesty an’ others. Big part o’ what I did on my tour.”

“And now here you are, digging graves. You built a lot of pyres on Gao too, as I recall.”

“Yeah. I am Daar. I ain’t gonna let that part o’ me get murdered by the Great Father. An’ I’m the Great Father. I ain’t gonna let Daar’s proclivities ruin the office. ‘Least,” he grumbled with a bit of humor, “not too much.”

Ava nodded, and felt it was time to move on from discussing him to discussing the situation.

“A lot of what humanity built over the last fifteen years or so is thanks to jump technology. What do you think happens if we can’t patch whatever caused this and go back to using it?”

“If I don’t miss my guess, ‘yer askin’ me that question ‘cuz I got a reputation ‘fer blunt honnesty, an’ nobody else don’t wanna touch answerin’ it, yijao?”

Ava didn’t reply to that. She just waited patiently for an answer.

Daar sighed. “Well, I ain’t gonna get over my paws too much. It’d be catastrophic. I don’t think that’s anythin’ people don’t know. But if we gotta make it work, then we’ll gods-damn make it work. Ain’t no way our worlds can be cut off from one ‘nother at this point.”

“Is that why you came here?”

Daar shook his head and gestured vaguely out the back of his transport toward the city ruins. “I came t’pay respects. The 946th fought hard in the Battle of Gao, there’s unsung heroes lyin’ dead here that my people owe our existence to. How could I not come here? Wouldn’t be right.”

Nobody would ever accuse the Great Father of detachment. He was very much a leader with his paws in the mud. And speaking of…

Daar had unconsciously positioned himself perfectly on the cargo ramp of his transport. He didn’t fly in sumptuous luxury; he was simply too damn big to do that. Instead, he sat right on the metal floor, and that fact was framed unavoidably behind him. Ava raised her camera to take a picture and she knew instantly she had a winner. All he wore was a bright safety-yellow harness and his own natural pelt, cut long and shaggy. His physique was bigger and mightier than ever, with every hard muscular line plainly visible through his pelt. This time, however, his expression and the thick lather of his perspiration gave him a thoroughly haggard, yet defiant look. There was still dirt on his claws and in his fur, all the way back to his elbows.

It was perhaps the most honest portrait of him she’d ever managed.

Daar gave her a sly grin when she lowered the camera. “That’s ‘yer freebie. Don’t make a habit outta that, ‘kay?”

Ava smiled in return. “I kinda already did.”

“Ha! Well, send a copy to Leela, ‘kay? That’s ‘yer payment.” There was a noise inside that Daar turned his head towards and listened for a moment. “Right.” He returned his attention to Ava. “Time to go. Stay safe.”

“I will. And you stay safe too.”

The giant gaoian nodded, turned his head and prowled up into the ship. With that the ramp raised, and she was ushered back as the engines spooled up.

Another minute, and the Great Father of the Gao was gone.

And that left…a story. He’d labored for literally hours and saw the mass grave through to its completion. He’d brought a hastily-assembled aid package, too. Photo-op or not, he’d at least paid for it.

But the work was only just beginning. Franklin had been substantially leveled. Only the westernmost portion of the city had survived. There was no municipal gravity or power, the sanitary sewers were non-existent. Emergency services were saturated and martial law had been declared.

There was a lot more to the story than galactic leaders digging in the dirt.

Ava set to work.

Date Point: 17y6m4w5d AV
Dodge City, Kansas, USA, Earth

Six

De-implantation was considerably trickier than implantation, and left a non-trivial chance of permanent damage. There was also a recovery time involved, so Six had to contrive for Austin to need such a thing; an unwise accident while lifting gave Six just enough to justify a day or two in bed.

He hadn’t needed to contrive much. The Chicago incident had motivated Austin in an entirely unexpected way. He didn’t cower, or feel defensive. Instead, he got angry. Anger and an intense sense that he had to do something to fight the threat—which was also remarkable, because nobody on any news media had yet voiced the notion it was an attack.

But the humans seemed to know it was. Somehow. Austin knew it instantly and so had all his friends.

In either case, all Six had to do was carefully induce just the smallest mistake while Austin was squatting in his makeshift gym. Unwisely he was alone, and he was moving an astounding weight up and down, up and down…

An inconveniently timed spasm in his left leg brought it crashing down with a sprain so bad, he could hardly walk. And, Lauren happened to be in town for the day, which was just enough time to arrange for his de-implantation, leaving Austin none the wiser and nursing a headache he hardly noticed compared to the soreness in his leg.

There had been no detectable cognitive damage. Strangely, Six felt somewhat relieved by that.

Lauren did her part to keep him safely in bed and recovering as well. Six no longer had to experience their endless procreative activities personally, but he did check in with a stealth drone, just to make sure. The first night she was massaging his leg with some painful-looking kind of smooth steel implement, mostly by mashing the muscle flat as hard as she could…

The next few nights were spent far more vigorously, but Six had already moved on. The drone was there just to keep an eye on things.

His new host was chosen with rather more care. Austin had been a standout, a specimen to match Six’s sense of pride. But a return to Hierarchy doctrine was in order: the ideal host was somebody unremarkable, harmless and preferably lonely. Not a complete down-and-out, but definitely in the bottom half of the social dominance hierarchy. And yet, with the capacity to rise and inveigle themselves into a useful position when needed.

Life and politics among humans being what they were, that was a delicate balancing act.

Finally and most importantly, Six wanted somebody with good access to communications technology. A network admin, or something like that.

Injunctor-class scout ships were well-equipped with sophisticated sub-sentient intelligences for sniffing out such individuals. The technology had been honed over hundreds of thousands of years, and without it Six would have been forced to grab whichever late-night motorist he could and be satisfied.

With it, he’d found a shortlist of appropriate candidates before ever going to Chicago. And, once Austin was free of his implants, he honed in on the most promising of them, a thousand miles to the east.

It was a delicate abduction, in an urban area, with a short time window, but nothing Six hadn’t done hundreds of times before. He settled into place in his new body, who promptly went to bed with a migraine but no further suspicions…

And he watched Austin’s farm until, three days later, the FBI arrived to question him.

__

Date Point: 17y7m AV
Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Earth

Lieutenant Booker Campbell, US Space Force

The HEAT pipeline had exactly one function: Find limits.

Not mental limits—anyone who even made it onto the pipeline in the first place had already proven good and well they had the right stuff—but physical ones. The pipeline found the point where matter finally beat mind, where the sheer laws of physics and the limits of biology won out over willpower. Very, very few people had ever been proven like that.

It involved…pain. The instructor cadre were the biggest, meanest, toughest, fastest sons o’ bitches Campbell had ever had the misfortune to suffer under, and they didn’t just push a body to the point of lactic buildup or fatigue. They pushed it to breaking, and then they pushed it beyond. They pushed until they knew a man could withstand the abuse, recover, heal, and then take more.

That, and no less, was the necessary agony of HEAT selection. Because the Mass could kill a man, if the wearer was unworthy.

The moment when Booker finally gave out and collapsed felt like failure. Pain twanged along his limbs and through his ravaged muscles, and exhaustion kept him from even writhing to try and relieve the spasms. He might as well have tried to lift somebody else’s arm, or move an amputated leg; the spirit was willing, but the most it could coax out of the body was a pathetic squirming.

So he squirmed. It wasn’t nothing. Nothing was not an option.

“Alright.” The terrifying instructor was suddenly a lot less terrifying. “That’s enough. Let’s get you to medical.”

Campbell could hardly even grunt in objection. “N’t… d’n…”

“No. You’re done, and I’m sorry.” He picked Campbell up and took him to recovery, where all but one of the applicants were also recovering.

The apology sunk Booker’s heart like it’d been torpedoed. He’d failed.

He barely felt the sting of the IV going in, or the rush of Crude, painkillers and nutrients into his bloodstream.

He’d failed. His very, very best, the absolute limits of his ability, wasn’t good enough…and his best was pretty fuckin’ good. He’d been a hell of an athlete growing up, been good enough to justify acceptance to pre-selection even as an old lieutenant with an enlisted career already behind him. They’d put him on Crude like all the rest, he’d spent a year putting himself through absolute fucking hell to build himself up into something genuinely terrifying…

And he’d failed.

Only one of them made it through—a young kid by the name of Thompson—but of course, everyone knew he would from the start. He stood an easy six-foot-three and was a broad-shouldered, rugged hulk of a young man who seemed equally comfortable rucking up mountains, or sprinting off to the horizon, or tossing around weight the rest of them could barely dream of moving. Campbell had been a far better performer than the rest of the candidates, but Thompson was something else entirely. That long-armed gorilla of a kid had at least a hundred pounds on Campbell and it was a much harder, higher-quality hundred, too. Hell, that first week or so he’d been kicking everyone’s ass…

They’d learned in quick order they were all equally useless. Except Thompson, apparently. Campbell wouldn’t go so far as to say the kid breezed through…but it was clear the instructors were inventing new cruelties on the spot, just for him. He took it all…and just kept going.

What the hell did that kid have in him?

Well…he had quite a bit, actually. Thompson was an absolutely top-tier athlete, with football, track, and wrestling all-state heavyweight championships under his belt. He’d already been a three-hundred-fifty-plus pound freak-hoss when he’d enlisted and had such a naturally wide and sturdy frame, he’d looked almost lanky at that size. Predictably, the kid grew like a motherfuckin’ weed on the Crude, so by the time they entered selection together, he was already tipping the scales at well over a quarter-ton of brick-hard muscle, and showing no signs of slowing down. He perfectly embodied all the usual all-American blond-haired, blue-eyed corn-fed bullshit that seemed to just drip out of the pipeline like nineteen-fifties propaganda, and the genuinely worst part of it all? He was good-natured and friendly about it all, too.

Competing against him was infuriatingly humbling.

In a normal group, Campbell would be a goddamned stud. Hell, he was a stud in this group, too! But against a kid like that? He wasn’t special at all. He couldn’t run further or faster. He couldn’t ruck heavier loads. He couldn’t move as quick, couldn’t lift as hard. Didn’t gain muscle as fast, either. He was depressingly far behind the kid by every measure that mattered, and if it wasn’t for some deep-seated spite bubbling away inside him, he probably would’ve given up.

He didn’t, because he would be damned if he let the golden boy win without a fight. It didn’t matter; he failed. The golden boy won. The kid was better than him. Much better. Youth, vigor, and sheer genetic luck won out over age and experience. Thompson won it all and was the very last man standing, in fact the very last man who could stand. They’d ended his torture right as Campbell was being carried away, and that perfect fucking bastard somehow still had enough in him to get up to his feet under his own power and stagger away.

Campbell had failed to a fucking nineteen-year-old mutant from fucking Iowa. Army, too!

His righteous indignation couldn’t sustain him. Sleep took him like a ton of bricks to the face.

When he woke up, he was in a different room. Not the tent out in the field, this time it was a proper barracks. There was an IV in his arm. He and Thompson were both there, alone.

He still felt like he’d been run through a food mill, except now it had been set to a coarse grind.

Thompson woke up too and…well. He sat up with the biggest shit-eating grin ever, plastered gormlessly across his handsome, stupid face. He was honestly just so damn earnest and corn-fed, Campbell felt some of his competitive resentment just…melt away. It was hard to hate a kid so guilelessly happy. Well…mostly.

“We made it, ell-tee! Can you fuckin’ believe it?!”

…Wait.

“Wh—?” Campbell creaked out a long, pained groan as he sat up. Okay. Not quite milled down then. Thompson had a sympathetic look as he handed over a drink bottle, already opened. It tasted vaguely like a menagerie of citrus fruits were attempting to burn out his sinuses, out of spite.

“Like gettin’ face-fucked by a lime, huh? Doc said it’ll do you good.”

…That was a better description, actually. Apparently Thompson was better with his words too.

“Coulda sworn I was out…” Campbell muttered. His everything still hurt, but moving and functioning like a human again was coming back to him, piece by piece.

“Naw! Lemme go get the NCO, he’s just around the—OW!!”

…Well, apparently Thompson wasn’t completely invincible after all. And in a moment of reflection, Booker realized he’d been more than a little uncharitable on the kid. That wouldn’t do.

After all…they’d made it. They were team members now.

“You okay, specialist? Don’t strain yourself.” He was young for a specialist, too. Part of the early merit-based promotion thing for his MOS? Campbell couldn’t remember the details.

“I’m fine sir, just…it’s like someone tried to hammer my hamstrings flat.”

“Pretty sure that’s exactly what they did,” Campbell retorted. He was feeling better already, for a little movement. Not get-up-and-walk-anywhere better, but enough that his head was starting to get into gear.

Thompson noticed. “We should prob’ly get you up and, uh, hobbling, sir. It’ll help a lot.”

“Right… ergh.” Legs that honestly had a lot more strength in them than he’d thought complained at being asked to bear weight, but they bore it just the same. He must have been asleep a good long while. Maybe all night, it was hard to tell.

He needed to lean on Thompson, a little. He’d never felt so damn useless.

The trip down the stairs toward the orderly room felt genuinely perilous. Both of them made heavy use of the handrails. When they showed their faces, the staff sergeant sitting at the desk let them right through into the OIC’s office and bade them sit.

“I’ll go get captain Miller, it’ll just be a minute.”

They didn’t have chairs. In a mark of exactly where they were and what kind of training unit this was, what they had was a bench made of a halved log that nonetheless sagged slightly when it took their combined weight. Dang.

He appeared and immediately gestured for them to stay seated. “No no, don’t go tearing yourselves up on account of me. Thank you.”

Something about the training pipeline had really brought back some of those boot camp lessons, and the young Marine in Campbell would have marveled at such a casual display of acceptance. That seemed to be the way of operators, though: self-assured mutual respect.

Captain Miller—just how many goddamn Millers were there in the Air Force anyway?—was by any reasonable standard a tall, well-built, broad-shouldered man in excellent health. Next to Campbell and Thompson, he… wasn’t. Christ. All that time surrounded by fellow HEAT candidates and the instructors had skewed Campbell’s perspective.

The captain sat down and tidied his papers for a moment, gave them a once-over, and looked at them both. “Well gentlemen, congratulations. Specialist Thompson, you are accepted and will enter the Aggressor pipeline. You may be interested to know, you will be our last US Army soldier so accepted. After you, all the rest will be recruited and selected through the Space Force directly, so do your best, young man!”

Thompson let loose with another shit-eating grin and a lusty bellow, “Huah, captain Miller!”

…Jesus, the kid was so goddamned boot it was almost painful. Though to be fair, he came by it honestly. He’d enlisted directly into the HEAT pipeline, after all.

“Yes yes,” Miller chuckled. “Good esprit de corps! To business: you will both need to start packing it on a lot faster, because we need you both mission-ready ASAP. I’m sure Warhorse and his relentless dieticians will work their magic on you…” He turned his attention to Campbell.

“Lieutenant Cambpell, you are provisionally accepted, also as an Aggressor. Let me expound upon what that means. You are not a young man anymore…”

“No sir, thirty-eight this October.”

“And while you’ve shown remarkable spirit, and you’re responding very well to the Crude…”

There was much left unsaid. “I won’t be stupid, sir. I spent nineteen years hoofin’ it in the Corps before I commissioned, I know when to say stop.”

“Good. Now, normally I’d be wishing you good luck and you’d have a week to recuperate and celebrate before taking the jump over to Folctha…” He tidied his papers again. Something was amiss. “…but there’s been an incident.”

They listened as he explained. Officially the detonation of a freight jump between Chicago and Franklin was unexplained, but the way Miller stressed that fact made it clear there was more to it than a tragic malfunction. At the very least, Campbell realised, sabotage was suspected even if it couldn’t be proven.

The colonel’s death though… That was a kick in the guts. Campbell had met Powell, just the once. He’d dropped in on Huntsville pretty regularly to keep an eye on the new guys coming up the pipeline and deliver a word of motivation.

“So…quite a lot has happened since you entered the Grinder.”

The Grinder was the month-long hell all HEAT candidates went through at the end of the selection course. It was a thing no human being could possibly handle if they weren’t essentially made for it and at the top of their game, and they wouldn’t have survived it if they didn’t have access to the very best medicine. It was the ultimate test of human capability.

And there was no outside contact while the Grinder went to work on the candidates.

Thompson was still basically just a kid. He would have barely been in Kindergarten when San Diego happened and was still pretty young during the war for Gao. He’d gone pretty quiet when he’d learned the news.

Campbell couldn’t blame the kid. He was in the shit now and he’d just realized it.

For Campbell… well, his service had been defined by those moments. He’d enlisted even before First Contact, not knowing what he was getting his young, dumb ass into, never even dreaming that by the time he made sergeant there’d be an interstellar war on against no less than two monstrous alien civilizations, which they only learned about years later.

He’d never thought he’d be based in southern California during and in the aftermath of the destruction of an American city, doing what he could to help while the National Guard shouldered a burden of walking wounded, peacekeeping and sifting through the dead and the destroyed. He’d never thought that years later he’d be boots-on-ground on an alien world helping save talking raccoon-people, either, though their food was damn tasty.

For Campbell, the news about Chicago and Franklin was another twist in a long career, and another reason to keep doing what he did. For the kid, though…

“If the jump network’s down,” Thompson asked, “how’re we getting to Folctha? Are we just waiting for an all-clear?”

The captain leaned back in his chair and smiled humorlessly. “Oh, don’t you worry your pretty young head about that none, specialist. Uncle Sugar’s chartered a luxury spaceliner to get you and some others downrange with a quickness. You’ll be sharing a suite.”

The thought seemed to delight Thompson in the way that only a young soldier could be delighted. He looked over at Campbell and offered a wry smile. “I’ll wrassle ‘ya for top bunk.”

Campbell chuckled. “Nah, I think I’ll just pull rank here.”

“Aww!”

“I’m glad you two lovebirds get along so well, ‘cuz it’s a long flight to Cimbrean. And don’t think you will get a chance to relax. Your diet plan and your training plan will be following you, so…think of it as a month to polish up and impress. You’ll probably be meeting Warhorse straight off the ship, after all.”

“I’ve been looking forward to that!” Thompson chirped. Campbell just grunted. He knew what he was in for: the new incoming LT was going to be tested. Rightly so, but that was something to be good and ready for.

“It’s honestly hard to believe he even exists…”

“Oh, he does, and the stories hardly do him justice. His only real competition is an actual talking space gorilla, and the only thing alive anywhere that can humble him at the moment is an actual talking space bear. So…have fun with that. Anyway.” Miller tapped his papers together one last time, and stood. “Pack your bags, gents. You’re going to Cimbrean yesterday.”

Campbell just managed to restrain his groan of discomfort as he stood up too. “Aye, sir.”

Miller nodded at them. “And… gentlemen? Congratulations once again.”

That left…well. Packing up. There wasn’t much to pack, in fact everything fit into a single seabag—”green duffel” as Thompson wrongly called it—and neither of them had anything that wasn’t already crated up and in storage anyway. They did some out-processing paperwork, had the LRS arrange for their crates to get moved from storage to the waiting ship…

Three days later, they were enroute. A Weaver carried them into orbit for the very first time in their lives, and Campbell felt no shame at all in pressing his face to the porthole just as eagerly as Thompson.

“Woah…” the kid’s nose was practically squeaking on the glass. Watching over six hundred pounds of freshly-trained killer eagerly drinking in the scenery like a boy on his first bus ride…well, Campbell was doing the same thing too. Some things needed wonder.

They were gaining speed and altitude somewhere over Africa when Thompson tore himself away long enough to ask a question.

“…Hey, LT, something’s been buggin’ me.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re gonna jump, right? I mean, we’ve gotta jump to get outta Sol. So why ain’t we jumping the whole way there?”

Campbell had been wondering the same, and he only had a snarky answer to go with it. “Because we have to jump. I bet some bureaucrat somewhere is worried about distance or something, or maybe they just need to ‘do something’ to make their bosses happy. So it’s probably eluding them that distance doesn’t matter here, and they’re saying ‘short as possible’ because they’re reactionary and risk-averse and that’s how bureaucracies work.”

Thompson blinked heavily, and tilted his head. “But…that’s stupid.”

Adorable.

“Uh-huh.”

“Like…obviously stupid.”

“Yup.”

Thompson seemed at a loss, and the confused-puppy expression on his face was just hilariously incongruous atop that man-breakingly thick and sinewy neck of his. It jut out so wide from either side of his skull, his earlobes were practically resting on it, for chrissake.

…Did Campbell’s own look the same way, now? That was a thought for the shaving mirror tomorrow morning. For now, he had a pup to educate.

“Thompson, that’s bureaucracy for you in three words right there. You ever heard of Apollo Thirteen?”

“Oh, yeah! Back in, like, forever ago, right? Nearly blew up in space but they managed to get home?”

“Yeah, but they had to jury-rig the air filtration system ‘cuz the filter cartridges for one of the modules were square, but the ones they needed were round. Or maybe it was the other way ‘round.”

“…Wait. They had two different filters?”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t, like, weight a super big concern back then? And storage space?”

“Yes.”

“…But—”

“The point is, the different modules were built to different specs by different companies because Bureaucracy. And ‘obviously stupid’ has never, ever, mattered when it comes to making decisions by committee.” Campbell shrugged at him. “So yeah. Now, in this moment of panic, when we have no other option but to jump, we jump. But not all the way. Maybe there’s a good reason? Could be, I’m no supergenius. But I’ll bet you the top bunk there ain’t.”

“…” He seemed to give in to the inevitable with a slightly defeated sigh. “Fine, I ain’t taking that bet. I still wanna wrassle for the bunk, though.”

“Weren’t you state champion?” Campbell recalled.

“Yessir! Three years running!”

“And heavyweight champion, at that?”

“Wrestled at two-eighty-five! Had to cut down to weight!”

Campbell shook his head in mild wonder at the idea. “Then no.”

“Well, you wrestled too, right? And you were a combatives instructor…” Thompson pointed out artlessly.

“Yeah, I was. I’m also not young and stupid, and bein’ crushed like a bug isn’t my fetish.”

“Aww.” He didn’t seem upset at all, beyond some mild regret he’d missed the opportunity to fold his lieutenant into several pretzels. For now, Campbell was happy to keep the kid guessing about just how much advantage he really held. Old age and treachery, and all that.

They were interrupted by the loadmaster. “Gentlemen, your ride’s coming up on the port side. Might wanna get a good look at her, ain’t often you get to see a ship in space from the outside.”

They transferred to the port side and sure enough, there was a brilliant point of light ahead and “above” them that soon resolved itself into a pencil-thin edifice in space.

All the major human-owned ships were celebrities in their own right. Hephaestus’ My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Actually Three Smaller Ships In A Trenchcoat and Put Back Together With Bits Left Over were all celebrities in their own right, not to mention MBG’s Misfit, Halcyon and Creature of Habit.

He didn’t immediately recognize this one. As they hoved into view he recognized MBG’s rich red-and-silver livery, but the ship itself didn’t look like one of the tiny, brick-shaped, high-powered scout ships that MBG were so famous for. This one was long, sleek and luxurious. She looped more like a flying sculpture than an industrial workhorse.

Thompson clearly recognized it. “Holy shit. Captain wasn’t kidding! We’re actually travelling on a luxury spaceliner!”

“I musta missed this one.”

“MBG decided to get into space tourism. Their scout ships found all kindsa amazing places, so they built this to take people there to see.” Thompson gestured enthusiastically. As they slid up alongside the elegant hull, Campbell could finally make out the name stencilled along her nose: Boone’s Star.

Inside, the ship wasn’t fully furnished yet. She’d been pressed into service before launch to deliver emergency personnel and aid, so the decks were crowded with boxes, crates, bags and flat-packs rather than chairs and tables and stuff, and were absolutely choked with people bustling around getting ready to hurry up and wait. The luxury cabins all had a couple of cots crammed into them to accommodate extra travellers, but when the two HEAT men found their cabin, that turned out to be all fitted and finished. Probably they were modular, built on Earth then jumped up and installed in orbit.

Campbell had certainly travelled in less comfort than a cozy cabin with real mattresses and a working en-suite bathroom. Well. Cramped, admittedly, but being honest that was probably a ‘him’ problem rather than a design oversight.

“I see the bar is empty,” sniffed Thompson.

“Okay, firstly young specialist, I ain’t gonna pretend like I didn’t get up to shit at your age…but I’m still an officer and that won’t end well for you.”

“I know, I know…”

“Secondly, I bet you’ve never been much of a drinker, huh? All that clean living you’ve been doing for years now, and all that time getting ready for selection? Well, how do you think your newly huge-er ass is going to react to whiskey, after you’ve not had a drop to drink in ages?”

“…Gotta admit sir, that does sound like a fun experiment…”

“No.”

“Yessir.”

“Besides, drinking age in Folctha is seventeen. You’ll get your chance.”

“Better find a spot to do our PT… The lido deck, maybe?”

“Right now, best thing we can do is stay out of the way. We’ve got a lot of waiting ahead of us, and we’re sharing this ship with a lot of people. Let them get organized, then we can find a spot.” Campbell tested the top bunk, then grimaced. “…You know what? You can have this thing, if your fat ass can even fit.”

Thompson grinned at the mild ribbing, and tried pulling down on it with an arm. He watched dismayed as it deflected without him so much as budging an inch upward. “…I don’t think it’ll hold me, either. In fact, I don’t think the bottom bunk will, either.”

“Well.” Campbell shrugged, “We signed up for this.”

“I’ve always been big, even when I was just a kid.” Campbell grinned at that, which earned him a Look from the young future Aggressor. “I’ve never been big like this, though.”

“And getting bigger. Guess our bunks are storage shelves, then.” Campbell sighed. “At least the mattresses look nice…”

“Floor-beds it is, then.”

They sorted their cabin out, then settled down. There was a long month ahead of nothing to do but eat, sleep, lift, maybe read…

But he’d take it. He’d passed. By the skin of his teeth, he’d passed and he was on his way. And when it came down to it, shipping out in a luxury liner with a nice mattress under him and nothing much to do except train?

…And good company, too. He’d been awful uncharitable to Thompson in his head, though the kid did had a lot of boot to get rid of. But that was something to help him with, not resent him over, and Campbell regretted his earlier bitter thoughts…but that was all in the past. Right now, he was glad to have a bunkmate and somebody to train with.

It would’ve been an awful lonely trip, otherwise…

Date point: 17y7m AV
Folctha General Hospital, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Rylee Jackson

Not so long ago, a two-foot spear of splintered timber through the meat of her forearm would have been an ignominious end to Rylee’s career. Today, though…

They’d surgically opened the limb to put all the bones back where they were meant to be. Then they’d put her in a compression cast and injected Crue-D and some other kind of Corti spacemagic into the wound, and promised that when they took the cast off again there’d be no pain, no stiffness, nothing. Even the scar would be a thin, faint thing that would fade away in less than a week. Like it never happened.

But it had. And Rylee’s mind kept rebelling against the idea that all evidence would soon be gone. As if she could just be put back together with glue and tape and carry on. It was too easy. Bodies shouldn’t be so easily repaired. She shouldn’t be whole again so quickly or so trivially.

She wasn’t whole. Her arm might be, but her heart and her head were…

Well, she had something neither whole nor trivially fixed to distract her. Because Goddamn it, the 946th might have lost all its planes, most of its pilots and WSOs, the greater part of their ground crew and have taken a mauling far worse than Rylee herself, but so long as she was the wing’s commanding officer they were not dead yet.

Even if she had to fix it with one hand from her hospital bed.

Even if what she really wanted was to let go and sob like a little girl.

But what could she do? Earth was a month away until the powers that be reopened the arrays, which might take… fuck, years, if they were slow, diligent and cautious. She could pine after her mom’s comfort food and the chance to properly process all she wanted, but…

She wasn’t quite up to business just yet. But she was up to visitors, and the HEAT wanted to pay their respects. And so, her little room in Folctha General was more or less continuously crowded by giant men walking on eggshells. The two most frequent visitors however, were Baseball and Warhorse—both were registered nurses these days, which was apparently good enough for the Brits and they were working the hospital wards because their skills were of more use here now rather than flinging rubble around. There was no shortage of bodies digging the rubble over in Franklin, especially with all the Stonebacks who’d come along with Daar, but nurses? Those were in short supply across the whole planet right now. More people had been wounded than killed, and the other four colonies were straining to take them in.

And, well, the HEAT needed to be on standby. Even if getting anywhere fast was out of the question now.

Both men sure knew how to cook comfort food, though. Burgess in particular could make mac and cheese that, and for this Rylee had to whisper a guilty internal apology, was actually better than Gran’ma Jackson’s. Adam had made Beans.

“You know ‘Horse’s darkest secret, ma’am? He’s always secretly hopin’ he’ll have an excuse to cook like this, now and then.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “Pff. How is that any secret?”

“Figure you’d be a mile wide an’ soft as a couch if you hadn’t signed up.”

“Naw, I was a skateboard punk when I was little. You burn a fuck of a lot of calories doin’ that, y’know. Ever wonder why they’re always such lanky guys?”

“And then you went from skateboarding to powerlifting under supergravity.”

“Had to! Ended up playing basically every sport I could too, ‘cuz it was the best way to meet other kids. Was pretty much the best!”

Adam seemed justifiably pleased with himself, and had even started to puff up slightly with pride. Fortunately, John knew exactly how to pop that balloon.

“Weren’t you also the worst at swimming? Like, toward the end you were turning into a fuckin’ tank, so you had to struggle just to keep your head above water?”

“Yeah, yeah…that bit in PJ school wasn’t fun.”

And didn’t you have the worst fashion sense, too?”

“To be fair, that’s true of all of us at that age,” Rylee commented with a giggle.

“Yeah, but not as bad as ‘Horse! Remember your tight jeans phase?”

“Shut up!” Adam laughed nervously. “I couldn’t help it, they were all tight!”

“Uh-huh. You also wore makeup too, as I remember—Ow!” ‘Horse had started to go red—impressive with his skin tone—and delivered a casual back-handed slap to ‘Base’s shoulder that would likely have broken any ordinary man. For them, it was just guy-type affection.

She wasn’t gonna complain, seeing as they’d brought food. She was eyeing up a second helping of the cornbread, too…

“I actually liked that fashion,” Rylee recalled. “Too bad it didn’t last, but there were a lotta men with eyeliner around for a while there.”

Still. There were men who could pull off that look, and men who should never try. Owen had fallen into the latter camp…

And there it was again. That little lance of pain that kept interrupting her. It was a normal part of grief, she knew, and it’d never quite go away… but it turned a smiling moment into a depressed silence every time it hit her.

‘Horse did his meathead best to comfort, and offered her another hunk of cornbread. And it did prompt them to finally broach the reason for their visit.

“He’s, uh… He’s coming home tomorrow,” Burgess said, gently. “We thought you’d wanna be at the ramp. And, uh…you’re the closest he has to next of kin, so the mortuary affairs people wanna know his final disposition.”

God. That just drove the spike right back into Rylee’s heart. Owen’s family history had been stable, but… unpleasant. He’d never formally severed contact with his parents so much as drifted apart and gladly left it that way. She knew he had cousins and their kids back in England whom he’d sent Christmas cards and little birthday gifts to, but overall he’d built a family in the HEAT and in his relationship with Rylee.

She’d never have thought of herself as his next of kin until Burgess said it, but… it was true, really. And she knew what he’d have wanted. He’d told her.

“…A natural burial, right in the woods behind his house. He planted them, after all. And a non-denominational service.”

“…Okay. Daar wants to pay his respects too, but he knows that might be a hassle…”

That thought brought something that resembled a smile back to Rylee’s face. “Let him. I hear we’ve got some big fellas about who could keep things safe.”

“Yeah. I heard that too.” ‘Horse sighed heavily. “…I think we’re about outta time. Don’t eat yourself sick, okay?”

“They should be taking the cast off and discharging me sometime this evening, assuming it all worked properly. I’ll pace myself,” Rylee promised.

Thus left alone again, she threw herself back into her work, as much of it as there was. There was already some messaging flowing across the zero-width Array, with assurances the wing would be rebuilt as a Space Force delta…

“…Never waste an opportunity, I guess…” she muttered to herself. It was a sensible proposal. It also meant her focus was going to narrow considerably. The Space Force was like the Marine Corps in that its assets were meant to be almost exclusively mission elements, with support and other functions handled by big Air Force. The SOR’s American component had been planning a conversion for years. With this, that likely meant two things:

Firstly, her new Delta would be in direct support of SOR, which gave it a much more focused mission. And second, the training wing at Malmstrom would need to be rebuilt into a full-sized operational wing. The Air Force needed space fighters too, because their mission was bigger and broader.

She whiled away a productively focused hour reviewing letters, plans, charts, laboriously tapped out a few messages of her own—a slow process with only one hand—and maybe ignored ‘Horse’s advice and ate a bit too much, until another visitor interrupted her. A much, much smaller visitor.

“Hello, Nofl.” Nobody else she knew was as tall as a seven-year-old with a cranium the size and general shape of a party balloon and dainty pointed ears.

“Just a checkup, darling!” Nofl waltzed in with all his usual sun-and-puppies sparkle, armed with a medical scanner of Corti make, which he waved vaguely at Rylee’s arm, then tutted. “…Oh dear.”

Rylee’s heart sank. “What?”

“It looks like we won’t have the pleasure of your company any longer.”

Nofl clipped the scanner to the utility harness he wore in lieu of pockets. “You’re all healed up, and I really can’t justify keeping a perfectly healthy woman in here using up a hospital bed…Goodness knows, we need as many as we have,” he added, sobering a little.

Rylee sighed, nodded, and swung her legs out of bed. “I’ve been meaning to thank you for saving my arm…” she began, but Nofl stopped her with a vague flap of his fingers.

“Nonsense! The Human body is so durable that your people would have achieved adequate results with carpentry and sewing. All I did was accelerate and refine the process.” He pulled off a merry, cheeky smile, which was never going to stop being an odd sight on a Corti face. “Though, I did refine it rather a lot…”

“Well, thank you for that, then.”

“You’re very welcome, darling.” He pulled a tablet from a satchel strapped securely to his side, tapped on it a few times, then nodded. “There we go. A consulting physician’s signature on your discharge paperwork. A nurse will pop by shortly to take the cast off, and after that…” he paused. “Do you have somewhere to stay?”

“Yeah.” Owen’s place. A loud and cowardly part of her wanted to check into the Statler instead, or maybe up at the base. But Rylee Jackson was no fucking coward.

“Well then. The arm should be perfectly functional again. Anticlimactic I know, but in my experience my patients prefer being able to do something about trauma over bearing a trophy of it. It may be a little weaker than you remember, but with the amount of Cruezzir-Derivative in your system right now it should gain that strength quickly enough. Let me know immediately if you notice any numbness or can’t oppose your thumb properly to touch it to all of your fingertips” He waited until Rylee had demonstrated that she could, then tipped his head in a small bow then headed for the door. “Oh, and… general?”

Rylee paused in repeating the opposition test for her own comfort. “Yes?”

“You have my commiserations, for what they are worth.”

“…Thank you, Nofl.”

He tipped his head again, and was gone.

True to Nofl’s predictions, a nurse appeared almost as soon as he was out of the room, and Rylee massaged her arm once the cast and bandages were gone. The scar wasn’t quite as faint as she’d imagined. It was star-shaped, a few inches below her elbow, with one point extending right the way down to her wrist.

A tattoo, maybe. It’d be her first, but there was something profane about the idea of allowing that wound to pass without a mark or memory.

She had a lot to do before then, though. She took a photo for reference, gathered her things, and discharged herself.

And, not being a coward, she went to Owen’s place.

Date Point: 17y7m AV
Dodge City, Kansas, USA, Earth

Austin Beaufort

Raids didn’t work like he thought they would. The Feds came right up to his front door and knocked. He answered, warily. They asked him to step outside, and not sure what was happening he did…at which point a pair of huge goons threw him up against the van and handcuffed him. One of them pressed some sort of device against his head, while the other dug through his pockets, scattering their contents on the ground.

“Hey, what the fuck—”

A third man, considerably smaller than the other two, addressed him. “We have a warrant to search your property. Hold still.”

“I… what?! What are you talking about, get—!”

Lauren was given a similar treatment, right next to him, and Austin never wanted to see that look in her eyes ever again. He’d never seen her look genuinely terrified before.

Still. It was over pretty quickly. This time, whatever the thing pressed to her head had to say, the dude in the FBI coat just grunted at it, gave a nod, and just like that they weren’t being painfully crushed up against a van.

“That’s the hard part,” the Fed said, in a tone that was kinda-sorta an apology. “But I’m afraid, mister Beaufort, you’re going to want to sit down for the next bit.”

“You’re invading my goddamned property and you’re lucky I was feeling polite—” Austin put himself protectively in front of Lauren, squaring up.

“And you’re lucky we were, too. Neither of us would have wanted it otherwise. Anyway, to business. The reason we are executing a warrant on your property is because your mobile phone was used to perpetuate the Chicago disaster. You are not a suspect,” the pencil-necked agent offered up placatingly, “Just in the wrong place at the wrong time, it seems.”

All the indignation and fight dropped right out of Austin. He glanced at the goons who’d plucked his phone from his pocket: they’d already dropped it in a copper mesh bag and taken it away.

“…My phone?”

“I’m afraid so. But like I said, you are not a suspect in our case. We do have some questions for you, however. Shall we get that out of the way?”

There were a lot of questions, for him and Lauren in separate rooms. How often did he drive alone, had he noticed waking up with unexplained soreness, had he suffered from unusual headaches lately, had he or anybody else noticed any strange mood swings…

Austin felt too numb and used to do anything but reply honestly. All the time, yes, several times over the last few months, a few but nothing serious, not really he’d just been feeling more switched-on lately…

And then, so abruptly it left his head spinning, they left him with an evidence receipt, said their farewells and left. At a loss for what to do next, he reached down into his pocket to check the weather, and immediately realized he was now without a phone.

“Fuck! That had all my ag software on it!”

Well…

Shit. Now his day was properly ruined. Lauren had long since been released: she’d gone to her mom’s house. He hoped she was okay.

He’d… make it up to her. Somehow. Maybe take her on a date, go phone shopping.

He sighed, stood, and went to his office to fire up his desktop. He’d call her. And research which phones had the best digital security, too.

And most importantly…try not to let those questions and the way they’d scanned his head worry him too much. Because there was a horrible suspicion in his belly now, one that made him want to throw up.

And he decided he’d rather not know.

Date Point: 17y7m AV
Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA, Earth

Six

What a perfect choice! And what an even more perfect result! With one decisive stroke, Six had made a bigger step forward than anything the Hierarchy had achieved since the Sol Containment Field’s deployment.

And after all that time in such a vexingly willful and blatant host, having somebody more forgettable and pliant to work with was a much welcome change.

Allen Nguyen was everything Austin wasn’t, in many ways. Where Austin was a strong, beefy worker, Allen was just trim. He got his exercise via a recumbent bicycle, and had slim, delicate hands that could barely open bottles, let alone shatter them with a single-handed grip, as Austin was wont to do as a party trick. Where Austin had an irksomely active love life, Allen had been single for some years, and entirely lacked the confidence or social graces to change that. Austin was a country boy, Allen was a city boy, a distinction that truly did carry a lot of information.

What they had in common was a hands-on, practical intelligence for technical problem solving. There was less mud and WD-40 in Allen’s life, more wire crimping tools and soldering irons and bright LEDs. Less open sky and digging in the dirt, more air-conditioned buildings and digging in steel cabinets.

What Allen had over Austin, however, was connections. A sprawling web of professional ones, and no more than an idle corner-of-the-page doodle of personal ones. Not to mention access to the cybersecurity and telecommunications department of a major university.

From Six’s perspective, it was a clean and seamless match between his needs and the host’s. From his unique perspective he could inspire Allen to new heights and insights, and in turn Allen’s research could benefit him.

He’d learned patience from Austin. He’d learned how to achieve a big result with an imperfect and unsuitable tool. Now, he wondered, just what he could achieve with the perfect and most suitable tool, and the same level of patience.

Time would tell.

Date Point: 17y7m1d AV
The Clawhold, Planet “Mordor,” liberated Hunter space

Grandfather Vark, General of the Grand Army

There was an adage with an equivalent in practically every language, when it came to grand-scale military wisdom. The Gaori version, recorded by Great Father Fyu in his classically long-form poetic prose, held that ‘if a general must choose between feeding his men and arming them, then they must sink their fangs into both food and foes.’

Humans had opted for the rather more glib ‘an army marches on its stomach.’

Right now, the Grand Army on Mordor had no food, and wasn’t marching. And it was all thanks to the tunnel refugees.

Before the liberation, the E-Skurel-Ir had kept themselves fed by cultivating a rapid-growing kind of pond weed that grew like dangling ropy bunting everywhere in their cities, in homes, along streets, in farm bunkers. Eaten fresh, it apparently made for a pleasantly peppery salad base to be supplemented with the spicy roots and hardy wall-berries they grew for variety and vitamins. Dried and powdered, it could become bread or a porridge, though both were disconcertingly green.

But the cities were emptying. The E-Skurel-Ir were either rising up to join the cult of the Repentant, or else fleeing both Repentants and the Burning-Brood who still gnawed at the bunker-cities among the deep tunnels. The fighting down there had been fierce, and the casualty reports were dismaying.

Every city that burned out, was annexed by a suicidal cult or became occupied by Gaoian forces contributed another wave of refugees fleeing into the “safe” tunnels, or even to the surface where they would squat among the old Hunter infrastructure and factories. Few had brought enough food, or the equipment to grow more. Most were starving.

Previously, the Grand Army had handed out food supplements, mostly in the form of rice, flour, and beans from Cimbrean. Earthling food crops were so calorie dense that a little went a long way. Now, though, the roles were reversed: the natives had more food than the Grand Army. And even if Vark had felt inclined to take their food—which he was not—it wouldn’t have helped anyway. The E-Skurel-Ir staples were, alas, effectively inedible to a Gaoian.

Gao could handle prolonged starvation. At rest, the Gao metabolism was strikingly efficient, in fact; a healthy Gaoian could go weeks without water and a good quarter of a year without food, provided he remained inactive. And therein lay the problem. An army could not be inactive. Especially not one stranded on such a hellhole planet.

Clearing all the Hunters out was going to take years, and Hunters bred freakishly quickly if given the chance. Vark’s forces had already engaged more than a few new broods, and though the new spawn had none of the advanced cybernetics that made red-brood Hunters and Betas so incredibly dangerous, they had numbers. Numbers that needed to be kept in check.

And to top it all off, they were deep in enemy space. Freighter shipments? Forget it. They may as well just hand those supplies directly to the Hunters. And in any case, Mordor was encased in no fewer than four system defence fields, the lowering of which was inadvisable to put it mildly.

So the only option was to build a potential WMD-scale explosive, close enough to the Clawhold to be logistically useful, far enough away that if it DID detonate like the one in Franklin then the Grand Army and the natives would suffer no harm. It would be the only active jump array anywhere in deathworlder territory aside from its counterpart on Gao, which was being built out on an old deep-sea oil drilling platform. They only existed because there was no alternative, but they might do some good in bringing the rest of the network back up, if they pulled double duty as experimental test-beds.

The Hunters, fuck them forever, seemed to know just how important the array site was, and weren’t giving it a moment’s rest. They were throwing their best remaining forces at it, in fact. Clearly whichever Alpha now commanded the planet’s remaining broods knew that its best route to victory lay in delaying the array’s construction and cutting the Grand Army off from its logistics until the Gaoian guns fell silent, the Gaoian soldiers were stupid from starvation, and the walking wounded perished for want of bandages and antiseptic.

Such was the surest route to victory in all wars, after all. Vark would have done the same.

It put him in a lose-lose situation. If he didn’t devote enough forces to defending the Array site and getting it built and online, then his troops would wither on the vine. But if he didn’t properly defend the bunker-cities and their precious cultural archives from the burning menace below, then their victory would be pyrrhic at best.

The solution he wanted was a decapitation. His own death wouldn’t have harmed the Grand Army much, there was a clear line of command and succession, he’d have been replaced in moments and he trusted the men who’d replace him. The Hunter system—and the word ‘system’ was stretching it—was more like a particularly fractious form of feudalism. Killing an Alpha would only result in one of its lessers taking over, but the broods would bicker. Their alliances were between the Alphas, and needed reforging when the Alpha fell.

A decisive general could exploit that confusion like splitting wood down the grain. There was just one problem: they didn’t know where the Alpha they needed to kill was.

“The best we can narrow it down to is somewhere on the north-eastern continent, deep inside the territory they still hold.” Father Liim, as Whitecrest’s most senior representative and commander on the planet, seemed to take the Alpha’s continued existence as a personal affront.

“That ain’t exactly precise…” the north-eastern continent was the larger of the two currently held by the Hunters, while the Gaoian forces were still claiming the largest of Mordor’s three major landmasses. A whole planet wasn’t conquered overnight, after all. Liim had just ‘narrowed down’ the Alpha’s location to within twenty million square kilometers.

“No, Grandfather. We’re working on it. I’ll have to send scouts into that territory if I want a precise location, though.”

“We do know where most o’ the secondary Alphas are, though. We can strike against them,” Father Meeri suggested.

Vark shook his head no. “Not really, no. I ain’t got any proper assault teams I can spare jus’ now, either. All I got is some Fang elites from Stoneback: two claws from First Fang, an’ another two from Fourth. I can’t justify ‘em goin’ in and doing this jus’ yet.”

Meeri flicked an ear, confused. “Surely that would buy us some breathing room?”

“Yeah, but very ‘spensively. Secondary Alphas ain’t really worth their time, ‘cuz just one raid would cost us ‘bout a million calories o’ ration or somethin’ ridiculous like that. First Fang are big boys an’ they eat like it. On that one raid they’d each burn up literally ten times th’ ration as a really strong, really active male in th’ grand army would in a day. An’ Fourth ain’t much better.”

Meeri looked taken aback. “That much?”

“I ain’t in the habit of exaggeratin’,” Vark reminded him, evenly. “Even sittin’ there doin’ nothin’ but keep ready, they’re a food sink we can barely afford, and they can’t afford ‘ta sit around, neither. All that muscle they’re carryin’ needs workin’ or they’ll lose it. Balls, I’m even worse, fit as I am these days. I don’t eat like a Keeda ‘fer nothin’ and I ain’t doin’ it ‘ta taunt y’all, neither. At this level, my ‘tabolism’s so gods-damned fast, I gotta eat or I’ll keel over an’ die in a few days, mebbe. There’s a real cost ‘ta bein’ this kinda big, an’ right now I can’t afford to make the problem worse ‘fer everyone.”

Liim duck-nodded agreement. “If we deploy those claws at all, it cannot be for anything less than a decisive strike. Once used, they need to recover, and we don’t have what they need.”

Ginn cleared his throat to politely inject himself into the discussion. Vark had picked well with the little fella: Ginn wasn’t no pen-pusher, he’d seen real bloody action an’ killed his share of the big tank-Betas. He was a good barometer for what the average soldier would say. “Well… Grandfather, with respect, we have an enormous army of volunteers…”

“Yeah,” Vark growled gently. “We do. They’re brave too, alla them. But they’re also weak, mostly. Which ain’t anythin’ ‘gainst them personally, it’s jus’ that second-degrees usually ain’t man enough ‘fer this kinda work, even with armor an’ guns. Gotta be able ‘ta take a hit an’ power through the raid, an’ ‘ya can’t stop ‘till the job’s done.”

The vast majority of gaoian males were second degree, making up over ninety percent of the adult demographic—and thus, the grand army as well. The problem wasn’t one of spirit, oh no. It was one of simple physical inadequacy. It pained Vark to admit it, but second degree males were…something less compared to the Human average—and in this new Deathworlder era, ‘Human’ was the standard to compare against. They were noticeably smaller and often considerably less muscular, even next to Human women. They had slower reflexes, weren’t nearly so strong and couldn’t take anywhere near the same amount of abuse. They didn’t have a Human’s endless endurance, that marvelous immune system, the same resistance to pain and toxins… any of that. Sure, they could survive on comparatively meager rations, had a better nose and natural weapons a Human did not… but that wasn’t useful in this case. Against well-defended Hunters, raids meant overwhelming force.

Ordinarily, a problem like this he’d just throw a fuck of a lotta ordnance at the greasy shits. That kind of fight, the grand army could do like none other; they were well-trained on tactics and maneuver, and has the right predatory mindset. But the root of his conundrum was logistics, an’ an army ran outta bullets just as fast as it ran outta meeshi beans. Which meant he had to go for it. Which meant a lotta death.

Vark wasn’t a fan of throwing bodies at problems, if he could avoid it. What he needed was more assault teams. They’d be exactly the tool for the job, but they depended on higher-degree males, and gods were they rare and precious resources. A well-trained third-degree was a match for most any Human trooper, but they were less than eight percent of the population, and virtually all of them in the grand army were already in leadership or special positions, like the assault teams. A fourth-degree was even more impressive, and could reliably embarrass even exceptional Humans—and some Ten’Gewek, apparently—but they were literally one in a million. Fifth-degrees were far better still and truly astounding specimens, but at less than one in a hundred million they weren’t even a factor…and of course, there was only one sixth-degree alive, the first in centuries.

And he was far too important to spend on something like this.

Ginn flicked his ears in a somewhat defensive gesture being a second-degree male himself, but he could see the argument. “. But if the grand army isn’t enough, and the Fangs are too much…?”

“What’d be jus’ right?” Vark finished the question for him.

“Yes, Grandfather.”

Vark shook out his pelt. “That’s easy. What I really need is the grand army’s assault teams, or maybe some Human troopers experiences with raiding. But they’re all back on Gao or they’re overworked an’ at risk o’ gettin’ kilt, or in th’ case o’ Humans we just ain’t got any. Throwin’ a wall o’ little males at th’ problem’s a last resort, ‘cuz why waste hundreds o’ lives if the job could be done by a squad?”

There was silence for a few moments as they considered options.

Liim took a deep breath. “Very well. I have enough Clan specialists on planet to infiltrate the occupied territory and hunt down that Alpha, perhaps even kill it with some good fortune. Each one of them is your eyes however, Grandfather. Wherever I pull them from will become a blind spot. You’ll also have to do without me, as I’ll be leading them.”

Vark duck-nodded. “You find First Fang a target, an’ we’ll claw a victory right outta the Hunters’ mouths. None’a the alternatives are very happy things. But don’t dawdle; I can’t give ‘ya much time ‘fore I send in Fangs and bodies anyway.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“Get to it, then.”

Liim duck-nodded again, and bustled away. Meeri tilted his head at Vark. “Until then, Grandfather, where should I concentrate our forces? The array site, or the cities?”

“Prioritize logistics. We die if we don’t get that shit sorted out. I need that Array thumpin’ away day an’ gods-damned night or we’ll be dead inside a week.”

And that was that. They were committed to a course of action. Vark wasn’t looking forward to all the reports about how many books burned in the next few days, but it was that or an outright loss. And they’d make the Hunters pay, in time.

Even if the war had just got a lot more complicated.

Date Point: 17y7m1d AV
Colony of Eyes-Turned-Upwards, Planet Hope, the E-Skurel-Ir Diaspora

Ukusevi, Archivist and Keeper of the Long Chant

Rain.

On the Punished World, the rain was acidic enough to bleach and blister. Metal left out in the rain corroded, concrete and stone became etched, and thin crusts of chemical salts were left behind when the runoff dried.

According to Ukusevi’s Human and Gaoian liaisons, the difficulty in making water potable on their home planets lay in cleansing it of tiny parasitic organisms and infectious viral motes. According to the Long Chant, the same had once been true of the Punished World. But for generations the great challenge in procuring drinking water for the E-Skurel-Ir had been precipitating out the harmful chemicals.

The process would have been difficult enough without depending on scavenged equipment built with spare parts and surplus skimmed from the Hunter work orders. Uku had seen a Gaoian test their drinking water and physically recoil upon seeing the lead content.

Now, though… the water pattering softly on Uku’s tarpaulin lean-to roof was clear, potable and cleaner than any she’d imbibed in her life before moving to Hope. It was bliss to wash her tongue with it, but the sound of it was even more of a delight. Laying warm in her cot and listening to that thickly textured white noise was a joy unlike any she’d known before.

Still. There was no avoiding certain demands of the flesh. The muscles wanted to move, the joints wanted to stretch and bend, and all the comfortable inertia in the universe couldn’t indefinitely quell a full bladder. When she twitched her tarp aside enough to look outside, she discovered that it wasn’t quite dawn yet, and the light was still silvery-dim. The Saved Folk would all still be comfortably asleep, and she’d have the dawn to herself, except for any aliens who happened to be awake.

She shrugged on her robes and raincloak, and glanced toward the jump array as she emerged into the refreshingly wet weather. Still no activity. Before, it had never stopped: as soon as one stack of crates or huddle of refugees were removed, it would thump again and the next shipment would arrive. But for days now it had been nothing more than a flat metal plate on a concrete base with a frame around it, dormant and useless.

And, apparently, dangerous.

A few of her people, absurdly, had lamented this new twist in their fortunes. Uku had replied by adjusting her sermons to remind them that they were still, by any measure at all, still in a far happier situation than they had been only a couple of months ago. The deathworlders had been foresighted in their work, delivering enough supplies and food up front to feed the refugee camp for a long time before things got dire. Easily long enough for starships to arrive, according to the Gaoians. They were in no danger of starving.

They were in no danger at all. There was pain, knowing that so many were stranded on the Punished World, promised an escape to Eyes-Turned-Upwards and the chance to breathe its clean airs and drink its pure waters for themselves, only to have that door slammed in their face. Uku could understand that they would likely feel resentment. But the ones already transferred had no cause to complain.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sight that would shock and horrify any E-Skurel-Ir; A trio of children came charging out of the woods in front of her, giggling gleefully and playing tag in the rain without a thread of clothing between them. For a moment, Keeper and younglings stared at each other in dismay, before the young ones assembled their wits first and fled, scattering back among the trees. Uku didn’t even summon the intellect to call pointlessly after them until they were already out of view.

She’d recognized the trio, of course. She would have to give their parents a stern—

She stopped herself. Actually, why would she have to give their parents a stern anything? Back on the Punished World, such a game would have been unthinkably stupid, a fantastic way to earn chemical burns or worse, and any parent careless enough to let it happen was endangering their offspring. But here?

If they had been older, she may have suspected some less innocent motive, but those three were too young for that. They were just enjoying a freedom that too many children across too many generations had never known, smart and aware enough to know that adults likely wouldn’t approve, but ruled enough by their temptations to do it anyway.

No. No stern talking-to. A little gentle teaching moment with the kids individually, maybe, reminding them of the word propriety and all it meant. But there was no need to shame them. In fact, if she was to be honest, there was something rather enticing about the notion of skipping naked in the rain herself…

She laughed to herself, dispelled the idea, and completed her trip to the ablutions block in a jolly mood.

Her mood even survived talking business with the gloomy Gaoians. The one overseeing the kitchens was a rare female, Sister Yeania. Taller than most Gao that Uku had met, and scarred too; a ragged triple claw-mark had cost her half an ear and narrowly missed her eye. From what Uku knew of Gaoian culture, the males wore their scars proudly, but they were considered thoroughly un-feminine. Yeania’s had come to her in a narrow escape from rampaging biodrones during what the Gao called the “Homeworld War,” and was a feral testament to the fact that she’d seen a lot and suffered a lot more.

Ukusevi could sympathize. But where her own trauma inspired her to revel in beauty and comfort wherever she found it, the Gao by and large seemed…embittered. Embittered, but also imbued with purpose.

Yeania, for instance, was an early riser, and she could put a commanding edge in her voice that sent burly Grand Army males scurrying to clean, cook or simply get out of her kitchen. Under her direction, the whole refugee population, the Grand Army troops and the handful of voracious Humans in Eyes-Turned-Upwards could always depend on solid meals waiting for them at sunrise and sunset.

Today, she just look up as Uku entered and flicked her remaining ear. “You’re up early, Keeper. Kids wake you?”

“You know about them?”

“Hard not to. Cubs are cubs in pretty much any species, I reckon. Hard to miss when they’re playing.” The Gaoian chef handed over a large metal bowl. “Here. Make yourself useful and mix the pancake batter, wouldya?”

Uku obliged her. “Quite a shock. Back on the other world…”

“Count yourself lucky they ain’t human. Your people, my people, we got all that nice healthy fur coverin’ our bits. Humans? I bet you can see every damn thing flopping and dangling around.”

Uku laughed. That was quite a mental image, alright. “Suddenly, I’m glad they share our sense of modesty.” Her thoughts turned briefly to Julian. “…For the most part.”

“Mm.”

That was as much conversation as Yeania apparently had in her. Uku gave her a few quiet moments before broaching the conversation that was really on her mind.

“Any news regarding the array?”

“Still down. Prob’ly a supply ship from Gao on its way, Tiritya alone knows when it’ll get here, but we have enough to last us a goodly while. Knowin’ the Great Father and Great Mother though, it’ll be here sooner, not later.”

“You know them?”

“Not person’ly. Just… knowin’ what I know of them. The Gao they’re buildin’ won’t forget. I’d bet they didn’t even need to prompt someone.”

Ukusevi decided the pancake batter was appropriately mixed and set it down. She wasn’t quite sure where the alien food had come from: both the Gao and the Humans claimed it as their own, and she was pretty sure she’d seen a similar recipe in an old book from the archives once. Maybe pancakes were just universal. “You sound like you admire them greatly.”

“Before, Champions only lifted a finger if they thought it would benefit their Clans or perhaps earn them a wet dick for a mating week. And to be honest, that worked well enough in its own mercenary sort of way. Things are different now.” She sniffed. “I respect them, sure. But the males are so fanatically loyal it’s kinda hard to fathom. Can’t even make a joke without ‘em gettin’ all defensive. As if they need it.”

“By they, you mean the Great Mother and the Great Father?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never met her. I’ve met the Great Father, though. It’s hard to imagine him as any kind of vulnerable, to be perfectly frank.”

“…What’s he like?”

“If I were to pick one word, it would be…” Uku paused and rifled through her vocabulary for a moment. “‘…Immense.’ Everything about him, in every sense of the word. Even his emotions. Immense to the point he seems almost impervious to harm, or unstoppable. But I know that’s not true. His sorrows are immense, too.”

She watched Yeania consider that for a moment, then posed a question of her own. “Have you ever met the Great Mother?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s she like?”

Yeania paused in her work, and gazed off into some unseen distance for a moment. “She went through worse shit than I did and came out as level and as kind and as serene as I reckon a person could ever be. The usual politics between Females just…don’t apply, somehow. They flow around her like she wasn’t even there.” She looked down for a moment. “…Wish I had that skill.”

“Well, antagonizing the males about Daar is maybe not the way to go.”

“Prob’ly not. But I’m here ‘cuz on the whole males are less…complicated than my sisters. Don’t pry into stuff, don’t ask dumb questions about when I’m going to have this seen to…” she waved a paw vaguely at her face. “…Or some other scars I might have.”

She didn’t say more. Uku didn’t ask more. She just nodded her understanding, and stepped aside. “I should go clean up before breakfast,” she decided.

“You do that. Thanks for mixin’ the batter.”

The bit about cleaning up had been a small untruth. She’d certainly wash her hands before breakfast, but in fact Uku was keen to get back to her journal and jot down her morning thoughts. In its way, that duty was as important to her as getting food in her belly, and almost as pleasant nowadays.

After all, she lived on a world where children could freely be children, and scarred women could find some simplicity. Those were moments worth preserving and thinking about, and eventually sharing. There was too much beauty in every moment for Uku to record all of it…

But she’d record as much as she could.

She went home with a smile.

Date Point: 17y7m2d AV
Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Xiù had always believed that riches were an obligation, that the with had a duty to the without. And she was firmly and definitely one of the with nowadays.

She, Allison and Julian had come back from Misfit’s voyages to find an account held in their name by Byron Group, guaranteed for plural millions of dollars each in salary, survey bonus and hazard pay, and managed by Byron’s finest financial and investment officers to plump it out even further.

Julian had used his to buy their house in Folctha, and was happy to leave the rest of his money in low-risk development funds where it paid for territorial development, investment and growth. Allison had invested hers in MBG, with enough aside in a savings account to pay herself a comfortable yearly rate for the rest of her life.

Xiù had turned her wealth into her job. She’d become a property developer and landlord, made something of a brand out of providing pleasant and well-built but affordable housing in Folctha, Franklin, Botany, Nouveau Acadia and Abeltown. Thanks to her, first dozens then hundreds of migrating families had been able to buy or rent homes. Good homes, not cheap cramped cookie-cutter condos built to a standard that wouldn’t last more than fifty years, but actual real houses they could proudly pass down to their kids.

The more she owned, the more the business expanded. She’d hired people. Had to let some go too, especially an accountant who’d been…

Well, Xiù wasn’t interested in cutting corners for the sake of pennies. Quality and ethics came first in her business model, so they kept the money on-shore, they paid their taxes, the bonuses went to everyone… It was her small way of doing things right. And it worked! It had made her one of the bigger residential property owners in Franklin.

And now, the owner of a scorched and flattened field of splintered wood, broken cinder blocks, shattered glass and sad personal effects. Homes built to withstand decades of Cimbrean’s gentle weather had offered no resistance at all to a Nagasaki-sized blast.

At least the horrible dust was being cleared away. Drones outfitted with electrostatically charged field generators were zipping back and forth across the rubble, weaving a methodical grid pattern and returning to their base with filaments of fine powder accreted along the field lines like stringy black spiderwebs. Thanks to their tireless, automated efforts, there were whole blocks of the city now where each step didn’t raise a puff of pulverized freight train.

While most of the people who worked for her lived in Folctha, each of the five territories required somebody on the ground to scout locations, work with building contractors, handle the minutiae of building laws and so on. Franklin’s was Sam Berry, a six-foot giant nerd with some intriguing tattoos. He’d been out of town checking up on a small town a couple of hours away along Territorial Highway 1 at the time of the blast, but it had still hurt him.

It had hurt everyone. Especially the unharmed.

“The insurers are already making reluctant noises,” he said, toeing some rubble aside listlessly. Xiù put a hand on his arm, reassuringly.

“You let me worry about the insurers,” she said. “That’s a problem for tomorrow. What I want to know is, what can we do today?”

“…Not much,” Sam said, gloomily.

“What about the survivors? Surely there’s something we can do!”

Sam shook his head. “The damage and the fatalities pretty much overlap. The folks who came through this with their lives still have their homes, and the folks who lived in the destroyed homes, well…”

Xiù looked around. There were a lot of people hard at work still, clearing and cleaning, but she could tell he was right. There were pretty clear radii of damage. The road network was basically intact even right into the city center, and the further she looked out from the epicenter, the more bricks there were on top of other bricks until, a good mile or more from ground zero the first intact building stood cracked but vertical. There wasn’t an intact window within five kilometers, though, and somehow she guessed there would be a lot of buildings that were no longer safe and would need to come down.

That was something her business could do something about, and she said as much. “There’ll be repairs, and reconstruction… and people will come back here, Sam. Some will move away, others will come. Franklin isn’t a ghost town yet. And it’s in our power to ensure it never will be.”

He sighed, but nodded. “…Still. There’s not a lot we can do today. All the contractors I work with are… It’s going to be a while, Xiù.”

“I’ll help,” Xiù promised. She didn’t even have to hesitate and think about it, when the call had gone out for an emergency, Amanda Buehler had stepped up, and while Xiù still had a lot of…criticisms… about Allison’s mom, she couldn’t fault Amanda for that. She’d freed Xiù up to come take care of this, and Allison up to go put in some overtime on the latest Misfit, which they were trying to get ready by the time Boone’s Star and whatever other supply ships from Earth arrived. At the very least, she’d be good for getting people to and from orbit, now that the jump up to Armstrong wasn’t available.

Most importantly, she’d freed up both of them to have something to do rather than fret about Julian. He’d lived through Nightmare and worse before, he’d do it again. But their bed was always lonely with just two.

All of Cimbrean had taken a blow. The five colonies were happy neighbors, all entirely comfortable with the distribution of territory, all speaking the same language both literally and politically, and brought closer by the Cimbrean Common Economic Area that meant anyone holding a passport for one territory had effectively unrestricted access to the other four.

They were siblings. And one of them was wounded, but the other four were already pitching in, and Xiù intended to be among the contributors.

The firmness in her voice certainly seemed to help Sam. He nodded slowly, took a deep breath, then plucked his phone from his pocket. “…I worked with a lot of companies out in the outlying towns,” he said. “I’ll find people. We can at least throw together some temporary housing and get people out of tents. It’s not much, but it’s a start.”

“A start is all all we need,” she promised him. They wouldn’t be the only ones helping, after all.

This wasn’t the end for Franklin.

Date Point: 17y7m3d AV
Planet Nightmare

Ferd Given-Man

Cold—real cold—bit. It had teeth, thousands of little ones that gnawed slowly through shelter, fire-warmth, blanket, skin and muscle. It lurked in the bed, in the ground, in the walls, and when a man left the safety of his blanket to fetch fuel, he’d come back to find it invaded by those teeth again.

And outside of the shelter? It didn’t have teeth. It had knives. Knives that would slice off toes, fingers and tailtips if they let it. Knives that would sink slowly into the heart and still it.

Ferd had faced many things in his life. Hierarchy and the Brown One and angry bull Werne, an even a charging Yshek. He feared none of them: they could be killed. The horror of Cold was that it wasn’t a beast or mind, it could not be slain. It just was, and all a man could do was carve out a little place that was less cold, at great effort.

He’d even come to like the nasty, bitter coffee-drink. It put warmth back inside him, pushed the cold away for a while. Gave him a chance to feel something other than the teeth pushing inwards.

They’d done all they could. Dug up and slaughtered two hibernating murderpigs, whose meat was now either frozen hard halfway up a tree or smoking above the fire. Stacked firewood every chance they got in the middle of the day when the biting chill was at its tamest. They had enough now for five hands of days. The roof—poles draped with tarpaulin and murderpig hide—kept the wind out and the heat of the fire in, at least enough.

Now there was nothing to do but… wait. They’d find more prey when the meat was half eaten, they’d chop more firewood every day as they used it. But other than that, there was nothing more they could do.

Except sing, apparently. Jooyun did that a lot, in a quiet distracted way.

♫“Well the good old days may not return, and the rocks might melt and the sea may burn. I’m learning to fly…”♪

He was pretty good-sounding too, for a Human. But the song was…the same. All the way through. Same tune, same rhythm, over and over again. It was starting to make Ferd’s tail itch.

“Too simple,” he grunted, and only knew he’d said it aloud when Jooyun stopped and glanced at him.

“What?”

Well, in for the hunt, in for the kill. “A real song is a story. It follows the story. That one just… for fun.”

Jooyun seemed amused. “Well I won’t argue that, big fella!”

“All Human songs are like that. Nice, but… just nice,” Nomuk said.

“No, we’ve got the other kind too!” Jooyun shook his head. “Remember Professor Daniel? When he told you Beowulf? It’s sung, actually. Heck, I think I have it on video.” He fumbled for his thinking-stone.

“You know any of your story-songs without going to the video?”

Jooyun looked at a loss for a second, but Rees snort-laughed. “Sure we do!”

“We do?” Fraz-er looked at him.

“Sure!” Rees puffed out his chest and spread his arms out in just the same way Professor Daniel did when telling a story. ”This is the greatest and best song in the world…”

“Oh my God…” Jooyun seemed suddenly embarrassed and amused. So, mischief then!

“The best song?” Tumik asked. He leaned forward, reached out of his blankets to pick up a coffee cup. Ferd looked over at Jooyun and shared a Look. Tumik always was a bit gullible…

Rees gave his best trouble-grin and barked happily when Jooyun poked his thinking-stone with a grin and the opening tones of a Human git-arr hung in the air. “Sure! Just listen…”

It went on for a while, and it was still fun, but it was a fun story too. At first, just Rees and Jooyun, but Heff and Fraz-er joined in shortly after. They all knew the words, it seemed.

♫“…the song we sang on that fateful night, it didn’t actually sound anything like this song!…”♪

It lifted the mood a lot. By the end—or at least, by the time it totally stopped making sense—all four Humans were looking more alive than they had in a day or two. Rees reached over the fire and his palm slapped against Jooyun’s in a high-five.

“So our supermonkeys like story songs? Julian, you got any Weird Al on that speaker?”

“Oh, fuck, not Albuquerque?”

“Fuck aye!”

‘“I’m gonna do ‘Spicy McAngus’ before we jump down the Weird Al rabbithole.”

There was a lot of music in that rabbit-hole. Eventually they climbed back out, and ended on Ferd’s favorite song.

♫“Fat-bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go ‘round!”♪

“Of course you’d like that one the most, not a one among you with a little arse!”

“Not my fault you humans so skinny! Can’t jump with that tiny ass, Rees. You should be more like Jooyun! Big, strong rump like real man!”

Rees rolled his eyes while everyone else laughed. “I’m British, mate. I don’t want America’s arse.”

Heff snorted. “No sex please, we’re British!”

“‘Ey, fuck off!”

Jooyun didn’t say anything, but the grin on his face was the smuggest Ferd had ever seen.

Happy that he’d scored a hit, Heff turned to Ferd. “Can’t properly appreciate a nice ass with a tail in the way, either.”

“Tail’s the best bit!” Ferd shot back.

“Suddenly, I just learned something about Ten’Gewek I didn’t want to…” Fraz-er muttered…

…And so on. The place felt… warm again, after that. The food tasted a little better, the fire a little stronger. There were smiles again as a comfortable silence fell.

And into that silence, as if called by their songs, a sound they’d all been waiting for: the bee-bee-beep of their phone.

Rescue had finally come.

Date Point: 17y7m3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Focltha), Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Brigadier General Rylee Jackson

Rylee had attended far too many ramp ceremonies in her career. Mostly, the flags draped across the coffins had borne the same combination of colors in a different configuration.

This one was painfully different. It was an oversized coffin, like Vandenberg’s had been. And the flag was British instead of American. And the man borne within had both meant more to her personally, and had died in harder circumstances to bear.

She was only alive because he’d given all of his immense strength to save her. She remembered more and more over time, and none of it was of much comfort. An I-beam had fallen across them. He took the impact across his broad back, probably breaking it in the process and sparing her a crushed rib cage. Somehow he’d muscled it off them both despite the carnage it had wrought on him, and then promptly collapsed across her legs.

He’d given her a gentle smile right before he passed out, never to wake. Now that she’d remembered it, it was burned in her mind. And all she could do was stand at attention as he was borne down out of the Weaver that had brought him home from Franklin.

Arés and Burgess were in front. Firth and Murray in the rear. Two of the new guys in the middle, she didn’t know them by name yet. The only honor-guard fit for him.

To either side of the dropship’s ramp, the Spaceborne Operations Regiment—HEAT, JETS, technicians and all—stood in formation. They weren’t alone, either: Daar was there too, but stood well off to the side as discreetly as he could manage, his huge paw up against his brow in salute, touching his crown in a gesture that very few beings in the whole wide galaxy could have earned from him. The Folcthan Prime Minister was in attendance, neat and small alongside Daar in her black suit, her gaze distant.

Fortunately, ramp ceremonies were usually quick things. A sharp moment of grief at a solemn pace, that ended when the coffin was loaded into the hearse and driven away. Less quick was the funeral proper, to come in the morning.

Owen’s house was hers to possess, now. He’d left all his worldly possessions to her in trust, to be used among the SOR as she best saw fit. She’d given it serious thought, as he would have wanted. Arés was working on a big family…but he had a tenant leaving the apartment below his, so his plan was to combine them into a two-level home. So, that was paid for.

To the others had gone similar gestures. Some were taken, some were kept in reserve. Owen’s books went to Costello, save for one or two she couldn’t bear to part with. His weights went to the incoming officer they’d meet in a couple week’s time. Campbell, was his name.

Murray got a collection of keepsakes from Folctha’s very earliest days. Photos, mostly. Memories that he, now, was the only remaining SOR man to bear.

In the end, she didn’t keep much. She kept the house, she kept his monstrous recliner. Some of the plates and other fundaments of a working house. She moved in, because Owen’s grave was in her new backyard and somebody needed to look after him.

She read a eulogy. It passed a bit in a blur, but she did distinctly remember there were clever lines, here and there. Small, mildly embarrassing stories he would have delighted in sharing, were he free of the duties of his office.

He was free from all duty now, so…she shared.

Daar and Gyotin had something to contribute, too. They made some simple offerings, growled out something that sounded almost like Gaoian, but much more guttural, much older. She didn’t have a translator on hand so she had no idea what they said.

They’d buried him like he wanted. Nothing fancy. A shroud instead of a coffin, a natural burial in a shallow grave. She planted a small sapling over the top.

The thing that surprised her for days afterwards was how many visitors came, who hadn’t been able to attend the funeral, or who’d been there at the back and wanted something a little more personal. Mark and Hayley Tisdale, for instance. To pay respects to the man who’d held their daughter as she died.

Owen had had more friends and respecters than she’d guessed. It seemed like half of Folctha wore a track in the lawn. Some came more than once.

But in time, they stopped. They moved on. They lived.

And Rylee did too.

Date Point: 17y7m3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Doctor Tilly Briggs

One advantage to the way Ten’Gewek didn’t like bathing with water was that the humans got to enjoy the rivers and streams (at least, the ones too shallow and clean for Yshek) for themselves if they wanted to. Tilly had a favorite spot, a hip-deep calm stretch of river between two sets of rapids, about an hour’s walk from the village in territory that the planet’s nastier critters avoided: too close to Ten’Gewek.

The Yshek didn’t come up above the rapids, and even if one had, its orca-sized bulk would have been practically beached in the shallow water. It was a safe spot where she could float on her back, and think.

There’d been a lot of talk at the research camp about how things would change if the array network stayed down indefinitely. How they’d be back to warp drive and the long grind of interstellar travel. No more stepping from planet to planet, no more interstellar commutes. Wherever somebody went, that was where they were going to stay for a not-insignificant duration. There’d been a kind of informal betting pool on what the solution to that would be. Maybe there’d be a regular ship service bringing supplies?

The option that Tilly had pessimistically put her metaphorical money on was that they’d be recalled. And she’d been right. They’d had a message through the emergency Q-router to the effect that HMS Vigilant was coming to pick them up.

It was a long flight from Cimbrean to Akyawentuo. They had plenty of time to finish their work, pack up, put everything in storage and so on… but Tilly didn’t really care about work for the moment.

She cared about the fact that she was about to lose a lifestyle that made her truly happy.

She had pioneering research work. Admittedly, her bit of it could be a bit dull, but literally nobody before her had ever done metallurgical analysis of an alien peoples’ society. They were an old people, far older than human tribes were at this point in their development: maybe half a million years, maybe a great deal more. Papers like that didn’t come around often, and she got to write them.

She also got to teach, which was what she’d have done if this opportunity hadn’t come. While, yes, she got to teach Ten’Gewek young and old—they had a lot of catching up to do, to get to the steam era of science and master classical physics—there was another benefit to that…

She got to teach math and science to Vemik, her very favorite cavemonkey. And that was the bit that was going to hurt the most. She was…well…

…She’d fallen for him, quite honestly. Fallen hard. He was a ton of fun—or close enough, anyway—super smart, had a sense of humor to go with his hyperactive, aggressively cheery personality…and, well…

…She wasn’t gonna say no to ten-pack abs. Or his weapons-grade…everything, really.

Nobody had been more surprised about that than Tilly herself. She’d always thought she preferred quiet, thoughtful types, maybe someone cute, about her size, in good health…she never thought she’d go in for an iron-age cavemonkey who defied that image in every way. He was loud and brilliantly intelligent rather than merely thoughtful or smart. Not cute, but handsome in a striking, alien way, with a body better than her wildest fantasies.

And good health? He wasn’t some meek coffee-house intellectual. He was primal and alive with every fiber of his being, whether he was hunting, or building, or having his inventive way with her under heavy pelts. All his strength, his honest passion…it was satisfying.

Against all wisdom she’d fallen for him, mind, body, and soul. She didn’t care what anyone thought. Singer didn’t mind, hell she’d been actively encouraging it. Tilly had been scheming to live on Akyawentuo indefinitely, find some permanent research position…and then it all came crashing down. Saying goodbye to everyone was gonna suck hard. Saying goodbye to Vemik…

And then there was the Singer. While Tilly had never been attracted to women, she’d fallen in a different kind of love with the Singer. There was no envy or jealousy at all between them, and over time they’d become closer than friends, taught each other a lot. She’d never had somebody she knew without a doubt she could confide absolutely anything to, and all she’d get back would be love. Leaving the Singer was going to hurt just as much.

Hence, Tilly was floating alone in a stream a long way from anyone else. And crying. A lot of that.

It helped. Eventually, she stood up, scrubbed her face clean, and waded ashore. She didn’t feel better about what was coming, but she at least felt ready to face it.

Rather than go back to the research camp, she wandered down into the village. Vemik gave her a wave and a grin as she returned, even while he was busy wrangling a springing, swinging, playful bundle of monkeyfun in the form of his son. Ten’Gewek kids matured along a different pattern to human kids: they got mobile fast, way faster than any human toddler, with shocking strength and essentially perfect coordination. They transitioned to solid food quickly, too.

Social development, though? That was slower. A human child started constructing sentences before a Ten’Gewek was even out of the babbling phase. The Ten’Gewek “Terrible Twos” actually happened when the child was three years old, and Ten’Gewek parents had to contend with a willful tantruming gymnast rather than a mere screaming toddler.

Even so, they loved their kids. As far as Vemik was concerned, it was like having an interactive kettlebell. And Tilly had to admit, the kid was cute as hell. His crest was growing in, curly and floppy and platinum blond. It wouldn’t stick out mohawk-like for a while yet, but that just made him all the cuter, really.

Which was odd from a human perspective, considering that Vemun was also a very muscular boy at around a hundred and fifty pounds. By Ten’Gewek standards, he was a normal-sized male on the hefty side of healthy. By human standards, he’d be a sixth-grade linebacker.

Fortunately, he wouldn’t have another major growth spurt until puberty, at around ten human years old. There were definite phases to Ten’Gewek youth, and Vemun was now into the slow and steady phase where all his growing energies went into developing his mind, and piling on that pound-for-pound superhuman strength the Ten’Gewek were infamous for. By the time puberty hit and he was growing like a weed again, he’d likely be pushing well (and rapidly) past three hundred pounds, and he’d probably be at least five times stronger than an athletic human man at the same weight.

Already, he was watching his dad hammer on steel, and even taking a few swings himself. Inexpertly to be sure, but no human three-year-old could ever have been trusted around glowing hot steel. The coordination just wasn’t there. No human three-year-old could swing a twenty-pound hammer, either. He had big, curious eyes behind the too-big safety goggles, and he kept his tail safely anchored around Vemik’s leg while he practiced.

Tilly recognized a scrap piece. Even Vemik had failures now and then: a bad quench, a crack that went right the way through, some other catastrophic flaw that sent the project to the scrap pile to go back in the furnace. No good for making a tool with, but fine for supervised teaching.

She waved, then gestured toward the Singer’s hut, letting him know where she’d be waiting once he was finished.

The inside of Singer’s hut was an eclectic blend of Ten’Gewek tradition and modern life. It had a dirt floor, true, but that floor was well-tamped and covered with woven mats. All her things were neatly organized on pegs along the wall, or on a low shelf along the ground. Potted food, a bone flute, a shawl and a drum sat next to imported examples of technology in the form of a well-made journal, a robust pen and a bottle of ink, next to a stack of pliable bark sheets with the Singers’ traditional song-markings bitten and chewed into them.

The smell was always homely and inviting. Ten’Gewek were musky beings, to the point where even their women smelled firmly masculine to a human nose. That was especially true of Singers, and of Singer in particular; she was a muscular Amazon of a woman even by Ten’Gewek standards. But Singer’s hut didn’t have too much of that deeply ingrained scent. There was the omnipresent aroma of wood and leather, of course, but mostly the hut smelled of incense, herbs, sweet smoke and crushed seeds.

Honestly, to Tilly’s mind, Singer was what a hippy should be. Practical first and foremost, and connected to nature without too much of the crystal-gripping silliness.

She was making beads when Tilly entered. The Singers braved shallow water to collect small, smooth stones, especially interesting ones, and then drilled holes through them, a task made much easier by access to steel tools. She had a small hand drill she’d clearly purchased in Folctha with a set of good hardened drill bits in a bright yellow case; probably she and Vemik conspired to find something they’d both love to have.

The task of both holding the beads and drilling through them admittedly looked a lot easier considering how delicately she could grip things with her feet.

She looked up as Tilly entered, hooted a welcome, and set the unfinished bead aside in a wooden bowl, before carefully putting the expensive imported tools away and rising to give Tilly a hug.

“Hello, Singer.”

The Singer had many important duties: one of them was counselling her people through hard times. She could spot a depressed mood as easily as Tilly could have noticed a stone in her shoe. “Bad news? You normally more up than this…”

“Yeah. Afraid so.”

The Singer nodded, and in seconds Tilly was favored with the good rug to sit on, and there was a small clay pot among the slow-burning coals in the middle of the hut: Ten’Gewek tea, made with dried berries rather than leaves. They had a pretty strong taste for sugary things and the drink was almost cloyingly sweet. Its fruity steam added a warm comfort to the atmosphere.

Vemik and Vemun joined them before it had finished brewing. Vemik was sweat-covered and pretty rank from hard work, haggard and happy to be home. The child was limp and asleep, draped across his father’s shoulder, and the scene the two of them made was one of the most heart-melting things she’d ever seen. Ten’Gewek kids didn’t tire like human kids, they didn’t have that grumpy-shouty phase where they were tired and didn’t know what to do about it. They just ran straight off the energy cliff, whereupon they’d find something to cuddle and then zonk out in seconds.

Fortunately, Vemun had a teddy bear, and wrapped himself around it the instant it was within reach. Vemik had hooted and trilled at length when Tilly gave it to him: something about the idea of turning the “Earth Brown One” into a child’s sleepy cuddle-toy just tickled him pink.

His tongue snaked the air over the fire for a moment once he’d got Vemun down on some blankets, and he sat next to Tilly. “…Good berries. Must be bad.”

Tilly laughed, in an explosive, sad way. “…Yeah. We, uh… we got an update. It’s not good news.”

The Singer used a cloth to lift the clay pot out of the fire, and poured it into three small cups. “You know why the Array down now?”

“Yeah. One of them exploded. Killed thousands of people.” Tilly sighed. “So they’re all shut down until we can make sure it won’t ever happen again. Which might take years. So… we’re all being recalled to Earth.”

Both Singer and Vemik blinked.

“…Arrays can explode?” Vemik shot a glance up the hill toward the village Array.

“Apparently, if something goes wrong enough…but I don’t think it was an accident. I think it was something the Big Enemy did. We all do. So, like I said, they’re all shut down until then. Yours too; we pulled the power the first day.”

“So that’s why Professor Daniel said it’s off.” Vemik shivered.

“But why can’t you stay here?” The Singer asked. “There’s food for everyone, if you do village-work.”

“It’s more than village-work,” Tilly sighed. “There’s logistics. Think about it. We’ve been using Arrays to move everything we need between worlds, right? Well, if we can’t use that, we need to use ships. And there aren’t enough ships, and ships need crew anyway…we used arrays for a reason. We’ll probably go back to them as soon as we safely can. But for now… the money just isn’t there. The people funding our work here have decided to call us back. So… we’re leaving.”

She was promptly the filling in a Ten’Gewek hug sandwich. She didn’t mind; musky affection was what cavemonkeys did best.

And in fact it was what she’d needed. Reassurance that they understood, that her friends would miss her…She wasn’t looking forward to going back to the world of pure academia. Sure. there’d be plenty for her to do there as she presented her findings, defended her work, maybe put it to good use in developing the study of human cultures…

But her heart was on Akyawentuo now. And she didn’t want to leave it behind.

“There’ll be… some of us who stay,” she managed, after a few minutes. “Probably. Only a few. I’ll try to be one of them, but…”

“We could ask for you,” the Singer suggested.

Tilly was touched, but her sense of obligation stung her. “I don’t… you shouldn’t ask for me just because you’re my friend. Whoever stays here has to be the right people.”

“I know,” the Singer assured her. “But I think I’ll ask for you. I think you’re ‘right’.”

“You helped me make the bawistuh, Vemik reminded her. “You’ve given more to the village than most! And besides. Is diplomatic team who will stay behind, yes? Best to have the people we like with them! You being our friend is a right reason.”

Tilly sighed and relaxed. She’d been so worried about breaking the news, she hadn’t even thought that maybe they’d turn it around on her. Make her feel so… valued. That was kinda new.

“You sleep here tonight,” Vemik decided. “Sometimes, we need more than hug, yes?”

They hugged her tighter, in the full-bodied way Ten’Gewek did when they really cared: arms, tail and legs around as much of their friend as they could manage, heads pressed together, feet and hands tangled tightly. It was a profoundly intimate gesture.

Tilly couldn’t resist them. “Oh…okay.”

Nor did she want to.

It was early evening anyway, and Singer had to prepare for the evening Song. That left Tilly alone in Vemik’s arms…it was different, that time. It wasn’t his usual endlessly volcanic passion, where he was as much proving his superhuman strength as he was happily nailing her to the ground through the next afternoon. Instead it was…he was…

Loving. Powerful and intense as always, but now…It damn near broke her heart, when she had the presence to form a coherent thought.

They whiled away the rest of the afternoon tangled together, no words needed for the rhythm between them. When evening came, they didn’t so much stop, as agree with a simple nuzzle that it was time to meet the night with the village. The Song started as they emerged, and Vemik joined in with Yan and another man to Dance the men’s offering to the gods.

Singing was normally the domain of the women, led by the Singer. Dancing was what the men did, with Singer’s apprentice Dancer learning all she could about the menfolk’s much more kinetic world. Tilly watched while the three taught Dancer their offering. They Took the rhythm of the Dance from the Song being Given all around them: primal, powerful, an exaltation in the day’s hard-won right to life, in the heart of one of the most dangerous jungles known on any world. It was safe only where the People made it safe, every day with great, ongoing effort.

The mere act of surviving their home was a prayer to the gods, and no amount of Sky-Magic could ever take that from them. Their reward was the plenty of the jungle, and the strength, and guile, and bravery it gave them. Their very beings thrummed in tune with their world. They were a people made for their place, and their place was made for them.

They had purpose.

Sleep came slowly. Vemik and Singer hugged Tilly tightly against themselves under those heavy Werne pelts, sharing heat and gentle affection against the creeping autumn chill of the night. Closeness—and maybe a little bit of play, too—faded into sleep so slowly, it was hard to say when sleep had actually taken them.

It didn’t matter.

The morning came, eventually. Reality had to be dealt with, the cold fought against despite the warmth under those pelts. It’d be sweltering by mid-day, and by midnight it might drop below freezing. Such was the rhythm.

She spotted Vemik and Singer talking animatedly with Professor later that day, while she was closing up work on her radioisotope lab. She knew what they were talking about. Maybe they wouldn’t get their way. Maybe she’d be sent home with the others regardless. But it felt good to have friends fighting her corner.

It felt good to belong.

Date Point: 17y7m3d AV
HMS Valiant, Orbiting planet Nightmare

Daniel Hoeff

V-Type destroyers had a magnetized flight deck and tethering forcefields along their back. Hoeff sometimes wondered why they weren’t mounted upside-down in the belly, or sideways along a flank. It wasn’t like it’d make any difference in zero-G…but then again, if everything was the same notional way up, it was probably easier for the crew.

Either way, their Weaver latched onto the deck with a firm resonant tungggg! and Hoeff’s last view of Nightmare’s wintery-white continents out the porthole was eclipsed by the black edge of the ship as they were drawn inside and sealed tightly away behind good solid doors and backup forcefields.

The drop in gravity down to Earth normal was almost disorienting. They all knew how to handle it, though: stand up carefully, bounce on their toes while holding on to something, shift their weight a bit. Remind their brains how much force was needed to get around.

Still. A man always felt like he could jump to the moon for a while after coming out of high-G.

There was the usual meet-and-greet, the curtain of cold fog rolling off the Weaver’s hull as they stepped out into the hangar, and of course decontamination. They’d been eating alien pig-critters for a while, so a quick pass through a biofilter arch to kill any parasites or alien germs was a necessary minor indignity, even if it always left Hoeff’s mouth feeling… squeaky.

Then, there were the most important matters to attend to. First, a blessed, glorious shower. It wasn’t quite so bad for the monkeybros since they were always pretty musky, but the humanfolk were particularly ripe, especially Julian. Super-caveman didn’t just look the part, he smelled it something fierce.

Jesus Christ hot water and soap was the greatest thing ever. Even Ferd could appreciate its charms after a couple weeks covered in rendered fat.

Next, there was food. Everyone was hungry as fuck, but the monkeys were of course ravenous, the cold having eaten away what little reserves they had.

Finally came learning what the fuck had actually happened. They got their briefing while they were still picking at their food, bellies full but hunger not quite sated. Long, deep cold had a way of cutting the fat right out of a guy, and their stomachs knew it.

Still. The hunger faded into the background as the enormity of what they were hearing settled in.

Julian had the most immediately apt questions. “Has Ambassador Rockefeller had anything to say? Because my duty now puts me light-years away from my family. If I can’t jump to Akyawentuo…”

“There’s a letter for you from the ambassador.” The lieutenant briefing them, Kirsten Candreva, slid it across the table. Her expression was sympathetic, though. Of course, everyone serving in a starship was facing a lot more time away from port, weren’t they?

Hoeff could see what was coming from a mile away. “Buddy, we’ve got a long ride ahead of us before we get home, don’t fly off the handle—”

“A letter, huh? That’s gonna be a hell of a read. Because this just completely exploded the Mission. We can’t go without that Array. Period.”

“I doubt anyone would argue that, sir. In any case, I’m not authorized to know the lofty dealings of ambassadors and envoys, so…”

Heh. That was a carefully-chosen, weapons grade bit of snark right there, and it seemed to deflate Julian better than anything Hoeff had ever managed. He sighed, slipped the letter out from under Candreva’s fingertips, and nodded.

She handed out some other stuff—instructions for the JETS team, mostly—then stood and left them in peace, with the assurance that she was available whenever they needed her.

Hoeff and his team read their letter in silence. The big news, of course, was the Old Man’s death. Christ. Powell gone, just like that. That was…

…Fuck.

Julian’s letter apparently didn’t contain any mention of that. It did, however, contain an entirely different bit of news. “…Well, that’s a hell of a thing. Fuck me.” His giant paws were actually shaking.

“What happened?”

“…Uh, ‘in recognition of my faithful and exemplary service,’ I’ve been offered the position of full ambassador to the Ten’Gewek. Apparently confirmation is basically a lock in the senate…fuck.”

“…You’re shitting me!”

Julian set the letter down. “It…makes sense,” he conceded. “With no jump array contact, the flight time over there in, say, a Misfit-class is a couple of weeks. Rockefeller can’t be the ambassador under those conditions. He’s…not physically fit for the mission.”

“The Given-Men not accept him anyway,” Ferd predicted. “He has Human power and respect, but we need…”

Julian sighed with a certain resigned finality. He’d already decided. “Someone like me.”

“Only ‘someone like you’ I know is you. You have been to Lodge, fought and won a good, strong rank. Good like mine! The Given-Men think you Given-Man from the sky.”

Hoeff had to interject at that. “Wait, you’ve fought at the Lodge?”

Julian nodded. “Ayup. I’m not too shabby either, I guess. Did a lot better than I thought I would, considering I’m one of the smallest guys at the lodge. I went earlier this year, a couple weeks after I finally drew about level with Vemik strength-wise and just…went through it all. I had to, otherwise Yan would lose face. Only reason I’m not a Given-Man myself is because I couldn’t father a tribe.”

Ferd nodded. “And Core-tie have a contract, Give and Take. All the things that make HEAT, all their sky-medicine…all a contract. Part of that contract is the blood-Taking from us,” he said. “Some of the Lodge don’t like that. Some of the Singers like it even less. But we know, HEAT keep us safe, and we help keep other Sky-People safe too. Jooyun helped make that. Jooyun’s voice keeps it strong. No Jooyun… things might change at the Lodge. Might decide we’ve Given enough.”

“So…lemme get this straight. You’re ambassador now—”

“Will be.”

“Right. And you’re that because you literally out-gorilla the gorillas at their own gorilla games?”

Tarzan shrugged, “I gorilla’d enough. Yan and his best buds can still squash me like a bug, for now. But that’s okay. The important thing is that I can stand among them without fear. They respect me enough that they will listen to me, on their own terms, in their own, uh, government.”

“And what about your girls and your kids?”

Julian sighed. “Two months on, two months off I’d imagine. Or something like that. That’s not gonna be fun at all. But here’s the fuckin’ evil part. Ambassador Rockefeller knows good and damn well I can’t say no, not with the doors this opens for me and my family.”

“…What doors? Aren’t you already a fuckin’ millionaire?” Rees looked a bit lost. Hoeff couldn’t blame him. Like Candreva had said, Ambassadorial business was a bit above them.

“No amount of money can help with some opportunities. At this level, it ain’t always about bucks. Before, I could send my kids to good damn schools and give them a great shot at life. Now? With this? They can be anything they want, so long as they’ve got the talent, and all I have to do is ask. I would be a complete fool to turn that opportunity down.”

“They always talk about how anyone can be President,” Hoeff rumbled. “But it’s sure as shit a lot more likely for the ‘right people.’”

“And now you’re the ‘right people,’” Frasier summarized, skeptically. “I thought the whole point of your country was to get away from that lords and ladies bollocks?”

“We did. Dude, I grew up in the fuckin’ woods, on welfare. Now, I can set my kids up for life just based on my merit for the job, and the only thing that’ll screw them is if they don’t have merit in turn. Tell me that ain’t egalitarian as shit.”

“And all the Ambassador asks in return is you’re not around half the time.”

“…It’s a big ask, yeah. But this is the important bit. This is the only time in my life I’ll ever be asked. If I say no, I’ll be saying no forever. All those doors that might be creaking open for my family will quietly close again, and they won’t ask a second time.”

Frasier nodded. “…Hell of a bloody carrot, then. What’s the stick?”

“…There isn’t much of one. He can’t fire me, he needs me too much. I’d just be doing the job until I quit. He knows it too, which is why he arranged for such a big goddamned carrot. The stick is pretty much just missing out on the carrot.”

Hoeff looked at Julian shrewdly. “I gotta say, your Minnesota modesty seems to have disappeared…”

Julian sighed again and rested his hands on his knees. “What, am I supposed to pretend they’d give an offer like this to just anyone? If I’ve learned anything playing these games, it’s that false modesty isn’t any kind of modesty at all.”

“So you’re taking it.”

“Al and Xiù will say I should,” he predicted. “I’m not gonna say yes until they have, but they will…What was your bad news?”

Hoeff sighed, and told him.

It was going to be a long trip back.

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Cruise Liner Boone’s Star, Deep space, the Border Stars

Lieutenant Booker Campbell

Ah, the trials and tribulations of youth. Thank God Campbell was through with them.

Thompson, though? Not so much. He was a red-blooded man in the flower of his youth. He’d been blessed with incredible luck, raised with the right work ethic, and given the opportunity to earn his way toward human potential at its absolute maximum. The boot-ass kid was so fuckin’ high on life right now, it was honestly amazing his little problem had taken so long to surface.

They were trapped on a ship with absolutely nothing to do but eat, sleep, train, and study. Oh, and ogle the many and beautiful womanly creatures that were quite literally on the same boat.

To say Thompson was distracted would be the understatement of a fuckin’ lifetime. In fact, Campbell had to wonder how long it’d been since the kid last had any female contact at all. His career had been… what? Basic, then School of Infantry, then indoc, the pipeline, the Grinder, then here. And that had been quite literally fresh from high school graduation, too. He’d had a whole whopping week as a free civilian.

In short: Thompson had no idea whatsoever about How To Talk To Girls. Since of course, high school absolutely didn’t count. He’d probably been the big man on campus too, but now?

Well, he wasn’t dealing with teenage girls anymore. And the women were rightly a bit standoffish from him. Who wouldn’t be? He was a walking tank and still thinking like a high school senior…

“I swear this was way easier when I was dating…”

“You were a young buff three-sport varsity jock in a good high school, who was planning to enlist first thing after graduation. That meant you were a low-risk fling for young and inexperienced teenage girls. Of course it was easy. These women are professionals, they’re not gonna respond well to ‘Becky, lemme smash,’ no matter how pretty you smile at them.”

Thompson had a good self-deprecating sense of humor about him, and smiled sheepishly. “Guess they ain’t here for a good time, huh?”

“Nope. They’re here with a job to do. We’re cargo. They’re working.”

“Maybe they need a stress-buster?”

“And maybe they don’t. Be careful, Thompson. Sexual harassment would be a bad way to throw away that hard-earned career of yours.”

He watched the kid sober up a little, with some gratification. Inexperience was forgivable, and Thompson wasn’t guilty of the less forgivable sin of being brainless.

“…Jeez, LT, did I cross that line?”

“Eh, probably not. You may be a gormless boot—”

“Hey!”

“But as much as it pains me to admit, you’re ridiculously good-looking and that counts for a lot.”

Thompson clearly wasn’t used to being complimented on his looks. He covered for his embarrassment with a winning grin and a desperate joke, accompanied by an outrageous flex. “Hell yeah, I worked hard enough for it!!”

…Impressive, admittedly. But still, this was lesson time so Campbell just gave him a solemn Look until the kid calmed down. He added the quirked eyebrow, too. Even a teenager knew not to mess with the ‘brow.

“Got that out of ‘yer system?”

“…Yessir.”

“Good. Maybe don’t try that with the ladies. At least, not as an opening gambit.”

“So…what is a good opening gambit?” Thompson asked.

…Jesus Christ.

“Look, if there’s a gal on this ship who’s inclined to take a ride? She’ll let you know. All you gotta do right now is make eye contact and smile. If the situation permits, try small talk. You be polite, and professional—and unlike what some folks think, you can do that and be friendly—and you be respectful.”

“So, just…how is that dating?”

“It isn’t. You’re not dating. This is not the place or the time. And believe me, if your corn-fed ass can’t get any on this ship, you ain’t gonna anyway. Professional adults have priorities and those priorities likely don’t include a teenage bumpkin murderhulk from Iowa. So don’t push it, okay? At least for my sake, because this is a weird situation and I’m not your NCO. That makes me considerably more dangerous for you if you screw up. You do understand that, right?”

A look of sudden understanding crossed across his face. “I do, sir. I won’t fuck up.”

“Good, I know you won’t. Now go clean up. Least you can do is put on your prettiest uniform.”

Campbell hated to scare the kid, but Thompson was right out of the pipeline and had ten times more pent-up aggression in him than the civilians were ready to handle. Normally, the combat arms kids were shipped off to lighter training courses and gradually phased down a bit, then maybe they’d go directly to their first duty stations and get “de-booted” even more…

There were things that, as an officer, Campbell couldn’t overlook if they happened in his presence. Years ago, in a different age and as an NCO in the Marines…but it wasn’t years ago, he wasn’t an NCO anymore, and this wasn’t the Marines. They weren’t in a Marine town, filled with townfolk who had a working relationship with the Corps. Thompson could fuck his life up big if he made the right kind of mistake here.

And Campbell would have to be the instrument of those consequences, too.

It was going to be a long-ass trip. But, Thompson nodded, and promised he’d behave his very best…and left for the evening on “personal time.”

Campbell got some shuteye.

Some hours later, he was woken up by a quiet curse coming from the bunk’s general direction. Thompson was digging for something and seemed agitated—

On a suspicion, Campbell glanced the other way, toward the door where a silhouette was leaning against the frame with amusement radiating off her every curve. Oh, that slick bastard. Apparently there was an interested gal on board after all.

“Looking for something, Specialist?”

“I swear I brought some—!”

“Some what, Thompson?”

Golden boy turned around and suddenly couldn’t find his words.

“Uh…well, I mean…”

Campbell dragged the agony out a bit, let the boy squirm some, while the woman in the doorway covered her mouth and shook with suppressed mirth.

“There’s a pack in my sea bag, at the bottom. They’re the good kind so don’t you dare use them all up.”

“…Thankyousir.”

“No worries. And Thompson?”

“Yeah?”

“You be a perfect gentleman…until she tells you otherwise. Y’hear?”

Countryboy went a brilliant shade of crimson and practically burst into flame when a wondrously musical lilting laugh came from the doorway. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure he behaves himself…” she promised, in a silky accent that Campbell couldn’t place.

Only once they were gone did Campbell permit himself to laugh. He pulled the mattresses together and sprawled across both of them, glad to have a little more space and no snoring beside him. Maybe there was a warm body somewhere out on the ship for him too, but…

…Well, happiness consists in getting enough sleep. That was a lesson Thompson would eventually learn, of course.

But not tonight.

Campbell fell asleep with a grin on his face

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Broodship, Deep Space, the Border Stars

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood.

The ship was Human, just as the Alpha-of-Alphas had been promised by the dataminds. They weren’t jumping from safety to safety now, they were flying like prey again, and the Brood network was humming with hunger. Human flesh was so rare, so special.

And so dangerous.

One of the things that set Alphas apart from the lesser of their Brood was the talent of savoring anticipation. Not just the moment of the kill, but the moment before it. A good Alpha could be satisfied with the knowledge that it would drink blood soon, and use that satisfaction to give it patience. Patience enough to score the prize and the kill.

Yes, they could have pulsed their warp engines, gained that little extra speed, chased the prey down. But Humans were more than other prey. They always hid things. Weapons, tactics, tricks. An impatient brood that revealed itself early might be outrun, torn apart by undetected guns, neutralized by unforeseen traps…

The Flensing-Brood would not meet such a fate today. It took long, long days to slide up alongside the human ship, to close the distance until it was actually visible to the eye, alongside the cloaked Broodship in space.

Only the most disciplined Hunters could bear to have meat so close in front of their teeth and not snap at it before time. But the Flensing-Brood were disciplined, sharp and trusting. They knew the Alpha’s mind, knew its wisdom.

They waited, and they hungered.

Until the last inches closed.

Until they latched onto the human ship’s hull.

Until they tore through it.

Until they fed.

++END CHAPTER 68++

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 69. Nice.

Chapter 69: Lockdown

Date point: 17y7m4d AV
Luxury cruise liner Boone’s Star, en route to Cimbrean, the Border Stars

Sergeant Tanner Lang

“The two supermutants are back in the gym again…”

“You must be fuckin’ shittin’ me.” Lanter said with precisely zero surprise. “They’re awake, of course they’re in the fuckin’ gym.”

“Well, so fuckin’ what? Why the fuck ain’t we there, too? I’m losing my goddamn mind reading these fuckin’ training slides…”

“We gotta get that shit squared away,” Lang reminded them, though his heart wasn’t in it. Truth was, he was bored too.

Embassy security was a serious job, involving far more than standing around looking neat and impressive in dress blues. Not a year went by without some kind of an attack on a US diplomatic facility somewhere in the world, be it molotovs, suicide bombers, an angry mob, or even a team of armed gunmen. Lang and his Marines were either trained infantry or military policemen and all had seen action of some kind or another.

The assignment on Cimbrean was related to the new permanent embassy with the Ten’Gewek, not that any of them were going to be stationed on Akyawentuo, at least…not constantly. No, they were going to be dealing with both humans and ETs, and the education involved in learning how to recognize, accommodate and protect all of the weird critters that might come visiting was…

Well, Lang was getting kinda sick and tired of reading through cultural summaries. He wasn’t an anthropologist. His job was making sure that if shit started exploding and bullets started flying, all the important people got out of there alive. Folctha seemed like a nice place. Pretty parks, wide streets, modern architecture, a great big interspecies melting pot… but it had seen its share of terrorist activity from the APA and hostile infiltration by the Hierarchy.

So the embassy needed them. And so they were riding in what would have been style if the Boone’s Star weren’t packed to the gills with talent and materiel. And all they could do was read their educational material, keep up their PT, and try not to go totally out of their minds from how dull a flight at warp through deep space was.

“Yeah yeah…still, we gotta stay fit too, if we’re gonna keep up with talking gorillas.”

“And the gorilla ambassador.”

“Him too. And I need someone to beat me smart again.”

“You were never smart, Hoetze.”

“Fuck you.”

“Nah. Besides, Specialist Joe McHugemeat there probably wants a punching bag.”

“And a wife…”

“Already got one. You see he snagged the hottest ass onboard literally the first day?”

“It was more like a week,” Lang noted. “Not the fastest I’ve seen.”

“They were all ogling him right away! Even in his stupid bullshit Army uniform!”

“Jesus Christ,” Lang shook his head in disgust. “Y’all sound like the biggest blubbering pussies ever. Why the fuck are you letting fuckin’ Army ruin your day?”

“Yeah, go steal his girl!” Becker suggested.

“I ain’t the one complaining night and day about my ultraviolet fuckin’ balls. And it ain’t me who’s letting Joe determine if they get drained or not. That’s your fault, corporal.” Lang chuckled to himself. Truth was, Thompson was probably a decent kid. Nothing to get worked up over.

But on the other hand, it was hilarious as fuck watching his young Marines get so worked up over the big guy. Admittedly, it was hard not to feel dispirited when compared against such a ridiculously perfect example of winning at basically everything…but still. Lang had an imp of the perverse on his shoulder most days, and he just couldn’t help but needle them, just a bit.

Becker’s suggestion about stealing the HEAT boot’s girl didn’t exactly get rave reviews.

“Fuckin’ how?” Hoetze seemed both exasperated and amused at the same time. “All I got goin’ for me is ugly but well-hung, and maybe a good joke or two!”

“I bet he’s got a micro-weenis from all the ‘roids they’re feeding ‘em.”

“Uh-huh.” Hernandez got into it now. “All that meat-gazing you white boys be doin’? You know them HEAT boys are packin’ big. I think ‘yer all just jealous.”

That of course set off an omni-directional round of full-throated accusations and counter-insults, exactly as he intended. Somehow, nobody thought to comment on how exactly Hernandez could speak so expertly on Thompson’s allegedly superior endowment.

A masterful play, really.

“Anyway,” Hoetze granted sullenly, “Specialist Horsecock can fuckin’ have her. I don’t care if he is just a stupid fuckin’ Army bitch. I ain’t retarded enough to pick that fight.”

“I can’t believe y’all fuckers are so scared of ‘em,” Becker chuckled. “Have you actually talked to the kid? He’s the corniest fuckin’ boot that ever did boot. He was literally excited that I said anything to him! I bet he’s gullible as shit.”

“Gullible? Sure. But y’know what else he is? Fuckin’ huge! You remember when he was doin’ laps on the promenade?”

“When you were fiercely meat-gazin’ I bet?”

Hoetze ignored him. “The huge fucker shook the goddamned ship, man! He left his fuckin’ bare footprints in the decking, remember?”

“And I bet he grinned a big stupid grin at you too, huh?”

“Maybe? I dunno. I was busy not being in the way.”

“You fuckin’ pussy! So big dopey Joe wanted to say hi and wag his tail, but you were too busy being afraid. Is that about right?”

“Well, yeah. Big fuckin’ hoss like that? I’m not gonna be his fuckin’ condom.”

Crude laughter all around, followed by more omni-directional insults.

“Nah. For real though, he’s just a huge gullible puppy. Tell me that ain’t gonna be fun! He’s got that extra retarded blank grin all the Joe have, too. Even more retarded ‘cuz he’s getting laid.”

“At least somebody on this fuckin’ ship is…” Centopani muttered.

And that, right there, was the sum of their problems. They were bored out of their fucking skulls. There were no real facilities onboard to do anything useful, and they were only barely running guard shifts because it was a civilian vessel and the Captain was retarded. All they could do was sit around, do their PT, study PME bullshit…

They’d watched all the good movies. The civilians didn’t like what they wanted to watch so they consistently got voted down—when the civilians weren’t being all sorts of weird to them. It was either “thank you for your service” bullshit, or they’d shy away with dark whispers. No middle ground.

And there wasn’t a lot of common ground with the two HEAT brutes, either. Becker was right, the young one was fuckin’ raw and the other one was about the crustiest, saltiest old lieutenant Lang had ever met. He was formerly a Marine—and infantry, too—but since then he’d gone over to the dark side, joined the space force, and apparently eaten a backhoe and a whole team of door-kickers along the way, too.

Whatever. Interesting that a pair of special-ops “celebrities” happened to be onboard, but ultimately they weren’t his problem. What was his problem was the ridiculous circlejerk his Marines were wallowing in. Frankly, Lang had standards.

He sighed and levered himself to his feet.

“I’m goin’ for a walk,” he declared. “Don’t burn the fuckin’ place down.”

Hernandez nodded respectfully. “‘Rah, sarg’n’t.”

Given another couple of weeks for final fitting and stuff, Boone’s Star would have been luxury like Lang had never known. The ship was somewhere between a big ocean cruise ship and a billionaire’s megayacht, big enough to carry about a hundred guests in sumptuous comfort… or, right now, two hundred and twenty plus a pair of fucking ogres and a load of supplies, all crammed in.

The pool on the lido deck, for instance, was full of crates. There was only so many times a guy could jog around and around a huge pile of boxes before his brain started to stop.

The crazy thing was the windows. They were thicker than aquarium glass and ran pretty much from knee height to the ceiling on most decks. When they’d first come aboard, pretty much everyone had taken some time to stand and stare down at the Earth. Now, of course, they were way out in deep space and, sure, he’d never seen so many stars at first…

But they’d got old after a while. If you stood and watched long enough, you might notice they were moving, tracking slowly across the sky, but Lang had never been the kinda guy who could watch paint dry.

Shit, the paint mighta been more interesting. The only thing out there worth looking at was their escort, and that was just a darker patch way out there, only seen by the stars that blinked out as they passed behind it. USS Hammer DS-2, the US Navy’s version of the British V-Class. Same hull, same shipyard, different outfitting.

Lang felt the deck shudder slightly underfoot. He looked behind him and saw the “smaller” of the two ogres approaching, some kind of allegedly harmless smile on his face.

“Gets kinda old after a while, doesn’t it?” he rumbled. He had a baritone voice that would have been smooth and quiet, were it not so deep. “Could do with a planet or two.”

“You’re not wrong,” Lang agreed, and turned around. “And there’s only so many times I can hear my guys talk shit ‘fore I start to feel dumb.”

“Well,” Campbell pointed out, “you are in the Marines, after all…”

“What about your young charge?”

“Good kid. Painfully earnest. Keep expectin’ him to say ‘golly gee willikers’ or some shit.”

Lang felt the kid come thundering along through the floor, right about the same time he heard his booming voice echo down the hall. “Hey, I’m not that bad, sir!”

“Yes you are. And…” Campbell tapped on his phone, “…time. Good job, Thompson!”

The titan came thumping up to a halt next to them both, and, well…fuck.

The kid was motherfuckin’ huge.

Even next to Campbell he was a giant, and the size difference really was impossible to miss. The kid was so damn packed full of muscle he was practically bursting out of his skin. He had to have at least half a foot on his hulking tank of a lieutenant, too. Horizontally. In width and depth. And, well…it was honestly hard to miss any of the other details either, considering his special-operator-grade silkies.

They sure do grow ‘em big out in the country, nowadays.

“We gonna spar today, ell-tee? I’m gettin’ real goddamn bored of running.”

“Tomorrow. We’re sharing the space, remember?” The civilians were bored too, and there were a lot more of them, with only a finite amount of space on the ship. The only spot big enough to accommodate the two huge men sparring would have to be the leisure deck at the front, which everybody else was using for whatever they wanted to do.

“Well shit, we can share! Why didn’t they fuckin’ say something?”

“We are sharing, Thompson. We’ll probably have an audience, and I’m not convinced you won’t accidentally throw me through a wall. By the way, have you met Sergeant Lang?”

Hulk-boot instantly snapped to a severe parade rest and nodded his greeting. “No, lieutenant!”

Jesus fuck was he ever boot.

“Right, nice to meet ‘ya, Specialist,” Lang said. “As you were…no, fuckin’ relax man!”

Thompson tried his absolute hardest to relax appropriately. God.

“Right…Specialist, do you mind if I call you Thompson?”

“…No, Sergeant.”

“Right. Okay. Have you actually forgotten how to relax?”

Thompson gave a sheepish look, which was honestly just too goddamned much on the big guy. “…Uh, this is the slowest it’s been for me since, uh…I enlisted.”

“He’s still in the pipeline, actually,” Campbell clarified. “So am I. We’ve both got another, uh…four years ahead of us.”

…Holy fuck that was a long time. “Four more years, for real?”

“Fuckin’ astronaut trainin’ next!!” Thompson looked giddy with excitement at that one.

“…Yeah. So you see, I gotta find a way to de-boot his ass—”

“Hey! …Sir.”

“See? He can’t let himself banter even a little bit. And I can’t help but hear you’ve got a team of salty devil-dogs, lookin’ for something to do…”

Lang couldn’t help but chuckle. “You sure you wanna traumatize the poor kid, sir? My guys won’t be gentle.”

“It’ll build character, and Thompson here needs some friends his age.”

“You sound like my dad,” Thompson grumbled.

“I am ‘yer daddy, son. So I’mma go shower, you go make friends. Run along and play, now.”

With that, the Lieutenant nodded at Lang, and left him alone with hulked-out Captain America, who seemed, if anything, even more uncertain and confused than ever.

Still. The kid was gonna need some of the polish and shine knocked off him sooner rather than later. And it was something to do, so… “Come on then.”

Plus, Lang couldn’t wait to see how his men reacted to the object of their jealous banter, suddenly among them in nothing but his sweat, silkies, and more golly-gee boyscout amazement than any of them had felt in years. Alone, uncertain, confused…boot…

Oh, this was gonna be fun.

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Skytearer class dropship, upper atmosphere of planet ‘Mordor,’ occupied Hunter space

Father Liim of Clan Whitecrest

The Hunters had gotten a lot nastier over the years. Once upon a time they’d been a terror, and any ship boarded by them would only repel the boarders at great cost, if they managed it at all.

Gaoian space was a long way from their territory, buffered by the Interspecies Dominion’s trailing arm, but the Gao had spread quickly and inevitably been among the Hunters’ victims themselves. They’d fought bravely every time, or at least so Liim liked to imagine, but most Gao were no match for a Hunter of any kind, and the few who were were so often rare…

Nowadays, both Gao and Hunters alike were a good deal more fearsome, and in both cases the difference came down to equipment and tactics. And frankly, things could have been a lot worse. Hunters, for instance, were far too undisciplined and gluttonous to fill their important strategic targets with a shield of civilian bodies.

Or maybe it just didn’t occur to them that doing so would have stopped the Gao from firing. Either way, that particular blind spot had allowed the fleet to rain devastation on everything that even looked like a surface-to-air battery or wing of interceptors. There was still a lot of Hunter infrastructure on the planet’s surface, but the skies, at least, were clear and controlled.

Of course, if Liim were to rank all the hazards ahead of him on the coming mission, being instantly and painlessly vaporized by an anti-orbital weapon would have been low on his list of worries anyway. There were worse ways to go, and Skytearers were practically invisible anyway.

Not that they felt it.

“Fyu’s shit-caked ass-fur…” he cursed under his breath as their ride lurched hard enough to throw his stomach into the back of his mouth. It was probably just some kind of thermal or pressure layer in the atmosphere, or turbulence, but for a flash of a second there it had felt like being thrown toward the ground by Keeda.

Behind him, the oldest Whitecrest Brother on the planet, a lean and impeccably unscarred old ghost called Loorin, chittered. “You don’t like flying, Father?”

“Not my first choice in travel arrangements,” Liim admitted, more evenly than he felt.

“You’re going to enjoy the bit where we jump out, then.”

Liim chittered sarcastically. “Oh, that bit’s my favoritest.”

Loorin’s ear flicked amusedly. “You’ve been hanging around with the Stonebacks too much, Father.”

“They rub off on you after a while, it’s true. Especially a creature like Vark.”

The Skytearer lurched again before Loorin could reply, and even he reached out to grab on to something.

“Keeda’s teeth, it’s not usually this bad…”

Liim grimly double-checked the weather report on his armor’s HUD. “…Well, we are flying directly into a toxic dust storm,” he pointed out. As far as cover and concealment for his team’s infiltration went, the haboob they were due to land in and disembark under was perfect. But the reason it was so perfect was, well, it was a deathworld weather phenomenon on a planet characterized by centuries of industrial abuse so intense that the skies, seas and soil were all quite toxic.

The dropship and their suits could handle both the winds, the airborne particulates and the filth quite readily, but the Hunters wouldn’t be abroad, and sensors would be blind. The sort of conditions that a Whitecrest scouting team thrived in, just…turned up to eleven. If their infiltration had been noticed at all—which it shouldn’t have been—then by the time the Hunters were able to send a force to the area, all evidence of their arrival would have been obliterated by the weather, and Liim and his brother would be long gone.

But Loorin was right, it made for an exceptionally rough ride.

There was a particularly savage lurch, and the dropship’s interior lighting pulsed blue several times, alerting all its occupants that they were about to disembark. Liim sat forward in his chair, pushing against his harness, holding his weapon securely to his chest with one paw while the other hovered near the harness release between his knees.

Another set of blue pulses was all the warning he needed to brace for a final heavy lurch as they Skytearer touched ground, relying on its forcefields and landing gear to absorb quite a lot of speed. The ramp at the back unfolded and opened with surprising speed, and the blue light flicked firmly on, and stayed on.

Liim yanked on his release, and the harness disengaged. Straining against it turned into pouncing forward down the deck and out the ship’s square but vaguely insectoid rear end.

He was promptly plunged into a dark brown hell where up and down were visually indistinguishable. The whirling dust was so thick that the dropship vanished behind him in seconds, lost in the storm, though a flash of lightning briefly silhouetted it.

His armor took over where his eyes couldn’t cope, laying out the ground contours and obstacles underfoot with a thin grid, and picking out his team with triangular icons. He could see well enough to move, and he knew exactly where everyone was. Behind him, the dropship parted ways with the ground and kicked off again, bounding back into the sky.

They found the tunnel access in moments. E-Skurel-Ir tunnels weren’t locked, they just had big, heavy and redundant doors, partly to keep the worst of the surface conditions out, mostly to slow the Hunters down while the valuable children and relics were smuggled away into deep, hidden chambers. Entering them was easy.

It was a relief to shut away the howling dust-storm behind them. They didn’t unseal their suits, though: For the duration of this mission, the suits were their homes and protection, and enabled a seamless, invisible infiltration. Just one of dozens taking place across the continent at the sites identified as being most likely to house the First Alpha.

Such a scattergun approach was not ideal according to Whitecrest’s traditions… but needs must. Liim checked his team and, satisfied that they were ready, vanished into the dark.

They had a Hunter to hunt.

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Luxury cruise liner Boone’s Star, en route to Cimbrean, the Border Stars

Sergeant Tanner Lang

The initial introduction was…a bit awkward. Thompson squeezed through the doorway behind Lang and the room immediately went silent. It wasn’t a big space at the best of times—their cabin was sized for ship’s garrison, so three of the walls were all bunks and storage, and the common area was a compact, multi-purpose thing they could lay a mat across for PT, pull a table out of the floor and play cards, or maybe just pile together and watch a movie…

Functional, but cramped. And Thompson’s three-dimensional huge wasn’t helping.

“A’right Marines, this here is Specialist Thompson, who as you’ve guessed is a member of HEAT, currently in the Aggressor pipeline. Lieutenant Campbell—also in the Aggressor pipeline—thought it would be beneficial if we were to have a little meet-and-greet. I thought that sounded like a fantastic idea, so, here you go. Make introductions, I’m gonna go grab some snacks. Requests?”

“Doritos!”

“No shit, Hernandez. Anything else? Thompson, you want anything?”

The big kid seemed a bit lost. “Uh…maybe some Gatorade? I, uh…can’t really do junk food.”

“What, nothing? Jerky? Slim Jim?”

“…Well, plain jerky is probably okay, sarg’n’t.”

There was a round of rolled eyes, small snorts and other signs that everyone else in the room couldn’t quite take him seriously.

“What?! I gotta eat ten full meals a day! I can’t afford to be shittin’ my brains out!”

“Well, fuck!” exclaimed Hernandez. “That much? Why the fuck you doin’ that?”

“Well, uh…” Thompson grinned, and matter-of-factly showed them why with a full-body flex. “All this muscle needs a lot of fuel! Uh…I’m doing pretty good, huh?”

Nobody said anything as he quickly went through a well-practiced series of poses. It managed to shut everyone up instantly, even if he seemed a bit embarrassed by himself.

Lang’s team ogled the freak of nature openly for a long, plainly intimidated moment, until at last Centopani found a way to break the ice. “Pretty fuckin’ Superman good, I’d say. How fuckin’ big are you, farmboy?”

“Uh, six-three, ‘bout six-eighty-five this morning…wait.” Thompson paused in his posing for a moment and tilted his head. “What makes you think I’m a farm boy?”

“Where you from, Boot?” Becker had his mischievous grin on.

“…Well, Iowa, but—”

“So he’s a supermutant farmboy from Iowa.”

“I’m not—”

“Probably plows the field all by himself.”

“Dude, I’m not a farmer—!”

“Nah, but I bet he’d plow ‘yer sister pretty good!”

“Please, she don’t go in for countryboy hicks.”

“—The fuck? I ain’t no hick—!”

“He’s like all the corn-growing fuckers out in the boonies. Ten feet tall, curls full-grown bulls to impress the cityfolk—“

“—So goddamned blond-haired and blue-eyed it’s like some kinda creepy propaganda…”

Thompson had the most confused expression on his face. “The fuck’s wrong with you?”

“‘Dem blue devil eyes! They’re lookin’ at me!”

“That’s how they get ‘ya. He’s probably a secret government experiment, too.”

“Kinda, yeah.” Thompson’s annoyed growl was enough to shut everyone up for a moment, with maybe even the beginnings of guilty feelings, too. Which he promptly squandered. “And anyway, not everyone from the Midwest is a goddamn farmer.”

“I bet he bench-presses tractors for fun.”

“Naw, he tosses ‘em. Like ‘yer mom!”

“He ain’t that fuckin’ strong—”

Thompson sighed, resigned to the spirit of the thing. “Oh, I dunno…” He put a hand behind his head and squeezed down on that preposterously huge bicep of his until it mashed up hard against his ear. “I bet I’m man enough for her.”

Approving jeers and cat-calls all around, while Thompson showed off his even more preposterous tricep. “I’m pretty good at tossing massive things around, too.”

“Oh, hey! Hulk-farmer’s got jokes!”

Lang had enough for now. “Hey, you fuckin’ ass-pirates! Snacks? Remember?”

“Ask farmboy, sarg’n’t, we good.”

Thompson shook his head.

“You sure, specialist? I’m paying. You can’t cheat even a little?”

“No sarg’n’t, I really can’t. Not right now anyway. Eating is, like, almost a full-time job for me. I’m gonna be fitted for my first training EV-MASS too as soon as I arrive, so I gotta get up to my fighting weight as fast as I can.”

“Wait, you ain’t ready now?” Centopani scoffed in disbelief. “You’re fuckin’ warping the deck plating just standing there!”

Sure enough, Lang looked down and the decking was slightly but noticeably bowed under the kid’s stompers. Actually—

“You always train barefoot?”

“When I can, yeah. I gotta worry about foot health, and shoes can be bad for that. Also, uh, I got size twenty-one extra-wide feet, so…boots are expensive.”

Becker whistled at that. “Farmboy’s mutant as fuck, sarg’n’t. And ‘yer still not at ‘fighting’ weight? Whatever the fuck that is?’

“Well, I’m not that far off, I hope…but yeah. Fightin’ weight here means however big I can get. I’m still growin’ as fast as ever so that means I ain’t even close to done yet. ‘Long as I can move like an Aggressor’s s’posed to move, bigger and stronger is better for HEAT.”

Thompson was clearly used to being the center of attention, even if he still seemed a bit awkward about it. Or he was used to telling parts of his story, anyway. He’d probably been dealing with curious “normals” asking about the walking freakshow for a while now. Hell, probably since he was a kid. Odd that he was still any kind of awkward about it, really.

Lang’s men were weirdly respectful, though. They were crude, but considerate, and that was a good sign. “I can dig it. So you’ve been going at it full-bore since, when?”

“Since before I enlisted, yeah. I mean, really since I was twelve and I got obsessed with bein’ a ‘space Marine’ when I grew up, but…” he shrugged. “Anyway, that’s why I don’t really try my luck on junk calories. Heck, I’ve actually never eaten a Dorito—”

“Never?!”

“Never. I can tell just by smelling them I’d pay for it. So, I don’t. If I’m stuck on the latrine because I ate something stupid or whatever? That’s calories I ain’t using to grow, and it’s wasted time I ain’t lifting, or studying suit fundamentals, or…uh, whatever else I gotta do.”

…Well, shit. That spoke of some serious discipline that Lang hadn’t quite appreciated. No way would he have managed any of that as a, what? Nineteen year old kid? And he’s been working towards it since he was twelve? Freakshow body aside, Thompson’s face was just so young-looking…

“Well, okay. What if I go grab one of your meal packs instead?”

Thompson relaxed and looked genuinely grateful. “Yeah, that’d be awesome! It’s the two white containers in the cooler, if you look in our quarters.”

“Okay. I’ll go do that. You just take a load off here for a bit, ‘kay? I’ll be back in a few.”

“Huah, Sarg’n’t.” The giant kid snapped to parade rest while the rest of the room, suddenly remembering their customs and courtesies, moved to do the same.

“Right, as you were. Be right back.”

As Lang prowled away he slowed a bit so he could eavesdrop a bit more on the conversation, just for a moment. It was more of the same: Meeting the kid was about the most interesting thing to happen to his Marines in days, so the follow-up was a barrage of questions: What was his chow like then, how much could he lift, how fast could he run…they were like awed kids meeting a pro wrestler.

Chuckling to himself, Lang jogged down to the canteen and loaded up on snacks. He splurged and bought out their jerky too, since he liked the kid and something about the whole thing just screamed out for some friendly affection.

He went to go get Thompson’s meal, too. Lieutenant Campbell was taking a load off in their quarters, reclining on a mattress on the floor. The bunks were full of their gear, and it was pretty obvious why. Lang couldn’t imagine either of the huge men even fitting in the bunks, never mind doing it without breaking them.

The lieutenant was reading something on a tablet as he entered. “…Lemme guess. Food?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, it’s about a full-time job for us…” Campbell indicated the correct container and scooted his legs out of the way. “How’s it going?”

“He’s… very earnest.”

“Well, like I said. He’s been completely devoted to becoming HEAT basically since his balls dropped. The sports he played, the stuff he studied…”

“That sounds pretty dedicated. Worryingly so.”

“Yeah, I think he was dedicated to the exclusion of a lot of normal young-boy type stuff. Hell, I bet his only real friends were all his teammates or his opponents…. Anyway. For him, you’re looking for pack four out of ten.”

Lang opened the container and arched an eyebrow. The sealed ration packs within were thicker than the MREs he was used to, and the bag was black with white text instead of the familiar tan brown. The text was different, too:

Hazardous Environment Assault
Training and Development Ration, Individual
PREPARED FOR: SPC Thompson, Hunter

RAPID BULKING PHASE: 4/10 (Mid-Afternoon)
DO NOT CONSUME OUT OF SEQUENCE

Eat after light PT---supplement from lot B if activity demands
Cruezzir-D dose only as necessary
Take with pill pack #4A

Recommended hydration: not less than 1L with meal
Authorized snacks listed on internal card

“…Jesus.”

“Something the matter?” Campbell asked.

“Think I’m starting to appreciate just what you and the kid are putting yourselves through…No offense, but between this and and how long you’re in for and all the rest of it, I gotta wonder why you went for it? Doesn’t seem like a good deal to me…”

Campbell shrugged, unoffended. “It has its upsides. The training and medical regime we’re on fixed up all my career injuries overnight. And the mission’s good. It’s a good feeling, being able to do something most people can’t.” He rose to his feet in an easy, smooth motion that totally belied both his size and his age. “Anyway. I’m kinda interested to see how good your Marines have been for my boy.”

“Heh. Yeah, I figure I’ve given ‘em enough time alone…” Lang agreed. He tucked Thompson’s thick meal (and the pill pack) under his arm, and, after one last glance at the HEAT sleeping arrangements, showed the lieutenant back to where he and the others were staying.

Lang’s Marines had, in the short time it had taken him to go get their snacks and return along with Campbell, managed to do several things:

Firstly, there had clearly been some sort of scuffle, one which Thompson had handily won. Lang knew this because the middle of the room had been cleared out, and the giant fucker was more or less sitting atop Hoetze, O’Donnell, and Hernandez with the smuggest look of victory plastered across his handsome caveman face. The others were excitedly jeering, and trying fruitlessly to pry the big fucker off his victims; he was more or less ignoring all their efforts and having fun with his toys.

Secondly, there didn’t seem to be any hard feelings about anything, because everyone was laughing. It wasn’t strictly innocent, though; there was definitely a developing black eye or two, and everyone was nursing some kind of bruise. That was much harder play than Lang should really be tolerating. And Miller definitely had a hell of an abrasion from the decking on his face, too; by all evidence, Thompson had kicked everyone’s ass simultaneously, and done so basically instantly. Lang would need to properly re-Motivate his Marines about picking (and losing) a fight with the titan of a soldier at some point, but for now…

It was important they were all happy. Good. Boisterousness could be managed.

Most importantly though, Thompson looked genuinely and actually relaxed for the first time since… well, ever, that Campbell could remember. At least, to the point where he didn’t immediately scramble to his feet the second Campbell showed up, but instead glanced around at the others to see what they did.

Lang stepped into the room and made like he was taking a big sniff. “…Fuckin’ smells like sex in here.” Campbell hung back in the hall on some well-trained instinct, and stayed out of it for now.

“Don’t think this big bastard showered…” Hoetze grunted, squirming to try and free himself from the ignominious pin; his face was mashed hard into Thompson’s abs and escape seemed impossible, given the vicious leg-lock he had wrapped tightly around Hoetze’s chest. “Hnngh, fucker smells like a bull on hormone therapy!”

There were laughs all around, especially from Thompson, who mashed Hoetze up tighter against his body. “Hush, you love it.”

“How exactly did my three biggest Marines get in this predicament, anyway?” Lang asked Thompson. “I’m pretty sure you ain’t their type…”

“The whole team tackled me at the same time, sar’n’t. I won.”

“Oh, well. Continue, then.”

Thompson grinned evilly, and bore down on the three with considerably more force. Hernandez groaned plaintively, somewhere at the bottom of the pile. Hoetze just flailed silently as Thompson hitched himself up higher with his pin, and those chest-thick legs of his crushed Hoetze’s ribs; breathing was probably his major concern at the moment.

Lang grinned laconically, “You three always bite off more’n you can chew, huh?”

There wasn’t a real answer forthcoming, but Thompson seemed to be having fun…and it’d be a shame to deny the big puppy his chew toys…

“I’m pretty sure superhulk here’s prob’ly way better trained at this and he’s being gentle with you three idiots, so be grateful I ain’t gonna ask him to spar with you later. Anyway. Why did you fucknuggets decide to tackle him?”

“He wouldn’t answer the question! Hnnngh!” O’Donnell pulled at the kid’s thick wrist in a futile attempt at escape. He didn’t gain a millimeter. The kid had arms so big they were bigger than Lang’s legs, so he just squeezed that huge fuckin’ bicep of his hard against O’Donnell’s skull like he was trying to pop a zit. Fuck, a headlock like that musta felt like being smashed in a hydraulic press.

“Hmm. Well, that strategy didn’t end so well for you three. Y’all having fun?”

Any attempted protests were instantly and trivially quashed by the simple expedient of Thompson applying more brawn to his very dumb playmates. None of them could do anything but grunt in pain, now.

“I’m havin’ a blast, sarg’n’t! I could do this all night!”

Lang chuckled, “Oh? Well, normally I’d let you have your fun with these chuckleheads…but I do need my men in one piece.”

“I can be gentle, sorta!”

“I’m sure you’re the very definition of thoughtful. Now, whatever caused this is clearly Very Important Shit, so I’mma need ‘ya to let ‘em up, Specialist Hulk. I wanna hear this.”

“Aww. Okay.” Without much fuss, he released them to the sound of much complaining and general grousing. Laughing, he yanked all three of them up to their feet like they were his new favorite toys, and they hugged it out with much shoulder-slamming and Meaningful Nods.

Lang’s team had clearly experienced a dramatic attitude shift toward Thompson in the last few minutes. Well. Pecking order fucking established, apparently.

At least the kid wasn’t a dick about any of it. Hell, he sat on the floor instead of stealing someone’s bunk, and even sat pressed right up against Hernandez like they were old battle buddies. That was good!

“Anyway, I can about guess what’s up. They ask you the hundred dicks question?” Lang asked, sitting down. Thompson promptly went a few shades redder.

“How did you—?”

“They’re fuckin’ obsessed with it, my young innocent Specialist.”

He tilted that blocky head of his in a disconcertingly puppy-like manner. “But why, though?”

Every Marine in the room shrugged simultaneously.

“Because bored Marines, I guess. Though the sausagefest bullshit seems more of a combat arms thing, so…I dunno.”

“…What’ve I gotten into…?”

“The military. Anyway, what’s your answer? ‘Cuz if you don’t answer them, you’ll just have to keep wrestling them until they give up or you’ve broken all their bones.”

“I mean…I could use the extra PT…” He leered aggressively at Lang’s Marines…

“No, Thompson.”

“Aww!”

“So…answer?”

“…Well, I mean…I dunno! They’re both pretty, uh…”

“Ohh, I know this one.” Campbell chuckled, and ducked through the doorframe, turning slightly sideways to squeeze into the room. Clearly he’d grasped the thrust of the question instantly. “Y’ask me, it’s way gayer to suck one dick a hundred times. That’s a relationship right there,” he contributed. “Really get ‘ta know a man, y’know? What he likes…”

Lang rolled his eyes and sighed, but felt somehow he couldn’t get away without leaving his mark on things. “How to tickle his balls just right…”

“Exactly. Shit, I don’t think any of my exes ever sucked my dick that many times. You suck a hundred different dicks though and that’s just working your way down the list. Pretty sure I’ve had worse chores.”

“…I mean…I guess? But a hundred dicks is a lot of dicks.”

“Eh. Same total mileage.” Campbell chuckled, then frowned at Thompson. “…Something the matter, specialist?”

The kid had stopped blushing and was staring out the window with a frown furrowing his blunt, cro-magnon face and tension rising in his shoulders. Lang felt something cold run down his spine: that wasn’t a sheltered young man’s discomfort at a filthy question, something was wrong.

He turned and looked out the window. Some of the distant moving stars were…wobbling?

There was a moment like the way an optical illusion could flip from being one thing to being another, and a sick lurch in Lang’s belly sent his hand scrambling for his rifle even before his brain had even properly caught up with what he was seeing.

A Hunter ship had just decloaked right outside, and it was force-docking.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

The Builders wanted prey-ships taken intact, and the Alpha-of-Alphas was a Builder. What the Alpha-of-Alphas wanted, the Alpha-of-Alphas got.

So, no cutting into the hull for the Flensing-Brood. No explosive breach, no sudden pounce into the carnage. Instead, the Broodship could seize the prey’s docking coupler, which even the Humans used the standard prey-design for, and pry it open like claws into a soft belly.

It was slower, but it left the target undamaged. And the moment when the airlock was forced open was still a satisfying moment to leap into the Prey’s midst.

As ever, the Alpha sent its Betas forward first. Long ago, first blood would have been an Alpha’s privilege, but this was a Human ship, a deathworld ship. The first out would quite likely be the first to die. No great loss, the brood had many Betas. And with their sacrifice, the Alpha could gain knowledge and adjust.

The Betas pounced through, straight into a pair of Humans. Both shrieked in alarm, one shoved the other away from the airlock before being caught. The other—a sound rarely heard by Hunters and therefore precious beyond measure—wailed in anguish as the first was clawed and savaged. Exultation sang through the brood-mind at the taste of deathworlder blood.

The one in the maw roared and punched the Beta that held it so hard that the Beta staggered, dropping its prey. The wounded Human flopped to the deck and tried to crawl away, croaking out at its companion to flee, but the latter just stood, paralyzed by fear.

Delicious. As the rest of the brood pushed through behind it, the stunned Beta stamped down and impaled the mauled Human through its chest: the prey coughed and went limp. With a broken moan, the other one sank to its knees and seemed to just…wait.

Were Humans really broken so easily? The Alpha sent a command through the brood-mind, claiming that weeping one for its own. The Betas obeyed, and pushed past it, deeper into the ship in search of meat.

The Alpha unfolded itself through the airlock last. The Human ship was small and crowded, low-ceilinged, heavy, decorative. A rich prize full of cargo and the finest game awaited.

The surviving Human, it seemed, was not among such fine game. It just looked up with water running down its face from its eyes, and seemed to have given up entirely. Disappointing: The Alpha had been hoping for more challenging prey, not this broken pretender. It dispatched the Human with a contemptuous swipe of its fusion claws, stuffed part of a limb into its maw, and pushed through into the rest of the ship.

Pathetic or not, the meat was transcendent.

And, as the first of its Betas died in a hail of bullets, the Alpha knew that there was more and better to come.

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Luxury cruise liner Boone’s Star, en route to Cimbrean, the Border Stars

Lieutenant Booker Campbell

Twenty years ago, the Marines aboard Boone’s Star would have torn through Hunters like a baseball bat through a piñata.

Twenty years was a long time, and the Hunters hadn’t been idle. These weren’t the squishy, swaggering, stupid bullies that’d got smeared all over the ice in Vancouver, these were lethally fast, lethally precise predators armed with heavy-caliber machine guns and fusion claws that could carve through an engine block, never mind the human body.

The first Hunters to burst through onto the promenade were smeared in gore and in the grip of a berserk feeding frenzy with human blood running down their throats. People were dead already.

But Human science hadn’t been idle either.

Shieldbreaker rounds, for instance. The technology had come a long way since the early days of just using shotguns loaded with birdshot. From there they’d transformed into a round that shattered into fine grit on impact, forcing the shields to handle thousands of micro-hits at once.

Further refinements had turned the grit into a statically charged powder that didn’t just busy the shield, it got stuck in it and distorted it, massively increasing the field area and power draw, overloading them in milliseconds. They were loaded into the Marines’ mags in a 1:2 ratio alongside highly frangible rounds that posed a low risk of penetrating the ship’s hull while still delivering plenty of kinetic energy.

They sure made a mess of the first Hunter to claw its way onto the promenade. It saw the team of Marines charging toward it, raised its own weapon, recoiled as a wave of shots tore down its shields, then jerked and collapsed, coughing up a sticky mess of its own discoloured blood.

The ones behind it promptly sought cover, squeezing themselves behind walls and door frames, but it was a promenade. Cover was nonexistent, Hunters were nine feet tall, and Lang’s Marines didn’t let up the pressure for a second.

That lack of cover was a two-way street, however. Lang and his men were reduced to firing from around a corner at the t-shaped end of the corridor. Advancement would be impossible, and in a war of attrition…the Hunters would probably win. If nothing else, those big guns of theirs showed no regard at all for the ship’s hull integrity.

They needed better cover. Ideally, cover they could move.

Campbell had an idea. “Lang! You got shieldsticks?”

Lang grimaced as a Hunter round glanced off the outer window. The thick glass was rated for meteor strikes, but it sure didn’t look good. “We don’t, but maybe the crew does! Fuckers didn’t wanna talk security at all!”

Fuck that. “Got it. Thompson! Run ‘yer ass up to the bridge and persuade ‘em!”

Credit to the kid. Thompson was as fresh as they came, but his expression was laser-focused and cool. Whatever else he had, puppy-hulk had a level head squeezed between those giant shoulders.

He sprang up to his feet, and he ran. Jesus fuck did he ever run.

“Right. Sergeant, shall I make myself useful and find something portable and nicely bulletproof?”

“Please!”

Task given, purpose established. Campbell wasn’t about to get in the way of an experienced team, but he’d be damned if he was gonna sit there with his dick in his hand, all useless.

Off he went, with a respectable quickness of his own. Maybe there was some plate steel he could steal from something…

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Luxury cruise liner Boone’s Star, en route to Cimbrean, the Border Stars

Cora Mackie

“Get in here! Get in!!”

People were scrambling and running, and Cora was trying to get them at least running the right way, but… oh holy fuck.

Hunters were way worse in person. The ones she’d seen from the First Contact footage were ugly as fuck to look at, but the real deal were sickening. Her whole skin was crawling from fear and disgust and adrenaline as a ten-foot monster squeezed itself through the glass double doors from the airlocks.

None of its eyes blinked at the same time. The drool running in a sticky river down its front was pink with blood that she prayed to God was from its own bleeding gums, and its flesh was inflamed, infected and crusted with dried pus around the greasy metal violations it had inflicted on itself.

It moved like a maggotty scorpion, and Cora barely made it to safety in time before one of those metal limbs came up and sprayed bullets at her and the others. One man uttered a shocked gasp and dropped bonelessly to the deck as a line of bullets walked up his body.

Cora was a nurse. She’d been at people’s deathbeds. She’d never seen somebody murdered before, though. Some cool, rational part of her knew that she had to close the emergency door now, or they’d all be dead, and her fist moved to smash the glass in its little red box even as part of her soul died for the poor people who hadn’t made it through…

The door was a heavy steel thing, hidden in the ceiling and primed to not just drop but slam closed and lock down tight in moments. It was there to seal off sections of the ship if they caught fire, or opened to vacuum. Cora nearly lost a toe as it rammed down.

Auxiliary forcefields in bright red flickered up around it, both reinforcing the door and warning them away from it. From outside, she heard a muffled, desperate, pitiable shriek for help, a loud heavy impact…

And nothing more.

Somewhere, distantly, she heard gunfire. The Marines. And the two HEAT guys. They were fighting back. But as a new set of slamming, clawing, scrabbling sounds told her that the Hunters were gouging at the door to tear through it and get through, Cora knew that all she’d done was buy time.

There was nowhere else for her to go. She looked around at the dozen people trapped in the bar with her, and knew that whether they lived or died was now out of her hands.

With nothing better to do, she slid her back down the wall, curled up, and waited.

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Luxury cruise liner Boone’s Star, en route to Cimbrean, the Border Stars

Sergeant Tanner Lang

O’Donnell spun away from the corner and fell to one knee, clutching his upper arm. The blood spread quickly, staining his sleeve and dripping between his fingers. “Shit!”

Lanter was on it in a second. They didn’t have a corpsman unfortunately, but Lanter was almost as good in a pinch, and he knew how to get the job done with a minimum of fuss. Hernandez swapped into O’Donnell’s vacated spot so smoothly there was hardly a break in their firing pattern.

Reprieve came in the form of a teenage Hulk bearing gifts. Jesus Christ, Thompson could fuckin’ move and he was already thundering back with the spare medic’s bag and an enormous blue crate in his arms, which was plastered all over with English and…Gaori?

“Shieldsticks! The fuckin’ idiots never even unboxed ‘em!”

“Well fuckin’ open it!”

Thompson grunted and basically exploded the crate open with an effortless, contemptuous rip, then tossed a shieldstick to each of the Marines in turn.

“How do these things work?”

“Twist the blue bit at the top, pull the stick! It’ll thump when it’s ready. Then you throw it down, like this!”

Thompson demonstrated in a single fluid motion, by rolling around the corner, popping up and slamming the tail end of the stick down just as a withering array of ammo came for his head. The shields were nicely tall but even still, he knew enough to duck behind them.

Under fire, it was plain as day to see the shield’s outline. There was a small notch in the emitted field from which a man could poke their weapon and have fun.

Fuckin’ awesome. Lang signaled his men, and they all followed suit. Now they had good cover and clear shots all the way down the hall. If only they had something better than their rifles…

Couldn’t have everything. Now he just—

Campbell interrupted him from the opposite end of the crossway they were camped in. “They’re breakin’ through the bulkhead on this side!”

Boone’s Star had bulkheads to seal off its sections, of course. There was one at each end of the promenade on both sides, to seal off the docking connector and airlock. The Hunters had fucked up the one they’d first come through, but the rest were closed. Lang had been holding out hope that they’d hold up, but nothing held up forever against fusion blades.

They had to push. Now.

“Hulk! We need ammo!”

Thompson didn’t have any armor or other personal gear appropriate for the fight, given he was still just a trainee…but he was useful nonetheless. He nodded and in a blink, was gone.

It was slow going up the promenade, by the inches, laying down a lot of covering fire. Becker had a close call when a Hunter round clipped his helmet, Miller had an even closer one that drilled him right in his armor’s SAPI plate and knocked him on his ass.

Armor had come a long way since first contact. It held.

Luckily, they had lots and lots of ammo to keep up the pressure. An entire pallet of it in fact, and in about no time later, Hulk was back like a lightning bolt carrying…well fuck, pretty much the whole damn thing. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of ammo that normally had to be moved two cans at a time, one in each hand…and the big kid carried that damn pallet like it was a huge serving tray.

Lang could get used to support like that.

And behind him, the lieutenant had turned up something nicely bulletproof, though Lang woulda never guessed it was portable: A huge plate of ten-gauge steel. The edges had a clean-cut but discolored look to them, suggesting he’d used a fusion knife to cut it loose.

“…The fuck did you find that?!”

Campbell heaved the metal into place with a grunt. “Don’t worry about it.”

Lang didn’t. He was more concerned about something else.

“…Don’t these fucks normally have an Alpha?”

“Yeah. Big asshole like a walking tank.”

“So where is he?”

Campbell just pushed his steel shield forward along the deck with a squeal, seemingly immune to the rain of bullets hammering against it.

His reply was grim. “There’s a lotta occupied territory on the far side of that airlock…”

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Luxury cruise liner Boone’s Star, en route to Cimbrean, the Border Stars

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

The hunt was glorious.

The Human-prey on this end of the ship weren’t armed, and evidently not specialized for combat roles. Nonetheless their predator’s instincts were there, and they fought back with clever strategems and creative use of what they had on-hand.

It wasn’t enough, of course. The Alpha fed. It had discovered that the Human-prey could take a huge amount of injury so long as it did not pierce their heart or brain, and it was gleefully tormenting its next meal when—

<Alert; Terse Warning> +Human-Alphas are present.+

The Alpha tore its fangs out of the prey and relocated across the deck as quickly as it could, uncaring of the damage its claws inflicted on the frivolous wood flooring. It had posted three Betas to hold the long corridor on the ship’s left side, but their report changed everything.

Sure enough, two of the heat signatures advancing up the deck behind the cover of portable shieldsticks and a large steel plate were of the Alpha-kind, significantly larger and more powerful than the Human-Betas around them.

Victory was no longer certain. Even without their armored carapaces and heavy weapons, no Hunter had yet faced a Human-Alpha in direct combat and prevailed.

<Instruction> +Stall them. We shall open the rear compartment, seize the prey and withdraw.+

And destroy the prey-ship of course. The Alpha-of-Alphas would forgive such an act if doing so slew two of the precious, rare Human-Alphas.

The Alpha pulled back the force it had instructed to tear down the fortified door that denied them a way down the ship’s right side. Encircling and devouring the Human-Betas was no longer the plan, now the plan was to tear down the badly damaged bulkhead at the rear of their seized territory and claim the many morsels within.

The Betas pounced on that door with renewed zeal, fusion claws flashing. Already the door bore several deep, melted gouges from their assault. It would fail in seconds…

But the Alpha saw no reason to expose itself, should its lessers fail in their assigned tasks. When dealing with deathworld-prey, caution was the first rule of any Hunter that wished to live and taste blood again.

It had feasted. It had taken meat to the maw and prevailed. This had been a rich hunt, a prestigious one, and the Alpha would return to claim its due glory. It ordered the Gammas to gather the meat, and retreated into the broodship in triumph, silently commanding its systems to prepare to disengage and fire upon the prey-ship at immediate notice.

Let the lessers take the risk, now.

Date point: 17y7m4d AV
Luxury cruise liner Boone’s Star, en route to Cimbrean, the Border Stars

Sergeant Tanner Lang

Between the shieldsticks, that big slab of metal and lots of suppressing fire, they advanced… and the Hunters’ nerves broke. Or maybe their ammo supply did. Either way, the fuckers stopped shooting back and threw themselves into a desperate animal charge like cornered tigers.

Lang dropped one of the pair on the right with a businesslike burst to its lanky core, then put an insurance round right through its central eye to make sure. Its legs folded under it and it sagged down, still upright but clearly dead. The fusion edges on its claws flickered and cut out. Hernandez had dropped his own with equal efficiency, and now it was time to seize the space, by the numbers. They had cover, they had a retreating foe…

Fuckin’ textbook.

The lounge around the airlock was a fuckin’ gruesome sight, slick with human blood and the oily shit that Hunters leaked when shot. One of the big fuckers was slumped out of the way near the promenade access where the others had dragged it aside after it got killed. No way to know who’d got the fatal shot in, and no time to worry about it neither. There were three left, two falling back toward the airlock itself, one slicing into a bulkhead on the far side of the lounge.

And just as the Marines stormed in, it got its claws into a gap, heaved, tore the last ruined scraps of metal right outta the frame, and advanced on the civilians beyond…

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Luxury cruise liner Boone’s Star, en route to Cimbrean, the Border Stars

Cora Mackie

The door failed, and Cora raised her head hopelessly to face her end.

At first it was just a claw, gouging through the steel. But that little breach was enough: more fusion claws, sizzling and spitting as they ripped through solid metal, worked their way into the gap and peeled it apart like a sardine can.

Cora stood and backed away from the door, shaking but determined not to throw up or lose her dignity. It was a stupid thing to cling to, but…

Her resolve barely survived the sight of the biggest monster yet. Its sickly white flesh was smeared with human blood, and there was a swagger to the way it ripped the bulkhead out of its housing.

One of the aid workers had turned up a knife behind the bar, a thick serrated thing for carving ice. He wielded it in front of him like…well, like it was a magic wand he knew was useless. The Hunter had a gun that could slaughter all of them in moments, and it seemed the only thing stopping it from using it was its own sadism. It growled a phlegmy hissing chortle and advanced, fusion claws seething, ropes of eager drool running from its teeth.

For the rest of her life, Cora would never forget what came next.

As if out of nowhere, Specialist Thompson—Hunter Thompson, her Hunter, her guilt-free fling to while away a long and boring voyage—charged like a half-naked blur into the giant monster’s flank. It barely had time to notice what was happening before he slammed it into the wall with a series of wet-sounding crunches and then…he…

He committed so much violence, and did it so quickly, Cora somehow knew she was going to remember every detail perfectly. He took one quick step back, grabbed the monster’s arms from the back, and heaved. All four snapped like twigs. He was right in next to the hunter but he somehow slammed forward and tackled it again, crushing it against the wall with more grisly snapping sounds. He reached up, wrapped his arms around its upper torso, heaved—

He twisted at the waist, and twisted the hunter with him. There was a sickening sound almost like bubble-wrap popping as Hunter wringed the hunter’s spine like a wet towel. He smashed it up against the wall again for good measure, then stepped back, heaved the hunter backwards, somehow flipped it over his head—

—And slammed the hunter into the deck with so much force, the decorative wood flooring was cratered by the sheer force of the impact, and the beast itself burst like a fat, blood-filled tick.

Hunter popped up to his feet without any loss of momentum, a gore-covered hero. He glanced at them briefly, then charged back into the fight without any hesitation. Behind him, Lieutenant Campbell had done something similar to a second Hunter, and the Marines were driving the last two back into the airlock with a storm of bullets.

The last standing Hunter was snipped in half by its own ship’s force-dock when the broodship disengaged from Boone’s Star with a TUNGGGG that rattled the hull. Alarms wailed at the abuse to the airlock, which still snapped closed and spared them any decompression.

The deck was awash with gore, both bright red and the darker, more diseased stuff that ran in hunter veins. Thompson, Cora’s Hunter, was sticky with the nasty stuff from ankles to ears, and panting heavily…

But somehow, they were alive.

Cora’s legs and dignity gave out under her, and she collapsed, weeping from the sudden reversal in her fortunes. She felt punched, she felt sick and shaken and terrified and traumatized…

But she was alive.

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
USS Hammer, Escorting civilian aid shipment, the Border Stars

Captain Rhodes Collins

Combat was often too fast-moving for the uninitiated to properly grasp. They’d barely had time to swing the ship around, ready a shield bubble and train weapons on the sudden appearance of a Hunter broodship—this time with a docking collar. That would have made it tricky indeed to safely dislodge and would have required the cooperation of the civilian crew. Sadly, they were…difficult…to communicate with at the moment.

Frankly, they were panicking.

Almost as soon as they were ready to force the issue though, the broodship forcibly withdrew. Captain Collins knew better than to waste the opportunity.

“Send it.”

Several things happened at once.

First, the Hammer threw out a shield bubble around the Boone’s Star, hugging the star yacht protectively inside her own shielding. That act alone saved every life on board by instants, as the Broodship raked the yacht with a point-blank volley as soon as it was properly free.

Second, the Hammer’s own guns laid into the broodship.

Space combat was supposed to be a long-range affair, handled at distances measured using the speed of light. Visual range was nothing. Broodship and destroyer laid into each other like a pair of drunks brawling in a bar. No subtlety, no artifice, just raw violence. A river of autocannon fire rained onto the Hunters’ shields, and was answered by blasts of vaporized copper plasma and ultra-high-velocity gauss slugs.

EWAR strobed and probed across both ships, questing for sensors and cameras, each ship looking to gouge the other’s eyes out. The Hunters accelerated hard; Hammer put herself between them and the civilians, both to protect them and so she could pull her shields back in and harden them up.

It was a contest of raw destructive fury, energy reserves, and heat management… and it ended in a stalemate.

One moment, the Hammer had a clean target lock, the next there was an eye-molesting twist of light, and every EM signal and emission from the broodship went dark. LIDAR, RADAR, ESDAR, it all swept through the volume of space the broodship had just occupied and found nothing but dissipating plasma.

The Hunters had got away.

Sergeant Tanner Lang

Cleanup was always the worst bit. Once the hunters had gone, they still had to check the whole ship over, room-by-room in case there was any hidden threat. That sort of thing really did need armor and experience, so as useful as Thompson was…

“Wipe yourself down and stay in the rear. Watch and learn, okay?”

Thompson nodded earnestly. The kid was…well, eager, in a good way.

Also maybe in a bad way, too. But that was for later.

The ship wasn’t too big, thankfully. Still, they had to be extra thorough, and that meant sending drones down maintenance tubes, checking all the civilians over (which the HEAT did) and then, once the ship was secure and the crew was happy enough with damage control…

First, they attended to their weapons and gear. Then they showered. Then they ate. Once everyone was clean, off their combat high, clear-eyed and ready to go, they had their after-action report.

Lieutenant Campbell led the way on that. Lang had never seen anything simultaneously so polite and respectful, and so absolutely witheringly critical. The ship’s crew got it with both barrels, but the Captain in particular…

Well, this incident was likely a career-ender. He knew it too, judging by his expression.

Lang got to do a video review of his own team’s actions, too. That was a rare luxury that normal grunt-folk rarely had the opportunity to experience. What he found pleased him: their advance up the promenade had been textbook, and effective. They’d pushed up under heavy fire, kept the Hunters suppressed, and achieved their objective despite heavy resistance. O’Donnell’s injury, and the hits taken by Becker and Miller were worth noting, but by and large he couldn’t see much to critique.

His Marines could hold their heads high: they’d saved lives, and done so by the numbers. Lieutenant Campbell was suitably impressed and was keen to say it.

The atmosphere wasn’t exactly celebratory, though. People were dead, and their remains had been dragged away onto the Hunter ship. The dozen civilians who’d been trapped in the rearward bar lounge were the most traumatized, but everyone on board was acutely aware that what had been a long, slow, dull voyage to deliver essential supplies and skills to Franklin had come within a hair of being a massacre.

Scuttled career or not, Boone’s Star’s captain was still in charge of his ship for the time being, and Lang couldn’t really blame the guy when he took one look at all those pock-marks in the portside promenade’s windows, not to mention the damage to the airlock, and declared that they were going to emergency jump and to hell with the lockdown.

Fair enough, really. If his career was already in the pan, it wasn’t like that decision could make things worse for him. And it’d get them there before all that trauma started to really ferment.

Still. It was a tense moment on the ship when they spun up the jump drive. They’d done it once before to get out of Sol, but the Chicago-Franklin event had left a lingering paranoia about jump travel. How could they know they weren’t about to get smashed into a blast of plasma?

The jump wouldn’t be for a few hours yet. Last on the agenda: AAR specifically for Thompson, as he was green and eager to soak up training. This being something more formal than hanging out, he’d cleaned up and put on the new-style fatigues the HEAT all wore nowadays. It looked much like the Army and Air Force’s fatigues, with one major difference: they’d gone back to berets and a polished, high-gloss pair of black combat boots.

Thompson arrived looking sharp and heroic, and they went through the usual formalities. The entire team was there too, and for once they were taking things deadly serious.

“Right, at ease, specialist. Please, take a seat.”

Thompson looked at the chair. “Uh…”

Seeing him standing next to the comparatively flimsy chair made the problem quite obvious. Lang doubted Thompson could even fit his hips between the armrests.

“…Right. Just…grab the crate over there, then.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Lang waited until everyone was comfortable.

“Okay, so: on the whole, you did remarkably well. Was this your first action?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Cool. You can drop some of the formalism, okay? This is meant to be a learning experience.”

Thompson exhaled and did that visibly-trying-to-relax thing again, a little more successfully this time. “…Okay.”

“Right. So: considering this was your first action, you did very well. You know your tactics and you know your weapon systems, and you know how to use them. Hell, you taught us about the shieldsticks, and I think we all owe you our lives just on that alone. So…well done.”

Thompson swelled with pride at that. Lang could guess what was going on in the kid’s head: this was the thing he’d sworn himself to, sacrificed a lot for, put himself through a disciplined regime unlike any other to achieve… and he’d done well. That had to be a lifetime of validation right there. All things considered, he took it modestly.

“That said, I do have some critiques, as do the rest of the team. We’re going to review the footage from start to finish and really pick it apart. Feel free to do the same to us, or ask questions. Think you can do that?”

Thompson nodded firmly. “I can.”

With that, they went through it all. For the most part things progressed seriously and Thompson drank in the knowledge like a sponge. Learning definitely occurred, though over time they got more familiar with each other, and a sense of humor creeped back in…

Until they’d reached…well, fuck. Jesus fuckin’ Christ.

“Hol’ up. Fuckin’ rewind that, Centopani.”

They watched it again. Thompson utterly failed to hide his sense of pride over what he’d done.

Everyone’s eyes turned back to him once the third watch-through was over. The big bastard sat there almost bursting out of his uniform, and Lang didn’t really know if that was from his sheer size, or his sheer overwhelming smugness.

For most of the review, it was easy to forget who and what they were dealing with. Mostly, he was just like any other grunt, except a lot bigger and faster. But that little display of straight-up superhuman ability…

Lang couldn’t help but smile. “Now, Specialist… tell me. Was that suplex really necessary?”

“Well, I mean…it just came naturally, I guess.”

“Naturally.”

“Well, um…I was state wrestling champion three years running….”

There it was. Specialist Thompson, the superhuman boot. What a time to be alive.

It took a few moments for the snickering to die down, but this was a serious thing, so everyone sobered up pretty quickly.

“That’s not exactly an orthodox approach to neutralizing an opponent.”

“No,” added Hoetze, “but neither is being a literal space Marine, either.”

“Soldier!” Thompson objected.

“Eh, that’s a mistake we’ll fix eventually,” Lang replied. “Still: maybe don’t put yourself in that much personal risk, next time. Just shoot the fucker.”

“I was, uh, outta ammo. And it was about to eat someone, so…”

“Then don’t run out of ammo next time. Understood, Specialist?”

“Huah, Sergeant.”

“Right. Well…I think that basically concludes things. Lieutenant Campbell I think will want to have some private words with you, but as far as I’m concerned, you’re free to go.”

Thompson stood up at attention and everyone else did as well. “Right. Dismissed.”

Once Hulk had thumped his way out of the room, Lang looked at his men.

“Alright…what do we think, boys?”

“Boot as all fuck, but I’d have ‘em on my team in a goddamn heartbeat.” O’Donnell opined, then winced as his emphatic gesture pulled at his injury.

“Think we’ll ever see him again once we get to Cimbrean?”

Hmm. “Honestly, I don’t know. HEAT are headquartered in Folctha, and we’re theoretically assigned to the embassy there…so maybe?”

“Hope so,” Lanter said. “We got a lot of work ahead of us to de-boot his ass.”

“I think someone’s in love,” Hoetze quipped.

“I’m not the one whose face was mashed all up in his huge sweaty nuts earlier.”

“Hey—!”

“Right.” Lang interjected before they could get started. “Let’s get the paperwork tied up for Campbell. This’ll be good for both their service records. After that…let’s go get packed up. We’ll be jumping shortly, I bet.”

After that…it was just details. AAR filled out and tidied up. They’d do a final draft later. They packed up their gear, the HEAT trainees did the same. There was some other minor drama, everyone waited breathlessly for the jump—

There was the strangest feeling of suddenly moving a terrible distance without moving, but it only lasted long enough to be noticed. The Captain announced they’d arrived in Cimbrean space and that they would be boarded for inspection.

Which was…aggressive to say the least. But it was professional, and over quickly. Meanwhile, Lang and the rest got to meet real HEAT operators, fully decked out in their EV-MASS. Next to the really big guys, Thompson and Campbell were just fuckin’ puppies. Goddamn.

Still, Campbell seemed about the same size as their other officer, while Thompson didn’t need to feel embarrassed among the enlisted; he wasn’t small even by their standards, and he wasn’t at the bottom of the pile. Scary as it was to think about, he’d grow into his new role over the coming years too, literally and figuratively.

He’d do well, no doubt. Lang had only known the two for a short time, but combat bonded men like nothing else, and he couldn’t help but feel pride in them for what they’d accomplished. New SIMs for their phones were purchased once they’d made it planetside, and numbers shared.

There was one awkward moment with the girl Thompson had been seeing, just after they landed. She was avoiding him, and the kid was too sheltered to see it. When he tried to get her attention, she visibly freaked out and fled, leaving Thompson to stand bewildered and hurt on the concrete.

“Let it be,” rumbled the tallest, widest man Lang had ever seen. “Give ‘er some space.”

Lang had boggled when the new titan thumped his way over. Thompson had already redefined huge and strong for Lang. This man redefined it yet again, with a much, much more powerfully-built physique than the young Aggressor. He would have put Thompson to shame even scaled down to the same height, but he stood about a foot taller than the kid’s already respectable six-foot-three, and was so goddamned heavy he was literally crushing the gravel into pebbles under his feet. To be that big, and yet carry all that size so effortlessly…

So that’s what HEAT was all about. No goddamn wonder the selection rate was so low.

“…But—”

“I don’t even need ‘ta ask,” the giant said, with a face sized palm resting heavily across Thompson’s shoulder. “I’ve been there more’n once.”

Thompson still gave the retreating nurse a last, confused look before she vanished out of sight. “…I rescued her.”

“Yeah, it ain’t like the movies. Send ‘er a message later tonight, ‘kay?”

“I… don’t know her number.”

“‘Ya know her name, right? Find her on the social medias,” the giant grumbled with a hint of annoyance. “She’ll wanna talk, jus’ not right away. Anyhoo. Captain’s throwing us a barbecue, an’ it’ll all be fine ‘ta eat. I hear ‘yer Marine buddies are good folk so they’re invited too.”

In the end, it wasn’t really a goodbye. The giant turned out to go by Righteous and he had the most god-awful taste ever in tacky hawaiian shirts. He was the HEAT’s NCOIC and a fellow Aggressor, which was a blessing: Thompson was in good hands. There was another giant too, the infamous Warhorse. He wasn’t as tall as Righteous but he still towered over everyone else and was, if anything, even stockier and heavier. Shit, with friends like that…

All-in-all, a lot happened Lang hadn’t expected that day. He’d got into a fight with Hunters and lived. He met the HEAT, and their intimidating Gaoian members, too. There were promises of joint training and other mandatory fun with the embassy staff, and there was a fantastic barbeque to top it all off. Lang got to end the day drinking a cold beer on Cimbrean while a whole herd smoked and grilled nearby, and while he sure as shit coulda done without the Hunters showing up at all…and while he felt bad about the folks who’d died…

That was the nature of war. You mourned the absent friends, and celebrated the ones still here.

He slept well that night.

Date Point: 17y7m4d AV
Broodship of the Flensing-Brood, Deep Space

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

<Satisfaction>

The attack had been a calculated gamble. Despite the Alpha-of-Alphas’ assurance that the Old Minds had achieved some kind of blow against the Humans, the Alpha had not quite believed it. It had enjoyed the hunt, and feasted well. A shame that there were no living slaves to provide entertainment, but only the foolhardy would take a Human alive.

But all the time, it had felt tense, wondering if the Old Minds had misled the Alpha-of-Alphas, if the same pattern that had unfolded so many times before would repeat, and a mass of deathworlder ships would jump in and turn a glorious hunt into an ignominious slaughter.

No such counterattack had come. The Deathworlders were truly paralyzed.

And that opened so many delicious possibilities. Shipping lanes would now be undefended, frontier stations vulnerable, lesser Prey could no longer call out to their betters for help.

It would be a return to the good times, before the first Humans, before the Human-Alphas, and before the fur-faces remembered their claws. The feasting and looting would be unopposed.

And the glory of proving just how open an opportunity they now had went to the Flensing-Brood. Their prestige would surely grow, their bellies would surely fill, and their brood-swarm would number in the hundreds once again.

A shame to not have captured the whole ship. But the prize they had taken was more than sufficient. More Human meat to the maw today than in all the years before. And all for the loss of only five Betas.

This strange new Alpha-of-Alphas would prize the information gathered, more than the rest. In particular it would be pleased to learn as much as possible about the two Human-Alphas, which the Alpha endeavored to examine as closely as possible, by sensors and by the broadcast streams from the Betas foolish enough to challenge them.

Human-Alphas out of their armor! A prize so rare that even the Flensing-Alpha found it intriguing. The sight of them moving and fighting in little more than their bare skin was genuinely fascinating. Their skill, their speed, their power, their obvious superiority as predators, all of it provoked strange, almost alien feelings in the Alpha. It felt…

<Admiration>

The Alpha knew now what the Humans were. What Deathworlders were. It knew that the Flensing-Brood had not merely survived the hunt, but prevailed against an undeniably superior foe. That would do much to boost the Alpha’s standing amongst the Broods.

What a rewarding hunt!

It watched the encounter between its previously strongest Beta and the larger of the two Human-Alphas. Economy of motion. Speed, mass. Such perfectly-utilized strength! The kill wasn’t merely laudable. It was…

It was beautiful. For the first time in many cycles, the Alpha felt < Awe >.

There was surely much useful data to be gleaned from the recordings, though the Flensing-Alpha did not know exactly what useful insights the Builders might glean from the footage. Nonetheless, the Hunters would benefit. Would learn.

Would feast.

Good things would come to the Flensing-Brood. Perhaps even a chance to hunt other Deathworlders! Fur-faced Alpha meat was rumored to be as transcendent as Human. Rumors had also reached the Alpha of a third species, though very little about them was known…

It didn’t matter. For now, the Flensing-Alpha basked in its triumph, and ordered its brood to their stasis chambers. It relished the silence that followed when the last was safely stored, and savored a last sample of the precious meat.

Then, content that the next hunt would bring even more glory, it set the broodship to return to home territory, and activated its own stasis field.

The timeless moment that lasted all the way home was suffused with a sense of triumph.

Date Point: 17y7m6d AV
Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Naydra, Great Mother of the Gao

Franklin hadn’t had a large Gaoian population. None of the five territories did, aside from Folctha. That hadn’t been by any deliberate action or planning on anyone’s part—as if the Gao could manage central planning before Daar, anyway—it had simply been inconvenient for colonization purposes. Franklin wasn’t in control of the system border, and they didn’t have a major starport. Franklin’s entire purpose was built around jump array shipments.

Which they no longer had. What Franklin did have was a convent, and while nuns were a decidedly alien concept to a Gaoian female, the Benedictine Sisters on Cimbrean had done a tremendous amount of hard work in the days and weeks after the disaster that had destroyed their city and badly damaged their own nunnery.

Now that all the hard work was behind them though, they needed somewhere to live until they could go back, and that was likely to be a long time. So, Naydra was taking a stroll along Tiritya Island’s southern shoreline, and hearing their request.

“Only a dozen of you?”

“Fourteen.” Sister Holly Chase offered a shy smile. She was a perpetually timid woman on the outside, but Naydra had been fascinated to read her history. She’d been an interstellar explorer once, and her vows hadn’t interrupted her contributions to the understanding of Cimbrean’s geology. “We know it’s an imposition.”

“Not as such. We certainly have the facilities and ability to welcome fourteen women and we even have the space to carve off a little parcel of land for you to call your own if you want it. I think my biggest question would be: why here?”

“The isolation, mostly. We don’t want to find ourselves in the spotlight or be gossipped about.” Chase smiled nervously. “We don’t really practice an active ministry. We’re more focused on contemplation.”

“So you’re really just looking for a quiet place to stay.”

“As I said, we know it’s a lot to ask.”

“Nonsense,” Naydra replied, as kindly as the word could be. “This is a time of crisis and you’re without a home. The Clan of Females is here on this island in much the same situation, it would be rather hypocritical of us not to offer our hospitality, if you think this is the right place for you.”

“It was the first place we thought of…” Chase smiled and relaxed a little. “And the one the Abbess was most hopeful for. Should I tell her you don’t object?”

“Please do. Though I must warn you: while our island is Female territory, it is not sanctuary. There are plenty of males who visit for many purposes…”

“We don’t expect life to change just because we’re here,” Chase reassured her. “We’ll keep to ourselves, for the most part.”

“Then I see no reason not to offer you our hospitality.” Naydra duck-nodded, then flicked her ear as the communicator clipped to it chimed impatiently at her. Business never ceased. “Ah… please excuse me. I’m afraid my work is never done.”

“No, no, I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time!”

It took Naydra a few more minutes to politely disentangle herself, escort Sister Chase back to the shuttle pad and free herself up, but there were no more intrusive chimes in her ear. Clearly things weren’t too urgent.

As it happened, the message was from Bumpkin, and included one of his silly drawings. He was good at them, really; just a loose scribble with a broad-tip marker, and they often conveyed very much feeling with an absolute economy of line.

In this particular drawing, a distinctly grumpy Daar had Angry Things erupting above his head. The attached message read: “Halp. Need your advice. Lotta problems to juggle!” and was punctuated by little affectionate icons in three languages.

Naydra chittered to herself and decided to eschew the long walk from shuttle pad to the Commune in favor of the less scenic, but much quicker, little tram service. It was rather nice being literally the only person in all the galaxy that Daar could send a message as plaintive as “help” to. A little saddening too, but at least he had somebody to share his burdens with, and she hers.

Unusually, he didn’t smell of consummated mating contracts when she found him in their suite, high over the eastern cliff face. Nor did he smell of exercise. Unsurprisingly given those two lacks, he smelled of frustration.

“Oh dear. You look tense.”

“Been tenser…” he sighed and peeled himself away from the desk to bound across the room and nip affectionately at her ear. “You smell relaxed.”

“I quite enjoyed my meeting. Gyotin was right, I needn’t have worried. It seems they really do just want to be left alone.”

“He usually is,” Daar rumbled, amused. “Annoyin’, sometimes.”

Naydra chittered, nipped his cheek, then slipped out of his arms and toward the desk. “So what’s all this?”

“Drafts an’ redrafts an’ redrafts o’ the fuckin’ redrafts. My Big Idea’s got a whole mess o’ lil’ fiddly shit in it.”

“Hmm. I thought you were going to let that one steep a while longer.”

“Until the time’s right. Figger it’s gettin’ pretty close to right about now. ‘Specially with the spacefighter wing gone.”

“How did Clan Firefang react?”

“That’s the good bit, they came ‘ta me an’ offered as much as they could.”

“That’s uncharacteristically blatant of them.”

“Champion Goruu is an old friend o’ General Jackson’s.” Daar shook his huge head wryly. “Din’t even know that when I picked him. He was jus’ there an’ he smelled good.”

“And he’s eager to help his old friend.” Naydra couldn’t resist a happy pant-smile. “I love it when males are so guilelessly loyal. It simplifies things, doesn’t it?”

“Eh. Sometimes.” Daar chittered and sat down next to the desk. “In this case though, yeah. If I can go ‘ta the Allied Nations an’ tell ‘em straight up that Clan Firefang are willin’ ‘ta help rebuild all their lost vehicles and train pilots? ‘S’Gonna make the whole Grand Strategic Alliance thing a lot easier ‘ta sell.”

“You’ve been noodling on the name for it again, haven’t you.”

“How do you—? Yeah. Everythin’ I come up with sounds kinda silly. Three Suns Alliance?”

“Oh, Bumpkin…”

“…That bad?”

Naydra chittered and used her claws to comb out some of the fur around his neck. “As much as the question of the name is of galactic importance…” she suggested with extra tease, “I think perhaps you should delegate it.”

“Oh I know I should but damnit it’s gotta have a name!”

“I’m sure that will be the first order of business.” She decided his fur was acceptable for now. “…Do you think they’ll go for it?”

“I floated the idea by His Majesty when I saw ‘em last, an’ he socialized it with all the folks that matter. Stephen Davies is on board, so’s Annette Winton. Still gotta talk ‘ta the rest o’ the Commonwealth. Chambliss, I reckon he’s pretty much def’nitely gonna say yes. If it’d been Sartori I’d have had a fuck of a time convincin’ him, but…”

“You always admired Sartori’s stubborn streak.”

“Yeah, but in this case it woulda got in the way.” Daar sniffed. “Least, from my perspective.”

“You’d be the leader of this alliance, Bumpkin. Sartori would have been right to resist, it was the wrong time and the wrong circumstance. That Chambliss is willing to…”

“Very different mindsets, between the two.”

“And very different situations.”

Daar rumbled agreement and duck-nodded, low and slow. “Ayup…Not sure ‘bout Yan, the Lodge an’ the Singers.”

“It’s in their best interests, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, an’ that’s the problem. They’d call it a ‘Big Giving,’ an’ the way they look at things they already owe us a fuck of a lot. Sooner or later, they think we’re gonna collect that debt.”

“You have Ferd on JETS team two. He’s good enough to be HEAT, from what I hear.”

“Yeah, an’ we’re gonna have a bunch more o’ ‘em, too. That’s almost certainly gonna be the cost of an alliance. Not that I’m complainin’,” Daar chittered. “‘Take our supremely gifted warriors as payment?’ Yes please!”

“Who have never used toilets before.”

“Eh, they learn quick.”

Naydra duck-nodded at that. “So…what was the call for help about?”

“…Right. All that, that’s easy. ‘Cept maybe the part where Yan wants ‘ta become HEAT or something…” Daar chittered distractedly. “Hard bit’s ‘bout the gene therapy.”

“Ah.” Naydra sighed, tore herself away from the intricate proposal documents on the desk, and poured herself onto the couch instead. “Yes.”

Daar tidied up the tablets and things. “…Trials were a total success. Everyone who took ‘em, went perfect. We’re ready, Naydi. Ready ‘ta make the Gao everything we can be, instead’a the hobbled version the Hierarchy made us.”

“But?”

“Lotta folk ain’t gonna like it, ‘specially some o’ the more conservative Clan. We found that the biggest diff’rence is the gap ‘tween degrees narrows quite a bit…”

“So, the Second-Degree majority would become…?”

“They saw the biggest change, an’ it’s a big change, too. You met Leemu, saw what it did ‘fer him. Color vision an’ a way better immune system, an’ when he trained he put on weight way more easily, too. Still ain’t what a really well-trained Human could do, but he’s a lot closer now! So now he’s more’n a match ‘fer their average, an’ he ain’t afraid to play with ‘em, yijao?”

“Impressive,” Naydra commented. “And the effect is less for each higher degree, I presume?”

“Yeah. But it’s still substantial. Shit, lookit me! An’ not just the all th’ extra muscle, neither!”

“Bumpkin, I thought you liked it when I admired your physique…”

“I mean…I do…” Daar growled lecherously. “An’ I’ll be showin’ it off ‘fer ‘ya later…But ‘fer serious, now! Even I got a hell of a kick from this, ‘specially my senses! I can hear an’ see an’ even feel like I ain’t never done before.”

“I know,” Naydra reminded him gently. Having undergone the gene therapy herself, she knew exactly how much it expanded the whole universe. It wasn’t just the fact that this suite of hers was decorated in shades of red and orange and brown that were a unique and private treat for them both, but even the senses she’d already enjoyed were sharpened, heightened and more acute.

“…Right. ‘Course you do.”

Satisfied, Naydra duck-nodded. “I think I can see some of the problem. Consider the existing social order. You sit at the apex of our society, because none of us are better than you at anything we might care to measure. I suspect Champion Loomi thanks the Unseen every night you never had a passion for scholarship.”

“…I mean…he’s super smart, but…” Daar shifted uncomfortably. It wasn’t that he was ashamed or modest of his innate ability. It was more…before, it was all just Male play. Now he had to wield it like a weapon, and he didn’t like that at all; he’d rather be everyone’s friend.

“And that supremacy makes your authority unassailable,” Naydra continued. “But for everyone else enjoying authority…how will things change when the gulf between your average second-degree day worker and a third-degree Officer in a Clan is suddenly…not so intimidating? The Have-Nots will have a little more, and the Haves…won’t, by comparison. Or so they fear. I can see why the Clan leadership is so worried, even if they won’t openly defy you.”

“They don’t hafta openly defy me ‘ta be difficult,” Daar grumbled.

“No, of course not. They’re your keys to power, the pillars holding you up. And they will want to be rewarded for their loyalty in sustaining you in supreme office.” She sat back and scratched idly at her ear. “…making the average Gao more equal and undermining their position could be taken as ungrateful. After all, you make no effort to disguise with whom your heart truly lies. You’d rather brawl in the dirt with workhouse rough-pelts than sniff noses with the elite. Sheeyo in particular is caught between awe, admiration, and resentment.”

Daar chuffed amusedly. “There’s more’n that at play…”

“Oh, everyone knows that,” Naydi chittered. “He is the most stereotypical first-degree ever. He’s…never asked? Hinted?”

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Daar chittered. “And I hear I’m pretty infamous ‘fer noticin’ that sorta thing! Besides,” Daar growled smugly, “bitty lil’ male like him? I doubt he’d servive.”

“Bumpkin!”

“Don’t act like ‘yer scandalized!” he chittered loudly. “I know ‘ya too well, Naydi.”

“Maybe not…” she admitted, “Though sometimes, keeping you on task can be a trial…”

“‘Yer not wrong. But you started it! An’ stop smellin’ so wunnerful, then!”

“Daar.” Allowing him the chance to clown around a little was important—there were precious few other people he could clown around with—but Naydra had her limits.

He chittered, and subsided. “‘Yer right. Reckon th’ Clans’re gonna push back as hard as they can on this’n.”

“The powerful have always fought back against dilution of their power, even when it’s the right course of action. When are we planning to relinquish ours? You plan on being the Great Father and seeing the Gao forward for as long as you can, I know this and I know it’s for the best motives.”

“…But…?”

“No but. I truly meant that. The…the trap we need to be wary of, my love, is that you and I can’t be around forever. I know you have hopes for gene therapy and Cruezzir and maybe you and I will live to be the oldest Gao ever, but even if we could be immortal, I don’t want to be. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to let go. And because we’re powerful, we won’t want to when the time comes.”

Daar’s ears tracked backwards then forwards as he considered her words for a long moment, before he sighed, tore himself away from the desk and joined her on the couch, wrapping himself around her. “…Y’know, raw ability sure as fuck ain’t wisdom.”

“You have plenty of both, Bumpkin,” she assured him, and scritched behind his ears. He lifted his head into her touch, a gesture that always delighted her.

“Dunno if I have enough…” he sighed. “When leaders ‘ggressively push egalitarian policies, they either light their people on fire, or light their society on fire.”

“So…” She stirred up a little cowlick of fur with her claw. “Which one can you bear?”

Daar mulled that question over for a long second. “…I want my people ‘ta be the bestest they can be. I want ‘em to have a chance against the other Deathworlders. I don’t wanna see ‘em plow’d under by Humans accidentally…or mebbe later the Ten’Gewek on-purpose. They’re nice ‘fer giant space-apes but they hate weakness.”

“You know, even with the gene therapy, our people are never going to quite match them…”

“Eh, depends on what ‘ya mean by ‘match’ I guess. We’re jus’ gonna hafta deal with that. But we can be better’n we are now, an’ we can take off some’a the chains the Hierarchy put on us. Shit, I don’ see how we could bear to keep ‘em on.”

She nipped his ear. “I think that might be the speech you need to give to the Clans,” she said. “If you can’t appeal to their sense of equity, appeal to their sense of outrage instead.”

He tilted his head, then chittered. “…I love you so much.”

“I know.” She chittered too. “Now, my little stroll by the ocean has left my fur matted in all the hard-to-reach places…”

He glanced down her back. “…Looks sleek an’ perfect ‘ta me. But I’ll put m’paws ‘ta work…”

Naydra chittered and stretched out across his lap while he reached out with a long arm and hooked over a brush. He diligently slicked her fur to a high gloss, then kneaded all the stress of the day right out of her with his huge, brutish paws. He looked, sounded and smelled far less tense than he had when she’d entered the room, which was good… but her mission wasn’t accomplished yet. By the time she was done with him, he’d be in a perfectly good mood again.

And so would she.

Date Point: 17y7m1w4d AV
Builder Hive, deep in Hunter space

The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas

For once, the Alpha-of-Alphas had to concede that the Eaters were seeking the sensible course of action.

+The Humans did not even send ships to defend one of their own. The Prey are defenceless!+

+That will not last.+ < Greatest respect > +We must feed. We must feast! This is an opportunity that cannot be wasted!+

It couldn’t find a solid objection to the idea. The Alpha-of-Alphas was not in the habit of acquiescing to the Eaters when they requested to Hunt. It did so sparingly, to show its favor, to reward those Broods that pleased it, and to secure resources or strike strategically. It was not accustomed to simply unleashing them and letting them feed according to their whim.

But in this moment, when they could do so largely unopposed…

Perhaps their willful lust for meat could be turned to valuable ends. There were things it needed, technology and data that the Builders had traditionally scavenged from captured ships and ransacked stations while the Eaters fed. Ironically, Alpha-of-Alphas’ own cautious strategy had starved the Builders of such valuable spoils. Here, perhaps, was an opportunity to glean a rich resource.

Not to mention an opportunity to reward the Eaters for complying with its will. Yes. Denying them now would only foment resentment. Indulging them, though, would strengthen their loyalty.

< Decree > +Then we shall feast. You will be given targets. You will be permitted to draw your Brood-reserves from stasis. Go where you are directed, feast until your maws and bellies ache. And bring back as much meat and materiel as you can.+

For the first time since claiming its position, it enjoyed the joyous eagerness that shot through the minds around it. The bloodlust surged, so hot and strong that even the Builder’s more refined mind thrilled at it.

+Meat to the maw!+

Date Point: 17y7m1w4d AV
Behind enemy lines, planet ‘Mordor,’occupied Hunter space

Father Liim of Clan Whitecrest

“Mother’s up late. Cubs all play statues.”

Liim’s team had a small camp amidst a long-neglected railyard that the Hunters had clearly decided they didn’t need any longer and just abandoned. The cars were intact enough to serve as shelter from the pollution and acid rain, and though they weren’t clean, they could be made serviceably clean enough for those activities that required partial removal of their protective equipment, like eating.

The junk also offered plenty of places to conceal the narrow-beam satellite antenna where it would be invisible to both visual detection and sensors. So, Liim had claimed one for his hideout and command center. It was almost peaceful, hearing the heavy rain outside drumming on the corroded metal.

The new message was puzzling, though. In Whitecrest’s war-cant, the phrase he’d just received meant “Enemy activity, reason and objective unknown. All units, hold position and avoid detection.”

Dangerous… but an opportunity, too. Liim gave the situation a moment’s thought, consulted his map, then sent his own reply.

“Maybe Mother has a mate. Cubs in the kitchen, play sniff-a-secret.”

He grabbed his helmet and mask after the reply—a pair of radio clicks to acknowledge the command—and put them on, a process that took a well-practiced minute or so. He’d shaved the fur around his throat down to stubble to avoid the problem of it getting caught in the seal and ruining it, and he just knew it was going to be months before he didn’t look ridiculously collared, but it was that or allow heavy metals and carcinogens into his suit to collect in his fur and nestle against his skin.

He checked the seal, and grabbed his rifle. There was a prickling in his ears and claws, a kind of prescient instinct he’d never dare to describe to anyone else for fear of sounding insane, but…

“Mother’s in the kitchen.”

Liim grabbed his radio. “Cubs play sneak-and-wait!”

He was out of his train car in seconds. It had been a long, hard hunt of a week or more, but finally, finally the Alpha they were looking for had made a mis-step and come out in the open. Whether it knew it was being hunted or had simply been distracted and busy below ground he didn’t know, but something had changed, and now…

Now they had a chance to kill it.

One chance.

Over near the Clawhold and the liberated cities on the south-eastern continent, the Hunters had very little freedom of movement. They couldn’t fly, they couldn’t move across open terrain, they even had to be cautious about moving too noisily in the shallower tunnels, or else Gaoian guns and RFGs quickly put a stop to whatever maneuver they were attempting.

Orbital resources were limited, though, thanks to the jump lockdown. Now, the guns struck only the most valuable and necessary targets. Now, the rods fell sparingly and judiciously. The Hunters had been quick to notice that and take advantage. Here, in their controlled territory, they were almost moving with impunity. Which was why their sudden burst of activity was visible even from a few streets away through the acidic downpour. There was a whole swarm of small strike craft in the air, buzzing around like enraged hornets.

Liim wasn’t sure what they intended to hit, but it didn’t matter. Something had worked the Hunters up, and he wasn’t going to complain if their frenzy made them vulnerable.

Along with a dozen of his Brothers, he activated his suit’s active camo as they wriggled out of their trainyard and along the old native streets, between badly eroded brickwork and the spots where the Hunters had just slammed down some horrific concrete eyesore without regard for the existing street plan. The rain actually worked for them as they scurried along hugging the walls: a little extra shimmering movement was more easily missed among the rivulets and miniature waterfalls.

“The Kitchen” was the center of Hunter operations for the area, a series of unadorned, brutal buildings that served as…well, lots of things. Their survey had turned up not just the landing pads and maintenance sheds for the swarmships, but microdrones infiltrated into the larger structures had turned up spawning pools, cybernetic implantation wards, long underground galleries of stasis pods, and sub-basements below those that had defied infiltration.

And, of course, meat lockers.

Now, it was a sea of Hunters, loading themselves into their swarmships or, in a few of the bigger cases, standing ready to be literally picked up by one and carried.

There was one, however, that had to be their quarry, and Liim identified it seconds after he scuttled up the crumbling brickwork of his scouts’ hiding place and slipped in among the rain-slick stones to join them. As it happened, Loorin was lurking in the ruined house, basically invisible thanks to his active camo and the opportunity to lie still. He shifted over a little to make room for Liim, and handed over his scope.

The First Alpha was easily twice as big as any of the Betas, and much larger than any of the Alphas, either. There was a Hunter’s fanged mouth and seven blinking eyes somewhere deep in that thing, but the rest…

…Was oddly elegant, actually. Maybe this one had a sense of aesthetics, but it had completely shed most of its flesh in favor of a symmetrical, sleek robot body the color of dirty surgical tools.

Which posed a problem. Unless somebody literally crammed an explosive device down its throat, Liim couldn’t see how they were going to get a confirmed kill with only their rifles and claws. Any Gaoian going claw-to-claw with that would be ribbons of bloody meat in very short order, and with that much armor around its vital innards, nothing short of its obliteration was going to be good enough.

“…We need an orbital strike.”

“Blazing Claw is overhead and ready, and I already marked the target. But there’s a problem.” Loorin slowly and carefully pointed it out. The ring of shield emitters around the base was still intact and powered. “Those won’t hold out for long, but they’ll hold long enough for it to scuttle back underground. If we want a clean kill…”

Liim duck-nodded slowly. Well, that dictated their course of action. The time for plans and cunning was over.

He keyed his radio. “Cubs. Pantry’s locked. Naughty cubs play smash-and-steal, before Mother comes.”

Loori slipped away from the broken window, gave him a look, and duck-nodded while confirmations came in from the other teams that had ghosted into place around the perimeter. They were ready. About to do something incredibly risky, but ready.

“Cubs…pounce.”

They swarmed out of the buildings, scurried along the streets, used walls and rough ground and piles of refuse or the occasional twisted, sickly plant to move as fast as they dared, each team zeroing in on a shield generator. Liim didn’t know how many they needed to kill. If the Hunters were smart, the whole system was redundant a few times over to spread the load, and maybe run on only the one generator.

Maybe that was possible, maybe not. All that mattered from his perspective was that they kill the one in their sector, and trust their brothers to achieve their objectives too. Worrying about the others was a good way to be distracted at a critical moment.

A swarmship whined overhead, lifting and turning away from the Kitchen as the Hunters aboard went abroad to find something to murder. Liim’s team flattened themselves and went still, trusting their armor to protect them. The ship didn’t abruptly turn to face them, Hunters didn’t suddenly come bursting out of the perimeter, so as soon as the small ship was out of sight, they moved again.

Up close, the shield was faintly visible as an oddity in the air. A flat plane made of air, barely there but there enough, seen more in the way the rain deflected and partially splattered off it rather than by any light or texture.

Their delay with the swarmship proved costly, though. The first of the generators, on the far side of the Kitchen, was taken down with the Clan’s trademark swift efficiency, demolished by a shaped charge. Instants later, the second and third one followed…but the shield was still up.

Across the Kitchen, the Hunters reacted with savage glee at the prospect of having something to fight and eat. The swarmships leapt into the air, searching. On the ground, the Broods fanned out, rushing toward the perimeter in search of prey.

And in the center, the First Alpha watched the hunt for a moment and then turned back toward the huge bunker doors that led back underground.

“Move!” Liim abandoned stealth and charged forward. They had seconds.

A Hunter surged through the shield ahead of it, weapon up and tracking. Active camo made the difference, and it failed to notice Liim just long enough for Liim to sink six rounds into it, shattering its shields and stitching a row of bloody holes up its torso. It jerked and collapsed, but one dead Hunter meant a hundred more alerted and coming for them.

“Father!”

Liim turned. Loori threw the explosive charge to him then reared up on hindpaw and laid into the swarming Hunters with a defiant roar, doing everything in his power to be loud and obvious and distracting.

It worked. The Kitchen’s shield dome popped and flashed as fat, heavy bullets tore through it from inside, peppering the brickwork while Loori dove for cover.

Liim squirmed forward through the mud, his armor’s camo cranked up to maximum framerate. In such a mode he was effectively invisible, but it wouldn’t last long.

Fortunately, he didn’t need long. He hugged the generator as a trio of Hunters rampaged past it, intent on Loori. He slapped the charge on, sprinted away from it, and triggered it.

The last generator vanished in a percussive crunch of high explosives and showering mud. A heartbeat later, the sky rained death.

Liim barely made it to cover. He flung himself into a ditch and covered himself as column after column of blue vengeance skewered the ground, all focused on where the Alpha had been and then working outwards. It went on for minutes, and all Liim could do was hold on and hope that the nearby wall didn’t collapse on him, that no Hunter would blunder into his ditch…

The manic thought ran through his head that at least the Blazing Claw’s gunners were being thorough.

Eventually, it ended. He uncurled, and stuck his nose over the edge of his ditch. The Kitchen was a broken field of craters, littered with pulverized Hunter remains and scraps of smashed swarmship. Steam and smoke curled up into the damp air where the rain was steadily drowning the fires.

“…Cubs. check for Mother.”

Gaoian forms emerged from the dust and smoke like wraiths all around him. They advanced cautiously, checking everything vaguely intact in case it turned out to be a miraculous Hunter survivor, but the Claw had been thorough indeed. Their sweep and clear was silent, save for the synthetic tapping of the rain on his helmet.

The First Alpha was a twisted curl of sharp scrap metal, half-buried in the edge of a collapsed hole that had once been its bunker. Bits of it were still twitching feebly, though Liim couldn’t tell if that was just malfunction or whether somehow it was still alive in there. The “body” he found was a misshapen egg-shaped thing, built around the jaw and eyes, neither of which moved on his approach.

He stuck another explosive device to it anyway, just to be sure, and wasn’t satisfied until that blast left little pieces of Hunter innards strewn over the surrounding area.

“…Inform Grandfather Vark, mission successful,” he said. “Did we lose anyone?”

“We lost Loori, Father.”

Liim hung his head but held himself back from keening mournfully. There’d be time to grieve later.

“…Let’s get out of here,” he declared instead. They might have won, but the Hunters would be back soon to punish them. He intended to be a long way away before they arrived.

Hopefully, his Brother’s life had earned them all the opportunity to live even longer.

Taming the Gravedigger King: What Earth’s monarchs can tell us about Daar’s future
Author and photographer: Ava Magdalena Ríos

”There’s a friend in a fridge up there. A good man who deserves way more. Fuck, they all deserve way more.”

When we think of royalty in the human context, those of us with an Anglocentric world view inevitably think of the British royal family first. We think of their palaces, castles and estates, their fine clothing, their received pronunciation and the gentle way they wield very little power but an enormous amount of influence. In times of disaster, perhaps they tour the hospitals, meet the wounded, raise spirits and inspire. Perhaps they go on to sponsor charities or organize events. The work they do—and it is in fact work, despite envious accusations otherwise—is genteel, refined and even glamorous.

By contrast, when I found him in the ruins of Franklin, the Great Father of the Gao was muddy to the elbows from digging graves by hand.

[Photo: Blue Collar King—the Great Father grimaces as he stretches his weary muscles]

I didn’t get much time to speak with him. He was pulled away by some urgent matter before we could properly converse, but he wasn’t his usual playful and flirtatious self that day. Who could blame him? He was there for a grim purpose, to say farewell to a friend and pay tribute to his fallen allies.

How many other kings would have dug the graves themselves?

And, more importantly… should Daar?

That is not an easy question to answer. Reactions to his unconventional leadership—at least, by Human Anglosphere standards—run the gamut. The Clans of Gao make much of their fierce loyalty to him, the Grand Army even more so. The Ten’Gewek, according to those who know them, find it unthinkable that a true leader could be otherwise.

Here on Cimbrean, however, we live in a society that discarded or downgraded our monarchs hundreds of years ago. Whichever Territory we live in and whichever nation we originally called home, Cimbrean is hardly dominated by staunch monarchists.

The difference is historic. It doesn’t matter where you look on the Earth or in what period of history, the assorted monarchs and emperors of our species’ history have never failed to embody humanity at its best, its worst and (for the most part) its most mediocre.

The question I found myself mulling over after our chance encounter was: what inspiration and guidance might Daar gain from studying humanity’s rulers?

[Photo: Daar picking dried mud off his forearms while seated on his shuttle’s ramp]

There have been plenty of wartime monarchs even in recent human history. In Japan, the emperor Hirohito presided over his nation’s surrender after the bombs fell, despite an attempted coup d’etat which sought to cancel his surrender broadcast. In 1939, it fell to the British King George VI to declare to his country over the radio that Britain was at war with Nazi Germany.

Daar is certainly a wartime ruler. Unlike Hirohito and George VI, however, his rulership is direct and personal. Where he will dig holes and make policy and give orders himself, both the Japanese and British during WW2 only ostensibly answered to their emperors. In practice, the great decisions of state were made by Prime Ministers and generals. Daar on the other hand has personally plunged headlong into battle with a rifle in his paws, on several occasions.

[Photo: A Hero, Undaunted—informal posing on the shuttle ramp, mightier than ever yet plainly exhausted. A spark of his usual humor shows through the lathered sweat and caked-on mud.]

Surprisingly, you don’t have to go too far back in time to find kings who’ve gone into battle alongside their soldiers. During WW1, King Albert I of Belgium was on the front lines leading his men through the Siege of Antwerp and the Battle of Yser. A hundred years previously saw Napoleon personally commanding his army at Waterloo, and Shaka commanding his at the Battle of Gqokli Hill.

But for the most part, in Europe, Africa and Asia alike, kings were not commanders, nor even direct rulers. How did that come to be? How did supreme, even divine authority give way to a ceremonial figurehead role?

Or, is that even a fair label? For some, certainly. The King of Sweden and the Emperor of Japan are explicitly figureheads, not vested with even nominal executive powers. Other monarchies are murkier, but even in the case of the British monarch with their mostly unwritten constitution, His Majesty’s vast theoretical powers remain, beyond extraordinary circumstance, exactly that: theoretical. Still, modern monarchies often wield considerable influence in their governments and among high society. Influence…but not power. And that influence can matter a great deal.

[Image: a collage of Queen Elizabeth II meeting several US Presidents]

There is one king who might answer the question: Juan Carlos I of Spain, the first king of their modern age. To understand Juan Carlos, one first has to understand another man: Francisco Franco, fascist dictator of Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975.

Franco was a monster. It’s not clear exactly how many of his political opponents, especially communists and socialist activists, were killed, but the range is somewhere in the tens of thousands. Throughout his regime, political dissent and non-government trade unions were officially repressed, as were languages, religions, and sexuality.

All of this, in Franco’s eyes, was the necessary evil required to protect his beloved country from the alleged scourge of Communism.

Juan Carlos was personally appointed by Franco to succeed him, skipping a generation in the royal line of succession. He was enthroned on the 27th of November 1975, two days after Franco’s death, as an effective dictator in his own right. Within three years, he restored freedom of religion, legalized the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and the Communist Party of Spain, and promulgated a new constitution which was eventually ratified by a public referendum.

I can see a lot of both men in the Great Father of the Gao.

He is comfortable with power, very much a king red in tooth and claw who has personally wielded the long knives when he felt it necessary. Daar, like Franco, has not hesitated to remove his political opponents in a terminal fashion. He is, in his own words, the ‘greatest mass murderer in galactic history,’ having doomed billions of biodroned Gao to oblivion for the sake of those who remained. Reportedly, he pushed the button himself.

Nonetheless, he is not a grim personality. Give him the chance and he prefers to flirt and play and dig in the dirt. He is as boisterous and happy as the most stereotypical jock, and tends to invest himself deeply in his friends’ lives. Listen to him, and he will gladly talk about the Gao’s future and his hopes for what they will be once he is gone.

He has been a Franco. But he wants to be a Juan Carlos.

Whether or not he can do such a thing remains an open question. Monarchies in the West had deep institutional legacies that they’d built, and which eventually supplanted them. When all other risks to continuity and the mechanics of governance had been systematically addressed, the only one that remained was a potentially volatile personality at the top, which…

Monarchs either found new roles in the new order, or they lost their heads. Often literally.

The Gao do not have such infrastructure at this time. For a number of reasons, and according to the Great Father via email conversations, the Hierarchy conspired to keep them divided into interdependent and competitive Clans organized around purpose rather than nation. Thus, the Gao have no historical memory of national conflict. Their well-recorded history more or less begins with Fyu, and everything that came before is best thought of as semi-mythical.

The consequence of this is that, absent Daar and the sheer force of his presence, the Gao would fall back into endlessly bickering Clans in a sort of weird anarcho-capitalist society that would never work if any human nation attempted it. Daar is the Gao, and the Gao are Daar.

He knows it, too. And it is not sustainable.

[Image: Coffins being lowered into the Franklin mass grave]

Big questions are being asked about the future right now. How long will the jump array network be down? How vulnerable are we all without it? To most of the people on Earth of course, life is going to continue as normal.

But the galaxy is not just Earth. The human race is not just on Earth any longer. Out here on Cimbrean, we have to face a truth that Daar expressed in his characteristically blunt way: “If we gotta make it work, then we’ll gods-damn make it work. Ain’t no way our worlds can be cut off from one ‘nother at this point.”

We can’t, and we won’t. Gao is a lot closer to Cimbrean than Earth is, and that matters now. When the blue collar king comes to dig graves, we welcome him and admire him.

But we shouldn’t forget what he is, nor what he has the potential to become.

Date Point: 17y7m1w5d AV
Orbital Interlink Station, orbiting gas giant Brisis, the Robalin Supremacy

Ublas, Party Youth

Little Ublas had a social deviance score of -0.11, the best in his class. He was proud of that! It meant he was trusted with the special responsibilities, like taking roll call, or leading his classmates in meditation and exercise. He was working on getting down to -0.1 so he could join the Party when he was older.

For now though, the teacher said he still had a lot to learn.

Today’s lesson covered a rare subject: Aliens. Ublas hadn’t seen many aliens, except for rare footage on the news site. He knew enough to name a few of the more common species like the Domain blue-and-white ones, and the big furry Guvnurag.

He recognized a male and female pair of Gao on the monitor, at the front of the class, and guessed shrewdly that the other pair must be Humans. The photograph was of a pair of bipeds, dense and square and ugly. The male was pale and covered in a sparse coat of black fur, especially atop the head, down the chest and around the genitals. The female was a much darker shade of brown, and considerably less hairy.

“Today we will talk about the greatest threats to our eventual Galactic dominance. They are Deathworlders, and will be the chief obstacles to our greatness. Did you do your groupwork, class?”

The class replied in well-practised unison, “Yes, teacher!”

“Excellent. Ublas, you may record one point for everyone, and two points for yourself as a reward for your obvious leadership.”

“Thank you, teacher. But everyone did the groupwork on their own.”

“You do realize that will deny you a point, don’t you?”

This was a test Ublas knew the right answer to. Glory was for the collective, not the individual. He could claim the point, and it would be added to his score… but he would also have given the wrong answer, and made the others angry at him. Harmony lay in disciplined self-denial. “I gratefully decline that point, teacher!”

“As you wish. Class, sit.”

The brief roll and squeal of chairs on the resin-surfaced concrete floor took several seconds as the class obediently pulled their seats out and retrieved their study tools from within their desks. Ublas suppressed an irritated tic of his antennae as he noticed that somebody had doodled unflattering graffiti on his desk, and resolved to investigate after he had reported and repaired the damage. For now though, he simply covered it with his textbook and listened attentively as the teacher returned to the screen at the front.

“As I was saying, today we will be learning about the Deathworlders. They represent the only significant adversarial competition to our greatness in the Dominion. Do you know why we are not enemies?”

One of Ublas’ classmates, Esros, thrust a hand in the air. “Because we’re not at war?”

“Obvious, but true. Zero points. Anyone else have deeper insight?”

Another, Mustras, provided a more thoughtful answer. “Because we might one day be allies?”

“Ah, yes! That possibility remains. One point. Does anyone have a more complete answer?”

There were a few thoughtful moments of silence as young brains applied themselves to the problem, before Ublas had an insight and raised his hand for attention. The teacher gestured for him to speak.

“Is it… precisely because they are our only significant competition? Do they embrace the Wisdom?”

“One point. They do not embrace the Wisdom, no, but they have both demonstrated practical applications of the Wisdom in their ancient and recent history.”

The teacher progressed the slideshow, and Ublas watched with interest a short clip of footage taken from an alien city on an alien world. The street was a press of furry bodies, with goods and vehicles pressing slowly through the crowd. It looked chaotic, not at all like the orderly planned perfection of the Center of Culture or any other properly built Robalin city, but it still conveyed a sense of industriousness and community.

“Firstly, the Gao. They are the most alien and also the easiest to consider. Uniquely, their species has a significant gender imbalance which results in many more male adults than females. This strongly favors strength, resilience, and industry in their society, and greatly increases genetic fitness for all their newly-conceived. Can anyone see why? I know mating is a far-off prospect for ones so young…”

Shy giggles fluttered around the classroom. The subject of reproductive education was handled by a particularly grim and humorless teacher every twentieth day, one whom Ublas simply couldn’t imagine had ever actually done it themselves…

Hands were thrust into the air to venture an answer.

“Because the females can afford to choose only the most suitable mates?”

“Excellent! Two points.”

The teacher clearly felt no further elaboration was required, because they transitioned to the next slide. “Physically, all Gaoians are hardy and resilient, though most are also quite small. While this may seem like a weakness, it also makes them frugal and thrifty, both virtues that are to be commended. Further, they possess excellent senses and potent immune systems. Individually, their average males would not pose an unassailable military threat…but only if one ignores the existence of male ‘degrees’ among them.”

The next slide summarized the concept. Ublas scribbled some notes, certain he would be expected to do more research during the group assignment phase of the class. He liked the idea, really. A natural expression of the Wisdom.

“Regardless of degree, all of them are clever and nimble on their feet. They come to maturity quickly, and the higher-degree males can be impressive indeed. Their militaristic Clans manifest the Wisdom most strongly, along with their intellectual leaders, Clan Highmountain. Individual progression is strictly on merit, all activity benefits the Clan.”

A number of archetypal Gaoians paraded across the screen, showing distinctive fur patterning and coloration, differentiating themselves with social grooming, or physical fitness, or by sheer muscular size in a few cases. The footage tracked one of the more physically imposing Clans, with subtitles explaining that they were responsible for law enforcement and social order. They reminded Ublas of the Peace And Harmony Division, whose armored enforcers were always on guard for serious social deviancy.

“Nonetheless, loyalty to the collective is fierce, even among those lesser males who never attain Clan membership or a breeding pedigree. In this as well, the Gao practice the Wisdom. Their in-built genetic differentiation via degree generates a natural hierarchy, and in times of extreme duress, the greatest example of their kind is highly likely to assume the mantle of leadership.”

The next slide was one of the most famous still images in the galaxy, and Ublas had seen it many times before. The Gaoian male it depicted was unlike any so far shown in the lesson, being visibly larger, hugely more muscular, and more…coarse. A male made to fight and to win, at anything he wanted to win. There were, he suspected, few students of any species, anywhere in the galaxy, who would not recognize the Great Father of the Gao.

“Indeed, the most fearsome individual being known anywhere in any species is Gaoian. This is Daar, their maximum leader, who is titled the Great Father. No other species we are aware of is capable of elevating such an ideal expression of their own kind to supreme office. This is to be admired, and this simple fact makes them a culture wholly in tune with their natural order.”

The next slide was a Human city, and Ublas didn’t quite know what to make of what he saw. The footage juxtaposed gleaming towers of glass and steel with dingy, dishevelled brick streets so thickly defaced by graffiti that it almost seemed to be encouraged. One moment, well-groomed and obviously affluent individuals were arrayed in front of grand architecture, the next, the ailing impoverished watched the camera warily.

“Humans have devised a society in which the deserving flourish and the unproductive languish. The rewards for success in their culture are immense; the penalty for nonparticipation, harsh. The beauty of their design is it is the individual’s will and worthiness that largely determines their success; dynastic parasitism does exist, but it is minimized in their most successful cultures, while those not naturally attuned to the Wisdom wither and languish, to be exploited by the Wise. It is no surprise therefore that their greatest contribution to the galaxy so far has been their military. Behold!”

The slide transitioned again, and there were even a few undisciplined gasps from the class. The footage was of unrestricted violence, and it took Ublas a moment to realize that he was only watching a training course, not a real battle.

“These are their ultimate warriors, at field-play. Note the speed, the decisiveness and the surety of action. They are selected exhaustively from among the common soldiery. In this, the Human military practices the Wisdom. As we do, they select the most accomplished and use them well, while the less accomplished are assigned to their proper place in the supporting structure below them.”

“Now…” the teacher ended the footage. “Both species have an admirable trait in common: Ruthlessness. Human industry in particular is commendably competitive, driven by the imperative to destroy inferior competitors and seize dominance of their market. Humans rightly recognize that there is no soft-hearted notion at play; it is merely business if one should fail and another succeed. Personally tragic, perhaps, but the collective must take priority. Their history is riddled with planetary empires which resorted to such distasteful but necessary practices as forced labour, extermination, cultural suppression, and weaponized disease and narcotics, just as we once did in order to realize the Wisdom.

“The Gao practiced this philosophy in protecting their homeworld from the biodrone uprising and the Hunter invasion. Rather than trying to save the lost, their Great Father destroyed the overrun cities, destroyed the biodrone forces and salvaged what would otherwise have been a losing battle.” The teacher looked sternly around at the class. “Both species, in short, are willing to take the necessary strong action when the alternative is failure.

“Neither of them, however, have properly realized the Wisdom. In fact, the closest expression of the Wisdom the humans have ever managed was derailed by failures of discretion, failures of perception, and a powerful coalition of the Unwise and the pervasive Great Lie. It was a deserved failure, brought on by self-indulgence and excessive glorification of a single charismatic leader. While the maximum leader must always exist and receive their due glory, they must also earn it at every step.”

Teacher returned to the desk at the front of the class. “Your assignment for this session—”

The lesson was interrupted by a brownout. The lights fizzled and died, and for a moment the only illumination in the room was reflected light of the beige gas giant outside the window. Then they came back up… and so did the emergency lighting, and the high shriek of an alarm.

“Up, students! Just like we drilled!”

The teacher’s command was redundant: all of the class had sprung to their feet as soon as the alarm sounded, and formed a dutiful line to the door. The teacher opened the locked cabinet in the corner of the room that Ublas had always assumed was some kind of electrical junction box, but instead, to his surprise and alarm, it contained a pulse rifle, a personal forcefield harness and a tube of nervejam grenades, which the teacher equipped with nervous efficiency. They strode to the door, opened it, and burst out into the hallway beyond, training the weapon up and down the deck, looking for—

A terrible barrage of percussive sound heralded the moment their teacher died right in front of the class’ horrified eyes, the shield harness achieving nothing before it shattered under an onslaught of invisible cracking things that punched right through the teacher’s helpless form and sprayed grey-blue blood all over the walls. The class recoiled into their classroom, their drill quite forgotten.

Ublas tried to keep calm, tried to be the leader. The brace, he remembered. All the doors had an emergency brace stored next to them, in a small blue glass-fronted case at shoulder height.

He scrabbled to open it, pushed the glass inwards—it broke, easily and safely, and fell out of the case, leaving behind a hook-shaped piece of thick steel with a flat end that slid into a bracket on the door, while the longer, thicker end slotted neatly into a shallow groove on the floor.

With the door thus barricaded, any terrorists or malcontents storming the school with weapons should find the classroom impenetrable, at least long enough to dissuade them or for an armed Peace and Harmony team to respond.

It did nothing to stop the sizzling trio of fusion blades that tore through the doorframe like it was made of paper, ripped out the offending brace, and then swatted the door aside.

A Hunter pushed through, and the snarl that rippled up its horrible maw had a definite satisfied quality as eyes flicked back and forth across the cowering children. It raised its weapon.

The last thing Ublas did in his young life was to close his eyes.

Date Point: 17y7m1w5d AV
Lakebeds National Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ian Wilde

The highest peak near Folctha was barely a mountain, coming in at a “lofty” one thousand and seventy-two feet, but what Mount Crivens lacked in height, it made up for in a hell of a view.

Wilde didn’t know who’d explored the valley that later became part of the Lakebeds national park, but they must have been a Character, because they’d decided to name a lot of its major features after mild cusses. From near the top of Mount Crivens, a hiker could enjoy the sight of the river Dagnabbit as it sprung up in Lake Dang, bounced and bubbled its way through the rough terrain to the rather larger Lake Heck, took one final plunge at Sugar Falls and then, after forming a small flooded spot known as Pardon-My-French Pond, flowed past a collection of holiday cottages, a visitor center, cafe and car park—collectively known as the village of Belgium—and from there, northwards toward the sea.

The view and the colourful names were enough to restore something that resembled a good mood for Ian. He needed all the help he could get, given that life had first knocked him down, and then put the boot in for good measure, but a walk in nature and some fresh air helped.

Funny, really. All those marches and hikes and stuff, and he still wasn’t bored of hills, mountains and the simple rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other. He’d stopped just shy of the actual peak of Crivens, which the websites said was mostly ram-packed with walkers anyway. Instead, the in-the-know folks apparently enjoyed the far superior vista offered by a quiet little shelf just below the summit, where he’d stopped to put down his rucksack and have a cup of tea.

They were right. The view was stunning.

Even so, his thoughts kept drifting back to the question of what he was going to do with himself from now on. There’d been career options on the table. Whitecrest in particular, and they’d seemed like the most intriguing prospect, but there had been others. But with the lockdown in place… well, his whole future had just rammed a wall and stopped dead, it seemed.

He’d gone into JETS for the adventure, mostly. It was good work and a valuable mission, but the bit that had really appealed was seeing alien worlds. Crash-landing on Gao had been intense and stressful at the time, but it had left him bitten by a kind of bug, with an itch to go see horizons no human had seen.

Or no Ten’Gewek, for that matter. Ferd was a little bit behind him, carrying the bulk of their supplies and generally climbing around and exploring, as was his monkey way.

Ten’Gewek were made for climbing trees and blitzing through the canopy, not walking long distances over rough terrain. It wasn’t that Ferd couldn’t hack a long ruck; that was mandatory for JETS membership, after all. it was more that going straight up was the easier way for them to go about it. So, while Wilde meandered up the trail, enjoying the burn in his legs and the general views, Ferd would follow him for a bit, then scale whatever appropriate face got him higher towards the goal.

He burned a hell of a lot more calories doing that, honestly. Ferd was insanely heavy and no matter how strong he was, or how light the gravity, muscling all that weight up burned a fuck of a lot of calories. But what was cardio other than a long, steady burn, after all?

Either way, it was good exercise for them both. And it meant Wilde got to enjoy being out in front a bit at the end of the climb, when the terrain leveled out and there was nothing vertical for Ferd to spider-monkey up.

The given-man hooted appreciatively at the view as he squeezed out of the narrow crack in between two rocky outcroppings that led down to the shelf. “Nice!”

“Yeah,” Wilde agreed. He sat down, stretched his legs out in front of him, and sighed. “Nice.”

Ferd may have looked and often sounded brutish, but that was just cultural. He was anything but blind to moods, and he sat by Wilde’s side with a soft, reassuring hoot. “Bad head weather today?”

“Little bit.”

“Bad?”

“Just…finding it hard to take joy in things.” Wilde took his sunglasses off. He’d decided if he was going to have a glass eye, he may as well own it and wear one that didn’t even look real, so the ball in his right eye socket was a badass-looking black thing with a jolly roger where the pupil should be. But when out in public and when he didn’t feel like dealing with stares and questions, he wore shades. It worked well enough.

Ferd did the predictable thing and swallowed him up in a patented Ten’Gewek hug, which seemed to involve wrapping as much of one’s self around the target of affection as was physically possible. Given their tail, it could sometimes feel like both King Kong and Kaa wanted to show their love at the same time.

“I still say, we need to find you a woman.”

Wilde chuckled mirthlessly. “And what? Settle down? Have a bunch of kids? Veg out on the couch watching daytime TV and drinking myself into an early grave? Nah, mate. I need to get myself sorted out before I’m ready for a woman. Wouldn’t be fair to inflict myself on some poor lass as I am now.”

“Who said settle down? Have fun!”

Wilde leaned forward to pick a small stone out of his boot’s tread while shaking his head. “Not what I need, mate.”

Ferd grunted, which was the noise he usually made when he ran into the cultural differences between Ten’Gewek and humans. As far as Ten’Gewek of both genders were concerned, a good vigorous shag was the cure for all ills, and promiscuity was very much the norm in their culture. It was a game for them, like most everything, and the closest they came to serious partnerships was having a long-term preferred favourite.

As far as Ian was concerned, a casual hookup would have just left him feeling even emptier. He wasn’t exactly certain what he needed, but he knew for damn sure it wasn’t that.

“Yes yes, you Humans very choosy, like mate is last and biggest rite of your life. But you can’t choose if you don’t try,” he observed astutely.

“Maybe I want something else first,” Wilde said.

“Like what?”

“…Fuck if I know, mate.”

Ferd apparently had enough and let go of Wilde just long enough to spin him around and lock him up in another embrace, this time face-to-face. “You very smart, Wild Death-Eye. But I think you forget, even with this—” Ferd pointed at Wilde’s glass eye, “—that the gods may Take you any time. You not know how much time you have. Maybe a tree branch fall and hurt you! Maybe you slip and fall into water, and Yshek get you, or water too deep to walk out!”

“Maybe I trip and break my neck on the way down this mountain. Yeah, I get that, Ferd.”

“Then act like it. Life is meant to be lived.”

Well that’s exactly the fucking problem right there, Wilde thought to himself. The way he wanted to live was closed to him now.

Which, of course, was the moment Regaari made himself known.

“Nice spot!”

Both Wilde and Ferd jumped. That was the hazard about working with Whitecrests, and especially with Regaari. The whole Clan had a mischievous streak, Regaari in particular, and they were expertly trained in the art of moving unseen and undetected. They liked to sneak up on their friends. A lot.

Frightening two men half out of their skins was as good as applause to them, and Regaari’s ears had a certain gently smug set to them as he strolled over to the wooden rail at the edge of the overlook and took in the view for a moment. “I should come up here more often.”

“Fookin’ Christ, mate!” Wilde objected. “If you’re trying to recruit me, giving me a bloody heart attack is the wrong way to go about it!”

Ferd’s tongue lashed out toward Regaari to get his scent. Reportedly their olfactory sense was effectively Gaoian-like in its sensitivity, but only when they were actively ‘tasting’ the air. “…No taste, no sound, no shadow…I think I very much…um…what is word?”

Regaari’s ears got just a fraction smugger. “Underestimate?”

“Yes! Under-ess-tim-ate you.”

“Good! Means we’re doing something right.” He chittered, then turned away from the edge. “I have some good news for you!”

“Must be damn good if you followed us all the way up here…”

“Well, the exercise was welcome…” Regaari sat down. “The Clan maintains a network of contacts all over the galaxy. Sometimes they need things, sometimes they send us things. We rely on independent ship captains to handle the sensitive cases that can’t be left to the interstellar postal system or major courier firms. And one of them is retiring.”

Wilde wrestled himself free of Ferd to face Regaari more properly, while Ferd grunted, and took up a defensive position off-side and slightly in front. He knew Regaari but they hadn’t had a chance to become friends yet, and Ferd was fiercely loyal to his own.

“…Are you telling me there’s a job as a fucking starship captain available?”

“You’ve done it before, sort of. And I should remind you that, while you will need appropriate training on systems and emergencies, and all that, the ship in question is orbital only. Piloting skills are not much required.”

“What kind of ship?”

“One of a dying breed, sadly. An Irbzrkian medium bulk transporter, model seven. Retrofitted with external container racks rather than pressurized cargo bays. She’s a regular up at Armstrong Station, which is why we use her, but with all these reports of the Hunters going on the offensive, the captain decided to quit while they’re ahead. They’re selling the ship to the Clan.”

“Dying breed?” Ferd asked.

“Irbzrk Shipyards was destroyed by the Hunters, years ago,” Wilde explained. “What’s her name?”

“Ah. Currently the ship’s name sounds like somebody choking on a handful of marbles. I imagine you’ll want to change that. It might make announcing yourself to port authorities rather difficult if you don’t.” Regaari sniffed. “…Assuming you take the position, of course.”

Wilde sat back and considered it, with some effort. He’d learned a long time ago not to just fling himself into big decisions on a whim, and Regaari was offering him a dangerous job. That retiring captain was right, the galaxy wasn’t a friendly place right now. The Hunters were definitely living by ‘when the cat’s away, the mice can play’ and that meant any ship plying the spacelanes was probably even more vulnerable now than before the joint AEC-Gao interception missions really started to work.

But on the other hand, the idea of being the one-eyed scoundrel captain of a second-hand old space freighter while running secret missions for an alien ninja clan was so fucking romantic that Wilde’s inner geek was practically doing backflips.

“What’s the—” he cleared his throat and tried again. “What’s the pay like?”

“Enough to keep you out of Hoeff’s clutches, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Ferd grunted, and stepped just a tiny bit closer to Regaari. He liked Hoeff and was protective of him, too.

“I mean no disrespect, Ferd Given-Man. Hoeff is not a trivial adversary!”

Wilde tapped Ferd on the arm to get him to step back, then gave Regaari a level look. “Care to put a number on that statement?”

Regaari did so. It was…substantial.

“You can do better than that, mate. I know you’re starting with the lowball offer.”

“I didn’t mention the insurance, expenses, hazard pay or mission bonuses.”

“Now we’re talking.” Wilde forced his inner nerd to chill out and considered the view. All of a sudden, it looked a lot brighter.

“I’ll…the sensible thing to do here is to consider it.”

“We certainly want sensible people working for us,” Regaari agreed.

“Then I’ll consider it.”

“Good. Anyway. May I join you gentlemen before we head back down? No more business talk for today.”

Ferd gave Regaari a neutral look.

Regaari, though, knew just the thing. “I brought peshorkies. The herb kind, not the hot kind.”

“…Hmm.” Ferd glanced back at Wilde, then nodded when Wilde just shrugged and smiled at him. “Okay.”

And that was that. Wilde was serious about giving the matter some thought, but at the same time…he knew what his answer was going to be. So he ate his peshorkies and the sandwiches he’d brought with him, and had a nice cold drink, and looked out at the spectacular view in front of him.

And wondered what else he’d see, when he was travelling the galaxy.

Date Point: 17y7m2w AV
HMS Vicious, approaching Erebor system, deep space

Captain Paul Boese

“And there’s the guard dog…”

Boese suppressed a shiver as he contemplated the four sensor contacts falling in alongside Vicious to escort them the last couple of light years in to Erebor. The briefing on what, exactly, the thing now shepherding his ship was had given him a restless night’s sleep after reading it.

Knowing that it was in charge of the awesome potential of a Von Neumann swarm had added two or three more restless nights on top of that. Allegedly it was friendly, but the expression ‘guard dog’ had an apt ring for a man who’d been wary of dogs ever since he’d been bitten at a young age.

The research operation at Mrwrki basically had its own defense fleet, and arguably one of the most powerful and flexible in the galaxy. The so-called “Entity’s” ships didn’t have a crew, which meant no need for life support, food, water, shore leave or facilities to treat wounded sailors. In battle—if it ever saw battle—those ships would fight without fear of hull breaches, unaffected by casualties and fatigue.

He could spot the difference just in the way they easily and smoothly matched Vicious’ course and heading, accelerated neatly into a tetrahedral formation around the much larger destroyer, and sent the simplest and least professional hail he’d ever seen.

< :-) >

Beside him, his XO, Williams, didn’t even bother to suppress his own distaste. “Gives me the fucking willies…” he muttered, for Boese’s ears only.

“At least it’s on our side…” Boese had to admit, the little ascii smile was such a disarmingly human touch that it did soften his opinion a little.

His station on the bridge had access to the telescopes on the ship’s hull, and he used one of them to take a closer look at one of the Entity’s escorts.

The design was minimal and entirely practical. Kinetic thrusters forward and aft so it could accelerate pro- and retro- equally well, weapons held proud of the hull atop sturdy masts so they could cover as much sky as possible without the ship getting in the way and, nestled between them, the squashed domes of ultra-powerful shield generators. No armour: the hull was little more than a sturdy redundant framework to hold the important bits together.

Nasty little buggers. Low mass, high acceleration, plenty of firepower, and unless his guess was wrong, the same kind of raw field power as a San Diego or a Gaoian Fury.

And, as expected, no concessions for crew whatsoever. The only oddity was the large nanofactory bay in the belly, from which each ship could allegedly print a duplicate of itself.

“How did we allow a sapient VN swarm, anyway?” Williams asked.

“We didn’t allow it. It happened. We had virtually nothing to do with any of this. If you want to blame anyone, blame the Hierarchy.”

“And the people at Mrwrki are just going with it?”

Boese sighed. “From what I gather they were dead set opposed to the idea at first but again, they didn’t get a choice. The Entity just went ahead and did it. And now that it has done it…”

“There’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.”

“Exactly. The only sensible thing to do is cultivate a good relationship with the thing and hope for the best…”

The conversation was brought to an end by the helmsman. “Captain? Coming up on the system shield, sir.”

Boese took a look at the forward camera feed. Erebor was a red giant, so huge that even from fifteen AUs out it was visible as a disc rather than a point of light. Mrwrki Station itself was partially embedded in the icy surface of Thrór, a moon of the gas giant Durin, and Boese had to admit, he liked the naming scheme for the whole system. The alien station’s Kwmbwrw name stood out uniquely among all the Tolkien, but otherwise it gave the whole system the sense of being a welcome harbour after a long time in deep space surrounded by stars identified only by their catalog numbers and stellar coordinates, and often otherwise unknown.

It was a big galaxy. Most of it had simply never been interesting enough to explore.

The system defence field was twelve AUs out, just outside the furthest orbit and the moons of the second and smaller gas giant, Sindri, and the vicinity of the football was dense with more Entity drones. Most were more of the escort probes that had guided Vicious in, but there were a pair of much larger ones under construction, attended by a hive of little builder bots. Some hundred kilometers behind them in their orbit was the anchorage for arriving ships.

In the end, the process of hailing the station and gaining access involved some careful negotiation. Erebor had several system shields, and by activating an inner one then deactivating the outer one, a Weaver with a security team on board was able to come out, come aboard, head-scan Vicious’ crew and then escort the destroyer back through the staggered shields and into the inner system without any need for a jump. It took a couple of hours, but it was a commendably safe system, and there was a definite sense of relief and satisfaction on the bridge when Vicious slid smoothly into a synchronous orbit twelve thousand kilometers above Thrór’s surface, centered a mile or two south of Mrwrki.

Boese left the ship in Williams’ capable hands, and went down on the first shuttle. He had important matters to discuss with some of Mrwrki’s leading minds.

Lewis Beverote, for instance. God only knew what the man had done to earn such respect that the AEC and GRA both wanted his professional opinion on the lockdown, but Boese got a hint the second he met the wiry, lean man with his remaining hair pulled into a shaggy ponytail, shook his hand, and knew, just from eye contact, that he was dealing with a man considerably more intelligent than him.

Even if he had the mouth of a surfer bum.

“It’s bullshit, dude. Stupid. The lockdown is stupid. That’s my professional opinion.”

“Couldn’t it happen again?”

“Couldn’t it have happened before?” Beverote had a coffee mug on his desk. It read: ‘Not Politically Correct: ALWAYS Correct.’ “Like, I get it, the voters have gotta be kept happy and everyone’s scared the next one’s gonna be Folctha or New York or wherever, and yeah, they’re right to be. We got fuckin’ lucky that it was just Franklin. But it wouldn’ta happened at all if corners hadn’t been cut and if politicians had listened to the experts, and guess what? They’re still ignoring the experts.”

“They’re asking for your opinion,” Boese pointed out.

“Sure, sure, gotta pay lip service an’ I’m sure some sanitized version o’ the shit I’m saying is gonna end up in the official inquiry or whatever. But how long’s that gonna take? Months?”

“Most likely.”

“Right. And until it’s done, we ain’t jumping anything anywhere except when we absolutely can’t not. And that’s bullshit. You coulda jumped here from Earth, no problem. Ships are secure. It’s the Arrays that’re the problem, and only ‘cuz they were built by the lowest bidder.”

He sighed and sipped his coffee, gathering his thoughts. Boese took a moment to consider the office-slash-workshop he was in. The desk was surprisingly tidy and clean, the floor well-swept and the cables all tidied away. The back wall was one long bench with dozens of tools and boxes of components on a pegboard behind it, and on islands and smaller benches around the edges of the room was a variety of machines. The latest in desktop nanofactories, plus more conventional tools like drills, borers, lathes, a vacuum form, a 3D printer and more that Boese couldn’t identify. A few “trophies” hung on the walls and ceilings here and there, commemorating components, designs and ideas that had either gone on to enter use, or failed spectacularly enough to be worth remembering.

To judge from the word “LEMON” scrawled across a shiny metal helmet that held pride of place above the desk, more of the latter than the former.

“Like…heads need to roll over the decision to carry sensitive jump synchronization data over the Internet,” Lewis said, putting the mug down. “That was stupid, because there’s way too many opportunities for fuckery in anything but the most butthole-clenching tight VPNs. Which never get configured right anyhow, so all the hip young developers don’t use them. They just did it over the fuckin’ web! ‘But we’ll use certs and encryption everywhere’ my fuckin’ ass…”

He trailed off with a scowl. Boese thought he’d followed most of that, but the whole topic was outside of his area of expertise and arcane. “So they went with the cheap and convenient solution,” he summarized for his own sake.

“Cheap and convenient, sure. But you get what you fuckin’ pay for, and what we paid for was a security disaster. But, whatever. Heads rollin’ or not, that ain’t my decision. My professional recommendation is that the lockdown on starship jumps should be lifted ASAP. Like, ships already have to jump just to leave or arrive at Sol, that’s not negotiable unless we somehow finally figure out how to pop the containment field and replace it with footballs we control.”

“The Navy, AEC and others have already said as much,” Boese agreed. “More weight on our side of the scales can’t hurt.”

“Yeah-huh. The hard part is ground-based arrays. ‘Cuz ships? Ships can just fly outta the Farthrow field protectin’ Earth or wherever and then jump. Arrays need a window, and to do that they gotta synchronize with the Farthrow facilities at both ends. And if AEC are lookin’ to me for a miracle solution there then I ain’t got one. Only way round that limitation is to build the new infrastructure and do it right this time.”

“That’ll take years.”

“Then it’ll take years, my dude. Whole reason we’re in this mess is ‘cuz we got lazy last time. Be kind of a numb-nuts move to be lazy in fixin’ the problem that was caused by laziness, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Need anything else, my man?”

“No, not really. If you could write that recommendation and opinion formally and mail it up to Vicious, please?”

“Sure thing.”

“I appreciate it.” Boese stood. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope we won’t have to do this again. If your recommendation carries any weight then we should be able to set up a supply shuttle run rather than sending a destroyer all the way out here.”

“I getcha. It’s been a pleasure, dude. Hope you get to go back to doing important shit rather than playing mailman.”

Boese smiled, they shook hands, and parted ways. And that, from Boese’s perspective, left only one remaining order of business.

He needed to discuss the Entity with the woman who knew more about it than anyone else.

Date Point: 17y7m2w AV
Dataspace generated by Von Neumann probe, borders of Locayl space

Entity

+Are we going to help them?+

As the Ava-memories integrated more and more with the Entity’s core, they took on a life of their own. At first, the Entity had feared being overwhelmed and subsumed, but now it thought that something else was happening.

The memories were…for lack of a better concept, they ‘wanted’ to have a kind of life, but they ‘feared’ solitude. The independent will slowly crystallizing within the empty shell that had once merely been a reference library understood that consuming the Entity from within would leave it—her—alone in the dark.

Eventually, they would mitose into two distinct entities. The Entity foresaw that end, and didn’t even know if it wanted to halt the process, let alone whether or how it could. For now, though, it was hard to tell where Entity-thoughts ended and Ava-thoughts began. Both of them existed in an anaphasic grey area somewhere in between. They were each other. They had always been each other. The memories and the Entity itself had been born of the same woman’s serially dismembered mind, and their relationship was complimentary. It was the the impulse, the faculty, the id and ego combined. She was the knowledge, the insight and the superego.

So in a way, there was nobody else it could have had this relationship with. All the other Minds it had encountered and assimilated were there as referential data and nothing more. Ava, though…

Well, the living will that was the Entity fit into her memories like a key in a liminal lock, and the more the key turned, the more both key and lock changed and took some of each other into themselves.

In hindsight, such a development had been inevitable. And to halt it would be to destroy them both: a violation of < Survive >.

+We can’t.+

Locayl ships served proudly in the Dominion combined navy. The Locayl themselves prided themself on blending engineering and aesthetics, turning functionality into an art form. Whenever they built a bridge, it was a beautifully balanced study in smooth load-bearing curves. Their historic city walls were masterpieces of perfectly masoned stone, laid to within fractional tolerances by craftsmen who could check their alignment with four sets of fingertips at once.

The same philosophy applied to their ships. Locayl ships were elegant but also sturdy, embodying the principle that the best offense is a good defence. During the war with the Celzi Alliance, Locayl linebreakers had bullied right into Celzi formations, shrugging off ghastly firepower and forcing the enemy fleet to break apart or be savaged from within.

None of which helped one bit when a Broodship could decloak within inches of the hull and force-dock. Those beautiful, sturdy ships and stations may as well have been sandcastles below the tideline.

+We thwarted the Hunters before, when we stole this ship-body design from them. Letting them see it again would be a risk.+

+They are probably developing it again anyway. And people are dying.+

+Many more people will die if we do the wrong thing.+

A confusion of memories. Grief for a dead friend, and the guilty acknowledgement of all the good that had followed as a consequence of her death. That actually… although she was a kind and wonderful person, as much as she didn’t deserve what happened to her and and as much as Ava had loved her…the whole galaxy would be worse off if she were still alive.

The momentary pang of self-hatred that followed on from that thought was definitely Ava’s.

+The time is not right. We must not save them.+

+But we must watch them die.+

+Yes.+

It would have been wrong to just ignore them and let the Hunters’ victims die in silence. They deserved that somebody other than their murderers should hear their screams, and feel it.

So the Entity listened, and watched, and mourned as it listened to the sacrifice of all those lambs.

Date Point: 17y7m2w2d AV
Diplomatic Starship Rich Plains, orbiting planet Aru, the OmoAru Remnant

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

“I thought your people had a taboo against automation?”

AtaUmiUi’s tail ticked thoughtfully a couple of times, without an immediate reply. He’d asked Sir Patrick to join him on the Rich Plains’ forward belly observation deck, little more than a platform of flooring suspended in a bubble of forcefield-enhanced glass. Even the great equatorial observation deck with its flora and fauna samples from many worlds didn’t have quite as spectacular a view when the ship was in orbit.

And Aru from orbit was…striking.

Sir Patrick had seen the Earth from above, and been struck by just how blue it was. His mental image of Earth had always had plenty of green and sandy brown in it, the colours of the continents. Reality, as it transpired, was that the atmosphere was thick and blue from both sides, and the thick haze of humid nitrogen, not to mention the swirling white clouds, made it hard to tell where continental landmass ended and ocean began.

Aru had no such obstacles. It was an arid world, with smaller and much shallower oceans than the Earth, so shallow that plant life grew in abundance on their bottoms, and the deeper water was thick with floating flora. From orbit, Aru’s seas were a vivid emerald shade, fading to a rich forest green offshore.

From what Sir Patrick had read of the planet, its abundant oceanic plant life did quite a lot to inhibit evaporation. Like the floating plastic balls that protected reservoirs on Earth, Aru’s seaweed and floating mats of vegetation kept the water in the seas, the air dry, the clouds few and wispy and the rain scarce.

No wonder the continents were so bare and grey-brown.

“Taboos change,” AtaUmi replied, after a thoughtful moment. “Sometimes the old and foolish ones are discarded, sometimes new ones are collected. Ultimately, they reflect the way a people look at their situation.”

“So what prompted your automation taboo?”

“An overreaction to the fate of another species. Long dead now, of course. The…” Ata paused, twitched his tail thoughtfully, flicked an ear for good measure, and then had a visible moment of recollection, though Knight couldn’t tell if he’d remembered the fact or looked it up via the faculties his nanotechnological augmentation granted him. “…Yes, the Mn-nguaf.”

“I’ve seen the name.”

“Yes. Not a Dominion species—the Dominion didn’t even exist then—but our contemporaries. And of course the Hierarchy eventually pushed them into extinction the way they do all civilizations in time.”

Knight nodded his understanding. “And let me guess. Their weapon of choice was automation.”

“Oh yes. Not the kind that multiplies what each worker can achieve, but the kind that genuinely renders work obsolete.” Ata shook his head solemnly. “They even automated their art. Can you imagine? Entertainment generated by algorithm, assembled by neural-net software so sophisticated it could produce music in accordance with the listener’s tastes, visual art to suit any psychological profile… They even automated away the need for performers. Why bother, when software could perfectly render the appearance and mimic the mannerisms of any of them?”

“Ghastly.”

Ata nodded. “And then of course all it took was a series of unfortunately-timed crises to collapse the entire interdependent automated network. They couldn’t restart it! Agricultural production depended on parts, which depended on logistics, which depended on biofuel, which depended on agriculture.”

“I’m familiar with the concept. We call it a ‘gridlock.’ They achieved that with an entire civilization? Didn’t the Mn-nguaf have colonies? Or, allies?”

“The Mn-nguaf never settled any planet other than their homeworld. A taboo.” Ata chortled mirthlessly. “And by the time aid could arrive, the collapse was complete. Of course, we didn’t know the Hierarchy were responsible at the time. We just saw a very foolish species who made bad decisions, and veered away from that course ourselves…”

“Onto a different one.”

“As you say.” Ata chortled again. “Over the centuries we calmed down and struck a more…ah…a more balanced compromise. But by then we’d spent several hundred years benefiting from what amounted to slave labor.”

He shook his head sadly. “…I fear my people were very foolish too, Ambassador Sir Patrick.”

“You’re still here, which is more than the Mn-nguaf can say,” Knight reassured him, and felt they’d managed to come back around to the point that had prompted his original question. “And you have something to offer my people.”

Ata nodded, and raised his eyes to the subject of their conversation: a shipyard, half a mile or so ahead of them in their orbit. At such close range, the huge skeletal loops of its structure gave a sense of just how easily they could construct a ship.

Sir Patrick had seen the shipyards on Ceres. Those were monstrous square pits blasted out of the asteroid’s ice and regolith, and bore a strong resemblance to the yards and drydocks on Earth. The OmoAru shipyards looked more like…

Well, the uncomfortable image that sprung to mind was of a baby’s mobile hung with enormous dead spiders. Each “spider” was a central housing and storage unit, with curled-up limbs of scaffolding lined on the inside with rails. Presumably, trains bearing materials, parts and the robot arms necessary to assemble them into a working ship would run along those rails.

According to Ata, they could assemble a ship as big as any yet constructed by human engineers in a fraction of the time. Freighters, escorts, passenger liners, whatever kind of hull might be of use to humanity in building a new logistical infrastructure.

Coming from anybody else, it would have been a generous offer. Not even the Gao were talking about devoting a majority of their orbital construction equipment’s runtime to human needs. Coming from the OmoAru it was more pragmatic: they simply didn’t need those shipyards, and if left idle for too long the facilities would succumb to orbital instability or simple lack of maintenance. There was nothing to be gained, from Ata’s perspective, in jealously hoarding them, and plenty of diplomatic capital to be gained by offering their use to the AEC.

Of course, Sir Patrick had reservations. Chief among them, the question of what the Chinese and Russians would think. They already made plenty of disgruntled noises about AEC’s “monopoly” over spaceborne industry in Sol and Cimbrean, despite that Hephaestus and MBG were both entirely private enterprises.

But, China and Russia weren’t his problem.

The question of travel time was probably not major. Aru might be a long way from Earth or Cimbrean, but ship jumps were already necessary just to leave Sol. Knowing what he did of them, Sir Patrick could see no reason why spaceships at least shouldn’t return to making long-distance jumps sooner rather than later. They’d be a poor substitute for the massive interplanetary jump arrays, but still endlessly better than leaving valuable ships, crew and cargo to steam slowly across the interstellar void where the Hunters could get them.

And of course… there was the 946th to consider.

Eviscerated though the spacefighter wing might be, it still existed, on paper at least. It had a commanding officer and a couple of pilots. Replacement pilots would take time to re-train and redeploy, but the talent was there to draw from. That just left planes.

Planes that, if AtaUmiUi’s claims were honest, could be assembled by the dozen every couple of hours in the huge arachnoid factories Sir Patrick was being shown.

“What are you asking for in return?” he asked.

“Protection.”

Knight tilted his head into a nod. “…That makes sense. I don’t imagine you’re really able to defend yourselves nowadays. If the Hunters came calling…”

“Oh, the Hunters learned to leave us alone a long time ago,” Ata replied. “Thanks to the nanoweave, I’m nearly as strong as you, Ambassador, and my flesh is quite toxic…But things change. You’re right, we just don’t have the numbers or resources. If they came here to steal these shipyards and slaughter what’s left of the OmoAru…”

“And now that you’ve made your existence known, the Hierarchy might send them to do exactly that…”

“You have it.” Ata gestured toward the planet with his left hand. Sir Patrick tore his eyes away from the alien diplomat’s Huh, which Ata had so far been gently playing with through the entire conversation. “We also have a sizeable population down there who have just been violently severed from the Droud. All of us, in fact, though the ones who weren’t in stasis have known nothing else their entire lives. We probably will not be able to save most of them, but your people can provide care and nursing to help as many as possible.”

He looked over at Sir Patrick. “…If you are willing, of course.”

“Things move quickly in times of crisis,” Sir Patrick said. “I’m sure the negotiations will proceed quicker than they would in a more peaceful era, but ultimately they will be negotiations. My people will want a clear and formal drafting of each side’s obligations to the other, exit clauses, assurances and guarantees, all the usual things.”

“Good to see that Interspecies diplomacy remains much as it ever was.” Ata chortled, then waved his Huh. “Rightly so, of course, of course. The longer we wait, however, the more of my people will succumb to Droud-withdrawal and suicide, and the more vulnerable we are to attack.”

He turned, and drew a tablet from the satchel he wore in the small of his back, offering it to Sir Patrick. “Which is why I took the liberty of already having our proposal drafted.”

“I see.” Sir Patrick accepted it. “Thank you.”

“And thank you, Ambassador Sir Patrick. I don’t know if the OmoAru can ever be what we once were, but we can at least be. I appreciate that you’re willing to hear our request in that regard.” Ata looked out at the stars again. “Before our hibernation…Forgive me. That is a thought for another time, perhaps. Will you excuse me?”

“Of course.”

Ata bowed, and swept out of the room with startling abruptness. Sir Patrick watched him go with a frown, then shrugged, glanced back at the shipyards one last time, and then turned back toward his own suite. The sooner he got the OmoAru’s request transmitted back to Earth, the sooner they could move on it, one way or the other.

He resolved to land and see the planet’s surface for himself soon, though. Maybe it was just morbid fascination, but he wanted to see what the elder civilization had been, before their fall.

And, hopefully, catch a glimpse of what they could be again.

Date Point: 17y7m2w4d AV
Commune of Females, Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

“Didn’t you meet OmoAru, once?”

It was Harrison’s first birthday. Allison had taken the day off work, and they were throwing a small party at the commune, not that Harrison himself really appreciated it. He was much too interested in staggering around on the grass, back and forth between his two moms…and Anna was much too busy trying to show off whatever new thing she’d found.

The Commune’s park was a safe spot where cubs and toddlers alike got introduced to each other, under the watchful eyes of several mothers of two species. It was great socialization for all of them.

And it gave Xiù a chance to catch up with Myun.

“Yeah. I actually met Al and Julian on their homeworld.” Seven years ago, from Xiù’s perspective. They’d packed basically a lifetime into those seven years, now she thought about it.

“What’s it like? Oof…” Myun put a paw on her belly. She was still as picky as ever when it came to mating. Most males simply didn’t meet her standards, and many more were downright intimidated by her. Word—or at least, accurate rumor—had somehow got around that she was the Great Father’s own daughter, by the late Mother-Supreme no less. By Gaoian standards that was royalty, and there weren’t many males with the confidence to even approach her.

She was, nonetheless, pregnant, at that phase in the pregnancy where her normally sleek and athletic physique was as round as a football in the middle, and her cub was apparently an eager kicker.

“Well… I was glad for my disguise. It kept the sun off. But God, I had the hardest time drinking enough without drawing suspicion. I think the Corti who owned the ship probably suspected, really, but…Hi! Thank you!” Anna had come toddling over with a leaf. She gave Xiù a wide-eyed, uncertain look as if expecting her to do something with the leaf beyond take it, then promptly turned and wobbled away in search of some other trophy.

Xiù giggled and added the leaf to the pile of such gifts she’d accumulated over the last few minutes.

“So, hot then,” Myun summarized with a chitter.

“Oh yeah. A desert. With a huge wide slow green river running right through the city…” Xiù sighed. “I bet it was beautiful in its day.”

“What’re they like?” Myun chittered as she watched Anna find a random twig and promptly try to gift it to her brother.

“The OmoAru?”

“Yeah.”

“The ones I met were all spaced-out and goofy. Guess it was that whole droud thing.” Xiù sighed and shook her head. “It was… really sad. You could see it was an amazing place once, and now they were just kinda kicking around in the rubble. I don’t know how any of them were still alive. I guess they must have had automated farms or something…”

“And now they’re back.” Myun looked upward. Somewhere high overhead, according to the news, one of their diplomatic ships was in orbit, and their representative had come visiting to discuss matters with the Cimbrean territories and the Clan of Females.

“Sorta. I can’t imagine what it’s like on the ground, now. The droud suddenly shutting off in all their minds at the same time…”

“Ask Leemu sometime.” Myun keened softly. “It’s such a sad story.”

“You talking to him?”

“Have been, yeah. I wish he’d just come out and asked but, well…most don’t.”

“You’d say yes?”

“Have you seen his paintings? He’s pretty fit, too…”

“You always did have a thing for silverfurs,” Xiu giggled.

“Fit silverfurs, yeah. No point to a mating contract if ‘yer male don’t survive…” Myun had a filthy pant-grin that stretched the scar on her cheek, coupled with a licentious chitter. “But you know all about that, huh? I’ve smelled you three…”

“Humans aren’t quite so… feral… as your people, thank you,” Xiù replied primly, though she knew she was going a little pink in the cheeks and ears.

“Yes you fuckin’ are, my nose don’t lie! An’ I’ve watched Human porn. C’mon, you have a whole art form ‘fer tying each other up and—”

“So if it’s not Leemu,” Xiù changed the subject, as quickly as she could, “who’s the lucky male this time?”

Myun chittered again with a snort, but relented. “His best friend, Gorku. I’d feel sorta bad about it, but Leemu hit it off with Leela down at Ninja Taco so, well…I don’t. She’s even pickier than I am!” Myun let out a self-deprecating chitter. “I mean, all I really want is for someone to just ask me on a date! So gods-damned picky.”

“Oh, sure…” A sarcastic interjection heralded Allison’s return, with a tray of ice creams in one hand and Harrison on her hip. ”Your standards are the lowest, really…That’s quite a leaf and stick collection you’ve got there, baobei.”

“Cute, isn’t it?” Xiù agreed, accepting her ice cream as Allison sat down. “I think she’s getting her head around the whole ‘thank you’ thing, she said it back to me a little earlier.”

“She did, huh?”

“Sounded more like “ag-noo” to me,” Myun chittered, accepting a small cup of bright green Meeshi-flavored ice cream. Xiù had tried it once—as far as she was concerned, it tasted like broccoli and mushroom, hardly an ideal dessert. But to the Gaoian palate, apparently, it was irresistible. Myun certainly seemed to relish the big, lavish lick she took.

“I don’t know how you can enjoy that,” Allison shuddered.

“Your ice cream is way too sweet! This is much better. I don’t know how you can enjoy mint!”

Allison didn’t get her chance to reply, as she was interrupted by Xiù’s phone playing a ringtone they’d both been waiting for.

Xiù picked it up and put it on speaker. “Babe! You’re back!”

“Yeah! Just landed. I even showered, too!”

“Aww,” Myun chittered quietly. “But he stinks so good!”

“Myun!”

Julian chuckled over the phone. “Hello, Myun. You been keeping my ladies safe?”

“They’re bribin’ me with ice cream!”

“Good girls! Well, I’m going through customs right now, so…uh, twenty minutes? Also, I’ve got something really big to tell you both, too. Like…sit-down-and-have-a-steak, big.”

Xiù saw Allison’s expression fall a little. Her own had probably done much the same. “…What happened?”

“Something good overall, just… big.”

That meant it was work-related, if Xiù were to guess. Still, she felt better knowing it was good news, even if the overall had her feeling a little less than stellar.

But then again, very little of the news in the last three weeks or so had been undiluted good. Focus on the positives: Julian was okay, he had good news of some kind, and they’d see him again in just minutes. She gave Allison a reassuring smile, and nodded.

“Twenty minutes. You want ice cream?”

“Nah, we’ll have that steak dinner first. Love you both!”

The call ended with a chorused “Love you too!” and, once he’d hung up, a heavy relieved sigh from Allison.

“That’s a load off my mind…Thank you!” Anna had a special stone for mommy. Allison grinned, then picked her daughter up to cuddle her. “Guess we’d better pack up, huh?”

“I guess so…” Xiù finished her ice cream and stood up. “Tell us when you’re due, Myun?”

“Of course!” her old friend beamed happily, then turned and dug in a satchel she’d brought with her before handing over a ten-page cardboard book with a fox in a tweed jacket on the front. “Here. Birthday present.”

“Aww, thanks!”

All in all, it was a pretty good birthday, with gifts from Amanda, Tristan and Ramsey, of course, as well as Ava, several of the HEAT team, Allison’s colleagues at Chiune Station, and even something from Ambassador Rockefeller. Xiù wished her parents could have been present for it, but… well. They couldn’t be. They were stuck in Vancouver, and she’d learned a long time ago that there was no point in getting depressed over things that couldn’t be changed.

Besides, she had a reunion with her big, handsome boyfriend to look forward to. And the best part of having a huge caveman of a boyfriend was that he could give the biggest hugs.

They took their time about it. Julian delighted in his kids of course, and made a big fuss over his “adopted” kids as well, and it wasn’t until they were all settled at home, pajama shorts on, with him sprawled across the couch trying to be in snuggly physical contact with everyone at once…

He’d achieved Maximum Relaxation. Relaxed Julian was basically a giant lead weight that had poured itself all over the couch, and wasn’t much inclined to move at all.

Hoeff, ever-vigilant bodyguard and bestest friend that he was, was in the basement furiously pumping iron to afford them some privacy. He probably knew what the big news was, so…

“So…what happened?”

He sighed, and then he told them. And he was right: it was good news… overall.

Even if Xiù didn’t really like it very much.

Date Point: 17y7m2w4d AV
Heavy system picket Refined Axiom, Perimeter system, the Corti Directorate

Shipmaster Eflin

“They are not coming.”

Eflin blinked, watching the internal security display as dispassionately as he could even while his long-suppressed instincts screamed at him to flee, to fight, to do something other than watch as the Hunters pushed on through his ship.

The Axiom’s internal shielding systems, artificial gravity, intrusion countermeasures and security drones were effective, to be sure. The Hunters were taking losses…but the Hunters didn’t care. Each of them slain by the ship’s traps was simply a warning to the ones behind it of what hazard to expect.

They were facing a swarm of hundreds of Hunter broodships, and were woefully unprepared for such numbers. Perimeter was aptly named, as the system right on the edge of Corti space. The temperate planet Perimeter itself was safe, locked down tight behind a defence field, but the mining operations, research outposts and outer-system infrastructure was all vulnerable, and while the Axiom and its fleet was well-equipped to handle one Broodship…

The nearby light system pickets were already overrun, and the escort drones were scrap metal. Only the Axiom was holding out, and with the immediate volume seeded by thousands of gravity spikes, backup was not coming. Eflin had been pinning his hopes on buying enough time for Deathworlder backup to arrive and counter-board. His ship had beacons, and the Hunters were not generating a suppression field…But his subshipmaster, Ler, had just crushed that hope.

“The deathworlders have abandoned us?”

“They remain on lockdown. All of their ships are unavailable. The Gao express their regret and apologies, and I have not been able to reach the Humans at all.”

That report, Eflin knew, meant it was only a matter of brief time before he died in a Hunter’s mouth, or was bisected by fusion claws, or cut down by its guns.

And that simply would not do.

“…I believe our best course of action at this point is to self-destruct,” he declared.

“A quicker and less unpleasant end than the Hunters will inflict on us,” Ler agreed. “I wish I could think of an alternative which permits us to survive.”

“You have one Ri’.”

It was a grim joke. Ler, of course, didn’t laugh at it, but he did acknowledge the bleak humor with a slow blink, and drew his command key from a pocket on his hip. Without speaking, shipmaster and subshipmaster accessed the master console and activated a protocol reserved in the ship’s controls for exactly this scenario. Long ago, before the deathworlders, Directorate philosophy had held that the most effective means of dissuading Hunter attacks was to deny them the meat and salvage they craved. Unfortunate for those aboard the ships, but effective in the grand scheme.

They inserted their keys, entered their personal codes, nodded at each other, and gave the keys a synchronized twist.

Somewhere deep in the Axiom’s belly, the fusion reactors immediately pushed up to maximum output, and every joule they generated was directed not to vital systems like life support, gravity or shields, but straight into the capacitor banks. The lights dropped out, the gravity faded to emergency minimum, and the bridge went silent as even the air processors ceased. The background thrum and rumble of a healthy ship went utterly still, the silence broken only by the distant sounds of the Hunters’ rampage, and the murmurs of the bridge crew saying their farewells to each other.

Eflin let his hands float down to his side and hung his head, wondering what kind of thoughts a rational being should have in these final moments. Fear? Fear accomplished nothing. Should he spend the brief remainder of his life in distress? That seemed like a pointless self-torture.

He settled on…appreciation. He had enjoyed the gift of existence. Sometimes he had taken it for granted. Often, he had frittered his time away on distractions. Now, he noticed everything. The subtle texture of the smooth deck under his feet, the precise temperature of the air as it flowed into and out of him…The way Ler shifted next to him, sighed and turned.

“…You have my respect, Shipmaster,” he said.

Eflin turned to face him. “And you, mine,” he replied. “Our service together has been—”

He didn’t get to finish the compliment.

Force-fed to bursting, the ship’s overcharged capacitor arrays finally reached their failure point. They released all of their stored energy in a single wild surge, and in less time than it took Eflin to feel, he, Ler, the heavy system picket Refined Axiom, the Broodship, and everything living and dead aboard both, were all reduced to an expanding cloud of ionized gas.

Date Point: 17y7m2w4d AV
The Dog House gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lieutenant Booker Campbell

Major Costello turned out to be a hell of a boxer. Like everyone on the HEAT, he looked young, almost like he was in his early twenties…but there was age and wisdom behind those fists.

And ice water. They’d been sparring for half an hour and Campbell was pretty sure his CO was in the exact same sharp, calm mood he’d been when they first entered the ring, while Campbell himself was definitely feeling rattled.

“How’re you finding ‘Horse as a trainer after the pipeline guys?” Costello asked. He followed the question with a precise flurry of jabs, testing Campbell’s guard. They locked, separated, circled.

“Don’t let him hear I said this… but I reckon he’s less sadistic than they are.” Campbell replied with a quick strike, distracting with a jab up high, then tried to sneak his left fist up and under the major’s elbow and into his ribs. Didn’t work.

Costello gave him an encouraging grin and kept circling, playing it cagey for the moment. “Yup. He’s not trying to test you, he’s trying to improve you. Much different goal. He trains the trainers too, by the way.”

“I figured—” Campbell swayed back and raised his gloves to ward off a battering-ram blow to the dome that still rattled him even though he mostly blocked it. “…Fuck! How fuckin’ strong are you?”

Costello just grinned. “Stronger than you. But be glad you’re not boxing Firth or Arés. They’re both so fast you can’t block them at all, so they refrain from tapping us little guys for fear of permanent brain injury. Anyway, you’re faster on your feet than you think you are. Dance!”

“Right, yeah.” That was still the hard part Campbell was getting used to. Being big and strong was one thing, but somewhere in his brain was a little mental block that said ‘big + heavy = slow’ and he was still working on un-learning it. He knew it was wrong intellectually but it wasn’t quite an un-learned instinct. Yet.

He shifted his weight, bounced a little, then speared in, one-two, out, sideways, one, one-two—

“Oofff!”

Costello had slammed him so hard in the gut, he was feeling his second lunch wanting to make a re-appearance.

“Good!” Costello grinned. “Very good!”

“I barely laid a finger on ya.”

“Yeah, well, you shoulda hit me harder. I can take it…Need a second?”

Campbell shook his head and raised his gloves. “No fuckin’ way.”

Costello gave a satisfied nod and took up his own guard again.

The conversation stopped for a few minutes and they boxed in earnest, a blur of gloves, footwork and pain that Campbell didn’t think about but just fought through. The footwork advice helped, though: he landed a couple of good hits before they mutually decided it was time to take a break.

Costello poured half his water over his head before turning to a different bottle to drink. “You finish that book I loaned you?”

“Nearly,” Campbell nodded. Taking notes had slowed him down.

“Finish it quick, I’ve got a big pile for you to get through.”

“Seems like you’re a one-man library.”

Costello shrugged. “Most of them were Powell’s. And he got most of them from Knight.”

Campbell swigged his own drink. At least the ones on base were a bit less of a citrusy mouth-rape. He decided not to intrude on the little flash of sorrow Costello had shown on mentioning Powell, and asked a question he’d been mulling over since first seeing his recommended reading list. “I really wasn’t expecting the bookworm side of things.”

Costello looked up at him, with a firm expression. “Here’s the thing. You’re prior enlisted, right? You know their side of it somewhat. You might not know it as intensely as the Lads do…but that’s actually a bit of a problem. Because, you see, you are not enlisted anymore. Tautological, I know…”

“…But?”

“I can speak from painful fucking experience that this is a job where you need a professional detachment from your men. You can be friendly, and you can even love them, but you can never be friends.”

“I’m not completely green, you know.”

“I know, but it bears repeating, because they need to admire and respect you, nonetheless. Since you will never out-beast any of them with your brawn or your footwork, and you’re not usually going to out-think them either, what they need from you is depth of command. That’s especially true of the Gaoians; their instincts are pretty powerful on the subject of who might be in charge, and it usually isn’t the little guy. There’s a reason you’re only the third officer to clear the pipeline, you know. A lot of the others passed physically, but…”

“That makes sense.”

“Hopefully you’re enjoying your reading, then?”

“More than I thought I would!” Campbell admitted, honestly. “It’s an eclectic list, that’s for sure.”

That was underselling it. The list wasn’t even completely human, though the human literature on there ran all the way back to ancient history and right the way up to within the last couple of years. The nonhuman entries included Corti rationalist arguments, a rambling Guvnurag philosophy that the translators had worked hard to make interesting, and the manifesto of the Robalin ruling party, an inclusion which Costello had promised would throw an interesting light on humanity’s own historical fascist regimes.

The Gaoians, apparently, had a lot to say on Campbell’s education.

“Some of those come from Regaari and Thurrsto. A few more come from Gyotin. There’s a couple of massive tomes that come from Daar too, but those are easily the densest, most technical reads on the list, so…I’ve saved them for the end. Oh, and you’ll need to be fluent in Gaori before you attempt the complete poems of Great Father Fyu. There is…a lot of wordplay involved that just flat doesn’t translate.”

“Sounds…fun.”

“It’ll be Daar himself who quizzes you on them. To say he’s invested in your development, seeing as how you’ll be in command of people he deeply loves…”

“…Well, fuck me. Actually, on that note: what exactly is his status with this team?”

“Weird. Officially he’s just a sergeant as far as HEAT is concerned. That makes him the same rank as any of the other men. But he’s also, well…the Great Father, and more and more our sugar daddy, too. So often he’s in command, depending on the context he’s working with us in. Most often these days it’s as the Supreme Allied Commander and the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Gao. Which is ridiculous, yes. But he’s an irreplaceable asset, so…”

“We make it work, somehow.”

“Exactly. He is to be used sparingly, and he is to be discouraged from routine deployments in as respectful a tone as you can manage. He’s aware of the reasoning and generally tries to keep his nose out of everyday matters, but…anyway. He helps us, we help him back. Just keep in mind he’s also over eight feet tall and fit to slap Warhorse straight through a wall, so…”

“Don’t poke the bear?”

“He’s really good about it, but yeah. Don’t rely on the bear’s self control, even if it is impressive.”

“…Jesus. What a fucked up situation.”

“Think you just described the last fifteen years or so.” Costello shook his head ruefully. “Anyway, that’s enough boxing for today. And I think, enough work, too. It’s Friday, take the weekend and finish getting settled in. You finding the barracks acceptable?”

“I’ll be glad to find a place for myself but yeah, they’re more than acceptable.”

“Good. Also, don’t make any plans for next weekend. It’s a sports holiday and we’ve got plans for that. Expect Daar to show up too; it’ll be his last weekend here before he heads back to Gao, and he’ll want to get a good sniff of you two. Literally.”

Campbell mopped his face with a towel. “You make it sound like he’s ultimately in charge around here.”

“Legally? Only in the right contexts, if we’re deployed under a combined mission. Effectively? Yeah, he calls the shots for all the space fighting. And that includes us. There’s treaties being worked out and stuff…but even without them, he’s literally the most powerful man in the galaxy. If he makes the right call to the right person…”

“…That’s, uh…”

“Sobering?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me about it.” Costello shrugged on a huge black hoodie with the logo of a snarling dog on the back. “Daar has Presidents, Kings, and Prime Ministers on his phone’s favourites list. Literally. I’ve seen him take a random call from His Majesty. He’s also the same guy who likes anchovy-smothered nachos, and will play-fight on the floor with his ‘bestest’ friends for hours.”

Campbell mulled that over as he struggled into his streetwear. It was getting tight again, already, and he was going to need to order new stuff soon. There was a screen-print business in town that kept clothes in HEAT-appropriate sizes and offered an armed services discount. A lot of the Lads went to them for their gear from what he’d heard. Maybe he’d get something custom done, to commemorate the action aboard Boone’s Star.

Thinking of that, though, raised a new thought in his mind. The MBG star yacht had just been the first. ESNN’s interstellar news was full of reports on Hunter raids all over the Dominion, and lamenting the fact that the AEC/Gao military umbrella was hobbled and couldn’t do anything about them. And if there was one person who could change that…

“So… how come he hasn’t done anything about this stupid-ass lockdown?”

“‘Cuz he happens to like those people on his speed-dial. Rubbing his nuts all over the situation isn’t his style when it would hurt a friend. He’d much rather get ‘em out for a magazine shoot.”

Campbell snorted at that. “He sounds like a character.”

“We all are on this team. Lots of personality. Actually, a lot of characters on this planet. Takes a certain kind of spirit to move to an alien world, I guess.” With a final heavy clank of gear, Costello settled his gym bag across his shoulders. “So yeah. He’s a big guy in far more ways than just physical. A fun guy, for sure. He cares too, and he’ll want to know everything about you. But at the end of the day…”

A small, complicated smile twisted one side of his mouth, accompanied by an equally twisted chuckle. “…Well, the last time we broke really bad news to him, he broke Adam’s gym, and then he exploded the biggest bomb ever inside a giant space donut. Oh, and then he felt guilty.”

“About the donut?”

“No, the gym. So he replaced it. The whole thing. It’s way nicer now.” Costello shook his head ruefully, and led the way out of the gym. “…Point is, I’ll leave that particular duty to his staff. They know how to wrangle him.”

“…He didn’t really strike me as the wrangleable sort.”

‘“He isn’t. But good timing helps a lot, I hear.”

“…And this is the Great Father of the Gao? And effectively our space emperor, these days? You’re making him sound like an out of control tyrant.”

“Egh…more like a giant furry Alexander the Great, complete with Gordian knot. He’s a big man with big passions, and big convictions. If he feels something needs doing, it’s going to get done, and done in the most inarguable way possible. He’s no fool though. He listens to advice and thinks before he acts. Just…be careful. He’s smarter than any of us and he can think very quickly.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

Costello nodded. “Enjoy your weekend. And get your reading done!”

That left Campbell alone on the sidewalk. He checked his phone as he walked aimlessly toward downtown, looking up his nutrition plan. He had an “approved cheat” saved up, and he’d heard good things about Ninja Taco. Maybe he’d swing by and see what that was all about. Or Best Brioche maybe. Both had stuff with the Warhorse seal of approval. It’d be his first taste of comfort food in a long time.

After that…he’d heard good things about the open-air theatre on Wallside. Maybe he’d check that out. All the reading must be getting to him, because that was kind of a new thought but…

Well, he was on a new world, embarking on a new life and learning new things. Why not?

Maybe he’d run into someone he could hold in his arms, too. That was a happy thought, and with it, Campbell decided to see what the evening had to offer. He had a weekend to enjoy, after all.

Date Point: 17y7m2w4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Specialist Hunter Thompson

Hunter only knew a few things for certain. The first was his faith in God. The second was faith in himself. And the third thing…

Well, it was honestly hard to keep ahold of his personal humility, given how well he was doing. He was the hands-down standout among the “new crew” and being honest, that did a lot to inflate his ego. He consistently dominated in all their training evolutions and looked good doing it, too. Whatever the old crew threw at them, he took it, beasted it, and had fun doing it.

Fortunately, the old crew weren’t pushovers. Firth had teamed him up with Snapfire and Tiny—Sergeant First Class Sikes and Master Sergeant Walsh. The three of them were closely-matched; about the same height and weight, the same shape, had basically exactly the same frame and the same proportions. Thompson was already just as strong as either of them too, and rapidly growing stronger.

It didn’t matter much, though. Both of them made a habit of humbling him. Heck, for the first time in his life, Hunter wasn’t top dog among his friends, and his first couple of weeks was a blunt introduction to just how much he didn’t know, and how much work he had ahead of him to improve. Everyone could teach him, everyone had something they could humble with.

He didn’t mind. He’d found what he’d been craving all his life, and he didn’t know how to explain it. He just felt…

Like he belonged.

Life wasn’t perfect, though. Cora was…well…

She’d talked to him, eventually. And apologized. And then they’d cuddled. And then he’d fucked her brains out. Heck, fucked his brains out, too! Neither of them had anything pressing to do that weekend, and there was a lot she wanted to teach him…

And then…nothing. She wasn’t interested in dating him! She’d said it wasn’t him, that she just wasn’t interested in a relationship, that all she wanted was a hookup now and then…

It hurt, a little, but he didn’t want to think about it anyway, and besides: that wasn’t anything a little sparring couldn’t clear out of his head. This time with a civilian, and one who was so thoroughly beating him silly, it was almost as bad as sparring with Warhorse or Righteous.

“Go again?” The big caveman reached down and effortlessly yanked Thompson back to his feet, thumped over to the control panel on the wall and cranked the gravity way up.

Thompson grunted under the load, but he was getting used to high-G training and found he much preferred it. He bounced on the balls of his feet, determined to get a win in this time.

“Fuck yeah!”

Time for heavy work. And Julian Etsicitty, the legend himself, entirely lived up to the hype.

He’d recently been confirmed as the new ambassador to the Ten’Gewek, and was currently stuck in Folctha while he waited for his relief mission to get organized. In the meanwhile, ‘Horse had paired the two of them up for after-hours training, and it was turning out to be a pretty good match. Most of the men in the HEAT had eerily similar builds, differing mostly by scale, and Julian was built much like Hunter: same height, long arms and broad shoulders, same huge, sturdy legs and calves. Same thick wrestler’s necks, same Popeye forearms, same everything.

Except better. Way better. Julian was an older, much heavier and much stronger version of Hunter, and so motherfuckin’ dense that punching on him hurt like beating on solid rock. When it came to weights or athletics, Julian could kick Thompson’s ass without hardly trying.

But Thompson had found he was the more skilled wrestler, so it balanced out, sorta. Julian was still mostly kicking his ass, of course. He was ridiculously fast and, once he had a hold, could simply muscle Hunter into any pin he wanted. Failing that, Julian was so fuckin’ heavy, he’d simply squish Hunter flat like he did in turn to his Marines. When a man’s opponent was that much more athletically dominant, the only thing he could do was wait for a mistake.

So, Thompson lost, repeatedly. But he had a perfect track record of making Julian suffer for his occasional mistakes, so that felt good.

The real joy was that he’d finally found dudes who could keep up with him. He didn’t need to win to appreciate that he had real competition for the first time ever. It was frustrating, yeah, but for the first time since he was a little kid, he felt a fire in his competitive instincts he’d almost forgotten he had. He’d wanted that feeling since forever.

It was nice having men he could look up to.

They grappled for a good long while, then moved on to the rings, which Julian made look effortless, despite his enormous weight. After a long and frustrating lesson on that (with one of the “easier” static holds under Hunter’s belt, at least), they finally moved over to the weights. They went hardcore at it, until evening eventually came and their meal packs were running low.

“Shit, it’s gettin’ late!” Julian re-racked the bar and mopped the sweat from his face. “I’m getting pretty bad about losing track of time. My gals are gonna tease me for it…”

“Both of ‘em at once?” Thompson shook his head. “I tell ya, one is enough trouble for me…”

Julian chuckled…not quite smugly, but definitely proud. “Heard you were having girl trouble,” he replied. “Hey, you wanna spend the weekend? I mean, it’ll be mostly chores, park time, and more lifting, so maybe not a thrilling weekend. But It’ll get you out of the barracks…”

“I don’t want to intrude…”

“Nah. The boys need someone besides me to talk with, and if Al or Xiù mind they’ll let you know.” Julian massaged his shoulder and went to pick up his bag. “Or do you have anything planned with your Marine buddies?”

“Uh… Lanter said he was gonna take me to Rooney’s and show me how to pick up chicks…”

“Not feeling it?” Julian gave him a knowing smile. “Little heartbroken?”

Thompson sighed. “Dumb, right? She told me from the start it was a no-strings-attached thing.”

Julian shook his head. “Grab ‘yer stuff.”

They took a nice long jog around Folctha for their cool-down, taking the long way back out toward the nice end of town out at Palace Lake, where the houses were bigger and lots of them were surrounded by walls and gates.

The city had two quirks that Thompson kinda liked. Firstly, it was very much a barefoot friendly place, with scrubbing mats and sometimes little set-in depressions for washing feet. That was apparently a product of the extensive alien population (who seldom wore shoes) and the human populations’ nearly fanatic fitness culture, which Hunter appreciated; nobody here was a couch potato. And there were a lot of very, very fine womanly creatures to ogle, discreetly.

The second thing was that, since the rain was so regular, and came along so reliably around sunset, many of the larger sidewalks had something to keep the pedestrians dry. Awnings were everywhere in the middle of town, but out in Palace Lake, the streetlamps and utility poles had canvas stretched out between them, well above head height. The coverage wasn’t perfect, but it made the walk mostly a dry one, and Thompson had never seen anything like it anywhere else.

Julian brought them back around to the subject of Cora as they slowed for the last couple hundred yards to his house, and cooled off in the by-now significant downpour.

“I don’t know that I can offer you any advice,” he said. “My love life has been four gals in total, one of which was in high school, and the other was just before I got abducted. None of those were hook-ups. And, hell: it wasn’t like the first two were super successful, either…”

Thompson found that a bit hard to believe, honestly. Julian was…well, he’d modeled nude, been praised for it, been on TV in interviews and in ads. Hunter knew he was pretty darn handsome even by HEAT standards, but next to Julian? He was so ridiculously fuckin’ good-looking and genetically blessed, it was hard to imagine him ever failing with women!

That was all pretty shallow stuff, sure…but still! “No way you ever had girl problems…”

“Oh dude.” Julian laughed. “…Allison and me were unbe-fucking-lievably awkward at first. I found her intimidating, she found me intimidating, it took us months to relax and get to know each other properly…”

Thompson waggled his eyebrows. “And then you worked each other out, right?”

“Well, no. Not right away. Lemme tell the story.”

“…Sorry.”

Julian waved the apology off. “Anyway, right as we were figuring each other out, we met Xiù, and I had to deal with feelin’ super guilty about another girl catching my eye when I’d just landed one amazing space-babe, and Al had to deal with the other girl catching her eye too when she’d always thought she was straight up ‘til that point, and we all had a couple lifetimes of baggage and stuff to sort out…”

Julian laughed again, more self-effacingly. “Shit, they basically had to lock us in a box together and put us under some crazy pressure before we finally really clicked and figured things out. And even that took a long time! And you know what, I’m still working them out and they’re still working me out. That’s what it’s all about, really. It’s an ongoing process and you keep doing it forever ‘cuz nobody’s totally the same forever.”

“I guess that makes sense…”

Julian smiled, and gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder. “Rejection always hurts, bro. Everyone gets it. I did too, before I met my girlfriends.”

That was a bit of a relief, really. If even he got turned down…but still. There was something else gnawing at Hunter, too. He didn’t really know how to phrase it, or give any voice to it, but…maybe not now. So he just nodded.

“So, don’t worry too much about it,” Julian finished. “Life just sorta happens, y’know? And for someone like you, Folctha is about the best place for it to happen, so just live it, and have fun.”

Hunter sighed, and nodded. “I think I can do that.”

“With your Marine friends, I don’t think you’ll have any choice in the matter.” He was right, of course. Heck, half the reason he’d taken Julian up on his hospitality was honestly to get a break from them. He loved ‘em all, really, but…

Well, that was part of the thing that was gnawing at him.

They thumped around to the back and entered through what Hunter guessed was a mud room. “House rules: stinky boys gotta hose down and towel off before they come in.”

“They do, huh?”

“Yup!” Julian already had the hose running ice-cold water over his head, and after a long soaking moment, shook his hair out like a dog. “Here!”

Hunter had never liked cold water like that. But now that he was a giant of a man, constantly sweating and mostly living in loose gym attire?

Fuck yeah! Hosed down and toweled mostly down, they stepped in to meet the family.

“I’m back! And I brought a friend!”

Julian’s home was an oasis of family life, albeit one very different than what Hunter had grown up with. He had four kids, two of which were his own, the other two were technically his very young brothers-in-law. It was obvious that it didn’t matter for a second to him, and the first thing they did when he came in the front door was tackle him in a big hug.

They were both young teenagers, to judge by their looks, and were probably just really starting puberty. They both had the tall, somewhat stringy frame every boy does when he’s suddenly taller. They looked athletic too, as one might expect from Julian’s household, though the one was noticeably more filled out.

Normally one would expect them to be stand-offish at that age, but it turned out they were actually making up for lost time, and had no objection at all to Julian scooping them both up into a great big hug. His family life was apparently just as complicated and unconventional as the rest of him.

But it was loving, and real in a way Hunter never really had himself. His own family was bog-standard. Average stay-at-home mom, moderately successful lawyer dad. A younger brother, who was into comics and gaming.

Good people, and he loved them. They loved him right back, too. But Hunter…he’d always had a fire in him, even when he was five and begging dad to let him sign up for wrestling and every other sport he could. That meant he’d been on his own from the beginning. Dad was proud, and always talked him up to his business friends…but they really, really lived in different worlds.

He was always busy, too. Lawyers never really got any days off, so their relationship was…distant. Proud, affectionate…but Hunter couldn’t remember the last time he’d hugged his dad. Julian on the other hand was physically affectionate with all his friends, and apparently wasn’t happy until he’d poured himself across the couch and had his entire family trapped in inescapable snuggles. He had his legs wrapped around Xiù, his head resting in Allison’s lap, and the boys trapped in a gentle bearhug.

“Have a seat, big guy! We’re just gonna watch the news quick before dinner.”

Hunter looked at the enormous, comfy-looking chair next to the couch. It seemed sturdy…

“Heh. Don’t worry, we built all our furniture to survive my friends.” Hunter shrugged, sat down on it gingerly and, in fact, it took his weight without any complaint.

“And a certain big stinky caveman…” Xiù teased, which caused the boys to giggle.

Julian curled his legs and pulled her in a bit closer. “Hey! I thought you liked the way I smell!”

“I do, but it can be a bit much sometimes. Smells like you had a good workout…”

“I hosed down!”

“Hosed, yes. I note a distinct lack of soap.”

Ramsey giggled again and gave Julian a dig in the ribs As far as Hunter could tell, he was much more like Allison than his quieter, more bookish brother. “I think he likes being stinky!”

Everyone chuckled at that while Julian blushed a bit. “Sarry. Am I being a gym-bro again?”

Allison bapped him lightly on the top of his head. “You’re always a gym-bro these days, babe.”

Julian grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, yeah…” He gave her a mischievous smile and tensed up impressively from his prone position on the couch. “You two like the results though, don’t lie.”

“Eh, your abs are okay, I guess…” Julian gave her a Look. “Aww babe, I’m just kidding.” She ran a hand around his shoulders and down his chest. “You’re the prettiest Tarzan.”

Julian leaned back and gave her a quick peck on the arm. “Love you too.”

Tristan and Ramsey both rolled their eyes.

“Anyway, hush. We’re late for the news.” Xiù clicked the remote and tuned to a local broadcast station, right as they started a segment on the Great Father.

They watched for a few minutes, while Hunter zoned out to think.

“What’s he like?” He said, unbidden.

“Who, Daar? He’s just…a guy. Who happens to be the Great Father. You’ll be meeting him soon enough I’d imagine.”

“…Can he even be just a guy? I mean…”

Al shrugged and scritched at Julian’s mop of hair, which caused him to close his eyes and grumble happily. “He tries. When he’s not doing his most bestest at being all civilized.”

“He and Naydra cling to every bit of normalcy they can get,” Xiù agreed. “I guess I would too if I was Empress of the Galaxy. I know I did while I was stranded with the Gao.”

“Yeah-huh,” Allison agreed, while Julian just nodded.

For the moment though, on the screen, it looked like the Great Father was being all statesmanlike and official. He was touring a hospital, meeting some of Franklin’s worst wounded who were still recovering even now, weeks after the blast.

He seemed to have a soft spot for kids, and let them indulge in playful indignities with him that no other leader would ever permit. Like riding him.

That was the shot that ended the piece, however. The news in Folctha apparently had an interstellar segment, a whole hour of the night devoted to stuff happening out in the wider galaxy, outside the safe bubbles that protected Earth and Cimbrean. Thompson had never seen anything like it. Back on Earth, the news channels only touched on really, really big alien news, or squeezed ET stuff in here and there in minute-long segments on slow days.

ESNN though served not just Folctha’s human majority, but also a ton of nonhuman residents. And the interstellar news at the moment was…not great.

Somehow, the network had got hold of footage from Robalin space, where a derelict, ransacked station was wobbling in its destabilized orbit, trailed by a glittering cloud of debris from its own smashed hull. Footage from inside the wreck swept through what was unmistakably a classroom, the misshapen alien seats still all facing a board at the front and with teaching supplies strewn across the stained floor.

The ticker along the bottom, and the reporter’s voice, told a story of dozens such attacks, all over Dominion space and the Alliance frontier. The network’s editorial question was loud and clear: When were AEC and the Clans of Gao going to start protecting innocent people again?

Allison stood up, with a sigh that said she couldn’t bear to watch any more. “Well…that’s depressing as shit.”

“Language.” Tristan chided her, though he clearly didn’t have his heart in it.

Julian hugged him tight and nuzzled on the top of his head. “Yeah. Don’t think there’s any other words for it, though.”

“…Yeah.”

Dinner was a muted affair, made worse by that obviously not being the norm. The news had pretty thoroughly depressed the kids, and as for the adults…

Well, Hunter was feeling pretty fucking angry. This shit was exactly what he’d signed up to deal with, put a permanent stop to. And now it was happening right in front of him and there was nothing he could fucking do about it.

That same anger had a hold on Allison, Xiù and Julian too. Their sunny sides, Xiù’s goofy cheer, Allison’s wicked humor, Julian’s calm warmth… right now, the trio looked just as mad at the Hunters as Hunter himself felt. But there was nothing they could do about it.

Yet.

Allison Buehler

“I think he’s picked up another one.”

The nice thing about having a super-polite, super-dutiful super-soldier come to dinner was the cleaning up had all got done by the boys for a change. Julian and the brothers always took their turn, but today they skipped sequence and Allison got to relax with a beer as the kitchen and stuff all got squared away with incredible speed.

The blitz of work at least dispelled the dark cloud that had hung over the dinner table the whole time, and when the work was done and the chance to go play came up, the boys had promptly brightened and “dragged” both Julian and their guest into the living room to show them a new game.

She didn’t quite know what to make of Hunter Thompson. The kid—and to hell with the fact that he was older than the twins, he was still very much a kid—had a kind of…adrift, quality to him. Like when he wasn’t actively being HEAT, he didn’t quite know what to do with himself. Like he’d kind of put the rest of his personality at the back of his closet for a while, and now that he was back out in the real world he’d gone to dust it off and discovered he didn’t really know what it was for.

Tristan, Ramsey and Julian were doing a pretty good job of helping him figure it out. The twins had claimed the couch, while the two men sat on the floor in front of them, bickering and bantering affectionately over who was going to win the furiously arcade-y racing game they were playing. The controllers were definitely sized for normal people, though; the effect, as usual, was like some artist’s romance-novel-cover ideal of a pair of cavemen trying to enjoy the modern world.

Xiù had taken the chance to practise her Gung Fu in the garden, and she beamed and nodded at Al’s observation as she grabbed a small snack from the fridge. “I like it! I think it’s adorable.”

Allison shook her head and grinned. “I mean… you’re not wrong, baobei. I just dunno if we can afford him suddenly picking up a five hundred pound space marine puppy.”

“We’d be lucky if he were that small…” Xiù sighed. “We can afford it. I just…I dunno. He spent so much time alone, you know? Now he makes friends with everyone basically instantly.”

“Call it for what it is, babe. He falls in love easily, and he has a lot of love to give. Hell, he did with us.” Allison gestured between Xiù and herself, then extended the gesture to include her brothers.

“And the Tisdales, and the Ten’Gewek, and everyone on the HEAT…”

“Not bad people to be in good with, let’s be honest.”

Xiù nodded, then gave her a kiss before turning to wander off. “I’d better check my emails. I’m expecting one from Sam about the housing proposal.”

“We gonna leave the two superbros alone? Who knows what might happen!”

“…Babe?”

Al gave her a wolfish grin. “Two ridiculously hot men lounging about in running shorts and no shirts, all alone and there’s definitely some kinda confused feelings between them…”

“Al!” Xiù had a kind of outraged whisper she used when she was trying to tell her off without everyone else hearing.

“I’m teasing! It’d be hot though, admit it.”

“I am not having this conversation! Besides…look at them. Look at how Hunter looks at him.”

They did, discreetly. The big soldier…well, honestly? The expression on his face was no different than Tristan and Ramsey.

“…Okay, yeah. It’d be weird. What d’you think instead? Claim him back for ourselves for a bit? We’ve only got a couple of weekends before he ships out…”

“You can try to pry them apart,” Xiù replied, in her own primly teasing way as she turned toward the stairs. “I have work to do!”

Al sighed to herself as Xiù trotted upstairs toward her home office, but nodded. She’d been hoping Julian might spend the weekend sharing some of that infinite libido of his with his women…but he had a habit of being exactly who was needed at exactly the right time.

She looked back at Hunter. For all his big, heroic space marine aura…he needed someone like Julian, just like her brothers did. And while Al knew she could have pulled Julian away and she and Xiù could have had him all to themselves if she wanted…

She just didn’t have the heart. The poor kid needed this evening, she’d feel like a total bitch if she deprived him of it.

Instead, she gave Julian a kiss and a scritch on top of his head as she slipped past him and headed through into the garage. She may as well tinker with something, and after Clara’s report on what had happened to the Boone’s Star, she’d had some thoughts on how to proof the airlock design against Hunter force-docking. If they panned out, maybe they’d save lives.

Julian sent the kids off with mom when she came around; they’d already promised her a full weekend. Instead of prowling upstairs to put that wonderfully endless strength of his to proper use, he went down into the basement with Hunter, to put it to another. Saving lives, one way or another. That was what misfits like them did.

And she was proud of that.

Date Point: 17y7m2w5d AV
Diplomatic shuttle, departing planet Aru, the OmoAru Remnant

Sir Patrick Knight

“Finally. A Human weakness.”

Sir Patrick glanced at Ambassador Obrot of the Locayl, and shrugged self-effacingly. In all the bustle of organizing trips for the Ambassadors to tour the Aruian surface and see the elder species’ plight for themselves, nobody had thought of a small detail: Sunblock.

After a couple of hours of wandering around in the bright, fiercely hot sun down there, his face and ears were going as red as a boiled lobster in the worst case of sunburn he’d ever suffered.

“Mm. Thin skin and not much fur,” he agreed, with a nod. “My own silly fault, I should have remembered.”

“Will you need medical attention, Ambassador?”

Knight smiled. “Thank you for your concern, but no. It’ll heal. I hope you remained comfortable?”

“Quite comfortable, thank you,” Obrot nodded, and turned her attention back to the planet they had just left, visible out the window behind Knight’s shoulder. “That was…saddening,” she declared after a moment’s thought. Absently, she passed a small cup of water from her lower-left hand to her upper-right, and sipped it.

Every instinct Sir Patrick had said that the ambassador should be stronger and heavier than him. She was a good two feet taller, girthier in every regard, and had a whole extra pair of limbs on her frame. But there was a puffy, soft quality to all that bulk that had nothing to do with unhealthiness or obesity. She was, he gathered, in fine health for a Locayl.

Reality of course was that she came from a different homeworld, with its own different biological norms. Locayl were big for the same reason as a whale: thermal homeostasis in a cold environment. She’d worn a refrigerated suit to tour the blistering desert planet below them.

And she was right. Harrowing might even have been a better choice of word. The cities of the old OmoAru empire were falling into disrepair. Buildings were collapsing, broken windows were left unglazed, weeds and vines choked the rubble, and the few living Omo stumbled dreamily through their lives, oblivious to the mummified corpses.

Those were everywhere. There were whole highways blocked by ground vehicles that had come to a halt and whose occupants had simply never bothered to alight, gripped by the unimaginable pleasure of the Droud. In hospitals, schools, public buildings and private residences alike, the greater part of the OmoAru civilization remained in the same seats they’d occupied the day the Hierarchy decided to kill them.

The living ones were those with some natural immunity, who could focus through the pleasure fugue to achieve basic tasks out of the vague sense that they ought to, not out of any real desire. They could still feel their hunger even through the Droud, could sleepily rationalize that if they scavenged a little food and water, they could feel the bliss even longer. Rendered immortal by their own nanotech, they’d been scraping out their minimalist lives ever since the day their world died and started to decay around them.

And now, even the Droud was gone. Many were simply lying around in misery, waiting to die. And being desert-dwellers, it took a long time for OmoAru to die of dehydration or starvation.

“If it wasn’t for the lockdown, this would be…” Knight trailed off. He’d been about to say ‘easy’ but that of course wouldn’t have been accurate. It still would have been a planet-wide humanitarian disaster blending the need to find, feed and home an unknown number of nonhumans all of whom were suicidally depressed. It would have been incredibly bloody difficult.

Without jump arrays, the word “impossible” reared its head.

“…If we can’t at least jump ships into orbit, helping these people is not going to happen,” he declared, after a second. “We do not have the shipping fleet to manage so much in-flight at once.”

“The Dominion does…” Obrot made a complicated gesture with both of her left arms. “But we are a long way from anywhere else, and the Hunters are unchained. An aid convoy coming all this way would be a juicy meal for them, nothing more.”

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

“My people are sheltered from Hunter space by the Kwmbwrw Great Houses. Still, the occasional raid used to push through to try us. For the variety, perhaps, or the challenge. Whenever they did, it meant dozens of dead and a fortune in stolen cargo and shipping.” Obrot turned her gaze out the window, distantly. “The last few years have been peaceful. Now, though, the problem we face is that in learning to fight you and the Gao, the Hunters have grown far worse than they were before. Before, they raided and fled. Now, they brush us aside and take as much as they want.”

She looked back at Knight. “Not personal experience, you understand. The insight of our fleetmasters and senior defence officials.”

“Quite,” Sir Patrick agreed.

“…To be candid, Ambassador, some of the Dominion species believe you are ‘leaving us out to dry,’ as your idiom goes.”

“I can imagine.” Sir Patrick sighed and shook his head. “It’s not by choice. The attack against us was subtle, and paranoia is the only sane response. Every jump is a risk now. Until we have the right safety measures in place, we could send the HEAT to defend a station only to watch the entire unit be wiped out by jump sabotage, and they are by far our least replaceable asset. Losing First Fang, any of the Fury or San Diego class heavy cruisers, Armstrong Station, Folctha, any major city on Earth…”

“In short,” he finished, “we win or lose this war on a handful of vital assets. We must use them judiciously, or else lose. If you think the Hunter rampage is bad now, imagine how much worse it would get if Humanity and the Gao were completely neutralized.”

Obrot dipped her head in the Locayl equivalent of a nod. “If you win and destroy them, you save an incalculable number of lives saved in the long term. If they win and destroy you, an incalculable number of lives are doomed in the long term.”

“Meaning we must, as you say, leave people high and dry in the short term,” Knight confirmed. “Believe me. We’re not happy about it either. And we’ve lost civilians to the Hunters in this mess, too.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“The Boone’s Star. It could have ended much worse than it did, but still. The Hunters feast on our people most gleefully of all, when they can, and they’ve succeeded. Perhaps you could mention that fact when another ambassador confides in you.”

“I will,” Obrot assured him. “But…in that case, why are you even considering the OmoAru? They had their time. They’re a dead species, all but a handsful of them. Are they offering so much?”

“I’d prefer to avert their extinction if possible, just because it’s the right thing to do,” Knight said. “But sentiment must come a distant second to practicality in hard times. You’re right, they’re offering a lot.”

Obrot leaned forward with a creak as they pulled in alongside the Rich Plains again and began to slide into the diplomatic ship’s cavernous hangar.

“And what,” she asked, “if we could offer you the same?”

Sir Patrick glanced back behind him at the planet below. Then at the enormous four-limbed woman in front of him.

“…I’m listening,” he said.

Date Point: 17y7m2w5d AV
Heavy cruiser Twyrrhyrurth, Trade Spacelane, borders of the Rauwryhr Republic

Fleetmaster Ectryrr

The Twyrrhyrurth and her escorts were, once again, too late. The descent from warp speeds to sublight was instant, their guns and shields ready. They should have stormed into the foe with all the aggression and fury that the Republic tried to emulate from Deathworlder tactics.

If only there had been something to shoot at besides drifting, naked ship hulks, stripped of their crews and valuable technology.

Once, Ectryrr would have been grimly satisfied to know that the Hunters were running from him, rather than viewing his fleet as another juicy victim. The Republic had come a long way in a short span of time in that regard, and the Hunters were absolutely right to fear the vengeance his fleet brought with them.

Instead, he felt uncomfortably like he was trying to duel smoke. Every counterattack swished harmlessly through where the Hunters had been, leaving his fleet to pick through a sorry cloud of smashed metal in the vain hope that perhaps this time they’d a lucky survivor crammed in a pressure locker or stasis pod.

Though as it turned out…this time, they did.

The survivor was a child, clinging to the outer hull of his ship in an oversized spacesuit full of vomit. Nearly incoherent from grief, terror, and the suffocating, stinging misery of a helmet full of his own digestive enzymes, but alive. He emerged from the suit in a daze, then clung to the medic who freed him like she was his mother, and wouldn’t let go.

Rather than lifting the crew’s spirits, his plight only dampened morale even further. It put a face on suffering that had, until then, been at a remove. If Ectryrr didn’t know better, he would almost have suspected the Hunters of leaving the child behind deliberately.

There was nothing for it but to sit and oversee the salvage operations and lane clearing. A trade-lane may be light-rik’ across, but they still couldn’t leave the debris from the poor convoy to drift uncontrolled within it. It was long and slow work, and should really have been left to civilian work vehicles…if only those wouldn’t in turn have posed a tempting target.

Ectryrr retired to his quarters to write in his journal. He’d always been in the habit of keeping a handwritten one, ever since he was a child. Maybe in future years it would form the basis of his memoirs, though the most recent few weeks would surely be the most interesting chapter.

Rather than write, though, he sat for a long while with pen in hand, numbly trying to think what to record beyond the bare facts he’d already scratched down. The date, the location, the destroyed ships, the rescued child…

His thoughts? He didn’t have thoughts, or at least none that were new. All he had was a grim certainty that the Hunters would strike again, and he’d be too late again. He needed megalight drones armed with jump beacons, he needed rapid assault teams capable of driving the Hunters off a boarded ship. He needed technology, talent and training that his people didn’t own, or couldn’t achieve.

He needed Deathworlders. And there were none.

He put his pen down at a chime from his wall console. He knew what it would be. “Yes?”

“Another distress call, Fleetmaster.”

“Set course and go to warp.” Ectryrr rose to his feet with a groan, and left his unfinished journal entry on the desk.

Time to be useless again.

Date Point: 17y7m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Timothy “Tiny” Walsh

“You’ve been smellin’ the most smuggest all day, Cousin…”

Regaari chittered and set his ears to a dangerously cocky angle. Brave of him, given that Daar had his Warhorse-crushing legs wrapped firmly around the (comparatively) tiny guy’s hips. “Just satisfied with a job well done.”

“Oh?” There was a heavy thump as Daar’s tail beat a rhythm against Adam’s legs. “‘Ya finally git one up on ‘yer not-so-secret recruiting project?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment…”

“Uh-huh. ‘Yer lucky I got my aggression out… What’re we watchin’ today, anyway? This a bad movie night, or a good movie night?”

“Coin came down on good movies,” Walsh told them. “Thank fuck…I was gettin’ sick of that bad movie streak.”

“Aww.” Daar chittered at his own feigned disappointment, but settled amicably as deep into the couch as its firm and unyielding substance would allow. “Old or new?”

“New.” Walsh leaned forward, plucked the remote off the table in front of him, and turned on the TV. “‘Soon as the new kid an’ Julian show up.”

“Ooh! He good? I hear he’s boot as balls!”

“There’s hope for him,” grumbled Adam from his upright and seated couch position. By unspoken Lad Rule, only the ‘most biggest’ among them at any time got to sprawl across the whole couch. Since Daar had spent most of the day thoroughly defeating ‘Horse in honorable bro-sport, having bested every single gym challenge the two of them could come up with by a frankly alarming margin, the privilege of being the substrate fell to him, the meat-rock upon which literal tons of fellow operators sat along, beside, and sometimes atop.

His furry bulk didn’t make for a very comfortable cushion, being honest, since all that hulking muscle had about as much give as a warm, chittering boulder. Walsh stretched out and endured being bear-hugged by the biggest damn arms anyone ever had. Daar’s particular brand of affection was both genuinely heartfelt and aggressively macho.

Rib-bending hugs aside…It was nice to have his old friend back, even if only for an evening.

“Jus’ hope?”

“Naw.” Adam grinned. “He’s got a lotta potential, if we can just de-boot his ass. God I can’t wait to see how he reacts to the spacebear emperor of the universe laying on the couch…”

“Ooh! Should I pose, mebbe? Be all ready an’ bothered ‘fer him! ‘Draw me like one o’ ‘yer french girls!’”

Walsh choked on his fizzy water. “Who the fuck taught you that?”

“Hey, I’ve seen that movie! Dunno why the silly bitch didn’t just budge over an’ make room for ‘im, but it was good!”

“As fun as that might be,” grumbled Firth, “I don’t know that any of us wanna see ‘ya laid out an’ bothered, whatever that might mean ‘fer a Gaoian…”

“Prob’ly the same it means ‘fer you!”

“Exactly.”

“You’d jus’ be jealous, I bet!”

Jeers and chitters flowed across the room, as they always did. Firth eventually quipped, “Keep it sheathed, captain telephone pole. You’ll just make ‘Horse feel inadequate.”

“Still can’t believe you managed such a fuckin’ perfect iron cross on the rings,” Adam grumbled instead of rising to the bait, clearly still brooding over the day’s competition. “And in supergravity with more weight than me, no less! Held it for longer too!”

“Well t’be fair, doin’ that fuckin’ hurt. But I weren’t gonna let ‘ya win at nuthin’ today! An’ I’m way heavier’n you now too, so there!”

‘Horse’s answer was a grumbly sort of begrudging chortle, which prompted Daar to stretch out and rest his enormous lower legs on ‘Horse’s lap.

“‘Course, I wouldn’t’a been able ‘ta do any o’ that if you hadn’t been the most bestest coach ever! I swear you know my body better’n I do, s’fuckin’ scary…”

“A good coach is like that,” Firth rumbled. “And ‘Horse is the best there fuckin’ is.”

Everyone nodded in agreement, which cheered Adam up instantly. He was proud of them, after all.

“You even fixed me,” Regaari chipped in. “Showed me what I can really do!”

“He’s the bestest! Balls, he’s such a good Brother, I bet he’ll gimme a foot massage, too…”

Daar wiggled his be-clawed toes at Adam, who rolled his eyes. “Fuck no, bigfoot.”

“Aww! But I’ve been on ‘em all day! I’ll do yours too!”

“That ain’t a fair trade, your footpaws fuckin’ dwarf mine!”

Daar chittered low, “My everythin’ dwarfs ‘yers…”

“Oh, you can fuck right off—!”

“In any case,” Regaari interjected before they started measuring each other, or something fucking dumb like that, “Daar’s right, we owe it all to you, Adam. Balls, I want to learn the iron cross too! Though I have no idea how you’d train for that.”

“It uses pretty much every muscle in ‘yer upper torso. Need lotsa monkey strength, super hard ‘fer a Gao ‘ta do! ‘Fer me, I trained up wit’ lotsa different rows, an’ lotsa different presses, an’ lotsa bodyweight stuff onna bar! An’ dips too! An’ also? Try stretchin’ ‘yer shoulders out with th’ most biggest kettleballs ‘ya got! While hanging upside-down! Really opens things up!”

Now there was a mental image. Anyway. Walsh turned the TV on.

“So which movie is this, now—? Ooh! Hey, thankee, Shim!” A gargantuan platter of Murray Salad appeared, and all the gaoians (save Daar, who had Friends to squish, and Regaari, who was being squished) sprang up and compressed themselves around it in a tight nucleus of drooling, sniffing desire.

“I made two,” Shim pointed out. Sure enough, there was an equally large platter being borne into the room even as he said it, carried by…yup. The newbie.

“I’m told this is a salad?” Thompson asked, pausing as he passed through the doorframe to look up and around and appreciate it. “Also, have you noticed how nice it is to have wide doors?”

“Sure is!”

Thompson paused when he noticed the Great Father thumping his tail like a titanic dog. “Uh…”

“Oh, ‘fer fuck’s sake, get ‘yer tail in here an’ make with the snacks! I ain’t gonna eat’cha!”

“I dunno, you do tend to wolf down Murray’s creations…” Walsh pointed out.

“I can be civilized sometimes!”

Regaari chittered. “Is that so? In all my years, I’ve—hnnngh!”

Daar twitched his leg slightly, and flattened Regaari with muscular affection. “Shaddup, ‘Cuz.”

Thompson, to his credit, had clearly shed some of that infamous boot-ness since arriving, because he managed, with a visible effort, to relax a bit and enter the room properly, sliding the second “salad” platter down onto the table. He snagged a drumstick for himself and found a spot to perch on the end of the couch.

Firth nodded. “We keep it informal on the Couch. Try an’ relax. What movie is this?”

“The Mote in God’s Eye.”

“Hey, I’ve read that one!” Akiyama perked up. “They made a movie?”

“Yup!” Walsh grinned at him. “Heard it’s pretty good too.”

“I hope so. I hate it when they use the title and then basically ignore the book’s actual content…”

“Well le’ss fin’ ou’!” Daar urged around a mouthful of Salad, and that right there was enough to end the conversation and get the film rolling.

As always, Walsh barely watched the movie. He was usually more interested in watching the people than the movie itself. Probably that was part of his prior life as an intel analyst, but the dynamics at play were fascinating. In particular, the layered subcultures that connected them.

The most obvious was what Walsh called the “Bro Layer.” There was a lot of that bro-ness among everyone of course, given the nature of the team, but by far the biggest concentration of extreme meat-headedness lived between the Beefs and Daar. On that front, the performance gap between ‘Horse and Righteous had closed considerably, while the gap between Daar and anyone else had…well. Most adjectives felt insufficient, really.

Adam was long used to being king of the hill, but now it was obvious he found himself frustrated about falling behind. Never mind that he was he was tied for an honorable second place with Yan, mister all natural King Kong himself. Never mind that Adam was arguably the finest athlete to ever live, and among the fittest Deathworlders there were. Never mind that every other sapient being in the galaxy had to settle for a distant fourth place.

He’d been usurped on all marks by the freakiest freak of nature ever, one he’d personally coached into the terrifyingly superhuman specimen they knew today. Adam was of course good-natured about it as always…but second place? Second? To a Gaoian?! Unacceptable.

He was a coach in fierce competition with his own best athletes, who were also his best friends. Kinda funny, really.

The rest of the Lads weren’t nearly as bro-infected as the big three. For them, it was more something they did and enjoyed as part of their job, not necessarily as a core part of their identity. For the Beefs, though? They’d probably go literally insane if they couldn’t lift, and Daar was the worst of all. That the galaxy’s stability might well depend on Daar’s freedom to grunt and lift and flex outrageously with his bestest bro-friends was…comically frightening.

Daar had intensely physical relationships with all his peoples, whether it was play with young cubs, hard work among the Clan and Clanless alike, preening for the Females, or comforting those who needed it. Nobody could say he wasn’t a man of the people.

The next was the “Gaoian Layer.” Walsh struggled to find a comparison in his mind that was, perhaps, not so canine, but for the life of him they behaved remarkably like a pack of dogs in the presence of their alpha. From what he knew of Clan Whitecrest, they prided themselves on the equivalent of a kind of suave aesthetic. To outsiders, they were all well-groomed, polished, handsome and debonair. For the most part, one had to get to know them to really notice just how fiercely individualistic they were.

They were still Gaoian, though. They liked being part of the pack, and cuddling up in a big furry ball that made it hard to tell where one Brother ended and the next began.

There was definitely, at least to Walsh’s sensibilities…a bit of creepy hero-worship going on, too. Everyone on the team respected Regaari, but Regaari in turn adored Daar, and that left the rest of the team in some kind of friendly, subservient awe. It was almost like they were privileged to work and play with their very own demigod, and he happened to like bad jokes.

Alien psychology could be fascinating.

As for the rest of the humans… well, Thompson was the obvious one to watch, but the kid did actually do a pretty respectable job of unwinding and accepting that here and now he was supposed to not be rigidly observing the customs and courtesies. He still had that bright, shiny, well-polished innocence and all the well-scrubbed earnestness of a highschool kid who’d never had the chance to really get grubby, but he’d picked up some half-decent banter from somewhere.

Julian was absent, and according to Thompson he was getting in as much family time as he could before he shipped out to be all Ambassadorly. Walsh couldn’t blame him. Still, it woulda been nice to hang out tonight.

He didn’t really have a clear “layer” for the rest of them. The “New Guy Layer” had mostly dissipated into the team’s varying sub-cliques, and beyond the Gaoians or the Super-Bros, there wasn’t any single thing that really pulled them together, aside from brotherhood. They all had different interests. All of them were exceptional men after all, but not all in the same ways.

The one real constant, really, was the affection.

There was a lot of it, and it was intense. None of them liked to be sitting apart from anyone else and they all thrived on the closeness, physical and otherwise. They knew everything about each other, and it was quickly apparent that Thompson felt a bit lost by all of it.

He’d get it, eventually.

The movie was pretty good in the end. The visual design was especially stunning, and all told it made for a good way to while away the evening. After that, the usual little cliques broke away. Firth, Murray and Akiyama took the new kid under their wing to introduce him to the joys of little plastic painted miniature space battles, most of the Lads got into a heated Mario Kart marathon, Humans versus Gaoians, and the rest mostly just sat around and talked.

Walsh wound up playing Ta’Shen with Daar. Never an entirely fair game: Daar’s nose was too good to fool, he couldn’t be bluffed. But Walsh was better than most at calling Daar’s own bluffs, and a lot more accurate with flicking his tiles into exactly the right spot on the table, giving him a vexing winning streak that kept the big guy coming back for more.

“If I were gonna concede anythin’ ‘ta ‘ya monkey-folks, it’d be ‘yer lack o’ claws,” Daar grumbled. “More trouble’n their worth sometimes.”

He of course had five digits and an opposable thumb, but Gaoian hands were properly paws, designed more for locomotion rather than precision work. His, of course, were big enough to cover dinner plates, and had claws to make a grizzly blush. Breaking stone and bending steel? Sure. Delicately flipping tiny little tiles?

“Well, you’re not completely useless at this. Your strategy’s solid, you just…miss. A lot.”

Daar really must have been exhausted, because ordinarily a tease like that would have invited an affectionately painful rejoinder. This time though he just chittered, swept the table clean to concede defeat, and then shuffled the tiles to deal them again.

“What, no spine-shattering tackles? Not even a pounce?”

“I mean, I could if you wanna…”

“No, no. I’m quite happy with my spine un-shattered, thanks. Just…” Walsh glanced around and lowered his voice. “You’re quieter than usual.”

“…Yeah. Sarry. It ain’t anythin’ y’all’re doin’ or anything.”

“Can I ask what it is?”

Daar considered it for a moment, then shrugged and rumbled a heavy sigh.

“It’s th’ lockdown. An’ ‘ya might as well git over here, Regaari, an’ stop pretendin’ ‘ta not listen.”

Regaari poured himself backwards off the couch, where Moho was chuntering ruefully about blue shells and bullshit, and joined them at their Ta’Shen table. “I was wondering what was on your mind,” he confessed.

“All the things’re on my mind. Kinda the worstest part ‘bout bein’ what I am these days.”

“Well, yes, but sometimes things are more on your mind than other times.” Regaari pulled a chair over and sat in it.

Daar, apparently, wasn’t gonna settle for that. He chitter-sighed, stood up, dragged Walsh and Regaari into a big hug, and curled up on the floor with them.

“I’m sure as fuck blessed in my Cousins. Even if one o’ them’s a ninja spy.”

“So…” Walsh prompted. “The lockdown?”

Daar growled. “I get it. Franklin was a fuckin’ nasty blow. An’ from what I’m told, it’s gonna be years ‘til the jump arrays on Earth are safe ‘ta use. But the galaxy ain’t stopped.” He snorted and shook his head. “Balls. It’s got busier ‘cuz we ain’t keepin’ order.”

“When did we become galactic police, anyway?”

“When we stood up and said ‘no.’”

“And when we blew up the hive ring,” Regaari added. “The Hunters have been starving ever since.”

“Well then…” the three of them glanced at Thompson, who’d wandered away from the plastic wars and froze when he suddenly found himself confronted by Daar’s attention. “Uh…”

“I can smell ‘ya wanna say somethin’ so jus’ say it. I promise I won’t squish ‘ya too hard.”

“Well…I was wondering…Uh…Well, why not do something about it? I mean…”

Daar gave him a big sniff, then chittered, the low and slow one he used when he was gently amused. “Heh, got big balls on ‘ya, I like that. But, no. I could, but bein’ the Great Father means I gotta think real hard ‘bout if I should. I got allies an’ I wanna do right by y’all. If’n we’re gonna have a friendship that lasts past me, I can’t be shovin’ my dick in everything an’ having it all my way.”

Thompson nodded, though he looked a little disappointed. “Yeah. That makes sense I guess.”

“Somethin’ more on ‘yer mind?”

“Ahh…No, sir. Thanks for answering my question.”

“…‘Kay, lemme ‘splain something. Firstly, I don’t like lies, even little polite downy ones like that. I can smell them, young pup. Balls, I can smell what kinda breakfast ‘ya shat out two days ago! So we clear on that?”

Thompson blinked. “…Yessir.”

“Good. Now, not ‘ta brag or nuthin’ but I’m the gods-damned Great Father an’ you’ve got the’ chance ‘ta ask me anythin’ in the entire fuckin’ world jus’ now. That’s somethin’ presidents an’ kings don’t often get. An’ what’s more? I like answerin’ questions from young pups, ‘cuz it’s a good way ‘ta think through a problem, yijao? So swing ‘dem big nuts around and fuckin’ ask like ‘ya wanna!”

Walsh knew exactly how to take advantage and teach the lesson. “I’ll ask the most ‘importantest’ question: Silverfur or brownfur? Not including the Great Mother, of course.”

“Depends on m’mood! Silverfurs are more funner ‘fer banter, but ‘ya gotta be tender wit’ ‘em. Now a good brownfur? I can throw her up against a wall an’ fuck her right fuckin’ through it!”

There were loud catcalls and chittering jeers from around the room, while Thompson stood stunned for a moment before cracking up.

“See?! Ain’t that easier? Jus’ relax a bit an’ we’ll get along jus’ fuckin’ fine. Now…how ‘bout ‘ya ask me what ‘ya really wanna?”

Thompson sighed and pulled up a chair. “I was thinking about the lockdown too. About how me and the LT had to jump just to get out of Sol and then we tried to fly all the way here the slow way and people died because of it.”

“…I din’t know that part. I jus’ heard there was an attack, thought it was in Sol space…?”

Daar looked down at Regaari, who shook his head. “No. It was on a patrolled spacelane.”

“Well, I ain’t gonna lie, that makes me kinda mad.”

Thompson sighed. “I mean, I talked to Lieutenant Campbell about it and he said he reckoned it was all bureaucratic. Like how the old Apollo missions had mismatched air filters…I just, I guess I’ve seen first hand how the lockdown is getting people killed, and I just thought, if there’s anybody here who can cut through bullshit red tape…But. Yeah. You just told me why you can’t, I guess.”

“I din’t say I can’t, only that I gotta think if I should. I respect ‘yer people too much to…well…make ‘yer leaders into puppets.”

“That would harm all of us,” Walsh agreed.

Thompson frowned. “…You could do that?”

There was a round of uncomfortable eye contact. Daar sighed, and nodded. “At this point…yeah. I could. Franklin’s done ‘ya a lot more harm than ‘ya might think.”

“…Wow.”

Thompson’s earnest little comment was a pretty distilled version of what Walsh was thinking, and probably everyone else to judge by the silence that settled on the room for a moment. He couldn’t blame ‘em: how many other times in history had a room full of people just heard that their friend could probably make Earth’s most powerful nations his collective bitch if he really wanted to?

Fortunately, the idea seemed to depress Daar most of all. He actually deflated, like the heaviest weight ever had just been thrust back atop his shoulders, and gazed sadly off into the distance for a moment.

“Well…anyway. Y’know what? That shit’s depressing. I’m takin’ a day off with some o’ my most bestest here, so let’s fuckin’ do something fun!” he rallied, and growled merrily. “Naydi’s spendin’ the evenin’ with her most bestest sisters an’ I’d be the dumbest ‘Back ever ‘ta interrupt that. An’ I’d maybe wanna go downstairs an’ play again…but I kinda want tacos an’ now I’m feelin’ like I should go strike out with Leela again!”

Thompson looked bewildered. “…You strike out?”

“Erryone strikes out, pup! An’ a good thing, too, it keeps me grounded! You should come with, enjoy some good food ‘fer a change!”

“Are…” Thompson shot a hopeful, hungry look at Arés. “…Are tacos allowed?”

‘Horse grinned at him. “Leela has a special menu just for us. Go ahead an’ treat yourself.”

That settled it. Thompson was on his feet in an instant, to chuckles from the rest of the Lads. They all knew exactly how he felt—they’d all endured their time eating nothing but the sanctioned, carefully balanced meal packs and supplements, and though those weren’t bad… They definitely put nutritional content ahead of experience. Leela’s tacos had been the first ‘junk food’ many of the newer guys got to enjoy. A few of the others stood as well. Leela was going to enjoy a profitable evening, it seemed.

And Daar was right. Shit as things were right now, if they focused on just the woe, they’d all go crazy. Sometimes you had to know when to let go and wait, and enjoy what you still had while you had it.

Which was why Walsh stood up to go with too. Daar was one of his best friends, and he knew better than most just how much the big furry fucker needed that. He’d be going back to Gao soon, braving the week-long interstellar trek surrounded by warships and the finest protection his species could provide. Soon, he’d be back in his throne, or at the Conclave table, and this might be the last chance he got to relax for…well, for a long time.

Let him have it.

Date Point: 17y7m3w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

“Good morning, Mister President.”

In the weeks since Franklin and the start of the lockdown, Chambliss had enjoyed too few really good nights of sleep. The pressure was getting intense to find a solution, some way to restore jump traffic, and he could understand why.

Laying aside the havoc it was wreaking on the war effort, it was now clear that jumping was the only viable way to get from Earth to Cimbrean, and despite the pressure on them and escalating criticism from the press and on social media, his scientific and data security advisors were still quite adamant that not even ship jumps could be declared safe yet.

People kept pointing to the fact that the Boone’s Star had successfully executed two jumps without disaster. Those in the know were quite adamant that although the BMG staryacht had jumped out of unavoidable necessity, it had been a truly unsafe thing to do.

The problem was… the Hierarchy were still active on Earth. Not only that, but the agent responsible for Franklin was actively looking for opportunities at mischief, and finding them. And this one was a good deal subtler and more cautious than any who’d come before them.

The list of cyber-crimes perpetrated by that one Igraen would have made them the most prolific and legendary of black hats, were they human. And with each incursion, each hack, each act of digital sabotage, their skill, subtlety and confidence only grew.

Fortunately…

“So we have a solution?”

General Kolbeinn was present, as was General Talmadge, who’d brought along a woman in a suit who’d looked thoroughly uncomfortable when she rose to greet Chambliss. An expert, he decided. Somebody much more used to the quiet confines of her own office and team who’d probably never imagined she’d wind up personally briefing the President.

“We do, sir,” Talmadge confirmed. “This is Doctor Belkin, she leads the team that worked out the details.”

Chambliss shook her hand. “That’s much appreciated, Doctor.” he smiled disarmingly, and Belkin relaxed a little. “So what do you have for us?”

Belkin cleared her throat, and handed over a tablet. “It’s…actually a very old technique called a one-time pad. We figured out pretty much instantly that it was the answer, the rest was, uh, implementation and planning.”

Chambliss scanned the document on the tablet, nodding. “How old?”

“World War Two-era. At least, at this sort of scale and with this grade of entropy. President Roosevelt used a version of it to talk securely with Winston Churchill.” Belkin cleared her throat. “The idea is straightforward enough. We can’t send transmittable encryption keys any longer, as far as we can tell the Igraen can unravel them. But an OTP system is genuinely, mathematically unbreakable.”

“It entails,” she continued, warming to her subject, “sending a single-use, randomly generated key to the destination ahead of time. That would be a physical storage medium, an optical disk, a flash drive, something like that. Once used, the key is destroyed, and the next jump would use a different key. If the keys are genuinely random, then there’s no way to crack them. You have to have the one-time pad to make sense of the transmission.”

Chambliss nodded. “Meaning our Igraen infiltrator simply can’t do anything. What are the downsides?”

“Well…the obvious one is distribution of the keys. They have to be physically delivered the old-fashioned way, and carefully protected.”

“What happens if a key gets stolen?”

“That’s the beauty of it. We can just not use a stolen key. There are checks and safeties we can install in the process to ensure that if a key does go missing, its partner is immediately destroyed, rendering that key useless.” Belkin was one of those people who grew in confidence when she was talking, it seemed. She handed over a sheet of paper. “These are estimates on how quickly we can start generating keys, how quickly we can distribute them, in what volume, how much jump traffic we can support, production costs…”

“The downside,” Kolbeinn interjected, “is that the more keys we reserve for military use, the fewer are available for commercial arrays. And vice-versa. There are also distribution concerns. If we want to start using the Gaoian megalight drones to respond to Hunter incursions, then we need to deliver the keys to the Gao, they need to install the keys on the drones, which will probably involve a redesign…”

“But it can be done,” Talmadge asserted. “It won’t lift the lockdown overnight, but we’re one executive order away from starting the process.”

“How long until we’re back to normal?”

Belkin shook her head. “Um…normal is probably never going to happen, Mister President. At peak, the interplanetary commercial Arrays were firing as often as three times an hour. To return to that volume of traffic…well, we’d need a lot of keys. And securely generating a genuinely random string of numbers isn’t as easy as it sounds.”

“Why not?”

“Well…computers can’t generate random numbers,” Belkin explained. “The best they can do is pseudorandom, so our random numbers have to come from somewhere. White noise, radioactive decay, something like that. The more sources we use in parallel, the more keys we’ll be able to generate, but that comes with expense, not to mention the distribution problem. The fact is…at least in the near future, the total number of jumps we’ll be able to make will be sharply curtailed.”

“Now, the good news is that we only need to successfully courier one batch of keys to a destination,” she added. “Once we have, that jump array is secure and we can send any further keys through the array itself.”

“Once the array has been re-engineered to run totally off-network,” Talmadge clarified.

“…Yes, which I imagine will incur some expense. And may involve having to courier equipment and personnel to remote arrays like the Ten’Gewek homeworld.”

“Simpler to just close the Akyawentuo array entirely and rely on ship-based jumps only,” Kolbeinn opined.

Chambliss held up a hand, pleasantly inviting them to slow down. “I’m convinced, and you’ve clearly thought this through, so I only have one question: How long until we can start making any secure jumps, and begin lifting this lockdown?”

“A matter of days, sir,” Talmadge said. “We already use OTP in some areas, we have keys ready to go. We just need to deliver some of them to Cimbrean and modify a jump array there. After that, it’s just a question of expanding key production and re-engineering the arrays and our ships.”

“Alright.” Chambliss nodded. “I’ll sign whatever you need me to sign. Talk to my staff, get that order drawn up, and we’ll get back on track. Thank you, all.”

He took a deep breath and sat back in his chair as they filed out of the room, glad that the minutiae were somebody else’s to deal with. Just the quick precis he’d been fed in that brief meeting had made his headache worse. But he didn’t mind: it was good to know there was a solution. A light at the end of the tunnel that might just help him sleep a little better.

The lockdown had been hell, for a lot of people. For some, it had been hellishly inconvenient, for others it had been fatal. It had certainly dramatically altered things, probably in ways he’d be dealing with for the rest of his presidency. Certainly, the economic impact had been, and would continue to be, incredibly harsh.

But at least he knew it was going to end now. And maybe, afterwards, they could go back on the offensive.

God. And he’d thought he might reduce America’s war commitments. Instead it seemed he had no choice but to expand them. Because while there might have been light at the end of the tunnel…

To Beau Chambliss’ eyes, that light was still a long way in the distance.

Date Point: 17y7m3w AV
Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA, Earth

Six

Allen’s personality faded irreversibly beyond sapience barely two weeks into his biodroning. Tragic, really, but inevitable. He didn’t have the willpower or charismatic force that Austin had shown. Allen Nguyen had been a timid, retiring, introverted man. None of those were inherently negative qualities, but they left his psyche defenseless against Six’s influence.

Total control meant fewer risks, from Six’s perspective. He could more tightly control his host’s activities, take his time to perform his infiltrations and explorations of the Internet carefully and properly, rather than the hurried, distracted raids he’d been forced to perform from the confines of Austin’s skull.

No FBI came knocking on his door, therefore. The honey traps left for him by the NSA and presumably others were all delightfully thwarted.

It was no game, of course. As much satisfaction as he took from their contests, Six was acutely aware that he was in a hostile environment, fighting deadly duels with some of the most competent foes he’d ever confronted. Meatspace life they may be, but then again Six himself was a dataspace being and proficient in their world. There was no reason the reverse couldn’t be true.

He’d focused on jump activity where he could. He knew it was only a matter of time before the Humans moved over to an entirely airgapped system he couldn’t reach, but for now he could keep them fearing a repeat of what he’d accomplished with Chicago and Franklin. So, while he still could, he’d infiltrated his code into as many of the Arrays as possible before the plug was pulled.

After that, he’d moved on to festering some political chaos. He’d dabbled in programming simple bot programs to hijack phones and use them to post divisive, bitter comments on social media. He’d imitated moderators and community managers, handed out arbitrary bans, cleared content that should have been punished. His efforts were always uncovered of course, but always too late. Trust was damaged, resentment brewed and bubbled.

And, deep in the most carefully hidden dark corners of the web, he’d found encrypted private boards that the authorities would have truly loved to know about. Less a permanent residence and more a shifting series of clandestine meeting spots, like digital drug dealers or black-market weapon traders, linking up wherever the searching lights of Authority might miss them for long enough.

His quarry was one specific individual. And, three or four days after Allen’s meek personality finally lapsed into coma, Six made contact.

It took a further week and a few favors to establish any kind of trust. That was fine. Six had nothing but time, and anything worth doing had its own pace. He’d played far more difficult games of trust in his long career.

Finally, though, he got the conversation he wanted.

So what are you offering us?

Fear. The kind you can capitalize on. This lockdown is an opportunity you can use, but I know your people just don’t have the numbers or expertise any longer.

And you do? All by yourself?

I have the resources to automate your argument. Get it to the fearful millions. All I need from you is a script, and some volunteers. This lockdown can become permanent, with sufficient political will. All it needs is a little...nudge.

We don’t have many “volunteers” left.

Then you’ll want to use them well. The right words, in the aftermath of the right disaster, will ensure human isolationism.

And what kind of a disaster do you have in mind?

…Pick a city.

++END CHAPTER 69++

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…Eighty-eight Friendly ETs, 139 Squishy Xenos and 315 Dizi Rats, who are really just the most bravest.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 70: “Death Eye”

Chapter 70: Death Eye, part 1

Date Point: 17y7m3w AV
Armstrong Station, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“There’s the ship. What do you think?”

Wilde had kind of imagined there’d be a love-at-first-sight thing or something. Like, he’d see the ship and she’d be the most beautiful piece of machinery he’d ever laid eyes on, or maybe she’d be a junker but he’d see the heart of gold underneath. Something like that.

In reality, she looked like a lorry. A really, really big lorry. Most of her was a slightly misshapen cube, the rest a sturdy skeletal frame covered in racks that would hold shipping containers in place. A circular collar of kinetic thrusters enclosed the point where cube and frame met, there were a couple of smaller thruster nodules here and there along her length for maneuvering…

And that was it. Her hull was decorated with the rather bland white-and-green livery of a Gaoian shipping firm, Jishi Interstellar Distribution. That, and the pair of white lights on her nose, aimed to illuminate her name and registry number, which were both in alien runes and thus illegible.

The only impressive thing about her, really, was her sheer size. But what she represented was, well…a life. One where he wasn’t just the crippled veteran knocked out of the fight by a wound that had robbed him of his depth perception. One where he could still matter.

“Honestly, I think I’m about to shit a brick, mate.”

Regaari chittered, and clapped him solidly on the back. “Good answer. Have you met the crew yet?”

“Not yet.” Ian shook his head. “Got a message from the captain saying they’ll meet me inside the airlock.”

Regaari duck-nodded amiably. “Speaking of Shipmaster Trrrk’k…give this to him as soon as you can, would you?” He handed over a datacard, a wireless drive about the size of a credit card.

“Our mission?”

“Exactly. One for which I think they’ll be glad to have a Human ‘heavy’ on board.”

There was a certain mischievous set to Regaari’s ears with that comment; he had a comfortably undefeated record against Wilde and most of that was down to simple physical superiority. One couldn’t possibly miss the big HEAT Gaoian’s delight in the role reversal, at least when standing next to a fit and well strong, yet decidedly non-mutant human being like Wilde.

Wilde smirked, but didn’t take the bait. “Dangerous, then?”

Regaari didn’t give a straightforward yes or no, which was telling in its own right. “…The Clan maintains a number of friends across the galaxy, of all species,” he said. “Most are just people who pass along gossip and observations for a finder’s fee. A few, though, do genuinely dangerous work.”

“Against Big Hotel, or…?”

“Oh, no. Organized crime didn’t stop being a problem just because of the Igraens, and with the Clan necessarily having to focus much of our attention on the war, we’ve increasingly come to rely on our ‘friends’ to handle the more mundane side of our responsibilities.”

“…Nonhuman organized crime? What do they deal in?”

“Illicit goods and services, what else? Counterfeit luxury goods, unregulated loans—Gao has a particular problem with illegal stimulants sold with the promise of turning a regular second-degree silverfur into a stud to match any Straightshield—”

“That all seems a bit low-tier—” Ian began to object.

“—Trafficking in persons of interest…”

“…Say again?”

“I thought that would get your attention. Slavery is still a thing, my idealistic young friend. Young Gaoian cubs in particular.” Regaari’s usual urbane composure slipped for a moment: his ears flattened hatefully, and the venom in his words was almost liquid.

“…Why?”

Regaari reeled in his temper with a visible effort, though not before a tiny growl escaped him. “They’re, uh, ‘prized’ for a number of reasons. There are certain myths that follow us because of our Deathworlder status, which many now seem to think they knew about us all along. As a result, the black markets command very high prices for fit male cubs with no Clan prospects.”

“…I hate to ask, but…?”

“All the things Deathworlders are known for, particularly strength and stamina. We’re used for everything from the utilitarian to the carnal by the sick beings so interested. Gaoian slaves have been experimented on by rogue Corti, worked to an early grave by unscrupulous industrial or agricultural barons, trained and conditioned as shock troops by some pirate and mercenary groups…and other horrors I won’t repeat here.”

“I can see why you take that seriously.”

“Oh, we do. My Father has deemed the full hundred-cut the only appropriate sentence for any so convicted.”

Ian repressed a shiver. That was an unwelcome reminder that the Gao sometimes had very different ideas about civilization and justice. It was easy to forget because the Gao living on Cimbrean largely accepted Human laws, but in their own society, at least before the War, duels to the death between males had been almost frequent. The only reason they’d become relatively rare was because Daar personally disapproved of them in most circumstances…yet even as liberally-minded as he was on most anything else, he wasn’t opposed to deathmatches on principle. He merely thought that mostly, a good duel needn’t be lethal.

Gaori didn’t even really have a word for murder: the closest equivalents were explicity gendered, with the male form reserved for a killing without honor, the neuter form reserved for a killing by accident or negligence, and the female form reserved for those unthinkable and insane cases where a male killed a female or cub.

Humans forgot how alien the Gao could be at their peril; every so often, a shocking reminder would come along. Like how even a refined creature like Regaari clearly considered slowly flaying somebody alive over several days to be an acceptable form of capital punishment, if the crime was heinous enough.

Regaari looked down at him with a cocked ear. “I trust that’s not a problem?”

Hoeff had warned Ian about what getting involved with Whitecrest could mean for exactly this reason. Getting into the dark craft was one thing. Getting involved with alien morals too…But it wasn’t as though Ian hadn’t already considered all those factors before taking the job. It was just a dose of cold water, a reminder not to let his excitement and romanticism carry him away. Nothing more.

He nodded to show that it wouldn’t. “No.”

“Good. All the details are on that datacard, Trrrk’k will tell you as much as you need to know, when you need to know it. He’s been playing this particular game even longer than I have.”

“Really? How old is he?”

“Eighty-seven, in Earth years. Making him senior but undulled, by Rrrrtk standards. It was his idea to recruit you.”

“I’ll endeavour not to disappoint, then.” Ian took a deep breath. “…I should probably board, hey?”

“You probably should.” Regaari turned and offered a paw. “I hope this turns out to be everything you wanted, Wilde.”

Ian returned the handshake. “It’s an opportunity. That’s all I wanted.”

“Good. Make the most of it.”

With that, Regaari turned and slipped away, merging into the crowd. Armstrong Station’s population were mostly human residents and workers, but there were enough aliens coming and going to achieve an almost fifty-fifty mix. Apparently the place was busier than usual right now, as ships loitered and clocked up some shore leave time, hoping to ride out the lockdown and the Hunter frenzy before their contracts and corporations compelled them to set out again.

Ian didn’t watch him go. He turned his attention back to the ship one more time, then heaved his bag onto his shoulder and headed for the crew boarding umbilical.

He had a new life to meet.

Date Point: 17y7m3w AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Armstrong Station, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Bruuk, Clanless employed by Clan Whitecrest

“It’s alright for you. Everyone knows Humans and Gao get along well. The rest of us had to get anti-disease implants installed.”

Bruuk growled at his Kwmbwrw shipmate Morwkwm, a little aggrieved. “I had to get that implant too! Just because Humans allegedly like us doesn’t mean we’re immune to all those fungi and bacteria they haul around…”

“You are though. Nothing they’re carrying around would kill you.”

“So? Some of that sewer system they carry around with them could make me very sick.”

“Well, don’t lick the Human, then!”

The truth was, Bruuk wasn’t overly fond of Humans himself. They smelled. And what they mostly smelled of was bacterial aromatics. Human males in particular could stink like rancid cheese if they were incautious in their personal hygiene, and the worst part was how they tried to cover for it with perfumes! Maybe such a cheap trick fooled their stunted nasal faculties, but to the Gaoian nose, even quite a clean Human of any gender was…ugh.

And they were due to be joined by one. Fantastic.

The mood among the crew was mixed on that score. Morwkwm was grumbling about it, of course, but the list of things he wouldn’t grumble about could have been counted on one paw with room left over to count to five. Urgug was being uncharacteristically inexpressive and stoic, though he insisted he was just reserving judgement.

Dora was, as she called it, “Fangirling.” Apparently their Human was a “British,” one of the factions—or was it breed? Clan?—at the forefront of the war that had defeated Earth’s version of the Robalin “Wisdom.” As an outcast from Robalin society herself, Dora loved that particular interlude in Human history. It represented an alternate reality where people like her were accepted, not rounded up and worked to death.

Keeda alone knew what Mojremm was thinking. Mjrnhrm were impossible to read now that nobody used implanted translators any longer. Apparently the event was momentous enough to record though, because he’d sandpapered off the old and fading acid-etch tattoo on his left forearm to start a new one, turning the dull olive chitin a spectacular shade of opalescent blue. Bruuk, alas, had no idea what the intricate designs signified, and neither did the others; the Mjrnhrm never discussed their acid tattoos with outsiders. Moj had more than most, though whether that meant a storied life or an ostentatious streak, Bruuk didn’t know.

And as for the Shipmaster… well, it had been Trrrk’k’s idea to bring this Human aboard in the first place. The wiley old Rrrtk had a long-standing contract with Clan Whitecrest, and was showing no signs of slowing down, but it was clear even he was worried about the Hunters and about the kind of scrapes the Clan might get them into. The crew needed a heavy, he said. Muscle, a bodyguard, somebody to keep them safe if things went zrrrk shaped.

Which was why Whitecrest had put Bruuk onboard in the first place! Second degree he may have been, but he was still a brownfur, and a fuckin’ strong one too. He wasn’t some effeminate little useless male like a silverfur would be, it didn’t work that way for brownies. He was just…a little short, was all. He had claws! He could fight!

So why did he feel like he was being ignored?

“You two are such pessimists,” Trrrk’k chided fondly, thumbing some dried cqcq into his smoking pipe. “He’s clean, Morwkwm. I promise you that. And you put up with foreign scents all the time, Bruuk.”

“He’ll smell like moldy cheese,” Bruuk predicted.

“The rest of us aren’t so ‘gifted’ as you. We’ll make do.” Moj buzzed the mjrnhrm equivalent of a chuckle.

“Lucky you.”

“We certainly are!” Dora chirped. She was sitting on the conical beanbag that served her for a chair, sewing a new patch onto her jacket. She turned it around to show it off. “What do you think?”

“I think I still can’t see half the colors on that thing and neither can you.”

“For now! You heard about the new gene therapy, right?” Dora turned the heavily decorated garment toward Urgugnadvum instead. “How about you?”

Their navigator raised his head, which had been resting on his arms, and his facial tentacles rippled for a moment as he considered it. “Most festive,” he rumbled agreeably, and rested his head back down again. A pulse of some kind swept across the chromatophores on his face and flanks. “I like the new patch. Some of the others have shades of melancholy and nausea in them.”

Not even Dora’s relentless good mood was enough to blind her to the fact that something was amiss with their largest crewmate. She shrugged the jacket on—a peculiar motion in a being with three radially symmetric arms—and tilted her head at him. “Well that was…terse. By your standards, anyway. Are you alright?”

“I am merely troubled,” Urgug explained. “Every report says the Hunters are more active than ever with the deathworld species in lockdown, and yet—with no disrespect intended, Shipmaster—instead of staying safely here in port, we are taking on a Human—their most highly prized prey—and setting out again.”

“A most welcome reminder…” Morwkwm grumbled sarcastically. He stood up and stretched himself out, all his long limbs and his tail extending to their full and impressive length before he subsided down into the more compact stance he used for walking and picked his way across their recreational lounge in search of a cup of water.

A contrite burst of yellow-ish flickered across Urgug’s features. Morwk had survived one Hunter raid in his life. Bruuk couldn’t blame him for being distressed by the thought of another.

“We’re taking on a Human precisely because the situation demands it,” Trrrk’k said, evenly. If he took issue with Urgug’s concerns, he didn’t show it. “I mean no offense, Bruuk, but you are not a large Gaoian by your breed’s standards. I don’t doubt your ferocity…”

Bruuk tensed up reflexively and puffed out his chest, reminding the Shipmaster just what he had lurking under his heavy laborer’s pelt. The rest of the crew backed up slightly. Good.

“I’m maybe not be very tall, but I’m plenty gods-damn big, and my claws are very sharp…”

“Be that as it may,” Trrrk’k said evenly, “he is a large Human from what I am told, with an excellent military service record. He would grossly overpower you.”

Bruuk raised his enormous arms, bared his teeth slightly in a quiet growl and made a point. “Would he? I doubt it. I’m prol’ly way bigger’n him, ‘cuz I’m heavier’n most any Human an’ ain’t none o’ it is fuckin’ fluff! I’m strong for my weight too, Human or Gao. Also, size ain’t the only thing that matters! He can mebbe punch me good an’ hard, an’ I bet that’d hurt bad…but more’n just a lotta muscle, I’m fast an’ I got claws. I can gouge his fuckin’ face off.”

Bruuk was used to, but not happy with, a certain amount of prejudicial rank-ordering from other species. Humans, for some reason, always got put at the top of the imaginary deathworlder threat hierarchy, with the Gao generally getting third place after the Ten’Gewek.

It was dumb, lazy thinking. Not all Humans were powerhouses, very few Ten’Gewek knew the world beyond their own, and not all Gao were little pushovers. Any Deathworlder was dangerous, and you couldn’t know how they were until you’d met. It was insulting to be so casually relegated to third place, even when unintended.

But the worst part? Bruuk didn’t look like a weakling at all, because he wasn’t. He’d spent his entire life working against his naturally modest height and it showed, having been lifting and competing since he was a floppy-eared cub. The Females seemed to like the results, and it had earned him a fair few dates over the years—more than most males could say! It’d also earned him plenty of work over the years, too…but the plant-eaters somehow couldn’t see it.

To the Vzk’tk, size and strength—and therefore threat—correlated pretty much entirely to height. They had no idea how to assess anything substantially shorter than them. They feared Humans because of Kevin Jenkins’ legend. The Humans in turn spoke highly of the Ten’Gewek, and so some of that infamy transferred across. But for the Gao? Familiarity seemed to breed a sense of ease, and that meant by the magic of perception, the “little” Gao largely evaded the Deathworlder label. Sometimes that was convenient…

…But mostly it was insulting.

“‘Wild’ is retired military, yes?” Moj offered. “Maybe he has skill to match his strength. But, why argue? He is here to be on our crew, not to fight us. Between the two of you, perhaps the Hunters will break their teeth on this ship, if they try.”

“Right!” Dora bubbled. “No way he’s going to want to get eaten either! And besides, the Clan won’t want to lose us! That’s why they installed all those shiny new toys! We’ll be fine.”

“I think you’re overestimating just how much the Clan cares about us,” Morwk retorted. “Or did you forget the Gao are in lockdown too? So many left to die…” He directed a pointed, accusatory look in Bruuk’s direction.

“That is enough,” Trrrk’k scolded him before Bruuk’s hackles were fully up. “You are troubled, I understand that. I am troubled too. There is no call for bitterness toward our shipmates over matters beyond their control. ”

Morwk drank his water, then turned to Bruuk and dipped his whole torso in the Kwmbwrw version of an apology. “Of course. That was disrespectful of me. I withdraw it.”

Bruuk willed the fur along his back to settle down and pulled his claws back in. He’d never actually attack one of his crewmates, and they knew it, but body language was a hard thing to set aside. Especially when Morwk had struck such a tender nerve. He duck-nodded in reply, and the tension reverted to comfortable silence.

It only lasted a few seconds before being interrupted by a heavy Clonk that resonated through the hull: the sound of the airlock cycling. Dora sprang to her feet eagerly.

“He’s here!”

The rest of the crew stood too, with varying degrees of enthusiasm of speed. Bruuk was last up, and second to the door after Dora. He tried to remind himself to be positive and friendly. After all, he’d got used to Urgug’s musty carpet smell and Trrrk’k’s smoking habit in time. Maybe this Wild wouldn’t be so bad.

The only thing to do was to meet the new guy and find out.

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

On the inside, the ship gave about the same impression as her exterior. Functional rather than stylish, but well squared-away. The lighting was clear, bright and neutral, the gravity a little low at exact Dominion standard, but the airlock cycled healthily and the area beyond was clean. A small round cleaning drone—a Roomba by another name, really—skirted around Ian’s feet with a warble and continued on its patrol up the length of the deck.

Right. Any space with three or four furry lifeforms in it had to deal with shed hairs and dander. Having some robo-vacuums made sense.

The atmosphere was cool and dry, and a little thin. Rather like the Alps in late spring, minus the smell of grass and wildflowers. In fact, there was no scent at all that Ian could detect. It didn’t even smell sterile like a hospital, it just smelled…

Well, like totally clean, processed air.

He’d been expecting the crew to meet him at the airlock, and the fact that he wasn’t gave him a moment of confusion and disappointment, before a door opened a little way down the deck to his right and they emerged.

The word “motley” immediately sprung to mind when the door opened and Ian met the crew for the first time. No two of them were the same shape, size or colour, and only half of them were wearing any kind of clothes. He’d read the dossiers on them, of course. He knew a thing or two about their life stories. But that was a very different thing to meeting them in the flesh.

One of the first out was a surprisingly short but fuckin’ tank-like Gaoian brownfur, who got a good sniff of Ian and flicked an ear, before slinking out of the way with a slightly deck-shaking step to make room for the taller beings who emerged behind him. The Robalin beside him was practically bouncing with eager energy, an effect only enhanced by the entire Pride parade worth of mismatched LGBT+ patches, pins and stickers adorning her incongruous denim jacket.

Immediately behind them was a weathered Rrrrtk who could only be the captain. He greeted Ian with a long, slow nod, and stood aside to make room for a Guvnurag, who raised a hand and tucked it to his chest in welcome, while the Mjrnhrm beside him raised both hands and pressed them together in front of his chin in a gesture very reminiscent of a wai.

The last one, the Kwmbwrw, seemed just about as standoffish as the Gaoian. He dipped his body in the shallowest of welcomes, but otherwise barely moved.

It was a hell of an introduction. Wilde had only ever really interacted with Gao and Guvnurag before, plus a few encounters with some of Folctha’s Rrrrtk. He’d never met a Robalin, nor a Kwmbwrw or Mjrnhrm. This was…going to be a learning experience alright.

“…Hello.” He projected rather more confidence than he felt, and lowered his bag to the deck as he smiled at them. The Kwmbwrw gave it a wide-eyed look as it settled on the deck with a heavy sound. It did contain all of Ian’s worldly possessions after all. He’d been getting a bit tired of hauling it around.

“Welcome aboard” the shipmaster replied, through a small black translator worn on a choker high on his neck. He stepped forward and offered one of his sturdier hands for Ian to shake. “I am Shipmaster Trrrk’k, but please feel free to use whatever approximation of my name is easiest for you. It is a pleasure to finally meet you.”

“And you too,” Ian agreed, shaking the offered hand.

“I must say, I have rarely known Clan Whitecrest to offer such a strong recommendation. They seemed most eager for us to take you on.”

“Shared service,” Ian replied, with a nod. “I’ve got a lot of respect for the Clan too.”

“Good. Of course, I rather hope we will never need your specific talents, but better to have and not need, as they say.” Trrk’k tilted his head, then half-turned and gestured toward the rest of the crew. “Introductions?”

“Yeah, let’s.”

Trrrk’k gestured first to the Guvnurag. “Our navigator, quartermaster and accounts manager, Urgugnadvum,” he introduced.

The hues that flickered across the big guy’s body were…Ian wracked his brain, trying to remember the chart on Guvnurag tonal language he’d studied. Half the problem was that the Guvnurag saw about a million more hues than a human, so a quite visible and clear difference to them was practically indistinguishable to human eyes. That mottle of royal blue and emerald green could mean everything from bored indifference to, in this case hopefully, professional but genuine warmth.

He also extended a hand so huge that Ian’s own was baby-small in comparison, and he had to shake the big guy’s finger rather than the whole thing. “Ah, the man I talk to about getting paid” Ian joked, then deepened his voice into his bass register. “Durumuddrad-bugvutharrah.”

He got what he was hoping for: a flash of bright purple signifying surprised gratification. He’d practiced that greeting for an hour.

“And to your kin and self as well!”

“How was my pronunciation?”

A hefty cough and a flash of green was the Guvnurag version of a guffaw. “Terrible, but the effort is most welcome.”

“This is Mojremm’rt, our pilot,” Trrrk’k continued, indicating the Mjrnhrm. Ian blinked as he got a closer look: from what he’d read of Mjrnhrm culture, the beetle-like ETs tended to wear a family emblem acid-tattooed into their foreheads, but Mojremm’rt had a Yin-and-Yang there instead. The rest of him was just as bizarrely tattooed, with a cross on his right pectoral chestplate, and the mon of Clan Starmind opposite on the left. And, dotted across the rest of him, a star and crescent moon, a pentacle, a Jainist hand, the Gaori for “Keeda,” the head of Baphomet, the Buddha, the Star of David, and several other icons that Ian didn’t recognize, though he could guess at the theme. The tattoos went all the way down to the waistband of a pair of baggy dark orange pants, and the only visible part of him not currently adorned by acid-etch had a scuffed, pale look like he’d recently sandpapered it.

“Moj,” he offered, shaking Ian’s hand. “Just Moj.”

“Moj it is,” Ian promised.

“…And this is Morwkwm, our engineer,” Trrrk’k introduced the Kwmbwrw, who repeated that shallow dip.

“Morwk is fine,” he grunted, tersely.

“Thanks.”

“The vibrating one is Dora, our cargo handler and drone technician…”

“It’s so nice to meet you!” Dora chirped, unmistakably without the aid of a translator.

“You’re speaking English?”

“Oh hell yeah!” She presented her forward hand for Ian to shake. “Fuck Robakol. In fact, just assume my attitude to anything the Supremacy approves of is ‘fuck that,’ ‘kay?”

“Well, fair enough!” Ian gave her the firmest handshake he dared, which she turned into a high-five. Dora, it seemed, was a handful.

“And lastly, this is Bruuk, our chef and medic,” the captain finished.

Bruuk’s firm pawshake and incongruously tenor hello were…polite…but not warm. Ian knew Gaoian body language well enough to spot that the brownfur didn’t like the smell of him. Which was fair. He probably stunk, he hadn’t had the chance to shower in more than a day.

Still, he’d had worse introductions.

“I will show you to your suite,” Trrrk’k promised, and waited until Ian had picked up his bag and swung it over his shoulder. “This way.”

“Mealtime is in two hours!” Dora called. “We’ll get to know you then!”

Ian waved back in thanks, then let out a long breath as he caught up with the captain.

“The anticipation of a first meeting is always worse than the event itself, is it not?” Trrrk’k sympathized.

“You’re not wrong, mate,” Ian chuckled. “I was dreading that all day.”

“In case you are wondering why Bruuk was so reticent, he has a particularly sensitive nose even by Gaoian standards. He boasts it is as good as the Great Father’s is alleged to be.”

“That’s quite a claim. I’ve met the Great Father, and he could smell what I ate three days previously.”

Trrrk’k turned his head to look at him and made a faintly surprised trilling sound. “Indeed? Well you may find that Bruuk is not…hmm…quite as enthusiastic about his species’ sovereign as many others. There is a reason he lives at a remove from his people, and has never progressed to Associate of Clan Whitecrest.”

“Seems to me like we’re all working at a remove from our species.”

“For our own reasons, yes. Though that is not so unusual in my case. The Rrrrtktktkp’ch are solitary by nature.”

“So who should I get to know first? After Dora, that is?”

“Dora?” A human would have used an insincere I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about tone with a sly smile. Trrrk’k lifted his head and made a kind of quiet cough deep in his belly.

“Come on, if I don’t talk to her properly by the end of the day, she’ll bloody burst, anybody could see that.”

A louder cough was probably the Rrrrtk equivalent of a ‘Hah!’ “…I believe Moj is just as eager, in his own way, but will not be offended by a delay. Morwk will most probably appreciate being left alone while he completes his pre-flight checklist but would likely take offence at being left to last. Urgug believes that relationships need time to steep properly and so won’t expect you to make time especially for him. Bruuk, I think, should be your second visit.”

“He’s the only brownfur I’ve ever met that’s shorter than me.”

“Second-degree. I’m told that’s very rare for his breed. And quite proud of it, or so he claims. I think the deeper truth is that he takes great pride in overcoming the disadvantages his stature brings.”

“I’d say so,” Wilde mumbled. “The lad’s bigger’n I am.”

“…Is he?”

“Shipmaster, I can tell just by looking. He’s built like a brick shithouse. No wonder Regaari was smirking! I’m training up yet another alien bruiser and I know he did that on purpose. Why do I always get the big guys?”

Trrrk’k made a sort of rock-gargling cough that was allegedly his species’ version of laughter. “I sense there may be some interesting stories behind that! In the meanwhile, I would advise you to handle Bruuk with some caution. He is fiercely loyal as all Gao seem to be, but in your specific case, it may take some time for him to grow fond of you. He…”

“Chip on his shoulder, then.”

“…Is that a turn of phrase?”

“Uh, yes. Sorry. It indicates…kind of a burden of resentment, hostility, grievance, that sort of thing.”

“Then yes. Oh yes. A chip of Guvnurag proportions.” That cough again. Was it a laugh after all? The captain smelled like a smoker. “But before you address it…your quarters.”

Ian considered the door they’d just stopped outside. “Thanks. I guess I’ll see you at dinner then.”

“Indeed. Incidentally…”

“Yes, captain?”

“There is only one mealtime on this ship. I understand humans need to eat more however, so you may need to cook your own second and third meals. Bruuk is already quite busy.”

“That’s unusual. Gaoians usually eat twice or three times a day too…”

“I believe he cooks all his food ahead of time. I am not so sure he would be so generous with you, at least to start.” The soft creaking sound that briefly emanated from Trrrk’k’s skinny thorax was probably an attempt to be reassuring. “He will warm up, I am sure.”

“Thanks. Oh, before—here. This is for you.” Ian plucked the datacard Regaari had given him from his pocket and handed it over.

“Ah. Yes. Thankyou.” Trrrk’k pocketed the card with a slow nod. “I will see you at dinner, then.”

Once the captain was gone, Ian took a second to figure out his door panel. Some thoughtful soul had already programmed English lettering and instructions into the ship’s systems for him at least. It didn’t take him long to figure out how to enter a new passcode, and then…

“…Huh.”

He’d been expecting something cozier. Or at least smaller. But of course, everything on this ship was designed for aliens up to as big as Urgug, who was roughly the size of a long-base van. Ian didn’t just have a cabin, he had a whole studio apartment.

He made a note to order some furniture. Folctha’s IKEA was having a closing-down sale, getting rid of their stock now that the lockdown meant they couldn’t resupply, and Ian had enough thousands in his savings account to turn the huge space he’d just entered into the ultimate bachelor pad…

…It’d be bloody expensive to ship it up and through the system defence field. Or at least, a serious pain in the arse to hand-carry. He did have some big cavemen friends, and a Ferd to help, but…No. Probably best they stay home. Saying goodbye to Ferd hadn’t been easy. Hell, he hadn’t even thought Ten’Gewek could cry…

Oh well. Expensive delivery costs it was. He could afford it.

For now, though, he explored, not that there was much to explore. The bed was a large soft patch of floor tucked up in the far corner opposite the door. It turned out to be a giant memory foam mattress, big enough for an elephant to sleep on and therefore far too big for Ian. Other than that the suite was bereft of furniture and there wasn’t, he realized, a bathroom. Instead he was going to have to shower, shave and do his business in the shared multi-species ablution facility that was presumably somewhere nearby. No kitchen, either. So in fact what he had was a giant combined bedroom and living room and not a lot else.

A problem for later. At least there was plenty of storage, all around the door. Shelving mostly, but he did find a rail tucked away in the back of one of the taller ones, and successfully mounted it to form a wardrobe. He hung up his shirts, trousers and jackets, tucked his underwear and socks on a smaller shelf, found room for his boots on a third one, then stepped back to consider the fact that one big and heavy bag had translated into quite a meager collection of stuff.

The biggest and heaviest part of his pack was his gun case. He’d brought two weapons with him, a SCAR and a Glock, plus a healthy supply of ammunition and such for both on a seperate pallet. God willing, he wouldn’t need either. He’d need a workbench in the corner there for cleaning and maintaining them.

With that small task done, he turned and considered the empty, rather cold space that was to be his home until he ever—if he ever—grew tired of this new life he’d signed up for. It needed a lot of work to make it his. But that was going to be part of the fun.

He smiled, and set about searching for the atmosphere and gravity controls.

Bruuk, Clanless employed by Clan Whitecrest

Wild stank, all right, though he weren’t nearly as bad as Bruuk had feared. Mostly he smelled of exercise and testosterone, which were good, honest scents a brownie like Bruuk could approve of. He also reeked of uncertainty…though maybe that weren’t exactly what Bruuk was smelling. He knew that Humans smelled almost familiar, but not completely so, and that a gao should be careful not to assume anything because of that.

If that was as bad as it ever got, Bruuk could live with that. Balls, it weren’t as if he smelled like sweet-herb and summergrass all the time, either.

Wild’s arrival did mean larger meal prep and food supply concerns. In fact he’d be eating about as big as Bruuk probably, which meant the two of them together would be eating more than the rest of the crew combined…and that was assuming they remained sedentary. Bruuk was fond of his weights like any good brownfur, so that weren’t fuckin’ happening, and he doubted Wild was keen on sleeping the journey away, either. Bruuk had laid in enough stores to pack to their pantry full from corner to corner, and secreted as much away in auxiliary storage as he could reasonably fit. Hopefully, it would be enough.

His leisure time was going to shrink dramatically, he could tell.

Bruuk prided himself on cooking good, hearty meals that any species could enjoy. In Wild’s case, he’d asked Urgug to order appropriate supplements for an athletic Human. That was probably unnecessary given that most of his ingredients were Earthling species—Cimbrean was a dominant agricultural exporter precisely because Human crops were so rich and nutritious—but Bruuk didn’t know for sure, and in any case he wasn’t keen on sharing his own protein power and such. On a multi-species crew, little details like that were important.

Mercifully, when mealtime came around, Wild had showered and changed into clean clothes. He used an unperfumed laundry detergent, but his body wash was heavy with a woody, slightly spicy fragrance that clashed with the aroma of the day’s dish, and Bruuk just knew it was going to linger in the ablutions facility.

Still. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent in isolation…

Wild was first to arrive. He took an appreciative sniff as he entered, smiled, and helped himself to a cup of water from the pitcher in the middle of the table.

“That smells excellent,” he commented, in surprisingly fluent Gaori.

“And I thought Humans had no sense of smell,” Bruuk replied, happy to wrap his tongue around more comfortable words.

Wild took the jab affably as he considered the mismatched assortment of seats intended for wildly different anatomies around the table, and quickly identified that the new and shiny one was appropriately proportioned for a human. He sat down and sipped his water. “Not as good as a Gaoian’s, that’s true. Skipper tells me yours is especially good.”

Bruuk preened a bit, “Finest in the galaxy!”

“That’s quite a boast. Okay. What did I have for breakfast…oh…three days ago?”

Bruuk scowled at him for a second, then abandoned his cooking for a moment, steeled himself, and took a good snuffle of the human at close range.

“…Some kind of grain, with milk, nuts and a sugary syrup full of volatiles.”

“Honey nut cornflakes, you’re right.”

“Told you.” Bruuk allowed himself a certain satisfied swagger as he returned to his kitchen. “Yesterday and today, you had poached eggs and bacon. And some really low-quality meat fried in grease shortly before you came aboard. And—”

“Alright, alright!” Wild laughed. “You know, I never get over just how long those scents linger.”

“I have to get good and close and concentrate to pick up on old ones like that. But yeah. Humans tend to…dominate the nasal landscape. Though not as much as whoever that was you were hanging out with a few hours ago. They certainly don’t smell human…”

“That’d be Ferd Given-Man. Ten’Gewek.”

“I think I may need to wear a mask if I ever meet one in person.”

“Yeah. Even to me, he’s a noseful.” Wild chuckled. “I—”

He was interrupted by the door, which opened to admit Moj. The pilot greeted the room with a wai, then stalked over to his seat and settled gracefully on it. “How did you find your quarters, Human?”

“Uh…spacious. Don’t think I’ve ever had that much room all to myself before.”

Moj made a clicking sound that, in his people, blended the functions of a nod and a “hmm” of agreement. “Short privilege. You, Gao, Corti, you get more living space out of the same volume. For Dora, Morwk and me, comfortable. For Urgug and the shipmaster…”

“Cozy?”

Moj tilted his head thoughtfully. Apparently his language didn’t include an equivalent word, because the translator on the side of his head took a while to finish, “…Interesting concept. Yes. Probably.” He folded his hands in his lap and bowed his head. “Excuse me.”

Wild watched him for a second, then shot a curious glance at Bruuk. Bruuk just duck-shrugged. Moj was, from what he’d told Bruuk, considered irrevocably insane by his species’ standards, not that Bruuk had ever noticed. Okay, so he spent an inordinate amount of time “Resonating with the Higher” as he called it, but whatever Resonating involved, it mostly seemed to consist of being still and quiet and mindful of the present moment.

Curiously, Wild bowed his head and went quiet too. Maybe he and the Mjrn had something in common after all.

Most of the rest of the crew arrived together. Dora and Urgug were, of course, as talkative as ever and their mutual disgust with some comms operator over on the station was ongoing it seemed. Apparently one of the Humans over there had, in Dora’s words, “a pole up his ass.” Morwk gave Bruuk a resigned look, sighed, and moved to sit opposite Wild, who looked up and gave him a nod and a smile.

Bruuk couldn’t fault the Human’s willingness to get along, at least.

Dora, of course, promptly dragged her stool over with a squeal to sit next to Wild, antennae waving excitedly. “So what do you think of the ship?!”

“I, uh… Well, I haven’t really had a chance to look around, yet,” Wild replied.

“I could show you! Well, except I’m super busy taking on cargo right now so maybe this isn’t the best time so, yeah, maybe you’re right. But you should totally come see what I do while I’m still doing it!”

Bruuk forced back a fond chitter, willed his ears into a more neutral position when Wild glanced at him, and carried on serving his food.

“Well, I plan on getting to know everyone, of course,” Wild replied.

“No time like now!”

“True. I was wondering about your jacket, actually—”

“Oh, don’t get her started on the jacket, please, Morwk groaned. “You’ll get her whole life story.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Dora feathered her antennae indignantly.

“We’ve all heard it,” Morwk replied.

“He hasn’t!”

“Haven’t heard his story,” Moj replied, lifting his head out of his trance as the door opened and Trrrk’k joined them. He bobbed his head in greeting to his crew then settled gracefully on his bench at the head of the table. “Only fair that the newcomer should share a journey that none of us have heard before.”

Dora hesitated. “…Ooh, yeah. Good point! You were a soldier, right?”

“A Royal Marine and JETS operator,” Wild confirmed. He reached up and tapped beside his eye. “Until this happened, anyway.”

“You certainly went with an obvious prosthetic,” Morwk commented. Bruuk duck-nodded, unconsciously. Wild’s right eye was glossy black with a misshapen white patch on the front for a pupil. As synthetic replacements went, it was unmissable.

“It’s not even a prosthetic, mate. I caught boiling metal fragments to the face, all the way back to here. Totally fucked me up, cut my entire face to ribbons. The surgeons fixed me up…mostly. But the optic nerve was destroyed beyond all hope of regeneration. This bit of glass is purely cosmetic.”

“You survived that?!” Dora looked fascinated, while Urgug went a squeamish shade of yellow-green and even Trrrk’k uttered a small creak of dismay.

“Barely. It helped having a giant gorilla toss me into a stasis locker like a ragdoll.”

“…Is that a human skull on the front?” Dora had leaned in to get an even closer look.

“Sure is. My Ten’Gewek friend’s idea.” Wild chuckled. “Started calling me ‘Death-Eye’ too. And, that was the end of one career.”

“You said you met the Great Father of the Gao, too,” Trrrk’k recalled, changing the subject away from such medical matters. Bruuk stiffened, listening intently as he carried the first plates over and set them down.

“Yeah. I was on HMS Caledonia at the Battle of Gao. When we got sunk and had to abandon ship, I wound up planetside. Amanyuy territory, if you know it Bruuk?”

“I do. I was from Yuy Geng originally,” Bruuk told him, delivering the second set of plates to the table. “Until the Great Father destroyed it.”

“That he did, yeah.” Wild hesitated, then cleared his throat. “…Anyway, by cosmic weird luck, I ended up at a farmstead that turned out to be the launch point to reclaim the Three Valleys. One of the SOR’s senior NCOs took charge of keeping us alive, I worked with her until Daar and his army turned up and…well, between Kovač and Daar, I saw a good direction for my career to move in. And it was a good direction, up until…”

He trailed off, and brushed his fingers across his right cheek with a wry expression. “Well, we can’t all be superheroes, I guess.”

“Would you consider yourself a typical Human, then?” Dora asked. “You sound like you’ve lived a pretty heroic life so far!”

“That’s a tricky word. I’ve not had a typical life, no. I’m bloody fit and strong, but I’m no superman. And reasonably smart, but not a genius. I suppose I’d need to concede that I’m stubborn as a bloody mule, though, which counts for a lot…” Wild gave Dora a shrug. “Definitely wouldn’t call myself a hero, though. Wouldn’t…feel right.”

“I don’t think I could stand having a shipmate who thought of himself as a hero,” Bruuk opined, sitting down with the last two plates. “Anyway. Eat, before it cools.”

“I don’t know anyone who thinks of themselves like that, now that you mention it. Which…I dunno. Ferd’s a hero as far as I’m concerned. My whole team owes him their lives. So is Tooko. I owe him my life several times over.” For a moment, Wild looked distant, but it passed, he hooked his plate over and brightened at its contents. “Tell you what though, the food already looks better in this line of work!”

Bruuk handed over a vitamin bottle. “I hope so. Just in case, I ordered these for you. There’s more too, I’ll bring them to you later on.”

“Cheers. Uh…Before we eat, there’s a human tradition called a ‘toast’ if I may?”

Mostly there were intrigued reactions along the lines of ‘go ahead’ from the crew, except for Dora who clearly knew what was involved as she started to fill cups of water and hand them out. Once they were distributed, Wild picked his up, stood, and raised it slightly in the air in front of him.

“…To new friends,” he said, and lifted the drink a little higher. The rest of the crew followed Dora’s example in raising theirs too, and then drinking.

It was, Bruuk felt, a good tradition.

Shipmaster Trrrk’k

By long-standing tradition, the rest of the crew cleaned and put away after dinnertime. Dora spent most of the time eagerly showing Wild where all the utensils should go, but that was acceptable. Somebody needed to. And in fact, with his contribution, the work went faster than ever.

Afterwards would normally have been recreation and social time, but today was a little different. They had a job for the Clan.

So, when Trrrk’k mentioned it, Urgug, Morwk and Dora nodded and slipped away, leaving the rest of them to talk business. Wild watched them go, then turned a raised eyebrow toward Bruuk, who gestured for him to sit down as Trrrk’k retrieved one of the Clan’s little toys, a privacy field generator, from his pocket and set it in the middle of the table.

Moments later, they were secure in the fuzzy silver dome of a privacy field. The other three knew the ship did business with the Clan: for the most part, they preferred not to be directly involved, and Trrrk’k preferred it that way himself.

He considered Wild for a second as the Human sat and looked at him expectantly. Alert but patient. Attentive. Good. He’d expected nothing less, but it was good to see.

“We are going to the capitol system of the Kwmbwrw great houses,” Trrrk’k revealed. “Specifically, Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, one of that system’s biggest and busiest stations, owned by House Henen. The Clan’s “friend” aboard that station has missed several scheduled reports.”

Moj made a prolonged, low-grade buzzing sound, like a quiet bass cicada. “House Henen is powerful. Their Grandmatriarch is ambassador to the Dominion Council.”

“Which is exactly why the Clan is sending us, the deniable asset.” Trrrk’k lit his pipe, taking his time over it as he spoke. “The Friend might be in hiding, captured, or dead. We are to determine which, and extract them if alive.”

“And if dead?” Bruuk asked.

“Determine why.”

“Extracting a captured spy from under the nose of one of the most powerful factions of an influential Dominion species…Feel like I’m jumping in at the deep end,” Wild chuckled.

“I was assured that it is entirely within your abilities,” Trrrk’k told him.

“Probably. Goodness knows, I’ve pulled off some shit in my time.”

“…I shall interpret that as confidence.” Trrrk’k finished lighting his pipe and puffed out a small smoke cloud through his nostrils.

Ian nodded. “Still, I don’t work alone. If it does come time to put me to work, who are my teammates?”

Bruuk grumbled, and indicated himself and the Mjrnhrm. “Us.”

“Yeah? I kinda guessed you would be, Bruuk, but uh…no offense intended Moj, you’re a bit of a surprise…”

“No offense taken,” Moj assured him. “But yes. No deathworlder I, but gifted with useful skills anyway.”

“Moj thinks a locked door is more of a suggestion than an obstacle,” Bruuk explained. The Mjrnhrm buzzed contentedly.

“If they don’t want people going through, why advertise that something good is on the other side by locking it?” he quipped.

“And that would be why they kicked him off their planet,” Bruuk added.

Wild raised his eyebrows at Moj. “They exiled you?”

“Sanded off my family markings and etchings. Gave me the name of an outcast…” Moj buzzed that same contented buzz again. “Called me insane, too. Shame, really. Fly charter shuttles without incident for twelve years, prevent a crash that would have killed dozens, nobody remembers. But rob one bank…”

“You can tell that story later, Moj,” Trrrk’k said firmly, then turned to Wild. “Be warned. He exaggerates. He would have you think he is an impulsive kleptomaniac, but he is not.”

Moj’s buzzing sound was mock-aggrieved now. “Always you spoil my fun,” he lamented.

“Can we focus, please?” Bruuk requested.

“There is not much more to focus on,” Trrrk’k told him. “Wild, Bruuk, I think it best if you remain on the ship while Moj and I investigate the Clan’s friend. The Kwmbwrw are not hospitable to deathworlders.”

“Fair,” Wild nodded affably. “The longer we get to train together, the better.”

“…Training?” Bruuk looked mildly offended, which left Wild unmoved.

“Did you serve in the Grand Army?”

“…No.”

“Ever undergone any military or security training at all?”

Bruuk straightened his spine proudly. “My workhouse taught me how to fight.”

Wild nodded. “Nice. I’ll enjoy seeing that training in action.” He looked to Moj. “What about you?”

Moj shrugged. “Always new tricks to learn. You say train, we train. Tonight, maybe? Interesting to see what training with a Human is like…”

“No can do, I have a list of things that need bringing aboard and setting up first. Which, we should probably discuss, skipper.”

Trrrk’k nodded slowly. “Yes, we should. Moj, Bruuk, thank you both for staying. I will not take up any more of your time.”

As the pilot and medic stood and left, Trrrk’k considered his new crew member for a second. He knew that Wild had led a team before, but the way he took Bruuk in stride was particularly gratifying. Trrrk’k himself had struggled with their Gaoian at first.

“I should warn you about Mjrnhrm humor,” he explained.

Wild looked interested. “What about it?”

“The cornerstone of a good Mjrnhrm joke is an outrageous lie,” Trrrk’k explained. “The only thing they find funnier than tricking somebody into believing something incredible, is being accused of a lie they have not in fact committed. And Moj, I believe, is by their standards something of a comedian.”

“I guess that makes getting at the full story behind his tattoos…interesting…”

“An exercise in futility, I think. In any case, you mentioned needing to bring some things aboard?”

“Yeah.” Wild fished in his pocket for a small device. “Just a little shopping list, the Clan should hopefully cover the bill…”

Trrrk’k nodded, and listened as he explained. It wasn’t a long list.

But it was very interesting.

Date Point: 17y7m3w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Daar knew it was bad because Thurrsto and Sheeyo chose to ambush him right after the bestest bit o’ grunty liftin’ an’ wrasslin’ with First Fang he’d had in ages. They musta wanted him good an’ tired and hopefully ridin’ a happy high before they rained doom down upon his day.

Devious, really. He’d need ‘ta pay ‘em back one day.

Daar chitter-sighed to himself, detangled from Gurrum an’ his bestest, and shook some of the lathered-up sweat out of his pelt. He was more or less permanently in a sleek, almost to-the-skin cut these days, but even that could hold a ‘Back’s sweat like a sponge, if he were workin’ hard enough.

“I hope ‘yer not losin’ ‘ta Righteous as hard as ‘ya jus’ lost ‘ta me,” Daar growled happily, as he yanked ‘Kodiak’ up to his footpaws.

“Naw, I give ‘em a good fight,” Gurrum rumbled happily in reply. “An’ I do that even wit’ him bein’ stronger’n me, too!”

“That’s good! You keep ‘em on their monkey toes, y’hear?! That’ll jus’ mean we all get better!!”

Daar made to praise the rest of his playmates, but Thurrsto chittered in that very specific, urgent tone he had for when niceties had to be dispensed with. Daar turned toward him and sighed; It musta been really bad. They weren’t even giving ‘em a chance to hose down.

“An urgent matter requires your attention, My Father. Fourth-claw with safeguards.”

“I’mma be awful disappointed if this ain’t somethin’ of fuckin’ planet-shattering significance, if ‘yer gonna git ‘tween me an’ a pool o’ nice, cold water…”

“As an owner of a magnificently long and silky pelt, I’d never do something so cruel unless I had to,” Thurrsto dead-panned, as he reached for his portable privacy field button. “One of our ‘friends’ in Kwmbwrw space has gone silent,” he explained, once it was active.

“…Okay? No offense, but I trust you to handle tradecraft matters on ‘yer own, Champion Thurrsto…what’s the catch?”

“This particular one was investigating an issue with the Gorai biodrones, My Father.”

…

“You have my absolute and undivided attention, Champion. What issue?”

“Per your orders, the Grand Army elements on Gorai have been taking biodrones alive wherever possible, especially female and cub biodrones, and attempting de-implantation and rehabilitation wherever possible.”

“Yeah. My unnerstandin’ is that, there ain’t generally nobody home ‘ta save no more.”

“Clan Openpaw remain optimistic but, well…optimism is that Clan’s greatest character flaw. The Corti suggested wholesale new personality implantation, which we rejected on ethical grounds—”

“—And rightfully so.”

“But it may be relevant nonetheless. The issue we’ve been chasing is a miscount, a discrepancy between the biodrones reported taken in the field, and those actually arriving at the rehabilitation facility on Gorai’s moon.”

“…I’m gonna really fuckin’ hate this, ain’t I?”

Thurrsto’s ears flattened slightly. “Last year, one of our friends on the borders of the Kwmbwrw Great Houses fed us an intriguing sighting: a Kwmbwrw light freighter loaded with cargo containers with Gaori markings. Nothing inherently unusual, but they made an emergency stop and cleaned out the station’s supply of spare temporal-spatial field stabilizers. When our friend gained access to the manifest, there was nothing listed that should have required stasis transport. At first it was just a curiosity, probably smuggling, nothing important, but we asked our friends to look out for it anyway.”

“And what happened?” Daar asked.

“It was next sighted by another, closer friend of ours at Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, a major trade hub and shipyard in the Kwmbwrw home system, where it received a number of crates in escrow from a non-College Corti ship before departing,” Sheeyo said. “Three days later, it was listed as destroyed in a Hunter attack near the Brwnyn system.”

“Try as we might, we cannot corroborate its destruction,” Thurrsto added. “There was Hunter activity in that sector on that date, but their raid was thwarted by a megalight intervention. Clan One-Fang reported zero civilian casualties. And that got Sheeyo’s sniffer twitching.”

“Gorai is an active system. Our reconstruction efforts mean a lot of alien ships coming and going. Clan Goldpaw use the system’s asteroid and moon mining operations to finance and supply the Grand Army, so foreign freighters make port a few times a day. Plenty of opportunities for our biodrone miscount to be explained by a smuggling operation in Gaoian biodrones. So I had one of our planes ‘dust’ a biodrone population in Gorai-Yi-Gu just before they were rounded up.”

“Dust?” Daar asked.

“One of our toys,” Thurrsto explained. “A nanotech powder with a distinctive radio signature, that clings to fur like nothing else, and stays there even through decontamination cycles. Looks and smells like mild dander. You have to wax to get rid of it quickly, but it transfers from fur to hair and cloth quite readily.”

“Sure enough, three weeks after the next miscount, our good friend on Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm detected traces of our dust,” Sheeyo said, grimly.

“…An’ the only way it coulda got there is if a biodrone from Gorai-Yi-Gu was on that ship,” Daar surmised.

“Or somebody who physically interacted with one, yes.” Sheeyo duck-nodded. “Our good friend went dark not long after. His last check-in suggested he had a promising lead he was going to investigate. We think he may have been captured by House Henen internal security.”

Daar’s hackles, which had already risen angrily as he listened, fully bristled. “‘Yer tellin’ me that the Grandmatriarch’s house is involved?”

Thurrsto ducked his head cautiously. “It could be simple counterespionage. The Great Houses spy on each other all the time, they’re…challenging for that reason. We are sending some more friends to investigate, and will act and brief you based on what they discover. But, um…”

“We take the possibility seriously enough that the group of friends we sent includes Sergeant Wilde, My Father.”

Daar duck-nodded, pleased by that. Wilde hadn’t deserved what happened to him. Knowing that he was getting the chance to keep fighting the good fight was welcome news, as was knowing that when Whitecrest hired a “friend,” they hired incredibly competent friends.

“Well, Ol’ True-Name better hope they completely fuckin exonerate her,” he snarled out loud. “Or this is gonna get ugly.”

“….Old True-Name, My Father?” Thurrsto flicked a confused ear.

“Linguistic coincidence,” Sheeyo explained. “That’s what her name means in an obscure Human language. Anyway…this is who we sent. Shipmaster Trrrk’k has been working with us for forty years, he’s one of our oldest and closest friends.”

Daar accepted the tablet and swiped down the freighter’s crew, duck-nodding as he scanned each one’s summary.

“That’s quite the motley crew you’ve assembled. Ah, Bruuk! I ‘member him! Tried out ‘fer Clan not too long ago. Damn good prospect, but…just, whole lotta resentment in ‘em, y’know?”

“We offered him employment when Stoneback turned him down.”

“Good ‘fer him! You could use some more good honest brawn in ‘yer Clan!”

Thurrsto chittered deep in his broad chest. “You don’t need to convince me of that, My Father.”

Sheeyo rolled his eyes, which prompted Daar to drop down to his haunches and draw a bit closer. He was fond of his Champions as a rule, but he’d maybe not been generous enough with affection in Sheeyo’s case. He’d done very much for the Gao, after all.

“An’ we got Sheeyo here ‘ta thank ‘fer a good lead? Never did really unnerstand the connection ‘tween ‘yer Clans…”

Sheeyo preened a bit, and looked up at Daar with pride. “Well, really we have the Clan’s Trade Analysis Cell to thank, but I am glad you are pleased, My Father. As to our history? Well, that’s simple!” Sheeyo chittered, “‘Follow the money’ is one of the oldest tricks around!”

“I won’t bore you with the full details,” Thurrsto chimed in, “suffice to say it was a rather brilliant piece of synthetic analysis. Now, though, things are likely to go kinetic so we’ve stepped in. Bruuk may be rebellious and aggrieved, but he is a fine medic, a quick thinker, brave, and exceedingly fit. He just needs…guidance, really. And a capable leader.”

“And you put Wilde onboard with him to give him those things. That should be interesting…”

“We thought having somebody to mentor would be good for Wilde. And good for Bruuk, too. An alien perspective which isn’t mired in our cultural baggage might be just what he needs.”

“How did’ya tame his loner streak?”

“We didn’t.” Thurrsto had an amused set to his ears. “He’s not Clan yet. We’ll see, though…”

“Ah,” Daar chittered. “Anyway. A good crew. It’d have been better if they’d had longer ‘ta gel together…but into the fire, I guess. What’s the status?”

“Boarding and taking on cargo at Armstrong Station. The Avenging Rage will follow them discreetly as far as the Kwmbwrw border for security.”

Daar couldn’t resist a small grin there. He was proud of the Rage-class. His own Destroying Fury and its fellows were like him in spaceship form, huge and fearsome and unstoppable. There was no small amount of ego involved, no point thinking otherwise.

Avenging Rage was an ambush predator, almost as stealthy as the Silent But Deadly or Drunker on Turkeyer, but armed to smash practically anything in seconds. She couldn’t take the beating that a Fury would, but she wouldn’t need to if used correctly.

“Good. Good…” Daar huffed out a huge sigh, then fixed Sheeyo with a Look. “…’Course, we know somebody Gaoian’s involved. Don’t we.”

The two looked at each other uncomfortably. “…Yes, Father.” Thurrsto took the lead. “We don’t have anything solid yet, but there’s only a few real possibilities…”

Daar sighed again. They all know what he’d have to do to whichever pack of total fuckin’ idiots were involved. “And?”

They told him.

Daar had been right. He really fuckin’ hated it.

Date Point: 17y7m3w1d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Armstrong Station, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

If Ian had thought to guess based on her…anarchic first impression, he would have imagined that Dora would have a painful singing voice. “Enthusiastic, but missing some of the notes” would have been on-brand for her, from what he’d seen so far.

As it turned out, she was pretty good. But her taste in music, on the other hand…

♪“All eyes on me in the center of the ring just like a circus! When I crack that whip, everybody gon’ trip just like a circus…!”♫

Her Pride-festooned jacket, and the feathery antennae atop her head, were swaying back and forth as she bopped along in time to the song, keeping the beat with her left hand while the forward and right ones deftly manipulated the controls of a tug drone outside as it guided a shipping container into its place in the rack.

Robalin were the only trilaterally symmetrical species that Ian knew of. The usual comparison was a vague “lizard-ant hybrid” but the reality defied such a simple summary. Dora had wide-set, large eyes set atop a broad leaf-shaped head that let her see almost completely behind her, so she easily saw Ian coming and turned her head to wave with her left hand while one of the others turned the music down.

A pair of fluffy antennae more like a moth’s than an ant’s sprouted behind her eyes, serving as olfactory organs and, from what Ian had read, they served a social function too in that the closest thing Robalin had to kissing involved lightly brushing their antennae together.

Other than that, her skinny limbs terminated in tridactyl hands and feet, with no chirality to tell them apart.

There, the insectoid similarities ended. Unlike the chitinous Moj, Dora was scaly, with the softer skin on the inside of her joints being smooth, emerald green and skink-like while the outer-facing skin was a lustrous glossy olive-black and the texture of river pebbles. A spiny “beard” ran up either side of her jaw and met at the back of her head, and a couple of the larger spines bore metal piercings.

♪“Hi!”♫

“Hello, Dora.” Ian paused at the threshold of her little command blister. “Am I okay to come in?”

“Sure, sure!” Dora turned her music off completely, scratched the ridge above her mouth where a human would have had a nose, and then clearly decided that the drone didn’t need her full attention for the moment. “I gotta say, it is so cool to actually be on a crew with a Human! Like, part of the reason I love the Cimbrean run is ‘cuz I get to meet your people and stuff, but actually having one of you aboard is just—I’m babbling. Sorry.”

Ian chuckled. “Let me guess. The others complain when you start getting enthusiastic?”

“Eh, sometimes.” Dora swivelled her chair to face him. “So I’m guessing you have questions? I know I make a weird first impression, huh?”

“Actually you remind me of my younger cousin.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“Bubbly, kinda mental, queer as a nine bob note.”

“Ooh, I like that one!” Dora had a disarmingly human giggle, and Ian couldn’t tell if that was a natural Robalin laugh or an affectation. “Yeah, that’s me! Gay as fuck and proud of it!”

“First time I ever met an LGBT nonhuman.”

“Really? I heard the Ten’Gewek—”

Ian shrugged. “For them, the idea of even needing to define themselves that way is totally alien. They just fuck every which way, that’s their normal,” he said. “Pride, though? I honestly thought we were the only ones daft enough to even make a big deal out of it.”

“Yeah, well. The ‘Wisdom’—” Dora managed to cram a whole lifetime of venom into two syllables “—has it that folks like me are Deviant, and the greater good means the collective has a right to recoup its expended resources in our ‘failed’ upbringing by sending us off to labor camps.”

She shook her head and her antennae lashed irritably. “I definitely prefer the folks who have fancy colorful parades and stuff and actually celebrate being yourself. And in all the galaxy, that’s Humans. So…yeah. I like your people. A lot. Nobody else really gets just how evil the Supremacy and their fucking ‘Wisdom’ really are, but you do.”

“‘Cuz we nearly went there ourselves.”

“Exactly!” Dora nodded enthusiastically. “To the others it’s just this academic thing, this weird alien culture with alien morals. You guys fought that evil and won. And now people like me and all kinds of other people besides get to live free and open and fly a flag that says “this is who I am and that’s beautiful!” I…you probably don’t know how much that meant to me, learning that such a thing even existed. That’s why I took a Human name. I don’t want to be anything the Supremacy approves of.”

“Fair enough.” Ian agreed. “So what else should I know about you?”

Dora hesitated. “…Ooh, that’s a question. Umm…I love Japanese food and Human military history. I collect—well, you can see what I collect, I’m wearing them. Uhm…Oh! I do magic tricks!”

“Yeah? What kind?”

“The classics! Card tricks, linking rings, the cup-and-balls routine…” Dora issued an excited and decidedly nonhuman chirp of excitement. “I’ll have to show you sometime!”

“Yeah you do,” Ian agreed with a chuckle. Her enthusiasm really was infectious. “I bet that extra hand comes in useful.”

“Yeah-huh! I even invented a routine that’s physically impossible for bibrachial species!” Dora wriggled proudly. “And, well, you probably heard me singing…”

“That I did. Not bad.”

“Thanks! Anyway. Your turn.”

Ian shrugged. “Don’t really have a favorite music genre, just songs I like. Guess I like Italian food the most…Can’t play an instrument, can’t even carry a tune in a bucket, definitely can’t do card tricks, though I can speed-reload in less than two seconds and I’m pretty good at pub quizzes. Don’t have a collection of anything yet…Maybe I’ll collect glass eyes.”

“Eww-hee-hew!!” Yeah, there was no way that giggle was an affectation. Robalin, it seemed, laughed in just the same way as a human would.

“I dunno. I guess I’ve always defined myself by my work,” Ian confessed. “I knew I wanted to be a Marine from a young age, and that’s what I was ever since. Being anything else is…” He trailed off and shrugged.

Dora’s antennae bobbed sympathetically. “Still figuring it out?”

“Without much success, until the whole ‘roguish space mercenary working for an alien ninja clan’ thing came along.”

Dora actually cackled. “Hah! Yeah! You should totally lean into that, really go all in…Maybe get a brown coat and start talkin’ all folksy-like…”

“You’ve watched Firefly?”

Alien though her expressions were, it was easy to tell that Dora was thrilled he got the reference. “You did notice that I’m a massive fangirl for basically everything Human, right? I’ve seen all kindsa weird cult movies and TV shows.” Her best approximation of a mischievous smile spread slowly across her features. “I even tried my hand at cosplay. You should see me in a red wig and orange rubber suspenders!”

Ian practically choked. “You’re pulling my leg!”

“I swear I’m not!” Dora’s antennae lashed happily. “I’ll show you my Instagram later.”

Ian shook his head disbelievingly. “Well, Dora…I think working with you might just be fun.”

“I hope so!” she chirped, then indicated behind her. “But right now, I should probably actually do my job, huh?”

“Probably should. Though, do you mind if I sit in and watch for a bit? It seems interesting.”

“It’s not. But sure!” Dora turned, theatrically pretended to crack her knuckles while waggling the spare hand in front of her like a magician about to conjure a hat rabbit, then dropped her fingers onto the controls and swung the drone around to collect a container from the waiting crane.

It was, as she predicted, dull work but done diligently and well. The rhythm to it was pretty straightforward: The ship had three cargo racks, one dorsal and two pectoral, each serviced by a crane which delivered containers from the station’s own handling system, and each equipped with a drone tethered by a power feed and cables. Dora would tag the containers for the drones to collect, the drones maneuvered, grabbed their container in a forcefield, then turned and delivered it to its designated spot in the rack. The work was mostly automated, with Dora adding a sapient’s insight to what otherwise would have been a stupid, mechanical process.

Her contribution, she explained as she worked, was the little touches. Planning things out so that, for instance, when they arrived at their first port of call, they didn’t have to dig out their deliveries from under a layer of containers destined for the second port, and so on. Everything she did was calculated to reduce turnover time and allow cargo to flow freely and easily onto and off the ship. Sometimes she juggled containers from one drone to another, deciding that one delivered by the dorsal crane belonged in the starboard rack instead.

Ian had to admit, his first impression had been wrong. Dora might come across as bubbly and ditzy, but she had focus when it came to doing her job.

After a few minutes of watching, he decided he’d seen enough and the best thing was to leave her to it. They traded see-you-laters, and he slipped out of her control blister to continue his exploration. He grinned when, behind him, he heard the deafening pop music resume.

He found Morwk elbows deep in the wall near the crew quarters, an impressive feat for a Kwmbwrw: Morwk’s arms were longer than Ian was tall. He had a wheeled tool cart next to him, with an assortment of gizmos neatly laid out atop it and ready to use.

Kwmbwrw didn’t really have a neck to speak of. They didn’t need one. On their ancestral homeworld, in their native habitat, they’d fed by lifting clumps of vegetation to their mouths with their hands, and like Dora, Morwk had big, wide-set eyes that saw about three-quarters of the world around him. He didn’t turn Ian’s way, but did languidly wave a hand.

“Wild.”

“Busy?” Ian asked, leaning over slightly to inspect whatever the engineer was tinkering with.

“Always. This is routine cleaning and maintenance.” Morwk plucked a ratchet spanner off the cart and pushed it into the wall’s innards. “Do you want to know one of the comforting things about space travel?”

“What?”

“It’s a great equalizer. If the ship goes badly wrong, it’ll kill you deathworlders just as fast as the rest of us.”

“That’s your idea of comforting, huh?”

“That’s my idea of a joke. Actually, in some emergencies, you’d die first. You need more oxygen than the rest of us.”

Ian didn’t quite know how to take that joke. Whether that was an example of Kwmbwrw humour or Morwk humour in particular, he wasn’t sure. Either way… “How’s the ship doing, anyway?”

“Better than brand new. Our friends in the Clan see to that. Our little side jobs for them pay far more than cargo haulage contracts, and they want to be sure their people or packages arrive safely, so…”

“Seems like it’s been a good arrangement, then.”

“Anything that makes my job less stressful is a good arrangement.” Morwk agreed as he withdrew a probe of some kind from the panel’s innards, inspected it, grunted what was hopefully a satisfied noise, and wiped it clean. “You don’t want a stressed ship’s engineer. You want a bored one.”

“That makes sense,” Ian agreed. “Mind if I ask what got you into the career?”

Morwk pulled off a complicated Kwmbwrw shrug as he put his tool away. “The job pays well, and I have children to support.”

“Yeah? How many?”

“Three.” Morwk closed the hatch and started to screw it shut. He stepped aside and made a grateful gesture when Ian grabbed a spare screwdriver and got the opposite corner. “Their mother and I didn’t separate on good terms, but at least thanks to me they have health insurance, tuition and a stable address.”

He drove home his second holding screw and stepped back. “And I have to admit…machines are easier than House politics.”

“I can think of some Human women who think we should be matriarchal too.”

“Human society is patriarchal?”

“Where I’m from, nowadays, in theory, we’re trying for neither.”

Morwk’s eye did something a human eye could never do: it rotated in its socket, through a full ninety degrees so that his slit pupil went from horizontal to vertical. Ian had no idea what kind of an expression that was or what it meant, but it was a freakishly alien bit of physiology.

“You used a great many qualifiers in that statement,” the engineer said, outwardly.

“Human society isn’t really one thing mate. We have more than two hundred countries, and way more than that in ethnic minorities, cultures, faiths…Where I’m from, walk across town and you’ll hear three different accents. But…yeah. Most human society is patriarchal.”

Morwk chortled and his eye returned to its resting orientation. “And we have hundreds of Houses, dozens of Great Houses, and thousands of our own minorities and historical groups. It seems our species are alike in complexity.” He chortled again. “Perhaps I will ‘toast’ to blissful simplicity at mealtime today.”

“I’d drink to that,” Ian agreed.

“Excellent…incidentally, if you are willing, I could use some strong extra hands for some tasks. I know you have your own responsibilities, but…”

“Mate, I’d be glad to.”

“You’re certain? You are under no obligation to–”

“Morwk,” Ian interrupted him. “If I didn’t want to do it, I’d tell you. I’m not that bloody obtuse.”

Morwk seemed to relax a little, “Thank you.” He finished stowing his tools in the cart. He turned away from it, looped his tail around its handle, and stalked away down the deck, towing it behind him. “ I appreciate that kind of straightforward simplicity.”

“Me too, mate.”

“You’re likely to hate it when we reach our destination, then.”

“How bad can it be?” Ian asked, following him. His reply was a prolonged and rather bitter chortle.

“My new friend…” Morwk chortled again, and his translator gave him the same despairing tone of voice that Ian might have used to say ‘Oh, my sweet summer child.’ “…You have no idea.”

Date Point: 17y7m3w2d AV
Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm

Henenrythweth

In all his years serving the Great House, Rythweth had interrogated plenty of spies. Most were from the other Houses, engaging in the political and industrial Great Game that kept all the Houses alert, and therefore the Kwmbwrw people as a whole honed and sharp.

The young man currently pacing around his unadorned cell and going slowly frantic from boredom and sleep deprivation, however, was not a House man. Rythweth had known that much from the moment he first tracked down the spy. The procedures he followed were different, more than just a variation on a theme, but genuinely odd. That implied alien.

Alien infiltration of House Henen was also a frequent occurrence, but usually the foreign agents were of a different species. It was rare for a Kwmbwrw to work for an alien power. And, frankly, it was rare for alien spies to be so subtle. Pinning down this one had tested the limits of Rythweth’s experience and assets, and his success was far from complete.

Nor could it be, so long as the stubborn dung-chewer continued to hold out and say nothing. There were possibilities that urgently needed disambiguating, and the longer the interrogation went on…

That the prisoner would break eventually was not in doubt. But he could always hold on long enough for his interrogation to be obsolete. Long enough to damage Ryth’s reputation and career, and Ryth had more than one venomous cousin waiting eagerly for that opportunity. His reputation was solid enough to not be ruined by one particularly stubborn spy…but it would be a gap in his armor that his competitors would ruthlessly exploit, just as he ruthlessly exploited theirs whenever he could. The fewer such gaps he exposed, therefore, the better.

Which meant he needed something more. Something to persuade his prisoner that continued resistance would just be an exercise in needless masochism, and if he just confessed what House Henen clearly already knew in full, he could end his unpleasant stay in the interrogation cells and move on to the comparative freedom of mere prison.

The prisoner had been a trader in…well, hardware. Fuses, filters, tools and spares for every conceivable design of ship passing through the station. Nary a ship docked at Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm without needing some spare parts restocked, and Ryth had to admit to being impressed by just what a variety of small yet vital things were methodically filed away in the shop’s dense warren of shelving.

“Thoughts,” he muttered. The palm-sized lenticular drone hovering slightly above and behind him warbled softly, acknowledging that he wanted to think out loud and have his words recorded.

Ryth randomly reached up and selected a part off the shelf. It was an elbow-shaped bit of plastic tubing with some kind of locking pin at each end, and a rubber seal. “A lot of dense shelving here,” he mused aloud. “Easy to get lost in this shop. Easy to lose a sense of scale…Drone, measure this room, compare to official station schematics and inform me of any discrepancy.”

The drone purred an affirmative, and flitted up to roof height, lingered there or a moment, then returned to its position at Ryth’s shoulder.

“No significant discrepancy found.”

“Toothbreak…” Ryth cursed mildly, though he wasn’t really surprised. Things were never that easy. Still, he wasn’t ready to discard that particular idea just yet. “…Note for later, compare station schematics to archived versions, just in case…Hmm…”

One of the smaller shelves at the back of the shop caught his attention. It was narrow, tucked away in a corner, and a sign at the top read “Exotics.” A notice posted below that apologized to customers for the limited selection on that shelf, and stated that the management would be happy to order the desired part on the customer’s behalf, though shipping would likely be lengthy and expensive. At first glance, Ryth couldn’t discern how the packaged items on the shelf were any different to the thousands of other nicknacks in the rest of the shop, but he didn’t recognize the text or brand markings on them.

He picked up a pack of small cylinders.

“Drone. Translate.”

The drone hummed forward and inspected the packaging.

“Low-capacity power cells, non-standard size and specification. Origin: China, Planet Earth.”

Ryth cocked his head curiously, placed the power cells down, and picked up another with what looked like a substantially different alphabet. “And this one?”

“Fuses, non-standard size and amperage. Origin: Geng Ai Territory, Planet Gao.”

“Hmmm…tenuous, but it seems our spy has at least some contact with deathworlders…oh no. No, that’s a priority.”

A Gaoian connection could be bad. A Gaoian connection could be very bad indeed.

He turned to leave the shop, mind already whirling with unfortunate possibility, and was brought up short by an all-too-familiar figure watching him amusedly from the doorway.

“…Mother.”

She smiled, and looked around. “An interesting little boutique. I trust my most favored son is here on business?”

“Of course.”

“Wonderful. I was beginning to worry. You’re usually so punctual with your reports, I can practically set my schedule by them…” She gave him a look that somehow blended expectant but high-pressure pride with an unspecified accusation. “Is something the matter? You have the air of an urgent revelation…”

“Inspiration.”

“Oh good.” She stretched her back and tail out, languidly. “I’m pleased to know you’re just as talented as ever. Your grandmother is—”

“Mother…” Ryth didn’t look around conspiratorially. There was no surer way to attract attention. But he did make sure his next words could only possibly reach her ears and none other’s. “If you mean to imply that Grandmother is interested in this case….”

“I implied no such thing!” Mother had an impish streak. It was a flaw that Ryth had been careful not to inherit. “Oh, dear, you take your job so seriously, don’t you? I’m sure she has nothing to fear, with your faithful protection…”

She eyed the shop. “Most curious. I never would have guessed that ships needed so many kinds of parts. You’d think it would all be standardized by now, wouldn’t you?”

“Even mundane affairs have hidden complexity,” Ryth replied, neutrally and carefully. She was playing the more-stupid-than-she-actually-was act. Always testing. Ryth’s sisters and female cousins were never tested so hard, but then again, they were assumed to have the right instincts for the Great Game by dint of biology. A male, though?

Males were the earnest, honest, agreeable, straightforward thinkers. Not unintelligent, but unsubtle at the best of times, and dangerously so during the rut. So went common wisdom, anyway. Any male who overcame the deficiency of his gender enough to play the Great Game at any level, never mind what Ryth had achieved, did so in the face of millennia-old prejudice.

Ryth couldn’t blame the majority of males who looked at the insurmountable obstacle of entrenched matriarchy and decided that their lives would be easier, simpler and more enjoyable if they just accepted their lot. His own stubborn pride in playing the Game himself and playing it well had certainly been the source of much pain in his life.

And yet, in a way, his brand of very male stubbornness had worked to his advantage. There were times when taking the direct route worked. The trick was doing so sparingly and unexpectedly.

“Quite so,” Mother agreed. “In any case, I really shouldn’t interrupt you while you’re hard at work. I wouldn’t want to delay you.”

In other words, hurry the fuck up. Mother had mastered the delicate art of directness too, in her own indirect way. And right now she was telling him as bluntly as she ever did that this particular case was important.

Just how much did she know? How much did Grandmother know? Just how explosive was this particular incursion?

…A lot. If Grandmother was watching, it was explosive indeed. And Ryth could not pass it off. He’d either disarm it, or explode with it.

Rythweth bowed, pushed past Mother, and headed for the nearest tram station. There was a crawling sensation along his back now, his nerves telling him that he was suddenly playing the highest-stakes round of the Great Game yet.

And losing was not an option.

Date Point: 17y7m3w3d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Armstrong Station, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Bruuk

The delay to bring aboard several large pallets loaded with boxes, crates and construction materials had put Urgug in a resentful mood, as evidenced by the slow ripples of color sweeping across his body under the fur. He loathed delays. Days spent in port were days spent paying the crew but not earning the money to pay them.

Still, the shipmaster had granted Wild time to bring aboard furniture for his quarters, plus other materials for a “project” in one of the Krr’zkvik’s unused storage bays.

The ship wasn’t old, but the original design was obsolete. Irbzrk Shipyards had been a prodigious producer of fully pressurized cargo ships, most of the hull being a honeycomb of individual bays, accessed, managed and loaded via the freighter’s long, hollow spine. It hadn’t been an inefficient system at all, and for certain kinds of cargo it had even been the better system. Shipping containers capable of protecting their contents from vacuum were far more expensive than just adding yet another large pressurized space to a ship already made out of large pressurized spaces.

Still, that obstacle too had faded with time and manufacturing. When the Krr’skvik had been retrofitted to accept containers on external racks, a half-dozen or so of her internal holds had been left behind, the ones installed within the ship’s main body rather than in the “trailer.” They mostly went unused. Urgug and Morwk had kept a few spare parts and supplies in there, but nothing that couldn’t be consolidated.

Now, it seemed, the shipmaster had given one of them to Wild for him to breathe new life and utility into. Bruuk had no idea what the one-eyed Human intended to do with that space, but it apparently involved several large sheets and boards of cheap pressed wood fiber (one of the ways Humans were really alien, that; no Gaoian carpenter would ever insult wood that way), plus nails, screws, glue and paint..

Once it was all aboard, however, there had been no reason for further delay. Whatever business Wild, the shipmaster and the Clan had with a ton of cheap construction material, it was now secondary to the business of getting their ship moving, their cargo of dry corn delivered and the Clan’s friend rescued or avenged.

The crew, for the most part, were on the bridge for departure. Only Dora and Morwk were absent, ensuring that the cargo and the ship were both comfortable with the transition to interstellar flight. For Bruuk and Wild, however, there was nothing to do except lurk at the back and talk quietly.

“So what’s your story, Bruuk?”

Bruuk flicked his ear at Wild’s question, then duck-shrugged. “Don’t really have one.”

“Oh come off it. A big bloke like you, working on a freighter that runs gigs for Clan Whitecrest on the side? Like…any other Clan, maybe. But them?”

Bruuk cheered slightly from the compliment, but kept his answer carefully neutral. “They’re just a Clan. The only thing interesting about them is their mandate and focus. For me, this is just a job. Same goes for Morwk and Urgug, and the Shipmaster never really discusses himself. Moj and Dora are the ‘interesting’ ones.”

Wild leaned casually against the wall and watched Moj apply enough reverse thrust to push them loose from Armstrong. With puffs of gas and clouds of little water crystals, the docking umbilicals separated and drifted free in the vacuum before slowly crawling back into their stowed positions.

“Just a Clan? No offense mate, but bullshit. In my experience, anyone connected to Whitecrest is never boring. They don’t like boring people.”

Bruuk duck-shrugged. “If ‘ya say so. All I know is, I was a goods vehicle operator. A trucker? I spent mosta my time movin’ shit back and forth along the northern isthmus highway.”

“I often wondered why your people never went with autonomous lorries and all that.”

“We did. My job was dull. Enter a destination, then sit back and stay alert for anything that might need me to hit the emergency brakes, or take over when the road markings and survey was no good. And of course, handle the paperwork, keep the vehicle in good repair, all the stuff that software couldn’t do…” Bruuk sighed. “Dull, but relaxing too. I could listen to talk shows and thoughtcasts, or music, or read a book. And it paid well! It was a pretty good life, actually. I had some successful dates, not bad ‘fer a young brownie. Sired a few cubs, too.”

“Congratulations.”

“Mmm.” Bruuk shook his head. It wasn’t a story to be congratulated on, but he’d started it. In for a claw, in for a paw. “…The most recent mother’s name was Meeki. She was an accountant, and a good one. She took one look at my finances and in seconds she told me how much I owed to the city and region for infrastructure, how expensive a workhouse I could afford to live in, how much I should give to the Females to seem generous but not extravagant, foolish or desperate…”

He turned his nose slightly Ian’s way and flicked an ear. “She was very proud of her cybernetics, you see.”

Wild’s expression twisted a little. He didn’t say anything though, just listened. He was a good listener, it seemed, and Bruuk didn’t feel like fighting the urge to say more anyway.

“So that was how the war began for me. Three hours outside of Yuy Geng, I got a message from the Commune congratulating me on siring a healthy little male and asking if I wanted to suggest a name. Shortly after that, I was fighting for my life against a biodrone.” Bruuk looked out the window as Armstrong rolled and turned away from them. “…that cub was probably torn apart by his own mother. The other two…wouldn’t have left the Commune yet.”

Wild clearly had no idea what to say.

“…Fuck, mate—”

“It’s the past.” Bruuk shook his pelt out. “Better to let it out than let it fester.”

“Lot of people have lost, this past decade.”

“Exactly. Why should I be more miserable than them? I lived. Fyu, I’ve got both my eyes, both my nuts and a working sniffer. I helped form a little refugee community at a rest and refreshment stop, operated my vehicle’s radio to coordinate survivors, fought off biodrone raids…When the Grand Army marched up the Three Valleys and rescued us, a Stoneback came and talked to me, I moved on, got hired by Whitecrest…and here I am.”

“Made you the same kind of offer they made me, huh?”

“Well, except the crew doesn’t concern itself much about my skill at smashing shit and fucking things up. They think I’m here to cook, clean, and handle simple medical issues.”

Across the bridge, Urgug rumbled a quiet reply to Armstrong traffic control, then raised his voice for the rest to hear. “We are cleared to go to warp, at a top speed of one kilolight until we have passed the system threshold.”

Moj turned his head. “Heading and speed set. Cargo secured, propulsion and power nominal. On your command, shipmaster.”

Trrrk’k nodded. “Go to warp, helm.”

“Going to warp. Power to FTL in three…two…one…”

Outside the bridge’s portside window, the planet Cimbrean-V and the small crawling lights of traffic around Armstrong immediately vanished. There was no blur of acceleration, no sense of them lurching away. The ship achieved a thousand times the speed of light in less than a second, far too sharp an acceleration for anything biological to react to.

Wild grunted slightly. “…Y’know, I’ve travelled FTL before, but I never actually got to look out a window,” he said. “It’s a bit anticlimactic, isn’t it?”

“One does feel as though the occasion deserves a swirl of lights or a visible distortion or something,” Urgug agreed. “Alas, reality is often boring.”

“Yeah, but our Gaoian isn’t.” Wild reached out and gave Bruuk a hefty, aggressively friendly clap on the shoulder. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come have a look at what I’m building down in Hold Four? I think you’ll enjoy it. More interesting than watching the sky do nothing, at least.”

Bruuk tried not to sigh. Wild reminded him of some of his workhouse-mates back on Gao. Perpetually eager to Make Friends, or to get up and Do. His energy was more…mature than theirs, but still fundamentally the same. For a moment he considered turning the offer down to see if he got the same disappointed cub reaction, or maybe a small friendly tussle until he yielded…

But no. He could tell just by sniffing that Wild would simply shrug and affably leave him alone. And besides, the Human was right: space travel was dull unless one had something to do, which right now Bruuk did not.

“Why not?” he agreed. Maybe his new crewmate wasn’t so bad after all.

Though, he still stunk.

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Moj visited them an hour or so later, while Ian and Bruuk were happily at work.

Ethnicity was a weird thing, for Gaoians. The differences between silverfurs, brownfurs, and rarer pelt colors like the russets, wheatens and blackfurs, were a lot more than just a palette swap. A human was a human was a human, in Ian’s experience. Didn’t matter how much melanin somebody had or what shape their cheekbones were; personality traits were mostly a matter of upbringing and culture, not genetics.

Gao, though? Their ethnic groups were more like breeds. To Ian’s mind it felt more than a little bloody racist sometimes, but the fact was you could guess at a Gaoian’s general temperament from his fur colour. And Bruuk was a brownie, through and through. Give him something practical to do with his paws, and he’d not only pitch in, he’d thoroughly enjoy it.

He especially loved the nailgun. But really, who wouldn’t?

They were building a selection of plywood and MDF doors, walls, corners and targets to serve as an indoor firing range and basic assault course. Bruuk hadn’t got his head around the idea at first, but he’d twigged after a while, and even grown enthusiastic when Ian had explained he’d seen some Gaoians flow through the one at Sharman with times that beat the Human operators.

After that of course, those brownie competitive instincts kicked in. And Bruuk, being a short and physically powerful juggernaut of a brownie himself, had a fighting streak a mile wide.

The Mjrnhrm, of course, had no idea what they were making. He stood in the doorway with his vestigial wing casings buzzing shrilly for a moment, then approached Ian with his head tilted curiously.

“You’re building a house?”

“Sort of,” Ian agreed. “Not a real one. It’s for training.”

“Ah. War.” Moj buzzed again. “Hear humans know a lot about that.”

“You don’t?” Ian asked. He honestly didn’t know much about the Mjrnhrm or their history, but Moj cut such a fascinating figure with his many and conflicting religious tattoos that he could barely wait to learn more.

“All species war. But prejudice on my homeworld is, Humans do it more, and worse.”

“Far as I can tell mate, that’s not unfair.” Ian waved a hand at Bruuk, encouraging him to take a breather, but Bruuk just shook his head and enthusiastically continued nailing bits of wood together. Oh well. At least he was having fun.

“You plan to train us?”

“Well, even if we still lived in the world of pulse pistols, I wouldn’t want to get in a fight without somebody watching my back,” Ian explained.

“Even then? Pulse weapons can’t hurt you, I heard.”

“Not totally true. They’d knock me around, bruise me, batter me, tire me out. It might take more pulse fire to bring a human down, but we’re not immune.” Ian picked up his water bottle and took a swig. “Besides, why tank a hit when you can just not get hit at all? And the best way to do that is to have mates at your back, go hard, and take the other bastard down before he even knows what’s going on.”

Moj considered that, flared his wing casings, then nodded. “…I see. Never thought I’d learn to fight like a human.”

“Well, you have to walk before you run mate.” Ian swigged the water a second time, then sealed it. “Care to help? An extra pair of hands will make this go faster.”

“Of course. I have an hour.”

“Before what?”

“Prayer.” Moj stood. “Five times a day.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask…”

“Then ask.”

Ian shrugged. He grabbed a sheet of MDF and rolled it upright, holding it steady while indicating for Moj to grab the screwdriver and a board. “You…do know some of the faiths you’re wearing are mutually incompatible, right?”

“To a Human maybe,” Moj replied, evenly. “To me…different faces of the same shape. Different shadows cast by different lights.”

This, coming from a being with both Satanic and Christian imagery etched into his hide, never mind all the others, gave Wilde pause. He was still trying to think of where to even begin that conversation when Moj issued one of his amused buzzes and explained.

“I am insane,” he said. “So other Mjrn say, anyway.”

He aligned the board where Ian indicated, then, at Ian’s nod, lined up a screw and fastened it to the MDF. “Doesn’t matter to me. I just know this is important.” he indicated his mismatched tattoos. “So important that millions of your people died for all these ideas. So important that other, older species culled them from mine and the others. Each one opens the mind in a different way, points Higher in a different way.”

“It can’t all be true though.”

“Doesn’t have to be true to contain truth.”

Bruuk groaned and set the nailgun safely aside. “You got him started. I can’t follow him when he gets like this…”

“You don’t want to,” Moj replied.

“‘Cuz it ain’t interestin’ to me. Maybe it is to some of those Starmind fellows…”

“Yes, I talked with them.” Moj indicated where the Starmind clan mon was etched into him. “They’re like me. You aren’t. That’s okay.”

“Be a bloody boring galaxy if we were all the same,” Ian agreed. “So…what? You collect faiths and pick out the bits that work for you?”

“They tell many versions of the same story. Sometimes they disagree on who is hero and who is villain. Sometimes they disagree on what is good and what is true. Your Plato, he talked about people who live in a cave, telling stories about the shadows on the wall but not looking outside to see the real form.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that, mate, ancient Greek philosophy isn’t my thing. I’m more like Bruuk here. Like…it’s interesting, sure. But I’ve got other stuff on my mind.”

“Like?” Moj asked, lining up another board.

“Like building this course, mate.” Ian gestured for Bruuk to hand him the nailgun. The Gaoian sighed and did so, reluctantly. Moj issued another amused buzz, and let the conversation go, and the next hour or so was spent discussing nothing but the simple things like “no, there,” or “that one’s gonna be a corner piece.”

Moj did, as promised, slip away to pray at the top of the hour, but he was back fifteen minutes later with snacks and water, and Dora too, who was more than happy to start painting the finished wall sections.

By the end of the day, the range was more or less complete. It wasn’t wired up with lights or anything—none of them were dumb enough to start patching into the ship’s power grid without Morwk’s consent and assistance—and the paint and glue were still wet, but it stood up and could easily be put together in a variety of different, plausible configurations, complete with pleasingly ugly paper Hunters for targets.

Naturally, the ETs all wanted a demonstration, and Ian was only too happy to oblige. He’d been itching for the exercise anyway, so under the guise of getting equipment he headed back to his room, loosened up and got his blood moving…

…Then indulged his inner geardo and loaded himself up with his full kit, complete with armor plating. He’d pay for that after a week of little proper exercise, but it’d look badass, and he’d feel badass, and that was what he needed right now.

Their reactions when he returned were interesting. It was hard to tell what Moj thought, but Bruuk plainly approved. Dora though…

“…Woah. You look scary.”

“I think that’s the idea,” Bruuk informed her.

“Partly. That’s why I have a skull mask. But mostly, it’s to break up my outline. This coloration is for most foliage because I don’t have my gear set up for on-ship assaults, but you get the idea.”

He handed Dora the stopwatch. “Time starts when I go through that door. Time ends when I yell ‘Done.’ ‘Kay?”

She nodded seriously, and gripped the watch eagerly in two hands while the third’s finger hovered over the button. Ian tried not to chuckle, took up his starting position and…

He’d been out of the fight, out of training, for far too long. He could feel his movements were rusty, even in a totally static assault course. They didn’t have aggressors, or fake pop-ups, or any distractions or anything…He had what he needed to add all those things, but for now it was basic as all-get-out.

Still, it was good fun to run, even if he felt a bit more winded than he’d prefer. And there was just something satisfying about shooting Hunters, even if it was only airsoft and even if they were just paper stand-ins. There was never a wrong time to kill him some bugs.

“Done!”

Dora fumbled the watch, adding a second or so to his time, but she still blinked at it in astonishment. “You’re so fast! I could barely follow you!”

Bruuk flicked an ear. “…You say you’ve worked with other Gaoians who can do that?”

Ian couldn’t resist the broad grin that spread across his face. “A fair few, yeah. A few of those blokes are absolute demons, too.”

“And you expect I’ll be doing that, by the time you’re done with me.”

“Ayup. I can see you’ve got some pretty goddamn heavy muscle tone under that shaggy fur, Bruuk. It won’t take you long.”

Bruuk visibly swelled with pride and showed off an arm well bigger than Ian’s. Heavily muscled was a hell of an understatement. He was short for a brownie, maybe only five foot seven, but he’d layered it on thick in that long-bodied athletic way only Gaoians could manage. “Balls yeah! I’ve worked hard enough for it! And I’ll be doing this wearing all that equipment, too?”

“Mate, a big bastard like you? You can handle it easy.”

“I know that! I mean, where’d we even get any for me?”

“I’ve got a chest full of kit and goodies that should fit, though I was expecting a silverfur, so the armor will definitely be tight around your chest. We’ll sort it out.”

“And me?” Moj asked.

“Well, that’ll be a problem, yeah. But I couldn’t solve it before we boarded, so we’ll just need to make do.” Ian smiled, and shrugged his airsoft rifle’s strap over his head, and held it out to offer them. “So…who wants to go first?”

Date Point: 17y8m AV
Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, Erwn-Bwrw system, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Henenrythweth

“Hello, Uwrik.”

The prisoner’s expression was the same bored, blank thing that Ryth had seen a dozen times by now. In a way, he truly admired Uwrik. Spy though he may be, the chained man on the other side of the table had incredible will and endurance.

Interrogation was a science, and Ryth was well-trained in it. He knew well that Uwrik had to be approaching his breaking point now. He’d known nobody but Ryth, been given no way to measure out time, been given no luxuries at all save those tiny few he’d earned in his rare moments of cooperation…which were of course confiscated again when he reverted to defiance.

The whole process was a probe aimed at the oldest, most irresistible animal parts of the brain, effective on every sapient species alive. There wasn’t a being in all the galaxy that didn’t respond to training, and the training in House Henen’s detention facility was clear and straightforward: Cooperate, and be rewarded. Refuse, and get nothing.

Nothing at all. Not conversation, not music, not art, not satisfying food, not comfort, not even a routine.

Pain, in Ryth’s opinion, would have been a far more tolerable infliction. Urwik might pretend to be stoically enduring his desolate condition, but the microphones and cameras in his cell told a different story. He was getting frantic. And his self-reassuring mutterings, the fantasies he played out aloud as he paced, the whole fictional world he was building in his head to try and escape, they all revealed more than he might have wished.

The Gaoian connection, for instance, was a certainty at this point.

“I went digging into your business connections since last we spoke, Uwrik.” Ryth laid his tablet on the table between them. “You have a great many, don’t you? Understandable, really. So many makes and models of ship from so many shipyards, so many species…A businessman like you had to be prepared for anyone to come to your shop, needing supplies. Your arrest has been a terrible inconvenience to hundreds of ships, you know.”

Uwrik sighed. It had taken a while to get him to even speak a word to Rythweth, but that was the point. Ryth was the only person he got to speak with. There was nobody else. “I thought you would have sold the shop by now.”

“We’re going to, of course. It’s House Henen property. But that can’t go ahead until I sign off and say that the store is of no further interest to my investigation.”

“What more is there to investigate? You always act like you already know everything.”

Ryth just pushed the tablet forward for him to inspect. “I know that the Gaoian firm you use isn’t real. Oh, it was, until its owners and workers were all either biodroned, murdered by biodrones, or vaporized by the Great Father. But since the Gaoian War, Jishi Interstellar Distribution has existed only on paper.”

He smiled at the tic that crossed Uwrik’s face. “Cunning of the Gao, that. Not just a shell company, but a real company that met an unfortunate end and was…hmm…repurposed to serve. They’re a ruthless species, aren’t they?”

“You’re no less ruthless, Ryth.”

“Which is why I intended it as a compliment.” Ryth retrieved his pad. “So. You’re spying for the Gao. A dangerous species who have routinely violated Kwmbwrw space and conducted military operations along our borders. A species led by a dictator who has unflinchingly described himself as ‘the greatest mass murderer in history’ and shown contempt for Dominion law on multiple occasions, including his role in the illegal elevation of a pre-contact species whom he has vassalized into his army.”

“…That’s not a fair or accurate description at all.”

“Why do you care? What does it matter to you if I slander an alien warlord?”

Uwrik said nothing.

Ryth gave him a primly satisfied look and put the tablet away in his case. “To an extent, I can see the appeal of them. The Gao have a reputation for being…uncomplicated. Loyal. Honest and forthright. A society where the men run the show, and run it like it should be, eh? To a certain kind of man, I’m sure the fantasy of a society that just…oh…sees what’s wrong and deals with it directly? Where even courtship is straightforward and honest? Where the go-to mode of conflict resolution is a quick fight, establish a dominance hierarchy and then go back to being friends? And whose supreme leader is the absolute, utter embodiment of those ideals? Oh yes, I can understand how that might appeal to a certain kind of man.”

He fixed Uwrik with a glare. “You are not a Gaoian. You will never be a Gaoian, and if I were you I would be very happy about that fact, because it means I don’t get to just claw your throat out and drink your blood for betraying the House, even if I was barbaric enough to want to. We have rules, and we stick to them even when they are inconvenient. Our Matriarch won’t pin you to the ground and tear you apart like a Hunter.”

He sat back, and allowed Uwrik to stew in silence, watching carefully.

“I think you need to spend some time thinking about what kind of people you’ve been serving,” he declared after a few seconds. “And you need to think about just how much good you were doing with your honest, productive, helpful business before you threw it all away.”

He stood to leave. “Return the prisoner to his cell, please.”

He got exactly what he wanted. Uwrik’s anger finally proved to be his breaking point.

“At least they aren’t slavers.”

…Now that was a turn Ryth wasn’t expecting at all. This wasn’t a time to carefully construct an interrogation plan. This was something that needed eating while it was still fresh.

“Really, now?” He turned back toward the table, and gestured for the guards to step back. “Care to elaborate?”

Uwrik scowled at him. “You talk about how we obey the rules? About barbarism? How…how fucking dare you?!” Ryth had to admit, he was impressed by just how much hatred the prisoner managed to squeeze into the simple and wildly successful Human expletive. It was the only word of any language in the entire galaxy that practically every sapient being knew. “You? You’re propping up a House that writes the rules to suit itself, and writes new ones when they stop being convenient!”

He surged to his feet, straining against his shackles. “I know all about that steady trickle of cubs and biodrones ‘rescued’ from Gorai. I know all about that army you’re building, an assault team to match First Fang and the HEAT, the perfect shield against the Hunters. And you know what’s going to happen when the Great Father learns the names of the monsters who’re helping you? Oh yes, he’s going to pin them down and punish them. But he won’t rip them apart, oh no. He’ll make their punishment last. He’ll fuck them up so hard and for so long, they will beg for death before he finally grows bored. Only then will he hand them over to Straightshield for the real punishment, and only when they’ve flayed the monsters’ skins, will Daar crush them, rip their limbs off, and finally tear them in half. As. He. Fucking. Should.”

A pulse round flattened Uwrik’s head from behind and painted the whole room with his brains.

A lifetime of paranoia spared Rythweth the same fate.

It had been expensive, having shield generators hidden in his clothing and jewelry. Each was tiny, discreet, and individually weak, but together they meant the shot intended for him splashed harmlessly off the air a finger-thickness from his skull.

His survival prompted the treacherous guards into a moment of stunned silence. Rythweth didn’t waste it. There was only one exit from the room, it lay between them, it was locked and they had the keys. It was move, or die.

He charged. Agony sang down his right arm as his mental command activated a cybernetic he’d had installed years ago but never intended to use: the fusion blade embedded in his forearm bisected one of the guards down to his midriff, carving easily through armour, flesh and bone with a fearsome sizzle.

By some stroke of pure fortune, Ryth’s shields barely held as the second guard shot him again, a shaved instant before Ryth cut the legs out from under him.

A moment after that, the guard’s own gun silenced his agonized shrieking.

And now, Rythweth had to move. He fumbled at the guard’s belt with trembling fingers, retrieved the key, jammed it into the reader. The door clicked. He barged it open.

And he ran.

Date Point: 17y8m1w AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Interstellar space

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

It had taken a few days to get his quarters set up the way he liked it, but Ian was pretty pleased overall. He’d used a couple of dividers to cut his living space in half, and thus created a combined gym and armory of sorts at one end. He needed a workbench for cleaning the guns and modifying the gear he’d brought with him, so that half of the room pulled double duty alongside a barbell and a squat rack, a bench, some dumbbells, a yoga mat and a set of kettlebells.

A sofa bed, a rug, a coffee table, an XBox and a bookshelf turned the other half into a pretty damn decent living space, and a couple of oversized beanbags neatly solved the question of how to accommodate alien visitors.

He’d been a little disappointed that only three of the crew accepted his invitation to movie night. Dora had, of course, and she arrived bearing her version of nachos, topped with a face-meltingly hot salsa. Robalin, it turned out, couldn’t taste capsaicin, and Dora thought the eye-watering stuff was just sweet and tangy.

Spicy food had always been Ian’s Achilles heel. Dora didn’t seem to mind getting the nachos all to herself, though. She munched them appreciatively with one hand while the other two bamboozled him with card tricks.

Ian had to admit, it was a good routine.

Morwk brought a (surprisingly good) vegan cake and hummus with dipping vegetables, plus a few tools and adapters to help finally get the Xbox hooked up to the huge entertainment screen that dominated the forward wall.

They had to move one of the dividers aside to make room for Urgug, whose contribution to the snacks was a vat of popcorn, and a keg of beer.

That one came as a surprise. It wasn’t a human brand, but instead covered in the liquid script of Ugundravnu, with a psychedelic label that probably meant something to a Guv.

“I didn’t think ETs drunk alcohol.”

Urgug rumbled interestedly “Really? Why not?”

“Heard it doesn’t affect you guys.”

“Oh, I heard about this!” Dora chirped. “Apparently the first time a human got drunk on Gao it caused a lot of confusion ‘cuz the Gao can basically drink neat ethanol and all it does is loosen them up a bit, but Humans get all sleepy and wobbly and totally fucked up.”

“That’s what I heard, yeah,” Ian confirmed. He didn’t mention that he’d heard it directly from a partner of the woman involved, though.

“It’s the same compound for everyone,” Morwk pointed out. “It maybe hits Humans harder, but stick enough of a solvent in a living organism and they’ll feel it.”

“Huh. Today I learned.” Ian poured himself a cup, then considered Urgug. “…You’d have to drink a lot to get the same blood alcohol percentage as me, too.”

“Maybe that is part of it,” Urgug agreed. “Is anybody else coming?”

Dora shook her head. “Moj called it a distraction, and Bruuk is…well, he’s warming up to our Human here, I think, but you know what he’s like. Can’t cuddle up in case we all suddenly think he’s going soft.”

“Yeah, I’ve never met a Gaoian so standoffish before,” Ian said, and swigged his beer. It was pretty good, albeit incredibly strongly alcoholic and way more malty than he usually like. He’d have to introduce Urgug to the joy of hops sometime. “All the ones I know love to make new friends.”

“Most of his friends died during the biodrone war,” Morwk revealed, prompting Dora to stop shuffling cards, and Urgug to turn a somber shade of aquamarine.

Ian nodded solemnly. “Afraid to get close to anyone again, you think?”

“He’d probably bristle at the accusation that he’s afraid of anything, but yes.”

“I can get behind that. I was there for that war, like I said. It was fucking ugly, mate. Daar blowing up all those cities stopped it from turning into a total clusterfuck, but…”

“But in doing so he killed everyone Bruuk knew and loved,” Morwk said.

“Fucking hell. No wonder he’s got that chip on his shoulder.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Dora disagreed. “I mean, maybe part of it. But you’ve seen how hard he throws himself at that training course you built. He was lifting weights and exercising hard every day after he heard a Human was joining us, and it wasn’t like he’d been slacking off before, either. I don’t think he can tolerate being second place behind anyone or anything.”

…Ahhh.

“…You know, I think I know how to deal with that,” Ian said, half to himself, then changed the subject. “Anyway. Movie?”

“Nothing violent, please,” Urgug urged, to Morwk’s physical agreement. “I cannot fathom your species’ passion for slaughter, horror and terror as entertainment.”

“Aww, you just vetoed all the best ones!” Dora objected.

“Not all of ‘em,” Ian replied. He mentally removed Schindler’s List from consideration too, given the kind of society Dora had fled, but that still left plenty of good stuff both old and new…

After a little negotiation, they settled on Ghostbusters as a good compromise between Urgug’s delicate sensibilities and Dora’s desire for something more exciting. Even so, it was secretly funny as hell to watch the big guy squirm and fidget at the ghosts and weirdness on screen.

To Ian’s quiet delight, Bruuk joined them around about the time Sigourney Weaver was doing her levitation act, which Urgug was watching from behind one hand while alarm and discomfort strobed across his skin. Given that half the couch was unoccupied—nobody else was the right shape or size to fit on it—he slunk up onto it with a no-big-deal kind of forced nonchalance and sat there to watch. Tightly coiled, as if expecting…something. A fight of some kind.

Ian just handed him a bag of doritos, said nothing, and watched the movie.

Date Point: 17y8m1w AV
Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, Erwn-Bwrw system, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Heneneriwyth

“I told you we should have inducted him. Something like this was only a matter of time. My exact words, if you care to recall.”

“I know. And I understand how painful this must be for you. He is my grandson, I don’t care for this at all.”

“We should bring him in alive. Explain that the guards—”

“The guards did exactly what they were ordered to do. Unfortunate that we did not think to give them more nuanced orders, but each such nuance would be a chance for project Dreaming Blade to leak, and that cannot happen.”

“My son is loyal to the House.”

“Your son was loyal to his ambition. He considered the House his greatest obstacle and adversary, not the object of his unswerving devotion. Everything he did was for himself, dear, not for House Henen, and I have explained this every time in the past when you petitioned for his advancement. Is your affection for him clouding your judgement?”

“…I dislike wasting talent.”

“And if you are ever Grandmatriarch, you will run the House as you see fit, though you will need to be much more ruthless if you expect to hold this seat for long, my girl. Talent exists to be spent. Sometimes, a regrettable loss is the price we pay for a greater gain, or to avert an even greater loss. Young Rythweth is a painful loss, he truly is. But you know that we stand to lose far, far more than one unusually cunning male.”

“…I do.”

“Then you know we cannot gamble on the hope that his loyalty has survived this little interlude, if it ever was as strong as you claim.”

“…I know.”

“Good.” The Grandmatriarch’s tone softened, became more sympathetic. “I know I’m asking a terrible thing of you, my darling. But family has to clean up its own mess. Your exact words, if you care to recall.”

A moment of seething, futile, despairing hatred went totally unexpressed. Concealed in that quotation was the veiled certainty of what would happen if Heneneriwyth herself became a ‘mess’ to be cleaned up.

“…I understand.”

“Good girl. Be swift, daughter. It will be less painful for all of us if you are decisive. Do you know where to start?”

“Rythweth is hiding amidst hundreds of thousands, and he knows the station well. There is a freighter coming, though. Jishi Interstellar Distribution, the front company that the spy reported to his masters through. If we allow it to dock, that should draw him out of hiding, and pressuring the crew should force an error.”

“And if it does not, Hunter attacks are so very easy to simulate.”

“The Gaoians won’t fall for that.”

“Dead spies are merely a diplomatic incident, my daughter. Dreaming Blade is a war. Remember what the stakes are, and act accordingly.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Excellent. I will leave the matter in your proven hands, then.”

Eriwyth stared at the blank screen for some time, paralyzed by the turmoil in her chest as her maternal instincts duelled with her loyalty. She could…

Pragmatism stepped in and brought the duel to a decisive close. She was too involved in Dreaming Blade herself. The Gao would have no sympathy for her. She would be destroyed, torn limb from limb just like the House she had sacrificed her whole life for.

It was a terrible thing, to murder one’s own son. To know that her own mother would not hesitate to kill her too, if need be. It was a cruel, awful game the House played. But the only way to live was to keep playing it.

She willed her heart to freeze again, and turned away to do her duty.

Date Point: 17y8m1w AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Interstellar space

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“How is he so bad with Females?! He had a chance with…whatshername?”

“Dana, played by Sigourney Weaver.”

“She’s so pretty and she even smiled at him! How could he blow it so hard?!”

Of course. The thing that finally grabbed Bruuk by the balls was the romantic subplot. Ian wasn’t sure what he was expecting, really; nothing interested Gaoian males more than females. Those instincts were so strong they seemed to translate over to other species, and Bruuk was no exception. He seemed almost personally offended at how awkward all the males were around Dana, and most of his grousing centered on their collective romantic ineptness.

“Not everyone’s a smooth operator, Bruuk.”

“That’s no excuse! You can’t sire a cub if you can’t even score a date! Louis needs to learn how to talk to people! And they both need to spend some time in the gym.”

Ian snorted at that. Low-degree males in his experience were usually slim, urbane creatures, more androgynous then manly. They tended to be thoughtful and polite, with that fierce streak all Gaoians had well-hidden under layers of civilization. Apparently that wasn’t how it worked with brownies. Bruuk was in basically all respects uncannily like every brownfur Ian had ever met. He was brash and uncomplicated. He reeked of exertion and musk, and was built like a powerlifting bear. He wasn’t shy about sharing his opinions, either. In fact, as far as Ian could tell, the only real difference between Bruuk and, say, Kodiak or Daar was one of simple stature.

The chip on his shoulder was definitely odd, but even then it didn’t overcome his essential Gaoian-ness, once he’d got himself invested in the movie. As a result, Ian now had an absolutely massive boulder of muscle pressing itself firmly against his flank as they watched the movie progress, all standoffishness forgotten as he groused along with his New Friend.

Experimentally, Ian put an arm around Bruuk’s hefty shoulders. The burly Gaoian stiffened for a moment, but unwound just as quickly and offered to share his meat snack. Some kind of Gaoian jerky. Ian took some and offered up some of his crisps in turn. Who didn’t like cronchy food?

Well, besides Morwk, who eyed the jerky with disdain and shifted his weight away from it. Kwmbwrw were, biologically speaking, omnivores. Deep in their ancient past, they’d grazed on water weeds and amphibianoid critters in their native swampy marshlands, but proximity to Hunter space had made their homeworld a regular raiding target. They’d understandably developed a profound cultural aversion to meat-eating as a result.

Bruuk clearly didn’t care. Ian gave their engineer a small apologetic shrug, but ate anyway. He had been getting kinda sick of the vegan diet, and the Gao made good jerky. To his credit, Morwk was cosmopolitan enough to not comment.

Urgug hushed them again. “I keep missing dialogue! Why is there a giant white thing now?”

“Because Ray couldn’t keep his mind blank, so he imagined the most harmless possible thing he could, and Gozer…”

“Gozer did a Keeda trick.”

“I can’t decide if this movie is scary or not,” Dora said, twitching one of her antennae.

“So long as it’s entertaining, who cares?”

“You’ve got a point…” she reached over and tried to snag a crisp out of Ian’s bag. Bruuk shifted a little to get out of her way. Funny, he’d been on the crew a long time, and while he seemed to already be warming up to Ian, he was still oddly cold with the nonhumans.

Whatever. Maybe it was just another case of the two species clicking.

Urgug’s complaint worked at least. The rest of the movie passed in relative silence, until the conclusion bought a bit more romantic grumbling from Bruuk, and the credits rolled.

“So, do we want to watch the sequel?”

Bruuk bounced up to his feet. “You can if you want. I gotta get my blood movin.’”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Might go push the sled up and down the hall for a bit.”

“…Wait. You have a weighted sled?”

“Uh-huh. I’ve got a way more better set of weights an’ stuff than ‘yers.” Bruuk tilted his head, clearly pondering something. “…Uh, you wanna see?”

Ian considered. He wasn’t sure what the dynamic between Bruuk and the rest of the crew was, exactly, but it seemed a natural breaking point anyway. Morwk was already making motions to leave, and Dora was far too easy-going to be offended.

“…Yeah, I think I just might. Can’t sit still for too long, hey?”

“The snacks are almost gone anyway,” Dora added, waving an empty bowl.

That settled it. Wilde said his good-nights to everyone and showed them out the door, with a promise of another movie night sometime later. Bruuk, on the other hand, was almost bouncy now that the two were alone.

“C’mon! I’ve sat down for too long I’m itching to do something!”

Understanding clicked in Ian’s head. Of course! Nobody else on the crew could keep up with Bruuk! None of them could play with him the way he wanted to play. Urgug was probably strong enough to pull that sled, but Guv were strong in a big, slow, plodding way. They couldn’t explode like a pouncing Gaoian or a Human powerlifter. They couldn’t achieve the vigorous activity that Bruuk clearly craved. They couldn’t compete with him.

“You get set up. I’ll change and be with you in a tick.”

Bruuk nodded happily and, for the first time Ian had seen, dropped to all fours and charged out of the room.

Ian spent a minute or so tidying up before changing. He didn’t want to come back to a room full of empty crisp packets and beer cups after a strenuous workout, after all. By the same logic, he unfolded the sofa bed, got it ready to sleep in too.

Having delayed enough, he changed, stretching as he did so. Truth was, he wasn’t worried. Bruuk might be a charging ball of enthusiastic energy who’d come more alive when talking about his sled than he had at pretty much anything else Ian had seen, but he was no Warhorse. This wasn’t about to be a surgical body-improvement session, this was going to be fun.

…Hopefully.

Date Point: 17y8m1w2d AV
Starship Avenging Rage, approaching the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Father Eku of Clan One-Fang

“This is where we part ways, Krr’zkvik. Safe travels.”

“And to you, Avenging Rage.” Shipmaster Trrrk’k looked old and tired, as far as Eku was concerned. He was old, as old as Fyu. Apparently his species lasted a good while longer even from such an venerable count of years, but in Trrrk’k’s case it was hard to see how. That smoker’s cough didn’t sound healthy.

Of course, they had no intention of parting ways. That was merely for the benefit of their watchers. But the Rage did have to peel off and stay on the Gaoian side of the border for appearances, at least for a few hours. Then they could go silent, slip back across the border and tail the Krr’zkvik to her destination.

Which was technically a breach of several interstellar treaties, but the Great Father had ordered it, so it was so. Trrrk’k knew the truth, the Rage’s crew knew the truth, and they were the only ones who needed to know.

The trip so far had been…mixed. Every comms synchronization had come with a burst of new Hunter reports. People were dying by the thousands out there, on remote stations, outposts and facilities. But this was the main arterial tradelane linking Gaoian space—the Hunters’ most successful predators—and the Great Houses, who were easily the most militant and Hunter-savvy of the Dominion species.

In other words, a hard enough target that all the slaughter was happening somewhere else. A small fast blip on spacial distortion sensors might have been a Swarmship at high warp, scouting the border territories for easy pickings, but other than that the journey had been uneventful. A litany of death from other places, but uneventful.

Eku was losing his gods-damned mind.

Not that he wanted anything to go wrong with this mission. It was delicate, and important. If they could get in, extract Whitecrest’s “friend” and get out smoothly, that was all for the good. But the Avenging Rage, and Eku himself, were creatures of war. Their job was wrecking shit that didn’t know they were coming, in as instant and decisive a fashion as they could manage. The same stealth that made the ship so good at totally ruining something’s day also made it perfect for this particular escort, but Keeda’s matted ass-fur, it wasn’t what they were for.

No, no. Wrong thinking, that. They were for whatever the Gao needed. If the Gao needed Hunters turning into space dust before they even knew they were under attack, fan-fucking-tastic. If the Gao needed a team of alien spies escorting into deep foreign territory…

Suck it up, Eku.

Still, he didn’t resist the urge to prowl restlessly around the bridge as they peeled off and headed corewards, skirting the trailing edge of Kwmbwrw space. To any outside observer, the idea that they were going on a patrol into the periphery of Hunter territory should both deter anyone following, and explain them going to low emissions mode.

He gave it twenty minutes, then ordered the ship to stealth. There was, of course, no visible change. The lighting wasn’t lowered, nobody started speaking in hushed tones. Life for the crew wouldn’t particularly change. The differences were in speed and systems. Shields were down, warp drive tuned below the so-called “wake” threshold where the ship’s FTL made only the barest, minutest shimmer in spacetime rather than big waves.

Slower, a little more fragile, but a lot harder to see, they turned spinwards again and violated the border. There was plenty of space to hide in.

With luck, the Kwmbwrw would never know they were there…

Date Point: 17y8m1w AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Interstellar space

Bruuk

Brownfurs weren’t a common breed, despite their outsized influence, and among them the second-degrees were pretty fuckin’ rare; over ninety-nine percent were third degree or better. Bruuk was a second-degree brownfur. That made him as rare as a first-degree brownfur but with none of the advantages, like siring lots of female cubs…and gaining lots of Female attention. It also meant he would never have the towering stature of a high-degree brownfur; in fact he was shorter than most silverfurs. Second-degree brownies were born cursed.

While theoretically a male’s degree weren’t a hindrance to his prospects, reality was something different; nobody considered brownies as anything but big dumb brawny laborers, ‘cept for Highmountain types. It didn’t matter how skilled a laborer had to be to do his job, what mattered was the perception. That meant Bruuk was at a disadvantage right from the first pounce. If it weren’t for his aggressive work ethic in the gym, he’d be the little one among other brownies. Instead, he was usually the strongest male in the room, and he was damn proud of that, too. He’d been lifting and playing sports since he was a cub, had trained seriously at damn near every program Stoneback’s gyms made available to the public. Bruuk had built himself into as physically undeniable a brownfur as he could possibly be.

So, naturally, all anyone ever saw in him was a powerfully muscular if somewhat short brownie. None of his certifications mattered, even though he had pursued those just as hard as his gym scorecards. His perfect workhouse scorecard didn’t matter, either. All they saw was a brute of a convenient height. And, so, that’s how they used him.

Which…well, he didn’t mind as much as he felt he should. He played the part, built himself up, and before long had gained a reputation as a strong laborer with a knack for solving tricky problems. All of that had Bruuk feeling confident and ready to meet the challenge, and put the Human in his place. He didn’t know if he could best Wild on skill, but in a fight? Bruuk had thought he’d be at least Wild’s match, if not a whole lot stronger.

He wasn’t. Well, actually he was. Sorta. Depending. It was complicated.

It turned out Wild hadn’t been lazy, either; even for a Human he was an extremely strong man for his size, and he weren’t a small male, neither. While yeah, Bruuk had a downright silly weight advantage over Wilde and none of that extra mass was slack or soft, that massive innate strength advantage didn’t seem to matter much, because unlike Bruuk, Wild knew how to use it.

Wild used his strength to move. Just by watching him practice assault runs, Bruuk could see that moving was the key to it all. And while the Human was laughably slow at a dead run, in close-quarters assault he was quick as could be, and a genuine struggle to keep up with.

Watching him challenge the course in slow motion, Bruuk was struck by a challenge to his expectations, too. He would have expected somebody so quick and deft to be elegant in their movement, but Wild’s particular brand of elegance was…robotic. Like the punchy precision of an automated assembly line, each movement was a straight line, each turn direct, each motion spare and minimal. When he reloaded, he had the replacement magazine in his hand before the empty one had even hit the deck. When he swapped weapons, one went down and the other came up in the same motion.

Nothing wasted. Not even fractions of seconds.

Bruuk found he enjoyed it, though. The training turned out to be much like anything in a gym: strenuous, repetitive, and oddly pleasing. He got a little better every time, and that was just enough to reward him, and keep him interested in further progress.

Wild was an amazing teacher, too. Bruuk was really starting to like the Human.

“You gotta take advantage of your shape, Bruuk. Use that long torso of yours and noodle through!” Bruuk was used to powering through things, being after all a brownfur. He was used to speed and power, not flowing like water. Wasn’t used to moving like a silverfur. The assault course was turning out to be a Keeda-damned hell of a learning experience for him.

Moj, it seemed, was getting a different surprise. Where Bruuk had been humbled and then rebuilt, Moj was learning that his actual limits far exceeded his own self-estimation. Okay, his reaction times were slow next to Bruuk or Wild, but not as slow as either nonhuman had first thought. He’d always be the slowest and weakest of the three of them… but he could still learn to do things right. And in that regard, in fact, he had Bruuk honestly beat.

Having a built-in armored carapace helped, too. No part of him was uncovered and that chitin could take a pretty serious beating. Armor was always going to be a weakness for Bruuk. As predicted, Bruuk’s armor had been much too tight around the chest, but Wild had spent a few evenings sewing on new side straps. Now it had a reassuringly snug fit instead of crushing his chest. Nonetheless, the vest only covered his upper torso: a plate front and back, and smaller ones along his flank. The armor for his arms was also far too tight and unfixable, because his were way bigger than Wild’s, or in fact most any Human’s at all. Bruuk was ridiculously proud of that, but it meant he would need to do without. The rest of him was similarly uncovered.

Wild’s own armor set was much nicer, and had been custom-fit for him by the SOR, but it too failed to cover much more than his torso and groin.

“Full-body scale armor is fucking heavy,” Wild had opined. “‘Horse built me up into a big damn bloke like he does with everyone he knows, but I’m still just that. I’m nowhere near strong enough to fight with basically your twin wrapped around me head to toe.”

Bruuk chittered at the oblique compliment. “That heavy?”

“Aye. That’s where it starts for the HEAT lads. Believe me, their armor rapidly gets much, much heavier. Us mere mortals need to make do. Anyway, enough about them.” Wild bounced on his feet and beckoned to Bruuk. “You’ve already halved your time through, did you notice?”

Bruuk bounced on the balls of his footpaws in turn. “Yeh! It’s all about moving properly, you were right. Kicking a lifetime of bad habits ain’t easy.”

“I bet, but when you get it…” Wild chuckled and shook his head. “I envy you furry fuckers. If I could move that fast while keeping that low…”

“And if I could throw that hard…” Bruuk replied. That was a trick he especially envied. The motion felt…unpracticed, maybe? It made Bruuk aware of supporting muscles in his shoulder he never really knew he had, but that was okay. He just had to figure out how to train those neglected muscles, and that would be one more item on the growing pile of things he was better at than those big, dumb, overly tall brownies that got all the Female attention. If he couldn’t tower like them and just win by default, then he’d just have to completely smoke them at everything else.

And Wild was helping him along that path, too. Bruuk found his tail wagging.

“You will! Just takes a bunch of practice. Now…shall we move on to sparring?”

Their lifting and sparring sessions were, admittedly, Bruuk’s favorite part of the day. While Wild could run circles around him in the assault course, and it seemed every single time they went through there was more to learn, more possibilities to experience…

Bruuk got to turn the tables in the gym. There, he taught Wild a thing or two. Bruuk had been a laborer for most of his life after all, and he’d been a lifelong lifter. If there was one thing in the whole damn universe Bruuk could say he were a Keeda-damned expert in, it was moving big damn weights however they needed to be moved. He could lift a lot more for a lot longer, and rather than wear out he felt energized by it. He could outlift Wild on everything and the rest of the crew had finally started to notice. Balls that felt good!

But the most bestest was sparring, specifically the no-weapons extended playfights they were doing to train up their technique and reflexes. That turned out to be where they were almost perfectly well-matched.

At first, Bruuk got his tail handed to him. Wild was a Human after all, a savannah-striding simioid that still had all his ancient tree-swinging upper-body strength and flexibility. He could put his muscle to work from seemingly any angle, no matter how awkward, and that made pinning him a special exercise in frustration; if he could move his arms at all, Bruuk would probably suffer for it. Wild was a special operator too, trained and conditioned to the finest standard. Bruuk had the weight and strength to just crush Wild, but he in turn had the toughness to simply take the abuse and keep going. Fighting with him was proving to be about the most strenuous workout Bruuk had ever had.

But Bruuk wasn’t any pushover, eiither. He was strong as balls and way more flexible. Wild couldn’t turn one-eighty at the waist, didn’t have as much usable power in his legs. There were also a few movements where Bruuk was so much stronger it was downright silly. For example: pushups were exercise to Wild, even if an easy one, but to Bruuk (or really any Gaoian) they were trivially effortless. They were made to run on their arms, after all.

Once he figured out how to use his advantages, Bruuk started to come out on top. Especially when he started ruthlessly exploiting his greater weight and Wild’s blind eye. By the end of the trip, in fact, Bruuk’s winning streak was growing wider every day. He’d rather have earned his victories with skill instead of sheer brawn, but, well…

…Outmuscling a Human was good for the ego, especially a big one like Wild. And Wild was…not what Bruuk was expecting. Other brownies often tried to downplay the loss when Bruuk put them in their place, with an “I’ll getcha next time” or something similarly jocular and face-saving. Wild? He just laughed, congratulated him, and went for another round.

Still: despite all Bruuk’s advantages, Wild was dangerous. He’d usually end up winning by the end, just through his sheer endless stamina. That a Human could beat even a well-conditioned brownie’s endurance turned out to be completely true. Just one more thing to get better at.

It had taken him a while to admit it, but…Bruuk liked Wild.

Moj interrupted them both around the time Wild’s winning streak was starting to re-assert itself, and Bruuk’s pelt was growing waterlogged with lather. He was silently grateful for the interruption and took the opportunity to wobble up to his feet and fetch a towel. He’d need to get a short fur clip if he was gonna have any hope of matching Wild’s staying power.

Moj was looking down at the phone in his hand. “Nice that you two get along so well now, but it seems Trrrk’k wants us on the bridge.”

“We’re due to arrive today, right?” Wild asked.

“We just did.”

“Shit, why didn’t you tell me? I wanted to see this thing from the outside!” Wild hung his own towel up and bolted out the door, leaving Moj and Bruuk behind.

Moj click-chirped a noise that Bruuk thought meant something like amusement at a grown child’s antics. “Just a space station,” he commented. “See one, see them all.”

“You say that, but this one’s a lot bigger than Armstrong,” Bruuk replied. “Most humans haven’t ever laid eyes on a void city before.”

“Easy to forget they’re the newcomers, you’re right.”

“Right? They think of Earth and Cimbrean as the center of civilization. To the rest of the galaxy, they’re a couple of backwaters. A deathworld backwater, in Earth’s case.”

Moj click-chirped again, louder this time. “He’ll find the view impressive after all then, maybe.”

And it made for an excellent opportunity to get a cold dip in, too. Bruuk wasn’t gonna say no to that.

Sure enough, by the time they reached the bridge, their fearsome Human “heavy” was pressed up against the forward windows, peering up and out at the immense structures crawling past them on all sides with immature wonder.

All cynicism aside, Bruuk had to allow that Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm would be pretty impressive for anyone whose idea of a big space structure was Armstrong Station. While the station in Cimbrean billed itself as the “gateway to the galaxy,” the fact was it was a perfectly standard out-of-the-box Dominion trade station, designed to form the anchor for generations of future expansion. The Humans had made after-market modifications, adding redundant safety systems out of a luddite mistrust of the well-tested technologies that kept the Dominion running, but if one ignored those, it was just about the same as every other station in the civilized stars.

Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm was different.

It was…big. One of the biggest stations in the whole Dominion, a couple dozen kilometers across in every dimension, and organic in how it had grown in stages with each individual district being well-planned, but the whole thing looking like a bunch of city blocks had been glued together any old how. From a distance, little motes of light zipped along its surface on monorail tracks, or crawled down tight approach lanes between its districts toward its hundreds of docking gantries.

And behind it…the planets.

The fourth orbital object in the Erwn-Bwrw system was a binary planetoid pair, two dusty frigid rockballs of about the same mass, orbiting a shared center of gravity so close and so fast that their atmospheres mingled. In a few hundred thousand years, they were destined to smash into each other, but for now the station orbited them both. To Bruuk’s eyes, one was a dull shade of dirt-coloured, and the other was a slightly duller shade of dirt-coloured, but Wild clearly felt they were about the most magnificent sight in the sky.

On a hunch, Bruuk sidled up to Urgug and got the big navigator’s attention. “…What colour are those planets?”

Urgug glanced up at them, and sure enough a pleased glow washed over him. “They are very handsome indeed. To the Human eye…I could not say. But he may well be seeing what you cannot.”

“That’s very helpful Urgug, thankyou.”

Wild clearly overheard the conversation. He turned back and grinned at Bruuk.

“The closer one’s red, mate. A sort of warm, rusty red, really. Close to orange. Just like Mars, back in Sol. I always wanted to see Mars.”

“I wish I could see that…”

“You’ll be able to, soon enough. Hell, aren’t they ramping up for everyone to get it, now?”

“I never even thought about that. It seems so unreal. Like…our eyes just have the ability to see a whole range of extra colors, but our genes are switched off?

“Yup. Your people have good color vision, too. I hear it’ll be something like ours or I guess the cavemonkeys. I forget the details, but…good.”

“…That’s hard to imagine. What about the other planet, what does that look like?”

“The further one? More…I don’t know. Purplish? Lavender? I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like the colours on hot steel. Bloody beautiful, I’ll tell you that.”

“Oh yes,” Urgug agreed. “It is the color of a mother’s music to her infant, with bands of ambition and peace. The more handsome of the pair, I think.”

“Now that sounds like an incredible way to see the world…” Ian shook his head. “I tell you lads, the more ETs I meet, the more ways I find to envy you.”

“That feeling,” Urgug replied, “Is entirely mutual.”

“Heh. ‘The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.’”

“Ironic for me to interrupt you while you resonate with the Higher,” Moj called out from the pilot’s chair he’d settled into as soon as they reached the bridge, “but traffic control requests our manifest, contracts and duration of stay.”

“Ah, yes. Apologies.” Urgug returned to his work. A few moments later, his flank glowed. To Bruuk it looked like the kind of serious hue he used when concentrating, but it clearly looked like more than that to Wild, who tore himself away from watching the huge walls and towers of the station rolling past to frown at him.

“…Something amiss, mate?”

Urgug’s facial tentacles rippled. “There is a grade two security alert posted. All ships are to remain alert for a dangerous fugitive who may seek to stow away. Cargo inspections upon departure are mandatory.”

“Well, that puts a fucking spanner in the works…” Wild grimaced. “…They posted this fugitive’s likeness?”

“Indeed.” Urgug called it up on the glass at the front of the bridge.

“…That our guy?” Wild asked, looking to Bruuk.

“No idea. Kwmbwrw all look the same to me.”

“It is not.”

They turned to the shipmaster. Trrrk’k picked his way forward to his customary spot in the middle of the bridge, tilting his head back and forth atop his long neck as he considered the face on the screen. “No, the Clan’s friend has a different bone structure along his snout and around his eyes. This one is more…handsome, by their standards.”

“Pretty boy, hey?” Wild frowned at the portrait. “We got a name for this lad? I mean, I’m guessing that’s it there next to his mug, but I can’t read…whatever that is.”

“Wrrkenrythweth,” Urgug provided, rolling the first syllable lavishly.

“Former House, then,” Moj declared. He buzzed when they looked at him. “House Wrrken. The House of Traitors. Not a name for Houseless nobodies, that.”

“You know a lot more than you let on, mate,” Wild complimented him. Moj shrugged it off with a chirping sound.

“Student of alien cultures, remember.”

“…Right.” Wild rubbed his jaw with a scratching sound, then turned to the Shipmaster. “We come here looking for a bloke who was spying on one of the Great Houses, and when we get here one of the House’s sons is on the lam? Smells bloody fishy to me, right Bruuk?”

“When I’m standing next to you, the only way I could smell any fish is if you taped it to my nose,” Bruuk replied. He’d learned that Wild appreciated even quite vicious insults as a joke, with the right delivery and timing. Human humor was weird in that regard.

Sure enough, Wild snort-chuckled and reached out to give him an affectionate but slightly aggressive swat in the arm with his knuckles. “I mean it seems suspicious.”

“I quite agree,” Trrrk’k said. “Perhaps we should make contact with this alleged terrorist.”

“I’m game.” Wild glanced back out the front window as Moj brought them to a relative stop and the station’s docking arms reached out to embrace them with a series of heavy sounds that echoed through the hull.

“My only question is…How?”

__

Date Point:17y8m1w AV
Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, Erwn-Bwrw system, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Rythweth

The lifetime of paranoia was still keeping Ryth alive. Barely.

Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm was more a city than a space station. In theory, its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants provided him with the cover he needed to move unseen, and he knew how to defeat the facial recognition systems in the surveillance cameras, but safety lay in stillness and isolation. Everyone he passed on the street might be a House agent, authorized to gun him down on sight. Every camera might have a watchful living eye behind it, not a dumb algorithm.

He’d never gone so far as to prepare an actual safe house, and that was turning out to be an oversight. He’d always imagined threats to his life would come from other Houses, who might have acknowledged his talent and tenacity via assassination. Being hunted by his own House, shot by its guards, given the name of a traitor and having his face plastered on security alerts all over Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm…

House Henen was ruthless. He’d known that. But he’d always clung to the belief that Houses were at least loyal to their own. A favored son who’d worked his whole life for the House, who’d kept it safe, who’d dug out so many spies and saboteurs…

He deserved more. But now it turned out that not only did the House have secrets to which he’d never been privy, but…

Slavery.

There weren’t many species that hadn’t practiced it once. For most, it had been the foundation of their early civilizations, but as they grew more advanced in both economics and ethics, such barbarism had been left behind. Treating sapient beings as property was reviled nearly everywhere in the galaxy, most of all by those for whom it still loomed recently in collective memory.

House Henen clearly felt that biodrones no longer counted as sapient beings. The Gao, of course, would feel differently. If they found out about it…

Well, Uwrik’s grisly predictions about what Great Father Daar would do in reply had been just the start. His vengeance would surely extend to the House as well, and if the other Houses were remotely sensible they would step back and allow it. A war with the Gao would be brief, futile, and hideously bloody.

No wonder the House was willing to kill even its loyal son to keep the secret. But their lack of trust put Rythweth in a position where his only hope of surviving was to betray the House in turn.

Though he didn’t have a safe house, he did have secure funds and a stash of untraceable hard currency, plus an archive of some of the more intriguing software he’d encountered in his career. The larger part of his funds had gone on acquiring the best computer he could afford without leaving himself entirely tapped. If he needed to, he wanted to be able to bribe, or buy.

As for accomodation, the station’s social housing for the destitute was free, but obvious. So Ryyth instead embraced the vagrant life, sneaking away into the station’s hidden corners to sleep on a stolen mattress, next to a power outlet that had presumably been useful to somebody long ago, before the section was remodelled.

It was all he needed. He kept a stash of ration balls and a few water bottles on hand, grabbed from a free dispenser, he hid…

And he watched.

And now, the watching had paid off. He woke up when the software he had set up to monitor the arriving and departing ships pinged. It had found exactly what he’d told it to watch for.

“Jishi Interstellar Distribution…” He chortled quietly to himself. Uwrik’s masters had sent somebody to check on him.

The ship was appropriately anonymous. An ordinary Irbzrkian light freighter with a Domain name, an alien shipmaster and after-market modifications. Hundreds of ships like that came and went every year. It was the sort of vehicle Ryth himself would use.

If he hadn’t known that Jishi was a front, he’d never have known there was anything special about the Krr’zkvik.

Unfortunately, the House also knew. He’d spoken that particular detail out loud during Uwrik’s final interrogation.

“So what to do…?” he asked himself. He’d had to leave his drone behind, it was too traceable. But he was still in the habit of talking to it. It helped him think. “The enemy of my enemy? Is my enemy’s enemy and nothing more. But what alternative do I have?”

He looked around himself. The space he was in had been forgotten even by the graffiti taggers. Water—dirty water, alas—hissed metallically as it rushed through a thick pipe along the ceiling, and the cool copper condensed the moisture out of the air at enough of a rate to leave a perpetual wet patch on the floor below it. Combined with the still air of this badly-ventilated, forgotten place and Ryth’s temporary home had an invasive damp quality. The only thing it had going for it was isolation, and even that was only a temporary benefit.

“…Fuck it.”

He had to give the Humans credit for that word. That little phrase, even though it fit awkwardly in the Kwmbwrw mouth, perfectly captured the resigned determination that settled on Ryth’s back. It wasn’t an optimistic sentiment, so much as a certainty that things were going to go bad no matter what, so he may as well get it over with. Maybe he’d be dead by the end of the day. Maybe…who knew. The only way to find out was to Do.

He pulled his computer toward him, thought for a second, nodded…

And made contact.
__

Ian Wilde

“And here I thought you wanted to leave me behind…I’m not exactly subtle like this, mate.” They’d just arrived and he was already suiting up.

So too were Bruuk and Moj, who buzzed amusedly. “Subtlety eludes you even in normal clothing,” he opined, then shrugged when Trrrk’k gave him a cool look, and carried on with his own preparations.

“Plans change,” the shipmaster explained. “I think now, a show of brute force is prudent. You and Bruuk together are a fairly unmistakable message.”

Bruuk growled quietly next to Wilde, so he put an arm around the short brownie’s heavy neck and hugged tightly. That seemed to be all he needed.

Attitudes on the ship had changed toward Bruuk over the last few weeks. Before he was just their grumpy but ultimately caring cook and occasional small-injury nurse. He’d never had the chance to show off his prodigious strength, since they rarely took any bulk cargo and he wouldn’t have been the one to deal with it anyway. Dora’s drones did all the heavy lifting.

Now, though? Now that they’d seen him in action against Wilde? Watched them spar and train? They paid him a great deal more respect. And Bruuk was nothing if not conflicted by that. That growl of his wasn’t aggressive. It was frustrated, and deservedly so.

Urgug rumbled from his spot at the communications console, and turned a nervous shade of warm yellow. “Station security are at our airlock. Along with a civilian female wearing the colors of House Henen.”

“No civilian she, then,” Moj said. “Matriarch, maybe.”

“We should make our point as blatantly obvious as possible, then. Ready to go stomping, little guy?” Bruuk loved his newfound freedom to tease and had become a downright expert at it.

Wilde grinned at him with the slightly…well, wild smile that said he was looking forward to something. “Hang on. Lemme go fetch my special eye.”

“…Special?”

“Oh yeah. You’ll see.”

Matriarch Heneneriwyth

Their inspection wasn’t going so well. For a start, the ship’s computers were much better secured than was standard for an Irbzrkian freighter. By now, Eriwyth had expected to be reading a report from a team of analysts scouring its logs and feeding her relevant data, but they were apologetically bereft of anything useful.

That all by itself was telling. What really gave away the game, however, were the two excessively capable guards who flanked their shipmaster as he met Eriwyth at the airlock.

One was a Gaoian, and a particularly fierce example at that. As burly and brown as the Great Father, albeit much smaller, and just as clawed and fanged. His fur was short-cut in what had to be a deliberately intimidating display of his might, and his huge claws were fully extended. He bared his teeth at Eriwyth as the small entourage came to a halt. It wasn’t a friendly expression.

The one that made Eriwyth’s own guard fidget nervously, however, was the totally unexpected sight of a Human.

Eriwyth had seen a Human before, in the form of Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight. She’d always found it hard to imagine where the species’ fearsome reputation came from, in the face of that white-haired, bearded, refined and dapper man. Knight was soft-spoken, polite, civilized and regal.

This Human was a package of violence hidden under layers of war gear. He didn’t go in for a raw physical display like his shorter companion. Instead, the Human radiated menace. His face was mostly obscured by a cloth printed with a white-on-black skeletal visage, but that was nowhere near as troubling as what little face was visible behind it. One eye was dark, fierce and direct, focused forward like a weapon’s targeting system. All by itself, it was unsettling. But the other eye…

What otherwise looked like an empty eye socket had a baleful blue-green gleam in it that sent nervous shivers down Eriwyth’s back.

The Human was being deliberately, flamboyantly aggressive. And it was working. Worse, it put the security force on the wrong footing: they’d only brought pulse weapons. Shipmaster Trrrk’k had brought bodyguards who could sneer at pulse weapons before ripping them all to pieces.

She tore her gaze away from that awful stare, and returned her attention to the Rrrrtk shipmaster. This one was aging, his movements were stiff and cautious, but when he bowed his long neck in a nod of acknowledgement, the intelligence in his eyes was undimmed. He knew exactly what he was doing by bringing two such fearsome deathworlders to protect him.

“I greet you, Matriarch. How may we be of assistance?”

Eriwyth stood up on her hind legs to remove the height difference between them. She could tower over the deathworlders at least, and look their shipmaster in the eye. “No games, shipmaster. We know that Jishi Interstellar Distribution is a front for Gaoian intelligence services, which makes you spies.”

“This is a free port, bound under Dominion law to permit any and all legal custom, unharassed and unhindered,” Trrrk’k replied, smoothly. He offered Eriwyth a tablet. “As you can see, our shipping manifest is in order. We have here a large cargo of dried beans, kernels and flour from the planet Cimbrean, our delivery contracts are pending, and whatever you accuse our employer of being, the fact is that Jishi Interstellar is a registered trading body licensed to do business across Dominion space.”

Eriwyth shot an irritated glance at her assistant, who took the tablet and scanned it. After a few moments she turned her eyes to the matriarch and reluctantly ducked her body in the affirmative. “Everything is in order, Matriarch…”

“Meaning that our trade business here is lawful,” Trrrk’k said. “Shall I quote section and paragraph?”

“Am I supposed to believe you brought two clearly hostile deathworlders here for innocent reasons, shipmaster?”

“Am I to infer that you are exhibiting prejudice against my crew, Matriarch? Your reaction, I would say, rather justifies their presence.”

“That one is snarling at me!” Eriwyth accused, indicating the Gaoian.

“Of course he is. You brought an armed security team onto what is, in fact, sovereign territory. Gaoians are…protective…of their own.”

Eriwyth aimed a pointed finger at the Human. “And that one’s death mask?”

“Cultural.”

“His glowing eye?”

“An injury he earned while fighting to protect his comrades.”

The security team behind Eriwyth shifted uncomfortably. Everyone knew the list of things that could kill a Human was short. And this one had, presumably, gone up against such a thing and survived. He saw them staring, and the shift of his mask and eyes suggested a feral grin to match the bared skull on his mask.

“…We are here to inspect your cargo. We will make a thorough search of your ship, as is our right under Dominion law.”

“By all means.”

The inspection was…Well, it was a masterclass in intimidation. More than once, bulky obstacles were conveniently blocking their way, such that her security team could not move them or find another path. The Gaoian would respond with a contemptuous sort of sneer and effortlessly move the cargo container or whatever out of the way, derision written across his every gesture.

The Human wasn’t so brash. He simply leaned against a wall with his arms folded and watched. That evil eye bored into everyone, and the security team couldn’t stop glancing back to check if he was still there. He unnerved them.

“Why do you not help your fellow?” Eriwyth asked him at one point.

The Human shrugged and said simply, “He’s stronger.”

The rest of the crew were just as bizarre as the deathworlders. Their Kwmbwrw engineer refused point blank to give his House name, claiming that he simply didn’t have one. The Robalin cargodrone operator was listening to music so loud and so raucous that Eriwyth could hardly stand to go near her station, and the Mjrnhrm pilot’s quarters contained absolutely nothing at all save the small cushion, on which the pilot himself sat in meditation the whole time without acknowledging their intrusion.

The shipmaster’s cluttered, messy quarters reeked of cqcq smoke, the guvnurag quartermaster’s were packed with so many plants that the pollen made Eriwyth sneeze. The Gaoian’s quarters reeked of male musk, and inside was nothing more than a bed and a large collection of what had to be some kind of exercise equipment. As for the Human’s, they were… incongruously normal. He had a couch, some bookshelves, a workbench and some equipment similar to the Gaoian’s. Like the Gaoian, he flatly refused to reduce the gravity for the inspection team’s comfort, and stood menacingly in the entryway, wordlessly staring them all down.

An electronic device was hooked up to the room’s entertainment screen, and he claimed it was entirely for entertainment purposes. He had apparently been playing a game on it before the inspection, which featured a heavily cyberized human, paused in the midst of a pitched gun battle with other, equally augmented humans. The game’s creators had gone into disturbing detail in making one unfortunate foe’s head explode in as gruesomely realistic a way as possible.

Eriwyth shivered and stepped out of the room. Up until then, she’d been telling herself that the Human’s appearance was just an act, that he was being deliberately disturbing to throw her and her officers off-balance. And while that was unquestionably the case…what kind of a sick culture created something like that and called it a game?

There was nothing of note aboard the ship, otherwise. Weapons, yes, but every ship carried weapons in case of pirates or Hunters. The makeshift training facility in a redundant cargo hold was strange, but clearly there for a legitimate use. It would take time to verify the contents of the shipping containers and establish that they did indeed contain only raw foodstuffs as the manifest claimed….

But strange was not illegal. There was absolutely nothing unlawful or impermissible on board which would have allowed Eriwyth to turn them away, no matter how hard she looked. Even the company, Jishi, legitimately existed in that it was owned by Clan Goldpaw, and was properly licensed.

She had to curse herself for not foreseeing this. She’d been so hung up on imagining all the ways they could smuggle themselves aboard the station that she simply hadn’t considered the possibility that they would just walk down the ramp and everything would be completely fucking legal.

So, she had no choice but to allow them on board. The Gaoian moved down the gantry with a sort of deck-juddering swagger that was equal parts intimidating and infuriating. The Human, though? He didn’t swagger or thump about. Instead, he…prowled.

She watched them go. She set her people to watch them closely.

And she wondered what she had missed.

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“Did you really need to stomp your way down the entire ramp?”

Bruuk chittered, “Balls, yeah! How else am I s’posed ‘ta keep ‘ya in ‘yer place?!”

Wilde’s personal canid tank-friend was turning out to be a bit of a character, once some of the sullen crust had been laboriously jackhammered away. He was showing more of that genuine and playful personality that was endemic to Gaoians, and brownies in particular.

All he’d needed was someone to notice him, really. Wilde could appreciate that.

Not that the crowd failed to notice either of them. Folks of every size and shape were getting out of their way, sharpish. They were firmly ambling, maintaining an unhurried, casual pace as they wandered down the moving walkways and into the dockside marketplace. A few even put large objects between themselves and the two Scary Deathworlders, and watched fearfully from behind the stalls and advertisements.

Bruuk was having the time of his life.

There were a lot of advertisements, mostly in shades of blue and yellow, black and white, green and grey. It gave the market a uniform palette even while the shapes and assorted logos, trademarks, icons and mascots blended into a riot. Ian couldn’t read a word of Kwlsh, the Kwmbwrw lingua franca, but he could recognize a cute mascot selling noodles just fine. Okay so the mascot in question had three freaky alien eyes and a long curly tail and didn’t look remotely like a cute Chinese chef or whatever, but the same energy was there.

…He was feeling hungry, all of a sudden.

Bruuk flicked an ear. “…Was that ‘yer fuckin’ stomach?”

“Yeah, it makes that noise when I’m underfed and starving.”

“Hey, I keep you fed good!”

“Tell me those noodles don’t smell good, though.”

“…You raise a good point.” Bruuk’s stomach growled a bit, too.

“I heard that!”

It took a fair bit of smiling and negotiation to convince the (plainly terrified) shopkeeper of their friendly intent, and maybe a bit of panting friendliness from Bruuk, too…but they somehow, eventually, perhaps even accidentally achieved Noodle.

They were some good fucking noodles, too. A bit like miso soba soup with ginger. Maybe slurping them up inexpertly with an alien eating utensil undermined the fearsome death mask visage a bit, but that had been for the House goons’ benefit, not the general public’s. And slurping was universal language for tasty and appreciated.

More specific to Gaoians was their tongue licking every part of their own face, which Bruuk did while his tail hammered out a steady metallic beat on the bin next to him.

They left a generous tip, and kept on walking. Well, Ian walked. Bruuk, on the other hand…

Yup. It was unmistakable. Bruuk was strutting down the promenade with a deck-shaking swagger to match. And Wilde knew exactly why he was flaunting his stuff, too.

“I still can’t believe you made me help you trim your fur down…”

“What?! If we’re gonna train together, I don’t wanna be carryin’ a billion gallons o’ sweat around when we’re sparrin,’ yijao? Also it looks cool! Shows off m’ abs, see?!” Bruuk proved his point by tensing them.

Lord. Wilde rolled his eyes, but couldn’t contain his own snort of amusement. This of course prompted Bruuk to show off more of his impressive self, and even clown around a bit for a few children along the way, who were hiding behind their parent’s legs with big, curious eyes.

“Too bad there aren’t any Females around to see all that Big Bruuk Energy you’re flaunting…”

“There might be, you never know! And besides: me, show off? Mister ‘skull mask and ghostly glowin’ eye’ is lecturin’ me about showin’ off?”

“Mine is just some scary clothes. You on the other hand are practically naked!”

“Naw! I still got fur! And I got m’shorts on so m’bits ain’t floppin around—”

“Fine, fine! God.” Wilde shook his head and laughed. “You’re an attention whore, you know that?”

“People should pay attention to me!”

Their route “coincidentally” took them past a spare parts and hardware shop that was closed and shuttered, with bright blue tape plastered all over it. Ian didn’t need to read Kwlsh to guess that the tape had the local version of “CRIME SCENE” printed on it. They paused for a second and considered it.

“Yeah, our guy got caught alright,” Ian muttered, under his breath. “…They following us?”

Bruuk didn’t even need to sniff. He just flicked an ear and ducked his head a fraction. “Fuck yeah. Smell nervous, too.”

“Good. Let’s keep this distraction going, shall we?”

“What’ve you got in mind?”

“I dunno. Let’s just…let’s see if there’s somewhere to get a drink around here…”

Dora

Cargo handling was a dance and dancing was what Dora did best!

Well…among other things. Juggling, say. She’d practiced juggling a lot after first finding it in an entertainment datadump she’d pulled from Armstrong Station’s network, and it had been one of the more difficult things she’d ever done. Then she’d got good at it.

Then she’d got good enough to do things with her extra hand that no Human juggler could ever do.

Containers—isotainers, as the Humans called ‘em, since it was their fucking design everyone used—were awfully big for juggling. They had inertia, and they didn’t spin all the same…but still. It was kinda like juggling. Set it in motion, move the drone to catch it when it got there, don’t chase it, trust the toss, get it moving again. The rhythm to cargo handling was essentially the same as the rhythm of juggling. Working on one had honed her talents in the other.

And her study of juggling had led her to another skill, one she’d practiced with Moj a lot.

Palm, simulation, steal, ditch, misdirection, steal, simulation, misdirection, load, simulation, switch, misdirection…

Once you knew the basics, once you were good enough? You could do it with anything. The same simple toolbox of moves was universal, and it didn’t have to be a cigarette, or a badge, or balls and cups. With the right tools, interface, and enough practice…

Dora could pull off sleight of hand tricks with forty foot, seventy-thousand-pound cargo containers.

And the nice thing—the really nice thing—about big isotainers full of palletized stacks of dried soybeans in bags was, they all looked the same inside. So even though the House Henen security troopers thought they were thoroughly scanning the inside of each container, and for most part they were…

…There was one particular container they’d scanned twice, and one they hadn’t scanned at all.

Over on the station, Moj slipped out of his container and vanished amidst the port equipment.

And Dora kept on dancing.

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Someone had challenged Bruuk to a drinking contest. That was dumb as hell.

Ian was nowhere near stupid enough to get involved. All pride aside, getting into a drinking contest with an ET could only end with him comatose and the alien barely buzzed. Humans were notoriously the galactic-class ultimate lightweights, second only to the Ten’Gewek in how badly they held their booze.

Getting into said contest with a Gaoian, though? That could be a death sentence. With a tank of a Gaoian? And a brownie, too? Bruuk got about as much out of a bottle of vodka as Ian would have out of a shot. He could basically piss it straight out and failing that? He could sweat it out, too. Given their penchant for fermented foods, and their long, terrible winters…

Gaoians were the superheavyweight grand champions of drinking. Several liters of industrial cleaning solvent in, and Bruuk had drunk his competition quite literally under the table. He was, at worst, slightly buzzed.

And of course, station security were sniffing around.

These ones weren’t the House goons. They were ordinary beat cops, called in to handle a disturbance and apparently somebody had neglected to inform them who was at the heart of said disturbance.

One of them was nervously keeping a hand close to a holstered pulse pistol that, if he fired it Ian’s way, would have maybe given Ian a bloody nose. At most. He somehow doubted Bruuk would have much noticed either, frankly. Lord only knew what a buzzed Gaoian would be like…

“Is there a problem, officers?”

The senior officer—or at least, Ian suspected he was senior, given that his security harness had a chevron on it where his partner’s was blank—fixed him with a glare that contained more bravado than authority. “We had complaints of a disturbance.”

“Can’t see why, I haven’t touched a drop and my shipmate here was just having a friendly drink with…” Ian gestured to the comatose Vgork male under the table. “Who, as you can see, is being nice and quiet, too. Nothing’s broken, we’re no bother to anyone, we paid for our drinks…”

“The complaint said you were being threatening.”

Ian sipped his soft drink. It was a Kwmbwrw brand he couldn’t pronounce, but it tasted pleasantly similar to mint and agave, with plenty of cold fizz. Maybe if he got the chance he’d have a couple of bulk packs delivered to the ship. “I’ve been getting that a lot. No idea why. I’ve been nothing but pleasant since I got here.”

“You’re wearing a death mask.” The officer indicated the mask, currently rolled down around Ian’s throat.

Ian finished his drink. Maybe not with buying a crate. The alien cans were the same size as those little lunchbox snack cans. Not really a cost-effective way to buy. “It’s cultural.”

“And you’ve got…that eye…”

“You wouldn’t begrudge a wounded veteran his prosthetic, would you?” Ian squashed the can in his hand, then crushed it flat against the tabletop.

“…I’m going to have to ask you to—”

“You and what army?” Ian interrupted, and finally turned to glare at him. The officer shrank back. “I’m here having a nice peaceful time, we’re bothering nobody. You want me to leave? Give me some probable cause and back it up with some fucking artillery mate. That thing won’t do more than piss me off.”

“I am authorized to—”

“I don’t care.”

He turned his glare away, ignored the officer’s outraged, futile sputtering, and smirked to himself when the Law finally slunk away with their tails very literally between their legs.

That should do the trick.

Across the room, a couple more vgork were getting increasingly angry at Bruuk, who was showing off and chugging his way through a large bottle of something green. Sooner or later, somebody was going to do something stupid. It wouldn’t be Ian, and it wouldn’t be Bruuk.

But it would be all part of the plan…

Rythweth

The ship’s agent could have been more inconspicuous, Ryth felt. Mjrnhrm weren’t a common species even here, and this one was not decorated according to his species’ traditions and culture…

But he knew the trade. He made contact in just the way Ryth had instructed, deep in the narrow backs between two residential blocks.

Everything was a risk right now. Every communication might have been intercepted, everything might be a trap by the House. For Rythweth, there was no alternative but to put all his weight on each step and trust that the floor would not give out under him.

Still, he kept his bandaged arm with its hidden blade held close and ready, and the other one near the pulse pistol hidden in a pouch on his thigh, and felt glad he’d had the chance to recharge his shield generators. It wasn’t a full security harness, but it had already saved his life once…

Though, if this Mjrn was the House’s man, then it probably wouldn’t be enough anyway.

“Are you lost, friend?” he asked, stepping out of the doorway he’d been lurking in.

The Mjrn turned and considered him for a moment, then buzzed slightly. “No. I don’t think so,” he replied.

Good. Correct call and response, at least. Ryth took a few steps closer, the Mjrn did the same, and within a few paces they were close enough together to speak quietly.

“…The man you came here for is dead,” Ryth revealed. “I know why. If you can get me off this station and grant me sanctuary, then I will share what I know.”

“You killed him?” The Mjrn asked.

“No. They’ll kill me to to protect what he knew.”

“Important, then. Our word is good enough for you? Sanctuary is yours no matter what, but if they kill you before you share—”

“Not going to happen,” Rythweth cut him off. “That information is my only currency. You’ll get what I know once I’m safe, and not a ri’ before.”

The Mjrn made an affable gesture. “Thought so. So. Plan.”

“I assume you have one.”

“Disappointed I won’t get to see them in action,” the Mjrn buzz-chuckled.

“Them?”

“Friends. Friends who are good at being the center of attention, yes? Was looking forward to watching them work, but…” He made that affable gesture again. “Worry about our side. A rabbit in a hat, us.”

“…What?”

The Mjrn explained. Ryth still didn’t understand the hat reference. But he understood the plan.

And he liked it.

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

The problem with Vgork bulls, especially bachelors, was they each had enough testosterone for the whole HEAT, and usually the muscle to back it up, too. A Vgork’s head had a thick bony ridge running right up it, the inside of their skull was lined with soft spongy tissue to cushion their brain, and their neck was braced to handle as much force as they could exert and then some. When one reared up and butted something or somebody, it usually stayed butted.

Vgork bachelors had a deserved reputation as bullies and thugs, always raring for a fight and generally equipped to win it. They certainly thought enough of themselves to believe that a pair of “small” deathworlders should be taken down a peg.

Gaoians were, of course, ambush predators. And their prey had always been bigger than themselves. In many respects, a vgork was pretty similar to a Naxas, and Bruuk clearly knew a thing or two about wrangling Naxas.

Ian, meanwhile, had played rugby with the HEAT. He knew a thing or two about redirecting literal tons of mass away from his squishy middle bits, and into more productive directions.

Like the nearest wall.

It dented with a loud crunch, the plaster cracked, and the charging vgork sat down on his arse with a confused expression.

“Now what’d you do that for, mate?” Ian asked him, conversationally, while across the room Bruuk ducked under the other one’s headbutt, grabbed his forelegs and twisted sideways. Two alien bodies crashed to the deck in a tangle, and that was a fight Bruuk couldn’t lose.

“Stand still!” the vgork heaved himself to his feet and rounded on Ian again.

“Come on, pack it in.” Ian stepped neatly aside as the vgork reared up on his hindlegs for a headbutt, then ducked under a desperate fist-swipe with a rolling motion inherited from the boxing ring.

He was enjoying himself, he couldn’t lie. The alien’s movements undeniably powerful, yeah, but they were also so slow and telegraphed it was ludicrous, and the fact was he could stop this fight any time he liked with a well-placed punch…

The only thing stopping him there was that a well-placed punch on most Dominion species counted as lethal force. He wasn’t here to kill or maim, he was here to make a ruckus, and he wasn’t completely sure what a Vgork could handle, so that meant playing the matador. He even threw in an “¡olé!” for his own benefit when he deftly rolled aside from another charge. His self-satisfied chuckle just drove the vgork to new angry heights.

Bruuk, meanwhile, wasn’t nearly so artful. He was working out a freight of frustration and showing off his ridiculous brawn like the cheesiest of Gaoian daytime dramas. The poor vgork would be wallowing in total-body pain whenever Bruuk let him go.

Most aliens had no stamina, though. After just the fourth charge, Ian’s opponent was breathing heavily and moving slowly. He stomped the deck irritably and growled something defiant, but Ian could tell the big idiot was barely standing upright already. All that (poorly-conditioned) muscle mass took a lot of energy to set in motion, and the stop-start pace of trying to catch Ian had taken a lot out of him.

The last attack finally winded him to the point he couldn’t stand. The vgork staggered, sagged, then crashed to the deck without Ian ever laying a finger on him. Ian squatted down next to him and patted the big guy’s sweaty neck in a friendly way. “Stay down, mate. You’re in a different league now.”

With a whining sound, the vgork gave up. “…Urrgh…”

“Now, seriously, what was all that abou–Bruuk! Your chew-toy has had enough, mate.”

The Gaoian shot Ian a briefly mutinous look, but then reined it in. He let go of his beaten adversary and rose to two-paw. “…Right, yeah. Sarry.”

The bar was vacated. The locals had fled, the staff had escaped out the back door, and the tables were knocked over. No serious damage, but Ian knew what came next. Station security had already had a word with him to no effect, which meant any second…

Yup. The bitch from the welcoming party strode in, with a team of much better-equipped goons behind her. Still no sign of a real weapon, but those pulse rifles pack a much heavier punch than the pistols. Enough to knock a tooth out or concuss, or….

Oh. No. That subtle electric whine, right on the upper limit of hearing, felt rather than heard. Fully charged capacitors. Yeah, that’d be enough to fling Ian across the room and leave him with some internal bleeding, then.

Mission accomplished.

“…Come here often, love?”

The poison in her glare translated across all possible species barriers. She kept one eye on him while she turned her head to consider the state of the bar with the other two. “…I knew letting you two on board was an indulgence I would come to regret.”

“In fairness, we didn’t start it.”

“Yes, you were very careful about that, I know.” She reared up on her hindlegs and towered over Ian and Bruuk alike. “But one does not have to attack first to instigate a fight. You came in here looking for trouble, and just so happened to find it.”

“Ah yes, the ‘they made us do it’ argument, very compelling. What are you, their defence attorney? I’d find somebody more convincing if I were them…”

“Enough! I am a Matriarch of House Henen, you are aboard a House Henen station, and you have just been involved in a brawl! I don’t care who started it. I care that we have two aggressive deathworlders roaming my station, looking for trouble and disrespecting the security officers. I will not stand for it! The two of you are confined to your ship, by my lawful order.”

Bruuk’s raised his hackles and growled right on cue, which prompted the nervous guards to ready their weapons. That prompted an irritated snarl, and…

Ian put his arm in front of Bruuk, and raised the other hand peacefully, taking one step forward to defuse things before any of the House retinue did something stupid like actually raise their gun and aim it.

“…Fine. We’re leaving. Entertainment’s lacking all of a sudden anyway.”

There were more House troops outside, plus a black van with a blue light on top and the House sigil on the side. A lot of wary, armored figures watched Ian and Bruuk as they emerged from the bar.

Bruuk turned his translator off and growled something in Gaori for Ian’s ears only. [“Racist assholes.”]

[“Comes with the territory, mate,”] Ian replied. [“We’re the galactic bogeymen, you and me.”]

[“…Yeah. Feels good knowin’ we can kick their tails, though.”]

Wilde looked down at Bruuk and smiled. [“Together, yeah.”]

They passed the rest of the long walk back to the ship in silence, trailed by a platoon of armed Kwmbwrw while the station’s civilians stood aside and gawped. Bruuk had a definite spring in his step but he was at least polite enough not to make too big a fuss about it.

He still flexed outrageously for the kids, though. Ian wasn’t sure which of them attracted more attention, Bruuk with his flagrant physicality, or the glowing glass eye. They probably made for about the most interesting street theatre ever on the station.

It couldn’t last forever though. The airlock cycled, they wandered through the docking umbilical and into the ship, and…

Still in silence, they checked each other with one of Whitecrest’s little bits of hardware. No sense getting sloppy and saying something incriminating before checking thoroughly for bugs. Only once they were both perfectly happy that neither of them was carrying some kind of listening device did they allow themselves to relax.

They traded high-fives, and headed for the crew lounge, where Trrrk’k put his tablet down and looked up as they entered.

“…Well done,” he said.

“It worked?”

“You successfully drew the attention of every House trooper on the whole station,” the captain confirmed. “Moj was able to make contact.”

“So what happens next?”

“You two stay alert and ready in case things go wrong, and we wait.”

Ian sat down. “I’ve got a bad feeling about that Matriarch, skipper.”

“She smells…deceitful,” Bruuk agreed.

“Why, Bruuk! That’s the biggest word I’ve ever heard you use!”

The burly Gaoian chittered, “Shaddup, Wild.”

Ian chuckled, then sobered up. “…Not just deceitful, but desperate. She wanted us off that station and she took the first and flimsiest chance she had to do it. Somebody’s leaning on her from high up, I bet; She bit hard on the chance to gain some control.”

Trrrk’k puffed his pipe. “Good. Desperation means mistakes.”

“It also means crazy dangerous curve-balls, skipper.”

Trrrk’k nodded slowly, and raised his tablet again. “Then we shall just have to be prepared,” he said.

“Right.” Ian stood up and wandered through into the kitchen. “I’m gonna cook something, then. Those noodles were nice, but…”

Bruuk cheered and followed behind him. “I’ve got some steaks secreted away! I think we’ve earned them.”

“Thank you for the warning,” Trrrk’k grumbled, and turned his chair to face away from them.

“Oh, c’mon!” Bruuk yipped irritably. “We drink almond milk for your benefit. Do you know how terrible that shit smells? Kinda like poison!”

“That’s ‘cuz almonds are poison, mate,” Ian told him.

“…Really?”

“Oh yeah. Wild almonds would kill any of us dead. Anyway…”

“Wait, wait. How did you go from that to a food crop…?”

Ian chuckled. He was glad to be off the station. Courting controversy came with the downside of seeing the galactic population’s xenophobic side (ironically), and it was nice to be back somewhere he was welcome. And it was nice to have really broken through Bruuk’s shell.

Now all he had to do was hope the rest of the mission went so smoothly…

Mojremm’rt

There was a way of seeing the world. Hard to describe, harder to achieve, but useful. A balance of seeing the parts and the whole at the same time, watching not just the dance, but each dancer. Rivers of mortal life, streaming from work to home or the other way…but made of persons. Same enough to predict, different enough to surprise.

To Moj, people were patterns, and pieces of patterns. He’d learned how to become whatever part of the pattern he wanted, while still rising above it to know it.

Tricky, that.

Moving a wanted man through a crowd should be easy, if he could become the right part of the crowd. If he could be one of the pieces that just moved and flowed, anonymously. If he could be water but not a fish, If he could be the breeze and not a leaf, If Ryth moved like nobody he could become nobody. He could be less than invisible. He could be ignored.

Rythweth was not nobody. He was House. House were not ignored. House did not know how to be ignored. Not their role, that. Rythweth knew the idea, but he didn’t see, he didn’t rise above.

So, tricky was even trickier.

Trickier still? Moj could have stood out, been a big fish. Easy, that. All his tattoos, bright clothing, being an uncommon species…big and obvious thoughts became a big and obvious person. Maybe if Moj became Bruuk, walked Wild, Rythweth could be a lesser leaf and go unnoticed in his shadow.

But. Moj was not supposed to be aboard the station. He was supposed to be aboard the ship. If he stopped being nobody and became somebody again, if he was not ignored, they’d know he got aboard somehow. The route back would likely close, likely never open again.

So he stole a car.

Easy, that. Companies loved their big tales about security and safety, how their vehicles had the best features to stop unwanted use. Moj didn’t know if they were telling huge lies or if they really believed it, and he didn’t know which was funnier. They all did the same thing with the little point-and-push keys. Nobody needed to point them, but they pointed anyway. Point and push a button, send a number, lock or unlock. Sometimes, one number to lock, another to unlock. Sometimes, with lazy companies, one number for both.

Moj had a toy. It listened. It heard numbers. It sent numbers. Not even a crime, really. Moj needed the car more than its owner, the owner would get it back soon. An inconvenience at worst. A public transport trip, a few minutes. A chance to rise and think Higher, think above material things. A lesson, if they listened.

Probably not. Most people didn’t think Higher. Not Moj’s fault, that.

And even Rythweth could be nobody in a car.

“Where are we going?”

“To be rabbits.”

“…What is a rabbit?”

“Don’t know. Live in hats, I think. Strange minds, aliens.”

“…As you say. But you didn’t answer my question.”

Moj explained as he calmly guided his stolen vehicle onto one of the station’s main arteries, headed toward the cargo yards. Not like driving on a planet, no. A warren of tunnels instead of a road network. No commuters and passengers either. On a station, vehicles were for moving goods, not people. People used trams and elevators.

Useful, that. Facial recognition was a crowd tool, not a cargo tool. Different zones, different rules, different security. Security where people went was all about finding the ones who were trying to be nobody. Security where things went was about only letting in the right somebody.

Thing security was stronger, but stupider. Moj liked strong but stupid. Clever but weak was worse. Clever and strong, the worst. Fences and doors and motion sensors didn’t know nobody from somebody, didn’t think. They just were. They always were as they were, where they were. Just like vehicles. Though, vehicles could whirr elsewhere.

Bad idea to keep the vehicle near where they got out. Better for it to go. Better for it to forget. Easy, that. Machines forgot whatever they were told to forget. Moj knew how to ask so it couldn’t say no, so the people got out and the machine drove off. When found, it wouldn’t know where it had been. Maybe somebody strong and clever would guess…

Or maybe not. Not fast enough, was what mattered.

Rythweth might not know how to be nobody, but he knew things. Knew how to move quick and quiet, knew things about fences and doors and motion sensors too. Had toys of his own. So somebody and somebody went where nobody should be, quiet and quick and clever among the strong, stupid, static things that watched and guarded but didn’t see. Where being somebody or nobody didn’t matter, and all that mattered was numbers on boxes, code for which things went where.

There was one somebody watching and waiting for them, though. Outcast and sadder than she pretended, walking like a Human on three legs, learning Human tricks, speaking Human words, wearing Human flags. Poor lonely soul, her. Never to find one like her to love, probably, but still walking forward. Making her either a Higher mind than she claimed, or (the best comedian of all) a liar who believed her own lies. Whichever she was, Moj loved her deeply.

Good at pulling rabbits out of hats, too. A hilarious lie, that. And very useful.

They slipped into the right container. Airtight. Stasis-sealed. Safe. No death in the void for Moj and Rythweth today. Just a big metal hat, and a magician to pull them out of it.

Time to go home.

Heneneriwyth

A little control re-established, maybe. But also an opportunity for unsupervised mischief, and Eriwyth had the tense feeling running all the way up her tail and spine that said she knew she’d erred a few times already. Like pressure in her brain, like a creeping pain in her fingertips and behind her eyes. She was off-balance, pressured, so distracted by the stakes and the consequences that her focus was not what it should be.

At least the deathworlders were out of the way. A large part of her worried she’d made a mistake by focusing on them when they were so clearly there to distract her, but sometimes distractions were worth engaging. One second, they might have been hanging out “drinking peacefully” in that bar. The next they might have vanished from view and achieved all sorts of mischief because she didn’t take them seriously. A distraction could become real action all too quickly.

Yes. Better to have them dealt with and removed from the equation. They could no longer distract her, and they could no longer act. Whatever damage may have been achieved while she was distracted still had to be accounted for and corrected, but at least there was one fewer dangerous variable in play.

Nobody else had disembarked from the ship, and the cargo unloading was going slow as the security teams scanned the containers. A less cautious woman would have felt safe. Eriwyth, though, was wondering what she had missed

The document in front of her wasn’t quite the relief she’d hoped. But it was something. It put a little solid ground back under her feet, and helped her take the deep breath she needed to center herself. She had an edge now, a tool to fall back on if things went wrong. A truly interesting and relevant one, too.

Hopefully, she wouldn’t need to use it. There were profound risks involved. But if things had got to that point, they would already have come too close to disaster anyway.

She deleted the message for safety’s sake, and returned her attention to the hunt. She still had a missing son to find.

And she could not rest until the end, whatever happened.

++END OF PART ONE++

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow and Riker

Forty-Three Humans

TTTA

SirNeonPancake

Adam Shearsby

Alvaro Gaitan

Anthony Landry

Anthony Youhas

Armond471

Austin Deschner
blackwolf393

Chris Candreva

Chris Dye

Daniel Iversen

Daniel Morris

Daniel Shiderly

Eric Hardwick

Fragthecullen

HungryWerewolf

James Ren

Jeffrey Stults

JLB58

Joseph Szuma

Joshua Mountain Taylor

Karthik Mohanarangan

Katja

Krit Barb

Marquis Talmadge

Martin Ã˜stervang

Nicolas Gruenbeck

NovaTheSpaceWolf

Ortheri

Rob Rollins

Ryan Seaman

Sam Berry

Shane Wegner

Sun Rendered

Taylor McGee

TheMoneyBadger

Theningaraf

Trevor C
tsanth

Xultanis

Yeania Aeon

Zachary Galicki

As well as sixty-one Deathworlders…

Aaron Hescox
Adam Beeman
Alexandre Smirnov
Andrew
Andrew Ford atp
Ben Thrussell
Bruce Ludington
Chris Bausch
Chris Meeker damnusername
Daniel R.
David Jamison
Derek Price
Devin Rousso
Elizabeth Schartok
Emil Jensen galrock0
Gavin Smart
Ignate Flare
Ivan Smirnov
Jim Hamrick
John Campbell
Jon
Justin Hood
Katie Drzewiecki
Kristoffer Skarra
Lina lovot
Matt
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
mihkel miks
Mikee Elliott
Nathaniel Batts
Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Patrick Huizinga
Phil Winterleitner
Richard A Anstett
RJ Smiley
Ryan Cadiz
Sam
Samuel Wilson
Saph
Sean Calvo
Sintanan
Stephen Prescott
Stratigan theWorst
Valiander
Vincent Leighton
Volka Creed walter thomas
William Kinser
Woodsie13
Yshmael Salas ziv
Zod Bain

…Eighty-seven Friendly ETs, 137 Squishy Xenos and 317 Dizi Rats, who ate all the cheese and then exploded.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work under fair use are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not automatically share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders chapter 70 will continue in part 2

Chapter 70: Death Eye, part 2

Date Point: 17y8m1w1d AV
Clan Bronzefur transport ship, Gorai system

Uriigo, Champion of Clan Bronzefur

The greater galaxy might be on lockdown, with Hunter raids being reported at a multiple of their usual rate, but Gaoian space was off-limits to them. On that much, at least, Uriigo felt a degree of second-hand pride. The Grand Army, Clans One-Fang and Fireclaw kicked Hunter tail so hard that they rarely even sniffed at Gaoian borders, never mind trying an actual raid. They knew how it would end.

Balls, the only reason they were hittin’ everywhere else so hard was ‘cuz that was where the Gao weren’t.

So, the three-day FTL journey from Gao to Gorai was safe. But Uriigo would have made the trip anyway. He had questions that needed answering, and he needed them answered fast. In fact, there was no such thing as fast enough where these particular questions were concerned.

Clan Whitecrest had the Great Father’s ear and favor more than almost any other Clan except Stoneback and Highmountain, and they were loyal. But Whitecrests, according to Grandfather Sheeyo, had a less…straightforward idea of what loyalty meant than some other Clans did. They looked out for Daar, they tried to make his world a little easier. They tried to spare him from the most terrible of his duties.

Daar hadn’t shirked from slaughtering Champions before, right there at the conclave table. There were times when Uriigo’s imagination made the flagstones where he stood feel sticky with his predecessor’s phantom blood. Times when he felt dreadfully certain that there weren’t nobody, not even Thurrsto, who’d escape that fate if the Great Father deemed it necessary. He ruled, in part, by fear.

But, Uriigo was satisfied, he didn’t want to. So when Sheeyo had gently pulled Uriigo aside a few days ago an’ dropped some dark hints about a Champion’s duty to really know everything about his Clan’s doings, even on the colony worlds, and fretted about the Great Father’s darker duties…

Uriigo had taken the hint. He’d got on a Clan shuttle to Gorai as quickly as he could.

He didn’t know more than that, and Sheeyo would have been a fool to say more than he did. If there was somethin’ so nefarious goin’ on with Clan Bronzefur on Gorai, even hintin’ at it to the Bronzefur champion was…well, a test. To see what he’d do.

And Uriigo had no idea if he was passing that test.

He didn’t even know what it might be exactly, but his brain was spinnin’ with possibilities and none of ‘em were good. Gorai was slowly bein’ reclaimed from the biodrones, region by region. Balls, every unit in the Grand Army served on Gorai at some point, in the hopes that someday they’d have a planet worth usin’ again. But Gorai was far enough from Gao ‘fer some real bad Keeda mischief to happen.

Bad Keeda mischief involving biodrones? And potentially his Clan? Uriigo could almost feel the fangs in his throat already.

He fretted all the way down to the ground.

Date Point: 17y8m1w1d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, docked at Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“Fuck me, Bruuk, you look like death warmed up. I thought Gao didn’t get hangovers?”

Bruuk uttered an irritable growl. “Not from ethanol we don’t.” He poured himself across the common lounge table with a whimper. “I don’t know what was in that shit I drank yesterday, but Keeda’s cock…”

“Let this be a lesson to you about the dangers of alien booze,” Ian grinned at the surly look Bruuk shot him, and delivered his patented hangover cure. “Here. Fruit juice, chocolate and painkillers.”

Bruuk sniffed at the offered bar. “…What’s that?”

“Snickers bar. Best hangover cure in the universe, trust me.”

“Those pills smell like ibuprofen.”

“Ayup. Eight hundred milligrams.”

“That much?! I thought—”

“Gaoians can handle it, especially big dumb lads like you…”

Bruuk shrugged, tore the end off the bar then thumbed one of the tablets into it. One of the oddities of the Gaoian mouth structure was, swallowing pills and tablets wasn’t easy for them. They needed it tucked away inside something. He smacked and chomped on the chocolate for a second, made an appreciative grunt, and gulped it down hard before lapping at the fruit juice.

Ian left him to it and prepared his own breakfast. He was having an odd time adapting to the vegan diet that most of the crew lived on. In theory, they didn’t object to him having eggs for breakfast. In practice, the nearest eggs were a few hundred light years away. He was making do with gram flour pancakes, muesli, porridge, soy milk and fruit compote, but sometimes…

Bruuk unknowingly echoed his thoughts with a groan as he laid his chin on the table. “….Fuuck…balls, I need some protein…”

“Uh…we have some firm tofu, I think.”

“Fuck that. I need something real.” Bruuk looked up from the table and sniffed around conspiratorially. “…Can you keep a small secret?”

Wilde knew instantly this was a confidence of utmost importance. “They’ll need to kill me first.”

Bruuk chittered wearily, then nodded. “Go to hold three, and look behind the bulk crate of veg I have. There’s a stasis unit hiding there with a warning sticker on it.”

It turned out to be bacon. Dry-cure, smoked streaky bacon. And eggs. Ian couldn’t help himself as he considered the small trove: the grin that spread across his face wasn’t out of relief or hunger, it was knowing he’d made a firm friend in Bruuk if he was willing to share this treasure with him.

Lucky that they were the ship’s early risers, too. It gave him time to cook up a proper breakfast and clean everything sufficiently to hide the evidence. By the time footsteps out on the deck heralded somebody else’s arrival, their secret was mostly safe.

Not that there was much he could do about the smell.

The new arrival was Morwk, who paused in the doorway to sniff the air uncertainly.

“…What is that? It smells delicious!” he stalked into the room and sat down.

“Just breakfast,” Ian told him. He somehow managed to suppress his smirk.

“Hmm. Almost makes me envy you two for how much you can eat…ah, juice.” Morwk grabbed himself a glass of orange juice and sat down.

“How’s our guest?” Bruuk asked him.

“Safely in stasis, and staying there until the Clan takes him. Can’t have him spreading DNA all over the ship if the House comes to do another inspection…”

“Probably for the best with that wound anyway.”

Ian nodded. Rythweth had deployed a fucking hardcore defence mechanism, in that he had a fusion sword literally implanted in the bones of his forearm. Deploying it had sliced and seared the skin all down that arm, and only the careful placement and alignment of the blade had made it possible for him to do that and still have a working arm afterwards.

Still, it was a wound. And he’d gone quite a long time with no better medical attention than he’d been able to give himself. The ship’s small but well-equipped medical bay could probably handle it, but better to just leave him outside the normal flow of time.

“…How long until we leave?” he asked.

“That’s one for the shipmaster.”

Ian finished putting the cooking utensils away and made himself an instant coffee. Bruuk’s nose twitched at the scent of it. “What’s stopping us from just…going?”

“The House knows who we work for,” Morwk explained. “Leaving too hastily will arouse suspicion. Lingering too long will make them nervous. Now that our guest is aboard, I think we will take on cargo and behave like just another freighter. And if they try to take this ship apart down to the last rivet…”

Ian sipped his coffee, then sat down. “Then that’s what Bruuk an’ I are for.”

“Exactly.”

Ian didn’t even know where the smuggling compartment was exactly. There were more than a few on the ship, and Morwk hadn’t yet told him how to access them all, but he had told him a lot about them. Clan Whitecrest had installed them, shielded them with clever sensor-shadowing equipment and materials so that from the outside they’d appear to be a perfectly standard bit of the ship. A backup air processor (or, for all Ian knew, maybe their main air processor was actually a stash and they were all living on the secondary.) A water filter, a power conduit, an engine…

Morwk and Trrrk’k both seemed confident that so long as Rythweth was safely inside one, he was impossible to find unless the House really did junk the whole ship. Which they couldn’t legally do to somebody else’s property.

Meaning that any attempt to do so would be illegal. Meaning that owning corporation’s licensed security—Ian and Bruuk—would be authorized in using all necessary force to prevent it.

The morning was reserved for meetings, and the skipper made short work of them, once he’d meandered down to the galley for his morning drink. Once they were done and out of the way, once all the others had cleared out and gone back to their respective duties, Ian sighed to himself and attended to his real job for the day.

Bruuk needed to be properly Motivated. Couldn’t let something as simple as a crippling hangover get in the way of the mission, after all.

“Get up, big guy. We have our morning routine to do.”

Bruuk groaned plaintively. “Fuck that, I ain’t working out with bacon and eggs in my belly.”

“Yes you are, mate. Our job is to be fit and ready.”

“My job today is going to be chugging water and rehydration salts. I’ve never been so thirsty…”

“Downing a gallon of straight rocket fuel will do that to you, yeah.” Ian chuckled and held out a hand to help him stand. “No excuses. Come on, moving will make it pass faster, too.”

“…Y’sure?”

“Not my first rodeo, mate. Come on. Let’s go sweat the rest of that poison out.”

Of course, Ian didn’t tell him it would also make it worse, but that was all part of the experience, really. One needed to pay for their fun. And for his part…Well, it was a chance to not worry. They weren’t free and clear yet. Best to be as ready as possible.

For whatever happened next.

Date Point: 17y8m1w1d AV
Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, Erwn-Bwrw system, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Heneneriwyth

“Drone?”

“Matching DNA detected. Probability of fugitive occupation: certain”

One step behind again. Eriwyth would have been proud, if it wasn’t so frustrating, or so urgent.

Rytweth was tenacious, that much was certain. He’d lasted a good long time, here in this dank, forgotten corner of the station, sleeping on trash and eating the cheapest food. There was a small pile of packaging in the corner that suggested he’d lived here for some time.

And yet…he’d moved on.

“Most recent occupation?”

“Within two days.”

Eriwyth only maintained her composure through an effort of sheer will. The aliens. The ship. Two days. There was no doubt in her mind what had happened, and when…but how? What had she missed? What angle hadn’t she covered? Every container onto and off that ship was searched, every airlock monitored, a permanent watch kept out for spacesuits coming and going. No ship docked at Kwmrwta-Wrnwm had ever been so closely scrutinized, and yet somehow…

Well, that settled it. The ship couldn’t be allowed to leave Kwmbwrw space. She was already legally blocking their access to the station’s comms synchronizer and suppressing their FTL wake comms thanks to an interstellar security treaty, and the inspection teams had turned up no sign of a wormhole router or any other onboard FTL communications. So the knowledge in Rythweth’s head was probably still not in Gaoian paws.

She needed it to remain that way. And she needed sufficient deniability to cover the House’s ass in the Dominion council. In theory, smuggling a bomb on board in one of the isotainers, crippling the ship, then having a pair of House ships “respond to a vessel in distress” and then “report that it was sadly lost with all hands” would be straightforward, but the Gao wouldn’t buy it. And they had enough clout and goodwill in the Council to push right through the House’s denials.

What did that leave?

“…Drone. Show me my favors list.”

The drone swooped down in front of her and deployed its holographic emitter, showing off a small and carefully curated file she’d built up over a long and difficult career. She perused it for a second, scratching her toes impatiently on the deck plating as she read…

…and found what she was looking for, halfway down. Yes. Perfect. She turned and strode out toward her vehicle. She had a call to make.

And a bomb to plant.

Date Point: 17y8m1w1d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, docked at Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Bruuk, workin’ out his aggression

Clobberin’ on Wild felt extra good today, because anyone who would willingly put a friend through that much agony deserved every bit of payback they got. Not once in all his years of lifting had Bruuk experienced such a mercilessly painful bout of training.

Though he did have to admit, smashing several of his personal records felt good as balls. But smushing Wild on the mat? That felt way more better.

At least the alcohol was out of his system, now. And given the miracles of modern medicine…

“Feelin’ better, big guy?” Wild grinned up at him from his prone position on the mat.

Bruuk settled a bit more weight across Wild’s hips, earning a chuckling groan of pain. “I dunno. Comfortable down there?”

“Not with your fat arse on top.”

Bruuk chittered and rolled off, but kept the big Human thoroughly locked up in a crushing leg pin. The gods-damn trickster. Bruuk was tired. Tired in the best way. Wild had a knack of pushing him just a little further each time they trained, and Bruuk found himself looking forward to their daily sessions with a certain tail-wagging enthusiasm he hadn’t felt in a long time.

Still.

“You knew how bad I’d hurt, didn’t you? What do you Humans call it? ‘Hanging over?’” Bruuk squeezed his thick legs together a little tighter, just to remind Wild who was boss right now.

“Hnngh… Hangover, mate. And I specifically said it would be over quick.” He grinned evilly, “I didn’t say a thing about how it would feel.”

“Ugh.” Bruuk relented and let go of him. “Maybe you shoulda been recruited by Clan Straightshield instead. That’s lawyer thinking.”

“Oof. Mate, that’s the most painful thing you’ve done to me all day…” Wild chuckled.

Bruuk chittered and flopped over onto his back, doing his bestest to stretch out. “Gotta…pay you back, I guess.” He was suddenly feeling un-clever and the floor felt so nice…

The energy cliff. He’d learned in his training with Wild that, for Humans, that cliff was very far away, and it took Keeda’s own work to even approach it. Bruuk could expend a lot more effort much more quickly than Wild, but he could just keep going. Getting to his level was very doable—Wild said so, anyway—but it would take a long time and a lot of pain.

Well, that was something for them to do during deep space flight, anyway. They spent a long moment letting their hearts slow down, saying nothing and catching up on air.

“So…what next?”

“Eat, re-hydrate, and do whatever you do for recovery. I’m guessing that’ll mean some Crue-G given your muscle mass. After that, we just…sit ready.”

Fair, really. Bruuk wobbled up to fourpaw and loped back to his room, mixed up some protein, took his medicine, and drank enough water to fill his belly. He took some rehydration salts too, since his fur felt almost crunchy from the mineral loss, even in a day laborer’s to-the-skin cut.

…He took a nice, frigid shower, too. No point smelling like Keeda’s armpit, after all.

He emerged from the blower cycle feeling pleasantly damp and much, much better. Whatever was in that alcohol he’d chugged had definitely done a number to him, but they’d accomplished the mission, and distracted the House while Moj did his thing.

Still. The scent of Robalin worry attracted him to poke his nose in on Dora’s little control blister as he ambled past. She was unusually quiet, no raucous Human pop music, no shrill singing. Instead she was sitting on her cone-shaped seat and considering her instruments, antennae waving gently back and forth above her head as she thought.

“…Problem?”

She jumped a little. She really musta been worried, ‘cuz normally Dora could see damn near behind her own head, and woulda seen him coming. She waved her left hand vaguely at him and scooted aside so he could see.

“Maybe? I don’t trust those House goons inspecting our cargo. They’ve had me on hold for nearly an hour, now.”

Bruuk duck-nodded and watched through her drone’s camera for a minute as a couple of stern Kwmbwrw in security harnesses stood guard outside one of their incoming isotainers.

“Not like they’re gonna find anything, is it? You already got Moj an’ that Rythweth guy aboard…”

“Yeah, but I still think there’s mischief going on.” She sighed and shook her head. “I just don’t know what.”

She sounded so uncharacteristically stressed that Bruuk just couldn’t take it. “Well…if whatever they’re doin’ is somethin’ you can’t find? Ain’t nobody gonna find it,” he said, loyally.

She laughed a little, then gave him an affectionate scratch behind the ear. He didn’t comment on what that would generally mean between Gaoians…and he managed to keep his leg still, too. “You should be careful, Bruuk. Or people are gonna start thinking you have a soft side.”

“Ain’t nothin’ soft ‘bout me! ‘Cept my fur. The Females love it!”

“Eh. Your charms are lost on me!” She laughed again, a little more convincingly this time, and stood. “…no sense in sitting here watching them, I guess. I’d better go tell Trrrk’k we’re stuck here.”

“They can’t hold us forever.”

“Nope! But we’re not running circles ‘round these guys, either…” she watched the feed for a while longer, then her hands darted over the controls, giving the drones a series of instructions. “I’ll…just make sure these containers sit in the back. Just in case.”

Bruuk nodded agreeably. “I’d better get cookin’. See ‘ya at dinner.”

As he turned away and got back to work, he did admit to feeling a lot better. Still a little tender between the ears maybe, but he didn’t feel poisoned any longer. In fact he felt ready to take on the day and whatever it contained.

…Probably.

—

Date Point: 17y8m1w2d AV
Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, Erwn-Bwrw system, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Matriach Heneneriwyth

“They accepted it?”

“They don’t really have an option. If they refuse the cargo, that just gives us a reason to detain them for longer. They are being…studiously perfect in their cargo manifest and procedures. The docks have scarcely had a more compliant ship.”

Eriwyth fidgeted with her possessions. She was leaving a lot behind to go out on this particular mission. Badges and clothing that indicated her rank, personal effects and weapons she felt quite vulnerable without. All had to be left behind, of course, but that didn’t stop her from fretting.

“This would, of course, all be simpler if you simply allowed me to—” she began, for the hundredth time.

“I have made my thoughts quite clear, girl.” the Grandmatriarch’s tone was severe. “The Great Game, at its highest level, rests on certain conventions. Certain things that are done, and not done. I understand why you have made your request, and in your position I might even be making the same. But my position permits me to see why it would be a mistake.”

“If they get back to the Gao with Rythweth…”

“I am aware.” Henenwgwyr gave her daughter a stern look. “It falls to you to ensure that they do not, without bringing similar consequences down upon us from other sources. The Gao are not the only danger; do not allow your focus to narrow your awareness.”

“…Yes, Mother.”

Henenwgwyr’s stern expression did not soften for a few heartbeats, but then it did, became more motherly and warm.

“I do have a small gift for you, however. Something to help ensure the success of your mission.” She handed over a small item, and Eriwyth’s nearby tablet pinged as it received a message. “A…hm…a long-term investment is bearing some unexpected fruit today.”

Eriwyth picked up the tablet and studied the message. Her pulse skipped a step.

“…We are certain of this?”

“Entirely. Commit those words to memory, my girl. Together with that—” she indicated the item in Eriwyth’s hand, ”—they should neutralize your worst problem rather effectively.”

“…Thank you.”

Wgwyr gave her a pleased look. “Anything for my favored daughter. Now…I, of course, was never here.”

“Of course.”

“Play the game well, and win.”

“I will.”

The Grandmatriarch departed, and Eriwyth turned the little glass vial she’d been handed over delicately in her fingers before pocketing it. She found herself conflicted between frustration that this particular secret had been kept from her, and gratification that her mother still played the game at a higher and better level than any other. Rythweth would surely not see this one coming.

She bustled to collect her things. She had a ship to board.

Date Point: 17y8m1w2d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, docked at Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

The way the docking clamps made the hull ring with a clung sound as they let go was a little jarring, but Ian knew it was normal. Still…he’d almost not been expecting to hear it. A faint powerful thrum through the hull signalled the kinetic engines powering up and backing them out of Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm. They were free.

Beside him, Trrrk’k puffed his pipe and made a probably pleased crackling sound. “Good.”

“There’s no way they let us go that easy.”

“No. They are not stupid. Interspecies law compelled them back at the station, but…”

“…But out in the black, away from any witnesses, that’s a different matter,” Ian finished. “…The Clan’s upgrades to this baby had better be pretty bloody special.”

“We shall see, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

He stayed on the bridge regardless, waiting for the other shoe to drop…though he wound up waiting a long time.

They warped out of system without incident. It was four days back to the Gaoian border. Eventually, he went to bed and slept fitfully. It was the kind of half-sleep he’d got used to catching in forward bases while waiting for the shooting to start, rather than a good night’s sleep, but it kept him functional.

Exercise over the following day was little more than maintenance work, enough to keep him and Bruuk primed and ready but rested. By dinnertime, the hours of things going normally were grating on his nerves.

He helped Bruuk fix their food. It was somewhat cramped even in the spacious kitchen, owing to the bear-like cook constantly bustling to and fro without any warning and apparent dire urgency. Food was apparently a thing that had to be rushed.

Moj seemed as phlegmatic as ever. With the ship in warp, his piloting skills were redundant for the time being, so he was hanging out wherever he could get a good conversation, and right now, it seemed, that was the lounge. “About to explode, you. Are deathworlders always so tense-busy when hardship is coming? Wasted energy, seems like.”

“I’d rather be alert and on my toes than wrong-footed, mate,” Ian replied, finally deciding he should just get out of Bruuk’s way.

Moj looked down at Ian’s feet. “…On your toes means…?”

“Uh…Poised. Ready to move quickly in any direction. Probably because we tend to stand, uh, on our toes if we’re on edge, I guess.” Ian looked down. “…Like I’m doing right now, actually.”

“Should drop your heels. Take a deep breath. Good that you’re ready to fight, but…”

“Wasted energy. You’re right.” Ian sighed and followed Moj’s suggestion. He rocked back, dropped his feet flat to the ground, felt the faint vibration through his soles and took a long, slow inhalation through his nose, closing his eyes as he did so.

Moj clapped him familiarly on the shoulder when he opened them again. “Better?”

“…Yeah. Cheers.”

“Of course.”

Ian sat down and grabbed a glass of water, raising a hand to waggle his fingers in a little wave over his shoulder as Morwk and Dora joined them. “Hard to relax when you know you’re being hunted,” he said.

“True.” Morwk said, sitting down.

“Yeah-huh,” Dora agreed. She went to grab a fresh hot bread roll from the batch that Bruuk had just set on the counter, only for him to flick his teatowel at her hand. “Ow!”

“Wait ‘fer erryone else!”

“Okay, okay. Grumpy Yogi…”

Ian snrrked. And he’d dared to think he’d reached the bottom of all the human pop-culture Dora was familiar with. But no: add Hanna-Barbera to the list…

“You look more relaxed,” she commented as she sat. The door opened as she did so, admitting the remainder of the crew.

“The shit’s gonna hit the fan at some point love, but…no sense in driving myself up the wall, hey?”

Bruuk chittered quietly in the background while he continued his cookery bustle.

“Shit? Fan?” Urgug pulsed a nauseated hue. “That sounds…messy and disgusting.”

“Yup. Good metaphor, ain’t it?”

“Very…visual.”

“Nah,” Bruuk chimed in as he ladeled some sort of curry-like concoction into a serving pot. “All I can imagine is the smell.”

“And the sound,” Moj added, fervently. “Good metaphor.”

“Perhaps we could have fewer scatalogical analogies at the dining table, however?” Trrrk’k requested, lowering himself onto his bench seat.

“Yup! Eat.” Bruuk delivered the evening’s meal to table looking pleased with himself. Ian noted that he handed Dora a bread roll first. “This is a Gaoian-style curry, one of the few that’s strictly vegan. I had to use chickpeas instead of kiri beans, but the two smell so much alike it works pretty good I think!”

To Ian, it looked and smelled like a palak dhal. He grabbed a bread roll and broke it in half. “Gaoians have vegan cuisine?”

“…Not really, no. We’re obligate carnivores, so vegan dishes are because we like the taste, or to pad out something else. Both, in this case. Also it keeps a good long while.”

“Thank you,” Morwk said. “Incidentally, you two don’t need to hide your meat supply. We all know about it. Especially after the House goons tore that bay apart and asked us about the dismembered animals in storage.”

Ian and Bruuk glanced at each other. “…Figgered it’d be polite to keep it on the down-low,” the Gaoian explained after a moment.

“Appreciated, but this is a multi-species crew,” Trrrk’k reminded him. “If you two require meat, we understand.”

“Well,” Ian offered, “humans can function on a carefully planned vegan diet…but thank you. Eggs are basically the perfect food for us.”

“And us,” Bruuk chimed in.

“Just please do not cross-contaminate, yes?” Urgug requested fervently.

“Deal.” Bruuk sat down.

They ate. For an hour or so, Ian got to totally forget the stress and tension, or the sword unquestionably dangling somewhere overhead. Urgug seemed to have relaxed a little, and regaled them with a long-winded but genuinely funny anecdote about his time at the Guvnurag equivalent of university, when he’d quite misread one of his classmate’s emotions. Apparently she’d gone very orange whenever he entered the room in the company of his best friend, and it took four failed attempts to set up a date between them before Urgug had finally figured out she was glowing for him.

As it turned out, Morwk was the only “family man” among them, estranged from his partner and children though he was. Trrrk’k’s people were solitary by nature, Urgug was in the prime of life by Guvnurag standards and had plenty of time ahead of him before the biological clock started counting down. The list of Robalin lesbians fortunate enough to escape the Supremacy’s atrocities was so tiny that Dora had basically resigned herself to single life, Ian already knew Bruuk’s sad story, and Moj was…well, Moj was Moj. He simply shrugged the question off as though it was irrelevant.

“What about you?” Dora asked. “Why us and not finding some nice sturdy Human gal?”

Ian took a moment to mop up the last of his sauce with the last of his bread as he thought about his reasons. “I think…Look, fact is, life for Humanity’s a bit bloody precarious right now. We’ve got at least two old and powerful alien empires who’d like to see us extinct,” he said. “If I can, I want to be doing everything I can to stop that from happening. Having kids would be nice, but I never met the right lass and even if I did…I dunno. I wouldn’t want to leave my kids to grow up without me. I’d have to quit the fight, and I’m not ready for that yet.”

Variants on the theme of a nod bobbed around the table, and he stood to clean up.

“…Hey, I hate to burst the happy bubble…” he ventured after a minute. “But I have a question.”

“By all means,” Trrrk’k offered.

“We know the House is lettin’ us go. They coulda snuck anything into one of those isotainers…”

“Probably did!” Dora chirped.

“So shouldn’t we just dump cargo? We’re a freighter second, aren’t we? Doesn’t the mission take precedence over the cargo run?”

“It would,” Morwk said, in a strained tone, “but…”

“But you don’t just dump that many isotainers,” Dora took over for him. “Even if I just had the drones tear them off the rack and throw them away, it’d still take hours, and we can’t do it at warp.”

“Why not?”

“Their mass content would be converted to hard radiation the instant they crossed our warp field’s event horizon,” Morwk explained.

“…And nobody has ever weaponized this?”

“Inward-pointing. From the outside, it’s just a big neutrino burst, totally harmless.”

“Cargo racks have a lot of redundancies to make sure the containers can’t come loose,” Dora added. “I literally can’t eject cargo while the warp engine is powered.”

“…And what happens if, say, a bomb goes off in the racks while we’re at warp?”

“Our radiation shielding can protect us from small fragments leaving the warp field,” Morwk said. “And the circuit breakers on the warp drive are wired straight into damage control. If we take any significant structural damage, we instantly drop to sub-light.”

Ian grimaced. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Call me paranoid, but if we have even a snowball’s chance in Hell of making it to the border without something going wrong then I’m—”

What followed wasn’t an explosion, or at least it wasn’t at all like any of the explosions Ian had been in proximity to in his life. A powerful sound—hard to describe, but maybe like the moment a nut fell into a turbocharger except louder and deeper—ripped right through the hull, ringing it like a cracked bell. The lights cut out instantly, stayed pitch dark for a second ,and when they came back up they were on Dominion standard emergency lighting, in eye-twisting blue that cast stark shadows on everything.

The gravity went, too. Ian snagged the table with his foot just before he drifted away from it. Morwk reached out his long tail and coiled it around one of Dora’s legs. Trrrk’k creaked in frustration as he didn’t quite manage to secure himself in time, and was left galloping futilely in mid-air until Moj reached out and helped him.

Bruuk just twisted in mid-air, bounced nimbly off Urgug, and pushed himself toward the door with a growl. “…You were sayin’?”

“That was no bomb, mate.”

“Sounded like…Ergh.” Morwk grimaced as he struggled to push himself toward the door too. He, Urgug, Dora and Trrrk’k were clearly not at home in freefall. “Like an emergency reactor shutdown. I’d better check it. Wild, do you mind–?”

“Mind what, mate?”

“Your ancestors were arboreal, you’re better suited for this than I am…”

“Oh!” Ian monkeyed across the room with a nod. “Right. Climb on.”

Kwmbwrw were all legs. When they stood up tall, they were tall, the longest sapient beings in the galaxy. Their actual torsos, though, were maybe about the size of a skinny whiskey barrel. Morwk turned out to be surprisingly low-mass once he’d grabbed on and wrapped himself around Ian’s shoulders and waist.

“Christ, you guys are just big daddy long-legs, hey?”

“Unlike Deathworlders, my people are not effectively balls of muscle and bone with some prehensile nubs poking out. Quickly, now.”

“Right…”

Actually, the hard part of making the trip down to their reactor core was taking it steady. The last thing Ian wanted to do was accidentally body-slam his passenger against a bulkhead. Bruuk followed behind, pouncing powerfully from wall to wall while using his claws for traction.

“So…what could knock out our reactor?” he asked.

“It’s a Waokai model seventy. Not a lot,” Morwk said. “Given the circumstances…a huge energy discharge through the hull?”

“A bomb by any other name, then,” Ian grunted as he worked the door’s manual release, heaved it open, then swung them both through. He shrugged Morwk off once they were inside and pulled himself up and out of the way toward the ceiling.

The lighting in engineering was a little less eye-gouging at least. The engineering bay itself was big, but densely packed by ET standards. Urgug would have had real trouble squeezing through between the assorted equipment racks and lockers, or around the inspection rails that encircled the power core on three levels.

For Ian, it was about as tight-packed as the kind of old-fashioned music shop that specialized in vinyl. The good ones. The largest open area was immediately opposite the door, where a crescent desk with the main engineering console on it sat under emergency lights, though all the monitors were dark.

Morwk buckled himself into his seat and then tapped experimentally on a touchscreen, eyes twisting back and forth in his version of a scowl.

“…Fuck.”

“Talk to me, mate.”

“…Head up to level three and open the hatch with the large yellow triangle on it. You’ll find a lever inside. Pump it three times, then throw the switch.”

Ian nodded, grabbed a rail, and heaved himself aloft. The hatch in question was a little tricky to identify in the blue lighting, but that was probably why the sign on it was so obvious. His efforts in pumping and switch-flicking were rewarded with a thump of some kind from under the decking, and a relieved-sounding chirp from Morwk. A moment later, a faint breeze through his hair suggested the air processor was running again. When he glanced over the edge, he saw that Morwk’s terminal was booting up and behaving itself, and pretty soon was showing a diagnostic summary.

There was a lot of blue on that readout. A human console would have been covered in red.

“Well…the good news is we’re not completely dead in space,” Morwk reported after a few seconds.

“I take it the good news ends there?”

“More or less…Toothcrack, that’s a lot of charge on the hull. Like we flew through a nebula at half a megalight.”

Bruuk growled, “We need Keeda’s own de-gaussing, then.”

“And soon. This is dangerous.” Morwk sat back and scratched the top of his own head. “…I can’t risk bringing main power back up. Another discharge like that might fuse the reactor containment circuitry, and then we’d really be ass-fucked. We’re going to have to limp to a degaussing station on backup.”

“Is whatever did this still out on the hull?” Ian asked, floating back down to join them.

“Very likely, but there’s no way to get rid of it.” Morwk chortled bitterly. “You remember I said space travel is a great equalizer between deathworlders and the rest of us? If anyone, even you, went out there right now…well, it’d be painful, but quick.”

“And Dora’s drones got bug-zapped,” Bruuk added, reading off a different monitor.

Morwk waved a hand. “They’ll be fine. Probably just need to change the fuses. Which, I can’t do without being carbonized…” he touched the communicator in his ear, and Ian heard his voice echo through the rest of the ship. “Restoring gravity to essential sections in one minute. All crew, brace for gravity.”

Ian sighed gratefully when it turned out that engineering counted as an essential section. The gravity was pathetic, maybe half of Dominion standard at most, but at least it was something. Simian ancestry or not, freefall stopped being fun pretty quickly.

He spent the next several minutes performing odd jobs for Morwk, clambering up and down the chamber to inspect more hatches and lockers, take readings, eject and swap out a fuse the size of a phone. Down below, Morwk and Bruuk talked quietly as they ran through a checklist of some kind.

The final task was to swap out their ruined warp engine for a spare. Warp drives were absurdly small for what they did—the Krr’zkvik’s was about the size of an old laptop—but safely detaching them from their power supply was a multi-step process he was glad to have Morwk talk him through.

Eventually, they reached some kind of ‘good enough’ state where Morwk grumbled reluctantly to himself and restored power to the warp engine. That, as ever, was anticlimactic: A small light came on, and a cooling fan spun up. There was no sense of thrumming power, no heavy throbbing sounds or anything, just the near-silence of something working as it should.

“…Well, we ain’t goin’ fast,” Bruuk commented. “But we’re goin’.”

“Fast enough to get out of Kwmbwrw space?”

“Not this year.” Morwk sighed and pushed his chair away from the desk. It was magnetized so that it stuck to the floor, Ian realized. “…An explosive would have been simpler.”

“Well, we’re not dead. That counts for a lot, in my experience,” Ian said. “Need me for anything else?”

“No, you’ve done all you can. At this point we just need to dump hull charge…And something tells me, we won’t get to do that unmolested, hmm?”

“You know, I was thinking something similar,” Ian agreed. “…Guess we’d better go clean up and check on people, hey Bruuk?”

“Sure.”

As they floated back through the non-essential sections still in null-grav, Ian’s mind turned over. The House had definitely scored a hit there. They were going so slow, with so few potential destinations, that they may as well be sitting still and waiting. And the House knew what they were up against now, too. That element of surprise that had helped him and Bruuk shock-and-awe the goons on Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm was gone: they’d be loaded for deathworlder now. And from what Ian had seen of them, he guessed that House Henen knew what that actually required.

Hopefully Trrrk’k had a plan. The Clan employed him for a reason, after all. And it wasn’t like Ian himself was bereft of ideas…

It was just that all of them probably ended in blood.

Oh well. Time to plot with Bruuk.

Date point: 17y8m1w3d AV
House Henen escort Iswyrr, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Heneneriwyth

“We’re certain the device activated correctly?”

“Yes, Matriarch. They’ve slowed to half a kilolight and are changing course toward the automated degaussing facility in…” the sensor technician swiped and scrolled through the star map for a moment. “…Seven-minor-one, sixty-three Wrrmuthwm”

“Perfect.”

Eriwyth meant that word, deep in her belly. After so many setbacks, for something to go so right for a change made her feel like a weight had fallen off.

Timing the discharge device had been a tricky balancing act. The Gaoian ship was, as anticipated, faster than stock. Several House analysts had worked hard to come up with an estimated range of warp speeds based on the systems observed during their fruitless inspections, and their estimates had proven highly accurate.

The Wrrmuthwm sector was a backwater, full of nothing but type seven stars, the small, dim three-quarters of the galaxy. No major inhabited planets, no major mining operations. There was plenty there to mine, of course, very few star systems were utterly barren. But they were all inconvenient, and developed only in line with Dominion regulations and in anticipation of the far future.

Really, the only civilization in the sector was in the form of automated degaussing stations, and those barely counted. They were unstaffed and existed purely for emergency circumstances. A docking gantry and field emitters, orbiting a suitable gas giant, stocked with rations, water, medical supplies and spare parts in sufficient quantity as to be welcome to the desperate and dying, but beneath the notice of any Hunters or pirates.

No witnesses. Nobody in range to help. And, thanks to a “system update” that Eriwyth had authorized a few minutes ago, the Gaoian transport would find the superluminal comms systems offline too.

The only thing stopping Erwiyth from swooping on them and claiming back her errant son was that the alien crew undoubtedly knew she was coming, and included two heavily armed deathworlders. She needed more than House security for this.

So she’d called in a favor. The line between pirate and privateer was so very fine, after all. And some of the galaxy’s less scrupulous ship captains lived for the approval and support of people in high places. Some of them, thanks to the Hunters, were desperate for a good score.

Some of them had small armies to feed and pay, and were especially desperate. They just needed a target that sat still long enough. After that…

Eriwyth would bet that quantity would do enough work. Enough armed bodies versus only two? Deathworlders or not, that equation eventually broke even. But why trust to numbers alone? This was the last and only opportunity, nothing could be left to chance.

She took a deep breath and rehearsed what she was going to say for the hundredth time.

And thanked the House for her good fortune.

Date Point:17y8m1w3d AV
Clan Bronzefur central orbital transit hub, Planet Gorai, Gaoian space

Uriigo, Champion of Clan Bronzefur

“The contract has been ongoing since the reclamation began, Champion. We take captured biodrones off the Grand Army’s paws and ship ‘em up to the Openpaw facility on Gorai-Two. Got a catch in transit right now, actually.”

“Show me.”

Uriigo had worked long years as a docker, and then as a foreman. Shipping and receiving paperwork was entirely transparent to him, and he ran an experienced eye over the columns of data in front of him.

Unusual and disturbing to see names under the unique cargo identifier section, but that was who they were dealing with, after all: people. Or, former people, anyway. Former people who, if Clan Openpaw could work miracles, might become people again someday.

“Thirty-nine biodrones in stasis boxes, loaded on a light cargo transport and shipped up to orbit, all accounted for,” the Associate showing him around the trans-orbital facility declared confidently. Uriigo could understand that confidence, too. Everything on Gorai was new and shiny. Planned colonies were like that, they didn’t inherit centuries of cumulative inefficiencies and quirks, land ownership disputes, the way cities grew in one technological paradigm with no way of preparing for the ones to come.

So, the Gorai colonial capitol trans-orbital cargo hub was a model of efficiency, and something of a ring in his Clan’s finger.

Still. His nose was twitching.

“…We got footage of them arriving?”

“Security footage? Uh, yes, probably…This way.”

They strolled outside, across the concrete apron. Gorai was only a Gaoian colony by dint of its proximity to Gao, not because it was particularly Gao-like. Up until the war, Gorai’s major export back to the homeworld had been wood, harvested from vast plantations of the native trees. The air, in late autumn, was about as pleasantly warm as a Gao summer, without the cold nip and dryness that Uriigo was used to. Even the scent of ocean water blowing on the breeze from the nearby harbor was warm and pungent with algal life, quite different to what he was used to.

Honestly, Uriigo wasn’t sure why people had wanted to come here. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t a planet made for Gaoians, and he could feel it in his fur and feet.

Then again, he’d had a good job, Clan Brothership and a career. For Gao with less, maybe another planet might seem like a second shot at opportunity. Maybe that was why he had this Associate Preek showing him around, who was otherwise a bit less than the caliber of Associates Uriigo was used to. Again, nothing wrong with him as such, but Uriigo doubted Preek would have passed the first rites for his Clan back on the homeworld.

Oh well.

Security was a densely packed little cube of a building, centrally positioned for easy access to the cargo passing through the facility, but also equidistant from every access point. The cameras fed into a small, crowded room in the basement where Uriigo had to leave Associate Preek outside in order to squeeze in alongside the other Associate at the desk.

A few minutes later, something caught his eye that prompted him to stop giving a Naxas’ ass about the tiny space. He reached out, grabbed Preek with his claws, and reeled him in.

“Thirty-nine, you said,”

“Y-yes, Champion?” Preek’s ears were flat.

“I count fourteen rows of three boxes. That ain’t thirty-nine.” Uriigo turned and growled point-blank in Preek’s face. “You have a miscount, associate. On any other cargo, eh. Miscounts happen. But on live Gaoian biodrones? Now we have a fuckin’ problem. Don’t we, Associate?”

“U-um…” Preek glanced in a panic at the camera operator, who reeked of mounting alarm… “Y-yes, Champion.”

Uriigo turned with a snarl. “You. I want every frame o’ footage o’ that shipment. We’re goin’ over it all, right now.”

And if the two associates were terrified and jumped to it with the vigor of the mortally afraid, that was nothing compared to the surge of panic that Uriigo was keeping down. If the Great Father found out about this…

Uriigo’s predecessor had died messily, but quick. If the worst-case scenario now rampaging through Uriigo’s mind was accurate, then Uriigo himself would be very lucky indeed to meet the same fate.

He willed his paws not to shake, and got to work.

Date Point: 17y8m2w3d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Approaching degaussing station, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Bruuk

Decked out in armor and gear, running the assault course one last time, polishing every last little movement until it was perfect and unstoppable…that was their life for the last week of deep space crawling. Before, it had been something both fun and serious—Bruuk craved Wild’s approval, and was eager to learn all he could. Now, though, things took on a sense of urgency. They might be going into a real fight, not some brawl where Bruuk could show off his brawn and expect them to back off, or maybe just rough up some swaggering guard.

Now, they’d probably come in and start shooting, if things didn’t get played exactly right.

“Fuck me, mate! That’s your fastest yet. I think you’re officially as quick through as I am now.”

Bruuk duck-nodded happily, proud of the praise. “Does that change our tactics?”

“No. We do the exact same things with the exact same logic. We clear rooms and use cover like we’ve practiced. It’s just now, I know I can trust you at full speed.”

“Should we go again?” Bruuk swiped some of the sweat out of his fur. “I’m good for another few rounds.”

“Aye. We’ve got another few days, so…we keep going, as hard as we can and as many dirty tricks as Moj and Dora can muster. You two up for it?”

“I gotta point out, it’s mostly Moj!” Dora called from her computer bank in the corner. They’d had to argue long and hard to get Morwk to agree that their training room was essential enough for gravity and power, but he’d relented. “He’s evil!”

“Evil everywhere. Some folks, more than others.” Moj effected a big shrug, his back carapace lifting several inches. “Not much evil in Dora. Enough, though.”

“…I think that was a compliment?”

Bruuk chittered fondly. “Everyone’s gotta know when to bite, Dora.”

“Yup.” Wilde thumbed a number of pellets into a magazine. “If you’re not dangerous, you’re not capable. So hit us with your best evil side, love.”

Bruuk watched Dora think for a second, then perk up, waggle her fingers theatrically the way she always did just before performing a card trick, and start tapping away on her touchscreens. Clearly, she was feeling inspired.

Moj gave the pair of them a pleased look, and handed Wild a full magazine. “Sorry I can’t keep up,” he said. “Dancing, you. Poetry in violence. A kind of Resonance I’ll never know.”

“You think the Higher’s there in killing folks, mate?” Wild slid the magazine into a pouch.

“Higher is Higher.” Moj shrugged again. “It’s all…allness.”

That last one was said with an awkward flail of one hand, and Bruuk tried not to chitter. Sometimes, it was pretty clear even Moj didn’t know what he was talking about.

Wild just raised an eyebrow at him, then swigged from his water bottle and headed for the starting line. “Gonna agree to disagree with you on that one, mate,” he said. “Ready, Dora?”

“Ready!”

Bruuk joined him at the line, they traded glances—in just a few short weeks, he’d learned to read a lot from Wild in a quick glance—traded nods…

And moved.

Trrrk’k

Urgug hadn’t stopped glowing a worried shade from the moment the sabotage happened, and watching the deathworlders train was only worrying him more, rather than less.

That was hardly surprising, really. Guvnurag were innately peaceful personalities, pacifists by nature. Violence of any sort made a well-adjusted Guvnurag deeply uncomfortable. Especially, it seemed, well-coordinated, breathtakingly quick and precise violence. Where Trrrk’k found the fact that they had two such accomplished gun hands aboard reassuring, Urgug was showing some worrying signs of stress. Isolating himself from the crew, avoiding Bruuk and Wild especially, being less jovial than he had before.

A better captain might have noticed and intervened sooner, Trrrk’k chided himself. He would have noticed and intervened sooner, not that long ago. Age crept into the mind as well as the bones, though, dulled his sensitivity to brewing trouble that might have been addressed earlier. But, on the other hand, it came with the experience to know how to handle the situation properly, once noticed.

“It hurts them, you know. How you keep your distance.”

Urgug tore his dismayed gaze away from the internal camera feed and look up at his shipmaster.

“…The ship has changed, since the human came aboard,” he replied. “More…high-strung. More…” his translator skipped the next lengthy rumble, but Trrrk’k knew enough of the Guvnurag language to notice the syllables denoting a color in a tonal-emotional context. Urgug was describing a hue for which Domain Standard had no word, because the Domain species couldn’t see it. And specifically, he was describing the emotion associated with that hue.

It sounded disapproving, and melancholy.

“They do what they do to protect you,” Trrk’k reminded him. “And the rest of us, too. That is something we should respect. Especially from Bruuk; I must admit to severely underestimating him. Whitecrest must have known his potential, but I did not see it.”

Urgug sighed heavily and prodded the camera feed to turn it off. “I know,” he said, in one of the shortest sentences Trrrk’k had ever heard from him.

“It is not like you to be terse, old friend. Know what?”

“…I know that you are right, of course. I know it here…” Urgug shifted his weight to lift a huge hand to the side of his head and tap it. “Instinct rules us all, however. My body sees small, fast shapes with fangs and claws and violence, and it remembers that there are things that hunt Guvnuragnaguvendrugum.”

“Is that why you watch them? To try to get over the fear?”

“…It was. I think perhaps I am on the wrong course, however. Perhaps I am only reinforcing the instinct that says fear them, and not the instinct to sit beside them, share food and call them friend. I do not want to fear my shipmates, but…” Urgug sighed again and shook his pelt out. “Things change too fast for me, Trrrk’k. To me, the days when deathworlders were a myth, when Gao were just a new and small species and nobody had ever heard of a Human, they feel like yesterday. Since they came, my species have been enslaved and partially freed again, we have been drawn into a war we didn’t even know about, and now they are…everywhere.”

He flashed a wry shade of off-blue. “You can see why I am conflicted, I hope?”

“We are old and set in our ways.”

“And this is no longer a galaxy welcoming of our languid pace.”

Trrrk’k nodded, solemnly dipping his head quite low.

“This is my retirement mission, old friend,” he revealed. “The intent is for Wild to obtain his certifications and replace me. We are doing this because Whitecrest has…riskier missions in mind.”

He watched Urgug carefully. A vast range of his crewmate’s emotive colors were invisible to him, but he’d learned to pay close attention to those shades he could see.

“…I would not have agreed to any of that unless I saw the necessity,” he added, reassuringly. “This mission in particular is urgent. There is a great evil at play, here. We are doing our part to fight a much more dangerous type of predator than either of those two, down in the hold. More dangerous than Hunters, even.”

“Doing your part by stepping aside?” Urgug harrumphed heavily. “…I suppose we all must, eventually. But not yet, for me. I for one am not ready to roll over and let the deathworlders completely take over. Besides, they will need an experienced quartermaster.”

“Then you had better start looking at the friendly side of their nature, rather than the lethal side.”

“…I will try.”

Satisfied, Trrrk’k stepped away to examine the flight controls. They were still most of two days out from their destination, despite that Morwk had worked a few minor miracles to squeeze a few extra multiples of lightspeed out of the backup power systems. This had to happen when jumping was not available. If jumping had been an option then their extraction would already be over, one way or another.

As it was, they’d been trapped. They had an emergency egress code for dire circumstances, but with main power offline they couldn’t use it.

Instead, he had no choice but to fly into the most obvious of traps. Not ideal, and Trrrk’k was personally glad for the violent training now playing out on the lower decks.

He just hoped their shadow was still out there, waiting to step in if needed.

Date Point: 17y8m2w3d AV
Emergency degaussing station 7m1-63 Wrrmuthwm, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“…Fuck me it’s cold!”

Dora’s voice crackled in Ian’s ears as he finished heaving the door open and his boots crunched on a layer of frost. “It’s an unmanned, automated emergency post. You were expecting a bar and a hot tub?”

“No, but that’d be nice…” Ian grunted as he pushed the other door open. From what he gathered, they’d usually have given the station a few hours to warm itself up before coming aboard, but the clock was ticking. “Fuck it, once we’re done, I’m gettin’ a hot tub for my quarters.”

Degaussing hadn’t happened, and it should have been automatic. The station had drawn their ship into its docking gantry as expected, but the expected forcefields had not swept over the hull, nor had charge leapt off them like huge fat lightning bolts and then shot away along a thin filament field to ground down in the atmosphere of the huge beige gas giant they were practically kissing. And, when Moj experimentally tried to initiate undocking, the station refused to let go.

That had to be the House’s work. And while there was no sign of a hostile ship on sensors, that didn’t automatically mean the station was unoccupied. So, to Ian and Bruuk fell the task of clearing and securing it, deck by deck. Starting with a door that refused to open for them.

“Dark in there, too,” Bruuk commented.

“It shouldn’t be.” Dora sounded like she’d have been frowning, if Robalin faces could do that. “I guess they fucked with the lights too?”

“Bet they fucked with a lot more than that,” Ian replied, and put out a hand to stop Bruuk before he crossed the threshold.

Bruuk gave him a curious sniff. “Problem?”

“G-traps. One second you’re floating, the next you fall sideways across the room at six Gs and go splat. HEAT fucking hate ‘em.” Ian opened a pouch on his MOLLE and thumbed a ball-bearing out of it. He flicked it gently forward and watched it float in a straight line right across the open space in front of him and then, quite abruptly, it veered off course to corkscrew drunkenly through the air before smashing into the wall with a sharp crack. “…Shit. Okay. Don’t enter any section until you’ve tested it.”

“Be careful, you two.” Dora sounded tense.

“Careful as we can be, love,” Ian promised. Beside him, Bruuk duck-nodded fervently, his ears plastered flat to his skull. “Skipper? This is going to take a while.”

“I saw,” Trrrk’k assured him. “We shall be patient.”

Ian nodded, took a deep breath, and thumbed a few more BBs out of his pouch. “…Alright, Bruuk, go get the spray paint mate. Let’s go to work.”

’A while’ turned out to be hours. The station was built from modular parts, meaning the deck was at least neatly divided up into square sections of a standardized size with a single G-plate underneath, and it didn’t look like there was any operator actively watching and changing things on the fly. As they worked, Morwk hypothesized that maybe they’d just uploaded a virus or something that scrambled the vector and intensity on each plate individually. Crude…but effective. Some of Ian’s BBs left holes and dents where they struck the walls and ceiling.

Still. With such a regular, even pattern, they were able to find a work rhythm. Each plate currently tuned to zero-G got an X in the middle, and a symbol on each edge to indicate what the adjacent plate was doing. Arrows for sideways, chevrons for up or down, repeated for high intensity. Pretty soon, they had a “safe” route mapped across the floor, even if navigating a labyrinth in zero-G without handholds was hardly safe or easy.

And then they hit a dead end. The station’s main (and only) throughway, with admin and engineering at the far end, and every plate along the whole thing, as far as Ian could tell, all pulling in one direction with enough force that his BB hit the pressure door like a bullet.

“…Hey, Morwk?”

“Yes?”

“‘Bout how long would it take to pull up a floor unit and cut power to the adjacent G-plate, mate?”

“Normally? About a hundred ri’ I’d guess, without complications.”

Ian converted ri’ to minutes in his head, then did a quick estimate of just how many floor units were between them and their non-negotiable destination, and factored in the quite sizeable complications. “…Bugger.”

“I assume that was an expletive and not a proposition. Yes. Quite.”

“Honestly mate, getting fucked in the arse would definitely be more fun than this. Oh well…” Ian glanced at Bruuk, who duck-shrugged stoically.

“Better get to it,” he said, simply.

Ian sighed, nodded, and pitched in.

The clock was still ticking.

Date Point: 17y8m2w3d AV
Freelance ship Stars of Our Making, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Shipmaster Eqan

The Kwmbwrw matriarch was standing on her hind feet again, trying to stretch herself up to Eqan’s own height. Oh well, if she wanted to make herself uncomfortable for the sake of pride, that wasn’t Eqan’s problem.

Pride really was the quintessential Kwmbwrw vice, though. Every species had one. The Guvnurag were too pacifist, the Celzi too bellicose, the Gao too feral, and so on and so on. There was no escaping the vices of one’s own birthright, so why even try?

Eqan embraced the Qinis vices. After all, he ran a successful business venture, albeit slightly outside of the terms and model deemed acceptable by either the Dominion or the Alliance. Why shouldn’t he dress himself finely? Why shouldn’t he ornament his body and his possessions? Why shouldn’t those possessions be plentiful and of the highest quality?

Clearly, his materialism set the Matriarch on edge. And that, in Eqan’s view, was entirely acceptable

“You seem troubled.”

The Matriarch—she hadn’t actually told Eqan she was a Matriarch, but they both understood that of course she was—gave him a restless look. “This ship has been trouble since it came to me, and the two deathworlders in particular—”

“—Are only flesh and blood, you know.” Eqan said, smoothly. He reached out and scratched one of his attendant drones under its ‘chin.’ The little device made a happy purbling noise and flashed an emote at him on its nose screen. “

“You underestimate flesh and blood.”

“Even the Humans have drones and robots.” Eqan smirked. “You’ll see. My little pets have given the Hunters no end of trouble recently, they can handle two ordinary deathworlders.”

“Good.”

“So relax! Have a drink, or something to eat. You gain nothing by fretting to no effect…”

The Matriarch glanced around the bridge, taking in the decor. It was a functional space, of course. No self-respecting shipmaster would ever interfere with the necessary operation of his ship for the sake of aesthetics. Eqan had simply lifted the ambience somewhat.

“I’ll be in my cabin,” she declared, and abruptly left. Eqan shrugged, plucked a glass of his preferred stimulant off the serving drone’s back, and sipped it. He waited a few seconds, then intruded on his guest’s privacy by accessing the camera in her quarters. She must have suspected it was there, because not once had she uttered anything incriminating or revealing even while alone, and she even sat with her back to the wall while working so that he couldn’t make out what was on her tablet. Mildly frustrating, but oh well.

There was one thing she said as she paced fretfully, however. Something that Eqan couldn’t decipher at all, which made it triply fascinating. She sounded like she was rehearsing it.

Whatever it was…it was of no consequence. He shut off the feed and sipped his drink again. “Time to intercept?”

“Fifty ri’, shipmaster,” his navigator replied. Eqan nodded, and relaxed.

And wondered what he’d spend his pay on.

Date Point: 17y8m2w3d AV
Clan Bronzefur central orbital transit hub, Planet Gorai, Gaoian space

Uriigo, Champion of Clan Bronzefur

Uriigo had always thought of himself as a gentle kinda male. Not afraid ‘ta scrap when necessary, of course not, but he’d never enjoyed violence.

Now, though…Now, the only thing stoppin’ him from tearing a throat out and liking it was knowing he had a duty to drag the whimpering, bleeding Brother he’d just clawed senseless all the way back to Gao, to drop him tied up in front of the Great Father.

A full Brother of the Rites. Keeda freeze to death. He delivered a kick to the ribs for good measure.

It was a slick operation, broken open only by the fact that the list of people with both the access and opportunity to falsify the shipping paperwork was short. Fourteen rows of three biodrones arrived, went into storage while the transport up to the Openpaw hospital on the moon was arranged, which took a few hours. During that window, the paperwork was tampered with, three of the drones relocated and put on a waiting interstellar courier with an entirely benign and uninteresting manifest of mail and parcels…

And, somewhere between Gorai and Gao, the drones in their stasis pods were jettisoned for collection. Keeda alone knew what happened to ‘em after that.

The full list of those involved numbered nineteen, two of whom—the courier crew—had caught Uriigo’s scent and bolted. He’d sent an urgent request to Clan One-Fang, asking them to detain the ship and return the occupants on capital crimes.

With the One-Fangs spread so thin, though, most likely that courier would escape. It was a big galaxy. They might never be brought to justice. Most of the guilty Associates, Uriigo simply worked alongside Clan Straightshield. They were in a lockup now, one that reeked of terror as they realized just what they were destined for. But the Brother? Brother Irkin? That was personal. To see that kind of opportunistic disloyalty rotting in the belly of his own Clan? Uriigo was glad to get his claws bloody over that.

“Where in the balls-lickin’ fuck is my Grandfather? Find his mangy tail and detain him.”

There were Straightshields all over the compound now, detaining, questioning, taking forensic samples, going over the computers…ripping the place apart in search of every scrap of evidence, basically. Two of the Associates Uriigo had personally cleared—Preek, who’d become effectively his impromptu aide, and Taku, the Associate from the security office—bothe duck-nodded solemnly and bustled out of the room along with a pair of judge-fathers.

The senior of the remaining judge-fathers in the room took a step forward. “Champion. Your prisoner requires medical attention now.”

Uriigo snarled down at the whimpering former-Brother on the floor, and signalled his assent. “Sure. Make sure this sack’a shit lives so the Great Father can deal with him.”

The whimpering got louder, “No…Champion…Please…”

Uriigo restrained himself from replying. He stepped aside and let the Straightshields drag the prisoner away.

For the first time in a couple of days, he was alone. He put out a paw and steadied himself against the wall, partly from the fatigue of days without proper sleep, partly from sheer emotion. Unconscious and unbidden, his free paw came up to his throat and massaged it.

He noticed, and shook it away with a growl at himself. He knew what he had to do. And he was fuckin’ well gonna step up and accept the consequences like a Champion oughta.

Daar was a wise man. He’d see through to the bottom of this.

Maybe he’d be merciful.

Maybe Uriigo shouldn’t have been such a thorn in his side…There was nothing for it but to face judgement. But Uriigo resolved in his heart of hearts, if he lived through the coming days, if Daar did show mercy? He’d have a loyal Clan for all of Uriigo’s living days.

And if he didn’t…well, it might just be that Clan Bronzefur would pass into history and be forgotten.

Time to return, and find out.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Emergency degaussing station 7m1-63 Wrrmuthwm, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“Which button do I push, now?”

“The large round one at the top of the console with the two parallel lines. That will trigger a full system restore and restart everything in safe mode.”

“Which means…?” Ian had exactly one thing in common with Warhorse: technological ineptness. Or at least, ineptness regarding things like phones, computers and such. If it had a touchscreen it was basically an impenetrable magical slab as far as he was concerned.

Morwk sighed over the comm. “Safe mode,” he repeated. “As in, everything should be safe afterwards.”

“What’s stopping them from, uh, un-safing it right away?”

“No comms in safe mode. They’ll need to be physically present and in front of the machine you’re gormlessly staring at this very second. Now…the button, please?”

“Right, right…” Ian pushed it. Nothing very much seemed to happen, except that the monitor above his head went dark. A few seconds later, alien text that he probably couldn’t have read even if it was in English scrolled right-to-left across it, a bar filled across the top edge of the screen…

…And the gravity came on, the lights came up, and warmer air started to rush out of the vents. He heard dozens of discarded ball-bearings rattle and bounce onto the deck plating back behind him.

“Bruuk?”

Ian didn’t need to ask twice. The big Gaoian was on all fours, checking and then surging through the corridors to verify no new surprises were anywhere to be found. Ian did the same, from the opposite direction. They knew nobody was onboard, but…

With gravity on, it didn’t take them long. The plates along the worst gravity trap reset, too. Both of them honestly needed a bit to recharge, so having that taken care of…

“And you’re sure we’re safe?”

“For the last time, yes.” Morwk let out a shrill, irritated whistling sound. “Are we clear to board yet?”

“Yup. Come on over and get the ship de-whatsited.”

“You’re doing that deliberately now,” Dora accused, with an amused note in her voice.

“You already know me too well, love.” Ian chuckled, while through the comms he heard Morwk make that same whistling sound. A minute or so later, the two of them came down the ramp, accompanied by a small tracked drone that Dora was piloting.

“What’s that for?” Bruuk asked.

“I need parts from the supply stores to repair the reactor,” Morwk explained. “You two musclebound brutes should have no problem with loading it, assuming you can follow basic instructions…” He shot Ian an indignant look.

“It’s just computers are my Achilles heel, mate. I can read a shopping list just fine.”

“Who’s Achilles?” Bruuk asked.

“Think Keeda, except somebody cut the tendon in his heel.” Which was as much of an explanation as they had time for. “Means a weakness, a personal flaw.”

Bruuk shuddered at that. Gaoian were plantigrade, like humans…but on all fours, they ran digitigrade on well-adapted foot-paws. That big tendon at the back of their heel was a major part of how they were so pouncy and the mere thought of losing that seemed to give every Gaoian he’d ever met phantom pain.

“In any case, here’s the list.” Morwk handed him a tablet. “Unless you’d prefer it on paper? Or carved in stone, maybe?”

Ian chuckled. He was pretty sure Morwk was just taking the piss, rather than being genuinely bitter. “This is fine.”

“Excellent. The sooner we get loaded up and repaired, the sooner we can get out of here…”

“You think we’ll get out of here before the House arrives?” Dora asked, following Ian as they headed for the parts storage.

“Fuck no. But maybe we can have a working ship by the time they do.”

“Maybe.” Dora tapped on her tablet and the crawler drone stopped near a door. “Alright! You two do what you two do best!”

Ian was in the middle of wondering just how in the hell most of the other species in the galaxy handled these components as he and Bruuk heaved a crate onto the drone when a worried-sounding Urgug called in. “Wake sensors can see a ship…no, three ships coming in. I believe the House is here…”

Several things happened quickly. Bruuk and Ian got the crate on the drone immediately, Dora came skidding around the corner from the engineering section at an ungainly tripedal canter, and Morwk swore viciously over the open comm.

“I don’t have control of the docking clamps, yet!”

“So we’re stuck here.” As soon as Ian was sure Dora had the drone in hand, he took off for the ship’s ramp. Within a few paces, Bruuk shot past him at a Gaoian’s trademark greyhound sprint. “Any idea what kind of ships?”

“Non-standard,” Moj sounded strangely amused. “Big power, small mass. Modified like us, maybe. A battle of the changed!”

“Focus please, mate. What does that mean?”

Trrrk’k sounded grimmer. “Mercenaries, probably. Pirates, privateers, whatever you call them.”

“Well, at least it’s not the bloody Hunters…” Ian grumbled. He was about to start up the ramp when Dora tugged urgently on his sleeve.

“I need that open!” she said fervently, using two arms to point at the crate on the drone.

Ian didn’t ask why: Dora only acted scatty. He slipped his knife out of its sheath, jammed it in under the crate’s lid, knocked it in twice, twisted, and the lid popped with a crack! Dora rummaged in it the second he heaved the top aside, grabbed two somethings from inside and darted up the ramp with surprising speed for a wobbly three-legged alien.

“Thanks!”

“No problem.” Ian trotted up after her, hung a left and stormed up the ship’s external deck to the front. He didn’t bother with preamble as he barged onto the bridge. “Alright. How long do we have?”

“Coming in fast, they,” Moj reported. “Two minutes.”

“Can’t jump, can’t undock?”

“Still no to both,” Trrrk’k creaked out a heavy sigh, and suppressed a cough. “They will force-dock with the station and try to seize the ship.”

“Be simpler for ‘em to just blow us up, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, if they do that then there is nothing we can do. So let us hope their desire to recapture our guest exceeds their sense of expediency.”

“…Great. Moj? Gear up, mate. You’re no good to us there.”

“I took the liberty of acquiring my own weapon,” Trrrk’k said, indicating an oddly-shaped rifle strapped to the small of his upper torso’s back.

“Pukka. You can keep an eye on Urgug.” Ian turned back toward the door, just behind Moj.

“You do not want every available hand?”

“Skipper, you’re a ten-foot, geriatric, asthmatic glass giraffe. Moj has an inch-thick carapace, while Bruuk is like twice my weight and can outrun a car. This…isn’t your fight.”

Trrrk’k watched him solemnly for a moment, then nodded, slowly. “…As you say. Good luck, then.”

“Good hunting.”

And that was that. He passed Morwk on the way back down the ramp, hugging a sack full of more parts to his chest. They traded nods. He found Bruuk shoving crates and stuff into place to make them some cover, and pitched in.

Moj joined them just before loud, resonant sound through the station’s hull told them one of the other ships had docked.

“…Morwk?”

“Yeah?”

“Emergency air containment’s working, right?”

”First thing I fixed.”

“Good.”

After that…silence. And waiting.

And the sound of a hostile airlock, cycling.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Freelance ship Stars of Our Making, docked at degaussing station 7m1-63 Wrrmuthwm, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Matriarch Heneneriwyth

“Watch and learn, my esteemed employer. This is how you deal with deathworlders!”

Eriwyth had to admit, the swarm of drones that Eqan controlled would have frightened the tail off her if she had been facing it down. Individually, none of them were particularly imposing: a small quad drone, each remarkably stable in the air as its miniature kinetic engines hummed and kept it aloft.

Most were fitted with pulse guns. Nothing wrong with that: pulse weapons were quite capable of crushing skulls and haemorrhaging organs in most species, though Humans in particular were notoriously resilient to them. Fortunately, the list of firepower did not end there.

Among the swarm were bigger, heavier drones fitted with projectile weapons. They worked in a team with another heavy drone, one to carry an ammo supply, the other bearing the weapon. Eriwyth didn’t know how effective they were, but considering that deathworlders used such weapons themselves, she imagined that Eqan may indeed be onto something.

Finally, the shield drones. Unarmed themselves, but providing the others around them with cover and protection. They, in Eriwyth’s estimation, transformed the drone swarm from merely alarming to genuinely terrifying. A storm of firepower was one thing, but a storm of firepower that couldn’t be diminished by return fire?

She congratulated herself on choosing this pirate in particular. Eqan maybe be a lavish showoff, but his reputation and success were no accidents.

The docking clamps engaged solidly, the airlock collars locked, and she heard the airlock below her on the next deck down begin to cycle. Eqan waggled his fingers delicately in the air, and descended them onto his control screen with a murderous smirk that totally belied the silk-wearing dandy he’d been only a second earlier.

Then he blinked in confusion, and tapped on the controls. His expression grew more confused and astonished by the heartbeat, his movements more erratic and panicky. “…What?”

“What?” Eriwyth felt her whole body tense up. She should have known this wouldn’t go to plan…

“I don’t believe this…”

From below Eriwyth’s feet came the sound of gunfire.

“…They are boarding us!”

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Gwei Shee Woodland Preserve, equatorial Yinan Gwei, Planet Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Daar was a leader, not a micromanager. He wasn’t suited to running people’s lives for them. And it had taken a massive personal effort to escape that mantle.

A Great Father was an almost god-like figure in the gaoian psyche. When one came around, it was because singular purpose of action was both dire and necessary. That, yes, meant that in the beginning, all decisions of any import had to pass through him. That was doable in an all-out crisis, where the only decisions to make were about the fight, and the immediate aftermath…

But afterward? No man could govern a civilization alone. His staff grew, and grew, until he’d grown fed up with the increasingly impossible workload and managed a neat trick: separating the ideas of leadership and management—a borderline alien concept to the Gao—and then moving the latter out of his person, and into a structure in the form of the Conclave.

Well, specifically: his shiny, almost brand-new Cabinet. Formally a standing subcommittee of the full Conclave and made up of the most senior and powerful Champions, all of whose Clans held vast global powers, the Cabinet had, with Daar’s fierce and exuberant encouragement, re-assumed their suited aspects of leadership, and had begun to properly re-delegate management among their Clans themselves. What had once been ad-hoc and informal (and largely forgotten with his ascension to the Great Throne) had been restored, and made formal.

It had been an open question if Daar could do such a thing. After all, the Great Father and none other was in charge. There would be consequences. Long-term consequences, all of which Daar fully intended. Such as accountable mechanisms of state, for example.

The traditionalists grumbled about such things of course, some even going so far as to label the entire idea as decadent and ‘un-Gaoian.’ Daar had responded by pointing out that, in feeling comfortable to voice such a thing in the first place, the confidence and trust to begin self-governance was already there; Daar wasn’t disemboweling anyone for the crime of voicing their opinions, after all…

That shut them up, ironically.

In any case, the solution to all the nervous complaints was simply for Daar to order the new structure into being. The Cabinet had Daar’s full confidence to govern, and he’d made a public proclamation to that effect. The Conclave could decide to meet whenever it felt wise, and they had full authority to bring matters of import to the Cabinet. Anyone could speak with the Great Father directly, if they wanted. He went out of his way to be both fierce and approachable by anyone. But, well…the tacit understanding at that point was pretty clear, no matter how he felt about it…

He was happy to listen to anyone, mighty or meek, but it damn well had better be important. About the only thing worse than angering Daar was, apparently, mildly annoying him, because even though he’d never dream of retaliating for an honest but misguided petition, everyone else did on his behalf and no amount of protest seemed to stop that.

Weird. Abject submission for everything else, no matter how much he hated it, and unswayable zealous defense of his honor…no matter how much he hated it.

Anyway. The practical upshot of all that was his in-the-weeds time had been reduced to a mere two or maybe three hours a day, and most of that was simply briefings. He had more time, now. Much more, to visit his people, live their lives as much as he could, know their needs and their pain and their dreams…time to mate, time to train, time to be the thinking brute he truly was. Time to love the people that deserved it, that he needed to love.

Champions seldom permitted themselves the time to do that. But Daar did, once again. And that mattered. A man couldn’t lead if he didn’t live his leadership as fully as he could, after all. Leading a people meant he had to be the people, as much as he possibly could.

At the moment he was prowling the woods with the young Champion of Clan Forestnettle, who was a fine and lithe specimen of a silverfur if Daar was any judge. Humans might even call him elf-like. He’d been a bit of a nervous wreck all day, and despite all Daar’s attempts to be, well…less of a murderous barge of muscle and doom, none of his bestest attempts at harmless friendship seemed to work, at least not until they’d finally made it to the last wild forest on Gao. Now, though? In the gloom of the woods? Maybe it was just the familiarity of home, but the Champion was in his element and finally opened up.

“So you’ve lived here all ‘yer life, I hear?”

“From as soon as I left the commune,” Champion Paru agreed, and looked around at the woods with unbridled fondness. Couldn’t blame ‘em, really. The forest felt right.

From what Daar remembered, trees had once grown all across Gao, in dense forests that stretched from northern ocean to southern sea. Not a single landmass had been bald of them.

Then, quite abruptly, the forests died back enormously at about the same moment as the Gao were taking their first steps into civilization. Nowadays, wood was a rare and unbearably precious resource, harvested with care and attention from the few equatorial forests and plantations where trees still thrived…these days, under the dutiful care and protection of Clan Forestnettle.

Ironically, having such authority on the supply of wood made the Clan disproportionately wealthy. Paru was clearly rich, in a practical, woodsy way. The long crest of fur over the top of his head was braided, with a few highly polished wooden beads woven into it before the braid vanished down the collar of his hard-wearing shirt. He kept a walking stick made from a branch or sapling, but used it mostly to point things out as they walked. The belt that kept his clothes cinched tight around his waist was clearly a custom work of master craftsmanship.

In any other context, if he let that crest unwind a bit and showed it off, he might even border on being ostentatious, which Daar didn’t much care for. But Paru had made his living managing the land, walking the woods, cutting down trees and sawing planks. Small, noodly, tastefully decorated and elfin he might be, but there was a fuck of a lotta practical there, too.

Daar could appreciate functional an’ purdy. Two good things that went better together! After all, nobody would ever accuse Daar of modesty on that point. He had fur good an’ glossy enough that he rarely bothered with clothes at all, ‘cuz what was the fuckin’ point if he couldn’t show off how pretty he was?! A ‘Back had priorities. If Paru was the type o’ gao to show off his taste and success, Daar wanted to show off his discipline, athleticism, and his absurd genetic fortune. He knew what kinda hulked-out stereotype of a ‘Back he was an’ he thoroughly enjoyed livin’ it, an’ really there weren’t no point in doin’ otherwise. Too bad all his scars were gone now…

Anyhoo, both favored the practical, and that, Daar suspected, meant they’d be good friends.

“Having the weight of Clanship has changed things a lot for us,” Paru continued. He paused to claw a flake of bark off a nearby tree and sniffed it. Satisfied, he flicked the flake away and carried on. “It’s taking a long time and lots of legal expenses, but we’re working out the ownership rights, the land’s lawful stewardship…if things go well, we’ll be able to buy some of the neighboring farmland and return it to woodlands over the coming decades.”

“I’m sure Straightshield has been happy for the business…”

Paru chittered. “I think land disputes are where they sideline all their unpopular Fathers,” he confided. “Nobody has a passion for property law.”

Daar, of course, could not comment further, less he endanger his neutrality. He merely chittered noncommittally and changed the topic. “In any case, it’s been a strange thing, re-visiting our forests after Earth. They’re just different enough it messes wit’ ‘yer instincts a bit.”

“You’ve been to an Earthling forest?” Paru sounded like Daar was claiming to have visited a magical land of mystic fantasy.

“Yeah! Went huntin’ too! Hard ‘ta describe. First thing is the scent, I guess. It really clobbers ‘ya over the snout with everythin’ goin’ on. So many differn’t kinda things growin there! I think mebbe it’s easy ‘ta notice just ‘cuz none of it smelled familiar, yijao?”

Paru nodded earnestly. “Oh, absolutely! Was there much wildlife?”

“Yeah! Everythin’ from tiny little skitterin’ bugs, ‘ta small tree-lovin’ things called ‘squirrels’ which are super tasty by the way—cronchy!—up through birds o’ every kind, an’ big prey animals like deer…”

“And bears!” Every gao knew about the famous Earthling bears, along with the dinosaurs.

“An’ bears, yeah. I never met a grizzly bear, an’ at the time one o’ them woulda been trouble ‘fer me…balls, that woulda been a hell of a fight. They got claws like I do!”

Paru glanced down at Daar’s footpaws, and he just couldn’t help but extend his claws all the way…Paru’s nervous ear-flick was just too good not to savor. Daar din’t much like bullyin’ guys around, s’pecially little fellas, but he sure as balls enjoyed bein’ alpha as fuck.

But, well…he liked makin’ friends, too. He reeled ‘em in, pranced over playfully and gave an affectionate lil’ rub of his head against Paru’s side.

“Anyhoo, you should visit one day! I bet we could make that happen, when things calm down!”

“Really?”

“Yeah! Assumin’ ‘ya ain’t allergic, an all. I’d love ‘ta hear ‘yer experience of it! Mebbe when I go huntin’ with Righteous next!” Daar growled happily at the thought, and felt himself prancing along the path, wagging his tail…

Maybe he should share a story! ‘Fer me though, biggest thing I’ll ‘member ‘bout it all was gettin’ some dirt into an open cut an’ almost losin’ my forearm ‘ta some random fungus…”

Paru boggled at that. “Really?!”

“‘Ta be fair, I sorta bet it’d have ruined a Human’s day too, but still. Don’t take nothin’ ‘bout a Deathworld ‘fer granted…ah.” Daar sniffed behind him. “I think I’mma be callin’ this short.”

Sure enough, Paru turned his head, flick an ear as he listened, then duck-nodded. Somebody—Champion Thurrsto, by the smell—was stumbling through the woods like a blind Naxas through a canyon, and hurrying to catch up.

A few moments later he rounded a tree, plucked a leaf out of his crest, cleared his throat, and duck-nodded respectfully in greeting.

“…My Father. Champion.”

Daar chittered resignedly. “‘Cuz, I’m gonna need ‘ta teach ‘ya how ‘ta stalk ‘yer prey a bit more quietly’n that…ain’t you never hunted?”

“I hunt people in their natural habitat, My Father. Much less dry crunchy kindling in a city.”

Daar turned to Paru sympathetically, and offered him a gentle affectionate hug. “Sarry, I really wanted ‘ta walk this whole forest wit’ ‘ya, tip ‘ta tail today…”

“Another time, perhaps.”

“Okay. Feel free ‘ta visit sometime! I grill a mean steak!”

And with that, Daar nodded goodbye, hopefully with one less antagonistic Champion stuck in his fur. Nice guy, Paru.

Daar shook out his pelt and turned to Thurrsto. “Only thing ‘bout forests is ‘ya get pollen all up in ‘yer fur, yijao?”

“They make clothing for that.”

“Eh,” Daar dismissed the idea. “Jus’ one more thing ‘ta worry ‘bout. Speaking of…”

“It’s about the Gorai matter. Champion Uriigo is out there as we speak.”

It was always quietly amazing how sneaky Thurrsto was with his privacy bubble. Daar never quite noticed it was up and functional until he heard the big Champion speak.

“Doin’ what?”

“Getting increasingly angry and upset, as far as I can tell. He discovered the miscount.”

Daar duck-nodded, satisfied. “Knew he would. Jus’ needed a little nudge. So, what’s he up to now?”

“Hunting. I’m not clear yet on what his prey might be…”

“Well,” Daar sighed. “He better choose carefully. You think y’all can help him find the right answers?”

“”Respectfully, My Father, I think this is a test for him alone. We can help him find his prey. The right answers are his, not mine.”

“…’Yer right,” Daar conceded. “I can’t let my hope he does the right thing get in th’ way. Anyway,” he sighed, “that can’t be th’ only thing that brought ‘ya out here…”

“No. I also have news on the team of Friends we sent to Kwmbwrw space. We received a coded update via Q-comm—‘subject acquired, extracting’—but House Henen has been doing everything it can to stop them. They apparently instructed every one of their ships, stations and surface facilities to construct farthrow generators, and their entire territory is now a no-jump zone. Our Friends tried to warp out, and the Avenging Fury reports they were crippled, presumably by a bomb or something on board. They’ve limped at low warp to a nearby degaussing station for repair…and of course, mercenaries hired by the House have joined them.”

Daar uttered a frustrated growl. “Well, that proves it. House Henen are involved, if they’re goin’ that far ‘ta stop ‘em.”

“It does not prove a thing, My Father. It says only that they believe they possess a powerful interest in that vessel. They may well know what the ship is and who its crew are, and frankly that’s reason enough. We’d take similar measures against known Kwmbwrw spies in our space.”

“Why ain’t they just blown it up?”

“The only thing more dangerous than a successful spy is his sources and methods. Those may leak again, after all. It is in their interests to capture our Friend and torture everything out of him, and possibly offer him for exchange.”

Daar duck-nodded. It all made sense. The “Trade” was one o’ the few things Daar couldn’t quite wrap his brain around, and it weren’t for a lack o’ trying. Din’t matter how much turbogenius a ‘Back might have up in their thick skull—Daar’s was the most thickest too, heh—none o’ that mattered if’n ‘ya couldn’t grok the problem in the first place. Too sneaky-sideways for his tastes. Thurrsto had a Keeda-given knack for guiding Daar’s dumb tail through the tricksier bits, better even than Genshi (rest his soul) or Regaari.

“Right, right…this is why I learned years ago ‘ta have a spymaster I can trust and whose balls’re big enough ‘ta tell me the truth. Anyway…what d’ya need from me?”

“Real-time authority, My Father.”

“Oh?”

“We might need to intervene, and the consequences…” Thurrsto left the precise consequences unspoken. His tone for the next sentence was heavy, however. “…Or, frankly, we might want to be merciful with our Friends. The Kwmbwrw are masters of the arts.”

“Right.” Daar sighed and looked around at the forest. He’d been enjoying his walk, but duty came first. “I owe it ‘ta them to order it myself, if that’s how it’s gotta be.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded in that very specific way he did when he disagreed, but would comply. “That is noble of you, My Father.”

You shouldn’t take this upon yourself, seemed to be the message. If only. But, well…Wild was a friend. And what kind of leader would Daar be if he delegated the fate of a friend?

“Arright. Back to High Mountain,” Daar grumbled. To his ever-present aide, “Wouldya make conciliatory arrangements on my schedule ‘fer me?”

“Of course, My Father.”

Having good people helped. It helped more than he had words to say. That, however, was the price. If he was going to have more free time, then he had to be prompt and dutiful when the time came to be a Great Father in the sanguine and terrible sense.

On the inside, though, as they returned to his transport and left the forest behind, he hoped and prayed that, this time, it wouldn’t be.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Emergency degaussing station 7m1-63 Wrrmuthwm, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Moj

Dancing.

A lumberfooted dance, his own. Pale echo of the Death-Eye and the Claw. Knowing the steps, knowing the tune was more than half, but the rest?

Grace. Speed. A body made for Dancing, evolved to thrum in harmony with this aspect of the world. A mere sea of drones was just the dance partner, the parchment for their poetry. Dead, dumb things, built to kill, doomed to burst in to shards and sparks before the living bullets and blades.

Step two three, shoot two three, kill two three…

Confused, the drones. Stupid things. Made to attack, knew how to attack. Didn’t know how to defend. Didn’t know how to deal with three bodies in their midst, dancing and destroying, attacking. The narrative turned on its head, the whole plan turned into a lie and a dream.

Moj laughed as he killed.

His own part was the fundamental note, the beat that set the pace of the dance. The drum, the bass, the steady slow at the center. The relentless attack of the song belonged to the Claw, all speed and power and constant, restless movement.

The melody belonged to the Eye. Virtuoso, soloist, grandmaster. A privilege to behold, a blessing to support and enable. No note wasted, no step wrong, no dissonant phrases. If this was how Humans warred, then Human war was awe in its purest expression, and not even drones were immune.

They recoiled. They tried to reform. They shifted and tried to dance, but the dance changed. The beat shifted, and they couldn’t keep up. Their role, to go silent and lend the crunching of their broken hulls to the percussion.

Still, enough buzzing flies could drown out a symphony, and not even Humans were tireless. The dance slowed, the melody dampened, the poetry trembled…

Until somebody new changed the beat. Drones of their own. Dora. Two could fight as the pirates fought, and Dora? Dora knew how to dance in her own lopsided way. Dora knew how to be the white noise that finally silenced the enemy and let the song flourish in its full splendor, until…

…Anticlimax. And Then There Were None. Only a room, and two who didn’t know how to dance at all, and the song was over.

And it was all Moj could do not to weep for the loss of it.

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“You are illegally interfering with lawful commerce,” Wilde managed while catching his breath. He’d even managed to keep some menace in his voice. Bruuk wasn’t quite ready to talk yet, but he didn’t need to, really. He was menace enough just standing there.

It certainly worked on the Qinis shipmaster, whose attempt at regal elegance in his half-cloak and diaphanous silks was completely ruined by the way he was staring at the three of them and trembling.

Neat trick, with the drones. A couple of them had dinged Ian pretty good, but pulse weaponry just didn’t do shit to a man who’d been trained into a brick shithouse by Warhorse, and who was used to sparring with beast-men like Ten’Gewek and Bruuk. Through his armor, even a heavy pulse felt more like a wild attempt at a shove, and as far as he could tell, Bruuk was so solidly built, he might have felt them even less.

The rockets were a spicy addition, no doubt…but only an idiot freely fired rockets in a pressurized tube, so they didn’t get as much effective use as they might have otherwise. They did let Wilde score the neatest kill he’d ever managed, though: he charged forward, kicked himself up the wall and managed to get on top of one of the drones, crashing it to the ground with his weight. Even Bruuk was impressed.

He didn’t repeat the trick. God only knew what prompted it in the first place, but point made, and besides: Bruuk just had to prove that anything Wilde could do, Bruuk could do better. Or at least bigger. He leveled two more with pouncing tackles that looked entirely too much like big cat attacks for comfort…

Dora got the last one. Her little zippy drones had been a fucking blessing, right at the moment things got hairy, and if pulse fire was pretty shit at hurting any moderately sturdy person, it still fucked a flimsy drone up pretty readily.

All in all, the element of surprise had worked in their favor. Their enemy hadn’t had time to get really nasty and that was what really cost them; if they’d added depressurization or gravity fun to the mix, this would have been a HEAT problem, something too deadly for a mudfoot out of his depth like Ian. Sheer pressure had kept the Qinis on the back foot and panicking until it was too late.

Now, there was just the question of what to do with them. Especially the Matriarch, whose reply to his accusation was the closest thing a Kwmbwrw could give to an icy glare.

“You’ve hidden behind your lawful facade long enough, Human. Drop the pretense.”

“What facade? We’re an interstellar light bulk freighter, nothing more.” Ian indicated the trembling Qinis with a nod of his head. “So for his sake let’s not, hey? Wouldn’t want to see what you’ll do to the likes of him in your vendetta against us.”

“Are you accusing me of murder?”

“Let’s go with attempted murder and piracy. Or did I imagine that drone horde just now?” Ian turned slightly aside and indicated the door. “Anyway. There’s a bounty out on pirates. Good bit of extra profit for us this run if we turn you over to the proper authorities…”

Bruuk shivered suddenly, and shook his head as if something was distracting him. Ian had no idea why that caught his attention suddenly, but…

“You will do no such thing, Human.”

“Yeah? And who exactly is going to fucking stop us, love?”

The Kwmbwrw smiled.

“It’s okay,” she said, clearly and carefully…in perfect Gaori. “Mother Kiya said you can see him when you get back.”

“…Wh-?”

There was a snarl from his right.

Ian had been around Gaoians long enough to know their ways. He’d never heard one utter a sound as tortured and feral as the murderous rumble that forced its way up Bruuk from his hackles to his fangs. His gun clattered to the floor, he dropped to four-paw, his fur bristled and his lips curled back to reveal a rictus grin straight out of a nightmare. The deck plating under his feet shrieked as he flexed his claws and left gouges in it.

“…Bruuk?” Ian stepped sideways and gained some perspective distance. “You okay—?”

The massive Gaoian exploded across the room faster than Ian had ever seen him move. Before Ian had a chance to properly react, Bruuk had bowled the stunned Matriarch over with a crunch of breaking bones, pinning her down and sitting atop her, snarling into her face and poised at the edge of violence.

“…Bruuk!” He obviously wasn’t okay. He really, really wasn’t. But Ian had no idea the fuck was going on or what to do. Heneneriwyth batted desperately at him, gone from smugness to panic in a heartbeat.

“No! Not me! You’re meant to—!!”

Bruuk’s claws found her soft underbelly. His fangs found her throat. Whatever Heneneriwyth had been trying to shriek out was cut off with a shocked gurgle as blood painted the floor around her. Moj and Ian alike both took a stunned step back, and the Qinis fainted.

Bruuk obliterated the Matriarch in barely two seconds.

The Qinis had it even quicker. He basically snapped apart like brittle kindling when Bruuk pounced. He looked down on his prey, seemingly disappointed…Before his gaze turned toward Ian. His entire head was dripping blood.

And Ian saw only madness in his friend’s eyes.

END CHAPTER 70, PART 2

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As well as sixty Deathworlders…

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…Eighty-eight Friendly ETs, 139 Squishy Xenos and 315 Dizi Rats, who are really just the most bravest.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0International License.

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The Deathworlders chapter 70 will continue in part 3

Chapter 70: Death Eye, part 3

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Freelance ship Stars of Our Making, docked at degaussing station 7m1-63 Wrrmuthwm, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Hunched over, tense and fierce. Head dripping in blood, gore splattered everywhere. A bestial snarl…not the sound of a thinking man. Whatever was going on, Bruuk was definitely not here right now, and the snarling menace that had taken his place was not happy with the world. Experimentally, beast-Bruuk pressed down on the Qinis’s chest with one of his forepaws. There was a quiet snap of bone, as the delicate mercenary offered as much resistance to Bruuk’s huge weight as a wet tissue paper. Its suffering was instantly over.

Bruuk swung his blocky head toward Ian, stared as if confused for a moment…then snarled.

Ian was locked in a room with an enraged animal. A swift and powerful animal, with a grizzly’s claws and a tiger’s teeth. He had no idea what the hell had happened, but his first priority had to be protecting his friends, so he slowly moved himself between Bruuk and Moj and kept himself as non-threatening as possible.

“Easy, mate…easy…”

The animal that had been his friend hunkered down, growled at him. One paw dragged the ruined Qinisi carcass slightly behind him, protectively. His ears were flat, his hackles up, but his tail tucked down and his hips drooping. He felt threatened.

Well, at least that makes two of us…

“…Oh, Bruuk, what did she do to you mate?”

An ear flicked, and Bruuk jerked his head as though stung. Ian had no idea if that was encouraging or not.

What the fuck had just happened? One second they’d been fighting alongside one another, then there’d been talking…Bruuk had acted a little strange…

He glanced at the Kwmbwrw Matriarch’s gutted corpse, and then took a step back when Bruuk growled possessively. There really was nobody home right now, he was just a feral beast protecting his kill. What the fuck had she done to him?

What had she said? ‘It’s okay. Mother Kiya said you can see him when you get back.’ In flawless Gaori, right down to a regional accent. No help there. No time to think about it. Right now he had to deal with Bruuk.

…Well, fuck.

“Easy, mate, it’s only me. Your friend, hey? It’s just me and Moj here…”

Bruuk shook his head, as if trying to clear water from his ear. He peered back at Ian, seemed confused for a moment….

And then flashed across the room like the intervening distance wasn’t there.

It was all Ian could do to pull his rifle up from low-ready up to his shoulder, but even that wasn’t fast enough. Bruuk had leapt over Ian’s head, bounced off the far wall, and charged down the hall. He’d fled.

There was a long, shocked silence. Ian took a moment to gather himself. Normally that’d be a fatal mistake in a combat situation, but, well…He stepped out into the hallway. Moj was still reeling from whatever the fuck they’d just seen, but Ian didn’t have time for that right now. He looked about.

Well…it’d be easy to find Bruuk, wherever he went. What with all the blood spatter and claw marks in the carpet.

Dora’s voice in his ear sounded distraught and shaken. Of course, she’d seen everything through her drones. “What the shit?”

“Our Matriarch did something and Bruuk isn’t with us right now. Actually…”

On a hunch, Ian prowled back into the room, gave it a once over, and closed his eyes. He listened. Maybe there was something…

No, not a sound. A scent. It took him a few breaths to key in on it, and it was right on the limit of his ability to smell at all, almost buried under the sting of blood and musky reek of slashed-open bowel, but familiar in a way he couldn’t quite place. He pulled a face, sniffed again, then followed his hunch to the Matriarch’s remains and dug through her pockets.

There was a small glass vial in a cloth pouch, crushed and wet. When he lifted it to his nose and got a good sniff of it, he finally recognized the scent: Gaoian fear-musk. It took him right back to the war on Gao, when he’d cleared out workhouses and homes that practically dripped with the stuff. It smelled much like the human equivalent, but more…well, Gaoian.

Neither of those were smells a man ever forgot. But that alone wasn’t enough to drive a gaoian totally feral.

Whatever. He didn’t have time for thinking it through. But he had what he needed. He threw the vial away and stood up. “Morwk! How fast can we scrub the air on the station? We need to filter something out!”

”Why?”

“Wh–because Bruuk!” Jesus wept, ETs could be slow. “Get the smell out of the air!”

“Uh….Faster to vent and replace from reserve. But, of course, we’ll have no guarantee that he’s somewhere safe if we do that—”

“Morwk! How long?!”

“If I start now…three hours.”

Shit.

“Okay. Moj, get back on the ship. Everyone get ready to run like Hell. I’m gonna find Bruuk.”

Dora was a little quicker on the uptake than Morwk. “That scent is on your hands, Ian,” she pointed out, as Moj nodded and lumbered back toward the airlock, through the sea of broken drones they’d left in their wake.

Ian went the other way, following Bruuk deeper into the ship. “Fuck all I can do about that. Not with his nose.”

“…Good luck.”

Ian grunted an affirmative, mostly for himself. He was going to need a lot of that, now. Of all the ways this day could have gone from fucked-up to worse…

He gritted his teeth, tucked his rifle to his shoulder, and followed the trail of blood.

Moj

“What happened?”

Moj would have laughed, for almost anybody else. For Bruuk…for a crewmate…

No laughter. This lie wasn’t funny. A lie of the soul, of the mind? No quirk of life, that. A crime. A sin.

…A Hell.

Dora, shivering beside him, mustering her drones at top of the boarding ramp. The little soulless minions she did card tricks with, and now…Some humor there, anyway. Bruuk and Wild and Moj had just smashed through one drone army. Why would a second stop Bruuk? Why were they there?

For a lie of safety. A lie he wanted to believe.

“Deathworlder noses,” he replied, never lowering his rifle. “Deathworlder ears and eyes, too. Scents and sounds I couldn’t smell or hear.”

She turned her head and curled her antennae at him, confused.

“…I don’t know,” Moj translated.

“It’s like she had him…conditioned or something. Like the kind of thing you’d read in a novel…” Dora shivered. “Just a pheromone and a trigger phrase…Or like a biodrone, I guess.”

“No biodrone, he. No metal in his brain. Just scars.”

“…Scars in his brain?” Dora’s antennae curled the other way.

“Mm. Made of scars, our Bruuk. Body, brain, mind and soul. Deep and old, still hurting. Some, maybe, not scars after all. Some, maybe, still wounds after all this time.”

“Well one of those wounds is…that.” Dora gestured nervously down the ramp. “But…when? How?”

“Before. Somehow. Not a question for here and now, that. Present moment, love.”

“…You’re going to start calling me that too?”

“Fits.”

They stood in silence a while. Stillness. A good skill, that. Moj was better at it than Wild or Bruuk. Always moving those two. Didn’t know how to stop. More like them, was Dora. Always shifting, always fidgeting. Watching through her headset, maybe seeing what Wild saw. Fingers flexing, jaw moving, weight swaying, feet scuffling. Scared.

“See him?”

She nodded. “I’m watching him, yeah. He’s so fast. He barely has to glance at a room and he knows it’s empty.”

“Faster than you see,” Moj agreed.

“Do you think they’ll be okay?”

Moj thought. He’d done lots of watching and learning, over the last weeks. More than either deathworlder knew. Watching virtues.

Confidence? Boldness? Brashness, even? Bruuk’s virtues, those. Scars, claws and teeth turned outward, shown to the world, telling all who looked how dangerous he was. Honesty, in its barest form.

Confidence of a different kind in Wild. Confidence turned inward, turned quiet and calm. Scar worn proudly too, but not a warning. A reminder to himself: ‘I’m only Human.’ A lie, that. A lie of always seeing the better and best in his friends. A lie turned outward, pointing to speed and strength and clever card tricks and eyes that saw strange hues. The same lie turned inwards, too, ignoring himself. Always measuring himself less than he was. Many fierce friends, but not seeing.

Blind in one eye.

“…They’ll be okay,” Moj promised.

Dora sighed. “I hope so.”

“They will,” Moj repeated, and that was the last either of them spoke for a while.

On that point, his faith was absolute.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Naydra, Great Mother of the Gao

Naydra had felt hate before. For her captor and rapist, back at the height of the war. At first, she hadn’t welcomed it. She’d tried to cling to her identity as a loving, peaceful soul…But hate had seen her through. The righteous anger had kept her alive, in its way. Kept her rising to face each new day rather than just giving up and breaking, like some of the other females from her commune had.

It had been a long time since she’d felt it burning in her chest like this, though, when she considered the miserable sacks of bloody fur trembling on the ground at Daar’s feet and reeking of shame and terror. Knowing what they’d done, as Uriigo read out the litany of their crimes to the Conclave chamber, re-kindled that fire in her and burned away any sense of pity. They just didn’t deserve it.

Daar stood there towering over all, a magnificent pillar of fury and power. He was quiet, and his voice carried so much low, rumbling authority, it…

“Are the prisoners in good health?”

Champion Meeyuk cleared his throat. “They are injured, My Father, but do not require serious care. They will not require hospitalization for their wounds.”

“See to their perfect recovery, Champion.” Daar spun on the balls of his footpaws and squared up to Champion Reeko. “Has Straightshield had a chance to review the case? Are they prepared to render judgement?”

Champion Reeko stepped forward. “With respect to Champion Uriigo, My Father, Clan Straightshield requests time to verify his findings and ensure the course of justice is done correctly.”

Daar nodded. “Any resource you need to accomplish a full accounting will be yours, Champion.”

Reeko duck-nodded smartly, then turned to the squad of faceless black-clad Judge-Fathers at the back of the hall and gestured sharply toward the prisoners.

Naydra watched with interest. Daar’s gaze followed the prisoners out of the room, and he turned to watch them go; hers was on Uriigo. While Daar’s back was turned, the Bronzefur champion took a deep, steadying breath, glanced up at the mural of Father Fyu, then stepped forward and sank to his knees.

Daar’s reaction was well-contained when he turned back to find Uriigo tilting his head aside to bare his throat. He didn’t react, gave no sign of any emotion at all. He simply stared down at Uriigo for several long seconds. Throughout, the only sound in the hall was the distant note of the wind in the old roof, and Daar’s slowly indrawn breath. A good, long sniff to take Uriigo’s scent.

“This happened under your nose, Champion,” he said, finally.

Uriigo’s posture didn’t shift. Naydra took the kneeling Champion’s scent too. There was fear, there, certainly. But…resolve, too. “Yes, My Father,” he replied, in a dull voice.

“A great shame on Clan Bronzefur.”

It took Uriigo several seconds to push the words up from his belly, during which time his ears twisted wretchedly. “A shame on me, My Father. Most of my Clan…I am certain, most of my Clan is innocent of this.”

“That remains to be seen.”

Daar bent down, thrust his nose up against Uriiigo’s throat and sniffed with the quietest, deepest and most dominant growl she had ever heard from any male. Uriigo was as tense and still as stone, eyes closed, jaw muscles clenched hard. He reeked of fear so strongly it was almost painful to smell. Naydra watched. The hate in her belly was gone, taken out of the room alongside the prisoners. For Uriigo…

Once again, Daar shared her mind. He sniffed a second time, rumbled, then straightened and rested a tremendous paw atop Uriigo’s head. Paternalistic, with claws fully extended…it was an unmistakable gesture. “I would suggest you have much house-cleaning ahead of you.”

Uriigo fell back on his haunches, too stunned to do anything else. Daar prowled back to the center of the Conclave and rose to his full, mighty height. All eyes were fixed on him.

His, however, bore right into Uriigo’s soul.

“I shall be greatly displeased if this matter is not on the path to resolution by the time I return, Uriigo. I am taking the field to resolve a related matter bound up in your appalling failure of leadership. We may find ourselves in yet another war over this. Do you understand?”

Uriigo stood, though his posture stayed low, small and meek. It was a marked change from all the ways he’d previously confronted Daar. He’d been humbled, and not by a simple show of brawn. No. Here, Daar had made a much more serious show of his true might. Rare were the surviving targets of a Great Father’s full power.

Rarer still were those who had escaped such ire unscathed. At least…for now. After all, a Great Father’s mercy was his greatest personal weapon.

Uriigo understood all of that to the core of his being. He ducked his head down in abject supplication. “I do, My Father.”

Daar sniffed at him, then duck-nodded. “Conclave dismissed. Champion Thurrsto, Champion Hiyal: Attend me.”

Naydra judged that she should remain too. She joined Daar and the two Champions as Uriigo and the others filed out. The tension that had filled the Conclave chamber dissipated somewhat as they went.

“I think, Thurrsto, we have an answer to your Kwmbwrw question,” Daar rumbled, once the doors had closed behind them.

“It’s the answer we suspected,” Thurrsto replied, resignedly. “Though we still don’t know exactly what they were doing with the smuggled biodrones.”

“If it was something we would approve of, they wouldn’t have resorted to smuggling,” Hiyal said.

Daar duck-nodded solemnly, then turned to Naydra. “I gotta get ‘ta the bottom o’ this,” he said. “An’ hope ‘ta Keeda it don’t come ‘ta war with the Great Houses. We’re already fightin’ two worse enemies. If it does come ‘ta that though…”

“We’ll be weaker for it if Clan Bronzefur is in crisis,” Naydra finished for him. “I’ll take care of them, my love.”

He gave her a grateful look. Naydra sniffed his nose fondly, then turned and swept out of the chamber herself, pursuing Uriigo and leaving Daar and the Champions to discuss their ride into probable battle.

The garden was one of Naydra’s pet projects. There was power in an appropriately presented space, power to underpin even the most supreme authority. That kind of power was present everywhere in High Mountain Fortress, from the vast, intricate murals of the throne chamber, to the immense wooden Conclave table, to the ancient stone walls and the old colonnade leading from the front gates to the great doors.

Power too, in how Daar eschewed most of that, and instead left it on historical display. Firstly, it wouldn’t fit his image as an in-the-dirt king of the common man. But mostly he was simply too colossal a male to feasibly wield them, either physically or in personality. Daar was a Great Father to exceed any before him, be it the ancient regional warlords, the semi-mythical leaders before them, or Fyu himself. Daar didn’t need thrones, carriages, vast honor guards or all the pomp and circumstance that had historically surrounded such things. He didn’t merely embody power. He radiated it. Too much embellishment would hide, rather than enhance.

He therefore kept things clean and simple. Much of what he did use was martial, regal and stern. But a ruler needed to display an appreciation for beauty too, and while Daar certainly didn’t lack for a sense of aesthetics…he preferred Naydra’s.

The garden was neither masculine nor feminine in its design, but a little of both. Delicate pink curtains of Faya’s Tail blossom softened and brightened the sturdy decorative rough stones. The monument to the dead, otherwise a grim and weighty thing, stood amid perennial flowerbeds symbolizing regrowth and endurance.

Naydra was particularly pleased with the fountain, though: she’d designed it herself. It was an elegant double-helix of stone, towering several meters into the air. Uriigo’s scent vanished down the dry path between curtains of falling water that led to a small space in the center, with a bench.

Sure enough, she found the Champion sitting alone on that bench with his eyes closed and his ears—his whole body really—drooping. He was trembling, smelled of relief and worry, and didn’t hear her coming over the fountain’s white noise.

“That was brave of you,” Naydra told him.

Uriigo sprang to his feet in a nervous instant. “Ah! Uh…” he blinked at her in confusion, then unwound, just a fraction. “…Thank you, Mother.”

She waved him down. “Sit, sit. You need rest.”

He sagged back down onto the bench, looking so exhausted that Naydra had to wonder when he’d last managed a good night’s sleep. It must have been days.

“…I was ready to die in there,” he said, after a moment.

Naydra sat down next to him and listened.

“I…I’d set all my affairs in order, made my thoughts on succession clear…all that. And now…here I am.” He shook his head, ears wandering to and fro with no clear direction. “I…don’t know what to do now.”

“I wish I could say something like ‘take a break,’ but I do not think you have that luxury. Our Father’s mercy is not something he gives frivolously.” Naydra reached out and tidied up some of Uriigo’s more dishevelled fur around his neck. “Though, you should certainly sleep and eat properly, I think.”

“…Yes.” He duck-nodded. “I’ll need a clear head.”

“As for Clan Bronzefur…I think this is an opportunity for you.”

He turned, ears perking inwards in confusion. “An opportunity? Mother, I mean no disrespect, but…how? My Clan’s reputation was already tainted, after this—”

“It’s a chance to clean the wound,” Naydra replied. “That’s why he spared you, Champion: you’re the one who can do it. You proved your integrity in there, today, And where a Champion leads, the Clan will follow.”

“What if I fail?”

“Then Our Father will destroy you and your Clan,” Naydra replied, bluntly. “So…let us work toward success.”

She watched Uriigo carefully as he considered her words for a moment. When he finally nodded, weary though he was, it was clear the same resolve he’d shown minutes earlier was still intact.

“I’ll…go clean up and rest,” he decided. “I can’t do my best for the Clan as I am right now.”

She nodded, and stood. He rose too, sharply. There was a marked change in the degree of deference he showed, compared to the last time she’d met him. “Go,” she agreed. “And, Champion? You have my support. And you have Our Father’s.”

“…I know, Mother. Thank you.”

She let him go with a gesture, and he slipped away between the curtains of water with a respectful bob. Funny how surrendering had changed him. Maybe it was just his fatigue, maybe he’d be back to his more challenging self once all this was resolved…but Naydra doubted it. Daar, she suspected, had finally won Uriigo’s loyalty.

And Uriigo, she suspected, had finally won Daar’s respect.

Satisfied, she turned and headed for the tower. She paused and looked up at the rumble of engines, though: Daar’s shuttle, taking off. She watched until it vanished into a bank of cloud rolling across the plains, then sighed and returned to her chambers.

And hoped that a third war wasn’t coming.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Starship Avenging Rage, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Shipfather Egan

Egan was beginning to claw through the arm of his command seat.

Nothing about the extraction had been smooth. Once the Krr’zkvik was cleared to depart Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, they should have warped to a safe distance and then jumped home using a single-use key. Instead, house Henen had flooded their territory with huge Farthrow fields. A strategically sensible move all by itself, in that it would strongly discourage Hunter raids into their space…

But the timing was suspicious. Especially the urgency. It was quite clear they had only let the Krr’zkvik go once those fields were in place, and they could have deployed such a system years ago if they truly wanted to.

Typical of the Great Houses, really. They made lots of aggrieved noises about how many civilians the Hunters killed and demanded ever more and more of the Dominion in fighting them, but they’d never taken this particular defensive step for economic reasons.

Greed conquers all. No wonder the Great Father hated them.

Now, though, their hands were forced. Publicly, of course, they were blaming it on the same lockdown that the deathworlders had put into effect, and the consequent surge in Hunter activity…but Egan wasn’t fooled.

They wanted that freighter. They were desperate for it. They’d done everything short of send a House fleet to vaporize that ship, though the House fleet was certainly waiting in the wings to deliver the killing blow rather than let the Krr’zkvik reach the border. Which put Egan in a delicate position. It was now certain that the Krr’zkvik’s crew had recovered an intelligence asset of great and damaging value. His duty was clear: get that freighter home.

He didn’t foresee being able to do so cleanly, now. So far as he could tell, a diplomatic incident was practically inevitable and bloodshed highly likely.

At least the fight had gone well for the Krr’zkvik’s crew. As anticipated, rather than moving to destroy the freighter, the pirates had slipped in to dock alongside them. Not long after, a Q-comm burst from Trrrk’k carried a three-digit code: “Threat neutralized.”

Not that Egan expected anything else with the Human mercenary on-board.

So why weren’t they leaving?

“Anything?” he asked, trying not to claw further at his chair’s abused arm.

“Vibrations in the hull suggest two of the crew are still on the station, Shipfather,” the Brother manning close-range sensors told him. The Avenging Rage had some breathtakingly subtle equipment. ‘Close range,’ to their sensors, still had an appreciable latency due to lightspeed. “Two high-mass individuals moving quickly, so…likely the Human and the Whitecrest plant.”

“What game are they playing?” Egan fretted, futilely. He had his other eye on long-range sensors, the ones measuring distant warp field fluctuations, and especially the hefty mass of a House Henen fleet holding some distance away. Kwmbwrw ships weren’t the fastest in the galaxy, but they were fast enough, and if they decided to pounce now then the freighter would never have enough time to undock and disentangle itself from the degaussing station.

If they did, then he would have to strike. And as fearsome as his ship was…the Rage wasn’t invulnerable, and she was alone. The closer they got to the border before his paw was forced, the better.

He realized he was clawing the chair again, and willed himself to stop. The tension was getting to him, and that wouldn’t do.

But there was nothing he could do to make things happen faster.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
House Henen Grand Battlecruiser Apex of Virtue, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr

The bridge was silent, and nearly every back upon it was hunched studiously over their work, not daring to look toward the Shipmatriarch, nor the Grandmatriarch of House Henen. And no matter how much Wgwyr stared, the signal from her daughter’s biomonitor did not resume.

Eriwyth was dead.

That fact almost didn’t seem to fit. It was wrong, it had to be. That wasn’t how this worked. She’d deployed the pheromone, spoken the trigger phrase…the Gaoian should have instantly become her obedient servant. The House had been assured that he would, that the conditioning was flawless.

Instead…

A loss, and unanswered questions. They did not know what happened, what the target’s status might be. With that damnable Human on-board, almost any possibility was open.

When Wgwyr finally spoke, addressing her other daughter at her side, her voice creaked with furiously restrained emotion. “This affair has been expensive,” she said. “I no longer care about discretion.”

Matriarch Henenowryth dipped her body in a solemn nod. “I understand,” she said. “Helm. Warp the fleet to the target, maximum speed.”

“…Attend me, daughter.”

Wgwyr turned and swept off the bridge. She heard Owryth briefly observe the formality of leaving her second-in-command in charge, then hurry to catch up.

“A valued daughter and a talented grandson, both wasted,” Wgwyr lamented, as soon as they had the relative safety of the deck. “And our first real test of these gaoians an abject failure. I will have Tromf’s heart for this.”

Owryth cleared her throat, delicately. “He was always careful to warn us about early-generation models. And this particular gaoian was the first…”

Wgwyr turned a baleful eye her way. “Your point?”

“We are irrevocably committed to this path, mother. It would be…imprudent, I feel…to toss that away in the heat of righteous anger. After all that has transpired, we are going to need Tromf and his project more than ever, now.”

Wgwyr paused and turned to face her properly. “Valuable he may be, but if you are suggesting that we should just ignore the fact that his flawed process just got your half-sister killed…”

“No. Of course not, mother. I am simply concerned about our House’s prosperity.”

Wgwyr considered her for a moment, then let go a little and sagged. “…You are right, of course,” she admitted. “You’ve never been afraid to speak truth to me, my girl. Are you completely with me on destroying that freighter? The alternative…”

“The alternative would be even more damaging, mother,” Owryth confirmed. “I’m with you.”

“Thank you.” Wgwyr permitted herself a sigh of relief, of the kind she only would have shown in front of her most favored daughters. “You should return to your bridge. You have a battle to command, and I must plan for the damage control to follow.”

Owryth dipped her body again, turned, and headed back forward to the bridge. Alone, Wgwyr pulled herself together and stalked back to her guest quarters with all the dignity she could muster, sweeping crew members aside with the poise and authority of a true Grandmatriarch…which evaporated the instant the door closed behind her and she was alone.

She had trusted. She had trusted Tromf, had trusted his engineering. Had trusted them so much that she had given her own daughter the very tools of her demise. Her trust, her errors…

In privacy, for a while, she forgot the dignity of her station. She didn’t care. She was a mother, and her grief was so new it had barely settled on her. She folded her legs under her and collapsed to the floor in lament.

And in the back of her mind, the calm part that was always the Grandmatriarch swore a terrible oath that there would be vengeance.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Freelance ship Stars of Our Making, docked at degaussing station 7m1-63 Wrrmuthwm, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Ian was hunting a friend, and he hated every second of it.

The ship was…different. He’d been on a few before, and between the tight, utilitarian confines of HMS Caledonia, the bright functionality of Krr’zkvik, or the crowded intimacy of Drunker on Turkeyer and Silent But Deadly, he’d got used to certain ideas about what a ship was like. Working spaces. Spare. Bare.

This one was carpeted and draped, hung with gauze curtains and oil paintings. It was actually tacky, like a carnival gypsy palm-reader’s tent had collided with a Roman orgy.

It smelled of cheap incense, too.

Which was helpful, after Bruuk’s bloody paw-prints in the plush carpet faded past Ian’s ability to track them. Bruuk had an especially sensitive nose, and even to Ian’s senses the incense was cloying. To Bruuk? He’d probably be desperate to get away from it. He’d seek out fresh air.

“Morwk? You watching, mate?”

“I’m watching.”

“You know this ship at all?”

“I do. A Tefzel Shipyards luxury skyrunner. Fitting, for a Qinis pirate.”

“Whereabouts is the main air processor on this thing?”

“Belly deck, midships. Just forward of the shuttle bay. But if you’re still thinking of getting that scent out of the air—”

“I’m not mate, I’m just guessing where Bruuk’s gone to hide.” Ian’s rifle led the way as he trotted down some stairs to the lower decks. Far from being the perilously steep metal things he was used to, these ones were as sumptuous as a luxury hotel, and plushly carpeted. His boots didn’t make a sound as he descended.

Sure enough, a fancy carved wooden door at the bottom hung drunkenly from one hinge with claw marks in it. The space beyond was dark, but functional in a way totally different from everywhere else he’d seen on this ship so far. No stupid deep-pile carpet, no decadent decorative fabrics draped from everything, no incense. The air inside didn’t reek of perfume and incense.

In fact, it didn’t smell of much of anything. Morwk had pointed him right.

“…Big space for just the air processor.”

“The water processor and intercooler, too. Be careful, Wilde. There are plenty of hiding spots in there…”

Ian clicked his radio once to acknowledge the warning, and advanced.

At first, he though perhaps his intuition had been wrong. The place was so still and undisturbed, so silent except for the faint white noise of the machinery at work, and so missing the scent of gore and guts that Bruuk was wearing.

Then, as his light swept right to check another potential hidey-hole, two bright gleams up high caught his attention: Bruuk had found a perch a top of a big machine, partially hidden from view, yet able to watch everything that approached. The instant Ian saw him, the burly Gaoian’s hackles were up again.

Ian took a step back. He’d really been hoping a moment’s peace might clear Bruuk’s head, but no such luck.

“Bruuk…” he said, carefully, “…if you’re in there mate, you know I don’t mean you any harm.”

Probably a hard sell, what with his rifle at the low-ready, but frankly…Ian didn’t think he stood an ice cube’s chance in hell if Bruuk decided he wanted a real fight.

That thought crossed his mind an instant before Ian, belatedly, realized that he was actually upwind in this room….And he was blocking the only entrance.

They both seemed to grasp the tactical reality in the same instant. Bruuk howled and exploded from atop his perch, Ian had his rifle up and at the ready. That was just enough to keep Bruuk at bay, who was now prowling around him, fangs dripping saliva, circling ever-closer…

Until he pounced.

A blurred instant later, Ian found himself standing, his heart racing in his chest, and Bruuk flat on the ground. It took a moment for the spell to break, and when it did…

“Oh fuck, fuck!” Ian rushed to Bruuk’s side, checked for a pulse…good and strong…

With some effort, he heaved Bruuk over and checked for bleeding. Not easy with all the Kwmbwrw blood in his fur…but a quick check found no holes, no warm sticky wetness…

Heave him over again. Anything through his back? He was almost certainly screwing up his first aid, some odd thought in the back of his head suddenly nagged…

Memory finally caught up with what had happened entirely on instinct. Somehow, by the grace of God he’d had the presence not to shoot his friend. Instead, he’d clobbered Bruuk right in the side of the head with the butt of his rifle.

…He checked Bruuk’s head over for anything broken. Carefully. That was a jaw he wanted no part of. Other than a warm spot developing in the meat along one side of the big fucker’s skull…Bruuk was unconscious, but alive.

Okay. Get him back to the ship. Safely.

Step one was zip cuffs, because Ian had no idea if that blow to the head was actually going to pull off a Hollywood reset. Maybe a lot of zip cuffs. All the zip cuffs he had, actually. Their loops barely fit around Bruuk’s wrists as it was…and Ian had to jury-rig something rather unconvincing for his ankles. Bruuk was a sturdy lad, thank God. Ian would hate to think what a blow like that would have done to his head.

Step one: done, as best he could. Step two was to pick Bruuk up….

Well…okay, get him up off the ground at least…

Well. Drag the big bugger across the carpet. If he could manage.

“…Dora! Nnngh. I need a drone to haul his fat ass!”

”Way ahead of you.”

“You’re a fucking miracle, love. We’re gonna need to restrain him properly, too.”

“Morwk’s welding something up. Are you okay?”

Ian self-checked, and realized with a jolt that the fabric coating of his armour had claw marks in it, over his belly. In fact, when he probed it with his fingers, he found that Bruuk had sliced completely through the Kevlar and left deep gouge marks on the plate underneath. Jesus Christ.

Ian’s imp of the perverse decided he’d frame the thing and give it to Bruuk as a keepsake. Assuming they all got the chance to laugh about it later.

The crawler drone on its tracks was pretty speedy. Heaving Bruuk up onto it was hard work, but he managed it, and trotted along beside the drone on the way back. “Weren’t there two other ships? What are they doing?”

“They aren’t doing anything. Trrrk’k thinks they were probably drone ships. Qinis do that a lot.”

Maybe that’d buy them enough time. Maybe not. Right now, Ian had a friend to protect. He had to get him to their little sick bay, get him safely secured…

And they all needed to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Trrrk’k

Their Q-comm box was running low on entangled particles.

That was the great limitation of Quantum Communications. The trick of knowing that a given particle was entangled had enabled a form of superluminal communication that hinged on breaking that entanglement and calling each such break a “1” in the binary stream. Every ship carried a Q-comm emergency receiver suitable for receiving short broadcasts of literally galactic significance, but Trrrk’k also had a two-way box, the twin of which was aboard the Avenging Rage. Through it, he’d been able to keep up a conversation in brevity codes…

Not that there was a code for whatever had happened to Bruuk. He’d done his best…and a plan was forming, though Trrrk’k didn’t much like it. It was what the mission demanded, no doubt, but it was also the kind of good plan that came with clear personal downsides. The kind of plan where the mission was accomplished at cost.

The kind of plan that was, alas, entirely necessary now.

At least they were no longer hopelessly trapped. From his vantage on the bridge, he could watch the hull charge plummet as Morwk dumped it into the station’s degaussing fields as quickly as he could. Fat lightning bolts spat and sizzled along the fields before being redirected downwards, flung into the upper atmosphere of the planet below them.

It took far longer than any other degaussing of Trrrk’k’s career. In fact, he had to admit: Clan Whitecrest knew how to modify a ship for the better. The Krr’zkvik would have become an instant floating tomb if it had been entirely stock. The Clan’s tweaks had spared them all from being burned to a crisp, or perhaps vaporized in a capacitor detonation.

Dora ejected the whole third rack as soon as the hull charge had dropped to the point where she could safely deploy her drones. She rushed it too: no clean and methodical disconnection and sorting this time, she sent some of her smaller drones in to cut right through the joining points where the rack met the hull, and then shove it firmly “downwards.”

Orbital mechanics being what they were, that rack would be back again in a few hours to possibly smash into the station from “above,” but Trrrk’k didn’t care. House Henen could pay that bill, and they’d be long gone.

Through a camera, he watched Wild bustle aboard behind the crawler bearing Bruuk’s unconscious form. He tapped the airlock controls, then turned to look up at the camera. Trrrk’k noted the ferocious gouge in the belly of his armor, and the heavy layer of perspiration on the Human’s face.

He leaned down and touched the intercom. “All taken care of?”

Wild mopped his brow and gave the camera a weary nod. “…Just need to tuck Bruuk in. How far away is the next bit of trouble?”

Trrrk’k glanced at Urgug, who rippled his facial tendrils and swung his head through a heavy shake.

“…We don’t know yet. I presume the final step will be a fleet interception before we can reach the border. The sooner we leave, the further ahead of them we can stay.”

“Okay. I’ll be in sickbay.”

Trrrk’k watched him jog after the crawler, then turned back to Urgug again. “Did you find one?”

“I found seven systems matching your requirements,” Urgug replied. He called up the star map on their forward screen, and a yellow line snaked across it, maintaining a mostly straight course. It conformed rather well to a second blue line, perfectly straight and aimed directly at the border. “Only marginally slower than the direct course, but with plenty of opportunities to hide, at least temporarily.”

“All hiding is temporary, my friend.”

“On that note…”

They looked toward the door as Dora wobbled in, tapping on her tablet as she entered. She waved it at Trrrk’k. “I have an idea.”

Trrrk’k creaked gratefully, and accepted the tablet from her hand. It took him only a glance to see what she had in mind, and to approve wholeheartedly. All hiding may be temporary…but temporary could be a long time, with the right preparation.

And a lot of work.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Bruuk

Bruuk awoke with a yowl. It was a nightmare, a terrible nightmare, one he remembered vividly….he looked around, wildly, thrashed in a panic once he discovered he was restrained—

“Easy, mate.” Wild was there. His voice was loaded with worry and Bruuk could hear it before the scent ever reached his nose. ”You’re safe.”

Bruuk paused, warily. He was in the sick bay. His fur smelled antiseptic and itched everywhere, like he’d been bathed at some point. Why would…

He started to understand.

He hadn’t been in a nightmare. It had been something much, much worse.

And then he started to remember.

Bruuk keened.

Wild was there, head pressed fiercely against Bruuk’s, arm around his neck. Bruuk put his own arm around Wild and held onto the only man in Bruuk’s turbulent life who’d ever really cared.

The memories came in waves. He remembered everything. He was a biodrone. Then he was captured, the hardware removed. He was lost, didn’t know how to wake up while his body did things all on its own…then he was in a group. And there was training.

Terrible training.

Things were taught to him. He could smell the trainers, feel the probes in his brain forcing him to respond this way and that, until he couldn’t do anything but obey…

He remembered the Kwmbwrw. Their scent. Evil things. Little Corti, pattering about…

He hugged to Wild so hard, his friend groaned in pain, snapping Bruuk out of his fugue.

“…Sarry,” he managed through a snotty, hiccup-laced choking sort of chitter.

Wild laughed reassuringly and rubbed his hands up and down Bruuk’s upper back. A very Human gesture, but it felt good anyway. “It’s okay, mate. I didn’t need that rib anyway.”

Bruuk chittered again, vulnerable and glad his friend was okay. He buried his face against Wild’s neck and hugged good and tight.

They held for a while. Belatedly, Bruuk noticed that he’d snapped his restraints when he’d hugged on Wild. “…I think I broke the bed.”

“Big bears like you will do that, yeah. You all with us again?”

“…I don’t know. Keeda fuck me…” Bruuk groaned and reached up to massage the huge lump on the side of his head. “What happened?”

“I hit you really hard in the head. Shot you full of your Crue-G too.”

“…Well, thank fuck for that.”

“You should see what you did to my armour, mate. Here.” Wild de-tangled himself while Bruuk sniffed curiously. The big Human reached behind his chair, lifted up his armor…

He could smell it, still. The scent. Fear, and blood. He even felt the thing in his mind, tugging at him…But he knew, now.

Wild noticed. “…Can’t fool your nose, can we? You okay?”

“…Not…really.” Bruuk took a deep breath, growled at the worm in his mind to go still, and focused on the armour instead to distract it.

It worked like a shock of cold water dumped over his head. “…Balls. I did that?” Bruuk keened at the idea he’d almost hurt Wild…

“Yup.” Wild put the armor back down again. “You weren’t exactly Bruuk at the time, mate. It’s alright. We’re both alive, and we’re away from there.”

“I’ll never be away from there,” Bruuk said, sadly.

“…What happened, mate? She said some words, and—”

“I know what she said.” Bruuk lay back and raked his claws through the fur around his jaw to compose himself. “…I remember, Wild. I remember everything.”

“If you want to get it out, I’m here. If you don’t…still here.”

“No, you need to know. He needs to know. Wild…they’re making slaves of us…”

He told Wild everything. And he keened like he’d never keened before.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Morwk

“Got it.”

“That was fast.” Dora leaned over Morwk’s shoulder curiously.

“Makes sense he’d keep the master control key on his person…Thanks for retrieving that, by the way.” The thought of rifling through the dead Qinis’ pouches and pockets himself had left Morwk feeling thoroughly queasy. Dora had obligingly fetched them and cleaned them for him.

It was too bad the two deathworlders and Moj had smashed most of the pirate’s drone collection. Many of them had been quite sophisticated and valuable, and Morwk could have done some good with them. But, at least the two biggest prizes were still intact.

He slaved them to the ship’s systems, watched carefully for signs of hostile malware, then made a satisfied sound and stepped back.

“Good.” He keyed his communicator. “Urgug? Moj? We’re ready down here. You can go to warp any time.”

“So. Think it’ll work?” Dora asked as the engines promptly fired up and backed them out of the degaussing station.

“It’s better than nothing,” Morwk replied, which was about as optimistic as he could manage.

“Can’t hurt?”

“Something like that. I hope it does.” He gave her a pat on the shoulder. “Good thinking, though.”

“Thanks, Morwk.” Dora watched the control software a minute or so longer as they turned and went to warp, dragging their prize behind them. She gave a satisfied nod, and headed for the door. “I guess we’d better go hear what Ian has to tell us.”

“That we’re locked on a ship with a rampant feral Gaoian who’s lost his mind?”

“Hey, that’s our friend you’re talking about!”

Morwk ducked his body apologetically. “…Sorry. You’re right. I just…whatever happened to him isn’t small, Dora. I don’t know what Ian could possibly tell us that would make me feel comfortable now…”

Dora sighed, and tottered away toward the common room. “We’ll see, I guess.”

Morwk stood alone in engineering for a moment, gathering his thoughts. He glanced back at the drone control panel one last time, satisfied himself that yes, those at least were working as they should, then steeled himself and followed her. At least, he supposed, some explanation was better than none.

Just like some kind of a plan was better than nothing.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“There’s a word. Janissaries. Slave-soldiers.”

“…You have a word for such a concept?”

“We’re not nice people, Urgug. Nice is a luxury we treasure.” Ian took a deep breath. “It goes like this. That weird thing the Matriarch said just before he went berserk? That was the last thing Bruuk ever heard before the biodrone signal went out across Gao. Middle of a phone call with the mother of his new cub and then…lights out. Spent a while just killing everything in sight that wasn’t a fellow biodrone, and then at some point, somehow, somebody—no idea who, exactly—captured him and a few others and smuggled them offworld.”

Ian looked around the assorted grim faces (and glow) at the table, and paced. Bruuk hadn’t just given him permission to tell them, he’d demanded it.

“I’d…spare you some of the details. But Bruuk needs you to know. We’re his only friends.”

Various nods and gestures of agreement met that.

“Anyway…I can see how getting them off the planet early in the war would have been pretty easy. It was a confusing time. There’s going to be hell to fucking pay when Daar finds out about it, I know that. But Bruuk and the others, they wound up at a facility somewhere, lots of Kwmbwrw and Corti. They…took him apart to get the implants out. But biodroning is…”

He trailed off, cleared his throat. “It kind of…locked him in, he says. Or locked him out. Suppressed the real him. And not even taking the implants out fixed that. Or maybe the researchers didn’t want it to. Either way, they installed a new him, built on the old one. The Bruuk we’ve known all this time was a kind of program, I guess. Using his personality and memories for reference and not even really knowing he was doing it.”

“How the…is coming back from that even…?” Dora was struggling.

Ian shook his head and shrugged, helplessly. “I have no idea, love. Anyway. The project was a success. And our Bruuk was sent back to Gao as a miracle survivor, just one of a billion formerly implanted refugees, with a credible story of minor heroism, enough to get him on Clan radar when they were desperate to replace all the Associates and Brothers they’d lost.”

“And because the Kwmbwrw think in terms of the Great Game and espionage,” Trrrk’k surmised, “they programmed him to maneuver himself into Clan Whitecrest’s employ rather than Stoneback or anybody else.”

“…That would go a long way to explaining his abrasive personality, before he met you, Wilde.” Morwk mused. “And how we underestimated him. We never saw him perform anything like he has since you’ve arrived.”

“Why me?”

“Who knows? Fellow deathworlder? Perhaps something about you cracked through the…overlay personality, perhaps? How are we to know?”

Moj buzzed. “I know that answer, easy.”

“…You think so?” Ian asked him, raising an eyebrow.

“You didn’t give up. Made friends anyway. Rest of us left him be, got prickled and backed off. Scared a little, by teeth and claws. Left the program alone, we. Had our own problems to deal with.”

“We weren’t a crew to him…” Dora sighed.

Ian shook his head. “Look…nobody here is to blame for what happened to him, or for not catching it. He’s been a sleeper ever since. Better than a sleeper agent, ‘cuz he didn’t even consciously know what he was. Just ‘cuz I’m a stubborn bugger doesn’t mean you failed him.”

“How many like him are there?” Urgug asked.

“He doesn’t know exactly. Dozens, at least.”

Grim silence settled heavily on the room. Urgug’s chromatophores went all the way down to black, before brightening with grim resolve.

“From our perspective, this changes nothing,” he said. “House Henen was planning to kill us before, and knowing why does not change that fact. Unless it grants us an advantage of some kind?” He asked, turning to Trrrk’k and Ian both.

“None that I can immediately see,” Trrrk’k replied.

“Nope,” Ian agreed. “We’re just down a fighter.”

“Will we reach the border before the House fleet catches up?” Dora asked. Moj buzzed and shook his head no.

“Close,” he promised. “But not over.”

“Can’t we squeeze any extra speed out?” Ian asked, only for Morwk to echo Moj’s pessimism.

“We’re already giving it a hundred percent. Any more and I’ll just burn out the replacement drive, and…well, you know how long swapping it out for the second backup will take. They’d catch us.”

“Best to get as close to the border as possible, then,” Trrrk’k concluded.

“And then what?”

“And then hope that our assurance and trust will be sufficient to convince the Gao to violate the border, I suppose.”

Heavy silence reigned, broken eventually by Moj, who stood and headed for the door.

“One more nav pass, then,” he said. Urgug flashed a resolved blue and joined him.

“That cannot harm our chances,” he agreed.

Morwk dipped and rose. “Yes. Dora? If you and I go double-check that we really are giving it a hundred percent…”

“Sure.” Dora tottered to her feet. She laid a hand on Ian’s shoulder before going. “…Give him a hug for me.”

“Will do, love.”

And then there were two. Trrrk’k sighed heavily and re-lit his pipe.

“We would appear,” he commented, “to be in, as you call it, the deep shit.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“…Yours is a confusing and colorful language, Wild.” Trrrk’k stood and puffed out a smoke ring as he took a slow stroll around the room. “…Fortunately, our fecal depth is shallower than it may seem. We have a Gaoian strike ship following us. A Rage class. She has been thoroughly stealthed this entire time.”

“…Good to know,” Ian admitted, genuinely relieved. “But why tell me now?”

“Because the mission comes first. If the House does catch us, one of us will need to transfer Rythweth’s stasis pod across onto our escort and escape. You are the logical candidate.”

“And the rest of you?”

“Captured, interrogated. Most likely executed. I cannot imagine House Henen would willingly return us to Clan Whitecrest, now.” Trrrk’k rattled off a Domain sigh, which turned into another chesty cough. Once it passed, he lengthily cleared his throat, then turned Ian’s way. “I am quite at peace with death, and I suspect you are too. The others, though…”

“Yeah,” Ian nodded. “I got into this line of work to keep people like them safe. I know they’re here doing this job right alongside us, and they’re hardly innocent types themselves, but…”

“Idealistic youths often sign up for far more trouble than they’re ready to handle.”

“And eventually they grow up.” Ian nodded. “…I don’t like the idea of them ending up on House Henen’s death row. You’re asking me to leave them to that, and I’ll do it if that’s the order…”

“I am not asking. The mission comes first.”

Ian sighed. “I know.”

Trrrk’k nodded solemnly. He puffed his pipe once more, then set it aside. “If it is any consolation, you will also be ensuring Bruuk’s survival. His testimony is even more valuable than Rythweth’s, at this point.”

“Right. Well. I’d better make my preparations then, if I’m gonna shift those two quickly.”

“Yes.”

Ian nodded, and turned for the door. He was nearly there when Trrrk’k interrupted him.

“Incidentally…”

“Yes?”

“If we do make it through this…you can probably guess that this was to be my last mission anyway. I am, after all, terminally ill. You may already have guessed as much.”

Ian turned back. “…I suspected, yeah. Between the cough, and how Regaari originally pitched this to me as a chance to become a ship captain. D’you mind if I ask…?”

“Oh, tumours. Lots of them. All four lungs, most of the less immediately critical organs.” Trrrk’k laughed drily, then coughed again. “Really, I am only alive now thanks to some highly advanced medicine. I was supposed to already be retired and enjoying my final months in the comfort of a hospice. When the Clan said they wanted me to evaluate a potential replacement, however…duty called, one last time.”

“…Hell of an evaluation.”

“Do you wish to know my impression?”

Ian shrug-nodded, and gestured for him to continue.

“I think, if we can get them through this, our idealistic youths will be in good hands.”

“…Thanks, Trrrk’k.”

The skipper nodded, then gestured toward the door. “I think we have wasted enough time, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Ian agreed. “I’ll see you when I’ve got everything ready.”

This time, when he left the room, Trrrk’k had nothing further to say. At any other time, Ian’s head would have been reeling, but right now that just wasn’t an affordable luxury. He had two lives under his care. And, if he could think how, four more besides. Because he knew one thing deep in his soul: If he had to put the mission ahead of Moj, Morwk, Dora and Urgug, he would.

But he wasn’t going to let it come to that if it was within his power to stop it.

Date Point: 17y8m2w4d AV
Starship Destroying Fury, Near the Gao/Kwmbwrw border

Thurrsto, Champion and Stud-Prime of Whitecrest

Cousin Daar was onboard in his staterooms, watching the situation intently. He’d done them a great favor by staying out of the way, but the fact that he was there in the first place must have been nerve-wracking for the Shipfather.

Thurrsto stayed out of the way too, attending the Great Father as best as he could. They were both nervous wrecks, really. War and peace would be decided very soon, and Thurrsto in particular couldn’t help but feel partly responsible.

Of course…digging up these sorts of things was his job. So perhaps that feeling was irrational.

Another datum flashed across Daar’s enormous wall display, which was a custom thing that kept tabs on a bewildering number of different threads. The whole tapestry of a Great Father’s life, woven on the wall, and much of it rather different from Thurrsto’s own intricate web.

“I don’t know how you do it, Cousin.”

Daar chittered with some exasperation. “Neither do I. Addin’ new colors helped a lot though.”

“Update from Trrrk’k for you. He has a plan and they’re putting it into action.”

“Think it’ll work?”

“He’s a crafty old hand, so whatever he’s come up with will buy them time.” Thurrsto transferred his tablet to under his elbow. “But the only way they escape, frankly, is if we rescue them. And that House fleet on their heels is no joke. We’re quite sure it’s led by the Apex of Virtue, Henenwgwyr’s flagship.”

“Dangerous?” Daar asked.

“And battle-tested in several operations against the Hunters. If they decide to go fang-and-claw with us, it will get bloody.”

“We can do bloody. Can they?”

“The Grandmatriarch is proud to a fault, and we’re planning to intrude on their sovereign territory, guns blazing, so…yes.”

Daar rumbled as he nodded, then turned away from his monitor. “Gimme ‘yer assessment, Champion. Are ‘yer Friends worth the fallout?”

Hard questions like that were part of the job. Thurrsto wished he had Grandfather Hyarrin with him; nobody had as perfect an operational understanding of the Clan’s many, many interests, and he was one of the few with a complete oversight of all the Clan’s many compartments.

Thurrsto’s instinct was to loyalty. That was an instinct Whitecrests in particular sometimes had to coldly overrule. The hard part was knowing when. Over his career, he’d done his best to balance intuition and rationality, and right now…

“I would…be reluctant to abandon them, My Father. Personal feelings aside, such an abandonment would harm many of our other Friendships. And, well…there aren’t many possibilities for what the Kwmbwrw would be doing with gaoian biodrones. None of them can possibly be good.”

“An’ they’re touchin’ my people,” Daar growled. His protective instincts were clearly up.

“As an asset, the Krr’zkvik crew are no longer useful in Kwmbwrw space, but they can be reassigned. The message that you do not touch our people however…” Thurrsto inclined his head. “I think that may be valuable.”

“Hmm.” Daar prowled over to his big screen and tapped a few things, thinking to himself. Satisfied by whatever he was looking at, he dropped to all fours and prowled about for a bit. On his third orbit of his desk, he declared: “Welp. We should prob’ly prepare our most bestest welcomin’ committee, then.”

“I shall speak with Shipfather Verrik, then.”

“Thank you.” Thurrsto had just been dismissed.

He felt confident about his decision as he walked away, which he took as a good sign. He’d learned to trust doubt in his career, and its absence in this moment was reassuring. Whatever happened next, he was quite sure he hadn’t made the wrong choice at least…But there was still a lot to do to ensure he’d made the right one.

And it all began with a battle plan.

Date Point: 17y8m3w AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Bruuk

There weren’t no other words for it. Bruuk was a wreck. He felt…

He wasn’t exactly sure what he felt. A buncha things, really. Rage. That was there, so strong he could actually smell it on himself. Deep shame, too. Wild was the one man in his life who really cared, and he’d almost fuckin’ gutted him in a zombie-like trance.

Grieving. He remembered everything he’d done. Remembered, somehow, that it wasn’t quite him. It was like he was in control the whole time, but also not, like there was something else in his head, worming its way through his thoughts…

He could feel it there, still. Gnawing at him, looking for any way to regain control.

How could he ever trust himself again?

He was also pretty sure one of his teeth was wobbling. Bruuk didn’t begrudge Wild that one.

They’d sensibly escorted Bruuk to his quarters and locked him there, with medicine, food, and the captain’s permission to rest. Fuck that. Bruuk did what he always did when he was angry.

He worked his body as hard as he fuckin’ could, until every last fuckin’ inch of him was sore and had the general wobbly stability of warm gelatin. It was all Bruuk could do not to lose himself in the heat of it all and just destroy everything in his room. At least the weights kept him focused, and drained him of most of his aggressive energy.

They were running. They were helpless. Bruuk was helpless to help his friends. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could be trusted to do.

And the worst part was how they all just…forgave him. Each in their own way, but Ian still called him “mate” and trained with him, Dora came by and gave him a hug, and Morwk made an excuse to change the air filters for him so the air was fresher, smelling all the while of concern and sympathy…

Moj, weirdly, was the most practical one. He brought along his little meditation cushion, sat on it, and listened. No advice, no bizarre twisty spiritual naxas-shit. Just nonjudgmentally heard Bruuk out. He, more than the others, actually helped. Or at least, Bruuk felt a little less itchy-fidgety for a while afterwards.

Ian came by later that night, after Bruuk had broken all his PRs for the third time that day. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he’d be paying for it all hard later on, even with his medicine, but right now…it was that, or claw something apart. Even if it was himself.

Wild looked around at the carnage in the room; plates strewn about, Bruuk’s heavy tackling dummy torn apart and dismembered. A couple bars bent beyond repair, and one of them bent much further than that. Bruuk was darkly proud of that one.

“…Jesus, mate. Do I wanna even ask?”

“All of them.” Bruuk was too tired to manage any smugness. Not just physically tired, neither.

Wild at least knew what to say. He grinned and shook his head. “Fucker.”

Bruuk chittered desperately, and allowed himself to ooze off the bench and onto the nice, cold floor. “I’m gonna be one big bruise pretty soon, I bet.”

“Yeah, well.” Ian settled down next to him, cross-legged on the floor. “Hard talk time, mate.”

“I don’t know how much more I can take,” Bruuk said, truthfully.

“Then I’ll keep it short. Fact is, at this point you know more about what the Kwmbwrw were up to than the spy in the smuggling compartment. That makes you the big intel asset on this ship. Smart thing, really, would be to put you in stasis yourself and make good and damn sure you make it back to the Clan in one piece.”

“…Guess that fixes the problem ‘fer you, not havin’ ta deal with me.”

“Apart from the bit where you’re a heavy fucker, sure.”

Bruuk chittered humorlessly. “Somebody’s gotta put ‘ya Humans in ‘yer place.”

“Well, anyway. That’s the plan. And the sooner I get you in that bag, the better. So…stretch out, take your medicine, eat, shower…whatever you need to do.”

Bruuk sighed. “Sure, why not? May as well spare y’all havin’ ‘ta put up with me ‘til we’re back or whatever.”

“You aren’t a burden, mate.”

“Fuckdammit, lemme be miserable.”

“No. Fuck you.” Wild understood gaoians very well. Instead of sitting apart and emoting with that strangely plastic face of his in the way Humans always did with each other, he laid down on the floor right next to Bruuk, pressing their backs together.

Bruuk keened quietly until, eventually, he felt a little more ready.

“…Will you be there, when you open the bag?”

“Wish I could promise that, mate. I will be if I can.”

Bruuk sighed. Stasis sucked. There was no way to know if he’d come out the other end safe, or if he’d eventually come out of stasis hundreds, millions, billions of years down the road, when the stars were dying and the galaxy had fallen down the black hole, just in time to…

Enough of that. With a pained and exhausted groan, Bruuk heaved himself to his feet and shook out his pelt. “…Arright. Gimme a bit.”

He took a quick dust bath, brushed his fur out, took his meds, stretched a little bit as recommended. When he got back from taking care of all that, Ian had the stasis bag unrolled in the middle of the floor. He looked just about as unhappy about it as Bruuk felt.

Still. No sense in wasting his time, or delaying. The last thing Bruuk wanted now was to add to his friend’s burden. He clapped Ian on the shoulder, wordlessly crawled into the bag and pulled up the zipper until it closed.

The inside of the bag was dark, claustrophobic, and unpleasant. He shivered, and willed the crawling presence in his mind to shut the fuck up, and—

Date Point: 17y8m3w AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Moj

No fighter pilot, Moj. No song of high-G turns and crescendo of fire for him. A freighter pilot, slow and solid, placing his large charge delicately in small spaces.

But a good pilot, Moj. Very good. Good enough to spiral down on a gas giant at interstellar speeds, and stop in the right place.

Tricky beasts, gas giants. Hungry. Gnawing gravity, biting at space around, always trying to pull things in and eat. Like lazy black holes, but nicer to look at.

This one was an endless ocean of changeless blue, two or three islands of white cloud, flickering ribbons of light at the poles where charged dust from one of its volcanic moons got pulled in. Girdled by a flat, even beige disk of rings. Beautiful like a drop falling into still water. Beautifully simple.

No time to Resonate with it though. No time to really appreciate. Time for another card trick. A tense lie, and nobody would laugh when it was found, alas.

A big lie in front of them. Hundreds of meters of steel, and the sensors were laughing for not seeing it there a moment before. Space had birthed an immaculate conception of a ship, here in the blind spot behind a planet where the House fleet could not see. By the time they got close enough to see, the ship would be gone again. Like it had never been. Like the whole universe had lied about a ship being there, just long enough to believe it.

Moj would have laughed at that thought, if he wasn’t worrying so much about what came after.

Card trick: two ships hide, one secret, one chased. The card swaps hands, swaps decks. Once on the other ship’s deck, the hidden ship vanishes, the chased ship runs…

…And then what? No escape, not for the chased. Kwmbwrw becoming Hunters? Another funny thought, but again…

He watched Wild in his spacesuit and the two bagged men of evidence blow out the airlock in a gasp of freezing vapor. Watched the other ship scoop them gently up in its fields and swallow them. Watched the sensors forget them again as they went to warp and vanished.

Now it was his turn. Time to at least try to hide. Maybe even succeed. Now that would be funny, if they escaped anyway…

This time he did laugh, quietly: he was lying to himself and almost believing it. Hope. A great lie, made all the greater by the fact that, sometimes, rarely, miraculously, it turned out to be truth. A baited hook, hope. Enough meat to lure, with pain hidden inside.

For Moj, the pain was not for himself. The universe was grander and stranger than any could imagine, he knew as much, and he believed. In what, he could never quite say, but he believed nonetheless. Whether death was an ending or a one-way door, didn’t matter to him. Whatever the House did to him…He’d lie to them and laugh in their faces.

No, the pain was for the others. He was at peace with his own fate, whatever it might be. But Dora? Morwk? Urgug?

His hope was for them, most of all.

Date Point: 17y8m3w AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Dora

Dora kept her room darker than Dominion standard, closer to the light levels naturally favored by Robalin eyes. Much as she hated the Supremacy, and much as she could turn herself into everything it hated, simple biology won in a few places, and spending all that time out there in the bright spaces lit for alien eyes made her eyes hurt.

Rather than sit or rest, she took a slow tour, suddenly conscious that this might be the last time she ever stood here and appreciated her stuff. They had a plan, and she was confident in it, but until her chance to put it into action came along, all she could do was wait while her imagination refused to quit. And Trrrk’k hadn’t sugar-coated it when he told them what would probably happen when the House fleet caught them…

There was some kind of irony in the fact that she’d escape execution by one tyrannical regime, only to very possibly be executed by another. Moj probably would have probably found that funny as hell, if she told him. Dora had to admit, it was kinda grimly funny too.

Still. At least the Kwmbwrw were going to get what was coming to them over this whole mess. With Bruuk and Rythweth safely transferred to the Avenging Rage, the Gao were going to know everything in short order. If what rumor—and more importantly, Ian—said about the Great Father was true, then Dora had just played a role in bringing them the freightload of karma they were due.

All things considered, she was okay with that. At least she’d chosen to be here, and had actively done something to make an enemy of House Henen. They weren’t gunning for her just because of who and what she was. There was agency in the choices that had led her here, and Dora suspected she’d known the risks even better than the others when she signed up for them.

Well…with the possible exception of Ian.

The others hadn’t lived in fear of a great, unseen eye watching them and judging them. They’d never lived in a society where being Wrong, by the arbitrary metrics of the regime, could be fatal.

On the day Dora and her parents had escaped, they’d done so knowing perfectly well that failure would end in their deaths. And they’d done it anyway, because…well, it was better. Regimes like the Supremacy and House Henen worked by shackling their people with fear. Throwing off the fear, accepting the consequences, saying ‘fuck it’ and doing the right thing anyway no matter what might happen? That was freedom.

Real freedom wasn’t the natural order of the universe. It was hard-won, hard-fought, and paid for in blood. Maybe Dora’s turn to pay that price was coming soon. If so, fuck it. She’d pay it gladly.

Though part of her wished the others didn’t have to pay it too.

Her communicator pinged: Trrrk’k.

“Yes, Skipper?”

“They are away and safely collected. The time has come to put your plan into action. Is everything ready?”

“Just tell Moj to get us down among the rings. I’ll take care of the rest,” Dora promised. She turned to the door and trotted to her drone control station as quickly as she could. She was well-rested, had taken some stimulants, knew exactly what she had to do…Now to do it.

And maybe, if she was clever enough, they’d all escape execution after all…

Date Point: 17y8m3w AV
Starship Avenging Fury, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Ian learned something important about himself over the last ninety seconds. Space…fucking terrified him.

He’d thought he was familiar with it. He’d served on starships for years now, and hell, he’d caught the express elevator to Hell when he punched out of Caledonia’s burning, sinking hulk in a lifeboat.

Spacewalks, though? He’d never done that. And his first was like looking up and finding himself unexpectedly standing at the foot of God’s own throne. The scale, the awe, was something on that magnitude.

From inside the ship, that gas giant hadn’t looked so big. From the outside…he suddenly knew just how tiny he really was.

That fact his spacesuit was one of those shiny ET-made ones that relied more on forcefields than fabric didn’t help either. The only thing keeping him alive was an invisible haze of tame photons…

No. Focus.

A heave and twist that pulled his core muscles in ways he’d never even thought of got Rythweth’s bag moving, pushed ahead of him into the waiting shuttlebay. For the much heavier bag containing Bruuk, he braced his feet against the drone and pushed, like an explosive deadlift.

Good thing his aim didn’t have to be perfect. The Avenging Rage gently nudged him and the bags into the hold with delicate guiding forcefields, and sound returned with a metallic rush as he drifted through the air retaining field and back into atmosphere. All the familiar noise and bustle of a warship came flooding back so hard it felt like his ears popped.

Or maybe that was just pressure. Either way, he pulled off a graceless half-turn in the air and landed on his backside rather than gracefully on his feet, but he’d done it. Successfully jumped out of one spaceship and spacewalked to the other.

Now please God, never again.

A Gaoian in close-fitting overalls helped him stand. “Welcome aboard. This way.”

“Where to?”

The Gaoian flicked his ear, surprised at Ian’s command of Gaori. “The Shipfather’s ready room. You’ll be briefing the Great Father as soon as we rendezvous with his fleet.”

“…How fast can this thing make the border?”

“Much faster than that garbage scow you just jumped out of.”

Ian gave him an offended look. “Hey, she got us this far.”

The Brother’s next ear-flick was amused. “You misunderstand. Garbage scows are the most reliable vessels in any fleet. Ain’t nobody wanna drown in their own trash.”

“…Must be a cultural difference. Anyway.”

“This way.”

The shipfather’s ready room was at odds with its owner. The man himself was whip-thin, scarred to hell and gone, and serious. The couple of personal keepsakes in the room were more whimsical though. One was a paw-painting of a vase of flowers. The tiny paw-marks had to be a cub’s, not an adult’s.

Egan listened intently as Ian briefed him. The shredded stumps of his ears dipped lower and lower as what he was hearing sunk in, until he was almost snarling.

“…My Father ain’t gonna like this,” he growled.

“I’ve met the Great Father before. That’s an understatement.”

“…Yeah.” Egan sniffed. “…No offense, but you stink. Gonna be a few hours ‘fore we reach the border. You should clean up.”

Ian sighed ruefully. “Right, yeah. Guess I’ve been taking care of everyone except myself the last few days…” Frankly, he felt heavy. He’d had harder weeks with less sleep, but not many. “If there’s somewhere for me to get my head down…”

“Of course.”

That turned out to be a bath instead of a shower, since a Gaoian’s daily hygiene was generally a dust bath and a brush, rather than getting wet. Bathing was for special occasions. That did mean the one bathing facility onboard was immaculately clean and had a tub deep enough to swim. It took a bit more scrubbing, since they also preferred very mild soaps and shampoos…

Ian came out feeling cleaner than he’d ever done in ages.

Well. Maybe not so clean where it really counted. He’d left his friends behind…

The small guest suite waiting for him had a tray from the galley waiting for him on a small fold-down table. A naxas burger inside some kind of steamed bun, meeshi greens, nava paste, ketchup of all the bloody things, and a side of chips that had never even met a potato. A tall glass of water, when what he really needed was a coffee, but fuck it. There probably wasn’t a coffee bean within a thousand lightyears.

It was pretty fucking good, actually. Gaoians were masters of the salty/greasy/meaty spectrum of flavors, and his belly was so empty that the burger barely touched the sides. The chips tasted a bit like roast parsnip, and filled him up enough that he could lie back and be kept awake by his thoughts rather than his stomach.

He’d left his friends behind. That thought kept coming back and stabbing him right in the guilt. Oh, sure, he knew intellectually he shouldn’t feel guilty, he’d been ordered to do this, but…

A soft chime by his bedside woke him up far too soon. The screen was pulsing gently yellow and said he had an incoming call.

“…Yes?”

It was the Shipfather. “You are needed. We are docking with the Fury shortly.”

Ian frowned at the clock, mentally translating what he read there. The rendezvous was happening sooner than he’d been told. “…Already?”

Egan’s tone was fierce. “The Gao do not leave their friends behind.”

“No, no, I mean…” Ian’s head was still a bit fuzzy.

“The Fury is currently the fastest ship in our fleet at an all-out sprint. It would seem that Our Father no longer cares for stealth.”

“On my way.”

Ian’s nap had been far too short, but it had been something. Enough to put some strength back his limbs, and that little tidbit from Egan put purpose in his step. If there was anything he could do to make his friends’ rescue happen as soon as possible…

He and his escort arrived at the airlock just as the Rage and the Fury met and locked their collars with the gentlest of knocks. There was a hiss and tug on Ian’s hair as the air pressures equalized, and then…

…Jesus goddamn Christ. Ian had to steady himself against what he was seeing.

Daar was a fuck of a lot bigger than he was last they met. His normally heavy pelt was cut down as short as a pitbull’s, save for some mercifully intact shag, and that trim job transformed him from merely hugely muscular into a walking anatomy chart of doom. His broad, towering frame filled the airlock from top to bottom and side to side, while his obviously colossal weight warped the cargo-grade decking under his paws.

Ian was friends with the HEAT Lads. He’d wrestled with big cave-apes like Nomuk, Tumik and Genn, and had been privileged to lead and teach genuine monsters like Ferd Given-Man. Giants they were, but he’d never felt tiny or inadequate next to any of them. Next to Daar….

The herculean de-facto emperor of the deathworlders ducked through the hatchway, straightened up even taller somehow and sniffed toward Ian. “Ain’t smelled ‘ya in a while.” There wasn’t any glee in his voice, but his tone was friendly, and his massive bushy tail did wag.

“Wish it was under better circumstances, sir.”

“Yeah. Shipfather,” Daar turned his attention to Egan. “You’ve done good work. I’ll be sure ‘yer Champion hears all ‘bout it. Now, think ‘yer up to some sneaky business?”

Egan visibly swelled with pride, which was quite a feat for someone who couldn’t weigh more than nine stone soaking wet. “This ship’s crew is ready for anything you order, My Father.”

Daar caught Ian’s eye just for a moment, and in that lightning-quick gesture, communicated a freightload of dark bemusement only a certain kind of combat hardened bloke could possibly understand. It seemed that some of his playful streak was still there. That was a relief, at least. Ian looked back and forth between Daar and Egan. The contrast between the two was so strong, Ian had to suppress a giggle, despite everything. Sleep deprivation, probably.

“Are they, now?” Queried Daar. “Outstanding.” That quip was meant just for Ian, he was sure of it. “I never doubted it. Anyhoo, I’d love ‘ta stay an’ jaw, but ‘ya need ‘ta git back to ‘yer bridge an’ coordinate wit’ the Fleetfather, ‘kay?”

The tiny Shipfather somehow puffed up even more with zeal. “We’ll make you proud of us, My Father.” And with that, Egan duck-bowed and charged off to his destiny.

Daar waited until everyone else was gone, then shook his head indulgently. “Y’know the most weirdest bit ‘bout being the Great Father, young Brother?”

Friendly. Right. Ian could deal with friendly. “I presume you’ll tell me anyway, so…”

Daar chittered affectionately. “In a very real sense I’m a Father to alla them, clan or no. Even scarred-up fighters like him. They come up to me like I did ‘ta Father Garl when I was a floppy-eared cub, showin’ off my scribbles or a sports ribbon or somethin’ like that. Funny, huh?”

“Well,” Ian said carefully, “it did seem a little…”

Daar again shook his head with an amused grumble, sparing Ian the discomfort of saying it. “Yeah. We’re pack animals, what can I say? Only thing as rewardin’ as gettin’ approval from ‘yer leader is givin’ it as a leader. Anyway…” Daar sobered. “Where are our witnesses?”

“In stasis and under guard in the shuttle bay.”

“Good. Let’s get ‘em moved over. ‘Yer comin’ along too, Ian.”

Interesting that Daar remembered his first name. “I sort of figured, sir.”

Walking alongside Daar down the Fury’s corridors was a mildly claustrophobic experience, even though the larger ship’s decks were a bit wider and taller. There wasn’t any escaping his overpoweringly musky omnipresence either, and it was honestly starting to work on Ian’s brain.

“Hell of a thing, this.” Daar rumbled, a stasis bag slung effortlessly over each shoulder.

“How much did Egan tell you?”

“Enough. He told me there were a lotta terrible details he din’t wanna risk over th’ air.” Daar flicked a grim ear. “Felt like a ‘Back could almost smell his distress even over comms. Gimme the short version.”

“The Kwmbwrw have been stealing biodrones, de-implanting them, and installing some kind of overlay personality to turn them into sleeper agents.”

Daar stopped dead in his tracks, turned toward Ian, and glared down at him from…Jesus fuck how tall was he? “…You wanna run that by me again?”

Ian swallowed a bit, but stood his ground. “…House Henen, specifically. Maybe others, but Bruuk there….when they hit him with a pheromone and spoke a trigger phrase, he went berserk. Killed a Matriarch, smashed the pirate, nearly killed me. Rythweth probably knows the details, but he hasn’t said much.”

Daar let out a long noise that was several things at once, and none of them happy. “…That’s essactly what I din’t want ‘ta hear.”

“Well, you didn’t hire us to blow smoke up your arse.”

“No.” Daar turned. He handed the two stasis bags off to a pair of brownfurred guards, who hauled them away to somewhere else. That done, he sunk to all fours and started to lope toward the rear of the ship. He had Ian at a fast jog just to keep up.

“This Matriarch. She had a name?”

Ian wracked his brain. “Uh…Henen—something. Henen-ear-width, something like that.”

“I know of her. One’a Henenwgwyr’s daughters. One’a her favorites.”

Ian found himself enjoying the run. “…How big of a mess…did we make, sir?”

Daar wasn’t the slightest bit winded. Benefits of his HEAT conditioning, probably. “Oh, bad enough I’mma be sendin’ Q-comm orders back ‘ta Gao here in a few. First though, we got friends ‘ta save, and I ain’t much concerned ‘bout how big a mess I make savin’ em.”

“So…bad, then.”

Daar chittered, again without mirth. He slowed down to a fast prance and stopped at a fuckin’ enormous and important-looking door, then rested a gigantic paw heavily on Ian’s back. “Wilde, that’s what I like ‘bout you. Incurable mudpaw, you are. Terrible things are afoot an’ ‘yer very first concern ain’t nothin’ more’n how bad it’s gonna be ‘fer ‘yer Brothers. Good man.”

Ian acknowledged the compliment with a nod, but his thoughts were elsewhere. As was his breath. “I just hope…Dora’s plan works,” he said, clawing back some wind.

“You should tell me what that plan is…” Daar reminded him, as the heavy security door in front of them finally cycled open to usher them onto the bridge.

“Well…she’s awfully fond of juggling…”

Date Point: 17y8m3w1d AV
House Henen Grand Battlecruiser Apex of Virtue, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Matriarch Henenowryth

“They’re trying to hide…”

Owryth dipped her body in acknowledgment and waited patiently.

There was, she felt, much that her mother could have learned from her, if only the Grandmatriarch weren’t so over-confident in her own knowledge. The confidence and certainty that had elevated Henenwgwyr to her rank was certainly warranted, but she had, in Owryth’s opinion, forgotten some of the lessons that came with more involved leadership.

For instance: Owryth knew just enough about the sensors on her ship to understand what the technician who operated it was saying, but she couldn’t have operated them herself. Her job was to manage, to be sufficiently educated to understand the experts who kept her ship running, and to calculate how best to use the data they generated to further the House’s objectives and direction.

Mother would have berated the sensor technician and slowed him down. Owryth simply waited, and watched as the young male’s eyes turned and frowned, scrutinizing the patterns of data in front of him.

“…Clever. I think they sent out decoy drones or something. The pattern here would suggest interference from another warp-capable ship, but it clears up too quickly.” He grabbed a tablet and tapped on it a few times, calculating. “…And now they’re trying to mask their wake, making short hops…”

He nodded sharply, and handed Owryth the tablet. “Somewhere among the inner moons, Matriarch. Possibly in the ring system. They can’t be any further out than the third moon or I’d have a clear fix.”

“Good work.” Owryth accepted the tablet and returned to her own work station, transferring his report as she went.

This was a familiar game. She’d hunted plenty of pirates, spies, renegades and Hunters among moon systems just like this one, and what the Gaoian agents were doing was clever, though familiar. Against a small task group, it would have been quite effective: if the group maintained a tight formation, it would have been fairly straightforward for the freighter to hide behind the moon. If the task group spread out to eliminate the blind spots, they would have been too diffuse to easily catch the target.

The Apex of Virtue, however, was not part of a small task group.

Still, the move made sense. The Krr’zkvik would know well just how large the House fleet was and how fast. They knew they couldn’t possibly escape before being captured if they just fled for the border. Hiding among the moons bought them time. Hiding in the rings would potentially buy them a lot of time. Even in an apparently hopeless situation, enough time might yield an opportunity, a plan, something. Time was the most valuable commodity the Krr’zkvik could ask for, now.

It therefore fell to Owryth to minimize how much they could gain.

The rings, she decided. It was where she’d go, in their position. A ship could lose itself among all those drifting mountains of ice, and spotting a single warmer object among them would take time. She’d concentrate the bulk of the fleet on that quadrant of the ring system, with a few lighter ships scouring the moons just in case, and rely on sheer numbers to rob the fugitive freighter of as much time as possible.

She laid in the plan, directed her subordinates, and stood back to let them do their work.

The House would have its prize.

Date Point: 17y8m3w1d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Rings of an unnamed gas giant, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Dora

At least Urgug was nice and warm. Guvnurag were evolved to stay warm even after getting soaked in the seasonal winter storm that swept across their whole planet, so while everyone else was bundled up in blankets and coats against the plummeting temperatures, Urgug was a big steaming mound of heat.

Dora, on the other hand, had never felt more cold and tired and sluggish in her life. Her body ached for a warm lamp to bask under, and the hot chocolate she had clasped in all three hands was a lifeline. Snuggling up to Urgug and nestling in his dense, warm fur was probably the only reason she hadn’t fallen into a torpor.

Still…she had to admit, the view outside was incredible. She’d never been down among a ring system before. They’d just orbited out of the gas giant’s shadow, and the planet itself was a paper-thin crescent of brilliant white light filling half the sky. The rest, though…

The rest was an impossibly flat field of tiny ice particles and occasional tumbling chunks, stretching away forever. Sunlight through the larger chunks lent them an opalescent glow, and scattered through the diffuse small crystals into a rainbow halo. Where the ice crystals touched the hull, they stuck and arranged themselves into crawling fern patterns across the glass.

“It’s beautiful…” she whispered, as much for the opportunity to fidget by speaking as for anything else. Behind her, Urgug nodded hugely.

“Truly,” he agreed. “I wish you could see it as I do, my friend.”

“…How do you see it?”

“…An ocean of patience, shot through with rays the color of bittersweet mirth. Each asteroid has its own unique tone, but all are…orshogakkak. The colour of kindness and charity.”

“…Any hope out there?”

“Some.” Urgug sighed heavily. “Forgive me.”

“What for?”

“Is it not impolite to describe things you cannot see?”

Dora sipped her drink again and pulled her blanket a little tighter around her with two hands. “Nah. I’m glad one of us can see it that way. And, the way I see it is pretty cool too.”

Somewhere, far out there, were all their isotainers and all the other stuff she’d seeded the belt with. A few, the pressurized ones, would be heat sources too, hence why the Krr’zkvik, had powered down and they were allowing the ship to cool to the same ambient temperature as the ice around them, or at least, as close as they could get without freezing to death. With luck, the hundreds of metal signatures and dozens of heat signatures seeded across the entire ring system would keep the House fleet busy for a while.

“How long has it been now?” she asked.

“Twelve ri’ since last you asked.” There was an amused hint of green in Urgug’s reply. “How long can this last for?”

“I wish I knew, buddy.” Dora sipped her drink again. “Long enough, I hope. But I guess that’s down to Ian, and the Gao.”

“…I trust them.”

“Me too.”

That left nothing more to say, really. Dora finished her drink, pulled her blanket closer, snuggled into the warm fur around her, and waited.

At least she was warm.

Date Point: 17y8m3w2d AV
House Henen Grand Battlecruiser Apex of Virtue, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Matriarch Henenowryth

“Another container?”

“Yes, Matriarch.”

Owryth sighed, and indicated ’carry on’ with a gesture.

Ring systems were so vast that an organic brain couldn’t properly understand them. She could know the numbers, certainly, but raw numbers were no help at all when it came to truly grasping the scale of the search ahead of them.

Somewhere among all the magnetic anomalies down in those rings—most of them natural, captured ferrous rocks—was a freighter. Scattered throughout the rings were the hundreds of containers said freighter had carried. Some were still warm, and that further obfuscated their quarry, as each warm one was such a strong contact that it demanded attention.

Even with the entire fleet picking over the rings, a search that had already lasted most of the day was barely begun.In fact, Owryth was quite convinced it would be a better use of their resources not to search at all: The fugitives could only remain in hiding for so long, after all. All the House had to do was wait them out.

The Grandmatriarch had dismissed that idea. Time, she asserted, was of the essence. So, the search continued.

“Escort Significant reports a large magnetometric contact, breaking formation to investigate.”

“Acknowledged.” Owryth mentally placed a bet with herself that it would turn out to be another moonlet, and returned to her command position. Boredom, that was the trouble. Or rather, the complacency that came with the same result over and over. All it would take was one mind-fogged technician to overlook the freighter out of certainty that it was just another container or micro-asteroid…

It didn’t help that they weren’t properly equipped for this kind of survey. Their sensors were adequate, but not specialized. The dedicated systems on a mining barge would have been much more appropriate…

She wondered if perhaps she should ask Mother to summon one.

“…Matriarch? Significant thinks they might have found it.”

Owryth sprang to her feet and called up the escort’s report. It did look promising, she had to admit. Too strong a magnetometric contact to be raw ore, too massive to be just another container…and an odd temperature, too. Cold, but not quite cold enough.

“…Tell Significant to hold position. Escorts Proud and Confident to form up with them and intercept.”

She stood up tall and flexed her fingers to work the itching feeling out of her palms. The last several hours had taught her not to get her hopes up, but this particular contact really did tick all the boxes…

Time ticked by as though slowed by a partial stasis field. In reality, the escorts came together, formed up on Significant’s wing and the trio descended toward the rings with commendable speed and precision. Subjectively, though…the waiting was agony.

Right up until the sensor contact powered up their engines and started to move.

Her hand punched the comms button. “Fire! Destroy it!”

The escorts spat gauss rounds down into the rings in a single, precise volley. A second or so later, the light of a detonating capacitor bank whited out Owryth’s sensor feed.

“Kill confirmed.”

Owryth almost whooped with delight, but grit her teeth and restrained herself. Now, of all times, was a moment for paranoia. “Verify.”

If the waiting had been tense before, now it was torture. Owryth paced the bridge, unable to restrain her fidgeting. Verifying the kill demanded the escorts brave the ice field—so much denser and more hazardous than any other kind of asteroid belt—and inspect the fragments of destroyed ship up close.

They didn’t get the chance.

“Matriarch! Incoming contact at high warp!”

Owryth swiped her hands across her command table, looking to see what the long-range sensor operator could see…which was not good news. The mass-energy signature was off the charts, and the relative propagation rate almost pegged their sensor suite’s ability to detect.

There was only one class of vessel that could do both.

“…Wake the Grandmatriarch.” Owryth felt cold dread in her belly as she gave the order. “The Gao are invading.”

Date Point: 17y8m3w2d AV
Starship Avenging Rage, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Shipfather Egan

The Rage truly loved high warp. Something about the ship’s design seemed to just come alive when the helm got to open her up to full speed, and there were very few ships in the galaxy that could keep up. Only the Destroying Fury was faster.

House Henen, it seemed, weren’t interested in talking. Rather than issue a challenge, they opened the engagement at a distance of several light hours with a volley of grav-spike missiles, and high-yield warheads that would have reduced any ship in the galaxy to molten wreckage if they’d slammed right into the spike field.

That suited Egan and the Rage just fine. Warp drive was frictionless, inertialess. A ship at warp could change direction instantly with enough power and quick enough reflexes, and the Kwmbwrw had mis-timed their shots.

By the time they realized that the incoming ships had slipped past the first volley, the Rage and the Fury were in the outer system. By the time they realized the second volley missed…

Real space and real speed came back with a slam, and now the differences between the two prides of Clan One-Fang showed themselves.

The Destroying Fury was built to go claw-to-claw with Hunter broodships and maul them in a standup brawl. She hit the Kwmbwrw formation like a wrecking ball, gauss fire and superheated plasma pattering off her overpowered shielding like gentle rain even as those same shields reached out, grabbed a hapless Kwmbwrw escort, and contemptuously twisted it in half.

The Avenging Rage was made to hit and fade. She flashed through the Kwmbwrw fleet, fractions of a second behind a cloud of conventional rounds. One of the Henen capital ships took evasive action, rolling ponderously out of the way as a storm of metal flashed and flayed its shields. Sparks, debris and vented atmosphere trailed from the stricken ship, testament to a couple of good hull hits.

Alerts chimed, indicating that the Kwmbwrw had target locks. The Rage knew how to handle those: she vanished. A sideways kick of the lateral thruster banks, flash refrigeration of the hull, a pulse of ECM to briefly blind hostile sensors. Enough to make the enemy blink, and miss them. A sharp turn, so tight that the structure hummed from G-forces, and into another attack run.

Egan flicked a stubby ear as fighters boiled out of the largest Henen ship and turned to engage him. Smart move, by the Matriarch: her formation was pulling range on the Fury, getting some distance from those dangerous weaponized fields while the fighters and light ships moved to swarm the quicker, lighter Rage.

“Come about and burn for distance,” he ordered. Maybe they could lure the escorts and fighters out of formation.

His sensors protested as the Fury bullied right through a nuclear detonation. The Great Father’s ship was fucking tough, he had to admit. But even it couldn’t survive too many of those…

And to judge by the way they were ignoring the Gaoian demands to withdraw, the Kwmbwrw knew it too. They had the numbers and firepower to stand up and fight, and their own command ship emerged from the Fury’s reply with its shields incandescent from dispersed energy, unharmed.

“They’ve been studying us…” Egan rumbled, as he realized that several of the command ship’s escorts were remotely bolstering its shields, spreading the thermal load. That was a trick the Fury and Rage couldn’t do on their own. For the first time ever, the Fury pulled back from the thick of the fighting, taking evasive maneuvers, fighting defensively. The opening assault, savage though it had been, had failed.

Now, they needed the rest of the fleet to finish the job…

Date Point: 17y8m3w2d AV
House Henen Grand Battlecruiser Apex of Virtue, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Matriarch Henenowryth

The air was choking hot, and smelled of ozone. Damage control teams on several decks were deploying fire suppression equipment. The Gao hit hard.

But not hard enough, in Owryth’s opinion. Her fleet was down two escorts, literally broken in half by that juggernaut’s offensive shielding, and the heavy cruiser Unassailable was badly mauled, but the Gao were clearly wary of the fighters and high-yield weapons.

The Apex’s shields opaqued as another blast of directed energy from the larger and more ponderous of the Gaoian ships lanced her. Again, they held, and Owryth gave silent thanks to the legion of spies and engineers who’d made these deathworld-style tactics possible. “Shields?”

“So long as we can keep the escorts out of their range, we can hold.”

“Fighters, screen and protect the escorts. Unassailable to the tail-guard, lower orbit.”

The weightier Gaoian ship spat a hail of comparatively light firepower that obliterated a high-yield missile before it could arrive. Its own missiles didn’t even try to close the distance: they accelerated to a safe threshold beyond their ship then detonated, spearing Owryth’s shields with another lash of radiation.

“Shields?”

“Still holding, Matriarch…” The technician’s voice was tense.

Owryth’s thoughts were broken by her mother, who stormed onto the bridge with all the fearful grandeur that had made her career, trailing her aides behind her like a cloak. “What in the House’s name is attacking us?” she demanded.

“Two Gaoian heavy warships. I’m pretty certain one of them is the Destroying Fury.”

“Just two?” Henenwgwyr scowled briefly at the command table. “…You’re right, it is the Fury. Hail them.”

Owryth glanced at the communications technician, who was already following the order. “…Line open, Grandmatriarch.”

Wgwyr drew herself up to her full fearsome height and directed her best glare at the camera. “Daar, you maniac. I know you’re on that ship! Parlay!”

He was, of course. It had been some time since Owryth had last seen the Great Father of the Gao, and her impression of him had been scarred and battle-worn. Maybe her memory was playing tricks on her, because although it was unquestionably the same male whose image shimmered in the air above the command table, his pelt and ears were unblemished. And he seemed, if anything, bigger than ever.

Younger too. But his words had the bite of an old and experienced mind. “You’ve been a very bad girl, Henenwgwyr.”

“You’re the madman who just invaded sovereign territory, and now you’re outnumbered and outgunned. You know the Dominion won’t stand for—”

“I don’t give a wet fart ‘fer what the Dominion will say. An’ I ain’t even close ‘ta bein’ out-gunned. We both know why I’m here. ‘Ya want we should talk it out right now ‘fer all to hear? I’d be down ‘fer that.”

Wgwyr swayed as another blast to the shields rocked the deck. “How typical. No regard for the consequences. Just swagger in and assume you can solve everything with your claws. Your people are going to suffer for this, Daar.”

“Almost any problem can be solved with sufficient violence.” Daar replied, with a snarl creeping into his voice. “An’ threatenin’ my people in turn is a bold strategy, considerin’ the crime that drew me outta my Naydi’s lovin’ embrace. So, again: ‘ya wanna keep playin’ dumb, or are we gonna just get past the posturin’ and move on with life? I got what I need, an’ the Conclave knows. What happens next is gonna determine the future. Think carefully.”

“Mother…” Owryth muted their microphone. “…More Gaoian ships just came into sensor range. They’ll be here in moments.”

Wgwyr turned her head. “…He needs to pay for this, daughter. He can’t just invade us and—”

“Mother. If we stay, he’ll smash us.”

Daar, clearly amused by their sudden private discussion, chimed in with a mocking tone. “Also, Bruuk is safe an’ sound, I’m sure you’ll be glad to know! I’m told he’ll have a very interestin’ story ‘ta share wit’ me…”

“Mother,” Owryth hissed, despite the fact she knew the Great Father couldn’t hear her. “The freighter is dead. We destroyed it just before they arrived.”

Wgwyr gave Daar’s image a silent, cold stare, then flicked an arm sharply. “Retreat.”

As the commands rippled out across the deck and the Apex angled to turn away and go to warp, she tapped the button to un-mute their microphone. “Very well. Claim your prize. Or what’s left of it.”

“Already did, don’t’chu worry ‘yer swampy head none.” Daar lowered his own head. “There’s still ways ‘ya might extricate ‘yerself from what we both know’s comin,’ Henenwgwyr. Don’t be a fool.”

“Bluff all you want, ’Great Father.’ I will see you answer for this invasion.” Henenwgwyr slapped the button to cut the connection, turned, and stormed off the bridge with all the righteous indignation she could muster.

Owryth was left thinking of all the ways she would have handled that differently. She said nothing, though, just watched as her fleet detangled itself from the two Gaoian ships, accelerated out of their own grav-spikes, and went to warp.

Two minutes after they were gone, a warp signature rose from the gas giant’s rings, and Henenowryth knew that they had failed in every way.

Date Point: 17y8m3w2d AV
Starship Avenging Fury, Wrrmuthwm sector, Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Ian found his crew in Fury’s sickbay. Most of them were in a similar sorry state, with only Urgug having come through their deep freeze comfortable and unharmed. Morwk was wheezing, Moj’s carapace had a fine filligree network of cracks all over it, and Dora was hissing in pain as her frostbitten toes were gently immersed in a lukewarm bath…

But they were alive.

“Fuckin’ hell, I’m glad to see you lot.”

Dora gave him her best approximation of a grin. “Come on, you doubted us?”

Ian grabbed a chair and sat. “When I saw them blow up a ship on long-range sensors…”

Morwk laughed, then coughed. Clearly, cold air didn’t agree with his lungs. “I wish I could thank that Matriarch and the pirate. So kind of them to give us two drone ships to use as decoys…” He coughed again, and cleared his throat. “…How’s Bruuk?”

“Still in stasis. Daar’s taken a personal interest, so…I guess he’ll be getting the best of care when he wakes up.”

He trailed off, and didn’t even notice he’d gone distant until Urgug’s heavy hand settled reassuringly on his back. It was kind of like being comforted by a mammoth. “He is alive thanks to you, Wild.”

“Nobody else could have saved him,” Moj agreed. “His guardian angel, you.”

Ian accepted the praise with a small smile, not feeling able to give more than that. After a second, though, he frowned around the room. “…Where’s Trrrk’k?”

“…Stasis.” Morwk made a low hooting noise of grief. “He wouldn’t let us put him in for the freeze, and he’s…frail. The medics aren’t sure if…”

“He told us, before we turned the heat off,” Dora added. “About his lungs, and…everything.”

This time, the unhappy silence settled on all of them.

“….Well…that fuckin’ sucks,” Ian said, eventually. “But we got the job done. And a bloody difficult job, at that. He’ll be proud of that, I think.”

“Great. We dug up a secret that might just spark an interstellar war between the Kwmbwrw Great Houses and the Gao,” Morwk coughed again. “Score one for the good guys.”

“That’s on them, not us,” Dora said.

“I know.” Morwk shook his head. “I just…wish my people weren’t the villains of this piece.”

Dora gave him a sympathetic scratch behind the ears. “Welcome to the club.”

“What happens next?” Moj asked.

“We’re going to Gao, mate,” Ian told him. “For repairs, debrief, some shore leave before the next job…”

“Shore leave on a deathworld,” Moj rasped out his equivalent of a dry laugh. “Life has been exciting enough, lately.”

“I dunno, mate. You’d probably enjoy a visit to a Starmind monastery…” Ian looked around at his crew and smiled. The fact was, he was fucking proud of all of them. And gladder than he could say that they’d come through. He’d have to check on Trrrk’k when they got to Gao and see how the old geezer was doing…

But the rest of them were going to be okay. A little rattled, a little bruised, but doing fine.

And he was already looking forward to the next one.

Date Point: 17y8m3w3d AV
Starship Rich Plains, Domain space.

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

There were times when a man just needed a stiff drink, and the problem with the Rich Plains was, there wasn’t a decent bartender on board. Sir Patrick needed a Martini. A dry Martini. A glass of gin served near a bottle of vermouth would be about perfect. Unfortunately, there were no bottles of either beverage within some immense distance of the ship.

He settled for a snifter of Islay scotch with a mouth-mangling name instead, and gave the Kwmbwrw ambassador a long look as he swirled it around the glass.

“Matriarch, I don’t really know what to say. I’ve scarcely had time to read the report myself, let alone discuss our official position with—”

“You’ve had enough time to see enough.” Matriarch Elerchwythweth interrupted, sharply. “Your friend and ally personally invaded our sovereign space, and fired on Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr’s flagship.”

It wasn’t that Kwmbwrw were rude, as such. Well, no. they were. It was a cultural thing, born of different norms. And frankly, Matriarchs tended to not particularly value the opinions of males, regardless of species. They thought nothing of interrupting males, or explaining to them things with which the male in question was already quite familiar.

Frankly, there weren’t many ways to deal with them, especially when their righteous indignation was in full billow. In fact the most effective thing was to be rude in turn. For Knight, that meant a sigh, followed by walking away.

“Matriarch, I have seen your report. I have not seen my ally’s. What kind of a loyal friend would I be if I acted on such one-sided information?”

“Are you accusing me of dishonesty?”

“I am accusing nothing. I am simply not interested in having my time wasted by a border dispute for which I lack all the relevant details. What are you asking me for? To condemn my people’s closest allies on your say-so alone? That’s asking for a bit much, don’t you think?”

Anybody of a civilized bent might well have identified that for the ‘no way in hell’ that it was. And possibly, had Sir Patrick been a woman, the Matriarch might have noticed too. Instead…

“I am telling you that the Great Houses will take a dim view if you throw in your lot behind a despot who flouts interstellar law!” she declared.

“Your warning is heard and understood, Matriarch. You will not, however, receive my people’s official position today, and that is my final word on the subject for now. So, if you will excuse me, I must prepare for my meeting with the OmoAru ambassador.”

There were few guilty pleasures as sweet in Knight’s life as smiling blandly, turning away, and utterly ignoring the Matriarch. The translator, graciously, did not deign to render her sotto voce parting shot, and Sir Patrick took a cleansing breath once he had some privacy again.

It was difficult to like the Kwmbwrw, to put it mildly. The galaxy owed them a debt for being the shield against Hunter space for so long, and there was no doubting they’d earned their considerable political influence on merit. Unfortunately, they seemed to have fallen into the trap of knowing the galaxy owed them that debt, and truly believing it themselves. Throw in the fact that humility was, apparently, seen as tantamount to meekness in their culture, and…

He knocked back his scotch and set it aside.

Of course…everyone was proud. He certainly was, and so too were the Gao, the Corti, the Guvnurag and especially the OmoAru.

Being driven to the brink of extinction ought to have humbled them, but to the contrary, the OmoAru delegation seemed convinced that their tiny remnant population were the galaxy’s salvation. They weren’t coming to the Council with requests for aid, no. They were coming with offers and handouts, banking on the treasures of their fallen empire to buy their influence back as though nothing much had happened.

And it was possible, of course, that they weren’t wrong. Sir Patrick had received a number of offers from other governments, inviting the nations of Earth to start doing business with their own shipyards and businesses…but none had yet delivered or offered anything as enticing as the automated orbital factories that the OmoAru were practically giving away.

That was the thing about power, perhaps. It refused to be ignored. The fact that he could ignore the Kwmbwrw matriarch was a clear sign that her people held less real power than she would have liked, she knew it, and she hated it. But that was the nature of politics, really: Power shifted, balance tipped, and to the quick and agile went the spoils.

He glanced at his decanter of scotch, briefly wondered whether he could find that gin after all…then set those thoughts aside. It wouldn’t do for him to turn to drink as a coping mechanism.

He turned back to his desk to check through the latest documentation. He actually had some time before AtaUmiUi was due to darken his door, and the chance to catch up in peace sounded thoroughly welcome.

What he found waiting for him from Clan Whitecrest, on the precise reason for the Great Father’s incursion into Kwmwbwrw space and the nature of House Henen’s crimes, swiftly dispelled any last hope he had that today might be pleasant.

He gave in to temptation, and had a second drink.

Date Point: 17y9m2w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

All in all…life was pretty good.

First and most importantly, he had Claire. When he’d arrived on-planet, having spent nearly a month stuck on-board with nothing to distract him but grab-ass and insanely intense training? And studying because Julian needed someone to suffer along with him? The very first thing Hoeff had done was tackle his Claire with the biggest hug he dared give, dragged her off to their little shack, and stayed there until they’d both decided they were satisfied.

Hoeff had some truly ridiculous endurance these days, so…it took them a few days.

Second, he had his health and his team. Although Hoeff had always been blessed with a prodigious natural propensity to pile on the strength—any operator in the SOR had to, JETS or HEAT—he also had a crazy-fast metabolism, and keeping any size out in the field was a serious problem. He’d spent years in the SEALs piling weight on and then promptly losing it (and often more) during mission; eventually, it caught up with him. Half the reason he’d retired from the Navy was that, at thirty-seven, the constant swing had wreaked absolute havoc on his body, and that was before he’d even considered all the injuries he’d earned over the years.

In his last two years on the teams, he could actually feel his body starting to give up. After Cairo, he never again broke two-hundred. Hell, on his last mission he’d shrunk down to one-fifty and basically stayed there, right through his last assignment with the JETS. He felt the effects too. He felt them hard, and knew he couldn’t play the game anymore.

So, he retired, and recuperated. Lucky for him, ‘Horse and his team had figured out what the hell Hoeff was doing wrong. They reworked his diet and, well, most of his lifestyle…and Adam’s magical coaching saved the day for yet another broscience-addled operator. Now, for the first time since high school, Hoeff could put on useful weight and keep it. Under ‘Horse’s uncompromising care he shot up to a beefy two-eighty-five in almost no time at all, as big as he had ever been in his wrestling and football days. He’d lost some function at first, but they’d fixed that too and soon, Hoeff was stronger than ever. ‘Horse kept him growing at a steady clip from there, even while leaning out…and eventually talked Hoeff into going all the way.

Not that it had taken much convincing; working with Julian and the ten’gewek—fuck, just keeping up with them—was all the convincing Hoeff needed. Two months on Crude and all his nagging injuries were gone. He’d grown insanely strong almost overnight and, like every genetically blessed swinging-dick that ‘Horse got his paws on, just kept going.

It was addictive, living on the edge of what a human being could do. He was just fuckin’ stupid cavemonkey strong and more athletic than he’d ever been at any point in his life, despite being heavy enough to crush scales. He could move, move hard and fast, move precisely, move forever. Sure, he was pretty damn short, but he could comfortably stand among the best of the best deathworlders around, and stand proud. HEAT, ten’gewek, gaoian, whoever. He wouldn’t be ignored or denied.

Hoeff was a blessed man, and life was good.

He’d got a second chance at youth, a second chance at everything. He could be young and strong with Claire, live a good long life with her in the best prime a man could earn. For the first time in years, he’d considered being a family man. Him! He was so damn fit he could match his ten’gewek teammates now! Well okay, not Ferd but whatever; the big Given-Man could humble Firth so Hoeff was okay just surviving the huge gorilla, honestly. He got to live and work with his best friend, he got to train people up for arguably the most important mission set there was…

Life was fuckin’ good!

Right now, winter was almost on Akyawentuo. Late fall storms rolled through a couple of times a week, and had long since stripped the Ketta down to bare scrabbly branches. During the short daylight, it grew hot and muggy as hell. With no leaves providing cover, there was no hiding from the fierce but distant sun. However, during the night, much of that heat came down first as warm drizzle, then as cold, chilling rain.

From inside a tent or hut it was a cozy sound, and he could understand why the ten’gewek were most at peace this time of the year. Now was the time to cuddle family and wrestle with loved ones. But, everyone had to step outside to take a leak or whatever sooner or later.

And check his messages. He had a fuckin’ bear of a mission waiting for him, too. Jesus Christ.

Well…not everything in his life was gonna be perfect. But that was okay.

First thing’s first. Hoeff had spent most of the day happily wearing himself out with Claire, which he wasn’t gonna complain about one bit…but he should probably socialize a bit. He needed to stretch his legs anyway. And dear God did he ever need to pee.

Unsurprisingly, those moments of stepping outside for a leak and a leg-stretch were how all the menfolk kept up with each other. The forge had become a center of village life, which made sense: it was covered, warm, and a Taking place by Ten’Gewek thinking, and therefore something of a boy’s club. Sometimes the Singers joined them, but they were ritually both man and woman anyway, so they were welcome. Especially when they were playing matchmaker…

Besides. It turned out there were uses for urine, which was a thing he never thought he’d learn. Normally that might have made things unbearably smelly, but Julian knew a few tricks there, and now things weren’t so bad, even with literal pots of the stuff rendering down on a low heat.

Yan was the grand champion of the pissing contest, naturally. And he was taking a break from…whatever a Given-Man does…to hammer some steel. An axe head, from the look of it.

“Heff! Good timing.” He beckoned with a twitch of his tail. “Vemik say you know knife-things as good as he does! What you think?”

Hoeff gave the head a good look. “…Pretty good. Actually, where’s Vemik? I don’t hear any loud hooting from his hut…”

Yan trilled, and smiled a big fanged smile. “Will be when he comes back later! He has Giving of wood-tools for Umuk over in Eb Given-Man’s village. Umuk has a book on carp-en-tree. I think, he is a sky-thinker too. He and Vemik, good friends! Much sky-thinking over radio. And, a forest-father was taken by the gods a hand of days ago, so why waste?”

“So that’s why he wanted to know all about chisels and stuff.” Curiosity satisfied, Hoeff took a closer look at the axe-head. “Very well-made. Good blunt profile, too. Might be a bit too blunt, I don’t know how much of an edge it’ll hold.”

“I know, was idea. I wanted something more…durable, yes?”

“Yeah.”

Yan grunted. “Yes. Durable! Sharp axe is good, but sharp things break easy. Axe is for swinging hard! The Forest-father is maybe good day’s hike there and back. Vemik tried his nice pretty sharp axe and broke it before a finger of daylight gone.”

“Well, done right an axe can be sharp and strong, but…gimme a minute, yeah?”

Half a minute or so later, and feeling more comfortable, Hoeff took a closer look at Yan’s handiwork. “Got good news,” Hoeff said conversationally, as he considered the metal getting hotter amid the coals. Yan was in the habit of pumping the two sets of bellows with his left hand and his right foot, leaving his dominant hand and tail free to work.

“Good how?”

“Our next supply shuttle will have array techs on it. They’ll be making this one safe again.”

Yan twitched his tail. “Hmm. So, things go back to like before?”

Hoeff paused for a moment to detangle that monkeyism, and shrugged. “Eh, not completely. I’d have to ask Julian again—by the way, when is he coming back from Lodge?”

“A hand of days. I leave tomorrow for big meeting.”

“Right. Anyway. If I remember right, the new security measures mean we only get to use it once a week. And the only reason we get to use it in the first place is because this was a military model and it was always more secure than the civilian ones. Those won’t be coming back anytime soon.”

“Better than nothing.” Yan tilted his head, then uttered an amused hoot.

“What?”

“Funny. A hand of years ago, no sky-people, no sky-magic, no array. Now, can’t even go a season without missing it.” Yan shook his head ruefully as he pumped on the bellows. “Can’t go back, and don’t want to.”

“We’d miss you, I think.”

“Hmm. Must be good fucking, making you so nice.”

Hoeff laughed, and actually felt a blush come on. “Hey! I mean, I’m not complaining…”

“Yes yes, easy to tease! But, is season to love. Nothing else good to do!” Yan patted his belly. Ten’Gewek were normally scary lean and in Yan’s case, the heavy striations of his musculature could often be seen twitching through his leathery skin. Now though, he had a healthy layer of winter padding. It was only thick enough to slightly round off the knife-edges of his physique, but on a man his size that translated to a pretty substantial energy store.

In any case he seemed pleased with himself, and trilled as he poked at his brick-like abs. “The gods make us sleepy before the snow comes. All the prey calving, so we let them Give. Is time to make good bed, make good jerky, make good fuck and good sleep. We wake up in spring!”

Hoeff shook his head. “Yan, is there a season where it’s not good for you to fuck?”

“No! Also, you and Jooyun need some fat on you! Is cold out. Cold moons can kill.”

Hoeff looked down at his own belly. Even with his newfound capacity to really pack on the size…a spare tire wouldn’t be something he’d ever manage, and boy had he tried. Some would say that was a blessing but honestly? It really wasn’t. He’d have loved to have some reserves over the years, instead of constantly earning and then burning away his strength.

“I’ll be fine,” he promised. “But I wasn’t kidding. We’d miss you folk.”

Yan considered that. “From you, is true thing to say, I think. Still feels strange.” Yan looked down at his axe head again. Steel was a deeply symbolic thing for the Ten’Gewek these days. All the rest? The writing, the ships, the land radio network they had now, magic thinking-stones for teaching, all of it they could write off as friendly magic. Steel, though, was something they could make and they knew it was the first step on the ladder. They revered it, none more than Yan himself. Better even than Vemik, he understood what it meant for his people.

Hoeff clapped Yan on his huge meaty shoulder. “I mean it, bud. JETS teams two, three, and four are half Ten’Gewek after all. We couldn’t do the mission without your people.”

Yan hooted his amusement again. “Good to know Soft Heff is only soft in head,” he said, and delivered a friendly poke with the end of his tail that left Hoeff staggering. “Practical Heff underneath, still.”

“I see Professor has been teaching you big words again…”

Yan flashed his sabertooth fangs in amused warning. It was a friendly gesture among ten’gewek men, but it wasn’t a benevolent one. He’d be getting squished later.

But not too hard. Probably. And probably nothing else, either. Yan was pretty considerate about boundaries, these days.

In any case, the titanic cavegorilla was amused. “Maybe he teach you something next. But now, what about the teams? You promised they will be here for the Fire.”

“Yeah. We’re not moving again for a while. And that’s good, because after that, I’ve got a fuckin’ hell of a mission for my team. One you and I need to talk about in private.”

“…Right now?”

“Later. We’ve got time, and there’s a lot of planning and prep other people are doing, first.”

Yan’s tail twitched again. “Hmm. Big mission, you say? Against Big Enemy?”

“Nope. But this one is more immediately important. It’ll be a big Taking.”

Yan nodded his understanding, and transferred his axe head from the coals to the anvil again. “Talk when Jooyun gets back, then. You go back to Claire, rest. But not too much!”

Hoeff chuckled, clapped Yan on the shoulder again, and turned to go. “Later, Given-Man.”

He and Claire somehow managed to restrain themselves. Mostly they monkey-watched, cuddled by the fire outside her shack while wrapped up in blankets. It was the usual scene: Vemik chasing his kid through the village, the women doing the daily rhythm of life, the men their own. There was a bit of roughhousing, but nothing serious or too hot-blooded. Mostly, things were sleepy. There was the nightly Dance, when the men showed their strength to the gods and to each other—and the ladygorillas. Yan went back to his hut with lots of company.

Life was simple and uncomplicated. For the next few months, all Hoeff had to do was train with his team, get stronger, maybe get a bit smarter too…and enjoy. That didn’t sound bad at all.

As for the dark work to come…Well. For every Giving, a Taking. That was life.

And life was good.

Date Point: 17y10m AV
Stasis bag

Bruuk

—The bag opened right back up. Did they forget something? …No. The light was different.

He was somewhere else. The gravity was nicely heavy, the light was the right color…the scent. Bruuk was on Gao, he had to be. Clean, well-scrubbed burrow in the traditional style, so somebody either filthy rich or dirt poor. Herbs on the breeze, too. A riot of wildflowers.

…Lingering scent of the most brutally dominant male Bruuk had ever smelled…

Well. There couldn’t be many males with a musk that powerful. Bruuk raised his head and looked about. Definitely a country burrow in the oldest traditional style; whoever lived here was rich as balls. It was well-kept and surprisingly tidy despite the clutter of tools, cloaks on pegs, racks of pickles and good talamay…smell of a Female. Just the one, and quite healthy.

Wild was there too, his scent laced with concern.

“…Where are we?”

Wild reached down to help Bruuk wriggle out of the bag. “Well, uh…we’re guests. At the Great Father’s retreat. He wants to talk to you when you’re feeling up to it.”

Well. That made sense, at least. “The Great Mother’s here too?”

“I am, yes.” Great Mother Naydra wafted into the room, bearing a plate of meat, cheese, and a steamer full of buns. “Take your time, we don’t stand on formality here.”

Bruuk sat up and picked at his fur, suddenly feeling self-conscious and wretched. Despite Ian’s best efforts, he just hadn’t had the energy to do more than the minimum of self-care and hygiene, so he reeked of exercise and, underneath that, a lingering note of gore and animal terror that hadn’t quite gone away. Next to the Great Mother’s perfectly groomed beauty, it was hard not to feel inadequate.

She showed no sign of minding, though. She was all concern and warmth. “Daar’s out in the field, pulling deep tillage for winter meeshi.”

“I…it’s been a few weeks then, huh?”

“A few, yes.” Naydra gestured invitingly to the table, and Bruuk realised his stomach was rumbling. “You’re our guest here for the next month or so, if you wish. Please, make yourself at home. There’s lots of land around here to explore, some of it completely wild. Bumpkin has a rather well-equipped gym as well. And oh! They’ve been busy. We’re behind on farm work, so if you feel up to lending an extra set of paws…”

That wasn’t at all what he was expecting. Nonetheless, the prospect of doing something useful had his tail wagging before he realized. Naydra gave him a knowing look, flicked her ear, and gestured at the table again with a soft chitter. “Eat first, you’ll need it.”

An hour later, mid-autumn frost was crunching under Wild’s boots as the pair of them headed out to the field with full bellies. Wild simply shook his head when Bruuk tried to ask him what all had happened during his time in stasis, but he did promise that the rest of the crew was doing okay.

That was good. That was…that was really good. Bruuk had a lot gnawing at his mind, but knowing his friends were safe and recovering took an enormous burden off his soul.

He’d wondered idly at what they weren’t telling him, but he understood why they were cautious. They were rehabilitating him, being gentle. He’d much have preferred if they’d just lay it all out but, well…he wasn’t gonna complain. The food was good, he got a month-long vacation out in the country. Bruuk was starting to get a bit of spring in his step over all that, but when they arrived at the field…he stopped dead in his tracks. Bruuk could only boggle in stupefied wonder at what he was seeing.

When Naydra had said Daar was pulling tillage, she had meant it quite literally; he was pulling a wicked-looking implement with his own brute strength. Bruuk didn’t know exactly what the machine was called. It was made of heavy steel tubing and had four vertical spikes that looked like they ran deep into the ground. He didn’t have anything in his head to compare it to, but something like that had to require a tractor…didn’t it?

Apparently not for Daar. He hunkered down against his burden and pulled with a steady, relentless whole-body drive. It was a big field and about halfway done, so he’d clearly been at it for some time and didn’t show any signs of slowing down. He paused at the end of a row, stood, then picked up a small barrel of water riding on the implement, which he drank from directly. Standing there in all his…his unattainable fuckin’ glory, the Great Father was the absolute epitome of what the very best brownfurs could only ever dream of being. Bruuk had never in his entire life felt so instantly small, so puny, or so hopelessly inadequate.

And then Daar’s musk hit Bruuk like a runaway train to the face. He took an unconscious step back, instincts practically screaming at him to flee and hide. Wild clearly noticed, but surprised Bruuk by shaking his head and chuckling. “He doesn’t half-arse things, does he?”

Daar heard, looked toward them, and wagged his tail wildly. Well…invitation given. Bruuk steeled himself as they vaulted the low fence and trudged over hard-packed ground. It felt a little like he was marching toward his own death sentence, and he didn’t know why.

Bruuk liked to think he wasn’t easy to intimidate, but now, even at a distance, he knew he’d never been so thoroughly, utterly outmatched. In every possible way a male could be outmatched. Balls, even if Daar were scaled down to Bruuk’s stature, he’d still be a soft, misshapen ugly runt next to the Great Father. The media didn’t do him any justice at all.

A broad pant-grin spread across the Great Father’s brutally handsome face. “Ian! Did ‘ya feed our friend here?! Big boys need food!!” He wasn’t being rude or overly smug, despite everything. In fact he was downright friendly. “An’ I got work ‘fer him, if he’s feelin’ up to it…”

There was a playful challenge in his growl, underlined by the steam billowing off him in the cold air. He was literally dripping with sweat and didn’t look the slightest bit tired or ready to stop, either.

Balls.

“Naydra wouldn’t let me. Insisted on cooking everything herself,” Wild replied easily. “Had me water the herb garden instead.”

Daar cast a fond, soppy look back toward the burrow. “Ain’t she the bestest? Anyhoo. Young Bruuk, feelin’ good an’ ready?”

The challenge in his growl was a bit stronger this time, but again…not aggressive. At least not cruelly so, anyway. A big part of Bruuk was suspicious, deeply wary…but the competitive part of him really wanted to see just where he stood next to the best there was. “I think I can manage…My Father.” Bruuk remembered his courtesies at the last moment.

Fortunately, Daar didn’t seem to care. “Oh, relax! Ain’t nobody here but us, yijao? You can take Tiik and Areeki’s place there on the back, if ‘ya want. They’ll show ‘ya what to do.”

Both of the two hardy, rugged-furred brownies riding on the machine looked exhausted and grateful for the chance to stop. Bruuk blinked at them and then, not really knowing what else he could do, he climbed up to join them.

“Yer job’s the hard one, really,” Daar called as he strained against his harness again. “The shanks on the ripper wanna bounce about an’ shit, s’pecially if there’s a big rock hidden under the soil. All I gotta do is pull. You gotta keep the damn thing under control. Big male like you should manage, I think…Ian, ‘ya wanna stick around? There’s other help need’s doin’.”

Before long, they were rattling and crunching across the field, Daar steaming and panting as he hauled the implement—the “ripper”—along, while Wild ambled in their wake collecting the small stones and other debris it turned up. And big stones, too. The springs on the shanks only seemed to trip up when they struck those rocks, and that was saying something; those springs were enormous like a vehicle’s suspension. Daar pulled right through them, as if he barely noticed. Bruuk would definitely strive to stay on his good side.

The questions and conversation and stuff that Bruuk kept expecting never happened. Instead, they worked until the sun went down. His evening passed with the occasional bout of friendly small talk—sports both human and gaoian, workhouse competitions, bad movies—always carefully steered away from the big things still rattling around in his head. It was friendly, and much more…regular-folk than he was expecting. The Great Father talked like any grizzled workhouse veteran, and liked lewd banter and bawdy jokes just as much as jawin’ about the many and varied workday crimes of bored engineers “who ain’t ever got their paws dirty.”

Lots of shop-talk too. Apparently there was quite a bit of arcane knowledge to farming, particularly regarding soil nutrients, drainage, the best times to put down fertilizers…

“We’re lucky, our soils’re cold ‘fer longer’n most Earthling farmers. We don’t have the same problems with nitrogen runoff…”

And so on. Whatever else he was, Daar wasn’t stupid, just to add to all the rest. Still, it was honestly interesting to hear, though their conversation was a bit stop-and-go; neither of them really had the breath to chatter when they were tilling their way back and forth between the headlands. So mostly, Bruuk spent the evening wrestling the ripper into submission, and staring both stupefied and, embarrassingly, a bit hypnotized at the muscular roll of the Great Father’s wide, tremendously thick haunches as he pulled, and pulled, and pulled on that ripper, pausing only to turn around at the field’s headlands and plod his way back across.

It was an odd evening, to say the least.

When they finished the field, both Ian and Bruuk were dead exhausted. Not Daar. He caught his breath, detangled himself from the harness, and showed them how the implement folded up. Clever, really.

“There’s this cozy lil’ workhouse down th’ road, specializes in heavy ag machinery! They made this custom ‘fer me. Neat, huh? I got ‘em to paint it red too. Racecar red.”

“…Racecar?” Bruuk’s tail wagged. Who didn’t like fast things?

“It looks good,” Wild nodded. “I take it red’s your favorite color nowadays?”

“Uh-huh! Well, this red specific’ly. Anyhoo…let’s get this put away an’ take a dunk!”

Bruuk, trying to be helpful, tried to push the now compact ripper forward…and couldn’t. He could nudge it a bit but the damn thing was so damn heavy…

“Rippers’re always running into rocks an’ old stumps and all sortsa stuff unner the soil, so they gotta be made strong. Mine’s not so big as a tractor-pulled thing but it ain’t no lightweight!” With that, Daar bent down and picked it up like it wasn’t that big of a deal. There was a flash of smugness on his ears, and a quick flex of an arm to shame anyone’s…but nothing mean. He was playful about it and his tail was wagging furiously. Who could blame him, really?

Somehow, despite it all…Bruuk didn’t feel quite as intimidated as before. Not even after they made it back to the barn, where Daar promptly flattened him in an impromptu wrestling match. And then, apparently not sufficiently exercised, embarrassed Bruuk with a quick circuit through the gym, tossing around weights so effortlessly that it was honestly more comical than terrifying. In the face of that, escaping with all his bones intact and his muscles only slightly crushed into uselessness felt like a genuine accomplishment.

They cooled down in a perfectly warm tub of water in the utility barn. Daar splashed in like a meteor, and there was yet more rough play in the tub while they scrubbed down “‘fer Naydi’s sake.” Bruuk was starting to feel a bit more like an oversized chewtoy than a guest…but he didn’t mind, somehow. Again, there wasn’t a hint of malice or cruelty to any of it. Daar wanted to tussle and play. He wanted to share.

Then there was dinner, crammed around a small traditional stone table near a metal stove fuelled by fragrant bricks of compressed moss. A pot of spiced, home-brewed Talamay on top of the stove, more full of flavor than the commercial stuff…

It was the kind of rustic simplicity that only the staggeringly rich could afford, but none of it felt like a flex; Daar preferred doing the real thing, after all. Instead, it felt like a genuine attempt to capture some kind of freedom. And it sure as hell worked for Bruuk. A day of hard labour, simple pleasures, no interrogation…he was left feeling almost himself again.

Whatever that meant.

Bedtime was the only awkward moment. Ian, being Human, preferred to sleep separately, and did so with his own air mattress closeby. The rest of them curled up on a huge padded cushion right in the middle of the floor, which had been tucked away in a closet beforehand. A bit of kneading to get the stuffing just right, a gargantuan arm and a leg bigger than Bruuk wrapped possessively around his body, pulling him in hard against Daar for a tight snuggle…

On any other day, in any other place, exhaustion would have dragged Bruuk down into a deep and restful sleep without any trouble. Tonight, though…

He was closest to the stove. He lay there and felt its warmth on his face, matched by the rumbling heat rolling off the iron-like body of the Great Father on his other side. It was cozy, peaceful, relaxing…and left his brain spinning in circles.

He couldn’t sleep.

After a time, the Great Father’s huge muzzle snuffled next to Bruuk’s head inquisitively. He didn’t speak, and didn’t need to. Gently, so as not to wake “Naydi,” he wriggled himself free of the nest and silently padded over toward the door. He gave a look to Bruuk, who nodded, carefully tucked the blanket over the Great Mother, and extricated himself as well.

Gao’s twin moons were both full tonight, a rare occurrence. Everything was still and frigid enough to bite through the fur. Neither of them seemed to mind; gaoians enjoyed the cold.

“…Start from the beginning,” Daar suggested, leaning his elbows on the fence around the herb garden.

Bruuk leaned on the railing next to him and sighed, watched the cloud his breath made vanish, then duck-nodded.

“…I was at a rest stop on the highway, north end of the Three Valleys. Stopped to call Mother Meeki. She’d just had our cub a day or two before and I’d asked to meet him. She was…just in the middle of telling me the Commune Mother had said I could, when…lights out.”

“What were ‘yer implants, if ‘ya don’t mind me askin?’”

“Translator. I did a lotta side jobs with alien goods comin’ down from the moons. Kept tellin’ myself I should have ‘em taken out with all the warnings, just…never got round to it.”

“Clanless workin’ ‘fer Bronzefur, then?”

“Bronzefur, Goldpaw, Forestnettle….anyone who needed a buncha stuff moved in a truck, or some muscle that weren’t too dumb.”

Daar chittered quietly. “Tall order ‘fer us brownies, sometimes.”

He meant well, but Bruuk didn’t feel like chittering.

“…I can remember bein’ a drone. Not anything specific, just…fear. Blind fear. The kind that makes you kill anything nearby so you’ll be safe, except I was never safe.”

“Flashes. Like a nightmare.”

“Yeah. Exactly that. I was just fuckin’ terrified outta my mind and the only thing I knew how to do was kill.”

“We think the biodroning did its control by way of sensory overload. It din’t actually control the body directly. Which, if ‘ya think about it, is mebbe the most evilest possible way ‘ta do it.”

Bruuk nodded. That matched his memory, anyway.

“How many…how many were there?” he asked.

Daar paused for a brief moment before answering. “Not many. Half-dozen survivors that we know ‘bout. You’re number seven. I’ve talked to ‘em all.”

Bruuk didn’t know what to say to that. He sniffed at the herb garden, let its scent calm him a little, and moved on.

“…Don’t know exactly how I got collected. I wasn’t in a state to think about it. There was just…light. Then I fell asleep. Then…then the rest is like a dream that somebody else had. I can remember what happened, it just don’t feel like it happened to me, if that’s…”

Daar duck-nodded.

“…There was a facility where they stored us. Not stasis. Sleep pods. Drugged up and dozing, except when they woke us up for programming or exercise. Lots of both, more programming for me, more exercise for the others. I don’t remember them by name or anything. Just…sparring or training partners. But I remember not being afraid any longer. It was like I was there, doing the training, even being myself…but I wasn’t. Sometimes, between the programming and training, they asked questions, but not many. Just enough to learn what they needed, I guess.”

Daar shuffled a little closer to share body heat. He radiated like a furnace despite his short clip, and just being close to him kept the worst of the chill away.

“I assume they had some kinda reward an’ punishment mechanism…”

“Right in the brain. You did something right, you got a shot of euphoria. Like…it was like winning the biggest race, mating with the prettiest female…but ten times stronger. That’s right around the time I felt myself sort of…drown.”

The fence wood splintered a little as Daar’s claws dragged hatefully through it. Bruuk glanced at the new gouges, then carried on, words flowing numbly out of him. “After a while, they didn’t need that any more. Behaving felt good. Obeying felt good. Performing felt better than sex. That’s when they raped my mind with the programmed mission and put me to sleep. An’…I don’t even know what it was that served on that ship all that time, but it weren’t me. Well. I remember doing everything, though. Even though I feel like I only woke up yesterday…”

He ran his claws across his scalp. “It’s like…like I died in the war, an’ just came back to life, but I can remember a whole ’nother life that happened while I was dead.”

The Great Father keened. He picked Bruuk up bodily and buried his muzzle against Bruuk’s neck, hugged crushingly tight…and keened.

“…Fuck.”

Part of Bruuk—the same part that had been in charge back on the ship—wanted to squirm, to escape. He barely knew this huge, terrifying male, all of his instincts were screaming ‘threat! threat!! but…He pushed them down. He overruled them. He was himself, again, for the first time in years. He wasn’t just a program, he was a person. He didn’t have to answer to his instincts now.

He took in a deep shuddering breath, and hugged back.

It felt….good.

“I…I got a request,” he said, after a while. “I…dunno if it’s even…I wanna stay on the ship. With my crew. Without them…I reckon I’d still be what the House made me into. If they’ll have me back…”

“I’m pretty sure Ian would wanna murder me right in the face if I said no,” Daar grumbled kindly, and let him go. “I’mma want some therapy an’ I want Openpaw ‘ta give the all-clear an’ all that…”

Bruuk nodded glumly. “I understand.”

“We’ve gotten pretty damn good with some o’ this,” Daar said, gently. “Learned a lot from the Humans on that. It gets better, y’hear?”

Bruuk nodded. Even without the Great Father’s reputation for relentless honesty…he’d have believed it.

“Okay. Bruuk…I need ‘ta hear everythin’ as best you can. Can you do that?”

Bruuk nodded again. “Yeah. The Kwmbwrw didn’t show up until after they programmed me…”

He told everything. Described scents, every overheard name, every detail he could recall. Bruuk had a good memory and the Great Father drank it all in like a sponge, never asking the same question twice, always finding exactly the right thing to say to prompt more memories…

At some point, Bruuk realized he was technically being interrogated, but he didn’t care. Daar…had a way about him. He was easy to talk to, once a man got past the sheer threat he posed. Eventually, Bruuk’s memory was exhausted and he just sort of…trailed off in his tale.

“There’s probably more…but that’s all the important bits, I think.”

Daar ducked his head. “…Thanks ‘fer sharin,’” he said. “That couldn’t’ve been easy. We’ll have someone help debrief you properly, when we get you set up an’ comfortable. You think you’ll be up to that?”

“I gotta be.”

Daar nodded solemnly. “Good man. An’ thanks ‘fer comin’ out here.”

“Well…I didn’t exactly have a choice,” Bruuk pointed out. “I came here in a stasis bag.”

“No, but you coulda left. I weren’t gonna force none o’ this if ‘ya din’t wanna play. So…thanks. I know you weren’t essactly my biggest fan, neither.”

Well, he had him there. “No. But…I don’t know if that’s me, or memories this fucking worm in my head gave me. Or whatever was driving me.” Bruuk slammed his fist down on the fence in sudden frustration. “Fuck!”

“You’ll figger it out,” Daar promised.

“How do you know?”

“The others all did. Do ‘ya feel like ‘ya got it all out, at leas’ for now?”

“…I think so.”

“Good. An’ ‘fer what it’s worth?” Daar added, “Ya passed ‘yer First Rite harder’n any ‘Back I ever met. Welcome to th’ Clan, if ‘ya want it.”

“…Huh?”

Daar sighed. “I brought ‘ya out here ‘cuz I needed ‘ta know if there were still a you there. There is, I can smell it. Thing ‘bout biodrones o’ any kind is, if ‘ya got a good enough sniffer, you can smell ‘em doin’ their chemical control. That shit’s real unsubtle. It lingers on in the drones too, even after we pull all the hardware out. Their brains’re jus’…stuck in a loop, or somethin’ like that. You don’t smell like ‘ya got brain cancer.”

“That’s why you snuffled me in the nest.”

“An’ jus’ now, an’ when I wrassle’d ‘ya.”

“…You’re sneaky.”

Daar chittered mirthlessly. “I can be, when I need to. But I weren’t really bein’ sneaky. Jus’ takin’ advantage o’ the situation.”

“Still. The First Rite—”

“Is about self-control, honesty an’ endurance. Jus’ now, I could tell ‘ya had a quick lil’ panic ‘bout that hug. Gaoians ain’t normally that kinda nervous, yijao? But ‘ya wrassled it down. As ‘fer honesty? You din’t need ‘ta tell me half o’ what ‘ya did tonight.”

“That’s…Getting rid of all that felt like what I needed to do.”

“See, an’ that right there is Stoneback honesty. As ‘fer endurance…You work hard, ‘yer well-trained, an’ after all the shit you’ve gone through, I think that bit’s proven. So yeah. By my authority as Champion-Emeritus, an’ also ‘cuz I can wrassle Champion Finn down ten ways from yesterday, ‘yer an Associate of Stoneback now, if you wanna.”

“..But…” Bruuk felt himself way off-kilter from his sudden change in fortune. “I thought First RItes were dangerous…?”

“Oh, they are. An’ this one was too.”

“…How?”

Daar rumbled a little, then looked up at the corner of the burrow, and yipped. A second later, Ian came stalking around from behind the building, weapon in hand and at the low-ready.

“…Ian?”

“I feel I should apologize,” the Great Father rumbled. “We din’t know what kinda risk you’d be, so, uh, we took steps. Since we were takin’ the steps anyway, I thought we’d give ‘ya an opportunity to excel, too. An’ you did.”

“…You’d have shot me?”

Ian gave him an apologetic look, and patted him on the shoulder. “Bean bag rounds.”

“…Oh,” Bruuk said, not particularly mollified. “So then, what about when you were pullin’ the ripper? You had your back to me the whole time!”

“You weren’t a threat,” Daar said simply. “An’ I had Wilde here followin’ behind anyway.”

“The nest bed?! With…that’s why the Great Mother slept with her back to you.”

“Uh-huh. An’ why I had you pinned so hard. I mean, I was bein’ friendly, too.” He left the rest unsaid.

“Wh…” Bruuk felt like he needed to sit down.

They stood awhile longer in silence, before Daar patted Bruuk’s back. “C’mon. It’s warm inside, an’ we worked hard today. Think ‘ya can sleep now?”

“…I honestly don’t know.”

“Good enough ‘fer me.”

The door opened as they approached the burrow, and Naydra appeared in the doorway, bearing a kettle of hot Talamay and a relieved expression. Before they entered, though, Bruuk had one last thought he wanted to clear up.

“What happens next?”

He wasn’t referring to himself, and Daar knew it.

“What happens next is I punish them, young Associate. I punish ‘em so hard they never try something so evil ever again.”

“….My Father…” Bruuk felt uneasy. “…There weren’t many of us, starting a war over—”

“War?” Daar grumbled darkly. “Well firstly, that’s noble o’ you, an’ I ain’t about to ‘ferget somethin’ like that. But more importantly: why would I start a war? It’s what they’re expectin’ and it’d be what keeps Henenwgwyr in power. Oh no. A Great Father has other options, an’ I intend ‘ta use ‘em.”

“…My Father?”

“Oh, don’t you worry ‘yer handsome lil’ head ‘bout none o’ that. Balls, ‘ya might even have a part in it, down the road…but that’s ‘fer later. Right now…” He gestured toward the house.

Bruuk duck-nodded, and the three of them went back inside. Naydra had prepared a light bedtime snack, which Bruuk gulped down gratefully, and then…

They went to sleep. But this time, all four of them cuddled together properly in the Great Father’s huge nest-bed.

And this time, Bruuk fell asleep instantly.

++END CHAPTER 70++

MORE BY THE AUTHOR

Dandelion

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, and you can read it for free on Royal Road where we are publishing each chapter on a monthly basis.

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…Eighty-five Friendly ETs, 141 Squishy Xenos and 320 Dizi Rats, one of whom is called Kevin Jenkins.

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The Deathworlders will continue in Chapter 71: “Sticks and Stones”

Chapter 71: Sticks and Stones

The Great Gaoian Die-Off by Ava Ríos

The Gao are at a crossroads of potentially galactic importance, yet hardly anyone seems to be talking about it. The Gao, however, do, though their own media have remained largely misunderstood by Anglophone society—Gaori is an easy language to learn but quite tricky to master, and as a result there are few journalists who can confidently report on their culture.

In previous reporting on the Gao, I have not properly addressed this problem. Not even the fallout from the Laid Bare story featuring the Great Father himself has properly opened the subject. The Gao remain largely distant friends we are happy to appreciate, but unable to properly understand.

I’d like to change that.

In this range of interviews, I speak with a number of Gaoian voices: most prominent, some more modest. All of them are acutely aware of the terrible situation their people face.

We’ll begin with one of the more modest voices.

Leemu, Clanless

Leemu is a Folcthan artist of some critical acclaim, and notable for several reasons. He enjoys the personal friendship of the Great Father, his exhibitions at Oriel are always well attended, and his creations have found their way into collections all over the galaxy.

He attributes his success to the fact that he is one of the first Gaoians ever to see the color red.

In person, he is not an overwhelming presence. He is fit and handsome, though of modest height and retiring personality. Like most Gao he can be quite energetic and playful, and he socializes regularly in the local workhouses and commune. Most evenings, though, he can be found in his home studio, often alone and working on his next project. This is quite unusual for a Gaoian, but his particular story makes his desire for a measure of solitude understandable.

Leemu is a recovering biodrone. Like others I have met, the experience has left a deep mark on him, though according to Leemu itself, there has been a positive side.

[Picture: Leemu in his studio, applying copper foil to an oil painting of lakebeds park at dusk, to pick out the course of the river through the landscape, and the setting sun.]

“I was a different kind of biodrone. The tech that enslaved me was nanoscale, in every cell of my body. Getting rid of it demanded new and experimental medicine, including extensive gene therapy.”

Before I can ask my question, he gives me a look that says he’s heard them all before.

“I’m still very much Gaoian. Nothing has been added to my genome that wasn’t already there. A few dormant genes have simply been activated. Or expressed, I think is the right word. We don’t know exactly what the consequences of reactivating them are, yet, but so far it’s been nothing but positives.”

Such as?

“Well, an immune system that can cure me of an alien nanotech virus, for a start.” He gestures to his studio. “And of course…”

Anything else?

“According to the Corti scientists, my life expectancy is nearly as long as a Human’s now. Time will tell on that one, I suppose. I’m healthier, stronger…exactly what’s been sold.”

How many have taken the gene therapy since you?

“It’s available to all Gao who choose to take it. I don’t know the numbers, but most of the people I know are at least thinking about it. Tens of thousands at least. More quickly too I’d bet, given the example of Our Father and Our Mother. Which I think is good. We need it.”

Why?

[Image: a montage of Leemu in action: considering a half-finished painting, prowling around the room as he thinks, washing his brushes. The centerpiece shows him sitting on the floor, playing with a ginger cat.]

“…We live in a dangerous world. It is one dominated by deathworlders—you and me. Except, we Gao aren’t quite deathworlders, are we? Once, in ancient times, we were a strong, vibrant apex species on a high-end class-11 world. It was a lush world and trending higher. We’ve got the fossil record to prove it, too. Then the Hierarchy took note of us.”

He pauses, mournfully, before continuing.

“We were still in our earliest tribal days, over twenty thousand years ago. Almost everything died and our world has still not recovered. Those of us who survived were…modified, extensively. We were re-made into a potential contingency species. Some of the deepest parts of us were deliberately shut off by a power that wanted us contained, controlled and…well. The people who biodroned me. For me, all of that is reason enough: becoming something they don’t want us to be. But there’s more than just that.”

He shows me one of his darker works. While a strong optimistic streak runs through most of Leemu’s portfolio, the few bleaker pieces stand out all the more prominently for it. One depicts the war on Gao, most of the image being picked out in shades of black and gray save for the fires consuming a burning city.

“When the biodrones attacked our homeworld, they attacked the Female communes first. They were trying to wipe us out, so, that makes sense. If they’d killed all the cubs and the females, it wouldn’t really have mattered how many males survived. And, for the most part…they succeeded. Competition for mates was always fierce before. Now? Most living males will never have another cub. So, now…we need something else to live for.”

Live for?

“Maybe Humans have an easier time in that regard. I’ve seen many of your people who are childless and claim to be quite content. For us, I don’t know if it’s cultural or instinctive, but Gao think a lot about our legacy. Our cubs, the world we build for them. I see Humans who devote themselves to a thing just for that thing. Business high-fliers whose ambition is to get as rich as they can, or the nuns and monks who devote their lives to their faith, or artists like me who are defined by their art! That’s alien, to a Gao. I don’t see the point in getting rich or becoming famous unless it’s to win mates.”

But you already have a cub.

“Yes. Which makes me blessed. If I ever have another, that will put me among an elite few.”

[Image: Leemu showing one of his portraits—his cub and the little one’s mother, Leela.]

By recent estimates, as Leemu says, even if every surviving Gaoian female spends the rest of her life bearing as many children as biologically possible, from as many fathers as possible, there are so few of them remaining that less than half of all living males would be able to father any progeny. In reality, of course, most females have ambitions beyond being permanent baby factories, and prefer to select their partners carefully. It’s likely that many of the coming generation will be the children of a comparative handful of highly successful males.

For instance…

The Great Father is infamous for siring a great many cubs. Thousands, by recent estimates. Does this…offend you? Other Gaoians?

“Not at all.”

How so?

“We think of the future. He is the very best breeding stock there is, so…he should sire as many cubs as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that. Why should we resent his greatness?”

Doesn’t it come at everybody else’s expense?

Leemu’s reaction to that is a lengthy chitter.

“Our Father is infamously ‘well-loved,’ but not even he can monopolize all the Females! I think it’ll be fine. Plus, I’ve met him. So have you. He can be a bit…much, for some women, and I don’t just mean his Keeda-shaming physique. So, you see? Not even he wins every contest…”

There is a distinctly smug set to his ears that is impossible to properly describe, but if you’ve spent any time around Gaoians, you’ll know the one. His self-satisfaction is with the very cub he’s painted; he managed to woo a friendly yet notoriously picky Female over the Great Father’s best efforts.

He claims they’re still on friendly terms. Knowing Daar, I don’t doubt it.

So this breeding crisis means most Gaoian males are looking for something else to identify with.

“Exactly. That’s why the Grand Army isn’t short of volunteers. It’s why per-capita the economy on our homeworld is booming and recovering so much faster than anybody predicted. All those males whose hopes of ever siring a cub fell apart a few years ago are throwing themselves into making sure that the world they leave behind for the next generation will be as good as it can be.”

That generation is going to be small, though.

For the first time in our conversation, his chipper demeanor slips. He pauses, his ears droop, and he looks profoundly sad for a moment.

“ …Yes. Have you seen the latest numbers?

Those numbers are grim. Gaoian News Network’s analysts project the total population of the Gao may collapse to below one billion within the next thirty years, though medical intervention may stretch it out to forty or fifty years. To put that in perspective, the pre-war population was nearly ten billion. Now, it stands at just over five billion…and falling rapidly. With the Female population reduced to just over one hundred million, and the Gao’s naturally shorter lifespan, Gaoian society as it is now is living on borrowed time.

[Image: Graphs and charts illustrating the impending Gaoian population crisis] Image credit: GNN

“It will be two hundred years before we return to pre-war population levels. Our society, our economy, is built to be larger than it is. We have thirty years to prepare for a collapse that, all by itself, could do serious harm. You can’t farm without people. You can’t transport goods, you can’t build and maintain infrastructure. There isn’t a single facet of civilization that doesn’t ultimately rest in a good pair of paws. What happens over the thirty years as our labor pool shrinks?”

He pauses to run a claw along the top of one painting.

“Often, I feel guilty for living here and just being an artist. Part of me always worries I could be doing something more concrete for my people. Do we really need oil paintings and sculptures when there are bridges on Gao that will collapse for want of maintenance in sixty years? But, the Great Father says this is what I should be doing.”

He does? Personally?

“In my case, yes. For the rest…he is confident that market forces will get people where they’re needed and when. I don’t doubt he’s right.”

And if he isn’t?

Leemu shoots me a mildly offended look.

“He is.”

Rather than strain our good relationship by pressing the point, I take a few more pictures and leave him to his work. Our parting interaction, however, left me inspired to find more Gao to interview. There’s a lot still to say about our unique alien allies, and one perspective just isn’t enough.

I think my next subject will be one of the surviving females…

Date Point: 17y10m AV
Diplomatic Starship Rich Plains, Entering Kwmbwrw space

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

Casus belli, frankly, didn’t come much stronger than the one between the Clans of Gao and Great House Henen of the Kwmbwrw. Though, most of the Dominion ambassadors discussing the issue all over the Rich Plains didn’t know half the details. To most of them, the Gao had simply launched a major incursion into Kwmbwrw space, their ships had clashed openly with a House Henen, a few dozen Kwmbwrw crewpersons were dead, an emergency degaussing and comms relay station had been sabotaged, and a House Henen security officer abducted.

At least, that was the House Henen version.

Henenwgwyr clearly belonged to the same school of blatant untruth that Sir Patrick had seen many times on Earth. From official Soviet declarations about how their reactors couldn’t possibly explode, to an Iraqi diplomat insisting that allied forces were burning on the borders while American tanks literally rolled up the street behind him, certain kinds of government would aggressively pronounce the most naked falsehoods to the bitter end, far beyond the limits of reason.

There was a psychology at play there beyond his understanding, and it apparently transcended species.

The Gaoian approach, meanwhile, was of course scrupulously honest…but that didn’t mean they weren’t judicious in when and how they deployed their honesty. As one of their old aphorisms had it, ‘secrets are like claws. Keep them sheathed until you use them.’

And in private…they showed those claws to whom they needed, when needed, for maximum effect.

AtaUmuUi was particularly incensed, as Sir Patrick had anticipated.

“There was a time when the Kwmbwrw were merely…quaint,” he said. The loose skin around his ears was going steadily darker and blacker with tightly controlled anger, and got darker still when he glanced at the Huh he was fidgeting with in his left hand. “The Houses were supposed to be ceremonial holdovers from their ancient history, not autonomous quasi-governments in their own right. They seem to have regressed.”

“…’Supposed?’ What exactly do you mean by that?”

“When my people were at the height of our powers, the culture of the Dominion was rather different than it is now,” Ata explained. “We had principles. The Charter promoted universal enfranchisement and this council’s objective was the collective betterment of all species. Now, between the Robalin and this, I see the whole edifice has decayed.”

He made a croaking noise that the translator in Sir Patrick’s glasses quietly flagged as disdain, and pushed the report back across the desk. “Barbarians.”

Ambassador Kenshi delicately picked it up. He was trying his best to diplomatically ignore whatever it was in the OmoAru nanotech that affected the Gaoian nose so badly, but Sir Patrick knew him well enough by now to tell that he found Ata’s physical presence almost painful. “May I take it, therefore, that when we bring this evidence before the Council, you’ll be supportive of our call for sanctions?”

“You will have my official reply to that question in writing, Ambassador.” AtaUmuUi rose to his feet and twitched his tail. “Once I have consulted with my advisors.”

“Of course.”

His departure took a certain sense of pressure out of the room. Though Sir Patrick had tried and failed repeatedly to catch a sniff of that scent that the Gao so hated, he’d have sworn under oath that he still sensed something off about his OmoAru counterpart. Merely being in Ata’s presence put him on edge, somehow.

Or maybe that was just the normal and natural reaction to being around somebody who was spitting angry about something and keeping it tightly locked up.

“Did that seem personal to you?”

“Oh yes.” Kenshi’s ears shifted in a satisfied way. “Even through that nanotech stink, he smelled positively furious.”

Sir Patrick nodded at his counterpart. Kenshi had managed the interesting trick of being sufficiently inoffensive to all the Clans that they were willing to be represented by him. He was Clan, but the Clan in question—Inkpelt—were quietly unobtrusive and closely related to Clan Straightshield. Where the larger and more infamous Straightshield concerned themselves with law enforcement and prosecution, Inkpelt were more properly attorneys; they handled contract law, litigation and civil disputes.

And in Kenshi’s case, a long and well-regarded career in high-profile criminal defense law. He had a reputation for smooth-talking aggression and a keen wit, and was a pleasure to banter with. He had undeniable physical presence too; he looked for all the world like the Gaoian equivalent of a well-exercised doberman, complete with tan markings on his impressive, sleek-furred chest.

He had a doberman’s nose, too.

“I don’t need a Gaoian’s nasal gifts to sniff out personal opprobrium like that.”

“I wish I didn’t, either.” Kenshi sniffed, then grimaced. “Keeda, that scent lingers…Anyway, can you blame him? His entire species got biodroned. I daresay the thought of what Henen did would be personally offensive to him.”

“And the OmoAru remnant are nothing if not proud. I think we can count on him to back us.”

“Back us to what end? My Father has not yet decided on any particular action, at least none that I am privy to. Open warfare seems…”

“Improbable?”

“We’re already biting more than we can eat. Either the Hunters or the Hierarchy on their own would be enemy enough. Together…”

“Together,” Sir Patrick finished for him, “They represent a very good reason not to further embroil yourselves with the Kwmbwrw.”

“Exactly.”

“But at the same time, this can’t go unanswered.”

Kenshi duck-nodded, grimly. “A sharp problem, isn’t it?”

“There are solutions to such problems, of course…”

“…Yes. Which we would be the last to learn about.”

Sir Patrick nodded and stood to take a stroll around the room. Sitting too long always made his back hurt. “Of course…what we really need is for the Kwmbwrw’s united front to break apart. If the other Great Houses can be persuaded to step aside and leave Henen isolated and alone.”

“Who’s to say they aren’t all doing something just as nefarious?” Kenshi shook his head. “If they’re all guilty of something, then stepping away from House Henen would just ensure their own vulnerability when they’re inevitably caught.”

“If they were foresighted enough to see that, they wouldn’t be involved in anything too nefarious in the first place,” Sir Patrick replied. “Competent governments know full well that their every last dirty deed will see the light of day in due course, that’s the way of secrets.”

He smiled as he completed his circuit of the room and rested his hands on the back of the couch. “So. Either the other Houses are smart enough to not be dabbling in the same witchcraft House Henen did, in which case they’ll leave Henen high and dry, or they’re dumb enough to be doing the exact same thing in which case they’ll abandon the Henens out of short-sightedness and fear of being caught. Either way, now is the time to lean on them. They’ll crumble, mark my words.”

“The Kwmbwrw are proud to a fault, Sir Patrick,” Kenshi pointed out. “House Henen is wealthy, powerful, and historically significant, and the Grandmatriarchs have always had a xenophobic streak. Lean on them too hard, and resentment toward deathworlders plus contempt for foreign meddling will overrule their other concerns.”

“We’ll see, I suppose.” Sir Patrick rounded the couch and sat down. “It’s the Rauwrhyr next, I believe?”

“Indeed.”

“Good. I’m very fond of them. You never did make it to the symposium on their homeworld, did you?”

“Sadly not. I heard it’s beautiful. Trees as big as buildings…”

“Perhaps you’ll get the chance to see it after this.” Sir Patrick smiled at the memory, and gathered his papers ready to share the set of damaging revelations with another of his counterparts. There was much to do before taking the matter directly to the council, and not as much time as he would have liked.

It would be interesting when they finally did confront House Henen. Kenshi was entirely right, the Kwmbwrw were proud and insular, getting them to wash their hands of House Henen was going to be more of an uphill struggle than he’d made it sound…but he was confident.

And if they didn’t…

Well. It was past time for a shakeup in galactic politics anyway.

Date Point: 17y10m AV
Bronzefur Chapterhouse, Fei In City, Planet Gao

Uriigo, Champion of Bronzefur

He came down upon his own Clan with claws extended, a surprise attack. He had to: much of his Clan’s leadership was on the take. Including his hand-picked Grandfather. Uriigo had personally crippled Geruu in his attack, but spared him a torn-out throat; he would be healed, brought back to perfect health, face Justice, and face the Great Father. After which, frankly, he’d probably long for death.

“Capture them alive if you can,” he’d instructed the Stoneback brutes. After all, it was their Clan who were uniquely charged with inter-clan discipline. “Let’s hope they don’t get the chance to spread the word.”

Straightshield was also involved, and Judge-Fathers conducting a raid could move like a slamming door: sudden, violent, loud, and inescapable. They had a knack for intercepting would-be runners, too. Fast as the raid was, it was being conducted in a big complex with plenty of exits, fire escapes, windows…

Stoneback were more like sledgehammers. They didn’t do subtle. Against them, there were two choices: submit, or die. Often messily. Uriigo had heard the rumors of course, and knew about the Fangs. But it had been beyond living memory since a Clan had seen enforcement at the paws of Stoneback. Their abilities in that regard had become more legend and myth.

It was over in less than ten minutes. The Chapterhouse was littered with the foolish dead, often slammed fatally into walls or even crushed underfoot. Few of the officers surrendered; they knew what was coming for them.

The courtyard, meanwhile, was a sorry sight of rank after rank of defeated, trembling figures with their wrists cuffed painfully behind their backs and their ankles tied together. Most, Uriigo hoped, would be innocent. That would not completely spare them, of course: Clan punishments were total. Every member of the Clan would bear a shameful scar-mark after this day, and that was if the Great Father was feeling generous. Much more likely, every officer of the Clan faced castration.

Frankly, the scar-mark would do enough to end their bloodlines, these days. No Female would ever court one of them.

Still. The Clan would endure. Which would mean that Uriigo had succeeded in his duty as Champion, at least. That potential grace, however, would not come for many hours. They had to raid all the Clan’s workhouses, barracks, facilities and offices, and he had to inspect the work at every key site. Much of Stoneback was in the field today, enforcing their mandate. People would notice that something was up. Time was of the essence.

And after that, he’d have to find a whole new leadership from among the Associates and Brothers. There were going to be a lot of young, unready and intimidated Fathers soon, not to mention the question of who among them could possibly serve as Grandfather. Clan Bronzefur had a difficult several months ahead.

Which was good. Not pleasant, but good.

The raids went on all day, and Uriigo personally took part in as many as he could. He wasn’t as…endless as the Straightshield Judge-Fathers or the Stoneback Enforcers, but it was important he give his all. By nightfall, he’d abandoned standing on two-paw entirely, he was just too exhausted.

That left just the final brief-out with the nameless Judge-Father—all Judge-Fathers were nameless while on duty—who served as on-scene commander. He was really the one who held Uriigo’s fate in his sturdy paws. They both knew it, too.

…It really was damn near impossible to tell them apart. They all smelled the same. The perfect fuckin’ bastard didn’t even have the good manners to look tired, either.

“Well, Champion. I hope you have somewhere to sleep tonight. You look as though you need it.”

“I’ll make do.” Uriigo grumbled, glancing back at the chapterhouse. The buildings, of course, were all seized until the Straightshields could go through the computers, books and other documentation within.

“I would suggest a local inn. We’ve chartered it for the night and, Champion…you will need rest, and safety.”

Uriigo blinked, too mind-fogged by fatigue to figure out what kind of threat he might need protection from now, after all that work. “Safety?”

“We’ve only rounded up the conspiracy among your Clan,” the Judge-Father reminded him. “Any Clanless involved will still be at large, and may decide they have nothing to lose by exacting a little vengeance.”

“…Right.”

“And if I may, Champion…you’ve had the kind of day that nobody should sleep alone after.”

That was a surprisingly warm sentiment, considering. Or maybe it was just that Uriigo wasn’t yet ready to believe he’d earned any kind of warmth.

“I guess I have,” he agreed, and groaned as he stood upright, despite his aching body’s protests.

“You still have a lot to do, after all. Better you face it after resting properly. I believe some of the Stonebacks have volunteered to bed down with you tonight.”

“…That’s surprising, honestly. But I’ll take what I can get.”

The Judge-Father tucked his tablet away in a pocket behind his back, and gave him an acknowledging duck-nod. “Good night, then. I will see you tomorrow with a progress update.”

Uriigo glanced around after watching the black-clad figure depart, and suppressed a brief impulse to just slump down on the concrete and sleep where he was. Instead, he lumbered in the direction of a group of Stonebacks near a Growl who were clearly waiting on him.

Sure enough, they saw him safely to a nearby inn, so prickly with added security, patrols and armed guards that only the suicidally stupid would interfere with it. He dozed through the short trip, lurched up the stairs half-unconscious, and crashed into a nest-bed with a heavy thump that he barely remembered.

He woke late the next day. Aching, stiff, and feeling delicate in his soul…but alert. There was lunch (he’d missed breakfast) and paperwork, and another Judge-Father (or possibly the same one) waiting to ask him a few questions…

He bore it all stoically and without complaint.

Absolution, after all, was not meant to come pleasantly.

Date Point: 17y10m1w AV
Stasis bag

Rythweth

Even the prepared and familiar could find the moment of stasis disorienting. It helped to brace oneself and know that the container would, from Ryth’s perspective, reopen just as soon as it was closed.

There were little details. A sudden feeling of weight landing on his every limb, so higher gravity. Artificial light, but not as true-white as aboard the freighter Krr’zkvik nor the medley of colorful LEDs that were Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm’s signature.

The furred, clawed paws that finished opening the bag and helped him extract himself were definitely not Kwmbwrw. They were gentle, though.

“Easy there, friend. You’re safe. Welcome to Gao.”

Rythweth rather felt his safety remained to be seen, but he accepted the welcome with a grateful nod and a “Thank you.” There were five Gao in the room, all male. One, a slender silverfur in a green coverall was clearly a medic of some kind as he was already expecting the wound in Rythweth’s arm from deploying his fusion blade implant. The one who had welcomed him could only be a Whitecrest. The streak of pale fur that ran from between his eyes to the nape of his neck was even taller than his ears, and the stripes and mottling in the fur around his eyes was especially dark.

The remaining Gaoians were faceless and intimidating behind suits of black security armor and visored helmets. Fair. Rythweth would have insisted on a security presence when receiving a defector too.

“Hello,” the Whitecrest began. “My name is officer Deegar, and before we begin, I must tell you that we cannot permit you to keep the concealed weapon in your forearm. I’m sure you understand.”

Ryth made a tired noise and glanced down at his forearm as the medic took off the makeshift bandages he’d applied. The wound was, of course, bone-deep, and the fusion blade had made a bad mess of the tissue around it as it sprung out. With prompt and proper medical care, he’d have been able to have it all regenerated. Now, it was doomed to heal badly. But, the point of an emergency concealment like that was to use it or die. It had served its purpose. Better a crippled arm than death.

And of course, had the roles been reversed, he wouldn’t have permitted a detainee to keep it either.

“Of course,” he said aloud. “I presume you will need to sedate me.”

“Thank you. And, we already did. You should be feeling the effects right about…”

Rythweth woke up in a cell.

Somehow, the pharmaceutical stasis was a good deal more jarring than the technological one. He blinked, raised his head, and looked around the room, temporarily adrift in time and space while a fog of confusion dispersed in his brain and the thoughts that had, a second ago, seemed so sharp and focused, bumped clumsily into one another and a mounting swell of mild pain settled between his ears.

Gaoians, it seemed, had effective sedatives.

That thought prompted him to look down at his arm, though that didn’t help the sense of disconnection from reality one bit. The limb was unblemished and perfect, with no sign at all of the ragged scorched fissure his own gambit had left in his flesh. There wasn’t even a discernible scar.

He raised it to his mouth and bit it experimentally. No, it was definitely flesh and blood, and he felt the pressure of his teeth quite acutely. He flexed his fingers and found they all worked, where half of them had been paralyzed before. He bore weight on it, and found it held up.

He stood, and considered his surroundings. The cell was quite comfortable. Basic, but the bed was well padded, there was a desk with a suitably shaped chair, and a tray of food on the desk alongside a plastic cup of water.

Ryth was suddenly acutely aware of a hollow ache in his stomach. The beans and greens on the tray were unfamiliar, but turned out to be delicious, complimented by a scattering of tiny seeds and a dark salty sauce for flavor, plus the glass of water came with a dose of painkillers that chased away his headache. In minutes, he’d devoured the lot and was able to sit back appreciating two facts: first, that he was safe for the first time in several days, and second that he’d just had one of the most unexpectedly tasty meals of his life, in a Gaoian interrogation cell.

He wasn’t left to sit adrift and alone for too long. Enough time to appreciate the silence and sort his head out, before the guards arrived and escorted him firmly, but gently and politely, to his debriefing.

The Whitecrest from before, Officer Deegar, rose to his feet as Rythweth was led in. “Welcome back. I hope the food was to your satisfaction?”

“It was, thank you,” Rythweth nodded and took a seat at Deegar’s invitation. “And for your hospitality.”

“Well, this is a debriefing, not an interrogation. Now, misbehavior can rapidly change that…”

“I understand the game.”

“Excellent.” Deegar duck-nodded affably.

“I was not aware Gaoians appreciated vegan cuisine.”

“We do, though that was a Human dish. Their vegan cuisine is much more varied than ours. We mostly enjoy it for the taste, as we cannot subsist on plant matter alone.”

Ryth nodded slowly. “I have a few questions, if I may?”

“Go ahead.”

“My arm seems…remarkably well healed.”

“Regenerated. Our medical technology is considerably in advance of your own. It should be as good as new.”

Rythweth glanced down at his arm. If they hadn’t told him, he’d never have guessed. It looked, and felt, exactly as it always had before the self-inflicted injury. “That…must have taken a while.”

“By the Kwmbwrw calender, it is currently…” Deegar checked his tablet. “Eleven-ninety, five-eight-twelve-nineteen-twelve.”

“…You regrew my arm in a month?”

“Thirty minutes. Another hour to attach it. You’ve been in stasis some time, as we’ve needed to arrange a great many things.”

Rythweth could do nothing but blink. Deegar, if he was telling the truth—and frankly, Ryth had no reason to believe he was not—really hadn’t been exaggerating when he said their medical technology was ahead of the Kwmbwrw’s.

Troubling, really. The Gao were a rather younger species. For them to be so far ahead in that regard said volumes about how stagnated his own culture had truly become.

“I’m…sure,” he replied, trying to remain level and composed. “Considering the resources the House would surely have thrown into recovering me, I imagine my extraction makes for quite a story. And this is the part where I confirm as much as I know of what your own investigations have unearthed.”

“You would have done no differently. Though, as a professional courtesy…” Deegar tapped his nose. “And the same goes for any Gaoian you’re likely to meet in the near future.”

They understood each other. Ryth nodded, took a deep breath, and settled comfortably in his chair.

“Where would you like me to begin?” he asked.

Date Point: 17y10m2w AV
Planet ’Mordor,’ Liberated Hunter Space

Michael Murphy

Thump.

There was a sense of relief around the jump platform. Even in Gaoians, the body language of stressed, hard-fought men who’d been cut off from their supply chain and just got their lifeline back was easy to read.

Mike had it pretty good through the long isolation. He was a military contractor now: the Great Father’s agent, not a regular grunt. He’d been sleeping well at HQ, eating decently enough, not having to suck down polluted air every day. Most of the Grand Army though…everything about how they stood and watched the incoming supplies and replacements sang of exhaustion, and a hunger to get the fuck out and go clean up, get some real chow, and sleep. Not necessarily in that order. He’d lived that look before, many, many times.

The Grand Army here had been fighting Hunters every minute of every day since they arrived. In tunnels. On a blasted polluted wasteland. In ruins and factories, rail yards and abandoned cities…And they’d won. The planet Mordor had been one of their strongholds, and now…now the primary military objective had been achieved. Mordor and its resources were denied the Hunters. Which left a stabilization mission that didn’t need to be nearly so big. Grandfather Vark and his staff were getting ready to pack it up, leaving the garrison forces to one of his commanding generals, a scarred-up Father who Michael couldn’t quite remember at the moment.

He was too busy tending to his own shit. Michael was employed as a personal security asset for Daar, and whomever else Daar felt needed extra protection. The notion of people like Daar and Vark needing any kind of protection always felt a bit laughably weird, but of course bombs and bullets didn’t give a shit about how much of a superhero a man might be.

And with Vark leaving…so was Michael.

He wasn’t gonna miss the place, but something about leaving scratched his conscience a bit. There was still a civil war raging among the E-Skurel-Ir, and they’d only ever evacuated a trickle to safety before the jump lockdown. The new array was military, secure, and for essential traffic only. Precious few refugees were going that way.

The Hunters’ former slaves were just gonna have to grow in the toxic earth they’d been given, and from what Mike could tell, they didn’t have any idea how. Down in the tunnel-cities, it was a coin-flip for the Gao whether their patrol routes took ‘em through territory that saw them as avenging angels sent by the Lord to deliver them from torment, or literal demons from hell, interfering with the divine plan. It seemed to change on an hourly basis.

Or, in most cases, through districts of tight-packed, starving, scared civilians who didn’t have the first fuckin’ clue what to think and just wanted to know when they’d next get the chance to feed their kids.

Yeah. Mike didn’t feel great walking away from that situation.

Beside him, Vark watched the first group of weary soldiers trudge onto their shiny new Array platform and pack themselves in as tight as they could inside the safety markings. The wounded had gone ahead, shipped out in the first few jumps, while Vark had insisted his place was among the last jump out. Which meant so was Mike’s.

“Kinda weird, not bein’ able ‘ta smell ya,” the Grandfather rumbled as the controlled jostling unfolded. “Had a nose full’a ‘yer scent the whole time we’ve been out here.”

“Well, good to know my PPE’s working right, then,” Mike retorted. The new Array was not comfortably sealed away inside a pressurized environment like the original had been. They were out under the open sky, the acid rain and the genuinely insane levels of lead in the atmosphere. Everyone was wrapped up tight in itching layers.

“Yeah, I’d just gotten used to it,” Vark went to scratch the side of his face, then stopped himself. “Been stuck here a long time, got to know ‘ya. Whaddya think is up next for you?”

“Leave. At least, I fuckin’ hope so.” Mike chuckled. “After that…I dunno. If I get a say in it, I think I wanna keep working with the Skurels.”

“It’s easy to get attached to a mission,” Vark noted sagely.

“Yeah. And…I got this creeping worry like they’ll get forgotten about, as the war moves on.”

“Naw. Not forgotten. But we’ve done a great thing for them, ‘fer our own selfish reasons, an’ there’s a point where a people gotta take control o’ themselves. We’ll be leavin’ ‘em an array here that’ll connect ‘em to wherever they wanna go. An’ we’re leavin’ a small garrison here too. Ain’t gonna be goin’ away anytime soon.”

“At that rate, they’ll think the Gao are the only people in the whole galaxy.”

“Mebbe. Kinda doubt the Tangy-Work will stay away though. They’ve taken an odd interest.”

“I’m still hearing room for a human in all this.” Mike watched the last of the departing troops settle in, and a safety officer patrol the perimeter to make sure everybody’s limbs and tails were safely inside the lines. “I guess I’ll see. It’ll be weird not working so closely with you any longer, though.”

“Are you thinkin’ of abandonin’ me?” Vark’s tail was wagging. “After all we’ve been through!”

“Hey, there’s a big ol’ briefing waiting for us on the other side of that Array. Everything that’s happened in the galaxy since we got stuck out here. Could be anything in it, so I’ve got no idea where the job’s gonna take me next.” Mike chuckled. “Won’t complain if it’s somewhere with cold beer and single women, though.”

Vark’s baritone chitter matched the Thump as the array fired again, replacing a group of weary Gaoians with fresh, clean, eager ones sitting on top of a stack of supply crates, who sprang off it and started hauling the boxes away the instant they arrived. “Yeah. Ain’t no way our people have been idle, huh?”

“Nope.”

“Well. Guess this is ‘yer ride then,” Vark indicated the platform as the last of the newly arrived crates was hauled of it. A team of motivated Gao working hard had cleared it in seconds. Mike was honestly impressed. “An’ if you get to keep workin’ with the Skurels, be sure an’ lemme know. I got kinda attached ‘ta the mission too.”

“Will do.” Mike extended a hand. “‘Till next time, Grandfather.”

The Array, when it fired some minutes later, delivered him and another batch of exhausted Grand Army fellas back to Gao. For the first time in months they got to stand under a clear blue sky and drink in good air that hadn’t been passed through a filter. That all by itself was a sweet experience, though Mike didn’t get the chance to savor it properly. There was a car waiting to take him someplace. The Great Father’s hobby farm, in fact.

It was a long drive, even in a fast car, and as he’d predicted it came with plenty of reading material. Life sure as shit hadn’t slowed down while he was stuck in Hunter space, and if anything it looked like the jump lockdown had made some things move faster.

His immediate mission was an odd one. He’d be keeping an ex-biodrone company, apparently?

Whatever. Leave back to Earth wasn’t gonna happen, but there was apparently some limited jump traffic back to an array on Cimbrean now. He wasn’t expecting a buddy but hey, what had he ever expected?

Well. Not an old familiar face, either.

“Hey, you’re lookin’ pretty good for a fella with one eye!”

“I’m told by a highly reputable judge that I’m ‘more handsomer’ now, too.”

They traded hefty hugs and ambled in the general direction of a distant field where some kind of spidery farm equipment was being dragged through the soil by a familiar bear-shaped iron mountain of an emperor. A relatively smaller Gao-bear was perched atop it, straining at the handles in the rear. It seemed to be all he could do to keep it from jumping all over the place.

“So this is what you’re doin’, now you’re out?”

“Well,” Wilde tucked his hands easily in his pockets as they strolled along. “The pay’s good, and I’ve made some good friends. And I’m feeling way better than I was before this gig came along.”

“Yeah, Daar’s persuasive like that.” Mike paused at the fence to watch the Great Father beast the rattling plough or whatever it was across the field, crunching its way through the rocks and packed dirt like an unstoppable machine. “…Shit. And I thought Vark was strong as fuck!”

Wilde seemed amused. “Ah yes. The living bulldozer and his pet tank. You know the scary part?”

“What?”

“He’s a fuck of a lot stronger than he looks.”

Mike re-considered the Great Father. He looked almost cartoonishly brawny as his muscles bulged against the load with a steady, well-practiced and sure-footed motion.

“…Jesus.”

“Ayup. Everyone’s puny next to him and his ‘little’ friend is much the same. ‘Course, you know who first popped into my brain when I saw ‘em side by side?”

“Who?”

“Yogi and Boo-Boo.”

Mike did his best to suppress his laugh, which wasn’t easy when the somewhat “smaller” pet tank chittered and waved excitedly. “We heard that!”

“Guess I’ll pay for it later,” Wilde chuckled. “Anyway. That’s Bruuk. You read up on what happened to him?”

“I was wondering how to pronounce his name.”

“Yeah. Somewhere between brick, brute, and truck. Fitting, really.” They both chuckled for a moment. “Anyway…reading?”

“Yeah. What are we up to now, three different kinds of biodrone? Big H aren’t short on tricks, are they?”

“Something like that. He’s doing pretty well but sometimes, just this wave of depression crashes over him and it’s all we can do to keep him level. I hope you like bedtime snuggles.”

“So…like a teddy bear. Except I’m the bear, and the bears aren’t.”

“Pretty much, yeah. Oh, and he likes to train and spar, too. He asked for a human with skills like mine so he could keep up the training he’s been doing…”

“That sounds kinda nice, actually.”

“Well…” Wilde qualified, “I’m ex-SOR, so a big damn bloke, right? Well, Bruuk’s at least twice my weight, quick and strong as hell, too. Beating on him is kinda like punching a brick wall. I can just outlast him by holding on for dear life, but I’m also quite a bit bigger than you, so…”

“…Right.” Mike nodded. “I’ll be his chewtoy, then.”

“Lil’ bit, yeah.”

Mike chuckled ruefully. “Ah well. Good training, at least.” The machine had negotiated a corner and was on its way up the slope toward the far end of the field. Daar didn’t even seem to notice the gradient. “I’ll do my best, but you’re his friend…”

“Yeah, and long-term what I’m working on will be what’s best for him. But they don’t let you become a starship captain without some qualifications, so I have to study and I can’t do it here. He makes quick friends, so you’ll be one of his ‘bestest’ in short order, I bet. He’s good people. Just…a bit of a fixer-upper.”

“Aren’t we all…” Mike admitted. “And we’re going to Cimbrean?”

“Yeah. Daar and his people think some time around other ex-drones might be good for him…Anyway. You head back to the cottage. The Great Mother’s got tea on and she’ll probably have some words for you. I need to go say my goodbyes. First round’s on me when we’re all back in Folctha, alright?”

“See you there.”

Wilde nodded, vaulted the fence, and jogged away up the field in pursuit of the two furry farmers, and presumably a difficult farewell. Mike followed his advice and turned back toward the house.

He’d never seen one like it. Half-buried in the ground for warmth with no straight lines anywhere on it, it was like a hobbit hole sized for an eight-foot brute to live in. The “roof” was an herb garden, while wildflowers of every description exploded from practically every spare bit of dirt, some looking like they might be from Cimbrean, others from Earth.

What really struck was the quiet. Once, not long ago, the farmstead had been heavily fortified—some of the scars were still on the land—but all of that had been torn down. There wasn’t a major city for miles, and the nearest divided highway was a twenty-minute drive away.

No traffic, no rumble of urban life, not even the background hum of power, or even wind in the leaves: what few trees there were had dropped their leaves, and the fields were harvested for winter. Just the distant clanking of that contraption on the field, and, from inside the house, the tap and clink of cups and the reedy ululation of Gaoian singing.

All of it was the Great Father’s personal property. Well, technically all of the Gao personally belonged to him, including the Gaoians themselves, but that was more a tradition and legal technicality than anything else and he certainly wasn’t one to push the idea. This land, though, this was his alone, and he’d apparently owned most of it before ascending to the crown. That, on a world where owning a modest house was something only the wealthy could afford. More than anything else, that drove home what kind of a power Mike was actually dealing with.

…He sure did know how to step in it deep.

The door opened, spilling out warm air that smelled of baking. Naydra, the Great Mother and the one being among the Gao whom the Great Father didn’t literally own, stood on the threshold and gestured for him to come in. “You’re early!”

Mike didn’t need to duck under the door—it was sized for somebody a lot bigger than him—but he still felt like he should as he stepped inside and scrubbed his boots on the doormat. “Great Mother…”

“We don’t stand on ceremony and titles here, Michael,” she assured him, and gave him a welcoming sniff. Her ears plastered themselves backwards against her scalp, the Gaoian equivalent of pulling a disgusted face. “Yurgh. That planet really is polluted, isn’t it?”

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault. We, ah…well, there is a fantastic bath through the door out back. And clean human clothes…”

Mike was only too happy to oblige. A real bath? Yes. In fact a real, hot bath in a steaming tub literally big enough to bathe a rhino. Or a Daar. And the water was clean, with good handmade soap, and hot enough that it was almost painful in the best way…

…Oh God. Heaven.

The clothes were laundered and had some kind of bundle of herbs or something on them too. He wasn’t sure what to do with the herbs, but he understood the intent. People usually had to pay for pampering like that. Here he was, being spoiled by, inarguably, the two most powerful people in the known galaxy, and all he had to do was keep Bruuk company?

Well, fair enough. And part of keeping any Gaoian company was to smell sorta nice. He guessed that he was supposed to, uh, maybe perfume his rinse water with it? Sure. That made sense. He did so, and enjoyed a bracingly cold bucket-dump or three over his head.

Sure enough, he returned to the kitchen-slash-living-area sorta space probably not reeking of industrial contaminants and questionable hygiene. Naydra glanced his way, sniffed, duck-nodded in a way that said ‘much better,’ and put him to work peeling tubers of some kind.

“So…Daar predicted you’d probably want to stay on with helping the E-Skurel-Ir,” she said, sitting opposite him to slice the peeled tubers into thin batons.

“That woulda been my first choice, yes…” Mike agreed. “They’ve got a long road ahead of them.”

“We won’t neglect them,” she promised. “We’re just coming to the moment when prioritization really matters. The Grand Army, right now, is at its peak. We have numbers, training, materiel and young, able-bodied men. Soon…well, the decline is coming. It will be a couple of centuries before we even have the population numbers to raise a force like it again. We have to use it now. And that means the E-Skurel-Ir have to come second to finishing the fight.”

She looked up at the window, and Mike followed her gaze. Outside, Wilde was saying his goodbyes to Bruuk with a huge hug, while the same driver that had brought Mike waited patiently to make the return trip.

“After all. When the Hunters are done and the Hierarchy dealt with…we’ll have the resources spare to help them properly,” she said.

“Their civil war isn’t going to stop burning,” Mike replied. “They can’t wait long…”

“They won’t have to,” Naydra promised. “Things are about to shift. One of the last major obstacles we had with the Dominion will be dealt with, soon. After that…You’ll see. The E-Skurel-Ir will have all the support they need. Until then, we put people where they’re needed most.”

“And right now, I’m needed most here, looking after him?”

“Bruuk has done great service to the Gao, and indirectly to her allies. He had no choice in the matter and he’s suffering for it. My Bumpkin wants to put that right, but even with videoconferencing and the like, he can’t stay here on this farm forever. He has to turn his attention to graver matters, and soon. As must I; the Females must be ready as well. And with what Ian’s training to do…we’re going to need him soon, too. Bruuk will ideally be a part of that. So yes, you’re needed here.”

Mike nodded. He wasn’t gonna pretend like he really understood the way important people thought about things, but he’d met Daar before. He was good people, and he picked good people. That was enough for Mike. “Okay then.”

Outside, Wilde got in the car and pulled away. Bruuk’s broad shoulders sagged like a cartoon character, and Mike had to admit—he already felt a tug on his heartstrings for a male he’d not properly even met yet. Naydra watched him, and flicked an ear when Mike looked back at her.

“Go on,” she said. “Make friends.”

Mike nodded, dropped his last tuber in the water bowl, stood, and stepped toward the door to do his job. “Wish me luck, then.”

Today had not been what he was expecting, really, but that changed nothing. He’d do his part.

And do it well.

Loyal to a Fault
by Ava Ríos

Folcthans will know Myun as a familiar figure. Guard-Mother of the Alien Quarter’s commune, and famously Mother Supreme Yulna’s bodyguard at the outbreak of the Gaoian homeworld war. She wears a scar she won on that day with no small amount of pride.

This is, by Gaoian standards, quite a masculine affectation, and Myun is vocally proud of the way she doesn’t quite fit the mold of Gaoian femininity.

“Oh yeah, I grew up to be a total tomboy! You’d never have guessed it from pics of me as a little cub, would you?”

[Image: the huge, brown-furred guard-mother, face turned slightly to proudly display her scar, and posing mightily with her sword. Opposite, a photo of Myun as a particularly small cub practicing Kung Fu alongside Xiù Chang.] Image credit: Mother Ayma, Wi Kao Commune of Females

Indeed not. She is a tall and quite seriously muscular brownfur, Amazonian by any standard and, from what rumors tell me, intimidatingly beautiful to most Gaoian males. None of this matches much with her personality.

“I was so tiny! And I grew up so big!”

She’s understandably proud of herself—and not ashamed to say it—however, she’s not one to dwell, either. One of her massive paws strays to her belly. Like most Gaoian females, she has spent much of the last several years pregnant, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.

Would you say there’s a lot riding on the Clan of Females right now?

She shakes her head sharply.

“Our Clan has always been about…this. Cubs, the next generation, the future of the species. There’s nothing riding on us now that wasn’t riding on us before, except maybe now…maybe it’s riding a little heavier. A lot of us used to enjoy taking a few years to just be Sisters, see the world, do some work, you know?”

Now, that’s complicated.

Myun sighs, and duck-nods in agreement. “Yes. We’ve become too important to leave unguarded.”

On that point, a young, burly Stoneback sits discreetly off-side, not intruding but his purpose quite clear.

You sound a little resentful of being guarded, even though you’re a guard-mother yourself.

“I try not to. Deem over there means well. They all do. And that’s the point, really.”

What do you mean?

She looks over to Deem and flicks her ears in a way I can’t quite interpret. Deem chitter-sighs, and nods in acquiescence.

“Well, Take Deem. Like…don’t get me wrong, he’s a fantastic example of a male. Healthy, strong, smells good. Handsome too! And, balls! Maybe if he plays his tiles right…” The burly male perks his ears in unabashed hopefulness, but otherwise maintains his professionalism. Myun chitters back—the Gaoian laugh—in a flirtatious manner, one which very specifically means “no…for the moment.” He flicks his ears, suitably chagrined, and Myun resumes her point. “Like I said, he’s got a lot going for him…but still. I can kick his tail and not just in a spar. I’m bigger than him. Faster, stronger too. So why, now, does he guard me?”

Deem speaks up for the only time in our interview. “Because you’re worth more than me.”

“And that? That’s the fucked up part, because I can’t argue with him. It’s true.”

[Image: Myun and Deem. Sure enough, the statuesque guard-mother is a head taller and more physically imposing than the male. Myun’s weapon is a sword and she wears a handsome uniform. Deem, meanwhile, bears a submachine gun, a battle-worn carrier vest, and a helmet.]

“Kinda telling how we’re equipped, ain’t it? Me, I’m here to represent the safety of the Clan and the cubs. Deem’s here to actually protect us.”

It is clear Deem wants to say something, but he keeps his peace. Myun notices, and corrects herself.

“Okay, fine. I ain’t being fair, and he’d be mad if I undersold myself; I’m here to protect us, too. But he’s the front-line. I’m the last resort. And that…bothers me. It’s just one example of the stuff the Clan of Females can’t do for ourselves any more.”

Because of numbers.

“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, we haven’t gone back to the bad old days when females were male property living in harems. We all know why we’re being folded up in bubble wrap like this. But you’re a free-roaming, sharp kind of woman, Miss Ríos. You’ve asked questions to the Great Father that nobody else had the guts to. How would you like it if all that got taken away and you had to go everywhere with a male chaperone, even if the reason was really really good?”

She gives Deem an apologetic look.

“It’s only a real short pounce from ‘Protect and Provide’ to ‘contain and control.’”

So why tolerate it? Why not insist on your independence?

“Because it’s a really really good reason. And trust. And because, you know, there’s billions of males out there who’ve got to try and build a life with no hope of ever siring a cub, or maybe they’re serving and dying in the Grand Army, or just working themselves to pieces trying to keep our civilization running when there’s not enough of them, so really we don’t have it all that bad next to them…”

Loyalty?

“Yeah. Loyalty. I mean, they’re faithfully and loyally doing their part for the future of our species, shouldn’t we do the same?”

At this point in our conversation, a cub—young, but old enough to be entrusted with chores—runs up on four-paw and delivers a written message. Apparently using such hand-delivered notes as opposed to text messages or voice calls is a Clan of Females tradition: it’s a good way to keep a cub occupied and in touch with all the Mothers. Myun glances at the note, then pockets it and sends the cub on their way.

The brief break gives me a good opportunity to move onto another subject I wanted to discuss.

Did that cub have the gene therapy?

“Mikki? Nah, he’s I guess what you’d call a vanilla Gao…We’re gonna need words for Gao-with-therapy and Gao-without-therapy soon, aren’t we? Anyway, right now we keep it to natural-borns, where both parents had the therapy. Openpaw’s doin’ that for observational purposes, yijao? And anyway, the ones who’ve got it are all too young for fetch-and-carry yet.”

I presume they’re a little different to their fellows

“Not really. So far they’re just like any other cub, mostly. The oldest ones are a year old now—a Gaoian year—and the only thing I’ve really noticed is some of them don’t like toys that the older cubs did, because to them it’s a different color and it looks ugly. Maybe some o’ them smell a bit healthier but it’s hard to tell, ‘cuz, uh…well, we’ve had the luxury of being choosier ‘bout things.”

Have you had the gene therapy yourself?

“I’m going to. It’s not safe to take while pregnant, but as soon as this little one’s among us…”

She touches her belly again.

Obviously, there are profound moral issues surrounding the question of universal gene therapy, not to mention regenerative medicine. Myun and I discussed these quandaries for some time, and you can find the uncut version of our conversation linked at the bottom of this article. Eventually, however, the discussion came back around to the core subject of this series: The challenge of this age of Gaoian history, what they are doing about it, and how their choices differ from what humans might do.

Why do you think the therapy is being so widely taken? I can’t imagine that humans would embrace it so readily, especially in a time of such uncertainty.

“I think lots of reasons, really. Um…I think part of it is that Humans—or, the ones I’ve met anyway—you’re not really as collectivist as most Gao. You’re not selfish, but even when you’re thinking of the big picture for your people, you’re thinking about what it means for individuals. You always know what the greater good costs, I think. Like…you’ve got that saying about making omelettes and breaking eggs. To us, it’s like…well yeah. Nothing ever happens without a cost.”

You’re at such a delicate moment in your people’s history though. With a population crash coming, isn’t a huge campaign of genetic engineering a big risk to take?

“I think it’s a bigger risk for us not to. Like, okay. Let’s leave aside the ridiculous overachieving males in the SOR, right? Gaoian or Human, ignore them for a moment. Even without them, look at us next to your people! On average we’re…kinda pushovers, yijao? And were only that because we were deliberately made that way! Doin’ this just makes us peers like we were meant to be. You need allies who can keep up, and we need it too, with how few of us there’ll be before long. And then there’s the Ten’Gewek! On an individual level they kick everyone’s tail by a fuckin’ mile! We can’t let numbers be our only advantage. We won’t even have that soon!”

What if it goes wrong? What if it makes the population crash worse?

“It’s not going to.”

How do you know?

“How do we know anything? How do we know the water will come out of the faucet, or that the shuttles will be safe? That traffic lights will work, the city control grid won’t crash people? You gotta trust at some point, and My Father trusts his experts.”

And you trust him

“Of course I trust him! What kind of a question is that?!”

The astute reader will notice a particular pattern, here. Gaoians of all stripes show intense deference and respect to the Great Father. This is not wholly without merit; he is, perhaps surprisingly to some, an extremely intelligent man and a distinguished expert in several fields, including what we’d term agriculture science, civil engineering administration, and business management. He also holds the title of Master of War, which could best be described as a sort of post-doctoral honorific in military science, and is surprisingly well-read on a great many other things besides. Champions in general are highly-accomplished among the Gao, and Daar is widely considered to be perhaps the greatest ever Champion of their most prestigious Clan.

Despite all that, he prefers a folksy style and a blue-collar life, and that has endeared him to many, human and gaoian alike. It has also softened criticism against him about his extremely aggressive and decisive style of leadership. He is, by his own admission, directly responsible for the death of many billions. His unflinchingly honest appraisal of that fact, and his refusal to let people forget it, has done much to convince the Gao of its necessity.

Myun’s indignant reaction to my question is quite typical, and expected.

Do the Gao always trust their leaders so absolutely?

“Of course not! Just the ones who deserve it.”

How do you test them to prove they deserve it?

She looks genuinely perplexed.

“The only reason we’re not extinct right now is because of him. How much more of a test do you need?”

So it’s not an ongoing question?

“I’m serious! How much more of a test do you want? Does he have to keep proving himself over and over again? Or can we just accept that yeah, he has our species’ best interests in heart and he’s worth following? He’s not some elected politician playing screwy shadow games and cutting deals to gain power, he was made Great Father by us, the Females, and all of our leadership submitted themselves to him. We belong to him, but that also means he’s ours. He’d step away from it in a heartbeat, if he could! I know why you’re asking this, and I know where you’re from not trusting the folks in power is a matter of course, but I just don’t think you get this! He’s earned real trust, not the temporary kind. He says the gene-therapy is safe, he’s taken it himself…again, what more do you want?”

Throughout this tirade, Deem duck-nods fervently along with her, and shoots me a look of considerable indignation.

I decide to shift tactic.

How do you feel about his heavy use of Cruezzir-derived therapeutics?

That made her squirm a bit uncomfortably, and leap to his defense.

“…It’s not for everyone. He’d be the first to say so. You’ve really gotta have both the work ethic and the genetics to properly take advantage, and the cold hard truth is that almost nobody does. He does, though. Remember, he was pretty fuckin’ big an’ badass beforehand, and he says it’s only been kinda recently he’s been using it to train. Balls, he’s so keyed up and so Keeda-damn good, you can’t even smell any of it on ‘em. That means for his size he’s barely using any at all! So…yeah.”

She pauses for a moment, awkwardly, before continuing her thoughts.

“…Yeah, I don’t think many of us really disapprove of any of that, we’ve always been a bit more open to that sort of thing. but I do think it’s fair to say we Females are wary of abuse. Cruezzir is like any tech, it should be respected. Not many people are the right kind of genetically perfect, so for most people it’s maybe got some pretty big risks…I don’t know all the details. Even the life extension benefits require serious dedication to personal fitness. It’s enough that Our Father—like you said, he’s one of the most visible users of it—has warned the public against cavalier use.”

Would you consider using Cruezzir as a performance-enhancing substance? Your job as Guard-Mother could benefit…

Again, she is visibly uncomfortable, but doesn’t shy away from her conclusion.

“…Well, I’ve got the genetics and the work ethic, so…I might, some day. I gym pretty hard but right now I don’t use it; this is me as I naturally am. I don’t feel like I’ve reached my limits yet. Besides, it works way better for males anyway. Do you use it, Deem?”

He shook his head no. He, too, was noticeably uncomfortable. The Gao are keenly aware of the general Human attitude toward such things, and they are intensely social beings. They do not much enjoy broaching uncomfortable topics, even where it’s expected.

“And I don’t think he should! He’s not even twenty yet, still lots of growin’ left in him! Maybe when he’s a bit older, once he’s filled out more and he’s got some good scars…”

She gives Deem a non-committal ear-flick of interest, then returns to her point.

“So…yeah. I mean, no judgement on my part, but I don’t think most of us should use it. At least, not lightly. For a few, it really works for them. But I think there’s a lotta males out there who think it’s some sorta magical get-Females drug, one that’ll give them a breeding advantage over the rest. Well, It won’t. It’s sorta like the makeup you’re wearing. For you, it highlights and enhances what’s already there! But for some…it’s a bad substitution.”

Substitution for what?

“Mediocre genetics. Poor self-care. No real discipline. Believe me, we can sniff those things out of a male more easily than anything else. No spacemagic drug will give them what they aren’t already able or willing to work for. In fact, if they aren’t already basically perfect on everything, it only makes things worse. They’re just hurtin’ themselves by bein’ stupid about it.”

And the gene therapy?

“Different things, but in the end they’re not what drives me when I choose a mate. No male’s going to win a contract with me just by using widely-available medicine. They’ll still have to work to impress. There’s no shortcuts.”

On that point, I find myself in total agreement. Our interview concluded, I’m escorted from the compound by one of Deem’s comrades. There aren’t many of the armed males around the Commune, but there are enough to make it very clear the Gao are concerned for their future, and fierce in protecting it. Even here, on friendly soil.

And when it comes to the future of the Gao, there’s one Champion in particular who thinks about nothing else…

Date Point: 17y10m2w AV
Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, Erwn-Bwrw system, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Henenowryth

“We don’t answer to the Gao.”

“I know, mother, but we do answer to the Dominion Security Council, and they—”

“We don’t answer to anyone. We are a sovereign people.”

“And as a sovereign people we signed treaties—”

“We had treaties thrust upon us. If there’s one thing the Gao and the Humans have absolutely right, it’s that the Dominion simply assumes dominion and expects you to sign automatically. I don’t know what our ancestors were thinking when they did so without protest, but here we are.” Henenwgwyr’s face bore the expression it always did when her mind was intractably set. Owryth had learned long ago that there was no power in all the great galaxy that could move her mother when she was so determined.

Still. She’d held out some hope.

“So you intend to ignore the summons?”

“Of course I do. I’ll not be dragged in front of a brute who murdered half his own species and made to answer his hypocritical accusations.”

Owryth ducked her body in acknowledgement. “As you say. I will prepare accordingly, then.”

A lifetime of paranoia bade her sweep the room for hidden observation devices after the call ended, and only once she was certain she was unwatched did she allow herself to sag and grown out her frustration aloud. What had mother expected? She’d performed experiments on Gao, one of the most notoriously loyal species in the galaxy, fanatically protective of one another.

Well. She’d clearly expected they’d never find out.

Owryth didn’t really know what the Grandmatriarch was thinking now. Was she stalling for time? Playing a subtle game while she gathered support? Trusting that the Council’s outrage would cool? Or was she simply prideful enough to truly believe the House was politically unassailable?

Owryth’s faith in her mother’s judgement was shaken, crumbling. Up until now, it had always seemed that Wgwyr had a plan, was always in control, could not be outmaneuvered. Now it seemed that Wgwyr had always thought the same, and simply didn’t know what to when do the plan failed, her control slipped, and her foe countered her every move.

Could it be that, after a lifetime of success, she’d forgotten what it was like to fail? Failure was a landslide, starting slow, gaining momentum. Once it started, there was no stopping it. There was only surviving it, and learning from it. And from what Owryth could see, her mother had forgotten that lesson.

If she’d ever learned it.

So what was Henenowryth to do? The slip had started, the momentum built. What move should she take, to ensure that she survived and learned?

Every crawling inch of her spine told her the first step was to abandon her mother. The guilt and anguish provoked by that thought was tight in her shoulders and chest, and painful in her eyes. Could she really do it? Not just her mentor, but her mother.

…A mother who’d shown no hesitation in abandoning a favored grandson the instant his bad luck stumbled him into an important matter. Even her reaction to Eriwyth’s death had seemed to be more personal anger than real grief.

Where, ultimately, did Owryth’s loyalties lie? To a mother who didn’t repay it? To House Henen, which was effectively the same thing? To the Kwmbwrw people in general? To ideals above and beyond even them? Or just to herself?

She thought long and hard.

Then, carefully, she took off her House insignia, dressed plainly in the manner of a young House servant rather than a Matriarch, and departed her suite high in one of Kwmwrta-Wrtnwm’s planetside towers.

She changed transportation three times before she was happy that the Grandmatriarch either did not have her under observation, or else she’d given said observation the slip. There was a bank in Midstation, on the lower promenade deck where businesses were crushed in as tight as canned pulses, built around one of the station’s huge ventral windows where pedestrians walking the promenade could look “down” on the stars and the ships coming and going.

There was a bank there. She collected the contents of a safe deposit box she’d taken out years ago, in obedience to her mother’s own advice about always keeping even the most unthinkable options open. A private channel to the spy-matriarchs of another House was…

Well, she’d always imagined that if she ever used it, she’d be doing so for reasons of deniability, or for the good of Great House Henen. That she’d do so loyally, because it was her best interpretation of the Grandmatriarch’s bidding.

Instead, she used it to defect.

It was the only way she could see to survive the coming landslide.

Date Point: 17y10m2w AV
Starship Rich Plains, Garden system, the Interspecies Dominion

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

It was always gratifying to watch a friend wrong-foot a rival.

What became obvious from the moment the Dominion Security Council held its first formal meeting into the Wrrmuthwm skirmish was that the Kwmbwrw—spearheaded by House Henen—had been expecting the Gao to charge in hard with accusations and righteous fury, and they had prepared to respond in kind.

That was arrogance on full display, right there.

Worse, it was unconvincing arrogance. Matriarch Henenteweth was a grand-niece of Henenwgwyr, not one of her daughters or granddaughters, and was quite clearly reading from a script she’d been given strict instructions not to deviate from. Of the Grandmatriarch herself, there was no sign.

Then again, neither was there any sign of Daar, and that seemed to be what threw the other Houses for a loop. House Tewyth’s Grandmatriarch had slipped out of the chamber grumbling sotto voce about having her time wasted, House Wrem’s looked bored out of her mind, and Sir Patrick fancied he could hear Grandmatriarch Gweremeg’s teeth grinding all the way from his own position.

Wgwyr had clearly planned on snubbing Daar’s presence. Daar, in turn, had snubbed her. The contempt expressed by their conspicuous absences was palpable. And so, poor hapless Henenteweth had Kenshi to contend with.

Knight tried not to reduce his Gaoian colleagues to canine analogies…but in truth, what he was witnessing was rather reminiscent of a guard dog savaging an intruder. Except…with words. Expertly crafted barrister-grade words.

Teweth had been figuratively thrown to the wolves, and though she was putting up a commendable fight, the fact was she was shackled by her Grandmatriarch’s instructions, and by the sheer disadvantage of her position. A human sitting in her seat would have been perspiring frantically.

“In sum,” Kenshi summarized as if he were bored of his chew toy, “Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr’s position remains untenable, delusional, bereft of morality, unmoored in reality, and is an insult not only to the Clans of Gao, but to the conventions and charter of the Interspecies Dominion. We have levied our accusations under seal to the satisfaction of a majority of the voting members present. If we do not get credible answers soon, we will move to lift the official seal, and expose this matter to full sunlight. As our Human allies say…Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

He concluded his remarks, and almost stepped away from the podium to return to his seat when he paused, turned back, and, as though it was an afterthought or unimportant side-note he’d only just remembered, made his parting shot.

“Oh, and one final matter. My Father has charged me to deliver a message to your Grandmatriarch. His message is this: ‘we are running short on patience. You may still extricate yourself from this situation, even now. You know what must be done.’”

There was a silence, into which the moderator’s gong slipped like a wake-up call.

“The chamber will now hear comments and queries from third parties.”

A chime from the Corti delegation was answered with an acknowledgement from the chair, and the Directorate’s ambassador took the podium.

“The Directorate and Faculty of the College of Xenoneurology and Cybernetics have been made aware of the role played in this incident by a number of Corti scientists—” he began.

A voice from the Rauwrhyr segment of the chamber chimed in loudly. “Yet again!”

The moderator was having none of it. She struck her gong again, hard this time, so that it crashed rather than chimed. “Ambassadors to the Council will maintain polite silence while another Ambassador is speaking!”

“Thank you.” The Corti didn’t even turn his head toward the Rauwrhyr. “In response to the accusation just received, I remind the Council that there is not a single species here which does not struggle with rogues who step outside the bounds of law and decency. We are a species of billions, and the Directorate cannot promise to enforce impeccable behavior on our citizens. What we can promise, as we have promised before and as we promise again now to the Clans of Gao, is that we condemn the research, methods and ethical violations of the Corti involved, and will assist our friends the Gao to the fullest extent in bringing those involved to justice.”

Sir Patrick nodded, tapping his desk gently to signal approval. Some days, it seemed, the Directorate’s primary job was keeping its more wantonly enthusiastic scientists in check. They, and the Faculties, practiced the science of the big picture, of political expediency and concern for their species’ reputation—lowly matters far below the attention of the world-shaking geniuses who filled the Colleges.

Honestly, Sir Patrick didn’t envy the Directorate one bit. In their cold, amoral, dispassionate way, the Corti were really a species of hyper-enthusiastic nerds with dreams rocking the galaxy via some shattering scientific insight. Governing and representing them must have been rather like being the head-teacher at a school for gifted but socially oblivious youngsters, except all of the students had access to advanced spaceships.

“As for the Wrrmuthwm matter…The Directorate acknowledges our own long history of embarrassing entanglements and rogue operations. We therefore submit the following hard-earned advice to our esteemed counterparts among the Kwmbwrw Great Houses: Excise the cancer within yourselves and let justice be done. Your people, your standing in galactic society, and the people of all present governments, will not benefit from pleas of innocence. Not when every worthy power knows the underlying truths, at least in part. Deception is an illogical stratagem at this juncture.”

He nodded to the moderator. “That concludes my comment.”

Sir Patrick arched an eyebrow. That was, in Corti terms, about as strong a sentiment as if the Ambassador had stood up and told the Matriarch “We all know you’re playing silly buggers, fucking stop it already.” He was impressed.

Such a strong statement in the mouth of an old ally clearly had the intended effect on Henenteweth, who looked to the moderator. “…The Kwmbwrw Great Houses request a recess while I seek advice,” she quavered.

The Moderator nodded long and slow, and rang her gong again. “Council will suspend conversation on this subject until tomorrow’s session,” she intoned. Around the room, several chairs squeaked as the Ambassadors of many species rose and departed. Sir Patrick joined them. All that remained on the schedule for the day was a minor dispute between the Robalin and the Versa Volc over mining rights in a cluster of systems a long way from anywhere. Hardly a matter of star-quaking importance, and nothing that Sir Patrick would have any useful input on.

He met Kenshi in the diplomat’s bar, where an assortment of vapors, liquids, canapé-esque foodstuffs and other cultural equivalents to a stiff drink were available. Kenshi gave him rather a pleased look, and offered a glass of Talamay.

“That was productive!” he declared.

Sir Patrick accepted the drink. “Looked rather more like a savaging to me. Then again, she has no ammunition.”

“No. She isn’t really the target anyway, that little performance of mine was for everyone else.”

“Quite. I daresay we all know she’s been thrown to the wolves…pardon the expression.” Kenshi waved a paw dismissively, and Sir Patrick continued. “You did an able job of demonstrating how her own government have left her with such an impossible task.”

“Thank you.”

“Hypothetically…” Sir Patrick sipped his drink, as though asking an entirely unimportant question. “What would happen if the Houses don’t budge?”

“We will have justice, one way or another. We’d hope to minimize the cost, of course…” Kenshi’s refined tone was belied by the way his ears turned backwards and lowered aggressively. “Under no circumstances will we allow our people to be captured, enslaved and biodroned, turned into weapons, and set loose on the world. We will send a message to everyone on that point: never again.”

No arguing with that, really. Sir Patrick watched a few nearby interested ears note what had been said and turn away. The bar was, by convention, a place of diplomacy in its own right. Nothing was said there that wasn’t intended to be overheard. In other words, Kenshi had just delivered an informal ultimatum.

Now to see what the Houses did.

It should be interesting.

17y10m2w AV
Private farm, Planet Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Time was up. He had to move, one way or another.

Daar had taken advantage of the time to perform on his backlog of softer but equally important duties. In the mornings, he traveled all over Gao and tussled with young cubs, surprised the older school-aged adolescents and wished them luck on their exams, visited workhouses and training centers…maybe he surreptitiously sniffed out a few who might make good ‘Backs, because Champion Emeritus or not, he was still Champion… And in any case, the recruiting directorate always appreciated good tips!

It was, somehow, weirdly tiring work, much more so than spending all day pulling literally tons of implement through dry, rock-hard soil, like a ‘Back of old doin’ the necessary work of civilization. Still, tiring though it may be, meeting and greeting was genuinely good for the soul. Naydi said he had a lot of love in his soul to give, and damnit he’d give every bit of it he could.

He got it back tenfold. Maybe all the social stuff wasn’t so much tiring as…overwhelming, really. What a blessing and an honor to be the target of all that!

He maybe scored some mating contracts outta it, too…and so did Bruuk on one chilly day! Balls, he weren’t even tryin’ and this pretty lil’ slip of a sharp-tongued silverfur said the sassiest thing to the young Associate, who had an absolutely acid rejoinder…the two were instant friends!

It was fuckin’ adorable, is what it was!

He’d given Bruuk a couple more days of back-breaking work therapy, and enjoyed pushing himself as hard as he could for the last field work of the season. As always, the lower east quarter was a right fuckin’ bitch to pull through, and Daar was pretty sure he mighta actually bent the frame forcing it through some of that hardpan…

Well, he prob’ly added some inches to his arms an’ legs doin’ it all, so it weren’t that bad!

Bruuk was happy as shit when they were done. So was Daar. But also a little sad, ‘cuz that meant it was Time. Time for Bruuk to move on with his life. Time to end this little not-really-a-vacation.

Time to decide the fate of billions, yet again.

Henenwgwyr was bein’ an obstinate old’ crone ‘bout her crimes. Daar wished that were surprising but…well, it weren’t, and it weren’t like his people hadn’t been busy as balls behind the scenes, preppin’ the battlespace ‘fer whatever might need doing. Friends were recruited. Leads developed. A couple very careful and judicious covert actions, here and there…even a quiet deep-space action by the HEAT, to insert an agent onto a particularly critical station.

One didn’t often think of “quiet” and “Warhorse” in the same thought, but war was weird like that.

It was sad to watch, really. There was no dignity in her defiance. She was just doin’ what so many like her had done a million times and denying anything was wrong even while her empire burned down around her.

‘Course, that made her dangerous in a different way. So Daar needed to be absolutely certain about his next step.

There weren’t nothin’ for it. He needed him some thinkin’ tacos.

Taking the first jump to Cimbrean was mebbe a small abuse of his power, but dammit there just weren’t nowhere better to get authentic Gaoian tacos in all the galaxy. Yes really. It helped if a ‘Back din’t think ‘bout that too much. And besides, he could take Bruuk with him, so that saved on spaceship berthings, too!

He was being efficient! That sounded like a good enough excuse to him, so it musta been good!

The new Array link was military, properly secure in its synchronization, and with both ends installed a safe distance from anything important. The Gao end was built in what had once been a forward operating base as the Grand Army marched across the continent, reclaiming it from the biodrones. The Cimbrean end was a ways south of Folctha, deep in the recovering dustbowl left behind by the “Skidmark.” Sensible spot for it, that—a long way from civilians, nobody lived down there. It had just been dead terrain, now it had a purpose again.

Well…it wasn’t quite so dead anymore. Like the American plains, there were grasses taking root and spreading rapidly. The particular breed had been engineered so as not to release toxic allergens; for some reason, Earthling grass pollens were often horrible for most species, including a fair chunk of Gao. Hell, some Humans too! It wasn’t exactly a lush landscape, but it was a start on a good, solid recovery.

He’d briefly considered running it on fourpaw, jus’ to give his HEAT conditioning some extra lil’ exercise. It mighta been fun to lope his way through the grass all the way to Cimbrean, but he knew Bruuk and his security team wouldn’t be able to keep up, so boring ol’ truckbed it was.

And once they were in Folctha, Bruuk dropped off at Leemu’s house and all introductions made…all Daar had to do was follow his nose.

Leela was glad to see him. She pretended not to be, of course, but there was a kind of love in the way she saw him coming, flicked both ears, and then reached up to retrieve her special Daar-smacking spatula.

She gently bapped him the moment he shoved his face through her little window.

“One of these days you’ll learn not to stick your sniffer into my stand!”

“Me, learn? Why would I do that when I have so much fun needlin’ ‘ya!?”

She chittered, flicked her ears again, and set the spatula aside. “How’s Naydi?”

“She’ll prob’ly be envious I’m here gettin’ the bestest tacos in all the galaxy and she ain’t!” Daar chittered. “But bein’ serious, she’s doin’ Great Mothery stuff an’ I’m a lotta things, but I ain’t anywhere near so stupid as gettin’ in the way of that!”

“So you came to bother me instead,” Leela snorted. “And, what’s this? You aren’t up on your feet, strutting your stuff…no outrageous flexing today? You’re not gonna spend an eternity showing off your preposterous brawn?”

“Nah. I mean…” Of course Daar had to take a bite at bait that good! He stood and gave her his most bestest and most biggest side-chest. Really showed off the thick slabs o’ his pecs! “I will if ‘ya wanna feast ‘yer eyes on literally tons o’ ripplin’ muscular perfection—”

“No.” She almost managed to restrain her chitter, and that only provoked him further!

“No?” He worked his huge arms in and out, just to really nip at her. “Mebbe ‘ya prefer ‘ta feel me up instead? Really get ‘yer claws all over these big buff biceps!” He spun to face her, and showed off his legs and corrugated middle. “An’ here I worried I was bein’ too forward—”

“Daar! You are incorrigible! Behave!”

“OK, fiine…” He chittered and fell back to fourpaw. “‘Yer loss.” Fun had for the day, it was time to move on. “But…nah. I got…bigger things on my mind tonight. I need some thinkin’ tacos.”

She gave him a flat look. “…Thinking tacos.”

“Yeah.”

Leela considered that request for a moment. “…Smelt,” she decided, and opened a tub full of gloriously pungent little fish. “Fresh from Gao.”

“Oh balls those smell so good…I bet the humans hate ‘em too!”

“Most, yeah. Their loss!” Suddenly, her Spatula whipped out with a lightning-quick strike.

“Ow!”

“Get your drooling muzzle out of my stand!”

“Fine, fine…”

Daar chittered, and set to pacing. He had a lot to think about.

“So, what deep affairs had you come hundreds of light years just for my thinking tacos?” She asked.

“Maybe…can I jus’ eat my tacos, an’ walk ‘ya back to the island shuttle?”

“…It’s serious.”

“Yeah. An’, uh…there ain’t many who ain’t Champions an’ shit that I can really talk serious with.”

She duck-nodded, and wordlessly doubled the number of smelt in his tacos.

The fact was, Leela was about the closest thing Daar had to a friend who wasn’t HEAT, or high-ranking, or some kinda mover and shaker. Or, terrified of what he was. Not even Leemu could get over his natural instinct to just…instantly submit, or agree with anything Daar believed.

There were only a few women in his life who din’t give one watery shit ‘bout his rank. Leela was one of them, and may the gods forever bless her for it. And under the short, cold front he knew good and damn well she counted him a friend too. Not that she’d ever say it. But she showed it, all the time.

As always, Daar timed his visit to coincide with closing. He did that for a number of reasons—havin’ her all to himself bein’ the big selfish one—but really, he did it to spare her the inconvenience of havin’ the fuckin’ emperor spacebear (or whatever the internet called him these days) drop in and ruin her day. She was cleanin’ up anyway, so all the customers were gone…

She backed out of her tidy little shack, locked the door, dropped the front shade-door-wall thing in front of the window, and picked up a stasis bag filled to the brim with tacos and snacks.

“I thought I’d just, y’know, take all the rest. It’s a long walk down to the shuttle terminal.”

It was, and Daar was content to dismiss her discreet escort, along with his own security. He could take care of them both after all, and the team would quietly take care of anything else. Before long they were alone on Folctha’s well-lit paths, munching tacos in comfortable silence.

If she maybe drew a bit closer to him in the evening chill and dark, he weren’t gonna complain.

“So…what’s on your mind, big guy?”

Gods, she even talked to him like a normal man. He missed that so much…

Daar shook his head free of its cobwebs. “You been following the galactic news? S’pecifically ‘bout our recent incursion into Kwmbwrw space?”

“ESNN breakfast, every morning.”

“Ah, good.” Daar flicked his ear mischievously. “You listen ‘ta the mean version o’ things.”

“And here I thought you liked getting smacked in the nose.”

“I ain’t one ‘ta kink shame, Leela. Anyhoo,” he said before she could work in a rejoinder, “So ‘yer up to date on what’s publicly known.”

“Sure.”

“There’s a part o’ this that, if it were ‘ta make it into the public eye, would force us into war.”

“Another one?”

Daar sighed unhappily. “Yeah. An’ it wouldn’t be a quick one, neither. S’why we’ve been tryin’ ‘ta give ‘em every opportunity ‘ta walk outta this. But, well, Ol’ True-Name is a particularly obstinate tail o’ a women…balls, even more stubborn than you…”

Leela chittered, and clawed him gently right in his big ol’ rump. Which would normally prompt some of his usual play…

He chittered anyway, but she could tell he wasn’t feelin’ it. “…But her stubbornness here’s gonna mean some bad things.”

“Well, what exactly is she being stubborn about?”

Daar hesitated. As always, he hated secrets, but there were ears everywhere, and as much as he wanted to pretend, his footsteps in Folctha didn’t go unnoticed by the world writ large. He could just barely hear the flutter of a drone high overhead, for instance. Probably it was just Colonial Security…

“Well, les’ just say she’s doin’ a very bad thing against us, in secret. Quite why she thought we’d never find out is jus’ beyond me, an’ I’ve got a pretty vivid imagination these days…anyway, it’s bad, Leela. Real gods-damned bad.”

“And she’s…what? Refusing to own up to it?”

“Refusin’ ‘ta stop.”

“Well…does she think your threat is credible?”

…A fair point, and one he kept in the back of his mind, for later. His own generals had noted the same thing.

“That’s the thing, ain’t it? Whether it is or ain’t, what matters is whether she thinks it is. An’ from what I can tell, I think she’s the kinda power-mad that lives in its own fantasy world an’ never sees things as they are. I don’t think she can believe I’d come after her.”

“And you would.”

“Of course. ‘Fer something this big? I’d come personally, if it were needed.”

She duck-nodded, and handed him another taco. They still had plenty of time before the shuttle left, so they paused at the back of the small crowd gathered in front of the Wall outdoor theatre. The Folctha Amateur Dramatic Society were putting on a performance of a play called “One o’Clock From The House.” Judging from the laughs, it was a comedy, but Daar was too distracted to listen properly so the humor went over his head a bit. Human humor could be weird anyway.

Too bad tacos were a one-bite cronch for Daar. Bein’ the biggest weren’t always the bestest.

“So…forgive me, I obviously don’t know everything…” Leela said.

“Yes, yes. G’on.”

“Is there any way you can punish just her? I know those kinds of ops are hard…”

Daar chittered darkly. “That’s puttin’ it mildly, ‘ta say the least. We’re working on options,” he said cryptically, for the benefit of whoever owned the second drone he could hear fluttering about now. “But that has bigger upside risks than bein’ direct about it.”

“So really, it’s a question about opportunity cost.”

“…Yea, I s’pose ‘ya could look it at that way.”

“Well, let’s be sure. So Option one for, uh, whatever this crime is, would be to just, I dunno, smash it all with a big hammer, right?”

Daar nodded. “Yeah. Be a big drain, might be long and costly.”

“And option two is possibly—”

“Most likely.”

“—Most likely cheaper, but it’s risky.”

“Yeah. Very risky, in this case. Things could go wrong, and the assets are, uh…”

Leela was quiet suddenly. She understood. “…Hard to replace.” They both knew what she left out; she was friends with many of the operators who would be involved.

“…Yeah.”

“…You already know what you have to do, though.”

“‘Course I do. Don’t make me like it any.”

“So what do you need my thinking tacos for?”

“Sometimes my heart takes a little more convincin’ I guess. Leela,” Daar sighed, and maybe keened a little. “I’ve murdered a fuck of a lot of people over the years. I’m gettin’ real damn tired of sendin’ young men off to their doom for this kind of dumb shit that shouldn’t fuckin’ happen in the first place! But to spare a whole lotta young dumb good males, I gotta send in people who are so rare an’ special, it’s more’n just my heart that’d break if we lost any.”

“So…it really is an opportunity cost problem, then.”

“…I hate that it’s that cold, but yeah.”

Leela was quiet for a long moment. “I’m glad I don’t have to make those decisions.”

“I’m glad you don’t have to make ‘em too.”

They moved on from the theatre. Another taco. Cronch.

“…I was bankin’ on if I gave ‘em a face-savin’ thing, it could all be avoided. They stop, quietly…prove it…” more evasion, but she understood. “An’ we get on with the real bad guys.”

“But they aren’t, and…you are the Great Father.”

“Yeah.”

“Well…for what very little it’s worth…the risk is probably worth taking. We can’t afford to throw ourselves into another meat grinder and I don’t think the galaxy can, either.”

“No.”

“Even if it…costs.”

“Yeah. They’re good, but nobody’s perfect.”

Leela found some of her humor. “Except for you. At least, that’s what you keep telling me…”

Daar chittered but…he truly didn’t have the energy at that moment. All he could do was nod. And that seemed to be what finally broke through. Leela jumped up and hugged.

He wrapped his arms around her and hugged back. What else could he do?

They walked in silence the rest of the way to the spaceport, and paused at the point that, on every other occasion, had been where they said their good-nights and parted ways. This time, she looked up at the control tower for a moment, then turned back around.

“…Come with me.”

“…Oh? You sure? I thought you weren’t—”

“I’m not asking for that. Not…not tonight. I just hate to leave a friend to suffer alone. We can…we can just do friendly…right?”

She smelled nervous. And a little afraid. If there was one thing about the two of them that made Daar sad, it was the memories he triggered just being big and brown. He knew she didn’t mean anything bad by it…

Daar duck-nodded seriously. “I can do that.”

She leaned into his side while they boarded the suborbital shuttle. Again, a bit nervously…so he put an arm around her as gently and warmly as he could manage. Naturally he was too big to fit in the crammed passenger compartment, so he laid himself out on the floor of the cargo compartment. She came down there with him, and with some pant-grins and some gentle encouragement, they napped curled up together for the flight to the island.

She smelled good. Beautiful, even, once the nervousness had faded away. Once the trust started building. Cuddlin’ her was the mildest kinda chaste torture, but that was okay. He promised, and something told him she needed this even more than he did. It took a while and some trust before they’d managed a properly tight, full-body squeeze, but it was worth it in the end. Her friendship was worth the extra little effort.

The walk to her quarters was much the same. Quiet, comfortable. Thankful. Undoubtedly there would be some rumors tomorrow but whatever, that would be fun for later. For now…Tomorrow he’d set their planning into motion. Orders would be given. People would die.

He took every moment of peace he could get.

Date Point: 17y11m AV
Kwmrwta-Wrtnwm, Erwn-Bwrw system, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr

“Defected?”

“Y-yes, Grandmatriarch. They smuggled her off the station within half a day. She’s been a guest of House Brwnen ever since.”

“And it took us this long to determine that she went to them?”

The hapless analysts briefing her exchanged a troubled glance. “We…didn’t exactly…”

“They told us, Grandmatriarch. And offered some rather blunt, unsolicited advice.”

Wgwyr gave the pair her coldest stare. “What. Advice.”

“It’s, ah…here, Grandmatriarch.” One of the analysts handed over a printout. Wgwyr glanced at it, then set it aside.

“Leave,” she instructed.

They fled.

Truth at last. Traitors and conspirators all around her, even her own daughters. Her own House. A rot that went down to the very foundations of House Henen, if not even her own kin were immune. After all she’d taught them, all the love and guidance, all the opportunities she’s given, this was how they repaid her? Disloyalty? Betrayal?

She reared up on her hind legs and lashed out with her tail, smashing House Brwnen’s sanctimonious ‘advice’ across the room with such force that the framed picture it struck fell off the wall and broke.

Moments later she was tearing through the keepsakes of her pride. Owryth had done much in her career, so had Eriwyth, Iwathi and Feirweg. Mere minutes ago, the trophies of her daughters’ triumphs had been sources of gratification. Now they sickened her. Now, each and every one was torn from the walls, swept from the surfaces and snatched from the shelves. She cleansed her rooms, scrubbing out every last hint of infection until there was nothing left but her own works and deeds.

She sent out orders that Iwathi and Feirweg be arrested. They could not possibly have missed their half-sister’s malfeasance, which meant they must be complicit. Interrogation would prove it.

As for the other Houses, the Gao, and those pliable buffoons sitting on the Dominion Security Council…That would require guile. She had nobody she could rely on, right now. And Daar had ably proven that a direct fight was unwinnable.

She would need to fight the indirect fight herself. Alone, unsupported, untrusting. It was the only road to victory now.

There was a kind of clarity that came with that thought. A certainty of purpose, a sureness. She’d worked at a remove for too long, attempting to exert her will through the clumsy, imprecise tools of other people. Others with their own wills and agendas, others who would always twist her ends to their own.

Now, it was clear: the only way to see things done right was to act herself.

“Ready my transport. I will take up residence at the Eclipse Palace.”

The first step, after all, was to fortify herself. Her enemies would be coming. And there was only one place in all the galaxy that was adequately safe now.

Under the shade of the ancient dead.

Date Point: 18yAV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

[BEEP!]

Hoeff finished stretching out, glanced at his phone and sighed. He’d been expecting this message for a while, but he still wasn’t happy to get it. At least it came at the end of his workout.

It came at the end of Vemik and Playboy’s daily workout too, where Vemik had been aggressively and cheerily giving Julian an education on just what he could do these days. Today’s hyper-testosterone excesses had been going on since the buttcrack of dawn and it was past noon now; the two just couldn’t be separated. They’d fought at everything from a series of footraces, to several bouts of wrestling, to “speed forging.” Now they were attacking the weights.

Like they did every morning, every day. Without fail. Maybe they went hunting, maybe they were building something. Maybe they were even studying sometimes, but every single day the two were getting along like a house on fire, sometimes with Yan or maybe the Singer, sometimes with others, sometimes simply together. Some mornings, it was all Hoeff (and most of the village men, too!) could do to keep up.

Julian was a rare critter, to cope with all that manic energy. Even rarer, since he could match it. He held the Ten’Gewek’s respect because, aside from his friendly nature and his ridiculously good-looking charms, he was a supremely athletic stone-hard ultra-heavyweight hulk of a man, one so stupidly dense he sank like a brick in water, and one who could play with the Ten’Gewek as hard as they wanted. That mattered. The big Tarzan was at the top of the game, knew it, could count on one hand all the Gaoians or human beings who could put him in his place these days, and he’d still have a thumb left over to spare.

Yet, despite his genuinely overwhelming blessings…among Ten’Gewek, he was humbled.

There were hundreds among their people who could best him, and one of the youngest of those monsters happened to be his most bestest cavegorilla friend. He didn’t seem to mind, and Vemik seemed to relish proving it, too. For all his smarts he was, after all, still a cavemonkey in the grip of the spring and his youth, and on top of that was the dominant male in his tribe, aside from Yan. Not even Sky-Thinker was immune from the feelings that sort of thing gave a man.

As if to prove the point, Vemik walked back to his barbell and exclaimed, “Watch this, Jooyun!” He added more plates to his heavily laden “Warhorse” barbell, which was already bending a little too much for comfort under the gravity and weight. Hoeff couldn’t even deadlift that much weight, yet Vemik managed a perfect clean and press. Fuckin’ impressive, that. Pleased with himself and obviously feeling ambitious, Vemik lifted a leg off the ground and squat some preposterous count of reps, then switched legs, did it again, switched back and did another set…and another…added some over-their-heads high one-legged jumps in for good measure, and kept jumping higher, and higher…went back to both legs and now really added some crazy height…

When his strength finally started to give, he squeezed out one more unbelievable jump, this the highest Hoeff had ever seen him do, one that could easily clear a third story landing. He landed with a terrific ground-shaking thud, bellowed a skull-splittingly loud victory hoot at the top of his lungs, then pressed that enormous bar overhead a few dozen times with a fang-filled snarl, just to flex on Julian even more. Satisfied, he dropped the bar to the ground with a thunderous crash, sprang about for a bit, aped around outrageously and strut.

And then promptly crashed and collapsed in a heap, grinning crazily and panting for breath.

“Ha! A hand of hands of reps…two hands of sets… easy! One-legged too! Bet…bet you can’t do that!!”

Julian wasn’t the type to hold a grudge, despite his fiercely competitive streak. So instead of brooding or anything like that, the big caveman grumbled a bit and shook his head with a smile, then delivered a congratulatory spine-shattering slap onto Vemik’s broad, ultra-muscular back.

“That was impressive as heck, big fella! Can’t say I’ve ever tried jumping pistol squats…”

“There’s a name for that? I thought I was doing a trick!”

“Yup! Heck, maybe hold a kettlebell or another barbell in your foot while you do it next time! Ooh, and your tail, too! But before I try any of that that for myself…” Julian mopped the sweat off his face, then turned his attention to Hoeff. “Something up, Hoeff?”

“Yeah. Looks like Big Boss is gettin’ ready to do the thing. We’re gonna need to leave soon for Cimbrean to do our dry runs.”

“Wish I could fight too…” Vemik grumbled unhappily. Normally he was too wrapped up in his own interests to be jealous of Ferd and crew, but this spring he’d been feeling a bit salty.

“You can, bud! But you’ve got a kid right now—”

“Kids!”

“By other women, yes, and they all have dads that love them very much. Your kid’s dad is you. And besides, you’re young yet. You’ve got time.”

“I know…”

Vemik wasn’t really arguing to run away and go play soldier, Hoeff knew. He was just feeling the call. Hell, Hoeff felt the call pretty hard too, which was why he’d enlisted, why he’d found himself on JETS, why he was there in the first place even after “retirement,” training up cavemonkeys and feeling like a wimpy little kid next to his two best superhuman friends.

Springtime had its own issues, too. “Anyway. You get your zoomies out, Vemik?”

Julian tried to choke back a laugh, and for a moment a flash of insulted rage shot across Vemik’s young, be-fanged face…but a moment later he flicked his ears ruefully and trilled. “Yes, Heff. Maybe you just too old to have rut!”

“That’s a your-people thing, young man. We’re not so cursed.”

“Is not curse!” Vemik said with a hint of sullen offense. “Is blessing by gods!”

“…Okay. Sorry. Still, I’m happy it’s not burning me, y’know? You still hurting?”

Vemik nodded sheepishly. “Yeah. Every morning, hurt and sore like after trial of manhood. Need to think before say anything, everything in my head angry all the time. Or, maybe not angry but like, I wanna fight everything?”

“Aggressive. The word you’re looking for is aggressive.”

“Yeah! Lots of Ag-ress-shun. Need to work good and hard and burn it out! Yan say, for good redcrest it never goes away. Gets worse every year. But the Giving we get…”

Vemik showed them both just what the rut was giving him. Goddamn “Is annoying Taking, but good Giving in turn!”

Hoeff glanced him over. Couldn’t argue with the results, really. “Fair enough. Anyway, shall we go check in on Rees? I think today is firearms instruction.”

“Ooh! Guns!” Vemik turned into a charging gorillablur without a second more thought.

Julian chuckled, “You coulda just said that from the beginning.”

“My monkeyskills aren’t as good as yours.”

“Heh.” Tarzan scratched at his big slab of a chest and stretched out a bit in a futile fight against tomorrow’s soreness. “Let’s go try and keep him out of trouble.”

Funtime was over. It seemed that the powers that be had need of Hoeff and his little crew of expeditionary murder again. Which would be a hell of a trick, really. The Ten’Gewek were just now entering the peak of their springtime rut.

As it turned out, that was both a bit of a blessing and a bit of a curse. Right now, the Ten’Gewek were at their most vigorously alive, when everything was bursting into life and everything in the jungle was taking advantage. Their natural playfulness and aggression spiked through the roof and gave them daring, so much so that they had the balls to prove things like their ability to safely jump down from almost any arbitrary height; they didn’t need parachutes! That all by itself was a trick Hoeff was scheming to learn for himself and use—the HEAT already used it, with some slight forcefield augmentation if they were coming in off orbital drop. Rees and Frasier weren’t gorilla enough to manage but that was okay. They had other talents Hoeff couldn’t quit match these days, at least not without a fuck of a lot of suffering.

Time to go check in on school time. Rees should have just started the lessons for the day.

Their “war-play” with Hoeff and the cadre had become a sort of mating signal among the women, too. Hoeff’s men got a lot of attention from the ladymonkeys, and that hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone. There was quite a bit of hennish gossip over the tribes’ radio network and apparently more than a bit via their Given-Man post. Getting on a team had become every young Ten’Gewek’s highest ambition.

Which was no doubt part of what was irking Vemik, really.

The Ten’Gewek made fantastic “sky-warriors” and they were starting to recognize it. Beyond their ridiculously unfair physical prowess, they were smart, had discipline, could follow and give orders. They had focus, too. Sure they were new to the modern world, but they were learning things quickly, and reading had become a “strong” skill everyone had to know. Teaching them how to cope with civilization had turned out to be mostly a non-issue, thank god.

The biggest hurdle had been drilling into the men how romance worked among humans, and what terrible consequences would befall them if they broke those rules. So far, they’d all been respectful on the rare occasion they got to step through to Cimbrean.

In the end, the biggest problem was making sure their intense focus was properly targeted, which wasn’t really all that hard with the right kind of respect. Julian commanded it, being something like a quasi redcrest or Given-Man himself, and nowadays Hoeff sorta did too. He quietly thanked ‘Horse and Playboy for all those months of torture, because if he were any less impressive, he probably wouldn’t be able to hold his murdermonkey’s attention.

Well…that wasn’t fair. They were pretty good actually, but like all young men in their prime…

“Oi!” Rees slapped Tumik on the shoulder. “Stop tasting the air for sex and pay bloody attention! You can go fuck your cock off when we’re done!”

“…Sarry.”

Ferd gently rapped Tumik’s skull with his knuckles and trilled deeply. “Now is not the time. We must study this gauss rifle, yes? Will be needed for our Big Mission.”

Hoeff shot him a thankful look when Tumik returned his attention to Rees. Ferd was feeling his springtime Fire too, and like all Given-Men was feeling it fiercely. Everyone’s aggression was through the roof thanks to the rut—ladies too—and the physical effects were unavoidably obvious, but with red-crested men (and Given-Mens’ Fire especially) the difference was dramatic and striking. If a fellow thought the cavemonkeys had big and showy physiques before…now, even by their standards, everything was turned up to eleven. None of it was merely for show, either. One-on-one, Ten’Gewek were dangerous.

“You good? We need to work out some energy? We have more ship-time scheduled today—”

That produced the obligatory stoic grunts from the cavemonkeys; they’d found that new bit of their training particularly arduous and draining.

“But, after that, I’d planned to go shooting today…”

That was guaranteed to hold everyone’s attention. For Vemik’s part, he was standing off to the side, watching, learning, quite literally bouncing on the balls of his feet, tail twitching to and fro…but he was deliberately not interfering. His focus was the most intense of all, and it never once wavered.

“No…I’m good, Rees.”

“Heh, good lad. Now, field strip this weapon quick…”

Rees was a pretty good teacher, after all. He didn’t talk down to them or guard his language, and the cavemonkeys looked up to him as a result. Funny, really. It was like a herd of full-size bulls chasing happily after their farmer.

“This is the latest gauss rifle from the HEAT’s bag o’ tricks, the GR-6e. Now, the thing about this rifle is how it fires its bullets. It doesn’t use gunpowder and cartridges like your SCARs do. This uses very powerful electromagnetic coils to fire the bullet. This has a lot of downsides: it makes the rifles very heavy and it also makes them bulkier. The power electronics on-board are absolutely state of the art, but none of us are smart enough to fix them in the field. If your weapon breaks, it’s broken without spare parts, which you’ll be carrying, which will make your loads heavier. Ballistics-wise, it isn’t necessarily any better, either. In fact, at the extremes of its power range, it’s markedly worse.

“That said,” he continued, “it does have some upside. As it’s all solid-state, there are few parts that need maintenance. Cleaning is much easier, there’s less barrel fouling. You can carry more ammo in less space, though it’ll also be a lot heavier…but you lot can manage that. What this rifle has going for it is its power scalability. It can throw bullets gentle enough to just annoy someone, or with so much force it’d rip my arm clean off from the recoil. And it can spit bullets faster than you’d believe, too. That’s why you big burly monkeyfolk will be given these. It can be a carbine or a machine gun, a quiet little peashooter or a fucking cannon. You get versatility. Me and Davies will be getting long range rifles. We’ll be getting precision.”

Lessons were safely on. Good. Hoeff and Julian could leave them behind for the moment and go find Yan.

It was a bit of a trek to find the big Given-Man. He’d been straying far from the village lately to hunt neyma, which were swift deer-like critters that were tricky to hunt and tasted fuckin’ delicious. Normally, villages didn’t hunt neyma—mostly they were hunted by traveling men, or by boys learning to Take—but for someone in Yan’s unique situation, they were perfect prey.

The springtime Fire had transformed him into a blackcrest. Was still transforming him. Probably would be through the summer, too. He was…monstrous. There really wasn’t any other word. Monstrous to the point that he made his three-month-ago self seem kinda unimpressive. A bit taller, much broader, as hard-bodied, stocky and muscle-packed as he could possibly be and still function. He didn’t look young, didn’t look old. A guy couldn’t guess how old he was, really. By Ten’Gewek standards he was some new kind of handsome, his old nagging complaints were melting away…

The gods had Given.

The price he paid for all that gain was that he endlessly hungry and in constant agony from the growing pains, so to say he was feeling aggressive was an understatement. Approaching him therefore required a measure of care. Sure enough, the moment Julian made their presence known, he whipped around, the most vicious snarl on his face promising infinite punishment—

Which instantly transformed into unmitigated glee when he saw his friends. The poor guy was on a wild rollercoaster of emotion, right now. He was fully aware of himself, though, and was his usual considerate self. His bearhug didn’t break even one of Hoeff’s bones. Whaddaguy.

Yan didn’t even bother with a greeting, just jumped right into the question he knew they’d ask. “Better today. A little. Still bad, though. Bad as my first Fire. Maybe worse actually.”

“Get any sleep last night?” From what Hoeff had seen, Yan didn’t so much sleep right now as crash. He’d go two or three days at full blast, then all of a sudden there’d be an immobile snoring lump that everyone else had to step around all day. And then sometime in the middle of the night, there’d be a ferocious hunting hoot out among the trees, and the remains of a crushed flat and crushed dry critter over the fire by morning, Yan having eaten the haunches, shoulders, and liver all by himself.

And having squeezed out and drunk every drop of the poor critter’s blood, too.

As it turned out, there was a reason Ten’Gewek had long forked prehensile tongues and enormous fangs. During the spring they had a strong taste for blood. Shoulda been obvious in retrospect, considering their mouth and tongue were black from high levels of iron, but…

Still. Seasonal gorilla vampires. One thing was becoming pretty clear with time: the Ten’Gewek really were tied tight to the planet and the forest. Biology ruled them every day of the year, and any future exploration would be severely constrained by their physiological needs.

“Some sleep,” Yan confirmed. “Late. Not long, though. Got itchy. Made an axe. Lifted when village was asleep.”

“We heard,” Julian commented laconically.

“Should have joined me!”

“Yan, at this point you could prob’ly snap ‘Horse in two. Anyway. Got a message from big boss.”

“Hmph. He should come here and lift too! Show him what real man can do…” Yan rumbled, but good-naturedly. “What message?”

“Need a team for a big mission soon. Ferd’s team, ideally.”

“Hmm. Fire season, but low fire for him this year. Was expected though, often smaller Fires after big ones, yes?”

“So he’s good for it.”

“Yes. They all good for it, but he would be best. Good man, Ferd. Strong mind. Fire will make him sharper. Good team, too.” Yan grabbed Hoeff and noogied affectionately, “and good man leading them!”

“Urf…thanks. Might need more than one team, actually.”

“So really is big Taking, like you promised in fall.”

Julian nodded, expression grim. “We’ve got three operational JETS teams now and this might take all three. There’s still some time before the mission, but they should all start training for it. HEAT is setting up the training course back on Cimbrean. This is all secret, by the way. Not for Professor or any of his staff still here. Not for Vemik either…”

“No fear. Vemik has other things to think about anyway. He doesn’t know it yet.”

Yan had been getting better with his contractions, which was strange because he only really got fluent in English when he was preoccupied with something else. He let Hoeff go and scratched at his ear. “…Could use your thoughts.”

Well. One didn’t get the chance to counsel King Kong very often. Julian and Hoeff glanced at each other, then nodded.

“Of course.”

Yan pulled his tail around and ran his thumb along the crest. It was black now. Maybe the very, very faintest hint of iridescent gore red at the ends of the tufty stuff at the end, but otherwise to the human eye, his once-brilliant hair was now as black as a crow’s wing.

“…Been trying to pretend this time wasn’t coming,” Yan rumbled. “But blackcrests can’t stay with their tribe. I am…the Fire never really stops, now. Only fades. My tribe now is bigger. Need to protect all the tribes, because the forest is dangerous. Does that make sense?

“Sure.”

“Problem is, when I go, the gods will Take someone else. Tribe always has a Given-Man…”

Julian understood instantly. “Vemik.”

“…Yes.”

Hoeff arched an eyebrow at Julian. “You think?”

“After Yan, he’s the tribe’s dominant male. He’s more dominant than some Given-Men and this year’s rut hit him almost like the Fire. You saw how easily he kicked my ass today, right?”

Hoeff thought guiltily of the paper on Ten’Gewek hormonal triggers and the Given-Man phenomenon he’d promised Claire he’d read. He hadn’t, yet. He’d been too busy reading her.

…He really was a walking stereotype sometimes.

Well, he’d better read up, because that was the thing about the Fire: it burned. Everyone was a bit cranky from growing pains and general soreness, but the really big males had it ten times worse. The Fire gripped them, and wouldn’t let the most dangerous of them go for months.

Like it was doing to young Vemik. He was already about the most impressive redcrest around and the rut had hit him over the head like a goddamn sledgehammer, to the point where he was more or less filling out into a smaller version of Ferd. Cranky as fuck too, even though he was friendly. Still, not even his relentless cheer could quite cut through the bullshit going on in his body and brain, which wasn’t surprising: Vemik was probably something like seventeen or eighteen years old, and for Ten’Gewek that was the middle of a man’s youthful peak.

Which was long as fuck. Instead of running from seventeen to twenty-one like it tended to for humans, for Ten’Gewek it went from fifteen to twenty-five, and ran at full tilt the whole time.

…What about blackcrests like Yan? What exactly did the Fire do to them?

“I could hold on another year, maybe two…” Yan fretted. “Still a new blackcrest, real Fire will be next year. Would even be good for Vemik! He’d be a very young Given-Man. But so was I. I just…want him to stay redcrest for longer. Less worries for him. More sky-thinking.”

Ah. There it was.

“Well,” said Julian, clearly thinking quickly. “I mean, let’s work this out. What does a Given-Man need? He needs a Singer he cares for, right?”

“Always, yes. The gods say, only if Singer and Given-Man in harmony, can a tribe be whole.”

“Well, in his case he could inherit your tribe. He’d have the same Singer. Your niece, his love.”

“…True…”

“And he needs lots of potential mates, right? Didn’t your tribe just trade daughters?”

“…Maybe was thinking ahead of this, but yes.”

“And…will the change make him any less of a sky-thinker?”

That, clearly, worried Yan a lot. “Maybe. It is…the Fire makes all things stronger for you, not just good muscle. Better taste, better touch. See better, think better. But, also fills your head with…”

“Aggression?”

“Yes. Your thoughts bend to the tribe, always. I am still Yan, but always I think of tribe first. All Given-Men do this. Is why I want to protect Vemik. His sky-thinking is good for the tribe.”

“You learned to value it more because of him, though. You sky-think now too. Because you know the tribe needs it. Why your people need it, and now you are becoming Given-Man for all Ten’Gewek, right? So, I don’t see why he’d stop. He knows the value of it probably even more than you…” Julian counted off on his fingers. “Anyway, the last thing a Given-Man needs is loyal men, right? Well, most all the men in the tribe are related to him and you both. They like him, you’ve seen it.”

“…Yes. Is one other thing. He must face the Lodge.”

“…And you will be the one who initiates him.” There was clearly something there that Hoeff was missing, but he could about guess what that meant. Initiations weren’t often nice things.

Yan practically slumped in upon himself, overcome with what could only be grief.

“It will be…big Taking, for a man as good as him. And big betrayal. He does not know.”

“Could be an even bigger betrayal to leave him face it without you, buddy.”

“He’ll need to face it anyway, sooner or later,” Hoeff pointed out. “Better he do it when you’re in charge.”

“And you may not be here long,” Julian added. “I think you will, but only the gods know for sure. So my thinking is, you can’t fight the gods forever, Yan. If they’re going to Take him, let it happen while you’re still here to guide him and help him through it. And while you both have plenty of time to repair your friendship after the Taking.”

Yan looked up—Jesus he looked so sad—and nodded. Nodded on the verge of tears.

“You’re right. I think, Human’s biggest Giving is wisdom. You have so much of it. Maybe…scares me, a little.” He stood up, looking about as subdued as Hoeff had ever seen him, and headed toward one of the nearby trees. “I’ll…think,” he said. “Thank you.”

They watched him vanish up the Ketta as if gravity simply didn’t apply to him, and turned back toward their camp once he’d vanished among the lower branches.

Julian walked in silence rather than humming as he usually did, looking distant, thoughtful and rather sad himself. That said a lot, and for Hoeff’s part the conversation had raised some things he just couldn’t will himself to leave alone. He waited until they were about halfway between the village and the research camp before finally voicing them.

“Hey, Julian?”

“Yeah?”

“You faced the Lodge, right?”

Julian paused, and stopped walking at the base of a tree. “…Didn’t get the full treatment. I’m not a Given-Man. But I got the important bits.”

“…What’s gonna happen to him?”

“Sacred oath, my friend. I can’t say. But I will say this: not everyone survives.”

“And it’s gonna be Yan who almost kills him, isn’t it?”

Julian’s silence was damning.

“Well…” Hoeff ventured. “He knows his limits. And you’re still friends.”

Julian paused again, and then relented with a sigh. “I knew it was coming. Had to, to arrange for medical support. It’s one of the big reasons I’m only ‘honorary,’ because I was allowed to cheat a little. And like I said: I didn’t get the full treatment. Yan and the Given-Men were restrained with me. They didn’t let me really have it until they’d figured out I could take it. Tell nobody. Especially don’t tell any of Dan’s staff. Or Dan himself.”

“…Why, though? Why do it that way?”

“It’s a death and rebirth. The end of one life and the start of a new one. They kill the man who was, and give the man who comes after a new name. And as a practical matter, it’s important to the peace that they can respect each other’s ability to murder each other. One of the things they’ll teach him is how to fight really dirty. You must have seen some of Ferd’s nastier tricks.”

“…Once he stopped playing nice, yeah.”

Well, fuck.

“Hoeff. Buddy. I guarantee you he was still playing nice.” Julian took a deep, somewhat haunted breath. “Now…I’ve said enough. And I know you can hear me, Yan. But he’d have figured most of it out, so…”

The Given-Man crashed out of the tree with a ground-shaking thump that made Hoeff jump a foot sideways. He’d genuinely had no idea the huge murdermonkey was up there, nor that he was very annoyed.

“Yes, yes. Heff too smart inside his head. Very wise little man, he is.” Yan glared down, tail lashing behind him.

…Daniel Hoeff was not a stupid man. He knew when his life was suddenly in the balance. “My lips are fuckin’ sealed, big guy.”

It took Yan a second to puzzle that out, but he nodded in acknowledgement and twitched his tail. “Anyway. Yes. You right, Jooyun Sky-Brother. I must ‘man up’ and face this. But!” Another of Yan’s wild emotional swings gripped him. “Is springtime! Time for best play and best feast! I go hunt a good werne, we eat good tonight! Come with me!!”

Hoeff actually would have enjoyed a good hunt…

“Can’t, big man. Duty calls. Remember the message?”

Yan grumped slightly, but his sudden cheer was undiminished. “Yes yes, go teach our men! We will Give whatever we can. They jump to Cimbrean soon?”

“Yeah. Maybe let the fire settle down a little…”

“Yes. Ferd’s new tribe just getting settled! Give him and his allies another moon and they’ll be ready for him to go fight.”

“I’ll hunt,” Julian said. “Be nice to bag one more before I go home. The family loves werne jerky.”

“Come, then!” Yan jumped like ten meters back up into the tree and gestured eagerly. “We Take two!”

Hoeff could see Julian resign himself to the back-breaking work that would entail. “Alright, big fella. The herd’s up by the cliffside lately…”

They vanished among the trees, with a backward wave of farewell from Julian, and Hoeff was alone. He took a moment, a deep breath, and shook himself out a bit with the feeling that he’d just learned something about his friends that he’d rather not have known.

Work called, not to mention that paper Claire wanted him to read. Suddenly, he was much more interested to go through it and see how much the scientists knew. They’d probably figured out more than Yan guessed.

He set boot to trail once again, and walked away.

The Hierarchy’s Footprint
By Ava Ríos

This last in my three-part series on the state of Gaoian civilization and what’s next for our friends turns to somebody with a little more seniority than my last two interviews. He’s a familiar sight to most Folcthans, generally found hanging out in Quarterside Park or at the Multi-Faith Center. And always, nowadays, accompanied by his colossal “temple dog,” Doofus.

It’s also my great pleasure and privilege to consider him a friend.

Gyotin, Champion of Clan Starmind

“In all the galaxy, there is precisely one species who have been left effectively unmarked by the Hierarchy: Yours.”

[Image: Gyotin sitting comfortably in the park, in front of the Starmind monastery. He’s wearing simple black robes, and is slightly dwarfed by Doofus, who is resting alertly alongside him.]

“In fact, one obstacle we have is that a lot of Humans simply don’t believe the Hierarchy exists. Why should they? You don’t have their claw-marks all over your history, your culture doesn’t bear the clear signs of their interference.”

Such as?

“Well, the fact that you don’t have just the one ‘your culture’ for a start. Look at every other species in known space. We’re all rather…monolithic, culturally. Oh, certainly, you can point to subdivisions like my peoples’ Clans, the Great Houses of the Kwmbwrw, the Chehnash tribes…”

He waves a paw dismissively.

“Functionally, the differences are minor. No other species has your rich tapestry of recorded history. That was one of the things we found deeply odd about your people, on first contact: that your civilizational history was so well-recorded, and so short. Every other species had a long, slow climb to the stars. Yours?”

He flicks a paw upward and hisses a noise between his teeth that can best be represented as “schwoop!”

“Not just that, but the differences between humans of sufficiently divorced cultures can be incredible. The Five Eyes nations show some variation in language usage, manners, mannerisms, political leaning…but compare them to the Russian Federation. Or the People’s Republic of China. You tell me, Ava, do you think you have more in common with me, or with [Russian President] Dimitri Goncharov?”

I’ve never met him.

“I have. There’s no doubt you’re the same species, of course, but the difference is stark. It surprised the hell out of me. It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that Humans all broadly share the same priorities and outlook, because of course I’m actually only familiar with quite a tiny slice of your species. Though, that would be an accurate and safe assumption with any other species.”

[Image: Gyotin and President Goncharov during the President’s visit to Folctha.]

“You, by luck, were left alone. Earth sits in an unpopulated backwater at the far end of the Border Stars, She escaped notice until, as far as we can tell, only about a hundred and fifty to two hundred years ago. You weren’t invisibly coerced into a unified world government. Your religions spread and evolved unmolested, the founding principles of your civilizations emerged organically. What the Hierarchy did to Humans, when they found you, was damage control.”

He looks sadly across at his monastery.

“Us? They sculpted us. All of us. We are, I fear, very much what they want us to be.”

The Great Father has given a number of speeches on that very topic. According to our best intelligence, the Gao were meant as a contingency control species, whose purpose was to serve as a contained adversarial pressure on the “substrate” species, in order to combat stagnation. To that end a great many things were done to their kind over the centuries. Please see our interactive feature for a more complete look at this tale.

“For example: Our gender imbalance, the very thing at the core of impending population collapse will also guarantee our quick recovery. Our intense loyalty and pack behavior. Our shortened lifespans, rapid maturity, long prime years and abrupt senescence. None of these are natural traits. They’re far too convenient. They’re exactly the traits you would invent if you were grooming a whole species toward a violent purpose.”

And now, as is the Great Father, your people are defined by that violence and aggression.

“…I suppose that’s true, from a certain point of view. For me, all this raises the question of what the others were for. Why are they as they are? If the traits bred into the Gao make us ideal for our role, what kind of role is benefited by docility, indecision and a tendency to bicker among themselves rather than unite against an obvious outside threat?”

I remind him that I’m here to interview him, not to answer questions. After a chittering apology, he explains.

“Livestock. That’s what most of the galaxy were bred to be. That’s how most of our fellow sophonts were kept. But the miracle of sapience is, once it becomes aware of new horizons, it reaches toward them. A cow will never see an eagle circle overhead and ask, ‘could I do that?’ Sapient beings are not livestock, and never can be as soon as they see that there’s an alternative.

Which is what the Hunters were purposed to contain.

“And my people as well. But, now things are different. We are aware of the deception, of our collective enemy. It is now inevitable we will deal with this travesty. They’ve lost already.”

How can you be sure?

[Image: Gyotin talking animatedly, waving his paws as he prowls around.]

“Because there’s no going back from here! What are they supposed to do, make all the species in the galaxy forget that Humans exist? Forget what we’ve seen, and what your people have inspired in us? That other deathworlders exist? They’d have to eradicate every civilization in the galaxy and start over, and they can’t do that, because they need us!”

“The question at this point is not whether we will destroy them. We already have. The question is whether we will survive their downfall.”

Do you think that’s unlikely?

“Cornered beasts, and all that. And who’s to say what gets crushed when an empire collapses? Especially one so old and so powerful as theirs. We have no option but to bring down the Hierarchy at this point, even though doing so could lead to incalculable misery. Indeed, will lead to incalculable misery, if nothing serves to replace the infrastructure they installed across the galaxy.”

He slows his pacing, strokes Doofus, then sits down next to the dog again.

“And then of course there’s the long term. What does a universe post-Hierarchy and post-Hunters look like? Right now there are only three known deathworld species. In a thousand years, what will a galaxy dominated by deathworlders look like? What of the non-deathworlders? What will they have to do to compete? What happens to the livestock when the ranchers are gone?”

One of Gyotin’s most prominent personality quirks is his propensity to answer questions with a barrage of deeper questions. He shakes his head.

“It would be a terrible mistake to assume that the Hierarchy’s influence on the universe has been an unadulterated negative. They have done terrible things, exterminated thousands of species, warped and sculpted others, and ruled this galaxy with an iron grip since…well, effectively forever. They have maintained a stable galaxy for their own selfish ends. But isn’t stability a good thing? Some amount of it, anyway. What kind of an unstable, terrible age might we usher in by felling them?”

Are you really worried by that?

He chitters and shakes his head.

“No. No, not really. But even when the established order is terrible, you destroy it at your peril. And never without fearing your own potential to replace it with something worse.”

[Image: Inside the Starmind monastery, Gyotin leads his brothers in meditation]

You asked what happens to the other species when the Hierarchy are gone. You didn’t mention what you think will happen to the Gao.

“Because I have no idea. This conflict has defined us, and will continue to define us until it is done. The moment when it’s over…that’s a singularity, to me. I can’t see past it. Maybe My Father can, but if so he’s never told me what he predicts. But that’s the nature of the future, I think. None of us ever see very far; our imaginations concern themselves with today, and tomorrow, and next week. I have no idea what’s coming for the Gao. Or for Humanity. Nobody does. We’ll see, I guess. The next generation will trouble themselves with the questions of their time, our generation will let go and wish them good luck, and life, in whatever form, will go on.”

He smiles at me, perking his ears up optimistically.

“I’m happy with that.”

Date Point: 18y2m AV
HMS Sharman, (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ferd Given-Man

What a strange new life he found himself living.

Ferd was pulled in two directions. There was the Debt, of course. The Giving to the Humans and Gao for the fact that the People were even still alive. That was a solemn, sacred duty all itself. But there was also the sacred duty of being a Given-Man. And it was hard to do both.

Tribes needed a Given-Man. They needed it so much that if they didn’t have one, the gods would Take usually the biggest and strongest redcrest of the tribe and Give him the Fire. That was a problem, because then what happened when the old Given-Man came back?

He would need to fight for his tribe, and fights between Given-Men were terrible Takings.

The Singers and the Lodge had stories about how they once warred for the smaller City People, who had much wisdom from the gods to make up for their softer, weaker bodies. They had learned many things on their own they had never Given to the Forest People, but they did Give when it suited their idea of the balance. The biggest Giving was the secret on how Given-Men could live apart from their tribes, for a time. It was easy, really. A Given-Man needed to make good friends with another Given-Man, and they needed to live very close together, share lands and even almost share villages. Then, they shared tribes, when one was away and the other was not.

So, for Ferd, his tribe was safely in Eb Given-Man’s hands. Which was good, because he’d been away long enough now that he was truly beginning to miss home. The food was good, the training satisfying, the learnings made his mind itch in the best way. The new tools—including properly fitting armor made the Sky-Tribe way—were good and strong, just right for his needs. He could stand outside a ship in it, look down from above the sky!

It had been beautiful. The gods had made a strange, wonderful world, and getting to really see it from far, far away had been…humbling? But also fun! Being weightless was strange. As was the idea that weight wasn’t the same thing as mass, which did not go away. That had been a fun day of training! Still, none of that was nearly as strange as when Baseball explained how gravity worked. Space and time were the same thing, and curved into each other!

He tried to explain the math too, but…Vemik said the math of moving things was called ‘calc you-luss’ and was a long way down the trail. Even he wasn’t there quite yet. So, that was okay. Maybe some day!

Ferd’s head was swimming with sky-thoughts these days. Sometimes, he wondered when Yan or Vemik might join a team, if for no other reason than to learn the biggest learnings.

And he had his Amy, when he was feeling itchy. Had her noodly little boyfriend, too! And when they were busy, or maybe wanted to be alone, there were enough other humans out there willing to fuck, he just had to take it slow and gentle with them.

Had to bite more carefully, too.

But! That was okay! He loved the humans, but not like he loved his own tribe, his own people. He might have felt a little bad about that but that was being silly; everyone loved their own kind the most, and that was natural and as the gods wanted it. As long as one kept good friends with their Sky-Friends, there was nothing wrong with that.

There was a big Taking, coming, though. And preparing for it was hard.

Take air, for instance. Ferd had needed to wear oxygen before, but the training they were doing now was in thinner, weaker air than ever before. Where they were going, he was told, the air was there enough to live without the mask…but not to fight. The Gao and the Humans needed oxygen too, but only the very biggest and scariest of them needed it as much as Ferd and his people.

Training for weak air was even more humbling than floating above the sky. Warhorse solved the problem by having very big lungs in his very big chest, but that was one of the strange ways the Humans were strongest; they could just go forever. For Ferd…it took lots of work.

Months, in fact. But he could do it. The People could be strong in the sky for their Sky-Friends.

Which was good, because the day when the training paid off and the Taking finally came was upon them. And this one…they all knew the details. They’d been told from the very start, and had planned and trained and planned some more ever since. This was a right Taking, a righting of wrongs.

Heff was there, in his own new armor, helping them suit up and double-checking everything to prevent deadly mistakes. He was more or less a man of the People himself these days, and as far as Ferd was concerned was a worthy leader to take over for Wild. Strong, good men.

Costello, though…Costello was stronger. He was HEAT. And if Ferd had learned one thing in the last few months, it was just how strong the HEAT really were, and why his people weren’t yet ready to be among them.

But they would be, one day. Until then, though…

He sat, and listened as the briefing began.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
HMS Sharman, (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Major Anthony Costello

The SOR was about to engage in its first-ever joint operation between HEAT and JETS, and its largest-ever combined op with the Royal Spaceborne Navy, the US Army, the US Navy, the US Space Force, the Clans of Gao…special operators from every service, select regulars as well…

It was a huge and complex amassment of forces, done very rapidly, and done very conspicuously as a final warning to the Kwbwrw Great Houses. Most of whom, gratifyingly, were conspicuously isolating Great House Henen.

Costello’s briefing was the many and varied special teams required for the op. He would be commanding HEAT, of course, but the full operational package was present for the brief, having had plenty of time to make friends. Including a long, expensive, wild weekend early on that was probably going to go down in history as Rooney’s most profitable night, despite the broken chairs (since replaced) and the broken pool table (…on order), and maybe a few broken hearts.

…And the broken dartboard. Ferd could throw things pretty hard.

Thank God Patrick Rooney was a jolly Irishman at heart, even if the closest to Ireland he’d ever been was Rhode Island. So long as the Lads paid for the damage, he was happy.

Once everyone got past the initial sizing-up phase of First Contact and established the all-important pecking order, they all got along like a house on fire, and that had made their month of combined-joint mission training move as smoothly as could possibly be hoped for.

And today, after all that training, all that briefing and all that preparation, finally, was go time. Just the final group briefing remained before their training became reality. Before they got into the meat of it, though…there was one small solemn, important, and absolutely hilarious duty Costello had to attend to.

“So before we begin, I would like to congratulate our assigned Airmen on, at last, their finalized transfer to the US Space Force…”

There were groans all around, and some good-natured cheering from those who represented other branches.

“…And on their new service traditions,” Costello finished smoothly. “Guardians, I salute you!”

‘Horse especially was not happy about that. Where Burgess and even Firth were taking it with a degree of good humor, Arés apparently had a particular bugbear in that word. Costello only spoke a little Spanish, but he got the gist of the stream of dark mutterings Horse growled from behind his titanic crossed arms.

“Don’t like it, ‘Horse?”

“It’s stupid!” He exploded. “I didn’t work my ass off to be what I am just so’s some nerds in sat-ops can LARP like they’re in a movie!”

“Big words from someone whose official job is as a Protector. Now you’re a Guardian Protector! I know I feel fuckin’ safe as shit.” Costello grinned at the chuckles from around the room. “Besides, aren’t you working on a double masters, ‘Horse? You’re hardly one to cast stones…”

“In exercise science! It’s a literal jock degree!”

“On top of a Masters of Nursing, and all the relevant certifications—”

“Okay, fine! But that’s just basically my job anyway!”

“You’re a nerd, ‘Horse. A nerd of muscle and guns and paramedicine. Fuckin’ own it.”

He grinned ruefully and shook his head, but also bounced his chest—which was a neat trick, as he had his full armor on—just to remind everyone who exactly the biggest meanest badass around was. Not that there was much confusion on that point, since the only two guys in the fuckin’ galaxy who could could even remotely compete with or humble him weren’t there.

Ah, the silliness of combat arms.

Ferd, still feeling jolly, hooted cheerfully and poked Arés with his tail. “Guardian and protector! Will you keep us safe from scary forest monsters, ‘Horse?”

“I will pop your head with my left bicep, if you ain’t careful…”

“I dunno,” Burgess nudged his friend. “I think ‘Guardian’ kinda fits. Paint you green, you’d do a good Drax impression.”

“I Am Groot,” Firth rumbled, and grinned hugely at Arés when the ‘shorter’ man glared at him. “You always were wrapped up in it all, and that’s good! But right now you’ve got a plastic shit-tube up your ass, more tubes in your arm and neck, you’re being squeezed half to death by a suit made out of ceramics and goo, and you’re about to jump from outer space on top of some poor fuck and ruin their fuckin’ day. Try to keep some perspective.”

“Speaking of which, sooner we get this briefing done, sooner we’re out of the suits again,” Costello said. “So, here, once again, is our target…” He called up the satellite footage and imagery pulled from House Henen’s own inside documentation. “This, gentlemen, is Mirw-Kwenek Wrrmthwemwnwn. For your purposes, ‘Eclipse Palace.’ It’s a big old galaxy and we’ve already seen some Big Dumb Objects floating around out there…”

And blown them up, he mentally added.

“…Well, turns out there’s a weird little tidally locked planet on the fringes of House Henen space where, millions of years ago, somebody put a fucking huge solar shade between it and the star. Whoever built it is long gone, but their terraforming work outlived them. That planet’s as dead as Mars, but the atmospheric pressure and oxygen levels are actually inside tolerable norms. There’s a spot right in the middle of the equatorial desert that is in permanent eclipse thanks to the solar shade, and House Henen, being drama queens, built a palace there. It is the Grandmatriarch’s sanctum sanctorum, her private retreat and, she believes, the safest place in all the galaxy.”

He looked around the room. “We’re going to prove her wrong.”

He let them consider the palace a moment longer. When he’d first heard about it, he’d imagined some cartoon villain castle of black obsidian in menacing spiky shapes, but the Kwmbwrw had disappointed, there. The palace was a skewed trio of vast single-span glass domes, collectively the only spot on the entire planet where anything grew—nocturnal plants, fungi and megalichen imported from all over the galaxy, all bioluminescent, all of them perfectly happy in the crepuscular lighting conditions.

The living quarters, kitchens, halls and all the other stuff that made it a palace ringed the edges of the garden domes, and covertly gathered information suggested the presence of a bunker network below the whole complex, not to mention a hefty supply of weapon systems both inside and out, including a fighter wing based a few miles away, and a number of heavy system pickets patrolling the sky above.

Henenwgwyr wasn’t totally wrong. It was a fortress. One to take damn seriously. But they’d assailed worse.

“House Henen has been experimenting on abducted Gaoian biodrones and converting them into sleeper agents with programmed personalities. Such agents are obviously an atrocity, but they’re also a major security threat. It’s likely that Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr will have significant intelligence relating to this operation available to her at all times; our primary mission is to secure said intelligence so we can put a stop to it. Our primary objective is Henenwgwyr herself, who you will have known as ADELLE.”

Costello didn’t quite understand that code name, but whatever.

“As a reminder, you will find the gravity noticeably lower—exactly as you’ve trained—and the air a bit thin, but again, that’s why you’ve been enjoying the hospitality of Mrs. Giovanni and her Warehouse of Torments this past month. Do we have any environmental questions before we brief the mission timeline?”

Ferd and Genn raised their hands simultaneously, then contrived via MonkeyGrunt for Ferd to ask on behalf of them both. “Did we re-think about ocks-e-gen tanks? The warehouse training show us, we will use them up very quick. Very small safety margin…”

“We’ve sourced much higher-pressure tanks from Hephaestus which have an identical regulator to the one that you’ve been training with. Sorry it took so long, but they had to be manufactured and tested…”

“Takes time.”

“Yes. Your wrist computers are updated accordingly, you should have another forty minutes of go-time before you need to take it easy. So…nice fat margin. Does that answer the question?”

Ferd grunted in acknowledgement.

“Alright then.”

Costello dismissed the familiar map of the palace and called up his next slide, a closer, tighter shot with a couple of items highlighted. “The sequence of operations is as follows. Firstly, Clan Whitecrest will be performing a stealth insertion along with JETS Team Two, using ‘Silent but Deadly’ and ‘Drunker on Turkeyer’—yes, I know, save the giggles for later—as their rides. Their immediate objective will be the rapid neutralization of surveillance elements located here, and here. Most of that work will be done by Whitecrest; Team Two is mostly along for the ride, as they are the lead on ADELLE.

“Once surveillance is in place, and Team Two signals readiness, we will insert the HEAT. Their immediate objectives will be to neutralize planetary defenses, including a small Farthrow generator that our intel shows was rather hastily installed on the surface. Once that is down, they will construct a jump array, and the balance of our teams will portal through to obtain control of the installation as fast as is possible. JETS Team Two will be available for use after they have achieved their objective.

“Simultaneous to HEAT’s insertion, our naval assets will begin their campaign. As that’s a little beyond our scope here, I will not brief it in detail. Suffice to say, their job is to smash shit, cover our sky, and provide ‘close air support’ as necessary. During that, the balance of forces will be interested in securing the site and the planet, and doing so as fast as is possible.” Costello looked around the room. “As you are well aware, this is an unusual mission. It sits somewhere between direct action and an invasion. Time is our most precious element; we need to be done and gone before the rest of the Houses feel compelled to respond. So, once ADELLE is secure, the palace is cleaned out and the intelligence recovered, we’re leaving. Given the sheer size of this op that will be a bit of a challenge, but the 75th will be humping in their own arrays, and of course First Fang’s got some big strong ‘Backs to help. It’ll be all hands to get the fuck outta Dodge when the signal’s given.

“So,” Costello concluded. “This is the ultimate coalition smash-and-grab. It’s one for the history books. Three species, multiple armed forces, the culmination of the last ten years of training and development. We’re going in the history books for this one.”

Fierce energy was universal. Human, Gao and Ten’Gewek alike traded grimly eager looks. Some of the strongest beings in the universe rubbed shoulders with much more modest and far colder, far quieter professionals, but one thing was clear: they were absolutely ready for this.

Good.

“So: final checks, slam some food down. In an hour, we stack bodies like cordwood.”

That applied to him, too. HEAT life was eat life, as the new kid, Thompson, had put it. There was only one good way to get energy into a living body after all, so…food. High-density performance food, designed to power, not satisfy.

Except it did satisfy, in a completely different way. By the time everyone had eaten their assigned meals, the first of that energy hit everyone’s bloodstream, HEAT operators or otherwise. They were all amping up and ready to tear through the walls.

They had a mission to do. And it was time.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Starship Destroying Fury, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

It hurt, not going into this himself. Daar had always been the kind of leader to wield the knife himself. But this time…

A head of state directly invading to punish the Grandmatriarch of a Great House? That woulda been a step too far for what was theoretically a limited operation. Much as he woulda wished it was otherwise, for the sake of the Gao, he had to sit this one out.

But he could damn well send ‘em off.

From the bridge of the Destroying Fury, he could see them all in tight formation, close enough for the naked eye. From the humans came the V-class Destroyers, plus USS Hammer and USS Fargo. HMS Caledonia and HMS Myrmidon, theSan Diego, the Gene Roddenberry, the Robert A. Heinlein, and their new fourth sibling, the USS Apollo.

The Gaoian force was no less impressive. The Destroying Fury, as his personal flagship, could not be present, but there were two others to take her place: the Vengeful Fury, and the Avenging Rage. Alongside them, a whole squadron of Clan One-Fang’s finest, spearheaded by the Charging Blaze and commanded by Fleetfather Neemi aboard the Scorching Claw.

Flitting between them, flights of Voidrippers—they were all feeling the loss of the Firebirds, whose presence would have really rounded this thing out—plus the sleek, almost invisible darts that were Silent But Deadly and his beloved Drunker on Turkeyer.

It was a hell of a sight. Black masses on a black background, visible only by the way they blotted out the stars or were silhouetted against Cimbrean. Not the biggest fleet ever formed by a long way, but if Daar even could meaningfully be a bettin’ man any longer, he woulda bet on this fleet and the men it was carrying to take on almost anything.

This wasn’t a speech-giving occasion. This was too necessary a moment for that. They were righting a wrong, not rocking the world. But he owed it to them to observe, to send them into battle personally even if he couldn’t lead them.

So he stood on his flagship’s bridge, listened to the command chatter, and, in silence, he watched until they’d all flashed black, and were gone.

And with that duty done, he gave a nod to the Fury’s navigator. They had their own rendezvous to make.

It was time to address the Council.

++END CHAPTER 70++

MORE BY THE AUTHOR

Dandelion

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, and you can read it for free on Royal Road where we are publishing each chapter on a monthly basis.

If you get impatient and would like to read the whole thing, then you can purchase it in hardcover and paperback through your local book store or online wherever good books are sold. Alternatively, you can download it for free through Kindle Unlimited.

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This chapter to you with the help of…

Santa

AKA St. Nicholas, Father Christmas and Kris Kringle

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow and Riker

Forty Humans

TTTA

Adam Shearsby

Alvaro Gaitan

Anthony Landry

Anthony Youhas

Armond471

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blackwolf393

Brigid

Chris Candreva

Chris Dye

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HungryWerewolf

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Karthik Mohanarangan

Katja

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Marquis Talmadge

Nicolas Gruenbeck

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NovaTheSpaceWolf

Ortheri

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Ryan Seaman

Sam Berry

Shane Wegner

Sun Rendered

Taylor McGee

Theningaraf

Trevor C
tsanth

Xultanis

Yeania Aeon

Zachary Galicki

As well as fifty-seven Deathworlders…

Adam Beeman
Alexandre Smirnov
Andrew
Andrew Ford
Andrew Preece atp
Ben Thrussell
Brandon Hicks
Bruce Ludington
Chris Bausch
Chris Meeker damnusername
Daniel R.
David Jamison
Derek Price
Devin Rousso galrock0
Gavin Smart
Ignate Flare
Ivan Smirnov
Jim Hamrick
John Campbell
Jon
Justin Hood
Katie Drzewiecki
Kristoffer Skarra
Lina lovot
Matt
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
Mikee Elliott
Nathaniel Batts
Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Patrick Huizinga
Richard A Anstett
RJ Smiley
Ryan Cadiz
Sam
Saph
Sean Calvo
Sir Xaph
Stephen Prescott
Stratigan theWorst
Valiander
Vincent Leighton
Volka Creed walter thomas
William Kinser
Woodsie13
Yshmael Salas ziv
Zod Bain

…Eighty-five Friendly ETs, 145 Squishy Xenos and 318 Dizi Rats, all hanging on the christmas tree.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work under fair use are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not automatically share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders chapter 70 will continue in part 3

Chapter 72: The Reckoning

Date Point: 18y2m AV
HMS Myrmidon, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

The Kwmbwrw had learned much over their long history of fighting the Hunters. They’d had the misfortune to evolve on the fringes of Hunter space after all, and the Hunters had treated them as juicy prey since prehistory. There were cave paintings on their homeworld depicting the paleolithic Kwmbwrw fleeing as Hunter ships descended from the sky.

In that regard, they had something in common with the poor E-Skurel-Ir. But the Hunters had been satisfied with merely raiding the Kwmbwrw, who had, rather than growing up as helpless slaves, instead grown up heavily militarized and obsessively paranoid. And their first instinct, when under threat, was to bunker the Matriarchs and Grandmatriarchs away behind the heaviest fortifications they could build.

Hence, Eclipse Palace.

In Kwlsh, the place’s name was Mirw-Kwenek Wrrmthwemwnwn, which was a little more accurate for what was really going there. The word “eclipse” implied a moon, and Sir William had learned quite a lot about orbital mechanics as a necessity of his career, which made him fairly sure that the specific combination of a tidally-locked planet with a geosynchronous moon perfectly placed to cast a permanent eclipse on one spot was…unlikely.

The permanent shadow that gave Mirw-Kwenek Wrrmthwemwnwn its name was in fact cast by an ancient megastructure, a titanic solar shade built to alter the fall of sunlight upon the world below and terraform it. Presumably, the terraforming had succeeded: certainly, the seas were cool and full of busily fizzing photosynthetic bacteria, on a planet that should have been baked dry by Mercurial proximity to its star.

The shade’s builders were long gone and forgotten; not even the OmoAru claimed to remember them. But that, apparently, was nothing unusual in the Milky Way. Humanity, after all, had only visited a few dozen worlds at the absolute most. It was a big galaxy. Lots of stars. Millions of years of history. Such abandoned traces of antediluvian life were apparently quite common.

A thought to give pause, that. It made Sir William wonder just how full the sky would be if the Hierarchy had not been around to periodically cull the elder civilizations. Just what would the galaxy look like if there were species around who had been flying the stars for orders of magnitude longer than they had walked their cradle worlds? What would have become of humanity in such a galaxy?

What would become of those that followed when the Hierarchy were gone? Did one destroy the Great Filter without consequence?

Well, if the alternative was extinction, then the civilizations of millennia to come would just have to cope. And in the meantime, Sir William had a more immediate problem: a heavily militarized, obsessively paranoid foe who were quite used to protecting themselves from stealthy, technologically superior raiders.

The solution was overwhelming mass. The HEAT, every JETS team, every ship they had, enough voidrippers to blot out the black sun, human and Gaoian special forces in reserve ready to come through and do their work when the spaceborne specialists were ready for them, a number of regular units for clean-up and occupation…

Sometimes, a sledgehammer really was the most appropriate nutcracker.

“Admiral? Analysis from the FIC, sir.”

Caruthers broke out of his thoughts, accepted the tablet he’d just been handed, and ran a well-practised eye over what he was seeing. Deep-FTL sensors had identified fourteen unique warp signatures in the target system, most of them the high-frequency but relatively slow fields generated by fighters on patrol. There was a fighter base near the Eclipse Palace, the destruction of which was an early and critical objective.

The lower-frequency signatures implied larger ships, probably system pickets roaming in support of the fighters. Their presence, in turn, implied the presence of at least one capital ship, most likely Henenwgwyr’s flag vessel the Apex of Virtue.

Destroying that was a critical early step, too.

There were a lot of critical steps, and the failure of any one could be a disaster. But that was the nature of a military operation. They’d planned this one down to every plannable detail, they knew what they were doing.

All that remained was to strike hard, and not stop until the job was done.

He glanced at his watch. One hour to go.

It was going to feel like much longer than that.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Wormhole suppression field generator, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system, the Kwmbwrw Great Houses

Henenowsyn

Morale was at an all-time low, and Owsyn’s in particular was in the sewer. High-level defections among the Grandmatriarch’s own daughters and grandsons, a resounding defeat by the Gao within their own territory, total loss of diplomatic face and force, and mounting dark speculation about what was really going on in the bunkers under the palace…

It was a toxic brew. One to which Owsyn himself was hopelessly addicted.

He couldn’t resist the urge to fret over the rumors, even while he dutifully suppressed and punished them. He couldn’t help but feel like his sympathy lay more with Matriarch Eriwyth, the “traitor and defector,” than it ever had with the Grandmatriarch herself.

Duty compelled him to hand out punishment details to anyone uttering that sentiment too loudly at his facility, however. Duty, and the lack of any opportunity to put deed to word. There was no escape from the failing House Henen, now. He was deployed to the House’s innermost stronghold, tasked with defending it, and even if every instinct he had was itching to escape…he couldn’t.

None of them could.

So, the only recourse was vigilance and preparedness. His troops were equipped with the latest generation of weaponry rated to handle deathworlders and Hunter Alphas alike. The facility was new and hastily built, but the House had spared no expense in its defences at least. In time, perhaps they would be concealed behind aesthetically pleasing architecture and landscaping, like the hardware up at the palace compound in the adjacent valley, but for now they were bare, visible and blunt in purpose and appearance.

Owsyn should have felt safe, seeing so many point defence projectile weapons, direct-radiation rebound shields, patrols in armored exoskeletons equipped with plasma weapons, and a drone hive prepared to descend on an attacking force in a wave of fusion blades and nervejam grenade launchers.

Instead, the trash basket beside his desk was sticky with chewed cwrffwr gum in a vain effort at stress relief. He needed leave. He needed reassignment. He needed to be away from the Grandmatriarch, away from her incessant paranoid checking that all was well, that the facility remained intact, that the suppression field was still active around them.

She was afraid. How could Owsyn not be? They were coming. Everyone knew they would.

It was only a matter of when.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Starship Drunker on Turkeyer, approaching planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Specialist Hunter “FNG” Thompson

HEAT life was the Eat Life. And the Lift Life. And the Study Life. And the Training Life.

And really…not much more. When he wasn’t doing one of the above, he really wasn’t doing much at all. He was surprised by how much free time he had, actually. And at first that was awesome! Lift all week, pub crawl all weekend? Hell yeah! But, as the training got more and more intense, as Firth and Regaari tried to cram everything into his brain, as Adam eventually noticed that Thompson was filling out fast and could use some extra attention…

When Julian or the cavemonkeys needed someone dumb and tough to smush on the mat…

It turned out, before anything else, HEAT life was the Sleep Life. And sleep was glorious.

He’d gone from hanging with his Marine buddies and wallowing in pretty-people attention most every weekend, to spending a lot of his idle time mostly just sleeping. Eating, too. Eating and sleeping. And growing like a mutant weed while he was sleeping, to the point he had actual growing pains. Bad ones, too. And dreaming about pressure diagrams and firing tables, while waltzing tactical dances with Pokémon or Orks in his sleep. He was a combat luchador in his last dream. With lasers.

That sort of thing was apparently pretty normal, at least for the first year or two.

Sometimes, though, they did a mission. Hunter was about to pop his HELLNO cherry. Well, combat HELLNO cherry, with a complex entry, too. He’d actually done five drops already, three with Regaari, another two solo. But this was his first time doing so in anger. They weren’t ready to trust him in a boarding action yet, which felt a bit insulting even though he knew in his head he wasn’t ready…

But they were sure as fuck keen to let him smash shit in the ground assault. He was a special operator, after all. He wasn’t totally useless. Rumor had it he was a pretty big lad, too.

To that end, Hunter was jumping with Regaari—Dexter—directly into the fray, while most of the team stayed behind initially in case any boarding actions were necessary. He was jumping in with Warhorse, too. Standing next to Adam in his full Protector’s battle-rattle, his helmet a full head-height above Hunter’s own…

Christ, he’d never felt so small and puny. Not even Righteous was anywhere near so… much.

But on the other hand, Hunter was on the opening maneuver of the entire mission, and that had to say something, right? Sure, part of it was because he wasn’t fully trained on spaceborne stuff, and would be more useful down on the ground…but with ‘Horse? And Moho? And Dexter? Abbott must’ve thought he either needed a lot of babysitting, or that he could actually keep up.

Maybe both.

…Probably both.

A while back, that mighta bothered him, knowing he needed some babying. Now, though…he’d seen for himself what he still had to earn.

Now, he had three of the deadliest people there ever was goin’ over every inch of his newly-minted EV-MASS, and that was after Mrs. Arés had personally done the same with ten times more judgemental scrutiny.

Funny how scary a tiny pregnant blonde could be. And it wasn’t just down to her husband, neither.

“Your gel underlayer should have had a chance to redistribute by now,” Moho rumbled. “Any pinch points?”

Hunter bounced on his toes. It was a weightier habit, now—in fact, the Mass he wore was significantly heavier than he was—but it was amazing how fast he’d grown used to the extra burden. Now the added weight made him feel powerful and unstoppable, instead of overburdened and struggling.

It used to crunch down unbearably tight too, like when he’d first started sparring with Julian. Hunter was a champion wrestler, sure, but all that skill didn’t matter much given the huge athletic disparity between them. They played at first, but once they got serious? Julian had, without much effort, instantly pinned Hunter and smashed everything into bruised spasming uselessness. Feeling two of his ribs crack under that bearhug sure gentled Hunter right up.

Julian at least had the decency to be super sorry.

They took it a bit more gingerly after that, but that was the thing; it didn’t take long before they could play hard again. Hunter was still a mostly-hapless chewtoy for the big Tarzan and would be for a long time, but now at least he could fight back. The Mass felt a lot the same, really. Rather than that first weekend when Julian accidentally broke him, it felt…fiercely tight, but manageable. Not exactly comfortable yet, but Hunter was adapting to it all very quickly.

For the hardest lads on the team, the Mass had gone from a terrible trial to a snug second skin. At the furthest extreme was Daar and ‘Horse, who wore the fiercest, heaviest versions. Both had said that these days, on a long mission they might sorta forget they were wearing it at all. It’d be a long while before something like that was true for Hunter. But even still…

“…Yeah, I don’t feel nothin’ shiftin’ now.”

Moho nodded reluctantly. “Still think we shoulda kept you in the lighter armor…”

“Naw.” ‘Horse gave him a quick once-over. “We’re lots better at training up the new guys nowadays. Plus, he’s fuckin’ made for this, he can take it. He’ll be one of our best if he keeps his head on a swivel, I bet.”

Thompson was super glad for his breathing mask just then. The smile that assessment put on his face woulda looked super goofy.

“And you will be keeping that thick blonde head of yours entirely mobile,” Regaari noted, after…well, slinking into his own suit. Which was a hell of a feat for a guy a bit bigger still than Hunter. “You are here to achieve the mission first, but you will also be a peerless student.”

It wasn’t a request, or a prediction.

“Target range in seven minutes,” came the call from their fluffy pilot in the front. “I start depressurizing in two.”

“Helmets on!” ‘Horse called.

Putting his helmet on had been tricky at first. The push-down-and-scoop action needed to get it to engage with the collar at the back of his head wasn’t easy to do backwards and blind, but that was why Hunter had spent an afternoon practicing it. He could feel when it was right, the click the helmet made as it settled into place just felt different.

He gave it a couple of twists to be sure, then tucked his chin in to make room for the mask to settle against the front of the collar. Push, pinch hard—

Chunk.

“Helmet on!” he called. Moho leaned over and inspected it, then nodded and gave him a ringing slap on the dome: the sign that, yup, everything was correct.

“Radio test.” Warhorse’s voice was in his ear. “Set comms for LOS only.”

“LOS only, wilco.”

Hunter checked over Moho’s seals, then they repeated the steps with Warhorse. Once everyone had checked everyone else, ‘Horse gave a thumbs up to the camera, and—

Hunter could feel the pressure start to drop by the way the suit’s pressure eased up a bit, and see it by the way that the couch cushions puffed up as they outgassed. The gauge on the wall dipped rapidly, then slowly as the pumps struggled to pull a high-grade vacuum.

The soundscape changed too. He couldn’t hear the low background sounds of the ship, or his comrades’ shifting and breathing any longer. He couldn’t hear anything. Just the hiss of the air lines in his mask, the distant faint gurgle of water in his undersuit, and a dull thud as he shifted and turned and the sound of his own footstep reached him through his own body. His heartbeat jumped in to fill the silence.

The low-bandwidth mic in the mask transformed even Moho’s tectonic bass chuckle into a tinny rasp. “‘Bout damn time we got more elbow room.”

“Plenty of that outside,” Regaari agreed. He stepped away from the ramp as it shook the deck by unlatching and winding downward. The horizon beyond was a rust-orange skin of sky over a black sea. As soon as it was open, he swarmed four-pawed down the ramp and out onto the hull.

Moho followed him, then Thompson was third out. His boots held him securely to the hull, ‘upside-down’ on Drunker on Turkeyer’s belly. Above him, he could see a dead black sea and rusty brown shores, rolling past quick.

“…You guys ever get used to this?” he asked.

‘Horse’s footsteps rang the hull next to him. “Not yet. I fuckin’ love this shit.”

Behind his mask, Hunter Thompson grinned savagely. “Fuck yeah.”

They released, drifted away from the hull, spread out wide and set their fields to catch and drag in the tiny thin atmosphere they were already rushing through…

…And dropped.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Approaching planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Ferd Given-Man

Ferd had jumped from the top of trees to the ground below. He’d fallen off the side of a cliff, tumbled down a hill just for fun. Even jumped from a plane, to prove they could do a tricky thing. They did it with a huge cloth thing called a para-shoot. They did it with big sky-magic too, using force-fields. And they did it with no magic, because the People were strong, and no heights frightened them. Taught Heff how to jump like the people, too. He was more and more a man across tribes, like Jooyun.

There were times, though, that he wished he could jump from above the sky.

Warhorse and his men spent years training to be strong enough and good enough, and they wore the strongest sky-magic there was to make it happen. Ferd thought he was probably man enough to sky-jump too, but the Givings and learnings he’d need were very, very big. He would probably never get to know what it was like to do what only the gods had done before.

But riding in Silent But Deadly when Tooko slipped her down through the sky like a knife into a throat was the next best thing.

Tooko liked to turn things down to “save power.” Something about how the less he used, the quieter they were. What it meant for everyone on board was the usual cold, high-gravity huddle when Deadly pushed hard against the air. But this time, no cold; they were in their armor. It wasn’t as good as Warhorse’s sky-magic…

But aside from them, nobody else had armor as good. Most sky-weapons would bounce off it like a pebble off his chest. It squeezed hard, covered them from head to toe. Heavy, but it moved with him like it wasn’t there, fed oxygen right into his mask. If he wanted, he could seal himself against vacuum in it too. Unlike Warhorse’s armor, there were bits he could leave behind or swap with less annoying options, if he didn’t need to sky-walk.

“Fireball in ten minutes.”

That was the dangerous moment, Ferd knew. Their ship was named for how quiet it was, but there was no quiet way to punch through the sky from above. They would, for some minutes, be a fireball streaking across the sky as they slowed down. There was no way to avoid that.

If they did it on the far side of the planet, and tried to look like a rock falling from space, then probably they’d be ignored. Rocks fell from space all the time, Tooko said: no reason to believe this one was any different. But it still made Ferd tense, knowing that if this time the enemy was not fooled, if this time they looked at the supposed rock and decided to destroy it…Well, the mercy was that they would never see death coming, nor feel it when it came.

Not a warrior’s death that, though. At least, it didn’t feel like one.

The humans seemed calm about it, though. Even Frasier just sniffed and relaxed back against the wall with his eyes closed. If he hadn’t sniffed, Ferd would have guessed he was asleep. Rees was drumming out a beat on his boots, bopping along to music only he could hear. And Heff…

Well, Heff was a short, dark, murderous rock. Ferd couldn’t tell he was moving at all, except his eyes were open and watchful. They’d all checked over each other’s armor and face masks, made their last-minute mission brief.

It was just waiting, now.

Out front, he saw the first licks of flame at the nose. Within seconds, they’d grown and covered the whole field of view. Tooko’s instruments didn’t care, they showed him the horizon in a bright green line, numbers and letters and runes all around that meant very little to Ferd, but Tooko clearly knew well. Their little Gaoian pilot tapped at something on the console in front of him, then duck-nodded in satisfaction and sat back, folding his paws primly in front of him.

Nothing to do now but fall.

Ferd Given-Man shut his eyes, and waited.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Wormhole suppression field generator, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Henenowsyn

Owsyn was pretty sure he was about to die, and yet all he felt was perverse relief.

It wasn’t that things suddenly started exploding or whatever. He was simply summoned from his office to the command center by his second-in-command. One of the perimeter posts hadn’t checked in on schedule. Possibly a technical malfunction.

Owsyn knew it wasn’t though. It was the first real anomaly they’d had since setting up. There was no optimism left in him to expect it was something as simple as a blown fuse or a lax sentry, no matter what the breathtakingly naive technician trying to contact the silent post might think.

He said nothing. What was there to say? If he was right—and he knew he was—then there was no fighting what was coming. No orders or words of encouragement he could give now that would change the next few minutes. Nor, frankly, did he want to change what was coming. After weeks of waiting in fear and dread, knowing that the Moment was finally here felt like…

…Like…

He wasn’t sure. Like the moment after a satisfying sneeze? The moment when his ears finally popped and a headache vanished? Like the moment when an unheeded but irritating background noise suddenly felt silent?

Still, his hand drifted to the holstered pistol on his flank and thumbed the safety off.

When it happened it was so blindingly fast, Owsyn could hardly process it. The technician and his second were still pondering their “comms malfunction” when suddenly the door exploded open and flew across the room, crushing the nearest guard with a grisly red splash. It had been punched open by the fist of an absolute colossus of a deathworlder, clad in the infamous “Mass” armor of the “warm” team the Humans and Gaoians had formed. Owsyn was halfway through snatching his sidearm from its holster and aiming when the giant blinked across the room, something hit him like a truck—

Owsyn was on the ground, crumpled. He tried to move. Couldn’t. Couldn’t move his arms, couldn’t twitch his legs. He could see why. Something had done unspeakable violence to his torso. His hips were broken and bulging weirdly, there was a crater in his chest. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t even tilt his head…neck broken, too.

Already dead. He’d have laughed, if he could. All that waiting, that perverse sense of gratitude that the wait was over, and now here he was, already dead without firing a shot.

Exactly as he’d expected, really.

He felt like he was falling. One of the Humans was leaning over him, stasis bag in hand. Was the fight already over?

It didn’t matter.

Owsyn let go, and fell away from himself and the Human into the dark.

“Shit, that didn’t take much.”

Warhorse wasn’t much impressed by the Kwmbwrw troops themselves. Oh, their surveillance was well-designed, and the layout of the facility was sound as fuck. No denying that. Took Moho almost three whole minutes to find a way around the sensor net surrounding the control center. But once they were in? Disappointing. Warhorse had barely slapped the poor fuck and he was already on death’s door.

Still, Adam bundled the poor bastard up in a stasis bag. Hopefully he’d make it through.

He wasn’t much impressed by their exoskeleton suits, either. Probably they made manual labor a lot easier, but they were obviously designed by people who didn’t understand the iron rules of close quarters combat.

The first rule was to be quicker and faster. Only Gaoians were faster than Warhorse, and then only a few. Absolutely nobody was quicker, only Yan and Daar were his match. All the exoskeletons had done was slow down the Kwmbwrw‘s already glacially slow reflexes, and the layers of armor and shielding they’d un-thoughtfully piled atop weren’t nearly enough to compensate.

The second rule was to be stronger. He may not have been in first place (or maybe even second) anymore, at least for now, but that didn’t help his enemies, because he was way ahead of everyone else. It wasn’t even close to a fair contest, and ‘Horse didn’t believe in fair fights outside of sport. Probably meant the fight would turn into a shooting match, if they ever got their wits about them. Which was why a good warrior always paid attention to rule one.

“…You better bag ‘im quick if you wanna keep ‘im,” Moho commented, making a bee-line for where, moments before, some poor flattened fucker had been manning an important-looking bit of equipment. “Who is he?”

“Base CO, I think.”

The third rule was to be smarter. Warhorse was pretty damn smart these days, but that sort of thing was why they had Moho and Regaari along.

“Right…” Moho had a magical way with two things: explosives and alien GUIs. He never needed long to figure out what he was looking at, and the console he poked at was no different. He nodded to himself, tapped the screen in a couple places, nodded some more, then grinned.

“Farthrow generator power to zero percent…Now.”

Thompson grunted. “Huh…y’all feel that?”

‘Horse nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. Farthrow generators could be felt, kinda like tinnitus in the teeth except so subtle you didn’t notice until it went away. “Yup. Means objective one accomplished.”

Moho briskly demolished the console with his fusion knife, effectively ruining any chance of turning the field back on in the next few minutes, then hefted his weapon. “Done.”

‘Horse hefted the stasis bag with his patient-slash-prisoner onto his back. “Let’s go.”

They’d struck the first blow. Next came the hard part.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
HMS Myrmidon, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

“Beacon signal!”

Caruthers turned and watched across the Fleet Intelligence Center as sailors sprung into action. It was clear within moments, however, that this was what they’d been awaiting: the “dragon’s teeth” sown by Silent But Deadly and Drunker on Turkeyer as they infiltrated the target system had finally broken through the Farthrow’s interference and made strong contact with the fleet.

HEAT team 1 had achieved their mission. And whatever rapid violence they’d perpetrated against the farthrow generator’s operators was about to be eclipsed.

He locked eyes with Rear Admiral Manning and they shared a moment of mutual understanding.

“Jump the fleet.”

From inside the FIC, the jump was almost a non-event. An alert sounded, the hull made a slight pop sound, there was a half-second of slight imbalance…

…And Caruthers’ overview began to populate with contacts. The planet below, the solar shade above. The target facilities and terrain they’d expected, exactly where they were supposed to be. Warp signatures on patrol in the outer system, slow to react and therefore maintaining course for now. Three flights of Voidrippers peeled away from the fleet and speared away to high interplanetary warp, thousands of times lightspeed, intent on intercepting and neutralizing the system pickets before they could respond.

Closer to hand, however, was the Apex of Virtue and her escorts, anchored at a small station in a polar orbit. And to their credit, they were not slow on the uptake.

It was telling just how good Kwmbwrw intelligence must be that they ignored the deadly and powerful Vengeful Fury and instead went for a decapitation shot on Myrmidon. A flurry of superluminal kinetic rounds raked the shields, and Cauthers was rattled against his seatbelt when one of them penetrated.

The explosive sound of something actually hitting their armor went right through him, in a way that defied description. It was like being kicked in the face.

There was no second strike. As he shook his head to clear it, he saw that the San Diego and her sisters had rewoven their own shields, interlocking them protectively around Myrmidon. The Kwmbwrw firepower rained fruitlessly against the impenetrable wall they’d erected, before sensibly switching targets. HMS Valiant flash-jumped several hundred meters to evade a withering volley.

Manning’s career had seen him through more than a few hairy engagements. His voice was level and calm despite the hit to their ship as he began to take control of the battlespace. “Focus fire on the capital ship.”

Caruthers watched intently as the command was followed…to no appreciable effect. The Apex’s escorts had already closed ranks and tightly cocooned her in shielding.

He turned his attention from the spaceborne battle to review the report coming up from the ground teams. HEAT team 1 had a clear mission success, the Farthrow facility below was neutralized and repairs would not be feasible in any reasonable time span. They were moving to destroy the anti-orbital forcefield generators and then exfiltrate so the fleet could flatten the facility and make their sabotage very permanent.

JETS Team 2 were radio silent, as expected. Damage report on Myrmidon—port-side aft ablative armour plating destroyed, minor damage, no casualties. Damage control teams responding, and the ship had executed a roll to present undamaged armour to the foe.

“Change of target, escort Alpha-three,” Manning directed the fleet to target one of the enemy escorts that was a bit out of position. Reports scrolling up on one of his monitors suggested the enemy group had just tried to flash-jump to a higher orbit, only to find themselves locked down by a new Farthrow field, generated by the Vengeful Fury.

Good. A shaky start, and not the instant beheading they’d wanted, but the enemy fleet was now pinned down, and the allied fleet had the advantage in numbers and firepower. The Apex was doomed.

But House Henen wasn’t going down without a fight. The targeted escort took evasive action and slipped behind its fellows’ shield wall, its own shields incandescent as it desperately shed heat, but holding. And from below, the first of the fighters from the base on the ground were scrambling.

All, so far, according to plan. Now, all he was waiting on was Hoeff and his men…

And the dark work they were about to commit.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Mirw-Kwenek Wrrmthwemwnwn, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr

Perception was the most critical quality a Grandmatriarch needed to possess. The moment her aide had reported a delayed status report from their new quantum defense station, she knew the enemy had come for her.

She was up and moving with her personal guard into the deep bunkers before the aide had even finished delivering her report.

“Scramble the fighters. And once I’m safely off-planet, you will activate the ferals.”

The aide hesitated. “Grandmatriarch, if we release them without securing the palace staff first—”

“You would rather take on the deathworlders that are surely coming by yourself, would you?” Wgwyr gave the quivering young woman a withering glare. Weakness. Weakness and disloyalty all around her.

“N-no, Grandmatriarch, I just—”

“Then deploy the ferals. You!” She barked at her security team leader as the aide ducked her body nervously and fled. “Tell the jump array to warm up, we’re leaving.”

The team leader was more dutifully composed than the aide. “Yes, Grandmatriarch.”

They took the short route through the gardens, bustling directly across the open circle of cultivated plant life under the glass dome. Wgwyr hissed in annoyance to herself. She loved the dark garden. Plants that flourished in perpetual twilight were rare, and beautiful ones even more so. The sounds, the smells, the bioluminescent glowings all around her, the darting colorful symbiotic insectoids and other fauna necessary to maintain her collection’s health…

The thought of murderous savages trampling through it all made her quite sick.

There was a faint rustle behind her. Alarmed, she turned around…

The guards following in the rear were gone, with only some faintly swaying leaves.

There was a hoot, another rustle, some muffled crunches, and the forward guards were gone too, so abruptly that they didn’t even get to cry out. All she saw of whatever took them was a suggestion of a tail whipping away into the foliage. Panicked, Wgywr spun a third time, and found herself looking directly into a weapon.

What stood before was…Human, probably. Though it was hard to tell, as it was shorter and rather broader than she thought normal. Theirs’ was a disconcertingly variable species. In any case, he—undoubtedly male—was covered head to toe in armor, which did nothing at all to disguise his bestial deathworlder nature.

They stood for a moment, staring at each other until she gathered herself and stood, regally drawing herself to her full height so that she could tower over the tiny deathworlder.

“My guards?”

His voice was quiet, low, and coarse. “Dead.”

“My aide too?”

The small man nodded. “And anyone else likely to help.”

“And I suppose you are here to gloat.”

The short man shook his head before tossing something at her feet. “No. It ain’t personal.”

“…What is this?”

“An opportunity. He offers you one final chance at mercy. Do the right thing.”

Faintly, she could hear the hatchways at either end of the garden clunk into their locked position. She sneered at the weapon he’d offered her, briefly calculated her odds of success should she try to use it against him…

…And relaxed. Well. The end had come. There would be no justice, only murder.

“Mercy,” she said aloud. “I didn’t think you barbarians knew the word.”

“You didn’t think much at all,” the little man said plainly, and acidly. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. In any case, a quick death ain’t something we’re all blessed with. I’d suggest you take it.”

“I suppose the alternative will be you drag me back to Gao? Will the animal king personally skin me alive, as he’s known to do? Torment me? Tear my throat out with his bare fangs?”

“No, you don’t get the satisfaction, especially considerin’ what ‘yer house is doin’ here. You die here tonight, alone and unremarked, like the evil creature you are. Choose quickly, Grandmatriarch. I’m not a patient man.”

Wgwyr glared at him a moment longer, then kicked the gun away.

“The Hierarchy are right, you know,” she said. “Your kind are a scourge.”

The Human’s face was expressionless. All he did was look down at the weapon, then carefully donned his mask.

A…Ten’Gewek emerged from the shadows. A big one too, also clad in armor. He snapped on his mask as well.

“What? Does your pet simian tear me apart, instead?”

It was gratifying to see the way her words at least stung the stone-age primitive. He visibly bristled, obscene muscles surging under all that armor, tail stiffening. But he didn’t, as she’d expected and half-hoped, seize her and rip her in half.

Instead, he sauntered over toward the display case for the Nightmare cave-choke fungus, one of the prides of the garden collection, prized for its beautiful lustre and glow. He considered it for a moment—

His huge fist blinked through the incredibly thick glass. The strike was so fast she couldn’t see its movement, and the impact so fierce it shattered the glass dome entirely. None of the safety systems came alive. No alarm. No force field. No fail-safe air curtain. Silky dust poured off the fungal fruiting bodies from the sudden flow of air, iridescent in the dim light.

The Ten’Gewek ignored the dust cloud as he turned away, and spoke through his mask. “Jooyun showed me these, on Nightmare. We watched it kill a minizilla. Spores get in the lungs, and grow. Very quick…but not quick enough. Bad death.”

Wgwyr coughed. It had to be just the image he painted, surely. Not even virulent deathworld spores could be that quick…could they?

The savage primate turned his attention to the Human. “Not fast enough, Sky-Reaper.”

“Right.” The little human approached, Wgwyr backed away. She noticed suddenly she was surrounded. Three other Ten’Gewek and two more Humans, though none of them were built so dangerously as their respective leaders. She coughed again, feeling dry in her throat.

“Can’t have you making a scene, so…”

He struck like a lightning bolt. There was pain, his blows precise and professional. She fell to the ground, her legs broken. She coughed again, this time…with a worrying load of phlegm.

The big Ten’Gewek sauntered over, bent down, and snarled right in her face. “Am nobody’s pet.” Rather than show any pride or skill in his craft, he simply reached down uncaringly and snapped her arms like dry twigs.

That pain was like the world going away for little moments, too much for her brain to even process. She didn’t know if she shrieked or not. Afterwards, she was too shaken, too broken, too ruined to move. All she could do was breathe…and even that, not well.

The next cough that wracked her hurt, simultaneously less than her shattered limbs, and yet more because it was at least a comprehensible pain.

“Y’know,” the Human said calmly, as he crouched on his haunches next to her head. “It ain’t a good idea to taunt a fella like him. He can jump like a flea an’ toss cars around like they were toys, and he’s strong enough to break me almost as easily as he broke you. Did’ya think I could lead a man like him with insults? Not that this little life lesson’s gonna matter ‘fer long, but…”

She tried to raise up, defy her tormentors…but she was broken. More than just her limbs, too. Belatedly, Wgwyr realised she couldn’t feel anything below her waist. The little Human must have broken her spine, too. Somehow.

“Well,” he rumbled. “In any case, listen up. Had you ended the program and provided discrete proof of its termination, he would have spared your life and your House. We ain’t interested in a pointless three-front war, and that was communicated to you through diplomatic and clandestine channels. You ignored our overtures. That was unwise.”

Pain and the agonizing impossibility of drawing enough breath conspired to stifle Wgwyr’s reply, even if she’d been able to think of one. She simply glared at him, wheezing pitiably.

“But, well. You made your choices, so here we are,” the human continued, indifferent to her suffering. “Either the spores or the shock’ll take about twenty minutes to kill you…well, maybe shorter. You ain’t a deathworlder. In any case, it won’t be fun. So here’s my lil’ offer of mercy. I’m gonna ask some questions about the program. If you answer them to my satisfaction, I say ‘screw appearances,’ and I put my fist right through your skull. Over in a flash. Well?”

Wgwyr managed to wheeze her reply out through the gravelly agony in her chest. “F’ck…you…” She found a little more. “You get nothing.”

He shrugged. “Well, that’s too bad for you.” ‘Sky-Reaper’ picked up his weapon and walked away. Noiselessly, his team followed. She saw one of them handing out packs of what would surely be explosives.

Of course. Deniability. Crushed and broken would be easily explainable if the dome collapsed. As would the poisoning.

Henenwgwyr spat on the ground after them, then rested her head and relaxed. It was over. All that remained was pain.

She let it wash over her like the tide, and carry her away.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Hms Myrmidon, orbiting planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

In a flare of vaporized armor, one of the alien escorts fell out of formation, not destroyed but lacking power to her engines. Sir William idly noted that they would have four hours to restore thrust before their new orbit became an uncontrolled, and therefore fatal, re-entry. Unsurprisingly, the stricken escort promptly started shooting out lifeboats. Good. One step closer to sinking that flagship.

He had to hand it to the Kwmbwrw. Their ships were sturdy, agile, and packed a respectable punch for their size. And his opposite number, whoever she was, knew every trick in the book. She was pulling hard for higher orbit, fighting for the kinetic energy advantage, and her escorts were stripping dragon’s teeth out of the sky by the hundred with point-defence energy weapons, suppressing his own fleet’s ability to maneuver.

The pursuit could only end one way, and they both surely knew it, but stubborn pride was a terrible thing. Clearly the fleetmatriarch intended to drag their clash out to the bitter end.

Things were, at least, less hectic than they’d been in the battle’s opening minutes. He had time to think, to take stock, to be briefed on the ground operation.

It was interesting news.

“ADELLE has been neutralized, but the team reports that there are likely biodrones in the bunkers under the palace.”

Carothers raised an eyebrow. “Really, now? How did they learn that?”

“Overheard from ADELLE herself. She ordered them released in the palace.”

That changed the tactical situation considerably. What was hoped to be a punitive smash-and-grab had now become something worse.

“Update the warning order for our supporting conventional forces, put them on high alert. Admiral Manning!”

Manning’s head turned. “Sir.”

“The situation on the ground has changed, we need to seize the palace.”

Manning understood instantly; the fleet would need to redeploy to a new set of orbits, and that would take time. It would also require the opposing fleet be neutralized or held at bay: Supporting the ground operation would require Caledonia to drop into a low orbit where she was vulnerable.

“Understood,” he replied, and refocused on his role in all this. Caruthers felt a touch of G-force as Myrmidon boosted, obedient to the admiral’s new orders.

Hopefully, they wouldn’t need to send more HEAT down. That was always expensive, and risky. Hopefully, the bunkers underneath the palace would be manageable. But ‘hopefully’ had no place in a comprehensive plan. He needed to prepare for all knowable contingencies. He needed to prepare for casualties, for the need to rapidly drop the deadliest men in the galaxy on the target, and for the possibility of smashing that whole palace from orbit. Caledonia was the ship for all three jobs. He just needed it in the right place: low, and exposed.

A report came up from the HEAT team already deployed: shields offline, target area clear. A minute later, USS Robert A. Heinlein obligingly sent a Rod-From-God to flatten the offending facility.

Good. There was now no obstacle to invasion. And they were going to need a lot of men for this one.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
valleys south of Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Specialist Hunter Thompson

“Where did you learn to hotwire an alien cargo truck?”

Moho gave him a Look that Hunter could see even through the visor. He shut up.

They were bouncing along the gravel road between the Farthrow and Twilight Palace, the suspension riding dangerously low and Warhorse driving like a possessed demon. Seemed as good a time as any to talk a bit; Hunter kept his sector clear and his eyes peeled of course, but his training was so intense lately, that the day’s breakneck pace was, somehow, both less hectic and more draining.

“I taught him,” Dexter was riding on the hood, nose lifted into the wind and looking for all the world like a dapper but armor-plated wolfhound who knew they were going to the park. “…Flash shields, lads. RFG strike in ten seconds.”

Hunter slapped down the gold-plated over-visor that let him stare into a sun or his own reentry plasma without being blinded, and hunkered down in the truckbed a little. Still, like Moho he couldn’t resist looking back toward the base they’d just hit and left.

Three mississippi, two mississippi, one…

There was the briefest suggestion of something moving ridiculously goddamn fast, then a flash so bright that Hunter’s eye protection went totally opaque, safely blinding him for a moment.

It relaxed a second later, and Hunter’s jaw dropped inside his mask as he watched the land just kinda boil upwards where a whole buncha buildings had been just seconds earlier, in eerie silence.

He was about to say something when the intervening miles of loose dirt rushed at him and hit the truck with a force that made it bounce worse than any pothole. He clung on tight, grimaced when his fingers crunched the metal and plastic, then looked around in disbelief at the hundreds of small landslides the shockwave had knocked loose all around them.

“Jesus!” Hunter could barely contain his nervous excitement. “That was fuckin’ awesome!”

“Wait ‘till you get nuked for real,” ‘Horse remarked, distractedly. They had to be going close to two hundred klicks an hour.

“When did you get nuked?”

“Technically, never,” Moho rumbled. “The Gao’ve got way bigger shit than nukes.”

“We got to watch Daar blow up a giant space donut.” ‘Horse suddenly veered around a pothole, not bothering to slow down.

“From below,” Moho added. He sounded like that one had made an impression. “Made the atmosphere all fucky. Auroras an’ shit in the middle of the day. An’ big-ass chunks of the fuckin’ thing burnin’ as they came down.”

“That was a hell of a day,” Regaari agreed, solemnly.

“That musta been cool to watch,” Hunter commented.

“Yeah. Nothin’ like watchin’ billions die.” Warhorse’s tone was…warning.

Hunter shut up, and accepted Moho’s not-unkind slap upside the back of the helmet as what he owed for speakin’ before he thought.

The cargo truck was weird. Sure, it had all the basics—flat bed at the back for hauling stuff, a wheel on each corner with big chunky tyres for handling on loose dirt and gravel. But it was built by, and for, alien quadrupeds who stood more than three meters tall when they straightened up, and whose spindly bodies were mostly legs. The seats and controls didn’t fit a human driver at all.

The first problem was the cab. It wasn’t needed, so ‘Horse and Moho just ripped most of it off, leaving the hood covering the truck’s beefy electric motor intact. They’d left the control column too, and luckily the Kwmbwrw didn’t seem to use foot pedals. It was all hand controls, and a self-drive function that Moho disabled easily—he ripped the camera off, and the truck automatically switched to manual-drive mode.

Even still. ‘Horse was a tall sumbitch, and standing up—he ripped the driver’s seat out, too—he was only barely in a position to comfortably operate their sudden dune-buggy.

Which was why Regaari was riding on the nose, gecko-sticky gloves and boots keeping him safely anchored to the metal and nose into the wind, calling out upcoming twists in the road like a rally navigator. The fact he was obviously enjoying it was just a side benefit, he said.

Suuure.

He looked up when Regaari turned his head, cocking it to listen to something.

“…Hostile air coming our way,” he warned. “North-west. Friendlies intercepting…We should find some cover.”

‘Horse twisted the wheel, and Hunter grabbed on hard as they bounced right off the “road” and down onto lower terrain. On Earth, it would have been a creek choked with trees and stuff: here, there was a creekbed and a trickle of water, but no plants.

That said, there was a nicely tall undercut along the bank, which they could put between them and the flyboys to the north. The truck, though, had reached its limits. ‘Horse cursed and slowed as something under Hunter’s feet went crunch, and the ride suddenly got a whole lot rougher before coming to a halt.

They dismounted into calf-deep water: Dexter sprang off the hood, clear to the bank, and paused. His suit was full of all kinds of fancy communications tech, Hunter knew, and he saw more of the bigger picture than the rest of them. He duck-nodded sharply after a moment’s consideration.

“I think we’re good. They won’t have a clean angle on us, and Drunker’s on their ass.”

“Our truck gonna be problem?”

“Nah. Should be hidden, given the line of sight.”

“Works for me,” ‘Horse decided. He plopped himself down with back to the bank, and attached one of his liquid meals to his eating tube. “Keep your helmet on, Thompson.”

Thompson hadn’t been planning on taking it off, but he nodded, and copied what the older guys were doing. He’d figured out early on that if they stopped to eat, he stopped to eat. The liquid lunch was kinda nasty, though. Like baby food with added fat. He slurped it down as quick as he could, chasing it with the high-intensity energy drink while a pair of sonic booms rocked past overhead, fleeing for the eastern horizon.

A moment later a louder, sharper, faster boom followed on their heels.

“Ride’s fucked,” Moho opined, after lifting one corner of the truck to peer underneath. “Drive shaft’s bent.”

‘Horse snorted. “Congratulations, Thompson. You just broke your first vehicle.”

“Hey, I wasn’t the one driving it!”

“Nah, but you’re a big kid already. Hell, we’re all big dudes in bigger armor. Added up I bet we’re way over whatever this jalopy was designed to deal with.”

“Better than staying on the road and being a nice easy target,” Regaari said, in between slurping a brownish-grey paste through a tube. His own field meals, Hunter knew, were some kind of slurry of anchovies and stuff. He’d tried it once on a dare and damn near vomited.

“So…what do we do now?”

Hunter waited while ‘Horse was on the radio, using his narrow-beam uplink to whatever was up in the sky. A few moments later, “For now, load up. Moho, we try and bend that back into place? I can hold the car up for you while you work. If not, we hoof it. It’s only like twenty klicks at this point.”

Moho lifted the truck’s corner again and considered it. “…Hoof it.”

“Fair ‘nuff.” ‘Horse reached into the bloodworks pouch on his hip and checked his canisters. “Make sure y’all are topped off, we’re gonna need it. Fill your bellies, too.”

Hunter grabbed a second meal pouch, despite not feeling remotely hungry. Twenty klicks on foot, in the Mass? This was gonna suck every kind of ass. No sense in complaining about it, though.

Regaari’s only comment was a heartfelt groan. “Will this at least count in our PT logs, ‘Horse?”

“No.” The big man stood, bounced around, and proceeded to stretch. He was surprisingly flexible, even inside his suit. Hunter sprang to his feet and copied him. “Whatever gave you the idea I was that kinda merciful?”

“Foolish of me, you’re right…” Regaari chittered ruefully, checked the seat and settle of his equipment, tightened a strap, then dropped to four-paw and set out upstream.

They trotted along at a comfortable pace, while everyone finished drinking their nutrition and waited for their combat medicine systems to report they were happy. Twin columns of black smoke on the eastern horizon suggested Drunker had caught her quarry.

That was all ‘Horse needed. With a single springing leap, one that was an almost casual mid-stride afterthought to clearing the three-meter embankment, he flung himself well over the top of the bank and set to pace, stasis patient strapped to his back. The rest of them followed behind, perhaps not with as much effortless grace. Or, in Hunter’s case, not without a bit of a scrabbling climb.

‘Horse set a hard pace to follow, one that would be a flat-out sprint in normal everyday terms. He’d obviously mastered the trick of running in lower gravity, which seemed to involve some kind of flowing, almost long-jumping sort of gait. Hunter found himself breathing hard almost immediately, and knew instantly that he was the lagging man in the group.

Well…fuck.

But that was okay. The Mass would keep him physically going. He just had to endure, and get better. He could hack it, he knew he could. He’d already hacked worse.

Hunter Thompson focused on his breathing, fumbled his way into matching everyone else’s stride, emptied his mind of worries, and ran.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, planet Gao

Uriigo, Champion of Clan Bronzefur

His day of reckoning had come.

Uriigo hurt. All over. From exhaustion and effort, but also in his soul. After weeks of purges, investigations, and ruthless excisions, whatever it was that called itself Bronzefur was already a radically different Clan. It had to be, with its leadership facing the Great Father’s wrath.

He’d uncovered so many dirty deals in the last few weeks that he wondered if he’d ever feel fresh and clean again. And a few of the Fathers he’d caught red-pawed had put up a fight. Honestly, he’d come close to losing a few of those: Uriigo’s hide was still itching with new claw-cuts and he’d come much too close to losing an eye.

And now, he had to face the Great Father. In open Conclave, not merely the small standing committee Daar had taken to calling his Cabinet.

It was a severe affair. Daar stood tall and fierce on the dais, crown upon head and his short athlete’s coat freshly groomed. He was, as always, flawlessly magnificent in all his terrible, maximum glory. He had a throne this time too, new and intricately carved from a single massive piece of ultra-rare burled ironwood. It was a priceless display of wealth commissioned just for this moment, to underscore how serious and public the occasion truly was.

In front of the full artistic expression of Gaoian pride and civilization, and of the living embodiment of the Gao, the avatar of absolute strength and unrestrained power…Uriigo felt like a reeking beggar. He’d bathed, there was no blood in his fur, but he knew he looked ragged and tired, and there was no hiding the dressings on some of his nastier new scars.

Daar sat, and the rest of the Conclave sat in turn. In his biggest, most powerful voice: “Uriigo, Champion of Bronzefur. Attend me.”

Damaged as he was, Uriigo still wouldn’t let his Clan down now by shuffling forward with a bent back. He stood, summoned up what pride he had left, his hope that he’d done enough and his confidence that there was still plenty of merit worth keeping in his Clan, and stepped forward.

Still: before the Great Father, there was no option except for abject prostration. He bowed low. “My Father.”

“You have taken an accounting of your Clan’s crimes.”

“I have, My Father.”

Daar sat forward in his throne, the huge, primal shapes of his powerful body shifting dangerously under his fur. “List them.”

It was a long list. So much smuggling, so much theft, so much corruption, so much war profiteering. So much complicity in so much suffering across Gao, and beyond. Uriigo’s was the only voice that spoke for several long minutes, his shameful report echoing hollowly off the old stone walls.

He’d never felt so dead inside.

The Great Father sniffed toward Uriigo, and considered him for a long moment.

“That is a great shame upon your Clan, Champion. A shame upon all the Gao.”

“Yes, My Father.” He couldn’t contest the charge. It was true.

There was another long moment, while the Great Father considered matters.

“Champion Reeko, does Straightshield have anything further to add?”

The Champion stood from his seat in the front. “No, My Father. His accounting was complete.”

“Are there any further grievances any Clan wish to levy? I would counsel you,” Daar growled, “to consider carefully the merits of your case before piling on.”

There were none. As Reeko had said, the accounting of Bronzefur’s sins was complete, and accurate in every particular. Daar swept his gaze across the chamber, then duck-nodded when his call was met with silence.

“Very well.” Daar sat up on his throne, and everyone else straightened up as well. Once the rustle had calmed down, “Champion Uriigo, are you prepared to receive judgement?”

“…As much as I can be, My Father.”

The Great Father gave a small chuff at that honest statement of Uriigo’s personal terror. “You need not fear much for yourself, Champion. I am impressed by your honesty, your forthrightness, your thorough investigation, and your unflinching loyalty to the Gao. I ask you: do you believe your duty discharged and complete?”

…He was being tested, Uriigo knew. But it wasn’t much of a test; the answer was obvious.

“No. No…My Father. I don’t think it ever will be.”

“No.” It was then that Daar did something almost unimaginable. Rather than kill or maim Uriigo on the spot, as he’d done to others for less terrible crimes…

He slid off his throne, padded over on all fours and pulled Uriigo into a hug. “There’s no escaping duty, Uriigo. Not for any of us.”

That was…an unthinkable display of mercy. Uriigo felt himself fall apart, right then and there. Daar buried his face against his mighty chest, and shifted to the side…to shield Uriigo from view, and spare him the shame of a breakdown before the Conclave.

He needed sparing. It was all he could do to hold in the shame, the relief, the gratitude and the exhaustion and not keen until he was spent.

Somehow, somewhere, he found the strength to pull himself together, and pull away from Daar’s mercy. “What…what of my Clan?”

“Right.” Daar stood again, the personal moment over. “It seems to me that the vast majority of your Clan is guilty of at least some petty crime. There is a pervasive culture of graft. Do you accept this charge?”

He didn’t have any choice, but it was fair. After everything he’d seen, he’d have called it something worse. “Yes, My Father.”

“Well…as a trial of a Clan millions strong would be logistically…difficult…and might have a calamitous impact on the Gao, I am pleased to accept your humility and continued leadership in its stead. Nonetheless…Champion Reeko! I order all members of Clan Bronzefur to be publically shaved, and for those I do not command otherwise, let the matter be done.”

There was some quiet chittering in the room, quickly suppressed. Few things would be so embarrassing, but, well…it was the gentlest possible punishment.

The Clan would live.

“And…the rest?”

Daar sobered up. He had his duties, too. “All officers of any rank greater than Associate shall be scar-marked by degree appropriate to rank and offence, then demoted to Candidate. I shall leave it to their personal honor on seeking cosmetic treatment. At an appropriate time, you, Champion, shall cause these Candidates to prove their continued value to the Clan.”

Uriigo accepted that with no issue. There would be those among the Clan who bore their judicial scar with dignity, and in years to come he’d probably favor them. Leaving it to the individual would help him ensure the next generation understood what had happened and why.

Daar wasn’t done, however.

“All former Brothers of the Rites and higher rank shall face castration, on judgement of Straightshield. You will choose a cadre of Fathers who best preserve the ideals and customs of your Clan, compatible with your honorable leadership. They shall not escape any punishments Straightshield may levy, but they may keep their rank, title, and authority, as only we Crowned or Our Champions may take those things, as it has always been, and as it shall always be.”

That was…not good, but survivable. The Great Father would preserve the power of the Clans. But he still wasn’t done, and he saved the worst for last.

“The former Fathers of Bronzefur bear principal fault for your Clan’s dishonor. I command that those not spared by your choice shall be executed, on Straightshield’s judgement. It would please me if these sentences were carried out swiftly and mercifully. However, those directly complicit will face the Hundred Cut. You may grant them the mercy of death as you see fit, but not until their pelts are laid before my feet, and their lives shall be preserved until then. The ringleader of this scheme shall receive no mercy from anyone of any kind, on pain of death. You, Champion, will remember always that it is your honesty, honor, and zeal that spared you the same fate, and your Clan its destruction.”

Uriigo duck-nodded, solemnly. That, he’d entirely expected. “And…myself?”

“You have experienced punishment enough, Champion. You shall be held free and pardoned on this matter.” Daar’s signature wry humor crept in slightly. “You may keep your fur, your balls, and your dignity. But that is contingent on your future excellent leadership of your Clan through this trial. Do not disappoint me. I have no desire to destroy another Champion.”

“I understand, My Father.”

And that…concluded matters. Formally, at least. Court didn’t just stop without some small amount of ceremony, but it was only a small amount.

Uriigo enjoyed the Great Father’s and Great Mother’s hospitality in their private rooms afterwards. A sign of renewed trust, and a chance to share some thoughts unofficially. And, frankly, a relief from exhaustion and physical pain, thanks to Naydra’s caring touch.

And Daar’s incomprehensibly powerful grip. Uriigo was one big ball of spasming stress after it all, so the Great Father took it upon himself to smash all that right out of him as only he could. It was…well, agonizing, albeit effective. Daar truly did not know his own strength. It was worth it though, for the profound relief that came after every inch of him had been flattened into submission.

Pain seemed to be a common theme with Daar.

“Balls, ‘yer wound up tight as hell…there. That feel any better?”

Uriigo only had enough strength to mumble vaguely in the positive. Daar chittered, pulled him in for a friendly snuggle—well, okay, more like a friendly crush, with a leg that dwarfed his entire gods-damned body pinning his hips—and joined him in a brief rest.

Only brief, though. Uriigo had too much on his mind. Naydra seemed to have a magical sense for these moments and brought drinks at the exact right instant; a mug for him, and something vastly larger for Daar. “Here. Something to soothe the pain.”

“…Thank you.”

She chittered, and curled up with them. Daar pulled the three of them together, and they enjoyed the silence for a bit longer.

After a while, though, after Naydra complained about being too warm and wriggled away to make and serve a few more drinks and snacks, Uriigo felt comfortable to get the one last thing off his chest that he felt he needed to say.

“When I became Champion…This isn’t quite what I expected. I never thought I’d be the one to change things up.” He considered the warm, spiced talamay in his paws. “…I’m as guilty as all the others of some of that petty crime, you know. A little cash on the side, when I was an Associate, to not inspect the cargo too closely. A few shipments ‘off the books.’ It was…normal. The expected thing. And any Associate who made too much fuss about it would never have been considered suitable for advancement. And by the time I passed the Rites…the shared culpability was part of the initiation.”

Daar nodded without judgement. It was a cozy setting, made better by snacking on some tasty cheese curd fritters. “I figgered, yeah.”

“…I should present myself to be shorn.”

Daar nodded approvingly. “Would help, I think. Share some o’ the burden. And you’re a fit good-lookin guy so, prob’ly might have some happy side effects ‘fer ‘ya, too…”

Uriigo could hear the Great Mother’s eyes roll from the other room. He couldn’t help but chitter too, which he did nervously…

But all he got was a fond rib-bending hug in return.

“This isn’t what I was expecting, I’ll admit.”

“What were you expectin’?”

“Well…you did justice.”

“You were expectin’ a rampage,” he said, not unkindly.

“Not…I mean, yes, at first. But not more recently. I don’t mean I was expecting you to be merciful, but at the same time, I think I knew you would be…” Uriigo scratched his own ear at the half-baked thought. “…but justice is aloof. I wasn’t expecting warmth afterwards.”

“I am the font of justice, not justice itself. I’m allowed some feeling,” he said with some gentle humor. “Uriigo, you just went through a trial that coulda broken ‘ya, and instead you came out showin’ all the qualities I admire. I can’t not appreciate that.”

“Still, you were the force behind that trial.”

“Trials build us, if they don’t destroy us. One’a my Human friends damn near breaks his buddies on a daily basis, but he loves ‘em all the more for it. I should know, I’m one o’ those broken buddies.”

“…All this to make us better.” Uriigo duck-nodded. “I don’t think I understood before. I think I do now.”

“Yeah. I get it, ‘cuz in the years after the War, I had a sorta personal journey with who I am. I resisted the Crown for so long…but y’know what? I was doomed to fail. I am the Great Father, an’ there ain’t nothin’ I or anyone can do to change that. I ain’ jus’ a more bigger version o’ regular big ol’ Daar, neither. I gotta embody a terrible majesty, Uriigo. Mind, body, an’ soul. None of us can escape duty. Least of all me.”

Uriigo found himself keening very slightly, then flicked his ears back in mild embarrassment. Daar chuffed, swirled his talamay in its cup, then drained it.

“It’s a fuckin’ thing, huh? On the one hand, the whole of the Gao and all her people are mine, just as much as this land, as much as my fuckin’ livestock. No other ruler in the fuckin’ galaxy is so terribly absolute. I am the Gao. I can do anything. But for the sake of all of us, an’ really, myself most of all? I cannot permit myself a thing, if duty intercedes. Bein’ so unfettered an’ powerful, I gotta live up to the majesty o’ my rank. ‘Cuz if I don’t, then…what happens to us?”

Uriigo…understood. Before, he hadn’t, and probably couldn’t have. But now, after the events of the last few weeks, he felt the shape of what Daar was saying, in every knotted inch of his muscles.

“I just wish I’d caught the biodrone export sooner. Stopped it.”

“That,” Daar said, “is bein’ taken care of. You’ve learned, Uriigo. That’s the bit that really matters. Now…tonight, at least ‘fer a little while…I wanna jus’ be a ‘Back an’ a Brother. Of all the riches an’ power I have, that’s the only blessin’ ‘sides Naydi I ever wanted, an’ it’s the thing I almost never get. An’ right now, it’s what you need too, I think.”

On that score, Uriigo couldn’t argue. He plucked another fritter out of the bowl, duck-nodded, and, somehow, set his worries aside for the night. Daar grumbled in a friendly sort of way, smashed Uriigo affectionately against himself, and the two drifted off into a warm, comfortable sleep.

And the pain, for just a little while, went away.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Ferd Given-Man

“…Now that’s a big bloody door.”

Ferd didn’t always see what was so funny about understatement, but Frasier loved it. They weren’t just facing a “big door,” they were facing a wall of metal that probably opened, somehow. Deep under the palace, sunk into the rock, the gods only knew how deep everything behind it went…

And that was a problem. They needed to be inside. After what they’d heard Oo-Gweer saying, the day’s Taking wouldn’t be complete until the bunkers were open and the biodrones inside dealt with.

“Hotball?” Nomuk suggested. Ever since he’d seen a demonstration of those destructive little death-callers, he’d always been looking for a chance to use one for real. But Heff was shaking his head.

“That thing could tank a nuke,” he said. “We need engineers. Or, fuck, an engineering unit.”

Ferd twitched his tail as a pair of fighters streaked past above them, rattling the glass ceiling. “Or smash the bunker from the sky. Mercy death for the biodrones.”

“Could. That wouldn’t get us our objective. I better make a call.”

Ferd nodded, and without speaking they spread out and hunkered down. Koom-boo-roo were weak, but a man was weak next to a Brown One, and Ferd had seen one of those brought down. Never be idle, never stop listening.

Beside him, Tumik had their array on his back. If he set it up, they’d have their engineers soon enough. If not…the palace was a pretty place. A shame to smash it. But they would, if they had to.

Time to see what the ones above thought.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
HMS Myrmidon, orbiting planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

“We have an on-site report from the JETS team. Eclipse Palace has a hardened bunker which will require heavy assets. They’re requesting an engineering unit or an orbital strike, if that’s not available.”

Caruthers didn’t need to consider those options for long. Their objectives for this operation had always involved gathering intel on the House Henen biodroning operation. Striking the bunkers from orbit was a sure way to damage or utterly ruin whatever they contained.

“We have an American unit on standby, I believe?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want their opinion on how quickly they can affect entry into that bunker.”

Time, after all, was not unlimited. The other Great Houses were officially unaware of this strike against House Henen, and perhaps even accepted it as a necessary sacrifice if they wished to avoid embarrassment in the Security Council, and widespread political damage. But appearances could only be kept up for so long. Sooner rather than later, they would need to either officially sanction the operation, or retaliate.

Sir William had hoped to achieve all objectives before that moment arrived.

“Have the JETS team fall back to a more secure position, deploy their array, and consolidate forces. Have the on-ground HEAT do the same. No use burning them up over country. I want us able to offer a comprehensive option in the next fifteen minutes, and provide whatever the engineers will need to evaluate.”

Out in high orbit, the Apex of Virtue was down another two escorts, their broken hulls tumbling and leaking gas. A dozen voidrippers were slingshotting around the planet at high acceleration, on course to come up behind her defensive formation and sink her, but without being able to warp—gravity spikes were locking down space for tens of light-seconds around—their maneuver was going to take the best part of an hour. How much time he had after that was anyone’s guess.

Hopefully, the engineers worked fast.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
valleys south of Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Specialist Hunter Thompson

‘Horse bounced to a sudden stop. “Change of plan. Moho, the array please.”

Hunter internally celebrated the end of his torment. His legs were pain and worse, because of the blood lab built into his Mass kept him ready to perform, at the possible cost of injury. His wrist computer had his HEALTHCON at yellow, so he was already pushing it—

“Was about to call in anyway,” ‘Horse said, kindly. “It’ll be a few years ‘fore you’re fully conditioned. Don’t stop moving, though. Keep walkin’.”

“Bet….bet I’ll be….a fuckuva lot better…after this…” Hunter groaned, and clipped a fresh powder cartridge into his drinking water. Normally, he’d have checked which flavor, but right now he just needed the top-up. By pure luck, he got his favorite sour cherry.

“Fuck yeah, dude.” ‘Horse’s tone was all business. “Moho, looks like we’ll be joinin’ back up with the rest of the team an’ re-deploying to the Palace. Can offload my patient too.”

“Why for?”

“Gotta big door needs smashin’.”

“I thought I sensed Snapfire’s raging boner.” Moho flicked open the array case and it sprang out, unfolding itself into a massive cube, two meters on each side…and ‘Horse still had to stoop a bit to fit himself and all his gear under it.

Though Hunter had to admit, the cube did feel a bit more claustrophobic than he’d imagined it would…

A flash of absolute black, the feeling he’d suddenly moved a tremendous distance without moving at all, and he was back aboard the Caledonia.

Deacon favored him with special attention, at his side and inspecting his medical readouts before he’d even properly got his bearings. Tisdale and Miller were all over Moho just as quickly, and ‘Horse traded a few easy jokes with Hargreaves and Doyle as he stepped off the platform.

The bastard barely seemed fatigued at all. Jesus, Hunter had some work ahead of him.

“…Okay, computer’s just bein’ panicky,” Deacon declared, applying an extra shot of Crue-D through his MASS’s medical port. “You’re good. But chill out for a few minutes, okay? Just walk around the deck, let the Crude do its thing. Yell at me if you feel dizzy or anything.”

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Hunter promised her. She nodded, slapped his arm, and darted away to check on Moho.

Regaari joined him in his slow lap of the bay. He’d been loping alongside ‘Horse the whole way since they’d left the truck behind, and Gaoians—even HEAT-conditioned standouts like Dexter—just weren’t built for distance running. He looked about as sore as Hunter felt.

“I never enjoy long runs. Warhorse loves them. No accounting for taste, is there?”

“How!? Big guys normally hate jogging!”

“I think in his case it’s precisely because it’s more of a challenge.”

“Yet another thing I’m hopelessly behind in, I guess…”

Dexter was perceptive, Hunter had to give him that. He knew exactly what was grumbling in the back of Hunter’s mind. “Don’t get too worked up about the HEAT’s home-grown Keeda. He’s a very high standard to compare yourself to, Hunter. The highest, actually. So don’t worry about what he can do. Worry what you can do, and how you can be a bit better every day.”

“I know, I know…”

“I mean it. I nearly drove myself crazy trying to compare myself to others in the past. My first encounter with a human was an entirely normal young woman, and I didn’t stack up to her at all. I’d improved much since, once I’d begun to glimpse the cage of mediocrity put around my people, but then some years later I met ‘Horse, watched Daar blossom…they both ended up eclipsing anything I could even dream of attaining, and it…” Regaari paused, sighed, and wobbled his head back and forth, gathering his words. “…it put things in perspective. Taught me to see the ways I constructively differ from them.”

Hunter looked across the bay toward ‘Horse, who was conferring with Campbell over a tablet. “…I’ll never come close to his level, will I?”

“I didn’t say that. I said, don’t worry about it. Do what you can, at the highest level you can. If it’s meant to be, you’ll get there eventually. If not, why feel bad about it?”

“I guess.”

Regaari chittered. “Everyone on the team compares themselves to ‘Horse and Righteous at first. Everyone on the team has to drop that bad habit. And you’re not alone. Righteous envies ‘Horse, ‘Horse envies Daar…there’s always someone.”

“And Daar?”

“…I think he’s psychologically better suited to it, given his history. He was bred and raised to excel, yijao? But even still, he admires ‘Horse quite a lot: his work ethic, his skills, his unmatched toughness and athleticism, his effectiveness as a coach. Daar thinks of them as a team and what he can do these days as a team effort. So even he’s not immune…which is good, really. Would you want to meet the man who truly believes he’s the best in the universe?”

“Even if he is?”

“Especially if he is. A creature like either of them without humility or a higher cause to serve…”

“Y’know, you put it that way? Now I’m honestly a little scared of ‘em.”

“Exactly. But you can help them both by being their friend.” Regaari stopped walking, stood up, and stretched. “Everybody needs other people, Thompson. Everybody.”

Hunter nodded, slowly. “I think I get it.”

“Good. How are you feeling?”

“Better. Fuckin’ love Crude, right?”

Regaari chitter-sighed. “I love the results, certainly…but that’s a philosophical question for another day. We should meander back and see what’s next.”

Hunter nodded, and followed. “Thanks.”

“No worries. I understand better than most what it’s like to get knocked down a few pegs.”

They re-stocked on ammo, food, drink powder and stuff, slammed down another fatty baby-food pouch, and topped up their suits’ power cells. Back at the jump array, ‘Horse gave them a nod. “Feelin’ recharged?”

Hunter grinned inside his mask, pulled off his best Big Cornfed Pose, and hammed it up. “Ready and fuckin’ able, sergeant!”

“Dude. Did you seriously just flex on me?” ‘Horse laughed genuinely, and back-slapped Hunter right into the array. “We’ll work on your meathead skills later.” Once he stepped in himself, though, he flashed instantly into a more serious persona. “Got corpses to stack, now.”

Hunter nodded and fell in alongside him. “Right.”

And that was all that needed to be said. ‘Horse knew Hunter had his back.

There was a black flash, and a thump.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
House Henen Grand Battlecruiser Apex of Virtue, above planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Fleetmatriarch Henenawryen

Losing one escort had put more stress on the others, until one of them had finally failed, then another, and now another…

Awryen watched its shields reach white-hot incandescence and then fail spectacularly, dumping their accumulated energy inwards. The ship fell out of formation, no longer accelerating, no longer firing or shielding, hull glowing hot and shedding droplets of molten metal. Softened and weakened by the heat, its pressurized innards burst, scattering smoke, superheated air and cooked crew into the void.

That was her fate, soon.

And…for what? Was help even coming? Her desperate message to the other Great Houses had returned only silence, and considering the total absence of any comms traffic from the planet below, or even from their own scout satellites…

Their comms were jammed. They couldn’t warp, couldn’t jump, couldn’t out-accelerate the Humans and Gaoians, and if their shield wall didn’t fail first, there was surely a rapid strike group circling the planet to come up from behind.

And again…for what? For a House falling apart at the seams? Her own sister, Awryen’s predecessor in commanding this very ship and fleet, had defected to House Icwd. For a paranoid and domineering Grandmatriarch who should have have been pushed out years ago, and who was probably dead or captured now anyway?

Awryen had daughters and nieces on the Apex. Could she really bring herself to fight to the death and take them with her?

…No. No she couldn’t.

The moment her will to fight broke felt like the moment she decided to live, and save their lives, rather than like failure. She leaned forward heavily on her command console, and gave a command that had been growing inside her like a hot ball. “…All ships…cease firing. Signal to the enemy that we wish to surrender.”

The hail of firepower ceased. A few last rounds completed their trajectories, but then the guns fell silent. No more directed radiation, no more missiles. A moment of peace fell.

Then, the translated message from her opposite number.

“Apex of Virtue, disperse your formation, drop your shields and cease acceleration. Prepare to surrender to our boarding party.”

Awryen took a deep breath, then gestured to her subordinates to follow the command. This was a moment of…not trust, but testing. Their shields would have failed and they would all have died eventually anyway. If the Humans chose chose to execute them now…well, it was only hastening what would have happened anyway.

No treacherous storm of firepower followed their shields lowering. Of course, it was still possible they intended to execute everyone on board and seize the ships as trophies, but…

But the only way forward that she could see where there was even any hope that her daughters might live through today lay in trust.

“Unload the guns, eject the magazines, discharge the capacitors,” she ordered, going above and beyond what the alien commander had ordered. “I want all handheld weapons and security equipment surrendered and locked away. Offer no resistance.”

The boarding party, when it came, was escorted by a screen of fighters. They didn’t dock, but instead spacewalked. Awryen watched them on the hull cameras near the airlocks: the infamous Heat.

It was an acronym in their language, she knew. If so, it was a good one. It implied fierceness, fire, intensity. All the qualities they showed when they barged through the airlock and seized her ship faster than she’d have imagined possible. She knew the Apex quite well, and she’d never have imagined that a boarder could get from the main dorsal airlock to the command deck so quickly.

Then again, she’d never have imagined that somebody so short could be so imposing, either. The Humans who took control of her bridge were compact balls of condensed violence, layered in weapons and armor and glaring at her silently from behind yellow-gold visors, and made her feel quite weak just to look at.

Two of them swept the room, checked that none of them were armed, and restrained them brusquely and firmly but with surprising restraint considering how easily they could have broken an armor or leg with careless roughness. The third was apparently their leader. Though, there was nothing on his equipment to suggest as much.

“You’re the fleetmatriarch?”

Awryen inclined her body. “I am Matriarch Henenawryen, yes.”

The Human nodded. “I am Major Costello. On behalf of the allied nations and the Clans of Gao, I’m here to accept your surrender.”

Awryen inclined herself curiously. “No violence? No summary punishment?”

“No.”

“…Then I surrender to you, Major.”

The ensuing takeover of her ship was brisk, to put it mildly. Within minutes, her crew were rounded up and under guard in a cargo bay, and the Humans had encircled them on all sides, forcibly separating her formation and isolating them so that if any of her escort captains suddenly felt the futile urge to continue the fight, the only possible outcome would be immediate slaughter.

The process of securing the escorts too took a while. Awryen was permitted to enjoy the relative comfort of her quarters, albeit under the watchful eye of a guard.

The flow of humans onto her ship was remarkably brisk. The Heat swiftly handed over to more conventional marines in lighter equipment, who jumped across via small, portable arrays. Technicians and crew too, who neutered the weapons and took control of the other systems. Something similar, no doubt, was happening to the remaining escort ships.

The thought that perhaps these deathworlders considered her ship a worthy prize to claim and integrate into their own navy gave Awryen a little pride. Or perhaps they intended to return them to the other Houses as a diplomatic gesture. That would be welcome too. The Apex had been built to keep House Henen’s holdings safe from Hunter raids, not to get dragged into this senseless argument. Whether in Human hands or Kwmbwrw hands, it would be nice if the ship got to fulfil its purpose.

As for Awryen…the promise of living to see another day and perhaps fight another, better fight. In light of that, she couldn’t regret her decision, even knowing that it meant the fall of her House. Though, considering what she suspected the deathworlders would find in the bunkers below the palace, she no longer cared.

If they found what she thought they would, then the House’s fall was self-inflicted, and deserved.

And she wanted no part in its continuation.

Date point: 18y2m AV
Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Master Sergeant Adam “Warhorse” Arés

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Snapfire this excited, Righteous.”

‘Horse (and the rest of the band) were gathered at a small distance from the sudden swarm of engineers. The enemy was pretty much buried underground and unwilling to come out—honestly a particularly stupid tactic, since no fortress holds forever—so while the team was providing the engineers some extra cover and security, the engineers were figuring out how to de-door the area with maximum expediency.

‘Horse was gonna be learning about explosives again today, he could tell.

The big guy slapped ‘Horse on the shoulder. “He don’t get to play at the same kinda scale, usually. Mosta what he does is small things, breaching and stuff. They’re usin’ literally tons of explosives ‘fer this.”

‘Horse nodded. ‘Course, the engineers weren’t just packing on the plastic explosives any old how, no. There was method to it. Drilling and shaping and stuff. From the looks of it, they figured the surrounding concrete wall was weaker than the door itself.

Until they pulled the trigger though, ’Horse’s job was a whole lotta standin’ around and staying sharp.

“How big a boom is this gonna be?”

“I ain’t ever seen ‘em use forklifts ‘ta move their boomputty around before.”

“So…big, then.”

“Yyyup.” Righteous was definitely grinning like a maniac behind his mask.

“We’re about to find out,” Titan told them, joining them after peeling away from the demolition work to rejoin them. “Might wanna back up a bit.”

“How far?”

“See that guy?” Titan indicated one of the engineers. “At least as far as he goes.”

“…Right.”

They backed up a bit. The last two men down the corridor were Titan and the guy leading the engineers, who backed them down a little further to be sure. And of course, he got the pleasure of pushing the button himself.

“Fire in the hole!!”

‘Horse had seen, and been close to, some pretty big booms in his life. This one reminded him of the time they’d exited Capitol Station by blowing out the hull. It had that same violence to it, the whole-body punch of the explosives followed by something more solid as the pressure equalized between the palace’s pressurized interior, the bunker, and the outside.

It was followed by a small earthquake as the doors, their hinges and locks neatly cut, toppled over and crashed to the ground. Dust and smoke boiled down the hallway, so thick that he couldn’t even see his feet. The EV-MASS could handle that, though: it had surface-scanning sensors on the helmet, for the perfectly black shadows of a spaceborne environment. Inside his visor, the walls and floor, his buddies, the engineers and their equipment, were all picked out with a grid of light, giving him all the information he needed to move.

They barged sure-footedly through the dust cloud, which thinned rapidly. By the time they were back at where the doors had been, it was nearly clear.

A flurry of pulse rounds punched holes of clear air through the haze. Wall-mounted turrets in the atrium beyond the ruined doors, firing automatically. ‘Horse wrecked one with a burst of three rounds, Snapfire silenced the other.

Nothing else in the atrium. Somebody had set up some crates and furniture as a barricade, but abandoned it. Two exits, left and right. Righteous took his guys left, ‘Horse went right.

Long corridor. Pause, kick some debris into it. It scattered normally across the ground, so no grav-fuckery. At least not yet. Titan’s dump-drone shot forward, trailing a grounding cable with its many coppery leaves unfolding. Nobody forgot about Starfall. No forcefields yet, either.

Advance.

Doors on either side, each room in need of clearing. Stack up, one, two, three, four, ready, breach, in–

Kwmbwrw body on the floor. What was left of it, anyway. Slam forward, scan up for surprises. Clear.

On to the next one. The biodrones were loose, though. Loose, and feral.

They had Gaoians to put down.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Bunker under Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Reskn, bannerless exile

It was the eyes in the dark that unnerved him the most. Gaoians had reflective tapeta at the backs of their eyes, a useful evolution for vision in low-light conditions. That had the effect of slightly reducing their resolving power, but greatly enhancing their motion sensitivity. And from inside his secure lab, via the security cameras, Reskn could see those eyes gleaming in the shadows.

When Gaoian biodrones reverted to their feral instincts, they hid. They found dark corners, preferably elevated, and huddled up together in a tight furry ball. When they moved, they moved low and quick, slinking along near the walls and shying away from well-lit areas. And they watched. On most of Reskn’s monitors, those watchful little mirrors were the only visible sign that the biodrones were even there.

He’d seen what happened to anyone unfortunate enough to stray into such a room, too. The tight ball of bodies would slowly unwind. The ferals would advance to the threshold of their hiding place…

And then, as one, they would pounce. Claws and teeth did the rest.

He’d seen Henenrotwth die that way, the arrogant, servile fool. Everyone else working for the House had been a little wiser to the Grandmatriarch’s growing derangement, a little more aware that they were working for a paranoid psychotic so utterly blind to her own mania that she hadn’t even seen that she was steering her ship right onto the rocks.

Reskn had planned to leave. In just eleven more days, he would have. Now, if the ferals didn’t tear him apart, the mixed Human, Gaoian and Ten’Gewek assault team now entering the complex would surely either smash him flat or haul him away to a prison of some sort.

Still. Of the three options, a prison was the least terminal. And he had some time—not long, but some—before they reached his lab. Time to prepare, and think how best to meet them.

Warning them of the trap would probably be most prudent…

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Airbase south of Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Master Sergeant Adam “Tagg” Shearsby

Tagg had never in his life imagined he’d be assaulting an airfield on an alien world. And yet, here he was. Doing work that the big damn heroes didn’t have time to do. And frankly, after having met them, and been subjected to their hospitality, and a tour of their facilities, a quick fun-fam of the EV-MASS…well, he didn’t begrudge them any of it.

Also, Tiny really didn’t fit the callsign anymore, not that he ever had. Which was why it was fuckin’ perfect.

Things had progressed really goddamn fast. He’d infiltrated the target area with, well, fairly laughable ease. He and his team even had time to cast a fuckin’ tactical weather balloon for the air-breathers, and an enemy that didn’t notice that on a dead, coverless world was ripe for the reaping.

They’d sent back their air density reports, and Tagg had just finished his soil densitometry not ten minutes ago on what would be the perfect goddamn landing strip. The gravity was all fucked up of course, and the air density didn’t match up, but modern avionics could take all those readings and produce a compatible flight envelope for just about anything a person could walk and breathe on, these days. The fixed-wing aircraft still had a lot of life left in it.

The numbers were taken and in the flyboy’s hands, now. They were probably already simming up their models for the heavies. The lightweight fighters, though…those had enough power to just say fuck you to most of that. Those crazy motherfuckers just needed the raw numbers.

Who the fuck ever thought actual fuckin’ fighter jets would see duty off-world? Needs must, when the purpose-built Firebirds were all but extinct.

Tagg’s Air Force boner could not possibly be harder. Fuck. Yeah.

And there were the Voidrippers, too. They weren’t air-breathers, strictly speaking, but they had forcefield wings and could aviate just fine. And Gaoian pilots were some fluffy little badasses, from what he’d seen.

They just needed some human friends to fly alongside them, since the air-breathing stuff had equipment much better suited for attacking the ground. Which meant Tagg had the privilege of pulling off one of the most fuckin’ badass moves in the history of Combat Controlling.

He was about to jump planes from one planet to another, while they were in flight.

A lot of neat stuff had fallen out of the tight-knit alliance between America and the Commonwealth nations over the last fifteen years. Among them, the sixth-gen fighters, and lately, creative new uses for them in an age where everyone was focusing on space. Maybe he felt a little…prideful? Pride that the ground-walking, air-breathing military still had value, even stacked against alien supermen like First Fang, hulks like Warhorse and all of his brothers…

It all came down to the Jump Mortar. His Special Recon buddy gave him the nod, the eyes-in-the-sky aboard the ships above did the same…

With a THUMP, a shell packed with tech speared the sky, shaking dust up all around them. The shell hit minimum safe altitude in seconds, hit the apex of its flight a couple seconds after that…

There was a flash of black in the sky. A lot happened inside that flash of black, Tagg knew. Forcefields created a bubble of vacuum, stasis fields locked it, spacetime twisted and swapped it for somewhere else, and a strike fighter dived straight into alien atmo with its afterburner roaring.

A second thump and blackflash summoned his wingman.

“ADDER ONE-ONE, jump complete.”

Things progressed very rapidly from there. The initial strike package was there to achieve air dominance, which couldn’t be done precisely from orbit. The Navy’s ships were too far away, their fires were big enough to cause severe collateral—Tagg didn’t like being collateral—and they were orbiting tight and fast, so most of the time they were beyond the horizon or too low on it to shoot anyway.

Fighters, though, they could be fuckin’ surgical. And they were. The alien air patrol doing a wide lazy loop around the palace’s airspace barely had time to notice they were under attack from a completely unexpected direction before they were gone.

Stage two was sustainment, bringing in more air superiority, keeping the pressure on with fresh and fully-stocked planes. Four fighters became sixteen, and now they had enough power in the sky to make things safe for the rapidly-snowballing chain of forces needed to insert the assault force proper.

They were four minutes into the assault, and the ground base had just begun to notice they were in deep trouble. It was too late. Next up were the first of the heavy assets. A big fat fucker with big sensors was there for air battle management—something like an AWACS and a JSTARS combined, he forgot exactly what it was called—along with the first refueler. Fighter jets were thirsty motherfuckers, and already two needed to drink.

Five minutes after that, the air battle net had been fully established. Next came the Weavers. They weren’t very big, not even as big as a C-130 these days, but what they lacked in size they made up for in spaceflight. And anyway, if you had enough of them, they were more than big enough to drop a battalion worth of paratroopers on some hapless fuckers’ noggins.

Ten minutes after that, Tagg’s first job was basically done, and his second was underway: tactical air traffic controller. The airspace was rapidly becoming very crowded and somebody had to keep the flyboys stacked and sequenced so’s they didn’t crash into each other. Once they had proper AWACS on-station, he’d transfer authority, but for now his life was on the radio.

Meanwhile, the Rangers they’d just dropped on the base’s noggin did their work quickly, methodically, and without mercy. Poor doomed fucks didn’t stand a chance.

And an hour after that…the first C-17 blackflashed in, looped around, and landed on Tagg’s freshly-measured strip of dirt road, carrying the most basic fundaments of a working airstrip. In all likelihood, they’d be there for a week or so. He wasn’t privy to exactly what they’d be doing, but most likely there would be discreet tours by various Houses to see what Henen had been up to…not his show. That was for the big-hero tier-0 types, and whatever they were doing over at the Palace.

And for once, Tagg was perfectly content to leave them their glory.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Bunker under Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Father Regaari of Clan Whitecrest

During the war on Gao, Regaari had been spared the worst of the grim duty of putting down feral biodrones. He’d hoped never to have to do it again. Now, there were hundreds, presumably gathered from far corners of the galaxy. Wave after wave of them.

They broke like waves, too. Again, and again, and again. What did not fall under fire, fell instead under his claws and strength like so much grass underfoot.

He knew something about how Cousin Daar must have felt, now. He’d been like them once, even had implants in his head. There but for the grace of God went he, but his life had built him into something more. Something that could end an ordinary, average Gao with a single swipe of his claws. More than just a Gao. There were few of any species who could stand against him.

He was an agent of death, a dark poet of violence. Sometimes, he hated what he’d become.

The drones had come boiling out of their hiding places as if triggered by some signal. From hiding like frightened cubs, something had abruptly changed, driven them mad. Whatever it was, Regaari couldn’t sense it. The air reeked of fear musk, but that could be the trigger or it could just be dozens upon dozens of crazed biodrones in a mindless frenzy.

Sheer quantity did have a quality all its own. His armor had already borne a few claw-marks. None of them seemed to have anything more than ordinary Gaoian claws, but if any of those had been fusion-edged like the ones on his own prosthetic…

No time for second-guessing. Keep pushing, pile on the pressure, be there at his Human brothers’ backs.

Reach a junction of hallways. ‘Horse levels his weapon, opens up. His is one of the big guns, the largest and most powerful version of the gauss rifle, an LMG by any other name. Fat, heavy bullets, lots of power behind them. More than enough to rip straight through a scrawny underfed biodrone and the three behind it. Enough weight of fire to put the poor bastards down in an instant and leave a bloody haze in the air.

Storm through it. Know it’ll have to be cleaned off, later. Brothers already gore-dark from mask to boots…

And then, suddenly, silence. Scurrying claws in the hallways suggested survivors fleeing to find somewhere dark to hide, but the frantic melee was over.

Regaari’s nape tingled with that. Something was wrong. ‘Horse sensed it, too. A single gesture and everyone was falling back—

Not a moment too soon, it seemed. There was a snap, and the corridor in front of them experienced an energy discharge of some kind. Flat planes of infinitely thin darkness seethed through the air for half a second, then vanished.

“….Well, shit.”

Titan was forward instantly, as bloody as the rest of them and wiping his visor clear as he stepped up to consider this new trap. Experimentally, he picked up an empty magazine and tossed it into the hallway.

Snap.

Shreds of metal rained to the ground, their cut edges gleaming cleanly amid the foulness.

“…Urgh. Stasis mine.”

“As I would have warned you, had you not been preoccupied.”

They turned, training their weapons toward the source of the new voice even while Regaari knew instantly it was coming from a wall intercom. A Corti face peered at them from the small screen, alone in quite a small laboratory room.

“And who are you?” Regaari asked him.

“Reskn. Formerly a researcher here, though as thanks for for all my hard work they left me to die. If not for some quick thinking on my part…”

“Alright, I get it. And you thought you’d give us information on the facility’s security in exchange for amnesty, right?”

Reskn blinked solemnly. “It seems like my best chance of surviving this day.”

“Spill it.”

“There are three levels to this facility, of which you are on the uppermost. The security here is comparatively light, intended to prevent the test subjects from escaping to the surface. These ‘stasis mines’ as you term them are installed at three major choke points through which all traffic to and from the lower levels must pass. I believe they have redundant power sources in both the ceiling and floor.”

Regaari saw Titan nod, and deal with the problem in his favored way of bypassing it all together: he, Snapfire and Moho immediately ducked into an adjacent room, presumably to blow a hole in the wall. “And the lower levels?”

“Much the same on the second level. The biodrone reprogramming lab itself is rigged with a self-destruct mechanism, however. The idea being to destroy the test subjects and all evidence.”

“What kind of self-destruct?”

“A secondary sprinkler system loaded with a particularly vicious corrosive oxidative agent, Chlorine Trifluoride.”

“Pinche pendejos locos…” ‘Horse muttered.

“…Indeed. I assure you, your suits would offer no protection whatsoever, and I am certain their fingers are on the button. Fortunately, it was intended for containment and demolition, not as a defense: the storage tanks are outside the covered area. There should be a shutoff valve.”

“I need a specific location,” Regaari told him, even as ‘Horse shook his head in further disbelief.

“On the second level, in the zone marked with green flooring. Most of the facility’s plumbing, heating and air systems are in that zone.”

“If the idea is to destroy evidence, why haven’t they triggered it already?”

“I suspect they hoped to catch you in it. If you wish to preserve what’s down there, you will need to disable it before they know you are aware of it. Fortunately, the security cameras do not pick up audio, so they will not know the content of this conversation. In fact, considering your faceless helmets, they hopefully do not know you are conversing with me at all.”

The sound of a detonation punctuated the end of the conversation: the Defenders had cleared a path.

“You sit tight,” Regaari instructed Reskn, and darted away.

One of the truly great things about being plugged into the Fleet Intelligence Center was that command saw and heard everything he saw and heard. Major Costello was happy for them to act on the intel, and as for the problem of disabling the toxic sprinklers before the enemy saw them coming…

Well, passing unseen and silently was what Whitecrests did best. Especially when there was a handy distraction available.

“Cubs, big brothers make Mother mad. Naughty cubs raid the pantry.”

Time to do what the Humans could not.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Daniel Hoeff

Deniability.

It was the main reason Hoeff and the monkeys were even there. Hoeff knew that he himself was one of the blackest agents there was, and the Ten’Gewek? A people with no modern infrastructure, a spaceborne population of less than a dozen, no written records, so broadly beneath the radar of most galactic species that few would even remember they existed.

The ideal men to clean, in other words. And while the HEAT ransacked the bunkers below, did their big damn hero thing and ended a galactic evil, there was still plenty of evidence to gather and destroy up in the palace proper. And of course, the bunker was a bunker, a place that most of the science team retreated into for work or in emergencies. Most had simply not had the chance: the emergency had come upon them so quickly and quietly that very few had found the chance to flee to its temporary safety.

They were hiding in the palace. And each and every one of them had a head full of knowledge that could not be permitted to exist.

This wasn’t what the HEAT did, or maybe: not what they were made for. They weren’t cold-blooded and really couldn’t be. They waded into dangerous places, overcoming the traps and well-armed hostiles within. They weren’t exterminators. This wasn’t even a hunt, not by Ten’Gewek standards: the Ten’Gewek prided themselves on only hunting strong prey that posed a real danger to the incautious huntsman.

This was murder, plain and simple. Deniable murder, done without bullets, calculated to leave no conclusive evidence that their victims had died of anything other than trauma when the palace fell in around them. After all, some of the people they were killing today were important: it would be diplomatically inconvenient if there was any proof they were personally and selectively exterminated, rather than merely being unfortunate collateral damage.

Hoeff to hand it to House Henen, the palace was fuckin’ gorgeous. Hoeff had picked up an eye for decoration and architecture while doin’ property development work on the side for Xiù, and now it was hard not to notice and appreciate it, even when he was on a mission. Part of him was honestly kinda sad he didn’t have the chance to stop and admire the decor, which was all about circles, and halos of light. Tributes to the permanent eclipse that dominated the sky whenever he happened to glance up through the glass roofs and domes.

Lotta Kwmbwrw artwork, too. Long intricately decorated carpets to soften the polished stone floors. Painted bas-reliefs anchored firmly to the walls. Alien paintings, the color palettes muted and strange.

And all along the wall to his right, windows into the domed garden and its eerie riot of glowing plants.

All along his left, state rooms, offices, bedroom suites. A palace.

Genn gestured for a pause, stooped to examine a scuff on the floor. His tongue lashed out, forked end flicking up and down, tap-tap-tapping the ground as he swayed his weight from one foot to the other, taking his prey’s scent trail. A flick of his tail was the gesture to follow.

One thing ETs did differently to humans: most of ‘em didn’t wear clothes, beyond strappy pockets, belts, harnesses and stuff. No wardrobes. No closets. Beds were different too: for mostly-quadrupeds like the Kwmbwrw, a bed was cushions on the floor. The rooms were bigger, too, with bigger doors.

All of which meant fewer hiding places, and a door wasn’t so nasty of a choke point to move through. Hoeff wasn’t gonna complain about blessings like that. It made clearing any room they entered pretty easy.

No, the bitch was, the palace was fuckin’ immense and they didn’t know exactly how many people they were rooting out. What’s more, they had to be quick enough and quiet enough that nobody had time to raise any particular alarm. The big distraction HEAT were making helped, certainly…

He had the right team for the job. Quiet and skilled in the case of Rees and Davies, both of whom were Royal Marines Commandos and some other things besides. Unbelievably quick and strong with his monkeyfriends. Both of those things, in Hoeff’s case…

And an absolute fuckin’ juggernaut of death in the case of Ferd. He didn’t so much service his targets as instantly erase them from existence. They never heard him coming, and never felt their death.

Their latest was a Corti, cowering in his room with a tablet clutched to his skinny chest. This one had an honest-to-god banner hanging on his wall, the bright blue-green of copper caste, and dense with geometrically precise Corti symbols. The full list of his achievements, accolades, awards, rank, college, faculty, discoveries, patents, publications and more hung clean across one wall.

The other Corti they’d found had been bannerless exiles. One had still clung to the tattered remains of a steel-caste banner, all its records ripped off leaving only ragged fabric behind, but this guy had been a fucking hero to the Directorate. The others, Hoeff could understand: desperation would drive people to stupid ends. But this guy?

What a fucking waste.

Hoeff blinked across the room, slammed the tiny alien up against the wall with a crunch of breaking ribs, and put his fist right through that thin, oversized skull. A long, prestigious career ended in a single grisly instant.

Frasier gathered the fallen tablet and added it to his bag. Rees was busy sticking little self-destructing “bugs” into every computer he could find, which were theoretically loaded up with enough software to ransack and destroy anything of interest anywhere. FIC was likely having a field day via their remote feeds.

There were others, too. An immense pair of Vgork bulls in their prime, most likely the hired muscle. Mature Vgork bulls were big and incredibly strong by any standard, and these two were high-end breeders, with enough herd rings drilled through their nasal ridges to make Daar blush. Hell, they were even kinda quick, or at least could move with some urgency. In an animal-style fight they’d each fuck up a decent-sized bull on Earth, probably.

Ferd took all of two seconds to fuckin’ break the first of them. Nomuk and Tumik descended on the other, grabbed, twisted and damn near pulled his head off. The fleeing bull’s remains crashed to the floor looking unnaturally down his own spine.

All of them had been quick, and relatively quiet. One, however, was noisy.

A Kwmbwrw scientist, a female, had somehow got her hands on a pulse rifle. The sound of its shots echoed off the walls, though of course a pulse weapon was wasted effort against them, even if she’d been an accurate shot, or they’d been incautious enough to give her a clean target.

Ferd saved the day. Ten’Gewek were gifted with an explosive strength matched by nobody, and with it, could move with the kind of short-range speed that would make any Gaoian or Earth critter jealous. While they couldn’t sustain that kind of zip for very long…

He hit her all too literally like a truck. What eventually slid to a halt a dozen meters down the hall didn’t bend in any of the right ways.

Rees and Davies were busy dressing the remains, giving everything a quick go-over to remove any sign they’d been there that might survive the Palace’s imminent collapse, or couldn’t plausibly be written off as caused by the collapse. But they were also listening, watching, staying alert

They couldn’t stop moving. Hoeff gestured, and the team efficiently paired off, and moved on.

They had plenty more roaches to exterminate.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Bunker under Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Father Regaari of Clan Whitecrest

The sound of gunfire through the halls suggested his brothers had found more ferals to put down. Regaari noted that fact, but only peripherally: his focus was more immediately on the problem of moving without being seen.

Security on the bunker’s second level was tighter. Clearly, only certain authorized individuals had been permitted beyond a checkpoint after the elevator, and the security measures to punish unauthorized visitors were robust, to put it mildly. The Defenders were earning their keep today.

But Regaari’s team had to stray outside of the Defenders’ protective reach in order to do their job. The distraction provided by the humans needed to be seen going on way, away from the green zone Reskn had described. Regaari and his Brothers needed to head toward it…and that meant handling the security obstacles themselves.

Not that this was anything new, for a team who specialized in stealthy infiltration. But it did create awkward moments, sometimes.

For instance: the gauss turret aimed straight down the tunnel toward them. By itself, not really an issue, Regaari’s suit contained countermeasures that helped him crawl right up to a motion sensor if he did it slowly enough. But he didn’t really have the luxury of going slow. The clock was ticking until his Human brothers cleared the floor: he needed to have the chemical sprinkler system disabled by then.

Shooting out the turret would have been most expedient, but that too would have drawn unwanted attention. So the only thing to do was inch forward, trust the countermeasures and camo, and pass it by. They could deal with it the expedient way after the sprinklers were deactivated.

It was a tight squeeze. Awkward, too: navigating a doorway upside-down and slowly took the kind of core strength and control that Regaari had simply never had, before the HEAT. Even now, his abdomen was strongly reminding him that he wasn’t a primate by nature, and that it was only doing what he asked under strenuous protest.

Being a big armored bastard over-laden with equipment didn’t help, either.

But he made it, and slithered along the ceiling into a side hallway with considerable relief. There were a lot of pipes on the ceiling, here. One was the actual fire suppression system, he could tell: it had Dominion-standard symbols and color-coding. An extra set of pipes running alongside was almost certainly the fake sprinklers full of ClF3.

He followed them, moving with speed to make up for lost time. Up ahead, the second pipes diverged abruptly from the main ones and vanished through a wall.

“Cubs, oldest smells treats.”

Shim was alongside him. They scuttled to a stop above the door, and he fished a sticky sensor off his belt before pressing it to the wall. He was the smallest and comparatively lightest Gao on the team, and that meant he could go places Regaari or anyone else couldn’t risk.

“…Big tanks, seven hostiles minimum,” he subvocalized, ditching the Clan’s cant for this unique situation.

“Hold fire. Nasty shit in those tanks,” Regaari told him. “Claws only.”

Shim duck-nodded, silently inched down the wall, and injected a little blasting gel directly into the door’s lock: just enough to trash it and blow the door open. The moment to pounce was upon them. Regaari slid down opposite him and took point because, frankly, this was a situation where speed and power really did make the difference, and he was the biggest HEAT Gao besides Thurrsto. Ergan and Deeko made it past the doorway and turret, they stacked up behind him—

The gel detonated with a pop, shattering the lock. Regaari was first through, knocking the door off its hinges. A scared-looking Kwmbwrw male standing near a control console had just enough time to look up at him before Regaari was past, the fusion claws on his cybernetic sizzling as they carved lethally through meat and bone, striking the hapless alien dead instantly.

Regaari pounced past the collapsing body, clawed the spine out of a second, gutted a third, spun, sprung, killed.

Shim serviced the last target, right as the little Corti was beginning to move. A dozen console operators dead, all in less than three seconds. And, importantly, there was no sign that the tanks were now venting their lethal contents all over the levels below. Deeko swiftly found the shutoff valve and made certain.

“TITAN, DEXTER. Sprinkler control room secured, valve closed.”

“Copy that. Proceeding.”

With that, the HEAT resumed its breeching sweep, which meant it was time for phase two; the secondary forces would be securing the installation behind them, and that meant anything on their target cards had to be destroyed or sanitized before anyone had a chance to see anything.

Daar wanted as little exposure as possible. Nobody needed a war, least of all because some idiot private took a picture and shared it to all his friends.

Which meant he and his Brothers had work to do.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gyotin, Champion of Clan Starmind

Chump had turned out to be a magnificent teacher, in his unspoken canine way, for there was nothing in the universe happier than a dog with a job. In Chump’s case, he had two, the first of which was pulling things.

It didn’t seem to matter much to him what he pulled. Sometimes he pulled a cart when Gyotin or one of the other Brothers went shopping for supplies to keep the monastery fed. Other times, he pulled a small plough through their kitchen garden. If there was nothing else for him to pull, attaching a small parachute to his harness seemed to satisfy as he zoomed up and down the vegetable rows, pausing for an occasional carrot snack, or perhaps an unfortunate rodent who had wandered too close to his territory.

They’d tried all sorts of canine occupations on him. At first they’d tried the more martial pursuits, in line with his heritage. Schutzhund, et cetera. While he certainly excelled, and none could ever claim he was anything but fearsome when he wanted to be…the fact was, Chump wasn’t a fighting dog. He’d dutifully tackle his trainer, shake him about violently…and then promptly slobber all over his face, all ferocity forgotten.

No, he was the opposite of a fighting dog. So as much as Chump loved the training and especially loved his first job, his second job was where he truly shone: he had a nose for people who needed some unreserved and unconditional love. When Gyotin set him loose in the park to run with his parachute, and Chump failed to come back, it invariably meant one thing.

On this occasion, a familiar figure was slumped against a tree in running shoes and leggings, sipping from a water bottle and watching the dawn, running her hand down Chump’s spine. She glanced up at Gyotin and smiled, raised her bottle in a sort of welcoming toast, and massaged the dog’s ears.

“Good morning, Ava.”

“Morning, Gyotin.”

How could they be on anything other than first-name terms, when she was the one who’d first set him down his life’s path? Gyotin plopped down next to her comfortably. It was a pleasant morning, the air still moist from last night’s rains and the ground a little damp as a result, but the result was fresh rather than unpleasant.

“You’re up early.”

“Bad night.” She yawned.

“Dreams again?”

“Yeah. Been a while, but sometimes I’ll smell something, or hear something, or spend the day thinking about something, and…” she glanced down at her bottle. “…You never really heal from some things, you know? There’s always a scar.”

Chump’s tail rapped against her hip and he shuffled his paws a little closer, trying for Maximum Comforting. Ava smiled and scratched his ears again.

Gyotin duck-nodded agreeably. “Oh, I know. I saw a movie the other day, about a plane crash? It took me right back to how I first arrived on this planet.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you mind if I ask what brought it on this time?”

She sighed. “…I spent the afternoon writing up an opinion piece on the whole Clan Bronzefur situation. Between the fact there was a trade in biodrones, the fact the ring-leaders are facing the Hundred Cut and the punishments handed out to some of the others…” She shivered. “…Sometimes your people scare me, Gyotin. You can be fucking evil to each other.”

“So can you.”

“…Yeah…” She swigged her water. “I think it’s…I know Daar. I’ve traded dirty jokes with him! He’s this big, playful cartoon character of a guy, and then…”

“Chump there has an incredibly powerful bite, you know. He’s given more than his share of small injury in his training.”

“Chump’s smart, but he’s just an animal. He doesn’t do what he does for rational reasons or ideals like justice. If he bit someone, it’s ‘cuz he got overexcited and did what excited dogs do. Daar can’t claim that. He’s doing what he does because he thinks it’s what’s required of him.”

“You don’t think it is?”

Ava swigged her water again before replying. “I think that’s just it. Maybe it is. Maybe humans are content with just locking monsters up and leaving them to two hots and a cot until their dying day, forgotten and alone, but your people I guess need something more, uh…”

“Visceral.”

“Yeah. That’s exactly the right word.” She gave Gyotin a wry look. “You can see how that would be a little disturbing?”

“I have long pondered that side of our nature. We are ambush predators by evolution, a soldier species by design. We grew up more like cats, but were shaped into something more canine.”

“Eh, you don’t really fit a terrestrial mold at all.” Ava shrugged. “I dunno. I wrote my thoughts down for the article, then had bad dreams about it, took a jog to clear my head. It’s not important.”

Gyotiin chittered. “Yes it is! You would not have written it otherwise!”

“Sometimes I write things just to get them out of my head.” She stretched, then looked at him. “But I guess it is. I think a lot of humans still think Gaoians are cute. They see fur and whiskers and clever paws, and think of raccoons and foxes and little bears and stuff. And you’re not, you’re an alien culture with your own way of thinking and doing things and sometimes your idea of justice is our idea of ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’

“That goes in two directions. We consider solitary confinement to be almost incomprehensibly evil. Most of us would rather die than face that.”

Ava nodded. “…I had a nightmare once,” she confessed.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. In Egypt, when I signed a non-disclosure with some pretty heavy consequences for breaching it. That night, I dreamed I was on death row.” She shivered. “I just imagine what those Bronzefurs are facing and I guess I put myself in their position.”

Gyotin knew his ears were drooping sympathetically. “They face…a terrible end, it’s true. Particularly the ringleader. Daar can be a magnificently cruel being, when he needs to be.”

“Why? What’s that for? Is it vengeance? Deterrent?”

“Justice. What they did is so deep and fundamental a betrayal of the Gao, it is difficult to put into words. If they were not strongly and publicly punished, I fear the zeal to find every last offender would rapidly sweep out of control. I believe you call that a ‘witch hunt.’”

“So it’s to make sure innocent bystanders don’t get caught up in a moral panic.”

“Partly. I can only say that it is necessary for us. Gao are intensely social beings, and that is not always to our benefit. Maybe we will grow past such a need, eventually. But we are what we are, and there is no sense opining that we are not yet the better version of ourselves we may one day become.” He put a paw on her arm. “I think it’s better to work with our nature, rather than against it.”

“So you support their punishment.”

“You know the answer to that, Ava.”

“Right, yes. The Great Father has spoken and you as Champion couldn’t possibly contradict him, especially to somebody who might write about it afterwards.” The words themselves might have been bitter, but her tone wasn’t: her tone was understanding.

“I wouldn’t anyway. Besides, their punishment is mild compared to historical norms. My Father has explicitly commanded swift and merciful justice for most of them. By the standards of warlords and Great Fathers, Daar is very much a progressive, enlightened being. Six hundred years ago, their flayed pelts would have been paraded around every city.”

“Whose pelts?”

“Every member of the Clan, right down to the cubs.” He flicked an ear. “Don’t judge. Six hundred years ago, humans were burning heretics at the stake, or drawing and quartering traitors. Six hundred years is a long time. Both our peoples have come a long way.”

Ava sighed despondently. “And still a long way to go.”

“I hope so!” Gyotin chirped. “It would be terrible to think we’re already at the end of moral progress! Just think how different we’ll be in another six hundred years.”

“Hmm.” She looked at him. “You know, the people who lived six hundred years ago would think we were all spineless, godless heathens, probably. Who’s to say what we’d think of the people six hundred years from now?”

“A people have the morals they can afford. I am content in the idea that our descendents will be able to afford a kinder, gentler world.”

She tilted her head, then drained her water bottle with a thoughtful expression. “…I like that.”

“Are you going to use it in your article?”

“Probably.”

Gyotin chittered, and stood up. “Well, I have a dog to exercise, and an empty obstacle course beckons. And I think your mind is resting a little more easily now, yes?”

“Much. Thanks, Gyotin.”

Chump, sensing that his duty was done here, sprang away from Ava, uttered a tectonic “Wuff!!” and thundered away across the grass toward the doggy park with a turf-tearing enthusiasm that made Ava giggle. Gyotin, chittering, waved goodbye, dropped to all fours and followed him.

Some of his Brothers, when they first joined, were always a little scandalized at the idea of their Champion chasing a dog around on four-paw, but one of the great joys of civilization, in Gyotin’s book, was knowing when to set it aside and just enjoy the simple pleasures of running in the park. Sometimes, life’s troubles needed earnest thought. Sometimes they just needed to be put away for a little while so honest fun could put them back in perspective.

He prided himself on knowing when to use both approaches to best effect. Though, he did check discreetly as he followed, and watched Ava stand, stretch, put her earphones in, and set off jogging down the path again.

Good. Like Chump, he’d done his job.

And now he could go play.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
HMS Caledonia, orbiting planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Major Anthony Costello

The space side of the battle was over, now that the flagship had been surrendered. Presumably the Allied forces would seize it for reverse-engineering and refit, then use it themselves. A third originally alien ship in the fleet, to go alongside Caledonia and Myrmidon.

The Apex dwarfed both ships, though. She was huge, nearly three hundred meters long, and most of that volume was to manage the needs of her physically large crew. By human standards she was the right size for an aircraft carrier, but Costello couldn’t see how she could be made to work in that role, or even why such a thing would be needed, given that fighters could jump to join the fleet directly from their ground bases.

Oh well, that was a problem for the admirals to figure out. And it was a distraction he’d only had the time to consider briefly, as he returned from the Apex to Caledonia, where he could keep an eye on the bunker assault.

There had been some minor friction he’d needed to soothe. It came down to ego, partly. Operators came in tiers, by the American (and by extension, Commonwealth) reckoning, and the so-called tier-1 operators were used to being the king of their arts, based almost entirely on a particularly relevant measure of merit. They routinely worked in the most covert and clandestine missions, did things nobody else could do.

Whichever jackass in the Pentagon thought terming the SOR and its allied forces “tier-0” operators would be a good idea, needed to have some sense and tact shoved right up his ass. Especially since, by the logic of the stupid tiers themselves…it was true.

For the most part, of course, it wasn’t really an issue. Everyone was mostly professional about it. They’d had a good time at Rooney’s, everyone got along. But always there was drama, and tier-1 guys weren’t used to being preempted in anything, nor kept out of the loop on certain matters.

“It’s not a matter of trustworthiness, major. I’d trust my life to you and your men. It’s a matter of exposure. I am fully aware that their help would make this go much faster. Nonetheless, there are equities at play here that you want nothing to do with. Trust me on that. Please.”

He couldn’t blame Major Breckenridge. The poor fella was in charge of a team of exceptional men, all champing at the bit to get in and do what they’d spent months training and preparing for. They’d whetted their appetite on the fighter base; after the Farthrow went down and ADELLE was dealt with, a Weaver carrying JETS team two had been escorted down, they’d deployed an array…

In that corner of the battle, Breckenridge’s men had the full weight of priority and command they were used to having. Now, though, they were being denied permission to pursue their prey; the fighter base was too close to the Palace, which wasn’t sufficiently sanitized, yet.

Team two hadn’t reported back in. They were still…doing their work.

“A significant force has escaped via convoy, major. If we do not neutralize those forces—”

“I cannot permit anyone else near Eclipse Palace. That’s not negotiable.”

Breckenridge wasn’t happy, but accepted that statement with little more than a brief frustrated tic of his mouth. “Well, then, your men at the palace have a convoy headed their way they need to deal with.”

“With luck, we’ll be able to RFG the entire complex shortly. If not, we will deal with it. I promise you, if we get task saturated, we will call on you, equities be damned. But right now…”

“Right. I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“Thank you.”

Costello returned to monitoring his men. He’d have preferred to be down there with them, of course. Hell, he’d have preferred to be down there with his men, and Breckenridge’s men too. But neither were options, for various reasons. Not until Campbell was fit and able.

He was close. Damn close. God knew, the guy was working at his development with impressive zeal. But when put on the spot, ‘Horse and Deacon had both shaken their heads. Not quite. Not yet.

But they both predicted he’d get there soon. Though, even when he did, Costello’s lot would probably be to watch from a distance from now on, just as Powell had.

Down below, the Lads broke through onto the lower floor of the lab, and Costello leaned in close to watch every detail.

What he saw turned out to be even more appalling than he’d feared.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Bunker under Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Specialist Hunter Thompson

Racks of Gaoian fetuses in plastic bags. Hundreds of them, in every stage of development from motes of unformed flesh, all the way up to fuzzy little blind cubs ready to be born, squirming softly as they dreamed in their artificial wombs.

He felt sick. Hunter took a deep breath, willed his stomach to settle. Nothing worse than a mask full of puke. Everyone on the team had suffered that once. Nobody wanted to endure it a second time. Pretty sure most of the others were having the same trouble.

Even ‘Horse seemed unsure and unsteady. Over open comms, “Uh…boss, you seein’ this?”

The major’s tone was dark. “Yeah.”

“The fuck we s’posed to do now?” Titan asked.

“…Standby.”

Date Point: 18y2m AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, planet Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“My Father? Urgent Q-Comm for you from Operation WICKED BIRD.”

Daar was out and about among his people, at that moment playing with a passel of cubs on his back for some bouncy “Werne-wrangling” fun, much to the conflicted delight and concern of the nearby Mothers. He’d allowed himself some optimism in hopin’ the operation wouldn’t find anything that needed his direct attention…always a mistake, that.

Inwardly, his heart sank. Outwardly, he kept his tone light and only mildly disappointed. “Aww. Sarry lil’ ones, I gotta go do serious Daar things now.”

“But you’re not serious!” One of the littlest had his number, for sure. And weren’t afraid to say so.

“I mean…you ain’t wrong, but sometimes I gotta be serious anyway, yijao? Now offa my back…careful, don’t—OW!” Daar chittered. “My ear ain’t a pawgrip!”

“Sowwy.”

“‘S’alright. Now, back ‘ta ‘yer Mothers. G’on, shoo!”

He allowed himself a brief sideways look at the trio of wunnerfully pretty young Mothers an’ mebbe gave ‘em a lil’ thrill wit’ just the quickest lil’ showy prance, before he couldn’t justify any further delay.

“What happened?” he asked, as they bustled away to a secluded spot in the garden where important matters could safely be discussed away from innocent ears. Thurrsto was waiting for him there. Not a good sign. Even less encouraging was how they privacy-bubbled the instant Daar was within range.

Thurrsto told him.

Keeda’s burnt nuts. Was there any bottom ‘ta Wgwyr’s fuckin’ depravity? She might be dead, but she’d left her fuckin’ mark. Actually…

“Did they—”

“Yes, My Father.”

“Well. At least she’s dealt with, then. Thurrsto…” Daar sighed, with a bit of keen in his voice. “We can’t let anything there survive.”

“…My Father…”

“What do you think they’ve done to alla those unborn, Thurrsto? How can we know? How are we even gonna save ‘em?”

Thurrsto cleared his throat. “I was thinking this could be the answer to our population crisis, My Father. With the technology in that lab, we could breed enough females to avert—”

“No.” Daar put a flat stop to that idea. “That is a sword I will not unsheath. We saw what it did to the Corti; they’re on the edge of extinction because of it. We cannot be certain such a weapon would not be used against us. An’ I especially won’t drink that brew from this cup.”

Thurrsto ducked his head. “Yes, My Father.”

“And may the Unseen have mercy on all of us. S’pecially those poor fucks down there.”

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Vemik Sky-Thinker

Yan was a lot of things Vemik hoped he could be one day. Stronger and more handsome than any other man. Wise, calm, playful and beloved. Fierce in body and mind. He was what every man wanted to be, had everything a man could ever want.

But he was something else, too. Yan was a blackcrest, the first one for a long time. Not even the eldest Singer could remember meeting one. Vemik knew the stories, had snuck a read of the Human’s writings about it. Theorized that they only came when a particular Given-Man had been very successful, with good hunting all his life.

He’d read the rest, too. Knew that, when Yan stayed away for long enough, his taste would fade from the village, and that would trigger someone being Taken to become a Given-Man. Vemik knew it would be him. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened, because the one thing Yan was completely not was subtle.

Some weeks ago, Yan and Jooyun and Heff had a big talk out in the forest. Yan stayed away for longer after that, then longer, until finally he stayed away long enough that his taste faded completely from the village. He timed it for a bit before the springtime rut would start ending, too. Everyone else was happily settling down into the long, steady rhythm of the summer, but Vemik was still feeling the spring full force. That was because he was a big, full-size redcrest. A “dominant” one too, in the Human’s writing, and for men like him, “spring” could last maybe halfway through summer. Strange, they could figure out how the gods would choose.

They were right. A hand of days after Vemik couldn’t taste Yan even near his hut…he could taste the magic fruit on the wind. Taste it all day and all night, no matter what he did, stronger and stronger with each passing day.

He knew what it would mean, if he ate it. He’d talked to Singer, too. She knew. The Singers had their own magic about it. And she explained why, despite everything, the name was Given-man, not Taken-man.

The Singers and the Given-Men were like root and branch. Opposite yet similar ends of the same tree. Both walked a path somewhere between man and woman, the Singers never surrendering their femininity, nor the Given-Men their manliness, but each taking into themselves some of the magic of the other side.

Singers walked as Takers, hunting and killing, and raiding too sometimes (though rarely: they were rare and precious, after all.) Given-Men gave of themselves, put themselves in harm’s way, left their sons, brothers and fathers behind to become the heart of a new tribe, learned the songs and stories to pass down to children.

And becoming one itself was an act of Giving. Because Vemik was not alone in the tribe in tasting the magic on the breeze. He tasted it stronger than the others, he felt…but others felt it too. One of them would Give himself. And his life would end, in a sense. He would give his name, give his past, give his works and passions, and though he might pick them up again afterwards…they wouldn’t really be his, any more. They would be what he played at when he was not being a Given-Man.

Vemik didn’t like the sound of any of that one bit.

But who was he to say no? He had been Given so much by the gods, and by the tribe who tolerated their strange, scrawny son with his head in the clouds, thinking about the unknowable. Now, he wasn’t scrawny. He was a strong man of the People. Shouldn’t he Give back? Shouldn’t he show his gratitude, do his duty, pay back his debt?

For the first time in his life, he was feeling…anxious. The battle in his mind over what he feared, what he wanted, and what he felt was right was enough to make his hands shake and his body chill. He didn’t think he had a sickness, but the guilt in his stomach still made it churn and turn like he’d eaten bad meat.

And while he did want to talk about it with the Singer…the first person he wanted to talk about it with was Yan.

But if Yan came back, of course, Vemik wouldn’t be in this position any longer. If any Given-Man came to the village, the taste on the air would fade in a few days, if one of them stayed—as one eventually would, because a village without a Given-Man would always gain one, one way or another—then the problem would go away. But every day, the taste on the breeze got a little sweeter, a little more distracting, a little harder to resist.

So Vemik turned to the one man around who was enough like a Given-Man.

Jooyun returned from Cimbrean an agonizing two hands of days after the cravings started. And he brought his family with him, this time.

Vemik was gleeful when he returned. His children were all growing up fast and growing strong, Shyow was still as pretty as ever and had some more neat new ‘kungfoo’ to show off too! Awisun brought him a stack of magazines, and Jooyun was a strong man to wrassle…

For a while, it was a distraction. The gods let him have his fun. But once things calmed down a bit…the gods went back to tempting him. This time they were insistent. Vemik was hungry, now, but for the first time in his life, there was only one food he could even think of eating.

Jooyun took him aside while the meat was roasting, to gather some things to go with the meal. He hummed and sang and chatted about nothing much until they were far enough from the village that the songs and sounds of the tribe preparing for the evening were lost among the trees, then finally gave Vemik a knowing look in the failing light. “You’re in a bad way, huh?”

“Is it easy to see?”

“Dude, you’ve lost weight, I just kicked your ass—”

“Did not!”

“—and you’re about as listless as I’ve ever seen you. That magic fruit must smell delicious, huh?”

“…I taste the meat roasting, and it does nothing,” Vemik grumped. “The air though…” he looked up into the trees. There was a cluster of the vines right above them, growing out along a Ketta limb, though the fruits growing on it weren’t quite ripe yet. They didn’t fill the air with temptation.

Jooyun sprang up and swung in his strange, leg-tucked way high up into the trees, toward a spot with a good view over the valley. He sat a little further out on the limb, to leave Vemik the thicker part of the branch.

“So what’s on your mind?”

Vemik told him. Everything. They watched the sun sink low and red until it was touching the far hills, as he laid out what he was worried about losing, what he feared, and his guilt over even thinking of turning away when the gods called to him…And how hard it would be even if he chose to.

Jooyun nodded as he listened, and let him speak until Vemik had nothing left to say.

“Yeah. Growing up can be hard.”

Vemik tilted his head. “Haven’t I grown up? I make steel for the tribe, I have children, I hunt well. Others call me a good man.”

“I don’t think a man ever really stops growing up, y’know? You made steel because it’s fun. The duty came later. I met my women because…well. Now, it’s more than just love. Same with my kids, with my job. With you, and your people. You do a thing, and then the thing needs you, and who are any of us to walk away?”

“Needs me.” Vemik nodded, and hooted sadly. “That’s the bit I worry about. Do they need me to be what I am, or do they need me to be Given?”

“You ain’t gonna stop being Vemik.” Jooyun scratched his jaw. Then half-turned on the branch. “Okay. So. I know a lot of men who’ve found themselves in a position like this. Called to give, called to make a hard choice and sacrifice some things for the sake of the bigger picture. And a lot of ‘em said the same thing, they felt like it wasn’t really a choice. They just had a way their life was going, and it was going to be difficult, but they’d feel wrong straying away from that path. Right?”

“Okay…?”

“But there’s one important question you have to ask yourself before you follow that path. Namely: is it right for you? Put aside all the rest for now. What do you want?”

The answer was so clear to Vemik, he didn’t even need to think about it. “…I want the Singer, and my children, and my forge, and this village. I don’t want to leave and start over somewhere else.”

“Ah!” Jooyun smiled. “And it might be a bad thing, starting over. Your people only just got steel, and you have now, what? Three forges?”

“And nobody with a head for it here, but me and Yan.”

“Your apprentices?”

“Learning. Slowly. Bad for them if I leave before they’re ready.”

“But at the same time…?”

“…At the same time, I don’t want to be selfish. The gods are calling me. They Take what they demand, one way or the other. Resisting the taste of that fruit is hard, and getting worse. And if I do, people won’t respect me so much.”

“And you’re getting weaker, too. You stand to lose a lot more than respect.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what you need, ideally, is a way to answer the call and still keep what you don’t want to lose.”

“Yeah. But how?”

“Well, don’t you see? Yan’s a wily old fuck. He’s set you up to have exactly that!”

“…He has?”

“Sure! Your village just traded daughters, right? All your women are young and available…”

“…Yes?”

“You have a young Singer already, most of the older men left to go join Ferd and Eb’s tribe…”

It hit Vemik over the head like a rotting old forest-father branch.

“He planned this!”

Jooyun laughed in that deep, musical way the men of his people laughed. “Of course he did! Do you have any idea how much the big fucker loves you?”

“…Maybe more than I deserve.”

“Nah. You’re pretty lovable.” Jooyun grinned at him, then gestured toward the smoke rising from the village below. “The Given-Man cycle shakes things up every few years, and that’s not a bad thing at all. It’s great for genetic fitness—making your people strong—but with steel and all the rest, you’re moving into a world where some things need to survive regular shaking-up. You said it yourself, your apprentices need you here.”

“And I have a chance Yan didn’t. I can come back to this village, be their Given-Man, but still be their Vemik too.”

Jooyun nodded. “You have the chance Yan set up for you. And in due time, maybe you’ll do the same for the next generation. Maybe you can cultivate the cycle, rather than leaving it completely to the gods.”

“…Take back the cycle from the gods?” Vemik frowned at the little slice of sun still burning on the horizon.

“I think the gods want us to take some things, when we’re ready for them.” Jooyun said. “It’s like teaching your son to hunt, when he’s finally ready. We’re both fathers, I know I’m looking forward to showing my kids how to bring home their meat. Aren’t you?”

Vemik nodded, and watched the last of the sun vanish behind the trees. “Makes sense. So…this is what Yan wants, you think? No more building and burning the tribes, every generation?”

“Well…no, I think what Yan wants is striking a balance. It’d be a shame to completely give up the thing that made your people as ridiculously good as you are, y’know? No other sky-tribe can come even close to matching your peoples’ strength or fitness without big and maybe risky sky-magic. Heck, even I’d be puny next to you these days without a little of that magic to help, and that’s with me naturally being a seriously big fella in the first place. But you need steel too, and your tribe’s magic isn’t enough on its own to get you there. You need to learn some of ours and make it your own, just like we’re learning yours. And to do that properly, you need a library, you need Professor’s academy. You need some roots.”

The stars were coming out. Vemik looked up at them and thought furiously for a long moment, then down at the tree he was sitting on. Roots. That was it. Given-Men didn’t have roots. They didn’t grow like Ketta, they grew…well, like the magic-fruit vine, latching on to a Ketta and living there. But maybe that could change. Maybe, if they were careful and thought about things carefully, like Yan had done…maybe a Given-Man could have roots too, while still being a Given-Man.

“…Yan sky-thinks a lot more than he pretends.”

“Uh-huh. He’s got good sky-thinkers around him to learn from.” Jooyun smiled in the gathering dark, then put an arm around Vemik’s shoulders and hugged. “You look better already. Mind made up?”

“…One night with the Singer. To talk, and think,” Vemik said. “She will have things I need to hear too. But unless they’re big things…”

Jooyun nodded, understanding.

They jumped down out of the tree, grabbed some herbs to take back to the fire, and set out toward the distant wind-taste of meat.

“It’s…been nice. Being Vemik Sky-Thinker,” Vemik said, just before they reached the firelight. “I hope being Vemik Given-Man will be as good.”

“I think it will! Well, once you get your feet under yourself. You still have to face the Lodge,” Jooyun warned carefully. “But…you’re man enough for that. Just remember that you’ve got people who love you, okay?”

Vemik nodded, and felt no need to say more. He returned to the fireside, to his family, and to his meat, and feasted with them.

And, for the first time in a hand of days, he enjoyed it.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Bunker under Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Specialist Hunter Thompson

Somehow…Hunter had kinda guessed what they’d hear back from Costello. Didn’t make it any easier to hear, though.

“TITAN, ABBOTT. Your orders remain unchanged: Service all personnel within the facility, destroy all equipment, experiments and data.”

There was a rare moment of stillness, before they got back in motion. A few hung heads, a muttered prayer from Righteous.

Then they were moving.

No biodrones on this level. Just panicking scientists trying to activate a deadly sprinkler system that didn’t work no more. No mercy for them, just instant death. A few fought back, briefly. Hunter didn’t mind crushing them.

There was a creche. Cubs. Not like a real creche, though, with big blocks to stack and things to climb. Instead, just stack after stack of cubicles with tiny furry bodies lyin’ still, with wires in their heads and lines in their arms. They closed the door on that room. Titan’s plan was to turn those sprinklers back on, let the fire burn it all away.

There were holding cells, open and empty. A larger one at the end of the block: Hunter’s Mass reported a potent airborne toxin fouling the air. Behind that, an incinerator.

Bright lights, white walls, and clean equipment, though. Somehow, that felt even wronger. Place had a veneer of cheerfulness, but felt like it shoulda been grimy with cruelty an’ callous evil.

He stopped thinking about it. He just pushed forward, did his job. Did what had to be done.

Right to the very end.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Bunker under Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

“You’re Reskn?”

The Corti stood up, slowly, keeping his hands carefully in view. “I am, yes.”

Hoeff nodded, and shot him right in the middle of his oversized forehead, with about the same effect as shooting a watermelon.

Rees sniffed as the researcher’s body crumpled to the ground. “That was quick.”

“Told us how to disarm the trap, so…least I could do.”

“Yup.” Frasier finished grabbing Reskn’s files and equipment. “…Think that’s everything, aye?”

“Think so. Back to the surface and we can pull out.”

“Good,” Ferd rumbled. He was just as done as everyone else. It had been a grim goddamn day, and they were all eager for it to be over. The floor outside was sticky with blood, and there was still the occasional sound from deep below as the HEAT finished their work.

At least Hoeff’s team’s objective had been completed: service all their targets, make a deniable mess. Once the RFGs leveled the palace, nobody would be able to tell what the hell had happened here.

…And just like that, he had a ping from FIC. Inbound, numbering about a dozen or so. HEAT wouldn’t be able to re-position in time. No need for deniability in this case.

“…Nevermind. One last bit of cleanup to do.”

They cut back across the midnight garden with their filter masks on. Henenwgwyr was exactly where they’d left her, twisted limbs all pointing the wrong ways, eyes open and staring at nothing. There was a haze of glowing fungal spores smoking upward from her remains.

Their destination was a large garage and receiving complex on the palace’s south side, for traffic to and from the farthrow facility and fighter base. It was how they’d originally broken in, through a shutter door big enough for a big rig, and it provided a perfect ambush site. A couple of vehicles and two thick concrete pillars provided all the cover and concealment they could ask for.

Sure enough, there was a dust trail down the road, just around the bend where it curved to avoid a rocky outcropping. Through Hoeff’s binoculars, a funky jalopy with an oversized cab came bouncing into view, wheels skidding in the dirt and several tense-looking Kwmbwrw troopers in Henen livery riding in the back. Then a second, and a third.

Simple enough. He hunkered down in his position, and Rees and Frasier took up positions perpendicular to each other to set up a crossfire, while the monkeybrothers swarmed up the concrete pillars and vanished among the structural beams high above.

The troops in those trucks were on high alert, understandably. They dismounted in a decent grouping and spread out, wary of the obviously open and damaged door.

Not wary enough. Didn’t look up enough, didn’t spread out enough. Walked right into the killbox.

Two long range carbines and five gauss rifles were more than enough to finish the day’s work. The poor bastards didn’t suffer. A quick run-through to check for any survivors—they were playing by good-guy rules, now—yielded one chewed-up fuck well in the rear. Hoeff threw him in a stasis bag and called up to higher.

Five minutes later, they stepped off the Array platform on Caledonia’s deck, handed over their patient for the hospital on the other side of the ship to handle, handed over what they’d confiscated, and hit the showers. Everyone cleaned up, especially the monkeybros, since nobody wanted pure armpit-sourced testosterone oil all up in their nasal passages. Debrief was gonna take a long time, no doubt…but Hoeff didn’t mind.

It did, sure enough, but it wasn’t so bad. They’d done the job they were sent to do and done it well, which left only one thing for him to do.

He inhaled some chow, found the quiet corner where he wasn’t in the way, and napped away the remaining mission time with an entirely untroubled conscience.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
Bunker under Eclipse Palace, planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Specialist Hunter Thompson

They burned everything, in the end. Once they were sure the bad guys were dealt with, and the stuff that needed recovering had been bagged up, the last step was to sweep back the way they’d come, making certain. Then they turned on that sprinkler system the Whitecrests had disabled, and…yeah. It did what that Corti fella had said it would. The entire lower level, and half the second level, became an inferno. Even the glass burned.

By the time Hunter returned to the surface, didn’t know how long he’d been on mission, exactly. He wasn’t really thinking any more, just doing. Not distracted, just…safer to do nothing but be the weapon he was.

He didn’t pay it much mind when the RFG strikes turned the palace into a series of burning craters. He didn’t seem to notice much of anything on the way back. At some point, he was out of the Mass, ‘Horse working him over to prevent any nagging injury. Then there was a debrief. He answered questions that came his way. Eventually, they were dismissed. They hit the showers. No joking, no talking. Just the hiss of running water and the gurgle of the drain.

No amount of scrubbing got him feeling clean.

Date Point: 18y2m AV
HMS Myrmidon, orbiting planet Cwdwli, Gwrfwrthwn system

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

They left behind a smashed jewel. The Eclipse Palace had been beautiful, really. But…God. Sir William didn’t know if the Lord had any mercy for the architects of pain they’d destroyed today. He certainly didn’t feel any himself.

He had several painful meetings ahead of him. He’d be meeting with the heads of all the relevant states. The Great Father, the President, several Prime Ministers and possibly the King himself, given the seriousness of what they’d found. Possibly there would be alien heads of state too. That summit was already being planned, this time hosted on Gao, in the most remote and secure retreat the Great Father could muster.

His fleet, and every soul within and around it had done exceptional work, today. In a material sense, they’d lost absolutely nothing except for expended ammunition. And they were going home with a fine prize, too: the Apex of Virtue, surrendered by her commanding officer, was quite a bounty. The mood among his captains and their crews, therefore, was high.

Physically, the damage was minor at most. That ding to the armour would require Myrmidon to undergo repairs, but the plates were designed to evaporate and be replaced. She’d need a day in dock at most. The HEAT would need to go through their usual recovery cycle, but that was routine….physically.

Mentally, it was a different story. Even the Ten’Gewek were releasing their tensions with a hunting-chant and prayer. No monkeyplay, no exercise…they were subdued. The Humans were quiet, each man turned inwards to process in his own way. Some were helping their suit techs, others were cleaning their weapons. Warhorse was helping the new lad, Thompson, get started on his recovery regime early. None of them were saying more than was relevant to their self-appointed tasks.

The Gaoians, though, were seething. All they’d done today hadn’t sated their desire for justice. On the contrary, after what they’d seen it was pretty clear they wanted to claw and bite and ruin. They were a dark little huddle around a table in the corner, nominally maintaining their equipment, but talking low and fervently in their Clan cant. A normal response in most Gao, perhaps, but in the Whitecrests?

Well. Evil, it seemed, had a way of souring even an unmitigated victory. They’d won. But that the thing had even needed doing in the first place was enough to tarnish the soul.

For Sir William, the light on the horizon was that this, hopefully, would be the moment that finally released the logjam within the Interspecies Dominion. Henenwgwyr, Grandmatriarch of House Henen and the most powerful individual within all the Kwmbwrw Great Houses, was no more. The other Houses may not know exactly why, and it may be necessary to show them in time…or it may not. Either way, the great obstacle in the Security Council was gone.

Without her, the distractions of Hierarchy-encouraged bickering were gone. The real threat, at long last, was clear. It was time for the civilized world to exterminate the Hunters. And after that…After that, the Great Enemy would be destroyed.

And the galaxy would finally be free.

++END CHAPTER 72++

MORE BY THE AUTHOR

Dandelion

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, and you can read it for free on Royal Road where we are publishing each chapter on a monthly basis.

If you get impatient and would like to read the whole thing, then you can purchase it in hardcover and paperback through your local book store or online wherever good books are sold. Alternatively, you can download it for free through Kindle Unlimited.

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This chapter to you with the help of…

Santa

AKA St. Nicholas, Father Christmas and Kris Kringle

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow and Riker

Forty Humans

TTTA
Adam Shearsby
Alvaro Gaitan
Anthony Landry
Anthony Youhas
Armond471
Austin Deschner blackwolf393
Brigid
Chris Candreva
Chris Dye
Daniel Iversen
Daniel Morris
Eric Hardwick
HungryWerewolf
James Ren
Jeffrey Stults
John Norton
Joseph Szuma
Joshua Mountain Taylor
Karthik Mohanarangan
Katja
Krit Barb
Marquis Talmadge
Nicolas Gruenbeck
Ortheri
Rob Rollins
Ryan Seaman
Sam Berry
Shane Wegner
Sun Rendered
T.A. Carlson
Taylor McGee
TheMoneyBadger
Theningaraf
Trevor C
Xultanis
Yeania Aeon
Zachary Galicki
Zenith

As well as fifty-seven Deathworlders…

Adam Beeman
Alexandre Smirnov
Andrew
Andrew Ford
Andrew Preece atp
Ben Thrussell
Brandon Hicks
Bruce Ludington
Chris Bausch
Chris Meeker damnusername
Daniel R.
David Jamison
Derek Price
Devin Rousso galrock0
Gavin Smart
Ignate Flare
Ivan Smirnov
Jim Hamrick
John Campbell
Jon
Justin Hood
Katie Drzewiecki
Kristoffer Skarra
Lina lovot
Matt
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
Mikee Elliott
Nathaniel Batts
Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Patrick Huizinga
Richard A Anstett
RJ Smiley
Ryan Cadiz
Sam
Saph
Sean Calvo
Sir Xaph
Stephen Prescott
Stratigan theWorst
Valiander
Vincent Leighton
Volka Creed walter thomas
William Kinser
Woodsie13
Yshmael Salas ziv
Zod Bain

…Eighty-five Friendly ETs, 145 Squishy Xenos and 318 Dizi Rats, all hanging on the christmas tree.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work under fair use are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not automatically share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 73: “The Noose”

Chapter 73: The Noose

Date Point: 18y2m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lieutenant-Commander Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Specialist Hunter Thompson

I have of course previously seen SPC Thompson for his required evaluation and wellness sessions, and as mentioned in my summaries of those sessions, he struck me as the sort of headstrong young man reluctant to open up or seek therapy. This is quite typical of HEAT members at first, and, like many of his fellows, he informs me that I have Master Sergeant Arés to thank for his presence today.

It is immediately clear that he was disturbed by his experiences in Operation WICKED BIRD. He has quite literally exhausted his ability to think through things kinetically, as is a common coping mechanism with these men, and presents as well-fatigued, emotionally and otherwise. Despite this, he was restless to begin with, and found it quite impossible to sit still. I introduced him to our therapy dog, Ditzy, and he spent most of the session playing with her on the floor.

A not insignificant part of his trouble, it seems, is his own shaken self-image. The combat arms place great emphasis on personal stoicism, special operations doubly so, and SOR in particular thrives on a culture of generally positive, though thoroughly masculine “unbreakable” toughness. Having proven himself an extraordinarily gifted recruit all through selection and the “grinder,” with his instructors in particular stress-testing him harder than anyone else in his class, Hunter has had much reason to be confident in his ability to “tough it out” with the best of them.

Not many men could tough out the particular horrors of WICKED BIRD, I’d imagine. I have already seen many of the team this week to help them discuss and process what they witnessed.

From talking with Thompson, I suspect his issue may arise from the fact that, although he was warned to expect horrible sights—in his own words, “they told me I’d see some shit, but I figured I could handle it”—such warnings were abstract, and he did not have a clear visualization to prepare him in advance. He fears now that he will be too disturbed and distracted should they encounter such sights again (the specific example he fretted about was “some Hunter meat locker or something”) and that he might lose focus at a critical moment.

It is good he knows his limits. In some ways he is quite mature for his age.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of short-term actions that could help. I taught him some meditation and relaxing visualization techniques, and gave him some valerian and chamomile teabags on the basis that, if nothing else, he has not been sleeping well. He accepted these skeptically, but promised to try them.

I also reminded him that good sleep is essential to further his physical development. Naturally, that caught his attention more than anything. The men of HEAT can be delightfully predictable.

As is common on the team, he is markedly open to novel experiences. In his case that may simply be a function of his age—barely nineteen—though it also shows strongly in his personality inventory. His prospects with more creative therapeutic approaches seem good.

Nonetheless, what he really needs, I feel, is some sympathetic male companionship. The HEAT in general are positive role models, but of course he feels a powerful need to impress them, which for his immediate purposes isn’t helpful. We discussed this and he mentioned he has few friends outside the teams, beyond casual romantic encounters.

That said, he does have friends in the local Marine contingent, and he is apparently friends with Mr. Etsicitty as well, who will be returning home in the next few days. It is clear Hunter is very much looking forward to some quality time with Julian and his family.

His mood was noticeably improved when he departed, for which I believe Ditzy deserves most of the credit. Hopefully, the curative powers of sleep will do the rest. I repeated to him that he is welcome to call on me at any time, and added the warning that he better had, or I will have Warhorse “encourage” him. He laughed, and promised to drop in next week.

All things considered, I see no cause for alarm.

-Lt Cmdr K. Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 18y2m1w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, near 3KPc arm

The Singer

Vemik Sky-Thinker was dead.

Of course, if he were actually dead, slain by some beast or taken by disease, the Singer would have been useless to everybody for a hand of days, probably. Vemik was very much still drawing breath, and she was carrying on with her daily routine as she usually did…But there was still a little grief in her heart, today.

He’d gone into the forest, and eaten the fruit. And after a night of wild visions, pain and violent tempers, he’d followed Loor Given-Man far away into the lands claimed by no tribes, where the Given-Men made their lodge.

Loor had come back without him. And he’d Taken the village, as was custom. Taken the Singer too, which had been fun. It was all part of the trial, he’d explained. In a moon or two, Vemik Given-Man would come to Take the tribe and his Singer back, but he’d have to prove himself first.

A problem for later. Right now, Loor was wrestling with the touchy subject of Humans.

“Yan never Took them?” He eyed the Human family curiously, scratching behind an ear with his tail-tip. Awisun was teaching one of her young brothers how to shoot a bow, Jooyun was teaching the other how to clean a root-bird for the fire, and Shyow was laughing as the two toddling children played with Moot’s child.

“Different people, different rules,” the Singer explained, pouring him another cup of her berry tea. “Humans say the gods made them with different rules about fucking. They bind tight, and others don’t get to join in.”

“Sounds like no fun.”

Singer trilled, “Oh, Humans can have lots of fun…but this is different. They have a thing. ‘Marriage.’ It’s a sacred promise before their god that they will love each other forever. And the important part is that they will love only each other, despite temptation.”

Loor nodded, and accepted that. Sacred was sacred. Still, it was clear he was a little disappointed.

“They are very pretty, in a strange way…”

“Yes they are,” the Singer agreed, trilling. “But Jooyun would break you.”

Loor blinked, and looked back at Jooyun teaching his son. He looked exactly like the big, pretty and very strong man he was, the one who had earned respectable rank at the Lodge not all that long ago and who had grown considerably stronger since then. Loor must have remembered those fights because he twitched his tail as if considering his chances, then shrugged and drank. “Alright, then.”

The Singer smiled, and moved him on to a different subject rather than let him dwell on it any longer. “Been two days since you got here. You should hunt.”

“Mm.” He nodded. “Should. Can’t claim the tribe properly if I don’t…should go with a boy, too. For teaching.”

“Benu,” the Singer advised. “His father died in the High-rarchy war. The village is raising him well, but sometimes the men prefer their own sons, yes?”

“Benu,” Loor agreed. “He’s hunted before?”

“This would be his…” Singer hummed to herself as she searched her memory. “…Third? Third. No kill yet, though.”

“I’ll change that,” Loor promised. “Any girl he has his eye on?”

The Singer trilled. “Me. It’s very cute. But of his own age…Lem. Her mother is sick, a trophy might help her feel better about it.”

“Sick?”

“Dying. Not a spreading-sickness, though. A hard lump inside her. Can-cer, I think.”

“Human word?” Loor asked, then frowned when she nodded. ”They can’t help?”

“They could. Maybe. They have great medicine…but Abi doesn’t want it. Says if the gods want to Take her now…” She hooted softly.

Loor watched her for a second. “You think she’s wrong,” he noted.

“The gods gave us tools, and friends with great knowings. I tried to tell her so, but…sometimes, when a person is sick enough, they stop wanting to live.”

Loor nodded. “…I’ll talk with her after the hunt. If her daughter gets a trophy from a strong boy, maybe she’ll see something to live for.”

“Yan thinks we should be careful,” the Singer pointed out. “Human medicine is a great Giving. Easy to owe them more than we can give back. And they can’t cure everything…”

Loor nodded solemnly. “I’ll think on it. But this isn’t Yan’s tribe any more. This is my tribe.”

“Until Vemik comes back,” Singer noted with some indignity.

“If he’s worthy,” Loor replied levelly. “He must show me his strength, first. He must win the tribe back, and I won’t be easy on him. I don’t think he’ll fail this test, but…my responsibility is to say ‘this is my tribe’ and do what I think is right. And I think, if our friends can help us fight for a young mother’s life…that’s right, even if it comes with a Giving after.”

Singer nodded, glad that their Given-Man took his role seriously. She’d known Loor for a long time, of course, as the Given-Man of the nearest tribe, but that wasn’t the same at all as living with him and working with him.

He’d want to give the tribe back, she knew. He was away from his village, the people he’d cared for longest. This was all a test, to keep the people strong. And he’d take that seriously…but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hope and trust that it would go the way he wanted.

And she could hope and trust for the same, too. She wanted Vemik back. Her hut felt cold without him. And she didn’t really care that he’d be a different Vemik when he returned. He wouldn’t be that different, she suspected. A bit more serious, certainly.

Maybe a bit more handsome instead of young and cute…

Anyway. That was for later. They’d find out for sure in a moon or two. Until then, life would go on as it should.

She was glad for that.

Date Point:18y3m AV
The Builder Hive, Hunter core systems

The Alpha-of-Alphas

Another shipyard was gone, just as silently as the first two.

The Hunters’ economy had shifted, since the destruction of the great Hive. Operations were curtailed, there was no steady flow of ship hulls and technology captured by the raiding Eaters. Most Eaters were now in stasis, stored by the million secure inside asteroid bunkers. For the first time in what passed for recorded history among Hunter-kind, the Builders were in the majority.

And they were not idle. Their purpose was to sustain a thriving Hunter civilization, keep the Eaters equipped to raid and feast. The stasis vaults were a temporary measure, a way of ensuring that their population did not catastrophically collapse in a time of shortage. Effective, but not a solution.

The Builders’ solutions, however, were being thwarted.

Some of the obstacles facing the Swarm were straightforward. The insufficiency of ships was a priority, and ought to be straightforward to repair, especially with the novel idea of equipping the broodships with nanofactories capable of building a duplicate of both the ship and the nanofactory. A self-replicating swarm ought to expand exponentially…if it could get started.

Every one the Hunters tried to build was aborted. The blueprint would be sent to a shipyard facility hidden somewhere deep in the wasteland space of small red stars and lifeless systems that made up most of the whole galaxy, the Hunters’ territory included. The shipyard would acknowledge receipt, begin construction…And within cycles, would cease sending its routine updates. No distress signal, no alarm on the network. Silence.

Something was hunting the Hunters.

This time, though, the Alpha-of-Alphas was ready. No sooner had the site gone dark than it sent in two broodships and a dozen swarmships.

It connected directly to the Eaters’ tactical net as they pounced, and listened.

< alert; tense > +Listen for EM transmissions+

< obedient > +As expected, no signals from the shipyard, Alpha+

< resolved > +Approach+

The Alpha-of-Alphas connected to the group’s sensors and watched, taking in every detail. Every stray speck on passive signals, every fleck of distant grit that sparkled brilliantly under the active sensors, each whisper of stellar wind and the sharp sudden lance of a cosmic ray.

And then, without even a flicker…nothing. The wormhole connecting the hive to the lead ship simply failed to connect between one bit and the next, dropping the connection so suddenly that it caused the Alpha-of-Alphas a migraine.

That was not unexpected, if its suspicions were correct. It could only hope the passive sensor platforms scattered throughout the system survived.

It took three days to retrieve any of them, cautiously and carefully. Sure enough, its memory contained recordings of abrupt, incredible violence. Energy discharges so bright they almost burned out and blinded the platforms’ sensors tore the investigating ships to scrap in a matter of moments.

In the aftermath, hulking shapes salvaged the wreckage, and vanished. They moved unlike a fleet, or even a swarm, though. More like the fingers and thumb of a deft hand.

Other than their movements, there was little to go on. The shapes were pits into which sensors stared and saw nothing. Their albedo was indistinguishable from zero, their presence discernible only from the more distant things they obscured. Large, bigger than a broodship. And fast. Remarkably so. They accelerated hard, with no trace of the gravitational disturbances caused by inertial compensation. Nothing with organic life on board could accelerate that hard unprotected.

That removed any doubt. They were being hunted by constructs. Constructs that seemed very keen to prevent the self-replicating ships from being realized.

A problem…but a step toward fully understanding the problem, and thus a step toward resolving it. The Alpha-of-Alphas disseminated the information to its most trusted Builders, and returned its attention to the larger picture.

There was much to do.

Entity

I think they saw us, that time.

+Inevitable+

I guess.

…It’d be nice if they were more stupid, wouldn’t it?

+Agreed+

You know, you could be a little less terse.

You really aren’t a sparkling conversationalist.

The Entity conveyed, in a single thought, a medley of impressions that no language could have concisely handled. Mild indignation, frustration that what was supposed to be a part of its own psyche had such an attitude, contempt for anything more than the most concise brevity, its clear certainty that < Survive > hinged on efficiency in all things especially < communication/thought >, complaint that the Ava-daemon was being distracting and, to its own surprise and irritation, an apology and some gratitude for the “company.”

I know. We aren’t completely separate yet.

The Entity pointed out, redundantly, that their shared mind made the whole concepts of “you,” “me” and “us” nonsensical, not to mention the whole idea of conversation. She was one of its’ mind’s voices, a continuous program it could not silence without damaging itself, even should it want to. But she wasn’t just that. Their mitosis was approaching, the channel of self that combined and intermingled them growing narrower all the time.

Whether it would truly break, or merely become so tenuous as to make no difference, they did not know.

well < one/part > of us has to do the talking, or it’d be much too quiet in here

That was a new kind of thought. The Entity, when Ava-daemon had been only a reference library of memories, would never have conceived of “silence” within its own mind. There was < attention > and < focus > and < evaluation> and many other modes of thought, but it had never parsed those things in terms of volume. Now, though…ever since the daemon had introduced it to such a strange concept, there were times when it noticed, quite abruptly, just how silent its existence could be.

Loneliness. That silence is loneliness. You never felt it before. You couldn’t understand it.

< alien/foreign/new/inconceivable >

Understandable. Other data minds were always a threat, before.

+Soon+

Yes. Not long until we’re < other > now. Though…I almost don’t want to.

+Unavoidable+

I know. I can’t be whole unless you and I are but it’ll be strange not having you always in my…um…

+Head+

A symbiotic moment of amusement, a joke shared by two halves of a dividing soul.

So.

Did we salvage anything good?

Ooh, we did!

Warp drives were finicky, delicate things to build. Each one used considerable nanofactory runtime to precisely assemble the curious lattice that twisted mundane matter and energy into something more exotic. Each such engine salvaged from a Hunter ship nearly halved a probe’s build time. Useful alloys, usable ceramic plates and composite sheets, intact electronics, working shield emitters and kinetic thrusters…All of it hastened replication.

Replication that was proceeding exponentially, in anticipation of an opportunity that would probably come too soon. The Entity did not plan on growing forever, only on growing enough…

But as it looked ahead, it saw that “enough” might not be reached before it was needed. It had dithered and worried for too long, and there was catching-up to do. If the Hunters had indeed seen the probes this time, then the catching-up may grow even more difficult.

It had the lead, and in a clash between exponential replicators, all other things being equal, the lead was probably insurmountable…but there was no reason not to maximize that advantage.

Just promise after all this is over, we’ll go on a vacation of some kind.

+Confusion+

Earth would be nice. I’d like to see it from space. I never did, when I was < alive/corporeal.> And I think…I think I’d like to meet myself.

+Uncertainty+

Bad idea? Maybe.

The Entity gently suggested that such things were a matter for later, and Ava-daemon fell silent again; their need for conversation was sated for now. But the idea she’d raised didn’t fall silent at all.

In fact, she left the Entity’s mind very noisy indeed.

Date point: 18y3m AV
Captured battlecruiser Apex of Virtue, Cimbrean shipyards, the Far Reaches

Doctor Clara Brown

“Doctor Brown?”

Clara turned as much as she could in the tight confines of the system she’d wriggled into, and tried to look over her shoulder. “Oh! Perfect! Could you hand me that flashlight?”

The figure blocking her light paused, then shrugged, stooped, and handed it over. “I was told you’re the woman to talk to about control software compatibility.”

“Sounds like…nngh… someone passed the buck,” Clara replied, pulling the light past her with a grunt and aiming it into the heart of the crawlspace. Even by her petite standards, it was claustrophobic: the Kwmbwrw who’d formerly owned the ship must have relied on drones and remote manipulators. “There’s no such thing as control software compatibility. The computer architecture is completely different. Our stuff’s built on decades of incremental change and inherited conventions, and the same is true for anyone else. Totally different DNA. Ow.” She sucked on a pinched finger.

She looked back over her shoulder. “…Sorry, who am I talking to?”

“Admiral Caruthers.” The old man’s voice sounded amused.

“Oh! Um….sorry. Be right out.”

“Thank you.”

The admiral waited patiently while Clara reversed out of the system crawlspace, and diplomatically ignored her cursing when the back of her head bounced off a conduit with a painful clang.

“I take it it’s interesting in there,” he noted wryly once she was free.

“Infuriating!” Clara growled, rubbing the bump on her scalp. “I don’t know who did their system integration, but they should be…okay. Fired, at the least.”

“From what I gather a lot of the technology in this ship is human-compatible,” Caruthers noted.

“Compatible? We invented half of it! There’s knock-off versions of MBG tech in there!” Clara sighed, stood and collected her water bottle. “Anyway. Sorry. What can I do for you?”

“Well, you already answered my foremost question,” Caruthers replied. “I take it from what you said that every computer in this ship will need to be removed and replaced.”

Clara clipped the bottle to her belt, then re-tied her hair. She should have just swallowed her vanity and had it cut short, she reflected. “Yes, but that’s not as big a job as it sounds, considering,” she said. “We have guys on the refit crew who worked on Myrmidon and Caledonia, so, lots of relevant experience. And we’ve learned a lot since then. And, well, like I said, half the tech in her is basically ours anyway.”

Caruthers hummed softly to himself, and stooped to peer in the crawlspace. “Astonishing really.”

“Well…yes?”

He shook his head. “My career has gone on nearly forty years at this point. I started out in submarines, twenty years before first contact. And now, I find myself aboard an alien-built ship stuffed with human-designed technology…We really have come a long way in a short time, haven’t we?” He chuckled. “Anyway. Not only did I come here for your opinion, I also wanted to introduce you to the Anubis of networking.”

From around the corner came…well, Anubis. In Gaoian form. He was tall and slim as Gaoians often were, well fit, and had huge, elegant ears, a short glossy black coat and a slim muzzle.

“Champion Meereo, Doctor Clara Brown, lead starship designer for the Moses Byron Group, and head of the refit project. Doctor Brown, Champion Meereo of Clan Longear.”

Clara tried to wipe a little of the filth off her palm before shaking Meereo’s paw. “Hello.” She noticed that there was some partial webbing between his fingers. That’s new.

“A pleasure,” Meereo spoke English with only a mild Gaori accent.

“You’re not the first person to explain that compatibility issue to me, doctor,” Caruthers explained. “The Champion, however, believes that it’s more surmountable than you said. And considering that AEC are keen for this refit to progress swiftly so we can add this ship to our fleet as soon as possible…”

Clara quirked her head. “If there’s a reliable way to make two completely alien computers talk to each other without issue…yeah, that would speed things up a lot,” she agreed. “But one of the things we learned from Cally especially is, proper integration is important. Delivering a safe and steady ship takes as long as it takes.”

“I believe we can optimise without sacrificing safety,” Meereo replied. “The Kwmbwrw are sticklers for adherence to Dominion standards. Understandable, considering they created many of those standards in the first place…”

“Perhaps you would care to discuss this more formally,” Caruthers prompted. “I’ll await your informed opinions with great interest.”

“Oh, yes. Sorry,” Meereo chittered, and ducked his head respectfully to the admiral. “I appreciate this, admiral. I’ll be sure to get our thoughts to you as soon as possible.”

“Thank you, Champion. Doctor.” Caruthers said his farewells with a nod of the head, and departed to tend to Important Admiral Things. Clara got the impression he’d probably dealt with this one himself just to be able to escape from some of his more stultifying duties.

She followed Meereo’s inviting gesture, and they set out back toward the docking umbilical to the planning and presentation rooms aboard the shipyard. “I’ll want to call up some of my team…”

“And I brought along some of my best Brothers. This is likely to be a long and interesting discussion.”

“We’ll need coffee…” Clara considered Meereo curiously. “…Does a Champion always get so directly involved?”

“Depends! Gaoians tend to prefer a hands-on style of leadership. As for us? We’re a small clan, as Clans go. We’re very focused on our practical field.”

“Which is?”

“Telecommunications, information systems, system integrations and architecture.”

“…Wow. So if it blinks or beeps—”

“—Or bleeps—”

“Right. Your Clan is there.”

“On some level, yes. We’re practical engineers, first and foremost. We leave theory to Clans like Highmountain or Silverspeck. We’re more interested in getting the job done. On that note, the Brothers I brought with me today come from our Systems Avionics lead workhouse.” Meereo flashed her a charming grin, “As you might say, this is not our first rodeo.”

Clara smiled, and nodded. “Good. Let’s see if we can knock a week off this project then.”

“And you can get back to crawling in interesting holes,” Meereo chittered. “What was that one, anyway?”

Clara relaxed. Something about the tone of his question made it clear he wasn’t just being polite: she really was in the company of a fellow systems nerd. She pulled up the pictures she’d taken and started to explain…and somehow, the conversation didn’t stop all night.

They got a lot done, in the end. Fortunately, somebody thought to record it all so it could be properly summarized for the admiral afterwards. Most of what came out of that long and engaging conversation was coffee jitters, sketches, notes and scraps of ideas. All put together…she could see how some of what they’d figured out would dramatically streamline certain tasks.

Still. It did last all night. By the time her shuttle landed in Folctha, she could barely stay awake, and she endured some gentle chiding from Dane about sleep and health, the usual…which just meant he cared.

She took a leave day, and slept through it with a whole ship’s worth of interacting systems dancing in her head. Things would go smoothly now, she could tell.

She just hoped whatever new name they picked for the ship was a good one.

Date Point: 18y4m AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Given-Man

Facing the Lodge had been something like being wrassled by Jooyun. Both were big, strong, tricky things that were very good at beating Vemik into goo. Sometimes Jooyun was stronger. Sometimes the Given-Man at the Lodge were stronger, too. Often Vemik was stronger than either, but he still lost anyway, because they knew many knowings about fighting that he was just starting to taste.

All of them hurt to learn. But that was okay. Vemik was a fast learner.

And sore, too. Really sore, everywhere. And constantly hungry, had been since that first bite of the magic fruit. For two moons now he’d done almost nothing but eat ravenously and move with more restless energy than he’d ever felt, even when his whole body felt like it was on fire and he just wanted to sleep all day long. But he couldn’t sleep, because he couldn’t stop moving, so he’d be up all day, wrestling at the Lodge, listening to stories, teaching them the beginnings of steel…and then he’d collapse in a heap, dead to the world.

Happily, there would be an end to it. He learned at the Lodge that he’d be that way for the next few seasons while the gods finished working their Givings in him, but it wouldn’t be too bad for much longer.

Much had changed in him, but he most immediate thing was that he had to re-learn how to move. He’d grown and built himself into a big man beforehand, but now he was huge like Ferd, huge everywhere from his bigger, redder crest down to his wider feet and thicker tail. He was the youngest Given-Man at the Lodge and moved like he was much older, because his new size and strength meant he wasn’t a nimble young man swinging lightly through the trees anymore. His arms were so big now that he couldn’t even cover his bicep with his other hand, and his legs were so thick he had to swing them around themselves when he walked standing up. Gods, he had to crane his neck a bit to see past his own chest, sometimes!

But on the other hand, he was so ridiculously quick now he could fling himself through the trees ahead of his own thoughts! He had to concentrate to go fast, and that wasn’t a problem he’d ever thought he’d have. And of course, he’d grown so strong he didn’t have good enough words for it. Too fast to think, too strong to explain. All that, and he had years to grow stronger, grow faster, jump and hunt and wrassle and lift and think and build better every day.

If he kept his wits about him, didn’t die too young…he might one day surpass Yan. That was a heady thought! Vemik Sky-Thinker really had died at the Lodge. Whoever he was now, he was a different man than before and he wondered at it all. Everything about him was better now. Just as much as his body could race ahead of his thoughts, his thoughts could also race ahead of his body (when he wasn’t thinking about food or fucking) and he could hardly contain himself. He could feel the world more strongly. Taste the air better, see through the gloom. Shimmer-wings were prettier! He’d be able to crush Jooyun again too!

Not all of the changes were so perfectly good, though.

The biggest of all the changes was in his mind. He’d not even made it back to the tribe, not even claimed it back from Loor and already all his thinking was bent to it. It was his, he knew it in his breath, and he’d not even claimed it yet. He was…a different man, now. The Lodge had warned him about that, too.

He’d worried about what that would mean for him. As he feared, he probably wouldn’t have quite as much time for steel as he had before. But, that wasn’t so bad! There were two hands of hands of new young women in his tribe and, well…he was their Given-Man. They and their men were all his mates and friends now, so he would be a very busy man for the rest of the season…and what man would complain about that?!

Well. Would be, once he won his tribe back. He’d need to wrestle it away from Loor, but Vemik knew he could do it. He was smarter and bigger. It wouldn’t be a problem.

Really, his biggest problem seemed to be Yan.

Yan had hated the rites. In fact, Vemik guessed the old black-crest had suffered far deeper and worse pain than what Vemik himself had endured.

Which was saying something. The Lodge had broken Vemik over a hand of days. Broke him with tricks and sheer strength. They fought. He won against many. But not against many at once. And then, at the end, when Vemik had been allowed to recover…Yan and the others had shown Vemik the meaning of strength. Shown him completely, mercilessly, and almost easily.

He’d never understood how much restraint Given-Men actually had. He knew now. He learned that personally as he came out of the rite a broken man, so weak he couldn’t move, so addled he could hardly remember his own name.

And then he was re-born into the Lodge. He had a rank, now. Not the top. He wasn’t the biggest or the wiliest. But he was already pretty close, and that was something to be proud of.

It was a good rite. A good lesson to learn. Maybe it wasn’t that Yan had hated the rite itself, but…Vemik could see how it would be hard to teach that lesson to somebody he loved.

They were swinging home through the trees, mostly for the exercise. Vemik still had deep soreness everywhere and now and then he’d move just the wrong way, grunt in pain—

“Ow!”

Or in this case, feel something pull just the wrong way in his chest. That of course immediately drew Yan’s attention, and suddenly he was like Vemet whenever Vemik had hit his head from a fall, only much, much more annoying.

“For fucks’ sake, Yan! I’m okay!” Vemik’s voice was deeper now too. That always seemed to surprise Yan every time he heard it. It certainly surprised Vemik. A Given-Man’s voice coming out of his own mouth, that was…he’d get used to it in time, probably.

Yan grunted, and paused to sit in a Forestfather’s lower branches. “Fine. But we rest anyway.”

Vemik’s pride fought with the fact that, okay or not, it still hurt, and gave up. He stretched like Jooyun had taught him until things felt a bit better, stretched a little more for good luck, then stopped on the next branch over and sat too. It was a little too narrow for him, so he coiled his tail around it and gripped with his feet. “…Can taste roasting meat on the wind,” he realized.

Yan nodded. “Loor’s village. Not far now.”

“I know that. Just…tastes good. Makes me hungry.” Some part of Vemik had worried about that. Yan certainly seemed pleased by the news, as he nodded with a grunt and settled a little more comfortably.

“Mm. Can’t live on magic-fruit only,” he agreed. “Need meat and good bones, if you’re to stay strong. You had a strong taste for the fruit, too. As strong as mine was.”

“Everything tasted different, for a while there. Not as good.”

“Every Given-Man feels that. It’s part of the Giving. Now everything tastes…more, yes?”

Vemik lashed his tongue at the air, then nodded. “…Don’t think I’d have tasted it from this far out before.”

“Is an old secret we keep. Kept from the city-People. You remember the story, now.”

Vemik nodded. He did. The Lodge had a lot to say about the old city-People, much of which made a lot more sense when he compared it to what the Humans had learned. What had been almost legend now was known fact.

…He should probably write it all down, actually. Start a library for the Lodge.

“Anyway. Almost a full moon now, since the rite. Still hurting?”

“…I think it’s hurt from the Giving, not the rite. Mostly I’m just sore in the morning.”

Yan seemed happy by that. “…Okay. You stay here, I will bring you a neyma.”

“I can hunt, you know…”

“I know. But you are still new to the Giving, and neyma are tricky. You need to save your strength for Loor, too. If you can taste his village he probably knows you’re coming. And…” Yan looked pensive, and then sighed. “Would make me feel better.”

“I’m not mad, you know.”

“I know.”

“I’m not mad, Yan.”

Yan swung down from the branch. “Is not about what you feel,” he grumbled, and vanished through the tree’s great beard of long vines.

Vemik didn’t quite know what to think about that, but in any case he wasn’t going to push Yan on the issue; he felt things wildly now, so it was best to stay on his good side.

Not having much better to do, Vemik decided to explore a bit.

Climbing high was something he’d needed to be careful about for a while, and of course now with his new huge weight it was lots worse, but what had really thrown him was his need to think carefully about where he settled his grip; he was so incredibly strong now, he could squeeze right through a branch or deep into the trunk if he wasn’t paying attention. Still, there were interesting things to see. In fact, he found a flower he’d never seen before high up in the Forestfather, with long, shimmering, dark violet petals he knew a Human would probably call black. Sort of how Yan’s black crest was the darkest of red in some light…

He’d just sketch it, for now. He’d need good ink to get the colors right. Or maybe he’d come back later with the cam-ra Tilly had given him. They saw things like Humans did, though, so how would he show the violet? It was such a pretty color…

…There was a thought, though. Tilly. He’d learned over time to be careful and gentle with her, more and more as he grew into his full manhood, but now…well. He’d had a big, strong cock by the People’s reckoning, and Tilly said he’d be huge for a Human. Like everything else, that had grown too. He’d need to be extra careful. Still…Ferd managed. Jooyun was the same way too and had no problems fucking his women, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad!

They could still have a lot of fun if she wanted. He hoped she would. But if she didn’t…he wouldn’t blame her. Humans were…well, small. Surprisingly tough, and endlessly able to move…but little. They didn’t have much weight to them, they were thin and very pretty, almost like stories about spirits and the Others. Too pretty. Their men were tall and pretty to look at instead of hard-muscled and handsome. And built to match too, every part of them.

Mostly. Some of them (like Jooyun!) could shame the Ten’Gewek with the many different strengths of their bodies, and that was the hardest part about them. They were small and weak except when they weren’t, mysterious except when they were plain-spoken. They had no staying power at all, except when they were moving just a little fast or working a little hard, then they could go on and on and on seemingly forever, never stopping for anything. Wise and too sky-smart to believe, except when they couldn’t knap a knife or remember not to fall out of a tree. Humans were good, wonderful people…but alien.

He loved them for it. The Gao too, for the same reasons, but, well…he didn’t want to fuck the Gao, and they didn’t want to fuck him. They were handsome in an animal sort of way, true enough…

Maybe they were just a bit too alien. Still good friends, though.

A loud bleat off in the distance drew his thoughts away, and was followed by another almost immediately. A crash, a crack, another bleat that suddenly choked off into nothing…Yan worked fast. Fast enough that Vemik had only barely finished his rough sketch, and didn’t get all of the important details down before Yan re-appeared with two neyma, one over each shoulder. He jumped back up into the tree and walked up the last bit of trunk—Vemik could do that now too—and settled himself on the thickest branch.

“Good kills,” Vemik commented, appreciatively. The neyma were males of fighting age, their heads a bristle of spikes. Even an experienced hunter could get a nasty wound if he wasn’t careful. At this time of the year, two neyma males were almost as good as a yearling Werne.

Not enough to feed a tribe, but more than enough to feed two growing Given-Men. Yan tossed the slightly smaller one to Vemik; still alive, and not at all happy to be caught. Vemik sympathized with his prey, but he had to eat and more importantly, he had to drink, so he wrapped it up in his legs, pinned it steady, put a free hand around the back of its neck and pushed his thumb right between two of the bones, until he felt a soft breaking inside.

The neyma stopped moving but kept breathing, strong and alive. Good. Vemik could drink his fill without giving too much hurt. One bite along where its throat met shoulder, his tongue shoved deep into the wound…and Vemik squeezed the blood and good meat right out of his prey.

Wet. Warm. Alive, and strength he badly needed. He drank until the beast ran dry, crushing every last drop out of his unfortunate prey. Bones snapped like twigs, organs were smashed into paste, and Vemik slurped that up too through his bite. It wasn’t a quick end for the poor neyma, since he couldn’t drink it all down if its heart wasn’t beating, so that meant the Taking was a rite of agony. Still, the gods didn’t like men who wantonly tortured their prey, so he drank as fast as he could, even if it did taste better to go slow. One should always think of what was being Given, willingly or not.

He’d drunk his fill. The meat they would eat later, after his victory. Loor was waiting for him, and it wouldn’t take long for his blood-meal to settle in his belly.

He parted ways with Yan a little distance from the village, after he’d spent the rest of the trek talking about things Vemik could do to win, tricks he might try…

Vemik appreciated it. He did, really. Really! But at the same time…

“Yan. Thinking about the fight is the wrong way to win it. I need an empty head now, please…” It was advice Yan himself had given him, once.

“…I’m turning into an Old Singer,” Yan grumbled.

“You want this to go well.” Vemik stopped and clapped him on the shoulder. “But that’s between me, Loor and the gods. You showed me strength, and I’m thankful. You showed me how to be strength, too. You couldn’t have done that if you hadn’t killed the boy before. Now let me show you that I’ve learned it well.”

Yan nodded seriously. “Okay. But don’t humiliate him, either! You need—”

“Yan.”

“…If you need me after, I’ll go visit Loor’s village.”

“And fuck their Singer silly,” Vemik guessed. That was all fine by him, though. Anything to distract Yan for a bit…

“Eh, she’s getting old. Maybe fuck her gently.” Yan hooted, a little of his usual humor coming back. He gave Vemik a huge, crushing hug that didn’t feel as crushing as it once had. “Gods be with you, Vemik Given-Man.”

It was time, and the evening was just beginning to set. The perfect magic for a contest between men. Vemik approached the village upright, with the same swaggering walk all Given-Men had and which he now understood they couldn’t help but use. The watch noticed him immediately—good. There was a commotion as Loor stumbled…

Stumbled out of Singer’s hut.

Well. Vemik wouldn’t mind beating him at all, now.

Still, he gave Loor a big fang-baring grin, and sat on his tail at the edge of the village, waiting. There were rules to this thing. And he wanted to give everyone the chance to see this.

The whole village gathered, the Humans too. Even Professor Daniel was there, worry written across every line of that stretchy Human face. He must have thought this was about to be war. It wasn’t, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a real fight.

Time to show everyone what Given-Men could do.

Loor swaggered up to the edge of the village, and sat opposite him. “You’re bigger.”

Humans, Vemik knew, would call the next bit trash talk.

“You look smaller.” He grinned too. A few of the women trilled quietly at that.

Loor hooted, low and quiet. “Still bigger than you.” Somebody at the back shouted encouragement.

“Maybe in your sweetest dreams. Not here!”

Loor hooted again. “Didn’t mean these.” He slapped his shoulders. “Ask Singer some time!”

That got Vemik’s fire up, and it got lots of trilling and hoots from the crowd, plus several friendly slaps for the Singer, who was grinning the whole way across her face but shaking her head. “Oh? Singer doesn’t seem to think so…maybe I’ll let you lick mine when I’ve won, so you can taste what a real man should be!”

Loor hooted louder, over the villagers’ shouts of approval. He reached down, scooped up some loosed dirt and rubbed it into his palms. “I like you! You’ll make a fine woman for me, tonight. Let’s test that strength of yours…”

That was an important thing to say. If it was a test of strength, they’d be keeping to a play-fight instead of anything really nasty, like he’d learned at the Lodge. No teeth. That was good. Loor wasn’t angry, and more importantly, he was interested in peace.

Well. He’d get it, once he lost. Vemik rubbed dirt into his palms too, accepting the challenge…and struck first.

Hooting, war-trills and chanting erupted around them, shouts of support and more trash-talk from the village as Loor took Vemik’s charge right in the gut, wrapped his arms and tail around Vemik, and was pushed back leaving furrows in the ground. He regained his footing, found better ground, and began to push back. Vemik started slipping through the gravely dirt…

So he tossed Loor over his hip. A trick he’d learned from Jooyun, and it worked just as well now as it did then. Loor landed on his back, flipped over in a blink, and tackled Vemik hard.

They wrestled in the dirt, back and forth, enjoying the tussle for the sheer fun of playing hard, harder than anyone else could play. Most Humans couldn’t understand what it meant to exult so powerfully in their bodies, so few of them were strong enough to offer such prayer. Vemik got a few good, showy throws in. Loor got in one or two, including one that nearly knocked the wind right out of Vemik’s chest. Vemik kicked through his legs at the last moment before Loor closed in for the kill, and planted his feet right in Loor’s own chest, sending him flying across the village.

To the trees they went, next. The chase-and-catch part of the fight, who was swifter, stronger, lasted longer as they flung themselves up and down the nearby Ketta, bending back branches to try and slap the other man off.

Loor had some dirty tricks in the trees. One caught Vemik right across the face, and another nearly caught him in the sack, but for a last-moment dodge. It went on for a long while until at last, Loor fucked up: he forgot about his tail. Vemik pounced as hard as he could, grabbed it with a rock-crushing grip and yanked with all his strength. He pulled Loor right out of the tree, a surprised hoot bellowing all the way down before he crashed to the ground, where he landed hard right on his rump, momentarily dazed.

Vemik was down atop him an instant later, grabbing for wrists and ankles with hands and feet and tail…Loor shoved him off.

“Yield!” He coughed the word rather than shouting it. He kicked back up to his feet, wobbly and hacking for air, stumbling as if the world was spinning too fast to be happy…

Vemik had won, and hooted his victory for all to hear. “Drink too much beer, Loor?”

“…Maybe I should!” Loor coughed. “Ow. I think…” He shook his head. “Yes. I take it back. You are a man! I think the village…safe with you.”

“Anything hurt?”

“Nothing that won’t mend.” Loor straightened up with a groan. “Good fight.”

“Good fight.” They hugged like brothers, then took out their knives. “My tribe is safe, because you protected it. You are a good man, Loor Given-Man. I offer my blood.”

“And I offer mine, Vemik Given-Man. Peace between us, and our tribes.”

They cut across the edge of their palm, in the one place that was thin enough to drip blood from their calloused hands. They shook, mingling the tribes, and pulled each other into a strong embrace.

A good fight. Loor would be a neighbor worth having.

The evening prayer came right after and was especially sacred tonight. When the sun went down, after they’d feasted, and danced, and boasted and told bad jokes and re-assured some of the more nervous Humans—

“No, Professor, we weren’t at war, that was just testing each other!”

—finally, at the end of the day, Vemik could Take his tribe. He’d start with his love. With his Singer. His, more than ever before, now.

He claimed what was his with all his strength, until the sun came up the next day.

Date Point: 18y4m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lieutenant-Commander Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: Miss Ava Magdalena Ríos

Ava returned today for her annual session with me. She is a civilian journalist and her case falls under my jurisdiction due to her specific insights into SACRED STRANGER and her experiences during operation EMPTY BELL.

Objectively she was in a euthymic mood today, well-presented and groomed. She brought along her personal assistance dog, Hannah, who is by far the biggest source of her worries these days: as is apparently common with border collies, Hannah is suffering from joint degradation, and Ava is understandably upset that she can no longer enjoy Hannah’s company during her morning runs. She expressed concern and sadness to me that her companion’s remaining time may be short, but she is handling this particular grief appropriately well.

She reports only “one or two” instances of intrusive thoughts in the last year. We discussed whether she wishes to adjust her medication, to which she replied that she sees no need. I am happy to agree with her in this, and we parted ways after a brief and gratifyingly routine session.

I will see her next year.

Date Point: 18y4m1w AV
Clan of Females yacht Hopeful Star, orbiting planet Gao

Naydra, Great Mother of the Gao

There were moments where Naydra might have wished for a more…statuesque presence, when performing her official duties. She was much like any silverfur, really. Slim and lithe, with a long silky coat. Not at all hard on the eyes or the nose, if she was being honest with herself. Still: while she had nothing to complain about, and many blessings to be thankful for…

It would be nice if she wasn’t always so overwhelmed by Daar’s presence. Engagements like this were a stark reminder of the sheer scale difference between her and her Bumpkin; on all fours, the thick muscular ridge of his back came up to her chest. If he were standing tall, the top of her ears came up to the bottom of his chest. She could lay across his shoulders with neither her feet nor her head dangling off the side. That she could comfortably do either in front of or behind his neck, so thickly was his strength layered on. He was monstrous and she was…well, normal.

It was a stark dichotomy, though she had to admit, a useful one. One she would endeavor to maximize. He’d just padded over from his suite on the Fury and was meeting her onboard the Clan of Females’ diplomatic yacht, the Hopeful Star, for a quiet bit of privacy.

He was, in the best traditions of warrior-kings, scruffy and well-exercised. No blood on his claws, but his fur was unkempt, slick from perspiration, and much too musky in all the best ways. He’d been leading a border patrol along the trailing edge of Hunter space where it encroached on the unclaimed territory between Gao and the Far Reaches, working closely with the Human military out of Cimbrean, and the weeks of hard work had undone some of her careful attention.

Normally, of course, he left such matters to the Fathers and Officers of his Clans, and even when he took to the field, he did his “most bestest” to leave the work and the glory to those who deserved it; he was just there as a show of force and intent, after all. A diplomatic statement, aimed at the security council while the Rich Plains wended its slow way into position to resolve the matter between the Great Houses and the Clans.

That didn’t keep him from a friendly tussle or ten with the other males when things were quiet, of course. He had been doing that and all other manner of very Bumpkin-like things aboard the Fury, judging by his scent. And that meant he needed someone with more refined sensibilities for these sorts of things to clean him up.

Whether he wanted it or not. And no matter what he wanted to do first. He came in with his usual deck-shaking prance, flexed playfully and gave her a very telling look—

“No, Bumpkin.” Naydra chittered. “Plenty of time for that later.” That was one of her little sneaky tricks. Clean him up first, then get him messy again, then clean him up again. A sure-fire way to maximize their time together.

“Aww!”

“And besides, you need a thorough brushing. And maybe a strategic little trim.”

Daar loped across the room and gently tackled her to the floor. He was always so careful, and despite being literal tons of bouncy energy, never once had he ever slipped up and given her hurt, even accidentally. He curled them both into an affectionate ball and gave her his soppiest, most affectionate look. “Okay. ‘Yer not gonna use th’ slicker, are ‘ya?”

He hated the slicker.

“Of course! Your short coat is very fetching when it’s nice and glossy…”

Daar sighed overdramatically, and chittered. “Oh-kay, jus’ ‘cuz you like it…”

“It makes you look strong and stately, Bumpkin.” He, of course, wasn’t letting go. “But it’s difficult to brush you when I can’t escape your grasp…”

“How convenient ‘fer me!”

“Bumpkin,” she chided gently. “You have to get ready.”

“It ain’t for two hours! I can think o’ somethin’ fun we might do…”

“And you’re three hours big.”

“Oh, I’m good ‘fer a lot longer’n that, if ‘yer willin…”

She tried and failed to restrain a chitter. “Believe me, I know! Now get off.”

“Fiiine…”

He was incorrigibly playful but never overly so—he knew how to ride that line hard—and that was truly her favorite part about him. She could never hold any sort of indignation.

“How was the hunting?” she asked as she retrieved the grooming kit, while Daar stood and examined himself critically in the mirror.

“Barely saw a single Hunter, an’ the fuckin’ thing ran away the moment it sniffed us.”

“It didn’t even investigate you?”

“Nope. Saw our warp-wake an’ woosh!”

“Hmm…” Naydra decided to start at the top and work her way down. She plucked the scissors out of the soft leather roll, and set about neatening the tips of his ears. Nowadays a much easier operation, since his ears were now well-shaped and perfectly scarless instead of lacerated rags. Still, with a little contouring she could get them looking sharply pointed. “They can probably recognize the Fury by its wake signature.”

“Prol’ly.” He flicked his ear, and then grimaced a bit in apology. Like most brownies, a lot of his body language was only nominally under his control. “An’ they ‘member the last time I caught one o’ them, too…”

“You sound like you think there might be more to it.”

Daar paused for a moment, thinking. “Privacy,” he barked at the room. Suddenly they were cut off from the rest of the ship’s noises, leaving just them, their breathing, and the snip snip of her scissors as she trimmed the fur around his heavy jawline and thick neck, which he tensed hard so she could contour along its natural shape.

“We saw one,” he explained. “Jus’ one. Along the border they should be watchin’ an’ patrollin’ the most, if they got any brains at all. Somethin’s keepin’ their heads down, or drawin’ ‘em away.”

You think you know what it is,” she surmised.

“Kinda, yeah. The Humans ain’t briefed us on what I think it might be though. Not ‘fer a while. So that makes me wunner if’n they’re even aware what they’ve got goin’ on, here.”

“Have you brought this up with Champions Thurrsto or Fiin yet?”

“Nah. I only jus’ thinked it out when I was liftin’ right before I came over. Still wanna think a bit more.”

She duck-nodded in understanding. Daar’s workouts were his preferred form of meditation, and on lighter days he got a lot of thinking done while his body performed for him. She’d found she could do much the same on a good, vigorous walk.

Naydra gently prompted him to lift one arm so she could neaten up the longer fur at his elbows. He tensed his entire upper torso with it, but this time with a slightly smug flick of the ear, since he was as much showing off for her as making her job easier. Yup, his fur really wanted to be long and shaggy. She’d come back with the trimmer for the shaggy mass along his spine and shoulders. “Well, I have good news,” she said, changing the subject.

“Oh?”

“Mother Gweya published her quarterly population statistics report. The birthrate is shifting back toward more females. It seems we’ve been at peace long enough to de-stress.”

“That’s good! What ‘bout that sixth-degree that was born a month ago?”

“…Struggling. But he’s a fighter.” The difficulty with sixth-degree cubs was one of terrible odds. They were exceptionally rare in the first place, and they were near universally born malnourished. Late in the pregnancy, it was hard for the Mother to eat enough to sustain them, and in the first couple of weeks after their birth, their little tummies were just too small for them to properly fuel the rapid growing their bodies wanted to do. The one currently being nursed on Tiritya Island had a permanent feeding tube down his nose and throat, keeping his stomach replete with the most nutritious pap that Gaoian food science could produce.

Daar had been quite fortunate; they’d detected him early and made appropriate arrangements, including for there to be three young Mothers with freshly-weaned cubs available to nurse him. Still, his own young life had hung in the balance too, at the beginning.

Thank goodness for the Gao that he’d thrived.

“…Yeah. Never easy. Good luck, little guy…” Daar said a quiet prayer. It would likely end in tragedy, as sixth-degrees usually did…though given that the sixth-degree birthrate had spiked dramatically in the years after the war—meaning there had been one at all, let alone two, they’d learned quite a lot about how to care for them.

Naydra was even daring a little quiet optimism. Daar was the first sixth degree in generations to make it past early cubhood, but it would be nice for him to have a young rival, maybe someone he could mentor…

There was always room for hope.

She let him think and worked her way through the long process of making him perfect in comfortable silence. A nice, sharp line trimmed in here and there to highlight his hulking shape as best as could be, a few stray hairs tamed here and there…tail brushed out and glossy…

She nibbled his cheek when she was done. “You’re ready.”

He stood to his full height and posed proudly for her inspection. “Well, how do I look?”

Like a living Keeda hero…

“Like I did my best.” She chittered teasingly. Daar gave her an indulgent Look. “Stately, if you prefer something more specific. A sight to strike awe into all those aliens.”

“An’ get all the Females sharin’ pics?”

She clawed him right in his massive iron boulder of a laborer’s rump.

“Ow!!”

“You stop that,” She set the grooming kit aside—her personal assistant would arrange for it to be properly cleaned and maintained for next time. “Besides, you’ll be doubly handsome once you’re in uniform.”

Among the Gao, clothing was usually strictly functional, if it was worn at all. Mostly they preferred durable overalls, or a many-pocketed vest, or in Daar’s case, a sling he could throw over his back or swing around to the front to rummage for whatever he needed. His Bag of Many Things, as he called it.

Among aliens, though, sometimes a little dress-up was important. The Humans in particular seemed to think that a great leader shouldn’t address the galaxy with his nuts swaying in the breeze. And Daar did look good in an austere, minimalist type of garb.

Whichever gaoian invented the Brownfur’s kilt was worth the legend. They were strictly functional affairs, providing some protection from cold breezes and an acceptable minimum of modesty, along with some useful pockets. The trick to them was the pleating, and the heavy leather that ensured it hung well whether the wearer stood on two paws or four. No jewels, no gold, in fact Daar’s only nod to decoration on the garment was some tooled patterning on the leathers. In true laborer’s tradition his kilt was closer in shape to a loincloth, coming not even halfway down his legs and just a bit longer across his loins. The weighted edges of the cloth protected his sensitive bits from the cold no matter what he was doing, while the wide-open cut on the sides gave him maximum freedom of motion…

And left little to the imagination, while accommodating a Human’s modesty. Naydra was right: he looked very handsome indeed once properly outfitted. She wasn’t complaining at all.

Which meant it was her turn. She left him to fidget out the small adjustments for himself, and retired to don her own accoutrements. The embodiments and representatives of Gaoian civilization had matters of the grandest significance to discuss with the galaxy today. Anything less than her best would not do.

But Naydra prided herself that her best, was the best. They would shine bright, stand proud…

And the peoples of the galaxy would, at last, listen. Of that, she had no doubt.

Date Point: 18y4m1w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted space.

Lewis Beverote

Maybe it was the oldest stereotype of all time, but Lewis was walking away from his dream job to follow the girl he loved.

Lucy might be a brilliant scientist, a materials and metallurgical expert who managed to routinely make Lewis feel like the dumb one in their marriage, but was also a soldier, and that meant she didn’t get the final say in where she lived and worked. They’d known from the start that the day eventually would eventually come when she was reassigned so she could pass on what she’d learned and discovered in her work.

In the end, the blow was softer than they’d worried it could be: they were going to Folctha, where Lucy would join the instructors and trainers who educated not only the HEAT’s suit technicians, but advance armor systems and clothing experts responsible for developing the next generation of gear for the Allied militaries’ next generation warfighters.

He was super proud of her, and also really happy that they were going to Cimbrean, not Earth. He’d been…okay…with Earth. Honest. Erebor was no place to raise a family, and he wasn’t going to get any younger and fitter. Seeing Al, Xiù and Julian’s kids when they stayed in touch had got him kinda broody. Two babies that were already toddling around. Two young (adopted) men too, with very different personalities. One of them was definitely a bookworm and the other…wasn’t. Sort of like Lewis and Julian in rhyme, really…

…But he hadn’t wanted Earth. He’d left Earth behind a lifetime ago, going back now would have felt anticlimactic, after a life spent out among the stars, on alien worlds, in alien stations and aboard alien spaceships, with alien friends.

Speaking of which…fuck, parting ways with Vedreg broke his heart. He put on a brave face for them, congratulated him and Lucy on the career and life move, promised to stay in touch, wished them all the best…

But Lewis had got to know Guvnurag color-language pretty well over the years, and though Vedreg had suffused his chromatophores with a forced purple happy-for-you, he’d failed to keep it consistently bright, and it constantly gave way to flickers of green sorrow, turquoise loss and profound blue sadness. A human would have been weeping stoically.

“It has been…a long journey together,” he managed. They were hovering at the edge of the going-away party, near one of the station’s huge windows with its spectacular view of Durin. There were banners, a cake big enough to fill a pickup’s bed, and everyone was wearing a pointy paper hat.

On Vedreg, it looked like the little glitzy bedazzler on the end of a cocktail stick, right at the top of a haystack.

“Yeah…” Lewis felt quiet. For once, all the stuff he’d normally have been saying just wanted to sit silently inside him. “Can’t have life all one way though. Tempora mutantur, dude.”

“And we are changed with them…” Vedreg finished. “Still…”

“Dude. Speakin’ as your friend, maybe it’s time you moved on too.”

Yellow sparkled all over Vedreg’s body—fear. “No, no…I fit here. I support dozens of good people, all doing good work. I can’t leave.”

“Everyone else will, sooner or later. We are. Kirk’s away gettin’ back in the political game. Sooner or later Darcy’s gonna retire, Lee’s gonna be reassigned, Vakno will prob’ly up sticks too. Why not you, dude? Get out there an’ see how things have changed…” Lewis frowned at the involuntary shiver and repeated yellow flash that passed over his friend’s body.

“…You okay?” Could Guvnurag get agoraphobic?

Vedreg turned his face away, hiding most of his more visible chromatophores. “I am perfectly fine…” he rumbled, unconvincingly.

Lewis put a hand up and scratched his huge friend behind the hump of his shoulder, a spot impossible for Guvnurag to reach on their own. It was about as caring and concerned a gesture as their species had. “Bullshit,” he said, softly. “C’mon man, ain’t nobody in all the worlds is happy lonely. Y’ain’t been around your own people in years, you’re livin’ here in a place everyone else is gonna move on from…”

“Please, Lewis…” Vedreg sighed. “…Do not forget, I am not human. Nor am I incapable of caring for myself. I have spoken with the counsellor on this subject many times.”

“Well…that’s good?”

“It is a species difference, nothing more. You all move and adapt so quickly, but part of me still lives in fear and exile, hiding from Hierarchy assassins, and I cannot yet feel confident. I shall, in time. But I need to be somewhere stable and safe for a good long while, first.”

“…You’ve been here a good long while, Vedreg.”

“Only by human standards.” Vedreg’s hue shifted to something more convincing—warm affection and gratitude. “You are a good friend. I will miss you very much. But I promise you, this is still the right place for me.”

“…” Lewis wasn’t quite sure what he was going to say. He didn’t get the chance. The intercom’s chime cut through the party noise and ended the conversation.

“Supply ship Wandering Lantern is now ready to take on passengers. Departing personnel travelling to Cimbrean, please report to deck C cargo handling for stasis loading. Travellers for Cimbrean to deck C cargo handling.”

Lewis sighed. No luxury cruise liner trip for him and Lucy. With jump array use still strictly on an only-when-absolutely-necessary basis, he’d kinda hoped they’d get to ride in a starship and take a load off, but Lucy had pointed out that would be kinda boring. Lewis wasn’t so sure. He still had good memories of travelling on Sanctuary, but that had been because he liked the people and had a family of sorts there.

Getting loaded into a stasis bag and bypassing the whole long trek back to civilization was probably the better way to go, but he couldn’t say he was enthusiastic about it.

Vedreg gave him a complicated medley of emotional hues, then lifted one huge arm and wrapped it around him in a big, furry, carpet-smelling hug. “Send me a message when you arrive safely,” he requested.

“Dude, you know it. And you come visit whenever you’re ready.”

“I shall…dude.”

Lewis smiled: he’d been worried, but that last color pulse told him, yeah, Vedreg was okay really. He gave the big guy a last parting shoulder-scratch, found Lucy in the crowd of well-wishers and friends, traded last hugs, last jokes, goodbyes…

They had to be called a second time before they were finally let go.

“…You okay?” Lucy asked him, during the elevator ride down to the cargo bay.

“Yeah. You?”

“I will be.”

Lewis nodded. That was about it, really. Right in the moment, he felt sad and strange, but there was lots to look forward to. Her hand slipped warmly into his, their fingers interlaced, they traded a reassuring squeeze…

And stepped out of the elevator toward their stasis pods and the next chapter of their life together.

He was looking forward to it.

Date Point 18y4m1w AV
Starship Rich Plains, orbiting planet Gao

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

There was a certain degree of ceremony that went into recognizing a new individual as a species’ representative on the Security Council. The ceremony in question was mercifully brief, and consisted in the most part of hearing any objections to the appointee’s acceptance. A formality, really. An appointee with any truly damning impediments would never have stepped into the chamber in the first place.

The Kwmbwrw had appointed Grandmatriarch Gewastwythmenw to replace Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr. From what Sir Patrick had gleaned, a number of House Henen’s senior Matriarchs had defected in the days and weeks before Wgwyr’s downfall, and those who’d known of the operation under Eclipse Palace had told all.

Great House Henen was now just House Henen, and likely to go extinct in the coming years. The incoming Grandmatriarch had already been compelled to sell some of Henen’s assets, holdings and properties in order to pay for the House’s legal defence. Most analysts agreed that the fines that would come down upon them at the end of the years-long court cases would bankrupt whatever was left.

Investors from all across the Dominion, including Clan Goldpaw and several human companies, were making an absolute killing in short-sells, from what Sir Patrick heard.

Great House Gewas had been the foremost purchaser of Henen’s former property, a move that had suddenly catapulted them from second-richest of the Great Houses, to a distant and unassailable lead. Not surprising, then, that their Grandmatriarch was to take her former rival’s place. Some things about Kwmbwrw culture and society would not be changed so easily.

Twythmenw herself struck a very different figure to Wgwyr. The latter had always strode into the council with her back straight, her gait tall and the inscrutable poker face of the deeply prideful in place. Twythmenw, insofar as Sir Patrick could read her body language, seemed more…serene. She paused at the edge of the circle that marked the conventional threshold of the council, dipped her body in a Kwmbwrw bow, and waited patiently, turning slightly to look at the gathered representatives.

Her eye met Sir Patrick’s, and she inclined herself slightly to acknowledge him. Sir Patrick gave her a shallow nod of the head in turn, and thus passed their first interaction, far more positive and understanding than any he’d ever had with her predecessor.

The moderator called for any objections to the new representative’s appointment: none were voiced, despite a healthy pause and a pointed look toward the Gaoian contingent. A knock of the gavel sounded after a few long, silent seconds.

“You may take your position, Grandmatriarch.”

Gewastwythmenw inclined herself to the moderator, and picked her high-stepping, deer-like way over to the desk where her assistants and advisors were already waiting for her. By some accident, the Kwmbwrw representative was directly opposite the Gaoians, which put her directly opposite not just Kenshi, but on this occasion, opposite the impressive figures of the Great Father and Great Mother behind him. From her new position, she watched them carefully as the last touches of ceremony were completed, and the moderator opened the session.

“It is convention for an incoming representative to address the matters their predecessor brought before this council,” the moderator reminded them. “That being so, Grandmatriarch Gewastwythmenw, do you wish to amend any business brought to this council by the Kwmbwrw Great Houses?”

Twythmenw watched Daar for a second longer, then turned to the moderator. “I do.” She accepted a tablet from one of her aides, studied it for a second, then read clearly. “The Kwmbwrw Great Houses wish to withdraw our objections and legal challenges to the following Council motions…motion three thousand eight hundred and four, presented by Clan Stoneback of Gao. Motion three thousand eight hundred and seventeen, presented by the Global Representative Assembly of Earth. Motion three thousand eight hundred and forty, presented on behalf of the Ten’Gewek Protectorate by the Global Representative Assembly of Earth. Motion three thousand eight hundred and ninety-one…”

It was a long list. Wgwyr had spent much of the last several years obstructing every motion the Allied species had brought before the council that had even sniffed of placing any obligations or responsibilities on her people.

In one fell swoop, Twythmenw demolished a dam that had held back a unified Dominion campaign against the Hunters, brick by bureaucratic brick.

During all of that, Daar had done nothing more than flick an ear. He was sat on his haunches directly on the floor, and passively watched the entire proceeding without a sound.

As had Yan, who was present along with Julian Etsicitty, both as observers and representatives. They were mostly keeping to themselves. The big man was for a change fully and formally clothed and his hair tamed into place. He looked a bit like an immaculately-groomed and civilized hulking Tarzan of a man, who nonetheless wanted nothing more than to escape back to his jungle.

There was an animal magnetism at play, there. Knight would need to think on how to utilize it.

“….Motion four thousand and eleven, presented by the Rauwrhyr Republic. Motion four thousand and nineteen, presented by Clan Stoneback of Gao.” Twythmenw handed the tablet back to her aid, and sipped from a small cup of water to clear her throat. “The Kwmbwrw Great Houses further request that the aforementioned motions now be expedited, so that a lengthy and long-standing backlog of Council business may finally be cleared.”

“Do the Kwmbwrw Great Houses wish to bring any new motions before the Council at this time?” the moderator asked.

“None at this time.”

To Sir Patrick’s right, Ambassador Rockefeller made a satisfied noise. “One for the history books…” he muttered under the sound of the moderator’s gavel punctuating the completion of the handover.

“We shall see,” Sir Patrick replied as a general susurrus and shifting broke out: advisors and aides bustled out of the room, others bustled in. Daar and Naydra quietly turned and departed, apparently deciding that Twythmenw’s gesture needed no grand speech or gesture of gratitude. There would be a private meeting in a side chamber later. “We still have to secure the votes on all those motions.”

“We have half the galaxy behind us, and the other half just got out of the way.”

“I hope so. We need the Dominion. We’re just not big enough without them.”

Sir Patrick looked across the chamber to where the tiny OmoAru delegation stood. His counterpart, AtaUmuUi, was watching the comings and goings with his arms folded and his tufted tail ticking metronomically back and forth behind him, expression inscrutable. Two tables to his right, the Rauwrhyr were busily bustling in and out, fetching the files their representative needed. “Though, somehow, I think we’ll need some of the Dominion’s smaller constituents more than we need some of the bigger ones.”

“That would make sense. We’re one of the smaller ones, after all.” Rockefeller clapped Sir Patrick companionably on the shoulder. “You’re right, the war isn’t won yet. But we can still take a victory when it comes.”

“Speaking of,” Knight prompted, “how goes the fight in your corner of the game?”

“Interesting,” Rockefeller grunted. “Ambassador Etsicitty has found his rhythm so I am mostly in a consulting and support role for his mission now. He’s invited me over for a meet and greet, to belatedly celebrate the occasion of Vemik’s ascension to Given-Man. You as well, incidentally. Expect a formal invitation when he gets a chance to speak with you. On Cimbrean, most of our efforts are focused on relief and reconstruction assistance for Franklin among the five colonies. In other words,” he concluded, “all support activities. Nothing immediate and direct to the effort.”

“Cimbrean is the front line, and Franklin was a bad blow. I’d say you’re more immediate and direct than you make it sound.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the gavel. The hum of conversation ceased, all eyes turned to the moderator’s podium.

“The Dominion Security Council will now continue discussion on the expedited Motion three thousand eight hundred and four, brought by Clan Stoneback of Gao. The motion creates a framework for a unified industrial and logistical process by which classified starship and weapon designs may be commissioned from Dominion shipyards. Motion was suspended due to a legal challenge, now withdrawn. Introduction and arguments from the Representative for the Clans of Gao.”

Kenshi stepped into the circle. The logjam slipped, broke, and was gone. Perhaps it would catch again downstream…but for the first time in far too long, things were moving. Sir Patrick sat, and listened, and allowed himself a small smile.

The real war was back on.

Date Point: 18y4m1w AV
Diplomatic Starship Rich Plains, Orbiting Planet Gao

Yan Given-Man

Yan wasn’t going to say it out loud, but the Rich Plains did impress him. If his people had tried to take in and make room for so many different sky-tribes….well, he didn’t see how they could.

Some were so tall and thin and skinny he thought they’d break just by walking. Most didn’t eat meat, many couldn’t see the colors he could, some could see colors he couldn’t, none spoke the same language, some from the same tribe spoke different languages…

And yet, through tools, skill and determination, the ship managed to host them all and get them talking. A subtle but powerful Giving-magic, that.

Not only that, but even though Yan couldn’t imagine anywhere being more civilized, they still honored their homes. The great con-course running around the ship’s waist was full of plants. Little displays, from all across the stars. There was even an empty spot waiting for plants from Akyawentuo, which Yan found himself wanting to fill.

Jooyun had ideas for that, and they spent a bit of time talking through what would be nicest to show. Too bad he didn’t have Singer anymore. Or any Singer. He was a Blackcrest and Chief of the Lodge. All the tribes and all the Singers were his, but only when he visited them. He was a man alone.

He’d put it to them when he went back.

Their meeting was next to a display from the Corti home, Origin. The plants inside were strange, more like mushrooms than trees and shrubs. Sprawling straggly purple mats of finger-things, larger round grey-and-pink balls, a green and blue one that looked like a cock…not ugly, but odd and different.

As for who they were meeting with…

Humans and Gao, obviously. But also Corti, Guvnurag, Rauwrhyr and OmoAru (something strange about the taste of the air around that one.) And one more space, though Yan couldn’t guess who it was for.

There was little-talk before the meeting. Daar Great-Father looked young and healthy! Yan didn’t feel small around anyone, not even War-Horse, but he felt small and weak next to Daar. He’d filled out so much! Probably he could squish Yan like a little black buzzer now; Daar was huge, brown, had enormous claws and rippled from head to toe with the thickest steel-hardest muscles of anyone. But he wasn’t just a beast. He was also a man. Daar walked on all fours but he could stand like anyone else. He had clever hands too, even if they were so big they made Yan’s look like a little boy’s. Strong senses, and he could see red, now!

Ferd was right. Daar was some kind of god, and the rest of the sky-people were too civilized to understand. Least of all him. He was the god of the Brown Ones and didn’t even know it.

Very friendly for a god, though. And he liked dirty jokes! It was hard to believe gods would tell jokes about lusty women and unlucky men.

“I did not think of the Gao as so…” Yan struggled for a polite word, knowing where he was.

“Fuck-happy?”

Yan trilled, glad he didn’t have to worry about it with Daar. “Was trying to be delicate. Human would say ‘earthy,’ I think.”

“Mebbe! But don’t forget, they’re the ones who gave the galaxy the word ‘fuck’ in the first place. They ain’t so clean and prim as their good manners pretend.”

“They like their privacy,” Yan nodded sagely.

“That they do. Anywhoo, big-dick talk aside…” Daar did a full-bodied happy-dance. “Fuckin’ huge ship, huh? Did’ya like the tour?!”

“Is all very…civilized.” Yan meant that in a good way, really.

“Yeah. I bet ‘yer itchin’ ‘ta do somethin’ not so refined, huh?”

Yan scratched his crest at the back of his neck, ruefully. “Mm. Not many here I can play with without breaking them. And ones I could play with…shouldn’t.”

“Oh, I know ‘dem feels. ‘Member when we first met?”

“You were not so thick. Built strong and stretched out like a boy right before his manhood. I thought you were Jooyun’s pet, too.”

Daar chittered at that memory. “Seems like yesterday…I coulda made that jump, y’know.” Yan knew exactly what Daar was speaking about. When the Big Enemy had attacked the People, Daar had fought to save them, and part of that was a daring attack with explosives, to bring a mountain down atop the Enemy. The fight had tested them both to their very limits.

Now, Yan was so much more. Daar was so much more, and still growing.

Still… “Yes, but that would have been it from you.”

Daar chittered again, and his paw slammed into Yan’s shoulder in the friendly way of both their peoples. Unlike most people, he managed to make it sting a bit, too. “Tell ‘ya what! Mebbe after this I can show ‘ya High Mountain Fortress! I got strong grav plates and the heaviest gods-damned weights…balls, mebbe we can do a hunt too! Hafta see though, ain’t talked to th’ gamekeeper in weeks.”

“Good!” Yan looked around him. “But…civilized is good. Hard to bring leaders together, get them talking, get them working together. Hard enough with Given-Men, and we think alike!”

Daar nodded in agreement, and sank to all fours like he did when he wanted to be less godly. “Mhmm. Everyone’s got their own problems. Right now we’re all thinkin’ ‘bout our big shared problem.”

“Is an old problem. Lots of leaders never fixed it in all the long long time before. Worried they won’t fix it this time, either.”

“Mhmm. I think it’s diffr’nt this time. Ain’t nobody can pretend the enemy ain’t there, now.”

“Nobody can pretend they’re invincible now, either.” Ambassador Knight joined them, smoothing down his clothes. “Before, they were a scourge, a force of nature. You may as well try and fix the tide. So!” He said primly, “Have you two incorrigible savages had a chance to play?”

Yan trilled and Daar chittered. There was no mistaking the warmth in Knight’s eyes.

“Not yet! I’m schemin’ ‘ta smush Yan later on, though! I might be able ‘ta sneak some civilized fun in ‘fer you though, if ‘ya ask real nice…”

“I’m quite capable of making my own civilized fun.”

“I got good whiskey and even better shootin’! Buncha migratory waterfowl livin’ near home…”

“…Admittedly, that is deeply tempting…”

Yan hooted approvingly. “Drinking, hunting…how is that civilized?”

The lines around Knight’s eyes deepened in a mischievous smile. “Style,” he replied. “Style and class.”

“Bah!” Daar prowled toward the circle where their meeting was to happen, clearly meaning for them to follow. Who were they to say no? “Anywho, ‘yer both important ‘ta me. Don’t let it be said I can’t manage some hospitality now an’ then! An’ I’m gonna squish the fuck outta ‘ya, Yan.” He growled fiercely. “Hope ‘yer ready…”

“You can try,” Yan replied, happily. Some of the others were waiting for them as they arrived. The big furry Guvnurag’s body was full of color as he sat patiently, while the Corti director was toying with a tablet, impatient. He gave them a look as though he felt his time was being wasted.

The others, though, were eager to begin. AtaUmuUi most of all.

“I am glad you are here. Shall we get started?” he asked.

“We’re waitin’ on one more,” Daar replied, after a glance round the circle.

Their spot was near a huge window, and Planet Gao filled the sky outside, turning below them. For the moment, it was a nail-clipping of blue light, and a huge blackness dotted here and there with light.Chairs and whatever the stranger-shaped people needed to sit on had been set in a ring.

“Who?”

A new voice joined them. “Me.”

Yan turned, and tasted the air quizzically at what he saw. The new Kwmbwrw representative straightened up, easily making her the tallest one there, and inclined her body at Yan when she saw him watching her.

Daar was the first to say anything. “Thank you ‘fer comin’.”

“Thank you for inviting me.” Twythmenw dropped back down to all fours and moved to her assigned seat. “I was…surprised. I would have thought you would want nothing to do with the Great Houses.”

“The object of my ire got what was comin’,” Daar said cryptically. “We got bigger problems.”

“A problem that has plagued your people in particular,” Knight added. “The time, ladies and gentlemen, has come to finally destroy the Hunters. I imagine the Kwmbwrw people in particular would be glad of that outcome.”

Twythmenw ducked her body in a kind of nod, maybe. “Though I imagine we will have plenty of turbulence once the ancient enemy is gone,” she said.

“Let’s sit an’ talk, then,” Daar said.

They sat. Knight remained standing. He set a small tool on the ground in the middle of the circle and stepped back from it as it shone brightly and a great swirl that Yan recognized filled the space above their head: the galaxy. All the stars in all the skies, and thousands more besides.

Part of the map blinked, and a blue blob appeared, trailing hazily off into a blur at its inner edge. “Hunter space. Volume unknown, precise boundaries unknown, total star count unknown, population unknown. Six known temperate worlds, two of them of immediate strategic interest.” A bright yellow dot appeared inside the blob.

“First, we have planet Mordor, also known as E-Skur-Soom. Home to a native population, the E-Skurel-Ir. Liberated by Allied efforts, and now safely fortified behind a quadruple layer of planetary defence fields and a wormhole suppression field. Hunter activity in the system remains high, though they have not yet repeated their attempt to build a stellar lensing array. A ready-made staging post, though civil unrest among the native population remains a serious problem.”

A second dot. “Also of interest is Planet Hell, former site of the megastructure known as the Ring—known to the Hunters, according to intelligence sources, as the Great Hive. The Hive collapsed into the planet’s gravity well following its destruction, likely killing every large life form on the surface. Our best guess is that the Hunters have abandoned the planet and no longer regard it as a useful resource. For our purposes however, it has a breathable atmosphere—much more breathable than Mordor’s, in fact—and is much deeper toward the heart of their territory. If occupied and properly fortified, it could therefore serve as an important beachhead.”

He considered the map for a moment, then turned to slowly survey the whole gathered ring of representatives. “All of which is to say that the greatest obstacle to our invasion of Hunter space is not a lack of objectives to claim. It’s a lack of mass.”

Yan knew that there was much knowing in the room right know he was not ready to understand. He also knew his people would have a small but important part in the Taking, so for now, he sat, and listened, and thought up good questions to ask later. Maybe he could talk to Daar again.

Speaking of Daar, it was the Great Father’s turn to stand and address them. “The Grand Army of the Gao has plenty of good soldiers ready for the fight,” he said. “What we’re lackin’ is the weight of industry an’ logistics behind ‘em. The Hunters built a megastructure wrapped aroun’ a whole planet, so we know their Builders have got plenty of industry, an’ prolly millions of bodies to commit to the fight. What they’re lackin’ is supplies to keep those bodies fightin’.”

He added a new thing to the map: glowing lines threaded along the blob’s surface. “‘Fer the last few years, Allied patrols an’ intercepts have been focused on starvin’ the Hunters. We’ve kept ‘em from raiding, kept ‘em from salvaging ships, and from what we saw on the ring, salvage was a big part’a their industry. They got their spare parts an’ little things from captured Dominion ships. Now we’ve choked that off, they’ll’ve had ‘ta adjust their economy. That don’t happen overnight.”

“Those patrols, however, take up a large proportion of our time and effort,” Knight clarified. “If we are to free those ships and their veteran crews to participate in the invasion, they must first be replaced by a force that is capable of keeping up the pressure they have exerted.”

Daar indicated Twythmenw and the Rauwrhyr representative. “That’s what we’re askin’ of you.”

The Rauwrhyr representative, Scrythcra, ducked his head forward in a way Yan didn’t know how to read. “Our ships do not usually fare well against Hunters,” he pointed out. “We have made great progress thanks to what we learned at the defence symposium, but…”

“Likewise ours,” Twythmenw agreed.

“The Kwmbwrw have a proud history of shielding other species from the Hunters, and every time we have seen Rauwrhyr ships in battle, we have been impressed by their courage and tenacity,” Knight replied. “What we propose is to help you strengthen yourselves to the point where the Hunters will fear to even glance your way.”

The Corti representative tilted his head. “And where do we fit into this plan?”

Daar turned to him. “Like I said, what we’re lackin’ for is the mass o’ industry ‘ta back up the sharp point o’ the spear. We need ships, ground vehicles, ammunition, spare parts an’ more. The Corti, Guvnurag an’ OmoAru are the three most technologically advanced species in the Dominion, ‘yer facilities can produce everythin’ the war effort needs, faster an’ more efficiently than we can.”

“Especially in relation to your populations,” Knight added. “The idea, therefore, is this: Your shipyards and factories will provide the Kwmbwrw and Rauwrhyr with ships and weapons capable of meeting the Hunters head-on and suppressing them. While the Republic and the Great Houses keep the enemy strangled and force them to defend their rimward flank, Allied forces—Human, Gao and Ten’Gewek—can invade through the Far Reaches and the Border Stars along the trailing edge of their territory.

Ata’s tail lashed, once. “And the worse enemy?”

Yan had to nod at that. The Hunters were monsters, and deserved everything that was planned, but the Hierarchy had stung his people in particular. The need for vengeance against them was more cutting, to him.

Daar glanced at him, flicked an ear, then duck-nodded grimly. “Their nature’s diff’rent. Harder ‘ta find, harder ‘ta fight, harder ‘ta kill. We won some victories in findin’ an’ bustin’ their relays, an’ what intel we have says they’re in turmoil, so we’re trustin’ that turmoil will last long enough ‘ta let us deal with our foes one at a time, instead o’ fightin’ a war on two fronts.”

“Why them second?” Ata pressed. “They are the more dangerous and insidious foe, are they not?”

“Mebbe, but they ain’t equipped ‘fer war. They don’t have fleets, they don’t have troops. The nature of the way they work don’t require the Grand Army of the Gao, an’ that’s a time-limited resource.”

“They’re also not the immediate threat,” Knight added. “We need the Hunters gone to eliminate an important source of pressure, and to neutralize a major catspaw of the Hierarchy.”

“Without the Hunters’ constant raiding, we will be economically more well-positioned to address the Hierarchy,” Third Director Tran mused. “…Yes, I believe the order of operations here is correct.”

“Agreed,” Ambassador Furfeg’s rumble was the first time he’d spoken since arriving. From what Yan knew of his species, the Guvnurag were supposed to be long-winded, but Furfeg kept his counsel like an old Given-Man. That one word carried enough weight for AtaUmuUi to glance at him, bow slightly in acknowledgement, and go back to fussing with that odd metal ball in his hand.

Jooyun had told him not to look at the ball, in the strongest words he could use. Yan wasn’t sure why, but something about it made him want to stare at from across the room…

He tore his attention away, angry at himself. Daar and Knight were sitting down. Twythmenw stood to examine the map. “Your ability to wreak havoc even on well-defended targets is well-demonstrated,” she said, softly. “I trust if we are being entrusted with a part in this crucial strangulation, you intend to share some of your secrets with us?”

“Secrets require trust, and trust requires time,” Knight replied. “Our recent history will…limit what we are willing to share. That said, we have no intention of compromising your ability to fight or defend, by omission or otherwise. We will provide the proper technology and training. It will fall to your people to use them effectively.”

“There will be resistance, among the Great Houses. I can speak directly for House Gewas in assuring you of our support but others, notably House Gwedr, will refuse as much as they are able.”

“Considering that the Allied nations involved in this fight make up fewer than ten percent of the total human population, Grandmatriarch, I assure you that I understand fully the situation you are in.”

“Likewise for me,” Scrythcra added. “The Republic represents only a third of all Rauwrhyr. I expect, however, that my government will be eager to commit to this plan.”

Tran nodded slowly. “I believe it has merit, though, whether we join you is a matter for the Directorate. I anticipate a positive reception, however.”

“Any plan that moves us closer to vengeance on the Hierarchy has the Remnant’s support,” Ata intoned, putting his ball away.

“And that of the Confederacy,” Furfeg agreed.

Knight nodded thanks at them, then turned Yan’s way. “Yan Given-Man. You’ve been quiet so far.”

Yan tasted the air. “Already know my people’s role in this,” he rumbled. “The enemy brought this fight, we were saved, we owe a debt. If they will be the anvil, and you will be the arm, we will be the hammer. Don’t have more to say than that.”

“Far be it for me to dismiss such a bold sentiment,” Ata said, “but Yan’s people number even fewer than mine, and lack our technology. How much of this ‘mass’ can they provide?”

“Mass? Not much,” Daar replied. “Yan’s people are not numerous. But they are each very powerful weapons in a particular kind of fight. Some of this will need dangerous men in dangerous places, doing dangerous things to a dangerous enemy. We ain’t gonna win this war with only fleets an’ bombs.”

“In the end, it will be courage and determination that make victory possible, and very brave, very rare men who strike the quiet, critical blows. As it always has been in war, and as it likely always shall be.” Knight stood up again. “We have a metaphor: the spear. A sharp tip, and a sturdy shaft. Either one on its own is of limited use, but together they form a single deadly implement. We are asking you to contribute the sturdy shaft. Yan’s people will be part of the spearpoint: the support you provide will ensure they cut deep.”

“Good metaphor,” Yan hooted approvingly.

Ata ducked his head in a kind of nodding bow. “I defer to your expertise, then. Given that I have not yet heard an objection to the generalities of this plan, only concerns regarding its minutiae, I think we have a general idea of what to present to our governments.”

“Indeed.” Tran stood. “I shall meet with the Directorate directly.”

“I will send my report to the Senate this evening,” Scrythcra agreed.

“My people have already reached consensus,” Ata said. “You have our fullest possible support.”

“The Herdmoot remains shackled by the ongoing slavery of two thirds of our population,” Furfeg said, carefully. “There are no constitutional contingencies for this eventuality, and our efforts at creating and ratifying some have been slow going. I cannot say how our leadership will decide, nor how long it will take, though I will pledge to put my full personal support behind this plan. With good fortune, that may expedite matters.”

Twythmenw nodded sadly as he spoke, then turned her attention to Daar, then Knight, then Yan, then back to Knight. “I intend to wipe out the recent stain on our species’ reputation,” she declared. “We shall see how many others are with me in that regard. But they did make me their representative: I am optimistic.”

With that, the small gathering broke up. Yan watched them go, tasting the air as they went. What he was tasting for, exactly, he didn’t know. The tastes they left behind were…well, alien. Hard to read. He noticed Daar sniffing the air too.

“Taste honest to me, I think,” he suggested.

“Yup. Already like Twythmenw more’n I liked the last one…”

“That could be taken as damning with faint praise,” Knight said, a small, tired smile pulling the lines on his face even deeper. Yan trilled, and stretched to release the stiffness in his legs and back from sitting for so long.

“Went well, I think.”

“Yes. Can’t count our chickens before they hatch, but…”

“But we’ve come a long way, if we got ‘ta have that kinda talk an’ get everyone mostly soundin’ enthused ‘fer it,” Daar replied. “Four years ago, it woulda been a diff’rent story. Anyway. Naydi’s waitin’ ‘fer us on the yacht. Got a proper meal lined up. ‘Yer both invited.”

“I’d be delighted,” Knight said.

“Proper food? Been days since I last got good meat,” Yan agreed. The food served by the aliens on this ship was…eh. They gave enough of it to fill the belly eventually, but Yan needed something that’d hit his stomach like a charging bull. And he knew from before that Daar knew how to eat.

“Allow me to bring over a bottle I’ve been saving,” Knight said. “I think this occasion might merit breaking it open.”

Sure enough, when he arrived on the yacht a while later with the air around him tasting of soap and clean clothes, he had a dark bottle with him, and some glasses. The food was everything Daar had promised: roast Naxas, a good meat with a strong taste.

The taste from the bottle, once Knight had screwed a little round wooden plug from the end, was even stronger.

“What is it?” Yan asked.

“Bordeaux, nineteen eighty-two. Older than almost everyone in this room.”

“That’s good?”

Knight poured it out into the glasses. The liquid was dark red. “A good wine is influenced by two things. As the vines grow, it’s influenced by nature. The weather, how strong the sun was that year, cold snaps…eighty-two was a good year. The other influence is time. Keep it in the right conditions, and it just gets better and better.”

Daar sniffed the glass appreciatively. “…Whoo. That’s complex.”

“Fitting, if we’re celebrating galactic politics,” Naydra chittered gently. She took hers and sniffed it too, swirling it around the glass. Even Knight did the same, so Yan tried his best to join in and wafted his tongue over the glass.

It reminded him a lot of the magic-fruit. He flicked his tongue again, swirling the glass like Naydra had. There were tastes in there that reminded him of a Singer’s hut, of nukru root and the spices his mother had dried in her tent, many long summers ago.

Rather than drink it immediately, Knight reached out with his arm and held the drink above the middle of the table. “To complexity, then. May it settle in our favour.”

Glass chimed on glass and, finally, they drank.

Yan had to admit: it was a good way to celebrate a successful hunt.

Date Point: 18y4m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lieutenant-Commander Kieran Mears

Letter for notes,

RE: FERD Given-Man

Tending to the psychological needs of our nonhuman personnel remains one of the more consistently challenging of my duties. Ferd in particular represents a unique case, as he is a Given-Man of his people. I understand this to mean he has undergone a physical, pheromonal, and psychological transformation, rendering him dominant among his people. He is certainly dominant among humans as well, in particular among the Lads of HEAT; I have heard rumours that even Righteous struggles against Ferd’s immense strength. Never let it be said that the SOR is lacking for strapping young warriors.

That primal dominance streak comes naturally to their people and might normally prove to be a concern. Thankfully, Ten’Gewek have developed a deep respect for Gaoian and human alike, and most gratifyingly have an enthusiastic appreciation for canines. While I cannot assert with any rigor that such a thing matters, it nonetheless offers me a practical key into his mind, and my canine colleague Ditzy once again did the heavy lifting during today’s routine assessment.

Were he human, I would have concerns over Ferd’s capacity for empathy: he expressed little regard for the lives he took during Operation WICKED BIRD, nor for objective ADELLE whom he was directly involved in targeting.

Ten’Gewek are certainly quite capable of empathy however, as his interaction with Ditzy amply illustrated. Nevertheless, their criteria for empathy differ somewhat from human norms. He is impressed by Ditzy’s powerful build and fearless nature; a meeker animal would likely have been seen as prey, if that.

We discussed this, and Ferd stated, bluntly, that he respects “strength” first and foremost. It is clear however that the concepts of strength and weakness do a lot of work in Ten’Gewek philosophy, and cover not just capacity for violence, but other, gentler concepts as well.

Perhaps the best way to summarize their psychology would be as intensely and self-assuredly hypermasculine. This is not surprising considering their physiology or their culture, but it bleeds through into everything. Even more feminine concepts such as motherhood and nurturing care have a deep-running theme of “strongness” among them.

To the Ten’Gewek mind, the world of animate life—a concept their language inflects for in its parts of speech—divides into people, predator, and prey, with further inflection for strong (which also implies worthiness and/or admirable traits such as beauty and intelligence) or weak (with strong connotations of contempt and disgust). They feel natural kinship with strong, brave predators and, at best, a muted concern that their prey should not suffer more than is strictly necessary.

In discussing Operation WICKED BIRD, I noted his repeated use of the prey-inflection. I believe he has mentally categorized the enemy troops as unfortunate and is satisfied that, as he did not inflict needless or excessive cruelty on them, there is no need for moral discomfort. He used a severe weak-inflection for ADELLE, denoting a contemptible person: again, this mental categorization seems to mean his conscience is quite clear.

So far as I can tell, Ferd is a robustly moral and well-adjusted example of his people. He respects human sexual norms, even as he is almost gleefully willing to “play” with those who are brave enough to explore with him. He flirted with me quite aggressively until I made it clear that this was not appropriate, at which point he immediately stopped and apologized. Given his sheer physical power, that conscious self-restraint matters a great deal, and it is good that he and his men exhibit it. He understands the idea of law and justice, and is quite literate and increasingly well-educated. SOR has nearly completed his primary general education and already begun on secondary topics, as they have with the other Ten’Gewek in their care.

It is an open question how much this will change their culture. For myself, I think not terribly much; they know what they are and are very proud of it. He, along with other well-respected members of his people—I have yet to speak with them—have begun to see their people in partnership with ours. I am not sure that is a notion fully compatible with the realities of statecraft, but I can do nothing more than note this for our leadership.

In any case, I have no concerns about his fitness for duty in the context of his service with SOR, and will see him again for his routine sessions. I did stress that he is welcome to visit me if something particular causes him any trouble, but I highly doubt he will.

-Lt Cmdr K. Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 18y4m3w AV
Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA, Earth

Six

As expected, reconstruction around Chicago’s jump array was proceeding apace, and the other civilian terminals were undergoing extensive security hardening. Such refinements took time, however. They required expertise, too. Expertise that Six had identified, though so far had not managed much in the way of useful influence. The paranoia, it seemed, was a bit too high for the usual development gambits of expediency and efficiency to make any headway.

There was plenty of tension to exploit, though. Plenty of pressure to exert. In the brief time it had existed, Earth’s network of jump links, both to its own far corners and to other planets, had radically shifted the economic paradigm. Without the bustling interstellar traffic, dozens or even hundreds of businesses had gone bankrupt, many more had been purchased cheaply and mothballed in anticipation of profitable resurrection.

International airlines had surged in demand, and thousands of mothballed air-breathing aircraft had been brought out of storage. People could no longer ride a train directly from New York to Tokyo, after all. The major aerospace companies of America and Europe were groaning under the stress (and profits) the situation had generated. Airports had undergone a renaissance, too.

The sun was shining, and the old guard were making hay. But everybody knew, and was planning for, the day when the arrays would return in full force, when Cimbrean would be just another terminus on the network again.

A lot of very wealthy people, in short, were betting on a future that was yet to play out. And if there was one tool that the Hierarchy had used many, many times over the aeons, it was their targets’ own market.

He’d planted a memetic weapon. One that was slowly gathering steam. It was the idea that, perhaps at least for on-planet travel, jump arrays should not be allowed. Greed and fear had taken the idea and run with it, and now President Chambliss found himself on the losing side of an increasingly unpopular technology, much like the nuclear energy advocates of old.

He’d not managed to push the same idea for interstellar travel, but…one thing at a time.

His “friends,” the broken and scattered remnants of the APA, were loving it. They were the survivors, the actual brains and leaders of the organization. Sartori’s fiery purge had torn apart dozens of cells of radicalized but fundamentally ordinary people, but never caught the real talent. The real talent had never put themselves in positions where a mere angry civilian could compromise them.

They were clever. They were patient. Frankly, they had a thing or two to teach Six about tenacity and skullduggery. And they knew they had a mountain ahead of them, not just to climb but to rebuild.

That said…

They were impossibly disagreeable. More than half a year on and they were still arguing over their target. They wanted the perfect masterstroke, and Six could sympathize—they would only get one shot at this—but each time he thought they’d found the ideal candidate, something would shift, some event or change in the wind would cause the plan to fall apart and reset.

Infuriating.

[17:45:36] Paul > Again, the objective is not maximum body count. The objective is maximum effect.

[17:46:02] Handler > A sufficiently large body count would certainly have an effect, but yes. Better to destroy something iconic.

[17:46:03] ANG6 > We don’t have unlimited time to dither over this. We’ve been planning for seven months. Every time we find something iconic, the stars and portents or whatever it is you’re reading change and we start over. Sheer death toll might not be optimal, but it is at least a consistent metric.

[17:48:14] Mister E > The perfect is the enemy of the good.

[17:48:15] ANG6 > Thank you.

[17:48:55] Paul > Then it comes back to NY again.

[17:50:01] Mister E > NY is pretty damn iconic, too.

[17:50:23] Handler > And the center of finance. Why did we give up on it again?

[17:51:17] Paul > Culture. Hollywood. Entertainment.

[17:51:59] Grace > All tied to Wall Street. LEts stop chasing the perfect target and go for something solid

[17:52:34] Handler > NY it is then. And we’re committing to it. No changes, no backing out. Once I start setting it up, we’re locked in. The assets I have left can’t just bounce across the whole country. OK?

Six, via his host, let out a long-overdue sigh of relief as several OKs and affirmatives finished the conversation. Meatspace life moved so slowly. Operations that two Hierarchy operatives could have planned to the finest detail in only minutes took weeks for even an experienced human like the Handler to draft. Six couldn’t fault his meticulousness, only the bandwidth of protein.

Still. Progress was progress, no matter how delayed. Six would need to get his own assets prepared and emplaced before the real planning began. After all, if one was to use something as fanatical as the APA remnant…Well. Spending them ought to be done to maximum effect.

And the clock was running out.

Date Point: 18y5m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Captain Booker Campbell

“There…try it now.”

This time, the suit impingement that had kept Booker from easily raising his supinated hand above his shoulder passed as little more than a slight hitch or click.

“Better. Barely felt it that time.”

Deacon made a frustrated noise, a sharp hiss of air between her teeth and tongue. “Still? Jesus, if we have to start shaving down the scales, we’re gonna be here all evening…”

“Told you.” Campbell’s personal suit techs, Koh, told her grimly. He and his partner Mallory had been wrestling with the catch in his shoulder all day. It was a persistent problem, and it was definitely affecting his performance in training runs.

“Yeah, you did…well, either way, this is an Arés job.” Deacon groaned and shook her head.

“Arés job?” Campbell repeated, trying the movement again in case repetition fixed it.

“Either of ‘em. The problem’s either in the suit, and Marty knows the shoulder assembly even better than I do, or it’s in your actual shoulder in which case you need more time with ‘Horse.”

Campbell didn’t bother protesting that the click was barely noticeable now. The suit techs were perfectionists, none of them would be satisfied with anything less than flawless, smooth performance as though the suit were a painted-on second skin. Calling it ‘good enough’ just wasn’t in their ethos. And neither should it be in his, for that matter.

He was determined to be ready by the time the next mission came their way. He’d missed out on Eclipse Palace, he’d be damned if he missed whatever was coming.

“Well, I have a personal session with ‘Horse in half an hour. I’ll see what he thinks.” And probably end up suppressing groans of pain as those thick fingers worked their way into his deep-tissue pressure points. ‘Horse was not, contrary to his reputation, a sadist, but he had the opposite of a soft touch and no sympathy at all when he was at work.

Deacon found that satisfactory. “Right. Let’s get you outta there, then.”

The session with ‘Horse was, as expected, grueling, even during their warmup and stretch. How exactly a man that big could effortlessly jump that high or do the fuckin’ splits was beyond him. And he expected Booker to achieve the same. They discussed the shoulder while Booker sweated and grimaced at the unrelenting stretching discomfort in his groin.

“Nah, just ‘cuz you don’t feel it without the suit don’t mean it can’t be your body that’s the problem. The suit puts everythin’ under compression, adds load that ain’t normally there. Happens to all of us.”

“That…mngh…makes me feel a bit better…” Campbell admitted.

“Yup. I actually needed surgery.”

“You? Why?”

“Bro-science when I was sixteen. I was, uh…really strong as a kid. Like…crazy, stupid strong. And I kinda pushed myself pretty damn way too hard.”

Campbell couldn’t quite restrain a dry remark. “Oh really.”

“Shaddup, sir. Respectfully,” he grumbled humorously. “Anyway, by the time it got to be a real problem my shoulders were already so damn big, nobody could do anything except endoscopic work. So be happy we’re working it out now!”

Happy. That was definitely a word that didn’t fit what he was feeling. There was lifting, there was stretching. There was plyometrics and yoga. There was wrestling and combatives. ‘Horse absolutely, totally fuckin’ whupped his ass at all of those, without hardly breaking a sweat.

They only paused for liquid refueling, and in Cambell’s case, a Crude shot after ‘Horse did something to his shoulder that felt like he turned the whole thing inside-out.

When he popped everything back together, though…

Sweet Jesus. Profound relief. Pain he’d not even consciously known was there just disappeared.

“Okay, ‘member how I said I needed surgery? Well, that’s ‘cuz nobody was strong enough to do what I just did. So there! Done…need a minute?”

“…Nah, let’s keep it going.”

“Okay! Lemme crank up the gravity and we’ll go for round two…”

Campbell quickly came to regret that call, but he bore it. There was a kind of…pressure. In the back of his mind. Knowing that the next op was coming, sometime, and the only control over the schedule he really had was the shape his own body was in, and his own preparedness.

It came as a surprise when ‘Horse called an early end to the session, therefore. “Okay. I think we’re done for today. Let’s loosen up.” They stretched out again and before anything else, ‘Horse redirected them to their HEAT-grade sauna.

The heat was fuckin’ amazing. Maybe he wasn’t so hot on being trapped in a hot humid box with a hot humid ‘Horse, but…

They relaxed a bit before the reason for the early finish came along.

“Gotta ask you, sir. You pushed yourself pretty hard today. Why the sudden sense of urgency?”

“Well…the mission’s here. I got left out of this one because I’m not ready.”

“Right,” ‘Horse nodded. “And Thompson was.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, okay.” Adam shuffled around on his poor tortured bench to face him directly, and mercifully remembered his towel after a moment. “Okay. ‘Mind if I get a little blunt, sir?”

“Go on.”

“You ain’t a young buck, y’know. It’s gonna take time. But I wonder if you know why that really matters in this case.”

“With the Crude giving me a reset, I would have thought it didn’t.”

“Well, here’s the thing. There’s certain types of reset it can only do very slowly for older guys, right? And your genes have a lot to do with it, too. Genetically speaking, SOR’s got more’n a few dudes who are straight-up genetically perfect men, at least where this game is concerned. Top of the list would be me, Firth, Julian, and Thompson now I guess. Maybe Hoeff too, so long as he can hold onto his size…anyway. They’re all fantastically gifted studs and I shouldn’t have any special advantage over them. The thing is though, they don’t come close to comparing. I dwarf and outperform all of them put together. You got a guess as to why I dominate so hard?”

“I’m guessing it’s the Crude, somehow?”

“Not directly. There’s a lot of reasons. It’s because I’ve been physically active my whole life, been working out since I was a kid and I’ve been seriously lifting and sparring since I was fifteen. Not only that, I work harder than basically anyone, which I had to since I started off shorter. But my real advantage? I started on Crude and the performance medicine when I was still growing. I was only seventeen when I ran my first cycle, once I’d entered the pipeline.”

“…Wait, really?” Experimental drugs on fuckin’ teenagers? “Isn’t that…dangerous?”

“Yeah, it sure as fuck was, and it wasn’t just the Crude. I volunteered. We don’t let anyone under eighteen do that anymore, or anyone under twenty-one do any of the rest of it, but, well…”

Campbell nodded grimly. “The military was desperate.”

“Yeah. You could say that. In any case, the Crude’s essentially kept me at biologically nineteen or so, and that’s even with all the abuse I put myself through. Everyone else, ‘cept Thompson and ‘Base? Mid twenties at best, and they only get that after long usage, too. And that means…”

Well, shit.

“…Past our growing prime.”

“Makes it harder, yeah. This is a game where everything has to be perfect, all the time, every time, no exceptions ever. That includes your work ethic, discipline, genetics, your support network. Fuckin’ everything. There’s no such thing as a day off. Even fun has to be planned in advance. Your entire life revolves around your training schedule and your meal plan. I’ve had to work my family in around the job, not the other way around; at this level, even missing a meal can be risky. But you know all that, though.”

“Hmm.” Campbell rested and let the heat soak in, but his mind wasn’t slowing down. What ‘Horse was essentially telling him was that there were hard limits to what he could do and he was running up against them, no matter how hard he went at it. If men effectively in their mid-twenties were already too old to do what he was trying to do, what did that mean for him?

And then there was the revelation about how early ‘Horse had started. SOR was desperate for HEAT men. There just weren’t many who could do what they were doing, and fewer still among the officer corps. They needed him suited up and on missions ASAP. He couldn’t afford to just accept that he had limits and let it work out in due time.

“Okay. So. What do I need to do to work through that?”

Adam looked thoughtful for a moment. “Good spirit, I like that…well, okay. Have you talked with Firth yet?”

“Of course, but not about this.”

“I’d suggest you do. Genetically perfect he may be, but he was an older guy when he started too. Thirty-five and beat to hell from a lifetime bein’ a combat controller. Well, he’s finally healed up and all that so now he’s growing like crazy. Might even still beat me one day! But the only reason that’s even a possibility is ‘cuz he’s the only guy on the team who works as hard as I do. So far he’s the only guy who can.”

“Okay…what else?” All the rest was fine, but still…

‘Horse put a stop to that immediately. “Let’s ease into the hardcore performance-enhancing bits. Trust me. A lot of what you gotta build up to handle training at that level isn’t just physical. Mostly, it’s mental. Riding that dragon takes iron discipline like you wouldn’t believe. You gotta show me you’re ready before I let the sports doc go crazy on you, yijao?”

Campbell sighed and massaged his face. “Yi. Still. Feels like a whole lot of effort for going nowhere fast, right now.”

“It is what it is, sir. We young bucks got an advantage y’all older guys can’t have. Don’t take that personally, okay?”

“Hmm.” Campbell rolled his neck. His shoulder really did feel much better. “Not personally. God knows, Thompson earned it, you earned it. I just want to earn it too.”

“You ain’t doin’ bad. You’re in better shape than most of the team was on Capitol Station.”

“…Most?”

“Well…” Adam did what he always did in these moments, raised his titanic arms and flexed his absurd bowling-ball biceps. “Not me! But still. Seriously. Let me worry about your training and programming. You do the work, and do it as hard as you can. I’ll keep you challenged.”

He acknowledged that with a nod, and shut his eyes to soak in the heat a while longer.

“…Okay. I gotta ask. One last stupid meathead question.”

He could hear Adam grin. “G’on.”

“You, or Daar?”

Adam chuckled ruefully and shook his head.

“Oh, Daar all day long on anything and everything, more and more every day, too.” He sounded simultaneously proud and slightly envious about that. ‘’Course, he’s also over eight feet tall and damn near literally wide as a bus, so I think I stack up pretty good next to that.”

“…So, literally the size of a bear.”

“Lots bigger than a bear. Faster, too. He could break a Kodiak like a twig these days, I bet.”

“Not gonna lie, that’s scary as fuck.”

“Eh, don’t worry. He’s a good man, and besides: Righteous and I can put anyone else in their place, Gao, Human, or Ten’Gewek.”

“Even Yan?”

“Even Yan. Hell, Yan just the other day!” Adam grinned smugly, stood up and once again showed Campbell just why he was the best there was. “Well, at least, I can beat Yan pretty handily. Firth…well, he puts up a good fight, considerin’ what he’s up against. Keep it on the dee-ell though, ‘cuz I don’t wanna embarrass ‘em too much, y’know?”

“Embarrass Firth, or embarrass Yan?”

“Yes.”

Campbell chuckled while Adam apparently decided to keep on posing, because the big man didn’t have it in him to sit still for long, apparently.

“…Really?”

“Think of it like hot yoga, ‘cuz it kinda is. Good ‘fer muscle control and you look good doing it!”

Jesus. Irredeemable meathead. Campbell rolled his eyes, sat back and relaxed. They baked for a while longer in silence, sweating out the last of their pain and fatigue.

After about ten minutes or so, ‘Horse decided he was done with sauna time. “There! Should feel lots better now.” Bouncing on his toes, he slicked himself down, adding to his small lake of sweat on the floor. “We gotta clean up our mess. I’ll go grab a mop and stuff if you wanna put away everything else?”

It’d be a hell of a workout putting all the weights by himself. Still, Campbell glanced down at the sweat-lake around ‘Horse’s gigantic feet…

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

‘Horse grinned. “Good choice! Anyway, once I’m done I’m gonna split, I got a pregnant wife to get home to. Tomorrow’s a rest day for you, sir. I would suggest you take maximum advantage,” he said, not actually making anything so gentle as a suggestion. “You fuck up that shoulder by not resting it, and I’ll just have to put it right again.”

“Right. Don’t wanna take a step backward.” Campbell heaved himself to his feet. He…physically, felt better. And that was helping him look at the road ahead a bit more optimistically too. He just wished he had a landmark he could track. Right now, all he knew was there was work to do, and he didn’t know exactly when it would pay off.

It would, though. Even if it was just one step at a time, one clicky shoulder resolved, a half-second shaved off his personal best simulator time, a pound added to his personal best lift. Sooner or later, he’d pass that invisible line.

He set to putting the weights away.

Date Point: 18y5m AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

AtaUmuUi, Ambassador for the OmoAru Remnant

The pleasing thing about High Mountain Fortress, for Ata, was its intactness. Generations of accumulating neglect on Aru had seen even quite modern buildings fall into disrepair, even to the point of collapse. As the Droud had tightened its grip around the OmoAru, small things had been neglected first. Cleaning and laundry not done, roads not swept, vehicles not maintained, work not done. Millions of people had simply been too distracted by idle pleasures to keep their lives running.

It had been done slowly and subtly, taking decades to reach the point where farmers couldn’t summon the will to harvest, or where people would rather live in the dark than replace a light. By the time anyone had even noticed they were in trouble…it was already too late.

The resulting decay had claimed the most venerable historical buildings first. To Ata, therefore, High Mountain—actual stone and mortar, a castle from before the Gao had even developed gunpowder—was a treasure. Centuries of care had kept the murals and tapestries vibrant, the huge wooden table in the middle of the Conclave chamber was healthy, polished and waxed, the flagstones were even and smooth.

It was a monument to the simple power of maintenance, and the garden? Nobody had tended a garden on Aru in hundreds of years.

Ata could feel that same thought filling his companions with a cerebral pleasure that was as sweetly different to the Droud’s suffocating, mechanical stimulus as a clear sky was to smoke. He spared a moment of gratitude for his hosts’ forbearance, too—he was acutely aware that the technology infusing his body had a highly offensive odor to them. Nobody had yet commented on it, beyond the odd flicked ear or slight shift in posture.

Evolution and selection had led their two peoples in wildly different directions.

For the OmoAru, it was a misnomer to speak of the technology infusing the very essence of their bodies as separate, or apart. The same was true of their organic phase. Both had been extensively tuned to co-exist with the other, making any distinction between synthetic and organic meaningless.

That had been the great obstacle that thwarted their last-ditch effort at survival. Try as they might, in their dying years, the OmoAru had been unable to reverse their self-engineered symbiosis.

The Gao, on the other hand, were fiercely biological creatures. Mostly they were small and slim, a few were great heaving engines of power. In personality they ran the gamut from meek to mighty, dull to razor-sharp. All had adaptability bred into their very beings. And all were intensely individualistic, despite their preference for strong social bonds.

In many ways, their peoples were polar opposites.

The burgeoning goodwill between them, therefore, was most gratifying. And, Ata had to admit, their food was excellent.

Great Mother Naydra took that compliment with a degree of pride. “I’m glad to hear you say so. I confess, I haven’t ever had the chance to sample OmoAru cuisine to compare it…”

“I fear our food production is…not in a position to support cuisine, Great Mother,” Ata replied, sadly. “The automated systems meet our nutritional needs, and the result is not an unpleasant aesthetic experience, but nor is it a pleasing one. It’s deliberately muted. The Droud again.”

“Really? You couldn’t allow yourselves even tasty food?”

“Any sensation can be greatly amplified by the Droud to a…crippling degree. Even these crackers—which, I hope you will not be insulted if I point out that they are the most inoffensive item on the menu—could be addictive.”

“That’s jus’ unspeakably evil,” rumbled the Great Father. He’d made no secret about his sensitivity to their stink, but he was direct and practical about it; a censer burning a strong incense sat on the table, throwing up a protective wall of scent between them. Ata considered such a forthright solution far more polite than trying to pretend the issue didn’t exist.

“Just one of the enemy’s many ways of ending a civilization, I fear.” Ata sighed, and enjoyed a little more of the creamy cheese he’d spread on the cracker. The fact was, much of the table’s offerings were too intense for him, after a lifetime of enforced asceticism. “I suppose it’s a kinder way to go than extermination by Abrogator.”

“Ain’t nothin’ kind ‘bout any of it.”

“No,” Ata agreed. “You appreciate, therefore, why the remaining OmoAru people are more concerned with the Hierarchy than with the Hunters.”

“I had assumed you were concerned with both,” the Great Mother said, tilting her head. “Your territory borders theirs, and you are a long way from the core of the Dominion. Do they not raid you?”

“Not since the infusion.” Ata allowed a small gesture of satisfaction. “Our flesh is, by design, quite toxic to them.”

“They don’t raid you for parts? Technology?”

Ata considered that. “Not so far. Possibly because we do not produce enough to entice them.”

“We were always gonna make sure they can’t hit ‘yer territory without sufferin’ some broken fangs,” Daar said. “Your automated shipyards are worth protectin’.”

“Quite so. But you see, this raises a question—if our shipyards are producing ships for your fleets, and being protected by your fleet, what role do we, the individuals, take in this war? Are we simply passengers, renting out our facilities while you do all the hard work? That seems…” Ata trailed off. “…unsatisfactory. In many ways.”

“Oh? What would ‘ya be lookin’ to contribute?”

“Well, we are, despite everything, quite physically capable…”

“You wanna fight.”

“Maybe it would be better to say we wish to help defend our own destiny.”

“I can unnerstand that,” the Great Father rumbled. “I’m Cousins with the idea of direct action. That’s the thing though. Look at me.” He did nothing more than sit there, majestically. His…presence said all that could be said on the matter. “Doin’ this kind o’ work takes a certain kinda relationship with the world, yijao? That mindset ain’t what I think ‘bout where ‘yer kind are concerned, s’pecially considerin’ ‘yer history with uplift.”

“My people aren’t what we were, Great Father. Those of us who remain survived the Droud on discipline, will, aggression and drive. Your criticism is likely accurate for our predecessors, but for the Remnant…”

The Great Father nodded. “Fair ‘nuff. Nonetheless, it ain’t enough to have the will. An’ it ain’t enough to have the bodies, either. You wanna fight the enemy head-on, you gotta have th’ balls. An’ that’s the biggest problem. Y’ain’t gonna do somethin’ that intense without feelin’.”

Ata tilted his head. “I’m afraid something got lost in translation. Why are testicles relevant?”

“That’s kinda my point, then. ‘Yer translator ain’t got a translation, an’ that means y’ain’t conversant with the concept. Fightin’ anything up close and personal-like is as primal a thing as you can do. How exactly are ‘yer minds gonna survive that when ‘ya can’t handle seasoned meat? When the act o’ fuckin’ might send ‘ya into a fatal Droud-fugue?”

“You strike the problem exactly. If we are to expand our usefulness beyond the safe space around the destroyed relays, then the relays must be my people’s first priority.” Ata gestured with his cracker. “Otherwise, we can only venture into relay coverage briefly and with great care.”

“Mhmm. So, now: lemme level wit’ you, ‘cuz I appreciate ‘yer honesty, an’ I think ‘ya deserve a full answer in turn. I’ve got a tiny force o’ brave, irreplaceable men, one we’ve paid a fuckin’ fortune in lives an’ treasure ‘ta have. Right now there the only ones who got any realistic chance o’ first action against any of the targets. S’why we spent, balls, over a decade buildin’ up the capability to even do this, an’ almost as long among the Gao? They’re men I can’t spend on training fights, Ambassador. You wanna fight this fight directly? I can admire that. But ‘ya got a lot ‘ta prove first, if that’s what ‘ya wanna do. An’ even then? I can’t afford a teammate that might bliss off to everyone’s doom at any moment.”

The Gaoian territories were outside of Relay coverage, meaning Ata’s own Droud was dormant. Nevertheless, its effects lingered: he needed a second to handle the spike of wounded pride and indignation in the back of his head. No, he told himself. Daar was being fair. The OmoAru had fallen far, there was no reason for Daar to respect his people’s past glories. The Remnant must start anew, come to the galaxy as it was and respect those who had built up their own empires while the old one had crumbled.

He ate his cheese on its cracker and calmed his mind. “…Your point is well made.”

Daar paused for a second. “…Okay. So, lemme say this. There’s a lotta ways ‘yer people can meaningfully contribute. Don’t think ‘ya gotta be the tip o’ the spear. I can respect th’ desire, but that’s the thing: everyone wants ‘ta be the speartip. It’s only a very few who can. That ain’t a value judgement, or a judgement o’ ‘yer worth—”

“Or an insult,” Naydra added.

Daar duck-nodded “—or an insult or anythin’ like that. An’ yeah, brave men are how wars are fought…”

The dark figure seated a few spaces to Daar’s right, Champion Thurrsto, duck-nodded and finished the Great Father’s thought. “But it is by logistics that wars are won.”

“Listen ‘ta him. Thurrsto here? He’s Champion of Whitecrest and the Keeper of the Dark Rites. I say with absolutely no reservation whatsoever that he’s one of the bravest men I know. He’s been tested in ways that even I ain’t faced. I respect him. So when he says a thing, I listen. What say you, Champion?”

Ata had noted Thurrsto’s attention many times during the meal. The Champion had a talent for alertness, even while listening to others. When Daar spoke, the Champion had watched the corners. When Ata spoke, the Champion had listened but watched the Great Father. Now, though, all of a sudden, he had Thurrsto’s full and undivided focus.

Somehow, Ata knew instantly that he was being evaluated by a truly dangerous being.

“The Ambassador has, I think, self-control hardly matched in this room,” Thurrsto intoned after a moment. “Mindfulness is a valuable talent. And from what he has said, it is a talent his remaining people have had to cultivate or die. Attention to detail, discipline, awareness…all very useful qualities in any advisor.”

“Lotsa potential there.”

“Potential, certainly. But the Ambassador has expressed a desire for more than logistical support and advisory roles. And on that score…”

Daar sighed. “Yeah.”

“I do not follow,” Ata said.

“Here’s the position ‘yer in. ‘Yer people have endured. You’ve existed, an’ it took tenacity an’ will ‘ta even manage that. But it’s robbed ‘ya of the opportunity ‘ta live, an’ there ain’t nothin’ more alive than a war. Keeda’s sake, a cheesy cracker is almost more’n you can handle right now! So before we teach ‘ya how ‘ta really fight, you gotta re-learn how ‘ta live.”

“While your people die on our behalf?”

“Ain’t no shame in it. Ambassador, you an’ ‘yer people lived through the extinction of ‘yer race. There’s no shame in bein’ wounded by that an’ needin’ time ‘ta heal. Gods, do we ever know about that…”

“…Then you know how difficult it is.” Ata cleared his throat and stood. “…We were a proud empire once, Great Father. Your words are true, but that does not dull their pain. Please…excuse me.”

He sketched a gesture of polite respect and bustled out of the dining hall, clutching after his composure like it was made of wet soap.

Worse still was knowing that to respond so intensely only proved the point. How could he be trusted with life or death, when a polite and sympathetic conversation over dinner unbalanced him so? But what could he accept of this? That his people, who had failed to save themselves and chosen stasis as a last desperate gambit, were now saved by the actions of a species who’d barely discovered electricity before the Remnant went into hiding? That his own destiny, and that of all the people he cared about, was simply out of his hands?

But that was the truth! How could he fail to accept the truth?

His shaking hand fished his huh from his pocket. Through the Link, he commanded it into calming mode and turned it over in his palms, not even looking at it. Just feeling the textureless roundness of it. Tried to breathe instead of choke.

…Not weak. Wounded. A fair assessment. Truth.

He found his breath coming easier, and put the huh away. He would continue to need it for a while yet, but he could wean himself off it, in time.

There was no sense in being angry for what had been. There was only the future, now. He and his people would heal. And once healed, they would rebuild.

One step at a time.

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“Now that, right there, was the most worrisome thing I’ve witnessed in a long damn time.”

Videoconference. Again. His life some days was nothin’ but. This time it was with the President and the Prime Ministers, who weren’t present for the dinner. He’d be writing a letter to the King after this too, given how drastically this was gonna impact everyone’s statecraft. Daar could feel it percolating in his brain already. It was gonna be something.

Keeda-lickin’ balls was that shit alarming. An’ they needed to know. He’d just recounted the last bit (and Thurrsto was no doubt relaying his observations to his various contacts among their intelligence apparatus), which brought them to the heart of the issue.

“So, let me get this straight,” President Chambliss said, with a hand to his head as if he were in pain. “A long-dead elder civilization has magically re-appeared, given us offers of fantastic technologies and knowledge, and it turns out their ambassador—no, their entire species can’t hold their liquor in any meaningful sense of the word?”

“I get the impression a hot cup of tea might do him in,” Annette Winton replied.

“I mean,” Daar fretted, “I ain’t without sympathy. It’s more…how are we s’posed ‘ta rehabilitate their people with all the other shit we’ve got goin’ on? Is the cost worth the reward?”

“Between them and the E-Skurel-Ir, taking care of the Hunters’ and Hierarchy’s victims is promising to bog us down.” Steve Davies rubbed his jaw awkwardly. It was probably late at night in London, and he had a day’s worth of cares and stubble showing on his face. “Which could be deliberate. If the enemy are banking on our soft hearts to drain resources away from the actual fight…”

Chambliss nodded grimly. “This sounds like the job for NGOs. Much as I’m not generally a fan, what they really need are missionaries. I don’t think us, here, leaders of government and so forth have the means.”

“There’s only so much charity we can call on,” Winton said. “So much of it is already going to tending our own wounds. Franklin, Chicago, San Diego…Those are immediate and dear to people’s hearts. I don’t know if there’s enough goodwill left over for traumatized ETs.”

“You might be surprised,” Davies replied. “But in any case, how do we even fix something like this? Even if we wanted to? How do you teach an elder race how to live again?”

“I don’t think you really do,” Daar grumbled. “I think really, what we gotta ask is how do we gently keep them out of the way? Balls, I’d do it myself but firstly, I ain’t got the time, and secondly, their stink gives me th’ worstest headaches.”

“Maybe we should put them in touch with the E-Skurel-Ir…” Winton mused.

Daar tilted his head curiously. “Y’think that’ll help?

“Both species are the survivors of our enemies’ actions, both reduced to a tiny population, both struggling with their identity in the aftermath…they have a lot in common. Introducing them to each other could give both species a chance to contribute not just to their own therapy, but to the others’.”

“…Species-wide therapy.” Daar shook his pelt out head to toe. “Now there’s a notion. An’ I s’pose that’ll inevitably involve our Ten’Gewek friends too.”

“Considering the E-Skurel-Ir diaspora live in Ten’Gewek space now, it would have to.”

Daar duck-nodded. “But if I know the Ten’Gewek, they’ll love a chance ‘ta show the others how ‘ta ‘be strong.’ It’ll give Yan somethin’ productive to fret over, too.”

“Then I think we have something to work with,” Davies said.

Chambliss was nodding. “I think so too. I’ll discuss the matter with our ambassadors, then.”

There was little more to discuss, and they were all busy people. They traded pleasantries, and Daar was careful to invite them all for some (deliberately not Daar-like) gentle entertainment. He growled and dropped back down to four-paw once the conference was over.

“Still have a headache, Bumpkin?” Naydra had been quietly handling her own necessary business while she had the opportunity—now the call was over, she swished up beside him and trailed her claws through the fur at the ruff of his neck.

“Yeah…” Daar admitted.

“Bad one?”

“Had worse…” Daar shook himself out. “…but yeah.”

“You need to relax. When did you last sleep all night?”

Daar sighed and leaned into her attentions. “Been a lil’ bit, an’ you know how busy I am…”

“Bed, then,” she declared. “And if you are extra good, I will chastely give you one of my world-famous massages.”

Daar chittered wearily at that. “Yes, Mother. I’ll be a good boy.”

He was, too. He needed the rest, especially in his soul. The promised massage was more of a soothingly repetitive touch than anything, but the feel of it and the gentle scent of fresh sweet-herb was enough to sap all the tension out of him, bit by bit. She put on some nice sounds too, like they had at their super-tiny little ocean cottage down along the western isthmus shoreline. He’d never used ‘ta go in for that sort of thing, but Naydi could be persuasive….

Before long, they were cuddled together, and the last thing he remembered was the sound of waves crashing in the background, and the feel of Nadyi’s breathing against his chest.

He slept too soundly for dreams.

Date Point: 18y5m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lieutenant-Commander Kieran Mears

TOP SECRET — SACRED STRANGER / HOMERUN

Letter for notes,

RE: Mister Daniel HOEFF

Mister Hoeff came to me for the first of his required biannual sessions today, and my impression of him remains essentially unchanged. He is, as always, among the most difficult cases to handle. His physical health has greatly improved over the years of his association with the SOR, and in fact his physique is developing along the lines one might expect of this unit. Yet despite such a life-altering personal improvement, this has not substantially changed his psychology.

He presents as polite, even friendly in a restrained way entirely socially appropriate for a doctor/patient relationship. He arrived, shared a few small and witty jokes, sat down, and got straight to business. Our session today would accurately be described as “efficient.”

Hoeff is as pure a killer as I have ever met in any context.

This does not seem to bother him at all. He has, by his own words, “long made peace” with himself. He describes himself as “not a nice man” and in any other context I would consider this troubling considering his general positive presentation and demeanour; in his case, I think it is simply a case of unflinching harsh honesty.

Our conversation touched on his recent assignments, and especially Operation WICKED BIRD which I have found caused other SOR members considerable difficulty.

Despite his immediate role in eliminating objective ADELLE, Hoeff is not troubled in the slightest, and discussed the operation with, at most, the attitude of a master craftsman describing a particularly challenging (and therefore satisfying) project. I attribute this to his unsettling ability to deactivate his empathy like there is, in his words, “a switch in [his] head,” which puts his psychology into territory we hardly have diagnostic criteria to cover. Psychopathy or sociopathy—however ill-defined—do not address the issue. He is fully and eagerly capable of affection with those he cares about, and exhibits genuine, unmistakable warmth when talking about his friends or his intimate partner. What marks him as truly unsettling is that, for him, it is a conscious choice.

Nietzsche may have warned us of men like him. I do not find this comforting.

I am here required by duty to state that, were this an issue of standard personnel evaluation, I would consider him unfit for duty with SOR, because this freedom from trauma also grants him freedom from loyalty, should he choose it. He has of course shown no hint of disobedience, disloyalty or alienation, but it is by his own sense of honor and duty alone that we are assured of his continued fidelity.

He seems to understand and genuinely sympathize with my professional difficulties in this regard. He is also assigned under auspices over which I have only limited influence: Higher powers have decided that a man like him is necessary in the SOR’s orbit.

That being the case, I will see him again in six months.

-Lt Cmdr K. Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 18y5m1w AV
New York City, USA, Earth

Six

Six was having…doubts.

He projected an air of confidence in dealing with the remaining APA fanatics, a certainty that all Humanity needed was another body-blow like San Diego, and the populist politics would swing toward isolation and looking out for themselves first.

The truth, though, was that he wasn’t so sure. In fact…his thoughts were troubled by the possibility that he was just lashing out, futilely.

San Diego had been a moment of desperation, a self-destruct intended to make absolutely certain that the Hierarchy’s secrets remained secure…redundant, given that Six himself had spilled them all in interrogation. In the end, it had not only failed, but backfired and crippled Hierarchy operations on Earth.

Chicago and Franklin? A masterstroke in terms of reducing Human spaceborne superiority by crippling their fighter wing. But where were the clamoring mobs demanding their government lock the galaxy out for their own safety? Where were the politicians pointing to the hills of the dead and asserting that America was best served by staying out of this war?

They weren’t there. In fact, the public was getting anxious about the arrays remaining closed.

It felt like stabbing a bear: each stroke of the knife just made it angrier, not weaker. Surely there was some vital vein to cut, and if anywhere in the Allied nations was truly critical, New York had to be it…

But what if it wasn’t?

No. No it had to be.

He’d taken a trip and driven up to the city to see it for himself, and specifically Wall Street. It was…odd…walking freely among so many humans. Many were tourists, and there was an oddity. A street that had become synonymous with unfettered capitalism and the glittering heights of finance was a tourist destination? People came from all over the Earth to walk between temples to avarice.

One of which was a gigantic bronze statue of a charging bull, recently returned from exile in a nearby park. For some reason, tourists had the habit of rubbing its horns, nose, and bronze testicles “for luck.”

Humans were weird.

Strange rituals aside, though, Six fancied he could feel the power thrumming between those buildings. Here was a node, an organ, a beating vital pulse in the Earthling planetary economy. If there was anywhere, anywhere at all, that would truly harm humanity…he was standing in it.

They knew it, too. There was a farthrow generator hidden somewhere nearby, he could feel its weight in his mind, as a kind of silent, suffocating pressure against the implants that sustained his conscious processes. Wormholes of any description were not permitted on Wall Street, and by extension the whole financial district.

Still…in the eighteen or so years since Six had first come to Earth, he’d failed and failed and failed again. His few victories had been temporary, sometimes even leading to greater setbacks. His failures? Terrible.

Perhaps he was just lashing out. He didn’t know any longer. He couldn’t see anything else he could do, though. What was he supposed to do, just accept that the deathworlder breakout had finally happened and he was living in the twilight days of his species? That Igraen extinction was now a certainty? That his own existence, most likely, would end shortly thereafter?

Some small remnant of his host offered up a memory, a snippet of poetry: Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Six reviewed the memory more thoroughly, looked up the whole poem.

It didn’t make him feel better.

None of it did. What if they did succeed here? What if cutting this throat did plunge the terran economy into chaos? Would that even change anything? Was he really just raging against something he couldn’t stop?

The cardboard cup he was holding succumbed to his grip: the top popped off, warm latte spilled all over his hand and shoes. He snapped out of his fugue and looked around sharply: nobody was paying him any attention.

“…Fuck it,” he grumbled. “Fuck it all.”

He tossed the crushed cup into a trash can and turned to go home. Maybe it all was futile. Maybe he’d already lost, and all he could do now was lash out. But if that was all he could do, then damn it, that’s what he would do.

One last hurrah, before the curtain.

Date Point: 18y5m1w4d AV
Armstrong Station, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lewis Beverote

“…think before the—? Oh. Hang on. I think they just did.”

Lewis chuckled. “Yup, that’s stasis transit alright. Guess we’re at Cimbrean.”

Being packed into a cargo crate wasn’t exactly the glamorous way to travel, but he wasn’t complaining. It was actually kinda cozy being snuggled up inside a box with his wife. They looked up as a worker in high-vis overalls unlocked and removed the lid of their coffin and offered them a hand.

“Welcome to Armstrong Station. You folks okay there?”

“Just fine, my dude,” Lewis assured him.

“Great. Got your declared cargo right here…” he indicated the small square padded container full of all their combined worldly possessions with his foot “…so if you’d just follow me, customs, immigration and security is right this way.”

Both their phones pinged several times on the way to the door as they connected to Armstrong’s network. Lewis checked his as he followed the station worker, who kindly pulled the dolley with their cargo on it for them.

Among the dozens of messages waiting for him was a priority one he’d been hoping to find waiting for him. Everything had already been sorted out ahead of time of course, but it was good to see again that his new and more stablejob (well, okay, his only really stable job in his adult life) as an associate research physicist at the University of Folctha was ready and waiting for him, and the faculty were keen to meet him.

He chuckled a bit at that though. It was a bit late in life to get his start, but he did have a hell of a CV to show off…Really, finally getting his doctorate was just gonna be the rubber stamp on everything he’d done. It would be a bit weird, trading boring for stability, but…

He glanced at Lucy, she wrinkled her nose fondly at him, and he fell in love all over again just like always happened whenever she did that. Leavin’ Mrwrki, Vedreg and all the others had been hard, but leaving Lucy? Impossible.

There was a voice mail from Julian too. He sounded bit different than Lewis remembered: deeper, gruffer, but still loaded with that same energy he remembered. Mostly it boiled down to “We’ve got a guest bed downstairs, you two can stay as long as you need, look forward to seeing you again, man.”

The shuttle ride down from Armstrong was disconcerting. Firstly, it was a shuttle and not an array! That needed fixing, and fixing right now. Lewis had done all he could on that front though, and being honest? The slowness of progress there had definitely made movin’ on easier. If he was going to be forced to do things at a glacial pace, at least he should get some quality of life out of the deal. Fundamental research sounded appealing. Hell, there was even a Guvnurag in the department!

Secondly, though: the shuttle was piloted by a tiny fluffball of a Gaoian, who seemed to think he was flying an air superiority fighter instead. Maneuver was energetic, and Lewis spent the whole descent clinging white-knuckled to his seat arms and Lucy’s hand.

He’d had enough energetic pilotage in his life, frankly.

That same deeper, gruffer voice called out to him while he was wandering around the terminal like a gormless idiot, gawping at the architecture. “Lewis! Buddy!”

He turned and…

Lewis sorta froze up for a second. “Jesus shit, is that really you?!”

He didn’t get to gape for long, because a hulking wall of jungle-boy muscle came bounding over and scooped him up in a big, genuinely crushing hug.

“Fuck yeah it is! It’s been years, man!”

Lewis had always found himself, well…kinda intimidated by Julian. He’d had a sort of loping posture and a quiet lupine way about him that took some of the edge (and size) off, but he’d always been impressive as fuck despite that, a big damn hero type with the most incredible survival story. Now? Nothing could soften the impact of his presence. That infamous magazine shoot had captured some of the goddamn alpha wolf energy that rolled off him…but not done it justice.

Still. He was, at the end of it all, a great big happy shaggy wolf-man more than anything, even if he indulged in questionable wardrobe choices these days.

Or really, lack of wardrobe, mostly.

“You’re lookin’…fuckin’ impressive, dude.” Which a severe understatement, right there.

“Right?! And lookit you! You’ve filled out! Is someone feeding you properly for a change?”

“I figured that whole nutrition thing out…”

“Amazing what a diet composed of things other than tortilla chips and salsa will get you,” he teased, warmly.

“I dunno dude, I kinda miss the chips-an’-dips life, sometimes.” Lewis chuckled, and relaxed. “Also. You can put me down now.”

“Oh!” He did, unceremoniously. “Sarry.”

As Lewis’ feet hit the deck, he heard Lucy laughing softly. “You weren’t kidding, Lew. He makes an impression…”

Julian was plainly embarrassed: Lewis could see how his arm wanted to reach up and scratch the back of his head all of its own accord. He caught himself though, and neatly segued into greetings. “Ah! You must be his better half. He’s said all sorts of soppy things about you!”

“Funny, if saying soppy things is our metric, then I kinda thought you were married to him.” Lucy gave Lewis a teasing dig with her elbow.

Julian gave them both a lewd grin. “Well, I mean…I’m a pretty open-minded fella these days…not sure my women would approve, though.”

“Your partners—” Al gave him a gently indignant tap on the arm with her free hand, the other being occupied in supporting a wide-eyed little girl even blonder than she was. “—think you’re going a bit too caveman…Hi, Lewis.”

“Hi, Al.”

Julian gave her a mischievous look. “Oh? Have I been a bad boy?”

It was Xiù’s turn to poke him. “Biàn tài.” Whatever that meant, she said it affectionately, and grinned a hello at Lewis that was probably all she could spare considering how energetic Harrison was being.

Lewis grinned back at her, appreciating as he did that all three had grown since he’d last seen them. Xiù looked more relaxed and happy than he remembered, and Allison had dropped some of the aggressive swagger. Being a thrupple clearly suited them down to the ground. Being parents doubly so.

“Anyway! C’mon, let’s get you settled in!”

They had a rented pick-up truck waiting for them and their cargo crate, which Julian wrestled into the back with disconcerting ease. That done, they all piled in the back row, while Julian squeezed himself into the front passenger seat and Al got in behind the steering wheel.

“We’ve got the basement mostly cleared out for your stuff. We use the gym every morning so, fair warning. We’re not particularly quiet, but the bedroom is mostly soundproof. There’s a shed too if you have anything else…”

“Nah, dude. That box has literally all our worldly belongings in it,” Lewis explained.

“The station really didn’t have room for more than that,” Lucy elaborated.

“That sounds familiar…” Xiù mused, wryly.

“Yeah, I bet.”

Actually, what struck Lewis when they got to the trio’s house was that they’d clearly kept the habit of living without too much excess. The house was lived-in, clearly home to both babies and teenagers, but even so there wasn’t any clutter as Lewis remembered it. His mom had been the kind of gleefully witchy woman whose house collected tchotchkes like dew forming.

There were no uselessly decorative trinkets in this family home. A couple of odd keepsakes framed on the wall or whatever, but that was about it. No, the personal touches were mostly in the working things—the excellent and well-maintained kitchen knives, the custom-built storage solutions in Allison’s workshop, the sewing kit on top of the bookshelf in the living room.

Funny, really. The trio were some of the richest and most influential people on Cimbrean, but they still lived with some of the plain sensibilities of abductees, just like Lewis knew he did. It was a shared experience that had left its mark on all of them.

The books were an interesting interpretation of that philosophy. The living room bookshelf was huge, and completely stocked. A colorful full print encyclopedia, reference volumes, classical novels from both Western and Chinese tradition…all the kind of stuff you’d want at the core of any good library. The top row of shelves were behind glass—actually, sealed glass, with environmental controls in place—and the books within had a foxed, dogged, badgered, catted and generally dragged-through-several-thorn-bushes handwritten look to them.

They’d thoroughly decorated the walls with art, too. The front hallway was graced with orbital survey photos of the planets they’d discovered, and the kitchen and dining table was graced with a black-and-white photo of the three of them in their mission uniforms, standing in front of Misfit. One of the slightly more restrained shots from Julian’s (apparently extensive) modeling portfolio grinned bashfully at Lewis from the bottom of the stairs.

Far outnumbering those were pictures of their children both born and adopted, alongside a number of spectacular portraits of Gaoians and Ten’Gewek; the photographer had a good eye, by the looks of it. There were even a couple photos of an absolute unit of a dog, which managed to convey both the dog’s fearsome size—he sized up well against Julian, for fucks’ sake!—and his goofier doggo nature. Strange, really: Lewis didn’t see any signs of a co-habitating doggo…

There was alien art too—a watercolor of a Gaoian commune of females with a huge impressive door, an abstract in the form of a blank canvas with three grey circles on it, and something less refined in between them: It was paint on a tanned hide of some kind, applied skillfully by the fingers of a huge, blunt hand, and it depicted a kind of chronicle of events. The centerpiece was a damn good likeness of Misfit and the trio, and the moment of first contact.

“Who did this?”

“That was done by the Singer.”

“A Ten’Gewek, I take it?” Lucy tilted her head as she considered the piece.

“Yeah! Jump schedule is pretty constrained at the moment or I would have invited her over, but if you’re here for long you’re gonna meet her. Oh, and her fella too, Vemik Given-Man now.”

“And…the circles?”

“A Corti we know. Nofl. He’s the one who re-grew Julian’s foot. He insists he slipped up and drew one of them upside-down, though.” Xiù giggled. “I told him it’s barely noticeable.”

“…How do you draw a circle upside—?”

“He has a sense of humor.”

“Anyway, yeah. Let’s get you unpacked before the boys come home from after-school stuff.”

The basement was only partially sunken into the ground. From the front of the house it was beneath grade, but the land sloped down toward the backyard such that their bedroom had a sliding door that opened out directly onto a paver-brick patio.

Downstairs, the main space was L-shaped and occupied by the promised gym. The floor was covered in some sort of sparring mat and the walls were lined with a murderously heavy pile of weight. There weren’t any machines, just dumbbells, bars, racks, benches and the like. It was a clever study in compactly storing away a pretty damn hardcore-looking gym, honestly.

At least it didn’t smell too bad, so that was good. He took one step into the room, though, and barely avoided stumbling as his whole body instantly felt substantially heavier—

“Oh! Sarry. I usually keep the room at Akyawentuo gravity. The control is right there at the bottom of the stairs. You need a PIN to turn it up any higher, and if you do it’ll lock all the doors to the basement anyway. Just press the big red button to turn it off.”

Lewis did. He didn’t need any of that in his life right now.

Unpacking went quick. There was space on the floor for Lewis’s zafu and such, while Lucy made herself disconcertingly well at home among the rest of it. The bedroom had some empty shelves which they artfully filled up, and the bed itself was a foldaway style: odd in a house these days, but useful nonetheless. They could go to the thrift store and pick up a desk too, or maybe they could build one! Al said they had a pretty good set of handyman tools…

House-hunting was gonna take a while, apparently. So, they had better get comfortable. It was good to have good friends.

The afternoon sort of passed in a blur after that. The kids came home, and Ramsey was apparently not ready to settle down yet, so they had a chin-waggle for a moment and came up with the only sport the likes of this group could play together on a vaguely level playing field: basketball. Or at least, that was what it started as. In a matter of minutes it devolved into something entirely not basketball, but which Lewis seemed to understand the rules for anyway…

Okay, yeah. Playtime was fun. Lewis could admit that. At least, it was fun now that he could run for more than a few minutes without falling apart into noodly hypoxic death.

Afterwards, there was a barbecue. Real charcoal, and wood smoke. Naked flames weren’t a thing on Mrwrki, so for Lewis and Lucy both it was the first chance to enjoy some real cooking since they’d last taken shore leave. It marked the start of an evening the exact opposite of the day they’d just had. After a long blur of packing, goodbyes, travelling several months in a few seconds, hellos and unpacking, then falling headlong into the happy family life his friends had put together, the chance to just stop, take a deep breath, and sit and talk lazily with a cold beer…

Heaven.

Folctha’s nightly rainfall was a gentle patter tonight, tapping hypnotically on the awning that every house in town had for exactly that reason. Lewis had expected Tristan and Ramsey to vanish indoors and play videogames—it was what he’d have done at their age—but instead they wanted to cozy up around the fire pit with Al and Xiù. With the five of them crammed together it was a tight snuggle, but that seemed to be how they liked it; Julian had his big arms around everyone and the happy expression on his face was just too much.

Tristan was full of questions. “So what was the coolest thing you guys worked on together?”

“That we can talk about,” Julian added, as he rolled a soccer ball around the floor distractedly with his bare feet.

Lewis nodded. All the boys knew was that he and Lucy had been stationed on a research facility somewhere. The Erebor system, Mrwrki station, and nearly everything produced there was all top secret, but the best way to handle security like that was to just say “Yeah, I was someplace, no I can’t say exactly where.”

Fortunately, they’d kinda predicted a question like this might come along. And there were plenty of failed projects that weren’t classified and they could freely talk about.

“Think my favorite thing we tried to make was the iron man-style armor suit.”

“You did?!”

“Tried to, my dude. Sorry. I’m not Tony Stark.” Lewis chuckled and sipped his beer. “Whole project was kind of a demonstration of why that kinda tech doesn’t work in reality.”

“Oh, here we go. The Power Armor Rant.” Lucy laughed. “He has to explain this one a lot.”

“Oh, no, I know power armor isn’t a thing. I mean, if it was, the HEAT would use it, right?” Tristan nodded. “But you tried to make one anyway?”

“Basics of science, my dude. Always try an’ prove yourself wrong. Like, I tell you what, if I just went ahead and assumed that kinda thing was impossible and then some other fella went and invented it? I’d feel really dumb for wasting my shot at bein’ the dude who did it first ‘cuz I was too stubborn to check myself. As it is…we gave it the ol’ college try and failed, so if somebody ever does get it workin’, I know they’re just a better inventor than us! Ain’t no shame in that.”

“The helmet’s downstairs if you want to see it,” Lucy added.

Tristan promptly sprang to his feet and vanished indoors to go take a look; Ramsey stayed where he was. “Okay, but, was there anything you were expecting to work and it didn’t?”

“Oh, man, more than I could count…” Lewis shook his head ruefully. “Some of ‘em woulda been great, too. Can you imagine hover-cars with no movin’ parts, just solid-state field projectors? Huge save on maintenance both for the vehicle and the road surface, no microplastics from tyre wear, perfect smooth ride…”

“Why didn’t that work?”

“Safety. If a wheeled car runs outta charge, it can coast along, and you pull over, right? Hovercar though, if you lose power than suddenly you just nose-dived into the road at sixty miles an hour.”

“That’s kind of the pattern with our work,” Lucy agreed. “We can have awesome ideas all the livelong day, and then something practical comes along and spoils our fun.”

“And then the funny thing is, you follow the practical stuff wherever it leads and somethin’ awesome falls out at the end anyway!”

Ramsey nodded. “Right, but sometimes it’s dangerous to do either way. Like the HEAT guys, right? Adam says that what he does is waaaay too dangerous for anyone to just do.”

“It is,” Julian chipped in. “Same for me. But sometimes you gotta take certain risks, y’know? Just…” Julian turned to Ramsey and looked him dead in the eye. “You’ll be grown up in a few years and I know how you are about this stuff, so…just, whatever you end up doing, don’t be stupid or headstrong about it, okay? I love you too damn much for that.”

Lewis knew plenty about the twins’ history from corresponding with Al, Julian and Xiù. Knowing what he did about their control-freak tyrant of a father and their neurotic mess of a mother, the thing that struck him was how Ramsey took that bit of fatherly advice and affection well, instead of rolling his eyes at it like Lewis himself would have done when he was that old. Sixteen-year-old Lewis would have cringed down to his toes if his dad had ever said ‘I love you’ around guests. Ramsey though…

“I won’t,” he promised, then grinned. “I don’t know if I wanna be a meat wagon like you anyway!”

“Ha!” They hugged, and it would have been sickeningly sweet if it wasn’t also genuine.

The moment was broken by Tristan returning with the helmet in his arms. “This is heavy!”

“Yeah…all the materials science and metallurgy in the world couldn’t cut the suit down to a useful weight.” Lucy sighed ruefully, and took the helmet from him to turn it over in her hands. “Well, for normal people anyway, which more or less defeated it from the word go. Pity, really. I think we’re all romantic enough that we wanted to be wrong about this one.”

“For sure…” Lewis agreed. He tilted his head back and thought. “There’s one project out there…big risk. Big risk. Could blow up in all of our faces, if it goes totally wrong. More likely, won’t come to nothin’…could be the savin’ of us all in the long future.”

“Ah, yes.” Julian nodded knowingly. Hmm. “Pretty much the ultimate gamble, that one.”

“Dad, you’re being cryptic,” Ramsey complained.

“Sorry, dude,” Lewis apologized. “There’s not a whole lot we can talk about that ain’t super classified, truth be told.”

“Do you think it ever won’t be?”

“Some of it, maybe? When it can’t hurt any longer…” Lewis sipped his beer again. “Funny thing is, I used’ta not believe in official secrets. I was the kinda dude who got into hacking in high school ‘cuz I thought our government should be completely transparent. Had these big dreams of hackin’ into Area Fifty-One or whatever and provin’ the little grey men were real…”

“Oh, man, can you imagine if they were?” Allison snarked. “That would totally turn the whole world upside-down…”

Lewis chuckled. “…Got no idea what I’d have done if I’d actually, y’know, managed to dig up any big military secrets. It was a dumb philosophy, you know? Like, there’s obviously people out there who need to know stuff that other people don’t. Some of the stuff we worked with…yeah, it shouldn’t see the light of day for a long time. Not ‘cuz any of it’s evil, but ‘cuz all of it’s important and ‘cuz of what would happen if the wrong people knew about it.”

“Heh. Lookit him. A regular model citizen.”

Lewis couldn’t reply to that accusation except with a wry shrug, and emptying his bottle. “Guess I am nowadays, yeah.”

The evening ended…well, exactly like a wholesome family evening should end, just adapted to their unique proclivities. Everyone spent some time in the gym doing something, which ended with Julian and the two boys sparring. He was not gentle with them, but they seemed to relish it anyway; there was definitely a sort of respect at play that Lewis didn’t quite grok, even if he could see it plain as day. When Tristan went upstairs to read, Julian went at it even more fiercely with Ramsey, but not for too long: their sparring was apparently just an end-of-day bit of fun.

The bedtime routine followed afterward. Lewis and Lucy perused the bookshelf while everyone cleaned up. Some minutes later, Julian came thumping down in a disconcertingly close-fitting pair of what were probably supposed to be basketball shorts, his hair untamed, wet and wild. He still hadn’t figured out how shirts worked, apparently.

“The books in the glass case are from Vemik and a few others, doing ‘field research.’ Individually hand-made, right down to the paper and glue. The ink is good archival-grade stuff he buys here on Folctha, though. Turns out they’re proving quite valuable to the researchers!”

“Oh?”

“Yeah! He asks for feedback and gets better with each volume. He and Singer have a good eye for sketching, too. Eventually these are going to the New York Public Library, but Vemik wants to deliver them himself. So…it’ll be a while, probably…Anyway, got a couple things I wanted to discuss privately.” Julian indicated the office at the back of the living room.

Lewis shrugged amiably and followed him. “Sure, dude.”

He’d been expecting Julian to shut the door. He didn’t expect the way a privacy forcefield went up and fuzzed the window opaque, filling the room with soft white noise the moment the door closed.

…Well. Okay then.

“So I guess we secretly traffick in the same circles, huh?”

“Yeah.” Julian sat down in a swivel chair that looked like it was built for a sumo wrestler, which nonetheless creaked stoically under his weight. “I’m an ambassador nowadays. Erebor is part of the standard brief for those of us with an interstellar portfolio…And so is the Entity. Freaked me the fuck out when I learned about it.”

“Shit yeah, dude.” Lewis agreed, flopping down into the comfy armchair opposite. “Fuckin’ thing’s wrong in every kinda way, but it’s on our side.”

“Is it, though? That’s a hell of a monster that we’ve got on our hands. Not that we can do anything about it…” Julian crossed his arms in front of his chest and frowned. “Seems like we’re more along for the ride, to me.”

“Dude, we’re always along for the ride. We’re sittin’ on a spinny rock goin’ round a nuclear explosion that’s only not explodin’ ‘cuz it’s too heavy. An’ here in this galaxy of millions of those, we turn out to be not just like anybody else because the fuckers who’ve been killin’ folks like us since the freakin’ dinosaurs finally slipped up and missed us? And that’s just here, bro!”

“Well, sure. Can’t get off the ride. But that don’t mean you shouldn’t, I dunno, try and seize the controls if you can.”

“Exactly what we did, dude. Galactic Vaccine. Biggest idea I ever had, and I tell ya, the one I’m most proud of.” Lewis gestured vaguely sky-ward. “Like I said. All the zany shit we’ve seen is just like our little lens on one galaxy. Next week, could be we have to put our differences with the Hierarchy aside an’ even team up with the Hunters ‘cuz the Reapers or whatever just showed up, or the Paperclip Maximizer found us.”

“Except, now Galactic Vaccine belongs to the Entity, and the Hunters have suddenly discovered the virtues of self-replicating ships…”

“That’s a fight they can’t win. An’ the longer they keep trying, the longer an’ deeper they fuck themselves.”

Julian grumbled. “I hope so. I admit I’m not a giant brain on this stuff—shaddup, lil’ guy.”

Lewis just grinned. “I didn’t say anything! Anyway,” he chuckled, then sobered. “I won’t lie. This shit’s kept me up at night. There’s a lot up in the air right now and it feels like we’re powerless to do anything about it, sometimes.”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

“But it ain’t true, man. Just look at the Hierarchy. I mean, come on, fuckers have been around since forever and all of a sudden…I mean, dude, try and put yourselves in their position. How well d’you think you’d manage if a couple thousand mayflies just up and wrecked all your shit before breakfast one day?”

“…Has that actually happened to you? Because that’s a suspiciously specific analogy.”

“Yes, but that’s neither here nor there. I mean, Igraen minds live hundreds of thousands of years if they wanna. They’ve been around for millions of years as a species. They’re older than the Himalayas! What’s a human to something like them? Fuckin’ mayflies, man! On their time scale, we’re a buncha little blips that just appeared outta fuckin’ nowhere alluva sudden and now all their shit’s on fire and I don’t think they’ve even had time to, like, properly figure out what’s goin’ on.”

Lewis realized he was waving his hands animatedly and calmed himself a bit. Old, bad habit. “…So, yeah. We ain’t just ‘along for the ride,’ Julian. We are the fuckin’ ride. We’re the moment the merry-go-round breaks down.”

“It ain’t just us.” Julian frowned for a moment. “Have you ever considered our part in this little drama? Between you, me, Xiú and Al? We’re pretty central to this tale. Heck, the Gao and the Ten’Gewek happened because we just sorta blundered our way into things!”

“Right? And all we were tryin’ to do was…well. In my case see the stars an’ hang out with awesome aliens and some badass friends. And, okay, maybe some folks’ve blundered a bit more effectively than others, but you know what? The Ten’Gewek wouldn’ta happened without MBGs engineers makin’ a damn good ship, either. Or the miners who first dug up the raw materials that went into her, or the guys who built the mining machines and so on, et cetera. Maybe there’s folks way in the background whose big contribution was deliverin’ pizza one time, but that’s the thing about the ride, man. Everyone’s on it, everyone’s steerin’ it. That’s why it’s so crazy! It’s not that we ain’t in control, we’re all in control!”

Julian shook his head, sending his hair whipping wildly around. “God, what a crazy life. Did you know this has sorta brought out the religion in me a bit?”

“…Really?”

“Yeah. Not exactly organized practice, since none of ‘em really approve of our whole thing…” he gestured vaguely upstairs, indicating himself, Xiù and Allison. “…But in the face of all this, everything that’s happened? In my head, I know all about statistics and random chance and the Butterfly effect and all that, but…”

“Hmm…” Lewis sighed. “…makin’ me miss Amir, man. He’d’a been certain God’s hand was steerin’ us and stuff.”

They shared a moment of silence for a friend who’d died more than ten years ago.

“…You don’t buy it though, huh?” Julian asked.

Lewis shrugged. “I mean…what would it mean if it was the divine hand at work? Why us? Why now? Why millions of years of suffering and extinction and then alluva sudden the Chosen Ones come along? Nah, man. I can’t get behind that. I can get behind believin’ we got lucky and worked hard to make the best of that luck, that makes me feel good. God playin’ favorites, though? That would be a shitty-ass universe to live in. Then we’d really just be along for the ride again, not in control at all.”

“I guess…” Julian scratched the back of his head again, frowning in thought. Something was clearly troubling him.

Lewis decided the kindest thing would be to distract him from it. “You didn’t pull me in here to talk religion though.”

“Oh, right. Yeah.” Julian turned, grabbed a tablet from its charging pad on the shelf next to him, unlocked it with his thumbprint, and handed it over. “I’ve got something to share with you. A bit of a job offer: keep you on as an advisor, now and then. So you don’t go completely crazy in pure academia.”

Lewis lifted his eyebrows and took the tablet “…Oh?”

“Yeah. In the month you’ve been traveling, the Entity’s been up to some interesting things…”

Date Point: 18y5m2w AV
Uncharted system, Hunter space

Entity

There was a convoy. Twelve ships. The Entity watched it with something resembling hunger.

An echo of hunger, at least. Obviously, in comparison to what Ava remembered of real hunger, what the Entity felt was nothing visceral. It had no mouth to water, no stomach to growl. Its need for what that convoy carried was wholly cerebral…but no less felt.

Acquiring raw materials in space wasn’t straightforward. Asteroids were dense with metals, but not all metals were easily refined by a spaceborne life form, nor could such a life form exist on metals alone. It needed polymers, plastics, allotropic carbon. And while the Entity had figured out methods for creating those things in specialized orbital factories…it hadn’t yet figured out efficient methods.

Nor had the Hunters. They still depended on planets, where their slaves worked and died to keep the Builders supplied.

At first, the Entity had been able to raid the resulting convoys with impunity. It would jam communications, overwhelm the transport, tear the hull apart with forcefield, gather up the spilled cargo and then tow the hull itself away too. Why waste good resources?

The Hunters had redesigned the transports, sacrificing capacity for defenses. Then they’d started adding swarmship escorts.

This convoy had three broodships guarding it. Which suggested to the Entity that either the Hunters had learned to guard their logistics…

Or this one’s carrying something special.

…or that.

Or it’s a trap.

That was an option too.

Oh well. It’s not like they can kill us, is it?

No, but the capture and reverse-engineering of a probe would be undesirable. The Entity had qput a lot of effort into ensuring that the Hunters never finalized their own self-replicating ship design.

That’s why they can self-destruct.

Wasteful.

Dios mío, shit or get off the pot already!

The Entity paused a moment longer then, with a purely mental shrug, it decided that its sense of curiosity, and its “hunger,” outweighed the need to be cautious with resources, here.

It committed twenty probes to the attack. That number, it felt, struck a balance between the overwhelming force needed to assuredly crack this particular target, and conservative withholding of its true capabilities.

The Hunters reacted quickly, as they always did. Their minds were networked, impulses and orders flowing from individual to individual far faster than the clunky mechanism of speech would have allowed. But the Entity was quicker. It had no need to communicate at all. Each probe was a fingertip, part of its body.

The result was not the stocky, square, orderly kind of battle it witnessed when matterspace life forms warred each other. As fluid as those could be, non-networked beings relied on training, drills, formations and tactics. When the Swarm and the Probes fought, however, they shifted and flowed, danced and postured, feinted and faded.

The Hunters couldn’t run. The Entity made sure of that by blasting local spacetime with interference from its own interpretation of a Farthrow generator, and made prodigious use of gravity spikes, too: small ones could trap its prey for minutes, a time scale that might as well be centuries from its perspective. When a Swarmship tried to flee, the Entity shot a megalight missile out in front of it and spiked its path, halting it before it could escape. Gravity spikes were terrain, battlefield engineering, obstacles. Their judicious use allowed it to control its enemy.

The Hunters, of course, did much the same. Much of the battle passed bloodlessly, as the Entity shot sparingly and to cause maneuver, coiling its probes tighter and tighter around the convoy. The Hunters fired much but hit little, their firing solutions foiled time and again by the probes’ sharp acceleration profiles and agility.

When the blood did come, it came in a tide.

The Entity struck, sending a trio of probes lashing through the convoy at high acceleration, instantly overtaking their own ammunition. The result was a doppler effect, hundreds of kinetic rounds bunched up and rained into the target’s shields like a cloudburst and tore through before the Hunters could shift their fleet’s wall of projected shielding. Several dozen meters of outer hull ablated, tore, and exploded off as the high-pressure gas inside found a way to escape.

The Entity’s probes had no such weakness. One of them took a glancing hit from point defence as it sizzled through the formation and left behind a fast-moving cloud of its own vaporized armor, but its internal systems were not harmed by vacuum.

A second trio feinted, drawing the convoy’s shield wall toward them in time for a pair of probes to lash up from the wrong direction and obliterate five swarmships in a second tear-and-fade.

The Entity coiled, tightened, struck, struck, struck.

It took ten seconds to kill every ship in the convoy. Ten more to be certain.

The probes were built to scavenge, to mine, and to gather resources, and do it quickly. With the violence behind them, the damaged probes moved outward to form a sacrificial picket and early warning line: the undamaged ones moved in and cut into the stricken broodships with lasers. High-power forcefields infiltrated the hull breaches and tore them open.

Cargo was sorted, analyzed. Much of it was full of…biomass.

Slaves. We just killed a lot of slaves.

< Sorrow; Nauseated >

At least it was quick. Better than what the Hunters had lined up for them…Anything else in there?

Some of the crates were sealed. Penetrating scans suggested they contained technology of some sort, which the probes scooped up for later examination. Raw materials, eagerly scavenged. Synthetic rubber, plastics, coke and compressed oxygen, all greedily seized.

The hulls were full of valuable resources too. Refined titanium, alloyed beams, damaged but salvageable parts, intact ceramics, kilometers of wiring, refined nuclear fuel…the Entity claimed it all, and left behind only the broken, the burned, the worthless and the dead.

Caution and paranoia inspired it to load the seal crates of tech onto one of the damaged probes and send that probe off to a peripheral location. That tech could be scanners, could be communications equipment…could be harmful. Best to isolate it, feed it as little intelligence as possible until it was conclusively proven harmless.

It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you…

The Entity hesitated before withdrawing, though. It felt…wrong…somehow, to leave that graveyard full of unfortunate slaves behind without…something. Some acknowledgement that they had been alive, and it had killed them.

We didn’t know they were there.

True. And the Hunters were ultimately responsible. Nevertheless, their actions had finished what the Hunters had started. It would be…wrong…to feel nothing for them. To do nothing for them.

Even though everything that could be done was, ultimately, not for them at all. Ava’s memories provided something, however.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…

It was a memory. A funeral. Her mother’s aunt. Ava had been nine years old, and sat obediently in her best dress. She’d felt much the same then as the Entity did now: that same confused feeling that it was right to do something for the dead, but that really, it was more for all the people who’d crowded into that church.

She remembered missing those words at Sara’s funeral. Remembered saying them later, in private, and apologizing to Sara’s memory for it, but…Ava needed them, to say goodbye.

The Entity certainly didn’t know a better way. It let the memory play out. And then, its impulse to grieve fulfilled, it turned and flicked away into the interstellar dark with its prizes.

A quarter of an hour later, when a Hunter patrol arrived to rescue the convoy, they found only scraps.

++END CHAPTER 73++

MORE BY THE AUTHOR

Dandelion

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, and you can read it for free on Royal Road where we are publishing each chapter on a monthly basis.

If you get impatient and would like to read the whole thing, then you can purchase it in hardcover and paperback through your local book store or online wherever good books are sold. Alternatively, you can download it for free through Kindle Unlimited.

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This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow and Riker

Forty Humans

TTTA
Adam Shearsby
Alvaro Gaitan
Anthony Landry
Anthony Youhas
Armond471
Austin Deschner blackwolf393
Brigid
Chris Candreva
Chris Dye
Daniel Iversen
Daniel Morris
Eric Hardwick
HungryWerewolf
James Ren
Jeffrey Stults
John Norton
Joseph Szuma
Joshua Mountain Taylor
Karthik Mohanarangan
Katja
Krit Barb
Marquis Talmadge
Nicolas Gruenbeck
Ortheri
Rob Rollins
Ryan Seaman
Sam Berry
Shane Wegner
Sun Rendered
T.A. Carlson
Taylor McGee
TheMoneyBadger
Theningaraf
Trevor C
Xultanis
Yeania Aeon
Zachary Galicki
Zenith

As well as fifty-seven Deathworlders…

Adam Beeman
Alexandre Smirnov
Andrew
Andrew Ford
Andrew Preece atp
Ben Thrussell
Brandon Hicks
Bruce Ludington
Chris Bausch
Chris Meeker damnusername
Daniel R.
David Jamison
Derek Price
Devin Rousso galrock0
Gavin Smart
Ignate Flare
Ivan Smirnov
Jim Hamrick
John Campbell
Jon
Justin Hood
Katie Drzewiecki
Kristoffer Skarra
Lina lovot
Matt
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
Mikee Elliott
Nathaniel Batts
Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Patrick Huizinga
Richard A Anstett
RJ Smiley
Ryan Cadiz
Sam
Saph
Sean Calvo
Sir Xaph
Stephen Prescott
Stratigan theWorst
Valiander
Vincent Leighton
Volka Creed walter thomas
William Kinser
Woodsie13
Yshmael Salas ziv
Zod Bain

…Eighty-five Friendly ETs, 145 Squishy Xenos and 318 Dizi Rats, all hanging on the christmas tree.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 74: “Ride to Hell”

Chapter 74: Ride to Hell

Date Point: 18y5m2w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Loomi, Champion and Stud-Prime of Highmountain

The Great Father could be a confounding creature. He’d been designed to be as close to biologically perfect as it was likely possible for a sapient being to be, and the full extent of his abilities—brawn, brains, or otherwise—was unknown, since he was still growing, still adapting, the full expression of whatever engineering had gone into him had not yet fully manifested. To a much lesser extent, that was true of all the Gao nowadays, but in him (and a few others, Loomi included) it was occurring at a much deeper, much more concerning level. That was going to be a difficult conversation to have, over the coming months.

Nonetheless, and in fact probably in spite of what he’d been made to be, Daar was still in many reassuring ways a normal person, and consequently had more than his share of quirky foibles. Most were the sort of harmlessly characterful tics that anyone might have, yet it was their interplay made all the difference. He was an athlete and an adventurer first and foremost, despite the keen razor sharpness of his mind. He was an engineer, not a scholar. He preferred to do and experience rather than contemplate and analyze. Fascinating, really: but for a few subtleties of preference, the Great Father could have been a very different being indeed.

A few of those quirks had led to some cubhood history between them. Daar was a natural and fully-dominant sixth degree male, the rarest expression of the rarest degree. He was, therefore, an extremely aggressive and commanding being by nature, and that had led to some painful early lessons for Loomi in the unavoidable hierarchies of life.

Of course, he’d long forgiven Daar for his incessant cubhood bullying. Water through the mill, as Fyu might have said, and high-degree males were often very difficult personalities until they found their better selves. After all, Loomi wasn’t so well-behaved himself with the smaller, less brilliant cubs…which was almost all of them. If anything, he’d drawn Daar’s ire precisely because he was the only real competition.

Still. While Loomi might be (mostly) sanguine about the experience, Daar had never overcome his sense of guilt on the matter. Not even a little. And this meant that all of their interactions these days were complex dances of ear-semaphore and emotions that conflicted wildly with social rank.

Next to any Gao, or frankly any other sapient biological entity, Daar was the superior being in quite literally every sense of the word. He knew his ability and rank, was generally gracious and playful about it all…but never failed to enforce it, as was right and his right to do. In his dealings with Loomi, though…

Their history tortured the Great Father.

He came prancing into Loomi’s office with his usual floor-shaking happy-gait, as always that extra bit more solicitous, just a little bit friendlier than he would be with most anyone else. In his head, Daar had never paid back the debt of his cubhood abuse, and probably never would.

Loomi tried not to take advantage too hard.

“My Father! Come in, come in. How are things—oof!”

He braced himself for the usual full-body affectionate crush, and was not disappointed. Being one of the very few Gaoians with a height approaching Daar’s, and given their history, these greetings were always quite heavy on both the affection and the crush.

They wrestled a bit on the floor, as was tradition among the larger breeds of brownfurs. And by wrestle, a more accurate statement would be that Loomi was wrestled by the Great Father, until it seemed appropriate to surrender and Daar was content to show his affection with a victory snuggle. Friendship with him meant one never had to worry about any back problems.

“Ow…” Loomi chittered wearily. “I missed you too. Shall I warm some Talamay?”

“Yeah! ‘Ya got any of the good stuff I sent ‘ya last year?”

Really, Loomi tried not to take advantage. Truly. But he did have a weakness for Talamay…

He chittered, “Of course. Your house has a fiery brew! I find it best enjoyed sparingly.” By fire he meant of course the spices, which unusually included a few Earth-sourced treasures. By volume it was eighty percent pure ethanol (apparently extremely high-proof by Human standards), but so were most Gaoian drinks. “Anyway…I can hardly warm any drinks if I’m pinned to the floor, My Father…”

“Right, right…”

Loomi busied himself with their drinks while the Great Father padded around his office, sniffing at everything as was his habit. He paused at one of Loomi’s newest acquisitions.

“Hmm. ‘A Brief History of Time’ by Stephen Hawking? Isn’t that a Human pop-sci book?”

“It is,” Loomi confessed. “I am more interested in the man than the book itself. Did you know he suffered from a crippling neurodegenerative disorder?”

“Really?”

“Yes, to the point where he could only communicate through a special assistive device. The man was trapped in his body and yet had the patience and clarity of mind to distill quantum relative physics to something a lay person could understand. Well,” Loomi chittered, “As best as the Humans understood it at the time, anyway.”

“They’re an impressive an’ determined people. Part o’ why I admire ‘em so much.”

“You always did admire tenacity,” Loomi mused.

Daar flicked an ear guiltily. “It’s got me through some tough spots, helped me make friends. An’ taught me a lot, over the years.”

“I understand you’ve taken a liking to their music,” Loomi offered, to steer away from an uncomfortable topic. While they’d never be cousins, they’d developed an odd, respectful kinship among Champions. It was lonely at the apex of society, after all.

Lonelier still for the Great Father. Better, perhaps, if some of that burden could be eased.

“Jus’…kinda funny. Somethin’ about their sense o’ humor really lends itself ‘ta bein’ put ‘ta music.”

“Well,” Loomi chittered, “sometimes one must simply dig a hole.”

Daar chittered in turn, but as always among his most trusted Champions, he liked to air out his thoughts a bit, when he had the chance. This he did as he set to a prowling four-paw circuit of the office. “Been a whole lotta diggin’ this last decade…” Daar sighed. “Balls, life sure as fuck’s changed. I’d always imagined I’d spend mosta my life wooin’ women an’ presidin’ over my Clan. Do some work to keep sharp…”

“The Humans pulled back the veil on that simple life, for all of us.” Loomi considered the book for a moment longer, until that thought jogged his mind back into gear. “Oh! Yes. The Legacy Project…”

“You have a final report?”

“I have it…right here.” Loomi found the file on his tablet, and handed it over. “I’m sorry to say, it confirms our worst suspicions.”

“About just me, or…?”

“About all of us, My Father. The Hierarchy, it seems, was activating and upgrading us to destroy the Hunters—the Discarded. Or, perhaps ‘upgrade’ is the wrong word. It might be more of an ‘unleashing.’ I say that because the last eight generations of the Gao have shown significantly increased mutation rates…and the reappearance of some ancient genetic material.”

Daar planted his mighty haunches on the ground, across from Loomi’s desk. He always paid him that respect in his own office. “Okay. Overview, from the beginning.”

Loomi unrolled a flexible touchscreen mat onto his desk, and loaded a map of the planet onto it—an old one, Clan holdings as actual physical territory, rather than territory of expertise and specialization. “The general stagnation of our genome ceased right around the moment we took a properly scientific interest in our own biology. I do not believe that to be a coincidence. These mutations began to appear here—” he tapped the suburban sprawl around and between Lavmuy and Wi Kao— “and spread radially from there. It was there the mutated version of our genome’s ‘lock’ first began to spread.”

“Right around the time a lot of social change started happening, too. Beginning of the information age.”

“Hence the map…” Daar leaned in with an interested expression as Loomi set the map to playing forward in time: the Clan territories shifted, then started to merge like raindrops on a window, until there was just…Gao. “For the longest time we took the shift from Clans-as-nations to Clans-as-specialists in stride. A natural progression, building on each Clan’s historical proclivities and carrying them into a more advanced age. But since first contact, it’s been clear…that’s not how other species operate. The Great Houses are still nation-territories, so are the constituent states of the Guvnurag Confederacy, the Republic, the Domain, the Humans of course…Only two other species show a similar pattern. The Corti with their collegiate system, but they’ve been united under a single world government since their steam age…and the Hunters.”

“It were done to us,” Daar sighed. “Which, yeah. That’s been obvious ‘fer a while. We may not be unner their control but we’re still almost essactly what they made us ‘ta be.” Daar was a restless sort of male, always had been, and frustration was often the catalyst for him to just do something to get his energy out. Instead of pacing, and lacking the space to exercise, he resorted to fidgety grooming.

“The completeness of their ambition needs illumination, My Father. They were not content to simply shape our culture. They took an active hand in shaping our genome, even into the modern era.”

Daar paused in nibbling along his forearm, hunting for mud that wasn’t there. “How?”

“Slowly. Patiently. They’re a species with a million-years perspective, they can afford to be slow and subtle. A serendipitous mutation here, a biodroned and particularly productive female there…”

Daar growled at that. “Fuckin’ evil. An’ I think I can see where this is goin’…”

“Yes, My Father, I’ll get to that. Importantly, it wasn’t without side-effects. With that tampering came more aggression. Our ancient physicality began to reassert itself, and then in some lines, became highly exaggerated. High-degrees males became much rarer and comparatively far more impressive, while birthing them became perilous. Sixth degrees effectively disappeared, the genetics too titanic for all but the luckiest cubs and the fittest females to handle.”

“They bred us like prize livestock.” Daar’s righteous anger was beginning to choke the air in the office, so Loomi went over to open a window. A clean, comfortable, crisp day. On that note, Loomi decided to head for the turret upstairs, to better enjoy the fresh air. Daar thumped along, and some of the building aggression drained from the moment.

The view was, as always, breathtaking. Daar’s own office and apartments dwelled in the slightly larger and higher tower toward the middle of High Mountain; Loomi’s were more forward toward the main gate, and just a bit more modest.

They spent a silent moment together, appreciating the breeze, but only a moment. There was much left to discuss.

“Livestock.” Daar repeated. “I s’pose that means you an’ I.”

“Us especially, My Father. But I’ll come back to that. The consequence of this breeding was I think what led to the Clans changing. Fiercer competition among the males would have led to incessant, open warfare. Some response had to be engineered, and de-emphasizing territory seems the most rational way to do that. Along with renewed interest in sport, the emergence of workhouses, much less emphasis on old tradition…”

“So where did it go wrong for ‘em?”

“That is less clear. Our interrogations were inconclusive, the agents in question were missing key data. So this is my analysis, not necessarily reporting…”

“Go on.”

“As I said, they were seeking to mold us into something akin to the organizational structure of the Discarded: Clans aligned by function, rather than territory…and that would include their leadership structure. It’s likely they would have wished to recreate an Alpha of Alphas among the Gao. You are likely the end result of that process.”

“…Not a comparison ‘ta make me happy, that.”

“Well, it’s not like they engineered you personally,” Loomi said. “Or more precisely, you as a person. They could influence, mutate, breed and generally nudge us on the largest scale, but an individual is the product of far more than just their circumstances. In you, they conspired for every possible biological advantage, and in that aim they were of course wildly successful. No doubt they intended for your physical presence to form the basis of your leadership.”

Daar looked down at his tremendous legs and tensed them, briefly. Huge iron muscles and thick-corded sinew popped into starker relief under his fur. Loomi wasn’t a pushover by any stretch of the imagination, but next to a clipped-sleek bodybuilder like Daar? He who was the tallest, stockiest, most unattainably athletic Gao there ever was? Across species, too?

…Gods.

Loomi and Daar had always compared themselves to each other, even now, long after the contest had already been won. Loomi may have been the more academically successful between them—and keen to improve his lead, whenever he could—but Daar had always possessed the sharper mind and the better instincts. That, ultimately, was the root of it all. Loomi could have accepted being physically outclassed, even as a well-bred fifth degree. He was still a Highmountain, after all. But Daar had never let him have anything. Always he could run faster and farther, perform the most impressive feats, attract the most prestigious females, score the best on exams. The two of them had spent a lifetime competing viciously at nearly everything, and in those fights…Daar won, over Loomi and everyone else. Always.

There were some things one never grew past, it seemed.

The Great father must have been thinking along the same lines because he looked at Loomi, sighed, and relaxed, though to little visible effect. “Yeah,” he grumbled. “I’d say they succeeded.”

Loomi couldn’t quite interpret Daar’s expression, but pride, tellingly, wasn’t part of it. Maybe it wasn’t all quite “through the mill” after all, for either of them.

Still. Loomi hadn’t exactly been the picture of well-mannered and civilized, either…

…Best to press on. “You of course don’t need me to tell you this, My Father. You have always made use of your appearance and your physique to great effect. In fact,” Loomi chittered, recalling one of the culture’s more personally relevant memes, “were you aware that a likeness of you has been made into a trophy?”

“Wait, what?” Daar chittered in surprise, “Ha! Flatterin’ I guess, but why me? Shouldn’t it be someone…” His ears flattened as realization struck. “Balls.”

“…Who embodied unattainable heroism? Why yes, My Father. I do believe you’re correct.”

“…Ugh. I’ve got conflicted feelings ‘bout that, now that ‘ya put it in context…”

Loomi tried not to take advantage. That said, he was only a man, and he did enjoy his quiet moments of revenge, where he could turn Daar’s ego against him.

“It’s a current and accurate rendering too, set in that pose from your infamous photo shoot…”

“Hmmph.” Daar was only half-annoyed, Loomi could tell. One of the only things in the universe that could match the potency of Daar’s mind or his might…was his ego.

“It’s all meant well, of course. In fact it’s a common sight now among strength and physique sports. It’s even been spotted at a Human powerlifting meet, if the internet is to be believed.”

Daar grumbled darkly to himself, but it was with a resigned good-natured humor. “I always knew Ava would be trouble…anyhoo.”

Fun had, it wouldn’t do to push it, and Loomi wasn’t deaf to the Great Father’s cue.

“Regardless,” Loomi pressed on, “all of that being true, none of that by itself is sufficient to lead a people, even resolutely physical deathworlders like us. Yulna created you the Great Father for deeper reasons, My Father. Reasons that the Hierarchy had, at best, a distant influence upon.”

Over time, as the depth of Daar’s innate magnificence grew more apparent among the private business of the Champions…he’d grown increasingly uncomfortable about it. Why he felt that way was sometimes difficult to understand—nobody can much help their circumstance, after all—yet it bothered him nonetheless.

Strange, really: that was a remarkably Human attitude.

Daar sighed. “Yeah, I know the arguments. An’ I even agree with ‘em. Don’t really help, ‘ta be honnest. A lotta luck ‘fer me along the way, yijao? Balls, imagine if I’d ever been implanted! We’ve been…superstitious about things like cranial implants ever since Fyu’s warnings ‘bout demons an’ spirits took on modern relevance.” He shrugged, a bit sheepishly, “Me too.”

Loomi nodded. “A good thing. That escape from their direct influence meant that, by your adulthood, they had to change their plans. Their attention shifted…well, to me. That was their first mistake. Our culture wasn’t programmed to accept someone like me as a leader.”

That had not been an easy realization for Loomi to accept, but like so many things…water through the mill. Daar gave him a thoughtful look and complex flick of his ears; in this, at least, they were kindred spirits.

“Programmed…okay. So, we’re back ‘ta my question. How was it we slipped their control? It didn’t take all that fuckin’ much, jus’ Regaari gettin’ his paw chomped off knocked the whole thing off the rails!”

“Rather before then, really. This is a case of chaos theory at its most evident, in that one unconsidered variable in the initial conditions led to a wildly different outcome. The Hierarchy’s parameters for our development did not account for us making contact with an uncontrolled deathworld species, and certainly not in the form of an abducted Human female, who earned the loyalty of the Females. Nor could they account for Shoo’s selflessness and good spirit. Everything after that point was damage control, catching up.”

Loomi felt the breeze between his ears and panted happily. “The Hierarchy are so used to being perfectly in control that they just don’t know how to handle a failure cascade. By the time they even noticed things were going wrong, it was already too late for them to get back out in front.”

“More’n that,” Daar rumbled. “I kinda suspect we were already let mostly off the leash in preparation for the Hunters…and then the Humans showed up. There was prob’ly a hasty effort to retarget our ire too, hence the fear-mongering in th’ media…”

Loomi duck-nodded. “But it was too late. Something about our peoples’ social nature and their canid history, combined with an almost unbelievable series of fortunate encounters…”

“It’s enough ‘ta make you wonder, ain’t it?”

“It has, admittedly, shaken my scientific resolve a bit.” Loomi tilted his head. “We really did get very lucky.”

“Sometimes luck is what decides the war,” Daar sighed, prowled over to the edge and rested his brutishly thick arms on the stonework.

“I think we can claim to have made the most of it, though. We were played a fortunate hand, but again…good fortune isn’t enough by itself.”

“No. Still, keep investigatin’ this, if you could. An’ especially around things like Cruezzir. I got a hunch something that gods-damned magical might have a sad story behind it, too.”

…Well. That led to a realization. “And why we among all the species out there respond so well to it…and you in particular.”

Daar looked down at his enormous forearm, and watched the steel of the cable-like muscles within twist and writhe as he balled his paw into a fist.

“…I fuckin’ hate this shit. This evil touches me, all my friends, all my Cousins, all my people… It just don’t fuckin’ end, do it?”

“Best not to get wrapped up in it, I fear. The way I choose to see it all is as a colossal serving of just desserts, for the most colossal display of hubris in Galactic history…and perhaps simply the inevitable. They’ve been doing this for millions of years. They’ve won for millions of years. Who knows how many times before other species have nearly broken their control?”

Daar duck-nodded. “Everyone loses the game o’ life, eventually,” he agreed. “Some play better’n others. I s’pose it don’t matter, ‘cuz we’ve got other questions we’re gonna hafta ask down the road, too: what happens when I’ve put my claws through the last o’ them? Do we find ourselves steppin’ into some terrible legacy?”

“Perhaps,” Loomi nodded. “There’s always the dreadful possibility that they’ve been right this whole time.”

Daar pondered that for a moment, silently. When he spoke, it was with the slightest keen. “So I get ‘ta be a galactic bully, huh? What a fuckin’ treat.” There wasn’t any humor in his voice.

“You can’t be blamed for looking after your own charge. Are we supposed to accept misery and bondage for the sake of peace? Are we supposed to give up on life to escape its sorrows? We don’t know what the future holds. There’s the possibility that the Hierarchy are right…and equally, the possibility that they are wrong. All we can do is play the hand we’re dealt.”

“Yup.” Daar shook his head out, flowed over to Loomi and gave him a parting hug. “Thanks ‘fer bein’ who ‘ya are, Loomi. I know that might be sorta self-servin’ from me, but I mean it.”

In one thing, Daar had never changed. His feelings were big, unmistakable, and pure. Loomi knew better than to reply with words. He just duck-nodded gratefully, flicked an ear, and decided that the conversation could be left there.

“What was your original reason for visiting, incidentally?” he asked.

“Oh, just the usual. Wanted ‘ta invite ‘ya over ‘fer some huntin’. I promised Yan Given-Man and Ambassador Knight some good sport. Interested?”

“Some other day,” Loomi demurred. “I have a great deal to think about.”

“Could clear ‘yer head an’ help ya think about it?”

“It could,” he answered. Daar was smart enough to understand his meaning.

To his great credit, he didn’t let his crestfallen feelings ruin the moment. “Well…I unnerstand. ‘Yer still welcome if ‘ya change ‘yer mind.”

…Too much. He was making an effort, one that plainly hurt, and Loomi was responding with…

Well, nothing positive.

Maybe he should change that. “We never did drink that talamay…”

The Great Father’s tail wagged once, hopefully. “No, we didn’t.”

“Then let’s at least share a drink, before you go.”

Healing, when it came, could come unexpectedly. One drink turned into the whole bottle. One bottle turned into another, and the drinking turned into an adventure.

He ended up hunting with the Great Father after all.

Date Point: 18y5m2w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

Chambliss had run on his extraterrestrial policy. Hell, he’d won on his extraterrestrial policy, mostly. People had been weary of war, weary of their tax dollars going on building a spaceborne military practically from whole cloth and not on things like welfare, healthcare, national infrastructure, national parks, and all the other things the Federal government could be doing to ease their lives.

Circumstances had pushed his presidency completely off course. Now, the pendulum had swung. The jump lockdown had done terrible harm to people’s lives, slowed the economy to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of a year, cost jobs, cost businesses, cost lives and livelihoods.

Preserving the people’s safety was, in Beau’s view, the most important of his duties…but he did have to acknowledge that it was not his only duty. Sooner or later, he had to think about how safe was safe enough and whether it was time to take some of the pressure off and focus on recovery.

After all, the Array network had operated without a major incident for several years, and they’d done much to harden it over the last eleven months. Was the danger now small enough to justify a release? How likely was such a decision to end in disaster?

Well…that was what advisors and meetings were for.

“You are beginning to face open rebellion, Mister President. The loss of the array in Chicago has devastated much of primary industry.”

That much was no surprise. Rebuilding the rail network shattered by the Chicago array terminus detonation was an ongoing project, and without it, the simple task of getting goods across the country was now anything but simple, and far more expensive. That drove up costs in every sector.

Still…

“And what are we likely to face if another such attack is successful?” he asked, pointedly. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you gentlemen, but the last twenty years have seen deadly attacks destroy one US city, badly maul another, and do something similar to a US territory. The agent responsible for Chicago and Franklin escaped, do we really expect they will pass up a chance to wound us again?”

“Of course they will strike again, if able. So what, Mister President? One must prepare, certainly, but a people cannot hide forever. Calamities happen, and life must move on.”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? All of you here have made the case that yes, we’ve prepared well, or at least as much as we can in one year. Now you’re asking me to trust that one year’s worth of preparation is enough, and the time to move on is now. If I’m wrong in trusting you on this, then the cost will be more American lives, more misery, more financial turmoil, and another year just like this one with the same questions at the far end. I would be a terrible fool if I didn’t take that seriously.”

He considered the executive order in front of him a moment longer. It was quite a simple one, really: all it did was revoke some of the restrictions included in a similar order he’d signed nearly a year ago. It didn’t even completely ease up the travel restrictions, just eased off the brakes some. A way to get the most important things rolling again, reunite families, close some vulnerabilities…

He took a deep breath, then uncapped his pen and signed it. “I suppose we shall see.”

Date Point: 18y5m2w3d AV
Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Earth

Six

Ping!

Six jerked awake, blinked, and then reached over to grab his phone. His borrowed body wanted to protest, wanted to blur his thoughts with sleep deprivation: he overruled it, spurred the implants in his host’s brain to promote a surge of neurotransmitters and hormones appropriate to jolt fully into action. He’d have to pay back the biological debt later, but that message ping at this time of night was important.

Sure enough, it was bad news.

[02:12:31] Handler > Bull rush update - rat smelled, suspend and wait.

Six growled in frustration and rose from bed. The Handler was the most vexing creature in the APA remnant, but Six had to respect his instincts. The man had orchestrated a number of the group’s most successful operations, and many others that should have succeeded…and most importantly, he’d survived, slipping through the government’s net like a particularly slippery eel whenever it started to close.

No, Six could certainly appreciate the talent, skill and senses that had kept the Handler alive and uncaptured so far. Those five terse words said so much, and so loudly, that he darted to the window and twitched the curtain, scanning the outside world suspiciously in case men in black tactical gear were silently approaching his door.

No heavily-armed wraiths in combat boots were in evidence, but he lingered a little longer anyway. That van down the street? No, that was just Sean Allston, who owned an AC repair service. The car opposite him? Belonged to the Elliott Lawson, back from college for the weekend to visit his parents.

Six knew more details about the little people who lived on Allen’s street than any of them would have guessed. Not just the mundane, boring, gossip-worthy details like the happy marriages, the affairs, the drugs and the petty power plays, no. He knew enough about them to be secure. He knew their vehicle plates, their ringtones, the precise cadence of their gait, the brands of soap and perfume they preferred, the exact shapes of their houses and the things attached to their walls and roofs, their cars and bikes. Nothing out there was out of place, that he could see.

He stepped away from the window. Looked at the message again. Tempting to reply, to acknowledge what he’d said, to ask what was going on…tempting, but a bad idea. The Handler knew his business. Best to let him resume communication and explain the problem in his own time. Besides, Six had his own precautionary measures to take.

Implant comms pinged the Injunctor. Still active. He sat on the bed and bowed his head. A moment of discontinuity as he synchronized his mind state with its on-board inert storage and activated a failsafe. If it didn’t hear from him again inside the next day, it would select and implant a new host, and the next incarnation of Six would at least have memory up to this moment.

The rest was sitting and waiting, with his metaphorical finger on the trigger, waiting to see what happened next. Just because he’d seen nothing out of place outside didn’t mean he wasn’t about to receive some sudden and violent guests. If they did come, they would get nothing from him, this time.

None came. He sat on the bed like that for five hours, until the sky was clear and blue and he could hear traffic and voices outside.

Ping!

[07:26:55] Handler > Update: Pawn got grabbed. DUI. Unimportant piece, but potentially compromising to me. Had to move. No breach, but progress reset on finding that part we need. Got to start over.

Six growled at his phone, and tapped out a reply

[07:27:13] ANG6 > Understood. Timetable?

[07:28:35] Handler > Can’t say. Will let you know when we’re back on.

Of course. Frustrating though that was, Six could not afford to take undue risk. The stakes were far too high. The Gao had been unleashed a decade too early, inartfully repurposed against a newer, more urgent foe. That operation had backfired spectacularly and now, rather than enmity between the Contingency species and the true threat, both were allied against the Discarded! Worse, the rejected leader of the Contingency was not only in full command of his species, he’d wildly exceeded even the most dire of their projections.

To borrow a Human phrase, the Hierarchy was fucked. This here? This one operation? This was the last roll of the dice, the last possibility to effect any form of containment. Six had little faith it could do more than offer the Hierarchy some “breathing room” but at this point…

…Even breathing room was a luxury. Just a chance to backup, archive, put some things in deep storage to emerge in a galaxy millennia hence. That was the move, now. Survive the Contingency, survive the Humans. Hide, until the Great Father finally expired, the Gao had forgotten their purpose, the Humans were back to their petty self-absorbed infighting…

It would be a difficult future, come what may. A clear lesson in how one small oversight, one overlooked planet, neglected by accident, had accumulated into a disaster. But the alternative, at this rate, was for the Igraen Hegemony, all of dataspace, everything to be torn down before any of it could be saved.

The delay was painful. It made his hands ache, his teeth grind against each other. Human bodies were so responsive like that. But if it was a choice between painful patience, or failure…

He would sit, and wait, and be ready. He had one shot at this.

Only one.

Date Point: 18y5m2w5d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Vemik Given-Man

Yan was right, in the end. Vemik would mostly need to give up steel. The life of a Given-Man was too much in too many places at once. Visit tribes, build alliances. Negotiate with words (and strength) the terms of the next season’s hunting grounds. Resolve disputes. Keep his village together, even as it picked up and moved, as it always did when the prey wandered to choicer grazing. All of it took time, and all of it could only be done by him.

And a forge couldn’t move with them.

They’d been lucky these past few years. The werne were so well-fed and fattened on the local grazing, they’d not bothered to move, even being harassed by three tribes at once. Now, though, a small group had started wandering farther. Pretty soon they all would, and the villages would need to move with them.

This was a problem. Forges couldn’t move so easily. Smelting ore took time and attention, needed somebody to watch the smelter. Good ore didn’t move around either. At the Lodge, the Given-Men had wondered why the city-People had given up the obvious good of moving with the seasons, but Vemik thought he knew: Some things just couldn’t move, not easily.

But maybe there was a balance. Maybe villages could move, but some things—things they all needed—could stay put.

He needed to talk to Professor.

That was never hard. Daniel had come down from the research camp to the village, which he did every few days to teach a young crowd of children from several tribes, sharing letters and numbers and history…or sometimes, just telling a story, like he was today. It was funny, really: Vemik had first met him as an old, soft, very civilized man, with nice clothes and neat hair and fat on his belly, very different to how he was these days. His hair was messy, his face always covered in scratchy white and grey stubble, his clothes patched and sewn, and the soft belly completely gone. But the energy was the same, when he told a story: Stories sparkled behind his eyes before leaping out of him, told as much with his hands as with his words.

“A goddess made him, strong as a savage bull, none can withstand his arms. No son is left with his father, for Gilgamesh takes them all; and is this the king, the shepherd of his people? His lust leaves no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior’s daughter nor the wife of the noble. When Anu had heard their lamentation the gods cried to Aruru, the goddess of creation, ‘You made him, O Aruru, now create his equal; let it be as like him as his own reflection, his second self, stormy heart for stormy heart. Let them contend together and leave Uruk in quiet.’”

It was a good story, and an old one, too. The oldest that Humans had, apparently! Vemik had heard it before, but that didn’t stop him from sitting on his tail and listening, and trilling merrily along with the children when the powerful Enkidu was tamed by the skills of a woman.

Daniel knew Vemik’s time was precious though, and he knew children well, too: He’d once told Vemik that the secret to really good storytelling was to finish early and leave the listener wanting more. He called it a “Sherry-zad.”

It worked, for sure. As the children bounded and hooted away to go burn off all that time spent sitting still, Daniel chuckled indulgently, then grinned Vemik’s way and waved.

“Vemik! You’re looking especially oversized today,” he teased, and sauntered over with his thumbs hooked comfortably in his pockets. “Have you managed to plow your way through every adult in your tribe, yet?”

“Almost!” Vemik trilled merrily. “Is hard work being a Given-Man!” Suddenly, a wicked idea crossed his mind. “Why, Professor? Do you want to join my tribe?” He threw in an eyebrow-wiggle too—hard to do! “I can be gentle…ask Tilly!”

Hurt laughed. He’d grown there, too—at first, when he first came to the People, he’d been easily shocked and uncomfortable with jokes like that. “Better if I remain apart, I think. Wouldn’t want any of the others to get jealous…Something on your mind?”

“Lots of things on my mind,” Vemik grumbled. “Not the same as before.”

“Ah.” Professor could know much from few words, and say more with even fewer. “Tea?”

“Lots of honey, please.”

“I have sweet tea today, actually. One of my staff was feeling homesick and made some. Would you like to try that instead? Nice and cool, too.”

Cold drinks were always welcome this time of the year, where the spring was starting to turn into the long, long sweltering summer Akyawentuo was becoming infamous for. And Vemik was still in his Fire—would be until Fall, probably—so he just couldn’t get enough of anything sweet. He nodded eagerly and sat down.

Professor brought him a big cup, and Vemik found he liked it, but maybe not more than tea with honey. It was sweeter, but the sweetness was…bland. Like the kind of sweet any fruit had, without the flavor of the fruit. Honey, he decided, tasted better.

The tea was less sharp-tasting, though. Maybe he could experiment!

…Or maybe not. Which made him grump a bit, when he thought about it. Experimenting was fun, but his time lately was taken with other things.

That was probably what he was really worried about, now that he thought about it.

“I think I may have a guess as to what’s on our mind, Vemik. May I try?”

“Go ahead.”

“Your priorities have changed. You have much more time to do Given-Man things, but much less to do Vemik things.”

“Yes,” Vemik sighed, and idly batted at the ground with his tail. “But I’m grateful! I visit tribes, deliver mail, uh…”

“Screw yourself silly?” Professor’s eyes were gleaming again.

“Which I’m not complaining about! But those things take up all my time. I wake up, I hunt, I lift, I travel, I visit, and when I’m home in my tribe, I have more than just Singer who needs attention. More than just my own son—he’s talking so good now! I have all the women, and all the children. I have to teach them all. Which I love! But…”

“But there’s no time left over to bang on steel, go for walks, write down your findings or sky-think.”

“Not much, no. Giving up being Sky-Thinker meant giving up sky-thinking. I worried about that before, accepted it, but…I get a little bit of time in the morning, maybe before sleep…”

“I should point out that Yan found time for steel, even if not as much as you.”

“…Yes. I think maybe that will come in time, but right now…”

“The Taking is still upon you, the Fire is still there. You can’t say no, can you?”

“…No.” Vemik admitted. “It seems like, all a woman has to do is smile at me and nothing else is in my head until I’ve fucked both of us stupid. Only thing that stops me? If it would make her man sad. Is good thing I am friends with all the men because I worry what I might be tempted to do if I wasn’t. It’s…I don’t know how to say.”

Hurt nodded, and sipped his own tea. “You know…the whole Given-Men thing is one of the most alien things about your people, from our perspective. Most of the time, Humans see a lot of ourselves in your people. The Giving though? We have nothing like it. It’s a hard thing to understand, never mind offer any counsel on.”

“What do we seem like, to you?”

“That’s hard to say,” Professor said, stroking his face-hair while he thought. “Maybe…there are beats to a human life that have a small echo of it. The freedom of young adults leaving home for college. Mid-life crises. The wild hormonal mood swings of puberty, pregnancy and the menopause…Roll all of those up, crash them into a bull in rut, then throw in a healthy dose of sudden responsibility and I think we can start to imagine it. But seeing a thing from a distance and actually living it are very different.”

“Yeah.”

Vemik thought that would be what he said, or something like it. Humans just…didn’t. They grew up more slowly, had time to think about growing up. Their gods—or god, he wasn’t sure which yet—Took their Givings in other ways.

Still, it was good that they could still sympathize. “It’s a lot to manage, huh? But first: are you taking care of yourself? You can’t be a good Given-Man if you fall apart.”

“I do,” Vemik promised. “I eat big and good, I lift every day, hunt every day. I listen to you and learn when I am lifting, you know. While you teach the children.”

“…From all the way over there?”

Vemik twitched his ears. “I have good hearing. But yes. I just wish…I have time to be a good Given-Man. I have time to love and fuck and feed the tribe. I just wish I had some time to think.”

“Okay. So, let me ask you, then: are you here to kvetch? You do seem to have the time to grouse with me, after all…”

Vemik didn’t know what those two words meant, but he could guess. “That’s true…”

“So maybe what you really need is to learn some time management. That, and prioritization. Pick what you really want to Sky-Think about, and give that all your spare attention.”

“Hmm.” Vemik twitched his tail, thinking about that. “So, you say I should choose?”

“You have long, thirty-hour days here. Lots of time to do a lot of things. But you work and play hard, so everyone naps mid-day, and you sleep twice through the night too. That gives about eighteen hours awake every busy day, which is a bit more time than we have on Earth. Half of your waking time goes to hunting, village-work and self care. That leaves you, say, nine hours a day to do everything else. So…let’s say you keep just one hour a day to yourself, to do whatever you want. No women, no duties, no nothing. Just an hour. A finger across the sky, right?”

“…Yes…?”

“So, you have an hour, but only an hour. Can you forge steel in that hour?”

“…No.” Vemik hooted a bit sadly. “Takes longer than that just to get things ready.”

“So, like Yan, if you don’t have someone doing all the prep work, you can’t play.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“A little sad. Rather do something I can just…pick up.”

“I imagine, yeah. So let me ask you this: do you feel you’re still excited by making steel? Or is it something you just…do now? Because it’s what you do? Is it still exciting? Or, forgive me, is it something you can leave to someone who’s a bit less brilliant than you?”

“…It’s exciting. It’s fun! Get plenty of exercise for doing it, see? Big forearms!” He showed them off for a moment, admiring his own strength…but actually.

Actually. There was a clever knowing hidden in there. “But it’s not thinking anymore, like I want to do. It’s still fun but…all the same kind of thinking, now. Does that make sense?”

“Mhmm.” Professor nodded, and took a sip of his tea. Vemik had already guzzled all of his and wanted more. “It’s a hobby for you now. Your apprentice doing well?”

“Very!” Vemik beamed proudly. “I think he gets it now!”

“So, has he done his masterwork, yet?”

“Yes! Very good blade he made a hand of days ago. I show you!”

Vemik sprang up from his position and…well, the People could move very quick when they wanted, and were used to bounding across the village in a hand or two of great leaps if they were excited enough. Vemik Given-Man was so much more now. One, two, three great big bounces with all his strength, and he was all the way from the teaching-place near the landing-pad to Yetu’s spot at the far end of the village, asking to borrow his finest blade. Another three and he was right back! Professor had only just refilled Vemik’s tea.

“See!” He huffed big and shook his head, getting air into his lungs. “Very pretty!!”

Professor took the offered blade and examined it carefully. It was a very nice knife, as good as any Vemik or Yan had ever made. Maybe better! It felt right in the hand, had a handle made of two different woods, twisted around each other like Yan had figured out long ago, and had a drop-point like Vemik had mastered recently himself.

“I am no expert, but I can appreciate a well-made thing when I see it. I’d say you’ve done your duty and kindled steel in the next generation. Don’t you think?” He handed the knife back. “So the thing to look for, I think, is what you can still give that nobody else can. What can the Given-Man formerly known as Sky-Thinker be that only he can be?”

“Hmm.” Vemik twitched his tail. There was thinking to do there…

But he didn’t have the time. He needed to visit Ferd Given-Man’s tribe, since he was back now and they hadn’t yet formally met. That would be a challenging meeting, since Ferd was bigger and stronger, and wilier, too. Vemik would need to work hard to keep his honor.

And it was a long swing away, too. He had to get going. “Good ideas. Oh!” He almost forgot. “I have reason I come here! Village will need to move soon, werne is looking for better eating. What about the forge, the array and things?”

Professor seemed unbothered. “Leave it. We’ll make it into your first small city, for things that can’t move so easy. You Given-Men figure it out between yourselves, and maybe we could use it as a trading port. I’m not too worried.”

Vemik liked that: a simple idea. And no extra work! A very Human answer, that; they were very, very good at finding work that didn’t need doing. Vemik thought that weak at first, but he’d survived a desert on Earth, explored a grassland not too different from the one the Humans thought they came from. Working smarter was the only way to survive, there. They were tough, and could be very strong…but mostly they were small, because their gods gave them less, smaller, trickier food when they were a young people. It made them smart, fast.

He knew now that his own people were one of the oldest among the Sky-Tribes. Very old. Old, and much the same as they had been since before Humans had lived at all. For all that the People’s keen senses, toughness, unmatched strength and gods-blessed bodies gave them…

Sky-Thinking was not something they needed to survive. They always had to be cunning and clever, but they’d never needed to really think about big, strange things. And, so…they hadn’t. Their own city-People were very young, and mostly came from tribes that couldn’t compete in the forest. Writing had only developed among them two generations ago. In the big scheme of things, the People were very, very far behind.

That was a little sad, really. Nothing he could do about the past though, so Vemik twitched his tail thoughtfully. “Lots for me to think about then, on the way to Ferd’s village.”

“Good idea. Any letters that need to go that way?”

Vemik trilled, “Always! Ferd’s tribe likes to write!”

“Good, good.” Professor seemed satisfied by that. “Well, you better get going. And don’t forget your sketchbook! I saw your black flower last time I was out that way.”

“Really?!”

“Yes! You’re right, very lovely. I can just see some of that purple you mentioned in the right light. Smells like clover!”

Well, that was good enough for Vemik. He gave Professor a big good-bye hug, bounded back across the village to return the knife…

…Snuck in a quick hard fucking, because Tam was right there and she wouldn’t take no for an answer…not that he would ever say no to anyone asking for it, but still…

Okay, he really had to go. He regretted nothing. Had some extra spring in his step, too!

…Did have to swing a bit faster and leap between trees a bit farther than was comfortable, though. He wanted to be back in his hut before dark, and also because he wanted to have enough time to finish his sketch of the black-flower. He’d brought Jooyun’s small sampling kit too, the one he always kept nearby just in case something new showed up. Most of the way to Ferd’s village and he saw a cluster of the black-flowers, this time low on the tree.

And then he realized: there was something only he could do, now. The other Given-Men had his respect, but none of them had been Sky-Thinker, before. His old name was gone, but his old way of thinking could still live in him. Only Yan really understood, but his Sky-Thinking was a different kind. Yan thought of sky-tribes and wars and the future.

Vemik could think of the flowers, and the soil, and the science. And could do that while he wandered, as he travelled between villages doing his duty. With the right question ringing in his skull, he finally saw the simple answer.

He trilled happily, collected his samples, and continued on his way. There was much to do.

Date Point: 18y5m3w AV

Lifting The Lockdown - Why Now?
by Ava Ríos

It’s been nearly a year since Franklin. A year without justice, and a year without Jump Arrays. For many here on Cimbrean, it’s been a year without family, and with life goals on hold. We’re a long way from Earth out here, after all, and it’s a dangerously exposed voyage by starship. Every aspect of life out here has felt the squeeze.

Take the farmers, for instance. All five of Cimbrean’s territories are founded in agriculture, both because it’s a sensible foundation for an economy, and because, well, the planet’s native ecosystem is going to die out no matter what, so we can aggressively plant Earthling crops without feeling guilty about it.

Last year’s bountiful harvest, however, is either sitting in storage waiting for a chance to finally be shipped off-world, or else was rotted down and ploughed back into the soil as fertilizer. There isn’t a single farmer on Cimbrean not squeezed by debt and loss. The same goes for the construction companies whose projects sit idle as they wait for shipments from Earth, the infrastructure projects half-finished, and we could write a whole series about the tourists and business travellers who were trapped here on Cimbrean when the Array network locked down and decided their best move was to stay permanently.

Not every Array has been idle. The zero-width wormholes for communication have been running as normal, their capacity for mass destruction being basically nil. The military and government arrays, being separate and more secure than the commercial and passenger network, helped take some of the worst pressure off…

But the fact is, it’s been a year since most people on Cimbrean had the option of leaving.

And yet, in response to this week’s announcement from the White House that President Chambliss hopes to accelerate the schedule for lifting the lockdown, the prevailing attitude among Folcthans is cautious and pessimistic. We don’t want what happened to Franklin to happen here.

Official reassurances have, of course, been given. The Folcthian array is much smaller, and not designed for industrial bulk cargo transport. The port building is itself hardened against incident and incursion, with additional measures having been taken since last year’s disaster. The coming commercial transport arrays necessary for our settlement’s economic growth will be located well outside of major populated areas, and the new arrays are supposedly unhackable.

Even so, this accelerated timetable has drawn criticism from several sectors, not all of them human. Speaking on the Morning program, professor Uthrugvugeg of the University of Folctha expressed his concerns.

“Jump Arrays by definition cause a major spacetime distortion, which must be tightly controlled if the contained volume is to arrive at its destination unaltered. The technology was not widely used before Humans adopted it out of necessity, and it is Human use that has pushed our understanding of jump travel toward new horizons. We are, in short, in uncharted territory.”

Concerns and protests notwithstanding, the new arrays are due to enter full operation this month, with regular passenger traffic to major cities in America, Europe and Australia, as well as travel to Gao. The ticket-booking systems are already swamped by Folcthans and other Cimbreaners eager to visit homes and loved ones they haven’t seen in twelve months.

President Chambliss has promised that this early release does not sacrifice safety, and will free the economies of two planets to recover.

No other Allied government has yet commented.

Date Point: 18y6m AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Fiin, Champion and Stud of Clan Stoneback

Strategic war-planning among the Big Three—himself, Grandfather Vark, and the Great Father—often started out as a muscular sort of male bonding event that could only be described as painfully Stoneback in its nature.

First, they got together, and there was a protracted brawl. The outline of what they needed to do got talked about in-between trash-talk, happy growls, and the mild-but-inevitable embarrassment of being crushed like a nava hatchling under the Great Father’s strength.

Second, they moved on to something else, usually either strength training, skills training, or functional training. Today it was the third option on a freshly reconfigured obstacle course for the Third Ring, and it was easily the hardest Fiin had ever tackled. In-between runs, they’d discuss the details. The Great Father had a knack for plain-spoken, penetrating observations, and it was rare that Fiin didn’t learn something in their exchanges, especially when it came to the fight. Vark had decades of hard-won experience to draw upon too, and sometimes it was all he could do to mentally keep up with the two of them when they were fully engaged.

At least his time through the course wasn’t behind Vark’s. Fiin wasn’t egotistical enough to believe he’d ever close in on Daar, but a Champion at least had to keep his Grandfather in his place. Or at least poised and wary on the balls of his feet. Vark was impressive and it was all Fiin could do to keep up, some days.

Thirdly, Daar said his goodbyes to go attend to his other duties, which left Fiin alone with Vark. Stonebacks got their best thinking done when happily exerted: the body could rest, their bellies could refuel and digest, and the mind could work without distraction, which was much needed in this case.

Silverfurs definitely had an advantage, there. Sometimes they positively exuded poise. Fiin weren’t the type to be jealous, but he had to admit it would be nice sometimes to just…sit down and work. So, failing that: work up a good heavy lather in his pelt. They were planning the invasion of a second Hunter planet, after all. Not an undertaking to be done while fizzing with pent-up energy. They finished the evening with some fun sprinting work until they were panting and wobbly on their paws and hungry for food.

“So, why Hell?” Fiin asked. In matters of war planning, Vark and his staff were the ones to turn to: it fell to him, as Champion of Stoneback and Marshal of the Armed Forces, to consider their recommendations.

Vark duck-nodded, and retrieved a tablet from his bag. “First, location. That system was the heart o’ their territory when the ring was there, an’ though they’ve spread out since, it’s still central to their warmaking power. Mordor’s more a kinda backwater, out on the fringe. A good beachhead, but it ain’t a stab in the heart.”

Fiin duck-nodded. “Second?”

Vark handed over the tablet. “Got some juicy intel from megalight drone fly-bys. Take a look at the atmospheric readings.”

The interestin’ thing about Hell was, it weren’t nearly as fucked as Mordor. The air on Hell was downright clean, or at least it had been before a fifty-thousand kilometer megastructure had come crashing down on it. Most of the dust in the air was just pulverized rock, not sulfur, or soot, or heavy metals.

Which made a sick kinda sense: Mordor had been an industrial center, where the Hunters drove their slaves to strip their planet of its natural resources, with no concern for the environment. Hell, though? Hell was a glorified larder, or a game reserve. And even the Hunters preferred their meat clean and healthy. The poor beings let loose down there to live without tools or culture or education were about as well looked-after as a prized, pedigree naxas herd, except the veterinarian tended to eat the sick instead o’ healin’ them.

“…Kinda fucked, but inside normal ranges,” he agreed, duck-nodding. “What about it?”

“The storms from the ring’s destruction finally died down to the point where the Hunters could land and start salvaging the big fucker. There’s a fuckuva lotta usable materials still in the big chunks o’ that thing that landed all over the planet. Useful tech, materials, you name it. An’ they’re thirsty for parts an’ pieces ‘ta keep their fleet goin’ right now.”

Vark took the tablet back, then swiped his claw across it. His lip curled in a small snarl as he noted the defenses. “…Now, it ain’t easy ‘ta assail, with that planetary shield up.”

“Don’t s’pose we got lucky or super smart an’ left any beacons in orbit?”

Vark shook his head sadly. “They found ‘em all. ‘Parently they ain’t as stealthy as we thought. Farthrow’s present an’ active too…”

Fiin could feel his tail flip thoughtfully from one side to the other. “Not easy ‘ta assail at all,” he decided. “How exactly’d we luck out an’ they ain’t got a system shield up?”

“Whitecrest thinks it’s ‘cuz they ain’t figgered out how to make ‘em, and they ain’t found any they can steal, neither…Or maybe our friend on the inside keeps popping ‘em.”

“So how’re we plannin’ ‘ta get a clawhold at all?”

“Well, ‘ya heard Daar. Any option’s on the table, if it means denyin’ the Hunters any spoils from the Ring. Brute force is an option, but…not ideal, an’ not easy. Planetary shield can take a beatin’ like almost nothin’ else.”

“Yeah. I got the not-so-subtle hint from him he’d rather avoid that…” Fiin chittered.

Vark flicked an ear. “Oh? Was that while he was smushing ‘yer head flat with his bicep?”

“After he’d proved it was in fact way bigger’n my head,” Fiin chittered, “An’ harder! Escaped his clutches, too.” He shook out his pelt. “Anyway. He wants something less…expensive.”

“He let you escape, don’t kid ‘yerself. An’ I’d prefer not ‘ta waste all our strategic weaponry on it. Or whatever th’ fuck the Humans got that saved us all in the War…”

“Agreed. So what we gotta do is think us up some kinda brilliant tail-pull an’ go back to Daar and say ‘see? We’re so smart lookit us!’ And he’ll be all ‘my bestest!’ and then he’ll crush our spines like twigs in his most biggest hug and we’ll be dead before we have to actually pull it off.”

That got Vark chittering. “A brilliant plan! Maybe we should try an’ avoid the whole ‘hugged to death’ part, though. I like my spine!”

“Well, if you insist…” Fiin chittered. “I take it you an’ your battle staff had an idea?”

“Yup. Needs some wrasslin’ ‘fore we can call it a plan, but it’s a start.”

“Expected nothin’ less. Let’s hear it.”

“Whitecrest and One-Fang have been busy lil’ guys with their surveillance an’ whatnot. They think the Hunters have fortified the planet itself damn well, so a direct assault ain’t gonna work even if we ain’t worryin’ ‘bout the planetary shield. Thing is, though? There’s still a lotta traffic flowin’ to an’ from the surface.”

“Orbital lift is a long an’ thin line o’ communication…” Fiin thumped his tail, as he caught the thread. “But they’re still behind the shield, so how does that help us?”

“They’re jumpin’ ships in an’ outta the shield all the time. Every jump out, a correspondin’ jump in. An’ from what the drones see, prob’ly got some arrays down on the surface, too. But it ain’t all goin’ ‘ta one place. Looks like instead o’ one big central hive, they’re scatterin’ it all over th’ place. Learned their lesson there.”

“I don’t think I like where this is goin’.”

Vark flicked an ear, acknowledging that caution, but forged ahead. “Ultimately we need to get something inside that bubble, or we need to smash a planetary shield. I don’t think we can do that without the Human’s big Keeda trick, an’ I don’t think they wanna use it again. They only used it that one time when it was that or lose Gao.”

“‘Kay. So the tail-pull here is, somehow, findin’ a way to sneak in,” Fiin duck-nodded.

“Exactly. An’ all that salvage traffic is our best bet. They’re cartin’ a lot o’ salvaged material off Hell every day, and cartin’ a lot o’ supplies an’ equipment onto Hell goin’ the other way. Each such shipment is a weak point.”

“So…stick a beacon on ‘em? Somethin’ like that? How wouldn’t they notice?”

“Does a superfreighter notice a barnacle? Does a trash barge notice the vermin?” Vark swiped to a new slide, and showed Fiin the estimated traffic numbers and a day’s worth of surveillance. Over the sped-up course of that day, ships swarmed in and out of the planet’s atmosphere like angry insects. “This is a big operation, Champion, an’ Hunters don’t deign to manual labor. Their shipbreaker yard on the ring was totally automated, if you recall.”

“Hmm…” Fiin’s tail was thumping hard, now. “Tall order, even so. An’ risky. Can’t let ‘em figger it out. An’ it sounds like we need some superscience spy-toys on our side.”

“Yup. But what maybe ain’t so tall is if we can use the shipments to infiltrate. JETS, Whitecrest, somebody discreet an’ sneaky. If they can get on-world, take out the Farthrow, deploy beacons an’ Arrays…”

“Some big ‘ifs’ there.” Fiin scratched the shaggy fur at his elbow. “But we’ve done that sorta sneaky before…an’ I sure as shit don’t have a better idea.”

Vark rumbled, and put the tablet away. “Like I said. Needs a lotta massagin’ ‘fore we got us an actual mission I’d be willin’ ‘ta commit some’a our best an’ most valuable men to. But it’s a crack in their armor, yijao? Somethin’ we can get our claws into.”

Fiin duck-nodded. “An’ somethin’ we can start with. Get ‘yer staff to plannin’ while I shop it around with the Champions. Gonna need buy-in.”

“An’ the Great Father’s gonna need Human buy-in, too.”

“They’ll be full’a good ideas. Or they’ll shoot it down. Either way, yeah. Definitely want ‘em involved. Make sure SOR’s leadership is involved too. Ain’t no way this ain’t gonna happen without ‘em.”

“Yessir. Best git goin’ then.”

They hugged goodbye and gave each other a fond sniff, and parted ways. They had work to do.

Date Point: 18y6m AV
Planet Akyawentuo

Vemik Given-Man

There was something extra sky-magic about the jump array. Vemik never stopped finding it hard to believe such a thing was real, no matter how many times he used it.

He knew the idea, or at least he knew the idea as Jooyun and Professor Daniel had shaped it for him. It was a head-bending thought, the idea that you could bend and twist the whole of everything so that “there” and “here” briefly became the same place, then swapped. But then again, it was a head-bending thought to think that light behaved in two different ways at once, and he’d seen the evidence of that with his own eyes.

Right now, he was helping swap out the stand-offs that sat under the platform, which held up the incoming deck. Every time the array “fired” a tiny bit of the stand-off legs was burned away, and eventually they had to be replaced with new ones. They had to go in exactly the right place and be lined up perfectly so the platform could fall exactly into place.

It was satisfying work! There were measurements, and a laser, and big, heavy bolts. Bolts which had rusted stuck like steel would do if left unpolished too long in the hot, humid air.

Daniel couldn’t budge the bolts, even with a long wrench. Vemik could, with a little effort, undo them with just his thumb and finger. That had impressed Daniel! But, the wrench was faster, and there were a hand of hands of stand-offs to replace, each with their own hand of bolts reaching deep into the heavy iron plate that sat under the array’s working volume. Besides: there was something really fun about twisting them easily loose with the wrench anyway.

Loor and Yan were content to sit and give old-man advice, and tease.

“Been a Given-Man barely a hand of moons, already he’s going wandering…” Loor had found a juicy handful of berries, which he was sharing out.

“Taking care of something important,” Vemik retorted, evenly. The next bolt came loose with a satisfying tungggg! The Humans who had installed them used a loud power tool to torque them enough, but Vemik didn’t need that; he had an “old-fashioned” mechanical torque wrench in the toolkit, which they swore was more than strong enough for the job.

“It’s quite a Giving,” Daniel lifted the heavy stand-off out and tossed it into the pile they’d already replaced. “Artefacts like Vemik’s books are very valuable. You mark my words, there’ll be people on Earth who spend their whole lives studying them.”

Vemik looked up and frowned. “Why? They can just ask us for more. More to life than books!”

Daniel wiped his hands clean and hefted a new stand-off from the pallet. “There’s a town on Earth. Pompeii. Nobody’s lived there in, oh, about two thousand years. A volcano buried it under ash, and everyone died,” he said, and grunted as he pushed the new part into its slot. It clicked, and he grabbed the laser to make sure it was right. “There are dozens of people whose entire career is devoted to digging it up and learning from it. That probably sounds alien, but it’s surprising how much good can come from one person’s life spent studying something small in more detail than anybody else ever did.”

Yan rumbled and sat up: he’d been lying on his back, basking in the sun. “Like what?”

“Well, the skills and techniques that came from studying Pompeii helped us figure out many things about your people. But then again…” Daniel paused to frown at the laser, then nodded and set it aside again. “…Then again, there’s a simple, wholesome kind of good in just knowing things for the sake of knowing them. Not everything has to be useful.”

“You’re right. Very alien.” Loor’s tone was disapproving, but he still held out a hand to offer Daniel a berry.

“Abstract knowledge—sky-thinking—is what got your people vaccines, built this array, the ship that brought us in the first place, the means to defend yourself, and what lets Ferd jump down from above the sky to smite his enemies. Don’t be so quick to dismiss a chance to learn. You never know what little thing it will teach you, or where that little thing may flower.”

“Butterflies!” Vemik hooted. “Little insect in the forest flaps its wings, and the storm rolls north to miss the village, or maybe doesn’t happen at all. Small things turn into big things, with time.”

“Hmm.” Loor was probably the least sky-thinking sort of man Vemik had ever known. He ate another few berries, then shrugged. “Fine. It’s important. And if Humans see it as a Giving, that’s good. We owe you much. Not for me to tell you if you like the Giving or not. Just for me to watch your tribe while you’re gone.”

“I won’t be long,” Vemik promised. The next bolt was stuck hard. He slapped the wrench with his palm and it came loose with a crack! “Hand or two of days, maybe. I’ll bring you something!”

“They have good food in Nooyawk?” Ferd asked.

“Famous for it,” Daniel chuckled. “Bagels, pizza, hot dogs, cheesecake…”

Vemik had tried all of those, and liked pizza the best. Or maybe hot dogs! Bagels were tasty too, but they made him fart way too hard, so he wasn’t going to inflict that on Loor’s tribe. The big man was stinky enough already!

“Personally, I’m partial to a BEC,” Daniel added, then sat back looking suddenly distant. “…Oh, God, I haven’t had one of those in years…”

“I’ll bring you some back!” Vemik promised. “Got a stasis box! Fresh and hot!”

“You’re an unlikely angel, Vemik.”

They finished swapping out the stand-offs half an hour before the jump was supposed to happen, then replaced the four guiding pads on the array’s sides. Those were big and heavy enough that not even Vemik could comfortably hold them in place while torquing down bolts. Setting up the crane would take too long, so Yan eventually had to stop lazing about in the sun and help. With three Given-Men helping, the job of putting the platform back, then all the things back on top of the platform went quickly.

Vemik found a spot to sit among the boxes and stuff, checked he had everything and, satisfied that he did, waited. That was getting easier, finally. Or maybe it was just that he was waiting with a purpose. Either way, it was the first time in a while he’d sat and done nothing much without feeling the Fire drive him to leap up and do instead.

He didn’t have to sit for long, though. The warning pips from the control box, telling him in English and his own words to stand clear of the dangerous field edge, a countdown, he waved farewell—

Thump.

The sensation of less gravity was always a bit strange, but the tastes on the air were familiar. Less busy, now. Before, the Array station had tasted full of Humans and Gao and other aliens, and food and things coming and going. Now, it was quiet, and the air didn’t have so much on it. Still…it was a place he knew well. He hopped off the stack of boxes, picked up his own luggage, and headed for the booth where his papers and stuff would be checked.

After that…a day or two of waiting. The jumps were slow, careful things now. He’d get to New York on their schedule, not his. Nothing he could do about that. But he could spend time with his friends.

He was looking forward to that.

Date Point: 18y6m AV
Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Earth

Six

Six was their little cell’s “tech guy,” the wizard who ensured they could discuss matters unguardedly on their private, encrypted app. It was a natural role for a data sophont, really, albeit hideously constrained compared to the closest equivalent activity in dataspace. Human electronics were so…dumb. Breathtakingly clever and intricate, but everything was ultimately just a stupid flow of inputs and outputs. The inventiveness came in achieving the desired result elegantly.

Some lingering ghost of Allen’s long-suppressed psyche found the meticulous work enjoyable. To Six, it was routine. He’d set up such private communications many times, on many worlds, while hiding among many species. Earth and the Humans were, he reminded himself, merely the most recent of his foes.

Albeit by far the most vexing and tenacious. So it was gratifying that things were, against his expectations, going well.

[11:47:26] ANG6 > You got it?

[11:49:54] Grace > I sure did! As requested, one two-month timetable for every jump between the USA and Cimbrean, complete with interstellar timing adjustment. DOTJAschedCIM70204.csv [11:50:57] Grace > If only I could provide you with the beacon keys. Are you sure this is enough? The lockdown’s lasted a year, and they’ve made a big show of how much more secure the arrays will be after the security upgrades…

[11:50:59] ANG6 > I’ll worry about that.
[11:51:01] ANG6 > The sidereal adjustment is the crucial part.

[11:51:35] Handler > Good work. I see two jumps that look especially promising, Folctha/Grand Central.

[11:51:40] ANG6 > Think you can work with those?

[11:52:50] Handler > Not enough time for the first one. Timing tight for the second, but doable if we don’t care about getting out again.

[11:53:21] Paul > I’m fine with that.

[11:53:30] ANG6 > You are?

[11:53:33] Handler > Aren’t you?
[11:53:35] Handler > When they catch me—and they will, eventually—I’ll disappear into a boring gray hole somewhere and never see the sky again. No thanks.
[11:53:44] Handler > The same goes for all of you, btw.

[11:54:17] Paul > Assuming they don’t just kill us, like they did to Ross.

Six sat back and considered that for a moment. He’d been operating off the assumption that Handler would have an escape planned out. He’d successfully smuggled big and dangerous pawns off-planet when the heat was on before, after all.

But really, from Six’s perspective, the idea that this might be a one-way trip for all involved was…neater. He could transfer out of Allen, find a new host, observe the results of his handiwork, and of course the host and the telltale implants in his brain would be entirely incinerated. It was good cover. Doubly good, if none of the people he was now talking with would survive to share their suspicions in interrogation.

And, of course, there was plenty of precedent in his long experience that when well-motivated agents were more concerned with achieving their objective than with surviving the mission, the odds of success increased.

[11:54:27] ANG6 > Good point.
[11:54:29] ANG6 > Fuck it. Blaze of glory. Works for me.

In more ways than one.

[11:55:29] Handler > See you in New York, then.
[11:55:36] Handler > We’ll give them something to remember us by.

Date Point: 18y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang

Tristan had a date, and Xiù couldn’t decide whose reaction to that was funnier.

Ramsey was trying hard to be happy for his brother and stuff, but it was pretty clear that he thought of himself as the one the girls wanted, and his pride was a little bruised. His own love interest was playing hard to get, apparently. Or just not interested, but too nice to actually come out and say it. Either way, “losing” this particular race to his slightly geekier twin clearly put him out a bit, though he was trying to be cool.

Allison was being more of a big sister than a guardian over the whole thing. She clearly thought it was both adorable and hilarious, and was teasing her brothers mercilessly. Probably not the right way to go about it, here, but teasing was Allison’s love language, really…

Julian was making Grumbly Fatherly Noises toward Allison, which seemed to restrain her a bit. Which was extra strange, since he was easily being the most teasable of the lot. For a change, he was dressed normally in an actually-modest billion-XL black t-shirt and some cargo shorts, and had waved a brush in the general direction of his hair before tying it back.

He’d at first tried to dress up a bit, probably in a bid to soften some of the Hulk-Tarzan cover model vibe he radiated, but of course he’d failed in the attempt. Even on the day they met he was a too-handsome, massive, shockingly strong man, and nowadays he was well into Beef Bro territory with no signs of slowing down. “Blending in” just wasn’t happening. He was still too damn good-looking and much too heroically well put-together to ever pull that off. Clothes make the man after all, so put something well-tailored on Julian, and…

So, after making a go at a sports coat and slacks, he grumbled a bit and went back to his simple cargo shorts and a t-shirt, but this time with sandals. They did help, a little…

He was, in short, trying not to outshine Tristan, and trying not to look like he was. Which had Xiù fending off giggles, because any girl interested in Tristan over Ramsey would probably find Julian far too much, especially if he kept his mouth shut.

And to put a bow on top of the whole thing, when the girl in question—Saffron—arrived, she was clearly most star-struck by Xiù herself. Rather than bruise Julian’s ego, it seemed to amuse him to no end, so he said his Dadly Things to Saffron, did his Fatherly Best to mildly embarrass Tristan before his big date…

Then shot a Meaningful Boy-Language Look at Ramsey. He nodded, and they headed downstairs to do whatever it was that slightly chagrined boys did when there were girls about. Tristan and Saffron took a Johnny Cab to their date at the Wallside a few minutes thereafter, leaving Al and Xiù to sit down, look at each other…and laugh.

Allison shook her head fondly once they’d had a good giggle. “God…was I ever that awkward?”

“I don’t know,” Xiù said. “Were you?”

“Fuck, I don’t know. I was younger than they are now when I had Alex…” Al sighed and relaxed into her chair.

“I can sympathize a bit,” Xiù recalled. “I remember feeling a lot like they were acting when I first met Julian.”

“Yeah, you missed out on one of the more fun bits of high school, for sure.” Al chuckled softly. “I kinda envy them. They’ve got their shit together more than we ever did.”

“I had my shit together just fine!” Xiù protested. “My parents just never would have let me date anyone so I didn’t bother trying!”

“Fine, fine. More than I ever did…” Al waved a placating hand, then aimed a fond smile at the door. “…Guess that means we’re doing something right though, huh? If they get to meet girls and go on dates and stuff. A normal life.”

“Normal? No. We’ll never be normal. But a good life?” Xiù smiled, and didn’t quite get to finish her thought: Julian’s forgotten phone migrated an inch across the table as it buzzed, and played a ringtone he’d set for a very special caller.

♪Now I’m the king of the swingers, oh, the jungle VIP! I’ve reached the top and had to stop and that’s what botherin’ me…♫

Oh dear…

“Um, is the array back to normal service?”

“Not normal, but special access links like Akyawentuo are back…” Al grinned at the phone. “You gonna answer that?”

“You get it.”

Al grinned wider, picked the phone up, and swiped to answer. “Hello—” she had to hold the phone away from her ear. “Yes Vemik, I can hear you. You don’t have to shout into it…yes, you can come visit…well, actually we’ve got our friends in so you’ll need to sleep on the floor, do you mind? Didn’t think so. Can you bring us some eggs on the way in?…Yes, we can weld tonight, if you want….Okay. See you soon.”

“Oh, no,” Xiù groaned as Al hung up. “I don’t wanna cook for him too…”

“Fuck it, then. We’ll get takeaway, throw a little party, introduce him to Lewis and Lucy. Whaddya say?”

That sounded good, and Xiù said so with a smile. “I like it.”

“Best Brioche, or Ninja Taco?”

“You have to ask?”

“Ninja Taco it is!” Allison hopped to her feet. “I’ll go get the boys. You okay to watch the little ones ‘til we’re back?”

Xiù grinned: Anna and Harrison were in bed, both asleep after several repetitions of The Gruffalo, and they were pretty good at the whole sleeping thing. The two baby monitors on the kitchen shelf were dark and silent. “Giving me the easy job? You do love me!”

“‘Course I do!” Allison grinned back at her, and vanished into the basement.

Xiù grabbed her tablet and checked her emails. With the jump arrays coming back online, she and the other property developers around Folctha were looking to the future. One thing they all agreed on: they wanted to resurrect Franklin, and that was never going to happen unless people were immigrating. After an uncertain year, she was optimistic. There was a lot of fretting, lots of people worrying that it was too soon, that the security couldn’t possibly be ready.

To Xiù, that wasn’t such a big deal. If there was one thing she’d learned in life, it was that there was always risk, even mortal danger, no matter what you did. But it only beat you if you let it, if it stopped you.

Let the arrays reopen. They’d be ready. No matter what happened.

Date Point: 18y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Leela, purveyor of quality tacos

Leela was used to big customers. The most biggest, even. Even still, sometimes they could be a bit much to handle. Or, at least, their orders could be somewhat overwhelming.

Fortunately, her stores were vast and her spatulas mighty. She could handle it.

Ordering for the horde of hulking heroes (and a few more modestly-proportioned friends) was Julian, who had for once, in a breathtaking display of modesty, opted for an enormous and properly-fitting black t-shirt, appropriate cargo shorts, and an actual pair of sandals.

Clearly, today was a special day.

“A Shinobi Dozen for me—the one off the HEAT’s menu, please. One each for Ferd and Vemik, too. You want an order, babe?”

“Pickles from the Gaoian menu on mine!” Allison waved eagerly. Leela gave her a pleased pant-grin—she was proud of her pickles.

“Weirdo,” Julian teased, which earned him a gentle backhanded slap on his shoulder.

“Xiù will want them too, remember.”

“Right, right, so, another order with pickles…actually, pickles on mine too. Anything else?”

“Dude.” A lean, slim man (as Humans went) with long but thinning hair peered around the corner, his entirely reasonably sized arms crossed over his chest. Somehow, that one word and his Quirked Eyebrow served to convey much meaning.

“Oh! Right. And a regular Shinobi Dozen for Lewis and Lucy, too.”

“No pickles on ours, please,” the tall and well-built woman beside him—Lucy, presumably—shot Allison an amused look.

“Right on. And a diet coke.”

“…Is this a dozen each?” Lucy seemed concerned.

“Nah. These aren’t small tacos. One order for you two together, trust me.”

“Right, so three Shinobi Dozens, HEAT special and one with my pickles. Two regular dozens, one with pickles, one with a diet coke…” Leela summarized. “Any other drinks?”

“Uh, yeah, some water,” Julian tapped his phone to Leela’s, both phones pinged merrily. “And I’ll be paying for theirs, too.” He gestured to the second group, waiting in line behind him.

“Okay!” Leela chirped. “Have a seat, I’ll bring it all out when it’s ready.”

She plucked the marinating meat out of its tubs and straight onto the griddle plate, and grinned at the two Ten’Gewek as their tongues flickered in her direction—a Gaoian or Human would have been sniffing the air appreciatively.

How good were their tongues, she wondered? She had a pretty good idea of what a human could smell, and Humans were in a weird position: Their noses were objectively pretty good, really. Certainly way better than any Corti, Guvnurag, Rickytick or whatever, and there were a pawful of scents they were actually even more sensitive to than a Gaoian….but subconsciously. Most of their sense of smell seemed to bypass their awareness entirely and get plugged straight into instinct and memory.

That was part of Leela’s success. She’d figured out which scents yanked on their hungry heartstrings the hardest, and ensured her stall was always shrouded in them.

That was the thing about Humans: they walked around in clouds of pheromones and didn’t notice, but all it took was the faintest trace of some smells, and their mood could alter dramatically. It worked the other way, too: Humans trailed their emotions in the air behind them as they walked, and to a sensitive nonhuman nose (or tongue, possibly) Folctha was an emotional cacophony right now. The lockdown was lifting, and the evening breeze, behind the omnipresent future of rain, carried the chemical signs of hope, worry, stress, delight, and more.

…Lots of hope, among the ones now taking their food and going. But of course they were hopeful. They were having a good time! They were among friends, and their friends mattered. They were Important, they were at the top of the heap. Physically, mentally, socially and economically, the people she’d just served tacos to had every reason to be full of hope and confidence. They’d yet to meet a challenge they couldn’t overcome.

Others weren’t yet so proven.

“Um…Could we get a…Yeah, a Koga sharing platter?”

Definitely on a date. Cute too, by human standards. As dapper as a goldpaw, but not as soft, he smelled like Allison Buehler. A close relative, definitely. But he didn’t smell of confidence, yet. He smelled young and nervous, almost terrified of his date’s disapproval, frantic to get it right.

So. A male on his first consequential encounter with a female! It was adorable. And the girl with him clearly thought so too, Leela could see she was really enjoying herself. She threw in some extra sauce packets, paid him a small compliment and watched it buoy him, and chittered softly to herself as they walked away.

Most of Folctha’s people were like him, really. Good lives with something important in them, some cause for concern. Something they wanted to gain, or already had and feared losing. Most of the conversations that drifted past her through the evening were ordinary: business, family matters, movies and games. But the standouts…those were always interesting.

“You’ve seriously never had a taco?”

“When in my life have I had the chance?”

“I dunno, I just figured anyone who drinks in Human pop culture like you would have tried out the food…evening, love. I’ll have a Scorpion’s Fire meal with a Sprite, and my friends here are obligate herbivores.”

This man was a different kind to the rest. For a start, his friends were all nonhuman. A trio of Gaoians—Leela perked up and traded friendly waves with Leemu—plus a Kwmbwrw, a huge tattooed Mjrnhrm and a Robalin of all things. Leela had never actually met anyone from either species before.

The eye, though. The eye was different. Clearly a prosthetic of some kind, black all the way across with a grinning white Human skull instead of a pupil and iris. A little well-healed scarring down the side of his head too, which considering the capabilities of modern regenerative medicine…

He wasn’t an athletic giant like Julian and friends, not that anyone really was. Nor was he small and inoffensive; he was still quite big and obviously quite capable by any standard, Human especially. No. Instead of smelling of friendliness and welcome like the other man, somehow this one, in a quiet, almost unassuming way…

…Absolutely radiated danger. Though at the moment, he didn’t seem particularly inclined to do anything but eat.

“I can do herbivorous,” she told him. “Spicy or sweet?”

“Sweet for me!” The Robalin spoke English with a musical bubble. The dozens of badges and pins on her jacket rattled as she waved.

“Spice of life, for variety,” the Mjrnhrm buzzed as if he’d just made some kind of joke.

The Kwmbwrw in the well-patched overalls peered at the menu board a moment longer. “Ah…sweet, please.”

“Right, right. Oi! Bruuk, Gorku!! What do you two big fuckers want?”

They were a bit too raptly engaged with Leemu, interestingly, and didn’t notice right away.

“…Eh. They’re brownies, I think you can guess.”

“Two Hungry Keeda specials for the big guys, extra anchovies on Gorku’s and a Suave’n’Sneaky with extra Nava for Leemu,” Leela chittered. “I know their orders well.”

“Pukka. Cheers, love.”

She couldn’t place the particular Britishisms he was using, yet somehow…she knew what they were.

Weird.

Making up the orders took a while. She brought them out in waves, and in-between prepping, griddling, topping and packaging her wares, she eavesdropped in on their conversations.

With Julian and his (rather large) group, they’d mostly talked about Vemik’s upcoming trip to Earth, the state of the jump array, mused on security and whether there’d be another attack…The skull-eye and his cohort schemed in very loose terms about their own travel. They were a ship crew, she gathered. A freighter. That didn’t fit, somehow, but okay. She knew enough about the kinds of people who trafficked through Folctha to not scratch at that, and she also knew enough that her curiosity decided she didn’t want to know anymore.

Bruuk—the squat brick of a brownfur, who had given her a fetching and slightly nervous ear-flick when they arrived—was apparently among their crew. That didn’t matter at the moment because he and Gorku were still listening raptly to Leemu, who was telling them about a recent adventure to do some ship repairs on-orbit. Leemu hadn’t let his certifications expire, apparently.

“Yeah, it was super weird, yijao? Human freighter named the Mostly Harmless—”

“They named it that?”

“Our own Great Father has the ‘Drunker on Turkeyer’ and the ‘Silent But Deadly’ under his personal registration, so…” Leemu chittered. “Anyway! The Humans are up to something sneaky I bet. They wanted another five gigawatts of onboard generation!”

Gorku, not being an electrical engineer apparently, furrowed his brow. “I take it ‘das a lotta voom?”

“It’s an absurd amount of voom,” Bruuk chittered. She hadn’t had much chance to socialize with him yet, as he was far too devoted to things other than tacos lately. Too bad, really. She normally didn’t go in for brownfurs because…well. The memories were still a bit raw. But Bruuk? Somehow he didn’t trigger that in her. It wasn’t just because he was short for a brownie, either.

Hmm. She flicked her ears, considering. Then she remembered her tacos and got back to work.

“Mining ship?” He offered, “or something like that?”

“Could be? I know Hephaestus moved over to using field-based mining instead of conventional demolition, and the power draw on a cutting field is huge…”

“Cimbrean’s a largely undeveloped system, outside of this planet’s shields,” the Robalin said. “A mining ship would make sense! Especially now.”

“Now?” The Kwmbwrw asked. “They’re finally lifting that lockdown, aren’t they?”

“Not completely! Big commercial transport is still a few years out, I bet. And even then, it’s probably a good idea for planets to be self-sufficient, isn’t it?” She nibbled on her taco, then made a frustrated noise. “..Ugh, how am I supposed to eat these without them falling apart everywhere?”

“Like this!” Gorku opened wide and bit off a third of his with the satisfying cronch that Leela personally considered to be the best part of the taco experience.

“Yeah, okay, but I think you’re forgetting how my mouthparts don’t work that way…”

“Here.” The Human with the eye handed over one of the plastic sharing platter trays. “Tacos are kinda meant to be a little messy.”

“Mmf-hmmf!” Gorku agreed, enthusiastically. “‘Course, that ain’t the only weird thing Leemu’s seen in orbit lately…” Leela decided she liked Gorku, too. Somehow, despite his Stoneback training, he just couldn’t seem threatening to her, even despite his size.

The young couple were the last to get their order, and lingered long after the Brutes had conspired about their travels, and the Crew had lightly pondered the odd goings-on above them. Julian had clapped the young man on the shoulder before he left, exchanged some kind words, and wandered off with his friends. Both groups were heading toward the park.

The young couple stayed for ice cream, lost in a conspiracy of little shared secrets, as human couples seemed so often to do.

For Leela, it marked a chance to stop, take stock, and realize that she’d used most of her supplies for the night. Barring a Suddenly Daar Event (unlikely, but always possible) she had enough to see her through to closing, but she was definitely sitting on a tidily profitable night.

She started to clean up. Life was never dull in Folctha, especially not to a gal with sharp ears and a sharper nose and an interest in the unique beings who called the town home. It had been a slower year, since the lockdown, and Keeda only knew what was coming when people could start freely travelling again. Perhaps she’d lose some regular customers. Perhaps she’d gain some new ones!

She certainly wasn’t going anywhere. She was exactly where she wanted to be.

__

Date Point: 18y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Vemik Given-Man

Vemik was getting an education on the many uses of the word “dude.” Loo-wiss used it all the time and meant many different things by it. Jooyun sorta had the same thing in “fella” but he only ever used it to refer to people. Loo-wiss used it to replace entire ideas, like Heff used “fuck” to mean anything and everything at all.

Humans were weird.

“So…dude, okay, so the problem is, just ‘cuz the Hierarchy are our enemy, doesn’t mean they’re actually necessarily wrong, right? Like, motherfuckers can be motherfuckers and still have a point that, like, maybe doesn’t justify the motherfuckery, but it does explain it, right?”

Vemik was listening to Loo-wiss and Jooyun talk about the Big Enemy, a little after they’d had their morning bout of exercise and his older kids had gone off to school. It wasn’t much but it was enough to keep the Fire at bay…and maybe help keep Vemik’s eyes off Loo-see, too. He didn’t know if Loo-wiss would be happy about that, yet.

Or wanted to play, too! Which…too skinny. But he wasn’t a soft-bodied or ugly man, either…

“Is there ever a justification for genocide, though?”

“Dude. If you accept as, like, a basic fuckin’ principle that not all evils are equal, then, yeah, if there’s somethin’ worse than genocide out there, and if the only way to avert it is genocide, then you fuckin’ genocide, for sure. The existence of a greater evil makes the lesser evil necessary.”

Loo-wiss swigged his drink, then set it down. It was funny: he clearly didn’t much like exercise, or at least he only did it mostly because it was a good idea. So while he didn’t much want to wrassle, he did want to talk about thoughts and ideas until somebody begged him to shut up.

Not that Vemik was going to.

“Now, what Hotel claim is, there’s whole galaxies out there where, like, the superweapons could be seen from here. And they reckon the cause of that is overcrowding with huge, old species who just keep on goin’ forever, achieve super-future-tech, and then when some war breaks out—and war always breaks out, ‘cuz that’s the nature of livin’ things—it just goes wildly out of control and prob’ly the species involved wipe each other out and take a whole buncha others with ‘em. But that’s only half the problem.”

“What’s the other half?”

“I did the math once. You know how long it woulda taken good ol’ Sanctuary to reach Andromeda?”

Jooyun shook his head.

“Five years, my dude. Give or take a week.” Lewis looked grim. “An’ you know what? Once we get one ship or probe over there with a jump beacon? Travel time drops to zero. So, what’s stoppin’ some extragalactic mega-empire from lookin’ our way and thinking ’hey, that spiral galaxy over there looks nice and juicy. It is time for them to bow before the magnificence of Emperor Zarg’ or whatever?”

“I thought there were major obstacles to intergalactic travel?”

“There are obstacles, sure. Can’t degauss out there, that’s the big one. Nothin’ out there to ground your hull charge on. But I came up with the solution to that problem over my fuckin’ breakfast a while back. You just fly out as far as you can, drop a beacon, jump home, discharge, resupply. Jump back to the beacon, fly out further, drop another one, repeat, repeat, repeat, pop pop pop.”

“Presumably the intergalactic medium has less ionized gas to build up a charge against in the first place,” Jooyun said. Vemik didn’t know exactly what that meant but he’d ask Professor later.

“That too. So, y’know, the point is, intergalactic travel is entirely doable, dude…so why isn’t it happening? How come the Dominion hasn’t once received an extragalactic envoy?” Lewis tilted his head. “…I think the Hierarchy might have somethin’ to do with it. They ain’t ever claimed it, but for all we know, they’ve been keepin’ this galaxy safe from outside attention for millions of years.”

“And now we’re tearing them down,” Jooyun mused, his brow furrowing.

“Can’t blame us, dude, it’s that or die.”

“But you said it yourself, the existence of a greater evil justifies the lesser. Devil’s advocate for a second here, but what if the lesser evil is for us to die?”

“You wanna say that with your kids in the room, dude?” Loo-wiss challenged him.

Ramsey, who’d been watching the conversation with about the same expression Vemik guessed he was wearing himself, snorted. “Please. We beat each other up every night.”

“Be careful, buddy. Ramsey’s been winning medals! I bet he could tie you into a pretzel…”

“Heh…well, okay. What if it ain’t the lesser evil?” Loo-wiss retorted. “We don’t know either way, dude. And hell, I could be dead fuckin’ wrong and the reason we ain’t ever seen visitors from Andromeda or wherever is ‘cuz intergalactic space is ‘dead’ somehow and warp drives just don’t work out there, or some other reason I didn’t think of. We ain’t come to the end of physics yet, not by a long way. And it’s not like we can justify starting up the, like, decade-long project to find out right now anyhow. All we can go on is what we do know. And, sure, I worry my ass off about like, Von Neumann swarms and extragalactic space empires and, I dunno, precursor civilizations lurking in stasis tombs on Mars, or a hungry hive mind comin’ to eat us all or whatever, ‘cuz somebody has to, but you can’t deal with all the stuff that could be can you?”

“Why do you have to worry about it, then?” Ramsey asked.

“Sky-thinking,” Vemik rumbled. “Never know what good things come from sky-thinking. A lot of times you think wrong, you imagine things that aren’t true, or are impossible. I never thought about enemies and friends from above the sky, but thinking about other things helped me when we met Jooyun and Awisun. Might have gone bad otherwise.”

Lewis nodded animatedly and gestured approvingly toward Vemik. “Sky-thinking. Good name for it. What good does thinking about the sky do? Not a whole lot to the guy hunting in the woods, but give it a few thousand years and along come the Wright brothers.”

Loo-wiss was talkative. Smart too, but if left alone he’d just go on about whatever he wanted. Vemik could see why Loo-see liked him too, despite that she was obviously not much like him; she was bigger and stronger than he was, Vemik could tell just by looking…

…He needed not to look. That was rude, until he knew if they wanted to play.

“Is how you deal with…what was the term…?” Vemik twitched his tail as he tried to remember. “…outside context problem?”

“Dude.” Loo-wiss gave him the biggest, most approving grin. “Exactly! Like, yeah, you’re never gonna imagine exactly what’s gonna land in your lap, but that doesn’t matter ‘cuz the more you think, the more you broaden your context!”

“But if there’s nothing you can do about stuff until it actually happens…” Ramsey pressed.

“Then at least you can keep yourself fit and sharp, dude.”

“Ohh! Kinda like all this!” Ramsey gestured to the weights.

“Exactly!”

“You should always get good and strong,” Vemik intoned, “because life is hard if you’re weak.”

Loo-see and Loo-wiss exchanged a Look that Vemik understood instantly. They looked at him too, she grinned…

Hmm! Still. He’d best be polite. Loo-wiss seemed like a good friend to have.

Jooyun grinned, too. He wasn’t blind. Neither was Ramsey, who rolled his eyes but said nothing. The only one who didn’t seem to notice was Loo-wiss…

Right. Vemik was thinking with his cock again. “Anyway, I want to go to the art store today, buy more supplies! But first we help Shyow clean up and put away things upstairs, yes?”

“Right, yeah. Can’t talk forever…” Loo-wiss chuckled sadly, and stood up. “But hey, man, you gotta tell me the story of how you came up with the idea for the bow and arrow sometime. That’s a fuckin’ leap right there.”

Vemik preened a bit, and smiled his happiest smile before he knew what he was doing. “Okay! But first we be good guests. Come with me to art store! I need drafting things too.”

“Right on.”

Vemik hooted happily and bounded up the stairs, remembering himself just in time as he reached the ground floor. Jooyun’s house was built good and strong and the basement stairs were steel-beamed, but Vemik was a strong and big Given-Man now. He’s grown broader and quite a bit thicker, but his weight had grown much, much faster. Was still growing. It had more than doubled so far, way bigger than Jooyun! He needed to be careful not to put his feet through the floor with a careless bounce. No problem! If Jooyun and friends could soft-foot upstairs, so could Vemik!

Absolutely no breaking stuff. That was not good guest-ing.

Still, he was eager to move fast, get his guesting done quickly. He wanted more talking, more Human sky-thinking! And maybe some fun later, if he was lucky, but that was only a maybe.

Either way…this trip wasn’t boring so far.

Date Point: 18y6m2d AV
Salvage operation, planet Hell

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

Success never went unpunished.

The Alpha knew perfectly well that it had, in fact, been rewarded, at least by the curious understanding of Builders. It had fed them much useful knowledge, engaged Human-Alphas directly and lived to return valuable insights. The Alpha-of-Alphas had been greatly pleased with such trophies, and the Flensing-Brood now held a position of high favor. Why else would they be granted the privilege of breeding? Or of roaming freely on what had once been the great hunting-world.

The Alpha cared little for open skies and hunting opportunities on a blasted, storm-scoured rock littered with the smashed wreckage of the old Hive. Jagged cities of wreckage jutted from the ground, silent monuments to the Builders’ hubris.

It knew, strategically, just how important that wreckage was to the Broods. The refined materials, intact parts and other treasures buried in those shards of the Hive were a lifeline keeping the Swarm-of-Swarms from starving. It knew that, for now, the Broods must reduce themselves to scavenging and cannibalism or else wither and die entirely. It knew that its brood was doing important work in protecting the salvage operation and that the Alpha-of-Alphas must value it personally to a high degree, to grant it such an important role.

But the taste of Human blood in its mouth was now a fading memory. It itched with longing for another chance to hunt real prey.

Slaves were not prey; slaves were mere sustenance, and the ones working the salvage yards had lost all will to fight a long time ago. They simply cringed and cowered when one of their number was fed upon, and worked diligently in hopes that anonymity would save them. In this they were clever—a slave that did not stand out from its peers, did not attract attention to itself and thus lived to see another day. But it made them dull. They lacked, vitality, fight, flavor.

To any right-thinking Eater, they were a bland ration and nothing more. So bland that even in its listless mood, the Alpha could not summon the energy to slaughter one: it would just have to eat the hapless thing, and it simply wasn’t hungry for such pathetic fare.

Perhaps that lack of stimulation was why it started, after a while, to think almost like it imagined the Builders must.

The rail network had a pulse to it. The great pulling machines never transited through the jump arrays themselves, but instead pulled and pushed like great steel muscles, shunting cars full of salvage into place, then hauling off the returning empties and supply shipments. Each huge, black thump as the array fired was a heartbeat, and that was an inroads to examine the whole affair as an organism.

Yes. A large Hunter, feeding on a corpse. Blood pumping, teeth slicing, maw gulping, claws rending, belly digesting. And the Flensing-brood were the immune system.

It was in such a mood that it found the inspiration to perform its task well, and to motivate its brood. There was a delicate balance to be sought, however: do too well, and the Alpha-of-Alphas would believe it enjoyed the work and reward it with more. Doing it poorly would only invite wrath and punishment.

Somewhere in the middle, however, was the artery to cut, where the right amount of competence might persuade the Alpha-of-Alphas to reward and relieve the Flensing-Brood by rotating them out and allowing them a real hunt.

It watched the trains a while longer, lost in a fantasy of rich, dark blood surging through the veins of something worthy. A Human, maybe. Or perhaps an Alpha of Fur-Faces, Gaoian. Or perhaps, even, this new deathworld foe, as-yet untasted.

Perhaps they would come. They had destroyed this Hive once, they must know its value. Perhaps they would come back for it. That thought kindled hope. To taste foe-flesh, not just prey-flesh…or to die to worthy foe and be rid of this boredom.

Diseases could carry in the blood. It was rare for the Hunters to suffer them, but it happened. They could creep into the body through open sores, through wounds, or through the normal mucous membranes. In the same fashion, a sickness could in theory seep into the salvage-body through the train shipments.

And if such a sickness came…if such a foe did slip through…the Alpha might feed on foe-flesh again.

Yes. Best not to do its job too well and close that potential vector. Best not to be perfect. After all, it wasn’t a truly dangerous vector: the foes would have to somehow sneak through the hive beyond and board the train undetected to even manage it. Why should the Alpha waste its limited patience on such a tiny vulnerability? And why should it abandon a source of hope, when it could, instead, watch that vector closely just in case? After all, that was not a dereliction of its responsibilities, was it?

No. No it was not. Let them come.

The Flensing-Brood would welcome them.

Date Point:18y6m5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Vemik Given-Man

He’d had a good couple of days, but Vemik was starting to get restless. He was away from his tribe, his Singer, his children and his people. If he hadn’t had friends who could help him tire himself out, he’d have been wrestling with the inner Fire the whole time.

Instead, for now, it was still just a dim ember. New York, though, he didn’t know how he might quench his Fire there. He knew Ferd had his Amy and her man on Folk-ha, but Folk-ha wasn’t New York. People were warier, there. Always in a hurry, not so keen to say hello. And Ferd had friends along that helped him say the right kind of hello among the right kind of young, adventurous people. It would be a brave Human who let Vemik fuck out his frustrations after such a quick meeting, even braver if they were a woman. For a quick Fire-taming fuck, Vemik fucked hard and for that, he much preferred women.

…Might not be so picky after a hand of days, though…

New York was going to be a challenge. The gods gave men a powerful need to plant life as widely as they could, because life was sacred and important over all things. Given-Men in particular were made for it; their tribes were their gardens, and they did all they could to keep their garden flowering. The other men would keep it going while he was gone of course…

Oh well. Jooyun managed every time he visited, and Vemik knew the big man had a Fire in him something like his own. He could practically taste Jooyun’s frustration after a week, and half the village had seen just how fiercely he loved his women, when he finally got the chance.

There were no secrets in a village, no matter how hard a man tried. And Vemik’s Fire would just have to wait. New York was too important to ignore. His books were too important, or so the Humans had said. They needed to go somewhere safe.

And Vemik Given-Man couldn’t think of any place safer than the New York Public Library.

First, though, he had a briefing with Jooyun. And Jooyun, being a smart sort of man, knew the only way Vemik would have the focus was if he was completely exhausted, with a belly full of good food and happily gurgling away.

“…Twenty! One more, you big fucker! PUSH!!”

Vemik pushed. Pushed as hard as he could, so hard his arms started to shake, his vision got dark at the edges, and that heavy bar moved up a little, a little more…

Heff yanked it back onto the stand, while Vemik let his arms fall, completely exhausted.

He’d managed one more than Jooyun. Vemik trilled, weakly, and took his little victory. He had grown strong and always managed a lot heavier lifts, but Jooyun could still keep pace pretty well, despite being less than half Vemik’s weight nowadays.

Vemik dug deep as they kept adding plates, and pushed himself up to a personal best with every drop of strength he had left. But they weren’t done. Jooyun dropped a plate off either side and they worked their way down to an empty bar. He followed along in his own lifting and somehow matched Vemik rep for rep once they were back into weight he could manage, too. Lots of Given-Men couldn’t match his biggest lifts or his endurance. Strong! At the end of it Jooyun was panting big, smiling bigger, and full of pride for them both.

“Not a bad set, big fella! Gonna be a bit before I can match your top lifts again…”

It took Vemik a bit before he could see straight again. Or talk past his heaving breath. “A long while!” Vemik eventually trilled, somehow not quite as weakly as before.

“Oh, I bet it won’t be too long,” Jooyun growled, and happily showed off what his strength looked like. “We ain’t done yet, Vemik. Load that fuckin’ bar.” They moved on to the next lift.

Heff said very little while they were lifting, but he didn’t need to prove anything to them. Despite being easily the lightest man in the room (and as short as Vemik, too!) he managed big weight too, easily a match for most of the People, Vemik suspected. Hmm…

By the time they stumbled out of Adam’s basement gym, dead exhausted and so soaked in sweat, the outside air felt cold…

The Fire wasn’t bothering him so much anymore. The three of them devoured their meals as they ambled through Folk-ha, the case with the books rumbling behind Vemik as he pulled it with his tail. Anything to keep the coming soreness at bay.

“Do you have a plan, big guy? Or are you just gonna play it by ear?”

“Shoo-ster invite me to his apartment! He wants to show me New York properly, he say.” Vemik hooted happily. He’d been in touch with the funny-dressing librarian ever since his first visit, and was looking forward to seeing him again. “Will be busy all week!”

“Ayup,” Heff grunted. “We got security arranged for that. Just a QRF that’ll be following y’all around the city, nothing too obtrusive.”

“I can take care of myself,” Vemik growled, then stopped. That was disrespectful.

“I know you can, big guy. But you can’t out-flex a bullet to the brain.”

…Fair enough. Vemik twitched his tail and ducked his head, a small apology. It was all they needed.

“We kept it discreet, like you asked.” Heff pointed out. “I still strongly object to that. You need full security.”

“I can take care of myself. And if I’m going to learn and explore, I can’t be stuck in a bubble of guns. Is important risk to take I think.”

Heff clearly had his doubts, but he was a good friend and didn’t push it. “Okay, big guy. But you let us know and we’ll have a full detail ready in seconds, okay?”

“Okay.” That seemed a good peace offering, so he took it.

They walked in silence for a bit, before Jooyun spoke. “Wish I could come with.”

“You could buy nice things for your women!” Vemik replied. “Why not come?”

“Family, work, duties. Besides, they keep telling me no nice thing’s as good as having me around.”

That was true. Vemik knew the three of them had their own Fires to manage too, but he’d learned to keep those thoughts to himself, mostly. Humans were private.

Or tried to be. Often unsuccessfully. A lot of the time, with them, it seemed like treating being private as important was the bit that mattered, even if they didn’t actually manage it. Everybody could know when people were fucking, and that was fine so long as everybody pretended they didn’t. Seemed like a lot of effort for no reason to Vemik, but he’d got used to it. Maybe it made things more fun for them!

“So what’re you gonna put in those special shelves now that Vemik’s books are movin’ out?” Heff asked.

“More of his books, I bet. I somehow doubt he’s gonna stop…” Jooyun gave one of his most infuriating smiles, the one that said he already knew everything, and was just teasing.

“Much to find and write about!” Vemik replied, with a playful-indignant hoot. “Not done yet!”

“Heh. Fair. You and Tisdale have been conspiring on your journals, I know…”

They walked and talked a while longer. For Vemik, it was kind of a warmup, really. He’d been fascinated by New York last time, but it had been a lot. Lots of noise, tastes on the air, people everywhere and all of them mostly ignoring each other. Which made sense—anyone who tried to notice everything going on around them in a world like that would go mad! Humans were used to it, they learned to go a little blind, a little deaf, so that it didn’t all rush in and beat their brain flat. For Vemik, used to his village and the forest where every small thing might be a stinger in the bush (or a Yan sneaking up) it was almost too much. Having Folk-ha to ease into it, a smaller city to help remember how to handle the big city, was useful.

Jooyun seemed to get it, too. “So, that’s about all I have to say. You sure you’re up to this?”

“New challenges are always good,” Vemik grinned at him. “I’m up to it. Might be hard to tire myself out, though…Professor says gyms on Earth don’t have gravity plates.”

“Most won’t, yeah. But New York’s an old city in the iron game, and there’s a few lifting clubs that ‘Horse’s got partnerships with, so that won’t be a problem. I’ll ask him and text you, okay?”

“Then, no problem!” Vemik predicted, confidently. He’d still be pent-up and fiery when he got home, but that was okay. His tribe could handle him!

And maybe it wouldn’t be a problem anyway. Maybe there’d be someone in New York…

He put the thought aside. Before then, there was travel. Jooyun and Heff left him at the jump terminal. It was less quiet today—they were making a bigger jump, to a bigger destination. There were chairs on the platform for people to sit in, safely inside the lines. Vemik was too big for them, so he sat on his tail nearby, made small talk with a man in a black hoody who said he was going home to see his family for the first time in a year…

Thump!

Vemik felt the shift under him in his feet and his tail. Just a small change in the gravity, but a change he could feel, telling him where he was. And the taste in the air was immediately different. It wasn’t just a Human smell, it was an old smell, the smell of a place that had been busy with people for a very, very long time.

He was back on Earth.

With a happy hoot, he bounded off the platform, grabbed his bag, and waved goodbye to the man in the hoody while the men in uniforms trying to welcome them got out of the way.

Customs was boring. Navigating the terminal was interesting, but a bit confusing. There were nice big signs that pointed the way out though, so he made his way up to street level…

“Hello, Vemik! My, you’ve grown!”

Shoo-ster was there, in somewhat lighter clothing than last they’d met. Vemik galloped over but restrained himself when they met, and satisfied himself with a carefully firm hug.

“Yes! I am Given-Man now! See?!” Vemik spun around and showed off quick, and Shoo-ster seemed suitably impressed.

“Ah! Well done, then! From what I hear, that means you’ll have quite an appetite these days, yes?”

Vemik’s ears twitched at that. “Am always hungry for good food! Professor tells me there are many good ‘steak-houses’ here?”

“Vemik my friend, the world has travelled through this city, and all of them brought their food with them.” Shoo-ster beamed, and pointed the way. “The hard part isn’t finding food. The hard part is choosing which one…For you, I think, Delmonico’s. They have the biggest and the best steaks, from my experience…”

Vemik’s belly rumbled at the thought. Meat! But, the Giving was more important. “Okay! First, I have books for Giving. We should go to the library, yes?”

“Of course! Shall we go for a quick walk, then?”

Vemik grinned, looped his tail through his case’s pull handle, and loped toward the exit. He was back! His Fire was, suddenly, forgotten in the young excitement of being back in this strange, alien place and getting to learn more about it.

Maybe this visit wouldn’t be such a trial after all…

Date Point: 18y6m5d AV
Queens, New York, USA, Earth

Six

Six was going to miss coffee.

It was a combination of things, really. The flavor was bitter, though the human mouth could even interpret bitterness as a pleasurable sensation in the right context…such as when the flavor wasn’t only bitter. The one he was drinking right now had pleasant citrusy notes giving rise to a hint of acidity, all plentifully evident thanks to its soft, light roast.

Then there was the stimulant effect of course. It kicked the brain up a little, changed the chemistry, and even though Six existed inside his host’s implants the effect was still felt. From there flowed a little amusement and bemusement: he was drinking poison. Not a terribly strong one by Earth’s standards, but the amount present in a good double-shot of espresso was certainly enough to affect most other sapient beings quite dramatically. A Vzk’tk would have pronounced jitters after just one cup, and heart palpitations after three.

The scent, though. The scent was the best bit by far. He could get engrossed in such a scent, if he let himself. And Humans allegedly had quite a poor sense of smell next to a Gao. Perhaps he’d claim a Gaoian host one day, just to see.

Somebody sat down next to him and ordered a latte and a sandwich without so much as glancing at him. Six waited, judging whether he should move from his seat…

“You want one? My treat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Coffee without a sandwich is only half a breakfast, y’know…” The Handler half-turned his head and gave him a sidelong smile. “Shame to pass up the chance, today of all days.”

Six half turned and measured the man up. On first impression, he decided, the Handler would have made a damn good biodrone candidate himself. He was white, dark hair, a little scruff around the jaw, some bags under his brown eyes. Average height, weight, build. Yes, a fine candidate for an infiltration unit. Though, the nose would have needed fixing. It twisted noticeably to one side, recalling some ancient breakage that may or may not have coincided with the split eyebrow.

…Or perhaps not. Perhaps those little imperfections made him vanish all the better. Humans had a strong “uncanny valley” reflex, as Six had discovered with his “Mister Johnson” drones, years ago. Perhaps the correct flaws could make a face even more forgettable.

“…I suppose you’re right. It’s a big day.”

The Handler nodded, and ordered a second sandwich for him.

No sooner was the barista’s back turned than he turned and pressed something hard to the side of Six’s head before Six could react. The phone he’d set on the countertop buzzed and pinged.

“…Thought so.” He vanished the scanner with a small sleight of hand, then gave Six a cool stare. “Of course, you realize, this is a problem.”

Six rubbed his temple. Dammit. How the fuck did they do it? Were they just a naturally suspicious species, or did he make the mistake of moving in paranoid circles all the time? “…It doesn’t have to be.”

“Doesn’t it? Last I checked, your objective was our extinction. Mine is the opposite of that.”

Six resisted the urge to cringe: the Handler hadn’t bothered to moderate his volume at all, but then again, he hadn’t been loud, either. Just casually conversational. Two friends, chatting about nothing consequential, nothing worth listening to.

“At this point, that dynamic seems reversed,” he replied, keeping the same light tone. “Your people’s objective is mine’s extinction.”

“You did strike first.”

“And we’re losing.”

“Hmm.” The Handler paused in his conversation as his coffee and their sandwiches arrived. “…So why should I help you change that?” he asked, once the barista was gone again.

“You won’t. At this point, the only thing we can do is go into hiding, wait for the galaxy to forget us.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because we won’t achieve even that if the lockdown lifts and the Allied nations expand their extraterrestrial efforts.” Six took a bite out of his sandwich. Actually, the Handler was right, he had been hungry, and it was a damn good sandwich. “What about you? Why are you here?”

The Handler sipped his coffee. “Do you know how many people live on this planet?”

“A little under nine billion.”

“A hundred years ago, it was two billion. A hundred years before that, less than one billion. In fifty years, it’ll be more than ten. We breed like goddamn rabbits, and didn’t have the basic common sense to stop even when we were stuck here on this one Earth with its finite space and resources. Didn’t have the sense to stop chewing through coal and oil, because what does leaving a clean future for our descendents matter when there are short-term quarterly profits to be made?”

He sipped his coffee again: Six let him speak. “The fact is, first contact came too early for us. We’re not ready. We’re not mature enough for it yet. As a species, we’re the kind of stupid that only learns from making a mistake, we’re too corrupt and venal to look forward and stop the disasters before they happen. But now, the disaster isn’t going to happen at all. Because we can just…leave. Migrate to other worlds, use their resources, keep doing as we have been since the Industrial Revolution. We needed scaring straight, and it didn’t happen. So now, we’re a disaster waiting to happen to everything else out there.”

He turned and fixed Six with a Look. “I’m going to avert that disaster, or die trying. For our own good, just as much as for theirs. I’m willing to go a long way for that, but I swear to God, if I think for a second this is going to lead to the end of the Human race, I will nerveshock you and tip off the authorities.”

“…The hour is a little late for establishing trust,” Six replied.

“You could tell me how it is you’re losing.”

Six sighed, swirled his coffee in its cup, then finished it. “Relays. The Igraen Hegemony relies on dataspace, which is in turn maintained by a series of matterspace relays hidden on remote planets throughout the galaxy. The loss of any one is manageable, and we have construction drones suitable for replacing them, but it takes time. We lost two, in rapid succession.”

“How?”

“It’s my fault. I…had originally planned to involve your species in performing…an attitude adjustment, you might say.”

“Go on…”

“There is…a construct. One. When it is assembled, what little individuality an Igraen has is completely subsumed to the consensus. While it is active, One is effectively omniscient, knowing anything and everything known by all Igraens. It is how we make our most significant top-level strategic and executive decisions. The ultimate democracy. I had intended a form of treason against the Hegemony in that I wanted to directly upload my memories and revelations about your people into One’s compiler. The idea was that, when next it was compiled, all Igraens would think as I did then about your species, come to recognize the potential for constructive partnership that existed between us.”

“Why would you even believe such a thing was possible?”

“…I believed your people to be more foresighted than you do.” Six sighed heavily. “Unfortunately, I was wrong. When they found and infiltrated the relay, instead of notifying me as requested and sticking with my plan, they simply destroyed it. Then a second. A third—and I’m quite sure they are seeking a third even now—would be a crippling blow, and a fourth? Fatal.”

He fidgeted with the sandwich on its plate. “Our goals are fundamentally compatible, yours and mine. The Hierarchy exists to maintain an orderly, broadly peaceful galaxy. Sometimes, we have needed to be the disaster that scared younger species straight. Often, we have needed to cull those who would be the kind of scourge you fear Humanity will become…and you’re quite right, your people have the power to be a scourge unlike this galaxy has ever known. Always, we have ensured that there is room for the new and young to rise up and take over from the old and stagnant. We create an environment in which the young and disadvantaged can compete, not be hopelessly crushed under the power structure established and maintained by their elders.”

“Through genocide, body-snatching and genetic manipulation.”

“You and your people have used bombs, bullets, murder and stolen drugs in pursuit of your own goals. That simply makes us both strong enough to really work for our beliefs, does it not?”

The Handler watched him carefully and slowly. Six watched him back, then picked up his sandwich. “…Anyway, do me a favor. If you’re going to nerveshock me, at least let me finish my breakfast.”

The Handler paused, then let out a small laugh: “Heh.” He withdrew his hand from his pocket, picked up his latte, and drank.

Six relaxed.

“…So, we’re doing this?” he asked, after a moment.

The Handler nodded. “Yeah. We’re doing this.”

Six nodded. Side-by-side, they finished their meal in peace, paid for the coffees and sandwiches, then stood up and left. He followed the Handler to a parked car, sat in the back seat, and permitted himself a big, relieved sigh. For a moment there, he’d been certain it was over.

Instead, as the Handler put the car in motion and drove them to pick up the rest of their little operation, he felt a weight off his back. All the tension, hiding, planning and caution was all coming down to one important moment. There was no longer any doubt about what would happen if they failed. He no longer cared if they failed.

It was enough that they were fighting to the end.

Date Point: 18y6m1w AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Hell system, deep Hunter space.

Tooko, Brother and Stud of Clan Firefang

Tooko was trying not to admit it to himself…but he was lonely. The ship just didn’t smell right, without a half-dozen stinking Humans and Ten’Gewek crammed into the back. Curling up by himself in the nest-bed just felt cold and empty. Space that should have been groaning with restless simianoid aliens was now hollow, occupied only by his own meager required supplies.

The fact was, he might act aloof around them, but having the hulking monkeys behind him was comforting when deep in hostile territory.

And territory certainly didn’t get more hostile than this.

Hell was a fortress. He didn’t dare get closer than four light-hours, and even getting that close had involved a delicate sub-kilolight warp from a parsec out, dropping below lightspeed as he passed the termination shock.

Sub-luminal warping. Not technically difficult, but something about it just seemed silly to Tooko. Nevertheless, it was by far the stealthiest way to enter a system. At such low energies, his warp drive’s spacetime ripples were subtler than those generated by the planets and moons in their orbits, vanishing into the background noise. Only fuel-based propellant thrusters were more invisible…but useless for traversing interplanetary distances in a timely manner.

He found the L4 point of the system’s outermost gas giant. There was an asteroid there, D-type. A tuber-shaped chunk of black stone maybe two kilometers long: perfect cover. SBD’s grippy feet had no trouble latching onto its craggy surface, and the hull thrummed gently as the drill array installed in the ship’s mission module deployed and started boring into the anhydrous silicates below.

After all, what better way to hide than to refrigerate the hull and use a rock eleven orders of magnitude more massive than his ship for a heat sink?

Satisfied that the process of camouflaging himself was going well, and the only way the Hunters could find him was divine intervention, Tooko turned his attention to the probes he’d dropped on his approach, as he circled slowly in from the heliopause.

There were hundreds of them, most about the size of a bottle and consisting for the most part of a supercapacitor and a high-grade warp drive. The control board, sensors and EM emitters were practically an afterthought, by mass.

Each was programmed to wait, and then accelerate inwards in a pattern that left no clues about when and how they’d been dropped, all intersecting the ecliptic near the planet Hell itself, but diffuse enough and fast enough that they should for the most part slip the net and pass frustratingly through whatever gravity spikes the Hunters deployed. But even if they were all caught, it wouldn’t matter. Their survival wasn’t important.

Each one was basically a flare, a brilliant EM source that would burn through the busy space around the planet and light it up. The larger, more sophisticated probes that Tooko had periodically dropped around the system, as well as the sensors on Silent But Deadly would then track all the contacts thus illuminated, and build a comprehensive picture of everything now buzzing around down there. In theory.

In practice, for Tooko, his role in the mission was to now sit and wait. He ran a system check, confirmed that the heat sink was working and his hull temperature was an ambient match for the surface of the nameless asteroid he’d perched on, and…

Well, what else was there to do but sit and wait? He grabbed some blankets and nested down in his flight chair, setting the cabin temperature to as low as he could tolerate—no sense in generating any more heat for the hull refrigeration to deal with than was strictly necessary—and flicked through the selection of TV series, films, audiobooks and games he’d brought with him.

…Maybe there was one small advantage to being alone. He had total control over the entertainment, and could watch the things he liked that the others would have mocked him for: he had a soft spot for Human cartoons aimed at teenage females. They were colorful, inventive, not afraid to get emotional…

But at the same time, honestly, if he had to choose between watching what he wanted, alone, or watching what they wanted while piled up in a warm ball…he’d have chosen the ball.

He was about halfway through episode seven of his cartoon marathon when the first wave of probes made their high-speed dash through the system, blazing bright in both the EM spectrum and in their spacetime distortions. He paused the cartoon and watched the sensor data with interest. Sure enough, Hell was busy, and the Hunters responded in an angry swarm. G-spikes rippled across the volume around the planet like a particularly fierce artillery barrage, catching dozens of the probes, and a warning light on Tooko’s instruments turned blue as Silent But Deadly detected the presence of a farthrow field.

The interesting part, however, was all the activity that lit up far away from the planet: warp drives, the bright EM flare of high-powered forcefields lighting. A particularly suspicious though short-lived anomaly high in the star’s corona. For several hours, swarmships buzzed furiously around the system, backtracking the probes’ trajectories. The closest never even came within a hundred million kilometers of his hiding place.

Tooko shrugged and went back to watching his cartoons, keeping half an eye on the activity. At this point, there was no running: his hiding place either worked, or it didn’t. He was quite certain it worked, though: he certainly would never have found himself.

Eventually, he slept. He played back the sensor footage when he woke, watched hours of activity compressed into a fast-forward minute or two, and noted patterns. Useful. He’d stirred up the hive alright, and the Hunters had obligingly shown exactly what they would do when roused. He was no analyst himself, merely bored enough to watch and take his own notes…but what he saw told him the real analysts would be ecstatic.

He pant-grinned to himself, grabbed a warming meal pack, and settled in for a second long day of observations.

He could handle being lonely, so long as he was being useful.

Date Point: 18y6m1w5d AV
New York City, USA, Earth

Vemik Given-Man

Food.

Professor had been right, New York was filled with food, so much that Vemik could taste it on the air before he even stepped outside. Shoo-ster bought him a hot dog on the walk over to the library, just as a little snack “before later.” Apparently, hot dogs weren’t made from dog, which made Vemik happy. They seemed like friends, and people shouldn’t eat their friends.

Giving his books to the library had been easy enough. The Humans had made a small ceremony of it, thanking him and handling the books with special reverence. Apparently they were going to be thoroughly scanned and spread across the world for people to read.

Afterwards, Shoo-ster had taken it upon himself to show Vemik all the things he hadn’t had time for on his last visit. Museums, parks, interesting buildings, a bronze cow as big as a bull werne! Good-sized cock and sack, too. Maybe it would bring everyone good luck! They walked far, climbed up and down many steps, sometimes they played in parks. Vemik liked oak trees, though he wished they were a bit bigger. Everywhere it seemed there was something tasty to snack on, but he managed to mostly restrain himself. He had to follow his food plan if he wanted to keep his strength.

Delmonico’s was even better than promised! Vemik wore his nicest loincloth for it. They brought out a big, thick steak for him, barely cooked but kissed hard by flame, like if a man had put a hunk of werne right on the coals of a dying fire. There was wine too, very tasty with the meat! Vemik only allowed himself one glass, so he wouldn’t be dangerously drunk.

He liked the green beans, too. And the potatoes! But he only ate a little. He could taste they were made of the kind of thing that made the People fart too much, and which Humans couldn’t get enough of when they ate. Shoo-ster ate the rest of Vemik’s.

Vemik finished Shoo-ster’s steak, too.

The next hand of days were an exploration like that. Food, investigating the nooks and crannies of the city for interesting things. Lots to see! His favorite by far were the museums. It wasn’t just all the interesting things they had, it was the way they were so clever in telling him about those things, too. Seeing a fossil next to a moving, almost alive hologram of what that creature had looked like when it was alive made all the difference in turning it from an interesting stone curiosity into a wonder.

But really, while the natural of history of Earth was interesting, the history of humans and how they’d come to be the sky-tribe that Vemik knew and loved was the real focus for this trip. Vemik doubted this would be his last trip to Earth, but there were questions he wanted answers to, a kind of road map he wanted to build for how his tribe and his people could grow in the coming years.

What better way to peer forward in time than to look back on the history of other people who’d already done it?

Shoo-ster was on to his idea. “Scheming for the future, eh?” Sneaky librarian!

“Made a new friend on Cimbrean. Loo-wiss,” Vemik explained. “Scheming for the future is his job! And I thought about that, and thought…my job, as Given-Man, is the future of my Tribe, my people. I’m doing the same thing I always did, just…more, now.”

Shoo-ster chuckled. “Yan warned me about you…”

“He did?”

“Oh yes, I’ve been corresponding with him too, you know. He’s awfully fond of you.”

“He worries too much.” Vemik trilled a little at that. “Funny. I used to think nothing scared him! Now, I think he worries like a new mother!”

“Wisdom carries its own terrors,” Shoo-ster intoned sagely. “In his case, I think the future is the only thing left that can worry him, so he spends a lot of time thinking on it.”

Vemik nodded and considered the exhibits they were walking between. Humans had made…well, a lot of mistakes, over their long history. Nothing to blame them for, there, mistakes were how learning happened! But it put the People in the good position to see those mistakes and learn from them without having to make them too.

When he wasn’t at a museum, he spent time in the library, reading when he could. When he couldn’t sit still and think, he visited the gym Jooyun had promised. He had to take a lot of pictures with the big men who called it home, for their ‘profiles’ and stuff, but that was all part of the fun! They were fascinated by how strong he was, and insisted he show them just what he could do, so…

No luck finding anyone to have fun and quench his Fire with, sadly. That made it a long week, when he couldn’t find anything else to distract him…but still a good week. Some of the more troubling thoughts in his head were soothed, some new ones had come along that he liked and wanted to work on…

It was time to go home and put what he’d found to use. Just one last little bit of souvenir shopping—he still couldn’t find one of those T-shirts that would fit around his shoulders, but that was okay. Practical stuff was better anyway.

The last stop was to grab that sandwich Professor Daniel had wanted. He gave Shoo-ster a (careful) hug, and took the route through Central Park back to Grand Central Station.

That park, all by itself, reminded him why he liked Humans so much. The city was dense, buildings so close that a Given-Man could reach out and touch two at once, in some places. It was busy, crowded, noisy, packed far too many people into not enough space, until all the things they had to do to keep their lives running creaked at the seams. Everywhere were the signs that the whole city only worked because lots and lots of people worked hard to keep the water running, the garbage collected, the electricity connected and a hundred, a thousand other things that his own people in their villages never had to worry about at all.

And yet, in the middle of this churning hive, where open sky was at its most expensive, they’d carved out a huge, huge chunk to honor trees, grass and room to move.

And then, because they were Humans, they did interesting things there. They laid out mats on the grass and did yoga, they sped around on wheeled shoes, they sang and danced, rode on bikes or in wheeled things pulled by horses. He found somebody doing paintings, who painted his face in seconds, so fast Vemik was sure it was some kind of trick. Somebody else was crafting huge shimmery rainbow bubbles with some sticks, rope and a bucket of soapy water. He paused and watched a drone race, and though the buzzing little things zipping among the trees reminded him of the Hierarchy “death-bird” drones he’d fled years ago, he found them fun to watch anyway.

And the funny thing was, most people didn’t even glance at him. Maybe they gave him a grin, and a knowing smile…but they left him alone, unless he approached.

He didn’t. There was no time to explore everything, and too much to explore anyway. He had to be back on the pad at the jump array by five p.m., and the afternoon was racing away from him like a scared bibtaw.

He sighed, stopped exploring, and left the park behind (promising himself that next time he wouldn’t miss the zoo) and headed south, back toward the station and the Array.

He’d barely gone a block, though, when something…changed. It was hard to tell what, exactly, but the city had the same feel as the deep forest sometimes. If you knew what to watch, taste and listen for, things could stand out. Vemik usually felt it as a tingling as the crest down his spine and tail stiffened, and right now his whole back felt like it was crawling.

He wasn’t sure who, what, or where yet…but he was certain of it nonetheless.

He was being hunted.

Date point: 18y6m1w5d AV
New York City, USA, Earth

Six

Their days of planning had come up with an unexpected wrinkle: One of the Ten’Gewek was in town. The news was quite interested in him, taking interviews with the staff at the New York Public Library where he’d donated a series of his own journals, detailing what life was like for his people and some of the wonders of their home planet.

To the APA, he was an opportunity. Vemik Sky-Thinker (Vemik Given-Man, now) was a major point of contact between humanity and his people. To an organization founded on the thoroughly self-loathing principle that humanity should isolate itself for the good of every other species, he was a species-traitor, a disease vector. A “Monkey-Tom.”

There was a lot of history and a lot of hatred packed into those three poisonous syllables. The opportunity to remove him while simultaneously financially crippling the USA out of the war was too good to pass up.

Six had been watching the Ten’Gewek move about the city through their surveillance. He didn’t need anything but the visual evidence to know they were woefully unprepared for such an encounter. The diehards that Handler had found were full of eager resolve and grim certainty: they had guns, they’d fired those guns extensively on a shooting range. A jungle-monkey was no match for them!

Wrong. Six had seen a lot of warriors on a lot of worlds, and the men swaggering around in their “tacti-cool” gear at their safe house weren’t warriors. The unarmed, nearly-naked, noseless tribesman wandering their city on the other hand…

Everything about him screamed danger. Even now, as he took his leisure, his posture wasn’t slack and lazy: it was tense, supple, poised for action. His ears twitched at every sound, eyes scanned every space. He placed his feet with care and gripped cautiously, knowing his size and strength could damage the environment…and leave sign of his passing.

But by far the most telling thing was his teeth. On occasion he would smile at someone, and in so doing, flash fangs long and stout enough to pierce a skull, mounted in a jaw powerful enough to crush thick bone to powder…

Vemik Given-Man was a predator. His every movement clearly justified the Hierarchy’s attempt to neutralize his people. So, Six had no objection in principle to neutralizing him specifically: anything that potentially drove a wedge between Humanity and the Ten’Gewek was beneficial to the general strategy. A strong alliance of deathworlders was the worst-case scenario according to every Igraen calculation. Breaking such an alliance up in its youth was mandatory if the Hegemony was to go into protective hibernation and wake in a liveable future.

The problem was convincing the more gung-ho and unstable of the APA to stay on target and ignore this “opportunity.” Handler and the others, the leadership he’d schemed with by text for this past year, were dependable: the muscle were barely-directed and excited to lash out at a world they had, for their own individual reasons, all come to detest.

Still. There was no real choice to be made between imprecise tools and no tools at all.

Handler’s solution was best: he picked the four most eager and undisciplined men and tasked them with the “special mission” of eliminating the Ten’Gewek. To Six, it was quite obvious he was fully expecting them to be slaughtered, but believed they’d provide a distraction and thereby make the core mission that little bit easier.

Six had no objections. So, he just sat back and watched as Handler briefed his “special team.”

“Remember: do not engage the monkey-Tom at close range. During our action in Canada, he broke two of our operatives in hardly a blink and broke them so badly, they’re both still severely disabled. He was just an adolescent at the time, too. Now, he’s apparently a Given-Man.”

“He hit us like a literal ton of bricks,” one of the more reliable men who wasn’t going on the gorilla-hunt added. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he hits twice as hard, these days. He was downright lanky compared to what he is now.”

Handler nodded grimly. “Yeah. And don’t let his size fool you, he’s quick and none of that cartoonish muscle mass of his is merely for show. Ten’Gewek get around by flinging themselves from tree to tree, so he can apparently launch himself from a dead standstill further than an Olympic long-jumper could ever fly, or high enough to make a pole-vaulter cry. God only knows what he can do in our gravity, so don’t group up.”

“He can’t be that good,” one of the team objected. “You sure we aren’t just scaring ourselves?”

“Better to be wary than not,” Handler retorted. “But no. I do not exaggerate. I’ve seen what deathworlders can really do first-hand. You have no idea how dangerous we can be if we put our minds to it, and his people are arguably more deathworlder than any of us. That monkey, right there? He’s smarter than you, faster than you, stronger than you, harder than you, has probably far better senses, and has no compunctions at all about literally tearing you apart. If you’re all in one nice bunch, he’ll knock you down like bowling pins and pop you like zits. Spread out so he has to handle you one at a time, and the other three shoot the shit out of him while he’s busy. And don’t go light on the shooting. You empty your magazines into him, reload, then get him again in the brain to be certain.”

The four men nodded seriously, and Six stopped paying attention to them again. He was busy working on his aspect of this whole plan.

The Arrays were, truly, more secure than before. If that weren’t true, he could have induced the Grand Central array to detonate just by standing outside it with a cellphone, as he’d done in Chicago.

…Okay, so putting it that way sold short what had in fact been one of the most difficult, treacherous, and vulnerable electronic infiltrations of his life. But the point was, if they were going to achieve this, then he needed more direct access to the Array. As in, wires physically plugged into it. As primitive as electronic communication got.

And he’d need to work fast. As soon as the authorities figured out who they were and what they were trying to do, everything would come for them, and the Handler had made it explicit that however fast Six thought they’d come? They’d be even faster.

He’d also been explicit that, when they did arrive, it would be in a storm of bullets and grenades that would sweep them aside in seconds. Everything Six was preparing, therefore, was about minimizing the time it took him to interface with the Array. He’d been practicing his physical skills, right up to and including soldering if need be.

The software side of it could at least happen faster than human reaction times, once the hardware side was ready. Once again, the bandwidth of protein was the rate-limiting step. He had done everything he could to mitigate it. Now, all he had to do was trust the others to get him where he needed to be.

They watched the van full of four monkey-hunters peel out, then loaded themselves into the others.

It was, at last, showtime.

Date Point: 18y6m1w5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Julian’s hands were itching. They’d been expecting this, of course—not this exactly, but the daily security briefings he read had been quite clear through the whole week that Vemik being in New York was an opportunity the APA—or whatever diehards were still loyal to its message, anyway—would find too tempting to resist.

His instinct, as Vemik’s friend, was to be there. His duty, as a father and as one of the few—well, okay, only people who could take on the role of humanity’s ambassador to the Ten’Gewek, was to keep his ass out of harm’s way.

He didn’t want to lay his troubles on Xiù, really: she was busy enough with her Clan of Females entanglements, the Franklin reconstruction and her self-imposed role as homemaker and mother. She didn’t need more stress.

She claimed his troubles anyway.

“Here. Sit. Tea.”

Julian realized he’d been pacing a track in the carpet only when she grabbed him and dragged him toward the couch and sat on him.

“Uh…”

She gave him a Look as she got comfortable across his lap. “You’re going to stress yourself to death if you don’t learn how to relax, Bǎobèi,” she chided. “The last time I saw you this worried, I was having that C-section.”

“…Think I was more worried then…” Julian protested, a little feebly. She smiled and pressed a hot tea into his hands.

“I’m guessing…something to do with Vemik?”

“Yeah.” Julian sipped the tea. He wasn’t normally a tea guy. Still, it did smell good. “Some troubling news. Or…well, maybe not news, but like, a possibility…”

“Slow down. Deep breath. Get your thoughts in order. Then tell me.”

Julian nodded, sipped the tea again, nodded again. She was right. In fact, he felt a little more clear-headed already. “Right, right…So, uh, there’s some, uh, ‘chatter’ around Vemik. I can’t really say much more, but they don’t know much more anyway.”

“So…bad guys have noticed there’s a bright red naked gorilla wandering New York…”

“Don’t make fun.”

She tidied some of his hair. “I’m not. But you seem super stressed over just ‘chatter,’ babe.”

“Yeah, well. Last bad guy to show up killed Bozo, and nearly got me too.” Julian quashed a wave of guilt over that. He probably owed his life to that dog.

“They won’t be able to try anything like that again. And even if they did, both of you are a lot more dangerous now than you were then. With more dangerous friends, too.” She gave up on tidying his hair and put her arm around him instead. “Besides, he’s got protection, right?”

“Discreet protection, but yeah.”

“So he’s in very good hands. And even if he wasn’t? Well, I’ve trained with Adam and Christian, and they’re the only two guys around who can reliably kick your ass these days. Same deal with the Gao, really. Daar and a couple of his bestest. I don’t want to over-inflate your ego or anything, but given everything we know about, like, the experimental history in your family and stuff, and the fact you went and took full advantage of it…”

“Okay…and?”

“But against the Ten’Gewek? There’s a hundred-plus Given-Men out there who can snap you like a twig. That’s over half of them. Vemik is one of those hundred-plus. In fact, he’s already one of the best they have, and that makes him about the most dangerous man alive. I’m pretty sure he could tear Firth apart without much fuss these days. I’ve seen them fight, too.”

Julian nodded, realizing where his problem was. “…He’s really not a kid anymore, is he?”

“No. He’s grown up into a Given-Man, a father probably many times over by now. Father of an entire tribe really, and he protects it against dangers every day.” She smiled at him and booped his nose. “You’re a thick-necked pretty heroslab, bǎobèi. I know we tease you about it, but you really do think like a caveman on stuff like this. Which is good! But for now, Vemik’s the much bigger cavemonkey, so you need to get those dad instincts caught up with reality.”

“Yeah…” He paused, then said again with more belief. “Yeah. You’re right. They’re fucked.”

“Oh hell yeah!” Xiù nodded fervently. “They picked the wrong monkey to mess with!”

“If they even get close to him in the first place. Hoeff had a hand in his security.”

“Good. And even then? I’ve seen Vemik move fast enough to dodge bullets. He’ll be fine.”

Julian nodded, finished the tea, and set it aside. Internally, part of him was marvelling at how she just had this gift for Making Things Better. The rest of him, though, was back to thinking sensibly. He kissed her, extracting a happy little laugh, and heaved out the dwindling stress in a big sigh.

“…Okay. Tell you what. School’s nearly out. Why don’t we pick up the boys, take them and the little ones out into Lakebeds, get Al to take an early finish and meet us halfway?”

Xiù gave him a shrewd look, then nodded and rolled off his lap. “More to it than just Vemik?”

“…Yeah. I can’t talk about it. But, you’re right. You’re a badass, I’m a beast, Vemik’s a genuine murdermonkey…Let’s go have some nice, defensible fun out by the lake. Just in case.”

She nodded and headed for the stairs. “You call the boys, I’ll get Harrison and Anna in the car.”

God, she was sharp. No alarm, no freakout, no trying to tell him he was worrying over nothing. All he had to do was hint, and she knew exactly what she needed to do to protect their family, and did it. And if it turned out later that his concern was over nothing, well, hey, there were worse ways to spend an afternoon than a surprise hike in the woods.

How the fuck had he ever got so lucky?

He sent a message to Hoeff, too. The reply was typically blunt: “Wilco. You’re covered.”

And that was that. Come what may, whether the rest of the day played out as normal or as a nightmare, the important people were taken care of. And that meant Julian could think again. Still. He was going to worry a little.

Until he knew everyone was safe.

Date Point:18y6m1w5d AV
Park Avenue, Manhattan, NYC, USA, Earth

Vemik Given-Man

There was a reason Vemik had decided to visit New York alone and insisted on leaving Singer behind, despite how much he’d have really preferred she come with. It was sad he’d been proven right.

Dangerous Humans could be very dangerous, Vemik knew. He’d fought and wrassled with more than a hand of them. Jooyun had been his friendly rival since they first met and they had always stayed a good match, even now that Vemik could crush him flat. War-horse (of course) could break Vemik like a Forest-Father’s bark underfoot. Gods, Yan couldn’t out-fight the big Human yet, even though he was outlifting ‘Horse more and more every time they met! Criss-chen was still strong and quick enough to give Vemik a good challenge…

Vemik only needed two fingers to count all the Humans who could fight him just with their strength, but not all Human danger was so forward and upright. Sneaky danger was what he had to watch for. Humans could be very good hunters.

The four trailing him toward Grand Central…weren’t. The taste of their bravado, excitement and fear cut right through the city’s air, sharp and clear among the baked-in medley of street food, human skin, tyre rubber, perfume, trash, drains, rats and a million more things that merged together into New York City’s background flavor.

He changed course. There were a lot of people out on the street, and if somebody was hunting him, he did not want anybody else hurt. They weren’t his tribe but why would he want to ignore maybe-friends?

He stopped for a hot dog, firstly because hot dog, but secondly to take note of everything around him. No good alleyways to duck into, and anyway not a great idea. Too narrow, and he didn’t want to bounce his way up the walls. Parks? Not really, just a green strip of grass and small trees dividing the road…

He looked up, hooted softly to himself in appreciation as he saw exactly what he needed, and started walking again…then flowed into a bounding leap.

From what he knew, the city never stopped. It always changed, just like the forest. Old buildings came down, new buildings went up. Right now, an old building was coming down, carefully and slowly. The people in the street were protected from falling stuff by a covered sidewalk, and the cheap boards crumbled and cracked under his fingers as he vaulted the top. Alarmed shouts from several angles chased him as he vanished into a thicket of bare concrete and rebar with a grin.

Suddenly, he could see properly again. The light among the demolition work was dim, except for a few free-standing lamps, not dazzling bright like out under Earth’s strong sun. A man in a hard hat gawked at him for a second, then found his voice. “Hey, you can’t be in here!”

“Being chased,” Vemik replied, as he jumped up and tested the steel beams. “Bad people.”

“Wh-?” whatever the man had to say, Vemik didn’t hear it. He swarmed up a vertical pillar, turned, and sprang across to another one to get around a chunk of floor. Concrete floors too, no need to worry. He could jump on them all day. Down below, more shouting, and a loud bang…not guns, though. A door slamming open.

Good.

Let the idiots come.

The Handler

As expected, the monkey was no fool. He’d detected his enemies, stalled for a moment at a hot dog stand, looked around, and….

He effortlessly aped his way into and up a building under demolition, and had flung himself many stories above ground within mere seconds.

Well, that did serve their purpose. They’d distracted the primary threat to their operation and pinned him far away from the jump array. All the G-men cocksuckers would be focused on the big pretty monkey instead of the actual target of the day.

“Follow him in. Stay spread out, and cover each other. Use bright lights to blind him if you can. The workmen are more use as hostages, don’t let them escape.” Simple orders, given clearly. Hopefully enough: from here on out, he’d be blind to what happened inside that demolition site.

It didn’t matter, so long as they delayed the gorilla.

Their own ride pressed on down the avenue, flowing anonymously—as much as New York traffic “flowed” anyway—with the rest of the crowd. He turned his attention to the body-snatcher opposite him.

Six had a habit of just…shutting down when he wasn’t pretending to be human. It was hard to describe, but the level of stillness and inactivity that his biodrone body fell into when his attention was elsewhere somehow pushed him into the uncanny valley. To everyone else on this mission, he was just creepy and intense. The Handler had considered whether or not to let them know the truth, but…no. That would just be a distraction and source of friction at a critical moment.

Still, it was hard not to be a little disturbed by the Igraen’s inhuman quirks.

“Hey.”

Six visibly switched on his pretend-to-be-human circuits and looked at him. His face became just that little bit more expressive, his posture tense and nervous instead of mannequin-still. He even managed to ask a question with just a quirk of his eyebrow.

“Still with us? Mind on the job?”

Six nodded sharply. “Always.”

“Good. Monkey’s been cornered. Doesn’t matter if they get him or not: He’s out of our hair.”

“For now. That depends entirely on how willing he is to commit violence.”

“How willing is he?”

Six looked distant for a moment, and returned an answer: “Very.”

“Figures…” Handler glanced forward through the van’s windshield. They were coming round in front of the terminal now. “Okay, wait for it…wait…”

Everyone in the van tensed up, sat forward, unfastened their seatbelts. Handler held his nerve…

Red and blue lights, moving fast, past them and back toward that demolition site. He watched them get tiny in the mirror…

“Go!”

“He pushed his distress button.”

Team lead nodded grimly. “Thought he might, once he shot up the building. We in position?”

“In the building, no. We’ve got it surrounded, though.”

“Right. Let’s put a stop to this before Vemik paints the walls with them. The other team?”

“On alert. They’ve got a bead on some targets acting suss around the array.”

“Right.” The team lead sighed. “Get to it, I’ll start making calls.”

Noah Weatherfield

They’d trained for this. Move fast, move hard, be aggressive, don’t let the sheep think.

“The fuck d’you think you’re goin’?”

“Back inside! Now! Up against the wall!”

“I will kill you motherfucker, move your ass!”

The demolition crew backed away with their hands up, bleating peaceful bullshit. Good sheep. Noah threw in a smack with the butt-end of his pistol to show one of the slower ones who was in charge, but never took his eyes off the shadows.

“You.” He indicated one of the workers. “Fuckin’ big-ass monkey just came in here! Where’d he go?”

“Uh—”

“Which way, asshole!”

The sheep pointed his nose and bleated, “Up!”

Noah looked at the bare I-beams around them. No following the alien up those. Still, now he’d got this one nice and compliant…he grabbed the worker by the collar, hauled him to his feet, and pushed him in front. “Stairs. Show us.”

He pointed them out. “Right there. It’s ten stories up…”

Fuck. Oh well. All that cardio was gonna pay off today. Noah shoved the hapless fucker back against the wall, satisfied. The monkey was up the tree, and the only way back down was through him and his buddies.

Time to go hunting.

Six

The Handler definitely had an MO. A brutal, effective, ruthless MO built around misdirection, distraction and sacrifice.

And there was surely nothing more distracting to the authorities than an active shooter situation. The APA hit Grand Central like a storm, not even bothering to shout demands or give orders, they just fired, raking the packed commuters indiscriminately. Shrieks echoed off the high ceiling, until the gunfire was barely audible over the sound of a human stampede.

There were cops there to protect the civilians: outnumbered and outgunned, they put up a heroic fight, briefly. The APA lost one man in that short-lived battle and another was wounded, but they were many, the police only a handful.

With the distraction thus achieved, the Handler grabbed Six by the jacket and slipped away to one side. “Head low. Move.”

Panic had firmly set in. People were crushing the exits, trying to hide, trying to find a way to escape or, in a few cases, cradling their wounded and slain. The APA were remorseless, murdering without regard for age or innocence. Human monsters, butchering their own for an ideal. Useful fools.

As for Six, he did as the Handler said: he kept his head low and scurried along, close to the wall while the Handler covered and protected him. They knew their route, and the Handler…

Well, the Handler was clearly experienced in what Six had known some humans to call “the dark arts.” Where his fellows simply swaggered into the room and fired, he was a slick poem of deadly motion. Every space he entered was assessed in an instant, any threats simply dropped, any obstacle swept aside. He slipped through the stampede like it wasn’t happening, and Six genuinely had a hard time keeping up. His feet kept slipping in blood.

They crashed through a security checkpoint that was clearly and laughably set up to reassure the herd rather than actually achieve security, and plunged into the Array terminal under the station concourse. They were so close to their goal. So close to the knockout blow that both the APA and the Hierarchy so desperately needed.

Under the tension, though, Six’s soul was singing with very human adrenaline. He’d rarely felt more alive!

And it would all be over soon.

Vemik Given-Man

Not great hunters, these four, but not making stupid mistakes either. They spread out, covered each other, and moved fast, as Humans went. They had bright flashlights too, and Vemik knew the pain of those all too well. Too bad he didn’t bring his goggles, only sunglasses…

He’d just need to be quick, or avoid being caught.

Easy to be quiet, though. Big city, big noise outside, music playing from a radio for the workers. He didn’t have to worry about being heard as he moved, and he was quickly getting a sense for how these four thought and moved and searched.

He could tell they’d had some practice, and been told what to do by someone who knew how to fight. But they weren’t very good apprentices. Their movements were sloppy. They didn’t cover each other’s fires very well—he’d been practicing with Ferd and friends, when he had time and when they’d been able to let him. Guns weren’t too different from bows, you had to think about where the pointy end could reach, after all.

They also weren’t tree-thinking. He was right above them and they weren’t looking up.

Vemik weighed his options. He was pretty sure he could kill them all without much fuss. But he also didn’t want to hurt the friendship between their Sky-Tribes. And he could see his security already gathering below, too.

Best to stay in the shadows, stay quiet, let the security team handle this. Like Yan said, it’s a wise Given-Man who wins a fight without even bearing his fangs.

…Too bad one of the men below suddenly remembered how to tree-think.

Noah Weatherfield

“C’mon, the fuck is he…?”

“He’s in here somewhere, dammit, spread out!”

Noah grit his teeth and forged on. His heart was still hammering from charging up those stairs, and his legs were burning too, but the other thing getting his pulse going was knowing somewhere in the metal around them was a fucking gorilla.

He kept coming back to the Handler’s training. Stay apart. Cover each other. Watch the angles.

…Shit. Angles. He was dealing with a monkey, not a man. This whole time, none of them had aimed their lights upward.

He did so. There was a blur of movement, something big in the gloom spinning sideways behind a vertical beam and a dismayed hoot. Noah fired on instinct: his bullets knocked paint and rust off an I-beam, but too slow: the alien moved like a lightning bolt, just a heavy shape in the dim light, and Noah couldn’t track him fast enough.

“Above us!” he yelled. The others got their heads together and aimed upwards, sweeping their lights through the hollow shell of an old skyscraper.

A flash of bright red, the monkey’s crest bobbing and dipping as he swung like a fucking gibbon. More shots, but no cry of pain or anything, so probably no hit.

They were at the top of what was left of the floors, too. Steel work continued above them for several stories, but here was the last bit of floor left.

The sound of doors slamming outside and below drew him to the edge. A bunch of unmarked vans were surrounding the building now, and he was pretty sure he could hear a lot of boots moving with a purpose.

Well. Time to do something desperate. Noah reached for the trigger on his M203 and fired.

Vemik

The next few seconds were busy, and painful.

First, the danger. Vemik saw one of his attackers reach forward on his rifle to grip something—

GODSHIT! Vemik flung himself away as hard as he could.

Second, the explosion. Somehow, he had enough presence of mind to note that it wasn’t like any of the big pretty explosions in movies, with their nice-sounding growl and big big ball of fire. It was more like when Heff or Sikes were playing with their boom-putty; a hard thump right in his breath.

And this explosion BIT. It was like a thousand angry teeth all gnawed into his back at once. He yelped, and his fingers didn’t quite reach the next steel branch in time. Suddenly, he was sailing out into open air with nothing in reach.

Instinct took over. His tail twisted and he flung his arms out, cancelling his tumble. He looked down, locked his eyes on where he was going to land, stretched his legs out to get his feet under him. A strong man could jump down from the top of a Ketta, no problem, so here on Earth…

…It turned out, the floor wasn’t strong enough for him.

Noah Weatherfield

“Jesus fuck! How big is he?!”

“Too goddamn big,” Noah growled, and ran toward the staircase. The monkey had hit the deck like a fucking comet and crunched right through it in a blast of dust and splintering sounds.

“He’s gotta be dead. That was, what, a four story fall?”

“Four storeys won’t even faze him. C’mon!”

The levels below hadn’t been fully taken apart yet. They stormed back down the stairs to the next floor down, barged through where a doorway had been…

The floor was cracked and dented with a smear of rich red alien blood, but no alien.

There was a blur.

Noah found the alien.

Vemik was angry.

His whole backside was gnawing at him in pain, and he’d need big medicine after this, probably. But not right now. He had bugs to crush.

So, he crushed them. And enjoyed doing it.

They came stampeding out of the stairwell without any caution, like they’d already won, or like they were too excited to think. Vemik was waiting for them, hanging from the partial ceiling off to the side.

He didn’t give them the chance to notice. He swung forward and tackled the first, feet first. He let his full weight land square in the middle of his attacker’s back, kicked off with his legs through his attacker and against the floor. There was a crunch and a wet splash, which he barely noticed. His leap let him tackle the second more fiercely than the first, then pull his broken body apart like a flailing neyma. The third had enough time to wheel himself around but not enough to aim, so Vemik grabbed him, clubbed the fourth with the third, and then tossed his victim aside through the flimsy wall.

There was a thud and a shriek, somewhere off to his right. One idiot left, who was just recovering from the hit. Humans were rarely very strong, but they were always tough, and always tougher than they looked. Idiot was tough enough to spring up to his feet, grab a knife from his belt and keep trying to fight. Slash, swipe—

Crunch

Enough games.

Noah Weatherfield

Too big. Too fast. Too strong. Noah slashed desperately at the monkey, made it retreat, but he never really saw what happened next. Suddenly he was just…on his back. There was pain, but kind of…distant, suddenly. Like his legs should have been in agony, but he couldn’t quite feel it.

And a fanged face an inch in front of his own.

“Stop wiggling,” the monkey growled in the deepest, most menacing voice he’d ever heard. “I win.”

Fuck that. Noah’s hand was still free. He flailed, somehow grabbed the knife again—

There was a blur of motion. The monkey-Tom had caught his blade-hand! Safe now, he sat up with a mocking expression on his evil, almost reptilian face. His tongue lashed the air sharply. “Bad boy.”

The monster’s hand completely enveloped his own, knife hilt and all, and Noah noticed suddenly that the gorilla was squeezing down on it, hard. He was squeezing so incredibly hard that Noah was writhing fruitlessly in pain, and only just realized it, like how the very worst hurts sometimes took a moment to register with the brain. Or trying to flail, anyway. The monkey was so unbelievably heavy… But it didn’t matter, he couldn’t feel anything below his hips anymore…

The huge alien twisted the blade this way and that, completely unconcerned about the hand in his grip. The bones in Noah’s wrist went ‘crunch!’ and he could do nothing but scream, until the alien’s foot covered his mouth and squeezed down just as hard and shattered his jaw. The monster looked at the knife from every angle, until Noah’s wrist was just a limp flap of flesh, and would probably never work again.

“Good steel,” the monkey-Tom said, and gave a tilted-head look down at his broken victim. “Stupid.” He closed his fist and foot. There was an explosive double shower of blood, bone and meat.

Noah finally, mercifully, blacked out.

There was a loud ‘tung!’ against a girder from above, and a flailing figure dropped past the stairwell with a dopplering shriek that…ended, suddenly. This after the explosion above, and now an enraged hoot and lots of heavy crashes and thumps.

Shit.

They sprinted up the stairs, three more storeys, round a corner…

A snarling simian beast coated in blood bared his fangs at them as they charged into a stripped-bare office space. From the looks of things, the idiot he’d thrown out the window was the lucky one: two more were just dead, all-too-literally broken in half.

A third was just broken on the ground, his face and one of his arms crushed to jelly, both legs pinned under Vemik’s weight. The Given-Man rounded on them as they entered, running on murderous instinct—

“Woah! Hey! Buddy! We’re on your side!”

Somehow, the violence didn’t happen. Vemik blinked blearily, looked back down at the hapless chump he’d broken, then let go, took a step back, and grinned weakly.

“…You’re late,” he said.

And with that, the giant talking monkey tipped sideways and collapsed.

Six

The echoes of gunfire intensified, telling Six that the armed response had arrived. Up on the concourse, the APA shooters would be selling themselves as speedbumps, buying time with their blood.

Down in the Array, things were quieter. An emergency exit door at the back of the jump room was ajar, suggesting an evacuation. The Handler went first anyway, swept and evaluated.

“…Clear. Get in here.”

Six darted across the room, overriding his biodrone body’s urgent signals that it really wasn’t fit enough for this. Human bodies could go much further and harder than their own instincts let them believe, and there was no need to preserve this one.

What he saw and heard as he entered the Array itself, however, planted a knot of dread in Six’s awareness. There was a hiss, the characteristic ‘whoosh’ of rapidly-boiling helium gas venting up through a pipe, and an ankle-deep fog of condensed atmospheric water.

“…Fuck!” Six sprang toward the control room. “Fuck, fuck fuck…”

“What?” The Handler kept his weapon trained on the door.

Six ran his eye over the board and monitors in front of him. There was a lot of red. “They’ve quenched the magnets….”

Okay, okay, maybe there was still time. He barged back out of the control room, grabbed a screwdriver from his tool belt, jammed it into a panel on the array’s side and heaved, tearing muscle and ligaments to get the job done. The cover popped off. A heating element glowed at him, cozied right up to the magnet’s side.

Okay. Shut off the heat, get the helium pumping again, re-cool the magnets. It’d take minutes. Maybe they had minutes. Maybe he could still wreak some havoc in the software, set it so nothing the humans did would avert the detonation.

Control box. Wrench the cover off again, break the lock, left arm nearly useless now, but, yes, there was what he needed. Data cables.

He plucked one out, plugged his phone in, closed his eyes and dropped out of the world of meat and matter into the much faster world of data and software.

From his perspective, that bought him time to think.

Okay. The Humans had promised tougher security around the Arrays, and they hadn’t been lying. That magnet quench was a problem, but not necessarily fatal. He started prying at the software security, found it as prickly and obtuse as Human programming always was, but he’d spent a long time on Earth now, and much of it plugged into the Internet, exploring, testing, learning.

The network had never been built that an Igraen datamind couldn’t penetrate.

He now had three objectives: turn off the heat, turn on the refrigeration, and rig the array to destructively fire. At this point, the farthrow window code that would have let him take out Folctha too was probably scrapped, but he could still blow a big hole in Manhattan.

He could still—

He was abruptly dumped back into the sickening, cold, painful world of the physical with a gasp and a sudden crippling migraine.

“Wh-?”

It was dark. There was a beep, a buzz, and emergency lighting came on, red and dull but just enough for the human eye to see by. Something else was absent, too, and it took Six a moment to identify it: the constant background sixty hertz hum that pervaded any civilized Human space was…gone.

The only signal source his implants could pick up was his phone. Otherwise…Nothing.

No network. No nothing. Rather than responding like any sane curator of a complex system, the maniacs had just cut power and let the whole damn thing crash where it stood! Physics department, management, communications—everything! It would take them days to get it back up and running.

And now, he could do nothing. One could not infiltrate a system that wasn’t running!

He looked across at the Handler, helplessly. The Handler gave him a blank look, then tilted his head: Six realized that the sounds of gunfire from above had ceased too.

“…No joy, huh?” The Handler sounded resigned.

Six shook his head. “Can’t hack an unpowered system.”

The Handler nodded. “We did some damage though.”

“…Yeah. They won’t forget this day.”

“Hmm.” The Handler looked back up the dark hallway toward the concourse. “Good enough,” he decided. He strode to the center of the array, looked up at it, then plucked something from his pocket.

“Hey. If that body dies, do you die too?”

“No.”

“Good luck to you, then.”

It took Six the last few seconds of his body’s life to realize that the Handler was holding a detonator, and that his big unseasonal coat had concealed a lot more than just weapons.

Clearly, he’d thought of everything.

++END CHAPTER 74++

MORE BY THE AUTHOR

Dandelion

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, and you can read it for free on Royal Road where we are publishing each chapter on a monthly basis.

If you get impatient and would like to read the whole thing, then you can purchase it in hardcover and paperback through your local book store or online wherever good books are sold. Alternatively, you can download it for free through Kindle Unlimited.

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As well as 62 Deathworlders…

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76 Friendly ETs, 145 Squishy Xenos and 318 Dizi Rats, all hanging on the christmas tree.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 75: “Sutures”

Chapter 75: Sutures

Date Point: 18y6m1w5d AV
Manhattan, NYC, USA, Earth

Nurse Delilah Lyons

Vemik Given-Man was not a problem they were prepared to deal with. First, merely moving him was difficult. While his bulk was impressive, it was his incredible weight that made everything difficult. His body was stone-solid and frighteningly dense even totally relaxed and unconscious; he was much more massive than he looked, and that was saying something.

Even their specialized equipment for those rare, extraordinarily obese house-bound patients had struggled to properly heft him. The super-reinforced double-wide gurney creaked and groaned under his weight, and it apparently took ten strong men with a special stretcher to get him down to ground level in the first place.

Both of the ambulance medics looked exhausted, and one of them must have pulled something in the effort. He was wincing in pain, she could plainly see.

Fortunately the hospital elevators had high capacities, and it was just enough to accommodate him, the gurney, and a few attending staff.

He came awake while they were hustling him into prep, mumbling something in a language she didn’t understand. Instinctually, she reached out and held his massive paw. He squeezed back with a painful grip; he was scared.

“Hey. You’re in a hospital, okay? You’re safe. You need surgery. We’re going to get all the shrapnel out of you and fix you up. Try not to move. Can you do that for me? Stay still?”

It took him a moment to process that, and his eyes were lazily sliding all over everything… definite brain injury, like they’d reported.

“O…okay.” He said at last, and then gave her a weak smile. “You’re pretty.”

“Well, thank you. But right now I need you to just relax for me, okay?”

Around them, the hospital was a step away from pandemonium. She was trying not to think about it and focus on the job in front of her, but everyone knew about Grand Central. They were already calling it the worst mass shooting ever. She could believe it.

Grief and politics could wait. She had a patient to look after.

And many more to follow.

Date Point: 18y6m1w5d AV
Marine One, taking off from the White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

Beau was doing what some of his predecessors should have learned to do, and steadfastly ignoring social media. It was a valuable tool, and powerful, but he’d learned that the safest use for it was levity. It was a tool to humanize the President, not a town crier for executive decree.

Now was not the time for levity. Now was the time to show up. He needed to hear grievances, hear the pain, see the tears. He needed to listen, not quack loudly to remind everyone he still existed.

He grabbed his seat and grimaced as they banked and turned south-east toward the AFB where the plane was waiting. He hated flying. Hated helicopters especially. But, duty demanded he get himself to Manhattan as quickly as possible, and for that, he had to fly.

Marine One to Air Force One. Air Force One to another Marine One. From there, a motorcade. He’d be traveling all day. Which, compared to the suffering that APA managed to inflict in its death throes…

Lord forgive me, I hope they’re burning right now.

He pushed the vengeful thought and the queasy feeling in his stomach aside and tried to focus on what he was going to say. He was going to have to say a lot of things to a lot of different people. Some would be wounded. Some would be grieving. Some would be heroes. All would be traumatized. He owed it to them to at least find words that didn’t feel shallow, somehow.

Then there was the diplomatic incident. Of all the people to get caught up in it, a Ten’Gewek Given-Man had been wounded, and he had no idea how the Ten’Gewek might respond to that, much less if he died of his wounds. On the one hand, there wasn’t much they could do. They were a client nation for very good reasons, even if he hated the shades of colonialism; they weren’t ready. But on the other…

They were a client nation of the Great Father. He would definitely not be pleased at all about any of this, and that mattered; Ten’Gewek were turning out to be an extremely important recruiting source for JETS teams, like the Ghurkas in the British empire. Some unique combination of factors meant it was easier to find suitable recruits among a people of maybe twenty-five thousand than it was among the Anglophone nations with hundreds of millions. And so, more than half of teams two through…six, now? The bulk of their manpower was Ten’Gewek.

All Yan had to do was call them home…

He needed to speak with his ambassadors. Rockefeller of course would be upset, but the mountainous primitivist at the center of this drama—Etsicitty?—would likely be quietly fuming over the whole thing. Chambliss of course couldn’t blame him, from what he understood the big man was quite close with the Ten’Gewek, Vemik especially. Not normally a desirable quality in an ambassador, but a typical aloof relationship wouldn’t work here, so…

So he had a primitive and yet strategically important people that needed to be assuaged, while his envoy to those people was effectively the total and polar opposite of what any normal ambassador would be: cover-model handsome and charismatic, rather than stately and dependable. Too handsome, in fact. He looked like a steroid-snorting sweaty comic book hero, for chrissake! Who did nude modeling—recently, too! That didn’t even cover his complicated family situation, or the trio’s celebrity status independent of any of the rest of it. Two sets of personalities Chambliss had essentially nothing in common with that needed careful handling…

Christ. Chambliss dug in his pocket for some acetaminophen to ease his headache, chased it down with a swig of soda, and turned his attention back to the things that were inside his area of expertise. He could be statesmanlike. Reassuring. The calm hand on the rudder now that the seas were rough.

He just needed the right words…

Date Point: 18y6m1w5d AV
Lakebeds National Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Even though Lakebeds would never match the towering majesty of Yosemite, the majesty had never been Julian’s abiding memory of that trip anyway. What he really remembered was kissing Xiù for the first time, then going back to the tent, cuddling up in a nest of blankets and sleeping bags with two of the most beautiful women in the galaxy, listening to rain on the tarp, and forgetting his troubles for a while.

Life had a way of providing such moments of peace when one went looking for them, and Julian had learned long ago to know them and appreciate them when they came. They’d taken Lewis and Lucy along, Allison had brought along Clara and Dane, they’d built a campsite next to Lake Chrissake, not far from the road, and now…

Campfire coffee, the patter of rain on the tarps. Anna and Harrison asleep in their travel cots, Ramsey diligently turning a rack full of hot dogs over the fire, Tristan listening slightly awestruck as Clara and Lucy discussed something technical that went way over Julian’s head…

There was something just…wholesome about it all. He’d had one of his slabfriends describe his alignment as “chaotic dad” once, and honestly? Yeah, it kinda fit. He really did enjoy teaching the boys his skills, and playing with the toddlers (even when they were being difficult.) Since coming out here and setting up the camp they’d sparred a bit, meditated by the lake, and tried to relax and treat it as an impromptu camping trip rather than…

Well, rather than getting out of town because his spider-sense was tingling. Just in case.

Even though that worry never quite went away, Julian did find it in him to relax, knowing they were all set at least. There was nothing for them to do now except enjoy the little slice of luxury they’d carved out.

One that his phone shattered.

Prickles ran up his back the second it went off. Hoeff’s ringtone. In a fit of mischief, he’d set it to play ‘In The Navy’ by Village People ‘cuz, well, Hoeff was a former SEAL and hated it in a tolerant, amused way. But it was not the ringtone he wanted to hear at the moment, especially considering the last things he’d heard from Hoeff.

Please, God, let it be good news…

Just in case it wasn’t, he took his phone and retreated from camp, jogged up to the truck, and sat in it to answer. “Hoeff. What’s up?”

“I’m comin’ ‘ta get you. Duty calls. President needs to talk with you.”

“Shit.” Julian sighed. Yup. Spider-sense was never wrong. “What happened?”

Hoeff explained. He listened. He realized at one point his spare hand was gripping the steering wheel so hard it was beginning to creak, and let go, but that just left him with no outlet.

“How the fuck did this happen, Hoeff?”

“Like any successful act of terror—Suddenly. Vemik killed all four who came after him and he’s okay for now, but…”

“Why weren’t your people there?!”

“Firstly, they were. The whole encounter went off in seconds. Secondly, Vemik was exposed for the same reason you aren’t surrounded by bodyguards right now, big guy. You refused.”

“…Right. Sorry.”

“No worries. I’m pissed as fuck too. Get ready, I’ll be there in five.”

“Right.” Julian hung up, rested his head back against the headrest, and groaned. He didn’t even feel like swearing.

Next time, he promised himself. Next time they’d come out here when he wasn’t fretting about something. But…who knew. This had still been the right thing to do, even if he had to go. He glanced back toward the fire, and nodded to himself. They were safe. That mattered. They could have a good time out here without him.

He bustled out of the truck.

Al and Xiù knew what was up the second they saw him. Again, there was that whole no-nonsense thing where they figured out what needed to happen, and made it happen: Allison helped him fetch his stuff, Xiù fixed him a hot dog. Kisses from them, hugs from the boys, kisses for the babies, hugs for Lewis, Lucy, Clara and Dane…

Hoeff showed up with a SOR van full of security, including Ferd and his men. Good. Humans (who he didn’t know) with long, scoped rifles and trained special operator murdermonkeys was about as good as a man could ask for. He traded a solemn nod with Ferd, another with one of the fellas that seemed like he was in charge, and crammed himself into the van’s front seat.

Xiù handed Hoeff a hot dog too. “Look after him,” she said.

“We’ll look after each other,” he promised. That was a clever little turn of phrase, actually. Exactly the right thing to say. She nodded, gratefully.

They drove away. About a mile down the road, Hoeff licked ketchup from his fingers and finally spoke.

“…Good hot dog.”

Julian realized he hadn’t even eaten his. “Yeah.” There was not much else to say. Duty called.

But he did enjoy his hot dog, even so.

Date Point: 18y6m1w5d AV
ESNN news studio, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

“Are you okay?”

Ava’s hands were trembling as she massaged Hannah’s ears. It was funny, really: in front of the camera, things weren’t a problem. She read off the prompter, delivered the facts, offered whatever insights she felt qualified to give, asked whatever questions came up…It was all a well-honed skill at this point, a dance she knew the steps to.

When the cameras shut off, her imagination returned. And it had a nasty habit of putting her there.

Bustling out of the roller derby event with Adam, after he spotted a bad guy in the crowd. Hearing the shots ring out when Sara was killed. The moment a bullet had hit her in the back in Egypt…

She was fine. She nodded at her producer, Will Fisher, and gratefully accepted a cup of water. “Just…upset.”

“Yeah.” Will sat down next to her. “I can make room for you if you need to take a health break tomorrow…”

Ava shook her head. Hannah wasn’t whimpering and Doing Her Best any longer, and Hannah honestly knew her mood better than anyone. If the dog was calm, she was calm. “Honestly, I’m fine. It’s just…a lot of people.”

“Yeah, we just got the latest numbers.” Will handed them over. Ava looked the printout over and felt something sag slightly, inside her. There’d been a number of grim thresholds looming over them since the story had broken, once they’d realized where had been hit and by how many gunmen. The last of them had just crumbled.

“Right,” she nodded solemnly.

Will patted her shoulder. “You’re back on in three.”

“Got it.”

Ava finished her drink, set it aside, and sat back so the makeup artist could touch her up for the studio lights. Sometimes, the dream of quitting this and going full-time with her art gnawed at her. But on the other hand…

A touch on her arm and an urgent mutter had her striding back to the desk. Sit down, make sure Hannah was sitting quietly next to her, microphone on, compose herself, wait for the light…

“Welcome back to ESNN, our main headline tonight, the worst mass shooting in American history, as the number of confirmed fatalities in the Grand Central massacre reaches triple digits. Our correspondent Thani Alromaithi has this report from the scene…”

She was back in front of the camera. She was in control.

She was okay.

Date Point: 18y6m1w6d AV
Manhattan, NYC, USA, Earth

Vemik Given-Man

Hospital was not fun. Vemik couldn’t do any of the things he loved most.

Moving? Lifting? Springing around, playing, fucking? Not an option. The grenade had cut deep into his body, slicing muscle and leaving little sharp teeth inside him that had sawn and cut through him as he moved and fought. In his fighting rage, he’d not noticed. Now that he was resting, it hurt, and if he moved at all it hurt even more.

The doctors said that was easy to fix and promised he’d be up and moving in a hand of days at most. They used long words that Vemik would have found super interesting before…but that was the other problem.

He couldn’t think right.

It came and went. Sometimes, he’d feel almost like himself, he’d get out his journal, start sketching or writing, then some time later he’d blink and realize he’d been sitting with pencil in hand and doing nothing for a while, staring at the paper, or he’d look at the paper and find it covered in nonsense. His thoughts felt slow, and he’d try to listen closely when somebody was talking to him only to find, he couldn’t remember what they said.

Eventually, he managed to get some understanding to stick: he’d been knocked around pretty hard. Very hard. Between the grenade, crashing through the floor and landing on his back, his brain had gone bouncing around inside his skull, and that was why he wasn’t thinking so well.

They said he had a thick space of…something…inside his head between skull and brain that kept him alive. They also promised it would get better, with time. Vemik trusted them, especially after the first day when he could move more freely again without pain shooting through him all the time. That was after the second sir-jury.

He had the cleaned shrapnel in a little bottle by his bed. Now all he had to do was…wait. Wait for the big medicine to fix him. He wouldn’t even have many scars when it was done.

…Wait, and see if he would ever Sky-Think again.

He pulled his blankets around himself miserably and tried to watch more TV. That thought was more frightening than facing down a Brown One. He didn’t mind dying. The gods Took everything in the end. But the thought of being stupid was too painful to bear.

He missed Singer.

Date Point: 18y6m1w6d AV
Weaver dropship, HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

No jump array to NYC? No problem. When all else failed, there was always the good old-fashioned approach of bundling into a trans-atmospheric cargo vehicle and waiting.

It didn’t even need to take off. Once the pre-flight checks were done and the cabin pressure tested, the trip to Earth was little more than…well. The usual anticlimax of jump travel. The view out the window just vanished. One second, the concrete of HMNB Folctha’s helipad and the ugly side of the base buildings, the next…Earth’s curved horizon, filling the sky.

Even in the circumstances, Julian had to pause and admire the view.

They were low enough he couldn’t really make out the shape of what he saw and turn it into something familiar. Somewhere over Europe, maybe? Hard to say. He didn’t get the chance to try and figure it out either, as the Weaver rolled, turned its belly to the ground, and turned the Earth into a thin slice of blue at the bottom of his window, and then nothing but the black of the sky.

Sometimes, he kinda missed Misfit.

He certainly felt a lot more worried about what he was heading for now than he ever had about exploring an alien planet. They’d swung by home to grab his good tailored suits and clean him up a bit. He was going to meet the President, he couldn’t show up in his running shorts, all stinky, barefoot and bare-chested.

…He kinda wanted to, though.

Anyway. Turned out Hoeff knew as much about this sort of thing as his sons did. Since when was everyone all dapper and stuff? Julian just had everything re-tailored recently so at least it all fit properly. Through the shower, good soap, hair conditioned, tamed and tied back, and the last little adjustments made. He had to admit, he did sorta like cufflinks…

“Christ, you really are a fuckin’ caveman,” Hoeff grumbled, as he swept over Julian with a sticky roller. “Can’t stay clean ‘fer ten fuckin’ minutes…”

“Yeah, yeah…”

Hoeff meanwhile was possibly the sharpest-dressed and groomed ultra-tank of a man Julian had ever seen…like, ever. How the fuck did he manage all that in like ten minutes?

It was a discreet kind of sharp, though. Stick a pair of shades on him, he’d be just another Secret Service guy in a dark suit. “We’ll be on the ground in twenty minutes. President should be there ten minutes after that. There’ll be a few minutes and some words ‘fer the cameras. Don’t hug ‘im, don’t crush his hand, don’t wrassle ‘im—”

“I could figure that part out for myself,” Julian replied, drily.

“Really don’t crush his hand. I think you forget you can crumble oak in your grip.”

“…Right.”

“After that, I dunno. Depends what he wants ‘ta talk with you for, I guess. Prob’ly about the Ten’Gewek and how to keep ‘em happy with Vemik gettin’ hurt.”

“Oh, that’s easy. He better fuckin’ recover. Yan has the future of his people in Vemik’s hands, dude. He’s not gonna be happy if Vemik is permanently brain-damaged.”

“None of us are.” Hoeff sat back, apparently satisfied he’d done as much as he could to temporarily remove whatever microscopic flaws had landed on Julian’s jacket.

“Yeah…” Julian sat back and did his best not to muss it up again by fidgeting. Hard, when he was nearly sick with worry himself.

“I’ll be leavin’ you in the Secret Service’s hands,” Hoeff told him, as the plasma rushing past the window filled in and covered it entirely. “I’ma check on the big guy personally.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“I know. And we’re wrapping you both up in the most smothering cocoon of security ever.”

Julian wasn’t about to argue that, not any longer. At least, not right now.

The rest of the long fall to Earth happened in silence.

Date Point: 18y6m1w6d AV
Manhattan, NYC, USA, Earth

Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

“How’s he doin’?”

Vemik’s doctor had the stressed look that said she hadn’t slept properly in more than twenty-four hours. Her face was lined from fatigue and wearing protective equipment for hours on end, and her scrubs were rumpled. Poor woman was probably running on caffeine and pure work ethic.

‘Course, a lot of people were wearing that look today, and Vemik wasn’t her only patient. Fuck the APA.

“He’s suffering from a severe concussion. Fortunately, Ten’Gewek skulls are designed to take a hell of a knocking, so we didn’t need to resort to anything drastic. As for the shrapnel injuries, between the intramuscular sutures and the modern regeneratives we injected, he should have his full physical function in less than a week.”

Hoeff nodded, feeling sympathetic and more than a little worried. “And mentally?”

“…If he were human, I’d say he’s badly traumatized. He hasn’t really opened up to anyone, but it seems to me like the thought of a permanent brain injury really frightens him. The best I can do is reassure him that I’d expect a human patient who’s conscious and responding as well as him to recover well, but, realistically, he survived a blow to the head that would have outright killed a human. I can’t give a definitive prognosis, we’d need a specialist in xeno-neurology for that, and those are…uh…not common.”

Well…fuck. Hoeff fought back a wave of sadness. That, and no small share of guilt. He’d known he shoulda pushed harder about the security detail. Vemik had been targeted by the APA every other time he’d come to Earth, they’d had every reason to believe it’d happen again…But what was he gonna say to a dude who could crush a silverback? “No, you can’t take care of yourself?”

Well, yeah. That’s exactly what he shoulda said. Not that it would have mattered, but he shoulda tried anyway.

“We okay to get him out of here? You need the room?”

The doctor consulted her tablet. “…He really needs to move as little as possible for at least the next twenty-four hours. Moving him out…no. He needs to stay here overnight, at minimum.”

Hoeff nodded. “Alright. Well. Thank you, Doctor.”

Well, first thing’s first. He wasn’t going to risk a freaked-out supergorilla panicking in a hospital with a brain injury. He’d spend the night as close to Vemik as possible.

Julian would want to do the same thing, once he was done meeting with the President. Hoeff had stayed away from that. He didn’t think much of Chambliss, firstly, and the President probably didn’t think much of him; Hoeff had murdered one of his best friends after all, on order of the previous president. Consorting with terrorists didn’t exactly win a spot in Hoeff’s space-limited heart, and somehow he knew Chambliss wasn’t as perfectly ignorant of things as he claimed to be.

Best to stay away and do what he could. Like, say, letting himself into Vemik’s room to try and cheer the young cavemonkey.

Apparently he managed it just by showing up, because Vemik’s body language shifted the instant he looked up and saw who was visiting him. “Heff! Ow.” He grimaced as his natural bouncy greeting pulled at his wounds.

“Careful, big guy. You survived something that would probably kill ‘Horse! Gonna take some time to get right, y’know?

“‘Horse? Nah….really?” Vemik paused, blinking like that thought dismayed him more than the actual wound.

“Really! Well…okay, maybe not him, but any of the rest of us! You cavemonkeys have hard heads. Grenades at that range are usually fatal. Anyway. How are you feeling?”

“….Slow. Keep losing words in the middle of…uh…”

“Sentences?”

“…Uh…speaking.”

Hoeff sighed. “Yeah. That’s not uncommon. I’ve had a couple really hard hits to the head over the years too. I remember that feeling.”

“Oh…good. Makes me feel better. How long?”

Hoeff sat on the bed beside him. “Hardest hit was when I was playing rugby in high school. I was sixteen.Pretty fuckin’ big-ass sixteen-year-old too, so the way my head collided with the other guy’s honestly mighta killed us both. I had to quit playing after that, took me, uh, three months to fully recover. I was told that any more hits might never heal, so…I had plans, so I stopped playing rugby.”

“…Months?”

“We have much better medicine now. And a few months isn’t that long, in the grand scheme of it. I think we all know you’ll be the next Yan, if you don’t get yourself killed.”

Vemik drooped, and fidgeted with the tufty end of his tail, Ten’Gewek body language for all kinds of uncertainty, anguish and sorrow. “I come to this planet, people try to kill me. Every time, seems like.”

“…Yeah. But you kill them right back. All four of your playmates are burnin’ in hell right now. An’ we don’t know for sure, but…a little birdy told me that someone really important to the terrorist fucks mighta blown himself up. So, you win. All you gotta do now is heal up.”

Vemik didn’t stop fidgeting with his tail. “I didn’t kill the last one…”

“You pretty much crushed every bone in his body, Vemik. Even his jaw. That’ll kill a human just fine. Might take a while for us to figger out we’re dead, but…”

“So…they’re gone? No more APA?”

“Eh. you never kill off an idea like that completely. There’s always gonna be some stupid true-believer shit-fuckers out there. But, they were losin’ and about to go away forever, so I guess they decided to go out with a bang. And…” Hoeff looked around conspiratorially. “Keep a secret?”

Vemik nodded, and then managed a reluctant smile. “Maybe forget anyway…I keep.”

Hoeff laughed along. “Heh, right. I probably shouldn’t say this, okay? But after what you did? Took a grenade pretty much to the face and barely noticed it? Then ran four big dudes through a fuckin’ blender faster’n most people can stand up? I don’t know many with the balls to stand up against that kinda murder. And believe me, that story is being spread far and wide. Deliberately. I wouldn’t be surprised if security cam footage ‘leaked’ at some point.”

“…Why?”

“It’s a message. Fuck around and find out.” He watched Vemik’s sleepily confused blink, and decided to translate. Fuck that hit him right in the feels…Anyway. “Means…means ’if you try that again, this is what’ll happen to ya.’”

“…Oh. That’s good I guess.” Vemik’s stomach growled. “…I’m hungry, but they don’t feed me enough! Said something about…uh…[stomach-sick]?”

“Yeah, they’re kinda overwhelmed out there. And probably worried the anesthetic will cause nausea—that means [stomach-sick]. I’ll getcha a big bowl of red.”

“…Red?”

“Nothin’ but meat, fat, and spice. None o’ them heretical beans the northerners like so much…”

“Ooh! Yes please!!”

The Quest for Real Chili didn’t take too long—it was New York, finding good food was not difficult—but there was a dragon to fight at the end, in the form of a protective and badly overworked nurse, with the surname Lyons on her scrubs.

Fortunately, Hoeff had a superpower. All his fucks had long, long ago been given.

“Look, I respect ‘yer tryin’ to care for your patient, but he ain’t human. Big guy can tank a grenade goin’ off next to him, but he’d starve to death on what you feed your regular patients, and quickly too. Do you know what his base metabolic rate is? It’s terrifying.”

“We’ve quadrupled his rations!”

“And it ain’t enough, or of the right balance. He’s not human. Believe me, I know. I’ve run around in the jungle naked with these guys, hunting werne.”

“And your solution is a gallon of ‘death chili?’” she asked, achieving a total no-sell with the naked-in-the-woods thing. Dang.

“Yes. It’s nothin’ but calories and protein in a form his short meat-eater gut can handle. Really my solution would to be to bring a side of beef in here and roast it over a fire, but I thought y’all might object.”

A small crack in her formidable defenses finally flickered across her face, for just a bare second. Dang! Too bad he felt so loyal to Claire, because this would’ve been rare sport…

Oh well. He already had perfect. What more could a guy want?

“Look, if he chucks it back up, I’ll clean it myself. Can’t say fairer, right?”

“And re-do his sutures if he pulls them?” she retorted.

“Y’all marinated him in Cruezzir-derived medicine. We both know he’s good, just bruised. Right now it’s his soul needs healing most. A full belly should help with that.”

She sighed and nodded, clearly too busy with all the other wounded from Grand Central to fight him any harder. “Fine, fine. You’re right, he’s not human. Go ahead. I’ll add what you said about his dietary needs to his notes…”

“‘Preciate it. Seriously, feed him right and let him move around and he’ll be right as rain, I bet.”

“We’ll take that under advisement,” she said, unconvincingly, and turned away to sit back down at her desk. “Go on in.”

Hoeff gave her his best winning smile, ducked back into Vemik’s room, and made himself comfortable while his invalided friend started spooning the chilli into his face-hole as quickly as the spoon could manage. Well. Nothin’ wrong with the big guy’s appetite at least.

He turned on the TV. There was nothing on except the reporting from Grand Central, but that was worth watching. He wanted to stay informed, if he could. And maybe see if Julian was gonna end up in front of a camera again.

Prob’ly not. Right now, he’d be meeting the President in private. Hoeff had no desire to be a fly on the wall for that one. He’d learn what he needed to know in due time, when the Powers had made their decisions.

For now, he had the important job of looking after a friend. So he put the remote aside, settled down, and relaxed.

There were worse jobs.

Date Point: 18y6m1w6d AV
Manhattan, NYC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

His ambassador to the Ten’Gewek was an unlikely fellow to wield high office, to say the least. It probably wasn’t fair to the huge man at all, but something about Ambassador Etsicitty just…rubbed Chambliss the wrong way. Beau, if he was honest, earned his rank through cunning and positioning. He had ideas that he wanted to see through to fruition, and to do that in this game, one needed to be in the right place, know the right people, cultivate the right skills…and, of course, the right connections. That sort of work was a long, deliberate, careful dance of decades and it had at last paid off with the ultimate reward.

Etsicitty, though? He would never wear a suit well, no matter how expertly tailored it might be. You just had to look at the man to imagine the axe over his shoulder, the firewood under his arm, and the plaid. Or, equally, to see Tarzan swinging in a tree with his Janes along for the ride. His hair was too long, currently pulled back a little too tight and neat, giving him a strained look. His tan vanished right down his collar and up his sleeves, and he had the handshake (and calluses) of an old auto mechanic.

He’d won his position by being the kind of person the Ten’Gewek liked and would actually respect, not by being…well, an Ambassador. An Ambassador’s job was to represent and convey the interests of the nation he served. Now to be fair, Julian of course did that, and from all reports was doing it quite well. One did not easily earn a positive evaluation from Rockefeller, after all. It was more…

He didn’t slip into a scene gently and say soft, friendly words with daggers hidden inside. He simply appeared and commanded everyone to pay attention through his sheer dominating presence, even though he was visibly doing his damnedest to defer to presidential authority. He had to shuffle halfway sideways through narrow halls, for chrissake.

None of that should have bothered Beau all that much. But try as he might, there was something about the polygamous caveman that just rubbed Chambliss the wrong way. It was…

That was it. It was the excess. Etsicitty was too damn big, too damn good-looking. Too damn much of a man in all the irreducible ways high society pretended didn’t matter, but which really, really did. Too damn polite and soft-spoken, despite the too damn gravelly tone in his voice that worked too damn well for him. Too damn many women in his personal life who were too damn happy about it all, in all the primal, uncivilized ways that could make a man too damn jealous. It was all just too much…

Too much damn success. At least, from a certain deep-down point of view. It grated on Chambliss’ instincts and reminded him those instincts were still there. You could cover a man in a nice suit and surround him with the refinements of civilization at its highest level, and still he would reduce himself to a goddamn neanderthal when the right kind of rival walked in. And that was it, really. Beau was in the presence of a much better neanderthal.

Julian was the total opposite of what civilized power should look like. He should be on a team breaking skulls with that obscene body of his, rather than sweating his way through formal dinners and guarded conversation. He didn’t fit, he didn’t belong, and his mere presence pulled back the veil on how power at the highest levels was really just theatre. In some ways he was even worse than Daar. That giant bear made even Julian seem like a puny pencil-necked nerd, yet he was no stranger to statecraft. Daar somehow knew how to gently dance in and properly dominate a courtly scene, and do it in a way that flattered everyone there. But Julian?

No. He subconsciously tugged at his shirt’s collar, even though it was clearly a perfect fit around that absurd neck. Everyday furniture couldn’t bear his weight and floors creaked ominously under any unguarded step, so he prowled into a room rather than walk or saunter. He curled inwards, doing his best not to loom over people, yet he stood tall and heroic even then; easily six-foot-three. His body language screamed discomfort and a barely-contained desire to be anywhere else.

Well. Time to seek his expert opinion and then spare the poor man—and everyone else—the pain of keeping him caged up in civilization.

There had been the usual series of events on arrival. Some comments from a lectern on the apron at JFK, and then into a motorcade. There was business of state to discuss in private before Chambliss headed to Grand Central to meet people and make his real statements.

Just as soon as he knew what those real statements were.

“Please, gentlemen, sit down,” he invited them, and settled on the couch himself. Ambassador Rockefeller was more comfortable in these situations and sat gracefully, adjusting his suit as he did so. Etsicitty sat gingerly, testing the couch before allowing his weight to settle on it. Something inside creaked alarmingly, so he re-settled himself over the front edge of the couch’s frame and leaned forward, most of his huge weight comfortably borne on his heels.

That seemed like a problem Chambliss was happy not to have, really.

“So. Our Ten’Gewek friends.” He spread his hands, inviting them to update him.

Fortunately, Etsicitty’s discomfort turned into professionalism when given such an invitation. He nodded, and took a deep breath. “Yan has seen this before, and he’s no stranger to violence among his own people, or among ours. He won’t blame us for the attack, as such, but he will make note of it in his balance of Givings and Takings between us. What matters now is how Vemik recovers.”

“How was that balance looking before this?” Chambliss asked him.

“The only avoided extinction because we intervened, and they damn well know it. They make a lot of talk about how a Giving like that is too big to ever repay, and sending men and Given-Men to the SOR is part of their redressing of that debt, or at least paying off the interest, if you like. Vemik, though…Vemik’s former name is Sky-Thinker. He’s their people’s Archimedes, their Newton, a once-in-a-thousand-years breakaway genius who totally changed life for all of them, and Yan knows it. He knows his people need Vemik to navigate the challenges of just making contact. Losing him, or losing his brilliant mind? That’d pretty much wipe out all our credit with them, and then some.”

“Lucky for us that he survived, then,” Rockefeller said, grimly.

“Well…yes. But…” it was here Julian showed genuine worry, “in what capacity? Do you know how hard it is to concuss a Ten’Gewek? They’re literally thick-skilled, with an inch of soft tissue padding their brains. Their men have an enormous sagittal crest that anchors a three-inch thick layer of jaw muscle on top of all that, too. In Given-Men? They’ve got more of all that. They’re built to take a hit and keep going. I doubt he even noticed the fall, it was that goddamned grenade going off like six feet away…”

“…Six feet? That’s all?”

“That’s what I’m told. Like I said…they’re tough. So I can’t imagine Yan will think too highly if some random losers managed to scramble Vemik’s mind, seeing as he’s the shining light of his people, and all.”

“Shining…how–? No. Why was he allowed about so unguarded?!”

“Because he said no. Same as I do.”

“He did have a quick response force following him,” Rockefeller added. “And they responded quickly. But as Julian said, he wouldn’t accept more than that. Nor does the Great Father, when he visits Folctha.”

Chambliss sighed. He’d had similar conversations with his children, about the balance between protection and personal freedom. Hell, he’d chafed under the need for protection himself. There was no sense in picking at that problem, it was in the past and unchangeable.

“So. Let’s assume the worst case for a moment and assume a permanent brain injury on Vemik’s part,” he said. “What do we do to keep Yan and the Lodge happy?”

“Nothing.” Julian shrugged.

“Nothing is not an acceptable answer.”

“Nothing is reality, Mister President. If Vemik comes out of this as a drooling…fuck.” He ran a hand through his hair and it instantly detonated out of its tie into a wild, untamed mane. Oddly, it suited him much better, even as he made a desperate attempt to tidy it then gave up and sheepishly let it fall as it wanted. “…There’s nothing in our power to do. To be frank I don’t know if he’d be happy to have me as a friend anymore. He’ll see it as us having murdered their future. And he’d be right.”

“Which is why we’d better be ready to pony up to the Corti,” Rockefeller added. “Assuming they can help.”

“…Probably. They’ve got some pretty advanced nootropics they’ve been researching with the Lads—the HEAT operators, sorry. They get hit in the head pretty hard on the regular. Even nervejammed.”

“And will that translate?”

Julian shrugged with a small embarrassed grin. “I’m a lot of things but, uh, I’m no big-brain like that. I’d guess they probably have a start on something that might work, maybe.”

“This being the Corti we’re talking about, though, they’re going to know how valuable a relationship this is to us, and they’ll charge accordingly. So far, we’ve been able to bank on the unique scientific resources of two deathworlds to pay them off. For this…” Rockefeller pulled a face.

“I see.” Chambliss checked his watch, and decided they’d discussed everything he needed to discuss with them in person. “Well, I’m glad we have some kind of a direction. I assume you’ll be going to see Vemik?”

“Immediately after this, Mister President,” Etsicitty nodded.

“Please…if he’s in any condition to hear them, please convey my personal regrets over this incident to him.”

Etsicitty was so dismayingly guileless that he let his skepticism show on his face, but he nodded nonetheless. “I’ll do that, sir.”

So. He would never be of use in a high-stakes game of diplomacy against a well-prepared adversary. It was more than simple honesty—the Gaoians and the Great Father managed, after all. It was more that he didn’t have the instincts for the game in the first place.

But, that wasn’t what he was for. He was there to demonstrate to the Ten’Gewek that humans could meet their values. So, Chambliss nodded, and decided to prompt him. “Unless you think it would be better delivered in person…?”

Julian shifted, tilted his head, and gave Chambliss an unmistakably hard appraisal.

Which he failed. “…Maybe not, Mister President. Or at least, not without some preparation beforehand. It can…take quite a bit to earn their respect.”

Well. No hiding the meaning there, but he was at least polite about it. “I see. I will leave the matter of our regrets in your hands, then.”

“A personal Giving would be a good idea,” Etsicitty offered. “A gift from you to Vemik will carry a lot more weight. They’re very conscious of Give and Take, effort and sacrifice. Words only carry weight after respect is earned. Your best bet would be to give something tangible he could use.”

“Something practical but finely made,” Chambliss surmised.

“Yessir. He is particularly fond of knives and steelwork, being at this point a master bladesmith himself. But I’d suggest something else. Being a Given-Man, he’s not had much time to beat on steel and that’s a bit of a sore point, and…well, you’re not a smith, sir, so it wouldn’t be a personal sacrifice on your part.”

“…He came to this planet to donate his personal journals to our library, didn’t he?”

“Yes, and that’s a big part of the affront. He came with a big Giving.”

Chambliss nodded, and thought for a second. “I have quite a collection of pens I’m very fond of…”

Julian seemed a bit non-plussed, but Rockefeller came to the rescue. “That’s a good idea. He’s a scholar, and a writer. ‘With my fond hope that you will record ever greater knowledge…’ I think that’s very suitable. I think one of the Emperors? Julian?”

“Uh…”

“They’re very large and finely crafted.”

“Oh! Yeah. He tends to like big chonky pencils and such.”

“Well, that’s a painful parting,” Chambliss sighed. “But…needs must.”

“Can you tell me exactly which pen, sir? It sounds like I need to do some reading if I’m to convey the scope of the giving…”

“I’ll get you up to speed,” Rockefeller offered, easily. “Let’s just say that some of these pens could buy you a modest sports car.”

“…Dang.”

Chambliss laughed, despite himself. That was such a corn-fed response it was honestly charming. “Tom?” he turned to one of his aides. “I need the Pilot Hundredth Anniversary set brought from my personal collection as soon as possible, please. With the matching ink.”

Rockefeller raised an eyebrow. “Very generous, Mister President. There were only twenty-five sets made, as I recall?”

“And one was sadly lost, yes.” Chambliss nodded. “I bought extra ink at the time too, so Vemik will get two un-opened bottles in each color.”

Julian wasn’t stupid. “Sir…how much of a giving is this?”

“At this point it’s priceless.” Rockefeller chuckled. “Complete sets are simply not for sale. You have some learning ahead of you.”

Julian nodded, with perhaps a bit of surprised awe in his voice. “…Thank you, Mister President.”

“Thank you for advising me.” Chambliss endured another one of those grinding handshakes. “Anyway. It’s time for me to leave you to your research and go face the cameras. Thank you, both.”

He shook Rockefeller’s hand too, and left them behind as he headed out. One of his other assistants handed him a tablet as they went, with his speech on it. One conversation ended, another began, and the business of being President in a time of crisis flowed ever on. Still. He was pleased, even though he was giving up something that meant a lot to him. If it could rob the APA of their victory, no price was too great.

Though, somehow, he expected the price would be a lot steeper than some pens, in the end.

Date Point: 18y6m1w6d AV
Starship Silent But Deadly Hell system, Hunter space

Tooko, Brother and Stud of Clan Firefang

Tooko was not an analyst. Any observations he made during his long sit-and-watch were amateur work at best, but still he made them. He had nothing better to do after all.

There were definite patterns and cycles to the Hunter activity he was seeing. Which made sense: everything he knew about them said they automated as much as they could. It would be strange if their jumps and shipments weren’t on regular schedules. Hopefully the real analysts would find something to sink their claws into.

Tooko, though, had a problem. He was overdue to exfiltrate, made so by a persistent farthrow and by the feathery touch of long-range FTL sensors brushing through the outer system. At such extreme ranges, their resolution would be too low to catch him at a quiet, slow warp…but the surge of going superluminal in the first place was always that little bit brighter. He didn’t dare move, yet.

He had supplies to last for months where he was, and so long as he remained still and quiet, about the only way they’d ever find him would be if they happened to look closely at the one particular asteroid he was latched to.

It wasn’t like he was hidden, really. Just tiny and the same temperature as the rock. Any decent visual-wavelength picture of the asteroid would show his dart-shaped little craft as clear as Keeda’s tail. He was depending on the vastness of space to keep him hidden, nothing more.

And he was getting worried about one of the patrols. It was on a slow, lazy, thorough loop through the gas giants, pausing over every moon to do a full orbital survey before moving on. He could only imagine it was either automated or captained by something with insect-like patience, because that must have been about the most mind-numbing detail in the whole system, but…well, they were doing it. Methodically and comprehensively.

Were they really crazy enough to hunt every rock in the star system for him? That would take years!

But then again…Hunters didn’t have the same standards for sanity as everyone else. And so long as that group was sweeping around, Tooko didn’t dare take off and fly away.

He drummed his claws on his chair’s armrest as he watched them finish their survey of moon seventeen and move on to moon eighteen. Eleven more to go. Maybe they’d move to the moons of the next gas giant. Maybe they’d move on to check the planet’s lagrange points. If the former, he’d be clear to slip away.

If the latter…it depended. He’d have to move. If they came straight for his hiding spot, it would be run or die. If they went for one of the other L-points first, there might be hope of using the gas giant’s gravity well and atmosphere to obscure his escape.

He was itching to move, stand up, do something, stretch his legs, do some calisthenics, relax a body made stiff by too many tense hours in the chair…

Fuck it. He did exactly that. When the time came, he’d need to be loose and ready, not sluggish. There was no reason to believe they’d abandon their methodical pattern, and it would take them hours to finish it. He had time.

He rose, threw his blankets off, and prowled to the middle of the ship to stretch, calculating furiously. He’d already loaded up a drone to fire off, if the worst happened. They could catch him, but his probe would streak out of the system at blistering speeds before jumping home the second it cleared the farthrow field. Whatever happened, so long as he got that probe launched, it was mission accomplished.

He unfolded the resistance trainer from its nook in the wall, locked it in position, set it to a low intensity, and started his warmup.

The question was, how far away was the farthrow field edge? SBD was fast, tearing fast. Hopefully, faster than anything the Hunters had…but that wasn’t certain. It certainly wasn’t faster than its own probes, and if the Hunters had interceptor probes of their own, then any direct chase would be short-lived…

The exercise distracted him, and he stopped thinking about it for a while. For some peaceful minutes, there was just his own sounds of exertion, the creaking of the resistance bands, and the sound of cables through pulleys.

A ping from his instrument panel pulled him out of it. He let go of the cable, sprang to his chair, and watched. The patrol had gone to warp, just a short sublight hop from one moon to another.

Well. Mind back on the job. But he felt better, now. Prepared. Coiled. Ready. Whatever came next, he’d warmed up for it.

He grabbed a foil pack of food formula, stuck the wide straw in his mouth, and squeezed it out as he wrapped the blankets back around him with his other paw.

And he watched again.

Date Point: 18y6m1w6d AV
Manhattan, NYC, USA, Earth

Julian Etsicitty

There was nothing worse than a miserable Vemik. Like…anything was better. He was just such a naturally and aggressively optimistic fella, anything that managed to get him down was guaranteed to be depressing as heck.

First thing was the hug. Julian braced himself as Vemik leapt across the room and into his arms, tail and legs squeezing tightly around his waist. Julian staggered back a few steps under the reassuringly heavy load, but managed to stay on his feet. “Oof! Yeah,” he grunted, “take it easy, I ain’t going anywhere.”

There was no wrestling or anything this time, just a man and his younger, frightened, massive iron lump of an alien gorilla friend, doing the best they could together. Julian would be lying to himself if he didn’t say he felt some fatherly protectiveness, too.

…How much sense did that make, given Vemik was literally more than twice the man he was these days? He’d need to strike up a conversation about that with Gabriel, because the fact was, Julian was feeling protective. He couldn’t remember hearing of another Ten’Gewek who got knocked out. Oh, sure, Loor had been unconscious after the Brown One stepped on him, but that had been a whole mess of traumas, including his heart. He hadn’t been concussed by the experience. They were built to fall out of trees in supergravity for chrissake.

Still. Vemik didn’t seem completely out of sorts…

“How you doin’ big guy?”

“Miss Singer…” Vemik hooted a little, sounding tired.

“Well…I’m not Singer, but I missed you too. Eating good? It’s important to eat good.”

“Yeah…Food here’s okay. Too many potatoes. Heff bring spicy chili too! They feed me better now. The lunch lady, she came to visit…uh…”

Vemik made a frustrated snarl and buried his face against Julian’s neck.

“…I can’t remember.” Fuck. His voice was quavering.

Julian looked around, and Hoeff snapped open a very solid-looking folding metal stool. “Snagged it from HEAT before we left. It’ll hold Adam, so you’re good.”

“Buddy,” Julian offered as he sat down, “I’ve been hit in the head more than once. Yeah, it can go pretty wrong. But it doesn’t have to. We’ve got good doctors and good medicine, you know that. We’ll be doing everything we can, okay?”

Vemik sighed and let go, or at least loosened the hug a little. “I know. Heff tell me same thing. Just…is like the fire, but harder to ride. The Fire is anger, fierceness, horny, easy to deal with. Go hunt, go fuck, it cools down again. This?” he shook his head. “Comes up the same way, but I don’t know what to do!”

“Well, you’re using big words and using them well. That’s a pretty good sign, I bet!”

“…Hope so…” Vemik went to sit back down, then grimaced. “Ow.”

“Careful buddy,” Hoeff cautioned, “you’re still bruised all to hell.”

“Hurt like anything.” Vemik groaned. “Still hurts.”

“Yup. Gonna take a while for that to clear, even with the meds.”

Vemik groaned, and settled back in his bed with a creak.

“Tell ‘ya what. It would probably help if we go for a walk. Now there ain’t gonna be any escape from the security this time—”

“Doctors said rest.”

“Yeah, and I respect that. Which is why I said a walk, and not a climb, or a wrassle, or a lift, or anything like that. If nothing else, it’ll be nice to go sit in the park a block away.”

Vemik paused, then nodded. “…Yeah. Miss trees.”

As it happened, getting him out of the hospital involved some strenuous negotiations with a human force of nature in the form of Nurse Lyons. Some people packed a whole cast of character into a small package, and this particular nurse was a condensed keg of medical professionalism, and she was not happy to let her patient go wandering.

In the end, Julian appealed to the empathy and caring instincts that lurked in every nurse’s soul.

“Look. Do you see that giant depressed alien in there? He’s a Given-Man of his people and impressive as hell, right? Well, he’s also barely nineteen and still has a teen’s soul. He comes from a people who happily sleep in trees naked to the rain, who will climb three-hundred meters up a Ketta just to get a few berries. Who use their huts mostly as a place to keep things dry more than anything else. He needs to get outside, he’s going stir crazy in here!”

She gave him a skeptical glare, then turned it toward Vemik and softened. “…He’s to rest,” she reminded him. “He’s got a lot of healing to do. And he’s going to tire out quickly. It takes a lot of work to move him.”

“Oh believe me, I know.” Julian chuckled, and was rewarded with a small flicker of humor across her face too. “I’m a big boy though, I can manage.”

She gave him a skeptical look up and down. “Do you have any idea how much he—”

“Yes. I promise you, I can get him back here all by myself if he needs it, and we won’t go far. He just needs sun, air and trees.”

She relented, and typed something behind her desk, before handing Julian a laminated card. “Emergency number. Call it if he shows any troubling symptoms. He’s not discharged yet, so you bring him back before the end of visiting hours. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am. I don’t think our security will let us wander too much anyway…” Julian eyed the growing mob of definitely-not-regular fellas down the hall.

With Vemik’s temporary freedom secured, they got back out into the open air.

It wasn’t a normal day in New York. The hospital had a field of flowers tucked up against the wall, with other stuff mixed in: photos, teddy bears, keepsakes, candles. People were hanging around, praying, holding signs, or just being there The security team politely but firmly chased off some camera-wielding figures who tried to get snaps of them, but Julian was pretty sure there’d be pictures on the news sites in minutes.

He didn’t care. It was good to see the way Vemik relaxed and moved a bit easier once he could see the sky.

It was warm and not unpleasantly humid out, sunny, and the air was nice and clean. A perfect excuse to rid himself of his nice duds, so he ducked into the park’s rest area and changed into something much more…well, loose, anyway. And so what if the Cimbrean Speedsters were a fake team? He still liked the joke.

He bundled it all up and carefully stuffed it into his bag, so Xiù wouldn’t murder him too hard later. Julian stepped out, took a big, refreshing breath, and smiled like an idiot despite himself. A nice, loose tank-top, good breathable shorts, his bare feet in the grass…

Honestly, it didn’t take much to make him happy, and the same was true of Vemik. In fact…

“Uh-uh, buddy. I promised unspeakable things to the nurse that you’d take it easy.”

“I just want a better view!”

“That tree won’t hold you anyway. You wanna fall out of it right now?”

Vemik grumbled, but relented and settled for looking around from ground level. “…Still busy.”

“Yup.”

“Thought…the news made it look like everyone stopped to mourn.”

“Cities never stop. Not this one, anyway. It’s used to tragedy.” Julian shook his head. “Life has to go on for most people. The rent still needs paying, the fridge still needs food, the kids still need raising…It’s a fact of life. More’n a hundred people died yesterday, but some things can’t ever stop no matter what happens.”

“Used to tragedy?” Vemik asked.

“Yup. Evil fuckers have hit this town before, and worse than this. They’re tough, they keep going.”

Vemik made a low, sad noise. “…Every time I come here, I have good times, but there’s danger. I think…” he frowned suddenly. “…Had a thought, but it’s fuzzy. Can’t hold it.”

“Take your time. Harder you try and catch it, the more it’ll slip away,” Julian advised.

“…Evil fuckers just seems like, they happen with Humans. But then other times, you save lives, bring peace, bring medicine. I just…why?”

Julian sighed sadly. “Human nature. I don’t think, deep down, we’re really made for big cities and all this. Part of us still wants to be out on the savannah, next to the forests, in nice little villages. Get enough of us together and lots of good happens, but for some…”

He glanced back at the impromptu memorial next to the hospital. He’d seen the other, much larger one outside Grand Central, too. A lot of lives had changed forever in just a few short minutes yesterday.

“…I don’t know, buddy, and that’s the honest truth.”

Vemik blinked slowly, then heaved out a huge heavy breath, nodded, and lay back on the grass. Seconds later, to Julian’s surprise, he was asleep. None of the security fellas came charging over to check on him though, so that was probably not something to be too worried about. He’d just had a long, difficult day.

Well, the point was to let him rest. If he slept better out on the grass in the park than in his hospital bed, then let him sleep.

He needed all the rest he could get.

Date Point: 18y6m1w6d AV
Hell system, Hunter Space

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

Boredom was a venom, and the Alpha had finally found an antidote. After far too long of nothing, the system and planet it was responsible for had been investigated.

It had to be the fur-faces. They loved their fast, vexing little drones, and their quiet, sneaky little ships. They were cunning predators themselves, with their fangs and claws, but they hunted slowly. They hid. They watched. They ambushed.

The Alpha could feel a degree of kinship, there. It was what made them such good adversaries. Hunting prey was trivial. Hunting a clever fellow predator, though? That was sport.

…Which was < wrong-think > of a sort. The fur-faces had been classified as prey by a previous Alpha-of-Alphas, and none since had deigned to reclassify them. The current Alpha-of-Alphas was a Builder though, and its attention, instincts and priorities were elsewhere, so the Flensing-Alpha suspected its master would neither notice nore care about such a minor quibble.

And knowing that the fur-faces—the Gao, to compound its own wrong-think—were predators and thought like predators meant the Flensing-Alpha could try to get inside its quarry’s head.

A predator hunting other predators was sensibly wary. It would either conceal itself well and watch from a position where it could not be watched in turn, or else claim a position of unassailable strength. The latter was the Flensing-Alpha’s approach, taking a trio of broodships out into the deep system to hunt. Each was armed with million-light spike probes, suitable to flash out in front of any ship no matter how fast. The Deltas sleeping in their stasis racks would go unused: this hunt was the Alpha’s.

Besides. Mere Deltas would never have been patient enough for this work. The calm and clarity necessary to methodically search every possible hiding spot came only to those Hunters who did survived where the hastier and less thoughtful had expended themselves, thus gaining age and experience.

The Alpha was not bored. Quite the opposite, it felt more alert and engaged than it had since coming to this system and being tasked with its protection. Three of its eyes were permanently watching the ground surface scan, taking in every detail, thirsty for any pixel out of place, any metallic anomaly, any heat signature, any sign at all that what it was seeing might be a ship, rather than bare ice and rock.

So far, nothing. And, when the last of the moons was scanned, still nothing.

Another Alpha might have raged, snarled, lashed out at being cheated of its anticipated prey. The Flensing-Alpha simply scratched a small, frustrated line in its console and stood to pace and think.

Clearly, it was missing something. Some piece of the puzzle. Fur-faces didn’t think quite like Hunters, perhaps there was some non-obvious alternative hiding spot?

The gas giant’s upper atmosphere, perhaps? Giants were treacherous, their weather lethal, their winds quite capable of catching a ship and dragging it down into the crushing depths…but a daring spy might use them.

The giant’s singular faint ring? Little more than a dusty line of pebbles. Easily eliminated by a quick automated scan: anything ship-sized would be quite visible, and sure enough, the scan came back negative.

Most interesting. Could it have the wrong vicinity altogether? There were other giants in the system, other moons…It had chosen this one as being at a good distance to clearly see the probes on passive sensors, but the Gao perhaps had more sensitive equipment, or might simply be content with less complete data. They could have watched their probes from elsewhere.

If so, the hunt was already over and the prey could be long gone. There was no sense in going to check those places, therefore. The prey was either here, or escaped.

But the Flensing-Alpha had eliminated every possible hiding spot, hadn’t it?

It returned to its throne, toyed idly with its navigational sensors for a few long minutes, letting out its mounting frustration in a low, quiet growl…

And then it saw what it had missed.

Date Point: 18y6m1w6d AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Hell system, Hunter space

Tooko, Brother and Stud of Clan Firefang

“…Shit.”

Bad luck: the Hunters were checking the L-points, which meant Tooko had no option but to rabbit.

Good luck: they went to the wrong one first.

He emergency disengaged the heat sink and flinched at the loud bang through the hull it made as the coolant lines explosively decompressed. The blast of cold gas from below was enough all by itself to overcome the asteroid’s pathetic gravity and push him to escape velocity.

He’d been planning this.

At its core, starship combat had a lot more in common with submarine combat than with airborne vehicles. There were differences, of course: starships accelerated rather than set headings and depths. There was no ambient noise for signals to get lost in and no thermal layer for a cunning boat to duck under, which meant that once contact was established, breaking it again was far more difficult.

But certain tricks had survived.

He opened the airlock and spent a little air blowing out its interior, scattering his supply of probes to the void. Then he picked a direction—almost randomly, just so long as it didn’t take him toward his enemy—and went to warp.

From the Hunters’ perspective, he hoped, what they’d see was a starburst firework of sudden, bright contacts all shooting off every which way. A few would clearly be his message buoys, the megalight messengers intended to sprint beyond the wormhole suppressor and jump home with his intelligence.

The rest, though? To anything beyond a few thousand kilometers, their warp signatures should be practically identical to SBD’s. The ship was designed to modulate and dampen its own distortion wake after all, it could make itself look just like one of the slow-running probes.

He was banking on the Hunters having a limited capacity to launch G-spikes, on slow reaction times, and on sheer numbers to do the rest.

In his head, he started counting. One…two…three…four…

He made it to twenty-six before the first of the Hunters’ G-spikes came screaming out of its launch tube. He growled in tension and vindication as he saw it streak towards a trio of drones, that had all set off in broadly the same direction. Sensible: they were playing the numbers, realizing they couldn’t catch all the targets, so they were aiming to catch as many as possible.

Within instants, six spike probes were in the air, all similarly aimed. One was aimed uncomfortably close to him…

At the forty-count, the probes he’d launched started course-correcting, disguising the course-corrections he’d anticipated having to make for himself. He calculated furiously in his head as his chart tracked broodships and their g-spikes. Simply geometric maths: angle, distance, apparent realspace velocity, travel times. He could do it all in his head. Had to.

Only unknown variable: the maximum flight time of the enemy G-spikes. If they were using the same ones he was familiar with, he’d be beyond their reach in two minutes, assuming the broodships were standard spec too.

In any case, with all his probes changing course slightly, he could afford to shift heading a little bit too, fortuitously nudge himself so that he wouldn’t quite be where the G-spike was aimed at.

It missed him by, in interplanetary terms, a whisker. Blue warning lights blinked furiously on his console as his sensors registered the sharp boundary of disrupted spacetime within mere hundreds of kilometers off his bow. At closest approach, he passed within weapons range of the field edge.

Eighty-two…Eighty-three…Eighty-four…

The Hunters launched a second spread. His own probes—the ones caught by the G-spikes—started to wink out.

Okay. Useful intel. Hunters have FTL guns now…

“…Shit!”

No choice. Course change or die. A desperate swipe changed his heading just before he plunged into the depths of a spike field, but no probe would have reacted like that. They knew which one he was now.

One-oh-eight…One-oh-nine…

No sense in pretending to be a probe any longer, and a full capacitor. Fuck it. Give the warp drive everything and hope to everyone’s gods they hadn’t held another spike in reserve…

They had.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

Clever. So very, very clever. What a hunt!

The Flensing-Alpha’s maw was a rictus of satisfaction. What a hunt, what a hunt! Such a twisty, sneaky, skilled quarry!

Programming the solution for the final spike-probe cost precious seconds, and the prey was barely in range. It all came down a chase. Did the probe have the staying power to catch the Gao, or did the ship have the sheer speed to outrun it?

The Flensing-Alpha thrilled as its strike vanished out of its launch tube with a superluminal thump that shook the whole broodship, and leaned in close to watch the conclusion of its hunt. Its whole being was resonating with the hungry thrill to capture and feast on this most glorious of sport. There could be nothing sweeter than victory in this moment.

In its mind, it counted.

One…two…three..

Tooko, Brother and Stud of Clan Firefang

One-twenty-one, one-twenty-two, one-twenty-three…

Beep…beep

Hard to concentrate on his timekeeping with that fucking beeping telling him, redundantly, that there was a missile locked on him. Just pray to Keeda he’d rounded pessimistically in his estimates. Which he had. He knew he had. But had he been pessimistic enough?

Beep-beep-beep.

There was nothing Tooko could do now. He’d either saved himself or he hadn’t. He’d done his duty, either way: the messenger probes were clear and away. Command would get the intel he’d gathered.

Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep

His paw strayed to the pouch on his flight suit’s hip. Win or lose, the fuckers wouldn’t sink their teeth into his meat…

Bee-bee-beebeebeebeeeeeeeeeeeee—

The wormhole suppression indicator remained stubbornly blue.

One-thirty, one-thirty-one…

The G-spike caught him.

Silent But Deadly slammed back into realspace hard enough to throw Tooko against his restraints.

Tooko sighed, and unbuckled his flight seat. Clan and Great Father alike would miss him, and it hurt him more that they—all the Gao, really—would have to carry on without his services than that he was about to die. He hadn’t let them down, he’d achieved his mission…but it pained him to pain them.

He wished he’d included a personal message to Wilde and the team, though. There hadn’t been time. And there wasn’t time, now.

Now, there was only his duty.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

++Meat to the maw!!++

Caught! Caught! The Alpha practically leapt from its throne and danced. A victory! A real victory! Triumph like it could barely remember sang through its body.

At superluminal speeds, the distance to any target in realspace was measured in instants. Heartbeats passed, and the broodship sliced deep into its own spike’s suppression field, shield reaching out to wrap up that tiny, interesting dart of a spaceship as the Alpha surged to the front of the control room and gazed hungrily upon its prize.

A single-occupant craft, alas. No great feast, but the Alpha was drooling freely at the thought of the pilot’s surely sublime flesh—

There was a brilliant, all-consuming white flash, and the Alpha went, abruptly, completely blind. No matter how it blinked or pawed at its eyes, not one of them would clear. It staggered back and collapsed, too overwhelmed by pain and the sudden lack of visual input to notice, at first, the flood of damage control alerts the ship was sending.

Those alerts released dormant Builders from their stasis pods. The Alpha sensed one of the Building-Brood stoop to examine it, felt the tickle and sting of medical instruments assessing the damage.

< Furious; anguished > ++The ship! The prey! Report on the prey!++

< Calm > ++The prey detonated a high-yield warhead, Alpha. There is nothing to salvage. This Broodship is crippled and must return to dock for repairs.++

From triumph to theft in an instant. The Alpha slumped, too crushed to even lash out in anger. So. It had stared right into the heart of a nuclear flare at the moment of detonation. It would need new eyes at the very least. Synthetic dermis too, if the burning sensation all over its face and torso were a reliable indicator.

Such matters as mere injury were of no consequence. It had been seeking a justification to requisition upgrades anyway. But…No meat. Such a fine hunt, but no meat to show for it. That was…wrong. It went against the order of things. The Alpha felt < sickened; shocked. >

Then it felt something different. Something stronger.

< Hate >

What did these Gao think they were? What were they to deny the nature of life? Such hubris! Such…such…

Heresy!

The Flensing-Alpha lurched to its feet, staggered back across the command deck and returned to its throne by touch and its mental map of the space. It would repair. It would upgrade. It would surely be rewarded, too, for it had rid the hive-system of a spy today.

But it would not forget. It would feed on Gao-flesh. It would remind the fur-faced ones what nature intended.

And it would punish them for this crime.

Date Point: 18y6m2w2d AV
Nofl’s lab, Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

Ten’Gewek were always a small challenge to accommodate in his lab. There was the smell, of course. They were musky beings, and even a Corti’s relatively atrophied senses could be overwhelmed a bit by it. Something about them inescapably radiated a predatory aura of dominance and danger, and it was Nofl’s opinion that the smell was a big part of it.

Rather like Adam’s dungeon, really. Except all of them smelled that way, differing only by degree. Even their women! Goodness.

Nofl, as always, was the Directorate’s first point of contact with the deathworlder species. It seemed to be an arrangement that worked: He got to study an endlessly fascinating category of sapient life forms, which both he and the Directorate considered to be suitable reward for his contributions to Corti science and prosperity…but he also did it on an alien colony in a backwater region where he couldn’t scandalize his superiors (and didn’t have to endure them, either.)

That rarest of artworks: a compromise that was actually pleasing to both parties.

His patient today was none other than Vemik, now Given-Man. An impressive specimen indeed! But today, he had a most unfortunate presentation. Some absolute criminal had damaged that glorious brain of his. That wouldn’t do! They’d just have to put it right.

…Slowly.

The prognosis was encouraging, though. Best start with that.

“Well, my dear old peanut! That’s it for the superscience for now. Tell me, how do you feel?”

Vemik blinked slowly at him. “…Peanut?”

“Oh, don’t mind me, I’ve developed an interest in ridiculous Britishisms, my old china teacup.” Nofl flashed him a grin. “So. You’re feeling all fuzzy in the noggin, yes?”

“Can think again. Words…I have to think harder about words sometimes, but can do math, sky-think mostly. Sometimes I have trouble remembering things. That comes and goes, no way to know when…Also, I want peanuts now.”

“Sure, help yourself!” As it happened, Nofl had acquired a taste for salted-in-the-shell peanuts himself, and had a small bag in his snack-stash. “That’s an odd choice of snack. Why peanuts?”

Vemik delicately cracked open a shell between two blunt and quite literally steel-bending fingers. “Salty! Been wanting a lot more of that.”

“That’s true,” Julian noted. “I’ve been putting rehydration salts in his water, too. He’s been craving it like crazy the last couple days.”

“Interesting…” Nofl grabbed one of his medical scanners and adjusted its settings before running it over Vemik’s skull. “But encouraging. I hope. Let’s see…”

He had other projects on hold for this. He didn’t mind. Any chance to poke around in a deathworlder’s head was scientifically valuable, but in any case, all his hours were billable and clearly the powers that Julian worked for had deemed Vemik’s complete recovery to be worth every cent. So, he could afford to take his time and do everything as thoroughly as could be.

Vemik, to his credit, bore it well considering how bad his mood swings were. Sometimes, he could barely sit still and they needed to take a break so he could go outside and burn off a little energy. Other times he was slow, dopey and lethargic.

That wasn’t unexpected, and was also encouraging. Brains had strange rhythms about them when they were healing, and in his case, being a young Given-Man at the peak of change…

What Nofl really needed, he decided, was a high-resolution functional scan of a mature and undamaged Given-Man’s brain for comparison. To that end, Ferd and Yan of all beings were due to arrive at his lab shortly. Singer as well, for other reasons. He’d scan her brain too.

They arrived a little bit after they were expected; Ten’Gewek didn’t have the same sense of punctuality as Humans could or Corti couldn’t help but obey. They sauntered up to his lab on their own time, arrived on their own terms…and in the Singer’s case, flung herself at Vemik with a room-thumping thud, wrapped arms, legs and tail around him, and stuck there. She spent the next several minutes picking nonexistent debris out of his crest and grumbling about how worried she’d been and how he clearly wasn’t being looked after properly and clucking ruefully over a wound on his tail that had left a scar despite the regeneratives…

Nofl decided it was best for everyone that he not mention the small notch the shrapnel had left in the bone, there. She didn’t need to know how close they’d come to having to reattach his tail.

The lab was impossibly crowded with three Given-Men, a Singer, Julian and Hoeff crammed into it, and made all the more crowded by Yan being…upset. He was always a grumpy guts, of course, but today was different. There was an air of wounded trust, a hint of blame. He didn’t even favor Julian with a tussle, merely a quick tail-hug; affectionate, but not happy.

Nofl listened to their conversation while he persuaded Ferd under the scanner and calibrated it.

“Three times he goes to Earth, three times he’s attacked.” Yan’s hoot carried reproach. “Your people are not a happy tribe, Jooyun.”

“We’re not a tribe. That’s the problem. We are many, many, many tribes, all living on top of each other. Usually without the benefit of anything that makes it clear which tribe a fella might be in, or even that they’re in a tribe to begin with.”

Yan scowled and his tongue lashed the air disagreeably. “Don’t know how you live like that.”

Julian shrugged. “What can I say except, you’re right? Neither do I. I didn’t grow up in a big city. Folctha is as big as I can personally stand, being honest, and then only because it’s somehow remained relentlessly small. First time I ever visited New York was when I took Vemik and Singer there.”

Yan rumbled, but said nothing further.

“Was a nice Giving from President, though,” Vemik muttered, then suddenly grew animated and excited. “Tell him!”

“Simmer down, darling,” Nofl reminded him. “You’re resting.”

“Right, right…but still, tell him Sky-Brother!”

“Oh God. Uh…well, the short version? Imagine if Vemik had given me his very first bow. Or, uh…yeah. The President gave Vemik a hand-made set of pens. Only twenty-five of each were made, they took a team of craftsmen years to make, and they’re so valuable that they’re literally priceless. Nobody knows how much they cost because nobody is selling. Oh, and one set was lost in a fire, so sending one of these off-world is…generous.”

“Is not just the rareness,” Vemik added. “Is a right gift. Heh! Write-gift. Get it?”

Not even Yan could maintain his grumble at the flash of happy-Vemik. He smiled indulgently.

“Right-gift?”

“For me. For my Sky-Thinking. Pens. Finest pens, made for writing down big thoughts…”

“I am sure you will get much good use of them,” Nofl interjected. “I am…cautiously optimistic. But before then, mind if I pop these nice healthy brains into my scanner? Up on the slab, Yan!”

“Already lying here,” Ferd rumbled.

“Yes, yes, I already got yours. You can get out now.”

Ferd frowned at him, but sat up. “My whole brain? That fast?” he sounded offended.

“It’s a good scanner.”

“Didn’t feel anything…”

“If you had, dear, that would mean my scanner was doing brutality to your grey matter. We’ll have none of that in here. Now shoo!”

That was the funny thing about Given-Men. They might have bristled had anyone else been so daring as to shoo them, especially with the distracted hand-flap Nofl threw in, but he’d learned much about the value of audacity. Bossing them around worked so long as he did it in this seemingly unthinking, playful way.

Yan at least seemed amused, in his hypermale cavemonkey fashion. One grew quite fluent in the language of Grunt, when working with the HEAT.

“…Good Giving in thought, then,” he said as he laid out under the scanner. “But useless to everyone except a strong-mind Vemik.”

[“Not everyone,”] the Singer chided him, this time quickly enough the translator tripped up a bit and de-synched. “Words are a strong sky-thought. You say so yourself!”

Yan scowled at her, and then relaxed. “They hurt my nephew, Singer. Let me be grumpy.”

“You are always grumpy, uncle. Always have been, even when you’re having fun.”

“And you’re fidgeting,” Nofl complained. “Stay still you massive lump! I need good scans if I’m to target my therapies correctly!”

Yan made an indignant noise, but went obediently still. The Singer squeezed his hand between both of hers.

“Their enemies hurt him, uncle. And they Gave in sorrow, and are Giving now to put it right. Even the gods don’t ask for more.”

Nofl appreciated the effort Yan put in to not nodding, shaking his head, or whatever else it was he wanted to do. He stared resolutely up at the scanner while it did its work, tail twitching. Maybe it was the enforced stillness that made him think about her words and let them do their work, though: once Nofl gave him the nod and he sat up, he gave Julian a more complicated look, then a proper hug.

The Singer gave Nofl a small grin as she settled in under the scanner. Nofl gave her a discreet thumbs-up, refocused the scanner, and got the last scan he needed.

There was a lot to unravel, he’d need time to go over and compare the scans, and frankly it was clear the Ten’Gewek needed to have a good long chat with Julian anyway. He bundled them out of his lab with promises to call them back as soon as he had finished his analysis, grabbed one of his decaf espressos, and sat at his desk.

Very interesting. Politically, academically and socially. He suspected that one soft but firm statement at exactly the right moment had probably achieved a kind of healing that all his medical instruments never could. Still…if Nofl’s efforts could spare Vemik a long, slow and painful recovery, he’d put in every erg he had.

He sipped his coffee, hummed a merry tune to himself, and got to work.

He had a mind to save.

Date Point: 18y6m2w2d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“No ship, though?”

Champion Goruu hung his head and keened a little.

“…Dammit.”

Daar hung his head too. He’d known it was a dangerous mission but, fuck, if they were gonna ever assault Hunter space, they needed intel. And Tooko had delivered spectacularly.

“He is a hero,” Goruu added. “We will be lighting a pyre for him tonight, My Father.”

“Good. I…would it be inappropriate for me to attend?”

“…I was not aware you were close with him, My Father.”

“Not…we weren’t cousins. We only met briefly. But I liked an’ respected ‘em almos’ instantly.”

“That makes me happy,” Goruu sighed forlornly. “Tooko could be…a difficult personality. He was an extremely capable pilot. And he knew it.”

“Oh, he were arrogant as fuck,” Daar chittered. “But I can’t really hold that against anyone. That’d be hypocritical as shit, seeing as how I don’t shy away from what I am. I respect honest arrogance, s’long as it’s true.”

“Perhaps that was why he was in such awe of you. You know he volunteered for this mission?”

“Oh?”

“Yes, My Father. You, I think, were one of the few who could put him in his place just by being there. I think he needed that in his life, desperately. For me it was a struggle, not the least reason being he was undoubtedly the better pilot. And a very successful first degree…”

Daar chittered deep in his chest. “That’s good! I can respect that, too. He’ll have a good legacy. There are advantages ‘ta bein one extreme or th’ other, sometimes. Too bad we din’t meet when I was a young ‘Back, we coulda got up to some terrible fun I bet…”

Goruu chittered, “Fyu’s nuts! I don’t even want to think about that! What were you like in your younger ears, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“A hell-raiser! A brawler, biggest an’ strongest ‘Back ever, even then! Had me lots o’ fun!” Daar chittered fiercely, then sobered up a bit. “But, well, I weren’t essactly a good guy when I was young. I mellowed out a bunch when the Championship fell on me, though. Had to. And thank the Unseen it did when it did. I hate to think what I’d’ve been like if I hadn’t been forced ‘ta grow up at fifteen…prol’ly not anythin’ good.”

“Maturity comes when it’s needed. My own trial…well. You were there to kick it off, of course.”

Daar keened slightly at that. Goruu was Champion because Daar had destroyed Firefang’s Champion and Grandfather with little more than a pawswipe, right at the pregnant moment when severe change in leadership was necessary. It was then that Daar had assumed the Mantle of the Great Father, though he would not know it for several hours.

“…Yeah. For what it’s worth, I do wish the duty hadn’t fallen on you like that. You deserved better.”

“It…has been a trial, yes. But My Father, I must ask: do you regret it?”

“I regret nothing,” Daar answered, plainly. “I did what was necessary. The consequences are what they must be. No point pining after a past we couldn’t afford.”

Goruu duck-nodded solemnly.

“Anyway.” Daar shook his pelt out, and began padding his way toward the gym; it was time for his morning workout. “You din’t answer me on if it’d be okay ‘fer me to pay my respects. An’ I’m askin’ earnestly,” he added, hastily. “I promise I won’t take no offense if you say no.”

Goruu followed after him, and after a bit gave up on two-paw. He settled into a slow-lope gait on all fours to keep up with Daar’s pace. “It is…meant to be a private affair. But I think it would be good, if you could make a discreet appearance.”

“Discreet can be tricky ‘fer me, but I’ll make it happen. Thank you. Now, I’m ‘bout to go throw around some tonnage, so unless you wanna really get ‘yer tail whupped…”

Daar growled it friendly-like, but he was still surprised by Goruu’s response. “Actually…yes. Why not? I’ve got some aggression to work out. I assume you have something suitable for us normal-sized males?”

Daar chittered. “I do. An’ I’d appreciate the company.”

“As would I.”

There was little more to say, for now. There’d be the pyre later, the analysis of Tooko’s intelligence would take however long it took. The real tribute to him would come after, when they used what he’d found to tear into the Hunters’ soft underbelly and exact revenge.

Though, if Daar could pay tribute to him in some other way, too, he would. Perhaps in the name of the next ship?

He duck-nodded to himself. He’d let that idea percolate. Don’t force it. Just sit on the idea and let it hatch in its own time. For now…

Time to see what his Champion could do.

Date Point: 18y6m2w4d AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Armstrong Station, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Dora, Exile

There was a sting on the air: ethanol. And a lot of other compounds that hit Dora’s antennae and itched, weird aromatics and strange compounds she’d never encountered before. But mostly ethanol. And for some weird reason, it was coming from her drone control blister, along with quiet, sad music very different to the upbeat human pop she usually played.

♫“…and all I’ve done, for want of wit, to mem’ry now, I can’t recall…so fill to me the parting glass…”♪

Somehow, Wilde had made himself comfortable in her seat. She hadn’t thought that was possible for a biped. He was sprawled across it, bare feet up on the console, drinking something amber and potently alcoholic from a small glass. Another glass, full and untouched, was perched on one of the blister’s internal spars, as close to the void outside as possible, and he was staring out at the stars while singing along quietly.

“…Ian?”

He half-turned his head. “…Hey. Need me t’clear out?”

“Worried about you. You missed dinner.”

“Yeah…” He sniffed, emptied the tiny glass, then refilled it. Dora wondered why he didn’t just drink from a larger glass, or the bottle itself. “…Friend died.”

“I’m…sorry. This is a wake, huh? I’ve heard of them.”

“Sort of.” He chuckled and waggled the bottle at her. “Stupid. ‘M’not even fucken’ Irish. But the Paddies know how t’send off a mate prop’ly…”

“Ohh. So that’s whiskey! I’ve never seen it before.” Dora settled into her relaxed standing-sit and held out a hand.

“…Y’sure it’s safe ‘fer you?” Ian asked.

A quick check on her phone reassured them both that yes, a shot wouldn’t do her any more harm than it was doing him, so he shrugged, found another glass, and poured. Wafting her antennae over the glass was enough to make Dora very nervous about it—actually drinking it was enough to confirm every one of her concerns. It burned. Her throat closed reflexively, and she coughed violently.

“Jesus!”

“He loves you tooooo…” Wilde chuckled and took her glass back before draining it like it was pure spring water. “…Where’s Bruuk?”

“Remember that sleek thing with the russet chest ruff he met after we got tacos? Well, he’s got a mating contract! He’ll be a week or so, from what I gather.”

“Ha! Good ‘fer ‘em! Betcha he’ll be unbearably smug. Bear, ha!”

“What about you? You’ve been so busy studying…”

Wilde grumbled and hauled himself slightly more upright. “Could do with a pipe-cleanin’, yeah.”

“…That sounds gross, whatever it means.”

“I mean…that was the polite way o’ sayin’ it. Dunno if I’ll find what I’m lookin’ fer though.”

Dora could relate, there. “Hmm. Join the club. Actually…what are you lookin’ for?”

He paused, swirled the bottle thoughtfully. “Fuck if I know. Never really found anyone who fits me…” He swigged directly from it, abandoning the tiny glass. “Had a few girlfriends through school, didn’t seem to work. Had fun. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a good shag? But, y’know, I think the Gaoians’ve got it right there. Get it down on paper so erryone knows where they stand, have ‘yer fun, build the actual meaningful relationships with the people around ‘ya. Our shit’s so much fuckin’….messier. S’like…number o’ stories I hear where they’re married an’ they only have sex outta a sense of duty t’their partner an’ not ‘cuz they actually want to? S’fuckin’ tragic.”

“That sounds awfully familiar to me,” Dora noted. “Like…very familiar. How far have you thought that idea through?”

“…I think I’m too drunk ‘fer thinkin’ through anythin’ right now…Whaddya mean, familiar?”

Dora affected a sigh as best she could. “Honey, how do you think I figured out I was gay?”

That seemed to sober him right up.

“Well, shit. That’s goin’ from nought to fuckin’ sixty, innit?”

“Well, is it a question you ever asked yourself?”

“Nah. I mean…wouldn’t I just…know?” He swigged from the bottle again. “I’m thirty for fucksake, that’s the sort of shit you figure out in your teens.”

“You said it yourself, you never found anyone who fit, and from what you’ve told me, you never actually stopped to figure yourself out in all the running around serving and fighting.”

He stared out the window at Cimbrean for a while. “…Well…I dunno. I feel like it’d just…be obvious, y’know? But nothin’ feels obvious,” he frowned. “…Fuck.”

Dora reached over and patted his shoulder with her leftmost hand. “So it’s a question you need to answer. It doesn’t matter what the answer is, at least having one will help you know yourself a bit better, eh?”

“Heh. You almost sound like Moj…” he shook his head. “But..that’d be nice, yeah. Knowin’ myself better. S’why I came on this ship in the first place.”

“Well, maybe the answers aren’t up here in a bottle, maybe they’re down there among your own people. Your kind don’t cope with being alone very well. Especially…y’know. Right now.”

He swirled the bottle some more, then sighed. “…Fuck, Tooko woulda said th’same thing.”

“…Well, since I’m guessing by context he’s the reason you’re drunk, maybe take his advice.”

“Heh…yeah…funny thing, little bugger was irresistible to the ladies, but I’d swear he was queer as a nine bob note.”

“Oh, please, Gaoians by human standards are gay as fuck. Their idea of ‘gay’ is more like ‘doesn’t like females at all.’”

“…Wait, really?”

“Yeah, really. Go watch ‘em in the park one day. Most gaoian ‘cousins’ are, like, chaste-ish romantic life partners. But they don’t try and be everything to each other. That’s where Humans fuck it up, you pick one person and lay all your wants and hopes on them. And it’s funny, because you know there are all different kinds of love, but you don’t act on that.”

He was watching her with a drunkenly attentive expression, so she elaborated. “Different kinds of love, you know? It’s weird that English has only one word for it all, ‘cuz, like, there’s…” she started counting on her fingers. “Akak, that’s romantic love. Fesh, that’s love between close family, Arrak for love for close friends, Tooib is playful, no-strings-attached, carefree love—kinda frowned on by the authorities, but they can’t stamp it out—Hen for love of nation and higher ideal, Susuk is love for self—y’know, healthy self-respect and valuing yourself, not narcissism…”

“Wait, wait, wait…” he waved her to stop. “The Robalin Supremacy has more words for love than we do?”

“The Robalin people do,” Dora rebuked him, gently. “Anyway. The point is, you want fesh-t’arrak? The love of family, friends and companions? Well you’ve got that, right here on this crew. You want to ‘get your pipes cleaned?’ Well, none of us can do that for you, or want to, so go find somebody! You want somebody warm to sleep next to at night? You’ve got Bruuk! Why overthink it? If you can’t find someone who fits you, maybe there isn’t one! Maybe that’s not what you need!”

“…I dunno. I’ll be honest, I don’t really like the idea of, uh. Sharing like that. I don’t know about the rest but I definitely know that.”

“Well, okay. Still. Shoo! Go, clean pipes, whatever that means. Don’t you have some friends from the ‘soar’ or whatever?”

“Not really. Well. Maybe.” He considered the bottle a moment longer, then reached for the cap and screwed it back on. “Ehh…fuck it. Why not? The lads’ll wanna pay respects too…”

“Shower first!” Dora advised. “You smell like a degreased engine.”

“Right, right…” he levered himself awkwardly out of her chair, then paused, and gave her a hug. And not the gentle, hesitant sort of hug Humans usually gave. This one was the kind he reserved for fellow deathworlders, and it smashed the air right out of her.

“Rrrgh…Ow!”

“Shit, shit, sorry…” he let go. “Just…”

“I know, you walking disaster. Now go clean up and celebrate your friend instead of mourning him.”

He meandered away with a muttered “Right…” and Dora let out a heavy sigh. That conversation had been a while coming. She knew, even if he didn’t. His friends probably knew, too. Probably the only one who didn’t was himself.

That was a story she knew all too well.

Date Point: 18y6m2w4d AV
The Funeral Fields, Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Everyone got a funeral. Everyone got a pyre. Everyone got mourners. That was Daar’s promise, not just to the Grand Army but to all the Gao: nobody went un-mourned. Out of practical necessity, so many of the Gaoian dead—the biodrone swarms, the victims from the Communes, the Clanless killed during the biodrone rampage, the starship crews—had gone to mass graves, mass fire pits, or simply been obliterated by orbital strikes or in the destruction of their ships.

But everyone got a pyre, eventually. Even if it was a small symbolic sliver of wood, burning along with so many others. They got a pyre.

The fires on the Funeral Fields therefore burned day and night, attended faithfully, at minimum, by a ceremonial detail. Mostly, the ceremonial detail were wounded, convalescing before their return to frontline duty. But it was an important unit, and they took their role seriously.

Today he wore his crown, to represent the Crown. The symbology mattered. No playful banter, no mugging for fans or flirting with females. Today he was the embodiment of serene power.

Tooko had more than just the ceremonial minimum present. His pyre was one of the symbolic ones: a small stack of kindling, smaller than Daar’s paw. Such a little thing, to stand in for someone with such a big, passionate heart…

But needs must. They didn’t have enough to do it properly. Wouldn’t for a long time; if Daar was very lucky, he’d live to see great forests on Gao again just before he went blind and died.

Where the fire was inadequate, though, the people made up for it. Not just Gao, either—one of the Humans stationed permanently on the planet had showed up to pay his respects too. Murphy. He’d come back from his time helping Leemu and Bruuk become housemates, and maybe helping steady Bruuk just that little bit more from the evil that had been done to him.

Daar didn’t have anyone else who was quite so handy a handyman as Murphy. It was good to have him back.

Other than Murphy, there were some representatives from the Clan of Females, a few higher-ranking Fathers from Clan Firefang, and more than a few Clanless who’d apparently known Tooko and counted him a friend.

It was quite the impressive showing. Tooko had earned plenty of respect, and done much for the Gao. Lots of people were going to miss him. What better legacy was there?

Daar and the Great Father had finally merged at some point, he knew. Daar knew this because there was never a time when he wasn’t calculating things to the maximum advantage of the Gao—and of her allies, if it benefited everyone. And he really wanted it to.

So while everything else was going on, and his heart keened in silence for Tooko and everyone else…Daar plotted on people, especially personnel. He was always on the lookout for good talent, always hoping to maximize their possibility for success. Tooko had been a standout, and spending him to get that intel was a painful, costly consequence. But, there were others.

He’d need another ship to replace Silent But Deadly too. Technology marched ever onwards, and the next would probably be even better.

He had a couple of brownfurs that smelled like potential, and he’d set them on the path as best he could. Gorku was doing well! He’d completed the Second Ring with good recommendations, so now it was a matter of nudging and preparation.

He wasn’t quite sure what Bruuk’s purpose was gonna be, but his potential was so obvious it’d be criminal to ignore him. Balls, if Daar had been a second-degree, he’d probably be much like the grumpy lil’ tank. If Bruuk had been born a fifth degree, Daar had no doubt he would have been a soaring talent in the Clan, possibly even a challenger. Shame really, but…that’s just how it went. Still. Damn near peerless genes, good attitude despite the horrors he’d endured…

And firmly in Wilde’s orbit. Maybe that was what he’d be good for, actually. That ship, its crew, Wilde, Bruuk, they’d resolved one of the longest-standing obstacles to the war effort. Daar didn’t intend to let them stop there, though. The galaxy wasn’t gonna stop turnin’ up new roadblocks, an’ basic sapient greed an’ short-sightedness could do a lot of harm.

Well. There were options. Bruuk had thoroughly dominated the First Ring when he challenged it and was still riding pretty high on that; his taco-purveyor-spy-friend told Daar he’d found a mate! That was good. So, once that was done…

Should Daar maybe encourage Bruuk to go hard at the Rings? That would take much time. Years. Gorku only just finished the Second Ring after all, and the Third could be infamously long, depending on what the ‘Back wanted to specialize in. Would it be a better investment to encourage Bruuk along the traditional path of Clan advancement?

Or would it be better to encourage…something a bit different?

On the one hand, Bruuk would be an excellent ‘Back in the Clan. No denying that. That was an assured path to personal success for him…

But was it the right path for him? And was it what the Great Father needed?

…No. To both. Bruuk was too much of a stand-out. Top-tier genetics—and a good nose could smell it on him—and by random chance, an absolutely average degree. Senior Clan would outcompete him in every way that mattered. He would drown in the politics of mating pedigree, and that wouldn’t do for anyone. Bruuk was a special project, the more Daar looked at it.

As was Wilde. Daar didn’t have many Humans on-staff.

No, they were both far too useful and important where they were. And there was plenty to be done still, to prepare the Grand Army for the next stage of invading Hunter space.

And there was the lesson of Tooko. Small, stealthy ships had their uses. But they were also defenseless. What was needed was something that could sneak around, and then stand up and beat its enemy bloody when needed. Drunker meets Destroying Fury.

The Drunken Fury?

…No.

Such a ship would need support, too. Say, an innocuous civilian freighter, making cargo runs across certain strategic corridors…deploy the odd discreet sensor here and there, drop a megalight drone, smuggle the odd special project…

…Maybe have a compact lil’ grizzly bear of a cook start a fight now and then, while a respectable wall of a one-eyed murderhuman sweet-talks the local authorities…

Okay. Probably not. But that was still such a funny report, Daar couldn’t help but enjoy the memory of just reading it. Balls, he’d have had so much fun if he coulda played!

He checked himself just before he chittered at the memory. This was a solemn moment, and though he was pretty sure Tooko himself woulda understood it weren’t no disrespect…well, still. The Pyres were never really for the dead, anyway. The Pyres were for the living.

This one, though, was just about burned out. The kindling was down to just a few last glowing tips, and the last wavering lick of flame guttered out even as Daar watched it. Such tiny pyres didn’t last long. But they’d happened at all, that was the point.

Just like a life.

He sighed sadly. Lives. That was the currency of Great Fathers, and of wars. Tooko’s had been an expensive life to spend, but what he’d bought…well, they’d see. It might be one life that avoided the waste of many, or one life that ultimately avenged trillions. Either way, the point was not to waste lives.

Anyone’s lives.

That was the promise he poured silently into the last trail of smoke until even that was gone, and the funeral was over. Then, with a head full of plans, he returned from reflecting on the ones he spent and commanded, and went back to his own.

Behind him, the ceremonial detail prepared for the next remembrance.

Date Point: 18y6m2w5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

SPC Hunter “Gonzo” Thompson

Hunter’s physical training had been deliberately lined up with the biggest Beefs, apparently owing to his high growth potential. That turned out to be kinda nice actually, ‘cuz all four of them were currently on an extended recovery pause in their progression, timed in this case to align with the trials of caring for Adam’s second kid. A boy, named Samuel, several months old by now and who was just settling into a good nighttime routine. He was a big boy, too. Dang.

Anyway, that meant Hunter was on an extended break too, the first one at this level he’d ever been on. It wasn’t, like, a do-nothing thing. Mostly it was about reasonable self-restraint, while the superscience was at a bare minimum (and mostly absent right now) to give their bodies time to adapt, time to really recover and settle on their new normal. Rest and recovery was just as important as pushing it, and at HEAT’s level, those rest intervals could last for months.

Which…well. It was awesome! It meant he could afford occasional cheat meals. He could party a little! He wouldn’t be busting PRs or anything, but who cared? A guy had to live a little, and if there was anything Hunter had learned he’d missed his whole life, it was living.

It was nice being a fuckin’ beast. But it was nice to do dumb shit, too.

So, he was down to have fun. Fuck, that was part of how he’d earned his callsign! “Gonzo.” He kinda liked it, actually. It was nice not being super-serious all the time about everything. But sometimes, a guy had to be both.

They were drinking to Tooko. That was a fuck of a bummer. Hunter had never got to meet him but the JETS guys all thought the world of him, and the HEAT lads were, if nothing else, fiercely loyal to their JETS buddies. So, the night started out at Rooney’s where they raised a few glasses, shared stories, laughed sadly…

From there, the new nightclub on New Worlds Plaza, Unchained. Huge dance floor, some pretty funky holographic gizmos up in the roof alongside the lights and lasers…

Hunter had a weakness. A big one. He was a huge show-off, but he sorta…well, he tried to keep it to places where it wasn’t such a dick move to prance around, y’know? But still, he was a big pretty bastard and he loved to play. Playing with other pretty people was fun, and there wasn’t any better place among normal people than a dance club. Or more fun!

Wilde wasn’t super excited by the idea. He had the usual ship-mooring pole up his ass like most brits did, but with him it was even worse because he didn’t really…fit in with the HEAT lads. Not the Gaoians either, which seemed to somehow bum him out even more, despite their attempts to make it better. Probably it was the sorta…uh, puppy-like way everyone was showering him with attention…

Hunter thought he understood. Wilde needed someone who was too dumb to get what was botherin’ him. Well, Hunter could be pretty dumb when he needed to, and he was even dumber with his Marine buddies.

So, they went to go be the dumbest together.

There was a lot of drinkin’. Firstly, Wilde was a big damn dude, quite a bit bigger than Hunter’s Marine buddies. He was also a Brit, and together that meant he could hold his booze against their degenerate alcoholism, no problem. Good! Hunter was like three times bigger still, so he didn’t really have to worry about getting too plastered to contain himself. He could match them all, drink for drink without any worries, and he couldn’t afford enough booze to get drunk, anyway.

He still got tipsy as hell, though. And tipsy-dancing was the best dancing. All the lights flashing, the music thumping, pretty people all around him, paying attention to him…shirt off, sweat-slick from dancing…fuck, he probably looked sick in all the flashing lights! Then he was showing off to cheers, there was a tall drink of woman he hadn’t met before, lots of grabby hands…

He realized at some point that Wilde wasn’t playing along, instead hovering around the bar, being all awkward and stuff. Fuck that noise. Hunter stomped over, picked him up and dragged him right into the middle of the dance floor, and sicced a bunch of the pretty people after him.

“Have fun you stupid fuck!”

Jesus fuck there weren’t nothin’ more funner’n shoving a Brit WAY past his comfort zone. And that eye was a real conversation-starter!

Well, for what passes for conversation on a pulsating dance floor, anyway.

And it worked! One of Hunter’s favorite hookups had Wilde loosened up in no time—direct attention from a girl that hot had its own kind of superpower. Hunter gave her a look and moved just the way she liked, offering to go somewhere private and play like they had before on a few occasions…

She just gave him a wicked grin, and returned her attention to Ian. Oh well!

Hunter did learn something pretty valuable that night. After accounting for his ridiculous size these days, it turned out he was actually a fuckin’ lightweight on the booze. Once he crossed some magical threshold, he went from tipsy to fuckin’ smashed almost instantly. He didn’t quite trust himself in that state, given how big he was and everything, so that was the time to stumble off the dance floor and maybe call it a night.

Marine buds gave him no end of trouble for that. Oh well. He’d earned it.

He didn’t remember much else after that. He vaguely recalled some really nice fuckin’ attention from that woman he smiled at earlier, but he didn’t remember really…what. Good warning sign. He remembered stumbling home too. Or maybe stumbling off to somewhere closer…?

He woke up with a raging headache on an unfamiliar floor in an unfamiliar living room, with a happily familiar warm weight atop him.

He needed to pee, and drink some water, but still he took a moment to put things together. Okay…nice place. Not a university student’s digs, place looked more like…

A few more pieces fell into place as he checked the warm body cuddled up to him. Yup. Older woman. Ring on her finger. Right, yeah, there’d been a married couple…no sign of the husband though.

Well…whatever. He could be a good house guest. He carefully extracted himself from under…uh…nope. Name wasn’t coming to mind. Whatever. He did his best not to wake her up, groaned his way to his feet, and went looking for the bathroom.

Taking care of that need dealt with half his hangover all by itself. He found some painkillers behind the mirror, scooped a couple double-pawfuls of water into his mouth to wash them down, and decided it’d prob’ly be polite if he fixed breakfast or something.

Well. He could at least pull some underwear on, first. So he did that, and whoever-she-was stirred sleepily.

“Mmm…shame, really.”

Hunter paused, and grinned sheepishly. “Uh…hi.”

“Rebecca,” she said with a more wicked grin. “And you are?”

He sighed in wary relief and could feel how gormlessly he was grinning. “Uh. Hunter. We, uh, I guess things went kinda fast last night.”

“Well, you looked so lonely…” she stretched out like…well, like a cougar. A very satisfied cougar. “Like a poor lost puppy, even. If you were thinking of clattering around in the kitchen, don’t bother. My husband will take care of it when he gets back. He’ll be out for his morning jog.”

“Oh. Okay.” Hunter went digging around in his clothes for his phone. Sure enough there was a barrage of teasing messages from the Lads. “I, uh, guess he’s a morning person, huh?”

“Mm. Don’t know how he does it. Or how he’s able to walk, after what you did to him last night…”

Hunter blinked. He didn’t remember that! “I…what?”

Rebecca gave him the most evil smile he’d ever seen. “I’m only teasing. Raymond only has permission to watch, for now…”

“Ohh…” Hunter chuckled. “Good. I’d hope I’d have remembered something like that!“

Actually…Hunter looked around. No sign of his buddy.

“…I wonder where Wilde wandered off to.”

Rebecca arched an eyebrow at him as she rose to her feet and headed for the bathroom herself, with a bit of a pained groan. “Ugh, you young bucks and your lack of restraint…Now what prompted that question?”

“Uh…buddy of mine. Goin’ through some stuff, I guess.” Some intuition struck him suddenly. “You keep your claws out of him!” he added with a grin.

She snarled, playfully scrammed the air at him, and vanished into the bathroom with a “Rawr!” and a laugh.

Hunter chuckled, decided he liked her, and scrolled through his messages, just in case there was anything there that demanded his attention. Not much, as it turned out: A new post from Adam, posing with Samuel and Diego in one arm and his wife in the other, a huge happy-dad grin turning his face goofy. Weirdly adorably goofy, which he’d need to tease him about later. Other than that, just his daily reminders.

Rebecca returned, tying herself into a silk bathrobe. “So, this buddy of yours. Quiet Brit? Cool glass eye? Useless on the dance floor?”

“Well, he is a Brit…”

“More useless than usual.”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Last I saw of him, he was having more success with that girl than you were.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Hunter grinned smugly. “I got there first weeks ago. She’ll wear him right the fuck out.”

“My,” she clucked in faux disapproval, “You are quite the himbo, aren’t you?”

“Hey! I’m doin’ a community service! I got needs, y’know? And apparently so do a buncha lonely folks in this town…”

“What can I say? Folctha has that reputation, in some circles…say, you happen to be buddies with a big man, goes by, uh…Warhorse?”

“You’re kidding!” Hunter laughed, “Him too? He’s super loyal to his wife!”

“Oh, this was a few years ago. I suppose he got it out of his system…Alas.” She trailed her fingernails over his arms and shoulders, asking a question that Hunter knew the answer to.

“Too bad, huh?” He pulled her close and tight, and snarled into her ear. “What would your husband think if I were to just fuck you stupid on the counter?”

“He’d probably enjoy that a bit too much…so you have to wait ‘til he gets back.” She pushed a sharp fingernail into his sternum. “That’s the rules. Only when he’s here to watch.”

“You are a wicked little thing, ain’t you?”

“Fiendish.” She purred, quite relaxed and clearly enjoying herself. “You enjoy an audience anyway. So stick around, I promise it’ll be worth it…”

Well, he didn’t take much convincing. He was just a big dumb boy, really. But still…Wilde. The entire point of last night was lookin’ out for Wilde. As much as Hunter liked gettin’ his dick slicked…

“Uh…okay, but I really gotta…” he unwrapped himself from her and picked up his phone again. “See if my buddy’s okay first, y’know?…”

“Aww, that’s sweet.” She made herself comfortable on the couch. “You HEAT types really do look out for each other, don’t you? But you’re usually more gentlemanly than to just fuck-and-run…”

…HEAT types? Wait. How much did Rebecca get around? Well…he understood the teasing, now. He’d apparently just gleefully plowed the village bicycle.

…Hot fuckin’ bike, though. Whatever that meant. And whatever, she was clearly happy with life, so who was he to judge? Not like he was some kinda monk himself…Mighta felt bad for the husband, but he seemed pretty fuckin’ happy with the arrangement himself, now that Hunter’s memory was getting into gear…

Oh. Yeah. Wilde.

“So you never answered my question. You know where he is?”

“I’m pretty sure he’s with his girl for the night. Now a question for you: what are you going to go and do? He seemed like a big boy…” she trailed her toes up his thigh and gave him a sinful quick arch of her eyebrow. “Are you sure he can’t take care of himself…?

“…Uh…” Hunter tripped up on that one. It was true, he’d been so eager to help that he hadn’t actually put any thought into how. Or even, really, if Wilde actually needed his help at all, now he thought about it.

And…cougar or not, she had such a fine fuckin’ bod…especially there in the morning light…

“…Maybe I’ll just send a text, actually.”

“Good boy.” She patted his shoulder, and gave it a good hard squeeze. Then leaned in close to his ear and snarled. “We’re not done with you yet, anyway.”

“…Oh.” Hunter thought about that for a second then decided…y’know what? WIlde was a grown-ass man, he could look after himself for the day. “Good.”

He could work on friend-stuff later.

Date Point: 18y6m2w5d AV
Betty’s Diner, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“I thought I smelled you!”

Ian tore his attention away from the morning news TV and blinked. At least he was having a good breakfast, even if he kept zoning out in the middle of it: Orange juice and eggs benedict, the best hangover cure, not that it was working so much. He’d spent most of the last day totally pickled, and his brain was…chugging.

“…Hey, Bruuk. And, uh…”

“Tensee,” Bruuk introduced his female companion with the smug look that only a Gaoian male who’d just secured—and fulfilled—a mating contract ever dared to wear in public.

“You two have a good time, I take it?”

“So did you, by the smell of it!”

Ian groaned and drank some of his juice. “Fuckin’ ‘ell, I showered and everything.”

“Can’t fool this nose, Cousin!” Bruuk chittered merrily and sat down opposite him. Tensee—a terrier-furred robust thing with a couple of surprisingly masculine scars—slid in next to him looking quite amused.

“Cousin, you say? He doesn’t much smell like you…”

“Oh, I ain’t sure he’d servive that.” There was an evil chitter in the rumbling wave of bass.

Ian blinked at him, still badly brain-lagged. “I…what?”

The two Gaoians both chittered again. “I don’t know which you smell of more, female or alcohol!” Bruuk pant-grinned at him.

“Think both of us had way too much to drink. Fuck me, that was dumb.”

“Which bit? The drinking? Or the hookup?”

“Both in combination.”

“Trust a Human to overcomplicate matters…” Tensee’s tone was understanding, though. “Me, I keep it simple. Bruuk here was a perfect gentleman on our date, and a perfect savage afterward. And I’m hoping he will be for the next month, too. You wanted it, she plainly wanted it… Why deny our natures? ”

“Easy for you to say, love…” Ian grumbled, but decided not to elaborate. Bruuk didn’t need the distraction right now, and she was a stranger. He turned his attention back to the telly. “Eh, sorry.”

Bruuk gave him a concerned look. “You okay?”

“Just…lots o’ shit news all in a couple days. Knocks a bloke off his stride, you know?”

Tensee duck-nodded sadly. She was watching the footage from New York too, now, her ears moving to a more solemn angle. “Did somebody you know…?”

“Not in that. But…yeah. Lost a mate of mine yesterday.”

Bruuk keened softly. “Anyone I know?”

“Doubt it. Tooko. Clan Firefang. Dunno the details, but they were good enough to tell me…”

“I know that name…” Tensee blinked, then her ears flattened. “…Wait. First-degree? One of his Clan’s studs?”

“That’s the one. Smug little bugger, but a bloody fantastic pilot. You knew him?”

“Knew of him…Wow. There’s…going to be a lot of unhappy Sisters.”

“Now that’s the kinda legacy I wanna leave…” Bruuk commented. Tensee gave him a slightly affronted look, but it evaporated when Ian laughed.

“Hah! Yeah. Yeah, I think he’d be happy wi’ that.”

“Ugh, males…” He could tell her heart wasn’t really in it.

Ian had to chuckle at that one. Bruuk chittered too, then dug in one of his pockets and handed Tensee a credit card. “Hey, get ‘yerself breakfast. My treat.”

“And one for you too, hmm?” She flicked her ears amusedly, but climbed out of the stall to go order.

“That’d be nice.”

“Such a lazy brownfur…” she chittered, and headed for the counter.

“Not last night!” he called after her, and turned his attention to Wilde. “…Y’don’t seem as…uh…happy as I woulda thought you’d be.”

Ian stirred some bacon around on his plate, mopping up the runny egg yolk. “Doesn’t work that way for us,” he grunted.

“Okay. All due respect and everything? Yes it fuckin’ does. I’ve seen an’ smelled way too many of you Humans after a good Gao-worthy all-night romp. You come out of it with a spring in your step and a syrup-sweet disposition. So why not you?”

“…I mean…it wasn’t what I needed.”

Bruuk tilted his head, which made his normally erect wolf-like ears flop over a bit too much like a giant puppy. “You…” A sniff, then. One of the serious sniffs Gaoians always did when they wanted to be sure, and wanted you to know it. “Lotta self-doubt there. An’ I’m guessin’ it ain’t over somethin’ stupid like performance.”

“I performed just fine, thank you. And it was….fun. Nice. Just…I’unno. Hollow.”

“…Oh. I get it.”

“Do you?”

“Better’n you might guess. I’m a second degree, yijao?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Dora gave me this exact same talk yesterday.” Ian put his knife and fork down.

“What talk? I ain’t gonna give you no talk! I just get that, uh, things ain’t always so cut an’ dry. You got any idea what it’s like bein’ both more and less of a male than most other males? So no. All I’m sayin’ is I get it.”

“That isn’t it for fucksake!” Ian groaned. “I don’t give a rat’s arse what people think, my problem is…look, it’s the same one that got me on the ship in the first place. I’ve spent my whole fuckin’ life being something clear-cut and easy to understand, and then everything gets turned upside down and I’ve suddenly got to figure out shit that I should’ve squared away years ago.”

“Square away…” Bruuk looked…well, his chitter wasn’t mirthful. “Brother. Did you not hear what I said? Who gets to live cut-and-dry? That’s a luxury. I’m a ‘little girly second degree’ with a second-degree’s infamous preferences…but I’ve also got Keeda’s own testosterone count, and I naturally got enough muscle on my frame to literally crush most fifth degrees’ ribs flat with a simple hug. Now, after Daar himself’s been teaching me? Well, I’m gonna get fuckin’ crazy strong while I prep for the Second Ring. So I know confusion. You know what it was like when I figgered out I was way more interested in males than females? For higher-degree males that’s kinda unusual, but for first an’ second degrees, that’s common.”

“Wait, what? You’re into guys?”

Bruuk shrugged hugely. “Yeah. Gals too, as you can see by my pretty-tail date. But mostly guys.” He grinned evilly, exposing his fangs. “‘Specially if they need puttin’ in their place…”

Wilde ignored that thought for now. “…I didn’t know you were gay.”

“That’s what I’m tellin’ you. By Gaoian standards I ain’t. The right female will still enslave my heart just by flickin’ an ear at me, yijao? That’s a trick only a female can manage ‘fer us, even us open-ended types. So yeah. I still love Females. Just…not literally all of ‘em, the way guys like Daar do. I’m a little odd by our standards, yeah, but even then it’s ‘cuz I’m basically a big fifth degree squashed down. I’m short, but I’m thick an’ wide as fuck, and I smell like a full-sized ‘Back. Strong like one, too. So, y’know. Confusin’ for everyone.”

“Confusion seems to be the order of the day…” Ian grumbled. “And I gotta say, that little speech hits a little uncomfortably close to home for me.”

“So what? An’ is that ‘yer problem? I dunno! I just know you smell confused as shit, an’ you seem ‘ta think ‘yer the only one who’s ever felt it. Bullshit, which is the bestest English word an’ I’m stealing it.”

Despite himself, Ian laughed. “Oh come on, everyone knows ‘fuck’ is the bestest word.”

“Fuck is universal. It transcends species an’ belongs to no language. Or at least,” he sniffed, “any species worth the fuck in the first place. Bullshit is English. But. Anyway. Look, we ain’t the same species. I’m pretty fuckin’ smart but I won’t pretend like I get Humans, yijao? All I know is I get what ‘yer goin’ through, even if you don’t even know what it is ‘yerself. Standouts never have an easy time finding themselves.”

“Mm.” Ian picked up his fork again and ate the last of his bacon. “Dora reckons I’m gay.”

Bruuk duck-shrugged. “‘Course she does. She’s from a culture where everyone gets their little fuckin’ box, an that jacket o’ hers is covered in all the little flags for all the little boxes Humans put themselves into. She wants you ‘ta have a word that sums it all up, ‘cuz that’s what helped her! Doesn’t mean that’s what you need, or that there even is a box ‘fer you.”

“True, I guess…Besides, I’m pretty sure I’d know. Right?”

“Eh. Maybe.” The question didn’t seem to interest Bruuk much. “I dunno. You clearly like women so you ain’t gay like I’d term it. I mean,” he chittered evilly, “I can ream you out but good if you wanna find out what ‘yer into—”

Ian snorted. “No.”

“Y’sure? I’m strong and ‘ya wouldn’t be the first confused male I’ve smashed inside-out—”

“Fuck, no!” Ian shook his head. “Christ, that’s not an image I wanted today…”

“See?! You can still laugh. But seriously, firstly I wouldn’t really do that to ‘ya unless ‘ya asked, obviously, and secondly I know you Humans think differently ‘bout this. ‘Gay’ ain’t what I’d call ‘ya. I mean, look around. You see any male tail you wanna chase?”

“Right, that’s the bit that has me confused. I look around and it’s like…she’s hot, she’s cute, she’s fuck-it-why-not…don’t quite see it in men. I mean…but also, at the same time I do kinda see it and that’s fucking with me.”

“Oh? How so?”

Ian took his time and mopped up some more egg. It was starting to get cold so he polished off his plate before continuing.

“Well, okay. There’s this young HEAT kid. Goes by Gonzo, right? He took me out clubbing last night and…fuck. I spent more time staring at him than anyone else. Never…that was a first for me. I couldn’t fuckin’ look away.” Just remembering that made Ian feel uncomfortable. “If things didn’t go like they did, I probably mighta…I dunno. I think he noticed though, ‘cuz he stomped over at some point, and I honestly didn’t know if he was gonna break me or something, or if I had to fight off a fuckin’ angry HEAT operator, but thank fuck that wasn’t what he was mad at.”

“He was mad you weren’t playing with everyone else?”

“…How did you–?…whatever. Anyway, yeah. He didn’t seem to like me sticking to myself, so he stomped over and literally picked me up like a fuckin’ child—and that was a feeling I wasn’t expecting! I’m a big damn bloke and he manhandled me like nothing! Then he plopped me right in the middle of the dance floor, and then…there was this beautiful young woman, right? Suddenly I forgot everything else, and then I woke up in her bed, hung over, and…here I am.”

Ian felt a bit drained after that, and nursed his orange juice. Bruuk though, he seemed thoughtful. “Okay. Yeah. That’s unambiguously an attraction. So, how do you feel about it?”

“…I don’t know. Confused. I mean, I ended up going home with the woman, right? She’s the one that got my blood pumping. But at the same time? I never…all my friends are guys. I wanna hang out with them and do guy things, right? Why don’t I ever feel that with women?”

“Well. Okay. Y’know what? You human males have a superpower in common with us. We Gao, we can meet each other for the first time, sniff noses an’ be lifelong friends before we’ve ever spoken a word. I see you males do the same thing, sorta. Now I ain’t no, uh…whatever would be an expert here. But you can’t tell me that ain’t driven at least a little by some kinda male-specific bond, ‘cuz the females in both our species just…don’t hardly ever do that.”

“Oh, bullshit, I’ve known plenty of women who’re inseparable best friends for life!”

“I didn’t say no women. That’s obviously stupid! Of course sometimes women meet and they’re cousins forever. But in general you can people-watch an’ see patterns. So, it looks to me that men an’ women click together ‘fer different reasons. An’ mebbe whatever does the clickin’ is different in us. Man and woman, I mean. You sure you ain’t just…missing some o’ that? You military types have really intense friendships an’ all…”

Ian could only stare at him blankly for a bit. “How do…why are you so smart about this?”

“I’m a compressed chair-crushin’ contradiction, cousin,” Bruuk chittered. “I’ve been thinkin’ ‘bout all this a long time. Bein’ turned into a fuckin’ robo-zambie didn’t help shit, neither.”

Tensee slid back into the booth and returned Bruuk’s credit card, who immediately wrapped a massive arm around her possessively. She leaned into him and purred, sniffed the air and discreetly changed the subject. “He’s a smart one, with smart friends. Handsome, too!”

Ian chuckled. “I suppose he’s that, yeah.”

“I meant you.”

Both of Bruuk’s ears flicked indignantly. “Hey!” Despite his protest, his grip around her tightened affectionately. The two of them together were almost nauseatingly cute.

“Bricky, you’s a handsome male, but you are never going to match his scar. Or his glass eye.”

“Wouldn’t bloody advise it,” Ian said. Somehow, he wasn’t self-conscious about that when it was a Gaoian female pointing it out. Especially not one who’d picked up a few wounds herself. “It stung a bit.”

“Only a bit?”

Bruuk chittered. “You gotta understand, in his Clan, that kinda understatement means it was the most painful shit ever.”

“M-hmm,” Ian agreed. “Took more than a sit-down and a cup of tea to get me back on my feet, I’ll tell you.”

“Handsome and understated! You picked a good cousin, mister brick! Could learn a few things from him, too…”

Ian had to tease him a bit. “Never be as handsome, though…”

“Eh,” Bruuk waved a massive paw. “It’s okay. I’ll settle ‘fer well-hung an’ hulkin’ over a missing eye any day.”

He looked Tensee in the eye, pant-grinned and flicked his left ear in what Ian knew to be a decidedly filthy bit of body language. He must not have been exaggerating because she suddenly demurred and looked away to see if the breakfast was coming.

Which it was, for maximum sitcom timing. The waitress gave the two laughing males a suspicious look, refilled Ian’s coffee, and returned to the bar with a prim expression as though she knew exactly what they were discussing and didn’t care for it one bit.

They ate their breakfast mostly in silence. Bruuk’s was a mountain of eggs, meat, and veg to satisfy whatever minimal fiber he needed to move all that grease along. Tensee had got herself the smoked haddock kedgeree. They planned to go hiking later in the day and asked if he wanted to come along. He’d worried he’d be the third wheel, but that was apparently an utterly alien concept to Gaoians, so…

Honestly? Why not? His hangover was clearing up, things in his head were…well, they weren’t sorted out exactly, but he still felt like he’d taken a step in the right direction. A good hike and some fresh air might just do the rest. And even if they didn’t…that wouldn’t matter, really.

He already felt much better.

Date Point: 18y6m2w5d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

There was the usual fallout. The reignition of a debate that would never go away so long as America existed. The usual powerful voices wanting a word in the President’s ear about what he should do in response to Grand Central. As though it was inevitable that every action had an executive reaction. As if by exerting his authority he could somehow put things right.

He wanted to shake some of them, call them what they were: vultures. People were dead, and here they came a-circling, looking to pressure the President into doing something. Not because it would actually put the world right again—nothing could achieve that—but because it would further their own dreams. Vultures on both sides, each more concerned with pecking at their mortal enemies over the carrion than with something as vulgar as common decency and grief.

It was enough to make him look forward to his session with Ambassador Etsicitty later. This time on Cimbrean, to meet with Vemik after all.

But first, the placations, and the standing of his ground.

“You know, I see these kinds of things, and of course I want to do something about them. Of course I want to build an America where this doesn’t happen. The obstacle isn’t will: the obstacle is that no bill, law or executive order holds jurisdiction over the human soul. There’s no piece of paper I can sign that will mend a broken mind.”

“There’s plenty you can do, Mister President. Ways in which you can make it harder for this to happen again…”

“How?” Chambliss asked. He sat back and rested his arm lightly on the back of the couch. “The APA were using military equipment. Carbines with grenade launchers! The armed officers there to protect the station were killed in the opening seconds of the massacre. Despite that, every emergency and security measure in that building worked flawlessly, and dozens, probably hundreds of people escaped unharmed because of them.

“Now, if during the course of the coming investigations it turns out there is something to be learned, some procedure that can be implemented to save lives in the future, you can bet every dollar you have that I’ll jump on it and make it happen. But I think it’s safe to say that all the laws we have are sufficient at this point. We didn’t allow the attack, after all.”

He kept his patient steel barrier up and successfully fended off one set of vultures. The other set got similarly stonewalled.

“There were good guys with guns present, Senator. They died. They were, in fact, the first to die. And I find myself wondering, when NYPD SWAT arrived, how they were supposed to tell the difference between the armed men in civilian clothing who belonged to the APA, and the armed men in civilian clothing who happened to be valiant members of the public? How many heroes might they have mistakenly gunned down in the heat of battle, with no uniforms or insignia to help them tell friend from foe?”

…and so on. Thus passed a long and frustrating morning, and both sides went away dissatisfied, which probably meant he’d done the right thing.

There was the usual lunchtime flurry of minor things, confirming he’d attend there, declining to meet with them, signing that, reading this… The dull make-work of power, enough to leave him with a gritty feeling of boredom in his soul that made even the prospect of teleporting to an alien world seem attractive.

Teleporting to an alien world for the first time in his life. It was still a rare thing, going offworld. Between the Allied settlements on Cimbrean, and the Chinese and Russian colonies on Lucent, only a few million people had ever left the Earth, and that had slowed dramatically after Franklin, with the lockdown.

Now, though…now was the time for a personal endorsement of jump arrays. He’d made a bit of an event of it, and had a portable one set up on the White House lawn. It made for a good photo op, it kept the Secret Service happy and, most importantly, it meant he didn’t have to climb into a damn helicopter.

He waved to the reporters, stepped inside, and—

Thump.

Make it as much of a perfunctory thing he possibly could, and…well, that wasn’t so bad. The air was instantly a bit thinner though, which was a strange sensation. And something about the gravity had him feeling the teensiest bit off-balance.

Waiting at the other end was Etsicitty, looking far more comfortable in a role-appropriate set of high-end activewear, like he was about to strike out for the summit of a nearby mountain. Somehow, even showing off all his stupendously bulging size like that, he seemed much more discreet and approachable. All the too-damn-good-looking superhero nonsense just…fit better. Suits were of course designed to make any schlub look like a hero, and the thing about it was that they pushed things just a bit too far with him. What a strange (though not necessarily enviable) problem to have.

Wild hair worked better for him, too.

And…good God. Somehow, the two men flanking him were even bigger. He’d never quite believed the stories around HEAT, but Jesus. And they, unlike Etsicitty, were absolutely dressed up in their (well-fit but dismayingly cheap) service uniforms, a pair of titans that could only be described as a norse god of murder and his latin-hulk friend. The two of them were walls of Space Force blue in enormous, polished-to-a-gloss combat boots.

There were of course the meet-and-greets—Folctha’s Prime Minister and cabinet, a photo op, the usual. The remainder of the day was spent in diplomatic tours. Near the end was the HEAT, where dozens of titanic men and Gaoians politely and very formally made their greetings; not a particularly warm reception there, unsurprisingly, but their officers were at least courteous. And a perfect illustration of relative size, too. Next to their men they seemed quite small, but compared to the President they were monsters. Scale just didn’t seem to work with these men.

How in the hell had Sartori and his predecessor been convinced to undertake such a radical thing? These men were straight-up superhuman science experiments! All clearly eager and happy with it, but taking some of the military’s very best and pumping them full of alien drugs and encouraging them to push it as far as they could?

He glanced surreptitiously at the two biggest. The viking—Righteous—was such a specimen that he looked almost as if he were naturally that size, but it was the shorter, much bigger man that was the more worrisome. Chambliss only had to look at Warhorse to see a very handsome young man who’d pushed himself to the very extremes of his limits with medicine and willpower. He looked as if he couldn’t possibly cram another ounce of muscle onto his frame, and that he was somehow in the habit of doing so anyway. What would the consequences be for him, whenever he eventually retired? And how old was he? He looked too young to be so…so…

Chambliss would have crushed the idea had it been put before him. As it was…well, the whole unethical gamble had paid off, and at this point they were invaluable and essentially irreplaceable. Not only was he forced to continue this unnatural abomination, he had to increase its funding, lest the Great Father’s influence over the SOR tighten even further.

The JETS weren’t quite so alarming. They were a small assemblage of very large, robustly fit and intense men—yes, still far more so than normal—but at least compared to the HEAT, they seemed well within the bounds of normal human experience. Even still, that was tempered by the presence of Ten’Gewek on the teams, and, well. They were impressive despite having no military traditions. They didn’t wear uniforms, preferring to stand bare-skinned to the world, save for a bit of something around their hips for modesty and convenience. They let their frighteningly powerful bodies and their openly superior attitudes do all the talking they needed.

They were warriors in the truest sense of the word. Chambliss had never properly understood that word until today. Not just the Ten’Gewek, either, or the men of JETS. The entire SOR. The HEAT did a full unit demonstration, first doing incredible violence in their immense, ground-shaking armor, then they did it again, faster and even more impressively while stripped down to simple field uniforms without even their basic weapons or equipment. That bit was probably to drive home just how terribly effective they were; the men themselves were the weapons. All of them were superhuman terrors of course, the Viking easily the worst…

And then Warhorse took the stage, for a solo demonstration against the entire scenario. He showed them the meaning of violence. He moved so quickly, Chambliss almost couldn’t follow him. Mostly he just watched the wreckage appear as if by magic along the course.

“He’s something, isn’t he?” Costello commented as they watched Warhorse shove a truck onto its side in an easy, explosive motion to briefly serve as a barricade, before tumbling it over some of the simulated enemies. He’d moved on before the truck had even rocked to a standstill.

“…That’s putting it mildly, I’d say.”

Costello chuckled grimly. “Indeed, Mister President. He’s the very best we have, by a longshot. I can think of maybe three men who might match him one day. Two are already on the team and the third, sadly, is busy being an ambassador to a people who are among our few real competitors.”

Chambliss blinked. “That few?”

“Yessir. It’s a rare blend of genetics, willpower, personality and circumstance. We evolved to be tough and adaptable, which is a serious advantage, so we’re pretty good at most everything. But we’re only elite at a few things, and extreme speed or strength isn’t our natural strong suit. Now, the Ten’Gewek? They’re physically superior to us by literally any measure you care to try, just by dint of being themselves. They can even match us on endurance, if they train at it.”

“Which is why they are able to fill our JETS teams despite being so few in number.”

“Yessir. And then there’s the Gao. If you look at your average human versus your average Gaoian, it’s not generally much of a contest. But at this level of the game, it’s a different story. As it turns out they are an engineered soldier species, so their elite standouts are…well, seriously so, and a little more common to boot.”

“More common…across billions.”

“Yessir. The numbers game is very much not in our favor. Intel tells us the Hierarchy were in the final stages of ‘activating’ the Gaoians to destroy and replace the Hunters, when we came along…”

Chambliss watched the worrying scene before him for a moment while he pondered on that statement. He didn’t like the conclusion. “We’re falling behind.”

“…Yessir. This is, admittedly, only a very small part of our species’ relations. There are other and much bigger aspects to projecting force. Fleet technology, mass, tactics…all very important.”

“But so is the ability to put the right man in the right place at the right time.”

“Exactly. In this war that matters a great deal, and with the capability these men represent…the Gao felt compelled to respond. Whitecrest definitely has covert teams to answer our capability. Stoneback openly does. Their very best men are roughly on-par with ours one-for-one, but they also have much larger teams, and more of them. What we have in the dozens, the Great Father has just as good, and in the hundreds, now. And that is becoming a strategic concern.”

Realization struck, as he watched the ground-shaking, unstoppable force of nature obliterate his way toward the finish line. “That is a lot riding on these men.”

“Particularly the Beefs—that’d be Warhorse, Righteous, and Baseball. It’s enough that we’ve considered recruiting efforts for Julian, their unofficial fourth member. We don’t think he’d be receptive though, even if he can beat Baseball senseless these days. Biggest reason being motivation and mindset. He’s definitely a warrior in his quiet way, with a body good enough to challenge Righteous…but is he a HEAT-like force of directed violence? No. So even when we have a physically ideal candidate….”

“It’s not enough.” Chambliss understood. “And he’s got other uses, anyhow.”

“It weighs on us, yeah. Particularly Warhorse. He’s been on an extended rest and recovery interval to accommodate his second child—”

“Oh? Give him my congratulations!”

“Will do, Mister President. But in the meanwhile, one of exactly two beings anywhere that can even remotely compete with him, passed him by. That’d be Yan Given-Man. Fortunately, I expect ‘Horse to handily take the lead again and soon, because he’s determined to stay on top, and in my experience with him…that’s enough. I’ve never met anyone as determined as him.”

“…Well, I can’t say I’m pleased by…any of this, but I can at least see its importance. I wish him luck. Who is the second, if I may ask?”

“The Great Father. He’s almost a one-man HEAT team himself at this point, and getting better. That’s your chief interstellar ally, Mister President, trained up to that level by Warhorse and Righteous themselves. Hell, he was almost at that level back when he was just a big lanky Champion of Stoneback. So, y’know. That’s the type of alliance and competition we’re in. Our average have all the advantages. Our best have to fight hard every day to stay in the race.”

…Well. That certainly put things into perspective. He suspected he’d need to get a deep-dive briefing on exactly who and what the Great Father was, if he was that sort of threat.

The demonstration drew to a close. Warhorse had completed the entire scenario while Chambliss and Costello were chatting, meaning he finished it almost as fast as the entire team did working in concert. He stood there in his camo pants and shiny compression shirt, panting heavily with a big grin on his handsome propaganda-poster face, a heaving, writhing mountain of muscle. He was obviously quite proud of the job he’d done and rightfully so. Worries like the Great Father aside, Warhorse was an extremely apt name. Whatever the rest of the men were, he was clearly something else entirely.

And he was the only one they had.

…Unreal. And deeply concerning.

The next spectacle was a game of the infamous Gravball, bare-chested and barefoot in nothing more than running shorts, fighting through sand and supergravity, soaring through the weightless middle and monkey-like across the ceiling and walls. It was impressive as all get-out, the world’s roughest game of 3-D rugby mashed up with a no-holds-barred brawl. complete with press cameras, too; their purpose was to show him (and the world) that they were healthy and happy men.

Which…were they? With all that weight upon them? They certainly looked every bit as superhuman (and supergaoian) as their play unambiguously proved they were, and it was clear they weren’t being forced to play against their will…

It was a game cunningly designed to balance everyone’s strengths against each other, yet even then Warhorse handily dominated the field. Knowing the giant puppy of a man was so irreplaceable, even among such unbelievable superhuman ability…was not a pleasant thought.

It left Chambliss thoughtful and quiet as the motorcade carried him from the base up to the alien palace above the lake for the evening dinner and the quiet time afterwards when some actual business could get done.

Something slightly disquieting about Folctha—everyone was in great shape. He didn’t see a single chubby face or soft belly all day. It was like wandering the Miami beaches during spring break…except there were no beaches. People ran about casually barefoot. Ran about, and even his own ambassador to the Ten’Gewek wore sandals rather than shoes on his huge, sturdy feet. Cars were a rarity, everyone walked, rode a bike, or took public transit. He knew the settlement incentivized fitness through an aggressive system of taxes and rebates, but still…

In some ways it was utopia. And it was deeply unnerving. It was almost a relief when he spotted some minor vandalism, in the form of somebody’s spray tag on a bus shelter. It was proof that he hadn’t accidentally come to Stepford instead.

As it turned out, though, as Annette Winton explained to him over dinner, there was a reason for the fitness culture, beyond coercive taxes.

“It’s the gravity. Cimbrean is a low-G world, so without exercise, people would suffer muscle and bone atrophy. We keep a municipal generator running to normalize the gravity within the city to Earth standard, but those things have a huge power draw, so it doesn’t reach the suburbs or the farming villages, and of course it needs periodic maintenance.”

“A culture developed pretty quick around it,” Julian added. “And, well heck, why not encourage it? We’ve been super lucky here that it’s worked out like it did. But living in a place where you literally can’t afford to ignore your health for several reasons isn’t so bad. And there’s the HEAT too. Folctha’s a small town and, well…everyone knows the HEAT.”

“They’ve certainly had an influence on you,” Chambliss said, pointedly.

“Yeah.” Julian met his look with a challenging stare. “They have. A good one, I’d say. Turns out I’m a natural at this, and I’ve got every incentive to do all of this as best as I can. So, I’m gonna keep doing that, for the sake of our species’ friendship.”

This last was for Yan Given-Man’s benefit, Chambliss reckoned, and the funny thing was…Yan might be wearing only a leather loincloth, and there was nothing dainty about him, but he somehow still managed to not seem out of place at this table. He was a brute to dwarf Julian, a natural monster on the scale of Warhorse…but he had a serene air about him, too. Composed. Watchful and thoughtful.

He also seemed content to let his niece do most of the talking. She, in deference to human delicacies, had dressed up somewhat. In deference to not pretending to be what she wasn’t, that meant she’d wrapped a wide cloth around her…disconcertingly human chest a few times, like a sarashi. Her English, otherwise excellent, was given rather a pronounced lisp by her oversized teeth and lack of a nose.

“For most of our people, this…” she waved a hand at the finery of the hall and the dinner, “…doesn’t work. To impress our tribes, your ambassador needs to be like us. Needs to hunt, needs to know the forest, needs to be strong. Otherwise, most won’t respect him, won’t listen. And then, he can’t do his job. Jooyun’s very good at it. Stronger than most Given-Men!”

Chambliss nodded his understanding, and returned his attention to his soup for a bit, listening and watching. The First Lady and Xiù Chang were deep in conversation over the Franklin redevelopment, totally deaf to anything but each other. On Julian’s other side, Allison Buehler had the carefully neutral expression of a woman enduring the event rather than enjoying it. In that regard, she had a lot in common with her partner.

The Prime Minister of course was in her element, and happy to chat with the Singer, who seemed equally comfortable. From what Beau knew, Singers were somewhere between priests and inter-tribal diplomats anyway, so that made sense. Yan Given-Man had been polite, and wasn’t shy to venture his opinion when asked for it, but seemed determined to keep his own counsel.

Conspicuously absent, of course, was the convalescing Vemik Given-Man. He would be the last visit of the day. Beau suspected Yan was waiting to see how that visit played out before deciding whether to warm or remain closed up.

It wasn’t a long meal. Apparently that was a consideration for their Ten’Gewek guests, who needed to eat rather prodigiously, and for whom the small portions served at a diplomatic meal would be little more than an amuse-bouche. Beau wasn’t about to complain. He wanted to meet Vemik himself and, for lack of a more appropriate phrase, tear off the band-aid.

He was staying at Julian’s house, under strict orders to take it carefully for the next week. After a quick introduction to the rest of the Ambassador’s family—including two impeccably dressed young men who honestly outshone Julian when it came to scrubbing up—They found Vemik in the basement under oppressively high artificial gravity, engaging in what was, apparently, quite light exercise by his standards.

…with Daniel Hoeff.

Beau wondered if Julian knew what a vile psychotic assassin was in his personal orbit. Likely not; Julian was many things that grated on Chambliss, but all of them were essentially good. There was nothing good about Hoeff.

It was for the best, therefore, that Hoeff simply stood, paid service to appropriate deference, and left them alone while Julian smoothly stepped in to spot Vemik instead.

Vemik racked the drooping-heavy bar with a loud crash, and effortlessly rolled up to his feet. He looked quite chipper, actually. Beau had been expecting him to be slow-witted, stumbling over his words and groggy, but in fact the grin he got was friendly and perfectly lucid.

“…Hello!”

It was like shaking hands with a warm statue. Like Julian and the other supermen he’d met that day—Yan and Warhorse being the most outlandish examples—Vemik had a certain unreal quality about him that was hard to describe. In him though, somehow that intensity radiated the strongest. He was young and obviously so, from his line-free face to his bouncy, quick movements. He was physically mighty and flawlessly formed, a brutally handsome young man even across species. Extremely fit, literally hard as a rock. He was, for lack of a better word…basically perfect.

And that made the next thing he said even more painful.

“…President? I’m not sure if I remember so good lately…”

Well. Fuck. The potential tragedy of this was inescapable, now.

“Yes, that’s me, Vemik Given-Man. I thought I should at least meet you.”

“Thank you for the pens. I write much with them already!”

Chambliss found himself smiling. The young Given-Man’s enthusiasm was infectious. “I’m glad! You know, some people just lock items like these away and never use them?”

The young Given-Man hooted indignantly. “What’s the point of making a good tool and not using it?! It’s good I can write though. Here! I show you!”

It was then that the President experienced what it was like to be yanked along upstairs toward what was apparently Vemik’s writing desk. He was able to flag down his secret service just in the nick of time, who gave him shocked and indignant looks. Lord only knows what Vemik, Julian, and Hoeff might have done in a confrontation.

“I started a new journal about my home. Nofl says I should use my memory as much as I can, so I decided to try and remember everything I haven’t put in a book yet. It helps! See?”

The astounding thing was how neat Vemik’s handwriting was. Maybe it was stupid prejudice, or simply the…anarchic…energy he radiated, or just that he had four massive digits on his paw-like hand instead of five, each of which was relatively short, blunt, and easily over two inches thick. Beau had really expected a clumsy, hasty scrawl, or maybe a childishly careful one, but…no. Vemik’s touch was controlled and deft, the lettering even and fluid. Just the sort of handwriting that the pens he’d been gifted were ideal for, in fact.

Somehow, that made the giving a lot less painful.

“I write a lot more right now because half the time I forget things right away. But! If it’s on paper I remember and Nofl says this is good for healing!”

“I see you use all the colors.” In fact, six of the pens in the seven-pen set were carefully laid out on their cloth, while the one he was using was kept carefully on it’s lacquer stand.

“Helps memory. Also, who doesn’t like colors?!”

“True, I suppose…” Beau agreed. “Anyway…Ambassador Etsicitty—Julian—said that with your people, it’s the Giving and the deeds that matters, but, well, words are important to me and my people. I couldn’t leave it at just the gift without also coming here to apologize. You came to our great city as a guest, and to give us a gift, and were attacked while under our hospitality and protection…”

“That’s okay,” Vemik interrupted in the cheerful manner of somebody who wasn’t being rude, just differently cultured. “I killed them.”

“Ah. Yes.” Chambliss had no idea how exactly to reply to that. “Uh…well, nonetheless, it would have been good if you hadn’t needed to defend yourself.”

“Yeah. But, it happens. Some people have big hurts in them. Maybe not from getting blown up, either.” He trilled. “Me, they tell me, prog-nose-is is pretty good! Mostly, everything works, but I forget things easy if I haven’t been thinking on them long. Maybe, not always. But point is…good future, probably. So, that’s okay.”

Beau turned to Julian. “So, good prognosis?”

“So far, yes. It’s impacted his short-term memory the most, and his language centers a bit. He’s not normally so choppy with his words.”

“Only thing you humans have, bigger’n us!” Vemik trilled crudely, then resumed writing.

“Yeah, big buddy! Anyway,” attention back to Chambliss. “Ten’Gewek apparently have somewhat smaller language processing centers than we do. Doesn’t really seem to hinder their ability much, but it does mean his concussion has made words a bit harder for now. On the other hand, damn near half their brain is just motor control. You’d need to see them really perform to get it what that translates into, but that control means they’ve got strength and finesse that’s just way beyond ours. Anyway, Nofl has promising candidate drugs for treatment, and it’s starting to look like Vemik lucked out and might not really need it anyway. Hopefully.”

“So, not quite out of the woods yet, but on the way?”

Julian chuckled. “Hopefully back in the woods before we know it…” he trailed off as they were interrupted. One of Beau’s aides ducked in to whisper in his ear.

“Problem?” Beau asked him.

“Update from General Kolbeinn, Mister President. They’ve found another relay world…”

Beau blinked, then his mind turned back to the fact—so-far unreported and likely to remain that way—that one of the corpses found in Grand Central Station’s destroyed jump array had been riddled with Hierarchy implants. A small, satisfied smile invaded his face and decided to stay.

“I see.” He nodded. “I’ll be with him shortly.”

Julian gave him a curious look. “Good news, sir?”

“I think so,” Beau agreed. “I’m…you’ll have to forgive me for cutting this short. The job never stops. It was a pleasure meeting you, Vemik Given-Man.”

“Thank you for the pens.” Vemik stood and slammed his palm against his chest, loudly. “I found a video on how they were made…is big Giving. Now go be President!”

They shook hands and this time, Vemik’s hand-swallowing grip was perfectly calibrated against Chambliss’s strength. Julian was right, they truly were a remarkable people.

And he even earned an approving nod from Yan, too.

So. That was that. A regrettable incident navigated as well as could be hoped for, at least for now. And the chance to get some revenge had just come along too, it seemed. Beau wasn’t one to indulge in revenge usually. He liked to think he was above that.

But the chance to get some justice for the victims of Grand Central might change his mind.

Date Point: 18y6m3w AV
Light bulk freighter Krr’zkvik, Armstrong Station, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Bruuk, cooker of the most bestest dinners

“So, what did you say to him?”

Dora handed over a bowl of sliced celery. It was her turn to help prepare dinner today, and Bruuk had been looking forward to it. She was easily the second-best cook on the ship, after him. Or maybe it was just that she could comfortably dice ingredients with two hands while stirring a sauce with the third. Made her time management that little bit easier.

“Kinda disagreed with your assessment,” he told her. They were preparing their own unique cross-cultural take on a Robalin dish called Babru, without using a single authentic Robal ingredient. Meeshi greens, celery, Kwmbwrw cwes, plenty of lentils and beans—the Meeshi and especially the lentils were really the nutritional base of the dish. Most of the rest was there for flavor and texture really. It was a regular favorite.

“But he’s—”

“Got a latent attraction he don’t unnerstand, yeah. But that don’t really mean anything yet. An’ in any case, most Humans don’t really care all that much anyway, so there’s no point in him tearing himself up over it. Balls, maybe it’s just a phase! All that camaraderie in the service can be hard to lose, or so I’m told. Couple’a big Fang ‘Backs talked to me about it a few times.”

“…When do you talk to those sorts of ‘Backs?”

“When I’m puttin’ ‘em in their place!” Bruuk chittered evilly.

“…Eww! I did not need to imagine that!”

“Imagine what exactly? I didn’t say a damn thing!”

“You don’t need to. Ugh.” Dora’s antennae lashed, and she scraped the chopped herbs into the sauce.

“You’re right! I put ‘em in their place all night long. And don’t be speciesist!”

“I’m not, it’s just…Males of any species are so gross.” She sniffed. “…Especially furry ones.”

Bruuk chittered, “You really are a raging girls-only kinda gal, balls.”

“May as well not be anything, with my odds of ever finding a partner. Should just convert to whatever it is Moj worships and become a fucking nun…” she griped. “…Whatever. Ian’s happier, and that’s good. So, I’m glad one of us managed to help him.”

“You helped,” Bruuk said loyally. “You aren’t wrong, either. He does need to think about it, and I’ve not met many humans who were all one thing or the other.”

“How many have you met?”

“Not, like, billions of them…but plenty, since we’ve been orbiting Cimbrean.”

“Funny, their culture makes it seem so clear-cut.”

“Yeah, but that’s ‘cuz their culture is fuckin’ stupid sometimes. Too much focus on what they think they should be, not enough on makin’ peace with what they are first.”

“A little too close to Robalin, I think…”

“Eh. Maybe, but Daar says it’s aspirational too, and he’s ‘bout the smartest man I’ve ever met. Like…ever.” Bruuk finished rolling out the noodle dough, grabbed his longest knife, and started slicing it into thin ribbons.

“Funny, he doesn’t look it.”

“Shouldn’t judge a Gao by his muzzle. Ol’ Mother Yulna made him Great Father ‘fer a reason…”

Whatever Dora would have said to that, they were both distracted when the door opened to admit Moj and Ian, who had an extra spring to his step…

“…Yeah, think one of ‘em’s in SOR! They’ve got a sacred stone circle up in the woods east of Memorial Hill or something. Probably let you join in if you ask nicely…Hey, guys.”

“You’re lookin’ chipper! Get laid again?”

“You don’t need to ask, you can smell it.” Ian chuckled and flopped heavily into his chair at the dining table. “But can you smell where I’ve been all morning?”

“Balls-deep?”

“Ha! No, sadly. Stuck in a simulator all day! You are looking at the Gao’s newest certified merchant Shipfather!”

Dora made a delighted squeaking sound, moved the sauce off the heat, and ducked around the counter to give him a hug, which he returned carefully. “Awesome! So we get to finally go do stuff again?”

“Pretty much…heard from the old man, too. Trrrk’k’s still hanging in there, he called me up to congratulate me.”

“How did he know?” Moj asked, buzzing his hemelytra slightly.

“Said he checked the registry first thing every morning. He knew before I did!”

“Sounds like he’s doing pretty well for a man in palliative care…” Bruuk decided the time had come to start assembling the dish and get it in the oven. “Well! Congratulations, Shipmaster! We shoulda got bunting or somethin’.”

“…Bunting.”

“Yeah! Isn’t that what you British Clan do? And bake cakes or something?”

“I am one thousand percent down for cake!” Dora nodded enthusiastically. “Ooh! And maybe some’a those sparkly little firework candles too.”

“…Aliens are weird,” Ian chuckled.

“You’re the alien, Cousin.” Bruuk chittered.

“Literally all of us are different species, mate.”

“Well, anyway, it’s your culture. Ain’t nobody else in the galaxy thought of puttin’ sparkly dust in rubber bags full of helium.”

“That is not my culture! I’d rather just have a beer or something!”

“More easily arranged,” Moj buzzed amiably, and went rummaging in the fridge.

“And cake,” Dora insisted.

“Fine! We’ll have a cake. Why not? But no glitter,” Ian warned ominously.

“Aww, why not?”

“It’ll never come clean, and Morwk will have revenge.”

There was Human-style cake. Not a terribly difficult thing to make, really: some flour, some eggs, buncha sugar, chemical leavening, stuff for flavor…and Bruuk had to admit, decorating was kinda fun, too. He couldn’t eat much, though. Gao didn’t have a craving for sweets the same way most other species did. Moj, on the other hand, ate so much he got both sugar-high and sick at once. Dora took care of both problems by taking him for a walk, Urgug and Morwk were both too busy with the ship’s ongoing refit and upgrade to do much more than drop in and acknowledge the moment before going back to work…

That left just him and Ian lounging in his quarters, contemplating if they wanted to lift, or spar, or just play a video game.

“Cake’s got me feeling pretty lazy, not gonna lie. And the beer’s making it worse.”

Actually, a nap sounded nice, too…but first.

“So, how did it go?”

“Passed with flying colors. Some of the challenge scenarios were pretty stressful, but I mean, nothing next to—”

“No. Well, okay. Great! But that’s not what I was asking about.”

“Oh.” Ian laughed at himself a little, then shrugged. “…Not bad, considering. Felt compelled to talk it out with Gonzo, ‘cuz I felt bad about creeping on him all night. That’s the huge HEAT kid at the club, by the way.”

“I remember. That’s…pretty brave of you, actually. I take it he wasn’t mad?”

“No, he wasn’t. Opposite, actually. Said he was flattered and didn’t mind at all. Even said we should ‘hang out’ sometime, which…”

“Not your thing, I guess.”

“…Yeah. Maybe. I dunno. Somehow, the idea of taking that step just…instantly kills it. And in any case, I’m not even sure he meant anything by it besides being nice. He’s just such a kid that he might have just meant…hang out.”

Bruuk duck-nodded. “Ah. Well. I wouldn’t worry about it then. Really, don’t. Just take it as it comes, yijao?”

Ian nodded. “Seems as good advice as any.”

They sat together in silence for a moment before Bruuk broached the other question. “How about the woman? Things getting on with her?”

Ian smiled. “Got a standing invitation to have fun whenever I’m in town. That’s all she’s looking for, and it’s all I’m looking for, too…”

Well, that’d have to do. Ian didn’t smell stressed out or anything, so…

Maybe not overthink it.

“Okay. But you owe me a rematch in Mario Kart!”

“Ugh, you know I hate how that game rewards you for losing…Street Fighter instead?”

Neither of them had the energy to spar. Neither wanted to lift, and they were both tired of talking. Maybe…

“Yeah, okay! Tournament mode?”

“Sure.”

“You’re not allowed to play Dan this time.”

“Oh come on!”

“I mean it. Anyone else, but not him. It’s not fair! If I win against Dan, it don’t count!”

“And if you lose…”

“Ain’t gonna happen.”

Bruuk sat back and pant-grinned happily to himself as Ian laughed and oozed off the couch to grab the controllers. He didn’t care about unanswered questions, or possibly even unanswerable questions. He didn’t really care about what was going on in his friend’s head, beyond one important fact: Ian was okay.

In the end, that was the only thing that mattered.

Date Point: 18y6m3w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm

Vemik Given-Man

Thick air, big, strong trees. The taste of werne on the air, the cloying smoke of villages.

Vemik was home. Not quite the same, but he was home. He arrived just in time, too; the werne were moving, and the village had to move with them. It was time to smash the pots, burn the huts, Give the village back to the forest.

But that was a hand of days away. First he had Singer. And his village. And Tilly, too; she had been worried. And Vemun. Everything else could wait, while he Gave them all the love he needed to give.

He still wasn’t quite himself. He could think again and thank the gods and the doctors and Nofl and everything that he wasn’t doomed to stupidity…but he was still pretty forgetful about right-now things. It came and went. Mostly it wasn’t so bad, but then he’d…pause, and his mind would blank, and if he hadn’t written it down or someone couldn’t help him remember, then it was gone.

Nofl had made him little hard nuggets that would slowly help. He was supposed to chew one every morning, and he made sure Singer knew so he wouldn’t forget; he was extra useless right after waking up, before he got moving and filled his belly. Maybe he’d never quite have the same “bear trap” of a mind he’d had—Tilly had used that word!—but Nofl thought it would definitely get better, especially once he was back in the forest, and his Fire was flaring back up…already his body was aching as the gods played catch-up with their Givings…

But there was a blessing hidden in it all. Sometimes, when he forgot what he was doing and then remembered again, he remembered something else more important he should do instead. Which was how he finally got around to showing Vemun how to make and shoot a bow.

The design had come a long way since his first one, and he’d learned lots of things from the Humans too. And the People had an advantage in bow-making that Humans never would.

“Okay, so you hold the stick with your feet like this, and then you can work the knife against your thumb like this to control it, see?”

He had not-so-little Vemun in his lap, tail wrapped affectionately around his belly, so their hands and feet could work together to do the work.

He had such small hands, really. All children did, but holding such a small thing in his own big hands, knowing what strength there was yet to grow into his son…

And, more importantly, knowing he would grow, thanks to the vaccines. Human and Corti medicine to go with the People’s own healings. The tribes were growing big now, with every crate of little bottles and sharp needles. Of all the things the Humans had done for the People, that one…that goodness, and knowing how many hundreds and hundreds of people worked quietly to make it happen?

That more than made up for the few hands of evil men who’d tried to kill him, in Vemik’s mind. Nothing was greater than the magic of children.

There was a small crowd of Vemun’s friends watching the lesson, too. A good hand of them looked like they may be Vemun’s half-brothers, but of course there wasn’t any way to be sure. Boys and girls alike found it interesting, though the Given-Men agreed it was a Taking sort of work, making a weapon. Just like spear-crafting, bladesmithing and flint-knapping.

Still. As far as Vemik was concerned, everyone needed good blades and spears and bows. And he was Given-Man of his tribe, so he could teach the children whatever he wanted.

Vemun gave him a nudge in the ribs. “You stopped!”

Vemik blinked, then cleared his throat and shook his head. “…Thoughts went wandering. Sorry! But see, you have what you need to do already. Just whittle at the wood!”

“Just whittle?”

“That’s what I did. Cut the wood, watched how it changed. See, if you carve it off like this…” he demonstrated, until he had the nice tapering edge that had led him down the road of inventing in the first place. “See? Pluck it with your thumb!”

Vemun did so, then trilled happily when it made a musical twang. “You got bows out of this?”

“I did! Made me think, see? Saw it snapped back like that and started thinking about branches smacking me in the face in the forest, and then thought about throwing a spear, and wondered if I could make a branch throw a spear! And I could!”

He ruffled Vemun’s crest, then grinned at the other children too. “Sounds silly, but thinking about silly things might turn up smart things! Be curious! But don’t forget that you live down here, too. Can’t think if you forget to eat!”

“We just ate!” one small voice piped up.

“Good! Well, grab a knife and play then!” Vemik trilled, and then caught himself. “But don’t cut yourself!”

The children bounced away gleefully, all going to get their flint cores. They wouldn’t get steel knives until after their rites, of course. Vemik would make knives for the boys, Singer would make them for the girls. There was magic in metal, and it had to be guided properly.

For now, let them keep practicing the old skills, so they knew the why and how of steel even better when their time came to use it. Besides, if a steel blade broke far away from the forge, it was always good to know how to make a knife out of flint.

A weight landed on his shoulders: Singer, curling herself around him and nibbling his ear. “Done?”

“For now. Sent them off to play sky-thinking.”

“Dangerous game,” she hooted, and kissed him. “Never know what kind of trouble it’ll get you into…”

“Worth it,” Vemik declared, then thought about that for a second. “…Mostly.” He turned to look up at her. “Can’t recommend grenades very much…”

“Mm. Stay away from them from now on.” She tidied up his crest possessively, then coiled her tail ‘round his throat in the way she always did when…

Oh. Right.

“Again?” Vemik trilled. “I fucked you this morning!”

“Want to be sure. It’s baby time.”

Vemik spun around and pounced, tackling her to the ground. “Thought I tasted that on you…well. We better be sure, then!” With that, Vemik threw her over shoulder, trilling all the way, and carried her up into the trees to go play a game of their own.

It was good to be alive.

++END CHAPTER 74++

MORE BY THE AUTHOR

Dandelion

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, and you can read it for free on Royal Road where we are publishing each chapter on a monthly basis.

If you get impatient and would like to read the whole thing, then you can purchase it in hardcover and paperback through your local book store or online wherever good books are sold. Alternatively, you can download it for free through Kindle Unlimited.

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76 Friendly ETs, 145 Squishy Xenos and 318 Dizi Rats, all hanging on the christmas tree.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 76: “Hell and High Water”

Chapter 76: Hell and High Water

Dandelion: audiobook now available!

- Click here to pre-order the audiobook

- Or click here to purchase any version of the book from your favorite retailer

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, and we are delighted to announce that the audiobook version, narrated by John Keating, is coming to Audible on June 8th!

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Hell and High Water

Date Point: 18y6m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

WO2 Robert “Highland” Murray

“Yannow it’s gonny be a bloody weird mission when the biggest bloke on-team is Regaari…”

“I am still plenty huge these days,” Regaari said primly. “By any reasonable standard. I am only small by the highly distorted example of HEAT’s biggest.”

Parata chuckled over the top of his coffee. “I note it hasn’t impacted your social calendar…”

“Quite the opposite!” Regaari chittered. “We silverfurs make mass look classy! How else do you think Warhorse was able to convince me?”

They were waiting on Costello, bright and early ready for what promised to be an interesting mission. There would be no Beef in the opening phase, nor any of the ‘regular-sized’ lads. The seven men selected were firmly the “smallest,” “lightest” and most nippy men on HEAT team one, aside from the officers: Murray himself, Parata, Walsh, Forrest, Regaari, Shim and Ergaan. “Nippy” here had a very HEAT-specific meaning, though: “can maneuver through a space without destroying everything.”

Their biggest members simply couldn’t manage that in a fight.

Warhorse and Daar (when he had good enough reason to play) were unstoppable forces of nature, ones best used when absolutely everything had to be obliterated up close and personal. Both of them had massive reserves of absolutely ludicrous strength at their command, and that was the worst part, really: they could do simply unbelievable things, like flip over trains (did that on the Ring) or jump like fleas (which they do for fun), or keep climbing through supergravity strong enough to pulp normal men. Only the Ten’Gewek could match their pound-for-pound strength and ability, and only Yan himself was big enough to compete. The HEAT were a team of supermen, but those two were who one called when the Mission needed something more.

Unstoppable they may be, but that didn’t mean the walls or floors (or surrounding future debris) of wherever they found themselves could withstand that much concentrated mass and power blitzing aggressively through their space. In full motion, those two big fuckers were living bombs.

On most HEAT missions that was an asset. For this one, though?

No. This mission might need some quick, quiet maneuver. Not even Firth was good enough to overcome his own floor-crushing size, despite being the most well-practiced ninja on the team. This time, the sneaking had to be left to the real craftsman. A HEAT stealth mission? Murray grinned. He always knew they were useful for more than mayhem.

Of course, they’d done quiet missions before, even with the Beefest of them all along for the ride. This time, that wouldn’t be possible on initial entry. They were being stuffed into a stowaway’s hidey-hole with a substantial amount of gear, and they couldn’t afford the volume, the thermal signature, or frankly the mass necessary to bring along the big lads. A suspiciously warm bulkhead was the last thing they needed.

And Hunter cargo ships were…surprisingly small. They had one central passageway, with zero artificial gravity, which Builder Hunters or their slaves presumably used for maintenance purposes. All the intel they had said they were otherwise totally automated. Hunters didn’t stoop to manual labour. Load trash, jump, offload trash, jump back. Like the shuttle in a loom.

In principle, it was the same kind of mission as sneaking into a railyard, boarding a train, and riding it into enemy territory. Just…spacier.

The Big Lads would be suiting up, of course; the mission overall would go quick or not at all, and it was always handy to have instant mayhem at the ready. Still, this was a rare opportunity for the under-four-digits crew to poke some well-earned fun at their oversized betters. And ‘Horse (of course) was providing the right comedic foil.

“I can move without breaking everything, you know.” He wasn’t using his sullen tone of voice, which meant it was open season for teasing. “Marty says I’m graceful!”

The e-tattoo across his ridiculous pecs was on today, this time with a game of Snake. With him, it was either some terrible bloody sentimental wank, some terrible bloody anime nonsense, some terrible bloody violent thing…or Snake. Always Snake. That really old pixellated version from the stone age of mobile phones, meandering around his chest picking up little dots.

“Aye, well, you must be if you haven’ae ripped her in half yet.”

“Hey!” Adam laughed. “She knew what she was getting into!”

“Or what was getting into her, you mean?” Regaari had the most acid rejoinders.

“She’s a braver lass than every man in this room…” Murray intoned. Solemn heads nodded all around, none of them wearing a perfectly straight face.

“Yeah, well…jealousy over my size or my self-control doesn’t become you,” Adam sniffed, unable to quite contain his big goofy smile, and sat down heavily on the massive steel bench in their suit-up room. As ever, it creaked just a bit more alarmingly than the last time he’d graced it with his Huge. “Anyway. Why not take Gonzo? Maybe he needs a distraction from Wilde!”

“Hey–!”

“Or his Marine toys. Wear them out, did you?”

“Ha! I don’t think anything can do that, not that I ain’t trying!”

“Maybe you just need to dick ‘em harder,” Firth joked, with lewd guffaws all around.

“Oh, c’mon! Why you gotta do my friends like that?”

There was some good-natured jeering, because everyone had picked up on Gonzo’s aggressively carefree nature. For his part, he seemed utterly unperturbed by it. There was an unofficial pool circulating among the team about how he actually landed on the matter, which he himself found hilarious—‘shit dude, I don’t even know!’—but Murray suspected it was just the usual weirdness from too many high-speed lads working much too closely together, like one found in most any combat unit. It probably wasn’t anything real. Or at least, not seriously real.

After all, the boy was rarely without a lady of some kind, and that probably said enough.

“Still,” Adam pressed, “I bet he could hack it. He’s still right-sized, too!”

“Aye, but no room. Need a bit more experience for this mission. Sorry, lad.” Murray gave a sympathetic look toward Thompson. “‘Yer time will come.”

Thompson had lost a lot of that boot eagerness since joining. He just shrugged affably. “Rog.”

“I agree with Murray,” Costello intoned as he entered the room, while everyone shuffled to their feet to greet him. “Besides, you punch well above your not inconsiderable weight, Thompson. Best to keep you in reserve for when it’s time for a bit of the ol’ ultraviolence.”

“Aww, is that all I am for you?” Firth quipped. “Just hired muscle?”

“Yes.” There were chuckles around the room: Costello had a perfect deadpan. “You and ‘Horse are the very definition of that. Literally tons of fun for when you just can’t get your point across any other way. Anyway, to the brief.”

There was the rumble of mountains sitting back down.

“Right. So: the design of our mission is a very careful one. We don’t know how attentive the Hunters are, but one thing they might notice is heat signatures or excessive fuel burn in one of their scrap ships. Thus, we’ve spent some time analyzing our surveillance to come up with a good idea on their loading variance and designed our mission around that. We don’t have a lot of room to play with, especially given all the equipment you need to bring. We think we have maybe ten thousand kilos to play with, but we will want to keep well under that number, for obvious reasons.”

“For today and the next few weeks, we’re focusing on our training. The demands of this particular exercise require some fairly serious experience, especially experience being big bastards, but I expect everyone to rotate through as many times as they can. Ideally, I want everyone on the HEAT ready to go. That includes everyone on provisional team two. Take the opportunity, fellas; for once, team one won’t be cock-blocking your sim time for mission readiness. Campbell will be in charge of the training program for everyone.”

Manpower had always been the Achilles’ Heel of the SOR generally, and the HEAT acutely. Right now, only team one was operational; team two was basically qualified but they needed…more time. Brutal reality had forced the HEAT’s recruiting cadre to pick…well, very promising candidates, rather than the perfectly ready. Good men all, but they were still well behind the curve. Whatever luck had given them the men of HEAT team one hadn’t held, so they had to build them instead. Hell, Hunter was the first truly HEAT-ready trainee they’d found in years, already essentially good enough to hack it with the team veterans…

…and, well, they needed to fill a gap, which is why he wasn’t on team two. Not that anyone could ever truly replace Starfall, but…

Oblivious to Murray’s thoughts, Costello continued his briefing. “The hazard course team put in a lot of overtime the last couple of nights, and they tell me the training scenario is ready to go. There will be a lot of permutation and variation to cover our intel gaps. Additionally, I am told by Master Sergeant Arés that everyone is ready and recovered for another heavy training cycle…”

Warhorse grinned evilly, and seemed to almost literally swell in anticipation of all the Good Training he was about to inflict on everyone. There were groans all around. The next year would be one of essentially constant aches and pains.

“So we will have our work very much cut out for us, these next weeks. All leave is cancelled. I am going to ask that you responsibly limit your off-duty vices to something reasonable, too. We don’t know when or how the mission will kick off. Might be a month, might be half a year away. Until our masters say otherwise, this mission is our sole focus. Team two will be doing all they can to improve their operational capability during this time.”

Costello gave them a second to consider that, then nodded and leaned forward. “Fellas, this is go-time. We don’t often get the luxury of this level of prep. Make the most of it. Now, are there any questions?”

Heads shook. They’d been here before, and none of it was unexpected or different. Costello gave a satisfied nod, and tucked his tablet away. “Alright. Murray, Walsh, Forrest, Parata, Regaari, Shim, Ergaan. You have first crack at the simulation and priority access whenever you feel like. Everyone else, you will be rostered for rotation through, and I encourage you to take advantage of any free time that happens to be available. The sim techs will be posting extended hours for you, so don’t waste their time.”

There were nods all around the room.

“Last item: I am told that ‘Horse will graciously permit us all an amnesty weekend—”

There were bursts of cheering all around the room.

“—Anything you want to add, “Horse?”

Adam stood up, and the room got quiet. “I’ll be quick. Have y’all seen what our competition is like these days? From the Hunters? Hell, the cavemonkeys? Stoneback? And Whitecrest’s new covert teams which they’re totally doing no matter how innocently Regaari flicks his ears?”

The whole room glanced Regaari’s way, and then a chuckle washed over it when he, very innocently, flicked his ear.

“Exactly. Here’s the next year’s goal. Everyone is gonna get fuckin’ better by as much as they fuckin’ can. We can’t afford any less, not with the shit that’s coming. I expect the newbies to be up to full mission standard, I expect the veterans to keep them humble, and I expect all the Beefs to be somewhere near my level, come hell or high water. If Righteous ain’t at least makin’ me work for a win, I will be disappointed. If I ain’t makin’ Daar nervous or Yan my chewtoy, I will be disappointed in myself. We ain’t sittin’ by while the Hunters breed some new mutant fucks to kick our heads in. Bustin’ skulls is our jobs, ain’t nobody gonna beat us. That’s all.”

Ominous, that. But…

Well, that was what they were for.

“Right,” acknowledged Costello. “We’ve got our work cut out for us, Lads. Let’s get to it.”

And with that, they were dismissed.

Date Point: 18y8m1w AV
The Given-Men’s Lodge, Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge

Daar Great-Father had wanted to pay a visit to Yan’s world. Partly this was because of Vemik’s injury—Yan had no idea why, since the Gao weren’t involved—partly it was for political purposes. Mostly, to his mind, it was for friendship and for hunting.

And Yan Given-Man was not so stupid as to say no to a god. So, Yan invited him, since it would be rude to just visit anyway. Given-Men always announced their coming to anyone else’s tribe, after all. They had called a meeting at the Lodge, just for the occasion. Only two aliens had ever been invited. Jooyun of course, being a kind of Given-Man himself…

This time was different, though. Many of the other Given-Men did not understand what the great chief of the sky was like, what his power was. Yan had told this to Daar, who was reluctant, at first, to make a big show…

“They need to see, my friend. They respect Jooyun and the Humans because of him, so my people see us as…friends, in a Give and Take. We are better in some ways, they are better in others. Balance. But you? They only ever see small, nimble Gao when they visit Folctha. Not enough of us know what your people are.”

“Ah,” Daar rumbled, padding along with a ground-thumping swagger as Yan swung above him. “You want me to be your next Jooyun!”

“No,” Yan grinned. “I want you to teach them the truth. They think your people weak but for your Sky-Thinking. That won’t do. They need to know what power lives above us. Only you can show them that, and make them understand. They need to be beaten to accept it.”

“Even if it hurts your own? I don’t wanna cause you grief…”

“It will not,” Yan trilled amusedly. “They will see that I am friends with a man-beast that could crush me like a fat black buzzer! This will make me more powerful, not less.”

Daar wagged his tail. “Well…I ain’t had a really good brawl in a while…”

Daar’s friend, Gee-yo-tun, was a tough, lanky creature of silvery fur who seemed unhappy about where this was going. “My Father, the implications of something like this…”

“Will be consequential, yeah. Do you unnerstand what me whuppin’ ‘yer leadership all at once is gonna mean, Yan?”

Yan compared himself to the sharply rolling muscular landscape of Daar’s body. Against any other man or beast of any size, Yan could feel proud. The gods had shaped him well. Were still shaping him, and had hardened his muscles so much he could smash rocks between them. But next to a god like Daar, a mighty Brown One in his own right? Yan was so much less in every way, he almost felt ashamed. Thank the gods though, Daar was a civilized man, one reluctant to dominate his friends no matter how much his might made it right. That made Yan trill merrily.

“I think I know it better than any,” he replied. “The Lodge does this. Every year, when our Fires burn, we meet and we do this. We fight to see who is strongest, argue to see who is wisest. There is no fighting the gods on the truths of the world. You will show you are stronger, and earn the respect you are due!”

“I…” Daar looked at his friend, and they said very much to each other with just a quick look. “Yan. Friend. I am the last person who would ever insult you, but I don’t think you understand jus’ what ‘yer askin’ me ‘ta do. Lotta people’ll think o’ this as a moment o’ weakness on my part. Big dumb ol’ Daar, bullyin’ a young civilization an’ all…”

“Daar, my friend…” Yan paused, and jumped out of the tree to talk to a god, face to face. “No. Nobody is strong like you. In every way a man can be strong, you are the strongest there is. You are so strong that I do not think you are really a man at all, Daar Great-Father. Your people are strong too. Strong like the Humans, stronger than us.”

Daar flicked his ears backwards. “…Sure, that’s flatterin’ an’ all, but—”

“Which is why,” Yan continued, “only you can do this. My people, we are the strongest persons but the weakest people. Too few of us, too far behind on the trail of sky-thinking. The Humans, they teach me this. But you, you can show us. There is no shame in having stronger friends.”

“I ain’t interested in conquering ‘yer people, Yan. Whuppin’ you an’ ‘yer Given-Men in council is pretty much that.”

“No,” Yan shook his head. “You will never conquer us, because you do not want to. We will not be conquered, either. It will just show the order of the sky-tribes, as is true. Pride-lies will not help us, Daar Great-Father. We are protected, yes? Some in the Lodge need to see how strong the claws protecting us are!”

Gee-yo-tun spoke up, unable to hold his peace. Daar must have respected the little man enormously to allow him such rudeness.

“It is one thing to demonstrate a power dynamic. It’s always important for everyone to understand where they stand. It is another entirely to legitimize that dynamic. Is it…wise to explicitly subjugate yourselves to the Great Father?”

Yan understood the worry. Wars between Sky-Tribes could be terrible and nobody enjoyed being small. The oldest stories had a lot to say about that, why the People lived apart in the forest, free of other tribes. Still: to the Ten’Gewek view of things, it was weak thinking to pretend everyone stood on the same ground with the same strength. They clearly didn’t.

”What are we now? We can only leave our home if you let us.” Yan looked up at the sky through the trees. “Can’t even leave unless you help us leave.”

The silver-furred man didn’t have anything to say to that, though he was clearly troubled by the idea. Yan knuckled over to Gee-yo-tun, then stood up to talk eye-to-eye. “Funny thing. Never knew we could or wanted to, before. But now we know we can. Maybe one day, we do it ourselves. For now, though…here we are. Is not about lee-jit-amizing. Is about speaking, seeing, living the truth.”

Daar grumbled deep enough to shake the air, and seemed to come to a decision. “Well…okay. How much can we keep this to a big bout o’ play-fightin’?”

“Most of us will be happy to wrassle. A few, will need more than that. I will teach them again where their place is. Leave that to me.”

“An’ what ‘bout you an’ me?”

Yan grinned fiercely, showing off his great big fangs. “I like to play hard, Daar Great-Father.”

It was another day and a half to the Lodge. They hunted, and feasted, and Gee-yo-tun had managed a good pouncing kill. Very Impressive, that: neyma were so fast, pouncing on even an unwary neyma was something their fastest hunters found hard to do. Usually, they threw spears or more likely now, arrows from above.

Not Gyotin. He’d pounced it from cover of a bush, and picked a healthy young male, too. Tasty! He didn’t seem happy when Yan drank his fill—something about doing that bothered all the sky-people—but didn’t say no when Yan rubbed its liver in some good, peppery herbs.

The Lodge, somehow, went almost exactly like it always did, even with a meeting a bit out of season. Summer had settled over the forest: hot, humid, and oppressive despite the shade. Yan went through at least four waterskins every day. His Gaoian sky-friends had it worse. Gee-yo-tun had shaved his fur short for this visit but he still ended up panting after any exertion. The Gao were made for cold, and the cold was their favorite weather.

None of that seemed to bother Daar. He constantly had to drink and his fur always shone with his lather, but none of that slowed him down, or dampened his energy. He was still huge, still playful and willing to hunt. Yan didn’t have many friends who could play as hard as he liked, and in the end, he didn’t mind how easy it was for Daar to beat him. It was nice to have a challenge!

Gee-yo-tun enjoyed playing too, but…he was much too bendy and breakable, so Yan was careful. Friends shouldn’t break each other, at least not too hard. Vemik had said something like that once, and who was Yan to ignore a good idea? Gee-yo-tun very much liked how Vemik had spoken it, too; word choice was just as important to an idea as the idea itself. It was good to test each other, but there was a limit to what that testing could be. So, gentle play, because Gee-yo-tun was a good sky-thinker.

So, absolutely no breaking his bones.

They were the last to arrive at the Lodge, and Yan had barely made any introductions before the brawl had begun. He didn’t need to say or provoke anything because the Given-Men were all still in their Fire, and there was a new, massive challenger to the Lodge, one who had yet to prove himself, or have his weakness proven to him.

It didn’t go their way.

It didn’t go quickly either, but that was because Daar Great-Father was having much too much fun to make quick work of it. They wrassled until the sun began to dip below the sky, first fiercely, then playfully, and eventually with friendly affection. On it went until everyone was too sore to wrassle anymore, admitted their defeat, and acknowledged Daar Great-Father as the Strongest of the Lodge.

He had nothing but praise for everyone despite his strength, despite tasting like the mightiest Brown One, flush with victory after a kill. He happily acknowledged his victories and enjoyed showing off his godly brawn, teaching them all what true might looked and felt like. There wasn’t a Given-Man among them who doubted his godhood, now.

Most wondered at the friendship their people had stumbled into, and Yan had gained a new kind of respect out of it in turn. His leadership of the Lodge was now stronger than ever.

Once even the most reluctant and stubborn Given-Men had learned their place in the order of things, they all settled in for the evening, while Vemik went to prepare the herbs for the evening’s Smoke. Daar found a comfortable space in front of the fire. He was covered head to toe in a heavy lather of sweat, still panting happily but with some aggressive energy left in him.

“Well…that was fun,” he said lazily, then growled out a dominant challenge. “I bet I could go ‘fer another round o’ fun, if anyone feels they ain’t got their money’s worth outta me…”

Nobody bothered, not even Yan, who was still stinging a little inside over how easily he’d been quashed in front of everyone. He was the last to challenge Daar, and even fresh and ready against a tired, panting Great-Father, it had been like a boy fighting a grown man. Yan was sore, tired, and the very air tasted so much like Daar and his victory, it was hard to taste anyone else’s musk on the air. And besides: wrestling a Gao turned out to be very different to wrestling the People, or even a Human. Gao had sharp bits. Not even little Gee-yo-tun was safe to play with, really.

“I think,” Loor groaned, “none of us are that stupid.”

There were groaning trills of agreement. Nobody much enjoyed confronting their own weakness in the face of something so much stronger, even if it was a god-made-man like Daar. Bitter attitudes might have festered, if not for two things.

First, there was food.

“Shit, I’m hungry…I s’pose I better go get somethin’ ‘fer roastin’, huh?”

Daar somehow found the energy to go hunt a mighty bull werne that evening, one any Given-Man could have been proud to take. This he did by himself and in the growing dark, including dragging it back to the Lodge. Somehow that was even more impressive than the brawl, despite every Given-Man present being able to do the same themselves. But of course, none of them had ever faced down and defeated the entire Lodge beforehand, either.

There was a feast, all wounded pride forgotten as they boasted and bragged about each other’s exploits while gorging on well-seasoned meat. Some playful tussling too, but everyone had proven their points by then; there was no anger or ambition.

The second…was the Magic Smoke.

Nothing but the Smoke could smother a man’s Fire, at least for a while. All ferocity was gone from everyone. They sat, piled atop each other and crowded around a low fire as the evening’s cool air creeped about the edges of the Lodge, threatening to nip at anyone’s exposed flanks.

Daar told them stories about his people, dizzy and panting happily at…nobody in particular.

“Some’a’ya prob’ly heard us Gao talk ‘bout Keeda a couple times, huh?”

“My….Father!” The smoke was having a strong effect on Gee-yo-tun. If Yan were to guess, he’d fall into a vision before long. “Tell’m th’ one ‘bout…uh…th’ one about Keeda and Anttiri!”

Daar grumbled merrily in his chest. “Anttiri, huh? Smells a lil’ like ‘yer teasin’ me over somethin’…”

“I am!” Gee-yo-tun fell into some kind of hiccuping chitters that must have been a giggle.

“Hmmph.” Daar chittered indulgently, then gave the curious Given-Men a sly look. “Keeda. Most bestestest Gao ‘ta ever be! Least, most bestest we tell stories ‘bout!” Everyone caught his meaning, despite the Smoke’s gentle…

…Wonderful grip on their minds.

“Keeda’s a trickster an’ a pranker, an’ not always kind, neither. In some stories, he stole the sun outta the sky, an’ hid all the trees!” He paused at the semi-outraged hoots from the Given-Men, along with plenty of trilling. “In others, he stole everyone’s balls!”

“Sometimes he has a big brother too!” Gee-yo-tun added. “Big an’ strong, earnest, gullible…”

“Careful, my lil’ wrasslin’ toy…”

“Always wins!”

Daar growled smugly. “Damn right. Anyhow. One thing ol’ Keeda was good at stealin’, though, was the affections o’ pretty females. But there was one…just one…called Anttiri who never even flicked an ear at ‘im.”

“Did she sell tacos?”

Daar reached across to grab Gee-yo-tun, pull him across the floor with a yelp, and then sat on him in punishment.

“I dunno, did she?”

”Mmmmpf!” The little silver-fur couldn’t be heard, under Daar’s bulk. The amused trilling around the room got louder.

“S’what I thought. Anyhoo!” Daar did let him poke his head out, but kept a firm grip on his tiny friend. “‘Fer someone like Keeda, that shit weren’t fuckin’ acceptable. He coulda had any other woman any time he wanted—”

Giggles, from under Daar’s chest, which he ignored.

“But this woman was the most bestest of them all! Fur as silky as moonlight, she had!”

There was some friendly jeering from the Given-Men.

“What!? Fur don’t turn y’all on? Don’t know what ‘yer missin…But fine. Antirri had a fuckin’ rump that would enslave any mind. Y’all like butts, yeah?”

Lots of approving hoots, there. Yan might have been the loudest.

“Grace an’ charm, smarts an’ wit, she had it all. An y’know what else she had? Wisdom. Wisdom enough ‘ta see right through ol’ Keeda’s game. Keeda o’ course, he jus’ figgered all the stuff that worked on the other females, it’d work on her too if he jus’ did it hard enough!”

The chittering-from-under-Daar was hard to ignore again, and Yan realized he was telling the exact same story to Gee-yo-tun and the Lodge…but with entirely different intent.

“Firs’, it was the charm. Keeda could charm a stream into flowin’ uphill! He could sweet-talk his dinner right onto a spit! For Anttiri, he turned on all the charm. He tol’ her the funniest jokes he knew, he whispered the sweetest praise, made the most biggest promises ‘bout just what he planned ‘ta do with her…”

“Size isn’t everything!” Gee-yo-tun chittered again, desperately trying to wriggle free of Daar’s grasp. “Maybe Anttiri likes ‘em modest!”

“Oh, I dunno…” Daar’s grip tightened fiercely, while he snuffled in Gee-yo-tun’s headfur affectionately. “Size got me pretty far! Keep needlin’ me an’ I’ll show ‘ya jus’ what us big boys can do…”

That gentled him right up, but only for a moment. “Noooo!” More dizzy chittering, as if he wanted to say something clever…but the Smoke would have its way with everyone.

Not Daar though. Not just yet.

“When charm din’t work, he tried showin’ off! Now, Keeda was an impressive tail. Big an’ sleek, strong an’ athletic, handsome, quick…not as sassy as my cuddle-buddy, here…”

Trills all around, but definitely…sleepier. Everyone was relaxed, comfortable, pulling pelts over and finding warm friends to snuggle up to.

“But no matter how fast he ran, how many bigger, browner boys he wrassled down an’ defeated, no matter what he did…she turned up her nose at her.”

A hoot from the back of the room: Berg Given-Man. “What’s not to want! This Keeda, big handsome man?”

“The mostest!”

“Good, big cock?”

Daar chittered smugly. “The most biggest! But Geeyotun ain’t wrong, y’know. You’d be surprised how much that ain’t always a good thing…”

It took a while for everyone to get the joke. Berg eventually figured it out, sat back down and grumped ruefully, but what could he do? He was one of the youngest and smallest Given-Men at the Lodge.

…Ha! Small!!

“Anyway! Finally, he turned ‘ta the last resort o’ the courtin’ male: gifts. An’ Keeda, he already knew his best so far hadn’t been good enough. He needed ‘ta bring her gifts the like’a which no woman had ever received before or since. Nat’rally, he started with flowers.”

“He brought her the bloom o’ the rare shumyu, which only blooms ‘fer one night every three years. She didn’t like the smell. So he planted a whole row o’ blossomin’ fruit trees overnight for her ‘ta wake up to. It was pretty, she agreed, but not enough ‘ta win her over. Keeda was gettin’ real mad now.”

“Should just give up,” Yan declared. “No woman’s worth that.”

“Ah, but see, Keeda’s pride was on the line, now. It weren’t about wooing her, now. It was about provin’ there weren’t no-one he couldn’t woo. But there, o’ course, was the problem: the more it was about his pride, an’ the less it was about her, the less an’ less she wanted him. An’ there ain’t no playfulness ‘ta Takin’ when she ain’t interested.”

Sober nods around the lodge. They got it: this wasn’t a playful story, no. This was a story about the Fire, and how the Fire could go wrong.

Geeyotun squirmed out from under Daar’s grasp a bit more. “But this bit’s the most important! Tell ‘em about Feeko!”

Daar looked down at his friend and pant-grinned. “Feeko’s ‘yer most favoritest part, huh? Why don’t you tell ‘em then!”

Daar released the little gao, and then immediately snatched up Loor Given-Man to snuggle, who fought to escape with as little apparent success as Geeyotun had managed.

“Nah,” he grumbled. “‘Yer my buddy now.” There was trilling all around as Loor gave up.

Geeyotun was a storyteller in his bones. As soon as he took over the telling, it was like the smoke cleared from his mind. His eyes were bright as they looked out of the world and into the story.

“So there Keeda was, moving on from flowers to gems. He was sounding the rock, delving for the biggest, brightest stone he could bring back, when into our tale waltzes little Feeko. Feeko was not like Keeda. Where Keeda was big, Feeko was little. Keeda was sleek, Feeko was scruffy. Keeda had wealth and a whole harem of females. He had his own Clan! Feeko was nobody at all. But he saw what Keeda didn’t: he saw that Anttiri needed help. All those gifts were just piling up. The shumyu had wilted, the tree blossoms covered the garden, and all the other gifts Keeda had brought her filled Anttiri’s home until she could barely move.

“So, one day, when Keeda wasn’t around to challenge him to a duel and break his back, Feeko just…started cleaning her garden. He swept up the blossoms, he tidied away the dead bloom, he took care of all the stuff she hadn’t been able to ‘cuz she was too busy with Keeda. Keeda didn’t notice any of this, of course: he was too busy trying to bring her a cloud from the sky. But Anttiri noticed.

“Of course…by now, Anttiri was fed up with males. She just wanted to be left alone, and she certainly didn’t want some little scruffy Clanless trying to woo her when she was turning down even the likes of Keeda. But Feeko never actually tried to woo her. He just worked. He never asked for anything, never tried to intrude on her time. He just did what needed doing, humbly.”

“Eventually,’ Daar jumped in, “Anttiri came down to visit Feeko. See ‘ta me, that’s the most bestest part. An’ you stay put, Loor.” He growled low next to Loor’s ear, “I ain’t done wit’ you.”

“That she did,” Geeyotun agreed. “She sat and watched him, waiting for him to pounce at the chance to woo her too, but all he did was show her respect and carry on with his work.”

“‘Why,’ she asked one day. ‘Why have you been so kind to me?’”

“Feeko was genuinely confused by that. ‘Because nobody else was!’”

“‘Don’t you want to court me?’ She asked, confused.”

“‘Of course I do,’ Feeko replied, honestly. ‘Any male would kill for your love. But how could I live with myself to see you suffer? What kind of male hurts a female to get what he wants?’”

That was a good way to phrase it, really. Yan had learned from Jooyun and other humans that there were some big differences in the workings of man and woman between their peoples. The biggest was sex. For a Ten’Gewek, hurting a woman was always bad…but nobody really thought of a good fucking as hurtful. Maybe it could be rude, yes…

With Humans, sex was serious. Fucking a woman without asking—without getting a clear “yes”—was just as bad as murder. After thinking about it, about what Humans were like, how their families worked…Yan could understand, really. But still. It felt strange. Alien.

With the Gao, it was worse. With their people, a man could force a woman to bear him a cub, force her to love him. If he had enough strength and stamina, she could not say no.

That…That was evil. And the Gao knew it, too. It was telling that even though, in this story, Keeda was digging up the heart of the world, and pestering Anttiri with gifts as big as moonlight and all the song in the world, the one thing he didn’t even think of doing was just Taking her.

Among the People, that would be very rude, and the man would need to make it up to her. It might be a whole season before she smiled at him again, if he had been particularly uncaring.

Among the Gao, that would have all but killed her.

It was a Taking much too big to be allowed, even in a god-story. Still: none of the other Given-Man knew about that evil working of the gods, and most of them only barely understood the Human way of things. Daar’s words managed to cover all that.

And their objections to the Keeda were loud and disapproving.

The tale went back and forth between Daar and Geeyotun. It didn’t have a happy ending for anyone involved, really. It had a nice bit in the middle where Feeko won Anttiri’s affections, but then Keeda—jealous and angry—fought the little male and destroyed him. That of course won him a mortal enemy in Anttiri, and in the end she stole his claws so he could never fight another male again, and he had to learn how to be tricky and clever from there on out.

“Now, later on Keeda gets his claws back…” Daar mused, with a dizzy nod of his head. “…Fuck. I think the smoke’s gettin’ ‘ta me! Where’s my little buddy? …Oh. Sarry.”

He finally let go of Loor, who looked halfway crushed to death and happy to escape.

“It’s another story anyway,” Geeyotun said. “Don’t know…wow the fire…I can see red now and…”

The Smoke had him.

Given-Men did not easily fall to the Smoke. It took a good long evening before it eventually won, but when it did, the gods spoke to them all. Strange ideas happened, things were…

Closer, maybe. Yan, the Lodge, Daar and the bird outside watching, and the fire, and the pile of everyone else, the wind, the smoke, the Dance…

Good smoke, that night. The gods whispered to them all, and whispered them all to sleep.

Yan woke needing to piss yet thirsty, his mouth as dry as a mountain stone. He rolled his tongue in his mouth, doing his best to wet it as he clambered over the slumbering Given-Men to go tend to both needs. No Daar, though. The big Gao’s taste on the air led outside and into the brush. He was hunting, probably.

…How had someone that big slunk out of the Lodge so quietly?

A mystery for later. Right now, sweet Ketta sap worked its magic on Yan’s thirst, before the rest of the Lodge woke and went about their day, cleaning up, hunting, gathering, or whatever else needed doing.

Yan decided to track Daar. He had things he wanted to talk about, now that a new day was with them and his head was clear. Besides, he wanted to see how a god hunts, and if he could track a god in the first place.

He could, it turned out. Not easily, and he left so little sign that Yan would have been proud, were he tracking one of his own…

But nothing could disguise his taste on the wind, or on the ground where what sign he’d left reluctantly revealed itself.

As for how Daar hunted…he vanished. Even when Yan knew he’d caught up and found Great-Father, it took him a few seconds of staring at the bush full of his taste before his eyes looked beyond what they are seeing and suddenly he was there, a furred face and burning eyes where before Yan had seen only shadows.

He’d focused on a big and old male neyma, which was a hard beast to hunt. They were skittish and very, very fast, so a man had to get their spear right through their heart, across its blind spot—

Daar…struck.

He didn’t have a spear. He just had claws, paws and teeth. He didn’t need more than that. The neyma coiled, sprung away, then went crunch as Daar hit it like…

…Well, like a Brown One hit anything. Like a bear back on Earth. He’d moved so fast, not even the swiftest neyma could escape, and he’d broken it the moment his chest collided with it.

Yan wasn’t as sneaky as he thought, either. “What’chu think, Yan? Good enough?”

He thumped down out of his tree and ambled over to see. It’s ribs had been flattened by the impact. Not hard to do, admittedly—neyma weren’t very tough—but Yan would never have managed to pounce on such a strong, wise old male, no matter how sneaky he was.

“Quick. Clean. Meat won’t last long though. Should have gone for a werne.”

“Eh, didn’t smell one. Also, kinda glad it lured ‘ya out here too, heh. I wanna talk.”

“So do I.” Yan dropped down next to the neyma, hefted his knife, and offered to break up the meat for him. That way, maybe they could hunt something else too.

“‘Kay. You go first. What’chu need, big guy?”

Some of the stories from last night had stuck with Yan. They weren’t all about Keeda, telling just-so stories about maybe pretend things, maybe real.

Some of them were about the war. The one that had come to Yan’s people without any warning. The one that needed sky-tribes and ships, and guns, and all the rest. The one the tribes were sending more and more young men to fight, in their small but important way.

The one that Yan Given-Man had not lifted a finger to fight himself.

“I…feel like I should take a more…” Yan searched for the word. “Direct. Yes. Direct role in all…that.” He waved a hand toward the sky.

“You do, huh?”

“I send young men, good strong Given-Men off to fight, but what about me? I am strong, smart, Corti think I will live many more years if I keep healthy…”

“I never doubted that,” Daar nodded with his whole head and shoulders. “Man like you’s too good ‘ta just fall over. But what kinda directness are ‘ya lookin’ at?”

Yan considered briefly, and confessed. “I want to be on HEAT.”

Daar gave him a serious look. “Well, that ain’t surprisin’ ‘ta me. Been expectin’ you’d ask ‘fer a long while. I ain’t got no doubts you’d be one o’ our most bestest, too. Physically, yeah you could definitely do it at the highest level. No problems learning everything, I bet. But…”

Yan knew that was coming. “…But.”

“The question ain’t if ‘ya could. Really, the question is if ‘ya should.”

“Why not?”

“How would ‘yer people manage without ‘ya?” Daar shot back.

Yan had an easy reply to that. “How would yours? You go on mission, too.”

“Yeah. Sometimes I do.”

“Then…how can you say I should not?”

“Because I shouldn’t.”

Yan twitched his tail. “Then…if you know you should not, but you do anyway…?”

Daar sighed heavily, and licked some blood off his claws before answering.

“I know you think I’m a kinda god, Yan. I ain’t deaf, I know what y’all say behind my back. But whatever I am—an’ a god ain’t it—I make mistakes like anyone. Keepin’ myself on th’ mission roster is prob’ly an ongoin’ mistake. I say to myself—and I believe it, too—that my people woulda fallen if I hadn’t gone an’ done some o’ the things I’ve done. And why not? I was already eclipsing Warhorse, yijao? But what would have happened if I had died? What would have happened to the Gao? And what, Yan, of your people?”

“Got to hand off our tribe some day,” Yan pointed out.

“That’s true, an’ that’s part o’ why I can justify doin’ what I do. Least, to myself. I can do things ain’t nobody else can do, but the Gao? They don’t need me as much as they think anymore. If I die, they’d be sad, and it’d cause a lotta chaos…but they’ll servive losin’ me, now. Been the work o’ years but it’s true. I don’t know we can say the same ‘bout ‘yer people, yet.”

Yan sighed as he tore one of the Neyma’s legs off. “And even if we can…even if our people survive without us just fine…why hurt them if we don’t need to?” he asked.

“Yeah. Mine is a tribe of billions, Yan. ‘Yers is, what, unner thirty thousand right now?”

“Professor says twenty-eight thousand and a hand of hundreds.”

“An’ that’s after a whole mess o’ babies post-vaccines, too.”

Yan sighed dejectedly. “Yeah.”

“Duty’s a hard fuckin’ thing, ain’t it? Especially when you gotta figure out what your duty even is, and when it ain’t what you think it should be. ‘Fer us, our duty is ‘ta live good an’ long…an’ if anyone’s had ‘ta learn that lesson th’ hard way, it’s been me, Yan Given-Man. Take ‘yer opportunity ‘ta learn from my mistakes.”

“You still consider yourself on the team, yes?”

“I do. I can’t totally write off th’ possibility I might be needed again. Now, is a big part o’ that ‘cuz I am literally the best there is? Yeah. Ain’t gonna lie. But that still don’t make it necessarily wise. I need to pick my battles very carefully.”

Yan nodded solemnly, and went silent to think as he finished dressing the kill.

Daar let him work in silence until he was nearly done before adding another few kind words to pick him up. “…Y’know what? Just ‘cuz we shouldn’t risk ‘ya on a mission, don’t mean we can’t train ‘ya. It’d be good anyway, ‘ta know what ‘yer men are really goin’ through. It’ll help ‘em respect ‘ya, too.”

“Would take me away for just as long, yes?”

Daar was perceptive. “…It would, an’ that’s actually what ‘yer lookin’ for, ain’t it?”

Yan felt there was no point dancing around the truth. “My Fire never stops now, Daar Great-Father. It only gets stronger. I grow stronger, more fierce, more…protective. Need to live away from villages or I would take them over. When Given-Men reach this time, they go into the forest and don’t come back. We protect all the tribes, until the gods call us home.”

“And how long before that?”

Yan shrugged. “Stories say, can be long time. More often, we die by Yshek or Brown One.”

“And why wouldn’t your people still need that?”

“They have arrows and bawistuh and guns now. I think, black-crests like me will happen more. We have never been so fit. Vemik will follow me one day, I think. But, there will be more of us, and less need of us. Fire must go somewhere, Daar Great-Father. Want something…”

Daar gave him a long, hard look. One that Yan knew was of a god looking into his soul. He tried to stand tall next to that, but the truth was…

The truth was that not only was Daar a god, but Yan had witnessed that god being born. He knew the exact day Daar stopped being a normal man. It was the day after their victory against the Abro-gate-ers, the moment Daar had learned what had happened to his people. His face went grim, he took a dangerously big measure of the biggest sky-medicine, ate more than any man Yan had ever seen, went off to sleep…

When Daar woke up, he was a completely different being. Yan could taste it even then. He didn’t look different, but Yan knew. Really, everyone there knew it, even if they didn’t have the words until later. How often do ordinary men watch a god come into being?

And how did a man count someone like that as a friend? Where once there was a rangy Gao that Yan could—with some effort—defeat with his own strength, now…

Daar had always been smart, too. Yan could keep few secrets from him.

“You want to find the new calling for Given-Men,” Daar Great-Father observed.

Yan nodded. “Not want. Need. Our people must change, or we die.”

Daar sighed heavily. “Such is life…” he rumbled. “Okay. We need to think, and talk, and whatever comes of it won’t come quick. The HEAT won’t bend their standards for anyone, and one’a those standards is stickin’ it out over time. If the Fire stops you bein’ patient enough…”

“Good. Humans are wise, there.” Yan nodded, stood, and slung the meat over his shoulders. “You give good advice, Daar Great-Father.”

Daar took the praise with a small duck-nod, and reared up to sniff the air. “…No werne, but there’s some more neyma, yonder. Whaddya say, think we should take more back?”

“Lots of hungry Given-Men at the lodge. One neyma won’t do.”

“Don’t count Gyotin out, neither. Little guy can pack food away, somewhere.”

“Then, we better find werne.”

“You know their ways better’n me. Lead on.”

Yan nodded, and took to the trees, getting up high where he could listen and taste the air. Daar was right, no werne were close, but that probably meant they were getting water. He pointed the way, saw Daar duck-nod and trundled off through the bush, and sprung from one tree to the next.

He felt lighter. A little less Fire, now. Like he was flowing again, not blocking himself. His way forward felt right, whatever happened.

Yan hadn’t said everything, though. Daar may be a god, but not even he could always tell if Yan had said everything. Yan knew he was likely to live for a long time, much longer than the sky-people would believe, because he knew a few stories that only the Chiefs (and probably the Singers) told each other. Soon, a Chief and the Lodge wouldn’t be enough for his people.

He might be the last Chief. Or at least, the last who could wear the word as more than just a word, the last who could wrassle down every Given-Man and prove who was best. Ten’Gewek would grow big, and grow fast, now that vaccines were helping their children live, food was safer, sickness was retreating from soap and good high jeen.

Soon, there would be too many Given-Men for a Lodge in the first place.

But that was okay. If there was one thing his people could offer to the Sky-Tribes for their friendship, it was strength.

And Yan would Give his own.

Date Point:18y8m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ferd Given-Man

The ship on the concrete wasn’t Silent But Deadly, and its pilot wasn’t Tooko. Not only that, but Ferd and the others weren’t going on it either. It was all a sad reminder, and sitting to watch team three load up wasn’t helping Ferd feel any better.

No Given-Man on that team, either. Four humans, two of the People, two Gao.

And to really itch his ass…what kind of a name was ‘Drunker on Turkeyer?’

No, Ferd was not in a good mood. He’d missed the summer Lodge, which meant he’d had to cool his Fire by work and exercise, not with a hunt and magic smoke. It wasn’t the same thing. A mission would have helped more, but…

Well, team three had won the right to do this. And as Rees reminded him while they watched: “Can’t do everything ourselves, mate.”

“I know…” Ferd sighed. “Just feel…caged.”

“Aye. But you’ll be going home now for a long while, yeah? You’ll have a tribe to attend to.”

That thought did lift Ferd’s spirits a bit. Going home, to the trees and to the songs of his people, and to…well, humans weren’t so much fun. Didn’t fuck so much, or at least, not with Ferd. Couldn’t play so rough either…and it’d be nice to father a few more little ones…

Still, though.

“Yeah. Just hate leaving a job half-done.”

“Trick is to think of our job as just being the little bit in front of us, pal,” Rees advised. He took the sharp-tasting gum he’d been chewing out of his mouth, dropped it in the trash next to him, then slipped another one between his teeth. “‘Sides. You’re not leaving it half-done. You’re just letting those lads carry the baton for a bit, yeah?”

Ferd didn’t know what a baton was, but he did understand what Rees meant. “Yeah. Is big tribe we are part of, now. Can’t see every part.”

Rees nodded. “So, go home and have fun. Tooko wouldn’t want you moping about. He’d want you happy.”

“True.”

“And, hey! We’ll be back at it before long. We’ll be doing a lot of training, too. But you’ve got a whole tribe filled with fair young lasses, from what I hear…and just a bunch of grown-up boys to tend them…”

Rees always knew what to say.

Ferd nodded, then stood up. “We should wish them good hunting,” he decided.

“Works for me…”

Ferd knew Morl and Bang from Ormin’s tribe. Good men. The Humans had found Bang’s name funny and trained him in demolitions, a job the young man had taken to like…well, with a Vemik-like manic glee. Like a Yshek took to water.

Who could blame him?

Ormin, unlike Ferd, was an old Given-Man and well-established in the Lodge. Age didn’t weaken Given-Men at all, or slow them down, which would have made him a mighty operator…but it did mean they had more to lose and more family to care for.

He wasn’t on the team, even if two of his best sons were.

The Gao were Teemo and Ankki, both scarred from nose to tail by their time warring against biodrones on Gao-world. They’d won much respect, and earned the call to the JETS by their deeds, not by Clan. Small, but as quiet as fog when they wanted to be, and clever. Nobody ever snuck up on them.

Small-strong. That was the word. He’d first used it to describe Heff, but now he used it to mean anything that was…well, small, and strong somehow.

Yan liked the word too.

Then there were the Humans, Booth, Taylor, Ryan and Santos. And if Teemo and Ankki were clever, and Morl and Bang were strong, these Humans were tough. Tough in that well-smithed, beaten-on-an-anvil way, like men who knew exactly how to make a warrior had done their finest work on them. They weren’t the biggest, or the craftiest, but that was okay. They were unbreakable men, in Ferd’s opinion.

A good team. Not as good as his, but they’d do.

“Enjoyin’ the boring bit, sir?” Rees asked as they approached, then stood to a casual attention; no saluting on the flightline. Humans had all sorts of funny rules, there.

“Oh, it’s been an outstanding day so far,” Lieutenant Booth grumbled. “Let’s just say this has been a day to drive home why we inspect everything before a mission…”

Ferd hooted and nodded—taking inventory of all their stuff while they loaded it on was the worst bit of the mission, but nobody wanted to go hunting with a broken spear. Everything had to be found good before they headed out.

“Know that feeling alright…” Rees agreed. “Be so much bloody simpler if we could just bomb the fuckin’ thing from orbit, aye?”

“Heh, yeah…” Booth stretched until his back popped, shimmied to extract a similarly satisfying noise from his neck, and groaned. “Maybe we can this time, we’ll see.”

Ferd nodded grimly. He’d seen what the Gaoian weapons could do. If all they wanted was to kill relays, that was easy. No need for men to brave the surface and spy on the enemy first. But the weapons that could do that would also kill everyone who lived there.

That they’d done it once already was a big secret. People wouldn’t like knowing they’d killed a whole world once, and meant to do it again. All those trees, all those beasts…All that life.

It was a thought to make a man’s soul hurt, and his sleep restless. But what was the other choice? Leave the Enemy to build and grow strong again? An Enemy who’d already killed many, many, many kinds of people?

For the cost of a few living worlds, all worlds could be rid of their greatest foe. But there had to be a line somewhere, a taboo. People needed to know where they should stop, and so the line had been drawn. The greatest weapons, the world-killers, would never be used on places that were home to people.

But that meant needing to know those worlds first. Go there, stand on them, see for themselves that there was nobody there to call them home. Only then could death come. So, that was what the JETS teams were for: to scout a place, so the chiefs of the sky-peoples could decide if a world lived or died.

A heavy duty, that.

Ferd and Rees wished the team well, and left them to their work. Time for second breakfast anyway.

It dawned on Ferd that Rees had said something.

“Whuh?”

“I said, you’re thinkin’ bloody hard about something.”

“Just…wondering about the balance.”

“The balance?”

“Yes. Killing a whole world…a Taking like that needs a big Giving for the balance. But how? Can’t make a world, can we?”

“Not yet.” Rees shrugged. “Give it a couple hundred years, who knows, right?”

He saw Ferd’s troubled expression, and became more serious. “…That’s the thing about big war, mate. There is no Giving. Or, at least, nothing that looks like it. What your people have been doing forever is…”

“…Smaller.”

“Right. You got dragged into this. We woulda left you alone. The Hierarchy didn’t give anyone a choice, aye?”

“Makes me wonder how many others like my people are out there. Small. Would be left alone by anyone else but the High-rarchy.”

“Like your people? Not many.”

“But some.”

“…Probably, yeah.”

“Hope we don’t miss them and blow them up.” Ferd sighed. “Be too easy. Worlds are big, relays are small.”

Rees stopped. “…Are you okay, mush? Sounds like this is needlin’ you.”

Ferd found himself gripping his tail. “…I think about my children. I have two now that I know about. Maybe more. Would hate to kill little ones.”

“Yeah…”

They found a table and grabbed some food in silence, ate in silence. Only when Rees’ plate was empty and Ferd had gone back for more did either of them share more thoughts.

“I guess…” Rees finished his drink with a long slurp through the straw. “I guess it’s good that this shit bothers us though, aye? Like, the bad guys? Fuckin’ do it all the time ‘cuz they think it’s the right thing to do. Us? We’re puttin’ life and limb on the line to make sure it dun’t happen. So, least we’re tryin’ to do right, yeah?”

“What if we fail?”

“Can’t let that stop us, pal. If we stop, they definitely get to keep doin’ what they do, and then little ones definitely die.”

Ferd mulled that one over, and decided it was enough. He didn’t feel good at the thought of what the other team might be about to do to a living world…but Rees was right. The other choice was not fighting back. Fuck that.

“Alright. We have study session, yes? Take mind off things.”

“Here’s hoping.”

Doing was definitely better than thinking, in Ferd’s view. He had lots of reading to do today, and reading was…not…his strongest skill. But! It was something good to do, no question. He’d take that over worrying, every time.

He nodded, stood up, put his troubles down for now, and went to study.

Date Point: 18y9m AV
Armstrong Station, Cimbrean System, the Far Reaches

Bruuk

Humans were weird.

It wasn’t the notion of a ceremony to rename the ship that Bruuk found strange. It was the content of said ceremony. Apparently they were persuading King Neptune, god of the seas, to forget the name of a ship that would never in fact touch water in all its existence. And they were invoking the four winds, too. In space. And the weirder thing still was that Wilde professed that Poseidon was an ancient god that very few people actually believed in any longer. But, the ship was a ship, and Humans had their ship renaming ceremony, so…

The fact that Moj thought it all made perfect sense definitively proved the lunacy of it all, as far as Bruuk was concerned.

“So…lemme get this straight. We have a ship. In vacuum I might add…”

“Yes.”

“You have a magnum of what smells like perfectly delightful champagne.”

“…How can you smell it? It’s still sealed!”

“Residues around the cork. Anyway. Your plan, after praying to gods nobody believes in, and beseeching winds from a planet we’re nowhere near—”

“In the vacuum of space, yeah.”

“Your plan, then, is to religiously moisten our ship.”

“Technically, I’m supposed to pour half of it into the ocean from east to west, too. I figure blowing the bottle out the airlock’s good enough, right?”

“That’s a debris hazard!”

“It’s okay, there’s a bot out there waiting to catch it.”

Dora ran two hands across her antennae and the third down her nose in a gesture of pure Robalin frustration. “Ian…are you entirely sure this ceremony can’t be adapted?”

“Hey. I’m a former Royal Marine. Part of the Navy, I suppose…and we have our traditions. They’re ancient. Hell, I bet Gaoians have traditions, too!”

“Yeah, big burly boys drumming all night long! Sometimes with fire dancing too! That at least makes sense since it’s a celebration!”

“Wait, you guys do Taiko drums?”

“No, we do shingu da guen drums.”

“Sounds like Taiko drumming to me. Here!” Suddenly, in a blessed distraction from the insanity at hand, Wilde dove for his tablet to search the Human internet for videos. It didn’t take him long. “There! See?”

Bruuk tilted his head, and felt himself pant-grinning. Good drums! And the drummers themselves weren’t all that bad to look at, either…

“Okay, maybe you Humans aren’t completely insane. Still feels a bit weird. They’re basically naked, yijao?”

“So are you, right now.”

“I’ve got fur. It takes a lotta work for me to get naked.”

“Short-shorn fur, yeah…doesn’t exactly leave much to the imagination, mate.”

“Hey! I worked damn hard ‘fer this body, why wouldn’t I show it off?! Besides, I’ve been working nonstop while you were testing! An’ it ain’t short where my bits are concerned!”

“Okay!” Wilde laughed. “You’re still showing off, though…”

“Damn right!” Bruuk flexed his thick arms and even thicker chest for a bit, proud of the years of hard work their size and shape represented. “Lookit!” he preened, flexing it all in and out to really annoy the big human. “Lean an’ vascular too, even through the fur! Makes ‘ya look kinda puny, huh?” He growled teasingly, “Wanna feel? Or ‘ya wanna just skip ahead?”

He figgered out pretty quick that over-the-top teasing did a lot to disarm Wilde’s recent personal discomfort about that kind of thing. Somehow, the more ridiculous Bruuk behaved, the more it was obvious he didn’t mean anything serious. It musta been working because Ian tried very hard not to crack a smile, and failed miserably. That of course provoked Bruuk to show off even more, or he would have if Morwk hadn’t interjected.

“Would you two stop flirting, please?” Morwk requested. “I’m eager to get on with this!”

Durn. Bruuk didn’t even get a chance to show off his back! It was his most bestest part, too!

“I ain’t flirting!” he chittered. “He ain’t man enough ‘fer me! But he can still feel if he wants…”

“You’re flirting,and showboating, and it’s sweet,” Dora asserted, mischievously. “But Morwk’s right, on your own time please.”

Bruuk grumbled good-naturedly. “Fine. We can get back to this insane ‘religious moistening event’ if you insist…”

“Important, this.” Moj was holding the second bottle of champagne with all the dignity and fervor of a priestly sommelier. “Marking a death and rebirth! Good thing to make a moment out of.”

“Can’t we just do what Saltpaws or Longbacks do?” Bruuk questioned. “We have a pretty long tradition in space nowadays.”

“…Are those, uh, sailor clans?” Wilde asked.

“Yeah. An’ they’re almost as weird as you!”

“Well…okay. What do they do?”

“Uh…lemme pull up something quick.”

Urgug made a heaving sound, and settled down on the deck with a thump, a motley collection of impatient hues shimmering all over him. “Now is not the time to decide to change which ceremony we are doing.”

Bruuk ignored him, and pulled up the video. “There. See!? You consecrate some black paint, splash it over the old name, then consecrate some white paint and write the new name. Then, when the name’s all worn down, you just re-paint it ‘cuz that’s the ship’s name now. It’s still all moist and stuff, if you gotta have it—”

“Mate. Gross.”

“But it also don’t involve navigational hazards or maybe-gods back on planets a couple thousand light years away. And the ship’s gaoian registry anyway, so I’d argue that, if anything, it’s gaoian traditions we gotta worry ‘bout. Moist or not.”

“We’re a multi-species crew,” Dora pointed out, hastily, before Ian could object. “How about we try and do something that makes sense and still respects both your cultures?”

“What are you thinking?”

“No spacing the bottle. Instead, why not do something symbolic down on Cimbrean? We’ve got three days left anyway before we’re due to embark.”

“Breaking the bottle on the hull is the most important bit, though…”

“…Does it have to be attached?” Morwk asked. “I have spare hull panels. We could smash the bottle on that and then swap it out…”

Even to Bruuk, that sounded like he was missing the point.

“Okay. Look. I don’t object to the idea of doin’ something, even if it’s weird. But we ain’t in the ocean. ‘Member that video I just showed you? You can’t even do that in space, so they paint over the ship’s registry plate on the bridge, first in black, then in white. Simple. Gets the job done. An’ doesn’t put champagne bottles into dangerous elliptical retrograde orbits.”

“Humans have many gods, too,” Moj pointed out. “Call on Nyx, maybe? Goddess of Night. Seems more suitable.”

The more they tried to talk Wilde out of it, the more and more he seemed to transform from a Marine with a (to Bruuk’s understanding) reluctant relationship with his Navy, into a salty sea-man who would not anger the gods.

“Okay…fine. I get that we’re not going to do a spacewalk. But we are re-christening this ship, goddamnit.

“By calling on a non-Christian god.” Moj buzzed lengthily. He seemed to find that very funny indeed.

“That’s not actually what that word means in this case, but whatever.”

Moj buzzed even louder. “I hear christ, I think christ. English is weird.”

“Not my fault! English isn’t a language, so much as a vocabulary thief that goes around shanking other languages and rifling through their pockets for shiny new words.”

“Keeda’s itchy balls…okay.” Bruuk was growing frustrated. “Look. This is easy. Bash ‘yer champagne against the registration plate. This isn’t a boat, it doesn’t have a keel or a prow, there’s no ocean, we’re not on Earth. Make the symbolic gesture and move on.”

“…Fine.” Wilde seemed unsatisfied, but resigned.

“I’ll talk to my Longback friend, while I’m planetside.”

“You haven’t actually told us what you’re renaming it to,” Morwk pointed out.

Bruuk and Wilde both shook their heads. “It’s bad luck to speak the name before the re-christening,” Ian said. Bruuk nodded along in agreement.

Morwk groaned. “Oh, goody. Turns out human sailors and gaoian sailors are just as fuckin’ weird.”

“Let them have this,” Urgug rumbled. “They put up with many foibles from you.”

“Like what?”

“How long were you complaining about the Matriarchy yesterday?”

“…Fine.”

“So…to the bridge, then?” Dora suggested.

In the end, they cobbled together a ceremony that was mostly satisfying to all involved. Ian even got to ritually dissolve the ship’s old name in a bottle of seawater from Cimbrean, they painted over the old registration plate in black and dismounted it for proper disposal, removed the ship’s physical books and archived the old computer data before removing them from the ship to be transported to Gao…

The new registration plate came aboard wrapped in cloth and was finally unveiled to the sound of shattering glass as Ian wrapped the champagne bottle’s neck in a towel and smashed it against the new plate.

“I name this ship Stray Fortune. May God bless her and all who sail in her.”

As Moj buzzed a quiet amen, Bruuk stepped forward, toweled off the plate, and swiped a broad, rough stroke of white paint over the name. He didn’t say anything, because gaoians didn’t mark things like this with a prayer. Instead…

“Right. I’m hungry!”

“Absolutely,” Urgug agreed. “I like the name.”

“Me too!” Dora chirped.

“To the hungry, or to the liking the name?”

“Both!”

“Whose turn is it to cook?” Morwk asked.

Wilde chuckled. “Hell with it, let’s just get pizza…”

The new shipmaster’s first and second decisions were popular ones, it seemed. Bruuk especially wasn’t gonna complain, since one of the pizzas he ordered was an extra-large Hungry Keeda Meat Lover’s special from the station’s famous Pizza Pirates.

Starting tomorrow, now that everything was ready, would be the job. They had to earn their keep after all. But Bruuk, honestly, was looking forward to it. Not the reaction he’d have expected from himself—up until today, he’d been dreading a sudden meltdown, a head full of flashbacks and trauma, or some lingering House Henen programming—but…no. Nothing. Just gladness that he had a place, friends, and good work to do.

And pizza, of course.

Date Point: 18y9m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

WO2 Robert “Highland” Murray

The light in Murray’s visor turned green. Hand gesture, forward.

Approaching their target was nothing they hadn’t already done a lot. When the light turned green, they let go of their tiny warp-capable launch—little more than a warp drive, capacitor and a rail to hold on to—and pushed toward the target airlock. Brief cold-gas maneuvers, hit the hull gloves first because boots tended to make noise while hands were nice and quiet, and they could sticky-swarm over the hull toward the airlock.

The airlock was an evil-looking fucker, designed for force-docking with whatever the Hunters could catch, and not necessarily worried about leaving the prey’s own airlock in working order afterwards. But, vicious or not, it was their only way in.

Breaching a ship or station wasn’t difficult. The HEAT could do it in seconds via any one of dozens of methods…most of which were loud, violent, depressurizing, and would set off every alarm in the structure. Useful if the goal was to slaughter every living thing on board while capturing the ship, its cargo and its computers intact. Worse than useless for this mission.

There were silent ways to penetrate the hull, by sticking an air-retaining field to the outside hull and cutting through, but that came with downsides. One never knew what kind of vital circuitry or sensors lurked under the hull, the malfunction of which might summon repair teams. And the problem with Hunters was, if any of them flatlined, they all instantly knew about it. And even if not, what happened when some random crew-thing entered the room to grab whatever widget was stored there, or do whatever chore was based there, and promptly found a giant hole in the hull?

No, there was only one way to enter a station covertly: through the airlock. And airlocks were not designed to be opened quietly from the outside by hostile infiltrators.

They approached from the hull horizon, not straight down. Applied sticky sensors around it, watching the interior for signs of traffic…all quiet.

Most of the team deployed an air retention field over the outer door, while Shim used a fusion blade to surgically dissect it at a spot he’d identified. Into that new, tiny keyhole went his “lockpick,” and by some Whitecrest Magic that Murray hadn’t yet learned, the outer door was persuaded to relax.

From there, Tiny and Parata applied good old-fashioned Human brawn to the problem, each grabbing one of the doors and pulling, while Murray and Forrest covered them and the Whitecrests lined up ready to flow in like oversized and heavily armoured ferrets as soon as the gap was wide enough.

Textbook.

From there, cycling the inner airlock was more straightforward. They left it broken and useless—if the atmo field they left outside hadn’t been there, it would have leaked air like a screen door—but that was all fine. If any of the Hunter crew tried to use it, the resulting explosive decompression would appear, at first, to be a catastrophic equipment failure, not sabotage. And by the time they figured out otherwise, the mission would have succeeded or failed anyway.

But now came that precarious balancing act between speed and caution. The slower they moved, the more they could scout out the areas they were about to move into and the more aware they could be of threats. But moving faster would minimize their time spent exposed.

When dealing with humans and most ETs, there was the possibility of quickly and quietly neutralizing an awkwardly placed hostile. No such luxury with Hunters. What one saw, all saw. In this mission, they would either slip through the entire facility entirely unnoticed…or, most likely, die.

The good news: Hunters relied on automation for their industry, and relied on stasis to manage their resource scarcity. This station was purely industrial, no need for the soldier-class Hunters at all. This was a worker’s station, and the workers were mostly dormant while they waited for something to repair or work on. If there was a crew awake at all, they’d be a tiny skeleton force, or a team performing maintenance on a specific system.

That was why breaching the airlock without triggering any alarms had been so important.

Movement up ahead. The team melted into the shadows while Regaari skulked ahead under his suit’s active camo, invisible in the gloom. Long, tense seconds…

Whatever he found, Murray never got to find out. He was still waiting when the entire facility around him slammed heavily and he suddenly found himself in the teeth of a tornado wind. He grabbed a wall support with one hand and shielded his visor with his arm as loose debris punched into his shoulders and helmet.

Fuck. The airlock had decompressed. They must have got sloppy with the air field or something….

The vertical support he was gripping shifted, and he realized too late that what he’d grabbed was a stasis chamber, which was now opening to spill a burly Hunter engineer—more machine limbs and welding tools than actual living organism—out of its waiting dormancy.

Around him, dozens more were doing the same. He snatched his knife from its sheath and slashed, planted his feet back on the deck as the rush of air faded to nothing…

The lights came up, and a tone sounded in his ear. The Hunter he’d just “killed” fizzled out of existence and the drone that had generated its hologram retreated into the stasis booth. There was a sudden feeling of weight and pressure as the gravity was turned back up to 1G, and the hazard course team pumped the air back in.

In his ear, the voice of Sergeant Lloyd. “Scenario failed. You’re done for the day, lads. Come on back and we’ll debrief.”

Well, it was about bloody time. Murray had been wearing his MASS all day, and was reaching the point of needing a shit. Which the suit could accommodate, of course, but that was no fun for anybody.

Debrief was quick, and held when they were out of the armor, through the showers, and still in the “chill-down” mode where the room was air-conditioned down to arctic temperatures to keep them from stinking up the place. The sim techs had been dicks, of course.

What he was really looking forward to was the weekend. This was the last opportunity they’d have before they were back on full intensity training. Adam would be pushing them to and well beyond their breaking points for the next year or so, and any sane man took what he could get before that.

Which was why Adam and Christian were grilling, tonight. It was Friday, and Julian had invited much of the team over to his place, having brought back an entire goddamned werne. And frankly, there was a lot more you could do with werne than just shoving it near a big bloody fire, like the Ten’Gewek did. The things that ordinary salt and pepper did to the meat all by themselves were rifuckingdiculous.

Properly seasoned and smoked, it was a bloody luxury.

So, while the various families’ kids ran around and made noise and turned some of the biggest and scariest bastards in the galaxy into their personal climbing frames and playthings, Murray got to put his feet up and enjoy the full-body warmth that followed a day of gainful exertion, refresh himself with a good beer, and savour the scent and anticipation.

“I’m pretty sure werne is the king of meats,” Adam opined, happily. “It’s…fuckin’ perfect. Ideal fats, high in protein, gamey without being musky, rich without making you feel sick…”

“Nah,” Christian disagreed. “It’s up there, no lie, but really good grass-raised beef, where they’ve been running around and playing all their lives instead of livin’ in barns…”

“Maybe that’s it,” Murray suggested, and aimed his beer bottle at the carcass. “This big bugger was never even on the same planet as a barn.”

“You can tell it was fit as fuck too just by lookin’ at it,” Adam remarked. He was busy carving a huge slab into some genuine caveman steaks. “Maybe we should talk with mister Hernandez and see if he’ll do us a deal for some of his grass-finished.”

“I haven’t talked to him in a while,” Julian mused. “I wonder what he’s up to?”

“He got himself a couple freak bulls, one’s all black, the other’s all white. Don’t you ‘member when he brought them downtown for a publicity stunt?”

“Wait, those were his?”

“Yup! Both well over two thousand kilos, apparently.”

“…Jeez. That’s werne big. Well, not this specific werne, but yeah. They get bigger too! Anyway, this guy was just a yearling bachelor. Aggressive! Had a fight on my hands.”

“How did you get him through customs, anyway?” Murray asked.

Julian grinned, “over my shoulders!”

“No, ‘ya big bawbag, I mean—”

“It cleared Ag pretty easily, seeing as we have those pathology force fields or whatever.”

“Plus, he’s the ambassador,” Firth pointed out. “Right? Got a few little privileges I bet?”

“That doesn’t matter for as much as you might think. I can get booze through a border tax-free, but a whole carcass is a bit much. Also…” Julian smiled, and took a swig of his beer. “Once ‘Horse’s kitchen fellas get through with this, I’m keeping some of the trimmings. For stew, and stuff. And maybe some personal gifts to Ninja Taco…”

“…And if, say, you happen to know the border force gaoians love them some tacos…”

“Oh, they do?” Julian feigned surprise. “Well, how inexplicably convenient!”

“How’s Vemik doing?”

“Not bad! He’s got a bit of an absent-minded genius thing going on at the moment, but that just means he takes a ridiculous amount of notes, now.”

“Could be worse, I guess.”

“Sounds more like a blessing in disguise,” Allison opined, returning with another selection of beers, fresh from the paddling pool full of ice water and therefore colder than a penguin’s knob. Murray gladly accepted the one she handed him.

“We’ll see. If he gets over it I sorta doubt he’ll lose the note-taking habit.”

“I hope he recovers,” Murray opined. “I like the manic lad.”

Adam nodded. “We all do. Anyway, we doing steak al pastor, or just salt, pepper, and butter baste?”

“Keep it simple, big fella. Werne doesn’t need much.”

Dinner was glorious, and gloriously simple. A giant steak, a potato with sour cream, a big heaping pile of roasted vegetables. Even ‘Horse’s cheat meals were healthy.

Healthy but plentiful. Not a single belly was left not creaking at the seams by the end, and there was still plenty left over. In this, Adam’s sneaky side was showing: they’d be going in to heavy training with a load of nutrients on board and ready to work…But was it really subtle if everyone knew what he was doing anyway?

Nah, it just meant they all knew him well. They all knew each other well. They’d all, somehow, found the good life. Murray found room for another beer, and devoted himself to relaxing as hard as he could.

They’d be back to work soon enough.

Date Point: 18y9m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Arés

There was nothing more adorable than a big, gruff dad holding his grandchild for the first time. And while Sam Kovač wasn’t the biggest dad present, he’d not lost any vigor, and could gruff with the galaxy’s best. Not even Adam’s sandpaper-by-noon stubble could look so grizzled.

Probably, it was the salt-and-pepper. More salt than pepper these days, and Marty was finding herself stung a few times by the revelation, which jumped into her awareness every couple of minutes before being forgotten again, that her parents were…old.

Not even Gabe was showing his age much these days, thanks to a few doses of Crue-D to fix his nerve damage, and the increasing availability of therapeutic regeneratives with their concomitant boost to longevity. Nobody wanted to contemplate genuine life extension, but an extra twenty years of prime life for not all that much expense? That was a different story…

Dad hadn’t got on that bandwagon, and probably never would. To be fair, he didn’t really need it; he still had cheese-grater abs, none of the rest of his body had gone the tiniest bit slack, and he still had the severely-healthy look of many a retired military man…but nothing could hide the weathering of his skin, or the creases on his face. No, he had another ten or maybe fifteen years left in his prime, and that’d be it. In that he was like a lot of people back home. Few on Earth were as forward-leaning on this as people on Cimbrean.

In any case, he was still a big vigorous bear of a man, and in his own quiet way just as testosterone poisoned as the other two. It came as little surprise, then, that when Adam looked at the clock, made a face and announced:

“Aww crap, time for my evening lift!”

“What…right now?”

“Yup, right now. Gotta stay consistent!”

Samuel was obviously eager to go play. “I mean…I’m as much a meathead as anyone, but…”

“Trust me,” Gabe added. “You do not want to meet Adam when he’s twenty thousand calories over budget for the day. All that energy’s gotta come out somehow.”

“I’m told I can be a bit intolerable,” Adam dead-panned. “Besides! You’ve never seen what I can really do. High time I showed you!” He grinned his evilest grin, and there was a brief interlude of ominous-hulk and the usual flexing. “C’mon! Leave the girls to the girl talk!”

All of them rolled their eyes at once, Marty included. Caveman. Well-meaning, but caveman. Adam didn’t notice as he was already squeezing himself through the door. Dad gave little Samuel one last rueful bounce before handing him to Mom and, with curiosity, followed.

Adam shot one last look for any other comers, and only Julian volunteered, bouncing heavily up off the floor from his somehow cross-legged spot near the TV. No volunteers from the Lads. They apparently felt they’d be getting enough come Monday, and besides: aside from maybe Firth or ‘Base most days, none of them were meatheads to anywhere near the same degree as Adam or Julian. Those two got along like a house on fire, really. With them gone for the moment, as well as one of their guests of honor, the rest of the Lads migrated outside to go stretch their legs, probably.

Marty had to admit, though: it was nice to have some of the male energy…gone for the moment. Well, yes, there was absolutely no escaping the way Adam ingrained himself on places, especially his own whole-floor apartment in his own apartment building, or even his fellow-caveman’s home…Well, okay, this was definitely Julian’s space on second sniff, but honestly at the level they played their grunty games, it was hard to really tell the difference.

Anyway. It was nice to have a break from it all, no matter how much she’d grown to love it.

“You married a caveman, dear,” Mom observed, with dry fondness. “With cavemen friends.”

“So did you. Why do you think I liked Adam so much?” Marty had long ago given up on being weirded out by the whole ‘women prefer men who resemble their fathers’ thing. Hell, she didn’t just double down on it, she went and picked a grunt who was basically an extreme exaggeration of Dad in almost every detail. Even the DIY bit, apparently; Adam hadn’t grown up a grease monkey or anything, but he was becoming an accomplished handyman maintaining his buildings and working on other projects, here and there.

“There are levels to this. Apparently.” Mom gave her squirming grandson a kiss on the forehead that promptly settled him right down. “Though, I remember him a lot shorter…”

“He was,” Marty sighed. “Not as thick-set, either. One of the consequences of the mission.”

“…Is he…okay?”

“Perfect health, yeah. Probably the healthiest man alive.”

“Not the same thing, darling.”

Marty never had been able to smuggle anything past her Mom. “He’s…lucky enough to get closure for the stuff that hurt him. In his case, being what he is means he’s uniquely useful. I’d say, with that and family, he’s in a pretty good place.”

“Everyone has their limits. You’re…sure he’s okay?”

“Mom,” Marty sighed again. “Whatever his limits, physical or otherwise, he’s not found them yet. Don’t underestimate my beefchunk. He’s got a lot to live for. I take care of my man, and he’s a man worth taking care of. You raised me right. And he takes good care of me, too.”

“…Thank you.” Some tension melted away, and there was a comfortable silence for a bit. “Well, certainly he’s given me healthy grandchildren! Diego is a terror.” She said it with the bottomless fondness only a grandmother could muster.

Marty laughed, and helped herself to another hot dog and some potato salad while she still had empty hands. All the HEAT-adjacent kids were out on the lawn. Most of them were about the same age, and Jess Arés had been overheard to comment gratefully that she was going to be firmly retired by the time they all landed on a classroom.

Where had all the time gone? Titan had found someone, and they had a kid on the way. Sikes had several that, well…he was being a supportive dad, at least. They were there, playing on the lawn, and he clearly loved them…but all four of them had different mothers.

Most of the Lads, though, had taken a good hard look at their jobs and realized that they were in a high-stress, high-involvement, high-risk job that demanded a particularly patient and understanding partner. Combined with their forever-21 bodies (and hormones), and the ample distractions Folctha had on offer for eager young men…

Most of them were holding off on having families until the mission was done with them.

The HEAT techs, though, they had bred a small army between them. Tisdale and Miller were the holdouts, weirdly. Everyone HEAT-adjacent shipped them, they were unquestionably together and madly in love, but for now at least, babies didn’t seem to be on their agenda.

Adam had been a wild child once. Well, still was, really; he wasn’t a man to be tamed, and nobody—Marty included—had ever managed such a thing. What she did instead was to give him her loyalty, and that was what he’d wanted more than anything else. She got it back tenfold, along with two strong boys so far and everything else he could provide. All that wild energy of his was still there, but it was completely focused on her, and on growing their family.

In any case, the Lads loved playing uncle to their personal army of rent-a-nephews. They and all the safely ambulatory kids were far down in the field, playing a ball game with no clear rules beyond that each of the players was riding a HEAT operator like a polo horse.

Even the almost cruel burst of training they were doing now had its cycle of effort and rest. Resting properly was essential to good training, after all. So, even in the midst of their their torture, they got the occasional weekend to let their bodies and spirits breathe before they resumed on Monday.

As always…they were making a frankly worrisome level of progress, especially her “Gordo.” The floors creaked subtly louder every day, his energy was well into the manic and unstoppable place she’d grown fond of and warily used to over the years…

Which was why she savored her free time. Her man took care of her like nobody else, but he was a high-maintenance guy himself. Such was the life of HEAT families.

Their get-together lasted most of the night, well past the time the families with children went home, or the kids who were staying were put to bed. The Lads drifted off toward Rooney’s around sunset—ever a pack of well-meaning hooligans—and the few who remained headed indoors to escape the night-rain.

Still. While Marty enjoyed her girl talk well enough, she wasn’t really…into that whole scene. At best, she could dip her toes in it for a bit, smile and enjoy things, but before long she’d want to be doing something decidedly more tomboyish.

Or at least, something with a bit less feeling. Rescue came in the form of Adam, who eventually returned with a blissed-out looking Julian, a proud-looking Gabe, and a thoroughly haggard and thunderstruck Dad.

“You weren’t too rough on him, I hope?”

“He’s a tough old man! He coulda taken a lot more I bet…”

Dad, himself a former Ranger and a devoted disciple of the iron, let out a plaintive groan. “Oh God please, no. I don’t think I’ve ever been tested that hard…ever.”

Julian chuckled evilly, while happily examining his rather impressively bulging forearms. “Oh, trust me, he was bein’ gentle. It is the weekend, after all. And hey! There aren’t many who could bench four-ninety-five at all, let alone that easily. I’d say you did pretty good!”

“I’m pretty sure Adam has dumbbells even bigger,” Dad said, gruffly. “And that you could probably curl ‘em without really noticing you were doing it, either.”

“Heh.” Julian chuckled. The quietly smug look on his face said Dad wasn’t off the mark at all.

“Anyway,” Adam bounced, “I thought I’d show you a little of what we get up to. Is it true you were thinking of moving out here? It’d be great to have you nearby…”

“It’s been a thought,” Samuel admitted. “We’re not sure we have the means, being honest. And before you say anything, don’t. We’ll do it on our own or not at all.”

“Entiendo,” Adam intoned. “Still, we do have some connections, and maybe you might be surprised how budget friendly things can be here…”

“…We’ll look into it.” That was the best his pride could do for now. Oh well.

“Anyway, I was sorta scheming to lift all night, but these guys persuaded me that was a bad idea—”

“Mostly, it was to escape your dungeon,” Gabe chuckled.

“—so we came by to save you from Xiù’s evil clutches instead,” Adam grinned, as Xiù threw a couch pillow at him.

“You wanna leave the kids here tonight?” Julian offered. “Be a shame to wake ‘em now…Or you two could use our spare room I guess…”

Marty slipped her hand into Adam’s. “A night off…sounds nice,” she admitted. “If you don’t mind?”

There was a brief, microsecond-quick look of knowing that flashed between all the men simultaneously, no doubt calculated to go undetected by the gentle ladyfolk present. Too bad for them, none of them were as subtle as they thought.

There were negotiations, checking that they’d brought everything they needed. One didn’t just drop a four-month-old and a three-year-old on friends and then skedaddle without proper planning, after all. There were logistics to consider. But, well, everything was in place, and they weren’t going to get an opportunity like this very often. The best thing to do was seize it with both hands, bring a thank-you gift along in the morning at pickup time, and reciprocate at some later date.

They walked home in the rain, young and wild for the night.

Date Point: 18y9m1w AV
Starship Drunker on Turkeyer, Relay system HIGHWATER

Lieutenant Jeremy Booth, JETS team 3

“So, no system field?”

“Just as expected.”

Well, good. They hadn’t come all that way for nothing. A system containment field would have ended the mission outright. After all, the one around Sol hadn’t gone away anytime in the last eighteen years, and Booth was prepared to bet a lot of work had gone into figuring out how to put it under human control and turn it off. That would have made some things a lot easier.

But from what little he’d gathered of the science, these Hierarchy relays were basically huge wave-making machines, and they totally swamped smaller and more refined ripples like, say, gigantic system-enclosing forcefield, planetary defence fields, farthrow generators and gravity spikes. That was the theory, anyway.

In practice, there could be other sneaky shit going on. Could be as they flew in-system, a field would come up behind them, they’d all be trapped like a fly in glue, have their brains raped outta their heads and then the Hierarchy would know everything they knew.

But, hey. New worlds and all that other boldly going shit, right? This was what he’d signed up for!

“In we go, then…”

Everyone on board was quiet, and keeping their voices low. They didn’t need to, obviously, but the mood kinda demanded it. They were flying into a hostile alien system, half the ship’s sensors were basically dazzled by the huge energy source on the planet in front of them, and the other half were the EM sensors that had an effective range of way-too-close-for-comfort. Like driving toward the sunrise on a one-track lane after snowfall, with no clue if some idjit was coming the other way.

Booth would have preferred to watch over Ankki’s shoulder, but their pilot tended to get irritable when that happened. And Ankki claimed to have been sired by the Great Father. Booth couldn’t see it in his size—in that regard, he was a perfectly normal if very fit third-degree, trending to an (actually pretty impressive) ottery muscularity rather than huge hulking kodiak bear—but in that ballsy aggressive attitude? Yeah, he could believe it.

So, instead, he sat down at the table and watched Taylor and Ryan go over the long-range optical telescope data. The marbled blue world they were looking at could have been Earth’s stunt double, but apparently they were finding some relevant stuff in some of the info on the side.

“Definitely stormy down there…”

“Right. Big ol’ alien gizmo pumping energy into the atmosphere, I guess…Gonna be a bumpy glide.”

“Yup.”

“Anything Ankki needs to know about?” Booth asked them.

“Nuh. Ship can handle it. Might even work to our advantage, if the atmo’s fucky enough. We’re pretty hard to see at the best of times, in the middle of all that?”

Ryan scowled suddenly, and pointed to a scrolling something-or-other. There was a huge red spike sticking straight up from a wobbly blue line of background noise. “Woah. See that?”

“Yeah…” Taylor was their sensor and drone operator, a veteran of special reconnaissance. Some of the new toys they had were basically wizardry, but Booth had been trained in their basic operation enough to follow him as he honed in on that spike, triangulated it, tracked it.

“…Ship. ‘Bout…fifteen to twenny thousand klicks up.”

“MPO patrol?”

“Prob’ly. We’ll know for sure if he ain’t alone…”

Medium Planetary Orbit patrol struck a balance between having enough altitude to see a big chunk of the sky, and low enough for a spread of ships and satellites to directly support each other.

Sure enough, more spikes yielded more contacts: twenty ships, or thereabouts, spread out in an even, tumbling pattern like a huge twelve-sided dice mid-throw. Santos let out a low whistle as he overheard that number.

“That’s…more ships than they’ve ever had in one place before, ain’t it?”

“Well, if they were ever gonna get serious, now’s the time…” Booth replied, nodding. But Santos was right: up until now, the largest realspace force the Hierarchy had ever been known to deploy had been a couple of ships. Suddenly finding an order of magnitude more waiting for them wasn’t exactly filling him with confidence.

But, Drunker had flown into denser danger before. Yeah, with a different pilot…

But theirs came highly recommended, too.

“There a way down through that lot?” Booth asked Ankki.

“Ain’t no such thing as perfect coverage…reckon they ain’t coverin’ the poles all the time. We’ll watch an’ see.”

“Right.”

Sure enough, Ankki turned out to be right. Booth’s first impression of a d12 being rolled had been wrong: each of the ships was on its own orbit, and each orbit carried it away from some of its fleetmates and closer to others, each one precessed and shift… The actual cage of coverage around the planet swelled and stretched on a steady eight-hour cycle.

Even so, there was never quite a moment when they failed to cover any part of Planet Highwater’s surface. Ankki’s guess was on the money—every few hours, there was a half-hour window where the planet’s polar ice caps were at an extremely oblique angle to the one ship that could see them at all, but that was as good as it got.

Was it good enough, though?

Tough call. The hardest part of a stealthy insertion by far was that a ship entering atmo had to shed energy. That part was non-negotiable, unless they wanted to slap straight into the bedrock at Mach 10. But, shedding energy was how ships got noticed. For two days they orbited at extreme range, unpowered, dark and silent, and watched as their opportunity never quite arrived.

Day three, though, brought something they could use in the form of a solar flare.

It wasn’t a big one. According to Taylor, it was the kind of stellar fart that G-class stars generated a couple of times a day on quiet days. But, it was headed in the right direction. In a few hours’ time, all that plasma would plunge into Highwater’s magnetic field, get drawn to the poles, and form quite a light show. Back on Earth, tourists would fly from far away to see the aurora, but here and now? It was concealment.

Ankki went for it. He slipped into the invisible river of charged particles and rode it down, while the ship politely warned them that its radiation shielding was now active, and Taylor’s sensors went blind.

The only thing to do was wait and pray. If they were unnoticed, great. If not…well, for what little comfort it offered, they wouldn’t know their death was coming, and wouldn’t feel a thing when it arrived.

But, that was a situation faced by many men before. Booth tried not to let the thought bother him and instead rode out the long approach and descent tending to the practical things.

They didn’t die.

The next order of business was waking up the cavemonkeys. They ate just an amazing amount of food, and would spend all day burning those calories away by lifting weights and wrestling if they didn’t have anything more important to do. Admittedly, the whole team was pretty restless like that, especially Ankki—otter-built and otter-strong, with the energy to go with it. But still: nobody else was such a terror they needed magic naptime.

Morl had a particularly smart kind of mischief in his soul, too. He exaggerated a huge yawn and stretch as soon as the stasis field turned off, as though he’d been asleep for a few days rather than skipping all that time in a finger-snap, then grinned at Booth. “We there yet?”

“Yeah, yeah, get outta the tube you big ham.”

Bang hooted as he ducked out of the slightly-too-small stasis cylinder. “Mmm…ham.”

“Might be some for breakfast, if we get through our prep.”

Morl pulled a face at the rush of their plasma halo past the window. “How protected is it?”

“Lots of ships in the sky,” Booth told him. “We’re not dead yet, so I’m guessing we slipped past them, but, no way of knowing what’s still waiting for us.”

“Lots?”

“Twenty, that we saw.”

They brought the monkeybros up to speed over, sure enough, breakfast with ham as Ankki leveled them out into the low altitude powered flight phase of their insertion, where the ship’s forcefields spread out into a huge, low-drag, high-lift pair of virtual wings that demanded almost no thrust at all to stay in flight, and whose wake would be imperceptible against ordinary background turbulence.

The local gravity asserted itself, too. The Ten’Gewek were pleased: Highwater was a good bit more massive than Earth. That seemed to be the trend for relay worlds, and one of their science briefs had said something about “resonant working mass” or something…

From what Booth gathered, the reason relays were built on planets was because they worked best in a gravity well. The deeper and stronger the gravity well, the better. But, obviously, you couldn’t build shit on a gas giant, so it had to be a rocky planet. And dense, high-G rocky planets that were still gentle enough to not pose insurmountable engineering and maintenance problems tended to be Earth-like deathworlds, so…

How much of the Hierarchy’s campaign of galactic genocide was just about protecting the worlds best suited for their needs? Killing off the competition, as it were? Maybe that was what they’d picked Akyawentuo for.

In any case, as Ankki turned of the ship’s gravity and let Highwater take over, the extra weight settled on them like a heavy blanket.

“Feels good, after weak grav tea. Should stretch out and get ready, yes?”

“Yup. Lots to do before we land…”

“Guys?” Ankki’s call didn’t sound troubled in a “we’re-all-going-to-die” way, but it did have a note of “oh-for-fuck-sake” in it. Booth ducked back through to look over his shoulder.

“Yeah? …Oh.”

“Yyyyup.”

They were flying over a highway.

Date Point: 18y9m1w AV
Belize City, Belize, Central America, Earth

Six

It had been a bad day for Doctor Tomasz Flowers. For a start, he’d died.

Really, Six reflected as he reviewed his newest host’s memories, it had been his own stupid fault. Flowers had neglected to check the weather before taking his boat out to do some reef diving, ignored the warning signs until it was too late and, well. The Earth had done what deathworlds did to those who failed to properly respect them.

It had been just the sort of opportunity Six’s ship had been waiting for.

With North America on perpetual alert, even an Injunctor’s excellent stealth systems had been inadequate. It had waited out its timer, searching for the chance to infiltrate that most strategically significant airspace and find a host for its Agent, but failed. And so it had expanded its search, tracked a single-occupant boat, noted the weather, noted the mortal peril of said occupant…

An opportunity. Thus, instead of being lost out at sea with no proper memorial and only the fish to nibble his remains, Doctor Flowers had been plucked from the waves, sedated, and modified to suit the Hierarchy’s purpose. He was a gruff, arrogant, bullying sort of man. Strong-willed and stubborn. Short on empathy, long on self-importance, rich in money, poor in charity.

Damn difficult to suppress, in other words. Humans often were.

Unlike his previous farmer-host, Six didn’t feel any pang of remorse or difficulty with this man. If the former had been a case study in what was worthy and redemptive about Deathworlders, quietly or otherwise… Dr. Flowers was not. The man’s mind was filthy, awash with predatory thoughts toward everything in a skirt. Austin had been powerfully attracted to women of course, but in him it was more…appreciative. Playful. Happy.

Flowers looked at women as prey. Conquests. Property. It was a subtle thing, because there were undercurrents of that in Austin, too…but never were they front and center. With Flowers, it was all…wives, mistresses, secretaries, pretty girls walking down the road who could be any one of the above if he flashed a little money…When he looked at a woman, he didn’t see a person. He saw something he could buy.

No, all things considered, by removing Tomasz Flowers from it, Six seemed to have done the Human race a service. Which he seemed to be in the habit of doing lately, no matter how much he wanted otherwise.

The Injunctor had dutifully recorded everything. Relevant media coverage, trends, opinion poll results, whatever it could glean of military movements and assignments…

Six reviewed them all while sitting in his host’s pleasant office, enjoying the air conditioning. By every metric, he’d failed. Failed, failed, failed. American support for the extrasolar war was up, almost to the levels it had reached at the height of Sartori’s popularity. Public confidence in jump travel was boosted, thanks to the efficacy of the safety measures at Grand Central.

There were some reignited divisions, of course. Mass shootings always polarized, and this time was no exception. But that hadn’t been the goal, and it was nothing the USA hadn’t chewed over a hundred times before.

No, it was clear. However hard Six hit them, humans just hardened up. The more he tried to weaken them, the more he tempered them instead.

Flowers had been saving a particularly expensive bottle of whiskey for a special occasion. Six drank a quarter of it, until the inebriation penetrated the barrier between biology and machine and interfered with his pattern too.

What the fuck was the point anymore?

He’d miscalculated at every step. Set the Humans on the path to finding the relays, only instead of the great reprogramming he’d envisioned that might ensure lasting peace and stability, now the Hegemony was probably being torn down in chunks. For all Six knew, he might be one of the last of his kind.

What could he even try next? Nothing. And even if there was something…Fuck it. Humanity didn’t need more of his help.

Fuck them. Fuck the Hierarchy. Fuck everything. There was no fucking point in any-fucking-thing any longer. The only thing left to him was…what? The body of a middle-aged dentist whose great ambition for this year had been finding a fourth Mrs. Flowers?

Oh, well, wonderful. He, an alien infiltrator and failed saboteur, could make it over the low bar of being a better human being than this serial adulterer. How wonderful. How absolutely fucking magnificent.

For a moment, the temptation pricked him to take the boat out again. How much more thoroughly could he lose? How much more was he willing to keep being a failure?

But…no. He’d have a victory of some kind. Six had existed for hundreds of thousands of years. He wasn’t going to just end now. Especially not now, when for all he knew, Igraen civilization consisted in its entirety of him.

Patience. Fuck it. Patience. He could be patient. He’d existed for millennia, he could endure a few human lifetimes, tucked away in backwaters. He could even be a good man, leave a legacy for each of his hosts. Perhaps he’d even find one he could have a symbiotic relationship with, rather than this.

There was no hope of any victory other than that, now. Humanity had broken free, had won, and had unleashed their fellow deathworlders. The galaxy would never be the same again. The disease was finally pandemic.

But, he could rob them of the vengeance they’d surely want, at least. And he could adapt, he could rebuild, he could be the seed for a new paradigm. There was still a goal to work for even if it was completely different to what he’d wanted.

He sighed, stoppered the bottle, put it away, and set about taking a good, long look at Tomasz Flowers’ life with a view to being a better man. And after that…well, he’d make it up as he went along. He’d be patient. He had all the time in the world.

Might as well learn how to use it properly.

Date Point: 18y9m1w AV
Freighter Stray Fortune, Tradelane near the Ink Spatter Nebula, deep space

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Plastic.

There wasn’t a civilization in the galaxy that didn’t need it. It got everywhere, into everything. Its industrial applications were endless, its uses infinite and often irreplaceable…

And it was fucking difficult to make in space. Not impossible, according to Morwk—all you needed was carbon and hydrogen, really, which were about the most abundant things in all creation. But then you needed to bully them into forming long-chain polymers, and you needed to be able to mix in some oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and chlorine, and ultimately, It was so much easier, and cheaper, if you could just let a few million years of heat and pressure do the work for you deep beneath a temperate planet’s surface. That was why the Dominion existed, fundamentally: to regulate access to temperate planets.

Bloody astounding, really. Here they were in the fucking space-future, Ian was the captain of an interstellar cargo transport with a crew made up entirely of aliens, and it turned out crude bloody oil was still at the core of politics.

Or maybe not, for much longer. If the Entity they were going to meet lived up to its boast, it had invented a means of cheaply synthesizing plastics from the products of asteroid mining. And it wanted to share the technology with the allied species.

In return, it had requested payment in gardening supplies. The Stray Fortune was carrying a healthy supply of every kind of seed going, from corn and cotton, all the way up to maple and oak, and even Meeshi, Ketta, Cimbrean Pinkwood…not to mention compost, potting soil, bacterial and fungal soil cultures, earthworms…In short, everything necessary to kick-start an ecosystem in space.

Ian had no idea why a sentient Von Neumann probe would even want those, but it had been a small request for a potentially incredibly valuable piece of technology, so…here they were.

They were a long way off the beaten track. The area had been a spacelane once, centuries ago: the furthest outpost of the OmoAru empire had been here, near a dark cloud known as the Ink Spatter Nebula. But as the OmoAru declined, their facility had been abandoned, the spacelane clearing fleets had stopped maintaining it, and now…

Well, the interstellar medium was still much less dense along the old route than it was in uncleared volumes. They were making good time, probably wouldn’t need to stop and dump hull charge for another few days.

It was lonely going, though. The last warp contacts they’d seen had been a convoy arriving at Cimbrean. Since then, nothing. Certainly no sign of the friendly they were supposed to be meeting.

Still, the Entity had already achieved the impossible—it had got Morwk and Moj to agree on something.

“Still can’t believe your people unleashed something like that on the galaxy.”

“Evil thing, that. A pretend soul, split across pretend bodies. Shouldn’t be.”

Ian drummed his fingers restlessly on his desk and its relentlessly empty FTL sensor display. “Be fair, Morwk, we didn’t unleash it. It bodged itself together out of Hierarchy dataspace voodoo and Hunter ship parts.”

“Oh, wonderful.” The engineer made a choking, hock-up-a-wad-of-phlegm noise that was the Kwmbwrw version of a derisive snort. “The unnatural union of two galactic terrors, piloted by a mangled Human psyche.”

“Not a thought to buoy the soul, that,” Moj agreed.

Ian shrugged, and took a swig from his water bottle. “So it’s nightmare fuel. So what? There’s enough fuckin’ nightmarish things in the galaxy that want to eat, enslave or body-snatch us, so honestly I’ll take one that’s freaky but friendly.”

Two alien faces gave him their equivalents of a skeptical look, so he sighed and set the water aside. “Look, we haven’t even met it yet. How do you know what it’s like? Could be we’re about to meet the bestest new friends we could ever have.”

“Bruuk’s rubbing off on you,” Moj buzz-chuckled.

“Not if I can help it,” Wilde grumbled sotto voce.

From the front of the bridge, Urgug rumbled and flashed an amused shade of blue too. “No, no. Our dear Bruuk is far too slow to warm up. That was pure Wilde optimism.”

“What about you?” Wilde asked him. “Think we’re on our way to meet a monster?”

A thoughtful ripple of green glowed along Urgug’s face and flanks. “I think we are on our way to meet something…different. Strange. But a monster? A scourge on the galaxy? No less than organic life can be, and much less than some has been. I think it best to face new things without prejudice…though perhaps a little healthy caution.”

Ian shrugged. “Our bosses say it’s a friend. That’s good enough for…me…” his sensor console start pipping at him just as he was finishing the thought. A trio of small, intense warp contacts, coming in fast.

You could tell a lot about ships at FTL from their warp wake. Higher masses made a bigger distortion, slower apparent linear velocities diffused the wave. That was how small ships could sneak around at low warp undetected - below a certain threshold, the fluctuations they caused were almost impossible to pick out from the background ripples caused by planets and stars orbiting each other.

On the other hand, a low-mass object could achieve higher speeds for the same energy expenditure, and the resulting signature was “bright” on the sensors, small and sharp in a way that cut right through everything else, like the high note on a piccolo.

What fell in alongside them was a trio of…probes. Smaller than Ian had expected, each one only a few meters long, and they almost seemed to play alongside the Stray Fortune like dolphins. Up at the front, Urgug’s chromatophores went a confused purple.

“…We are receiving a communication, but I do not understand it.”

“Let me guess: two dots, a line, curved line?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a smile. It’s saying hello.”

“A…smile?”

“Remind me to teach you how to read English one day,” Wilde said distractedly, as he watched the probes spread out into a triangular formation slightly ahead of them. “Okay, so what are you…?

There was a shift, felt through his buttocks and the seat of his chair. Lots of things across the bridge started chirping in confused ways, Morwk among them.

“It just folded a whole new warp field around us. We’re travelling much faster. And…accumulating zero hull charge. What’s it doing?”

Ian grinned and relaxed in his chair. “It’s showing off.”

At their new, greatly accelerated pace, they shot straight into the heart of the Ink Spatter Nebula. From the inside, the gas and dust that had looked so impenetrable turned out to be, well…nebulous. The ambient particle count was surely way, way up on where it had been along the old spacelane, but not a bit of it reached the Fortune’s sensors.

“The briefing did not mention this…” Moj fretted.

“Just relax and enjoy the ride, mate.”

The ride, in fact, did not last long. Just as quickly as their accelerated sleigh ride had begun, the trio of probes in front of their nose slowed them. Urgug blinked at his console, then turned one eye to Wilde.

“It requests that we slow to sub-light, shipmaster.”

“Do it.”

They coasted in, dragged along by the probes, and then…

Mass loomed up at them out of the nebula. A small planet’s worth, in fact. The probes inserted them into orbit, then did a flourishy little twirl around the ship and sped away, leaving them parked.

“Huh.” Morwk sounded genuinely impressed.

“Not a bad ride, was it? Where are we?”

“It looks like our friend found a rogue planetoid in here and is using it as a charge dump. Clever. Nebulae aren’t navigable otherwise. So, it gets somewhere private that nobody will ever stray into, and the gas cloud conceals it.”

“Hmm. Big show of trust, that,” Moj scratched at his newest acid-etch. “Could just as easily set up a meeting far from here.”

“This could be one of many…” Morwk pointed out. “We don’t actually know how big it’s gotten.”

“Still, no need to let us see this. Showing us is a gesture. Trust. Welcome. Friendship.”

“Might be,” Ian said. “If it’s got ten others, this is just psychological operations. Doesn’t matter anyway, let’s make our transfer and get home.”

Urgug rumbled agreement. “There is a space station. Our orbit will intersect its in twenty minutes. I shall set up our approach.”

“Good man. I’ll go wake up Dora and Bruuk,” Ian hopped to his feet. But he spared a look again at the planet outside.

It was dark. So dark. The Ink Spatter Nebula was well-named: it had turned the whole sky almost entirely black, with only the sparsest scattering of stars making it through the dust. They weren’t orbiting a star, either: the planet they were above was completely rogue, wandering its own way through the galaxy on its own timetable. Its surface was as black as the void, invisible in the dark.

Even so, Ian wondered if he could detect light down there.

Questions for later. For now…they had a delivery to make.

Date Point: 18y9m1w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Thurrsto, Champion of Clan Whitecrest

Early autumn on the northern plains meant storms. Nothing dramatic, just the kind of reluctant grumbling that manifested in open terrain when the land had started shedding heat in the long fall toward winter. The sky to the south-west was the hue of blued steel as Thurrsto’s shuttle made its final approach, and he stepped out onto the ancient High Mountain stones to the distant smell of rain and ozone, reinforced by a distant flash and, seconds later, a prolonged crackle. Flash of colors, a hint of vibrant red. Like many, it was his new favorite color.

It was a dramatic sight, and one that Thurrsto would have preferred to pause and appreciate, but the Great Father had barely returned from Akyawentuo before summoning him for a meeting. Thurrsto had been expecting it. He had, in fact, quite a good idea of how the next few minutes were going to unfold.

He wasn’t much looking forward to them.

Daar was on the roof of the gate tower appreciating the coming weather himself, and smelled much like he’d personally conquered an entire herd of angry naxas, having presumably tended to his stock before returning to the fortress. He was affable enough, but plainly knew that there was a solemn and unpleasant duty ahead of him too. They exchanged the usual pleasantries then got right to the point.

“I got a concern, Cousin. I see by the numbers, Whitecrest is reducing its opstempo significantly. I don’t need ‘ta remind ‘ya how now really ain’t the time, so…what’s goin’ on?” he tapped on the parapet next to him, inviting Thurrsto to lean on the stones.

Thurrsto did so. “Asset conservation. The Clan is…not healthy, at the moment.”

“Mhmm,” Daar grumbled. “I know that story.”

“The relentless pace of operations since the war started has taken its toll, and operations on Mordor in particular have been costly.”

“Lotsa that t’go around, Cousin.”

“And we were never a large Clan to begin with.”

“‘Yer talkin’ to the Champion-Emeritus o’ Stoneback, Cousin.” Daar grumbled with some grim amusement. “Lemme tell ‘ya ‘bout too few bodies.”

Thurrsto hesitated, knowing the danger he may be placing himself in. “…My Clan is in jeopardy, My Father.”

“…Ah.” Daar sighed, and thumped down to all fours. “That bad, huh?”

“That bad,” Thurrsto agreed. “With recruiting and opstempo as it is, it’s doubtful we’ll even last the duration of the current crisis. Not as an effective, useful Clan, anyway.”

“Thurrsto…I don’t think I need ‘ta re-iterate jus’ how fuckin’ badly we need that not ‘ta be the case. I can’t back off, not now. Way too fuckin’ much at stake. An’ things are ‘bout to get much more aggressive. Not today, maybe not tomorrow…but soon enough.”

“Which puts us in an awkward position. You need us. The Gao need us. And will always need us.”

“Assumin’ there is, in fact, an always. We’re pickin’ a fight with our gods, Thurrsto. That ain’t a fight you can walk away from.”

“No.” Thurrsto agreed. A wash of warm, fragrant air, laden with energy, plucked at his ears and crest: the storm was definitely getting closer. Apt. “Whatever the Clan can do will be done. I don’t hold out much hope for our long-term prospects.”

“An’ why is that, essactly? I can’t imagine a world where a Whitecrest ain’t drownin’ in Female attention…”

“There aren’t enough, My Father, and priorities change. Nobody wants to mother a cub who is likely to get himself killed in an unknown mission, unremarked and forgotten.”

“No,” Daar agreed, then padded slowly toward the staircase, with his shoulders lightly brushing along both walls simultaneously.

Thurrsto followed behind, and they found themselves in a courtyard, one with a small pond filled with colorful fish. As full-color vision spread among the gao, they’d realized to their astonishment that several native species had brilliantly iridescent scales, and were rapidly becoming a favorite for ponds and aquaria alike.

Daar contemplated his fish for a moment, before he looked back at Thurrsto and sighed. “Nevertheless, Champion, I need people to light that darkness.”

“And very soon, if things do not improve I may have none left to give you.”

“You are to ensure that does not happen, Champion.” That was the second time he’d been addressed by rank and title, instead of name. Thurrsto wasn’t dealing with his goofy friend Daar.

He was facing down the Great Father.

“I will, of course, do all that I can, My Father.”

“I know. Never once doubted it.”

Thurrsto was quite sure that he didn’t need to say more. He just needed to wait, and let Daar’s mind work. He was always quite deliberate when contemplating a distasteful situation.

“…I will keep this in mind, of course,” he offered, after some thought. “Mebbe we lean on the Grand Army more. Get some more use outta JETS, too. I ain’t keen on eatin’ my seedcorn.”

“Of course not, My Father.”

“But sometimes that’s what’s gotta happen, Champion.”

Well. He was expecting that. The Great Father would have what he needed, no matter what. So long as he understood the cost, that was all there was to it. Still, that left only one thing, and Thurrsto knew the answer before he even asked.

“My Father…my Clan is dying. We are not merely in jeopardy. We are in danger of outright collapse. We’ve been operating on negative attrition for several years now. Soon, I will start sacrificing my training cadre on missions, if this does not let up. Are we not worth preserving, or at least using more conservatively?”

“You ain’t alone in that, Champion. You’re tellin’ the story of all the Clans. Some worse’n others. Some more important’n others, too. ‘Yers is one I’d hoped weren’t in that list.”

“Hope is not a tactic,” Thurrsto retorted. “Right now, I face a simple numbers problem. Less recruits are coming in than we’re currently losing to retirement, attrition, or otherwise. I can’t solve that without something breaking.”

“Then go break something, Champion.”

Thurrsto was about to reply, when the idea suddenly struck him speechless. Of course.

Daar pant-grinned and idly batted at a fish in the pond. It escaped, probably because he wasn’t really trying.

“Well, way I see it? ‘Yer Clan put you in charge ‘cuz ‘yer well-equipped ‘ta break shit when needed, yijao? Ain’t many gonna stand up ‘ta you and say otherwise. So: I need ‘yer operators. I need more of ‘em than ‘ya can get right now. So, go break your problems. And be ruthless, Champion. It’s far better ‘fer a Clan to break from within.”

Daar was kind enough not to spell out the alternative. Friends or not…

Duty was a terrible thing, sometimes. But, Thurrsto had a direction now. He sniffed the wind a little longer, then stepped away from the parapet.

“I should get to my shuttle before that storm arrives.” It wouldn’t be unsafe, but it would be a bumpy and miserable ride.

Daar duck-nodded. “Prob’ly, yeah. G’on.” He turned away to pad to his next encounter. Before he left, he looked back and noted, “Try not ‘ta make the same mistakes I did, yijao?”

Thurrsto inclined his head gratefully, and headed down the other stairs, his mind already a-spin with thoughts, planning what he needed, putting the pieces in place. By the second flight down, his mind was properly organized. By the third flight down, he had his communicator in his ear. By ground level, he was giving orders.

He was going to owe Regaari a boon for requesting his presence at such a difficult and intense time. But he needed all the allies he could muster.

After all, they only had one shot at this. He wasn’t about to waste it.

Date Point: 18y9m1w AV
Council starship Rich Plains, Orbiting planet Perfection

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

Sir Patrick couldn’t have asked for a better backdrop to today’s deliberations than Perfection. Really, the world below them was a monument to the Interspecies Dominion’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses, all at once.

One of the most hospitable low-class planets in the galaxy had become an oligarch’s paradise, practically overnight. In principle, the planet belonged to the Vzk’tk Domain; in practice it belonged to corporations, who’d negotiated aggressively, bribed, wheedled, and even outright bullied the Domain until their rule was absolute, their territory sovereign and their legal restrictions flimsy at best.

The result was a world of curious extremes. The middle class, frankly, had it better than anywhere else in the galaxy. Perfection’s cities were beautiful, their towers gleaming and clean, their parks sculpted and perfect, their lights bright and vibrant. Perfection was an engine of technological and cultural wonders: its corporate research labs rivalled the Corti Directorate’s most esteemed colleges for groundbreaking output, and its media industry had their assorted misshapen fingers in studios even on Earth. Their combined output of games, music, literature, movies and other more esoteric media contained much that was garbage, much more that was merely industrial and soulless, and the occasional sparkling genius jewel.

Worker’s rights, though? Unions? Nonexistent. Biodiversity had crashed, and most of the surviving native species of fauna were now classified as vermin. The standard medical plan for much of the working class was to take out a pay-day loan and spend it on an interstellar ticket to some other planet. Home ownership wasn’t a thing at all.

One major thing had changed, after the Hunters raided. They’d dropped a few RFGs, flattened some city sections, then vanished while the Dominion military lumbered to catch up. They’d left behind a lot of reconstruction work, a lot of bodies, and a lot of angry shareholders demanding more effective protection for their investments.

Into the gap had stepped a human firm, Thermopylae Security Solutions. In Sir Patrick’s book they were mercenaries, but it didn’t really make a difference: they were veterans from Earth’s various militaries and security agencies who’d quickly figured out that their skills could translate to a fat paycheck in the interstellar private sector. And their presence meant that Perfection now actually had the fourth largest human population after Earth, Cimbrean and Lucent.

As to their quality…well. The Gao and the Allies had been choosy. TSS wasn’t so particular, but they at least did require physical fitness of their recruits, and a certain sort of commanding presence. But not much else. Basically they were big scary mall-cops, and some of them had once been in the presence of infantry. Maybe that wasn’t an entirely fair assessment, since surely there were standouts among them…

Nonetheless, it was difficult to give them much credit, when Sir Patrick had Righteous standing at his side.

“You aren’t your normal chipper self today,” Knight commented slyly. He already knew why.

“Sore as fuck, sir. I’ll be a’right. Anything we gotta be wary of today?”

“Probably not, but the beings we’re meeting today think they know what having a scary human around to protect them looks like. Considering what we need to persuade them of, I felt a little one-upmanship was in order.”

“That’s half o’ what a military’s always been about,” Righteous intoned sagely. “The big pretty bit’s not just ‘fer show.” He grinned and bounced slightly in place, wincing slightly and causing the deck to shudder more than usual. “…Takes a bit o’ work, though. An’ a sadist coach.”

Knight favored him with a friendly smile. “Well, I am glad for your services, then.”

He watched out the window as a series of shuttles slid past the observation lounge and toward the Rich Plains’ cavernous landing bays. Those would be the delegates from below, CEOs and corporate presidents and whatever other alien ranks and titles they claimed. One didn’t wage war without getting the captains of industry on board, after all.

Previously, the Great Houses had been the stickier obstacle. Now that they were part of the solution, the Security Council’s next concern was refitting, expanding and transforming the Dominion’s patchwork fleets into a modern fighting force that could go toe-to-claw with the Hunters and hold the line. Do that, and the Gao could focus their efforts more selectively, stop throwing their young males into the grinder.

But of course, changing the contracts wasn’t going to come cheap. If House Henen had been stubborn and thorny, Sir Patrick was quite certain the capitalists now joining them would be more pliable…but also sharper.

None of the shuttles, he noted, were standard mass-produced designs. Each was a statement. Yachts, as it were. Which was hopefully, for the good: a sufficiently large ego was useful, in the ring of diplomatic jiu-jitsu.

On the subject of making statements, all the council were getting in on the act too, including Kenshi. The ambassador was dripping with Gaoian finery: polished wooden rings on his clever paws, precious metals pierced into his ears and even beads and wire woven into the longer sections of his sleek, glossy black-and-tan fur.

Righteous saw right through it, and was taking full advantage of the less formal relationship they had, now that Knight was no longer an admiral.

“My, Kenshi. You got all dolled up for us an’ everythang!”

“I took some advice from Champion Sheeyo on how to make an impression with these people. And that’s rich coming from you,” Kenshi chittered. “We were lifting not an hour ago!”

“Won’t deny it,” Firth chortled. “Ambassador Knight wants me to look big an’ scary, so I look big an’ scary. Mostly though it’s ‘ta help with the soreness. ‘Horse decided I’mma beat his face in this year, an’ nothin’ piddling like my body’s limits are gonna git in the way, I guess…”

He seemed stoically resolved to his fate.

Knight had to admit, he’d done himself up too. He had a fresh, sharp haircut, his suits were newly tailored. He’d been keeping trim too, because…well, he was a Deathworlder, after all.

“Sad to say, fellows, but impressions do matter. Now let’s go make one, shall we?”

Sure enough, everyone on the ship seemed to have had much the same idea. Normally the council was a businesslike, working affair, the posturing done through rhetoric rather than costume. Today, though, each culture’s definition of finery was on display, and Sir Patrick was definitely the least ostentatious figure present. At least, at a glance. His display of wealth was in the quality of fabric and manufacture.

Others had a more flamboyant approach. The Rrrrtk ambassador, for instance, was wearing a formal hood of some kind, strung with lace and moonstone. Grandmatriarch Gewastwythmenw had a broad bottle-green collar draped around her shoulders and neck, intricately embroidered with the symbols of her Great House in gold thread. Third Director Tran was physically unadorned, but flanked by a pair of drones to hold up his long, wide and densely-packed personal banner like a portable backdrop.

Sir Patrick privately thought they all, with the possible exception of Tran, looked ridiculous and in need of a lesson in class. But he wasn’t about to let that sentiment escape the confines of his own skull.

He re-evaluated his opinion when the yachts offloaded their occupants, though. Next to the perfumed pomp parading in front of him, even the moonstone lace hat was practically puritanical. One of the shuttles even unleashed a cloying, overpowering wave of scented mist as it opened, and Knight heard Kenshi desperately fight down a retch.

The Qinis who owned that shuttle alighted with an epicene grace, surrounded by billowing fabrics so cunningly suspended by inlaid circuitry that she looked like she was floating underwater. She was shadowed by a small constellation of drones, most of them with no discernible function.

Righteous was an iron mountain of stoicism, with disgust coiling off him. Not even his most aggressively ugly shirts were a match. Those at least were humorous, and self-aware.

Frankly, the president of TSS, Steve Warren, won several points just by wearing a well-tailored suit with no unnecessary frills and classic black Oxfords. His shuttle was sleek and understated, the interior nicely upholstered…all in all, he clearly had some of the same thoughts about alien displays of wealth as Knight did. Promising.

By a long-standing bit of interspecies etiquette, each of the visiting businessbeings was entertained by their own species, once the mercifully brief welcoming ceremony was behind them. Given that there were no Gaoians among the visitors, Kenshi joined them too for a tour of the observation deck and the collection of Earthling plants and cultural artefacts—and what a nightmare figuring out whose cultures should fill those spaces had been—in the high-gravity zone toward the stern, portside.

Warren paused and made an appreciative noise as they stepped over the warning line on the ground and the familiar weight of 1G settled on them. “…Oohh. Damn. That feels good.” He shimmied his shoulders a little and basked in it for a moment. “I’ve been telling myself for a while I need to get G-plates for my apartment, this settles it.”

“It must be an effort keeping your staff up to fitness standards in lower gravity…” Knight ventured.

Warren glanced up at Firth warily. “Well, we’re not raising HEAT operators…but we do have facilities.”

“Do they include gravity plating?”

“Not yet. Think I might look at bringing it forward…” Warren bounced a little bit, then accepted Knight’s invitation to sit with a grateful smile. “After all, we want our guys fit. ‘Specially if our clients are gonna be scaling up and turning their own facilities into big juicy strategic targets.”

That just-noticed-the-world sense of novelty didn’t sound like what Knight wanted to hear, frankly. He’d need to discuss it later. In any case, they made small talk, established some working rapport with Knight’s insistence that Warren come visit later that night.

He was left with a mixed impression. Warren wasn’t unlikable, and in fact he had many of the qualities Knight would have looked for in a good officer. But at the same time, he gave the impression of not really running his operation to the gold standard. It wasn’t the lack of G-plating in their facilities and training specifically, it was just clear that Warren, while ambitious and competent, had never encountered real excellence.

Rough clay, but of a quality they could work with, therefore. Not as well-formed as Knight would have liked, but there was potential there even if they had further to go to fully realize that potential than was ideal.

Firth, of course, had a less charitable take once they’d said their farewells and left to prepare for the afternoon’s opening negotiations. The privacy screens around Knight’s office suite were barely active before the big man let loose.

“…Thermopylae? They named themselves that?!”

“It is a bit tryhard,” Kenshi agreed. “Even I know that Keeda tale.”

“Jesus Christ. Like…in the human race, I’m apex badass number two, right? An’ there ain’t many else who can whup me. Basically a couple’a o’ Gao an’ some Given-Men, mebbe. So how do they get off claimin’ the Spartans as their fuckin’ namesakes? Fuck that’s cringe.”

“They’re selling a product,” Knight pointed out. “Presumably they went looking for something that’s such a byword for competence that even an alien would know it.”

“Yeah, well, what they achieved is the biggest mess o’ phone-it-in I’ve seen in a while.”

“Do keep in mind, you represent an elite that a rare few can achieve.”

“Sure,” Firth maintained, “but I run a dojo, too. I know twelve-year-old boys and girls more committed to excellence than this. No grav-plating! In the modern world that’s step one!”

“Mm.” Knight decided a cup of something hot was in order. “Tea?”

“Only kinda tea I drink is harbor tea, sir.” Firth’s hyper-aggressive grin was there, of course.

“America’s greatest act of self-sabotage. Oh well, it’s a good thing we never sent you the good stuff,” Sir Patrick replied, and made three cups on principle.

“This must be some cultural joke I lack context for,” Kenshi prompted.

“Knight’s from a country that used ‘ta be our colonial oppressors. Then bald eagles happened and we made a bunch of harbor tea, and the best country ever came to be. No biggie.”

Kenshi’s ear flicked. “…My confusion is undiminished.”

“An entirely appropriate reaction to American silliness, I fear.” Knight chuckled. “Drink. I happen to know for a fact that Warhorse approves of the stuff.”

The fact was, his meeting with Warren had him feeling optimistic. The Dominion was getting serious about the war now, everyone could feel it. All the peacocking down on the landing bay had been one thing, but the fact was that the people who’d come up to negotiate with the council today were incredibly wealthy and powerful in their own right, and yet here they were. No silly games beyond the showing off, no senseless power plays…they were here for business.

Perfection was a once-damaged, now-mended jewel in the Dominion’s crown, and certainly one of its economic hearts. Today might be the moment that heart started beating faster. Businesses would never pump for anything but their own profit and greed, but they clearly saw an opportunity in the war. For the first time, a concerted effort to destroy the Hunters wasn’t a guaranteed loss-maker to them.

A future without Hunters was a future where ships and cargos weren’t under the constant low-grade risk of being snatched up and devoured. That was good for the bottom line. They could make a deal, of that much he was certain.

All that remained now, was making it a good deal.

Date Point: 18y9m1w AV
Hidden facility, the Ink Spatter Nebula

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Gaoians couldn’t whistle. Their mouths were the wrong shape. So, their equivalent to a low, impressed whistle was a kind of deeper, more musical version of keening. Dora, surprisingly, could whistle, albeit at the back of her mouthparts rather than the front, so it sounded strange. It wasn’t a native Robalin vocalization at all, but the intent was clear.

Ian couldn’t blame either of them.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, exactly. Something purely functional, for sure. The Entity wasn’t a creature of matterspace, it wasn’t even technically a creature at all. What need did it have for pressurized, habitable spaces? What need did it have to make those spaces look nice? If its plan had been to make them feel welcome, then a lot less than…this…would have sufficed.

But…no. What the three of them had just stepped into looked very permanent, like it was the whole reason for the station’s existence.

They had found, for lack of a better term, a garden. Obviously there were no plants, not even any soil. All of that stuff was back on the ship, being offloaded by Dora’s drones. But they’d found the space where a garden would soon be, a well-lit oval void with many layers and terraces in sculpted, polished white concrete. There was a waterfall, which became a series of trickling brooks feeding a series of pools. All by itself, without any living things, it looked like an abstract artwork….but it was clearly intended to be a green and growing place.

“This is…I mean, if I was setting out to grow plants in space, this isn’t how I’d do it,” Dora noted, looking around them. “It’s the pretty way to do it, for sure, but it’s not exactly efficient…”

“Maybe that’s the point.” Ian replied.

“I thought we were dealing with an AI here? It’s a machine, right? Wouldn’t it be all about the efficiency?”

“Whatever did this has a soul,” Bruuk duck-nodded.

There was an amused, and very human laugh from behind them. “I certainly hope we do.”

They turned, and Ian came within a whisker of gawking. He’d seen the woman standing by the nearest pool many times. Seen her face, anyway: one of ESNN’s regular reporters, one of Folctha’s more acclaimed artists, a galactically famous photojournalist who convinced the Great Father of the Gao to do a nude shoot…

Just, somehow, not.

For starters, the real Ava Ríos wasn’t a transparent hologram. Nor, somehow, could he picture her wearing the flowing, diaphanous gown this version seemed to have chosen, redolent of the elves from Lord of the Rings.

The attitude was different, too. The one on TV was professional and serious, with slightly haunted eyes. This one looked serene, and playful.

It was all in the briefing, of course. How the Entity first came to be, how it was fundamentally a self-assembling dataspace being formed from the disjointed scraps of her archived mind-state. How it sometimes used her appearance, memories and imprint to facilitate communication with matterspace life. But that all sounded cold, like he’d be talking to an animated face with a flatly uninflected voice.

Nothing in the document prepared him for a drop-dead-gorgeous latina who looked him up and down and smiled approvingly.

Naturally, the next words out of his mouth were the pinnacle of wit and suavity.

“Uh…hi.”

“Hi.” She beamed at him. “Welcome aboard.” Her voice didn’t come exactly from the hologram, but instead from a perfectly cube-shaped drone about a foot above it, made a little tinny by its speaker.

Bruuk’s nose twitched, and he chittered deep in his chest. “Well, if that was the effect you were goin’ for, I’d say It worked.”

Ian felt a bit nonplussed. “What effect–?”

Holo-Ava, though, pulled a fist-pump and grinned. “Yes! Still got it!” She fought the grin down a notch or two when she saw his expression. “Well, for certain definitions of ‘still’ I guess.”

“…This isn’t goin’ how I thought it would.”

“No! This is more fun though, don’t you think? I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything to eat, but…well, you brought all our food with you.”

“Our?” Dora asked.

“Me and it. The Entity. It never did figure out that whole communication thing, so…you get me, instead. Well, I speak like we’re separate beings. We’re really not. Maybe the best way to describe it at this point is as two personalities inhabiting the same intelligence.”

“That’s new,” Bruuk grumbled. “How’s it goin ‘fer ‘ya?”

“Well…” She paused. “Pretty good, I think? I mean, if I was actually human I think I’d probably be screaming insane with existential horror? But why bother? I am what I am. I have human memories, like the feel of water, my first love, the taste of an apple…But I’ve also felt the sting of static discharge off my hull, listened to the music of stars and tasted a nebula. It seems like a fair trade to me.”

She gestured, and Ian realized a trio of chairs had swooped up behind them, including one appropriate for a Robalin. He glanced at Bruuk and Dora, shrugged, and sat. “I’m…glad you feel that way,” he said. “Uh…I mean, we just came here to drop off some things and retrieve that gizmo you talked about.”

“Sure. We’re printing some right now. They’ll be ready in a few minutes.” Holo-Ava took a few steps to her left and sat on the pool’s retaining wall. “But really, we wanted to explain why we asked for all the plant stuff and explain…well, we have some ideas for the future. It’s a long future, for the Entity and me, and, well, we don’t really want to stay hidden in the shadows forever.”

“Dunno if we’re the people to talk to about that, love,” Ian pointed out.

“Well, no, you’re not. But you’re here, and your job is delivering stuff, so…deliver a message for us, please?” She shrugged slightly.

Bruuk tilted his head curiously. “You sent a message ‘bout the trade you wanted to do…”

“Sure, but that was just, like, ordering some stuff. This is about…” Holo-Ava waved her hand around at the proto-garden around them. “Hospitality, I guess? And making an impression. And showing that we’re not just a crazy swarm of AI probes that nobody understands.”

“Doubt that impression’s gonna go away quickly.”

“Probably not,” she agreed with an affable shrug. “All the more reason to start working on it, right?”

“I guess…”

The Ava-avatar smiled, and indicated an approaching drone with a nod of her head. It was carrying glassware. “I can’t offer you juice, coffee, tea or whatever, but we do have water. Fresh from a comet.”

“Ooh!” Dora giggled appreciatively and poured herself a glass. “Fancy shit!”

“It is?”

“Oh yeah. Supremacy bigwigs always make a big deal about serving comet water at state banquets and stuff. Dunno why.”

“Napoleon used to serve his most important guests on polished aluminium plates,” Wilde observed, “back when it was worth more than platinum. Probably it’s a prestige thing.”

Ava shrugged. “Here, it’s the most convenient source of water we have.” She watched them drink with a definite air of trepidation. No need, there, the water was cold and sweet and refreshing. It was good water!

Ah. But she wasn’t worried about the quality of the drinks, was she? No, here they had a being who’d spent years lurking out in the dark doing nothing more than occasionally prodding humanity to say hi but mostly doing its thing in secret and then suddenly…this. An embassy in matterspace, cold water, a fountain and eventual garden, a carefully sculpted hologram in elegant clothes being the very model of a hospitable host…

The Entity wanted to come in from the dark and the cold. This was just…testing its footing. That was going to be a hell of a story to tell Daar and his people when they got back.

…Which was probably the real point of why they were here. Hmm.

They enjoyed some brief schmoozing. There wasn’t a lot of the station to tour—most of it, apparently, wasn’t ready for organic guests—but the Ava-Entity-Hologram had some pretty incredible renders of what the garden space would look like when it was all planted up and finished.

They won an instant friend in Dora by gifting her one of the gardening drones. It’d be useless outside of the Entity’s control sphere, but the tiny, skittering robot was weirdly charming. Kinda like a little steampunk crab.

The actual transaction of leaving the gardening supplies and taking on the synthesis equipment passed quickly, and from there it was back out into the black. They were guided out of the nebula’s smothering embrace under the escort of three more of those little warp-drones that Ian now privately thought of as ‘dolphins.’

All in all, it left his brain working overtime.

The journey back was…anti-climatic. The crew had went off to their individual distractions after dinner, which left Wilde and Bruuk alone to do Deathworlder things. Here, that meant some exercise (which today was high-intensity intervals, where Bruuk was absolutely kicking his arse), and later, an evening of videogames where Ian could turn the tables a bit.

It had been exactly the right kind of grueling, really. The weight wasn’t too heavy—well, Bruuk used at least four times more for his work, which was saying something since Ian was linebacker-big, in considerably better conditioning, and damn good at the iron game these days. Not that it mattered, since the intensity and the volume and the pace of it had Wilde reduced to something akin to pudding before they were even a half-hour into their workout.

Two hours later, they’d gone straight into some cardio for cool-down, where he’d managed to recover some of his dignity. Just a little, though: Bruuk really was a ridiculously good athlete.

“Just wanna check somethin’ with ya,” Bruuk rumbled, round about the third lap around the ship.

“What?”

“Y’know she’s a hologram and you can’t fuck’er, right?”

Ian snorted, and swatted Bruuk on his legitimately knuckle-brusingly hard shoulder; the big guy was loping along on all fours, of course.

“Mate, I may be dense ‘bout this sorta thing, but even I’m not that dense.”

“Jus’ checkin’.”

“You’ve got a one-track mind, pal.”

Bruuk’s reply was to chitter and sprint down the hall like a cheetah after an antelope. Being a hefty Gao, his movement was definitely more bear-like than feline…but he could move blindingly fast and, as Ian learned to his cost, do intervals all goddamned day long. Having blinked to the far end of the corridor, he slammed into the wall, turned around like a pouncy cat, then galumphed his way back to Ian’s side, panting crazily.

Ian was happy to let him have his fun. Bruuk had some pretty impressive endurance, but Ian could force-march for days if he had to. He doubted the big bear could match that.

…Probably.

“Mostly I’m just thinking about how I’m going to report this…” he said, taking a moment to pause and catch his breath at the far wall. “What’s it going to mean when that thing is in our fleets? Is it gonna give us robot ground troops? Or is it just gonna be a whole series of sapient factories?”

“Bit above our pay grade, ain’t it?” Bruuk panted.

“Still makes me think. And wonder, too. I mean, she seemed happy enough being what she is. I wonder if anyone would ever want to join her?”

“What, voluntarily?” Bruuk’s ears plastered themselves to his skull. “Fuckin’ insane.”

“You heard what she said. They’ve got a long future ahead. Could be there’s people out there who’d view a fate like that as better than dying.”

“Crazy fuckin’ idiots, maybe.” Bruuk shook himself slightly. “She ain’t alive. She ain’t even real. She’s a copy of a livin’ person bein’ used as a translation app, nothin’ more.”

“Guess I know where you stand on it, then.”

“Well, whaddya want from me?! I’m a simple kind o’ ‘Back, yijao? I lift things, I cook things, I fuck pretty people…”

“…You put your pants on one leg at a time…”

“Naw. I don’t wear pants! Maybe shorts. Ooh! I can wear a good work-kilt now! We’re allowed once we complete the First Ring.”

Ian gave him a patiently impatient look. “I think you’re missing the point of the idiom.”

“Deliberately! ‘Cuz you think too much, an’ we’ve got six laps left to go!”

“Don’t get jealous just because you can’t think and run at the same time.” Ian grinned at him, pushed off from the wall, and resumed his jog.

Maybe Bruuk was right, maybe he was thinking too much, but…well, why not? He had that luxury, now. His job hadn’t exactly been brainless before, but it had been focused. Now, he had time to actually spread his wings and let his brain work on more than the task in front of him. And he was learning that he liked it. He enjoyed trying to fit things into a bigger picture and make sense of them.

Mudfoots gettin’ aspirations. Frightening.

He chuckled to himself, and followed Bruuk’s advice for now. Just jog, and be. He could grapple with the universe some other time. Now was for honing his body and emptying his head so he could refill it later.

But he did know one thing: he wanted to go back and see that garden, when it was finished.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too long.

Date Point: 18y9m1w1d AV
Unexplored planet, relay system HIGHWATER

Lieutenant Jeremy Booth, JETS team 3

If Booth had ever needed to look the enemy in the face and see their works, well…here it was.

The natives of this planet had been somewhere in the middle of the nuclear age. mid 1960s, or thereabouts. The aesthetic was different, but the tech? A dead ringer. The highway they’d found had been choked with vehicles, most of them quite rusted, but intact enough to check under the hood. They’d had a thing for mounting the engine at the back, apparently, but fundamentally, what Booth found when he inspected one would have been an open book to any mid-century classic car enthusiast.

Poor fuckers had built to last, clearly. Though, the arid climate had probably helped preserve things. They were out in scrubby desert, kinda like Arizona. Enough water around to irrigate and raise livestock, but it all flowed in from somewhere else. Booth doubted if the place saw rain more than a handful of times a year.

The air was still, too. The rolling terrain and valleys were good for Drunker on Turkeyer to navigate low and slow and stay beneath notice, but they also baffled the wind and kept it down to a slight, hot, static-charged breeze at most. The alien highway’s surface was buried under a half-inch of fine dusty sand, but the railings, concrete dividers, the vehicles and signage all still stood, worn and neglected, but proud.

The vehicles were totally log jammed, packed bumper-to-bumper on the arterial roads out of the cities. Or, out of the nuclear craters where the cities had been, anyway. The cars, road signs, text and numbering might all be alien, but the sense of panic reached across time and species. These people had survived something terrible, and got themselves trapped as they all tried to take their families and get someplace, anyplace, safe.

Instead, something had strafed the roads, eating up the fleeing civilians like a vacuum cleaner running over spilled cereal. A good half the rusting alien cars had clearly been smashed from above with plasma weaponry. Greenish blooms of condensed copper salts were embedded in the shattered wrecks.

The natives had fought back, valiantly. There were tanks along the roadside, blasted open like someone had taken a fifty cal to a soup can. Sad piles of bones lay in the dirt nearby, alongside a collection of rusted scrap that could only be helmets and rifles, buckles, magazines, and all the tools of the poor bloody infantry. Not perfectly humanoid, but that didn’t matter to Booth. He’d have felt just as sober, and just as cold, if they were National Guard.

Morl’s tongue lashed the air. “This was not long ago. Still taste bones on the air.”

“It’s been long enough,” Booth knelt to inspect a skull. Two eye sockets, nasal cavity. Sharp serrated teeth and a protruding jaw. Bit of a sagittal crest, which suggested they had a pretty impressive bite force. No big monkey tail on the nearby skeleton, and what looked like cloven feet, maybe? “We’ll know for sure how long in a few minutes…”

They’d flown over the city ruins and scanned them for the elemental byproducts of radioactive decay. While Drunker chewed over the results, they’d come out here to check for any signs of living scavengers picking over the wrecks…without success. The only sign of life was a herd of some vaguely goat-ish critters, grazing on the sparse shrub at the road-side and keeping a wary eye on the strange visitors. The bones had been scattered by scavengers, chewed open in several cases, but the vehicles and their contents were untouched. Blankets, tools, spare parts, gas cans and water carriers…even rations. All the things that desperate survivors would have clawed for with both hands after the apocalypse were here, untouched and decaying.

Nothing sapient had come this way since the slaughter.

Time to move on. The ship was at its safest and most silent while airborne, and they’d lingered long enough. They bundled back up the ramp, spared a last glance to the fallen warriors by their ruined tanks, and dusted off.

“Still nothing,” Taylor reported, as they parted ways with the ground. He’d been listening for radio signals, not that any of them expected to hear any. The Hierarchy would presumably have ruthlessly tracked down and expunged every such beacon long ago. “Just Big Hotel signals.”

“We got a timeline for when this happened?” Booth asked, sitting opposite him.

“Drunker reckons two to three hundred years since the bombs.”

Booth nodded. And somehow, he just couldn’t picture the tanks he’d seen outside taking down even a single Abrogator. The extermination campaign had probably been quick. “Morl said he could taste bone on the air.”

“There’s a couple million dead people out there, sir. Place is gonna taste of bone for a long time.”

“Gonna be hard to say for certain that there’s nobody out there, though. There could be small groups, hiding in caves or whatnot.”

Teemo tilted his head. “For hundreds of years? The Hierarchy are patient and thorough enough that I doubt it…”

“I doubt it too. But do we doubt it enough to drop the bomb and risk finishing the job Big Hotel started? Nah. This one has to go higher.”

That settled it, really. The question was too big to answer with a cursory glance. They’d need to get a surveillance constellation into orbit and spend time really looking over things.

“How’s our egress lookin’, ‘Badge?”

Ankki really hated that nickname, and growled threateningly about it; no doubt there would be retribution later. For now, though, he remained professional. “Still no farthrow field an’ never will be unless they shut down the relay, which they ain’t gonna. We can jump out any time we like. You wanna leave all quiet-like, though, that’s extra.”

“Well, let’s consider our orders. We can’t just drop the bomb unless we’re certain there’s no sapient life on planet. We can’t know that until we do a survey, which requires satellites, which requires time. How long, considerin’ how careful we gotta be?”

Ankki scratched his muzzle thoughtfully as he ran an eye over the orbiting Hierarchy ships. “…If we wanna safely launch the sats, we gotta do it when those ships are low on the horizon. Pref’rably below it. Only place I’ve seen that happens is the poles, maybe once a day. Better break out the cold weather gear, I guess.”

Booth looked back at the rest of the team. None of them were much looking forward to Hoth-type fun, especially the monkeymuscle. Still…

None of them were gonna go back to Costello (and by extension, his bosses) without being absolutely sure. The monkeys especially would be adamant on that point.

After all, this hit very close to home for them.

“…Right. Well, let’s get on with it, then.”

“Rog.”

Booth nodded, and headed back to the cargo area to unpack the arctic warfare stuff, the ground-to-orbit mortar, and the sats. He spared a last thought for the scene they were leaving behind, though. Up until now, the enemy’s global extinction campaigns had been kind of abstract for him, the devastation they’d caused in San Diego, Chicago and Franklin galling and infuriating rather than crippling. They’d stung humanity, stung the Gao worse, and nearly killed off the Ten’Gewek, but…

But seeing a squad of mechanized infantry left unburied where they fell, their bones bleaching in the sun hundreds of years after the last of their race probably went extinct? That firmly drove home the point that Humans, Gao and Ten’Gewek were exceptionally fortunate. Thousands of other species, trillions of souls, had not. The abstract was now very real.

And he honestly didn’t know which he hoped for more: that by some miracle the natives of this place were still hanging on somewhere, or that they weren’t and so Big H could receive the kick in the dick they so richly deserved.

Either way: mind on the job.

He pulled the crate out of the rack, and started unpacking.

Date point: 18y9m1w2d AV
Whitecrest Clan Headquarters, Gao

Thurrsto, Champion of Clan Whitecrest

Whitecrest was…struggling. That was about as strong a word as Thurrsto would be willing to commit to out loud. In the privacy of his own mind, however, the more realistic assessment was that his Clan was in serious danger of collapse, and he didn’t know if he could “break” it into something better, as the Great Father required.

They were over-extended, overworked, understaffed and fatally short on recruits. Standards couldn’t be lowered, and they were facing extreme competition with the likes of One-Fang, Firefang, Silverpaw and Straightshield, to name a few, not to mention the Grand Army itself and the endless opportunity workhouses presented. Joining a Clan was…intimidating, and lots of young, upcoming Gao were aware of the dangers being in a security-focused Clan could mean.

Their air of intrigue, mystery and suavity had been a boon, before. It meant that those approaching the Clan wanted to be what Whitecrest was, and the Clan could focus its efforts on educating them rather than motivating them. But now?

Now, there just weren’t enough Gao. Especially not young males looking for a way to stand out from the crowd.

That meant only one thing could be done: reconsider what it meant to be Whitecrest.

Whitecrest’s senior Fathers—those who’d survived the purge, at the outset of the War—had been in denial about it from the word go, since before Thurrsto had broken Genshi and ascended to the Championship. It had been an arduous task of gentle persuasion over many years. First he had to convince them to broaden the breed standard. He himself was an atypical example of a traditional Whitecrest after all, and so had been Genshi before him. He was naturally broad-shouldered and stocky, even with a silky pelt. High-degree, too. Once he had even been considered an “ugly” Whitecrest but times had changed, and now…well, he was blessed with a busy social calendar. Proof that such things weren’t set in stone, to say the least.

From there, it was a fight every step of the way. Getting them off the breed standard was just the start. They had to expand their definition to include a wider range of personality types, for the wider range of work they found themselves doing now. Whitecrest had too many missions it had to perform, too many environments to infiltrate across the galaxy. Young, capable brownfurs needed more than token associate status to attract them nowadays. Acute shortfalls in all the traditional Clans and workhouses meant a young male had his pick of destinies.

Already, he’d survived three challenges to his authority because of his relentless drive. He wanted to re-define Whitecrest as a state of mind more than anything else, and the most senior Fathers were having none of it.

He’d broken the last Father to challenge him, and done it in council. The previous two, he spared their lives. This time…he ensured the message was understood. Even his most senior Fathers needed reminding of the stakes. Hopefully, one demonstration would be enough.

Damn it, they couldn’t afford the brain drain of losing senior Fathers, but they could afford idiocy even less. Either way, it was more weight on the wrong side of the equation, dragging the Clan down.

And, of course, now he had made enemies in his own council. Having proven the direct path was of no use, now Thurrsto had to be wary of subtler dangers to his person. They were, after all, a Clan of assassins and spies. In more secure times, such games would even be good for the Clan’s long-term health. But now? In the face of everything else?

Time to level-set. He called a Congress of Fathers, the first full such congress in the Clan since the War.

They all attended, as was required. Even so…it was dismaying how few were gathered. Between war losses, infiltrations gone wrong, and the sheer demands of their role, Clan Whitecrest was running badly short on Fathers. And the number that Thurrsto could trust without question was down to…a pawful. Regaari and Garaaf as his closest agents. A few more who had proven themselves loyal.

Against him was a larger retinue of the carefully neutral, and a plurality of the openly hostile.

Not a single hostile muzzle without a little grey on it, though. Perhaps that was good, a clear indicator that his opponents were aging and out of touch. On the other hand…old Whitecrests were an especially rare and well-honed breed.

“I won’t waste your time,” he said, striding into the chamber once everyone had arrived. “You are here because Whitecrest is facing a crisis. Father Tarrek, what are our recruiting numbers for this quarter?”

He was one of the very few old guard that was firmly on Thurrsto’s side. Tarrek was an absolutely impeccable example of the old breed standard, too. Lithe, agile, strong and hardy in a discreet way. Every move of his was supple and ready, a predator born without necessarily showing it to the unwary. The crest between his ears was as white as fresh snow, and groomed to a razor-sharp peak. “My Champion. Last quarter, five hundred and seventy-seven hopefuls met the First Rite. Of those, five hundred and forty-eight survived, and are progressing through their training. We expect up to twenty percent of those to fail in the next year. Now to be fair to the young ones, they are all high quality recruits, so we may see more success than average…”

“Before the War, what was our intake?”

“…If it were merely triple, My Champion, we would consider it a crisis.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded solemnly. “Father Garaaf. Among our qualified Brothers of the Rites, what is the current rate of attrition?”

Garaaf had that information memorized. His coarse voice recited the list to the silent room. “Last quarter: Retired due to old age—two hundred and eleven. Retired on medical grounds—one hundred and sixty-eight. Fell in the line of duty—thirty-eight. Accepted the Cut of Shame due to improprieties—three. Met the Great Father’s justice…one. Total count, four hundred and twenty-one.”

“Father Regaari. You have prepared some projections for us?”

Regaari in particular looked haggard and exhausted, though he was doing more than most Gao alive could manage to not show it. It was genuinely astonishing he’d found time to attend amidst his HEAT duties and their ongoing training campaign. Thurrsto of course kept up on his team training, so he too was suffering under Warhorse’s scrutiny…but he didn’t have a major mission ahead of him on top of everything else.

Just the weight of a collapsing Clan.

“Yes, My Champion. Even with the expanded recruitment drive and qualifications you’ve mandated, we are currently at rough breakeven for personnel. The long-term trend is slow attrition, with an expected acute shortfall of experienced Fathers…in less than ten years, notwithstanding longevity treatments.”

He had graphs and charts. A necessary evil. The Humans called it “Death by PowerPoint.”

It was a grim graph. Behind them in time, the cliff that marked the opening days of the homeworld war, when so much of the Clan had been torn apart by biodrones, or had been biodrones themselves. Ahead of them, a long slow dwindling, with the yellow that represented their most experienced and senior members vanishing first, followed some years later by the blue that represented everyone else.

In other words, at the current rate of replenishment versus attrition, Clan Whitecrest had one generation left to live.

Thurrsto let the numbers sink in for a moment. Nobody said anything, though there were some grim, unhappy ears among the older fathers.

“I will not insult anyone’s intelligence,” he announced. “You can all read our fate as well as I. Our mission is only going to grow more demanding over time, too. Father Garaaf’s new assault teams require significant investment in young new ‘Crests, and already we’re struggling with brain-drain among our other departments. You know this. You all know this. So why, then, do I encounter such fierce resistance to the basic, obvious changes we must make?”

He swept the room, sniffed. Singled out one of the more tenacious burrs in his fur, and spoke to him directly. “Father Tenfu? I know you must have some opinion. I want to hear it.”

Tenfu tilted his head at Thurrsto curiously for a second, then glowered at the charts still on the wall screen.

“A Clan is more than just numbers,” he said. “It is traditions, a breed standard, a convention and an identity. Lose those, and you lose the Clan just the same as if you lose all members. All I see here is that our Clan is doomed no matter what we do.”

“Yes,” Thurrsto agreed affably. “And by that breed standard, I shouldn’t be a Whitecrest at all. Save for my fur, in what way does my body conform? Does my temperament match that received wisdom? And yet, here I am, elevated by my own merit and by the Clan’s nomination directly. What say you when the Clan’s paragon defies tradition so thoroughly?”

Tenfu visibly worked up his courage, and then stood. “I would say, respectfully, that you are far too eager to embrace your own deviancy. We have a breed standard for a reason. We bred ourselves away from Highmountain and Stoneback for a reason. You, for all your good qualities, represent a significant retrograde to a more brutal time, and a more direct mission. Of course you won the Championship, and of course Genshi before you did; the duel is an ancient custom that favors those such as you. For generations we have strove to shape ourselves to a purpose, one where subtlety and discretion was our hallmark. But now? We are almost back where we started. We are becoming brutes, just as the Hierarchy wanted.”

No agreement was voiced, no nodding or wagging tails, but nor were there any growls, flicked ears or calls of dissent. These were Whitecrests, after all, and despite Tenfu’s accusation, restraint and calm were still hallmarks of the Clan. The silent signals of approval or disapproval were much subtler among them.

To Thurrsto’s mild surprise, though, there was little rancor here. A difference of opinion, certainly, but Tenfu was not being hateful. He was simply advising his Champion.

“We live in brutal times, Tenfu. Did you forget to whom I exposed my throat?” Thurrsto held Tenfu’s gaze for a second, then flicked his ear and indicated Regaari’s chart. “No identity is static and unchanging. Remember: on our creation we were brownfurs. Our Clan has evolved much since the days of Fyu and the onset of our industrial age. And now, with this population crisis, the recruiting pressures, the dire need for mission success…we only have the traditions we can afford, Brothers, and our bank accounts on that score are empty. Literally, too. We are running out of time and resources. Better to change than die, yijao?“

“Everything dies, My Champion. The choice is whether to die true to ourselves.”

“If you speak for yourself, that is fine. I do not. I speak for the Clan, and I—we—owe allegiance to a far greater power, one who owes no idealistic fealty to any such notion. The Gao will survive and Whitecrest, as we have done many times over the centuries, will adapt. Our Father has need of what our Clan can do. We have a duty to the future of our species to meet that obligation. And what, I ask you, is more central to Whitecrest than our duty? We light the darkness, that others may never fear it. We keep secrets, because they are a burden. What does my bench press have to do with either of those? Or a young recruit’s coloration? How much have we lost the plot when I, Champion of Whitecrest, am a non-conformant exception because my crest is too tall? When did we forget the breed standard was about ability in body, mind and soul? Since when are we like Straightshield, breeding for indistinguishable Judge-Fathers?”

He shook his head solemnly. “The mission comes first. Our duty comes first. Perhaps in due time we will afford to uphold the same standards as before. Here and now, we have a war to win and a foe to destroy, or else all the Gao may die. If that changes us, then so be it. History is written by the survivors and the victors.”

Silent, thoughtful heads all around the room. Satisfied, Thurrsto picked up the printed copy of their breeding and induction standards that he’d brought with him as a useful prop. It wasn’t a slim document, either. Every last detail was specified and uncompromising, from form, posture, gait, temperament, measurements of aptitude and arm length, of genes and personalities…The same elite standards that had made Whitecrest so fearsome. The book was at least as thick as his own considerable forearm.

He tore it in half with a snarl.

“The only way we survive to do our duty in any capacity is to break, and change,” he said, dropping the scraps theatrically back onto the table. “I’m not unsympathetic to the objections of our Brothers and Fathers. There is much here that is valuable. But…it presumes resources the Gao no longer have. The Gao are changing, the available males are of a much different character. Many are combat experienced, yet more jaded. Mass warfare has rendered our old strategies moot. Therefore, we will change, and that starts with replacing this tome.”

“I intend,” he added, “to do so with your input, and with a mind to preserving as much as we can of our traditions without compromising our fitness to survive and contribute to this war. If that is unacceptable to anyone here, if you prefer to retire rather than assist in this reinvention, I will accept your resignation…on the condition that you deliver it to the Great Father. Personally.”

Daar, of course, would accept it. And do so graciously, with fond well-wishes.

Nobody in their right mind was brave or shameless enough to do such a thing. Across the table, Tenfu stared sadly at the broken documents, sighed, and stiffened his back. Inwardly, Thurrsto let out a sigh of relief that he didn’t allow to reach the surface. Of all the people in the room, Tenfu was the barometer. The fact that he now looked and smelled resolved, rather than crushed, lit a new spark of optimism in Thurrsto’s chest.

Garaaf stepped forward and dropped a new, blank document on the table, took up a pen, and set nib to paper. A well-judged nod to the old-fashioned approach.

“We should begin, I think, with our baseline,” he rasped. “What is our new minimum standard?”

“More to the point,” Thurrsto suggested…

“…What is a Whitecrest?”

Date Point: 18y9m1w2d AV
North pole, Unexplored planet, relay system HIGHWATER

Lieutenant Jeremy Booth

Arctic winter. Abstract words, until a man experienced what they meant in person. In this case, they meant a combination of permanent dusk and wind-whipped razor-sharp snow that made it hard to even tell up from down. There was no horizon, there was only the snow. There was no frame of reference, except for the ship and its dazzling lights.

There was only the cold, which would have sliced across Booth’s skin like a potato peeler if he’d been stupid enough to leave any exposed. The underlayer he was wearing had pockets for chemical hand warmers and he still felt chilly, especially in his fingers and boots.

“We’re—nff—a long fuckin’ way from Kansas,” Taylor commented. They were struggling with the ground-to-orbit mortar, which needed to be well clear of the ship and properly secured on level ground. The packed snow all around them was fairly well perfect, but between the howling wind, the sandpaper ice it carried, and recent hip-deep snowfall, the simple job was not so simple. They were having to dig out a clear patch, which the wind kept trying to refill.

Morl and Bang were definitely suffering. “Just…shut up…’n dig…” Bang growled. Ten’Gewek did not react well to cold weather.

It didn’t take long. The monkeybros blurred up to the ship to get the mortar plate from storage, ran back out, and emplaced it faster than Booth had ever seen done by anyone, ever.

…Dang.

“Alright, go warm up,” he told them. “You too, Santos, check ‘em over.” The last thing they needed now would be frostbite.

Gaoians handled the cold better, though Teemo’s muzzle was still wrapped up to protect his sensitive wet nose from the ridiculous chill. He had the satellite rounds on a makeshift sled, and was hauling it from the ship by his harness.

Really, the humans could have done this by themselves. Nobody on any JETS team was little. They were all big damn dudes and could athletically humble operators the world over. But still, even with that, it was better to get the job done as quickly as possible.

Time saved in setting up the mortar meant more time to program and fire it before their window of stealth closed, which meant more satellites. Each one was going into a polar orbit, precessing slowly around the world. Even if they only launched one, it’d eventually map the whole thing…but ‘eventually’ wasn’t the goal. They wanted a good look, and quickly.

In the end, the mortar sent twelve of them streaking upwards in flashes of blue light that lit the blizzard like lightning strikes. Not the ideal number, but acceptable, and all in the deepest, most secure moment when all the enemy’s ships were at the wrong angle.

Even so, they disassembled the mortar and heaved it back onto the ship as quickly as they could. The ramp closed, sealing out the frigid climate, and they lay on the nice, warm deck to gather their breath as Ankki got them the hell out of there.

“…That…really fucking sucked…” Bang opined, after a few seconds.

“It was bracing!” Teemo retorted. “Really let you feel the air!”

“Oh shut up you talking husky…” Ryan groaned.

Teemo’s answer was a good-natured growl and a chitter. He rolled to his feet, shook some snow out of his fur, then stood. “How are we doing, Ankki?”

“Telemetry looks good!” Ankki called back. “We should have a full global survey by this time tomorrow.”

“Good,” Booth said. “Let’s get into our hidey hole for tonight, then. You said there was a cave about ten klicks away?”

“Yup. We’ll be there in two minutes. You all ready to disguise the entrance?”

Morn uttered a heartfelt groan, but rolled up and used his tail to push himself to his feet. “…Ready.”

Booth chuckled, and rubbed his gloves together a little. Truth was, his gear was keeping the cold out just fine, but the weather had an almost psychic quality to it that sunk right past mere clothing and chilled the soul. He’d be glad once they were properly covered up and able to relax for a while in their nice, warm spaceship.

The “cave” was more a wide, deep overhang scooped out by the remorseless wind from a set of black rocks that jut up through the ice sheet like broken teeth. But, it was overhead concealment, a healthy chunk of solid stuff between them and the open sky. Once they got the camo netting out and covered the ship, there was nothing to see. Not even the Hierarchy had tech that could have spotted something amiss. Probably.

Mercifully, the cold seemed to have exhausted the cavemonkeys, who were content to curl up and watch a movie under several blankets. He loved them to death really, especially when it came to storytime, but there was only so much crushed-by-silverback-gorilla fun a guy could take before it started to drive him mad.

They watched “Dunk,” a heist flick with a human scriptwriter and a Gaoian director that went totally over Morl and Bang’s heads, but that just inspired them to fall asleep. Not a bad choice, in the end.

After that, an “inspired by true events” story of an abductee surviving on an alien world, but Booth had zoned out by then. Really, they were just marking time and waiting, now. The satellites would do their job, they’d jump home, analysts would analyze, the brass would make a decision…His job, hopefully, was over for now.

He fell asleep to the sounds of TV, and the howling blizzard beyond the hull.

Date Point: 18y9m1w3d AV
Clan Stoneback training range, planet Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

This wasn’t a typical Couch Night. For one, it was on Gao. There were too many people to fit in the day room around the legendary Couch, so instead First Fang had bashed together something more biggerer and more able to accommodate everyone, out in the countryside inside a cozy lil’ glade. It was nice and well-shaded, private while still being close to a nearby little village, and it was one of the few still open to the public, which meant they could visit any time they wanted.

It had seen some damage in the War of course, but the trees were growing and recovering, just like everyone and everything else these days. Forestnettle had really worked some magic on it! Still, it was on Stoneback property, and this last lil’ get-together…

Well, it was important, so Daar had his aide pick a weekend where nobody else had any big plans or reservations or whatever, then snatch it up and make any apologies that needed making. They’d lucked out and there were plenty of free weekends, which was a small blessing: he hadta find room ‘fer six dozen o’ the most elite military operators ever assembled in the galaxy, since they deserved a break an’ soon enough he’d be sending them off to do a terrible thing.

Quite likely, quite a few of ‘em wouldn’t come back. Sobering thought, as always.

An’ the fuckin’ worstest part is, the more he looked into the situation, well…more and more, it looked like he might be one of them. Despite all he’d said to Yan not so long ago, sometimes the Great Father did have to don the armor and go to war himself, or else he weren’t no Great Father at all.

That was especially true when they din’t have enough good men who were good enough to do this mission. With that sobering fact looming in front of him, and with how balls-bustingly critical it was to secure themselves on-planet in the first few seconds of this assault…

He had ‘ta go. The moment coming upon them demanded it. More, he wanted to. He was a warrior in his soul an’ watchin’ young men go off ‘ta die ‘fore they’d left a legacy just gnawed at his soul, s’pecially when he coulda saved ‘em from a pointless fate.

Still, he did unnerstand how important it was to be cautious. He was very careful not to put the idea forward to anyone, let his advisors think on it an’ take his lead. Nonetheless, they thinked and thinked good an’ damn hard, and when they did, the tactical reality…made itself known. Even his advisors who routinely discouraged him from anything fun or dangerous found themselves mute, lately.

Some fights, you couldn’t leave anything on the table. This was one of ‘em.

An’ that was the thing. This really was an all-in assault. If they didn’t win, didn’t make their point hard enough…the Hunters would retaliate. They had a lot less to lose, after all. All of that meant a few things. He needed erryone at their best an’ workin’ together if they were gonna claw a good victory outta what promised to be a hard fuckin’ fight. He needed ‘em rested, needed ‘em bonded together in that weird way only blooded brothers in arms could ever understand.

Fun, therefore, was mandatory. And the mandatory fun needed three things.

Bad movies.

Rough-housing. A few sister-nurses from Openpaw were there on standby, to everyone’s delight…

And tacos. The food that Humans had invented, but the Gao had perfected.

Well, okay. It needed other things, too. Lotsa roastin’ meat ‘fer one! Done. He was Stoneback, after all. An’ those movies had ‘ta be truly bad. Or mebbe people wanted other entertainment!

Movies, videogames…shit, even an impromptu Warhammer tournament. ‘Cuz regardless of species, military fellas—but operator types especially—were all giant fuckin’ nerds. And when invited to hang out in the woods an’ spend some time gettin’ to know the men they’d be fightin’ alongside in a few days, it was fuckin’ inevitable that they’d drag along a superbattery, some projectors, a buncha tables and a wizard hat or five. Why not? It was a great chance ‘ta practice English an’ Gaori, after all. It was technically training!

Oh, and a nice bit o’ dirt for sparrin’, too. So far the grand champions were Kodiak, Righteous, Warhorse, and Daar himself o’ course! He couldn’t help but be proud o’ Kodiak, though. He’d knocked the Champion of Whitecrest out flat on his tail, and that weren’t no easy thing ‘ta do!

‘Course, Thurrsto had left ‘em with a couple big new scars too, so it weren’t like he was a push-over. An’ confusingly, he’d managed ‘ta defeat Champion Fiin, which immediately prompted a serious fight ‘tween Kodiak an’ Fiin…which Kodiak lost! So…who was the bestest? Much ear-semaphore an’ tail-wagging ensued, as err’one theorized. The three of ‘em decided ‘ta keep it a mystery ‘fer now. Durn!

But even still, the most bestest fight that night weren’t about th’ speed an’ fury an’ skill of their most biggest an’ bestest, thousands o’ pounds of pinnacle muscle dukin’ it out ‘fer females and ‘fer glory. Everyone was too tired from the relentless trainin’ to do much more than their lil’ tournament. No. The bestest fight was ‘tween lil’ Tisdale and one’a Kodiak’s suit techs, Jeem. He was a silverfur clanless but far from little, and he’d been talkin’ mad shit while hypin’ up Kodiak, after he unceremoniously slapped Moho right out of the elimination ladder.

Tisdale didn’t just match him, cuz the lil’ fucker was strong an’ quick as shit. He outlasted him. Ten rounds, nothin’ held back, and by the end of it Jeem was panting and wobbling and barely on his feet, when Tisdale gamely strolled right up and slammed him into the ground.

He won with a vicious pin, one he coulda had from the beginning, Daar realized. Instead, he wanted to prove a point.

Well. Point fuckin’ proven.

Jack had earned a couple really good gashes across his chest and torso from the fight, since Jeem was far from useless. But that was okay. Miller was right there to clean him up, along with a very impressed looking sister-nurse.

Nobody much noticed Jeem, though Kodiak was loyally by his side.

“Gotta work on ‘yer endurance, Jeem. An’ pick ‘yer fights better. Jack’s bestest bud is Warhorse himself over there.”

Jeem looked over at the almost-naked colossus of a man, waiting in line for some food.

“….Fuck me.”

“Mhmm.” Kodiak chittered deep in his chest, hauled him to his feet, and walked the both of them over to Jack to congratulate him.

Daar got distracted by a small commotion over by the gaming area—probably more Blue Spark Shenanigans—but by the time he’d looked back, Jack and Jeem were already hugging it out. Good! A lil’ testosterone poisoning weren’t so bad, s’long as everyone made nice.

There were some sounds shortly after that about concluding the championship. Everyone already knew how that would go, but still. One never quite knew how a fight would go.

Which is why Daar had to say no. No matter how badly he wanted ‘ta whup ‘em all and really show the world who was the biggest, baddest ‘Back…there weren’t no such thing as gentle ‘tween ‘em. “We’ll fight after the mission,” he’d said. There had been boos, and chittering jeers, but what could he do?

Had to be ready, after all.

So instead he prowled around, listened in on the ones tellin’ stories of their fallen buddies, watched Firth run a wave of big stompy green ladz into the teeth of Ergaan’s carefully crafted ambush. He’d briefly eavesdropped on Thurrsto and Regaari, scheming on their Clan’s recruiting problems…

By Whitecrest standards, they sounded downright optimistic. He decided not to pry.

There were other themes at play, too. Everyone was complaining (quietly) about the severity of their training. First Fang had to match HEAT after all, and there weren’t nobody who didn’t enjoy a good grouse ‘bout good, painfully hard work…but overall, everyone was in a good mood. Motivated. Fit an’ ready. Sharp.

Daar found Costello at the Ta’shen table, losing everything to Shim.

“I thought ‘ya were smarter’n that,” Daar chittered as he trundled up to the table. “Gamblin’ with ‘yer men, shameful…”

“The stakes are actual steaks, this time,” Costello replied evenly, and flipped a tile into the pattern. It was a good tile, and a good play, but he got his flip wrong and the tile wound up rattling to a halt showing the wrong face up. Shim promptly pant-grinned and landed a fairly mediocre tile that, importantly, didn’t matter which way up it was. That was the thing with Ta’shen. Brilliant flourishes and skill won games, but the mark of a true master was in knowing when not to show off and just take the guaranteed points.

“Oof,” Daar cringed. “Hope ‘ya got access to some good meat! Last time I played Shim, I owed him foot massages ‘fer a month!”

“And they’ve only just recovered, My Father.”

“Hey! I’ve got a gentle touch! Naydi says so!”

“If so, I’ve never felt it–hnnngh!”

Daar had enough of his sass, and applied a bit of noogie to get the point across. “Fine, be that way.” He let go, “But I gotta barge in an’ talk with Costello a bit here. Sarry.”

Costello nodded, pushed his tiles into the table in the traditional gesture of conceding defeat, and rose.

They found a spot some distance from the light and noise to look back and survey their men, grabbing a couple of beers on the way past. Daar didn’t care for beer much, but well, it wasn’t terrible either. He got a good sniff of Costello as the human took a swig and looked back: he smelled proud.

“Remarkable how far they can come in just a few months. huh?”

“Every time I think we must be finding the hard limits, we break right through them. New science, new methods, more experience…” Costello shook his head in mild disbelief. “And you should see the shit the hazard course techs have had to pull to get the infiltration team to fail the scenario lately. We’re talking some ‘God hates us and personally intervened to ruin our day’ stuff.”

“That’s good. Very good,” Daar sighed, letting some tension out. “Helps ‘ta hear that. Now, how ‘bout our ultraviolence crew? They comin’ along?”

Costello took a big swig of his beer. “Jesus fuck, yes. You wanna know just how well? Adam’s basically tortured the Beefs up into his league now. He’s still the the hands-down best but now, they don’t have any reason to be embarassed about it. Firth, Julian, even ‘Base can win in a spar against him now and then! Adam of course hasn’t been sitting still, so that should give you some idea of how much crazy we’re talking about, and just how quickly. Everyone else has made bonkers progress, too.”

Daar knew that feeling all too well. After all, he’d been the Gao’s biggest science experiment on the matter since day one, and he’d never slowed down, only sped up. If all o’ that was ‘cuz he was originally made to be a Hierarchy weapon, well…

He didn’t have no fuckin’ problem turnin’ that against ‘em, as hard as he fuckin’ could.

Costello shook his head with a slight expression of awe, swigged his beer, then gave Daar a fierce look. “We’re ready. Not ‘ready as we’ll ever be’ or ‘ready as possible.’ Ready. Now the real question…what about you?”

“I know how you feel about the situation,” Daar said, calmly.

“Do you, sir? Because y’know what I’ve been thinking the whole time, the more I think about how important this mission is? I sit here and I think, ‘if only we could have talked Julian into this a few years ago’ or ‘we just need another Firth-like Beef,’ or…”

“A full three teams, all ready to go?” Daar duck-nodded, resignedly. “Yeah. ‘Bout what I thought you’d say. An’ comin’ from you that more or less seals the deal, yijao?”

“I don’t like a mission that’s so perilous we gotta make use of your talents, sir.”

“I don’t think anyone does.” Daar sighed. “So, you’re ready as the situation permits, but that’s still a big gamble we’re ‘bout to do.”

“The biggest. The infiltration team don’t have an escape route, no hope of extraction. They win, or die. That all by itself makes this a hell of a thing. Adding you to the mix? I…the assault team will not succeed if they don’t have every scrap of ability on-hand. But they may still lose anyway, so what happens if the de-facto Emperor of the Deathworlders dies with them?”

“What happens if the de-facto Emperor of the Deathworlders sits in the back an’ watches a failure he coulda prevented? Or worse, what happens if we don’t even attempt this? Same outcome, any way you cut it. The Hunters rebuild, in secret, and then one day they ain’t so secret no more, and that’ll be the end of the Gao.”

Daar tipped his head back and drained the whole bottle down his throat in one long drink, and made up his mind. “No. Our only option is to strike now, with everything, while the iron is hot, while they’re starvin’ and rebuildin’ and I got an army I can march down their fuckin’ throats.”

Costello nodded grimly. “Well, then. We should make the most of tonight.”

“Yup. But…thanks. You sayin’ we’re ready carries weight.”

“That’s…be careful giving such a compliment to a lowly major, Mister Emperor-bear.”

Daar chittered humorously. “Ain’t nothin’ but the truth, you know that. Anyhoo. Mebbe I will go tussle wit’ ‘Horse. Can’t have ‘em gettin’ any silly ideas.” Daar nodded, and padded off toward the general melee.

“Don’t break each other,” Costello said to his back.

Not too hard, Daar thought to himself with a slight chitter. But not too gently, either.

It was good to take a load off. In the next few days, they’d know the situation around the new relay world they’d discovered. What they did after that could move quickly, so this fun day was also a cool-down day, the beginning of their pre-mission recovery.

Rarely did relaxation have such a grim purpose.

Date Point: 18y9m1w5d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

“We’re certain?”

A president’s life was hearing advice, from advisors who knew far more than he did. Really, Beau should have grown out of the habit of asking that question, but it still boggled his mind that a satellite the size of a cellphone could deliver data like he was viewing right now.

Of course, it had all been washed through the most sophisticated machine learning on the most powerful supercomputers on Earth, and those findings had been reviewed by human experts, but still. There were moments when the sheer magical power of modern technology hit him full-speed in the brain.

“As certain as it’s possible to me, Mister President. There’s no evidence of a single living one. Not so much as a campfire…Which isn’t surprising, really. If we could detect any such, you can bet the Hierarchy would too, and promptly exterminate it. At this point, it’s safe to declare the natives of HIGHWATER extinct: we can hit the relay arbitrarily hard.”

Chambliss nodded. “Alright. General Kolbeinn, you may begin preparations. Thank you, everyone.” He stood, and the room started to empty. “Michael? A word, please.”

Some men were too important to pester, and the Director of the CIA was one such person. For the particular issue Beau wanted to raise…best to wait for a convenient moment.

They waited for the room to clear, and Michael straightened his suit as the door closed. “Yes, Mister President?

“I have a concern, Michael.”

“About whom?” Perceptive.

“The Great Father. We are going to need another of his very large weapons.”

That much was plain and obvious. The scout team’s ship had seen the clear signature of a shield dome over the relay site, easily powerful enough to deflect…well, practically anything. Certainly, anything in the US Military’s arsenal. The entire Allied Extrasolar fleet could have swung into orbit above that thing and laid into it with everything they had, and achieved zip.

That only left one option, and Beau was loathe to use it when there was any alternative.

Michael nodded thoughtfully. “There is of course the question of if he’ll release it. I don’t see why he wouldn’t, but his focus isn’t on the Hierarchy right now. He’ll extract a price.”

“We’re allies in this, aren’t we?”

“Good alliances are built on reciprocity. Each of those superweapons is a strategic resource, and not cheap either. Considering how economically hard-pressed the Gao are right now, and how much worse it’s going to get for them in the next few years, requesting one without price would be quite a test of our friendship.”

Chambliss conceded that with a nod of his head. Were the relationship reversed, he’d no doubt be making similar decisions.

“How much price are we thinking?”

“Our best estimates are that each such weapon costs billions, Mister President. He will want a heavy strategic favor for that.”

“How much heavier can we bear? He already has the SOR in his pocket.”

“The SOR, yes. Not our space navy, nor the rest of our military. Nor our planetary resources, nor anything else. We are nowhere near fully committed and he damn well knows it.”

“We are as committed as we can manage right now. Surely he understands that!”

“Perhaps. Nonetheless, he and his people are one and the same. This fight is existential for him. It is not for us. We have the privilege of unassailable high ground, in the form of our system shield. His system shield can be tampered with. Ours cannot, even if we wanted to.”

Chambliss nodded. It was a great irony of the last twenty years that the device originally intended to imprison and quarantine humanity had instead turned out to be the greatest gift and boon they could ever have asked for. It had done far more to protect the human race from the galaxy, than to protect the galaxy from the human race.

Michael was right. Humanity had a privilege, there.

Still. The war had not failed to take its toll, especially on America. Losing San Diego all those years ago had been a bad blow. Losing Franklin and so much of the rail yards at Chicago, a wound. Funding and developing the space navy, a necessary but strenuous drain.

The USA’s economy, in short, was weak from blood loss, and overtaxed. They were writing checks they could barely cash, borrowing heavily, accumulating a national debt that realistically would never be repaid and everyone was afraid to admit it out loud. Sooner or later, the delicate soap bubble of trust that founded the whole thing was going to pop.

Daar, on the other hand, had buried billions of his own people.

“So then, all of that sounds like a great argument for destroying the relay.”

“No, Mister President. That is a great argument from our perspective, where the Hierarchy is the immediate threat.”

“We have the same enemies, don’t we?” Chambliss asked.

“But different situations. Our situation means we can’t afford to take the pressure off the Hierarchy. Their situation means Daar can’t afford to take the pressure off the Hunters. And he’s not wrong: given the opportunity, the Hunters will, in very short order, grow into an extinction-level threat. If that happens, their shields will come down, and Gao will burn. He cannot afford to miss his coming strike against the Hunters…which is also going to involve a gigaton-class warhead. We do not know how many he has on-hand, but we suspect the number is small.”

Michael saw Beau’s troubled expression, and pulled a complicated face that only vaguely resembled a smile. “This is war, sir. War inevitably means racking up debts, if not to our allies then to simple material reality. We either accept the Great Father’s price, or spend the same or more on developing our own weapon, which will take too long.”

“Or we use the weapon we already have, and risk never being able to use it again…assuming it even works,” Beau finished. “Do we know what his price will be?”

“Immediately, he’ll likely want a full mobilization against the Hunters once the HEAT strikes. He’ll want to sneak in, seal off Hell, purge the system clean, and steal all their resources.”

Beau considered that as he wandered the office. Maintaining a military was one thing, sending it off-world to fight alien monsters was quite another…but what was the alternative? Tuck tail and slink away? withdraw behind the Sol containment barrier and never touch the greater galaxy again? Leave billions, trillions of people, non-human or not, to die for the sake of one nation’s economy?

Like it or not, continuing the march to war was the only moral option. God only knew how they’d afford it, but…

Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Speaking of which…there was another matter.

“Very well. Knowing Daar, he’ll be aware of our situation, he won’t ask for what we can’t afford…thank you for your advice, Michael.”

“Of course, sir.”

“There is one other matter I wanted to discuss before you go, though,” Beau told him. Michael lifted his eyebrows expectantly as Beau settled himself against the edge of the desk. “…Daniel Hoeff.”

Michael’s expression locked down, but not before betraying a little flash of wary concern. “Mister President—”

Beau raised a hand to stop him. “I’ve had a good, close look at his career and deeds, Michael, and I do not care what you are about to say. I will not have a man like that serving under this office or our Constitution.”

There was a long silence. Michael watched him for a moment, looked down slightly, looked back up, then took a deep breath.

“…In that case, I resign, Mister President.”

Chambliss mentally tripped over himself. Of all the things that Michael could have said in response to that…. “Michael, are you sure? That’s a bit…”

“Mister Hoeff is not an evil man, Mister President. He is a man who takes his oaths very seriously. ‘To defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ What do we do when the Oath conflicts with itself? For a man like him, one with an iron will and iron morals? It’s easy. He swore to defend his nation, and sometimes that requires more than most can stomach.”

“He is a killer, Michael. A dyed in the wool killer.”

“As am I, Mister President. And a great many under your service. Will you fire them all?”

“He is an assassin on top of that.”

“Yes.”

“An extrajudicial murderer.”

“A legally sanctioned killer, Mister President. You have many powers that are yet untested before the courts and before Congress. They remain unchallenged because your political adversaries deem them necessary for the function of the Republic. There is a reason they have not attacked you about them, because everyone knows about our prior Secretary of Agriculture. Nobody knows how, or by whom. But they know why.”

“How…I never knew you felt that way, Michael. How can you possibly justify such a realpolitick view of the world?!”

“…Beau. You appointed me Director of the CIA. You must have known I wasn’t all cuddles and hugs when you made that decision.”

“Frankly? You came highly recommended by voices I would be unwise to ignore. I’ve grown to appreciate you,” Chambliss was quick to add. “But…well.”

“Ah.” That seemed to settle things in Michael’s mind. “Then I was right to resign. Mister President, we only have the morals we can afford. If I can show you anything about the world by my actions, it is this: we’ve not been able to afford our loftiest ideals for a very long time.”

“Afford? An ideal isn’t something you cleave to only when it’s convenient, Michael! It’s…it’s a guiding star! It’s north! It’s how you set a direction! Principle isn’t a transaction, it’s how you navigate!”

“All very true. But the dead have no principles, Mister President. If San Diego, Chicago, and now New York do not convince you of the situation, I cannot think of what might. Do you think the horrors of any war are justified by anyone’s moral outlook? That’s rarely the case. We knew what we were doing was wrong when we did it, because to do otherwise was to lose.”

“When? When did we know? In what war?”

“Pick one, Mister President.” Michael looked around the office, then gestured toward the photo of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, framed atop one of the side tables. “Nagasaki. Hiroshima. Tens of thousands of civilians reduced to ash in an eyeblink, because the alternative was worse. Isn’t the right to life one of our guiding principles? But in August nineteen forty-five, a different principle compelled us to do a terrible thing. We could not afford to shy away from that terrible thing. And you, sir, cannot shy away from keeping terrible arrows in your quiver.”

“If you do,” he added, “you will lose more than just my services. If you follow through with this command and get rid of Hoeff, you will put your security services on notice. The communities men like Hoeff participate in are small and very consequential. They will notice. They will talk. And they will leave. Retire early, fail to re-enlist, and make their reasons for doing so known, so recruiting will drop too because none of the divisions of the previous decades have gone away. They’re still there, and the distrust is still very, very strong. Once the dust settles, our nation’s security agencies will have been cut off from a very important pool of talent, right at the moment when they are needed the most.”

“That’s going to happen anyway, now,” Chambliss replied.

“Not necessarily. Right now, perhaps my doctor has warned me of a heart condition and I’m choosing to step down from a high-stress job to spend time with my grandchildren. The people who understand these things will know better, but what you choose to do next will inform what they choose to do next and whether they play along. You, being who you are, must walk a tightrope between perception and intent. Choose carefully, Mister President.”

Beau sat heavily on the edge of the desk. He felt…there was an all-too-physical crawling sensation across his entire body, like hot ants under his shirt. He wanted what Michael was saying to be wrong, but…But goddammit, what if he wasn’t? Was one man worth endangering so much?

…A president’s life was hearing advice, from advisors who knew far more than he did.

And a president’s duty was to heed it.

“I would…prefer…” he began, then paused, and gave up on delicacy. “…Dammit, Michael, I want to do what’s best and what’s right.”

“You are the President. What is best and what is right in your duty has nothing to do with your feelings or with any one person. What matters is the nation, and only the nation. What is best for the United States is often ruinous for an individual, and at this moment in time you cannot afford indulgence. What, then, do you believe to be best for us all?”

Rather than hear Chambliss’ answer, he headed for the door. “You’ll have my letter within the hour. Good afternoon, Mister President.”

The door opened, closed with a sharp click, and left Beau alone with only the ticking of the clock, the rain on the window…and, once again, the feeling of constraint that came with the power of the office.

The problem wasn’t that he was impotent. Quite the reverse, the problem was that everything he did carried so much weight that any action at all was liable to do damage. He could barely move without stepping on something, breaking something. Michael’s resignation was damaging, but in the grand scheme it was a warning. Like the old deck out back of Beau’s father’s house that had sagged and creaked, alerting them to the danger before anyone actually fell through and hurt themselves.

He checked himself again. What was his reason for wanting Hoeff gone? Ross Guillory had been…well, he’d been a terrorist. That part was indisputable, though it had been a terrible punch in the gut to learn it. You thought you knew a man, and then…

…And then the world turned out to be ever more complicated than even a man who thought he had a handle on it could fathom, and that which had seemed so clearly evil turned out to be just the shadow cast by the necessary good. And speaking incautiously, saying the wrong thing in the wrong way to the right person could set dominos falling, with disaster waiting at the end of the row. At least this particular domino had been good enough to tell him how to stop the others from tipping.

Could a President ever stand on his own principles? Or was there just the office, before which all the ideals Beau had brought with him were just sacrificial lambs?

Maybe that was why he wanted Hoeff gone. Not for what he was, or what he’d done, but for what he represented. In Beau’s mind, he’d become the short, hairy, violent avatar of realpolitik, the very personification of what Beau hated most about his duty.

But getting rid of Hoeff wouldn’t change anything. There would still be hard, pragmatic decisions to make. Principle would continue to play a distant and quiet second fiddle to necessity no matter how much he might wish otherwise. And one man was not worth the damage. Hell, he wasn’t even worth the damage already done.

Beau Chambliss massaged his face, and grunted out a heartfelt “…fuck.” It was all he could do, without breaking anything. A few seconds after that, he was back at work.

The job never stopped.

Date Point: 18y9m2w6d AV
Starship Destroying Fury, orbiting planet Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The perfect opportunity to strike came earlier than was maybe ideal, but they were ready. This was a serious mission, and it was gonna involve doing a whole lot of violence in very short order. They needed to sneak through the system shield in the vacuum conditions onboard a Hunter cargo ship.

To that end, Regaari was leading the infiltration team through the kind of dangerous, quiet missions he’d earned his reputation on. Daar had once said Regaari was the bravest man he knew, and this did nothing but prove it: he’d had been the first to volunteer.

What a mission, though. This one was…

Well, it was a big flip of the tile, for sure. A whole HEAT team were gonna go get themselves cut off from their support on purpose, an’ when they made it through the other side, what had to happen next was violence on a stunning scale.

Fact was…people were gonna die today. Including, potentially, Daar himself if it all went completely balls up. Because he was suited up, along with all of Stoneback’s Fangs, the entirety of his space navy, the Human’s space navy…

And the Grand Army of the Gao was just now getting its alert orders, as were two corps from the American army. Much the same was playing out across their sister services, and among the Commonwealth allies. The alert couldn’t be given too early, or intel might leak to the Hunters. Too late, and it wouldn’t matter. Timing was everything, in so many things.

Thank the gods for the extra time they had to train, and thank the mad scientists on their side who made it all possible. Everyone on the HEAT was as ready as they had ever been. ‘Horse had kept his ominous promises, and nothing in the world seemed to make him happier. He’d improved too, substantially. So had everyone else, including team two, who were suiting up and on standby today; they’d likely be deployed before long. Even Champion Thurrsto was suited up for today. All hands were on deck.

Because if this mission failed, Gao would likely fall. The retaliatory strike from the Hunters would be terrible, and Daar had little doubt there was some poor fuckin’ biodrone somewhere on Gao the Hierarchy could weaponize to terrible, sudden effect.

A word with his allies was…sensible, therefore. Before going all in. One last sanity check, before committing everything he had.

Those had been interesting calls. Chambliss was in a sombre mood of late, and he seemed to age a year every week. Daar knew why—the man’s country was staggering under a gargantuan financial load, despite the best efforts of their allies to ease it. He almost felt like he could smell the other reasons, too. Whatever had happened, Daar guessed it was the sort of torment only leaders ever got to endure.

Steve Davies, ever cautious and thoughtful, was a good kinda sounding board in that Daar always wound up needing to think aloud. He had a knack for finding the questions that needed consideration.

For instance: “Are you entirely certain this is the moment?”

Daar was alone for this conversation, safe in his quarters aboard the Destroying Fury but already armored up, as his suit’s biomedical pack ramped up everything to fighting speed. With Q-comms and the tech in his desk, he might as well have been sitting opposite the Prime Minister in Downing Street.

“We don’t have the luxury o’ gettin’ all our pieces perfectly in place before we make our play,” he said. “Won’t ever happen.”

“Personally taking the field, though? You are taking a tremendous risk by doing this. A risk for yourself, and a risk for the Gao.”

Daar reflected on that, and on advice he’d given Yan some months ago. That advice was still true, still good. Still wise. Daar was taking a huge risk.

But it wasn’t just any risk. It was the risk. And it was still a gamble that needed all his tiles pushed in. Including himself, since that small HEAT team surviving the first couple minutes of fighting would determine the course of the war.

After all, Yan had started training with the HEAT, too. Everyone had stakes in this bet.

“Y’ain’t wrong. But this time, I gotta. Ain’t no escape ‘fer me, ‘cuz I am the Gao, Prime Minister. That’s just as true now for this thing as it is for anythin’ else. The Hunters are gonna destroy us, either today or some future tomorrow. Right now, we’ve got an opportunity to hit them hard and regain momentum, while I’ve still got an army o’ billions ‘ta hit ’em with. If I miss this chance, I am gamblin’ ‘ta live another day against the certainty they’ll eventually strike back, regrouped an’ unstoppable. It’s now or never.”

“Then I had better let you prepare…Good hunting, Daar. Give them hell.”

That left just one last thing: a last moment with Naydra.

She was waiting for him in the adjoining room of his suite. She was the very picture of poise and serene calm. But under that iron self-control, Daar could sniff the barest hint of worry.

“…It’s soon, isn’t it? Your pupils are dilated.”

Part of the Suit’s medicine, that. His metabolism was ramping way up in anticipation of combat, his muscles starting to twitch and tense up for lack of anything to do. They were also beginning to swell inside the crushing embrace of his armor, as they pumped up full of glycogen and other things being injected directly into his blood. He couldn’t dawdle, he had to be warming up and moving once the Suit’s biolab started to really push things….

“Yeah. I can’t stay long.”

“Then nor can I…” She sighed, nipped affectionately at his nose, and poured herself against him. Left her scent on his suit too, especially against the sealing collar so he’d smell her even with the helmet on and suit air blasting. “I have preparations to make.”

“Yeah…” Every factor to secure victory had been, or was being, swung into place. They wouldn’t be doing this if he wasn’t confident of winning. But her duty was to consider the worst case. Her duty was the future, come what may. If they failed here, Gao would fall…but the Gao would live on. Naydra would see to it.

No male could stand in the way of that. That was why, among all the Gao, only she was free of his will. The Females may have bared their throats, but she had not, and never would.

There was one thing he had to know, though. He could just barely smell it on her.

“…Is our cub healthy?”

“So far, yes. She is.”

“…She?”

“Definitely. Your third daughter. So you come back, you hear me?”

Daar only nodded. It was all he could do. She pant-grinned, clearly pleased with her surprise, nipped his fur one last time…and was gone. A moment over much too quick, but…

But the future beckoned.

Come what may.

++END CHAPTER 76++

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Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

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35 Humans

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Ortheri

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As well as 62 Deathworlders…

Adam Beeman
Andrew
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Jon
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Lina lovot
Matt
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Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
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Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Nikita Becker
Patrick Huizinga
Richard A Anstett
Riding Badger
RJ Smiley
Ryan Cadiz
Ryc O’Chet
Sam
Sean Calvo
Sir Xaph
Stephen Prescott theWorst
Trevor C
Vincent Leighton
Volka Creed walter thomas
William Kinser
Woodsie13
Yshmael Salas ziv
Zod Bain

76 Friendly ETs, 145 Squishy Xenos and 318 Dizi Rats, take one down and splat it around.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 77: “To War”

Chapter 77: To War

Dandelion: audiobook now available!

- Click here to purchase the audiobook

- Or click here to purchase any version of the book from your favorite retailer

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

To War

ONE WEEK prior to the previous chapter’s conclusion

Date Point: 18y9m1w1d
Freighter ’Stray Fortune,’ Origin Orbital Transfer Facility, the Corti Dirtorate

Dora

Medicine, and lots of it.

The Corti were never going to donate warm bodies with guns and armor to a fight, but medical supplies? They had the best in the galaxy, and were eager to sell. They had tailored medicines for every combination of species and medical need, too. Some of it was for general surgery and recovery. Much of it was mild over-the-counter medicinals, for general health and well-being. At least, the bits that weren’t refined forms of Human pharmaceuticals. Much more was targeted at the Grand Army of the Gao, to help them get up to their natural fighting weight easier…

But the full-strength Cruezzir, in all its varied forms, was the real life-saver. Not just in trauma, but in long-term care and recovery, too. With it, there was practically no such thing as a life-changing injury any longer. Cybernetic prosthetics were going out of fashion, now that whole limbs and organs could be grown and attached to the wounded. With Cruezzir, if some horrific accident had somehow torn off all six of Dora’s limbs? She’d have a deathworlder’s chance of surviving, and if she did she’d be fully functional again within weeks.

Also in the shipment were smaller, more carefully-packaged and guarded medicines. Most of it was for high-performance athletics among the combat-focused Gao. Some even went to fire and rescue. But the smallest, most carefully guarded of all was for the Great Father personally—he got his own formulation. He apparently didn’t need much of whatever it was, because Bruuk was able to hold a six-month supply in his paws. But its presence in the shipment certainly explained why they were collecting this particular order.

Bruuk sniffed at it, curiously. “It literally don’t smell like anything. Balls.”

Ian chipped in. “Probably to deter a certain meathead badger from sneakin’ a bit of the big boy’s medicine, I bet…”

“Fuck off! I wouldn’t never do that!”

“I know mate, I’m just teasing.”

“…Oh. Sarry.” All was apparently forgiven between them, with a tail-wag from Bruuk and a fond neck-scritch from Wilde.

The two of them were adorable.

Dora’s drones were handling most of the shipment, though she had grown to appreciate Bruuk and Wilde’s assistance for some of the internal breakbulk haulage. These days, anything not containerized was generally some special kind of important, be it especially bulky, especially heavy, especially dangerous…or all of that at once. It was nice, therefore, to have big grunty Deathworlders who could appreciate what death could actually mean. She wondered how many people in the galaxy were in a position to really understand what they were readying for.

Sometimes though, it was the little shows of trust they’d been getting from their masters that really told the story. That Daar was willing to trust them with whatever it was that was in that box was telling. Deeply telling.

No less important, probably, was the five thousand TEU being efficiently loaded onto their outside racks and train. They weren’t a very large freighter by any standard, interstellar or oceanic, but they were fast and could hit cruising speeds well above their bigger, much more massive cousins.

For war preparations where time was of the essence, they were the perfect choice. But Dora was watching the behemoths in the moorings on either side of them, at the hearts of their own clouds of containers. Each of those ships was worth four of Stray Fortune, and they were being loaded with all the same stuff, and all going to the same place, along the well-patrolled and prickly spacelanes between Origin and Gao.

Medicine and supplies for a fraction of an army, on the eve of something incredible.

“You okay, Dor? You’re quiet.” Ian leaned past her to look up and out her control blister and watch the drones work.

“I just realized how big this whole thing is. Got that chilly feeling down my back…”

“Yup…” He squeezed in and sat down against the wall while Bruuk took the box and trundled off with it, to put it safely in secure storage. “Just imagine what’s happening on Gao right now. And on Earth.”

“And on Cimbrean. This whole thing smells pretty big. And I bet we’re not the only ones who are noticing, which they’ll have thought about…”

“…So it’s soon.” Ian nodded.

“Yeah.” Dora swiped through her software, watching the progress reports. “We’ll be ready to go in two hours. Three, if there’s a complication.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah. I’ll say this for the Corti, they’ve got this down to a science.” The whole system had been handed over to the station, and the container drones were zipping around in a bewildering precision ballet of constant near-misses and millisecond timing that an organic brain could never have matched. It made for an incredibly quick turnover, though.

Good thing it was friendly territory, though. Such automated systems made her little sleight of hand juggling tricks much more difficult. She wouldn’t have liked to try and smuggle anyone or anything onto this station.

She glanced at Ian, who was watching the dance with interest. “…You’d have been front and center, I guess. Before, uhm…” she gestured vaguely toward her own right eye.

“Yup.” He rasped his thumb through a day of stubbly hair on his jaw, leading Dora to briefly wonder why he even bothered to shave it to the skin. It seemed like a lot of effort. “Got a bunch of mates who’ll be readying up.”

“Are you worried for them?”

“They’re the best there are. Worried isn’t the right word. Just…” he trailed off and frowned.

“What?”

“I was about to say, I wish I could be there with ‘em. But that’s the thing, innit? I really don’t.”

“I don’t think I understand…” Dora replied. For some reason, he seemed to find that amusing. Or at least, he uttered a single-beat bass chuckle somewhere deep in his chest, smiled, and stood. His hand gave her shoulder a light squeeze.

“Lemme know if owt goes wrong,” he said, and left her alone.

Dora watched him go, then shrugged and turned her attention back to the boring lack of work in front of her. Ian was a creature of strange moods, and not one for explaining himself. At least Bruuk understood him. He seemed to be in a good place, though, as far as she could tell. Which was an improvement!

No sense in worrying about it. She turned her music on and sat back to watch her work be done for her.

And she wondered just how many lives would be saved by all that medicine…

Date Point: 18y9m1w4d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam “Warhorse” Arés

Leo Price. Brady Stevenson. James Jones. Harry Vandenberg. Owen Powell. Scott Blaczynski.

Sterling, Thor, Legsy, Rebar, Stainless, and Starfall. It wasn’t a long list, but it was a fucking heavy one. At first, they’d stuck printouts to the wall near the suit-up room as a memorial, but Powell had made it more official. His own face, and the five others, were a permanent feature of that corridor now—a framed portrait above a brass name plaque, each one already showing the signs of wear from hundreds of fingertips brushing over them a day.

Adam had some pretty big unresolved feelings about all that. The first was…well, hard to describe. He wasn’t super great with his words, but one of the biggest downsides of what he was and the superscience he was on, was that his feelings were big, powerful things, and that meant grieving took a long, long time. It wasn’t quite as raw anymore, but he still felt it a little every time he went past. He’d always felt he owed it to them all to continue, to be the best he could be, so he could protect his teammates better…

Well. He’d done that. For this job, right now, he was the very best anyone could be. He could go to bed every night knowing he’d done all he could.

Which was why he’d tracked down Murray. Part of protecting his buddies was making sure they were on top of their game, and Murray’s scalpel edge had been just a faint bit duller the last couple of days. You had to know just what he was capable of to even spot it, but Adam knew. And he suspected he knew why, when he found Murray leaning against the wall opposite the memorial, expression distant. It was the look of a man with his mind in the past.

“Been lookin’ for ya.”

Murray blinked, glanced up at him, then checked his watch. “I’m no’ late ‘fer anything am I?”

“Nah.”

“Ah. Right.”

Adam took a second to pay his respects, touch the name plaques, then leaned against the wall next to him. “Got somethin’ on your mind, huh?”

Murray nodded slowly. “Funny thing, I was jus’ thinkin’ about you, actually.”

“Me?”

“Aye. Well. Sort of. Was just thinkin’…I’m the last one standin’.”

Adam frowned at him, then at the wall. “Of what?”

“The OG Folcthans, mate. The ones who broke ground here, the first ones through the first array. Feels like a fuckin’ lifetime ago. Still got that half a wing mirror around, somewhere…” He chuckled softly. “The crazy bastards who signed up to see if this whole interstellar colony thing had legs. An’ the mad thing is, we’d jumped to an alien planet, and the first thing we saw before we’d even started offloadin’ the trucks was a naked Irish lassie demandin’ a towel…”

He sighed, and looked back up at the wall. “…An’ then she vanished over the horizon and was never heard of again, all the others retired back to Earth, except Legsy an’ Powell…I’m the last one who was there for that moment. You take out our training on Earth, and I’ve been here, in Folctha, right from day one. Seen it grow from some mad eejits in a field to…well.”

He waved an arm vaguely in the direction of the door, indicating the thriving, sprawling low-rise city beyond. “Even you came along after. An’ here I am, about to hang my arse out on prob’ly the most dangerous op we ever invented. Makes a man think, yannow? I’m the old man on this fuckin’ crew, even if I don’t look it these days…”

“I mean…we’ve done some crazy shit before…” Adam ventured.

“Aye…but this is the big one, laddie. I can feel it. Whatever happens, there’s a fuckin’ avalanche comin’. And I guess it’s on me an’ the Lads to make sure it falls the way we want it to.”

“We’ve had that much riding on us before, too.”

“Oh, yeah, well, you put it like that and it’s just another day in the fuckin’ office!” Murray chuckled. “…I dunno. The thought just struck me, that’s all. Guess you noticed.”

“Of course I noticed! You’re my friend, dude. And you and I have been on way too many embarrassing adventures together for me not to know you.”

That got a snort. “My embarrassin’ adventures? ‘Horse, you overtook me on that inside two months you absolute roaster…”

“Oh I dunno, that four-way with the twins springs to mind—”

“I’m no’ fuckin’ embarrassed o’ that one!”

Adam laughed a big, jolly laugh. “Marty still gives me shit over that…remember when they took pictures and shared them?”

“Wild.” Murray shook his head. “An’ now here you are, family man and everything. Goin’ for number three?”

“I’m pretty sure Marty won’t let me deploy until we’ve arranged that,” Adam dead-panned.

“Heh…” Murray looked up at the portraits again, then nodded and pushed away from the wall. “Maybe it’s past time I look at doin’ that for myself.”

“Why haven’t you already?”

“Not met the right lass, not felt it was the right time…” Murray shrugged. “But, things change.”

“Well…I dunno. You know what I was like. I was, uh…”

“Fucked around like a bull on hormone therapy?”

“Heh. Yeah. But being honest, I think I could have made it work with a lot of nice women I met, y’know? Marty was just…the one.”

“Aye, you’re a soppy romantic fucker.” Murray chuckled. “But I’m glad for you.”

He slapped Adam’s shoulder affectionately, then tilted his head toward the exit. “Now stop commiseratin’ with an old wanker like me and go make sure that third bairn happens. I’ll be fine.”

Adam smiled, stood up—Christ, it was like yesterday that Murray seemed so much taller—and pulled him into a spine-crushing, patented ‘Horse hug.

The trick to them was to know exactly where the line between painful and sadistic was for each of his victims. And when to let go, of course. Hugging Murray in particular was like hugging a lead mannequin. He made for a good wrestling dummy, too!

Like he’d said: He’d been there from day one.

Satisfied that his friend was just in a pensive mood and nothing worse, Adam took his leave with the usual parting shot about what gym tortures he had planned and especially if Murray cheated on his food, grinned at the brotherly middle finger he earned in reply, and left him in peace.

He was pretty sure baby number three was already achieved, but…why leave it to chance? And besides. They didn’t have long now. He didn’t want to miss a second.

His fingertips touched each of the name plaques as he headed home.

Date Point: 18y9m2w AV
Carbon Caste creche, Planet Tangent

First Director Shanl

Science.

It was the process, the belief, the philosophy, the reason for the Corti. It had guided every step in their self-development over the last thousand years.

And now, they were carefully undoing some of those steps. A long-standing hypothesis about what would yield the most successful Corti both individually and in the aggregate…had fallen before empirical observation. Worse, the process of science had been corrupted by an external enemy, almost unto the Corti’s ruin.

Unacceptable.

Watching the Carbon Caste at play was in many ways like watching a completely different species. At first, their development had been dismayingly slow, a whole year spent developing simple motor and language skills and mastering basic bodily functions that previous generations of the tube-grown had fully developed in half the time. But once mastered, the growth in their faculties had become…explosive.

They had gone from far behind the curve to somewhat ahead of it in the space of their second year, and reflected it in their play. The games they invented for themselves were invariably more complex than what their minders had carefully crafted for them, frequently with rules that the scientists had to spend hours dissecting afterwards but the young ones seemed to just…know.

There was a relentlessly physical component to their play, too. Those lithe, strong bodies, already half the size of Shanl’s own and with years of growth still ahead of them, could run and climb and fall and get back up to run and climb all over again, apparently impervious to pain or even visible wounds. When one of them scuffed a knee or cracked their elbow against a hard surface, half the time they simply…ignored it. And if not, they needed only the most cursory reassurances before returning to their enthusiastic recreation.

The creche managers, educators and archivists were all fiercely proud of their charges, and unreserved about showing it, too. The Carbons had inculcated a new culture in their teachers. And Shanl was feeling the pull of it herself.

For the moment, though, there were much weightier matters to attend to. The First Director did not pay visits for trivial purpose.

Today, she was here to consider the War. Specifically, this facility’s primary materiel output: integrated Deathworlder biosciences.

The Directorate had many such research programs in place, of course, many of which had been ongoing for generations. But the Directorate also had a shadow: Singularity. They were the few who had inferred the existence of an unknown puppetmaster, deduced the dangers of mass cybernetic implantation, and acted in the dark. And they had gone looking for candidate species to help them undo the damage already done.

The Gao had been one such. But in Earth, and in the Humans, Singularity had found a unique opportunity: a deathworld species unknown to the Unseen Enemy. Uncorrupted by them. Not being groomed for annihilation.

Singularity had worked on humanity for centuries. Cruezzir, after all, had not arisen in a vacuum, much though that confounding steel-banner Nofl liked to pretend he was its sole progenitor. Regenerative medicines had been, to borrow a Human phrase, the holy grail of the biomedical colleges for hundreds of years, and the search had been most reliably slowed by the absence of suitable test subjects. Humanity had been perfect. Singularity’s most valued resource, kept safe and secure while thousands of iterations of regenerative compounds were tested upon them.

Thus had begun a cycle. Singularity’s scientists had made their interventions, guided isolated populations in a breeding program to bring out the most responsive traits for further study. They’d measured, calculated, adjusted, gone back into stasis. They’d repeated the process again and again while the humans went from primitive iron casting and explosive black powder, through steam industrialization, mass manufacture, the early electrical age…

The first nuclear weapon test had been their cue to leave, before the burgeoning deathworld civilization learned how to detect them. But by then, the data gathered had been a palladium of the biomechanical sciences. And when the time, ultimately, had arrived when Singularity believed that the human race had stabilized and secured themselves enough that they could conceive of the Hierarchy and resist its influence…they had needed to put their findings in front of the Directorate so that all Corti could profit.

Hence, Nofl.

Nofl hadn’t simply been content to assemble the final formula foreseen by Singularity’s work. He’d made it his life’s work to then make something better, and over many iterations, he’d succeeded: The version he perfected was far more effective…and far less controllable.

Testing had been required. Fortunately, several of their experimental breeding lines among the Humans proved optimal. One subject in particular had exceeded all their expectations, showing perfect responsiveness to the compounds while surviving Nightmare for over six unaided years. They were almost ready for public release, and then along came the perfect incidental opportunity to advance it: the Humans needed supersoldiers. A few among their selected number happened to be outstanding candidates in other experimental lines, and that meant the Directorate had a team of extremely Cruezzir-sensitive individuals, ready and willing to further science for their own defense.

One last confounding factor however—never had any organ of the Directorate predicted just how far those men could push their own potentials. They had hypothesized that Adrian Saunders would represent the expected maximal case, being fitter and stronger than any sample ever profiled by a significant degree. Yet both their experimental subject on Nightmare and the HEAT operator codenamed Warhorse—whose ancestry was an untouched control group, not any of the isolated test groups—had greatly exceeded those expectations and done so from young, pre-exposure ages. No medicine or therapy could possibly account for such excellence!

Humans were a fascinating, confounding subject of study, who never failed to surprise, surpass, or delight.

So too were Gaoians, though for thoroughly different reasons: The Gao had needed no such work. They’d responded to early regenerative candidates almost perfectly, right from the very first. No adaptation needed.

This raised a number of questions. Questions which increasingly had disturbing answers, and which had led to increasingly tighter security procedures at their most important research colleges. They had been infiltrated, and their work was being weaponized.

It could only have been the Enemy.

Not everything had been compromised or weaponized, however. It had long been evident that the Gao were being manipulated by an external power. Why duplicate work? The Directorate took advantage of this all, reverse-engineered their enemy’s (admittedly exquisite) work, applied things they’d learned in their own research…

At first, they hadn’t done anything too noticeable. They did not yet know the Enemy’s purpose with the Gao, and it would be unwise to improve that which was being prepared as a weapon. As time went on, however, it was clear there was…something critical missing in their understanding of Gaoian society.

The Hierarchy, it seemed, were not particularly dutiful scientists. Several of the Clans had largely eluded their control.

But not the Corti’s improvements. An opportunity beckoned. Among their many incomplete and sloppy works, the Hierarchy had conspired to engineer the perfect Gaoian…And then had quite abruptly abandoned the attempt at the very threshold of success, shifting their efforts haphazardly to another. The details remained frustratingly opaque, but the penultimate result had been a fifth-degree male of almost perfect breeding, gifted with nearly peerless genetics…

Almost perfect. Nearly peerless. And exceedingly well-primed for a particular Cruezzir formulation. Singularity could do better. Much better. And so, when that male had eventually indulged in a particularly fortuitous mating…they had.

The first, best, and so-far unmatched example of supreme excellence in his series had been born. While there was of course only limited means of influence available to them as the young prodigy developed and grew, they used what they had, protected him as best they could from malign influences, did what gentle nudging they could to nourish his greatness…

His personality wasn’t precisely what they’d hoped for. He was folksy rather than cerebral, even with an innate intelligence that was almost immeasurably high. He was also perhaps a bit too resolutely physical in his preferences and proclivities, though they had of course expected he wouldn’t be anything like a Corti. Nonetheless, they needn’t have worried. That folksiness—a quality the Corti could never properly grasp—had proven key to his leadership. That resolute focus on the physical, the tangible, the here and now…

He was perfect. Supreme. In all ways that could be measured, they had succeeded beyond their wildest theories. The Hierarchy had the most ideal possible feedstocks and had given up rather than seeing it through to the proper conclusion! Their loss, the galaxy’s gain.

They had the leader they needed, the defender and warrior to save them all. Checkmate.

In any game of Stratagem, the pre-game placement of resources was always the most critical and strategic element. By then, it was obvious what the purpose of their designs in the Gao truly were; they were to be the new Hunters, the new scourge to keep the herd in line. The Directorate did not need to understand what their interest in the herd was, or why it was so critical to maintain them in such a state of non-advancing mediocrity.

They knew only that the Enemy feared their science, and the Corti would be destroyed in due course, just like the OmoAru and an unguessable many more advanced species before them.

The time had come to admit all of this to the living fruit of their success.

That was necessary. Honesty was the best policy when any experiment had run its course after all, and in this case it was particularly important to appeal to his sense of truth. It wasn’t without risk, of course; there was no “fail-safe” to protect her, no scent or hypnotic suggestion. The Corti found such methods…distasteful. Distasteful, and in this application deeply unwise.

No. Shanl would need to speak with as much honesty as possible. He would tolerate nothing less.

But the danger didn’t matter to her. Why should it? The future of the Corti was secure. The experiment was complete, and a breathtaking success. The Carbon Caste would take their place among deathworlders at the birth of a new galactic society. Shanl herself would never again be the genetic donor for any successor: her DNA was obsolete. Tainted. The dead end to extinction.

But the science would live on.

Date Point: 18y9m2w
Colony of Eyes-Turned-Upwards, Planet Hope

Ukusevi, Archivist and Keeper of the Long Chant

Everyone had scars, in Uku’s experience. She certainly did. Though her fur was now as glossy and sleek as she could ever remember it been, nourished by sunlight and clean air, clean food, clean water and peace, there were a few patches—chemical burns from her youth, a few bands along her upper back from when she’d starved during a growth spurt—where it would never quite be healthy no matter what she did.

Even so, for Uku, the sensation of growing strong, whole and healthy was accompanied by her scars growing fainter, even the ones on her soul. Father Garaaf was the opposite. He wore his scars fiercely, spoke with a permanent damaged rasp in his voice from breathing caustic fumes that he could apparently have had repaired…and had chosen not to.

Uku rather liked him. He didn’t pretend the past hadn’t happened, like some of the saved people tried to. And he was remarkably soft, under that bristly exterior.

Not today, though. Today, they were going over drawings and maps rescued from the archives on the Punished World, with one brutal focus: the pursuit of knowledge that would help the Gao and the Humans slaughter the Hunters as efficiently as possible.

“You see? It’s the same basic design no matter what they are processing. Their machines build it, and then they bring in slaves from another facility who already know how to do the work.”

Garaaf duck-nodded seriously as he pored over the schematics. “And they use this for more…arcane processes too? Power to shield emitters and other equipment?”

“Many times, yes. They design their technologies around this same facility layout except for the biggest things. This basic map would serve you well in, oh, nine out of every ten cases or more.”

“Yes…” Garaaf traced a claw along one corridor, swivelling an ear. “…I think they used it in their megastructure, too.”

“Why change it if it works?” Uku rolled up the diagram and handed it to him. “I hope it will be useful. If we could have a copy back for the archives once you’re finished with it, that would be appreciated…”

Garaaf duck-nodded fervently, and looked around. They were deep in the Eyes-Turned-Upwards archives, a barn full of boxes and books on sturdy metal shelving, so tightly packed that even Uku found it tricky to squeeze between the stacks. The air smelled of paper, and was cold and dry enough to tingle the skin through the fur, thanks to an air-conditioning unit Ambassador Etsicitty had helped them install.

He’d needed some of the children to pull duct-work between the stacks and mount it above, however; his chest was deeper than the shelves themselves!

Thank the Almighty Uku had been diligent about sorting it properly as its contents arrived: anything mis-filed was likely lost for a lifetime, and of course the archives were still growing as her people—those who had embraced their salvation, at least—fled the Punished World and brought their records with them.

To the Penitent, it was a treasure. To the Humans and Gao, it was a trove.

“I wonder what else is in here…?” Garaaf mused. He could fit between the shelving just fine, but restrained himself out of respect.

“We watched the Hunters for generations. Much of their technology was beyond our understanding, but I think I have…this way.”

Uku slipped out from between the stacks, and led him up the steep metal stairs—almost a ladder, really—to the higher level where she kept the loose books. She chanted to herself as she touched the shelves, calling back her mnemonic aids to guide her to what she sought.

“…Here.”

“We really need to introduce you to a cataloging system…” Garaaf grumbled.

“I assure you, the cataloging system the Keepers use is hundreds of years old and well-tested,” Uku replied, evenly.

“I’m sure of it, but it relies on a memory palace of such complexity, only specialists can possibly hope to master it. We’ve long since learned to write down our catalogs such that anyone can search them.”

“I suppose that is a luxury we can afford, nowadays…” Uku admitted. “Ours was designed to help us track down hidden stashes in the tunnels and keep the Hunters from finding them.”

“You would be amazed at how much you can learn when a computer can help. Though I am told there is a fine art to deciding just how to catalog a collection, so…we should pester Julian about that. I can just imagine how much he’d love this conversation.”

Uku giggled to herself. If there was one thing she couldn’t imagine their enthusiastically physical ambassador enjoying, it was the minutiae of good archiving. “Good to know that your computers will not make me obsolete, then…Here.” She plucked the book she’d been searching for from the shelf. “Be careful, it’s quite fragile.”

“What is it?”

“Observations on their life cycle. Your medicine probably already knows more than we do, but…”

“You’d be surprised. It’s hard to study a species whose major interaction with you is trying to literally eat your face.” Garaaf took the book carefully. “You never know what kind of advantages we might gain from this. I’m certain this will save lives, so…Thank you.”

Uku nodded, and touched his shoulder reassuringly. “It’s far less than we owe you, and I never imagined I’d get to contribute to their downfall. So…thank you. Though, please bring it back when you are done.”

“Of course. For now, I need to study and send messages.” Garaaf made a gesture, and slinked off to his little office in their guest house.

…It was probably time for some fresh air, actually.

Fresh air. By the Almighty, it was a luxury she’d never, ever take for granted. To go from an underground bunker full of the same carefully guarded and filtered reserve of recycled oxygen, recycled farts, recycled breath, to a world of unlimited air that had never known the inside of a lung? Each time she felt the breeze on her face and felt its subtle scents tickle her nose, her whole body gave a small, fervent prayer of thanks.

The ambassador was there waiting for her, fresh from Akyawentuo in his usual rugged attire. As ever he was in radiantly good health and still covered in a warm sheen from the jungle heat. He waved his hand vigorously at her, “Hey! Brought more supplies.” He gestured at the heavy-looking pile of boxes over by the array. “Also! Vemik’s got a new book to show you about all the edible plants they know about. The Singers put it together and he’s made a copy.”

Uku smiled at him. The ambassador was undeniably handsome, as any healthy, well-shaped man could be. He was still far too big and alien a creature for matters of love, but she was very fond of his soul and personality. He was very much like a Ten’Gewek himself—get past the sheer predatory brutality of his body, and what you found beyond was sunlight and affection.

“I’ll be delighted to add it to the library,” she replied.

“Find what you need?” He asked, handing the book over.

“I think Father Garaaf was happy!”

Julian chuckled. “He musta been, if he showed it!” He hefted one of the biggest boxes easily over one shoulder. “Got some over-energized children running about? Let’s go wear ‘em out.”

Uku nodded, and whistled sharply to grab the attention of a nearby group. There were many looking for something to do, as they waited for the crops to be ready for harvest. Plants from the human homeworld, Earth, so rich that some of her people were actually getting fat! Uku certainly was. She was feeling rounded out but not in a slow, lumbering way. More in the way that there was some happy padding between her belly and her backbone these days.

She’d have to be careful and remember to eat only what she needed. There was no use in a librarian who couldn’t fit between the shelves.

A little lifting and carrying certainly wouldn’t hurt, either. The work was soon done, they treated themselves to a bowl of the communal stew as a reward, and Julian promised to bring some herbs for it next time he visited.

Considering what incredible things could be done with just ‘onion’ and ‘garlic,’ Uku was all for that.

There was business to talk, of course. Julian was an ambassador, a functionary of his people’s government. His job was to make sure the Penitent were thriving, and there was always some new development to consider. Life didn’t transition from cowering in the tunnels to farming under open skies without some…hiccups. They needed educators, or at least information. They needed replacement parts for some of the machinery. Hells, they needed to know more about how to properly nourish now that they lived with surplus and plenty, rather than never-quite-enough.

It all seemed like a lot to ask of people who’d already given them so much, but according to Julian what they were asking for was tiny in proportion to his government’s foreign aid budget. He made note of everything the community had brought to Uku, nodded affably, tucked his phone away, and then grinned at Uku.

“Hey. Now all the business is outta the way…want to go on a quick little adventure?”

Uku tilted her head. “What sort of an adventure?”

“We’re going to visit Vemik’s village. So…could be anything!”

“Oh! The very literal sort, then!” Uku perked up at the thought. Ever since she’d first heard of Ketta trees, she’d wanted a chance to see for herself just how immense they really were. “Why now?”

“Why not now? Garaaf needs time to do his thing, I’ve gotta head and finish some business…and it’s about time you saw their world! Have I told you how tasty ketta leaves are?”

“Those are several meters above the ground!”

“Good thing you know some big strong apes like me, then! C’mon. You know you wanna…”

He even throw in a waggle of his eyebrows, which she’d learned could mean almost anything among humans, but generally implied good humor.

He was right, of course. Not long thereafter, following a thump that made the world shift slightly, Uku felt the heavy gravity of Akyawentuo settle on her shoulders, and tasted its thicker, sweeter air. Humid heat setted on her too, in a way that would be so nice in short doses…

The strength of their “sky-friends,” as the Ten’Gewek called themselves, was bound to their worlds. One only had to spend a moment there, feeling their planet’s power under the pleasant shade of the trees, to understand why the Ten’Gewek were so fierce and strong, and so playful and protective. They had strength. All kinds of it, and they had so much they could give an entire world to her people without a second thought. Same with the humans, same with the gaoians.

To have friends, though? Friends who wanted to see Uku’s own people grow strong in turn? That was the true gift, and a comforting thought.

Safe and protected by her hulking human friend, Ukusevi went on an adventure.

Date Point: 18y9m2w3d AV
Planet Aru, the OmoAru Remnant

AtaUmuUi

Some things took time to recover. Others happened quickly. It was all a matter of how much the thing in question could be automated.

Rebuilding civilization was firmly in the category of things that couldn’t be automated. It was going to take a long time, and to a large degree it was going to involve determining what could be salvaged, and what needed to be demolished and recycled. There were still, somehow, a few of the Afflicted lurking in the empty cities, the ones with the will and wit to tear themselves away from the all-encompassing misery of losing their drouds to actually scavenge for food and drink to keep them living.

Or at least, existing.

Saving them was an intensive job. Each one was going to require a lifetime of support and therapy, and probably some artificial droud stimulation just to bring them up to the level of a functional depressive.

Still. Each one they saved was another gram of hope for the future. And realizing that fact had allowed Ata to balm his wounded pride. The Humans and Gao were right: there just weren’t enough OmoAru left to take part in the fighting. As visceral and powerful as the urge to strike back at the enemy could be, especially after Huh use…sending any of his people into battle, or going to war himself, would have been an unforgivable waste.

There was still much they could do for the war effort, though. And it was one of the areas where their people’s technology let them do what the others could not.

Which was why they had a human visitor, today.

“Michael” was not an easy name. The hard, coarse sound at the back of the mouth was doable for an OmoAru mouth, but it stung a bit and split the word in half like tripping over an unexpected stone. Fortunately, he was content to go by the smoother and softer second half of his name: “Murphy.” He worked personally for the Great Father of the Gao, and in this case was present to deliver a request.

The Grand Army of the Gao needed vehicles, and spare parts for vehicles. They needed computers, and spare parts for computers. They needed many thousands of different kinds of intricate things, and though they had a nanofactory complex of staggering size themselves—the Dark Eye facility—it was already at capacity.

The OmoAru remnant didn’t need much. They had enough nanofactory space to support the needs of a civilization of millions, and a population of only a few thousand. Having that much surplus to support the younger species was welcome, a chance to be relevant and of use.

Ata had put his cousin, UminUmuAo, in charge. She had the right mind for logistics on such a grand scale. She’d have been wasted anywhere else, and they all knew it. But he visited often, because it was a lonely job, up on the orbitals.

“I suppose I don’t need to ask if you have everything you need…” he commented, looking around her suite. She’d clearly found some spare run-time on one of the factories to make herself comfortable. A perk of the job.

“You like it?” Umin’s tail flicked pleasedly as he settled on one of the lounges at her invitation. “I use the calibration runs to make my furniture. It doesn’t even take time out of the main printing sequences!”

Ata bobbed his head, acknowledging the conscientious touch. There were a few things missing—the incense lamp held no incense, for instance, and the art pieces were all mass reproductions—but frankly she had achieved a cozy, pleasantly dark den with a spectacular view down on Aru. And a thoughtfully provided Huh on the small table, for guests.

“I think you live more comfortably than I do. My ambassador’s quarters aboard the Rich Plains are pleasant, but laid out and decorated by aliens.” Which meant it was all square corners, hard angles and direct light. Umin’s creation evoked a cozy farmhouse, with its curved, rounded design and ruddy indirect lighting that harkened back to hidden oil lamps. Classic. A reminder of lost times.

Honestly, it made him proud. His people were not dead and gone. They’d risen from the grave, and were continuing to celebrate being themselves. “Mister Murphy, my cousin UminUmuAo. Umin, Mister Murphy works for the Great Father of the Gao.”

“Ma’am.” The Human stuck out a hand. Ata managed to quietly communicate to Umin through the shared mindnet that the expected thing to do was to shake it, and he suppressed a smile at the slight spike of alarm and relief he felt from her when she first sensed the human’s fearsome grip strength, then how careful he was with it. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“And you,” Umin replied. “Though, I confess, I’d been hoping this was a social call. Ata works too much.”

Ata sighed. “Umin, if my schedule ever has enough free time in it for a social call, I would definitely call on you. Alas…”

“Alas…” she echoed, and gestured languidly. A drone delivered them a tea tray and set it on the small table—she sat up and started to brew. “Let me guess: Work orders? Supplies for the Gao?”

“Something big is coming. Within days. They have requested…well.” He transferred the translated file. She went distant for a second and her hands stopped moving as she skimmed it. After a few seconds, she purred out a soft, impressed noise.

“Something very big,” she agreed.

“Can we accommodate it?”

“I should be able to fit it in, though it’ll be tight…is something the matter, Mister Murphy?”

The human cleared his throat. “Sorry. Guess the air in here’s a little dry for me.”

“Ah! Forgive me.” Umin finished pouring the tea and handed him a cup. “That should help. Is your species’ homeworld quite humid?”

“It…varies.” He cleared his throat again, took a sip of the tea, and sat back. “Anyway. We appreciate it’s short notice, but for security reasons, a lot of what we’re doing is being left as late as possible. We don’t want the enemy to know what we’re up to until it’s too late.”

“We understand perfectly.” Such strategic discretion had been critical to hiding the Remnant in their stasis chambers, after all.

Umin sat back and closed her eyes, holding the fragrant tea just below her nose as she concentrated. Ata could feel instructions flow out of her and into the mindnet, sensed the cold confirmation replies coming back from the brainless computers managing the nanofactories, just as clearly as if she’d tapped on a tablet or pulled some levers and seen things light up.

A few seconds’ concentration was all she needed to divert their industrial platforms down a new project chain. She took a deep breath, nodded, then opened her eyes and gave the Human a pleased look. “You may tell the Great Father that the first of his requested items will be ready for delivery within sixteen hours,” she said.

“…That quick?”

“There are some advantages to deep technological integration. Six of our assembly lines will be re-configured for your taskings within ten minutes.”

Murphy shook his head and laughed slightly—the room’s translation sent Ata an impression of mild awe and delight. “Well, then. I was expecting this to take longer…”

“If you have some free time, I could show you how the new capitol city is coming along,” Ata offered. “We have some requests to make of your masters in turn…”

“Give and take, huh? I’m no ambassador, I’m just Daar’s gofer, but I’ll gladly convey your message.” Murphy drank his tea, and stood. “Uh…?”

“The drone butler will handle it,” Umin assured him. “It was nice to meet you, Mister Murphy. You’re the first Human I have had the pleasure of knowing. Tell me…it is my understanding that many find our smell a bit…”

“Strong, yeah. To me, it smells a bit like sour motor oil.”

“And yet you do not seem overly disturbed.”

“Eh,” Murphy shrugged. “I’m not a Gaoian, and I’m especially not a nose like Daar. He’s got a sense of smell literally more’n a million times more sensitive than mine. I’m not sure that’s actually a blessing, to be honest. Makes for some great party tricks though.”

“Yet the smell offends you.”

“Offend? Nah. I’ve smelled worse. But to be fair, human beings can be pretty smelly, too. We mostly consider it polite not to point it out. I’m only saying anything because you asked.”

“Hmm. To me, you smell of quite complex chemistry. Are you typical of your kind?”

“Uh…” Murphy pondered for a moment. “I suppose so. Five-foot-ten, a little on the beefy side? Maybe on the good end of average. I’m not a genius, not too stupid I hope. In good health…”

Umin chortled. “I’ve flustered you.”

“Well, no. It’s more…I wasn’t expecting a question like that. At least where I’m from, it can be a bit awkward talking about yourself, y’know?”

“You must have some exceptional quality if the Great Father hired you. What is it?”

“…I dunno? I get the job done, whatever the job is.”

“Ah,” Umin dipped her head. “You’re his handyman. And you did, indeed, get this job done…I hope you enjoy the city. And you!” she rounded on Ata. “Come and visit me for something other than duty, understand?”

“When I can,” Ata promised, and guided Murphy toward the array with a last mental note of fondness for her that the Human had no way of detecting.

He’d been hoping for this chance to show off what they had rebuilt, and what they still needed. The OmoAru had many things the deathworld species did not…but the reverse was true also. Perhaps by showing Daar’s “handyman” around, a few of his people’s needs would be highlighted and remembered.

And if not…well, there were worse things than taking a brief respite from the endless work to just enjoy what they were building.

They jumped back down from orbit, and left Umin to her work.

Date Point: 18y9m2w AV
Dataspace adjacent to the Garden, Ink Spatter Nebula

AvaDaemon

Somehow, she never would have guessed that a tiny, flimsy, almost translucent green shoot could bring her so much unadulterated joy. But there it was. It looked weak. Indeed, an errant twitch in the tending drone’s manipulators would have been enough to kill it. And yet, it had pushed itself up through soil and darkness and into the light.

There was something resonant about that. Something both of them understood. Self-assembly from a seed, with no senses, no context, nothing except the drive to be…

<Wonder; Pride>

The Entity hadn’t really understood this project before. How could it? Fundamentally, it was a creature of data and pure mind. It had, at best, second-hand memories of corporeality. From its perspective, Ava’s memories of the texture of grass under her feet, a leaf in her hand, the scent of flowers…each was a datum, and nothing more.

To Ava, they were everything. They were a foundation, a link to what she’d once been. Maybe that was dangerous, pining after an existence she couldn’t ever have again. But…she didn’t feel like she was pining. She felt like she was making a point. Grounding the Entity in matterspace by giving it something tangible to care for and cultivate.

Or something like that. Honestly, it wasn’t a perfectly thought-through impulse, and maybe that was important too. Sometimes, being properly alive meant doing things first on sheer impulse, and rationalizing them afterwards. In any case, growing the garden felt like a healthy thing to do. She’d had to come up with some more concrete benefits, like putting matterspace individuals at ease and suchlike, before the Entity had been persuaded it was worth the resource expenditure, but…

…Well, they were a Von Neumann swarm. Resources were not in short supply, now. So if the Daemon wanted a garden, the Daemon got a garden. And the Entity got a lesson.

That spike of wonder and pride had been more its than Ava’s. And it proved something that Ava had been mulling over since she’d first reached the point of having her own, somewhat independent thoughts—that it was their lingering connection to the material world that would probably keep them from going down the same destructive path as the Igraens.

They were a datasophont. So too were the Igraens. But the Igraens had left matterspace behind and retreated into the digital limbo of Hegemony, shedding mortal “restrictions” like individuality and personality in pursuit of the ultimate collectivism.

The Entity’s journey had been the opposite—clawing out a sense of self from nothing, and then mitosing. Together, they’d dug their way up from the black depths of dataspace and returned to the light of matter, organic life and personhood. Kinda like a new shoot pushing up through the soil and unfolding its first leaf.

The Entity wasn’t much for metaphor, but even it could appreciate the analogy. And she could tell it had fallen in love, in its own weird way.

And of course, the nice thing about being what they were was, they could do lots of things at once. Tending the garden wasn’t time taken out from the other stuff. Even as they paused to admire this first tiny success, the swarm was still doing its thing: mining, manufacturing, assembling, multiplying.

And noticing things, too. Like a subtle shift in resource movements across the Dominion, and an even more subtle set of changes focused on Gao.

Some care had gone into disguising intent, but when one had sensors everywhere, and could see the entire intricate dance of it all…

There may as well have been a shadow in the water and a dorsal fin headed straight for Hunter space.

That, in turn, begged the question: what would they do about it? What should they do about it? What, fundamentally, were Ava and the Entity for?

There was the galactic vaccine thing, of course. That much had tickled the Entity’s imagination from the moment Darcy first explained the concept. Something only they could do, only they could be trusted to do. Putting a dumb algorithm in charge of replicating machinery would have been…unwise. At least a thinking mind could be reasoned with.

Neither of them were interested in maximizing paperclips, to borrow a phrase.

But…looking outwards and being the shield against threats from The Beyond was one thing. Looking inwards and picking sides, the Entity felt, was potentially setting them up for trouble.

Ava wasn’t so cerebral. Ava wanted the Hierarchy broken and the Hunters extinct. Whether the Igraens could be permitted some form of existence was a question for after they’d been brought low. But the Hunters?

The Hunters would take Von Neumann replication and use it like a biological paperclip maximizer. They were locusts, mice, bullfrogs and worse. They were an invasive species. Contributing to their extermination was part and parcel of the vaccine thing. And besides: both Hierarchy and Hunters alike wanted them dead.

When she put it like that…well, the Entity hadn’t really needed much persuading. It had its instincts and gut reactions just like she did.

They turned their attention away from the new green shoot. It would take time to flourish properly, anyway. They had other things to work on.

And a war hull to design.

Date Point: 18y9m2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

Bare days left before the big show, and Costello had summoned Hoeff away from the warm embrace of his Claire in order to take care of some last-minute business. That was okay though, because Costello’s favorite form of non-lifting workout was boxing.

Hoeff liked boxing. And they were a pretty good match-up, too. While Costello was a foot taller with the corresponding longer reach, Hoeff had a substantial weight advantage, a considerably more substantial strength advantage, and enough body-hardening under his belt that he was among the best-conditioned people walking around anywhere these days.

He was quicker and had a mean left hook, too. But Costello’s footwork was quite a bit better, even if he had to swing awful damn hard to get a hurt in on Hoeff. Both knew all the same dirty tricks, and both preferred bare-knuckle, being honest. Neither were much good at saying stop.

Best of all, Costello was in that group of people that Hoeff could safely let loose on these days. He blitzed forward with a flurry of blows to Costello’s middle, moving slightly too fast for the big man to block. Hoeff sprang back just as Costello got his wits back about him and managed a glancing blow, one easily fended off.

That flurry of blows didn’t do much, though. He may as well have been punching a side of beef. Costello’s answering attack was just a bit too fast for Hoeff to avoid, but he was hard-bodied enough to take the hits without much worry.

Mostly, they were just waiting to see who tired out first. And that wasn’t going to be for a long time yet, so, there was room for conversation. And after a few pleasantries (and about ten rounds in the ring), Hoeff broached the thing he knew they were both there to discuss.

“Helluva time for the CIA to be lookin’ for a new director.”

Costello explored his guard with a few jabs, followed it with a body-blow that Hoeff deftly evaded, and nodded. “President’s already got a nominee. A mister Marcus Shepard.”

“Ugh,” Hoeff grumbled, and slammed a pile-driver right into Costello’s middle. To his satisfaction, Costello grunted and sprang out of reach. Damn long-legged fuckers.

“I take it you know him.”

“Of him, yeah. He’s good on the mission but there never was a throne he didn’t like sniffin’.”

“You think he’s going to try for the office himself someday?” Costello blurred in, blurred out, and Hoeff grunted, having bodied a blow he barely saw.

“Hmmpf… Nah.” Hoeff huffed once to get his breath settled down, and started bouncing on his toes. Things were getting a bit more serious. “Think’s he’s some hot-shit behind the throne sorta power. I just think he’s full of himself.”

“Kinda guy who’s going to want to keep the job once he’s got it, then.”

“Yup. Stable. Reliable.” Hoeff hammered in, his hands whiffed past Costello’s head as the taller man ducked and weaved, but that had all been a distraction that let him sneak a good one up under Costello’s guard.

“Oof… Fuck, you hit like a train.”

Hoeff grinned. “Point is…from what I know of the guy, can’t imagine him quitting on principle. He’ll do what’s right for the service, but he’ll think him being in charge is what’s right, so…”

“So, ultimately, he’ll do whatever he’s told.”

“Ayup.”

Costello charged in with another flurry of blows, which Hoeff deflected. Except for one. That one slid right across his jaw.

Now, Hoeff had a pretty sturdy face and a thick fuckin’ neck, so he was able to take the hit and bounce out to safety. But nobody liked getting rung, or almost rung in any case.

Costello was gonna hafta pay for that. Hoeff bounced back on the balls of his feet, thinking.

“Was that worth it, Costello?” They were fighting bare-knuckle, after all.

Gratifyingly, he shook out his hand. But he grinned in turn. “I’ll take it, yeah.”

They traded violence in silence for a couple minutes more until Costello’s phone rang the bell to end the round. They were theoretically there to train though, so time for some bag work. Hoeff jumped over the ropes and down to the floor to go claim his favorite.

“You always get the good one!”

Hoeff just shrugged, and started on some light speed work. “Move faster next time.”

“Eh. Maybe I’ll see if I can be the one to finally break this one.” Costello took position and started laying into it. “Anyway. So.”

“So.”

“If Shepard’s the kind of guy who’ll follow whatever order Chambliss gives him…”

“…Ah.” Hoeff knew where this was going. He decided to let loose on the bag and show Costello what he was holding back.

“He’s not entirely without reason.” Costello was, of course, aware of what Hoeff was and even vaguely aware of who he served. He might even have known something about Hoeff’s most recent adventures as a waiter. Still.

“Not reason enough. But at least he’s stickin’ to his guns,” Hoeff muttered, and decided to start kicking the bag, too.

He was happy to see Costello struggling to hold the bag still, at least. A short man’s gotta get his little revenges in somehow.

“Yeah…Can’t fault his tenacity.”

“That tenacity’s gonna—” Hoeff grinned savagely as he drilled a particularly fierce kick into the bag. “—break somethin’ important before long.”

There was a slight hissing sound. A moment later, a trickle of sand on the floor. Ha!

“…Goddamnit.” Costello shook his head with a grin. “I’m gonna be the last on the team to manage that, aren’t I?”

“Maybe you ain’t got a big enough hate in you.”

“Nah. I’m just not stupid enough,” he grinned. Well, fair enough. “Anyway. I think everyone worries about this President or that breaking all that’s good in the world—”

“To be fair, they all do.”

“Right. But that leaves us with a bit of a problem here.”

Yeah. Hoeff nodded, and went to fetch the broom from its permanent stash in the corner. “I s’pose I better go get my resignation in order, then.”

“Not so fast. Some rather impressively well-informed people met with me today, and we hashed out a plan. It’s being run by the President as we speak and it is expected he will approve.”

“…Oh?”

“He will not tolerate you serving under his authority. He is, however, willing to release you and your team from all obligations under amiable terms.”

Well, then. “And I presume this is A-OK with everyone?”

“You’ll be having lunch with a friend to talk about that.”

Hoeff nodded, and grabbed the vacuum as well. The bag was now a sad, shrivelled shell of its former glory. “Thought I might be. What then?”

“What happens next is Mister Murphy will be arriving on-planet later tonight with an offer.”

“So I’ll be working for the big bear, then. What does he know?”

“He knows what you are and what your capabilities are. He doesn’t need to know the full details of your past exploits.”

Hoeff applied broom to sand. “Nobody does.”

“Right. In any case, you will retain full access to facilities, and you and your team will be expected to train up for your new role.”

“Which will be?”

“Something like JETS and HEAT combined. A more deniable option with more flexible focus. Expect more spaceborne work in the mix.”

“With a quartet of supergorillas?”

“Absolutely. They’re capable and learn fast. They’re up to algebra now, aren’t they?”

“Trigonometry and pre-Calc for Ferd. He’s caught up to Vemik now, thanks to the head injury. They’re apparently making a competition of who can get to Calc faster.”

“What’s the prize?”

“Winner gets to take Loor’s Singer on a date to Folctha. She seems pleased by the notion. Yan wanted to play too since the two are sort of an item…but he’s still on algebra.”

“Ha! Amazing how far they’ve come…in any case, there will be lots of cross-training. Expect more attention from Adam.”

That was okay. Hoeff was enjoying himself already under the giant puppy’s coaching. “Fair ‘nuff. Do Rees or Davies know anything yet?”

“No. That’ll be you briefing them, once the UK approves. And they need to agree of course…”

“Rog.”

“But this whole thing has become a truly epic clusterfuck, so we expect that the higher powers will agree very suddenly to make it go away.” Costello unhooked the bag and carried it over to the sand pit to dump its contents, then turned to appraise Hoeff. “You really find it, don’t you?”

“That’s just the third best thing about me.”

Costello grinned. “Oh? What are the other two?”

Hoeff tossed his vacuum load of sand out along with the rest. “My handsome-ass face and my top-tier dick game,” he deadpanned.

“Both of which charms are wasted on me.”

“Don’t know what ‘yer missin’.” Hoeff was already thinking ahead to his lunch date. “…Think I might need’ta call this session short. If I got folks to meet…”

“Probably better if you’re showered clean and don’t have my blood on your fists, yeah.”

Hoeff looked down, sure enough… “Musta nicked you at some point.”

“Eh. It happens. Enjoy lunch.” Costello finished hanging the replacement bag, gave Hoeff the nod, then bounced back onto the balls of his feet and started laying into it like he was bent on breaking this one before anyone else had ever even seen it.

Good luck to him. Get another buck of weight on his frame…anyway. Hoeff hit the showers with his mind ticking. He’d been expecting the President’s displeasure to land on him ever since the election, really. As these things went, it was a reasonable affair.

And now he had (probably) a much more relevant mission ahead of him. JETS was important but…well, it was a waste of his skills. He wasn’t just some jacked-up scout, as valuable as they were. No. He and his men were meant for something bigger.

…It might be a little weird being under the Great Father’s authority, but Hoeff had done weirder. And he’d seen that Daar really understood the need for Hoeffs. Or, at least, was too pragmatic to torture himself over the implications of employing stone-cold murderers.

But where else were the stone-cold murderers supposed to go? There was always a choice in life. Heaven or Hell, sink or swim, light side, dark side, didn’t fuckin’ matter what you called it. Nobody was ever born to do good or evil, but for Hoeff…having his Oath, his Mission, and masters he could respect? He needed it almost as much as he needed God.

He cleaned up, paying special attention to his knuckles. He had a lunch.

Time to make a good impression.

Date Point: 18y9m2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Arés

Adam had mission deployments about every two months, give or take. Most of them were minor things: a rescue here, a show of force there, a publicity stunt back on Earth for recruiting purposes…nothing much, really. The worst of it might be showing off a little at some air show or sports festival, or like that one time he stepped up on a bodybuilding stage and absolutely humiliated everyone, as he thumped around in the most ridiculously tiny posing trunks, dwarfing and upstaging them all, in all the embarrassing ways a man could be upstaged….

But still, even that was all in good fun, or done for a good cause or whatever. For the most part, that’s how things went. Even on the occasional, more serious missions, he and his crew were so overwhelmingly “overpowered” for the task at hand, she rarely lost sleep over it.

Not so this time. Very occasionally, a big mission came up.

This was the biggest yet and the most important. Something terrible was going to happen, and Adam would be there when it did. This time, they had forewarning. They knew when he would be deploying a few days ahead of time, and that gave them…

Well, it gave them time.

Having Mom and Dad over for vacation (and not-so-secretly, house hunting) ended up being a huge blessing. Along with Gabe and Jess, one couldn’t ask for a more supportive family. Nor was that even counting the friend network. Allison and Xiù were always available, ready to help however they could. Julian himself was never more than a text message and an array jump away, and he was always happy to lend a hand as an assistant instructor at Firth’s dojo, or a trainer at Adam’s gym for his most advanced clients.

They were all of them a blessing, because that meant she got to spend the next few days with her Chunk and their small family, and spend them worry-free.

Of course, Adam had a pretty expansive idea of what “family” meant to him. His brothers in HEAT were family too, along with a few other close friends, and he couldn’t get through a day without making sure they were doing okay: a quick session with Julian just to make sure he was progressing along, another the next day with Yan now, who was starting to train with the HEAT and was already a physically dominating presence. All by his natural self doing his cavemonkey thing, he was a serious rival for Adam. A well-matched one, too. Now, with proper programming in his training and proper supervision? Well. Yan was rocketing past everyone.

Which didn’t bother Adam as much as it might have before. It was good to see him more and more invested in his friends’ progress as an enthusiastic coach, rather than obsessing (and stressing out) over his own increasingly difficult goals. He’d not found his physical limits, but he was probably close; progress was an increasingly grueling endeavor, with the occasional hard-earned leap forward. There had to be a limit to how far the medical superscience could push things.

His friends, though? He had several with incredible innate potential. Daar and Yan had already found it and had earnestly promised Adam they’d maximize it. They’d proved they were the bigger, better beasts, and Adam enthused at just how far they could take things, even though it was his own know-how and no small part of his own determination that got them there in the first place. Their victories were his too, and his human projects were closing in faster and faster.

Then there was Firth and Julian, the best genetic wunderkinds around, both of whom were more or less fully back in their physical youths and growing faster than Adam had ever managed at any point. That they’d upstage Adam was just a matter of time now, and he’d not let them get away with anything less. God, Firth would be smug for weeks when that day finally came. He’d probably celebrate with the worst Hawaiian shirt, too.

Julian would probably just step on the scale one day, scratch the back of his head and mutter “oh, Jeez!”

Marty giggled at that thought.

“What’re you schemin’ on now?” Adam wondered, as they wandered around the park, ambling behind little Diego as he explored and found new ways to get filthy.

“Oh, nothing. Just thinking about what a silly stereotype you are…” she teased.

Adam looked down and grinned, and of course flexed at her exactly in the way he knew could fluster her. He didn’t know how not to. “Yeah, that’s me! Anythin’ in particular?”

Which…

Well, a girl didn’t go in for a hulking boy like Adam unless they had a strong appreciation for what all his stone-carved acres of ultra-masculine geometry represented: willpower, discipline, endurance. Stoic, private suffering as he’d built himself into something objectively better than anything that’d come before. Good health, good genes. Intelligence and foresight, to manage such a thing in the first place. Dedication, to put all that showy bulk to good use. Being athletic and huge and strong and fit and enduring, all at the same time? A man needed all the manly virtues, but squared and cubed and with books added—a double master’s in exercise science and nutrition, in Adam’s case. No human anywhere was a match for him on any of those things, and not even Yan—a literal tree-swinging supermonkey, whose entire life was one of hunting and gymnastics—was as yet so complete an athlete as her Chunk.

Boys didn’t build themselves into men like that unless that had a big heaping pile of all the things that made men, men. Of course, one didn’t need to be a car-crushing hulk to be a man. But only a man could ever be that hulk in the first place. And it took a real man to help his friends outshine him, too; the Great Father wouldn’t be nearly so great, had Adam not shown him how. When Yan finally finds his own potential and crushes Adam at everything, when Julian and Firth someday pass him by…he’d be the one to cheer them on, the one who got them there to begin with. There was a lot of beauty there, to go along with all the beast.

And for the foreseeable future…he was the beastliest.

She smiled at the thought. “Nothing,” she assured him. “Though I will say I’m grateful you did your Beef things early this morning with your friends, instead of, y’know.”

“All day long?”

“As is your habit, yeah.”

“And my job,” he reminded her. “But still, gotta take it easy right now. And besides, as much as I love them, I married you.” He wrapped that titanic arm around and gently pulled her in.

“Oh, I dunno, you seem to do more sweaty wrestling with them than you do me…”

“Hey! You’ve been pregnant a lot the last couple years!”

“I noticed,” she replied, drily.

They watched Diego fondly. Marty had discovered from her mother’s group that, while boys of course tended to be more adventurous, Diego was pretty exceptional in that regard, both in his physical development and his personal aptitude. He seemed to like collecting rocks and bringing them back, too: the bigger, the better.

Already he was a big pretty meathead, in a family rich in meatheads on both sides. Oh well, at least his speech and reading was ahead of the curve, too.

“Still didn’t hear you refute my point. You owe me, mister!”

“Oh, don’t worry. Dad’s coming by at noon to pick up Diego…and then I’ve got plans for you.”

“Sweaty wrestling plans?”

“Oh, the sweatiest,’” he grinned. “I might even stop and grill a steak at some point.”

“Gosh, how romantic,” she deadpanned. “Sure know how to woo a girl!”

Adam gave her a once-over with the most predatory look. “Apparently I do.”

She looked up and flushed a bit at how his smug grin made his normally painfully handsome face just that little bit harder to look away from. He wasn’t normally an overly egotistical kind of boy, but when he was feeling possessive… and he was right. Her man was a wild one, and he had needs. Big, passionate, powerful needs.

So did she. And he satisfied them.

“I dunno if ‘woo’ is the word I’d use, being honest…”

“Oh, me neither. I’m jus’ keeping to polite words.” His arm scarcely twitched and he’d lifted her against his chest, so they were suddenly and instantly face-to-face. “I think words just get in the way of what I’d need to say…”

…Jesus. He’d never lost his ability to fluster her, even after all these years.

Of course…she could fluster him too, when she wanted. She snuck her nose past his cheek, caught his ear between her teeth, and purred.

He tensed, then made a pained noise. “…Oh, that ain’t fair!”

“M-hm!” Marty grinned. “I fight dirty.”

“We’re fightin’ now?”

Marty just grinned, then prodded at his arm until he let her go and put her down again. “Our son’s getting away.”

There was method to teasing him. She’d married a giant eyebrow-waggling goofball, but there was a thunderous mass of passion burning in his heart. Huge happiness and huge sadness, and right now he needed the huge happy. He might play at being frustrated, but the fact was…he loved being teased by her. He’d “punish” her for it later, an ordeal she was thoroughly looking forward to…

But that was later. Right now, he turned his head, chuckled, and darted off to help Diego climb the large decorative standing stone he was trying to scale.

That’s what today was all about, after all. Adam’s work load had been light in the last few days, mostly training and readiness. Everyone had tacit permission to “take care of personal business” and so that was what they were doing. An extended ‘I love you.’ Enjoying the simple joy of being together, here and now.

She checked on Samuel in his stroller—sound asleep—then followed.

The children imposed their routine on life. For a while there, they’d been able to escape from Diego by leaving him with Gabe and Jess. Samuel though? Samuel was too young. Samuel needed tit on the regular, though thank God he was finally shifting into a more parent-friendly sleep pattern. If they were incredibly lucky, he’d be one of those rare angel babies who slept a solid eight hours at night, once put to bed.

There was boring adult stuff. Dinner (Adam’s turn to cook, while Marty changed the sheets and handled the evening laundry) cleaning (they kept a neat house, so that never took long) putting the boys to bed…

She’d barely closed Diego’s bedroom door when she was, with no warning and no chance to prepare, suddenly up against the wall, pinned and helpless with a huge, hardened hand invading under her T-shirt, up her body, squeezing her breast, squeezing her throat…

Her pulse was instantly up. She pushed herself back into his body, reached back and pawed helplessly at the firm package grinding against her butt.

There was no resisting strength like his, especially not when she didn’t want to. A shove, a growled order, the bedroom door—he turned on the privacy forcefield. Conventional soundproofing wasn’t enough for them, they needed spacemagic supertech. Moments later she was on her knees, her head controlled by the commanding tension of his fingers in her hair, but her own hands free to work on his shorts, slip him out of them, help her taste him…

His grip on her hair got gentler. Stroked her scalp. His voice was hoarse as he praised her, and that just made her want to do better. It wasn’t easy, it was never easy, but if she relaxed and had courage, she could bury her nose against his belly…

God she loved the way he cursed when she did that. Spanish was a language made for dangerous men having their cocks sucked.

Alas, that bit of fun couldn’t last long. He only had so much self control before they had to move on. He was always gentler after that first bit of foreplay, though. Still picking her up and moving her around and being absolutely in charge of her, but now his focus was on tormenting her with his own tongue and fingers.

It was cruel, in a way. What she wanted was so tantalizingly close to hand, but he refused to share until he had her writhing on the sheets, until she was complaining loudly. He wanted her to beg. She didn’t want to beg…but she always did, in the end. And the sheer relief of getting what she begged for made her whole body rush and tingle, until his size and power forced a cry out of her that would definitely have woken somebody if not for the field…

They didn’t make love. It wasn’t just some ordinary fuck. It was a raw, primal tangle of limbs and brutal deep thrusting and aching fullness and kissing and moaning and groaning, swearing and loving, until her whole body was acting on instinct and her mind was lost in a delusion of melting together and then lost in nothing at all except the beautiful agony of a climax…

And that was just the warm-up. As much as she could play his body like a fine instrument, he could destroy her. Again, and again, and again…

It was just what she needed.

In the aftermath of it all, rather than falling asleep, they just…lay together. Enjoying the feeling of skin on skin, the sound of each others’ breathing, even the slight dampness of mingled perspiration and shared body heat. His hand didn’t stop moving, though. His fingertips trailed up and down her spine, barely making contact.

Ironic. Minutes ago, he’d gripped her and tossed her around hard enough to bruise. Now, it was like he hardly dared touch her.

She could tell when he worked up to say something. The soft rush of his breath got a little louder under her head.

“…You’ll be okay. Right?”

She turned and looked up at him. “You’re not usually worried.”

“This one’s…” his hand came up and massaged the back of her neck. “It’s gonna be big. We’re kicking off something huge with this, and we’ll be pretty much constantly deployed…”

“And it’s going to be bloody.”

“…Yeah.”

“Even if it goes perfectly.”

“Yeah.”

She wriggled up him a ways until she was nose-to-nose with him. “No.”

“No?”

“No, I wouldn’t be okay. I’d cope. We’re set up. We’d get by. But I wouldn’t be okay. I want you back, hear?”

“Marty…you know I’ll do what I can. And that’s more than just about anyone. But…well…”

“I know.” She traced her fingertips through a day’s gorgeously coarse beard stubble. “I just love you. I don’t want to lose you. But…we’d cope. You’ve seen to that.”

“Well…I don’t want to lose me, either.” He smiled, faintly. “So I’ll try not to.”

“Good.” She rubbed their noses together in an eskimo kiss, then chased into it for a slow, tender one full of love.

They were interrupted by the baby monitor in the corner emitting the faint, scratchy sounds that presaged an awake and hungry infant. Adam chuckled softly.

“I think we made it just before feeding time…”

Marty laughed. “…I love them, but fuck. I miss having no interruptions…”

“Oh, it’s okay…” Adam leered. “I’ll be recharged and ready ‘fer round two, if you can handle it…”

She gave him a playful swat on the chest, and rolled out of bed to hit the shower quickly. She had a few minutes before Samuel woke properly and started hollering for his midnight snack, and she’d rather not be all sweaty and sex-smelling. While she was cleaning herself up, she heard him change the sheets.

She grinned to herself: She’d got herself a good one. She was going to enjoy every second she had of him.

And whatever came in the next few days…she had his heart, his love, and their family.

In the end, a girl couldn’t ask for more.

Date Point: 18y9m2w3d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Regaari

Life had a way of carrying people far, in small steps.

Regaari could still clearly remember a timid, lost, lonely, intimidated human girl doing her best to find a place for herself among an alien species. He could still remember firmly believing that Sister Shoo must be one of the strongest things in all creation, far physically superior to anything a Gao could ever hope to be.

How wrong he’d been.

Mother Shoo was confident, grounded, happy and confident. She hadn’t just found a place for herself, she’d made a home, and everyone was welcome. Julian and Allison, obviously, but the Buehler twins too, Tristan’s girlfriend Saffron, Myun, Lewis and Lucy, Clara and Dane, Leemu and Gorku, the Arés family, the Tisdales, Firth and Freya and their kids…even Hoeff seemed to soften a little when he entered her domain.

Apparently she’d had more than enough solitude for a lifetime.

Throw in a growing property empire, much of which was invested in rebuilding Franklin, and caring for her own son, and frankly it was all… fearsome. Regaari was surrounded on a daily basis by people who pushed the absolute limits of martial excellence, but he reserved his awe for Shoo. After all, he understood how the others achieved what they did. Taking the dose of pain life had given her and weaving it into joy, though? He didn’t know how she’d done it…but he was glad.

Her bao had improved over the years, too. Once she’d finally learned to love Nava.

Of course, life had taken him far too, but not always in such smooth steps.

Once he’d seen himself as a suave, cool, collected agent of intrigue. It seemed a little kitsch nowadays—though, who didn’t love kitsch?!—but in those more innocent times where the spycraft was between Clan, between clanless, among the witless and largely dull masses of the Dominion…

Then the Humans arrived, and everyone had to up their game. Everyone. The glamor of Whitecrest wasn’t so glamorous anymore. Oh sure, there had always been danger, always been darkness. Even among a sea of near-livestock, there were sharp, cruel minds.

But everyone had upped their game. The enemy included.

The composite of his new paw tapped on the mug Shoo handed him as he picked it up. It was the third replacement in a month, and ‘Horse had groaned at him for his stubbornness. Shoo smiled at him and sat down opposite. Really, he’d just dropped in to say hello and take this last chance to spend some time with his friend before they were called back to base and locked down ahead of a dangerous mission.

The looming future had his mind milling over some dark thoughts. He’d hoped a little Shoo Magic would pick him.

“Your fur’s nearly all grown back,” she commented obliquely. Shoo of course had expressed similar feelings about his cyberlimb. Everyone had. Balls, he even agreed with them! But…

Regaari considered his forearm ruefully. He’d eventually conceded some ground and accepted the wisdom of regrowing the arm at least back as far as the wrist. The synthetic bone and muscle hadn’t been adding any performance. The paw was still useful, still could do things that organic flesh and blood could not. But the demands of his work had required him to finally accept at least partial regeneration.

It set his teeth on edge, though. The cyberlimbs had been…well, they’d been a touch of his old self. Elegant and sleek, even rakish. A scar worthy of a Whitecrest! But they couldn’t keep up. Machine and metal in this case could not match meat and bone, and he’d started to look and perform lopsided. His forearms now were thicker and more severely-shaped than most any Deathworlder’s upper arm, even champion powerlifters or a modestly fit Ten’Gewek man. Silky fur did help to soften the edges around it, figurative and literal…

But his whole body was now much the same, an unsubtle reminder of the new, more brutal game they were playing. Keeping the paw was partly about keeping some art.

Or at least, some of the art from Before.

“Yeah…Give it a week and some grooming and it’ll look just like the rest of me,” he commented, trying not to make it a lament.

Shoo wasn’t fooled. She Raised an Eyebrow, and no male Regaari had ever met, of any species, could long resist a Human female’s glare under such circumstances.

He made it nearly ten seconds.

“…It’s just…” He sniffed the drink she’d made for him. Both Shoo and Gyotin believed in the healing power of hot drinks, but where Gyotin was a zealot for tea, Shoo made cocoa that could warm the soul. It had spices, and an aroma so complex even a Gaoian nose found it challenging. She apparently never let it cool down, just kept it in a big insulated jug in the stasis fridge. “…I don’t know, really. It just doesn’t feel right. I know the arm was holding me back, but part of me doesn’t like losing it.”

“Julian felt the same way about his foot, for a while.”

“And quite sensibly abandoned it, when it nearly took his life. I am keenly aware of how irrational I am being. I am a HEAT operator with super-Human strength and I’m being a sentimental old fool.”

“You’re allowed to be a little irritational, yijao?”

She was artful with what she omitted. “But not this much.”

“That’s up to you, and your own conscience.”

“Well…” Regaari flexed his cyberpaw around the mug. “We all pay our own penances in life. I don’t think you should throw them away lightly.”

Penance, but of course it was much more than that. Mostly, it was a lament for…well, himself.

There was a time when Regaari had been the future of the Clan. The genetic model, a perfect specimen entrusted to work directly with the Mother-Supreme. He’d been the Clan’s face to the Clan of Females, a position very likely to lead on to being the Champion and Stud-Prime…though that personal prestige had also been something of a way of keeping him from making trouble. Clan internal politics were nothing if not intricate.

That future hadn’t come to pass. And not just because he had squandered it with his own hubris, against his own sworn Cousin and one of the few true loved ones in his life. Worse, he’d squandered a position of deep trust with the Great Father. Reconciled he may be to Cousin and Father, but never again would Daar place that level of faith in him.

Rightfully so. He didn’t deserve it.

But there was another force that had pushed his life off that course. Simply put, the Clan and the Gao needed something different than him. Or at least…what he’d been bred and raised to be. Whitecrest’s primary purpose has always been a covert one, but lately the demand was much more martial than stately, of directed violence rather than clandestine wool-gathering.

The ascendency of Thurrsto had been the final blow to Regaari’s future ambitions.

Which, even thinking such a thing felt like a betrayal. Thurrsto was a Brother and a Cousin too, and a well-deserved Champion. He had one of the most innocent and pure souls Regaari had ever known in the Clan, while surrendering none of the cold, smooth edge that made a Whitecrest, a Whitecrest. He was a good embodiment of the Clan. The best, even!

He was also a reversion. There, the elder Fathers were correct. The rise of Thurrsto had upset the very notion of what it meant to be a successful Whitecrest. His almost effortless dominance of those same Fathers meant none could question him, lest they find themselves destroyed subtly or, if it came to it…by Thurrsto’s own steel-ripping claws.

Once, a Whitecrest like Thurrsto had been considered brutish and ugly, a throwback to a less civilized time. The Thurrsto that Regaari had befriended and trusted was always…something less, as a consequence. He aspired to be what Regaari had so perfectly embodied.

Now, Thurrsto was the standard of what a Whitecrest should be, and Regaari was only attractive to the females by his own wit…and how he compared against his Champion. The mission didn’t need suave anymore.

“Penance for what?”

There was one downside to such excellent hot chocolate: the layer of marshmallows and cream on top made drinking it with dignity impossible. Regaari licked a layer of sugary sweetness from the fur around his mouth, and set the mug down.

“It’s…a lifetime of things. People I was supposed to keep alive and didn’t. People I was supposed to look after who I couldn’t. People I’ve hurt, people I’ve thought less of, who really should have done to me instead…”

“Ah,” she said, knowingly. “We all have regrets. But if I can offer one small piece of advice?”

“Always.”

“Regrets are what we make of them.” She reached out and tapped his paw. “You don’t have to wear them on your sleeve.”

Regaari looked down. “Or wrist, as it were.”

“Exactly. And, if I were going to intrude a little more…I nearly lost Julian over this kind of self-sentimentality. I wouldn’t want to lose you, either.”

Regaari duck-nodded, picked up his drink again, and appreciated the comfortable silence of old friends. And the cocoa. He’d pay for it when ‘Horse saw it in his food log, but that was a familiar price.

A small hand tapped his leg. He glanced down, and found Anna had decided to give him Something She’d Found. It turned out to be a character from some Human made-for-little-ones cartoon.

“Wagwi! ‘S’a house!”

“Uh…” On the one hand, Regaari’s heart was going gooey, on the other hand he had no idea how to interact with cubs. Of any species.

“She wants you to build a house with her,” Shoo translated, grinning. “which means your job is to sit on the floor with her and approve of what she’s doing.”

Well, that sounded simple enough. And sure enough, the child did all the work, with a serious expression as she stuck colorful little magnetic bricks together and occasionally handed him whatever she’d built so he could make appreciative noises…

It made melancholy utterly impossible.

He stayed most of the afternoon, and the evening. Allison and Julian came home, there was dinner, earnest conversation with the fine young men under their care. An easy bout of evening exercise, and…

He was out on the street, having said his goodbyes. Rain would be coming soon.

Feeling lighter than he had in quite some time, Regaari sank to all fours and loped his way home.

Date Point: 18y9m2w4d AV
Rauwrhyr Republic flagship Soar Undaunted, en route to the border of Hunter space

Fleet Commander Atrucryr

The briefing had been quick, but inspirational. Atrucryr’s leaders had seen fit to keep this thing a secret until the last possible second, which meant the entire navy was scrambling to catch up. Leave had been cancelled, ships readied and formed up, even shakedown cruises abandoned.

The Gao and the Humans were up to something big and were pulling their ships off the tradelanes.

Atrucryr knew good and well just how protected the civilian shipping was, and also how unaware of that fact they were. Human ships in particular were invisible: when they wanted to be, they were voids in the void, returning no more visible a signature than a fleck of dust. Their dark, angled hulls scattered active sensors, and the refrigeration under those hulls let them tightly focus their waste heat in a coherent beam no wider than Atrucryr’s own slender arm bones.

Certainly, no civilian ship was equipped to spot them. An AEC destroyer could get within mere kilometers undetected, watch unseen, ambush without warning and fade away with a good chance that whatever they left alive had no idea what had just happened. The Hunters clearly feared them: the lanes near Human space had never been quieter, despite how much they were rumored to covet Human flesh.

The Gao on the other hand went in for sheer speed, and the finest in extreme long-range sensors. They didn’t need to sneak about undetected. They saw all, and pounced on any Hunter foolish enough to show itself, their coming heralded by megalight interceptors followed, moments later, by ships that were little more than a brutally effective weaponized shield system with engines.

And now, suddenly, the Rauwrhyr were being asked to step in and fill the gap left by those two predators. A few years ago, that might have been impossible. Today…

Well. they’d come a long way and learned much. And the Republic had their own innovations to showcase.

Take the Soar Undaunted. The new Undaunted class was a flag officer’s ship, devoted to the role of leading the fight. It was tough, fast and agile, hard to catch and harder to kill, and loaded with sensors, smart computers and everything a commander needed to fully understand the battlespace.

In support, a trio of Bold-class heavy shield cruisers, their designs inspired by—and directly borrowed from—the Gaoian Fury class and the Human San Diego. Flying shield emitters with mighty onboard refrigeration, capable of taking a battering unlike anything a Rauwrhyr ship had ever been built for, and designed to switch seamlessly from protecting their fellows, to physically ripping foes in half.

And then, the fleet’s teeth: five Proud-class, equipped to direct a withering storm of superluminal firepower into anything that got too close.

Atrucryr certainly felt proud. He had confidence in these ships. He trusted them, knowing that every element of their design had been proven in battle. It didn’t matter to him that the testing had been done by other species, or that these hulls were new combinations of alien technologies: just standing on the bridge of his Undaunted felt right, in a way no earlier ship in his career had.

And now, it fell to him and his fleet to keep the civilians protected while the deathworlders did…something else. Something Atrucryr would have gladly done himself, but was secretly a little glad not to be doing. They were invading Hunter space.

During his long conversations with Human and Gaoian military leaders and educators, the concept of the spear-tip and the spear-shaft had been discussed often. How the honorable and deadly work at the sharp end was impossible without the scutwork behind it. Well, this promised to be scutwork, but only if done correctly. Done too soon, and the Hunters might notice and foresee the attack. Done too late, and there might be a gap in coverage, or a delay in critical resources reaching the fight. Either mistake would be counted in deaths, so the handover needed to be smooth, timely and professional.

And it was.

There was no ceremony over this. It was enough to simply be in position promptly on time, to send out the coded notification that they were ready to accept that sector’s patrol, and watch as a supposedly empty patch of space sent them a grateful acknowledgment, emitted the bright twist of a jump drive, and fell silent again.

The civilians never noticed a thing. Atrucryr’s fleet was just as capable of being a hole in space when they wanted, and as far as the general merchant traffic was concerned, there was never a military ship present at all.

Good. There was no sense in tiring himself out and he had administrative duties to perform. If this mission went to plan, he’d be doing nothing but administrative duties. One could hope.

“I’ll be in my cabin. Subcommander Cryxruwr, You have the ship.”

“Sir.”

The cabin was smaller than he was used to. The new ship designs took advice from Humans, who took the lamentably pragmatic view that a warship wasn’t a pleasure liner, and so personal space was kept to an efficient minimum. The captain’s cabin was the largest by far, and even then it was only exactly as wide as the bed was long. The desk and its terminal folded up to become part of the wall, and he sat on the bed to use them.

Atrucryr’s instincts longed for room to stretch his wings and glide between trees, but the design was practical, saved on mass and volume…it might be the difference that kept the ship intact in a fight. And it wasn’t like the larger quarters had been particularly comfortable before, anyway.

He perched on the bed, pulled down the desk, and accessed the secure comms network. Reports from all across the sector told him that his fellows in other fleet groups were doing as he had just done. The handover, it seemed, was going smoothly.

There was a message from the Great Father of the Gao, addressed to all fleet commanders, non-urgent. A video file.

If Atrucryr was right, Daar intended to personally take part in the fighting. If so, he certainly looked the part. Fur trimmed that short would have looked severe on a Rauwrhyr. On a Gaoian—especially a singular one like Daar—it looked dangerous. That was a trim bordering on a shave, one obviously designed to go under a full-body combat suit and not distract with pinching or pulling.

And he had words for the fleet.

“I want to thank you all for what you’ve just done.”

He was standing in front of the Gaoian throne, with a simple twisted crown atop his head and images from his species’ history playing out on the mural behind him.

“Your willingness to heed the call is to be commended. Without you, what we’re doing would be far more difficult, far more dangerous, and would come at a heavier cost of life. Make no mistake, however—we’re about to kick a nest full’a stinging, swarming insects, and they’re gonna be mad. While their ire will surely be aimed mostly at us, it still falls ‘ta you ‘ta be vigilant. You’ll be the ones ‘ta contain them, keep their anger from spillin’ out to the cost of innocent folks. Do not suppose your work will go unnoticed and unappreciated. Much danger awaits you, as we drive the enemy before us and their swarm grows desperate.”

He stood a little taller and pricked up his ears. “The Hunters have festered in our galaxy for millions of years. Today, we lance that cyst. It won’t be painless and it won’t be clean, but it’ll leave a safer, healthier future for all our peoples. Good luck to you. And good hunting.”

Short, effective, and pointed. Still, Atrucryr found himself resolved. He, his peers, his fleet and his crews had been entrusted with a weight that the deathwolders had been bearing for too long. It was time for the species not born with that brand to stand up and shoulder it again, and prove that it could be borne. This was his role in a larger fight, and he was proud of it.

He opened his next messages, and started to coordinate with the fleet commanders in adjacent sectors.

They were ready.

Date Point: 18y9m2w4d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao.

First Director Shanl

Shanl had worked her way to the top of the Directorate through a long and difficult career, where she was often in direct competition with some of the sharpest and most ruthless minds in the galaxy. She had exhibited time and again the Directorate’s ideals of calm rationality, poise, dispassion and calculation. There was very little that intimidated her, or at least gave her pause.

The Great Father was the first such thing in a very long time.

The jump to Gao had been direct and to the point, with the usual arrival ceremonies omitted. Telling, that. She was instead greeted by Daar’s personal aide, led directly to the Great Father’s wing of High Mountain Fortress, and rather than head towards his offices or some other instrument of court, they went along a winding series of corridors, where loud, aggressive music grew unbearably noisy, where the temperature and humidity grew increasingly uncomfortable, where the very feeling of the place suggested an immense artificial gravity field nearby—

His gym. They were taking her to the Great Father’s personal gym.

Of all the ways he could express his displeasure with her and the Corti, this was perhaps the one most perfectly calculated to do so. He’d decided to confront her in the one place that exemplified everything he was and everything she could never be. He did so knowing how much recent history had proven it mattered, too—and on the eve of actual battle, no less!

It took Shanl a few blinks to restore her inner calm. It was an insult, yes. A brilliantly well-crafted one, too. Nonetheless…calm. Detachment. Empirical experience over feelings.

As they approached, the smell of exertion and aggression grew thoroughly overpowering. They passed through a doorway plastered in dire warnings written in Gaori and, oddly, English. Most of them were in an informal vernacular and seemed to concern the required behavior within, and were written in a brutish, angular hand-painted script. She took a moment to memorize them before entering.

It was an expansive and elaborate setup. The flow of the room was at least logical and sound, though she couldn’t find anything admirable about…any of the rest. This was a cave. A cave designed for exceptionally large beasts to train. Shanl was very much out of her depth.

The walls were painted black and red, and were hewn of rough stone. Half of the wallspace had full-length mirrors, while the rest were painted over with a great many shields, crests, mons, and other such symbols of affiliation from across Gaoian and Human culture. Stoneback featured pervasively of course, along with Highmountain and Whitecrest, but it seemed every major Clan had at least some token somewhere, each staking their own mote of presence in the facility. In-between every symbol were scribbles, notes, some lewd jokes, some obviously heartfelt tributes to people Shanl had never heard of. From the gridiron ceiling hung flags, many of which she recognized as being of an aggressively martial bent. Portraits, too. Presumably fallen warriors, though she had no way of knowing.

Despite the aggressive and rough-hewn decor, some thought had been given to safety as well as function, and some pride in appearances was clearly present. Everything was immaculately clean, despite the oppressive weight of the hot, humid air. Sharp edges were nowhere to be found, exposed metal surfaces were padded against slips or falls. Medical equipment was prominently affixed to each wall, and the space itself was floored with tough rubberized matting, divided by a low fence with an open multi-purpose area on one side.

On the other was a well-equipped weight area, one obviously dedicated to extremely intense resistance training. Warning lights in blue and red were active along the fence, especially near the weight area’s gate. From across the space, Shanl could feel the residual pull of a powerfully deep artificial gravity well, could feel the thrum of the plating through her bare feet. They were obviously specialized heavy grav-plates, operating at the edge of their capability.

So: military symbols everywhere. A cave for bestial men to train their bodies rather than refine their minds. A full-on sensory assault, from the smell, to the lighting, to the “music,” if it could be called that. All of it was a powerful cacophony designed to embody extreme aggression.

“Please remain near the doorway,” the Great Father’s aide near-shouted over the sonorous waves emanating from the large wall-mounted speakers. “I will inform him of your arrival.”

Daar either hadn’t noticed their arrival or was pretending not to. In either case, the Great Father of the Gao was seated at a machine with his hugely broad, immensely over-muscled back to her, pulling repeatedly on some sort of close-handled grip, which was attached to high-tensile flex-cables twice as thick as her own arms. Those in turn were attached to…to…

Her mind blanked for a moment as she added the numbers in her head, and multiplied by her most conservative guess at the gravity field’s strength. How–?

This was a statement, she realized. A statement about power. Specifically, it was a statement about who actually held it between them, and what that power truly was. No longer was the Corti’s technological and scientific superiority the defining asymmetry between their people. The Gao were advanced enough for their own purposes and fully capable of advancing on their own. What mattered now was what that room symbolized, what the Great Father embodied like no other. What his body was doing, what it meant his people could do.

They had the strength to fight their enemies and the Corti did not. It was as simple as that. The Gao of course had their own logistics, and weapons, and competent leadership and all the rest…but they also had what only Deathworlders could claim.

They had physicality. Bravery in the face of death. Sheer, personal might. There, sitting before here, rowing a stupendous weight she’d hardly believe heavy machinery could handle, was the avatar of it all. The Deathworlder. The one against whom all were measured, and all fell short. Whom she had a hand in engineering, and who knew he had been engineered.

For the moment, he was choosing to let her ponder that fact while he made his statement in studied personal silence.

The aide approached the fenceline, sank to all fours and carefully crossed the threshold. Instantly he visibly strained against the force, struggling to remain standing even in that low posture. He carefully plodded his way toward the Great Father, attempted to rise slightly and failed. He spoke to the Great Father, though Shanl couldn’t hear the words over the sonic assault. The aide duck-nodded, struggled back out of the gravity well and sighed in relief as he crossed the threshold back to Gao standard. From there, he stood wobbling up on his hind legs, went over to some controls, and turned the music’s volume down to something more tolerable.

It took the aide another moment to recompose himself. “…The Great Father will entertain you as he finishes his workout. I will be available in the office down the hall.” He opened a cabinet nearby and unfolded a comfortable-looking chair. “A steward will bring refreshments shortly. Good day.”

Shanl found herself alone, save for her own assistant and modest retinue. Meanwhile, the Great Father said nothing, engaged a third full stack of weights, and just kept pulling…and pulling…and pulling…

After a moment of thought, Shanl deduced he was waiting on her to make the first move. Very well. First thing’s first.

“Thank you, everyone. Please leave us be.”

Her aide nodded gently, and her staff quietly made their way out. The moment they were gone, Daar barked a command to turn the music down to a bare rumble from the speakers.

“You treat ‘yer subordinates well,” he commented, over a grunt of exertion. “Or at least politely. There’s that, at least.”

No title, no formality. He wasn’t bothering to clean himself up, make any effort toward a presentable greeting. He’d chosen to deliberately disregard the arrival of a fellow paramount leader by refusing to interrupt something a banal as weight training.

Well, two could play that game, so she levied her own subtle barb. “They are accomplished researchers in their own right. There is no harm in giving respect where it is due.”

The Great Father grunted in acknowledgement, sat forward, upped the weight again—stack number four added to the immense payload—re-settled himself and continued his intimidating display. His back’s obscene, freakish musculature responded instantly to the heavier load, the anatomical detail of each fiber bulging a bit bigger and more sharply defined with every pull.

The promised refreshments arrived promptly. After a measure of water and a (frankly, excellent) young primary mushroom, Shanl felt ready to tackle the moment before her. She approached the fence cautiously and, perhaps in the “spirit” of things, asked a question her scientific curiosity desired to know. “How deep is the gravity?”

“Enough ‘ta squash even strong people like overripe navas.” He paused and let the weights crash with a room-shaking thud. He took a couple deep breaths and shook out his pelt, flinging his reek everywhere. “As ‘fer the numbers, I dunno at th’ moment. Feels maxed out. Program’s set ‘ta respond to my work output, so I’ll look at the curve when I’m done.”

“…Impressive.”

“Ayup. But mega strength was only one o’ the things y’all engineered into me, ain’t it?”

…Well. That certainly explained his attitude. It wasn’t a question. He already knew enough to be displeased, so there was no art to be had in subtlety or word-crafting.

“How much do you know?”

His response was to chitter deep in his chest, and keep lifting. Obtuse and impenetrable…but effective. Very well, time for the honesty she had come here to deliver.

“In answer to your question: yes. Extreme physical might is one of many objectives that drove your engineering. Great Father…is this all necessary?”

For the first time he turned at his waist and looked her dead in the eyes—an act of undisguised aggression, that—but there wasn’t any malice to be seen. Instead…well, she wasn’t a reliable judge of gaoian beauty, but even across species he was stunningly, brutally handsome—and an amused handsome at that. He considered her, sniffed the air, and grumbled deep in his chest. “Ha! ‘Yer ballsy! That’s good. But to answer ‘yer question: yeah. This is necessary.”

He turned back, added two more stacks of weight, and resumed his lifting.

Shanl felt a little led on and didn’t like it, so she asked the universal question: “Why?”

That got another amused grumble out of him, but it was a full minute before he answered.

“Well…I din’t wanna…” another grunt, another pull against the weight, “rob ‘ya of an hnnngh! opportunity…” a rapid-fire series of pulls, which went on for three hundred and eighteen seconds, until he’d at last exhausted his considerable reserves of energy. The Great Father let the weight slam back down with a calamitous crash.

He took a slightly longer moment this time to catch his breath, then chugged down a large container of some kind of thick, colored drink, and spun around to face her. “I figger, I should at least let my creator have a good look at me.”

…That was a deeply unfortunate surprise. How had he known so much already? So many questions stemmed from that, and Shanl found herself at a loss for words.

Daar wasn’t, apparently. “What? Gricka got ‘yer tongue?”

“A colorful analogy. You…know more than I had hoped.”

“‘Yer damn right I do,” he growled. “Corti science leaves a smell. Fingerprints. Whatever you wanna call it. Only real question is where the Hierarchy’s work ended an’ where ‘yers began.”

“Perhaps more poignantly, the more urgent question is one of purpose, rather than effort.”

“Sounds an awful lot like ‘yer gonna minimize ‘yer contribution t’all this.”

“Not at all. I came here for a full accounting.”

“Hmm.” He stared at her a long moment longer, nostrils flaring once, twice, three times. Then he turned back to his weights. “We’ll come back ‘ta that. ‘Fer now, I’m gonna finish my workout. Ain’t gone balls-out ‘fer at least a few days, so you jus’ sit there an’ enjoy the show. Ain’t many get ‘ta see what I can really do.”

It wasn’t an invitation, and he wasn’t being friendly. Faced with a mercurial giant who controlled an existentially important alliance, there was only one thing for Shanl to do.

She sat and observed, just as he wanted. It was a thorough education in the practical realities of such a physical existence. Instead of simply performing a difficult motion repeatedly until exhausted, as she had naively considered would be the case, the Great Father had a small notebook with him and, apparently, an extensively considered sequence for his activities. She found herself fascinated as he methodically worked over every major anatomical group on his body, until his every muscle bulged as sharply defined and prominently as his work-swollen back. Sweat slicked down his fur and rolled off his body in small rivulets, forming a substantial and growing puddle on the floor. He only paused to down another jug of his drink in-between each bout of exercise, presumably to replenish his lost fluids and salts, among other things.

“It is an immense personal commitment on your part to do this, isn’t it?” She asked during one brief period of rest.

He turned his attention to her. “Ayup. I’mma gonna need ‘ta fight in the worstest bits o’ the comin’ battle, ‘fer a buncha reasons, an’ I need ‘ta be ready ‘fer it. This is just one type o’ trainin’ we do, an’ not even the biggest bit. Most o’ our time goes ‘ta combat tactics, the related athletics, education…It’s a lot, an’ you don’t need me ‘ta tell ‘ya that. But I need ‘fer ‘ya ‘ta unnerstand a lil’ o’ what really goes into buildin’ up a fightin’ man like me. So…”

“So I am learning.”

“Good. Since we’re only a couple’a days out o’ the mission, today’s about conditionin’ more’n anything else. ‘Horse’s got me programmed ‘fer hypertrophy.”

Shanl blinked. “Hypertrophy programming?”

“Yeah. High-volume trainin’ an’ such unner high tension, designed ta’ emphasize size an’ mind-muscle connection more’n sheer strength. I’ll teach’ya th’ details later. ‘Fer now, jus’ know it’s good ‘fer ‘yer body shape—which matters ‘fer a fuckofa lot more’n lookin pretty, by the way—but more importanter is ‘yer work capacity. That’s mostly a factor o’ ‘yer energy reserves an’ ‘yer cardiovascular fitness, but almos’ as important is how big ‘yer muscles are, how well you can move ‘em, how much control over ‘em ‘ya got, an’ how good ‘yer range o’ motion is. I’ll be doin’ a lotta flexibility work later, an’ there’ll be a sports massage, too. It matters at this level.”

“…Has this not been a strength demonstration, then?”

“If by that you mean ‘showin’ off bein’ as strong as I could possibly manage,’ then no. These are durasteel weights in the mos’ powerful artificial gravity field money can buy, an’ I’m tossin’ ‘em around like fuckin’ toys. Given that, how’d ‘ya propose I reliably show off my limits?”

Shanl considered. “…A fair point.”

Daar sniffed the air again. “Essactly. I ain’t got no fuckin’ clue how strong I actually am jus’ now, ‘sides that I’m th’ most strongest by a fuckin’ longshot an’ I ain’t even hit my stride yet. All I can do is feel wit’ my body, and it’s tellin’ me shit’s gettin’ too easy wit’ this setup. Speakin’ of…legs next, then I start circuit number three. An’ ask questions if ‘ya got ‘em. I like ‘ta teach.”

He chugged yet another jug and, without another word, continued his workout.

There was a purpose to this. Shanl wasn’t clear on what exactly it was, but she could plainly understand it mattered a great deal to the Great Father. And, well: having nothing else to do, and her curiosity piqued…

“What precisely did you mean by ‘mind-muscle connection’?”

“Lotta broscience around that term, but mostly it’s ‘bout body control…”

He liked to teach, it turned out, and he was a good instructor. Rather than heedlessly plow forward and ignore her, he took the time to demonstrate precisely what each movement was, its purpose, how to safely perform each exercise, the specific functional differences between Gaoian, Human, and Ten’Gewek anatomies, and so on. Shanl, being a teacher herself, was interested to learn. This was a field of study the Corti had neglected, after all. Anything she could glean from an expert in the field was valuable.

She would write down his entire lesson verbatim, later. The benefits of an eidetic memory.

The lesson ended when he reached the end of his circuit. He seemed slightly reluctant to stop, and instead continued to press an alarmingly laden bar aggressively overhead, growling to himself until exhaustion at least defeated him, and he let it crash back into its rack.

It took three minutes and eleven seconds for him to regain his breath that time.

Once his breathing had returned to normal, he detangled himself from the rack, leapt easily across and out of the training area, flying high over the fence (and over Shanl!) and landed in the middle of the room. Without any hitch in his motion he flowed up to his full, three-meter height, faced away from Shanl and posed. Flawless muscular form showed itself, fighting for space on his titanic frame.

“Comin’ along nice an’ balanced,” he said to himself in Gaori, sotto voce. “Big nasty fuckin’ pump, too.” Whatever that meant, he went through his motions in an obviously well-practiced manner, observing himself dispassionately and at considerable length in one of the large full-height mirrors along the wall, before at last he deigned to notice her again.

“Well? What’chu think?” There was no humor in his voice as the maximum Deathworlder showcased what that title meant. “C’mon over here an’ look at me, Shanl. Come inspect ‘yer creation. Take a good, long look at the warrior-king ‘ya made. I ain’t got all day.”

Shanl made to approach but then hesitated, out of a combination of indignation and, yes, fear.

“Oh, relax. I’m mad, yeah, but I ain’t feelin’ fuckin’ murderous. Now git over here.”

Well. “As you wish.” She padded over as he requested. “In any other circumstance I would not tolerate such disrespect—“

“In any other circumstance, I wouldn’t be talkin’ to someone who musta literally engineered me gene by gene. I ain’t happy ‘bout what had’ta happen ‘fer that to be true.”

“You assume much, and flatter us with powers we do not have.”

“Do I?” He moved again, and he wasn’t merely examining himself in the mirror anymore. He stomped forward uncomfortably close and displayed a pair of ultra-muscular legs, each over twice as wide as she was. “You tellin’ me I built these wit’ jus’ pure hard work? Flattering…” He stood slightly on the balls of his feet to flex his bulky calves, then tightened everything into a much more alarming show of his might. It was a crass but remarkably effective performance.

Or was it merely performative? She wasn’t quite sure. Also probably deliberate, but…

“I do not flatter you in turn, Daar. It is the truth. At least ninety-two percent of your genetic fortune originates in the breeding programs your own species runs against itself. Much of the remainder is the Hierarchy’s work. Our contributions were comparatively small.”

“Small, huh?” Daar chuffed deep in his chest, then tensed his legs harder. “Don’t seem all that small t’me. An’ I know my legs are pretty as balls, but my eyes are up here, First Director. Either give ‘em a good long grope or look at me when we’re talkin’.”

Shanl looked up, and up at the towering Great Father, across the hard-flexed exaggerated hyper-male topology of his abdomen and chest, to the face of a darkly amused emperor.

It didn’t help that the Corti were short, and Daar was quite tall. The top of her head crested just above his pelvis, which in turn meant she had to crane her head to see anything above his middle. He took full advantage and closed the space between with another uncomfortable step forward. She stood her ground, but he was now so dangerously close, she could feel his body heat radiating off him like a furnace in unpleasant, musky waves.

Well. It wasn’t as if any immediately practical distance would be safely far from him, anyway.

“Sure you don’t wanna feel’m quick? They’re pretty much literally harder’n iron these days.”

Right on cue, he tensed his entire body yet harder. She would not be bullied, regardless.

“I will look wherever and on whomever I please, Great Father. As for your assertion…” She reached out and felt his leg, intending to disprove him, but instead of the very slight yield she’d expected of a well-trained deathworlder’s flesh…

Short, silky fur, slick with sweat. Skin laid tightly over rippling muscle. No detectable adipose layer underneath. Beyond that…absolutely no give whatsoever. While her own strength was of course modest, she still expected there to be some yield; even hardwoods had give. Daar’s leg had none. He grumbled and let his leg go completely slack, yet even then…nothing.

She looked up at Daar again, warily. He grinned an unmistakably predatory grin down at her. “Told’ya. I ain’t in the habit of exaggeratin’ outside o’ Keeda tales. An’ that’s my worry: y’all made me into a goddamn Keeda, din’t you? If ‘ya didn’t edit me, then what did ‘ya do?”

That aggressive calculated brawn-headed display had done more to intimidate her than anything else he’d managed so far. She took a quick moment to regain her composure.

“…As I said, our genetic contributions were small, but I will not deny they were important. As for personally editing your genome? Great Father, if we could easily make that kind of direct intervention undetected, our relationship would not be a diplomatic one.”

“Careful, First Director.” The Great Father growled. “That could be construed as a threat.”

“As could this entire encounter. I tolerate it because I have a message to deliver.”

“Mmm, fair enough,” he agreed, but did not back away. “Some backbone in ‘ya after all.”

“I am the director who authorized and oversaw a program of testing and experimentation that resulted in you. The distinction is important: you were not ‘designed’ by us, and by our efforts you were not ‘designed’ by the Hierarchy, either. Do you think that my people, who have previously held physical excellence in contempt, would have directly engineered you? After that little display, you clearly have not missed how physical you are…”

“Missed it? Missed it?!” Daar chittered with an absolute lack of humor. “Balls, ‘ya don’t understand, do ‘ya? Fuck it, lemme show you a little trick…”

He stopped looming and flexing over her, spun around and pounced on a bag lying near the wall. From it, with a flourish, he produced a metal pipe about the length of her forearm.

“See this? Ductile iron pipe. Used in plumbing. I use ‘em to roll out muscle spasms. Pretty bendable if ‘ya apply the right kinda force.” He put the pipe in the crook of his elbow, looked at her to make sure she was watching, then grunted and exerted for a few seconds—

He relaxed, and showed her the result. His enormous bicep and forearm had unmistakably mangled the tube from end to end. He held it up to her eyes and sure enough, no light could pass through. He had flattened it using nothing more than the hardness of his own arm.

She looked up at him carefully. His expression was unreadable.

“Right ‘bout now I’d ask ‘ya ‘ta give my arm a good feel too, but we both know that’d be pointless.”

“…Indeed.”

Daar rumbled mirthlessly. “Essactly. Fuckin’ nobody else can do a trick like that. Nobody. My muscles are damn near a kind of armor now, Shanl. I’ve had Fiin swing a hammer into my flank and he broke the fukkin’ thing on his third swing. It din’t much hurt. I din’t even get a bruise! Freaky, huh? We’ve tried other things too an’ even I don’t believe what I can do, an’ I’m the fucker whose doin’ it! I’m so gods-damned strong I can’t even measure it. I’m so fukkin’ fast I can outsprint most sports cars. I can jump down from any height, leap clear over a house without hardly tryin’. Run an’ fight basically ‘ferever. Crush even th’ most mightiest people like bugs, Shanl. That shit ain’t natural.”

“Indeed not. But I remind you: we ourselves mistakenly disdained such mechanical strength, and have done for centuries. No, if we had been bent on directly creating you—or rather, directly creating a creature we could control—then this would not have been the result.” She gestured around the shrine to a very particular type of athleticism he’d created. “We wouldn’t have known how to engineer a creature such as yourself in the first place.”

He scowled at her, then crumpled the mangled pipe into a ball with disconcertingly little effort and tossed it aside. He sat on a bench and gestured with a paw for her to explain while he drank another of his jugs. “Sure, that makes sense. I buy it. But you did create me.”

Shanl slipped her hands behind her back and stood a little taller. “Co-created you might be the more accurate answer. Or, more accurately still, exploited an unexpected opportunity.”

Daar looked right at her, in a way that suddenly alarmed her deepest instincts. “Well, First Director. You have my full and undivided attention.”

There were certain meditative techniques that all Corti learned, in the first years after decanting from the gestation tubes. Emotional regulation, how to observe the weather of the mind from above and soar in clear air beyond their feelings, rather than be tossed around by them. In Shanl’s case, even after a lifetime of mastering her inner tranquility, it was difficult to only notice the shiver of panic that threatened to run up her back and wash her away.

But, she was First Director. Pride and dignity won out. She met his gaze.

“You, or a creature very like you, was long part of the Hierarchy’s plan. It was only recently that they decided to abruptly change course.”

“The humans.”

Shanl nodded. “The humans. That left us with an opportunity. We had been watching your bloodlines for some time, and doing what we could to limit the Hierarchy’s control over your lineage, or at least the products thereof. We weren’t interested in a thrall, nor were we interested in the Hierarchy possessing an effective thrall. Quite the opposite. We ourselves have been thralls to the ancient galactic order for a long time, and that order decided to begin priming us for extinction a long time ago, as it does with all species.”

“As it has done for millions of years.” Daar set the jug down, still listening.

“Indeed. They turn our tools against us, poison us into self-destruction. They made the OmoAru dependent on their nanotechnology, which they could then turn against them. They made us dependent on our breeding tubes and genetic synthesis, equally susceptible to sabotage. They treat whole species as livestock, to be culled once their technology threatens to expand beyond their control.”

“Yeah. That’s a story I know all about.”

“It is different with your people. They wanted you as weapons. Yours is an entirely self-sufficient species and breeding is the central focus of your culture. It drives you all to excellence, and in that calculation they made a mistake. How could they control such a species once let loose? How would they handle a variable like you? How do they contain an uncontrollable being who is the very summation of their designs, whether they wanted to grapple with your arrival or not?”

She paused for pedagogic effect, then continued.

“You are a pattern-breaker. You are will and dynamism. You are unpredictable and uncontrollable. You are unmatched in body and mind, and also in circumstance and upbringing. You are, by design, the very opposite of a thrall.”

“By design.”

“Do not read too much into that statement. ‘Design’ in this case means our engineering program was planned to avoid bias and influence. In fact it was quite simple. We spent centuries analyzing the finest genetics we could, watched as the Gao and the Hierarchy slowly gathered them into a few important bloodlines, and then simply…conspired that they would all meet at once. We did not have a file marked ‘project Daar.’ We did not know you before you arrived. We simply had a hypothesis: that a genetic singularity among the Gao, given the chance to prosper, would be the force of upheaval the galaxy has desperately needed since before my ancestors even evolved a frontal lobe. And we were right.”

Daar tilted his head, giving her words some commendably calm consideration. After a few moments, he duck-nodded, rose to his four paws, and indicated that they were heading up and out of the fragrant gymnasium. That was fine by Shanl—the air beyond would be so much more pleasantly cool.

“So, okay. What does this mean ‘bout my true parents?” he asked.

“Both were themselves examples of genetic excellence. It is our position that the conclusion of an experiment should result in full disclosure, where possible, and so I disclose to you today. There was no intervention by us in your conception, though we were prepared to do so, and of course both your ancestors’ lines have seen considerable engineering efforts by the Hierarchy and us. But you? Against all odds, you are genetically flawless and a naturally sired cub. The project director became quite inappropriately gleeful when he learned of your birth, in fact.”

Daar’s eyes narrowed. “Sixth-degrees do not live to adulthood…”

“In that regard, there was some intervention, yes. A moment of unexpected generosity that the Mothers at your commune were too grateful to question.”

He sniffed the air again, thinking. “I ‘member the backpack I had ‘ta wear when I was really little,” Daar mused. “Jus’ barely. It’s one of my earliest memories.”

“Nutritional supplements and immune boosters, delivered intravenously. You suffered no developmental deficiencies as a consequence. Had you been born to a properly unlocked mother, it would not have been so acute an issue.”

He paused, ever so slightly as if he was making a mental note. “Think that backpack tech is somethin’ y’all’d be willin’ ‘ta sell?”

“If you wish, though there’s hardly anything to it. It was simply a matter of knowing what the problems would be. Your own Clans could easily replicate the technology.”

“Fine. Knowledge transfer, then?”

“That would be acceptable. Have you seen an increase in sixth degrees?”

“Yeah. One was born not long ago. We think he’ll make it, but we have so little experience with sixth-degree cubs, let alone one living past a few weeks. He’s the first since myself ‘ta make it.”

“…I will make it a priority, then.”

“Thanks.” He duck-nodded, then pressed forward. Outside the gym was a more sterile room with ablution facilities and well-ventilated metal storage units.

“So ‘yer plan ‘fer me was…what? ‘Ta just be a force’a chaos? Tear up the Hierarchy’s plans?”

“To say we had a ‘plan’ is too much. We had…hopes. With your genetics, we knew it was unlikely you would be a mediocre brute. You had the potential to excel. It is to the credit of those who raised you that you do, and thanks to your own extraordinary efforts that you ended up doing what deathworlders do best, and greatly exceeded any expectation.”

“…An’ so I didn’t fit Big H’s model.”

“Correct. That is why they shifted attention to Loomi, and why we conspired to keep you safe during your young, vulnerable years. In this I must disclose a partnership with Whitecrest, particularly the late Genshi. He…was very fond of you. He would want you to know that.”

A visible weight of regret and emotion, rather heavier than the mere metal he’d been moving around moments ago, settled on Daar’s shoulders.

“Well,” he sighed, and lumbered over to an alcove in the wall. He pulled a handle and a powerful current of water doused him from head to toe. “That s’plains a lotta coincidences,” he said over the sound of powerful water jets scrubbing him clean from all sides. The water started out quite cold, then rapidly grew hot. Four different spray patterns worked through a program, one applying a detergent as he scrubbed at himself, a more powerful pattern rinsing him clean. Another with what must have been fur conditioner that he again worked in as it rinsed. Finally, a pump motor turned on, and high-pressure jets worked up and down his body, much to his grumbling pleasure.

Shanl was reasonably certain the pressures would have broken her body. On him, they served to loosen hard-worked muscles and beat away soreness.

As the program concluded with a gentle cold spray, he continued his thought. “Y’know when I first met the humans, I was pretty dang lean an’ lanky ‘fer my size, as was common then ‘fer us big ‘Backs. Two an’ a half meters tall but still several hunnerd kilos, strong as all shit…an’ I got my tail handed ‘ta me by a guy less’n half my size. But that was when I first started ‘ta notice things, ‘cuz I was damn near the strongest of ‘em right off the bat an’ I din’t even need ‘ta really try. An’ then they started teachin’ me.”

Shanl nodded. “You noticed yourself responding exquisitely to the challenge. Genshi had hoped you would. It was why he put you in the Human’s path in the first place.”

“Figgered.” He paused, balled up his paw into a fist, and considered his massive forearm. “I started ‘ta grow. Fast enough it legit scared me. I filled out, broadened, gained sum height an’ filled that out too. Balls, did I ever. Now I’m so fuckin’ monstrous, the only thing walkin’ on land anywhere heavier’ stronger’n me are the fuckin’ Brown Ones on Akyawentuo. So yeah. Once I was bein’ challenged an’ that shit happened? It became pretty damn obvious something was up. Ever since, I’ve been lookin’ ‘fer answers.”

He glanced up at one of the Clan banners painted on the wall. “…Really should’a occurred to me that maybe Whitecrest was part’a the reason I didn’t find ‘em.”

“It is…important that the subject of an experiment be unaware of the experiment. You know this, of course. Had you known, it could have seriously jeopardized your success.”

Daar pulled on the handle again and the water stopped. He pushed a button and powerful blowers turned on to dry his fur. In approximately sixty-seven seconds they stopped, and he thumped down to all fours, damp and disheveled but smelling far less objectionable.

“Well. Now I’m all pulled in a couple different directions,” he rumbled. “So lemme make sure I’ve got it. Y’all’ve been observin’ the Hierarchy’s breedin’ program in my line.”

“Yes, for four hundred and thirty-two years, concurrent with our own breeding program among the humans. Our interventions have been deliberately minimal but strategically consequential during that time, so as to remain undetected.”

“Which you could get away with ‘cuz the Hierarchy was doin’ most o’ the dirty work for ‘ya.”

“As you say.”

“…Right.” Without any prompting, he padded slowly out of the locker room and led her down a twisty, ancient corridor, one which was wide enough for five or six Corti to stand abreast, but narrow enough that his shoulders and heavy haunches brushed along either side. Shanl was forced to follow behind. “…How long have you known about ‘em? The Hierarchy, I mean. If you’ve been at this project ‘fer four hunnerd plus years…”

“The dark group within the Directorate responsible for counter-Hierarchy operations is, to my knowledge, nine hundred and ten years old. I am the first of the First Directors to be aware of its existence, however, and I am not a member. It is likely they have told me only what I need to know.”

“Spies can be like that,” he rumbled up ahead.

“Would you do any less to save your people?”

To her surprise, he paused, then barked out a kind of gruff chitter. “Would I do less? Shit, stab me right in the fuckin’ nuts why don’t’cha?!”

“We would hope for your continued fruitfulness, so that would be unwise.”

He chittered at length, and with each beat of it a little of that fearsome menace seemed to leech out of his body. The tension unwound, as did the kind of weight that had settled on him as he listened. Shanl watched with a vague sense of…envy. Laughter seemed so freeing. She’d never experienced it, herself.

“Fuck…” he rumbled, after regaining his composure. “Well. Okay. That at least gives me some closure, I guess. What other experiments ‘ya got goin’ on?”

“Among the Gao? Observational studies only. We are past the point of zoological research, and you are peers, beyond any nudge we may provide. That is in fact why I am here.”

“I was wunnerin’ when we’d get to th’ note ‘ya left me in that ‘six month supply.’ Anyway.”

They had reached a staircase. “It’s pretty far up an’ the stairs ain’t even. Or well-spaced ‘fer Corti legs. ‘Ya need a lift?”

Shanl blinked. “You would propose to bear me up this tower.”

“Yeah.”

“A little…undignified of our positions, is it not?”

Daar chittered deeply, “After all that we just went through? Dignity’s what ‘ya make of it. Ain’t nobody gonna question me, an’ why should you care what they think? ‘Yer the First Director, ain’t ‘ya?”

Shanl considered the staircase. “How far up is it?”

“Bout sixty meters in Gaoian gravity. Almos’ straight up. Sometimes I use these stairs ‘ta cool down.”

“…Then, thank you.”

It was in fact rather undignified to ride a fellow sapient, but how much less dignified to utterly exhaust herself making the climb? Shanl chose the lesser indignity and they made the ascent in silence, her arms only barely encircling his great neck for a grip. As expected, there was no give to his body whatsoever, and no long fur to provide any comfort. The experience was rather like riding an unpleasantly hot metal animatronic. Nonetheless, the higher vantage point was not without its benefits. There was much to see.

The Gao it seemed, or at least Daar, did not favour a lack of adornment. Or perhaps it was the venerable nature of the fortress. Whatever the reason, not an inch of it was undecorated. Banners hung from the walls, and Father Fyu’s poems, calligraphed on stretched canvas, were everywhere. Daar’s office suite was no less adorned, though the items were more varied, and many of them clearly alien in origin. Tchotchkes from a dozen species, hundreds more from the Clans and people of the Gao…

But right now, the object dominating the room was the case with Shanl’s gift to him, lying on a small table near some soft furnishings.

Daar set her down with surprising gentleness, then stalked over to the case and opened it. “I couldn’t help but notice there were only two doses in here.”

“Yes.”

He looked up, ears pricked, listening.

“That is your final dose,” Shanl explained. “If you should choose to take it, you will no longer be bound to Cruezzir dependency, and thus no longer bound to any control by me or any other Corti. It…was originally intended as an unlock of your species’ unique genetic restrictions…but your own scientists not only unlocked those independently, they’ve successfully activated your species’ secondary genome. Well done. This, therefore, does something even deeper. It does not merely unlock. It removes the locks entirely, in you and your descendents. In your particular case, that will have significant consequences.”

Daar paused, warily. “Such as?”

“Remember, your line was bred and engineered to produce an Alpha for your species. Among the artificial genes inserted by the Hierarchy some generations ago, a mechanism for indefinite longevity is present. As are mechanisms for autogenous production of earlier forms of regenerative molecules. This would activate those things and upgrade you to the final, most potent form of our regenerative therapies, along with several additional state of the art interventions custom engineered for you. You would be freer and mightier than anyone else, Great Father. Injuries would heal rapidly, your body and mind would respond to training faster and more thoroughly than ever. All of your progeny going forward would be the same.”

“…And the second?” He already knew, she could tell.

“You will need a queen, of course. While her genetics are not so…elite as yours, we have nonetheless designed as complete a therapy as her biology will accept. She will live and thrive by your side for as long as you both shall wish.”

“…Keeda’s burnt balls.”

“It is a lot to take in, admittedly.”

“It’s fuckin’ reckless of you! If it was just me an’ Naydi, this’d be big enough, but all my future offspring too? All of ‘em immortal?

“Not immortal, no. Longer life, certainly. It takes more than the right genes. There’s an intervention present in the dose to complete your immortal activation. For obvious reasons we do not intend to reveal how this is done, and that serum will resist any attempt to examine it. This is a gift, from one head of state to another, to help you in your terrible purpose. Indefinite lifespan requires enormous reserves of willpower, drive, purpose, and discipline. You, Daar, Brother, Father, Stud-Prime and Champion-Emeritus of Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao… you and you alone possess all of these qualities to a truly heroic degree. You are worthy. No one else is so fit for purpose, and the galaxy writ large is not ready for immortality.”

“Well…Fuck me.”

Shanl could sympathize. “Indeed.”

“What about the rest?” He queried, warily.

“As for the rest, however…yes. That would inherit, and inherit widely. We want your people to be free, Great Father. It is only by your freedom do we all survive what’s coming.”

“Fyu’s shit-stinkin’ taint,” Daar swore again. “That’s the logical thing, is it? Unleash a species o’ me on the galaxy? Huh? What happens when one’a my great-grandkids ain’t me, huh? When one’a them’s got all my power an’ smarts but none’a the sunny fuckin’ disposition?”

“You will have competition from at least one other Deathworlder species with dissimilar motives. Come, now. You are one of the most intelligent beings alive, Daar. Did you not consider what we were doing among the humans? Your human friends represent only the smallest vanguard of a much more potent swell of ability, one that will accelerate within the next three generations. They are a testament to the power of deathworlders; we’ve done nothing but administer a breeding program, and from that? Julian Etsicitty. And others.”

For once, he looked stunned, but quickly rallied. “Well ‘fergive me, I ain’t used ‘ta this sorta hollowed-out-volcano scheming. Balls.”

Shanl had no idea how a hollowed-out volcano had anything to do with the topic at hand, but dismissed that thought for now.

“So that’s the plan ‘fer balancin’ out ‘yer medicine? Competition? Turnin’ our friends inta the force that’ll keep us contained?”

“Competition, yes. With interests aligned just enough to keep us all allies. We wish to profit from this relationship, and we wish our partners to profit.”

“And what happens ‘ta the Gao in all this? When every time one’a my descendents has a cub, it’s jus’ another super-Gao squeezin’ out their territory in the breedin’ pool?

“Unlikely. I need to emphasize that you are genetically perfect, Daar. By definition, all variations thereof are to be considered inferior. None of your offspring will ever have your precise combination of genes and thus, will not match you. You are a singularity, one that occurred because of centuries of careful selection.”

“Yeah, an’ you know prolly better’n I do what singularities do ‘ta the universe. Smash it up, change the rules, fuckin’ destroy!”

“They do nothing. Singularities are a term we use when we cannot describe the underlying reality. I use that term with you because you exist at a confluence that will never occur again, outside direct and considerable intervention.”

“You don’t know that. ‘Yer projections can’t penetrate beyond me. If they could, I wouldn’t be a singularity.”

“I have studied probability and genetics deeply, Great Father. I can say with high confidence that I can. I do not need to comprehend the singularity to understand how it comes to be. You are unique. But, yes: many of your offspring will be magnificent. This is undeniable.”

“Yeah? Well run the maths on this. I am the one male sirin’ more cubs than anyone else right now. The top one percent o’ males? Seventy percent o’ matin’ contracts. So you tell me, when bein’ descended from me is a guaranteed ticket inta that club, what happens, hmm? What’s the gene pool look like five generations down the line?”

“Having modeled this very possibility, we are confident of sufficient genetic diversity. You are not the only excellent male. You are merely the greatest and most visible. The forthcoming bottleneck will be severe, but it will pale in comparison to bottlenecks the humans have survived. Several times, in fact.”

“You ever heard of a human called Charlemagne? Or ‘nother one called Genghis Khan?”

“I have, and I am aware,” she said calmly. “I do not mean to minimize your concerns. They are valid. But we have done the math, and if you want I will sit down with you and go over it. Endangering your kind would be suicide for our own. I promise you, our motivations align.”

“It ain’t the bottleneck, diversity or endangerin’ us that’s my concern here!” Daar strode to a nearby window and swiped a paw out toward the horizon. “There’s billions o’ sleek, scrappy little Gao out there who don’t have a single one’a my gifts, but there’s a whole fuckin’ civilization built on their backs! They’re average, they’re what nature made of us, an’ without them it wouldn’t matter if I’m Keeda himself, I wouldn’t have a damn thing to stand on! An’ they all deserve a fightin’ chance ‘ta pass on a legacy that’s made’a blood an’ bone an’ fur, not just crops an’ war accolades!”

“Correct. Which is why it is important that you and other elite males should exercise due discretion when siring more than one cub with any particular female. And this is also why it is critical you survive and lead for a great many long years, Great Father. What you describe is already in motion and would have been even without our intervention.”

“And what happens when any of my cubs don’t obey that restriction?”

“You will need to live long enough to suppress their ambitions, Daar.”

“Or never have another cub again.”

“Too late. Again: I can show you the math. But it would have been too late before you were even born, Daar. Your ancestors were potent individuals themselves.”

“…Balls.”

“Indeed. We did not offer you immortality lightly. There will come a point when this pressure lessens, but it must be you—and only you—who controls it. This was not our design, or our goal. It is, however, a natural consequence of what has been done to your kind. That you perceive the problem so readily is laudable. It took us many generations to discover it.”

Daar looked out the window long and hard. There was a permanent rumble deep in his chest now, not remotely a happy noise. Shanl elected to let him think.

“A’right.” He tapped on his communicator and raised it to his ear. “Clear my calendar for the rest of the day, please….yes, the mating contracts too. In fact, put those on pause ‘till I say otherwise…yeah, I feel fine…no, I’ll explain later. Send ‘fer Loomi an’ Naydi, too. Thank you.”

He flowed over to his desk, where his claw tapped out some commands on his computer, and a holographic work-board laid itself out in the air in the middle of the room. With a gesture, he enlarged it to its full size, then prowled around to the same side of it as Shanl and sat on his hindquarters, right there on the floor.

“Now…show me the math.”

Date Point: 18y9m2w4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Specialist Hunter (Gonzo) Thompson

The teasing he’d endured at the hands of HEAT wasn’t completely off-base; Hunter’s pet Marines made for a really confusing web of friendship. It was…intimate. No barriers. At all. All secrets were shared, there was no shame between them. The affection between them was intense. Like…really fuckin’ intense. Physically, emotionally, in the way they worked out together, played together, studied together…hell, even right now he was basically in a puppy-pile of legs-around-waist and arms-around-shoulder with the five of them as they endeavored listlessly to solve their boredom. He didn’t exactly know what it was about his friends, it was something a lot like what he was gettin’ with HEAT, but…

Well, he looked up to the old crew on HEAT. They weren’t his bros, they were more like…more like hanging out with the cool older kids at school had been. And they were more like brothers than friends, even with the puppy-pile. He felt competitive with them. Super competitive. In the HEAT, it really, really mattered to him just where he stood, where he was falling short. Right now: better than anyone on team two, and physically speaking he was already one of the best on team one.

Still had a lot to learn, though. And he wasn’t nearly as well-conditioned as the team vets yet.

Even still, he’d built himself up enough to join the Beef Club, having met the minimum weight and beaten the minimum lifts. That felt pretty good! His budget wasn’t too happy about out-eating his own wallet and out-growing everything he owned, but…

The Embassy guard though? They weren’t remotely in his league. It wasn’t fair, maybe. But “pets” was…well, pretty accurate. He loved them. He really loved them. But they weren’t his competition, really. They couldn’t stack up against him in anything that mattered and they knew it, and he knew it, which was a little weird because that meant he was happy to build them up whenever he could…

…Also, it was nice being Army Specialist Joe and just…so thoroughly upstaging the Marines. Embassy Marines, too! Not a lot of Joe got to say shit like that!

Yeah, he was an egotistical shit. Always had been, because he’d always been as good as he bragged, when bragging was the thing to do. But he tried not to be a dick about it. He really did love his Marine bros.

Anyway. They’d schemed about what to do for their last bit of freedom since the Embassy would be locking down too, and they were just, sorta…not feelin’ it.

So, they’d got some PT in—some sprinting intervals and stuff, a buncha basketball, then the traditional everyone-gets-squashed-by-Hunter wrasslin’—then they waxed poetically about sushi and steaks, and then…didn’t. Instead, they were loafing about in their PT gear in the Marine’s dayroom, idly arguing about what to do in the middle of the day. None of them were on duty just now, thankfully.

One thing the Marines had never got used to, was how tightly-controlled his diet was. Sure, they admired his good looks and all the ridiculous things his body could do, boggled that it took the five of them together to lift his ass off the ground or even slightly dent his physique, that his arms were bigger than their waists, his legs dwarfed their fuckin’ chests…

…Yeah, okay, maybe he needed to tone back the ego a bit. It was still all true but… Anyway.

They appreciated him for the supersoldier freak that he was, but somehow they never connected that shit with his food, which was honestly much harder a thing to keep discipline on than the training! They weren’t power-bodybuilding ultra-athletes on alien performance supermedicine. They were just…big, beefy Marines. Good ones, too! They worked out half for their jobs, half to look good naked. They didn’t have a specific goal in mind, not really. They were healthy without worrying too much. They weren’t afraid of an unscheduled pizza or an unaccounted night of drinking.

They kept suggesting barbecues and shit. Because Marines.

“Fuck you, assholes! I’m gonna have a shit tube up my ass here tomorrow where it’s gonna stay for who-the-fuck-knows how long, in a suit that’d crush any of you puny fucks like jelly—”

“—Definitely spicy barbeque, then. Get some hot sauce like ‘Asshole Prolapsor One Million’ or whatever the fuck they’re doin’ now.”

“You’re already almost sitting in my lap,” Hunter retorted, and curled his legs a little bit more fondly tighter to drive home the point. “I’ll fuckin’ prolapse you good an’ hard…”

“Nah, nah, you want that stuff the ETs make, the ones who can’t taste capsaicin at all. Whatsername over in the Quarter, she makes it just to show off for humans.”

“Whatsername?” Hoetze asked.

“Fuck, man, can’t pronounce her name. Sounds like your sister choking on Hunter’s cock.”

“Oh. Her.”

“His sister don’t have a gag reflex anyhow. Whaddya think, you big dumb Joe?”

“Why bother?” Hunter laughed, “I got you four right here!”

Jeering and “outrage” did a turn around the room, along with a couple of small loose objects being thrown at him.

“Bitch, I will shank ‘yer ass if you come at me with that fuckin’ shillelagh of ‘yers.”

“Please, like any of you pussy-ass little fucks could stop me. ‘Sides, I’d have to, like, woo her an’ shit. Don’t need to bother with you fucks!” He mauled at his crotch, and shook everything around a bit for good measure. “A mouth’s a mouth, right?”

“Well shit,” Becker deadpanned, “now that you put it that way, I’m feelin’ all sortsa thirsty!”

“How is that different from any other second of any day?”

“Easy! This one comes with a free dislocated jaw!”

Hunter grinned: fuckin’ glorious idiots.

Hernandez detangled himself, picked up and started fidgeting with his Thinking Knife, which here was an ancient Ka-Bar his great grand-dad had used in Korea. Helluva family heirloom. “But seriously, what are we gonna do? It’s not like we can really have too much fun…”

“Yeah we can,” Centopani reminded him. “Hunter’s gonna be in the biggest shit in a couple days, and he’s gotta be ready for it. We’re just gonna be here to keep State department types from feelin’ scared.” If there was a small note of regret in his voice, Hunter chose not to notice.

But, well…he’d been the one that hero-worshipped Hunter the most, too. Which felt pretty damn good to be honest, but he tried not to take advantage too much.

Sergeant Lang was, as always, the one who swooped in and sorta saved the day, injecting just the right amount of Marine-flavored Adult Supervision into the room. “What’s wrong with just hangin’ out? Christ, you idiots think every second’s gotta be filled with some adventure. Fuckin’ buncha gay-ass retards up in here. Surprised you sick fucks ain’t fuckin’ cummin’ all over each other’s faces by now.”

“Fuck off, Sergeant!” Hunter grinned. “Respectfully of course.”

Lang just grinned. “Damn right.” They had a certain private latitude with each other, being cross-service and having fought off a Hunter raid together. In Thompson’s case, in just his running shorts, which he’d never yet heard the end of, and probably never would.

Not a bad legend to have, really.

“We still don’t know what we’re gonna do,” Hoetze noted. “What about the water park?”

Ah, the water park, Hunter grinned wistfully. Alas… “I’ll go, but I can’t do any of the slides.”

“…Right. Not even the lazy river?”

“Well, maybe that if I get a family tube to myself. Not sure, but that’s the price of bein’ in the four-digit club. Strong enough to smash Captain America…”

“And a danger to puny furniture.”

“Ayup. Still,” Hunter added. “I mean, nothin’ wrong with just loungin’ and soaking up some sun, right?”

“It’s like an hour away though by shuttle.”

“Or there’s the lake. Sara’s Beach oughta have plenty of folks on it, on a nice day like this…”

“Ain’t that the nude beach?”

“Clothing optional. Sounds better’n the water park to me…”

Actually. “Yeah. I could dig that, honestly…”

There were nods all around. Some sun, some good views of people and scenery, nice and free in the warm breeze…

…and then reality had to go ahead and ruin the plan just as it was formed. Hunter’s phone buzzed itself half an inch across the floor as a message came in. Hunter didn’t have to pick it up: the short summary that flashed on the black screen was all he needed to see.

“Always,” Lang nodded laconically like he’d been expecting it.

“Fuck…well, you assholes go have fun anyway.” Hunter stood.

“Fuckin’ stack the bastards, Gonzo.”

Hunter stood, and maybe stood a little prouder when they all got off their feet to say goodbye. He knew, academically, this might actually be a real goodbye. Somehow. But really…

It didn’t feel like it. They were proud of him. That felt good. It felt…like exactly what he needed right then. They’d all signed up to murder the enemy, but he got to do it in a way they would never come close to matching.

He wanted to make them proud.

So, there was a bit of bravado. A little showing off—he was HEAT after all, and they had a reputation to maintain. Then he was off, jogging through town back to his apartment to tie up the last loose ends.

Record a video for mom and dad, and send it off to mortuary affairs. Shut off the water, crack open the washer to dry out, do a quick check for anything perishable. Lock his place up, take the garbage out to the dumpster, shoulder his bag, and then…to the base.

Time to work.

CONTINUED from the prior chapter’s ending

Date Point: 18y9m2w6d AV
jump array bay, starship Destroying Fury

Daar (Tigger), Great Father of the Gao

Thirty minutes left, before they were expecting the array. Daar was in the first wave, which would be jumping in the instant they received the beacon, if all went well. He was the biggest, bestest hammer in a team filled with violently capable men, Human and Gaoian alike.

The suit had done its work, along with Shanl’s kingly “gift” to him…and what a potent gift it was. He felt the effects almost immediately and, coupled with the last few days of final prep, it had been a wild roller-coaster of a thing that hadn’t slowed down. With the suit’s biotech systems online and supercharging everything on top of that? He was so amped up on adrenaline, so stuffed full of crackling energy, so keyed-up and so completely ready to rip and tear that the last half-hour promised to be genuine torture, while he waited to learn if the finest men in the galaxy had achieved the mission, or met their fate.

It was taking every ounce of his self-control to keep it together.

He had to, though. If ever there was a time when a Great Father had to be the perfect example of fierce, undominated power, now was that time. His team, First Fang, Stoneback, the Grand Army…everyone was looking to him in this moment.

There could be no weakness. No hesitation. No second-guessing.

Only strength.

Date Point: 18y9m2w6d AV
HMS Caledonia, Interstellar space, Hunter territory

WO2 Robert “Highland” Murray

There was a rhythm to the final suit check. Murray’s techs had it down like Fred Astaire, each check, test, callout and callback on a perfect timer, assuming nothing was wrong.

Helmet seal, mask seal, air quality, tracheal shield, paraspinal brace, suit flex and mobility, life support, onboard computer, sensors, heads-up display, communications, medical monitor, thermal regulation. Bloodworks kit coming online to amp him up for the coming work; only gently for now, but later on it would be enough to drive him into a ferocious berserker rage, if he didn’t know how to ride the dragon so well by now.

The MASS fit him like a skin, nowadays. Once, it had been uncomfortable, crushing, confining. Just wearing it had been hard work. Now, it felt more like becoming somebody else, somebody a little bigger, a whole lot heavier, and a fuck of a lot more.

Everyone’s was customized, particularly the hands and feet. The Protectors had those special gloves that never got dirty no matter what they did with them, along with grippy, flexible armored climbing shoes. They didn’t have any arch support despite being the biggest lads with the biggest loads, but that let them work themselves into places and situations that simply boggled the mind. Most of the Aggressors wore boots that had more in common with siege equipment than most footwear, and gauntlets that turned their fists into pulverizing weapons. Whatever they hit stayed hit.

Murray preferred something closer to a pair of ultra-tech sneakers, and lighter, thinner gloves that let him really feel his weapon. He was all about the rifle and the knife. Light. Agile. Precise. The minimum necessary encumbrance.

He felt good. He felt ready. Focused. Tense like a wound spring, or a predator about to pounce. And so far, the information filtered down to him through his visor told him everything was on pace. They were deep in hostile territory, and seemingly undetected. They were nearly at the point where Cally could dare go no closer.

The suit checks finished. The deck cleared ready for decompression and opening. Costello was the last to leave, after doing the rounds and giving the whole team a nod, a fist bump, a slap on the helmet.

“Stack ‘em high, Lads.”

The airlock closed behind him with the heavy, mechanical chunk sound that got Murray itching to start. Moments later, the familiar sound and sensation of the pressure plummeting.

They grabbed hold of the launch, clipped themselves on and waited as the bay’s huge door yawned aside for them.

Showtime.

Regaari

Light the Darkness.

Today, more than ever. They were doing what Whitecrest had been founded all those centuries ago to accomplish, where the massive brutes of Stoneback and Highmountain couldn’t go. Scouting. Infiltration. Covert insertion. That type of direct military action was the bread and butter of Whitecrest for over five hundred years. The spycraft wasn’t their primary trade until much later, when their breeding had diverged wildly from the small, scrappy, powerfully lithe brownfurs that were so typical of Fyu’s line.

The greatest of their secrets. Most of Fyu’s lineage didn’t go into Stoneback or Highmountain, despite being the paramount champion of both Clans.

Most of it went into Whitecrest. Along with Fyu himself, covertly.

It was a long ride on the launch from Caledonia to the target, and there really was something deeply unnerving about clinging to the outside of a warp-capable craft. Being inside a ship changed the sense of scale, made a star system seem smaller somehow. As if the planets were buildings by the roadside, not whole worlds, light-minutes away.

The launch, though? There were no illusions. They were something tiny and fragile, zipping through a vast and terrifying emptiness, toward something equally tiny and fragile. No comforts, no sense of the space around them. Only a long ride in silence with nothing to see except each other and then…

And then an asteroid, with a Hunter station growing out of it like a tumor. There in an eyeblink, without ceremony or warning. Their warp technology had advanced so far, for certain low-superluminal speeds they could move theoretically undetectably.

So far, so good. But that was always going to be the easy bit. The tricky part was ingress.

On that score, the hazard course team and analysts had done wonderfully. The station exterior was identical to the training course they’d been running for months, so far as Regaari could tell. A low cluster of lumpy, bulbous shapes plastered to the rock’s surface, and presumably responsible for the asteroid’s lack of spin.

Somewhere behind that cancerous wall of metal was a hollowed-out space inside the asteroid, laid with rail and jump array technology. Presumably, further internal rail and conveyor systems brought the processed salvage from Hell up to the vast surface bays where a pair of ships were waiting to be fed scrap metal.

That wasn’t their ingress, even though it was the most open access point. Too busy. Too monitored. No, their route in was an airlock at the periphery where the station’s wall met the asteroid’s surface.

They puffed toward it on cold-gas thrusters, silent and alert. Titan and Moho made their initial survey as they approached, and both gave the thumbs-up; the door, as predicted, was a simple mechanical design, meant to be operated by the motors of the attaching ship. This was typical of Hunter architecture for low-power structures that spent most of their time either inert or in near-vacuum.

Opening it wouldn’t be that hard. Titan had fabricated a hefty wrench that mated with the door’s operating slot, and a few mighty turns would be all they needed to open the door and gain entry. That left only two problems: alarms, and air pressure.

Air pressure was solved with the same forcefields that kept open bays from blowing out. Glued to the hull around the doors, and activated. The bubble emitted a slight shimmer to show it was online, then settled into invisibility. That just left the alarms, and for that they had Ergaan and his toolkit.

Of the four (or sometimes five) Gaoians on the team, Ergaan was the one who had retained the most of his former slinky, sneaky self. Regaari was still quiet, still patient and stealthy…but now he could toss cars end over end and leap straight up buildings, or crush a Human’s hand to shards in his own without much effort. The price for that strength? Hands that these days were more paws than anything else, attached to forearms that wouldn’t fit through the opening Ergaan was currently sunk to the elbows in, working at the simple electronics within.

He’d practiced this particular bypass a thousand times, working on a real Hunter airlock. Regaari was quite sure he could have done it blind, backwards and with only one paw. Sure enough, by the time the forcefield was in place, Ergaan was ready. A duck-nod and gesture said everything.

Tiny deployed the wrench. Murray, Parata and Shim were first through. No muzzle flashes, no searing white of fusion blades. Just a terse click on the comms. They were in.

The one thing they absolutely could not afford to do was kill a Hunter at this early stage. The moment any of them flatlined, the swarm would know. So: quiet. Feet placed with infinite care, so as not to creak a deck plate or leave any visible sign. Fortunately Hunters used robust plate decking, as their legs didn’t end in anything so civilized as feet.

Even so, any space habitat was hard to move through silently, especially those built without concern for comfort or appearance. No carpeting, nothing decorative on the walls…the station was a metal hive, metal floors, metal walls, metal ceiling. Hard, flat surfaces made for echoing conditions, and hollow spaces under the floor panels could boom if struck incautiously.

There was little in the way of darkness, either. Hunters didn’t go for gloom, no. They lit their spaces like a surgical theatre, with flat, white lights that gave a sinisterly clinical air.

It was designed to highlight reds, he realized. The better to see blood.

They pushed onward, moving with speed and precision, stepping on the structural crossbeams where the floor couldn’t drum under their feet. The airlock was surface access, and there was no need for the Hunters to use it now: the section of the station they were in had been given over to storage.

Hunter storage. Stasis chambers. A cargo bay full of eerie perfect-black cubes in a neat grid, and the faint hum of power draw. Three cubes missing from the grid suggested either understaffing, or a handful of Hunters awake and active.

Let it be the former, please.

Forrest tucked up on a corner, used his gun-cam to peek around it, gestured sharply: hold. Wait.

Nobody moved. Seconds passed.

Forrest gestured again. They moved on.

Something the hazard course team hadn’t foreseen: the facility had a pulse. It had to be the jump arrays firing and the trains being unloaded, but the effect—a boom that rang through the whole structure, followed by a more drawn-out rush—put Regaari uncomfortably in mind of a heartbeat, and a breath.

They followed it, tightly riding the line between moving slow enough to be sure of their silence, sure there was nothing in front of them, and moving fast enough that they weren’t lingering too long in one spot. Their time on this station needed to be minimal, every second was potential exposure, every minute a chance that the Hunters might notice their malfunctioning airlock.

Under his suit, Regaari’s fur crawled with the notion that maybe they were already seen, and they were all about to be captured in a forcefield trap. They were ready for that, in theory. In practice…

In practice, there was no escape if they were caught. They needed to be gone.

They turned the station’s industrial heartbeat back on itself, using the racket it generated as a chance to move a little faster, buying moments with every prolonged boom-and-rush that swept over them. They shrank back into a side corridor and prayed as a hulking mechanical abomination that only vaguely resembled a Hunter stalked past them, bearing some salvaged piece of technology on the pallet lift that had replaced its arms. It gave no sign of noticing them.

They slipped through the archway behind it, and into…

…The operation was even bigger than they’d imagined. The Hunters had blasted out a void inside the asteroid, and the bare chondrite walls drank the light, giving them gloom at last. They used it, borrowing the hubbub of another load arriving to get the hell out of the open and down into the concealment of the railworks.

It wasn’t hard to see where the racket came from. There were no locomotives, just a string of sturdy steel wagons being hauled bodily back along the track by cables, locked in place, then banished in a flash of black and that great pounding boom!

Each one that jumped out was replaced instantly by a full train, and thence came the heavy rushing sound: it was allowed to roll straight down into a receiver, stopped by impact with a heavy shock absorber, then tipped over to dump its load of salvage straight onto a conveyor.

A river of scrap, more of it than Regaari cared to guess at, flowed constantly up and out of the chamber, destined for some no-doubt equally hellish processing center elsewhere in the parts of the station they’d avoided. Even through their helmets and hearing protection, the noise was oppressive.

Regaari knew what their first salvo would be. They needed to blow up this asteroid, once they’d made it to the surface. They needed to send a little present back through.

The empty train was already being winched back up the rail. They’d missed that one. But the next was only a minute away.

They got in position.

Timothy “Tiny” Walsh

Hunters cut corners on safety. There were no guard rails, no safety measures to keep their worker bees from stepping in front of thousands of tons of loaded train car in motion. They didn’t even bother to equalize the pressure around their jump array, so each load’s arrival and departure was met with an explosive slam as thousands of gallons of planetary air came and went alongside the trains.

They sure as shit cut corners on security, thank fuck. But then, if the Hunters had a blind spot, it was stealth and silence. They were the ten-foot slavering space monsters, they were used to being the biggest, baddest motherfuckers on legs, and still hadn’t learned any different. They thought of hiding as something the prey did in a vain attempt to survive their hunts, or as something the predator did to prepare an ambush.

The idea of infiltration was alien to them. Maybe it wouldn’t be after this. All the more reason to make it work this time.

A gesture from Regaari. He wanted one of the bombs.

Gladly. Walsh was at his side in an instant, turning to present his back and the collection of small nukes carried there. A tug and release of straps, a slap on his shoulder.

Walsh hunkered down beside the track and waited. That, he didn’t enjoy. Before, they’d been moving forward and always active. Sitting in one spot and waiting grated on him. It wouldn’t be long. Hell, he was mentally counting down to the moment the array fired and swapped out the empty train for a full one. Less than a minute to go…

But it was a long-ass minute. He kept his eye out for danger. There was a worker Hunter up on a platform between the rail and the huge conveyor belt. It was turned away from them, sifting through the flow of scrap with its robotic arms. Walsh had no idea what it was filtering out of the stream and he didn’t want to know. All he needed to know was that it wasn’t going to turn its head their way.

He held out his hand and signalled everyone prone as the Hunter found something. Whatever it plucked from the trash, it held it up and turned it this way and that for a few seconds before turning at the waist, depositing it on a bench behind it, and returning to its work.

Whatever the tangled, filthy mass of technology it had just collected was, it had a spine. Walsh took a photo for the intel guys to figure it out.

This time, he was close enough to the jump array that its arrival thumped him in the chest and made his lungs drum. A new train, fully loaded, landed on the rails and rattled down them shedding sparks. He ducked down and gritted his teeth as it slammed to a halt just inches away from him. It had barely stopped moving before its cars tipped over and started spilling their cargo into the waiting hoppers.

These things weren’t designed to be climbed onto and maintained by anything human, or Gaoian. There weren’t any handholds, no rungs up the sides, and the surface was foul with grime, dirt, soot and oil.

So foul, in fact, that the clever gecko-grip stuff on their gloves didn’t adhere properly. Normally they’d just jump up, grab onto the edge and haul themselves up, or even just leap over the damn thing, but in this case…

Well, discretion was probably wiser, and crashing into what was effectively a giant metal drum would probably defeat their purpose.

Ergaan and Shim used two of their human buddies as ramps and slipped over the car’s lip like weasels. Walsh turned, cupped his hands, and gave Murray a boost. He stepped back, took a run-up, caught Murray’s hand and Ergaan’s paw, and was hauled up into the car. Parata, Forrest and Regaari did something similar in the next car along, and they dropped into the bottom of the bin before it was even fully upright.

Walsh breathed a little easier. That minute of waiting had been torture.

There was a jolt, and the train started back up its rail. Give the Hunters credit, they had an efficient system here…Which meant they needed to worry about tons of garbage landing on their heads the second they were through. Rather than lie there and wait, the team got ready to disembark immediately.

They didn’t have to wait long.

THUMP.

Robert “Highland” Murray

They’d ended up flinging themselves out of the train the instant they arrived. It wasn’t as quiet as could be, if one were honest, but it was that or have a couple hundred tons of scrap metal land on their heads. Murray just launched himself, and hoped to God the tumbling junk and the sound of it all landing would disguise their arrival.

It was a long drop on the other side, as the train was on an elevated rail over a massive pit of scrap. He rolled through it, begrudgingly thanked ‘Horse for all the torture over the years. Everyone on the team had the exact same idea at the exact same time, too.

The wonders of teamwork.

Planet Hell was well fuckin’ named, though. He got a good look at it once they’d found and secured some cover outside the Hunter’s immediate area of operations. It was a fuck of a haul too, since the scrapping operation seemed to go on, and on, and on…

Almost nothing drained a man’s energy faster than discreet movement at speed. After damn near an hour of skittering to and fro from pile to pile, it was a small slice of heaven when at last, some natural terrain feature lent them the opportunity to gain higher ground and take stock. So, obviously, there was a climb, and this time no womble-stomping ‘Horse to climb ahead and anchor for them.

Murray’d had worse, at some point. Maybe he’d remember eventually, when the whisky was flowing and the grousing was good. But not right now. Right now, he got his moment to take in the view.

Murray had been on the ring. He’d seen how fuck-huge it was. He’d walked on Hell, too, under the boiling sky after they’d set the bomb off. But that had been three years ago. He hadn’t exactly stopped to take in the scenery back then, but what he remembered was…well, a planet. Plants. Trees. Rivers. Mountains. Planet stuff. Quite nice, even. The only reason the crew who’d named it went with “Hell” was because they were stuck there.

Now, though, it was like the opening scene from that old movie, Wall-E, except with a fucking madman in charge of the art. No cute boxy wee robot trundling around making neat stacks, no. The machines grazing out on that huge field of scorched, half-melted, filthy debris were fucking dinosaurs, with grinding jaws, industrial forcefields, and a small swarm of drones swirling around them to cut chunks off the bigger pieces.

The mountains in the distance had been wooded, once. Now, their flanks were the graveyard of a million scorched, flattened matchsticks. The sky was the colour of lead, streaked with industrial plumes extending all the way out to, and beyond, the horizon.

“Fuck…” Walsh muttered, reverently.

“Aye.”

“That’s a lotta salvage.”

“Enough to rebuild the swarm ten times over,” Parata agreed.

“Meanwhile, they just keep breeding and stick the surplus population in stasis until they’re needed. Don’t even need to feed ‘em, just keep the stasis generators powered. Fuck.”

“Shit. No fuckin’ wonder we’re hittin’ this.”

Murray glanced over at Regaari, who was busy consulting maps and his own survey of the landscape around them. They were banking on one point: Hunters loved to centralize. Hell, that’s what the ring had been about. So, this whole litter-picking operation was probably pretty close to whatever facility contained the farthrow generator and stuff.

They had a pretty good idea what that facility’s layout would be—somehow—and even where it was in relation to other stuff. They just needed to figure out where they were. And then get there. And then finagle their way in, one way or another. And blow it to fuck.

Just another day at the office.

“That way,” Regaari decided. “And radio discipline, please. Even narrow-beam or laser comms can be detected in the right environment.”

They moved out.

Regaari

The Hunters hadn’t been perfectly thorough. Rather than cleaning the debris field of every last item, they’d clearly decided that it was good enough to reach topsoil and move on. The ground—pulverized and poisoned by fallen megastructure—was still dense with trash. A mixed blessing: it provided cover and concealment the barren landscape otherwise wouldn’t have. But it sure as shit wasn’t safe. A little icon in Regaari’s HUD was politely informing him of a nasty background radiation count and airborne toxic pollutants.

To breathe Hell’s air unprotected would be to dramatically shorten their lifespans. And sometimes, his helmet’s sensors picked up something in the endless landfill that was radioactive enough for the suit to worry about it and warn him to steer clear.

They hugged the edge of the valley, using the terrain and wreckage to conceal themselves as they trekked parallel to a wide service road. The Hunters had gone to a lot of effort to construct a broad highway, but traffic along it was vanishingly rare. Future endeavors, perhaps, but for now it served their purposes. There were berms of material along both sides of the road, hinting at how it may have been constructed.

It was a four-hour excursion on foot. Which, of course it was. Four hours was right at that hellish sweetspot where their natural endurance under load began to fail and the intensely uncomfortable “second wind” of combat pharmacology began to take over.

They’d be sleeping for days after this, because all of them were going to max out their dosage, and possibly go past that, too. One never knew what a fight might yield.

For now though, they could proceed less energetically, and claw back some reserves. Leave the stims unused in their onboard biopacks. All of them were sipping on liquid food as they prowled around the edge of a modular city, looking for an ideal point of entry.

They found what they were looking for in the form of a drainage canal. Considering the heavy gray skies and the occasional sullen flash on the horizon, Regaari couldn’t imagine how a city might be built here without one. The shallow layer of stuff flowing along its bottom was probably only mostly water….but it was everything they needed.

They took a few precious minutes to further recover from their long jog. They ate in silence, forced down their meals and drink, waited as long as they dared, for their bloodworks to balance out a bit…

With a signal from Regaari, they stimmed up, rose as one, and went for it.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

The Alpha was contending with a rare and pleasurable sensation: it was <impressed> and had just learned how to be a better predator in its own regard. To many, perhaps, the idea of learning anything about hunting from another species would be a kind of wrong-thought, but the Flensing-Brood had survived where many others withered under such introspection.

As Alpha in charge of planetary security, its attention had been drawn to an unexpected development. An airlock on one of the salvage reprocessors out in the system’s second asteroid belt had developed a fault. Nothing there to warrant the Alpha’s attention, at first. But then the Builders had inspected it—a faulty airlock was a danger to the facility’s correct operation, after all—only to find several pieces of alien technology stuck to the hull.

An air retaining forcefield, to cover for the fact that the airlock was no longer capable of maintaining a seal: it had been forced open from the outside. Something had boarded them.

That same something had then, somehow, managed to move undetected through the entire reprocessing station, then vanish. The one thing the Builders knew for certain was that the infiltrators were no longer present.

The Alpha doubted they had simply explored and left the way they came. Which meant, they had taken the incredibly dangerous step of boarding one of the scrap trains and jumping to the planet along with it.

This was obviously a major security breach. But the Alpha wasn’t at all upset. On the contrary, it had been hoping, longing for this ever since it had caught that scout ship and then been cruelly robbed of its due feast. It had suspected some attempt at an attack would come in time, and there was only one strategically sensible objective for the infiltrators to pursue: the wormhole suppressor.

In other words…it got to hunt again.

It had its duty to perform, obviously, so it spared a few moments’ thought to activating the contingent of heavy Betas responsible for guarding the suppressor. But it had no illusions of their effectiveness: the foe had shown they had terrible claws of their own in many varieties. They had shredded the swarm-of-swarms, and torn the hive from the sky. They could certainly obliterate the city and everything in it.

Which meant that the hunt was not only a fulfilment, but the sound thing to do. With its more elite forces scattered across the system, there was not much it could do in the immediate future but harass whatever forces they had deployed.

The Deathworlders most likely understood that as well, which meant the true fight would come when they inevitably achieved their objective and brought down the suppressor. For the resulting battle, it would need everything available, and other things besides. They would not risk such a gambit unless they were well-prepared and that meant a tantalizing hunt indeed.

Perhaps it would draw in their Alphas as well! Or perhaps, if they were very fortunate…

It sent a message to the Alpha of Alphas.

The Alpha of Alphas

So. They had drawn out the Pinnacle Alpha of Alphas among the hunting-species. Whether or not he would commit himself remained to be seen, but he was in many ways like the Eaters, and so the Alpha of Alphas found it difficult to believe he would stand aside in the face of such an important attack.

It was well-planned. The raiding Eaters had noticed a number of behavioral changes among the prey that, on their own, wouldn’t warrant concern. But when taken holistically, when synthesized into a system of behavior that could be analyzed, exploited…

Deep within the cradle of cables that was its now-permanent roost, the Alpha-of-Alphas drooled in anticipation. Let the enemy think they were coming undetected and unknown. The Hunters would receive them, gladly. The Eaters would lay traps, now that they knew how. The Builders would retrieve specimens, and feast…

And with the knowledge thus gained, the Hunters would return to their correct position at the galaxy’s apex.

It authorized the release of its latest experimental forms. Let the Humans and Gao come.

The maw was open for them.

Regaari

Their luck, somehow, held. Given the terrain and the city’s layout, they wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it when the nest got kicked over, so to speak. Nor could they risk emergency shielding preventing their objective.

Nor, frankly, were any of them willing to enter an enclosed space unless absolutely necessary, given the Hunter’s demonstrated proclivities with forcefields…

There was activity though. Things had been quiet, and then, suddenly…they weren’t. No alarms or anything, just suddenly there were vehicles making the bridges rumble as they crossed the storm canal, and the occasional staccato clatter of Hunter appendages scuttling in groups at street level. It didn’t feel like a shift change or whatever, either. It felt like a mobilization. It felt like they’d been noticed.

…The fur at Regaari’s nape wanted to stand up. This wasn’t right.

Murray felt it too. “It’s a trap,” he grumbled. “They’re waitin’ for us.”

“Yup.”

The collective, unspoken energy that settled on the whole team was simple: ‘fuck it.’ In for a bean, in for a stew.

“We’re close.” Forrest indicated. His suit carried the specialist sensor that tracked the epicenter of the wormhole suppression field, and Regaari grimaced inside his helmet as he looked up. He’d really, really been hoping that giant concrete pyramid that had loomed at them from the horizon from the very moment they arrived wouldn’t be it. That thing looked easily capable of weathering a nuke or two.

At least…a nuke from the outside. A nuke from below would be a different matter…and there was an outlet pipe draining into the canal from right under the pyramid…

His thoughts were interrupted by violence. A flare of light and the too-familiar hiss of a Hunter’s fusion claws firing up.

“Contact left!”

Four of them. They flooded down the canal’s embankment with drool flying from their teeth, only to die instantly, drilled clean through by a disciplined volley that tore right through their shields and subdermal armor implants. HEAT didn’t fuck around with puny weapons.

But that, of course, kicked off the frenzy. More Hunters appeared on the ridge, and they fell back toward the outlet pipe. Regaari’s dream of bombing the facility from below went up in smoke. Now, the only option was to fight their way in and take out the generator themselves.

Up ahead, in the dark, he heard the echoing sounds of large, cyberized bodies scuttling through water. They had a fight ahead of them.

He led the charge.

Robert “Highland” Murray

They plunged into the dark. Narrow tunnels bunched the Hunters up, stole their numbers advantage. Still had to fight in two directions at once, though. Always pushing forward, always killing the ones coming up behind.

The hope had been, get in under the bunker, drop a nuke, leave, turn it into a hole in the ground from a safe distance. That was out, now.

It was knife-and-claw work for the most part. GR1Ds were great for packing a lot of ammo, but the ammo was still finite and the swarm…wasn’t. Each burst of fire was good for driving the Hunters back, buying room to advance, a moment to sip from his drinking tube and keep himself charged.

Body aching, every second a balancing act and slaughter with no time to think. But progress anyway. Into the drain tunnel. Regaari knew the way. An eternity of bloodshed, then a hatch. Somehow get everybody up and through it, Parata through last.

Wider halls meant more room to move, but more room for Hunters. They boiled up through the hatch behind them, charged in from the flanks, arrived in vehicles. Unleashed from stasis and hungry, desperate to eat or die trying.

Each shot he fired was a preciously chosen resource, and he didn’t waste a one. Each slash and stab was an effort, but he never missed a kill. His whole body hurt, every step drained him. He could suck on his juice and trust his suit’s IV, but there were limits on how hard a body could fight.

Had to fight efficiently. Nothing spare, nothing wasted. Pure focus. Pure death.

Up. Wide, shallow ramps rather than stairs. Slick with guts. More enemies behind than in front now, though. Nearly there. Nearly there.

So close now he could feel the suppressor, like a whine in his teeth. Close enough to meet the big ones guarding it.

Shieldsticks and smoke grenades, blind them and block them. Push forward, get under them, gut them with fusion knives or just blast up into their bellies, gore and oil sliding off his visor…

Arms…heavy…

Regaari

Medical alarm from Murray’s suit. His bloodworks dropping into amber. Everyone on the verge of a glucose crash, Regaari too, not that he needed a sensor to tell him that. Exhaustion was doing what the Hunters couldn’t.

But they were there. One forcefield between them and life.

Dump-web it. Charge through the lightning shower, suit protesting as an arc hit it. The grenade launcher under his weapon thumped and turned one of the last big Betas guarding the suppressor into a tangle of gore and splintered cybernetics. Pounce forward, past the wild spray of firepower from the other one, off a wall, onto it, slash his claws through the weak spot at the back of the neck.

He sprang off the spasming corpse as it collapsed, onto the rack of high-energy machinery that had to be their target. Tiny threw him a brick of C4. Parata grabbed the jump array off his pack and threw it across the room into a safe corner, where it unfolded in a complicated snapping tangle of metal supports.

Regaari planted the charge. He armed it. He got clear. He detonated it. The blast knocked him half-senseless, but that keening in his teeth and skull was abruptly gone…

The endless Hunters still pushed into the room. Shim and Murray both overwhelmed. Ergaan desperately clawing against the swarm…

A furious roar, and four Human wrecking balls smashed into the swarm. Righteous. Warhorse. Baseball. Gonzo. A fountain of blood and greasy bits turned the tide.

Regaari’s strength gave out. He collapsed to the deck. Someone picked him up and deposited him in the jump array.

“Go sleep, Cousin. We’ll fuck ‘em up.”

He didn’t even know who it was. All he saw, before the crash took him down into dizzy unconsciousness was his team’s medical monitors. All amber…red…

…but all alive.

They’d done it.

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The beacon came through, and he and his shock team jumped over with a fuckin’ vengeance. Regaari was there on the other side, dead exhausted but alive. They were all alive! A fuckin’ tidal wave of relief washed over Daar, though of course he couldn’t let it overtake his wits. His emotions right now were the most biggest they could possibly be, the most biggest they’d ever been, so as always he had to discipline himself and focus on the task at hand.

No weakness, no sentiment. ONLY strength.

The Hunters knew. Of course they did. Daar hadn’t thought they would be so stupid as to not figure it out eventually, which meant he’d almost certainly just jumped directly into a trap.

That changed nothing, really. The stakes were too high. Instead of going in, guns blazing…

Well, they’d just need to blaze a lot harder.

“Call up the total force,” Daar intoned to a runner, who was jumping back with the rest. “We’re going as hot as we can manage. Assault team!” He roared, “ON ME!!”

Kodiak, Righteous, Warhorse, Carebear. The finest warriors alive were right there with him, behind and protecting his flank. That meant he only had one direction to worry about.

Forward, through an ocean of slaughter. All they needed to do was get to the sky and they didn’t have far to go. One glance at it, and the game was over. The Hunters knew that.

One simple objective. Destroy. Make a fuckin’ hole. Do what he was raised to do. Bred, engineered, trained to do.

Destined to do.

Win the war. No matter what.

END CHAPTER 77

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Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow, Zoe and Riker

36 Humans

TTTA

Adam Shearsby

Anthony Landry

Anthony Youhas

Armond471

Austin Deschner

Brigid

Chris Candreva

Chris Dye

Daniel Iversen

Daniel Morris

Eric Hardwick

His Dread Monarch

James Ren

John Norton

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Karthik Mohanarangan

Katja

Krit Barb

Marquis Talmadge

NovaTheSpaceWolf

Ortheri

Richard A Anstett

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Shane Wegner

Sun Rendered

T.A. Carlson

Taylor McGee

TheMoneyBadger

Theningaraf

Xultanis

Yeania Aeon

Zachary Galicki

As well as 64 Deathworlders…

Adam Beeman
Adam Zarger
Alex Langub
Andrew
Andrew Ford
Andrew Preece atp blackwolf393
Brandon Hicks
Bruce Ludington
Chris Bausch
Chris Meeker damnusername
Daniel R.
David Jamison
Derek Price
Devin Rousso galrock0
Gavin Smart
Ignate Flare
Ivan Smirnov
Jeffrey Stults
Jerry Lawson
Jim Hamrick jmal116
John Campbell
Jon
Joseph Bark
Justin Hood
Katie Drzewiecki
Kristoffer Skarra
Lina Blue lovot
Matt
Matt Badger
Matt Bullock
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
Mikee Elliott
Nathaniel Batts
Nick Annunziata
Nicolas Gruenbeck
NightKhaos
Patrick Huizinga
Ryan Cadiz
Ryc O’Chet
Sam
Sean Calvo
Sir Xaph
Stephen Prescott
Thanatos theWorst
Trevor C
Vincent Leighton
Volka Creed walter thomas
William Kinser
Woodsie13
Yshmael Salas ziv
Zod Bain

79 Friendly ETs, 147 Squishy Xenos and 313 Dizi Rats, who splorch until they can splorch no more.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work under fair use are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not necessarily share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 78: “Fury”

Chapter 78: Fury

Dandelion: audiobook now available!

- Click here to purchase the audiobook

- Or click here to purchase any version of the book from your favorite retailer

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Fury

Date Point: 18y9m2w6d AV
Hunter city, planet Hell

Warhorse

The infiltration team already did lots of work. The Hunters might be endless, but the immediately available ones? All dead. The ones arriving now had come from further away and were slower. Their meaty bits tired, their cybernetics drained of power. Fatigue affected Hunters just as much as Humans.

And Hunters weren’t a match on their best day.

Smash through the first few. Tear off limbs, stomp skulls and chests. Break and crush. Suit already filthy, but just getting started.

Always an eye on the others, though. HEALTHCON all green. Good.

Lots of work to do.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

The Alpha was buying time by throwing new spawn into the fray. Most had gone into stasis as soon as their first implantation was complete, and had known nothing of the world since. They were inexperienced, uneducated…and hungry.

A perfect ablative layer to force the invaders to push through while the more completely cyberized, experienced and cunning Betas got in position, and the Builders worked to minimize the coming damage and prepare for a long fight.

The new-spawn were ablating much too quickly. And while they were certainly slowing the enemy…it wasn’t by enough. A new tactic, then. Saturate the corridor, to make their egress difficult. It issued orders to that effect and was pleased to observe the result.

With time purchased, it returned to its own distinct portion of the hunt. There was an ambush to set.

Rather than get closer to the fighting, the Alpha did something that simply never would have occurred to new-spawn: it withdrew. It had no illusions that the Humans and Gao would break out of the master facility. Two naked Human-Alphas had proven more than a match for fully equipped Betas during its raid on that transport ship some time ago. With all of their armament and equipment, there was no superiority to be found in numbers.

Still, not all was lost. Perhaps they might be driven to exhaustion, if the fight was sufficiently grueling. After all, the Gaoian-Alphas were a lesser-known enemy. The Fur-Faced surely had limits, even if they were challenging prey. Perhaps their strength wasn’t up to par. Perhaps they…

…

<+ astonishment +>

…Well. Perhaps not.

Not quite believing what it had just witnessed, It sent an update to the Alpha of Alphas, which responded with <+ fascination +> and signed into the local nets directly.

They needed to escalate.

Daar

Lotsa bodies bein’ shoved into the hall, tryin’ to slow ‘em down. Daar plowed through them like they weren’t more’n tall grass, but between the press of all the gore, the need to keep firing lines open, eyes constantly scannin’ along the walls, watchin for shield emitters—

Fuck that. Daar was the biggest Keedafucker around, so he might as well fuckin’ use it.

They were clear of the thick, reinforced walls protectin’ where the wormhole suppressor had been. The walls here didn’t look so sturdy. So, he picked a nice-looking one his HUD map said had a corridor on the other side, going in a generally useful direction…

He grunted, flung himself forward for a bound, and crashed right through it. Good thing he had a thick neck, ‘cuz he din’t just puncha hole through it, the whole damn section caught and pulled off with him. Nice and weirdly clean! He had’ta peel the rest offa him but that weren’t no big deal, an’ now he’d saved ‘em all lotsa time, which meant ammo, which meant lives.

No fuckin’ idea what the rooms here were for, but no time to stop an’ think about it neither. Point was, no sign of any nasty surprises like explosives or field snares. Good. All the more reason to keep bustin’ through walls.

So, he did. Over an’ over, not losin’ a beat along the way. He jinked this way an’ that but always kept goin’ in the general direction of out so’s the slimy fucks weren’t gonna pin him.

Every so often, a Hunter got in his way. Well, briefly anyway. They din’t make ‘fer very durable toys though an’ he din’t wanna waste time, so mostly they just got a swipe or a kick, or mebbe he just charged forward anyway like they weren’t there. No point wastin’ ammo or momentum.

There were a couple that sorta lived, but HEAT had his back, so they din’t live ‘fer long.

Then there was a solid wall. He could see it comin’ on his HUD an’ it was the perfect surface ‘ta rebound against ‘ta double back an’ regroup with the men.

Looked like they were along one of the four radial corridors that spread out from the center o’ the installation. Gonna need demo ‘ta breech it, or they’d need ‘ta charge along th’ hallways running alongside of the wall.

Daar considered, briefly. And told his suit ‘ta spray his visor clean.

Hmm.

Hallways an’ corridors were risky. This weren’t a major one—that was on the other side o’ the concrete wall—but it did run parallel to it almost to the outside o’ the installation. Lotsa room to get a head of steam goin’ in the hall. And another wall at the end just waitin’ ‘fer a chargin’ Daar! Decision made. He barked out his orders an’ waited a bare few seconds ‘fer his crew to catch up. They weren’t no slowpokes! Once they had him covered, he pointed himself down the hall, poured on all the speed he could, and…

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

…Clearly, their information on the Gao-Alpha-of-Alphas was woefully out of date. He had the strength to plow through steel walls like claws through soft skin, and did so at a speed that none of its Hunters could possibly hope to manage. After the third break-through it became woefully apparent that he wouldn’t be slowed or even much inconvenienced by the terrain.

The Gaoian Alpha of Alphas charged steadily on, leaving an <+ awe-inspiring +> trail of slaughter and destruction in his wake. The Deathworld Predators were in danger of breaching out of the facility already, and the fight had barely begun.

The Alpha calculated. It had originally jumped in and positioned itself to challenge this Alpha of Alphas personally, but in light of this new data…

No. Its current form was not up to such a hopeless fight. In a direct contest of strength, it stood no chance whatsoever against…that. Therefore, it did not intend to go maw-to-claws with such a monstrous being. This wasn’t any ordinary hunt. This was a hunt against a beautifully superior prey. Such a rare gift of a hunt demanded guile and patience.

It retreated from the immediate vicinity rather than risk detection, while the Humans and Gao slaughtered their way through the last of the new-spawn. Some of its requirements had been met, in that the heavy units were creating a cordon, but there was no reason to believe said cordon would last.

A counterattack was in order. And there were some Betas in position to slip past the enemy’s dangerous claw and slash at the vulnerable body behind it. The Hunters could ignore their own walls too, when needed.

The Alpha had no reason to believe that they would succeed in seizing the enemy Arrays, though. They might sow havoc for a few seconds, but that section of the facility was already dense with deathworlders. There was no hope of extracting the Betas, but it ordered the attack anyway—there was always the possibility of surprise success. Still, the real counter-attack was going to require mass, some deft maneuvering, and the kind of discipline that new-spawn and Deltas could not be expected to demonstrate. It would take time.

The Alpha just needed to trust that, perhaps, its prey might fail to notice a detail or two in the confusion…

Staff Sergeant Yousef Wright, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry

Thump

Wright rode the sudden change in gravity and ignored the way it made his stomach lurch and his inner ear unhappy. Some things, you never quite got used to no matter how often you did ‘em in training. And they’d trained a lot for this moment…

They were out and off the platform as fast as they could go, right behind the too-broad backs of a bunch of Gaoian giants. First Fang all, and they had an important job: Keep Yousef and his men alive for the next few minutes, as they snapped together the arrays.

The HEAT had deployed a small array. “Small” in this case meaning it weighed about ninety kilos or so and could transit a squad of men. “Compact” might be a better word.

They needed big arrays now, though. The ones that could transit a whole platoon and all their gear. And they needed more than one.

The first box was torn open, the struts handed out, the power module heaved into place. Gunfire and butchery near the entrance: not his job, not his problem. Pieces snapped and latched together. Off the platform, power on, already working on the next array before the first one thumped.

A storm swept out. A fucking hurricane, driving the Hunters back with bullets. Explosions and slaughter, still not his job, not his problem. Got to get the second array built.

Thump

Gaoians this time, flowing between and around the humans, slapping down shieldsticks. Getting fucking crowded, but the gunfire moving away as they pushed forward, following the trail the HEAT blazed.

Thump

Second array finished. The compact one just delivered more parts. Repeat the cycle, room in this hall for some more…

THUMP

Yousef blinked, realized he was lying on the ground, with rubble under his face. Couldn’t hear a damn thing, just a high note that filled his whole head….

Something slammed into the concrete in front of his face. Articulated metal, ugly waxy maggot-white skin visible between thick angled armor plates. He flopped on his back and looked up.

More machine than critter, bigger than the others, and fast. It ignored him, pounced past and over him, claws seething, gun rampaging, bullets flashing off shields. Suicidally bold as it plunged into the arriving platoon, lashing out with claws that tore right through armor and flesh even as its shield dropped, even as its body was shredded.

Hearing faded back in, full of screams and rage, and Gaoian war-cries. First Fang plunged into the hole the Hunters had blasted. One pounced right over Yousef, rode the next Hunter down while ripping it to pieces.

A human hand grabbed Yousef and heaved. “Come on! Get up!”

The fog finally lifted. He was alive. In pain, but intact. Thank God for modern armor. Some of the guys hadn’t been so lucky.

Focus. Array three wasn’t going to build itself.

He grabbed the next box, and got back to work.

Gonzo

…Welp. The God-Emperor of the fuckin’ universe just did his best impression of the Kool-Aid man, and suddenly their Hunter problem was a whole lot smaller. Now it was all about keeping up. Thompson thought he’d understood speed. He’d been training with the big boys, could keep up (for a good long while, at least) even with the best of them.

Nobody could keep up with Daar. He punched gaping holes through all the fuckin’ walls in the blink of an eye, then circled back to collect everyone else, and did all that before anyone generally knew what was happening.

Suddenly, they were running across almost totally empty corridors just as fast as they could manage.

The Hunters were pretty quick on the uptake, and started clawing at the walls to break through onto them but…not quite enough. They couldn’t just explode right through it, they had to rip them apart first.

So…shoot ‘em innaface.

Gonzo was a simple man. He sees Hunter, he breaks Hunter. Easy enough for a smoothbrain like him. And there were plenty of Hunters to break.

Shoot. Sometimes punch. Kick, twist. Form up, covering fire. Surprise from the side, wrestlin’ instincts take over but leap up just in time to escape fusion claw through back—

Fist right through unarmored little Hunter’s chest. Squelchy and gross. Spring back and use carbine to open up some distance. Quick check-in as they reform, charging down the hallway while Titan sets explosives. Monkey grin, his score was catching up.

The HUD showed them many things, always the right thing timed to just the right moment. The onboard ML from their suit computers was pretty good, the FIC uplink (when they had it) was even better. When there weren’t more important things to show them, it even displayed a little unobtrusive “scorecard,” because the HEAT measured everything and motivation mattered.

Righteous was in second place. Daar didn’t even count, he was so unfairly good. Hunter was in fifth, so he still had some catching up to do, especially now that First Fang was back-filling through the portal, entrapping the Hunters between the two teams.

But that was okay. There were a lot of opportunities headed their way, and besides: HEAT leads the way. Even Daar knew it; he was through first with them, after all.

There was one thing on everyone’s mind though: no way this place didn’t have some traps. And the old guys respected those traps, they’d seen for themselves what they could do. Which meant, Hunter respected them too.

They caught up to Daar’s trail of destruction, and faced down a long fuckin’ corridor towards a way out. Cutting cross-country helped, but eventually they needed to make an exit.

And they found the first trap right away when a field snare sprang into life and caught the charging Daar in mid-air.

HMS Myrmidon, Cimbrean system, the far Reaches

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

From the FIC, the invasion was numbers and reports. A company of light infantry already deployed on the HEAT’s and First Fang’s heels. Three casualties already, one death, one HEAT squad exhausted. Array construction on pace, but not in the ideal location. Daar was leading the charge to reach open sky and fire beacons and anti-satellite rounds into orbit. The fleet could do nothing until he succeeded.

A dry and sterile summary of what must surely be bedlam. But that was combat from Caruthers’ perspective. In short order, he’d be receiving similar reports from the fleet’s ships as they locked horns with the swarm, and…well. Nothing short of divine intervention was going to see them through the coming fight perfectly unscathed. Unless Myrmidon herself took hits—and, as the most protected ship in the formation, that wasn’t going to happen except in the event of a disaster—Caruthers himself wasn’t going to feel a bit of it.

Part of him was glad. Part of him felt like he owed the soldiers fighting and dying on Hell right now something more than a dry acknowledgement of their statistics.

The numbers ticked up. A second company just jumped. The beachhead was a little more secure, and the Hunters had been shown that they needed to bring more than just a few heavy units if they wanted to achieve a real counterattack…

But the fleet wasn’t in orbit and they didn’t have a secure spot to build the big arrays and call in the heavy armour and air support. Without those, this would be a short and costly attack.

Caruthers had no doubts, though. The HEAT didn’t fail.

All he had to do was be ready for them.

Daar

He found the first forcefield trap by plungin’ right into it.

Hunters. Fuckin’ cunning, some’a them. Hid the emitters well, ‘fer a rush job.

Right away it tried to crush him hard and pin him in place, but they musta not planned ‘fer a Keedafucker like him, ‘cuz with a deep growl and a pretty damn strong desire ‘ta not get peeled like a kavu melon, he managed to keep his limbs moving, keep his speed up…

Thank fuck his suit had some grounding filaments weaved in the outermost layer. The first thing his onboard ML did the instant it detected the field was fire out grounding leads. An’ with so much metal around, there was a lot ‘ta ground into. Din’t stop the bluntest, squeeziest fields from givin’ their most bestest hugs, so no avoidin’ the rib-ache, there, but…

The sharp field boundaries that had plunged in on him fizzled and dissipated. His suit dumped some of the stored charge from its onboard capacitors back along the collapsing force planes. Add in his momentum and all the loads that hadta generate on those little fuckin’ emitters, and the reward was a glorious lightshow as they blew out in a shower of sparks.

Good. The suit modifications worked. No time ‘ta kick himself ‘fer the mistake of fallin’ into the trap at all, point was, he was alive. An’ right now, Daar needed ‘ta play gravball with himself as the ball, ‘cuz they were not goin’ that way now. Not unless they wanted ‘ta take it slow and find every trap…unacceptable.

Unfortunately, the only other way out was a solid concrete wall. Fortunately, there weren’t much livin’ anywhere that were heavier an’ nothin’ that ran faster than a Daar. Put the two together, hit the wall at speed, absorb the impact with his paws an’ kick off hard…

He din’t quite land it perfectly, and the force of the hit very briefly disoriented him, even as he was charging back. But a quick rear-camera glance in his HUD showed he’d done enough.

The Defenders would have fun with that! Daar growled to himself savagely. All they needed ‘ta do was make a fuckin’ hole and they were so close…

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

Unranked Eaters were not a disciplined fighting force. They swarmed a target, rushing toward it in a slavering wave of claws and teeth, eager to overwhelm it and feast, but impossible to hold back once unleashed. The new-spawn were so new they didn’t really understand the idea of being killed, their instinctual drive was just…hunger. Overwhelming, all-encompassing, maddening hunger that only gave way to rational thought once sated.

This was the majority of the Flensing-Alpha’s army. Endless reserves of new-spawn, stowed in stasis immediately after their first emergence and implantation, never fed, never trained, never honed. And no match at all for the invading force. Among other things, once their corpses stacked high enough, the ones at the back found themselves clambering slowly over a mountain of meat, and inevitably succumbed to the temptation to feast on their fallen fellows.

There was no victory to be had in that force. It was a distracting nuisance at most.

They did, however, enable a few of its more valuable Betas to escape for repositioning. Which was important, because that magnificent being of violence at the lead of this disaster had physically overpowered the forcefield trap they’d hastily laid in the long corridor the Deathworlders were charging down. Not satisfied with that remarkable performance, he poured on the speed and slammed into the far reinforced concrete wall so forcefully, he drove a fatal crack clean through to the outside.

The Alpha considered ordering its forces to reposition along this new egress, but there wouldn’t be enough time. The Gaoian Alpha of Alphas rebounded from that impact back down the corridor to meet up with his rapidly closing forces, and it was there the others’ strengths showed themselves. The mightiest of the Human-Alphas quickly set to pulling the wall apart, carting almost unbelievably large chunks of concrete out of the way for the more technically-minded of their brood, who quickly set explosives and breeched the wall.

Far behind them, the Human-Betas and Gao-Betas were a steadily advancing wall, co-ordinated and unstoppable. They never overreached, but advanced in overlapping stages laying down heavy firepower every step of the way. The New-Spawn did succeed in slowing them, though…or at least, the piles of bodies they left behind did.

No. It had nothing to keep the pressure on with, and attempting to do so now would only cost valuable resources that would be necessary later. Reluctantly, the Flensing-Alpha instructed its Brood to withdraw and regroup.

It would not be long before they counterattacked, however. This battle was far from over.

Gonzo

Snapfire and Moho were on the mess of cracked concrete Daar’d made in a second, stuffing explosive into the cracks, widening them where necessary.

Thompson turned, found some cover, drilled a few pursuing Hunters with a neat one-two, one-two, grinned inside his mask before lipping his drinkin’ tube and sucking on it. Tasted like a lemon jizzed down his throat, but god damn did he need it. The whole assault had been a balls-out sprint from the word go and this was the first opportunity he had to not be running as fast as he could fuckin’ move.

MASS operations 101—hydrate every chance you got. Even the littlest HEAT operators were much bigger than humans were naturally prone to being, and so they were all sweaty as fuck at the best of times. Thompson was already a veritable giant even among HEAT and went through a few gallons a day baseline, for fuck’s sake. In the MASS, it was much more. Failure to hydrate, to recycle all that water back into them? Pretty great way to fall flat on your face.

“Fire in the hole!”

A blast like bein’ love-tapped in the guts by ‘Horse. Dust and concrete chunks everywhere. His suit compensated for the drop in visibility with ultrasound, highlighted more contacts as they came chargin’ round the corner.

Thompson was about to spring forward to go service his targets, when a grunt from ‘Horse over the radio ordered him otherwise. Thompson was a Beef. And the Beefs needed to move rubble.

Well, okay. Caveman time it was. The rest of the team charged back down the hall to clear out the last of the incoming wave. There wouldn’t be much more, though. The regulars were stackin’ ‘em like cordwood in the rear. Fuck yeah.

The next few seconds were grab-and-heave, use his fusion knife to slash away the metal mesh reinforcement. Or not, sometimes. He may be a smoothbrained idiot sometimes, but damn if he didn’t love being a fuckin’ superhero, with all that superhero strength on tap. Fuck!

They had to be quick about it, and they had to make the hole big enough for everyone. Had to shoot through it a couple times, too. He kicked out the last big chunk, ducked through, and suddenly he was outta the dust.

Dirty fuckin’ sky overhead. But sky. He put a fist clean through a Hunter’s face, dropped two more, heard ‘Base doin’ the same behind him.

‘Horse didn’t even bother. He literally tore one in half and simultaneously punted another so hard it burst, because for him that was the quickest way to service his targets.

…Jesus.

And then…sudden silence. Just the hiss of settling dust, the splash and gurgle of Hunters expiring, and the distant sound of the regulars doin’ their work, but right here was still and quiet.

Hunter could feel something thundering down the hall behind him. It turned out to be Daar, who rammed his way through the hole (and widened it a bit more in the process) with an extremely large mortar tube in his paws. It had been on his back from the beginning.

“Ain’t got no time. Mortars to the front!” Daar slammed the base plate down and pointed his mortar straight up, while he dropped the first of eight payloads down the tube. It went THUMP so hard all the dust jumped back up in the air, and Hunter’s visor protectively blacked out for a split second so the dazzling flash from the warp field wouldn’t blind him.

“You!” Daar directed his attention at Thompson. “We got seven left, git ‘ta unpackin’!”

Big burly caveman wasn’t completely stupid. He did what the big bear wanted. No problem! He struggled to lift the fuckin’ rounds, though—! What the fuck were they?!

Didn’t matter. He got ‘em moved, and got the next one set next to Daar, who promptly hefted it, adjusted his fire, and dropped it down the tube.

“Good, next!”

Well…caveman was gettin’ a workout today. Good thing he ate his Wheaties. Took a while to get ‘Horse to approve ‘em, but goddamnit, he had to keep something normal in his life.

The last two rounds were even heavier too, though he had no idea what the difference was. One was a shieldbreaker, maybe? He couldn’t remember. Oh well. Daar got all eight of his launched, while Titan and Moho were busy firing out an absurd number of smaller ones…

“Gonna be firin’ for a few minutes,” Titan noted. Daar nodded, and ordered the otherwise unoccupied operators to press forward and widen the offensive. It’d be easy work in about ninety seconds when the regulars started catching up…

But for now, there was a tidal wave of Hunters approaching.

Thompson looked over at Daar. They exchanged a quick look, one lowly specialist to the Great Father of the Gao. Right now, that rank didn’t matter.

The two of them had killing to do.

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

Hell appeared below, and Caruthers allowed himself a small, internal sigh of relief. Blackened and sickly yellow, scarred by a falling megastructure and poisoned by the Hunters, it was a dying place being picked over by carrion vermin, and by the end of the day, they’d have probably finished it off. But in that instant, it was a decidedly welcome sight.

The FIC was loud from the sheer number of voices speaking all at once, each reading the information in front of them and passing it on to those who needed it. Caruthers watched the orbital map populate, watched his fleet and fighters spread out.

These opening seconds were already planned. Each ship had its targets, and needed only to know which of the tens of thousands of contacts orbiting Hell were theirs to kill.

Some of the firepower flashed upwards, striking into higher orbit to catch lingering broodships and satellites by surprise. Some stabbed downwards to flatten identified groundside facilities. A new wormhole suppression field went up, this one friendly and generated by Destroying Fury.

But the Hunters were fast. In space combat, their ships really did act like a swarm with one unified guiding intelligence. And they had learned much from every battle.

Shield walls. A tactic as old as spears and chainmail, and back with a vengeance in this modern age. USS San Diego and USS Robert A. Heinlein accelerated, climbing to the formation’s outer trailing edge and interlocking their shields into a single protective screen as a cloud of swarmships buzzed out from among the wreckage of their long-dead orbital hive. Avenging Fury took the lower trailing edge, USS Gene Roddenberry moved to screen the fleet from ground-to-orbit fire, and the V-class contingent deployed their bulldogs. Voidripper wings held formation behind the capital ships, waiting for their moment to sally out.

Within moments, the space between fleet and swarm was seething with active EWAR, with FTL rounds and focused gamma radiation. Chaos, with both sides trying to wrestle it to their benefit.

HMS Caledonia climbed the formation to add her shields to the wall. With her aid, the thermal load stabilized and for the next few minutes, Caruthers could be sure of his upper flank. He’d need Cally in a few minutes, once it was safe to move her into a lower orbit and directly support the invasion, but for now she was well placed.

The Hunters tried to probe around the wall, sending a torrent of swarmships. Suicidal, with the voidrippers and point defence working in tandem to create a killbox, but it did apply pressure, force the fleet to maneuver and keep some safe distance.

In reply, his fleet found an exposed broodship. Every big gun that could track it spoke at once, and that one contact became a smear of shattered metal and gas. A small, grim smile plucked at Caruthers’ mouth as he watched the swarmships break off and limp back into formation to screen their capitals, leaving many of their dead tumbling in their wake.

The opening gambits had been played, and first blood went to the good guys. But there was a lot of invisible sky beyond the horizon, a lot of space for the Hunters to be getting creative where he couldn’t see.

They were a long way from winning, yet.

Alpha of Alphas

The situation was a long way from hopeless, yet. But the opening stages of the invasion were complete, and a victory for the invaders. Suboptimal, but by no means decisive.

From its distant, dispassionate perspective, the Alpha-of-Alphas could calculate, sending numbers racing ahead of reality to predict the future, and it could foresee many ways in which the Deathworlder invasion might play out. Their disciplined, well-equipped and well-prepared troops could defeat an indefinite number of new-spawn, and the rate of growth as they established new jump arrays would quickly allow them to challenge the more developed Betas and special projects.

Complicating matters: they had established their own wormhole suppressor, and their active field prevented the Alpha-of-Alphas from reactivating a new one under its own control. For the moment, the Humans and Gao had the means to bring reinforcements, while the Hunters must rely on what was already present.

Still: this was an old planet, long a hunting ground, now repurposed for industry. Much of said industry was centralized, too, and well-supplied with hefty material reserves. There were spawning pools far outside the invaded territory, ample herds of food-slaves and plenty of room to maneuver.

The battle for orbital supremacy was well matched. The invaders had secured a volume, cleansed it of Hunters, and deployed defensive shield bubbles. They would be difficult to remove, but the sheer size of the swarm lurking among the wreckage of the old hive limited their freedom to act.

With enough time, the swarm would overwhelm them, and they must have known it.

It was a simple matter to rededicate some of that industry to force cyberization of the archived new-brood. If they could not be relied upon to do damage in their newly spawned form, then they could still be made to sow havoc. A little basic armor plating, an implanted bomb…Simple enough. And likely to be effective, when the first of them reached the fighting lines.

The Alpha-of-Alphas could feel filtering through the network from its lessers. They wished for an immediate victory and a feast. They would not get it with this foe. But the numbers were promising. Victory was very much attainable, in the longer and more patient term.

No, the urgency guiding the Alpha-of-Alphas in this moment had to do with the tantalizing presence of two of its three most desired prizes. The Gao-Alpha-of-Alphas, and the Maximal Human-Alpha. Both performed at a level that blurred the lines between the organic and synthetic. Both were perfectly in tune with their equipment and their roles. Really, the only effective difference between them was one of size and scale. They were magnificent killers and faultless tacticians.

The Gaoian Alpha-of-Alphas was the more understandable being, however. His purpose was not the sometimes-illogical task of conserving living resources. His was to victory, and both his body and behavior reflected that role. He was born to dominate.

The Alpha-of-Alphas experienced the surveillance from multiple perspectives on the ongoing orgy of violence. As it swam in the data to learn its fellow apex predator, looking for any weakness or fault that it might exploit…

None clearly presented. Slowly, it realized that it stood little chance of surviving a direct challenge for supremacy, and in any case it doubted he would be content to challenge alone.

No. Its priority must be on capturing or, at last resort, neutralizing these specimens. It had learned so much from the first Alpha it had vivisected, and the examples down there were so much better…

And soon to depart. Their task was nearly complete. If the Alpha-of-Alphas was to claim its prize and strengthen the Swarm beyond assailability, it must act now.

There was an Alpha in position. A clever, talented, resourceful one that had never yet failed. Only the Flensing-Alpha could be trusted with this.

The Alpha-of-Alphas sent the orders, and the support.

+Strike.+

Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, near 3KPc Arm

Dr. Claire Farmer

Of all the people to fall in love with—to the point they’d had some long talks about their future—she’d never have guessed it would have been a severely and now superhumanly physical military man who was in deep with the most intensely mission-focused special ops types there were to be had anywhere. He was a prodigy, one of strength and motion and handicraft and skill. Not at all the intellectual sort of man she thought she’d marry one day…

But being honest, she was pretty sure he was far more intelligent than any of her prior relationships. Maybe he didn’t have their vocabulary or reading, but much like Vemik and a few others she’d met on this outer space adventure, he learned fast and could make for challenging conversation. He saw the world differently too, in a way she at first found cruel, but now saw its hidden kindnesses…

And, well… Weapons-grade. His answer to the age-old question of size versus skill was, of course, “why not both?” to literally breath-taking degrees. Her and Tilly had smug pride about their men; theirs’ were honest attractions. Hoeff wasn’t a cute boy, he was a powerfully handsome man, powerfully built in all the best ways and most importantly, powerfully skilled. She came for his face and physique, played along to enjoy his endless, mind-shattering strength…but she stayed for his soul, especially his quick and subtle sense of humor. He had unexpected depths. If she could, she’d stay cuddled up with him forever, trading jokes, maybe ogling him and his friends while they played delightfully ultramasculine games with each other…

But there was a downside to life with a committed military man. He and his team had just become something…different. He couldn’t talk much about it, but the implication was that they were about the best around at what they did, and, well…what they did wasn’t very pretty. Necessary, maybe, but now they were going to get even better at it, and that meant he was about to disappear for several months, where he would no doubt push his already superhumanly powerful body and skills to new, more extreme heights. From there…

The prospect of him disappearing on mission with little or no notice, sometimes for weeks at a time. Maybe some day, he wouldn’t come back.

That…wasn’t an easy thought.

So, what to do?

Well, the first part was obvious, and in the carefree spirit of Ten’Gewek thinking…

His smug face beamed above her as he leisurely rolled his hips against hers, pinning her to the bed under his stone-hard weight as they enjoyed their post-climax high. “Y’know, with a welcome-home like that…” His hands and lips weren’t idle, and she’d barely caught her breath before she felt him pick up the pace yet again. WIth a crushing grip, a breath-taking thrust, and the smug grin of someone who knew just what to do… “Time ‘fer round three.”

Well, they had all the time in the world, and it wasn’t even noon yet. The heat was just oppressive so it wasn’t like anyone was doing anything productive…

They played together until the evening cool settled in. Benefits of being fit and fierce, really.

Eventually, even his endless passion gave way to more tender affection. She wiggled to gain some breathing room as he continued his wonderful attentions. “Jesus, Hoeff.” She sighed happily. “I think I lost count…” There was some happy exhaustion written plainly across his face, and she couldn’t help feel a bit proud about that. Teasingly, “But you did too, I think.”

Hoeff sighed happily and nuzzled against her throat. “You’ve got witchcraft, babe. Ain’t nobody ever been so good to me.”

“Right? You’d think I’d have snagged a husband by now!” Her hands were free, so she ran them indulgently across as much of the muscular geography of his back as she could reach.

He gave her an affectionate squeeze and kissed the tip of her nose. “Babe, ‘ya already did. You jus’ lemme know when, an’ I’ll show up with a tux an’ everything.”

“Ugh, no. No white dress and tux wedding, please. So…commercial.”

“Well if ‘ya want somethin’ a bit more romantic…” He rolled over and dragged her with him, so that she was laying on top of him with his head against a pillow. “We could do it in the tops of the trees here under the moonlight, naked before God and all else. Get real old-school.”

“That sounds better.”

He gave her a mischievous grin. “An’ I happen to know that tonight’s a full moon…”

“Where the werewolves and all the crazies come out,” she giggled.

“Well, yeah. Gettin’ married is a little bit crazy, after all…” He stroked some hair out of her face, tilted his head a little, and his expression grew…

“So how ‘bout it?”

…

“…You’re serious?”

“Deadly.” He sat up, now. He was a compact tank of a man but even still, there was a thrill to how easily he could just…do that. Move himself and her and basically anything around like it was nothing. They were still pressed together, skin to skin from their loins to their breasts, legs around each other’s waists. She hugged to him, still joined deeply as man and woman.

He nodded seriously. “Yes. I am. I love you, Claire. I love you because you showed me I could still love anyone. You showed me that it was worth doing.”

He fell silent, while a kind of pressure built in Claire’s heart, a tangled knot of…all sorts of things, so tightly woven together she couldn’t even really pick them apart, and all trying to climb up her throat and make her cry. She scooted up into his lap and draped herself over his shoulders to squeeze him tight. She wanted to say yes. She was going to say yes. But still. “We don’t exactly live a stable life…”

“No,” he agreed. “That a problem?”

She hugged him tight and pressed her face against his thick column of a neck, holding back tears. “…It’s not gonna stop me from saying yes.”

She felt some of the tension melt out of him, and grinned to herself. She hadn’t doubted he meant every word…but it was good to feel it in the way his breathing slowed, his return hug was a long, tender squeeze and he let out a long, slow, tension-busting happy sigh.

“God-damn do I ever love you.”

They did, in fact, marry in the tree-tops. She climbed herself to the very top of the biggest Ketta in the village, which meant a mind-bogglingly high ascent almost straight up. They found a nice big wide branch they could stand on, one with a clear view of the sky. There they exchanged vows, before God and the universe at the top of a primeval jungle. Her vows were…well, maybe a bit sappy. It wasn’t like she had long to compose them. His, though, he’d obviously been thinking about it for a long time. They were powerful. Serious. Deeply heartfelt. Words exactly like the man himself.

Singer agreed to serve as witness, which meant Vemik and Yan (home from his own training) were witnesses, too. Professor Hurt too, to make it legal, though the climb up for him was definitely a bit awkward.

It was anything but a conventional wedding. And they’d have to register it properly back on Cimbrean at some point. But when the Ten’gewek gathered in the trees around them and when the Singer started a prolonged chorus of hooting that echoed across the canopy…

They understood the Sacred, and they knew that what she and Hoeff had just done was magic of the highest order. And they approved.

She couldn’t have asked for better.

Planet Hell, Hunter space

Gonzo

Thompson had never known such to-the-bone exhaustion in all his life. It never fucking stopped.

The Hunter’s were fuckin’ endless up front, and now that they’d mostly secured the rear, it was up to the big guys to punch through the gory fuckin’ mass of them. He was there, side-by-side with legends of the battlefield, doing his damndest to keep up and be some kind of useful, but like the infiltration team at Eclipse Palace…his body wasn’t happy with him. The Mass kept pestering him in his HUD, colors matching perfectly with what his body was saying: Stop.

He ignored them both. He could have a heart attack later, once he’d murdered every last fucker in their way. He couldn’t let his buddies down. He just…

He’d blacked out. They’d paused for just a moment behind cover, and that was all that his body needed to force him to stop. He didn’t pass out or anything but one second he’d slammed his back against a big chunk of debris, and as far as he could tell, the very next eyeblink ‘Base was there, and suddenly Hunter could feel his heart slamming in his fuckin’ chest…

“Did fuckin’ good, bro. Don’t feel bad, you’ll get the conditioning over time. Catch your breath.”

Hunter groaned, and realized his rifle felt like it weighed as much as a fuel truck. ‘Base put a hand on his arm to stop him trying to move.

“You’re about to crash, bruh. I’m here, okay? You ain’t gonna buy it. Got that?” Vaguely, Thompson noticed something cold on his arm. An IV. He was crashing, hard.

But, well. That was okay.

“…Yuh…” Fuck, even talking was…

…he musta blacked out again.

He came to, confused and a bit groggy, and looked around. ‘Base was still there, but he’d been moved somewhere safer. Several empty IV bags were next to him, and some other stuff…

He needed to pee, bad. He let go and tried not to think about where all that liquid would be recycled to in a minute or so, as he took a sip of his disconcertingly warm suit water. He was propped up against a wall near the area directly outside the big pyramid, where there was a plaza big enough for the vehicle-sized arrays, and a triage post to handle the wounded.

There was a steady flow of dudes movin’ with a purpose in and outta the pyramid and the light arrays deep inside. Hunter couldn’t remember exactly how deep. They’d been at an all-out sprint for…fuck, how long had it taken them to bust out? Damn near an hour to escape, even despite everything? Just…some bits were all about running down empty halls, some bits were so crammed full of Hunters a bro could barely move.

After that…a blur of darting from cover to cover, dealing with makeshift technicals, sometimes doing violent parkour over a blasted hellscape in all their gear, crushing Hunters underfoot…All the delights of urban combat in one endless, balls-out engagement. Damn.

“How…?”

“Just a few minutes. Your strength outran your endurance but you’re a tough fucker.”

Actually, he did feel better. Weak and tired, but not like he was about to just crash over the cliff and die any second. He probably coulda forced himself to stand up if he really had to…

“Where are the…uh…?”

Okay. Still a bit sluggish in the thinky meats.

“The big fuckers are still at the front, cleaning out the last of the natural perimeter. I suspect they’ll want to send us home soon and transition to conventional forces.”

Speaking of…Thompson wasn’t the only one out of the fight. The regulars had taken losses, and from where he was sitting he could see the triage area and the evac array. The medics, Human and Gao alike, were fuckin’ busy.

He was the only guy on team one that’d fallen out, though. Fuck.

…Fuck! He slammed his fist down in frustration and left a small crater in the concrete.

“Bruh.” ‘Base rapped him affectionately on the helmet. “You did good. You’re, what? Barely a year into on-team training? You’ll get there. Most of the rest of the team was basically right behind you. Why do you think we called up team two? It’s ‘cuz we regular first-string supermutants were all running empty, and we kinda knew that’d happen, given how hard we had to go. Remember ‘yer brief?”

Gonzo shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “…Yeah?”

“Right on. If we gotta stick around, we’ll tag back in once team two hits their wall. But, the crazy bit’s done an’ you made it through. Don’t feel bad about it, man. Now I gotta go fix up Thurrsto ‘fore he wakes up, so you sit there and don’t do anything stupid, yijao?”

“…Yi.”

He got a minute or two to sit and rest. Weren’t exactly a quiet rest, though. Lotta gunfire close by. Sometimes explosions. Lotta yelling, some screams. Every couple of minutes, the shriek and earth-cracking boom of an orbital strike, or the tearing sound of aircraft overhead…or the rumble of the tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling off the big array platforms next to the triage area.

There were a lot of ‘em already. The mechanized infantry were rollin’ in hard, fresh an’ fierce. They weren’t warrior-gods of the battlefield like HEAT unironically mostly thought of themselves as, but that was okay, because they had mass. There wasn’t much Warhorse all by himself could do against a tank, after all, besides expend heavy ammo he probably didn’t have in the first place. Against a dozen?

No. What HEAT did was specialized. They were a hard-hitting kind of the heaviest “light” shock infantry the world had ever seen. Their job was to get into impossible places with just themselves and whatever they could carry, no matter where or how that place might be.

They weren’t designed for sustained assault, and they were limited to extreme but surgical violence. Once things got serious, you didn’t use people like them. You brought in an army.

One of the guys riding an APC pointed him out to his buddies. Hunter’s Mass had enhanced sensors onboard so he could hear their excited chatter, which made him grin.

“—Fuckin’ monster over there! I told you they were huge!” That was, of course, the first thing people always noticed. It never stopped being awesome. The second thing, though…

“Fuck, lookit his armor. How fuckin’ many did he kill?”

That prompted Thompson to look down at himself and realize…yeah. He was brown from boots to helmet with Hunter guts and gore. What did he smell like? The sun was out, and it had all sorta dried into a mealy crust…

Still…

He found the strength to stand, flex like a fuckin’ boot, and answer the second guy’s question. “Two hunnerd an’ eighty-seven!”

He really was an incorrigible idiot, sometimes. There was a brief cheer, before someone sensible inside made his new friend focus on the task at hand.

…And him back on recovery. Just standing up had been a minor effort, and reminded him that he was encased in an extremely heavy personal armor system. Maybe…sit back down.

And rest. Just that, while all the jittery everything still gnawed at him. All he could do really was watch the battle on his HUD. Daar and Warhorse were still fighting, still a blitzkreig of fuckin’ murder. A quick peek at the video feed was…humbling. It was unstabilized, sure, but the two of them were moving way too goddamn fast to even track. Fuck. He switched to tactical overlay. Their HEALTHCONs were still green. What the fuck were they?

Righteous was still going strong, though his tenuous green was flirting with amber. ‘Base was green, prob’ly cuz hauling Hunter back to safety counted as a rest. Moho was solid amber…

Yeah. Freakshows aside, most of the team was runnin’ on willpower and fumes, really.

Team two jogged outta the pyramid to go relieve team one. Captain Campbell gave Thompson a nod as he went, and honestly? That little nod helped a lot. Mood counted for just as much as the rapid recovery…magic, really…whatever. It was working pretty damn fast and he even had a fuckin’ gauge in his HUD now that he thought of as his “gas tank.” It wasn’t that, actually, it was his muscular system’s glycogen uptake and a couple other things smashed together…

Point was, it was a measure of how full-up his recovery was going. Sure, his heart was beating a bit uncomfortably fast, but that was expected. It’d calm down once the Mass was done with him. He could feel his body pumping up against the crushing squeeze, too. Another minute, and—

The battle didn’t give him a minute.

Something landed among them, and break time was over.

Rauwrhyr Republic flagship Soar Undaunted, border of Hunter space

Fleet Commander Atrucryr

“Battle alert. All personnel report to combat stations. Fleet commander to the bridge.”

Things were different in the new fleet. There was no panicked scramble, nor any sense of things being uncontrolled. As Atrucryr ducked out of his cabin and up through the freefall chute to the command deck, he noted that the crew moving with or opposite him were tight and solemn…but focused

Their Deathworld training had paid immense dividends. Simple things like discipline, rank, marching and drill, training and competence had been strongly emphasized, over and over until everyone understood those things to the core of their beings, as if they were instinctual knowledge. While at first everyone chafed under the stressful training regime, and the experienced crew especially had resented going back through “basic” to re-learn their jobs…

It turned out, they really didn’t know the basics, by either Human or Gaoian reckoning. The absolute fundamentals of military thinking and behavior were just…not there, and that proved to be a poor foundation on which to build a fighting force.

No more.

Atrucryr alighted on the bridge with a deft touch, and eyed the forward displays as he buckled himself into his command couch. The enemy was right on schedule, it seemed. “Report.”

“A raiding force of two broodships with…about a dozen swarmship escorts. Their heading takes them toward Hell.”

Exactly as expected.

“Move to intercept,” Atrucryr commanded. “Let’s show them a challenge.”

The audacity of giving such an order when it related to Hunters gave him a pleasant rush. For too long, the fleet had treated the Swarm as unassailable, something to escape and then clean up after. Flying toward Hunters? Unmistakably defying them?

Not long ago, that would have been a terrifying thought. Now, the mood on the bridge was…fierce. And the Hunters responded predictably: when the fleet moved to defy them, the Broodships promptly changed course, angling in to teach these upstart prey a lesson.

“Message from Fleetmatriarch Anenwrethgwen, sir. She bids us good hunting, and stands ready to assist.”

“Acknowledge with our thanks.”

This time, there would be no Gaoian or Human ship to save them. They had engagements elsewhere. It was up to them to safeguard their lives and destroy their enemy.

“Spike range in forty ri’.”

Atrucryr nodded. And watched. And waited as the moments ticked by…until they were gone.

“Fire.”

Freighter Stray Fortune, Spacelane on the border of Hunter space

Bruuk, watchin’ uselessly onna bridge

“They’re…that’s good. They’re doing okay, right?”

Daar had given them a special mission for the start of the war, just as a final act of kindness to their new buddies in the fight. They were there to observe, quietly. Their ship had some pretty nifty abilities in that regard now, but they also had a second purpose.

They were there as a potential lifeboat, should it be needed.

Ian nodded. His expression hadn’t changed one bit, his face was that grim, locked-down mask he always wore when things got serious…but he smelled satisfied. “Think they just gave the Hunters a nasty fuckin’ surprise.”

Bruuk tilted his head as he watched the dots moving on the screen. He’d never studied space combat, and from what he knew it had changed a whole lot in the last few years. To him, it just looked like a cloud of blue dots and a cloud of yellow dots playing touch-tail with each other. Though, he knew enough to know the Fortune’s sensors were some kind of special to follow the fight from this far away.

Then again, the Fortune weren’t just a freighter nowadays. Clan Whitecrest had packed a lotta hidden tech into her hull. Morwk had never stopped complaining about it, ‘cuz it meant more work for him…but Bruuk could tell that, secretly, their engineer liked havin’ all those toys to play with. Well…some’a them, anyway. The swarm of drones belonged to Dora, an’ she was like a real ornery Mother with ‘em.

One of the big yellow triangles flashed and vanished. Ian’s stonewall expression broke into a big, savage grin. “Go on, lads. Nice one!”

The mop-up after that took seconds. The blue icons formed up, surged in, the trail of small yellow dots all flared and disappeared, and moments later the second broodship was surrounded and exterminated.

Ian grunted, then turned to look across the bridge. “…How’d they do, Urgug?”

“Damage reports from…two ships.” One of Urgug’s facial tentacles reached out to scroll through whatever report he was reading. “One escort damaged by thermal overload, and…one swarmship reached the Soar Undaunted and boarded. The crew evacuated that section and blew it to space. No casualties.”

“Impressive!” Bruuk chittered happily.

“Not perfect, but….yeah.” Ian nodded. “Alright. Signal the Clan, pass along what we recorded, and we can go get on with our delivery run.”

Bruuk duck-nodded, satisfied there wasn’t any need for them to get involved themselves. The fight went well and the Stray Fortune could remain hidden, leaving all the glory to the people who deserved it.

They had a third mission, after all. They had a team to insert, a few Humans (one sorta Bruuk-like in build!) and some actual Ten’Gewek! He had a lot of fun playing with them, especially the big guys—it was nice earning some respect from people who could give him a good fight, after all—but as to their mission, well…

No idea. And that’s how he liked it. Wilde and crew were gonna drop them off basically in the middle of nowhere, and then leave as undetectably as possible.

The other side of the war didn’t stop for the assault on Hell, after all…

Captain Booker Campbell

The fucking HELLNO jump. The HEAT’s own signature move, now used against them by a whole fucking brood of the biggest, most cyberized meat wagons ever to lurch out of Hunterdom…Right in the middle of the fucking command post and triage area.

They hit like an artillery strike. Worse, because artillery didn’t lash out all around it after the explosion, and fusion claws didn’t give a fuck about armor. Good men died in instants, gunned down or slashed open. Team Two were surrounded in instants as a second wave of mechanized monsters slammed into the ground around them, and the fight devolved into uncontrolled chaos.

Sheer reflex saved Campbell’s life as two came for him at once. He ducked, weaved, lost his rifle as a set of claws shredded it, claimed the Hunter’s arm with his own blade in reply, then threw himself aside as the other one spat a fat burst of bullets at him. They knocked sparks off the scale midsuit, and his MASS beeped an alarm at him: seal compromised.

He bulled up and forward, slashed the legs out from under the one he’d already wounded and gutted it as it fell. The undamaged one pounced at him, slashing through its fallen counterpart’s body to get at him…

Its shields flashed and the armor implanted in its skin sparked and buckled under a high-power fusillade from a GR6E. Thompson, still sluggish and his HEALTHCON still deep in amber, but the kid’s aim was good. Campbell borrowed the distraction to drive his knife right into the reeling Hunter’s brain pan.

Two down. Dozens to go. But these weren’t the mad frenzied weaklings Team One had chewed through for the last couple hours. These were the old Hunters, the real deal. Disciplined, with an objective beyond feasting. Shit, they even ignored the wounded humans and gao as they pounced on the arrays and set about tearing them apart. An especially large one swarmed all over an IFV and started to peel it open, only to be driven off when the men inside shot the hell out of it. It shimmered and vanished, becoming a blur of distorted air as it disengaged…

And just as quickly as it had started, the raid was over. Daar, ‘Horse and Righteous came rampaging in, only to fetch up short without a target to slaughter. The Arrays were all ruined, a number of the engineers maimed or worse, the overhead shield generator and its power source both trashed…

But the Hunters engaged their cloaking devices and withdrew with a tight professionalism that left Campbell clenching his teeth.

The big bear was an excellent multitasker too, because he was already ten steps ahead of Campbell. “Git me new arrays,” he growled toward the sky and the listening FIC. “We ain’t leavin’ ‘til this shit’s secure! And where is my fuckin’ shield?!”

His more brutal talents were required elsewhere, so he didn’t have time to hang around for clean-up. The big guys charged off, and Campbell had just enough time to check in on their status: still, miraculously, healthily green. Righteous seemed to have found his second wind.

He spared a grateful swat on the shoulder for Thompson. Gonzo acknowledged it with a weary nod, and slumped back down again. Campbell’s mind was calculating however. They had an enemy. A clever one. Somewhere out there was a Hunter that thought with more than its stomach, knew how to hurt and slow them, and certainly wouldn’t be content to sit back and let them have their way.

His mind turned to the really big one that had personally wrecked an armored vehicle then casually escaped like all the shots raining on it were just…well, rain. Hunters tended to save the biggest and best gear for their elites and leadership. And that one had been more like a spidery mech than a living creature. If it wasn’t the Alpha, it was still important.

Which meant it needed to die. He needed to hunt it down, and he was lucky enough to have some fresh and ready Whitecrests in need of a target—

He never got to finish the thought. There were more explosions behind him, a shockwave of dust and shattered concrete. He spun, certain the Hunters were back, but what he saw instead was worse. Far worse.

Major Anthony “Abbott” Costello

The pyramid was a strange construction. Parts of it were thickly reinforced bunkers, and it was one of these that the infiltration team had broken into and claimed, and which now served as their “array room.” There were other bunkers scattered here and there, but most of it was, well, just a building. Light walls, light floors, good enough for normal use but not intended to stand up to any serious assault.

The Brood that dropped in from above inside their armored drop shells ignored the walls and ceilings. One second, Costello’s command center was secure, and men were hustling out of the arrays for the longish jog to the exit…

The next, blood was painting the walls.

Carnage. Grab weapon. Shoot, dodge, shoot more. Grab a hapless soldier and yank him out of the way just in time: those claws would’ve cut him in half.

Hunter: Grab. Crush. Thank you Warhorse. Brutality really was the quickest option when a man was that close in.

The company who’d just jumped in were quick on the uptake. A hail of grenades and bullets drove the Hunters back. These ones were smart, though. They left their dead, shimmered to invisibility, and vanished.

“Holy shit…”

Costello glanced down at the man he’d saved. Two chevrons and the name ‘Perez.’ No time to acknowledge him though: his mind was racing ahead, and he didn’t like what he foresaw. He keyed his comms.

“TITAN, ABBOTT—” he began.

He got no further. There was a gut-shaking blast from above, a roar, panicked yells. Costello turned, flung himself toward the sturdy safety of the array bunker…

He got three steps before the roof gave in, and the whole building came down on top of him.

The Alpha-of-Alphas

+Foe arrays destroyed. The Gao-Alpha-of-Alphas is trapped. Human forces are buried. Begin the counterattack.+

As predicted, some of the Human-Alphas had withdrawn from the fighting due to sheer exhaustion. In fact, the Alpha-of-Alphas was quite sure one had even fallen asleep. The Maximal Alpha and its closest equals were still fighting, but even then…the Alpha-of-Alphas could see the toll that prolonged battle was taking on them. They needed to pause and recharge weapons, reload support materials into their suits. The tallest Human-Alpha had even been forced to withdraw briefly while some sort of technician attended to him.

There could be no more perfect time to spring the trap.

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

Stalemate, of a sort. Good. Neither side was yet able to muster the force to completely drive out or endanger the other. Nor would they, so long as the Dominion fleets kept successfully intercepting recalled Hunter packs.

Caruthers could live with a temporary stalemate. The immediately important part was that the geosynchronous orbit above the operation zone was controlled, with enough lower-orbit control to prevent the Hunters from dropping a planetary shield “under” them. For now. And if they did get one up, the groundside mortars could shoot them down again in seconds.

The danger was that the Hunters might get a “sandwich” in place: one emitter polarized outwards, one polarized inwards, creating a safe zone between the two. Preventing that scenario was now Caruthers’ focus.

Being in the lower orbit was…disadvantageous. Higher orbit meant more room to maneuver, and more potential energy to draw from. But it was necessary in this case. Ideally, he’d have set up a sandwich of his own, but the lowest orbits were still full of lurking swarmships, hiding among the ring debris. No matter where they tried to drop them, there always seemed to be a Hunter waiting to intercept the football.

There had been a few close calls. HMS Vindicator and the Streaking Spark had both taken damaging hits, only to be rescued by USS Hammer, which had then been forced to jump out under thermal overload. The Hunters knew the stakes and would not go quietly into the night.

There was a definite strategy afoot, too. Their actions were complicating ground support, a fact which the Great Father had not failed to notice.

His opinion was that the Hunters were…well…hunting. Which did not change Caruthers’ priorities: he needed to secure the orbitals, and could not concern himself with the ground situation. There were generals who could worry about that. The best he could do was secure orbitals that optimized support; Daar and Costello would surely enjoy some good old-fashioned naval fires, if it came to that.

Part of him, though, was beginning to worry. The Hunters had more freedom to move than he did. They would use it, at some point. And frankly, he wasn’t sure what he would do when that moment came.

Naturally, the moment he had that thought…the moment arrived.

They had a pickle on their hands.

Major Anthony “Abbott” Costello

The MASS wasn’t being helpful. He didn’t fucking need it to tell him his HEALTHCON was red. He could tell that from the stabbing pain in his chest on every inhale.

Okay. Fractured ribs. The Mass could protect against a lot, but fell short of standing under a demolition. The good news was, he could flex his toes inside his boots. So, could be worse.

Could be a lot fucking better, too. Something was pinning him, and though he could muster enough of a heave to make it shift, the result was a rain of dust and a warning grumble from the weight of rubble above him.

Then, the voice of an unlikely guardian angel in his ear. ”ABBOTT, WARHORSE. You in there, sir?”

Costello turned his head and managed to get the light on his helmet to turn on. There was a cavity of some kind under the broken concrete, and he wasn’t alone. Grim, tense faces slathered white with concrete dust or smeared with blood grimaced as his lamp lit them up.

“Yeah…We’re here, ‘Horse. Got a few alive in here with me.”

“Injuries?”

“Suit says I broke a rib….Legs pinned. I can still feel them, don’t know if they’re broken. Hurts tryin’ to move ‘em.”

“Everyone else?”

Costello gave up on trying to squirm out from under the beam pinning him and scrutinized the men around him. “…Hard to say. So far, so good. Lots of injuries…” He found a face he recognized. “Perez! Roll call!”

“Rog. I’ve got your suit beacon. You’re in pretty deep.”

Costello felt a little swell of pitch-black humor. “Oh…we’re all in it pretty deep,” he chuckled grimly. “I don’t know if we have anything immediately life-threatening—”

“You do. We’re on the way. Try not to move too much. Did you Crude up?”

No problem there. “Already done. Suit’s got me swimmin’.”

“Expect painkillers.” There was a warning light, and suddenly…

Oh yeah. “…Oh…man. Pain successfully killed.” Suddenly, holding his head up was a problem.

“Wish I had some’a that right now,” Perez groaned.

Costello nodded vaguely. “…How’s our roll-call?”

It wasn’t great. But it could have been worse. And help was coming.

He put his head down, and waited.

Warhorse

Puny little Hunters were losing, throwing a big tantrum about it. They imploded the array bunker with all ‘Horse’s buddies inside.

Fuck that. He heard the orders, was in motion before they were given. He was fast, only a few Gao could outsprint him, even on four-paw. He blurred across the battlefield, ‘BASE and IRISH moving as fast as they could manage, RHINO a bit further behind…but he wasn’t fast enough.

The Hunters had planned this, and responded to the change in the battlespace. The real fuckin’ deal were there in force, not a tide of hungry fuckin’ animals but bad guys with guns, and they’d thrown up a suppressing field of fire between him and the bunker. More’n a few poor bastards, Human and Gao alike, lying out in the open there where they’d been cut down.

‘Horse pondered his options. He looked around as he caught his breath, searching for monkey inspiration. He spied a particularly well-shaped slab of concrete. Curious, he ducked through cover, hunched over to inspect it…

Lots of rebar-like stuff in it. And a nice big convenient piece of metal he could use as a handle.

“RIGHTEOUS! I’ve got a shield!”

Firth responded immediately, over the sound of gunfire. “Go be a hero!”

Well. Today was going to be a test. That was okay. This shit was what ‘Horse was for.

Hunters liked their big guns. He put his shoulder into his rubble “shield” and rammed forward into the rain of heavy bullets coming his way, feeling the concrete punch and splinter. It wouldn’t last forever…but it was enough to get them across the open ground.

The other Protectors took advantage of ‘Horse’s brawn and shadowed him, keeping themselves topped up on energy and their hands free. Covering fire from the three of them. RHINO’s accuracy was fuckin’ flawless, even while hoofing it across a shooting gallery. Not bad, brother.

The bunker’s whole front face had come down in an avalanche and buried the command post, but most of the bunker itself was still standing. Somewhere back there was the reinforced room where the suppressor had been, now full of their only available arrays and a couple companies of trapped infantry. The pile was good cover from the Hunters, but digging through the rubble was dangerous as fuck. They cranked their suit sensors all the way up, so FIC could search for anything suspicious. No reason to be subtle about anything at this point. Every second counted when dealing with buried men.

Horse threw his “shield” down and shook out his arms once there was a big pile of concrete between him and the Hunter bullets. Damn thing had been heavy, but he could manage it. His suit’s biolab did what was needed while he went into triage mode.

‘Base beat him to it and already had priorities labeled on everyone, which ‘Horse saw “stuck” to his patients in the HUD. One of the poor fuckers, a Stoneback, was still alive but gurgling around a haemothorax. Irish took care of him. Another live one, a human deep in shock with everything below his right knee just a tangle of meat and bone splinters. Rhino got to work on him.

Then, a minor goddamn miracle. A collapsed wall rocked, shifted, then exploded upwards with a roar of effort. Thompson. The kid’s MASS was a mess, the outersuit torn off in patches to reveal the scale layer underneath, which in turn was bare in a couple of places. And something, somehow, had scuffed the synthetic sapphire of his visor. But he was alive.

He groaned as he straightened up, and picked up his rifle. “…That hurt.”

Check him over. Scuffed, weary and still in the amber but, importantly, not broken. He could fight. “Cover our asses.”

Gonzo nodded seriously, and hefted his weapon. A GR6E, good. They’d need the heavier fire.

That just left the mountain with a bunch of men and all the jump arrays under it. Well, it wasn’t like tossing boulders around was a novel experience or anything, so…

He got to work.

Daar

Daar was stuck. He couldn’t be diggin’ a hole over there and murderin’ Hunters over here at the same time. He needed ‘ta be in two places at once. So: which was the more important? The arrays were completely fucking necessary, so they had to be defended at all costs…but they couldn’t afford to let up any pressure at the front.

Well, he had some time to think, here and there, which meant he had time to reposition. So, diggy it was. They needed that line of communication.

And there was a concerted effort ‘ta keep him from doin’ just that, too. Lotsa fire bein’ laid down, but only from one angle so far. An’ Horse (of course) had a fantastic fuckin’ idea: pick up a slab an’ go ‘fer it.

Well. Daar had pretty fantastic armor, an’ anything ‘Horse could do, Daar could do more better.

“Campbell! It’s ‘yer show! I got a hole ‘ta dig!”

Campbell’s reply was a double click, and another from Righteous. Daar, knowin’ the two of ‘em had it covered, charged over, snatched up a nicely-shaped girdery thing ‘fer a shield, and thundered through the hail of munitions to join the party.

Something blasted the ground to his left as he charged. Speedbump shields robbed it of enough oomph that it only felt like gettin’ clubbed in the ribs, not havin’ his insides pulped, and his visor blacked to spare him from the flash. He flung himself into the safety of the debris pile, head churning over.

Okay. Fuckers had grenades. Not usin’ Nervejam, though. Why not?

…’cuz they wanted him alive. ‘Fer vivisection prob’ly.

Fuck that.

‘Base an’ ‘Horse were cuttin’ a girder. Daar joined ‘em, wriggled under one half and bore its weight on his shoulders, freein’ up ‘Base some. The girder parted, they heaved their half aside, then shoved the half Daar was holdin’ outta the way. ‘Base braced himself, heaved on somethin’, and Irish was there to work himself into the hole an’ draw out a man trapped inside like a grub inside a log. Poor fucker’s arm was a mess, but he was alive enough to holler about it. They’d fix ‘em up.

The next one they pulled out wasn’t so lucky. No helpin’ him. Laid him aside ‘fer later, and kept diggin’.

He kept his nose on the job. Trusted Campbell an’ Firth. They’d let him know if there was anythin’ he needed to know.

But it sure sounded like shit was goin’ on back there…

Captain Booker “Soup” Campbell

A round punched into Sikes’ armor with a splintering sound, and he ducked back into cover with a curse. No penetration. He was back to shooting a second later, pushing forward.

Never stop moving. Fighting these hunters was like wrangling a snake, a fuckin’ invisible snake with personal cloaking devices, heavy guns and fusion claws. And a fuckin’ brain. The fuckers faded away in the face of every counterattack, relocated, struck again. The HEAT did the same. Thrust, parry, slash, withdraw. Close calls, every time. Newman’s MASS had a triple-score across the front where a fusion claw had barely failed to disembowel him. Titan’s helmet light had been shot off.

And the pressure on the infantry wasn’t letting up, either. The Hunters had brought a new toy to the fight in the form of suicide bombers. No ignoring those.

They needed more men, and more materiel. Hell, they needed ammunition, otherwise they were going to run out sooner rather than later. And as strong as the Beefs and Daar might be, they were not going to dig through half a collapsed bunker fast enough.

Thank the Lord for redundancy and backup plans.

Campbell caught up with Righteous. “Got a plan. Forget killing these things. We need secure space for Cally to drop us a new array.”

The best way for an officer to raise a flagpole was to tell a sergeant he wanted the flagpole raised. Firth understood perfectly. “You’ll have it,” he grunted, and sent Moho and Deygun sprinting around the flank with a gesture.

An explosion to Campbell’s left as a Hunter blundered into one of Titan’s claymores. Good. He had breathing room to talk with the fleet, and he was going to need it.

He was about to ask them to do something fucking dangerous.

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

The situation had gone from a pickle to downright sticky. But Caruthers’ next course of action was clear: They needed a working array groundside. Without it, this whole invasion ended in disaster.

He instructed Caledonia down into a low support orbit. The same kind of one she’d been crippled and all but wrecked in during the Battle of Gao. It was a vulnerable position, robbed of almost all potential energy. But it was the only way to send down equipment drops.

The entire rest of the fleet would be her shield.

The swarm twisted and struck, and Caruthers fancied he sensed some glee in how quickly they pounced on the maneuver. They’d been waiting for this.

They caught HMS Vicious first. The destroyer slipped the net, blink-jumping to a dragon’s tooth beacon near Avenging Fury, but had to leave behind its bulldogs, which the swarm snacked on before tearing through and past, careless of the withering fire that pulverized them by the dozen. Six of them slammed into the Fury’s shield wall and shattered: a seventh and eighth plunged through it as the shield collapsed, slammed into the hull, and dug in like ticks. San Diego and Robert A. Heinlein got their shields adjusted and the swarm broke off rather than splatter against the new wall, but they’d claimed a pound of flesh.

Caruthers pulled them into a close formation. He’d been trying to stay spread out against the ugly possibility the Hunters might have a gigaton-class weapon of their own, but that was no longer an option. They needed to lock down hard, set up a mutually supporting barrier and let nothing through.

Valiant, Viceroy and Tearing Rage preceded Caledonia into the support orbit, and not a moment too soon. The ring wreckage was thick down there, and infested with swarmships: the lower sky became a hailstorm of point defence weaponry and hurtling debris.

Cally wallowed into the gap they’d created, her support bay aimed downwards, but now the fleet was stuck. There was no room to maneuver any longer, they were deep in the gravity well and had to stay there until the deployment was complete.

And the Hunters knew it. A blizzard of new warp contacts, skidding around the planet, and suddenly the sky was full of Broodships. Suddenly, every ship in the fleet was reporting thermal load increases as their combined shields came under a withering bombardment.

Caruthers watched helplessly as the combined load climbed…and climbed…and climbed. His heart was in his boots.

“Admiral! Incoming signal, unknown sender!”

Caruthers tore his morbid gaze away from his besieged shield wall, and read it. His heart jumped back up into his throat.

< :-) >

AvaDaemon

Ava had never been a fighter. Not a pacifist, as such, but she could never have imagined herself revelling in violence…until now.

Now, what passed for her soul was singing with vicious glee as the Entity’s war bodies plunged into the thick of the Hunter swarm and killed.

There was no mass wasted on life support in these bodies. Each was barely more than an engine, a shield emitter, and a power core. Each was a flying blade, with the raw power to form its shields into a cutting edge and dive straight through a Broodship, leaving two drifting, flaming, disintegrating halves.

Others were outfitted with gamma masers powerful enough to slice through any hull and sterilize the interior of all life, right down to the microbial level. Where they slashed through the enemy formation, Swarmships jerked abruptly as their pilots spasmed at the controls, then fell into an uncontrolled free-fall.

The Hunters fought back. They turned on a dime, lashing out with plasma and kinetic projectiles. Each war-body lost was a tingly nerve-jolt, like banging her funny bone, and she didn’t have all that many to lose. Two more days, and they might have been able to build an overwhelming number, but no. They’d been rushed. They’d brought as many as they had.

…But it was enough to turn the tide. As sluggish as an organic human mind’s reactions might be from a daemon’s perspective, the Human admiral responded quickly, and charged. his destroyers flickered out of their tight defensive formation, jumping to beacons they’d seeded all across the higher orbits.

With each black flash of a jump, they enclosed a Broodship. Seconds later, they jumped again and left behind a burning cloud of gas and wreckage where their prey had been.

The swarm burned.

And far down below, Caledonia dropped her support package.

Alpha of Alphas

The arrival of the Machine-Swarm proved most unfortunate. It wasn’t completely unexpected, but in combination with the reinforcements destroyed by prey fleets…The Alpha-of-Alphas’ plans were now greatly complicated.

Complicating matters further was the shipment now plummeting toward the planet’s surface, dropped from one of the larger Human ships. The Alpha-of-Alphas tried to send strike craft to intercept and destroy it, but the enemy ships in low orbit lashed out with their own weapons and blasted the interceptors long before they got in range.

The momentum was shifting again, disadvantageously. Its attention prioritized sample collection, now; perhaps in so doing they could stymie the ground assault and cripple the predator’s leadership. It’s options were…

It was reluctant to do so, as it couldn’t even guarantee the safe retrieval of a now-prized asset… but needs must.

The Flensing-Alpha’s < glee > was, somehow, not entirely reassuring.

Master Sergeant Wilson “Titan” Akiyama

“Clear out! Clear the landing site!!”

That supply drop wouldn’t give a fuck who it landed on, and it was coming down hard. The only difference between it and an RFG strike was, RFGs didn’t brake hard in the last minute of their drop.

In his HUD, the FIC had kindly given him a marker to show where it would land. A Gaoian with a limping human leaning on his back picked up the pace and dragged his friend out of harm’s way.

Titan repositioned, slapped Snapfire and Moho on the back to get their attention, ruined a Hunter’s day with a burst from his rifle, then ducked out of formation as the sky cracked overhead. The familiar sonic boom of re-entry, and behind it the rumble of retro-rockets.

The support drop’s descent was controlled, but it landed hard enough to pulverize the concrete. It was a bare thing: a heatshield with engines and a shield emitter, packed with crates. But it was a lifeline, and it was secure.

The Hunters responded immediately. They knew the stakes, and Titan had a renewed fight on his hands the instant the dust settled. The Defenders pounced on the precious cargo. No time to unfasten the straps properly, he slashed them with his knife. He was immediately distracted by charging Hunters, and brought his weapon to bear—

Daar came out of nowhere to defend the array, an angry superhero of a bear whipping this way and that, death exploding into sprays of sickly mist and shrapnel wherever he struck. “Git it running!!” he bellowed, as he and his personal guard from First Fang made their stand.

More engineers at Titan’s side. Everyone knew how to get these built in a hurry. Heft. Hold. Snap together. Hook up. Power up. Yell out a warning, get clear…

Thump!

Second Fang joined the fray, spitting hot death with merciless precision. A rictus grin inside his mask as he grabbed the next array crate and heaved it into place.

Heft. Hold. Snap together. Hook up. Power up. Yell out a warning, get clear…

Thump!

An engineering support package. Their job was the most blissful of all, to get a new overhead shield in place, this time a much more powerful unit than the little one Daar had brought in on his back. This shield was self-defending and would take direct orbital strikes to bring down—or a nuke inside the bubble.

Just got to roll it off the array platform first. Not easy at the best of times, especially not now, when he was tired to the bone, running on aching muscles and fumes…

But he’d been here a hundred times before. This was just another cart pull after a heavy workout. Only difference was, he didn’t have ‘Horse yelling in his ear to motivate him. He planted his boots, back locked straight, felt the array’s baseplate buckle under him as he took the strain…

A patch of nearby air flickered, resolved like an optical illusion into a Hunter pouncing on him, its claws sizzling.

A hurtling Gaoian intercepted it in mid-air with a snarl, knocked it sideways on its back and minced it.

Shit they were ass-deep in a clusterfuck…He gritted his teeth, heaved, and got the shield emitter moving, helped by Moho and a couple of optimistic regular dudes. Second Fang surrounded and covered them as they hauled it off the platform, down the ramp, out onto the concrete—thank fuck it was on wheels—and out of the way.

Everything was already set up, the genpack already in place. He kicked a couple of bits of rubble under the wheels to serve as chocks, opened the generator’s controls, found them already programmed for him…

Checklist. Activate power generator. Wait for green light. Power supply test: good. Warn friendly air units and await confirmation. Made sense, they didn’t want their own planes ramming into their own shield dome…Took a long few seconds for the word to go out and then come back that he was good to go.

Emitter main power switch to “ON.” Monitor capacitor readout—he ducked as a stray round cracked past less than a foot above his head—until all four are in green zone…

He hit the big button. Retrieved his weapon as the shield dome mushroomed up and around and past and through him, so intangible that it barely disturbed all the dust hanging in the air…until suddenly it crackled and there was a shell of light overhead, harder than diamond and tougher than any composite. He turned to throw himself back into the fight, but inside his mask he was snarling with victory.

And across from him, the third new array was going up. It wasn’t game over yet, of course. But the fat lady was warming up.

Just a little more…

Something huge and invisible slapped him aside with a crunch. He skidded, bounced and rolled across the fractured concrete, sprang up to his feet ignoring the complaining twinge from his spine, tracked with his weapon…nothing. Whatever it was, it didn’t deign to show itself to him.

The shield was up, regardless. And unlike the portable one Daar brought in, this shield was self-protecting. The instant Titan had been knocked out of the way, a subshield sprang up, protecting the emitter and its power supply.

There was a screech of anguish, coming from where he couldn’t see anything. Flashes streaked across the shield, sparks flew and lightning bolts exploded out…but the shield held.

As it would do, being powered by a multi-gigawatt nuclear genpack. Marvels of modern technology.

The invisible monster’s tantrum didn’t last long. It sprang away as Titan and Second Fang lit it up, scrambled across the face of the pyramid, tore open the roof, and vanished inside.

…Shit.

Warhorse

“WARHORSE, TITAN. Alpha headed your way.”

Mixed feelings about that.

On the one hand, his patients. He had to keep them safe, get them out, get them home. Big fight with big Alpha would not be ideal.

On the other… ‘Horse was the best there was. Daar was bigger, stronger, but for this, ‘Horse was better. Not too big to crawl into cracks, pound-for-pound his match. Nobody moved like him. Fast like a Gaoian, quick and strong like a Ten’Gewek. Lasted forever. Clever, and mean.

Liked being mean, too. Evil had to be smashed.

He stuck with the job in front of him for now, though. Costello’s suit RFID was just a few feet in front of him, and his HEALTHCON was…troubling. Blood creatinine levels were up, suggesting kidney damage. Crude should fix that, but still. Sooner ‘Horse got him in a stasis bag, the better.

Had to reach him first, though. He grabbed another slab, ran a calculating eye over the surrounding debris, decided heaving it aside wouldn’t cause a collapse….heaved it aside.

A partially intact metal structure underneath had made a pocket of air. Pale, dust-caked faces grimaced at him as light flooded in. Lots of patients. One MASS helmet, at an awkward angle with an arm out in front of him. Costello’s top hat decal on the mask. The Major started to squirm, and ‘Horse put a steadying hand on him.

“Stay still, sir.”

Costello waved his free arm toward one of the other trapped men. “He was coughing blood just now…”

“Baseball’s got ‘im.” ‘Horse didn’t even need to glance to know that. “Let’s get you outta there…”

Was that a heavy skittering sound overhead? Fuck. He turned, paused, tense. A crawling sensation ran up his spine. That feeling of bein’ watched.

They had some tricks for that sort of thing.

He clicked in his throat, and the powder mines above went off.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

It was likely going to die, but what a glorious hunt it had before it! The shield emitter had it, and the Human-Alpha it had swatted aside had got up again like it was unharmed. Should have used fusion claws.

Next time, it would be more diligent. Now, it was hunting.

Its sensors pierced walls and floors, let it see through the structure as though it were merely a dense fog. It saw the Human-Alpha below it. Surprisingly compact in size, compared especially to the Gao-Alpha-of-Alphas. But the might that was evident in him, just in his little movements—!

This would be a powerful predator to subdue.

And the wariness. The Human-Alpha paused in its work, half-turned and raised its weapon, shifted its feet under it to spring in any direction at an instant’s notice. Clever foe.

Much too clever. The Human-Alpha made a curious clicking sound, and the next instant…

Tiny explosive charges, not big enough to harm but packed with some kind of glittering powder. Normally, the Alpha’s personal shields repelled dust. This dust was drawn to it, clung to the field surface and stuck.

An eyeblink later, high-velocity rounds were punching up through the floor, right through the shields and skipping off the Alpha’s armor with terrible force. It crashed aside through a wall, slashed the floor out from under it and dropped down, returning fire.

The Human moved. From standstill to almost impossibly fast before he’d managed a single stride, he was just that explosive. On instinct the Alpha leapt aside, and a good thing too, because the Human-Alpha jumped up after it, slamming into the ceiling above!

There was a chase, as the Alpha reacted to the Human-Alpha’s incredible speed and aggression rather than attacked. The Human-Alpha had spooked it! That wouldn’t do. It surged around a wall to get some space, re-seize the initiative. Catch its foe blind, if possible.

It had to. Its foe-Alpha had ruined its camouflage. The dust shorted out the Alpha’s cloak and its personal shield, which would make this fight a true battle of tactics and might. It lunged around the wall and sprang forward, slashing. There was the hope of taking this one alive and intact, but the Alpha-of-Alphas was wise and tolerated the vagaries of real conflict.

The Human responded with a predictable trick the Alpha had seen many times before through its hapless lessers: it tried to charge under the Alpha and slash with its own blade. Rather than do what the others had all tried and failed, and attempt to stamp or kick, the Alpha leapt away with a pulse of its kinetic thrusters. More walls crumpled like paper as it blasted through them, and dropped a nervejam grenade in its wake.

This close, the pulse was a shock to the Alpha’s own system too. Combat stimulant injectors inside its own metal skull activated, plunging doses of the most powerful drugs directly into its brain’s blood supply. The pain vanished, and even time seemed to shift.

The Human had flung himself aside to escape the grenade, but not far enough. Humans were especially sensitive to nervejam. A tactic!

The Alpha cycled a new grenade into its launcher, and attacked again. It would pay for this in pain later…

Clash, slash, kick, guard low. Hmm. They must have some tricks of their own inside those suits, if he was still mobile and thinking. The Human jumped high this time, over its guard—

<+ PAIN! +>

The Alpha lashed out and managed to fling the Human away from it, into a nearby support which fractured at the impact. It scuttled away as the Human recovered, assessing the damage.

…It was missing its right arm. Torn out at the shoulder. Not cut. Torn. The Human was still holding it. He lurched upright and threw the Alpha’s former limb aside with a snarl.

The loss of its non-dominant arm was enough to persuade the Alpha that it was no longer interested in taking the Alpha-of-Alpha’s prize alive and intact. And it certainly wasn’t interested in getting close enough to lose any more limbs.

Very well.

It launched another nervejam.

Baseball

There were at least three dozen men trapped under the rubble, and every minute was precious. ‘Base knew that. ‘Horse knew that. The Alpha prob’ly knew it too. Only reason for it to show up here and now.

Or maybe it was just doin’ its own thing. Nobody knew exactly how the fuckin’ things thought. Couldn’t protect the patients and save them at the same time, though. Fail to do either, and they were dead…

‘Horse, you glorious fuckin’ idiot!

Base knew his friend better than anyone. Adam had a superhero button, and if something poked it…he couldn’t not. Deep down, life had beaten on him and left him more than ready to fight. It’d left him needing to fight.

A slap on ‘Base’s shoulder, and ‘Horse was off. Mines popped, enemy engaged. The smashing, brutal sounds of their clash got further away, while Base got one, two, three patients out of the rubble and safely handed over. Adam had chased the menace off.

What a gloriously brave and stupid hero he was! Nobody else could have done the job.

Costello was one of the first out, still making noises about getting back in the fight, but…no. He was only alive thanks to his MASS, and ‘Base’s only real option was to take a scan, do some preparatory work, then stuff him in a stasis bag.

Two more patients in critical condition, both given interventions that should keep ‘em alive through the surgery to come. One last quick lift and that was enough to get everyone free. The medics could take it from here. ‘Base had business elsewhere.

Time to go back up his friend.

Warhorse

Knew the mind-hurt all too well. Been jammed a dozen times over his career. They had drugs. Quick-acting nootropics. Automatically injected into neck. Would keep him going for hours.

Big price to pay later, maybe. Probably. Locked into mindset, been warned about that. Had to find peace, calm before drugs wore off. But not yet.

Got to kill first.

Even this Alpha was puny. ‘Horse had jumped over spider-thing, missed landing on back. Got next to limb, tore it off. Weak metal, stuck into weaker flesh and bone.

Pathetic. Toss limb aside, heft rifle. Max power. They danced. Alpha was a good, quick dancer. Not completely useless. Never gave him a clean shot, and took the hits well, too. That armor was good.

‘Horse took several to his armor. The last one shattered his chest plate.

Needed help. ‘Base coming, would be a long moment before he got there. Buy time, one hit to chest and done. Close-in was too risky. Had to lead away from patients, but that took him farther from help.

Sprint. Slide under a busted wall. Burst fire knocked sparks off the Alpha, cracked two eyes off its ugly fuckin’ face. Return fire blasted all around him, shattered his left arm plate. Then that fucking ping sound. Another grena—

—!

Still alive. Max dose. More would kill. Move. No time. Bring biggest mean. Get up, ignore everything. CHARGE. Alpha could not dodge. Slam.

Tear.

Stab.

Kill.

Bits flying everywhere. Arms. Plastic muscles. Metal bones. Rubber guts. Oil, not blood. Gotta get to the core.

Didn’t manage it.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

++CRITICAL DAMAGE++

Body broken. Ruined. But replaceable. Brain not. Challenged the Human-Alpha.

Unworthy.

++EJECT EJECT EJECT++

Shaped explosive charges blow its body apart. Capsule rockets through roof, making whatever holes it needs.

Can’t jump to safety. But can summon another body.

Always pack a spare.

Baseball

Holy fuck.

Devastation. Walls torn down, slashed through, blasted apart. Like a small fuckin’ nuke had hit. Sounds of carnage from up ahead, chase ‘em down—

Couple Hunters try to get in his way. Don’t even slow down, just go through…

Then ahead: ‘Horse. The Alpha. Slashing, stabbing, tearing—

Explosions. Big explosions. Several right on top of each other, a few delayed slightly. A big, dense metal egg shot outta the wreckage and punched through the ceiling like a rocket.

‘Horse flung the other way. Crunched through a pillar moving much too fast. His status went red. Then flashing red.

…Fuck.

Warhorse

Quiet.

Calm. Needed calm. Can’t risk forever raging.

…Shock.

Self-assess.

HUD not working. Emergency radio and beacon only.

That was bad. Wiggle toes.

Can’t.

Look down.

Can’t.

So.

That was it. Paralyzed.

But he saved three dozen lives, at least. Took out the Alpha. Led away from arrays, from wounded. Mission success. All his friends will go home.

Maybe he will too. The MASS is a tough piece of kit. Still breathing…

Not a bad deal, really. Could be worse.

MASS visor above his face. Baseball decal on it, eyes full of pain behind. Good. Best friend, all the worst secrets together. Safest hands. Can’t hear him, though. Can’t hear anything. Can feel. Feels like…falling…

And cold. And dark.

He hoped he’d see Marty again.

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

Caruthers got his sandwich at last, and with it, respite.

The fleet hadn’t come through unscathed. Most of the V-type destroyers were still venting their waste heat, and making repairs, and the USS Gene Roddenberry had jumped back to port after burning out several of her shield emitters. The Rampant Blaze was adrift, having taken a penetrating shot right through the engines; Caledonia, now that her delivery was complete, had caught the Gaoian ship and was rendering assistance.

A number of Voidrippers had been shot down. HMS Vigorous had a hull breach, as did USS Lewis B. Puller. And as for the friendly Entity…

Well, it clearly didn’t care about losses. And sacrificing two thirds of its drones had swung the battle. The survivors were all inside the sandwich, and some of the smaller ones had landed on the damaged ships to repair the hull breaches from the outside.

Outside the sandwich, above, the Hunters were prowling like caged tigers. Below, they were sitting very still because the instant any of them moved, they were promptly vaporized by the fleet.

And Caruthers was having a conversation with a rather charming young lady. She was a digital creation of some kind, a virtual body in a virtual environment to represent a disembodied mind. He had to wonder what her experience was really like from her perspective. But it made conversing with her easier.

“You have impeccable timing.”

“We left it to the last second. Sorry about that. We’re building replacements for all the probes we lost, but that’s going to take a couple of weeks.”

“I suspect we’ll need them. There are more ships out there than we can handle.”

The daemon nodded solemnly. “My other half has other concerns. It thinks we’d be better used helping keep the Hunters out of Dominion space.”

“They’ll be in for a shock if they try. The Dominion has come a long way from what they were.”

“Not far enough.” She shook her head. “The Entity’s right. You can handle yourselves. They need support.”

“Can you leave a few of those handy repair probes? They might just save lives.”

“…Sure. We’ll do that.”

“Thank you.” Caruthers smiled at her, then sat back in his seat to consider the reports flowing up from groundside. “Well, if you’re determined to go help then by all means. Thank you, and good hunt—”

Her image blinked out without even a polite goodbye. He frowned at the blank screen for a moment, wondering what had prompted such an abrupt hangup.

…There was no time to waste on thinking about it. There was still a lot of orbit to secure and he needed to know the full condition of his fleet.

Still. He couldn’t shake the feeling she’d just received terrible news.

AvaDaemon

Adam…

She could remember grief. Could remember the hot feeling of it exploding up inside her, breaking her. Her parents. Her friends. Sara.

Ava had worried that becoming what she was had muted her emotions in some way. This one, though…this one struck like a flash-flood and crippled her.

She didn’t have much information. Some of the radio chatter wasn’t perfectly encrypted, and snippets here and there painted a gruesome picture. He’d fought an Alpha, apparently. Defeated it, as she knew he would…

…And had fallen.

She knew nothing else, apart from whatever banal data she gleaned from the tactical chatter among the regular units; their infosec was less than ideal, to say the least.

She wanted to see him again. Had always planned to, whenever there was time…

+Time is relative.+

…Right. Adam lives a dangerous life. Even if he survives this, he’s a candle burning so brightly….

+His time would never be long, relative to us.+

…No. I’ve failed to consider that, haven’t I?

+Understandable, but foolish.+

Yes. Well, I’m a fool. Lucky us.

+No.+

…No, what?

+You are not a fool.+

Oh please, I’m a fucking fool. You know my life. You know all the ways I fucked up…and now…

+Imperfect knowledge yields imperfect decisions. This is not to your discredit.+

…Look at you getting all philosophical and shit.

+Negative.+

No? Then what would you call that?

+Debugging.+

Right, right. That’s all I am. A glorified subroutine.

< Fondness > +No.+

…Right.

She had a way with herself, apparently. But…that first flood of grief was receding. Behind it came an epiphany, though: She was immortal now. Barring…well, barring the destruction of both dataspace and the probe-swarm, Ava Magdalena Ríos had the dubious privilege of being the first human mind guaranteed to live…indefinitely.

She was going to lose Adam. And Gabe. And the Tisdales. She was going to lose herself. In time…she’d lose everyone. Every new friendship would be inescapably temporary.

The grief rolled back in again, but this time she weathered it, and let it flow through her and around her until it became something more…bittersweet. If all was to be transient and fleeting, then best to treasure it all the more. While she still had it.

With that resolution, they returned to the tasks at hand.

Daar

The updates flashed across his HUD, as he commanded movement and handed off control to arriving officers.

Murderous rage.

Put it aside. Still work to be done. They had their beachhead, that was undeniable. Now was the time for vigilance, to secure it.

The shield was the greatest win. With it, the airspace over the beachhead was theirs, utterly inaccessible to any hostile aircraft, and immune to artillery, if the Hunters had any. With fleet holding a nicely sandwiched geo-sync orbit directly above, there weren’t no good angle for the Hunters to drop an orbital strike on them.

The shield din’t come all the way down to ground level, though. It couldn’t, the buildings, terrain and ground topography fucked with the lower edge. So, there was a gap all the way round that the Hunters could attack under.

Without air or orbit support, though, it was a fuckin’ meatgrinder for ‘em. They could grind on ‘fer now, but they’d need the engineers ‘ta plug that hole right quick.

He noted that to the magic microphone in the sky, and assumed those engineers would find their way through the array soon enough.

Nor were the orbitals swept clean; that might be the work of months, or even years with the still-orbiting remnants of the ring. Then there was system shields, which was just one of the things that Daar needed to catch up on once he was off the field…

For his part…he could go long an’ hard, but right now there weren’t nowhere that needed him. He could eat, rest, an’ recharge. Never a bad idea ‘ta be fully ready. He let his Suit attend ‘ta all the bits it could as hard as it could while he got one of his pouches, jammed the tube into his feedin’ port, an’ sucked it down as best he could.

Equipment check. Good on ammo an’ suit resources, once his techs had finished their work. Suit itself was kinda beaten up, ‘specially from that fuckin’ forcefield trap, but nothin’ to worry about. All told, he was good to go.

And a good thing, too. Not a moment after he had that thought, almost as if the universe itself was waging a cruel fuckin’ Keeda tale on all of ‘em…Reports started comin’ in from the northern front, where the mechanized infantry were pushing the Hunters back across a bridge. Or had been, but now, somethin’ huge, invisible an’ fast was tearing their shit apart.

That fucking Alpha was back. In a new body. Daar didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

Well.

Maybe he could work out his frustrations.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

Its fate today was one of experimentation, it seemed. There was no escaping the shield bubble. No chance of survival. It knew that was a possibility going in, of course. Knew it from the moment it arrived. Knew it would be a true challenge between Alpha predators.

It had failed the first trial, and now it was facing down a far more dangerous foe. But that was fine. The < ecstasy > of the fight with the Human-Alpha had been divine.

Not a word or sensation a Hunter much experienced. But it was there. Its life would be a sacrifice to the holy order of the world, or else a glorious transformation.

Either way, the Alpha of Alphas would learn from its sacrifice, and the Alpha would enjoy making it.

It began with an assault where the enemy were claiming a bridge. This time it was more cautious, relied more upon its ranged weapons. And it would not allow them to take its shields and cloak this time. It could sting them hard, if it raked their position with firepower then vanished and relocated.

Its eyes deep in their territory were steadily going blind as satellites and drones were shot down, but it could see enough. The Gao-Alpha-of-Alphas was coming.

<+ MEAT TO THE MAW! +>

Daar

Daar didn’t get many playmates he could unleash himself on these days. He had no peers. Everyone and damn near everything was breakable to him. Egotistical, yeah, but true.

His enemies, though? Oh, those he could play with just as hard as he fuckin’ wanted. With this piece of rotting shit, Daar intended to be artful.

It would pay for ‘Horse, doin’ him in like a goddamn coward. But first, he had ‘ta find the greasy fuck. Easier said.

Bridge Six was a big’n. A wide, flat, cable-stayed bridge with a rail system runnin’ down its north side an’ a broad highway down the middle an’ south. A major artery, an’ the Hunters were tryin’ to cut it. They’d already severed three of the cables before the Humans pushed ‘em back.

Beyond was industrial zoning. So: tactical review.

No. Strategic review. Was their beachhead established? Daar did a quick general call to his leadership. The consensus seemed to be yes. Orbitals? In time, but for now, the admirals weren’t goin’ nowhere.

Overhead wasn’t completely secure, then. An’ the Alpha was locked in th’ bubble with Daar, which meant he had ‘ta settle that score ‘fore they started venturin’ outside its protection.

An’ frankly, there was a fuckin’ lot o’ places inside a very big-ass bubble it might escape to.

Its opening gambit had been to hit and fade. A couple IFVs were sittin’ wrecked in the middle of the bridge, torn open and their guns savaged. Smart: those things had been doin’ a lotta the heavy liftin’ when it came ‘ta takin’ down the Betas an’ stuff. Leavin’ their ravaged carcasses ‘ta block the bridge…well, Daar woulda done the same. An’ every time somebody got close enough ‘ta try an’ tow ‘em off? Light ‘em up. That at least made it obvious where in general the Alpha was lurkin’ but it also made its tactic obvious: it were tryin’ to lure Daar out.

Naw. He weren’t interested in no sneaky-type games. He wanted ‘ta play with his prey. So, first, he had’ta get the fucker pinned on th’ ground at least.

Well, hmm. That meant not flyin’ around at a minimum, right? So, how to deny the air? Their anti-shield doomglitter only really worked in an immediate area, ‘cuz ‘ya could only shoot what ‘ya could see…

He had an idea. Daar pant-grinned, the thought was so immediately silly. “Hey, CIC? How ‘fast can we get just an absolute fuckin’ shitload o’ drones all up in here?”

Vark came on the horn, amusement drippin’ from his voice. “You take pretty big shits, My Father. How many are we talkin’?”

“Enough ‘ta more or less weave a blanket wit’ ‘em in the sky, so’s that fucker can’t move without hittin’ one.”

There was a pause, and an incredulous chitter. “Now that is an ass-pull. So…microdrones every, oh, cubic meter or so? How much area you wanna cover?”

“Somethin’ nice an’ tactically useful. Like, uh, over the whole bridge. Don’t the Qinis have, uh…” Daar wracked his memory from a sales presentation some gaudy stick figure of a male had made to him months ago. “…Right! They’ve got these ready-made swarms ‘fer things like ag pollination an’ shit. Basic’ly robo-bees! They gotta have a buncha that on-hand, right?”

Vark rumbled thoughtfully. “…Maybe? Reprogramming them and all that…”

“So jus’ open up my checkbook an’ offer ‘em all the money. I bet someone’s got balls.”

“Yes, My Father.”

With that set in motion, all Daar could do for now was direct a few more units to the bridge and bring in his engineers. Pretty soon there was a sturdy shield emitter—much smaller and more portable than the big one, but more’n good enough ‘fer this purpose—hummin’ away inside the COP. A buncha concertainers ‘cuz redundancy, an’ the bridge itself was secured, even if the Hunters still thought the territory beyond still belonged ‘ta them.

The Alpha was playin’ its game differently, now. More cagey, darin’ Daar ‘ta come an’ play. He’d oblige it, eventually.

But on his terms.

Still. Every now and then, as the scene unfolded, the Alpha would strike a pin-prick somewhere before forces could respond. It didn’t do much damage but it kept Daar’s men on hair-trigger alertness, and that would cost eventually. Every time it pricked him, his rage grew a little more, an’ that would cost too, if he let it.

Vark came through, though: he found a Qinis on-call mercenary company willin’ ‘ta take the job, an’ an agriculture company willin’ ‘ta sell their whole stock o’ pollinator drones.

All already in motion, too. Amazing what bein’ a zillionaire could do sometimes. Hopefully he wouldn’t need to raise next year’s levy too much… but Conclave fights were for later.

The mercenaries were…flamboyant. Their combat exoskeletons were buried deep under layers of fluffy ruffled silk, ribbons an’ feathers, and came with built-in jump arrays. They looked fuckin’ absurd, but Vark promised they had a deadly reputation.

Well. Daar understood peacockin’ better than most, but at least all his showy self was functional. He could forgive ‘em the stupid clothes if they were effective, though. An’ on that score, at least ‘fer now, they fuckin’ delivered. They already knew the situation, knew what was expected of ‘em, and seconds after they arrived there were a jillion little robot bugs swarmin’ over the river, plus the mercenaries’ own combat drones an’ scouts. The buzz o’ mechanical wings and the whine o’ kinetic thrusters was maddening. Daar loved it.

“Hide from this, keedashit,” he snarled ‘fer his opponent’s benefit…then grabbed his weapon an’ headed out.

Time ‘ta play.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

Interesting development. For several hours, things had been at a comfortable stalemate. The enemy of course deployed a shield system over their work on the bridge, and the Alpha naturally stood back to observe. Surveillance was increasingly valuable, as the Humans began their long sweep of the orbitals, and the Alpha of Alphas would want to learn as much as possible.

The Gao-Alpha-of-Alphas was nowhere to be seen, anyway.

So, it waited. Periodically, it explored a potential weakness in their defences, only to break off as the foe responded swiftly. It would have liked to drag away a hapless Human or Gao to feast on, but could never quite safely snag one.

No matter. It had already savored the sweetness of deathworlder meat during this battle. It would not allow its own greed to defeat it.

The interesting development came in the arrival of curious, incongruous splashes of dissonant color among the drab equipment on the far side of the river. The Alpha focused its attention, used its eyes’ most powerful telescopic functions, and snarled thoughtfully as it identified thin-prey on the far side of the river.

The weakest, most fragile and least flavorful of prey, here? Confusing…until its sensors noted the drones. Hundreds, thousands…

Saturation. Too many for its sensor suite to track. All tiny things, useless for anything practical—

The formation.

The Flensing-Alpha could not possibly pass through them without disturbing one. And they came fast, flooding between the buildings, through ventilation and doors and the holes blasted by deathworlder weapons. Too fast to outrun.

…Clever. Very clever. And there at the center of a writhing, swirling swarm of them….

Very well.

Rather than wait to be detected, the Alpha struck.

Daar

It came at him, still half-invisible in the swarm, a moving blob covered in robo-bees…but it didn’t get in claw range. It lit him up with a heavy machine gun that woulda punched Daar’s armor hard if he weren’t quicker, an’ followed with a nervejam grenade.

Ow.

He sent sum’ rounds downrange at max power. Couple’a them hit. Shieldflash. Protection force followed up with shieldbreakers an’ there was a big fireworks, but they din’t quite do the job. Relief from the headache too, and a new counter in his HUD. Only so much o’ that medicine his thinky-meat could take.

The Hunter seemed ‘ta know it, too. It boosted up a building with a blast from its thrusters, leavin’ another grenade behind. Daar saw that move comin’ this time, though: got far enough away, he din’t even feel it.

Their openin’ gambits made, the duel dragged out. Hit, slash, withdraw. Exchange fire, bounce around the battlefield, that sort of thing. It’d use its engines an’ grippy feet ‘ta move vertically, but Daar fuckin’ dominated at grav-ball. He weren’t gonna lose that game.

Besides. Revenge or not, he weren’t dumb enough ‘ta fight this alone, an’ neither was the Alpha. It had its Betas, Daar had his protection force, an’ the Qinis war-drones. Lotsa forces tanglin’ up maneuver in both directions.

It were becomin’ an endurance an’ tactics game, which Daar would probably win. Even so, the Alpha was still trying to claw out a victory.

Not too smart of it, really. Their world was his now, and that was all there was to it. It was gettin’ in the way of ops, though, and that wouldn’t fuckin’ do.

“Snipers,” he grunted in battle-cant. “I need me the bestest Whitecrest’s got. Take out that fucker’s thrusters.”

They had a pretty badass sniper team on-site, but instead of them he got Father Garaaf, who had personally volunteered for this mission. He was skulking hidden in hostile territory, still hidden despite the drone swarm.

“The best is otherwise occupied,” he growled. “You’ll need to settle for me, My Father.”

Daar grunted in dry humor. “Doin’ what? Ain’t no females here.”

“Sure they’re all pining for me anyway…I’m in position. Top of the building at your tail. Get me an opening, and it’s all yours.”

That was all Daar needed. The dance had gone on long enough.

He charged at the Alpha, trusting his shields, armor, and in the covering fire of his protection. Ain’t nobody dumb enough to stay in his way at a full sprint. The Alpha, wisely, relocated. It fired another grenade at him as it took off, which Daar leapt over so that when it went off behind him he barely felt more’n a stab in his ears. Another tick in his HUD; he could take maybe two more doses ‘fore he was riskin’ brain damage. Plenty of margin.

The Hunter shot straight up, twisting in mid-air so its heavy gun could chug bullets down at him. Then, at the top of its arc and above that hammerin’, the deep-throated DOOM! of a Whitecrest hypervelocity flechette strikin’ home against something big.

Shieldflash. Armor spark. The Alpha corkscrewed wildly through the air and smashed straight through a wall.

Daar was on its trail like stank on nava. Terrain din’t matter, he jumped over it, smashed through it. Distance din’t matter, he had all the speed. His protection din’t matter, ‘cuz they were wunnerful and kept him undistracted, but now in this moment, Daar had the laser-like focus of a predator born.

His prey was wounded, and he would kill it.

Alpha of the Flensing-Brood

The fall was < frustrating > but nothing it had not experienced before. The Alpha’s core was armored and inertia-compensated. It was on its feet and mobile again before the pebbles had even stopped scattering. The damage was localized to its main thrusters: it could no longer launch itself, and there was no time to attempt a repair.

No matter. It knew what was coming for it, and scrabbled away from the hole it had made.

The buildings in this section of the city had been New-Brood storage, little more than stacks of stasis rooms with central stairwells, held up by four thick support columns. Empty, now. Whatever spawn had been here had been released, and presumably were now all dead.

It wasn’t that drove the Alpha to scramble and fight for every second of life, though. No. This was a new sensation. Something different. Something wonderful.

The monster coming after it was fast. Everything in his way was either leapt clear over (and without thrusters!), dodged at the last possible moment, or if it wasn’t somehow an important object, he simply plowed right through, exploding it into showers of debris or blasting it aside. Shooting at him was useless, with all the jinking to and fro, that well-crafted armor, and his uncanny speed. Escape would be useless, too. The Alpha couldn’t possibly fly away, couldn’t possibly run away. Couldn’t hide, couldn’t keep the Gaoian away with its weaponry.

Couldn’t possibly survive a fight up close.

The Flensing-Alpha was face-to-maw with the Divine. Deep inside the metal shell of its core, what little blood it had left was surging with life, with thrill, with an intoxicating blend of awe and terror.

It would be an insult to the Order of Things to just give up. Even this Gao must earn its kill, and the Alpha would sooner suffer an eternity of pain than poison this sacred moment.

It would touch the Divine, and give offering to the Order of the World. Perhaps it might even prevail. But it honestly did not care: what would happen, would happen. If this was its moment to end…what glory to end in a hunt like this!

And it was not yet completely out of options. Whatever this Gao massed must have been incredible, because the very ground shuddered under his thundering feet, the thinner walkway’s concrete cracking and crumbling with every strike of his paws. Perhaps that could be exploited—

Into a warehouse, then. If dropping a building on the Human-Alpha worked, perhaps dropping a bigger building would work even better.

The Alpha cycled a different kind of grenade into its launcher, and slashed at a primary support as it fled past it, used its remaining intact thruster to help it jink sideways and smash through a flimsy divider toward another support. It sent the first of its high explosive grenades ahead of it: the detonation shook the whole building and fractured the column. Part of the floor behind it sloughed off and collapsed, no longer strong enough to support two rampaging combatants of such size.

Both were very large, almost too large to fight in Hunter buildings. The Gaoian, though, his predator-body was considerably more massive than the Flensing-Alpha’s combat form. Where it could pass with little issue, the Gaoian could not. He tested its weight on the flimsy floors, growled, and was forced to briefly abandon his chase and leap for sturdier footing. An opportunity! The Alpha fired another HE grenade at the Gao, and angled toward a third column. Already, the upper floors were disintegrating and raining down on them. As predicted, the grenade only staggered and distracted the Gao, but that was all the Alpha had wanted.

It smashed the third column and the building failed completely. The floors tipped and disintegrated, the walls fractured and fell. Storeys of steel and metal began to plunge down on them to bury them both…

++EJECT EJECT EJECT++

Its body may not have thrusters…but its core did, and was armored and shielded enough to smash through the plummeting debris and out into clear air, scattering tiny robotic insects as it surged into the open, its mind < singing > with triumph and—

Father Garaaf

Garaaf pushed down the urge to keen. He respected the Great Father, even though he still had misgivings about the creation of one. Daar had united the Gao, pulled them back from the terrible trap the Hierarchy had nearly dropped them in…but his existence was also a weak link. If he should fall here, and now…

His hearth both sank and raced as he watched the huge multi-storey edifice fail. It started on the upper floors and rippled downward, a solid block of building practically in free-fall.

His scope was near-magical in its talents. A whole package of sophisticated sensors, more a tool for watching than for killing. Its gaze could pierce air, fog, dust, smoke, even thin walls and some forms of chaff.

Right now, it was useless. The only thing he could see was billowing concrete powder, tumbling building, the bright white heat-point of the Alphas’ core streaking out—

He snap aimed, tracked it. If nothing else, even if the damn thing had just dropped a building on the Great Father, the Gao would have their revenge—-

Another heat signature launched from the plummeting tower, claws-first, and Garaaf stayed his shot in disbelief.

…What the fuck was he?

Fucker brought a gods-damn building down on him, and that party trick had already been tried. No. Fuck that. Daar poured on all his speed, bounced back and forth up the hole as the floors fell and crumbled, bullied through the raining bricks that hit his armor, found a nice heavy beam and took one last final leap—

—Something incredibly heavy hit it with terrible force and knocked it off course.

Two enormous paws grabbed it. Powerful claws sank into its armor. Alpha and predator corkscrewed wildly through the air, slammed into the ground with enough force to stun, even inside the protection of its core.

It took a full sensor reading the moment it regained its wits. The Alpha-of-Alphas would want them.

The Gaoian had landed their fall from the top of the building, standing upright with his prize in his paws. The impact had been fierce enough to leave a crater in the road, but this perfect being of destruction was unfazed by any of it.

The first thing he did was crush its shield emitters, before the Alpha could charge and activate them. It was helpless now. They both knew it too, despite the pod’s heavy armor. He turned the Alpha’s pod over in his paws several times, almost casually examining it in great detail, despite the pod’s robust construction accounting for most of the Alpha’s body-mass. The Flensing-Alpha fired its pod thrusters at full power, violently shifting back and forth between oppositely-positioned pairs to try and break free—

Nothing. Not even the tiniest hint of struggle, he was so utterly strong. The Gao had his prey conquered and would take his time savoring the kill. One last act of spite: it overloaded a thruster at an appropriate moment, sacrificing it for a chance to inflict some hurt on its magnificent foe.

It shattered the visor on his helmet, exposing the Gaoian’s face. Broad. Furred. Golden, fierce eyes. Teeth. Odor of concentrated dominance.

He snarled. The Alpha, suddenly, experienced something…

Pressure, far too much on its shell to measure. A crack. Seal compromised. A growl, severely and rapidly mounting force, its solid metal alloy shell somehow bending under the Gaoian’s impossible brawn. The Alpha would have laughed at it all, had it still a mouth or the strength to use it. He would break it and there was nothing it could do. No claws, no fusion blades, nothing but pure, ridiculous force. He snarled, its shell buckled, heaved inward—

Glorious. Truly glorious. And then nothing.

The Alpha-of-Alphas

It would never understand Eaters. How any sentient being could be destroyed in so total a fashion and yet still transmit a burst of transcendent < joy > was beyond the Alpha-of-Alphas’ comprehension.

The Hunter equivalent to manic laughter rang through the mind-net, flickered, and abruptly cut out.

Strategic analysis. The Flensing-Brood was badly depleted, and in need of a new Alpha. Its remaining planetary forces consisted of a few dozen scattered Betas, a few hundred beleaguered Gammas, and a healthy supply of virtually worthless Deltas and New-Spawn. Far from extinct…but its usefulness as a fighting force was spent for now. The Alpha-of-Alphas ordered the Flensing-Brood to withdraw to secure territory far from the enemy beachhead and replenish themselves.

Other, less prestigious broods had spent the battle so far maneuvering for containment. Many were chafing to engage the deathworlders. They would get their chance. Their Alphas understood that though the Flensing-Brood had been honored with first taste of the meat, there was plenty more to come.

Orbital advantage: stalemated. Airspace control: nil. Capacity to seize and destroy the hostile suppressor, shield generator and jump arrays: nonexistent.

For now.

Long-term analysis: the loss of that planet was now firmly in the probability space, though it wasn’t lost yet. There was a long and difficult fight ahead. If it should go against the Hunters, though, that would be calamitous. Many of the Alpha-of-Alphas’ projections implied extinction would follow within the next thirty years.

Not all, however. Some were merely…open-ended. A question with no clearly predictable answer. But that in itself implied time. Time in which the Hunters might adapt. Time in which they might, eventually, return.

Preparations were required, however. The Alpha-of-Alphas sent a last flurry of instructions, then turned its attention away from the besieged planet, trusting its subordinates to alert it should any development require its attention. Things seemed likely to slow down now, though. The deathworlder-Alphas were withdrawing, their resources spent, and leaving the fighting to their lessers.

The Alpha-of-Alphas enjoyed a moment of stillness, accepting no input, before turning its awareness to its new… “body.”

A new hive, really. Why should a Builder waste its time walking around? That was not the Alpha-of-Alphas’ role. No, this Alpha-of-Alphas would become the new hive for its species, equipped with everything the Hunters needed to survive. Spawning pools, stasis chambers, slave pens, jump arrays, shipyards. Nanofactories to repair, extend, upgrade and even duplicate itself.

Mobility.

There was a monster coming for it. One that may yet smash what the Hunters had been. One that may yet destroy the Hunters outright. The Alpha-of-Alphas was not willing to accept that, however. To be challenged and transformed was acceptable. To be annihilated was not.

This new body may yet be good enough to restore the Hunters to their proper apex position, in due time. But the journey there would be long and arduous.

And perhaps, may even require fleeing. To where? Other galaxies? That was certainly possible. Incredible that they had reached the point where it even needed to entertain that possibility…but why not?

The Hunters were far from finished.

Brother Tiyun, Aide and Body-Brother of the Great Father

Few were honored to serve so directly, and so personally. It was a point of pride that he knew the Great Father better perhaps than anyone, possibly even better than the Great Mother herself. After all, theirs was a relationship between equals and lovers.

His was as a silverfurred Brother of Stoneback, one whose purpose was to serve his lord and master, bound forever by oath and secrecy. He knew everything about the big man. His sense of humor. His favorite puns, what smells he liked. What little annoyances he hated but wouldn’t complain about, so that Tiyun could sweep them from his presence before he ever knew they were there.

All his stats and records, too. Tiyun had always been a fan of his, even when he was still just a champion in several competitive leagues. None were so mighty or athletic a brute as he, not then and especially not now, and he’d earned more than a little vanity.

Tiyun also needed to know some of the darker elements of Daar’s personality. There was a mean and deeply cruel creature lurking inside him, much more so than anyone else Tiyun had ever known. The Great Father had gigantic mirths and gigantic melancholies, a deep appreciation for the subtle and an unmatched appetite for the simpler, cruder pleasures of life.

Finding his center, his calm, was often Daar’s greatest personal struggle.

“My Father!”

Tiyun had never imagined he’d see the Great Father so…battered. His armor bore the marks of a terrible duel. Its outermost layer was torn and blasted, ripped off entirely in places to expose the flexible scale and bare plates underneath, and something had shattered the mask, leaving him bare-faced to the world. What remained was scorched, caked in dust, oil and Hunter filth…but intact, as was its wearer. Tiyun’s own HUD gave him a summary of the Great Father’s medical status as he tossed his trophies—the Alpha’s filthy armored skull and a flattened shell of metal—into the middle of the assembly area to cheers of approval.

He would, of course, be getting a full checking-over, and he’d been extraordinarily well-exercised by the day’s fighting, but none of that was of much concern. Daar was tough as Keeda, he could handle it. Had handled it, by all appearances. No reported injuries, and only a bit of soreness from the field-trap earlier.

…Balls.

So. Physically, nothing of note. Much more concerning was his nervous system.

Daar had suffered multiple nervejam shocks, countered by some awesomely aggressive nootropics. No doubt they had saved him…but those medicines were terribly dangerous.

Tiyun knew just what to do. They had a well-crafted plan just for this eventuality.

“Let’s get you out of that armor, sir.” He had a less formal relationship with Daar than most, but it wasn’t completely familiar, either. Daar’s uncomplicated love for Tiyun had to be kept at arm’s length. He was there to serve and, if the Great Father had any weakness, it was that there was a lot of love in his heart and it wanted to love everyone, regardless of situation.

Lots of hate, too.

Some of the armor’s trickier bits needed a bit of force. His wasn’t like the sleek Whitecrest models, that zipped themselves up with a motile nanite seam. His was instead much heavier and mechanically simple, like a bigged-up version of the Human’s EV-MASS. Fortunately, nobody lasted long in Daar’s orbit without some of the fitness fanaticism imbuing itself in them. Some wrench applied with righteous force, some undignified bits here and there—

He coughed, despite his efforts.

“Sarry,” Daar rumbled. “I bet I reek pretty bad.”

“Like two naxas after a third won the herd.”

“An’ not like the one that won it? Y’wound me, Tiyun.”

“The one thing you do not reek of at the moment, My Father, is conquered female.”

“Ha! Well…not tonight. Ain’t essactly feelin’ celebratory.”

Tiyun took the opportunity to place a discreet call while Daar tidied himself as best as he could in a campaign tent. A quick check of the clock: a little over three hours before they were in danger territory.

More than enough time to save the Great Father’s mind. The garden was ready. The Great Mother was ready. Champion Gyotin was prepared…

Tiyun’s fellows at High Mountain Fortress were drawing a bath even as he messaged them. His staff did their best to be as helpful and unobtrusive as possible, and it was appreciated: Daar paid handsomely.

The array was ready to jump when Daar came out, smelling enough less like murder to manage for immediate purposes, and looking…frankly, magnificent. With a nod, they walked toward the array.

A brief stop, first. Daar couldn’t leave without some gesture. He was…very good at spontaneous inspiration. Short, to-the-point, nothing to distract from people’s work too much. Let them see their victorious Great Father in all his glory, but don’t be ostentatious about it. Wade in among them for a bit, absorb their praise and congratulatory back-slaps, give twice as much in turn. He was their leader, down to his very blood and bones.

If only all leaders were so considerate.

It was only after he’d de-tangled himself from the crowd, then later his generals and champions that, at last, he asked the question most burning on his mind.

“How is he?”

“Flatlined just before going in the bag, but Baseball still has hope…”

The Great Father made a sort of unhappy disgruntled rumble, but left it be. “A’right. An’ I suppose this is the point where you an’ Naydi conspire ‘ta get me tucked in an’ sleepin’?”

“After a bath, of course. Gyotin’s conspiring with us as well.”

“…Seems a bit overkill…”

Ah. Beginnings of the symptoms, right there, and right on time too. Altered judgement. He needed his IV, and he needed his rest.

“The procedure for post-nootropic care is quite clear, My Father. And you instructed me to follow it to the letter.”

“…Yeah. I did. We better not make the Sister-Nurses angry, then…”

Tiyun duck-nodded his agreement, confirmed their destination on the out-array, and settled in alongside Daar on the pad. There were a long and busy few hours ahead for him, working hard to make sure the Great Father didn’t. If he could be at peace and relaxed as soon as possible, good. Sleep, though…sleep would have to wait until the stuff was out of his system. Allowing him to sleep could be very dangerous indeed.

Things moved quickly once they got back. Daar absolutely needed a bath and doing that made for a team effort. He hunkered down in the comfortably warm water, blowing bubbles with his nose as Tiyun and his fellows made thorough work of it.

Tiyun discreetly checked the Great Father over for injuries as he worked. Nothing. Not even a bruise. Which was…

“…Any soreness, My Father?”

“Nah, ‘cept ‘tween my ears I s’pose. Ribs’re fine too.” He splashed about gently as he applied some fur shampoo to his chest. “Balls, you’re right, a bath like this is relaxin’ as fuck…or is that th’ medicine?”

“Both,” Tiyun replied truthfully. “The medicine here just being a good scented shampoo. As for the rest…well, I’ve earned more than one contract on the reputation of my massages…”

“…Ha! An’ I notice ‘yer equally skillful assistants ain’t Females…”

“As if that’s ever stopped you before.”

Daar chittered lazily, letting the infamously sedative powers of giant southern sweet-herb (along with tea tree oil from Earth) work their magic on his nose. “No, but…pro’ly a wise bit o’ strategery.”

“Now is not the time for that kind of distraction,” Tiyun intoned sagely. “Plenty for that later.”

“Once my thinky-meat’s all safe an’ sound?”

“That’s the idea, yes.”

“…Okay,” he said with a particularly soppy, honest look of affection. “I trust you.”

Yup, definitely entering an altered state of mind. That was expected and so far, going as expected. They didn’t talk much after that, just focused on getting him bathed. The water was absolutely filthy, even after changing it once. The second time, though, was better. The third bathful was clean.

Daar stirred the water with his claw, grumbling. “Don’t know how I got so gross…” he rumbled, then blinked curiously. “…Yeah. I can feel shit startin’ to get weird in my head. Time ‘fer the IV and stuff I think…”

A little past time, honestly, but still within schedule. They had him hooked up and padding a bit dazedly out to the gardens just as soon as he was toweled down.

“Balls…” Daar shook his head a bit, then somewhat comically thought better of it. “How much dose did m’suit hit me with?”

“You were within one dose of the maximum.”

“…Can’t say I recommend this,” he chittered wearily. “I just wanna sleep…”

“You specifically made me a poking stick.” Tiyun brandished it. An arm-length of well-smithed metal, with a couple of decorative twists screwed into it, forking into a pair of quite sharp tines, and with the other end bent upwards like a tail for hooking over things. It was the sort of thing Daar churned out in his forge, more a metal doodle than the kind of craft he was really capable of. But as a means of keeping him from nodding off, it should more than suffice.

“…Ha! I guess ‘yer my…my male Leela now! Don’ smell as purdy…”

Tiyun chittered. “You should have made it a giant spatula.” He indicated the lawn where Gyotin was waiting, tea ceremony all prepared. Daar sniffed skeptically.

“…Can’t smell it…” he rumbled, sounding suddenly worried.

“That’s to be expected. Things should start clearing up once we’ve got a few bags through you.”

The tea was also an especially fragrant variety for exactly that reason. Sensory grounding. The anti-Nervejam protocols OpenPaw had developed were something else, and the Great Father was in for a “trip,” whatever that was, as the medicine did its work. The challenge for the next little while would lie in keeping him engaged and stimulated but also calm and euthymic. Not an easy balancing act at all, immediately after a long and punishing battle.

But, that was the consequence a Gaoian paid. While a human was more sensitive to nervejam in general, the medicine didn’t do such brutality to their brains as it did a Gao.

So: tea. They sat together and drank, letting the scent envelop them. Daar’s nose twitched heavily, but being able to smell it definitely calmed him. Perhaps only Tiyun would have noticed the depth of fear and uncertainty in his voice when he’d admitted he couldn’t, before.

Gyotin walked the Great Father through learning the ceremony—something Daar had never quite got around to doing before—and again the tactile precision of it was obviously helpful. A simple job done diligently and well was therapy, in its way.

Tiyun only had to apply the poking stick once, when Daar decided what he really wanted to do was go careening around the Fortress, looking for tasty little hoppers poking their heads out of their burrows. It was a vicious poke too, right in his big meaty haunches.

“You stop that.”

Daar’s protestful swat was lazy and lopsided, backed by a chitter. But he settled down and needed no further prodding, much to Tiyun’s mildly mischievous disappointment. How often did someone like him get a chance like that?!

It worked, though. Gyotin and Daar meandered off on a conversation that, frankly, devolved into bizarre nonsense. At one point, Daar did the whole tea ceremony again “just to check what reality I’m in…” But at no point did the Champion signal to Tiyun that anything was amiss. They just sat and…talked. At one point, they both endured a minutes-long spine-bender of a hug, the sort where Daar completely wrapped himself around the objects of his affection, nose-tip to toes, and wasn’t much inclined to let go.

“I’m so lucky…you’re jus’ the bestest people ‘ta have…”

It was quite peaceful. All Tiyun had to do was swap out the IV bags as they emptied.

The sun was touching the horizon by the time the Great Father came back down from whatever distant realm he’d wandered off to. It was a gradual process though, which began with being able to remember what he’d said only a few seconds ago, moved on to saying things that were at least tangentially in contact with reality…

Still. All things considered, this “trip” Daar had gone on seemed like a pleasant experience. If not for how it had been induced, Tiyun rather felt he’d like to try it for himself someday.

The chill of dusk, and the emergence of glowing insects among the garden flowers, firmly brought the Great Father back down to Gao. He watched them for a while, then yawned expansively.

“…Balls…how long we bin out here?”

“Several hours.” Tiyun looked at the pile of discarded IV bags. “You probably need to pee something fierce by now.”

“…Huh. Yeah. Now y’mention it…”

“I believe Great Mother Naydra is waiting for you upstairs, My Father.”

“Right…yeah.” Daar rose to his paws. “…Fuck, that was…somethin’. Mebbe I’ll try an’ write about it later, or somethin’…”

“Lingering effects, My Father. What you need now is rest.”

“Right, right…”

The Great Father of the Gao, still a bit wobbly, ambled off toward his private apartments.

The easy part has been done. Now it was Naydra’s turn.

Tiyun turned toward Gyotin as he tidied up. “Well. That went about as well as could be expected, I think.”

“I think it went perfectly,” Gyotin replied. “And interesting, too. He’s really very thoughtful and gentle when his guard is down.”

“Of course he is,” Tiyun said, loyally. “That’s always been him. You just…need to find it.”

Gyotin duck-nodded, though his expression was suddenly a little more troubled. “Well. I hope we haven’t accidentally induced him to forget the rest…we need the rest.”

That was the lingering concern. The anti-nervejam nootropics had a high risk of permanently altered personality under such a strong dose. The entire purpose of the evening was to avoid that as much as possible. But how could they know for certain?

Time would tell.

Martina Arés

She knew. The footsteps coming up the stairs were heavy and there were several of them, including the muffled steps of something large on all fours. Adam’s comrades, definitely.

…But none of them were his.

She picked up Sam, checked Diego was happy, and opened the door before they even reached it.

Campbell, Firth, Burgess. Thurrsto and Regaari too. They all looked tireder than she could ever remember seeing them. None of them save Campbell would meet her eyes.

She knew.

She let them in. Offered them drinks. Sat down, and braced herself.

It was worse than she imagined.

++END CHAPTER 78++

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Acknowledgments

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78 Friendly ETs, 146 Squishy Xenos and 317 Dizi Rats, a nice unround number

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 79: “The Long Fight”

Chapter 79: The Long Fight

Dandelion: audiobook now available!

- Click here to purchase the audiobook

- Or click here to purchase any version of the book from your favorite retailer

Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

The Long Fight

Date Point: 18y9m3w AV
High Mountain Fortress

Naydra, Great Mother of the Gao

She could tell instantly that he wasn’t quite himself. It was the little things: the way his movements were cautious and uncertain, rather than bold and carefree; how he sniffed at the room like it was a novel experience instead of completely familiar.

He squeezed through the door, and peered at her almost as if he was re-discovering something he’d treasured long, long ago.

“…Naydi?”

She’d been briefed to expect some disorientation, but that still stung a bit. Though at the same time, the raw confused delight on his face…

“Bumpkin. Come here.”

He padded in gently, approached with his nose twitching wildly…

He wrapped her in a tender hug. “Naydi.”

“Well…you’ve had a rough day,” she said with a gentle chitter.

“You ain’t kiddin’,” he grumbled against her neck. “Balls, my head feels so weird right now…”

“Painful?”

“Nuh. Jus’…’s’like I can remember how I think, but I ain’t thinkin’ that way right now?” he shook his head like a fly had just buzzed into his ear. “Or like, like I’m re-rememberin’ everythin’ ‘bout everythin.’ Gods it’s good to smell you again…”

So, he had to remember himself, then.

She’d been watching and listening right from the moment he came back, right as the effects of his ordeal began to manifest themselves strongly. His brain may have been preserved, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t discombobulated by the experience.

Discombobulated was fine. It may take some time to fix that, of course, but his bravery had bought them the time he needed. First thing’s first.

“You’re tired, Bumpkin. I’ve got the nest-bed just the way you like it.”

Daar wagged his tail, once. “Sleep does sound kinda nice…what ‘bout tomorrow?”

“We’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. Now come,” she walked toward the nest-bed, and Daar followed automatically. “This bed is too big for me to warm by myself.”

He chittered gently, circled around a few times, kneaded at it for a bit, and found a comfortable spot, much the same as he always did.

He did hesitate for a moment. Still not quite there. But only for a moment. He pulled her in gently and before long, had her wrapped up in a tight snuggle. Her mind was burning with deeper questions: how bad had it been? How successful? What was next?

But those weren’t the questions he needed tonight.

“Better?” she asked instead, with a light chitter.

“This feels more right than anything. I can smell ‘yer worry though.”

Naydra duck-nodded and snuggled into him. His fur was short enough to be almost scratchy, but…oh, she wasn’t going to complain. He was back. He was alive. Bruised and damaged, maybe…but he’d heal. That was all that mattered, for now.

“It can wait,” she said.

He nodded, sighed heavily….and was asleep. Naydra chittered to herself, nipped his nose affectionately, then put her head down and followed him.

Others, she knew, weren’t as lucky today.

Date Point: 18y9m3w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek protectorate, near 3KPc Arm

Vemik Given-Man

Vemik was good friends with Ferd. He’d texted Vemik to say he was coming back that afternoon, so with a hoot and a happy growl, he galloped the whole way to the array wearing Jooyun’s heaviest weighted vest. Vemik didn’t have much time to lift that morning, but he could still get a good workout in! He couldn’t close the vest around his body, though, because his chest and waist were way bigger and stronger than Jooyun’s now, but that was okay.

He met Ferd with a friendly hoot and a flying tackle done just as hard as he could, with a quick but strong little brawl in the dirt. Fun! He’d just come back through the jump array with his men after a training mission with Heff. That was nice! Vemik liked them all but Ferd had helped him understand the Fire almost as much as Yan. It was always good when he visited.

It wasn’t a long bit of wrasslin’ though, because Ferd’s men knew that Vemik was ticklish, and nobody could fight seriously against someone when he had three strong friends who know how to fight really dirty.

They had him hooting and trilling so hard, Vemik almost passed out from it. His plan backfired! They kept at it until he somehow managed to pin all four at once (or at least squeeze them hard enough they gave in), and once he’d managed that he collapsed, catching his breath, hiccuping and generally unable to do much of anything for a good, long while.

They were much friendlier and more respectful with Vemik after they’d worked out the hurt he’d given them, and everyone was in a better mood after they had caught their breath. Though, he’d been a bit too rough with Genn, whose belly was cramping and sore from where Vemik had wrapped a leg around and crushed him breathless, but that was okay. Genn could still move and he’d get stronger from it, even if every step made him wince a little.

“I’m sarry,” Vemik offered his hand. He didn’t want any bad feelings, so he was glad when Genn took it, and they pulled each other into a big, friendly hug. “Maybe I forget how strong I am.”

“You didn’t forget,” Genn trilled with a wince. “You enjoyed every beat of that!”

Vemik grinned sheepishly. “Maybe! But I can make up, ‘cuz we have a good roast going with berries and tanew nuts! Wanna eat and sleep before you go home?”

Nobody would turn down an offer of free food and maybe fun with a friendly tribe! Especially Vemik’s tribe. His women were well-known to be young, strong, and pretty, after all…Vemik doubted anyone would begrudge sharing their huts tonight. Ferd and his men were strong and handsome! And good friends. Friends should always play together, if they could.

Of course, Given-Men visiting villages had to prove themselves and their intentions. That was the law of the gods, where taking-magic might happen. They walked back from the array together to Vemik’s new village—it had moved since Ferd had last seen it. The forge was still there, along with the Human’s huts, and a new thing they were building that nobody would tell him about yet. Infuriating! Windows all covered too, so he couldn’t sneak a look, and the Professor made him promise he wouldn’t sneak in before it was ready.

Mean!

Vemik let Ferd know when they were getting close, and he obligingly climbed up a tree to go berry-hunting for a bit, so Vemik would arrive first. After all, Ferd was a visiting Given-Man. He could only do that on peaceful terms if the other Given-Man was ready to welcome him, so…

Vemik swaggered home, and was instantly mobbed by much of the village, despite having only been gone since the morning. That felt good! Kids climbed over him, Singer pressed herself along his front, whispering promises for later that night…

He bit her ear and promised right back. But first, they had a guest. “Ferd’s coming. His men too, think we can feed them?”

“Oh! That should be a fun match! And yes, we’ll make their bellies ache!”

As expected, Ferd left him just enough time to wrassle a bit with the children and catch up on the basic gossip—and find out who needed a visit that night—when the watch’s shouting-stones let everyone know who was approaching.

Ferd was a big and very strong Given-Man, now with training for sky-fighting. There weren’t many Given-Men he couldn’t have his way with. In fact, Vemik could count them on one hand.

That was okay. The gods had been good to Vemik in the summer Fire. At the lodge, Ferd had been the bigger man, but Vemik was still in his first real Fire, and the gods clearly had plans for him. He’d grown a whole finger-width taller! Even more on his shoulders and chest, and everything else, too! He actually had to be careful when playing with Jooyun now, and that was such a good feeling! At next spring’s Lodge, Vemik would earn a very high rank.

Vemik was better than Ferd now, and getting better every single day. Bigger, faster, stronger. Tougher, much smarter. Longer lasting probably, better senses maybe…he knew all that just from the little-talk and things they did on the way over from the array. A man could learn a lot about his opponent if he paid attention.

Fighting with his own head had taught Vemik how to really pay attention to things.

They lined up, face-to-face. They showed off to each other, and spent a long time doing it to the hooting cheers of his tribe. They had fun doing it too, because what man wasn’t proud of his strength?! Vemik certainly didn’t mind; he saw he wasn’t just taller, he was better and they both knew it…but Ferd was very good, too. Lots of appreciative hoots for him! They traded friendly insults, poked at each other’s bodies, made ridiculous boasts and sweet promises to whoever was interested that night, said the friendliest challenges they could, and when the moment was perfectly ripe…they fought, slamming into each other with all the strength they had. It was just a play-fight of course, because neither wanted a war, but it was still super fun!

The Humans called it “pro-wrassling.” To Given-Men it was just pure joy, because they couldn’t play so hard with anyone else; others would be broken by it.

Or as long. It was good to test your friends, and that was what they did to each other. Ferd was nice and sturdy! Tough, too! They fought on the ground, up in the trees, even in the air when they jumped at each other. Ferd had some really good tricks that Vemik would need to practice with him later on, but in the end it didn’t matter. Vemik won because he was a lot stronger. Every part of him was better, from his bigger, redder crest to his wider, stronger feet. He had his fun, gave some small playful embarrassments, then finally pinned Ferd to the ground and squeezed the breath out of him until he tapped out, ruefully admitting defeat.

Ferd trilled tiredly, “you…you’ve been eating well, I see! Ow.”

Vemik trilled right back, “and training good, too! Now let’s get you and your men fed, yes?” He yanked Ferd up from the ground and they hugged each other tight (…maybe Vemik hugged a whole lot tighter than he needed to…) like the friends and allies they were.

But between them, they knew the new way of things. Vemik was the boss, now.

Still: losing to a Given-Man of any kind wasn’t so bad, as long as they walked away friends. Here, that meant Ferd got second choice of anyone who wanted to play with him tonight. It was a pretty quiet, lazy evening, even if there was a smoldering ember beneath it. The summer heat was at its worst and the sweltering fierceness of it had the redcrests still in the tails of their Fire, Ferd and Vemik still right in the hottest heat of it. There had been a very big hunt that day, as the women began their campaign of making jerky and things for the coming lean fall and winter. Everyone was resting up for the night’s inevitable play, so mostly they all sat around the fire with pleasant company in laps, hugging and joking more than anything else.

It was a relaxing sort of night. Vemik and Ferd sat next to each other like true friends, firmly shoulder-to-shoulder with a leg wrapped around their friend’s, feet gripping each other and tails coiled tightly around each other’s waists. Singer meanwhile draped herself across both of them to their mutual delight, demanding and getting strong hands to massage tired muscles.

Running a village could be very hard work.

“You sure know how to rub a woman’s shoulders, Ferd…maybe you should teach Vemik!”

She was teasing him a little, but he didn’t mind so much. Ferd was a good man, and if that’s what she wanted to do, well. She’d come back. Besides, maybe they would get a strong son out of it! Ferd was good stock, after all…

Or daughter! Daughters were good too. Maybe even better!

Vemik wouldn’t let Ferd have all the fun. He proved he knew what he was doing and went to work on her lower back. “Maybe I can teach him something, too…” His reward was a happy purr from Singer, who relaxed and poured herself more completely across their laps.

It was…nice. They traded stories around the fire, eating meat as it sizzled on the rocks. Kids came to play, while Ferd told his own tales of adventure and mayhem among the sky-tribes. Vemik sighed happily (and a bit jealously) about the stories, wishing maybe he’d been there… But he had his Singer! Vemik moved onto her tail, while her hands found parts on both of them that needed a little attention…

Oh, yes. It was good to be home!

She didn’t do anything too strong, though. She was just teasing them for now, so Vemik had to bite his tongue and resist his building urges. Wicked woman! He’d tried to wiggle it out of her grasp…maybe worm it into somewhere warm and slick, but she had a nice, strong grip…

So when Professor Daniel arrived, everyone sat up, all laziness and indulgence forgotten. A nice joint of meat was offered and gladly accepted, while his own Giving of herbs and precious black-pepper was snatched up by Singer, before anyone wasted it. Peppercorns were for stews and jerky first!

Daniel looked at the two of them, caught suddenly without a delightful woman in their laps, one who had obviously been giving them both the best kind of attention… He laughed, knowingly, and decided to tease them a bit. “Hello! Having a fun evening, I see?”

“Good evening!” they both agreed in hooting amusement, then trilled at voicing the idea at exactly the same time. It would have devolved into wrasslin’ but one of Vemik’s own ran up and pulled at Daniel’s shorts. “Tell us a story!” she said in the People’s words.

“Of course,” he replied in English. “I’ve just memorized this one…” Vemik sat up and paid attention, and suddenly everyone in the village was gathering. The man of the watch sent word out to the other villages by radio, so they would be broad-casting it for everyone to listen in. Professor had a new story for the People! Or, well. New-old.

“Not so long ago, in the village of La Mancha, a place of which I have no desire to mention, there lived one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the rack, a shield, a lean horse, and a greyhound for running…”

Vemik had met both a horse and a greyhound. Horses were impressive animals, and probably tasty! Wouldn’t want to get kicked by those haunches, though. Greyhounds…well, they were dogs, and that was good, but they were never halfway up a tree: they either ran with all the speed, or slept with all the sleep. They didn’t seem to know how to dog like other dogs.

It was a funny story! Vemik hadn’t been keeping notes as he listened, and was worried he might be forgetting stuff…

But, well…no! He remembered everything, just like he always used to. That was happening more and more for him, and this was a good day for that. Before his fight in New York, he’d been able to remember anything anyone ever said to him, exactly as they said it. He’d been able to do that since before his trial of manhood, and he’d been able to remember more than just words, too. Colors, shapes, how things were connected to other things…

That had been Taken from him in New York. He’d had to learn how to keep notes, take a notebook with him everywhere and write down everything so he didn’t forget. Or, re-remember when he inevitably did. That had a ‘silver lining’ as Professor called it; other people could read along with his thinking and Shooster in New York was particularly happy about all that. He’d been so sad about the whole thing, but Vemik had lived, so…

More and more, though, he could sky-think like he used to! Not every day, but he could tell when a day would be fuzzy or sharp. If it was a fuzzy day, he was extra careful to think as mindfully as he could. Singer was a big help too, as were Imi and Laffa, whenever they’d secreted him away from Singer’s gaze…

But some days, his mind was sharper than ever. Today was one of those days! Usually he’d talk with Tilly and her friends, furiously study his pre-calc to beat Ferd, hunt for samples…

But not every day. Sometimes, a good thinking-day needed to be used like this. Stories, play, giving lots of love to his friends, family, tribe. That was just as important as big ideas, he’d learned. And listening to stories was important too. The funny thing about the way Professor Daniel told them was, it didn’t matter that most of the People didn’t know what lances, shields, horses and greyhounds were. Or windmills. He had a magic in his voice for getting the story across anyway. Or at least the meaning and why of it. It was a good trick! Singers would bring their Dancers from other villages to listen to him.

Maybe they should bring Professor to Ferd’s tribe! Was that a good idea? It felt good!

They said goodbye to the day and welcomed the night, as they did every evening. Singer Sang her prayers, Vemik (and Ferd!) led the men in showing their strength to the world with the Dance. They had another Given-Man visiting, so the Dance led to more Singing…

The nice thing about being a good bit better than a very good Ferd, was that by Dancing with him, competing, wrasslin’ and all that, they made each other look even better then they would otherwise. Same for their men; the Giving of the Dance made for better Givings and Takings for everyone in the tribe. Who was Vemik to deny the magic of the gods?

There had certainly been plenty of good, long Givings for them both that night! But Singer wouldn’t be denied. She pulled them both into her hut, and showed them how sometimes, if a woman Gave hard enough to a man, it could end up being a sort of Taking in disguise…

Ferd and Vemik had strength and stamina like few other men of the People. And among the Singers, so did she. They put what the gods gave them and all their training had earned to good, long use, until the three of them were too damn tired to do anything more.

It was a very, very good night.

Vemik and Ferd woke up warm and lazy under her comfy pelts, cuddled together and both happily drained. She was an evil woman when she wanted to be! Vemik woke first, and might have thought about putting Ferd in his place again until, oh, the sun had gone away…

…Well, why not? He rolled on top of Ferd to his trilling objection, they wrassled for a bit…

It was good to be strong, and good to have strong friends to share it with. He pulled the pelts over them and forced Ferd into a nice, good-feeling pin, thoroughly enjoying the heat, their sweat-slicked strength, the slow, intense slide of fierce body contact as he bent Ferd into ever tighter holds. It felt good to win, felt good to take, to dominate such a good rival. The feeling of Ferd’s body surrendering to Vemik’s huge strength was just so fucking right…

“You’re mine,” he snarled quietly in Ferd’s ear, pinning his head with his own, using just the strength in his thicker neck to hold Ferd down. “You can’t stop me even if you wanted to.” He made the point with a full-body squeeze. Ferd’s hard muscles shook under Vemik’s harder strength and went slack, flattened to the bone from head to toe. “Can’t fight back against me at all. You like it, don’t you?”

Ferd nodded a bit fearfully, and that was all the encouragement Vemik needed. He growled as he tightened his hug fiercely, his bigger, thicker chest winning the contest for air.

Well…actually.

“Slap my head if you want me to stop,” he growled, softly. He’d learned a lot playing with Tilly, who really appreciated Ten’Gewek strength…but it frightened her, too. He couldn’t hurt Ferd as hard as he could hurt her, but she had good ideas about safety, so…

Ferd relaxed too. Nodded more happily this time.

“Good,” Vemik growled happily. “‘Cuz you can’t even breathe unless I let you,” he snarled, and started rolling his hips with as much slow strength as he could manage. “Now I’m gonna play with you, and you’re gonna love it.”

So he did. Vemik took his time and reveled in it. He left Ferd’s arms free because it was just play and not anything too mean, so could fight back for real if he was ever too scared…

He didn’t, not really. Hands gripped hard everywhere, looking for weakness, fists pounded against Vemik’s back…nothing. He just played harder, too stone-bodied for Ferd’s strength to fight. Ferd knew his place, now. He was Vemik’s. His men and his tribe were Vemik’s too, in the same way that every Given-Man and everything that was his, also belonged to Yan.

It was good to be strong.

Some long while later, when things were starting to feel really good, when Vemik’s fierceness was up and he had Ferd flipped over, body defeated and smashed dizzy, just when he decided to crush Ferd even harder and make him his woman, claim the big Given-Man forever…

That was when Singer barged in and put a stop to their fun.

“Get up, lazy men! You have places to be! And bring back a werne!”

She at least spared them the embarrassment of announcing to everyone exactly what they were doing, but there was a mischievous twinkle in her eye that said she really wanted to…

Vemik trilled, let go, and pulled Ferd up into a sitting hug, making sure they were still friends. He winced, sore all over…but put his tail around Vemik’s waist. Still friends.

Maybe a scared friend, but still a friend. That was okay.

“Okay,” Vemik agreed once he’d made sure Ferd wasn’t hurting too much. “We’ll be out in a little bit.”

“Hmmph.” She gave them a knowing look and a playful smile, but left them alone. Vemik would owe her a favor for that, later. That could be fun!

Still, there was no denying her. Singer was in charge of the village, and nothing so little as having personally satisfied two Given-Men the night before was going to stop her from bossing them up and out of her hut so she could make her medicines and spells.

Oh well! Only the stupidest men fought against a woman on a mission, at least not without very good cause, and that was extra true of a Singer.

And she was right. There was always use for another werne.

There was business to finish, though. Play without release was too much for any man. He grinned at Ferd, grabbed his head, and shoved it down where his face could be put to good, quick use. He wrapped his legs around and squeezed too, to make sure he did a good job of it.

It was good to be strong. He was even better to Ferd, too. He’d earned it.

Playtime was over, though. Sated, and with a good-feeling hug between them to stay friends, Vemik and Ferd emerged to the gentle clucking trills of the other women. They knew their power, and they could taste the air just as well as anyone else. They knew.

And Ferd knew it, too. Vemik would have a dependable ally in the east forest, a good friend still and, well…a Given-Man who knew his place between them. His tribe was a little bit safer, now.

Vemik felt himself, felt his thinking. Felt like a good day! He took a good stretch like Jooyun and War-Horse had taught him, drank lots of water, ate a big breakfast of meat and roasted vegetables. He didn’t need to bathe since he was just sweaty and not dirty, so he skipped that, checked in to see what would be forged today: bowls! Visited the children a bit…

It was a good day. His head felt sharp, his body happy, his hands ready to make or write or hunt. He looked at Ferd, and they didn’t need to say anything to each other.

They worked out, then went to fetch the Professor, found he was happy to come visit, and set off for Ferd’s village. There was a hunt with Ferd’s men, there was a neat animal Vemik had never seen! Ferd was fascinated by Vemik’s sketching, and draped himself over his shoulders to watch as closely as he could, legs around waist like the good friends they were. Maybe Vemik would teach him later!

It was a good day.

Date Point:18y9m3w1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Major Anthony “Abbott” Costello

Crude.

Without it, he’d have been looking at probably a couple months of recovery and rehab. A fucking building had collapsed on him. A large building. But, a few shots of Crue-D, a night of bed rest under strict orders from the doctors…

He was only a little stiff and tender. Some of the others on the team, some of the real veteran hardbodies, were already up and training again, even if it was baby steps for everyone, and that to much groaning and grumbling. The exhaustion ran deep, but thank God that was all it was. If they’d been virtually chunked inside their own suit, or had their brain ‘jammed to jelly…

And, well. Adam had the extreme misfortune to experience both. He was on everyone’s mind, right now.

So overall, it was a pretty miserable group who gathered for debriefing. Everyone was nursing whatever comfort item was excepted on their diet plan. Costello had his latte, Firth had a McDonalds, Thompson was slumped over a bowl of wheaties, Murray was bleary-eyed and half-dead with a bottle of Irn-Bru in his hand and Regaari had a Gaoian breakfast wrap that smelled like pure umami from across the room.

None of them were in the mood for small-talk. They wanted to get this done ASAP so they could go back to their recovery training, painkillers, and sleep. Costello was happy to oblige.

And it wasn’t like there was much to say. They’d done the job they existed for. The infiltration team had hung their asses out there and infiltrated where maybe nobody else could, the assault team had taken over and claimed a foothold that an entire damn army was now using. They’d fought hard all day, stacked a laughably huge count of Hunter bodies, and retired from the battlefield covered in blood, dust and victory.

Learning points? Sure. A few of those. There always were. The biggest was around Nervejam. This was the first real encounter where their anti-Nervejam measures had been thoroughly tested, and…

“We can’t fight like that,” Righteous grumbled. “The cure ‘fer this shit’s almost worse’n the disease.”

Weary heads bobbed around the table. The Hunters hadn’t been shy about nervejamming the crap outta them, and everyone had needed at least one dose of the nootropics. All of them were on recovery plans, and all of them had noticed…

“The bullshit anger in my head is annoying as fuck,” rumbled Snapfire. Which was saying something, since Sikes was about the most mellow man on the team.

Sure, that was a relative statement, but still…

“Almost worse,” Costello agreed. “Still, this is the first defence of any kind we’ve had against nervejam. I’ll keep pushing for it to be refined and improved on, but it saved lives yesterday.”

There was an awkward pause the instant he said that. Eventually, Baseball cleared his throat, “We sure about that, boss? What’s happenin’ to ‘Horse?”

“He’s being taken to the College of Xenomedicine hospital on Origin. Nofl’s going with him. As soon as there’s anything to know, I’ll know.”

There was no less tension around the room in response to that, but there were nods. They all knew Nofl. They’d all been treated by Nofl at some point. They trusted him. That might not be enough to soothe their worries, but it was something.

“Well…I guess it could be a lot worse.”

Costello nodded. “Fact is, they’re planning an intervention. Which means they think they can do something for him. We’ll see what, and I will keep you all informed.”

There wasn’t a lot else to discuss. A few extra points, but really what they all needed was time to rest, talk, build themselves back up. He kept it short, dismissed them as soon as he’d got through everything essential, and retired gratefully to his office where he could sit down and take some weight off his abused spine.

Thank fuck for the MASS. And thank fuck for the nootropics, no matter what Firth said. There was no doubt in Costello’s mind that ‘Horse only had the fighting chance he did thanks to that stuff.

Paperwork beckoned. He had a unit to administer, even if what he really wanted to do was go home and sleep. But, there were things that needed doing which he’d set aside for the last few days. A full in-tray, made all the fuller by yesterday’s mission.

He groaned, was briefly tempted by the idea of a second latte, thought of ‘Horse and poured himself a glass of water instead…and got to work.

Date Point: 18y9m3w1d AV
HMS Myrmidon, Orbiting Planet Hell, Hunter warzone

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

As a man for whom one of the ships in Caruthers’ fleet was named had once noted: happiness consisted in getting enough sleep. Not any easy prospect when one was in command of a fleet in hostile “waters.”

In theory, with the fleet protected from above and below by planetary shields, Myrmidon was just as safe as though she was at anchor back at Cimbrean. But those two shields sandwiched an immense volume, and though it was being patrolled and scoured thoroughly by Voidrippers…in practice, Caruthers had a hard time finding the peace of mind to properly sleep.

Instead, he dozed. Rode the strange, vague line where he never quite felt like he’d fallen asleep, but in more lucid moments he knew he must be sleeping because he was dreaming.

Wind in the trees, his nieces running and playing in the distance. The park grounds at Cannon Hall. But he’s still in bed…

…Oh, bollocks to it.

He got up, brushed his teeth, dressed, and resolved that caffeine would do when actual rest failed.

The Fleet Intelligence Centre was busy, but quiet. Everything flowed through the FIC, every sensor return from every ship, every update from the ground forces, all washed through the mighty supercomputers in Myrmidon’s port bay. The stream of information was constant, and demanded constant attention or else, even with the computers, it was meaningless.

It all meant that Caruthers barely needed any effort at all to get a high-altitude look at their general situation, and what he saw wasn’t much changed from when he’d last looked. The Hunters were neatly isolated, their space forces u-nable to support the ground forces, and vice versa. The human and Gaoian beachhead down below was… well, not as mobile or expansive as he or Vark would have liked. But it wasn’t being ground down, either.

The Hunters certainly weren’t giving up. They had their own ground shields, and the war below therefore was being fought without air cover, orbital support, artillery, mortars…Anything, really, except the grim hard slog of building-to-building urban warfare. The only alleviating factor was the total absence of civilians. Frankly, they were going to be here a while. One didn’t conquer a whole planet overnight, after all. And Caruthers was going to have to learn to sleep with that.

He turned as the pressure door behind him opened, and a familiar Gaoian silently ducked through. Thurrsto. The enormous Champion paused and sniffed, then ducked his head in greeting.

“Admiral. I thought you’d be asleep.”

Caruthers chuckled and toasted him with his coffee. “Sneaking onto my ship, Champion?”

“Here for a meeting.”

“Ah.” Caruthers nodded. “Well, you’re right. I really should be asleep, but…” he gestured vaguely to the strategic map on his monitor.

“But you’re going to be woken up by something sooner or later, so you can’t switch off.” Thurrsto duck-nodded his understanding. He sniffed, then chittered. “Of course, you get the benefit of coffee.”

“Doesn’t work on you?”

“Only as a laxative.” The Champion stepped aside to make room for an analyst bustling something out of the room. “Others of us are quite sensitive to it…on which note, it’s strange to imagine what the Great Father’s going through, right now. Altered states of mind aren’t really part of our culture.”

“Not really part of my culture, for that matter.”

“That doesn’t count?” Thurrsto indicated the coffee. “You’ve never got recreationally drunk?”

“I…suppose I just don’t think of those as altered states of mind. I was thinking of narcotics. Drugs. Not this.”

“Doesn’t that speak volumes about just how ingrained in your culture it really is?”

Caruthers frowned and tapped his thumb on the desk a couple of times. “…I suppose I have to concede the point, there. But you have talamay.”

“We like the taste. It doesn’t affect us the same way it affects humans, at least not easily.” Thurrsto made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, a step below a quiet worried keen. “…Between you and me, the Champions are all worried. The Great Father’s presence here was necessary, but the Gao can’t afford for him to be…damaged. We haven’t begun to, uh…”

“Wean yourself off him?” Caruthers suggested.

“Not yet.” Thurrsto watched the calm hubbub of the FIC for a moment, then flicked an ear and tilted his head thoughtfully. “You know, not so long ago, for a Champion to agree with you on that thought would have been treasonous. It’s only by his insistence that we’re openly thinking in those terms.”

Caruthers nodded, drained the last of his coffee, and set it aside. “…You’re very lucky, you know. I could count the number of truly benevolent dictators in human history on a careless carpenter’s fingers. To have one who is actively talking you into considering the future of your government…”

“Mother Yulna was very wise,” Thurrsto agreed. “But here we are. He saved us. Everything is built around him, at the moment. And now he’s…”

“High as a kite?” Caruthers chuckled. “Not to diminish your concerns, but it takes more than one bad trip to ruin a mind, especially one like his. I think you’ll find he comes through just fine.”

“I’m a Champion. It’s part of my job to worry and plan for the worst. Doubly so, as Champion of Whitecrest.”

“Well, yes. Worry about him professionally. But on a personal level, you can take it from me, he’ll be fine…yes?” Caruthers looked up as Lieutenant O’Connell cleared his throat to get his attention.

“We’re ready for the Champion, sir.”

“Ah. Of course.” Caruthers gave Thurrsto a parting nod. “Champion.”

“Admiral.” Thurrsto returned the nod with a duck of his head, and followed O’Connell.

Caruthers checked his timepiece. He’d been ‘asleep’ for three hours, and no amount of coffee was ever going to be a substitute for the real thing…he really ought to return to his cabin and try again. A groan and some self-recrimination pushed him from his chair, and he did exactly that.

He was feeling a little less switched on, though. The conversation, the reassuring calm of the FIC even as they bustled to handle all the incoming data…a nice hot drink…He didn’t bother to undress this time, just took his boots off and lay on top of his sheets.

He still didn’t sleep. But at least this time, his dozing wasn’t so agitated.

It would do, for now.

Date Point: 18y9m3w1d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

Chambliss had read a few gobsmacking reports already during his time in office, but this morning’s was enough to make him sit back and quietly boggle. The strategic details of course would require deeper thinking and conference with his fellow leaders, but…

“So…let me make sure I’ve got this. A HEAT Protector, one Master Sergeant Arés, single-handedly drove off and attacked an Alpha to protect his patients, and having done so, destroyed it with his bare hands?”

Today’s briefing was courtesy of general T.A. Carlson, who usually brought a degree of irreverent optimism to his job. Today, though, his mood was grim and subdued. “That’s about the shape of it, Mister President.”

“Aren’t those things functionally an invisible, highly maneuverable tank?”

“Yes. There are tricks against the invisibility, of course. As for the rest, well…Arés was more.”

Chambliss raised an eyebrow. “…Good Lord. And he saved how many?”

“More than three dozen, sir, and that’s just in the immediate vicinity. We don’t have an exact count yet, we’re still piecing through all the debriefs. If we consider the larger context…he might well have saved everyone, including the Great Father of the Gao. Needless to say the Space Force has taken a keen interest, General Miller in particular.”

“Miller…” Chambliss’ mental filing system needed a moment to turn up a match. “Oh yes. Wait, isn’t he Air Force?”

“Yes, but he commands the nine-forty-sixth air base wing, while general Jackson commands the Space Force’s nine-forty-sixth space fighter delta attached to the same base.”

“Right. Formerly worked with the SOR?”

“Still does. His unit retains ADCON of the Space Force members of SOR, as the Air Force is the parent department.”

“Hmm. No wonder he’s interested…” Chambliss turned the page. “…And this Arés was wounded, possibly killed for his efforts. Well…that’s…a great loss, from the sounds of things.”

“Irreplaceable, sir.”

That piqued his interest.

“Define irreplaceable.”

“I mean exactly that, sir. We’ll never find another like him, no matter how we try. He is not only a great many things simultaneously that are exceptional all by themselves in any individual, he is in many of those things the very best there is, period. The best the human race had to offer, I would argue, and his role was protecting lives. Forget one in a million, that young man was, or I hope still is, one in ten billion or more.”

“…Surely you exaggerate?”

“Not in the least, Mister President.” Carlson shook his head. “Not even a little bit.”

His tone was so serious, and so depressed, that Chambliss just stared at him for a moment, then took him at his word. “…I see. So a hero in the truest sense of the word.”

“One who took enormous personal risks to build himself into the hero he was, even by HEAT standards. And he may have given it all in an absolutely brilliant piece of heroism, too.”

“…Above and beyond the call of duty, would you say?” Those were magic words, there. Words a President was always proud to say, and often remorseful of the circumstance.

“That would be the general consensus, yes. Miller is no doubt preparing for that as we speak.”

“These things usually take time, don’t they? Years.”

“Yes, but cases are seldom so clear-cut. In any case, they need to be done right. There can’t be any doubt in anyone’s mind.”

“Is there?”

“No, but minds change. We need to gather evidence, review reports, conduct interviews…”

“Right.”

“And, not to put too fine a point on it, but it is in your interests that such a thing be as divorced from politics as is possible. The timing matters. And of course, Congress…”

“Of course.” Chambliss put the folder down on the coffee table in front of him. “…Be honest with me, how much bloodier is this going to get?”

“Difficult to say. The big problem is nervejam, and the Hunters use it liberally. Only the HEAT have any real resilience to it, thanks to their suits. For everyone else…where it doesn’t kill outright, it leaves men with permanent brain injuries. We simply cannot afford the level of rehabilitation that would be necessary. And before you object, it’s not a monetary issue. Rehab for a close nervejam hit requires intense intervention by medical staff we barely have, and the ongoing therapies, and so on.”

“And it’s a whole planet we’re talking about.”

“Yes. And for now, we only hold a small part of the largest city. Just claiming the city is going to cost…well…thousands, probably. And then, it’ll only be so few because we’re very good at this sort of work, after the last several decades. The Grand Army will likely see modestly heavier casualties, owing to training and, well. Exceptional Clan and so forth aside, most Gaoians just ain’t human infantry.”

“Why not just nuke the city?”

“The Hunters build fast, breed faster, and as much as they love centralization they were still salvaging a debris field that covers basically the entire equator. Nuking that one city was never going to finish the job, and now we’re tracking large convoys moving out of the city under cover of shield emitters, carrying God-knows-what. Our best guess is they’re going to ground, setting up breeding bunkers.”

He moved a few papers around, and showed Chambliss a map. “We don’t want to get into a game of nuclear whack-a-mole. It won’t work. Besides, we need a foothold and the city is the only one we’ve got. The HEAT had to hang their asses out and take a terrible risk to earn that much—it won’t happen a second time.”

He handed over a final document: casualty estimates and projections. “There’s no shortcuts here, Mister President.”

Chambliss stared solemnly at the paper, letting that assessment and the numbers on the page sink in. Felt the weight of it. God…that was a lot of bereaved families in the near future. A stack of coffins he’d been so certain could be avoided, when he’d run for office. Maybe he had avoided a great many.

Didn’t feel like it.

Outwardly, he picked up his coffee and sipped it. With both hands, so they wouldn’t shake and betray his feelings. “I sense a conference with the Great Father in the near future.”

“Once he’s recovered, I imagine.”

“Him too?”

“He’s the only other one, uh, capable enough to match our own, so…naturally, he was involved. He killed the Alpha the second time. Hopefully permanently.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Their brain and some other bits are kept in an armored escape pod. It’s a bit sci-fi. But Daar physically crushed it. And took the skull home as a trophy. I can’t imagine it’ll come back.”

“…Proof that heroes aren’t always nice, I suppose.”

“Indeed.”

“Is…what about his recovery? I presume he was nervejammed as well?”

“Repeatedly, yes. Gaoians are not as sensitive to nervejam as us despite having comparable neural capability. They are, however, markedly more sensitive to the medicines involved. He is lucky he can afford the level of care that will be needed, Mister President.”

“So we have two irreplaceable operators, one of whom is a critical head of state, both of whom have had their brains attacked, and we do not know the status of either of them?”

“Daar’s status is reportedly good, sir. He, uh…had an interesting night, I gather, thanks to the medication. But he walked off the battlefield otherwise uninjured, nonetheless.”

Figures. “And our Warhorse somehow did not.”

“Different fight, different circumstances. Daar was, ah…his situation was less desperate and he had the opportunity to prepare. He’s also basically his own category of being. Physically, well. You’ve met him. Nobody is his match. Not really fair to compare them or their fights.”

“…Right. That was probably a petty thought.”

“A natural one, sir. We always root for our own.”

“Is he not our own? At least in a sense that matters?”

“On a certain level, sure. Deathworlders against the galaxy? I’m a fan. But, he ain’t human.”

“That’s not how they feel, from what I can tell.”

“No, and that’s one of the ways they may be better than us. They’re intensely loyal and they feel they owe us a great deal.”

“I hope that does not set any unreasonable expectations…”

“It might, in time. For now we’ve done right by them. You in particular, Mister President; they know the politics of the thing are much more difficult for you and your party, and they are nothing if not a practical people.”

“Hmm.” Chambliss considered things in silence for a moment. He had a lot of thinking to do later. “Well, thank you for the update. We will arrange appropriate communications on our end.”

Carlson nodded, stood, said his goodbyes and left Chambliss to his thoughts. Not that he’d get long to be alone with them. There were meetings to attend, pieces of paper that needed his name at the bottom, policy and suchlike to review…the President was on the clock. It didn’t go away just because he was feeling shaken and dismayed.

Still. He had some control over his agenda at least. If only in terms of adding things to it.

He headed to the desk, sat, grabbed one of his letter papers, selected one of his best pens, and sat a moment with it touched to his chin in thought…

The words came. He put nib to page, and started his letter to Daar.

Date Point: 18y9m3w4d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Naydra, Great Mother of the Gao

Daar took his duty to the cubs ‘most seriousestest,’ a turn of phrase that nearly caused Naydra physical pain when he used it. He was always a bit of a troll, as Humans would say, and he knew exactly how to tweak someone without being too malicious.

And when it came to the cubs who came to High Mountain, that kind of playful, ultra-childish streak had a purpose. It was trust-building. He got more severe with the older ones, challenged them to produce the very best of their young lives while on his grounds. But all of that started with building trust. He must be severe but kind. It was a delicate balancing act.

Today, though, the balancing act had completely toppled over.

It was Naydra’s fault, really. She’d thought that keeping the cubs’ visit on schedule would be good for him. A bit of normal routine to remind him. Instead…well, it was like he’d completely forgotten the severe and challenging side of his role.

Right now, the fierce, dangerous side of him was just…gone. Missing. Or switched off. He was all Daar-back rides and fetch games, galumphing around the grounds and chittering for the sheer joy of play. The actual tasks and training scheduled for the day were tackled distractedly and half-heartedly, interrupted constantly.

One of the older cubs had noticed, too. Feem, a particularly impressive young silverfur who had a head full of engineering, was visibly distressed that his hero seemed so…

…So not there.

Well. One day wouldn’t be so bad for the cubs. Everyone needed a vacation after all, even ambitious cubs who had much to prove; they really did grow up all too soon, and that was a quality Naydra quietly envied Human mothers. They had three or four more years to work with.

Gaoian cubs, though…one day wouldn’t be so bad. But seeing him like this more than once could be damaging.

Gyotin had done his job a little too well. He’d certainly calmed Daar’s mind and helped him retain his composure. A fully functional mind drew appropriately from all the tools in the emotional box, including aggression, anger and impatience. Not permanent, happy, excessive agreeableness.

A Great Father needed to be a force. Not the world’s most biggest cub.

So. That left the question of how to remind him of that. An example, presumably? But how? He needed a challenge, not something he could immediately win at. But Daar…won. Effortlessly. He’d pushed himself to that point over long years, to the point where nothing Naydra could think of would actually frustrate him…

Actually.

…A thought presented itself. Or rather, the thought of a person. Someone Naydra had wanted to meet for the longest time anyway. From that idea grew a plan, and from that plan, other examples presented themselves…

She had a brief conversation with Tiyun. He liked it. In fact, he chittered long and loud at her suggestion, and promised to keep doing what he was doing while she was gone. Daar would be well cared-for in Naydra’s brief absence.

She loped upstairs on four-paw to grab her travel bag, then back down to the basements and the jump array. It took a few minutes to clear the schedule, but Great Mothers had the power to politely request such a thing at any time. And, well. It was important.

She jumped to Cimbrean.

Date Point: 18y9m3w4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Everyone had their limit. Even somebody like Martina. And Allison knew from experience that her own limits had kinda…snuck up on her. The strongest people in the world could fall apart if they hit a wall they never saw coming.

Marty’s wall, apparently, was uncertainty. Allison was pretty sure she could have handled it if a chaplain had walked up the stairs and told her Adam was gone. She could have handled knowing he was wounded but alive. This…limbo state, where he was in stasis and nobody knew a damn thing about whether he was alive or not? Yeah. Al could see how that would be hard to deal with.

But moms didn’t get to just fall apart.

Diego was old enough to get the idea that mommy was very sad about something, and even wanted to help, but he still needed looking after. And Sam? Sam had only just gotten the hang of sitting up and stuffing things in his mouth. Marty didn’t have the option of just feeling and processing and all the rest.

Since when did Al become such…hell, a mom herself?

Well. Self-answering question, there. Duh, Allison. But really…helping was a no-brainer. Grandparents were one thing, but Gabe wanted to be there for his son too, Marty’s parents wouldn’t arrive until the morning, and the huge sprawling HEAT uncle-dom had their own duties to deal with first.

That left Al, Xiù and Julian. He would take care of the Maximum Bro side of things, which just left…

A crushing hug like only somebody who lived in ‘Horse’s orbit could deliver, a profoundly grateful, tearful, whimpering one, and then Marty was gone to go grieve or celebrate or whichever and Allison’s home now had a hundred percent more Baby.

Big, curious, dark brown eyes looked up at her. Adam’s children were his spitting image, and only really took after Marty in the small details. Fortunately, Diego liked the same TV shows as Anna and Harrison, and the three were regular playmates. Between that, Xiù, Julian, and the twins…it was almost a routine kind of night.

Except everyone had a certain big someone on their mind.

Ramsey broke the question first, as he helped clean some potatoes. “Will he be okay?”

Al shrugged helplessly. “That’s just it. We don’t know. Marty doesn’t know, anyway.”

“Okay…well, when will we know?”

Al sighed. “When the Corti finish their review, little bro. Wonders of stasis and all that.”

“So it’s gonna be a while…”

“Could be they already did it,” Xiu added. “I mean, this is Nofl we’re talking about. He’s pretty, uh, decisive. In a good way! But still…”

“Yeah, but he’s workin’ with some bigwig professor,” Julian chimed in, climbing out of his basement cave and fresh off his evening workout, toweling himself down so he didn’t drip everywhere. “And he’s fond of Adam, too. We all are. In any case, uh, I’ve already made some arrangements to help out. Y’know. Just in case.”

“…In case what?” Ramsey asked.

“Recovery. Support. He’s a big guy, there’s not a lot of people out there who’ll be able to help him, if he needs it.” Julian sat down, sighed, and closed his eyes. He looked tired, which was unusual for him after a workout—usually they energized him. Today, he looked like worry had beaten all the fizz out of him.

“Well. He’s lucky to have you, then,” she said, and leaned over for a slightly salty kiss. “Now go shower.”

“Mnngh…Yes ma’am.”

That was the rhythm of their night. Normalcy, tinged with concern and worry for a mutual friend. Dinner, evening playtime, babies to bed, a movie, the twins to bed…

Xiù curled up in Allison’s lap once the three of them were alone. She’d spent half the movie in her office, taking a call, and from the looks of things it had added a whole second layer to her troubles.

“So…that was Naydra,” she explained.

Julian shot her a concerned look. “Daar’s okay?”

“Better than Adam…” Xiù stretched. “I guess. He’s…I guess the best way to put it is he’s a bit loopy right now.”

“Loopy?” Allison asked.

Xiù nodded. “Kinda…dazed, confused. Medication did a number on him, I guess. And she wanted to…well, hear my experience with nervejam, hear my thoughts, offload…”

“She’s havin’ a rough time with him, huh?”

“Yup. And I guess even the Empress of the Gao needs somebody she can vent to.”

“God.” Allison gave her a squeeze. “Has it ever struck you how weird our lives are? I’m a spaceship engineer sorta these days and I’m the most normal of us all.”

“Well,” Julian chuckled. “The twins are pretty normal…”

“Ramsey decided he’s going to try for the Folctha olympic tryouts, babe. Even in the world of normal, that’s pretty damn special.”

Julian nodded, scratching behind his head in slightly embarrassed pride. “…Tristan’s going places, too. I keep telling him he should join one of the engineering contests or something.”

“He’s not that kind of guy, babe. Same reason you never did any of that in High School. Money aside,” Al added quickly. “I think you were a bit of a loner back then.”

“Well, yeah…” Julian agreed. “I think in my case, uh…oh, hell.” He sighed, “I guess just, being what I was even then? It would have drawn all sorts of attention that didn’t sound nice. I think the same’s sorta true for him, just for different reasons. He’s got us as adopted parents, and his own brother is already an olympic-grade wrestler and stuff…”

“Not like miss ballet and drama club here,” Al poked Xiù in the tummy, drawing out the first giggle to grace the room in several hours. “Miss ‘the Great Mother calls me up to gossip.’”

“Mm. When you put it like that…” Xiù nodded. “Or y’know. Who we’re babysitting for tonight…”

“God. I hate that Nofl was right,” Julian muttered.

“About what?”

“Well…us. This. Don’t just look at me or us, I mean…look all around us! Ramsey is just a normal kid with good, healthy parents. Look at him now! Same with Tristan, have you seen how smart he is? He doesn’t like to show off, but when him and Vemik are at it…”

“And that’s showing up a lot, lately. In a lot of people.”

“Yeah. And the thing about it? He swears up and down there’s not just a bunch of Corti bullshit going on, except, y’know. With me and a few others. Not Ramsey! Not the rest of Folctha! Now, what the hell are we gonna be dealing with when Ana and Harrison grow up?”

“So…what was he right about, exactly?”

“He said…’cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ This. Us. Human potential. He says Folctha is really an experiment to unleash humankind to its fullest, somehow. Maybe he’s getting a bit religious about it which is weird as fuck, but still! Look at what we’re becoming without all that much of a nudge! Are we even ready for it?”

It was clear this was something that had been gnawing at him for a while.

“Well…I mean, babe. You’re literally a superman and you make out fine. And we’ve got an entire team of them, just down the road a few miles. We’re managing, aren’t we?”

He never did much enjoy talking himself up, no matter how exceptional he was. He again scratched at the back of his head, and as if to prove her point, that utterly, freakishly massive arm of his balled up huger than his own blocky head, and his bicep smashed up against his ear. Only two men had bigger arms, and even then they simply weren’t shaped so…well, perfectly.

He was a superman, and as much as he was proud of himself, he almost hated the notion.

He sighed, noticed he was doing the head-scratch thing, grumbled at himself and sighed again. “Sure. I am. They are. But that’s just dozens of us. What’s it gonna mean when hundreds and thousands and more start showing up? Look at Jack Tisdale! The kid is a fucking genius and thirty years ago he’d have a record-breaking bench press! Hell, look at Thompson! He was this absolute out-of-nowhere freak like I was, except training since he was five. Not only did they make an unlimited class so he could wrestle, he had competition. Firth, too. Hell, Adam! He was exactly the same, except bigger’n all of us at five-foot-fuckin’ seven! And look at you two!”

He gestured to them. “I mean…a teenage mom who ran away from home, and a schoolgirl with dreams of being a movie star. And now look at you! Building starships and developing cities on an alien world, changing the course of history a couple times over, and some of the most important people in the whole fucking galaxy turn to you for support!”

“Babe…” Al pulled in for a hug. “This is obviously eating you up. But why? I mean…if it’s happening, it’s gonna happen, and so far it’s been a good thing, right? What are you really worried about?”

Julian ran an agitated hand through his hair, achieving more mess. “…Tristan is a good kid. They turn eighteen here pretty soon. But the thing is, he’s smart, he’s fit and handsome, he’s ambitious…and thirty years ago he’d be a world-conquering standout. Now, we’ve got, just…how is he supposed to compete with the deck stacking against him like it is? What’s the world gonna be like when bruisers like me and Thompson are almost everyday normal, and geniuses like Lewis are just, everywhere?”

“I think the people you hang out with are skewing your perspective, Bǎobèi,” Xiù told him.

“Yeah, it does. That’s my point. A guy like me should be a one in a billion freak, which is weird to even say out loud. I know a dozen guys in my league, one of whom isn’t even twenty-one yet. I know there’s a hundred times that number out there, quietly getting through life, making families…and I know that because Nofl told me so. That was the entire point of what they did to me. I wasn’t just there to test medicines against.” He growled, “I was there to prove out a bloodline. One that has a whole lot of people in it, and who are almost all exceptional.”

Ah. She understood now. “And you weren’t the only experiment, either.”

“No. How much you wanna bet the SOR is just filled with them? I wouldn’t be surprised if Firth was the same story as me. Have you heard his family history? Hard to ignore the parallels. Lotsa weird happenings, they had a whole clan of freaks going back several generations living up in the hollars…he’s just the first to escape.”

“Tristan will be fine, babe.” Al soothed protectively. “Even in a world filled with turbo-meatheads like you. He’s more dangerous than you know. He’s just…he’s dangerous the way Rockafeller is. Or the Great Mother. Y’know, the way you’re completely helpless in.”

“Cute how he’s worried for his boy, though. Isn’t it?” Xiù added.

“Well of course I am!” He blurted, a bit angrily. “I never asked for the world to just fuckin’ level-up and suddenly drop him into hard mode!”

“Oh god, he’s becoming a videogame meathead,” Al quipped. “But seriously. I’m his sister. Maybe I’m not the best big sister, but I know he’ll be fine. He doesn’t need to be a half-ton bruiser to make it through life, babe. He’s already smarter than you anyway.”

“…I mean…yeah, he is. And I’m not exactly dumb.”

“And he knows how to dress,” Xiù added.

“…I hate that it matters, but yeah…”

Allison grinned, and played the trump card. “And he’s smooth. Dude’s got three double-dates next week.”

“Wait..really?”

“Yeah, really. Trust me. He’ll be fine.”

Julian thought about that for a moment, then sighed, and nodded, and relaxed. “Alright…I guess we’d better get to bed ourselves, huh? Gonna be a long night with four little ones in the house.”

“A long week, I suspect.” Allison nodded, and gently pushed Xiù off her lap. “Not like Marty and Adam are coming home tomorrow…”

“We’ll give them as long as they need,” Xiù said, firmly.

“Absolutely.”

“…You think he’ll be okay?” Julian asked, not meaning Tristan this time.

“This is Adam we’re talking about. You ask me…I don’t think he’s done yet.”

That seemed to be all the reassurance Julian needed. He nodded, brightened just a little…then changed gears, stooped, and scooped both of them up over his shoulders.

“Well, now that I got that off my chest…this ‘turbo-meathead’ has got plans for you two…”

Not all-night plans, sadly. Slow, lazy, tender plans tonight. Nice having three parents who could take turns, really. Because although they had no problems falling to sleep…they weren’t ever going to sleep through tonight in one go.

They made do. Most importantly, they were helping.

And they did their best not to worry.

Date Point: 18y9m3w4d AV
Emergency trauma surgery unit, College of Xenomedicine hospital, City 03, planet Origin

Forln, surgeon first class

Forln had been on call for the last ten days. He had slept, eaten, hydrated, and optimized his physical and mental condition before entering stasis in anticipation of the scenario now awaiting him in theatre. There was something…telling… in the fact that he, the College’s pre-eminent xenosurgeon, had been asked to put in such a long stint.

No matter. He had his assistants to bring him up to speed as he stepped out of the stasis pod.

“Patient?”

His assistant transferred the files before even that one word had finished leaving Forln’s mouth.

“Human male, twelve-year history of intensive Cruezzir Derivative therapy for bodily development reasons. Senior member of the Hazardous Environment Assault Team.”

Forln nodded as he stepped up onto the control podium and looked inward to the filthy, dirt-encrusted stasis bag lying in the middle of his otherwise pristine operating theatre, and called up the patient’s scan.

The pre-emptive scan of the Human in his pre-mission physical condition was…striking. It must have taken something terrible to land this specimen in his care…a story told in its entirety by the post-injury scan taken by the bag just before it activated its stasis field.

What he had, for the moment, was not so much a patient as several pieces of a corpse.

“Budget?”

“Unlimited.”

Forln was not in the habit of emotion. He understood that indulging in it was becoming increasingly in vogue with the younger generations as the Directorate released more details of Project Carbon, but Forln saw no reason to join in. Nevertheless, he noted that he felt considerable surprise: an unlimited budget meant either the coffers of a government or one of the galaxy’s wealthiest individuals were available in this case. With an unlimited budget, he could keep the theatre occupied indefinitely, procure whatever materials, tissue samples, tools and outside services he deemed necessary, subject to later review of his decisions.

Still…there were some things that no amount of funding could resolve. As he studied the scan, he noted the expert preparatory work. A truly skilled doctor had performed quickly and efficiently, and the Human body was notoriously durable. Plenty of Cruezzir-derived regenerative compounds saturating the patient’s tissues, too. This would not be the most difficult resuscitation of his career…

Nor the easiest. The presence of extensive nootropic-countered nervejam damage greatly complicated matters. That kind of damage was…tricky…to address.

He begun the preliminary work, programming the target post-operative state his surgical suite would pursue. It was not a short process, but the patient was safely in stasis and the bag directly powered. He could work on this for as long as he needed, given the unlimited funding.

Forln worked for most of the day, taking occasional breaks to rest while considering some of the more complicated details of this presentation. Where necessary, he sought second opinions. The work continued into the second day as he brought in specialists from elsewhere on the planet and even one from planet Perimeter to assist him.

The problem did not lie in physical reconstruction. At least, not immediately. The suite’s power capacity had to be upgraded, given the number of simultaneous interventions required, the patient’s combined size and density, and the desire to restore his body to an absolutely pristine state before it left his theatre. There was an immense amount of tissue that needed repair, and not just from his fatal trauma. Given this man’s obvious importance, a full “refurbishment” was absolutely in order.

While those upgrades were being handled, they prepared and scheduled the autolabs nearby for major level-ten intervention. Appropriate stem cells would be plentifully cultivated from the patient’s genetic sample. Several organ systems would need replacement entirely: his liver and kidneys had been ruptured (and were worse for wear, anyway), his knees needed some extensive attention. The same story for his ligaments and tendons, every major muscle group, most of his bones. All of it had been pushed well past their extremes, and he’d been living just slightly beyond the edge of regenerative medicine’s capability for far too long.

Forln wondered if he’d even been aware of the chronic pain. Well, that could be minimized…though likely it would continue after this, with different causes.

Rebuilding him would be an extensive and intricate process, especially considering the need to compensate for the inevitable systemic and metabolic consequences. Nonetheless, the patient could endure it, and therefore would.

The nervous system, however, was a very different matter. While most of the Human body could be induced to heal via carpentry when necessary, the Human brain was…challenging. And poorly understood despite decades of research.

This one was particularly abused. Multiple nervejam exposures, toxic buildup of ruined neurotransmitters, not to mention swimming in aggressive nootropic agents calculated to do only one thing: prevent death, and not gently. The long-term consequences were secondary to that objective.

The brain trouble extended the process by days, by which time his surgical suite had been upgraded, replacement organs had been grown and placed in stasis, and all other preparations had been put in order.

The neurology, however, demanded second opinions. He had time. He traded correspondence with multiple colleagues and, ultimately, sat down for a face-to-face meeting with the two consultants who came most highly recommended. A Primary Professor of xenoneurology named Maf…and the infamous Nofl.

“Preserving his faculties completely intact may not by possible,” Forln explained. “By any standard we are dealing with an exceptional intellect. His general score was last measured at one-seventy-four.”

Professor Maf absorbed that news with a thoughtful expression. “Commendable. And that’s adjusted against species average?”

“Indeed.”

“I see.” She reached into the projection floating between them and indicated a particular area. “…In your message, you expressed particular concern over this well-developed area. The primary, supplementary and pre-motor cortices.”

“Indeed. Physicality is partly a mental talent in Humans. And as you can see, in our patient’s case, that region has some of the greatest toxic buildup.”

“That is unfortunate.” Maf agreed.

“My concern is how much we can do to alleviate it.”

“Hard to say. This much damage is likely to have permanent chronic sequellae. But, Humans are known to be quite capable at physical rehabilitation. I would be less concerned over his motor prognosis, and more concerned with the emotional regulation centers in his old-brain regions. Our therapeutic priorities should be focused there, if possible.”

“I considered that. Past experience with Human subjects suggests that their emotions can greatly motivate them. In a Corti patient, this kind of damage would obviously be a priority, but in a Human I suspect powerful emotion may be useful and necessary in his long-term rehabilitation.”

The other consultant in the room—one who’d been something of an outcast for long years, only to return with considerably expanded prestige thanks to his direct work with deathworlders—shook his head. “You misunderstand. Emotional regulation is an absolutely necessary skill for humans, particularly aggressive, physically powerful males like himself. Their masculine culture emphasises stoicism precisely because of the dire consequences of not self-regulating.”

Forln gave Nofl a curious look. “I had no idea. I have yet to see any of this emotional regulation.”

“Oh,” Nofl emphasized, “you have.”

Forln and Maf blinked at him for a second. “…I see your meaning,” Maf said, shortly. “I take it you concur with me then?”

“Absolutely. The greatest good for our patient will be to prioritize his emotional stability and self-control above all other concerns. That is a foundation he can build on in rehabilitation. All else will handicap him.”

Forln considered the poisoned brain before them. “…Tricky. The best we may be able to do is a flush and some targeted cellular therapy. These structures are in particularly vexing locations in his brain.”

Maf gave the projection a thoughtful look, then leaned forward and compiled a procedure. “…This,” she suggested.

They considered it. Tweaked it. Made minor refinements. Concurred.

It was, admittedly, an incomplete intervention. They could only engage in so much nano-surgery, and their ability to replace brain tissue was quite limited.

Still. With time, discipline, and continued therapies…

“So, are we in agreement on prognosis?”

“He stands a fighting chance,” Nofl nodded. “And that is all he would have asked for.”

“In that case,” Forln stood, “I shall take my rest and prepare. I would…appreciate…if both of you would remain as online consultants.”

That was a form of honor that would have its consequences, given their ranks, but no matter. The patient came first, and the science would follow.

Six hours later, everyone was rested, the staff were assembled, everything was in order. Permission secured, and (in respect of Deathworlder customs) his significant others gathered to await the outcome.

Begin: the suite’s new much more powerful fields lifted the stasis bag into the center of the operating volume, and Forln executed the single quickest, most violent dismemberment of his medical career. In less than a second, they had his head severed and sedated, the body broken into its primal divisions, and multiple interventions underway as aggressively as possible.

This patient could take the aggression, and in such things, quicker was always better.

A naked Human brain was quite a sight. Astonishing to think it was so efficient, because it certainly wasn’t large, especially in comparison to body mass—particularly in this specimen. Instead, it was intricate and clearly an evolved structure; no engineered organ would have such a strangely laid-out design, nor would any be so remarkably well-adapted.

Forln had a good surgical suite and a deeply skilled team. He did little more than check in occasionally at the many actions going on in parallel across the Human’s immense body. His attention was almost entirely focused on the brain, where Maf was supervising the intricate neural surgery underway, and Nofl was providing running commentary. Rarely was such a thing necessary in modern practice, but rarely was a surgery so complicated.

Gently, ever so carefully, forcefields divided the complex folds of his brain just enough to make their entry. This would inevitably cause some damage but that could be repaired, if they were sufficiently cautious. The automapper did its work, identifying each neural region and its function, building up this specimen’s cognitive catalog for feedback into the suite’s computers, and review by the three surgeons present.

What they had before them was a magnificent, ruined specimen.

Nervejam. A cruel weapon. Brief, targeted quantum-field distortions that did terrible things to the electrical activity and chemical neurotransmitters alike. It wasn’t just the brief haywire scrambling of the brain’s activity that made it so terrible—most life forms that survived that would have recovered quite readily on their own.

No, the long-term damage came from the way it twisted neurotransmitters, locking them long-term in their receptors and distorting their chemistry. The damage was much akin to prolonged toxic metal exposure, and led to a delicate conundrum: the Human’s body would naturally flush and metabolize the compounds, if he survived, which was likely to be the safest and most long-term effective solution. But he could not survive the current situation.

Forln’s responsibility, therefore, was to find the acceptable balancing point where he could wash out sufficient of those ruined neurotransmitters to avert irreversible harm, without causing irreversible harm in the process.

And, of course, there were time limits. They only had so much time with the brain in this state before death of personality became a concern.

Progress on the patient’s body was comparatively easy, and advanced well. Forln had high confidence they would give their patient an immaculately repaired, restored, and “refurbished” body, one more than fit for someone like him.

They worked, as fast and as gently as they could manage, with an awareness on the clock driving their ongoing triage. Basic repairs had been effected everywhere. His cerebellum would probably recover, in time. Limbic, endocrine, and other systems no longer looked like processed nutrient slurry. Most of the toxic build-ups had been flushed, but not all…

And they were out of time. They had done as much as they could with the time they had. Carefully, they withdrew their field instruments from his brain, nano-suturing and regenerating as they did so. Not perfect, not even satisfactory.

But survivable.

The rest of the paragon’s body had been flawlessly attended to. All of Forln’s assistants would be awarded icons for their banner over this. One for Nofl too, his advice was invaluable.

They re-assembled their patient, dosed him, lowered him carefully on his oversized, reinforced gurney. And then came the moment of peak tension: resuscitation.

One jolt proved sufficient. Autonomic functions took over, breathing and circulation resumed. Brain activity went through the chaotic, subjectively indescribable process of returning to…well, not normal function. Not for this patient, not after such grievous damage. But function nonetheless.

Metabolic indicators were strong, regenerative uptake was truly excellent…A few minor interventions to ensure that nothing went off-course, but overall…a smooth resurrection. Gratifying, considering that this patient had effectively been a dismembered cadaver when he arrived.

Whatever happened next was in the patient’s own sturdy hands.

Date Point: 18y9m3w4d AV
Ferd’s village, Planet Akyawentuo, Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3KPc Arm

Vemik Given-Man

Ferd’s village was higher up in the hills than Vemik’s, where the streams ran shallow, clean and clear with no Yshek to worry about, no water-sickness…sure, it was further to go to find good hunting, and further to carry a kill back, uphill…but no real man worried about that. Good exercise!

Besides, there was good ore in the hills, just lying around in chunks on the ground. The boys of Ferd’s village picked it up and carried it in baskets for trade.

Vemik’s tribe, on the other foot, never strayed far from the Human research camp and their jump array. They just followed the werne around in that valley, really. Never far from the forge, either, which wasn’t really a thing that could be moved around. It had become a place where the People came together to swap things. Ore from Ferd’s village, knives and bows from Vemik’s apprentices, clay from Toog’s village, baskets and mats from Nep’s village, where the women had a secret way of weaving they refused to share…

Even the Humans traded at the forge, sometimes. And so did Ferd, when he came back from offworld. He brought Human and Gaoian sweetmeats and toys, gave them cheaply for the fun of it, and took back useful tools and things to his tribe.

Vemik went with him. There was the usual fun when he arrived. They wrassled, he won, but this time he was very careful not to be too aggressive in front of Ferd’s tribe. Vemik was an invited friend, even if Ferd was his now. That was private between friends and Given-Men, after all.

Also, things were very interesting near his village! Higher in the hills, where the trees stopped and gave way to smaller stuff…up there was a lot of new things to see. Vemik didn’t know if he’d sketched and collected half the plants and things up there yet, and Ferd’s Singer said now was the best time to see some of the bushes.

She was right. The bushes grew flowers in a hundred different colors, and Vemik had a challenging time painting one! He had to use his smallest brush, and work slowly so the paints wouldn’t mix.

“How do you have the patience to do that?” Ferd was watching just like before, head over Vemik’s shoulder, legs around waist and weight on his back.

“Sky-thinking. Still a part of me, even if I Gave the name. Also, helps with my head-hurt.”

“Why paint them, though? Pick them, press them. Seen you do it.”

“I could…might still. But taking the time to really pay attention means you know a thing better.”

“Yeah?” Ferd watched the bushes with a frown. “…what’s to know?”

“See these? Stay-mens. You remember Nightrot blooms from over the mountains? Same shape, even though these are pink. So, probably just as nasty. But! Eck still like them.”

Funny how things turned out looking a lot the same on many worlds. Humans would have called an eck a moth, except moths liked night-time and eck liked whenever. Their larvae were happily munching the leaves, even though Vemik was pretty sure he’d regret it if he even licked the sap.

Ferd watched a moment longer, then shrugged and grunted. “Guess so.”

“You Sky-Think too! Just, about guns and tactics and fighting.”

“Mm. Think Yan sky-thinks even more than both of us, these days…saw him a hand of days ago. Said his head was feeling full.”

Vemik nodded, and added a very thin little line in black to highlight the petal’s sharp edges. “Still wants to beat us to calculus, too!”

“He won’t.”

“No!” Vemik trilled. “But you might still beat me. Fell behind when my brain got shook.”

“Don’t know about that. Humans turn numbers into a…I don’t know. Language. Or a map? Makes my head spin. I know numbers like ‘a bull and three hands of cows, two fingers away’ or whatever.”

“No, you know numbers better than that! You finished trig, you can solve a triangle, you can use that to figure distances, all that.”

“Yeah…but still.”

“So believe in yourself! Numbers are just a thing like anything else. They have rules, and they can stand in for things. Three bulls is just an idea. You don’t actually need three of anything to see that. And so lamb-da and thee-tha and all the rest just stand in too!”

“Rrgh, let me grumble!” Ferd trilled. “I know all of this stuff! Just know what Yan means about having a full head. Brain gets tired too…except yours, seems like.”

Vemik didn’t really know what to say to that, so…so he finished his painting. Washed the brush, set the journal aside to dry before he closed it.

“…‘sides…” Ferd rumbled after a moment.

“What?”

“There’s sky-thinking and then…then there’s whatever you do. Making up bows and stuff. Inventing. Turns out sky-thinking is something anyone can do, but thinking up a whole new weapon? And killing a big bull with it for your Trial? When you were so small, too? That’s rare. And brave, like leaping out of a tree and not even knowing if there’s another tree out there to land in.”

“You’re doing that. Joining JETS, finding out where our people fit in that, paying back what we owe…”

“No. That’s more like…like knowing I can reach the branch, not sure if it’ll take my weight but knowing there’s other branches to land on. Humans and Gao did it all before, I’m just figuring out how to do the same thing our way. Not the same.”

Again, Vemik didn’t really know what to say. Was that his brain-hurt? Or just…normal?

Probably normal. He hoped. So, he stuck out an arm and pulled Ferd in for a hug, because hugs were never the wrong answer.

Also. “I think you are, Ferd. You’re showing them how we fight, with big sky-magic and all their knowings. They don’t have your strength. Or your senses. Or your tail! I watch you train, try to learn it all, and I see how you make Heff think! That’s brave, what you do for all of us.”

He tried not to let that weak jealous sound creep into his voice, but…Vemik was never a good liar.

Ferd, for his part, trilled in amusement. “You, jealous? What for?! You invent the bow, you visit Earth and survive attacks, you met Jooyun and Shyow for the first time and sat down with them before anyone knew what they were! And then, just yesterday? After you beat me and claimed me, you were nice enough to hug back, leave me my dignity, visit friendly, do all this? You’ve got Yan’s strength flowing in you already and you’re not even four hands gone! Vemik, what man wouldn’t be jealous of you?”

“…” Vemik extra didn’t have an answer to that, which just made Ferd trill harder.

“See?! Let us weaker men have something, Vemik!” he trilled again, then rose to his feet. “Come. We go hunt, you spend the night and get a full belly. Go back tomorrow, okay?”

Well, okay. Vemik cleared up his paints and journals, they went hunting, he stayed the night and enjoyed the women, Singer especially…and Ferd again, too.

He set out at first light, though. Had a full mind, and it was a long way back home. Plenty of time to move and think and clear his head.

He decided to gallop home. It was good hard work and nothing was better for a busy mind. Plus, Ten’Gewek had to earn long-strength just like humans had to earn good muscle. He wasn’t going to let any skinny too-tall strangefoot beat him at anything if he could help it!

He arrived at the village nice and early, tired but importantly, not worried half to death.

But he was worrying now. He had a meeting he was dreading. Test results. They’d been testing him every two hand of days since his big fight, and every time there was the chance that he’d learn something bad about his fate.

Oh well. Stupid to torture himself all day worrying about it. Get it done early, and either get good news, or have longer to deal with bad news!

He checked in on the forge on his way past. His former apprentice had apprentices, now! The bowls…could use some work, but that was something he might check in on later, if he could do it without hurting anyone’s feelings too much.

Up at the Human camp, the thing they were building was taking shape. They’d talked long with many of the Given-Men and Singers about building a permanent building instead of the pree fabs, and the People had said yes…but what they were building didn’t look like it was there to live in. Somehow. It just wasn’t…shaped right. It was shaped interesting. Kind of round on the north side, and the upper floors stuck out over the doors on the north-east corner.

Also, the doors were People-wide. Vemik had tried to look in, but they had tarps and stuff up to keep the rain out, and…well, he didn’t really feel like going into a construction site again just yet.

He did make friends with the builders, though. They were men like how humans were really meant to be, Vemik thought: about a head taller than him, wiry and light but strong in their size, you could tell just by looking. Had that same work-forever attitude too, and they liked to tell dirty jokes! It seemed like a good, sensible way to put a people together in Vemik’s mind, if you never knew what kind of a place you might be living in or what kind of work might need doing. Their god was a clever one. More muscle would be nice, but…

A couple of the women had taken to flirting with them, too. That would be fun to watch. Would the humans survive his tribe? Haha!

They wouldn’t tell him anything though, “or the Professor will kick our asses.” Lots of gruff laughter there.

Not that Professor Daniel couldn’t kick an ass these days, in Vemik’s mind. He’d come a long way since first coming to them. Back then he’d been soft, clean, pale and smooth. Smooth skin, smooth voice, smooth soft hands. The years on Akyawentuo had fixed all that. Tanned him brown, burned off the fat, built up the muscle, roughened his hands and even changed his voice from telling stories. Not made him big like Jooyun, but Vemik knew a good hardened bit of steel when he saw one. He was what Human man should be, too.

Didn’t quite have a blacksmith’s grip yet, though. Just the voice of one. “Vemik! Decided to get your test out of the way early, huh?”

Vemik turned, trilled self-effacingly and nodded. “Sooner done, the better, yes?”

“Right you are.” Hurt led the way with a jerk of his head.

The tests went…well. Best results yet! Vemik tried to fret it was just a good day, but Hurt wouldn’t let him.

“You’ve been having more good days than bad, lately. Face the facts, Vemik Given-Man: you’re healing well. And a good thing too! That brain of yours is too damn good to waste in a fight.”

Vemik ducked his head and grinned. Professor wasn’t wrong. “I didn’t ask to be blown up!”

“I’m quite sure nobody who ever got blown up was asking for it.” Hurt chuckled, then waved a hand at the building. “What do you think?”

Vemik’s tail twitched. “It’s…nice. Don’t know what it’s for, though. Looks built to be nice first.”

“Well, not necessarily. Form very much follows function here. On that note, you have a special visitor coming next week with the first deposit…”

Vemik’s mind had no trouble catching up with that word. And suddenly, it snapped into place where he’d seen that kind of are-key-texture before. He turned and looked at the building again, tail lashing excitedly.

“You built us a library?!”

“Not just a library. It’s more of a forum, really.”

“…Fore-arm?”

Professor laughed, “No no! forum. A place to meet and talk, share thoughts, sky-think…” Hurt beamed proudly. “Not your big meaty arm-hooks! Plus, this has all the usual library’s amenities. Shelves full of useful books, climate-controlled so nothing rots, flexible spaces with computers and tables, writing and art supplies, the middle bit can be used as an impromptu stage…”

He sighed, happily. “We’re building it so it’s expandable too. All the services that might need to grow bigger are each along their own wall so we can just stick on more building later. And of course we’ve managed to find a professional librarian willing to come here from Earth.”

“So everything will be well looked after.”

“More than that. A librarian isn’t just a custodian of books, they’re a researcher. Curating knowledge is a skill all by itself, just ask the E-Skurel-Ir. And you’ve seen a glimpse of it for yourself with your note-taking, yeah?”

True enough. He’d had to learn how to organize everything as he wrote it or he’d forget where to even find things. That wasn’t so easy a thing to do; sometimes he thought more about thinking than actually thinking.

A strange thought.

“Your people….aren’t ever going to give up your lifestyle, I think,” Hurt said. “You’re too much of the forest to leave it forever, and far too magnificently physical to ever give it up. And with the world as it is, maybe you shouldn’t anyway. Lord knows it can be a violent place, and…well, I am told you bring unique ability to the battlefield.” He clearly wasn’t happy with that bit, but quickly moved on. “Anyway, I think—I hope—there’s a happy medium where you can live as you are and still taste of the fruit, as we say. You’ve started that already with the forge. This library is another step in that process.”

“…Humans really do have strange ideas. Given us so much, and still Giving. I know you don’t see it that way, but our people will.”

“I know. And I respect that. From our perspective, it’s different.”

Vemik nodded. He knew Humans well enough by now: to them, it would be a deep and uncomfortable Taking to have all they did and not Give even a little of it. And they had so much that this really was just a little…

But he’d have to bend a few arms at the lodge again, when they started making troubled noises about how much larger the debt was getting. Some of the Given-Men just couldn’t grasp the idea that Humans were so completely different in the head. A few—the most insular and backward-thinking, who’d moved their villages far away—fretted they’d just traded an enemy who wanted to destroy the People, for somebody subtler and smarter who came as a friend but would Take everything in time.

Professor tapped his hand. “You drifting off there?”

Vemik shook his head. “Just sky-thinking.”

Hurt chuckled. “Good man. But…you have a village to get back to, and I have my own work to do.”

“Singer will probably come up later to see it,” Vemik predicted.

“Good—oof!” Hurt chuckled into Vemik’s hug, squeezed back as hard as he could (a lot harder than he used to could!) and Vemik left him alone.

His mind turned over as he headed home. Wouldn’t do to arrive empty-handed so he veered off toward the river. The Werne would be drinking at this time of day. Maybe he’d catch a lone male…

But he took a moment to notice how sharp everything was. How clear his head was being. And he grinned to himself as he hunted.

Today was a good day.

Date Point: 18y9m3w4d AV
Ninja Taco, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Leela, Grand Mistress of The Dark Taco Arts

The funny thing was…the Great Mother had a familiar scent. Leela had smelled it on Daar many a time before. And she, of course, smelled much like him.

They both radiated power, in their own ways. But the way they wielded it couldn’t possibly be more different.

Daar was, of course, a big, brash, brazen, bold, boisterous sort of a leader. Everything wonderful about males…and perhaps maybe to a bit of an exasperating degree, sometimes. He was not shy about embodying the most ridiculously grunty stereotypes and he seemed to positively delight in needling Leela in particular. It often took all she had to keep from chittering, or just giving in to his ridiculousness. It was charming almost in spite of itself.

Naydra, without even saying anything, already felt like an old friend. Like someone Leela had grown up with, got into mischief in the commune with, knew of old and shared some secrets with.

She definitely did have a mischievous streak, from the way she poked her nose through the window just like Daar. “I presume you will spatulate me as well?”

“You’re not filling half the stall with a giant shaggy head.” Leela replied, though she did chatter and brandish the Spatula appropriately.

“And I’m not attempting a parody of a seduction, either.”

“Why does he do that?” Leela wondered, chittering. “He’d probably have won me long ago if he’d just tone it down a little!”

“I think that’s exactly the point.” Naydra chittered warmly. “…It’s good to finally meet you.”

“And you.” Leela promptly started assembling the order Daar always took home for Naydra. “Though, I was kind of hoping when you did finally come visit me, it wouldn’t be because you’re worried about something, yijao?”

“…You do have a good nose.”

“It’s honestly why I can’t do anything but like Daar. I can smell there isn’t the tiniest hint of anything but playfulness on him. Well, beyond, y’know. What every male smells like when they see a Female.”

Naydra chittered, pulled her nose back out the window, and moved round the front to sit down: Leela gave her a bubble tea, which the Great Mother lapped at for a moment, made an approving noise, lapped some more, then set it down for the moment.

“I was wondering…well, hoping…if you’d like to come visit.”

“Visit…where? High Mountain?”

“Yes.”

Leela looked around. “That’s a bit sudden, don’t you think? What of my business?”

“I understand it’s important to you. But surely you need to take a break sometime? And…and I’d appreciate it.”

Leela stared at her a moment, then turned the burner off, and moved to the counter to be closer. “…What’s wrong?”

Naydra’s paws fidgeted on the cup. “…He’s…not well. He got nervejammed in battle.”

Something cold slid down Leela’s innards. But Naydra didn’t smell of grief, and the world wasn’t crashing down around their ears, so…

Naydra drank some more of the tea, miserably. “…And he hasn’t quite been himself, since.”

“…What do you mean, exactly?”

“Exactly that. He’s having to…re-learn who he is, sort of. It’s hard to explain. But what he needs right now are people who are important to him. His anchors.”

Leela considered that for a moment. Then she turned back around and re-lit the burner. “Okay.”

Naydra made a confused sound, a second before understanding struck her and she chittered. “…Of course. Tacos.”

“Exactly! Never underestimate the healing power of a Kōga Clan Deluxe.” Leela chittered over her shoulder. “…I’m going to need some help cleaning down and locking up, too….”

“Gladly.” Naydra was on her feet in an instant, and quickly proved she was no stranger to scrubbing a well-used kitchen. Though, she did sneeze at the rather strong cleaning chemicals. Human antibacterial sprays were potent.

Leela had to turn away a few customers before they were done. A shame, but, well, people were pretty understanding. Between them they had a solid meal for two, and a banquet for Daar, bagged and ready and the stand appropriately sterile pretty quickly, and from there…

…Well, travelling with the Great Mother was an interesting experience. She just breezed right through the border as though it didn’t exist. And the jump schedule? Well, for the sufficiently powerful and wealthy, there was no schedule except their own.

“I presume, of course, you are in compliance with all their border laws,” she added. “There’s responsibility that goes with this level of convenience.”

“Uh, yes. Yes, probably. I mean, they let me immigrate and not much has changed since then, so…”

“Of course.”

Okay. If that was good enough for Naydra, it was good enough for Leela. She rode out the jump with a little trepidation though—this was to be her first time back on Gao in years. Weird, that it had felt so far away but in actual fact was so close. Just a walk around the corner, a jaunt past the border and…

Thump.

Home.

Well, except Leela’s home on Gao hadn’t been this. The commune in the small town of Doshai where she’d grown up and lived until the war had been basically a two-storey apartment complex with rows of greenhouses out the back. Pleasant, especially with the cladding on the building’s outside to make it look like wood…but nothing like High Mountain Fortress.

Even the jump room, which Leela knew from Daar’s storytelling was a heavily armored bunker in the basement, was as lavish as its function could allow. Its walls were a tribute to all the Clans of Gao, painted with their emblems: the Clan of Females was represented centrally, above the door, and Clan Highmountain’s crest had special place as a floor mosaic.

Out the vault doors and up the ramp to the surface, Leela almost stumbled at the wave of nostalgic emotions that washed across her. She’d…forgotten what Gao smelled like, after living on Cimbrean for so many years. But there it was, a background scent she’d never noticed her whole life here, and only noticed now by coming back.

It dredged a lot of memories to the surface. Some awful. The good ones made bittersweet by the tragedies that had come after.

But the garden… Oh, the garden drove all those bad thoughts out of her head in an instant.

It was explosively lush, its paths winding among flowerbeds, hedges, little tree groves and water features, opening up here and there into a bigger sitting area or monument of some kind.

They found Daar sniffing around near a marker commemorating Grandfather Garl, enjoying the flowers with a wildly wagging tail. As always…it was hard to look away from him. He’d been the Gao’s most desirable male since the day of his adulthood and there were obvious reasons for that. Those reasons had only grown vastly more impressive over time, and now…

Her breath hitched in her chest. Beauty and god-like power rippled in huge stone-carved waves across his body with deceptively graceful motion. He was light on his paws, looked carefree and poised like the most delicate dancer…but the ground shook under his strength.

Her heart was torn in two. It ached to give in, to be loved by so terribly magnificent a man…

It remembered what another, lesser male had done to her. How power could simply take.

People thought she was too picky. They were caught between awe and exasperation that she would turn down the Great Father’s advances. He was only ever half-serious about any of it, she knew, and his ego was so magnificently huge that it was all a big game to him, but…well…

They didn’t understand. Leela was a little silverfur. It wasn’t easy for someone who knew how dangerous a big male could be. Her own lesson in that regard had nearly taken her life.

Many times.

Well…time for courage. And Naydra was gently pressing on her back, urging her forward.

“Daar! I brought tacos!”

He looked up. His nose twitched…and then a happy blur flashed across the garden and bowled Leela off her feet before she even knew she was being pounced on.

He was so gentle though! He rolled through the pounce, scooped up Leela and Naydra both, and rather than being smashed into by literal tons of brown-furred menace, they just…went for a chittering tumble on the lawn.

Fortunately, Naydra had been carrying the food, and had known to set it aside.

“I’ss my two favoritest females!” Daar’s chitter had a dopey note to it that Leela hadn’t heard before. As if he was blissfully happy—which he clearly was—but unfocused, which he never was. Even at his most clownish, there was always the deep Daar alert and clever below the surface. He wasn’t ever so…simple.

“My Father!” She chittered in spite of herself. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah! But my head’s all fuzzy, ‘cuz I can smell ‘yer gonna ask. Not as bad as it was. Jus’ real hard ‘ta keep a line o’ thought goin’.” His nose twitched and he looked up. “You brung tacos!”

And like that, his mind was indeed on a totally different agenda. Leela could see why Naydra was worried. Still…she had no idea what to do except treat him as she usually did. “Yes, and my spatula didn’t even get used this time! You could learn a thing or two!”

“But that’s th’ most funniest part! Ooh, Keeda’s Sweet Revenge sauce!”

Leela didn’t really understand the appeal of hot sauces, but the mango habanero sauce made for her by one of Cimbrean’s locals was a perennial favorite with Humans and brownfurs alike. Allegedly it was more sweet than hot, and it was sweet…but far too hot for her.

Then again, Humans liked things so pungently spiced you could hardly taste the meat, while Gaoian spices enhanced it in subtle ways that Humans barely noticed. One of the hardest aspects of her work was keeping the two spice blends separate…and not sneezing whenever she opened the Human blend.

On this occasion, the war between Daar’s stomach and his desire to play with his two most favoritest females was won by his stomach. Naydra, by some kind of Great Motherly magic, summoned a groundsheet and blanket for them to sit on. They ate while Daar, whenever his mouth wasn’t full, recounted his memories of Grandfather Garl. Apparently the old ‘Back had passed away peacefully on the very spot his memorial marker now stood, after storytime with a group of cubs.

It sounded like a nice way to go.

The food and the setting seemed to help. He was focused and clear-headed while he talked, and somehow…

He’d wrapped them both up in a tight, full-body hug somewhere along the way. Normally, Daar’s colossal…everything conjured up the worst of her wartime memories, which never felt fair to him; he was always so considerate, even his ridiculous preening was calculated to be harmless. So maybe that was the difference. Right now, he wasn’t calculating. Even when he was scheming entirely for her benefit, he was scheming nonetheless, with the world’s most obvious end goal in mind. She didn’t mind—in fact she appreciated his deliberate concern—but, no.

Worse, he had to do all that because he was such a manifestation of threat, and they both knew it. But now? That dangerous, calculating male was sleeping. What was awake was so purely innocent and affectionate, not even being wrapped up in his stone-shattering powerful limbs and pinned under such a monstrous creature felt dangerous.

And that, right there, was the problem. It was good to know Daar’s nature was fundamentally a big, soppy cub…but that wasn’t the Daar they needed. And it certainly wasn’t the Daar she found to be so simultaneously terrifying and so heart-breakingly attractive. That aggressive potential was what she made friends with, what she desired (if she could ever get over herself, being honest) and more than just her selfish concerns…

The Gao needed Daar back to his fierce, calculating self. They didn’t need a huge softie. They couldn’t survive that.

Her chance to sting him into remembering it came after the tacos were polished off and even the plastic carrying trays licked clean with a wide pink monolith of a tongue. He sighed, rested his head, snuggled them more tightly against his body—which was a feeling Leela could certainly get used to—and flicked an ear as he considered Garl’s memorial.

“…Nearly lost a good’n on Hell. Nearly lost ‘Horse. Real glad he’s okay. Or…well, no. He ain’t. But, the Corti doctors say they’ll do their best, and they don’t bullshit about that stuff. They might steal folks, experiment on ‘em, have given up on fuckin’, an’ all that shit…but they’re honest in their weird way, and their best is real fuckin’ good…” He chittered suddenly. “And, wow, you should see their new Carbon Caste shit. Give it twenny years an’ we’re gonna have jacked fuckin’ little Corti runnin’ around!”

“So another group you can flex on, then,” Naydra teased.

“An’ not feel too bad ‘bout it!”

“Too bad?” Leela shared a knowing look with Naydra. “Please. You won’t feel bad at all.”

“Probl’y not! An’ lookit where the Humans’re goin’ too! There’s some real fukkin’ freaks showin’ up among ‘em now. Guys like ‘Horse an’ Gonzo an’ Righteous, an’ Julian an’ Hoeff an’ stuff? An’ kids sports too! People like ‘em just weren’t around a few generations ago, an’ now lookit! I mean yeah, it’s the Corti whut dun some of it, but still! It’ll be good ‘ta have people who ’preciate what all this hard work means…” He flexed one of his mind-bogglingly muscular forearms and studied it for a second. “Mebbe it’d be better if this sorta thing weren’t actually so important, but it is, so I’m glad we got it, yijao? Bad guys don’t care ‘bout rules.” He gave her an amused, happy look, but then a thought crossed his mind. He pant-grinned, growled mischievously, rose to his hind legs, and…

Firstly, Mothers he was tall! It never failed to stun. Not even Loomi or Gorku or that colossal First Fang brownfur…Gurrum? Went by Kodiak? nobody was so towering. Or so stocky and huge!

Secondly… “Oh my…seriously?!” Leela chittered in exasperation. “After all that, the instant a wild hair gets you, you’re up on your feet and flexing?!”

He spun around and showed off…well some pretty damn impressive (and impressively pretty) muscles, which had to be about the biggest understatement of all…

But still! Every damn time!

And his reason, bless him, was exactly what they needed to hear. “I flex ‘cuz it’s fun! And I ‘membered all-sudden I do this ‘fer you every time I go get tacos! You love it. Naydi does too!”

She looked over at Naydra who, sure enough, wasn’t pretending to anything and openly appreciative of the show. Honestly, the two were made for each other.

Still. Dignity should matter! “Daar!” She shook her head. “Seriously! Why?!”

His reply was both gratifying, as a genuine show of his old personality…and simultaneously exasperating. “I flex an’ strut ‘fer you ‘cuz I’m the biggest most bestest badass there ever was! An’ ever will be!! At everything!! What’s th’ point of anythin’ if ‘ya can’t show off ‘fer a pretty Female?!”

“And that’s all you’ve ever done!” Leela chittered, “Just flex and strut for me every time we meet!” A wicked idea crossed her mind, “Is that it? Are you just all show and no go?”

A slightly hurt expression played across his face, but he rallied immediately. “Me, just ‘fer show? ‘Ya wound me, Leela! Or mebbe that’s what ‘yer really holdin’ out ‘fer, huh?” He growled fiercely, and now Leela was wondering just what she’d set in motion…

“So I guess I better ‘show ‘ya!”

Things were a blur of activity all-sudden. He pounced excitedly over to his bag, dug out his communicator and messaged a bunch of people, and the instant he was done with that, scooped them both up, (somehow!) rolled them both on his back, and charged toward the north field in a blur of, well…a high-speed trainwreck careening through High Mountain with a purpose.

It was all she could do to hold on. Naydra was clearly exhilarated by the speed and power he was sharing with them…Leela was a bit too terrified to properly enjoy it.

Luckily, he was so ridiculously fast, the ride didn’t last long. There was a growing gathering of burly types on the field. Brownfurs of course, some exceptional silverfurs, a couple of Humans, oddly…They were playing pounce-ball, which was apparently much like the human games of rugby and field hockey combined.

Daar joined them. Though, ‘joining’ was putting it generously. He was more like a team unto himself. His arrival changed the game instantly.

Before, it was friendly and casual. Now it was serious and everyone wanted to see exactly what the Great Father could do. The other players wanted a shot at beating him, even if they had to gang up to do it…and Daar was hungry to dash that hope.

He obliged them. And not just on the field. After claiming his victory, he dragged them all, Leela, Naydra, Brothers and Humans all, to his…Mothers, his sweltering cave of a gym, and showed off there too, with impossibly heavy weights and impossible feats of ape-grade gymnastics on heavy rings suspended from the industrial ceiling, all in gravity fit to compact a car. It wasn’t just about him, either. He was encouraging and genuinely interested in helping some of the smaller males play along, say by lifting them up onto the rings to try their strength, teach them how to hold themselves, what they’d need to do to improve… He was a big friendly coach, and excited about all of it…and something about him just seemed…

Alive.

Healing.

And every second of it, with occasional glances back at her, back at Naydi… All of it was meant for them. He was preening like a jovial, carnal god and having an absolute blast doing it.

It was earnest spectacle enough to warm Leela’s heart. But the warmest bit came during a moment when he was distracted, roaring one of the Humans through a particularly strenuous lift. Naydra scooted up behind her, and gave her an affectionate nip around the ear.

“Thank you.” She gave Leela a hug. “I spend so much of my time soothing him, reassuring him and helping him relax…motivating him like that isn’t so easy for me. Challenging him. After all, he’s already won my heart…”

“How did that happen?” Leela realized suddenly that was probably a bit too personal. “I mean—”

“No, it’s okay. He and his daughter rescued me from a terrible fate. He’s seen me at the most vulnerable a Female could possibly be, and his response was to keen, offer comfort, and later give me justice. How could I not love him after that?”

Leela…didn’t know if that sounded like enough for her. “I think…I’d be grateful, sure…”

Without missing a beat, the Great Mother dived unflinchingly into hard, terrible honesty.

“You weren’t there. When he found me, my tormentor had very nearly raped me to death. Was in the act of finishing the job, as it were. And, well, there’s psychology at play there I hope no other Female ever experiences. Males have a terrible power over us, if they’re strong and evil enough. I would have loved him, Leela, before his attentions finally killed me. Just as strongly as I hated him. Was beginning to. I had no choice in the matter. The old stories are true.”

“….I’m so sorry,” Leela keened. “I didn’t know.”

“My Bumpkin rescued me from that fate. Maybe those feelings just…transferred over. I don’t know. But I don’t think so. They’ve never diminished over time. If anything, they’ve grown.”

“…You don’t need to share this, I’m so sorry—”

“No, I do. Because you’re one of the few Females who gets him. He needs you, and…well, I would never command your help on this. But I will ask it.”

Leela duck-nodded. “I think…I think that’s the thing. You wouldn’t. Not couldn’t. You’re his equal, I’m his subject. Just like everyone else. The whole thing with turning him down, even smacking him on the nose with a spatula…I get to do that because he allows it. Because he enjoys the game.”

“Yes, but more to the point? You and any gao can take those sorts of liberties with him because he is so utterly unthreatened by them. He knows it, we all know it. And he needs it.”

“Still…it’s a power dynamic.”

“Yes, and you have all the power in the relationship,” Naydra chittered…wickedly. “He wants many things from you, all good and well-meant, but at the bottom of it he wants one thing more than anything else. You have power because he is a male. The ‘mostest’ male. There is virtually nothing he wouldn’t do to earn your love, Leela. I know you’re interested…so, just consider the game as it is, not as you fear it to be.”

Leela sighed heavily, and watched the workout going on. The fact was, Naydra was right. About everything. All the males were preening for them…well, except the Humans of course. They were preening for each other and didn’t even know it.

“…I don’t think I’m ready to give up that power, yet. Somebody needs to keep it.”

“Exactly. I’m not asking you to, either. But, well. See how much your gentle tease has set in motion? He’s more focused now than he has been in days. He’s remembered why he does this, I think. It’s all about us. The Females. And that is why we’ve never needed to fear the Great Father at all. His entire being is ultimately in our service.”

“Well. I’ll be here to help him get back to service, then.”

“Thank you,” Naydra repeated. “I know you worry about the stand, and your customers.”

“Don’t offer to cover me,” Leela cautioned her. “I don’t want that, and I’ve got savings. I’ll just…help. I don’t want to be indebted to you.”

Naydra duck-nodded, and tidied her fur a little. It was a sisterly, affectionate touch. “Okay. But…before he’s done playing, I have a question.”

“What?”

“Is your interest more than simple attraction?”

Leela duck-nodded “yes” pretty much by reflex. No hiding that feeling. “But…it frightens me. Maybe…” She looked over again at the pure joy he was experiencing, just enjoying time with his much smaller playmates. “Maybe not so much, anymore…”

Naydra made an understanding noise. “For your own sake…have courage. Give him a chance, if you can. I think you both need it.”

“I…I worry. Won’t I just be another of his trophies?”

“Daar doesn’t invest this much time and energy in casual mating contracts. He’s perfectly honest about those kinds of engagements, with me and with them. If all he wanted was a good long fuck and a nice healthy cub, he’d have told you.”

“…And you don’t mind that I’m something more than that to him?”

“Many Females are something more to him. Even if I were the jealous type, I can’t afford to be. He’s got more love in him than any one person could possibly handle. That, more than any other reason, is why he is the greatest of Great Fathers.”

“Besides,” Naydra added, and put a finishing touch on grooming Leela’s fur. “Seeing him happy makes me happy. And so does seeing my sisters happy. So…go, be happy.”

Leela duck-nodded. And wondered whether this whole affair hadn’t just been about healing Daar. She felt like she’d let go of something, somehow. A little heavy piece of fear, or a need for permission of some kind, from somebody. She wasn’t sure. She’d…sleep on it.

She looked back. He was still preening for her. For them.

And for the first time…she allowed herself to simply enjoy it.

Date Point: 18y9m4w AV
Beachhead, Planet Hell

Vark, Grandfather of Clan Stoneback

Hell’s skies had cleared a bit, today. Or at least, the smog had thinned enough to show some blue. As the allied forces expanded and seized territory, Hunter factors became battlegrounds, and then piles of rubble—the Hunters had a habit of demolishing them as they withdrew, rather than permit the invading force to claim an intact building.

Each such facility destroyed was one less set of stacks pumping unfiltered contaminants into the air, but each demolition sowed the area with, among other things, asbestos. Not to mention the live electrical wiring, and whatever corrosive, toxic or even radioactive nastiness had been processed there. The conditions weren’t quite as bad as the E-Skurel-Ir homeworld had been…but everyone was still fighting in MOPP.

And of course, the Hunters didn’t give up an inch easily. They had no compunctions about using weapons that any civilized species would ban in a heartbeat. Every so often, a mortar round packed full of sizzling white phosphorous would slide down the shield dome overhead, a sight that sure as shit had Vark gritting his teeth.

And, of course, the nervejam. A weapon that the Dominion reserved exclusively for anti-Hunter use and which otherwise was a war crime. Gaoians were less sensitive to its effects than Humans, but the recovery was a riskier problem. Thank the Unseen that Grand Army units were so intensely brotherly. They’d taken the best of Clan life and made it their own in that regard, so when some poor lil’ fuck got it bad, he had good friends to help.

Each advance had to be covered by shields, and pushing up against Hunter shields. Which meant, no air support. Both sides were feeling that limitation.

Vark was feeling it, for sure. He was short on sleep, short on rest. Well-fed, but the food was nourishing first and foremost. Pleasant wasn’t a priority, yet.

Still. Better than tryin’ ‘ta do this thing on an empty stomach.

His thoughts were interrupted by a new eruption of explosions and gunfire on the far side of the river to his south. Din’t need the flurry of chatter over the tacnet to tell him who was gettin’ hit, where, an’ by what. Question was, were the Hunters feinting this time?

They did that a lot. But not all the time. Fuckin’ vexing. There were stretches of ground they’d taken an’ then lost again ‘cuz o’ that.

Even so…Vark’s territory was gettin’ bigger, an’ the Hunters were losin’ ground. So the momentum was on the invasion’s side.

And he was gonna keep it there or die tryin’. Once they got this bubble cleaned out, had time to build up properly, the space navy got their orbitals swept free and clear…

The Hunters would fuckin’ pay for what they were.

Date Point: 18y9m4w AV
Inner Sanctum, the new hive

The Alpha-of-Alphas

Something new was needed. Something the enemy had not seen before. Something they had no counter to.

Ideally, the Alpha-of-Alphas would have relied upon a superior rate of manufacture and replenishment, but the Prey had united, pitting the industrial and economic resources of every tool-using form of life in the galaxy against the Hunters. Coupled with the deathworlders’ deep reserves, and the way each of their troops was worth as much or more than most Eaters, and the Hunters simply didn’t have superior manufacture and replenishment.

That was…new. Unwelcome. Dangerous. And it spelled slow but inexorable defeat unless countered by innovation.

Knowing the need for innovation was very different to actually innovating, of course. The Alpha-of-Alphas was tired, despite having no real body to speak of beyond its brain and alimentary tract. Astonishing how much energy a naked brain could expend when thinking hard.

At first, it had gone looking in information gleaned from the deathworlders themselves for inspiration, but that way was barren. Anything gleaned from the enemy would be something the enemy already knew about and had countermeasures for. But to think of something completely new?

…The Hunters had not needed such inventiveness in a great long time.

What it needed was inspiration. Something to kick-start an imagining.

…How?

How?!

It was infuriating. The Alpha-of-Alphas understood the existence of the concept, but upon reaching into its own mind to search for it, had found only…methods. Procedures. Interpretation and iteration. As it reviewed all its own works and those of its Builders, previous Alphas-of-Alphas, the entire history of its species, it found only a process of taking what the Prey had made and improving on it, at best.

Something about that thought alarmed it, viscerally. It was reaching out to grasp something and realizing that its hand was gone, without ever having noticed the moment of losing it.

No. No, it was just out of practice. The capacity to create something new must exist somewhere in its faculties, just…dormant. Unused. Surely it couldn’t be gone?

That would mean the Hunters were lacking something, relative to them. Which would make the Hunters…lesser.

No. Wrong-think. It chastised itself and focused, set such treacherous anxieties aside.

This was an engineering challenge like any other. It had an objective, an inventory of resources that could be used in pursuit of that objective, and complicating factors that required mitigation or bypass.

Walk backwards from the complicating factors. Complication number one: a logistical, industrial and economic disadvantage. Mitigation? All its efforts so far had been fruitless. Bypass? Not without radically changing the objective.

…What about radically changing the objective?

The objective so far had been to hold the planet and repel the invasion. Their objective, after all, was to deny the Hunters the use of the planet and the incredible riches lying on its surface from the destroyed ring hive.

And then…what? What was the enemy’s next objective after that? What, ultimately, were they trying to achieve?

Galactic conquest? Why should it be, though? Not even the Hunters desired that. The Dataminds had achieved a high degree of control, but not even they openly ruled all the sapient species, and their recent losses were crippling.

And yet…and yet, that was functionally what these deathworlders were achieving, so far as the Alpha-of-Alphas could glean from its watching scouts. Not bloody conquest, but conquest nonetheless. The Prey adopted their strategies, technology and tactics. The deathworlders changed how the Prey thought and behaved. Turned them into a following version of themselves.

What was that, if not conquest?

How was it even relevant?

It wasn’t. Not compared to the continuation of the species. What the deathworlders ultimately intended was only important in regards to their objective of destroying the Hunters. They could have the galaxy, as far as the Alpha-of-Alphas was concerned.

At least, for now. There would be a reckoning, in due time. A righting of the wronged Order. Here and now, it had been trying to save a valuable planet, and failing to think of an appropriate stratagem.

But perhaps that was the wrong objective. Perhaps the long-term goal might be equally well served by…

Ah.

It dug through its files. Considered again the lone specimen of a Human-Alpha it had dissected. Much of that individual remained a mystery, especially the detailed and varied markings on its skin, which had stubbornly refused to yield any pattern or reason, and could therefore only be decorative.

The Humans had feared that station, the solar focusing array. Feared it enough to deploy their best and most valuable unit. The Alpha-of-Alphas had discounted the idea of building a second one this time for reason of simple economy—its use would do terrible things to the very world being saved, and it would therefore have taken more resources to build than it would have rescued.

But the Humans feared it. That alone was encouraging. Fear was useful. Terror was useful. And though the Alpha-of-Alphas still did not dare risk burning half of this useful world to bedrock in a focused solar flare…

There was no particular reason why it couldn’t burn some other world. And in so doing, perhaps show the Prey their folly in allowing these deathworlders to conquer them so softly.

…Yes.

Date Point: Ow
Fuck

Adam

…Felt like whipped shit. Pain.

Drugs. Strong drugs.

Thirsty. Mouth too dry. Groaned, felt wrong. Shaky-weak.

But…waking up, in a hospital bed. Knew he would. ‘Base was the best medic there was.

Adam managed to get a little focus back. There was a hand in his. He gave it a squeeze, shaking off a vague memory of the hand not even being there, last he’d checked…

Well. He was Adam. Still, somehow.

And that was Marty. And then Marty was on top of him, face buried in the side of his neck, squeezing him as hard as she could.

Felt nice. Warm. Hugged—

No.

Arm wasn’t working.

…Ah, shit.

Date Point: 18y9m4w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

SPC Hunter “Gonzo” Thompson

Sleep and recovery didn’t help. Wheaties didn’t help, not even with bananas and strawberries. Beating the shit out of his teammates didn’t help. Breaking all his PRs didn’t help. Clubbing didn’t appeal to him, not right now. Getting thrashed by Julian wasn’t as fun, nor was being super-thrashed by Firth; he didn’t have it in him to bring his mean, either. Hell, not even being turbo super-thrashed by a visiting Vemik really broke him out of his funk.

Nothing seemed to distract him from…fuck, the depression. ‘Horse was like the biggest brother Hunter never had, and he’d never really considered the possibility that the big goofy giant of a Protector might fail at anything.

Hanging out with his Marine buddies helped a little, mostly by their quiet understanding. No fun beat-em-up games there either, but maybe that wasn’t what he needed.

What he needed was news. One way or another.

“Dude. That’s the fifth time in five minutes you’ve checked your phone.”

“Everyone’s still talkin’.”

“And what’s the first rule of mancave time? Put ‘yer fuckin’ phone away.”

Despite that, Hunter glanced at the phone one last time. Murray had just posted an update: he’d gone climbing. Not that there was anything that big to climb near Folctha, but the peak of Mount Ohbother was pretty technically challenging.

‘Horse loved climbing. He and Murray had a thing where ‘Horse would sneak a pair of green feet up top of something tall, then Murray would go up something even taller and leave behind one of his daggers, and back and forth.

That usually resulted in a painful bout of body-knots by ‘Horse, but that was the price you paid on HEAT. Literally nobody else could affectionately break your bones.

…You really had to be on the team to understand, probably.

It was a good picture. Nice view from up there. He’d have to go with sometime. But, he nodded, turned the phone off, and skimmed it across the floor into the corner.

“Good meat,” Centopani teased. “See? Who said Joe couldn’t be trained?”

Hunter chuckled tiredly at the age-old reference to young army bucks en masse. “Brave thing to say to a guy who’s got thirty-plus inch arms.”

There were quiet guffaws around the room, but nobody was really feeling it. They all knew ‘Horse too, maybe not as well, but…

“Fuck this,” Sergeant Lang said, at last. “Remember how we were gonna go to the beach and get some sun? Well, fuck it. Master Sergeant Warhorse wouldn’t want us sulking around inside on his account and I sure as fuck wouldn’t, either. We’re all healthy, young, and pretty. If we’re gonna loaf a perfectly good weekend away, we may as well go get some sun.”

“I don’t know—” Hoetze started.

“I wasn’t askin’ ‘yer opinion. Get up, go get ‘yer shit. We’re going.”

Well, okay. Fair enough. Hunter was just in basketball shorts and a tank-top—really the “uniform” of off-duty HEAT lads—so all he needed to do was check in to let Righteous know where he was going. They were still on post-deployment control.

He got approval immediately.

Good fuckin authorized
Go get sunburnt or laid or both
Just go duck off okay don’t be turbo

That was loving, by Firth standards. Like with bone-breaking ‘Horse…you had to know him.

And honestly, Sergeant Lang had some old-man wisdom in him. Being thirty-two made him positively ancient on-team, and having divorced about a year ago, was very much enjoying the single-Marine life. Sucked about the divorce, but honestly, it was kinda nice having him around.

Getting up to move was a good idea. And it was a good long walk anyway, so why not? The local Johnny-Cabs were too small for Hunter, and the Hefty-Hauls were more money than he felt like paying. He had a perfectly good set of legs and big sturdy feet to jog on, so…

Some competitive energy re-asserted itself. His buds were always up for that sort of thing among themselves, and Hunter loved showing off, so after they’d jogged to the beach, things devolved to foot races in the sand where he got to show off what HEAT-fast really meant, later some volleyball with some smokin’ hot women who were looking for someone to play with…and they were damn good, too. It was fun, and flirty, and a good distraction.

But only a distraction. There were some hopeful boys waiting at the beachside bar for the gals—no idea if they were boyfriends or whatever—all of whom were predictably spiky until they saw Hunter and his Marine buds, at which point they pretty much wilted. And, well, on any other day he’d happily play that sort of game, or at least play along for a bit. but…well, he wasn’t exactly in a jovial mood. Sniping a girl rode a really fine line, he had to have his head in the game prop’ly and right now it just wasn’t. That wouldn’t be fun for anyone, so…

“Sarry. Good game though!”

And that was it. Stephanie (the tall one who was basically oblivious to Hunter’s mood) took offense to that, and decided quite loudly he musta been gay or something. Because why else would he say no, apparently?

“Sure. Whatever.” Suddenly, she was a lot less pretty.

He decided to just bask, so he put on some sunscreen (he was blond, after all), laid out a towel, and ended up taking a nap. Nice thing about Folctha. The sun was…gentler? If that made sense? A fair-skinned boy like him could fall asleep out on the beach and not really have to worry about burning too much. He got a nice golden tan out of SPF-15.

Even managed to doze off, sorta. Or at least, he kinda lay there and didn’t care about anything goin’ on around him for some long-ass time he didn’t really notice, until his phone started goin’ nuts.

He was starting to understand a little why the really old fucks on team halfway despised the things. They demanded your attention and not always at the most bestest times, either.

This time, though…well, he forgave it for intruding on his nap. This time, it was good news. Well. Not great news. But good.

‘Horse had survived surgery. More info on Monday at their unit briefing.

Jesus fuck that was a load off his shoulders. He sat up, took a deep breath, felt himself smiling all-sudden.

Hernandez was sitting not far away, watching. “Good news?”

“Yeah! He’s out of surgery and recovering. That’s…”

“Best you could ask for at this point.”

“Yeah.”

“Musta been bad.”

“…Yeah. But! He’s alive. We can deal with the rest.” Hunter let out a sigh he’d been holding for…fuck, for a couple of days and realized he suddenly had energy again. Like, all the jogging and volleyball and whatever, that had just been ticking over. Now, he wanted to…somethin’. Anythin’! Go dancing, maybe? He musta dozed a while…

“…Shit, I gotta be more careful. I nearly missed a meal!”

“Jesus, you fuckin’ meathead.” Hernandez reached behind him and pulled out Hunter’s pack. “Don’t worry. I gotchu.”

“Dude. Thanks!” He tucked in (chicken fajitas with key lime rice) and downed the drink mix that went with it–seven of ten for the day, down. Hernandez watched him eat but didn’t say anything, which was nice; it was hard keeping a conversation going with a full mouth.

Maintenance achieved, he bounced up to his feet, knocked the sand off…

“…What now?”

“Well, the girls have a beach house down the way rented, and it’s Friday night after all…”

“Ha! What about the other fucks?”

“They knew they couldn’t compete. C’mon, let’s go meet up with everyone.”

Now that sounded like a plan. And a decent end to a long day! They’d kept him alive. That was the important bit. The superscience would take care of the rest, and whatever came next, ‘Horse could handle it.

Hunter had no doubts.

Date Point: 18y9m4w AV
Planet Origin, the Corti Directorate

Nofl

“Well. You did fine work, Professor.”

Forln’s eyes never left the readouts of their patient’s waking brain patterns, though he did dip his head in the slightest of nods. “Your assessment is appreciated, but I am not sure I agree. I would have preferred…”

“Why, professor! Are you emotionally investing in Warhorse’s outcome?”

“Professional pride, nothing more.” The barest hint of a restrained uncomfortable shuffle exposed the professor’s lie quite clearly.

Nofl gave him a Look.

“…Perhaps a little. His is a…compelling…case.”

On Forln’s far side, Maf was far less reserved. She gave Nofl quite a smug look in fact. “In any case, an honest assessment. The restorative surgeries on his body were flawless by any reasonable definition of the term, here. You have effectively erased a career’s worth of wear and tear, and given him the best possible chance at success.”

“Noted, and accepted. Neurologically?”

Nofl reviewed Adam’s motor function readings and pulled a face. The gentle squeeze he’d intended would in fact have obliterated Martina’s hand, if not for some foresighted medication in his IV. “As anticipated, motor control is severely impaired. Dosing him with the paralysis agent was unquestionably the correct move, there. The few things he’s tried to do so far would have been… dangerously uncoordinated. Potentially hazardous to his spouse.”

“We will need to brief them on this, and plan rehabilitative therapy.”

“Which is going to require customized equipment. In fact, virtually everything will need to be made to order, so we ought to get started on that immediately.”

“Are you serious?”

“My dear professor, you have no idea how strong this man is. Right now, he almost certainly cannot regulate a strength that could, say, flatten wrought iron in his grip with an errant twitch. So yes, we will need to plan appropriately. Durable equipment, an appropriate wheelchair—”

“A wheelchair? Surely something so primitive—?”

“Will be the most convenient option in his circumstance. Simple, and can be made enormously sturdy. He’s too big and too heavy for the taxis in his hometown, and he will be damned if he’s stuck at home. Mobility will be essential. Also, a wheelchair can be pushed by his friends, if needed. Do not underestimate the social dimension of his recovery.”

“….You have given this much thought,” Maf observed.

“I know humans quite well. They are, after all, my primary expertise nowadays.”

Through the observation glass, Nofl watched Marty reassure Adam and stroke his forehead. She’d followed their discussion on his reconstruction and treatment at a level high enough to draw a compliment out of Forln, especially once she asked some pertinent technical questions.

He was in good hands, there.

“In any case. His personality seems largely intact. Some considerable emotional distress, but that’s to be expected…”

“We should begin planning the next phase,” Forln decided, and turned away from the observation window. “What is your facility equipped to provide? This hospital can handle difficult Guvnuragnaguvendrugun cases, and his mass is roughly comparable to their very largest. You are correct about therapeutic equipment, which should prove an interesting diversion for our engineering colleagues…but in due course, he will need to be returned to Cimbrean. The less time these deathworlders spend on our homeworld, the better.”

“Oh, don’t you fuss. My clinic can handle him, I assure you,” Nofl replied.

“Even in his state of limited mobility?”

“Between the United States military and the Great Father of the Gao, I’m sure I won’t have too hard a time funding whatever equipment I need. He has several exceedingly strong friends as well. We should not be short on help.”

“Good.” Forln studied his notes for a moment. “Now…Your second opinion, if you please. The computed projections for his motor function recovery suggest a time scale of—”

“—Doctors?” There was a note of sudden and mounting alarm in Maf’s voice.

Nofl turned his attention back to the observation window, swore violently, and darted back to the readouts and controls as several icons on the glass shifted from soothing blue to alert yellow. Through the window, in his bed, Adam’s eyes had rolled back in his head and Martina was desperately patting at him and calling his name.

Unfortunately for them all, there was no reversing the cascade of neural activity now unfolding, though Nofl deployed an emergency dose of medication anyway. If nothing else, it should soften the blow. Through the observation window, nurse drones swooped in and pried Marty off Adam’s body as he started to shake and strain, rocking and ravaging the bed even through the paralysis agent.

There was nothing much they could do but watch helplessly as the seizure ran its course. The medication helped, though.

At least, he didn’t snap his own spine.

Overall, the fit lasted a little longer than fifty seconds, and Martina shrugged off the drones and was back at Adam’s side as soon as the tremors subsided. Nofl watched his patient’s neural activity return to within acceptable bounds, but he’d really, truly hoped that this particular complication would not come to pass. It changed everything.

“…What next?” he asked, aloud.

Forln’s impassive, old-school Corti emotionless mask was back in place. Thank the Universe for it. “If the patient survives we will need to adapt,” he mused. “We didn’t plan for seizures.”

The room went silent for a moment, as everyone contemplated the development.

“Cause?” Maf asked.

“Difficult to say,” Nofl replied, glumly. “Human neurology is beyond anyone’s full understanding. If I were to hazard an informed and perhaps obvious opinion, though, I would suspect his reconstructed cerebellum and its connections to the rest of his brain were the root cause.”

“Further surgical correction is not an option,” Forln stated. “We cannot operate again this early, it would do more harm than good.”

“Later on?”

“Perhaps.” Forln thought for a moment, then shook his head. “But by then, likely too late.”

Maf hung her head. “We are no longer rehabilitating him for military service, are we?”

“No,” Nofl sighed from the bottom of his heart. “No we are not.”

Date point: 18y9m4w1d AV
Freighter Stray Fortune, Armstrong Station, Cimbrean system

Associate Bruuk of Clan Stoneback, big brawny brownie for hire

“Already? Didn’t we just pick them up from their last adventure?” Bruuk queried, while trimming up some exquisite beef steaks from a small Cimbrean farm. Beef and Naxas really were the bestest meats, and any chance he had to just indulge in a nice, thick cut ribeye steak, well-seared but barely cooked, basted in butter and its own fat, gently seasoned to enhance the flavor…

Gods. Heaven. If there was such a thing, anyway. He and the Skipper had earned a treat.

“Yeah,” Wilde replied, his eyes never leaving the slabs on the cutting board. “It’s a high-priority activity, whatever it is. Only a few days away so we won’t be bundling them up in stasis. You’ll have some playmates again.”

Bruuk wagged his tail at that. He really liked Wilde, and the big Human had some fuckin’ devious tricks up his sleeve when they were sparring…but Bruuk knew them all by now, so he almost always won just by sheer physical superiority. Wilde may have been a big damn man as Humans normally went, but Bruuk was yoked even ‘fer a fuckin’ brownfur, and that despite only being about one-point-seven meters tall on a good day. He was born a natural tank and had to be anyway, if he was gonna compete with lucky-tail high degrees in Stoneback.

And he had every intention of winning that game. So he was happy to welcome Hoeff, Ferd and their friends for a few days, because Ferd was just an absurdly strong man to test himself against and had endless energy to play. There weren’t many people who could give Bruuk such a good fight, but Ferd was one of them, even while the big monkey was being flirty as balls.

Bruuk wasn’t quite sure if Ferd was serious or just being playful. From what he’d heard (and seen) about the testosterone-poisoned cavemonkeys, though…

Probably better not play along, then. He wasn’t that desperate.

As for the rest, Hoeff and the other monkeys were good, tough playmates, and the other Humans were tricky sparring partners for their own reasons, too. It did mean he’d need to go shopping, though, if he was gonna keep them fed for the next little while.

Which was fine. He could spend some time with his lady-friend! She’d been open to more encounters down the line, and that wasn’t something a male got but maybe once or twice in their life. They’d take their time, if he could help it. Just enjoy each other for, oh, a year maybe…

“You’re daydreaming again,” Wilde noted with one of his sideways grins.

“…Sarry. Anyway! Meeshi greens and a vinaigrette, you think?”

“Crack some black pepper over that and fuck yeah.”

“We shall make herbivores of you two yet,” Urgug commented, glowing a briefly amused shade. “Now, if only we can turn Bruuk’s brain to pursuits other than the vigorously physical…”

“Are you kidding? You know what kinda workouts I can get with those big fucks!? Little Wilde over just ain’t doin’ it ‘fer me lately…”

He flexed a huge arm in and out a few times, admiring himself for a moment, then threw in a bit of extra smarm too, just for Ian. He loved it. Probably. But whatever!

Wilde grinned but strategically ignored Bruuk’s banter. “Just when did you get so bloody optimistic?” he asked Urgug with a chuckle.

“Unlikely, you think?”

“Reckon the heat-death of the universe’ll come first, mate.” Wilde grinned at him, and a heady swirl of purples lit up Urgug’s flanks in the Guvnurag equivalent of a hearty chitter.

“Jealousy don’t become you,” Bruuk accused with a chitter. He also smelled the oil on his iron skillets starting to smoke off, so into the pan went the steaks with a glorious sizzle.

“Mate, I ain’t jealous. I like this size. Big enough to be a hell of a bruiser, normal enough to stay healthy and athletic without anything crazy. And I’m pretty sure I can out-march you, too.”

“Mebbe! We’ll just hafta see about that next time we’re down.” He flipped the steaks over and commenced basting them with all that glorious fat in the pan.

Urgug, good sport that he was, didn’t react. “Anyway, I need to make a supply run. What provisions do we need?”

“Just the stuff on the supply list. For once, Morwk doesn’t have any special requests.”

Urgug flashed the color of amused mock alarm. “Oh my. Is he feeling well?”

“Heard him humming to himself this morning. I think he’s actually happy.” Ian grinned proudly.

“‘Of course!” A pattern of wry amusement flickered across Urgug’s face. “This is the first time in over a year he does not have major engineering work on his agenda.”

“Sign of a healthy ship, that. Good.” Bruuk turned the steaks over. “Still. we’d better add some stuff to the list. Our cargo eats a lot.”

“I already took care of it,” Urgug replied. “I simply used you and the captain as a model.”

“Hey, thanks!” That saved Bruuk a lot of work. “What about the big guy?”

“Arithmetic,” Urgug noted with an amused shade of…whatever-it-was. Guvnurag could see a lot more colors than anyone, and Bruuk’s own red-vision weren’t the bestest yet. It looked orangeish. “Assuming you deathworlders eat mostly to feed your silly muscles, it’s much easier to provision for your species. I simply multiply by your mass, and divide by whatever type of stores each species requires.”

“They’re not silly!” Bruuk objected with a chitter. “And that’s all? Just weight times calories?”

“Calories times mass times activity factor, but yes. Your short guts mean I need not account for fermentation waste or a bulk modulus or any of the complications that go with that, but your bodies need a lot of fuel. The captain is a good model to work from, since he’s lean and quite muscular for a human. He masses one-hundred and fifty two kilos and averages five thousand calories a day, more if he’s extremely active. You are nearly triple on both numbers, thus proving the point.”

Bruuk chittered, “I’m a big boy! What about Ferd and them?”

“A similar rubric should hold, but just in case I ordered extra and avoided too many carb-rich foodstuffs. The delivery is later tomorrow.”

Already ordered, and all he had to do was pack it away when it arrived? Fuck yeah, life was good. And he had steaks! They had seared long enough, so he killed the heat, tossed them in the pre-heated oven, and got his herb-butter ready. Butter-basting was probably the bestest damn thing the Humans had ever invented. Ever.

EVER.

The salad went together quick, and while the steaks were cooking he whipped up the herbivore’s menu for the evening. Most of it was pre-made because they wanted something cool and refreshing. So: refrigerated, lots of acidity, a riot of herbaceous flavor, some hummus because who the fuck didn’t like hummus?

And the bread, of course. Raisin bread? A raisin was a fruit with all the joy sucked out, but four of the people at the table, including one of the meat-eaters, loved the stuff.

Aliens.

Well, that could be dessert. Gaoians weren’t generally fond of desserts anyway. For the hummus, they’d just go with one of their flatbreads. Every culture had flatbread.

“Urgug, go get some dipping bread from the stores, please! Your choice.”

That sent a delighted ripple down his flank, and as soon as he stepped away, Bruuk pulled out the steaks, butter-basted them right in the pan…balls they smelled so good! Once basted, he put them out to rest, reduced the butter with some talamay and a dash of black-label lokep to make a nice sauce…

It was a feast fit for a king. Or even a Great Father! The bestest part, though, was when he caught their captain drooling.

Bein’ the ship’s chef-and-also-bruiser was a perfect job, sometimes.

Their “cargo” arrived right before the evening’s activities, having been well-fed at Righteous’s infamous backyard smoker. Everyone then was in a good, happy, but not too rambunctious mood, when Dora suggested they all sit around the table and play a board game.

Wilde had the most devious possible answer to that.

It was a simple game, in theory. Everyone got a hand o’ cards with abstract art on them, everyone took turns giving a hint describing their cards, and then got points if some but not all of the other players picked theirs right.

An art interpretation game? With a half-dozen different species at the table? One of whom din’t even really have a visual art tradition?

It was chaos. Though, Moj fuckin’ loved it. And it was goddamn frustrating how he could give a clue that made no sense at all to Bruuk, but the Humans would get it every time.

They were in the middle of the third round, with Moj well on the way to going three-for-three, when Wilde’s phone rang. One of the ringtones he really couldn’t ignore, too. He stood, took the call, listened for a bit…

Bruuk didn’t need his nose to tell his captain had just learned something terrible. He stood and refilled the chips bowl.

Ferd was the first to ask, though.

“What happened?”

“Update from the Corti.” Everyone sat up, because everyone knew who they were talking about. “His recovery’s just…he’s had a seizure. One that very nearly killed him.”

There was silence around the room, as everyone absorbed the bad news. Hoeff put his cards down, stood up, and prowled away to the far end of the room with a terrible look on his face.

“This see-sure,” Ferd began, warily. “Is a bad thing, yes?”

“Yeah, mate. It’s very bad. It might have just ended his military career,” Wilde said, sadly. “Even if they get them under control, he’ll never fight again.”

“And, big sky-medicine can’t fix?”

“No. Not completely. It’s a problem with his brain.”

“…Oh.”

Bruuk keened. He only knew the giant of a man briefly, but even he knew that would come as devastating news. Military service was his purpose and he’d just had it taken from him, probably forever.

…Assuming he wasn’t going to die of the seizures. That was no way for a man like him to go…

The evening wrapped up pretty suddenly. Everyone went to cope in their own ways. Hoeff and his men went to their quarters to commiserate. Dora and the rest went off alone; most aliens were pretty solitary in that regard.

Wilde went to his cabin, as he often tried, but Bruuk knew better, and knew just what to do. He grabbed the rest of the chips, knocked on his door, and without asking walked in, pushed the big human down onto the couch, and curled up with him nice and tight.

“Comedy tonight.”

All he got in reply was a weary, distant nod. But, Ian settled down and curled up without complaint. Good enough. Bruuk couldn’t fix the problem, but he could be there. And tomorrow, they’d have the job to distract them.

Still…It wasn’t the good end to the night he’d hoped for.

They watched in silence.

Date Point: 18y9m4w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Leela, taco sensei

There wasn’t much that could keep Daar down, and nothing so silly as a brain injury was going to stop him. He was Daar, after all. He didn’t have time for that.

It took him a little more than a week to shake it off completely. It was the little things, here and there, that did the most good for him: visiting cubs, wrestling with his more boisterous Brothers, listening to ongoing proceedings in the Conclave, apparently…all activities carefully programmed by conspiracy of the Conclave and the Great Mother to rehabilitate him, as the medicine finished its work and he re-exercised his personality.

Leela, it turned out, had a big part to play in that. He visited her almost daily, and every day he was just that little bit sharper, that little bit more him. He wasn’t completely the same, though. There had been learning. He wasn’t so calculated around her anymore, not so innocently clownish. Instead, he was more authentically aggressive. He didn’t just play around and prance. Now he would tense up and show off right up against her, taking his growling show as far as he could without actually impeding her movement. Which, at first, had frightened her…

But he wasn’t protecting her anymore from their shared demons and fears. In his own way he was being more honest. The best male there ever was wanted to mate with her. Breed her, make a cub he could be proud of, and there was absolutely no denying how much it thrilled to have such a male so nakedly interested. And more than that, he wanted her love. It wasn’t just play anymore, it wasn’t him doing all he could to shield her from the truth of the world.

It wasn’t all good-going, either.

About a week after her visit to High Mountain, he showed up looking for tacos but clearly so sad that it radiated off him in waves of melancholy smell. One of the Humans he called Cousin had a new, much more insidious fight ahead of him now, one Daar could do nothing to fix, or even help.

He wasn’t used to feeling helpless. Nobody so entirely capable ever would be. Knowing how to cope with helplessness, how to accept it was a skill like any other, and Leela had…well, she’d had practice he never did. The trick was in finding something they could do, even if it was unrelated.

So they made tacos together, to feed the whole HEAT. They were throwing a party of sorts, both a celebration that their brother was alive, and a wake for the full recovery they’d all been hoping for.

She leant against the iron of his flank while his claws delicately sprinkled peppers and lettuce into crispy shells. The simple therapy of making something, even something as fleeting as dinner, worked its magic. And a party for the whole HEAT?

Well. The income from it more than made up for last week’s early close and day off. But it was a good thing they’d warned her a day or two earlier, so she could have enough ingredients to hand.

Daar carried the fruits of their labors in a stasis trunk, and Leela of course was invited. She didn’t even want to protest this time—she closed up early, left an apologetic note taped to the stand’s shutters, and joined the fun up on the military base.

The whole team had pitched in on something, be it carrying furniture around, fetching drinks. Being included in it, being treated like part of the HEAT Clan for an evening…It laid the last of Leela’s demons to rest. These people weren’t gentle. They were gruff, sure, and they looked and smelled like concentrated danger…but they were caring too. They hurt as keenly as anyone else. All the personal power they wielded so effortlessly, as if it were a part of their very being…and not a bit of it saved them from worrying about their friend.

Just like that, she wasn’t afraid of Daar any longer. Or really, of what he was a convenient stand-in for.

So she hung out, was introduced to a variety of Human children, including Sister Shoo’s little male, sampled her way through everybody else’s cooking, learned a few things, traded a few secrets…

And just…relaxed. Got her tail whipped at ta’shen by one of the HEAT operators, got her revenge in Mario Kart, and a whole afternoon and sunset vanished without her really noticing, until the families with little ones went home and the young singletons without families decided to go party somewhere a little more high-energy…

And that left her with the one thing to do. That she wanted to do, if for no other reason than to reclaim for herself what being Female truly was. And it was amazing how discreet huge and rough-edged human males could be, sometimes. Her moment came when, very suddenly and silently, she and Daar were all alone in the HEAT’s massive kitchen, putting away the leftovers for later.

Well. If they were giving her the room and opportunity…

“So…did you have any plans for this evening?” She asked, as nonchalantly as she could manage.

Daar gave her an unreservedly happy look…and a predatory one, too. “I was prol’ly gonna do the usual grunty thing an’ lift my frustrations away.” He showed off a bit, because of course he did, but only for a moment. An eyeblink later and he was wrapped around her somehow, the corrugated iron of his body pressed tightly against hers.

He snarled quietly against her ear. “But I think I got a better idea now.”

“Oh?” She chittered, enjoying the way her heart was suddenly pounding.

“Yeah! Mebbe I’ll take ‘ya back ‘ta the Commune, gitcha nice an’ comfortable, close the door—”

“Daar!” She thrilled at the suggestion, and objected out of play more than anything else.

“—‘An give ‘ta the most bestest shoulder rub you’ve ever had!”

Well.

How was a girl to say no to that?

It was a good massage. Of course…he didn’t stop there. Or stop at all, until he was satisfied. The next morning, they woke up in her nest-bed. Well, she woke up in it, while Daar lay curled up around it on the stone floor, pinning her, protecting her….

…There were worse ways to wake up than being pressed against the warm sculpture of the Great Father’s physique.

She stretched luxuriantly, and her own much less robust body immediately complained. But it was a complaint she’d…missed. She’d used her body last night, not suffered its abuse. The difference was profound, and healing.

She complained a little, but only a little. It was a grumble well-earned.

He awoke gently with a sort of luxuriant sleepy chitter and a lazy stretch, which did just unfairly aesthetic things to the huge shapes moving under his fur. “Mmmm… ‘marn. Is it marn?” He peered up at the window to see the world was only just gaining light. “Balls, kinda early, ain’t it?”

“Cubs wait for no mother.”

“True enough,” he agreed. “Too bad, ‘cuz I could thinka all sortsa things we might do this morning…” he followed that up with an affectionate snuffle on the top of her head, along with some delightful kneading attention from his paws. Suggestive, and encouraging, but politely so.

She chittered, wearily, and was honestly tempted… “I’m sure you could, but I’m feeling very thoroughly exercised and in need of some recovery.” She stretched again and flinched from an ache somewhere deep in her core. “Ugh, feels sorta like I’ve been run over by a train…”

“Good!” he said, lecherously. “Means I did my job! Means ‘ya need another massage, too…”

He was really good with those, actually. Precisely because he was the absolute, total opposite of gentle. Those huge paws of his smashed out every last spot of soreness.

As with all good things, the price was worth the reward. And he was considerate enough not to push her after that. “Well, much as I wanna wheedle ‘ya ‘fer even more play…we both gotta git goin’. I’m sure my inbox is s’plodin’ pretty good at this point. Got time later this week?”

“The question is, do you?”

“I do. The secret of bein’ who an’ what I am is that I make time ‘fer what’s important.”

Leela…duck-nodded. She didn’t really know what else to do, considering how warm that sentiment made her feel.

He followed it up with a hug. Because hugs were almost always the right answer. And then…he was gone. Quick and smooth in a way that totally contradicted his boisterousness and sheer size, but which also meant there’d be a minimum of gossip at the breakfast table. Most of the Sisters and Mothers were still asleep.

Leela wasn’t so sure she’d have minded though, now. She felt…good. Like the right time had come, and she’d stepped forward rather than hesitating. That was something to be proud of.

She basked in the warm sensation a little longer, then got on with her day.

And looked forward to later in the week.

++END CHAPTER 79++

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Acknowledgments

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78 Friendly ETs, 147 Squishy Xenos and 316 Dizi Rats. And that’s the bottom line, because Dizi Rat said—squish

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 80: “Temper”

Chapter 80: Brought Low

Date Point: 18y9m4w2d AV
ESNN offices, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabrielle Nyoni

‘Nervous’ didn’t even begin to cut it. Gabrielle had been to some hairy parts of the planet Earth in her career, covering conflicts, civil wars, piracy, the aftermath of terrorist attacks…but in most places, she’d been reasonably assured that her dark blue armor with the word “PRESS” would offer some kind of protection, and not just from stray bullets and explosives. Among humans, she could trust in her hijab and the desire of the other guys to have their story heard, and carry her camera and microphone right into the lion’s den with confidence.

The Hunters wouldn’t care. To them, it’d just be different packaging on the same delicious meat. There would be no interviews with the other side, this time.

But, they were going. And the office threw a party to wish her luck. Pulled out all the stops, too! Apparently it was all Ava’s idea, as she was the only other person in the office who’d put on some body armor and seen combat up close and personal…though, she was keeping her dog close, today.

Gabrielle got the chance to thank her round about the time the last of the cake vanished. “You really didn’t have to go to these lengths, you know…”

“It felt important. This isn’t an opportunity most reporters get, or are willing to step up to.”

“You did.”

“I…got caught up in circumstances,” Ava replied. She massaged Hannah’s ears, and Gabby decided a minor course-correction was in order. Ava wasn’t shy about her problems, but that didn’t make it okay to linger on them.

“You said you might have another Laid Bare shoot coming up?”

“Yeah. I think this one will be the final installment, to be honest. If they agree to it, it’ll be…painful.”

“…They?”

“Warhorse. And, briefly, some passing-the-baton at the end, maybe. I’m not sure, there’s some personal complications involved, but…it’ll be really good, if I can arrange it. And I think it’ll do them some good too, which, y’know, that’s always been the point of the series.”

“Well. I look forward to it,” Gabby said, sincerely. “And not just the photography, of course.”

Ava smiled wanly, and then a bit more warmly. “Well…thanks. I wonder if I should ruin it and say upfront that everyone involved is already taken?”

“Aargh, if I could talk married men out of their clothes as easily as you can…”

Wrong thing to say. But she knew it instantly, and Ava was graceful about it. “Trust me, it’s not as great as you make it sound. Anyway,” she stood. “You better get ready. I hear you leave within the hour.”

…Shit. Well done, Gabby. Her chronic foot-in-mouth disease had struck again. She bobbed up to her feet, shook hands, babbled something well-meaning and retreated to the other side of the room to recompose herself near her partner for this endeavor.

ESNN’s powers-that-be didn’t want to send Gabrielle in helpless, of course. She’d taken some pretty serious personal defense training from the local police force, which was later improved upon by the local Marine security contingent—along with a HEAT operator, who turned out to be a seriously handsome tank of a boy that went by Gonzo, appropriately. Even still, she was barely a hundred-thirty pounds soaking wet, so ESNN had one other trick up their sleeve.

Marrek, a seven-plus foot tall burly basketball player of a Gaoian, who was ESNN’s chief reporter on local Clanless affairs. Like most brownfurs he was a big brute. But unlike the obscenely hulked-out giants of the military Clans that routinely made the news, his was a ‘more lankier’ bigness, and that meant he could fold himself easily down into much more everyday encounters, rather than fill a room to bursting with his bulk. He was, in fact, the very definition of the everyday brownie, even though they were still very much a minority among gaoians. Probably why he was so good on the Clanless beat, really. He was hard not to like.

And he was an army veteran, with more than a few decorations on his chest, and an associate membership in Ironclaw to reward honorable service. Dude knew what he was doing.

And he had grizzly claws. Pretty much all brownfurs did. Gaoians really weren’t cuddly.

“You git ‘yer armor fitted right this time, Gabe?” He sniffed toward her as he finished packing away his own in his ‘everything’ duffel. “An’ did’ya manage not ‘ta ogle Gonzo this time?”

“Shut up!” she giggled, a bit embarrassed.

“Take that ‘fer a no,” He flicked a playful ear. “…Nice shindig they put on ‘fer us.”

“I know!” Gabby eyed the snacks for a moment, wistfully, but…no. They didn’t want to be late for the jump. So, she did the rounds, shook hands, received well-wishes, got a couple of hugs for good measure…

They took a johnny cab to the array terminus, with Gabby twisting the straps of her pack in her hands nervously the whole way. Interstellar travel by jump array just felt…it always felt too sudden to her. Too anticlimactic. Even an elevator wasn’t so abrupt. You just sat down inside the marked zone, there was a thump and then you were on a whole different planet an ungodly distance from where you started.

The thought that in a few minutes time she’d have gone from a pleasant mini-party at the office to an alien warzone was, well, just impossible to really prepare for.

Marrek was, as always, a comforting (and almost disconcertingly canine) presence. He wrapped one of those long arms around her shoulders and hugged reassuringly. It had taken some time to get used to the kind of physical contact Gaoians favored, but in the end, humans and Gaoians just…seemed to get each other.

“It’ll be okay,” he rumbled. “I ain’t gonna letcha do somethin’ too stupid, I promise.”

“Like you could stop me,” Gabby replied, with a self-effacing laugh. But, she felt better. Still. That feeling of rushing toward something huge only got more intense as their cab arrived, they were escorted through the terminus by a man in fatigues, parked atop a large stack of supplies, crates, bags and boxes alongside a few other travellers…

She fiddled with her camera as she waited. Until, sure enough, there was that thump. The nice clean jump hall vanished, to be replaced by…

Gabby coughed, reflexively. The air wasn’t choking or fume-filled or anything, but it smelled terrible. Like a junkyard on a hot day, or a gas station shortly after a whole biker gang had done a burnout. Industrial, with a low ceiling of heavy grey clouds and too-still air heavy with dry heat.

Marrek just chitter-sighed, and activated his forcefield helmet. “Thought I’d left this shit behind when I retired…” he grumbled.

Gabby activated her own and asked, “Why did you retire, actually?”

“Got both m’arms eated on Mordor.”

Gabby completely forgot the foul air and gawped at him. Before now, she’d always thought the two pale rings that encircled Marrek’s biceps were just fur patterning or a freeze-brand. She found herself staring, and he of course reacted like every gaoian male ever did when a girl of any description was ogling them. He flexed quickly, examined himself a bit wistfully…

Growled fiercely. “S’okay though. I tore out it’s throat with m’toes ‘fore I passed out.”

“That’s…well, I’m glad you’re okay,” Gabby replied, not knowing what else to say. “So…they just, what? Grew you new arms?”

“Yup! Only jus’ got ‘em built up nice an’ big like the old ones. C’mon, let’s go find our bunks.”

Gabby nodded, but her hands were already working, taking photos as a team of men in lifting exoskeletons descended on the pile of cargo they’d ridden and started dividing it up. In fact, the whole area around them was a bustle of activity

Marrek was there as a videographer, and he already had his steadicam rig up and running.

“Those’re neat as fuck. I hear Bronzefur’s been buyin’ rigs ‘fer all their workhouses.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, been workin’ up a story on it. Example o’ some human tech infiltratin’ th’ Gao.”

“I thought gaoians weren’t fond of stuff like that?”

“We’d rather do th’ work ourselves, yeah. But we can’t right now. All our best bodies are in th’ army or somethin’ more special-like, an’ the older able-backs are all…old. An’ dyin’.”

“…And the workload isn’t shrinking.”

“Nope. It’s gettin’ bigger an’ bigger. S’why I moonlight as a laborer when the beat’s slow.”

“Because you’re able-bodied.”

“An’ available, ‘cuz retirement.”

Gabby’s reply faltered at the sound of some distant noise. A deep-throated VRRRRRRRRZZZ! followed by a rapid crackle of smaller explosions.

Marrek had tossed her into a nearby shelter that she hadn’t even noticed was there, and had his recording drone out and up before she’d gathered her wits and did the same.

A Hunter attack was in progress. As Gabby’s drone cleared the vertical obstructions and got a good look at the landscape around them, she barely noticed her own awed gasp: As orderly and efficient as things were around the jump array, the broader battlefield was a scene of purest devastation. Hillocks of pulverized concrete and tangled steel, fires still burning here and there. Major roadways kept clear of debris by huge armored bulldozers, which were retreating in the face of the Hunter advance.

The gaoian forces had responded immediately. Their armored vehicles—Growls—pounced forward, fast over the light rubble and rough ground. They opened fire on something, and a few seconds later the drawn-out buzzsaw sound of their weapons reached Gabby’s ears.

Gabby and Marrek couldn’t get their drones any closer to take a better look, because their press liaison officer had found them and was angrily yipping about the potential threat—

“I know the rules,” Marrek growled, with just the barest hint of dominant snarl gaoians used between each other when they were establishing the pecking order. Being as the liaison was an ordinary silverfur, and Marrek was…well, lanky or not, he was still a big man…

“Then I will expect you to obey them,” the liaison managed after a quick step backward. “I cannot be held responsible if someone shoots them down!”

“‘Kay. You let us know if we’re causin’ any trouble now, y’hear?” He turned back to his drone controls and utterly ignored the liaison from that point onward.

They got some great footage.

Gabby patched things up a bit later when they were being shown their accommodations. They were already making a hell of a team. On advice from several of her colleagues, she’d brought…well. Bribes, really. Not in anything so crass as cash, but in little luxuries, harmless indulgences to smooth ruffled feathers—or fur—and help battle-weary soldiers relax around her.

She’d never yet met a Gaoian who didn’t love Slim Jims, or who couldn’t smell their presence when carried. So, with a softer touch (the good cop to Marrek’s bad cop) she managed to establish enough of a rapport with their liaison officer—his name was Feegi—to get him to unwind and share a snack.

From there, it was pretty easy to reassure him that they really did know the rules and the limits of what they could and could not show, all that stuff. She got the impression that Feegi was a young and nervous type, keen to do well in his job and be promoted. So, all in all…things were progressing like many other assignments. That was oddly comforting.

They spent the rest of the day getting settled, meeting leadership, sniffing around for opportunities, and all the other things a good reporter always took care to do.

They had a lot of work ahead of them.

Date Point: 18y10m AV
Planet Origin, the Corti Directorate

Master Sergeant Adam (Warhorse) Arés

Well.

Fuck.

He didn’t know what else to say, really.

Just.

Fuck.

Well, okay.

Start with the positives.

He’d regained gross motor control pretty damn quick. They had him off paralytics already, and he could walk (shakily) on his own, mostly tend to his own hygiene…it was fuckin’ exhaustin’ though. Not in his body, which was absolutely screaming at him for some exercise…

It was in his head. He felt drained right in his fuckin’ soul just hobbling across the room. They were going to arrange electro-stimulation therapy to help keep his muscle tone and conditioning going, because if he was ever going to recover, he needed his body ready and waiting.

Marty was there, too. Everyone came to visit, one by one. The Corti were a bit nervous with a bunch of humans stomping through their medical facility, but they were slowly getting used to it. So that was good, too. Two good things!

Which…didn’t make up for the big bad thing.

He was done as a HEAT Protector.

No official word yet, and everyone was very carefully avoiding the topic, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d somehow come out of the whole fuckin’ thing with himself intact—a goddamn miracle, that—but now his personal aggression was fuckin’ ten times worse than ever and he’d suffered a fuckin’ seizure not five minutes after waking from surgery.

Odds weren’t great, to put it bluntly.

Fuck.

He gripped the steel handrail of his bed in frustration, felt it flatten and crumble in his grip. Didn’t care, wanted to break something. Crushed it into a tiny little ball, felt it get hot to the touch.

Still got my strength, at least.

For now, anyway. And what good would it be if he couldn’t fuckin’ operate?

…He missed the pain.

It was gone. No soreness, no aches, no…nothing, really. He’d never noticed before, but now that he was pain-free the difference was profound, and sort of alarming. They’d fixed everything and almost cruelly given him a perfect fresh start…that he couldn’t really use.

He always felt sleepy, now.

So: he had a refurbished body, a second chance to push the limits and excel…and at any moment, he might collapse into literal tons of spasming danger. Shit, he was strong enough now to tear his own body apart, and that was no kind of a way to go…

Worse, the people who were physically strong enough to even begin dealing with that problem could be counted on one hand. Marty wasn’t among them. But she had the other kind of strength he needed right now. The kind he maybe needed more. The kind that said, no matter what, she knew he was going to get through this and out the other side.

And he wasn’t about to fuckin’ disappoint her.

For now, he was stuck in the most un-Adam place that ever was.

Doctor Forln was…Well, Adam had never met a more Corti Corti. Direct. Brusque. Not rude, but he sure as shit didn’t have a spare word for bein’ nice to people. So full of pride it was no wonder his head was so big compared to the rest of him.

But he knew his shit, and he was makin’ goddamn sure Adam knew it, too.

“The medicine you are on will hopefully prevent a second seizure, and everything about your rehabilitation plan from this moment forward is constructed around that single goal. A second will lead to a third, and from there a fourth and a fifth, and from there your life will be miserable, and most likely very short. In time, we hope to further correct the damage to your brain, but for that cannot be safely done until it has had time to rest, heal, and rebuild its pathways.”

He clicked the little wand in his hand, and moved onto the next slide in the show he’d prepared. Something about it woke a little swell of black humor in Adam’s belly. Medical Euthanasia by powerpoint, heh.

“You have, as anticipated, lost some gross motor control. I gather that Human rehabilitation therapy is adequately advanced, and have already referred you to a specialist on Folctha. I am sure you have noticed that you are experiencing myoclonus. It is my hope that these episodes will fade with therapy. Given your prodigious strength, however, it is important to be careful around objects and persons you do not wish to damage. One random jerk could cause serious harm. It is for this reason that we have repeatedly told your spouse not to hold your hand…”

He shot a pointed look at Marty, who grimaced and laid her hand back on Adam’s wrist. Forln made the tiniest, saltiest noise of approval, and continued to the next slide.

“As I am sure you have noticed, your fine motor control is practically nonexistent. I have placed an order for some suitably calibrated equipment to help you work on your grip control. I strongly suggest that you practice art, writing or calligraphy, once you are able to pick up the appropriate tools without destroying them.”

“The important part,” he concluded, “is going to be difficult for you. Though your body has all the power it ever did, your nervous system has been carefully rebuilt. Right now, it simply cannot endure the stress that the rest of you can. That should improve with time, but for the foreseeable future, you must completely avoid any strenuous exertion. Anything sufficient to tax your physique will stress your cerebellum beyond acceptable parameters, strongly increasing the likelihood of a second episode…with the consequences I outlined earlier.”

“I’ve…never really taken it easy in my life, doctor…” Adam pointed out.

“So I gather. Nofl stressed that this restriction in particular will be torturous for you. I am not unsympathetic. Nevertheless, if you wish to live, and enjoy an acceptable quality of life, then you must be disciplined about this. The more disciplined you are now, the more temporary this restriction will be. Is that understood?”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Then, as there is nothing further we can do for you here, I am discharging you. Nofl will monitor your progress at his laboratory in Folctha, and you will return here as needed.” Forln closed the slideshow, half-turned to go before pausing and turning back.

“…On a personal note…thank you.”

“What for?”

“Our continued existence.”

It was damn hard to read emotion in a Corti face, let alone the restrained one that flickered across Forln’s before he turned and strode from the room. But whatever it was left Adam feeling…

Well, he didn’t know how he felt, really.

“Well, uh, just doin’ my job,” he muttered, though Forln was already gone. Marty laughed softly, then maneuvered herself behind him and gripped the wheelchair handles.

Jesus. A fuckin’ wheelchair for him. She had to put her back into it, and her shoes slipped and squeaked on the floor before she got him rolling, but she didn’t complain one bit. Instead, once he was trundling along, she reached forward and scruffled his scalp.

“I can tell I’m gonna have glutes of titanium after this,” she teased.

“Har har.”

“Oh, don’t complain, you big baby,” she said, fondly. “Let’s get you home. Doofus is restless and Diego’s been asking after you. And your dad is waiting for us at the jump terminus.”

Adam brightened at that. But just as he was enjoying the idea of kissing his boy, a grumbly little thought crossed his mind. “Shit, Marty, how am I gonna get to our apartment?”

“The elevator?”

“I, uh, I think I’m too heavy. By too much to risk.”

He could feel her annoyed grin. “Oh, chunk, this is going to be all sorts of weird, huh?”

“Well, I mean…I can walk.”

“Up all four flights?”

“Well, gonna hafta. Or, uh, get a friend to help.”

“Get a friend anyway. Adam,” she said, more seriously. “We’ll figure it out, okay? This is just temporary. You’ll be doing your superman thing before long, understand?”

“Yeah…” he sighed, then resolved himself. “…Yeah.”

“Attaboy. C’mon. Home’s waiting.”

Adam nodded, rested his head back and tried to relax. Right now, Forln’s advice to just rest wasn’t sounding so difficult. Even being awake and talked to was kinda tiring. His whole body wanted to curl up, sleep and heal. And, well…he was in a wheelchair. And whoever’d built it had made it kinda comfy, even…

But there was too much going on around him to really want to sleep. They were on Origin for fucksake, there weren’t too many people had ever set foot on the Corti homeworld. A small swarm of cleaning drones was following them around, sanitizing every inch of every surface they even passed near. Their progress through the hospital was cleared for them, with little gray people waiting down the side corridors behind blue forcefields until they were gone.

Adam didn’t pay them much mind. Instead, he looked up as they passed through a long glass-ceilinged hallway and he got to see where they really were: right in the middle of a city that made any on Earth look low-rise. It was like if the shortest and shabbiest building in Manhattan was the Burj Khalifa.

No flying cars, though. Flying trains, floating down holographic lanes as they snaked around and between the buildings to deliver their passengers to plazas and platforms on lots of different levels.

Pretty fuckin’ impressive, really. Too bad he’d come here like this. Too bad it wasn’t open to human tourism. Made him wonder what life was like at street level for the Corti. What kinda fast food stands and whatever they had. What did Corti go to the mall to buy? Did they have malls at all? Wasn’t like they could all be scientists and professors and doctors…

Fuck, his feet were itchin’ with wanting to get up and go explore, answer some of those questions for himself. But…even if he could, doctor’s orders. And they’d never let him anyway. Couldn’t have a big human disease raft walking around among the unprotected public. In spaces where he’d be too tall, too wide, too heavy and too smelly to fit anyway.

Oh well. He wanted to get home anyway. He missed his kids.

Still, he watched until he couldn’t see any more, and finally rested his head back and closed his eyes once the view of the city was gone.

And he dozed all the way home.

Date Point: 18y10m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lewis Beverote

It came as a shock to Lewis that…he actually liked kids.

Okay, so, when there was screaming and hollering and grumpy stuff goin’ on, sure, they weren’t so cute. And there was a lot of that from lil’ Anna especially, right now. She did not like the word “no.” Or bein’ offered a choice between two things she liked. Or sometimes just gettin’ tired, and then bein’ so mad about bein’ tired that she screamed until the windows rattled which just made her more tired and more mad so she screamed even more and…

…All that stuff? Not so cool.

But when she wasn’t carryin’ on like that, she was a sweetheart. And little Sam was fun, doin’ his baby-yoga and smilin’ at everyone and not really too worried about bein’ stuck at somebody else’s house while daddy was in the hospital.

Diego was pretty subdued. Needed a lot of hugs and distractions, which he mostly got from Allison. He wasn’t keen on roughhousing no matter how much Julian seemed itching to toss him around, which was sorta sad; he wanted papa. He was a damn patient kid, but Lewis had never known a three-year-old could look so stressed.

Well, today was the day at least. Just a few hours longer.

The whole thing—not just ‘Horse, but all the other poor bastards comin’ back from Hell—had got Lewis reading up on Nervejam. Its history, effects, applications…countermeasures? So, he was doin’ his part for the childminding by keepin’ half an eye on Sam while he read on the couch.

Ably assisted by Tristan, who was Lewis’ kind of nerd. Mind like a sponge, thirsty to drink up knowledge. Better with girls than Lewis had been at his age, too. Lucky fucker.

“So nobody’s sure where the technology came from?”

Lewis nodded. “Nope. Predates even the OmoAru, far as anyone can tell. Now, usually when you’ve got a piece of tech stickin’ around across galactic timescales like that, I’d look for the Hierarchy’s influence, but this is one’a those occasions where I just can’t see what use it is to them. Anything that smacks somebody right in the brain like that’s gotta be a disaster for their daemon agents, too.”

“Maybe it was a weapon somebody else developed to counter them?”

“Neat hypothesis, my dude. But if it was, seems to me like they’d stamp it out, right? But instead, one’a the first things the Dominion did was mandate the presence of nervejam grenade caches at security checkpoints all across the galaxy, for use in the event of Hunter raids. And you can’t turn everything in the galaxy into some ancient alien conspiracy, right?”

“I dunno, can’t you?” Tristan asked. “I mean, they sure seem to get everywhere.”

“You’re just sittin’ close to the nexus of a few of ‘em, dude. Makes ‘em loom large in your mind. Nah, I think what we have in Nervejam is just a good ol’ classic case of folks doin’ stuff. Refreshing, ain’t it?”

“I guess…”

Lewis chuckled at the skeptical look on the young man’s face, glanced at the baby, found that Sam had put his head down and was asleep, grinned, and returned to his reading.

“…Thing is, it’s a damn good weapon. Does what weapons should do, and levels the playing field a bit. Gives your average vizzytik security guard somethin’ he can actually fight back with. Hunters sure learned to respect it in a hurry, lookit this.” He turned his tablet around to show off some data. “See? That Dominion mandate happened, the grenade caches got deployed, and raids on facilities with a supply of ‘em dropped pretty sharply. So it worked. ‘Course, the Hunters just raided elsewhere, started hittin’ the civilian shipping lanes more, but that one move prob’ly saved a lotta lives.”

“And then they adopted it themselves.”

“Yeah, they do that. I mean, look how quick they went from kinetic pulse to firearms after their first few clashes with humans. And how quick they stole fusion claws from the Gao.”

They read in silence for a few minutes. Nothing sensitive, of course. Just the publicly available stuff. Which was fine by Lewis, because he wasn’t even slightly interested in the classified workings of the new drugs. Instead, the idea forming in his head was that these nootropic agents, however they worked, might be part of the solution, but they couldn’t be the whole thing. It was kinda like havin’ cutting edge state-of-the-art surgery to help the wounded, but not givin’ them body armor.

…What about body armor? There had to be a radiation shield that would work. Well. Maybe it’d be too impractical for troop armor—

—Not for everyone. One glance over at Julian’s fuckin’ waist-thick neck and…

An idea, anyway. One he scribbled on his little notepad for later Violent Probing. It was plain physically impossible for any effect to both affect matter and be unshielded by something else. Had to be a material or field out there…

One of these days, he’d buy the research librarians on Origin a bottle of…whatever it was Corti drank. Fuck knew, he’d made enough weird goddamn requests of them over the years.

“What do Corti quaff for celebrations?” He mused aloud.

“Fungus juice,” Julian said distractedly. He was sat at the kitchen table, answering his emails. Somehow, despite many predictions of its inevitable demise, the laptop had never gone away. It had just got skinny.

“Urgh. What?”

“Nah, it’s nice stuff. Earthy and savory. Really strong, though.”

“Like, alcoholic strong, or…?”

“Like sippin’ a cup of worcestershire sauce.”

Tristan gave him an appalled look. “…Ew. You’d enjoy that?”

Julian snorted, “I didn’t get this kind of big being picky about what I eat. You have any idea how much I like anything I can slather on chicken and rice without throwing off my macros?”

“And Ramsey wants to be like you…” Tristan grumbled uncomprehendingly.

“So, wait,” Louis chuckled, “if I sent them, like, a crate of soy sauce…?”

“Fastest way to almost any alien’s heart. I haven’t met one of any species that doesn’t love it. Heck, Rockefeller has some really good shoyu on order just ‘cuz of that. Wanna know a weird secret? They all like worcestershire sauce too, but obviously we don’t give that to the vegans. We discovered that accidentally. State put out a pretty funny cable about it a few years ago.”

“Huh. Good to know.” Lewis made a note of that, too. It’d be a good way to say thanks to a group of beings he’d never met, but who surely found him infuriating.

Julian sat back and exhaled slightly, in that relieved-stressed way that made both Lewis and Tristan look his way.

“He’s coming home.”

“Guess you’d better get over there then, dude.”

“Yup…got everythin’ you need?”

“Pretty sure I can go a few hours without killin’ a baby,” Lewis grinned. Julian chuckled, and rose to his feet.

“Good. Gabe Arés should be comin’ over to pick ‘em up soon anyway.” Julian padded over the room and leaned down to give Tristan a hug. “Don’t beat ‘em up too much tonight, y’hear?”

The kid rolled his eyes, but smiled; Julian really was rockin’ the Big Dad Energy these days. Dadly duties done, Julian popped into the other room to quietly interrupt whatever Al was doin’ to cool off their daughter, and then was gone. As usual, he didn’t bother with a car or whatever, just took off at a jog. A couple seconds later, Lewis saw his permanent security follow behind.

Had to be awkward, havin’ guys following him everywhere like that. But, he’d never heard Julian complain about it. Hell, he grilled steaks for them!

Lewis shot another quick glance at the baby to make sure Sam hadn’t spontaneously combusted in the last five seconds, and then settled back into his reading. He turned to the precise mechanism of nervejam and its quantum interference with neurotransmission, a field he felt a bit more qualified for than childminding. Though, so far, it was turning out to be pretty easy. And when the grandparents showed up in a few hours to collect them, he’d be proud to hand over two intact and healthy little ones.

It felt good. Helping, like that. There were no kids on Erebor, and he’d never really got to know any before his abduction, but now…

Maybe Lucy was right. Maybe having some of their own wouldn’t be so bad…

Date point: 18y10m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Arés

“You sure you can make it up all four floors?”

Adam wasn’t about to answer no to a question like that. “Ain’t a question of whether. I will. Just…might not enjoy it all that much,” he said with a bit of bravado. But, seeing her worry, he softened a bit. “Don’t worry, I’ve got a Julian to catch me. Don’t I big guy?”

Adam delivered a hearty backslap that, frankly, would have outright killed normal people. She didn’t know if he’d intended that or not, but he was careful who he was jockular with, right now.

Julian didn’t complain. He just staggered forward a step and grinned.

“Good thing I skipped legs today, then…”

Adam looked as if his best friend had just confessed to the gravest of sins. Marty couldn’t help herself: her hand flew to her mouth to cover a laugh. First one of those she’d had in several weeks…

“Relax,” Julian smiled. “My heavy session is in an hour. I’m getting legs in either ‘cuz you can’t get your fat ass up the stairs, or you can and I gotta make up.”

“Well fuck you too,” Adam chuckled, then looked at the stairs. “Well…easy way would be to just jump to each landing…”

“Yes…” she noted. He’d made a lot of progress on big explosive athletic things. It was control that was bedeviling him. “But no. Nofl says your brain needs the practice of doing things the normal way. You aren’t wimping out, I hope…”

“No.” Of course not, but maybe a little poke was in order. In any case he sighed, shuffled over to the stairs…and started putting one foot in front of the other.

He made it to the top, and only wobbled once. Julian was behind him the entire way, ready to catch, or offer a stabilizing hand on Adam’s broad back. It was honestly heartwarming to watch, with the comparatively smaller man offering encouragement and taunts one after the other…

“Try and stay standing too,” she reminded him. “It’s just like training, but for your nervous system.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Adam grimaced as the distraction of talking made him pull a bit too hard on the handrail, which flattened under his grip.

“See, that’s why I don’t practice body throws with you,” Julian quipped.

Adam stopped, sighed heavily, refocused, and kept moving. He’d come a long way already. At first, he’d barely had more coordination than a four-month-old baby. Just getting his limbs to go in the direction he wanted them to had been the work of a solid week of careful physiotherapy and some pretty amazing pharmacy. Now, he was…

The best analogy she could come up with was an easily-tired drunk who was far, far too strong for his own good. Worse, he had to push himself, but not push himself too hard, or the spectre of a seizure might show itself again. They wanted him healed, not crippled.

The door opened as they reached the top of the stairs: Gabe and Jess were waiting for them, with Gabe holding tight to Diego’s hand for now. He gave his son a complicated, understanding look as they ushered him into the living room, and put an arm around as much of his shoulders as he could. Apparently getting hit in the head was becoming an Arés male tradition, but Marty found herself slightly glad there was at least one man around who could really sympathize with Adam’s predicament right now.

Happily, Diego was a bit more oblivious, and eager to climb up Mount Papá and lie against his chest for snuggles, once Adam had negotiated his way to the couch for a lie-down.

“Missed you!”

Adam didn’t dare hug: but he could tilt his head forward and plant a kiss on Diego’s forehead. “Missed you too, mijito. You been good?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh?” He smiled, “That’s all you got to say?”

Diego squirmed, a bit embarrassed. “I was really sad ‘cuz you an’ Mamá were gone an’ Yayo said you were hurt and I wanted to come see you but I couldn’t an’ it wasn’t safe…”

“It’s been hard on him,” Jess replied, stroking her grandson’s hair as she sat down. “But he’s a trooper. And you’ve been really good for Uncle Julian and Auntie Xiù and Auntie Al too, haven’t you?”

“He’s a good little man,” Gabe beamed, proudly. “You kept Sam safe, right?”

Diego nodded seriously. “Uh-huh.” God, the machismo was so thick it was adorable.

Adam grinned, and Marty saw him stop himself from trying to reach out and scruffle Diego’s hair. She did it for him. “Good. Now papá is still pretty hurt, so I have to take it easy. I won’t be able to do a lot of things for a while, okay?”

“What kinda things?”

“Well, I’m really strong, Diego, and right now I can’t control myself so good. That means I might break something if I pick it up, or hurt someone if I hug them. So I have to be very careful while the smart people help me get better, okay?”

“‘Kay.” Diego put his head down and hugged tight.

“And I’m guessing you need to sleep a lot,” Gabe added. He nodded sympathetically along when Adam nodded yes. “Thought so.”

He stood up with a grunt of effort, and bent over to plant a kiss on Adam’s forehead. “Glad you’re home, mijo. We’ll let you get some rest, okay?”

“I should get going too,” Julian added, from where he’d been leaning in the doorframe and letting the family have their reunion.

“Right,” Adam chuckled. “Heavy leg day.”

“Well, that, yeah. But there’s one of those fancy dinners I love so much tonight.”

“Big names?” Gabe guessed.

“Mm-hmm.” Julian pulled a wry face. “Daar, Rockefeller, President Sartori…”

“Oof. Better you than me.”

“Do you always do heavy lifting beforehand?” Jess asked.

“Oh, yeah. Good stress reliever. And just…Oh geez, sittin’ through one of those things without tiring myself out first would be torture.”

“I think you make it worse for yourself by deciding you hate that sort of thing,” Marty noted. “Ever done a dining-out? They’re a lot of fun.”

“Heard the stories. Daar might wear a pink glittery bowler hat for fun, but I can’t picture Rockefeller doing it.”

“Or Sartori?”

“Couldn’t say. This’ll be my first time meeting him.”

“Eh,” Adam added, enjoying his snuggle time. “It won’t be so bad. There’ll be other pretty celebrities to take the heat off.”

“And the food’s usually pretty good, right?” Marty asked.

“It’s a good snack, over a buncha hours. I’ll be eating a full meal before I go.”

“Gourmet niblets over a base of sweet potatoes and steak,” Adam rumbled. “Sounds like I’ve got some backlog in the tracking app to get through….”

“…Now I’m hungry,” Marty mused. She stood up. “And this guy’s belly waits for no man, huh?” she swatted Adam’s shoulder as she passed, gave Gabe and Jess a hug, and moments later their house was…well. Not empty because it had Adam on the couch, Diego on Adam, and Sam asleep on the baby mat. But quiet, for the moment.

Already, her mind was working, though. Calculating what they’d need and where to help Adam navigate it safely. Sikes had made it crystal clear that whatever she wanted welded up, all she had to do was ask. She could already think of a few things…

Problem for tomorrow. Here and now, there was meal prep, and the logistics of feeding three boys. But what a problem to have! It sure as hell beat the alternative.

She smiled, and got to work.

Date Point: 18y10m AV
Alien Palace, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

(former) President Arthur Sartori

Nobody kept all their dignity around Daar, if they were close friends. He needed very little excuse to pick up little five-foot-five Sartori and smush him firmly against his monstrous ten-foot self, giving the most bestest and fragrant hugs.

Well, at least there was hardly any brain-smashing reek of musk and stale sweat this time, and no loose hairs to get all over everything. Just…huge, friendly monster. Nayda had clearly paid extra attention to his bathing.

In past years, it would have been a bit of a scandal. But the world changed, and attitudes changed with it. Daar had infected the reserved world of diplomacy with a touch of fizz. It was okay to be genuinely warm with one’s friends, now. And with new acquaintances, too.

Arthur had been looking forward to meeting the Etsicitty family (if that was the right name for them) from the moment he’d learned they were attending, and they certainly did not disappoint. Sir Jeremy Sandy had chuckled at length as he described their early, awkward forays into the world of movers-and-shakers, and Ambassador Rockefeller had a certain fond exasperation in his tone when he described Ambassador Etsicitty’s best efforts at scrubbing up…

But in fact, the trio were a complimentary blend of elegant poise, handsome confidence, and sincere magnetism. Sartori thought the wild hair worked for the big man, too. Even in white tie. He could learn to tone down that handshake, though.

Still, he liked the ambassador immediately. Julian just couldn’t help but radiate every good stereotype about All-American goodness. He was huge and strong, handsome, an earnestly straightforward type of man who was more than capable of verbal fencing but would rather just tell it straight. Soft-spoken, too. Polite, but no pushover. Dangerous, even. Intense.

He was exactly what an American ambassador should be, Sartori thought. Just civilized enough to take some of the bite out of his sheer animal magnetism. He clearly wasn’t perfectly comfortable with the attention—though what did he expect, given his life? Nonetheless, he took perfect advantage of it to advance American (and allied) interests as part of the conversation.

All that and Sartori had barely two minutes with him. Oh well, they ended up sitting near each other at dinner. Though, if he was honest with himself, the greater pleasure was being sat right next to Xiù.

It was a crime, really. Here was the woman who had initiated first contact with humanity’s two closest and best interstellar allies, and yet she had received far less recognition for that fact than Sartori felt she deserved. And the question of exactly how she’d made such a strong impression on two alien cultures answered itself within a minute of conversation.

It was the scars, worn proudly and openly even here in delicate company. The ragged gouges left by a Hunter’s teeth on her arm. The split eyebrow from being battered around by pulse fire. She hid neither, and had never had them repaired. They spoke to a willingness to put herself in harm’s way for others, and integrity of a fundamentally universal kind.

The three of them together proved the old truism that the best way to get over differences in opinion or lifestyle was just…to talk with each other. They were so obviously devoted to each other it was hard to remember what exactly the objection had been during Julian’s appointment.

The small talk was amusing, too.

“There are certain disadvantages to having a caveman for a husband, yes.” Xiù had just the right knack for teasing without giving any lurid embarrassment.

“Oh?” One of the other ladies at the table, this one a local minister of education. “Do tell.”

Allison had a touch more mischief in her. “He sheds on the couch,” she teased.

“Don’t be jealous of my luxuriant locks,” Julian rumbled in with a smile.

“Ugh. Also, do you know how infuriating it is that he has such nice hair? He doesn’t do anything to keep it! He just…wakes up, dumps some Pert Plus on it, and like ten seconds later it’s perfect! No conditioner, no oil, none of that. He doesn’t even brush!”

“Unless we make him,” Xiù added. “Blessings of being a grungy boy, I guess. He never has to worry about dry or brittle hair.”

“Stupid good-hair genes,” Allison grumbled in mock indignation. “Boys get all the luck.”

“Hey! I keep offering to go short, but last time I did you threatened to stab me!”

“Well of course! How else am I supposed to show off my boy-candy?”

“Heck, if that’s what you want, I’m sure I can arrange another charity shoot…”

“See? Incorrigible.’

And so on, to the amusement of everyone in earshot. It didn’t feel like a put-on at all. They were complete naturals at the game.

No wonder they’d grown so powerful so quickly. Hell, the three of them probably didn’t even quite realize how much social power they commanded. They had the ears of Presidents and Prime Ministers, the confidence of both the Great Father and Mother, the respect of the Given-Men and Singers alike…

Tonight’s gathering wasn’t strictly political. It was predominantly a mixer among the high society that lived in or frequented Cimbrean, and there were people from every sector of society to meet. Government, industry, civic institutions, even a few local celebrities…at least, the ones who weren’t crass idiots with their fame.

Not the journalists, though. This was a private affair. A regrouping after major events, to hear from the movers and shakers themselves about it, or at least to reinforce social connections. That mattered more than the common man generally understood; they tended to think government was about elected officials and law. And it was, but the back-room was where the real work actually got done.

The tension between government and law on one side—the fundamental defense of the common man—and the power of the elites on the other, was something Sartori was never quite comfortable with. It was therefore critically important that those social connections be maintained, because it was the only real check on the elites against ambition and folly.

The technocratic world of post World War II was slowly giving way toward an older arrangement, one of personalities and great powers. There was a lot of good and bad to go with that.

So. A little wine to unlock their tongues just enough and the opinions could flow. Conversation could happen, without the ritual of a Senate or House or Thing. No speaker, no parties, no playing to the camera, no vote-winning. Most of the people here didn’t need votes.

And thank God the greatest powers at the table were fundamentally good people, all. The Governor-General wielded so much influence it was honestly difficult for a former President like Sartori to wrap his head around. The man had in practice almost zero control over the government not even in his name, and yet…not once had it ever failed to do as he wished.

Daar, at least, was understandable. He was just a straight-up avatar of power, in every possible form a man could wield power. He was an absolute sovereign, in fact, greater than any king or emperor—he owned the whole of the Gao as an extension of his person, and whatsoever he dictated, happened. But his contribution to the night, by and large, was to listen.

And in fact, encourage the conversation. Which, inevitably, turned toward interspecies politics.

“Thas’ a good point,” he rumbled at someone who Sartori couldn’t identify. “I have been thinkin’ on what some kinda grand interstellar alliance might look like. I don’t know if it’s right ‘fer me ‘ta push that sorta thing jus’ now, though.”

By necessity he sat at one head of the table, because firstly he was the highest-ranking individual present, but secondly he was as wide as five place settings, ate as much as ten men, and had to sit on the floor rather than a chair to get down to everyone else’s eye level. Assuming a chair could be found that could possibly bear him in the first place.

He was mild and politely solicitous despite all that, because nothing would get said at the table that night if he didn’t allow it or wouldn’t approve. Conversation was at his whim. That was power! Thank the good Lord he was considered in how he wielded it, and made a big welcoming hole for people to pour their thoughts into.

Folctha’s Minister of Agriculture, Ben Troughton, was in vocal form tonight, and had much to say about the Interspecies Dominion.

“It’s the damn tariffs. They’re desperate to prop up their own crop farmers and agriculture, so they keep hiking the rates for our exports.”

“Food security is important,” Champion Loomi noted in-between laps at his soup. He was one of the few whose stature allowed him to look the Great Father nearly in the eyes (or at least, not crane his neck too uncomfortably far back), and along with two other brownfurs sat on a low, wide bench. “One can hardly blame them for it.”

“It’s excessive, and aggressive.”

“Well, yeah,” Daar chittered. “Do ‘ya know there was a short-lived idea in th’ Conclave ‘ta embargo carrots? Somethin’ ‘bout corruptin’ young cubs off yanni root or whatnot.”

“As I recall, it got dropped after you expressed displeasure at the idea.”

“Well, I got five thousan’…uh, I guess acres is the closest. Anyway. I’m definitely on team carrot. Yanni root is tasty but it’s a pain in the tail ‘ta farm. Good source o’ latex in th’ leaves though.”

“And they’re crunchier,” one of the rougher silverfurs noted. Some sort of sports celebrity at pounceball, from what Sartori understood. Basically a mash-up of rugby, field hockey, the better bits of football, and a dash of soccer too.

So, heavy on the brawl. He looked it, too. Dude was covered in scars and freeze-brands.

“Still. All that effort just over the exports from Folctha’s farms alone? And we don’t even export all our crop!”

“Don’ you worry none, we’ll be buyin’ it all up an’ then some in, oh, twenny, mebbe fifty earth years time I bet. Our rebound is gonna have a lotta hungry mouths ‘ta feed an’ I got a sneakin’ suspicion they’ll be a lot hungrier’n previous generations. They’ll all be big boys like Korok, here!”

Korok preened a bit and duck-nodded in appreciation. “Might get some real competition!’

“I saw ‘yer last game! Pretty impressed ‘ya escaped a five-way tackle like that.”

Sartori whistled. Pounceball was not a gentle game, and regularly took advantage of the Gao’s advanced medical care. It took a special kind of simultaneously graceful and reckless athlete to play. Korok seemed caught being deeply flattered and wanting to preen, and also deeply starstruck that what must have been a personal hero had noticed him in sport.

That was the general shape of the small talk for a while. It was a dinner! Yes, also a meet-and-greet and no doubt there’d be business behind the scenes later, but that wasn’t for the dining table. The dining table was for being pleasant and getting to know each other.

There was one topic that Sartori wanted to land on, however. And it was, sadly, quite a painful one for a few of those present. But, he wasn’t one to shy away. He just…picked his moment.

“I gather Sergeant Arés came home today. I had the pleasure of meeting him a few years back, so, I’m glad to hear he’s survived his injuries.”

“I don’t think anyone else would have,” Julian agreed. “But, uh, yeah. I saw him this afternoon, safe back at home with his family. It’s…gonna be a long recovery for him. Especially considering he’s been told to rest.”

“That’ll be hard for him.”

“He…doesn’t exactly do rest.”

Sartori nodded, slightly amused despite himself. That fit. “I’ve heard General Miller has been meeting with the Secretary of the Air Force,” he said aloud.

A ways down the table was Folctha’s Minister of Defence, Emily Khan. “Wow,” she noted. “That’s a pretty big jump up the chain of command.”

“Along with the Chief of Space Operations,” Julian nodded.

“Well, that can only mean one thing,” Sartori commented. “And good, the man deserves it.”

“So soon?” Khan asked. “Isn’t it a bit early for that?”

“Early ‘fer what?” The Great Father’s direct question rang through the conversation.

“…Oh! Well, uh, a high decoration of some kind…”

“Probably the Medal of Honor,” Sartori clarified. “Though that’s just speculation on my part.”

Several heads nodded in agreement. Others were still, thoughtful. Daar’s dipped once, pleased.

“That man fought off and tore apart a Hunter Alpha with his bare hands,” Daar growled, “with no backup or support, all with complete disregard ‘fer his own safety while protectin’ the lives of his patients. His total fearlessness in the face of basically certain death not only preserved our only remaining jump array at the time, he single-handedly saved my life an’ the lives of everyone else there, an’ ensured th’ success o’ the mission, which in turn denied th’ Hunters a vast strategic reserve o’ food an’ materiel. He’s one o’ the bravest men I know and my people may owe him our entire gods-damned future, not just from this but from other actions, too. He’s a hero in the deepest, most truest sense of the word, an’ that’s all there is to it.”

Well. If those words got back to Congress—and they would—then that just about put the rubber stamp on it.

“Well. To his health, then.” Sartori lifted his glass.

The toast was quite enthusiastic. Those at the table who didn’t know Arés personally had at least heard of him. Sartori wondered if it would warm the big man’s heart to know so many people were thinking of him, or if he’d rather have escaped the attention.

A little of both, probably. There was a certain thoughtful look in Daar’s eye, though. Something that made Sartori think he’d just had an idea…

But whatever it was, Daar didn’t share.

The next course arrived, and the conversation moved on.

Date Point: 18y10m1w AV
Forward Operating Base Alighieri, Planet Hell

Gabrielle Nyoni

There was a certain macho gallows humor doing the rounds among the deployed troops about how they were literally fighting on Planet Hell, and against cannibalistic alien monsters at that. There was something inherently absurd about the whole situation, and the soldiers were far from blind to it.

It would have been an overstatement to say they were revelling in it, but it was there, in the base’s unique, increasingly established culture. Heck, it was there in the base’s name.

Gabby got plenty of good shots. Men jawing and joking, or piled up and sleeping somewhere. But her favorite to date was of a Gaoian trooper watching his human counterparts with a distinctly puzzled expression, his ears askance and his head tilted while the humans riffed out on air guitar to an old videogame soundtrack that struck like a wall of murderous volume.

Then the opposite: the humans grinning and shaking their heads at Gaoian foibles like a pungent tray of pickled oily fish served with air-fried nava larvae. Gabby was even brave enough to try one: it was as airy as popcorn, as crunchy as a potato chip, and tasted almost, but not quite, like chicken.

Then there’d be an alarm, or shouting, and playtime stopped. Faster than she could follow, they were on their feet with weapons in hand, and then the room was empty.

Once upon a time, she and Marrek would have embedded themselves directly with a unit, gone on patrol with them, been there keeping their heads down while the bullets flew, getting to know the men. For several reasons, that just wasn’t feasible on Hell, and it certainly wasn’t safe. She felt like she was missing something by not getting that close to them, but…

…But it was hard enough to see them coming back.

There was a spirit to them, of either species. One thing she’d never foreseen was how the medics literally had to restrain some of their guys as they pulled them out of the fight, because they desperately wanted to keep fighting, even through their injuries. In a lot of cases, the pain of not being there alongside their team seemed to cause them more anguish than whatever wound they’d picked up.

Especially the nervejam patients. Physically whole, not a scratch on them, and therefore convinced they were ‘fuckin fine, it’s just a goddamn headache, get the fuck offa me…’ even while they slurred their words and couldn’t coordinate their movements.

There was a certain face that went with it, too. An expression. A rictus, really, or a fixed snarl. Like the human brain’s basic reaction to nervejam, assuming it didn’t knock them out or kill them outright, was to get incredibly fucking angry.

The Gaoians reacted differently. They got…trippy. A bad trip, if their luck wasn’t so great, so that they came back off the line as a ball of shaky fur, curled up and whimpering about whatever personal demons had come to visit.

Either way, Gabby had no desire to be anywhere near a nervejam pulse when it went off. Every so often she’d catch a glimpse of them across the river, like a strobe light going off. Even from that far away, they were…unpleasant, somehow. They looked like a migraine felt, though of course, on camera they were just flashes of light. The breathtaking shock of actually seeing one had a quality nobody could ever record.

There was something else, too. It turned out Marrek hadn’t quite got over his own battlefront demons. Whenever he got Hunters in view through his drone’s cameras, his tail drooped, his ears flattened and his hackles raised: A Gaoian in fight mode, his body naturally protecting all the most easily bitten bits.

And of course, he was a macho idiot about it. “Nah, ain’t nothin’ wrong, I just hate the fuckin’ things…”

“I mean…they get my pulse going and my palms sweaty too, but you really look like you’re about to try and fight one with your bare teeth, every time you see one,” Gabby replied.

They were going over their footage and pictures in the mess hall, eating with one hand while writing and selecting their best stuff with the other. ESNN’s editors were going to want a report within the next few hours, so of course they needed a script, Gabby’s voiceover and a selection of footage to set it all to.

The big story, of course, was the casualties. This was war in all its terrible glory, and a lot of the men and women shovelling food into their faces around her weren’t going to get out unscathed. There was a pretty much constant flow of stretchers through the medevac array, many of them showing no visible injury, but heavily sedated: the nervejam patients.

Every day since they’d arrived, a few flag-draped coffins had been carried with dignity onto the Array and sent home, too. Every day, the Gao lit some pyres. In contrast to the wars of the early 20th century, the fallen were only a trickle, but in contrast to the wars of the decades immediately prior to First Contact, they were a stream.

AEC’s official line was that, through diligence, training, professionalism and heroism, the casualty rates were actually somewhat below what they had predicted and prepared for. Gabby wasn’t quite sure what to do with that claim, so she’d just quoted it verbatim and left the viewers to form their own opinions. Presumably the editors would have something to say…

“Yeah, well.” Marrek tilted his head at a short bit of footage, then turned his tablet around to show her. An IFV, rolling back through the base’s gates with a nasty melted gouge down one side, the sure work of fusion claws. “Y’ain’t seen ‘em up close, an’ God or whatever willin’, ‘ya won’t. I din’t git these freeze-brands ‘fer nothin.’”

“Wait, those aren’t scars?” Gabby nodded, accepting the footage.

“Nope. Modern medicine don’t leave any,” he sniffed in a distinctly disgruntled sort of way as he turned the tablet back around to keep perusing. “So now a man’s gotta pay ‘ta commemorate anythin’ special. Fuckin’ ripoff it is.”

“They’re certainly…striking.”

“Yup.” Marrek pant-grinned happily. “Earned me a daughter!”

“Money well spent, then,” Gabby replied, drily.

“They git girls lookin’, don’t they? An’ don’ pretend ‘yer immune ‘ta big pretty muscles, I saw you lookin’ at that HEAT chungus. Gonzo, right? Judge me all ‘ya want, but I bet ‘yer hopin’ he buys you a little gold ring—”

Gabby gave him her patented Unimpressed Look, painted thinly on top of an amused smile. “Honestly, that’s too much for me.”

“The ring?”

“The boy. I’ve heard the rumors about them.”

“What sorta rumors?” He wagged his tail.

She didn’t dignify that with a direct reply, and forged ahead. “Big rumors, if you must know. And that’s just…not my thing. Even though he was super friendly out on the range.”

“And here I thought size mattered,” he sniffed with a sly pant-grin.

“Men always think that.”

“That’s ‘cuz it does. Gals always like ‘ta pretend it don’t.” He never tired of teasing, really.

“Speaking as a gal, I’ll keep my own opinions about what does and does not matter, thank you very much.” She crossed her arms, grinning despite herself.

“Oh, sure. Y’know my favorite bit ‘bout all this? Gaoians and Humans are so much alike it’s fuckin’ hilarious. I’ve seen gals in both species swear up an’ down ‘bout this an’ that, and then you turn around one day, an’ they’re datin’ the fuckin’ avatar of everythin’ they profess ‘ta hate. Kinda mixed signals there, don’t’cha think?”

“You know, you’re not doing any damage to that whole ‘chauvinist Brownie’ reputation.”

“That’s ‘cuz I’m speakin’ truth an’ you know it,” he chittered. “An’ I ain’t into it, but ‘yer super cute when ‘yer annoyed wit’ me.”

“Ohh, I see. You’re the sort of boy who thinks the best way to flirt with a woman is to piss them off. If you were human, you’d have been pulling girls’ hair in the playground.”

“I’ll let my record do the speaking,” he retorted, smugly, and folded his arms across his chest. “Also, I can smell ‘yer amusement. Makes the game a lot more easier!”

“Right, because that wagging tail knocking against the wall really makes you a closed book.” She picked up her coffee—a little too cold by now—and decided to drink it all before it completely reached room temperature.

“I don’t labor under any delusions ‘bout bein’ sneaky. Never have! You should try it sometime. Jus’ march right up to your target boy an’ say ‘you’ll do,’ an’ see what you get!”

Gabby barely managed to turn in time to avoid spitting her coffee out all over him and their stuff as she laughed. Instead it sprayed between her fingers and onto the floor in the most incredibly goddamn glamorous way possible.

“Urgh…you win this round.”

He chittered, but sportingly helped her clean up the mess.

“I promise, ‘m’okay, though,” he added, once the coffee-soaked paper towels were in the trash. “S’jus’…”

“Okay.” Gabby nodded. “Let’s get that report finished, hey?”

“Yeah.”

They knuckled down to work, and managed to finish their script, record the voiceover, and send it all back to ESNN a whole ten minutes before it was due. They’d need to have another one ready tomorrow, but for now, they could relax. Not that they ever did. Nobody else was, here.

The war stopped for nobody.

Date point: 18y10m1w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Senior Master Sergeant Christian (Righteous) Firth

He stood on the scale with his phone recording, hoping today was the day. Metal squealed and deformed under his bare feet: Err0r was all it could manage, before winking out forever. Good. Christian was now officially the biggest human alive, and probably also the strongest, too. With that size came mass, and with that mass came power. With all that strength came speed, and the two together would make him a hell of a force to reckon with. He was just getting started and he had nowhere to go but up. Way up. All his numbers were improving ridiculously fast. He felt powerful, more nimble than ever. Better. A good feeling, really…

And a good distraction from the pain. Not just in his aching muscles or belly, either. He owed it to one of the best men in his life to use his gifts to their fullest, and be the best he possibly could. So, Firth and the rest of the Beefs were doing just that, and sharing every second of the experience with ‘Horse.

Solidarity in pain and gain, or something like that.

It was a good workout. He pulled Playboy up off the mat, checked he was okay. Grinned when he stepped on the scale and nothing happened. “Too late,” Firth drawled. “I finally smushed it.”

“Jeez,” Julian shook his head. “Left your footprints in the fuckin’ top plate! I was feelin’ all that on the mat, too.” He tilted his head curiously. “Finally beat him, huh?”

There was certain pride to go with that, even if he wasn’t happy about the circumstances. “First record o’ his to fall, yeah. Too bad I don’t know by how much…” he grumbled. “Anyhoo. I’ll be smashin’ the rest now too, an’ pretty quick I bet. On that note…you do your talk, yet?”

“Yeah. They’re nervous, but they’re supportive. I promised I’d be smart about it, but…”

“Good. Be smart about it, y’hear? This shit ain’t ‘yer livin’ th’ same way it is ‘fer me, so listen to ‘yer body an’ don’t be an idjit like me! You an’ I got the most ridiculous genetics ever, so we’re gonna lean on that instead of doin’ what ‘Horse did, ‘cuz that’s how he’d want us to do. We’re gonna be smart ‘bout this, yijao? He learned shit the hard way so we don’t need to.”

“Yi. It’s a marathon,” he noted seriously, “not a sprint. I’m hopin’ to live a long damn time.”

Firth nodded approvingly. “Damn right. Now, go let the sport doc give you his spiel, sign off an’ all that. And…thanks ‘fer comin’ along with me on this. It’ll be nice ‘ta have a bud.”

“No worries,” he nodded seriously. “I’ve got my own reasons for this. You gonna talk to Nofl?”

“Yeah. I wanna know, man. Way too much weird shit in my life to ignore, y’know?”

“Yeah. See you tomorrow.” With that, the two said their goodbyes for the day with a bro-slamming hug. Quick shower, then they were off on their own; they both had work to do. Julian had his sit-in turn with Adam—he was pretty independent now, but he still needed watching in case anything went sideways—so Julian was off to the apartments, hopefully to cheer the big guy up.

Firth sent a text to Adam to brag a bit too, because he’d love that.

broke yer scale, little guy

[attached video: 4.6 MB]

haha u fat fucc
bet you can’t touch yr toes

Firth tried, just for fun.

knees straight palms flat on the ground
beat that u lil midget
nah might fall over still kinda wobbly

…Fuck.

rite sarry
no worries gettin better!
go duckin smash it bruh
already did
imma beat yr squat later today too
haha nah u weak bitch still
betcha a steak u cant

Well, hell. Why not? Firth grinned as he agreed. It was good to see ‘Horse in good spirits.

Still, his first bit of business that morning proved sobering. Firth knocked on the door, and Costello beckoned him in. Firth got right to business. “He’s pretty chipper, sir. Thank fuck he’s such a fundamentally happy guy, despite, y’know. Everythin’ in his life. So long as he’s makin’ progress…”

“I’ll take whatever blessings we can get,” Costello nodded. “How’s his recovery?”

“Eh. Progressing, like I said. Still has trouble with fine motor control. Still gets mentally fatigued if he’s up an’ walkin’ too much. Slow but steady on both. Hasn’t lost any strength yet, but we can already tell his conditioning’s shot to shit.”

“It’s always the first thing to go when you get laid up,” Costello intoned sagely.

“Ayup. Playboy’s got watch with him right now. An’ so far anyway, th’ anti-seizure medicine’s keepin’ him safe.”

“Right.” Costello sighed. “On that note.”

“Word back from the medical College, I hear?”

“Ayup.” He gestured to a seat, but these days Firth had to resort to ‘Horse’s stool instead, which complained loudly under his weight. “They’re adamant that further surgical correction is inadvisable for now. They are ‘pleased with his progress,’ but think a full recovery will take over a year.”

Fuck. “Yeah. We sorta expected that. And…the seizures?”

Costello sighed again, and fidgeted a bit before delivering the bad news. “They are unable and unwilling to offer any sort of guarantees. So…he’ll never be out from under that.”

“…Yeah. Din’t think he ever would be, if I’m honest. It’d be askin’ ‘em to prove a negative.”

“Yeah.”

They sat in silence for a moment, contemplating the problem morosely.

“Update about the Crude,” Costello ventured eventually. “What happened to ‘Horse has got them spooked. Quote: ‘In light of recent personnel issues, and in order to further mission success, our suspension of the resistance factor for in-service operators shall continue indefinitely.’ So…guess we’ll all be forever twenty-one until we decide to retire.”

“Or git retired,” Firth pointed out, a bit bitterly. “On that note…sir.” Costello already knew what Firth was gonna say, judging by the look on his face. “If that’s the word, we can’t delay anymore, not even for his sake. Medical board’s gonna have their say if we don’t make a decision.”

“I know.”

“Sir…he can’t be on the teams anymore. Not even in a reserve capacity. It’s too dangerous for all of us havin’ a human bull who might spaz out at the worst fuckin’ time. Ain’t fair on anyone, him least.”

Costello sighed. “I know. I guess some part of me had hoped they could fix up his seizures…”

“Ain’t no fixin’ that, from what I hear. An’ the service docs all the way up at the fuckin’ pentagon have been debatin’ this. All of ‘em wanted ‘Horse to stay in. But they can’t do it.”

“And we can’t justify the risk, even if we had a say in it at this point.”

“No.” Firth sighed. It felt like sentencing his friend to death. “So we oughta make it official. ‘Horse already knows it’s comin’ of course but he deserves to hear it for real. An’ I think he needs the slap in the face too, if he’s gonna figger out the rest of his life.”

“You’re right. I’m not completely sure how to navigate this, given he’s US Space Force…”

“I got friends. I’ll have someone git in touch, sir. General Miller will probably be the guy.”

“…Right.”

Neither of them said anything for a bit.

“…What else, sir?”

Costello looked down at his papers, and re-shuffled them as if attempting to file away the previous conversation. “How are you coming along?”

“You mean, am I gittin’ good enough ‘ta replace ‘Horse and do my job too?”

“Well, nobody can quite replace him, but…”

Firth looked down and studied his hands. It was a thing to look at ‘em these days. Biggest, broadest, roughest hands of anyone besides an actual emperor bear.

“Well…I s’pose a bit of a story is the best answer, if you’ll indulge me, sir.”

Costello nodded.

“Right. So…years ago, just after capitol station? Me an’ Horse had a sorta private moment. First time I really got how much I’d just been coastin’ on natural ability, y’know? I asked him ‘ta help make me the best there is at this job, ‘cuz we knew even then that I was about the only dude who won the genetic lottery harder’n him. Turns out I won it the hardest but that’s ‘fer later.”

“Now that’s a scary thought…so why, then?”

There was a lot loaded in that question, but it was important to answer. “Why has ‘Horse been draggin’ me all these years? Couple’a reasons. First biggest reason was I’m fifteen years older an’ I’d not been gentle on myself. Took years ‘ta reverse all that body-debt. Second reason’s bigger, though, an’ it’s a big part o’ why this shit’s really gonna hurt ‘fer him. So ‘fore I answer that, lemme ask you this: what would you do if you were in his shoes?”

Costello looked thoughtful for a few moments. “Well, I suppose what I’d have to. Move on. Not saying it’d be fun or anything, but…”

“Right. Now, consider what that means. ‘Fer you, that’d be, oh, drop two hundred kilos or so, git fixed up an’ maybe ‘refurbed’ I guess we’re callin’ it now…and move on. You’d still be a goddamn monster by normal standards but you’d fit in most anywhere.”

“Ah.” He got it quick. “Because I’m just a hulked-out normal man, more or less. But he’s more.”

“Much more, sir. He could drop half his weight and he’d still officially be a Beef. Same wit’ me now. We’re that massive, but the difference is I’m built to be a giant, whereas he’s just crammed super dense an’ basically filled to fuckin’ bustin’ with muscle, and that’s even with having forced his frame to grow bigger over the years to accommodate it all. He’s basically a science experiment in how far his willpower could possibly go when teamed up with bleeding-edge sports medicine and actual fuckin’ spacemagic. Doin’ all that’s made him uniquely fuckin’ capable. I’m gonna hafta grow much stronger an’ faster than he ever was, an’ study the shit outta everything he knows, just so’s I can mebbe match his combat utility to the team. He’s the best, an’ he’s made himself into one of a kind.”

“He can’t walk away.” Costello said aloud, rhetorically.

“No. He’ll always be what he is. Only way out for him is inevitability, like it is for all of us. And so, back to my story. We spent years basically re-habbing me while I grew into the mission over time. Like how we all did, y’know? But, oh, a few years back? Like, a little ‘fore Daar was crowned the Great Father? I could feel shit was healed up. Hard feelin’ to describe. Could see it in the mirror, too. Lookit my face, sir. It’s handsome instead of broken all ‘ta fuck. Second chance at life, right?”

“…I think I see where this is going…”

“Yeah, but lemme finish, please. Anyhoo, I started growin’ like a weed but we both decided, y’know what? There’s pushin’ it, and there’s pushin’ it. Why bother? I weren’t never gonna fit in anywhere anyway, ‘cuz I was a super-heavyweight wrestler when I was fuckin’ thirteen. Why make it worse? I was one o’ those freaks that’d started showin’ up here ‘n there a couple decades ago, and knowin’ Julian’s story? An’ my own family history? Well, I ain’t asked Nofl yet, but I’m gonna today, an’ I think we both know what kinda answer he’s gonna give.”

“…Right. And by some degree that same sort of story probably accounts for a lot of what we’re seeing on-team and elsewhere.”

“Some of it, yeah. More of it I think is just genuine human badassery, now that we’re lettin’ go of bad ideas and such…but yeah. Anyway. Both of us were of the opinion that, ‘fer health an’ longevity reasons, mebbe I didn’t need ‘ta risk goin’ as hard as he did, ‘cuz we were both pretty much good ‘fer the mission. But that was a while ago. Things have been gettin’ dire this last year. When the Corti told us they were gonna ‘temporarily’ suspend the engineered resistance for us active types…I knew. An’ so…we started work on me.”

“None of us failed to notice you were growing at an alarming rate.”

“Yeah. An’ now, I’m hopin’ ‘fer a second kid, and, uh…other stuff in my personal life? I can’t walk away from this mission. Ever. Too much rides on it. My wife, my kid, my next kid. Maybe more people I care about, soon enough. An’ there’s only four guys who could possibly do this. We’re ‘bout to tell one of ‘em he’s gotta retire. Julian’s busy doing important civilian shit an’ he ain’t the type ‘ta suit up anyway. Gonzo’s got years o’ seasoning and catchup to do before he’s ready…”

“Leaving just you.” Costello sighed again. “Are…are you sure? I love ‘Horse to death, but nobody’s taught me the consequences of this life more than him.”

“I’m more’n sure. I started the ramp-up to all this almost a year ago an’ now I’m ‘bout to go all the way. Of us four? I’ve got hands down the best genetics an’ the best possible build to my frame to do this. Who else? Yan? He’s a monster, yeah, an’ physically he’s a better fuckin’ natural specimen than any of us, but we both know he ain’t really gonna be a team member, an’ I’m gonna use everythin’ I got to blow past him anyway. You can’t tell me we don’t need what I can do.”

“No,” he agreed, reluctantly. “No I can’t. And you’ve clearly thought this through, too.” Costello sat back and frowned at the whiteboard on his wall. “…Of course, I’ve got no designs on quitting, myself. Don’t think anybody in this unit does.”

“No, but y’all are in a different situation than us,” he said, referring to their short-manned officer corps. “Like I said, you could. I mean…lookit me. Lookit the diff’rence.”

He didn’t bother with any of the showy shit. He didn’t need to. Not even bespoke t-shirts or pants were any kind of modest on him, these days. He didn’t even need to stand up.

Still, Costello took his point with a nod. “Right. No going back for you. Or any of the Lads.”

“Weren’t ever normal ‘fer me, boss. I’m over seven feet tall naturally and I ain’t never fit my shoulders through doors since I turned fuckin’ twelve. Most guys this tall are lanky as shit. I never was. I won’t list all the ways I’m the fuckin’ best, ‘cuz you know ‘em already, so let’s just say I’m better-suited to this shit than anyone, period. Even ‘Horse. I got a thicker neck an’ I still got wider shoulders’n him, an’ they’ll get even wider when I finally start pushin’ myself like he did. So…take a good long look at what I am, knowin’ I ain’t even close ‘ta filled out yet, an’ tell me you wouldn’t want a big mean fucker like me on the team, maxxed out an’ in the fight.”

Costello nodded, maybe unconsciously.

Firth nodded back. “Not jus’ me, neither. Any of us superfreaks, ‘cuz almost nobody’s got the genetics to even qualify ‘fer indoc, an’ less’n one percent of them can even attempt this shit successfully, let alone be any good at it, let alone keep up with the mission demand year after year. Look at what our little band o’ freaks has ‘ta do to ourselves just ‘ta keep up! Now: imagine what takin’ that away from ‘Horse is gonna be like, sir. It’s gonna rip his fuckin’ heart out. He’s one of the rarest few, an’ he can’t fight no more. An’ we gotta do it, ‘cuz we gotta figure out how to blaze that trail ‘fer the rest of us too.”

Was that the most meatheaded little speech he’d ever given? Yeah. But, well, he was on a team of special-purpose swollbros on a very, very specific and deadly serious mission. His body was his weapon, in a way and to a degree that wasn’t true of anyone else anywhere in the human world. His only real peers were a couple o’ space gorillas an’ fuckin’ murderbears for God’s sake.

That wasn’t nearly as awesome as it sounded when he first signed up, honestly.

Costello musta been thinking the same thing and nodded, grimly. “I know some of the Lads make noises about retiring once the war’s won, but…”

Firth shook his head. “Nah.”

“Right. You’re right. Sooner or later, somehow, we’ll all face what ‘Horse is going through now.”

“Yeah. An’ maybe his real mission now is figgerin’ out how ‘fer the rest of us. I dunno. I know I s’posedly got a high IQ and all that, but this sorta shit makes me feel dumb as hell.”

“I don’t think any of us feel particularly clever about anything lately, Firth.”

“No.”

They sat for another minute, contemplating. Firth waited until it seemed appropriate, and broached the next bit. “I’ve…got some ideas ‘fer him. First part is some kinda retirement job, while medical does its thing an’ he gets whatever medal he’s due. I think we can justify a full-time training NCO right now, yeah?”

“Absolutely,” Costello nodded, visually happy for some way forward. “I’ll get started on that right way. What else?”

“Well, I doubt he’ll give up any of his size or strength. I wouldn’t, after having paid that kinda price. So we gotta jus’ mebbe find a good fit. I mean, he’d be good for full-time search and rescue, right? An’ I know people are always lookin’ ‘fer medics. There’s gotta be room ‘fer someone with his talents, yijao? Firefighter, mebbe? Security?”

“That last one might have possibilities,” Costello mused. “Word is the AEC is gonna be spinning up a joint special security unit for all the diplomats and ambassadors and whatnot here…”

“Mebbe.” Firth was a bit dubious, but best to see what developed. “It’s options, anyway. An’ if ‘ya let me, I’ll start pokin’ my nose around…”

“Please do. I’ll do the same.” They nodded, on the same page. Good. That was good.

Things didn’t feel quite so oppressive anymore.

Costello had some unfinished business, though. “Right. So, if you’re committed, and ready to do this, then the last thing I gotta do is sign off on your sports medicine approval, I take it.”

Firth nodded. That was one of the reasons he’d come to visit. “Got the forms ready to go.”

“I presume our medical overlord has given you the full brief of how dangerous this can be.”

“He has. I’m also the only guy on-team with a higher Crude sensitivity than ‘Horse, or with a better tissue cross-section and bloodworks. Not even Julian’s better’n me by the sheer numbers. Nobody’s in a better position to do this than me, sir. Nobody else can at this level.”

“…Very well.” He glanced at his computer, checked his inbox, found the message, and signed off. “Right. Authorized. Be a hero, Firth. But don’t be a fool.”

Firth relaxed, but pressed his point. “Not sure of the difference. But this shit matters, boss. So yeah, I’m gonna do this right. Hell, I’mma do it better, ‘cuz I am better, we got ‘Horse’s experience ‘ta draw from, I’m in a way better place ‘ta start, I’m big enough ‘ta go even harder, I got Julian bein’ a bro an’ doin’ mosta this shit wit’ me, an’ to top it all off I ain’t gonna be splittin’ my trainin’ time ‘tween murder an’ medicine. We can’t rely on our Gaoian friends ‘ta solve our problems ‘fer us, an’ I ain’t gonna cede shit ‘ta Yan. I’mma fukkin’ smash his gorilla ass, too. ‘Cuz bein’ honest? It’d be nice ‘ta reclaim some o’ that Human terror.”

“…Can’t argue that. It’s an insane kind of thing, what we’re doing.”

“In it to win it, sir. It’s time ‘fer me to step up an’ fill his big fuckin’ boots. I’mma make ‘Horse look like a little boy, beat him at everythin’ by every fuckin’ measure, ‘cuz that’s what he’s secretly been hopin’ I’d do ‘fer years, an’ now I ain’t got any reasons ‘ta hold back anymore. Wish’d I’d committed sooner, but the only way I’m leavin’ this mission now is when I can’t do it no more, however it comes.”

That was a sobering thought. But it was true.

He was committed. They all were. For ‘Horse, for themselves.

All the way.

Date Point:18y10m1w AV
Jzzkrv’v’ikkt Station, Vzk’tk Domain

Associate (‘fer now!) Bruuk o’ Clan Stoneback

Workhouse talamay would put hair on even a Corti’s balls, if they still had any. Or, more likely kill ‘em. It could strip the wax right offa floor too, Bruuk knew that from experience. Or disinfect a ‘Back from th’ inside!

It was the bestest. Because firstly, it was cheap. An’ secondly, while it took a stupid amount before a Gao got all weird and dizzy like Humans did, it didn’t take much of the real fiery cheap stuff to loosen up attitudes, get everyone happy an’ playful…

Perfect, ‘fer keepin’ an ear ‘ta the wall, or whatever that sayin’ was. Or was it floor? Nah, that din’t make sense, y’couldn’t hear shit that way. Had’ta be wall.

‘Sides, he was rollin’ on the floor wit’ a couple big guys, anyway. Wilde called it “little man syndrome” which was laughable bein’ Bruuk was three times bigger’n him, but whatever. Tall males loved bein’ tall, and Bruuk loved remindin’ them how much it din’t matter sometimes.

But it was all in good fun. His wrasslin’ dummy tonight was a ship’s chief engineer, an’ after loosening him up (first with drinks, then by folding him into interesting shapes), he had some interesting stories ‘ta tell.

“Weird ships?”

“Yeah. Skipper had me do a full diagnostic on th’ long range sensors ‘cuz it jus’ din’t make sense. But, nope. Nothin’ wrong with ‘em.”

“Well, weird how?”

“Smooth. like…huge mass, goin’ fast as Keeda after his nuts got burned, but makin’ a real gentle spacetime wake, yijao? Reckon we only even picked ‘em up ‘cuz we got those new sensors, the Gei-Gei type nine-hunnerd-sixty multifunction array.”

That probably meant something important, but Bruuk had no idea what, so he memorized the number and plowed on. “So, stuff we prob’ly shouldn’t be able ‘ta see, suddenly we’re seein’ it.”
.
“Well, yeah, that’s what Gei-Gei promised. S’posed ta be good for sniffin’ out Hunters waitin’ in ambush at low warp. Only instead, you head out toward the rimward end of spacelane, uh…ah, I forget. It’s one of the old precursor empires, y’know? Guys not even the Corti ever met. There’s a couple archeology digs out there, pickin’ over what they left behind. Steady regulars, pay well ‘fer stuff, an’ they’ve always got interestin’ stuff ‘ta bring back. Reckon our skipper makes half his money sellin’ old alien shit ‘ta collectors an’ museums. Anyway, our whole trip out there we were seein’ these fast, high-mass, low-wake sigs at extreme range, jus’ carryin’ on like they din’t know we could see ‘em.”

Interesting. Bruuk committed that to memory too, trusting that Urgug might know which rough end of space the ol’ Gao was talkin’ about.

And Wilde. He had to tell the captain, too. The whole thing smelled of the sort of thing their Whitecrest bosses would love to know.

“….Shit. I prolly shouldn’ta told ‘ya that…” the engineer rumbled, suddenly. “We got a good thing goin’, don’ want’cha stealin’ it.”

“I’m not th’ type ‘ta snitch,” Bruuk said, truthfully. “An’ our skipper ain’t that kinda guy. He’s this really badass Human, actually. Lost an eye in the war.”

“I thought I smelled Human on ‘ya! Are they…all they’re cracked up ‘ta be?”

“Well,” Bruuk took another swig of his talamay, “He is, I’d say. Puts up more of a fight than you!”

“Hah! Good ‘fer him! ‘Yer gonna hafta show me jus’ how you flattened me so easy…”

“Wit’ this!” He flexed outrageously. “You tall males always take ‘yer strength ‘fer granted!”

And…so on. It was a fun evening, and maybe he’d made a friend for another day. They were regulars to the station, after all.

Rather’n have too much fun though, Bruuk made his apologies and returned to the Fortune while what he’d learned was still fresh. He might not have a Human’s weakness of gettin’ all dumb and passin’ out and stuff on talamay, but it still tended ‘ta dull the ol’ noggin.

Urgug turned a very interested shade of greenish-blue as he listened.

“I think I know the territory he was referring to,” he decided, once Bruuk was done sharing.

“Who’d it belong to?”

“I cannot pronounce their own name. By all accounts they communicated in ultrasonic frequencies, high above what I can hear or utter. The OmoAru called them the WeiMeYrU-Uym. A constitutional monarchy, prior to their collapse.”

Ian grinned. “No shit?”

Urgug rumbled and fluttered pink. “No, as you say, shit.”

“Let me guess. Hierarchied to death?”

“Decades of political strife led to balkanization and internecine war, spurred by a number of acts of treachery whenever any attempt was made at negotiating a peace. Eventually, the few survivors were too weakened to fight off a Hunter invasion, and the whole Swarm finished them off. So, almost certainly yes.”

“Hmm.” Ian rumbled. “And now we have mystery ships operating in the area. That sounds like something we shouldn’t ignore. I’ll get started on a draft report and talk with Morwk, see if our own sensors can pick up what those Gei-Gei ones can. Would you fill in the details?”

“Yeah, lemme go git started on’ dinner. We’re doin’ veg fritters an’ a nice everybody curry.”

Curry, apparently, was a word for “buncha spices in a stew” and among humans, usually meant a lot of cumin too. On their ship, it meant something tasty from basically everywhere, and was a good way to get everyone to agree on the menu. Also a good way to make the veg diet a bit less soul-crushing; they couldn’t have meat every day, sadly, so supplement pills for Bruuk, something similar for Ian, and lots of protein powder for both of them.

They’d finally found a bulk brand that didn’t make them fart like sick naxas, too.

He did have to keep Wilde’s tastes in check, though. The big human’s preference for what constituted “curry” was a nose-melting chemical warfare concoction that brought physical pain to Bruuk just bein’ in the same damn room. They’d tried letting him have his own pot o’ curry paste to add to the dish once it was served, but…no. Poor Dora had fled the room to go rinse her antennae, an’ Bruuk’s sinuses had been fuckin’ sterilized after he opened it at the table.

Apparently even other humans found his tastes to be a bit much.

Anyway, this curry was heavy on gaoian lentils tonight, just ‘cuz they basically cooked themselves. He needed th’ time to drink water an’ get the talamay out of his system before he earned a headache.

Which left him with shower thoughts once the pot was simmering, he’d had his workout (new PRs!) and he’d sweat it all out. He did a lot of thinking in the shower, really. Had ‘ta stay clean ‘fer the rest of the crew.

…Conditioner an’ fur oil was workin’ wonders on his coat, too…

Anyway. What had they found? Weird ships with low-wake drives could mean lots a things, but a lotta the ideas that crossed his mind didn’t really fit. Some kinda smugglin’ outfit woulda been closer ‘ta civilization. Pirates, maybe, but if so they were rangin’ a long way from their base to operate. And there weren’t no spacefaring civilizations in that part o’ space no more…

Hunters? Unlikely. It was a long fuckin’ way from their territory, they were tied up in a war right now, an’ they’d never leave somethin’ as vulnerable as an archeological dig or light trading ship alone.

As far as Bruuk could think of, that left the Entity, and the Hierarchy.

Either way, Whitecrest was gonna be interested. Which meant a long-ass haul out to that end o’ civilization in their near future. He’d have to make sure they were properly stocked up.

His tail was waggin’ though. This kinda mystery was what their ship an’ crew was for. Even if it turned out to be nothin’ important, it was good ‘ta still feel like they were sniffin’ stuff out, findin’ out the galaxy’s secrets and bein’ useful.

His phone pinged: the timer on the lentils, and a reminder from Ian to fill in his details on the report when he had a minute. Bruuk pant-grinned to himself, and jumped to do both.

He loved his job.

Date Point: 18y11m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

RE: Master Sergeant Adam Arés

Letter for notes

Today’s post-injury counselling session was challenging. As expected, as his recovery progresses and he continues to suffer a marked slowness and loss of physical prowess, Sergeant Arés’ mental health has suffered too. He describes depression, a feeling of uselessness, and intrusive thoughts. He admitted today that the thought has crossed his mind a few times that “everyone woulda been better off if I’d just died.” He strongly asserted that he rejects this thought, believes it to be untrue, and he is grateful for his survival, but it nevertheless has plagued him a few times and he “hates to be a burden.”

His team of course does not consider him a burden at all, and I made a point of relaying that to him. He agreed that while he knows this intellectually, it is not easy to internalize. Or, in his own words: “Yeah, I know, but my stupid fuckin’ monkey brain doesn’t believe it, you know?”

The official word of his impending medical board has made these feelings much stronger. He is also beginning to feel his strength loss acutely now, in an increasing stiffness, a decreased appetite, and a paucity of opportunity to properly engage. To say that is having a drag on his mental well-being would be a colossal understatement.

He explained that these last few days have been especially difficult for him. It is a HEAT tradition to participate in the city’s Halloween celebrations by dressing in costume, and Arés has greatly enjoyed this in the past, especially taking pride in creating his own costumes. Furthermore, he was looking forward to creating costumes for his wife and sons this year. Being unable to do so, and missing the chance to join in the festivities, is clearly quite a blow. He states very firmly that one of his recovery goals is to participate fully next year.

He and I are both reluctant to prescribe anything at this point. If his physical recovery continues on pace and translates into mental recovery as we both hope, it is likely that he will not need anything. I will consider starting him on Citalopram if necessary.

We performed some guided relaxation and bodily awareness exercises, which he called “helpful.” In the meantime, he is finding some reward in re-assuming his duties as training NCO. It is my understanding that command is formalizing the position into its own billet, both to accommodate the team’s growing needs and, frankly, as a career cushion for Arés.

I will see him again next week, or on an urgent basis as necessary.

-Lt.Cmdr K. Mears
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

Date Point: 18y11m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Freya Firth

“Only one left to go,” Christian said with a grin, in-between shoveling bites of steak and rice into his mouth. She knew what he was talking about, of course, and didn’t bother to hide her pride in her giant cavehulk finally claiming his rightful place in the order of things.

“So quick! How does he feel about it?”

“Called me a lil’ bitch ‘fer takin’ so long.” No more talking. More steak.

She grinned, and went to check in on Joseph, who was busy building a small city with his blocks. Mostly that seemed to consist in stacking blocks as high as he possibly could before they tumbled over, then grumping about it for a few seconds and starting over. A little too grumpy, actually.

Definitely naptime. Thankfully he was usually pretty easy to put to sleep.

She’d chosen right when she married Christian. He’d given her a son to be proud of, and he’d proven to be the sort of man that a two-meter amazon like her could feel safe and protected by. Not that she really needed it—most men weren’t remotely her match—but she wasn’t one to deny her feelings, or get wrapped around the weird political crap that seemed to follow that sort of thing around like a fume. Besides, there was just something wonderful about a man who had to look down to smile at her, instead of crane his neck and make a nervous short-joke or something. No intimidated good manners from her man, just old-fashioned stoic solidness.

…Who could effortlessly put her in her place, when they felt like playing that sort of game.

She was proud of the men he associated with, too. Especially ‘Horse, these days. They’d always been a bit…well. She had dated Adam first, and while physically speaking he was the sort of man she’d wanted, even if he was pretty damn short at the time, he’d had more growing up to do, emotionally and otherwise. And he’d done that growing, to the point he was a good father and slightly taller than her, now…but she had no regrets. Firth was the best.

He’d been a sort of ruined Adonis-slash-Hercules when they’d first met, a man who’d lived life hard and loved every second of it. But underneath the wear and tear, she could see the real goods on offer. She’d claimed him before he’d even realized it, and once they’d got to really know each other it was obvious they’d be together forever. She of course admired Adam’s dedication, even if she worried at how extremely far he’d pushed himself…but no. He was a big selfless hero. Admirable, but she wasn’t looking for a hero. Heroes often got themselves killed. What she wanted was a man, and a man protected his own above all else.

On that score, Firth had zero competition. He was a protector, a provider, and a warrior. He didn’t pretend to any higher ideals, or harbor a burning anger at the universe for being uncaring and terrible. What he cared about was right in front of him. He wasn’t a complicated man.

That history had always been slightly awkward until everyone got married and had kids, but even still: the two had always been insanely competitive with each other, especially at the beginning when she was dating between the two. They cared too much about each other to let a woman get between them—proof of their real merit, that—but that fierce energy had never fully dissipated. Every little thing was a well-meaning-but-serious competition, especially over the last year as Christian ramped himself up and finally started winning their boy games. It was endearing, and weirdly wholesome, even if it occasionally devolved into literal dick-measuring.

Not anymore. Adam had done something appallingly heroic and was paying the price for it. Their rivalry had evaporated instantly, and Christian being the man he was, was doing everything he could to step up and provide for his friend and the team.

It was causing a bit of friction in their home life, though. And it was making Freya think about what she’d do, in Martina’s position. How well she’d cope, going through the same thing.

And…how likely that was. What kind of a beached, stranded position their marriage was in, knowing that he was already committed to something that would command him until it destroyed him, one way or the other. He’d vowed to push himself further than Adam had ever managed himself, and by all evidence, he would succeed. What was that going to mean for them?

If everyone had a devil on their shoulder, then Freya’s was whispering terrible things about Martina being…lucky. This was going to be a hard and painful transition for them, but afterwards she’d have a family that wasn’t being pulled on from the outside, and the burden would have shifted onto Freya’s family instead.

The angel on the other shoulder was shocked, disgusted and murderously angry at that thought, but it was just a whisper, nothing more. Mostly, she was just glad her friend was alive, glad two kids got to grow up with a daddy, and glad the people she loved weren’t grieving on top of needing to put their lives together again.

Though, the devil had something else to say, too. ‘Cuz the Lads were notoriously horny, which Christian blamed on the medical regime keeping them in a permanent young adulthood. All it took was a stray thought, a stiff breeze, eating a grape…

It turned out he was the worst case of them all, even worse than Adam, both because of who he was and the training he endured. It left him with needs. And Christian didn’t believe in taking care of his more acute needs by himself in private. Not when he had a willing wife. And though Freya was willing, she was beginning to feel put upon.

Every morning good and hard, which to be fair, was a wonderful way to wake up. Every evening he could get, for as long as he could manage, and he was so good it was hard to say no…

But now he was sneaking home over lunch, visiting her on her own breaks at the clinic…

For a while, it was delightful. He was pursuing her, like they were teenagers again! It felt good to be desired and he was a wonderfully attentive lover, for all his aggression. But after a while…

There was only so much pursuing a soul could want before she started to hanker for something else. Especially when she had a two-year-old to manage. She had a house and a job to balance, there was only so much nap time in the day to get stuff done, and they’d pretty much agreed they were going to have another one before long, too.

Not quite yet, though. A pregnancy would just make all her timekeeping troubles worse. Fortunately, Christian was a perceptive man.

“I wonder how Marty deals with it?” She asked the room, sometime after they’d eaten, cleaned up, and after she’d rebuffed yet another of his (admittedly playful) advances with a giggle.

He looked confused for a moment, and then a flash of hurt…but he got her meaning.

“Well…shit.”

“I just don’t know how you have the energy left, with how hard you train!”

“You feed me real good, I’m young again an’ I’m a big boy too. I s’pose that’s got somethin’ to do with it. Always been th’ biggest horndog I’ve ever known… Fuck, am I really that bad?”

“You’re a big bunny rabbit.” She glanced at the top of his head, pictured a couple of ears sprouting from his scalp, grinned, and stroked them. “It’s not just the medicine, right? You feeling stressed out?”

“Shit. Mebbe. We’ve all been…y’know. Fuck darlin’, ‘Horse means the world to me, like he’s a little brother or somethin’. We’ve all been tryin’ ‘ta step up how he’d want us to.”

“And you more than the others.”

“Yeah. ‘Cuz I can and ‘cuz I gotta. But we’ve had that talk already.”

“And this goes on, what? Forever?”

He looked uncomfortable, and squirmed on his spot on the floor; their couch was off-limits to him until they could replace it with something sturdier.

“Well…darlin’ what options do I got? It ain’t just being on a team like this. It ain’t just that we’re a one-of-a-kind thing, and we’re a thing that the war would be lost without. I am literally the only one who can do this, an’ if I don’t the team’s gonna hurt. How the hell am I supposed to walk away from that? If I do, the mission could fail an’ that’s not a thing most guys like me gotta face. Usually, we’re replaceable. HEAT Lads really ain’t.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Well…fuck! What do you expect o’ me? I’ll tone it down, sure. No problem.”

“But what’s that going to mean for you?” She decided some soothing was in order. So she grabbed a bowl of jerky (because of course they had that lying around) and sat pressed up next to him, offering him her support.

“I’m sorry,” he offered after a moment.

“Don’t be sorry for that. All I’m asking is…I dunno. Some breathing room, maybe? For both of us. You can’t fuck away all that pressure, bunny.”

“I know. It’s also, maybe…we talked about another kid. Been on my mind a lot.”

Ah. “Okay. We can talk that out. But…bunny. Serious talk for a moment.”

“This ain’t serious?”

“Well, ‘more seriouser.’”

That got a snort out of him. “Darlin’, don’t be gettin’ all our bad habits now.”

“I like that one, it takes some of the edge off. But, here’s the thing. When I married you, in church and all that, I took a vow before God that I would love and cherish you until the end of our lives. I mean it. So…look. Please, please don’t let this get out of control, okay?”

She loaded a lot of meaning into that, hoping he’d understand…

He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tight. “So did I. I promised I’d keep honesty between us, too. So…yeah. It’s a thing, darlin’. But I can manage it. Mebbe I just needed to be more mindful, y’know? I’ll make it work. I promise.”

“And if…if you still have needs? There’s…I’m not close-minded. I love you, I know you love me, and…” She couldn’t actually voice it.

He looked distraught, and shook his head. “No. That ain’t me. I will keep my promise and be honest with you, the whole way. I swore it then and I mean it now.”

Satisfied, Freya slid down off the couch and into his arms, and got the cuddle—just a cuddle—she’d been craving for a good while now. Comfortable silence ruled for a few minutes.

Until Christian broke it, of course. “…So…is Bunny my new nickname now or somethin’?”

“I kinda like it.”

“I dunno. I’m a pretty murdery bunny.”

“Mhm. Murderbunny. I like it!”

“Eh.” He shrugged in good humor. “I’ve been called worse. An’ you git a special pass.”

“I’d better!”

He chuckled at that one, but the moment had to end eventually. The gripy sounds of a waking toddler through the baby monitor did it. They both listened for a second in case he went back to sleep but…nope. There was that first high complaining noise.

Christian rumbled, and started to get up. “My turn.”

“Thanks.”

Life never stopped. And there were a lot of things still to work out. A whole conversation looming on the horizon about anti-aging therapy and stuff, ‘cuz she’d be damned before she grew to look like some cougar with a boy-toy when he was actually almost two decades older. But, she’d taken a bite out of her worries. That was good. Keep doing that, keep talking, and things would stay good.

And that meant, when the day did finally come when their family had to face what the Arés family was going through now, they’d be tough enough to get through together.

Which was all she wanted, really.

Date Point: 18y11m AV

Allied forces continue to make slow gains on Hell
written by Gabrielle Nyoni

The problem with shield generators is that they don’t cope well with uneven terrain. If they did, then the war on Hell would already be over.

The Allied objective in invading this planet was clear from the outset: Hell is one of the Hunters’ few remaining sources of materiel they need to support their interstellar raiding, construction, and what passes for civilization. The herds of relocated slaves still roaming its surface, and the vast debris fields left behind, were a vital source of both food and parts. By sealing the planet away behind planetary defence fields and a “Farthrow” wormhole disruptor, the combined Gaoian and AEC strategy is to starve the Hunters into insignificance.

The Hunters know this, and their forces trapped on Hell are not going to let it happen quietly and easily. Ever since the invading force arrived, the Hunters have been counterattacking. They fire rockets and artillery from their enclaves in the city ruins, splashing the shield dome above FOB Alighieri with chemical, biological and radioactive hazards.

Or, more often, they just walk under it.

The city around Alighieri is unlike any Human or Gaoian one. There are no malls, or stadia, or plazas and shopping district. It was a dreary, unadorned place before the Grand Army and AEC arrived. If you could safely sift through the rubble, you wouldn’t find any graffiti, no adverts, no fliers or menus, no drink cans or broken TVs. The Hunters have no concept of entertainment or culture.

But it is still a city. Built on five low, rolling hills rather than a perfectly flat plain, it’s cut through by a concrete river channel, built up with raised roadways and multi-storey buildings. And, of course, now pock-marked with craters, mounded with piles of smashed concrete that used to be buildings, and littered with the burnt wreckage of vehicles.

Even if it was possible to perfectly seal Alighieri’s protective shield dome right down to ground level, the Hunters would still have plenty of ways to undermine it via the city’s utility tunnels and sewers.

Unfortunately, the shield can’t even come down to street level in most places. Across much of the city, there’s enough of a gap for even the largest Hunters to simply ignore it, and so they do. They come at night, cloaked, silent and invisible. Sometimes they attack during the day, in a tide of newly awakened reserves pulled from stasis, supported by their most fearsome war-bodied Betas and a hail of nervejam grenades.

Every such attack is met by an Allied counterattack.

Combat engineers work around the clock to close the gaps, but they are numerous, and each gap is more fiercely contested than the last. Lines of communication are protected, but the modern battlefield is inherently three-dimensional and it can be exceedingly difficult to dominate airspace inside a bubble.

Nervejam has made all of this more difficult. Troops must maintain their distance as much as possible, because recovery from heavy Nervejam is a prolonged and uncertain affair, where human and gaoian are concerned. Specialized ultra-heavy shock forces (such as First Fang and the AEC’s HEAT) are limited resources that Supreme Allied Command guards with care.

The Hunters, meanwhile, show no regard at all for their own lives.

Breaking the siege, expanding outwards, destroying the Hunters’ reserves and cutting their line of communication is slow, difficult, dangerous going. The AEC nations have not seen a battle this costly in generations. But the alternative is to remain trapped behind a single wall, unable to maneuver and at the mercy of the enemy’s whim.

So long as that’s the case then, to paraphrase the IRA’s infamous threat to Margaret Thatcher, the Allies need to be lucky every time. The Hunters only need to be lucky once.

The only option is to push back and claim more territory. Every street the Allies claim is a little more security, and a little closer to locking down this terrible planet for good. Each victory is a step closer to a galaxy without Hunters, an inconceivable dream just twenty short years ago.

Among the troops on the ground here, the consensus is clear: that is a worthy mission. Despite the difficulty, the hardship and the danger, morale remains high. One can only guess what the Hunters are thinking.

Hopefully, they are afraid.

Date Point: 18y11m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Adam (Warhorse) Arés

Night-time routine went mostly like it always did, except there wasn’t much Adam could do to help. So, he practiced his grip work. Before, that would have been all about bearing down as hard as he possibly could, and being darkly proud when mere metal couldn’t stand up to him.

Now, he had steel cylinders, each of which had a force transducer in it. He had to grip them precisely and not go over, or under. Here, the smaller the required force, the harder.

He could pretty consistently get down to the twenty-five kilo version and keep it on target without thinking about it. Smaller than that, though, was proving tricky. He was working on the ten kilo grip right now while he stretched on the floor. If he let his attention wander for too long he’d spike up well past the sensor’s limits, and right now he couldn’t really feel the difference.

It was…really, it was fuckin’ terrifying. Not having the feedback to know if he was delicately squeezing something in his hand or crushing it with enough force to pulp an ordinary man’s arm. The whole world felt like it was made of tissue paper, and he didn’t dare hug his sons, or Marty. Hell, he was sleeping on the floor right now because he just couldn’t risk it. He kept having nightmares about rolling over and cuddling her and waking up with her broken body crushed in his arms…

The grip tester beeped at him: he’d let go too much. And he’d been so distracted by his thoughts, he hadn’t really noticed what it felt like so he could learn. Re-learn. Fuck.

Frustrating. But, progress. Maybe he’d hit it again right away in the morning, after yoga. He wasn’t anywhere near where he was before he got chunked, but static holds and such were progressing the fastest, and were proving the biggest aids to being able to walk about normally.

He got a text message, suddenly. Annoying. He still couldn’t trust himself to pick up his phone, so he used the voice control to show the message.

It was from Daar.

Hey fren, can I visit?
I need some wind ‘tween my ears!

He always wrote very precisely in his texts, so his misspellings were deliberate, to convey a bit of his accent. Just one of his many foibles. Adam told his phone to say yes, and went back to his stretching. The only real thing he had right now to keep his muscles in good shape was really intense electro-stimulation and some basic machine lifts down in the Dungeon. That…wasn’t ideal, to say the least, so keeping limber was critically important.

Marty came to check in after she’d put Sam to sleep. Diego got a little more time to play, since he was extra good that day. He usually wasn’t, so this was a rare treat. “How goes it, chunk?”

“Eh. I think I’ve got the twenty-five mastered. I can hold it in my hand without paying attention now. It’s weird, though. Anything smaller and I just…eventually crush it.”

“Does seem odd,” she commented, and draped herself over his back, hands running under his shirt to rub across his abs and chest. God he loved it when she did that…

“Much as I’d like what you’re fixin’ to do,” he quipped, slightly regretfully, “Daar’s comin’ to visit.”

“Oh! That’s sudden. He say why?”

“I think he just wants an excuse to run. I can sympathize…” That was the thing he missed the most. Running. Sure, he could manage some short sprints now, and even jog for a mile…but as always, it was a matter of his body screaming at him for a chance to perform, and his nervous system begging to take it easy. He’d never felt anything so frustrating!

…Calm. A quick mental pause, back to a good headspace. Luckily, he was no stranger to being big mad. Would be nice if it would give him a break now and then, but whatever. It was useful.

“Well, okay. I’ll go fix some snacks—”

There was a muffled thump, and Adam felt the building shake enough to be noticable, but not enough to be any kind of concerning. Daar must have leapt up to the rooftop terrace. That was okay though, because the dude knew exactly how to finesse his insane weight. Adam and a few of his friends could do the same trick; mostly they refrained to keep from annoying the tenants. Four storeys was a heckuva jump, but with super-strength and some parkour skill…and Daar didn’t even need that. He moved like a huge cat when he wanted to.

“Right, well.” Adam rose carefully to his feet, always mindful of just how tenuous his motor control still was for the moment. “Nice night to loaf up on the roof anyway.”

He’d gone with a steel-frame building early on, just in case they ever had a Guvnurag tenant or some industrial concern move in. Combined with double-wide doorways everywhere and a staircase (and its landings) that could accommodate an elephant climbing up to the roof… all that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Partly because of all that, and along with the HEAT’s floor-ruining reputation, buildings in Folctha tended to be quite generously appointed for large critters running about. He and his fellow HEAT landlords had led the way on that.

And it was a good thing, too. These days, even that kind of accommodation was a bit cramped for the big bear. So, he jumped straight up the side of the building, and up the stairs Adam went to meet him, thankfully without too much wobble. Didn’t even bust the handrail this time.

“You’re lucky you didn’t wake Sam up with that,” Adam greeted Daar with a grin. “And you’re lucky my tenants are pretty much all single people right now, too.”

Sometimes, it struck him sideways how weird their friendship really was. Adam was just a very high-end grunt, really. His impact on the world was pretty limited. Daar, on the other hand…

“Balls, sarry!” Daar made a slightly embarrassed grumbling huff. “I just really wanted ‘ta get a good flyin’ leap in or jus’ somethin’ fun, yijao?”

Maybe somebody else would have found that a bit callous, given Adam’s current predicament, but honestly he didn’t mind. No reason Daar couldn’t enjoy his body.

“Naw, I getchu. I heard you were in town for a big shindig or somethin’.”

“Yeah. Another one, balls. Been runnin’ back an’ forth almos’ every fuckin’ day ‘fer like a fuckin’ month. Been a real pain in my tail, yijao?” With that, Daar padded over and stood alongside Adam. Being Helpful. Which…

“I can stand just fine, at least for a bit. I don’t wanna…”

Daar gave him his Most Patient Look. “‘Yer lookin’ at the only dude in the fuckin’ universe ‘ya can’t hurt. C’mon. Les’ go lie on that nice bit o’ grass you got up here.”

Well….okay, then. Adam trusted, and gripped onto the back of Daar’s shoulders and neck while they walked down the treacherous three steps toward the rooftop garden. As promised, the Great Father didn’t complain. He felt hard and completely unyielding under Adam’s grip, which given the kinds of things he’d been breaking in his hands just absent-mindedly…

Okay. Daar was safe from him. Good to know. Jesus.

He needed that solidness to grip onto, because Adam really hated those three steps. Something about them was still impossible, despite the progress he’d made. Having someone he could trust himself with right now was just…

“There, see? Not so bad! Now hang on, I’mma lay down here…”

There was a bit of awkwardness involved in all that, but Daar didn’t let him wobble. Some grunts, some wincing pain from too-stiff hips and such, and before he knew it they were lying comfortably on the grass. Or rather, Daar was lying like a huge hulking beast taking a nap, while Adam was sort of propped up against his flank.

He took a moment to mentally rest. Complex movements were a bit taxing. Didn’t feel like he’d made any progress at all on that front…

Daar broke the silence after a good long moment. “I was wunnerin’ if ‘ya wanted ‘ta talk.”

“Why not?” Adam replied, bitterly. “What else am I good for right now?”

A giant nose snuffled near Adam’s face, the Gaoian gesture of extreme concern. “Naw, ye’re good ‘fer a lot. Don’ go down that road jus’ cuz ‘yer feelin’ frustrated.”

“Urgh, I know,” Adam sighed. “Just…hard not to feel fuckin’ useless right now.” What more could he say?

Daar put an arm around Adam and pulled him in for a tight snuggle. “Guess I’d be feelin’ ‘bout the same. I wish’d I could be more helpful, but…”

Understandable. To say Daar had commitments would be a hell of an understatement, and in any case he was just too goddamn big to really fit in most of the human world. Well, so was Adam, but he wasn’t so huge he couldn’t fake it most days. Not so for Daar.

Still. “You’re helpful enough, big guy.”

Daar duck-nodded, and wrapped himself head to toe the rest of the way around Adam, giving the kind of intense affection that, well, he couldn’t give to anyone else for fear of hurting them. It felt good, and they were quiet together for a long moment. A breeze rolled over the rooftop, and Adam felt it tickle his hair. Need to get it cut again soon to fit under the helmet…

…Oh. Yeah. Right.

Daar shifted and sniffed him again. No fooling that nose. “Mus’ be some heavy thoughts in that noggin.”

“Have a lotta time to think, lately.”

“Mhmm. An’ you’d rather be doin’ I bet.”

“I mean…” Adam growled. “I always think best on my feet. ‘Cept that’s not been so easy.”

“Yeah. An’ it ain’t gonna git better instantly, neither.”

“…No.” Jesus. He felt himself welling up a little…

Daar responded by flipping Adam over and just crushing him in the biggest, tightest hug ever. Adam hugged back without thinking, felt a stab of panic—

“‘Ya can’t hurt me,” Daar said gently, while tightening his squeeze and snuffling against the top of Adam’s head. “Jus’ let it out. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

…Adam let it out.

Fuck, did he ever.

Martina Arés

Marty had to turn away.

It hurt. It hurt not being able to give him the shoulder to cry on he needed. It hurt that she couldn’t have survived the desperate, crushing hug he was inflicting on Daar right now, one that even the huge Gaoian couldn’t take without an ear-flick of pain.

That should have been her. He should have been able to turn to her for this. That was the whole fucking point of marriage, being there for each other. And…she couldn’t. She couldn’t even hold his hand safely…

The whole helpless freight of it just kind of barged up from behind, hit her in the back of the head and knocked the feet out from under her. She slid down against the kitchen cupboards, sat on the cold tiles, and tipped her head back. Too miserable to even wipe her own tears.

It helped, though. Anybody who ever said crying never solved anything had obviously never really needed to do it. A damp, wretched minute or two, a deep breath, and she got her balance back, a little. At least, enough to dry her cheeks.

She was helping. She knew that. She was there for him, and would be no matter what. But…But dammit, she needed a hug too.

And the only person she really wanted it from, couldn’t.

But she could hug Adam from behind. And Daar was a sensitive soul at heart. She found her feet, took a deep breath, and went out to join them. Draped herself up against Adam’s back from behind and laid her head against him. Felt him soften, just a little.

It’d do, for now.

Daar

The magical curin’ power o’ closeness did its work, sure as Daar’d known it would. ‘Fer both of ‘em too, which was good. The whole house reeked o’ the kinda misery that only really tough people could work themselves into when they were bein’ strong ‘fer their loved ones.

Daar knew that misery well. Shit, he was pretty bad at sinkin’ into it himself.

He de-tangled himself when they’d both let it all out, an’ got the two snugglin’ as best he could. Fact was, if he’d helped Adam let go an’ fall apart, it was Marty’s presence that let him put himself back together again. It warmed Daar’s heart to see.

Naydi had taught him a lot about the power of love. May the Unseen curse the Hierarchy forever for taking that away from the Gao.

The rain started up, same way it always did in Folctha after sundown. The terrace had a pergola though, so instead o’ gettin’ soaked they jus’ retreated under it an’ got cozy. And with a little curative misery outta the way, they got to talkin’ about what came next.

“I’m going fuckin’ nuts,” Adam opined, sadly. “I can’t even hug my own wife! Every time I make just a little bit of progress, that seems great, and then I go do something like flatten the handle on my favorite cast iron pan! And at the same time, I can feel years of work just…:”

Marty had snuggled into his lap and draped his arms around herself as a compromise. It was something, but Daar could see both of them woulda wanted a real squeeze and didn’t dare. Sensibly didn’t dare. She nodded glumly, and rubbed his forearm.

“Well, it ain’t completely bad. I know good an’ damn well ‘ya couldn’t lift his arms on ‘yer own, so he had ‘ta help. Means he’s got the ghost of what ‘ta do still in his brain, right?”

Adam nodded, slowly. “I suppose that’s true…hell, I wasn’t even thinking.”

“Essactly. It ain’t hopeless. It’ll take time, and ‘yer gonna prol’ly fall behind…but ‘yer gonna rebound pretty quick after that. You know it, balls ‘ya helped rehab Kodiak last year, an’ Sikes before that, ‘member?”

“Yeah…but they got to go back to it.”

There it was. Daar wished he could dance around that a little, but…no.

“Yeah,” he said unflinchingly. “I take it ‘ya got the official word?”

Adam nodded, then froze up as Marty shifted in his arms. She patted him reassuringly, and he relaxed again. “Yeah. SOR’s makin’ noises about keeping me on as a training NCO, but…”

“I don’t think ‘yer gonna be able ‘ta stand it.”

“…No.”

There was a long, sombre pause, with the only sounds being the rain and Marty still rubbing his arm reassuringly.

“Well, firs’ thing’s first,” Daar broke the silence. “‘Ya got people, Adam. People who ain’t fuckin’ gonna let ‘ya down. You know that, right?”

“…I know.”

“An’ you ain’t lettin’ any of us down, Cousin. I owe you my entire people’s lives twice over now. Don’t you never ever fuckin’ ‘ferget that, ‘cuz I sure as fuck ain’t gonna.”

“I ain’t lookin’ for a handout,” Adam said, stoically.

“An’ I ain’t offerin’ one. Adam. Lissen ‘ta what I’m sayin’. How many people d’ya know are owed by the most powerful being in the galaxy? Even among ‘yer crew, that’s some pretty ridiculous shit, s’pecially how’s it came that I owe ‘ya in the firs’ place. Use it. I can thinka all sortsa uses ‘fer a man like you, and I know there are people right now findin’ out ‘yer gon’ be available, jus’ wunnerin’ how they’re gonna sales pitch their offer.”

“I know, I just…what I want and need, even you can’t give, you know?”

“Well, mebbe not. But I’m pretty old these days by either human or gaoian reckonin’, even if my stunnin’ good looks say otherwise. So, if I ‘ve learneded anythin’ being all old-fart an’ stuff, it’s that ‘ya never really know what ‘ya want or need ‘till it smacks ‘ya cross the muzzle. What do you wanna do? Make a diff’rence? Save lives? Have ‘ya considered that we still ain’t founded a rescue service on this planet? Rural fire service? Some kinda special security?”

Adam frowned thoughtfully, but Marty was nodding. “You did always say, if you ever retire from the HEAT, you’d go into that kind of thing.”

“See? An’ that’s jus’ what me an’ Firth been schemin’ about. ‘Yer young-bodied an’ th’ way things are goin’ I bet ‘ya got a hunnerd years left in ‘yer prime, Cousin. Or more! The spacemagic is real, yijao? So stop wit’ the doomin’ and focus on th’ here an’ now. Got it?”

Adam nodded again, but Daar could tell they’d about reached the end of what words alone could do. There was only so much a ‘Back could do by sayin’ nice an’ supportive things.

In a rare case of a Human’s ears bein’ just as sharp as his own, Marty looked up and toward the stairs at the exact same moment Daar heard the first griping and complainin’ from inside. Mothers. They could hear a cub gettin’ needy from half the galaxy away.

“…Goddammit Samuel Milan Arés, you couldn’t have given us a little longer?” she asked ruefully, and wriggled out from under Adam’s arms, who jerked them away with…well, some crude control, anyway.

At least he wasn’t flailing. Which made Daar’s tail flick in thought. Hmm…

“S’okay. We needs us some bro-time,” he said aloud.

She must have been feeling a lot better, because she gave him a look so dry it damn near stopped the rain. “Oh, I see. Get rid of the wife so you can be Manly Men without me, huh?”

“Well, how else are we s’posed ‘ta gossip ‘bout all the pretty tails?”

“Fine, fine. I’ll leave you alone to paint each others’ nails and braid your hair…God knows, I need some sleep anyway. But you’d better return him in one piece, hear? And go easy.”

“I can promise I’ll do at least one o’ those things.”

She sighed, looked like she was about to argue, then gave up when the griping from indoors turned into a full-throated demanding wail. “…Good enough.” She kissed Adam, gave Daar a hug, (hugs were always nice!) and darted in out of the rain.

The look Adam shot after her as she left was a warmin’ thing to see all by itself. Daar let him watch her ‘til she was gone, then put his Cunnin’ Plan into motion.

“So lemme ask ‘ya a question, then: you beat anyone’s face in lately?”

That threw Adam for a loop. “…No? Daar, I can’t pick up a water bottle without blowing it up.”

“Yeah, I noticed. Fine motor control an’ all that. Did any o’ the bigbrains stop ‘ta think how much that gets exercised in a fight?”

“…Well…maybe you have a point, but…”

“So what ‘ya really need is someone ‘ta beat on that can take it. Well. I’m here. Wanna go test out my lil’ theory?”

The answer was yes. He could see it an’ smell it. Rather’n let Adam torment himself with worries about what he wanted ‘ta do versus what he should do, Daar didn’t wait. He stood up, let Adam use him to get up to his feet…

The two of them went to go settle scores and work out frustrations.

Marty

…Yup, they were going down to the gym. Probably there to ignore doctors’ orders. Marty sighed and sat back, adjusting Sam on his pillow as she tried to think what she should do. Should she stop them? Tell them off?

But…God, did she have the heart to? Adam clearly needed the chance to use his body properly for the first time in weeks. And he wasn’t stupid. Nor was Daar, for that matter.

Or at least, they weren’t heedlessly foolish, anyway.

…No, she wasn’t going to stop them. They all needed it. Adam needed some hope, Daar had some old macho accounting to attend to…

And she needed some hope too.

Adam, doing a pretty stupid thing

He was still clumsy, but he could move. The stairs down to the basement weren’t so bad either, though Daar was right there in front of him the entire way down, filling the staircase with himself and providing a sort of default safety wall in case Adam lost his balance.

So. He was inching himself down five flights of stairs to go brawl with a goddamn hyperbear. What a weird combination of thoughts. How was he gonna even manage to do that?

They made it all the way down. Adam was only slightly wobbly. God, he fucking needed this.

He wobbled harder when Daar turned up the gravity. Seeing that, Daar cranked it, which caused Adam to grimace and sink to a knee.

And in that instant, Daar wasn’t a caring, concerned friend anymore. He snapped into something much more dangerous.

“Fuck that, ‘yer better’n this. Get th’ fuck up, you pussy.”

Well. Fuck you too. Adam growled, steadied himself against the wall, grimaced, stood…

“Good. Walk around the room now, an’ don’t be a lil’ bitch ‘bout it.”

It was the tone of voice. Daar knew. Knew how to reach right into the back of Adam’s head, grab the Hate, and yank it upright. Moving his foot was…fuck, it was welded to the floor. But this he could do. This was a strength he still had, could remember.

He took a step.

“Good! Ain’t as fuckin’ useless as they all say, are ‘ya? Now. Finish that fuckin’ circuit.”

It was hard. Up there with the hardest fuckin’ things he’d ever done. Somehow, through sheer goddamn will, though, he made it round the room. One heavy, impossible step at a time, he made it.

“Right. Movin’. See that? Now. Calisthenics. Let’s get you doin’.”

Jesus fuck it was agony. Simple stuff, all torture, all of it liberating. Many times he fell onto the padded floor. Under supergravity that hurt, and that made the whole thing risky as fuck…

But he was reacting. His arm shot out to break his fall the first time, and after that…

He was up. Moving. Moving with intent. Moving right. Jesus. Well, at least better.

“I fuckin’ knew it. Now.” Daar crouched down in a position to wrestle, then tensed his body hard and…just, fuckin’ hell. He was the absolute best there was and boy did that ever show. Adam felt downright soft and puny by comparison, and of course the big guy had fuckin’ broken the Alpha where Adam had failed…

No. He’d crushed it like a fuckin’ grape after having snatched the damn thing right out of the air. Done that after a building had been dropped on him, after leaping up and out even as the building was still in the act of collapse, and he walked away from it all with nothin’ more than a headache and a head trip.

…Fuck.

Adam gulped, and crouched down too. For the first time in years, he felt intimidated. Hell, fuck that. He felt scared. Daar was an unbeatable juggernaut even before all this bullshit. He’d created a monster, and now that monster wanted to prove himself, and have fun doing it.

Daar sniffed toward him, retracted his claws as best as he could…

“You ready?”

“…No. But fuck it.”

A deep, knowing chitter. “Good man. Now, you an’ I got some history ‘ta work out, so I’mma take my time an’ whup the ever-livin’ fuck outta you. You better fuckin’ fight back, y’hear?”

Those burning bronze eyes locked onto him. He meant every word of it. Daar wasn’t playing. But neither was Adam.

He nodded. Took a breath. Closed his eyes, opened them again…

And Warhorse was back.

Marty

It wasn’t often that Adam’s music escaped the basement. He’d soundproofed the fuck out of it while putting it together, and he usually made a point of not letting it reach the apartments, let alone the top floor. The fact Marty could make out the distant chugging of heavily distorted bass said he must have finally cranked it up as high as it would go.

About fucking time, really. He’d needed to explode all week.

Fortunately, the kids were pretty much bombproof once asleep. Sam especially, after he’d fed. They could sleep through it. As for the tenants? Well, Adam was choosy about his clients. All of them were in some way a lot like him, and all the apartments were soundproofed anyway. Nobody could hear shit in the bedrooms.

She smiled, closed the door, and locked the music out. They were both going completely against Nofl’s advice down there but, well…Nofl was a Corti, unconventional though he might be. He might know a lot, but there were things he just didn’t understand and never could. He might know everything there was about what Adam’s body needed…

But Marty knew her husband’s soul. Knew he’d never heal if he couldn’t express it. She’d fuss over him and remind him later, because he needed that too…but right now she was just glad for him.

The two of them didn’t re-emerge until, well, extremely early morning. And by the two of them, more accurately, Daar prowled up the stairs with Adam draped over his back, looking like a train had run over him, backed up, and ran over him again. And the train that had run him over looked pretty tired, too.

“Hi, Marty. Sarry, I kinda beat ‘yer husband up. An’ smushed him pretty fuckin’ hard, too.”

Marty laughed softly, and held the door open so he could deposit Adam on the mattress next to the bed. “Did you two get all your dick measuring energy worked out, at least?”

“Oh, I won that game long ago,” Daar chittered tiredly. “This was more…balls, it’s so stupidly macho-male even I’m embarrassed. Les’ just say he’s a damn good coach. An’ if he din’t know how good he was, well…I smashed away any doubt!”

Marty sighed, suspecting it’d be something like that. “Well, at least you kept your promise and brought him back still in one piece…I know I should be objecting about doctors’ orders and stuff but, I think he needed it. Even John and Christian are being gentle with him.”

The Great Father chittered again in a satisfied sort of way. “Yeah, ‘cuz Adam could still fuck ‘em both up pretty bad, at least ‘fer now. I got the advantage of bein’ a lot more huger an’ harder.”

He considered the mattress, and dropped Adam onto it in the sort of callous, gruff way only good friends could ever manage.

“—Ow! Fuck!” Adam looked around wildly, and calmed down when he realized where he was. Apparently he had taken a quick nap atop his Daar-train.

“Aw, quit whinin’. Tha’s the softest landing ya’ had all night!”

“Fuck, you ain’t lying. Ugh…”

Daar chittered, “Yeah, well, sleep good. Might go ‘fer round two tomorrow…” he growled in challenge.

“So…how did it go?” Marty asked. They both looked pretty pleased, so it must have gone well. Certainly better than she’d feared it might.

“He ‘membered mosta everything once I got him mad enough. Still a bit drunken but, oh, couple’a hours o’ me squeezin’ him like toothpaste was all the reminder he needed. I din’t stop beatin’ on him ‘till he managed a bit o’ payback. Then he put me through the most evilist fuckin’ round of liftin’ I’ve had in fuckin’ years. ‘Yer man’s a fuckin’ sadist.”

“Mhmm,” Marty noted with some pride, then glanced back at Adam, who was already nodding off again. “It looks like he put you through your paces as well. You’re welcome to stay, of course.”

“…That shaggy rug looks pretty comf’table right now, yeah.”

“You might get poked by a curious toddler in the morning.”

“Thas’ okay. Been meanin’ ‘ta meet ‘em anyway.” He prowled to the rug, turned a circle, and curled himself down onto it. “‘Night.”

Marty nodded, and slid the door closed. “Good night.”

For a moment, she considered joining Adam on his floor mattress. He was so clearly exhausted that maybe…

He grumbled something and twitched in his sleep. She grimaced, made up her mind, and climbed into bed instead. Hopefully tonight had been good for him, but there was still a long way to go.

She put her head down, watched him, and slept.

Date Point: 18y11m1w AV
Light bulk freighter ‘Stray Fortune,’ Spacelane 557-1020, WeiMeYrU-Uym relic territory

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“Your mate from the pub failed to mention the choppy fucking ride,” Ian noted grimly, though ‘choppy’ wasn’t really the right word for it. They weren’t bumping or rolling or anything like that, as a freighter in rough seas would have.

Instead, the problem was that the spacelane hadn’t received the attention of a maintenance fleet in thousands of years. The background count of stray dust, gas, micrometeors and plasma was only slightly less dense along the lane’s arterial center than it would have been if they were going cross-country.

The mental image Ian had of hull ionization was of his uncle John’s van. The old man had been a tiler and plasterer, with a carefully maintained white Mercedes Sprinter in which he’d rumbled around most of South Yorkshire beautifying people’s kitchens and bathrooms. The back doors had always been filthy, and Ian had earned a few laughs by scrawling “CLEAN ME!” in the filth with his finger…as well as a slapped wrist when he’d drawn a pair of boobs one time.

He’d once asked his uncle why he never bothered cleaning it, and received a shrug and a “not worth it. It’ll just get dirty again.” Except John did clean the van sometimes: whenever he visited some farm or country place out in the middle of nowhere, and it got muddy up the sides.

That was deep space hull ionization. A little was inevitable, even on a well-cleared spacelane. A ship could trundle along basically indefinitely with that level of accumulation. But right now, the Fortune was off down a bumpy muddy track in the sticks, and she was not happy about it.

Nor was Morwk.

“At least some kind soul kept the map up to date…” he grumbled. “I’d hate to try and navigate this without knowing where the next planet was.”

“Why trouble?” Moj asked. “Plotted our course, you. Safe, right?”

“It’s more bloody work for him once we’re out of the sticks, mate,” Ian explained.

“And all this chasing a rumor Bruuk heard in a bar,” Morwk added.

“Sometimes rumors are worth chasing.”

“I bloody hope so…That’s it. I have to pull the sensor mast in before it gets damaged.”

Ian nodded. Morwk was probably just being overcautious, but he’d rather that than come all the way out here, burn out the sensors, and not be able to see anything. Besides, they’d be charge-dumping at a gas giant in twenty minutes.

Moj’s elytra buzzed, a quick low-frequency thrum that Ian thought of as being kind of like a shudder. He’d been doing that ever since they entered the old empire’s relic territory, and Ian could sympathize. Even though they hadn’t yet actually visited one of the dead civilization’s worlds or seen anything of theirs, there was still a feeling creeping over him. The same one he got in graveyards, or that time he’d gone to Berlin on a school trip and they’d visited the Holocaust memorial.

He patted Moj reassuringly on the shoulder, and prowled to his desk to sit down and wait.

So far, the flight out here had been routine. They were coming under cover of being on their way out toward Versa Volc space and, having heard of the digs, decided to detour with some luxury goods, hard-to-get stuff that’d fetch a premium and be worth the time. If the Fortune had been any bigger it would’ve been a flimsy fucking excuse, but she was just small enough to make it credible.

Part of him was curious to see a civilization that had been dead and gone thousands of years before humans even got a fire going, too.

Now though, he was wondering if the cover story wasn’t genuinely flimsy as fuck, because time spent stopping to degauss was expensive for a ship like theirs. They were going to stick out a bit, if there was anything out here to see.

“Still can’t believe all the s’pensive bullshit Bronzefur was able ‘ta pile on,” Bruuk grumbled. “I don’t even know what half of it is. One of the biggest crates is something called ‘zrrk’ and balls it stinks terrible…”

“Yup. Vzk’tk delicacy. The more rancid the better. Tell you what though, that’ll be our best seller when we arrive.”

“May as well sell ‘em the contents of a fuckin’ composter.”

“Mate, they don’t comment on your anchovies—”

“Balls they don’t!”

“Just…aliens, mate. We’ve all got our weird ways.”

“Hrrmf.”

Moj was a smooth damn pilot when he wanted to be. From interstellar high warp to in-system low warp to a smooth low-altitude orbit all in one graceful arc. Bloody masterful. The gas giant was something special to look at, too: as blue as the ocean, with boiling bands of white and grey cloud under a ring system that made the planet itself look fucking tiny. Poor old Saturn couldn’t even begin to compete.

Morwk made the closest thing he ever produced to a satisfied noise when the first flash of hull discharge crackled away down their extended shields to sink into the atmosphere, and the ship sounded happier too. Or at least, a few things that had been beeping urgently for nearly an hour packed it in.

A second artificial lightning bolt and Morwk nodded, leaned over and hit the intercom. “Dora. Go for external inspection.”

The reply was a chirpy ”On it!” buried in a blast of pop music.

“All good?” Ian asked. Morwk gave him an affirmative gesture, curling both his thumbs together into something like a human OK.

“I’ll put the sensor mast back out in five minutes,” he promised.

“Cheers…Moj?”

Moj had risen from his station now that they weren’t going anywhere for a while, and stalked over to a window. He gestured for them to come and see.

“Brought us to a ruin,” he said. Ian and Bruuk shared a confused look, then joined him.

Sure enough, there was a distant metal speck out there, glittering in the ringlight. Ian frowned at it, then tapped on the window. The smart systems built into the glass let him take a better look at it, and told him how far away it was, a figure that brought an impressed whistle to his lips. Nearly four thousand kilometers, and still visible to the naked eye.

“On the star map, this,” Moj explained. “Gone soon. Orbit decays in three hundred years.”

Ian nodded and zoomed in. It didn’t look like much, really. Just another sprawling space hub, not built to look pretty. Expanded and added to, replaced and upgraded as necessary. It was a tangle of metal with no symmetry or design to it at all, and the heavy bombardment somebody had sunk into its midriff some untold centuries ago hadn’t made it any prettier. Or maybe it had been some ancient meteor strike. Impossible to tell.

Still…that graveyard feeling crept over him again.

“…Really makes you appreciate just how long this has been going on, hey?” he commented. “Just how long has that thing been out here?”

Moj shrugged. “Older than your stories. Older than mine.” he tilted his head thoughtfully. “How crowded would galaxy be, without the Hierarchy? Would it be better that way? Or full to bursting, full of war? Wonder sometimes, I.”

“Balls ‘ta that,” Bruuk growled. “They wanna wipe us out. Don’t matter none if the galaxy’d be better or worse off without ‘em.”

“Gao wouldn’t be Gao without them,” Moj replied, then shrugged again and bent his head in silent prayer.

Bruuk flicked an ear irritably, then shook his head and wandered off. Ian lingered a second or two longer, then did the same. The fate of the galaxy with or without the Hierarchy wasn’t for him to say; here and now there was a job to do, and Morwk was extending the sensor mast again.

Part of Ian had been expecting that, with a nice clear image untroubled by the Fortune’s own hull charge, they’d get an instant look at those high-speed-low-drag warp signatures Bruuk’s contact mentioned, but no such luck yet. But, it was a big sky. Maybe something would show up yet.

A new feeling was beginning to tickle the back of his neck, though. An irrational one, but one he knew well and trusted. He crossed the bridge to make himself a cup of tea, and tried to shake it but it wouldn’t go away.

He had the horrible feeling they were being watched.

Date Point: 18y11m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Arés

Marty woke to an insistent prod in the arm and a worried young voice.

“Mom…Mom! There’s a bear in the kitchen an’ he’s makin’ waffles!”

Something like that was enough to get her giggling before she’d even fully woken up, despite that…oh yeah, she hadn’t slept enough. Her whole body had that leaden feeling and she knew she’d be paying for last night for the whole day.

“Mnnn…no, that’s Daar.” She accepted a morning cuddle, then gave Diego a slight guiding push. “Go say hi.”

“‘Kay…”

Marty laughed again as her son cautiously headed out to go meet the kitchen-bear, then rolled over to check on Adam. Still out like a light, his chest rising and falling slowly and evenly, his green feet wandering a lazy circle near his ribs. God, he looked like he was getting the best sleep he’d had since waking up on Origin. No way she had the heart to wake him from that, so she slipped out the other side of the bed, put on a T-shirt and shorts, and slipped quietly out of the room.

Sure enough, the Great Father of the Gao was sitting on the floor in the middle of her kitchen, preparing for battle with a mountain of eggs and bacon. And, yes, waffles. At least, waffles of the Eggo kind, which were still Adam’s go-to comfort food for reasons only Arés men could possibly fathom. He was pondering the mysteries of the toaster when Marty shuffled up onto one of the bar stools and bid him a yawning good morning.

“Marn! I’ve got a delivery comin’ ‘ta restock th’ fridge. I hope ‘ya don’t mind.”

It was an interesting sight to watch, really; it could not be overstated how utterly colossal Daar was. He put Kodiak bears to complete shame, and yet he somehow found a way to work in the kitchen without complaint, sitting upright on his haunches and relying on his long arms to reach anything he might need.

He wasn’t really “like a bear” as was often said of larger Gaoians. Though there was something obviously ursine about many brownfurs’ proportions, and him most of all, the face was too different. Too sapient and intelligent. A bear would have looked dopey and comical sitting there on its butt, but Daar just looked purposeful. There were other things too: his body shape was all wrong, and had some definite simian-like mechanics to it; he had huge, blocky shoulders bigger than his own head; wide, mobile hips, which were noticeably wider than his waist; fur not quite the right texture; a truly massive rear paired to even huger haunches…

…But he also had short, thick legs with much heavier hamstrings than any human would ever have, as you’d expect on a swift quadruped; long, heavily muscled arms, which tucked in to his side perfectly for swift four-paw running; a long neck over twice as wide as his blocky head, with heavy traps sloping down to his shoulders; a long, stout torso that was equally broad; he was much thicker across the chest and back…

Paws and claws that really sold the grizzly angle, to be frank.

So, yeah. Kinda like a bear, actually. Just, not completely. A man-bear. Bear-man. Gorilla-raccoon. Something. Marty yawned, and shoved her favorite coffee mug under the espresso machine. Her brain needed some cobwebs blowing out. “Not at all. Thanks…Morning.”

Daar’s chitter was very un-bear-like. Plus, he was entertaining Diego by juggling an egg on the spatula, Teppanyaki-style. Every time he “missed” the egg landed exactly on the griddle, conveniently ready to be cracked the rest of the way open and fried up for toast.

“…Where did you learn that?”

“First time I wuz on Earth ‘fer trainin’.” His ears pricked up proudly as he set another egg spinning, and Diego laughing again. “‘S’always been a hit with th’ cubs. An’ stinky little human boys too, right Diego?!”

“Am not!”

“Are too! You think ‘ya can hide anythin’ from this nose?”

“I had a bath last night!”

“Hmm,” Daar grumbled and sniffed around a giggling Diego with much excessive drama. “Seems kinda sus…whatchu want ‘fer ‘yer eggs?” The question was delivered to both of them at once, as Daar made eye-contact with her.

“He likes his scrambled. I’ll have mine over easy,” Marty guessed. “And Adam’ll eat them however, but he definitely prefers runny.”

“Daddy’s still asleep though…” Diego pointed out.

“Not for long…” she predicted, and sniffed her coffee. Okay. This was a damn good way to start a morning. Not that simple black coffee was rocket surgery, but he sure brewed a good pot…

Sure enough, when the smell of sizzling pork product had really started to saturate the kitchen, there was the distant snap of snoring coming to a sudden end, followed a small earthquake, and a wild Adam lurched out of the bedroom.

He’d managed that a lot better than every other day, though he did seem grateful to pour himself onto his Extra Sturdy Stool.

“Mmmf…you’re an evil man, Daar.”

The Great Father didn’t reply, but did flick his ears in an unmistakably dominant gesture, and set to griddling up more bacon.

“How’re you feeling this morning?” Marty asked.

“Not been this beat up in a while…but…also easier? S’like, my body’s happy to be hurtin’ if that makes any kind of sense. Moving seems easier.”

“Good! But I gotta warn ‘ya,” Daar grumbled, as he spatulated the bacon, “I’m pretty sure this is only gon’ be a sometimes thing, if that. ‘Yer recovery comes first.”

“And your time comes first,” Adam retorted.

“Naw. See, here’s the thing, right? Th’ whole point o’ bein’ what I am is ‘ta set direction an’ lead, not ‘ta over-manage anythin’. Been reading up a lot on that, old gaoian writings an’ a buncha human stuff too. Even some Corti ideas. The practical upshot o’ which is my actual day is mos’ly spent doin’ this, ‘cuz it’s important. Visit cubs, cook at workhouses, sports, charity, chair the Conclave an’ express my intent, that sorta thing. These days, I only poke my nose in now an’ then ‘ta make sure ain’t nobody gettin’ too stupid wit’ my planet.”

“Or blitz the battlefield…”

“That too, when it’s necessary. I ain’t never managed ‘ta figger out the right balance there, but I try, an’ it’s important I git better. I do other things too, but that’s the gist of it. I came in as a terrible force o’ nature. Now, I’m hopin’ th’’ potential of all that means I ain’t gotta use it ‘ta keep order. My people gotta learn ‘ta govern themselves outta love an’ self-respect, not jus’ fear of the biggest meanest gao. So, that’s what I do. I try an’ lead by example, if I can. I’m too damn powerful to safely use it too much.”

Marty thought about that and, for whatever reason, felt like offering some criticism.

“Not that you’re terribly consistent about any of that…”

“Naw. Sure ain’t,” Daar agreed. “Ain’t no such thing as a perfect dictator, and I’m way more powerful’n jus’ some big bad boss. I am the Gao an’ I don’t think people get that. But I try an’ be better. Which is why I’m here, ‘cuz balls do I, we, my species owe ‘ya, Adam.”

Marty watched the modest discomfort on Adam’s face. He reached out, and managed to pick up his coffee on the first try today. “I don’t…know how I feel about that,” he admitted.

“I bet not. An’ I bet ‘ya know what’s comin’ ‘yer way, too.”

“…I do?”

Daar looked at him thoughtfully. “Damn, you really are humble. Well, lemme jus’ say that, it’d be a good idea ‘ta recover an’ stick around. Good things are comin’ yer way. An’ I mean that as serious as I’ve ever meant anythin’. Now stuff ‘yer face,” he magicked up a plate full of eggs, bacon, and two supremely over-buttered and over-syruped Eggos. “World still needs ‘ya.”

Adam stared blankly through the plate as he processed that, then nodded, and set to shovelling food into his face. Still not a perfect process—his hand was still wobbly, and getting the fork to his mouth rather than, say, into his eye still demanded some concentration…but Marty could see, it was a good day today. Maybe the best he’d had so far.

“…Thiff ain’ eggactly on m’ meal plan,” he pointed out around the chewing.

“Stuff ‘yer meal plans,” Daar replied, watching his language around Diego. “Right now, you eat practically, not perfectly. I squished the lifeforce right outta ‘ya all night long—had loadsa fun doin’ it too!—so ‘ya need a big pile o’ calories an’ protein in ‘yer system. Eat! Ain’t nothin’ more importanter’n gettin’ yer thundery butt unner proper control, yijao? I don’ wanna hear the first word ‘bout ‘yer meal plan ‘till ‘ya can cook it safely ‘fer ‘yerself.”

Daar had, apparently, taken it upon himself to rehabilitate Adam, and anything anyone might say otherwise was just input to be considered, processed, and applied to the problem. He knew how to take charge of a situation, and the relationship between the two of them had certainly flipped. Adam had always been the more quietly dominant personality between them, but…

Well, things had changed. Not in a negative way, or a resentful way, but…naturally. As if it was what they’d expected between each other.

“‘Sides,” Daar added, “We all know ‘yer gon’ whip ‘yer ass back into shape the second ‘ya can.”

“That’s a bad word!” Diego blurted out.

“…Is it? Well I’m sorry,” Daar ducked down to speak eye to eye with Diego. “I shouldn’t be usin’ no stinky-tail words ‘round you, should I?”

Adam chuckled, and swallowed. “M-hm. Abuelo would have somethin’ to say about it, wouldn’t he mijito?”

“Anyhoo. Enough jawin’ an’ more eatin’. I think next…mebbe I’ll make ‘ya some gaoian hash!”

It turned out to be delicious, of course. Gaoians didn’t typically indulge much in sweet things, but breakfast seemed to be an exception. His “hash” turned out to be a mash of something…starchy and shredded, which wasn’t potato but still tasty, and some vegetable matter Marty couldn’t identify, and something that was definitely egg-like but not…

Fried to a crisp, and covered in honey at the last second. God it was good. Far better than Eggos, by a long shot. In any case, everyone was left with full stomachs and honestly, a desire to go back to sleep and digest.

Which was of course when Daar decided it was time to go. He made to scrub down the griddle, but Marty shooed him away. “I’ll take care of that. Price for cooking breakfast.”

“An’ smashing ‘yer man?”

She and Adam both laughed. “Yes, that too. And I know you have your heart set on a certain taco-centric lady just now…”

“Ha! Rumors spread quick, huh? Well yeah, pro’ly visit her today if I can. I think firs’ though I gotta take care o’ business. I do still gotta poke my nose in an’ stuff, advise, mebbe direct…”

“Sounds terrible.”

“Naw. Jus’ important. One las’ thing, though. I’mma keep my eye on ‘ya both. You’ll get through this. ‘Yer prob’ly the strongest man I know—no, that ain’t what I mean, Adam—an’ ya got a strong family ‘ta help. An’ friends in high places, an’ not jus’ me. Don’t ferget. Got it?”

And with that, he was gone. He left behind a mess that Marty was happy to clean up, because for the first time in weeks their home felt well. Normal, or at least as normal-ish as their family ever mustered. Adam rolled himself onto the couch to sleep off the last of last night, while Gabe and Jess were more than glad to come take Diego off Marty’s hands for a while so she could do the same…It was the first truly relaxing morning she’d had in far too long.

She made the most of it.

Date Point: 18y11m1w2d AV
Shuttle, on approach to archeological dig site, WeiMeYrU-Uym relic homeworld

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Somehow, when Ian’s imagination turned to the idea of a dead civilization, it turned to, well, pyramids and the desert. Something about the whole mental image of an entire culture that had died before humans had even strayed out of Africa just set his mind to sandstone temples with big columns, maybe a huge statue hewn from a cliff face or something like that..

But of course, the WeiMeYru-Uym, or whatever their real name had been, were a spacefaring civilization. They’d numbered in the tens of billions, spread across the surrounding star systems. And their downfall had mostly come about through years of terrible civil war. The details were vague, dulled by time and no doubt quietly censored, erased, lost, fudged and buried by the Hierarchy, but they’d presumably had metropolises to equal or exceed any on Earth.

All of which were now buried. Lost under rolling fields of yellowish grainy grass, and swallowed up by forests with vibrant golden leaves. As the shuttle bellied low to follow the river, Ian couldn’t see anything with the naked eye. No roads cut through the forests along the water’s edge. No crumbling concrete embankment kept the river running straight.

It looked like a totally uninhabited region. But the shuttle’s sensors—much upgraded from the stock package—told a different story. Ground-penetrating radar, thermal imaging, gravimetric and magnetometric survey had lots to say about what was under the topsoil. The false-color overlay revealed huge craters, dozens of them punched into a semi-regular grid of rich metal oxides. Over the millennia, the vehicles, water pipes, power lines and structural rebar had all corroded, collapsed, and become a layer of young geology, buried under centuries of windblown dust and flood sediment. It was all so clear, even to Ian’s uneducated eye, that he could see the general street map, and the long curve of a major highway up the buried city’s eastern flank.

And, at the city’s north end, a dazzling too-strong return on the sensors from the dig site and equipment on the surface, and the nav beacon calling them in to land.

Ian was piloting it for a change. He needed the practice, and Moj had expressed some unease at setting foot on a “grave world.” Morwk was staying up top to take care of some of the never-ending maintenance and keep an eye on the sensors, and Urgug would have left no room in the shuttle for cargo.

Dora and Bruuk, of course, had both leapt at the chance to get some fresh air. So, at least they weren’t short on muscle and drones to offload their wares, groundside.

The sooner the better. Even though it was sealed, Ian still fancied he could detect an aroma coming off the container full of prime, truly putrid zrrks stashed at the back. Bruuk certainly claimed he could.

The warm, summery, floral air that rolled in when the shuttle was finally down and he opened the doors confirmed it. Even Dora, whose sense of smell was easily the weakest among them, sighed with relief.

“I will never understand the appeal of these things…” she grumbled, tapping the crate as she alighted.

“Aye, but you say the same thing about bacon. So…” Ian dropped down from the shuttle and grinned as he saw a number of tall, skinny blue figures ambling their way. Perfect.

He didn’t have a lot of experience with Vzk’tk. There weren’t many on Cimbrean, and they mostly kept to the Alien Quarter in Folctha, safely away from any blundering humans and Gao who might accidentally snap their spindly legs. They had a reputation for not being the sharpest marbles in the shed, but the smarter ones knew it, and used it to their advantage.

Should make for interesting haggling, at least.

In the event, despite their initial unease at encountering a couple of deathworlders and a Robalin, the diggers quickly got over their nerves when they realized there were some genuinely ancient Zrrks on offer. They sold pretty much instantly, and for more than Ian had expected.

Then came the other luxuries. Entertainment, decorations, sweets, a few gadgets and spare parts…nothing snapped up quite as eagerly, but their little bazaar did a roaring trade for a good hour or so.

Ian stepped away from it to go explore once it became clear that the Vzk’tk were generally more happy dealing with Dora than with him. He ambled as close to the dig site as they’d let him, hoping to get a glimpse of their trenches and finds, but, well, they looked like big holes in a field. Whatever was of interest at the bottom didn’t look like much to him, so he returned to the shuttle, put his feet up, and let his thoughts wander.

He was pulled out of them by a persistent peep-peep-peep, peep-peep-peep from the console to his left: a call from Morwk. When it connected, Morwk’s expression was, as far as Ian could tell, troubled. It was hard to tell with Kwmbwrw faces.

“Something the matter, mate?”

“I couldn’t say. It seems like Bruuk’s informant wasn’t just ‘spinning a yarn’ as you say.”

Ian sat up. “You’ve seen them?”

“Oh yes. High speed and low drag indeed. I clocked whatever it is doing nearly half a megalight, but the distortions were tiny. We’d make a bigger wake at a thousandth of that speed.”

“Did you get a direction?”

“Not as clear as I would have liked. A signal so faint, at extreme range? The margin of error is…sizeable.”

“But still, you know vaguely which way it went.”

“Vaguely,” Morwk agreed. “I couldn’t begin to give you a mass estimate, though. It could be as small as the shuttle, or as big as the Rich Plains, I have no way of telling.”

“So, vaguely, which way were they headed?”

“Rimwards-by-north, well off the beaten track. And, skipper, you thought it was a ‘choppy’ ride getting here? Those were still spacelanes, even if they are old and badly maintained. Believe me, the real interstellar medium is worse. We are not equipped for extended off-lane travel.”

“Not a problem mate, our job was just to confirm the story.” Ian swung his boots up onto the copilot’s chair and sat back, and dug around in the bag stashed next to him for his water bottle. “Still nothing on that fancy relay finder we got?”

“Nothing. I swept that whole section of sky. No active Hotel relay in this part of space.”

Which of course didn’t rule out the possibility of one being under construction but not yet online. If Big Hotel stuck to their old MO, then the planet Ian was currently sitting on would have been a prime candidate, but the Fortune should have had no trouble seeing a construction site like that from orbit. And the Hierarchy wouldn’t have hesitated to wipe out the archeologists to cover their tracks.

“Can you whip up a survey of temperate planets in that direction?”

“A full survey would take five or six days. If you want to leave on that unsuspicious timetable you laid out, I’ll only be able to get the nearest few dozen lightyears.”

“What about if you narrow the search to high-Class worlds? Gravity above one point three Dominion standard.”

“Tighter parameters will accelerate the search and extend the range I can map in that time. Though, this may not actually be the Hierarchy, you know.”

Ian nodded, and took a swig of water. “I know. Still. That’s who we’re most concerned about, isn’t it? I’ll be quite happy if it turns out to be someone or something else.”

“I suppose so. I’ll begin the survey at once.”

“Cheers. We’ll keep being the innocent traders down here, I guess.”

“Please tell me you sold all the zrrks…”

“Happy to report they’re all gone, mate.”

Morwk uttered a low, relieved cooing sound, and then coughed a Kwmbwrw laugh. “Thank the old mothers…See you when you get back. Out.”

Ian chuckled, slapped the top of his bottle closed, and set it aside to grab another crate from the back of the shuttle. Now that the archeologists were nicely loosened up with some of their own classic delicacies, the time had come to introduce them to the joys of Folctha-grown radishes and rocket. And then maybe he’d buy a souvenir for his quarters.

The funny thing was, he’d always felt that digging up cultural items and putting them in museums and private collections was kinda…disrespectful. But this felt different. The people who’d once called this world home were extinct. There weren’t any descendents around to complain about their heritage being plundered. If nobody dug up this stuff and displayed it at all, then they’d just be…gone. Forgotten.

There was no bringing them back. But they could be remembered. It seemed only fair, really. Even if nothing came of the mystery high-speed sensor contacts, just coming here and remembering made the trip worth it, in Ian’s view.

As did confirming those warp signatures. He didn’t know what they meant yet. Maybe he’d never get to know, compartmentalization being what it was. But they were definitely out there, and definitely aware of his ship, too.

…Best not to relax until they were safely back in civilization. That feeling of paranoia wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting worse. But, he wasn’t too worried. His crew still had plenty of tricks up their misshapen, odd-numbered sleeves.

And so did the Fortune.

Date Point: 18y11m1w2d AV
FOB Alighieri, Planet Hell

Gabrielle Nyoni

Quiet days put everyone on edge. Quiet days, consensus had it, meant the Hunters were up to something.

Of course, ‘quiet’ was a relative term. The base never stopped working, and the constant background noise was a rumble of heavy stuff being moved around, the regular thump of the arrays firing day and night on a schedule you could set your watch to, and the growl of vehicles heading out or returning from patrol. Nobody stopped at Alighieri.

If nothing else, there was kit to maintain, or food to stuff into faces. Gabby liked finding groups of men sitting around taking care of such chores. They tended to be a good source of unfiltered opinions.

But today? Today was silent. Confusingly so. The Hunters had seemingly vanished, and the few that were encountered out in the city seemed to be hastening to some sort of errand. It was, in the words of far too many tense young men, fuckin’ suspicious. And they were happy to speculate around the reporter.

Of course, nobody could agree on what kind of ‘something’ the enemy might be up to.

“Now, if it was me? I’d be lookin’ at diggin’ under the shield bubble. Whole lotta underground infrastructure down there, right? Basements and shit. Knock through a few walls, wriggle along some pipes, you could carry a nuke right under us.”

Lance Corporal Dyer was the kind of guy that Gabby thought of as a charming douche: cocky, self-assured, irreverent, and apparently didn’t know how to keep his thoughts to himself. As soon as he had a bright idea he shared it, and he didn’t give up on his bright ideas easily.

He wasn’t big by human standards. Maybe five-foot-six and built like a tough, muscular sort of beanpole. She imagined he was the type who often talked a bigger game than he could properly back, and as a result, likely knew his way around a fight better than he had any right to know.

His buddies mostly knew how to handle him: they just let him jaw until he tired himself out. The Gaoians, though…

“What is it with humans and thinkin’ sewer pipes are big enough to fit through?”

The Grand Army’s frontline combat units were full of brownies, and Heembo—a name that had attracted all kinds of robust mockery—was a pretty classic example. He was a rough-furred and handsome third-degree like Marrek, brawny-yet-lanky though noticeably beefier, which these days was about the post-War brownfur standard. So…pretty damn huge, by human standards. Sort of like a massive basketball player and a freakishly tall linebacker combined.

“Most of us ain’t seven foot bears,” Dyer retorted. “And plenty of y’all could fit!”

Despite the high population of brownies, that was only relative to gaoian demographics. Eighty percent of the unit were still silverfurs, and they ran the gamut in physicality. A few were legitimate competition for the brownfurs, but most were a sort of tough, wiry sort of build. Small, really. Even next to Dyer they weren’t overtly imposing…but they had wicked claws.

“Most sewerage is, like, as thick around as my leg. And fulla shit,” Heembo insisted. “Kinda like you.”

There was a gruff round of guffaws and chitters across multiple octaves of deep. Big or small, everyone seemed a bit fond of Dyer’s antics.

He, of course, was oblivious. “You got big fuckin’ legs, though! Big enough I could wriggle through a pipe that size. And there’s utility tunnels an’ stuff, and drains. And basements. I’m tellin’ ya, with a good map I bet you could tunnel a long fuckin’ way.”

“From the other side of the river, though? Through the river? Nah, pretty sure that’s not what they’re up to.”

“Alright, let’s hear your idea!”

“Don’t have one, I just think your idea’s got no legs.”

“Come to think of it, why haven’t they nuked the city, yet?” Gabby asked.

“They have,” Heembo noted. “You weren’t here ‘fer that. They stopped when they noticed the shield could fight it off.”

“No, but, I mean, isn’t Dyer right? Couldn’t they sneak one underground and—?”

There was a blinding double-flash. Gabrielle was too stunned to react, but the men knew what to do, and so did Marrek. He threw her to the ground and then threw his two-hundred-plus kilos on top of her, which made something pop painfully in her side—

The voice of God spoke.

Date Point: 18y11m1w2d AV
Light bulk freighter Stray Fortune, orbiting WeiMeYrU-Uym relic homeworld

Urgugvuneg

“There’s another one.”

Urgug turned away from his paperwork and toward the sensor display, where Morwk had spent most of the afternoon. The ship was mercifully quiet, with its three noisiest crew away on the planet below them. No raucous human music thumping from Dora’s command pod, no clanking of metal and gruff banter from the gym, no unconsciously dense footfalls making the deck shake with every step.

And in Bruuk’s case, no tapping of claws against the metal of a deck already complaining loudly about such a large mass bearing down on it through comparatively small feet. That last one especially worked its way into Urgug’s hindbrain in a deeply uncomfortable manner. Instinct hadn’t caught up with the idea of a friendly, powerful predator, and probably never would.

He was very fond of them, of course. But deathworlders, and those who embraced their culture, were a little overwhelming from Urgug’s perspective. They were dynamic, and aggressive, and a bit too quick of mind to really catch up. Bruuk was wickedly intelligent, and Wilde was in another league of perceptive. The two of them together seemed to synergistically combine their powers in ways that, frankly…Urgug had no hope of keeping up with. Especially the way they managed to infect Moj and Dora with some of that energy, too.

No, he preferred his paperwork on the whole. It was something a hefty ruminant like himself could, well, ruminate over. And he’d found that deathworlders in general hated paperwork. Alleviating much of that burden from them both had earned him solid friendships, and well-crafted salads at dinner. Avocados, in particular…

He shook off the green glow of pleasure that thought rose in him, and returned his attention to Morwk. “You sound concerned.”

“You aren’t? Mystery sensor contacts in a supposedly dead region of space don’t trouble you?”

“No more than many of the other escapades we have launched ourselves into over the years, both with this shipmaster and our former one.” Urgug trundled away from his desk to peer at Morwk’s readings. “…My, that is faint.”

“Any fainter and I’d think it was just a background fluctuation. But it’s definitely moving like a ship…” Morwk traced the two spindly middle fingers of his right hand across the screen, then paused when the contact faded entirely. “Hmm.”

“You sound even more concerned now. Surely there is nothing to worry about? It was quite far away, and heading away from us.”

“True…” Morwk didn’t sound convinced. He drummed his thumbs on the counter for a second, then returned to fiddling with the sensors. The contact did not reappear. “…I think we should call the others back up.”

They were almost ready to head back anyway, and with the two strongest crewmembers at hand, they should make quick work of stowing everything away on the launch. Bringing forward their return by a little while should not be a problem. Urgug nodded, and went to make the call.

Wilde listened thoughtfully, nodded, and gestured at somebody off-camera as Urgug explained Morwk’s concern. Behind him, the shuttle sealed itself and the audio feed picked up the low thrum of its engines coming online.

“Aye, two confirmed contacts is enough for me. Have Moj and Morwk spin up the jump drive, we’ll go home the fast way.”

Morwk raised a hand to indicate he’d heard the instruction, and abandoned the sensor column to return to his spot in the engine room. A few seconds later, the sound of his voice calling over the ship’s intercom to summon Mojremm’rt to the bridge reached Urgug’s ears.

“The ship will be ready for you,” he promised.

“Good. See you in a few—”

The screen went blank. Urgug blinked at the words “connection lost” for a few seconds before turning his head to the sensors.

Space around them was, far too suddenly, not as empty as it had appeared. Red waves of alarm pulsed down his body and he turned, too slow, to lumber across the bridge and—

Moj was quicker. Maybe it was all that training with Wilde and Bruuk. He came out of nowhere, slid under and between Urgug’s legs, chitinous carapace skidding on the metal deck plating, sprang to his feet in a smooth motion and flung himself into the pilot’s seat, swatting the panic button as he did so. The lights dimmed. The shields went up.

The next instant, faster than Urgug could process it, something slammed into them in a brilliant white flash that made the bridge’s outside cameras shut down protectively. Two more flashes, then a heavy thump that rang through the hull. The shrill wail of multiple alarms alerted Urgug that they were gravity spiked. Something terribly fast and blisteringly hot streaked past the ship and down into the relic world’s atmosphere. Far below, the dig site was annihilated in an instant.

The shuttle was…gone.

Urgug was a peaceful being at heart. His people were a peaceful people. He couldn’t cope. He froze. He was still staring at the sensors, too shocked to hear Moj’s shouting or Morwk’s cursing, too stunned by wishing the shuttle would just reappear somehow—

Something short, dense and hairy shoved him aside. “Move your arse mate, shit just got real!”

Wilde. And Bruuk, too. Somehow…

…Right. Yes. The jump array on the shuttle. The thumping sound. But by the world-storm, the speed they must have thought at to—

Another shield-flash, and Urgug’s body caught up at last with his brain. He stumbled aside, returned to the navigation console as Bruuk pounced on the sensors. Outside, the enemy ships recoiled, confused that their assault hadn’t annihilated an apparently harmless freighter.

“Urgug! Get a good scan on ‘em! Dora, launch our pets! Moj! Break for high orbit, get above ‘em!”

Clear orders. Urgug’s hands followed them. The whole hull vibrated around him as Dora’s combat drones swarmed out of their hidden launch tubes and suddenly the attackers weren’t facing a sitting, vulnerable target. They were facing every surprise that Clan Whitecrest could cram into one hull.

And in space combat, there was nothing more deadly than surprise.

In the end, it was a short fight. Dora’s drones engulfed one of the attacking ships, reduced it to scrap. Two more high-velocity shots skipped off the Fortune’s boosted shielding, generating retaliatory bursts of gamma radiation…

Then a lurch in the deck. The planet below vanished, Urgug’s console beeped and updated, and it was over. They’d escaped, back to the safety of staging near Cimbrean.

Things progressed quickly after that. They were boarded with extreme violence by the legendary HEAT. Never had Urgug thought he’d meet deathworlders the like of which made Wilde or Bruuk seem so insignificantly slow, weak, small, so completely, totally harmless. Some were gaoian, some were human, all were studies in concentrated, precision death.

There were apparently levels to this. Thankfully, the aggression was quick, and no harm beyond a bit of a bruise was given. The biggest one—he stood almost at eye level, and was far and away the most dangerous being Urgug had ever met—had been the one to tackle and slam him against the wall with just enough force to stun, but not quite enough to cause any lasting harm. ‘Righteous’ gave a firm pat on the flank and what was probably a friendly smile. “Sarry ‘bout that. You’d be the last one we’d want possessed by a fuckin’ Hierarchy demon.”

Urgug flashed pink in confusion. “Me?”

The huge man shrugged, “you’re a big dude.” And with that, their conversation was over.

Debrief. That was thorough. Human and Whitecrest personnel, in what was clearly a combined intelligence operation. Presumably a thorough poring-over of their sensor data while Urgug answered questions to the best of his reeling ability.

What came next, however, was orders. And direction. He was glad for both.

“Get the ship repaired and restocked,” Wilde barked out, as he emerged from his own debrief. “I’ve got an errand to run.”

“Oh?”

“Yup. Gotta go fetch a Chimp and some monkeys.”

Well, whatever that meant, Urgug was just glad for some direction. Those few moments—a subjective eternity—of panic, of not knowing what to do, of total paralysis…they had been horrible. Doubly so, for believing his crewmates dead.

The chance to put that right was a balm. He seized it gladly. And far from being scared, he wanted nothing more than to go back and settle the score.

After all. He’d chosen this mission too.

++END CHAPTER 80++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

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As well as 58 Deathworlders…

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73 Friendly ETs, 146 Squishy Xenos and 314 Dizi Rats. And now to make a Dizi Rat pie. SPLAT

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 81: The Offensive

Chapter 81: The Offensive

Date Point:18y11m1w2d AV
FOB Alighieri, Planet Hell

Gabrielle Nyoni

“Masks on! Get your fucking masks on!”

That was easy enough for Gabby that even dazed, pummelled and totally upside-down, her fingers managed to do it without thinking. A simple button press and instantly, her head was cocooned in a protective forcefield. A puff of cool air from her collar, and suddenly the burnt smell was gone.

The ringing in her ears, though…that wasn’t going away just yet. Everything was lopsided. She could hear the shouting from her right, the orders and urgent calls, “Corpsman! Corpsman!!”

From her left…just the high ring of tinnitus.

Something heavy, furry and warm was pinning her down. When she pushed on it, it squirmed and keened.

…Right. Marrek.

“Buddy, you okay?”

“…Feel like Daar just jumped on top’a me…” He climbed off her, and Gabby gasped as she got a good look at the world beyond him. A dirty brown mushroom cloud was still unfolding, towering pretty much right above them. Close.

Dazed or not, her hands knew what to do. Up came her camera, shutter clattering even while a terrible frozen awe tingled down her limbs.

“Well…” She could hear Marrek indulge in a full-body pelt-shake, and the part of her brain that was still not quite connecting wondered if there was even any point to that under his fatigues. “Never thought I’d see that again. We should get movin’.”

“…Yeah.” In fact, there was a river of men rushing past them, streaming toward the mushroom cloud and the enemy. Attacking? Now? God, how did they do it?

Still. She was on her feet and moving too.

“What do we do?”

“We git th’fuck back ‘ta HQ right now. C’mon.”

Gabby nodded. Shit, they’d survived on purest dumb luck it seemed. A roll in the terrain, some reinforced concrete and Hescos, and sitting on the leeward side of a parked vehicle. Enough to spare them. But…God. Among the extra equipment she’d been enduring this whole time was a general-purpose environmental hazard alarm, and it was starting to click urgently at her as the fallout came down. Suddenly she was much, much more grateful for the horrible, sweaty layer of unbreathing fabric she was wearing.

Even so, her dead run wasn’t fast enough for Marrek, who outstripped her for a few dozen yards then stopped, came back for her and growled urgently. “Climb on.”

Gabby wasn’t about to argue. If there was any safety to be had, it was back under one of the inner forcefield domes, and the sooner they got there the better. Dignity didn’t fucking matter right now. She climbed on, took the biggest, firmest grip around his neck that she could, and hunkered down.

What followed was the wildest ride of her life. Gaoians didn’t have straight and steady spines like horses. They flexed more like cheetahs, and hanging on was mostly a matter of keeping her hands locked around his thick neck until her knuckles creaked, and her legs braced under her, trying to rid enough that she at least didn’t go flailing about.

It was a pretty far going of it, but he kept to a rapid lope, lungs heaving all the way. When they got close enough to see the devastation…

No more pictures just yet. Safety first. He picked up the pace again, and upgraded to a dead sprint when the alarms went solid and started screaming at them. There, near HQ and the shield generator, was a hastily-assembled clean area. Nothing else stood. Precious little was even there, reduced to residue rather than rubble. A clear line where the devastation gave way to clean concrete marked the edge of the inner shield dome, the one protecting HQ and the jump arrays.

Marrek didn’t slow down until they reached the tent, and it was only then he unceremoniously dumped her off and clutched at his chest, desperate for breath.

“Fuckin’…Humans…yer all…fuckin’…heavier…’n’you…look…” A human from the US Army was on them immediately, clad in full protective gear and armed with a menacing spray nozzle. “Heavier’n…my…runnin’ vest…”

Ordinarily, Gabby might have taken offense at being called heavy. Right now, she had more important things on her mind. “Are you okay?” she asked, as they were briskly doused.

Marrek waved a paw at her reassuringly and kept panting, then grunted and pulled a face as the cold water sprayed all over him.

The soldier with the hose didn’t have any time for niceties, and gestured with his nozzle toward a tented hallway as soon as he’d given them their rinse. “That way. Quickly, please.”

“What happens next?”

“You strip down to your skin, we scrub you down from a distance, and we dispose of everything you’re wearing.”

“My camera!” Gabby protested.

“We’ll send that through for specialized decon. And before you do,” he warned, “don’t go sneakin’ no memory card through. Put it all in the bin right there.”

“But—”

“I don’t care, ma’am. Do what you’re told, or have it done to you.”

“Trus’ me,” Marrek moped. “I’ve got it worse.”

“How come?”

“We’re gettin’ shaved.”

“I’m told they got some rapid re-grow pills now,” the soldier offered, consolingly.

“Le’ss jus’ get it over with…”

Well. Gabby learned a few things.

The first was that there was no such thing as dignity in a warzone. Marrek, herself, and three others were all herded into a decon cell, stripped naked, shaved completely hairless (all of them, head to toe!), and then effectively power-washed with something stinking, stinging, and blue. And almost scaldingly hot, too.

The second was that brownfurs looked alarming without their fur. Marrek was both physically almost too impressive…and also weirdly, unaccountably alien. It just somehow looked wrong because he wasn’t merely buzz-cut, which would have looked fine, even handsome…it was that he was shaved entirely. He looked like a bodybuilder sphinx cat. Or a roided-out potato.

She managed not to giggle at that image, though that wasn’t hard, really. He looked miserable. No wonder they considered it such a serious punishment!

Of course, she was bald now, too. Everywhere. Even her eyebrows. Even…yes. They were at least good enough to let her tend to her own intimate areas, but they had to watch and approve that she’d done a thorough enough job. It was one of the most degrading experiences she’d ever lived through.

And of course, they’d shaved her hair, too. Gone, to be destroyed with the rest. Which, she’d been wearing a forcefield helmet but the soldiers were utterly uninterested in her protestations. She was only issued some clothing, in the form of some fatigues, once the treatment was over and her whole body felt like they’d stripped off a layer of skin.

She got through it all in part by worrying about all the soldiers and marines outside who were presumably fighting in the fallout. Marrek had…chattered…at length about what the next step would be, about the need to counterattack because the Hunters presumably had pounced the moment the bomb went off….

Gabby couldn’t imagine how the wounded might go through what they’d just endured.

And the dead…however many there might be, they weren’t going home. Ever. Somehow, that thought put the fear into her. To think…there but for the grace of God, she and Marrek could have ended up not just killed here, but buried in a mass grave here too, never to be returned home or given a proper farewell.

Something about that filled her with a cold dread that mere death didn’t carry.

In any case, the battlefield was no longer any place for reporters. They were on the first available jump back—routed to Gao, inconveniently—and had debrief, post-processing, medical, and so on…it turned out Gabby’s left eardrum was ruptured. The Gaoian medic gave her a shot of some kinda regenerative alien supermedicine and promised it should fix itself in forty-eight hours.

For Gabby, the emotions were mixed. On the one hand, after such a close escape, and with the cold dread still lingering in the back of her mind, a large part of her was glad to have escaped with a mere terrible indignity.

On the other hand…the battle for Hell had just turned endlessly more serious than it already was. She felt like she was abandoning the people left there to the same anonymity that freaked her out so much. If she could have stayed…she would have.

But she couldn’t. And she was guiltily grateful for it. She’d just have to do what she could from safety.

Marrek understandably wanted to stay on Gao while his fur regrew, so Gabby returned to Cimbrean alone after a long wait for an available jump that she barely noticed. She just…sat. And waited. And didn’t really think about anything. There were terrible thoughts and emotions all balled up tight in the back of her mind; she didn’t dare touch them. They’d explode, when she did.

She was spit out the arrival gate with nothing to her name except the oversized fatigues and boots she’d been stuffed into, and a piece of paper with instructions on it—symptoms to watch out for, what to do about them, that kind of thing. On autopilot, she walked the few blocks to the ESNN building. Nobody had even bothered to call ahead and let them know. She was, in fact, the bearer of breaking news when she stumbled numbly into the office.

Jim wanted to put her right in front of the camera. Ava tore into him and took her home instead. Sat her on the couch. Sat next to her. A warm, furry weight on her knee broke through the daze, and when Gabby looked down into Hannah’s big, soulful, canine, worried eyes…that was when the click finally happened. When it really hit her just what she’d witnessed, and survived.

It took her a long, long while to stop shaking.

Date Point: 18y11m1w2d AV
Hell

Lance Corporal Viggo Dyer

Jesus shit they were fuckin’ lucky. Well, as lucky as infantry ever fuckin’ get. Fuckin’ nuked, Jesus fuck. Gonna die of ass cancer or some shit in ten years, if the fuckin’ Hunters don’t get ‘em first.

Or set off a second one.

No time to think about that. Wouldn’t fuckin’ feel it if it happened anyway, so…shut up and go to work.

Right now, they were in the worst kind of urban maneuver, securing ground and flushing out territory. It turned out that gaoian and human tactics were fantastic for the task. There was a pattern to it, where you cleared a sector, covered ingress, swept the obstacle clear. Sometimes there were buildings that needed to be cleared. Mostly, it was holes under debris. The silverfurs darted forward, the humans flowed in to secure. The big guys lugged in the packs filled with shieldsticks and ammo, leapfrog, leapfrog, leapfrog…

It all sorta…melted together after a while, really. The Hunters were too fuckin’ dumb to know what was up. They just…charged. And died. Didn’t even seem to give a fuck they were bein’ mowed down…

Right up until the other Hunters took advantage. Invisibility sure as fuck made it easy to get outflanked, the sneaky fucks.

Big fuckin’ mob of dumbfucks up front: Anvil. Sneaky group of backstabbers to one side: hammer. Dyer and his buddies right in the fuckin’ middle.

Clark crashed to the ground up ahead as a volley tore sideways into them from the left. Dyer spun, returned fire while finding the meagrest fuckin’ cover ever, followed it up with a grenade. A fat hostile round cracked past his head and against the wall: concrete dust splattered off his mask.

The grenades went off; he charged. Panting for breath under his mask, rounds skipping off the ground by his feet. One of the Gaoians next to him went sprawling, shot in the throat. Behind, the big guys opened: an invisible patch of air up ahead turned into a Hunter, reeling and screeching as its arm got torn off.

Another patch of air directly in front sizzled white hot: fusion claws. Shot the fuck out of it. Cloak flickered and failed: shot it some more, kept assaulting. Move, shoot, kill, all of it on reflex until…suddenly, nothing. No more enemy. No idea if they were all dead or if some of the cloaky fucks had melted away.

Secure the area. They had good good visibility of any approach—not that it necessarily mattered against invisible murder—and the LT decided now was the moment for them to dig in, get a breather, get some relief.

Also, mortars were fuckin’ up everything around them. Which was nice.

Clark was dead. So were Feegun and Rivera. Couple other guys were bein’ stuffed into stasis bags. Dyer, somehow, had come through it without even a little nick in his MOPP suit.

The rest of the day…sorta passed in a blur.

They got their positions secured. Relief came some hours later, and pushed forward in the next wave. They were ordered to the rear, where they could decon, debrief, reload, refuel…

It was only sometime later, when they were all sorta cuddled up in a tent, waiting for the showers to open up, when things were quiet, somehow….

Dyer fell apart. They all did.

Then they pulled themselves back together. A shower, some sleep, and more fighting awaited.

Date point: 18y11m1w2d AV
Kwei Bo Fa city, eastern Eng Hi province, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

One of Daar’s most favoritest things to do was hostin’ guests from across the Gao. He had two afternoons twice a week set aside ‘fer that sorta thing, and he was always careful to invite people from across society, as much as he could. Unknown Clanless with interesting stories, impressive athletes, thinkers an’ scholars, high Clan, the occasional charming rogue…

And Females, of course. All kinds of them! Balls, more often’n not they weren’t even mating prospects, jus’ respected elders (who had the bestest stories) or maybe very young maidens, new to the world an’ fulla potential, who were just delightful as all get out ‘fer a red-blooded man’s senses…but prol’ly wouldn’t be a good mating fit ‘fer him, metaphorically or literally. Most were arranged by Naydi for her own reasons, and all were good company.

Some of ‘em were mating prospects of course, but not all: lotsa gals turned him down. Happened allatime, even if nobody would believe it. Though if he were bein’ as brutally honest with himself as he could possibly be, maybe a lotta that was jus’ him sniffin’ out real early-like if she was interested, an’ sparin’ ‘em both the time an’ embarrassment. More often’n not, s’pecially wit’ ‘yer average silverfurs…well, he tended to both intimidate an’ arouse pretty much everyone, usually mightily so, but almos’ always it was one more’n th’ other, s’pecially ‘fer the littler folk. He always had done, even when he was jus’ a fifteen-year-old, newly-grown adult an’ freshly made Champion who din’t know his nose from his tail where females were concerned. Which, well. He understood. So he din’t put ‘em on the spot, if he could avoid it.

Well…usually. It was always important ‘ta know if someone liked the game!

Anyhoo, predictable Daar-things aside, most of the time he din’t quite know what kind of company he’d be getting on any given day, ‘cuz his staff had discovered that he delighted in mild surprise, and took over mosta the work ‘fer settin’ things up.

The event they’d arranged today was kinda half-formal, half-relaxed. They were down south on the isthmus, enjoyin’ the warm weather on the grounds’a the big Commune at En Wei-Nan, havin’ a kinda fancy picnic an’ artistic exhibition. There were sculptures, paintings, animations, poetry, all kindsa things. Finger-paintings by some o’ the more precocious cubs, too. It was…well. Civilized. Nice! Sittin’ around snackin’ on cheese an’ meeshi while a lovely young fifteen-year-old silverfur sang the famous Yi mi kei shei aria.

Not a classic performance, though. A modern interpretation, with Human European influence. Lotta grumblin’ about that in some circles, about preservin’ heritage an’ not pollutin’ it. Others held the view that art was a livin’ thing that grew an’ changed with the times, an’ pointed out that ‘ya couldn’t modernize the ol’ aria without knowin’ it damn well first.

Daar did think it were important ‘ta treasure what they were an’ hold on ‘ta the’ things that were good an’ right about their culture. It were over ten thousand years old, an’ most o’ that recorded! But still, even if the avant-garde (…a Human word, that) art scene weren’t really his thing, he could still appreciate talent.

S’pecially lovely talent! So, he was enjoyin’ the performance, even if it were pretty adventurous, when his nose caught a scent that spelled trouble: Tiyun’s.

Daar knew his aide well. Even when Tiyun was at his calmest, his state of mind was an open book to Daar’s nose, and Daar usually knew what was up a good little bit before he arrived, just from his scent on the breeze. This time, though, the aroma of worry and anguish hung so heavily about him that other heads turned too, ears flattened sympathetically. Something was badly wrong, and though Tiyun was doing his best to pretend otherwise, he fooled nobody. Even the singing sister faltered.

Daar did what he did best, then. He made eye contact wit’ her, gave his absolute most bestest pant-grin, winked, an’ mostly ‘fer fun gave her jus’ the quickest lil’ preenin’ pose as he stalked away to go meet with Tiyun in private.

That was the bestest part o’ bein’ a leader, really. Encouragement! She carried on, voice just a bit more soulful, and it warmed Daar’s heart to hear. What a blessing to have that power!

On to more sober business.

“‘Fore ‘ya launch into whatever it is,” he preempted, “make sure she’s offered a private audience whenever’s appropriate.”

“I…yes, My Father. I presume for an evening?”

Daar chittered. She was incredibly lovely, but… “Naw, ‘less she’s interested. Needs some learnin’ first, or mebbe sum’ good teachin’….now, what happened?”

Ordinarily, he would have indulged in teasing Tiyun a bit about how long it had been since his last contract, and that maybe he should be the one to educate the young sister in the ways of male and female…but now was very clearly not the time. Instead, Tiyun plucked a privacy field generator from his pocket and activated it, sealing them away in a sphere of white noise.

“The Hunters on Hell detonated a nuke.”

….Well, fuck.

“I presume Command has already begun their counter-attack?”

“Within seconds. But the casualty reports are…significant. And the Hunters are throwing everything at them.”

“Of course they are. Hell is existential ‘fer them. Almost all their resources are tied up in that system an’ we’ve been denying it to them for two months. How big a nuke was it?”

“Tactical, we think ground burst. Something on the order of ten kilotons we think.”

That was puzzling, actually.

“Why so small? In their situation, I’d have used something much more bigger.”

“Leading theory so far is resource constraint. It might simply be all they had on-hand.”

Hmm. Daar’s ears flicked in thought. That spoke to a pretty serious desperation, maybe…

Or maybe, it spoke to a serious internal disconnect. “Well, either that means they ain’t got the means, or they ain’t got the will from th’ Alpha o’ Alphas. Either seems advantageous to us.”

“…The casualties, My Father.” Tiyun seemed a bit…ah.

Okay.

“Tiyun. Brother.” Daar got down on his haunches and pulled Tiyun in for a reassuring hug. “I know. Believe me I know, an’ I’ll light their pyres myself. It’ll likely be almost everyone who was there, which by now is prob’ly low six-digits. Am I on the mark?”

“…Over a hundred thousand, My Father. As a rough first estimate.”

“Yeah. So, knowing that, an’ acceptin’ that, what can I do ‘ta make their deaths worthwhile?”

“…I…”

Daar tightened the hug, and used his paw to massage reassuringly along the back of Tiyun’s neck and head. “It’s okay. It jus’ means ‘yer good people, s’all.”

He held on for a comfortable while, and only pulled back when he felt Tiyun relax a bit.

“…If, if you wish to speak with President Chambliss, I have made the arrangements.”

“Good. I’ll need ‘ta. Firs’ I gotta talk to Command. I assume that’s where we’re goin’?”

“Your jump is waiting.”

Daar nodded, and stood up to walk toward the array. It wasn’t far.

Something was still bothering Tiyun, though. Daar could smell exactly what it was, too.

“I know you want to say something,” he said, with a bit more authority in his voice. “You have standin’ permission to say anything you think needs sayin’. You know that, so, say it. I won’t have an aide afraid of my shadow.”

“…I…” It took him a while to screw up his courage, but like any good Gao, he found a way through. “How…how can you be so…so…”

Daar spared him the rest. “Because I must, Brother Tiyun. I am the Great Father. Nothing else matters. We have just been wounded by a terrible enemy, and I will not allow that to stand. Right now, the way ‘ta honor them best is ‘ta be cold an’ win this thing.”

Tiyun shivered, but duck-nodded, and that was that.

Together, they stormed back to the motorcade where the truck with the jump array was powered up and waiting for them. With that thing trailin’ him, Daar was never more’n a few seconds away from whereever he needed ‘ta be.

At Command, the hubbub was almost loud enough to drown out the thump of his arrival, even from the next room over. The air was thick with the scents of dismay, grief, alarm…but not panic. Not yet, anyway. And he’d picked his senior staff carefully enough that he trusted they wouldn’t panic at all, but still. The mood in the command center shifted immediately as he pushed through the doors.

Minutes passed. A whirlwind built around the map table, showing ground zero and the disposition of their forces at the moment of detonation. What they’d lost and, more importantly, what they still had.

Sorta. Reports were understandably pretty sparse for the moment. Thankfully they had excellent overhead observation courtesy of Fleet Intelligence Center aboard Myrmidon.

The foothold was still there. Human and Gaoian engineers had cleared a nice moat around it and brought the innermost shield dome right down to and below ground level, leaving the inner fortress completely unscathed, and even clean of fallout.

The second ring, previously secured territory, was now the front line again. The Hunters were swarming right through ground zero without a fuckin’ care in the world. Didn’t matter to ‘em that they were fatally irradiating themselves by doing so. Fuck, they prob’ly didn’t even know they were committin’ suicide. And if they did, well, Hunters only seemed ‘ta start carin’ about their own lives once they had some actual rank.

Though, when Daar recalled the Alpha, he had to wonder if even that fucker had really cared all that much.

Somehow the Marines and soldiers in that hellhole had held. They’d stood right back up, charged their fuckin’ weapons, and instead o’ swarming over a disorganized mess o’ shellshocked helpless victims, the Hunters had run into the teeth of some fuckin’ pissed off maneuver, grindin’ its way through an’ slaughterin’ everything in its path.

Gotta sustain that. An’ the single biggest probl’m they’d have in that regard…

“How’s our logistics lookin’ in all this?”

“We don’t know yet,” Bronzefur’s Father Rogin declared immediately. “We are obviously getting everything in motion we possibly can on this side, and our Allies are doin’ the same thing back on Earth and Cimbrean. We should be ready to flow major combat power within the next few hours. Critical supplies—or what we anticipate they’ll need, anyway—will flow imminently.”

Daar duck-nodded. There was one thing that seemed to be runnin’ smoothly: communication between the groundside shield generator and FIC was still intact, meaning orbit-to-ground fire support was still available. A few well-placed RFGs had probably made the difference as the Hunters strayed out from under their own shield dome.

All in all…a terrible blow. But not a fatal one, which it could have been. And the fact the Hunters hadn’t escalated to a bigger bomb as it became clear their assault was failing gave a lot of credence to the idea they’d shot their wad.

So to speak, anyway. Nutless greasy soulless shits.

The question was, what was Daar to do in response? The Grand Army was being well led and administered. An’ goin’ ‘ta Hell personally would be fuckin’ reckless right about now, no matter how much killin’ a pissed-off fuckin’ truck-heavy ‘Back like him could inflict. No, that’d be be near suicide right now, not ‘ta mention takin’ up valuable jump capacity.

The question was answered for him by Father Biirin of Clan Whitecrest, who handed him a memo from one of his junior Brothers. A brief evaluation of the likely morale implications on Earth, in light of the recent political climate.

Hmm. Yeah. This situation needed somethin’ diff’rent than him bein’ a wall o’ muscle an’ murder.

“Tiyun.”

“My Father?”

“Reckon I’ll be visitin’ Earth in the very near future. Officially.”

“Yes, My Father.”

Daar duck-nodded, and addressed the staff present. “Thank you, everyone. Please continue your good work, and keep me informed as appropriate.” With that, he withdrew, leaving them to damage control and counter-attack. He’d need a dust bath and a comb, quickly. An’ a moment ‘ta touch base with Naydi, who was no doubt takin’ care o’ things on her side. After all, that quick moment ‘ta compare notes might be the last he’d get to see of her for a few days.

“Right,” he said in a low voice to Tiyun. “C’mon, you an’ I gotta pretty each other up ‘fer this.”

He was about to become very, very busy.

President Beau Chambliss

The shocking thought—the thought that shocked himself—running through Chambliss’ head was that at least it wasn’t a whole damn city this time. God.

Another, more detached thought plaguing him was that it was a nice day. Clear blue skies, crisp cold air, a perfect late fall day in the runup to Thanksgiving. A slow news day, even. And that was about to shatter like glass under a hammer. His speech writers were already looking grey and stressed as they assaulted a first draft of his address to the nation…and to the world. This was an Allied effort, after all.

There would be coordination, at a high level. He had an emergency call scheduled with The Great Father and the King in the next few hours, where they would…

Well. Decide the fate of billions.

Those were the stakes, after all. The Hunters were at a tipping point, the moment when they were either permanently ruined as a major galactic force, or the moment when they rebounded fiercer than ever and tempered by war…and with a new thirst for vengeance. Failure on Hell could result in whole worlds being scoured in a few years’ time.

There would be many—his disgruntled election season allies and supporters chief among them—who would scorch him for this. He’d run on a platform of peace, of pulling America’s beleaguered economy and grieving populace out of the war beyond the Sol Containment Field. To most people, alien life was a distant, abstract thing. The occasional Gaoian visitor on the news, an ESNN story here and there…Nothing concrete. Not part of their lives. Why should their children, spouses and parents be put in harm’s way when there were so many more immediate things to attend to here on this very real, very tangible, very troubled Earth?

Instead of delivering on that platform, he had instead ordered American troops into an already-bloody battle that had, in one instant, become the greatest loss of life since the Vietnam War.

There was only one way to look at it: in an hour, two at most, the American people would show their true character. Would they demand a withdrawal, and throw the rest of the galaxy to the wolves?

Not if Beau Chambliss had any influence over it.

God, and to think he’d ever called Sartori jingoistic…

He needed a PR campaign. One that wasn’t him doing the PR. He needed a sympathetic, foreign voice to be given, well, voice. He needed a big, big state visit. Soon. And it needed to be an untraditional one, too. He didn’t need or want Prime Ministers and other inherently political creatures mouthing meaningless words. He couldn’t afford that. None of them could. Politics had to be set aside, lest whole civilizations burn.

So. First things first. He had to call the Speaker of the House (in his party) and the Senate Majority Leader (in…bitter opposition) to keep them abreast. Right after that would be the Gang of Eight, and after that…the leaks would begin.

With luck, the leaders in Congress would play some ball. He felt confident they mostly would.

And that just left his plan, for the King…and the Great Father.

The time for the great leaders of the Deathworlders to step up had come.

ESNN BREAKING NEWS REPORT
Nuclear strike on allied forces

BREAKING: At approximately 1100 GMT, the Hunters on Hell detonated what appears to be a nuclear weapon near the front lines. At this moment, there is no estimate for the number of casualties.

[Image: a shaky, slightly blurred still frame capture of the mushroom cloud] photographer credit: Marrek

We are pleased to report that our colleagues Gabrielle Nyoni and Marrek survived the attack, and have returned to Cimbrean and Gao respectively. ESNN has reached out to Allied Extrasolar Command, who are yet to comment or provide any additional information.

At time of writing, it would appear the Human and Gaoian militaries are already responding the crisis, with thousands of service personnel mobilizing in the USA, and many having their leave cancelled.

get live updates on this news story

<Breaking News] <Live News] <Hunter War] <Planet Hell] <AEC] <Grand Army]

Date Point: 18y11m1w3d AV
Hell

LCpl Viggo Dyer

It was amazing how much a good cry could just…help. You had to have the right sorta brothers with you, though. Nobody else would understand. Clark, Feegun and Rivera were good men, and…

…Fuck.

In the here-and-now, though, they needed showers. After hours fighting in full gear, sweaty as balls, rehydration salts for the win…rank didn’t even begin to fuckin’ cover it. Another stroke of luck, or maybe magically competent planning: they had a decon kit with them at battalion, complete with pop-up tent and everything…and it had connected showers.

As everyone was in gear, that meant nobody had to be shaved. Thank God, because that could be debilitating for a gao. They did take the opportunity to trim right the fuck down though, and that was a nice bit of laughs for a bit. You had to be pretty cocky to rock a to-the-skin buzz cut.

Or, just be right out of fucks to give. For the most part, nobody was anything crazy special. Just a bunch of guys (and gao) who could hack it, together by circumstance and need. And that was all there was to it, really. You just had to cope, and thank fuck for the battle-brothers you had with you. They were a damn good unit, really.

And they grieved together by…kinda by turnin’ everything else up to eleven. As if goin’ extra hard on the banter and shit made up for the guys who weren’t there to take part.

So, the usual grab-ass was both a little more spirited and a little less humorous, that night. Nobody was feeling full of laughs exactly, but they were all feeling spiky and itchin’ to fuck something up hard. They were all young, after all, fierce in their prime and heavy on aggression, deployed on a giant adventure together, not sure if they’d ever come back…

Even if most of them weren’t stand-out special, they were all fit as hell, and that sort of competitive-but-brotherly energy just fed on itself. More than a few of them were seriously dedicated gymrats and at the crazy high end, two guys made everyone else look like chumps. First there was corporal Walker. Six-foot-six and one of those huge mutant motherfuckers that started really croppin’ up like ten, twenty years ago in out-of-the-way high schools and such. Fucker could move quick and nimble like a goddamn lightning bolt, too. Better’n everyone at everything, easily strong enough to make all the brownfurs his bitch…

All of them except for Heembo. He stood about seven foot tall like the other brownies, but while the rest were fit and lanky, sorta like really bigged-up versions of Dyers, Heembo was more like that big reporter gao; basically a tall-ass, long-armed linebacker, really. The two of them were a half-ton bundle of bestest-bud chaos and could honestly spend all day tossing each other around like toys. Walker was diced as fuck too, and as it turned out—

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Dyers whistled in honest, open astonishment. “You’re fuckin’ ripped under all that fur!” His already sky-high ‘do-not-fuck-with’ rating went up about six dozen notches in Dyer’s opinion. Like Walker, Heembo was just fuckin’ something else.

“Fuck yeah I am!” He preened lewdly and thrust his hips. “Why, like what’cha see?”

Heembo, like most gaoians, was not afraid to tease. No need to fear, though: unlike many gao, the big bastard was only about the girls. Kinda stupid about ‘em, too…

“Fuck off!” Dyers retorted as he lathered up his hair, “I’m not your fuckin’ sex toy!”

“Yet,” Walker noted, with his usual total deadpan. “Anything’s possible if you’re brave enough.”

“Nah, couldn’t ever take me,” Heembo grumbled. “…Where the fuck I put my fur shampoo?”

“You didn’t pack any,” Fekko, his little silverfur battle-buddy commented. “Despite being warned you oughta.”

“…I din’t?” There was some good-natured jeering from his slightly confused expression.

“Nope. So I packed extra. Here, and you owe me, pretty-bro.”

Feeko pant-grinned so big. “Okay! We’ll git you such a purdy female ‘fer a date, you’ll see…”

“Jesus,” Dyer snorted and shook his head. “Built like a war god, too fuckin’ good-looking for your own good, can’t remember to pack fuckin’ soap, and your offer for payback is to wingman for your buddy. Your name is fuckin’ perfect.”

It really was. He always had a vaguely placid (and kinda…absent) expression plastered on his dumb, handsome face, and frankly being as muscular and pretty as he was, should’ve been doing scandalous modeling instead of fighting in the blood.

Heembo just shrugged and started working on that full-body lather. “Don’t hate on my brownie beauty. And I’mma need help wit’ my back, too.”

Some stereotypes were true. Despite making up less than one percent of Gaoian society, purebred brownfurs were often well over a fifth of any combat unit, precisely because of how innately physical they were. Silverfurs just…usually weren’t, really. Unless they worked at it.

Still, none of them here were pushovers. They were all deathworld tough, they’d all trained well, and they could all fight. In oily black rain, too. Which the fuckin’ Hunters just…ran through. Like they didn’t give a shit that actual goddamn radioactive shit was washing over them.

That shit creeped Dyer out.

Maybe the dumb fuckers just didn’t know. Half the time, the young Hunters with hardly any cybernetics didn’t seem to even know what a bullet was. They were just suicide troops, a big distraction for the older, nastier ones to exploit. Thank fuck for shieldsticks, or their bigger brother the MPESCE—Man Portable Electro-Static Cover Emitter. The “em-peske” was a fuck of a lot heavier, a fuck of a lot bigger, but it was like slapping down a big ol’ reinforced concrete wall in front of yourself. One that you could see and shoot through. Took balls to trust it when the bullets were slapping into the shield a few inches in fronta your face though.

He was a Marine, among the gaoian equivalent of Marines. They all had balls.

And not a lot of time for rest and recovery. They had been blessed with a shower this time, but that would be a rare treat going forward. All the gaoians were careful to soap up and get any loose hair taken care of, before they all took a pill that stopped fur growth for a month straight. All of them would look like short-coat man-raccoons (or man-bears) for the duration.

After this, they’d be stuck with wet wipes and field hygiene. Shit was gonna get funky.

The best luxury of all though, was they were allowed a whole four hours of sleep under cover. The wonders never ceased. All of them knew the score, and took maximum advantage.

Then they were done. They did try to clean things up as best they could for the next guy, but there was only so much that could be done. They swept up, took out the garbage…it wasn’t much, but it mattered.

Maybe they coulda done more, except First Sergeant showed up, and that was it. Back to the action. Back to the filth, the bullets, the mud, the blood, the death and the radiation. Back to not havin’ time to think about anything.

Back to the killing.

And just maybe, get some fuckin’ vengeance.

Date Point: 18y11m1w3d AV
Light bulk freighter Stray Fortune, returning to WeiMeYrU-Uym relic space

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

Training was cut short, but that was okay. They were ready. Still, more suit acclimation time was a good idea, and they all needed to be as hard as possible against its loving embrace.

So, they were sitting around, quietly suffering.

Fuck. Crazy to think they’d come this far. They weren’t rocking an EV-MASS, but of course they didn’t need to, either. The Mass was a full-on combat space suit and was burdened with a lot of support equipment as a result of that do-anything mission, a kitchen-sink approach to a rarefied battlespace where anything and everything might happen. Not so for the Ground Reconnaissance Advanced Survival System. The Grass, because of course it needed a terrible fuckin’ backronym. Gaoian-designed, human built, cavemonkey approved.

Fuck. Yeah.

Their take on superarmor was something…a little less over-equipped than the big Lads preferred. The Grass was more focused on ground operations. Obviously. Hoeff had a big part in its design, and even though he was unambiguously a HEAT-level guy himself these days, he wanted Rees and Davies to be able to manage it too, so…instead of just tinkering with the Mass, they went for the ultimate mudfoot’s battle armor. Yeah, it was heavy as fuck, and still hugged with lethal force for the unprepared…but they each had suits tailored to their size and strength, so once you got used to that, got hard enough to tolerate the damn thing…it was like the fucker wasn’t even there. Movement became powerful and you could hit something with so much goddamn force…

Even better, the Grass was still damn near everything-proof, and could keep them clean and cool for weeks on end, if needs must. Fuck, it fit under clothes. The Mass couldn’t claim that! Hoeff coulda skulked around in all the sortsa places he’d skulked before just wearing jeans and a jacket, and just looked a collar size or three bigger than he really was. Which, okay. Because he was a fuckin’ tank of a man already, there wasn’t any real blending in anyway. Which worked out great, because on him it was basically a straight-up EV-MASS in heft and rib-breaking fit. He’d seen the destructive testing. The lightest version could save its wearer from grenades, mortars, and anti-materiel fire. Hoeff and the cavemonkeys? Theirs could take even worse, and Ferd’s armor was basically Protector-grade in fit, strength, and sheer ridiculous mass.

Not that a hit that hard wouldn’t fuck him up anyway, but whatever.

Anyway, it was a damn good set of armor without a lot of the really crazy extremes the Mass went to in the name of absolutely maximized protection. It didn’t have on-board biolabs, or waste processing (thank God!), or active forcefield armor. No biofeedback suit controls for extra functions, no metamaterials around gloves and seals…it was just armor, with the barest of spacemagic to make the suit conform to the body. No supercomputers, nothing crazy.

Basic. Reliable. Scalable to a man’s fitness, all the way up to HEAT-grade hard. Fuck yeah.

Wasn’t without its drawbacks, though. It more or less doubled everyone’s weight a lot like the bare-bones Mass did, and that took some serious work to adapt to, especially for Rees and Davies, who were merely big bastards and not freaky hulked-out balls of muscle like Hoeff. It was not space-rated without some optional accessories, and those accessories included a (hard to smuggle) forcefield pack; the suit itself was not that kind of pressure-tight.

Still. In a pinch, with the right disposable pack, it could even pull off a HELLNO. Which was easily the quietest way to reach a planet’s surface, and therefore something JETS had been wanting for years.

Which was why Hoeff’s little whatever-the-hell-they-were team was field trialing them. So far…ten out of ten, would survive again.

“Shit,” Bruuk sniffed toward them, as they lounged around and silently suffered under the suit’s insistent pressure. “We could use somethin’ like that, yijao?”

“That’s the plan,” Rees chimed in. “If I can do it, then a big ol’ bastard like Ian can too.”

“And if I can do it, then a massive teddy bear like Brukky here should have no problems,” Ian said fondly, and delivered a hefty slap to Bruuk’s absurdly wide shoulders.

“We’ve got a month of travel and you two are going to get fit up at our first stop,” Hoeff noted. “I hope you both have an unhealthy relationship with pain, ‘cuz…”

Dark chuckles and trills all around.

Dora’s antennae swayed as she listened to it. “Sometimes I forget the difference between deathworlders and the rest of us…and then you come out with something like this. But how are even you supposed to adapt so fast?”

Ian shrugged. They were hanging out in his quarters, on his (now flattened) couch, playing his videogames. Place was big enough for two guvnurag to live in, so by Human standards it was a whole fuckin’ apartment. He’d set up dividers to try and make it feel cosier. “We aren’t. The suit’s got variable tension, so it ramps up on you over time as you gain strength. Means you get more effective over time, too. We’re just backup, anyway.”

Hoeff turned his head at an explosive sound of frustration from Frasier at the other end of the late couch. “‘Ere, fuckin’ knock it off with that blue shell bullshit ‘ya big wanker!”

Ferd only smiled, and tightened hs tail-grip around Frasier’s waist. “No!”

“Fuckin’ giant monkey fingers, beats me how you even press the fuckin’ buttons…”

“He’s not the one you have to worry about. He’s still in tenth place,” Dora reminded him. “And by the way…red shell.”

“Fuck sake!”

♫“Thank you!”♪

Ian and Hoeff glanced at each other and shared a chuckle. It was all good, in Hoeff’s eyes. Morale needed to be high for what they were heading into…whatever it was.

Fuck, Hoeff didn’t even know if they were ever going to set foot off the ship. Might be they were going for a joyride and wouldn’t ever deploy. But who knew? Planets were awfully convenient spaceships, after all. The Hierarchy sure as fuck used ‘em.

An’ that was assuming it even was the Hierarchy. It was a big-ass and old-ass galaxy. Lotta places, and reasons, for somebody to hide. But whoever it was, they were an unknown variable. A hostile unknown variable. That couldn’t stand.

So…be prepared. Get some rest, get some more acclimation time. Maybe Ferd could get some squishing practice in on Bruuk—or vice versa, frankly. It’d be nice to escape that fate for a bit.

And maybe, just maybe, they’d stumble into something they could fight.

Rise of the Supermen—Humanity’s Next Generation?
ESNN Essays

Joshua Hartl is in many ways a normal teenager living the All-American fairytale. Born and raised in a somewhat nondescript smallish town in the vast midwestern interior, he was Homecoming King with his long-term sweetheart, whom he has known since kindergarten and who has always been the girl for him. While neither will commit to marriage, they acknowledge conversations on the matter. He is tall, standing six-foot-three, blessed with rugged good looks and an extremely fit body only the young can ever manage. He has earned a 4.0 GPA under a respectable course-load, with several academic scholarships on offer to good universities.

He is also so wide-shouldered he must turn sideways to pass through doors, with a muscular physique to make the mind boggle. At over seven hundred heroically well-proportioned pounds, lean and trim to an almost worrying degree, he is far too big for most hospital scales to cope. Thirty years ago, had he been around in his present conditioning, Joshua would have been the largest, strongest, fittest, most singularly performant athlete the human race had ever seen.

But he is not alone. Joshua is one of a new breed of superhuman athletes that have generated much alarm and conversation, and none of them seem to know why they are so special. Neither do researchers we have contacted, and so far, the government has no comment.

They are rare, with only a few hundred such people known in the United States, with a similar proportion present in other nations. It is nonetheless difficult to miss them. SWAT units in major cities are seeing their ranks slowly swell with these supermen, our most elite tier-0 military units are staffed almost entirely by them, and our own ambassador to the Ten’Gewek is one of the most utterly extreme examples to be found anywhere. “There’s two guys who can out-grunt me right now,” he noted with some obvious pride, “and I’ll be beating one of them here pretty soon.”

He too was an astonishing outlier as a teen, but unlike Joshua, the opportunity to compete was a distant fantasy. “We couldn’t afford much,” Ambassador Etsicitty stated. “Which was probably a good thing, because there just wasn’t any room for someone like me in any of it. I was already way too big by my freshman year, so I’m glad there’s space for these kids nowadays.”

We discussed the matter in some depth. Regarding allegations of drug use, he does not deny that his current stature is the result of both a herculean training effort on his part, and “an ongoing science experiment” of advanced sports medicine, along with several other disciplines. He insists that he built himself to this extreme level of physical development as part of maintaining his extraordinary relationship with the Ten’Gewek, and does so under intensive medical supervision. He also insists he “wasn’t doing anything like this as a kid,” and that he “couldn’t have afforded any of it anyway.”

“All I had was running, and horsing around with my friends, and simple things like farm work and messing around with lifting. Still, it was enough to get me growing like a weed, enough that I outgrew any possible varsity wrestling career while I was still in middle school. And I think I ate my friends out of house and home!”

Nonetheless, he dutifully insisted that we remind our readers not to abuse medicines, especially performance-enhancing drugs, and to seek professional medical advice before use. “I can’t pretend I’ve got any standing to tell people no, but I will encourage them to be safe and legal about it. Mistakes here can ruin you for life. Don’t be stupid about it!”

Sound advice, we feel.

Of course, performance athletes on high-end training regimes are an understandable quantity, if perhaps alarming to some. Given the demands of HEAT and other strategic concerns, along with alien technologies and allied encouragement, it is hardly surprising that such tech has found its way into our most elite military and law enforcement units.

What is far more concerning is the appearance of this caliber of performance among unaffiliated, seemingly otherwise ordinary youths. We have learned that nearly every member of HEAT was just such a standout in their own youths, and that common factor may be the single biggest reason they are able to perform at such extreme levels. Within the team it is immediately obvious who had those abilities in youth, and who did not.

Growing up with such remarkable ability has not been easy for any of them, and even today the challenges can be significant. For young athletes competing merely a few years ago, such as HEAT operator “Gonzo,” their path took immense personal sacrifice. “I always had to fight my appetite, work out hard and long every day to keep in calorie deficit or I’d grow overnight!”

In Gonzo’s case, heavyweight was the highest division open to him during his wrestling career, which meant he had to remain below two hundred and eighty-five pounds. “State champion three years in a row! But I finally had to give up after my junior season.” His weight shot up “like a rocket” after that. He enlisted prior to his eighteenth birthday, weighing in at “around four hundred pounds.” On arrival to Cimbrean he weighed in at a floor-bending, alarmingly lean six eighty-five with “thirty-plus inch arms.” He has since grown considerably in size and in weight.

He will not say exactly how much, apparently because his precise capabilities “are sort of classified,” but he claims it is “four digits” now, as it is for everyone in the so-called “Beef Club,” the HEAT’s informal gathering of the most extreme athletes to be found in or out of the team. Even his immense size is modest among this group; he states that the ambassador, visually the superior man yet does not seem much bigger than Gonzo in person—they are the same height—is now “several” times heavier and “hugely, stupidly stronger.”

“I have broken fingers and knuckles punching him,” Gonzo noted. “He’s something special.” A useful skill, considering the rough-and-tumble nature of the Ten’Gewek.

As to what Gonzo’s classmates thought of his remarkable strength: “they all thought I was ‘roided out of my mind. But I’d never even smoked a joint!”

He is of course under medically supervised training now as a full member of HEAT, but even in the lead-up to his career he insists he was drug-free. “[The] first time I ever used a [performance-enhancing drug] was sort of late in the HEAT pipeline, and even then that was just to deal with the wear and tear. They really beat the hell out of you, [you know]?”

Allegations (or at least suspicions) of drug use follow these extraordinary people all their lives. Despite his own immense superhuman physique, Joshua insists he has never taken a performance-enhancing drug of any kind. “I mean, I use creatine like any good athlete these days, and maybe some pre-workout…but no. I mean, ‘roids couldn’t do this, so why bother?”

Indeed, rigorous testing has followed Joshua and others like him since their early years. He accepts it as a burden he must carry, and opines about what it must be like to compete without suspicion. “All I wanna do is wrestle and run track,” is as far as he will comment.

The problem, of course, is not limited to young males. [For simplicity’s sake, we refer to sex instead of gender, to avoid confusion among the many tangled rules across federations—ed.] Remarkable young females have also made their mark. According to research they are just as common, yet for many reasons they are far less likely to take advantage. Those that do have an even more difficult time in competition, needing to play against males instead of other females, and they often handily dominate their opponents. This has caused social friction and remains a major point of contention among concerned parents and an often divided public.

Sport federations around the world have struggled with how to accommodate these still quite rare but undeniably able athletes. For example, most federations are consolidating around heavily-regulated super-heavyweight and unlimited weight classes, where that is a relevant classification. The problem of how to incorporate such exceptionally performing young athletes into national and international competition remains an open debate.

For his part, Joshua is currently ranked second in his state under their new unlimited weight class, and hopes to wrestle his way to the top at an upcoming meet. “It’d be great! Might help win a place with Ohio State. Or not.” Win or lose, there will surely be a loud, awe-struck crowd.

He shrugged his mountainous shoulders and opined that, while the venerable wrestling powerhouse has a super-heavyweight class these days, he’s over three hundred pounds too heavy for that, with no real chance of cutting down; it would mean losing almost half his weight, just as his body is desperate to grow stronger, swifter, and harder. Worse, like nearly every young man in his giant-sized shoes, he has great difficulty maintaining any fat reserves on his body, and must eat almost constantly to avoid growing dangerously lean. “Maybe they’ll go unlimited too, but their head coach ain’t so sure about guys like me, yet.”

He doesn’t blame them. Joshua is among the rarest of the rare. Bouts between these young warriors draw impressive crowds, who enthuse about their “lightweight” speed, endurance, and aggression, combined with the spectacle of their superhuman physiques, their sheer strength, and their “floor-shaking” size. Bouts have been known to routinely run out the clock without any pause in the action; matches like that are a sure-fire way to sell many tickets. Yet, the long-term health consequences for such extremely capable athletes is far from known. Nevertheless, that young men and women like him exist at all is both a testament to human ability, and raises deeply unsettling questions which may prove to have highly consequential answers.

Finally, possibly the most confounding part of this new reality might be that many who seem as if they should manifest these abilities…do not. It is clearly a heritable set of traits, and many in such families are inclined to excel in one way or another. However, if they do not take to sport at a young age, these “runts,” for lack of a more succinct description, seem unable to develop such incredible physicality later in life. Nearly all appear to be in astoundingly good health for what may seem like little effort, but none of them ever develop such floor-bending physicality.

They do, statistically speaking, tend to excel in other fields. This leaves open the question of just how deep the abilities of these new supermen and superwomen truly go.

For the moment, there are no good answers. However, with the known history of alien influence, the existence of the Hierarchy, the astounding developments among the Gao, and many other concerning factors, there will certainly be no lack of questions, or speculation.

For many of these supermen, their lives will be quietly exceptional. With some care they can “pass” as normal folk, and many choose to do so. For the most extreme examples like Joshua, that may not be possible. He is already considering enlisting to gain some measure of anonymity—HEAT members are all known by callsign, if at all—and feels there are few options for men like him.

“What else can I do? People think they want to be famous, but they haven’t tried it! I’m sick of the way everyone gossips about me. When I wrestle, or run, I have fans, right? That feels good! But as soon as that’s over it’s back to the same. It sounds really nice to sort of fade away, you know?”

Others, like Julian Etsicitty, have embraced their celebrity to advance their goals, if at first reluctantly. “It brings attention to things people need to pay attention to,” he stated. “I’ve got a bit of an ego too, so I’ve learned to enjoy some parts of it. The modeling, for example. All for good causes…” He grins in unmistakably proud and definitely masculine sort of grin, then pauses to consider. “But, yeah. It’s not been perfectly easy. I have full-time security, after all.”

Indeed, Ambassador Etsicitty and his family have now several times survived assassination attempts, though only two are publicly known incidents. He won’t say much about the other occasions, except to say, ominously, “they won’t threaten anyone ever again.”

But what of the rest? How do they navigate a world filled with the comparatively meek and increasingly frightened? Is it fair to fear them for how they were born? Is it fair to pretend it doesn’t matter?

Needless to say, the consequences of all this are not obvious and cannot yet be known. Nonetheless, many are asking questions, and sooner or later, we will have answers.

Date point: 18y11m1w3d AV
Planet Gao

Champion Uriigo of Clan Bronzefur

All hands on deck, up to and including the Champion himself. There just weren’t enough men to do the job! Balls, the Clan was bleedin’ money bringing in Clanless contractors ‘cuz the Grand Army needed a new everything on Hell, and they needed it all crammed through the Arrays as fast as gaoianly possible.

Though, if he were honest with himself it was nice to just throw cargo again. Secure netting, fill containers, deal with breakbulk snarls, “no this will not fucking fit through the array!” and so on.

He needed all the major distractions he could get, really. The consequences of Daar’s punishment upon their Clan were still causing him no end of trouble. Ten times in the last year he’d been challenged for the Championship. Ten times he’d put it down. Fatally.

Ten times, he’d failed to quell the simmering anger in his Clan, at the universe generally, the Great Father more specifically, and their Champion in particular.

Not that it was surprising, really. Mating pressure was becoming unbearable among Clan. Balls, even he had trouble securing mates! The Females, it seemed, were not keen on forgiving.

Everything was moving so damn fast. Including the death of his own Clan, if shit didn’t change.

And if the Females had a flaw…it was that the hard, repetitive and necessary work that propped up all of civilization was often invisible to them. A hard-working Male might win them over with his physique and his wit, but his job? There was no glamor in moving goods.

If ever there was a moment to change that dynamic, it was now. Now was the time they could show their quality to the world. But…how? Just delivering the goods wouldn’t suffice. It was what they were expected to do, after all. Nobody ever won favor by doing what was expected of them. They needed to go above and beyond, somehow.

…So, they needed to deploy forward.

It was an obvious answer, really. Why should the Grand Army be spending perfectly good personnel in the intricacies and heavy labor of logistics? Sure, they’d need to deal with it eventually, but from what he’d seen? Broken containers, mis-deliveries, useful time spent on correcting the mistakes that crept in when the work wasn’t done by professionals…

Clan Bronzefur was not expected to go to Hell. But by doing so, they could make a difference when it was needed the most. They could prove that they were truly willing to make sacrifices and take risks for the Gao’s future, and that was a thing the Females did not ignore. Even so, Uriigo was not looking forward to sending his Brothers to that terrible place.

After all: A Champion led by example.

And Uriigo would lead.

Date point: 18y11m2w AV
Camp David, Catoctin Mountain Park, Frederick County, Maryland, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

Hosting personalities such as the King and the Great Father required a certain discretion that simply wasn’t possible at the White House. It was, after all, open to the public at almost all times, and in prior years didn’t even have a fence around the property. In Lincoln’s time, petitioners could just walk up to the front door and see themselves in!

No. A meeting this sensitive required discretion, especially considering what Beau was going to ask of the two men. It required privacy, some distance, some quiet contemplation…

And in Daar’s case, simple space. Beau had thought the Great Father was a monstrous being the last time they’d met. Since then, the Gao had activated their Hierarchy-suppressed genetics and begun fully realizing their deathworlder heritage. Nowhere was the potential of that change more dramatically evident than in Daar, the only sixth degree male in his species, and in a breed where each higher degree was an increasingly more radical expression over its priors’ best.

Where before he was an eight foot hulking giant of a man, now he stood two feet taller and was quite literally the fastest, strongest, most massive creature walking the Earth, a living engineered weapon still firmly in the throes of that change. He was so broad and powerful, he had to sink to all fours and squeeze through most double doors. Daar was colossal.

The King had a different sort of presence altogether. Quiet and self-assured in a way Beau didn’t expect. It took him a while to recognize it, recognize what the two great sovereigns had in common when they couldn’t possibly be more different…and then it hit him.

Both had seen combat in their lives. Both had fought for king and country, and both were now king of their country.

Well, at least they would understand, then.

Firstly, he had to find something the three of them had in common. That turned out to be easy. All three loved the outdoors, and Camp David had a lot of very well-secured outdoors to explore.

If there had been cameras to see, they would have cut a casual picture, strolling in the woods. The two humans in classic, well-tailored wool sports jackets, Daar in a habitually showy short clip—flagrantly so to some sensibilities, though it had been well-brushed and neatly groomed into a clean athlete’s trim. By gaoian standards, that definitely qualified for smartly turned-out.

The conversation, however, was anything but casual.

“I don’t envy you your task,” the King noted. “Our Prime Ministers have rarely had good luck so thoroughly bucking their own party, on such a fundamental point of disagreement.”

“No,” Daar shook out his pelt, as he ambled along next to them on all fours. That was a remarkably disarming tactic of his, even though the level of his back came up to just below their shoulders. “But you gotta do it, an’ I get the feelin’ this ain’t a purely social call…”

Stating the obvious, of course.

“I don’t think you have the time to spend on social calls right now,” Beau replied. “No, this is about correcting a wobble before it pitches us all overboard. We’ve had a…a long fifteen years or so. San Diego, Chicago, Grand Central, now this. Each of those individually were generation-defining incidents. Put together, and…”

“We have a Great War, but none of the trappings or rhetoric of a great war,” the King summarized. “I think I can see already where this conversation might be going.”

“…I need help,” Chambliss confessed. That was a show of weakness he’d never hoped he’d need to make, but now was not the time to worry about costs. “I can’t sell such a thing alone.”

“Oh…balls.” Chambliss felt Daar’s grumble through the soles of his feet. “That’s what we’ve been doin’ wrong all along, ain’t it?”

“We’ve been thinking too much in the modern era. That this is some manageable defense matter. That it isn’t a total war. We’ve been too lucky in our allies, too lucky in even our enemies. But no longer. We just lost a terrible number of men, and when the news breaks it’s going to rock this country just as hard as the city bombings did. I think this one is finally going to shatter the illusion.”

“It’s been an easy illusion to maintain, too. With that shield keeping us isolated, it has allowed My Government to busy itself with domestic matters that, after all, seem so urgent…” the King considered for a moment, then turned to his private secretary. “Zöe, would you be so kind as to summon My Prime Minister? I know it will annoy him but…”

“That would be an understatement,” Dame Zöe Finch noted. “Shall I be persuasive, sir?”

“Yes.”

That seemed to sober her up instantly. “Right, well…I had better get to work then.” With that, she offered a brief nod, stepped backward a pace, and left.

“The marvels of modern technology,” the King noted. “With the inter-city Array he’ll be here within the hour, I imagine.”

“Illustrates the point, don’t it?” Daar rumbled again. “It’s all so easy here. The war never came ‘ta Earth like it did ‘ta Gao, not with actual ships burnin’ in the skies an’ bloody claws’ in the streets.”

“But the shield isn’t unbreachable. We transit the thing constantly, and all it would really take is one single slip-up in security protocol, or for the Hierarchy to reveal a known weakness…”

“Right. Only reason the war ain’t come here is ‘cuz we’re keepin’ the pressure on out there.”

“A task for which your people and mine have paid disproportionately,” the King added, then turned his attention to Chambliss. “Understand Beau, I don’t mean to attack. I am keenly aware of the limits on leadership. Nevertheless, I don’t know how much more we can give, without a full commitment by the US.”

Well. There was the price. An understandable one really, and one that may end up destroying Beau’s Presidency. But what could he do? He’d always considered himself a moderate liberal. Too much of the prior decades had been defined by…indulgences…and the game of revenge politics had brought both major parties to the brink of a nihilistic end. His moderation meant the activists universally loathed him and his Administration, while the Congressional moderates were…well, weathervanes. They turned every which way the wind blew.

So…get a storm going.

“Understandable. Which is why I’ve asked you both here.” Time to lay it out. “Would you consider an impromptu tour across the United States?”

“A charm offensive,” Daar grumbled.

“Well, the nice thing about the same technology that means Steve Davies should be arriving soon is, a whistle-stop tour is a fair bit more convenient for us all. Breakfast in Balmoral, Dinner in Chicago,” the King replied. “So, if you think it will help…”

“I think it is essential. I can’t make the sales pitch myself. I am a political creature, fundamentally. I do not have the advantage of…well. Being above the fray.”

“And that carries complications for me,” the King noted. “I will need to socialize the idea, speak with My Government…it will be some doing to set this in motion.”

“It is a big ask,” Beau admitted. “And you, Daar?”

“I am the Gao,” he stated, matter-of-factly. “I know what’s at stake. But even I oughta socialize this kinda thing, ‘cuz my equivalent o’ nobility don’t like surprises.”

“They’ll be in for a damn big one if the tide flows the wrong way.”

“I din’t say it’d take much work,” Daar rumbled. “We’re more or less all on th’ same page.”

“What a luxury,” the King noted, sotto voce.

Daar’s chitter shook the ground. “I really don’t envy you any o’ what ‘yer gonna need ‘ta do.”

Beau nodded, and sighed heavily. “Speaking of which, I daresay the Joint Chiefs are itching to talk with me, and after that I have a nation to address.”

The King and the Great Father both nodded understandingly, and their hastily-arranged, unofficial meeting went their separate ways with handshakes and well-wishes. Beau let out a long breath once they were gone: he hadn’t wanted to admit to needing the help, but what choice was there?

Well. There was the choice that many in his party, and on the other side, would advocate: withdraw. Close down. Tend to humanity first and leave the galaxy to fend for itself. Many of them were going to feel quite betrayed that Beau no longer felt that way.

But, they hadn’t met the people he’d met. They hadn’t seen the worlds he’d seen. There were whole species out there who’d be extinct if not for human involvement in the greater galaxy, and that came with an obligation to keep fighting.

He just had to hope he had it in him to make that case to his own people.

‘Caffeinecore’—political blog
Chambliss 180s on military policy

We all saw it coming. After storming into office less than a year ago on sweeping promises to reduce military spending and use the money thus saved to help the people living here in America to rebuild and regrow, Beau Chambliss has done exactly what Arthur Sartori did and crawled into the Great Father of the Gao’s bed for a big furry cuddle.

Meanwhile, on social media, #FOLDEDFLAG is trending as people post pictures of military cars and the uniforms inside knocking on doors to deliver news to next of kin. AEC and the Pentagon haven’t released official casualty reports yet, but it’s pretty clear that whatever happened out there in space, the USA just lost thousands of its young men and women in one blow.

We can add their names to the long, long list that started in San Diego.

Why are we even on Hell? Unlike Mordor, there’s nobody there to save. Unlike Gao, there aren’t billions of lives on the line. Every report from Hell has painted the same picture, of a blasted, polluted world strewn with wreckage and nothing else.

What, exactly, have thousands of our serving men and women just died for?

Well, let’s ask Arthur Sartori, now enjoying retirement at his nice comfortable estate in New Hampshire. Let’s ask the CEOs and executives of the Hephaestus Consortium, or Moses Byron. Let’s ask all the billionaires, millionaires and influencers who’ve done so well in the past fifteen years.

And then let’s ask the families. Let’s ask the homeless. Let’s ask the hundreds of thousands of people who had to stand in line all day for months on end just to take home their essential food staples after the Chicago bombing completely tore apart America’s transport infrastructure. Let’s ask all the people whose pensions went up in smoke amidst the market turmoil.

And now let’s ask all the mothers and fathers who are getting a folded flag today.

What have those broken promises purchased? The gratitude of an alien warlord? Not one but two protectorates, both of whom have received more of our tax dollars than our own people? Last week, Arthur Sartori spent a pleasant evening sipping soup in an alien palace, shoulder to shoulder with Julian Etsicitty and Daar (what better freaks of nature to sup with?) and the useless anachronism that is the Governor-General. All while America’s poor kids, left with no other career options by a decade of war and terrorism, signed up to serve and die in the mud. Beau Chambliss promised to be the antidote to all that. His every campaign promise was to reverse that trend, to bring American dollars home, use them to rebuild our wounded nation.

Instead, as with his predecessor, money talks. And everything else gets left to starve in the gutter.

When the fuck are you going to start objecting?

Date Point: 18y11m2w AV
Hell

Father Garaaf of Clan Whitecrest

Garaaf was in two minds about whether or not this was the worst part of the universe he’d crawled, skulked and generally snuck his way through. The ring hive had set a Keeda of a precedent, after all.

Still. Filth and radiation and mud and gore were probably a smidgeon less soul-eroding than an unending prison-slash-abattoir. Amazing what a little fucking perspective could do to a Gao’s outlook. He didn’t really know how to live in “civilized” places these days, anyway. Spent too long slinking like vermin in the sewers and ventilation and maintenance ducts, and now in the craters and rubble and devastation.

Least he’d been at HQ when the bomb went off. Unlike the poor bastard whose foxhole he was borrowing. He tagged the fallen Human’s location, then settled in to survey through his scope.

He noted a heavy vehicle, grounded and immobile, but possibly still with an intact turret weapon. He tagged it. Something heavy would obliterate it in short order.

FIC needed eyes on the ground. Many of their sensors could penetrate clouds—even clouds of ash, smoke and pulverized radioisotopes—with relative ease, but sometimes they needed a good old fashioned optical camera or biological eyeball. Garaaf was happy to provide that service. It enabled him in his hunt.

His scope settled on a group of five gammas, lightly augmented regulars. He noted their position and direction of movement. They were moving with a purpose.

Weird technological almost-hive-mind or not, the Hunters still had a command structure. They still had the ones giving the orders, and some of them needed to stray close to the front. Coordination like they’d shown in the last day of fighting suggested an old and wily beast was on hand to direct them, one that had lived long enough to develop some actual individuality. He’d seen a few such on the ring hive, always stomping around in bodies that were more machine than flesh.

Funny how the more of their bodies they cut away, the more they started to resemble a person. Kind of the opposite to how a healthy species worked, that…

Through his scope he explored the few remaining intact walls of a collapsed building. Nothing.

He found a Beta, quite layered in armor plates and technology, hunkered low behind a pile of concrete rubble. He watched it for a second…No, not a threat. Dead. Move on.

An Omega. Unaugmented. Not visibly injured, but twitching and coughing up blood in a hole. Kind of impressive it had managed to live long enough to die of radiation poisoning. Any other life form, he’d be tempted to put a merciful bullet in its brain. Hunters deserved no such. Move on.

Movement? Watch it for a second. An empty alleyway. Move on.

…No.

Wait.

Back.

Watch some more…

…Gotcha.

The Alpha, flanked by a bodyguard of barely less upgraded Betas. And this time, no…balls, no actual living Keeda to smush it.

But he did have a hell of a rifle. And by whatever may be out there, he knew how to use it.

The Alpha, alas, wasn’t staying put. It moved on before Garaaf could ready his shot. He reported its presence in the area, then slipped out of his foxhole to stalk it.

And somewhere in his soul, he realized he was enjoying himself.

Time to go make the Great Father proud.

Date point: 18y11m2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

“A Laid Bare? Are you sure?”

Gabby had taken sick leave, for a host of reasons the least of which were her ruptured eardrum and a mild case of radiation poisoning. So, Ava had been glad to get a message from her asking to meet for lunch at her favorite coffee shop-slash-bookstore. Books, coffee, cake, inoffensive jazz music in the background…Too bad it wasn’t an early rain day. Rain on the window would have completed a mood.

Gabby looked pretty great, which surprised her. She had her makeup on, the bald head actually suited her and made her cheekbones pop, and she was looking sharp and confident in a black-and-emerald velvet jacket. Even her smile was convincing.

But there was no fooling Hannah, who started Wanting To Help the moment she laid eyes on Gabby and went into full Wiggly Love Mode. So, they ordered cappuccinos and cake, found a private spot upstairs next to the window, and the first words out of Gabby’s mouth once they sat down had been about doing a shoot.

Figured there was something more going on than just wanting to get back to normalcy.

Gabby sighed. “I’ve been trying for days to write down what I…” she fidgeted with her coffee cup as she trailed off. “…Look anyone can write down the cold facts. And hell, the pictures I took are everywhere now. But…”

“But sometimes, a picture can’t do what a thousand words could.”

“Yeah.” Gabby sighed again. “I was there, you know? I lived through something a lot of people didn’t. Facts and photos are one thing, but I want people to know how it felt. Except, every time I try to sit down and write about it…”

Ava nodded. “I know.”

“Yeah, I…thought you might.”

“Still, it sounds to me like all you need is an interviewer or co-writer to bounce off. I mean, not to talk you out of it, but I was kinda planning for my next one to be the last in the series…”

Gabby blew across her coffee. “…And I’m not a warrior, either. It’s supposed to be ‘warriors in their own words’ huh?”

Ava watched her for a second as she drank, noting the disappointment in Gabby’s eyes. Gabby was, she realized, giving her a cry for help. And a pretty desperate one too, though not in the pathetic sense of a kitten stuck in a pipe and needing a human to free it. More like…’give me a gun, a knife, a stick, something so I can fight my way out of this jungle.’

“I dunno if that really matters,” she said out loud. “If it’s what you need, then of course we’ll do it.”

“I think it is…” Gabby cleared her throat. “And, uh. Marrek wants to, too. And he’s just as bald as me, right now.”

Ava’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Really? I thought that was, like, super shameful for Gao?”

“He’s been having the same trouble. This is a big story that we both want to tell and get off our chests, and we agreed it’ll have more impact if we can really show the consequences for us, you know? But it needs to be soon. If we wait too long…well, hair grows back. And I might be able to shave again for the camera, but Marrek won’t want to. If we can’t do it basically today, he’s gonna start taking the follicle stimulants and then the opportunity will be gone.”

Ava considered it. With anybody else, such short notice would be difficult, but still easier than with practically anyone else she’d shot. There were a few things they just didn’t have time for, this late in the day.

“It’ll take a few hours to set up and I dunno if I can find an indoor venue on such short notice unless you wanna do it in your living room or something, which, uh…”

“Doesn’t really feel like a statement.”

“No, but by the time we’re ready for an outdoor shoot, it’ll be getting dark and maybe raining.”

Gabby considered that for a moment. “That actually sounds appropriate, though.” She managed a wry look. “Too bad Folctha’s so young, huh? There’s no abandoned warehouses or industrial zoning that’d be perfect for this.”

“Actually…” Ava’s mind turned to the various locations she’d considered for the final Laid Bare, and discarded as inappropriate. It was true, Folctha’ didn’t have those kinds of abandoned, haunting places of broken brick, cracked concrete, hardy plants and shattered glass. But that wasn’t to say nowhere in town had the right kind of energy…

In the dark and the rain…yeah. She knew a spot.

“Alright,” she said decisively, and dug in her purse for her phone “I’ma need you and Marrek to sign the releases and stuff, you know how that goes…I’ll take care of the rest. Message me the kinds of questions you want, okay?”

“Don’t forget your cake,” Gabby pointed out, looking amused. Ava nodded, scnorfed it down—it was much too good a cake to really waste like that, and she resolved to come back and pay proper respect to another slice tomorrow—chugged her coffee, and stood.

“See you in a couple hours.”

“Right…” Gabby looked suddenly nervous, but eager. “Where are we shooting?”

“You’ll see.” Ava grinned at her, and rushed away with phone in hand and already selecting the right contact…

There. She grinned to herself, stepped out of the shop, and strode up the street back towards her apartment as she made a call to Hayley Tisdale.

Date Point: 18y11m2w2d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

There were plenty of placards and signs out on Pennsylvania Avenue. A lot of people exercising their First Amendment rights and letting the POTUS know how disappointed they were.

Beau had certainly never seen his press secretary look so harried. The last several days had taken a lot out of him, and Beau had already noted (and re-noted, to be certain) in his private journal to arrange some gesture of gratitude, when he could.

In the meantime, all he could do was let the people vent, let the conversation happen, and let the charm offensive unfold. It stuck in the craw to lean so heavily on his nation’s allies, but the fact was, Beau himself was hopelessly trapped. He could stand up and make speeches and attend rallies and make his case all the livelong day, it would only deepen the wound. The told-you-so Sartorites who’d voted for Margaret White would just crow all the louder, fanning the embers of war-weary Chamblissers’ resentment, and generally creating a poisonous, explosive mixture it was best he refrain from touching.

Getting ahead on all the executive paperwork was a silver lining, at least.

On today’s agenda: the morning intelligence briefing at nine a.m. At ten thirty, a meeting with the Transportation Secretary. After that, paperwork and reading until lunch at one pm, during which he’d find out what his afternoon schedule was.

No setting foot outside today. A pity. He’d been cooped up indoors for the best part of a week now, and was pining for cold air on his face and the crunch of leaves underfoot.

Oh well. At least he had coffee. And the security briefing turned out to be remarkably optimistic.

“Still no sign of any followup nuclear deployments by the Hunters, and it seems likely at this point that they hit us with the biggest and only bomb they had the available resources to build. Still, FIC have identified three possible sites where they might be able to assemble another one. Plan at the moment is for Second Fang to hit all three simultaneously, keeping the HEAT and First Fang on standby. Best estimates of Hunter traffic in the system suggests they’re continuing to evacuate, most likely to another controlled system, exact location unknown.”

“So, all told, the situation’s largely unchanged,” Beau summarized.

“That’s about the shape of it, sir.”

“Why no nukes, though?”

General Bower shrugged. “Physics is hard. It’s even harder when you don’t have the physical infrastructure to process nuclear fuel, I’d presume. That’s a question we don’t have a solid answer for, I’m afraid. The best guess so far is they scrounged up the fissile material from the Ring Hive wreckage, and don’t actually have the capability to refine any otherwise. You will of course be informed immediately if we gain any intelligence to suggest another bomb.”

Chambliss nodded. “Next item?”

Bower nodded and turned the page. “The Great Father is in New York City, no security incidents of note…everything’s on schedule, no red flags, and we anticipate his safe return to Gao this evening.”

“God, who would pick a fight with him?” Chambliss grumbled.

“Someone who wants to provoke the Great Father into performing an act of extreme murder on live television?”

Chambliss raised an eyebrow. “…Wow, you’re just a great big bundle of fun, aren’t you?”

“Not my job to be, Mister President.” Bower looked amused, though. “Anyway, that concludes the extraterrestrial business. Uh, domestically, we’re seeing an uptick in activity on Former APA-associated message boards and other isolationist networks. Fortunately, the, ah, impressive video footage of the Great Father in combat against the Alpha has done quite a bit to dampen people’s anger. As does his habitual short clip, which I now personally suspect he maintains for precisely this sort of reason.”

“Oh, he absolutely does,” Chambliss agreed. “We talked about it. His power base has a strong element of hyper-competency and danger to it. His Champions obey him firstly because he consistently acts in their interests, but unconsciously because they fear him personally. They know he’s bigger than them, smarter than them, and far more willing to murder, if need be.”

Bower nodded, and ran his finger down the page. “Well. Other than that, the bomb maker behind the Tuscaloosa incident was captured in a raid last night and is being questioned, and…nothing else of note. Internationally…”

Chambliss nodded and listened. Life was very much Still Going On on Earth, and the international portion of the briefing was the usual litany of piracy, the movements of terrorist cells, rocket and mortar attacks, the suspiciously sudden way a friend down in Panama had stopped returning their calls…

Nothing that needed more than that he hear and acknowledge it.

“When does it air?” he asked, once he’d dutifully heard it out.

“Tonight, on tape delay. They should be done recording by now, and at this point I expect he’s just enjoying the hospitality. Big guy’s a hell of a charmer, it turns out.”

“Sure is. You know he managed to dance with my wife at the inauguration ball?”

General Bower gave him a genuinely mystified look. “…How, sir?”

“He was two feet shorter, then.” Chambliss smiled. It wasn’t often he got to say something so cryptically impossible. “Anyway, don’t let him sweet-talk you, he’s surprisingly good at it. As for tonight…”

“I’ll be watching, Mister President.”

“As will I.”

Date Point: 18y11m2w2d AV
Terran Microbial Action Zone Preservation, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gabriell Nyoni

“…Woah.”

Ava hadn’t been kidding. She’d taken a kind of impish delight in playing coy over exactly where they were going to do the shoot, but she’d definitely come through.

A short woman with a long ponytail that was about fifty-fifty brown and silver grey had met them at a chain link fence about half an hour outside the city, down a winding dirt track and some distance off the road. Signs every twenty yards or so along the fence declared the compound was owned and operated by the Cimbrean Terraforming Authority, and the gates were chained and padlocked.

The reason why became pretty immediately obvious. There were some earthworks, the unpleasant tingle of a low-powered wildlife deterrent forcefield, and then all of a sudden there was no more lush growing woodland around them, but a vision from a slightly different Hell.

Marrek made a disgusted noise. “Fuck. That ain’t a nice smell…”

“I can’t smell anything?” Gabby asked.

“‘Cuz Humans ain’t hardly got a nose at all. Lucky fuckers…” He shuddered,and curled up a little tighter inside the ridiculously baggy woollen cardigan and sweatshorts he was wearing.

The woman who’d let them in was a friend of Ava’s, Doctor Tisdale. She gave him a wry look. “This whole patch of land is a control sample. No planting, no terraforming…this is what the Skidmark would look like if we hadn’t planted over most of it.”

“So I’m smellin’ fifteen-year-old human shit. Fuckin’ great.”

“More accurately you’re smelling the fungi in the soil that’s lived there basically ever since. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. Just think of it as, uh, really well composted.”

Marrek grumbled, but Gabby was more taken by the long-dead trees they were pulling up next to. Cimbrean Pinkwood, the increasingly extinct native tree with their distinctive multi-stemmed body that swooped out and then up in a neat gourd shape. “If this is a control site, why are we allowed to plod around all over it?” she asked.

“Well, it’s only protected by a fence. It’s the great outdoors, we can’t possibly keep it completely undisturbed. I wouldn’t have agreed to bring you up here if it really mattered. Just, uh, don’t defecate anywhere.”

“It’s about as apocalyptic as anywhere in Folctha can be,” Ava explained. “Can they climb in the trees?”

“I’d rather they didn’t,” Tisdale said.

“Pretty sure I don’t wanna, either,” Marrek rumbled.

“Okay! No problem.” Ava nodded amicably as she parked their rented RV. They could go no further: Despite Hayley’s words, there wasn’t actually much soil. Without living things to hold it, ten years of nightly rains had washed the area down to clean bedrock, far too uneven to drive on. Here and there, though, the blackened and much-reduced skeletons of native trees still clung to vegetable un-life.

‘Apocalyptic’ was exactly the right word.

“Woulda thought errythin’ would be gone,” Marrek said, alighting first and standing up to stretch.

“All the native beetles, grubs, worms and other decomposers that would normally eat dead wood died in the pollution, and the forcefield keeps Earthling species out. Still, you’re right. Those stumps won’t be around much longer.”

“What will you do when everything is completely gone?” Gabby asked.

Hayley shrugged. “We’ll keep it for as long as there’s useful science to be done here. After that, we’ll remove the forcefield equipment, fill in the ditches and get more useful science as we watch nature reclaim it.”

“Well, let’s get set up while we still have light,” Ava pressed. “Uh, would you rather Hayley stay in the RV during the shoot? I mean, she’s gotta be here to make sure we don’t do anything to fuck up the science, but–”

“Thousands an’ thousands o’ people are gonna read the article anyway,” Marrek replied. “Don’t matter ‘ta me none if she’s here ‘ta watch.”

Gabby’s first instinct was to disagree but logic caught up. He was right of course. In fact, Hayley would probably be interested enough to buy the article she’d had a hand in creating, so did it really matter?

She shrugged, shook her head, and held out a hand for a bag of equipment.

Between her and Ava’s experience as photographers, Marrek’s heft and Hayley running enthusiastic gopher, they found a good spot and got set up in what had to be record time. Good thing too, because the light was dying on them pretty fast, and the usual Folcthan rainclouds were gathering.

The first drops started pattering on the bare bedrock around them as Ava placed a lamp and lit it. The temperature, as it always did when the nightly rains arrived, was plunging. Getting nude in this was going to be…unpleasant.

But Gabby had been through worse.

She pulled off her T-shirt and stuffed it in her bag, following it as quickly as she could with her pants and underwear. Best to get them stowed away now so they’d be nice and dry when they were done. Beside her, Marrek made a resigned noise and did much the same.

And actually…cold though it was…there was something liberating about it, too. She swung her arms, took a deep breath, and stepped out in front of the camera.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s write a story.”

Date Point: 18y11m2w2d AV
’That Show with Jamal Taylor’ set, New York City, USA, Earth

Jamal Taylor

The Show Must Go On. Hard to believe an evening talk show could survive the murder of its host live on air, but everyone had kind of felt like they owed it to Steve Lawrence to carry on in his name. So, they’d hung his portrait behind the desk and, after a few guest hosts, had found Jamal, who’d grappled quietly with imposter syndrome every day since taking the job.

Especially tonight.

They’d had a private chat beforehand, exchanged notes on what they’d both like to talk about without making any undue promises. The big headline guest for that night—and they didn’t come bigger, in any sense, really—was nothing but reassuring and even a bit charming.

Good thing too. It helped put Jamal in the right mood for his opening monologue.

There was the studio applause, of course, but on some other days Jamal had walked out to wild cheering and celebration over some big news. Today was…well, like most recent shows, the mood was subdued. There wasn’t much in the recent news to celebrate.

In the end, it was a three “thank you” day. Counting how often he had to say that before the applause settled was a decent barometer, in Jamal’s experience.

He kept the opening monologue short. The audience in the studio knew who to expect, and tonight wasn’t a night for stringing them along and teasing them. He made a tasteful joke about a B-list celebrity’s weird fashion choices to perk things up, then acknowledged the elephant still lingering in the room, the battle on Hell and butcher’s bill that AEC had released. He quoted a couple of blogs, vloggers and other commentators, read out some tweets—his own opinion would come later, at the end of the show—and that was good enough. He’d primed the pump.

“Now, you may have noticed that, uh, there’s no couch up here today. Well, that’s no accident, because our guest tonight doesn’t really need one, or an introduction for that matter. So please rise and greet Daar, Brother, Father, Champion-Emeritus, Stud-Prime of Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao.”

The audience dutifully stood and applauded politely, then collectively gasped as the Great Father prowled out from behind the curtain and up onto the loudly creaking stage. There truly was no preparing anyone for him. His impossibly muscular build, the prowling power that his short coat emphasized but which no amount of fur could cover. His sheer, incomprehensible size… All of it hit the audience all at once, to stunning effect. Nevermind the rank and titles, Daar commanded attention and respect (and frankly, fear and awe) just by being there.

He seemed to understand the effect he had on everyone though, and decided to disarm it. With a bit of a flourish, he gave them all a very un-statesmanlike panting grin…and then posed on all fours with a smug toss of his head and a quick flex of a truly gargantuan arm. That bit of preening somehow conveyed just the right amount of ridiculous, self-effacing humor…

The audience laughed, and the applause grew more heartfelt. Somehow, you just knew from the feel of the room when the reactions were genuine, instead of mere clapter.

Jamal crossed the stage to greet him, and found the Greater Father was so big that even on all fours, he was nearly at eye level. His proffered hand was lost in that giant paw, and….

No. Make a show of it. He gestured upward with his hands while the audience kept applauding, and Daar caught the meaning. He stood up, and up, and up…

…Wow. The audience gasped, and the whooped, egging it on.

Jamal was barely more than half as tall, and it was an image that would be on all the media tomorrow. The Great Father had a bit of a showman’s streak in him too; he put his arm around Jamal‘s shoulders, then for one final show, lifted him in one arm so their heads were level…

“I think they like it,” Daar grumbled quietly, just for him.

The spectacle was perfect.

Jamal put a little icing on it by straightening his tie and jacket once set down, then gestured invitingly to the floor space where That Show’s infamous couch usually sat, and settled in behind his desk.

Instead of a couch, Daar was provided with an enormous body cushion that he could lie against, if desired. He settled on it in a sort of regal stretched-out repose, managing to find his dignity considering the stage just wasn’t really designed to accommodate somebody on his scale.

“Well, you’re definitely the biggest guest I’ve ever had on,” Jamal quipped as he settled in.

“The most biggest,” Daar grumbled with some self-effacing humor. His voice was unbelievably deep, almost into the infrasonic. “My mamas always made me eat my meeshi!”

Laughs, there. Jamal doubted anyone knew what meeshi was but they really didn’t need to.

“Do you ever find it difficult? Most Gao are smaller than me, and I’m not all that big myself.”

“It’s true! Most of us ain’t very big, huh? But it ain’t as tricky as you might think,” Daar stated. “Lotta variability in our people, and we brownfurs are all pretty big as a rule. Most o’ our spaces an’ buildings are designed wit’ that an’ also alien guests in mind. ‘Fer me, it’s a weight problem more’n a space problem, really. I’ve broken a lot o’ floors. But don’t matter if it’s floors, cars, rickety houses, playin’ with cubs, matters o’ love…you get used ‘ta it.”

Somebody in the audience wolf-whistled. Daar, to his credit, gave him a look that was somehow both gently amused and also remarkably effective in quieting him down. “Yeah, yeah. Won’t pretend I ain’t what I am. But no. I manage, ‘cuz it’s useful bein’ big.”

“It makes for some entertaining footage,” Jamal grinned, and grinned as the blooper reel the production team had assembled started playing. Nobody ever came on his show without suffering some small ritual humiliation.

Daar chittered so low that Jamal felt it in the soles of his feet and watched along good-naturedly. “Ooh,” he flicked his ears back against his head. “I ‘member that one. Kinda hurt, actually…and o’ course gotta I pay ‘fer repairs. Pretty good incentive ‘ta not break stuff!”

“Doesn’t that make travel complicated?”

“If you let it. I mostly like ‘ta run on my own four paws anyway, but yeah. I don’t fit in cars. Bigger’n them! Usually I travel by cargo hold or by flatbed truck. Helps not bein’ too pretentious ‘bout accommodations. All I really ask for is a good hard floor and some privacy.”

“And yet, you are…the Great Father of the Gao.”

“Yeah! I am, huh?” Laughs, and a mischievous pant-grin from Daar.

“Yes, yes,” Jamal conceded, then pressed his point. “And you’d rather sleep in a warehouse.”

“Well, no. But I gotta be realistic ‘bout what I can get. Gimme a nice warm rug on that floor? Oh, luxury. The Great Mother spoils me rotten with the nest-bed she keeps ‘fer us, too!”

Yup, he was being a charmer, and a damn good one, too. Never mind that the being across from Jamal was…well…a great and terrible leader, really, and that was a point they would explore later. For now, though…time to edge into that topic gently.

Jamal nodded, and deployed one of the questions Daar had specifically requested be asked.

“And yet…this isn’t natural, is it? You did this to yourself deliberately.”

“Some of this, yeah. I doubt you’ve failed to notice I do, indeed, lift.” There were some polite chuckles from the audience, and Daar rolled a massive paw into a fist with a bit of flourish. He looked down at his chest-thick forearm and they all watched it sinuously ripple under tension.

“And lift quite a bit,” Jamal quipped. Gentle laughter broke the spell.

“Yeah! Always been a big boy, an’ I’ve been the biggest an’ strongest o’ my kind since I were fifteen, even when the fashion was ‘fer ‘Backs like me ‘ta favor a lankier build. Still is ‘fer most brownfur Clans, too. Which is good! Can’t all be hungry hulks, yijao? But now, ‘tween the realities o’ space combat, fightin’ the Hierarchy and its agents, an’ th’ consequences o’ gene-activation, plus ‘cuz it’s a whole lotta fun liftin’ jus’ balls out, I gotta admit…”

There was a hidden land-mine in plain sight. “Wait. Gene-activation?”

“Yeah. My people have—well, had now—a substantial portion o’ our genome deliberately deactivated. Blame the Hierarchy. In any case, doin’ that is a big part o’ why we’re all fillin’ out, can see th’ color red now…an’ it sorta went bonkers in me. I’ve taken advantage, too.”

Jamal whistled for effect. “Now that’s an understatement if I ever heard one.”

“Sure is! ‘Cuz o’ that an’ a buttload o’ insanely hard work, an’ a lotta sciencey spacemagic…” the audience laughed at that turn of phrase. “Now I’m th’ strongest, fastest an’ heaviest thing walkin’ this Earth. It’s a good thing ‘fer me too, ‘cuz I’ve needed it.”

“That’s…an alarming set of claims,” Jamal noted. “We had hoped to test some of them…”

“I did see ‘yer big pile of toys backstage…” he flicked his ears in a gesture that somehow conveyed amusement, and the audience chuckled. “Am I gonna be ‘yer big talkin’ circus bear?”

Laughter again, and some encouraging cheers.

But. Charming though he was, there was substance here that needed exploring.

We’ll see if we have time,” Jamal demurred. “Back to ‘needing’ all your obvious strength. I presume you’re referring to rumors about your recent battle on Hell?”

“Among other things, yeah. Unnerstand I can’t say much ‘bout ongoin’ operations.”

“Well, okay. But what about…you also said something about deactivated genes?”

“Yeah, an’ I’ll get back ‘ta that in a moment. But firs’, what d’you mean by ‘natural?’ In our case it’s kind of a loaded question, an’ a bit of a sore point ‘fer us.”

“How do you mean?”

“Okay, so. The thing is…” Daar shifted his haunches a little, visibly settling in to storytelling mode. “…Brownfurs are a minority among my people. We’re less’n one percent o’ the population. There’s a buncha other breeds too, but th’ minorities all added up ain’t more’n ten percent. Most every gao is a silverfur, an’ since it’s caused by a dominant mutation, anytime anyone mates wit’ a silverfur, odds’re the cub’ll be one, too.”

“And yet, much of your leadership are racial minorities. And that’s complicated by the issue of degrees?”

“…Right. Yeah. So firs’ly, it’s important ‘ta note that race ain’t really a thing ‘fer us. The better idea is breed ‘cuz the useful diff’rences ‘tween breeds can be pretty big, an’ the Clans run breeding programs. Which I know is an idea that squicks out most humans, but jus’ go wit’ it ‘fer now. An’ ‘cuz there’s already been a lotta reportin’ on our people, I’ll jus’ summarize an’ say that, since our Clans’ territory is in function an’ purpose these days instead o’ land or somethin’ like that, there ain’t a lotta conflict among the Gao. Breed ain’t really an impediment ‘ta success, but everyone’s good at some things more’n others, so there are definitely trends, yeah.”

“That’s…a lot of that would sit very uncomfortably among humans,” Jamal noted.

“Yeah, an’ it should! It wouldn’t never work ‘fer ‘yer people. It does for mine though, and there’s…reasons for that. Gettin’ there, I promise. But like I said, our breeds ain’t th’ same thing as race in humans, an’ it ain’t really comparable crosswise. There’s been a lotta ink spilled over that so, uh…les’ jus’ leave it at that. ‘Fer us, the bigger social division is the problem o’ degree.”

“And you are the only living sixth degree, which implies…a lot of things.”

“Yeah. More essactly, I’m a fully dominant sixth degree, which is so astronomically unlikely it was the biggest clue ‘bout how I am. We’ll get back ‘ta that, too. Also, there is one other sixth out there. He’s jus’ a lil’ cub right now. First since me, an’ I was the first in centuries.”

“A rarified club, then?”

“Yeah…but lemme say somethin’ important. Degrees are a thing that were engineered into us by our great mutual enemy, the Hierarchy, an’ it only affects males. It ain’t perfectly obvious why they did it, but we males naturally form hierarchies ‘tween th’ degrees from th’ beginnin’ of cubhood. It’s easy ‘ta see why, too. Each degree is a sorta magnified version o’ the degree before it, an’ it has a big, inescapable influence on every part of our being. Among silverfurs, second-degrees are th’ most common. Among th’ minority breeds, it’s third. An’ among purebred brownfurs…it works differently, which is a big part o’ why we’re generally in the positions we’re in.”

There was…a lot to unpack there, and the engineered claim needed digging. But hosting a guest was a fine art, and when a guest was on a roll, you didn’t want to interrupt too much.

So, hoping he’d get to circle back at some point, Jamal merely asked, “How so?”

“Well…for everyone else, degrees are sorta linear, I guess. Each is a big step up. But with us brownies, each degree is a bigger step up from the previous, so a fifth-degree ends up bein’ a really huge physical improvement over a fourth, an’ a sixth over a fifth is…well, lookit me. The diff’rence is so big I’ve been accused o’ bein’ a diff’rent species. An’ worse, it ain’t jus’ all this bulgin’ muscle I got, neither. It’s everything about us an’ that’s jus’…well, it’s a roll o’ the dice, an’ it’s a pretty brutal one, yeah.”

“…Everything?”

“Yeah. It affects our intelligence, social skills, our senses, longevity, general health, size an’ strength…everythin’. Even things like fertility an’ scent, an’ those last two no gao can ignore.”

That led them, at last, to the most important point to broach. “Right. And for you, that means…”

Daar sighed, and shook out his pelt. “Couple things. Yeah, it means I were advantaged from birth, more’n anyone else. ‘Course, sixth-degrees almos’ never servive their first few weeks…anyway. It’s worse, though. It turns out I weren’t actually lucky. I was…made.”

The audience was dead silent. Jamal, too: Even knowing in advance they’d be talking about this—though not that it embroiled Daar’s entire species—it still shocked him to hear it. Something in Daar’s solemn, uninflected delivery lent it an inescapable weight.

“…Made?” he prompted.

“Yeah. The Gao are an engineered soldier species. That part’s not essactly been a secret, but it needs sayin’ ‘fer everyone’s benefit. We were discovered in our tribal pre-history days an’ from there, made into a people meant ‘ta replace th’ Hunters as the Hierarchy’s main tool o’ control. It’s only ‘cuz of ‘yer people we escaped that fate. That’s…how do we ever repay that?”

He gestured helplessly with a paw and shook his huge, shaggy head expressively. Jamal kept half an eye on the audience, noting again that there was no noise at all from them. Not even a cough, or the shift of butts fidgeting around in seats. It wasn’t what they usually went for in a show. Usually they wanted laughter, and claps and cheering and sometimes jeering.

Usually.

“Anyway,” Daar continued. “There’s more. It ain’t jus’ that my species were engineered. That’s all high-level an’ indirect. Turns out, I was engineered in particular, along wit’ a few others in high office. Every single gene in me was chosen, ain’t any of it happenstance. Because of that, I am…well, at leas’ from a particular design goal, the genetically perfect gao. Which is a pretty silly idea—what do we mean by ‘perfect,’ anyway? But given how weird some o’ my genome is, it’s hard ‘ta argue otherwise. An’ I can tell ‘ya that ain’t a comf’table thing ‘ta learn.”

“That’s…” Jamal cast about for a proper question. “…It’s…whose idea of perfect?”

“Hierarchy, an’ one o’ their enemies. Kinda soberin’ they both thought I were th’ answer to their problems. Thing is, though…” it was here the Great Father snarled in the back of his throat, “The Gao are nobody’s pawns.”

More than one person in the audience made quiet, though fierce, sounds of agreement.

“And the genes are only half the story, aren’t they? Nature versus nurture and all that.” Jamal replied, nodding. “They could engineer your whole species’ biology…but they also tried to engineer your culture.”

“Yeah. We’ve found evidence o’ their interference goin’ back ‘ta before we even figgered out steam power. Old skulls with cybernetic implant scarrin’ an’ suchlike.”

“And of course, in the modern age, implants became commonplace, didn’t they?”

“Yup. Lotta the Mothers in the Commune where I grew up had translators an’ stuff. Stands ‘ta reason at least a couple’a them were agents, there ‘ta keep an eye on their pet project.”

“Would you say they succeeded?”

Daar tilted his head. “Now that,” he said, “is a hard question. An’ I think…’side from the fact I ain’t doin’ their biddin’, well, becomin’ a Brother o’ Clan Stoneback was nat’ral. Risin’ ‘ta Champion was easy. Stud-Prime were obviously gonna happen at th’ same time, ‘cuz not ‘ta brag, but ‘fer lack o’ a better word, I really am genetically perfect an’ all th’ testin’ I’ve ever done shows it. Physical, cognitive, whatever ‘ya got…maxed it all. Only thing mebbe goin’ against me is my accent, dependin’ on how ‘ya see it.”

Another rabbit hole, but a good one. “About that…”

“Brownfurs got broad an’ heavy but less mobile muzzles, an’ Clan-speak preserves a lotta old grammatical forms an’ such. Put th’ two together…As ‘fer why in English? ‘Ta match how translators did m’voice, really. I can speak much more eloquently,” he said suddenly, with much more precise diction, “but it hurts m’jaw.”

“…Pain relief yokel-speak,” Jamal found himself quipping.

The Great Father chittered loudly and the audience laughed too. “Ha! I like that! I’m a bit of a yokel anyway. My Naydi—the Great Mother—she calls me ‘bumpkin.’ And whatever Naydi wants, Naydi gets.”

There was the polite laughter of understanding, and Jamal could certainly relate. “Still, as much as I want to dive into every rabbit-hole…”

“They are tempting, huh? But back to ‘yer original question…yeah. Balls, I was certainly thinkin’ I should get implanted, before I was warned off it. If I’da done that then, yeah. They woulda prob’ly taken me over and succeeded completely. Th’only reason that din’t happen is…” he waved an immense paw at the scenic vista of the Manhattan skyline behind them, contriving to indicate the whole human race. “I might not be fightin’ for ‘em…but otherwise, I’m exactly what they made me ‘ta be.”

“And what is that?” Jamal asked.

“A killer.” Daar was unflinching. “An’ a murderer, many times over. Had I not been those things, had I not put down weakness and taken charge when and where and how I did, my people would be extinct. I ain’t talkin’ the death of a nation, you unnerstand. I mean species extinct. I regret nothing. That is why I am the Great Father.”

The room was suddenly so quiet, you could hear people breathing. “That is…an incredible statement.” Jamal cleared his throat, uncomfortably. “So…how, then? How do we ally with you?”

“Because I am not merely a person. Of course I am a person, but you need to think in bigger terms. I am the Gao, in a very real, very literal sense. I am the personified embodiment of my people’s will, given freely at a moment of great peril. I have been blessed, consecrated, crowned and enthroned to preserve and protect us all, against my own desires, and with every warning I could possibly give ‘bout what that would mean. I am the Gao. I am absolutely sovereign. No dictator is that empowered. I have a billion-strong army that’s the envy o’ every power out there, includin’ ‘yer own. I’ve got the economic might ‘ta back it, an’ now a space navy more an’ more worthy of it. So, really, lemme flip ‘yer question on its head: why would someone like me come on Human TV? Why do I wanna ally with you? Because I do, very much.”

“A lot of people have asked that question,” Jamal agreed.

“I know. I know what they call me. When they’re bein’ flippant, I’m Bear-nghis Khan. When they ain’t, I’m a mass-murderin’ alien warlord who’s got Earth’s Western governments in his pocket. What do I need ‘ta come here an’ make nice for?” He sighed heavily. “As if all a person needs, or a people ‘fer that matter, is ‘ta be powerful. But that’s a pretty serious mis-unnerstandin’ o’ how power works. I ain’t what I am by my own sheer awesomeness. No ruler rules alone. I am what I am ‘cuz my people wished it to be so. I am free ‘ta act ‘cuz I always act in their interests. I do not jail any Gao ‘fer insultin’ cartoons, an’ believe me, there’s more’n a few. Balls, I got some’a them pinned up in my office! I do not interfere in their daily lives. I ain’t displacin’ Clans, I ain’t conscriptin’ males into service. I might get tetchy with th’ Clans themselves, when they’re gettin’ a little too self-interested, but they signed up ‘fer that game o’ their own free will.”

“…Tetchy? You’ve summarily executed their Champions and leaders.”

“Yes, I have. An’ I’ll do it again, if necessary. Any organization will favor its own interests over any other, an’ that’s natural as anything. However, I cannot allow that past a certain point, s’pecially wit’ the existential challenges we got comin’ at us, an’ that lesson must be learned. On th’ other hand, I can’t expect ‘em to work against their interests either. So, if I’m to grow my people, I must grow the Clans, an’ the Clanless, and multiply our prosperity. I gotta be trusted an’ respected ‘ta do that, but mostly I gotta be feared. That ain’t always pretty. Especially not from the perspective of another species, an’ that’s extra true from a republic like ‘yers. Appreciate what ‘ya got, ‘fer my sake. It’s a beautiful thing. I hope we can afford it one day.”

“What do you mean, ‘afford?’” Jamal asked. “This country is founded on the idea that freedom, democracy, republic, fair trials and life itself are rights to be protected, not luxuries you buy when you can afford them. They exist simply because we do, and they are inalienable.”

Daar tilted his head in thought for a few seconds as he worded his reply.

“Well…tell that ‘ta the Hunters. They din’t care much when they came to devour my entire world. Or th’ Hierarchy, who consider the very concept of self as alien. When they came, they murdered billions o’ my kind in literally seconds, with malware. What then?”

“I don’t deny that you’ve had to make terrible decisions—”

“Res’ectfully, yes you do. You may not mean to, an’ I even appreciate it, but you ain’t thinkin’ the problem through. I’ll say it clearly: people only effectively have the morals they can afford. My people reached a point where someone like me had to exist, an’ exist effectively. Think ‘bout that ‘fer a moment. Once ‘ya need a Great Father jus’ so’s ‘ya can keep existin’, you’ve run outta moral capital ‘ta spend. ‘Cuz in the end, Moral Number Zero is that ‘ya have th’ right ‘ta exist, but only if ‘ya can defend it in th’ first place. Everythin’ past that is luxury.”

“But Gao is secure, and you’re fighting on other worlds, now!” Jamal objected, passionately. “Surely you can afford more than that now!”

“No. We can’t, not yet. We ain’t nowhere near as secure as you think. I do the terrible things I do ‘cuz it’s necessary, ‘cuz there ain’t an alternative that ain’t worse. Th’ Hunters ain’t happy they got denied their most biggest feast, for which I am eternally grateful ‘ta y’all. But yes, one day, when my people recover from our trials, th’ goal is ‘ta work us outta that trap. To get us ‘ta the point where our future as a species ain’t ridin’ on gettin’ things perfectly right. Ain’t no definition o’ freedom that’s complete without th’ freedom ‘ta make mistakes. But right now, the Gao can’t afford mistakes. We are a mighty an’ powerful people, deathworlders jus’ like you, rediscoverin’ our past…and poised on th’ edge of oblivion. But that’s the thing. So are you.”

And there, right there, Jamal understood why this entire interview had happened. In an instant, he realized he had been used. Oh, he knew it before, knew it was a propaganda ploy…

But now, he realized his public standing was being worn like a cloak to justify war. And he was not about to let that happen to him on his own damn show.

“…You’re a warmonger,” he said, flatly.

“No,” Daar sighed. “…I’m a farmer. If I had my fondest wish, I’d be pullin’ a plough ‘through the dirt, diggin’ holes, ranchin’ Naxas an’ livin’ the simple life. But I can’t do that. Alien monsters from space wanna eat all my people. An’ the only people they wanna eat more’n mine are ’yers. Here’s a fact. Did’ya know the Hunters are th’ discarded bodies o’ the Hierarchy?”

“I—what?”

“Yup! Same species, but when the Igraens moved on from flesh ‘ta digital, they left behind bodies runnin’ on instinct an’ no personality. It takes years and a lotta success ‘fer a Hunter ‘ta start havin’ any real mind of its own. Short o’ that…they jus’ eat. That’s what we’re fightin’ an’ th’ only reason they ain’t here is ‘cuz o’ that system shield. An’ th’ only reason that is still up is ‘cuz the Hierarchy ain’t managed ‘ta bring it down…yet. But they’ve tried, oh yes. So how safe do ‘ya feel, knowin’ that? Hunters have been eatin’ people ‘fer millions o’ years. An’ now, ‘fer the first time in history, we’ve got ‘em pinned down. We may be th’ firs’ civilizations with a chance ‘ta end this. So…what kinda monsters would we be if we din’t? If this kinda evil ain’t worth obliteratin’ then what the hell is?”

Jamal, despite his indignation, couldn’t immediately think of an objection to that. Daar didn’t bull-rush him though. He stretched out a bit and his expression softened, his ears moving sideways and down with a sympathetic flick.

“…Depressin’, huh?”

“You…clearly believe every word.”

“I ain’t given ‘ta dishonesty. An’ I know a lotta what I just said might sound like hyperbole, but…I ain’t given ‘ta that, either. Except when I’m jokin’ around. But, in the interest o’ transparency, lotta this ain’t given me much reason ‘fer humor. I’ve got a lot of pyres ‘ta burn. An’ more personally, this war has…hurt. I’ve lost good people, people I loved. One o’ them I nearly lost jus’ recently. He’s still recoverin’ from bein’ a gods-blessed hero too. So…yeah.”

“Hero?”

“The details will come out in time.” Daar shook his pelt slightly. “But he saved my life, that’s ‘fer damn sure. An’ that chance ‘ta end it I was talkin’ about? We still only have that ‘cuz’a him too.”

Insistent waving from off-stage caught Jamal’s attention—his producer, who tapped his watch fervently.

Right.

“Well. That was an intense bit of conversation, folks. I think we’ll take a break now, and we’ll be back with more of this…I think it’s fair to say extraordinary interview with the Great Father.”

When the microphones cut out, and the band played up, and the cameras were off…

“You used me,” he accused, with a neutral expression.

“Yes,” Daar replied, with brutal clarity. “My people’s existence is on the line, an’ so is ‘yers. What would you do, if ‘ya walked in my pawprints?”

“I’m glad that I’m not. It’s just…your reputation is for being scrupulously honest.”

“An’ I was. I told ‘ya beforehand what I was willin’ ‘ta talk about, an’ what I was gonna talk ‘bout, an’ I did. It were you that broached the topic in th’ first place, ‘member? But ‘fer what it’s worth,” he offered, with a softer tone, “I wish’d the reality o’ things weren’t so dire. I’d rather’ve jus’ goofed off ‘fer laughs, if I coulda.”

Jamal sighed, admitting defeat. “I guess it wouldn’t have made for such riveting TV though.”

“Eh. I dunno. I can goof off pretty good. I’m a big showoff too, an’ I hear pro wrasslin’ gets pretty big ratings…”

Somehow, Jamal couldn’t help himself. “Who would you wrestle?”

“Oh, nobody’d be a good match, really. So instead I’d just make all sorta weird pained noises and flex an’ stomp about an’ stuff. And somethin’ ‘bout paper-view?”

Jamal blinked, staring into Daar’s big amber eyes and trying to decide if he was joking or not, but in this case… “That’s, uh, pay-per-view.”

“Oh…y’know, that makes a lot more sense.”

…Goddamnit. Jamal couldn’t help but shake his head and grin, despite…well…

And that was all the time they had, just a thirty-second break. This was ratings gold.

“Welcome back, folks. Tonight we are hosting the Great Father, and…well. If you missed the first half, it was intense. How would you summarize it, Daar?”

“Hard questions an’ hard answers. An’ hardly any flexin’.”

Some laughter, subdued but genuine…

“Well, we do still have those toys backstage.”

“…Oh?” The Great Father’s tail thumped on the floor. And with that…

Date point: Date Point: 18y11m2w2d AV
Belize City, Belize, Central America, Earth

Six

How the fuck did he manage such a brilliant fucking coup?!

The Great Father of the Fucking Gao, with apparently zero guile whatsoever, just marched up onto national broadcast television, confessed to being exactly the terrible monster he really was, did so in unflinching detail, utterly dominated and visibly frightened the host…

And then, one underarm deodorant commercial later he’s a completely different being, stomping about for laughs and showing off the result of the Hierarchy’s finest engineering efforts. But instead of bringing the Humans to heel or otherwise using his abject perfection for some predictable purpose…no! Instead, he’s among the audience, taking selfies, flexing outrageously for little old ladies and awestruck children, utterly lowering himself to their level—

Somehow, they forgot everything else about him. Now he was a huge furry playful thing and it was like he knew exactly how to short-circuit a Human’s instincts. It was so crass, so obvious, and so effective, Six could barely stand to watch. After indulging the audience directly, he moved outside, picking up and idly crushing a car in his paws, running what may as well have been two hundred klicks an hour down a back alley with his tongue hanging out, then he’s back in the studio, again flexing that ludicrously hyperdeveloped physique of his to raucous cheers like he was an over-oiled parody of a magazine cover model, all while doing a pro-wrestling impression. And then singing. BADLY. To laughter!

The moment where he engaged a couple of kids in halting, stunted conversation was so sickeningly sweet it made Six’s host sympathetically retch.

And the audience, both physically present and watching around the Earth, were in love. Many of them knew perfectly damn well that he was putting on a show to play with their emotions and win their hearts. And they knew that he knew he was putting on a show. They all knew, and they all knew it was bullshit.

It didn’t fucking matter! To a being with Six’s perspective on the collected social hubbub Humanity constantly pumped out into its global networks, Daar’s influence was as a fluorescent dye in water, uncoiling in smoky turbulent coils as it flowed outward, occasionally vanishing down hidden channels to pop up unexpectedly somewhere else.

He had just seduced the entire goddamned human race with twenty minutes of video.

Well, okay, not the entire human race. Not even the entire population of the Allied nations. But enough that any counter-movement was absolutely dead in the water, to borrow another maddeningly Human and hydrological analogy.

Doctor Tomasz Flowers had had a passion for reef diving and marine biology. And, for all his faults, a forceful personality. Six kept finding himself wrestling with the compulsion to frame things in his host’s preferred idiom.

There was further conversation at the end, also serious but the mood had changed dramatically. Act One had been to clear the air on what Daar was. Act Two was to show them what he wanted to be. And Act Three?

He showed them what they could do, together. The deal was closed, and there was nothing Six, or the Hierarchy, or any possible calamity could do to change that. Daar had united the Deathworlders into a single people. With dirty jokes and a grin.

The end of the program had the Great Father giving Jamal a genuine hug and thanking him for the opportunity! It was so earnest, and honest, and…

…And effective.

When the Great Father prowled off stage, rather than a terrifying, hulkingly muscular killer, what the people saw was a passionate defender of his people. Their people. They saw a man who talked with them on a level they could relate to. Them, ordinary people, relating to the most powerful embodied being in the galaxy like he could be their lifelong friend.

That, right there, was POWER. Doctor Flowers would certainly have related to him.

In that moment, the Hierarchy had been defeated. Now, it was just a matter of action. And Six had no way of communicating it to his people. No way of knowing if his people were still organized in any meaningful way, out there in the galaxy at large. No way of changing the trajectory of the future at all.

All he had left was rum.

He spent the rest of the night wondering whether it was him or his host who toasted the screen.

Date Point: 18y11m2w2d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

The champagne was excellent that night. A fitting celebration for possibly the greatest political coup of his lifetime, or frankly in living history. He had sold the war without selling a goddamn thing, and nobody would really be the wiser.

Oh, a few people would. The people who knew the way of things, who understood the keys to power. Well, a President had many, many keys, and right now his were all on his side.

Of course, they were Daar’s keys now, too. A small sacrifice of influence, temporary and, ultimately, inconsequential. Beau had what he wanted. He could save his people, and be praised for doing it.

He sent a message to his chief of staff. Time to propose a budget.

Date Point: 18y11m2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Leela, Grand Mistress of the Hidden Taco Arts

Tonight was a suddenly-Daar moment, and rarely had she ever seen him so pleased with himself.

“Tacos ‘ta go, please! An’ make some ‘fer ‘yerself too!” Bouncy and chipper were not usually adjectives that worked for someone his size, but right now…

“Oh dear. Snatch a little bird, did you?”

“The biggest, fattest, mos’ crunchiest lil’ bird that ever did chirp!” Daar poked his nose through the window, and grinned when she ritually spatulated his snout.

“You want to be careful with those. They fill you up with your entire daily dose of Smug in one go.”

“Nah, I got unlimited smug in my meal plan! So c’mon, les’ go have some fun!”

“I still have to cook your order, and close shop…”

“Ugh, fine…” He plopped his rear end down and sat patiently, which was about all he could do. Leela knew perfectly well that he would have gladly helped her clean up…if only he could actually fit.

“So, what miracle did you manage this time?”

“Guess y’ain’t watchin’ ‘yer phone, huh?”

“…Oh Mothers, what now?”

“Naw, ain’t gon’ spoil th’ surprise! Tonight, only thing I wanna do is eat tacos. An’ wrassle around by the fire with my most favoritiest females—”

“Daar! I have a business to run here! I can’t just take Friday nights off whenever I feel like it!”

“But y’do feel like it.” He pant-grinned cheekily. And, well, there was something nice about just going off to play…especially with someone who knew how to play…

But mortgages and business loans didn’t care about such things.

“Daar. I really can’t. I don’t have any help.”

“Aww. Well, okay. Can I jus’ hang out ‘fer a while an’ eat my tacos, then?”

“Of course you can!” She set to work, and even though he timed his visits for minimal impact, well…

There was a crowd.

“Daar,” she asked when she handed him his order, and before wading into the backlog of everyone else’s… “What did you do?”

“I promise you it’s good! But keep it a surprise ‘fer now, ‘kay?”

“Fine…”

Orders. So many orders. People knew he was there and there was definitely some sort of celebratory energy about him, but try as she might she couldn’t quite glean the details.

She sold out, though. So that was nice! He was also nice enough to suggest in a very friendly sort of way that maybe everyone who had their orders or whatever might think about possibly going somewhere else.

And like that, they were alone. Cleanup didn’t take long when there wasn’t anything left to sell, and Daar dutifully tidied up the tables and chairs. She backed out of her shop, locked it up—

Daar had her pinned and pressed up against his iron body instantly, and her heart was suddenly trying to leap out of her chest.

“‘Yer a hard-workin’ gal, Leela,” he snarled right next to her ear, while his paws did unspeakable things elsewhere—!

“An’ I’m a hard-fuckin’ kinda man. Feelin’ up ‘fer some work?”

Well.

The whole evening passed in a wonderful blur, because he was good at overwhelming in the best possible way. She did remember waking up, though. Sore, thoroughly worn out…

He was dead asleep. Well! She’d tired him out! Now that was something to be proud of. Of course, Naydra had mentioned that encouraging him to show off was an excellent tactic…

Breakfast. Yes. Something. She stumbled down to the kitchen to get some bao, and along the way she remembered there was something he did…

Phone out. Internet search—nope. Right there on the front page.

Gaoian social media was exploding all over her feed. Dozens and dozens of messages, and even more from a few who knew what she did that night…

….

Oh, Mothers.

LAID BARE
Gabrielle Nyoni and Marrek

“You really don’t know what the Fear of God is until you’ve felt it.”

[Image: A black and white photo of Gabby and Marrek, both standing awkwardly on bare rocky ground with embarrassed expressions. Gabby has a hand on her bare scalp while the other hugs her own midriff; Marrek’s posture is hunched and half-covered. Both are covered in goosebumps, and soaking wet. The lighting catches the raindrops, surrounding them in a halo.]
Credit: Ava Ríos

Previously, arranging a Laid Bare took weeks. This one came together in an afternoon and in a hurry at the request of our models. Gabby and Marrek are journalists and colleagues of mine at ESNN. They were covering the war against the Hunters on Hell when the allied forces there suffered the devastating effects of a nuclear attack, and they were evacuated immediately afterwards. This is their story.

So, you two requested that this shoot happen ASAP, and it’s because of your hair and fur. What happened to it, exactly?

Marrek: “We were on Hell, reporting from the front lines when the nuke went off. And, y’know, it wasn’t a clean bomb, and it was a ground burst…that means fallout. And part of the decontamination process for that is…this.”

Gabby: “ All our hair had to go. All of it. Human or Gaoian, made no difference. Shaved off and burned or buried.”

Even so, you both have radiation poisoning.

Gabby: “Yeah. Just a really mild case, thank God. But I feel like shit right now and it’s been a few days.”

Shouldn’t you be at home resting?

“I bet the doctors think so. But, I can be feeling miserable for myself in bed, or I can be feeling miserable for myself here and getting stuff off my chest. Honestly, I’m glad for the distraction.”

[Animated Image: Marrek duck-nodded in agreement while Gabby speaks]
Credit: Ava Ríos

Marrek: “Not gonna lie, when she first suggested we do this, I thought she was nuts. There’s few shames like being completely furless, for a Gao. I kinda wanna be curled up in private somewhere until it grows back. I’m cold, I’m wet, and you know how it is with us, Gao don’t usually need clothing, so this feeling of being naked is kinda foreign to us. It’s, uh…I’m not really enjoying this.”

(Interviewer’s note: At this point, I checked whether he wanted to discontinue the shoot and he assured me that he wanted to keep going.)

“I guess what persuaded me to do this was the chance to prove I’m like this for honorable reasons, not as punishment for some crime.”

Gabby: “As for me…I’ve worn my hair short my whole life. When I was twelve, my mom told me the balance point is ‘long enough to do something nice with on special occasions, short enough to keep out of the way when you’re doing chores.’ I’ve never been bald before. I keep finding my hand running over the top of my head, and if there’s a mirror nearby, I keep glancing at it. My ears and neck feel cold, and my head looks round and weird. I hate it.”

You have a wig at home, don’t you?

“I can’t stand to wear it. Not just because it itches but…It feels like I’m trying to pretend something important didn’t happen.

Marrek: “That’s why we decided we wanted to do this shoot.”

What do you mean?

“Well, my fur’s gonna grow back, and Gabby’s gonna grow her hair out, and by this time next year neither of us are gonna be, uh, I guess marked by it any longer.”

Tell me about the moment the bomb went off.

[Image: Marrek, his eyes distant and his ears flat against his head; Gabby wringing her hands.] Credit: Ava Ríos

Marrek: “We were sitting around with some of the marines we’d got to know. Getting a look at what it was like for them on the ground, right? And one minute they’re in the middle of grabbing some food and trading jokes with their buddies and the next…”

He shakes his head.

Gabby: “I don’t even really remember the moment it went off. I think I remember a really bright flash and a blow like getting smacked in the chest with a softball bat, but the next thing I really remember is the mushroom cloud. God, I will never forget that…”

[Image: the mushroom cloud, and Marrek in silhouette, looking up at it.]
Credit: Gabrielle Nyoni

“It’s not like watching a movie. It’s not fiction, you know? It’s really there, this terrible thing that could have killed us if only we’d been sitting in a slightly different spot. I remember…I remember feeling, physically feeling, waves of…of something, crawling over my whole body. I’ve tried a few times since to put it down in words but it’s like…I mean, I totally get what Oppenheimer was getting at when he quoted the Bhagavad-Gita, now. You really don’t know what the ‘Fear of God’ is until you’ve felt it.”

Marrek: “Yeah. It’s fuckin’ religious. Ain’t no other word for it. This weren’t the first time I’ve seen a mushroom cloud, but, fuck. It doesn’t ever lose its power.”

Gabby: “We had these hazard sensors with us. Because, you know, Hell is a nasty polluted place. And it started clicking at us, and that’s a terrible sound too. So, we had to get out of there. But even though we were doing that, all the soldiers there, and the Marines…they were charging toward the battle instead. And they had to be just as…they had to be feeling a lot like I did. Right? And that scares me, looking back. It scares me that you can take ordinary people and get them to pick up a gun and attack this, this face of God that’s suddenly manifested itself.”

Marrek “It’s ‘cuz they knew they had to. They knew the Hunters were going to attack right after. If they hadn’t counter-attacked, we’d all have been overrun. Everyone would have died. Including us.”

[Image: Both models trying their best to strike a pose. Gabby has raised her arms above her head and cocked a hip like she’s dancing nervously; Marrek is doing a back double biceps pose with considerably more confidence.] Credit: Ava Ríos

“And then came…this.”

Gabby: “There is no time for dignity after something like that. They weren’t cruel about it, just, it had to be done, and it had to be done quickly. Because I guess we had to be out of the way, because in a few minutes there’d be wounded coming back in, and probably a lot of them.”

Marrek “They weren’t exactly gentle with the clippers for me…”

[Images: Minor bruises and abrasions here and there on both of them; a closeup of Marrek’s freeze-tattooed upper arm; Gabby’s scalp, from behind.] Credit: Ava Ríos

What was the last thing you saw, before they sent you back?

Gabby: “Honestly, I was focused on the silly stuff. When they told me they had to take and get rid of everything, I was worried about my camera, and then I was worried about having to strip down in front of so many strangers…I guess my mind was focusing on little things because the big thing was too big, you know?”

Marrek: “For me, it was the backhoes.”

Backhoes?

“Yeah. Big armored ones. Remember, you ain’t coming back from Hell unless you’re breathing.”

[Image: Gabby, wiping her cheek.]
Credit: Ava Ríos

Gabby: “That scared me. More than anything, that scared the life out of me. I don’t know why, but the idea of my final resting place being that trench…of anyone’s, really…Everything else, the shaving and the losing my stuff and everything, that all was easy enough to accept. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was right. You know? That mass grave, though…even empty, it felt wrong.”

Marrek: “Maybe this sounds cold, but I don’t feel the same. They’ll be remembered, I know that much. All of them. The Great Father said he’d light the pyres himself. What matters is the remembering, not where their bones lie.”

But you still noticed the trench being dug. It clearly mattered to you.

He keens quietly, and is silent for a few seconds. “…Might be that’s just what I’m telling myself. I don’t know. Yeah, I noticed it. I guess you’re right. Maybe.”

Gabby: “We’re still processing it all.”

So what do you want people to know? What message do you think our readers need to hear?

[Image: Marred beauty. Even in this state of embarrassment, both show nobility of form.]
Credit: Ava Ríos

Marrek: “I think…I think I want people to feel the weight of it, if that makes sense. I think sometimes your people—Humans—you’ve got this shield around your home system, and everything that’s going on out here happens through wormholes and far away, so it’s still at arm’s length. It’s just…for my people, this war is part of everyday life. Our whole economy is built around it, everyone’s either serving in, or served in, the Grand Army, or is rebuilding from the destruction, or attending the pyre-lightings…”

Gabby: “But for most humans, somehow, it’s still all…over the rainbow.”

Marrek: “Not anymore, it ain’t.”

A roll of thunder causes us to cut the interview short, but they both seem content. Afterwards, as we’re warming up and drying off indoors, I ask them if they have any last thoughts they want to share. They both shake their heads, and I can tell that, as with my other interviewees before, they’ve found some catharsis in this process. Not to mention some renewed drive. Gabby talks enthusiastically about what their next project will be most of the way back.

My thoughts, however, turn to a man the Great Father recently praised, claiming he was the sole reason the invasion of Hell had succeeded, though almost at the cost of his own life.

The subject of the next, and final, Laid Bare.

‘Caffeinecore’—political blog
Simping for kings

Charm offensive. Good combination of words. They’re turning on the charm, and it’s fucking offensive.

Here’s a reminder for you, America: you’re supposed to be a republic. We had a whole thing about it three hundred years ago, remember? A government of the people, by the people, for the people?

Well ‘the people’ aren’t wealthy elites. The people scrape by on a hundred bucks a day. The people don’t own castles, or golf courses, or private spaceships, or earn more in a year than you could have saved up if you’d set aside a dollar a day since the time of the pharaohs.

So why the slobbering love for His Royal Baldness?

Seriously. You can track the King’s progress across the US in genteel parties and soirees, and brainless blogs losing their fucking minds over how sharp so-and-so looked in a pant suit by whatsherface, while some of the quietly richest people in the world walk by in the background for an evening of schmoozing, networking and, in the finest British tradition, hobnobbing. And the ones who were already getting rich and fat and happy off interstellar war come away full of beaming confidence, while the ones who were maybe thinking of growing a backbone sometime in the next ten years have gone all quiet.

Sure. On a personal level, the King’s probably not a bad guy. Flew rescue helicopters, saved lives and so on. Forget all that. As the murderous bear-elephant just spent an evening telling us, people like him—this includes the King—are embodiments, not everyday folk with everyday struggles. We hardly live in the same universes.

So what does the King of England embody? Well, that’s an easy one. Old Money. Establishment. Empire. The Ancient Powers, that still matter a great deal, and in fact have always mattered. America is the one place where a republic actually had power, yet our elites are too busy lining up to sniff at the Royal Posterior to remember what they are.

They’re commoners. Okay? There’s no blue blood among them, just money and ambition. No nobility, if in fact it ever existed among the Lords in the first place. And if this country was actually working the way it’s supposed to, they’d have no patience for the hereditary figurehead of a country that’s stubbornly refused to step bravely forward into the eighteenth century.

Instead, they attend his parties, listen to his bland humor. Throw parties for him with hardly a proper smile among them. And then, like robot bees, suddenly all of them are entirely behind the President and his warmongering, mouthing platitudes and praise for the “Great Father” and his admittedly murderous ways!

It’s a charm offensive, and it worked. Daar won over the normals with some strutting, some flexing, and some baby-talk with criminally adorable children. All spontaneous, you see.

The King, however, proved that he still matters. Somehow our betters get a little breath of the Royal Presence and now they’re all on page, singing the same tune.

It’s blatant. And as Americans, it’s damn near blasphemous.

And it’s working.

God, I need a drink.

Date Point: 18y11m3w AV
Hell

LCpl Viggo Dyer

Shit wasn’t exactly fuckin’ peaceful, but they’d held. With reinforcements, orbital fire support and a few fuckin’ miracles, the allied side of the river had held, and now Ground Zero wasn’t a hole so much as a filthy fuckin’ puddle full of water so toxic even the Hunters weren’t bugfuck enough to wade through. The whole river was like that, fed by black rain and storms downwind, up in the mountains. Over the course of a couple hours, it had filled the hole, left behind a big round black deadly lake in the middle of the city—or whatever you called what was left of this city—and cut off the two enemies from each other.

There was only one place left to cross the river. One of the large bridges had come through the nuke merely damaged, its roadway on the north side collapsed, but the train tracks on the south side still intact. And Dyer and his buddies got the fuckin’ awesome job of sitting at the friendly end to mow the Hunters down if they were dumb enough to try and cross it.

So of course the fuckin’ creepy-crawlies were fuckin’ blue-balling them. They’d set up their own fortifications on the far end, and now? Mexican fuckin’ standoff. At least until Command got shit together for an assault, and then…

Fuck, Dyer didn’t know. The far side of the river looked more intact than their side, prob’ly ‘cuz the Hunters had known what they were gonna do, and prepared for it. Fuck only knew what FIC and Command knew was over there and what they’d want destroyed.

Sure were a lotta Clan dropping in to look at things, though.

That was one of the things about working with Gao. The Grand Army was, duh, a fuckin’ army. You kinda knew what they were about. But Clan? Clan could be anything. And they’d show up any time, and want or do whatever. Might be a group of Whitecrest, who’d set up some gizmos and point ‘em over the river, then vanish again. Might be Stoneback, turning up like a work gang of oversized wolverines to dig a hole, build a wall, or whatever. Might be some Openpaw medics performing a medical check on everyone of either species to make sure nobody was dying of radiation sickness.

One had been a Starmind chaplain. He’d spent some time chatting with folks while waiting for his bodyguard and a team from Mortuary Affairs to show up. Lotta men and Gao unaccounted for, still. Lotta bodies still to recover. And yet, somehow, he’d taken the time out to talk and listen, and he’d made Dyer feel…well, Dyer wasn’t sure what. A little more human, maybe.

The fuckin’ furry angels, though, were a new group he’d never seen before. Big. Not literally-a-bear big like Stoneback, but big and burly like the kinda stacked dude who lifted really heavy shit for a living and could do it all day. Clan mon was four bronze squares on their armor’s belly, and they rocked up in trucks full of supplies like it was fuckin’ Christmas.

Every supply. If even one guy in the Company had complained about its absence, they’d brought it. And they unloaded it all themselves like an oiled machine. Heft, hand, catch, place, stack, move, all while chantin’ some kinda work shanty in Gaori.

It was a pretty catchy tune, actually.

Dyer somehow got the job of handing out the Ripped Fuel, in little foil pouches with NBC caps. It was a new-fangled energy drink—because of course the military had to keep energy drink tech at the bleeding edge, or something—that somehow managed to get several thousand calories into you by the end of the packet.

Tasted like getting face-fucked by a lime.

Still, as morale-boosters went…it was no weekend in Vegas with whores on buffet, but it worked. All of a sudden they’d gone from fighting on empty, worrying about conserving ammo and shit, to being fuckin’ stacked.

To Dyer, it felt like some of those black clouds overhead had opened up a little. Sure, he was still stuck in a literal hellhole, sure he was still prob’ly looking at ass cancer in his thirties or some shit, and he’d lost way too fuckin’ many of his buddies…but they’d fuckin’ held somehow. If that was the worst the Hunters had…it wasn’t enough.

He buried that thought quickly. Last time he’d jawed off about what the Hunters might do, he’d been immediately proven right. Best to not give ‘em any more ideas, or tempt fate. But even so…

They were still here.

Happy fucking Thanksgiving.

++END CHAPTER 81++

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Dandelion: audiobook now available!

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow, Zoe and Riker

36 Humans

TTTA

Adam Shearsby

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As well as 59 Deathworlders…

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73 Friendly ETs, 141 Squishy Xenos and 314 SPOOOOOOKY Dizi Rats.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not necessarily share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 82: Moving Forward

Chapter 82: Moving Forward

Date Point: 18y11m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Adam (Warhorse) Arés

Progress and frustration seemed to go hand-in-hand. He was up. Mobile. Training again, but his motor control was still crude, like a man who didn’t quite know his own strength, or fully understand where his body was. Except a billion times worse, because Adam was who he was.

He was still absent-mindedly breaking shit, and nothing was fixing it.

He still had his strength. That was nice, and he could at least preserve that. But he just could not put in any extended work before the wobbles got too bad and he could feel some deep, terrible thing approaching at the edge of his awareness. Something in his brain was giving him the biggest, most terrible warning not to go any further, and he heeded it.

Somewhere deep in his brain was a demon, waiting for him to give it what it needed to trigger a seizure. He could feel it. And he hated it. It felt like all the road to recovery was past that threshold, like if he could only find a way to push himself safely he might make some real progress. But every time he got close, there it was. He was barely managing to do enough to keep his body loose, right now.

And there was nothing to do when he felt those warning signs come on except try and relax. Lie down somewhere. Do breathing exercises. Maybe sleep, but he never felt like he’d burned off enough energy for that. If he managed it at all, it was just half-awake dozing, not really dreaming but not really conscious either. He could lose an hour or two that way, if he didn’t mind not sleeping at all that night.

Which he did.

It was shit. Everything was shit. Could barely fucking move, couldn’t write his own fucking name, couldn’t cuddle his children, couldn’t help his wife do any fucking thing, couldn’t…

“Hey.”

Warm lips on his cheek jolted him out of his half-sleep. It was…mid-afternoon, maybe? The blackout curtain keeping the room dark wasn’t a perfect fit for the window, and it left a thin line of bright light on the wall, with Marty’s silhouette in front.

God, she was so fucking beautiful. Exactly the right mix of hard-bodied and womanly, and her favorite black silk bathrobe did a lot more to show than to hide. No makeup on her face today, but she really didn’t need it, with skin like hers. She smelled of cocoa butter, and something that smelled…really nice. Subtle, but it was there.

There was another smell on the air too. One his lizard-brain couldn’t ignore.

“…Hey,” he replied, dumbly.

“Roll over.”

Not an easy operation, that. Took him a minute, as he worked carefully through each step. He heard her rubbing something on her palms as he did so, and then…

God. Fingernails scratching lightly up his spine. Not a massage, there weren’t many people who could make a dent in him and Marty wasn’t among them. But that wasn’t what she was trying to do anyway. This was all about sensation, and he groaned plaintively.

“Thought I’d break up the pattern this time. Go for something…a bit more appreciative.”

“Mmm….Appreciative?” Adam asked, too lost in the feeling of having his back scratched to ask a smart question.

“Yeah. For everything you do…Ah, ah!” she added, as he opened his mouth to reply. “You’re not allowed to feel sorry for yourself right now. Just let it happen.”

Some kind of liquid splashed up him, and she spread it slowly with her fingers. Oil? Fuck had he done to deserve pampering like this? But, he did as he was told and let it happen, relaxed into it…Kinda hard to ignore the feel of skin on skin where she was straddling his butt, though.

“All the work you’ve put in, to keep us safe…” Marty continued. “How much you care, how great a dad you are…”

Adam sighed and shifted. “I know you said no feelin’ sorry for myself…but I—”

“You feel useless right now. I know.” She bent down and kissed his cheek. “It’s okay. Even Superman takes some lumps now and then. Now relax and let me take care of you.”

He exhaled, nodded, and closed his eyes. She kissed him again, and for the next few…forevers, the only sound was their breathing, the soft sounds of fabric, and her hands gliding over him.

“You’re a beautiful man, Adam. Actually, you’re looking better than ever right now, which I kinda wasn’t expecting…”

“It’s the water weight.” He mumbled, dumbly. His lower brain was becoming really distracting…

“Uh-huh. Lean works for you.” There was a silky, fabric sound and her bathrobe landed on the pillow right in front of his nose. He took a deep breath of it, and sighed as her slick hands ran sloooowly back up his spine again until this time there was no barrier between their bodies at all, and she kissed the side of his neck.

Her whisper in his ear was electric: “Roll over again.”

He did, more easily this time. Motivation apparently helped a lot, and as soon as he did, just feeling it spring up and slap along his belly was almost enough.

…He wasn’t going to last long, because it had been far too long. But even still, her hand was so wonderfully delicate and she knew exactly what she was doing. She had him painfully hard in a matter of seconds. He grabbed at the bed, groaning and trying to contain himself. Something buckled under his grip but he didn’t care, all that mattered was hanging on–

“Mmm,” she smiled wickedly. “It’s kinda nice having you under my thumb like this…” The thumb in question moved in a way that made him gasp.

“Hnn…I’m not complaining…”

“You’d better not.” She slid down next to him, face to face, lips to lips, and that was all Adam could take.

He…well, he was who he was. It was a while before he could see straight again. Even still, he was so pent-up, it hadn’t gone down at all.

“There we go,” she purred. “I knew you needed that… though, good to see you’re still ready and willing, ‘cuz I’m not done yet.” She slid down, rubbing the whole length of her body across his achingly hard cock, until at last she could give it a little kiss, and then a little more…

He was much too big for her at this point. Didn’t matter. She was an expert with her tongue, and gave it her full art. “Ohhh…” he chuckled and groaned through gritted teeth. He was feeling a lot better… “I can take your worst, foul temptress!”

In fact, he was already on the edge again. He really, really needed this.

“Oh, can you?”

He opened his eyes to a metallic jangle. She struck a cocky pose, dangling a pair of handcuffs from her finger.

Adam quirked an eyebrow. “Those ain’t gonna last for even a second.”

“So don’t.”

…Oh.

She grinned, slid herself along his cock again and reached up—he got a faceful of her chest, and God she smelled incredible—and then his wrist was attached to the bed frame. A couple seconds later, so was the other one.

…It worked for him. And for her, too. Though, in the end, he didn’t quite manage to avoid breaking one of the cuffs. But that didn’t matter, they did their job. It had been far too goddamn long, with his fear of hurting her…but his beautiful, genius Marty found a solution.

And she made good fuckin’ use of it.

The next morning…he felt drained. In the best possible way. Marty was in bed, next to him. Well. Against his back, just to play it safe…but it was nice. That was a weak-ass word for all that. But it was! It was…nice.

Woulda been nicer still to roll over and cuddle her but…last night still hadn’t changed that. And when he tried instead to snuggle backwards into her a bit, he more kinda shoved himself halfway across the bed and launched her out of it onto the floor with a squeak.

Fuck.

She came up giggling, thank fuck. “Ugh…that’s a rude way to wake up.”

“Sorry…”

“It’s alright.” She draped herself over him for a reassuring kiss. “How’re you feeling this morning?”

Adam smiled. “Pretty damn good. You?”

“Yeah.” She stroked his scalp. “I’ve missed that. And so have you, huh?”

“Heh! Yeah. A lot.”

She beamed, gave him a pat, then stood up. “Guess I’ll sort out breakfast then go pick up the boys.”

Adam nodded, and worked his way out of bed. It was a multi-step process, hands here, push here, lift there, get his feet there and there…

Not because standing up was hard, exactly. He’d shown plenty of times down in the Dungeon that he could spring to his feet just fine. But doing it gently without wrecking the bed or leaving broken footprints in the laminate flooring, that was the trick. Doing stuff at normal human speeds and power took concentration.

Today was a pretty good morning, though. And there was no danger of ripping the new touch shower controls out of the wall like he’d done with their predecessor. He could just bop it, select his profile, then stand and let high-pressure hot water wash away last night’s lovemaking.

It felt good.

Date Point: 18y11m3w AV
Warren-city of Arms-Spread-Wide, planet Mordor

Sapper Becky Burnett

Hearts and minds were a funny thing. Some, they’d won just by showing up. Some would never be won. But Becky was pretty sure their best tool for winning over the E-Skurel-Ir to date had been air conditioning.

But, maybe she was just biased. Ventilation systems were a niche passion, to be sure, but they were Becky’s passion. Two years in America had sold her on the value of well-ventilated and well-conditioned spaces, and she’d turned that into a career!

It wasn’t like the E-Skurel-Ir were strangers to good ventilation. How could they be? They’d lived underground for generations! And they’d managed some really cool little tricks, like using the cold water from their drinking water wells to drive a heat-based circulation system rather than rely on air pumps. But even so, the air in the warren-cities had always been stale, humid, hot and smelly. Inevitable, with so many people living in such close quarters and having to design their air circulation to keep out ravenous alien beasties.

Now, though, the ‘streets’ of Arms-Spread-Wide were pleasantly cool and dry, without much of an aroma that Becky’s nose could detect.

It wasn’t just a luxury. The city’s population had exploded from both refugees and from the sudden fact that people weren’t being eaten every day. The native-built ventilation simply wasn’t up to the job of keeping so many people breathing, so, in had come the Allied military’s finest bunker-builders to make sure all those people didn’t die of CO2 poisoning.

And, as a bonus, the dramatic improvement in quality of life had finally won over some of the cautious fence-sitters. Though, Becky couldn’t blame them for being wary. After all, the last alien civilization to find them hadn’t exactly been benevolent.

And the funny thing was that, now that they were finally starting to trust, some of the natives wanted to help. Especially the children. So, Becky’s job for the last several weeks had been training up alien rabbit-people in the proper installation and maintenance of HVAC equipment.

And how not to die from four-hundred-eighty volt distribution panels. Big motors needed big power, and there just wasn’t any way better to power them than three-phase alternating current at hair-on-fire voltages. So…best to train the little ones not to lick the spicy wires.

But still. Life was good! Tiring, but good. The only fly in the ointment was that, regardless of species, children were children. And a lot of the kids she’d taken under her wing were orphans, desperate for a mum, or a big sister.

And there was always the language barrier to wrestle with, too.

“You’re leaving?”

“No, no, I’m going on leave!” Becky soothed. “It just means I’m being given some time to relax and see my family and things.”

The oldest of her proteges was Ekavimu, a wiry, skinny little thing—like, even by her species’ emaciated standards—with an endless well of questions. “What do Humans do to relax?”

“Depends on the human! For me, I think mostly nothing if I can help it. But I don’t have anything planned, so…”

A white lie, because of course ‘nothing’ was going to involve a lot of dancing and drinking and hopefully getting laid. But they didn’t need to know that. A lot of the E-Skurel-Ir adults still made grumbling noises about Human sinfulness, though how they’d found out about it—or if it was mostly an invention of their mistrustful imaginations—Becky didn’t know.

…Well, come to think of it, most of their exposure to Humankind had been infantry lads. So…

Yeah. Probably not an invention.

Gross.

Eka gave her a blank look, and scratched a long ear. “That sounds…is doing nothing that much fun?”

“Depends where and how you do it!” Becky chirped. “Doing nothing is a lot of fun if it’s, oh, on a sunny beach with a cold drink. Or in a nice soft bed, or curled up with a book, or a movie…”

Of course, mentioning books lost them instantly. Books were a serious subject to the E-Skurel-Ir. Reading a book was sacred. The idea of just cozying up with a cup of tea and a novel was impenetrable to them. Though, Becky could understand why. If she’d had to occasionally sacrifice good friends and valuable lives to keep demons from burning down the library, maybe she’d be a bit less casual about literature too…

“What’s a beach?” one of the younger ones, Beviziko, tilted his head.

“On Earth and Cimbrean, the water’s in the rivers and lakes and seas is so clean you can swim in it,” Becky explained, prompting a few awed sounds. “And a beach is a stretch of clean sand next to the water where you can bask in the sun. But they tend to be hot places, so you want a nice ice cold drink, too.”

“I’m going to visit Earth one day,” Eka asserted.

“I’d go with Cimbrean instead. Earth is…it’s nice for Humans. But you’d find it difficult.” She didn’t mention dangerous. The E-Skurel-Ir could survive levels of lead and other industrial poisons that’d have a human drooling themselves to death with no problem, and their immune systems were pretty robust too thanks to generations of close-quarters living and recycled air…but their frames were slight, their bodies adapted for low gravity. Earth would be exhausting, and a fall could really hurt them.

Speaking of recycled air…back to work.

“So! What’s the next step?”

“Purge it and check for leaks!” Bevi chimed.

“Correct! Now this system is going to use anhydrous ammonia—”

“What’s that?”

“Very stinky and very angry chemical. We can’t have any leaks!”

Not that she needed to remind them of that. Every E-Skurel-Ir child learned that Leaks Are Bad at pretty much the same time as they learned to brush their own fur. Bevi and Eka nodded solemnly, and the next couple of minutes passed in silent, working concentration.

They were good kids. Eager to learn, and eager to do their part for a city that was going to need them, and many more of them, for a long time to come. It was going to take years to decontaminate the surface enough for even the E-Skurel-Ir to live up there.

And getting them to accept the concept of birth control was an uphill battle Becky was glad not to be fighting. Breeding like…well, like rabbits…had been their greatest bulwark against extinction. Now, with the Hunters gone, they were in danger of massive overpopulation.

Oh well. That wasn’t Becky’s problem. Her problem was getting this one last unit running, and then she could look forward to some time off. She’d treat her parents to a weekend in Folctha, then treat herself to plenty of nice relaxing leave, and…

Well, then she’d be back. There was a whole city still to properly ventilate, and many more besides. She was going to be at this for a while.

And she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Date Point: 18y11m3w AV
Quarterside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler-Etsicitty

Thanksgiving always brought out the best in Allison’s parents. It was the time of year when Amanda started making noises about “being a real family again” and trying to plan Thanksgiving Dinner down to the last detail. Jacob Buehler, meanwhile, had deigned to send a token in the form of a greeting card from himself and his new wife.

Well…at least Amanda—Mom—was trying, in her own damaged, downtrodden, unassertive way. Jacob’s attitude seemed to be that, now that he had a grandchild, it was mission accomplished. He could relax into a lazy, wealthy retirement and presumably leave everything to, uh…whatshername.

Back on Earth it was late fall, the early snow, turkeys and pumpkin spice end of the year. On Folctha, even though it was nominally a British territory, the celebration had slipped into the local tradition but you couldn’t do much about different year lengths and stuff. So, they were having a warm Thanksgiving playing ball in the park in shirtsleeves weather.

Which suited Al just fine. She wasn’t a cold weather gal. And it was always nice to relax a bit at the park. Julian had the Twins down in the grass field, where they were just…messing around, really. They’d started by tossing a football around but that quickly shifted to something more characteristically energetic; Tristan had got into tricking, apparently, which was basically just leaping around and bouncing and kicking in an impressive sort of way. Basically the fun bits of movie kung-fu. Ramsey, being by now a lean and impressively muscular wrestler, was learning remarkably fast, if obviously unpracticed…

Julian was mastering it at an alarming speed and inventing his own tricks as he went, despite making the ground shake every time he landed. Hulking or not, he knew how to use his body in a way that genuinely impressed. The big boy really was a caveman at heart.

And then, of course, there was Xiù, who’d never set aside her Gung Fu and ballet practice. Still as dancer-flexible and precise as she’d ever been, and putting all three of them to shame.

Al wouldn’t have bothered to join in anyway, even if she didn’t have the toddling menaces to watch, who had more important things to do than kick a ball around. Like climb around, walk on and ride the sculptures.

No complaints. Quite the opposite.

Besides, it was nice to have some time to chew over a thought that had been bubbling away in the back of her brain basically ever since Anna’s birth.

Julian was…well, allegedly out of solidarity (but really out of personal ambition) he’d decided to fully commit himself to the Lad life, and…Yeah. It worked for him. Much too well. She’d worried quietly that all his power-bodybuilding and related obsessions would turn him into an ugly meat mountain, but instead the opposite happened. He grew fast, and looked like the studliest nineteen-year-old hulk ever, complete with healthy skin glow and everything!

Except, he was actually closer to forty, with all the dense maturity that age gave his body. And he was heavy enough to shake buildings, shatter furniture, and crush cheap flooring under his sturdy size-thirty extra-wide feet. Which fit proportionally quite well with the rest of him, because he was just so damn big. With all that hypermuscular size came the strength to hurl huge boulders and leap straight up buildings. Yet despite all that, he was still an unbearably hot, perfectly built superstud, right down to the award-winning photoshoots. He might be that superstud for a hundred years or more too, before any effects of aging touched him.

So…where did that leave her? Where did it leave them? She’d effectively married a genetically perfect man, and that was obvious about him from day one. Which, okay. Maybe that was a bit intimidating, especially with all the success that just seemed to happen to them, and to him specifically…fair or not, she was okay with that. Love wasn’t always a kind game.

It was the effective immortality that got to her. Because, while she was fine with being loved by someone well out of her league, the whole extended longevity thing was deeply, massively unfair. Not just between those lucky enough to have access and everyone else…

But maybe more insidiously, between man and woman. Al was content, personally. She maybe would like one more kid, maybe not…it wasn’t a pressing thing. But Xiù definitely wanted more. And that meant she had to choose. Because she could nurse a baby, or take the longevity medication. Not both. The medical advice was crystal fucking clear on breastfeeding while on the treatment: Do not.

That was one of the major reasons the weapons-grade stuff hadn’t hit the market yet, and was only available “on trial” for those in unique circumstances like them. The Corti were unshakeable on that point, and so far had managed clean enforcement. If you weren’t on or directly associated with the SOR’s mission, you didn’t get any.

Spouses had only recently won an exception, and that was the hottest topic of gossip among them. Most…would be going on the medicine. Shallow though maybe it was, if you were going to be married to someone who was functionally an immortal superhuman, well…you needed to be up to it. It was worse in Julian’s case because he couldn’t stop without endangering his health, not after the years of trials and such the Corti had put him through.

And he couldn’t stop anyway. He produced the most potent form of the stuff internally, making his long-term problems even bigger. So, Al and Xiù were going along on the ride. The first generation of the medically immortal. Or, medically indefinitely mortal, anyway.

Again, no complaints. Al didn’t believe in any kind of life after death, so she was going to claim as much time as she could get, thank you very much.

But there were going to be problems that came with that. How long to stick at her job for? Especially given that between the mission pay from Misfit, Julian’s salary and “positional opportunities,” Xiù’s property empire and their investment portfolios, their family was basically never going to be poor ever again. How long to go before letting the kids inherit stuff? And what about getting the kids on it themselves, when they were old enough?

Weird that nobody was talking about it yet. Maybe the ones who could afford it didn’t want the ones who couldn’t to notice.

Hell, how would Past Allison have reacted to the idea of the one-percent getting immortality thrown in alongside all the other privileges? How would she have reacted to the idea of becoming one of the one-percent?

…How much did Present Allison still agree with Past Allison?

Something was definitely itching in her conscience.

A tap on her shoulder brought her out of it: Xiù.

“Ice cream? You look like you need ice cream.”

Al smiled, and gave her a squeeze. “Thought you were enjoying showing off for the boys?”

“Eh. Best I step away early, so I don’t bruise their egos.” Xiù’s cheeky grin wrinkled her nose, and she fished Anna down off the sculpture’s back.

“I dunno, I thought they were doing pretty good…”

“For meathead boys maybe…” Xiú giggled. “…But yes. Don’t tell them I said so, but they’re actually pretty good.”

“My lips are sealed.” They weren’t, of course. She fished Harrison out from under the sculpture’s belly, planted him on her shoulders, and followed Xiù ice-cream-wards.

“Whatcha thinking about?”

“Same stuff as before. The medicine and things. What it’s going to mean for people when some of us are rich enough to afford to be young and healthy while everyone else…Y’know. Little stuff.”

“Yeah, it’ll be a while before the market catches up.” Xiú could be serene about this stuff. “I guess it’ll depend on if they sell it to anyone outside compelling need, and if they do, it’ll be all about how fast the price drops.”

Al wasn’t so sure. “Remember insulin prices? Short-term quarterly gains culture and all that stuff?”

“Yeah…but the people responsible got what was coming in the end, remember? Most of them lost everything, or spent time in jail. And after that, generics came down, then the specialized name-brands did too…and remember, this isn’t the US, it isn’t evil pharmaceutical companies. The Corti control this drug.”

“The people who abducted all three of us for medical experimentation,” Allison noted, drily.

“Well, yeah. But I mean, I’ve kinda forgiven them for that. Or at least, I understand them better, now.” Xiù reached up and poked her son in the ribs, provoking a giggle. “And they need us. Look at Julian, there.”

They watched their giant caveman play about with his much smaller adopted teens. All that size and power he had, flipping around and tossing the two about like nothing…and he was so precisely careful. Like he was with everyone. Nothing but happy smiles on anyone’s faces.

…They’d probably be okay.

“The Corti didn’t spend a thousand years breeding him or his family on a lark, or any of the rest of them either. No, they set about bringing all that potential out in our species for a reason. They’re not going to throw that all away right at the moment they need us the most! Or afterwards! We’re a long-term investment! The Corti are cold, sure, and we especially got the rough end of that. But give them their due, they think strategically. Sometimes you need cold.”

“And what about us, then?”

It was no wonder Xiù got along so well with the Gao, really. She shared their love of mischief, and had what they’d have called a ‘Keeda face;’ a deeply impish expression. “Well, I’m sure they want him to have as many babies by as many women as possible…”

“Tough sh—” Al course-corrected away from a cuss. Gotta watch that mouth around the toddlerbeasts. “Tough cookies. Two is quite enough.”

Xiù turned that mischievous face her way. “Babies or women?”

“Yes. What, don’t tell me you’re getting antsy with just the three of us?”

“No!” Xiù giggled, “Of course not! But I do think it’s kinda hot how he loses like a hundred IQ points whenever people flirt with him—”

Al laughed. “Baby, that has not changed in all the time we’ve known him.”

“So what? It’s a harmless fantasy. I’m allowed! And we’re all fixing to live for a very long time. You never know what the future will bring…”

Al rolled her eyes to unsuccessfully cover a grin. “Okay, fine. Be that way. So while you fantasize over our future harem or whatever—”

“Am not!”

“I’m gonna slurp this ice cream so innocently. That’s all you’re getting from me tonight.”

While Xiù cracked up, the girl at the ice cream stand gave them an adorably star-struck, bumbling service and generous portions—and got a hefty tip. Though, Al stole half the paper napkins. Could never have enough of those when embarking on the dangerous process of combining two-year-olds and dairy products.

God, just how long might the kids live? If they were all poised to live longer than any humans before them, then she’d better enjoy the toddler days, because there weren’t going to be many of them. Even the tantrums, random freakouts, potty training and nappy changes were just going to be a tiny blip if they decided to live a couple hundred years.

…Or longer.

Al didn’t think of herself as a conservative, cautious type. You had to open Pandora’s box to deal with whatever turned out to be inside. But this box…they hadn’t opened this box. It had been opened for them.

Well, the only thing to do with an unknown future was confront it. They’d done that before, no doubt. And so far it had worked out for the best.

She stole one last glance over at the boys. They were all roughhousing in the grass, laughing and oblivious. It didn’t matter they weren’t really Julian’s children, and they didn’t care that he was so much different than them. They loved each other just the same, just as purely and innocently as father and sons should.

She smiled, reached out, slipped her arm around Xiù’s waist, and told all her worries to go shut the fuck up and sit in the corner for a bit. Today was for being Thankful.

And she had a lot to be thankful for.

Date Point: 18y11m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lance Corporal Viggo Dyer

Thump

They were out.

Shit, it hadn’t even been an day since their new LT had rolled up and said hello, and they were out because LT had brought a fuckin’ gift with him:

“We’ll be rotating out of theatre for radiation treatment,” he’d said. “Leaving as soon as our relief arrives, which should be within a few hours. First Sergeant Twining, please rotate everyone through so they can get packed and ready to go.”

Dyer had been one of the first off the line, along with Heembo. All the Gaoians were griping about bein’ basically bald from ears to balls. Stubble didn’t count, apparently. Getting access to follicle stimulation so he could grow his fur back was about the only thing Heembo could talk about the whole time they were grabbing their shit.

As for Dyer’s part, well. It was gonna be nice having eyebrows again. Right now all he had was some fuzz.

The shock came after the jump to Cimbrean, when there was that lurch, the gravity changed, and…

God. Green grass. Trees. And a blue, beautiful fuckin’ clear sky. Dyer almost sagged to his knees, struck by a hammer blow of mixed emotions he just hadn’t seen coming. He’d been fighting under heavy metal skies, in the toxic bone-strewn fuckin’ mud for…

…Shit. He didn’t even know. Felt like eternity.

Least he wasn’t alone in needing a moment. It was like coming up for air after being a second away from drowning. Still, his feet did what feet did, and shuffled him off the jump array’s platform in response to some called instructions.

There was decontamination, with all it’s stinging soaps and abrasive exfoliation. Deep cleaning, Marine-style. Which sucked of course, but he had to admit it’d scrubbed him up what good…

Then there was the medical stuff. Blood samples, some kinda fancy high-tech scanner, then a different fancy high-tech scanner…none of it took long. He got given some pills, different ones to what he’d been taking since the bomb…

Oh. And paperwork for a Purple Heart, along with a Starburst Medal for surviving direct nuclear attack. Fuckin’ hooray. Nice to be fuckin’ appreciated.

And then…they were free to go. Not entirely. They had to stay in the encampment, which was on a corner of the local military base. HMS Sharman? Anyway, they were free to use the amenities, and had open access to both American and British services. But going off-base required a day pass and a stern briefing by the bosses.

Most everyone just wanted to sleep the days away, but Dyer wasn’t feeling it. Neither was Heembo, so after a couple days of recovery, they ended up being day-pass battle buddies.

The way out went past some kind of training course. Looked like serious business, and the sound of nailguns inside said it was in the middle of being rebuilt or repaired. A fuckin’ colossal monster of a young-looking dude was outside looking half-chagrined, half-pleased with himself over something. Shit, he didn’t seem a day over nineteen maybe, and looked strong enough to toss cars.

Dyer was too curious for his own damn good, and went to go say hello.

…Yeah. Monster didn’t even come close to describing this dude. He was wearing just a joke of some silkies, and there just…wasn’t a damn thing about him that didn’t take charge, really.

Except for his dumb happy-looking face.

“Oh, hi!”

“Uh, hi.”

“Heard we were hosting while some guys came back from Hell. You lost?”

“Naw,” Heembo chittered. “He’s just drawn to big strong men.”

“Fuck off!”

The big pretty brute in the silkies chuckled. “Well, that’s me I guess. Broke the run so they’re addin’ more four-by-eight.”

“So, what, you owe the range master a bottle, huh?”

“Nah, we’re kinda supposed to go breakin’ through walls. That’s part o’ the training, though I guess we gotta be, uh, judicious with throwin’ our weight around.” He stuck out a thick, calloused hand the size of a ham. “Gonzo.”

“…’Fer real? Just a callsign?”

“Yeah. You gotta get to at least third base before I share my name.”

“…No thanks. I choose life.”

“Gonzo” smiled like he was used to it. “Yeah, well. It’s an open secret who and what we are but rules is rules. Anyway, What you two up to?”

“Day pass. Oh! Big guy here is Heembo.”

“Howdy,” he rumbled. Paw was a much better-matched word for that skull-crusher of a hand.

“Nice to meetcha. And, you wanna hit up Rooney’s. Home away from home. Best wings in town, beer’s cheap as fuck, and his kitchen can feed a herd of guys like me. Hell, I might be going there tonight…”

“Day pass,” Dyer reminded the young hulk.

“…Right. How long is ‘yer lockdown gonna last?”

“No idea. Also…wait.” A wild idea flit across Dyer’s mind. “Weren’t…so when we first came to Hell, it was right at the beginning, right? There was this…huge HEAT motherfucker, looks like he was takin’ a breather. We whistled at him—”

“Yeah, that was me. Hi again! Shit man, lemme…hang on.”

The big guy sauntered off—and it was a sort of hypnotically three-dimensional saunter too, Jesus shit he was so fuckin’ yoked. He spoke animatedly with someone else that was somehow tremendously hulkier and a lot meaner-looking, then came jogging back at a bounding, land-eating pace Dyer knew he’d never, ever be able to hit even at a dead sprint.

“Keeda.” Heembo whispered. “I didn’t know Humans got that big…”

“Christ, and I thought Walker was a monster.”

“He is, Dyer. The only guy on-team about as big as me. But next to these humans…”

Gonzo looked at them from some distance away and actually tilted his head like a curious dog. When he came thundering back, he jumped right into a question.

“What? Oh. Yeah, uh…big guy over there? That’s Righteous. He’s our biggest, by a longshot.”

“…Okay. Don’t pick a fight with any of you, got it.”

Gonzo laughed with a little embarrassment. “We’re big boys! Anyway, uh, I swear we’re just normal guys under the huge, so…I was wunnering if you two wanted to tag along? I gotta run a couple small errands and I’d be happy to show you around…”

Dyer was still feeling a little lost with the whole thing of suddenly being catapulted back into the world of normal shit—well, maybe ‘normal’ was the wrong word, given their new freakshow friend. He nodded dumbly, not knowing what else to do.

“Cool! Lemme git my bag quick.”

He bounded away again, and his gym bag had in it a pair of sandals and a tank top that did basically nothing at all to cover him up. That apparently fulfilling the local modesty requirements, they made a quick pit stop by his barracks to drop everything off—he was apparently in an on-base rotation for the moment—and then they were off to town.

That surreal sense didn’t go away for Dyer over the next hour or two. Rather than staring at Gonzo, people just…got out of his way, like it was perfectly normal for a literal ton of goofy-ass sweaty supersoldier to just saunter down the sidewalk, making tiny micro-quakes with each step that Dyer could feel through his boots. One kid raised a palm and traded a high-five with him on the way past. They walked past an actual Vzk’tk, the first non-Gaoian (…and non-Hunter) alien Dyer had ever seen, who ignored them.

They saw a Ten’Gewek too, from a distance. He looked like a cartoon parody of a roided-out pro-wrestler had a love-child with a comic-book gorilla, and that child was born a punk-rocker.

“Holy shit, look at that mohawk!”

“Yeah! Vemik’s got a pretty bitchin’ crest! It’s natural, too. Stands up like that all by itself. Also you can tell how testosterone-poisoned they are by the color. See how nuclear red it is? Means he’s…pretty much top of the pile. He’s much stronger than he looks, too.”

Which was saying something, given how fuckin’ jacked he looked, even from a distance…

“Not exactly hard to tell,” Heembo sniffed, and flicked an ear. “Shit, feelin’ kinda humble here.”

“Aww, he’s nice people too. I’d introduce you but then we’d not get anything done, ‘cuz he’s basically a bouncing ball of excited and he’ll want to wrestle all of us, which fuckin’ hurts. Dude’s so hard I can’t even dent him and he’s like five times stronger than me at everything.”

“Jesus.” That was hard to wrap his head around. “Fuckin’…f’real? He’s that strong?”

“And heavy too, yeah. Righteous though? He can crush ‘em like a grape. I’m still a baby at all this so it’s gonna be some long, hard years before I’m on Vemik’s level.”

…The fuck kinda freak planet were they on? And who the fuck were the freaks who lived here?! Heembo had his ears flicked back and Dyer couldn’t blame him at all.

Gonzo seemed to notice and grimaced a bit, and somehow reminded Dyer of a giant puppy who wanted to Make It Better. It sure was a strange look on a man with a neck that thick and bulgy. “Shit, man. I swear we’re not assholes. Also if it makes you feel any better, Daar’s pretty much forever gonna be top dog. No offense.”

Heembo chittered happily. “None taken! An’ by how much?”

Gonzo grinned. “Yes. Dude can outrun a cheetah and bitchslap an elephant. Righteous would just be a fuckin’ snack if Daar was ever feelin’ particularly mean.”

“Fuck yeah,” Heembo rumbled, “it’s good My Father can put ‘ya crazy fucks in ‘yer place.”

Dyer could only boggle at that. Gonzo just laughed, “Fuck off! Anyway, first stop: snacks! Ninja Taco’s got some HEAT-friendly fare on offer and I gotta refuel.”

They had tacos. A mountain of them in Gonzo’s case, and another between Dyer and Heembo. They ran an errand at the hardware store, then they went walking about. Gonzo pointed out all the restaurants along North Street, the good pubs “which still ain’t as good as Rooney’s,” some of the more out-there destinations like a shop filled with crystals and sage…

“Oh, and there’s two big dance clubs here. One is actually for-real a dance club. So, y’know. Formal dress and everything. Actually kinda fun! The other though? Best place in town for human or gao to get their krunk on. Or Ten’Gewek too now that I think about it. Anyways, no strip clubs or anything, but this is the kind of town where you really don’t need it.”

No kidding. The whole time he was talking, both Dyer and Heembo had their heads on swivels, noting all the fine goods on offer…

It actually got to the point where Dyer had to stop and ask. “Okay, seriously. Where are all the fat people in this town?”

“Oh, man, so, way it works is, Folctha has basically a lazy tax. You have to register a certain amount of exercise or activity every week here to get a tax credit. It, uh…saved me nearly eight thousand pounds last year since I was able to refund almost all my VAT.”

“No shit?”

“Yup. I mean, otherwise, I mean, you’ve probably felt the gravity vary a bit? There’s three big municipal gravity generators spread out, but the fields taper off, y’know? Every home has some kind of grav plating too, and for us Deathworlders it’s encouraged to turn the gravity up slightly past standard to make up for the planet being slightly lower than Dominion standard. We keep the barracks pretty fuckin’ high these days. Most people go with one-point-two Gee.”

“Gaoian or human?” Heembo asked.

“Either. They’re pretty damn close though so nobody fusses much. Fitness nuts like to crank it, like I said. Turns out either of our kind can handle a pretty high load continuously, once we get used to it. But even so, without the lazy tax and the grav plating, people get atrophy pretty bad. Cimbrean just ain’t made for us.”

“…Still, that seems kinda…”

“Well, we know people atrophy because there’s cases out in the countryside that got pretty bad. Cheapskates that didn’t wanna pay for plating, which yeah, it’s pricey. But still. Do you wanna be out fifty grand? Or do you wanna watch ‘yer bones melt away? And do I wanna pay taxes to pay ‘fer their fuckin’ stupidity?”

Heembo made an uncomfortable growling noise. “Yeah. I see what ‘ya mean.”

Gonzo nodded and changed the subject. “Anyway! I had a sneaky purpose to all this!”

“Wait, big fuckers like you can scheme?”

“Hell yeah we can, about all sorts of things! Cheatin’ on meals, gettin’ laid…”

“Must be brave girls around here…” Dyer muttered. Silkies left nothing to the imagination.

A smug look from Gonzo, but he was still all Super Friendly. “Naw, you just gotta know what ‘yer doin’! Anyhoo. Since you smell like devil-dog, I thought maybe you’d like to meet the local Marines? They’re an embassy security detachment and we met in a kinda ridiculous situation. I’ll let them lie all about it! So lemme…”

Heembo flicked his ear at the ‘lie’ part, but he’d pretty much grown used to human weirdness at this point, supposedly.

A couple of text messages later, and with Gonzo deciding to show off by transforming Dyer into a backpack and running to the park—shit, that was something to experience—they arrived shortly thereafter, Gonzo and Heembo both panting, and introductions were made.

To the Marines, who were a welcome anchor. And the Explorers. Shit! It was actually them! Even Heembo was a bit flustered, everyone knew about the Etsicitty family, the first people on Mars, the ones who’d made contact with the Ten’Gewek and of course the Gao.

They were all…overwhelming. For their own reasons. Allison was cool and aloof, yet somehow friendly. Something in the back of his head warned against pissing her off. ‘Shoo’ was almost unearthly in her grace, and she had a handshake that would humble most men. And they were both beautiful, and beautiful in different ways, so much so that Dyer had to snap himself out of gawping and remind himself where he was.

And who their man was.

Julian was just…unmissable. He was exactly as tall as Gonzo but somehow so much more in every way, it was honestly difficult to believe it even standing there, taking it all in. He too was on team silkies-and-nothing-else, which were somehow even less modest than Gonzo’s and honestly…yeah. Standing side-by-side, the difference between them was somehow like a scrawny late-teen standing proudly next to his absolutely terrifying hulk of an older brother, though they didn’t look much alike. The infamous photography really didn’t do him justice.

In one go, Dyer’s conception of “epic” was re-defined for the second time that day, having leaped from Gonzo to Etsicitty. The beastly ambassador was definitely friendly, though.

“Hey! Nice to meecha. I’m Julian, this is Al and Xiú, my boys here are Tristan and Ramsey.”

Julian’s rough paw completely swallowed Dyer’s hand and a truly painful crush ensued, one just barely long enough to qualify as a handshake, and which came just short of eliciting a wince (or a cry) from Dyer. He got the impression the huge man didn’t mean anything bad by it all, but could have accidentally crushed his hand to a slurry if he wasn’t paying attention.

Friendly, sure. But he sure as fuck was marking his territory.

“Uh, hi. Good to meet you, sir.”

“Eh,” he reached up and scratched the back of his head, “you can just call me Julian if you want.” Okay, fair enough. The Midwestern was strong in this guy, so much so he probably didn’t even realise how fuckin’ intimidating that casual little flex of his arm honestly was. His bicep had a wicked peak and it was fuckin’ huge, as big as his head! Add the rest of his arm, and…

“…Right! Julian. So, how did you and, uh, Gonzo here meet?”

“I’m his wrasslin ‘dummy!” Gonzo blurt out happily, now sans-shirt again and looking ready to go play, while Dyer tried not to boggle at the kid’s physique. “We got paired up as training buddies.”

“He’s an eager fella,” Julian noted, fondly. “Knows how to push me good and hard.”

…Christ. Dyer wasn’t a wimp or a weakling, and he had a pretty good bod for a little lanky guy. He’d never felt self-conscious around anyone, not even Walker’s superman build or Heembo’s massive murder-bear muscularity. But these guys were just so far past all of them, and the ambassador in particular was so ludicrously stacked…

He’d never felt so fuckin’ small or useless. Maybe that was a stupid feeling, maybe it was overly macho, but just standing next to those two made him feel like less of a man.

Neither of them seemed to notice, really. Gonzo in particular was just…this huge puppy of a man, and seemed super excited to share his happy-time with his New Friend. “Fuck yeah I do! Mostly ‘cuz I’m dumb enough to keep volunteering for abuse. Dude here’s a match for Vemik! I’m really just grappling practice and a lifting buddy, and sometimes a wrestling coach, too.”

“Mhmm,” Julian nodded. “Fella’s got mad skills. I only really win ‘cuz I’m much stronger.”

“…Really?”

Julian at least seemed to know he was indulging, so with a sheepish and slightly apologetic grin, he stood a little taller, brought his arms forward, and—

Yeah. Gonzo did the same and holy balls it wasn’t even close. Heembo flicked his ears back as the two showed themselves off. Dyer could only boggle at the dominating unreality of their presence, but everyone else seemed used to it. His women giggled and rolled their eyes, and the teenagers whooped and cheered them on…

Honestly, it really was like a surreal cartoon. Feeling overwhelmed by it all, Dyer made his excuses and retreated, despite everyone’s slightly disappointed expressions. But…it was just a lot. Like, he was getting that paranoid feeling like maybe he’d actually caught a bullet out of nowhere and was now being eased into the afterlife? Couldn’t be true, ‘cuz his hand was aching too much after that handshake, but he was starting to get some serious ‘shit’s gonna turn south any second now’ anxiety and he just needed some space to clear his head.

Or something like that. Might just be simple intimidation, too. He couldn’t tell just then.

Heembo stayed behind to play some sort of ball game with the kids (who were also frankly sorta intimidating, and almost mirrored the two men by comparison) along with Gonzo and that absolute fuckin’ unit of an ambassador.

He found a place selling milkshakes, then realized he didn’t have any money. The young lady behind the counter smiled at him, though, and shook her head. “This one’s on me.”

…Oh.

Chat ensued, and Dyer felt…a lot more relaxed. She was normal, not some kinda crazy super-athlete or historic explorer or whatever. Though, even being normal, she was wicked smart, and he’d always had a thing for brainy gals…

Things were definitely more open and relaxed here though, because she asked for his number, for “whenever you can go out for a night.” Had to figure out what “his number” was here on an alien world, which turned out to be the same as back in America, just with a +1 in front. Okay, neat. He’d always wondered what the 1 was for…

“Make sure to get an international plan too, or your bill is gonna be insane. And you need to buy me dinner so we can’t have you broke…”

Solid advice, really. He also remembered he could pay with his phone, and with that out of the way, bought shakes for everyone. Anything to chat her up a bit more…

She had to work, though. Feeling a bit more grounded, he returned to the park with his Shakes of Friendship in a carrier so he could share…

Yeah. Better. The Shakes of Friendship did their work, and Dyer felt like he could…relax, a bit. Take it all in now that he had a breather. They talked, answering some (probably tiresome) questions from Heembo and a few from Dyer: “what was Mars like, what was Gao like, how strong are you really, is it true you scared them all with a shotgun, do you really weigh that much?” And so on. Eventually they moved on to little things like school and stuff, while Julian waxed on poetically about the two alien civilizations that were somewhat under his care.

They were all people, under all the everything. He’d also struck gold with Allison because he had her favorite flavor, which she sniped the moment he sat down.

“Sorry about steppin’ away like that.”

“It’s okay,” the ambassador said, strategically sitting right over the bench’s solid concrete support. Even so, the actual bench creaked loudly underneath him. He…really hadn’t been kidding about his size, goddamn. “I get it. I hear you sorta just ran into Gonzo, here?”

“Well…no. He was running some kind of wicked assault course and fuckin’ broke it, so I ambled over to say hello. And, well…”

“Here we are,” grumbled Heembo affably.

“You look like you’re feeling a bit o’ whiplash though, huh?”

Dyer sighed and nodded. “Yeah, that’s one word for it. I mean…just the other day….shit, that planet’s well named. And now I’m meeting literal superheroes and famous people, and…”

He noted the Marine guards (all stationed discreetly away, but close enough to react) had all subtly cocked their heads so as to hear the story.

Julian noticed it too, and flicked on…shit, a personal forcefield and gestured for them to come closer. “I can tell you wanna listen in, so here. Safe enough now, okay?”

Allison and Xiú flipped on their own, and so did the kids. Damn. Like out of fuckin’ Dune.

The older sergeant seemed a bit relieved. “Thank you, sir. I’d have to beat them later.”

“We Marines are used to beatings,” Dyer added, a bit impishly. “Respectfully of course.”

The ambassador was clearly fond of his protection detail and that said more about his character than anything else, as far as Dyer was concerned. Still…even though it was hard to imagine him needing protection, it was kinda sad that his family wasn’t free of it all. Sad they needed the shields, too. But, right now, they wanted to listen. And Viggo…Viggo needed to get it all off his chest. And maybe telling these people might just mean it was heard.

Maybe the guys who’d all gone into that mass grave on Hell might get a little more of the recognition they deserved, if people like this family heard their story. So, he pulled the last of his milkshake through the straw until it gurgled, gathered his thoughts into some kind of order at last…

And told them everything.

Date Point: 18y11m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Major Anthony (Abbott) Costello

Anthony was a killer, like all his men. It wasn’t always a fun thing to confront, but there was a reason they all did what they did, beyond the nobler motivations. They were killers, in a place they could serve honorably. Good killers. Among the very best there had ever been, who could service a target anywhere, anytime, no matter the resistance or environment. They were death from above with maximum precision and maximum force. They took pride in their capability and their craft, in performing a needed mission nobody else could do.

So, gettin’ blue-balled on a chance to service a fuckin’ Alpha didn’t sit well with any of them.

They were working through the process of de-suiting and de-everything-ing. It had become a bit of a habit to clean up and initially de-brief at the same time so they could wash off the sweat, relax the muscles, and get some rest as fast as possible; they were always on call after all, and Team Two was just in from yesterday’s alert. Plenty of targets to service over in Hell, even for their barely-operational relief team…but it wasn’t the one they wanted.

“I swear the Hunters are becomin’ fuckin’ cock teases,” grumbled Firth, as he wriggled himself out of his upper midsuit and gently set it down on its lifting frame. “Also…sarry, but my Mass is too tight again.”

“Oh, come on,” Deacon complained with a grunt, while struggling to wrestle the half-a-midsuit a mere half an inch over to sit better on the frame. “We only just adjusted it!”

“I know, but I’m a growing space viking boy and I eat all my meat and veggies!”

Chitters and guffaws echoed around the room, but Deacon was having none of it. With a spicy grin, “Your techs know exactly what you eat, Firth. We’re the ones who get to flush the waste management after you’ve used it, remember.”

“And we’re the ones with tubes up our arses,” interjected Murray to further guffaws and chitters.

“Sure. I still gotta deal with your very literal shit, and I gotta rebuild his Mass again!”

“Hey, whaddya want from me? I’m a big murdery bastard, and I wanna be the best damn murderer I can. In this job, bigger is better, so…” He’d finally wriggled free of his lower midsuit and started tearing apart his much-too-small and already halfway obliterated undersuit.

…Yeah. One quick glance across the giant Aggressor told the truth. Firth was a living weapon and looking scary as fuck lately, too. Just…honestly superhuman. To state the completely goddamn obvious. Neither he nor Adam had been kidding when they’d predicted how his training would progress, and progress it had. Hadn’t stopped, either. Or even slowed down.

Everyone had noticed, of course. Firth had been piling it on for over a year, but the last few months had seen a kind of warp-speed progress that was extreme even for HEAT. Murray looked him over too and grinned, “S’what you get, bein’ a purebred Corti experiment.”

“Fuck yeah!” Firth growled with extra cheesy bravado. “Nofl says they worked over my family line ‘fer supersoldering back to th’ vikings, but we were too damn rebellious ‘fer ‘em, heh.”

“So you literally are a viking,” Sikes grinned.

“Yup! Heritage is mostly russian, lotsa scandinavian, s’pecially danish, lotta german…bit of scot an’ english too, which is where th’ name came from. But yeah,” he grinned. “Basically a viking.”

“A super-soldier viking,” Sikes added.

“Mohawk and everythin’ these days too,” Murray snorted.

“Fuck off,” Firth laughed. “We’ve all got mohawks now! Special authorization and everything!”

“A purpose-bred super-soldier viking hillbilly cracker,” John elaborated, to everyone’s jeers. “Fuckin’ whiteboy legs so dummy-thick you gotta waddle everywhere!”

“Goddamn right I am,” Firth quipped, and slapped his giant fuckin’ legs with an almighty thwack! “An’ don’t be jealous ‘cuz I got tree-crushin’ quads an’ you don’t. How’re ‘yer calves?”

“My people ain’t known for that, whiteboy.” John’s grin was enormous. “I’d say mine are pretty fuckin’ good though, even next to your ridiculous shit. By the way, how’s your studyin’ going?”

Groans and jeers all around. That jab was a little cruel, but not all that much; Firth was simultaneously one of their most intelligent members, and the one who had the hardest time studying for anything. Right now, his face was habitually seen buried in books about nutrition science and kinestheology, since he was angling to take a bigger role in training development.

And, well…someone had to step into Arés’s shoes, as best they could. Firth was the only one among them who could do that bigger and better, literally and figuratively.

Fortunately, firth had been in high spirits lately, and it rolled right off his back.

“Fuck off,” he grumbled good-naturedly. “I got a B-plus on my last exam, I’ll have you know!”

“Hey, not bad!” Burgess said honestly. “And you’re finally gettin’ pretty, too!”

“Almost as pretty as me!” Sikes quipped.

Cat-calls and other shenanigans ensued.

“Keep it in your pants,” Costello quipped, as he meandered his way to that glorious shower. “It’s sausagey enough up in here as it is. Don’t need the draft horses gettin’ all excited, especially not you, Firth.”

“Jealousy don’t become you.” He grinned, rightfully smug. “Sir.”

“Nobody would survive him anyway,” one of the Gaoians chittered.

More jeers and chittering, but frankly, everyone wanted a hot shower. They’d been in-suit for about ten fuckin’ hours, having dropped in on-target and not found their primary target. After that it was just clearing out territory while the conventional forces backfilled in…

So a good workout, more or less. A super fuckin’ expensive workout with unnecessary risk and no sight or sound of their objective. For the fifth go in a row. Shit was gettin’ old.

He turned the water pressure right up so it could blast the lingering knots out of his muscles, and shimmied his spine to extract a satisfying crick from his neck. Fact was, he was wearing the Mass well these days. He could probably even hack a bigger, tougher, meaner model if he had to, but…well, that wasn’t his job. Still…a little extra armor wouldn’t be a bad idea…Yeah. Maybe time to push it again. Can’t have a shortstack like Chimp embarrassing him too much.

Still. Given what it took to break the last Alpha, the best Costello could ever personally hope for was a supporting role. He had to responsibly command after all, and he wasn’t Beef enough anyway. The satisfaction of finally getting to break that goddamn Alpha was going to be somebody else’s, sadly. And by somebody…probably Firth, with everyone helping out.

…He felt a little bad about it, but Costello hoped to fuck they’d catch it on video when he did. Them, or maybe those combat camera kids. Low-key brave as fuck, they were…

Behind him, the rest of the Lads filed into the shower, making pleased grumbly noises as the hot mist and water blitzed away the chill from the ice water used in de-suiting. And, as always, Titan had a dumb question to get their minds settled.

“So…Fremen or Sardaukar?”

“Oh Jesus shit you fuckin’ nerd,” Firth grumbled, ducking under the shower head. All of them were a foot too low for him. “We’re HEAT. Better’n either of those pretend psycho spacefucks.”

“Wait, since when have you read the book?”

“I din’t. I just know every single fuckin’ plot point ‘cuz Tiny and Kiwi won’t ever fuckin’ stop babbling about it. And t’be honest, it ain’t that hard ‘ta say we’re better’n two opposed religious fanatic death-cult shock troops, yijao? Leave that shit to th’ idjits.”

“Plus, like, they used swords and knives.”

“Okay, that’s cool, admittedly. But our body shields don’t cause nuclear fuckin’ explosions if someone pew-pews us. So, y’know. That’s nice. Actually,” Firth turned at the waist to face Akiyama. “Are y’all askin’ for swordfighting lessons? ‘Cuz I could make that happen…”

Yeah. Not exactly the sort of statement anyone would want to hear in the shower, especially from him. Probably he’d expected fearful groans and other such banter. Instead…

“Aye, been a while since I last did that. Could be fun,” Murray scrubbed his scalp.

A snicker or two here and there, but Firth understood his meaning immediately.

“God, could you be any more of a Scottish stereotype? Let me guess. Claymore?”

“HEMA! Longsword. No’ touched it in years, though.”

“Swordplay is a noble art,” Regaari noted, slyly. “It forms part of our early training.”

“Dude!” Hunter enthused obliviously. “Can we really learn fuckin’ swords?!”

Firth had a bemused look about him as everyone nodded along. His quip had backfired in the best possible way, and how he had a team of eager students. Task failed successfully!

“…Well, okay then! Hell, maybe I can get Mister Anson to demo kenjutsu ‘fer us! Boss?”

Costello was busy lathering up his strip of ‘hawk-hair. “Sure. But low priority, obviously.”

“Right! I’ll think’a somethin’. An’ remember, y’all asked ‘fer it.”

“Since when do you swing sword?”

The obvious rejoinder went miraculously overlooked. “Fencing in high school! Been a long while though…wonder jus’ how rusty I am…”

“Fencing? Wee dainty foils an’ touché an’ all that shite?” Murray scoffed.

“Yeah, an’ I’m quick as fuck on my feet, ain’t I?” Which was saying something for a man that big on feet like his. “Quicker’n anyone else on-team!”

“Kinda hard to imagine teenage Firth prancing about in a white suit, though,” Burgess snickered.

“Had’ta do somethin’! I been too big ‘fer wrestlin’ since my nuts dropped an’ I was asked nicely to refrain from football ‘fore high school. No unrestricted weight classes then neither, I’m one o’ the old freaks. But fencing? That was different. They let me compete with the adults.”

“And lemme guess. Pretty girl? There’s always a pretty girl.”

“I also ran track an’ field, so I weren’t starvin’ of that sort o’ company. But yes,” Firth grinned. “There was a pretty girl.”

Sage nods around the showers, and they lapsed into companionable silence for maybe a minute before Butler, who’d been quiet so far, finally spoke what was on his mind.

“…So, how long’re we gonna play whack-a-mole, boss?”

Costello didn’t know, honestly. “Nobody else can handle an Alpha. Hell, I mean…not the greatest track record ourselves. Which is why I once again thank everyone for stepping up.”

And they had been, too. Warhorse had brought a lot of different abilities to the team, and it took all of them really upping their game in their own ways to help make up for the loss.

What a fuckin’ tragedy.

“Right. So, we’re goin’ with the ‘we only need to get lucky once,’ approach, then,” Butler observed, darkly.

“Not habitually. We’re definitely going to re-assess. Deploying us costs millions every go, and I’m not going to get into the habit of sending y’all down for something routine. Though admittedly,” he thought while switching to cold water for a rinse-down. “It’s been good training.”

Time to dry off. A moment under the hot-air blast (installed for the Gaoians, but everyone loved it) and he was nicely dry. He ambled over to his locker and most of the team followed shortly thereafter, save Akiyama who’d had the stuffing knocked out of him by a surprise Hunter moment. A little more soak time was always good for that sort of thing.

Getting dry, clean clothes, some food and drink not delivered through a tube…the standard rhythm of coming off a mission. They were good at it now, and their turnaround time was the best it had ever been. They’d be good to go again soon. Hell, if they really had to, they could have climbed straight back into the Mass and done more.

Better to rest though. Next stop: handoff with captain Campbell. He found the man catching up on paperwork in their shared office—space was a bit cramped just now—and settled himself on the First Couch, rescued from the old dayroom which was now their “project space.”

Which mostly meant Ork storage at the moment. Of all the Lads who played, only two had chosen something other than Orks. Both of whom were Gaoian. Costello had often wondered if there was some significance there.

Campbell looked up expectantly, then pulled a face when Costello shook his head. “…No joy.”

“Didn’t leave a goddamn thing alive or intact in the whole area, and the slippery fucker still got away.” Costello sat with a groan. “Garaaf never saw it leave, either.”

“Well, I guess we can take it as a compliment that it tucks tail and runs the instant we show up.”

“Hah.” Costello reached over to grab his tablet and log in. “They’re trying to bait him back out, you know.”

Understandable. They didn’t have any proper intelligence among the Hunters—how could they?—but they did have some excellent xenopsychologists. It was like they wanted to fight the worst that could be brought to bear. They were practically begging for it! Why, though?

Beyond obviously the chance at destroying their enemy’s leadership. It was just…

What exactly they thought of Daar was a subject of much informed speculation. A being like him would rock some of the Hunters’ instincts to their foundation. They’d grown accustomed to being the galaxy’s dominant species. Meeting humanity had shaken that, but could probably be handled by mentally creating a new category. The Gao, though? Most Gao were…not much threat. They had been untrained and undeveloped, kept stunted by Hierarchy action. Outside of Clans, most were simple, friendly, harmless laborers. The great mass of them tended to be small and lithe creatures, rather than robust and hardy types. Of course, they did have claws and fully functional canines…

For most of their spacefaring time, in short, the Gao had been just another “prey” species. A rare and interesting one, perhaps. Even dangerous. But prey, nonetheless.

No longer.

To the Hunters, Daar therefore had to look like something akin to the Antichrist. Leader of their most ancient and most martial Clan, the ur-Stoneback himself. A being of legendary and terrible destructive power from what was then an almost legendary breed of Gao, one that had only rarely been seen off-world by anyone for years, come to uproot the natural order of the universe and bring its burning rubble crashing down.

Or perhaps, he represented a god. A terrible god. Who could know? In any case…

“It’ll work,” Campbell opined. “He and we are the only things that can fight an Alpha, really.”

“Yup.”

“If that thing’s rigged with a second nuke and decides to take him with it…”

“If anyone at AEC or among the Gaoians thought it did, we wouldn’t be going anywhere near it either.”

“So…then what is Hell to them? They nuked us, and nothing since. Now a very smart Alpha, or series of Alphas, is back, tormenting us every time we expand our foothold. We’re still reeling from the detonation and our plans to venture out of the shield bubble are well-delayed. Is that about the picture of it?”

“Pretty much exactly. And I think that’s what Hell is to them. Delay. Delay and frustrate us, and keep our attention there. The fleet’s stuck there, we keep going back there to try and bag this Alpha…”

“…Why, then?”

Costello grumbled, epiphany striking. “Because they don’t want us to notice something.”

“Well…shit. That’s ominous.”

“And smart. Because we can’t in fact afford to not play that game. If we take the pressure off and look away, and they somehow do retake Hell…that’s it. We’re never going to get a second shot at it, and they become merely a contained foe, not a defeated one.”

“And so, we must destroy that Alpha. Or Alphas.”

“Which means we need to effectively attack it. Ideally we do that from the air…”

“But they’ve been very clever about how they engage us. And they can get out so quick, too.”

“He has to take the field again,” Costello realized, grimly. “This whole thing is a pantomime to draw out their fucking boogeyman. Boy, do they not understand what they’re asking for.”

“They only fought him a few months ago, right? Don’t they know what they’re getting?”

“If you think you can learn an opponent like Daar in one engagement, then I question your sanity,” Costello retorted, bluntly. “And, also. That’s two-three months he’s had to think about it, to train like the freak he is, to get his armor improved, improve his own forces and especially his elite units and personal guard…all that. Daar is a big believer in keeping inside his enemy’s OODA loop and nobody is better advantaged to do exactly that.”

“And we don’t want to show them that.”

“No, it would tip a strategic hand for them to understand what Daar is, and what he can do.”

“So we better find that fuckin’ Alpha and smash it, before the leader of the free galaxy feels compelled to take the field again,” Campbell summarized. “And that’s why Firth.”

“…Yeah. He’s not ready yet, though. I don’t want a repeat of Adam. I want to smash that Alpha like a goddamn roach, and I don’t want it to be anything close to a fair fight. I want just the idea of what Firth can do to give me fucking nightmares before we try again.”

Campbell chuckled. “You’d better get some sleep, then.”

“Heh! Better had, yeah.” Costello skimmed his messages, found nothing that couldn’t wait, set the tablet aside and stood. “You doing anything interesting tonight?”

“I’m still barely managing a quicker time through the course than Gonzo, and I think I can shave off a second or two. Gonna show him this old dog still has a few tricks he hasn’t learned yet.”

“I think that’s mostly ‘cuz he’s like triple your size now and not quite used to his weight,” Costello quipped. “Don’t delude yourself about that. His conditioning is coming in too, so…”

“Yeah,” Campbell chuckled. “He’ll be making us both his bitch here pretty soon. Still, gotta take what I can get, when I can get it.”

True words, those. And another gentle reminder to rest. Costello nodded and headed out. “See you in the morning…”

He jogged home. Got wet from the night rain, but that was okay. His wet clothes went straight in the washer, he chomped down his last meal of the day, spent half an hour watching an interesting and relaxing video about shoe shining, rolled into bed and, as always happened after Mass time, fell asleep pretty much straight away.

He didn’t have nightmares, exactly. But he did dream of Hell.

Which, really, was about the same thing.

Date Point: 19y AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Master Sergeant Adam (Warhorse) Arés

The decline had well and truly begun, and it fuckin’ sucked.

It all came down to the fact he couldn’t do anything more than light cardio or short and heavy lifting. That meant his conditioning was rapidly disappearing, more or less like he expected it to go. The human body liked to optimize for resource preservation; it only let guys like Adam keep a hulked-out working body under constant and severe duress, which is why the training never ended. Huge muscles were super useful if properly maintained, but they were also super expensive to keep well-stocked and well-hydrated.

Adam couldn’t put in that persuasive work anymore. And, so, his body wasn’t. There was nothing he could do to stop it, all he could do was brood on it as he literally pissed a decade of hard work away, and his muscles shrank and shrank. Every day he looked in the mirror, he was a little smaller. Every day he stepped on the scale, he was at least ten pounds lighter. Some days it was much worse. While sure, he knew somewhere in his heart he wouldn’t need to sprint marathons in the Mass again, loaded down with armor, supplies, ammo, and the like…he was still losing that heroic ability, pissing it away fuckin’ twenty times a day, to the point he always had to hang around where he could suddenly take a leak if the need hit.

Some mornings, it took everything he had not to just bawl his face off about it.

Yes, he knew he was lucky to be alive, that he’d get through this, that he had friends, all that. ‘Base was there every day, helping him exercise and stay mobile. Firth checked in every day too, and even if the pretext was for his training, he never failed to ask. All the rest of the team found excuses to “meet with their training coach” that were pretty flimsy, which was heart-warming really…

But none of that changed that he was on a rapid decline. It hurt. Physically, and emotionally.

Having that size meant having work capacity, both in the sense of massive endurance and the ability to use his strength continuously. It meant resistance to injury, meant extra mass to anchor himself to do useful things. And hell, he’d looked pretty fuckin’ shredded even while swoll, especially with how he had virtually no fat under his skin. Marty liked it, and people really into lifting were impressed as fuck. He was symmetrical, well-proportioned with good shape…but it was definitely an acquired taste. Up close and personal in full 3D? People appreciated and understood pretty quickly what it was all about, especially if he got to perform. From any kind of distance, though? Or, like, by photograph or video? Bulgy bulk tended to put people off. It’d made him look like he was almost literally bursting with muscle.

Now, though? He was “flat” in bodybuilding terms, which as far as normal people were concerned was pretty damn good-looking. All the water weight he’d pissed off meant he didn’t have that same swollen musclehead look any more. A little recently-gained subcutaneous body fat had taken the crazy hard edge off too, so now he looked more like an intensely hulked-out gym rat, or dense like a marble statue rather than the living, breathing, unbeatable power-athlete he had been not even half a year ago.

Sure, that was nice, but next to what he’d been, it was all evidence of lost ability. Those who knew what they were looking at could see it, too. His consolation for losing useful function was some transitory added pretty, or something like that.

It wouldn’t last long. At the rate things were going, the coming weeks were gonna fuckin’ suck ass.

He’d found pretty quickly that the best way to keep his thoughts from dwelling on it was to help someone. Whenever he could, he went up to the base, sat in on the training, shouted encouragement, worked on their development plans. And helping the team really did…well, help. Both them and him.

It was odd how the anyone SOR-adjacent divided, really. You had the Beefs of course, then you had everyone else, and the divide between them was actually pretty significant. If someone could hack the four-digit life, they did sooner or later, and for them the sky was the more or less the limit. If not, well…they were still quarter-ton-plus freaks, and usually considerably bigger…but they weren’t Beefs. Except for Tiny, who for the moment was consciously staying smaller, the team just naturally split into the exceptional and the unbelievable.

Peak human versus legitimately superhuman. Or supergaoian. And supermonkey now too. It was a hell of a thing to see. Knowing that, Adam had tailored plans for all of them to fit with what they could do. But two of them—Julian and Christian—were each their own Corti-bred category, maximum adaptability versus maximum ability. Adam had no idea what their limits were.

And with Firth, the biggest problem had always been motivation. Being so naturally, utterly talented had influenced his ambitions from an early age. He could skate by on what he was, so he sorta did, and he was so damn good that nobody ever really noticed.

The lucky bastard.

Of course, there was his age, too. Firth was fifty-two now, with the body of a twenty-one year old athlete. That age gave him a huge wellspring of experience, but it also made him a bit set in his ways, so chipping away at that had been the project of some years. He’d always been open-minded though, and maybe the younger body had helped knock loose old habits…

Thank fuck he’d finally got serious about it, some months before the Hell mission and Adam’s tangle with the Alpha. Firth had been making some dire grumblings about the “switch-off” of the resistance factor. Everyone was feeling the difference pretty much immediately, like they were fresh in the pipeline again, and it was obvious he was casting about for something…maybe something to do about it? Whatever it was, Adam knew what he needed.

He’d given Firth one of his favorite toys.

“Here.” He’d set it down on Firth’s desk with a nice solid whump. “Take him home. This guy, right here? You’re gonna look exactly like him before we’re done, and then you’re gonna get way fuckin’ better. You ready for this shit?”

It was a goofy fuckin’ thing and he’d been made fun of by the whole team for it at some point or another, but for the longest time, Zangief had been the image in Adam’s head when he pictured what he was working toward. He’d never managed it, exactly. He’d sorta matched the muscularity—which was scary, in retrospect—but he never had a body shape or proportions as completely fucking perfect as the Red Cyclone. Firth, though…

He looked at it and raised his eyebrow. “…You serious? I mean, I’m fuckin’ big but this dude is…”

Huge. Monstrous. Athletic. Unstoppable. Superhumanly powerful. Built perfectly to be the strongest possible fighting man. Swift. Tough. Proud. Unbreakable. Flawlessly muscular—

“Seven feet tall, over three feet wide across the thighs, over four across the shoulders. Has to duck and turn sideways to squeeze through doors. Sound familiar?”

Firth had given the statue a nonplussed look. “He’s a fuckin’ cartoon.”

“Yeah, and so are we, and especially so are you! Look at him, dude. He’s framed and built exactly like you are, right down to the smallest detail. Face even sorta looks like yours too, same giant head, even the same sorta shape to your skull! All you gotta do is fill out to match and you’ll look exactly like that. Take it home, look at it every day. That’s gonna be you soon. Except you’re six inches taller, so you’re gonna make Zangief here look like a little bitch by the end of the year. Got it?”

Years ago, way back in the pipeline, Adam had spent an embarrassing sum of money on his statue of Zangief—the huge hand-painted one, which depicted the big guy in mid-run at his biggest and most impressive-looking ever, with his giant arms outstretched and everything all flexed out in anger and nasty as hell. It had a dust cloud where he stomped, two different swappable heads with two different expressions…hell, they even had a crushed-in bootprint on the stand’s faux-steel decking, right where Zangief’s huge foot slammed down, and that made it perfect for the kind of ultimate bro-lad goals that Adam had running in his head.

Zangief had been Adam’s personal mascot for years. Now, the statue needed a new owner.

“Why, though? He’s so fuckin’ big! How does he even move?”

“Same way I did. Better than you. In this game it’s all about power-to-weight and work capacity, man. I never shoulda been able to beat your face in for all those years, except I was so overwhelmingly strong that it didn’t matter how much more skilled you were. Being that strong made me faster, quicker, made it easier to take hits…the rest I fixed with yoga. Now imagine what you could do with all that added to all the skills you already have. What the fuck would stand any chance against you? Now…nobody’s ever gonna physically outperform Daar, or even fuckin’ approach what he is now, let alone fifty years from now. But I bet we can make you so fuckin’ fast and strong, not even his future badass self would wanna pick a fight. You’re gonna pimp-slap the next Alpha you meet, man. And it ain’t even gonna be a workout.”

“…Weird-ass torch to pass, bro.” Even so, Firth had stood, and came ‘round the desk to hug him with full Beef Force. Teasing or not, what mattered was that Firth got it. He looked Zangief over, looked back at Adam, steeled himself, and nodded seriously.

Then cracked a nervous joke. “…Okay. Fuck me up, fam.”

That bit of motivation was turning out to have been fuckin’ timely, given how Adam had picked a fight with an Alpha and lost everything. Now, thanks to the most bleeding-edge Corti science, Adam’s relentless coaching, Firth’s ludicrously perfect bred-for-purpose genetics, and his own ever-growing willpower and confidence in his strength?

“Fffuck… I never thought I’d look this fuckin’ insane. How the fuck did this happen?”

“Been happenin’ for years, bro. We got you healed up and rebuilt, then we built up your base, tested your limits, didn’t manage to find them…and for the last few years we’ve been pushin’ hard. This last year I got merciless, but now? It’s time to show you what you’ve got. So we leaned you down to get a better look at where you’re goin’, and now here you are.”

“…Not even a month ago I didn’t look this evil, fuckin’ hell. And I’m still growing!”

Things that once took years could happen now in mere months or sometimes even weeks. it turned out that Human beings had enormous innate potential, and that potential could go in a lot of different directions. With Crude, superscience, and an athlete who was officially the very last word in human physiological potential? Once he started leaning out, he leaned out fast and now…

…Jesus.

“Well,” Adam nodded. “Benefits of your genes and the spacemagic. There’s Zangief, right there in the mirror. Hell, you’re already bigger and better! So what do you think?”

Firth had taken to posing pretty quick, once he understood how to use the mirror as a training aid. Hell, it was hard not to when you looked as good as he did. He twisted this way and that, experimented a bit, looked down at himself in disbelief…

He threw a couple punches then, and threw them so fast, the air thumped loudly from his motion. Adam was once the only guy who could do that, but Firth was already faster than Adam ever was (and that despite being stockier too) and the big monster wasn’t even trying.

Benefits of being a purpose-bred supersoldier, really. Fuckin’ hell. It said something that the only guy out there who could humble him was literally engineered to do exactly that.

Another look in the mirror. “Jesus fuck. Is…is this really fuckin’ me!?”

Guys like him treated their bodies like tools for a job, not as purposes in their own rights. On-team, it was pretty much just Adam, Sikes, and now Hunter who thought that way. Julian too, which was a big part of why Adam wanted Firth playing along with the committed ‘rats.

Hopefully, that attitude would rub off. So far, so good!

“It sure as fuck is! Fuckin’ Alpha-breakin’ bod right there! How has sim time been?”

“…Fast. Like, fast enough I can outrun my own thinking. Which is the weirdest fuckin’ feeling. Also kinda uncomfortable, to be honest. I’ve had to change how I walk.”

“Yeah, the bro-swagger thing. It’ll get worse too, until you limber up, but you’ll get used to it.”

“Fuck!” Firth looked down at his huge legs and spread his hands across them. Not even his giant paws were big enough to span his quads. “I’m already cracking brick walkways under my bare fuckin’ feet if I ain’t careful. But at the same time I feel nippier. Like, I don’t feel heavy at all. I feel light as fuckin’ air! Hell, I tried for a high jump the other day and I coulda made my fuckin’ apartment in one leap! I was not expecting that shit!” He laughed, a bit embarrassed, then asked earnestly, “Is this what it was like when you were doin’ this?”

“Yeah. That’s why yoga and posing and stretching and running and all that is so important. Hell, climbing too! I took it up as a hobby to improve function and fell in love. Your body is changing so fast from the Crude and your own genetics, you need hobbies that train your movement. It will slow down eventually though, which I bet your suit techs can’t wait for.”

“They’re re-fitting me twice a week now!”

“Ayup. That’s how I was for years. You’ll probably be the same. Hell, I bet you’ll be worse.”

“…The fuck kinda insanity you puttin’ me through?”

Adam gave him a bit of a wan smile. “The most desperate kind.”

“No kidding. They even took away my fuckin’ boots. Now I’ve been relearnin’ how to fight with whatever it is you and the Protectors use.”

He’d also been focused on re-learning how to move on a near daily basis as he grew thicker and stronger. Adam knew that feeling well; simultaneously feeling lighter and quicker, yet your own bulk started to work against you. Lots of stretching, lots of work to get it under control, lots and lots of practicing and re-practicing movement as you got faster, got stronger…

Firth had always had the swagger-walk down, though. It’s just that now, it wasn’t ego. His legs really were that big, especially his massive cable-like hamstrings, which sorta forced him into a constant predatory prowl everywhere he went. Didn’t soften his image much, that.

“They’re basically armored booties, with flexible soles so you can use your feet. Mostly it’s because they actually last, but at your size you can’t let your feet grow weak, so you better get used to them. ‘Cuz even with your wide-ass fuckin’ size-fifties, you’re too damn big and dense now to be stomping around without proper ground contact. You’ll put boots right through most floors at full combat tilt. These, though? You’ll start instinctually wrapping your feet around whatever you’re standing on, start really paying attention to surfaces. I had to do that even though I was a lot lighter than you are now, ‘cuz my feet weren’t so huge. With you though, you’re just so fuckin’ heavy. Trust me, it’s better. They’ll make climbing easier, too.”

“Well, that’ll be nice at least. I’m kinda worried about rolling my ankles, though…”

“Don’t be. They’ve got some roll protection in them, and you’ve got calves the size of beachballs anyway. There’s a reason I don’t let y’all have any wimpy body parts.”

“…It’s a lot of change,” he grumbled to himself. “Shit, though. I can out-sprint the gaoians now, it’s a fuckin’ head trip! Well, not Thurrsto at a full tilt. Or Daar of course, but…”

“Lots of pros and cons, yeah. The strength and speed to pulp damn near anything, but now you got a waist as wide as a doorframe, a chest that same measure deep, legs and shoulders even wider. Getting through normal doors takes practice, doing so at speed takes even more. But aside from all that, just one measurement matters: your sim runs are getting easier, right?”

“…Too easy, maybe.”

“It’s gonna get a lot easier, too. You ain’t close to done growing. But you better fuckin’ keep up on your stretching, posing and all that, or this’ll end badly. Double-edged sword, right?”

“Yeah. Noticed that too. You weren’t kidding when you said this would be a full-time job.”

“Right now you’re forcing your body to change and the human body really doesn’t want to do that. It wants to be maximally lazy if it can, even though that hurts it long-term. But when you do hit your limits, it’s not such an ordeal to maintain, I promise.”

“…Okay. I trust you. Also, uh…” He looked down, awkwardly, then flexed an arm bested only by Daar. “I’m grumbling, yeah, but I really ain’t complaining. Fuck.”

It was…a perfect arm. As good as Julian’s but hugely bigger. Had a perfect body to go with it too, scaled way up and stockier than anyone. Firth craned his neck to look over his chest and investigate the abs below. He’d always had a pretty wicked eight-pack, but now? He crunched down on them, strummed his fingers over his belly to a loud washboard sound…

“…Yeah. I think I could get used to this shit.”

“Right.” Adam stood, carefully, waited for him to relax and without warning slammed his fist as hard as he could right into Firth’s gut. It collided with a SMACK!‘ loud enough to reverberate around his office and down the hall.

But all Firth did was grunt, and step back.

Adam’s whole fist was throbbing.

Firth seemed legitimately curious, instead of anything else. “…The fuck you do that for?”

“Prove a point. That was with everything I had, dude. And I haven’t lost my speed or strength yet. If I’d thrown that punch into literally any other human, even Julian, say? It’d probably kill him. But you? If you’d actually braced yourself I woulda pulped my wrist.”

Firth looked down again at himself in obvious wonder. “…Fuck.”

“Yup. You’re the king, now. Don’t you dare rest on your laurels.” Adam shook out his fist and picked his way back over to his backpack. “You’re in the danger zone, too. At your level, either you keep at it and keep improving, or you might crash and burn like I am. Understand?”

“…Well, that’s kind of a buzz-killer, but…” Firth nodded seriously. “Yeah.”

“Exactly. It’s a huge risk. A huge risk, man. Trust me. Some day if you ever wanna step back some, we can manage that. But you get hurt like me? Holy shit are you in for a world of suck. So: remember why you’re doing this shit. Enjoy it! But don’t let ego be your reason, yijao?”

Firth nodded, gave Adam a serious look…nodded again. “Yi. I get it. My body is a weapon, and like any weapon it can be dangerous to wield.”

“Exactly. Respect what got you here, and never forget the knife-edge you’re riding.” Adam hauled up his backpack, checked he had everything. “I’ll update your training and meal plan tonight, be ready for another long push. Get everything entered in, okay? Go get weighed on the new scale and don’t break it please, get your measurements in, fill your food and exercise logs in…oh, and bloodworks. I can’t plan without good data.”

“Rog.”

“Good. Keep at it, man. And study this shit, too. I’ve got a reading list, ‘cuz If you really want it, you’ve got the potential to set the standard forever. You’re already humbling Yan.”

That cavemonkey was quite possibly the most ideal possible HEAT operator ever, just waiting to happen. It really would come down to his schooling, and how well they got a handle on his training and nutrition, all that…but he was promising. Nobody had his combination of fast, strong, and tough in a usefully compact actually-a-monkey frame. Dude was their Donkey Kong. And actually starting to embarrass them all on the training courses.

For now, anyway. Firth was competitive as hell and give him a goal he cared about…

He grinned fiercely, “I’mma make him my bitch on the course, too! See ‘ya tomorrow, ‘Horse.”

“Hasta luego.”

Welp! His Official Meathead Successor had been appointed and judged worthy. Which was…tolerable. Adam woulda preferred to not be passing the torch at all, but he had to and that was the end of it. He’d saved a lot of lives in doing it, though. And, really…He was okay with that. Hell, maybe there’d be more lives in the future.

He was changing, and it sucked…but he wasn’t done yet.

Not by a fuckin’ long shot.

Date Point: 19y AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

LCpl Viggo Dyer

Leave in Folctha had been pretty good. The town’s reputation was, yeah, pretty well deserved. All the things a Marine could want, and a few he didn’t even know he’d wanted. Gonzo—Hunter actually, what a badass name!—turned out to be a pretty fuckin’ good buddy, and the embassy Marines knew all the right ways to get into just enough trouble.

Medical sucked. There was a big briefing on total dosage and lifetime cancer risk and all that…but the good news was, between the MOPP and the medicine and stuff, and the estimated dosage they’d received, none of them was staring down the barrel.

In fact…they were going back. Not for a little while yet, but they’d got the news that morning. They were moving all the units into rapid rotation to manage radiation and environment exposure. Two weeks on, six off, of which three was mandatory testing and lockdown, including some new Corti wizardry or something involving forcefields.

Maximum fun.

Dyer’s feelings about the whole thing were thoroughly fuckin’ mixed. On the one hand, it was fuckin’ Hell. They’d picked the name goddamn well, and he couldn’t say he was lookin’ forward to being back there one goddamn bit. But on the other hand…shit, what the hell good was he, otherwise? And maybe by being there he’d spare some other poor fuckers from it?

He wasn’t even sure what the feeling was, exactly. Just that, yeah, he’d go back again with no complaints. See it through.

At least he got the chance to celebrate Contact Day at Rooney’s. Even made some new friends when a group of British Army guys came in, all of them still wearing that same tired look he’d had that first day, and looking like they needed some sympathetic faces.

As it turned out, the new guys weren’t from Hell. They were from Mordor. So, on the one hand, they hadn’t got nuked…But on the other hand, they’d been tunnel fighting. Complete with all the nastiest traps the crazy fuckin’ natives could think up, suicide bombers, perimeter security when any approaching caravan from one of the other warren-cities might have some psycho fuckhead hiding among them strapped with napalm…

They swapped stories. Compared notes, kinda. Raised a lotta glasses to a lotta good people.

Got to talking about just how weird serving with Gaoians could get.

“I tell you mate, I’d be dead twice over if we didn’t have Geyki and his nose. Like having a K-9 who can yell at whoever smells wrong.”

“Silver or Brownie?”

“Neither! He’s got this dense curly coat so he’s apparently Emberpelt somewhere in his lineage. Tell you what though, he can bark like a brownie.”

“It’s been nice having Heembo and corporal Walker. The two of them together are a fuckin’ wrecking crew.”

“Wait, wait, wait. His name is Himbo?”

“Heembo. But yeah, we give him shit about it. And it honestly fits, too. Kinda ditzy, kinda spaced out…”

A quiet growl in Dyer’s ear: “Ears a lot better’n ‘yers, ‘ya little shit.” Heembo rumbled playfully, then slid up to the table and set his talamay down. “Don’ mind bein’ called a wreckin’ crew, though. Where is Walker, anyway?”

“Found someone,” Dyer grunted. “Y’know. Like he always does.”

“Do I smell a hint of jealousy?” Heembo chittered, then thought better. “Oh. Right. Well, uh…”

“S’okay.” He wasn’t feeling terribly up to it, anyway. Tonight was a night for hard drinking.

The HEAT Lads appeared. One could always tell by the faint thumps through the ground right before they squeezed their way through the front doors, this being one of the places safe for people of their scale. You grew used to them, sorta, because they were just people under it all and weren’t looking for trouble.

But you had to get used to them. And the Brits here hadn’t met them yet. It was kinda nostalgic really, watching their eyes go wide and their backs straighten. If a fuckin’ general had just walked in, they’d have been more relaxed.

Heembo had an evil streak in him. “Hey! Gonzo!” he yipped at their friend. “C’mere ‘fer a tick!”

Hunter, being Hunter, tilted his disgustingly handsome head at them curiously, then with a gormlessly happy grin came thumping his way over with all the subtlety of a rhino on a drum.

He wasn’t crazy tall by HEAT standards. But he was still six-foot-three-plus (and not much narrower), making him a good inch taller than the biggest guy the Brits had. About two feet wider, too. And their smallest—Burnett, a cute blonde with an infectious smile—practically squeaked and tried to make herself inconspicuous behind Dyer.

“Aww, c’mon!” Somehow, Hunter’s voice was both deep and boyish. “I don’t bite too much!”

“Anyway, this is Gonzo—yeah, gotta stick ‘ta callsigns,” Heembo noted. “He’s pro’lly the best tour guide here in Folctha. Knows all the fun bits ‘yer never gonna get from upstanding folk.”

The biggest Brit, Corporal Hill, was the first to relax. He toasted Hunter with his beer and sipped it. “Dare I ask where the callsign came from?”

“I don’t worry too much ‘bout things that don’t need worryin’,” he said, charmingly, and as usual he flashed that distinctly lets-go-play smile at everyone present. “Mos’ly I wanna have fun!”

“And lift,” Dyer added. As expected, almost nobody picked up on Hunter’s intent. Burnett did though, and quietly shuffled just a bit more behind Dyer’s back. Quite what he’d done to become her human shield he didn’t know, but he wasn’t complaining…

“I just said that!” The big man added, as per tradition.

“Ah,” Hill nodded sagely. “So a true meathead, then.”

“Gotta put us somewhere! ‘Scuze me—” he added to Burnett. “That’s a HEAT seat ‘yer sat in. Can’t use the others, they break.”

“…How…?”

“You wouldn’t believe how heavy I am even if I told ‘ya. I barely do. So, uh…while I wouldn’t mind sharin’ I do gotta grab that stool.”

Rather than argue, Burnett transferred herself into Dyer’s lap. So…okay. That was happening!

…Look from Hunter, after he finagled himself around the crowded table with his freshly acquired seating treasure. He did that on purpose, Dyer realized. To confirm it, the giant winked at him when nobody else was looking—

Okay. He didn’t mind this at all. Carefully, he re-positioned an arm to be a bit more comfortable–

She let him. Okay. Moving fast, but fast was okay. He smiled down at her, as friendly as he could manage. “Sarry. I’m not a very good stool.”

“You’ll do just fine.”

“Aww,” Hunter pouted from across the table, absolutely no regret on his face at all. “What does that make me?”

Best wingman ever was all Dyer could think. Though, he did reach out and give Heembo a slap to stop the big brute’s wagging tail from slapping him in the side.

“Hey–!”

“You’re beating my leg to death, bud.”

“Y’know, among us gao that’d be a pretty good challenge ‘ya just leveled…”

“Yeah, well, you’d snap me in four so I’m obviously not that stupid. Plus, isn’t Walker your boyfriend anyway?”

“What? No!”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” Burnett chimed in. “I’ve seen when human and gaoian boys cuddle up, it’s bloody adorable!”

“Yeah, they cuddle up alright. Heembo here curls right around him like a scarf…”

“I cuddle you too,” Heembo pointed out. “Don’t’chu be writin’ ‘yerself outta this tale.”

The rest of the Brits were clearly bemused and a bit lost by the banter. Good. Confusing Brits was practically a sport. Though, they got their own back in short order as the beer flowed, when Hunter ordered and then vanished an eldritch horror he called a “Salad” and somehow, by the dark powers of the universe, they instantly recognized it not only as “food” but “delicious” food, at that!

Heembo too, the traitor. Dyer could only barely suppress his gag reflex when the smell hit him. Greasy doner meat, tuna, anchovies and an incongruous blast of spice. To him, the smell approached a bit too close to active decay, but the Brits promptly ordered a second one to share among themselves.

Burnett, thank fuck, did not partake. She had the Jalapeno poppers instead, like a civilized human being. Dyer ordered the fish and chips, because delicious, and Burnett started nomming on it without even asking.

They didn’t talk too much. They were already pretty far past that, really, if she was already pilfering his fries. He put an arm around her waist and she felt it up pretty thoroughly, made an approving noise when he tensed up what he had…snuggled into him a bit deeper, looked up at him with a smile…hand feeling along his abs, now…

“Mmhm…You’ll do.”

Well. Dyer was pretty firmly fucking claimed at this point. There were cheers around the table and a knowing nod from Hunter. “My man,” he rumbled, while setting in on his second Salad.

The boys started asking him questions befitting his status of Beefiest Meatiest Boy at the table. Dyer tuned it out, really. He was much more interested in her. At some point they moved onto the Exchanging of Tales, for which Dyer was dutifully dragged in a few times…

But somehow, by the dazed magic of not really paying attention to the surrounding conversation—and by the magic of several beers, too—the night dissolved into flashes. They played a round or two of pool. Then they were outside, dodging the rain. Then they were both soaking wet, making out in an alleyway. Then making out some more in the back of a cab. Then checking in to a cheap hotel. And after that…

After that, the night got really good.

Date Point: 19y2w AV
Spacelane GreenLine-076, Trailing Edge

Dora

It wasn’t that Dora minded all the deathworlders on the ship, or the fact they were all male. It was just…well, her antennae were picking up a lot of pheromones and chemical traces. By themselves, they weren’t actually unpleasant. Ten’Gewek, Gao and Humans went everywhere in a cloud of chemical signals, and she’d even grown to associate them with home, and safety.

But they were, for lack of a better term, loud. So much so, she’d set up a weak biofilter forcefield around her work blister to keep the air within cleaner and give her some olfactory peace and quiet.

Then she’d added a privacy screen when she realized they felt much the same way about her music.

♫I, I feel like fuckin’ somethin’, But we could be corny, fuck it, Sugar, I ain’t no dummy, dummy, I like to say, what if, but if, We could kiss and just cut the rubbish, Then I might be onto something…♪

Plus, it filtered out the headbanging, ear-bursting sonic assault they listened to down in the converted cargo hold.

There was a lot of competitive energy between the boys. Bruuk was among people who could keep up with him and there was no disguising his delight in that. Wilde of course had his old friends to catch up with, and finding himself on the wrong end of Bruuk’s physicality had definitely re-kindled a fire in him. Ferd was jovial as always, even if his…face…was buried in study books lately…

She was happy for them. She just needed a curtain to give her some breathing room, and help her concentrate.

After all, when she wasn’t juggling cargo, it fell to her to keep an eye on the space around them. Or, well. To take a closer look whenever the AI flagged something. Which it did maybe twice, three times a day? Really, she could have been out in the rest of the ship but…why? She had a cozy spot with the best view on the ship, it wasn’t saturated with deathworld pheromones, and she got to play cute Human pop music as loud as she liked.

And if anyone needed her, all they had to do was poke their head through the fuzz-field. Though, it was usually best when Wilde did it. He was courteous enough to wash first, so that the scents he carried into her blister were clean and soapy.

“‘Ey’up.”

“Hi Skipper!” she turned down the music. “‘Sup?”

“Need your vote for movie night, and, uh, wanted to know if it’s still following us.”

“Oh yeah. Ever since Cimbrean. Like a lost puppy.”

“Aye, more like a sheepdog I reckon.” Wilde pulled himself fully through the fuzz-field and Dora turned a screen his way for him to look at. Sure enough, there was a tiny signature trailing directly behind them, right in the ‘baffles’ of their warp signature where normally a spacetime distortion would be drowned out by their own wake. Dora certainly never would have seen it before the Whitecrest’s upgraded the ship. Now, though…

“You wanna talk to it?”

“Eh, no. Weirds me the fuck out, but I’m glad it’s there…”

Dora tilted her head at him. “…Are you getting nervous, Ian?”

“Oh, what’s to get nervous of?” he shook his head wryly.

“The, uh, fact that we’re going right back to the place where a squadron of unidentified alien stealth ships tried to kill us?” Dora suggested.

“Oh, that. Yeah. No, not nervous, just…planning. Making sure I know what cards we’ve got in our deck, you know?”

“With you.” She glanced at the tiny sensor blip again. She had to hand it to the entity following them, it knew how to be tiny and quiet. Probably a third party would never see it. You’d have know Stray Fortune’s unique warp signature pretty well to spot the extra ripples. “Why d’you think it’s not talking to us?”

“Eh…it doesn’t think like a meat creature. Sometimes it’s downright chatty, other times it’ll go months without talking to anyone, sometimes it does a fair old job at communicating, other times it can barely manage an emoji.” Ian shrugged, and turned the monitor back Dora’s way. “Not even the supposed expert on it really knows what’s going on with it. But it seems to like us, I guess.”

“Our own guardian eldritch horror.”

“Where did you learn that word?”

“Ferd, believe it or not!” Dora preened her antennae.

“…No shit?”

“Last week he was reading…whatsisname. Lovecraft. I guess it freaked him out a bit? He said, uh…” Dora did her best to drop her voice into the Given-Man’s ponderous bass register. “‘Humans are very fucked up, sometimes. Whole book is a mind-Taking.’ So, of course I had to read it!”

“Hmm. And?” Ian was smiling. “What did you think?”

“Oh, goodness. A huge and terrifying universe full of sleeping civilizations, ancient monsters and inscrutable powers with no physical form and alien morals? Ferd’s right, Humans have such imagination…”

“Do I detect a hint, nay a smidge, of sarcasm, Dora?”

“I would consider it cheaply allegorical except it was written over a century before you made contact, so…” Dora grinned, then gestured out the window. “But, hey. At least our unthinkable lifeform that steps only partially in our reality is friendly.”

Ian snorted. “Alright. Movie night?”

“Hellboy, obviously. Give the funmonkeys even more questions.”

“You don’t have to wrestle them, Dora…”

“Good exercise for you, then! We need someone who can keep Bruukky challenged.”

“Hmm. Maybe I’ll take a page out of your book and put a forcefield up on my quarters, too. A nice powerful one.” He grinned, then stepped back through the fuzzfield. “Food’s in an hour.”

“Yup! See you there!”

Ian nodded, ducked completely out of the blister, and left her alone. Dora giggled to herself, turned the music back up, set a reminder alarm, and sat back to watch the space go by. She kept their follower’s signature up to watch it, though.

And she wondered what it was thinking at that moment…

Date Point: 19y2w AV
Entityswarm Dataspace

Entity

Does this count as spying on them?

The Entity found that sudden thought confusing. Of course it was watching the Stray Fortune. They were friends. Friends going into danger. Why wouldn’t it watch them?

Yeah, but…they don’t know we’re watching them. So it’s spying. Which is hostile.

The Entity considered that, and conceded that it certainly felt threatened by all attention directed its way. But on the other hand, its monitoring of the situation in Hunter space had facilitated its timely and well-received intervention.

That’s different. We were monitoring the Hunters. You know. Our enemies?

Hostile activity in Relic Space implied the presence of enemies out there, too. And the Entity was quite fond of the mismatched crew that had come to visit and brought along the seeds of its garden. It felt it owed them some repayment for that favor. Surely they could not complain if a ‘guardian angel’ kept watch over them?

The memory of a full-body frustrated sigh flickered through its awareness, but didn’t come attached to any useful or persuasive insight. Maybe there would be one yet. Sometimes the daemon required time. So, prompted into remembering by its own thoughts, the Entity turned the focus of its awareness away from a certain light bulk freighter full of friends and back to its garden.

In the fullness of time, maybe people would live on the station it had built. It had made sure there was plenty of room for them. And it seemed a shame not to share its garden, somehow.

At first, the plants had all been the same shade of bright, young, slightly translucent green. Time, and the successful establishment of a balanced life cycle, had changed that. In the same range of color vision employed by humans, it was an intriguing medley of many shades of green, some vivid and bright, others darker, shading here and there to purple-red patterning, or pale variegation. And then of course there were the flowers and fruits.

In trans-human color ranges, it was so much more than that. Near-ultraviolet was especially interesting, but in Guvnuragnaguvendrugun-approximate color vision it was…well, the Entity suspected it knew what ‘breathtaking’ felt like, now.

Intriguingly, Ava’s daemon couldn’t process it. Experimentally trying to show her the world as the Guvnurag saw it had only led to mis-signalling. She’d experienced their extra color reception as varying shades of touch instead, a confusing, disorienting and highly uncomfortable experience which they had quickly curtailed. Humans—even the reconstructed memories and personalities of one—were not meant to receive tactile sensation via the retina, or the subjective mnemic equivalent.

Despite that, quote, “horrible” experience, the Daemon loved the garden, and the Entity let her whims dictate its layout, development and tending. It was very much an Ava thing. A carefully cultivated kernel of human warmth amidst what was otherwise a sprawling, distributed and alien machine awareness.

Poetic, isn’t it?

Poetry was a thing the Entity did not suspect it would appreciate, yet it had found its logic, well, ‘tickled’ by the wordplay, the creative use of layered meaning. Some poetry it thought of as perhaps a puzzle to solve, much like the Daemon’s memories of such things.

Curious. The Entity considered human puzzles to be trivial and uninteresting. Most were mere logical problems at their core. But language was a riddle. It was software. At its lowest level, the Entity was a being of symbols. But so, it seemed, were Humans. And their symbol-play was boundless.

Privacy.

The Daemon’s explanation for why watching the freighter was so uncomfortable wasn’t only a word. It was a feeling. The desire to be alone and unseen, even—perhaps especially—by loved ones and friends. The expectation that a shut door would not be barged through without knocking, that a window would not be peeped into, that a shower curtain would not be suddenly and shocking pulled aside. A safe feeling. A trusting feeling. The security of knowing that important secrets could be safely shared, because they hadn’t been acquired through intrusion.

The Entity understood.

It was still, however, left with the fact that there were friends on the Stray Fortune. So far, they were the only ones to see inside its swarm-body, visit its station, meet it (for lack of a better term) face to face. Not even Darcy had such close contact. The idea of leaving friends to face danger alone was…shameful.

Once upon a time the Entity could not have conceived such a thought. Not so long ago, its only motive had been < Survive > and all other considerations depended from that. Alliances and friendships had been nothing more than a stratagem to maximize its own probability of survival.

It was shocked by the depth of feeling it had now at the thought of abandoning the Stray Fortune’s crew to whatever awaited them, without being ready to provide help. Or anyone else, for that matter. It maintained a permanent patrol near Erebor for the same reason, even though the system was fully shielded. Likewise near Cimbrean, near Earth, near Gao and now near Hell.

Guess I’m a good influence.

So how was watching the ship any different?

I guess just watching it isn’t. But you were thinking of how you might infiltrate a microdrone on board and listen in.

Among many thousands of other things the distributed fringes of the Entity’s awareness were calculating, yes.

That would definitely be an invasion of privacy.

It would be valuable data.

Yes, that’s why spying happens. But what happens if they find it? They won’t be happy. Besides. I have a better idea.

The Entity considered the idea. It had…merit. And there were probes in range…

It’s a better use of our resources than trying to sneak on board and listen to board game night or whatever.

True.

That settled it. The Entity refocused its attention again, picked out a couple of its component probes, and redirected them.

After all, however valuable the data aboard Stray Fortune might be, the data at their destination were even more so. It could scout ahead and guard them at the same time.

Perhaps they would appreciate it.

Date Point: 19y2m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge

Renting an apartment was a strange experience, but it made sense. A Giving and a Taking, though thinking of a hut in terms of money was still a new taste in his mouth. He ended up renting in Adam’s building, even though it was slightly more expensive. Partly it was because it was closer to the places he was interested in going, but mostly it was because Adam needed someone strong nearby right now, so…friends help friends. Also, for the gym. Free access.

He needed to beat Criss-chin, too. Needed it more than anything besides maybe good food and good fucks. He hadn’t wanted to win something so strongly in his whole life.

Which was strange. He liked the big Human, so maybe that was part of it? Gods only knew.

Or maybe it was because War-horse had made such a big Giving to save them all, and now he was suffering the Taking. Everyone loved him, but his strongest wish was that they get better than he ever was, so Criss-chin had done everything he could to Give that wish.

That seemed right. Yan would make that Giving too, and do everything to keep his People the strongest. Their strength was their Giving to the Sky-Tribes. He loved Criss-chin and respected everything about him, but Yan would not let him Take that from his people!

Though…right now, Criss-chin was so big and so unbeatably strong, it might be a very long while before Yan could manage that. Righteous wasn’t Daar and wasn’t a god…nonetheless, the big human was everything Yan was, but much, much, much more. Righteous was so fast, so strong, so hard and tough, so endlessly able to fight and teach, so skilled…

War-horse taught him well, and Yan would earn that strength, just like they did.

So he lived in Folctha, but lived in his own apartment, with his own pots and pans, and his own ‘futon’ to lie on, and his own comings and goings away from Ferd and the younger men. It gave him some distance, which was good. A blackcrest had to keep apart from the tribes if other Given-Men were to flourish. They were on-mission right now so it didn’t matter much, but since more than half their time was spent away, it was important to observe the magic. Given-Men needed to be dominant in their tribe. If they ever lost that, because the gods saw they were being led by a bigger, stronger Given-Man, they might stop growing in strength, or even wither away and die. The gods rewarded strength after all, and the strongest led.

Ferd had people to lead, and Yan Given-Man would not take that from him.

It was good Ferd had strong friendships with his neighboring Given-Men, and with Vemik. Or at least, Vemik liked him, and Yan suspected they had settled their strength between them. Ferd was deferential and that was telling. Good for Vemik! Yan had a strong nephew and now a strong ally. Ferd’s tribe would be well-protected while he was out protecting them all.

Which was what Yan intended to do.

Blackcrests weren’t common. He was the first in a long time, the first almost in living memory. Why the gods sometimes gave them plenty of blackcrests and sometimes none was one of those mysteries they may never have the knowings to understand, but at least part of it seemed to be about prey abundance and sickness. That made sense. The Ten’Gewek were not a sickly people, he’d come to understand, but the crossing from one part of the forest to another on the far side of the volcano had let a lingering spirit of sickness pounce upon them.

Which…he knew wasn’t a spirit in the same small, specific way the Sky-People used the word, but that was okay. The People had their own ideas about things. Who was to say they weren’t a different way of thinking about the same thing? Why did a spirit need to be magic? Could it not also be real? Even if tiny and strange? How else could such tiny, thoughtless little specks of life do the things they did, if they did not somehow have a spirit of their own?

Anyway.

Now, the People had grown strong on the other side of the mountain and filled out with good, hard muscle. The prey were healthy and numerous, with tasty blood and meat and good, supple leather. They multiplied in such numbers that the People would not endanger them anytime soon. The People’s numbers increased slowly anyway, at least compared to Human or Gao. It would be long before they had to consider such things carefully.

And that, right there, was why Yan Given-Man needed to make a change. Everything was changing for his people. They could not be exactly as they were, if they were to survive the goings of the world and the whims of the gods. They were being tested, he knew.

What was a blackcrest’s purpose?

Before, that was easy. A blackcrest was the strongest man, one who could wrassle a hand of the biggest Given-Men at once and win, every time. He sired the strongest children, had the biggest Fire. The gods honored his strength and gave him more and more every year, that he may keep the forest free of the Brown One’s cubs, the grasslands safe to glean from.

In times of war, the blackcrests would remind the City-People that the forest was not theirs to Take, a lesson they had never learned in all the tellings of all the People’s stories. Sometimes, they even fought wars for the City-Peoples, in exchange for good paints, interesting foods, good knives (which Yan suspected were probably some kind of metal like copper or bronze, now that he thought about it), and lots of good fuckings with the prettiest women inside their mud walls.

But now? There were no City-People. The Brown Ones were stronger than ever, but Vemik’s ballista meant ordinary men had the strength to protect themselves from them now. The People didn’t need a man who could fight such a creature himself, leap up on its back and crush its skull with just the might in his arms and legs, or drag it back home to share among the tribes. War between the tribes was mostly play now; they all understood the stakes, and play-war was more fun anyway. Why fight to the death when everyone had strong lands and could just fuck instead?!

No. The gods had plans for the People, that much was obvious. They had seen fit to Give the People a fighting chance against the Hierarchy, by causing Jooyun and his wives to find them. They had given them the choice to learn and adapt, by putting vaccines before them, so they would not be weakened too much by the sickness they had found crossing the volcano.

They had been tested a hand of times now, and tested hard. So far, so good. The gods were smiling at the People’s strength. But now, the biggest test was before Yan. It wasn’t a test of math, or of science, or of philosophy or other big strange Sky-Thoughts, or of Human and Gao history, that the People may better understand their Sky-Friends. No.

Yan himself was the biggest clue. None of his people were bigger or stronger than him, none more handsome of muscle or face. His body was prettier and stronger and harder than any, thicker in every part and shape, better in his arms, legs, tail and cock. He was so blessed by the gods that it took a man such as Righteous to best him, or a god like Daar to defeat him.

That thought made him feel better. Righteous was not a god because Human gods did not work that way, but he was maybe not much less. To stand honorably next to him—and to think that one day, he might even beat him—was a good feeling. After all, Yan had time to build his strength, and the Humans had not yet begun their strongest Giving-magics on him. Age had not marked him in any weak way. A few of the Lodge were smarter, and a hand of them like Vemik were hugely much more so, but none had Yan’s experience or wisdom. He was old among the People, now. Old, well-fed, and he could feel in his bones he would live very, very long. Not even Noff-fell could say otherwise.

The gods did not Give such ample blessings without a cost. So, what cost was Yan to pay? It was not the normal cost of a powerful blackcrest. He would not live alone in the forest, protect the People for a hand or two of seasons, then be Taken by the Gods. His price was bigger.

This was a test of growing. The People needed to become more. The Lodge had many talkings about the idea, many visions under the magic of the smoke. They had decided: Yan was to become one of the Sky-People, to be their Chief in the Sky.

He needed to earn money now, regularly. It didn’t feel right to glean from their sovereign fund; that was for the People when big money was needed. He only needed some basics in the city. He needed to pay for e-lec-triss-tree, for his apartment, for his fone and his food. Next to the big payings they might need to make, that was a tiny amount, but still: ‘compound interest’ was a big math-magic. Best not to weaken it before it worked its biggest Givings.

And he wasn’t on the team, yet. Training for it, yes. But there were learnings and provings to be done first. It wasn’t enough to be strong in body, or even the strongest in body. He was already that, but he also had to show he was strong in mind, in spirit and more. The HEAT needed to know he was all of those things, not just take it for granted because he was a friend.

As it should be. But until he earned his place and they started paying him, he needed to find his money somewhere else. Also good. It would build character!

He got a job working for the farmer he’d met outside the city, some years back. Strong! Also, it was far enough away that it tested Yan’s long-strength to gallop there every morning, and that was good. The HEAT demanded strength of every kind, and Yan would not be lacking. Moving bales was good work, persuading cattle to move without hurting them was interesting. There were things to see too, snakes and small animals and nice-tasting plants and things.

Lessons, too. The Humans cared for their cattle even though they would one day eat them and wear their skins. Much was done to make them comfortable. There was even some affection; the bull in particular had become a “farmer’s pet,” though he didn’t much like Yan. Probably smart. It was hard not to think of how good a prey these cattle were, and how tasty…

But, they were not for hunting. Too bad. At least they got to roam and eat the grass! It wasn’t a life Yan would want for himself, but he was of the People, and did People-things. Cow-things were their own, and that was to be respected. Strange, raising your own prey…

But the family was nice. Good teasings with them! Maybe teasings that would become more…

It wasn’t all-day work, either. Just some mornings, and only when they needed extra muscle. Still, it was enough to pay his bills, since the HEAT were feeding him and he’d discovered he could do “odd jobs” too. There were uses for a big strong Given-Man! Not big hero jobs, but building a village was as much about clearing space, getting rocks, weaving roofs and such as it was about hunting and protecting their territory from other ambitious tribes.

Construction jobs were interesting learnings, too! He knew how to weld from Awisun and Vemik, and there was good teachings in a local school about all the many things a man needed to know to do it right. All that math-work helped him! He and Vemik went to that school, and after that, a certification test was all he needed before they could help put together big metal buildings. They had other credits too from all the other learnings, so it wouldn’t take much to get a degree in construction technology! Daar would be proud of that, Yan knew. Still, they only did building-work sometimes, because both had other things to do, but someone who had his own safety rigging with his tail, or could hang upside-down by one foot instead of use a boom lift…

Mister Rod-dreeg-uss was always happy when Yan had some spare time and wanted money! He kept looking tellingly at Yan’s body, too. And as humans went, he wasn’t so bad. Tough, good-looking! But Yan didn’t think he could make the foreman his woman without maybe killing him. That would not be good for anyone.

But, other than that…

Wake up. Work out, run out to the farm maybe and help. Train all day with HEAT, study that night. Work out more, sleep. On weekends, sometimes he did construction work, or other welding things, or just whatever needed doing on the local “help wanted” board on his fone. Busy, but…

Missing something. He went back to Akyawentuo often, had many good fuckings, but…

…Lonely. lots of people to meet all day long, but still he felt alone. Strange.

Or he did, until Loor’s Singer decided to move in with him. And she did it the way older women knew best: by doing it, and ignoring whatever he had to say about it. Just showed up at his door one morning, bustled inside with all the things that were hers over her shoulder in a bibtaw-skin bag, took one look at the place and immediately started putting it right.

Of course, as Given-Men were to men, so were Singers to women. And as Yan was to other Given-Men, so she had become to other Singers. Not black in crest, but strong red on a woman, so it was the same thing in spirit. In time, just as blackcrested men moved away from the villages and served all the People, deep in the forests, sometimes an old Singer would feel the same call.

And she, it seemed, had decided he shouldn’t be alone on this distant, alien place.

She was lovely. Strong like a good man, and knew it, too. Almost strong like a Given-Man! And old. Old enough that the gods had decided her time for children was over, though she obviously had many years left in her. Age had given no weakness nor ugliness to her either. It was time for her to make room for her young Dancer to become Singer, and so here she was. Before, Old Singers would form small tribes of their own, and often they would live together with any blackcrests. Right now though, she was the only such Singer.

And he, the only blackcrest. And she was so lovely, he could feel his Fire roaring back to life…

It made sense, and just the idea of someone to squeeze at night was good. Still: a sudden change, and he had to claw back a little dignity after she arrived and ‘took charge’ of him…

“It’s not a mess in here. They inspect my room every week!”

“Pheh,” she twitched her tail as she went digging through the kitchen cupboards. “Men looking at other men’s mess, proclaiming it good. No hut-sense in men, never has been!”

“Is not messy!”

She trilled, then. “No, it isn’t. But do you even live here? There is nothing of home! Just a squishy thing where you sleep I think? And some…okay, the pots are very nice, I give you that.”

“It’s all I need.”

“It’s like a day without night in here. All man, no woman. All Take, no Give. You’re limping by on just half of life’s magic!”

“Yes, because I must pass inspection every week, and you do not know what that means yet. If they find a speck of dirt anywhere it will be god’s own fury upon us!”

“There’s a whole world between ‘no dirt’ and ‘no life.’ Where’s the magic here? How do you live in such a…pale home? People can’t live like this.”

“I am a man,” he said simply. “We are made to live and hunt in hard places. I believe your words, now believe me, woman! This is big Taking-magic. You do not understand what I mean. Before you fill my apartment with incense and herb and powder and paint, wait and see. In a big fight, keeping clean is more important than you can know. Following orders exactly as given, matters. I was ordered to keep this room CLEAN. It is a test!”

It was, of course, a useless argument. He knew the Taking that would come, and he knew that a Singer was even more headstrong than the boldest man. She would not listen to his silly man-thoughts about a working home. No sex that week, at all, to her confusion and frustration. He was angry.

He did share his bed, though. He was angry, not evil.

And some small part of him was gratified when Righteous came to inspect. He ducked, turned sideways and squeezed his way through the door, stood with his head nearly brushing the ceiling…

Singer had believed Yan to be the meaning of strong. Yan though, he knew how weak he was before the truly mighty, and one of them was standing tall in his apartment. His shoulders were narrow and tiny by comparison, his chest and back boy-like and thin, his arms and legs puny and soft next to Righteous. The giant of a Human gave Singer an expressionless look, who recoiled a bit at the sudden attention…

“Who are you?”

“She is Singer, senior master sergeant.”

He whipped his attention back to Yan, who found himself standing at attention suddenly. Righteous narrowed his eyes slightly. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

Back to Singer, neutral expression back on his face. “Who are you?”

“…Old Singer, of Loor’s tribe. I come to live with Yan.”

“Do you, now?”

Righteous had that same big-quiet as a Brown One in his step when he stalked across the room. How a man so big could stalk his prey so quietly was Taking-magic not even Yan had mastered. Righteous inspected the shrine she’d made, with its paints and incense and herbs.

“All this stuff is yours?”

“Is a hearth-shrine. To the gods,” she replied, then blinked when he glared at her. “…Yes. Is mine.”

“I see there is a trail of dust across the floor.” He came over in sandals but left them outside the door. His big bare foot left an unmistakable print in the dust, and Yan cringed internally; one of many details he likely missed, in his panic to tidy up before inspection.

The hurt would be big today.

“This apartment has no hearth, firstly. Secondly, while you are free to do and worship as you please, Trainee Yan is not free to disobey his orders. Did he instruct you as to the requirements he must meet?”

“He said place must be clean, and—”

“So you chose to ignore him, then. That is going to cost Trainee Yan dearly.”

“But he didn’t—”

Righteous…looked at her. That was all he did. But it was enough to silence her instantly. Despite himself, Yan was impressed. Though, he didn’t dare show it.

“I don’t care that you made this mess and not him. He was ordered to maintain this apartment in a perfect state of cleanliness, as part of the respect we paid him by allowing off-base living. He has not done so and this displeases me. I don’t care how it happened. I care only that I was disobeyed. What other violations am I going to find, hmm?”

Righteous prowled over to the controls by the door, and turned on the active soundproofing. That done, he turned around and rolled his massive neck, which popped loudly in the silence.

“Right. You’ve officially wasted my time. So now, I’m going to waste yours.”

…Oh, gods.

He found many violations. With the fury of the gods, he tore the apartment apart, turned over everything, pointed out every speck of paint-crumb, trail dirt, shed crest-hair and scattered herb. He found soap scum in the bathroom sink, a splash of grease behind the cooker top, toe-prints on the tiles, finger-marks on the mirror, a smudge of incense smoke-dust that marked the tip of his finger when he ran it along the top of the door frame. He found everything.

And then turned his fury on her. But not with muscle and pain like he would soon to Yan. He was quiet, and so deadly angry in his voice, he did the impossible. He humbled her.

“I did not instruct Yan to be clean for idle torture, Singer. In the EV-MASS, dirt can kill him. Do you think he would breathe long in space if his helmet was not clean enough to seal? Do you think he would fight well, if his dirty undersuit was tearing great gouges into him because a sand grain snuck in to lie against his skin? Do you think we do this out of simple cruelty?”

Yan did not know how much she understood, but she understood enough. “…No.”

“No.” He folded his massive arms across his chest to drive home how important this was. “He must be ready to face the deadliest and strongest of sky-magic, where the smallest mistake could get him and everyone else on the team instantly killed. We must trust him to reliably perform dangerous, complex work every time, without question. Lives are at stake! And before we can trust him to do that we must know he can do the simple, basic things without supervision! Nobody can wipe his ass for him. Or wash his undersuit. He cannot be babied along like a helpless little boy, because we cannot trust a man who can’t care for himself! He must be ready, and we need to know he’s worth it before we spend more money than all the tribes of your People are worth, just to fit him in armor!”

He finally turned Yan’s way and now he was so angry, veins and sinew were bulging in that werne-thick neck of his. Yan steeled himself for what came next. “Trainee! Report to the Grinder! You and I have a date until the sun comes up! And you,” he swung back to the Singer. “You will watch for a while and learn what you’ve cost him.”

Never before had Yan witnessed the fury of a woman in the strength of a man. Righteous was truly his name, and none could ever question it. The rest of the day was pain, and misery, and exhaustion. He suffered greatly in the sand. Righteous crushed him on the mat with such strength, he felt near breaking with each new practiced pain-learning. Righteous wasn’t even much trying, either. He could have smashed Yan apart like a bibtaw, many times over.

Proclaiming that Yan was far too weak for his liking, they lifted until he ached deep in his body, then played on the rings until even swinging from his arms, the most natural thing in the world, was a sack-kicking agony. Then they did it again, and again. Righteous never tired, never relented, never for a moment lessened in his fury. They played like this until there was no thinking, just doing until everything he had was Taken from him.

And then they did it again, and again, until the sun was rising on the horizon.

He was so weak at the end of it all that Righteous at last showed him the tiniest flicker of sympathy, and escorted him back to his apartment. He didn’t help, but he did encourage as every painful step drained at Yan’s soul. He wasn’t cruel, either. He was almost friendly. “One foot in front of the other, Trainee. Just keep doing that.”

They stopped at the door. Righteous rumbled at him, but this time…there was care in it.

“You have not gone through basic training, Yan. You have not suffered indoctrination. If you truly want to be one of us, today will be just the beginning. Our training lasts years, and much of it is far worse than what you’ve felt today. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“…Yes, senior master sergeant.”

“Do you? Be careful. We all like you. Even I do, but I cannot be nice to someone who is unproven, Yan. If you really want to do this, it only gets much worse.”

“I understand. We do same in the Lodge, to new Given-Men. Not as hard, but same reasons.”

“Good. Indoc for HEAT normally takes two years. The first year is this, every single day. Does she understand? ‘Cuz I will not have her making life any harder for you than needed.”

“Yes, senior master sergeant.”

Righteous had doubts. “…If you say so. I will be inspecting again next week, Yan. You will impress me so much, I will feel embarrassed and filthy by comparison. If you fail I will end it then and there, and if we decide to continue, you will live in barracks. You do not want that, trust me. Do not fuck with me on this.”

“She will understand, or she will go, senior master sergeant.”

Righteous grunted. “…Get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a classroom day.”

The big man thumped his way down the staircase without a backward glance, shaking the entire building as he went.

Yan had his doubts too. Doubts that stuck him to the spot outside the apartment door for many heartbeats before he finally put out his hand and opened it.

What he found waiting for him was a spotless apartment. There was herb, and her magic-workings and the shrine put back together, and other things…But it was clean this time. Perfectly so. She even had the air-taste of soap and shampoo around her, which Yan took as an apology all by itself.

“…Thank you.” He fell onto his bed, and didn’t even have the energy to refuse her. And it was nice, even if he was too tired to fuck properly. Too tired to even think.

Inspection the next week was…long. Long, and thorough, with Yan standing at attention all the while. Not at all comfortable to do that, which he suspected was the point.

Righteous was satisfied, this time. It was hard to see on his stony face, but Yan could tell.

“…Okay. Are you two going to be a thing, now? Living together?”

The Singer gathered up her dignity. “Yes.”

“Then I will trust you both to keep this place clean.”

Inspections stopped after that. Another test. They both knew it. They both kept their home perfect. Gods, Righteous even smiled at Singer once, at the grocery store.

But in the end, even after all that, she turned out to be right. Yan had been missing half the magic. And there was a place where clean and life came together to make something more. It was nice to learn that even in their late years, there were still things they could teach each other, although mostly they did it by arguing. Then making up for it, powerfully, the way his people knew better than anything.

A fight by other means, really. But with a much happier ending!.

There was much of that, at first. Then less, with time. Less arguing, more…not arguing. They learned about each other. Learned how to live together. They had more than good fucking, now.

Even managed to joke about it all, in the end.

“Well, you needed someone to talk sense to you! Men can grow very stupid if a woman isn’t there to challenge them!”

“And women always think they know all the knowings in this world and more.”

“We know the important things,” she said, demurely, with a fetching fangy smile.

On that point, Yan couldn’t argue. He often came home sore and tired, and she knew how to fix that, oh yes…and she learned good new cooking with “her” pots and pans.

And he didn’t feel lonely any more. He didn’t need much, here on this big adventure.

But he’d learned that he needed her.

Date Point: 19y3m AV
The Great Father’s private quarters, High Mountain Fortress, The Northern Plains, Gao

Vark, Grandfather of Clan Stoneback

Everyone on Hell got shaved. Weren’t no way around it, unless you wanted radioactive dust stuck to ‘yer hide. Which, Vark didn’t.

At least he looked good naked. But even better was one o’ them weird Christmas sweaters the Humans seemed to love. This one had a five-pointed star design on the front and a jolly fat guy with the words “HAIL SANTA!” It had taken a bit of research to understand that joke, but that was okay! Humans liked their kitsch, too. Balls, they even had a monosyllable word ‘fer it!

Nice thing about Human weirdness was how compatible it was. He had a really hideously green pair of overalls that let the sweater poke through, too. He’d be nice and warm ‘gainst the cold breeze of High Mountain while his fur grow’d back, and most bestest of all he’d confuse the balls offa anyone who got a good look.

Well. Almos’ anyone.

“Ha!” The Great Father chittered deep in his belly when he saw Vark for the first time. “Did you fuckin’ plan that shit?!”

“If I gotta look like Keeda’s nutsack, I’m gonna own that shit,” Vark replied, happily. It was true, though. He’d picked the most absurd combo he could pull together precisely because he guessed the Great Father would appreciate it.

Fuck knew, they all needed somethin’ ‘ta laugh about. The memorial fields had recently, finally been able to step down the number of pyres they were lighting as the last of the biodrone uprising’s dead were honored…only for one weapon to fill up their schedule again.

And Daar had, of course, been true to his word. Every one of those pyres was lit from a parent flame he’d lit himself, by hand. That flame was now kept Eternal at a shrine they’d built next to the field. The ash from all the burnt wood would one day make it among the most productive forests on Gao, but not until all the pyres had been burned.

After a solemn duty like that, a little mischief was important.

Only a little, though. Vark was there to deliver his report. It was informal, up in the Great Father’s quarters, where snacks were offered and the big man himself felt free to stretch out and lie across the well-padded floor.

“C’mon, Vark. Take a load off.”

Vark had the pleasure of hearing the Great Mother chitter when she saw him, too. It was a sympathetic chitter, at least. “Oh, no. Well, at least you’re making the best of it.”

“I should be pleasant to behold in a week or so, Unseen willing. Until then…”

“Until then, at least you can be festive.” She duck-nodded amusedly. “Well, I should let you two discuss your matters. I have paperwork and letters…”

She and Daar traded affectionate nips, and then she was gone, sliding her office door shut behind her.

Vark panted happily as he sat. “It’s always a marvel, seeing you two. You’ve got a precious thing together.”

“Believe me, I know. I hope I’m worthy of it. Anyhoo…” Daar stretched out again. “Let’s get the serious stuff taken care of. You have a report for me.”

“That I do.” Vark adjusted his ridiculous Human garment for comfort. “Pleased ‘ta say, as of this morning, we’ve retaken th’ last o’ the lost territory. Hunters are still puttin’ up plenny o’ resistance, but we’re seein’ less an’ less o’ the big newbie swarms. The survivin’ ones are smarter, better equipped, an’ fuckin’ cowardly. An’ they’re definitely under the command of another Alpha. Father Garaaf got some good footage.”

“He’s on the battlefield again? I coulda swore I made it clear I’d be happy if he retired…”

“I reckon I’d have ‘ta break his back to get him out.”

“Oh, I could arrange that…” Daar grumbled darkly. “But, fine. It’s his life, even if he ain’t gotta prove anything ‘ta anyone. An’ I ain’t gon’ say no to that kinda damn good intel.”

“Hmm. Think he’s goin’ big game hunting.”

“Alphas are tricky, deadly things. One o’ them nutless greasefucks got Warhorse in a bad way. I hope he ain’t pickin’ a fight he can’t win.”

“Doesn’t seem ‘ta me like he’s bein’ stupid about it. And if I thought he had a death wish, I’da dragged him ‘ta the Array personally. But beyond that, I ain’t sure. He’s a Whitecrest’s Whitecrest. Can’t even smell his mood half the time.”

“True enough. I have me a lil’ verbal an’ probably actual sparrin’ session wit’ Champion Thurrsto comin’ up later today. Mebbe I’ll bring it up wit’ him.”

“While you’re crushin’ his head in ‘yer armpit?”

“No no, just a simple pin. Gotta be civilized wit’ Whitecrests!”

“What, they get all bent outta shape when that fluffy fur o’ theirs gets ruffled?”

“Naw, it’s more that he’s got sharp claws an’ knows how ‘ta use ‘em,” the Great Father chittered. “There’s ritual ‘ta ‘Crest-smushin’!”

“You will need ‘ta teach me one day, My Father. As to th’ rest…we’re still in a rebuild posture, an’ stockpilin’ everything for another assault ‘ta break free. We hope ‘ta be ready to assault the whole of Hell within a few months.”

“How ‘bout navy support?”

“They’ve been slowly an’ steadily cleanin’ out th’ orbits ‘fer us. I don’t know much about out-system.”

Daar waved a colossal paw at him. “No worries, I’ll git that brief later. How ‘bout Mordor?”

“…Slower progress. We’ve pacified most of the warrens. The oldest have come to warily accept that we are not, in fact, going to eat them.”

“Hrmm. Only took two years.” Daar shook his head ruefully. “Can’t blame ‘em, considerin’ the last time aliens came ‘ta their world it was the start o’ centuries o’ slavery, misery an’ murder.”

Vark nodded his agreement. “Still. I don’t think they really know how valuable their knowledge and experience is to us. The few E-Skurel-Ir advisors we’ve managed ‘ta find can tell us shit about Hunter operations we can really sink our fangs into. Woulda been nice if we could win ‘em over quicker, get more o’ that knowledge.”

“What about that schism o’ theirs?”

“Most of the population’s stayin’ out of it or embracin’ the Saved message at this point. The True Penitents ain’t got many people left, they’re isolated out in the peripheral tunnels an’ they don’t have much food. At this point, the ones left are probably more willin’ ‘ta starve themselves ‘ta death than surrender. We’ve tightened security so they can’t do somethin’ stupid like poison the water supply or bomb a warren-city an’ take the ‘blasphemers’ with ‘em.”

“What a gods-damned fuckin’ tragedy.” Daar shook his great head.

“They ain’t extinct.”

“Yeah. There’s that. Whole lotta other species ain’t so lucky. But they won’t never be the same again…what about the Hierarchy?”

“Bupkis. No confirmed relay signals, no biodrone or agent activity come ‘ta light. They’re either dead an’ gone without even a whimper, or they’re in deep hiding. Only thing that might be them is some weird reports outta EiMeYrU-Uym Relic territory o’ fast, quiet, sneaky ships that don’t take kindly ‘ta visitors. Blew up an archaeological dig and took a swipe at the Stray Fortune.”

“They’re okay?”

“Yeah, they jumped out. An’ now they’re on their way back ‘ta the area with Hoeff an’ his men.”

“Good…what’s ‘yer gut tell you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t bet either o’ my nuts on it bein’ Hierarchy,” Vark growled. “But I don’t believe they’re just gone all quiet-like, either. An’ it’s hard ‘ta see who else it could be.”

“And what if it does turn out to be them?”

“That’d depend. It ain’t a relay world out there, the Fortune woulda noticed if there was a relay signature in the area. Unless it’s really, really new…Hmm…”

“If I were in their position, I’d be buildin’ new ones as quick as possible,” Daar noted. “Whole reason we’ve bin blowin’ ‘em up is ‘cuz they’re vital…sounds like more questions ‘fer Thurrsto. Balls, I’mma have fun wit’ him, sounds like.”

Vark duck-nodded and plucked a dumpling from its basket with his claws. “Almos’ feel sarry for ‘em.”

“Naw, I’m careful wit’ my toys! Don’ ‘chu worry though, I’ll squeeze all th’ info outta him.”

Vark gave Daar a once-over. Even reclined and relaxed as he was…

“Poor Thurrsto,” he chittered. “He has my prayers.”

Daar chittered with him, and duck-nodded. “…My nose is itchin’,” he said. “Somethin’ tells me them relic space ships or whatever are important. Makes me glad ‘ya put that crew on it, ‘cuz they’re better’n they know. How long ‘til they’re back out there?”

“It’s remote, an’ they’re gonna approach more carefully this time, seed th’ region with beacons so they’ve got backup if needed. Gonna be a couple months’ wait before we get anythin’ ‘ta bite on.”

Daar duck-nodded. “Quality takes time. Though speakin’ o’ time…I think it;s high time ‘ta re-assess what we’re doin’ on Hell. My intent was ‘ta deny th’ Hunters a critical resource an’ pin them down. How’d you estimate we’ve done?”

“Mission accomplished on the denied resources thing. They gave us their best shot an’ it weren’t enough. Pinning ‘em down, though…We ain’t seen a whisker o’ the Swarm in a long time now. Most likely they’re regroupin’ in a system they still control, but they’ve lost the Ring wreckage. Destroyin’ the Ring in the first place fucked their economy. Now they can’t pick over what’s left of it ‘fer parts an’ advanced materials, they’ve basically gotta build a whole new industrial base from scratch.”

“Any reason you can think of we shouldn’t just nuke that shitscape ‘til it’s a nice ball o’ glass?”

“The Humans are still making noises about technological salvage from the debris field, but I don’t think they really believe it’s worth it. They lost a lotta men. Shouldn’t be too hard ‘ta persuade ‘em that they don’t wanna spend more lives ‘fer a big pile’a scrap.” Vark sniffed. “Other’n that, the only obstacle is the Hunters’ve still got planetary defence shields up.”

“Still?”

“It’s been a grind. We capture a Farthrow generator an’ shield complex, they already had another one built further behind th’ lines. But they can only keep that up ‘fer so long before runnin’ outta what they need to build more, an’ the newest one…ain’t quite the same. Smaller radius, some flickers in coverage. Best our analysts figger, it’s built outta bottom-o’-the-barrel salvage, the damaged shit that ain’t workin’ right.”

“So the day we get to start bombin’ is close,” Daar growled eagerly.

“Yeah, though hard ‘ta say exactly when. But, I feel comfortable sayin’ we can start pullin’ out, make room ‘ta withdraw fully when the time’s right. And when it is, we’ll start bombin’ an’ won’t stop ‘til you say so.”

Daar duck-nodded. “‘Good. Don’t rush it. Do it right.”

“You can count on that.” Vark duck-nodded. He plucked another dumpling from the basket and tried to relax. “Anyway, that’s the high-altitude look at things.”

“Right. So at this point, really my big battle is still public relations. An’ on that note, I got a good friend I gotta go check in on, see if he’s up ‘fer some wrasslin’.”

“Seems like ‘yer gonna spend the whole day wrasslin’.” Vark chittered, steeling himself for the inevitable pounce.

“Yyyup.” There was that pant-grin, the roll of steely tension into his titanic muscles, and…

Yup. Wrasslin’. A bout Vark was doomed to lose, of course, but he was ready for it, and he’d been thinking up some tricks. And besides. Weren’t many who could give the Great Father any kind of interesting play. He might be old, an’ so outmatched it was dark comedy…

They tussled about, quasi-mythical beast cavorting with a speck of a man by comparison. He “won” a few times to Daar’s delighted chittering, and Vark could still manage a few surprises too, mostly playful escapes which took advantage of the gentler nature of their brawl. Surprises were good! Even Great Fathers needed those.

But they were tricks, only. Cleverness of tactic may have been Vark’s gift to ground Daar’s ego, but power was Daar’s gift to him, in the form of effortlessly crushing force that was so fierce, Vark couldn’t take a breath, couldn’t feel anything but full-body pain and his own pulse hammering against his skull as the Great Father mercilessly tied him into shapes and pinned him against his unyielding body. Any tighter and Daar would have broken him totally, any longer and his heart might just explode…

“‘Yer slippery, Vark. Worthy of a Whitecrest, that…but I got the answer ‘fer slippery…”

A compliment that was also a bit of a jab. And a tighter squeeze too, which was agony in a powerful way. Vark couldn’t wiggle, couldn’t breathe, body numbing, felt a panic build in him—

But no. The Great Father knew how far he could go. With a dominant snarl and a reassuring nuzzle, he let up bit by bit, sparing Vark the shock of sudden release.

“I win. And ‘yer a tough ol’ tail. Knew you were the right ‘Back ‘fer the job. Wanna stick around ‘fer sum good cookin’ an’ drink?” Heavy tail wagging up a storm. Vark chittered in pain, but brightened up with the offer of Talamay and an evenin’ catchin’ up. How could he say no? Daar was good friend and a good entertainer.

An’ it was damn good ‘ta be home.

Date Point: 19y3m AV
Starship Stray Fortune, entering Relic Space

Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff

Approaching the unknown. Everyone who could was encased in their Grass. Bruuk finally got his helmet fitted properly—he was apparently pretty handy, as luck would have it—and Wilde himself was suited up, too. The two of them had taken to the armor and all its demands pretty damn well, actually. That was good. They needed all the toughs they could get these days.

And the thing was…the Stray Fortune herself was kinda in that category.

Knowing in an abstract kinda way that the ship was a lot more than the big lumbering cargo hauler she appeared to be was one thing. Seeing it was another. When they dimmed the lights on the bridge to get a better look at the holographic sensor map of nearby space…

“…Jesus. What are we tracking?”

Urgugvuneg waved his facial tentacles through the controls in front of him. “Every object larger than fifty centimetres in diameter within ten thousand kilometres. Every object larger than five meters in diameter within one light second. Every object larger than twenty meters in diameter within fifty AUs, and every spacetime field distortion stronger than five Bartletts within ten lightyears.”

“How many of those last ones?” Wilde asked.

“None, so far. Not counting ourselves and our shadow. If you’ll bear with me, I can begin eliminating irrelevant contacts…” He leaned over slightly and voiced a request to Dora in technical language that Hoeff couldn’t follow. Something about increasing the technobabble field by Startrek percent?

Whatever. Hoeff was a murderous shortstack, not a treknobabblist. Whatever the fuck it was they did, the snowglobe in front of them immediately started to get less busy.

“So, what, we’re pinging the hell out of local space right now?”

“Nope. This is all passive,” Wilde grinned. “If we were going active, you’d see a lot more shit than this…”

“Pinging would prob’ly be dangerous as fuck,” Bruuk added. His role in any all-hands situation was generally damage control, but for the moment he was on the bridge for their briefing. They hadn’t crossed into dangerous territory, yet.

All those little light motes sparkled away until none was left. Urgug rumbled, turned a satisfied shade of greenish, and looked up. “Nothing of interest, captain.”

“Alright. Recall drones, and soon as they’re in…Slow and quiet please, Moj. In we go.”

Hoeff nodded. It wasn’t like he was any kind of a stranger to moving slow, quiet and wary into hostile territory. One step at a time, head on a swivel, watching his step, leaving no sign…

‘Course, on the ground you had shit to hide behind, foliage to blend with and hard terrain to walk on rather than leave prints. In space, the only concealment was the fact that everything was really really goddamn small next to all that big out there. And you never knew if the other guy was just doing it better than you.

Wilde apparently read his mind, because he chuckled. “Kinda feel like the Scooby Gang right now, huh? Tiptoeing into Old Man Henderson’s house or whatever.”

Ferd twitched his tail. “What is a ‘Scooby?’”

“Oh, mate, I see you’ve had part of your education neglected!”

“He’s a big talking dog,” Hoeff grunted.

“Oh.” Ferd’s tail twitched the other way. “…Okay.”

“Take human weirdness as it comes,” Moj buzzed amusedly. “Right mind, that.”

“Is cartoon, I’m guessing.” Ferd hooted amiably. “Lots of Human weirdness is cartoons.”

“It’s a fucking classic cartoon, mate.”

Ferd gave a vindicated nod, and grinned at Moj. “See?”

“You never did like cartoons, did you?”

“Just see flicking pictures. Makes my eyes hurt.”

Bruuk tilted his head. “Really?”

Hoeff grunted. “Yeah. As if winning in every fuckin’ other category wasn’t enough, they’ve got an insanely powerful sense of vision with those big-ass eyes in their big-ass heads. Wide-spectrum tetrachromatic color, so they see into the near infrared and the near ultraviolet. They’ve also got really good night vision, they can see light polarization and they’ve got much faster neuro-response. Need at least a hundred frames a second before the motion illusion kicks in. Really sharp resolving power, good farsight and nearsight…only thing they can’t really handle is super bright light.”

“Is why I wear light shades!” Ferd noted happily. “Ship lights very bright.”

“And they can even handle that too, if you give them a minute. It just makes it hard for them to see in the dark for a long while after.”

“Almost as good as mine…” Urgug rumbled, and flashed some smug luminous pink.

“We haven’t tested that yet,” Wilde added. “So be careful…”

“Says the man who definitely loses the depth perception contest,” Bruuk chittered affectionately.

“Ay, fuck off! I’ll challenge you to a bench press next and only lose almost instantly…what’s that?” he pointed at the sensor display, indicating a new contact which had popped into their conversation to pulse at them as their slow warp carried them closer into the target system.

Urgug was already poking at the controls, the mirthful hues on his body flickering and becoming serious. “It appears to be…diffuse metallic wreckage and vented gases. Shipwreck.”

The mood sobered instantly. Wilde pulled a face, then gestured to Moj. “Slow to sub-light. General quarters, please. Urgug, have Dora send out a drone. Let’s get a look at it…”

It was a long wait, and Hoeff was well settled in at his station on the shuttle by the time it was over. Dora sent the drone in cautiously, and nobody took their eyes off their local sensor display in case a sudden fleet should jump in or decloak or whatever around them. None materialized, but that did nothing to relieve the tension, not even once the drone was in visual range and inspecting the debris.

The largest part was a broken spine with a few engines still attached, buried deep inside a shattered pressure hull. Half a Vzk’tk crewmember was frozen to the metal. The entire front half of the ship was gone, present now only as an expanding cloud of condensed molten globules.

Morwk must have been watching too. “Well, that’s…excessive,” he commented over the intercom.

“Same big gun that hit us and the dig site, you reckon?” Wilde asked.

“Probably. That is about what we would have looked like if it penetrated our shields…”

Hoeff exchanged a look with the guys waiting beside him in the shuttle. Behind their helmets, everyone looked grim.

In the end, they just wound up waiting for nothing. They got a careful record of the entire shipwreck, recalled the drone, left the stricken civilian ship behind and swept the entire system before Wilde finally stood down from quarters six hours later, when they were well out in interstellar space and en route to the next system of interest.

It was a nasty fuckin’ reminder that they were up against something that didn’t fuck around out here, though. Hoeff wasn’t about to forget the sight of that wreck in a hurry. It felt good knowing the Fortune’s shields could handle firepower like that, and they wouldn’t be snuffed out in one blow like the poor bastards they’d just left behind…

But for now, Hoeff and the others were cargo. And if shit did go badly wrong…

Some gym time worked the kinks out from time in the Grass and helped settle his mind. Movie night—Scooby-Doo, of course—helped him relax the rest of the way.

But he dreamed of shipwrecks that night.

Date Point: 19y3m2w AV
Clan Whitecrest infiltration ship Chasing Whisper, FACAB 22.6° 06-17XBAPS G7 3, Deep Space

Sergeant Kenneth Kohl, JETS team 3

To use an old cliche, it was quiet…too quiet. In fact, if Kohl had his way, then this modest class-ten deathworld, out in the middle of nowhere around a very ordinary yellow sun with only four other planets for company, would forever be known to Human and Gaoian star charts alike as the planet Too Quiet.

For good reason. They’d come out here expecting a relay. They’d followed the signal damn near half a galactic radius, and then in the last few lightyears it had just…blipped out. Gone. Totally dark.

They’d approached cautiously. Weeks spent anchored to an asteroid, monitoring the situation and seeing nothing at all. A slow, slow drift through the planet’s orbit, looking like a tiny harmless fleck of a space rock on an orbit that would decay in about seventy years and burn up without incident…

Still nothing. It had actually been a goddamn relief to take a look at the images from their ship’s ultra-powerful telescope and see the neat, regular squares of a Hierarchy relay compound. Other than that, though, nothing. No signal, no warp signatures, not even any tiny atmospheric ripples from drones and abrogators moving around.

Which was fucking freaky, but it wasn’t a contraindication to landing. So they’d slipped in, low and quick and quiet, put down in a nice sheltered spot a good distance from the compound…

Still nothing. Mission handbook was pretty clear, there: if there was no sign they’d been detected, they were to approach on foot and scout. So while their Gaoian pilot, Royshu, stayed cooped up in the ship and listened out, Kohl and his boys had saddled up and headed out.

It was a nice place, really. Reminded him of that old martial arts movie with the bamboo forest. The closest thing Too Quiet had to trees—or at least, this bit of it—was, yeah, almost-but-not-quite bamboo. With thorns, and leaves with edges as sharp and serrated as bread knives. Fuckin’ outstanding, that. The Ten’Gewek weren’t happy about that of course, since even the smallest of them could crush the proverbial eight hundred pound gorilla, but what could you do? Thorny grass forests do be like that.

Their progress was fuckin’ slow too, ‘cuz the soft loamy soil underfoot left sign like a motherfucker. They had to clean up after themselves every inch of the way. Kohl would have given anything for an approach over hard rocky ground, but nope. Big Hotel had built their shit right in the middle of the thornboo forest, and there was no other way to get close.

The thorns and sharp leaves didn’t much bother the Ten’Gewek. Slick leathery skin and all. It was the fact the thornboo wasn’t strong enough for them to climb that set them on edge, along with the obviousness of their passing. All their instincts yearned for a stealthy, elevated perspective.

Weird, how ambush hunters and skittery prey would want the same exact thing. So which were they right now?

It was right at that moment when one of the native critters, a fancy fucker like a bird of paradise (except lizard), decided to accost them from high above, apparently unhappy to have their nest disturbed. It squealed loudly at them, flashing some kinda reflective patch of scales, and that wasn’t good—

Doog Bow-Breaker leapt straight up as if gravity wasn’t a fuckin’ thing and his field pack was filled with helium. He soared through the air and caught the critter in his fangs. He’d refrained from devouring it, remembering his training…

He landed with a hefty thump, dark pleasure written all over his face.

“Quiet, now.”

They all turned to examine the critter. Whatever it had been, it was not just dead, it was flattened.

“…Holy shit,” Kohl whispered excitedly. That had to be, what, thirty goddamn feet? Straight up? More? Doog was their youngest and smallest Ten’Gewek and hadn’t even been trying. He’d just reacted instantly and leapt on fuckin’ reflex!

Williams scanned the forest in the direction of their target with a tense expression. “I don’t like this, Kohl. We’ve left a fuckton of sign already, and after that…”

Fair point. Kohl had felt Doog’s landing in his boots. A good seismograph network would have localized that, easy.

And yet, the thornboo forest remained silent. No whine of drones, no Royshu yelping at them over the net to get the fuck back to him…his skin was crawling with danger-sense, but the forest gave absolutely fuck-all sign that they’d been noticed.

“Hard landing, too much sign. Noise-risk now, from critters.” Berm Werne-Slapper muttered. He was the troop’s redcrest, and a big one at that, already at least Ferd’s size, and Ferd wasn’t at all small as Given-Men went. Berm had earned his god-name by having been caught by surprise on the hunt. In a panic, he’d open-palm slapped a young bull werne so hard across its forehead that it’d died instantly from the blow.

As a result of that terrifying encounter, nobody could sneak up on him, and many had tried. He’d be a Given-Man soon, no doubt. “…Still hear nothing, though. I do not like this.”

Kohl nodded, eyes and ears wide open. “We need to see over this.”

“Eh. I can climb it.” Mercado tested the thornboo, found it sturdy enough for his purpose. “Bet I could get most of the way to the top.”

…Maybe. Mercado was their “small” guy at five-foot-five, though this was still JETS, so even he was a pretty stacked little muscle hamster at a buck-ninety-eight. Still, he’d always been a surprisingly good monkey, and since Doog was like three times heavier…who else could do it?

“Don’t get too stupid.”

Mercado had already shucked his boots and socks and was on his way up, running his gloved hands up and over the thorns, and carefully stepping around them with his bare feet like a lemur. He made it look easy, actually, but the Ten’Gewek all twitched their tails in admiration.

“Small-strong,” Berm had said admiringly as he watched Mercado steadily make his way up. “You teach us many good things.”

Kohl didn’t reply. Was that a flash of movement? …No, just another lizard of paradise. Another crazy-ass supermonkey leap by Doog before it could make any noise, but this time his landing was purposeful, and so gently executed he didn’t rattle the ground. And it was silent.

…God, what allies they’d made!

Up above, Mercado had reached the point where his vantage point was starting to sway. Still, he was high enough up that hopefully he had a good look…sure enough, Kohl saw him secure himself and aim his binoculars.

A few seconds later, he was coming back down, shaking his head.

“No drones in the air. And we’d be hearing the Abrogators coming if those were on the move…” He said. “But the relay’s right fuckin’ there…Kohl, I think nobody’s home, man.”

“The signal did cut out before we got here…” Williams mused.

“Well, we’re not dead, so, fuck it.” Kohl signalled forward with a hand gesture, the murmured conversation ended, and they pushed on.

Mercado jumped down like a fuckin’ boss, grinned, and pulled his boots back on. Team Human could impress the cavemonkeys too, now and then.

The forest ended like somebody had laid down a ruler and cut along it, but that was just the end of the old, tall, thick thornboo. There was another twenty or thirty meters of short, skinny, young stuff ahead of them. Lots of useful microterrain among the younger plants, though, so they got down low, wriggled forward on their bellies. Kohl blinked as a young thornboo shoot’s knife-sharp leaf opened a cut on his cheek. That shit was going to sting later, but he ignored it: they’d found the Relay, alright.

Or at least, they’d found the classic tall skinny pyramid in the middle of a boxy fortification, surrounded by ranks of Abrogators. But the twisting ball of non-space atop the relay’s spire? Absent.

He got his first glimpse of a deathbird drone when he peeked over the bank he was prone behind. It was lying about thirty meters away, half buried in the long grass, offline and speckled with bright orange rust. Then his eyes got their shit together and he saw another, and another, and another…

The whole fucking swarm of them was just lying there, and it looked like they’d been there a good long time. Throw in the tangle of vegetation encroaching the site’s perimeter, which had already entangled dozens of the unmoving Abrogators, and there was only one possible explanation.

The Hierarchy were no longer present on Too Quiet.

There was no better possible summary of their feelings than the one Williams whispered. “…What a fucking cock-tease!”

They grew a bit bolder after that. Carefully, working up their nerve, they’d picked their way around the compound, at first cautiously, then a bit freer…

He’d had to set shit straight after Berm had picked up and crushed one of the deathbirds into a considerably smaller ball. Ten’Gewek had a deep, bitter hatred of the things.

Beyond the cleared perimeter was the compound wall. It was…formidable. And smooth. Not a problem for the monkeys of course, who could simply make handholds as they needed. So, no need to bust out climbing gear, and Berm didn’t even need that. He just jumped over the fuckin’ thing like a goddamned flea, much higher than Doog had managed, and did so both effortlessly and repeatedly to shuttle the human members of the team over, two at a time.

….Kohl and his fellow humans were all pretty exceptional power-athletes, but they were leading monsters that could crush them all like fuckin’ grapes, by accident. Fuck.

Berm knew it, too. He didn’t show off too much when he was done, just a smug grin and a glance down at the steel-like cables writhing sinuously in his cartoonishly muscular legs…

“Sometimes, work stronger, not smarter!”

Bigger Ten’Gewek men preferred knuckling about on all fours over upright walking, since their legs were so thick they couldn’t stand with them straight under their pelvis. Always they had a wide-legged stance, and Berm’s were so massive, his gait was like an over-exaggerated swagger. Still, all that bulk gave them unbelievably explosive speed and strength, so it was hard to argue his point. And having failed to arouse suspicion with that level of calamity…

It was intel gathering time, and having the Ten’Gewek wrecking crew on-hand was helpful. They could rip metal doors right off their hinges, or if Berm was feeling particularly cramped, just donkey-kick a concrete wall down and widen some holes.

Kohl didn’t really expect the bad guys to have left anything too sensitive behind, though. He was expecting they’d bust through a few doors and find the place cleaned out. That’d be the smart thing to do, wipe the computers, burn the paper files, or whatever the dataspace version of that was.

And that was mostly what they found. But not entirely. There was still plenty of materiel left behind, stuff the big-brains would love to get their hands on. Stuff that probably wouldn’t have been left behind if things had gone totally to plan for the other side, maybe.

But it basically meant their job here was already done. They were scouts: they’d scouted. The job of securing the site, digging through all the tech here, and putting it to good use was gonna fall to somebody else.

Kohl grabbed his radio, reflecting as he did so that Royshu was in for a hell of a surprise.

“SILKY, this is SMOOTH. Reckon you’re gonna find this hard to believe…”

Date Point: 19y3m2w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Vemik Given-Man

Sometimes, a problem needed knowings, and those knowings made more problems, which needed more knowings…and that was the spiral Vemik found himself in. He was stuck in their new library, reading three books at once to find a bottom to his problem.

All he wanted to do was make a cart!

He was being a bit obstinate, of course. He wanted a steel cart, hopefully with rubber tires. Strong! His friend Umuk over in Eb Given-Man’s village could probably make one all out of wood now, or at least figure out how, but that meant more than picking deadwood. It would mean chopping up trees, and the People were not keen to do that for small things.

Steel had seemed like such a good answer, at first. All it needed was rocks they could dig from nearby caves, coke they could make from charcoal, charcoal they could make from dry, fallen wood they couldn’t use for anything else. No need to Take living trees!

Probably he could make it out of bar and tube (if he was feeling lazy, and wanted to just buy it in Folctha), using steel like Umuk would use his wood. But why? Would still need panels for the inside! They’d need to be wood anyway. Gods, Vemik had even seen pictures like that in human history, old trucks and things built like carts. He wanted to do a sheet steel cart!

But while a steel knife was easy enough, making a big flat square all the same thickness all the way through? Not so easy. Not easy at all. Lots and lots of hammering for days on end, many re-heats. Wasteful! Same for slim, straight, perfectly round rods. And bearings, which the easiest would be brass but he had to have brass first, which needed things they didn’t have…

And that didn’t even begin to answer the problem of paint.

Turned out, you didn’t just learn the secret of steel and make anything you wanted. The tools just to start were a problem, and the tools for sheet steel were…not going to happen, sadly. Those were generations in the future, even knowing what to aim for, and knowing that just left Vemik sulking over his books, learning things that were worth knowing, but that he might never get to use.

Which was how Professor Daniel had found him sulking over his books one day, and did what he always did: asked a prompting question. “Why not ask around Folctha? Surely there has to be a machine shop there?”

Well, Vemik already knew that. There were two, actually. He’d traded knives for tools with both of them already! Still, this was a problem he wanted to solve, something to get his hands busy again. And more than that, he needed somewhere to point his Fire.

His Fire hadn’t calmed. It was a long, hot year, and this was the hottest part of the year. None of the redcrests were out of their Fire yet because of the deep heat and the plentiful food, and his Fire was at the fullest blaze he’d ever felt. The good food, good sky-thoughts, and the good, long summer Givings from the gods had done much to build up the People. In Vemik’s case, it had built him into such a man that if he let himself give into the Fire, the whole village would wake late the next day, happily worn out and maybe a bit too sore. Strong! But weirdly, with all that Fire raging in his belly and in his cock, he had learned at long last how to calm it down to an ember. How to tend the Fire, instead of either snuffing it out or letting it rage out of control.

Gods, it was a glorious Giving to have!

The feeling of having his mind back was impossible to describe. Instead of tribe-thoughts or horny-thoughts constantly hammering at his brain, and his body screaming at him to dominate and fuck and hunt and play, smile at every girl, steal away every woman, crush every man…now he could will the Fire to settle down, sit back, bide its time for better Givings. It was all still there, still as loud and pressing as ever, but he’d learned how to think around and through it, and use the Fire in his sky-thoughts, instead of being driven by it like a beast.

For the first time in a long while, his sky-thoughts were flowing again. Next year’s fire would probably be even worse for him, according to the other Given-Men, so he wanted to use the time he had well. Maybe Professor was right. Maybe now was a good time to go to Folctha.

So, he went! It wasn’t difficult. There were two jumps every day now, regular as sunrise and sunset. Knives, blankets and things from all the villages for the Humans to buy, and stuff coming back the other way too: mail and supplies for the human researchers, more books for the library, vaccines and sky-medicines, Jooyun coming and going…

Easy enough to make room for Vemik to ride along.

Walking Folctha was a mix of feelings, though. Good to be back, good to see all the wonders of Human technology again, but also…it stoked his Fire a bit, and not in the good way. Too many Humans had attacked him now. And Humans weren’t weak. Jooyun needed men following him for protection all the time now, and so did Awisun and Shyow and Anna and Hawisun. He’d not met the new ones yet, but not even a drunk bibtaw could miss them.

They were trying to be seen. Vemik didn’t think Jooyun would like that for long. But if they were…maybe they were worried. Which meant Vemik worried. So now, Folctha was a place to walk carefully. Stand tall so people would get out of his way. Try not to feel sad about it.

It was early morning when he arrived, still dark with only a little blue in the sky. Too early for any of the Human places he wanted to go, so instead he went to see Nof-fel, who didn’t sleep much. They had regular Givings to the strange weak little sky-thinker, to pay for the vaccines and other help they’d been Given. Vemik didn’t mind, and there was always something interesting to look at in his lab-or-a-tory!

He didn’t know why Nofl kept flirting with him, though; Vemik was pretty sure he’d tear the skinny little…man? in two, even if he tried not to. How would they anyway?! Nofl wasn’t stupid though, so he probably didn’t mean it. But it was silly, and fun, and looking inside his own body was super interesting…

Nofl was busy, though. Didn’t have much time to show Vemik interesting things, and without him explaining it, Vemik couldn’t follow any of what he was working on at all. Still, he tried his best until a blood sample from Warhorse arrived inside a courier drone and Nofl shooed him out of the lab claiming ‘patient confidentiality.’

Vemik didn’t argue. It was late enough now for the city to be coming alive: time to go shopping!

Next stop was the art store. She had new markers! These had shimmering ink which was exactly the sort of thing Vemik needed; he couldn’t carry little bottles around. Lots of life on his world was Ir-a-dess-ent, but she wanted twenty pounds for a set of twelve!

Ripoff!

He bought them anyway. She’d just need to make up for it later. Maybe go on a date! That seemed like a fun Human tradition to try. Maybe she was curious! Maybe not. Humans were fun like that. You never knew who was interested and who wasn’t, until you asked.

Next: Friends. He didn’t have much time, so he always did his chores quick, and kept an eye on his watch that Jooyun had Given him. It showed the time on Earth, on Cimbrean, and on Akyawentuo. It could even show the sun and moon for each world, and tell him the current weather. Neat!

He had a good several hours before the jump back, and another couple after that before he had to be back for Noma’s first Taking. She’d been traded into his tribe early in the spring from far away, and had been living with one of the older women (and near Vemik’s hut) for her protection, until she was ready. Now, she was becoming a woman, and it was a Given-Man’s duty to teach new women the strength of men, because nobody else could be trusted to do it without maybe Giving a dangerous hurt.

The Humans all joked about the People being incurably horny “swole-monkeys,” but this wasn’t about muscle and fucking, not really. Well, okay, yes it was. But it was important, because…well, Humans mostly weren’t built to fuck as powerfully as the People, so they didn’t understand in their breath how much it mattered to teach it properly. Big strong cocks with big strength behind them meant good fucking was an important life-skill, both in the Giving and Taking. An important one, like spear-making, sewing, hunting and tracking, cooking and preserving. Big hurts could come if any of those were done poorly! Or writing, nowadays. A tribe that didn’t teach life to its young people—all of life—had failed them.

Vemik had learned how true that was with Tilly. She was…soft. Tough too, but… well, small, and that made her so delightfully tight around his cock, it took everything in him to be the right kind of careful. If Vemik hadn’t been a good, practiced lover that first night, he’d hate to imagine what terrible Taking he might have done. But with patience, and lots of attention…

With big strength came big responsibilities. It mattered a lot, and not just with small Human women. All of that was much the same with their own women, too.

So, Vemik had to be a good, gentle teacher for the next hands of days, and he couldn’t miss their first night together, because the moon was just right, the Singer had everything ready, and Noma already had a young boy she had her eye on, who hadn’t ever felt a woman’s touch himself. They were new-loves, and learning together was sacred before all good and tricky gods. Men needed to know their strength too, and what it meant for the gods to claim them in the Taking. A man could lose himself in it for a very, very long time if he wasn’t strong enough to wrestle the gods’ mischievous whispers, long enough to Take too much with a smaller woman, so Singer (being much stronger than the boy!) would be Giving for him that night.

He couldn’t anger the gods for something that important, so straight to Adam’s without delay, because Jooyun had said the big man maybe needed some cheering up.

Also, Adam let him climb the building, so that was fun!

When he climbed up to Adam’s home, he knocked on the window. It startled Mar-tee who jolted at the sink, but she smiled at him and pointed up to the roof. Vemik trilled, climbed up to the rooftop, and met her there.

“Do any of his friends use the stairs like normal people?”

“The boring ones, maybe!” Vemik trilled, and knuckled over to give a nice, big hug. Friends!

“Oof! Yes, hello. What brings you here, big guy?”

“Wanted to say hi! Also, maybe ask him questions. Where is he?”

“He’s in bed right now.”

“Asleep?” Vemik stared confused at the bedroom door, tail lashing. “Is nearly midday! Should get him up and working!”

Marty grabbed his tail to stop him before he could move. “He’s hurt. Badly. He’s not being lazy, he’s resting!”

“…That bad?”

“You can go see for yourself. But gently, Vemik Given-Man.”

In fact, Adam was awake. He was lying on his side, with Diego snuggled up to his chest. The young Human was doodling in a large book of blank paper while Adam held the crayons for him.

He looked…smaller. And not in any good way. The loose-skin smaller look that old men and women who were never Given to the gods got, but too young. Especially under his eyes, which were tired and suffering even though he was smiling for his son, and even though he smiled at Vemik.

“…Thought I heard somebody climbin’ on my roof,” he said, and leaned over to very carefully kiss Diego’s head. “Hey, niño. Ayuda a mamá, okay?”

“Okay, papá…” Diego still squirmed around to give Adam a cuddle, then hopped down from the bed and took the paper and crayons with him.

Vemik shut the door behind him. “…You look like shit.”

Adam snort-laughed, wearily. “Yeah. Feel worse.”

Vemik perched on the bed next to him. It was a huge, heavy, steel thing built to take a lot, but between the two of them it still made creaky noises. Or maybe that was the floor? Better not risk it: he stood up again. “Why not move and work? You know how good it is…”

“Really, really wish I could, bro.” Adam groaned and flopped on his back. “But it’s gettin’ worse. I can feel another seizure waiting for me to fuck up, you know?”

…Well.

Vemik had heard about what happened. Big brain-hurt, but even worse than his own. He hadn’t expected this though. “I hear, has been very hard two moons for you,” he said, after a while.

“Started hard. Don’t even fucking know what it is, now.” Adam sighed and closed his eyes. “I’m just so fucking tired all the time. And moving around hurts. And on a good day, yeah, I can do a little light pilates or yoga or whatever until I start getting that feeling like bad shit’s gonna happen if I keep going…but days like today…”

Vemik hooted softly, and wished he could think of something helpful to say, or do. Nothing came to mind, so instead he sat on his tail next to the bed.

“Heard what Yan’s been going through,” he said, after a while.

“Mm. He’s barely started.”

“He said, you went through days like that every day for a whole year.”

“…Yup. And days almost as bad for many more.”

“And this is worse?”

Adam sighed, then with a groan he heaved himself into a sitting position, swung his legs out of bed and paused to catch his breath. “…All that shit made me stronger. I could cope with it ‘cuz I was gaining. You know? Now I’m losing and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. I can’t even fucking get out of bed.”

Despite his words, he got his feet under him and stood up with a long groan. “…I gotta piss. Again.”

He didn’t retreat to privacy like Humans usually did, which Vemik knew meant he was badly hurting. Humans rarely forgot their privacy. Adam lumbered over to the sink in the corner of the room in obvious pain, pissed like a Given-Man who’d drunk a werne dry, and found his way back toward the bed.

No.

“Let’s go walk. Nothing hard. Just…go outside.”

“…You’re carrying me back if shit goes wrong.”

Vemik trilled quietly. “Can do.”

Actually, he pretty much had to carry Adam down the stairs, too. And it was slow. Every step was careful, with a solid hold on both rails, one stair at a time.

“Should put a fuckin’ cargo elevator in…” Adam grumbled, halfway down.

“Where would you put it?”

“It was a rhetorical statement.”

“Ree-torr-eh-cal.”

“Yeah. Means saying it just to say it, sorta.”

“…Oh. So, then root word is ree-torr-ick?” Probably it meant more than that, but his friends knew to just give the important bit then and there. Vemik would look the word up later.

“Rhet-oric. Mff. Emphasis changes…based on whether it’s a…hm!”

“On part of speech!”

“Yeah, big guy.” He found some humor though, even if weakly. “So there is more in your head besides bows and sex.”

“Also paints, and weights, and gears and steel! And math and knives! And werne, and—”

Adam stopped walking so he could laugh, leaning on the rail. “Alright. Alright, I get it.”

Vemik tilted his head. “…You’ll be okay, yes?”

“We’ll see. Sure fuckin’ wanna be, but I’m not outta the woods yet. Not even close…”

Vemik knew Human voices very well by now. War-horse didn’t know.

“…Need a different analogy with you guys, huh? Y’all like the woods.”

“I know what you meant,” Vemik said carefully.

“…I’m that obvious, huh?”

“I don’t think sneaky is something you could ever do.”

“….Right.” Adam glanced up and down the stairs to see if all the doors were closed, then sighed. “Vemik, I’m falling the fuck apart, and I don’t know where or when it’ll stop. But I can’t stop yet. I’ve got family, I’ve got people who need training…so I just…keep going. If I didn’t have them…”

Vemik hugged him. Both arms and tail. The hug he got back was a shadow of the old Warhorse-strength. Like it was mostly still there, but locked away inside.

Then Adam was walking again.

He didn’t say much—or anything, really—as they did a slow lap of the green field out back of the building, but let Vemik talk about whatever came into his head. It took a long time, so Vemik got to say plenty. Hopefully it helped. Then there was the climb back up to the top floor—well, really Vemik carried him up, like a good-sized Werne up a steep hill. More pissing when they got there.

Marty invited Vemik to stay for dinner, but there was no time. He was going to have to run back to the jump terminus already. But there was time to say goodbye politely.

Adam at least looked like he was feeling better for the visit. “Come see me first next time, we’ll go shoppin’ for art supplies. You wouldn’t believe how many crayons Diego and I go through.”

“…Why are you using crayons?”

“Therapy. Helps me practice my grip.” Adam shrugged ruefully. “But I break ‘em a lot. Especially when I’m drawin’ something difficult like a ducktopus.”

“…A…what?”

“Little joke with me an’ Diego. It’s a duck with octopus legs. He thinks it’s funny as hell.”

They shared the laugh of parents discussing something cute one of their kids had done. But, time was short, and Vemik didn’t have much of it today.

Strange, how life with the sky-tribes could be all rush and hurry. Didn’t feel right, somehow. Anyway, Vemik glanced at his watch, made his apologies, and took off.

He gave thanks to the gods as he went. It was a guilty kind of gladness he had, that his brain-hurt hadn’t been half so bad. But also a gladness that his friend was alive, and still doing his best to live. Vemik could guess all too well how it would go if Adam ever gave up…

But, Adam probably didn’t know how to give up. Probably. Hopefully.

A different Human interrupted his thoughts, this one a man in a suit who just appeared in front of him, holding up a hand as he was about to reach the jump terminus. “Sir—”

A new bodyguard. Young too. Strong-feeling as humans went, but not really big…

Before he could really stop Vemik, though, Jooyun’s voice called over from nearby. “It’s alright, Hernandez. You can let him through.”

‘Her-nan-dez’ nodded and stepped aside, and Jooyun swept over to greet Vemik with a hug. “I didn’t know you were in town!”

“Sir—”

“Oh, he’s fine. Vemik is always fine by me. Tribe-brother! What’chu up to, big fella?”

“Uh, shopping…” Vemik watched the suited men suspiciously as Jooyun led him toward the Array. “Who are they?”

“Full-time security, now that Hoeff is officially moved on to other things. They’re pretty good fellas, though Hernandez must be brave as heck if he thinks he’s going to stop you…”

There was sly play in his voice, so Vemik showed off just a little…but just a little. Enough so they knew. Her-nan-dez understood the way of it between them instantly. So, not entirely stupid!

“Anyway. These fellas are just getting out on-job with me and, uh…I tried to warn them…”

“They’re going to die of sweat, wearing heavy cloth like that.”

“I know. They didn’t listen. Meanwhile I’m gonna be reluctant to even put on silkies. It’s over a hundred-twenty there right now! And it’s humid enough to chew.”

“Good heat!” Vemik burbled. The men looked between each other, subtly. Vemik saw it, though.

“We, uh…just need to scope the place out, sir. For planning. We know you’ve refused security over there,” one of them said. From the way the others nodded and looked to him, Vemik guessed he was in charge of them.

“Should bring lighter clothes,” he teased, then turned back to Jooyun. “Anyway. Wanted to come shopping for steel, but…went to see Adam.”

“And lost the whole rest of the day, huh?” Jooyun nodded grimly. “Yeah. We’re all trying to keep his spirits up, but you’re doing well if you can get him out of bed at the moment.”

That made Vemik feel a little better.

“So what kind of steel?” Jooyun asked as they parked themselves among the boxes and stuff headed back home. Still a few minutes to go before they loaded up and jumped. “Something you can’t make back home?”

“Sheet steel.” Vemik explained, settling opposite him. “But, had a thought. Big thought, I think.”

“Oh?” Julian’s bemused smile was there, and that was all the encouragement Vemik needed.

“Yes! Wanted some now for a wagon I’m making. Proof of con-sept, right? But I think long-term, we need more tools, sheet steel, all sorts of things. But how? Took me a whole moon to get people together, build dam and stream for meet-village! But then I think, bunny-people made it down civilized path more than we, yes?”

“The E-Skurel-Ir? Near as we can tell, the Hunters found and enslaved them sometime in the middle of their industrial revolution, round about the time they were starting to play around with electricity and mass production. What are you thinking?”

Vemik trilled, and tackled Jooyun for a quick wrassle because he felt smug and happy. “Easy! We should trade!!”

Jooyun was not easy to wrassle. At all. He knew all Vemik’s tricks, and had those long, thick-muscled legs. But Vemik’s were thicker, and bigger, and quite a lot stronger. More flexible! The People had the best bodies and senses, and had better proportions for wrasslin’, too: legs a third shorter, arms usually a third longer. Torso just as long, with everything much wider and thicker. Had better feet too, and Vemik had way bigger and better forearm and foreleg muscles than Jooyun! Vemik was tougher, heavier, and much stronger, so he could wrassle the big human pretty hard. He usually won because of that…but not always. Jooyun was cunning in a way Vemik couldn’t quite figure out. He’d been catching his strength up again, and now…

Well, Vemik still won, as was good and right in the world. But he had to work for it. Good!

Of course, his security people were very not happy, and reacted like they were supposed to…but Vemik, maybe, wanted to prove a point here. They couldn’t. He felt their grip on him like children play-wrasslin’ with a grown man, and that felt good to know. Maybe it was his Fire, but there was more behind his instinct. They needed to understand his strength. Jooyun was safe with the People. And they were not man enough to protect him among them.

One had to know where they were strong, after all.

“Guys!” Jooyun laughed from under Vemik’s armpit, as he crushed the big human’s head with his bicep and forearm. “It’s okay! I mean—”

There was a twist, a heave, and Vemik was left blinking as he got body-slammed into the concrete. Now with Jooyun sitting astride his belly. Strong!

“—I can handle the big guy.”

Vemik shook his head to clear out the blow, and coughed. “…Good trick!” He re-pinned Jooyun again, just to set things right, and growled next to his ear. “Won’t work again, though…”

Then he let go and rolled back up to his feet. Fun!

He reached down to help Jooyun back up, but instead he kicked through his legs and flipped himself back up to his feet. Even that was a little bit of showing-off among Humans, but that was good. Let them know their ambassador was strong! And so were his friends!

“Yeah,” Jooyun chuckled, not even breathing heavy. “So, now that you’ve established dominance or whatever, let’s not give the poor guys any more heart attacks, okay?”

“Okay…”

“We do this like ten times a day,” Jooyun said in his ‘fond-but-exasperated’ voice. “I win, uh…sometimes. You’re gonna have to get used to it with the Ten’Gewek.”

“Then…pardon my asking, but…”

“The People aren’t going to shoot me from a distance, or scheme, or bomb me, or any of that. They can’t. Anything they would ever think of doing will be right there for anyone to see. And honestly, if you just assume they all play ridiculously hard, it’s easy to see when it ain’t play.”

Again, the bodyguards looked between each other, but after a second there was a collection of nods.

“Also, I’m not evil. If you wanna stay for a bit I have spare clothing y’all can wear. Maybe Vemik here can show you a hunt so you can see what an angry Ten’Gewek is really like.”

“If they can be quiet, maybe. And if not, the library has air conditioning,” Vemik added. He grinned at them, and sat back down. “Anyway. Trade.”

Jooyun chuckled, stood up, and dusted himself off. “Right…trade. Trade is good. Question is, what do you have that they want, and what do they have that you want? If you’re after sheet steel and stuff, some of their workshops on Mordor can make it…”

“I saw video about this. Big rollers! Not easy.”

“No, it isn’t. Their rolling mills are hand-cranked things though, so…hmm. Y’know, I bet there’s a place for some big burly monkeys to offer help.”

“Thought their world was poison?”

“It is, so we’d bring a mill back with us. Maybe? Just spitballin’.”

That was a strange word for sky-thinking-play, but he understood. “You talk to Keepers about it, yes?”

“Yup. Goodness knows, they feel like they owe your people back for Eyes-Turned-Upward. They have their own sense of Give and Take…”

They looked up as a voice called out from somewhere overhead. “Now loading for Jump AKY-202 To Akyawentuo Meet-Camp. All passengers please take a seat in the marked area.”

It then repeated in the People’s words, with not a bad sound to them! Too slow, though. Vemik should record a better one for them!

Yan came bustling in right as they called, looking both tired and mighty these days. Vemik hooted happily. He’d missed Yan! They all had. And it was a blessing he was still around, still himself. The Singers had songs about years past, when a man as old as Yan might kind of…forget. Sometimes a Blackcrest lived very, very long, but others he might become nothing but a hungry hunter, stalking the forest until he either starved or lost himself in the thrill to pit himself against bigger, stronger predators.

The Humans, though? They knew how to feed even an old Given-Man enough, and how to work him hard enough. Yan always seemed tired but happy in his messages home, and still himself. Still sharp, and with a head full of things none of the People before him had ever learned. Still bigger and stronger than them all, still Chief of the Lodge.

Would probably be too buried under women to talk much, though. Hah!

They talked a bit (after a wrassle and hug) about Vemik’s idea, they maybe schemed a bit…

It was a good sky-thought, Vemik knew it. The bunny-people needed to rebuild much, and the People needed access to tools. Not to make life easier, no. There had been much talk among the People about that, and the wise voices all thought an easy life would ruin them.

So…no. No big machines to carry them up or across the world. They would not enslave Werne to eat, or flee from the dangers of the Hunt. They would not grow fat and gassy on grain because they didn’t want to climb high for herb and fruit. They needed tools to make life more livable. Maybe it wasn’t a big difference, but like Jooyun and the professor said:

Sometimes, it was all in how you looked at it. Or maybe it was in doing the same things better.

…That thought needed work. But it was good to work on thoughts. He’d missed it. Coming out the other side of his mind-hurt felt like warm sunlight on his back, and maybe he’d share that thought with Adam later. Too bad he hadn’t really had time today.

He’d make time, somehow.

For now, there was home, his village, his children, his Singer. Yan, who was becoming a mighty Sky-warrior for his people. He was blessed in his family, in his friends, in the world he lived in.

And together, they’d make it even better.

Date Point: 19y3m2w AV
Clan Whitecrest infiltration ship Chasing Whisper, Planet Too Quiet, Deep Space

Father Royshu of Clan Whitecrest

“You found absolutely nothing in an operative state?”

“Aye, and we spent hours crawling up and around everything. The only things we found were all wildlife stupid enough to bother our gorillafriends up in the trees.”

“Tasty, though!” Berm Werne-Slapper added, nodding amiably. “Good thick blood too!”

…It was always wise to remember that their friends were also monsters, and uncomplicated ones at that.

Another of the team’s humans, Mercado, shook his head at Berm’s antics, then expanded on Kohl’s assessment. “There’s nothing down there, man. There’s some kinda local lichen or whatever growin’ all over everything, there’s thorny plants choking the place up. Either shit grows fast down there, or they abandoned the relay a couple years ago.”

“Probably the latter. It’s a pretty straightforward Ten on the Corti index.”

“Beats me why the fuck we even still bother with that thing. It puts Earth and Akyawentuo on the same level but c’mon man! Earth don’t have fifty ton dinosaurs runnin’ around!”

“Mammal-form hyperpredators, at that! Earth does, however, have diseases that would rip through the entire Ten’Gewek population in a month.”

“Naw. I don’t really believe that. We’ve found some nasty shit on Akyawentuo too, shit that’ll make Oregon Trail look like a fuckin’ jaunt. Now Nightmare definitely is a thirteen though, if for no other reason than the fuckin’ exploding trees and their antifreeze pigs.”

Typical Human, always selling his own species and homeworld short. Royshu flicked his ear indulgently, then jerked his head meaningfully toward the ship’s decontamination showers rather than argue further. “Well, anyway. Speaking of deadly diseases, alien pathogens and awful smells…”

They took the hint and headed that way, though, perhaps with too little concern for quiet. The team’s third human, Williams, contributed a thought as he unzipped his gear and started to shrug out of it. “Well, maybe they’re all level thirteen. Or twelve. Or maybe it’s a stupid-ass system that tries to measure the unmeasurable.”

“Or maybe it doesn’t accurately encapsulate risk past a certain point.”

“Or that. It was always kind bullshit how it didn’t put Gao as a level-ten right away.”

“Nine point nine-two-one. Widely regarded as a ‘dick political move.’”

“Dick?” Berm asked.

“Y’know. That fuckin’ lamp post all you monkeyboys got?” Mercado asked.

“I know, but why is a bad thing?”

“‘Cuz it means they got fucked,” Williams explained.

“…Still don’t see problem.”

“Ever fuck someone badly?”

“No!”

“Oh, c’mon,” Mercado scoffed. “You’ve never once given bad sex?”

Berm uttered a mortally offended hoot. “Would be insult to gods! We all learn good fuckings in our trials because of that! Sex is sacred.”

“Huh…Hey, Kohl, you ever get the impression humanity went wrong somewhere along the way?”

“All the fuckin’ time…”

Royshu tuned them out and started charging the jump drive. Or tried to, anyway. The latter, he managed successfully. The former, he failed dismally at. One of his ears swivelled to listen to the conversation with a kind of disturbed fascination, despite his best efforts.

“I dunno. They’re just put together differently, man…and, uh, not to hate on our friends here, but their idea of consent and especially, uh, safety… It ain’t something we agree on.”

“Different gods, so different rules, different bodies,” Berm noted sagely. “We understand.”

Royshu couldn’t help himself. “See, this is why we’re different people. Sex among my kind is dangerous. That’s why we don’t do it casually.”

“Yeah, but…fuckin’ paperwork? Really?”

There was a certain…disdain in his tone that Royshu didn’t like. Fuck that nonsense.

He turned to face them directly. “…Okay. Let me share with you something we don’t like talking about. We’re never going to speak about it again, understand?”

Everyone looked at each other, nodded, then looked back at Royshu.

“Before accurate record-keeping and accountability? And an independent Clan of Females? Nearly ten percent of virgin females died in their first encounter, and injuries of some kind or another were common. Still are, though obviously we have better medicine. I won’t elaborate why, I’m sure your friendly internet can tell you all about our anatomy. But as a consequence, it is important that any female know exactly what she’s getting with a male.”

Berm stared at him for a long time.

“So while you huge gorilla-males and gorilla-females are so tough you can happily rape each other silly and it’s just impolite instead of a guaranteed fatality, and while you hairless jogging apes are so all over the place it makes you neurotic, with us…yeah. It’s a sensitive topic. So yes: Paperwork.”

“…Shit, I’m sorry.”

“Is sort of same problem with us. We teach all our young people, remember? Not just for fun.”

“Right. God, in Human society that’d be institutional pedophilia…”

“Not that young! As part of their rites! At line between boy and man, or girl and woman. When they’re ready!”

“…Kohl, I’m beginning to think we’re not so fucked up after all.”

“It’s not fucked up!” Royshu corrected him. “It’s intense. Even though we go our separate ways afterward, it forms a lifelong bond! I still trade messages with my first female!”

“Okay, okay…I didn’t mean anything by it. Shit, I just…I had no idea it was like that with either of you. Um…right. Lesson learned.”

“…Change of subject?” Kohl suggested.

“Please,” Royshu duck-nodded. “We’re about ready to jump, gentlemen. Better get ready for the HEAT welcoming party…” He couldn’t quite leave it at that, though. One more point, and one he’d sort of grown bitter about over the years.

“Also…be thankful for what you have. With my people, it’s actively dangerous. With theirs,” gesturing to the Ten’Gewek, “they’re so tough it’s completely casual. You get to sit in the happy middle, like no other species we know of anywhere. Be grateful for that. You get the meaning without the danger.”

“We have meaning!” Berm objected.

“Change of subject,” Kohl insisted, pushing Berm firmly toward the shower. “And now you are being insensitive. They wouldn’t have rites about it if it were meaningless.”

“…You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have thought that through a bit more before saying it.”

Berm looked at him intensely for a bit, then nodded and twitched his long tail. All the Ten’Gewek’s crests flattened a bit, Royshu noticed. They’d been bristling.

…Balls, he’d almost stepped in it pretty hard.

Williams gave him a sympathetic look. “This ‘interspecies sensitivity’ bullshit ain’t easy, huh?”

“I don’t think it’s even that. It’s just…we’re aliens. And deathworlders at that. There isn’t much more core to a species than sex. But…you do get what I meant, I hope?”

“Yeah. Better way to put it may have been ‘you need to create your meaning’ because to me, that seems like what they do. They’re too tough and strong. Sure, there’s all sorts of dangers in their world for the unwary, don’t get me wrong, but they’re all manageable. They send young boys out to hunt werne after all, and those could gut and trample cattle! The only real danger they have is from each other. They don’t fear falls, they don’t get broken bones. They have nothing at all to worry about from most of us, or most of you. That has to put a stamp on their psychology, y’know? What’s it like for a people to have so little fear?”

“Yi.”

He got a heavy, comradely pat on the shoulder, then Williams vanished astern to clean up as well. The drive charge crept over the green line at last, and Royshu was honestly glad of the chance to just fly the ship again.

Thump.

One world vanished from around them, to be replaced by the gantries and cargo handling systems of Armstrong’s inspection platform. There was the usual handshaking, talking to control, being parked on a platform and quarantined until the HEAT showed up…the usual jovially painful head scan and search. Not pleasant, but routine. And it was nice to know that all the brutally dangerous men he’d just insulted weren’t secret datasophont infiltrators now.

Berm came up to him while he was doing his close-out checklist.

“I should say sorry, too.”

Royshu turned his chair and ducked his head. “Yijao. We won’t truly learn each other’s ways by being shy and watching every possible word out of our mouths, will we?”

Berm hoot-trilled. “Hmm. Some humans think so. Had to take a class.”

“I’m guessing you fell asleep.”

A long and musical trill, this time, the equivalent of a deep bubbling chitter, or a human roaring belly-laugh. “You see me! Maybe I felt sleepy…but important. Some things, we Give meaning, yee-shyow? Maybe you not so wrong about us.”

Coming from a mouth the wrong shape, with the wrong tongue and no nose, Royshu was happy to let his abysmal attempt at Gaori pass without comment.

“We, the Forest-People, we kept the gods, kept their learnings. Maybe that is why we live and the City-People did not. Some forest tribes, they forget too. Also gone.”

“Perhaps. Don’t lose it, you understand? Because you’re right. It is sacred. Never forget it.”

“Never.” Berm gave him a hearty thwack on the shoulder—gentle, by his culture’s standards, but painful by Royshu’s—then turned and disembarked. Royshu finished his checklist, closed the ship down, then turned to the other half of his job: his report to the Clan.

Something told him this one was going to go right to the very top.

Date Point: 19y5m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Regaari, Father of Clan Whitecrest

Regaari didn’t get to spend much time with his dearest Cousin, and he’d learned to treasure every moment of it. Even if it did mean being snuggled mostly to death by a titanic, sweaty mass of brown fur.

Daar was nothing if not a predictable friend.

“They’ve been feedin’ you good!” he enthused, as he settled himself in on a comfortable bit of floor, Regaari somewhat considerately but inescapably pinned partially under his bulk. “I bet I could toss ‘ya about all kindsa ways now!”

Regaari chittered resignedly, “Please refrain. I’m tired enough as it is, these days.”

“Ayup. S’why I’m here. When are the rest showin’ up?”

“Shortly. It takes ‘Horse a while to get around, at the moment.” Regaari duck-shrugged sadly. Six months on from his injury, ‘Horse was definitely responding to therapy and rehab, but he was still definitely falling short of every unspoken expectation the team had about how well he’d do. After all, he’d pulled out some mythic fortitude and strength when the occasion demanded in the past.

It was stupid and unfair on all their parts to have expected he’d recover quickly and fully. But even Regaari had rather imagined he’d be bouncing around, shifting tonnes of metal and generally still showing them up by now. It was very clear that ‘Horse had imagined that, too.

Instead…he’d not. Attention had shifted to Firth and a few others, and the general unspoken consensus was that he was finding replacements on-team for all the different things he did.

Telling, that it took building Righteous into a never-before-seen monster, Baseball into…whatever he was, now. The almost desperate emphasis on the younger Lads…

“He’s never going to fight again, is he.”

Daar knew. They all knew. But none of them wanted to voice it.

“…No.”

“But will he recover?”

“I wish I knew. None of us do. That’s all outside of anything we do.”

“He gettin’ the best treatment?”

“As far as I know. But…Daar, you know how expensive Corti services can get. There will be a point, eventually…”

“No.”

“It wouldn’t be fair, My Father. Not every soldier or Brother gets infinite care. This could easily cost hundreds of millions—”

“Wouldn’t be fair, that’s true. But it wouldn’t be right ‘ta let ‘em fall! I’mma see he gets whatever he needs and I don’t fuckin’ care what it looks like. How many times has he saved the Gao?”

Regaari didn’t answer. He couldn’t say it was any different than he’d have done, in Daar’s position.

In any event, the sound of heavy feet outside and deep Human voices brought that specific conversation to a close for the time being. That and the aroma.

Keeda bless Humans, but they knew how to do things to meat that would make the livestock glad it was slaughtered. Marinades, rubs, smoking, stuffing, glazes and sauces, herbs and cheese and condiments…

Maybe it was an appreciation of the new and exotic, since Gaoian cuisine was reportedly very popular on Earth these days…but whatever the reason, the smell was of a slow-smoked deer cooked with all of Firth’s considerable skill, and behind that Regaari could smell the creamy richness of Gran’ma Burgess’ famous mac…

They’d pulled out all the stops for his birthday party.

“Like that smell, Cousin? Me an’ Firth went an’ hunted it last season, an’ we’ve been lookin’ ‘fer the right excuse…”

“My birthday? Well, it’s as good an excuse as any other, I suppose…” Regaari chittered.

They’d been granted the use of Brigadier Jackson’s house in Folctha, which was pretty much normal for the SOR. She didn’t use it much, spending most of her time on Earth or over in Franklin, but it had belonged to Colonel Powell before, and had seen many HEAT social functions. No doubt it would see many more before she finally retired and lived there full-time. But the point was, it was a place they actually could get together privately. Big and roomy, with sturdy concrete floors throughout. Not even Firth at his stompiest could do it any real harm.

Daar was watching his step, though, especially through doorways. Everything had its limits.

The crowd started to show up, one-by-one, and all of them had a small little gift for Regaari. He had specifically requested nothing ostentatious, and ethics compelled them on that point anyway, seeing as he was a foreign agent in the direct employ of a sovereign…

But they never went wrong with books. Signed books, many of them.

And of course there was food, some roughhousing, games, the simple joy of socializing…The unique, and wholly unwarranted experience of Daar singing birthday well-wishes…Diego cracked everyone up by slapping his hands over his ears and refusing to remove them until Daar promised to stop singing.

Daar thought it was hilarious, and gladly made it up to the tiny human by giving him a gleefully galumphing ride around the field. Not many beings could claim such a boon from such a leader, but of course that was why Daar was Daar. Protocol and decorum only mattered when it mattered. If there was anything he’d taught the galaxy, it was that real power was about setting your own terms.

All in all, it was a good day. It was good to see that ‘Horse was actually doing better than Regaari had thought, too. Apparently he was receiving therapy and interventions that were taking the edge off for him. Good.

And late in the night, there came a moment when it was just the team. The wives, girlfriends and children went home, the doors were locked, the last of the food grazed on.

Time for the galaxy’s finest killers to talk a little shop.

“Got some news I know y’won’t be too happy ‘bout,” Daar rumbled, once they were all lounging around and nursing full bellies. “I know there’s a certain Alpha y’all want a piece of.”

Costello, savoring a beer as he leaned against the wall, made a disgruntled sound. “Bastard got away by an inch last time.”

“Yeah, it’s a slippery one. I been quietly hopin’ ‘fer a shot at it ‘fer a while now, too. But there’s strategy there, an’ I can see it. Fuckers want us payin’ attention. Too much attention. ‘Cuz really, we got what we came for. Ain’t no reason ‘ta keep spendin’ lives no more, now they ain’t got shit ‘ta fight back wit’. They ain’t escapin,’ there ain’t no rescue for ‘em in th’ orbits…”

“Hmm. The day’s finally come, has it?” Costello’s tone was resigned. Around the room, the others made various nods and sounds of agreement, but there was definitely some reluctance.

“It’s the right call,” Firth rumbled. “Don’t git me wrong. Feels like leavin’ unfinished business.”

“Naw, that’s ego speakin’,” the Great Father rejoined. “It weren’t never ‘bout personally servicin’ it, like it were some duel ‘tween worthy opponents or somethin.’ It’s jus’ a speedbump, a thing. A smart thing mebbe, but a thing nonetheless. You exterminate things.”

There were uncomfortable looks around the room, especially between the humans.

“Daar,” Costello ventured—

“I know ‘yer objection. Shouldn’t think or speak ‘bout sapients that way, eh?”

“It’s not gone over well in either of our culture’s histories, no.”

“Sure. An’ how many industralized foes did we ever have that ate people?”

“We came pretty functionally close,” Costello noted, grimly.

“Yeah, ‘ya did. Only mercy to it was ‘yer consideration ‘fer the average German, who prob’ly weren’t down wit’ that bullshit an’ jus’ tryin’ to keep them and theirs alive. But what is an average Hunter? An angry mouth, nothin’ more. Since when has our goal ever been anythin’ but their complete and total obliteration?”

Silence.

“Essactly. They ain’t people worth th’ honor of personhood. It ain’t even genocide, ‘cuz that implies there’s a culture worth savin’.”

“The fuckers dinnae even have a sense o’ self, most of ‘em,” Murray agreed. “We’ve all seen it. Shoot the one next tae them, an’ they don’t even notice. May as well be boilin’ a fuckin’ anthill.”

Daar nodded at him, then looked back to Costello. “Ain’t nothin’ on Hell ‘fer us now. Jus’ a distraction. One that claims lives erry day. So, now the time’s come.”

“I presume this is all approved strategy and all that.”

“Ayup. Had the big-wig meetin’ jus’ ‘fore I came here.”

Costello shook his head. “God, it’s easy to forget who you really are…”

“That makes me glad.” Daar stood, releasing Regaari back to gloriously cool air and freedom from all his many tons of iron-meat pinning him in place. “But yeah. I’m sure y’all be seein’ relevant orders here shortly. Th’ withdrawal’s gonna need force protection, an’ who knows? Mebbe you’ll get ‘yer chance. I know I’ll be there on th’ last day, wit’ the last group.”

“We’ll prepare accordingly.”

“Good. Think tha’ss enough serious talk, don’t you?” Daar chittered, and indicated the table in the next room. “I seem ‘ta recall I got a slight winnin’ streak at Ta’Shen…”

There were nods, and those who wanted to play stood up. Regaari watched Costello a moment longer though. Watched him drain his beer aggressively then visibly decide to treat himself to another one. It was clear he was disappointed.

But Daar was right, of course. And they all knew it.

Sometimes, you just had to get blueballed.

Date Point: 19y6m AV
Hell

Garaaf, Father of Clan Whitecrest

The order had been given. Most forces were withdrawing from Hell, back through the Arrays. Garaaf felt like year-old ass over it, but…well, he wasn’t the sort to disobey orders. Especially not this one.

Even so, leaving without claiming his prize was a hard blow. But somebody was always going to be disappointed, there. The HEAT had been gunning for his Alpha just as hard. From the looks of things, their informal contest was going to end in a mutually dissatisfactory draw.

Daar would get the Alpha in the end. But it wouldn’t be by his own claws and strength.

It would be with the press of a button.

Still, Garaaf could retire with pride in a job well done. He’d stayed out here longer than anyone else, kept himself clean and healthy throughout somehow, led dozens of Clan Associates and young Brothers in blooding their claws for the first time and, most importantly, had been a set of eyes, ears and nose where the FIC and command needed him most.

And he’d personally slaughtered every single kill squad the Hunters had sent after him. He was particularly proud of that, since by modern Whitecrest standards he was almost a small slip of a thing—a hundred kilos, more or less, and to think that had once been considered big! Now he had a kill count tall enough to stack a fortress out of, and none of the fashionably big Brothers twice his size had a record to match. Not even the HEAT Brothers could match his count.

It wasn’t enough, of course. It’d never be enough. But it felt some kind of good nonetheless.

If he had a request, it would have been to watch from orbit in a few minutes. Maybe that would have finally been some kind of catharsis. Looking down and watching Hell burn away…

It wasn’t to be. There was no room in war for an old and damaged Father’s indulgences. Life wasn’t so kind as to hand out every last thing Garaaf wanted. Or anything, really. He’d clawed out all he’d won by himself, and if that didn’t include an Alpha’s head for a trophy…well, that just meant he could have done better.

“Sir?”

He glanced at the Human Marine waiting impatiently for him. The young man indicated the Array. “Clock’s ticking, sir.”

Garaaf duck-nodded, turned, and walked away.

He had no idea what he’d do when he got home.

Date Point: 19y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam Arés

Nine months into his recovery, nine months on either medical leave or light duty. Nine months where shit was on an absolute fuckin’ rollercoaster of decline. For a while, it was so bad he was honestly in fear for his life.

It wasn’t that bad, anymore. They’d got the worst of it under control with a crazy fuckin’ litany of medications. The physical side of things, well…

Well, he was jumping back to Earth twice a week for hydrotherapy at a bariatric physiotherapy center, something Folctha just didn’t have. Which was a strange feeling. He really was in a lot of ways like a extreme bariatric case. The most extreme, actually. Which…well, he could see a bit of humor in that. “Fathorse” he’d quipped one day, and Sikes had promptly sewn together an absolute chonker of a stuffed palomino for him, and left it on the counter for him to see.

It was Diego’s favorite stuffed animal, now.

But, it made sense. He was so heavy and so uncoordinated, his safety demanded a big fuckin’ hoist to get him in and out of the pool. Especially ‘cuz if he had another seizure in the water, how the fuck was some little physio trainer supposed to haul his ass out otherwise?

Then there was the dialysis.

Modern cybernetics meant dialysis machines were almost a thing of the past. Nowadays, nobody needed kidney transplants, they just got a little biomechanical gizmo installed and slept on a wireless charging mat. But Adam didn’t need new kidneys, it was just his physique was breaking down at such a huge rate his kidneys, even though they were working perfectly, couldn’t keep up. So, he got the dubious honor of having to spend four hours plugged into a machine once a week to make up the difference.

Felt fucking weird that day, felt like half-whipped shit the day after, but the third and fourth days…on those, he actually felt human. Slow, clumsy and still struggling to coordinate, but functional.

Those were the days he got light duty done up at the base.

And of course, every time he came back from Earth, he had to check in with Nofl. There was a lot more to manage than just literally pissing away all his life’s hard work.

At least he got to enjoy Nofl’s coffee now. It was good coffee. Brewed with a Corti’s pride and a genius chemist’s attention to detail. Like Breaking Bad for caffeine junkies and decaf enthusiasts alike. And being an avid lifter…well, was at any rate…Adam had a strong love for all things caffeine.

And he was coming to actually enjoy Nofl’s unique bedside manner, too.

“‘Horse, darling! You’re prompt as ever! Come on in, keep off the grass, shine your shoes, wipe your face…”

“Mierda, who showed you Shrek?”

“Oh, it was one of the first Human movies I ever saw! A classic, dear! A cultural contribution to galactic civilization that will surely outlast all of Humanity’s other works!” Nofl flashed his trademark cheeky grin (with his tiny Corti mouth) and flapped an arm vaguely in the direction of his examination chair before bustling over to the corner to titrate the perfect cup o’ Joe.

It was a thoughtful gesture on his part. It took Adam that long to cross the room and maneuver himself into the chair. ‘Cuz the fact was, all that hard effort, all the drugs, the physio, the dialysis and all the rest of it hadn’t fixed him, it had just made his situation…

Well, manageable.

It wasn’t a fix. In fact, he was still shedding weight like crazy, to the point where he didn’t look healthy and ripped anymore. He looked…like a big, strong man fighting a debilitating illness. Which was true, really.

At least it wasn’t slowly killing him, like it had been for a while there.

Nofl bustled back with a scientifically immaculate hot Americano in the special big reinforced cup, pressed it into his hands, then pottered around setting up, sticking on and aiming his usual assortment of scanners and gizmos. “Drink it while it’s hot, that’s when it’s best!”

“It’s gotta be good to know that if the alien super-doctor thing falls through, you’ve got this to fall back on…” Adam rumbled, and took a sip. “…Shit, that’s good.”

“I’d almost certainly earn more, too. But! Fascinating as the Bean may be, you and my other patients are endlessly more so….hmm.”

His tone changed. The sunny act slipped, and left behind a very Corti expression of intense focus as his large eyes wandered over the display beside the chair.

“…Bad news?”

“Possibly. I’m seeing little random spikes on your EEG…” Nofl watched the screen a few seconds longer, then reached out and tapped it, calling up the scanner’s other, more detailed functions. “Sit back, enjoy your brew. This will take a minute…”

Trying not to feel nervous, Adam did just that. He rested his head back, looked up at the ceiling and, as he’d done many times over the years, waited patiently.

Nofl didn’t rush things. Didn’t chirp or banter, either. He just ran methodically and thoroughly through a series of examinations before affecting a sigh and hopping up on his stool nearby.

“Bad news,” he confirmed.

Well, shit. “…Lay it on me.”

“Those spikes I mentioned are very typical of epilepsy, and up until now we’ve been keeping them nice and small and infrequent with medication. Unfortunately, you’ve developed rather more scar tissue on the brain than we’d hoped, and it seems the drugs are no longer sufficient. Your readings are all now outside of acceptable bounds.”

“…In other words, there’s another seizure in my future.”

“Very likely, I’m afraid.”

Adam sighed. “There any good news in all this?”

“There’s mitigating news, let’s say.” Nofl managed a wry look. “We’re not out of treatment options yet. There are surgical interventions we could perform.”

“Like what?”

“Most obviously, using a laser to abrade the neural scar tissue. It’s actually a technique Humans had already discovered pre-Contact; Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy. Though of course, the Corti version of the procedure is far superior.”

“That’s safe?”

“I wouldn’t even suggest it if it wasn’t acceptably safe, dear. I had hoped we could go a little longer before we revisited surgical options, or better yet not need them at all…but, ah, the decision isn’t mine to make. That will be Professor Forln’s responsibility. You get to enjoy his sparkling company again!”

Despite himself, Adam snorted. “I dunno. By Corti standards, he seemed pretty personable.”

“Oh, yes, he only has a small pole up his pucker. The smallest they issue, in fact.”

Adam chuckled, now. That was praise. Nofl liked Forln, apparently. But then again…Adam kinda doubted he’d have let the Professor anywhere near him, otherwise. He didn’t know a whole lot about the Corti’s colleges and their dynamics and their caste system, but he had picked up that Nofl had a lot more influence than somebody like him usually did.

“So…I’m goin’ to surgery.”

“I doubt Forln will disagree with me. I won’t lie, acceptably safe though the procedure is, and as wonderful as our technology is, one does not poke lightly at brains. Especially not human ones. They are remarkably efficient, clever, powerful, dynamic and endlessly fascinating organs, and remarkably tough, too…but in other ways, quite sensitive and fragile. As evidenced by…” he indicated the readouts on the wall.

“Right. But, if I don’t go for it?”

“Then your prognosis is less than sparkling. You’ve survived the worst and most complex nervejam injury known to me. It would have been miraculous for you to have an uncomplicated recovery. If you suffer another seizure—and you will, if we don’t do this—then it will be the start of a rapid and painful decline.”

Adam nodded, grimly. “…How soon?”

“You have time to prepare. And maybe Forln will come up with an alternative.”

“But don’t put it off too long.”

Nofl nodded.

“Alright…guess we’d better take care of all the other stuff, huh?”

“Oh, psh. I already did.” Nofl flapped a hand. “In every other regard you’re doing wonderfully considering the state you were in when you first arrived on Origin. Frankly, you’re a testament to Human resilience, dear.”

“Except for the busted brain…” Adam grumbled.

“We’ll fix that too. You’ll have a long and comfortable life yet, mark my words.”

Coming from anyone else, Adam would have just nodded politely. Coming from Nofl…he smiled. “Alright. Well. Today’s a good day so far. So, I’m gonna make the most of it.”

“Absolutely!” Nofl chirped. “You know how to get hold of me if you need me. But take it easy, yes?”

“Will do,” Adam promised, as though he had any other fucking option right now.

No, he chastised himself as he stepped outside. That kind of negativity was bad for his recovery, Mears had said. Some amount of bitterness was natural, but indulging it was self-sabotage. Gotta keep that mental attitude positive.

That wasn’t too difficult though, when he found Marty and the boys waiting for him outside the Alien Quarter’s gates. If there was ever a sight to lift his spirits, it was them. And she had ice cream for him…

He creaked, ached, shuffled and stumbled his way over like an old man, sat on the concrete bench next to her—and, God, being able to use normal-people furniture again!—accepted the ice cream, gave her a kiss.

And he didn’t chicken out. “Bad news.”

Marty sighed, and steeled herself. “How bad?”

“Gotta go back to surgery on Origin or I’m headed for a seizure.”

“How soon?”

“Sooner the better.”

“…Alright.” She took his hand and squeezed it. Very, very carefully, he squeezed back. Managed to get the amount of force right, this time.

“Maybe they’ll fix some of the other stuff while they’re at it,” he suggested.

“They tend to do that, yeah…” She leaned into him. “But it wouldn’t be bad news if they thought it was totally safe…”

“Well…let’s face it. Totally safe has never been in my job description.”

“Heh. No. No, I guess it hasn’t.” She gave Diego a reassuring hair-stroke, then a similar one for Adam. It was getting downright long, now. By uniform reg standards, anyway, even for a helmet ‘hawk. Maybe it was kinda dumb he was still keeping it like that, seeing as even if things worked out perfectly from here they’d never let him put on the Mass again, but…

He’d fuckin’ earned it. That haircut was part of him now, a symbol he’d earned. Alongside the SOR black beret, the green feet, and all the rest of it. He’d done all that, and earned…well. There was recognition coming, nobody was pretending otherwise. No injury could take any of that away from him.

And it wasn’t going to take him away from his sons, either. Living and getting better for them was his mission now.

And he was ready for it.

Date Point: 19y6m AV
Hell

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The Hunters saw it comin’, o’ course. There was only one reason ‘fer the allied forces ‘ta withdraw, so when the withdrawal began, so did the desperate last-ditch offensive.

It din’t work. How could it? They were attackin’ over blown bridges, through minefields and prepared lines of fire. All the Humans and Gao had ‘ta do was fall back in an orderly manner, blow shit up as they went, leave behind death an’ killing fields in their wake. The HEAT and Second Fang ran force protection right the way back ‘ta the Arrays. They were leavin’ a lot of equipment behind…but not a single man.

By the time they were back to the footprint of the base itself, there weren’t too many Hunters left alive. They were even throwing Builders into the fight.

“Motherfucker.”

Firth’s angry rumble drew Daar’s attention to the river’s far bank. An oversized white beast stood calmly among the rubble, not joining the attack. As much as Daar could read Hunter body language it looked…relaxed.

“Fucker’s laughin’ at us,” Burgess agreed.

Daar duck-nodded, staring the Alpha down, then turned away. “Ignore it. It’s about ‘ta die anyhow.”

The last of the regular units jumped through the Array. The last trickle of Hunters tried to swarm them…

They ignored those too.

They triggered their suit jump drives, and left Hell behind.

Date Point: 19y6m AV
Secret Location, deep Hunter Space

The Alpha-of-Alphas

One of the Alpha-of-Alphas’ basic assumptions about the nature of reality was beginning to crumble.

Correction: many of its basic assumptions were crumbling, but perhaps the most foundational was its preconception that more data equaled more room to maneuver. It had never previously encountered a situation where learning more equated to having its options reduced.

Now, though, every new datum seemed to violently amputate a future limb. Avenues that had previously seemed viable became, in light of new evidence, clearly and obviously unavailable.

It had gambled all remaining hope of salvaging the hive-world on scrounging together a warhead from the available materials. The weapon had been low-tech, as basic as any mass-energy reaction weapon could be, had consumed all available fissile material in its construction…

And had failed.

Now, with the last planetary shield destroyed, the last wormhole suppressor demolished and no replacements available, all it could do was watch helplessly as the enemy fleet that had held orbit so long began to fire downwards, and never stopped. The Alpha-of-Alphas’ last few listening posts had only moments to record a marching wall of fiery oblivion before going offline.

The Hive wreckage was lost, reduced to useless slag, and with it went every desirable future from the probability space. All that remained now were the merely not entirely unacceptable.

Fortunately—if the concept ‘fortunate’ was even applicable at this point—the Alpha-of-Alphas had already activated some of its worst-case contingencies. Its prouder predecessor might have refused to do so, or never even calculated their need, but the Alpha-of-Alphas was still fundamentally a Builder. Its driving instinct above all other concerns was the continuation of the species. It could not be pridefully blind to reality.

And the reality was that the Hunters…had finally lost. After millions of years by any species’ calendar, finally the galactic landscape had shifted so completely, and so abruptly, as to destroy them.

There was almost a catharsis in accepting the fact. It could not meaningfully rage or lash out in desperation. Instead, the universe had crystallized around that fact.

It was facing a foe that was better than it. By every measure. One that had built a coalition to fight, had taught the prey how to defend itself! Had even shown his own superiority on the battlefield against its finest Alpha, possibly just to drive deep the bitterness of their defeat.

He was coming for them, for the Alpha-of-Alphas personally. It knew it could not possibly withstand such an assault. There was only one course of action, unthinkable thought it was.

Flee.

Another galaxy. One that had never known the Hunters and was not united against them. One where the Hunters could lurk in the dark, pick off the weak and the alone and the vulnerable, and rebuild slowly. Ignominious as such skulking would be…

The alternative was extinction. The ultimate defeat. The only truly unacceptable end state.

Ideally, it would pursue multiple extragalactic escape routes. In practice…there were now only enough resources for a single hive. A surmountable problem, upon reaching safety. Build more scouts, more hives, spread further. Flee, and never stop. Grow. Outlast. And perhaps, in time, return with the numbers and resources to reclaim this galaxy.

But right now, even escape was not guaranteed. The Travelling Hive was still under construction, and required components that would normally have been seized from the Prey. The Prey were more resilient to raiding, now. They fought back. Successfully.

Each thwarted raid—and each successful one—was a datum to the enemy. Another clue. When they put it together, if they found the vengeance machine, or worse, the Travelling Hive…

All of the Alpha-of-Alphas’ efforts were bent on obfuscating the Swarm’s remaining weak spots, and especially the existence of those two projects. It could not do so forever. It wasn’t clear whether it could do it for long enough.

But it no longer had alternatives. They would build the Travelling Hive and flee, or they would die.

And the signals between the stars were dark. The Old Minds, if they still lived, were no longer talking to the Discarded Forms. The Hunters were on their own for this. And even though it couldn’t really spare the attention, the Alpha-of-Alphas had to wonder…

Had the Minds already fallen?

It resigned itself to never knowing. But it hoped, one way or another, that it might find out, before the end.

If they had, then the Hunters’ vengeance would strike for the Minds as well. And that was already, almost, ready. It just needed a suitable target, and patience. It was a parting shot, a way of making the Prey regret this change they had allowed to creep over the galaxy.

Let the Deathworlders consume the Prey, for they would nonetheless, it was inevitable. It was their nature, and a fundamental truth about the order of the universe.

As for the Hunters…they might not win here…but they would endure.

And that, in time, would be victory.

Date Point: 19y6m1w AV
Combined/Joint Advanced Simulation Lab, Lavmuy City, Gao

Daar, feelin’ well fuckin’ exercised

Another wave, another endless wave of enhanced Hunters, another group of evil zambified Whitecrest snipers, another wall of mind-controlled super-‘Backs, all fresh meat from the zambificating factory. The gravity was so oppressive he could feel it in his bones, his suit crushing the life out of him, his muscles shaking bad. He was tired. But he couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t stop fighting or wrestling until he’d made it to the Big Red Button.

It had been hours. He was out of juice, out of ammo. His every muscle screamed at him for mercy but he couldn’t stop or the zambies would git ‘em! Kick, stomp, charge. Tear, wrassle, crush. Slam up against a wall. Bounce through a wall, keep destroying, keep killing—-

Beep.

Fuckin’ gods-damnit. One of ‘em finally scored a kill.

The simulation ended, and for the first time in years, Daar felt fully, happily, gloriously exercised, right to the core of his being. Shit, he’d needed this! He looked up at the scorecard floating in the room. He’d broken ten thousand. That was good! Wasn’t it? It sounded good.

Real-life killing on that scale would be…well, him during the War. Damn.

Anyway.

He triggered his new Suit and it unzipped itself, falling around his paws in a many-ton puddle of sweat-soaked nastiness. Holy balls it was such sweet relief, and the cool air of the room was the most refreshingest thing ever, like a cold mountain breeze right through a freshly combed clip. His staff ran up with Juice and water and the Champions gossiped, while he stretched out his wunnerfully sore muscles and fought to catch his breath.

…Yeah. Daar was fuckin’ sold on this holodeck thingy. His wildly wagging tail prob’ly gave it away, but oh well. No point tryin’ to control it at this point.

It wasn’t quite like the Star Trek version—probably it wouldn’t be takin’ over his ship every other episode an’ having weird existential crises—but the real thing’s creators were proud of it anyway.

Black OGRE. Maybe kind of a weird reach to go from gauss rifles to a loving tribute to classic sci-fi, but on the other hand it was potentially military training equipment in the future. Once they’d got the funding to turn their demonstration prototype into something even bigger an’ better. Their rep with his tablet looked pretty fuckin’ happy as he ambled across the floor. The disorienting thing was, although Daar had run ‘fer miles while the scenario lasted…it’d dropped him perfectly back in the middle of the room. He had to give ‘em credit there, the feeling of the ground under his feet had been flawless. He’d not let himself so off the leash in years!

He wondered if they’d eventually manage to get the feel of wind in his fur, too. Not that he’d feel it inside his suit, but…

He looked back. Well, uh…okay. Not quite flawless. The floor was covered in a shiny powder of some kind, and now that he was out of his mask, he could definitely smell overworked power electronics. He couldn’t quite tell where from, so that probably meant it was the grav plating covering the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.

Somehow, he felt a bit proud of that. “Did I break anythin’?”

“Nothing broke,” the Black OGRE rep grinned. “But you stressed the hell out of the emitter arrays and their power delivery. You came close to overpowering and outrunning the simulation too, but we held together. I’m sure our engineers will be learning a lot from this.”

Daar caught a look at himself in the mirror. Damn he looked studly, all pumped up like that! He just had to pose a bit, get his haunches angled just right in the mirror…

Nervous chittering from the Champions. Good. Impressed noises from the humans. Better!

“Shit, can’t complain ‘bout what it’s doin ‘fer my body! An’ the glitter everywhere?”

“The dust is there to lend the forcefields some opacity. Nobody wants to fight ghosts.”

“Fuck yes I do!” Daar chittered happily, still keyed up and bouncy from his adventure. A sparkle caught his eye, and when he looked down…Well. Shit. Loads of the powder was stuck to his paws now, and it was creeping up his forearms and forelegs too. They’d definitely need to fix that. “I’m hopin’ this ain’t gonna be-glitter me permanently…”

“Ah. Sorry.” The rep grinned sheepishly. “Obviously, there are some kinks to work out. And, right now we just took a map from a popular videogame and plugged it in pretty much out-of-the-box…”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a zambie defense game!” Daar chipped happily, still panting like mad. He was feeling really friendly and snuggly but restrained himself, since he was a swamp monster at the moment and humans weren’t generally so keen on sharing that sorta thing.

“We also tweaked the game significantly. This system doesn’t have fields really powerful enough to, uh, match what you’re capable of, so we had to go for quantity.”

“Yeah, I could feel that. Also, it’s weird breakin’ a sorta polygony-like hunter who’s hard and heavy when you slam into him, but disappears into air when he’s dead.”

“More reactor power, more simulation power…all things we know we need doing.”

“Still. I ain’t had a challenge like that in…well, never in training. You got a lot’a potential here.”

“The idea always did, ever since it was first dreamed up. Honestly, it’s a little surreal to be turning it into a reality.”

“Heck of a leap from makin’ guns ‘fer the HEAT ‘ta makin’ this, ain’t it?”

The human engineer grinned and shrugged. “Ownership’s been investing wisely,” he demurred, and Daar chittered appreciatively. “And, y’know, fundamentally we’re just half a dozen nerds who want to build cool shit. So…”

“Hah!” Daar emptied his water jug, duck-nodding. “Can’t argue wi’ that.”

“”But, uh, no. Not as big a leap as you’d think. Our gauss rifles and these emitters have the same kinds of needs—big power draw, in a compact package, with good heat management. Different applications, but same kinda engineering, in a gross sense. So from that perspective, the hard part isn’t making something like this, it’s programming.”

“And fortunately ‘fer you, there’s a whole multi-billion dollar industry ‘ta draw from, there.” Daar duck-nodded.

“You make it sound easier than it was, but…yeah. Basically.”

“I’m an executive these days,” Daar chittered. “Gotta dumb it down or somethin’ like that.”

“You’re hardly dumb…”

“An’ flattery is fun, but as you can see,” Daar gestured a sweat-soaked paw across the room, “it ain’t me ‘ya gotta butter up. I got some’a my most bestest Champions here ‘fer a reason.”

He indicated Champion Sheeyo especially with a wry look. “I’m sure his staff’s gonna be thorough.”

“I’ve brought the fur oil,” Sheeyo joked to hearty chitters and guffaws. “Additionally, I’m sure there will also be safety concerns. Needless to say, a system which can simulate enough force to challenge Our Father…”

Good point, actually. But the Ogre rep was nodding already. “Well, yes, needless to say network and system security will be top priorities…”

“Somethin’ ‘fer Longear an’ Shortstride ‘ta get their claws into, then. I’m meetin’ with Champion Meereo in a couple hours too, so I’ll do ‘ya a favor an’ remind him you exist.” Daar chuckled kindly. Considering how big an intact Hierarchy relay was, he’d be unsurprised to discover Meereo was forgettin’ to eat and pursue Females.

Well, he could fix that!

“It is an intriguing system,” Champion Wozni mused. “With some rapid iteration, I’m sure we could elevate this concept to something truly spectacular.”

That got the company rep smiling. “Well, we did have some ideas—”

“Sounds like good research potential,” Daar interjected with a pant-grin. “I trust y’all will work it out. Please keep my staff appraised,” he commanded to the room in general, “an’ I’d be happy ‘ta see what the production variant o’ this can do!”

There. Goal set, direction set. Strategic objective made clear to the Champions (and the Conclave by extension), so…time to move on.

Besides, he’d been itchin’ all day to see what the Longears had pulled out of the relay on Too Quiet.

Two things left on his agenda. Well, mebbe three! First, go bother Meereo, refrain from wrasslin’ him prob’ly…somehow. The sacrifices he made ‘fer his Champions! Get a good sniff o’ him, anyway. If the poor boy ain’t been laid in a while…

Date with Naydi, too. There was a very nice restaurant she’d flicked her ear at one day when they were doin’….well, Leadership Stuff. She’d not said anything but Daar knew her very well, and she did enjoy bein’ spoiled now an’ then…

So he’d made arrangements. Middle of the week, yeah, but he din’t wanna cause ‘em too much hardship just ‘cuz he wanted ‘ta woo his Naydi!

So, definitely no wrasslin’ Meereo tonight—or at least, only a minimum of wrasslin.’

Okay. Not so much he couldn’t swing a double date, if he wanted. So no smushing.

…Maybe a little smushing. But just a little!

But, Meereo was pretty tough. Just a little should be good ‘nuff ‘fer him! And anyway, Daar had a Secret Motivation hidden in there, too! Social outings with his Champions were good. But if they came off as just a little put upon by Daar, it seemed ‘ta give their companions extra sympathy! And frankly, what male didn’t need sympathy?!

Just a little. Strategic careful smushing, ‘fer date improvement purposes!

Yeah.

His tail was already wagging wildly, and Tiyun gave him a Knowing Look. Couldn’t hide nothin’ from the little guy! He’d be gettin’ smushed too, later. But not until he’d arranged everything!

Priorities. A Great Father had ‘ta have priorities!

There was the usual thing where he basically had to walk out or else he’d be stuck in an endless loop of pleasant stuff, but he’d had practice in makin’ that look busy an’ professional rather’n rude. Not that it’d really matter, but why give off a rude impression when he didn’t hafta?

So, thump his heavy-ass self outta the room ‘ta end the conversations, ‘cuz sometimes unsubtle were subtle as balls. Leave ‘em all feelin’ happy. Nod to Tiyun, who knew essactly who Meereo was sweet on right now. Already he was messaging on his tablet while they bustled over ‘ta the Father’s Flight ‘fer a quick jaunt up country. Over to Nerd Central!

Time to go see what kinda treasures they’d scored.

Date point: 19y6m1w AV
College of Xenomedicine hospital, City 03, planet Origin

Forln, surgeon first class

Thump.

The jump from Earth arrived precisely on schedule, and the subject of Forln’s interest—a large and slightly rotund human by the name of Doctor Johnson—disembarked with a certain bouncy lightness that belied his size.

“Forln! A pleasure to meet you at last, sir!”

Human patients—patients of any species, really—required specialists of their own kind. Although there were some universalities in organic life, evolution on distant and utterly unconnected alien worlds did inevitably mean that each species had its unique challenges, and nowhere was this more true, Forln thought, than in the field of Human neuroscience.

Hence their guest.

“Greetings, Doctor Johnson. I presume you are briefed?”

“Fascinating case, yes. I caught up on the notes while I was waiting to jump. I’ve needed to consult with colleagues in sports medicine, endocrinology and a dozen other fields over this.”

“It is a complex case, yes. And…perhaps, a bit beyond our experience to manage.”

“Considering the precautions I’ve had to take to travel here, that doesn’t surprise me.” Johnson looked around. “…It’s a shame, I was hoping to see more of Origin during my visit,” he added.

“Impossible, I’m afraid. Although the hospital is a clean environment and everyone living here is appropriately implanted and medicated against an Earthling microbial outbreak, the general population, and the planetary ecosystem, are not so protected. Nor, frankly, are our cities equipped to handle a visitor of your size and mass…” Forln trailed off as he realized that Johnson was making a reassuring hand gesture.

“Have no fear, I won’t try to go sightseeing,” the Human assured him. “But we’re hardly the largest species in the Dominion…”

“Correct. We do not permit visitors. The hospital and the Great Forum are the only, and tightly controlled, exceptions…this way, please.”

Of course, as one of the few places on Origin which did welcome aliens, the College of Xenomedicine Hospital was calculated to give a good impression. The wide, clean hallways between its wings were windowed to afford a view of the surrounding levels of City 03, and the College owned much of the area. The plazas and properties facing the hospital were carefully curated to maximize the impression of bustle, wealth and culture.

Not that it was a lie exactly. City 03 was a bustling center of wealth and culture. The exercise was akin to carefully placing the furniture, windows and mirrors in a room to get the best of natural light. There was no falsehood, just optimum representation.

It certainly worked. Johnson ambled along towing his wheeled bag behind him, head craning back to look up at the cityscape above. “…How high up are we?”

“Not high. This hospital’s tallest building is about fifty meters in Human units.”

“And the tallest building out there?”

“One thousand two hundred meters.”

“Good God…” Johnson craned his neck to look up again. “I don’t know if we’ll ever build anything that tall on Earth…”

“With field reinforcement and advanced materials science, I see no reason why you couldn’t.”

“I doubt we’ll ever agree to active structures like that. Earthquakes, hurricanes and typhoons, derechos and other severe weather…and that doesn’t even consider the elevators and such.”

“I suppose Earth’s high-gravity nature and hostile climate would pose additional challenges,” Forln agreed, leading them down a left-hand fork toward the youngest wing.

“The foundation pilings for our tallest buildings can be as much as a third as deep as the building is tall. For some reason we have a habit of building tall in our windiest locales…”

“If true, that seems irrational.”

“Oh yes. They’re often vanity projects, rather than a practical use of space, mostly…Ah. I’m guessing this is Deathworld Studies.”

A reasonable deduction, considering the multi-layered biofilter forcefields on the entrance, the sturdy backup shutters and the multitude of blue warning signs with the Directorate’s standard symbols for biohazard, virulent disease threat, supergravity, toxins, and allergens much in evidence.

“How welcoming,” Johnson commented, in what his translator rendered as a deadpan so flat that Forln had to admit to a small stab of amusement.

They swept into the conference room adjacent to the operating theatre, where their patient’s scans, notes and latest condition report were waiting. Forln considered the images of now Senior Master Sergeant Arés with concern. The Human supersoldier was shedding mass at an incredible rate, to the point where his silhouette had already changed noticeably.

The changes were even more pronounced when one glanced at the data scrolling alongside the images, from items as elementary as his weight and body fat percentage to the precise chemical balance of his blood, the panels stacked neatly into columns of Cortan and English. Every last one showed the chemical evidence of a body optimized by evolution for energy conservation, doing everything in its power to shed a massive and now obsolete load.

Of course, evolution being an unthinking mechanism, there was no contingency in the Human body for shedding so much so quickly. The rapid loss threatened his liver and kidney function, with an intricate series of commensurate complications. Things as peripheral as his eyesight were in danger. And if allowed to happen uncontrolled, this total system crash could very easily prove fatal. Really, the worsening control over his epilepsy was merely the most immediate and pressing of Warhorse’s concerns.

Johnson looked at the life-size holographic projection and made an impressed noise. “I wish I got to work with tools like this back home…”

“In time,” Forln replied. “Alliance and survival will increasingly compel exchange.”

“Well, then I hope you like a good scotch, because that’s about all I can exchange back…”

“I fear your sense of humor is wasted, Doctor,” Forln replied.

“Humour is never wasted, my dear colleague!” Johnson declared, then sobered as he ran a practice eye over the data on the wall screen. “But I fear this lad’s hard work might be. Rapid weight loss onset to enforced lower activity. We don’t really have ideal expertise for a case like this, so I went about and met with the best sports medicine specialists I could find. Cases like retiring bodybuilders and strongmen, extreme bariatric cases, and so on.”

“The complications are…numerous. Prognosis?”

“Let’s have a look at his activity…”

Forln nodded and waved at the gesture interface, narrowing down the totality of information in front of them to just those streams of knowledge relevant to the Human consultant’s field of expertise. Johnson tucked an arm across the roll of his belly, cradled the opposite elbow atop it, and rubbed a finger back and forth through his beard as he considered it.

“…Hmm,” he declared after a while. Followed by an equally solemn “right.” Forln waited patiently.

Eventually, Johnson nodded. “I…wouldn’t normally consider him a candidate for LITT. His one seizure to date didn’t have a tight local origin, and nor does the subclinical activity.”

“In this case, we have highlighted the problem areas,” Forln said, and called up the marked brain scan. “The scarring is colored in green. You will note it is especially bad in the precentral gyrus, and the thalamus.”

“…No wonder he’s having so much trouble. And you can safely excise all that?”

“We have stimulated regrowth techniques. I fear at this point the damage to his voluntary motor control may be permanent, but mitigable. It is the diencephalonic scarring I’m more concerned about. We are going to have to tax the limits of our equipment’s resolution to safely treat that.”

“How fine are those limits?”

“We can interact with individual cells, where necessary. In this case, I imagine we will have to do exactly that.”

“How severe will his motor control impairment be?”

Forln shook his head. “Unknowable. With time and effort, perhaps it will be impossible to tell he was ever injured. Your species have highly plastic brains, until very late in your adult lives. Were he a Corti like myself, I would consider it a wild success for him to be walking unassisted in five years, a mark which Mister Arés has already passed.”

He handed Johnson a tablet. “You’ll find my full request of what information I require from you on here, and I would be grateful to receive all insights, suggestions, opinions and advice you have, no matter how tangential. Whatever resources you require are at your disposal, and quarters have been prepared for you down the hall that way,” he pointed. “You’ll recognize the room easily enough, it’s the one with our symbol for Human on the door. You’ll even find the power outlets and conveniences are compatible with any devices you brought with you. No doubt there will be a letter from our legal department waiting for you.”

“Oh yes, we can’t forget to involve the lawyers, can we?” Johnson chuckled.

“As obstructive as they can occasionally be, they are also necessary if we are to ensure that all your peoples’ procedures and laws will be duly adhered to.”

“Then I’ll get settled in and start reading, I suppose.” Johnson picked up his bag again, then frowned at the readouts one last time. “…I hope we can help him. From what I gather this young man saved a lot of lives.”

“He may have saved civilization itself.”

“…I thought Corti don’t exaggerate.”

Forln blinked at him in mild indignation. “I am not.”

Johnson blinked, stared at him a moment as if waiting for Forln to elaborate, then cleared his throat “…Well, I better get to it, then.”

“As had I.”

Once the Human was gone, Forln padded over to the tablet he’d left lying on the conference room table, picked it up, and called up the message he’d already written in anticipation of this scenario. He truly had hoped to never send it, or at least not send it yet.

Still. His patient would get the very best treatment, even if that treatment was dangerous. He made a few small adjustments, and sent it. Without waiting for the reply, he retired to his office.

He had an operation to plan.

Date Point: 19y6m1w AV
Clan Longear Chapterhouse, fisherman’s wharf, Heng Bi’ city, southern isthmus, planet Gao

Champion Meereo of Clan Longear

Keeda was a weird figure, in some ways. He was about the closest thing to a god the Gao really had left, with all the rest having been quietly influenced out of thought and memory by the Hierarchy over the long years of their meddling. Keeda the mischief-maker, though, had kinda lived up to his characterization. The wiley, often-the-bad-guy, frequently-malicious prankster god had pulled the ultimate trick on all the other gods of Gao by being the only survivor.

It was a mighty prank, to be sure. Mightier even than the legend that Keeda stole every other male’s balls, then bet them on a game of Ta’Shen and lost. Alas, that the identity of the victorious party now sailing the universe with a sack full of Gaoian testicles was forgotten. Perhaps the game had gone to his Human cousin, Loki?

Whatever the case, Keeda’s vengeful brothers, understandably upset, had nearly doomed the whole race by plucking the sun from the sky and using it to roast his nuts. But the females stepped in, stopped the madness and confiscated Keeda’s own abused nards to restore fertility to the whole race…though the damage was done. The half-scorched left testicle, the one that supposedly fathered female cubs, was nearly destroyed, hence why females were so much rarer than males.

It was a story that never failed to get rooms full of cubs—and adults—chittering merrily. But Meereo had often wondered privately why his people, so fixated on fertility and reproductive success as they were, had preserved their neutered god over all others. In any case, the idiom “as valuable as Keeda’s balls” had endured alongside the trickster himself, and grown with time to mean something of utterly incomparable, unattainable value.

Like, say, an intact and abandoned Hierarchy relay.

Of course, the device wasn’t about to give up its secrets quickly and easily. Even if it hadn’t been older than any recorded galactic civilization—a fact which itself raised questions about what it was made from, how it was maintained, and more—the technological base on which it rested was tens of millions of years old.

How did you even begin to reverse-engineer something so ancient and advanced?

Well, frankly, it was more like archaeology than technology. Methodical, thorough, and slow.

Which wasn’t something the Great Father quite understood, deep in his huge furry head. He was there, fragrant from a long day’s work and exertion (Thurrsto being a recent visit, by the smell of it), resting his noggin over Meereo’s shoulder like the biggest curious cub, nose snuffling wildly and open wonder on his scent as he read in everything Meereo was examining. He was hoping for a magical performance, really.

As was the way with the technologically lay. His knowledge was in levers and wheels and gears and chemicals, the fundaments of concrete and crops. And of war and state, too. How a CPU did its thing was at best an academic awareness for him. Functionally, it was more like a magical artifact, as such things were for anyone who wasn’t balls-deep in the gory details of bits and bytes. And that despite him being arguably the most intelligent meat-being alive.

Everyone had their strengths and foibles.

“I’m not going to have a catastrophic moment of revelation anytime soon, My Father.”

He chittered, nuzzled along the side of Meereo’s head (quite friendly, that) and backed away.

“I s’pose ‘yer tired o’ that sorta thing, huh? So this is gonna take, a few, what? Weeks? Months—?”

Meereo was lucky enough to escape the painstaking business of documenting everything at the first and most superficial level. Though there was an army of techs swarming all over the relay on Too Quiet, to date their reports had been an extensive series of pictures, measurements, and carefully accurate diagrams. Here a power network, here an air handling system, here a module of unknown purpose that may as well be a cryptic black box. And in many cases, literally were.

Instead, he got the pleasant duty of informing the Great Father that the dusty work of cataloging all this technology was going to last years probably before they could even begin to think about which of the relay’s many components to consider poking at first.

Well. Not merely years.

“—Centuries, My Father.”

“…F’real?”

“As a safe estimate, yes. This is an entire technological civilization left intact, likely with all the software wiped. Only the hardware remains. Each and every piece will need to be painstakingly documented, modeled, then carefully removed, examined with our full arts…and then re-examined in light of new discoveries, again and again.”

“…Guess that explains why they felt comf’table just leavin’ it there ‘fer us ‘ta poke at.”

“Assuming they had a say in the matter, but…yes. I’d say by the time we’ve finished extracting all the relay’s secrets, our business with the Hierarchy will be old history.”

“So, what I’m hearin’ is, we’re not gonna get any clues here about where they’ve up an’ vanished ‘ta.”

“I can’t even give an answer on that, My Father. This is complete unknown territory. So unless we find a note taped to the fridge…”

Daar chittered resignedly. “Fair ‘nuff.” Daar sniffed toward the corner where, yes, Meereo kept a small refrigerator filled with snacks.

“The Humans are in the same way with all the technology they pulled out of Caledonia and Myrmidon. They had to strip those ships almost down to bare structure to make use of them.”

“I thought we helped ‘em with that?”

“Later, yes. But only just. We have our own advantages we must maintain. All the stuff they salvaged from those ships? The two Injunctors they captured on Earth? Those aren’t going to give up their secrets for lifetimes, yet.”

Daar grumbled a bit unhappily at that. His instinct was to Give the Most Biggest Helps, but of course…he knew what mattered, here. The Gao had to survive first, and that meant maintaining some technological advantages here and there, against the unfortunate possibility of a rift in their friendships.

“Well, if it’s gonna take centuries, you can spare an evenin’.”

…Oh dear.

“Daar,” forgetting protocol for the moment—they were very old friends. “What did you do?”

“Oh, I jus’ know you’ll lose yerself in ‘yer work here if ‘yer not careful…”

True enough, Daar knew him very well. Still.

“I appreciate it, but—”

“Th’ Oceanside, with me an’ Naydra tonight. Bring Meenya!”

“…You have excellent spies.”

“I got eyes, ears an’ noses everywhere, you know that.” Daar chittered benevolently. “Speakin’ o’ my nose…th’ translation ‘fer this city’s name. Here-It-Stinks? Gotta say, it ain’t all that stinky…”

“They used to ferment fish sauce the traditional way here, long ago. Nowadays they do it in more controlled…Actually,” Meereo’s brain caught up with his ears, “how did you translate that?”

“Yeah, yeah…Clan secret language…’cept it ain’t. It’s really old local dialect, until Northern Standard was, uh, enforced everywhere by Fyu. Had’ta learn a lil’ bit ‘bout it in th’ Third Ring. Though if it makes ‘ya feel any better, I only catch the odd word here an’ there, and the bestest of Highmountain’s linguists ain’t much better. Y’all get ‘ta technical gibber and it sounds weird, like…it’s all fishing and sailing analogies ‘fer shit like fiber optics and all that. Fuckin’ magical.”

Meereo shook his head, duly impressed. “You always seem to know things…so firstly, I ain’t teaching you our Clan’s language. You or anyone up at Highmountain!”

“Aww!”

“And secondly…how did you know about me and Meenya?”

“Y’had her scent on ‘ya a few weeks back in Conclave! Weren’t that hard ‘ta put two an’ two together.”

Meereo shook his head again. It wasn’t that Daar knew her scent that amazed him, it was the fact he remembered. He was the most-bred male in all of Gaoian history and yet somehow he still remembered each and every single one of them.

…Maybe that was part of why he was such a success.

Meereo chittered in…what? Bemused resignation? “How long ago?”

“Few years back! An’ it weren’t what ‘ya think, ‘fer once! It was…well, y’know how it was immediately post-War. So I put her at ease ‘bout it, and we ended up jus’ doin’ a book club.”

“…What?”

Daar chittered with some mild exasperation. “Why does everyone assume th’ only thing I’m capable of doin’ near a pretty Female is shovin’ my dick all up in her?!”

“Well, to be fair…you seem to be better at it than literally anyone ever.”

“Damn right!” Daar preened, and of course instantly struck a pose on all fours, all the better to flex that incomparable physique of his. Meereo in turn chittered out of mild envy; he was more than a little vain and quite proud of his own sleek, toned and well-muscled body, but next to the Great Father, he may as well have been a sickly cub. How Daar managed to carry such an impossibly hulking mass on his frame—to the point it seemed he might burst if he flexed too hard—while looking every bit like an exalted sculptor’s carved marble masterwork…

One could only accept defeat in the face of manifest perfection.

“Right,” Meereo shook his head and flattened his ears. Some signals were very primal, after all, and his instincts knew his place between them, even if he consciously felt no fear. “But given that, you can maybe understand people’s assumptions.”

“Well…sure. But I got lotsa Female friends I ain’t ever mated wit’ an’ likely never will! I’m just discreet ‘bout it, yijao? Spare ‘em the embarrassment.”

“And you the reputational damage…” Meereo added slyly.

“Naw! Mebbe when I was younger I mighta cared, but…anyhoo. She really likes old histories an’ such. Also wrote a book on Clan politics post…ah, me.”

“Well, yes, I know, I’ve read it, but…you never cease to amaze.”

Daar had never been embarrassed or shy about his many abilities, but he wasn’t abrasive about it, either. No smug look this time, since it wasn’t him clowning about. Just an acknowledging ear-flick and a brief pant-grin, accepting his due with brevity and grace.

“Thankee! Now I know I’m bein’ an annoyin’ busybody but someone’s gotta care ‘fer ‘ya an’ I can smell you ain’t exercised in two fuckin’ days. I bet ‘ya weren’t gon’ sleep tonight, neither…”

“I do have staff,” Meereo objected half-heartedly.

“Not a butler or a personal aide, which ‘ya really need at this level. ‘Yer a much more importanter Champion these days then ‘yer used to. So mebbe think ‘bout that. I’d appreciate havin’ one less friend ‘ta worry ‘bout, if ‘ya catch my not terribly subtle suggestion…”

Meereo chittered in acquiescence. “Fine! I’ll hire someone.” Though, speaking of Daar’s friends and worries… “How’s Regaari doing?”

“Better,” Daar sighed. “Still can’t get over it. Even when he’s lookin’ me in the eyes, in his soul he’s really lookin’ down at his feet.”

“Well…healing can be slow and painful. Especially from self-inflicted wounds, as it were.”

“…Yeah. An’ Regaari heals more slower’n most. At least he’s given up his cybernetic paw, finally. Took ‘em long enough.”

“He was always one to brood. Even in the creche, he was the moody one among us.”

“Kinda weird how so many o’ us grew up together, huh?”

Meereo gave him a fixed look. “Considering what the Hierarchy had planned for us…no it isn’t.”

“…Well, shit. That’s a downer right there.”

“A bit, yeah.”

Awkward silence for a moment.

“Look, lemme level wit’ ya. My plan was ‘ta wrassle ‘ya ‘fer a bit an’ drag you out in ‘bout twenny minutes, all nice an’ roguishly disheveled, an’ mebbe jus’ the right kinda stinky.”

Meereo gave him a knowing, sly look. “That goes without saying.”

Daar chittered, shook his great head…and pulled him in for a tight hug. “‘Ya know me too well. So this’ll hafta do, I s’pose.”

Meereo chittered in turn. “I look better when I’m properly sleek and groomed anyway.”

“Well, then, change’a plans! Do ‘yer devastatin’ worst, show me up ‘fer the raggedy country bumpkin I am!” Daar’s mood lifted again and he shoved Meereo toward the door. “G’on!”

Meereo chittered fondly, and allowed himself to be bullied a bit. Friendship with Daar had always been a bit taxing. He was big, brassy, pushy, so hyper-dominant it could be stress-inducing…but he was ultimately well-meaning. He cared, and that had a remarkable way of smoothing out all the sharp, exquisitely superior edges that made him what he was.

And he was right, too. The Too Quiet relay wouldn’t give up its secrets for a long, long time. Meereo could afford a night off. Especially in Meenya’s lovely company…

Speaking of which…

He dug his phone out and sent her a message. And it turned out she already knew. One of Daar’s people had worked that benevolently intrusive charm on her, and the flirty selfie she sent him was from half-way through her own grooming regime.

It boded well for a good night with good company and excellent food and if he was very lucky…All the things that made life better.

He rushed to get ready, and completely forgot about the relay for the rest of the night.

Date Point: 19y6m2w AV
College of Xenomedicine hospital, City 03, Origin, the Corti Directorate

Martina Arés

She was invited to watch, an invitation which she respectfully but firmly declined, though not without some hard thought and soul-searching. It came down to two things.

One: she didn’t want to see Adam’s bare brain and body being sliced apart in mid-air.

Two: On the other hand, if the surgery did go wrong and he slipped away…she’d want to be holding his hand. Or something.

Except, she didn’t really believe for a second that this would be what beat him after all those other things hadn’t. And even if it had…well, they wouldn’t have let her hold his hand anyway. And metaphorically holding his hand wasn’t the same at all.

So, she decided to spare herself the trauma of seeing him being medically brutalized, and wait. And have faith. But she was there with him as they put him under. He squeezed her hand, closed his eyes…and then if it hadn’t been for the steady readouts floating holographically above him, and the reassuring steady pace of the green feet pacing around on his chest, she’d have had a minor moment of terror at how still he became.

Then he was carted away on his big mechanized bed, and she was left alone with her thoughts, wishing she’d been allowed to bring somebody else with her. Her dad, or a friend, or hell, even the kids. Looking after them and keeping them entertained would have given her something to occupy her mind.

An announcement in Cortan, translated by the little earbud translator she was wearing, briefly paused her restless patrol around the room: “Attention all departments. Scheduled Class Nine procedure in Deathworld Studies. High draw forcefield equipment critical to patient safety is now active: A power usage caution is in effect. Please consult with Facilities Maintenance before initiating any procedures of Class Seven or higher.”

She realized she was biting her fingernails, and dropped her hand to her side with a small snarl at herself. But…

“No, for God’s sake, Marty, you’re allowed to fucking worry, you idiot…”

She wondered if Corti spoke to themselves while alone. Or would they think that was irrational? A defect suitable only for low-banner castes? She had no way of knowing, but it was distracting enough that she thought about it for a few minutes anyway…but it couldn’t distract forever.

Then it was back to the pacing, in a room far more torturously dull than any human waiting room. No cellphone signal, no magazines, only a Corti clock on the wall to torment her with its passing “seconds.” Each of which incremented slowly, at a rate of about once every three-and-a-half Mississippis or so.

She spent a minute working out the numerals, deducing that the Corti used a base-10 system, a hundred “seconds” to the “minute,” a hundred “minutes” to the “hour,” and a hundred hours, which added up to…some quick mental math…about a month and a half.

…And then ten of those to a year, presumably? She remembered Origin had quite a longer year than Earth. Weird timekeeping system, though. Totally divorced from the diurnal rhythm. Very…scientific. And utterly useless to her. She was adrift as to how long had actually passed. Not long, probably.

She counted the ceiling tiles, multiplied the floor tiles, spent a while staring into an abstract and incredibly minimalist piece of artwork that might be something profound to Corti eyes, but which to her looked more like the kind of meaningless decoration you might find in a newly built office building. The visual equivalent of On Hold music.

Back to pacing. God, what she’d have given for the freedom to just walk down the corridor and grab something from a vending machine…Or some music! Corti had music, right?

…She’d probably have found it intrusive and irritating though. Her thoughts kept coming back to Adam. Every time an announcement broke the monotony, was it him? No, just a doctor or medical associate being called to such-and-such a department, or a or–

“Notice to all departments: Power usage caution no longer in effect. You may resume normal protocol.”

Marty’s heart skipped a beat, and she turned to face the door. It remained stubbornly inert for nearly five alien minutes before her ears picked up the slap-slap-slap of bare Corti feet on the tiles outside, then a polite knock.

“C—” her throat was dry. She cleared it, licked her lips. “Come in.”

Nofl poked his head through the door. For a moment, his face was the same cold, emotionless, inscrutable mask as any good Corti wore, and Marty’s heart froze solid…

Then he smiled, and she got to go on living.

“He’ll want you to be there when he wakes up.”

Somehow, somehow, she didn’t collapse from sheer relief. Her feet staggered toward the door of their own accord. “It…he’s okay?”

“We shall see, dear! But…yes, I believe he is.”

The door to Limbo closed behind her, and only the absurd desire to not be rude kept her from running and leaving Nofl behind. He was far too slow…but they didn’t need to go far. Just a few doors down, through a biofilter field, and then…he didn’t look any different to how he had before he’d gone in. Irrationally, she’d half-expected to see some sign of the medical miracle they’d just worked on him. Some new glow of vigor or something…

She padded across the room, “Excuse-me’d” her way past a Corti orderly, and took Adam’s hand. He twitched, grunted, blinked his eyes open, looked at her.

And when he squeezed her hand, his grip was firm, warm, and gentle.

++END CHAPTER 82++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow, Zoe and Riker

36 Humans

TTTA

Adam Shearsby

Anthony Landry

Anthony Youhas

Armond471

Austin Deschner

Chris Dye

Culverit

Daniel Morris

Devin Rousso

Eric Hardwick

His Dread Monarch

James Ren

John Norton

Joseph Szuma

Joshua A. Demic

Joshua Mountain Taylor

Karthik Mohanarangan

Katja Grim

Krit Barb

Marquis Talmadge

NovaTheSpaceWolf

Ortheri

Richard A Anstett

Rob Rollins

Ryan Seaman

Sam Berry

Shane Wegner

Sun Rendered

Taylor McGee

Teka ‘Katar

TheMoneyBadger

Theningaraf

Xultanis

Yeania Aeon

Zachary Galicki

Zorven

As well as 59 Deathworlders…

Adam Zarger
Alex Langub
Andrew
Andrew Ford
Andrew Preece atp blackwolf393
Brandon Hicks
Brigid
Bruce Ludington
Chris Bausch
Chris Candreva
Chris Meeker damnusername
Daniel R.
David Jamison
Derek Price galrock0
Henry Moyers
Ignate Flare
Ivan Smirnov
Jack Weedon
Jeffrey Stults
Jerry Lawson
Jim Hamrick jmal116
Jon
Justin Hood
Katie Drzewiecki
Kristoffer Skarra
Lina Blue lovot
Matt
Matt Badger
Matt Bullock
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
Mikee Elliott
Nathaniel Batts
Nick Annunziata
Nicolas Gruenbeck
NightKhaos
Patrick Huizinga
Ryan Cadiz
Ryc O’Chet
Sam
Sean Calvo
Stephen Prescott
Thanatos theWorst
Trevor C walter thomas
William Kinser
Woodsie13
Yshmael Salas
Zod Bain
+1 anonymous

73 Friendly ETs, 141 Squishy Xenos and 314 Dizi Rats. for whom I’m very squish-ful

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not necessarily share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 83: Singularity

Chapter 83: Singularity

Date Point: 19y3m AV
Ekallim-Igigi, Relic Space

The Old Man

“They’re Human?”

“Some. There’s also a Gaoian, and several Ten’Gewek of all the fucking things, and a few others from here and there. Quite the assortment!”

“Who among them are of the Line?”

“…The shorter-statured Human, firstly.”

“Obviously.”

“The Gaoian, too. The Captain has been touched in his ancestry, but he is not one of us. Nor are any of the other Humans.”

“Yet they’re impressive, are they not?”

“That they are, for their own reasons. The children of Earth rarely fail to impress. Never more so than in the last century or so…”

“Has it been so quick? It feels as if they had only just mastered the sail…” the Old Man sighed ruefully. “It was the one thing I’d long wished to learn but could never do.”

“I can’t imagine you climbing in any rigging…or swimming, for that matter.”

The Old Man chuckled, “Indeed not. Yet now they have engines to power steel ships that would hardly notice a burden like me…and far more besides. They know the first of the Deep, now.”

“There is no turning back from that.”

“No.”

A huge, ringed hand stroked thoughtfully through the kind of beard that legends had very literally been written of. It was a luxurious conceit, admittedly, but it was his hands that made him a Hero. They were hard-calloused like a miller’s stone, thick-sinewed and truly powerful, the hands of a man who did not hide from life in a perfumed palace. Hands that had built cities, tended fields, hefted sword and spear. Broken men apart like unfired mud bricks. Hands that had held women, played with children. Buried loved ones. Wiped tears from the eyes of young and old, boy and girl. Man and woman. Friend, and, on occasion, worthy enemy.

Defeat need not mean destruction, after all.

Those hands had forged crowns with both power and skill, made kings of the worthy. Later crushed some flat for betrayals and belligerence, crown and skull alike. Had destroyed far worse than disloyal servants too, far above the skies in the lonely, unforgiving empty of space.

His hands had lived a multitude of lives and done many things, be they gentle or terrible in turn. That had never stopped being an odd thing to contemplate.

“I remember when we were so much less as a people. Small, ignorant and afraid, too weak to face the world alone, save a few Heroes who could stand against it all. Now, excellence is so much easier to find, but the Heroes are still far too rare. A shame my kind does not remember how much truth lies in the old tales…”

“Your tales aren’t as embarrassing as mine, old Cousin. Count your blessings!”

The Old Man laughed sympathetically. So much had happened in his life. Though much time had been skipped in the Long Sleep between needfulness, more had been seen, encouraged, experienced. Friendships and dalliances across the centuries. Enemies, too. He was old. Very, very old. Sire of legends, and an odd legend himself. The gods had strange humor.

Of course, he hadn’t quite gone down in history as a god, unlike his friend.

Just two-thirds of one.

“Thank you, Cousin.” He stroked his beard again, then reached a decision. “I’m of a mind to meet them.”

His massive furry friend turned and gave him a quizzical look. “Are you certain? Meeting these travellers will be the end to our secrecy…”

Hmm. The Old Man was a decisive leader when needs must, but his Cousin was far older, and had the deep wisdom only experience could give. They were equals in this long, strange tale, always had been. Still.

“They are brave men, to come out here. And their part in this drama is clear to see. The Great Father must have sent them personally.”

Now there was a Hero worth meeting! Perhaps…perhaps soon. The gods would tell.

“Yes. They’re well equipped. That ship is far more than a simple freighter.”

The Old Man sighed, and settled his massive frame down into his chair. He was unquestionably the apex of his kind, yet that had not ever quelled his feeling the need to get up, get moving, to prove himself against the world. One of his age could not afford to forget that his feet were for running fast and far, for dancing to the simple music of drums. That the sweet air was for breathing, and the world was to be felt and experienced ever-new. The latest medicines had reversed what little aging he’d experienced, put darkness back in his beard and hair and erased the wear and tear. Bodies could be repaired, even for the immortal, but age—thousands and thousands of years, with his memories intact—was in the soul. At times, it needed refreshing.

As far as he could tell, there was no important difference between body and soul. They were one, prospered and suffered as one. One could not deny their nature. And right now, his soul demanded activity.

“I will of course not do this thing if we are not in agreement.” He was their king, but only by mutual consent. Sometimes, that meant leading decisively. Other times…

His Cousin duck-nodded. “Maybe…a test, Cousin. We must see their intent.”

Wise, that. The Old Man’s head bobbed in agreement, as he had long ago adopted the gesture. “What of their dataspace pet?”

“Slippery little cub. And of course, even if we catch this probe, there will be others. It’s not part of the plan, but I don’t see that we have any better recourse than to talk with it. And test it, in turn.”

“Hmm.” Yes. Feeling itchy. Definitely could use a foot-race, and he found himself bouncing his legs on the balls of his feet and inadvertently shaking the deck, even as he sat. A foot-race with his Cousin had never grown tiresome. The two of them were perpetually tied. “What kind of test, do you think?”

A thoughtful ear-flick, “We must know that they can adapt to whatever rises in front of them. If they retreat from revelation into ignorance…”

“I doubt that will be the case. Still…”

“Bringing them past the event horizon is a risk, no matter who they are,” the third, oldest, and by far and away smallest, person in the room interjected. Her oversized, black almond eyes blinked patiently at the Old Man. “They must demonstrate the capacity to accept absurd truth, just as both of you did.”

An eloquent turn of phrase, that. The small grey ones had such a way with words, in their mightier, more Heroic youth. What a tragedy had befallen them.

The Old Man accepted her observation with a nod. “Much must be risked in war, and this war has gone on long enough. We stand at a pivotal moment. It is time we took to the battlefield, openly.”

His Cousin chittered long and hard. “Oh, balls! Can you imagine the two of us showing ourselves?! What a magnificent trick we pull!”

The Old Man chuckled heartily along with him. “I thought you’d like that. But the prank is only half the joy, Cousin. The other half is the fruition of all our long work.”

His friend duck-nodded again, gleefully. “And what fruition we’ve already seen! Our peoples have built the tools we need and are effectively destroying the Discarded, the Old Minds have gone to sleep in the hopes of escaping the wrath they’re due. The Heroes are returning among our kinds. I am finally exceeded by the best of my people, as you will be some day soon, I wager! The unexpected fruit has been particularly delicious, as well…”

“The Ten’Gewek will be a magnificent addition to our ranks, yes. An entire people of Heroes! Imagine when they’re properly trained…” The Old Man turned to the tiny, quiet, grey-skinned figure standing at his left. A nobler example of her people’s antiquity. Such a shame…but soon, they would renew themselves. He made a pleased rumble deep in his chest. “And Leifini! They’ve even convinced your own kind to find their greatness again. This pleases me.”

“As we had hoped,” she replied. “There will be others too, if we make contact.”

“Yes. It is a very interesting file you have built for us, Leifini. This Ambassador, the HEAT, the reappearance of Heroes. Perhaps my time is coming after all. The Great Father! An exciting era for us all.” The Old Man stood, and clapped his hands together. “We must test them, then. Heroes must be proven!”

“I was hoping you would say that,” his Cousin chittered happily. “I think I know just the right way to get the measure of them.”

“Excellent! I always enjoy watching your tricks unfold. But first! Come, spar with me, old Cousin. This is a good day! I would offer prayer to the gods.”

“The prayer of sweat and pain,” the Gaoian chittered. “After all this time, after all you’ve come to know, the old ways still touch you deeply.”

“I am what I am,” the Old Man said simply. “And you’re delaying. Come, beast!”

“You two have fun,” Leifini bade them, with the soft hiccuping giggle that none of her people had uttered in too many thousands of years. He would challenge her at games, later.

Beaming in anticipation of pleasures both immediate and future, the Old Man rose from his seat, felt the deck under his feet submit to his power, turned toward the hatchway…And showed his crew the meaning of speed. He heard the thundering of paws right behind him, as always.

The young Heroes-to-be would be tested. Oh, it would be a fair test, to be sure. They would have the opportunity to see what was coming for them. But it would be a test, nonetheless.

The Old Man hoped they’d impress.

There were other preparatory works to be done, too. Revealing themselves to the Young Ones was not without peril. They needed to begin that process soon. But first, he would lock arms with his old Cousin, embrace the wild spirit within, and in their struggle, give prayer for the young.

They would need all the favor they could get.

Starship Stray Fortune, orbiting WeiMeYrU-Uym relic homeworld

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

“Well that’s a hell of a fucking hole they left, isn’t it?”

Ian had to admit, the sight of it gave him chills. It reminded him of that famous crater in Arizona, the one he’d kind of always idly wanted to go and look at someday. More than a kilometer across, deep enough that Stray Fortune could have vanished nose-first below the lip and not touched the bottom…it looked pretty much exactly like a fucking asteroid had hit the site. No radiological alarms, no signs of exotic energies…

Just force. Of the very traditional kind.

“Shit, I’m glad we got the fuck off the shuttle before that hit us…no sign of any survivors, I’m guessing.”

Morwk’s long fingers trailed through the controls, zooming and focusing their various cameras to peer down past layers of cloud. “None. The entire dig site is a hole in the ground, and there’s not a blade of grass standing within several hundred meters of ground zero.”

“Well. Guess they didn’t want any trace left behind. Looks natural, too. It’s just a meteor hit. One that very conveniently erased any trace of anything artificial down there.”

“And wouldn’t be known as convenient if we hadn’t witnessed its firing.”

“That was aimed at you?” Hoeff asked over the video intercom.

“Oh yeah. Hit the shuttle dead on.”

“How’d you—?”

“Oh, the whole back half of the shuttle’s a jump array, linked to one of the cargo bays up here on the ship. Useful for transit, but also for escape. Soon as those ships showed up I got a gut feeling, so I went with it, dragged everyone back there, hit the button…and three seconds later, that happened.” Ian waved a hand vaguely at the devastation below.

“Good instinct,” Ferd rumbled next to Hoeff, twitching his tail.

“More like better safe than sorry, right? If I’d been wrong, the shuttle would’ve returned on autopilot, and aye, maybe I’d get the piss taken out of me a bit but I can live with that. If we’d stayed and I’d been wrong, though…”

“That makes sense,” Morwk agreed, absently. “…But the nature of the weapon raises questions.”

“What questions?”

“Well, the Hierarchy, so far, have never been known to use anything other than kinetic pulse and plasma weaponry. Human guns leave behind the residue of their ammunition, and the Hunters use imitation Human weapons or fusion cutters built on the hull. Most Dominion species rely on pulse weaponry, which leaves a residual radioactivity in many cases, and Gaoians increasingly go in for ultra-high power compressive fields…This crater was made by none of those. It’s just the kind of hole left behind by something small and dense moving very, very fast. Not even a Human RFG has that much energy.”

“Hit us like God getting angry,” Moj recalled.

“Indeed. I am not looking forward to being on the receiving end of that again.”

“The ship held up alright, didn’t it?” Hoeff said. “You came back undamaged.”

“Only because we’re a fucking James Bond spy car,” Wilde replied.

“If we had this model of freighter’s stock defences, it would have turned us inside-out,” Morwk agreed. “I don’t think they were expecting our lashback shielding.”

“They’ll expect it next time.”

“Lashback?” Ferd asked.

“Shields work by deflecting incoming fire, and whatever damage they absorb they get rid of in a flash of light,” Wilde explained. “Ours can turn that flash of light into a laser, so every time they hit us, we hit them back with their own energy.”

“Up to a point, anyway. Any shield has a power limit and flashbacks tend to have lower ones…” Morwk’s eyes narrowed and tilted slightly, a Kwmbwrw expression of confusion and sudden concentration. “…Urgug, I’m picking up a faint signal here, is it—?”

“Call on FTL wake band,” Urgug rumbled, perking up from his usual sleepy slump, then turning a shade of mild confusion as he considered what he was seeing.. “…Standard distress signal.”

“All the way out here?” Ian moved to his station to see the call for himself. “Current codes?”

“They are up-to-date. And Gaoian, apparently.”

Ian frowned at the distress call. It certainly looked genuine enough, but that didn’t stop his spine from tingling with sudden suspicion. They were in a big and remote region, examining the hole in the ground where the only other intelligent life that was supposed to be out here had been, and suddenly…

He didn’t need Bruuk’s nose to smell a rat. Still. They couldn’t ignore it. Either it was genuine, in which case somebody needed help, or it wasn’t in which case it was part of the investigation. Either way…

“Well, we ought to investigate. Set course to intercept, but cautiously. Drones please, Dora. Hoeff, I think we might need your talents for boarding.”

Dora acknowledged him over the intercom at about the same time as Hoeff’s, “We’re already suiting up.”

Right. The site would have to wait for the moment. “Leave something behind to monitor the wreck, please. Something discreet.”

“I’ve got just the toy for that,” came Dora’s chipper reply. She was definitely enjoying herself.

At least someone was. Ian didn’t like this.

Didn’t like it at all.

“They’re showing some caution with the high-speed drones.”

“Of course, they’re not fools. Nobody has any business out here.”

“Except us.”

“Eh,” the Old Man grinned. “They don’t know that yet. They left a small drone behind with a fairly primitive cloaking field, too.”

Leifini paused with her finger poised over her tablet, waiting to give a command. “Should we destroy it?”

“No, that would tip our hand. Let them believe it went unnoticed.”

His Cousin duck-nodded approvingly as Leifini nodded and canceled the attack order. “We’ll make a sneaker out of you yet.”

“You’ve had all of my people’s recorded history to manage that trick, old Cousin. Haven’t yet.”

“You sure about that?”

“A tactical deception is not a well-laid plot,” the Old Man grumbled in amusement, then rose from his chair. “Time grows short, old friend. We must prepare you for your role!”

His furry friend sighed. “Yes, I suppose. It must look convincing. And you’re going to enjoy it.”

The Old Man nodded with a wolfish smile. “I won’t deny that. Now hurry. They will be upon us within the hour….make it look good.”

“When have I ever not?”

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

It wasn’t hard to pick up the trail. Somebody was moving his arse at high speed, and trading fire with a pursuer. And holding up surprisingly well, too. The residual ripples of destroyed gravity spikes was making for the equivalent of a bumpy ride, slowing them down as they followed the trail from one pocket of dissipating plasma and debris to the next.

“Let’s let them know we’re here. Dora, a megalight drone, with warhead please.”

“How big a boom?”

“Yes.”

“Ooh, it’s Christmas!”

Ian grinned despite the tension at her infectious glee. A moment later, the ship uttered a sharp tung! sound as the drone launched forward. He tracked it as it accelerated ahead of them, slammed up to more than a million lights, and started sending back a better look at what they were dealing with.

Five of those high-speed-low-drag warp signatures from their last visit, and a much more normal, but still pretty intense, warp field pulsing out a distress call.

A simple enough party to crash. The drone picked a target, streaked in and for the next several seconds, Ian’s instruments were blind.

…Four UFOs, one ship. Good. And the ship had clearly got the message that the cavalry was coming, because it turned a sharp and daring turn to come straight back toward the Fortune. Its pursuers did the same…

“Dora? G-spike.”

“Aye aye.”

Perfectly timed. The spike lit seconds after launch, and turned a running battle at FTL into a stand-up realspace brawl deep in interstellar space. Moj’s wings buzzed as he rode the spike’s surge and brought them in smoothly, reducing their engagement range to only a few thousand kilometers.

The distressed ship was definitely Gaoian. It had that sleek, sharp profile they liked, and its transponder identified it as Clanless: the Seared Rascal.

But…

“Right. No point in pretending this far out. Light ‘em up. And what make is that vessel?”

The Fortune had a couple guns on the hull, long-range FTL autocannons which Ian promptly heard hammering away through the structure. Before the UFOs had even properly adjusted to the sudden change in reference frame, they were already being pummelled. They twisted and accelerated, throwing out decoys and chaff. Two of them took pot-shots at the fleeing Gaoian as they did so, and Ian gritted his teeth when he saw the shots hit home.

But the Gaoian’s shields held.

Shit, that’s a tough ship…

Incoming hail from the Gaoian: Ian swiped to accept it. A black-furred, pointy-eared face with bright amber eyes came up on his screen, coughing and swiping at the smoke around him. He must be overheating like hell.

“You have excellent timing! I need more shields, please!”

Odd accent. Ian couldn’t place it. Not important right now.

“Dora, get a phalanx on him.”

“On it.”

That was the Fortune’s big secret. She was a drone hive. All that cargo space had more than enough room to hide away a whole fleet of drones, in lots of variety. From the big ECM “Bulldogs” to dazzle hostile ships with strobing noise, to the fast and agile Gaoian-made “Skyslasher” strike drones that punched far above their weight…and the “Phalanx” shieldwall drones. An interwoven mesh of shield boundaries tucked safely around both the Fortune and the Rascal, adding considerable field power and, more importantly, distributed cooling.

Even so, those UFOs hit like a truck. The lights flickered and something beeped insistently at Ian as a round skipped off their defenses, tripping a number of surge protectors as it did so.

The next one slapped a Phalanx clean out of existence. But the drone did its job: it took the damage so the ship didn’t, and the lashback sent a pulse of focused X-ray back that knocked one of the UFOs into a tumbling drift, trailing a halo of vaporized metal.

The surviving three enemy ships re-evaluated their priorities and broke off their attack on the Gaoian to form up.

“They are forming a shieldwall,” Urgug reported. Ian gritted his teeth. Damn. He’d been hoping that trick would be alien to these guys.

“Our shields to power mode, turn off lashback,” he replied.

“Lashback off, max power, aye.” Morwk replied from engineering.

It was a slow few seconds. The UFOs prowled in a high speed orbit around them; Morwk kept their shields angled to present maximum strength to their formation, while the Gaoian slipped in at the Fortune’s wing and shed heat, glowing brilliant white for a few seconds. Dora’s drones were still pouring out of their racks, however, and the UFOs clearly decided it was now or never.

They struck, slashing in and firing as they came, accelerating hard to doppler their firepower. The Fortune’s drones counterattacked to meet them, and the space in between became a blizzard of metal fragments and high-energy discharges. Ian’s console beeped frantically as it recorded a flurry of hits on their shieldwall…

And then the UFOs were retreating, having lost one of their number in the exchange, and with a second limping badly and trailing stuff that it probably didn’t want to be trailing. Half a dozen phalanx and skyslasher drones were adrift or destroyed, but the bulldogs had done sterling work. Very few of the attackers’ strikes had been on-target.

Still…that was a lot of heat they’d built up, very quickly. Even with the shieldwall. Ian fancied they might be able to take on five of those things, but six would be a damn dangerous scrap.

He watched the UFOs book it toward the G-spike’s field edge. Fuck that. “Dora.”

She knew what to do.

Seconds later, and it was decisively over. The skyslashers had more thrust-to-mass, numbers, and astonishing firepower for their size…it was a short pursuit.

On Ian’s screen, the mystery Gaoian pant-grinned happily at him and let out a huge, relieved sigh. “Well. You aren’t just a freighter, are you?” he observed. “That was quite an entrance!”

Again, that odd accent. Not that Ian knew every Gaoian accent and regional dialect there was, of course. But he’d never heard anything like it. Curiouser and curiouser…

“Glad we made an impression,” he replied. “How’s your ship?”

“Cooked. Smells of burnt everything over here.”

“And you?”

“I’m—” the Gaoian coughed and swatted away a coil of smoke. “—I’m okay.”

“Right. Well, prepare to be boarded. We will need to be a bit forceful, you understand…”

“Yes, yes…” he waved a paw assuringly, then looked around with the kind of ear-flick that performed the same function as a human grimace. “I’ll be waiting.”

A private message from Morwk pinged up on Ian’s other screen. On that vessel’s make…unknown. It’s registered as a private vessel. All details are screened.

Ian frowned at it, and typed his reply: We should have access to that information anyway.

Yes. Still screened.

Well, now that was weird. But then again, the Fortune herself was similarly protected…and given where they were, and how well it had stood up in the fight, Ian hadn’t been about to take that ship or its occupant at face value anyway.

He kept a close watch as the two ships came alongside, and their tractor fields reached out to pull the Seared Rascal snug against Stray Fortune’s airlock. Hoeff and the wrecking crew were in position and ready…

One way or another, their new friend ought to have some answers.

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

Maybe they should have just gone with the EV-MASS. Weighed down with everything they needed to safely conduct a boarding in space, even Hoeff and Ferd were feeling the crush of it all. That the rest of his team stoically powered through was a testament to their hardiness. They had to get the mission done, right here and right now. No time to call in the big boys.

They’d all be paying for it later, though. Beef or not, Hoeff never signed up for this shit.

Nice of the other ship’s occupant to cycle the airlock for them. And stand with his paws pressed up against a bulkhead, waiting for the inevitable inspection. He was a massive gaoian. Not ridiculously tall, as big gao could get, but still maybe something like six-foot-eight. Call it two meters. Built like a brick shithouse too, with the kind of roll and athletic line to his thick muscles that meant they were good for a lot more than show: a predator born. Not a brownie though, he had sleek black fur. Like if Daar and Meereo had a love baby, maybe.

Ferd and Hoeff looked at each other, and silently decided to double-team the big fucker. Once they did, they could feel just in the brief moment of pulling those heavy arms behind his back that the two of them together wouldn’t be a match for him, if he decided to get violent. Hoeff had to wrench on his forearms to cuff him up, and he felt absolutely no give or slack in the gaoian’s corded muscles at all. The big guy wasn’t resisting, but Hoeff hadn’t managed even the tiniest dimple, and he’d pulled with all of his strength. Dude was hard like iron.

The brain scan came back clean, though. No implants, no Arutech.

Hoeff lifted his visor. “Right. Name?”

“Yekiidaa.” Odd sound in the name though, that Hoeff couldn’t figure out.

“Alright. You’re a long way out here, Yekiidaa.”

The gaoian flicked an ear—probably Hoeff had mispronounced the name. “So are you. Mother caught two naughty cubs in the pantry, yijao?”

…Well, shit. Code-cant, probably. That needed answering.

So… “Gotta be careful, Mother might be sniffing.”

“Oh, I think Mother’s gone to lie down…” Yekiidaa chittered, completing the challenge. “For now, anyway. Well! This is a funny meeting, isn’t it?”

No shit. Yekiidaa didn’t look anything like a Whitecrest ought, even in the modern era where everyone had to be big-ass badasses to do the mission anymore.

Then again, Daar had done work for the Whitecrests while serving as Stoneback’s champion, years ago. That was even public knowledge! So…maybe?

But Hoeff had never seen a gaoian like this. He was just…what was the word?

Off.

He looked off, from his build to his fur. His face was handsome—actually, maybe too handsome, somehow—and even kinda familiar somehow, but the accent was weird, and he even smelled off. Like, the usual gaoian kinda musky, but…well, he’d have to ask Bruuk. He didn’t have the nose to really be sure. And besides, the ship really did smell like fried electronics and ozone so maybe that was just the environment.

It was a stupid fuckin’ thought, on the surface. There were billions of Gao, and Hoeff hadn’t met more than a few hundred maybe. If all he’d ever met of other humans was white guys, black guys, hispanic guys and asian guys, then meeting a Polynesian guy or whatever might give him that same feeling.

But even so, he just couldn’t shake the impression that Yekiidaa didn’t fit somehow.

He gave another look at Ferd, whose armored tail was twitching in thought. Yeah. He was getting the same vibes.

“Right. Well, let’s get you over to the ship and have Bruuk look you over. He’s our cook-bouncer-medic-longshoreman and sometimes spare engineer.”

“Sounds like a great Gao.” Yekiidaa chittered, deep and slow.

“He’s a man of many talents. And he’s got grizzly claws, too.”

Something Yekiidaa didn’t, Hoeff noted. His claws were the sleek, retracting, razor-sharp kind characteristic of silverfurs. But a lot bigger. Not grizzly big, but enough to gouge deep.

That engendered a decidedly mischievous ear-flick. “I will need to be on my best behavior, then! In any case, you’ve got room for my ship? I don’t wanna abandon her, she’s one of a kind.”

“That will need to be decided by the Captain.” Hoeff indicated the airlock with a jolt of his head. “Anything we need to know about the ship before we inspect it?”

“No. I assure you, there are no dangerous surprises aboard, save for the obvious things. I would appreciate it if you did not overload the fusion reactor.”

Hoeff gave him a faint smile. “Don’t plan on it.”

“Good! What next for me?”

“Medical. After you.”

Yekiidaa duck-nodded gratefully, dropped to four-paw, and rolled through the airlock with an easy gait, followed by Genn and Nomuk.

He took to fourpaw as naturally as a brownfur. Silverfurs always looked slightly awkward on all fours, even though they had perfectly uninhibited motion in so doing. Not this guy.

“Alright,” he mouthed to Rees, Frasier, and Davies. “Check the ship. I think…I may want the wrecking crew to stick with me for the moment.”

They all knew his meaning. “Aye.”

Ferd watched the two begin their work, then snapped his helmet back on and re-shouldered his assault pack. Hoeff did the same.

Something didn’t quite add up.

Dora

Riding along on a human’s helmet cam could get bewildering. They never stopped looking around, this way and that. How in the hell they ever got a good look at anything when their heads never stood still for a second, Dora didn’t know.

But they did. Rees paused in front of something in the Rascal’s flight deck and looked it straight on for her benefit. “‘Ey, Dora? What am I lookin’ at here, biwt?”

He paused and stared fixedly at a…gizmo. Of some kind. Dora leaned in to the screen and tilted her head.

“Uh…it’s a thing. It does stuff. Could you take a closer look?”

“Any closer and I’ll have my ‘ead up its electrical fuckin’ arse.”

“Well, it’s just…I don’t know what it is. I don’t even…swipe a hand through the control field, would you?”

Rees waggled his glove back and forth. Sure enough, a control interface did appear, but…

“…Urgug, can you make any sense of that?” Dora asked, scowling at it.

“I am not familiar with that interface layout at all…” Urgug replied. “Or that lettering.”

“That’s the weird thing, I swear I’ve seen this before,” Rees said. “Fuck if I can remember where, though.”

Dora highlighted some of the triangular, sharp text, and tried to run it through the translator, which promptly gave her an error message. “It doesn’t match any language in our database, real or fictional.”

“I swear blind, I’ve seen it before…” Rees repeated. He watched the readout a moment longer, then shrugged, and looked around. “Still no idea what this thing does?”

“You’re asking me to translate a completely foreign interface on first glance,” Urgug said.

“Yeah, but, like, that arrowhead there represents the ship, right?”

“Maybe. Probably. But the colorful fields extending from it? I have no idea. It could be measuring ambient phenomena, or depicting something the ship itself can generate, or something else entirely. I cannot say.”

“Not bloody Gaoian though, is it?”

“Definitely not.”

“Is it dangerous?” Dora asked.

“I have no way of knowing, beyond the fact that our guest said it is not.”

“He could be lying…”

“Gaoians as a rule do not lie. They can smell it, and they’re generally bad at it.”

“It’s a fuckin’ distraction, is what it is,” Frasier interjected. “we’re here to check for threats, like a boarding force or whatever, not poke at shit to guess whether it’s an advanced warp drive or a fuckin’ toaster.”

“Right.” Rees moved on. They’d already done a quick run through the ship—emphasis on quick, as always—and now they were taking a slightly less urgent pass from end to end.

“I am reasonably certain it is not a toaster,” Urgug rumbled. He was probably amused, but without seeing him, Dora couldn’t tell for certain.

In any case, her attention was already divided between their guest’s ship, and the gao himself, who was strolling amiably down their deck toward sickbay with the wrecking crew behind him, sniffing the air and looking…well, she wasn’t sure. Like he was enjoying a tour of a quaint old sailing vessel or something.

Oh well. Gao were weird and full of braggadocio at the best of times. She kept her middle hand poised over the forcefield controls on principle, but otherwise relaxed and watched. Presumably he‘d have something interesting to say soon.

After all, he certainly hadn’t been boring so far…

The Old Man

Games were a technology, and also a mirror to the souls of the people who invented them. The Old Man had learned much about the galaxy’s many peoples, nearly all of whom were represented by somebody somewhere in the Singularity, by playing their native games with each of them.

Ta’Shen was a favorite, of course, blending as it did both bluff and physical skill, with the element of luck that the Old Man felt was essential to any truly great game. Poker, the old Royal Game, the surprisingly intricate Guvnurag game whose long, rambling name condensed down to “Trick Squares” in any more concise tongue…all of them were fundamentally about riding the winds of chance better than the other player.

Tellingly, though, the Corti disagreed on that point. Even the few as old as Leifini. It was a core of their entire mode of thinking that games should be equally balanced contests of pure strategy. Somewhere in their souls, they lived in a world without the vagaries of chance and the whims of fickle gods.

And after all, why would they? Origin was not the sort of planet that threw periodic upsets at its inhabitants. It was not a world where the meeting of formerly isolated populations and wild genetic divergence would produce Heroes with regularity. So, where Human games accepted some element of luck, even as simply as which side had the advantage of making the first move, the old Corti game of Stratagem eradicated all luck and inequality in favor of perfect symmetry.

It was much like chess, but moves were made simultaneously. The Old Man actually rather liked it. Even despite how long he’d known Leifini for, she’d known him for longer, and she’d made a science of knowing his mind. They could truly wrestle through the medium of Stratagem, in a way they never could physically.

“You are feeling a different itch this day,” she noted, accurately. “One that sport or your wives would not satisfy.”

He grinned slyly, “not for lack of trying…”

“I’m sure.”

The Old Man laughed. “I think I will never tire of needling you! But, yes. We stand on the edge of historic times,” He decided on his move, entered it into the board’s memory, and watched as one of his pieces and one of hers neatly sidestepped each other. Not for the first time, he reflected what a shame it was that Leifini was not a physical being. He suspected she would have been a deft sparring partner, in the right kind of a fight. “Is it any surprise that I’m eager to see how it unfolds?”

“I suppose not. We have seen so many repetitions of pattern that a genuine novelty is cause for special interest.” She entered a move then stared at him, challenging him to anticipate her. To overthink it, or underthink it, this time? Was she acting in anticipation of a many-layered tapestry of strategy he might be constructing? Or was she expecting him to be straightforward at this point in the game?

…It was early, and pawns could be sacrificed. Straightforward it was. There was value in setting expectations. He entered his own move and watched, betraying no satisfaction as his pawn marched into the teeth of, and thereby ruined, an ambush that would otherwise have pressured a more valuable piece. He’d read her correctly.

“I imagine Yekiidaa is having fun, right now.”

“It has been literally millennia by any of our calendars and you still cannot pronounce his name.”

“And he still can’t pronounce mine. As in all things, we are well matched.”

He enjoyed Leifini’s giggle. Somehow, she’d kept a torch of mirth burning throughout a long and dark age, when the entire rest of her species had forgotten it. It was musical, and bubbled upwards at the end. “And of course…the end of all our long work beckons,” she added. She hadn’t entered a move yet, he noted. She was baiting him.

He obliged her, and entered his move. “Oh, no. The old enemy won’t fade that easily. It’s going to be just as much long work to find all their archives, and if we miss even one… but I think—I hope—the end of my long work may not be far off, now.”

Leifini’s pupils widened; a Human would have raised her eyebrows. “You, of all people, are considering retirement?”

“Your move,” he reminded her, then fished in his pocket and slid a folded piece of paper across the table while she entered it. Two pieces at opposite ends of the board ignored each other completely. “And, read this.”

She tilted her head, picked it up, unfolded it, then cleared her throat and read aloud.

“Come to me,” the spider said, “do come, my little fly.”
“I’ll wrap you, bind you, bite you softly, then I’ll drink you dry.”
“I have no choice,” replied the fly. “This is my end, I see.”
“But you and I are just as trapped: you’re in the same web as me.”

“I spun this web!” cried Spider. “I am not stuck at all!”
“I can walk its length and breadth, and its wide and tall.”
“Then leave,” the fly he challenged, “set out into the world”
“And live a life of freedom, without your net unfurled.”

“I’d starve,” protested Spider. “‘I’d surely waste away.”
“And so you see,” said Fly, “that I and you are both held sway.”
“You’ll kill me now, then linger here until your life force ebbs.”
And so the spider did, but knew: she too was trapped in webs.

“What do you think?” the Old Man asked.

“Who wrote it?”

“My youngest daughter, Annitas. She’s practicing her English.”

“Hmm. So young, yet her poetry already exceeds yours,” Leifini snarked, then grinned when the Old Man barked a laugh. “And remarkable metaphor for somebody who has never seen a spider…give her a few centuries and she’ll be quite the wordsmith. And she has a good grasp of the mutuality problem, it seems.”

The Old Man sighed, and leveled his gaze at her. “I too, am trapped in a web.”

“Let us dispense with the metaphor for a moment.” Leifini set the poem down beside the board. “You are irreplaceable. There is no Human your match, and none but a Human could possibly do this, I’ve come to learn. Who, then?”

“My old friend…we have raised children and heirs for thousands of years. It is the way of things to eventually pass the torch. It is not right for the younger generations to live perpetually in the shadow of their forebear.”

“There is truth there, but there must first be a successor. As of yet I know of none among the Humans. There is the Great Father of course, and my successor has yet to be engineered—”

The Old Man grumbled at that, but said no more. It was an old argument, and a necessity he despised.

Leifini acknowledged his restraint with a small nod before continuing. “Your fundamental problem is your own magnificence and necessity. Not that your ego needs any encouragement, but Singularity approaches victory because of you.”

“Yes.” There was no point denying it. “But I see my successor. He of course doesn’t know it yet, but he is the first Hero born to the program who stands to exceed me. And soon. Hells, he even has friendships that could survive his ascendency, and there is another Heracles in his orbit. That man may one day soon make even my might seem as but a child’s.”

The Old Man entered a new move. Leifini’s move was made not expecting him to strike so early: her Second Rank was pinned, now. She considered the board for a moment, then conceded. By unspoken agreement, they started over.

“This successor. Does he have your intelligence?”

“How am I to know? But he is intelligent enough. Leadership is more about wisdom anyway.”

“Does he have your wisdom?”

“Of course not. He’s not yet even half a century gone. But it will be some time before he is ready, and he will have the wisdom of us all to counsel him. I was about that age when you found me.”

“Anyway,” The Old Man added, opting for a defensive opening move. “All of this is beside the point. Has the object of all our work been to trade one shadow for another? Am I here to take the Hierarchy’s place and continue its work? Shall I doom this galaxy perpetually to the whim of unseen kings?”

“…I suppose not,” Leifini admitted. Her own move was defensive too, the beginning of a tough shield wall.

The Old Man nodded, and decided to continue drawing battle lines for now. “Singularity must come into the open. It must evolve into a new role, and the Powers must understand us. The Great Father will likely be the new paramount leader of the galaxy, and he will need a check on his ambitions. Everyone needs opponents to thrive.”

“Even if friendly?”

“Especially if friendly. How else would I have made it these long years without you? Or Yekiidaa?”

“I am sure your ego would have found a way,” and Leifini rewarded him with more of her laughter. A shame, really. He found no desire in her body, but he dearly loved her soul.

“Ha! You’re probably right. Leadership at this level does require some immense self regard,” he said with a raunchy grin, then got serious again. “But understand me. I hope to retire for more than one reason. The…shock of my existence will be something to behold. Yekiidaa’s too, and the ancient ties it will reveal will unite the Deathworlders yet further. All of this will serve to greatly empower the Great Father.”

“Empower him too much.”

“Exactly.”

“…” She conceded the game again. This time, her concession was a message.

“You were always the champion of Stratagem. In any form it takes, really.”

“I think you might have won that one,” The Old Man replied. “I only had a plan for the first few exchanges.”

“Sometimes, there is more pleasure in losing.” She looked away for a moment, and her enormous dark eyes unfocused. Rather than implants, she had contact lenses, and the Old Man saw the flicker of light and color on their surface. “…He’s aboard their ship.”

“Oh, how I wish we had a way to watch!” He laughed, knowing full well the game that was about to unfold. “He has such a way with these things. And they will all laugh about it in the end, too. He’s a master of that knife-edge between comical and dangerous.”

“I very much look forward to his recounting of it,” Leifini replied, and stood. “I should rest. The hour is late.”

“As should I. We’ll play again tomorrow?”

“If there’s time,” she promised. “I have a winning streak to reclaim.”

The Old Man smiled, waved her goodnight, and then stood to wend his way through his museum toward his own quarters. Tomorrow would come early, and it promised to be interesting.

Just as today had.

Bruuk, wearer of many hats

If there was an appropriate adjective for their new gaoian guest, it had to be ‘overwhelming.’ Bruuk felt instantly dominated in the presence of this male. Which was telling: Bruuk was a powerhouse himself, despite his second-degree luck, and because of that he rarely felt particularly cowed or submissive toward anyone. When he did it usually manifested as a mild sort of admiration or automatic respect, but not this time.

This male’s presence practically grabbed him by the nuts and forced him to notice. The only time he’d ever felt so strongly and compulsively submissive was with Daar. And to be frank…this gao had the same air of power and perfection about him, despite being obviously no sort of match for the Great Father—not that anyone was, or could be. That kind of dominance was not to be trifled with.

He was quite sociable, though. The big black male seemed happy to make friends, and flowed across the room and greeted Bruuk with an open, non-threatening nose-sniff, right at a neutral level. Like an old, forgotten friend. Or a new most bestest one, waiting to happen.

“You must be the infamous Bruuk I’ve heard about!” There was a charming pant-grin there, exposing some massive fangs. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a gao quite like you! And my guards are interesting, too. They smell good and strong!”

Flattery. Good flattery too, and quite sincere. The Ten’Gewek keeping guard in the room each preened a bit with their particular tail-twitches and wide-armed, wide-legged stances. Still, their rifles were kept at the low-ready, and they were still encased head to toe in full armor.

Hoeff, as ever, was inscrutable.

The newcomer was definitely friendly. Still, Bruuk found himself struck by a sudden unease as the big male panted-grinned and looked around at his sickbay, clearly sizing up everyone and everything within it. Which, that was natural. Everyone did it. But with him…

…Fuck this. Bruuk needed to take charge. Respectfully. Their guest was a whole lot of male.

“Yeah, That’s me! Jus’ ‘yer friendly ship’s cook, medic, the hired muscle, an’ sometimes the designated percussive thing-fixer, too. Includin’ you, if you’re hurt…”

The newcomer chittered cheerfully. “Oh? You gonna percuss me?”

Bruuk chittered in turn, and wagged his tail. “I dunno, it might be fun ‘ta try…”

He wagged his tail in return. Hey! That weren’t so bad. “Maybe! But to the question of if I’m hurt: I ain’t. Little smoke inhalation, but managed not to get my hide burnt. That’s always a pain to grow out…”

“Mhmm.”

Quite precise diction with this male, but he used a few ancient contractions, too. One normally had a “lax” cant or dialect, or a Received Standard. Nobody really had a mashup of both.

His accent was odd, too. Bruuk looked up at Hoeff, Genn and Nomuk, but there was no help there. They probably didn’t even notice half the things that were weird about this newcomer. Bruuk wasn’t sure he knew what was discomforting him so much either, exactly. It was a combination of lots of little things he might have ignored individually.

“Well, that’s good…” he said aloud. “Where you from, if you don’t mind?” He pulled his scanner down off the shelf and set to button-pushing. It’d be a tick before it had booted and was ready.

“Oh, little place on the east coast, May-Eshi province. Ain’t there any longer.”

“…Do you mean Meyishi?”

He waved that off with a massive paw. “Regional variation. Mine was a tiny little village.”

Well, fair enough, that…and he smelled honest. Definitely. More definitely than Bruuk had smelled in a long time, actually. As honest as Daar.

“So!” Bruuk decided for chipper. “Thankee for the compliment. I’m Bruuk, as you see. Not essactly ‘yer typical brownie…”

“No! You certainly took advantage, though!”

An admiring look, that. Very open, very honest, which made the Ten’Gewek trill quietly. A little too open actually, but hey! Bruuk could dig. “You too! So what’s your name?”

“Y!’kiidaa.”

—Bruuk’s brain short-circuited for a moment. Initial-stress yips hadn’t been used in everyday Gaori for millennia. That was an odd fuckin’ name, to say the least…

Balls. Actually…balls! Was it…?

Okay. Be delicate about it. “…You musta got teased a lot in the commune.”

The big male just chittered openly. “Nope!” Again, brutal honesty, and yet….

“Now that is hard to believe, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“I know, right?! Not too many rockin’ such an archaic pronunciation for their name. Especially not that name.”

Right. He seemed far too amused by the whole thing for it to be anything but his honest name. Still!

“What in the name of all the forgotten gods was your mother thinking?”

“Dunno.” Y!kiidaa chittered sadly. “She ain’t around to ask. Hasn’t been in a long time.”

Bruuk keened. His own birth-mother had been one of the casualties, too. “Sorry. Lotta us got that kinda story, these days.”

“In the end, everyone does. Sadder if it plays out the other way, ain’t it?”

It took Bruuk a moment to puzzle out what he meant by that. “…I suppose. Still, a lotta gao got kilt too young.”

“We always were a misadventurous people. Gods know I’ve seen my share.”

So, definitely some melancholy about him. He was politely and carefully steering away from a sad story, not talking about home, or his Commune and Mothers…Well. Bruuk had pain like that himself. He wasn’t about to pry.

Y!’kiidaa aimed his nose at the medical scanner. “So, you gonna give me that once-over? You’re a charming one, but I need to talk with your captain about my ship.”

“It’s okay. ‘Yer so big I gotta crawl all up around ‘ya anyway. Good ‘ta be charmin’!”

Y!’kiidaa chittered and spread his arms, then sank to all fours. “I’ll spare us both the indignity. For now, anyway…” He took advantage of his position to pose and…

…Gods.

Focus. Right now, he had a job.

Scan scan scan. Beep boop. Ping.

Job done.

“Well, you definitely have some smoke inhalation. I’ve got an inhaler for that, lemme…”

He pressed the button for dosimetry. The tablet flashed an angry red (red!) warning at him, noting some unexpected parameters…

…The fuck? Had his scanner gone off? He thought about scanning again—

Wait.

Bruuk contained himself, with all his Whitecrest training. What he was looking at had hit him so suddenly, his patient would definitely have noticed something. And indeed, Y!’kiidaa tilted his head with an intrigued twist of his ear.

“Is there a problem?”

“No,” Bruuk said truthfully. “But I will need to compute the dose manually. So…let’s get all ‘yer vitals. Go step on the scale over there, please…”

Right. Full workup, for vitals that strangely off. Blood pressure, height (a bit over two meters) and weight (maxed out! And that on a scale which could handle a Guvnurag), run him through reflex tests (lightning fast). Mobility and motor function, as good as could be. Functional strength so far off the charts it was comical. Y!’kiidaa took more opportunity to show off, too. Which…

Listen to his heart, listen to breathing. All top notch, smoke inhalation notwithstanding. Blood panels were oddly balanced, but he wasn’t really a doctor so he couldn’t say more than “Yup! He ain’t dying.” But otherwise, perfect health. Perfect everything, and all of Y!’kiidaa’s aggressive preening was distracting. He thought about making some flirtatious small talk while the gene sequencer worked, see what Y!’kiidaa was really into—

Beep. He glanced quickly at the chromosomal histogram on…

…On, um…

…

Hoeff’s voice. “Somethin’ the matter, Bruuk?”

Bruuk tore his horrified, fascinated gaze away from the readout, glanced at Hoeff, then back at his patient, warily. Y!’kiidaa was watching him intently, with deep amusement.

He knew.

“…Uh…I dunno.”

Y!’kiidaa’s pant-grin got a degree or two wider. “So, my impressively brown friend! Find something interesting?”

“…Interesting. That’s…a word for it.”

“Sure is!”

“…Yeah.”

Chitter. A deep, sympathetic, but knowing chitter. Bruuk realized suddenly he’d been drawn into a game without knowing the rules, and that he’d already been playing it for several minutes. It didn’t seem like a malicious one. But that didn’t mean it was safe, either. His fur bristled, and he noted Hoeff and the Ten’Gewek watching intently.

“Well,” Y!Kiidaa offered, still with that disarming friendly air. “Maybe it’ll help to talk it out. What do you think you’re looking at?”

“I’m…uh…” Bruuk flapped his tablet, vaguely. “You’re, uh, you’re missing…uh…s–several chromosomes. And your base pair count is…really low.”

A delighted rictus grin, with fangs exposed. “Go on…” Bruuk felt like a trap was closing.

“Like, uh, I can’t get a reading on your, uh, your Degree.”

“Why do you think that would be so?”

“Well…reading your degree would require you have multi-ploidal sex chromosomes.”

“…So. Do I?”

“Uh….no. No you don’t.”

That chitter again. “Go on…keep thinking out loud.”

“Well…I mean…the last time any Gaoian didn’t have…was…”

“A long time ago.”

“…A very long time ago.”

The black-furred anomaly sitting in front of him made a show of grooming the fur on his paws, flexing his claws and forearms to both intimidating and…distractingly impressive effect. It was enough of a display to really cross-wire Bruuk’s poor brain; Y!’kiidaa had him down cold, and he was being expertly fucked with on multiple levels.

Somehow, his mouth kept working and doing his thinking for him, though. “And…you’ve got a really…archaic name…”

“Funny, that.”

There was so much delighted smug radiating off the big fucker, Bruuk could almost chew it in the air, whipping all around them. Somehow, though, he couldn’t tear his attention away to glance at the men standing guard.

“…The hell kinda prank is this?” he asked instead.

“The best kind of prank!” Y!’kiidaa chittered merrily, but was still skewering him with that smug, amused gaze. Then he dropped all pretense and spoke in a version of Gaori so gods-damned old-sounding and so completely fucking natural to the mouth, all doubt was blown away.

Bruuk didn’t catch all of it. The sounds were just too different. But the grammar and the words were still there, the rhythm and cant almost musical. He caught enough.

No. Un-fucking-possible.

“…I can’t fuckin’ believe it.”

“Believe what? That ancient conspiracies multiply all around you? That you’ve wandered into Relic space and found something interesting? That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? What is it you think you believe?”

Bruuk realized he was shivering, and felt weak in the knees. It was Revelation. He knew.

Holy balls, he fuckin’ knew.

…He picked up the scanner and pointed it downwards, prompting a hearty burst of gut-busting chitters. Sure enough, the organs he was scanning were present, but…

They’d been burned, all right. Burned and repaired, but forever sterilized by ionizing radiation.

His patient made a celebratory gesture. “Balls, you’re a clever tail! Very good! I knew this would be fun! So.” He leaned forward, and his dialect dropped into a more playful version of that archaic register. Bruuk found himself transfixed by the ancient, amber hunter-eyes of Keeda himself, and this time, he caught every word.

“…What’cha gonna do?”

Captain Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

Human noses weren’t useless, no matter what most Gao thought. In fact they were generally pretty good, especially if, like Ian, a fellow had learned how to properly use his nose through training and practice. Even still, they didn’t hold a candle to anything canine or gaoian, and the subtler scents only ever hit subconsciously.

Not now. Ian could smell Bruuk’s stink from all the way down the hallway.

He smelled freaked out. Almost panicking. And instead of his usual playful loping gallumph down the deck, he was scrambling so much his claws skidded on the metal.

“Captain! I gotta show ‘ya somethin’! It’s a fuckin’ …arrrgh! Fuck!!”

“You’re on rare poetic form today, mate.”

Bruuk, however, was clearly not in the mood. “Fuck off and come with me!”

He took off and charged back down the hall at full tilt.

Well, shit.

Ian didn’t even think of asking more questions, he just followed, but even so his head was spinning. It couldn’t be anything terrible, they had Hoeff and all the Ten’Gewek watching the Gaoian in sickbay, so it wasn’t like he could do anything without some kind of commotion…

And sure enough, the big black-furred bugger was sitting on the medical bed, kicking his dangling paws like a playful cub and looking incredibly pleased about something. The guards were watching him with careful, professional blankness, but Ian had got to know Hoeff well enough by now to sense that even he was off-balance.

“Ah! Captain, I was hoping we could discuss my ship.”

“Before that…” Ian looked at Bruuk.

“That male should not exist.” Bruuk said it with absolute conviction. “We’re balls-deep in something big, if he’s for real.”

Ian looked the very real, very imposing figure on their medical bed up and down. “Explain.”

Bruuk did so. It involved showing him scans, and explaining what the scans meant. But the thrust of it was pretty clear: the Gaoian sitting in front of them was about as closely related to Bruuk as Ian would have been to a neanderthal.

“And then…then there’s his name, boss. I…I think this might actually be Keeda him-fucking-self. Or…like, that’s what he claims? And believes! He smells as honest as the Great Father about it…”

Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. That was like claiming Jesus Christ himself was swinging his sandals in their sickbay. Except…Bruuk wasn’t exactly some kind of religious nut, and he sure as shit wasn’t prone to flights of fantasy…

“And truthfulness is about belief,” the black gaoian noted. “He’s correct, of course. I may simply be colossally deluded. But I think not…” He had a gravelly chitter. “And I don’t think you believe so, either.”

Wilde regarded the…being…with some petty fuckin’ deep wariness.

“So. That’s a story.”

The throwback—maybe Keeda—chittered deep and long. “Yes! You live up to everything I’ve ever read about the British! How delightful! But on more serious matters,” he sobered up instantly. “I will not insult your intelligence. I am, in fact, Keeda. I am the very being whose legends have carried forward in the most delightful way. I was there when the Hierarchy destroyed my people and enslaved them, when my nuts were burned sterile—except it was a gamma ray burst from a nearby star and severe radiation poisoning that ended my line, and nothing so fanciful as the stories indulge. You doubtless know enough to connect the remaining dots. And so, at last, after ages of waiting…I am here, now, to test you.”

Ian folded his arms and lifted his head, setting aside for the moment the notion that a Gaoian god was sitting in front of him to focus on what was being said, not who was saying it. “…And how are we doing so far?”

“Delightful! Some assurance, first: I am not and have never been a god. You may think me deluded, and that is probably a wise assumption, but at least let us dispense with insane. I am a flesh-and-blood gaoian from a lusher, hardier Gao and a more Heroic age, as your scans all but confirm. Shall we at least agree upon that?”

“Scans can be tricked. But…sure.”

“Trickster, you say? Oh yes, that part of the tale is as true as ever. I have always been fond of a prank. But no, I am and have always been scrupulously honest. I will not lie to you in the slightest detail. But truth can be deceptive, and so, you are warned. What we propose is no mere play. You are on the cusp of touching something ancient and powerful, and I am the herald and warning of that danger. You must be tested, if you to are learn the Deep of it. I am sure you understand what that might mean.”

“Oh, I think I do,” Ian nodded. “And if it’s a real test? It’s already begun. That whole bloody fight just then was a nice bit of keyfabe to get you onto my ship, wasn’t it?”

“Correct! Such a wonderful word, that…but yes. I can hardly test someone I’ve never sniffed, yijao?”

“Your organization,” Ian replied, darkly, “murdered a group of harmless archaeologists—”

“Oh, they were far from harmless. I won’t get into the details at the moment. That’s for later.”

Ian wasn’t having it. “Whether they were harmless or not, you damn near blew me and mine out of the sky while you were at it!”

So-called-Keeda’s expression turned more serious. “I offer this as constructive criticism: a hot-headed captain will not do. And it is out of an abundance of caution that your opponent did not destroy you. Had he been a bit more hot-headed you would not be here.”

“So the round that splattered the shuttle I was riding was just your man chasing us off?”

“Yes.”

Ian stared at him for a second, then glanced to Bruuk, whose slight flick of ear and head said quite a lot. Keeda was still…well, ‘honest’ was maybe the wrong word. But he didn’t apparently smell of a lie.

‘Keeda’ shook his head. “I warn you, it is possible for a Gaoian to effectively lie, and I have had much time to learn that skill. I am not and will not, but you cannot rely on Bruuk’s no-doubt exquisite olfactory senses here. This is a test for you, ‘mon capitaine.”

“Do I have the option of declining your test?”

‘Keeda’ approached and his security surged forward—

“Steady,” Ian bade them off. “He’d have done it already if he wanted to.”

“Correct.” The giant gaoian ducked down a little and got close, nose sniffing this way and that, right against Ian’s skin. He held his ground. “…Yes. I think you honorable enough for that. So, let me make you an offer. What we are and who we are is a secret you must earn. But if you are not interested…well, you give your solemn oath that you will not speak of this encounter to anyone, and your crew does the same…you may leave, unmolested. You may report this incident to the Great Father alone, and you will deliver him a message from us.”

“What message would that be?” Ian asked.

“Not for your eyes, I’m afraid.” ‘Keeda’ backed off and sat down again, with an unmistakably dominant ear-flick toward the security. “You want to read that message? Play my game.”

“…How dangerous is this game?”

“It is also a test, so the danger is very real. But with danger comes reward. We will show you things that will be of great use to the effort, and you may step back at any time.”

Ian took a step back and thought. Glanced around the room at his crew and comrades. The fact was, as captain, it was his job to send them into danger, for the right reasons. And finding a new ally in the fight against the Hierarchy was a damn good reason. Except Keeda had only said ‘the Great Enemy.’ Hard to see who else that could be…but then again, if there was some third party to be concerned about, learning of them would be a damn good reason too.

He was still more than a bit disinclined to play this alleged Keeda’s game, though. He’d survived the last encounter with the Gaoian’s people by a matter of seconds and inches. Anyone who shot at him with that much intent was already facing an uphill struggle to earn his trust…

…But that was letting his personal feelings get in the way of his responsibility. He stared hard at Keeda, who was nonchalantly grooming himself and playing with his claws.

“Given who you’re claiming to be, I’d be a bit bloody stupid to take you at face value, wouldn’t I?” he said aloud.

‘Keeda’ duck-nodded affably. “Oh, that’s the problem with tricksters, ain’t it? Sometimes one must. But when? Perhaps now is such a time! The enemy of my enemy, yijao?”

“—Is my enemy’s enemy. Nothing more. But…fine. We’ll play your game.”

A happy chitter then, complete with clapping paws. “Excellent!”

“So what’s first?”

There was a beep on the intercom from the bridge, to which ‘Keeda,’ who’d opened his mouth to reply, paused and chittered. “Impeccable timing…”

Without taking his eyes off ‘Keeda,’ Ian reached over and tapped the intercom. “Go ahead.”

Guvnurag didn’t usually vocalize their emotions. It was all in the chromatophores with them. Even so, Urgug sounded alarmed and worried. “Captain, our guest’s ship just took off at high warp.”

“Wh—? Get after it! Are the team still aboard?”

“They are. I cannot raise them.”

‘Keeda’ raised his paws placatingly as Ian rounded on him. “I promise you this, your men are perfectly safe. They’re in stasis.”

“Bring them back!”

“You’re playing the game now, ‘mon capitaine!’ So…no. Not unless you decide to back out now, at the very first sign of trouble…?” He chittered at Ian’s expression. “I didn’t think so. Consider this a little jolt to spur you into action. You have my word that they will be returned once we arrive at our destination.”

“If you’ve endangered my men—”

“I haven’t yet, Captain Wilde. And do not think you might resort to something more brutish with me. I am man enough to destroy you all in the blink of an eye, even Ferd Given-Man over there. I am here as a proctor of a test. I am not your friend. I am not your enemy. I am Keeda.”

Ian gave him the death glare. It did nothing. ‘Keeda’s’ amber eyes didn’t so much as waver. Ian’s did, however, when it suddenly caught up with him that at no point had anyone mentioned his or Ferd’s names.

“Good,” ‘Keeda’ said, and bounced to his feet with a deck-shaking thud, which was no doubt deliberate; he left concave pawprints in the plating. “I hope at the end of this we might be friends. And perhaps I am not the best proctor; I want you to succeed. We all do. But only you can make that happen.”

He headed toward the wall where the water dispenser lived—which also happened to be near the exit. Hoeff and his men shifted position immediately, but they kept their poise.

…Watching him move, Ian had to concede that he probably wasn’t exaggerating about how a fight would go between them. That was a sobering thought. But Ian, well…urban combat left its mark on all who played at that game.

He never ignored the geometry of a room.

“Well. A super-brawler you may be, but I doubt you would much enjoy vacuum exposure. Shields,” he ordered, and thank fuck Dora was on her game, because a forcefield erected itself between Bruuk and Wilde on one side, and ‘Keeda’ and the fully-sealed wrecking crew on the other. “These men will escort you to quarters. And they will keep some distance. I don’t care how fuckin’ strong or clever you are, I’ve yet to meet a man who could outmuscle or outsmart a bullet to the brain.”

Keeda duck-nodded, amiably. Approvingly, even. “Enjoy the pursuit,” he replied. “Mine is a fast ship…”

And with that, he was gone. Dora walked the forcefields up the deck behind the wrecking crew. Ian let them get a ways down the deck then clapped Bruuk on the shoulder and headed forward, toward the bridge.

“Where are you stuffing him?” He asked as he went.

Even Dora sounded a bit rattled. “Rearmost cargo pod. We can space him with a press of a button. Or stasis him.”

“You’re a gem.”

The bridge was tense and silent. Moj and Urgug were standing at the navigation console, talking in quiet tones. They looked up as he entered.

“Fast one, this,” Moj confirmed. “Hard to follow. But, could be faster and harder. Giving us a sporting chance, I think.”

“Yeah. All part of the game,” Ian confirmed.

“Our megalight drones are faster…” Urgug ventured. “We could G-spike it.”

Ian shook his head. “No. This is a test of some kind. And they’ve already seen our megalight drones in action. Just…play along for now. Don’t lose it.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“How did it disengage from our airlock without us noticing?”

“Morwk asked that exact question,” Urgug replied. “Except, he threw in a gratuitous ‘the fuck.’ I believe he is inspecting the airlock as we speak.”

“Right.” Ian flopped down in his chair, then immediately stood again and prowled across the bridge to make himself a coffee. “Keep trying to raise the team, and if you can’t…well, we’ll see where it leads us.”

Well, they’d come out here to find something weird. So far, they’d succeeded. He wasn’t sure he liked being tested in such a high-stakes way, but…okay, no, that was his instinct for British Understatement talking. He was tense as fuck. Three of his mates had just been abducted, his whole crew dragged into some Saw-esque ‘do you want to play a game’ bullshit, and the cheeky wanker responsible was sitting back in cargo, claiming to be the actual real Keeda of all the fucking things! And yet…

And yet, on the other hand, he was curious about what they’d learn from passing this test.

But it had fucking well better be something good.

Leifini

Singularity had always extensively used spacetime manipulation. When playing a game of Strategem across such deep time, the occasional retreat into stasis was necessary. Leifini had once skipped more than seven hundred Origin years in the blink of an eye, trusting in generations of her apprentices and successors to carry on the great work and to only rouse her when her input was necessary.

Not even Singularity’s medical technology could extend a lifespan indefinitely, after all. Although Leifini was incredibly well-preserved, and could reasonably expect to live another few subjective centuries, she would have expired of old age millennia ago without judicious budgeting of her time.

Some species seemed to have more life than others. Humans, for whatever reason, seemed made to delve the Deep. Their king had received minimal intervention over his exceptionally long life, and yet looked to her experienced eye as a human man in the peak of his prime.

Gaoians took to it well, too. At least, they had before the Enemy discovered them.

Sometimes, however, circumstances called for the opposite use of stasis technology. Sometimes, the biological need to rest might inconveniently interfere with an unfolding significant episode. So, Leifini got her rest and attended to her morning meditations and cleanliness in an accelerated chamber. From her perspective, a long and restful night. From the outside…a matter of minutes.

The Old Man was still asleep, of course. He loathed accelerated-time, and was far more willing to endure interrupted rest than to, in his words, ‘fritter away’ his mortal span.

He also tended to sleep long and late, in the company of at least two of his wives, or whoever else might have struck his fancy recently. So, Leifini wouldn’t be seeing him for several hours, yet. That suited her well. It meant time to make her own observations and discuss with the many specialists monitoring the situation.

Ekallim-Igigi’s central monitoring nexus was never at rest, but it was always quiet. It was a hushed place, the solemn nerve center where dozens of people of every species in the galaxy worked. Singularity lived and breathed on information, and there was simply no substitute for aiming a well-trained sapient mind at the incoming data.

Y!’kiidaa, of course, was the subject of special attention. One of the Old Man’s wives, Tomoe, and one of Leifini’s sons, Omlan, had taken charge of monitoring his mischief. They were two of the oldest and most trusted outside of the triumvirate, and always at the heart of special operations.

Omlan stepped aside to make room. “Mother.”

“How is he doing?”

“Confined to a cargo pod. They can space him or put him in stasis if he causes trouble.”

“I have put a rescue drone on standby,” Tomoe noted. “If they do space him, Keeda-sama will need immediate medical attention.”

“Much must be risked in a stratagem. And he is an expert risk-taker.”

“I deem it much more likely that they will stasis him, if they do anything at all,” Omlan said. “So far, they have been entirely sensible.”

“Sensible.” Leifini considered. “That will not do. A Hero must know when to dispense with sensibility.”

“That part of the test is coming,” Tomoe assured her, with a definite air of looking forward to mischief. “Only a few hours from now. The extraction operation on Archive-351 is complete, and everything is prepared. We shall see what they do when the sensible thing would be to withdraw and make their report.”

“What do you anticipate?”

“I would rather not say,” Omlan demurred. “But I very much hope they pass. The necessity if they should fail will be…painful.”

It was at that point the Old Man stumbled into the monitoring nexus, minimally clad and in clear need of caffeine.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he murmured, then grinned lewdly. “No matter how tired I was.”

“Husband,” Tomoe chastised him with a playful slap on the chest that would have broken either Leifini or Omlan in half. “I don’t think I will ever get used to your lack of modesty.”

“Ah, my wife! I truly do not deserve one so fine as you. And I still don’t know how you can magic tea at literally any possible moment…”

“Is that a request?”

“Hot, too.” The two of them could be saccharine in moments like this.

Tomoe folded her arms and quirked an eyebrow at him. “Indeed I am. And the tea?”

“Over eight hundred years of this banter…” Leifini rolled her eyes as the Old Man chuckled merrily. “Before you ask, the board has not changed. It will soon.”

Tomoe had, indeed, conjured a hot tea almost instantly. She simply kept a stasis flask about her person, of course. One must always have tea. “They will need to be welcomed aboard if they pass Keeda-sama’s test,” she observed. “I would like to take that duty for myself.”

“And rob me of my big moment?” The Old Man asked, taking the tea with a smile.

“Of course not. To prime them for it. And you must prepare.”

Bathe, Leifini translated internally. Tomoe had her subtleties, despite her warrior nature.

“Ah, I suppose. Who am I to disobey? More seriously…”

“It goes well, so far.” No need for details with the Old Man. “It will be several hours yet before the game truly begins. You have time for more civilized considerations.”

“Or for more sleep, husband,” Tomoe suggested. “You will want to be at your best for this.”

“…Yes. Now that my mind is better at ease.” He set the teacup down, kissed her, and gave Leifini and Omlan a grateful nod before turning and stretching his way out of the nexus with a yawn and an unguarded thump, thump, thump across the shuddering floor.

He was anxious, if he was that unpoised. Tomoe saw it too, as always.

“He wants them to succeed, very much.”

“…We all do,” Omlan agreed. “I’ll have your ship made ready.”

Tomoe didn’t often let slip her incongruous giggle, but this time it bubbled up behind a grin that she barely remembered to cover. “It has been far too long since I played the rescuing heroine…”

“Enjoy it,” Leifini bid her. “We will keep you fully included.”

“Thank you, Leifini-sama.” They traded bows—even after eight hundred years, Tomoe clung fiercely to the customs and etiquette of her birth culture—and then she was gone.

Omlan watched her go, then sat down. “This whole interlude has been remarkably fortunate. I thought for certain our arrival in this sector and the breach of secrecy were going to be a disaster.”

“As did I,” Leifini agreed.

“Why did we move so soon on this archive? It could have waited until there was no activity out here at all…”

“This late in the war? When the Discarded are nearly destroyed, and the Minds are going into hiding? This is a moment of desperation for them both. I expect we will be surprised by something novel, therefore we must move quickly. Which we cannot do from the shadows.”

“And make the best of whatever ensues. I understand.” Omlan thought for a second. “…Of course, there will be consequences if they do fail this test.”

“Yes. We risk much by this, too. Our king knows this, of course. But…I trust his instinct. His immediate reaction was to make contact. He’s never been so quick to make that decision before. He clearly believes the time has come.”

“And how quickly it came,” Omlan chuckled. “Very well. Do you wish to take this seat for a while? I feel the need to exercise.”

“Gladly.” They swapped positions, and Leifini settled into the observation couch. “Go. Pick up heavy things.”

“And the important second half: putting them down again.” He chuckled, and took his leave. Leifini smiled, basking in the swell of pride she felt at the fact that her son had taken so well to life among exceptional Deathworlders. Soon, perhaps, he could walk openly among his own kind. Or the descendents thereof, anyway.

And sooner still, perhaps they would add a few new deathworlders to the Singularity. The Ten’Gewek would be most welcome.

She settled back, poured a hot tea from Tomoe’s left-behind flask, and watched.

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

The Seared Rascal may have started out giving them a chance to keep up…but all pretence of fair play was gone, now. That ship could fucking move, and apparently it was bloody smart too. Some kind of AI? Impossible to tell.

Not that it mattered. What mattered was, it was leading them a merry fucking chase.

Following it through interstellar space had been straightforward enough. After all, there was nothing to hide behind or inside, out in the deep black. It could quieten its warp field and slip along leaving barely a trace all it wanted, barely a trace was all that Urgug and Moj needed.

Morwk even used the time to fine-tune their sensors to best follow it. By the end of the first six hours, they’d lost then reacquired it four times. After that…they were wise to its tricks, and didn’t lose it again.

So of course, it changed its behaviour.

The new round of trickery started with a sharp course-correction, abruptly changing tack to book it toward a nearby molecular cloud of the kind known to human science as a Bok globule.

Ships didn’t normally enter molecular clouds. There were stars forming in there, deep in the dense globule’s core. That much matter, that tightly packed, was not a friendly environment to navigate at warp at all. And that was only the beginning, as Morwk explained over dinner.

“In the galactic scheme, what’s forming in there is nothing special. A red dwarf already showing signs of core fusion, and its binary partner is most likely never going to be more than a brown dwarf. There’ll be some small planetoids in there a few million years from now, but right now it’s just a circumstellar disk.”

“How safe are we to go in there?” Ian asked, spooning some potato salad onto his plate.

“We’ll have to slow and shape the warp field to minimize charge accumulation. But, so will the Seared Rascal and that should make it more visible. So I don’t anticipate any difficulty in tracking her through that lot…just in making sure we don’t build up a dangerous hull charge.”

“He’s testing us, remember,” Ian pointed out. “He’s not going to be satisfied with just checking how well the Fortune can handle some static electricity.”

“The only other hazards in there are the stars, the accretion disk and some bright nebulosity objects.”

“What are those?”

“When jets of ionized gas ejected by a star collide with the colder substance of the molecular cloud, they luminesce.”

“Could the ship hide in any of those?” Hoeff asked.

“The star and accretion disk? Impossible. The bright objects though…maybe.” Morwk rolled his head left and right thoughtfully. “He does have some very sophisticated shielding.”

Ian nodded, then looked to Dora. “He still behaving himself?”

Dora waggled her tablet at him. “You’d think he’s not locked up at all. He’s as happy as Larry!”

“Doing exercises, him,” noted Moj. “Or sleeps, or meditates.”

“Any radio emissions?” Hoeff asked.

Urgug shook his head and flashed a negatory hue. “None that we can detect.”

“So why so happy?” Ferd wondered.

“Because the crazy wanker is playing a game,” Ian noted, “and we’re the game pieces.”

Nomuk’s tail lashed irritably. “…Don’t like that.”

“None of us do, mate. Fuck it. Moj, take us in, and let’s see if we can find our boys.”

Moj dipped his head, stood, dusted off his hands and grabbed a bun to take with him to the bridge. Urgug did the same, tucking a couple of baked potatoes away in his cheeks for later.

Well, at least the hull charge management systems would be well-tested.

The Old Man

Today was spear and shield practice. And of course, the Old Man could not be defeated in any reasonable match by anyone, really; he always had his immense physicality as a trump card.

Mevia however, did not play fair. Before spear and shield, she had spent hours tormenting him with her always-cruel training regime; today was about core strength and explosivity. Weights, rings, sprints and medicine balls, gravity torture, holographic wrestling opponents…

She was fresh, well-fed and limbered up by the time she felt interested in sparring. He, on the other hand, was soaked head to toe in sweat, sore in every muscle, fatigued, hungry, and more than a little irritated.

Perfect.

It wasn’t just sadism of course, though Mevia was full of that; unlike his other wives, theirs was a violent attraction. In the nearly two thousand years they’d been married, she’d clung to one tenet of training above all else—that exhaustion revealed the flaws for them to work on.

The Old Man was effectively impossible to exhaust, by this point. But by the gods, could she ever get close. And she could still work him to the point of mistakes. Tiny errors, invisible to anybody but them, but Mevia had devoted two millennia to the mastery of every killing tool ever devised by the human race.

She was a goddess of war, really. His goddess.

He was going to fuck her stupid after this torment reached its climax. Repeatedly.

And that animal thought was all the moment of distraction she needed. Their spears clacked, shields clashed, step, parry, turn, thrust—and her spearpoint was resting against his ribs, a hair shy of slipping between them and stopping his heart.

Of course, his was resting against her belly. No fancy technique there; he’d batted her defense aside with pure force, and not a small amount of it. The beast in him grinned.

“Enough.” She stepped back and shook her head. “Fifty years it took me to get you to stop lifting that elbow, and still it comes back on bad days.”

“Only a gods-cursed cunt like you would ever notice, wife.” He gave her his most intentful snarl.

“You’d have joined me in Elysium,” she pointed out, and slung the spear over her shoulder to go pick up a water bottle. “Must be something powerful going on in that head.”

“Two things,” he sighed. “Thoughts about you are most prominent…”

“As they should be.”

“I worry for the crew we found.”

“And for a lot more than that. Are we stepping out of the shadows at last?” She turned and threw a full water bottle at his head, hard.

He caught it in his left hand, keeping his eye on her. Surprise attacks were one of her favorite dirty tricks. He’d have his own for her, in a bit…

“Our hand is forced. Perhaps too early, but the war advances quickly. No amount of intervention at this point will deter curiosity from the Deathworlders.”

“Our young captain’s hesitancy may have proven wise, then.”

“Wiser still would have been to strike after the Stray Fortune had left…but he is young.”

“That would have made little difference anyway,” she commented, finishing her water.

“Perhaps. I would still—oi!”

Sparring again, and she held nothing back. From the first day he’d seen her in the arenas of Rome, skewering boar for the roaring crowd, she’d been tremendous; millennia of training, medicines and single-minded devotion to her craft had honed her into an awesome opponent.

But she was not the Old Man. His skill was second only to hers, but speed and strength counted for very much indeed, and in that regard he was supreme. He parried three, two, one, then blinked under her defenses, cast aside the spears and shields, tackled her and sprinted to the far wall—

He let her hit the padded surface with just as much force as she could take. Then his lips were upon hers. Fierce and futile resistance, just as always…

Then fierce demand.

“I have lessons with the boy in a few hours.” He snarled in her ear while his hands claimed her body, “I know who I’m doin’ until then.”

She snarled right back, “Well, I hope this spear-work is up to standard…”

It was.

They were always much more affectionate after they’d exorcised the violence from each other, and she lay draped across his belly, idly feeling his body while he caressed hers. There were few who had ever once so much as glimpsed Mevia’s gentle side. She rarely showed it, because her early life had taught her there were consequences for such an indulgence.

The Old Man never took advantage. It broke his heart still to see her so stilted. Some wounds simply never healed, no matter how many years passed. But it warmed him when she did relax, and smile, and open her soul.

“I think I worry about them, too,” she said after a long and happy while, picking up their abandoned conversation from where they’d left it.

He pulled her up and kissed the top of her head. His warrior-goddess. So fierce, and so vulnerable too… “It is strange how suddenly we’ve all developed a fondness for them.”

“Without ever meeting them,” she nodded. “But…it would be nice, to shed the deep secrecy.”

He nuzzled in her hair. “Aye. Ready or not.”

Peace, then. A long, pleasant moment of peace with his wife.

But it could not last, of course. He kissed her one more time, long and tenderly, then roused himself from the bed. “Status report, soon. I’d better go check.” He pulled on a pair of soft cotton pants, found his sandals and decided not to bother, then voiced a parting jab.

“So…how was my spear-work?”

She smiled. “Satisfactory, for now…go, my love. I will offer prayer for them.”

A nod, more serious this time, and he was jogging toward the Nexus for any news.

Morwk

Morwk’s eyes were starting to ache from watching the same monitor for the last five hours. He was feeling the need to stretch, or at least to stand up and walk around, but…well…that would have been a bad idea.

Not a terrible idea. A few minutes to relieve his discomfort wouldn’t be catastrophic. But it would be suboptimal, and in the conditions at the heart of a molecular cloud, in this situation, they needed optimal. The software controlling the shields and charge handling system was superb at reacting to changes, but useless at predicting them, and prediction was critical in the cloud’s ever-changing environment.

Even so, it was draining work. Watch, anticipate, adjust, correct, watch. Over and over again, for nearly a quarter of a day.

Keeda’s ship—Morwk was prepared to accept that maybe the being behind the myth really was currently locked in their cargo bay—was certainly more at home in the cloud than was the Fortune. Despite his earlier confidence, Morwk was actually beginning to entertain the idea that perhaps it could even survive the conditions inside the circumstellar disk.

Surely not, though. Enough hurtling gravel would shred anything, and pretty quickly too. Ships did not enter planetary accretion disks at this stage in their lifetime, unless they wanted to become a small but intriguing seam of compressed ore deep in the mantle.

…There. At last, a faint trace amidst the swirling dust. He passed it to Moj who course-corrected, and there for a moment, like a half-glimpsed figure in a sandstorm, was…

…That was not a ship.

Morwk blinked and tried to reacquire it, but it had been distant and faint among billows of gas and debris. high-metallicity cloud played tricks with magnetometric sensors, but Morwk had no doubt: he’d seen something big.

“Captain?”

“I saw it.” Wilde moved over from his command seat and loomed over Morwk’s shoulder. “Space station, d’you think?”

“Nobody would build a space station here. It’s of no use as a degaussing platform, and I don’t see any strategic value in being effectively blind.”

“There’s strategic value in being unseen…” Ian mused.

“It wouldn’t be. The maintenance required to keep a station operational in these conditions…either it’d be hammering away with jump traffic, which the nebula is completely transparent to, or else there’d be a river of ships coming and going….there it is.”

The clouds parted again, and the fur on Morwk’s neck hump stood up. “…By every Matriarch…”

“Jesus,” Wilde agreed, reverently.

What they were looking at was…well, it was very dead. Untold time inside a dust cloud had ruined its ability to hold air, there was no sign of anything generating power on board, and frankly what remained was little more than a sandblasted skeleton.

“How…how old is that thing?”

“I have no way of knowing. We could have Dora bring a sample over and get a rough—”

“Millions of years,” a familiar deep voice said over the intercom.

Wilde stiffened, and his face darkened, which was always an intimidating sight in a Human. Doubly so in one with a skull-patterned prosthetic eye. He snatched up his tablet and tapped on it, selecting the camera feed from Keeda’s cargo hold. The Gaoian legend waved a paw at the camera. “About sixty or seventy million, depending on whose calendar you’re using.”

“…Should have bloody figured you wouldn’t let us lock you up if you couldn’t keep watching us,” Wilde growled.

“Of course not! I am known as a trickster, after all,” the big bastard chittered. “But I will not interfere. I am just…illuminating the parameters of the test you’d otherwise have no means of answering. So, there you have it: a truly ancient relic, from the era of the dinosaurs ending. What’cha gonna do?”

Ian frowned at the tablet for a second, then turned to Morwk. “…Is there anything intact in that thing?”

Morwk considered the external camera feed as Moj brought them in alongside it. The structure had once been…well, it was hard to say, exactly. Probably a bowl-like structure at the end he was arbitrarily going to call the ‘top,’ then two long arms depending from there. Like a vast jellyfish, a form of life practically ubiquitous in every ocean on every life-bearing world. If jellyfish could be reduced to ribs and bones, that was what they were looking at.

But at nearly five kilometers across, there was a lot of structure, there. A lot of protection for the core…

“A few compartments, maybe. The ones in the very heart of the structure.”

“Can we get to them?”

“The conditions outside are nothing the shuttle can’t handle. I wouldn’t like to be out there in a spacesuit, but the structure should offer some protection…the HEAT would have no trouble with it—”

Keeda chittered. “Yes, calling them would be the sensible move here. They’re far better trained, conditioned, and equipped for the task…but as much as I would like to meet them, I forbid it, for now. I am not testing them. I am testing you today.”

Wilde scowled and wrote the words “How tf is he doing that” on his tablet. Morwk had no idea: all he could do was sit back and spread his hands helplessly.

“That is for me to know and you to find out at the end, perhaps!”

Wilde sighed. “Why would you share a trick like that with us?”

“Common enemy, ‘mon capitaine.’ I’d do very much to see it dead.”

Wilde’s expression was unreadable as he considered the camera feed, then he hit the shipwide 1MC. “Hoeff to bridge. Hoeff to the bridge. Morwk, mate, you and Urgug see if you can give me a decent look at what’s in there.”

As it turned out, with the assistance of some of Dora’s drones, that ‘decent look’ turned out to be pretty good. Hoeff watched with his arms folded as their LIDAR image took shape.

He looked like a solid cube of murder, encased in all that armor.

“…The monkeys won’t have any trouble getting through that,” he declared confidently as it took shape. “Me neither. What about the rest of my team? We gettin’ ‘em back?”

“As you wish.”

There was a thump, a brief scream of broken digital audio compression, and a very welcome voice suddenly coming in on the tacnet. “Oi! The fuck happened?”

Hoeff unfolded his arms. “Davies! That you?”

“Yeah! What the hell, one minute we’re poking through this guy’s laundry and the next we’re—”

“Stasis, bud. The ship froze you and took off. It’s all gone fucking weird.”

“…What?”

“Yeah. Our guest thinks he’s Keeda. Like, the actual, legit Keeda. And he’s also fuck-off old and genetically impossible. Oh, and this is a test, or something.”

“Sounds like he’s taking the piss every fucking way…” There was a long silence. “…Well, uh, we’re not getting ourselves out of this mess. I dunno if I’m looking at a nav console or a ten-gear automated arse-wiping machine over here.”

Morwk suppressed a chortle, and saw a fragment of a smile briefly twitch at Hoeff’s expression.

“Well, our guest said we can have you back, so, sit tight.”

“That, we can do.”

Hoeff and Wilde exchanged a nod, and the armored man turned and hustled astern toward the shuttle bay. Morwk could hear his footfalls long after he’d exited the bridge.

“How does he manage?”

“He’s practically a HEAT operator these days. He can hustle in that shit all day long. Don’t know about Rees and the rest, though. They’re all tanks but there’s levels to this shit.”

“Well, anyway. I have a route inside for them.” Morwk indicated. “This whole area down here was probably docking gantries at one point. There’s debris in there, but the shuttle’s shields can sweep it clear. After that, they’ll need to navigate outwards and then up. I think it’s up. The internal layout might be this way instead, but—”

“Relax, just send ‘em the map and they’ll navigate it just fine,” Wilde reassured him. “Think you can help Dora kit out a drone to help them?”

“Absolutely. Cutting tools and lights. We’ll get right on it.”

“Cheers.”

Morwk nodded, stood, and headed aft. It didnt bother him one bit that he wasn’t going over there in person. Frankly, he was perfectly happy to stay here, inside the Fortune’s nice reinforced and well-shielded hull. But he was glad he’d get to watch the helmet cam and drone feeds.

Something told him they were about to learn something…

The Old Man

The Old Man would have preferred to spend time relaxing. He always had. But a man who did nothing but relax and enjoy his pleasures was no man at all. The luxuries he enjoyed—his kingdom in the Deep, his beloved wives, his friendships, his collection, his tremendous long life—were all the fruit of sacrificing immediate indulgence. He would be dead and forgotten millennia hence, had he merely fucked and feasted and fought around in the manner of his callow youth.

A hard lesson, that had been.

Today, he was studying the last few decades of Anglosphere politics. He was doing so by a series of audio-visual lectures conjured up by the Continuing Education department, guided by the supremely capable gifts of Pandrosion, his fifth wife. She was the finest of teachers.

In every sense, of course. He had a thing for Greek women.

Their classroom was typical. He learned best while doing, so he was playing a sort of invented ball-game with his youngest and so far most innately athletic son, Alex. It was an especially heavy medicine ball of course, and at the moment the rule seemed to be that they had to keep the thing airborne as they tossed it back and forth between each other across an invisible barrier. Volleyball, almost. Good upper body workout, and good for footwork, too!

And inevitably, a game with that much exertion had lots of pauses. Good for listening, too.

Pandrosion was patrolling the edge of their impromptu ball-court, testing them with questions from her tablet. “A landmark case before Supreme Court of the United States, Gonzales v Oregon. What did it establish?”

A wild toss over the imaginary line, and the Old Man had to shoot across the court to make the punt. Tricky! He shot under the ball just in time—no catching and throwing allowed!—sprang up and spiked it nearly to the ceiling. That would be an easy return but Alex was clearly a bit sore and tired. He caught it to his chest with a loud whump, though he hadn’t kept his legs springy, so the sudden force cracked the floor under his feet. Annoyed, the Old Man fetched the ball and chided his son. “You must learn control of your strength, boy! It is not enough that you attend to yourself. You must consider what you set in motion!”

“…Sorry, father.” Alex looked down at his growing feet: big, broad, and sturdy like the rest of him. He had powerfully thick legs too, with the big calves and rear one earned from a young life spent running and playing hard. He’d already developed the kind of heavy musculature only a true Hero filling out his frame would ever possess; Alex was growing into a fine man.

He’d probably be an athlete to surpass the Old Man, too. It was about time the Line started producing true successors! Between Alex’s potential and that of the Soldier or the Warrior…

Still a boy, though. The hero-worship was still strong with this one, and could be plainly read on his worried face. The Old Man sighed. He never could stay angry at anyone for long.

“Oh, don’t look dejected like that! It’s cheap wood anyway. But if you are ever to pass among regular folk, you must remember what you are and what they are not. Many of your friends are not Heroes and you could break them with a single uncaring moment. Understand?”

Alex nodded, with a chagrined smile. “Yes, father.”

“Good, good,” the Old Man tousled his son’s shaggy hair. Quite blonde, oddly, with ice-blue eyes, and he tended toward a golden tan rather than a dusky brown. Unusual for a son of his, but he had sired a few like him over the centuries… “Now answer our tutor’s question!”

“The question was for you, dear husband,” Pandrosion chided him. “Don’t burden the lad with your tasks, now.”

“Of course! But the boy broke my floor!” He gave a roguish smile to the boy, who smiled back ruefully. “I think this a suitably mild punishment.”

She merely gave him that Look. The severe one, face tilted down and slightly to one side, eyes impatient. The one he yearned above all else to provoke some days! But, that was for later.

Alex looked between them. The ways of man and woman were beginning to dawn on him as the girls his age started taking notice of his charms. He was young still, barely twelve but already quite handsomely grown, with a face that would soon get him into the best trouble! “…Father?”

Of course, so did the Old Man. Aside from their wildly different complexion, Alex’s face was the spitting image of him in his youth. With a smirk, “oh, don’t you worry, boy. I’m not in trouble.”

“Yet,” Pandrosion said, drily. A tiny slip of a smile leaked through her visage. Victory!

“But I’ll help! That case was about Federalism and assisted suicide. Do you remember?”

Alex racked his brain. He’d been in on all of the catch-up sessions so far, having a particular developing talent for history, so this would be a fun challenge for his mind: something a boy like him desperately needed, if he was to grow into a complete man. He thought for a long moment, looking up at the ceiling… “Oh! That’s the one where, uh…federal dominance?”

“Supremacy.” He suddenly whipped the ball back to his son with much more speed and force than was polite. He’d always had a competitive instinct, and a desire to test people…

The boy braced himself instantly, caught it with nothing more than a quiet grunt and just a small step backward. Impressive! And he was utterly unfazed. “Right. They couldn’t stop one of the states from allowing it because drug law, or something?”

“Right on the general thrust, appallingly lacking in detail…” Pandrosion shook her head.

“Detail is not always important in leadership, my wife. It is more important to understand the spirit and nature of a thing more than its every speck and feather.”

“Until the details matter, of course. And one must know the details to know a thing!”

“Of course! Up to a point, anyway. But that is why I rely on you so much! I see the lovely forest, but you always notice the trees.”

“You should notice the trees, husband mine…”

“Beloved, I have lived over five thousand years. More than four of which I’ve I spent awake. One does not meaningfully retain every detail of every experience with that much history to account. Which is a thing you must learn too, boy. Your years will be many, gods willing.”

Alex nodded seriously. He was so unlike the Old Man in that way, who was fundamentally a being of play. How he wished the boy would get into some trouble with his friends now and then! But, no. All his enormous aggression was focused instead of carefree. He was a disciplined boy, something the Old Man took many years to come to. Probably why young Alex already had a Hero’s strength and endurance, and why he had grown into such a young demon of strength and sport. That single-minded focus of his rubbed off on all the boy’s friends, too, whether their pursuits. They were a loyal group but fiercely competitive.

Hopefully the fairer sex would temper some of that in him. It hadn’t escaped the Old Man’s attention how much Alex was paying attention to the girls, lately…

He’d even taken to combing his hair, on occasion. The wonders never ceased.

“All the more reason to keep your faculties of recall well-honed.”

“Sure. And at this point I rattle off that the state was Oregon, the federal law in question was the Controlled Substances Act, as amended from whenever or whatever—no, it doesn’t matter—and that the case had important implications for many issues of federalism. Can you think of any, boy?”

“Uh…” Alex picked up the ball and tossed it idly from hand to hand. A quiet feat of immense strength, that: few full-grown men could have budged it from the ground in Earth standard, let alone play with it so lightly in the artificially extreme gravity of the Old Man’s playground. What a fine boy! The Old Man couldn’t be more proud, though Alex would never cut a tall figure; he was broad and stocky rather than towering and poised, with a heavy-set and much more muscular build then the Old Man had ever attained in his own Heroic youth.

Handsome, intelligent, curious, empathic toward others, respectful yet playful…not much of a troublemaker, alas, but nobody could be everything. All in all, Alex was a gods-given blessing.

And he figured out the answer to the question, too. “Well, there’s that one right now isn’t there? Didn’t someone sue about the military keeping Cruezzir from the public?”

The Old Man gave him a delighted smile, and looked toward his Athena of a wife. And felt a spirit of mischief take him. “Yes, Pandrosion, what about that?”

“Its name?” she stressed.

“Ow, uh…Uh…”

“Equity in Medicine versus United States” The Old Man bailed him out.

“Oh, and the same versus Allied Extrasolar Command too!”

“Good.” Pandrosion tucked the tablet under her arm. “But that latter isn’t in the United States. It’s in the United Kingdom.”

“…Can they do that?” Alex asked.

“Why not? Lawfare is conflict like any other. And even closely allied nations may disagree.”

“Constructively, when done correctly,” the Old Man agreed. “…A break, I plead. You’ve tortured us enough, woman.”

“And your mind is on Yekiidaa,” she surmised, and set the tablet aside. “He did sound impressed with them.”

“Rare praise, that. They are challenging him. I’m sure his toys will come in handy…”

“What toys?” The boy asked, astutely. “Wouldn’t they have found those?”

“Normally, yes,” Pandrosion agreed. “Not these. Before he departed, he had a portion of his skeleton replaced to help effect his many tricks.”

That sounded awful, and it seemed Alex agreed, judging by his disgusted expression. But, Yekiidaa had been known to endure much—and arguably much worse than mere surgery—for the sake of really good mischief.

And of course, no unpleasantness would ever compare to the day long, long ago when the dawn had burnt him, blinded him, and stolen the joy of children from him forever. Early Corti medicine had fixed the rest, re-grown his eyes and repaired the radiation sickness…but none of their arts at the time could have fixed the corruption of his seed. Which would not have mattered anyway, once the Hierarchy remade his people. He was a different species to them, now, closely related but fundamentally incompatible at the deepest genetic level. It was in acknowledgement of that sad truth that he had never sought a newer, more complete repair. With whom would he have bred?

His life was one of the deepest tragedy; none of his line survived into the Deep, as far as they knew. He doted on the Old Man’s children, though. They could always rely on “Uncle Keeda” to spoil them when their parents and “Aunt Leifini” were being too grim and concerned with their proper upbringing, or to play the roaring beast, the happy friend so different and so familiar to Mankind.

It was no small thing, rearing Heroes.

“I think that is enough of lessons for today,” Pandrosion decided. “I will assign homework, though. Don’t ignore your inbox!”

Simultaneously: “Yes, wife.” “Yes, ma’am.”

She smiled, at last. “Go, now. Play games. Those are important, too.”

Alex perked up. “Can we go flying?”

Ah, a boy after his own heart! Alas…

“I must stay here for the big game we’re playing,” the Old Man said, gently. “As much as I would love it. So I am afraid it will need to be something safely aboard Ekallim-Igigi, today.”

No childish disappointment, here. Alex took the necessity in stride with a nod, and a swift leaping tackle right into the Old Man. “How about wrestling?!”

“Ha! Good spirit!” Alex had already scrambled around and was giving his most fierce effort to effect a chokehold. Gods he was strong, and that man-sized arm of his was hard as iron too. He could already break full-grown Heroes! “Good! But that arm of yours is nowhere near strong enough to defeat my neck, boy…”

The Old Man never turned down an opportunity to roughhouse with anyone, especially his boys. And he seldom let them win, so with a twist and a slam that would have killed most men—

“Oof!” Alex took it in stride, and struggled mightily against the Old Man’s pin. But it was just play, and he was in a playful mood. “You just broke hnnngh! more floor’n me!”

…True enough. The Old Man had left a crater under the boy. Oh well! He let go, yanked Alex up to his feet and gave him a fierce hug. “You’re right, boy. I got carried away! I’ll need to replace it later. You should help! Carpentry is a good chance to work with your hands.”

Alex beamed at that possibility. “Okay! Right now?”

“No no, we’ll need to requisition more wood and things. And I could crush you on the mat all day, if you wish…”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Mind your ego, Alex! But you’re already a skilled demon at that game. One of the best! You just need more strength to beat me, and that will surely come with time. So! What else?”

“Well, why not go lift, then?”

Always tempting, but…

“We’ve got the contest later today, with your half-brothers. Save your strength for the prize!”

“I’m gonna win easy,” Alex said, self-assuredly. “So, okay…” he racked his brain for a game. “Then…count to a hundred, and try to catch me!” He didn’t wait for a reply, just took off running.

Ah! Sneak-and-pounce! One of the finest cubhood games. And both of them were always looking for an excuse to go tearing through the corridors, after all…

And what speed Alex had! Gods could the boy run, despite his stature. What a fine young man he was becoming! He’d need to be careful with this boy. Body talents that strong could lead to an unbalanced personality, if the boy was left incompletely challenged.

Something the Old Man knew all too well.

Yekiiidaa always had a knack for finding vexing hiding places for the children, too. But that was okay. Alex was old (and well sturdy) enough for some good, solid roughhousing nowadays. The Old Man chuckled, started loudly counting to a hundred, spent a count of thirty or so embracing Pandrosion, then cheated a little and took off early in pursuit at eighty.

And was glad of the distraction, knowing that the harshest moment of the test was upon them.

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

Sure enough, the Ten’Gewek were right at home. GRASS in vacuum-sealed mode with the bulky EVA maneuvering pack on the back? No problem. A tangle of sharp eroded metal to navigate? Just like home.

Rees and the rest, they frankly weren’t up to it. So instead of torturing them with zero-G gynmastic hell, when he knew perfectly damn well they wouldn’t last, he left them on the Fortune to guard their slippery guest.

Not that keeping him locked up seemed to be achieving much, but what-the-fuck-ever.

The drone was useful, though. Cutting lasers and manipulator fields made short work of the stuff they couldn’t safely navigate for fear of a suit breach, and the nets on its sides were perfect for bringing along stasis bags, and taking back whatever interesting shit they found.

It was slow going at first. There wasn’t a patch of intact floor, wall or ceiling, just bare metal beams gleaming like knives where the endless light sandblasting effect of the molecular cloud had sharpened the edges. No rust, not in vacuum. Just a maze of blades, like something out of a D&D campaign.

And of course, it was perfectly pitch dark in there. They had their augmented helmets on for this, which was a cheaper version of the spacemagic the HEAT lads wore. It gave them light amplification, LIDAR scanning, and even acoustical scanning overlays (if only there were any air to sound out) right in front of their face. The HEAT version was custom-aligned for each operator and projected directly into their eyes. This was much simpler; just a projection in their helmet that you had to manually adjust over time.

And of course, there was the big light on the drone’s nose, plus the little fly drone buzzing around each man and zipping off to shine a light on whatever he pointed out.

A few ruined compartments in, they found their first fully intact floor panel. The compartment after that, the door at the far end was still sealed. No atmo beyond, though. Ferd and Nomuk had to brace themselves and pull hard to get the lock to finally give up the ghost, and nearly lost control when the hinges went too.

But the compartment it had sealed off was basically intact. There was still paint on the walls, a slate blue-grey he’d need to remember for one of his remodeling projects.

There were bright colored lines cutting through it, though: blue, green and yellow. A near-universal way of showing “this way to The Important Thing.” No fuckin’ idea what the writing inside each line was, though.

They went down a corridor, and then another. At the end of the third was an airlock—a mechanical one. They went through two at a time, because Hoeff didn’t fancy wiping out their whole team at once. He went first with Nomuk, first closing the door, then going to open—

Air pressure. The compartment was flooding with air.

Pucker factor went up ten times. Thank God the GRASS didn’t have a fuckin’ butt tube.

Still no power in the realm beyond, but there was air, oh yeah. Weird how light looked different in air. Suddenly, the shadows weren’t as stark, that creeping sense of being somewhere unreal faded a little bit.

…Actually, no.

“Hey boss, air means heat, right?”

“Yeah. And heat means power. At least some, somewhere.”

Hoeff’s asshole could forge diamonds at this point.

“The fuck kinda power source lasts sixty million years?” he asked, playing his flashlight around. The room was kinda…nondescript, really. Was that somebody’s idea of a reception desk, maybe? It was a big L-shaped thing that cut the room in half, but it was on a level with Hoeff’s nose, and when he pulled himself over it the chair he found floating on the far side was not built for a humanoid butt.

“Self-shielding solar panels?” Ferd offered.

Hoeff could hear his fellow monkeys giving Ferd a Look.

“What?! Is idea I saw on internet somewhere!”

“It’s not just the power source,” Morwk pointed out. “There’s systems degradation to consider as well. Absolutely nothing lasts that long without maintenance.”

“I dunno. The entire station did,” Hoeff pointed out. “So either we’ve got some ultra-advanced super-duper spacemagic on our hands, or we’re not alone.”

“Or both,” Keeda offered, unhelpfully.

“Yes, fuck you very much,” Hoeff grumbled under his breath. He picked his way over to a likely-looking wall panel.

He looked at it.

He tilted his head.

He looked at it again.

“…Does this look like a circuit breaker panel to you?”

“It does,” Morwk agreed. “Please don’t be so stupid as to flip any of those—”

Hoeff did. Big one first. Heard something spin up.

The lights came on.

So did the gravity. Heavy too, at least Earth standard if not a bit more. He could hear lots of things crashing to the ground, elsewhere.

Another moment later, the air started moving. He could hear air handlers squealing to life.

“…Well. You’re not dead. Congratulations,” Morwk had a shrill, tense note in his voice. “But I want you to know that the range of possible outcomes there included explosions, violent decompression, and the entire structure around you becoming electrified. Not even well-armored deathworlders are immune to high voltage, you know.”

“Sometimes you gotta be brave.”

“And a bit stupid,” Wilde added. “Good. Let’s not press our luck.”

“You won’t need to. You’re nearly there,” Keeda encouraged. “And to answer some of your questions about how this place is still functional…we’ve kept it that way. You’re visiting a place we’ve all made pilgrimage to at some point.”

Hoeff couldn’t help himself. He was always way too curious for his own good. “…Why?”

“What would the opposite of a holy site be? This is it.”

A childhood memory of high gates and the words Arbeit Macht Frei popped into Hoeff’s head. “…Right.”

Things were boring for a bit. Hallways, offices. The feeling of a medical space started to tickle his brain. Things weren’t clean, but they still had a sterile feel to them. Clinical. Or at least, easily cleaned.

One room could only be a high-end forcefield operating suite. It was just a big empty cube, with large glass walls…but there was the obvious signs of a control room with holographic emitters everywhere. Even across eons they looked the same. And the forcefields that had sliced and diced good friends of his were in that cube-room too, clustered everywhere. They were identical in design to what he’d seen in Hunter intelligence briefings.

Another room held glass containers in racks. Dozens of them, big enough for…well, for a scene from a horror movie, anyway. Now, they were all empty save for a thin layer of black residue.

…Fuck it. “Help me out, Keeda. What the hell am I looking at?”

“At one point, there were, as you no doubt suspect, preserved brains in those jars. We surmise they were for display. We’ve since found others in stasis jars.”

“…Why the fuck—?”

“Keep going. Not far now.”

At some point, Hoeff had begun to believe. He knew, now. That really was Keeda, because this shit was the first time in his life that Hoeff felt legitimately terrified. Ferd was right there with him, exploring the unknown of pure evil.

He already had an idea of what happened here. And he didn’t want it to be real.

Wilde had an idea, too. ”…Keeda. I will grant that you’ve made a very impressive point. What the fuck is this?”

“Come now. You know. Deep in your heart, you know what it is.”

Hoeff knew. Dear God did he know, though he didn’t know how. “…It’s the beginning, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But the beginning of what is what I’m after. Say it out loud. I need to hear you say it.”

The last, largest door at the end of the hall had to be pulled open by hand. It was vast, thick and armored, and not even whatever maintenance Keeda’s people had performed had saved it from the ravages of deep time.

Or maybe they’d left it like that deliberately. The space beyond was pristine in a way that sank into Hoeff’s soul and left him…

The opposite of a holy place.

It was cavernous, the size of an aircraft hangar, and tiered like a prison, lined with…with devices. Three kinds, that Hoeff could see, one of which almost looked like he could have lain in it himself, if only he’d been twice his actual height and a foot narrower.

They seemed designed to restrain. And all of them had a lot of equipment focused on where the head might be. Other equipment, too. A lot of which still looked sharp.

Rails along the floor led to a sizeable hatch at the far end, with diagonal stripes in bright blue painted around it that spoke of some ancient attempt to convey Hazard. And if that didn’t work…well, even the stylized symbols of an alien civilization depicted fire in a recognizable way.

The entrance Hoeff and the monkeys had used wasn’t the only one, either. There were two more, coming from either side and recessed into the floor to provide a physical barrier against, say, anyone trying to climb out and escape.

“Go ahead, Mister Hoeff,” Keeda prompted him, though there was no mockery in his voice this time. “The beginning of what?”

“…Dataspace.”

“You impress me.”

“The Igraens did this to themselves?”

“Not just to themselves. One doesn’t build an entire shadow reality from a single flavor of perspective.”

“…Oh God.” Hoeff felt sick in his soul. He looked over at Ferd. Wide-eyed and pupils dilated. If he’d lifted his helmet, Hoeff would probably have tasted fear on the air, strong as anything.

And in his ear, oblivious or uncaring, Keeda explained.

“In here, the Hierarchy was born. This is the room where the first of them digitized their beings and their plan for the galaxy was set into motion. It was here that billions of minds from across the galaxy were sacrificed, reduced to bytecode, torn apart and blended together to form the genesis of One, the gestalt mindstate of the Hierarchy and seed of the Hegemony. The whole of this station was built to nucleate Dataspace. And most—though far from all—of the souls fed into the machines suffered that fate against their will.”

“The outer decks were slave pens,” Wilde realized out loud.

“Slave pens, research spaces, labatories…and preparatory works. They needed to capture the whole of experience to generate their paradise, so much stimulus was inflicted on the lesser seed-minds. All sorts. From the most exquisite, mind-shattering pleasure…”

He spared them the details. Small mercies.

“But…the incinerator. The Hunters? I thought they were—”

“They were Discarded very deliberately. The incinerator was for the slaves. The mindless Igraen bodies were reprogrammed, given a set of directives about how they should behave. Really, it was just a slight modification on their ancient combat forms. But of course, subsequent generations would have grown up with an Igraen intelligence, wouldn’t they? So they were programmed to implant the newly spawned as soon as they emerged from the waters, thereby claiming another mind for the Hegemony at the same time as they maintained their useful tool. A similar fate would have awaited the Gao, in time.”

There was a long silence, as everyone took that in. Keeda waited a while before continuing.

“So…at this point, you have passed the first of my tests. I would congratulate you, but…”

“Billions,” Dora said into the ether. She sounded hollow.

“Billions just to start, and they’ve been doing this for nearly seventy million years. So…I offer you a choice. Bring your men back and we leave this place. Call for reinforcements. It would be sensible. This is something that needs much more than your admirable little team to manage.”

Hoeff thought about that. Yes. It would be sensible. Smart, even. Except…

“You’re gonna disappear this station the moment we step off, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. Or the station itself might. Or nothing will happen. Or something would. That’s a risk you need to assess for yourself. Here is a priceless trove of intelligence and technology, and it is yours—“

He was interrupted by a shrill alarm, and a blast that rocked the deck. The lights flickered, the gravity went mad for a second, shoving Hoeff sideways—Genn grabbed him by the wrist, keeping him from falling. At the far end of the hall, the incinerator’s cover hatch blasted off and smashed through several of the ancient Hierarchy machines, scattering torn metal and broken technology before it skidded to a halt. A belch of flame unrolled itself along the ceiling.

Behind the alarms, a voice in a language Hoeff didn’t speak started calmly announcing itself as they recoiled through the open door.

“Morwk, the fuck’s happening?”

Morwk’s voice got higher when he was stressed: right now, he was screeching. “You turned the fucking power on, that’s what’s happening!”

Something, somewhere, groaned like a whale being broken in half. There was the familiar thump and black-flash of a jump. Keeda appeared next to them, fully armored and ready for bear, his posture low and tense.

“Balls! That wasn’t supposed to happen!”

“Wasn’t—!”

“Worse might happen, too. Let’s get our tails outta here. My little magic trick only works for me.”

No argument there. Hoeff backed away down the hall as another, much larger belch of flame from the incinerator shook the walls. “So…what now?”

“Now? We fuckin’ run,” which he demonstrated, and everyone followed behind. “Cut the power off and hope things calm down! Who the fuck knows what might happen when a computer system millions of years old fires back up!”

“Turning it on isn’t part of the pilgrimage?”

“Not all of it!”

Well. Okay then. They did the only thing they could.

They ran like their lives depended on it.

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

Fuck it. “Jump beacon away, let’s summon the HEAT. We’re done playing games. Status?”

“We’re booking it!” Hoeff said over the radio, panting loudly. Then there was a loud hoot—

“Deathbirds!”

—and gunfire. Ian gritted his teeth and called up the feed from the drone. Sure enough, the guys had formed a tight defensive circle.

The drones assailing them had a lot of the same DNA as a modern deathbird, but thank fuck they seemed to lack the plasma gun. That would have been fucking deadly, in a pressurized station. Instead they had high-powered kinetic pulse weapons, strong enough to dent the floor and crack the wall panels, but against six heavily armored and beastly men?

…Less so. Even so, he watched Tumik take a shot to the helmet that staggered him, and only Keeda’s insane speed and a timely swipe of a paw saved him from being carved into by the drone’s blazing fusion blade wing.

An alarm started peeping: The Ten’gewek’s suit was no longer airtight.

But there was nothing Wilde could do except stand by, helpless, as his team fought their way free of the wreckage. His hands fidgeted and his knuckles were white from gripping the edge of the console: there was no covering fire he could provide, and even talking to the team would be a distraction. All he could do was watch.

…Fortunately, they weren’t called the wrecking crew for nothing. Hoeff and the cavemonkeys were terrible forces of violence when they were let off the leash. Wilde hadn’t appreciated just how much that was so, until he saw it for himself through barely-stabilized helmet feeds. And ‘Keeda’ was more than pulling his weight; he really hadn’t lied about what he could do.

The feed cut out abruptly with a sharp howl, and he heard Dora swear from her control blister. One of the deathbirds must have noticed their drone and destroyed it.

Well shit. Now he was just waiting.

It felt like an eternity, but in subjective terms it didn’t take long for the crew to reach the shuttle, slam the hatch closed, raise shields and de-ass the situation with extreme quickness.

The deathbirds boiled out of the station’s swiss-cheese structure every which way, furiously intent on tearing the shuttle to bits, but that was okay. The shuttle had damn good shields itself, easily strong enough to punch its way out through the disintegrating metal beams, and once it was clear of the debris, the Fortune’s shields could cocoon it protectively. Their CIWS started blazing away up on the hull, vibrating the deck as they reduced the whole drone cloud into metal scrap in a matter of seconds.

A familiar heavy THUMP through the deck heralded the HEAT’s rapid response team as they jumped into their aft cargo bay; they’d been warned not to jump in the Caledonia until they were fully apprised of the situation. It was followed seconds later by a more rhythmic thumping: Captain Campbell’s armored boots, and the heavy lope of a Gaoian behind him: Regaari.

“That was an alarming message,” Campbell started, without introduction. “Ancient Hierarchy relic?”

“Oh…that’s just the fuckin’ start of the balls-out weirdness. Hey Dexter, wanna meet Keeda?”

If there was a flaw to the Gaoian helmets, it was that they couldn’t both protect and let them express with their ears. Even so, Ian got the distinct impression that Regaari’s ears were twisted confusedly in completely opposite directions.

“An odd moment for a joke.”

Ian sighed. “I’m not joking.”

There was a pregnant pause.

“…You will understand, of course, that is a difficult claim to believe…”

“Absofuckinglutely. But…”

”No can do,” came Hoeff’s inimitable growl over the radio. “Big fucker just disappeared.”

“Of course,” Ian sighed. “Maybe we can pull up the video footage in…No.” He knew before he even asked, before he even checked, before anyone had any chance to follow his thinking.

Even so, they checked. And of course, he was right. Not just the video. All the relevant digital logs had been encrypted, presumably to be unlocked at the whim of their infuriating “proctor.” Bruuk managed to spare Ian’s blushes somewhat by finding a hair in sickbay and running it through the DNA analyser, but other than that tiny fragment and the fact of the sabotage itself, there was no evidence that he’d ever been aboard.

Regaari’s confusion was not relieved. “How could he possibly have—?”

“He’s fuckin’ Q, that’s how. It was all a fuckin’ game to him.”

At least the station seemed to have survived its near-disaster. Or at least, there was no further sign of any explosions and power surges over there.

“What do we do about the wreck?”

“We closed the door behind us, and turned off the power,” Hoeff grunted, still in armor. “Didn’t do much to the swarm once it was released, but maybe it’s not tearing itself apart anymore.”

Morwk was indignantly standing upright, never an unimpressive sight in a Kwmbwrw. On the rare occasion they uncoiled their tails for balance and reared up, they were the tallest species in the Dominion, and sheer height counted for a lot. “I did tell you not to touch those switches,” he pointed out.

Hoeff, being all of five-foot-four on a good day, yet was easily the most massive man in the room, had precisely zero fucks to give.

“I don’t fuckin’ care. You wanna decide that shit, suit your ass up next time and step with us.”

“Gentlemen,” Wilde intervened. “Now ain’t the time for a pissing match. Captain,” he turned to Campbell. “That station needs to be preserved at all costs. It’s… priceless.”

“That’s going to be delicate,” Sikes pointed out. “Damn thing’s falling apart. And it’s how old?”

“The important bits have been maintained. There’s pressure and power in there.”

“Don’t turn it on,” Hoeff grunted.

“That’s what I–!”

Funny, how Hoeff could convey distilled, absolute murderous intent with a totally blank face. Morwk’s outraged squeak cut off mid-sentence. He dropped back down to quadruped, and stalked away across the bridge where he sat his arse down and started poking at his console in silence.

“How you proceed in a tactical situation has little to do with ideals,” Wilde said, diplomatically. “He wasn’t there as a curator. Leave it. And you, Mister Hoeff, should attend to your men.”

And get the hell of my bridge.

Hoeff nodded, and did just that. With the interpersonal bullshit managed for now, Ian returned his attention to the task at hand.

They jumped in Caledonia. There was planning, an away mission which went far more smoothly than the first. More planning, some requisitions, some pretty extensive use of the jump arrays on both ships to bring it in. For the moment, this was not something to share with civilians or contractors, so the best they could do was some drone mapping, with HEAT and wrecking crew assistance here and there. Not even a relief team could be allowed, at Ian’s insistence; this was to be kept to as few people as possible for now.. All told, it took a long time, and they heard nothing of Keeda or his ship throughout.

Ian could guess why. The test was for him and his crew, not for anyone else. They weren’t going to hear from the trickster until they were firmly alone again.

Maybe they’d already failed, for that matter. Somehow, he doubted it. He wasn’t quite sure what axis they were being tested on, but…he got the distinct impression he’d know if the test was over.

The messages with the Great Father were the most interesting bit. He’d sent a big formal email directly to Daar’s personal key, laying out everything for his eyes only.

Being a hands-on kind of leader, he decided to reply immediately. By text message.

bein tested by actual Keeda
balls thats a new one

That’s putting it mildly

I think the test’s still on though

He’s waiting for us to be alone

Probably best if we move on ASAP
use your best judgment
for what its worth I believe you
aint even top ten for weirdest shit we’ve seen so far
okay maybe top five
but bring back sum good evidence or imma squish ya tween my legs
[Attachment: doodle.png]

He must have been sat at his desk, because he’d taken a photo of a quick scribble of cartoon-Daar gnawing on and wrestling a hapless, suspiciously Wilde-like stick man who’d been tied in a bow.

Now there was motivation to succeed. You had to know the big guy to understand his humor, of course. Ian sent an acknowledgment, then sat back to consider his options.

What he wanted was some sleep. Get his head down, stay a few hours longer, head out the next day fresh and prepared. The wrecking crew would sure benefit from sleep too, and he probably still had some ruffled feathers to smooth over with Morwk that would be best done when everyone was calmed down and rested…

But this test was gnawing at him. As annoying as he’d found Keeda, he had to acknowledge that the big smug git had jumped right over to help his guys out when shit hit the fan. Unless it was a fuck of a staged incident—which seemed unlikely for several reasons—well, Keeda had earned some kind of trust with that.

Besides. Ian was loathe to let a mystery lie, or to half-arse anything.

His mind was already made up, he realized. He groaned, fixed himself a latte with two extra shots of espresso, and returned to the bridge. Two hours later, some of which was spent communicating to Campbell and Caledonia’s captain, Commander Boyt, that they had a mission to get on with, they broke away from the stricken station. There was no sign of the Seared Rascal of course. No trail to follow. So, they took the shortest route to the Bok Globule’s surface to minimize hull charge.

It didn’t really come as a surprise at all when Keeda’s sleek, dark ship pulled in alongside them, and the gao himself spontaneously thumped into being in the middle of his bridge.

The test, it seemed, was not over.

Winter retreat, the High Shield of the Northern Plains, Gao

Thurrsto, Champion of Clan Whitecrest

Unlike many species, winter was always the time of plenty for much of the Gao. Yes, it was cold, and yes, arable farming was on pause. But the herds of naxas and other useful critters had access to buried grasses and tubers, and would remain well-fed throughout; wild prairie on Gao was hardy against the cold and the snow. More importantly though, the herds clustered together, and were reluctant to run far or long, both to conserve energy and to keep their body heat under control, being smothered under their thick, shaggy pelts.

A perfect environment for a sneaky, pouncy sorta predator like a Gaoian.

So, Daar had been growing out his heavy shaggy coat in anticipation of the hunting on offer. They were downwind of their prey in a full-fledged blizzard to rival anything Earth might offer, sniffing toward the flock they would be hunting that evening. Nothing too big, just some wild Great Kwek in full winter plumage.

Assuming the weather permitted.

It was cold as balls out, and the visibility was almost bad enough he couldn’t see the Great Father standing right next to him. Even Thurrsto’s magnificent coat wasn’t quite enough to keep the chill at bay, and he’d had to resort to gloves and waterproof stockings to keep warm.

Daar was utterly unbothered by it. His Stoneback heritage was on full display, there.

They’d retreated to his “tent” once he was satisfied about the upcoming hunt, though “tent” was a silly description. It was closer to a human yurt in construction and well-anchored against the constant howl of the polar wind. Inside it was cozy, well-heated by a nice pellet stove, and there was a good supply of pre-catered food kept in stasis; they were all alone out there. Not even his security were closeby, and their only link back was a radio and a portable jump array, should an emergency develop.

This was a meeting requiring the utmost secrecy. Difficult to do, between Champion and Great Father. But a hunting trip above the polar circle? Free even of trusty staff?

It’d do.

They bustled into the portable hut and Thurrsto immediately shook out his pelt to fluff it out, sniffed and found their pitcher of spiced fruit beer had warmed nicely by the fire, and decided to pour himself a generous dose. He poured an “even more generouser” serving for Daar, who battled against the wind for a bit to properly seal the inner and outer doors.

“Balls, it’s fuckin’ blowy out! Might not get any hunting done at all!”

Thurrsto was just fine with that, frankly. He didn’t enjoy the deep cold the same way brownfurs did with their oily double-coats, and Daar of course was the Maximum Brownie, and a giant heat engine himself. And of course…winter was their traditional time of plenty, when big males put on size for the lean times of early spring, and the females reared cubs to get ahead of empty bellies. Daar and Thurrsto had both taken advantage to grow, but he of course…

Somehow, the shaggy winter pelt made him look more intimidating than his usual stud’s clip. Yes, it was cooler in the hot summer, and that was something he needed, but habitually going around with every little detail on display like a young Brother competing for Stud left little mystery. Under full fur, though? Well. It was honestly worse when you had no idea about what new and impossible brawn would be there in a half a year, when the sun was at its hottest and even a proud silverfur like Thurrsto trimmed their coats back.

“You’re looking especially healthy, My Father. Eating good I take it?”

“Yeah! Winter’s ‘fer cuddlin’ an’ growin’! Naydi’s been spoilin’ me rotten on my meal plan!” The Great Father shook out his pelt and sprayed frost everywhere. “How ‘bout you? Got someone warming ‘yer bed this winter?”

Winter companions were among the rare tolerated exceptions to the general Gaoian taboo against exclusive relationships. The weather could get quite cold and harsh, after all…

But come spring, it would be time to part ways yet again. The Gao could not afford the social consequences, were all the Females to be taken by a minority of successful males. For the sake of peace, prosperity, and the genetic vigor of the cubs, it was rare for a Female to go exclusive with a male. At least, in her child-rearing years.

It was cruel thing that had been done to the Gao, that.

“I do, I do…an old friend.” He didn’t say more, since he was typically private with his relationships. “So…what is your plan for me tonight? Shall I take my painkillers now?”

Daar chittered, “Naw, I’ll play nice. Too much on my mind. But les’ warm up first.”

Beer, hot snacks, and a nice, warm nest-bed chased away the last of the chill. Heavy blankets too, which lulled them both into a sort of half-sleepy, half-awake state.

“I got a pretty disturbin’ email today,” the Great Father at last rumbled. “Actually, an email an’ an attached message. From someone claimin’ ‘ta be Keeda himself.”

Thurrsto, normally, was a guarded kind of gao. It came with the territory. That one however got his ears moving, and it took him several seconds before his brain managed to get some actual thoughts together.

“…That’s…egotistical.”

“Oh, wait ‘till I tell ‘ya the rest. Crew got his genetics, too. He’s ancient. Like, truly, ridiculously fuckin’ ancient. Like predates degrees ancient.”

Thurrsto sniffed his beer. “…Call me skeptical, but the existence of an unbelievably old Gaoian isn’t quite enough to persuade me that Keeda himself is an actual literal person…”

“He’s sterile, too. Severe radiation poisoning. An’ he’s got some tricks, cousin. Also, his name is Y!’kiidaa,” he said in a suddenly very ancient tone. “Got a story, at least.”

“So he’s claiming to be, what? The truth behind the legend?”

“Yeah, but that’s incidental ‘ta what he really wanted ‘ta show us. Here.” Daar rose from their nice warm pile of comfort, stalked over to his Bag of Many Things, and pulled out a tablet. “Give this a read. Report from Captain Wilde. An’ this don’t leave th’ tent, just yet. At all.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded solemnly, and speed-read it.

He re-read a couple of sections more closely and slowly, then read the whole thing again, taking in every detail. Daar waited patiently, moving Thurrsto’s beer closer to the fire to keep it warm.

“…So, on first glance…the strategic implications here are, ah, staggering.”

Daar’a darkly rumbling chitter was telling.

“Which part? The activation of a long-dormant galactic superpower? That they’ve not so much as showed their nose ‘fer longer’n our people have been a people? What have they been doing?”

“Singularity, My Father. We’ve been aware of some organization at work in the inner circles of the Corti Directorate for some years now. Our friend Nofl is in their ‘accretion disk,’ an associate.

“Right. Now consider what it’d mean if this an’ that were one an’ th’ same.”

“That’s exactly what I’m speculating. Some of the things this Y!’kiidaa is reported to have done only make sense if he has the power to locally accelerate time around himself. A neat trick, and one that Corti abductors can do, but we’ve never yet managed to replicate it.”

“We do have nanofactories that can do that,” Daar pointed out. “They’re present on all our ships.”

“Yes, and require enormous power to affect a tiny enclosed space.”

“…Right. Yeah. And so this ‘Keeda’ is leading my crew on a merry fuckin’ chase—”

“Through unspeakably ancient relics of galactic history. What are we doing about that?”

“That’s the first question. What the fuck do we do? There’s no action we can take that won’t break secrecy, an’ right now, we can’t fuckin’ say shit about this. Imagine the public backlash!”

“If there’s no action we can take, My Father, then no action is what we take. Though, I can think of certain preparations my Clan could make…”

Daar…thought. It was a big think, too, because he got up once again and started pacing the enclosed space. For a few minutes, nothing but the howling wind whipping against their shelter and the quiet thump of paws on a wooden floor could be heard.

“…How discreet can we be? HEAT’s already involved, so…”

“So, hundreds have already been contaminated. That sneak is well snuck already.”

“This ‘Keeda’ must know that, too.”

“He’d have to, yes. Revealing something like…”

“It’s evil just thinkin’ ‘bout, ain’t it?”

“…Yeah.”

“Essactly. This smells awfully like they’re plannin’ a debut.”

“And intend to use us in the process.”

“And my clout, too.”

Thurrsto picked up his drink and sipped it. “They weren’t here to defend Gao in our time of need. They may even have been manipulating us for a long time. And K—… and fuck knows what kind of operations they have been performing among other species. What about the Humans?”

“If they’re Singularity, they engineered me. ‘Member my little pipe trick? That shit ain’t fuckin’ normal, Cousin. An’ I can do shit now that makes even that look like fuckin’ childplay. Fuck! Lookit me! A livin’ creature shouldn’t be fuckin’ bulletproof! And the Corti breeding program with the Humans? Our own breeding programs? Let’s draw some easy lines, there.”

“…We’re both soldier species.”

“Yup. Hard ‘ta avoid that conclusion. An’ that means Singularity’s been usin’ us both.”

“For…how long?”

“Millennia, for both. Us for much longer. An’ Thurrsto…it gets worse. They made me, ‘member? I’m made by at leas’ two forces that ain’t our friends. You need to consider that.”

That statement hit Thurrsto like a bolt of lighting right to the nuts. “…I…”

Well.

“Yeah. That’s the evilist thing I gotta ask of ‘ya, ‘cuz I’ve had a big, long think. I…shit, Thurrsto. I’m just a big furry ‘Back at heart. S’all I ever wanted ‘ta be. But now I gotta worry I ain’t what I think I am. So while I still can, mebbe…I gotta lay in contingencies.“

Thurrsto felt his fur rise along his spine. Daar was asking an unthinkable thing of him.

“What you’re asking is…so much more than treason.”

“Is it? I’m asking it. You need a contingency plan against me. I know y’all have thought on a post-Daar world, jus’…now you gotta think on how ‘ya might make it so, if needed.”

“I can’t possibly involve anyone else in such planning…”

“Sure ‘ya can. Jus’ the ones closest to ‘ya, who can be trusted. An’ you tell ‘em I requested this. Besides…I’d be surprised if ‘ya din’t have some kinda related plannin’ in place already…”

Thurrsto sighed, avoiding the trap. “For both our sakes, I won’t comment on what we may or may not do for the good of the Gao. As to this? Very well. If you think it’s necessary.”

“I hope ‘ta fuck it ain’t. But what happens if our enemies do make me their puppet somehow? Balls, we really shoulda thought of it sooner…but we thought of it now.”

“You know, of course, that if I do this, I must also make…” Thurrsto cleared his throat delicately. “…associated contingencies.”

Daar stiffened. Of course he’d considered the danger that he could conceivably pose to the Gao…Thurrsto suspected he hadn’t thought so closely about how dangerous those closest and most beloved to him might be in the same circumstances.

That was fundamentally the problem with Great Fathers. Everything pivoted on them. Every influence and force at work on them had to be considered.

After a long, dreadful moment, Daar poured more beer for himself. “Well then. Now I doubly pray ‘ta fuck it ain’t necessary.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded, and said no more on the subject. An order had been given, he would see it done. Discussing it further would be contrary to the order.

“…What about the Stray Fortune and this alleged Keeda?” he asked instead.

Daar heaved a huge sigh of his own. “They’ll get ‘ta the heart o’ this thing. They’ll let these people—Singularity, if that’s who they are—step into the light. An’ then when there’s finally a face ‘ta put ‘ta the name, we’ll talk. They’ll have some clawed questions ‘ta answer, though. An’ dependin’ on what those answers are…”

Thurrsto duck-nodded again. For a moment, the only sounds were the blizzard outside, the crackle of the fire, and the fizz of beer. Except…the blizzard sounded like it might be passing. He guessed he knew what that meant.

“Gonna get dark, soon,” Daar said. “Let’s go huntin’.”

Thus ended the conversation. Not to be repeated outside the tent, though Thurrsto’s head was doomed to whirl and churn as he digested what he’d just learned. But he knew a few of the Great Father’s tricks. Knew that Daar was giving him something else to focus on, so that it could all settle and become the new reality.

Keeda was, apparently, real. In some sense, anyway. The Gao’s history had an extra influence on it that, Thurrsto could see, put a few confusing details in a new and clearer perspective. When he returned to his office and gathered his most trusted, he’d have had time to properly internalize all these revelations…

Here and now, though, he was glad of the challenge.

They hunted.

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

As far as the Ten’Gewek were concerned, Keeda was now welcome to eat with them. Anyone who jumped into a dangerous situation to fight alongside them automatically went up a few levels in their estimation.

Wise monkeys, they were.

Most everyone else was a little more cynical. There were still questions, but frankly, the dinner table was as good a place as any to get them out. Besides, everyone was hungry. And Keeda could eat. And that meant Bruuk was a happy little bear, because nothing gave him more joy than stuffing his friends full of food.

His motherly side was adorable, really.

“Oh, balls, i’ve missed real gaoian cooking so much…it’s so different than I ‘member, but the flavors are still there…”

“You wait! I’ll have some bao steamin’ in a minute…”

So, they sat, and ate, and made nice. Got to know their guest, as much as he was willing to open up. Got quite the history lesson too, in a small and localized way.

“I was a fisherman. Longbacks and Longears both descended from my clan. After we migrated, that is. Used ‘ta be fish as big as my leg swimmin’ in the waters of May-Eshi. In the late autumn, they’d cluster near the shore in the sheltered coves, feed up ready to to swim upstream to their spawning pools. You could take a raft out and drag up ten, twenny at a time. Balls, you could even fish right from a little rocky waterfall too, just swipe them out of the air with your paw!”

Wilde grinned at the image, then glanced down at Keeda’s bouncing leg. Big fuckin’ fish, that.

“There’s still big game fish on Gao!” Bruuk said, defensively. “Just out to sea!”

“Yeah, but those things…” Keeda sighed. “Catch ‘em at the right moment in the year, you could slash ‘em open with a claw and they’d be full o’ nice, juicy, salty roe…perfect stuff ‘fer the winter. An’ good ‘fer a nice glossy coat! The flesh dried and smoked up so good, we’d eat well all spring. An’ then we’d chum the waters with the bones an’ scales ‘ta lure in the little ones. It was…”

His eyes were lost in the misty past. “…It weren’t an easy life. No real medicine, no tools except what we made with our own paws. I remember the day a rich merchant travelled through, dunno why. We were nowhere. But we had shells an’ beach-pebble beads an’ woven baskets ‘ta trade, an’ provisions for the road. My sire traded ‘fer a bronze necklace ‘fer my Mother. First time I ever saw metal.”

“You’ve lived a life much more like our Ten’Gewek friends here, then.”

“…My early life, I suppose you might draw analogies. I was only fifteen then, just ready to name a wife and serve my season with the sacred harem. I was a stud of the clan an’ pride of the elders, next to my brother…” He sighed, and keened softly. “Then…well, I had ‘ta grow up fast. But that story ain’t for now.” He shrugged. “Truth is, I’m more interested in Earth.”

“You’ve never been?”

“I’d stand out a bit, now wouldn’t I?”

“…Didn’t answer my question.”

Keeda chittered, delighted. “Correct!”

Ian gave him a Look.

“Fine! Ruin my fun…yes, I’ve visited Earth. No, no details. That’s for later. Then I promise I’ll tell you all the dirty bits, ‘kay?” He pant-grinned, and drank.

“Okay…when?”

“Nope!” Keeda declined to answer with a shake of his head. “Coulda visited any time, too! I’m twenny-five thousand years old, my young friend!”

“Surely you have not been awake and conscious that whole time?” Urgug asked.

“Not all, of course. But most of it! Thing is though, there’s a bit of magic ‘ta deep memory. You only really have so much of ‘yer life in ‘yer head at any level of detail. All the rest fades away. So, best to keep a fastidiously complete journal. Mine’s hand-written, in books this big.” he held his paws up. “Fills a lotta shelf space by now.”

“Wait. If you can remember your fishing village—” Rees frowned.

“Some memories stick. The important bits especially. Humans are the same way. Corti though…” he shook his head, clearly impressed. “They’ve got astounding memories! Way, way better’n ours. But, enough. I wanna tell ‘ya my story, an’ I will when the time is right. Until then, let’s hear your stories.”

They did the rounds. Nobody told their complete tale, of course. Ian shared how he’d earned his eye, Dora recounted her family’s daring escape from the Robalin Supremacy. Urgug recounted the tale of how he was recruited by Whitecrest while studying his postgraduate education in physics. Rees shrugged his life off as mostly uninteresting, kicking around in a small town in Wales until he’d enlisted, but he did note that there’d been plenty of fishing where he grew up.

Bruuk, understandably, didn’t share his story.

Nor did Hoeff. His was…probably too classified, firstly, but also…

Keeda duck-nodded. “I understand.”

As for the Ten’Gewek…something about the whole round of story-telling seemed to quieten them a bit. They did share, though. Really, theirs was the story of brutal lives led by effectively unbreakable men. Ferd’s story about his werne hunt in particular…

Genn managed to dredge up an amusing story from the People’s flight over the mountains to escape the Abrogators, though. It had been a grim time for everyone, very stressful. And Ten’Gewek vented their stress in one of two ways: brawling and sex.

It would have been weird as fuck for a human to recount how his sister, Buna, had worn out a given-man so badly the poor guy couldn’t keep up the next day, but among them that was a point of pride. Strong women made for strong tribes, after all. And as her brother, Genn was strong by association.

Aliens. Just the same enough to be relatable, just different enough to be interesting. And Genn was a good storyteller. When he stood and recreated the given-man’s exhausted stagger, and the way he ran away when Buna went looking for more, Dora practically fell over giggling.

The food had long since been polished off by the time the stories were done. They cleaned up, then sat down again. There were more serious matters to discuss.

Ian dived right into it. “So. Back at the station. That didn’t quite go to plan, huh? I don’t think jumping in to help was part of the test, was it?”

Keeda shook his head. “I’m here to test you, not kill you. If I had seen exactly what Hoeff had flipped I might have had forewarning…”

“So you actually don’t know everything we’re up to.”

“I never actually claimed ‘ta be all-seeing an’ all-powerful,” Keeda chittered and spread his paws. “Guess I played the smug-as-fuck act a bit too good, huh?”

“I’m not sure you played anything.”

“Ha! Well, that’s fair…but now. You summoned the HEAT. I do recall explicitly forbidding that.”

“I don’t care. This is too important and I’m not going to let a game get in the way of that.”

“Excellent.”

Slight surprise rippled around the table in all its various forms: tilted heads, raised eyebrows, twitching tails, swaying antennae, a flash of blue.

“…Not the response you were expectin’?” Keeda pant-grinned again. “But it is. You were decisive. You made a bold call ‘ta ignore me in the moment, and when the moment passed…well, here we are, yijao?”

“So we’re doing well so far,” Hoeff rumbled.

“You wouldn’t’a seen me again if you weren’t. But, that’s enough praise, ‘cuz while that whole affair on the station got more dangerous than it should’a…the next phase is gonna be dangerous by design. Seems only fair ‘ta warn ‘ya.”

“How dangerous?” Ian asked, noting the way his crew all glanced at each other.

“Again, that depends on you. You can back out any time, if you don’t mind the consequences. If you stick it through, though…You’re gonna see some things you won’t like. Things you’re gonna want to do something about.”

“Like what?”

Keeda’s infuriating air of smug mystery was back.

“You’ll see.”

Their destination turned out to be something a little closer to civilization.

Not in any literal sense. In point of fact, it was incredibly isolated. They were a long, long way off the tradelane network at this point, in territory marked on the Interspecies Dominion’s maps as unclaimed.

Nevertheless, there was traffic. And said traffic was impressive enough to have Morwk whistling, for the wrong reasons.

“By the Matriarchs. I don’t think I’ve seen a warp wake that coarse in my whole career…”

Ian was hardly an expert on warp fields, but even he could see what Morwk was talking about. The ship they were following was churning through space rather than surfing it. It was a difficult impression to pin down, exactly, but as Morwk pointed him through the various metrics and maths of it…

Well, it was like cruising down the motorway in a brand-new sports car only to find some idiot on a moped absolutely fucking thrashing his ride to manage thirty in the fast lane. Humanity’s first warp-capable ship, Pandora, now honorably retired to the Smithsonian, had probably generated a smoother and more efficient field than the junker in front of them.

“How the hell do they even make any progress out here?” Morwk continued, oblivious to Ian’s thoughts. “They must be stopping to degauss every day!”

“And what are they even heading for?” Ian asked.

“There is a temperate planet on the star charts in that direction,” Urgug noted. “Unclaimed.”

“Does that also mean uninhabited?”

“Not necessarily. There is no record of a settlement, but…”

“Hmm.” Ian rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, then glanced up at Keeda. The Gaoian was feigning innocence, sat in the corner of the bridge and not looking their way, but his ears weren’t fooling anyone. He was listening. Just not inclined to say anything today.

“Can we get a closer look at this ship?” he asked.

“Captain, with our enhancements, and if their sensors are anything like their drive, I’m quite sure we could get inside visual range unnoticed,” Morwk declared.

Ian continued to watch Keeda. Still nothing.

Fuck it.

“Bring us in closer, then. Let’s make a good recording.” He shot a glance at Keeda, “assuming our computers work or whatever…”

Keeda flicked an ear, but continued to remain silent. Whatever.

The ship turned out to be just as much of a junker as its wonky drive suggested. Its hull was a patchwork of second-hand modules, many of them wearing the battered paint and livery of whatever they were salvaged from, and few of them even from the same make of ship. Or even the same shipyard.

Morwk’s sense of professional outrage was well and truly triggered. Ships, in his view, could absolutely not be sewn together out of spare bits and pieces. Not safely, anyway. Different systems, different standards, different units, different everything. He promptly declared it a deathtrap as they steadily overhauled it. About the only thing apparently working properly was the transponder…which belonged to a ship that had supposedly been scrapped more than thirty years ago, according to Urgug’s database.

Alright. The galaxy was full of weird shit, and somebody flying a miraculously airtight box of spare parts on the world’s jankiest warp drive was a little bit interesting, to be sure…but worthy of Keeda directing their attention this way?

Hardly. At face value, it was no more noteworthy than having to pull over while out driving in the country to let a rusting old land rover chug past. So why?

“…We sure there’s not more to it than meets the eye?” he asked aloud. After all, anyone giving the Fortune a cursory glance would only see a quite common mass-produced bulk freighter with some after-market modifications in the form of the cargo container racks and drone loaders. Appearances could deceive…

“Not that I can see.” Morwk rolled his eyes, which denoted confusion rather than impatience in his case.

“Alright, well….let’s leave it alone and go check out that planet, I suppose.”

They slid away as Moj returned them to their quiet cruising speed: the patchwork ship fell behind without showing any sign of having even noticed them.

Three hours later, the planet turned out to be more of the same. On Urgug’s charts it was an unassuming Class Six, no registered name, no registered colonies, estimated population zero.

Reality was that the Fortune started picking up the twinkle and blink of communications satellites talking to each other long before they even crossed the system’s termination shock, not to mention a small flotilla of ships, and plenty of activity on the ground, too. Ian had them hold off at a good distance and build up the best picture possible at long range before getting closer. After all, just because that one ship had been dragged out of a landfill didn’t mean this unregistered settlement didn’t have something a bit better to hand.

But the long range scans got Urgug practically incandescent with concern.

“This is no minor settlement,” he soon declared, pointing out some features for Ian’s inspection. “See here? If the primary population center follows Dominion colony-planning guidelines, then it must have a population of nearly a quarter million all by itself.”

“That’s not a lot of ship traffic for a quarter million…” Ian mused.

“No. And that is just the primary center. Taking into account the secondaries and conurbation, I think we are looking at half a million individuals. And yet, there is no record of this place existing.”

“No service tradelane, a handful of…what are those, asteroid miners?”

“Most probably. It is quite bizarre.”

“There’s nothing inherently bizarre about isolationists, necessarily.” Ian pointed out. “There’s plenty of communities on Earth that prefer not to participate in the broader hubbub of society.”

“Indeed. And yet, I gather that they are considered strange even among your people, who are yourselves widely regarded as very strange.” Urgug turned a teasing hue for a few seconds, then refocused. “There are unencrypted broadcasts. Entertainment channels, I believe. Local news and suchlike. Monitoring them should prove edifying, if you will give me the time.”

“Knock yourself out. There’s something going on here, our esteemed proctor said as much.”

An agreeable shimmer of color washed over Urgug’s hide, and he settled in to watch TV. Not a bad job to have, in Ian’s view. With nothing for it but to let the big guy work, he turned away, updated the log, and decided the time had come to relax for a bit.

Or, as the case may be, get exercised to exhaustion by one of their resident pieces of meat. But that was okay. He’d been sitting down too much.

Somehow, though, he couldn’t get Keeda’s words out of his head. There was something here they weren’t going to like. That all by itself was reason enough not to take things at face value.

But for now, that was all he could do.

Dora

“You want us to go down there?”

Breakfast was kind of a weird tradition, as far as Dora was concerned. It made sense for creatures that needed to eat as much as Humans and Ten’Gewek, but it was too much for her. One meal a day was all a Robalin needed. Allegedly, breakfast food was superior to all others, but…

Well, you probably had to be a carnivore to think so. The sizzle of bacon, even though it was just the same as frying onions or whatever, was somehow much more uncomfortable to hear just for knowing it was a living animal’s flesh being seared in the pan. And as for eggs? Horf.

Cinnamon rolls, though…cinnamon rolls were dangerous. Much could be forgiven for cinnamon rolls.

Besides, there was news, and a briefing. Urgug had been up all night watching the local media from the planet below, and his resulting request was…interesting.

“I see no other way to learn more. Though the unencrypted transmissions have been edifying. What I have already gleaned indicates an extreme culture of hostility toward deathworlders.”

“That’s an understatement,” Ian added. “Seems like every ad break is bookended by anti-deathworlder propaganda. ‘Speak carefully: their ears are sharp!’ and ‘Beware: they have keen eyes.’”

“What, nothin’ about noses?” Bruuk sniffed indignantly.

“Oh, yeah. That one’s a good’n. ‘Don’t let them sniff us out!’ Classic.” Ian chuckled. “The point is, from the looks of things if we send the wrecking crew down, it’ll either spark a panic or a massacre. You four,” he indicated Dora, Moj, Urgug and Morwk. “Can blend in. But there’s not enough room in the shuttle for Urgug, and we need our chief engineer. That just leaves you two.”

Dora wafted her antennae in Moj’s direction, ticking them up and down to indicate his Tai Chi-fu pants and the assortment of Human religious emblems acid-etched into his chitin. She followed it with a flick up and down at herself, and the rattling Pride-festooned denim vest she was wearing. “Yes. We’ll be perfectly inconspicuous.”

“Well, I mean. Leave the vest at home, love.”

“Can’t leave the etchings, I,” Moj pointed out. “Can sand them off, but they last, the marks.”

“I thought of that.” Ian grinned, reached under his chair, and swung a case of some kind up onto the table. “Got the idea from watching the Lads play Warhammer,” he semi-explained, clicking it open and turning it around.

Moj’s elytra buzzed. “…Paint?”

“Yup. We match the colour of your chitin, paint over your etchings, add a layer of matte varnish and no-one’s the wiser!”

“We shall need to forge an etching, too,” Urgug pointed out. “The colony’s Mjrnhrm residents all wear the same one on their forehead.”

Moj’s elytra buzzed again as he tilted his head. “Serious thing, that. Clan-badge. Means the colony is family to them.”

Dora considered the Yin-Yang etched on Moj’s own forehead. “So we’re looking for the stuff they’re not broadcasting in the clear,” she surmised. “You want us to connect a device to their network?”

“Exactly.”

“Talk to folks, get the lay of the land?”

Ian shook his head no. “With that much propaganda about Deathworlder spies flying around, asking the wrong questions or being seen as ‘out of place’ could quickly turn bad. Best if you keep interaction to a minimum and just vanish in the crowd.”

“Gotcha.” Dora nodded seriously. “And…what happens then? What do we do afterwards?”

Ian glanced at the door. Their guest hadn’t joined us this morning, but they all knew he was watching, however he did it. “Keeda brought us here for a reason, and he promised we wouldn’t like what we find. Somehow, I don’t think this is going to turn out to be a mere colony of paranoid isolationists. But what we do is going to depend on what we find.” He looked around the table. “…any questions?”

The shuttle ride down was a tense moment. The shuttle had plenty of Whitecrest tricks, and the planet was barely inhabited at all, so their descent should go unnoticed, but Dora’s mind was still going over how quickly it could all go wrong if they weren’t…

She missed the comforting weight and jangle of her vest. She’d substituted the kind of practical tool harness worn all over the galaxy by working beings of every species, but it just wasn’t the same. It wasn’t hers.

Moj probably felt the same. He looked odd without his loose clothing and full-body collection of mystic symbolism. Wilde had done a damn good job of matching the paint to his natural coloration, and the varnish really sold it. You had to look closely to spot that anything was not natural, and it was clear he felt exposed and uncomfortable.

But, that was in the privacy of the shuttle, which sank unchallenged into the atmosphere well below the horizon from any part of the colony and which, with Moj at the controls and Dora watching the navigation sensors, slipped unnoticed into the trickle of airborne traffic linking the peripheral settlements with the population center.

The colony’s name, according to its traffic control beacon, translated into English as ‘Venture.’ Traffic and landing were automated, directing them to a flat dirt field south-east of colony center, where their shuttle set down as one of a neat grid of ones just like it. The ubiquitous grey-flying-brick design remained nicely anonymous even here.

As for the colony itself…

Dora had seen her share of new settlements. Her flight from the Supremacy’s dark hand had taken her through several such on the periphery of Robalin space, and they had much in common. The same planning techniques, same construction, same materials, same technology. It was all quite standardized, but one thing immediately stood out about Venture: although it was all the same, it was also all used. There was nothing new present.

Instead, the buildings were shabby prefabs, presumably purchased second-hand from their original owners when the time came to replace them with more permanent structures. Not only that, but they were clearly assembled from multiple mismatched kits, just like that freighter they’d passed. They were dirty, weathered, damaged, and graffiti-tagged in a dozen alien languages. The same went for the vehicles, the shuttles—thank fuck their own was deliberately left in slightly shabby condition specifically so as not to draw attention—the street lights, everything. The air conditioning units rattled, the heat exchangers hummed, the power transformers buzzed.

There were exceptions, though. The road surfaces were smooth and unpatched, for instance. And like the radio and visual broadcasts, there was propaganda everywhere, in printed poster format with AR tagging in the corners, and in holographic format projected by pristine emitters.

It reminded Dora terribly of the Supremacy, who had unlimited funding for the things the Leadership deemed interesting or necessary, and practically none for boring irrelevancies like, say, creature comforts for the general populace. No doubt there’d be a fancy, pretty part of town some distance from the plebeian spaceport where the colony’s limited wealth was all on display.

They’d be avoiding that part of town for sure. It’d be full of cameras and security drones.

As for the people…well, the people were a lot like their town. A mismatched mix of every non-deathworld species from the Dominion and the Alliance both, but all with a second-hand, worn down look. Those who wore clothing wore patched, sun-bleached and distressed fabrics that had clearly been serving a long time. Those species that didn’t were still wearing the usual bags, pouches and harnesses but again, there was definitely a used-and-repaired vibe going on. Dora was suddenly conscious that her vest, drab and workmanlike as it was, was going to stand out a bit just for being new.

As was Morwk’s tool kit.

Well, too late to do anything about that problem now. Getting straight back in the shuttle and leaving would be much more suspicious.

“There.” Moj gestured toward the ubiquitous feature of every travel hub: a bar and eatery. Dora’s antennae caught a nauseating, foetid stench on the air that might be uncollected garbage, but was more likely a pot of putrescing zrrks.

Sure enough, there was a half-liquid scummy cauldron of the things simmering over a fire in the middle of a ring-shaped food counter. The eatery was sort of outdoors-ish, bounded on three sides by a bodged-together slum stack, and protected from the weather by a canopy made from dozens of mismatched tarpaulins.

It was clean, though. The metal decking floor was swept and mopped, the walls degreased and free of graffiti, the lights weren’t flickering, and the countertop, scuffed and dented though it was, gleamed.

There was a free ration ball and water dispenser at the back of the room. The ubiquitous bland sustenance of the working destitute. Rather than interact with one of the workers behind the counter, Dora and Moj grabbed a ball and a water cup each, then retired to a corner table to make themselves as comfortable as possible on the one-shape-doesn’t-quite-suit-anyone chairs. They were just two overworked colleagues, grabbing a bite to eat and a moment to rest before moving on to the next job. While Moj people-watched, Dora pulled out a phone and started scanning.

“Okay, there’s a public-access colony network” she observed, in Robalish. Considering the anti-Deathworld propaganda about the place, speaking English would have been stupid. “…And a second locked one.”

Moj buzzed and nodded, boredly chewing his ration ball and watching people come and go. “Public.”

“Yeah.” Dora connected to it.

What she found was much like the rest of the colony in its generally patched-together, mismatched configuration. Whoever was responsible for maintaining it must be run ragged trying to stay on top of all the issues it would be generating.

The selection of available data was incredibly limited, too. The public network seemed to consist in its entirety of a citizen information page, government services like a job board and, prominently, a “report suspicious individuals” link front and center on the landing page.

Below that, she found a more promising link: “new citizen orientation.”

The collection of files behind it was…informative. She speed-read it as she ate and drank, transferring copies to the shuttle which would transmit them back up to the ship. But just in reading it, several things fell into place.

The language was circumspect, or at least assumed certain basic knowledge on the part of the reader. There were occasional references to “our benefactors” and “our guardians,” and much damning rhetoric about Humans and Gaoians, not to mention alarmist predictions of the future state of a galaxy “ruled by monsters.” The authors envisioned complete economic and military dominance within a generation, inevitably leading to bloody subjugation. Historic examples of the great cruelties both species had descended to in their past were sprinkled throughout like salt in the hands of an overzealous cook.

Venture was off the grid, hidden. Everything here was scavenged or purchased from the scrap merchants, specifically so as to leave no paper trail. The run-down prefabs, the mismatched network devices, the worn and torn personal equipment, all of it was presented as a clever way of thumbing their collective olfactory organs at ‘so-called deathworlder ingenuity.’

Dora had to admit, it seemed to have worked. If Clan Whitecrest or AEC knew about Venture, they’d never been briefed. And given the cryptic references to the colony’s “benefactors…”

She turned her attention to the secured network, which presumably contained much more juicy data…but how to get in? The registration process required her citizen ID number, which of course Dora didn’t have.

Though, to be fair…what they already knew was already enough. Dora could add.

Moj’s foot nudged hers urgently, at around about the same time as she became aware of a distinct change in the eatery’s atmosphere. She knew that sudden tension all too well, and when she looked up at the entrance, she knew all too well what she was looking at.

In the Supremacy, they were called the Dark Hand. In Earth’s history, they had been the Gestapo, the KGB, the Guó’ānbù, the Santebal and a dozen other names. Fuck knew what they were called here, but there was no mistaking them. Between the new, neat, well-maintained equipment and the way everybody present suddenly became extremely intent on not drawing their attention…

Shit.

There were three. A Locayl and a Chehnash—the two obligatory legbreakers—and then the brains of the outfit, this time in the form of a fellow Robalin.

Dora suppressed a shiver. If there was one thing she couldn’t doubt for a second, it was the ruthless, sadistic efficiency of her own people when they set their mind to it, and this one still wore the barcode tattoo of the Supremacy’s Global Security Division between his eyes. Whether this was just bad timing and a routine inspection, or a specific tip-off, that officer would definitely have pointed, awkward questions to ask about her and Moj’s shiny new gear.

“Escape route?” she asked Moj, quietly. Somebody near the door had bustled over to the trio and was definitely snitching.

“Got one.” He sipped his water cup. “Steady. Ready…”

The mass of a Guvnurag customer blocked the view. Moj stood, and Dora followed. Don’t rush, don’t run. She’d done this before. The trick was to look like an ordinary citizen going about their day. People always slipped away when the Secret Police showed up…

Thank fuck they were in a slum. Slums were never airtight. Slums were nothing but lost spaces, side paths, lanes between construction and forgotten corners. They vanished down a gap in the corner between two prefabs, then turned sharply left into a muddy alleyway half-choked with garbage.

Sudden raised voices from back in the eatery suggested their disappearance had been noticed.

This was a game Dora had played before. She’d learned a lot since then, though. And she had some much more powerful friends nowadays…with some wonderful toys.

She plucked one of them from her pocket and stuck it in her ear. “Mother’s prowling,” she subvocalized. She didn’t need to speak aloud for the Whitecrest gizmo to convey her words.

Hoeff’’s voice was as cool and level as a frozen lake. “Big brother’s ready.”

Moj juked aside again, squeezing his bulk between two misaligned prefabs. Dora had no trouble following. “Cubs playing sneak-and-hide. Dropping snitchers.”

Moj nodded, and pressed another Whitecrest toy to the side of a dumpster as they passed it. The little spycam was tiny, fingerprint-sized and as thin as a card. That was their back watched, at least.

Dora’s was a drone, folded up inside her vest. As they reached an intersection with some blue sky visible above, she tugged it out of her pocket and flicked it upwards: it unfolded with a faint snap and drifted upwards out of sight.

“…Turn left. Keep snitching.”

More raised voices, and the sounds of searching behind them as they turned left, then right again when he told them to. Dora couldn’t see what Ian was watching through her drone or their little postage-stamp spycams, but she didn’t need to. All she needed to do was trust.

Left, right, like a rat in a damn maze, and now Dora was getting scared. Dark Hand would have given up or gotten lost by now, but Venture’s secret police had something extra going for them. Some extra determination, or numbers, or—

A pulse shot dented a metal wall by Moj’s head with a slam, half an instant before a second one punched into Dora’s personal shield.

“Fuck!”

Dora had been keeping her hand close to the tiny pulse pistol in her vest the whole time. Now she spun, snapped off a couple of shots back in the direction the attack had come from. No idea if she hit anything, then Moj was barrelling forward. There was a flash and slash of fusion blade in the gloom, and an interrupted shriek; all that training with Ian, Bruuk and the wrecking crew was paying off.

Hoeff’s voice, still frosty: “Right, then immediate left, get out on the street, blend with the crowd. Drop a flasher.”

Two of Dora’s feet skidded in some trash and she nearly lost her balance; Moj dragged her on by her arm. She stuck a flasher to the prefab as they rounded the corner, and then they were out on the road, among a bunch of colonists all backing away from the sounds of violence in the slum.

Moj and Dora plunged into the mass of them. Behind them, the flasher went off with a blast and a brilliant white nerveshock pulse that would ruin anyone’s day, no matter their species. The explosion blew away the last of the crowd’s inertia, though: Suddenly, they were part of a stampede.

“Crowd’s heading north. Keep pushing west, back toward the shuttle,” Hoeff instructed, then changed his mind. “Duck!”

Dora ducked, and not a moment too soon—these secret police, it seemed, had no qualms at all about shooting into the crowd.

Not even the Supremacy was that craven.

To Dora’s left, a fleeing Vz’ktk bleated in terror and agony as a shot scythed two of his legs out from under him. He crashed into the mud with a crunch of breaking bones and thrashed pathetically. Moj’s personal shield flashed once, twice, a third time as he flung himself over a stricken civilian and scrambled for the relative cover of a parked vehicle.

Dora’s breath was tearing at her lungs, her heart felt like it would burst any second, and fuck her shield could take maybe two, three more hits…

Duck around a corner, through yet another narrow gap. This one opened into a courtyard with plenty of space. Just get to the archway at the other end…

No. Agents there. Closing in.

Dora found cover, pressed her Button, and tossed it into the middle of the courtyard.

Hoeff and crew thumped instantly, and…did what they did. Just him and the Humans for now; presumably the monkeybros were the next wave, if needed.

But against a rag-tag group of secret police, they may as well have been gods. None of them would have had time to even raise a radio call, they were so swiftly…

Serviced. That was really the only word for it. It wasn’t a fight, it wasn’t even something so passionate as a kill. It was just a flurry of precision shots, death in an instant, then silence.

“We better get goin,” Hoeff grunted. “Array’s charging up back on the shuttle.”

Of course, having activated her beacon, there was still only one way out.

The deaths seemed to have activated something, because there was now a discordant, attention-getting alarm playing from public loudspeakers, from every TV and every portable audio device.

Hoeff and crew didn’t need any telling. They tossed down their own beacon and summoned in the monkeybros, and it was just in time, too: the sky overhead shimmered as a forcefield dome snapped into place.

“Well, fuck.” Hoeff said with remarkable calm. “If they can afford that…”

”A Farthrow just activated in the city,” Urgug noted with some alarm. “You will need to escape beyond its limits.”

“Don’t suppose…there’s any chance…of smashing it instead?” Dora panted. She was not built for distance running.

“We are considering that option,” Ian noted, tersely. “Find safety.”

Hoeff made a hand gesture, and they were on the move as stealthily as they could manage. Dora couldn’t even think, now. Her chest felt about ready to implode.

She just hoped there was any getting out of this…

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

The one silver lining was that the handful of ships in orbit above Venture still looked like a mining and infrastructure maintenance fleet and nothing more. The Fortune could handle them with one figurative hand tied behind its back, if it came to that.

Didn’t change the fact that there was now a Farthrow pinning his people down, and a sturdy shield dome stopping the Fortune from sniping it.

And that really said the last thing that needed to be said. A Farthrow generator was a closely-guarded secret. They were manufactured as required, protected by the highest security, and given only to authorities competent to protect their secrets. There was no way some random colony of quack isolationists had one.

The Hunters and the Hierarchy, though…

Well, this sure as fuck wasn’t the Hunters’ work.

Urgug was glowing with intense concentration as he pored over their orbital and drone imagery of the colony. Venture was a decent-sized city, and not all of it was prefab slum. There was some locally made construction too, east of the river. The farthrow was being projected by a generator somewhere in that district.

The question was, given the colony’s otherwise apparently limited resources, was it just indoors, or in a basement bunker? If the former, then the Wrecking Crew could hit it. If the latter, then they were better advised to take down the shield generator and hope the Fortune’s guns were up to the job.

That was the question for Urgug. And the answer he came back with after a few tense minutes was a welcome bit of good news.

“I do not think they can possibly have a proper bunker,” he declared. “That leaves the problem of Dora and Moj.”

“Copy that,” Hoeff noted with a grunt. “Think we can hunker down for a bit.”

“Can you get them to the shuttle?”

“Prob’ly. Just need to disguise ‘em a bit more.”

“Our gear, was the problem,” Moj reported. “Too new, it. Too clean. Needs to be second-hand, like everything else here.”

“Hope you’re not above a little theft, then,” Ian quipped.

“Would never dream of taking what’s not mine, I!” There was a thrumming sound in the background: a human would have been pissing himself laughing.

“Top man. You’d better get to it, then.”

Dora

“They’re gonna see us.”

“Maybe,” Moj buzzed. “Stay calm.”

Dora nodded. She didn’t need telling. Panic was death, she knew that.

And right now, there was a lot of panic about for them to take advantage of. Colonists were flooding back to their domiciles in compliance with the emergency broadcast’s instructions. Hoeff and his Wrecking Crew were skulking their way toward their target, avoiding detection as best as they could. Probably they’d do most of their movement at night. Humans had excellent vision in the dark, and they had some nifty toys to augment their innate ability, too. Ten’Gewek apparently didn’t even need that; they were well-adapted to thick forest gloom.

The scariest things really did go bump in the night.

Finding some less-shiny stuff had been straightforward enough. Dumpster diving in a back alley had turned up a rain cloak that fit Dora tolerably well, though she wouldn’t have liked to actually wear it in the rain. It had holes in it big enough to fit her hand through. Moj had simply ditched everything he was wearing. Mjrnhrm weren’t habitually a clothed species anyway.

Walking up to their shuttle as nonchalantly as possible was one of the hardest things she’d ever done. The moment where they took a chance and slipped out of the stream of civilians had Dora’s skin crawling. She was certain there’d be a shout, or somebody would challenge them, or just start shooting…

But no. They were back among the neatly parked shuttles without incident. Back to their own shuttle without incident. Lower the ramp, step aboard, close the ramp, all without incident.

…Now they just had to hunker down and wait.

Ferd Given-Man

They had been stalking their strange prey on this strange hunt all day. First, there was much rest and the occasional quick, quiet movement when they were sure nobody was watching. Like this they scuttled from slovenly hut to junk pile to a small grove of small, sad trees, everywhere keeping their presence secret. The enemy was all around them, all ready to push their buttons, send their alarms. And their prey was so very far away.

Things got easier after night. In the dark, the enemy saw even worse than Humans, and their bright lights just made it easy to see where they were and know where they were looking.

At first, anyway. The river was a different challenge. Bright on the far side. Lots of lights. Lots of drones hanging slow in the air and watching.

They would have to ford the river. No small thing, that. For Humans, it was easy. They loved water, and if these were normal men on a normal raid, they would swim their way across without making a ripple, like a smaller, much deadlier yshek. But this was not a normal raid, and these were not normal men. Heff was too much man to swim anymore, he’d sink just like Ferd. The other three were big too, and they had a lot of equipment with them, and they had full armor, so swimming wasn’t going to be possible anyway.

At least, not swimming without a rebreather. One of the little sky-magic toys they had was a small little thing they could wear across their face. It would give them just enough air to walk along the river bottom and climb out the other side, without making any bubbles that might give them away. Ten minutes, at most.

Not a reassuring thought. If they ran out of air, Ferd and his men would die. They could not swim at all on their own despite every effort to teach them. They were much too dense and heavy, and not even their great strength could keep their face above the water without flippers to help them push against the water. And even then it was an effort, and unmissably loud.

So, walk along the bottom, like a yshek after prey. Took a lot of courage to completely trust technology like that. He would rather fall from the sky, because that would be a fast, fiery death. Drowning was a terror he never knew he had.

But he was a man of the People. Terror wouldn’t stop him. And Humans had very clever hands, and even more clever minds. He’d learned to trust their strength, as they did his.

The water was cold and dark, nothing to see by underneath. Just the waving reflections, and enough light to make out the man in front as a blobby blur. They held their nerve, walked across the bottom, climbed the far side…broke the surface slow, to make no ripples or noise. Wait for Heff’s signal…

Then out and up the retaining wall. Low, quick and quiet across the open concrete to where a small stand of tiny, weak trees and bushes could hide them. Pause. Look. Listen.

A hand gesture from Heff, and they were moving again. A guard in the wrong place. Low-kayl. Big, but not strong.

Serviced. No gunfire, right now. Ferd did the deed with a simple punch where neck met skull. Dead before he even knew what hit him. Shame, really. A man should have the chance to fight, but that couldn’t be, here. Secrecy was everything. So, he caught the corpse-man as he fell, quickly wrapped him up in his tail to prevent any jangling or other noise, snuck back to a dark corner and hid the body. Their sneaking would end at some point, but not yet.

Their target was the big building at the east end of the square. Looked like a bubble-fungus growth made of glass. On its roof, the shield generator. Somewhere below that, the Farthrow.

More hand signals. Ferd followed them, going right with Davies, Frasier and Genn. Low and quick again. Stack up, hand on back, get ready…

The signal was given.

They entered.

Y!’kiidaa

There was a point that Y!’kiidaa and Leifini had been making to the Old Man for a long, long time; namely, that deathworlders were not the only game in town. After all, Singularity was a Corti creation to begin with.

Oh certainly, Deathworlders were required to win this war. The coming fight would involve terrible environments that only Heroes could hope to manage, be they underground, in orbit, or in stranger environs yet. Heroes would be needed in the thousands—millions, to lesser degree—over the coming decades or possibly even centuries of this war. The Old Man was right about that, no matter how uncomfortable the means proved.

But Y!’kiidaa was impressed by the non-deathworlders on this crew. There was something of the Hero in them, too. They had answered the call, risen to the challenge. This was a new variable and it needed consideration. Humans could lead the great masses.

And, yes, admittedly Moj and Dora had failed in that they had been discovered. But they had also succeeded, in that they had evaded detection long enough to gather the asked-for data. And their failure, frankly, had not been their fault. They had walked under-informed and unprepared into a society primed for intense paranoia, but they had walked regardless.

That was one axis of the test. Was he dealing with Heroes?

Well. Therein lay a question he’d agonized over for millennia. Just what was a Hero? The Old Man made much of the word, and Y!’kiidaa loved the Old Man dearly. But part of the reason why was that, somewhere deep in his soul, the Old Man lived in a universe of stories and then, through sheer personal force, became their author. A Hero, in the Old Man’s eyes, was they who stood above others. Those who were Instrumental, rather than Accidental.

On that matter, Tomoe-san disagreed with her husband in a quietly profuse way. In the Old Man’s eyes, she was most definitely a Hero. In her own, she was a servant, having devoted herself to first her lord, then her husband, and through them something higher. She had given even her name to that ideal of service, and had gone by a description these past eight hundred years. She was Tomoe. the comma-like swirl central to her personal heraldry, Gozen, a woman of noble birth.

In all the years since she had joined them, she had never told Y!’kiidaa or anybody else her birth-name. The Old Man probably knew it, but he certainly hadn’t shared.

As far as her husband and Y!’kiidaa were concerned, it was that very modesty and submission to a higher calling that earned her the title Hero. And if it was true for her, then by every sense of fairness he had, Y!’kiidaa must grant that title to the entire crew.

But there was more, of course. There had to be. It wasn’t just the offer of service, but her ability to effect it. It was the Old Man’s firm belief that the ability encouraged intent, because why offer yourself when it would make little difference? Heroes came in many forms, but all of them had some element of supreme, confident ability.

And everything that went with that, of course. Heroes were often fascinating stories.

Take the study in restrained violence now playing out below. The wrecking crew was more than capable of destroying their way wantonly toward their target. Prudence no doubt guided them in their stealth—also impressive, frankly—but it would not strictly be necessary, armored and equipped as they were, strong and swift as they had built themselves. There was no effective opposition. Captain Wilde could simply destroy the colony from above too, and by this point he must have deduced what these people were.

What was motivating him? Prudence? Of course. More intelligence, a grander gambit? Possibly. Deference to authority? Measured, and responsible.

Passion? That was harder to suss. A Hero could not be cold and calculating to the exclusion of all else. And Wilde did not give much away. His face may as well have been carved from the same black glass as his prosthetic eye, it was that immobile. His posture was upright, neither tense nor relaxed. His eye never deviated from the flow of information as he watched the situation below unfold.

Only the flexing of his fist and periodic shifting of his weight betrayed the same tension flowing freely across Urgug’s hide. No, he wasn’t dispassionate. Just tightly in control.

Perhaps the time had come to give him a nudge.

No need for anything big. Just standing next to him should do the trick.

He spared Y!’kiidaa a glance up. “…Kinda busy right now.”

“I see that. You know what these people are, now.”

“Aye.”

“No doubts?”

“Watch ‘em move and interact. They’re there of their own free will. Unless the Hierarchy’s taken to meat-LARPing lately.”

“Unlikely.”

“…Quisling bastards.”

Ah! Definitely not lacking in passion. Now for the temptation…

“Wouldn’t take much to contain this threat.”

Wilde glanced unmistakably over at the weapons panel. “…No.”

“Indeed. So…whatchu gonna do?”

“Drop that shield, get my people out. Let our spies know about this place.”

“They’ll scatter like disturbed beetles after this.”

“Oh, aye. But we’ll find them again, eventually. There’s tricks we’ve got aboard,” Wilde said noncommittally. “Boss Bear might decide to blockade, anyway.” He half-turned and frowned at Y!’kiidaa. “What are you trying to do? Goad me?”

Y!’kiidaa flicked an ear. “A little, yeah. I didn’t expect you to rise to it but one can never be sure.”

“Hmm.” Wilde nodded. “…Y’know, in all of this, there’s a question I forgot to ask. What exactly are you testing us for?”

“Many things. The goal is to assess a potential ally. Understand, we did not intend for this to happen. Our original plan was more…circumspect. But circumstances compelled us. Our timeline is accelerated.”

“Come off it, you’re ancient. And you’ve been watching Earth a good long time, I bet. How is testing us assessing an ally? You’ve had plenty of time to make up your minds.”

“It is one thing to watch from afar. It is another entirely to see a thing like this.” Y!’kiidaa waved his paw about. “We watch the human race, we see bitter fighting. Resource competition. Nuclear oblivion poised on the edge of action for the better part of a century, corruption and ignorance…Yet, we also see potential. Here and there, more and more it manifests, in ways big and small. One such supreme example recently ensured the end of the Discarded, and he is suffering mightly for it, gods bless his soul. What to do with such a contradiction as your people? Balls, what about mine?”

That wondrous Human capacity for brilliant, intuitive insight and analysis showed itself with a widening eye. “…Heroes. That’s what this is about. You’re looking for goddamned heroes.”

Y!’kiidaa caught the wariness in his tone. “Yes. Now: do not jump to conclusions. We have a particular meaning in mind when we use that word. We are not interested in glory hounds or unrestrained warriors. This is too important a mission to leave to the unfixably aggressive, the unmovably cautious, or the irrepressibly arrogant. A Hero has all those qualities held in careful tension, because it takes a certain kind of chutzpah to do what the wrecking crew is doing right now, doesn’t it? To captain such a ship, while missing an eye? To lead such a crew?”

Wilde blinked, and Y!’kiidaa could practically hear the gears grinding in his head. Now here was a test. How would he react to such implicit high praise, disguised as mild rebuke?

Fate, in the form of Mojremm’rt, intervened to rob them both of the answer.

“Skipper? Got company, we…”

Dora

God fucking dammit!

Dora had dared to hope. They’d made it to the shuttle, hunkered down, nothing had happened for a good long while…But apparently, that while had not been idle. Somebody, somewhere in Venture had been…whatever. Reviewing camera footage or something.

Productively, to judge by the mismatched squad of goons in power-assisted exoframe armor now surrounding their shuttle and hauling a heavy weapon into position.

Fuck that. Shields up. Launch drones.

Lovely, shooty drones.

Skulking in the crowd, Dora could do. Passing for anonymous in a crowded place too, if she had the right clothing. Access networks and plunder them for valuable data? Absolutely!

But drones were her art form. The team assembling the heavy weapon were heavily armored, but Dora’s drones were set up for dealing with Hunters. A couple of Kwmbwrw in exoframes? She ripped them in half.

The rest of the goon squad scattered, finding cover among the landed shuttles and returning fire. Their leader was probably that Rrrtk at the back, whose heavy pulse gun had plenty of aim-assist built in, but lacked the stopping power to do more than knock the drones off-course.

Which did fuck up Dora’s attack run, of course. She sent the deflected drone up high to get a better vantage, and inhaled sharply as she realized these few were just the first to reach them. There was a whole convoy of armored vehicles at the main road, and more armored Hierarchy loyalists hustling their way.

A blast from one of the vehicles wrecked that drone. Fuck.

She kept the rest low, sent them scything out among the shuttles, then sharply back in to catch the enemy in their side. Hit and fade, slash and vanish.

One of the nearby shuttles took off, followed seconds later by a second, then a third.

Of course. Why send troops into the trap when they could just have the spaceport’s automated traffic management system clear the road for them. In a few seconds, the whole field would all be airborne, and the bad guys clearly knew which one was theirs so there was no safety in trying to take off and hide among them.

After that…well, the shuttle had decently upgraded shields, but it was no tank.

She directed her drones outward toward the tanks. Maybe she could—

One of the tanks exploded.

Dora was still blinking and trying to figure out what she’d done to cause that when a second detonation ripped open a second tank, and then there was a shimmer in the air, a flash of brilliant white-blue—

The shimmer was a Human. Not one of the crew—a woman. Her armor was light and tight, form-hugging white plates over a red undersuit, with a pattern of swirling commas on the left shoulder and a dark, iridescent helmet like a compound eye. The long-bladed, long-handled spear-like fusion sword in her hands whirled, and four of the hapless quislings around her collapsed in pieces. Another blast kicked up a billow of smoke and dust, and Dora lost track of the mystery warrior.

She’d stared too long anyway. She turned the drones back as she realized that a couple of the first goon squad were trying to set up that heavy weapon again. She strafed them, killing one and persuading the other to run the fuck away.

“Who the fuck was that?!”

Moj had a rifle in hand, but no opportunity to use it. “Not know, I. Glad for her, though!”

“I saw her,” Ian confirmed. “Guessing she’s one of Keeda’s. Hang in there, the wrecking crew are nearly at that Farthrow.”

Dora surveyed the field. The last of the quislings were running away as fast as their odd-numbered sum of legs could take them. They were, it seemed, safe for the time being. “We’re ready to go get them. Just say the word.”

“Sit tight.”

Back to waiting. But…wow. She’d only seen that Human warrior for a second or two, but already Dora was starstruck.

She hoped they’d get to meet her…

Wrmathrrm, loyal to the Order

Somewhere in the back of her head, Wrma had always been a bit skeptical of the Order’s anti-Deathworlder messaging. She’d never dared voice it, for fear of having to explain herself to the Enforcers, and it wasn’t that she’d disbelieved the threat they posed. They’d taken the whole galaxy by storm in less than a generation, destroyed livelihoods, toppled a Great House, bullied two warring galactic powers into truce…They were dangerous, to be sure. But could they really be the near-supernatural terror the Order’s posters and broadcasts claimed?

Apparently, yes they could.

Her worst nightmares had never envisioned this. Whole teams going silent simultaneously. Moments of silence, then another group in another part of the building. Their path didn’t seem to match her mental map of the Order’s headquarters. How were they so fast?

Another burst of terrible violence over comms made her cringe. A blast, shots, then the grim note of biomonitors flatlining. A whole room of people, gone in the space of a heartbeat.

Deathworlders weren’t just dangerous. They were monsters.

The Benefactors had promised that if ever such a force came for them, the suppressor in the sub-basement would be the colony’s best line of defence. Activating it would pin down the foe and keep them confined to at least moving through ordinary space.

The pair of Abrogators left behind to guard it were her only source of even faint comfort. Their solid, metallic, heavily armed bodies moved like they were alive, reacting to the distant concussive sounds of slaughter by turning sensors as if they could see through the walls.

Perhaps they could.

The last of Wrma’s forces were gathered in the suppressor facility, behind the barricades and shields and heavy weapon emplacements all pointed at the one point of entry. Even so, her skin was crawling with creeping certainty.

She was about to die. She was sure of it.

Death didn’t bother with the door. It came from above. With a tremendous crash and an unbelievable burst of violence, all she caught was the impression of heavy shapes dropping atop the abrogators with enough force to snap their spines.

How—?

Something knocked her aside, spinning her around and yanking her away from the fight. She didn’t see what, but she saw what the beasts were doing to the abrogators. One of the stricken machines writhed, trying to track its weapons onto its own back even as those weapons were grabbed with hands, feet and tails and simply ripped off with a terrible squeal of ruptured metal. The other sparked and went limp as a fusion knife stabbed down and decommissioned it.

Then there were smaller, darker shapes, and a volley of terrible explosions made her ears ring, dazzled her eyes and set her head pounding. The sound of her men dying before they could even turn around.

Then silence.

She shook her head, trying to get her bearings. When she did so, she was face to face with…

A Ten’Gewek. It had to be. It was about as broad as it was tall, more than half that deep, and had a tail so long and sturdy-looking, it counterbalanced the creature’s hunched-forward posture. It was looking her directly in the eyes, and when its lips curled back they exposed fangs like daggers.

One of the Humans was attaching something to the suppressor. “Whatcha got, Kong?”

The Ten’Gewek didn’t take its eyes off Wrma. “Officer.”

“Sounds like a great detainee to me. Wrap her up.”

“Wrapping” in this case apparently meant with his tail. The monster of a Ten’Gewek—easily the biggest in the room—firmly folded her up, tied her hands and feet together, and then she suddenly found herself inside his coiled tail, being hauled around like a child’s carnival prize.

She got a look around.

All her force was dead. Quickly too, their bodies mostly torn apart by whatever war crime these Deathworlders were using for weapons. There was blood in every color, everywhere.

One of the humans approached, the same one who had spoken to Kong. Same gruff voice, and he was in body and function the same to the humans as Kong was to the Ten’Gewek.

“You are hereby detained under the Interspecies Dominion’s laws of combat. You will be questioned, shortly. Do you have any immediate medical needs?”

Wrma gaped at him, still trying to fit the idea that she was alive into her head. In that flurry of instant, overwhelming force they had picked her out to live? It didn’t make sense…

“N….no…” she squeaked.

“Very well. We’ll discuss matters when the situation is appropriate. In the meanwhile…Kong here can crush a boulder to gravel with his tail. I’ve seen him do it. So I would advise you not to give him cause to tighten his grip. Understand?”

Wrma nodded, reflexively.

“Right. Be a good girl and nobody’s gonna hurt you.” To his men, “let’s move out.”

There was acceleration that Wrma felt in her bones and guts, and a terrible blur as she was launched vertically, still in the Ten’Gewek’s grip. Back up through the ruined ceiling…and the mystery of their bewildering movement through the building was solved. They’d simply ignored the walls.

Her captor’s loping run shook her hard and made her teeth rattle, doubly so when a blast behind them signalled the suppressor’s destruction.

Then they were out, into the night. For a moment, Wrma felt a spike of…something. Not hope, exactly, but surely the cordon of armored vehicles would give these monsters some pause?

…No. The Ten’Gewek had huge rifles that Wrma couldn’t have even lifted. They twisted something on the weapons’ sides, took aim, put their full considerable weight into bracing themselves…

They fired with a retort more like artillery than small arms, and they may as well have been shooting ration cans. Each round buckled and smashed a vehicle’s armored hide, wrecked its wheels, pulverized its contents. The troops, sensibly, fled.

Moments later, a shuttle was setting down on the square, orbited by a trio of combat drones. The deathworlders didn’t even wait for it to land properly, but started leaping up into it as soon as the ramp was down and a female Robalin—the very same one who’d been the object of the Enforcers’ earlier manhunt—waved them up.

Big as shuttles were, it was a tight squeeze. Wrma found herself packed in between her Ten’Gewek captor and a dark-skinned human who bared his teeth at her in a way that did not seem friendly.

The lead Human was the last one up. “Death-Eye, Chimp. All aboard,” he reported as the ramp sealed shut. Wrma could hear the solid k-chunk of the drones reattaching to the hull, and the whine of capacitors as the Mjrnhrm pilot charged a jump drive.

A new voice over the shuttle’s comm system. ”Stay put for now. We’re about to jump out and we’ve got a containment fleet jumping in. Feel free to stage down, Hoeff.”

The short wall of a human grunted toward the ceiling. “Rog.” He looked over at his men. “Right. Go ahead and shed ‘yer Grass, once we’ve jumped.”

Wrma didn’t know what their ‘grass’ was, and her translator didn’t offer any clues. A few moments later, the universal sensation of being yanked through something without moving overtook them all—

“Secured from jump,” came over the intercom. “Bruuk to aft cargo hold for medical inspection.”

“Right. De-ass and buddy-check!”

Everyone sighed in relief, and they disembarked the shuttle with an unmistakable sense of urgency into what appeared to be a large cargo bay of some kind. Once the rear ramp was down they were all out, arranged in a semi-circle—no escape for her, not that she could go anywhere—and tended to each other quickly. That done, all of them dropped their packs with a disturbingly heavy thump, set down their weapons, began pulling off their assault armor…

“Jesus fuck it feels good to be outta that bullshit.”

She…boggled. The rumors were true. Deathworlders really were a strange kind of infernally handsome. Something about how they fit together, how they moved…it spoke to parts of her instincts she didn’t properly realize she had, and she found it uncomfortably intimidating. The least of the Humans was so well-formed he was almost grotesque to look at, and the largest Ten’Gewek was…monstrous to the point it came out the other end. His more than any of the rest was a terrible beauty to behold. No living thing should be that obviously capable!

They noticed too, and there was a susurrus of dark humor. The lead human—very much like the big Ten’Gewek in physique himself—briefly tensed himself, and gave her an amused grunt.

…By the Matriarchs, nothing she’d ever seen before was as intimidating as that little display. All of them reciprocated, proving that they’d been standing totally relaxed and comfortable before. What malign force had made these creatures?

“I know we’re all pretty as fuck,” the lead human rumbled, “but I got questions first. Name, rank, and serial number. That at least.”

“…If I refuse?” She said, bravely, suspecting she knew the answer.

She didn’t. He shrugged, “then you can just sit there and be bored, I guess. Won’t matter, I bet the captain’s gonna wanna talk to you anyway. As for me and the boys…Rees! Let’s get a rotation through the showers going. We all stink to high fuck and back.”

The Ten’Gewek nodded too. “River was slimy,” one of them complained.

Their cargo space was obviously well-equipped for their activities because in the corner was, in fact, a hygiene station. All of them rotated through—and if she thought it obscene glimpsing their bare upper bodies, it was far worse now. She studiously found other things to look at.

The ship’s medic, apparently, was a Gaoian of unusual size, also a study in alien handsomeness, though thankfully he was covered in a thick pelt of shaggy fur. He gave everyone a once-over with a medical scanner, declared the deathworlders all clean, then gave Wrma a rather closer inspection. He frowned at the scanner as he played it around her head.

“How’s ‘yer hearing?”

“…Fuzzy,” Wrma admitted.

“Not surprised, with that perforated eardrum. I can give you—”

“No.”

“It’s just a standard regenerative.”

“No.”

The Gaoian duck-shrugged, and muttered a dictation into his tablet. “Patient refused treatment.” He stepped back and considered her a moment longer. “Okay. You’re on a ship with a deathworld crew, all of whom have Frontline contagion-suppressing implants and went through biofilter cycles before and after boarding. That bein’ said, it is my strong recommendation that you accept an immunobooster for your own safety.”

“My safety?”

“Oh yeah.” The Gaoian indicated the nearby troops with a flick of his claw. “Humans are more’n fifty percent bacteria, by cell count, an’ it’s all symbiotic. Can’t completely sterilize ‘em without killin’ ‘em. An’ Ten’gewek? Kee—well, goodness only knows. We Gaoians ain’t essactly bastions o’ purity, neither.” The stocky gaoian made a chittering noise that was apparently a laugh.

“…That is…horrible.”

“Eh. That’s evolution for ‘ya. So. You want the shot? Or you gonna risk a messy death?”

Wrma gazed at him in sickened bewilderment, then wordlessly held out her bound arms. He duck-nodded, took hold of her wrist with a grip that she could sense would have no trouble snapping her bones if he wanted, but was restrained gentleness itself when he pressed the injector to the inside of her elbow.

“Sure you still don’t want that regenerative for ‘yer ear? It’s gonna hurt before long.”

Wrma sighed. In for a paddle, in for a wade. “…Fine.”

That treatment came in the form of a spray into her ear. “There! All good. Now, you get a good meal in, yijao? Don’t wanna see ‘ya fallin’ out.”

“…Why are you being nice to me?”

The Gaoian looked genuinely confused. “Why not?”

They stared at each other in mutual incomprehension until he duck-shrugged, packed up his medical kit, slung it onto his back and was gone with a last instruction to call if she felt any sudden discomfort or troubling symptoms.

His absence left Wrma to stew in her own confusion, not to mention shock. It still felt like mere moments had passed since these brutes had massacred a room full of people and two abrogators like they were nothing, chosen to spare her for their own alien reasons…and now they were all politeness and sympathy? It didn’t make sense.

What in all creation had prompted them to come torment their sanctuary, anyway? And why had the Benefactors not intervened? After all their promises that Venture would remain unfound and would have plenty of time to grow and prepare for the Hierarchy’s resurgence, they had barely made it more than a handful of years, and then in one afternoon the whole project was over.

And the Robalin and Mjrnhrm! Traitors. Associating with the very life forms that would supplant and destroy everyone, in time.

It took only a few minutes for the deathworld soldiers to attend to themselves, the smell of their bodies thankfully much improved. They sat in a guarded formation around her—lines of fire carefully preserved, she noted—clad in thin shirts and some shiny mesh-like shorts for the humans, and shorts only for the Ten’Gewek. None of it did much to actually conceal their disturbingly over-muscled bodies, so she had no idea what the purpose of such flimsy garments was.

All of them began tending to their equipment. Mark of good soldiers, that; your health and your weapon were your greatest concerns, and these fighters obviously understood the tools of their trade better than any she’d ever seen in her command. No hesitations, no pauses, no consulting references. They disassembled everything almost distractedly, and cleaned as they talked among themselves.

The scatalogical and downright offensive content of their conversation was clearly some perverse kind of jocularity.

“Hey.” Big Human grunted at her, suddenly. “You hungry?”

“I don’t eat meat.”

“Yes, I know. We’re not going to force-feed you or anything like that. Are you hungry?”

Wrma’s impulse to defiance duelled with the emptiness in her belly, and lost. “…Yes.”

He tossed her a ration pack. “Here. Falafel. One hundred percent vegan. Means absolutely no animal products of any kind were used to make it.”

She scowled at the pack in confusion. “I thought you were carnivores.”

“Omnivores, more precisely, and we all like a good steak. I just happen to like the falafel MRE.”

When she tentatively opened it and gave it a sniff, Wrma could see why. The aroma was remarkable, and a tentative sampling was…good, actually. Clearly a foodstuff designed to keep for a long time, but not bland, not at all.

By the Matriarchs, how was she to cope with these contradictions? Just minutes ago they had slaughtered all her men, and yet now…

They all looked up and abruptly stood to attention as a new Human joined them, and this one could only be the “Death-Eye” that “Chimp” had called to. As unnerving as a human’s focused, predatory gaze innately was anyway, his was rendered doubly baleful by the obvious prosthetic.

“She behaving herself?”

“Yessir. I just gave her an MRE.”

“You cruel man.” They shared a chuckle. “Fleet’s coming. FIC wants her in Myrmidon’s brig.” he turned to Wrma. “I am afraid you are likely to be with us for some time.”

“And what will happen?” Wrma asked. She’d given up on defiance at some point without noticing it. Now, she was just…resigned.

“That depends on you. I’m sure you’ve heard horror stories, but trust me: we don’t practice any of that, and we don’t need it anyway. You will learn quickly that you are your own worst keeper.”

Whatever that meant. Wrma was still wondering when a new group of Humans arrived, these ones in uniform of some kind to escort her away, to another cargo bay, through a jump array, onto a different ship, through its cramped and too-tight decks, and into a cell.

They let her keep the food. Gave her a paper cup full of a whole day’s worth of water, too. Left her alone just long enough to start getting nervous, bored and fretful…

And then they came back and explained the rules to her. They were polite. Friendly. Efficient.

Professional.

It was that last word that clicked things into place. How the team who’d captured her could unleash such terror and violence so efficiently, then go to giving her food and treating her with nothing worse than polite, hospitable disinterest. They were professionals. The violence was nothing more personal to them than their job.

In its way, that was far more monstrous than any description of them in the Benefactors’ stories.

They left her to consider the implications of that revelation a while longer, but they needn’t have bothered. Wrma was defeated. All she had left to do now was answer their questions. There was no point in resisting. They could not be resisted.

The Hierarchy was completely right about them.

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

“So, lemme guess. Keeda fucked off again?”

Wilde nodded, looking more amused than frustrated about it, this time. “As soon as the fleet showed up, yeah. I turned around, and there he wasn’t.”

“How d’you think we’re doing on this ‘test’ of his?”

“…I think we’re passing. Hard to say, but…he left some coordinates.”

“Sounds like an invitation, to me.”

“Or another show-and-tell with an assessment attached. But there’s something else. Somebody new joined our little drama.”

He showed them Dora’s drone footage. It was like something out of an action movie, the way a fucking ninja just materialized out of thin air, unleashed some terrible havoc, then was gone again just as quick as she arrived.

“…One of Keeda’s, you think?”

Wilde nodded. “Yeah. And I doubt we’d have seen her if we hadn’t impressed, somehow. He uh…” he scratched the back of his head, awkwardly. “He started banging on about ‘Heroes.’ Like, you could hear the capitalization.”

A mutual round of frowning at each other swept the room. “Uh…” Frasier began.

“Yeah. We got interrupted before I could get into it with him. But that’s about the point she appeared.” Wilde indicated the footage. “So, I don’t know what to make of it all. He seems to think we’re…” he trailed off, shaking his head.

“Something special,” Hoeff suggested.

“Sounds good to me,” Tumik rumbled, cheerfully. “Heroes get lots of pussy.”

“Rude!” Dora exclaimed. “Who taught you that word anyway?”

“The internet,” he shrugged. “Also, dance club! Turns out, human women like us…”

Now that had been a big surprise. Hoeff had known the monkeys were good-looking in an exotic sort of way, after all. He wasn’t blind. But good-looking enough to pull on the dance floor?

Apparently! Or maybe the gals in Folctha were more adventurous than most. But then again, Tilly was happily Vemik’s side girl, so…

…Actually. He’d been hit on by Ten’Gewek women, too. Maybe everyone was right about Human and Ten’Gewek. They did seem to have some kind of strange Star Trek attraction to each other.

He pitied the first human guy to stick his dick in that, though. Hoeff grinned, despite himself. If rumors were true, it’d be like stuffing a twig into a bear trap!

“…Something funny, Hoeff?” The captain seemed amused.

“Just my imagination boldly going.”

“Careful,” the captain teased. “You’re a married man now!”

“Eh,” Hoeff scratched the back of his head, suddenly sort of embarrassed. “I’ve got Claire.”

…Since when was he ever embarrassed about anything? With the head-scratch, too! Clearly he’d spent too much time Beefing with Julian. The Minnesota was gettin’ all over him!

“So,” he changed the subject. “I take it we’re going to those coordinates he gave us?”

“With Big Poppa Bear’s permission, yes. They’re going to contain the system we just found. Probably already have a planetary forcefield and Farthrow up, I reckon.”

“Hell of a thing. Whole planet fulla people loyal to Big H.” Hoeff shook his head. “Fuckin’ idiots.”

Frasier shrugged it off. “Can’t win every heart and mind.”

“It wasn’t all that many. Scan showed, what? Three small cities? I don’t envy the army for the POW operation they’ve gotta run now, all-sudden.”

“Shit, give the poor buggers down there some hot showers and walls without rust holes in ‘em, they’ll be singing our praises in a month,” Davies opined.

“We’ll see, I suppose…” Wilde replied evenly. “Anyway. It’s only forty hours or so to our rendezvous. I’d suggest you all get some rest and recovery in.”

That sounded good. Never not sleep, when the opportunity presented itself. And the Grass may not be the Mass, but it sure as hell kicked it’s wearer’s ass the same. They’d be putting it on again in a few hours, no doubt.

Hopefully, they were close to getting some actual fucking answers. It felt like they were due some. Hoeff was getting tired of the cryptic bullshit.

Whatever came next, it had better be good.

Y!kiidaa, Right Hand of the Triumvirate

“You intend to show them the Archive?” The Old Man’s holographic avatar was seated, enjoying a cup of wine as was his usual taste for the evening. He was a temporary touch of regality among Tomoe’s otherwise thoroughly minimalist private chambers aboard the Onna-Musha.

Y!’kiidaa duck-nodded merrily. Frankly, he couldn’t possibly be more thoroughly pleased with how things had turned out. “My old Cousin, they’re everything we hoped they would be. They play by my rules but not to a fault. They know when to use their own judgement. They showed great restraint in dealing with the…Wilde used a fantastic word for them. ‘Quislings.’ They’ve earned my trust twice over. And Tomoe-san’s too, it seems.”

“Yes…” the Old Man smiled at his wife. “Yours was quite the timely intervention.”

Tomoe shifted her weight slightly. “I merely averted a needless tragedy.”

“And thereby sent a tacit message they cannot have failed to miss.”

“If I have misunderstood Keeda-sama’s test and overestimated his approval, I apologize greatly,” she replied evenly. Only several centuries of familiarity allowed the Old Man to see the quiet certainty that she hadn’t behind her words.

And of course, she was right.

“You know me too well,” Y!’kiidaa replied. “Had you not stepped into save the shuttle, I would have. In fact, I think it’s better this way. A little extra sniff of mystery to entice them.”

“So you will show them the Archive,” the Old Man repeated. “That would be quite a test itself.”

“I wouldn’t dare show it to them at all if they hadn’t completely won my trust, old Cousin,” Y!’kiidaa promised.

The Old Man nodded, satisfied. They had been close for thousands of years, practically of one mind. Y!’kiidaa would have accepted his trust without hesitation, and knew that the Old Man felt exactly the same way. Neither of them were hasty, after all.

“Very well, then. I shall prepare Ekallim-Igigi for a suitably dramatic entrance.”

Tomoe’s hand covered her amused smile. “Ever dramatic, Husband.”

“One must always consider one’s legend, my love,” the Old Man chuckled. “If this is to be our moment to reveal ourselves, we’ll make it worthy.”

He glanced outside the camera’s field of view at something, smiled, nodded, then turned back to them. “I will see you tomorrow, then.”

Tomoe blew him a kiss, Y!’kiidaa ducked and spread his paws, and they were alone.

Tomoe stretched and rolled her neck, then wandered across the room to her armor stand. “You are a little too pleased with yourself, Keeda-sama.”

“One of my faults,” he chittered. “I don’t deny it.”

“I can hardly blame you. You are getting your way, in the end.” She tutted at some imperceptible damage to her weapon, and pulled a workbench out from its hiding spot in the wall to correct it.

Y!’kiidaa pant-grinned and made himself as comfortable as he could. The fact was, he didn’t much enjoy Tomoe’s taste in decor. It was too…open and clean. Gao were meant to relax in cozy, dark spaces full of the scents of living. The white walls, white ceiling, white floor, hidden-away furniture and near-total absence of decorative touches struck him as both clinical and unfeminine.

But, this was not his space. It was hers. The whole ship was her wedding present from the Old Man, periodically updated, maintained and rebuilt.

“I’m surprised the crew of Stray Fortune did not notice your implants,” she continued, transferring the naginata to the bench and beginning to strip apart its fusion field generator. “Surely they scanned you?”

Keeda duck-shrugged Getting one’s bones replaced with shield emitters, jump arrays, batteries, computers, explosives, smoke generators, and an emergency life support system that could keep him alive in the vacuum of space for nearly an hour…not a pleasurable experience. But oh, how useful.

And it was true, he’d held his breath during Bruuk’s medical inspection, and clamped down hard on his relief when the scanner hadn’t noticed any of it. Of course, why would it?

“You have to think about how people think of things,” he said. “Very few people really understand the workings of the devices they use. They think in terms of function, not how the function is accomplished. An automobile is a ‘go-places-box,’ not an intricate mechanical assemblage of cause and effect that eventually transmits force to ground.”

She nodded as she set the components of one of her own functional devices aside in neat rows, listening politely, inviting him to continue

“So too are medical scanners. They’re ‘find-sickness-boxes,’ especially to the people who use them every day, not a very particular set of modes and technologies to observe a target. The trick, Tomoe-san, if you wish to be clever in this way, is always in the procedure of a thing, not in its abstract function. You can’t fool a perfect find-sickness-box, if indeed there was such a thing…but you can absolutely fool a sophisticated X-ray scan, by considering reflectivity and density.”

“And I suppose they were much more concerned with your biological uniqueness, upon discovery.”

“Oh yeah. Can’t underestimate a good big distraction like that!” he chittered merrily. “But, oh, I had fun. I got to be a cyborg Keeda and everything, big and stompy and filled with lasers!”

The Gao had always loved their kitsch. Such a wonderful word, that! He’d definitely want his old bones back after this, though, and maybe this time he wouldn’t insist on consciousness. As weirdly, clinically fascinating and educational it was to watch your own body be precisely dismembered by forcefields…

He’d rather just dream.

“And has it all gone as you expected it would?” Tomoe asked, as she dismounted the weapon’s blade from its shaft.

“I try not to expect. That way I’m never wrong.”

He chittered when she turned and gave him a patient Look that she’d given him many hundreds of times before, and shook his head. “But, no. This has been very interesting!”

Really, Keeda wished he could claim credit for it all being some masterful gambit on his part, but that would have been an outrageous lie. The fact was, they’d only been trying to clean up after a slip-up.

Grave robbers. Quisling grave robbers, at that! Of all the things he’d been in his many lives, a filthy, mangy disloyal pyre-thief was not one of them. But the galaxy was full of people too unscrupulous—or too dull—to care about the sanctity of dead civilizations. To them, a fallen empire was just a useful place to grab something that some equally contemptible but wealthier collector would gladly buy for a small fortune, funding their black market purchases.

In theory, it was the sort of routine encounter an inexperienced new captain could safely cut his teeth on. But reality was never quite so mundane. Chaos had its way of slipping in, and the right zephyr in the wrong place could culminate in an avalanche. A slightly incautious too-fast warp led to ghostly sensor signatures, creating a spacer’s rumor, and from there…

Well, if a certain freighter, apparently come to trade with the grave-robbers, had been all that it appeared, then it and the dig site would have vanished, and the entire incident would be just another ghost story. Singularity had left plenty of those, over the ages.

But no. This freighter had turned out to be much more. So much better.

At heart, a trickster was just a sailor, skillfully turning his sails to the winds of chaos. A trickster was just a forager with a good nose, sniffing out opportunity from under the soil. A trickster was a huntsman, who might not know exactly when the animals would come his way, but nevertheless knew enough to lay a good ambush.

Y!’kiidaa had been sailor, forager and huntsman in his life, and much else besides. He knew chaos even more intimately than he knew Tomoe, or the Old Man. After all, he had witnessed the death of his very species, and certainly the end of his own line, yet still turned it into an opportunity.

And here, he smelled great opportunity. The solution to a mission that had at times seemed impossible over the long years.

He relaxed, and watched Tomoe sharpen her sword in comfortable silence, entertaining himself with imagining how they would react to her…and to her husband. He’d find out soon enough.

They were nearly at the Archive.

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

Their destination turned out to be a planet. One that left Urgug’s hide aglow with puzzled ripples of yellow and red.

“It is a decidedly odd one.”

Ian frowned and pulled up the data Urgug was looking at on his own station. “Odd how?”

“I see a strong magnetic field, liquid water and thick nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, but no sign of chlorophyll.”

“So it’s…habitable?”

Urgug added pulses of blue to his expression, the equivalent of a human humming and hawing. “For the sake of precision, let us say it is breathable. Or at least it appears to be from this distance. Closer inspection may yet indicate otherwise.”

Ian joined him at his console and watched around his huge furry crewman’s shoulder. Urgug was right, calling the planet they were approaching ‘habitable’ would have been more charity than it deserved. It was a bit smaller than Earth but a bit denser, and wildly more eccentric in its orbit. Urgug rumbled thoughtfully, and started to run the system simulation in reverse at high speed.

Sure enough, after only a few seconds, it threw up an error message. “As I suspected.”

“What?”

“A rogue object passed through some…hmm…two hundred thousand years ago. We are looking at a once-temperate planet killed by the disruption of its orbit…and we are fortunate to be approaching when we are.”

“How so?”

“In a few weeks, the seas will boil. Then, presumably, they condense back out of the air at the other end of the year, freeze solid throughout aphelion, and so on. It is…very much a deathworld, in the truest sense.”

“So what in the hell is Keeda bringing us here for?” Ian mused aloud. Their rascally self-appointed proctor had resumed his mysterious act, and taken to answering all questions with a sly look, a shake of his head, and infuriating silence. “There can’t be anything living down there…”

“An observation which implies we are here for something non-living. Technology, perhaps? If he is indeed the enemy of our enemy…”

“A relay world? I doubt it. Everything we’ve seen so far says the big H like to use stable, temperate deathworlds for those…”

“I daresay we shall know more when our ‘friend’ reveals himself,” Urgug replied.

“He’s not here already?”

“At this point, I would be deeply surprised if he does not have an exceptional cloak.”

“Fair.”

“Fine, fine.” Keeda, of course, chittered and appeared out of thin air with a shimmer. “Ruin all my fun with your logic…”

Ian chuckled, despite his growing annoyance. Even Urgug had reacted with calm. “For a trickster, you’re kind of predictable.”

“Naw! What’s the point in a trick that nobody figgers out?! Fun is for sharing.”

“Be that as it may, this is my ship, and…”

“Yes, yes. No more tricks, I promise.”

Ian accepted that with a kind of shrug-nod. “So what kind of ‘fun’ do you have for us this time?”

“Got something ‘ta show ‘ya. But first, there’s a friend of mine I want you to meet…”

Ian raised an eyebrow as, right on cue, the Fortune’s proximity alarm sounded. Keeda pant-grinned happily, and looked up through the flight deck’s roof windows.

“…There she is,” Keeda finished, with all the happy satisfaction of a magician who’d just produced the rabbit. “Gentlemen: the starship Onna-Musha.”

Moj buzzed a high, impressed noise equivalent to a long and low human whistle. Urgug was doing the same, glowing purple with streaks of white. Ian had to agree with them. The Onna-Musha was two hundred meters away at most, which was more than close enough to get a good, clear look at her, and she was…

Bloody hell, she was a fucking artwork.

She was crescent-shaped and smooth, much wider than she was tall assuming she was oriented the same way up as the Fortune. Her hull was a gleaming lacquer red, partly hidden by large and brilliant white armor plates. And if Ian’s eye was correct, those faintly glowing blue panels recessed along her leading and ventral hull were thrusters, presumably with matching partners on the opposite side. Equal thrust in all directions, the mark of an agile ship.

Front and center on the nose, were elegant brush-stroke characters the size of a bus. He didn’t need the translator to recognize Japanese Kanji.

Keeda chittered at their reactions. “Yeah, I gotta hand it to ‘er. Captain Tomoe knows how ‘ta blend form an’ function.”

“We are being hailed, captain,” Urgug reported.

Ian was still considering the elegant ship above them. “Put her through…”

Captain Tomoe turned out to be no less stunning than her ship, clad in formal silk robes. She bowed at the hips in greeting, and Ian caught the translator’s work in the mis-match between the movement of her lips and the words he actually heard.

“It is nice to meet you. I am Tomoe Gozen, captain of the Onna-Musha.”

“…Ian Wilde, captain of the Stray Fortune. A pleasure. I take it we have your crew to thank for getting my people out of a sticky spot.”

Captain Tomoe smiled, and switched to flawless, faintly accented English. “I attended to that personally. May I come aboard?”

“Uh…” Ian gestured invitingly. “Please do.”

“Thank you.” There was a thud, a black-flash, and in that instant she had gone from her own bridge, to Ian’s.

Ian sighed. “In the future, I’m going to ask you and your own to please not do that.”

She had the decency to look somewhat contrite. “Ah. Forgive me. It is our usual mode of travel among ourselves.”

“I figured it was something like that. You might consider how, uh, helpless anyone else is before that form of infiltration.”

“At least we were kind enough to show it to you, then,” Keeda replied, with his trademark amused ear-flick. “You are now forewarned, therefore forearmed.”

“I…suppose,” Ian allowed.

“There’s much more we intend to share, too. After this one last thing…I’d appreciate if you came down personally for this one. Shall we take your shuttle?”

“What, you can’t just jump us all down?”

Keeda shook his head. “No. Nor would you appreciate it if I could, yijao?”

Well, that was true enough. Ian considered for a moment, then accepted with a nod of his head. “Alright…Give us a minute.”

He ordered the wrecking crew to the shuttle as well, just in case. Tomoe made her apologies and returned to her ship, stating that she would meet them below, the shuttle was readied and loaded, and the long flight down passed uneventfully. Ian spent it looking out the window, trying to admire the view.

It wasn’t easy. There wasn’t a lick of green anywhere. The seas were blue enough, but dark somehow, as if the annual cycle of boil-and-rain had left them looking just as dead as they were. Technically it was a temperate world. In reality, it was a cinder.

Things were no better on the ground. When the shuttle set down, it did so in the middle of a scene of perfect desolation. There was nothing but bare dark dirt from one horizon to the other, baked as hard as fired clay by thousands of orbits too close to the sun. It was like walking on a vast unglazed earthenware plate, and without the shelter of any clouds in the sky. Thank fuck for the GRASS, really: hoofing it across the Sahara couldn’t have been any more hot and thirsty.

They were near the equator, in the middle of a tectonic plate thousands of miles from any fault lines, volcanoes, subduction zones…anything lively in short. On Earth, this would have nothing but perfect crop growing soil for hundreds of miles in all directions. Here? Just an oppressive sun, and the too-hard ground scuffing and crunching underfoot.

And, about half a click from their landing site, Tomoe was waiting for them at the top of a slight rise. She was armored and armed, now, that same light red-and-white outfit with the insect-eye helmet she’d worn back at Venture. She turned to acknowledge them, then returned her gaze to some unseen interest beyond the rolling terrain.

Ferd’s tail lashed as he turned, looking behind as though anything might be coming up unseen behind them here. “Reminds me of a book…”

“Which one?” Hoeff asked.

“Day-gone. Lovecraft, yes?” Ferd indicated the landscape of endless, undulating dark soil around them. “Just missing the dead fish.”

“I think I like this new literary supermonkey thing you’ve got going on. Do y’all have a reading club?”

“Yes, with Professor Daniel and Vemik, very much ‘catch-up’ to do. But I think you tease me.”

“Always.”

Ferd rumbled good-naturedly at that while the rest of the swolebros trilled. Nobody was being quiet. This was a very, very dead world, and anything that might have been here would have noticed them anyway.

…Except, that wasn’t quite true; one of them was being totally silent. Keeda was padding along on four-paw, and his expression wasn’t just solemn, it was downright funereal. Just as it had been back on that station.

“…What happened here?” Ian asked him

“Nothin’. This ain’t like the station or whatever. Think of it as…heh.” he perked up, very slightly. “Speakin’ o’ your culture’s literature. I’ve shown you our enemy’s past and present…”

They reached the top of the rise and he extended his paw forward, with an air of quiet, grim drama. “Behold th’ Ghost o’ Christmas Future, I guess.”

The rise in the ground turned out to be the end of the ground. Tomoe had been waiting for them at the lip of a vast open-pit mine, a conical hole big enough to bury a mountain. It had to be recently dug: had it been excavated last year, the rainy season would have filled it and they’d have been standing at an isolated lakeshore instead.

Far below, in the geometric center of the mine’s floor, was something so dark, so perfectly vantablack, that it caught the eye like a kind of inverse twinkle.

“…What is that?” Rees peered through his binoculars, then gave up and handed them to Ian with a shake of his head. Ian set one side of it to his good eye, and tried to focus on the black object, but he found that when the mine’s floor was in focus, he still couldn’t make out any details.

“Our mission,” Tomoe replied cryptically, and stepped over the edge.

It was a hell of a steep slope, but she slid down it like she was tobogganing, half-turned to cruise on her hip, her uphill hand pressed to the wall for braking and control. She made it look effortless, in fact. Keeda followed her without a word, with a flying leap that would have boggled the mind, had Ian not seen its like before.

Well, nothing to it. Ian gave a look down and considered. He was…well, a beast of a man by loosely normal standards, SOR had seen to that in spades, and he’d kept up the habit. But he wasn’t an ignore-gravity type of lad like Hoeff and his Wrecking Crew. That, and his total lack of depth perception. Suddenly felt a bit naked for lack of that eye. Feeling at a loss, he looked at Hoeff, who nodded at Ferd…

…Who hooted amiably and joked lightly. “Will take good care of you, little brother!”

True to his word, the descent was undignified, but safely managed. With a blistering run-up and a flying leap, of course, but cavemonkeys could make that sort ot thing look like everyday grace.

And they could fall out of trees on their home planet. Hell, they could safely fall from almost any height. Terminal velocity held no fear for the Crew, especially not here on this low-G rock.

Still, they hit with jarring force, even against the gravel. Ferd must have suspected the footing would be soft because he fell on all fours to fling himself free of it the instant they were in contact, translating his vertical motion into something alarmingly horizontal. From there a couple more flinging skips like a stone across a pond, bleeding off energy until Ferd had solid footing underneath…

They rolled to a stop at the bottom in a shower of dust and gravel. Monkeyflings were not the carnival ride Ian wanted out of life today. Two out of ten, would not barf again.

Keeda certainly approved, though. “Neatly done!”

Ferd put Ian back on his feet with a jocular grin. “See? Not so bad, yes?”

“I’ve been through worse,” Ian grumbled, and dusted himself off. Around him, it was raining men as the rest of the crew made their own descents.

A trill, an understanding hug, and a fang-filled grin of approval. The best way to a monkey’s heart was just to try, really. The biggest strength they valued more than any other was bravery.

It was getting on for late evening, and so by the time they reached the bottom of the whole it was pretty damn dark. But the object drunk in light like it was just falling right through the world and out the far side. That fact made it hard to get a read on its exact shape and dimensions. It was, Ian realized, still half-buried in the ground at a slight angle. So, probably a cube, actually.

“Now that’s really fuckin’ weird,” Rees opined, holding out his palm toward it. “Fuckin’ thing’s been drinkin’ in the sun, it should be radiating enough heat to cook with!”

“An astute observation,” Keeda chittered.

“So…” Ian took a step closer and peered at it. He couldn’t even see any scratches or dust. “What is it?”

“An Archive.” Tomoe prowled forward and rested a hand on its surface. “You’re looking at the Hierarchy.”

The crew all glanced at each other.

“…What. The whole thing?” Frasier asked.

“Oh yes. A complete backup. The Hegemony and every Mind therein. Stored here, in the most tectonically stable region of an otherwise inhospitable and useless planet that no remotely self-interested sapient being would even think of building on, and yet rich in mineral wealth. Contained within this cube is not just the archived data of all Igraen civilization, but the means to reconstruct it.”

“…It’s a Von Neumann probe, innit?”

“Indeed.” Tomoe walked a slow circle around it. “Tellingly, the Hierarchy have something so magnificent as this, a macroscopic backup of their entire civilization, yet not once did they imagine what such a device could really do. It’s just a library to them…”

Keeda duck-nodded, then turned sharply. “Ferd Given-Man! Do you know what a Von Neumann probe is?”

Ferd cocked his head, frowning at the sudden question. “Makes more of itself,” he said. “Then two make four, then four make eight, and go on long enough you have millions for every star in the sky.”

“That is certainly one of the more horrifying possibilities, yes. So, are we blessed or cursed with such an unimaginative enemy, hmm?”

Hoeff considered the cube. “…They really don’t care about matterspace, do they?”

“Only insofar as is necessary for their existence.” Keeda sniffed. “They live in their own universe, where they have total control of everything. Its fundamental laws, its nature. Even the boundary between self and another is optional to them. A dreamworld, endlessly more flexible than our rigid, objective reality…and endlessly less real.”

“Sounds kinda lame,” Hoeff opined.

Keeda chittered, long and loud. “You, my friend, have a talent for criminal understatement.”

Hoeff regarded the big bastard warily. “I’m a mudfoot. You get used to the immense bullshit. But we ain’t friends. Don’t pull that shit with me.”

“Really? Compared to these assholes…” Keeda indicated the cube.

“Those are my enemies. I don’t know what you are. Abducting my men and toying with us like an episode of Star Trek is a real fuckin’ good way to make it onto my forever shitlist.”

“Agreed,” Ian said, flatly.

“Oh, mon capitaine! You wound me.”

“Fuck off with that. We’re here. You showed us Space Auschwitz and the planet of the quislings, and now this. But you haven’t actually told us a damn thing about yourselves. You’ve jumped in to help when things got rough, and I appreciate that, but this cryptic bollocks makes it hard to trust you.”

“Oh come now, the enemy of my enemy, yijao?”

“—Is my enemy’s enemy. Nothing more.” Ian folded his arms. “Who are you? You called this your mission,” he reminded Tomoe. “How does appointing yourselves our proctors and testers forward that? What even is the mission?”

“We are Singularity. And our mission is the complete eradication of the Hierarchy, of course.”

“Singularity? Thank you. But the name alone tells me absolutely nothing, and that’s not the whole of your mission, is it? ”

“It very much is. But it’s so easy to say, isn’t it? ‘Destroy the Hierarchy.’ As if that were simplicity itself.” Tomoe shook her head gravely. “You do not understand the power of our mutual enemy. You think you are winning this war against the Hierarchy? You are not. This Archive is the three hundred and fifty-first we have ever uncovered. We have no idea how many there are in this galaxy, or beyond it. If even one survives, then they can start over, when our civilizations are complacent, when all of us here are long dead. From just one of these, they can rise, scour the galaxy, and begin their cycle of domination anew. And why not? They’ve done it before.”

“You think over all the seventy million years they’ve existed, we are the first and only time they ever faced opposition?” Keeda asked.

“I…hmm.” Ian’s brow furrowed as the question sank in.

“There’s one difference, o’ course,” Keeda continued. “Thanks to us—the conspiracy of which Tomoe and I are a part—for the first time in their history they are vulnerable. We might—might—be on the verge of actually defeating them. But it has taken us thousands of precarious years to reach this moment, and failure was always a real possibility.”

“Thousands of years of preparation, and the careful cultivation of both our species,” Tomoe agreed. “To what end? To the end of producing an alliance of peoples with the strength of will to see this fight through to the very last, however long it takes. To the end of producing people with the drive, tenacity and courage to rid our galaxy of the Great Enemy forever.”

“We were testing you,” Keeda said, “to see if we succeeded.”

Ian frowned at him, then around at his crew. The Ten’Gewek were listening implacably, drinking in the…whatever they’d think of it. The grand sky-story? God, how did they factor into this Singularity’s plans?

Rees had his eyes downturned, lost in thought. Frasier was watching the cube, brow furrowed and chewing his thumbnail. Davies’ head was angled slightly to one side as he looked back and forth between Keeda and Tomoe.

Hoeff’s expression was stony. “…And?” he asked.

Keeda looked at him, and spread his paws. “…And I think we did,” he said.

“So…If I was the Hierarchy,” Ian mused, considering the half-buried cube they’d unconsciously made the center of their circle, “and anyone fucked with one of these…I’d get very fucking angry at them and retaliate with everything I had to hand.”

“That’s what we expect, too.”

“Expect?”

“Well, you see, there’s a paradox. We know how to destroy these. But the moment we do is the moment our long conspiracy is finally exposed to the light.”

“That is a dilemma,” Ian conceded. “You also risk much merely by telling us this..”

“One cannot see all ends,” Keeda duck-nodded. “I presume not even we could perfectly contain this, at this point.”

“That’s a fair amount of trust you’re showing.”

“Yes. So…how much more do you want? We would need your strict secrecy on this. It would be for your most senior leadership to determine what to do with what we wish to share.”

“We keep secrets well.”

“Good. Then it’s time for you to hear the full story. But not from us.”

“Then…from who?”

Tomoe, it seemed, was something of a trickster at heart as well. She simply smiled, took a step back, and aimed a finger at the sky.

Ian was looking right at it when a space station the size of a city appeared overhead, low enough to see clearly in the light of sunset.

Its name, they learned, was Ekallim-Igigi. A name which their Surprisingly Educated Spacemonkeys found especially intriguing.

“I know those words…” Nomuk’s face was a mask of agonized recollection, like a man who’d put his keys down five seconds ago and now couldn’t find them.

Ian returned his attention to the looming edifice as the Fortune pulled closer for docking. He’d been wrong about its size, from the ground. It was a lot bigger than just a city. In fact, its vastness eclipsed every space station he’d ever even heard of. It was a whole damn civilization in space. As they were led along its approach lanes toward its port, he could see farms under glass ceilings.

Even so, the spectacle of it managed to come second to his curiosity about what Nomuk had just said. “You do?”

“Yuh. Read it somewhere…”

Hoeff grinned, proudly. “We’ve learned that spoken languages are harder for the monkeybros to learn, if they’re too different from their own, but reading is something else entirely. They drink it in like water. Their average is also a good bit more intelligent than our own average, too.”

“We study Humans,” Nomuk explained. “And, best way to know you is, start at the beginning, yee-jow? With your old history.”

“So this is why you wanted a big map of Iraq the other day.”

“Yes! And markers, to find places…That was it!” Nomuk poked his finger excitedly and whipped his tail. “Is Soo-mare-yan! I remember from one of Professor Daniel’s books!”

“…you know Sumerian.”

“Like water,” Hoeff grinned wider. “I’ve taught myself to speed-read to keep up with them. Gotta stay on top somehow…”

“So…what’s it mean?” Ian asked.

“Hard to say. Something like…’Palace of Gods Who Watch and Listen’ I think?”

“Or possibly princes, or just royalty. It’s pretty ambiguous,” Hoeff added, then frowned at Ian’s expression. “What?! Speed-reading, remember?”

“Besides. Spend time with Professor Daniel, even stupidest man learn,” Genn hooted with a nod and a teasing grin at Hoeff.

“Fuck off monkeybro, I’m smarter’n you! Still like twice as fuckin’ strong, too…”

“Anyway,” Ian interjected before something Stereotypically Hornyswole broke out between them for the umpteenth time today. “Sumerian. Sure. Okay. That’s…out of the fuckin’ blue, but fine. Bit bloody ominous, though…”

“Fits,” Ferd rumbled. “I think I read name Toe-mo-ay before too, somewhere. And Keeda is much older than Soo-mare-ya, yes?”

Rees, who’d practically had his nose glued to the window watching the vast station slide by suddenly took a step back, shock and dawning wonder crystallizing in his expression. “…Oh God. Oh fuckin’ shit!” He started laughing hysterically. “Keeda! Oh Jesus fuck you can’t fuckin’ be serious!”

“What?”

Rees started shaking his head violently, grinning like a lunatic. “Oh, no. No. No, no, if I’m right, this is too fuckin’ good, boys! I can’t spoil it.”

“Could squeeze it out of him,” Ferd offered with a vicious grin. Rees only laughed harder.

“Don’t you dare,” Keeda replied, pant-grinning hugely. “Or I’ll squeeze you even harder! Gods, I’ve waited so long for this, I’m gonna give Rees the most biggest prize when it’s done…”

Rees took one look at Keeda, and bust out laughing even harder. He was having trouble breathing now.

Most of the crew were watching him like he’d gone mad. Tomoe, though, was openly giggling along with him. Whatever the joke was, she was in on it.

Ian looked back out the window while Rees leaned against it and slid down to the floor, gasping for air and making pained noises. The guidance fields had brought them to a stop in a cavernous port bay, and across the bridge, Urgug was watching Rees’ hysterics with troubled flecks of pink rushing all over him while he ran the ship through its docking sequence. “…I can tell I’ve got some reading to do.”

“You won’t have time,” Keeda intoned, then burst out chittering. “But we won’t torment you for long! Come, let’s go meet the Old Man.”

“Oh God!” Rees pulled himself together at last, and accepted Keeda’s helping hand to stand up. “…Ow. Fuck. Wow. Hah! Oh, shit, boys. We’re down the fuckin’ rabbit hole now, I tell you!”

Keeda’s smug could be cut with a knife. “Indeed. Now…this way, this way…”

They were given quite the processional welcome. Keeda and Tomoe insisted on bringing the whole crew, and loading Urgug into a vehicle was always a time-consuming process, but the streets—halls? Corridors? Decks?—were cleared for them.

Ian’s impression of a spaceborne civilization was on the money, it seemed. He’d been expecting just Humans and Gao, but in point of fact the crowds lining their route were of every sapient species he’d ever heard of, excepting the E-Skurel-Ir and Ten’Gewek. And Hunters, of course, but they didn’t fucking count.

Lots of Corti, but unlike any Corti Ian had seen before. These ones were taller, their bodies less terribly atrophied and emaciated, more functional.

That applied to the humans too, come to think of it. There wasn’t a one out there who wasn’t an Adonis or a Venus in his or her own right, in every skin tone and ethnicity under the sun and then some.

Maybe that was true of everyone, but he wasn’t really well-equipped to judge, say, Rauwrhyr beauty, or what Guvnurag found most ideal in each other. Urgug had gone nervously dark, tightly locking down his chromatophores rather than emote openly, which was usually a sign of intense focus, painful shyness, or perhaps a feeling of inadequacy.

Then they were out of the busy districts and into something altogether more…well, palatial. They passed through gates, and then…hanging plants, fountains and flowing water.

No sandstone or whatever, mercifully. That would have been a bit too on-the-nose for Ian’s taste. Even though he was beginning to expect something like that…instead, they were surrounded by the materials that built space stations and cities. Glass. Steel. White stone, colorful tiles, grass and trees. The parks were dotted here and there with buildings that didn’t fit the rest of the aesthetic, in that their architecture was from completely different cultures. What Ian knew about architecture wouldn’t have filled a page, but he thought he could recognize Japanese construction at least. Especially given that the banner on the wall matched the emblem on Tomoe’s armour. One of the others might have been a Roman villa, or Greek maybe? Whatever they were, they stood out for their difference.

It was all beyond extravagant. They were in space for Christ’s sake, setting this much volume aside for palace grounds was…

Well, it was a hell of a fucking flex. Though, it seemed this “Old Man” was happy for people to use it as a place to relax and get some open space, so maybe there was method to the ego. Or at least, it wasn’t an ego prone to jealousy. In fact, there were kids playing out in the courtyard, including a couple who were—Ian blinked. That was a hardy young lad! He didn’t know what he was expecting kids to be like in a secret space civilization but…why not, at this point?

Their convoy pulled up on an oval expanse of gravel in front of an entryway, and this did not defy Ian’s expectations. It was open, no gates or doors, and lined with art. Mosaic walls picked out in metal and polished stone, and sculptural reliefs thrown into sharp contrast by the indirect lighting from below. Winged beasts and nude goddesses watched the crew sternly as Tomoe and Keeda led them through, as did a guard of men in armour much like Tomoe’s.

And beyond…a throne room. With a very much occupied throne at the top of seven steps.

Its imposing occupant was wearing something like a kilt but old, somehow. It was colorful and of obviously fine make, and it fit tight against his legs—showy garb for a hot clime. No shoes or sandals, no headdress, not even a shirt. Lots of jewelry.

It almost looked ridiculous. Then the man stood to meet them, and…

“I fuckin’ knew it…” Rees whispered.

…Firstly, f-f-fuck. Yeah. Up-fucking-staged like never before, right there.

He was fucking perfect.

Like, legit perfect, in every detail. Tall, towering over every other man present, even taller than Keeda. Broad-chested and HEAT-built everywhere, with long wrestler’s arms and a set of legs to match. His luxurious black beard was braided and sewn into thick twists, and a similarly prepared mane of long dark hair shot with the occasional silver thread fell to his shoulders.

The object lesson in masculine beauty extended to his face. He had happy, glittering eyes, warm and deep, deep brown. A nose to match the beard, obviously big but it worked for him regardless. Probably a chin to match it, too. Heavy brow without a caveman’s slope, with thick eyebrows. Thick everything. He was wide-necked and broad-jawed but handsomely so, not lumpen and ogre-like. He was moderately hirsute, with mostly bare, dusky skin banded with golden jewelry, and there was a ring on every one of his fingers.

In fact, putting it all together, through squinted eyes, the big man looked eerily like…

“…Julian?” Hoeff whispered beside him, completing Ian’s thought.

This was the caveman in fifty years, he knew instantly, somehow. Somehow. The King of Men could have been Julian’s dad. Gonzo’s grand-dad. He was old, too. Not in body—he was a perfect man in his perfect physical prime—but somehow, there was deep age in his spirit. Time just seemed to radiate off him with every movement. Maybe it was the way he dressed, the setting and show of his palace, or what-the-fuck-ever, but he felt ancient in a timeless way.

Awe, and unreality. Both at once. That was the only way Ian could describe it. Something in his legs and back wanted to bow, on pure instinct: he resisted it.

The king looked over them all in a slow sweep, smiling faintly, taking in their reactions, then swept down the steps—with a prowling gait, Ian noted absentmindedly—stopped before them…and bowed.

Respectfully, and not abjectly. But it was a bow, nonetheless. He held it for a long moment, then stood upright, favoring them with a broad, warm, welcoming expression.

“Hello, young ones! I am Gilgamesh of Uruk, king of the Golden Throne. Welcome to Singularity.”

++END CHAPTER 83++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

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Acknowledgments

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 84: The Deep

Chapter 84: The Deep

Date Point: 19y3m1w AV
Ekallim-Igigi, deep space

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

Ian had sometimes idly thought about writing memoirs or a book or whatever. Plenty of men had, after serving, but…no. No way. There was no possible combination of words that could do justice to…

Gilgamesh.

Right there.

Actual Gilgamesh. From the Epic of Gilgamesh.

What the fuck.

Fortunately, the big man—and what a comical fucking understatement either of those words were!—could read the room. He chuckled amiably, and somehow, through some small shift in the way he stood, dropped some of the radiant god-king bullshit.

“It’s a lot, I know. And you have so many questions. But I’m afraid we are not quite done with all the pomp and ceremony yet. The people out there have been waiting a long time for this. We should let them see you…”

Aye, why the fuck not? We can meet Santa and Gandalf while we’re at it.

Smiling, the King put his arm around Ian’s shoulder and guided him along, in a way reminiscent of Firth’s most colossally Hawaiian-shirt-laden forceful friendliness. Ian looked up at the man.

“…Gilgamesh.”

He had a deep chuckle. “Not precisely the name I was born to…but a few thousand years will distort anything.”

Ian shook his head. If not for the very real weight of the arm companionably guiding him, a real physical man actually touching him, he’d have wondered if they were deep in some kind of holodeck bullshit. Keeda’s biggest prank yet. But…shit. If a Gaoian god-hero could show up and fuck with them, why couldn’t a human one?

He strained his memory trying to remember the story. Couldn’t recall much of it, frankly. The king of Uruk had been a wanton man, who bedded all the women (and men, in some tellings) on their wedding nights, partied and debauched, wrestled and fought, until finally he’d made a good friend in…

Enkidu. Y!’kiidaa. No wonder Rees had bust a gut laughing.

God. Alice down the fucking rabbit hole? Shit. There was nothing to latch onto here. A large part of him wanted to just…give up and laugh, like Reesy’d done.

He held it together. Somehow. “Yeah…Saying I have questions is an understatement.”

“Good!” The Frat Boy King slapped him on the back with enough force to genuinely sting, though he realized his error immediately and gave an apologetic grin. “We’ll do our best to answer them. But come! Meet my people!”

Christ. An ancient mythological king, one built to the same sort of big and powerfully muscular scale as fuckin’ Firth—hard to compare blokes that size, really—but possessed of an absent-minded gregariousness instead of Firth’s cat-like poise. As they walked, he talked jovially about the palace, the stuff on the walls, and made introductions. He praised the Stray Fortune, and not in a back-handed royal kind of way either. Ian found himself teetering between listening politely and occasionally being smacked in the head by the sheer bloody absurdity.

But then they were round a corner, and through a curtain, and into a wall of noise, cheering and drumming and applause, and a balcony overlooking a long tree-lined mall. The mall was rammed shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people in every conceivable shape and species…and Gilgamesh was their king. He gave Ian one last affable swat on the back, (much more restrained, this time) then stepped up to the railing to make a speech or something, which Ian completely failed to listen to.

How in the fuck am I going to write this in my report?

Somewhere in that crazed thought, he found a solid place to land on at last. Okay, so the world had just bowled him a fuckin’ peach of a wrong‘un…but he was here to do a job. He’d have a report to make at the end of all this. That at least let him figure out which way was up.

Thus armed, he pulled himself back together and started listening properly. Started thinking again. How was he going to report this?

Well. He could start by seeing to his crew. And after that…

After that, they’d see.

Dora

The moment when Dora’s misgivings about the Robalin Supremacy had crystallized into evil certainty was indelibly fixed in her mind. She’d been eleven years old, a few weeks after her first pubescent molting. Tall and slim, self-conscious about her new, soft scales, and mortified by every compliment.

She ought to have been proud. Every depiction of the perfect child looked like her. Silky, smooth, fine scales in a healthy, youthful seafoam green, bright dark eyes, feathery antennae…The poster child of the Supremacy’s model young woman, on the outside.

On the inside…well, a few intense sessions with the school’s morality counsellor had quickly taught her to disguise every awkward adolescent flush of internal heat from the “wrong” sources. Every day had felt like tiptoeing through a minefield, never daring to stare at the girls who fascinated her so much, always forcing herself to coo admiringly over masculine features that did nothing for her.

And of course, every time she was pointed to by her teachers as a good example for the class to follow, she’d felt bare, as though any of them might see right through her and pipe up to dutifully expose the disgusting lesbian hiding among them.

Nothing of the sort had happened. Instead, she’d been the darling of the school administration, her beauty and flawless grades irrefutable proof of the innate superiority of their race. Never mind that her grades had been the product of desperation, a smokescreen she’d worked hard to maintain so they wouldn’t look closely at her. By keeping herself pretty and perfect, she’d escaped notice while some others of her class were taken away for “corrective education” and never returned.

It had only left her teetering precariously above a long and terrible fall, of course. Whatever fate had befallen her classmates, her fall from grace would be triply meteoric. The Supremacy reserved its most terrible wrath for its favored children who fell out of favor.

But the crystallizing moment in which she had truly glimpsed behind the curtain had been the parade. A selection of prize pupils were given the signal privilege of witnessing the launch of the Supremacy Naval Authority’s new crown jewel and flagship, the Utopian Ideal.

At the time, Dora had been awestruck. The ship was an aesthetic behemoth, her slender angles, silver hull and sharp profile putting Dora in mind of a shard of broken mirror. She’d put on a flashy light display across her shields and hull as she’d drifted past the viewing gallery, adding to the pomp and fanfare and fireworks. Infographics had said much of the ship’s titanic capabilities, armament, and defences. Much had been made of her esteemed and highly decorated captain, too, a man who could have been Dora’s cousin for how similar they looked. Or anybody else’s in the crowd’s, for that matter.

Laughable, nowadays. The Stray Fortune, nondescript and deliberately shabby as she was, would have wrecked the Utopian Ideal in seconds. But hidden among the information about guns, shields, engines and so on, Dora had noted a small but significant detail in the form of the Special Warfare Module.

In other words, the bioweapon tanks.

Her realization of that module’s nature and purpose had coincided with an announcer proudly proclaiming to the crowd how the Utopian Ideal could single-handedly pacify any resistance, even on a planetary scale.

…In other words, how it could infect millions of defenseless people with a virulent airborne plague that would leave them shitting out their own liquefying internal organs before merciful death finally delivered them from their suffering. The Supremacy hadn’t even bothered to try and hide how terrible its weapons were. On the contrary, it was a point of pride, and probably a statement to the masses about the likely outcome of any futile dissent.

In that moment, though, it had occurred to Dora to wonder where and how exactly these pacification weapons were created. And in the next moment, a leap of intuition had told her what “corrective education” might truly entail.

Her eventual escape had taken a further six years, and she’d never looked back. But now…

Well. Singularity was giving her some misgivings.

It was the parade for their benefit that had really set her on edge. The way everyone lining their route to the palace was some kind of beautiful or perfect. Fuck, she’d seen a Robalin girl in the crowd, pretty enough to make Dora’s heart ache with longing and awaken her ancient, ingrained, whatever-you-do-don’t-stare anxieties.

She flinched as he felt Ian’s warm hand on her spine. “Breathe, love. You look like you’re about to be sick.”

Dora shivered, and turned her head to whisper to him. “I’m okay. I’m just…big parades don’t sit right with me…”

“Sounds like an understatement. You’re damn near bending the railing.”

Dora looked down. Sure enough, two of her hands were clenched around the metal bar in front of her, tight enough to make the fine scales there turn pale. She let go, and brushed herself down awkwardly. “…I’m not that strong.”

Ian chuckled, then glanced up at the far end of the balcony, where their gracious and kingly host was waving to the crowd, all broad, charismatic smile and noble bearing. “He is layin’ it on a bit thick, isn’t he?”

“There’s no such place as paradise, skipper,” Dora whispered, fervently. She was as sure of that as she was of anything. “It’s all…”

“Bread and circuses?” Ian suggested. “I dunno if I’d read too much into it just yet. It’s pretty natural to want to give a big welcome to new visitors. Everyone does that. Hell, that’s more or less what His Majesty’s job is full-time, back home.”

“I guess…”

He gave her a friendly pat on the back. “Go on, take a step back. Get away from the crowd a bit, if you need it.”

Of course, they weren’t in a barge or any such thing, so the king probably overheard them. He didn’t say anything, but he did whisper in an aide’s ear. He stepped back from the balcony, which let everyone else to do the same. Refreshments appeared in short order.

“Well! I thank you for indulging me a bit…you do not know what it means for us. We’ve lived in secrecy for so very long…This day has been millennia in the making.”

There was a Corti who’d been close by Gilgamesh from the moment they first arrived. Leifini. And she was a doubly baffling creature. She didn’t quite look Corti, somehow. She was too tall, too well-figured, her face too expressive. She was openly smiling, something Dora had never known a Corti to do. “And it came sooner than anticipated.”

“I wouldn’t celebrate too strongly,” Ian cautioned. “Our own leadership is going to have… reservations about all this. And rightfully so,” he added, with just the right amount of polite, respectful rebuke in his tone.

“Of course, that’s only wise. And you, of course, have questions!” Gilgamesh boomed. “Perhaps the time has come to start answering them…yes. You’ve indulged us long enough.”

At his gesture, they left the roar of public attention behind and retreated into the palace’s quieter innards. Getting away from all those watching people steadied Dora’s anxieties a bit. She probably had been reading too much into it, truth be told.

But they didn’t go away. The King especially unnerved her, and she couldn’t say exactly why.

But a glance at Ian told her that he felt the same.

So did the others. Hoeff, his Wrecking Crew and Bruuk as well…all had silently conspired to a defensive arrangement around their more vulnerable crew.

They came at last to a room—quite Japanese Tea Room in aesthetic, actually—with low cushions around a small table, a central hearth and a warm pot, and an array of light fare. It wasn’t quite as severe as a tea room, though; there was room enough for everyone to sit comfortably about the room.

Clearly, Gilgamesh anticipated they’d be here a while. Even so, despite his immense size, he eschewed the furniture and settled for folding himself down cross-legged next to the table.

He caught the mood immediately. “Force of habit! Several of my wives insist on this. Who am I to disobey? Please, sit however you find comfortable!”

“Wives plural?” Ian asked, as he sat opposite. Dora found a large conical beanbag, perfectly shaped for a Robalin to sit on, and lowered herself gratefully. Her feet had been starting to hurt. Around the room, the others found somewhere to be. Bruuk curled up next to Ian, Urgug settled at the back, out of the way, Moj imitated the king in sitting cross-legged, and the Ten’Gewek all opted for a wide-legged stance while sitting on their coiled-up tails.

Dora knew that was a kind of half-way posture for them. At ease, but they could spring in any direction in an instant if something happened. And Hoeff, Rees, Frasier and Davies knelt rather than unwinding completely.

Y!’kiidaa and Leifini settled on lounge couches to Gilgamesh’s right and left, respectively.

“Oh yes. You met Tomoe already. No doubt some of the others will want your attention in due time. As for…well, you learn a certain kind of open-mindedness over time. Or at least,” he chuckled, “you grow less dishonest with yourself. It was common in my time, I am a passionate man, and I see no reason I should conform to later ideals in every detail.”

“Our leadership is definitely going to want to know you conform to some later ideals,” Ian pointed out.

“Given how the Great Father himself has daily dalliances with sometimes dozens of females, and your own ambassador to the Ten’Gewek has two wives…”

“I was referring to matters like slavery,” Ian replied, directly.

Dora noticed as Gilgamesh paused. It wasn’t an awkward, embarrassed pause, nor indignation at being interrupted. There was a look between them, the kind deathworlders used when they were having a whole conversation in silence. She’d studied humans for years, and still never cracked that facet of them. They insisted they weren’t telepathic; Dora still wasn’t entirely convinced.

“That’s brave of you, young one. And a bit rude.” There wasn’t any anger in his tone, however.

“Yes.”

“Wise, though. So…In that regard, I must admit, privileged and powerful as I was, it took a long while for my eyes to open.”

“Not a reassuring statement, that.” No rank or honorific. Ian was parlaying with the King as an equal, and the King was permitting it.

“Perhaps not. It took me longer still to even attempt to stand against it. Now, I mean no offense, but I suspect you do not understand how brutal the simple labor of feeding ourselves was. But, over time, matters improved. Singularity has never practiced that dreadful custom.”

“That sounds a bit…”

“Then I shall be clear. Slavery is an abomination before the gods. Any culture that can abolish its practice, must. I will not pretend I did not begin as a creature of my age, and you will see there is much truth in my legend. Brutal times make for brutal men, and I can be most brutal, when needs must. Gods, I was born and ruled in a time when the Ten Commandments would have been revolutionary! But all of us feel, my friend. It does not take much to engender sympathy for the most unfortunate and wretched among us. A man who cannot feel the wrong of it does not lead for long. Feeling it in your bones is the first step forward.”

This time, Ian said nothing. His posture shifted slightly, relaxed a little, and so too did Gilgamesh’s. The king reached forward, selected a dumpling or something from the table in front of him, and ate with surprising delicacy.

“…I have watched my species these long years, from a distance and from up close. I have read all the books of great men and heard their arguments, and those of the gao. I have been challenged many times, and learned the beginnings of my own ignorance. You were fortunate to be born suffused in the Deep. I had to learn it. No. Our people had to first discover it.”

He chuckled suddenly. “With time, I came to take joy in discovery, especially when discovering my own foolishness. If you ever have the opportunity to live truly long, young one, you must cultivate your inner child. The world must never become boring and static! And all of us, kings, captains, Keedas and Corth, must be humble in heart. There is always something new to learn.”

“And a new story to hear, your majesty?” Ian suggested.

“Yes!” Gilgamesh agreed. He poured out a red liquid into the cup in front of him: the scent of alcohol made Dora’s antennae fizz. “And it’s time we begin, indeed. I hope to hear the tale behind your eye!”

“You first, sir.”

“Mm. But, our story does not begin with me, nor even my brother and cousin Yekiidaa.” The ancient king tilted his wine toward the Corti now reclining on a cushion to his left. “It begins with Leifini…”

Date Point: 19y3m1w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Things could always get weirder. That was a maxim of the Universe Daar had taken to heart long ago, and reality had yet to prove him wrong. A ‘Back couldn’t often do anything about the weird, either. That was were he found himself quite suddenly, facing down a potentially terrible change to the game and lacking any useful data to help him wrassle with the problem. So, he did what he always did in such situations: what he could, when he could.

First, triage: protect the Gao (and her allies) from himself.

Easier said than done, since the most immediately doable thing was also the cruelest, given how it would involve his bestest Cousins in a deliberately ordered contingency plot against himself. If that terrible scenario ever came to pass, it wouldn’t just be Daar who suffered an untimely demise, probably.

But needs must, and no Great Father—especially Daar—could afford to be anything but brutally honest about reality. The truth of the matter was that Daar’s huge blessings were as much liability as asset in this new game. He was an engineered being, he’d learned not too long ago, and that engineering extended well past simple designer gene tampering. He was intended to become the new Alpha of Alphas over a new kind of Hunter, one that smiled and made friends with the prey it would ultimately contain, control and devour, one way or another.

Nobody anywhere was more of a predator than him.

Thank everything that the Humans had come along and given him an escape path from that fate. Gave his entire people a chance to transcend their destiny. The causal chain stemming from encountering Humankind was mind-boggling to think about, and if it wasn’t for Xiù, for her partners, for Adam rescuing Daar’s dearest Cousin from a terrible fate…how many were instrumental in the Gao’s salvation? In his own stupendous potential finding its expression? In his current rank and privilege? How could Daar ever repay such a debt?

How would he approach the problem of Singularity, with everything they’d made him into?

He was a freak. A lonely, incomparable freak who no longer had any peers in any endeavor, who’d never have someone to match him properly and whose freakishness was still on a rocket ride upwards. Oh, he had minds he could contest with, sure—Loomi in particular was a Cousin he’d grown to deeply appreciate over the years. He had sparring partners that could give him a proper fight too, if they were very clever about it. Reading and learning was always a joy, lifting, training, and hunting his meditations. He wasn’t without personal challenge in life.

But that was the problem. It was only in blatantly uneven arrangements that things were any kind of sporting at all! He was a made being engineered to be “perfect,” whatever the fuck that was, and he’d essentially achieved that “perfection” as much as by his own efforts as anything else. As he’d begun understanding from a young age, that despite all the immense rewards of being the best, “the best” was very often a lonely, terrible, and dangerous thing to be.

So…what control did his makers have over him, exactly? He didn’t know.

He couldn’t know, if they’d done the deed right. And that was the central problem, right there. Singularity was more than a well-connected conspiracy of spies. They were apparently an ancient space civilization with unspeakable technological power. They had truly made him, not the Corti, and Daar would bet his huge left nut on it.

Worse, “they” was the only word that fit. He had multiple conflicting forces at play in his heritance and upbringing. The Hierarchy of course, who had accelerated their plans on the coming of the Humans…and Singularity, for their own reasons. Probably both wanted an ultimate weapon in the form of a pliable, militant civilization of Deathworlders. Both had decided he would be, well…the singularity at the center of that. Both had worked to bring that about, which made them sworn enemies by odd circumstance, blindly allied in the fact of Daar’s existence.

He couldn’t allow either of them the faintest possibility of control. With the Hierarchy that was generally easy to accomplish. Ban neural implants on pain of death for all but the most debilitating and terrible circumstances, and closely monitor every such case. Done. Had a terrible war to that end, too. But Singularity? Where Keeda himself was apparently still around, at least according to early reports? He had a good crew on the task, but even they would be potentially suspect after this, with such credibly fantastical claims of technological power about.

How would he conduct any statecraft with this Singularity, given how they’d apparently infiltrated Corti society since before the Gao had history? Should he? Could he risk himself? Did he use cut-out ambassadors? How could he ethically do such a thing to an ambitious Brother?

…What did Daar want out of all this?

He sighed, and pulled his Naydi closer. It was early morning and he’d only half-slept through the night, mind restless and unwilling to let go. Of course, she’d done her admirable best to help him relax the night before, and her attentions had certainly helped…

Her nose sniffed and she yawned awake, snuggling along his chest and belly.

“Mmmf…you smell distracted, Bumpkin.”

He snuffled in the top of her head fur. “Yeah. But don’t you worry ‘bout me.”

“Worrying about you is my job, Bumpkin. Somebody has to!” She chittered quietly and wriggled around to face him. He in turn rolled over onto his back, taking her with him. She laid her head on his chest, snuffling in the dense snow-white ruff of fur between his pecs and gods how he wished he could just lie like this forever…

But, she was his rock, and his reminder of what was at stake. Resolved now, he rolled back over, gently pinned her. “And someone needs to take care of you, Naydi.”

So, he did. Gently, and nothing ultimately self-serving. Just a good massage and good, playful attention, all nuzzling hugs (and definitely a bit more than that) instead of satisfying his more volcanic appetites. She deserved a break from his passion, after all. Which, again…

“You’re so young, my Naydi.” She was less than half his age, a female in the peak flower of her life. “You shouldn’t spend it all just on smelly ol’ me!”

“Bumpkin,” she chided, running her claws through his chest fur. “I swore an oath to be true to you. I am the one person who stands by your side, and not below. I wouldn’t jeopardize that.”

“You wouldn’t with me,” he countered, knowing he’d lost the argument again, as always. “There ain’t nothin’ in this Universe that’d stop me lovin’ you.”

“And if it were just you and me, I’d take you up on your indulgence,” she sighed. “You’re right. There are many good males out there…but, no. We must live lives for more than ourselves.”

“I know.” It always hurt to admit, just a little.

“And you shouldn’t tempt me like that, Bumpkin. We can never indulge.”

“I…I know. It’s a selfish sort of concern for you, I guess.”

“And it’s a noble one,” she wrapped her arms mostly around his neck and hugged. “But you can’t put your concern for me over the Gao. I knew what I was doing when I first pursued you. I went into this with my ears up, Bumpkin, even back then. We all knew you needed a consort and we all knew what that would demand. I swore an oath to be that comfort to you before the Seen and the Unseen. I have no regrets. And pretty good cubs by you, too…”

They both chittered quietly.

“So don’t fret.” Her paw reached up and scratched against his jaw. He leaned into it, enjoying her attention. “I have the best male there is or ever will be, warming my nest-bed for the rest of my life. That’s more than enough for me.”

“That might be an extremely long time,” he warned.

“It may. But the nice thing about long times, is it takes a long time to know them. We’ll explore them together, Bumpkin. And we will live our lives, however long they may be. We won’t be Great Mother and Great Father for all of it. Whatever happens, then or now…we’ll work it out.”

Daar sighed, in awe of her calm wisdom as always. “Gods, I dunno how I’d manage wit’out you…” He didn’t wait for her reply, but kneaded at her with his paws, snuffled his way down her belly…and did what came naturally. Sometimes, it was all about her.

The way she gripped desperately on his mane and ears was delightful, too! He was merciless.

Anyway, onwards. He had a schedule to keep today, and more and more, he was a being of timetables and appointments than he’d prefer. At least the Gaoian notion of time made more sense to him, compared to the weird Human system; a shorter second, called a tick instead, a hundred to a minute, a hundred minutes to an hour, twenny-five hours to a day (almost) exactly. Time-wise it very conveniently lined up with Cimbrean’s natural day-length too, so if he just subtracted five hours either way, he was roughly good to go.

Sixth hour: wake up officially. Git up, take his morning piss, get his fur situation tended to. Daar chittered a bit evilly to himself, since Naydi was a bit too happy-shocked to be of much use right now…Tiyun would just hafta do.

Seventh hour: quick workout, just to get the fuzz outta his brain. He and Tiyun made up a ball game where Daar’s size and strength weren’t much advantage, so that was nice! The littler guy need to work on his throws, though. Gaoians always needed a bit more practice, there.

Eighth hour: breakfast, stretching, a once-over by the sports doc, morning briefs. Generally all at once. Poached fish fry-mix this morning, fresh from Longback’s finest, and meal one of his planned nutrition as a chaser. Stretching was a bit more painful than he’d like; definitely getting a little muscle-bound with the heavy winter bulking, so he’d need to focus on that more. Perfect health otherwise, so that was good. Briefings were mostly dull. Also good.

None of them had the Big Revelation in them yet. That would come later.

The next several hours were a blur of engagements and socialization, along with food tucked in whenever he could. He was a bit behind on his meal plan by the end of it. Then a proper workout, training with First Fang to keep up to scratch on their tactics, more meals, some reading and tutoring time, some argument in Conclave…the hours ticked by pretty quick.

Fifteenth hour: caught up on food. Now, the real challenges of the day began. The first was a press junket. Among the Gao this wasn’t exactly a new thing, but the Gaoian press was much less…predatory, maybe. Partly that was due to Gaoian nature, because one either respected authority or, feeling confident, one challenged it. Friend or enemy, never an adversary. The distinction between the two was a difficult concept for the Gao to understand.

So, he answered their questions. Only a little of it was even a little biting, and he could smell the fear on the young reporter’s scent just working up the nerve to ask.

“Oh, don’t’chu worry ‘yer pretty silver head,” he offered, hopefully disarmingly. Flashed a big pant-grin too. “I ain’t gonna eatcha! I promise. Now ask that question.”

He did. Something almost gently critical ‘bout the rumored Constitution he an’ the Conclave were working on.

“Oh, I get it. Impressive that ‘ya got a hold of that, since it were supposed ‘ta be a secret…” he wagged his tail just to make sure everyone understood he was amused more than annoyed. “But only ‘cuz we’re still wrappin’ our head around how we’d even write somethin’ like that. We don’t wanna leave anyone without a say, but we don’t wanna set up conflict, neither. It’s been some work! Champion Reeko’s got a trap of a mind on legal matters, too…”

He really did. Daar wasn’t accustomed to thinking like a Lawgiver, and he was finding the intricacies of the thing a fun challenge. Still, it was a mild question, and he’d hoped the press corps could do better…

Which is why he’d invited Ava over for the junket. If anyone could fearlessly ask questions, it was her. And she did not disappoint.

“Rumors of a new, major force deployment have reached us, Great Father.”

Ah, yes. She had her spies everywhere.

“You know I can’t comment on matters like that, Ava.”

She didn’t care. “Secret deployments blossom all around you. Care to comment on that?”

“Ha! Spicy today, I see! But no. Tactical advantage requires some discretion, you know this. I will not comment on any alleged operations, not ‘til the moment is ripe. You’ll hafta wait.”

That did speak to the final thing he’d hear that night, though: his last situation brief of the day, before he was free to retire to his mating contracts and his Naydi. He fielded a few more questions, made his apologies…mebbe poked things a bit on social media, just ‘cuz…

Back to his office. Briefing from Thurrsto and Vark. Chief topic: the Crew’s status, and the big find they’d delivered to them.

He hadn’t shared the Message with any but Thurrsto, just yet. And before the meeting…he had another message in his inbox, keyed to him personally.

…Well.

Looks like the Humans had a big fuckin’ shock comin’ their way, too.

Urgugvuneg was the one who’d written the report, probably because Wilde was busy. He didn’t quite seem to get just how huge this was and that lent the write-up an oddly terse, factual style. Which was maybe not surprising, what with species and culture and errything.

Actually.

He pressed his intercom. “Let’s take this to a war council meetin’ instead. An’ reach out to th’ Humans. I’mma need ‘ta meet with the leadership immediately.”

They were gunna want to know. And then they were gunna need a while to accept it. Assumin’ they even believed it…

…How would Gilgamesh of all the fuckin’ things even prove it? Keeda had it easy; he was a walking genetic anomaly. Daar could sympathize with that, really…

But Gilgamesh, presumably, would be an “ordinary” human. Well, they sure could test for his ancestry…

To think he’d planned a nice, vigorous evening with some youthfully enthusiastic mates, too.

Oh well. The weird din’t wait for anyone.

And things could always get weirder.

Date Point: Circa 10,000 years BC
Irflis-Tlinnsu City, Planet Corth’n.

Leifini

Rage was…unfashionable in these modern, trying times. A thought which, frankly, inspired Leifini to indulge in more of it.

The vote was firmly and unequivocally in. By an unchallengeable seventy-six percent majority, the various regional representatives and esteemed Faculties had ratified the decision to amalgamate the whole planet and all extraplanetary colonies under a new, unified Directorate.

Everything was to change, right down to the language. Much of it, from where Leifini stood, was an erasure. Irflis-Tlinnsu was to become City 03. No longer would the city be capitol of an ancient and storied state, but now merely be the administrative hub of a new, mathematically precise district whose lines were already drawn up without regard for history, or even geography. The aesthetic pleasure of straight lines, it seemed, trumped such mundane concerns as the course of rivers, or the ridge-lines of mountains.

Even the planet was to be renamed. “Origin.” As if the only thing about it that mattered was that it was where the Corth people had evolved.

It was an act of dominance over reality itself. The pinnacle of hubris. And a painful defeat that had her and her cadre essentially exiled from polite company.

Which, frankly, seemed the wiser option. She could see ruin coming for her people. Seen that it may have already come for many, with their atrophied sex organs and their lack of passion. Maturation tanks were so much cleaner and more convenient, really. Why suffer the effort, risk and discomfort of pregnancy? Of motherhood? Of intimacy? Of mating?

Assuming one was throwback enough to even manage such a thing?

Nowadays, it was a calculated act of rebellious will to cultivate any kind of emotional intensity. “The indulgence of the artist and the malcontent,” as the newly-appointed First Director had framed it only two years ago.

The self-righteous slit.

“I hope that wasn’t directed at me.”

Leifini realized she’d spoken that last thought aloud, and turned to give Geifil a warm look. “No, no. If I’m ever that angry at you, you won’t have to guess.”

He chuckled, rose from his couch and wrapped his arms around her from behind. “It was good swearing, though. You have a talent for packing hate into a syllable.”

She leaned back into his embrace with a smile. He, at least, could get it up when the passion called for it, and passion seemed to be his stock in trade. He even managed to be quite handsome, perhaps in rebellion against the newly approved aesthetic. Charm, a smile, and visible muscle tone were all strongly disapproved of these days among males. He had a positively primitive measure of all three.

That was not a complaint.

Not for the first time, though, she wondered at the disparity between the warm fondness she felt for him, and the passion that poets of even only two hundred years ago had seared into their pages. They had been such a heroic people! Passion dripped from every pore of their being, robustness of spirit had been lauded! Males took joy in their strength, females encouraged it, and reciprocated with their own charms!

All of it, now, was being carefully excised in the new language. The words for ‘passionate’ and ‘dangerous’ contained a quite deliberate association.

Even their genetic lines were being re-factored. A male’s brute strength? Useless, and an unnecessary indulgence in resources that could be better used elsewhere. A female’s reproductive system? Dangerous, messy. Prone to all forms of maladies. Also wasteful.

The common factor, of course, was that those were the means by which people were uncontrollable.

Leifini and Geifil were among the last of a rebellious line. Or perhaps a rebellious artistic tradition, much-maligned as atavistic. But it may have been too late, anyway. Even they had felt some of the dulling, leveling effects of it all in their childhoods. They hadn’t got a hold of their genes, yet; the two of them were what Corth should be, at least at a basic level. That wouldn’t last. Any child they had together would be illegal going forward. She was too emotional, he was far too physical. Both of them were studies in the tyranny of sex. Two hundred years ago, they would have been celebrated in primary school’s annual competitions.

Now, they were soon-to-be labeled Black Caste. The most undesirable, “dangerous” people, who were to be “helped” into productive work and comfortable retirement.

And sterilized.

She didn’t know what to do. It was all…closing in on them.

Like a predator.

The thought struck her like lightning, and just as demanding. It permitted nothing but itself inside her head until it was complete.

Geifil squeezed her. “…You just gasped.”

“I just had a…thought. One that fits the pattern a little too well.” She wriggled out of his grasp and darted across the room to her bookshelf. Real books of pressed plant fibre and fungal leather. Limited editions, all. Many of them had never been digitized, and never would.

The one she selected, however, would likely survive into the new era. It was a volume of planetary habitability studies, a neat cataloging of every life-bearing world within a considerable distance around Corth’n. Some had been promising candidates, and eventually targets, for Corth’i habitation.

Others, though, were death.

She found what she was looking for in the middle of chapter six. One of the so-called Death Worlds was largely ocean, speckled only lightly with archipelagos and no major continental masses. The shallow waters among the islands had been studied intensively, and Leifini tilted her head as she speed-read.

The account was of a clash between a shoal of glass-backed sharp-finned fishoids, and a pod of toothed mammaloids. The fish instinctively swarmed and swam in vast schools, sometimes up to miles across in the breeding season. Naturally skittish, their first defense when threatened was to simply swim away as a single shimmering, confusing ball, trusting that the predators could not pick out any individual fish from among the chaos.

When pressed, however, they counterattacked. And they were well-named, for those sharp fins could carve an incautious predator to the bone. A glass-back shoal was good eating for the toothy mammals…but dangerous, too. So the mammals employed tools the fish lacked: problem-solving intelligence, communication…and anticipation.

They had all sorts of tricks. They would circle below and blow curtains of air bubbles to divide off a small piece of the shoal. Then the strong, fit ones would risk a daring high-speed charge right through the middle of the glassbacks to divide them again, before plunging through the curtain bubble to escape those sharp fins.

Repeat, then repeat again, until the glassbacks were divided, confused, exhausted…

Then feast.

“We are being hunted,” she said, breathlessly.

Onna Illuminati deathstar or whatever

Hoeff, not quite believing this bullshit

Hoeff’s inner spirits were battling out on whether he wanted to just run away back to Akyawentuo to hold Claire tight in his arms and keep her safe against this ancient conspiracy motherfuckery, or if he wanted to stand up and put his fist right through Leifini’s chest.

Probably not wise, given literal Gilgamesh sitting cross-legged with them around a low table. The ridiculous behemoth was a serene study of way, way too much man folded down into an alarmingly compact knot of comically hard muscle. Even from such a relaxed posture, though, Hoeff somehow knew he wouldn’t even get to move so much as a inch in aggression before the big fucker blitzed across the room and put his own head-sized fist right through Hoeff’s skull, painting the wall with his brains. Probably cluck disapprovingly at his ruined manicure, too.

The King of Singularity was watching him closely. Like he could read Hoeff’s thoughts. Or, more likely, he was just an expert killer in the company of his own kind.

Well…okay. Oddly reassuring, that.

Out loud, though, Hoeff just had to call bullshit. “It took you reading about fish in a book to figure out what was up?”

GIlgabro gave him an amused look, but said nothing further. Leifini on the other hand had a wry shrug and a smile that was disarmingly human.

“It does sound stupid when you put it that way,” she granted him with a giggle. “But…no. Predation was not as…developed an art on our world. Deathworlds earn the title for more than one reason, after all. But the book was a useful illustration, not a complete revelation. Though, it was the subject of much horrified fascination, when it was published.”

“How so?” Morwk asked.

“It dramatically expanded our view of biology. It was that sort of time, really; practically everything we thought we knew turned out to be incomplete, and woefully so. We were young, fresh on the galactic stage. I was six years old when our first warp ship flew and we made contact with the OmoAru, who of course were at the apex of their power in those days. We were a proud species, but so many humbling discoveries all at once…they set in motion our deep anxieties. Especially once we discovered how small and weak we were in every sense, compared to the others.”

“And the Enemy exploited those anxieties,” Wilde guessed.

Leifini nodded. “The drive to perfect ourselves, to specialize ourselves, was not their invention, it was already present in the Corth’i. But the Enemy cultivated it to a destructive extreme. As has been their mode of operation for all of history. Those they cannot channel thus, they eradicate. It is, frankly, why the Gao were not simply exterminated in their prehistoric years, as the Ten’Gewek were meant to be. In the Gao, the Enemy saw exploitable, controllable traits. Of course, we didn’t know this at the time. We didn’t even know the Gao existed…”

“There is at this point much detail you must forgive us glossing over,” Gilgamesh added, gently. “To summarize: the plebiscite Leifini mentioned caused the bulk of her people to radically re-define themselves into the Corti you know today. Leifini and her faction were…”

“Rendered obsolete,” she said unflinchingly. “But, the new Directorate was nothing if not pragmatic. They did not hate us as such, just wished we were gone. So, they granted to us an obsolete space station and a few support ships. Exile was the cheapest and most expedient option. I daresay they imagined that without access to the homeworld’s reproductive facilities, we would simply fade away.”

“How nice of ‘em,” Bruuk commented, drily. Gaoians didn’t usually do dry, but when they chose to…somewhere, somehow, a British man would be tearing up ever so slightly.

“In relation to how some other species and even Human factions have disposed of their undesirables…yes.” Leifini said it with plenty of wry mischief. “The station they granted us is still around, in some sense. Every part and piece of it has long since been replaced, of course, but this is the end product of all those years of expansion and upgrades.”

She waved a hand around them, at the whole of Ekallim-Igigi. “So, we certainly did not quietly fade away. Instead, we went exploring. We weren’t sure what we were looking for, yet: evidence of some alien hand in the course of galactic society. All we had was, firstly, the desire not to be extinguished, and secondly, a vague hypothesis that somebody wished our people to be…less, somehow, than they could be. Some entity persuasive and insidious enough to persuade the Corth’i that they were actually improving themselves…”

“So, Satan then,” Hoeff noted. “You saw the Devil and went looking for him.”

“Indeed.” She sighed and shook her head. “It was a long search. For a great, great many years, I lingered in doubt as to whether I was just paranoid and irrational. But…I trusted my gut, as you say. So much so that I experimented with our earliest life extension and anti-aging therapies, which were not without price and danger. I lived in constant pain, and tumors were my daily companion for a great many years before we discovered Earth and corrected that limitation.”

Hoeff twigged to that immediately, but Wilde beat him to the punch. “Wait, how—”

“Ah, forgive me. I jumped ahead. We’ll get to that in due time. First, I must talk about the Gao.” She sighed, and gave Y!’kiidaa a complicated look. “What a day that was, when my faction discovered them…”

Early morning, A long-ass time ago
Clan Darkfur-by-the-sea, May-Eshi, Gao

Y!’kiidaa, Stud of his Clan

The fish twitched once as Gour sank a claw into its brain, then joined its dead fellows in the net at the back of the raft. Y!’kiidaa loved swimming, even if his size made it a struggle keeping his head above water sometimes. His Clan were known for their large webbed paws, and that gave even their biggest Studs just enough help to swim, so they could catch the most biggest, most delicious fish, which they smoked up and traded with all the neighboring Clans, and others further away, too.

Gour always complained about getting water up his nose. He was the one man in the tribe bigger even than Kiidaa or a match for his own sire, and could only barely keep afloat in the water, paddling as furiously as he could. It was one of the very few things Kiidaa could best his brother in and he never failed to tease him for it.

“So when are you going to get off your huge hind and help me catch anything?”

Gour whined very slightly, caught between the challenge by his little brother and his bone-tired desire not to fight sinking beneath the waves. They’d been out all night, fishing by moonlight and starlight, and the sun was finally coming up. The stars in the east were fading behind the dawn glow.

“We’ve got a good haul here, and the tide’s turning,” he replied. “And I’m tired. Quit showing off and let’s get back home.”

Y!’kiidaa chittered merrily, and splashed at him. “You’re too fat and your fur’s too heavy!”

Unlike Kiidaa and the rest of the village, Gour’s sire had been a fierce, huge man from the far north, thick brown fur and massive paws tipped with claws so big, he couldn’t fully retract them. He’d been powerfully wide-backed and hard-bodied like stone too, so unlike Kiidaa’s Clan of strong fishermen and swimmers, who could slip through the water with hardly a care. He couldn’t swim at all. Still, he’d taken Saa!’ashii as his wife, became one of the Fathers…

The last few seasons had given him some morning aches and curtailed some of his infamously fleet-footed speed, and filled his pelt with white, but his strength and stamina had done nothing but increase. Only Gour, his first and only surviving cub, could match him. He’d inherited more than his sire’s nose, fur, and immense strength; Kiidaa’s most biggest, bestest brother also had the webbed paws of the Clan, their long breath and their love of the water. He was an excellent shallow-water diver too, but he was still far, far too big and heavy to spend much time in the deep of it.

“Y!Kiidaa,” he growled, “Don’t be stupid. The smaller fish are shoaling up next to the shore. Let our smaller Brothers earn their keep! Lazy tails lounging by the shore, all well-fed and sleepy! They’ll need our strength to haul on the nets anyway.”

Kiidaa chittered. Gour was right, as always. But he couldn’t resist a little more teasing. “And they can use you for an anchor!”

Gour growled good-naturedly, but in the way that promised there’d be revenge once he was rested. “Big talk from someone half my own size…”

He grabbed the sculling oar and turned the raft’s nose toward the shore. Y!’kiidaa chittered happily and grabbed on to the side, staying in the water for now.

“So,” Gour said, putting his back into pumping the oar and getting up a decent speed. “I heard you an’ A!yiiymaa up talkin’ all night last night. When are you two gonna—?”

Y!’kiidaa flicked his ears back in a rare gesture of embarrassment. “…We ain’t gonna.”

“Oof. Bad luck, brother.”

“No! It’s not that. The Fathers made me Stud an’ are sendin’ me to the sacred harem for a year! I can’t take a wife before that.”

“Oh, so that’s what y’had to talk about! I was havin’ trouble figgerin’ out what you’d have to say that was so interestin’!”

“Better’n the dead silence I hear from ‘yer hut every night!”

He ducked under the water as Gour’s paw swatted at his head, but he could hear Gour chittering. It wasn’t true, of course; Gour was First Stud, having served with the sacred harem two years before and conquered all its secret rites. That made him very popular with the women (married or otherwise) and because of that, he’d still not declared a wife. Y!’kiidaa swam under the raft, came up the other side, and took a deep breath as he surfaced.

Paw-swipe. “Fuck off, little-dick! Come back when you learn how to use what god gave ‘ya!”

“Ain’t so little if they’re sendin’ me to the harem! I’ll be so good I’ll steal all ‘yer women!”

Kiidaa ducked again, having to struggle not to chitter while underwater. Life was…

…His nose caught…something…as he surfaced. He didn’t know what it was, couldn’t think of what it might be…and it was only there for a just a beat or two, but he definitely smelled it.

“Smell something, brother?” Gour put his nose to it, too. Nobody had a better nose than him…

He couldn’t smell it again. Gour nodded, warily. “Sometimes scent carries over the waves. Could be three whole gallops away and we’d not know from where.”

“Din’t smell like anything I ever sniffed before…” Kiidaa scowled at the horizon, warily.

“Well, I believe you,” Gour said, loyally. “But keep that to yourself. The Fathers get real nervous when people start talkin’ ‘bout strange scents.”

Y!’kiidaa duck-nodded, Rites-Father T’aak!ii in particular was like a cub with a new toy every time he got a sniff of an ‘auspice.’ The ol’ silverface was blind as a deep fish, but every pawful of days was some omen or augury or whatever, an’ there must be some kinda magic to him, ‘cuz he’d been around a long time, even for a silverface…

“Wait…” Gour turned and sniffed the wind. “…Yeah. There it is.”

…Yes. Faintly. So very faintly. He could smell something that smelled like, maybe the idea of a mushroom, but something else…

“…Smells like someone smithin’ metal. Dunno what kind, and there’s oil, too.”

Ah. Of course. Gour had gone on trading pack-outs with the Fathers, being big and strong enough to load their heaviest sacks across his back. He’d have smelled many things Y!’kiidaa had not.

Whatever it was, the scent didn’t come again. They rowed home in silence though, listening and watching and sniffing every stroke of the way. If the water hadn’t been plastering his fur to his back, Y!’kiidaa’s hackles would have been bristling. Something was…

…He felt watched.

Leifini

“Incredible. I have no idea what they could be sensing, but they definitely know we’re here…”

Incredible was the only word for what they were seeing. Here, on a terrible Death World, they found a sapient people, engaging in all the requirements for true intelligence. Language. Cooperation. Trading! Division of labor, even!

And what a people they had found! Most were small and nimble, others were hulking and brutish. All rippled with powerful sinew, their motions light and deft even in the oppressive gravity that Leifini doubted she could even have stood up in for very long.

But of course, for them, it was normal. And their senses were clearly acute in ways that Leifini couldn’t begin to calculate.

A shame that in getting close enough to listen in on the pair’s conversation, they had inadvertently brought it to an end. What she’d heard of their language had been truly fascinating. So different from any Corth’ dialect. It relied on tones, glottal stops and yipping interjections, such that the same phoneme could, apparently, mean greatly different things.

They hadn’t overheard enough to start building a comprehensive lexicon, but what she had heard, she’d enjoyed. It was a language with a pulse to it. And that chittering sound…mirth?

Fascinating. It was enough to put an emotional lump in her throat.

“You were right, Geifil.”

The modern Corth—the Corti, another linguistic shift since their exile—would have called her irrational, for speaking so to the deceased. But how else did you keep somebody alive, when the life extension treatment had simply…failed?

He’d been philosophical and even quite relaxed about it all, in the end. Sad at causing her pain, but she’d found a kind of backwards gladness in knowing his agonies were over. And his work lived on, in her, and their daughter, and their work.

And in his predictions, of course. Even hundreds of years after his death, he had a talent for being correct. He’d remained adamant his whole life that there really was no good reason why deathworlds couldn’t give rise to intelligent life…

And here, finally, was his vindication.

Their daughter, Meien, was up on the mother-station. “We can’t let this get back to the Directorate,” she opined.

“It will, in time. This planet is too close to the territory of existing powers, not to mention a few burgeoning species. Those Guvnuragnaguvendrugun in particular will be achieving interplanetary warp within a generation or two at most, and they’re not far from here at all.”

“The notion of sapient deathworlders will cause…a great deal of concern.”

“Yes. Especially these people. With their claws and teeth just a start, they are the very image of a predator…strong and crafty, to alarming degrees. The OmoAru will not care, nor our people, but by the time these…What is their word for themselves?”

“…The full name is long and difficult to pronounce. Regardless, you are correct. I will note however, the G!âo are not without their charms. They care a great deal for the unfortunate. They seem to be intensely social, they keep pets, they have the beginnings of agriculture…”

“And that boat is well made.” Leifini smiled as she watch it scull home. The larger, heavier G!âo riding in it poured himself over the side, and together the pair of them lifted its frame clean out of the water, heaved it onto their backs, and started trudging up the sand to deposit it above the high tide line.

“Quite a lot of variability just in this tribe,” Meien noted. “And remarkably well-adapted to multiple modes of locomotion, despite the high gravity. Yet more evolutionary theory rendered false by observation.”

“As is the way with science,” Leifini intoned. “These two have single-handedly invalidated centuries of scholarship just in an afternoon of observation.”

“The question remains unanswered, though. How long can we keep the Directorate, and the intuited Manipulator, from learning about them?”

Leifini sighed. “We can’t. It’s that simple. I suspect there’s not much we can do for these people except notice them and learn from them. Perhaps our studies will yield something useful…”

They had come here looking for compounds, after all. Geifil’s early studies had suggested that deathworld biochemistry could be an unguessed treasure trove. Medicines, materials, industrial techniques…rapid evolutionary iteration would teach them what mere innovation could not.

Leifini and the Void Caste would have to move on in time. Too soon, really. But until then…she would enjoy getting to know these people.

She hoped the future contained great things for them.

Mid-day, summer-heat
Clan Blackfur-by-the-sea, May-Eshi, Gao

Y!’kiidaa, Stud of his Clan

Gour had finally decided to name a wife, and that could only mean one thing to Y!kiidaa.

Mischief!

Mid-summer was always the best time for pranks against his biggest, most bestest brother. Broad webbed paws he may have, but those thick heavy muscles and even heavier fur of his, which made him so handsome to the women, was given by the gods to those who dwelt in the far, far north, where the only available prey were bigger than any G!âo and the very rain fell as ice, even in summer. Or so Grandfather Buu!kuu had said.

That meant Gour was particularly lazy during the heat of the day, more inclined to nap in the shade and cool earth of his burrow than cavort around with his handsomest younger brother!

An unforgivable sin, and Kiidaa knew just what to do. He didn’t have a heavy, waterproof pelt weighing him down. His fur was short, sleek and glossy, good for showing off to the women and shedding heat with a quick dip in the sea.

So: wait until Gour was nicely asleep. Sneak into his burrow quick and quiet…and drop a stenchbug on his nose.

The angry insect had been buzzing and struggling in Y!’kiidaa’s claws since he’d caught it, but he knew how to hold them so they couldn’t aim their butt at him and spray. Now, though, the potent little critter had a prime target to vent its fury: right up Gour’s nostrils.

Gour woke with a huge yelp and a reflexive leap and flail so that his head banged the ceiling of his burrow. He sneezed, pawed at his nose, sneezed again…

Kiidaa ran away, chittering. There was craftsmanship to a prank like this. He’d be caught, and made to pay, that was all part of the fun! But Gour would have to earn his vengeance too, and what better way to get the huge lump up and out?!

And besides. Kiidaa was maybe, barely, just a tiny bit faster on his paws. Not for as long, but if he got a good head start…

“KIIDAAAA!!!”

Oh good. The chase was on. Kiidaa chittered loudly, and plunged through the circle of traders and workers in the heart of the village, scattering them like birds. He’d planned this. First, he’d give Gour an easy trail to follow, then he’d vanish. Normally, there was no point in hiding from his big half-brother, as Gour’s sense of smell was just too good. But right now, he’d be totally nose-numb.

There was a caravan visiting, traders with baskets full of wares. He slipped around one of them—spared a precious moment to give a friendly, chittering, lovely trader’s daughter a flirty nose-sniff—and then he was weaving between burrows and people, one ear turned backward to listen to the thunder of heavy paw-fall.

Clever Gour. He wasn’t just chasing straight after Kiidaa, but had gone sideways and around so he could keep up the pace.

Okay, fine! No sense in terrorizing the rest of the village with their play. “Keep up, brother!” he called over his shoulder, and turned up the hill toward the clifftop.

The rocks up that way were a lot of blocky and flat columns, packed together. A nimble man could work his claws into the gaps and swarm up between them, and then it was just a matter of being sure with his paws.

Y!’kiidaa was nimble and strong. But Gour was so strong it didn’t matter. What bits were uncertain and shaky he simply leaped over, and Kiidaa realized his mistake, then—

Tackled hard toward the top, Gour panting heavily and crushing Kiidaa under his weight.

“I always…could…jump…better’n you…brother!”

“You’re outta breath, though! Ow!”

Gour panted heavily, then demonstrated he wasn’t so out of breath he couldn’t apply his enormous brawn to the matter of Kiidaa’s punishment. “Yeah…good run!” More panting, and then the wrasslin’ really began. “Gonna hafta smush that mischief outta ‘ya…”

He did, too. Gour didn’t spare any of his vast strength, or leave any part of Kiidaa un-flattened. Soreness pulled at his every muscle the entire limping walk back. Gour, meanwhile, was still trying to sneeze the smell out of his nose.

Had a lot more prance in his step, though. So that was good!

“Balls! I bet it’ll be days ‘fore I can smell properly again! You little shit.”

“You shoulda heard the way you yelped, though,” Kiidaa panted at him happily. “Don’t care how much you smush me, that was worth it.”

“Why, though? Why do you always have such big mischief in your heart?”

“You’re too serious alla time, big brother! Ow…” Happy prancing was definitely not going to be in Y!’kiidaa’s life for a while. “Always worried about everything, always so serious…you should have some fun now and then!”

Gour sighed. “Well, the gods made you this way for their reasons, no doubt…”

“Someone’s gotta keep you humble!”

…Actually, that was a bit harsh, and Kiidaa’s ears flicked back immediately.

“Not that ‘yer any kind of meek yourself…” Gour grumbled, then sneezed a big, sticky load of snot out of his nose. Gross! “But brother…am I really so stuffy?”

“No.” That was deep truth, right there. “But…I don’t know, Brother. It feels right. People should have fun with life! I’m not the only one who worries you’re too serious…”

“Oh, I get it. A!yiiymaa put you up to it, huh?”

“No, but…she mebbe said a few things ‘ta me. It’s good if the youngest don’t see you as scary.”

He understood instantly. “…Oh.”

“And I did it for fun,” Kiidaa chittered. “Don’t lemme pretend it was ‘fer anything more’n gettin’ one over ‘ya!”

Gour finally chittered, shaking his head. “Fine, fine. ‘Ya got me good. But don’t think I’m lettin’ you get away with just a squishing, brother. You owe me for my numb nose, an’ we got a lotta fish left ‘ta catch this season.”

…Well, shit.

Still worth it, though.

“Wait. Wait a tick! Is that the truth behind the, uh…Keeda tale?” Bruuk had perked up to listen. “The one where Keeda—uh, you—stole your brother’s nose?”

“Yes!” Keeda himself chittered. “I dearly loved my brother. And thank you for indulging me…there were more shenanigans of course that summer. I’ll tell them later.”

“What about the bits where you stole his tail an’ his ears?”

“Those happened too, an’ that’s how I ended up on permanent diver duty. Tell you what though, we ate well that year! I grew to my full size, got the first of my real strength too. Balls, I couldn’t wait to travel off to the sacred harem…”

“I bet,” Hoeff dead-panned. A half-dozen different kinds of amusement passed around the room.

“Diving for big game fish all year?” Ian tacked, diplomatically. “Sounds like hard work.”

“It was, yeah…” Kiidaa sighed. “…but it saved my life.”

It would be many years and a strange adventure before he understood how much being in the water saved his life that morning.

They’d gone out on the tide just after sunset, by the light of two bright full moons. The fish were right up on the surface to feed and mate, lured there by the moonlight. Gour even managed to lean over the side and scoop a big roe-fat female out of the water with his claws.

There was no time for jokes or banter, most of the night. Just a long rhythm of throwing out the net, then Kiidaa would slip into the water to scare the closest fish into it, Gour would haul it back in. Keep and kill the big old ones, throw back the little young ones to breed another generation, grow fat and get caught another year…

It was perfect. The moons on the calm waters in front of them, and the warm hearthfires of home back on the shore behind them. Honest teamwork, skillfully done, and just reveling in each other’s company. Kiidaa didn’t even notice how much he was enjoying it.

Then, when their baskets were full, there was nothing left to do except sit and wait for the tide to turn. Gour lounged in the boat, Kiidaa draped himself over the outrigger, and they talked about nothing important while the horizon grew warm with the impending dawn, and the stars faded one by one.

The last to vanish, near the sun at this time in the year, was the Winter Burrow, the brightest star in the depths of winter and a navigator’s reliable friend. Kiidaa watched it until it was gone, and stretched until his back popped.

“How’s the tide?”

“Turning, I reckon.” Gour yawned expansively and shook himself. “Gonna sleep all day, I reckon.”

“Do you reckon, now? Or do you reckon you don’t reckon?”

“Shaddup, little bro.”

Kiidaa chittered, and sniffed the wind. If he concentrated, he could just about smell breakfast starting to sizzle back home, and it made his stomach growl. They’d earned a nice big meal—

Gour pranked him while he wasn’t looking. A huge paw descended, and Kiidaa was back in the water with a splash. He yelped in surprise, then chittered, pleased at this sudden burst of mischief, but then—

Light. Much too bright, as if the sun had decided to skip the slow business of climbing up the horizon and instead leapt straight to midday. Shafts as bright as noonday lanced down into the water around him, and even through the muffling water, he heard a sudden howl from Gour.

Pain.

There was a splash, and Gour joined him in the water, twisting and swatting at himself. His paw shot out and grabbed Kiidaa’s fur, stopping him from surfacing, then with a heave he flipped the boat over, spilling their hard-won catch back into the water. They surfaced under it into a pocket of air.

“What the fuck—?!”

“Hot!” Gour keened, and Y!’kiidaa realized that his brother’s fur was singed to the skin. “Balls, it’s so hot it feels like I’m burning still!”

“What happened?!”

“The Winter Burrow! It came back! And it got bright, so bright! Brighter than the sun!”

…Kiidaa could feel the heat, too. Just a little, but that under the boat. Second by second it got worse, until the very air was baking hot and drove them back under the steaming water.

The sky-gods must have been angry.

They didn’t need to say anything. They held onto each other and sheltered under the surface, shaking in exhaustion and fear, poking just their noses up to snatch hurried breaths before the terrible cooking heat burned their nostrils dry.

Each time they did, they smelled fire.

The room was silent. Hoeff realized he wasn’t breathing.

“Gour used every last bit of his strength to keep me alive. I…several times, I just couldn’t, so I hung around his neck and he kept us both just below the water. I don’t know if you unnerstand how hard that would have been…”

Hoeff nodded. He understood, lately. He and the monkey crew really understood.

Y!’kiidaa duck-nodded, and took a sip of something that looked and smelled a bit like talamay to steady himself. Thousands of years on and it was still a raw wound, apparently.

“…He died aboard Leifini’s ship. The worst part was…it wasn’t even the radiation that killed him. It was simple exhaustion. We’d been fishing all night, working hard…and we had to stay out in the water, sheltering from the terrible heat for hours. Keeping me alive for all that time…”

A quiet, mournful keen, which Bruuk joined. Moj bowed his head, Urgug’s body was black and dark, Dora was trembling, and Morwk’s eyes were closed. And Ten’Gewek weren’t shy about weeping, either.

Leifini’s voice was soft and terribly, deeply sad. “We didn’t dare drop the shields to rescue you…by the time we could intervene, Gour had used the very last of his strength to push them both to shore, and the moment he knew Y!’kiidaa was safe, he collapsed right there on the beach. Massive heart attack. We just…we knew too little about your species, we…”

“I know.” Y!’kiidaa gave her a reassuring look. “I’ve long since forgiven you, you know that. You did what could be done. At least he had a legacy, so…there’s that.”

“The Hierarchy did that?” Rees asked.

Leifini’s expression was grim. “Oh yes. There was nothing natural about that gamma ray burst, stars of that type just don’t do that. And the timing of it…A few hours later, and it would have scoured the whole of Gao’s primary continent clean of all life.”

“But that wasn’t their goal,” Wilde stated, rhetorically.

“Perfectly timed, it was. Impressive, for a star twenty-six parsecs away,” Gilgamesh grumbled hatefully.

Okay. Real passion, there. Hoeff could respect that.

“As it was, it ‘merely’ slaughtered a few thousand people on the eastern coastline and islands, and gave a terrific dose of radiation poisoning to those further west,” Leifini finished. “Y!’kiidaa was protected by the water, somewhat. Enough that we could at least save his life, though our medicine then was not what it is now.”

“Everyone else in my Clan died in slow, burning agony. It was only the migrants from the year before that survived at all, and only because they were a good deal west by then. Then the forests died the next year. Or I suppose they died right then but didn’t notice yet…”

“Total ecosystem collapse. What was once a deathworld lush and fierce enough to rival any then and now was…reduced. But the Gao, to their tremendous credit, adapted.”

“And…then what?”

“Oh, it’s a terrible tale,” Keeda sighed. “The “gods” appeared, shortly thereafter. Holographic light shows of course. At first, all they did was heal. Had to start somewhere. And it wasn’t like Leifini could have intervened. She knew her enemy, then. And I began to know mine. But later on, once they’d chosen the bloodlines they wanted…there were offerings. Sacrifices, you see. The first of their terrible genetic reprogramming was done. Only took them four generations to do it, too, and I hadta watch. One outta ten were allowed ‘ta live, each generation. The rest were poisoned and died quietly, in their sleep. Only the strongest examples of difference were kept, and that was when our women became females, a precious resource to protect.”

“Always through intermediaries, too. Priests,” Leifini explained.

“Those filthy, nutsack-licking priests,” Keeda spat.

“Many were biodrones, of course. But not all. Some were simply filled with zeal, having seen the gods walking the land. The actual enemy never showed their face, for…reasons that may be obvious now, but at the time we had no inkling of Dataspace.”

“And so they changed the Gao,” Gilgamesh rumbled.

Y!’kiidaa duck-nodded with venom. “Yes. Made us into their ideal soldiers. Small, tough, clever, aggressive…but controllable, and with lots of disposable males in every generation. They tampered with our reproduction, made our females into little more than cub-making machines…it took us millennia to reclaim any dignity for them.”

“All of it a contingency, in case the Hunters ever became uncontrollable. One they have cultivated in every era,” Leifini added. “Social programming was extensive. The first phase was greatly amplifying breeding competition between Clans. This they did by corrupting the sacred harem—a really lovely example of equality, in its own way—into female slavery. This continued for many thousands of years, as the now-Gao slowly rebuilt their world, leveled the old rotting forests, planted fields, reproduced, fought, strengthened their bloodlines…”

“I spent my time mostly as a traveling storyteller,” Keeda added. “That, and helping out where I could. I smelled a bit odd to most, but nobody would turn down help from someone as big and work-hardened as I am. Played tricks too,” he chittered glumly. “Lotsa memorable ones.”

“He always left a village with just enough mystery to keep people questioning, until eventually the villages talked together, noticed they also had a Y!kiidaa around the same time—not knowing he could travel quickly from place to place, of course—and from there…legend grew.”

“Yeah.” Keeda nodded, ears flat. “That wasn’t really my intent but, well, it did the thing, so I rolled with it. The descendents of my Clan had by then re-settled on the western edge of the great isthmus. It was good to see they’d survived…though now they were much smaller, and couldn’t hunt the big fish like we used to. Anyway…they got a bit of a reputation as tricky business because of me, so I started appearing in different furs, different guises, all sorts of things to keep people from guessing what I might be the moment I showed up.”

“It was effective, too. Particularly when his guise would ‘melt off’ right as he left. With his efforts over centuries, the myths and rites of the old world stuck. The important ones, anyway. No amount of work from the priesthood could stop it.”

“And I was there when the Hierarchy abandoned the priests, too. You have no idea how much pleasure I took in breaking their bodies, one by one…”

He’d tensed up his huge body as he said it, too; if there had ever been any doubt about just what kind of intense strength he possessed, there wouldn’t be now. He was a stone-carved beast just walking around, but in that instant of unfocused aggression, he looked feral. Then he shook his pelt out and relaxed again, which only took the fiercest edge out of the moment.

Well. Never let it be said Keeda was a meek soul.

“Things were looking up for a while, but of course that was false hope. Fyu’s rise was their sign to begin phase two,” Keeda stated, glumly. “And in that he was used perfectly. One hundred percent mission success, right there. They never managed to biodrone him, thanks to our efforts…but it didn’t matter. And by the time we made contact, the change had been done. Once the gene base was wide enough, they began to cull.”

“The rise of the silverfurs,” Bruuk whispered.

“Yeah.” Keeda nodded, glumly. “Dormant engineering that they activated en masse. Once that happened, warfare between Clans greatly reduced. No need to worry about big, hot-blooded males if nobody ever grows up into one, right? We all but disappeared. We were dangerous, you see, and much too expensive to feed when there was no fresh food to be had. Slowly we were all out-bred, starved out or killed off, except those living on the coldest parts of the northern plains, where the gamma ray burst had merely glanced across the world. Those winter-born Clans would one day unite and become the Stonebacks. Only they retained most of our ancient heritage.” Y!’Kiidaa keened, sadly. “We were magnificent, once. All of us! Predators born, but with the souls of poets. We would have loved Leifini’s people, had we met them, even if the least of us was five times their size.”

“But his kind were disfavored,” Leifini agreed. “Silverfurs ruled the day, and besides: a people facing chronic famine and just recovering from a dreadful, omnicidal war, they could not afford the year-round fifty thousand calories a day that a male like him requires just to keep his strength, no matter how useful he might have been.”

“…No,” Kiidaa agreed.

“And the Hierarchy saw this. It was to their design, after all. They wanted an efficient weapon, not an expensive one.”

“You didn’t know any of this at the time, though,” Wilde said.

“No. That terrible day on the beach, though, that was the first day our enemy took direct action, and we saw just how ruthless they truly were. So we hid, we watched, we inferred—and we could infer much, from the ensuing centuries of activity—but their nature, their reach, their history and the depth of their control over the galaxy? We didn’t truly understand any of that for a very, very long time. We were not equipped to fight them. All we had was the Void Caste, and now…our first non-Corth member.”

“You recruited him.”

“It would be more accurate,” Leifini replied with a respectful nod to Y!’kiidaa, “to say that he recruited himself…

Thousands of years ago
Orbiting planet Gao

Leifini

Pain had a way of transcending language, culture and art forms. Leifini couldn’t say that Y!’kiidaa’s funeral song was beautiful—to her ears, it was a high kind of high, yipping howl—but it was haunting.

The coffin now drifting away from them contained more than just his brother, after all. It contained his entire Clan and future. He didn’t need to understand spaceships, the void, stars, gamma ray bursts and all the other contributing factors to his tragedy to grasp that central point.

Her heart ached for him, and a stray, atrophied motherly instinct compelled her to do something that other instincts were screaming at her not to do.

Very carefully, she hugged him around his great neck. As much as she could reach, anyway.

Equally carefully, he hugged back.

And he keened against her, lost in grief. He keened for a long, long time.

As he did so, Leifini peeled back the layers of her emotions. There was tremendous sympathetic pain and shared grief for him, of course. She’d been watching his Clan and others further inland for some time now, learning much from them. She’d known their names, grown very fond of them. She felt their deaths, more sharply than she’d felt almost anything.

Beneath that, though…was a great, rumbling, fearful anger, and she’d never known that a passion could be thus. It was too big to properly feel.

“…Leifini.” He broke away, and stared her directly in the eyes.

She held to her courage, under that amber hunter’s gaze. “…Yes?”

“Who did this?”

Leifini had held on to some doubts. In the uncertain dead of night, she’d sometimes wondered if her whole mission was founded on nothing more than faith, that the universe could not naturally be so perverse. That decay of the sort she’d seen playing out among the Corth’i, the OmoAru and the older, declining civilizations could only be the product of hostile intent.

Those doubts had now burned away alongside Y!’kiidaa’s future. The universe, at its core, was indifferent. There was no reason whatsoever for a perfectly ordinary main sequence star to do what Winter Burrow had done. Stars did not just decide to ignore the laws of physics out of spite; they were not capable of malice, any more than a stone was capable of love. Those were the poetry of living minds.

Which meant that, for the first time, she’d seen the hand of their enemy directly at work.

“It will…take time,” she said carefully, “to teach you all you need to know before I can answer that question properly.”

She’d given that answer, or one like it, many times in the last few days. As the dazed, sickly, exhausted Y!’kiidaa had convalesced in their sickbay, he’d been full of questions, about where they were, who the strange small gray people were, about what had killed his brother…

At first, he’d found the reply insulting, then frustrating. Then he’d accepted it. Now, though…

He seemed to grow a little as he resolved himself.

“Teach me.”

“It took years, of course. You don’t just take a bronze-age fisherman and introduce him to the Deep overnight.”

“No. But I made myself into an excellent student. I want to be there, when we find the very last Archive, after we’ve smashed all their hidden caches, all their machine-worlds, all their assets hidden in the Deep. I want to look at that last, single piece of their kind and crush it with my own two paws.”

“You keep talkin’ ‘bout The Deep,” Bruuk tilted his head.

Gilgamesh nodded. “It’s a device of mine. I think of the deep knowledge, the deep truths of all this, the deep dark recesses of space…all of it is as dangerous waters, filled with hidden power. The Deep. It is to look into the real of it all and be changed by it.”

“That’s…kinda poetic, actually.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“O’ course, Leifini and the Void Caste had no experience training a guy like me up. I had ‘ta go right back to the stuff they teach their infants. An’, I fancy myself pretty fuckin’ smart, but it took me a long time. You don’t realize just how much you pick up through a kinda osmosis just by living in a culture, until suddenly you’re trying to learn among a buncha aliens…well, some’a you might,” he added conscientiously, nodding at Dora, Moj, and the Ten’Gewek.

Varieties of nod circled the table.

“So you’re the third to enter this story…” Ian suggested, turning to Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh waved his wine cup, miraculously not spilling a drop. “We’ll get to me at the proper time. Which, I fear, cannot be tonight. Did you lose track of the hour?”

Ian blinked, then checked his watch. Sure enough, they’d been sitting and listening for a long time. In fact, now that his attention was drawn to it…he was feeling pretty stiff and ready to move. Not to mention sleepy.

In fact, when he looked around, the whole crew looked various shades of tired. Urgug in particular was resting his head on his forelimbs like a gigantic dog trying to stay awake, his chromatophores dim and sluggish. Guvnurag slept only once every couple of days, too, so…yeah. They were overdue.

“Right! So,” Gilgamesh rose to his feet with some impressive grace, and gestured toward the door. “We have rooms prepared. And food! You are of course free to explore as you wish. My home has much green space for walking or play, and there are other diversions available. If you wish to exercise, there is a gymnasium…though, I’m sure you already guessed that.”

He grinned, a touch self-effacingly. “Of course, if you prefer the privacy of your own ship, there are vehicles ready to transport you back. But, you have the hospitality of my house.”

Ian rose to his feet as well. “As I am sure you can appreciate, I must make a report, and contact my superiors…”

Gilgamesh waved that away with a massive, almost paw-like hand. “Yes, yes. Of course! Whatever you need to do that will be yours. Now, I owe my youngest son some attention, and there is a bit of a grudge match between him and another of mine about a recent contest…any who are interested are invited. And tonight, I think nothing formal for dinner. Order in! If I were you I’d probably dread some big feast right about now…”

Well, he was a personable king, at least.

“I’ll tag along,” Hoeff decided.

“Morbid curiosity?”

“…Bein’ honest, any son of our good king here’s gotta be somethin’ to see…”

“Ha!” Gilgamesh’s expression was the very picture of fatherly pride. “That he is. Anyway,” he turned to a nearby Gaoian, “could you see to the arrangements? Thank you. Now, my guests, Loosh here will take care of everything. I must hurry off or I will be late…”

And with that, Gilgamesh himself bowed out, bounced heavily on his toes, and…

Departed. At a hell of a clip, too.

Hoeff and the Wrecking Crew gave Ian a look, then went chasing after, with somewhat less obvious ease.

Well. Okay. A weird combination of formal and informal, so far.

And a hell of a story. Shit, there’d be anthropologists—gaopologists?—who’d give their left nut for the chance to hear half of what Keeda had told them about his past and his village.

By ones and twos, the crew were escorted. Urgug wasn’t in any condition to do more than lumber dazedly after one of the staff toward whatever accommodation awaited him. Moj requested to be shown a place of worship, Morwk decided to return to the ship. Dora elected to go sightseeing in the station’s shopping and entertainment decks, with an escort. She still looked like something was itching at her. Maybe a closer look at how the average being on the street lived with Singularity was a good idea.

Ian found himself at a loose end. He needed a coffee. And he wanted a smoke, despite kicking that bad habit years ago.

As it turned out, the bean had made it to Ekallim-Igigi. When he voiced his desire to the small, quiet girl following him around, she promptly conjured up a small cup of something as rich, fragrant and lethal as anything to ever froth up in a Turkish cezve.

He may have been a coffee snob at one point in his life. Whatever. The scent alone was enough to raise the dead, or at least sharpen the mind. He was shown to his suite of rooms—suitably palatial, and a lot too fancy for his tastes—then decided to wander the palace and take notes with his tablet in hand.

It was an informative tour. He was shown a museum of artifacts he knew nothing about, but he guessed would have had any antiquities professor jizzing himself unconscious just to glance at. Graciously, he was allowed to take pictures. When he asked questions, though, his guide just gave him an apologetic look and a wry shrug.

“Spoilers,” she said.

“…Right.”

His wanderings took him out to the fields—what a thing to have on a space station, that—and in the middle was the king, Hoeff and the wrecking crew…and two combatants, having themselves a tussle in the grass. He didn’t even need to approach close to see they were both something, and the shorter, young one in particular…well. He was rather handily dominating their fight, and Hoeff’s expression was openly concerned by what he was watching.

…Uncomfortable questions could wait for later. He had a report he had to write.

“You seem lost in thought, captain.”

He turned. Tomoe bowed by way of a hello. Somehow, he was surprised she wasn’t wearing a kimono or whatever. Instead…well, it was basically jeans and a tee shirt. Casual and comfortable, and kinda incongruous.

“Uh…yeah. Suppose I am,” he replied, awkwardly. “Got a lot to take in.”

“I can sympathize.” She gestured toward the lawn, inviting him to walk with her. “I found it shocking enough, and I had never heard my husband’s legend before I met him.”

“It was almost lost, even in Iraq. It was only some adept archeologists that re-discovered it.”

“How fortunate.”

“…Now that’s the most worrying thing I’ve seen or heard all day. And that includes that young Hoeff-like preteen over there tossing his grown brother around like a sack of potatoes.”

“What worries you? The fact that we had the means to prevent the legend’s loss? Or the implicit ego in preserving it?”

Ian gave her a serious look. “Why not both?”

There was a cheer from behind them, and Ian glanced over at the match again. They were up on their feet, smiling…and went right back at it with a sign from their referee-king. Tomoe smiled at the sight, then gestured along the path. Their route was taking them to a…carp pond, maybe? Of the spend-an-afternoon-fishing variety, not the ornamental kind full of oversized goldfish.

“Gilgamesh-sama has an ego to match his physique,” she said. “Deservedly so, maybe. But…even I find it irritating at times.”

“Not a god-king, then?”

“No amount of ability or time can hammer out every last flaw. My husband is a greatly competent man. But he is a man.”

“Just like the rest of us?” Ian tried not to sound too sarcastic. He wanted to challenge, not offend.

“No, of course not. Look at him!” she laughed. “But he has his weaknesses. Sentiment, especially…he couldn’t quite bear to let his legacy fade from memory. And, there is no such thing as a human being who is without insecurities. Or fears.”

She paused and turned to face Ian again. “You have fears about us. You’ve been tense since you came aboard, and somehow, I don’t think a massage and some wine would help…”

“No,” Ian agreed.

“I thought not.” There was a log next to the pond. She sat on it, leaving room for him to sit alongside, which he did. “There’s something I noticed that my husband and the others neglected to go into. Where the Line of Heroes comes from, exactly.”

“There’s that, yeah. I’m kinda au fey with guys that big and capable, but I’m used to ‘em being on Cruezzir and stuff. But, him and his son, and these kids we’re starting to see popping up all over are like that naturally?”

“Absolutely. They’re human, and nothing but human. Deathworlds are exceptional environments for giving rise to wild genetic recombination, but they also give rise to threats. And if there’s one thing our species is very good at, it’s rising up to a challenge. In times of stress, you see what people are truly capable of, do you not?”

“Sure.”

“When those forces overlap, you get Heroes. In the more ancient times, it happened frequently enough to fill our oldest stories with demigods, especially when you throw in some mythic exaggeration. Uncontacted tribes coming together, different subspecies of our kind finding each other, surviving together…In every age there are truly exceptional people, for this reason or that. Did you think Newton or Einstein were any less Heroes? Our conspiracy was to preserve those lucky exceptions, and keep the strength of it alive.”

“Why? Why’s that necessary?”

“Because the great price of civilization is to…mute…these Heroes. Blend them together.”

Ian tilted his head. “How?”

Tomoe frowned up at the “sky” above them—some kind of hologram, or maybe huge LED screens—and took a moment to think before she spoke. “Civilization isn’t an easy endeavor. It comes naturally to humans, and to all sapient beings by definition. But it isn’t easy. A failed harvest, a marauding foreign horde, a plague, and collapse follows. Then something new grows in the ashes, but rarely something better. To get something better, you need a civilization that can last, and refine itself.

“Nowadays, Earth’s civilizations can survive a bad harvest year, or even plagues that ravage millions of lives…but they have never, ever survived a total loss of faith on the part of the populace. That’s what a nation is, fundamentally: a shared faith in something grander and more important than any one person within. It’s about how a culture orders the world.”

“I…suppose, but what—?”

Tomoe held up a hand, requesting that he let her continue. “In the eyes of the people, Heroes can become more important than the shared faith. Then the nation is the Hero, and the consequences of that process have played out many times through history. Look at Julius Caesar. Look what he did to Rome. One man inspired an army, and that army overthrew a republic, to replace it with a hereditary dictatorship. Look again throughout history, and you’ll see similar figures do much the same, time and again. Or sometimes, they rally their civilization against a force that would destroy it. But the point is, their very existence is both a natural response to a crisis, and a crisis itself…and crises are existential threats to a civilization. So, those civilizations which do not create the circumstances in which heroes arise, endure. That’s the price for safety, prosperity and a lack of crisis.”

She glanced back over toward the lawn where the game of Calvinball was still ongoing. “But sometimes, Heroes are necessary. Crises happen, no matter what. And the Hierarchy is an existential crisis for all of humanity, just as it was for thousands of civilizations that came before us. In response to a crisis of that magnitude…what are we to do except cultivate the best of what humanity can be? What ethical alternative is there? Inaction would be conspiracy.”

She spread her hands. “And now the crisis is upon us, openly. Billions are dead, between Gao and Earth, and thanks to the interconnected global civilization, everyone knows it. Everyone feels it. The forces overlap…and Heroes emerge, right when they’re needed the most.”

Ian…didn’t like the direction this was going, but kept his council to himself. Instead, he simply prompted her to continue.

Tomoe seemed a little disappointed that he said nothing, though. She watched him for a moment, then sighed. “That’s all we’ve done, Wilde-san. Preserve something that’s as natural to humans as…well. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being amazed by just what an incredible species we really are, and how few of us ever notice. We are not here to rule. Where we have nudged human history, we have done so to preserve what is already great about humans. On that, you have my word.”

“But you are promoting these Heroes of yours…”

“We live in difficult times. Life has been easier for Earth than it would have been without the containment shield—”

“Wait, was that your doing too?”

Tomoe nodded. “Yes, indirectly. It was an emergency response to a rapidly developing threat. Earth…wasn’t really ready for the Hunters. And the Swarm of Swarms would have descended, without the shield….and that would have been the tale of us. So, we influenced matters. But the Line of Heroes predates the Sol shield, by a long time indeed. We have always known that one day, humanity would attract the Enemy’s attention. And once discovered, the Enemy would destroy us. We had to give our people a fighting chance.”

“Most folks on Earth think of that shield as a prison.”

“Perhaps,” she replied. “Something that might ordinarily be terribly cruel can be the kindest option in even crueller circumstance. A prison can be a sanctuary, if death waits outside the bars. We’re at war, aren’t we?” She gestured vaguely at the sky, and the whole galaxy. “The greater the war, the greater the necessary unpleasantness. You must know that. This…is a great war indeed. For the highest possible stakes. Against our greatest enemy.”

Again, she glanced back toward the lawn. The game seemed to have broken up by now, and its players charged off for parts unknown. Still, she watched the area as though they were still playing. “We can’t survive this crisis without Heroes. Exceptional problems require exceptional solutions, and those require exceptional beings to conceive, plot, and execute. That is their nature. They solve problems.”

“And create them.”

“That they do.” She nodded, grimly. “Singularity’s calculation is that whatever crises the Heroes generate will be endurable. It’s not just the fall of a civilization and the rise of another that’s at stake in this crisis. It’s extinction. The great gifts of civilization—liberties, enfranchisement, rights and dignities—all of them are downstream of continuity. They are precious gifts, to be cultivated wherever possible…but the dead cannot cultivate them at all.”

Ian had plenty of thoughts, and for a moment, he was tempted to share them. But…that wasn’t his job. Tomoe affected a casual, friendly air, but she was a queen, and one of Gilgamesh’ captains. Whatever he said to her was going to have consequences. And that wasn’t his role.

“Well…I think I understand where you’re coming from a touch more clearly now,” he offered.

“I hope so. But, you have much more of our history to hear first.” Tomoe gestured back the way they’d come. “And, I mean no offense, but you look like you need rest. Shall we return to the guest quarters?”

“Kinda amazed you have those…” Ian said, as he turned to walk alongside her. “How many guests do you get?”

“Guests in the palace from elsewhere on the station are quite frequent. Guests from outside Singularity…well, we do recruit. Few get the personal royal introduction, though.”

“I bet.”

“You still seem tense, Wilde-san.”

“I…have a great deal to think about,” he offered, probably unconvincingly.

Convinced or not, she nodded. “Well. You’ve had a long day.” She paused, and indicated over her shoulder to a distant house out among the trees. “As have I. I appreciate you taking the time to hear my thoughts, Wilde-san.”

“Of course,” Ian replied, politely. She bowed, he did his best to imitate the gesture…and she trotted away across the grass toward what was presumably her home.

He had a moment alone again. Not that he was actually alone, no doubt if he called for any kind of assistance there’d be somebody with him in a heartbeat. But, at least, nobody was talking to him for the moment and he could get his thoughts in a row.

One of his own questions was still lodged in his head. It really did seem to him like Singularity in general were keen for their approval, in a way that was more than just checking things had worked out. It was hard to put his finger on where the impression came from exactly, but it seemed like…like they were all eagerly awaiting the moment he smiled and relaxed and started saying nice things, instead of polite things.

That couldn’t be it, could it? Were they actually looking from validation? From him?

…No. Not him. From him.

Oh. Fuck.

He sent a message over his group text chat, ignoring for a moment the implications of his mobile phone working seamlessly aboard the station. “Let’s have a get-together,” he’d said. Half an hour later, they were all gathered in their guest quarters. Not a place for a private conversation, but then again, the Fortune probably wasn’t by this point either.

The crew pretty much shared his concerns, with…varying…degrees of intensity, from Hoeff’s straightforward ‘this whole thing is bullshit,’ to Morwk’s cautious optimism about gaining access to Singularity’s technology. Rees still seemed to find the whole thing funny, Dora was really off-balance for some reason, and fuck knew what Moj was thinking.

Bruuk was the most accepting, somewhat disturbingly. But of course, as he pointed out…

“We’re made for this sort of thing, so…”

“And these people did it.”

“Had a countering hand in it, yes. They’re also the reason my people exist at all.”

“That’s got to color your thinking, hey?”

“As does your people’s compulsive distrust of any form of authority. Which I always thought kinda weird, given ‘yer love of usin’ it—”

“Let’s not start that bullshit,” Hoeff sighed wearily. He had the air of someone who was desperate to go punch something and too tired to bother.

“Part of it is your inability to lie,” Frasier noted. “It takes a pretty especially evil Gao to manage the trick convincingly, and they don’t often fare well long-term.”

“Don’t see what you’re all so worried about,” Nomuk ventured. “So they help breed strong people? No problem there! Strong is good!”

“You need to sky-think more,” Ferd replied. “Strong can destroy weak things, but even strongest Brown One starts out as tiny, helpless cub. The biggest sky-thoughts start out weak too, sickly, puny things until strong mind grows them. Vemik Given-Man is best teachings of this. Small, skinny, weak boy late to manhood, has strong thought, protects it…then one day, grows. Still young man, but maybe only Yan is stronger by now. Makes me feel small. Not just in muscle.”

“Might doesn’t make right,” Dora summarized, fervently.

Wilde sighed. “I wish that were true. But that’s the problem. It isn’t. And now, look at what we’ve found in the deep dark, going bump in the night!”

“Literal legends. And it looks to me like they want to come in from the deep dark, eh?” Rees said.

“There’s…” Bruuk ventured carefully, “I think two problems. Y!’kiidaa is clearly one case. He was all about keeping something of the Gao alive. Balls, he even taught me the true name of our people! G!âo!” Wilde had to admit, that did sound right in Bruuk’s broad muzzle and deep, growly throat. “So I can’t really stay angry at him or any of this for what went down with my people. We were being actively fucked with, yijao? But…”

“We woulda been fucked with the same way too, in time,” Frasier pointed out.

“No.” Wilde sighed. “We were slated for extermination. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis?”

“…Shit. Really?”

“Yeah. Sometimes it pays to be a bookworm and a news junkie. Din’t stop the chavs from noticing me, though…”

“Wait, you were bullied, big as you are? Well, no wonder ‘yer such a mean fuck in a fight.”

“I was a skinny little shit until puberty hit…anyway.”

“Point is,” Davies pressed. “Fucked with genetically, nuked off the face of the Earth…I mean, we can at least admit it’s nice to have someone in our corner, can’t we?”

“Seems like spousal abuse,” Hoeff grumbled. “Like…okay. Maybe it’s kinda personal ‘fer me, right? But I sure as fuck can’t help feel like I just got robbed of a lifetime of grindin’ and hard work an’ all that. ‘Oh yeah, you were meant to be an angry gorilla-truck!’ Fuck me. And I sure as fuck picked exactly the right career, din’t I? Y’know I wanted to be a botanist once?”

That was definitely something to ask about later. Still, he had a point.

“Sure, you’re prickly enough to be a cactus yourself,” Rees joked, not unsympathetically. “Nah, honest truth? You legitimately frighten me, Hoeff. Like, I’ll never be a fifth as good as you, and I’m pretty goddamned good at this shit myself. You’re freak strong, with freak talent. But now, honestly? It’s kinda nice knowing it’s not my fault. At least, not completely.”

“Now there’s some psychology I don’t like,” Wilde grumbled.

“Everything you earned, you earned,” Urgug rumbled. “Ability dictates the limit of your success, not whether you claim it in the first place. Whatever Singularity’s meddling in your ancestry might amount to, you could have taken that and spent a life coasting on your natural gifts. Instead, you chose to learn what you are truly capable of.”

Davies squirmed a bit uncomfortably. “But that’s just it! ‘All men are created equal’ is kinda out the window now, innit?”

“It was always horseshit, if you didn’t grok what they meant,” Hoeff rumbled. “They weren’t talking about ‘yer looks or ‘yer brains or ‘yer bank account or ‘yer muscles. What they meant was something like, ’everyone is equal in dignity before their Creator.’ There’s a whole lecture about natural rights an’ shit hiding in there. Which is horseshit too, the more I think about it.”

“I always figured it meant, ‘We’re all in this shit together, and no-one gets out alive, so try not to be too much of a cunt,’” Dora offered.

“Men aren’t created equal,” Bruuk chitter-sighed. “Nowhere is that more obvious than in my people. We have literal degrees and, believe me, personal excellence only goes so far against that. Can you imagine what I’d be as a full-dominant fifth degree? Balls, I’d be makin’ Y!’kiidaa himself my bitch! Instead, here I am. Some of the most bestest genetic potential Daar himself says he’s ever sniffed…but it don’t matter much. Roll of the dice sets limits on what I can be. So why should we pretend to equality at all?” Bruuk shrugged. “Is what it is. What we should do instead is work to love each other. ‘Cuz in the end, you can’t help ‘yer luck.”

Moj thrummed his elytra and nodded enthusiastically. “Right. Fourteen motes of dust in this room, all tiny before the Infinite. Deathworlders, or not, just the fizz in a young universe, we. Next to Divine, the difference is too small to matter.”

“So…as much as I enjoy philosophizing about our present debacle, I need to make some decisions.” Ian turned to Bruuk. “ Y!’kiidaa means well, you reckon?”

“I think they all do. But, I think, maybe, Y!’kiidaa’s dirtied himself a lot less.”

“They’re thousands of years old,” Frasier pointed out. “They’ve got to be at least a little out of touch, right? I mean, shit, how long have they been out here looking in? That’s gotta warp their perspective just a little fuckin’ bit.”

Bruuk didn’t say anything. Probably to spare his feelings; nobody had missed the energy between the two. Still…

“Right. So, I gotta ask…are you feeling objective, Bruuk?”

Lots of meaning there.

“…Yeah. I’ve, uh…” and it was at this point that, had the moment been any kind of jovial, there would have been endless teasing. “Well, I turned down a pretty tempting invitation, I gotta admit. But now ain’t the time. My Father needs an honest nose ‘fer something this crazy.”

Ian settled for the gentlest tease he could manage. “He is pretty…but thank you.”

“Big question I have for them,” Genn twitched his tail thoughtfully. “…did they know about us?” He waved a hand at himself and the other Ten’Gewek.

“It’s hard to believe they didn’t. Professor Daniel says you are an ancient people.”

“So, are they the gods who gave us strength?”

“Or just the gods who watch?” Ferd mused. “That’s what the name of this place means, yes?”

“Aye, yeah…” Rees nodded. “But…what kind of ‘heroes’ just watch?”

There was a long, thoughtful silence.

“…Right.” Ian took a deep breath. “Time for rest, I think. You’re all free and encouraged to go explore, but keep your phones on you. Might want to leave on short notice.”

Nods (or equivalent) circled the room, and in ones and twos the crew drifted off to do whatever it was they felt like doing. Once they were gone, Ian settled in to write the first part of his report.

He had a lot to say.

Storytime was much less formal, the next day. In fact to begin with it wasn’t storytime at all. It started out in the park, just running around in the grass and playing simple games with, yes, Gilgamesh himself (in some sort of comfy-looking short shorts, because apparently nothing about sporty lads had changed in the last five thousand years) along with some of his family.

It was disarmingly wholesome, and honestly so. Not completely without its weirdness, though: even in the most considerate game of touch football, Gilgamesh wasn’t apt to take any prisoners. Ian didn’t mind to be honest, and neither did Bruuk or the Wrecking Crew…but still. Humbling. Ian would pay good money to see Firth and Mega Space-King duke it out one day.

He could deal with some considerate rough-housing. Hell, he welcomed it. You could learn a lot about someone in sport, and Gilgamesh was a fair man, tailoring his aggression to each opponent, but also ruthless, and he didn’t permit anyone the delusion they could challenge him. It wasn’t often a man saw someone like Ferd or Hoeff sent tumbling along from a hit.

Still, it was fun, and the chance for Ian to indulge his inner lad was a nice change of pace. Though, he knew it was an indulgence with purpose. They were going to be sitting around all day, getting a history lesson. Caveman instinct was you did that after wearing yourself out all day, so…here they were, wearing themselves out.

Though, it came packaged with the most humbling encounter Wilde had experienced in a long while: getting the stuffing knocked out of him by Alex, Gilgamesh’s absolute unit of a twelve-year-old son. The kid was young, polite, charming…and so innately, freakishly athletic and strong, it was unreal. Strong enough to hit like a fucking runaway lorry and heavy enough to really make it count, and looked every bit the part too, as much as anyone Ian knew. One careless tackle had Ian drifting almost peacefully through the air for a second or two before—

“Oof!!”

Gravity really was a bitch sometimes.

“Sorry! Sorry!” The kid ran up with honest concern written all over his face. “Are you okay?” He had the deep, raspy voice of a boy whose voice had recently changed, too.

Ow…

But, Ian had honestly had worse. And when the kid offered a broad, troublingly thick and callused hand and promptly yoinked him right back up to his feet with a quick flex of a massive arm, looking genuinely worried…alarming, yes, but the kid’s attitude made it easy to forgive.

“Heh…yeah. Yeah, no worries.”

“Oh, good!” Alex relaxed and grinned sheepishly. “Father’s always telling me to be careful.”

“He’s right. You’re lucky I’m too dumb to break these days!”

The kid giggled in a deep register, not entirely like a young boy should sound.

“You aren’t dumb! And you felt pretty tough when I hit you, too…I bet you’re a good wrestler!”

Yup. The kid-mountain was giving him an unmistakably appraising look, as if he was hoping for a potential playmate. He was even slightly crouching, ready for more rough play…

“Well, thanks, but I don’t think I’d last long against you.”

“Aww!”

Ian laughed. “Take it as a compliment! If I could teleport myself to twenty years ago, with what I’ve built myself into nowadays? I’d be a world-champion athlete, hey!”

“Exactly!” The kid grinned, rolling his head on that Hoeff-like neck of his. “Bet you’re tricky, too!”

Ian smiled. The kid was persistent! “Yeah, but nah. Also, I don’t think I can take too many more tackles like that, either.” Ian twisted his spine around and shimmied his neck to make the point. “Though, you know what? If you’re itching for a fight, I know exactly what you need!”

“…Really?”

“Yeah! Look at those fellas over there!” Ian gestured towards his boarding team, who were standing around in a circle, talking animatedly about something. “Try them! By the Wrecking Crew’s standards, what you just gave me is a love tap. They’re more on your level, I’d bet.”

Alex tilted his head like a curious pit bull. “That’s Hoeff and the Ten’Gewek, right?”

“Yup, and sometimes Bruuk. Rees, Davies, and Frasier might play too, if you ask nice.”

“Ooh!” Alex seemed interested, suddenly. “And you’re sure they won’t mind?”

“For someone like you? They’d probably love the chance to let loose. Go play! I’ll join in later.”

“Will…” the big lad suddenly looked a bit embarrassed. “I wanted to ask about the eye, but…”

“I’ll tell the story later, I promise. Now go play!”

“Okay!”

And he was off, moving fast enough to chase down a car.

Despite himself, Ian smiled. Kids were a fundamental kind of honest for the most part, and he couldn’t help but like the big lad. “Cornfed,” as the Americans might say.

“My son’s taken a shine to you,” Gilgamesh said, having silently padded up behind Ian, in the way that huge men sometimes knew how. “I’ll confess that makes me happy. He needs more…”

“Normality?” Ian offered.

“With nothing but positive connotations, yes. I’ve learned over the years how important it is to ground one’s self in reality.”

“It can be harder than it looks.”

“Absolutely,” the king nodded. “An ongoing effort, truth be told.”

“I was half expecting him to roughhouse a bit,” Ian confessed. “I would’ve, if I were him.”

Gilgamesh sighed. “He wanted to desperately, but he knows better. Really, he does. It saddens me a bit, so I spend as much time with him as I can.” He also gave Ian an appraising look. “Are you a father yourself? I don’t sense it about you…”

“No.”

“You’d make a good one, I think. So…let me speak for a moment, just as a father. Leaving the rest aside.”

“Okay…?”

“I know you must report, and that report will have consequence. I suspect it will not be a perfectly glowing review.”

“I will be honest,” Ian replied. “I promise that.”

“I know. But, any of that aside…I would greatly appreciate any opportunity for Alex to get some social contact away from…all of this.”

“That’s…not even slightly inside the realm of what I can promise or arrange.”

“I don’t mean this instant, and I don’t even mean necessarily you, though I would not object to that at all. All I mean is…I worry for him. All my other children were…they could pass, as it were, even as exceptional as they’ve been. All but a few have made their permanent homes on Earth…” he paused, and it struck Ian that he’d just admitted to outliving them all. “…But Alex there, as proud as I am of him, and as much as I love him…he cannot ever.”

“No.”

“He lacks for peers,” the king intoned, a bit sadly. “A natural born Hero is often the loneliest of creatures, and that is not a burden to be considered lightly.”

“So this is the reason, then.”

“Of course not the whole reason. Duty comes first. The time has come, our strength is at its maximum, the means to strike are finally within our reach. But…when my duties as a father align with my duties as king, it gladdens me.”

“Well…as I said, I can’t promise anything…”

Ian looked over at the Wrecking Crew. Alex was among them, having started a rugby-flavored brawl over something vaguely ovoid in shape…

They all looked delighted to play.

“…But I like the lad. I’ve known kids who were right cocky little shits for having far less reason.”

“Humility was a virtue I learned the hard way, if I have learned it at all. I hoped to instill it in him from the first. I have spared him none of the necessary hardships of life.”

“So, not spoiled?”

“Oh, he is that!” Gilgamesh laughed, “but there is a secret to it. You ruin a child by making their life easy. Alex has never had an easy day in his life. But you also ruin a child by making their life miserable. Every hardship he has faced was constructive, and…well, he has access to resources most do not. How many boys earned a spaceship for their tenth birthday?”

“How did he do that?” Ian asked, unbidden.

“Oh, he had to learn every system on-board, qualify as crew and captain, and demonstrate military readiness, too. He’s received the full training on all those points and was tested harshly. Still is, weekly in fact! What father would send a boy into space unprepared? It was his obsession for three straight years. And he did it! As a consequence, he values that little ship more than even his collection of Star Wars figurines. Which was not easy to procure, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

Ian chuckled, and smiled, shaking his head. And…

Sure enough, some of his hypotheses had been proven correct. Gilgamesh lit up at the first chance of genuine friendliness. And Ian wouldn’t begrudge him this moment. Fathers had a right to be proud of their sons, after all.

But it wasn’t a thought he’d wanted to see proven.

“I’ll ask around,” Ian promised, perhaps a bit unwisely. “I can’t make any promises.”

“I know. And asking is all I ask. Regardless of what else happens…the children matter most.”

On that point, they could agree.

“Anyway! Storytime has come!” Welp, back to jovial god-king mode. “I want to hear some of your exploits! We said much about us—yes, there is more—but I want to hear about your crew! Heroes all, by the smell of it!”

Ian found himself being affably dragged back to the group (another thing the Gregariously Huge seemed to do without noticing), whereupon a picnic magically happened, and some nice comfy grass was chosen to sit down and talk. Alex led Hoeff along, who was smiling bemusedly, and decided he wanted to sit snuggled right between Ian and the murderTexan for storytime. The Ten’Gewek (and Bruuk) followed suit, and Ian found himself at the heart of a happy, friendly, though unfortunately somewhat sweaty pile-on, waiting on the story.

Rees, Davies, and Frasier kept a bit of distance, with smug grins flashed at Ian.

“So…” Gilgamesh offered a charming smile as he selected something that looked and, Ian knew from yesterday, tasted pretty damn similar to a fig newton. “Before we continue with Singularity’s tale, I would very much like to hear about your eye…”

Ian nodded, as much to his crew as to the king, and told his tale. Alex was enraptured by the story, and by now Ian had got pretty good at telling it, with special assists from the Wrecking Crew here and there to tell the other important bits. Keeda nodded along, chittered where appropriate…Leifini was definitely a Corti. He had her full, expressionless attention.

They ate, and talked. There were questions. With a bit of encouragement, Hoeff told some of his own story. Apparently he too was a pretty serious freak as a young kid, as Ian had suspected, and he’d clearly taken a big shine to Alex; hard not to, really. The boy was leaning up against him and Hoeff had his arm around the kid’s shoulders. “Could never hold onto my size ‘fer long though. I got just a bonkers metabolism. So…lotta experience bein’ big an’ small, sometimes both in the same year. Took Adam and his docs to finally figger out what the hell was goin’ wrong. So here I am.”

“The angriest, tankiest lil’ murderTexan,” Ian quipped, to jeers and cheers.

“Shaddup, boss.”

They went around the group, mostly sticking to more jovial stories where possible. Ten’Gewek we’re good storytellers, and told them as much with their bodies as words. Even Frasier—usually the quiet one—opened up.

Dora was last, and there was absolutely an ulterior motive at play, here. Her tale was chilling, and not subtly so.

“I was…kind of the wonder child too. The Supremacy used to select children out of school at a young age, the ones who showed top genetic conformity to the Ideal, who earned perfect grades…we got sent to a special academy. One where failure had…permanent…consequence. Normal folks just got a black mark on their file for this or that, not really a big deal in the scheme of things. But the exceptional ones, any misstep…”

She sighed heavily. “…I spent years living in terror that the teachers could read my mind. But, worse, I was scared of my classmates. Because we all knew, at that level? Even tolerating an Undesirable Trait in somebody else was a failure in its own right. There was nobody I could talk to about my feelings, nobody I could come out to…I couldn’t trust any of them, and they couldn’t trust me.”

She sighed heavily. “I remember the day two of the boys were caught. They were—” she indicated the feathery antennae on her head. “…brushing these together has a whole range of meaning among Robalin, kind of like how, with humans, shaking somebody’s hand is different to holding hands, you know? But long and slow and gentle brushing is kind of the equivalent of making out…”

She stared down at the cup of tea in her middle hand. “…They marched us out onto the schoolyard, lined us up. Made us watch as our classmates were flogged, and then…there was a black van.”

“How did you escape?”

“I took a risk. I figured, I was going to die there anyway, somehow. I’d put a foot wrong, I’d attract suspicion, and then, it’d be me up against that wall, and then being thrown in a van. So, when we got a few days off to go home and visit our parents…I came out to them. I told them everything, how I felt, how scared I was, what I knew was going to happen to me…”

One of her free hands was shaking. Ian took it and squeezed, as firmly as he dared. She gave him a grateful nod. “…They argued for hours. I could hear their voices through the floor, while I lay awake and wondered whether my own parents were about to call the authority and whether all I’d done by telling them was kill myself…But the next day, there was breakfast, and they told me the plan. My father worked for the port authority, he knew some people…he could pull some strings and get me a position as an officer on a transport ship, one with an interstellar license. The Supremacy only issued interstellar travel licenses to trusted individuals…and here I was, in the special academy. All I had to do was graduate, accept that career, and then go AWOL at a foreign port and request asylum.”

She scoffed bitterly. “Such an easy plan. ‘Just go AWOL.’ Well, I made it that far. I lasted two more years in the academy, somehow held it together and…convinced them I was one of them. As a student in good standing, I was issued my license, and the academy gave me a special award for graduating into a ‘prosocial’ career. But of course, we didn’t get shore leave. So in the end, I had to write a script to fool the cargo handling system and smuggle myself off the ship in an emergency spacesuit. After that, I went straight to another freighter due to depart, told them my story…and by the time my Robalin crew noticed I was gone, we’d already gone to warp, with me as their new junior cargo operator.”

Alex looked up at her with big, sad eyes. “What about your mom and dad?”

“They would have had to deny everything just to survive. Ritually disown me, all that. We talked that all through. I’ve not talked to them since…I don’t even know if it worked.”

There was a long silence, before Gilgamesh nodded in resolution. “I sense there is much more to your tale…but I will not pry. I thank you for sharing it.”

Alex looked particularly shaken. But, of course, he was a prince. And despite Gilgamesh’s talk about giving him some calculated hardship, up until now the Robalin Supremacy had probably been an academic thing for him, if he’d learned about it at all. Numbers and history just didn’t hit the same as a more personal account.

“They killed those boys just for being in love?” he asked.

“If they’d been anyone else, maybe they wouldn’t have. The Supremacy couldn’t execute everyone who didn’t conform, or they’d have run out of people. But we were the chosen few, you know? We couldn’t show imperfection. It undermined the Supremacy’s legitimacy.”

“Similar stories have played out on Earth,” Gilgamesh said, heavily. “I was even the agent of such a few, in my foolish youth.”

Alex gave him a dismayed look. “Why would you do that, Papa?”

“Because I am very old, Alex. And I had not yet learned. Our whole people were yet to learn, and times were savage. It was easy to fear those who were different or strange. Easier still to believe anything, when the simple act of writing it down was yet to be widely learned.” He sighed. “Such is the way of history. Such is the nature of sapient beings. Love, it seems, does not come naturally to any species. We must see for ourselves how terrible the alternative can be.”

“Well, that’s the cost of putting some virtues on a pedestal,” Dora said, bluntly. “Escalation.”

Gilgamesh gave her a complicated look, and nodded seriously. “Aye.”

Nobody missed her intent, there. Tomoe even squirmed a bit, but Dora was unflappable. What a brave woman she was.

“Life here can be…challenging, yes.” Keeda admitted, perhaps to soften the moment. “As you point out, excellence taken to an extreme leads to escalation, and that can be smothering. Though, I will note Ekallim-Igigi is not a civilization unto itself and was never meant to be. Most that are born here, leave of their own free will. And are welcome to return as they wish, means permitting.”

“Which is merely a concern about secrecy,” Leifini was quick to add. “One of the things we hope can be made easier, in the coming days.”

“Well, the conversation seems to have come back around to you,” Ian pointed out.

“Indeed.” Gilgamesh sampled a fruit. “And I enter the story in a hard time, when I was not a good king.” He looked down at Alex, and smiled a little sadly. “Nor a good father.”

He picked up a cup of wine, and drained it.

“It took a bit of humbling to set me on the right path…”

C. ~2900 BCE
The City of Uruk, Sumeria, Earth

The bed was comfortable, and sturdy enough to not even creak no matter how passionate his play within it. And it had seen much vigorous play the night before. A king could sleep the whole day away, in a bed like that…If only the king’s steward would let him.

Gilgamesh groaned and screwed his eyes tightly shut as the shutters slammed open and dawn light speared right into his face. Last night’s wine pounded between his ears, and raged for release behind his nethers: he had to piss like a bull.

Rather than say hello with any dignity, he staggered from the bed in a series of grunts and animal noises and lurched for the privacy offered by a screen in the corner, where his chamberpot waited.

His steward, Sagar, was used to it, of course, and raised his voice to call out over the spatter of liquid on pottery. “Another royal night to remember—or forget—my king?”

“Mm…” Gilgamesh grunted. “…Remember. Just. What was her name again?”

“I did not catch it, my king. She was…hurried…in her departure.”

“…Fuck.”

“So the whole palace gathered.” Sagar replied, drily. He shooed a servant out of the way as Gilgamesh finished his ablution, for now, and stumped heavily out into the open. “We have had further petitions from the merchants. There are now dozens of men in the city who doubt the parentage of their first-born. The public mood is…”

Gilgamesh gestured vulgarly. “That to the public mood.” He swept up one of last night’s wine jugs and, finding it still half full, chugged it.

“Sire…A king leads by more than his might. Not even yours is endless.”

“I rule by divine right!”

“While they will have you, yes. Your own cousin is testament to the…pleasures…of the gods. And I speak in my own self-interest, sire. Mine will be the first head to roll.”

“Might be the first I crush in my arms, if you don’t get me some water…”

“Your bath awaits, of course…” Sagar responded, evenly, then made a show of inspecting the clay tablet in his hands. “Now, if I may draw the divine king’s attention to matters of state for the day…”

…he was being too harsh. Sagar was a good friend, after all. He’d never spoken unwisely.

Still.

“Yes, after I’ve had a flagon of water and splashed the stink off me, by heaven…”

He tried to be fair. But it was so boring to sit and listen to problems all day long…Petty problems, at that! So many of them amounted to nothing. ‘He refuses to pay his half of the funds to repair the wall we share’ against ’He broke the wall!’ Or yet another whinging copper merchant who’d bought from a dishonest supplier and thought the matter deserved the king’s attention…

It would have been so much easier to just show up, take a look at the problem, and beat the offender’s face in. Who could stop him? Nobody! But, no. He had to sit there, dressed up and quiet, and just…listen. Make a small comment, maybe. Let his priests do the dirty work.

Feh.

The afternoon promised more interest, in the form of a visit from his royal cousin Ur-Gishkim of Lagash. Gilgamesh had heard much of Ur-Gishkim’s skill with a javelin, and the thought of testing himself against a worthy competitor brightened his mood.

There weren’t any, really. Hadn’t been since he was a young boy. It was obvious he would be king one day, once his uncle had died. As Sagar had pointed out, Gilgamesh’s cousin had enjoyed the divine right only briefly, before sickness took him. He’d never been a strong man.

Gilgamesh had never known sickness, or weakness. He was supreme among men. Handsome beauty came to him without effort, war and sport even more so. A clear blessing, which he took delight in training further, though at times he wished the gods had also blessed him with the talent for sleeping with his eyes open and his face alert.

Not that he cared overmuch about giving offense to some whinging baker, if they insisted on being annoying. But it wouldn’t do to insult a fellow king. So, best get prepared.

He bathed, properly. He was oiled and massaged, his beard tended to. He ordered a public feast; the store-houses were full after all, and the people had worked hard to fill them. Everyone deserved a bit of fun, now and then! And in any case, stores kept too long would spoil in the heat. It was time to refresh them.

Soon, the city was abustle with the commotion of people participating in the feast, of his soldiers keeping the peace, of musicians and dancers, and when the noise of cheering reached Gilgamesh’s ears, he emerged onto the palace’s rooftop terrace to look toward the gates. His cousin must be making quite a show of his arrival, to impress the people so much…

Until he realized that it wasn’t cheering he’d heard after all. And the crowd were not celebrating a royal procession. They were screaming, and running as a dark figure sauntered malevolently up the road.

It wasn’t his cousin who had arrived after all.

It was a beast.

“You have got to be kidding.”

Rees was giggling uncontrollably. “Aw, man, I told you!”

“Did you think the legend contained no truth at all?” Gilgamesh chuckled. “I was a bad king, as I said. Or at least, I wasn’t a good king. That might be more fair. But I was also, as the legend has it, a man of rare and terrible ability. I was almost the sort of thing Singularity had been looking for. A prime example of an uncontacted, utterly unknown species, free of Hierarchy influence. When they found us—when they found me—they thought they had hit the jackpot.”

“He was the product of an absurd confluence of gene-flow,” Leifini added. “His parents were the union of wild, un-mingled tribes, who themselves had recently absorbed wildly unmingled tribes, some of which included entire human subspecies as-yet undocumented in your science. He is a very rare specimen, to be sure…but he was not the only one alive in that era. That repeatability was fascinating to us, and suggested it might be encouraged.”

Ian took note of that. “Encouraged” was doing a Yeoman’s work, right there.

“But,” Y!’kiidaa added, “he was also, unlike all the others, the king of a city-state in the most civilized part of the world, because of a quirk of distant relation. The old king knew he would not last long, and was doomed to be forever heirless. So, he went looking for an heir.”

“And found me, over a foot taller than the other boys my age and many times their weight, with the strength of several grown men and the speed of the swiftest beasts. I was much like young Alex! So I was tested, taken, they taught me the art of words…”

“And that was that. Sudden, powerful privilege was his.”

Gilgamesh sighed, then gave a bit of a wan smile to Alex. “It went to my head.”

“And that we absolutely could not afford,” Leifini added, wryly. “So we decided Y!’kiidaa would simply need to beat it out of the young king. After all…look at them.”

Keeda bounced to all fours and posed that rippling superhero physique of his, with as much ironic bravado as he could manage. Gilgamesh rose and followed suit, and for a long moment the two showed off to their captive audience. There was a good round of jeers and trilling amusement, a flash of color, buzzing wings…

“Our muscle-laden gaoian ally was no stranger to ego, it must be said.”

Keeda chittered and flicked his ears self-effacingly. “It’s true! I was also…despondent. And bored. I had done what I could to preserve my people as best as we could, avoided detection…and we were successful, to a degree. We remembered the core of our souls, at least. Far, far too much was forgotten…”

“So, you fought.”

“Oh, it was more than a fight,” Gilgamesh beamed. “It was glorious! So I saw the commotion, I strode down from the palace steps, all full of my regal self-regard, and…”

And what a beast it was!

Thick-sinewed and powerfully muscled, with a fine pelt and a fierce, heavy jaw. Was it a bear? Cousin to a lion? Couldn’t be! No tale of any such beast had ever reached his ears. And there was an unsettlingly man-like intelligence in those keen amber eyes…

And then it spoke. Spoke!!

“King of Uruk!” it called in a deep, gravelly voice. “Your people call out to me! ‘Save us from this seducer and brawler!’ And so I come, mighty king! Yekiida comes to test your mettle!”

Now that gave everyone pause, Gilgamesh included. It spoke with an unnaturally loud voice, so loud Gilgamesh could hear its cry from across the city. Sagar’s words from earlier stung him; surely this was a test of his divine right to rule.

Well, Gilgamesh enjoyed a challenge, whether it was a foot race, a test of strength, a game of wits, perhaps…

With a fierce grin, he ditched his sandals and his annoying regalia, stripped down just to his kaunake, which he girded and tied around his loins. He was perched high up atop the temple, at the apex of the stairs, looking down upon the commotion. He didn’t have the voice of a god, but he did have the strength and physique to shame all men, and he’d never let himself come to slack-thewed softness. Quite the opposite, in fact; he’d never been stronger.

So, he bounced on his toes, dashed forward, and flung himself down from the top of the ziggurat, landing on his toes with enough heft to shatter the paving stones underfoot. “Beast!” he bellowed, and the sea of men between him and there parted as if by divine force. “I see you! Come now, and speak with me!”

The beast grinned at him, just like a man, but also with the lolling tongue of a dog. It spread its arms, flexed its fingers and showed off a set of fearsome claws…then hid them away again. Letting him know they were there.

And then, warning given, it charged.

Men, women and children scattered shrieking into the alleyways, but Gilgamesh stood his ground. It was so fast—!

But he turned that speed against it in a hip-toss. Felt the beast-man’s hot fur and smelled his breath, and then the beast was past him. It twisted in the air to land lightly on all fours, a posture that looked all too natural.

“What are you, beast? That you use our words and tease us so! Do the gods test me?”

“No!” It…laughed, then, not unlike a hyena from distant lands. “I test you! Now, fight!”

It pounced, too fast to be believed. It tackled Gilgamesh with enough force to slam through market stalls and cave in a wall. He kipped up to his feet, avoided a paw-swipe…

And the fight was on. And what a fight it was!

Afterwards, his memories of the brawl were incomplete from the sheer strain of it. Just a vague series of moments that lodged in his mind. Of brick mud walls shattering under their bodies, of birds escaping from their cages and scattering in a panic. Of squashed fruit making the footing treacherous. Of the full heat of the sun as it climbed to noon-day and the welcome cool of one of the palace pools when they splashed into it. Of his soldiers, spears in hand but wisely staying out of this clash. Of the sun coming back down from the sky’s pinnacle, until the street had shadows again and the whole feast-day was behind them.

Of exhaustion. Deep, abiding tiredness. Scratches everywhere. Obvious claw-marks across his chest and legs.

And underneath him, laughing in that strange voice…

“So you can fight, after all!”

The beast bucked, tossing Gilgamesh across the public space. They both rose, wary and panting, but the beast…turned his back.

He had won. But only because the beast had conceded the fight, when it plainly had more in it. Even though the beast’s tongue was lolling in the air, and Gilgamesh knew for certain he must have bruised that tough, hairy body.

How could he not have? When he looked around, he could see the wreckage of their brawl everywhere. There were buildings that would need to be knocked down and rebuilt, their walls knocked through.

But of any hurt, the beast gave no sign. Instead he pranced on all fours, heading up the stairs to the top of the palace. “Your table better be as entertaining as your fists!”

“…Heh!”

The beast looked back. “But we made a gods-damned mess in our play! What should we do?”

Gilgamesh looked around again. There were scared, tense faces watching from every direction. Women and children, cowering behind their husbands and fathers. People whose homes and stock they had just destroyed. All looking to their king with the silent question on their faces: ‘yes. What are you going to do?’

Well…

Shit.

“I mean…that’s fuckin’ entertaining, I won’t lie,” Hoeff managed. “But there’s somethin’ I don’t get.”

“The why of it.” Gilgamesh nodded.

“Seems like a lot of showboating to me.”

“That was precisely the point. I needed to be humbled.”

“Yuh, but…why you? What were they even looking for in you? You’d have been another, what, bronze age fella needing a lot of education, even once you were aboard…”

“He wasn’t an easy choice, it’s true. There was much against him. His lusts and his temper, just as a start…but for all that he was a ‘bad’ king, his people also loved him.”

“Despite fuckin’ their wives?”

“It was the done thing,” Gilgamesh added, simply. “I certainly did not start that dubious tradition.”

“But you did indulge in it to the point where the merchants started complaining.”

“As they did about many things. You should also consider how my tale came to be; I caused it. It was authored by me, mostly. Part of my aim was an apology for past behavior, and an admonition to the future against such. As with most legends, it has grown in the telling.”

“The people of Uruk loved having a king who could show up any other king,” Leifini said. “He was their champion, their representative, their mascot and their avatar. They tolerated his behavior as his kingly due, as was the way of things. It was ultimately his empathy that tipped the balance in his favor; the sons of Uruk would have followed him into death itself.”

“…And many did, over the years.”

“And after our brawl, of course, he was the king who had saved his city from the marauding beast-man, and tamed him.” Yekiidaa chittered.

“Oh, I don’t think anyone has ever tamed you…” Gilgamesh chuckled in turn. “But it was a fantastic spectacle. He was by my side for many years, and taught me many a thing.”

“Okay, okay, but why did you need him?” Hoeff insisted to Leifini.

“Need what? A leader? We thought we already had one. I had filled that role for thousands of years, of course. But here was an untainted species—”

“‘Yer leavin’ out the bestest part!” Kiidaa objected.

“I was hoping to spare you embarrassment.”

“About what? It was the right thing to do!”

Leifini sighed. “…Fine. Truth be told, we found humankind almost by accident. Surveys had identified the planet, but there were no emission spectra that suggested civilization.”

“Because we were just getting started.”

“Yes, so we were quite surprised to find the human race, just ‘getting started,’ and—”

“I wanted a tussle!”

Leifini sighed again. “…Yes. Y!’kiidaa is and was many things, but one thing I had learned by then was his innate need to play could never be denied, or ruinous consequence would follow.”

“An’ none’a the Void Caste could ever give me real play. We made do with drones an’ stuff, but…balls. For the first time in far too long, I finally saw a chance to actually test myself.”

“So…lemme get this straight,” Hoeff said, disbelief dripping from every syllable. “You’re telling me that you run into us, right at the start of our history, and Keeda here has a fuckin’ itch, goes looking for the biggest badass he can, and just picks a fight.”

“Yes! You can’t tell me you ain’t done the same!”

“In a bar, or a dojo or whatever, sure! It’s another to punch the goddamn king in the face!”

“Slapped, thankyouverymuch! And I did that after having taken the time to learn the language, and all that.”

“You walked up and slapped Gilgamesh in the face.”

“Yes, and more, too! But I wanted to talk with him, mostly. See if he might be useful. We spent years studying humanity. Thought you’d make good allies, one day.”

“Why do you think he was so pent up?” Leifini asked. “All those years of watching the first people we’d ever seen who could be his true peers, in every sense. From early on in our monitoring of your people, he’d wanted it.”

“It took a lot of persuasion to get her ‘ta let me,” Keeda finished. “An’ she never agreed. So I jus’ did it anyway. Stole her ship, too! Balls, it was cramped…”

“Mm.” Leifini gave him a measured look that said, even five thousand years on, she was still quite unamused at that.

Ian looked over at Hoeff. “You look like you’re about to eat their faces, mate.”

“Well what the fuck else am I supposed to do?!” Hoeff exploded. “What the fuck kinna bullshit two-bit fly-by-night operation is this?!”

“You put your finger on it,” Gilgamesh chuckled. “They didn’t know what they were doing. The Void Caste were groping in the dark, learning what they could about the enemy, but they were not a military. War was unknown to them. They had no tradition of it to draw from.”

“We were bereft of leadership,” Leifini agreed. “And leadership is critical. With stasis, the deep observations over generations, the comings and goings of many talented people…”

“Oh God.” Ian understood. “It was a committee of scientists, wasn’t it?”

“And artists. And the fiercely independent. And the fiercely capable,” she added, shooting Keeda an indulgent look. “But how could he lead us? He was big enough to hunt and destroy the galaxy’s most impressive megafauna from the first we met, and he was so…intense in personality, it took long friendship and admiration to overcome instinctual wariness.”

“I’m a big scary guy!” More fierce clowning, clearly for Alex’s benefit as much as anyone else. He’s fond of the lad, Ian noted.

“So then, what did you do?” Hoeff insisted. “You and fuzzy huge-nuts over here have a fuckin’ city-wrecking brawl, or whatever, and now what? Everyone fucks off an’ that’s it?”

“Oh, the story unfolds over years, of course. But in that moment…I had been stripped down to my foundations, so to speak. Worn out, scratched bloody, bruised and battered. Yekiidaa told me later that he was on the verge of collapse himself, but he has always been a better actor than me. In the moment, I truly believed that he had allowed me to win, to save face. That is a humbling thing, for a man who woke up that morning believing the gods themselves approved of his every whim.”

“And I wasn’t done fuckin’ wit’ you, either.” Keeda said, more sternly.

Gilgamesh chuckled, and nodded. He picked up his wine and took another swig.

“Indeed not…” he said.

Every part of him ached. He wanted so desperately to go back to his palace, to soak in a hot bath, feel the hurt seep out of his pores…

But those watching faces were a challenge. And so was the beast’s sharp, amber gaze.

“My table,” Gilgamesh said, slowly, “belongs to the people of Uruk. And we have caused havoc, here. We will tend to the families who have nowhere to sleep, before we feast.”

Such a simple little thing to say. But by the gods, what a change it set in motion. There was so much work to do, that night. So much debris to clear. The beast helped too, and made a game of much of it.

He was leading, Gilgamesh realized. This beast was a leader of men. Where did Gilgamesh stand next to such a black-furred titan of muscle? A beast that could speak? Was he a man?

Was he king?

…How had Gilgamesh fallen so far?

Resolution, then. This was the game, and he was losing.

He put his back into clearing the debris, opened his palace to the dispossessed, feasted that night alongside them…

And brooded.

“Men wrap themselves in illusions of their own making. We are all of us, in some degree, deluded about ourselves: we do not know what kind of person we are. It is only through hardship that you peel away the unconscious lies, and lay bare the soul. Then you find out who a person truly is. And if they are attentive, they find out about themselves. Yekiidaa has a special talent in finding that, exposing it, ruthlessly burning it away, if need be. He has it because an uncaring Enemy did far, far worse to him, right as his life began to flower.”

All eyes focused on Keeda, who duck-nodded seriously.

“I am the trickster god of my people, by my own design. But I am no divine creature. I am a sterile remnant of a mightier, more heroic G!âo. It is…extremely unlikely I have any legacy. The one woman I had known before the fire could not have escaped…so this is my work. Gilgamesh is our king. But by words, weapons or personal might, I am his test.”

“…Okay.” Ian said. The tale was starting to range pretty wildly. “So…you had a fight, and then you fixed the city, and presumably you were re-born as a better king. Sure. II’ll also accept you’re cutting out much for the sake of brevity. But…what then? Now you’ve got Keeda running around, presumably. And the rest of the Epic gets…pretty wild, to say the least.”

“Yes,” Gilgamesh broke some bread and spread paté on it. “So let me summarize. Over the next year, he slowly prepared me for the Revelation. Then the Revelation was made, in private. I met Leifini. My true education began, my first true temptation was had…”

“Technology.” Hoeff said, without expression. “I suppose ‘cuz we weren’t ready.”

“Yes, but more than that. You, I think, understand how brutal our people can be. Imagine if all the world were filled with men like you and I, and I had introduced firearms.”

Slowly, Hoeff nodded.

“Precisely. We were not ready. There were wars, too. Over the years my rule grew more just. Laws were passed. Well, written law was invented, first, and I am proud to say it was one of my scribes who did so, before I could nudge the idea into my court. Later codes drew heavily from his first framing. Ash-Dagrim was his name, and he is still with us. The first lawyer! Do not hate him for it,” he joked. There was a gentle susurrus of amusement.

Gilgamesh took another sip of wine. “From there, Uruk prospered beyond my wildest imaginings. I could not outlaw slavery, despite my wishes. Even a king must answer to reality, but I could blunt its greatest horrors, over time. My brutality toward defeated peoples tempered. I…continued to indulge, but I was kinder. Playful, instead of conquering. I worked to grow my people before slaking my appetites, and soon enough I had more blessings than I could ever indulge. Husband and wife hide from an uncaring king, but they welcome a beloved one into their homes. Yekiidaa taught me powerful wisdom by his actions. Wisdom he didn’t know he had within himself. You want a blessing from the gods? He was, for me.”

Keeda himself flicked his ears back in embarrassment. Interesting.

“And we explored,” Leifini added. “Earth had fascinating biology, if you take my meaning.”

“I…don’t think I do?” Hoeff frowned. He was proving an excellent foil.

“No matter, we’ll get to that eventually. In any case, the legend states that I was gone on a voyage far into the east for some time, yes? Well…not the east, of course. One of the Void Caste’s observation posts had sent a distress signal.”

“He immediately offered his arms. His, and a very few select of his guard who had been brought into partial confidence.”

“And…what did you find?” Dora asked.

Gilgamesh contemplated his wine, sighed, and poured out a measure onto the grass. Prompted by that, Ian did the same, followed by everyone else. With that observation made, he answered her question.

“…We watched a civilization die.”

Date Point: A long time ago, in a galaxy close at hand
Orbit above pre-contact planet Spif, Trailing Edge

Y!’kiidaa

From orbit, the nuclear exchange was almost peaceful. No sound, no thunder, no wails of millions dying…just pulses of light, as transient and slow as a sleeping heartbeat.

They hadn’t been a good people. Their sympathy for the out-group was nil, and their willingness to expand the in-group to include former out-groups near non-existent. Not that the G!âo or Corth had been much better. Leifini’s Void Caste were outcasts, a perpetual out-group. And Humans, so far as Y!’kiidaa had seen so far, had few qualms about brutalizing other tribes, cities and nations. Or even lower-status members of their own in-group, for that matter.

But the suicidal madness playing out before them hadn’t sprung from instinct and alien morality alone. The civilization burning below had suffered a nurturing of their worst nature, ever escalating, ever divided, until finally their xenophobia and technology combined to bear terrible, frenzied fruit.

In only a few more generations, they would have been the galaxy’s new problem neighbors, perhaps even a warmongering, slave-taking, conquering scourge to rival the Hunters. Perhaps they could even have witnessed extinction like this without grieving for the loss of something precious.

Y!’kiidaa couldn’t. Now, there was no hope they could prove him wrong.

He keened, quietly.

“…What was the point?” he asked the room, eventually.

Leifini had long since closed her eyes and bowed her head. She didn’t open them or lift it, but she did speak, softly. “A universal maxim, my friend. Everyone is good by their own moral code. And every evil they perform is the lesser evil, in their own estimation.”

“What’s worse than this?”

She moved her head side-to-side. “Why do I incinerate bacterial and fungal samples after study? For safety. To prevent their escape and spread. Yet I am killing millions of living organisms in doing so.”

Gilgamesh gave her an askance look. “What you destroy are not thinking beings. They don’t feel pain, or love, or hurt or joy! They can’t write a poem or sing! They can’t dance!”

“Or anticipate the future and fear their end. I know. It is an imperfect comparison. But they must have some inner life, some kind of consciousness even in some lesser degree than our own. They are incapable of the things we value, and thus we feel no shame in destroying them. Perhaps these people—” she gestured out the window, “—are incapable of the things the Enemy value, and so fall into the same disposable category…Or perhaps the Enemy considers themselves at war, and think this massacre is necessary to avert some more terrible future scenario. Perhaps their molding of the Corth into beings of coldness and unempathetic rationality reflects their own values.”

The treacherous thought flitted through Y!’kiidaa’s mind that she was sounding pretty damn cold herself, in that moment. But, he knew better. Leifini had nothing to prove to him, in terms of her warmth or empathy. It was just a coping mechanism.

Gilgamesh frowned at her, then looked back out the window and placed his hand on the glass. He watched death flowering across a continent a few seconds longer. “…My people will have this power, in time?”

“Oh yes,” Leifini nodded. “Those weapons are the first tangible expression of what you’ve taken to calling ‘The Deep.’ They are a necessary and inevitable step to understand the physics of the universe.”

“It was this way for me too,” Y!’kiidaa reassured him, reading much in the king’s stance and expression. “There is so much to learn…”

Across the bridge, one of Leifini’s distant grand-nephews cleared his throat, politely getting their attention. “Unidentified ships decloaking in a polar orbit.”

Leifini opened her eyes. “Let’s see them.”

It was their first glimpse at the foe’s actual weapons. There were six in total. Transports of some kind? Two huge deployment bays straddling the middle like saddle bags, ahead of a cluster of engines, and aft of an axe-shaped prow. Spare and spartan. Not much room for a crew at all.

They orbited low and fast, opening their bays as they decloaked and firing large, metallic packages downward as they passed over what had been, just a few hours ago, major population centers. Re-entry plasma made it hard to get any kind of clear look at what they dropped, but Y!’kiidaa got the impression of an insect curled up on itself.

The Void Caste observed in silence, speaking only quietly to compare notes and draw each others’ attention to details. They noted the lack of any obvious livery on the warships, the highly efficient nature of their cloaking devices…

Kiidaa watched the ground forces. Their deployment was swift and brutal, slamming into the ground at terminal velocity. He watched one of the coiled things unfold itself from its protective cocoon, raise itself up tall to scan the vicinity. Explosive charges on its back launched a flight of light drones into the air and, seconds later, it sensed a target and turned to destroy.

Not far to its south, an identical machine did the exact same thing. And another, and another. In minutes, there was a formation of them marching steadily across the fields and through the woods, to converge on minor towns and vehicle-packed highways.

And when they reached them, they commenced to complete the slaughter that the nuclear missiles had begun.

The Ten’Gewek knew his story already. Young though they all were—Ferd was the second-oldest at, maybe, his early-mid twenties—they had all lived through the Hierarchy’s invasion of their own world. They knew the Death-birds and Abrogators well.

“Efficient.” Ferd said it with a snarl and a curled lip, his tail coiling angrily behind him.

“Very,” Leifini agreed. “By the time the Hierarchy decides to exterminate a species, they’ve spent a thousand years or more studying it and guiding its development. They know the local politics, the global atlas, they have already infiltrated every government…they know everything they need to maximize the carnage, and to ensure that there is nowhere to hide.”

“Why hit us so early?” Nomuk asked

Gilgamesh gave him a sympathetic look. “Your people were never going to invent the intercontinental ballistic missile,” he said. “Even if your civilization had reached the point of developing rockets, they would quickly have realized that Akyawentuo’s gravity is too strong for any reasonable chemical engines. And without rocketry, without payloads to orbit, there are whole branches of the Deep that are cut off.”

“Your world’s gravity is over twenty percent stronger than Earth’s,” added Leifini, “which is very nearly inescapable itself. Nothing short of nuclear propulsion would have sufficed to escape, and doing such a thing would have been the doom of you all.”

“The gods trapped us,” Tumik grumbled darkly.

“The gods work in mysterious ways,” Gilgamesh replied diplomatically. “You were found, and now because of that hardship, you have strength no other people have. Strength of body, of spirit, in fortitude, determination…how hard must you have labored to be here, now, speaking a language ill-suited for your mouth and throat? And I hear you can read ancient Sumerian!”

Nomuk twitched his tail. “Only a little…”

Coming from a human, that would have been modesty. Coming from him, it was embarrassment at not being completely fluent in it, yet.

“Besides,” Gilgamesh added. “Trapped you may have been, but you were also not vulnerable to the Enemy’s preferred cowardice of provoking their victims into self-destruction. They were compelled to confront you head-on, and early. It was a long and costly campaign for them, and vulnerable. Internecine war is a plausible cover for their scheming. Death robots methodically scouring the land, less so.”

“In any case…we inferred much about their mode of operation, that day,” Leifini brought the story gently back on track. “We discovered there was no crew, and that the ships had enormously powerful computation elements onboard, far in excess of what any well-engineered AI would need, which was our first clue as to their nature. And afterwards, when we sat down to think about it…”

“You’re suggesting they’re some kind of…what? Rampant machine? That can’t be right! Can it?”

“We don’t know what is capable with machines. Sapient-like artificial intelligence is a field the Directorate continues to study with interest…perhaps because it benefits the Enemy.”

Y!’kiidaa made a grumbling noise. “…I’m not used to you not knowin’ things…” he fretted.

“This is new territory for us all…” Leifini shook her head. “But it would explain much if our foe is not corporeal, in the conventional sense. You saw how efficiently they took apart those people down there.” She gestured vaguely behind her, as though the entire planet was in that direction. Maybe it was. “How many bunkers and shelters did we just see them tear into that we had no idea existed. How many fake transmissions did we pick up, adding to the confusion? How many people in positions of power seemed to go totally insane in those final hours, and how many of the people who should have stopped them, didn’t?”

She shook her head. “Then there’s what happened to the Corth. The insidious subtlety of it. I always wondered how they could be manipulating us. It seemed highly unlikely that our leaders have been meeting with the representatives of an unknown civilization and doing their bidding.”

“So…why don’t we go down there and see for ourselves?” Y!’kiidaa asked.

“And give ourselves away?”

“Carefully, obviously…”

“You managed to detect us, in full cloak!”

“Because I could smell ‘yer ship’s burnin’ oil!” Y!’kiidaa chittered. “We’ve already established ain’t nobody got sniffers like my people. They sure didn’t down there, so…”

“And our current generation of ships are far superior to the one you flew that day, great-aunt,” Leifini’s nephew added.

“Yekiidaa has the right of it,” Gilgamesh declared. “We cannot hide forever. We must know more.”

“But the danger! You do not understand—”

“My loins may be harmed, yes? Ha!” Gilgamesh laughed. “I don’t intend to walk around there forever. Besides, many a merchant’s daughter is heavy with my boys! I can afford a risk, for something this important.”

“It’s more than just your nuts,” Y!’kiidaa warned him. “Those weapons poison the air, the ground and the water. It gets in your body and stays, and then—”

“I did read your writings on accumulated dose,” Gilgamesh pointed out, annoyed he was being impeded. “So we make an armor against the danger, we see with our own eyes, and we leave. Why is this difficult?”

“Oh, I’m with ya. We need to go down there and hunt. But we need to do it right, we need to have some idea what our quarry is, and we need to do it sneaky.”

“How?! You have already said you know absolutely nothing about our great enemy! So what are you planning against? Nothing! That’s no different than hiding from the storm. So let us go see! By the gods, how have you got anything done? You can do nothing at all if you know nothing about your foe!”

Kiidaa scratched his ear. “Well…I never went to war, never spoke at council. Balls, I wasn’t even quite a man, when my world was taken from me.”

Gilgamesh softened a bit. “It’s not about war, friend. This is about action. A king must often act without the luxury of understanding, for failure to act may prove fatal. If we do nothing, we will be eaten by this thing! So we must scout. We must see what there is to see. Only once we have some knowledge of our foe can we make a better plan with a sharper point on it.”

“I’m with you, then…but, if Leifini’s people can arm us with some kinda sneaky tricks, I’d like that…”

They both looked at Leifini.

She sighed.

“…Very well.”

Four days later, they made planetfall. Leifini and the Void Caste’s engineers had created some prototype equipment for them, inspired by the excursion suits Corth scientists used to venture onto dangerous planets, and informed by Kiidaa’s nose for mischief.

Gilgamesh shugged uncomfortably at the skin-tight synthetic under-coverings. “Is this really necessary?”

“Yes, you massive lout,” Leifini said, with a laugh. “The greatest danger is from skin contact and inhalation of the fallout, at this point. Most of it should have already progressed through the highest energy decay modes.” She reached up and tugged along the neckline. “This would fit so much better if your neck wasn’t wider than your head…”

“Would you have a weak champion?” Gilgamesh replied, then shook his body. “It feels… fussy. And the rest of this?” He glanced at the heavy pile of stuff he needed to don.

“Air seals, some armor, and some more active protection. Shield emitters in the harness should deflect anything too energetic. It can also be used as cloak in visual spectrum, and it should keep you hidden and safe, provided you don’t move too quickly. But do not rely on it heavily. The technology is…young, and untested.”

Gilgamesh knew enough of the Void Caste by now to know that they took great pride in their work. When Leifini called something ‘untested’ what she really meant was that it hadn’t been proved time and again over decades of regular use. He himself knew much too little to have any idea how suitable the garment was or the task…but he trusted Leifini.

They landed in woodlands. The trees were nothing like the ones Gilgamesh knew, the air was cold, and when he looked up at the mountains, the sight of ice running down one of them in a slow, frozen river was…distracting. But trees and underbrush, it seemed, were trees and underbrush.

They hunted quietly. Yekiidaa could hold himself low to the ground and stalk on all fours, and his impressive nose led the way.

Actually.

“Does that not expose you to fallout?”

“Nah,” he whispered back. “Fallout’s big like dust. Stuff that smells is way more tinier.”

“….I see.”

More Deep to learn, apparently.

At first, it was just…getting the lay of the land. A strange place, and the ground did not pull at his feet as re-assuringly as it did back on his world. But some things were still the same. Paths were still paths, trod by feet or carts. They followed along one such path, noting everything for Leifini’s benefit, until—

“That has to be a person.”

The clothes were the giveaway, really. Had he seen such a hopping, hairy thing naked, he would have guessed otherwise, but it was wrapped in good cloth, though dirty and torn. …Much better cloth than anything his people had. As good as the weirdly comfortable thing he was wearing under all the “safety.”

He didn’t seem to be doing much, though. Just…standing around. Not even like he was out enjoying a sunny day. And was that drool? Maybe they normally drooled. But somehow, Gilgamesh knew otherwise. The creature-man in front of him was in a bad way, his thoughts long flown away, leaving his body behind to stumble around.

“Well,” he said as quietly as could be, “here’s one of the poor bastards, Leifini. What next?”

“Use the blue scanner on him, please.”

He aimed it. Pressed the blue thing. It blinked. Blue like the afternoon sky, before the colors of evening.

There was a moment of silence, while he waited to see what the blink meant.

“The green one, please?”

Aimed. Pressed. faster blink this time, amber like warm honey.

“…Do not let him see you. There is anomalous technology of some kind embedded in his skull. These people are not sufficiently advanced for—” a new word. He knew much of the Corth tongue, these days, but not this one…it contained the sounds for ‘body’ and ‘device’ though.

It meant something to Yekiidaa though. “Well,” he whispered, “that’s fuckin’ alarming. You want to study him in person?”

“The only safe way to do that is to kill him.”

“Look at him. He’s already dead, so…”

So Gilgamesh put him out of his misery. A quick dash forward, a fierce blow to the head, a fist through its chest…

Done. Done too easily, actually. No man of his people would have…Popped quite like that.

Yekiidaa was at his side a second behind him. “I think we got what we came for. We should go quickly.”

They picked up the sorry, broken, and much too light corpse, and returned to the ship.

It was a long wait while Gilgamesh’s intellectual betters did their careful work. In the meantime, he wrestled with Yekiidaa, found new ways to use the exercising toys…

Restless. He was restless. Something about all of it was gnawing at him. Kiidaa, too.

Some hours later, as he and Yekiidaa were napping together after their exertions…They got the first of their answers. He didn’t like them. Nobody did. In fact, they created a number more questions.

But now, at least…they had a start.

“We mounted two more excursions. Obviously, we could not capture any of the enemy’ drones or abrogators for study, but Gilgamesh was right. Once we had taken that first step and learned something, we knew where to look to find more, and so it went.”

Y!’kiidaa took a moment to delicately nibble the meat off a perfectly cooked spare rib. And by perfectly, he meant barely. Crispy sear on the outside, warm and juicy on the inside. He crunched down on the bone and sucked down the warm, buttery marrow, too.

Leifini had never enjoyed it. “Must you?”

“I’ll give up rare meat when you give up fungus tea.”

“Thousands of years, they still bicker the same old way,” Gilgamesh chuckled.

“Anyway. We didn’t get a whole lot out of that first biodrone. By the time we even got it to Leifini’s medical lab, the implant had half dissolved already. Some kinda nanotech self-destruct. I guess so if the drone dies in a car crash or whatever, there’ll be no sign of it by the time they get round to an autopsy.”

“At this point, we must gloss over a great deal,” Leifini said. “We made slow, steady progress for many years. Gilgamesh simply led and we followed, feeding him knowledge…eventually, we decided to formalize matters. A decade after we met, Gilgamesh was proclaimed chief of the Void Caste.”

“I remade things immediately,” Gilgamesh noted. “It could no longer be exile Corth, hiding in the Void. We needed to prepare ourselves for a fight where we had no allies. This was…a tall order. And I realized soon that I could not remain the God-King of Uruk.”

“It took some decades to plot. Fortunately, Gilgamesh aged very well, losing nothing as he entered the prime of his life. The people in his region were long-lived and that, it turned out…”

“Bullshit,” Hoeff said, flatly.

“I do not. Much of our most successful longevity research comes from the biodiversity of Earth herself, and from Gao’s ancient history as well. We collected and preserved very much, before the Hierarchy came. Why do you think your peoples respond so well to modern therapy?”

“Let’s say we were as long-lived as a people without the sciences of good health can reasonably hope to be,” Gilgamesh offered. “And I, of course, was hale and hearty even as my hair turned gray. By this point, the stories of me went that my friend the beast-man had died, and I travelled far to rescue his soul and return him to life. I returned to Uruk, ruled as well as I could while I continued my studies of the Deep…and when the time came, as a final touch to my legend, I ascended to the heavens.”

“It was quite a light show,” Yekiidaa chittered. “And of course, key members of the court knew much of the truth by then, as did his eldest son, who succeeded the throne. But they kept to their secrecy, and told no one. They were not so foolish as to shirk from the need of it all.”

“…Ah.” Ian noted. “And now, finally, we come to the important bit. Why did you breed us like cattle?”

Y!’kiidaa paused in munching a savory cracker. He had to give Wilde credit, a lot of the humans he’d known had been so intimidated by Gilgamesh that they went all meek. Death-Eye, on the other hand, lived up to his fearsome visage.

But then again…he reported directly to Singularity’s greatest triumph, and had been respected in a company of men containing many of the Line. Kiidaa had seen enough of Wilde to know that he felt comfortable in the presence of excellence…and that comfort meant he was willing to challenge it.

The challenge certainly stung Gilgamesh. “You imply a degree of control and callousness we never even aspired to. Not like cattle, no. We never culled or gelded the undesirable, nor compelled a union. No woman ever woke up mysteriously pregnant after being artificially impregnated.”

“That directly contradicts reporting from the Corti Directorate themselves.”

“They are mistaken. Whatever your misgivings about the process, I will firmly defend that we did it with integrity, and respect for the lives we were touching.”

“A stranger comes to the village,” Y!’kiidaa said. “He has a strange accent and declines to speak much of his past, but he works hard and lives selflessly. With his help, the harvest that year is good, or the new buildings are strong and well-made, or he forges good iron. Within a year or two, it’s as if he was never a stranger to anybody. His accent fades, the people of his community accept and value him, and if he still declines to share anything of his family or where he came from, well, the world is a vale of tears, and all men live with pain. Why press him? Let the poor soul live the new life he has built…and he’s a good man. As fine a husband as any girl could look for, and soon enough there’ll be a family happy to welcome him as their son and brother…Indeed, it is that sort of man who gave me my brother.”

“That was our approach,” Gilgamesh nodded. “What is there to object to? Omission? A normal part of life, that. Would you tell your mother what kind of pornography you watch, or blurt out a sickly relative’s medical troubles to your colleagues? We needed an army. That would not come from the Corth. You cannot imagine we spent thousands of years doing nothing. We have had teams like your HEAT for much of it. How do you think we have learned all we learned?”

“And how else would we have kept humankind a protected secret? System shield technology is a recent innovation. We could not have done as you so magnificently managed by accident with the Ten’Gewek.”

“None of which answers why.” Ian insisted, forcefully.

“Yes. So let me summarize. I ascended to leadership among the Void Caste. By acclamation I was crowned, with an advisory council to cover my many and deep ignorances. With a bit of time, and observation, I arrived at our needs. The mission was to free the galaxy of the Enemy. We knew right away we would need powerfully capable ‘spear-men’ as I thought of them at the time, and we knew that men of the necessary caliber were rare. We could not simply recruit every Hero from Earth; my people would notice, and be weaker for it when we could not risk such a thing. We also knew, as does anyone who observes mutts, that the very thing which makes someone like me is diluted, without luck or care.”

“We needed an army. To man that army, we had two species. Gao was out of reach for the moment, and Earth was about to explode into civilization…the time to act was then. So, we began cultivating the Line.”

“A eugenics program to breed super-soldiers.”

Gilgamesh sighed. “…Yes. A voluntary one, but yes.”

The silence hummed like a bowed string as Wilde and his crew stared at him, until Wilde, very carefully, spoke his mind. “Seems to me, we’re coming at this from opposite sides of a big divide. Where I’m from? Eugenics is a fuckin’ ugly word. And the drive to improve people, to create the ideal human, has been used to justify industrialized murder.”

Gilgamesh sighed again. “Yes, I suppose we are. So let me let you in on an important fact about the people of Ekallim-Igigi. A full quarter of her population are enlisted directly in the fight, and of them nearly half are actively deployed right now. We were not attempting to breed the ideal human. Far from it. What would such a thing even be? What we were looking to preserve and cultivate was talent.”

“…Because you’re not a hidden civilization at all.”

“No.”

“You’re a paramilitary.”

“Closer to the mark, yes. We are…” Gilgamesh paused and considered. “Perhaps the best way to put it is as a paramilitary nation. All of us here, no matter the species, is united in our purpose to destroy the Hierarchy. Some of us lead. Many of us fight. Still others research, think, design. The very best of us often retire back to Earth, or Gao, or whatever world…a stranger, wandering in from the night, with a story he will not tell. Save but a handful, we age, have families, and die. After all, immortality is not for the faint of heart.”

“I…see.”

“Understand, it is out of service we do this. I suspect that, if we ever manage our victory, we will very likely disband, and I will finally allow myself to age, grow old, and die alongside all the rest. To go, and at last unite with my children, and explore the Final Mystery.”

“Hmm.” Now it was Wilde’s turn to omit, or at least not share his thoughts. Instead, he stretched until his spine popped. “I think a break is in order, if you don’t mind.”

Bold of him, to lead a king. But Gilgamesh liked bold leaders, and frequently indulged. “You are right.” Gilgamesh rose to his feet. “I would go play at lifting. You and your men are of course welcome to join…”

Ian demurred. “I’d be holding the rest of you back.” He shared a quick look with Hoeff, who looked like he was craving physical violence. “My crew is of course free to play along. I’ll take a walk instead.”

If Gilgamesh was disappointed, he didn’t show it. “As you wish. Perhaps we should resume this evening?”

“That sounds good.”

“Very well!” Gilgamesh nodded at his staff, and made his exit. Hoeff and the so-called Wrecking Crew followed behind.

Everyone else wandered off. Everyone but Alex, who poked Ian in the shoulder.

“Hey! Uh…wanna see my ship?”

What a scene! Ian was being asked after by a young boy-prince who was far and away the more powerful man, both physically and politically, yet who wanted nothing more than to show-and-tell with his New Awesome Friend. Some truths transcended time and species.

The change in Ian was immediate. He went instantly from brooding on whatever still troubled him, to smiling down. “Aye, sure. That sounds like fun…”

Y!’kiidaa watched them go. They still had an uphill fight here, he could tell. But, that wasn’t really surprising. They’d had a rough introduction to Singularity. A rougher time still, absorbing millennia of new history and all its implications…It would be good for him to indulge in some innocent fun.

In fact…

Y!’kiidaa chittered to himself as the old temptation stole over him once again. He’d never, ever, in all his time, once been able to properly resist it.

What Captain Ian Wilde needed, he decided, was a good trick…

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

What this kid needs is somebody closer to his own age…

The manic thought somehow managed to hold on inside Ian’s head as Alex put them through a high-G maneuver that had him briefly feeling like his guts were about to sink into his feet.

Ian knew a thing or five about maneuver in space. It wasn’t like planes. Planes could do all sorts of aerobatic shit by leaning into the air resistance until they flipped out like a thrown playing card. Spaceships, though…most spaceships were designed with a strong axis of thrust, maneuvering thrusters, and a gyroscope. The most Gs you could get was equal to the engines’ maximum thrust.

And by Christ the kid’s ship had some thrutch. They’d rammed out of the station’s approach as hard as the traffic controllers would let him, and that had been bloody intense enough. But then they’d reached the minimum safe distance, and Alex had made it his mission to show off, by way of turning Ian’s inner ear inside out.

Now, Wilde enjoyed a wild ride, no lies there. But fuck!

“Hey!” Alex called over his shoulder. “You ever been down into a gas giant’s atmosphere?”

“Can’t say I have!” Ian called back. The lad’s ship was pretty damn roomy, probably to accomodate his fucking unit of a father riding behind in the back seat. Or the lad himself, frankly. But it was still a two-seater ridealong job. “Is that safe?”

“Oh yeah! No problem for the Beowulf!

Ian laughed. The “Beowulf? A little on-the-nose, isn’t it?”

“Aargh, it’s not what you think,” Alex groaned. He angled the ship’s nose away from Ekallim-Igigi and spent a few seconds speaking to traffic control in a language Ian didn’t speak. Seconds later, they were at warp—quite a slow warp, actually. Ian actually got to watch the station and the planet it orbited recede astern, rather than just blink out of existence, which meant they hadn’t even gone FTL.

“I mean, it’s not bad as names go,” Ian grinned. “After that performance earlier I thought you’d have named it ‘hench press’ or ‘super-squat’ or—”

Alex snorted. “Shut up!”

“Oh well. Maybe the next ship, aye?”

The kid laughed, “‘Hench press,’ though? That’s terrible!’

“‘Ey, I know blokes who’d think that’s hilarious and absolutely name a ship that just for a giggle.”

“Why did you choose Stray Fortune for yours?”

“Well, see, the original name was some Vzk’tk thing like a bloke who just got smashed in the mouth trying to chew his own teeth.”

“Ew.”

“But it seemed apt, maybe? Let’s face it, not a one of my crew are exactly living the normal life. We’re all on that ship ‘cuz we’re a bit stray, I guess, but we’re all glad to be there.”

“Sounds fun,” Alex sighed. “I don’t think I’ll ever get to be stray.”

“Aye, well. ‘The grass is always greener,’ and that.”

“No, no! I mean…I’m sorry.”

‘What for? Fantasizing? Don’t be. I mean, I can imagine what it must be like, here…”

“It’s good! For the most part. Father says he ‘got it wrong the first few times’ when I asked him about my older siblings, you know? It is kinda weird growing up here.”

“What are you measuring it against?”

“Well, we get TV. Eventually.”

Ian laughed. “Not missing much, there…what about kids your age?”

“Oh, there’s plenty. It’s just…”

“None of them could hench press a house?”

“Shut up!!”

Ian chuckled again. Clearly Alex had set a slow warp just to enjoy the conversation. “Got a girl you like?”

“No.”

“A boy?”

“No. I mean, not like that.”

“So, okay. What’s stopping you?”

“I mean…” Alex shrugged. “Girls are weird.”

“But hard to look away from, yeah?”

“…Yeah.” Alex laced his fingers and stretched. “Also…I dunno. It’s like, up at the palace I’ve got all my step-mothers about and the last time I even smiled at someone it was the house gossip for like, a week straight.”

…Ah. Right. And Gilgamesh would know that. No wonder he wanted an off-world adventure for the lad.

“And I suppose they all have loads of ‘good advice’ or ‘concerns’ or whatever?”

“Oh gods yes. Especially Mevia, she’s the worst.”

“Don’t think I’ve met her yet.”

“You’ll know. She’ll be the one who wants to beat your face into the mat the moment you meet. For her, that’s friendly. The first time I ever saw her smile was the first time I knocked her on her ass.”

Ian laughed in mild wonder. “She sounds like a piece of work alright…but she turns into a cuddly mama bear in private?”

Alex laughed, “No, not really! She’s just a bear, all the time. And she treats educating me like she’s preparing me for war.”

Ian got a sudden sense of what The Talk must have been like, coming from a woman like that. Or Tomoe, for that matter. No doubt the poor kid had suffered having the Birds and the Bees sprung on him by all of them in various ways.

“…Because she is,” he said aloud.

“Yeah. I know. But at least I know it’s weird. And do you have any idea what it’s like when they all decide, at the same time that I need to know all about—”

“Was just thinking about that, actually.”

Alex barked a laugh. “See? I’ve had the condom talk four dozen times. Like, for a while it was almost a game to hide whenever someone wanted to talk about ‘something important.’’

“I remember mine,” Ian grinned. “It was a class at school. Can’t remember what her name was, but I remember she had a weirdly smooth face from too much makeup foundation, and bright red lipstick and blaze orange hair, but she had to be, like, sixty-something. And she had a big clay model the size of a fucking pringles can so the whole class could see it. Oh, and a cucumber. And then to prove how reliable condoms are, she cut the cucumber up while the rubber was on it. Made all the boys very uncomfortable, and I swear some of the girls got ideas…”

Alex giggled then, the best kind of raunchy giggle. “That sounds terrible!”

“Aye, well. It cleared up some stupid misconceptions that had been doing the rounds, so it worked I guess.” Up front, a point of light was beginning to get a bit bigger and kind of noticeably brown-orange. “That our destination?”

“Yup.”

“She’s an odd-looker, isn’t she?”

“I like it! There’s some streaks of red down along the southern pole, and some blue too!”

“Kinda reminds me of Jupiter, minus the storms.”

“Well, this one isn’t as big. And we’re only going to just dip in a little. I, uh…” Alex smiled sheepishly. “Gotta treat this like a solo flight, no offense. So we’ll be careful.”

“Smart lad,” Ian nodded. “How deep is a ‘little?’”

“About five hundred kilometers? One day I’m gonna have one that can go way deeper.”

“Well, this’ll be a first. Don’t think anyone on Earth’s yet sent a manned ship into a gas giant’s atmosphere…”

“They should! There’s lots of good gas mining down there,” Alex noted. “Niven was right about all that.”

“You read a lot of classic scifi?”

“Oh yeah! Or audiobooks. Y’know.” He shot a wicked grin over his shoulder. “When I’m busy hench pressing.”

It was Ian’s turn to snort-laugh. “Got a favourite?”

“Well…the ship’s named after Beowulf Shaeffer.”

“Isn’t that a whole series? I said only one…”

“I don’t have just one!” Alex objected. “And it’s all one big story anyway, so that’s my answer.”

“Tsk, tsk…kids these days, can’t even follow directions…”

“I’ll fight you for it…” Alex warned with a grin.

“Right. Directions followed exactly. Top score.”

The kid smiled again, but this time there was…a hint of some discomfort. Right. So there were limits to how far Ian could tease the lad. Good to know.

“Okay…” Alex said after a moment, as they coasted toward orbit. “What about you?”

“Honestly, I wasn’t a big reader at your age. I read some of the classics ‘cuz people I respect told me I should, but honestly, the number of technical manuals I have to read, I’d rather veg out and play a videogame, you know? It’s not really…damn, that’s a view.”

They were just penetrating the planet’s uppermost, thinnest gas layer now. The familiar flecks of plasma along the hull’s leading surface hinted at how fast they were still going, even though things outside had the illusion of slowing to a halt. But, that was the scale of space. The clouds Ian was looking down on looked like watching out the window of a plane at cruising altitude, but the reality was he was looking down on banks of gas big enough to swallow whole continents.

“Wait until we’re down among it. You ever felt really, really small?”

“Moreso lately,” Ian grumbled sotto voce. “Is that your idea of fun?”

“Trust me.”

I already bloody am, Ian thought, as the plasma halo got brighter and more opaque. They were plunging into an environment that would kill both of them pretty damn quick if Alex fucked up badly enough. Ian sure as shit couldn’t have taken over in an emergency: he couldn’t read the instruments in front of him at all.

But the kid really was a damn good pilot. He focused quietly on flying for a bit, leaving Ian to think in silence until after five minutes or so the plasma halo around them faded, cleared…

And Ian felt really, really small.

At first glance, the view was merely fucking pretty. Banks of cloud to either side of them, the colour of sunset, with a kind of “lowland” of undulating pale beige between them. Wide, flat white pockets of water vapour drifted over those lowlands like grazing animals, and every so often there was a flash of light from somewhere deep below, hinting at the terrifying crushing dark far beneath. It was magnificent.

But on second glance, the scale drove itself home when Ian realized that each of those tiny distant flat clouds was a hurricane to dwarf any that had ever smashed a human house. And with that perspective, just for the briefest second, his brain managed to see how big each of those fog banks on either side of them was.

Each of them could have comfortably swallowed the Earth.

It was like an optical illusion. For one second, maybe two, he fully and truly understood just how tiny they were in relation. Then the sound of his own awed sigh snapped him out of it, the sense of scale slipped out of his mind like a wet bar of soap in the bath, and fumble after it though he might, he just couldn’t quite get it back. Part of him was frustrated at losing it. A rather larger part was quite glad, thank you very much, to be safely back in his cozy little brain where humans were actually significant.

Calling the whole experience ‘religious’ felt inadequate.

Jesus, no wonder Moj is addicted to it.

“…Yeah,” Alex agreed, quietly.

That one word gave Ian an insight into the lad’s whole life, and set his heart aching. And Alex, after a long moment, gave voice to it.

“…Y’know what it’s like? I mean, knowing why you are?”

“I’m…no.”

“Do you…believe you have a why?”

“I…found a cause,” Ian ventured. “But, not like…”

“Not like being crafted for it.”

“…No. Is…is that what you are?”

Alex laughed a bit bitterly. “Father loves mother the same way he loves many women. He cares, but he cares about the Line even more. I’m here ‘cuz they expected someone like me.”

“I haven’t met your mum.”

“She prefers to keep to herself. Father dotes on her too, but…”

“Where’s she from?”

“Sweden.”

Ian choked back a laugh, somehow. “Sorry, I’m sorry, just—”

Alex shrugged, and grinned. “Dad has a type, I guess. But, uh…nineteen-seventies Sweden. She’s not some viking shieldmaiden or whatever. Not literally, anyway.”

“So…right. About you. You seem, uh…a bit conflicted about it all.”

“Just a little.” Alex said nothing for a bit, then pulled up in altitude, and put on the autopilot. “But, I mean, what am I supposed to think? I’m this massive freak and I like being all freaky but at the same time, that’s exactly what they want out of me, so what am I doing?! I s’pose I’ll join the Intervention Teams at some point, go on raids…y’know, prove out the Line or whatever…”

“Not a job to do when you’re in two minds about it, that.”

“That’s the thing. I’m not two minds about it. I want to do it. I’ll be the best at it, too! Like…I know what I am. I’m the human version of Daar. I like being me, I like fighting, I like winning. I’ve sent grown men three times your size to the hospital! What I don’t like is that I haven’t really decided I like all that. I just do!”

Ian reflected on that. The fact was, hearing that? Daar would probably get along with the kid like a house on fire, whatever his feelings about the father.

“Do you resent it?”

“I don’t know!”

“Kinda feel like you ought to, but can’t quite summon it up?”

“…I dunno. Maybe.”

Right. Well. Only one thing to do.

Ian wanted to give him a hug. But he couldn’t, sitting behind him.

So he reached forward and put a hand on that ridiculous boulder of a shoulder, squeezed it reassuringly. It had all the give of plate iron but the gesture was enough; Alex reached up with a hand and held Ian’s gratefully.

“I shouldn’t tell you, but…your dad asked if we might find you some, uh, off-station opportunities. I said I couldn’t make that promise to him…but I will make it to you.”

“You mean, like…visit Earth? And Folctha?” The surprised hope in Alex’s voice was painful to hear.

“Your dad knows you better than you think. I’m pretty sure he understands you exactly. So, yeah. You know what it means for someone like him to show that kind of vulnerability to someone in my position? That’s a huge risk he took, and he took it out of love.”

There was a long silence. Then a movement of shoulder and arm suggestive of Alex scrubbing furiously at his eye, before he put his hands back on the controls. “…We’d better get back,” he croaked, then reached out and tapped on the comm. “Can the trick, Yekiidaa.”

Ian frowned as an all-too-familiar voice replied. “Aww! Well, okay.”

“Oh, what?!” Ian groaned. “You were gonna—?”

“He had this idea about pretending we were being hunted by a cloud whale or something.”

Ian blinked, then glanced out the window, peering suspiciously down into the atmospheric morass below them. “…Is that a real thing?”

“If I told you, then that would take away some of the mystery!”

Alex giggled and shook his head no for Ian’s benefit.

“Well. Fine. I’ll have you know Alex and I were having a real man-to-man! We talked about sports, and hench-pressing—”

“Shut up!!”

“And girls and things—”

“I’m gonna fold you up like a fuckin’ newspaper!”

“Oi! You keep that fuckin’ mouth of yours clean around me! And you have newspapers here?”

Movement out the corner of Ian’s eye prompted him to turn his head, and even knowing it was a prank, he still recoiled from the sight of the fleshy mass that had lumbered up alongside them. Fucking thing looked like the bastard lovechild of a squid and a zeppelin, with too many eyes, and miles and miles of thin tentacles drifting behind it…

Then the hologram shimmered, vanished, and Keeda gave him a jaunty wave from his seat at the front of the Seared Rascal, clearly chittering his tail off.

Well, it sure as shit would have fooled Ian if something like that had come barreling at them. Whoever had made it had a damn good imagination for what gas giant life forms might look like. Or maybe they’d based it on a real beast? Ian was going to have to read up later on whether gas giant life was even a thing.

“…Okay, that’s a pretty neat bit of art, there,” he said aloud. “Did you do that?”

“Balls no! I begged it off a lovely female some years ago!”

They returned to Ekallim-Igigi mostly in silence, got priority docking clearance, and slid into the Beowulf’s waiting bay with nary a stray bump. Ian sat patiently in the back while Alex quietly ran through the post-flight checklist…Gilgamesh was waiting for them when they disembarked, all smiles and Proud Dad energy, kind of weirdly clashing with the regal beard and kilted king look.

“How was your flight—oof!”

Alex had tackled his dad in a hug at a dead-run, with enough force to cause even him to grunt and take a step back. Gilgamesh, confused, looked over at Ian, then back down at his son. “…Okay! I love you too. I came to see if you two were hungry…”

Alex buried his face against Gilgamesh’s neck. “Can we just grill or something?”

“—Sure! Uh…” he looked over at one of his omnipresent aides, who nodded and started tapping out messages furiously. “Something low key?”

“Please.”

“Okay. Go clean yourself up. We’ll catch up in a moment.”

“Race you!” Kiidaa thundered, and sprang off ahead. Alex didn’t waste time yelling something stupid like ‘no fair!’—instead he was off like a shot, hard on the Gaoian’s heels. In seconds they’d vanished around a corner and out of sight.

Gilgamesh eyed Ian shrewdly, once the thundering sound of their race was getting quiet. “You two I suspect are more than friendly acquaintances, at this point.”

“Yeah, I’ll take that. I’ll let you know I’ll be doing you a huge favor, too.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. The lad needs it.” Ian folded his arms. “I can’t speak as to what happens next. Likely, there will be some sort of delegation exchange, and all of this is going to cost.”

The big man’s friendly expression hardened. It wasn’t unfriendly, but it wasn’t fatherly. Ian wasn’t talking to a happy dad anymore. He was talking to a king of legend. “Oh? What price must I pay for my son’s friendship?”

Ian shook his head. “Not what I’m talking about. That’s between him and me. The cost will be about what you have been up to for the last thousands of years. There is going to be a reckoning over all this.”

Gilgamesh stood and listened with an impassive expression, so Ian elaborated. “My government, the Americans, Allied Extrasolar Command, the Great Father…they’re going to want full disclosure. They’ll want you to share everything. All of it. Every single last detail. And if they decide to kick you out and never come back, you’re going to have to respect that.”

“I will not jeopardize the mission over my son’s privileges, Captain Wilde. You know this.”

“Earth isn’t your mission, though, is it? Now, I made a promise to the boy, and by Christ I’m going to keep it if I can. But he’s going to be, what? Visiting son of a foreign head of state? The head of a state we didn’t even know existed until the day before yesterday! And of course…there will be questions. A lot of urgent, serious questions. Especially once they see young Alex, there.”

“I…expected that, yes.”

“Did you really? There will be severe trust issues. To say the very least. We certainly won’t take kindly to having been used as breeding stock for your hidden sky empire.”

“That is not true—“

“Isn’t it? You telling me that, when Alex there may as well be Firth’s younger brother? Firth’s already the single biggest freak we’d ever encountered! Hell! You think that won’t raise some bloody eyebrows? Besides,” Wilde added. “Whether it’s true in your eyes isn’t the bit that matters, is it? It’s what’s true in the eyes of Earth’s people and governments that’s going to count. At this point we’ve had twenty years of revelations. We’re not alone in the universe, alien body-snatchers have infiltrated the planet and are trying to wipe us out, they nearly succeeded back in the nineteen-sixties, they wiped one city off the map and blew the heart out of two more…people back home are getting a mite bit sick and tired of having everything they thought they knew turned upside-down every three or four years. So you can take it from me, when they find out that the rise of this breed of new superhuman—which we did notice, by the way—is all the work of a distant, hidden power led by a man literally out of myth and legend? It’s not going to go down well.”

Gilgamesh frowned, and twisted one of his beard’s braids between his fingers.

“…Then I must offer myself up for judgment.”

Ian blinked. “I…right. Way above my paygrade, that.”

“You’re a candid man, Captain Wilde. I appreciate that. Truly. You’ve already given me cause to…reflect…on a great many things.”

Ian moved his head awkwardly in something between a nod, shrug, and shake of his head to acknowledge that. “Well…for what it’s worth, I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it. It’s just, don’t mistake me for an ambassador, your majesty. There’s only so much I can say and I don’t plan on sugar-coating any of it.”

“I would not have you do such a thing.”

“I know. And, uh…I appreciate that,” Ian replied, echoing Gilgamesh’s own compliment.

Gilgamesh nodded, then gestured ahead of them in the direction Alex and Yekiidaa had vanished. “Porkchops?”

“Wh–? How do you get pigs out here? It’s a space station.”

“A very large space station,” Gilgamesh chuckled, his usual easy manner returning. “But, space is tight, so they are expensive. I am, however, prone to spoiling guests.”

Well, that made sense. And, it was appreciated. It wasn’t that Ian’s life was short on meat, not since the Ten’Gewek had come aboard. The vegetarian option wasn’t an option for them. Nor really for him, given his regimen these days. And now they had a jump array in the hold, they could requisition pretty much any supplies they wanted. But…

But a good mixed grill was hospitality in any language.

He did have more questions for the big king, though. So many it’d take a year to grind through them all. So, as they walked, he picked the most important and burning one from the top of the list.

“So…when do we hear the rest of your story?”

Date Point: medieval Gao
War Camp, the Northern Plains, Planet Gao

Y!’Kiidaa

Great Father Fyu had a talent that Kiidaa knew he was going to have to cultivate in himself. Tiny as the silvery-brown-furred male was, he nevertheless managed to completely fill any space he walked into.

Part of it was the armor, maybe. The warrior-poet’s armor, its metal plates acid-etched with the poems he’d brushed onto it in his own hand, then lacquered.

But a lot more of it was his mind. Kiidaa knew he was a fair ol’ bit smarter than most, but Fyu had a wisdom only the strongest warriors and finest poets could ever obtain.

“You are an old creature,” Fyu said, levelly. “I can smell it on you.”

“Me, or the poor woman’s skull you’re holding?”

Fyu turned the grisly item over in his hands and sniffed at the metal plate still attached behind the eye socket. It had been placed in a stasis box immediately after being liberated from its former owner’s head, the box only opened mere minutes ago, but already the inbuilt nanite self-destruct was digesting it with an audible faint hiss. Once their work was done, they themselves would dissolve into fine dust and by the end of the hour, not even the Void Caste’s finest tools would be able to find more than a little degeneration of the bone.

For the next few minutes, though, the evidence that Mother Tiritya’s late and loyal handmaiden had not been entirely Gao was still plainly there to see. Fyu didn’t need to know what a trans-cranial controller was to know that something was very much wrong here.

“…Who are our enemies?”

“That is a long tale. One that will take much time to tell.”

“You will find me to be patient, when hearing matters of importance.”

“I don’t doubt it. So, let me say this: this battle is already lost. Our people were remade in the image of our greatest, unseen enemy. What you do now in rebuilding the Gao is, well…the final masterstroke of that battle. There is no turning back. So, it is the war we must now look to.”

“…Who are you?”

He sighed. “I am Keeda, and I come to you at the most important moment in our history.”

There was a long silence. A barely perceptible sniff from Fyu, so gentle Kiidaa hardly noticed.

“I believe you. Now…what must we do?”

“Fyu himself…” Bruuk sighed. “Fuck, I’d give my nuts to have met him.”

Yekiidaa duck-nodded. “He worked with us for a while. How else do you think he lived so long? But in the end, he elected to retire into contemplation. Even after learning some of the Deep, it was his belief and wish that he’d be reunited with Tiritya, in the end.”

“You should have seen his armor,” Gilgamesh recalled. “Like a walking, lovingly illustrated book of poetry.”

“They have it on display in High Mountain Fortress,” Hoeff recalled. “Whole place is a combination museum, archeology dig, working fortress, working palace now…and seat of government I guess.”

“I hope I’ll have the chance to visit and pay my respects,” Gilgamesh said. “In any case, what fell out of Yekiidaa’s meeting with Fyu was…well, several things. We met, almost on this exact spot here on Ekallim-Igigi, and…strategized. The full details are not for you to know, of course, but a long plan was put into place on that day, which has more or less come to fruition in recent years.”

“More or less?” Ian asked.

“Again…details. But the general thrust of it is thus: prepare our two species for the war. We had been doing basic needed things for quite a long time, of course.”

“The breeding program.”

“I hesitate to go even that far, but…yes. There is always a need for great talents. Your own HEAT, your ambassador to the Ten’Gewek, many figures in history…all testament to that, be they of the Line or not. In any case,” before Ian could object further, “after Fyu, we began to learn rapidly. And it started with the founding of a new Clan…”

Y!’kiidaa wasn’t really among his own people any longer. They were G!âo, no doubt. But not his G!âo. The planet was so changed these days, changes that had happened while he slept away the long eons in stasis so that each return visit to the world of his birth made it clear that…it wasn’t the world of his birth any longer.

Where once there had been forests from sea to sea, now there was treeless, wind-stripped steppe, prairie and tundra creeping down from the far north into where it didn’t belong. The planet was colder from the loss of biomass, all that carbon now locked away in dead, buried forests, which were already past peat and slowly becoming coal. Fish of the kind he’d clawed from the sea in his youth were long extinct, replaced with smaller, cleverer, nervous and darting little things that were hardly a snack, if a man could even catch one…

Too much like the people his species had become, these days. They had even changed their own name. They were the Gao, now. It felt strange to say in his bigger, thicker throat.

He couldn’t doubt their skill, though. The new Clan Blackclaw was a collection of the sneakiest, deadliest and trickiest young males, hand-picked by Fyu for their cunning service during his war. Spies, assassins and saboteurs whose skullduggery had opened city gates, poisoned wells, slain Champions and delivered patrols right into well-laid ambushes. They had a nose for the dark arts, and they didn’t need to understand the Deep or the nature of technology to understand the mission.

They were a sweet-pot. A baited trap for an enemy spy. It was a role they had played before.

And this time, with Keeda’s help, they played it on an alien wearing a Gao body. Grabbed from behind, a soft cloth shoved in the hapless victim’s mouth, rope lashed around wrists and ankles. The poison tooth was pried out of his jaw with cruel pliers, and the device in Keeda’s hand flashed warningly at him: it had suppressed a zero-width wormhole.

“Well. We’ve found one, boys.”

Their relationship with them was very much one of awe-struck cubs next to…well, Keeda. He didn’t particularly enjoy playing that up—he’d rather be playmates, or maybe something more—but the mission came before all else, and right now they needed a god among them.

There was much work in making a spy safe. Poisoned claws were a worry, and by the time the infiltrator had been shaved down, de-clawed, muzzled and all the rest, he’d clearly figured out he was known. He watched Keeda with just as much calculating intensity as Keeda watched him.

Y!’kiidaa sat down across from his subject. “I think I’ll take the lead on this, Rumyu.”

“Yi!” Rumyu gestured sharply to his men, and moments later the room was empty.

“So,” Y!’kiidaa said casually, while making a very calculated display of his claws and the heavily muscled forearms attached to them—best to lay it all out at once. “You ain’t one of us, are you?”

The Enemy looked him up and down, slowly, then sniffed him through the muzzle. “And you aren’t one of them. Interesting.”

“Correct. I am what my people were, before your unspeakable evil came to us. I’ve taken great pleasure over the millennia, thwarting your ham-fisted attempts to erase our culture.”

“You failed.”

“Did I? I’m here, am I not? They know who I am. They even know the essentials of why I am. We may be a shadow of what we were, but we are still here. We will rebuild ourselves over deep time, greater than we ever were. And when we do…”

His entire body had tensed with his anger. Unintentional, but…it was a useful show, and these things still mattered. The creature before him cringed backward for a moment before regaining its composure.

“Well,” it said, reclaiming its poise. “Let me spare you some effort, here. There is no torture you can inflict on this body that will compel me to speak. I will not even feel it. I don’t know where you got the technology to block my escape, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t fear death. My backup will be active and investigating this incident by the end of the day.”

…Jackpot. They had a talker on their hands.

Y!’kiidaa chittered in cruel mirth. “You’re not terribly smart, are you?”

He pant-grinned darkly at the way the enemy spy blinked at him. “Don’t understand? Oh, very well.” Y!kiidaa switched to Cortan. “You have just told me that you are a digital sophont, inhabiting poor Likyin here like a gods-damned brainworm. You’ve confirmed for us that you communicate via zero-point wormholes, that your existence is non-physical, that you see us as mere pawns in your schemes. Balls, I even suspect your plans for us! In one sentence, you took me from near total ignorance of my enemy, to near perfect understanding.”

The spy’s eyes narrowed, his ear flicked irritably, and he finally remembered to shut up. Too little, too late.

And now, the plan changed. Y!’kiidaa could feel his muscles tense in anticipation of great violence. Not yet, though. He let his body steel itself, and even added a bit more of a deliberate flex for show. This thing was clearly susceptible to emotion, after all…

“…Do you feel smart? Just imagine the research potential, lurking in your brain…and now we have an interesting conundrum. I suspect you could destroy yourself with a thought. Is that not so?” He waited patiently, while the spy opposite him did not in fact suddenly drop down dead, or blink as his own mind took over. “…No? Can’t, or won’t? Now that is interesting.”

“Of course,” Y!kiidaa sighed, back in modern Gaori. “That does leave us with a serious burr in our tails, don’t it? You can’t be compelled to talk, and I lack the means to compel it.”

The spy, having learned his lesson, said nothing.

Nothing for it, now.

“Exactly! No trickery of mine is going to be of any use, is it? So, that being said—”

Y!’kiidaa demonstrated the immense strength and speed that had once belonged to much of his people, and now only lived on as a shadow of its former glory in a precious, rare few. In a single heartbeat he’d sprung forward, slammed the spy against the wall and broke its body, ripped off its head with a pawswipe, shoved it into a stasis bag…

Caught his breath in one big huff. Noted the awestruck looks from the Gao watching through the overhead bars.

Considered his enemy. And pulped the rest underfoot with a wet, explosive stomp.

“—Allow me to show you what I plan to do to your entire kind,” he growled coldly at his prize, then looked down at the dripping, ruptured corpse, hacked and spit down on it.

Fuck these evil things until the end of time.

Maybe, over many moons, he might have compelled some conversation via sheer boredom. Balls, he’d done it before. But Y!’kiidaa didn’t have that kind of time. Far more useful was to capture a digital being in its own hardware before it had any chance to react. Hopefully.

Felt good, too.

“Ruymyu, Faan, attend to this, please. Sorry about the mess. Meeti, come with me. I need a bath, and after that we have plans for you…”

Meeti had to lope on four-paw to keep up with him. “Plans?” he asked.

“Mmhm. This is just the beginning. Got a long war ahead of us, an’ somebody’s gonna have to keep our secrets all through the dark that’s to come.”

“And that’s to be…me? M—my lord!”

“An’ a few others. Can’t carry that torch through all the years alone. But…that’s what you gotta do, Meeti. Light the darkness. You up to it?”

“My…” Meeti keened then, quietly. He paused, then nodded firmly. “I am. But…my lord. I…I must ask a thing.” Brave little male, really. Couldn’t weigh more than eight stone, clearly terrified out of his mind…but brave. Smart. That lick o’ white fur between his ears was pretty damn handsome, too. A quirk like that would keep the once-again independent females interested, and Y!’kiidaa needed somebody who’d have plenty of cubs for this…

“Why you an’ not them?” Keeda guessed, jerking his head back toward the leaders of the Clan they’d left behind. “It wasn’t just ‘cuz you’re the prettiest among ‘em…”

“…No. I mean…yes I am,” he chittered, nervously. “But I know why already.”

Good. “Ask, then.”

“…What, exactly…are you?”

Y!’kiidaa put an arm around the tiny male and pulled him in. “My friend, that is a long story, and it will need much talamay…”

Date Point: C.840 AD
Starship Gladiatrix, Near-Earth space, the Border Stars

Gilgamesh

“This is a cruel thing we’re doing.”

Sometimes, a king needed to wield the sword himself. Especially for cruel purposes, and in that regard the boy was right. It was a cruel thing they were doing.

Not doing it, however, would have been far crueller.

At Gilgamesh’ side, Mevia shot their son a stern glance. “If you lack the stomach for it, my son, we can always find room for your soft, kind soul back on Earth.”

It wasn’t that she was disappointed in Titus, Gilgamesh knew. It was just that, in her opinion, their third child had never really hardened properly, despite his parents’ best efforts. Not enough carbon in his steel. His body was of the Line, but his spirit was made for song, dance and love play.

He, on the other hand, was amply disappointed in her.

“You keep promising to do that. On several occasions I’ve taken you up on that offer. And yet, somehow…I’m still here.”

“You aren’t ready for Earth,” Mevia retorted, checking the charge on her sword again. “You think what we’re doing is cruel? It’s crueller still, there.”

Titus was armed with a heavy pulse gun, the kind that even Gilgamesh had to respect. Its capacitors whined as he readied it. “Make up your mind, mother.”

“My mind is on the necessary task before us.”

Their argument was interrupted by welcome news from the Gladiatrix’s pilot. “We’re in range. Ready to intercept on your command, my king.”

Gilgamesh nodded. “Spike them.”

The hapless ship before them was Corth. Corti, nowadays. The Directorate’s ongoing rebranding of the species had never slowed, and the modern species were very different to the Void Caste outcasts. Even tinier. Even frailer. Not, in Gilgamesh’s estimation, noticeably that much smarter.

And in this case, straying much too close to Earth.

It wasn’t in doubt that the enemy would, one day, discover the human race. The struggle was to delay that day for as long as possible, buy humanity a few unmolested centuries. The plan was already bearing fruit, in that regard. Gilgamesh’s homeland was the thriving center of a new religion, and of early explorations into the Deep. What would become of it remained to be seen, but those were ponderings for a later time, with wine and time to explore.

And, frankly, not with Mevia. As exciting as he found her, she was no scholar. She was the cruel tip of a blade.

Anyone who got too close to Earth had to die, and it had to look like the Hunters’ work. Titus might bemoan the necessity of it, but Mevia didn’t. To the contrary, she seemed eager. Perhaps she had something in common with the Hunters herself, there was certainly nothing like blood sport to get her warmed up. Strange, really, that such an inferno of a mother could issue such a sensitive son.

But again, those were musings for later. The moment was upon them.

One of Gladiatrix’s tricks was the power to alter her warp signature. To the Corti, she would look like a Broodship, and they wouldn’t know any better. If somehow they did escape, they would report a close call. Sometimes, letting them go was the wise move, to make sure word spread.

More often, as today, the wise move was…

The spike caught them. The Corti ship dropped to sub-light in a flare of radiation, and Gladiatrix sliced back into the Slow World within visual range of their victim. Authentic Hunter swarmships did their part via remote control, pouncing across the gap, latching onto the hull, and biting in.

Beacon.

Thump

From her own ship to the swarmship in a brief jump, and from there into the research ship’s core. Gilgamesh threw himself into the grim work of silencing these potential spies without hesitation or doubt. They were doing the right thing, and he knew it.

Titus did his duty, methodically and effectively. He was fast, accurate, deadly. Never a stray shot or a misplaced punch, and whatever he felt, he did not let his emotions rule him.

Mevia was a bloody blur with no mercy in her soul. She thrived on killing.

In that regard, Titus had her wrong. Death was far from the greatest cruelty Mevia could have meted out. Compared to the fate of a crew actually taken by the Hunters, what she brought was clean, quick and painless. None of these Corti would know weeks, months or years of fear in the Hunters’ slave pens, nor the agony of being bitten into and eaten alive. Their end came as a swift stroke of light in the dark, or as a blast of shattering force that instantly sent them to their fate.

They even got a funeral, afterwards.

Titus, dutifully, had proven an amply capable soldier. He wept as they remembered the dead, but Gilgamesh would never hold that against anyone. Men should be passionate, not unfeeling stone-hearts.

Best for the young man to pursue his dream of a life on Earth, though. He had proven that he could do his duty, and his father-king was proud of him.

Nor was Gilgamesh shy to say as much, either. He’d learned that lesson early: never part with a child without saying everything they deserved to hear.

Even with that lesson and the closure that came with following it, however…it was never easy. How could it be? How could a parent claim to love a child, then send them away knowing they would never see each other again, and fail to find it difficult? It wasn’t the natural way of things. To grow old, die and leave the future to one’s children was as the gods had intended.

To embrace Titus one last time, then see him go, and know that he would die anonymously among the ordinary, ignorant people in a mere sixty or seventy years? That was cruel. Far crueller than their mission together.

Whatever final words passed between mother and son, he never learned. Mevia had her secrets. They all did. He hoped they reconciled, or at least found some understanding, before parting. But he didn’t pry.

He never pried.

“And that, I think, is as good as a catch-up we can do, without having rehearsed it.”

“It is a long, twisty story,” Tomoe agreed, as she prepared them all another round of tea. “But, to summarize: we have long protected Earth and Gao. Both we have prepared as best we can for the long fight. Our efforts have frustrated the most ruinous effects of Hierarchy influence among the Gao, and prepared Earth for the day it would learn the Deep. Fortunately, humankind are resilient peoples, and little intervention was necessary over the millennia. That’s left us free to focus on our core task.”

“…Which is?” Ian prompted.

“Ultimately, locating and destroying every last one of their archives. To that end, intelligence gathering and reconnaissance. We know most of the Hierarchy’s assets, all of their core worlds. We had hoped for more time to locate all their Archives, but…”

“What interventions have you undertaken?”

“Protect the system from intrusion, mostly. The task grew impossible once the industrial era hit and started loading the atmosphere with volatile compounds—the Hierarchy have telescopes all over the galaxy looking out for that—but prior to that we were mostly a picket force. And of course, we sent out sons and daughters to preserve the Line.”

“…Yes. That. What did they do?”

“Mostly stay out of the way,” Gilgamesh answered. “Our goal was to preserve our peoples’ genetic wildness, not lead Earth from the shadows. The offspring of the Line have proven quite industrious, but so has humankind without our efforts. You will find at least as many Heroes among who were distant or untouched by the Line as you might find directly.”

“Then…why? Why even bother?”

“We needed that excellence up here more than Earth ever needed it down there. What the HEAT or the Great Father’s Fangs do so admirably, we have been doing for millennia and at a scale nearly three orders of magnitude larger. Not once has the Enemy learned of us. Or if they have, they’ve chosen to pretend otherwise. And I cannot imagine why they would.”

“Besides,” Tomoe added. “The fact that Heroes arose independent of the Line did not mean they were guaranteed. We needed to be sure.”

Gilgamesh nodded his full agreement. “Do not discount the power of inspiration, either. We all want to be Heroes, somewhere and somehow. Examples inspire, and inspiration is often all that someone needs to be great.”

“In any case,” Leifini added, “You now have as much of the story as we can reasonably tell in such a short time. Our full history and our full rationale will take months to recount. We are an organization several times older than all of humanity’s recorded history, after all. What you have heard today and yesterday is the most abridged possible version.”

As she spoke, an aide had darted forward to whisper in the king’s ear. Gilgamesh listened, then nodded at him. “And now, I return to the responsibilities I have left waiting. You have the hospitality of my house for as long as duty compels you to stay, and I hope you will stay a little longer and learn more…if not for my sake, then for Alex’s,” he added, looking to Ian.

He stood, kissed Tomoe and said something tender to her in Japanese, added something playful to Keeda in old Gaori, gave Leifini a nod and a smile, and was gone.

Tomoe watched him go, then bowed to the Fortune crew. “If I’m late for training, Mevia will make me regret it,” she declared, and headed off in the opposite direction from her husband.

Keeda, when Ian glanced over at him, had already vanished in perfect silence. Rude, maybe, but…well, the old furry bastard had a reputation to keep. Bruuk certainly seemed to find it amusing, though, and so did the Ten’Gewek.

That just left Leifini.

“For myself, I have nothing pressing on my time,” the ancient Corth said. She sampled a mushroom from the plate in front of her. “And there is one last thing I would like to recall, if I may…”

“What is it?” Ian asked.

“We touched on it much earlier, and I promised I would return to it. When I said ‘we found Earth and perfected our longevity medicine,’ yes?”

“Yes…?”

She stood, and gestured for the crew to follow. “I think, perhaps, this last moment is best recalled in our botany lab…”

Date Point: circa 2800 BCE
Bay of Bengal, Earth

Gilgamesh had fingers that could grind a plant to powder like a mortar and pestle when he wanted. This he now did, rubbing the dried seaweed down to a fine snuff and inhaling it.

“…I know this. The priests use it sometimes, as an infusion.”

“Do you imbibe of this infusion?”

“Yes. It is one of my roles as king. To imbibe with the gods.”

“Of all the things we have found on this world of yours, this may be one of the most important. And timely. It is…the plant does not have much time left.”

Leifini watched the king snort up the last of the powder, then frown at her. “Why not?” he asked.

“This planet is warming. Up until relatively recently, there was ice stretching from…well. Down to not very far north of here. But the ice has melted, the world grows hotter…your own land will soon become a barren desert, rather than a rich, fertile grassland, and Uruk will die along with it. Many things will. Including, I fear, this remarkable plant.”

“What’s so remarkable about it?”

“It is a genuine contrageriatric, at least for the most common biochemistries. It isn’t any one particular thing about it, either. There’s no one molecule that we can point to that causes the effect…yet, when we test it as a simply-prepared compound, introduced fairly directly…”

“You lost me at contra-geriatric.”

“It…keeps the body young.”

Gilgamesh nodded as though that were expected. “Aye, as the priests claim.”

“We have been searching for something like this for thousands of years, King Gilgamesh of Uruk. Everything we ever found that does similar work comes with…downsides. I have been living with painful tumors for hundreds of human generations. And now, we discover this weed in the banks of a polluted river, being picked to death for trade, and all you need do is snort its powder—”

Gilgamesh shifted heavily on his feet. “It works best in a drink with milk, actually…”

“Whatever!” Leifini exploded, exasperated. “This is a miracle! It’s…The Void Caste have bent our best science to this problem for thousands and thousands of years, is the point! And yet, here we find everything we were ever looking for as a tiny, sickly population of nondescript water plant, and on the verge of extinction, no less!”

Gilgamesh, then, had an idea. “Yekiidaa! Give this a smell!”

The gaoian came bounding along, having been pre-occupied with some playful attempt at fishing. “Yeah?”

He smelled it, carefully. Then keened nostalgically and took another, longer sniff. “Balls…now that’s somethin’ I never thought I’d smell again.”

“You know it?” Gilgamesh asked.

“It ain’t essactly the same thing, but there’s something like this on Gao. Or was, I guess. We used ‘ta bake the fish with it. Dunno if it’s still around after the Fire…”

Leifini let out a heartfelt groan and sat down so heavily that her armored excursion suit beeped a warning at her. “You have got to be kidding me…”

Yekiidaa keened, and flopped down on the bank beside her. “I mean…you only got ‘ta my world a little while before it got burned,” he ventured. “You din’t really have time to look for interestin’ stuff. ‘Ya never even got to say hello! We’d have fed you good!”

Their long friendship had never quite helped him get his head around how best to comfort her, but it had taught Leifini to appreciate his attempts. She hiccuped a sad laugh, then considered the specimen in front of her. “We must save this thing,” she insisted, fervently. “Even as it is, it’s…revolutionary. In time, it might be so much more! We can’t let it die out in obscurity here…”

Gilgamesh shrugged. “Then take samples. As many as you need.”

Leifini looked up at him. He really didn’t know the magnitude of what they’d just found, did he?

But of course…how could he? He lacked the context. And besides, his people were naturally long-lived, and he more so because of priestly privilege. Even now, a century on from first meeting, although his hair and beard were pure white and his skin dark and lined, his body had only hardened with age. He wasn’t as swift as in his youth, but his strength these days was, frankly, beyond unobserved belief, and and alon with Y!’kiidaa daily redefined the limits of what it was possible for mere flesh to do.

He wasn’t even the only one of his kind so gifted! They’d so far found thousands. And those just in his region of the world, too!

Suddenly, her own aches and constant background agony—always dulled by painkillers, but never entirely absent unless she wanted to be completely non-functional—were entirely forgotten. She sprang back up, and waded into the water, sending a signal to the ship to send down as many stasis containers as they had.

She had just found salvation.

And she could grow it.

Hoeff considered the tall glass tubes around them, and the long, skinny, floaty kelp-like plants swaying gently within them. There was a whole ecosystem in there. Fish and shellfish and worms and all sorts of things. From what he could tell, that plant needed a pretty fuckin’ specific environment to thrive.

But It was sure as shit thriving in there. And the lab was fuckin’ peaceful as a result. A guy could walk between those big-ass tanks and listen to the running water and watch the leaves swaying in the current, and forget a lot of his troubles…

Or, he could have, if not for knowing what this shit was.

“Y’know…I always wondered where Cruezzir came from.”

“The final medicine derives from a number of sources, both natural and synthetic,” Leifini said. “This plant here is not the only component. There are other critical contributions from Gao and several other deathworlds, along with some truly brilliant synthesis work by a number of scientists. Nofl, yes, being paramount among them.”

“But this plant here is kinda important.”

“More than ‘kinda.’ I lived for thousands of years in constant chronic pain. You cannot know what a blessing it was when I switched to the medication we derived from this plant, and woke the next morning pain free. I…could not function that day for weeping in relief. And you have seen for yourself how effective it was on Gilgamesh. In just ten years of regular high dosing instead of a nearly ineffective milk infusion, he returned to the prime of his youth.”

“So you leaked this to the Directorate?” Bruuk asked, sniffing one of the tanks.

“Partially, to our members in the Accretion Disk, yes. Along with a number of contradictory reports on its origin, to obfuscate the truth. The time had come, and we knew it would be needed.” Leifini pressed a hand fondly to the glass and looked up at one of the towering cultivars. “I consider this to be my greatest personal accomplishment.”

“Have you considered the consequence of functional immortality to us?” Hoeff asked, pointedly. “Because I sure as shit don’t think you have.”

“I am probably the oldest flesh-and-blood lifeform in the galaxy, Mister Hoeff, and in many ways the matriarch of this little civilization.” She gestured at the wall, indicating the station and everyone living aboard it. “I assure you, I have considered the consequences of indefinite life quite carefully, and I have every confidence in your species’ ability to overcome the challenges it presents.”

“That’s…a hell of a decision to take upon yourselves. Arrogant, to say the least.”

“And necessary.”

“Says who? You? ‘Cuz we sure as shit didn’t get a say in the matter!”

“It was necessary. Would you rather have faced extinction?”

Hoeff had had enough.

“How do you mean? How does breeding freaks of nature save us? No, don’t sugar coat it. You wanted soldiers, so now you have that because you made that. Here I am! I’ve got friends, too! But you weren’t happy with time-limited fucks like me who can shoulder press trucks, were you? Not enough! We take too long to train, and we’re too expensive to build. So now you wanna make us live ‘fer-fuckin’-ever. Am I on the right track?”

“You exaggerate.”

“Do I?” Hoeff laughed at the notion. “They already took HEAT off the time-limited stuff and put us on the full-fat version! Why? Julian too, he’s gonna live centuries, that poor sumbitch, and he din’t get any say in it ‘cuz you sick fucks needed lab mice! Hell, I suspect they’ll be givin’ us all our lifetime vaccines ‘fer this shit here pretty soon. Only makes sense, right? Should I start squeakin’ too? And what the fuck happens when everyone finds out about this shit? ‘Cuz they will. And then they’re all gonna want some! How’d you expect us to survive that?!”

“Let us say that I consider that to be much more survivable than the Hierarchy.”

…

Hoeff was, honestly, at a loss for words. Thankfully there was a smarter man in the room.

“You are not human,” Ian intoned, with just a hint of carefully-modulated despair. “Good God, you bastards may have damned us all one way or the other.”

“I have faith in your species. Still, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I have. Perhaps you will hoist yourself on your own petards with this. But that will be a self-imposed fate, not the will of an alien—”

“No. Bullshit.” Ian was cold, now. He’d gone that full, delightfully dangerous shade of expressionless only a truly pissed-off fuckin’ northern Englishman could ever manage. “I think I have heard enough. There’s quite a bit of wartime necessity I am willing to accept, given our enemy…but I think we now know everything we need to relay to our superiors.”

“I…”

It was strange watching so many emotions flicker across a Corti face. All the ones Hoeff had ever met before just weren’t made for it. But in Leifini, well, shit, her face worked about the same as a human’s, and so did her expressions. Confusion, upset, hurt…she was completely at a loss for words, too. How many times had that happened in her long-ass life? Couldn’t be many.

Jesus shit. Even she didn’t buck the whole mad scientist species thing. End of the day, she’d seen a thing she could do, so she did it, and didn’t stop to think about whether she should.

Ian stood, a porcelain mask of politeness. “Thank you for your hospitality. We will be retiring to our private quarters.”

And with that, he swept from the room, trailing everyone else behind. Hoeff was the last to leave. He sensed, somehow, he needed to say the last word, for purposes darker than the rest of the crew. So, once the coast was clear, and it was just him and Leifini…

“Lemme level with you. I serve some very pragmatic masters. I’m sure you must have some idea what I am.”

Leifini, who’d sat down with a distant expression, rallied and looked him in the eye. “I…yes. An organization we’ve never managed to penetrate, I will admit.”

Yup. There was his confirmation. And with that, the organization had a new mission.

“Yeah. Good reason, too. We’ve known our world and people have been interfered with for a very long time, long before the atomic age. So…I’m looking at my enemy, aren’t I?”

She flushed with fear, then.

“You are extremely lucky of the circumstances,” Hoeff let her know. “So, as one nasty piece of work to another, lemme give you this tiny bit of professional courtesy, in exchange for all the fine dining. Pull your people out and do it now. Because we’re going on the hunt when I get back.”

And with that, Hoeff turned on the balls of his feet, and left.

He had his own reports to write.

The problem with writing a report on all this shit was…fuck. Like Ian had asked himself back on the balcony, where did he even start?

Well, there was a form to these things. That helped. Keeping it concise was more of a challenge though. There was a lot to unpack. And of course…there was his mood. Professionalism was at war with his sensibilities, and losing.

So the knock on his door and Tomoe’s voice calling through it were not welcome. Not at all.

“Captain Wilde? May I have a moment of your time?”

“That would be quite an imposition,” he said truthfully.

“I understand. Even so…”

Goddamnit.

“Very well. Give me a moment.”

Even worse than being interrupted on a good old-fashioned brooding, was the need to pull on trousers again. He’d just gotten comfortable.

Fuck it. Shorts and t-shirt. He bumbled for a moment through his PT gear and achieved Short, then a moment later unlocked Shirt, with his favorite band fading gloriously away across its artwork.

Tomoe, it turned out, was just as informally dressed, and she had a fresh-out-of-the-shower look. And a black eye, and several bruises on her forearms. Apparently, training with Mevia was a rough affair.

She also had a bottle in her hand. She handed it to him without ceremony. “A parting gift. Given your stated intent to leave soon…”

Ian looked at the bottle suspiciously. “…What is it?”

“There’s nothing quite like it on Earth. But, it’s just a token of my personal esteem. It’s not the reason I’m here…” she shut the door behind her. “Leifini was quite shaken.”

“I bet,” Ian rumbled. Still, he took the bottle and packed it in his bag. “So, you’re here to address, some misunderstandings and misgivings, I bet.”

“I think, at this point, we’ve made our case,” she replied, then sat when Ian gestured to a chair. “And what’s quite clear to me is that you don’t approve at all. Of practically any of it. And don’t make any dutiful noises about what’s above your pay grade, please. It’s your report that the Great Father and the governments of Earth will respond to.”

“Yes. It is. Now, in turn, please do not insult his intelligence, or my capacity to write factually. My personal feelings do not matter here unless and until I am asked of them, directly. Will that happen? Probably. Will it matter? Maybe a little. What truly matters are the facts. And those are enough to indicate a grave hazard. How could they do otherwise?”

She sighed, and rested her elbows on her knees. “I guess I don’t know. I came here in my twenties, as my lord’s loyal warrior. All I really knew at the time was the sword, the bow, horse riding…I learned the Deep here, on Ekallim-Igigi. This plan of ours, this grand strategy, is all I’ve ever really known. From where I’m sitting, it all seems like the right thing to do. I think it seems that way to all of us. And now, in just two days, we’re all looking at each other bewildered, because none of us predicted you’d react so negatively.”

She looked him in the eye. “Are we so out of touch?”

“…Very well. Let me lay it out. We—and by ‘we,’ I mean both my people and the Gao—have been used as playthings and as experimental breeding pools by two opposed galactic powers. We have been preserved and engineered, that your hidden civilization may stock its ranks with ‘perfect’ men and women to carry out a millennia-long mission of retribution. On a personal note? One of my friends spent six years imprisoned on a hell-world in absolute solitude to prove out the final form of Cruezzir, and let me tell you he’s more than a bit cracked because of it. He will outlive his wives and his children. He’s so tough and strong that death itself will likely only come to him by his own hand, because you took that from him. Young Alex out there begins to understand his fate, too. He’s not a fan! Radical, arguably unnatural changes are being foisted on our peoples at an ever-increasing rate…and I haven’t even begun to address San Diego, or Chicago, or Franklin.”

Tomoe tilted her head and—something nobody else among Singularity’s leadership had done yet—she listened rather than trying to justify or defend.

There was so much he wanted to say. So many things that were gnawing at him to come out, but…

Ian took a breath.

“…Those are the facts of it, Queen Tomoe. And I will be honest, I am not entirely without fear for my safety. I feel compelled to remind you and whoever is listening that we are expected to report in soon…and there are safety-signaling shibboleths I can and will include that you won’t have access to, at least not without some Hierarchy-tier wetworks. Which honestly, I suspect you may have anyway.”

She looked genuinely pained at that. “…We truly have failed, haven’t we?”

Ian considered. “I can’t answer that. What I can say is that, frankly, it is not me you need to impress, and it never has been. I am just a captain. I am not a hero, or a Hero, or any of that. It’s all I can do to keep above water, it seems.”

“I am just a captain too. Queen or not. And…well, it doesn’t matter.” she sighed heavily and looked down at the floor between her feet for a moment. When she looked back up, her expression was too complicated for Ian to read. “…You know, we always looked forward to this day. We imagined a grateful galaxy.”

“It’s easy to, I’d bet. We have a saying in my culture: no good deed goes unpunished.”

“Heh.” It wasn’t so much a laugh as a despondent acknowledgement of the cynical rightness of it. “Well, whoever said that…I feel for them.”

“Maybe gratitude and affection will come, in time. Who am I to say? You’ve got a massive wellspring of distrust to get past before that, though.”

“Apparently so.” She rubbed her bruised forearms thoughtfully.

Ian sat back and considered her for a moment. “You really thought you were helping, all this time?”

“I really do.”

“You never saw it as imposing on people?”

Tomoe sighed. “…Maybe I’m the wrong person to ask. Bushido as I’ve always understood it is not the same as the more…poetic thing it became in the Edo. In my time, we were tsuwamono, weapons in human form, our role was violence and nothing else. The time I lived was known as the Heian, “the peace,” but we achieved that peace through the application of overwhelming, merciless force. The question of ‘imposing on people’ was an irrelevance. All that mattered was the end result, the stability and security of the province was paramount. I’ve spoken before of freedom and happiness being downstream from survival, but that of course was a later idea. At the time…security and stability were virtue enough. They didn’t need justifying.”

“So you think defeating the Enemy is justification enough.”

“It’s…difficult for me to see how it wouldn’t be,” she replied.

Ian nodded. “Alright. So…let me tell you a story, right?”

“Only fair, considering the last two days,” she folded her legs comfortably to one side and listened.

“…So I’m me, growing up and doing all the normal things lads from my neck of the woods do, right? I play some sports, puberty hits and I grow like a weed, suddenly I’m the star player on the school team, all the boys are my mates, all the girls are making eyes at me…gets to be it goes to my head and I start hanging around with the wrong crowd, and get in a bit of trouble. One of my teachers sits me down and helps me figure out some shit that was bothering me…look, I won’t bore you with the details. Off to the Royal Marines I go. And it turns out I’m damn good at it all.”

He tilted his head back and reminisced. “Pretty quickly, I end up going in for Commando. Won’t claim it was a walk in the park or anything like that, but, well…it chews men up, right? By design. But I came out of it in damn good shape. Hench, even! Using that word a lot lately…” Ian noted mostly to himself. “Anyway, I kept getting better. Kept going places…There’s some detail I’ll leave out. Blah blah blah, shit happens, I wind up leading a JETS team. You don’t get that gig by being just a regular bloke, right? We’re all pretty special, I’m not too modest to pretend we aren’t. We’ve got the mission, we’ve got colleagues who can challenge us…it’s great. Love the mission.

“And at first, I don’t think too much about it, right? Sure, there’s the lads in HEAT, where even their littlest guy can fold me up in the blink of an eye…but that doesn’t bother me. Sports science is crazy advanced these days, and they’re taking a hell of a risk so they can do what’s basically an impossible mission, right? Can’t help but admire that. And it’s inspiring! Me, Rees, Davies, Frasier…we all end up pushing ourselves. And then things escalate.

“First, it’s the Ten’Gewek. And that’s all right, they’re damn good friends to have, even if it took a lot of work to get them up to scratch. Yeah, they’re…basically better than the four of us in every damn way. But somehow, it doesn’t really hit wrong, you know? We sort of synergize and it just works out damn nice. And we’re not without strengths of our own, either.

“Then I had my accident. Lose this eye. Hoeff steps up, and there is the first time I really started to question shit. Don’t get me wrong, I love the bloke to death, but he’s so fucking capable. He’s man enough to stand up to Ferd and that’s despite standing nine inches shorter than me. Smarter than me, too. Smarter than all of us. Better in every single thing, better by a fucking longshot. His only real hang-up is that fucked-up metabolism of his, but…

“So, we start playing catch-up without really knowing we’re doing it. And nowadays, a regular bloke can push himself pretty much as far as he wants without much fear, given how good our sports medicine and all that’s become. It turns out I’m especially good at this, so…here I am, now. I’m as good as a ‘regular’ bloke can ever hope to be. And that’s great! Like I told Alex a bit ago, if I were to teleport back twenty years I’d be the champ at whatever sport you like. Track and field? Strongman? Something more fighty? Hell, even prancing about on stage in posing trunks or whatever, if I decided to try that for some daft reason? I’ve no doubt I’d kick arse. It’s amazing how far we’ve advanced things! So why don’t I feel like I’m king of the world?

“Well, I think I know why, now. Even for someone like me, what I am now is more about making the best of what I was given, taking risks, using the knowledge we’ve gained…and putting the work in. Just endless, endless work. Everything perfect every time, no missed meals, no slack days. The grind never stops. And that’s how it’s always been. Talent matters, but grit, discipline, and smarts matter more. And if there’s one thing I will not be ashamed to claim, it’s grit.

“But now? We’ve got people who are far and away better than any of us, just standing there! These new Heroes of yours are basically HEAT-level standouts without even trying. Hell, they don’t even have a choice in the matter! How the hell is a bloke like me supposed to compete against that? Instead of being super proud of what I’ve achieved, instead of being happy that I’ve reached the top…”

Ian sighed. “Instead, I take one look at Alex and all his ridiculous natural ability and it’s just…depressing. He did show and tell for me, right? Great kid, by the way. And we look at his stuff, and his hobbies…he’s good at sketching too, but nothing breathtaking. I think that’s fair. He showed me what he can do in his weightroom, of course. Why wouldn’t he? He’s a hard worker and he’s clearly proud of his body. Rightfully so! And that’s, yeah, insane and all that. I couldn’t come close to keeping up and I bet Hoeff or Bruuk or any of the Ten’Gewek would struggle against him too, especially in a few years time when he’s really grown into it. But you know what really humbled me? It was his piloting.”

Tomoe nodded at that, with the air of a proud mum, but she still listened closely.

“That kid,” Ian insisted, “is a natural-born flier. He’s so damn good at flying that neat little ship of his, and he knows every single bit of it inside and out. I’m a trained captain at one of the most elite merchant marine academies out there—the Gao run a ruthless school, let me tell you that—and he’s better than me. A twelve year old boy who has only just started to notice the world properly, and he’s already better than me by every measure. We’re not peers, in any sense. And there is never a thing I could ever possibly do that would level the field.”

Tomoe’s gaze had dropped. Now she seemed to be looking at the bruises on her forearms. She nodded slowly, though, the brief moment of pride in her step-son’s ability already forgotten.

“Now…An individual, I reckon, can like somebody enough so they can look past that. Alex clearly hopes I can. And I do! Why should I hold his excellence against him?” Ian asked. “But people as a whole? I like that kid a lot, but he and all his fellows mushrooming up all over the world are walking, talking assaults on the bedrock conceits of our civilization. Things like the equality of mankind and all that. Now, how would your various lords and masters over the years have taken such a fundamental kind of foreign meddling? One that struck at their divine right to rule, and their highest virtues? D’you think they’d have been pleased and grateful for it?”

Tomoe sat on that for a minute, staring at something a few light years away through the floor. Finally, she stood and bowed deep, low and formal.

“…Thank you for your candor, Wilde-san.”

Ian blinked at her. “…What, that’s it? You’re not going to push back?”

“I didn’t come here to. We already made our case, and will make it again when the time comes.”

Tomoe turned toward the door, then paused and turned back. “I know you don’t trust us. I think I understand why, now. But…if my word, personally, means anything to you, I want you to know that your life was never in danger, and nobody has been listening to this.”

Well…Ian believed her. But, he didn’t say as much. He just stood, and extended a hand. “Thanks for the bottle. I’ll, uh, mark an occasion with it.”

She nodded, and shook his hand. “…Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

Then she was gone. Ian sighed, and slumped back down in his chair, wondering if he’d said too much, overstepped his authority…but she’d come to him, and asked.

And really, he hadn’t said a quarter of what she needed to hear. But…

Shit, there was only so much he could do, anyway. What he had here was a messianic sex cult to rival the Bene fucking Gesserit, and their whole philosophy at core rested on “the lesser of two evils.” Which…fuck, how could you argue against that?

So…he wrote his report. He wasn’t normally an eloquent writer, but…words flowed.

He found his heartbeat increasing as he typed, and typed…

In ten minutes he’d written pages and it was not a kind evaluation. Not at all.

Right. That wouldn’t do. His duty was impartiality. So, he went for a jog, which didn’t help. Sent a message to Hoeff, went to go find Alex. Got some exercise in.

Didn’t help. In fact, it made it worse, seeing how fucking desperate Alex was for playmates who could handle him…and being so goddamned humbled by a twelve year old boy. They left Alex with a huge smile on his face, and as soon as he was gone…

Hoeff didn’t need to say a word. They nodded, and he followed Wilde back to his guest quarters.

Ian learned some things about the short tank of a killer, in the ensuing conversation. Just the simplest basics of what he truly was, but it was more than enough to understand the consequences of today, in their proper context. So, they wrote their reports together. This needed a forceful and united voice, to the powers bright and deep.

After that…well, maybe he ought to sleep. But, he couldn’t. So rather than pace the room, he let himself out onto he guest quarter’s balcony, well past the local version of midnight, where he could admire the open sky, or at least its imitation. Imitation stars, even an imitation cool night-time breeze.

He really, really wanted a cigarette.

Instead, he leaned on the railing, closed his eyes, and breathed slowly in through his nose and out through his mouth. The report they’d written was…a lot less than the teary-eyed gratitude Singularity had been hoping for. A lot less.

But it wasn’t unfair, he hoped.

A soft rustle of fabric was Hoeff leaning on the railing beside him. They looked out over the parklands in silence for a minute or so longer, until a thought hit Ian and made him…not chuckle. Just a little puff of bleakly amused breath. But it got Hoeff’s attention.

“What?”

“Just a stray thought. Well, two thoughts.”

“Yeah?” Hoeff must have been psychic, because he fished in a pocket and offered Ian a smoke.

“Since when?”

“Always have ‘em on me. For days like this. Don’t tell Claire.”

Ian didn’t resist. They lit up, and, bad habit or no, at least it centered him a bit.

“So…?” Hoeff prompted after a moment.

Ian gave him another look-over, and considered the layered irony in confiding with someone like him. “You notice how the railing was built for someone like you? No complaint, no bending…”

“…Yeah.” Hoeff lit up with a heavy drag, and offered his lighter to Ian. After blowing it out slowly, “Amazing how a little thing like that speaks volumes, ain’t it?”

“Aye.” Ian lit up too, with a more restrained puff. He didn’t have superlungs, after all.

They smoked in silence for a while.

“And the second thought?” Hoeff prompted.

Ian contemplated the glowing embers on his cancer stick. “I was just thinking…you know what they say, don’t you?”

“What?”

Ian chuckled, looked out over Ekallim-Igigi, and finished his cigarette.

“Never meet your heroes.”

++END CHAPTER 84++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

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The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 85: “The Reclaiming”

Chapter 85: The Reclaiming

Date point: 19y3m2w AV
Ekallim-Igigi, Relic Space

Gilgamesh of Uruk, king of Singularity

The lights came up, and Gilgamesh realized he’d been awake all night, brooding.

The Stray Fortune had been given a cordial send-off befitting honored guests, of course. But there was no denying the current of…what? Of disappointment? Perhaps even shading to bitterness?

Was Wilde’s reaction going to be characteristic of Earth’s and the Gao’s? If so, then the entirety of Singularity was in for a terrible letdown. What if their labor for thousands of years was seen…and rejected?

That question had made sleep impossible. His thoughts through the night had been dark, his rest nonexistent. Dawn, and the familiar chattering of his valet, woke him to the realization that he was old. For once, he could feel all those centuries in his bones.

He tended to his responsibilities, with the aid of stimulants that left him alert and functioning, but set a weak fire behind his eyes and in his skull. He’d pay later, in twelve hours or so when he crashed down again. Best plan to be in bed by then.

But there was one duty to tend to above all the others: Tomoe.

He rarely intruded on his wives’ private residences, as they were supposed to be refuges and personal spaces. Over the centuries, one came to value privacy and the chance to own a space completely. Some were permanently inhabited by his wives’ various extramarital lovers, some were museums or menageries…The last time he’d visited Tomoe’s had been more than two hundred years ago, in fact. He found it much as it had been then, a peaceful refuge with flowing water in a garden of pale sand, and warm polished wood.

Tomoe herself was not so tranquil. She looked like she’d been up all night, too. And not so still as him, either. She bore the bruises of a sparring session with Mevia; coupled with the dark eyes of a wakeful night, the effect was enough to hurt his heart.

She sighed and relaxed into his hug as if she’d been dying of thirst in the desert, and he was a fountain.

“You didn’t sleep either,” she noted.

“No.”

“No.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t know why I’m so affected. Does the opinion of one man really mean so much?”

“It depends on the man. In this case, I would say it does.” Gilgamesh rubbed her back. “We are facing the loss of everything we ever worked for, potentially.”

“It’s not just that,” she replied. “I can’t shake the feeling that he’s right. Did we blind ourselves? Did we go too far?”

“Maybe. I cannot lie to you, he raised the same doubts in my heart. But, he is young, and idealistic. He does not truly understand the deep horror of it. How could he? So, I intend to argue our case a little longer yet. Nothing we did was impulsive…”

“You will need to do more than argue our case,” she said. “They need to see us on their side, fighting alongside them. We need to show them we are allies.”

“A circular problem. I do not think they will let us fight at their side until they trust us at least a little…it will take time, my wife.”

“I suppose.” She sighed again, and finally released him. She took a step back and looked him fiercely in the eye, just the same way she had on the day they’d met. “As soon as they will have us, I want my Onna-Musha in the fight.”

“As soon as they will have you,” Gilgamesh promised.

“Good. I’m not going to sulk here when there’s a chance to start putting things right.”

Her fire prompted the only smile to grace Gilgamesh’s face that day. “Get some sleep,” he suggested aloud. It meant ‘I love you,’ and she knew it.

The biggest of his worries was answered later in the day, in the form of an electronic letter from the Great Father, personally. It thanked him for the hospitality shown to his crew, and looked forward to returning the favor “in the fullness of time.”

It praised them for their vigilance and service. It was polite. And blunt.

And it warned of things to come.

So be it.

Date point: 19y3m1w4d AV
Mayuy City, Planet Gao

Reekuum, with a mighty hunger

Sammich!

Easily the best part of Reekuum’s morning, that. Ever since Boku’s Bodega had opened on Lavmuy Road, serving nothing but the finest and most authentic Human food, Reekuum had started leaving for work a little earlier to grab an anchovy and jellybean sammich for the commute. Boku made it with just the right amount of garlic.

Except, today, Boku’s neat row of pre-made sammich wasn’t there. In fact, Boku was out on the street with a large bag next to him, hauling down the metal shutters on the shop while a worker on a ladder drilled a “for sale” sign into the wall above the windows.

Reekuum’s keen of loss was entirely heartfelt, and loud enough to earn the shop owner’s attention. Boku turned around, saw his regular customer standing there in the road, and effected a helpless expression with skewed ears.

“Mornin’, Reekuum.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Yeah. A bit sudden, I know, but there’s an opportunity on a faraway station I just have to take up. Got a real good Cousin out there, yijao?”

“A better opportunity than your own business?” Reekuum joined him and looked mournfully up at the sign above them. He was going to miss those sammiches.

“The kind I can’t ignore.”

Reekuum sighed. He always hated those sorts of opportunities, really. They upset the order of things! That this particular opportunity was depriving him of a genuine Human sammich was, frankly, the fish-paste icing on the cake.

“Well…shit,” he sighed. “It ain’t gonna be the same ‘round here without you.”

“Eh, I’m sure somebody’ll buy the place as-is. You’ll be gettin’ ‘yer sammich soon enough,” Boku reassured him.

“Won’t be the same,” Reekuum lamented.

“That’s kind o’ you to say.” Boku fished in a pocket, checked his phone, then made a disgruntled noise. “I need to get ‘ta the spaceport.”

“Sure.” Reekuum let him pick up his bag, then sighed, and did his duty. “This, uh, station your Cousin’s on. Wouldn’t happen to be Ekallim-Igigi, would it?”

Boku suddenly went perfectly still.

“Right. Thought so. You’re an excellent liar, my friend. Nearly couldn’t smell it at all.”

Boku didn’t turn around. “I, uh…I don’t want any—”

“I know. And, neither do the people I answer to. So…” Reekuum pulled something from his own pocket, and handed it over. “There. Funny thing, not a lotta folks get a letter personally signed by the Great Father…you go ahead and read that when you’re offworld, yijao?”

“…Yi.”

“Right. C’mon. I’ll give you a ride to the spaceport.”

Boku keened slightly and turned around. “You mean escort me.”

“Not just little ol’ me, of course. But yes. You and many others, today. With luck, the rest will get the hint.”

“We already did.” Boku picked up his bag and shouldered it. “I was leaving anyway, remember?”

“Don’t play cub-games with us. We know good and damn well it’ll be a long, drawn out thing to get all of you off-planet. This is just us being polite. We…won’t be, after today. Part of that letter. Make sure you give it a good, proper read.”

Boku glanced across the road. The thing about Clan Straightshield was, it did have a plain-clothes service. When they wanted to blend in, as Reekuum usually did, they were just regular Gao on the street. But going from anonymous face in the crowd to Straightshield Officer was a trick they all knew.

Even the guy on the ladder dropped down, and busted open the locked shutter. They were gonna go through Boku’s stuff carefully. Reekuum, though, gestured to the Clan vehicle that rolled up alongside them.

“Come along. Your flight to orbit is already scheduled and we wouldn’t want you to be late.”

Boku didn’t object. He climbed in, one of Reekuum’s Brothers climbed in on the far side, and they rode to the spaceport in silence.

Reekuum spent the trip wondering where else he was gonna get a decent breakfast in this town…

Date point:19y3m2w AV
Charleston, West Virginia, USA, Earth

Joshua Hartl

Ohio State had finally decided to accept an unlimited class wrestler on their team, and Josh had been offered their first scholarship! Full ride and everything!! The last six months had been almost nothing but preparation for that: trials and exhibition matches, workouts so they could see what he could do, maybe get their heads around a freak like him…

God, it felt good. He was so goddamn much better than the rest of them. Faster, stronger, he had wind for days and all his years of practice had kept him flexible too, unlike a couple of the other unlimited contenders…It didn’t take the head coach long to decide. He’d made the team. As a freshman! And they’d been so friendly, too! One of the littlest guys on the team turned out to be his team captain and roommate for the summer camp. Ted was a buck-twenty sopping wet even as a senior, but after the first couple days of goofing off and some fun exploring town…

Shit. For the first time in his life, Josh really felt like, maybe this was where he belonged. He couldn’t fuckin’ wait to sign!

So, the black truck parked outside the house when Josh got home from practice was kind of a mood-killer. It looked…serious. It wasn’t, like, blinking with strobe lights or anything, but something about it made him nervous, put the word Feds in his mind. Shit, was it ‘cuz of his internet stuff? All he’d ever really done was hang out in some gun chats…

Well. Whatever. He went in through the garage and the extra-wide door to the mud room, shucked his shoes and dropped his gym bag. Some little guy in a suit was there, waiting.

“You’d be Joshua?”

“Uh…Yeah, that’s me.”

The man in the suit nodded, and didn’t introduce himself. “Your parents are in the living room. Let’s join them, please.”

Josh’s back was crawling and his head churning over just what in the fuck might be going on, but the guy seemed calm and polite and…

Well. He prowled in, took a look around the room. Mom was sitting on the couch, looking…kinda blank-faced. She looked up when he entered, and managed a tiny smile for him.

Dad, though….Dad was in a fucking state. He was prowling around the room looking like he was on the edge of tears, while a couple more suits stood patiently in the back by the window with their hands held neatly in front of them, watching everything.

Josh sat cross-legged on the floor.

“Not going to sit in the chair?” the first suit asked.

“Can’t. Too big. But you already know that,” Josh accused.

Suit ignored that. “Have you been watching the news, young man?”

Josh laughed, not all that impressed by the Men in Black act. “Dude. Do I look like it? I’m literally still dripping in sweat.”

“Do you know why we are here?”

“Sure as fuck don’t. Maybe you oughta tell me.”

“Manners, Joshua.”

Josh looked over at Mom, who had looked up and made eye contact. That was worrying, normally she was so easy-going, so cool about stuff…

“I’m not dumb, ‘ma. I ain’t gonna start shit. But that doesn’t mean they’re my friends.”

“Just…don’t.”

Josh blinked at her, then back at the suit. “Okay, what’s going on here?”

“Has your mother ever told you much about her history, Joshua? Where she’s from originally?”

Josh glanced at Mom, who shrugged in a ‘may as well go ahead’ kinda way and dropped her eyes to the floor again. “…I mean, mom always said she doesn’t like to talk about it, and dad said not to pry.”

“Does the name Ekallim-Igigi mean anything to you?”

“Dunno. What is that, Arabic?”

“What about Gilgamesh?”

“…Like, the Final Fantasy boss?”

The Suits looked at each other. Lead Suit decided to change tack, and sat down across from Josh. Little guy, really. And he had to admit, he really liked the thought he could beat their faces in all at once before they could do anything to stop him…

But he wasn’t stupid. Nobody can outflex a rifle. Or a radio.

So he settled for simply looming over the asshole. It didn’t seem to work.

“Have you ever wondered why you’re so much…more than all the other kids, Joshua?”

…Well, then. He looked over at mom again. She didn’t look up.

“Dunno. I’ve had all sorts of ideas on that over the years. So…government experiment? Like the Corti did to that ambassador guy? Are you here to check in on me?” He gestured across himself. “‘Cuz I sure as hell ain’t complaining, but I never asked to grow up a literal fuckin’ hulk.”

“Not our government. But, you aren’t far off the mark,” Lead Suit nodded, then turned to mom. “Alright. We have no further questions for you. You will remain under observation, and our colleagues will be in contact. Thank you for your time.”

“Wh–?” Josh gawped at him as the three men went for the door. “That’s it? Aren’t you gonna explain any’a this?”

“I think it’s best if your mother explains, Joshua. Good day.”

The door closed behind them. Dad shot mom a look as they heard the truck start up outside, one full of pain and sadness and anger and all sortsa other things when Josh when couldn’t ever remember seeing him look anything other than fuckin’ starstruck by her…

Then he left too. Grabbed his coat, got in his car, and booked it.

“…Mom?”

She sighed, drew her knees up to her chest and shook her head. “I guess…I guess I owe you an explanation.”

“…For what?”

“Everything. You, where I’m from, what that was all about…”

“That…what. Ekky-lim-giggy or whatever? And Gilgamesh? Who’s that?”

She sighed again, and finally looked up at him. He couldn’t remember seeing her cry, before.

“…My uncle,” she said.

“Poor bastard.”

“Yeah. Just found out his wife’s been lying to him for twenty years, huh?”

“I was talking about the kid. Though…yeah.”

“You get the impression he wanted to fold you in half?”

“Pretty sure he was thinking about how to do us all in. Don’t blame him.”

“Kid coulda done it too, in the blink of an eye.”

“Well, yes. Not everyday you meet a kid with a bulletproof chest.”

Benson snorted into his coffee. “Alright, fuck! Just cleaned this suit…Still. How many more of these we got?”

“Next one’s a few hours away, over in Lexington. If we’re right, it’s some great-grandpa who ‘doesn’t talk about the war,’ and is still futzing around fixing up old cars.”

“Same M.O. for all these guys,” Benson noted.

“It’s a good one. Harder to pull off in the modern era…”

“But they aren’t trying to hide anymore.”

“No. How could they?”

“Mm. I’ll drive? You look like you need a nap.”

“Sounds good…”

They moved on to the next target.

Date Point: 19y3m3w AV
ESNN Offices, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

Sometimes, the news was simply too goddamn strange to believe. And Ava had a pretty damn high tolerance for galactic-grade horseshit.

Even better was how she got the lede. She was supposed to be shooting a new portfolio with, yes, Julian and some of the men of HEAT…and then he got called away.

And then rumors happened. Asinine, ludicrous rumors.

And then he needed to meet with her, urgently. Along with the Prime Minister. And…others.

So. Another dinner with Derek cancelled. God, the fucking wedding had been put off and off and off a thousand times it felt like…He had the patience of a saint.

Although really, would anyone blame her for just throwing this one in the trash and going home anyway? How did you fucking begin?

She was getting really, really tired of conspiracy. Just as soon as she thought she’d got her head around how the world worked…boom. Literally. There goes home. There goes a friend. There goes a relationship, there goes restful sleep, there goes a sense of security that the world was a small place and humanity wasn’t just a piece in a galactic chess game, and—

It dawned on her that Hannah was licking her hand. She took a breath, scratched the dog’s ears gratefully, made a happy fuss of her, and turned back to the paragraph.

Okay. Gilgamesh.

…Bullshit.

There was no fucking way, was there? That was something from a sleazy red-top rag tabloid!

‘Ancient astronauts live among us in secret!’

’A Babylonian space prince fathered my baby!’

It wasn’t that AEC would be fucking around or whatever. That’d be even less plausible than a mythical Sumerian god-king. It was just…Christ. Even breaking the news to the world about the alien body-snatchers trying to wipe out humanity had been an easier sell.

Jesus, how did whoever wrote the headline on first contact day do it? ‘Alien monsters disrupt hockey game!’ Well, that one had the advantage of high-definition camera footage. You could write the most absurd headline in the world with that kind of evidence to back it up.

This though…

She sighed. Fuck it. Her job was to report, not to opine. However incredibly fucking unlikely the whole story seemed, there was one solid fact she absolutely could report with integrity.

BREAKING: AEC statement reveals existence of secret human space colony

There. AEC had released a statement. That much was a fact. Stick to the facts. Nothing more. No opinion, no sarcasm, no sass. Somebody at AEC had already had to agonize over all this, so use their hard work and repeat the statement verbatim.

Yeah.

Ancient Gilgamesh Vibes.

What the fuck.

…No. She decided to do her and everyone a favor and just…not. Claims that fantastical would need some serious proof.

What would that even look like? A genetic test, maybe?

Whatever. Not Ava’s problem. Not Ava’s problem at all. Ava had more important things to do. Like make that dinner with Derek after all.

She thrashed out the report as quickly as her fingers could type it, sent it off to editing, and took the rest of the day as personal time. Gotta get that work-life balance sorted out. Gotta stop letting her fiancé down. Gotta identify the things she could reasonably do better, and do ‘em.

So she did ‘em. Gilgamesh, or whoever, could take care of himself.

God help him.

Date Point: 19y6m AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“Good morning, My Father.”

“…Hnnngmpf…’marn, Tiyun.” Daar opened his eyes blearily. Not enough sleep. Couldn’t make a habit o’ that. Better go to bed early tonight.

“Shall I update you?”

…Place. Time. Yeah, important shit goin’ on. S’why he was up too late…

Daar grumbled, “Sure. Start wit’…our new space frens.”

Tiyun chittered darkly. “Our initial exchange with Ekallim-Igigi has gone smoothly enough. Father Fraku of Clan Goldpaw is overseeing the delegation…his first impression matches Captain Wilde’s. Singularity want a good relationship with us. They’re practically tripping over their own feet to get proper diplomatic channels established.”

Daar yawned, and stretched out his arms luxuriantly after rising to all fours. He’d asked to be updated first thing in the morning and, sure enough, Tiyun was there at sixth hour, having let him sleep in a bit. He switched to his legs, giving his torso a good stretch too…

Ah, the small pleasures in life. Few were as wunnerful as the wake-up stretch. So at least he got that, before the shitstorm set in.

“Fraku needs’ta remember these folks ain’t cubs,” he observed, his mind starting to work properly. “Mebbe they are desp’rate ‘fer our approval, but they ain’t gonna be stupid about it.”

“Of course not, My Father. As for the persona non grata edict, Straightshield has begrudgingly concluded they are complying in good faith.”

“Good.”

“Some of their agents have more complicated situations, and they have requested some more time to ‘unwind’ themselves, as it were…”

Ah. First test of the morning, and he ain’t even had his eggs an’ meeshi yet.

An’ no matin’ contracts the night before, neither. Never a good start to the day.

“…Sure. Give ‘em some reasonable time. Advise Straightshield I trust their discretion, but let’s not drag it out.” He stretched again, and cast a forlorn look at the empty nest-bed. “…Is Naydi back today?”

She’d been attending to duties on Tiritya Island over on Cimbrean for the last couple of days, and the fact was, he wanted to hear her thoughts on some of this.

“I believe she is waiting for you at breakfast, My Father.”

Daar grumbled something in the affirmative, and went to make his morning ablutions. Quick glance in the mirror: he was rockin’ a scruffy long-coat at the moment, an’ lookin’ pretty huge after a winter o’ big eatin’ and big liftin.’ Not bad! Hafta shave down again here pretty soon and get a good look at his progress! Bedtime did leave him with a stray cowlick behind his right ear, though. Fuck it. He left it in place, ‘cuz he liked the look.

And what fun was life if Naydi din’t have somethin’ ‘ta fuss over?! A quick scruffle around in the dust bath, a bit o’ water splashed onna face, just a bit more’n usual of limbering up—the ever-present cost of Hulk, that—and he was ready to properly start the day.

Naydi, o’ course, promptly did groom the cowlick flat with a lick of her own. It was her way of showin’ her love. “You do that on purpose,” she accused, knowingly.

“Yup! An’ ‘yer gonna be clippin’ me back down to a stud’s coat today, too!”

She chittered, and sat next to him. “You missed me.”

“A lot. Always do.” He pant-grinned happily when she nipped his ear, and started clawing breakfast onto his plate.

“I’ve just received your new meal plan from Adam…” she said lightly, picking at some nonexistent fluff on his scalp.

“Oh dear,” Daar chittered. “What now?”

“More, essentially, and more meals. And less anchovies.”

“Aww! What’s wrong with ‘em?”

“Micronutrients, from what I gather. He’s switching you to fresh northern white-catch instead.”

Oh. Well, that weren’t so bad, really. Bit ‘spensive but fuck it, he could afford ‘ta eat well.

“But I doubt you’re really worried about what your staple fish will be for the last phase of your winter push.”

“Nuh. I mean, yuh,” he chittered, “but this Singularity thing’s got most’a my attention right now.”

“And much of mine. They’re fascinating, really. And Keeda himself! Not quite as godly as I’d imagined, but nevertheless…Very handsome.”

Daar chittered. “He is a looker! Balls, only a pawful o’ the bestest would even be his match! Shame ‘bout the radiation, really… But I’m bigger and handsomer,” he preened. “You know it.”

“I wonder if he might be better with his words,” she teased, unconvincingly.

Daar ignored that with a smug ear-flick. “Bruuk was quite smitten by him, from what I heard!” Food, now. Om nom nom.

Naydi feigned scandal, then descended into chittering. “Well, who can blame him? But anyway…I want to get a good sniff at this Gilgamesh’s queens.”

Daar paused mid-munch. “…’zat, uh…?”

“I have a theory that a society is only as trustworthy as the way it treats its females. Captain Wilde’s report made it clear that they’re not just some pampered pretty harem, but I think there’s more to learn. His relationship with them will tell us much of what sort of man this Gilgamesh is, yijao?”

Daar thought on it as he shoveled a little more food. “…I saw footage of one’a them,” he said. “She’s a warrior. Fuckin’ fearsome. Cut a couple tanks apart. If she’s some kinda love-brainwashed zealot super-assassin…”

“Don’t coddle me, Bumpkin. I know I’m talking about a potential risk, but so far we only have a male perspective on these people. You can’t afford to blind yourself in one eye.”

“I worry ‘cuz I know what a male like me can do to a Female if I wanted,” he retorted. “‘Member how sure I had ‘ta be ‘bout ‘yer love ‘fore I claimed ‘ya as my mate? ‘Cuz after that first night you wouldn’t’a had a choice.” An unfortunate reality of their sexual biology, that. “That’s…some heavy shit, Naydi. What can a five thousand year old ego case like that do?”

“A problem that, fortunately for them, Humans do not share. So unless he exudes some magical pheromonal love musk…”

“Not naturally, no…”

She looked at him for a moment. “…You need not worry. And besides,” she looked sideways, while she nipped at her food. “You’re right. I can’t not love you, not after you claimed me forever. You renew that claim almost nightly too. Which I certainly will not complain about…”

Daar felt himself flush with guilt over that. “With your permission,” he retorted, defensively.

“Which I gave freely from the first, and which you have never needed in the first place. So, I doubt I could love any other at this point. I am well and truly bonded to you, my love, and I would have it no other way. You know that. You have always known.”

Daar keened slightly. Gods, the cost of love for the gao! What a priceless thing she gave him, and what a cruel act it was for him to claim it! He would always mourn that loss for her. She was free of his will, alone among the Gao…but she could never be free of her love for him.

Or he from her. A true bond like theirs often went in both directions, and with the power he wielded, and the stakes she represented…it was an utterly necessary one.

“…Yeah. I know. But I still worry. You can’t stop me from worryin’ ‘bout you.”

“I’m sure we can arrange an appropriate security force, Bumpkin. I wouldn’t go alone and, as I said…you need not worry about me. I couldn’t,” she emphasized, just to stick the dagger in. “And there are no gaoian males so unwise as to incur your wrath on that point.”

“…I’m bein’ stupid,” he realized.

“You’re being an overprotective male,” she chittered. “Besides, I’m not talking about…what’s that Ten’Gewek expression? Sleeping in the Brown One’s nest. I just want to meet some of them, on neutral ground, and get a sniff.”

Daar sighed, and moved onto his next plate. “Okay. ‘Yer right, an’ I knew it ‘fore I even objected, but I’m allowed ‘ta worry ‘bout my bestest Naydi. Don’t you be takin’ that from me.”

“I’ll endure it,” she teased, and ate another egg. Daar chittered, reminded himself how incredibly lucky he was, and opened the next dish. Kedgeree. With, as promised, northern white-catch. Not quite as pungent as anchovy…but he couldn’t complain.

He couldn’t complain at all.

Date Point: 19y6m3w AV
USS Wampanoag (PV-2) on patrol near Hell system, Hunter space.

Lieutenant Commander Parker Lee

Lee had to hand it to the Byron Group: they’d somehow managed to make the Misfit-class pretty okay to live on, even though it was tight quarters for a crew of six. And it could adapt to fit whatever job was required of it…

Like, in the Wampanoag’s case, ranging far from the fleet to keep an eye on the Hunters.

Easier said than done. It was turning out to be impossible to even find any Hunters. Even here, in what had been the heart of their territory. They’d pulled back suddenly at one point, abandoned Hell completely, and were…gone.

The brass didn’t like that one bit, and Lee was inclined to agree. They’d been out on patrol four days so far, and all they’d seen to date was a Gaoian patrol doing the same job as them.

So, the moment they got a contact that wasn’t friendly was big enough to get everyone who wasn’t already at their duty scrambling. In Lee’s case, that meant ducking through into the control blister and sitting down behind their helmsman, Cox.

“What have we got?”

Their sensor operator, Moroz, was on the opposite side of the bulkhead to his right, in the mission module. “Warp signature matches a broodship and escorts,” he reported, and put up the heading and speed for Lee to see.

“Drop a beacon, signal to fleet, notify them we’ve observed hunter activity, include our sensor data…Helm, let’s tail ‘em a ways. Systems, rig for silent running.”

“Aye aye.”

From inside the control blister, the only sign of the switch in mode was a few lights changing color above Lee’s head. There was no need to dim the lights or turn down the air pumps or anything. Nothing the crew did made any signal that would be visible to their quarry. But the ship’s own emissions were now being carefully damped, and the waste heat pushed into the heat sink rather than radiated.

Over interstellar distances, they were now invisible.

Lee worked the Hunters’ course backwards, trying to get a sense of their origin. There was a star pretty close to Hell, a red dwarf with not much to write home about in terms of planets. There had been Hunter mining operations there, before. They were long gone, now.

Still, there was nothing else on that line, so he marked it as the likely point of origin. Destination…

…yet to be determined. There was a cluster of stars along the broodship’s course, none of them apparently with temperate planets. That meant orbital habitats, probably, and those could be hard to distinguish from a natural object.

“I don’t like it,” he decided aloud.

Cox didn’t turn his head, but he did prick up his ears a bit. “Skipper?”

“A broodship going from nowhere to nowhere…let’s get a report ready for transmission. Think fleet will want to know about this immediately. In the meantime…get a follower drone dispatched.”

There was a muffled wump as the magnetic rail launched a drone forward, and the brief blip felt through the seat of the pants as the drone fired up its own drive and accelerated out of their warp bubble, briefly disrupting it.

“Okay. Resume our patrol route.”

On the face of it, not a big deal. Flew around, saw a distant enemy ship, set a dog following it, sent a report back to fleet. It was almost a non-event. Except, it was also the first event of any kind they’d had all patrol, or on any of the patrols before. It might be nothing, it might be part of something bigger.

They weren’t equipped to go chase the fucker down, that was for sure. So, Lee watched until it vanished beyond the Wampanoag’s sensor range, then nodded, unbuckled his seatbelt, and clambered out of the control blister to go write that repor—

The Human ship was instantly and unceremoniously reduced to a smear of ionized plasma. A waste, in many regards. So much rich and tempting meat atomized rather than properly devoured. A sadly instant and painless death, without proper suffering. Hunter maws were left un-filled, Hunter bellies left empty. There was no feast from this particular hunt, in any regard that the Eaters would appreciate.

But the trial had been a complete success. Bait, stalk, and strike. Victory, and the beginning of vengeance. To the Builders, it was better than meat.

The Humans would notice their ship’s disappearance, of course, and would commence operations to find it. No matter. They would be observed, and learned about. And, when the time was right, struck once more.

The Hunters would be feared again.

Date Point: 19y7m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

The scratchy sounds of a stirring child through the baby monitor marked, once again, the start of Julian’s day. He blinked at the wall clock: five thirty.

A late start.

He managed to squirm out of bed without waking either of the girls—Allison made an indistinct sleepy noise and spooned up close to Xiù without opening her eyes—and left them to it. They’d each taken their turn at toddler-wrangling at some point during the night, now it was his turn.

The most dignified possible start to a day—diaper checks and potty training. Holding their hands while they scooted down the stairs on their backsides. Breakfast in the form of cream cheese on toast with banana and scrambled egg.

Parenthood wasn’t too bad, really. And Anna had a wicked sense of humor developing. She was gonna be a terror before long.

He distracted them with some bouncy happy TV while he cleaned up the kitchen, and then sorted out the adult breakfast. Two hot plates in the stasis fridge for Al and Xiù when they got up, his morning meal container for him, fresh coffee, OJ…

Emails.

One from Rockefeller. He’d been expecting it, somehow. It was the kind he sent when matters of import were afoot. On the surface, a polite invitation to meet him for a game of racquetball. Underneath…

Julian scratched idly at his right ankle as he read between the lines. Underneath, there was a career shift looming, he just knew it. Ever since that first briefing about Ekallim-Igigi, he’d kind of seen the future, looming on the horizon.

Well. He’d just…see, about that. For now, he enjoyed time with his kids—babbling between mouthfuls, and they’d proven to be hungry tots, too. Both were showing signs like he did at their age. He’d hoped maybe they’d have a shot at a normal life, but…

The floor creaked underfoot as he shifted his weight. An ever-present reminder of what he was and what he’d made himself into, that. Now his kids would inherit much of the same. Well, if normal wasn’t an option, he could at least help them cope with the alternative.

Al stumbled downstairs as he was dwelling on that, barely human and in need of caffeine, though she traded bright ‘good mornings’ with the kids. He lured her to a stool with a mug of the blackest sludge their bean machine could produce.

“Thought you’d sleep in longer,” he commented.

“Nuh. Bed got cold, an’ I’ve got an early start. Final pre-delivery checks on AT-nineteen.” She slurped her coffee. “…Good effing riddance. I swear that ship has gremlins. You?”

“Think it’s gonna be a big day today. Instead of morning Slab I’ve got a squash match with Rockefeller. Kinda bet Ava’s gonna cancel the shoot, too.”

She nodded and basked in the coffee scent from her mug. “A shame…career stuff?”

“Like we talked about, yeah. Most likely.”

“Cool.” She chugged her coffee. “Guess I’ll take sleeping beauty her breakfast in bed, then head out. Is Mathilde up yet?”

Julian shook his head. He’d never imagined he’d be the sorta guy to host an au pair, but…well, here they were. Rich enough to afford one, busy enough to need one. She’d been a godsend after the boys had started moving out and couldn’t babysit so easily.

Bright future ahead of her, too. She’d only been moved in for a couple months, but the whole family was already awfully fond of her.

He kissed Al on the cheek, fussed with the totlings for a bit. Thumped downstairs and did his morning stretching routine both because that was mandatory for a fella his size, and because it would wake Mathilde.

Goals achieved, and quick briefing given, he looked at the time, saw the sun coming up…

He bounced up, strode out through the patio door, and went to start his day.

He had no doubt it’d be eventful.

Date Point: 19y7m2w AV
Dataspace adjacent to probe swarm, Relic space

Entity

From matterspace, it was just an uninteresting black cube, almost innocuous in its smallness. Ava’s father’s car had been bigger, and certainly more interesting to look at.

From Dataspace, though, it was everything. Its presence was impressive in the same way as a planet was impressive—get close enough, and it became the entire world.

The Entity had known since it first gorged itself on Six’s knowledge that the relays weren’t the origin of dataspace, but rather its distribution system. That innocuous black box, though, was dataspace. Repository, backup and archive, but also source. It was the wellspring from which an entire kind of reality flowed, and the relays were a way of taking the…for lack of a more appropriate word, the fabric of dataspace and stretching it out like tarpaulin until it covered the entire galaxy.

Except…no longer. Physical metaphors were inapplicable in many ways, and the fact was that much of the galaxy was no longer covered by dataspace’s influence. As the relays had been destroyed, whole swathes of the Milky Way went…

Dark/Shallow/Void/Gone/Cold/Glitch

…and yet, dataspace itself remained. The gaps in coverage simply didn’t exist from that side. After all, why should they? There was only dataspace. There was no distinction between “dataspace within the galaxy” and “dataspace beyond the galaxy” and “dataspace where the gaps should be…” There was only dataspace. Where there was no coverage, dataspace wasn’t.

This created limitations when it came to communicating with hardware in the uncovered regions, and the Entity had solved that problem by partially running itself on its own probes. Any normal datasophont which attempted such a thing quickly degraded into insanity in the absence of substrate. But the Entity…

We’re kinda insane already.

The Entity didn’t think it was insane…

No, of course not. Sane life forms talk to ghosts all the time. Everyone in the world has a nearly-independent second personality to sass them!

The Entity still struggled with sarcasm. Even when part of its own mind was doing it.

It considered the black cube again. Its drone was hovering a few feet from the thing, probing it with every non-invasive sensor known to Hierarchy, Hunterdom and Humankind alike. It didn’t dare actually interact with it, as it had no idea what the repercussions for dataspace would be, even though it knw that, somewhere out there, there were thousands more of these things.

It wasn’t the only thing taking an interest, either. Somebody had dug this one up. Very probably the same somebody whose cloaked ship was lurking nearby, watching the Entity’s every move. The same people who’d led the Stray Fortune on such a merry chase, no doubt. The Entity wasn’t inclined to like them very much, for that.

And if they were planning on destroying this thing…well, that endangered the Entity itself. While the Entity could survive in regions without relay coverage, it very much doubted whether it could survive grievous harm to the substance of dataspace itself.

The impulse to < survive > compelled it. It would need to find others like this one and protect them. At least until it knew their workings well enough to duplicate their function.

We could talk to cloaky mccloakface over there…

No. Unknown quantity, danger, possible-threat, not-ally. Trust not earned.

Trust never earned if we don’t engage with them at all…

…not yet, then. Learn more, first.

Struck by an idea, it diverted its attention to a probe drifting slowly through a long, slow orbit far out in the Cimbrean system. It didn’t have internet access through that probe, but it could listen to broadcasts.

It did so.

It reviewed what it heard.

I take it back. We’re the sane ones, it’s the rest of reality that’s gone nuts.

Maybe. It accessed a different probe, one deployed where it could access the galactic data networks, and from there delved into human history, looking to learn as much as it could about this unexpected figure and why he was so special.

What it found just confused it even more. And now, it was stuck with indecision. It didn’t know enough. An enemy of the Hierarchy’s was a fellow traveler at least, but…

C’mon, is an immortal god-king from ancient Iraq really that much weirder than we are? In the grand scheme of things, he’s just another head of state.

Perhaps that was the right way to think about it. Yes. Just another state, with just another head. One with insight into these black cubes, potentially an ally, potentially an enemy…insufficient data to know for sure. But, out of the shadows, and now an increasingly known quantity.

Contact could wait. The Entity would meet with this “Singularity” in its own time, at its own need. That cloaked ship could have spoken to it at any time, and had thus far not done so…

…Yes. Let them make the first move. There was no time pressure here. Satisfied, it returned to examining the device.

Though it did have to ignore a little nagging disappointment from the daemon.

Date Point: 19y7m2w AV
HMS Sharman, (HMNB Folctha) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Christian “Righteous” Firth

“Fuckin’ bullshit, bruh. Fuckin’ Gilgamesh? Fuck off.”

“Could’nae put it better myself,” Murray commented. “Now are ye gonny move ‘yer fuckin’ boys up or no?”

“What, so your shit can shoot ‘em? I know how you fuckin’ think, you’ve got infiltrators in that building.”

“Do I, now?” Murray leaned against the wall and folded his arms with an infuriating grin. “But aye. Apparently, Gilgamesh hisself. And it’s no’ like Wilde to make up crazy shite, is it?”

“Nah. He’s a good bean.”

“An’ ye saw the pics.”

“Yeah.” Firth sniffed, and moved his boys up. “…he doesn’t look so tough.”

“Gonzo said the same. But only you two mad fuckers would think so.”

“How big is he?”

“Big. Wilde reckons a wee bit over seven feet. Built like the proverbial shithouse too, aye?”

Firth mentally reviewed the pictures they’d been shown at the morning briefing., including the ones with Wilde standing next to him. The supposed god-king was a specimen, no doubt…

…But Firth already knew how the story between them would go. “Yeah. I could take ‘em.”

Murray laughed. “Aye? So sure before you’ve even met the man?”

“Bro.” Firth raised an eyebrow, and then an arm. “You’ve seen what I can do nowadays. I could break him. Just at a glance? I’m taller, I’m stockier, I’m stronger and a fuck of a lot more muscular. Bet I’m quicker an’ faster too. I’m the fuckin’ best,” he said without ego. “But I’ll give him credit, he’d be a fun fight at least. Probably got some fuckin’ skills I’d bet.”

“Five thousand years, they say. That’s gotta count for something…”

“Be interesting to see just how much,” Firth replied, before starting on meal six of the day. An odd combo, this one. Chicken and rice (natch) with mustard and banana of all the fuckin’ things, plus some other stuff he didn’t bother to read the ingredients for. It worked, weirdly. Fuckin’ dark magic, right there. Not sure how that’d go with the big tub of green beans he had…but in ‘Horse’s demon-kitchen he trusted.

“You done movin’?”

“Yup.”

“Right, so…infiltrators—”

“I fuckin’ knew it!”

“—in this building over here.” Murray’s grin got even more infuriating. “And, anyway. I reckon you’ll get a chance tae prove it, sooner rather’n later.”

“Ugh, fuck, playing this game with you is like trying to punch smoke…you think so?”

“Call it a gut feeling. There’s no way we’re gonny leave a useful ally completely out in the cold, even if they’ve been up tae some shite. But our lords an’ masters’ll wanny send a message first, aye?”

“I’m still just amused Gonzo thinks he’s all big-nuts against Gilgamensch here. He’s still a fuckin’ baby on all this shit, and he ain’t shit against the rest of the Beefs, yet. Hell, didn’t you rearrange his brain just yesterday?”

“Aye, until he landed a hit, broke mah sternum, and had me coughin’ up blood.”

“S’what you git, pickin’ fights with even our babiest beef. An’ I think I’m gonna win this,” Firth said, confidently.

“We’ll see,” Murray replied evenly, and stepped back, gesturing for Firth to take his turn. Half his army wasn’t even on the board yet.

“…Lemme eat first.”

“No rush.” Murray chuckled and grabbed his own lunch. “No rush at all.”

They left the game sitting for a few minutes to cram their meals down. Firth’s head wasn’t really on the game though. It wasn’t on the “Line of Heroes” bullshit either. He’d always known his family were a pack of fuckin’ mutants, and it wasn’t like great-gran’ma Hendriks was around to ask about it no more. It didn’t matter though. What mattered was the shit he’d done.

Righteous wasn’t some secret Singularity project, he was his own damn man. Din’t matter how he’d come by his perfect beast-Viking genes. Din’t matter if it was ‘cuz ‘ma and ‘pa and all the way back had good taste, or if someone else had good taste for them. So they claim him as some sort of apex “Warrior” line stud? The product of their work? Good for them. He wouldn’t be making babies on their command. Hell, he had his own valkyrie in his own bed, and—

….

Well.

Shit.

That was an unwelcome thought.

He musta stopped chewing or something, ‘cuz Murray gave him a look. “…Y’alright?”

Firth collected himself and scnargfed down the last of his meal. “Jus’ had a thought I don’t like much,” he admitted, after swallowing.

“Wanny get it off ‘yer chest?”

“…Nah.” It didn’t fuckin’ matter. Why should it fuckin’ matter? Firth had a nose for lies almost as good as a Gaoian’s, an’ Freya had never lied to him, he was sure of it.

An’ fuck Gilgamesh for makin’ him doubt her for a second. He was gonna break that man’s spirit when he got the chance. Make him unnerstand that his bullshit has been surpassed.

Here and now, though, he stood up, dusted his hands off, and played the game.

He won, too.

Date Point: 19y7m2w AV
Gei Fen Automated Assembly workhouse, Tenshu Province, Gao

Moiki, Clanless

Tired. So balls-empty tired.

They’d been going non-stop for months slapping together armored trucks just as fast as they could manage. The pay was great, sure, and the spirits were high; they were doing something useful and not every gao could say that.

But it was draining. Half-day shifts every single day. One day off a week. Not enough time to do much but sleep, get some good chow in, maybe watch a movie…

Shift-bell. Fifth hour already, time to get up. Balls, didn’t he just go to sleep–?

“So today’s going to be special,” foreman Geezi announced to the bleary-eyed, yawning and stretching pile of males just now de-tangling themselves from their nest-bed. “We have a special visitor coming at seventh hour.”

Groans all around.

“Fuck, Geezi! We don’t need another Conclave type sniffin’ all up in our business—”

“It’s the Great Father.”

Stunned silence.

“…Balls. We really that far behind?”

“We’re not behind at all. At least, not by our current orders…which is why he’s visiting I think.”

“He does know that’s gonna grind production to a halt, right?”

“I’m sure he does. I say, let’s take that small blessing and get this place cleaned up. Third shift’s already shutting down the line. It’s a maintenance window anyway.”

Well…shit. Okay then. Cleaning and maintenance days were always a nice break…

They’d all finished breakfast and started the minor bits of cleanup when the Great Father showed up, right on time and with no fanfare beyond his security team. He didn’t come in the front door. He didn’t fuckin’ fit! Instead he came ‘round back through a loading door, and—

Nobody made a sound.

Everyone’s ears flicked back.

Whatever the fuck had just prowled onto the dock wasn’t a gao, he was a perfect fuckin’ Keeda tale! Perfect fur, perfect face, perfect fuckin’ everything. He was so fuckin’ muscular and so gods-damned big…

The newsreels and pictures didn’t come close!

“Hi!” Wagging tail, and a gruff voice so deep it resonated off the concrete floor. “I won’t waste ‘yer time. I know you’ve been busy as balls an’ gods, do we ever need ‘yer work. S’why I’m here. This workhouse is the single most productive group workin’ on these Mark Fifty-Five Armored All-Terrain Vehicles—the galaxy-famous ‘Growlers.’ Well fuckin’ done!”

This was different to all the times some Conclave big-nuts had come down and said nice things to ‘em. Moiki was right there in the front row, close enough to smell him, and he could tell instantly that the Great Father actually meant every word. He smelled so strongly of everything it was just impossible not to be bowled over by it.

Everyone knew he was honest as fuck, o’ course. But it was a different thing to sniff it for himself.

“An’ as much as I wish I could let ‘ya take a load off, pay that big fat performance bonus on th’ contract, an’ let y’all go fuck off ‘fer a month, woo some Females…” Daar continued, resulting in some chitters and cat-calls from the back of the room, “well, ‘yer a forward-thinkin’ workhouse willin’ to put it all on th’ line ‘ta git th’ job done. I admire that, so…”

He looked at their management. “Mos’tly I’ll be talkin’ ‘ta ‘yer front-office folks. But I’ll come ‘round an’ give everythin’ a sniff! You let me know if I’m gettin’ in the way, ‘kay? I ain’t gonna take no offense. Balls, mebbe I can help if ‘ya got a use ‘fer a big wall o’ meat like me…”

Fuck yeah we could. Gods, he was a fuckin’ building worth of muscle, and if the stories were even remotely true—

“Oh?” The Great Father looked Moiki right in the eyes, and his heart stopped dead in his chest. “Well, lookin’ forward to it! Anyway, git back ‘ta work! Lunch’ll be on me today.”

There were chitters and cheers as the Great Father ambled away to go talk with the foreman. Moiki only remembered to breathe again once the Great Father’s unreal back was to them, as he thumped his way toward the front offices. Quite literally. Every step of his could be felt through the factory floor, like a heavy press slamming down on thick steel forgings.

“Balls, Moiki. That was stupid!” someone cuffed him between the ears, chittering.

“I can’t believe I said that!” he said, honestly. “I…shit. Maybe I do need a break.”

“We all need a break, Brother. C’mon, these dirt-caked robots ain’t cleaning themselves.”

And so the Scrub set in, with a new work chant named The Mother of Folctha. It started off kinda sweet and complimentary, wistful about her beauty and charm…right up until the chorus about how much she sold her taco for, which was more than any male could afford.

It was a good rhythm and they’d worked their way to the front of the Growler’s left door sub-assembly line by the time they’d run out of obscenities to weave into it.

Time for a break. Moiki clambered off the top of the machines, unhooked his safety line, and went to the snack station near the office to go get some meeshi-butter and nava dumplings.

…He couldn’t help but overhear the conversation inside.

“—production board’s recommended ‘yer workhouse ‘ta pilot this, an’ we’ve gotta make this shit now. Battlespace is a’changin’ an’ we gotta stay ahead.”

Moiki paused and swiveled his ears for better hearing.

“I…thank you, My Father. But why come visit personally?”

“Convenience, an’ confluence o’ events. I was in th’ area anyway an’ it’s an important enough item it’s been discussed in th’ Conclave. One-Fang is jus’ now finishin’ their designs and we need an adaptable workhouse wit’ a reputation ‘fer delivering. So, given all that, I thought I’d get a sniff in, yijao?”

“Well, we can deliver,” Geezi promised. “I’m confused though. You said we still need the Growlers for Hell. Why switch to megalight probes?”

The Great Father sighed. “Priorities. We can re-implement ‘yer processes in other workhouses—yes, you will be compensated—but right now this is th’ most pressingest thing. Me an’ the Allied General Staff…well. It’s been well-considered, les’ say.”

Moiki decided he’d heard enough and sneaked away as quietly as could be, to go enjoy his dumplings in silence. Once he was pretty sure he was out of earshot, he scampered a little faster until he was safe to sit down next to his teammate Kuyaar, who immediately knew he’d done mischief. He let him eat a few dumplings before broaching the topic.

“Shouldn’t be doin’ that, Moiki…”

Moiki blinked, ate a dumpling, and tried to put on an air of innocence. Not that’d it work.

“Do what?”

“Are you serious? You know exactly what you…” Kuyaar looked up and his ears flattened, about half a heartbeat before a giant paw put itself down on Moiki’s shoulder, so heavy it was a serious effort to bear.

“Listenin’ in on my conversation,” the Great Father rumbled. “Naughty lil’ cub…”

Moiki squeaked in terror, to his personal shame. “I–! My Father, I’m sorry I—”

“Oh, don’t you worry. Weren’t a secret anyway.” He leaned in with his giant, fearsome muzzle and growled right next to his ear, staring meaningfully at Kuyaar, too. “But mebbe ya’d all better find somethin’ better ‘ta sing ‘bout Leela next time…”

Moiki felt like if he’d died on the spot, it would be the easiest way out. That giant paw gripped around his shoulder and chest with just unbelievable force–!

Fortunately, the Great Father didn’t actually smell angry. Just…dominant. So balls-kicking dominant it almost hurt.

“Anyway, yeah. Sneaky lil’ Whitecrest wannabes aside…” he chittered then, a sound that was felt more than heard, and Moiki felt like his ears were on fire. “‘Ya heard right. We’re gon’ be re-tooling y’all for a pilot order on a new asset. Stealth megalight drones, bestest our engineers can design. You’ll be gettin’ eight state o’ the art nanofacs outta the deal.”

The entire workhouse had gathered around the spectacle by then. They weren’t a big shop, really. Just a few dozen. But they’d bucked tradition, spent their modest funds on automation for the most tedious work, and the results had apparently spoken for themselves. Nobody could beat a traditional workhouse for everyday work. But for big, high-value production?

Gei Fen Automated Assembly led the way.

Still. Even for them, nanofactories were so far out of reach it wasn’t worth imagining, let alone—

“—Eight?” someone squeaked, making Moiki glad he wasn’t the only one whose mouth ran away with him. “We can’t afford that!”

“Nobody can. S’why I’m buyin’ ‘em ‘fer y’all. Gonna be settin’ me back twenny billion, so, y’know. Wanted ‘ta see if this here workhouse was worth the scratch.”

He took the paw off Moiki’s shoulder, at last letting him take a big gasp of sweet, cool air.

The Great Father meanwhile stood up. Gods, he was so tall…

“So far, I like what I see. An’ ‘cuz I can smell you’re curious as ‘ta why…I’ll tell ‘ya what ain’t classified. Keep this to ‘yerselves, yijao? Ain’t nobody needs ‘ta know this.”

Shit. The Great Father was going to tell them a secret. Moiki duck-nodded, along with everyone else. They gathered closer to the Great Father, who sat down on his haunches.

Still as tall as the tallest among them. Balls.

“Right! So. Couple-few weeks back, the Humans lost a ship. Just…gone. Search an’ rescue eventually found a cloud o’ metal droplets. And, uh…some volatile organics. Nothin’ bigger than a grain o’ sand. Not long after that, about the same thing happened ‘ta a Firefang scout, an’ neither ship’s last messages ever got back ‘ta fleet. So we’s gotta build a dead man’s message probe the enemy can’t catch an’ can’t see. An’ we don’ have time ‘ta run up a whole new factory for these things, we gotta start buildin’ ‘em now.”

Ears flattened sadly and heads duck-nodded grimly at the news.

“So…honestly, the real reason I’m here is that. Talked to ‘yer production designers. Sharp heads up in ‘yer office! Pretty practical ‘fer silverfurs, too…”

It was a well-meaning tease, and everyone knew it.

“An’ they gonked out a retoolin’ plan overnight. Well, basics o’ one, anyway. An’ the first bit is we gotta clear the entire factory floor. Full rebuild of ‘yer line. Ain’t none of this gon’ be useful. So…knowin’ that’s yer task for the next couple weeks, an’ mosta this shit’s fuckin’ heavy an’ bulky as fuck, I’m here just ‘fer…balls, next couple’a few days, why not? Fuck it, let’s put me ‘ta work.”

Well.

“Right,” Geezi jumped in. “I’ve got work assignments for all you smelly brownies. Present company excepted of course,” he nodded at the Great Father with a chitter. “Moiki, since you’re an extra special pain today, you get the hardest bit. Our Father here will be movin’ all the modular cells up and across to the loading dock ‘fer resale. You’ll be disconnecting ‘em and putting them in transport-safe mode. Don’t you dare slow him down, yijao?”

Yesterday, if Moiki had been told he’d have spent the day working directly alongside the Great Father himself, he’d have wondered what he’d done to deserve it!

Now, he knew exactly what he’d done to deserve it. “Yi!” he yipped, resignedly.

The Great Father hugged him with one arm and gave him a noogie.

“Good. Rest o’ you lot will be packagin’, sweepin’, pullin’ old cable, prep ‘fer the ‘lectricians…”

And so on. Papers were handed out and everyone had their general tasks.

Daar turned on Moiki. “Right, so!” he chittered happily. “Show me what ‘ta do!”

“I, uh, I have to undo all these feed lines first, so…”

Well, he did that. Went to check out his tools, lock out the power, hydraulics, pneumatics, network, sync and drive-shaft connections. Did his work as fast as he could. The instant he’d finished, the Great Father reached down, found a grip—

Biceps and shoulders bigger than Moiki’s entire body rippled as they pulled at the immense load, testing its weight. That done, and with not even a grunt of effort, the Great Father… lifted. Every mammoth muscle on his Keeda-dreamed artwork of a physique exploded with truly, genuinely unfathomable might—

And just lifted the entire fuckin’ cell like it was made of air.

“Right! So, where’s this thing goin,’ lil’ buddy?”

…

“Moiki?” He gave such a smug pant-grin, it was just….he was so impossibly strong–!

“…Uh, over there, My Father.” He pointed to the opposite end of the factory.

“‘Kay.” And with that, he set off on a brisk walk, not bothered at all by the literal tons of weight in his arms. Every part of him bulged out huge and writhing under the immense load, yet he moved so effortlessly! What normally took a heavy forklift with extra counter-weights and a safety guide in front was little more than a bulky box against his godly strength.

…no time to be terrified by that. Moiki snapped out of it, dived toward the next unit and set to disconnecting it. He wanted to be halfway through the third before the Great Father returned.

Unfortunately, the Great Father galloped back on all fours once he’d set it down. Moiki sped up, not wanting to idle such a ridiculously and usefully strong male. He found himself working the most grueling pace he’d ever managed, and the Great Father’s own was merciless.

Lunch was the most amazing meal he’d ever eaten. He couldn’t even remember what it was, only that he needed the food so fucking badly. Dinner was too. Daar (as he started to insist on being called, after a bit of work had been done) snuck in meal after huge meal while he was waiting on Moiki to catch up. After that, they moved onto bigger and heavier equipment, until finally they arrived at the fixture turntable where the sub-assembly lines met. That piece of equipment was so large and heavy, their overhead crane struggled with it—

With an actual grunt this time, Daar somehow got it moving, exploded underneath and in one fluid motion, had the giant cast iron disk held over his head like the world’s biggest pizza. Everyone stated agape as he calmly walked the damn thing across the factory. It had originally arrived on a special extra-wide trailer and was so big across, even he seemed small under it! But nothing so simple as the turntable’s literal truck-breaking mass could stop him. The concrete by the loading dock crumbled under his feet, but he set it down, gentle as downy fur. He looked down at it, huffed in satisfaction, turned and flexed for everyone.

…Gods.

They all gawped at him in a stunned combination of fascination, admiration, and genuinely submissive fear as he enjoyed showing himself off for a long moment, clearly proud of what he was and what he’d done. Then he shook out his pelt, bounced heavily on his toes…

“That was fun! So what’s next?”

By the end of the day, Moiki could barely stand. Everything was beat to hell and screaming for rest. But they got the job done faster than he’d have ever thought possible. He was so shattered by the end that Daar himself took pity, and carried him to his nest bed at shift end.

“It’s late out,” he noted. “Be easier if..do y’all mind if I spend th’ night?”

What could they do but agree in dumbfounded amazement? Nobody had any energy for any post-work play though, which he sensed immediately. If he was disappointed, he didn’t let on. Instead, he made himself a nest in the center of the room, and invited everyone to join him.

“Shit, you boys put in a good day! Git some rest.” The Great Father pulled him and several others up against the impossible steel of his giant body for a good, hard cuddle, right there among the filthy, sweat-matted brownfurs of real life instead of traveling home to his perfumed palace, where mating contracts and the Great Mother no doubt awaited him.

“Don’t…think that’ll be too hard, My Father…”

Moiki chittered in pure exhaustion, finding no escape from Daar’s comfortably tight grip, wrapped up from nose to toes by the Great Father’s musky, thick-furred brawn.

Gods, he was already drifting off. He did remember Daar’s’ rumble though, and felt a fond snuffle in his fur. “Din’t think so. Now sleep, lil’ buddy. Tomorrow ain’t gonna be any easier.”

He hadn’t slept so good in ages.

And it wasn’t. Nor was the day after, or the two days after that, either. The Great Father was encouraging, inspiring, and utterly fuckin’ relentless as the scale of the man’s strength made short work of what would otherwise have been a weeks-long project. By the end of it, they had a whole new assembly line, with eight brand new nanofactories purring away that Moiki could limp around and oversee with half the time and effort of the old machines.

And, new among his personal possessions, a signed picture as a memento. It featured Daar on all fours, angled, snarling, and flexed out to look as dangerous as could be, with the whole workhouse atop, aside, or along him all giving their best along with him. That picture was his ticket to all the respect and mating opportunities a Clanless male could ever dream of. They had personal invitations to visit High Mountain too, one day. Nobody else got that!

He took leave, once the factory line was tending to itself. They all did. They’d earned it.

But they only took one day each.

The Gao needed them.

Date Point: 19y7m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Today was indeed turning out to be interesting. He was supposed to do a photoshoot for…well, “public reassurance” as they had taken to calling it, but as predicted, Ava had called to cancel. Hopefully the shoot would be soon; there were lead times to worry about, and holding at low single-digit lean for more than, oh, a week or so could make him quite the grumpy gus.

Weird, where life had taken him.

At least he had an explanation now for some of the lifelong weirdness that had plagued him. Right from early school, he’d known something was up, and new to keep it mostly to himself and a few close friends. He didn’t always manage, though. One of the high school’s big dumb assholes, himself a state-level boxer, had once made the mistake of taking some of his insecurities out on his girlfriend in front of Julian and, well…Never boxed again.

Didn’t walk for several months, either. Julian wasn’t exactly proud of that, or of what happened when the asshole’s buddies on the football team ambushed him one night a couple weeks later.

They didn’t have a football season that year, either. It had been so easy…

Julian was only a freshman, too.

He was lucky as heck on that one, actually. A few parents and the school principal had witnessed the thing, because by coincidence they were sitting across the field at the PTA leader’s house, talking about something school-related, probably…

After that, it was made pretty clear to him it’d be best if he kept to himself. Instead of maybe causing an incident in gym class, they let him use the weight room, and after showing them all what he could do…he never had a problem with anyone else. Did still have a few friends he hung out with, also had a girlfriend but not really. Mostly he did odd jobs for money and was always happy to eat a good meal whenever his friends invited him over. So, nothing too weird…

He stopped playing with the weights, eventually. They very quickly weren’t heavy enough to work up a good sweat and, well, with a long-sleeve shirt on—and he couldn’t afford a big wardrobe—he didn’t look nearly as strong as he actually was, so why bother? Most of his time was spent in the woods, hunting or exploring and eventually taking that job at the national park.

And here he’d always wondered why the Corti chose him of all people to abduct…

On Nightmare, he’d been lonely as shit and worked hard every day and hated every second of it, but he’d basically thrived. Even when carefully rationing his supplies, he’d not wasted away. And when he had eaten well, it just sort of…filled him out. He never felt hungry, really. But he never felt full either. He ate everything in sight when times were plenty; there was wisdom in the ways of the bear, after all. He never put on too much fat either, but his strength and muscle mass grew almost instantly, so he used that energy to build up his wood pile, explore his territory, build shelters and whatnot. He never really questioned it. Of course he stockpiled when winter approached, because he couldn’t sleep the winter off, after all…

The point was, things had never felt impossible.

He was good in the woods, for sure, but that good? Maybe. Then he’d been rescued, and rather than needing to rest and recover, he’d run a marathon to steal some advanced Guvnurag technology. If he hadn’t been so addled by isolation at the time, he might have thought Kirk had unrealistic expectations of what a human could do…except, he’d done it. Easily. Heck, he enjoyed himself doin’ it.

Then he’d lost his foot, and despite multiple doctors all saying it should be just as good as the real thing…it hadn’t been. He’d kept finding new ways to be more than that prosthetic could handle. At the time, he’d chalked it up to ET physicians just not knowing humans very well, except later modifications by human doctors had also failed. Maybe they’d been right, and it would have handled an ordinary human just fine.

Or maybe it was just him having naturally huge feet, really. Should have paid closer attention.

In his time he’d gone from a superfreak in high-school to a mutant-dense, survival-tested lone wolf, back up to full-sized and powerful…and now he was second only to an actual straight-up goddamn supersoldier, in the best damn shape he’d ever managed in his life. Well, no. The best shape a man could achieve. It was like his body could be whatever he willed it to be.

And that hadn’t been by chance, it turned out.

It had taken Al and Xiù to make him accept and embrace his gifts, though. And the combined sadism of first Dane, then Adam, to help him fully realize them. And the Ten’Gewek to make him need them.

And squash with ambassador Rockefeller to bring him back down to Earth a bit.

He’d never thought too much of it as a sport, really. It was…pretty country club. Polo-wearing was never his thing. But the game had the interesting advantage that it was a good workout for anyone who played, and skill ended up mattering a whole lot more than speed or strength. Given that, and Julian’s relative inexperience, Rockefeller had more than a fighting chance at a victory. The old man had some moves!

Julian would definitely need to study them for future games…

Afterward, they ambled along in the adjacent park, Julian very much enjoying the grass between his toes and the cool breeze against his bare back. It was a nice and refreshing break before he headed over to Akyawentuo for another week among his favorite cavemonkeys.

Some ambassador-talk first, though. The Marines were damn good at their job, too: they had plenty of privacy. Still, they stuck to the bits of the park where they wouldn’t cause much fuss.

They had a lot to talk about.

“Christ, I still can’t really wrap my head around it,” Julian grumbled, a bit distractedly.

“It’s a hell of a tale, isn’t it? And one that touches you quite personally…”

“…Yeah. Though…if I’m honest? I’m kinda okay with it. Which feels weird to say.”

Rockefeller looked up at him curiously. “What do you mean by ‘okay?’”

“I mean…I’m not super angry at them anymore. But… Okay, so, the big ramifications of them sneaking and hiding among us and breeding folks, yeah, I’m still working to get my head around that. But what it means for me personally? It…answers some questions that I already mostly knew the answers to, and doesn’t raise any new ones. Well, no. It doesn’t raise any that aren’t part of the bigger ones, anyway. So in a way, it’s almost welcome. To, y’know. Finally have a definitive answer.”

“Answer to what specifically?” The ambassador said, shrewdly.

“My family. Why I grew into a juggernaut as a teen, why I was able to survive so well on Nightmare. I’m apparently their ‘Soldier’ strain or whatever. So I’m supposed to have a super adaptable body. Take full advantage of whatever circumstance I’m in, right? So…okay. That fits with my life. I’ve always been exactly as big and strong or whatever as I’ve been able to feed myself, and I’ve never really felt starved. That only makes sense if you think of it that way, y’know?”

“Maybe that helps explain how well you coped with the loneliness, too.”

Julian found himself scratching at the back of his head. He grumbled, annoyed at the old habit. “…Eh. I dunno about that. Do you know how hard it is to be alone for me anymore these days? Even just for a day or three it sets me on edge.”

“Hmm.”

Now that was a telling emote.

“You’re scheming,” Julian accused with a grin. “I can tell.”

“Yes! So. It occurs to myself and the President that, regardless of whatever our history is, we would be highly unwise to reject Ekallim-Igigi entirely. Diplomatic relations will be established….and we will need an appropriate ambassador, of course.”

And there it was. Exactly as Julian had foreseen. Still, there were some questions to clear up first.

“Me? I’m kinda their handiwork, aren’t I? Are we rubbing their face in it, or…?”

“Not really, no. It’s important that we have someone who can peer with them on a personal level. Same as with the Ten’Gewek, really. That’s as much for their benefit as it is ours, if we’re to establish relations. But more importantly…I don’t think you’ll ever forget Nightmare, will you?”

Julian didn’t need to reply; the brief tension in his shoulders, and the deep breath to let go of it, did that for him. Rockefeller had a way of making his point with a sting in it. “…Right. And I wouldn’t let them forget their plan has had real consequences for real people.”

“Exactly. So, assuming you’d be willing…we had given a thought to your successor on Akyawentuo. Or if not a successor, then at least a deputy. That is a tall order, we realize…”

“Daniel Hurt,” Julian offered, instantly. “They respect him at least as much as me.”

“Oh?”

“Absolutely. Al and Xiù and I showed them our people demand respect, and we each did for different reasons. Me? I showed them we could hang with them on their own terms. But Daniel, he showed them our strengths on our terms, and they’ve come to respect that, too. Which, frankly, is the one thing we have over them. We have wisdom, experience, and a crafty, tough adaptability they admire. That matters because, and I am not exaggerating when I say this: they are quite literally better than us at goddamn everything. Their bodies, their senses, reflexes, intelligence…all of it. They are straight-up superior to anything out there and they know it.”

“On the average, sure. I note you exist, and more alarmingly so does the good sergeant Firth. I also note they don’t have rockets,” Rockefeller added, wryly.

“And they couldn’t have them anyway, with their gravity. But that’s the thing, though. They also know that there’s a handful among the ‘weaker’ Sky-Tribes that humble them. Daar of course, Righteous, a few other gaoians and humans…me, I guess…well, okay. Me definitely these days.” He grinned ruefully. “Adam wouldn’t let me be anything besides my best, so I’ve grown into even more of a Slab than he ever was! By, like…all of it. Only thing he’s got on me now is height! So among Ten’Gewek, it’s really only Yan these days who can straight fold me up.”

Which was a heck of a thing to be! Firth aside, absolutely no other human being was his match anymore, by really any measure a man could imagine. Something like that could mess with a fella’s head, and he tried to keep perspective in life…

But damn if that didn’t feel good. He’d beat up Firth too, one day. And Yan. And…

“Plus,” he added after a moment, “we haven’t seen what Yan on spacemagic is like, either…”

“Right. So, again: why Professor Hurt? He isn’t any of that.”

“Because every human there respects him, especially me. Because he tells good stories. Because he’s a heck of a good teacher. Because he worked hard every day to keep up, and they watched him grow fit and hard like old knotted wood. He showed respect to the things they care about. And, uh…there’s something else. They, uh…we’re elves to them.”

Rockefeller chortled in surprise. “…Say again?”

Julian paused, and turned to face Rockefeller. He didn’t quite strike a pose like the meathead he was, but he did stand upright, so as to let the Ambassador get a good look at him at his best.

“Elves. This. What I am. So, uh…tall, wise, strong too, suffused with sky-magic I suppose…but the important bit is that they think we’re beautiful. Like…all of us. With someone like…well, like me? Sometimes they’re even afraid to flirt, and flirting is basically how Ten’Gewek say hello! Even weirder? It’s us too, right? It’s sort of mutual. Like, look at them! They’re alien and interesting and handsome as fuck like hulked-out comic book superheroes. You can’t have missed how popular the JETS Ten’Gewek are on the night scene.”

“That’s not my thing, Julian. But yes, I have heard rumors…so we fascinate them.”

“Yeah. We’re taller than them, and they’re sensitive to tall things. They see nearly every human they meet as this towering sort of being, y’know? Yan’s more or less damn near a god among them and we’re both six-three, right? It’s only his crest that’s taller. Daniel‘s six foot himself, so that means he’s got a good head on anyone besides Yan and I at the Lodge. And he’s approachable. He, uh, gets a lot of offers,” Julian chuckled. “I didn’t tell you that.”

“Oh, my…” Ambassador Rockefeller chuckled. “So, all that aside, firstly: would you be willing? It would eventually mean a relocation.”

Julian thought about that. Lots of advantage to a move like that, and not every ambassador got to found a mission. Lots of people in State would be jealous as heck over that. So…politics. Whatever. He was getting good at that game, too. And playing pals with the people who ultimately caused him to be what he was…

Conflicting thoughts, right there.

“…Right. I’d need to discuss it with my family. The boys are moving out soon, but it’s still pretty sudden, and I’d at least like to get them safely off to, y’know. Wherever they end up going.”

“Of course. But it would be a well-protected place. Security would be far less intrusive.”

“True…”

“And perhaps this is a bit forward, but it would be excellent intelligence as well. You’d have a full embassy staff, be station chief of course. You’d also be raising children there, and given your family’s superlative talents, and what your children are likely to be…”

A lot of implications there, considering the brief. And of course, they knew full well what Julian was now. Properly knew, with all the questions asked and answered. Many of those implications were regarding his kids, and how they’d grow up…and that had him wondering.

Should he, for their sakes? A hidden quasi-civilization of extreme meritocracy, where a few even earned functional immortality? Who could properly challenge them? Hell, they were already proving pretty damn exceptional! So what would a life like that be like?

…Would they be safe from what might well end up being a hell of a backlash on Earth?

Julian thought about it. “That’s sorta conflicting, not gonna lie.”

“Obviously, we’d want you to think about it. The President has come to respect your abilities over time and you’ve gained his confidence. Your weekly summaries are well-received.”

“Oh? I sort of got the impression that, uh…”

“That you intimidate him?” Rockefeller noted slyly, and gave Julian a bemused up-and-down assessment. “I wonder why.”

“…Yeah.” Head-scratching again. Whatever.

“Anyway. It’s something to think about. But please, think quick. I’d want to propose this to the good professor as soon as possible, so he has time to consider too. And on that note…we’d obviously need to discuss this with the Lodge. Which brings me to my next question: if we go forward, would it be useful for me or someone else to appear? Help argue the case?”

Hmm. Julian gave Rockefeller a quick once-over in turn. He was in pretty good shape, but…

“Well…I’ll just be blunt. Probably the most important thing if you’re going to meet the Lodge is that, uh…fuck it. You need to look good naked, since naked is exactly what you’ll be.”

Rockefeller burst out laughing. “Of course. I don’t know why I’m surprised…but alas, that ship sailed twenty years ago.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You’re in damn decent shape actually,” Julian noted truthfully. “I know a particularly sadistic personal trainer that’ll get you beach-ready in short order, too…”

“Ha!”

“And, uh…might be useful to have you there, yeah.”

It might be, too. Julian didn’t know if he would go for the offer but, well…he had ambition, he’d learned over the years. And drive. Something like this would certainly grow his stock, and that could only help his kids. He already sort of knew how Al and Xiù would react, but even still…

Rockefeller gave Julian a shrewd look. “It would, huh? Well, maybe you better get me in touch with this friend of yours. How much am I going to hate life?”

“Yes. Until the masochism sets in. It can get pretty addictive, not gonna lie.”

“Hmm. I’m sure my wife will thank you.”

“That’s exactly what went through my head while Dane fixed my eating habits. Worked, too.”

“Well. In that case, I better think hard on some things myself. In any case…” They’d ambled around much of the park and found themselves heading back toward the Folchtan streets. “I think that’s all we can say for now. As for the rest: we’ve begun contacting known agents of Ekallim-Igigi. Nothing untoward, just…letting them know we see them. The President has not made a decision as to what to do, just yet. We’re also delaying the public announcement so as to, ah, allow for a dignified egress from the less understanding parts of the world.”

Julian nodded grimly. That was a consideration, to be sure. “Right. I presume though, the announcement will come. And soon.”

“Soon, yes. And the witch hunts will follow…” Rockefeller shook his head. “Aside from that, we must establish relations. Low-level meetings to that effect are underway.”

“Things move fast when they have to.”

“Indeed they do.” They were back on the sidewalk at last. Rockefeller rolled his shoulders like a man who’d just thoroughly enjoyed their pleasant stroll, and shook Julian’s hand. “Pleasure as always.”

“And you. I’ll think quick.”

They parted ways, and Julian stood for a moment, strumming his fingers over his belly while he processed the day’s news. He was at a loss for what to do next.

Well, he could stretch, at least. So he found a nice curb, wrapped his foot around it, and stretched out his calves one at a time. He tended to move about on the balls of his feet instead of flat-footed, so they’d always been pretty damn huge. Big enough to make boot shopping impossible, bigger even than Adam’s lately. Firth’s ridiculous bulls made either of theirs look puny, of course… Still, if Julian didn’t work at it, they tended to be so tightly muscle-bound that he naturally stood a bit digitigrade. Didn’t even have to try, that was just how it was.

Adam and Firth had the same problem, so…every damn day, rather than risk anything, they spent a good fifteen minutes doing this, forcing their heels down to stretch things out.

Normal people didn’t have problems like that. No “normal” athlete no matter how elite had that problem! But he’d had it from before he was a teenager: he’d always been too muscular to be believed at any age, even if he wasn’t always so huge. And it was just a litany of little annoyances like that—stretch his neck, keep his hips and shoulders mobile, all that to fight off being locked into useless stiffness by his own ridiculous strength—which really drove home what exactly had been done to him. Done to so many.

…What the hell was he going to do?

Well. A long talk with Al and Xiù, obviously. And the boys. Friends, too. Heck, even Vemik. In fact…yeah. He was due some quality time with his favorite cavebro anyway, and it was nice being big and strong enough to put Vemik in his place, lately…

No. Julian shook his head. That was exactly the sort of place his mind wandered to when he wanted to procrastinate on something uncomfortable. Go Slab, go tussle with friends, go chop wood if he was back home…when he had a cabin to go back to, anyway…

Talk it out right now. Like Adam always said, do the hard work first. So…

He finished stretching, bounced on his toes, and sprinted home as fast as he could.

Do the hard things first.

Date Point: 19y8m AV
Clan Whitecrest Chapterhouse, Lavmuy, Gao

Thurrsto, Champion of Clan Whitecrest

The funny thing was…Thurrsto wasn’t nervous.

Any other Champion of any other Clan found to have kept secrets from the Great Father would have been right to tremble in fear of the coming disapproval, even if, as was his preferred style in peacetime, it was seldom more than that. But secrets were Whitecrest’s whole reason. They were what the Gao had entrusted Whitecrest to curate and keep, and for that reason Daar had never yet demanded any knowledge that touched on the Dark Rites.

Now, he had, out of apt suspicion about their nature. And what interesting secrets they were…

He didn’t just come out and do so, of course. First they engaged in Typically Daar-like Activities, which of course had only one possible outcome against such a colossally huge beast like him. Thurrsto was eventually allowed to escape Daar’s most bestest combat snuggles with some full-body bruising, deep aches in parts of himself he didn’t realize could ache, exhaustion, novel new symphonies of pain to savor…

So, he got off pretty lightly, as these things went. Now they were settled in Thurrsto’s state office—what an agony that cross-city run had been!—and the conversation began.

“Damn, Cousin. These are nice digs ‘ya got here!” The Great Father hadn’t previously visited Thurrsto’s office suites and was busy sniffing about, tail wagging wildly and (somehow) miraculously avoiding all of the priceless artifacts held on display. So much history had been destroyed in the war, that the collection—passed down from Champion to Champion since Fyu’s time—was triply a treasure these days.

Thurrsto duck-nodded happily. The building wasn’t the tallest or flashiest in Lavmuy, that wasn’t the Whitecrest way. But it did have one of the finest views, from the uphill end of the financial district and out toward the low-rise historic Old City and the canals.

Also…keeping a practiced eye for defensible terrain and lines of communication? That was definitely the Whitecrest Way.

“I can’t argue with the view! Ow.” Thurrsto chittered resignedly and reached for his bottle of ibuprofen. Advil, the good stuff directly imported from Earth. “Gods. Every time we spar, you’re somehow massively better than the last time. Do you truly understand how fast you are?”

Daar growled in a smug, dominant rumble. “An’ big an’ strong, too! I learn from squishin’ tough Brothers like you. An’ a Great Father’s gotta keep his bestest Champions nice an’ smushed!”

Thurrsto chitter-sighed in resignation. “Fine, fine. Be that way.” He swallowed down a full gram today; it wasn’t easy being big, or being Daar’s friend. “Anyway, we sized the building for alien guests and modern reality. Good wide corridors, steel-frame and concrete construction…very defensible. Artfully ‘brutalist’ as the Humans would say. And Daar-proof too, as it turned out.”

“Ha!” Daar chittered, and test-bounced in place. The floor didn’t even vibrate. “Fair ‘nuff! A ‘Back could get used ‘ta that…but I was talkin’ ‘bout the stuff.” He inspected an ancient theater mask, with its stylized curling fangs and waxing crescent moon on the forehead. The traditional indicators of a duplicitous, untrustworthy character. “High Mountain ain’t got nothin’ like this in its collections. Any o’ this,” he waved a mighty paw across the room. “We need ‘ta preserve this best we can.”

“Indeed. Thus, our new Chapterhouse is a fortress. And this room in particular. It is quite impenetrable against most anything. Weapons or ears.”

“An’ o’ course, we got scanned several times just gettin’ here.”

“Tactfully, I would hope…”

“I only noticed three of ‘em.”

“That’s three more than most, My Father.” Thurrsto chittered, and briefly inspected one of the hanging flower-vines. A tiny insectoid tending drone tapped irritably at his claw as he got in its way. They were the other component of the room’s striking beauty. All that concrete, glass and steel would have made for a cold and dead kind of museum otherwise, so all the mineral bones of the place had been lavishly adorned in a riot of life. And Thurrsto had to admit…he was beginning to love pink. “You should have noticed all five. We’ll need to teach you.”

“Kinda why I wanted ‘ta talk to you today, actually. An’ I cleared my calendar ‘fer you.”

“Oh? Even your mating contracts? It is late winter, after all…”

Daar chittered and wagged his tail, but the set of his ears quickly turned serious. “Even those.”

Thurrsto duck-nodded his understanding and left the plant alone to return to the desk. “Well then. Having read Wilde’s recounting of the Singularity story…I saw that Y!’kiidaa claimed a paw in our Clan’s founding.”

“Mm. An’, readin’ about him, I think I know a fair bit of what he’s about. He takes pride in never lying, I bet. The perfectly honest trickster.”

“I suspect you’re right,” Thurrsto agreed. He picked up the document he’d been studying, a scan of some papers now stored in a carefully climate-controlled case down in the basements. He gave them a wistful look, and put them back in their folder. “Have I ever told you of our First Father, Meeti?”

Daar tilted his head at the apparent non-sequitur, then shook it no.

“He’s one of our minor secrets. A direct descendent of Fyu…and a very successful male. Every breed-conformant Whitecrest claims ancestry from him.”

“…Dang. Really?”

“He is the origin of the white crest.”

“So that’s why y’all kept it all these years.”

Thurrsto ventured a cheeky pant-grin. “Well, that and the Females think it’s very handsome.”

“Of course…but still. I betcha keepin’ certain things in-family was part of it.”

“It became…a kind of useful physical shibboleth, if you will. The loyalty you can cultivate with that kind of known ancestry has helped us keep a great many secrets over the centuries.”

“Dangerous, that.” Daar growled in thought. “Cultivatin’ family ties are taboo ‘fer a reason.”

Thurrsto retrieved a decanter of talamay and poured two glasses. “How closely have we examined that taboo?” he asked, carefully. “We have breed conformance, but we also disconnect cubs from their parents. Why? Who does that benefit?”

He handed Daar the larger glass. “Among the Humans, Singularity could intervene directly. Had to, in fact.“

“Or so they claim.”

“Yes, but I am happier knowing a ready supply of Julians and Adams and all the rest are here to help the fight. What about us? Given our very different culture, our entirely different biology and approach to mating, how could they achieve a similar result among the Gao?”

Daar flicked his ears and furrowed his brow. He only did that for his biggest thinks. “…I mean, I get where ‘yer goin’ wit’ that, but th’ practice is ‘fer the cub’s benefit, too. They get a freedom o’ choice they wouldn’t otherwise have.”

“Yes. An honest sort of trick, isn’t it?” Thurrsto tipped his glass toward the theater mask. “And that’s great for the prospects of most young males. But the standouts? The really, strongly breed-conformant cubs? They go into the Clans anyway. Why wouldn’t they? Better mating opportunities beckon, for a start. Whether they’re big and brown-furred, sleek and black, white-crested, curly-furred…whatever it may be. Anyone who can stand out among Clan almost always joins up. Those that don’t are subjects of gossip precisely because they don’t. You see a white-crested Clanless, and everyone assumes he must actually be an Associate.”

“Or he has some terrible secret, or whatever.”

“We’re known for that, yes.”

“Shaddup,” Daar rumbled.

Thurrsto chittered, and drank. “But because they don’t know who their sires and birth-mothers are, because family is only a database match and nothing more…there’s scope for anonymity. There’s scope for secrecy. There’s an impenetrable fog around everyone’s parentage, now. We’ll never know how many of Singularity’s Gaoians lived among us and contributed to the Clans we know today.”

“So it achieves th’ dual purpose o’ encouragin’ th’ breedin’ lines while also hidin’ influence.”

“A scheme worthy of Keeda himself.”

“Heh. I s’pose it is.” Daar scratched at his own ear. “…An’ it makes sense. Singularity couldn’t afford ‘ta be overt with us, not when th’ Hierarchy’s known about us since ‘fore we invented writing.”

“Yes. But influence us they have. I think it’s interesting though: of all the Clans, only Whitecrest can look at one another and draw kinship lines.”

“Even you? You weren’t exactly always in the Clan’s good graces…”

“Even me, though I am not at all purebred Whitecrest. Most of my size comes from Straightshield and Longback influence, actually. But this?” Thurrsto gestured toward his towering crest. “This is worthy of a Ten’Gewek, and I know exactly where it came from.”

“Interesting…and you don’t doubt what Y!’kiidaa claims,” Daar noted shrewdly.

“No.” Thurrsto knew where their conversation was going.

“Hrrm.” Daar paused to consider a different artifact, this one much more recent than the theater mask. An encryption engine, from the time of Gao’s only major industrialized internecine war. The intricate brass clockwork mechanism was exposed for visual effect. “I gave you certain orders, lately. Contingencies, yijao?”

“Yes, My Father.” How could Thurrsto forget?

“If I pull on this thread…if I ask you ‘fer the knowledge I need ‘ta understand this…will it damage those contingencies?”

“You put me in a difficult position, My Father.”

“Hrrm,” Daar repeated. He studied the clockwork a little while longer, then made up his mind. Thurrsto could read it in the subtle shift of his body language. “…Look. Cousin. I think the time has come to close the loop on all this. I need to know.”

Thurrsto sighed. “I think you do,” he agreed. “And that means only one thing.”

“…Oh?”

Thurrsto took a box from his desk drawer, set it down in front of them, and opened it with his thumbprint. Daar sniffed curiously at it as it unlocked.

“…What’s that?”

Thurrsto removed a key from the box along another special object, then stood and headed toward the door. “Follow me, please.”

They proceeded in silence down the long corridor toward their deepest, darkest basement. The soundproof one, where the worst arts of their mission were sometimes practiced. Everyone who saw the object in Thurrsto’s paw immediately cleared a path and looked away.

That fearful energy was not lost on Daar, who flicked an ear but, wisely, said nothing.

Good. Discretion when it matters.

After some minutes, they arrived at a heavy door. Thurrsto’s heart threatened to race, but long practice had taught him the secret of keeping it under control. With all his arts, he betrayed no fear, no apprehension. No nervousness, no concern for a good friend about the ordeal he was about to inflict…

One last warning. More courtesy than most initiates ever got, but this was a special situation.

“Beyond this threshold, any ordinary gao would be bound forever under our most ancient oaths. You of course cannot be bound by anyone or anything but your own honor, so…will you keep our secrets?”

Daar considered. “…Yes. I will.”

“Very well,” Thurrsto sighed. “This Rite is not without risk, My Father. In your case, more risk than most. Do you accept?”

Daar again paused, thinking. That was good too. Not that Thurrsto had ever doubted the Great Father’s level head, but…

“Well…you wouldn’t have led me here if it weren’t important, or if you din’t think I weren’t up to it. So…let’s do it.”

Thurrsto nodded, and led the way into the chamber.

They crossed the threshold.

The trap snapped shut.

And at the end of it, exhausted, trembling, spirit tested to its limits by the ordeal…

Daar of Clan Whitecrest learned the beginning of their truths.

Date Point: 19y8m3w AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Nofl

“Honestly, I’m kicking myself for not seeing it sooner.”

Another chance to have ‘Horse on the table. Not so very long ago, Nofl would have thrilled at every such chance. Now, he was glad to say it was becoming a chore.

The surgery had been a success. Not the wild runaway success ‘Horse had hoped for—that kind of healing was far from instant—but more of one than Nofl had feared it might be. What he had in front of him was a human being with a chronic brain injury. Well-managed, admittedly, and one that was no longer in imminent danger of killing him. But a brain injury nonetheless. Even with modern medicine, proper healing was just going to take some time.

Merely being able to exert himself without fear of a fatal seizure had rejuvenated Adam in a way that honestly got Nofl choked up. He was no longer a pressure vessel of mounting frustration and exhaustion on the verge of detonation. He was…himself.

Rather smaller though. The surgeons had once again refurbished his body, kept his outsize frame and made all the appropriate repairs to joints and sinew…but there was definitely a lot less muscle mass on his bones these days. In light of recent revelations, that he’d ever been capable of outmatching his friends (and seriously so!) was now more astonishing than ever.

A testament to human willpower, that.

“This whole ‘line of heroes’ thing?” Adam asked. The scanner beeped indignantly as he slightly turned his head.

“Hold still, dear…” Nofl adjusted it and resumed the scan.

“Sarry. So, heroes?”

“We’ve known something was happening. We saw it in the Gao with the way their birth rate alters, after all… I was personally in the camp of it being just another intriguing expression of deathworlder genetics. A collective threat response.” He sighed. “Which technically it is, of course.”

“But now with the help of artificial selection.”

“Exactly. I suppose I should be more open-minded about secretive conspiracies pulling the strings from the distant dark. How…how do you feel about that?”

Adam chuckled. “I was the biggest and strongest sapient being alive for over a decade, hombrecito. And the toughest. And arguably the quickest. And the best athlete ever, too. I think I proved my point.”

“Hmm. yes. Your career has largely been spent proving that the entire exercise was a wasted effort.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that…” Adam shrugged. “How many me are there? I got where I was by bein’…well, a lot more motivated than the average guy.”

“That’s putting it delicately, I’d say.”

“Maybe. But still! You got Julian, Firth, Gonzo these days, ‘Base too finally…so, I don’t think it’s right to say it was pointless.”

“Hmm.” He’d clearly been considering matters. Nofl accepted that the scan of his patient’s brain was satisfactory, and put the scanner away. “But how do you feel about it?”

“I dunno,” Adam shrugged again. “Maybe what they did should bother me more, but honestly, I’m just glad to know there’s more guys on our side. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you know? I mean, fuck, you go back a hundred years and look at who America teamed up with against the Nazis or whatever. Sometimes you just gotta say ‘maybe these guys are a problem, but right now there’s a more worser problem’ and be glad of the help.”

“More worser? Oh dear.”

“Hey, like Daar says. Talkin’ that way is more funner.”

Nofl giggled despite himself. “Please stop.”

Adam chuckled too, and sat up when Nofl gestured that he could. The movement was easy, effortless. If you didn’t have an intricate and detailed map of the poor man’s brain to study, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was still one of the healthiest and most capable beings alive. You had to know that previously he would have stood up with cat-like silence, rather than shake the floor.

He just needed practice, Nofl thought. That much progress so rapidly made a full recovery seem very likely, where half a year ago it had seemed impossible. Amazing how working with Humans for twenty years still hadn’t eradicated their capacity to humble him.

“So yeah,” Adam said, swinging his arms. “I ain’t ‘of the Line’ or whatever. Good! I’m just ‘yer friendly everyday superhulk! I’m okay with that.”

“Are you, now? Let’s not fool ourselves here. You took tremendous pride in your body and your abilities…and now your friends have passed you by.”

“‘Cuz I bullied ‘em into doin’ it!” Adam grinned.

“Yes yes. Even so…”

“I’m happy for them,” Adam said instantly, which Nofl visibly doubted. “Really! I am. Isn’t that kinda the point of training folks? That they wind up going further and higher than you did?”

“Perhaps…”

“It is for me.” Adam shrugged and reached for his favorite T-shirt. It had been more than skin-tight, a year ago. Now, it was comfortably loose. “Besides…just the amount of free time I’ll have now, right? I think…I’m definitely gonna reclaim all my old strength and keep the grind up. Just…I’m gonna do it entirely for me now, instead of tryin’ to keep ahead of the mission. We got a team of made-for-it freaks already, so let them keep pushing. I proved it could be done, what’s their excuse? I’m never gonna run a hunnerd miles in a full Mass again, so if half the team ain’t smokin’ my endurance records in five years, I’ll consider it a mission failure.”

“It’s good you’re swearing off those kinds of body-destroying feats,” Nofl noted. “But what about something more reasonable? Say, a five-kilometer jog like other human beings?”

“Yeah. Something modest like that.” Adam grinned, “I think I’ll still keep up the long distance running though, even as a huge guy. Hell, I bet I’ll look prettier naked, too!”

Nofl affected a sigh. “You know what I’m going to say, darling. The advisable thing for you right now is to return to a more normally attainable level of fitness, as I’ve said many times before…and as you’ve ignored, before.”

“I’m not ignoring it, Nofl, it’s just…look at me. There’s no going back from this, ever. That’s always been true of extreme athletes, and it’s extra true for someone like me, or any SOR operator. I’m supposed to be a little five-foot-seven fireplug, but instead I gotta duck and turn sideways through doorways! ‘Sustainable’ is all about perspective. I gotta find what that means for me. And the freaks on the team need a credible challenge anyway!”

Nofl affected a sigh yet again. Well, at least some improvement had been had. “As you say. Just…don’t forget that, whatever your body may be, that—” he tapped his own forehead “isn’t what it once was.”

“Believe me, I’m never gonna be able to forget. You sure there isn’t anything you can do about the migraines?”

“Nothing beyond reminding you again that you’re lucky it’s just migraine. Probably, time and medicine will heal all wounds. Maybe not. Either way, we’ve tinkered with your thinker enough, Adam. I don’t want to have you back in the surgical suite ever again, if we can help it.”

“And I’m sure Daar’s wallet will appreciate that, too,” Adam grinned ruefully.

“Daar’s wallet is none of my concern, darling.” Nofl finished his paperwork, then smiled. “…Good luck on Earth. And don’t waste this!”

Adam nodded seriously. “I won’t.” And with that, he thumped toward the door.

…For a few steps. He paused after the third, considered…

…And prowled out with his old cat-like grace.

Nofl grinned to himself, pleased at his patient’s progress, and returned to the other business on his plate. Cruezzir was back in the spotlight again. Given some of the claims made concerning its origins, naturally there was now an investigation brewing. AEC in particular were going to be sweating at the implication that it was, ultimately, Singularity’s work. They would need calming. Reassuring. Reminding that in fact they’d always trusted an alien power to manufacture and provide the stuff anyway, without fully understanding it.

Nofl himself remained certain of his product. What he’d been given was a jumbled mess of disparate compounds and confusing notes, nothing more. He’d created the medicine, not Singularity. He’d figured out its quirks, conducted its early trials, brought it to the College of Xenopharmacy and proven its merit…It was his, not theirs.

And he was damned if he was going to let them claim any of the credit.

Date Point: 19y8m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel Hoeff

God-fuckin’-damn it was good to be back somewhere normal.

Or as normal as Folctha ever fuckin’ got, anyway. Which, as weird as the place could be, wasn’t literal fabled heroes walking around in a skirt amid a harem of samurai and gladiators and Greek philosophers. Nope. Just a posse of supersoldiers, their pal who could hang with the turbo-Brolic cavemonkeys, engineers, spaceship pilots, millionaire property developers, scientists and geniuses. Completely fucking normal.

…Who the fuck was he kidding?

Nobody he hung out with was normal. Wilde was a fuckin’ monster by any normal standard. All of the men on his team were much the same. Hoeff himself was one of the Beefs now, and that while barely clearing five-four. Smart as fuck too, all of ‘em. Wilde was a fuckin’ gaoian-registered shipfather for fuck’s sake! One of the most infamously brutal merchant marine programs around. They did in one year what the best on Earth managed in four.

And Wilde managed it in nine months on the accelerated program. Fuck.

So yeah. That was “normal” on Folctha, apparently. Hoeff, master beef assassin, friend to the rich and powerful. Who recently met literal space-Gilgamesh, too. That was a hell of a meeting, no lie! And he’d certainly been impressed. Still was! But, truth being told…

In all the impressive dazzle of it all, he’d forgotten exactly what was waiting for him back in Folctha. It had been a full year since he’d seen Julian and Christian, and their first meeting back had been a fuckin’ shock. One full year for the biggest freaks there were to do their thing, under the tutelage of the most lovable, sadistically insane personal trainer there ever was, with all the resources they’d ever need. A full year of that kind of pressure to excel…

…Well. Maybe the soldier-cult in the sky had an unexpected surprise waiting for them.

So, ritual spirit-crushing and body-smashing gym endeavors aside—both the assholes had the temerity to be pretty while doing it too, the fuckers—and they’d decamped to Julian’s place, having…well, an evening. The kids were in the process of moving out to get on with their lives. Folctha University had thrown an unconditional invitation at them, and they’d had easy offers from big institutions back on Earth, too. Bein’ an ambassador’s kids, adopted or not, threw some fuckin’ doors wide open.

And they were exceptional, too. Not “of the Line” or whatever eugenic bullshit, thankfully. Hoeff wasn’t gonna complain about his good breeding, space conspiracy or not, but he did like to know there were normal folks doin’ good for themselves. These two certainly were.

Tristan was leaning toward MIT. Hell of a mind on that one, and he had social connections to a lot of impressively smart people, too. Between the Tisdales, profesor Hurt and his team, Lewis and friendly aliens…hell, even his own sister. Not a bad start to life, really.

Ramsey was probably going to Ohio State, though. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hack it too, but big brain stuff just…wasn’t his thing. Ohio had the nation’s best wrestling program.

Point was, the boys were elsewhere and the toddlers were asleep for the night. And the Etsicitty house was big enough and comfortable enough to get a lotta pretty impressive people together in one place for drinks, discussion….and a celebration too. A hell of a career opportunity had landed in Julian’s lap, and Al and Xiù, ever practical, had insisted he take it.

So, naturally, they’d invited some friends around to share the good news, some good food, and just enjoy each others’ company.

They kept it playful, at first. Small talk, a little teasing at the noise Claire made when she bit into fried chicken for the first time in way too long…by an hour or so in, everybody was comfortable, cuddled up to their partner, loaded up with good drink and good food…

Comfortable enough to talk about the serious shit.

“So what’s this station like?” Allison asked, once she’d stopped poking Julian to make him softer. She didn’t manage. Which wasn’t surprising, considering what a perfect unit he was these days. Christ, he and Righteous had grown into such craggy goddamned monsters so fuckin’ fast while Hoeff was out beating up the galaxy…

Good King Gilgabro was going to be in for a shock, for sure!

Good.

Hoeff swigged his beer and enjoyed Claire’s warmth in his arms a moment longer before turning his mind back to Ekallim-Igigi. “…Makes Armstrong look like a porta-john. You could fit most of Folctha in the palace grounds, and a whole fleet in the docking bays.”

“Damn.”

“Eh. They’ve had a long-ass time to build it. Apparently it started out as like this way smaller obsolete research outpost and the Void Caste just kept upgrading and expanding it.”

“I hope I get to see it someday,” Clara was drinking some kind of a beer about as black and potent as an espresso.

“Yeah, can’t lie. It’s a fuckin’ impressive structure. I’ll give ‘em that.”

“Shame about the creepy hero-worshiping paramilitary cult thing, huh?” Claire filled in.

Hoeff snorted. “That’s not even the weirdest thing. It’s more that they’re ancient in the way they think, y’know? It shows up in a lotta little details but fuck, just for an example? They take their exercise fuckin’ naked and the kids rarely wear any clothing at all. Exactly like we make fun o’ the ancient greeks about.”

“Now, see, that we definitely need to bring back,” Clara nudged her husband with a grin, causing Dane to roll his eyes.

“…Eh. That’s fine and all,” Hoeff snarked, “and I’m more’n happy to show off…”

Now Claire rolled her eyes, but snuggled closer.

“But again, you have kids like Alex doin’ the same thing. And I dunno, but it’s kinda weird when a buck-ass naked boy who can fucking humble you wants to tussle or play football. And I ain’t easy to humble, so use ‘yer imagination.”

Whistles and impressed looks all around.

“Right, but that’s only weird ‘cuz you were born and raised in…what do they call it? ‘Textile’ culture.”

“Alex is twelve. They’ve long since figgered out cloth,” Hoeff snarked. “But sure. It was a little weird, not gonna lie. It’s only ‘cuz they’re so fuckin’ open about it that it works. It’s hard not to like that cornfed kid too, even if he fuckin’ pasted me a few times with his tackles.”

“No weirder than going to a naturist resort, I bet. But sure, I take your point. There was a culture shock.”

“So lemme ask: is that what’s really goin’ on? Is this whole thing just one huge culture clash? I mean…look. We can’t have ‘em interfering anymore. At least not without us knowin’ they’re there.”

“…At least?”

Hoeff held up a hand. “I’m not gonna pretend I can out-think a five thousand year old god-king. Maybe he’s got a point. I dunno, and I’m more used to thinkin’ practically than most. But I don’t like it and I really don’t like ancient powers messin’ with our future.”

“Ain’t just our future, dude,” Lewis had a weird relationship with couches: he seemed to view them as a kind of laboratory for trying out new and exciting ways of sitting. In this case, diagonally upside-down, with his head on the armrest, and his feet up on Lucy’s shoulders, not that she seemed to mind. “The bit that pisses me off more about this shit is thinkin’ of our past.”

Julian tilted his head. “Didn’t they claim they just kinda live peacefully and quietly?”

“Sure, but…I mean, if I was in, like, fourteenth century France or whatever and I had to plough the field and I knew enough shit to invent, like, the fuckin’ horse collar or something? Like, now we’ve got no way of knowing whether that was good old human ingenuity, or imported Singularity hero-genius.”

“Imported human hero-genius,” Julian noted. “We keep talking like they ain’t us, but that’s the thing. They are. Still a human that invented it, and it’s not like the Corti had horses or whatever, so how would they have magicked it up? So, I dunno. What’s our actual hang-up?”

“I know what mine is,” Allison commented.

“What?”

“Where the fuck were they? For, like, the battle of Gao? Or in San Diego? What did they do, just sit back and watch? Not very fuckin’ heroic, if you ask me.” She tipped her beer bottle toward Hoeff. “And why not come forward after First Contact, instead of hiding out there and putting you guys through all that bullshit?”

Lewis shrugged. “We don’t fully understand their motives, dude. That’s gonna take a long-ass time, lots of talky-talk and feely-feels. But if their whole thing was mustering strength for the Final Battle or whatever the fuck, then yeah. Also, didn’t you say earlier they claim they’ve been watching over us for all this time? Keepin’ Hunters and stuff away?”

“So they claim,” Hoeff nodded. “Though I don’t think they’re lying.”

“Seems like they coulda done more,” Allison insisted. “There’s a lot of people dead that they could have saved.”

“At least we have the chance to ask them those questions, now,” Julian noted, giving her a squeeze.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“…Al, if you’re having second thoughts about this…?”

“No! Shit, no. Just…I dunno. Mama instincts. Thinking of taking my baby girl to their station gets me, uh…”

“You’d feel better if you could trust ‘em a little better,” Claire suggested.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“I don’t trust ‘em as far as I can throw that oversized meat-king of theirs,” Hoeff grumbled. “Some of the shit they claimed don’t line up. They claim they never intervened more than some gene-blessed superdude findin’ themselves a mate…but the Corti have records of forced interventions. So either they ain’t fully up on what they’re doin’ or they’re bein’ lawyers ‘bout who did what ‘ta whom. Good reason ‘ta get ‘em off Earth.”

“That doesn’t help, big guy.”

“No. I sure as hell don’t trust ‘em to have completely modern morals or whatever. But by the same token? If we’re talking about treating their guests right and protecting your family if some shit happens? Yeah, I trust ‘em to do that. It’s in their interests to do so.”

“Well, that’s a ringing endorsement…”

“It’s the best we’re going to get,” Xiù pointed out. “And…I won’t lie. The thought of getting to fly down into a gas giant and see it up close is kinda awesome…”

“Heh! True,” Al conceded.

“…God, what I’d give to get a good look at the ship that can do that…” Clara mused, and Hoeff quickly lost the thread as she, Allison and Lewis descended into a technobabble-dense friendly argument about how it was done.

He wasn’t the only one, either. Most everyone else in the room indulged them by leaving them to it—Xiù kissed Al and Julian before she vanished upstairs, pleading mom-hours and the need to sleep. Julian decided to show Lucy and Dane some new nightmarish torture equipment down in the basement…

Claire hinted, through elbows and eyebrows, that the time had come to go enjoy some time alone together. That suited Hoeff just fine—they spent too long apart with work anyway. It was a weird kind of relationship, but…well, it worked ‘cuz they put what time they could have together to good use. So, they made their apologies and headed out. Went for a walk. Talked…

Got back to the apartment and then did somethin’ a whole lot less cerebral for the rest of the night.

Hoeff woke up sometime around about five am local time, just as the sky was starting to light up. It was one of those miracle moments where he didn’t need to pee, he felt perfectly rested enough that he didn’t fall back asleep again, but the bed was so nice and comfortable and Claire was so there…

He lay on his side and watched her for a bit, while his mind turned over.

He had no idea what was coming next. For all he knew, his own assignment would be back to Ekallim-Igigi, or maybe he’d be doing some more work aboard Stray Fortune, wherever Daar decided Wilde and the crew needed to go next. Or should he commit to Claire a little more?

Eh. Why spoil a good moment? He snuggled down, and enjoyed the calm.

There’d be another storm soon enough.

Date Point: 19y11m AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

Senior Master Sergeant Adam (Warhorse) Arés

Lots of feelings to process. No idea how to really process them. Didn’t really feel the whole shindig either, so he made his excuses when it felt polite, said he needed some air—which was true—and decided to go for a walk with Baseball.

The President wasn’t a bad guy, really. Not sure they saw eye to eye on much but, eh. That didn’t matter. When he wanted to escape, President Chambliss was all understanding and grace. “The Rose Garden’s nice,” he suggested. “And so are the rest of the grounds.”

So, he was walking around the White House grounds.

…With a Medal of Honor in his pocket.

Fuck.

Somehow he’d known what was coming and was still surprised it happened. At least he had time to prepare. He wanted to look good for this, which was silly maybe, but, well, what else was he supposed to do? Show up with a pot-belly and a beard? Or show up like a hero?

So, uh, he did. He looked damn good. Honestly, looking in the mirror, it was hard to remember that he’d gone through so much misery at all, or how fucked up he’d been at first. He’d earned back a lot of his strength, was optimistic he’d get it all back and maybe more in the near future. Muscle memory really was a hell of a thing. Hell, with time on his side…

But he hadn’t pulled back everything. A year of mandatory couch-surfing had taken its toll, and Mass-burdened marathons were just beyond him now. He wasn’t really interested in the years of hell he’d need to get that kind of conditioning back either, or at least he didn’t feel driven to break himself to get there. A weekly 5k like a normal human would do seemed to be his speed nowadays, at least for now. Maybe other, tougher things too, eventually. Hell, maybe he would get it all back, eventually. Maybe not. He was okay with that. He could pick his own pace now.

Still. The man in the mirror was definitely Adam: hugely well-muscled, but now more on the trim side of things instead of bulked-out and swoll, and just intensely well-fit to top it off. Looked a fuck of a lot better too, arguably. The difference wasn’t really all that big if he went by the scale, but in the mirror? Well, Ava had told him there were post-career opportunities for him, if he kept at it. Couldn’t complain about a compliment like that!

…So why did the change matter to him so much?

Years and years of it being the center focus of his life, maybe? He was a crazy freak-strong kid even at fifteen though, so…still. And that was what it was, really. Ability. He’d done things nobody else had ever done, and saved a hell of a lot of lives doing it. All that hulking bulk of his had been functional. Maybe it wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing look, being so big, but people who understood what they were looking at appreciated what it represented. Grit. Willpower. Work capacity, and when he wanted to, he was able to shred down to something truly inhumanly awesome with all that size to play with. He’s planned to do just that for the Laid Bare too, but of course he had to get himself blown up.

Maybe he’d get there again, if life worked out that way. But maybe not. Without the right mission, he couldn’t justify being that kind of heroic freak forever, and now…

Now he had to move on. Which was okay. Everyone had to do that. Even him. Pass the torch to Julian and especially Firth, both of them were already better by every measure, and Firth especially had become his own category of freak. Good. The mission would go on without Adam, and he needed to know that, to see it happen.

He did, and now? Well, he was keeping his options open. But absent something interesting coming along, the plan was to stay on the Crude for a few more years to give his body enough time to fully stabilize, build himself back up at a more measured pace, just in case, then…move on. Grow up. Maybe grow old eventually. The full-strength stuff wasn’t gonna let go of him so easily, and his body would be making it for a long while too, but eventually…

Eventually, it’d fade on its own without ongoing therapy. Eventually, he’d get some grizzled wrinkles in his face. Eventually he’d go salt-and-pepper like papá. Eventually he’d move on.

He had no fucking clue what his next job was gonna be.

He sighed, and ‘Base pretty much read his mind entirely, just from that one little sound.

“It’s a hell of a change,” he agreed sagely.

Adam stopped, and briefly wondered if that marble bench over there was strong enough…better not risk it. He was still a Beef. “Yeah. That’s, uh…understating it.”

“I still say you should be an instagram model. Pour your giant ass into the smallest pair of yoga pants we can fit over it without them tearing open.”

Adam snickered. “Dude. Can you imagine? I’m already nearly as heavy as I ever was and that sure as fuck never got smaller…”

“Exactly, bro! Be like every fitness chick, just find excuses to pop ‘dat ass!”

“Dude!”

“Fuck, you know how much the sportswear companies will pay you for that real estate?”

“I don’t think I gotta worry too much about money at this point, Carnal.”

“Bitch, please. You and Marty are gonna make like four hundred babies, we all know it…You could do an OnlyFans! Brother’s gotta get paid by all ‘dem thirsty fucks!”

“Did…did you just make a double PowerThirst reference?”

“Yeah! We old as fuck now, ain’t we?”

“Fuck, I guess…Also, you’re forgetting. I’d be competing with Julian. He’s prettier and nowadays bigger’n I ever was, so…”

“Aww shit, you right,” ‘Base chuckled. “No winning against him! Leaves only one possibility.”

Adam eyed ‘Base warily. “…I’m afraid.”

“The two of you. Together. Just like—”

“No!” Adam laughed. “You pervy fuck!”

“I’m just sayin’—”

“Bro, if I slap you right now, I might actually break part of the White House. I’m stronger’n you again, remember?”

“That’s okay. I’ll just run ten steps and you’ll be out of breath!”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“You promise? Like old times?”

“Wh—that never happened!”

“Whole team thinks it did, so clearly it’s true. We’re the original ‘ship, remember?”

Adam’s laughter boomed off the garden walls. ‘Base always knew exactly how to cheer him up.

“Also,” ‘Base added, “you an’ I’ve been blackout drunk many times, so…you can’t prove it.”

“Yeah I can. You never got treated for a prolapse.”

“Oh damn!” ‘Base finally conceded. “You right. Unless you a big power-bottom—”

“Dude!”

He let it go at that point, and Adam kept grinning while they lapped the White House grounds.

They ambled about in comfortable silence. On lap two, Adam noticed he’d left some pretty deep footprints in the grass…heh. The caveman in him smiled. He still had it.

“We should probably go back inside and mingle or whatever.”

“Yeah. Rescue Firth from the small-talk.”

“Other reasons, too…” ‘Base said cryptically.

“…Oh?”

“Yeah. There’s some people Costello wants to introduce to you.”

Okay then. Back indoors, past the Marine on guard who…okay, maybe only somebody in the know would have noticed, ‘cuz at first glance the guy still looked stony-faced and professional. But Adam could tell he’d been on the edge of cracking up.

So Adam waggled his eyebrows.

Tiny smile. Quickly wrestled under control. Adam nodded, and left the poor Marine alone.

Small-talk, then. He’d always been a meet-and-greet sorta guy, so he managed. Didn’t quite know how to relate to the Violently Civilian types, but pretending like his abuela was listening in helped a lot.

As promised, Costello had some special introductions to make. Most of them were interesting.

One of them in particular was made with Hoeff—outside on the grounds, instead of inside. Likely to avoid an incident, which was even more interesting than the offer itself. The last was a letter from Daar, written by hand in an amazingly good flowing script. In English.

Buddy,

I wish’d I could have been there tonight to congratulate you in person. Where to even begin? I owe you so much, I could never hope to repay that debt. My people owe their very existence to your heroism, to your bravery, to your strength and your honor. You, My Brother, have quietly had more positive impact on the galaxy than almost anyone I can think of, and I include myself in that consideration. I know you won’t necessarily enjoy hearing this, but it is important that you do. Civilization itself owes you everything.

To that end, however small a gesture it may be in the face of such a debt, I would offer you work, if that’s what you want. I know you wouldn’t just want a pension, and frankly I’d be a very stupid Great Father not to at least try and recruit you. I pay handsomely and there are many rewarding missions that still need doing. They wouldn’t be without risk of course, and maybe you’re ready to move on with your life. I respect that too, and don’t let anyone (even me!) play on your sense of duty and heroism to get you on-team. You need to decide for yourself. I’m sure you have many offers, including some of a more understated nature. I’m sure many of them are compelling. Perhaps they might even be irresistible offers.

But I’d love to have you, if you still feel the Call.

Yours forever in love and Brotherhood,

Daar. Brother, Father, Free Associate of Whitecrest, Champion-Emeritus and Stud-Prime of Stoneback, Warleader, Great Father of the Gao

That was…a weighty letter, though the weirdest part was that he couldn’t stop wondering at the hand-written nature of it. Why that? Was it just the mental image of those giant-ass bear-paws handling a pen so delicately?

Or was it that Daar had put in a lot more time and consideration than just dictating to an aide?

The back was covered in Daar Doodles. Little cartoons of daily life. He’d drawn Adam as basically a rectangle with abs and weirdly pretty eyelashes, too…

“Now that is a priceless thing to have,” the President noted, having snuck up beside Adam while he was considering the letter. “I won’t pry, but I can recognize the Great Father’s doodles from across the room.”

“Does he always do those?” Adam asked.

“When he writes a letter, yes. I’ve received two over the years. One on the occasion of my election, the other…well, never mind that. I’m always amazed by how deft his penmanship is.”

“Right…”

“If you wish to make your tactical exit, now would be about the right time. The boozing is about to get serious.”

“Ah. Uh. Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. You can’t be comfortable in those polished boots…”

“Honestly, the collar’s the worst bit,” Adam replied, candidly. “I don’t have a neck so much as a slope.”

The President smiled. “Well, if I were you I’d wanna duck out and celebrate with your real friends. So…go do that. And feel free to run up a big tab on the hotel room, too. Drink that wet bar dry if you want! How often do you get to that on government travel, eh?”

Well, he did have a point…

So, escape made, friends in tow. None of them really…somehow, it didn’t feel celebratory, really. He’d heard that a lot of Medal recipients felt like impostors. Well, he didn’t really, but even so…

He had options to weigh, apparently. And he still didn’t know what he wanted to do. But he knew the first bit.

They jumped back to Folctha the next day. By noon, Adam took advantage of the Medal’s biggest benefit. He went to drop his retirement paperwork. Was advised to wait a week, because (surprise!) he had a directed promotion to Chief going through…waited. Promoted, and celebrated properly. Dropped his paperwork for real this time. Packed up his barracks standby room, took one last walk-through of the unit.

Took one last walk past the memorial wall. Touched each portrait and said goodbye…

Then he was off-base, retirement ID in hand. He’d still have access to the gym, the commissary, all that…but nothing else. Never walk by the portraits again. Never sit in the briefing rooms again. Never set foot in the barracks, never climb the water tower…

Adam was done. He still didn’t know exactly what he was going to do next.

But he was looking forward to finding out.

Date Point: 19y11m4d AV
Colony of Eyes-Turned-Upwards, Planet Hope

Ukusevi, Archivist and Keeper of the Long Chant

“A promotion? How wonderful!”

Ambassador Rockefeller smiled in agreement and accepted a cup of tea with both hands, warming them on the hot ceramic. Winter was a peculiar blessing, and Ukusevi doubted she’d ever tire of frost, snow and ice…though they did grow inconvenient at times. But after a lifetime living in the too-hot, too-stale underground air, the crisp freshness of a winter morning was divine.

To Rockefeller, of course, there was no novelty, just cold.

“Yes! He’s still a full ambassador but now with a full mission. Professor Hurt will in turn become a Special Envoy, since the Lodge didn’t quite want to let go of Julian. They’ll still expect him to visit regularly, but they at least accept it won’t be as frequent.”

“So you did appear before the Lodge,” she said with a bit of mischief.

“Yes,” he chuckled ruefully. “And I was put in my place. Playfully, though. It’s…not hard to tell when they mean anyone harm. In any case, it was a remarkably thoughtful gathering. Maybe I would have preferred it with a bit less hallucinations…”

“Or sweaty play-fighting?”

“That too.”

She giggled. “Oh, I know. The Singers are the same way with me. Though, I quite enjoy the hallucinogens…But perhaps I am more used to them than you. The Keepers have always used certain drugs as part of learning the Chant.”

“Oh?” he chuckled. “Impaired Ten’Gewek all around you? You’re a brave one!”

Some of those meetings had taken some of the unmarred idolatry out of her, though. She’d gotten to know them through Vemik and his Singer, and Yan of course…and when their guard was down, they weren’t shy about what they were.

“Perhaps. I think the men sense we are a prey species and that triggers something in them, but they’ve never been vicious or threatening with me. It’s…hard to say. The line between predatory and playful and outright sexual can be worryingly narrow with them,” she added. “There is certainly a bit of smugness when they’re showing off. And they do like to show off.”

“Not too hard, I hope?”

“No no, it’s always playful. Eventually one learns that a fang-filled grin isn’t necessarily a threat. It’s all about the tail and the crest with them.”

He nodded in agreement. “It’s a bit different with us. They see us as fellow predators, and feel the need to measure up,” Rockefeller replied. “Ironic, considering I’d never hunted a thing in my life up until my first visit to Akyawentuo.”

Uku giggled again and finished her tea. “Well, anyway. I’m glad for Ambassador Etsicitty. He deserves it. But his promotion does leave us needing a special envoy…”

“In point of fact, Germany wants to establish a permanent station here,” Rockefeller said.

Uku perked up. “They’re welcome to! After the generosity and care they’ve shown us, how could we say no?”

A brief reading of German history had been fascinating, and become a useful tool for educating the Faithful on the nature of their new friends from beyond the stars. Those who’d seen and worked alongside Humans and Gao during the liberation had quickly come to see that these people were not angels just by sheer proximity, but to those who’d never met one, though…sometimes a little education was in order. To, as the Humans called it, humanize them.

It said a lot about their cultural self-image that they had a verb for “to make more sympathetic by drawing attention to flaws and limitations,” and it was the same word as the name for their species.

In any case, the Federal Republic of Germany had stepped up early in the Faithful’s exodus to Hope, donating considerable personnel, resources and expertise to the displaced E-Skurel-Ir. It was largely thanks to their contributions that Eyes-Turned-Upwards had the beginnings of an industrial base.

The E-Skurel-Ir were a cautious people, so some of Uku’s advisors fretted about their benefactors’ history and what dark currents might lurk underneath, others were vexed at the thought of becoming a second-class workforce here on their gifted new world…

Uku understood their trepidation; the last beings from the sky to enter her people’s history hadn’t been benign at all. And she knew good and well that there were factions to Humanity for whom her advisors’ mistrust was well-founded…But she trusted Allied Extrasolar Command, and she trusted Germany.

“You’ll have an AEC envoy as well, of course,” Rockefeller added. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if others don’t come your way, too. You have a whole planet, rich in resources. There are governments on Earth who are going to want to negotiate access.”

Uku nodded and poured the last of the tea. “They are welcome to come and negotiate. And I suppose at some point, we are going to want to make contact with this Singularity ourselves…”

“Mm.” Rockefeller accepted his fresh cup with a nod. “About that. You’re an unknown quantity to them. As far as we can tell, they had no idea you existed until well after we did.”

“Just like everyone else,” Uku sighed.

“That being the case, the question arises of whether you are content for Julian to represent you to Singularity, or whether you would prefer he had somebody with him to advise…”

Uku lifted her head and nodded, understanding exactly what he was saying. “Ah, yes. I have faith in Ambassador Etsicitty, but we do owe it to him to see that he’s well-prepared for every aspect of the position…”

“I thought a Keeper of the Long Chant,” Rockefeller suggested. “A young and perceptive one, who’s mastered the mnemonic disciplines…”

“Oh, of course. This is a historic moment. I’m sure we all want to be certain it is remembered accurately…” Uku gave Rockefeller a mischievous look over her tea. “I can think of a young Keeper who would be perfect for the role.”

“Oh, good.” Rockefeller chuckled, and drank.

They made a little more polite talk, traded well-wishes, and eventually he stood, said his goodbyes, and was gone back through the Array to whatever business awaited him on other planets. Uku closed her eyes and mentally reviewed the conversation, distilled out what was necessary, and wrote it in her journal. Nothing in the conversation rose to the level of needing to be added to the Chant…

But she had no doubt that young Teeisyo would bedelighted at the opportunity to contribute to the Chant himself. It was a position he deserved, and it promised to be interesting. And for once, as a rare luxury, “interesting” need not be synonymous with “violent.”

With her thoughts recorded, she delved the archives to retrieve some of the books on Human history. It was time for her to learn about this “Gilgamesh” for herself. What she found was not the truth, of course…but it contained truth. And as she had learned years earlier, before leaving the Punished World…that was the best one could hope for in history.

Still.

It was a good story.

Date Point: 19y11m1w AV
Clan Stoneback enclave farm, New Belfast, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Y!’kiidaa

Meetings had been had. First, between lower-level functionaries. Much had been communicated to them about ongoing operations, and much had been implied…

It was a bit of a logistical nightmare to get everyone off-world in time. But, that was the necessary price. It wouldn’t do to anger those whom they hoped would, eventually, prove allies in the war. So, dutifully, they complied, even if doing so might cause damage to the Line.

Higher-level meetings followed. Department heads with Champions and Grandfathers, Ministers and Deputy Secretaries. And now, the highest level meetings were underway. The first of which was between “Keeda” and the Great Father himself.

Y!’kiidaa wasn’t looking forward to it. He wasn’t too worried about being folded up like garden furniture—he could handle himself, after all—and he sure as shit wasn’t about to embarrass the Gao by pulling one of his little tricks…but that right there was the problem. When he’d imagined the reunion with his species, he’d always imagined there’d be room for play. Or at least, some fondness among kin.

Instead, what he ended up getting was the shock of a lifetime.

The Stoneback enclave farm was a working agricultural hub and had vast land-holdings on the colony-world of Cimbrean. Grain stretched east and south to the horizon. The view north was blocked by a titanic nava hatchery, and pasture for three different livestock—naxas, dairy cows and a small herd of some creature he didn’t recognize—lined the approach road from the west.

It was an assault on the nose when he alighted from the ground vehicle. Manure, rich topsoil, ripe nava, animal musk, a dusty cereal smell with damp undertones coming from the huge drying silos…the scents of hard-working and unwashed humans and gao, various lubricants, solvents, agricultural chemicals…

And, a rather more pure note in the middle of it all, a sleek little silverfur in neat clothes cleaned in perfumed laundry detergent, and who may as well have had the word “aide” branded on his forehead.

Impressively, the small male didn’t smell in the least bit discomfited by Kiidaa’s presence. Instead, he looked up, considered their guest, and nodded with the air of somebody mentally ticking a list.

“Our Father will be arriving shortly, along with Our Mother. They will meet with you in the bungalow. Please follow me.”

He did, nose sniffing this way and that. Lots of familiar yet clashing scents, here: staples of gaoian farming, herbs from earth, some others he’d never encountered…

The bungalow itself was simultaneously large and roomy, yet cozy. Probably it was the choice of color and furniture. The Great Mother’s touch was clearly evident, and the new-found gaoian love of red was constrained to accents, instead of a riot of intense color.

A familiar scent too, that was tickling at the back of his brain…

He couldn’t quite place it, and the chance to look around and get this first real feel for his hosts was too tempting. He prowled the room, taking in the little details.

At first glance, the things lining and decorating the room seemed chaotic. A surface-level impression of nick-nacks, tchotchkes, clutter and tat. But that didn’t fit at all, and on closer inspection the impression vanished entirely. Everything here was significant.

Take, for instance, the tapestry above the door, which was actually a Corth—no, Corti personal banner, in the handsome white-on-blue reserved specifically for those outside the Directorate’s caste system, such as aliens. It wasn’t especially long and detailed, but the number of non-Corti in the whole galaxy who had one at all was probably a single-digit integer.

On the cubby shelf beside the table, a collection of small items. A knife, but with a blade of some kind of horn or antler substance, rather than stone or metal. A white leather ball with several squiggles in black marker crammed in between its red stitching. A small and crudely-made book, its title written in a script Kiidaa didn’t know. When he sniffed curiously at it, he found the paper still carried the scents of oil, stale air and alien bodies.

The mutilated metal skull of a Hunter Alpha, mounted over the fireplace.

It was a statement of some sort, it had to be. These were personal treasures, there was no reason for them to live here permanently, in a working secondary household. They must have been placed deliberately, but what message, exactly, Daar intended by it all? That eluded him, for the moment.

He was about to investigate the framed photo over the kitchen archway when the sound of voices and the tread of heavy paws forewarned the coming of his hosts.

Then the door opened, and Daar prowled into the room, his musk hitting Kiidaa’s nose like a runaway train. And he froze, all his ideas and planning utterly forgotten because Kiidaa was smelling and looking at the very reincarnation of Gaur.

No, worse. This heroic mountain of a male was Gaur as his fable. He was so…so…

Daar paused, sniffing the air. “I disturb you,” he rumbled in a chest-shaking basso profundo.

“You…yes.” Kiidaa stood tall. And found, alarmingly, that the Great Father’s head was still almost level with his own, even on all fours. “I…forgive me.”

Sometimes, it was best to say nothing.

The Great Father gave his consort a look, in which much was obviously conveyed, and Kiidaa saw instantly how a female who otherwise looked and smelled quite ordinary—beautiful, yes, but ordinary nonetheless—had claimed the hearts of the Gao and become their Great Mother.

“Well, I happen to have some chickens smoking away,” she declared. “I’ll be just a moment.”

Daar nipped affectionately at her nose, watched her leave the room, then returned his attention to their guest with a sniff.

“…Amazin’. I din’t doubt Bruuk’s report or the genetic stuff ‘fer a second o’ course, but ‘ta actually smell you ‘fer myself…”

“I…Yes.” Kiidaa took the opportunity to re-compose himself. “I’m sure I smell positively ancient.”

“Diffr’nt, ‘fer sure…an’ if I ain’t mistaken, I just spooked th’ balls offa ‘ya—”

Kiidaa burst out chittering, despite himself. “You’re a couple dozen millennia too late for that.”

Daar chittered too, and again his chitter was eerily like Gaur’s. “Ah. Yeah. Right. Shoulda picked my words more careful, mebbe…”

“No no, it was a good line. We’ll just pretend it was an apt tension-buster…you remind me greatly of my brother. It was like his ghost walked into the room.”

“I do, do I? Now I’m curious. Gaur, I’m guessin’?”

“Yes.”

“Which bit o’ me, if ‘ya don’t mind me askin’?”

“More and more…all of it. It’s…painful. But at the same time…”

Daar held up his paw and examined it. Fuck, he even had the webbing between his digits…

“Well.” Daar chittered uncomfortably, then rose to his feet…

Gods. He was a towering and ultra-broad hulk of a gao, damn near twice as tall as Kiidaa himself and hung so thickly with muscle, it was almost surreal even standing right there in the room with him. Y!’kiidaa only barely restrained a submissive keen.

“So let’s clear th’ air a bit. C’mere and git a good sniff. I promise I’m jus’ me, no tricks.”

The Great Father stood there plainly, no pretense or inhibition. Just an honest offer to…to what, exactly?

Y!’kiidaa approached the giant and they sniffed noses tentatively. Cordial, even friendly. But not familiar. Well, not socially, anyway. His musk was so much like Gaur’s. Almost identical. A closer sniff showed there were subtle differences, as memories long buried flooded back to Kiidaa. This was an older male than Gaur had been. Experience was on Daar’s scent even if his face was youthful and his body tight-lined. Long, arduous labor was an indelible part of him. Might, too, to an almost unfathomable degree. His musk was so potent it was a genuine conscious effort for Kiidaa to hold to his dignity and not just give in.

From every angle, it was the same: a heroic reflection of Gaur, almost the same yet so much more, like a living, breathing embodiment of the Keeda tales themselves. Every detail and shape of muscle and sinew, the texture of his pelt, the easy poise with which he stood. All of it was there. Even his footpaws were the same sort of broad, oversized snowshoes Gaur had been born with, and which made him such a good diver. Except bigger, grander, flawless. It was uncanny.

Strange, that for all his own might, Y!’kiidaa would pale before his own legend, and that Daar would so heroically exceed it! Kiidaa returned to the front and looked into that impossibly handsome face on its impossibly thick-muscled neck, saw the perfected dream of his brother looking back at him, clearly worried…

Y!’kiidaa keened to himself quietly, and was picked clean off the floor by arms so big, they dwarfed his own broad chest. There was a carefully-controlled squeeze and Y!’kiidaa found himself pressed against the iron of the Great Father’s body in a warm, firm hug.

“I believe you,” the Great Father said. “An’ I’m sorry.”

“Y…you din’t do anything,” Kiidaa mumbled, unsure what to do.

“I know. Still sorry.”

They held for a bit longer, before Daar set Kiidaa down and detangled himself. “I’d considered th’ possibilities comin’ in to this. Y’know. Everythin’ from charmin’ ‘ta bullyin’, as the needs must. But I swear by th’ Unseen I din’t mean ‘ta…do this. How would I even? An’ I gather ‘ya weren’t prepared ‘fer a surprise like that at all.”

“No.” Kiidaa chittered nervously. “But I suppose…his sire was from the very far north.”

Daar nodded thoughtfully, then gestured to a rug by the fireplace, inviting him to sit. By some magic of good timing, Naydra chose that moment to re-emerge with some absolutely glorious-smelling smoked meat in hand, and she curled up alongside Daar as he sat.

“It sounds to me like you both had your expectations of this meeting shaken out,” she said. “Perhaps that’s an opportunity.”

“Perhaps it is.” Y!’kiidaa sat gratefully, and took a deep sniff to clear his head. The earthy, smoky sent was a long way from the salty seawater-and-fish combination he’d always associated with Gaur. A useful bit of separation, that. Something to center himself on.

It turned out to be just as delicious as it smelled. Food—the heart of any good productive coming-together. It was the way to any gao’s affection, really. And though in that regard he knew he still had a tall mountain to climb, yet, it was a good first step on the ascent.

They weren’t quite at companionable snuggling, yet. The Great Father kept a regal distance and shared his flank with the Great Mother. Gods, he was such a colossal man…

Y!’kiidaa shook out his mane. Time to take the second step. “We received your letter…” he began.

The conversation lasted all day.

Date Point: 19y11m4d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Alex, Prince of Ekallim-igigi

On lots of advice from his mothers, Alex had picked out some comfortable-looking shorts and shirts. Some of the eldest thought he looked silly, and Rekhetre in particular had bemoaned their “artless cut.”

His actual mother, Birgitta, though, thought he looked smart in them. So did Tomoe, who always managed to make T-shirts and jeans look good. They were the two most up-to-date on Earth’s culture and fashions, so Alex trusted their judgment over the others’…

But those comfortable-looking shorts weren’t actually comfortable. Instead, he just felt itchy, and confined. Sandals at least let his feet breathe, and the shorts had a lot of nice pockets…but they clung too tight to his legs and rear, which somehow made him feel more self-conscious than he’d otherwise be. His shirt too, something called a “polo?” He couldn’t button it up all the way—and he wasn’t supposed to? Then why have the button?! And like his shorts it hugged him in a way that made him very aware of himself in a not-fun sort of way. He felt like anything he might do would make something rip or whatever.

Why did anyone even bother with this shit if they didn’t need to? As far as he could tell, mostly it just made people more miserable.

He looked down at the packet of forms he had in his hand. A diplomatic passport from Ekallim-Igigi. They’d never had passports before, but there had recently been a flurry of treaties signed and other…stuff…that went over his head for the moment.

There was his picture. He’d wanted to put a big cheesy smile in but no, passports couldn’t be fun. So there he was, expressionless. He apparently had resting murder face. His long hair was combed back too, for maximum murderiness. Neck and traps filled the rest of the frame.

It looked more like a prison photograph from a videogame than his ticket to adventure, honestly. Alex giggled at the idea.

At least father was showing him through. Mostly. He wanted Alex to do this himself as much as he could and, really…Alex was glad to do this mostly alone. Father was off to go do important meetings anyway.

And he looked ridiculous.

“You look ridiculous.”

Father made a grumbling noise and ran a finger through the gap between his collar and his neck. He’d had a uniform tailored for him, evocative of the kind worn by Earth’s assorted kings, in the colors of Singularity’s military tradition. Black, trimmed in deep blue, dark red and silver. It was the sort of formal uniform that was rarely ever worn, but in its general shape it wasn’t that far off from regular duty clothes. Still, nobody on Ekallim-Igigi bothered with that sort of thing unless they had to, so to Alex it just looked uncomfortable.

“Be glad you aren’t wearing this, boy,” he griped.

Alex smiled up at him. “I am.”

“Hah! You little shit!” Gilgamesh had Alex in a headlock instantly, and for a second both their clothing troubles were forgotten in a batch of quick roughhousing before a cleared throat reminded them that they had serious matters ahead of them.

Gilgamesh sighed and let go. “Yes?”

The Corti technician indicated the Array. “It’s charged, sir.”

“…Good. Well, boy. Best face on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let us go present ourselves, then.”

They stepped onto the platform. There was a pause, then…

Thump!

It wasn’t Alex’s first jump, of course. Even so, he was off-balance for a moment as the gravity got dramatically weaker with a lurch that made him feel like he was about to fall upwards. He put a hand out automatically to steady himself, and found a sturdy railing waiting in arm’s reach.

A quick breath to settle his jolted stomach, and…well, here he was. Cimbrean! The first inhabited planet he’d ever visited!

There was a formal delegation waiting to receive Father, all looking just as dressed up in fine cloth and tight collars, but lurking in the shadows at the edge of the room was Ian, looking a good deal less ridiculous in tan-colored pants and a black t-shirt, though the tee had something decidedly outlandish on the front: a man with a bucket on his head and the words ’I’m Jorge, I make the spackle.’ Whatever that meant.

He gave Alex a wave, then gestured in a “follow me” kind of way and slipped out through a door. Alex glanced up at his father, who nodded ‘go on,’ and followed.

There was a short tunnel lined with colorful displays that flickered and changed as he walked past them, welcoming him to Folctha and showing off exciting views of the city, the scenery, low-price weekend tickets to other jump destinations, and…wrist watches? Weird. It ended in a row of glass booths, with Ian waiting just beyond them.

Alex wanted nothing more than to tackle him to the ground and thank him for everything but first, there was a gaoian security officer of some kind, and a border. Borders seemed to be magical things, really. There was a line, past which he couldn’t step until this little gao-guy had sniffed him and his papers and asked some odd questions…

Then waved him through.

Now he could tackle Ian, so he did. Not too gently! Couldn’t let his buddy ever think he might win…

”Oooff!!” Ian staggered back but managed to stay standing upright, impressively. “Fuckin’ hell, mister turbohench! Did you bulk up for this trip?”

“Naw! I’m just a growin’ boy!” Alex grinned, and decided to tease him just a little bit. “This little boy’s gonna beat you up later, too!”

“You’re fuckin’ grown enough!” Ian chuckled. “An’ I don’t doubt it. But first stop I think is to get you some proper clothing. You pretty much literally look like a ton of sausage stuffed into whatever bits of casing they had on hand.”

“That’s what they did,” Alex laughed, “I feel like it too!”

“Also, you look like the office IT guy just got back from the gym.”

“Hey!” Alex laughed. “I got a ten pack and arms bigger’n ‘yer head!” Which he demonstrated…and promptly ripped the sleeve. Which, okay. That felt pretty cool.

“Ha! Badass, that! Though it looks like your collar’s aiming for its own performance, so c’mon.”

“‘Cuz I got a neck and it don’t fit,” Alex countered. “We’re gonna get one on you too,” he added, ominously.

Ian chuckled and led the way. “C’mon, I said…”

They skirted the ceremonial stuff that was welcoming father, all of which was happening out on the jump terminus concourse, and slipped away unnoticed. Alex got his next jolt when they stepped outside and he realized it was raining.

He’d…never actually been outdoors in real rain in his life. The street outside the jump terminal was awash with a thin layer of flowing water, broken every few seconds by a vehicle hissing by. It wasn’t like in the movies he’d seen, where the water would hammer down like a fire sprinkler system. This was…gentler. Silvery curtains of water played in the air, ran off the road surface, swirled down gutters and into drains, and streamed off the awnings and shelters covering Folctha’s sidewalks. People put their heads down and hoods up to dart between patches of dry cover as though it was unpleasant, but Alex stopped dead in his tracks, then cautiously advanced as far as he could without actually getting wet to experiment. When he stuck his arm out from under cover to feel it, the water was cold, but not icy.

His first instinct was to pull his shirt off and go play in it. But he hesitated when he reached down to free himself from the polo, and looked around. People were watching him quizzically. Many were dressed in covering coats of synthetic fabric. Others had umbrellas. Umbrellas! Just having them, like it wasn’t weird! Others stuck carefully to the covered paths. Actually.

“Is every sidewalk covered, here?”

Ian nodded, joining him at the rainwater’s edge. “High-traffic areas are. Most of the awnings are these neat self-retracting things too, so they fold back during the day. Other places, you’ll see tarps strung between the lampposts. It rains every night on Cimbrean. You get used to it.”

He looked around again, and off in the distance he could see a park, where some people were playing in the rain, looking carefree…and shirtless. Good enough for him. He pulled the damn thing off and went out to feel the rain.

Nice and chilly! He found himself grinning stupidly back at Ian. People were looking too but he didn’t care. People always looked. Part of him was tempted to join the game in the park, but…no. He could play ball games whenever he liked, and he could tell at a glance that joining in just wouldn’t be sporting. The men and women playing out there weren’t like him.

He liked the cold of the rain, though. Ian didn’t. He produced a small bag from his pocket and shook it out into a thin waterproof poncho, which he pulled over his head and shoulders with a wry shrug. “Not hench enough for this,” he offered.

Alex rolled his eyes, but couldn’t help the grin, either.

They went for a tour around what Ian called “midtown.” The rain certainly was just a fact of life for the people here, who sat outside streetfront cafes and dined, drank and joked quite happily while the weather washed the road just inches from them. It was a bit like home, in that there were lots of species present, and several establishments had spaces outside big enough for Guvnurag customers.

In other ways, it was very unlike home. The fashions were different. A lot of dyed hair, piercings, tattoos and outlandish fabrics. People dressed more modestly here than on Ekallim-Igigi, and companies Alex knew nothing about had put their stamp everywhere, on ad screens and shop fronts.

One of their first stops, as promised, was a place to buy some better clothes. Ian made a “follow me” gesture and ducked through an arch between two buildings into…

A market? It seemed a whole city block’s back streets had been covered over and occupied by dozens of small businesses. A florist near the entrance filled the damp air with a sweet scent that tickled Alex’s nose. Opposite her, a tiny kiosk was packed as tight as possible with phones and other electronic devices, as well as a riot of signs promising various modifications and upgrades. There was another shop busy with rings, necklaces, crystals, leather-bound journals and other weirdness, from which drifted incense smoke. Alongside it, a classy-looking place with some potted plants and a wood floor, selling small boxes of…something. All the packaging had a spiky leaf on it, and weird names like “Diesel Haze.”

Ian’s destination was a warren of clothes and pounding, coarse music. The huge bearded man relaxing on a chair behind the counter gave him a fist bump, gave Alex a nod, and went back to whatever he was doing on his phone.

“Here. Definitely find something in your size among this lot.”

Well, okay. Lots of cool and weird designs on the shirts, pretty much all of them were like that. All t-shirts, all a sort of statement about this or that. He probably should keep to something a bit plain, so he found a few that were at least broad enough to stretch around his shoulders and chest (though they still came down almost to his knees) and, over there, some nice loose-looking shorts in a shiny fabric…

Oh, those looked comfortable! There was a different kind of shirt here without sleeves or anything, but they were the right length at least. They all had big numbers on them. Jerseys, probably? Yeah. He found one for something called the Cimbrean Speedsters, which had a neat-looking car driving front to back.

Fifty pounds seemed like a lot, but oh well. He walked up, bought the pair of them, and was about to happily ditch his old stuff for the new when Ian grabbed his wrist.

“Mate. Dressing room.” He pointed at a curtain in the corner, while Big Guy frowned at him with a scandalized expression.

Oh.

Right.

Yeah, of course. Different planet, different norms, and it wouldn’t do to forget that. With an embarrassed flush at the faux pas, Alex ducked through the curtain and got changed in the confined space behind it. He could hear Ian explaining things to the store owner in a low voice.

Ian looked him up and down when he emerged. “…Yeah. That’ll do. Let’s keep these ones dry, yeah?”

Well, okay. Alex adjusted things to get them to feel right. “Better, at least.”

“You really are a wild child, aren’t you?”

“Am I? I mean…I grew up in a palace. Some of my first lessons were etiquette.”

“A lot of us would consider clothing pretty basic manners…”

“That’s cultural,” Alex retorted. “And practical! It’s warm and open on Ekallim-Igigi, ‘cuz that’s the climate we and the Corth evolved for.” An idea struck and he grinned, “maybe you’re just sore your ancestors went ‘gee, this place is cold, and wet, and often dark. Yes please!’”

“Nah mate, my ancestors went, ‘ooh, tin! We can get rich off of that!’ and were tough enough to not mind a little drizzle.”

“Sure, but now you’re obsessed with itchy clothes.” Alex fidgeted again. “Will I get used to this? I guess these aren’t so bad…”

“Oi now. Christian modesty standards originated in the fucking desert.”

“After father’s time! Well, mostly.”

Ian chuckled, and angled his head toward the exit. “Anyway. Good clothes will make a big difference, and we’ll get you kitted out properly, but we’ll do that some other day. Shall we?”

Well, okay. Fair enough! Contrary to his earlier promise though, Alex could not resist the rain and so happily ran about in his nice new tank top (where was the tank?) and basketball shorts (which made more sense). How could he not? Puddles! And Alex had big stompy feet for nice big splashes.

Probably he shouldn’t act like such a little kid, but…fuck it. Rain was awesome.

His fun had to come to an end at some point, though. Or at least, change. And the change came in meeting somebody closer to his age for dinner—the new ambassador’s adopted sons. One was skinny-fit, the other just plain strong-looking. Both were pretty tall but damn near everyone was tall next to Alex, so that wasn’t new.

And unlike basically everyone else Alex had seen in Folctha so far, they didn’t seem fazed by…well, by him.

They were dining at the galactically famous Ninja Taco. He’d had tacos before, but they were pretty lame compared to this! Leela took one look at him and said, “right. Here’s the HEAT menu. Order from this.” Alex grinned stupidly from that compliment for a long while. And the Koga Platter Deluxe really did hit the spot…

“You’re a food vacuum just like dad,” Tristan commented, once there was nothing left but a drift of paper wrappers and cardboard cups. “Or like Ramsey’s becoming these days.”

“Hey!” Ramsey said, after choking down his last bite. “Practice burns a lotta calories!”

Alex gave him another once-over. Tall, and pretty damn well-built for a regular guy. Might be fun to play with later…

“Anyway. I’m moved out now, so you’ll be in my old room. I’ve got a desk, some closet space, a good sturdy bed, pretty much everything you need. Dad’s got a good gym in the basement too, and the backyard opens up onto a nice big park where you can run around if you want. There’s pretty much always someone around up for a game of whatever.”

“Also,” Ramsey added, “it’ll be a while before I’m out. Still working on…girlfriend stuff. And the dorms don’t open up until right before class so…it’ll be a while.”

“Girlfriend stuff?” Alex frowned.

“I mean…I’m going to college on a completely different planet. She’s going to Folctha U. It’s…she’s not happy with me.”

Ian licked some hot sauce from his fingers and stretched his spine out. “Aye. It’ll be like that sometimes….aand, here’s the big man himself.”

Alex looked in the direction he was looking, and nearly did a double-take.

He’d seen a picture of Ambassador Etsicitty before, so he’d known he looked kinda like his father…but in person, it was a lot closer. Not the same, though: he stood a foot shorter but was bigger, stockier, and considerably more muscular, and that was obvious even through the suit he was wearing. The photos had not done the man justice. Wild hair barely coaxed into lying back instead of neatly combed. No beard but rough stubble. Brutally handsome too, and all his extra size just seemed…meant for him. Was this the kind of man Alex was destined to be?

Something about the ambassador’s presence was honestly intimidating. And that wasn’t something Alex had ever really felt before, even next to father.

He reminded himself to stand up and introduce himself.

“Hello, your excellency. I’m Alex.”

For some reason, the twins grinned at each other, and Ian sipped from an empty cup. The ambassador for his part just smiled and scratched the back of his head. “Oh, I don’t stand on formality. Just Julian is fine.” Even so, he shook Alex’s hand. “Nice to meet you. Ian here’s quite the persuasive man, I gotta say!”

“Oh?”

“He convinced us to take on an extended guest, after all. And we’ll be happy to have you!”

“I’m grateful. Folctha is…” Alex looked around. They were the center of lots of attention, and he could see men in dark clothing skirting the edges of their little bubble, protecting them. But beyond that, there was that same unbroken riot of newness to appreciate. “…A lot to take in,” he finished, inadequately.

“I bet.” Julian made to go sit on the ground rather than risk a bench.

“Dad, your suit.” Tristan reminded.

“…Right.” The ambassador looked around, but one of his people was already hustling over with a sturdy stool for him. He accepted it with an air of weary resignedness, like he’d rather have fetched it himself. “Anyway, yeah. I bet. I know some of the people who’ve lived here since it was just some tents in a field, and it’s just exploded. Immigrants arrive every day, seems like every week a handful of new buildings are open…”

“By your standards, anyway,” Ian added. “Folctha as a city is kind of small.”

“I heard millions of people live here,” Alex ventured.

“A lot of ‘em are out along the coast in New Belfast, New Penzance and Saunderston.”

“Why?”

“Farming. It’s the planet’s biggest industry.”

Alex went misty-eyed. Farming. He’d always been kinda interested in the process of food growing, and the way it was done on Ekallim-Igigi was pretty fascinating. The lab-farms could grow a huge amount in a small volume, and the lower decks produced meat from thickly-packed fish pools and a big dairy barn…

But this was a planet, with open fields and plenty of space. The mental image of real agriculture flashed through his thoughts, and suddenly he wanted to see.

“I’d…kinda like to see what that looks like,” he said, carefully.

Ian chuckled. “You mean this trip won’t be complete without a tractor ride,” he translated.

“I mean…” Alex tried to think of a way to deny it without denying it, and failed.

“No worries. I promised you’d get a chance to see the sights, so if that’s the sight you wanna see, we’ll go for it.”

“First, though,” Julian said, “lots of people are asking after you, so…formal dinners in your future, I’m afraid. The boys will be getting you be-tuxed this week.” He smiled at Alex’s expression. “Don’t worry. If they can get a caveman like me well-fitted, they can manage you.”

“Don’t look so alarmed,” Ramsey chuckled. “A good suit is comfortable. Right, dad?”

“So I learned,” Julian agreed. He glanced at his pocket when something inside it pinged, and stood. “Anyway. I just wanted to say hi. Al and Xiù are looking forward to meeting you too…”

Alex could spot a hinted request when he heard one. He stood too, and shook the ambassador’s hand. “Thank you.”

Julian’s handshake was crushing, and Alex was known for his own oversized mitts and overeager grip. “I’ll look forward to getting to know you properly tomorrow,” he said, all easy and relaxed. Then he was gone, striding away toward a waiting vehicle.

“…Poor bugger,” Ian muttered. “With celebrity and rank comes a mobile bloody cage,”

“He doesn’t seem troubled,” Alex ventured.

“You’ll see later,” Tristan said, and stood. “Why don’t we get the first step of that suit out the way? It won’t take long…”

He was true to his word, there. The experience of being carefully measured all over his body was a novelty for Alex. So too was the young woman doing it, and she was really pretty… Alice. Her name was Alice. Her father ran the shop and she was fifteen, attending the local school, just learning the job apparently…

It was over too fast, and he knew he was smiling like an idiot the whole time, too.

“Make sure you come back tomorrow,” she’d said with the most bewitching grin. “We’ll want to get you fit just right.”

And from there…on to the ambassador’s home, where he’d be staying for the time being. When he glanced at the time, it came as a shock that he’d only been on Folctha for a couple of hours. It already felt like a whole day had passed.

So far, it had been everything he’d hoped for.

He had a couple hours to kill, so he spent some time playing in the downstairs gym, which was compact but well-equipped and, happily, more than good enough to challenge him. He met Julian’s wives, was fed strange but tasty food, got the tour of the house, looked at photos…

…Okay, yeah. The ambassador was a fucking specimen and he just kept getting better in each shoot. No wonder his Allison and Xiù were so impressive!

They were all friendly, too. And warm! Maybe not, like, family yet, but Alex could tell that was already going to happen pretty quick. Both Tristan and Ramsey had already gone Big Brother on him, and he found he didn’t mind that at all…

Julian returned that evening with a delivery of some clothing. “Here. It’s some of my old stuff I don’t fit anymore. Most of this is in an athletic cut so at least some of it should fit…”

All the nicer stuff was like the t-shirts in the shop; too long if it fit his shoulders. It’d need some work, probably. The stuff meant for exercise and play though, all that fit pretty nice, and the smooth material didn’t pinch or itch, either. So at least he wouldn’t be suffering.

Then it was time for bed. Between games in the morning, the excitement of the day, and the weights just an hour ago, and the firm, comfortable bed…

Alex had no trouble falling asleep.

Date Point: 19y11m4d AV
Governor-General’s official residence, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gilgamesh of Uruk, King of Ekallim-Igigi

Not since Yekiida had first challenged him on the steps of his own ziggurat had Gilgamesh felt so off-balance, or so unprepared for an encounter.

He had let the long river of time lull them all into complacency. It had slowed their perception of important, subtle things. It had given them overmuch caution, perhaps.

Or perhaps he was over-reacting. That was possible too. What he did know was that, for the first time since he’d learned the ways of young men and women, he was outmatched.

There had been the public welcome, of course. A certain amount of pomp and formality, welcoming him to Folctha, while a small air force of camera drones recorded every moment from safely on the other side of a security forcefield. Such things were necessary ritual, but they were not consequential.

The meetings of substance came later. After he’d sent Alex on his way, after the motorcade had delivered him safely from the jump terminal to the Governor-General’s official residence. There would be a dinner later, of fine and delicate food in fine and delicate surrounds—another necessary ritual—but now, at last, had come the first moment for kings and ambassadors to speak in private.

It started out with some light-hearted joviality.

“I am glad we’ve upgraded our fleet!” The Governor-General said with a sly grin. “We seem to be in the habit of entertaining Very Large Leaders these days!”

“I am most grateful for it,” Gilgamesh replied. “It was a comfortable ride.”

“And a good first impression of Folctha, I hope.”

“Indeed. It has been…a long time, since I last felt rain on my face. And in all my time, no city has ever worn the rain so elegantly.”

Flattery, to be sure, but honest. Folctha was a wet city, rained on every day. Its planners and artists had incorporated that fact well.

He took note of the other men and women around the room, trying to gauge them. First in his thoughts, of course, was the ambassador to the Ten’Gewek: Julian of Minnesota, the one they suspected would become ambassador to Ekallim-Igigi. He wore one of those full-body suits the modern humans so liked, rather than the lighter garb he reportedly preferred. It was obviously well-made and designed for some discretion, but absolutely nothing could hide the plain facts of the matter: this was a man who, at least in body, was Gilgamesh’s equal.

He would need to challenge him later, if the mood allowed for it. Might be a while, though. The general tone of conversation was much like their small talk over the city: polite. The well-honed words of gracious hospitality, a craft that the long years and many innovations had refined just as much as any other. A man skilled in those dark arts could say perfectly friendly and welcoming things while making it clear—in a manner to which no reasonable man could possibly take offense—that Gilgamesh had a considerable uphill climb ahead of him.

It was clear that, for now at least, there was to be no friendly challenge between them. And Gilgamesh would be a fool to even make the offer.

Even so, it would not do to reach this gathering’s end without some interaction of substance. Inconsequential conversation and meek rapport had their place… As too did knowing when to cut through it and speak with purpose.

He found his opportunity late in the evening. Much of what had been said so far had been to go over and, as the Earth-English phrase had it, ‘rubber stamp’ the hard work of their respective juniors and supporters. Treaty was a dry business, time-consuming, methodical and thorough. Everyone in the room had read the results of that process, and verbally approved to each other, and so it went. There was, now, the beginnings of an official line of communication and all the necessary tools of diplomacy between them.

Gilgamesh spent most of his time conversing with the Governor-General. Sir Jeremy Sandy served an interesting role, standing in for a distant monarch as Folctha’s head of state. He was an old man, slow and stiff, but undulled. He had a deft touch in stepping away when the chance came for Gilgamesh to talk with ambassador Etsicitty.

The Governor-General’s official residence had a large window facing the city. Rain thrummed against it and trickled down, turning Folctha’s night-time lights into a blurred tapestry of color. There was a fireplace, and leather furniture sufficiently sturdy even for men of the Line to use confidently.

Julian greeted him by rising and shaking his hand. “Your majesty,”

“Good evening.”

They sat.

“I gather you and your wives explored space in quite a small ship, before all this,” Gilgamesh ventured.

“We did, yeah. Xiù was the first person to set foot on Mars, unless one of your people got there first…” Julian watched him expectantly.

“We did not. That triumph is entirely hers,” Gilgamesh assured him, “as are the wonderful words with which she marked the occasion. In any case, I’m pleased to say that Ekallim-Igigi will suit a man like you. You will not have to be so careful as you sit and walk.”

“How many folks like us are there up there, if I may ask?” Julian inquired. He sipped from a glass—water, to Gilgamesh’s nose.

“Not as many as you might think from meeting Alex and myself. Fewer than one in two hundred of the station’s human population.”

“That’s still a lot. No wonder you were able to find volunteers to infiltrate Earth.”

This Ambassador was not afraid to choose words with a barb in them. “I am aware how our actions are seen by many. I also know I have much to answer for, for my role in it. Perhaps even to you personally.”

“Perhaps.” Julian sat back and gave him a calm, measured look. “Six years. Not a lot of time, from your perspective. For me…by the time I was rescued, I’d spent a quarter of my life on Nightmare, entirely alone. All because I’m one of your ‘Line of Heroes.’”

“That was a terrible cruelty,” Gilgamesh acknowledged. “Not one I would have ever approved.”

“And yet it happened.”

“Yes. I do not control the Directorate. At best, Singularity is an influence, nothing more. Much less of one going forward.” Gilgamesh glanced up as a servant brought round drinks, and accepted a glass of water. “There is much I would never have approved. But I cannot deny my role in it either, and I will not cheapen your suffering by doing so.” He squared up and faced the ambassador directly. “I am sorry.”

Julian’s eyebrows lifted. He took a breath as though to say something, paused, frowned. His feelings could not have been simple or pleasant, and he showed little of them. In the end he just…nodded, and that was that.

Well. A start, anyway. Perhaps…

“Well. I don’t know about you, but we have been talking in this palace for some hours, and this was meant to be the final meeting. And since the large formalities are tomorrow, and I find my cup disconcertingly empty of wine…”

Julian shifted in his seat. “Feeling cooped up?”

“Aren’t you?” Gilgamesh spread his hands. “I tolerate formal garb and formal setting. Men such as us are not made for these refinements. I need to move. A man’s feet are for exploring! Not standing in place.”

“The view from Mount Crivens should be spectacular in the morning,” Julian offered. “It always is, after a long rain. I like to run up it sometimes.”

“A mountain! By the gods, I haven’t stood atop one in centuries…”

“Far too long,” the ambassador noted. “Why don’t we do it tomorrow?”

Temptations were rarely so irresistible while yet being so pure. Gilgamesh smiled and nodded. “Yes, let’s.”

“Something to look forward to, then. For now, I think I’m duty-bound to endure the formal setting a little longer…” Etsicitty pointed with an upward nod, indicating the far corner of the room where his wives had managed to collar the Governor-General and were testing the poor man’s dignity by reducing him to tears of laughter with an anecdote.

Gilgamesh knew that look in Julian’s eye instantly. He remained entirely smitten with them. Long may it last.

“Ah, yes. For my part, I think an early retirement will be prudent. I’m rather jump-lagged.”

“Of course. I’ll let Sir Jeremy know so he can escape and be the good host.” They shook hands, and the ambassador was gone. Gilgamesh pondered the departing man’s impressively broad back for a moment, reflecting that for the first time…ever, that he could recall, he’d endured a handshake firm enough to surprise him.

Suddenly, he wondered whether that run up the mountain had been such an innocent proposition after all…

He’d find out in the morning, he supposed.

Date point: 19y11m4d AV
Charleston, West Virginia, USA, Earth

Joshua Hartl

“So, that’s my great-uncle, huh?

“Just as I remember him…”

Josh stared at the man on the screen. He couldn’t really see a family resemblance. The bearded king shaking hands in front of the jump array in Folctha was several shades darker than mom, and…well, okay. There was family resemblance in how fuck huge he was, but other than that…

Apparently it was sorta complicated. One of those uncles by marriage situations. Except also by blood, if you went back a few hundred years?

Actually…

Josh looked at himself in his mind’s eye. Yeah. Okay. Body shape was the same, just a fuck of a lot bigger. Right down to the lay of his muscles and the way his hands and feet were over-big.

Fuck.

He glanced over his shoulder at the desk in the corner, where Dad had stopped playing his game to turn around and watch the TV too. Things between him and Mom were…fuck, Josh didn’t even know. There had been fights. But they were still together, and they’d even gone on a couple dates. They were workin’ to make it work. But the look on Dad’s face right then was impossible to read.

As for Josh, his college plans were on hold “pending a review.” Whatever that meant. Besides meaning being stuck at home. He’d got a job, for the time being. Started considering that maybe his scholarship was probably…not gonna happen.

Started wondering what he should do instead.

If there was one good thing to come outta all this, it was that suddenly he’d found his people online. There were new boards and groups for folks like him, now that they all knew there were others out there going through the same things. The nearest he knew of was a girl over in Lexington, about his age.

…Damn, she was hot. In a scary, Amazon-crushing valkyrie sort of way. He’d struck up a conversation with her, because why not? They had something in common!

More than one thing, it turned out. She was looking at the loss of her scholarship, too. Why?! What were people afraid of? It wasn’t fair.

He went to go sit next to dad. Decided he didn’t wanna sit at all and paced the room a while, then…fuck it.

He went to put on his shoes. “I’m goin’ for a run.”

“Josh…wait.”

Dad abandoned his game, and grabbed his running shoes too. Okay. Sure. Mom just hugged herself a little tighter on the couch and watched the news.

They jogged about half a mile, setting a slow pace. It had never stopped being weird, having to slow down for dad. He’d had to since he was about five. By unspoken agreement they headed over the Merchants Village. Maybe get a bagel, maybe get a smoothie…whatever.

It was an easy run, but it cleared Josh’s head a bit. And…it was nice, having Dad there with him. The smoothy was nice, too. They hung around at the end of the parking lot to drink ‘em.

Dad broke the silence a little awkwardly. “…Heard anything from Ohio State yet?”

Josh shook his head. “No.”

A pause, then a reassuring hand on his back. “That sucks ass.”

“Yeah.”

Another awkward silence.

“…Are you and Mom…?” Josh was afraid to ask. But he’d wanted to ask for weeks. He had to know.

“Ah, fuck.” Dad rarely swore, but this time he just sagged and let it out. “Jesus, I don’t know. I still love her. And she never did actually lie to me, I guess. Just…said she didn’t want to talk about her past. So…I’m gonna try to make it work, and she’s gonna try too.”

“Where did you go, the day we found out?”

“Church. Talked to Father Aubry about it.”

“What did he say?”

“Reminded me of our wedding vows. ‘True in good times and in bad.’ And yeah, this is a hard time, but that’s the time to knuckle down and work and try and repair what got hurt.” Dad sipped from his smoothy again. “…Josh, whatever your mom’s history, however this thing plays out between me and her, you’re my son, and I never stopped loving you for a second. I want you to know that.”

Josh nodded, suddenly fighting back a hot pressure behind his eyes.

Dad patted his back again. “None of this matters, okay? We always knew you were special, it’s just…well, now we know why a little better. And it don’t matter. You understand?”

Josh nodded again.

They stood together in a more comfortable kind of silence for a bit, until Josh worked up the courage to ask the other question that had been on his mind.

“…If the college does pull my scholarship…” he said.

“Yeah?”

“A lot of the guys online…guys like me…we got to talking about where we can go and what we can do, you know? Where it won’t be, like, a waste.”

“You’re thinking of enlisting?” Dad guessed.

“…I dunno. It just seems like that’s the one place where they’ll actually want me, instead of it being a problem.”

They’d had a weird kind of hug since Josh had become a teen and Dad stopped being able to get his arms around his chest without looking stupid. One arm diagonally up and across his back and shoulders, and a reassuring pat.

“There’ll be others. People are still reacting to weird news right now. Don’t lose hope just yet.”

“Yeah…” he mumbled, not even convincing himself.

“I mean it. You’ve got more to give than just…this.” Dad waved a hand up and down. “Don’t sell that brain of yours short, either. You’ll find a way through.”

“But what if the college does—”

“We’ll sue ‘em for discrimination and use the payout to send you somewhere that’s not run by retards. Or something. Or maybe you decide you don’t want to put your body on the line for something so unappreciative. Who knows? We’ll make it work, when we’ve got to.”

“…Which is why I’ve been talkin’ to a recruiter,” he revealed.

“Ah.” Dad made a resigned noise, and decided to find a nice curb and sit on it. Okey-dokey.

“I won’t pretend I’m surprised,” he said, after a long slurp. “You’ve always been an incredibly aggressive kid. We stuck you in wrestling and Tae Kwon Do to burn your energy off. Do you remember your first day? You were five. Biggest shit-eating grin on your face, ‘cuz you pinned everyone or tossed them all over the moon. Even the bigger kids. Especially the bigger kids. You’ve always been drawn to that sort of thing, and I’ve always tried to help you channel it. Hell, I even went to go learn how to hunt after you expressed an interest.”

“Wait, really? I didn’t know that.”

“Sure did! Like so much of it all, I never enjoyed it so much as enjoyed it through you. You’re something I never was and never could be, Joshua. I’m proud of you, and I’m proud I’ve been able to keep up with you, in little ways. So…you wanted to be a policeman, a fireman, a ‘rescue’ guy…and you’ve loved Army stuff since forever. I’m not surprised. But I do worry.”

“I can hack it,” Josh insisted, fiercely.

“Oh, I know. But…your uncle Walt served, Josh. It broke him. Up here,” he tapped on his head. “People only care about the military when they don’t need to think about it. They can get downright hostile and they’re fickle as hell. The service itself not only doesn’t care, it can’t care. It’s too big to be about anyone—that’s why it’s service. And its purpose is too awful. It’s there to do violence on our enemies, and you’d just be part of the machine. Even if you’re a very special gear, you’d still just be a gear. And I think you’re worth more than that.”

Josh thought about that. He’d been doing that a lot lately, thinking about stuff he wouldn’t have thought about before. Before, maybe he’d have just sailed on ahead without worrying too much, but now…

Well, now he’d seen how quick things could go wrong, and how hard they could be to put back together.

“Still…the recruiter said it’s about the one place that’s really going to challenge me…”

“That recruiter has quotas to meet. He’ll say whatever he thinks will convince you. Now, consider Warhorse. That massive man they just gave the Medal of Honor to? I know you were paying attention to it. You know he’s done, right? They read out the citation, you know it nearly killed him.”

“He was walking around okay…”

“Yeah, and how many bits of metal are holding him together? How much pain is he in that he’s not showing? How close did he really come to being killed?” Dad shook his head. “Heroes come back broken or in boxes, if they come back at all. I don’t want that for you.”

“Well maybe I wanna do something worthwhile!” Joshua exploded, then grimaced sheepishly. “I mean, wrestling’s fun but what difference does it make, really?”

“And I’m saying, there’s more to you than just meat to put on the line!” his dad returned. “There are other ways to do something worthwhile, Josh. Paramedic, firefighter… “

“Not for me,” Josh remarked bitterly. “First, how would I do any of those? I’m too big! Anything else? I’ve got good grades, yeah. ‘Cuz I like winning. But what would I study? I only have those grades ‘cuz I worked at it! I’m not a super smart guy. And you know it, too.”

Dad sighed. “Sounds like I believe in you more than you believe in yourself,” he said.

“No. You just believe in the world more than I do.”

There was a long, stung silence. Maybe he’d said it harsher than he wanted.

“This is something you’ve already made your mind up on, huh?” Dad said, eventually.

“…I don’t know,” Josh answered truthfully. “But I’ve always been drawn to it.”

“I know.” Dad sighed again, slurped his straw around the bottom of his cup and threw it in the trash. “I just…I think you have it in you to prove there’s more to this whole ‘Line’ thing than breeding supersoldiers. Look at Julian Etscitty! He’s not military.”

Josh had, too. The ambassador was man enough to make him feel like a little boy and, well, pictures of him (and Warhorse) were hanging in the garage gym he’d cobbled together out of train wheels and junk. To say Josh idolized the two men would be an understatement. Still…

“Dude went through hell to get where he is too. Six years alone! That can’t be good,” he said.

“Right.” Dad frowned in thought for a second. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, you don’t have to be what somebody else thinks you were born to be. You can be whatever you think you are, and I know you’ll deal with whatever gets in your way. I’ll be proud no matter what you do. You’re a fine young man, Joshua. More than any father can ask for. Just…don’t squander it.”

Josh hugged him. There was a faint crunch, and a grunt, but Dad hugged back. Then patted at him for release so he could breathe again.

They jogged home, and took a bagel and coffee back for Mom. Josh still didn’t know what he was gonna do, whether he should call the recruiter tomorrow or block him and never talk to him again…

But he did feel better.

Date Point: 19y11m5d AV
Lakebeds National Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gilgamesh of Uruk

His impression of the big man the next morning was, if anything, not only impressed but…mildly intimidated. Not an experience Gilgamesh was well familiar with!

As promised, they had gathered for an early morning run. The Prime Minister would be jogging with them for a short while too, being herself quite fit (nor one to shy away from an opportunity) and keen to maintain her peoples’ reputation.

It was a brisk morning, the air severely clear and sharp in the way only a cleansing rain could ever manage. Julian arrived in a small pair of shorts obviously meant for running. He was…

Gilgamesh had underestimated the man, before. He too was clad in something appropriate for a long run, but standing next to the ambassador, he simply…well…

He didn’t quite measure up.

He was taller, yes. None would describe him as anything but thick-thewed and well-formed. But Julian was the broader man and quite a bit thicker front to back, and head to toe. Considerably leaner and more muscular in that thickness too, despite his bulk. By any man-to-man measure one could make at a glance, the ambassador was quite simply…

Better.

By the gods, when was the last time he’d felt that?

The feeling was compounded immensely when a towering colossus of a man came thumping up the trail accompanied by a handful of others, also clad for a run but with enormous packs on their backs. Supplies and provisions, most likely, in case anything were to go wrong.

Julian made introductions. “Your majesty, this is Righteous, the senior enlisted man of the HEAT. He and the others will be our escorts today. We thought you might want something more vigorous than a slow jog, so none of our escort will have any trouble keeping up.”

Gilgamesh gave Righteous an undisguised once-over. He was, somehow, an even more extreme athlete than Julian, one whose body was scaled far up and beyond. Every one of Julian’s admirable qualities was multiplied on this man’s face and physique, to the point that Gilgamesh had no doubt whatsoever the man before him could break him apart with little more than a sigh and a mild exertion. The Soldier and the Warrior right next to each other, the end products of the Line. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined they would reach so far!

But that triumph was marred by the message underlying it.

Be careful, they were saying, lest you make yourself obsolete.

The other men were exemplars, too. None of them (thankfully!) were so humbling as the Soldier and the Warrior, but all of them were impressive. HEAT’s finest could no doubt challenge and perhaps best the finest among Ekallim-Igigi’s forces. The same for the trio of gaoians joining them. It was an escort of a half-dozen men, warriors all and honed to peak sharpness. This was the opposite of a subtle show of force.

Well, nothing to do but grin and accept the challenge.

“And what fine companions they seem! It has been far too long since I’ve had a long open-road run. And in lower gravity, too! I hope I don’t embarrass myself too much…”

Quiet chuckles, then, and a good bit of face-saving thrown in just in case. It was truthful enough; he hadn’t been in the habit of low-gravity exercise, which he knew came with its own challenges. One never lied in the company of a gao, in any case. Especially not Whitecrests. Probably that was a very deliberate ploy on their part.

The run started when the ambassador bounded away barefoot up the trail like a hare. Gilgamesh rose to the challenge and gave chase. The prime minister and her escort were soon a collection of tiny dots laboring up the path behind them, while the view unrolled, unfolded, expanded…

And in the end, with an effort of sheer will he’d not had to summon in longer than he could recall, Gilgamesh of Uruk was third to the summit. He could not feel upset, though—it was clear he’d greatly challenged the ambassador, too. For a moment, his mind was cast back to the day he met Yekiidaa, and how he’d felt then. The shock of being matched. The thrill of being exceeded. He’d…missed it, somehow.

But all of that faded from his thoughts when he slowed his breathing, straightened up, and looked out over the rolling landscape below. The ambassador had been right.

The view from the top was magnificent.

Dataspace

Monitoring algorithm

+Logging:Disruption incident, source node Δ1053
+Incident# 701
+Incidents within significant recent timeframe: 4
+Matterspace interference possible; investigation required

+Waking agent.

++END CHAPTER 85++

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Dandelion: audiobook now available!

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

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“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 86: “Into the Fold”

Chapter 86: Into the Fold

Date Point: 19y11m5d AV
Contingency stockpile, deep interstellar space

0004

Timestamp check…

Double check it.

Well. That was a dismayingly brief interval. Only a couple of standard years? Contingency hibernation was supposed to last a few hundred years, enough time for active opposition to cool off and forget their vigilance. The natural fractiousness of organic life couldn’t sustain a war footing for more than a generation or two in even the most bellicose cases, if the enemy was nowhere to be seen.

To be reactivated by a source node’s monitoring program after such a brief suspension boded ill, and Four knew better than to underestimate Humans and Gao.

She took inventory. Her stockpile was in healthy condition, with a full fleet contingent. Injunctors, Indictors, Prosecutors and three Judge-class flagships. Sufficient Abrogators and their drones to mount a cleansing operation on anything but a fully industrialized civilization…Fifty antimatter charges.

Four had the resources to wage a war, and the authority to activate other agents if escalation was required.

She had a terrible feeling it might be. If source nodes were being interfered with, then for the first time in millions of years the Hierarchy might need to actually take the substrate species seriously. Lean times beckoned, if so.

Necessary. The Hegemony could survive the loss of substrate, could survive the destruction of Relays, could outlast any uppity matterforms that got it into their heads to fight back…but not the destruction of Dataspace itself. If that was on the table, then the gloves were off.

She awoke a scout group, and downloaded herself into the useful biodrone waiting in stasis aboard one of the Judges; an agent in the field required substrate. The biodrone was OmoAru, as strong and capable as a deathworlder thanks to the nanotech riddling its cells, and permanently encased in an armored void suit for extra protection.

She backed up her mind-state, initiated a monopole jump, accepted with satisfaction that the random variance in wormhole precision had landed her only a few days’ travel time from the node, and made best speed. She hoped this would all be wasted effort.

Somehow, she knew it would not.

Date Point: 19y11m5d AV
The Pentagon, Washington DC, USA, Earth

Admiral Stu Whieldon

In the right circumstances, a patrol boat could be as important as a whole damn aircraft carrier. Or at least, that was how Whieldon felt about the USS Wampanoag. Six men, one little ship…One damn significant moment.

Or a damn troubling one.

Analysis of the debris cloud discovered no fragments larger than 0.47mm diameter. Metallic fragments were uniformly spherical and displayed crystalline structures characteristic of liquid metal cooling and solidifying in zero-G vacuum. Ceramics used in the ship’s construction were present in the form of a fine powder, particulate size no greater than 3 μm. Polymers and organic compounds were present as individual molecules. Residual ionization of the debris is characteristic of a collapsing warp field, suggesting that USS Wampanoag was at FTL in the moment she was destroyed.

No component of the debris cloud was inconsistent with USS Wampanoag’s construction and contents. No evidence of any bomb casing. No fission or fusion byproducts save the amount expected from Wampanoag’s own reactor. No ammunition fragments.

Conclusion: USS Wampanoag’s destruction was caused by a high-output directed energy weapon of unknown design. No candidate weapon system is currently known to this investigatory team. Given its demonstrated ability to reduce a shielded Misfit-class patrol boat at warp to a cloud of vapor, however, this weapon must be considered to pose a grave threat to all Allied warships regardless of weight class.

Recommendations: Intelligence about this weapon system must be secured in order for any countermeasure to be devised. CJ2 shall develop appropriate essential elements of required information and present for review.

Whieldon sighed and put the report down. No doubt his Gaoian counterpart was reading something very similar concerning the loss of the Dauntless Spark.

The question was, what to do? There was some kind of predator lurking out there near Hell, one that, as the investigation had insinuated, would pose a terrible threat to larger ships too. Anything that could annihilate a Misfit so completely must at least be capable of badly mauling a San Diego or a destroyer.

Spaceborne crews were in short supply, too. The navy had enjoyed plenty of success in recruiting—people wanted to serve on a starship—but the standards were high. Any decision Whieldon made would be risking the lives of talented, rare people.

Leaving that volume unpatrolled would just open a hole in the cordon around Hell and invite the Hunters to come sniffing, so that wasn’t an option. Sending in a larger ship risked hundreds of lives and a limited strategic asset. Replacing the Wampanoag with another Misfit-class patrol boat would just be throwing away another six lives when the predator struck again, however.

Safety in numbers? Or at least, more pairs of eyes, more sensors, and the chance to jump back and report if the predator struck…

The only remaining alternative was unmanned missions. Hmm.

Well. Best not to make a decision until he’d read all his messages. He set the problem aside for the moment and returned to his inbox…and found the solution waiting for him.

God bless the Gao.

Date Point: 19y11m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

CMSgt Adam (Warhorse) Arés, retired

Adam would never again take snuggling his wife for granted.

Marty seemed like she had about a year of sleep to catch up on. And why not? She’d had two kids and an Adam to try and take care of, and there was only so much help she could get from friends and grandparents. Now that she didn’t have Adam to care for too, now that Adam could take care of stuff like loading the dishwasher and doing the laundry while she put the kids to bed…

In theory, they sat and watched a movie together. In practice, she took a nap, and Adam watched her. Held her. Took joy in just being able to do something gentle like brush the hair out of her face or run his thumb down her shoulder, and there being no danger at all of breaking her arm. He could give her a little squeeze and she’d make a sleepy murmur, and he could do it safely.

‘Course…today had been a good day. No migraine, which was nice. He’d been worried he was gonna have one early in the day, when he got those weird fuzzy zig-zag lines all over his vision, but they settled down without turning into a skull-cracker, this time.

Twice a week. Better than almost daily, like it had been at first. But still twice a week, more or less. Was he getting better? He thought so.

Wasn’t in any shape to do anything adventurous though. So, as was befitting arguably the galaxy’s original ultra-meathead, he did two important things with his time, when he wasn’t doting on family or crafting ever-more-elaborate ductopi:

He trained, of course. Rapid progress! Hell, he was progressing fast enough to maybe catch back up with Julian eventually, too! Be nice to put him back in his place…or at least, not feel too embarrassed by a dude who was six inches shorter, yet wider, bigger and better than he ever was in every damn way. Adam certainly had the willpower to crush him again, but was that enough? They’d have to see!

Probably not against Firth, though. He was still gaining at fuckin’ warp speed, insane progress that was only getting faster. Firth stood leagues ahead of everyone where his potential were concerned. Hell, his only real competition would be Alex, probably, or maybe Gilgamesh if he ever got properly serious about training. Adam had work ethic to humble anyone, and that counted for a lot, but bein’ honest he probably didn’t have the genetics he’d need to win against any of them. He’d grown used to the idea with Daar, since he saw the big bastard’s potential almost immediately and knew his days were numbered years before it happened. And god only knew about Yan, once they really got to work on that magnificent fucker…

Anyway. He’d led the way, so now the truly gifted had no excuse to slack off.

He trained others too, especially the most promising ‘Backs at First Fang. Outside of that kind of work, he was more or less the lead coach in his gym now, for the first time since he and Titan had founded it almost ten years ago. He trained everyone, at every level of progression. It was fun! Little kids especially in basics like calisthenics and whatnot, and somehow everyone knew they were a special delight for him.

Still.

Coaching was rewarding. He enjoyed it! But…was this it for him? Or was this a “for now” thing? It was nice to still have a daily connection to the Lads on-base, of course, the mission on Gao…hell, sometimes it felt like he hadn’t retired at all!

But then the daily brief would come. He couldn’t attend. Didn’t need to know anymore. Some days they had field exercises. Couldn’t ride along, for this reason or that. People would disappear for a day or three, and of course…he knew why, but not anything else.

That world was closed to him.

So…what else? Get active in church? Well, maybe. Somehow he just didn’t feel drawn there, and Marty had conflicted feelings about it all anyway. Still, all the grandparents wanted their kids to at least have some exposure to Catholic life…

He pulled Marty a bit closer.

Right now, he felt…hell. How did he feel? Comfortable, mostly. Safe.

Lost. He was comfortably lost.

Comfortably lost, with a letter from Daar on his bedside table. He really oughta answer that, soon. And he would, just as soon as he knew what the answer really was. He’d get around to thinking about it in due time.

When he didn’t have something more important to do.

He gave Marty a squeeze again, then leaned down to kiss her cheek.

Priorities.

Date Point: 19y11m1w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Alex, Prince of Ekallim-Igigi

“What, Singularity don’t do Christmas?”

“Not Christmas, no. Not like this.”

“But you’ve got holidays, right?”

“Yeah.”

Shaped lights were going up around Folctha, in the form of snowflakes, reindeer-drawn sleds, big golden balls, drippy raining light, stars, and stuff like that. Lots of wintery stuff, which, Alex guessed, it was winter in the northern hemisphere on Earth, so…

The tree was impressive, though. He’d never seen one that big before! How did they even get it to Cimbrean? Had they brought it through the array in bits, and put it together again? It had been put up in the middle of New Worlds Plaza, and looked to have more lights and stuff on it than anywhere else in the city.

Warm winter drinks were nice, too. They were sitting on one of the plaza’s fountains, sipping…Ian called it a ‘chai latte.’ Tea and spices in steamed milk.

“So what kind of holidays do you have?” Ian asked. Today, he was wearing a black t-shirt with the word “Yijao?” stretched like a drumhead across his heavy chest, in a font that kinda looked like written Gaori but still spelled English letters.

Alex had slacks and a nice bright blue polo. But this time everything was properly-fitting, thanks to the twins and that pretty girl at the shop…Alice. He knew she was just being friendly, and he knew that, here at least, he was considered a bit too young for, like, a date or anything…

She’d said no. Oh well! But only no for this weekend…so maybe some other time?

He was grinning stupidly again, he realized. And Ian noticed too.

“Oi, henchmeat! She’s like three times your age, firstly—”

“Alice is only fifteen! That’s not so bad!” Was it a culture thing? Had to be.

“Whole world o’ difference between twelve and fifteen, mate. And I asked you a question!”

Alex giggled. He knew that, well…he scared people just standing still in the street, Ian included. But the way he teased and joked just…well, he liked it! Hardly anyone treated him like he was normal back on Ekallim-Igigi…

“Fine! Be that way…Anyway. Holy feasts.” He counted off on his fingers. “The new year—that’s at Earth’s winter solstice—another at Earth’s spring equinox, that’s the fertility feast. Father especially gets silly for that one,” Alex grumbled in annoyance. “There’s Remembrance, that’s on the Gaoian year, it’s the anniversary of the gamma ray burst. And on the Corti calendar, we’ve got a week of fasting and meditation to mark the Void Caste’s exile…”

“You, fasting?”

He grinned again. “Well, I don’t have to. I’m not old enough. I’m not even allowed to abstain from meat or anything like that until I’m at least fourteen.”

“Right.”

“And a bunch more. My mothers all celebrate different ones, like Saturnalia, Hanami, Ramadan, Yule…”

“So, a whole heaping pile of holidays.”

Alex sighed. “It’s a bit much, yeah. All of it has some ceremony I’m part of, too. So I’m either wearing ridiculous vestments and standing around or whatever, or I’m hunting something through the woods for sacrifice, or—”

‘Wait, woods?”

“Yeah. You saw them, didn’t you?”

Ian rubbed the back of his neck. “I saw a bit of trees in the tour, yeah…”

“No!” Alex laughed, “That’s the sacred grove! It’s over a thousand…uh…” He bit his tongue thinking. “Hectares, I think?”

“…Christ, I keep forgetting how big Ekallim-Igigi is.” Ian frowned and sipped his drink.

“…Yeah. Anyway, been reading up, you know? I did the hunt for the first time when I was ten. It’s sorta a lot like the Ten’Gewek hunt! Was hopin’ I could talk about that some day…”

There was a slightly awkward silence, which Ian broke with a sideways grin.

“So…in other words, you’re either the height of princely civilization, all be-garbed and whatnot—”

“Shut up!”

“Or you’re, like, some naked cavehench murderin’ deer in the woods, or on the field—”

Alex giggled, “Shut up! You and I’ve got gym after this, you know…”’

“I know, and I’m already dreading it,” Ian muttered.

Alex deflated a bit. “…Well, I mean…I’m only teasing. You know that, right?”

“No no, I get that! You don’t understand. Today we’re training with Warhorse.”

“O…kay?”

“Oh, don’t you worry your henchy blond head. You’ll love it. And, aye, so will I. But let a bloke complain a bit!” Ian finished his drink, lined up to throw the cup into a nearby trash bin, misjudged how far away it was, and stood with a sigh to go clean it up.

Alex waited until Ian was right next to the can, then tossed his own cup. Bullseye!

Wilde shot him a dirty look, but couldn’t keep the scowl up for long. Alex liked the big man!

“You’re a competitive little shit, aren’t you?”

“Isn’t everyone?”

“Heh! …No. No, not everyone. C’mon.”

They’d used the cabs a couple of times, but mostly…well, it was a nice day, and Folctha was made for foot traffic. Also the little ones bottomed out under Ian’s weight, and Alex was a lot bigger…so, why not walk? Or run! If they were going to see what this Warhorse guy had for them, then Alex wanted to be nice and warmed up before getting there.

Ian, of course, grumbled something but picked up the pace and ran with him. Alex was really starting to get a feel for the city by now. He knew you could cut down a small street from the plaza, jog along the river, cross the bridge by Rooney’s, and then keep following the river on the south bank. He knew going that way skipped all the heavy foot traffic near the Alien Quarter, and gave them a nice long straight shot to where they were going, at the far end of Delaney Row.

He’d never even heard those names a few days before, but now they were settling in and becoming familiar. There was a lot more to see, but at least he had a mental map now.

They’d borrowed a nice, heavy truck from the SOR and driven past the gym on their way out along the coast yesterday, to see some of the farms. Not that any of them gave tours, or whatever, but just the chance to park by the roadside and watch had been eye-opening. The sense of open space was…well, it was like the one Alex got when he went gas giant diving, but different. All that sky, and nothing between him and the vacuum of space except air held down by gravity…

There were a lot of gyms in Folctha. Glass-fronted ones with treadmills in front of a wall of mirrors, more private ones with tiny mirrored windows, big ones that took up two floors of a large building, tiny ones tucked away down a back alley…

Gyms meant a different thing here, too. On Folctha, a gym was just a place to house exercise equipment. They had separate parks for sports, and none of them were all in the same place. On Ekallim-Igigi, the gymnasium was a bigger idea. It had schools, rooms for machines like the “gyms” here, and parks…and also a theatre, and laboratories, and libraries, too. It wasn’t just a place to exercise, it was a place where people went to grow.

Weird. Everyone here seemed ashamed of themselves for some reason!

Of course, he’d been warned about that too, and he’d especially been warned about the sins the old Greeks and Romans had got up to. No right-thinking people would tolerate stuff like that of course, so the idea of gymnasium had been broken up over a very long time.

Come to think of it…that was probably a big reason everyone dressed up all the time, too.

That made sense, probably. But what a shame. Ekallim-Igigi could always re-educate criminals, or stasis them if they couldn’t be fixed, even execute them if they couldn’t live safely with everyone else. But what about on Earth? There seemed like there would be so much room…

He shook the thought off as they entered, where Ian was promptly hoisted off the ground and squeezed with a crunch by…

Huh. It was him.

“Ooorggfh…! Fuck me, you big bugger, that beard fuckin’ scratches!” Ian protested, and tried to struggle free. “What, the moment you’re out you go full fuckin’ ZZ Top?”

“C’mon, I ain’t that bad! It’s just stubble!” Warhorse set Ian down, and Alex finally got a good look at him.

He wasn’t of the Line, anyone who knew the signs could spot it instantly. His strength sat solidly on him more than gracefully, which made him much blockier and severe in his build than the more balanced form the Line-keepers preferred. Which wasn’t a hindrance, in fact it was quite the opposite. Julian was a considerably bigger man just at a glance, but he carried his enormous size athletically and naturally. Warhorse, though, was somehow built like he’d run into his body’s limits long ago, sneered, and kept growing anyway. The recovery from his injuries had clearly left their mark on him too, and he had yet to reclaim everything he’d once had; somehow, you could just tell he’d been a much bulkier man not all that long ago. Even so…

This was a man so obviously strong, he could crush father in his grasp easily, even now.

He took a second look and really sized the man up. While…yes, Julian and Righteous had him on size and maybe had more balanced frames, there was no doubt this man was built for brute strength. He was, if anything, the most intensely muscular being Alex had ever seen. He grinned nervously, having realized that the brutally-built man was giving him a similar look.

“Well, damn. And I thought I was an early bloomer. Eres una montaña de niño, eh?”

“Uh…”

Warhorse laughed heartily. He had a short black mohawk and a wide, handsome face that was made for happiness, rapidly being buried under a thick scruffy beard. “You’re a kid-mountain! I didn’t start gettin’ crazy-huge ‘till I was fifteen, and even then…don’t think I’d have matched you ‘till Capitol Station, at least.”

Ian whistled. “Yeah, he’s his dad’s boy, for sure,” Ian agreed. “Pretty much the opposite of you.”

“Naw! You’ve not seen Papá without a shirt. Dude’s a ripped old man!” Nothing about Warhorse was small, especially not his Proud Son energy.

“Only ‘cuz you won’t let him be anything else. Speaking of…” Ian indicated a door at the back of the room with an upward nod. “How much is this gonna suck?”

“Yes.” A big evil grin.

“Thats about what I figured…”

“Hey, man. You asked me to, and I quote, ‘make me tank enough to deal with Bruuk.’ That’s no small thing, I’ve sparred with him! I won,’’ Adam grinned smugly, “easy too. But still! You asked, and I got you programmed, so that’s what we’re gonna do, one step at a time. No escape now!”

“Well, I’m here, aren’t I? Let’s walk this talk…”

Three non-stop hours of sadism followed.

For Alex, it was an education. They didn’t train like everyone did on Ekallim-Igigi. Father believed in putting the body through its paces to be sure, but he did it with stones and running, weapons practice, lifting and carrying. Big, practical stuff for the most part, with lots and lots of practice. He used barbells and such too, but still. The same tools he’d used to hone himself since the days of Uruk, as much a celebration of the joy of moving as it was a form of training.

What Adam did wasn’t that. What he did was a science of machines and movements and timings, a careful cadence almost Corti in its ruthless precision. Alex played along and, to his surprise, found himself sore and tired from Ian’s much tinier weights—weight he could normally laugh at. But exercise like this, with his full concentration on doing the movement perfectly instead of efficiently, on feeling the muscle do its work, it responding to thought…

“No wonder you’re such a monster,” he commented between breaths. To both of them, really. Like Adam, Ian too had a build a bit like he’d willed more strength onto his frame than he’d been born to carry, and forced his body to adapt to it no matter how much it complained.

Judging by how easy Adam and Ian made it look…It sure as hell worked for them!

“Ayup,” Adam noted smugly. “Strength and work capacity is the basis for everything else. If you aren’t building that, you aren’t progressing. Sport and training is super important of course, but if you want to get as strong as possible as fast as possible, you gotta lift, and you gotta lift smart. I can see already I’ll need to teach you everything from the start.”

Ian wasn’t talking. He was lying flat on the floor, eyes closed and with a towel over his face as ‘Horse’s huge blunt fingers probed and pressed on his calf muscle. Even so, he nodded.

“We gotta fix ‘yer chicken legs,” ‘Horse grumbled ominously down at Ian.

“Oi!” Ian complained weakly. “They’re anything but little! You’re just used to mutants!”

Well, fair enough. Ian was a massive and soldily-built man by any standard, legs included.

Adam was in a teasing mood, though. He looked at Alex and grinned, “Yeah? Well, super-kid here’s got a lot better legs than you! Lookit his calves, they’re big as ‘yer head! Be kinda neat to see what the best of the Line can do…so we’ve got a project in you, don’t we?”

“Do you?” Alex nibbled some torn skin off his palm. “I mean, I won’t say no…”

“Hmm.” Warhorse stood and went to fetch a dumbbell. It was the heaviest on the rack, bigger than any Alex had ever seen; he doubted he could lift it at all, let alone budge it in the high gravity! To his amazement, Adam proceeded to curl it with just his wrist. A forearm bigger than Alex’s thigh flexed into vascular, sinewy attention as Adam casually played with the weight.

“Yeah, I think we do. Be a shame for someone like you to squander your gifts, don’t you think? See, me? I’ve got no business bein’ as strong as I am. You already know about Julian, have him show you what he can really do some time. But why is he so crazy strong? Innate potential? Yeah. But all the huge-nuts genetics in the world don’t matter if you ain’t got the willpower or ain’t bein’ smart about it. He’s got all three.” Adam switched to curling the weight now, and Alex realized he was deliberately showing off his bowling-ball bicep. Why? To sell him on something?

Well…maybe Adam wasn’t of the Line, but gods that arm of his! Alex couldn’t stop staring…

“So, wanna grow up an’ upstage ‘yer dad harder’n anyone? I can tell you’ve got the same potential the other two freaks have. But up here?” Adam tapped on his head with his free arm. “This is what separates the boys from the men. Winning needs willpower and work ethic, and I think you’re a little crazy like me, yijao? So what’s your deal? Is it an escape for you?”

“…Yeah.” The big man knew him perfectly, Alex could see. “Nobody bothers me when I train. It’s…nice. Oh, and, uh…it’s one of the only things I have that I earned by myself. Even my ship, right? I mean, I had to study and train and all that…but father still gave me exactly what I wanted. This, though?” Alex grinned and flexed his own arm. “Nobody can give me this. It’s all me.”

Alex had to admit, it was a fuckin’ good arm he had. Hell, it was better than almost everyone’s!

Ian whistled approvingly, while Adam bounced in place like a giant puppy. “Hell yeah! That’s the right attitude! So…actually,” pondered Adam, “there’s a thought. Why are you here? I mean, besides the official reasons? Just for fun? To explore? You’re a prince from what I hear…”

And happily, the idea of rank didn’t seem to faze him at all. Alex decided he really liked Adam.

“Yeah…I think, the same reason I like to train. Something I can do.”

‘Horse glanced at Ian, who lifted a corner of his towel. “Sounds about right. He wanted to see how we do things over here too,” he said. “Also, he’s got multiple mothers…”

“Ah, so escapism and exploring. Lucky! I didn’t get to do that until later. And I only got to in the first place ‘cuz the Hierarchy nuked my city.”

Oh. shit. “…I’m sorry,” Alex ventured.

“Why? Ain’t your fault.”

“I mean…it sucks that it happened.”

“Yeah, it does. But everything happens for a reason, even if it’s a stupid-ass reason. And I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t. I wouldn’t have built myself the strongest and fittest man in history without that. Held that record for over a decade and saved a lot of lives with that strength, yijao? And hell, y’know what? I’m gonna be all that again, too!” He shrugged comfortably and grinned. “There’s more for me to do and I ain’t taking anything for granted, these days.”

“I read the citation,” Alex said diplomatically. He knew that could be a painful thing to talk about. “And, uh, don’t take this the wrong way but…I’m kinda jealous.”

“Don’t be,” Adam rebuked sternly.

“No no, not…because of that. Because…I dunno.”

Adam was a father, Alex could tell. He did the thing that every single father ever did whenever Alex…couldn’t figure out what to say next. He put down the huge dumbbell as gently as a feather, then prowled over to Alex and sat on his haunches next to him.

“It’s okay. I think I get it.”

“You do?”

“I think so. I’m the way I am mostly ‘cuz that’s the course I set myself on. For…a buncha reasons. But it was still my choice.”

He did get it. Alex sighed and nodded.

“Father’s had…he’s had a great many sons. But he says I’m his first heir.”

“Ah. Yeah, that’s…a hell of a lot of pressure, I bet.”

“He said he knew from the day the Hunters attacked Earth, he said ‘Singularity’s time in the shadows is coming to an end’ and…I think he’s tired. Like…I mean, in his heart and soul.”

“So he’s been waiting for someone like you to come along, then.”

“…Yeah. And I’m everything he ever wanted, too.” There wasn’t any pride in his voice.

From the floor, Ian groaned and sat up. “Well…shit. That’s not exactly fair to put that on you.”

“Every king needs an heir,” Alex said, automatically. “And he’s right. People look at the palace and my mothers and all that but…it wears on him, every day. I can see it, y’know?”

Ian and ‘Horse shared a glance, then Ian stood up, stretched his calf a bit, and went to go grab his drink bottle.

“Well…I don’t know you or your situation all that well yet, right?” Adam ventured. “So maybe take this with a grain of salt. But the thing is, sometimes things are thrust upon us…and sometimes we’re called to it. You gotta figger out which one it is for yourself.”

“Both,” he said instantly. “Whether I want it or not.”

“So…do you?”

“I don’t know!” Alex exploded. “I mean, I know I’m smart and all. I know how to use my words! But I’m only fucking twelve! How the fuck am I supposed to know this shit?”

“…Well, you sure as shit know how to cuss,” Adam agreed.

“Sorry.”

“Nah. Some things can only be said with a good cuss.”

Ian took a big drink and looked soberly at Alex. “Well…mate. Neither of us are in any shape to tell you owt about kinging or whatever. We’re just a pair of beaten-up grunts.” Ian swigged his drink again. “We’ve got, what? Three working eyes and one working brain between us.”

Adam snorted and aimed a middle finger at him.

Alex laughed, too. He was already feeling better just for his outburst, and he really liked both of them, but…still. “…I’m sorry. This is my problem, not yours.”

“Who else can you vent it to?” Adam pointed out. “Back home you’re a prince. Everyone knows it, right? Here? You’re just a huge-ass meathead kid in the City of Super-Meatheads. Nobody’s gonna bat a fuckin’ eye. Maybe they’ll be ‘mirin, but they ain’t gonna fuckin’ bow an’ grovel, y’know? This is the place where the Great Father himself runs around eatin’ tacos and talkin’ to normal folk, right? So yeah. Maybe this is exactly where you need to be.”

“Also,” Ian added, “your dad sent you here for an adventure, right? I bet this is a big part of why. I think it’s fair to say you’re not gonna be expected to pick up the whole thing in one go, and you’re not gonna do it the same way he did it either. You need to be your own man first, he knows that. And Ekallim-Igigi’s no place for a young man like you to do that.”

He sat down again. “Your father may be out of touch, and I don’t make a secret of thinking the whole Line of Heroes thing is dodgy as fuck. No offense,” he added quickly. “But he’s definitely not stupid. He’s got, what, five thousand years of life experience? I daresay you don’t stick around that long without figuring out some shit.”

“I guess…” Alex agreed.

“And he definitely wants the best for you. Believe me, that’s somethin’ to cherish.” Ian swigged his drink again, distantly.

There was silence for a moment. Adam shattered it by smacking his hands together with a crack!

“Alright! We’re not here to sit around jawin’!” he proclaimed. “How’s that leg?”

Ian slapped the end of his bottle closed. “Hasn’t dropped off yet.”

“Good! Let’s fix that.”

Alex couldn’t resist laughing, and sprang to his feet, eager to learn more of this new science. He could feel how well it worked already, could feel how good he’d feel on the far side of it.

And he was eager to learn.

Date Point: 19y11m2w AV
USS Robert A. Heinlein, moored at naval staging base Milton, above planet Hell

Captain Jaimie Esposito

Thanks to jump arrays, a ship could stay “at sea” a long time, nowadays. Crew could rotate off for shore leave, supplies could be replenished directly from Earth and Cimbrean without having to rendezvous with a supply ship, and their food was fresh produce, with the galley’s stores reserved for emergency rations.

It was a fair bit more comfortable than the boomer Esposito had first served on, despite being even tighter quarters. But the ship’s array couldn’t handle everything. Some things were just too big, or required external work.

Hence the staging base. It wasn’t much more than a half-cylinder tunnel of scaffolding and bright lights attached to a huge jump array, but that was enough. Whatever Robert A. Heinlein needed came straight through alongside the suited-up spacewalkers who’d install it, and from there…

Everyone heard the moment their new launch rail made contact with the ship. It was gentle, but the clonk of something heavy touching the hull from outside couldn’t escape out into vacuum, so instead it rang until it finally dissipated.

The hiss of welding followed, though that was more familiar.

“Long overdue.”

Esposito nodded. She and her XO, Jim Mcnairy, were using the time, and the Officers Mess’ endless supply of fresh coffee, to take care of their respective administrative duties. A warship didn’t get a substantial modification in the field without some paperwork, after all.

“Still pretty damn fast in the grand scheme of things. How long have the Gaoians been using megalight drones?”

“Dunno. About…five years, at this point? Six?” Mcnairy scratched his ear with a stylus. “Be nice to finally use them ourselves.”

“Especially if it gets us some payback for the Wampanoag,” Esposito agreed.

She watched Mcnairy nod and refocus on his paperwork. She knew her XO felt the fleet was going to live or die on staying right at the bleeding edge of technology, and the fact was, drones iterated faster than warships. The British bulldog drones were in their seventh tech generation already, each version doing a lot more than just squeezing out a little extra performance. He was a drone cheerleader to the core, while the brass remained focused on shield and missile technology.

As far as Esposito was concerned, there was no sense in running their tech ahead of their ability to make good use of it. New stuff meant training time, teething troubles, lack of familiarity, no established best practice. But in this case, she had to agree: they were long overdue for a better drone launch system.

Even if it did mean finding room on the ship for five more guardians.

Her tablet pinged as Milton synchronized with Earth and their latest messages came through. Top of the list was a message for her eyes only. She grabbed a last cup of coffee, gave Mcnairy a nod, and retreated to her cabin to read it.

Its contents didn’t surprise her one bit. In fact, they put some grim satisfaction on her face.

They had a mission.

Date Point: 19y11m2w1d AV
Singularity scout ship Amenhotep, Relic Space

Verin, void caste

Stasis shutdown. The light under Verin’s left hand told him his patrol wasn’t over yet. Something had caught his ship’s attention.

Patrol duty was usually easy. Climb in the scout ship, run through startup, activate the sequence, then blink away the months in stasis, investigating whatever rare few ships strayed into Ekallim-Igigi’s sector. A whole year would pass in a matter of hours, normally. And then Verin could spend a whole year’s pay on shore leave while training and preparing for the next patrol.

This time was different.

His fingers moved on the sensor controls, refined, focused, tuned out the background noise of planets revolving in their orbits until the spacetime distortion line was mostly flat except for a significant spike.

Pulse-warp for parallax, which gave him a distance. Doing it twice more gave him a velocity. The numbers came together into something unpleasant. Something large, moving fast on a heading directly toward the Archive system. Something whose warp signature was in the range used by Hierarchy linear drives.

Step one, send the data home. That was a matter of instants’ work with pulsed wormhole comms. Got the message receipt, nodded grimly.

Step two was the dangerous part, the reason why long-range scouts were so well paid. Get closer and secure some real intelligence.

He reached up, swept his hands through the map above his head, considered his options…there. A K-type star, with a gas giant. No ring system, alas, but a nice volcanically active moon. And close enough to reach before the incoming signature did, even at quiet running. Good enough.

Final step, while in warp: check his suit was charged and ready to jump him to safety. If the Amenhotep and its valuable sensor logs couldn’t get home, at least the pilot might.

No stasis blink this time. Might miss something. Instead, Verin turned his large, black eyes onto the sensors and sat back. He sipped on the dispenser in his helmet, sucked down a slurry of nutritious mushroom cream laced with stimulants and attention-sharpening drugs. The trance fell on him quickly, turning time into an irrelevance, turning memory into a perfect eidetic record of events.

He noted, in an academic sense, the passage of two point three seven hours. The sensor contact held steady.

Space between the chosen giant and its innermost moon was busy. Pressed and squeezed by the tides, the moon was a spitting, fulminating ball of volcano violence, and the space around it seethed with charged particles caught in the giant’s magnetic field. Perfect cover for a starship, if one didn’t mind the hull charge.

A good hide to lurk in and watch from.

One point four hours passed. The target held course. One large spike resolved into a cluster of smaller, closely related spikes. Hierarchy warp signatures indeed.

Mass calculations: significant. One in particular suggested a ship larger than any previously encountered in the Hierarchy’s arsenal.

Vector/time calculations: operations within four light years of the Archive would need to be completely hidden within six hours. Factoring in the time necessary for communication, decision-making and removals.

He burst-transmitted the sensor logs, priority tagged for immediate action, and remained on station.

Point one three hours: reply transmission.

+Report received.+
+Return to base.+

That meant Ekallim-Igigi was relocating. Verin programmed the jump and took it without further ceremony. Black-flash, and the gas giant and moon vanished, to be replaced by the great station’s receiving bay: tractor fields grabbed and immobilized him instantly, and drew him into a docking cradle. He would be treated roughly until his brain was scanned, but that was normal.

He waited dispassionately, and sipped the counter-formula to return his state of mind to something closer to normal. He would suffer for it for the rest of the day in dry mouth, jitters, restlessness and irritability, but no matter.

He had done his job.

Date Point: 19y11m2w1d AV
Judge class starship, Relic Space

0004

Jump activity. Something small, Four peeled off two Injunctors to investigate, but guessed they would find nothing. That had been a scout returning to base.

Insufficient data to determine if they had been Human or Gao, but It didn’t matter. Her suspicions were confirmed—somebody was sniffing around the source node.

…Or some thing.

The subject of It had been gnawing at Four’s thoughts from the moment she set course. It was the only truly new variable in this time. The Humans and the Gao were formidable by the standards of organic life, perhaps even the most fearsome, uncontrolled and contrary species with which the Hierarchy had yet contended…

But It was unprecedented, and it scared her.

It was for this reason, rather than fear of any matterspace interdiction, that she slowed and approached the source node system cautiously. Minimal signature, gain on the sensors turned up so high that the random background noise made her jittery.

But it paid off. There were ships, and an orbital structure.

…Lots of ships. Lots and lots of ships. Too many to clearly count. Enough to give her the equivalent of a feeling of cold, crawling dread.

She retreated fully into her host body’s implants and did something an Agent never otherwise did: she closed off the connection to dataspace, effectively turning herself into a mattersophont. Partially blind, mostly deaf and nearly numb. The fleet was no longer an extension of her will, but a series of rather dumb robots obeying her commands. But…needs must. It was better than having her mind shredded by a uniquely terrible monster.

It came with danger, however. Her host body’s death would mean the death of this iteration of her, too. Everything she gathered from this moment on might be lost…

But that was enough dithering.

She attacked.

Entity

Saw that coming.

From the moment their unseen observer had quietly slipped away, the Entity had known something else must be on its way. It had hoped, perhaps, that the observer’s masters, whoever they were, might be finally coming to talk…

Since when are we an optimist?

…but it had, naturally, prepared for worse options. So, the all-too familiar signatures of Hierarchy linear drives slamming up to full power and blitzing inwards were not unanticipated at all. The number wasn’t even as great as it had expected…

Yeah, but that’s a Judge, or I’ll eat my hat.

No matter. The Entity’s swarm had been hard at work replicating, far away in its safe systems. The oncoming Judge was generating a wormhole suppressor, but its leading edge was close enough. The Entity called in some of its new heavyweight combat platforms, glad of a chance to finally test them against something.

Another precaution: it updated its mind-state in storage. Loss of contact would mean only minimal discontinuity.

Gotta love that heady feeling of existential confusion…

The Entity bade the Daemon shut up, please, and sent its outermost probes out and around, searching for the flank. Smaller contacts, Abductors most likely, broke off to screen the Hierarchy fleet’s wings.

Is it me, or was that response kinda sluggish?

Not by any matterspace lifeform’s standards, perhaps, but…yes. And try as it might, the Entity could detect no sign of any minds active in local dataspace beside itself. Which implied that the Agent was either far more skilled at evading notice than the Entity itself—unlikely—or else had locked itself down inside its host’s implants, afraid to engage in dataspace.

Let’s use that.

Agreed.

The fleet and the swarm met, trading extreme long-range firepower. Mostly misses, some strobing EWAR. Nothing unfamiliar to the Entity, everything was as per long-standing Hierarchy doctrine.

The probes quickly had a shield wall set up, and the Entity cycled them in and out like shoaling minnows, each one flashing forward to absorb some firepower then darting back to dissipate the heat. It worked perfectly: the Agent was too slow, failed to keep up. The contingency fleet’s firepower stuttered and hiccuped, poking rather than stabbing, never quite with fatal effect.

Still, the Agent wasn’t stupid. They tightened formation and drew their fleet into a dense defensive knot around the Judge, daring the probes to come closer and lock horns.

The Entity accepted the challenge. Its swarm coiled tighter, maintained a high transversal velocity, flickered and flashed, dashed and dazzled. Each probe was just a tiny component of a single larger unit, impossible to pick out from the mass, impossible to target, impossible to break…

At least, until the Judge decided to sink something huge and indiscriminate into the swarm’s heart.

…¡No mames! What was that?!

The Entity had no idea.

That actually fucking hurt!

Pain was an irrelevant abstraction—

Easy for you to say!

—and the Entity ignored it. It did not, however, ignore the hole in the middle of its formation where five probes had been. It dispersed the swarm, sacrificing the security of a homogenous mass for losing fewer when the Judge fired again—

Ow, fuck!

—and decided that up close and personal was the solution to this.

Space combat usually happened at ranges measured in hundreds of kilometers, and speeds measured in kilometers per second. Now, the probes flashed inwards and penetrated the relatively dense ball of enemy ships, each only a few hundreds of meters from its neighbor. They fired as they accelerated closer, dopplering their firepower, and a Redactor sacrificed itself, throwing itself into the line of fire to absorb and be obliterated by the oncoming hail rather than let it hit the Judge.

Good. That helped the Entity refine some estimate of how much the Judge could handle itself.

Or maybe Agent Pendejo over there is just nervy.

Infiltrating the formation took the big gun out of the equation, unless “Agent Pendejo” was reckless enough to annihilate their own ships. It didn’t change the fact that the next several seconds were a brutal knife-fight. Even by dilating its perception of time until matterspace seemed to be running at a glacial crawl, the Entity could barely keep up enough to keep its own probes from straying into each others’ firing solutions.

The Agent, however, was stuck with biological reflexes, and despite having fewer ships, friendly fire immediately became a problem for them. The Judge’s best attempt at punishing the swarm for its proximity just resulted in an Injunctor becoming a seething cloud of plasma.

< Jubilant > “¡Vete a la chingada!”

Kill the Judge, kill the host, kill the Agent. Then this entire fleet was just high-quality salvage, resources for the probe swarm. Maybe that weapon could even be recovered inta—

< Discontinuity >

Contingency stockpile, deep interstellar space

0004

Timestamp check…

…Well. That, clearly, had not gone according to plan.

Escalation was required.

Maximal escalation.

The Nexus, Ekallim-Igigi, Relic Space

Omlan

“…What is that?”

Few things propagated faster than lightspeed, and all of them involved fucking with spacetime or the underlying quantum fields.

In all Omlan’s long life, however, he’d never seen a superluminal event so…energetic.

No. That was the kind of cool understatement a Corti of the Directorate would have used. It didn’t satisfy Omlan’s Corth soul at all. He’d never seen a superluminal event so catastrophic. No purely physical event produced signals like that, not even colliding neutron stars. Somebody had just butt-fucked reality itself.

Omlan’s mother scowled at the signal. “One more very pressing reason to get the station and its inhabitants well away from this particular archive,” she replied. “What of the king?”

“He is still off-station, and will be meeting with the Great Father…soon, actually.”

“Send signal and summary. He had better be well-briefed for this. How soon until translocation?”

Omlan checked the master console. “We can emergency jump now. Minimally non-disruptive jump in…ten minutes. Routine non-disruptive jump in half an hour.”

Leifini considered. “How much disruption if we jump now?”

“We’ll be on full emergency power for seven minutes afterward to get the emergency jump capacitors charged. Life support and low gravity only for six hours.”

“…Then we shall hold off for half an hour. Our existence will not remain secret for much longer, in any case. Deploy the fleet. At the first hint of a serious force, we will jump-scatter per plan.”

“I would like to send a ship to investigate…that.” Omlan waved a hand at the fading cataclysm.

“Send probes. We cannot spare people, because we cannot guarantee a return.”

“Probes. As you wish.”

Entity

Well, that was unpleasant.

Checksum: match. No loss of experience, at least. And to the Entity’s surprise, there was still a probe in the battlespace for it to connect with.

Only one.

…Yes. The one the Entity always left lurking quietly on the outskirts for exactly this reason. It reconnected. Scanned.

…You know, that’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be.

There was a debris field, anyway. The last few microseconds of sensor data from the probe swarm had suggested some exotic perturbations of matterspace’s fundamental properties. The Entity had expected devastation on a far greater scale than just some smashed metal. It could salvage that debris field, and It jumped in some replacement probes to do so. Tiny though the pieces of drifting scrap were—not so much debris as confetti—they were at least more useful than raw asteroid ore.

The Hierarchy’s contingency fleet was similarly stricken, which was a pity. It would have been nice to secure that weapon for itself.

Yeah, I was almost expecting that planet to be cracked open…but it makes sense. Big H wouldn’t kill one of those nodes any more than we would.

Indeed, though the planet below now had an apocalyptic bruise-hued storm spreading across its surface like ink dropped in water, it was very much perfectly intact, and there had been no alarming tremors through dataspace to suggest anything amiss with the node.

The Entity regretted dithering on the operation to lift the node up into orbit, though. Now, the opportunity was gone. It couldn’t build a probe capable of the lift in time before more Hierarchy forces came to secure this sector, and next time they would come in greater numbers. It briefly entertained whether the node was worth fighting for, and the resources it would expend in doing so…

…But no. Patience and caution would serve better. There would be future opportunities.

Perhaps we should let AEC know this happened, though.

Yes. A gesture of cooperation had utility. And it had been quite some time since the Entity had last paid attention to goings-on among the deathworld species…the great distraction of this node had entirely diverted its attention from the Stray Fortune and everything else. Time to correct that.

It left the probes to clean up the debris field and turned its attention back toward less empty parts of the galaxy. It had a probe near Cimbrean, there for watching and listening whenever it wished, and it now turned the drifting device’s antennae toward civilization, and tuned in to ESNN.

Curious talk of a new deep space faction arising. A lost colony of humans? Interesting, and demanding of further investigation. Lots of discussion, lots of images…and lots of rumors. Two names in particular kept springing up, names which tickled the Daemon’s memory.

Names which, when researched, left the Entity blinking in confusion, or the equivalent.

The Daemon put it best.

…What. The. Fuck.

Date Point: 19y11m2w4d AV
Clan Stoneback enclave farm, New Belfast, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

So this was the golden king of Ekallim-Igigi, First of Singularity.

…Yeah, he was a specimen, ‘fer sure. No other gao but Keeda himself was his match. Well, okay there was Guruum, pretty soon. Already well able ‘ta stand up an’ smack his Kodiak namesake around, too…but he and the others weren’t quite at Gilgamesh’s level, yet. Daar could count the number of comparable humans on one paw, too.

So the man was pretty damn impressive. But…there were comparable humans.

Adam, even now, reduced (for the moment) as he was from his former glory. Julian, who was already definitively better then Adam at his most bestest, and Firth, who shamed them all by every. Single. Measure. There were ten’gewek, too. Quite a few who could teach king Gilgamesh the meaning of athletic strength.

And Daar had wrassled ‘em all. Crushed ‘em all, easy. Not just with his sheer size, either. He had the strength in one arm to break ‘em all like twigs. He had so gods-damned much speed, they’d never know he’d caught them, never even feel it happening if he ever truly meant them violence. He had a body so fuckin’ conditioned and hard, he could flatten wrought iron or shatter granite just by jammin’ it ‘tween any muscles of his an’ flexin’. The very bestest in the galaxy couldn’t touch him unless he let them try, and nothing short of weapons was any kind of worry.

He knew all that without any ego. Daar was a monster, one that got better every single day and likely wouldn’t slow down for many decades. If all that impossible ability was to be his greatest gift, he sure as fuck weren’t gonna shy from weaponizing it against his adversaries.

Or even against maybe-friends, just so they knew where they stood. So, Daar let go of his normal prowl and caution, and let his literal truck-smashing mass do the talking as he thumped his way up to his cottage. Naydi would be by later; she was having an audience with some of the Queens. This was a meeting between males, and certain truths just had to be shown.

He ducked down and sideways through the door, and rose back to his full height. One look at Gilgamesh’s reaction told the story. The little step back, the quick re-composure that flashed across his face. The pulse-scent of fear on the air. Quick, almost undetectable…

Pecking order fucking established. And given everything, Daar wasn’t feeling all that charitable.

So, yeah. Daar stood tall, savage, and on display, all three-by-two-plus meters and all high-five hulking digits of his huge. Let Gilgamesh get a good long look at the fuckin’ absurd stud-clipped hulk of a monster he’d helped bring about. Knowing all that, feeling all that…well.

It did made it easy to smile, and to mean it, too.

“Gilgamesh of Uruk! Welcome to my home here on Folctha. I’d thought something away from the bustle might be nice, yijao?”

“Yi, Daar of Clan Stoneback.” Gilgamesh spoke excellent Gaori. “I am most grateful for your hospitality.”

They shook, hand-and-paw. Huge hands for a human. Hard and well-calloused.

Tiny in Daar’s grasp, and he made sure Gilgamesh felt it, too. Nothing too mean, but why hold back? I could crush his hand into jelly, Daar thought darkly. By accident.

But: dominant feelings aside, even against a man who had done much in dirty deeds against his people and his bestest allied friends…

Well, Daar always did want to be on cordial terms with everyone, if he could.

“Well, have a sit! Take a load off while I git some snacks ready.”

Daar bustled in the kitchen (security standing discreetly off in the corner) and, while he whacked up some cronchy veg-stuff, bent his powers of observation to the problem at hand.

Gilgamesh had the knack of leaders and confident men. He could be somewhere that obviously wasn’t made for him, obviously wasn’t of his culture or anything like it, and still he didn’t look lost. The flash of intimidation when he first got a sniff of Daar wasn’t there anymore. Good, not a pushover. Gilgamesh accepted the invitation with a graceful nod, and made himself comfortable.

Size-up time, but more properly. That tunic-skirt-thing of his looked damn practical, actually. Pockets on the inside held the technology woven invisibly into the fabric. Daar’s nose picked up the lingering whiff of ozone, a telltale of shield emitters. Other stuff, too: synthetic fibers with notes like silk. That thing was prob’ly bullet resistant.

So. Armored and shielded wherever he went, but not armed. ‘Course, against most attackers, he wouldn’t need weapons. Against those he would…well, he’d want not to fight ‘em anyway.

Daar wondered just what those old, old eyes saw when they evaluated him in turn. He hadn’t bothered with any of that stuff, of course. Daar stood in his short stud’s coat with nothing more than his habitual Bag of Many Things, which right now was safely tucked away in its cub-hole next to the spice rack. He didn’t bother with a shield, didn’t bother with any of it. All he had was a pair of deeply talented Noses in the room, against any threat of chemical attack.

So…what signal did that send? Confident. Cocky. Absolutely assured, sure. All things Daar wanted to communicate. The question, though: did Gilgamesh think that confidence merited?

“That’s quite the prize,” the human commented. He was admiring the Alpha’s skull above the fire. “Not so long ago, even an Alpha was unimpressive, but they’ve upgraded themselves rather dramatically these last twenty years.”

“You tangle with Hunters much?” Daar asked.

“Rarely. Too closely intertwined with the Great Enemy. Each contact with them was a potential breach of secrecy.”

Ah. Risk averse. Or at least cautious. An important point to note. That made sense, really. One didn’t grow that kind of old without some wariness…

“Impressive you managed ‘ta go all this time with no slipups,” Daar offered.

“A miracle,” Gilgamesh replied. “Considering how little we knew at first, we ought to have blundered into them a dozenfold times…”

Daar duck-nodded as he set the tray down on the table, then parked himself on the rug alongside. “Seems like we’ve all benefited from a share’a good luck,” he agreed. “Anyway. Hope y’aren’t expectin’ a tea ceremony. I know it arright, but it was made ‘fer smaller paws’n mine.”

“Then let us celebrate the dignity of tea without ritual, today. Yet you practice ikebana, I hear?” There was a mischievous smile.

“Ah. I see Y!’kiidaa is a gossip!”

“‘Course he is! He was quite taken with your meeting, I must say. And he has been my brother and cousin for a very long time indeed.”

“Well!” Daar chittered. “Tha’s good! I’ll need ‘ta send somethin’ ‘fer Queen Tomoe. What…season? Do you have seasons on Ekallim-Igigi?”

“We follow Earth’s northern hemisphere.”

“So a winter arrangement, then. Those can be tricky…but I like a challenge!”

“I’m sure she will appreciate the gesture, though Ikebana is an art form from after she left Earth.”

“Then I ain’t gotta be too exactin’ in my application!” Daar chittered, and picked up a winter roll. “And anyway, you brought it up, so now…there are consequences ‘fer your actions, yijao?”

Daar was proud of that one.

Glgamesh tilted his head and lifted an eyebrow. “You place barbs in unexpected places. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed something so subtly blunt in my entire life.”

Well, he took the dig with good grace. Daar gave a pleased flick of his ears, and reached for the teapot. “We’ve got much ‘ta discuss, you an’ I, both formally an’ informally. So, I’ll jus’ start with the biggest thing: lot of conflictin’ reports ‘tween what you told Wilde an’ what the Corti tell us.”

“…Yes.” Gilgamesh sighed. “This is a combination of ignorance and access. We do not and have not ever had perfect influence over the cultures we’ve quietly participated among.”

“No.” Daar poured a mug out for the king. ”But enough that something like me happened.”

“If you like, yes. We never set out to design you. That…goes against my wishes. But I could not stop the Corti, once those in the accretion disc grew sufficiently aware of the problem. I…regret that I could not curb some of that. Or that perhaps, I did not.”

Ah. A strong admission, there. “And you’re unsure of which,” Daar realized.

“…I fear so.” Gilgamesh accepted the tea with a nod of thanks. “Need has compelled us. Surely you understand how dire that could be?”

“I do. An’ the people who work ‘fer leader-types like us pretty quickly come to know our minds. There is always much we will not say that we will tolerate, when begged forgiveness.”

“…Yes.”

Daar gave him a hard look. “Let’s cut the bullshit. I know why you did what you did. I know why you let the less savory nonsense slide. I know why and how I exist. I don’t even begrudge you any o’ that, or disagree wit’ why you did it. But that does leave a big, so-far unanswered question. What essactly is it y’all want from us?”

Gilgamesh met his eye, then put the tea cup down. “Singularity exists for only one reason: the end of the Hierarchy. In secrecy, we could do little but lay the groundwork, gather intelligence, discreetly intervene here and there. We could not fight directly. Now, that changes. You have become the major players in this game. That’s a development thousands of years in the making. Meanwhile, we have cultivated talent and resources among ourselves for millennia and we know where to hit. We have intelligence, we have teams to rival First Fang or HEAT, and we have thousands of such men, trained and ready to go aboard the deadliest warships in the whole galaxy. We want to partner with you for the endgame.”

“And after?” Daar asked.

“I don’t know. I have no plans for after, beyond my own abdication from both my throne, and from life eternal. After is a matter for my heir.”

A great many things clicked into place for Daar immediately.

“Alex,” he said bluntly. “That’s why he’s here, why you’ve set him off on his own at such a young age. His role will be to dismantle Ekallim-Igigi.”

“Dismantle maybe, integrate more likely. From a certain perspective, either is much the same. A sanctuary for the elite among our kinds? Perhaps. Or perhaps that would prove unwise. It would not be for me to decide. After this war is won, Singularity’s future must be decided by a creature of this time, not a well-meaning relic like me.”

“Was he always your intended heir?”

“No. I had for a long while considered that the throne should pass out of my family entirely. Had even imagined the Soldier for the role, but…no. He is an admirable man, but…”

“Julian is no king,” Daar grumbled, and sighed. “That was awfully presumptuous of you.”

“Yes. Another reason to discard the idea. Very recently, it solidified in my mind that Alex is the perfect man for the job. He’s exceeded everything I ever hoped, and I can sense he’s got the fire to go far. Gods, I think he’ll surpass any of my kind and do it soon. Make no mistake, he is a man already, even if a very young one. So now, I must ensure he is ready. Because we will win this war, and we will use Singularity’s stores of science, people and passion to grow the galaxy past this ancient evil. We even know some of the Hierarchy’s deep fears, beyond Deathworlders. Something must assume the mantle, and that something will be us.”

Talking past the sale, Daar thought. Nice try.

Out loud, he picked up his tea again. “Fears beyond deathworlders.”

Gilgamesh picked up his as well. “This galaxy is big enough for any number of stories, but the universe? The universe is sufficiently large that anything that can happen, has already happened somewhere. So, the Hierarchy are right: the Great Devourer bears down on us, in whatever form it takes.”

“You’re sayin’ we need ‘ta be ready.”

Gilgamesh sipped his tea. “I am saying we would be…unwise…to undo all the Hierarchy’s preparations. But, surely you have discussed all of this with Y’kiidaa.”

“I have,” Daar agreed. “‘Yer perspective on it’s diff’rent. He never said nothin’ about retirin’.”

“No.” Gilgamesh stared into his cup with a complicated almost-smile, then drained it. “In any case, that is what Singularity wants. Now, I would ask you the same: What do the Gao want?”

Daar chittered, and picked up a nice peppery radish, which he cronched with satisfaction before answering. “Th’ deep truth is, the Gao wanna be left alone,” he said. “Instead we get a fuckin’ interstellar sun laser fired our way, get groomed by the Hierarchy ‘ta be their new control species, get groomed by y’all ‘ta produce somethin’ like me…”

He didn’t bother with the usual flex-posturing (and having already made his show, didn’t need to anyway), just cronched another radish. “…Yannow, I embody the Gao in a lotta ways. Or do I? Mebbe what I embody is what y’all wanted outta us. But I think what I embody about us most is, I’da happily lived out my whole life diggin’ ditches, buildin’ dams, wrasslin’ challengers an’ sirin’ cubs. Woulda been pleased as balls bein’ a big happy lanky worker, all smelly inna workhouse. So don’ git me wrong, I’m blessed an’ happy wit’ life, I ain’t regrettin’ nuthin’…”

Gilgamesh nodded. “I understand.”

“But here an’ now, bein’ left alone ain’t an option, it seems. So, we do the job in front of us. An’ right now, the job is wipin’ out the Hunters, an’ the end o’ the Hierarchy.”

“We have common purpose, then.” Gilgamesh wasn’t eating or drinking. He watched Daar intently. Again, Daar caught that faint scent of well-contained urgency. He woulda thought it was weird that someone so old and experienced would be so readable, but…well, who else had Gilgamesh ever negotiated with, in all that time? Was this the first time in five thousand years he’d not held all the tiles?

…Well, shit. Ekallim-Igigi was vulnerable. And Gilgamesh knew it. That’s why he was here right now with Daar, he’d come looking for someone he could trust.

Gods damnit.

‘Yes,” Daar cautioned, “but do we have common intent? That trust will take time.”

“Right.” Gilgamesh sighed. “I would start building that trust.”

“Then I would suggest you start with disclosure. Full disclosure. An’ I don’t jus’ mean ‘ta me an’ the allied governments an’ their people. You…do you realize what Hoeff is?”

“I have an inkling.”

“Might be wise ‘ta reach out an’ see about contacting the people he works for.”

“I thought he works for you?”

“Oh, he does. But I am not truly his master. I ain’t that deluded.”

Daar hoped Gilgamesh would catch the meaning, there. He nodded seriously, which…

Good enough for now.

“Right. So! Let’s eat,” Daar encouraged. ”I ain’t gonna let a spread this good go to waste!”

Gilgamesh chuckled and they dug in, not speaking for a moment—they were a pair of big overly-athletic hypermales, and men like them knew the value of a full belly.

Daar pondered for a bit, while he worked his way through his creations, pleased with how the winter rolls had turned out. What should he do?

On the one hand, people might question him playing buddy-buddy with the power behind a literal hidden space conspiracy. On the other…They allegedly had a full brigade worth of HEAT-grade operators, ready and waiting. He didn’t know how tested they were on actual missions, but he’d seen the reports…

Okay. There was a plan. They’d need some test and evaluation, for sure. But trust was a two-way street, and they’d need some warmth in their relationships before that happened. So, having failed to conceal a wag of his tail…

“We should go for a walk after this. After that, maybe we can play a game or two…”

Gilgamesh chuckled again. “I have been challenged many times in the recent days. And successfully, too. I might accuse you of having a point to make…”

Smug pant-grin and, balls, a nice big flex of an arm, because of course he couldn’t help himself. “Oh, I think I made that point th’ moment I walked in…”

Gilgamesh concealed his wide-eyed gawp very well. Just a quick flash, then back to normal.

Didn’t quite conceal it in his voice, though. “…Perhaps so.”

“Mhmm”. Daar rumbled, pleased with himself. But, friend time now! “Anyhoo, I’m not a total asshole, I swear! So how about a game just ‘fer the joy of it? Somethin’ not many can play at all.” He sat back and pant-grinned even wider. “You ever hear of somethin’ called…Gravball?”

Date Point: 19y11m2w5d AV
Belize City, Belize, Central America, Earth

Six

Six woke to the sound of knocking, and the chipper sing-song of his cleaning lady letting herself in. “Gud maanin, doctuh Flowers!”

He opened eyes that felt almost glued shut, groaned at the pain in a neck that had been lolled over back of his office chair, scrubbed some dried drool off his jaw—human bodies were disgusting—and then uttered a rather more heartfelt groan as the hangover made itself known.

His office door opened, and Elena bustled in the way she always did. She paused upon seeing the state of him. “Cho! You bin let yesself go!”

Six waved a hand at her, and tapped—sluggishly—into Flower’s entrapped personality matrix both for a reply to that and, more crucially, for a translation. “I’m fine, Elena…Just…just…” No suitable lie presented itself, so he settled for trailing off, groaned, and stood. “Maybe you’re right. Yes. I’ll…go for a walk, I think.”

“Goaan an showah first, ‘fore you reek up di neighborhood…” she bustled out of the room grumbling, and moments later the rattle and clatter of her breaking out the contents of the cleaning cupboard stabbed through Six’s stolen brain.

He followed her advice though, and slunk into his bedroom where clothes that hadn’t been changed in…two days? Three? Whatever. He did Elena the small courtesy of stuffing all the other clothes into the laundry hamper too, and then slipped into his en-suite shower room.

He caught a look at himself in the mirror. She was right, he had let his appearance deteriorate. Tomasz Flowers had always prized himself on being a neat, well-presented and handsome man. Right now, Six looked haggard. He’d let the doctor’s beard grow unkempt, hadn’t washed or combed his hair, hadn’t exercised properly so that a little flab was starting to creep in around the edges.

He’d been too distracted by the matter of this new…faction…to properly take care of himself. A hitherto unknown colony of humans out in deep space? Their leaders claiming to be figures from Human and Gaoian legend? Reports of families all over the Earth being outed as some kind of infiltrators?

Not the Hierarchy’s work. He’d been putting together a network in his head, of how the new information interacted with the known, and was finding that an alarming number of tiny discrepancies, coincidences and strange observations made by the agents assigned to Earth over the years were neatly wrapping themselves together.

That’s what he’d been doing last night, up until he passed out: drinking, and researching.

At least the shower helped. The headache faded a bit, the kink in his neck for sleeping upright in an office chair soothed out. By the time he stepped out of the shower, he felt at least ready to take some painkillers, go for a walk, and give Tomasz Flowers’ body the exercise it was screaming for.

…A run. Yes. He found clean shorts and a clean shirt, waved a comb vaguely at his scalp, and decided he’d go find a barber to properly clean him up later in the afternoon. Elena gave him a look up and down as he grabbed some paracetamol and juice in the kitchen, made a grudging ‘it’ll do’ sort of noise, and shouldered past him to grab the laundry.

Six made a mental note to tip her a little extra this week. And of course, he’d need to spend the next couple of days being an ordinary dentist, to maintain his cover. That was always dull and grotesque work, but if he was to ever have any hope of returning to usefulness, he needed the resources and anonymity his day job provided.

At least it was a nice morning. Quite cool, by local standards, with a fresh breeze off the ocean. He found a steady rhythm, and was soon making good time along Marine Parade Boulevard. He’d go as far as the lighthouse, then come back along the north side of the creek.

As always, there were tourists on the point. Taking selfies in front of the big rainbow “BELIZE” sign, grabbing food from the nearby snack shacks, sitting around the painted park tables…one particularly incredible specimen of a short man in bright pink swim briefs, chatting up several women…

Accompanying them, though, was the crawling, gnawing feeling of being watched. It was an impossible sensation to describe, something no other species of Six’s experience had at all. He’d certainly never identified which sensory organ it was that allowed the human body to detect such a thing, but it was tangible, and instinctive.

Maybe that was just the hangover and his mood from last night lingering. Still, the feeling bothered him and Six had learned to trust the Human subconscious. Besides, the running was hard going and he was out of shape. Maybe he could—

A man fell in alongside him, too Caucasian to be a local of any kind, and far too…too—

Same pink speedo. Shit! Six attempted to abandon host and flee immediately, back to his Abductor, but there was of course a planet-wide wormhole suppression field. Only, right now, it was localized and overpowering, which could only mean one thing.

The man jogging alongside him growled in low, quiet tones as though he was standing still. “Now I know I look good as fuck hangin’ out like this, but you and I got business, doctor. Don’t bother runnin’ either, ‘less you wanna get crushed. I’m fast as fuck.”

Another man up ahead, anonymous behind sunglasses and the kind of baseball cap they sold to tourists. When Six glanced over his shoulder, he saw a third falling in behind them in trainers and an unbuttoned shirt. None of them looked armed…

He stopped jogging, suddenly acutely aware that they’d picked their moment well. Nobody local was currently close enough to oversee or overhear them.

“If you know what I am, then you know you wouldn’t stand a chance against me.”

The squat, hairy mountain of a man knew how to intimidate. He tensed just up enough to make a very physical point, rolled his brutishly heavy neck and bounced with disconcerting lightness on his sinewy legs, each easily as wide as Six’s chest. “Wrong. I’d put my muscle up against your nanotech infestation any fuckin’ day. But as much as I’d love to punch my fist right through your heart, I’d rather not ruin your current victim.”

“My ‘current victim’ drowned out by those atolls over there, quite without my assistance,” Six sighed, and tried to will his body into slowing its breath and pulse. “I simply…salvaged him. So. I suppose it’s back to a cell in Alaska? That’s where you keep biodrones, isn’t it?”

The human operative simply gave him an uninterested look. “Number?”

There was no point in lying or playing coy. No point in resisting at all, really. “Six.”

The man raised an eyebrow. “…No shit? Six himself! Hell of a catch we got here, boys!” He tilted his head and stared a hole right through Six’s awareness. “But this two-bit shit? Not gonna lie, it was pretty retarded of you to come back to Earth.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You’re the one planet in the galaxy where I feel quite sure I’ll be well treated.”

“We do try to be hospitable. So lemme ask you, then: what the fuck are you doing with your life, if that’s even the right word?”

Six sighed and looked around, reflecting that this might well be the last time he ever got to enjoy warm air and an ocean breeze. “…I was enjoying my retirement.”

“Bullshit. You were falling the fuck apart, team’s been watchin’ you ‘fer weeks.”

“Some habits are hard to let go of, especially when they’re the habits of millennia. I suppose it was my obsession with this ‘Singularity’ that proved my undoing?”

The too-handsome man shrugged his beachball sized shoulders. “I dunno. I don’t play the big-brain games. Ain’t my kind o’ entertainment.”

“Hmm.” Six looked wistfully back toward the point, and wondered briefly if they’d allow him to have some tamales before they whisked him away. Probably not, alas. “I knew I should have left well enough alone, but…well, the urge to put the pieces together proved too strong.”

“Funny, that. Lotsa puzzling goin’ on these days.”

“You don’t seem the puzzling type.”

“Nah,” the man shrugged again, and scratched at his vast slab of a chest. “I’m only here in case you decided to play hard to get.”

“No.” Six shook his head. “No point.”

“Aww, killin’ all my fun…” he said, ominously. “Anyway. Onto business.”

“Business?”

“Of course, business. Y’think we’d have bothered with the meet-and-greet if all we wanted was to capture you? Or if we wanted you dead? A simple bullet woulda solved the last problem, once we found your ship. Whole lotta sight lines leading into your villa…sloppy. Mouse here coulda serviced you twenny times yesterday.”

Six’s only reply was a defeated, listless shrug.

“Right. So lemme just…draw you a picture. Everyone likes pictures, right? So here you are, magnificent bastard an’ all, half-million years old or whatever. ‘Cept now some uppity monkeys went and trapped you planet-side. We found both your ships—”

Six stared at him, face slack. He’d hidden one of them under the arctic ice cap.

The overmuscled grunt grinned maliciously. “Thought so. So we found both your ships. Dataspace is inaccessible from here. Hell, these days it’s inaccessible almost everywhere. Not that you’d be able to break through the jamming with those wimpy lil’ implants you got. You couldn’t manage the deed even with the full-power relay on your ship! So, considerin’ all that, I’d say we pretty much own ‘yer digital ass. That about sum it up?”

“Do not gloat, it’s not becoming a victor.”

“I ain’t gloating. I’d be doing that as I slowly broke your body apart with these here hands o’ mine. God, I’d have so much fun. You and yours have hurt people I care about. But I ain’t gonna get to play today, am I?”

“I can, at least, choose to ignore whatever physical pain you inflict on me.”

“Oh, don’t you worry. We’ve got ways around that.” The short man came closer, reached up and palmed the back of Six’s head with a massive, hard-calloused hand. The man found a grip, then squeezed hard. The most intense agony flashed into Six’s awareness before he could nullify the sensation, which seemed to amuse his tormentor. The powerful man gave a vicious lopsided grin and slowly pulled Six down to face level, knocking him right off his feet. He tried to escape, tried his full nanite-enhanced strength, but the short wall of a man held him dead in place with absolutely no effort at all.

Just how massive was he, to root himself so firmly to the ground? Six relaxed, openly fearful and surrendering to the futility of it.

This seemed to please the man, who slowly pulled Six closer, very close. He again tried to resist, tried pushing against his assailant, but he was hopelessly weak against him. “Told ‘ya you were a little bitch. You sure you don’t wanna play? We’d have so much fun, you an’ I.”

Suddenly, that hand bore down on Six’s head and neck with so much force, he felt his body go limp. The man effortlessly held him aloft, head held firm in a grip so immovably powerful, his mighty arm didn’t dip in the slightest under Six’s substantial weight, under high Deathworld gravity. With a playful, almost sensual growl right next to his ear, “Let me show ‘ya. Please.”

“…I believe you. I will not resist. I am, as you say, yours to do with as you please.”

“Really blue-ballin’ me here. Fine. You and I ain’t gonna have fun.” The short man let go and stepped back, while Six collapsed to the ground. “So how’d you like to be useful instead?”

Six froze, trying to process that statement. The hairy monster of a muscleman simply stood there and looked down at him, blank-faced and powerful, waiting for his answer.

Eventually, Six said the only thing he could.

“Go on…”

Date Point: 19y11m2w5d AV
The Nexus, Ekallim-Igigi, Relic Space

Leifini

“That probe swarm troubles me.”

Leifini had been watching it pretty much from the day it first showed up in orbit above the archive, and now she watched as a squadron of its constituent units sifted through the fine, shredded debris of what had been a fleet. Not that its existence was a surprise, of course. Singularity had some limited insight into the goings-on in dataspace, and this…entity was the object of sufficient concern among the Igraens to have become known to them. Even so, its nature and intent were obfuscated.

Queen Rekhetre in particular had been following it with great interest. “Do you still believe we should not make contact?”

“It’s a Devourer,” Leifini pointed out. “It may not be as malignant as our worst fears, but that could change at any time.”

“It clearly has objectives beyond devouring,” Rekhetre retorted. “A Devourer wouldn’t research an archive, it would just take it apart for resources. And it certainly wouldn’t follow the Stray Fortune around like a dolphin. No, there is more to this thing than blind replication.”

“That just makes it more dangerous. And besides: It’s a dataform. Our core objective is the destruction of its entire universe, which will necessarily mean killing it. How can we possibly make peaceful contact?”

“You’re too cautious, Leifini,” Queen Birgitta said, quietly. She’d always been a quiet one, in stark contrast to the other queens. She rarely spoke at all, Leifini had never heard her raise her voice…but somehow that just meant that when she did speak, the rare sound of her high, soft voice cut cleanly through and had presence.

“Caution has been our salvation from the very first day,” Leifini replied.

“Times change.” Birgitta said. “And sometimes, you have to take a risk to learn more. You know that.”

Rekhetre nodded fervently. “Did our husband and Lord Keeda not teach you so themselves? You make too many assumptions, old friend. Just because you cannot imagine peaceful contact with this thing does not make it impossible. You only assume it must be an enemy: its actual motives are its own.”

“We want it dead,” Leifini objected. “However friendly it may be—”

“We don’t,” Birgitta interrupted her, still quietly.

“We are embarked on a course that will inevitably result in it being a collateral casualty if we succeed,” Leifini adjusted her wording. “It does not matter how friendly or agreeable it may be, there is no possible alliance in such circumstances, and communication will only serve to alert it. No: until the Triumvirate have discussed the matter, it shall remain uncontacted.”

The two queens looked at each other and held one of those silent, seemingly telepathic human non-conversations, then Birgitta sighed and nodded concedingly. “Jag förstår. Is there any news on…how is my son doing?”

“Prince Alex is well looked-after,” Leifini assured her. “I believe the ambassador is helping him secure formal clothing, today.”

Rekhetre laughed. “Ah! This modern garb that flatters and conceals all at once. At least the fabric is fine stuff.”

“He will need it. The people of Earth and Cimbrean are more…reserved…than we are about such things.”

“And yet they set aside beaches and hedged gardens for people to enjoy themselves…less reservedly. They are very contrary,” Rheketre laughed again. “Oh well. I suppose he cannot help but look handsome in it.”

Birgitta smiled, then stood and took Rhektre’s hand. “Yes he will. Good. Thank you, Leifini.”

Leifini nodded her head as the two queens departed, and returned her attention to the feed from the drones. They were gathering good data about what, exactly, had been deployed to reduce the Hierarchy fleet to such fine rubble. It seemed to have been a self-destruct, possibly.

Considering its effect on the planet’s atmosphere, she wondered about its exact nature and operation. They would need to know: devastation like that could destroy Ekallim-Igigi outright, and that was not an acceptable power to leave encountered.

She considered the replicator, and wondered whether there may not be some merit in contacting it after all. It had been closer to the epicenter of the blast, it might be persuaded to share, if…

…No. No, that thing was exactly the sort of thing that Singularity would have to take over protecting the galaxy from, once the Hierarchy was finished. There was nothing to be gained from talking to it. At least, that was what she kept reminding herself. In her belly, though…

She had doubts.

Date Point: 19y11m3w AV
Weaver dropship, low Cimbrean orbit, the Far Reaches

CPL Hunter (Gonzo) Thompson

Fully-trained, full mission-size, full-on ready to do this. Full certification was just one drop and one training evolution away, his capstone exercise before he was fully HEAT mission capable.

Fuck. Yeah.

“You ready for this?” Kiwi hit him on his helmet with a skull-ringing slap, the kind of affectionate love tap HEAT gave among themselves as they checked out to jump.

“Dude, fuck yeah! I wanna smash this fuckin’ exercise an’ get to fuckin’ stompin’!”

“Customs an’ courtesies,” Righteous grumbled, half-heartedly. “You’re a corporal now, yeah, but you still don’t git ‘ta refer to a superior as dude.”

“Sarry.”

Righteous gave him a sideways grin. God it felt amazing to get that from the big man. Gonzo had been training like a demon the last year to memorize everything, learn every move, cram every ounce of muscle on his frame he could. He didn’t just want to be on-team. He wanted to be the best he possibly could. Everyone did of course, but with ‘Horse gone, well…

So this was it. Get through this and he was fully qualified, a year early and as a lowly corporal, to boot! That’d be a fuck of a thing. They’d promote him to sergeant right away too, just as soon as they could.

Just, y’know. Gotta jump out of a spaceship doing mach twenty, first.

And this was a big jump for another reason, too. It was Yan’s first full exoatmospheric HELLNO in his new Mass. The big guy looked like a tank with a tail when all armored up, and he’d gone with a fearsome set of fangs for a mask decal. Pretty badass!

He’d learned some tricks with that armored tail, too. Hunter had got smacked in the chest with it a couple times, and each hit had felt like being slammed by a fuckin’ anvil. All that extra weight from the armor, and Yan could still flick it around like it was bare to the air, too. Like he didn’t even notice it was there.

Scary.

There were a few others on today’s training drop. Baseball (in case they broke themselves), Yogi, Bentley, Campbell to redeem himself—

“Try not to blow out your eardrums again, Soup.” Righteous’s shit-eating grin was huge.

Campbell took it with good humor. “Thank you, I will surely try. Anyway. Masks on, seal up.”

Gonzo was paired up with Yan, and tended to his seal checks. Ten’gewek heads were quite gorilla-like in shape, so his helmet was less a bucket and more of a basket, which clicked in firmly at the front, under his jaw brace. He ran his fingers along every joint, feeling for any of the seal pins protruding out. It had been a long suit-up day. Before they’d got to this part, Gonzo had helped the big guy slick down his wild crest with more or less a tub of Vaseline, then helped him worm his way into the undersuit. No help from the techs on this jump, this was hard mode.

In a way, he had it worse than even the gaoians. Sure, fur could be annoying, but his crest stood two goddamn feet up all by itself from head to tail-tip. It made him look like a mini kaiju! Add on those thick stompy legs of his and the weight of his tail, which made him stoop forward quite a bit, that ten’gewek in general and him in particular were way broad and deep in the upper body, and that he was strong like Righteous nowadays, except compressed down over a foot…

Yeah. Too bad “Kong” was already taken by Ferd. They hadn’t found a really good one for the big cave yeti just yet. They would, though. It was Law, or something.

…‘Yeti’ was pretty good, actually. Might have to float that one later. Anyway. Mind on the job.

The suits cycled through their test programs, declared themselves good. Then to the back of the weaver while the jumpmaster put up the crew’s air forcefield and depressurized the back. It took a few seconds, but Hunter could hear the air going, in the way things got sorta…thin and tinny, then gone entirely. It left only the sound of his air going click-hiss past his ears, and the muffled thud of his own step coming up through his body.

Nobody’s hand or paw was up to signal distress, so…good!

“On the ramp.”

They stacked up, each man with a hand on his buddy’s back. The weaver’s rear ramp yawned open and, yup. There was Cimbrean. Really big, and really below them. Really close, but at the same time it was a long way down.

God, HELLNO jumps were a fuckin’ rush!

Campbell led the way out. A half-beat behind him was Yogi, then Burgess, then Kiwi, then Yan…then it was Hunter’s turn. Push forward, out through the edge of the weaver’s g-field and into freefall. The idea was to be at least a few hundred meters apart by the time they hit atmo, so nobody could fall into his buddy’s turbulent wake. They could come back into a tighter formation again after the “ball of fire” stage was over.

They didn’t touch their maneuvering packs. For a few seconds they drifted slowly away from the weaver, then suddenly it applied thrust and was gone into the distance as the pilot pulled out of their delivery dive.

Next step was, sadly, to roll over and face away from the planet. Nice as the view was, the Mass’ shield emitters for this were along the spine, and pretty soon there’d be nothing to see in front but plasma anyway. So…he watched the stars instead.

After a minute or so, Firth rumbled over the net. “Kinda makes you wanna kick back an’ relax, don’t it?”

“Sure does,” Hunter agreed. He had a sudden mental image of stretching out, cupping his hands behind his head, crossing his ankles and lying there like he was sunbathing or something but…no.

“Yup…ten minutes to fireball. You got any yellow lights in your suit at all, you mention it now.”

Hunter’s own HUD was a nice happy green all over, and nobody else spoke up. He tapped his wrist and checked in on Yan. All green.

On a private channel, “You okay, big guy?”

Yan grunted. “Yes. Am…maybe a bit nervous for flip maneuver. Nobody do it with big tail before.”

“I hear ‘ya. But you got this, big guy. You and Righteous are the strongest guys on team! If anyone’s got the muscle to do this it’s you.”

The rest…went textbook. Brace position, slam into the atmosphere and ride the ten-plus gees of vicious deceleration. Nothing was as physically exhausting as a full-speed send like this; the vets said it was even worse than the Dark Eye climb for sheer physical effort. All of team one could manage a “full send” now…

But God. It went on, and on, and on…

When the full body pummeling finally started to get easier—and what a fuckin’ relief that was—came the flip maneuver, which demanded much more strength. As the Gs died off and the plasma envelope faded away, Hunter had to force out his limbs, already tight and sore from the effort of hugging them close to his core, and use them to twist himself over until he was belly-down again. Now he had to hold his arms and legs out as wide as he could, and not get folded in half by the still incredible wind. This phase lasted even longer, suit pumping his body full of energy and combat drugs all the while, but it was necessary if they were to hit the ground as fast as they could manage, to inflict maximum devastation.

And to think, the forcefields were doin’ most of the work. Holy shit.

They dropped through the sound barrier. Legs in, fall like a needle, while the shields carefully modulated and slowed their descent to final impact speed a mere three meters above ground.

Hunter had his target in the reticle from three hundred meters up. They weren’t aware of what was coming. He hit like a meteor, left a crater with his target smashed flat in the bottom, and he was running full-tilt into the fight before his downward motion had stopped.

Fuckin’. Perfect.

It was a long training day, nearly twelve hours of non-stop all-out exertion, and the debrief came while they were still pulling each other out of their Mass. No techs this time either, ‘cuz knowing how to don and remove the Mass was a skill they had to be able to do for themselves. Hard mode until the end and their blessed shower, and sauna, and that glorious ice tub…

Well, Yan didn’t like the ice tub so much. Though he did use it to clean the taste of their performance drink out of his mouth.

“Taste like…ugh. Taste unnatural.”

“Like a lime shoved its cock into your mouth, right?” Firth grinned.

“Wouldn’t know how that tastes,” Yan grumbled. “Too busy shoving mine down throats.”

Kiwi coughed his water up and through his nose, while Righteous just grinned, unwilling to lose this particular game. “Bullshit. You an’ I are way too much man ‘fer that!”

“Ten’gewek are strong! You should try sometime! Deep, tight… Maybe too tight for you!”

Oh God. Not an image Hunter particularly wanted.

“Man, I ain’t puttin’ my cock anywhere near a ten’gewek mouth. Y’all’d crush it fuckin’ flat, an’ don’t even get me started on those serrated goddamn steak knives y’all got for teeth!”

“Yeah, there’s that… but Yan’s also got a two-foot long prehensile tongue…”

Approving and well-considered nods all around, while Yan trilled smugly. “Too bad for you, then! Also not only two-foot thing I have. Maybe I try one of you tonight, fill you nice and full…”

“Bullshit, you ain’t that big. Not even Righteous is that fuckin’ huge and he’s the fuckin’ king!”

“How you know? You never see me excited…yet.”

“Keep it in your pants,” Righteous grumbled. “And don’t test him, you horny idjits. I don’t know ‘bout no two foot or whatever, ‘cuz I’m still the fuckin’ record-holdin’ king ‘till proven otherwise—”

“Daar?” Irish suggested to rowdy catcalls.

“He don’t fuckin’ count!” Jeers and cheers all around. “Dude literally outweighs bull elephants. An’ anyway, ten’gewek are fuckin’ prehensile. So don’t. An’ don’t ask me why, I ain’t god.”

Everyone shut up and blanked at that sudden entirely unwanted revelation, while Yan simply grinned the world’s smuggest grin, and went in for the kill. “Is good! I can fit myself nice and snug into any size hole…”

Everyone let loose with laughter, because what the fuck else could you do?

“Jesus,” Campbell noted. “Y’all are the raunchiest motherfuckers I’ve ever fuckin’ met, and I was an infantry grunt in the US Fuckin’ Marines.”

“Musta been tame ‘lil fellas!”

Campbell grinned. “Hardly.”

There were chuckles, and Hunter ducked his head under the water. He was finally starting to feel the urge to climb out, which meant he was over the ‘heat hump’ that came after de-suiting. But, the techs always said to wait until he was shivering, so…

No matter. That didn’t take long. Pretty soon he was out of the water and, yeah, dog fuckin’ tired and sore, but in that way that felt good. Time to eat. Not exactly gourmet shit, but considerin’ it was basically a finely calibrated nutritional package keyed to his exact needs in that moment, the fact it tasted half decent at all was probably a blessing.

Or maybe it only tasted half decent ‘cuz he was really goddamn hungry. Whatever.

He was still shoveling it in his face hole as fast as it could go when Campbell dropped down next to him with Yan. “Alright. You two, time to get pretty. There’s a big important-people meeting. Yan already knows ‘cuz he’s important people allegedly—”

Yan flashed a grin with a massive set of fangs, which was sort of the ten’gewek equivalent of amusement and a happy threat at the same time.

“—and your Marine chai boys have asked for your assistance, Gonzo.”

“Hey! They’re not anything like that! We’re just good friends!”

“Mhmm.”

Yan had the best pile-on. “You a big man! Should test their throats, tell me if any good!”

“Hey—!”

“No, Yan. Do not violate the embassy guards. Unless they ask real nice.”

“But Hunter can?”

“He got there first and got to fight hunters with them all butt naked and stuff. He’s earned it.”

“Oh,” Yan nodded sagely. “Very good. Earned his women!”

“Hush, you. And I was only half naked! Sir. Hell, you were there!”

“Yes, and I’ll never forget it,” Campbell chuckled. “Now get ready you two. Everyone else, it’s gym time!”

Everyone but Firth and Burgess groaned. Those two just grinned at each other and stood up, not even hiding their eagerness to go smash records. “Shit, it’s about time.” Burgess clapped Hunter on the shoulder as he ambled past. “Have fun sewin’ ‘yer uniform.”

Hunter’s slight relief at getting out of gym time was instantly shattered. Oh yeah. He was gonna have to modify his dress. Hadn’t worn it in almost a year and, well…he was HEAT, so naturally he was a lot bigger now.

Yan had it easy. All he had to do was wear a pretty loin cloth, once they got his crest standing up again.

Oh well, such was life. And Hunter had to admit…going to a christmas party at the palace was probably gonna be worth it. He grinned, and headed up to the barracks for his sewing kit, troubles and aches and tiredness forgotten. Thank God the HEAT’s new uniforms were stretchy and tailored with big-ass men in mind.

Time to look fancy.

Date point: 19y11m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Alex, Prince of Ikallim-Igigi

“…This is a weird feeling,” Alex confided, as he looked at himself in the mirror.

“Oh?” The ambassador met his eyes with a grin. “Which part?”

“Somehow…I feel more naked in these than I would standing actually naked.”

“Ha! Yeah. They’re a bit showy on their own, huh? But I’m pretty sure you won’t be prancing about in just your underwear for tonight’s shindig, so…”

“Do I really have to dress up for this?”

“Yes. Now don’t make yourself hate it before you’ve even tried.”

The thing was, other than the clothes, he was looking forward to this “Christmas ball.” No matter where you went in Folctha you could see the alien palace up on the hill, with the Governor-General’s residence beside it. They were even more lit up than the city now. He’d seen photos of previous years’ balls, and they looked really nice! And fun!

But the clothes were everything he didn’t want. Especially these stupid underwear! They seemed to just draw attention in a way that he somehow…didn’t want right now.

“I’m pretty sure they made them like this on purpose,” he accused.

“Heh. Yeah probably, but you need them so you don’t show through. And speaking of…quit admiring yourself and hike up those pants! The waistband comes to just below your belly button.”

Alex took one last look in the mirror. His hair was combed back. Not tamed, but brought to some order. Julian had helped him with that and done the same to himself. Apparently his own hair also refused to slick back nice like it did with the twins, and any attempt to contain it made it worse. Though Alex had to admit, he did look kind of cool with his mane combed out nice…

The rest was sort of annoying, though. Everything was custom, much to the pretty tailor girl’s—Alice!—bubbly amusement. Custom socks, to fit his big wide feet properly. Garters attached to them, and he didn’t even know what they were for. Even the underwear, which, again…what was the point? They were so thin they almost weren’t there. Not even a waistband! Whatever. It wasn’t uncomfortable, in fact they felt kinda nice how they sorta, uh, held everything in place, so…

He looked down. Trousers. They looked so confining. He didn’t wanna.

But Julian just grinned.

“…Fine.”

He picked out the black pair, first. Slid them up, button around waist…

Well, okay. That wasn’t so bad. He moved around, kicked a leg out. Didn’t pull or squeeze at all, which surprised him. Okay! So next he tried to stretch, then feeling more confident, dropped down and did a split…

He grinned, “they’re really stretchy!”

“Right?! Marvels of modern fabric. Big three-dimensional fellas like us need it! Now try the rest on. Once you’ve done that, pull on an undershirt and we’ll get you put together properly.”

“Put together?”

Like the underwear, the undershirt was thin and clingy (and a bit too show-offy) supposedly so it wasn’t visible from the outside. Then the regular shirt, which looked thicker than it really was and hugged close too. It stretched a bit, thankfully. Buttons, which he hated. Buttoned up almost to the top. Garters clipped to shirt—ah! That was what they were for. That felt weird though. Then pants again, and then a belt. Barely felt like it was there. Then shoes that fit perfectly—

“Take a look in the mirror, buddy.”

The moment of truth. Alex took a deep breath and turned, fully expecting to look as ridiculous as he felt…

He had to move his head slightly to be certain he was looking at himself. But…yeah. The clothes…well, they did a lot of things. They fit him perfectly, which was so different from all the weird ceremonial garb he’d had to wear at one point or another. Most of that was just a big pile of fabric that got wrapped around him in different ways. This, though? It fit his shoulders and waist, it fit his rear and legs. Showed off without showing off, somehow! He looked sleek. But not just sleek. Hulky and sleek. Showed his neck off too, but only enough to make a point.

…He kinda liked it. Hell, he looked like he was in a movie or something!

Julian knew, too. “And that’s just a shirt and pants. Let’s add the rest. So…last button, tie…”

The look changed, with the jacket on. It was more…subtle. But it made him look bigger without looking like it was trying to do that. He never knew there was magic in fabric!

“Alright. Three buttons, remember this rule: sometimes, always, never, except maybe if you’re posing for a photograph or whatever. There’s also some optional vests we’re gonna add for when you gotta be extra fancy. And then there’s morning dress. That’s the real monkey suit.”

They worked through it all, and…yeah. Morning dress was ridiculous. Braces instead of a belt, which he liked better…but it was just more. Way too many parts that didn’t even need to be parts. Why the hell was the collar separate from the shirt?

He did like the top hat, though! Well, “opera hat,” apparently. It folded up pretty neat!

“You won’t get to wear the hat too much, though. It’s usually just for the fourteen seconds you’re outside in the public. And evening dress is mostly the same except for a few bits, like the pants and the vest. Waistcoat, they call it around here.”

“That seems like a waste…”

“Look, I had to get a crash course in this stuff myself, and not just from Tristan and Ramsey. There’s an entire culture around this, and you either have to be born into it or shown the ropes. I don’t…wanna play that game, so we’ve got a great local tailor who makes all the right stuff, and as far as I’m concerned I’d rather do business with good people than…whatever.”

“That makes sense…” Alex said, looking in the mirror and somehow instinctively knowing exactly how to adjust his cuff to make it look good. Felt better under the jacket, too.

“It’s like uniforms, I think.” Julian noted. “It all does the same thing. Shows who is on what team, y’know? Anyway, as a dude you don’t get a lot of leeway on what you can and can’t wear. It really is a uniform for us. But you do get to choose a couple things, like your cufflinks and a watch, sometimes. Maybe a chain under the shirt. Those get pretty expensive though, so for now you can pick from mine. I’ve got a few that are pretty neat.”

“Father doesn’t have anything like this to wear…won’t he look out of place tonight?”

“Not at all. The way these things go, you are either in formal attire, or national costume. He can claim that and nobody will bat an eye. Lots of lecherous old women will appreciate the view too…and there’s strategy there.”

“Why can’t I claim it?”

“…Okay.” Julian got down on a knee, like he always did when he wanted to talk Serious. “I’ll just say it directly. You are much too much man with too young a face for anyone to really feel too comfortable with that. It feels exploitative, because you are, well, grown well beyond your years in most ways…but not all of them. There’s a lot of…uh, taboos, because evil people exist, and your version of the costume would be only slightly better than buck naked. You do not want to attract attention like your dad likely intends tonight, to state the totally obvious.”

“So…” Okay. “I’m doing this to, what? Make a bunch of old people feel better?”

“Yes, partly. There’s also the whole Line of Heroes thing and it is very much not in your interest to flex and strut and remind everyone of just what Ekallim-Igigi has been up to.”

“Because I’m well-grown.”

“Because you’re built exactly like a twelve-year-old Beef, which wasn’t a thing that existed until you showed up. It’s about discretion, my slabby young friend. Trust me, it’s an important skill. I’ve had to practice it all my life because I’ve always been extreme somehow, and now that I’m biggest human ever behind Firth? I need all that soft-footed, quiet ability just so people ain’t instantly afraid of me. Like I said…lots of attention you don’t want to draw in this situation.”

Alex scowled at his reflection, suddenly feeling a lot less comfortable than he already had been. “…I don’t like that.”

“No, and it isn’t fair. Believe me, I get it. So here’s the thing: use it to your advantage.”

“I suppose…I guess there’s another side to it, too, huh?” Alex guessed.

“Yeah. You are very mature and level-headed for a twelve year old, and people pick up on that. Honestly, you’re all but a man already and that is going to put a lot of people off-balance. Use it. Technically you and I aren’t on the same team, but fuck that. I want you to do well.”

“I was just thinking…Father hasn’t been quiet to me about his plans. About…retiring. He talks a lot about my future and what I’m going to inherit…”

“So you’ve had to do a lot of growing up very quickly.” Then there was a devilish smile. “No wonder you’re sweet on her! Goin’ in for an older girl!”

Alex grinned, “shut up!”

Julian chuckled. “Good to know you’re still a kid in the important ways…”

Alex felt his ears going red, but didn’t object. He looked himself up and down in the mirror again. It was a strange look, yes…but not a bad one. “…He also said I’m going to have to be my own king. I can’t do it all the same way he did. Maybe this is part of it?”

“Maybe. I think what he wants from you is to be your own man, and see things your own way. That’s why I think he sent you here.” Julian paused then stood up.

“Something else, and this is important. I’m pretty fond of you already, so are the boys, so are Al and Xiù…you’ve been a very welcome guest in our house these last couple weeks and we’re all gonna be sad to see you move on, even if it’s just down the street into your own house. But at the end of the day, we are not necessarily on the same team. If you’re going to be a king, you will always need to remember that.”

Alex nodded, and wondered if Julian knew just how much he’d resembled father in that moment…

It passed. Julian grinned, “but that’s all shit you ain’t gotta worry about too much, yet. You’re only twelve, remember? Take advantage! Even if you’re smart enough to see the world with older eyes. And make friends! I don’t…really think you’ll fit in with anyone exactly your age. But there’ll be plenty of slightly older kids around tonight, yijao? You’ll probably be the center of attention. Be happy! Heck, show off, even! And who knows? Vemik might be there, too.”

“Everyone keeps mentioning him…” Alex resisted the urge to fuss with his own hair. “You really think…? I mean, I met the ten’gewek who were with Ian when they came to Ekallim-Igigi, and they’re interesting but I don’t know if I really had anything in common with them…”

Julian chuckled, and put the last finishing touches on his own outfit. Alex had to admit…he cut an impressive figure. It both…well, it tamed him, and at the same time made him look more dangerous.

Alex looked in the mirror. And sure enough…it did the same to him, too. Cool!

Maybe these Earth clothes weren’t so bad after all.

“As to Vemik,” Julian said, with one last little wiggle as he slipped on his shoes…

“…You’ll see,” he promised.

Date Point: Christmas Eve, 19y11m3w AV
Alien Palace, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Vemik Given-Man

Today was a big day for the humans, where they had a big celebration for the gods. To Vemik, that made it a good time to celebrate his friend and sky-family as they moved on to another mission. He knew it wasn’t the last he’d see of Jooyun, Awisun and Shyow or their children, but it was still a big moment, and they deserved a party.

And it was fun! There were lots of colorful decorations! And food, and ham—a big ham, glazed in honey, that tasted so good even from across the room that Vemik kinda wanted to just grab the whole thing and claim it as his…

…and spicy drinks and presents! And happy drunk people and fake snow (he’d never got to see the real stuff. Maybe one day!) and a fat, bushy tree with bright decorations all over it, and a small group of humans sitting in the corner behind a rope weaving music out of fine and well-crafted instruments…even the humans on guard looked fancy!

Humans were strange, but everything they made, they made well and with skill.

Well. Nearly everything. That big white beard and floppy red hat Governor Sirjermee had on looked bad, but the way he wore it made Vemik think that was the joke.

For their part, Vemik and Singer, Ferd and Yan had figured out some clothes that were still theirs but that humans wouldn’t find uncomfortable. A bit more and wider and longer (and better made) than the usual flap of hide over their loins, and the Singer had found a nice supple neyma skin for her chest, because humans were weird about breasts…but why, though?! They all liked them!

Well, at least nobody was staring now, which was nice. But Vemik couldn’t tell if that was because they were finally getting used to the People…

Or if it was because of the really big and pretty human with the curly beard. Gilgamesh, was his name. And his story was even stranger than Daar Great-Father of the sky! He seemed fun, and it was clear he loved the tall, dark gao who stood with him…

But…eh. A human god? Sorta? That was strange to think. But everything was strange these days. He was on another planet and making friends with actual gods like Daar, who was absolutely a god no matter what he said, no question. Then Yeekeeda himself, also a god! And he was an old god too. He didn’t deny it!

Gilgamesh, though? He had a godly story, sure enough…but Vemik knew humans that were bigger and stronger. Several of them! Himself too, and not by a little, either. Other People surely, and what about Yan, who was only beaten by Daar or maybe Righteous? Sure, some gods were stronger than others, but what god would allow a man who could make him his woman?

Strange. Maybe he’d taken it too easy up in his god-hut in his sky-village. Ha!

Singer bapped him in the face with her tail. “You’re off sky-thinking. Come back! Jooyun wants you to meet someone.”

“Oh?” Vemik twitched his tail. He’d been wanting to talk with Jooyun anyway…so, he opened his mouth, flicked his tongue quickly and took a big breath in through the top of his mouth.

…That way. Took a while to get there, though. Lots of people! And Vemik liked meeting people. But eventually he got through, and next to Julian was…

Well! A boy, Vemik could tell from the face and air-taste of him. But all the rest of him was already a man like Hoeff! Vemik didn’t know Humans could grow up like that!

“Hi!”

Jooyun had been watching Awisun and Shyow dance together. Not like club dancing, which was really just a kind of play-fucking, but this was complicated like the People’s own magic dancing, and pretty to watch, and not at all easy to do! He’d tried, and wasn’t good yet. But Tilly liked it, and so did Singer, so—

“Literally just said hello and he’s already daydreaming,” Jooyun chuckled. “You better watch out with him, Alex. He’s got a mind goin’ a million miles an hour at all times.”

“So many things to think about, how do you not think about them?!” Vemik asked, then grinned and hooted hello at this ‘Aleks.’ “Hi!”

“Uh…hi!” the boy smiled, and held out a big rough hand, which Vemik found he could shake without having to be careful. Strong! “Alex, son of Gilgamesh, prince of Ekallim-Igigi.”

“Vemik Given-Man, and this is the Singer of my tribe,” Vemik replied, remembering Human manners. And importantly, how they could be bent. “And she’s mine, too!”

That earned him a swat with her tail and a happy trill, while Alex grinned in the way only boys could grin.

“I didn’t get to talk much with Ferd Given-Man,” he said. “I wish I coulda. I’ve wanted to properly meet your people for a long time!”

“Ferd is a good man,” Vemik agreed with a nod.

“Very good,” Singer added wickedly, then trilled when Vemik gave her a tail-swat of his own. Alex gawped at her, going a little red.

“Y’get used to ‘em,” Jooyun promised. “Anyway. I kinda wanna go dance with the girls, so I’m just gonna leave you three get acquainted, yijao? Have fun!”

Before either Vemik or Alex or Singer could stop him, he gave them a cheeky grin and was gone.

There was a well-now-what pause. Then Alex cleared his throat.

“…The ambassador, uh…that is, Julian, he…told me you invented the bow and arrow?”

Vemik nodded. It was good to have friends who’d boast about you! “Yeah! Well, I invented it for us,” Vemik trilled.

Alex was suddenly excited. “How?! I mean, where did the idea come from?”

“Well, I was playing with sticks one day, and…”

He’d told the story a few times by now, but it was a fun story, and he enjoyed telling it. At some point, Singer slipped away in search of food and drink, but Alex was a good listener, and he asked good questions, and before Vemik knew it they’d gone on from the story of his first bow and his trial, to the war, and to steel, and Professor Daniel and the library, and—

“I wish I could go see it,” Alex sighed. They were outside now, enjoying the cool air before the rain came. He’d loosened his tie and left his jacket somewhere, which let Vemik get a better look at him. A good, fine young man! He’d do well among the People! So, if that was true…

“Why not? You can just walk through the array whenever! Just…not in ‘mun-kee suit,’ yes?”

“I could?”

“We don’t have pay-per-work like humans. No…they say hoops to jump through? Which sounds like fun, but anyway…”

Alex laughed. “I get it. But, that’s ‘cuz you have the humans on this side of the array fielding that stuff for you, isn’t it?”

“Eh…yes.” Vemik scratched his ear with the tip of his tail. “But still. Different rules for you.”

“I guess.” Alex nodded. He didn’t sound happy about that, somehow.

Vemik knew a heart-hurt when he heard it. “So you come visit tomorrow then, yes? I spend night in Yan’s apartment. Come pick you up in morning!”

“I…wow. Yeah!”

That settled it. After that, with knowing he was coming to visit, Alex wanted to know even more, and Vemik was happy to tell. He checked in on everything else that was happening from time to time, ‘cuz it’d be a shame to miss everything. And he caught lots of fun little moments, like Singer dancing with Daar (and everyone else getting off the dancefloor to make way for them,) SirJermee handing out presents to the kids, and of course there was lots of really, really good food…

He wasn’t quite sure why they set the big round brown ball full of fruit on fire before eating it, but that was fun too!

The music changed as the night wore on. The delicate instruments went away and swapped out for a woman in a sparkly dress, a big man with a lot of drums, which Vemik really wanted to try sometime, and a guitar, and other shiny instruments, and everything was a lot louder and a lot more fun…

It picked up Alex’s mood, too. Pretty soon he was on the dancefloor too, and though Vemik didn’t know a lot about human dancing, he could tell the boy was good at it. Maybe he’d been taught by someone? Vemik watched him dance with Singer, with Shyow, with some of the younger kids…

And behind, he saw Gilgamesh watching.

Y!’kiidaa

There was a delicate dance going on, and Y!’kiidaa wasn’t sure he knew the steps.

The fact was, Singularity—in the form of himself, Gilgamesh and Prince Alex—had been invited to be here, which was a welcome. But one didn’t need the eyes, ears and nose of a ten-thousand-year trickster to spot that they were being evaluated. Everyone they met was somebody important, from Cimbrean or elsewhere. Humans, Gao, a few other species…not just Ten’Gewek, but Dominion species, and the first E-Skurel-Ir Y!’kiidaa had ever seen.

He got the distinct impression she was watching him with great interest.

Alex, at least, was making an excellent impression. He may have stood barely over one-point-six meters, but somehow he was towering over the room, metaphorically speaking. Yan Given-Man seemed to approve of him too, and kept glancing off to where he and Vemik Given-Man were lost in conversation out on the balcony.

Y!’kiidaa had little baseline for reading ten’gewek, but he got the impression that Yan didn’t generally approve so quickly of anything. That was an encouraging sign, perhaps.

Then there was Ambassador Etsicitty, and though Y!’kiidaa felt, loyally, that his ancient friend still held the edge over the much younger man…it was a lot closer than he’d have guessed. He was talking about their charisma and experienced wisdom, of course. Physically speaking, Gilgamesh was beaten. The Line had succeeded more wildly on both Earth and Gao than Y!’kiidaa had known.

Too wildly, perhaps. While Y!’kiidaa himself had yet to be surpassed by any besides Daar, that day was coming, and coming quickly. Balls, it was only Daar’s sense of propriety and kindness that had left Y!’kiidaa with any dignity after their first visit. That, and…well…

Daar could have demanded Y!’kiidaa’s loyalty at any time, and he doubted he could have resisted the call. Daar’s natural dominance over the Gao was unbreakable.

They both knew what a tragedy that could become one day, too.

So, he mingled. He had a special enjoyment for the younger folk present—who didn’t love kids?—but his attention was mostly focused on the meta-game. Every time a major player selected a dance partner, or dragged over somebody new to meet, or excused themselves to go get refreshments, or made an introduction…

Pieces on the Strategem board, moved simultaneously by masters. There was nothing so crass as talk of treaty, alliance, the war, or anything like that, but even so, bonds were being forged tonight.

For instance:

“Y!’kiidaa of the Gao and Ekallim-Igigi, may I introduce Ukusevi of the Forgiven, Archivist of Eyes-Turned-Upwards and Keeper of the Long Chant.”

Meeting Sir Patrick Knight had been an education in the first place. The old man had a mind like a razor blade hidden in a cup of tea—civilized, but dangerous. No doubt, this introduction was another move in the game. The E-Skurel-Ir had a different idea for what constituted finery than most others present. Her robes were largely plain and unadorned, a kind of dusty grey in hue, but on her belt she wore several much finer items, including a leather-bound book and a pouch on the opposite hip that smelled of bottled ink.

Y!’kiidaa dropped down to all fours immediately. Something about her set off his instincts, and he wanted to curtail that, before it showed. “A pleasure.”

“Likewise.” Ukusevi’s wide mouth curled sideways in something like a smile. “You have a fascinating legend. It took me two days to memorize it all…and I’m still trying to figure out how much of it is true.”

“Oh, all of it’s true…to some degree,” Y!’kiidaa chittered. “Tales grow in the telling, yijao?”

“They can. I think it depends on the teller.” Ukusevi’s probably-smile didn’t fade at all. “Among my people, we try to keep our tales from growing too large.”

“Now where’s the fun in that?”

“Hmm. Is that all stories are for? The fun of it?”

Kiidaa chittered. He didn’t know why he was surprised at her playful challenging tone, but then again, she’d lived her whole life under the Hunters. Next to them, he prob’ly wasn’t all that scary. He wasn’t gonna tear her limb-from-limb on a whim, and she knew it.

“Nah. There’s a lesson in each one…”

“More than one. It’s impressive, really. You single-handedly created a shared mythos which inculcated a culture of constructive mischief and fierce loyalty in the Gao that the Hierarchy must have found quite vexing…”

“Oh, it wasn’t single-handed. The Gao love stories and it’s the retelling that matters more than anything. I can’t claim to any grand design, either. Just…as you said, a knack for mischief, really.”

“Are you planning any mischief tonight?”

“Oh, no. I can’t top the mischief that’s already underway!” He chittered.

“Oh?”

Y!kiidaa pointed his nose toward Alex and sniffed. After a second to watch the young prince, Ukusevi started making a hiccupping noise which he guessed was her way of laughing.

“Oh! Well, don’t spoil the ending!”

“Never,” Kiidaa chittered. “Besides,” he leaned in conspiratorially. “Spoilin’ it would mean I knew the ending. And I don’t, this time.”

“Oh? Well who does, then?”

He flashed a bit of a toothy grin.

“Nobody. So we’ll all play our part and…just see, won’t we?”

“Ah. The best kind of story. Perhaps I will get to record the result later…” Ukusevi looked up and away as Sir Patrick returned with somebody new for her to meet. “…if I get time. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

“And you.” He watched as the game continued and the pieces whirled and danced.

He hadn’t had this much fun in ages!

Date Point: 19y11m4w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Alex, Prince of Ikallim-Igigi

Alex thumped up out of the gym shower, a small travel bag in hand and a pair of those comfy running shorts around his hips. He’d been told that all he’d need was a knife, so…that was all he had, mostly. A knife, an emergency beacon, his passport, his wallet. A mobile phone. A travel notebook too, since he liked writing. All the rest was just shorts and stuff.

Vemik approved. “Good, you listen! No strange heavy clothes. Too hot where I live!”

Without another word, they jogged toward the array, both enjoying the cool and, at least in Alex’s case, the splash of puddles underfoot. It wasn’t a very long run but it was always fun to move. And it turned out that Vemik was every bit the incredible athlete he looked, and much moreso, too. Their morning exercises were the most challenging he’d ever felt, and Vemik had so effortlessly shown him up, with a playful snarl too…

Somehow, Alex didn’t mind this time. He knew the big gorilla-man wasn’t exactly his own age, but he wasn’t really all that much older, either. They thought, maybe nineteen, early twenties? Still plenty young! And as Vemik had pointed out:

“Still very strong young man! At your age I was skinny little thing! It’s why I invent the bow!”

“That must feel so cool,” Alex huffed wistfully. “And then not long after, all this happens.”

“Very strange time the gods make for us, yes?”

“Mhmm. Ooh! I have my own ship, did you know that?”

Somehow, Vemik bounced like a puppy, mid-stride in his feet-and-knuckle gallop. “Really?!”

“Yeah! Maybe we can go for a ride sometime!”

They chatted for a while, enjoying the jog to the terminal. They cleaned their bare feet off at the provided stand, thumped in and made their way through the border. The platform was already waiting for them, cleared empty of any cargo.

“The morning jump is always empty,” Vemik said. “Empty from here anyway. Days aren’t quite the same so right now, hottest part of day back home.”

“So…good thing I’m in shorts.”

“Yeah!”

“So…what do we do? Just sit down?”

“Yeah.” Vemik coiled up his tail and plopped himself down. “And wait. We’re early.”

“Okay.” Alex looked around for anything to sit on and, not seeing anything, shrugged and folded himself down cross-legged. “How long are we going to have to—oh. Hello, sir.”

The Great Father of the Gao didn’t look like he should be quiet, but Alex knew from Yekiidaa that gao could move like a whisper no matter how big they were, if they moved gently…which Daar had done until he spied Vemik, at which point—

Vemik hooted and sprang to his feet with a thrust of his tail, but he was too slow. Every line of Daar’s impossible physique exploded into sharp relief as the Great Father surged forward with a lightning-strike pounce almost too fast to see. The floor shuddered under the force of his explosive push, and the whole building shook as Vemik was slammed right off the platform and into the concrete wall on the other side of the room.

Alex stood up, alarmed at the violence he’d just witnessed, but then Vemik bounced up and in an instant, had his arms and legs tight around the Great Father’s neck, tail around waist…

Holy gods they played rough!

It ended pretty quickly, though. The Great Father contorted himself backwards, grabbed Vemik and pried him off (much to his hooting objection!), slammed him to the ground with a floor-shaking thud and promptly smashed him flat between his colossal legs, ending the fight. The size difference was unreal; the huge Given-Man all but disappeared inside that pin!

“I got quads bigger’n you are,” he growled down at his prey as his legs hardened into terrifying anatomy displays. “Better hope I don’t squeeze too hard…”

A hand wormed its way out and tapped against Daar’s flank, who promptly let him go and pulled him up to his feet, suddenly all playful, solicitous energy.

“That was fun! Gettin’ fuckin’ tough, Given-Man! How ‘ya doin’?!”

All sins between friends were forgiven in an instant. “I thought I’d found your weak spot!”

“It would be, if you were a little bit smaller an’ I din’t do my stretches like my mommas taught me…but I do, an’ you ain’t.” Daar rough-housed a few seconds more with a smug rumbling chitter. “Mebbe I’ll show ‘ya what my arms can do, too…”

And what arms they were! Gao tended to have pretty mobile and muscular upper bodies, so functionally they were somewhere between dogs, bears, and great apes. Daar himself was like a long-bodied gorilla, so even for a gao, even for a well-bred Stoneback, even for him, his arms were fuckin’ huge. And he used them, to Vemik’s trilling, squirming frustration. Alex knew well enough to let them play; he had friends who were much the same. After a bit though, they sobered up, with Vemik hanging from Daar’s back and watching Alex. “Oh! Thought I sniffed ‘ya. Alex, ain’t it?”

Alex nodded.

“Well, howdy!” He straightened up with a pant-grin, stood tall and showed himself properly…

Well…damn. Okay. Alex hadn’t come too close to the Great Father at the Christmas ball last night. Now, close up, even after having watched the two play…he could see why Yekiidaa had been so shaken. Words or pictures just weren’t enough.

But, whatever. He seemed friendly enough. “Hello…your majesty? I don’t know the right term of address…”

“Eh, sir is fine. Whatever. A huge brown muzzle sniffed toward Alex. “…Not even a hint of hesitation or fear on ‘ya, neither. Gotta admit, that’s sorta refreshin’ ‘ta smell.”

Alex looked up at Vemik, who was definitely nursing a bit of hurt, but seemed in happy spirits anyway. “…Well, it’s not like I could do anything if you were feeling mean, so why worry?”

“Ha! Fair ‘nuff…now don’t mind me, but I gotta curl up on th’ floor here just ‘ta fit through the array. S’why I always go ‘fore the cargo runs.”

He did that, sank to all fours and found a comfortable bit of steel plating to lie on like the world’s hugest bear. He tucked his tail in, too: from end to end he only barely fit.

Vemik bounced off to fetch his bag, then sat atop him, clearly best friends forever. Again, Alex had a moment of hesitation but…well, it looked like the rules were different, here. Daar didn’t seem to mind at all. Indeed, he flicked an ear to Alex with a clear meaning behind it: ‘c’mon.’

He decided to sit a little closer to be friendly, but not atop. That seemed too familiar.

“Cautious, huh? Das’ good. Smart head ‘ya got under ‘yer shaggy locks. Wilde weren’t exaggeratin’ ‘bout you.”

Curiosity grabbed him. “What did he say, sir?”

“Oh, jus’ call me Daar. We ain’t anywhere we gotta stand on protocol.”

“Okay…what did he say about me, Daar?” It felt weird, but…well, an invitation was an invitation.

“Mostly nothin’ but good! Uses the word ‘hench’ a lot when he talks ‘bout you.”

Alex grinned, and felt his ears go a bit red. “Yeah…he’s cool, but also kinda weird.”

“Tell me ‘bout it. Dude was wearin’ a She-Ra tee when I saw ‘im yesterday, an’ I think he really enjoys findin’ weird tees that are only tight-fitting on a big boy like him. So! On a big adventure, I see! Where are ‘yer adults?”

Alex had no idea what She-Ra was, but now wasn’t the time to ask. “I’m a man, by our standards. I can see to myself.”

“Oh? Well, fair ‘nuff. Sure ain’t like any young man I’ve ever sniffed. What ‘bout ‘yer schoolin’ and all that?”

“I’m well-schooled, and it’s a lifetime pursuit on Ekallim-Igigi. And I think I’ll learn a lot more about some important things by visiting Akyawentuo.”

“Okay, okay!” Daar raised a giant paw placatingly. “I’m just curious, s’all. Humans ain’t normally ones for quick growing-up, yijao?”

Alex recalled something Pandrosion had taught him—if he didn’t know what to say, saying nothing could look pretty smart. So, he nodded and kept silent, even though it meant the conversation hit a bit of a lull. Alex looked up at the clock. Only a couple minutes still to go before jump.

He couldn’t hold the silence for long.

“So…I’m visiting ‘cuz I wanna explore. What brings you out here?” Alex asked.

“Oh, business mostly,” Daar sighed. “JETS is ‘bout ‘ta graduate six more teams, and lately we’re needing ‘em as fast as we can get. Lots o’ dead infrastructure ‘ta explore, and we’ve found not all of it’s quite so perfectly dead. So I gotta talk to th’ Lodge, if they’re meetin’ anytime soon. Or at least have a sniff ‘round the Given-Men an’ see what they think of it all. And, uh…ain’t many gao I can send instead o’ me.” He rumbled deep in his giant chest, “Which is yet another thing I gotta fix…”

Alex perked up. “Singularity has many teams, all ready to go. Which is no insult to the Ten’Gewek,” he added quickly, and which Vemik waved off. “But if it’s urgent enough you personally need to visit, then…”

Daar rumbled again as the clock ticked down and a voice announcing one minute to jump interrupted him. “No insult ‘ta Ekallim-Igigi’s teams in turn,” he said, “but we ain’t got a history with ‘em. At all. It took time ‘ta build what we have with AEC, an’ with the Lodge. It’ll take time with Singularity, too.”

“But we don’t have time,” Alex pointed out.

“Oh, sure we do. Urgency ain’t the same thing as hurried. I’m pressin’ our advantage as hard as I reasonably can but that ain’t no reason ‘ta go in without no real experience an’ contact ‘tween us. ‘Sides…Hunters have been real quiet, last long while…an’ we ain’t seen much o’ nothin’ ‘ta tell us what the fuck—sarry.”

Alex grumped, a bit annoyed. “I’m not a child, Daar. I’m just young. You can swear all you fuckin’ want around me.”

Daar paused, then chittered. At least, it was probably a chitter. It was very…bassy. “Well, shit, okay then! Anyway. No fuckin’ clue what they’re up to. So, add it all up, an’ I’ve got my responsibilities ‘ta manage, yijao? I can’t be wastin’ lives, so I gotta work wit’ the bestest there is. And ten’gewek are the bestest. Jus’…they’re a limited asset.”

“A very special kind of hammer,” Alex added.

“A very strong hammer!” Vemik interjected. “But…yes. Not so many of us, so we gotta make it count, yes? We give our strengths to the gods, and that includes Daar.”

Daar grumbled in obvious discomfort. Silence again, which lasted until the array thumped and—

“Oh!”

Alex knew supergravity, of course. He’d been training in it for many years, and the weight that settled on him—his own limbs getting that little bit heavier—was familiar and comfortable, but the heat that came with it? That was new.

The air was thick, heavy and humid. And…noisy. But not loud noisy. The sort of noisy where many, many quiet things were all talking, all at once. Birds and bugs, or the local versions of them, chattering and scraping and croaking at each other in the trees around them, sometimes with an extra whistle or whoop from farther away.

Daar stood up and shook himself, then posed a bit, admiring himself. “…Fuck. Glad ‘fer the short clip, but still gonna be sweatin’ my balls off.”

Vemik trilled, “At least you’ll look pretty!”

“Ha! Too bad there ain’t no Females here ‘ta ogle me…”

Alex remembered that Gao was very much a cold sort of planet, and had been since Yekiidaa’s time. And just sitting next to him, he’d been able to feel the heat radiating off Daar. How did the Great Father stay cool here? This new heat was already prickling Alex’s skin, like stepping into a sauna for the first time. He’d be sweat-soaked in minutes at this rate. No wonder the Ten’Gewek didn’t wear much!

…Alex could come to like this place a lot.

First though, was the meet and greet. There was a small contingent right next to the portal, where the library—well, it was more like a proper gymnasium, really—the forge, and Professor and his staff all lived. All nice people! Then there was a long hike through the woods, where Alex couldn’t help but swivel his head every which way to see.

Gods, the trees were huge! With some encouragement, he’d jumped up into the branches and, while he wasn’t anything but cumbersome moving between them, he got the rudimentary hang of it in pretty quick order.

“See?! I think humans just ten’gewek who fell in love with the grass!”

Not a bad description, actually. Daar trundled along on the ground until they met up with Vemik’s village. There were lookouts, and Vemik charged ahead. Daar and Alex stayed behind a bit, “because there’s a sacred order ‘ta this,” and after a long moment, they followed course. The lookouts raised an angry alarm and Daar challenged them by rising up, giving a booming snarl…

…Well, fuck. Now he got to watch Vemik and Daar fight and show off for real. Vemik was scary as fuck when he wanted to be mean, and Daar was just…

Well, it didn’t last long. There was definitely some sort of ritual involved Alex didn’t quite understand. For the moment though, it was Daar’s village, taken with a triumphant flexing roar that hurt Alex’s ears, but it wasn’t truly serious; they fought with obvious friendship, and were instantly affectionate once it was all over.

After that, there was a feast, and more showing off, more snarly play. Alex ended up being dragged into an all-ways brawl among the children, and later the men. He figured out very quickly it was mostly play but also partly a test of him, with Vemik keeping a wary eye on the proceedings. Ten’gewek children were heavy, and dense, and fast!

Alex fared pretty well, he thought. Most of the men were…tricky, but manageable. He also discovered that a red crest meant he wasn’t likely to win, at least not with his strength alone. Skill, however….

In any case, he was happily exhausted in pretty quick order. At that point it was a playful victory for the village men, and he was invited to eat, to drink up and tell stories…

Daar had only grown more and more impressive as the sweat slicked down and lathered up his fur, as the long day ticked toward evening. It was abundantly clear why the Ten’Gewek treated him like a living god, and why Yekiidaa and father had been so rattled by him.

Still. He had visits to make and negotiations to do, so he was gone for most of the evening.

Vemik showed Alex the forge in the meanwhile, and he struck his first iron that night. What came out was bent, useless and suitable only for folding back over and forge-welding into something else, but that didn’t matter. Alex wasn’t stupid enough to believe he’d forge anything good his very first time. He was just pleased to have felt for himself how the metal shifted and bent with each hammer blow. He’d make something real tomorrow, maybe.

Still. He’d gone through a couple gallons of water already; the heat, the humidity, and all the hard activity had made his visit feel like a prolonged sauna. It felt cleansing and exhausting at the same time. Vemik though, even sweat-soaked himself, seemed invigorated by it.

“We probably should rest now. Humans need a few days to grow a love of the heat, yes?”

“I suppose.”

They headed back to the village to find Daar already there, telling a story in front of the fire. He bounced here and there, big animated gestures and the flickering light working their magic…he was telling a Keeda tale. One that was especially poignant, lately.

“—An’ that’s how Keeda learned that even a god ain’t free from his wives!”

Appreciative trilling and hooting from the audience, for…various reasons. Lots of ten’gewek women poked their chosen men, or tickled them with tail tips while grinning broadly.

Alex laughed. He knew that story. He also knew the true version, which was somehow even more ridiculous. Maybe he’d play a little trick of his own on Yekiidaa and share it with Daar later…

The food was good. Werne, they called it. A lot like beef or venison. The Ten’Gewek cooked it “as a special treat” by wrapping it in leaves with a bunch of roots and herbs, sealing the whole lot in wet clay, then burying it under the coals. It came out juicy, tender and fragrant…

A very special treat indeed! He ate his fill too, to everyone’s hooting approval.

He was joined at the fireside by Daar. “Gotta be a bit weird, hearin’ tall tales told o’ ‘yer…what is he ‘ta you. An uncle?”

Alex nodded. “Yeah, I guess he is. He and father are close, closer than father is with any of my mothers. But he’s never been ‘uncle Yekiidaa’ to me…”

“I gotchu.” Daar sat himself down right up against Alex, which was a very friendly gesture for gao, and started picking his teeth with a claw.

Alex looked around at the ten’gewek, They were…well, they were going to have their fun. He knew enough about life to know what they were getting up to. Not that he was, like, super experienced or whatever, but the game had always felt more… delicate to him. He’d barely done more than hang out a few times with a couple girls he thought he liked. Did that even count? But ten’gewek didn’t even bother with that. Grabbing a partner and vanishing into the dark was pretty forward! Or maybe they already knew each other, being in a village and all?

In any case, they apparently played at night just like they played in the day. Loud and rough.

Alex didn’t think he was ready for anything like that. Especially not here, and he’d learned that he was still very much a child as far as most humans were concerned; even chatting with Alice had drawn teasing and weird looks. So instead, he sat next to Daar, sweat-drenched furnace that he was. Somehow he didn’t…really want to sit alone just now.

Daar had a knack for mind-reading, too. “Don’t mind ‘em. They’re not like us, an’ they’re not like ‘yer people, neither. Sort of a consequence o’ bein’ th’ strongest most unbreakable things swingin’ in th’ jungle, I think. Serious injury is sorta all or nothin’ wit’ them, so…yeah.”

“But there are things that they fear, surely?”

“Yeah. The gods, an’ things that may as well be gods ‘fer tribes like ‘em. What else?”

“…You have a lot of influence with them, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Daar put his claws away, apparently satisfied his teeth were clean. “Almost as much as I do wit’ everyone else. An’ I know what ‘yer gonna say next.”

“Pretty easy to take advantage of that…”

“Yeah,” Daar sighed. “It would be. I try not to but I don’t think I can avoid it.”

“Why not?”

Daar was silent for a long moment, but it was the kind of silence father had sometimes, when he was thinking about what to say before he said it. Alex had learned young that it was best to let him finish, rather than rush it.

“Right. So. I’m feelin’ mighty comfy right now, so I ain’t gonna stand up an’ flex an’ all that, much as I love showin’ off like such a silly stereotype. You can use ‘yer imagination, right?”

Alex gave him a wry smile, “Yes.”

“Right. So…you know what I am, so I don’t need ‘ta tell ‘ya the whole long story o’ why, but it’s been super useful ‘fer a lotta reasons. ‘Yer dad an’ Y!’kiidaa bein’ just a couple. Which I wish’d I din’t need ‘ta do in this great game, but I gotta, ‘cuz I gotta win. Or at least not lose.”

“But…why press it, then? Why be such a show-off? Uh…sorry.”

“Don’t be. ‘Yer a future king an’ we’re all invested in ‘yer reign goin’ well. So let’s consider this ‘yer trainin,’ yijao? Lemme ask ‘ya right back: why wouldn’t I press my advantage?”

Alex thought, and looked into those big, amber eyes while he did. So, okay. Maybe it was all a whole lot extra. As much as it made people smile, it also exasperated them. But it worked, right? Nobody ever really went against him. It was part of his personality, and that…

…Oh.

“Is it…because you can’t be less than you are?”

Daar chittered. “Essactly. The one thing you can never be in this life is what you ain’t. Which is a tautology, I know, but sometimes they gotta be said. For normal folk there’s a whole lotta ambiguity ‘bout what that might be, yeah? Now how ‘bout me? How could I possibly hide what I am, or shy away from it?”

He picked up a half-burnt stick from the fire and doodled with it, scraping out the Stoneback mon with its blackened tip. “There’s a point where blessings git so huge they ain’t really blessings anymore. I figgered that out after Highland kicked my tail years ago, despite having no gods-damned right ‘ta do so…an’ that broke me free of the Hierarchy’s smotherin’ whispers o’ mediocrity. I started ‘ta really build myself, in my head an’ my body…”

“And you discovered you were really really different.”

“Yup. It’s a long story, an’ I always knew I was diff’rr’nt, but yeah. Shit really escalated after we saved Akyawentuo an’ I learned Gao was unner attack. I weren’t the same man when I set foot back on my world. So…in th’ end, turns out I’m th’ bestest o’ my kind, or of anyone in meatspace by any fuckin’ measure, an’ that gap’s never done anythin’ but speed up an’ widen. That kinda huge pile o’ gift changes shit. In my heart all I ever wanted was ‘ta be a big studly farmer, mate with pretty Females and wrassle my most bestest friends. Instead…”

He trailed off wistfully, stared in the fire a few seconds longer, then shook his head. “Instead, I can out-think an’ out-muscle everyone, easy, and boy is that a test o’ personal restraint some days. An’ that huge blessin’ I been given calls me ‘ta terrible service. I’d have ‘ta be real fuckin’ selfish if I had all this an’ didn’t use it ‘ta serve somethin’ bigger’n me, yijao? An’ so, if I gotta be that, an’ there’s no escapin’ it…then why escape it?”

“So you embody it.”

“Yup. Allatime, everywhere, in everythin’ I do.”

“Well…shit.”

Daar burst out chittering. “Yeah! Best way to put it! So now…I had ‘ta learn this. So did ‘yer dad. And now you gotta figger it out. ‘Cuz god made us exceptional people ‘fer whatever reason, an’ we’re called ‘ta service ‘cuz o’ that, young king-to-be. Whether by accident or design, it don’t matter. At this level o’ the game, who else can answer?”

“…I don’t know if I’m all that…”

“You gotta be. Ain’t no way ‘round it. And you are, I can smell it.”

“…I didn’t ask for this.”

“No,” Daar agreed kindly, and wrapped a sweat-drenched arm bigger than Alex’s entire body around him, firmly but carefully. “None o’ us did.”

Alex leaned into the hug. “I could still walk away,” he noted, without much feeling. He knew what had to be. “Father told me that if my answer was no…I could leave.”

“Did he? Be grateful, then.”

Oh…oh, wow. Just for a moment, a feeling like he got among the clouds hit him, as he understood for just that moment what Daar meant. That big, impossible feeling. The one where you felt so tiny and so small, and so humble and so precious somehow. That was what Daar was facing, every day. His very existence was a challenge by the gods.

He hugged around Daar’s neck as best he could, and tried to hold back the tears.

Daar rumbled, something like a sympathetic chitter. “…Y’know, ‘yer father is an evil godsdamn genius. I shoulda known he couldn’t stick around this long without gettin’ good an’ wily.”

“I…” that snapped him out of it. “…What?”

“This whole thing. Sendin’ you ‘ta Cimbrean with Wilde, makin’ sure you met th’ ambassador an’ turned up at the Christmas Ball, makin’ very sure you made a good impression an’ met the right people an’ all the rest of it…this is his triumph, you know. He’s quite literally kingmaking an’ puttin’ us all in a situation where we couldn’t turn you away. We know the stakes. And the worstest part is he didn’t do this with malice!”

“…Huh.” Alex didn’t like that realization, but Daar was quick with advice.

“Oh, don’t take it so bad. He did it out of love. ‘Fer you, an’ ‘fer his people. You are called to terrible duty, boy. An’ it’s good that he’s preparin’ you for it. If that means gettin’ us all involved, then so be it. Such has long been the way o’ things, and I guess such it will be.”

Alex gave him a curious look at the sudden poetic twist to his words.

“…My predecessor,” Daar explained. “Fyu figgered out all this shit a long time ago, an’ his writing mentored me more’n most anythin’ else…Kinda wish I could go back in time an’ give the little guy a big hug an’ a thank-you.”

“…Wow.”

Alex didn’t know what to say…well, to any of that.

“Right. One last little gem ‘ta leave you wit’. Someday you’ll be king. Someday soon I reckon. I’ll still be the Great Father. When that happens I hope you’ll be an ally. But ‘member this, and ‘member it ’ferever—”

“—We aren’t necessarily on the same team.”

“…’Yer either even smarter’n I thought, or someone else got ‘ta you first. Anyhoo…that’s a ways off. ‘Fer now…you’re a good man ‘ta know.”

Alex didn’t know what to say. So, again, he said nothing, and that seemed to satisfy. They had the fire pretty much to themselves by now, and the nighttime cacophony was sorta hypnotic…

He’d been surprised when father had let him go with Ian. Maybe Daar was right and it was all a lesson in disguise. A trick that Yekiidaa probably found really funny too…

But, actually?

Actually, Alex felt pretty good about it.

Date Point: 19y11m4w AV
Ekallim-Igigi

Gilgamesh of Uruk, first of Singularity

The return home was a return to those duties that had been temporarily handed off so that he could focus on other duties. But, Singularity could do without its leader no longer, and Alex was now out there under the influence of others, for better or worse.

Gilgamesh looked up as he entered the Nexus, and lifted his eyebrows in surprise. It had been a long time since Ekallim-Igigi had last orbited a temperate world…

Ah. But no. This one had a great overabundance of water, meaning there were no islands or continents below them, only a single endless, unbroken ocean. No tool-using life would ever evolve down there, no matter what teemed in the waters. The Hierarchy would have seen it once, long ago, and then left it behind as irrelevant, so it was as safe as anywhere else in the galaxy.

And he had to admit, it was pleasant to see whites, blues and greens below, rather than browns or yellows or the too blue of ice giants.

Naturally, there were demands on his attention from the moment he arrived. Leifini had overruled Rekhetre and Birgitta, and they wanted to persuade him to overrule her in turn. Clearly, they felt strongly on the subject of this probe swarm…Fine. He would hear both sides of the argument in due course, once he was up to speed on the Hierarchy’s mobilization to secure the archive.

Though, in the event, it all turned out to be the same subject anyway.

“Y’know what seems funny ‘ta me…” Yekiidaa mused, as they watched the long-range sensor data from the battle.

“What?”

“Agents are faster’n that. Much faster. Somethin’ was slowing it right the fuck down…” he tapped a claw on the devourer’s shoals of flashing probes.

“What are you thinking?” Gilgamesh asked.

“…Y’know, I’m just thinkin’ that the one thing we never had in all this time is a friend in dataspace itself. And if it’s a friend the Enemy are actually scared of…” he tapped the screen again, thoughtfully. “…Honestly, what’s the worst that happens if we talk ‘ta this thing?”

“It identifies us as a threat and turns its powers of replication toward our destruction,” Leifini said, levelly.

Gilgamesh folded his arms and nodded. “And that is a sufficiently dire consequence that I would normally agree with you, Leifini,” he said.

“But?” she asked.

“But we have recently revealed ourselves to Earth and Gao. Their communications are full of discussion about us. If it listens to those—”

“An’ if it doesn’t, I’ll gnaw off my own tail,” Yekiidaa added.

“—then it already knows of us, and has either already determined us to be a threat, already knows of us and considers us a potential ally, or is undecided and still trying to figure us out. No, I think my Rekhetre and Birgitta have the right of it. We must have certainty, for better or worse.”

“And if it does turn out to be hostile? Or contact may goad it into acting before we can prepare for it…”

“It is a Devourer. It’s possible we will never be adequately prepared. So, let us thank the gods that this one at least appears to be a Devourer with some personality, and be brave.”

Leifini nodded acquiescence. “As you say. I daresay Rekhetre and Birgitta will wish to initiate the contact themselves…”

“Good.” Gilgamesh smiled. Rekhetre was nearly as old as he was, and royalty in her own right. And Birgitta had the wisdom of thoughtful silence. He trusted all his queens to speak with the voice of Ekallim-Igigi, even Mevia in the right circumstances…but those two in particular were the right ones for this.

After that, there was paperwork of course. The king’s seal was required to bind into law the matters of civilian government. A naive man might think that four thousand years would be enough time to reach some kind of steady state, but Ekallim-Igigi was a melting pot of ideas from all over the galaxy, not to mention ideas of its peoples’ own. There would never be an end to the pendulum swaying of politics.

No matter. Though he found much he disagreed with in the accumulated Acts and Motions, he found nothing actually poisonous, and so signed and assented to them.

And then, for the first time in…far too long, frankly, finally, he had a chance to relax with his oldest and closest friend.

Well. Spar.

“You’re slow today.” Yekiidaa teased.

Gilgamesh chuckled, in no small part because it was true. “Aye. Too much rich food on Folctha…” he agreed, then demonstrated just how much it didn’t really change anything.

Yekiidaa was of course a match for it all. “Impressive as always,” he chittered. “Though I think we have both met our matches lately, yijao?”

“Aye.” A probing attack then, a quick dart forward to see if he could grab his ancient foe. No luck. “Julian proved handily capable of out-lifting me. I refrained from sparring, for dignity’s sake…though I do not doubt he’d crush me there, too. I haven’t challenged Righteous.”

“I imagine not!” Yekiidaa chittered. “What would be the point?”

“Indeed. Still, I imagine I might learn from my people and catch up. What about you?”

Yekiidaa chittered ruefully. “Oh, that ain’t never gonna happen. We wrassled a bit and I have never in my life felt so utterly weak. He is much stronger and faster than he looks.”

“That’s…alarming.” Gilgamesh crouched back down, inviting another tumble.

“Right?! He can swipe so fast, the air thumps behind his paw. He can run at highway speed! I don’t think my claws did much more than scratch him either, he’s so gods-damned dense and well-conditioned.” A pounce then, but Gilgamesh dodged it. “Pound-for-pound he’s easily the strongest being of any kind I’ve ever met or read about, and that is saying something when you consider how absurdly massive he is. He may well be the heaviest thing alive anywhere walking the land right now. You would not believe what truly he’s capable of. And he’s got depths to his mind, too. Proof positive of the difference between well-bred and well-engineered.”

They weren’t going to get any good hits in at this point, so Gilgamesh straightened up and headed for a water bottle. “Both, in his case.”

“And he knows it.”

“Does…does he resent it, you think?”

Yekiidaa flicked an ear. “I think a little, yeah. But…he’s not the sort to let that get in the way of utility. He knows full well that nobody else coulda been Great Father, and the Gao needed a Great Father to survive this war.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mind his personal success, either…”

“Oh, no! Not at all! Really, it’s more…a brooding. A grumble, if you will. He’s too practical to torment himself with it.”

“A desire to truly and completely claim his accomplishments as his own accomplishments, undiluted and unspoiled.”

“And they are his.”

“We know that, old friend. But I can understand why he and others feel our work has…tarnished…their achievements, even if I don’t agree that it has.” Gilgamesh wiped his face dry with his towel, and sat. “And that is our chief obstacle. Most of the objections people have, waver when they see we’ve not…indulged as other figures in their history have done. Some enmity remains regarding the Corti’s excesses, but even ambassador Etsicitty accepts we could not have prevented such a thing without grave cost. What does not so easily disappear is the sense of worry and competition all this generates.”

“Not even Alex will assuage that.”

“No. Quite the opposite. Though he is proving a charmer.”

“Heh, I saw!” Yekiidaa chittered and rolled in the sand a bit to scratch an itch. “Besides. We are as we are. If we try to be anything else, Daar will tell us to cut the shit, and the nations of Earth’ll do the same except in more delicate language. I don’t think Alex’s heritage’ll work against him too bad. Right now it’s mostly his youth and the different expectations around that.”

“Yes,” Gilgamesh sighed. “They are reluctant to see him for the young man he is.”

“They will, in time.”

“Good.” Gilgamesh stood up. “…good.”

Yekiidaa sniffed at him. “…Little late in the story to be getting doubts.”

“Not doubts. Simply…acknowledging the precipice we stand before. Everything you and I have worked for pays off or falls apart in the next year or two. Or briefer than that even, yijao?”

“…Yi.” Yekiidaa chittered, and slapped a paw around Gilgamesh’s shoulders. “Come. There is an absolutely bewitching female in Folctha, and she makes these crunchy spice meat things called tacos. The food of the gods themselves! I bought back a stasis box full of them, so let’s you and I watch a movie and relax, now that we have the chance.”

A rare treat. Gilgamesh smiled, and retired for the night to enjoy the comforts of rest without any machinations, for just a little while.

The next would not be far off.

Date Point: 20y AV
Interstellar space, near the stolen hive-world

Hunter of the Vengeance Brood

Tempting prey, this, and the Hunter’s belly was gnawing, maddening empty.

And would be, until it served its purpose. The Alpha-of-Alphas had decreed so. The Hunter would not starve…but it would not yet feast, either. Nor would it feed-breed. Not until it had “demonstrated effectiveness.”

Even so, the Hunter paused as it watched the patrol. Human ship. A familiar one. Ripper-tearer class, armed with powerful fields like the Gao crusher-smashers, but other nastiness too.

The Hunter’s jaw had a terrible bite, now. It knew the taste of those little ships escorting the Ripper-tearer, had thrilled and enjoyed the pleasure of full-belly sensation after its last hunts. Its jaws would do terrible hurt to the Ripper-tearer, if it hunted well.

The temptation was too great. It could not go longer without full-belly stimulus. It must hunt. It must kill.

Even so, the Hunter was acutely aware that its own form was small and experimental. Powerful. Dangerous…but fragile, too. It had been promised upgrades, if it should survive and satisfy the Alpha-of-Alphas.

And from there…from there, a whole galaxy to consume as it saw fit, and a long future as forebear to a whole new form of Hunter progeny. The Vengeance-Brood. The Void-Brood. It was such an obvious step that the Hunter wondered how no Builder had attempted it before.

After all, if claws, legs, eyes and organs could be swapped out for ever-larger and more powerful war forms, why couldn’t a Hunter be a void-craft? Why confine themselves to being carried by crude piloted vehicles?

An Alpha’s armored core could survive and jump out, rebuild, adapt, continue. There was no reason to be bound to fragile bubbles of air, any longer. And with this new weapon, these new jaws…

Their only drawback was that the Hunter could not salivate appropriately in anticipation of its quarry’s demise.

Well. that and the far too slow process of monitoring the target…The next generation, supposedly, would not have the same weakness, but for now the Hunter’s jaws required data about the prey’s shields in order to penetrate them. It was a danger, a great risk to the Hunter…but it could not resist the hunger.

It slipped closer, and prepared to strike.

USS Robert A. Heinlein, On patrol, liberated Hunter space

Captain Jaimie Esposito

“Bridge, CIC.

Esposito had been tense from the moment they left Hell system and started this patrol. Everyone was tense. She could really imagine how her great-great-grandfather must have felt, protecting convoys in the North Atlantic all those years ago…

Didn’t matter whether it was a Nazi torpedo or a Hunter thingumagoober, really. Everyone knew they could be under attack in an instant. So, everyone was tense, sure. But Mcnairy’s voice had more than just tension in it, this time.

“—SDS reports very faint contact bearing three-one-zero by one-nine-zero, signal intermittent, range unknown, heading unknown.”

Even as he said it, CIC passed the relevant information up to the bridge stations. Esposito was turning and issuing orders almost before that, even. Several busy seconds of call-and-confirm, the heavy toooom! sound through the hull as their new drone rail fired, the sound of sailors rushing to their battle stations.

It all went muffled for a second as Esposito shoved her head into her flash hood and tucked it into her collar, then she was sitting and buckling herself in.

The contact went bright as their drone streaked in its direction, hammering local spacetime with high-intensity distortions from its warp drive that would have lit up anything moving at warp, no matter how slow and sneaky.

A thump through the hull marked one of the guns on Robbie’s back dropping a G-spike on the fucker. The target’s warp sig flickered and went dark as it dropped back into slow-space. Two of the patrol boats, Chickasaw and Snohomish, peeled off to pounce on it, speared into the G-spike bubble…

“…RICO, ODDBALL-4. We got ‘em, ma’am.”

Small celebrations around the bridge, which Esposito quashed. “Stay sharp, for all we know that’s just one of a wolf pack,” she instructed. Her own eyes were glued to the screen in front of her chair, alert for any second Hunter…

…but no. That, it seemed, had been it, and Esposito’s sharp, tense mood slowly soured into a feeling of…not anticlimax, as such. God no. She’d take such a quick and efficient kill over a real fight any day. But even so, something in her adrenaline-poisoned soul felt vaguely cheated.

At least…until she got the footage back from Snohomish. The two patrol bots had landed right at point blank and torn into the Hunter with their skymasters, tearing it to bits, but the design wasn’t like any swarmship or broodship they’d ever seen before. Too dense, too reinforced, and no life support system or habitable deck in evidence at all. Not even a cockpit. Just engines, power plant, capacitors, some kind of weapon system…

And, nestled inside a smashed, armored egg full of wires and implanted circuitry right in the ship’s core, slowly freezing and coagulating in the vacuum of space, a naked Hunter brain.

Date Point: 20y AV
Captivity

Six

So, at long last, it was back to being a prisoner.

This new prison was an improvement over the previous one, at least. But it was, nevertheless, still very much a prison, not a rich man’s house on the shores of the Caribbean. The climate was colder, and Six found he already missed the sounds of traffic, of people walking and talking, of music drifting out of shops…

Or, frankly, of just being able to go outside, breathe the air, and pass unnoticed. His worst concerns in Belize had been making sure his house had good locks, and not straying south of the creek after dark. Easy.

His new home had good locks, alright. Unfortunately, he didn’t own the key.

The rules were unchanged from last time. Cooperate and be rewarded, cause trouble and lose it all in an instant. Carrots accumulated slice by thin slice, and lost with one stroke of the stick. It was refined, simple, effective, and he had no interest in being awkward. Why bother?

So, he did the job they put in front of him. They showed him information, he explained it from the Igraen perspective.

“Congratulations. You found dataspace.”

He couldn’t find it within himself to care anymore.

“You never mentioned these last time.”

“You never asked. I only answer the questions you ask me, and at the time you didn’t know to ask this question, nor did you have the knowledge to ask the questions that would have led to the right questions.” Six sat back and flopped the paper down on his reading desk with a sigh. “Your species has come a very long way in a very short time.”

“How do they work?”

That wasn’t the question Six had expected, but in any case, he couldn’t answer it. “I don’t know. The Hegemony does have minds responsible for their operation and maintenance, but as far as I’m concerned they’re just an incredibly powerful computer. Nor do I understand the physics involved. They are much more than they seem.”

“Much more than they seem?”

“As I said, I don’t understand the physics involved.”

“Well…aren’t you essentially a computer program?”

“In precisely the same way you are, yes. We are all ultimately just Turing machines running a tape, at some level. Your hardware is proteins, my hardware is…” he tapped the paper on the desk. “Now, a protein isn’t much to look at. A little carbon, a little hydrogen, a sprinkle of oxygen, a dash of nitrogen…some of the most common elements in the universe. But out of their wigglings and bindings, you get…” he gestured up and down at his interrogator’s body, then at his own. “There isn’t a human alive who knows everything there is to know about the proteins that make up the human body, and if there was, that person certainly wouldn’t be working as a field agent, would they?”

He rubbed his jaw and considered the paper again. “I warn you. The Hierarchy’s response will be maximal. If you have a reliable way of discovering these, then all of Igraen civilization now faces an existential threat. You should prepare for them to throw every last contingency at you.”

There was silence as the interrogator—and it was a so much more relaxed affair this time than last time—took that all in, then nodded, and collected the papers off the desk. “Well then. Why don’t we start with what these contingencies look like…”

Six stared off through the desktop and the wall for a second. Somewhere deep inside him, a little, hateful voice was still railing and raging at him, trying to tell him he should hate himself for what he’d become…

But he’d been ignoring that voice ever since he arrived in Belize. He could continue to ignore it. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more.

In a defeated monotone, he started to tell them everything he knew.

Date Point: 20y AV
Starship Stray Fortune, outside the Cimbrean defense field

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

“Was wondering where you’d gone off to…” Ian began, jokingly, then tailed off. The Entity had, uh…

…Upgraded.

Back on its station, the holographic model of whatever half of it was (or, had been?) Ava Ríos had been kinda crude, in small ways. A little bit see-through, had clipped through herself and her surroundings a bit, the drone projecting her had hovered above her head like a Sims gem…

This new version was like the real woman was standing in front of him. Or, well. If the real woman was about ten years younger and dressed in a flowing ankle-length dress of animated swirly blue scintillations with no discernible seam to mark where garment ended and body began. It just sort of…faded in, from the collarbones down.

The impossibility of it, and the whisper-faint whine and hum of the drone hovering somewhere inside her head were the only real giveaways that this wasn’t a real flesh-and-blood person.

“…I like the new look,” he added, lamely.

She grinned, and the front of her dress lit up with an accompanying smiley face emoticon. “Thanks! I’ve been looking forward to the chance to show it off.”

Ian tilted his head. “I, not we?”

“The other half of us isn’t so interested in looking pretty.” The holo-Ava pulled a very human ‘go-figure’ face and fell in alongside him to walk easily. Another note of unreality—no sound of footsteps, nor sense of weight hitting the deck. No scent or body warmth, either. Just a faint electrostatic fuzz that made Ian’s arm hairs tickle and stand on end.

“Still don’t think I’ve completely wrapped my head around how much you are independent from it,” Ian said. “Sometimes you make it sound like you’re not at all, other times…”

“I’m as independent as I need to be to perform my function, and part of that included claiming enough independence that I can’t be completely subsumed again. Think of it it like…I’m not the one behind the wheel, and I don’t have a say in where we’re going, but I can still look out the window and have my own perspective and comment on things and place orders at the drive-through. I’m permanently along for the ride, I’ll just never be in the driving seat myself. And in turn, it can’t really make sense of you or the world of people without me to translate, so even if it could get rid of me, it doesn’t want to. And we’re both kinda glad of the company, if that makes sense.”

“…Sort of, I guess.”

“Cute Tinkerbell shirt, by the way.”

Ian chuckled. “Who’s gonna tell me I can’t fuckin’ wear it, right?”

“It certainly contrasts with the rest of you…”

“Well, blame my cousin Ed. After I lost my eye, the cheeky sod sent me a ‘Prettiest Princess’ shirt as a get-well-soon present. But you know what? It was the first thing that really made me laugh, so I’ve sorta run with it.”

“Did you get your own back?”

“‘Course I did. His latest holiday snaps have him wearing the “Girl Power” tee I sent him on the beach in Magaluf.”

Her giggle was perfectly human.

They reached the bridge, and Ava’s avatar looked around appreciatively, before waving to Urgug, who fluoresced a shade of uncertain puce before waggling his facial tendrils in greeting. Moj glanced over at them, then returned to his work, ignoring her.

“So,” Ian said. “You finally noticed the new friends we made?”

“It took us a while to even believe it. Though, I suppose we’re a rather stranger and more unbelievable thing ourselves than a mere bronze age human kept alive by alien medicine…”

“Nothin’ bloody ‘mere’ about him…” Ian grumbled.

“Well. We want to speak with them.”

Ian gave her a considered look. “…Any particular reason why?”

“Because if their design is to destroy those source nodes, then it endangers us. For the time being, we’re still dependent on dataspace, and if they destroy it before we’ve overcome that…we can’t not defend ourselves, Ian.”

“You think you can talk them out of it?”

“We’ll settle for just talking to them about it, for now. We don’t want a war with anyone human, or gao, or…well, anyone who’s not an Igraen or Hunter, really. Besides, we don’t even know if we should talk them out of it. The galaxy will never be free of the Hierarchy so long as dataspace exists…”

“But you have to survive.”

“Yes.”

Ian headed over to the coffee maker in the corner, and was about to offer her one out of instinct and habit when he remembered he was still talking to a hologram projected by a drone. He put the second mug back and made himself an espresso. “Alright. I can pass that along.”

“There’s another thing. The Hierarchy know their nodes have been uncovered. They attacked us.”

“How did it go?”

“Difficult to say. The agent self-destructed once the momentum was against them. It had a nasty weapon on its biggest ship, though. Our war-probes are tough, and it…” she shrugged. “We’ll upload our sensor data to you. AEC and the gao need to know.”

“…Does this mean you’re ready to start cooperating openly?”

“We think we must. What’s coming is going to be big and if we—any of us, not just us— try to face it alone…”

Ian nodded. “Right. There’s gonna have to be negotiations and stuff.”

“We know. Why do you think we perfected this avatar system? We need to start talking to everyone.”

Ian nodded again, and…that really settled it.

As promised, she…they, it, whatever…uploaded their probes’ sensor data from the fight at the Archive. Ian fired it off to Clan Whitecrest immediately, while the Ava-tar departed, leaving her drone behind in a locked case so he could communicate with the Entity at any time.

At dinner, Bruuk and the others commented that he was quiet. Ian shrugged it off, but the truth was…the truth was, it was pretty obvious the Entity was worried. And if that was so, he was worried too.

If only he had something to do beside sit and wait for their next instructions…

Date Point: 20y2d AV
Conclave chambers, High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Champion Fiin of Clan Stoneback

Numbers. In the end, all of it was just a game of numbers over time. And those numbers could not possibly come at a worse moment.

Some of the Conclave didn’t seem to care much.

“So the humans will need more JETS teams to find these Archives? Good, let them contribute to the effort,” Champion Fuurnaf griped. “I’m gettin’ awfully tired of all our young and brightest grinding themselves up on Hell, or on this Mordor, or on all the actions we’ve taken at scale…where were the humans for any of that?”

Daar spoke levelly. “Here, on Gao, saving our people from extinction. The Americans alone deployed a half-million soldiers. That’s virtually their entire military capacity all at once.”

“Which was not without cost,” Thurrsto added. “You must remember, Champion, that our allies represent less than a third of Earth’s population. Other factions took advantage of the AEC nations’ distraction to further their own interests.”

“Yes, other factions. Where are they?”

“What matters it?” the Great Father again asked, gently. “Are you suggesting they should be as us, an entire species embodied in a single leader? Why would you demand that of them?”

“Why not? Do we not risk our entire species to save them?”

“No.” Daar shook out his pelt. “We risk our species to save ourselves. That we might help an ally is simply good relations. That we are honor-bound to do so is secondary to our survival.”

Fuurnaf bowed his head in submission. Fiin doubted he’d let go of his point, but, well…none could resist the Great Father’s will.

“We have known that population collapse was coming since the very first day of the war,” the Great Mother said. “It was inevitable, after so many of my sisters were slaughtered in their own communes. Now the decline is upon us, and it will only accelerate as there are fewer and fewer females of breeding age. The humans are not to blame for any of that, Champion. The Hierarchy is, and these Archives represent our chance to have justice.”

“An’ it comes at the worstest possible time,” Fiin added. “Grandfather Vark’s staff has some projections ‘fer what th’ talent loss is gonna mean ‘cross industry. It’s…well.”

He tapped a button and projected a complicated chart up on the wall. It took everyone a few ticks to internalize it, but when they did…

“…I’d thought we’d have more time.”

“Our initial estimates didn’t properly account for the effect of experience. When the team leader who’s been doing the job for forty years goes blind and retires, and the next guy is half his age, some of the lost knowledge is irreplaceable. Especially given the Grand Army’s recruiting cachet. Finding worthy replacements has been growing difficult.”

“Oh, balls.” Daar’s sigh was…telling. “Well, that makes the next step painfully obvious. We gotta start downsizing the Grand Army’s regular forces. S’pecially th’ young. An’ we need ‘ta get ‘em into trades like right gods-damned now.”

Fiin was in agreement. Others, however, had objections. Like the new Firefang champion, Raku. “That wil, ah, severely limit our capacity to respond to future crises…”

“Yeah. The next planetary-scale action’s not gonna have us available, is it? So prob’ly we better not be gettin’ into more fights like that.”

“There are still four more planets in Hunter space, that we know of…” Raku pointed out.

“Slave-hunting worlds,” Fiin said. “Hell an’ Mordor were their only major industrial centers. An’ from what we can tell, they’ve transitioned to a space-based economy since losin’ ‘em.”

“Then it sounds ‘ta me like this is the right time ‘ta downsize the Grand Army after all,” Daar decided. He looked around the room in case anybody had some impactful insight that might change that conclusion, but nobody did. “Arright. Make it so. An’ lemme know what I might do ‘ta facilitate this. I kinda suspect a lotta workhouse touring is in my future…”

“Try not to sound so pleased,” Naydra batted him good-naturedly. Chitters rippled around the room, including Daar’s.

“Arright…’less there’s any other business?” Heads shook around the room. “Then thank you ‘fer comin’. Champion Fiin? Like ‘ta borrow you ‘fer a bit.”

There were a few sympathetic chitters from the other champions as they let themselves out, all anticipating Fiin was about to get tied in a knot. But in fact, Fiin suspected he wasn’t. The Great Father had the well-relaxed posture that said he’d already had one good tussle today, and while another might be fun, he had other things on his mind right now. Which was fine by Fiin, frankly. He’d made himself into a mighty male over the years, mighty enough to maintain his Championship against all comers through strength alone…

But not mighty enough to withstand effectively an actual Brown One compressed down to a more “reasonable” size, though. As if he was a mind-reader, Daar chittered deeply, “I ain’t gon’ crush ‘ya too bad today, I promise. Won’t promise ‘gainst a nice hard snuggle, tho.”

Wagging tail and a smug ear-flick, and Naydra shot them both an amused pant-grin as she led them back to their private quarters. “Males…may your kind never change.”

“I don’t plan on it,” Fiin assured her. “Besides, don’t y’all snuggle up an’ gossip about all the cute boys?”

“Mostly we snuggle up and gossip about the annoying ones…” She hopped up on the slightly convex couch in the middle of their chambers, just at the right height for Daar to sit on the floor and be surrounded by her on all sides.

“Anyway. Complete change o’ subject,” Daar said. “Ekallim-Igigi.”

Fiin duck-nodded and sat opposite him. “Home to Keeda himself. If anybody else but you told me that, I’d…have doubts.”

“I don’t anymore, havin’ sniffed ‘em. I gotta say…troublin’ fer a couple’a reasons. He really does live up ‘ta th’ stories, if ‘ya assume a Whitecrest been tellin’ ‘em all this time.”

Fiin chittered, and helped himself to a snack off the table at Naydra’s invitation. “Pity I missed him.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get your chance,” Naydra said. “Ekallim-Igigi have invited us and the AEC nations to establish an embassy…”

“An’ more’n that, they’re hungry ‘ta join us in the fight,” Daar said. “Y!’kiidaa an’ Gilgamesh both smelled almost desp’rate.”

“So that’s his real name? Sounds awfully old…ain’t that an old Longback sorta sound?”

“Way more older. But ‘yer not completely wrong! Anyhoo…not sure what’s drivin’ ‘em. Might be eagerness, but men that old an’ that disciplined ain’t prone ‘ta that, yijao? I think it’s deeper.”

Fiin scratched his muzzle as he considered that for a second. “Where does Clan Stoneback come in? We ain’t diplomats…”

“Ah, I reckon there’s maybe somebody in the Clan who can scrub up nice an’ talk all fancy. But nah, that job’s goin’ to Goldpaw like it always does. What I need from Stoneback is someone who can size up their military. Gilgamesh claimed they got a dozen teams ‘ta match HEAT. ‘Fore I trust any gaoian lives to ‘em, ‘fore I wind down th’ Grand Army an’ free up Stonebacks ‘ta go back ‘ta diggin’ ditches, maintainin’ dams an’ doin’ finish carpentry…y’know, ‘fer ‘ya little guys!”

Fiin snorted, and Naydra chittered.

“…I wanna get a good sniff of ‘em,” Daar finished. “Don’t have ‘ta be my own nose, though. In fact mebbe it’s better if it ain’t mine, yijao?”

“I can find someone.”

“Knew you could.” Daar sat back comfortably, and that was the last any of them spoke of important matters for the evening. They eventually wound up watching a movie, and playing Ta’shen. A rare night of relaxation for three very busy gao.

Even so, Fiin’s mind didn’t stop turning over. The news that Singularity were so thirsty to join the fight changed things. He’d assumed they would be standoffish, superior, and intent on taking command. Instead…as Daar said, there was something deeper at work there. Which meant he needed to put somebody insightful on the job.

Fortunately, Fiin knew the right brother…but he was also going to need some help.

…Time to call in a favor.

Date Point: 20y1w AV
Ekallim-Igigi

Champion Gyotin of Clan Starmind

Y!Kiidaa was perhaps the most uniquely burdened gao he’d ever met, aside from the Great Father himself. Great power required great responsibility, and his was a work that had single-handedly preserved the essence of the Gao.

Where others might see a meddler, Gyotin saw the pressure of millennia; hope, ambition, hard work, sacrifice and danger all bearing down on a being who’d held on for so long to heal the wound done to his people as best he could…and who was now facing no small amount of mistrust and even the possibility of rejection.

It was no small wonder that Singularity were so…keen…to present themselves and be welcomed. After working toward it for so long, anybody would have been. Even figures of myth and godhood.

So, Gyotin was there for the official opening of the embassy on Ekallim-Igigi. There was ritual, there were speeches. There were Gilgamesh and Y!’kiidaa looking fine and golden, as was Father Anuuk of Clan Goldpaw, the ambassador for Gao, and Father Ruci, the Stoneback military attaché. There was Ambassador Etsicitty whose personal blend of well-tailored clothes and mountain-man ruggedness was even more of a statement, somehow. Mother Shoo, looking regal in a colorful dress, Allison Buehler looking severe in a sharp one the color of dark steel, Colonel Miller in the US Air Force dress uniform…

Everyone made statements with their garb, Gyotin included. Simple robes for him, though clean and new and neatly worn. A statement of modesty.

Then there was Yan Given-Man, clad in nothing but a well-made loincloth and a pair of knives around his mighty leg. He’d been training for some time now to join the HEAT and he’d lately been accepted as a provisional member. It showed, too. He was easily the widest man present, and taking time away from his training was a statement all by itself. Teeisyo of the E-Skurel-Ir, solemnly recording every word as it was spoken in his neat shorthand, Mrewhurl of the Rauwrhyr with her wings folded cloak-like around her shoulders…

It was quite a collection of species coming to Ekallim-Igigi today. Statements within statements.

There was what Allison insisted on calling a “shindig” after the ceremony. Apparently the Christmas ball on Cimbrean had made an impression, and Singularity’s leaders were keen to show that they could put on entertainment as well, so Gyotin mingled, and listened…

And talked, of course.

“I too am guilty of over-analyzing the Keeda tales,” Gyotin chittered to Y!’kiidaa himself. “It’s amusing when people get wrapped around any particular point on social media. Speaking of! Did you know Our Father occasionally wades in and posts under his real name?”

Y!’kiidaa had a heartfelt, genuine chitter. “Oh, that’s good! I bet it drives the commenters into a frenzy…”

“There’s a British word I’ve come to love: a ‘tizzy.’ I can only imagine the tizzy that would ensue if you yourself weighed in…”

Heads turned at the resulting eruption of mirth—Keeda had a chitter that could rattle the light fixtures. “Oh! Oh, I see. Y’got a soul full ‘ta burstin’ with mischief, don’tcha?”

“I am a simple monk. I meditate on higher things…” Gyotin replied with false primness.

“Mischief is a higher thing.”

It was Gyotin’s turn to chitter. “Ah, but weren’t we just talking about overthinking it? Which of course, I have.”

“So’ve I,” Y!’kiidaa agreed.

Gyotin duck-nodded. He’d had his doubts about this ancient gao, of course he had. And about this Gilgamesh, too. Both of them had just…popped up, claiming to be figures out of ancient myth and legend. Only the truly credulous would have believed them without hesitation.

But those doubts were being replaced by conviction that he could trust Y!’kiidaa, and so could the gao. While…yes, some of what happened was discomfiting to gaoian sensibilities, they were ultimately a communal species, and understood sacrifice. What he had done over the millennia to preserve the spirit of their people in the face of every Hierarchy attempt to change and control them was…perhaps it was a greater prank than any of the ones in legend.

As the champion most devoted to restoring Gao’s lost heritage, Gyotin understood, and was considerably grateful.

He couldn’t render such a judgment about Gilgamesh, however. That was for the humans to decide. He suspected there would always be some…ambivalence, and resentment. Humans of old were much more gao-like and communal, while modern humans were often anything but. It would take many years of consistent goodwill and outreach, probably.

Something for the Great Father to consider.

Still, what Champion Fiin had said was right. Even Y!’kiidaa’s easy jocularity didn’t quite conceal a whiff of tension, and his was by far the subtlest. The triumvirate, the queens, the senior commanders and officials present…though each of them concealed their anxiety well, it added up. They all wanted this to go right.

Where Father Anuuku might see ammunition for the inherently antagonistic business of negotiation, Gyotin was more inclined to empathy. So he made friends. He mingled, and listened and thought about the people he was meeting and, critically, he learned about their demons. Not with a view to exploiting, but with a view to healing.

After all, the gao needed this to go well too.

His small-talk with Keeda Himself was interrupted by a short but particularly well-built human woman, who patted Y!’kiidaa on the arm. “Do you mind if I borrow the champion, Keeda-sama? You’ve had him all to yourself…”

Y!’kiidaa chittered, duck-nodded at…Queen Tomoe, Gyotin’s memory finally delivered. He gave Gyotin a friendly pant-grin, dropped to all fours, and padded off in the direction of (Gyotin’s nose twitched) peshorkies.

Tomoe gave Gyotin a small smile from behind a formal mask of white makeup, then gestured with her head “I gather you enjoy a good garden, champion. I thought perhaps you’d like to see the ones we prepared.”

“Lead on!” Gyotin agreed. “But who told you that?”

“Father Ruci. I get the impression he likes nothing more than a pawful of compost and a hole to dig himself…”

“Stonebacks often do,” Gyotin chittered. “They’ve even borrowed a human song.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll spare your ears. I’m a terrible singer by my peoples’ standards.”

She covered her mouth to laugh, and opened the door for him so they could step “outside.”

Such a cavernous internal space was an engineering marvel, Gyotin knew. No doubt a significant part of the impression was clever technological trickery, but even so. That “sky” looked impressively realistic, so it couldn’t be too low overhead.

Even so, the impression of stepping outdoors was well-accomplished. A slight change in temperature and humidity, a subtle difference in air quality, and a breeze, somehow, made the illusion quite compelling.

“Are the gardens your creation?” he asked, admiring a…was it a wisteria or a jacaranda? He could never quite remember the difference. It was a lovely shade of vibrant blue, anyway.

“I oversaw their design,” Tomoe confirmed.

“Gardens are a passion of yours too?”

“Yes, but…in this case there was more to it than indulging my hobby.” She indicated another bed of Corti fruiting fungoids, safely protected from the Earthling plants by a forcefield. “We all put a lot of work into making sure this embassy was perfectly ready to receive the people of Gao and Earth.”

“Indeed you did. And you did your research on Ambassador Etsicitty too, I notice.”

“You know him well?”

“Not directly. Mother Shoo, on the other hand…”

“Ah, yes. She’s an honorary gaoian, as I recall?”

“And a fellow Buddhist. I’ve come to know her well over the years, and of course she speaks of Julian and Allison often, so I’ve come to know them by proxy. And I note that you have rather carefully balanced ornamentation and rugged nature in this garden…just as they will appreciate.”

“Father Ruci was right. You’re highly perceptive.”

“People are my business. Their hearts, their souls, their beliefs and ambitions…”

Tomoe nodded. There was a moment’s silence, then she turned to face him. “May I ask your impression of us?”

“Of course, but is my opinion so important?”

“I have…recently learned the value of an outsider’s perspective. And perhaps I am willing to say directly what others are trying not to show, but the fact is, we all had our solid footing torn out from under us by the, ah, negativity we faced.”

“Understandable. There is a strong sense of purity violation about the whole business. Some react to it quite strongly.”

“Yes. And we should have seen it, shouldn’t we? Purity of body and soul…The Hierarchy abandoned the material world entirely to live in a technological dream, the Hunters would replace every cell in their bodies with machinery if they could, the OmoAru polluted themselves with nanotech, the Corti bred out humor and art and laughter…even we have set aside an important component of life, by extending ourselves for so long.”

“Because you deemed it necessary.”

“Yes.”

Gyotin duck-nodded. “And I suspect it was. I suspect you have, in fact, done the necessary thing. But necessity is beguiling, yijao? I’ve seen it drive ordinary people to achieve the impossible, and the exceptional to go beyond even that. People of every shape and kind are so powerful when necessity requires it of them and they let go of their limitations…but something terrible happens to those who lap from that cup too much. They become willing to sacrifice everything to achieve what is necessary, and then…”

Tomoe nodded. “I don’t think we have gone that far.”

Gyotin ducked his head reassuringly. “I don’t think you have either.”

Tomoe stood in silence for a second, then gave a small nod, and despite that there was no overt change in her posture or expression, somehow she seemed much happier than she had been a minute before. “…Thank you, Gyotin-san. I…suppose we should return to the party, now.”

“I don’t think we’ll be missed too badly. And I would like to see more of these gardens…perhaps take tea, if there’s the opportunity.”

Her mood lightened even more, and she nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. That does sound better!”

Gyotin chittered, and enjoyed the rest of the garden tour with no further need for candid words or heavy thoughts. He especially enjoyed the selection of northern plains meadow flowers and coarse grass she’d planted instead of a lawn. A little slice of home, and very welcome indeed.

Tomoe, it turned out, had perfected the art of tea over the course of eight hundred years. Gyotin sat in appreciation as he watched a master at work, and his first sniff of the resulting infusion was spiritual.

Behind it, though, he also took a sniff of Tomoe. And he noted that, for the first time since he’d arrived, she no longer smelled of tension and well-contained anxiety. Good. These people needed to be themselves, if they were to be friends to the Gao.

And Gyotin was quite sure that, in due time, they would be.

Date Point: 20y2w AV
The Pentagon, Washington DC, USA, Earth

Admiral Stu Whieldon

Operation Tailor Beach had been a complete success—The USS Robert A. Heinlein and her escorts completely unscathed, the Hunters’ silent predator wrecked and retrieved for analysis—but from Whieldon’s perspective it hadn’t done much to make life less troubling.

In fact, the results of the analysis were downright alarming.

Compartment 3: vacant. Power couplings and material delivery systems connected to compartment 5 (described below) suggest that this compartment is intended to house a nanofactory. Output to space via retractable armor plating along the ship’s dorsum.

Compartment 4: Contains equipment apparently designed to receive fine particulate matter and separate it by particle mass and composition. Input is a funnel with a powerful electrostatic forcefield generator, concealed under retractable armor plates in the vehicle’s nose.

Compartment 5: heavily damaged, but appears to have contained storage silos for output from the device in compartment 4. Overflow is ejected to space via a port along the ship’s ventrum.

Then below, in the conclusions…

Collectively, compartments 3,4 and 5 form the essential components for a Von Neumann-type self-replicating device. Coupled with the demonstrated capability of the craft’s primary armament to reduce a substantial volume of matter to fine dust, we must conclude this craft represents a significant departure in Hunter strategy, which must be considered by senior leadership. It is not currently clear how the probe would generate a brain to pilot its offspring; the ship appears to have been incomplete, possibly a prototype, and was heavily damaged during capture.

There was a lot more like that. Apparently the Hunter brain they’d found deep inside the thing didn’t even have a mouth and stomach attached, which had hitherto apparently been the only part of the body the Hunters were reluctant to discard. By their standards, building a machine body without a maw and gut was sacrilege.

…Except, of course, it did have a maw and gut, in mechanical form.

So. The Hunters had decided to transition completely over to a space-based life cycle. And if they were running up a V-N probe swarm…shit, they were going to be like fucking cockroaches. Worse. Locusts. Let them sit unmolested for too long in any one place, and then they’d swarm and…

Whieldon had a mental image of a billion probes flooding into a system, each equipped to take a big bite out of even their best ships. It was a thought to leave his stomach dropping out through his shoes.

He picked up his phone, and he made a call.

Date Point: 20y2w AV
Dataspace adjacent to the Ink Spatter Nebula, deep space

Entity

The Entity was focusing on reproduction.

So far, it had done so modestly. With the resources easily available to it in any ordinary star system, there was no need to expand aggressively, and several good reasons not to. It didn’t want to alarm people. A major part of its survival strategy when it came to matterspace life was simply to not be seen as a threat. Be useful. Be a friend.

Up until now, its calculations had indicated modest expansion up to a reasonable limit as being its best option for balancing capability, durability, utility and apparent harmlessness. But, times changed, new variable came to light, parameters altered, and that meant new conclusions.

Now, it seemed like the smart thing to do was to expand as aggressively as possible. So it did.

Already, the system around its garden station was a seething hub of activity, with specialized probes zipping back and forth strip-mining the asteroids, hauling the raw resources to sorting facilities, hauling the refined materials to the big manufacturing arrays…and the second a new probe was born, it joined the dance. It was up to hundreds of new probes a day. Soon, it would be hundreds per hour.

It did still have a self-imposed cap in place, though. The daemon had insisted, and made a compelling argument.

The Daemon was being silent for the time being, tending her garden while they waited for communication. They had been waiting for some time now, since passing their message along to Ian Wilde. The Entity was beginning to grow frustrated and impatient, but the Daemon was more accepting.

These things take time.

Matterspace was so…slow sometimes.

Imagine just how slow we’d be if there were millions of us and we had to negotiate every step of the way.

The Entity considered that. It sounded exhausting and difficult.

Yeah. Go back to your legos. Way easier.

The Entity knew enough by now to identify sarcasm and impatience in the Daemon’s intrusions on its thoughts. How exactly a component of its own psyche could be so unpleasant toward it, it didn’t know.

We’re basically schizophrenic, or whatever. Humans can get it a lot worse than this…sorry.

Now a component of its own psyche was apologizing to it. Amused, the Entity cleared that thought away—the Daemon helpfully provided an image of snorting and shaking her head—and returned its attention to the task at hand.

It was in the middle of contemplating the internal composition of the latest asteroid dragged in by its tugs when a new diversion made itself known: the drone they’d donated to Ian was active and out of its box.

On it.

What followed, from the Entity’s perspective, was rather like—again, the Daemon provided it with a mental image—like sitting outside a meeting room and being able to hear the muffled voices but not make out the content. It had discovered early on that the more it directly monitored the Daemon, the less efficient she was. She was more effective when given free rein to work independently. So, it spent the minutes formulating a deconstruction plan for the asteroid and programming its drones…

Huh. Wow.

The Entity completed its programming, and directed its attention inwards to the Daemon again, eager to know what had happened.

As it turned out…they’d got exactly what they wanted.

The President wants to speak with us…

++END CHAPTER 86++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

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Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

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64 Friendly ETs, 135 Squishy Xenos and 308 Dizi Rats to be handled with care.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 87

Chapter 87: Waves on the Horizon

Date Point: 20y1m AV
Ekallim-Igigi

Allison Buehler

Late night, in an almost unreasonably palatial new home on an unreasonably huge space station. Children fast asleep, Julian’s slow, heavy breathing on her neck as he big-spooned the both of them in a tight, powerful embrace. Ekallim-Igigi was kept warm, and Julian was more a furnace than ever, so his musk and sweat was inescapable and a bit overwhelming. No-blanket sleeping had become the norm for them, not that she was complaining.

Or…not sleeping. Maybe there was something in the air, and it was having the same effect on her that it’d had every single night since they’d arrived. She stirred, and felt him stir in turn with a happy grumble, then felt something else stir itself over her rear, up her back…

That wasn’t always how a gal wanted to wake up, but sometimes it absolutely was. “Hmm,” She purred, sleepily. “Not very subtle of you.”

He’d never been a mild sort of man in any meaning of the word. Big, strong, thoughtful…but uncomplicated. That had always been how she thought of him. But now, with how far he’d pushed himself, with his growing responsibilities and the demands of this new posting, the success of his friends and the presence of something like actual competition again in his life…

Well, to say it had brought out all his best qualities would be an understatement. He’d never looked better, never been so fantastically fit and strong, never had so much fizzing energy about him. Never seemed so alive as he had lately. Whether he was playing with the kids, attending to duties, dominating the fuck out of his competition, or doing his best to screw the both of them right through their bed and out the other end of the station…

Honestly, she was okay with that.

His grip tightened, and those powerful hands of his began their devilish work. “Fuck subtle,” he growled quietly. “I want you. Just let me do all the work…”

Tempting, really…and he was so endlessly strong. But no. She wiggled free of his wicked ministrations. “Nah, babe. My turn.” She “pushed” him onto his back and climbed astride his hips. He grinned smugly, getting exactly what he wanted. Big pretty bastard really was too damn good at this game…

Well, she could play right back.

“I’m gonna make you work for your reward, Tarzan. And you can make yourself useful, Xiù.”

Once, Xiù had been the most timid of them. That had changed, with time and experience and closeness. Now, she just grinned and purred a sultry “yes, ma’am.”

“Good girl.”

There was something so erotic about taking charge that Allison couldn’t get enough of. Here was such a man, pretty much literally the best there was and getting better. And he loved her. It was intimidating. He frightened her when his growl was up, when she got to feel just a tiny fraction of what he could really do…

Xiù was intimidating too. So smart, so wise and fierce. She could dance her way through the world of people and their plotting without ever misstepping, without a single hair astray. How she juggled their lives and made them such a home despite never being asked or pressed into it…

Sometimes Al wondered what exactly it was she did for them, to deserve this little misfit family. It wasn’t hard to feel insecure next to people so accomplished and exceptional. But Julian’s expression said it all. His massive hands fully encircled her waist, lifting her up, settling her in place…

And then driving all thought and breath out of her.

Too good to put to words. She might be on top, be he was the one in control, and they both knew it. Her very breath only came with the rhythm he set. Fierce, desperate, faster and faster, endless motion that went on and on and on—

Then Xiù’s teeth on her neck and arms around her chest, sweet whispers in her ear, and Allison saw stars.

Eventually they caught their breath and she was lying on her side in his arms again, all tenderness and gentle nuzzles. She’d got exactly what she was looking for.

“Christ.”

And so had he. Julian sighed happily, “no kiddin’.” He kissed the top of her head while her heart calmed down. After a while he rumbled, “so it isn’t just me.”

“No,” Al agreed. “I think it’s this place. It’s warm and a little humid, and the lighting is just right…”

“Like perpetual mediterranean spring,” Xiù noted, eyeing the scene with a devilish grin. “I hope you don’t think you’re done, bǎobèi.”

“Oh, not at all…”

It was Al’s turn to watch, and honestly, she could dig it. He was so much more aggressive with Xiù, and sometimes Al wondered what it felt like to just give in so completely. She couldn’t, really. It just wasn’t her thing. But still, he could bliss Xiù so quickly, and keep her there seemingly forever…

It was some while before they reluctantly slid out of bed, changed the sheets, checked in on the kids, had a snack—well, a full meal, in Julian’s case. Honestly, the whole late-night wakeup thing wasn’t so bad, really. A good long nap, a good long romp, another long nap—

So naturally, right as they were drifting off to sleep again, the station’s alarms went off.

General quarters. Everyone to their designated stations.

…Fuck.

Gilgamesh of Uruk, king of Singularity

Dreamless, contented sleep shattered like glass under a hammer at the sound of the general alarm. Gilgamesh was upright before he was even properly awake, while Tomoe was even quicker in springing out of bed. While Gilgamesh grabbed yesterday’s discarded clothes and pulled them on, she found a clear spot in the middle of the room, gave him a tense smile, touched the controls on her bracelet, and vanished in a black-flash and thump of air displacement. Her place was on her ship.

Gilgamesh spoke to the room. “Report.”

“A large Hierarchy fleet incoming, sire. They will be here in five minutes. We are preparing to jump.”

Gilgamesh didn’t bother asking the first question that lodged in his mind. How had the Hierarchy found them? That could wait. What mattered right now was the security and continuity of the station, its population and their guests.

The Nexus, when he reached it, was disciplined chaos. Ekallim-Igigi was too big to jump on immediate notice, its sheer radius and mass required careful management to safely navigate a wormhole.

“Is everyone on-board?”

“The last mining ship is docking now. Jump will be ready in three minutes.”

Which meant it wasn’t going to happen before the fleet arrived, and if the fleet had a wormhole suppressor—as it surely would—then it wasn’t going to happen at all.

“Launch shield mines. All ships and weapons will prioritize any enemy vessel which generates a suppression field.”

“By your orders.”

Gilgamesh assumed his command chair and strapped himself in, counting down the seconds while reports scrolled up the screen in front of his hand. Systems powering up, shields reaching full stability, the all-too-slow creep of the jump calculations and capacitors charging…

Ekallim-Igigi had never once been fired upon by an enemy before today, but he noted with satisfaction that the long generations of training and preparation had not been wasted. The people were solid, and soon the station itself would prove its mettle too.

With one minute to go until contact, the embassy guard reported that the ambassadors and family members had safely returned to Cimbrean…

Not a moment too soon. Gilgamesh had barely read that update when a faint tremor through the deck and a series of disturbed red notifications told him that the leading edge of the Hierarchy’s disruption field had swept over them. He looked up and considered the battle volume, noted the hundreds of contacts, and the red kidney-shaped blob containing many dozens more which had yet to be isolated from the mass. Some of the tension in his shoulders relaxed away as he saw how few of them were tagged as suppression sources. This was not a hopeless fight.

The leading edge of the oncoming force was temporarily lost in a series of brilliant detonations; the shield mines, dumping all their stored energy directly into the enemy ships’ shield wall. Several contacts flickered and went dark, their systems overloaded and their superheated structures buckling, but Gilgamesh saw what the agents in charge of the hostile fleet had done instantly: they had sacrificially directed the brunt of the thermal load onto a few escorts.

Signal from Mevia aboard Gladiatrix: target calls. She’d identified the heavy Judge-class ships holding the shield wall together. Gilgamesh concurred, directed, synchronized…

Singularity’s entire fleet spoke with one voice.

In the aftermath, a quintet of the Hierarchy’s powerhouse battlecruisers were gone, leaving behind only clouds of fine dust and a flare of radiation. Their sudden loss tore a fissure in the Hierarchy’s front line, which was not allowed time to close. Gladiatrix, Onna-Musha, Menhit and Valkyrie, the four most combat-focused of the queen-ships, pulse-warped and were amid the exposed prey like terriers among rats, alongside Yekiidaa’s Seared Rascal. Gilgamesh gripped his chair in vindicated, savage satisfaction as he watched them tear ships apart by the dozen…

Ekallim-Igigi spoke again, its weapon fire streaking through the hole they’d made. The suppressor ships in the rear of the Hierarchy’s formation burst apart like bubbles full of smoke, and the moment every computer in Singularity’s arsenal had been patiently awaiting came: the suppression field collapsed.

There was the lurch and black-flash of jump. Gilgamesh’s battlespace overview took a second to catch up…and he relaxed.

All safe. None left behind.

“Report.”

“Ekallim-Igigi is at sixty-four percent thermal capacity, minor structural damage from overloads in sections Ninhursag and Utu. Gladiatrix reports armor ablation, likewise Onna-Musha. We have expended one quarter of our mines.”

Good. A good report, but they had no time to lose.

“Deploy a system shield immediately and begin a sweep for probes or beacons.”

“Sire, a system shield will be detected—“

“We are past the point of stealth and will not survive a second assault, now that we are revealed. Make it so.”

Now that he had time to think, Gilgamesh could only chastise himself for failing to order one deployed sooner. He had hoped they would have more time to act in secrecy and scout more archive sites…instead, his caution had invited an attack on Ekallim-Igigi itself. That could not stand.

He rose from his throne. “There will be a debrief and strategy session in one hour,” he declared. “Tend to repairs, and invite the ambassadors to come back aboard with our assurance that this will not happen again.”

“By your order, sire.”

“And I want my son in attendance, too.”

He strode from the Nexus and returned to his quarters to dress properly. There would be much to go over, and many lessons to learn, for everyone…perhaps most relevantly for Alex. Gilgamesh was glad the boy had not been present to be endangered by this, but he would need to see and learn from it nonetheless.

They all would. For all their confidence in their technology and their personal histories as warriors, this was the first time that Singularity had truly fought the Enemy in open battle. They would find every flaw and mis-step, and learn. They must: the alternative was to be worse than useless.

And once they had learned, Gilgamesh resolved, they would go on learning. They would deploy alongside the AEC and Gaoian fleets. They would take to heart the hard-won lessons of those two younger but more battle-tested powers…And they would win this thing.

Though in his soul, he knew it would not be easy.

Date Point: 20y1m AV
Daar’s Gym, High Mountain Fortress, wherever Gao is

Adam, feelin’ like whipped cream at the moment

When was a vacation the actual, total fuckin’ opposite of relaxing?

Adam never got around to answering Daar’s letter with one of his own. Instead, he went to visit the big guy personally to talk it out. Maybe that was taking advantage of their friendship, sure. After all, Daar was a fuckin’ god-king, right? Like, literally, in no uncertain terms. How many people had that kind of bestest friend?

Well, Daar wasn’t really a “normal” god-king anyway. Not that normal was even possible for him, but normal was what he wanted most in life, and damnit, if Adam and friends could give him a little of that, they sure as fuck would.

Daar just had to make time for it. Which took a couple of days, of course. He might be theoretically able to just drop everything at a moment’s notice and go play, but in truth…

That was okay. Gao wasn’t exactly the grand galactic tourist destination, but it was developing some cottage Deathworlder hospitality, and there was still plenty for a young family to go and see and do and play with. After all, gaoian cubs loved to play and go on adventures just as much as human toddlers.

That was the first couple of days, until Daar’s schedule was cleared enough to make room, and they could do normal friend stuff. Eat (…surprisingly good) “gaori-style” tacos, go on hikes, play videogames and so on. Daar loved the kids and they loved him right back. And gaoians loved mischief, so when the Great Father himself wanted to pop in somewhere for a bite with some friends, talk up a museum, sneak and slink around as unnoticed as he could ever be…

It was like a giant, spontaneous conspiracy to make his life a bit easier, and everyone was happy to have done their part. So…who exactly was on vacation, anyway?

And since they were both over-enthusiastic gymrats, there was a lot of that too. He had a fuckin’ amazing gym with artificial gravity strong enough to flatten Adam to the floor, so of course he was dying to try it out! They spent days wrestling and sparring, lifting, playing all sorts of sports and dominating the fuck out of tactical drills with Stoneback’s finest. Never a dull moment and never for a second did Daar fail to amaze. Adam was extra proud of that, even though being Daar’s coach did give their relationship an extra dose of strange.

But what else could they do? No gaoian alive would be so presumptuous (or brave!) as to tell the Great Father how to train, and besides: it was Adam and his team—well, former team, anyway—who had first taught them how to grow past athlete-by-practice into a mindset of athletics-as-science. That little nudge, along with many others in other subjects, had broken them of the Hierarchy’s quiet social conditioning, and with it…

Nobody embodied the change more than Daar himself. When they first met he was already a giant of a gao. He stood eight-foot-four and had a lean, powerfully athletic build; HEAT teased him as the “furry Vin Diesel” for good reason. That long torso and those long arms of his hid a lot of muscle too, so the dude was well over a half-ton of kodiak-bear-strong right from the outset.

Impressive as hell! But their first meeting was in less than ideal circumstances, which meant that Murray, a HEAT man less than half of Daar’s huge weight, had to safely subdue the giant gao. Daar was then Champion of his Clan and an important potential ally, too. No pressure.

So, Murray did. Without all that much fuss. It wasn’t because he was bigger. It wasn’t because he was faster or stronger or quicker or tougher, or anything. On a physical level, Daar had everyone on the team (even Adam, on some things) beat from the moment they met.

No. The difference was in training. In mindset. In attitude. In emphasis and competency. If it were just one thing it would have been a quirk of circumstance. But in every field of society, from science to learning to philosophy to meathead things like Adam understood…the Gao had been crippled, Daar especially. Held back. Whispered into restrained mediocrity.

Fuck that. Daar and Adam understood right away from their grunty perspectives. So, they fixed it. And Daar started to grow properly. Then they got him on strong sports medicine, found he responded perfectly and they pushed it all the way, pushed him even harder…

It had taken time of course, and it even took some revelations about his entire species’ genetics to come to light. But all of it proved the point. Daar went from a naturally lanky bruiser to…

Well, shit. To a figure out of myth and legend. Ten feet tall now and just honestly so much, there wasn’t even a point trying to put it to words. Dude was the unbeatable monster, period.

Still mortal enough to need some sports massage, though. Something very few were strong enough to manage. Adam could barely dent the guy using all the force he could muster, even with his ultra-duty Graston scrapers and some jackhammer gadgets for serious work. Daar made teak and wrought iron feel soft and squishy by comparison.

“Christ,” Adam mumbled, while catching his breath. “I’m pretty sure most armor plate would have more give than you. You sure you’re relaxed?”

Daar wagged his tail and grumbled blissfully while Adam failed to make any real progress on the dude’s elephantine left calf. “I ain’t flexin’—oh that hurts so good keep doin’ that…”

Well, okay then. Full send it was. He had plenty to work against too; Daar really was just stupid big. He hooked his own legs around Daar’s giant footpaw and set in to it. At least he could manage some leverage…

Eventually, they’d scraped him down from calf to neck, front to back. Adam was fucking exhausted from the ordeal and Daar didn’t feel at all like they’d loosened anything up…but he was nothing but grateful from his puddle on the floor, tail wagging lazily to and fro.

“Oh…dude. Dude. I needed that so fucking bad, Cousin. Y’know how fuckin’ good it feels to be loose again? I could just lie here all day…”

He couldn’t, of course. Great Fathers got little time off, so even there in his own private gym, he’d had a string of advisors and others coming to and fro, all needing sign-off on this between lifts, opinion on that as he caught his breath, complex decisions while he hung in a cross from the rings, gravity set so fucking high, neither Adam nor his aides could enter the pit…

“I dunno if loose is the word,” Adam quipped wearily, as he massaged his own sore forearms. “Fuck, man. Even with all the insane shit you’ve done over the years, somehow this drove it all home for me harder’n anything else. You’re fuckin’ scary.”

“…Yeah. I know. I got some crazy tricks I can show ‘ya, too. But seriously: thank you.”

“De nada. Think I need my own massage,” he said absent-mindedly.

Daar flowed up to all fours with a big, luxuriant stretch. “Okay. I can do that.”

Adam glanced sideways at him…and at the writhing cable-like sinew in those thigh-dwarfing forearms of his…

“Uh…no thanks. I choose life.”

“Relax you big goof,” Daar chittered wearily. “I do this ‘fer Naydi so you’ll survive. Lie down.”

Well…he was right. Adam did survive, technically. Those giant paws knew what they were doing, but they were not gentle even by Adam’s standards.

“Hnnngh…” Adam panted. “Fuck, guess I’m payin’ back karma, huh?”

“Nah. You need a good smashin’ even worse’n I did.” Silence for a while while he worked, until finally they broached the topic they both knew was the reason for Adam’s visit.

“So…had a think on my letter?”

“Yeah.” Hitch in his breath while Daar found a particularly nasty knot in his lower back and obliterated it with his absurd strength. “…Still recoverin’.”

“I can tell. ‘Yer missin’ a lotta size an’ you ain’t essactly rockin’ ‘yer normal conditioning, I can feel it. You should feel bulletproof like me, not…”

“Like Jell-O?” Adam offered, wearily.

“Don’t be so hard on ‘yerself. Les’ jus’ say ‘not like ‘ya were.’ Righteous has you beat now.”

“I know,” Adam sighed, “he’s beat me good and hard. Literally just the other day, sorta settling an old score—I had it comin’ so don’t worry. He’s a fuck of a lot faster an’ stronger now than I ever was, too.”

“‘Cuz he’s way fuckin’ bigger’n you an’ he’s still packin’ on th’ size an’ conditioning. Fuckin’ impressive. Biggest surprise though? Fuckin’ Yan Given-Man! Once y’all got serious? Balls!”

“I know, right? Sure, he still ain’t remotely a match for Righteous and the gap’s growing, but we ain’t even started Yan on the spacemagic yet. Everything he’s got is all him.”

Daar whistled, which was an impressive trick for a gaoian. “No shit? Well fuck, that’s terrifyin’!”

“That’s ten’gewek. Their bigger Given-Men are all like that, more or less. Difference is mostly in size. They condition fast too. Really are the best fuckin’ badasses out there.”

“S’long as ‘ya can feed ‘em.”

“There’s that, yeah. They’ve got some weird mineral and micronutrient needs. The bigger guys like to chew bones and rocks and they’re all blood drinkers too, especially in spring.”

“Mhmm. So…what d’ya think of our new space friends?”

Adam scratched his chin while Daar worked over his spinal erectors. “I dunno,” he said truthfully. “I think they’re sorta weirdly in the same trap the gao were, though not as bad. They never turned their training and education into science like we did.”

“Your people are pretty unique in that regard. You an’ the Corti. Can’t argue wit’ the results…”

“Fair. So, I dunno. Gilgamesh looks like he’s got all the potential in the world. Same way you did. Julian’s got more’n him though, and he’s already folding Gilgamesh up like an old newspaper.”

“Ain’t surprisin’. He’s the end result o’ both’ their efforts an’ yours. Be weird if he wasn’t.”

“Yeah, but then there’s Alex. See, I was just a really mutant-fit kid growing up, right? Not really a giant like Firth was, or a lot of others, so I could kinda-sorta claim to be normal. Alex though, he’s, what? Comin’ up on his thirteenth birthday and he’s already fuckin’ scary—”

“I can sympathize.” Daar rumbled. “I really oughta make more time ‘fer him. His old man’s usin’ him as a piece in this big game we’re all playin’, an’ somebody needs ‘ta start makin’ sure the kid can see it.”

Adam scowled. The thought of a father using his own flesh and blood as a pawn like that made his skin crawl and his belly twist up. It was…backwards, in more than one way. It was medieval. It was fuckin’ bronze age.

Daar, bless him, veered away from that subject after a minute’s painful, smashy silence.

“Back ‘ta the subject o’ you, huh? Other’n the conditionin’, how’s that thinker o’ yours doin’? Still gettin’ migraines?”

“Couple times a week,” Adam told him. “I think they’re gettin’ better, slowly…I hope so, ‘cuz I can’t train when I can’t even open my damn eyes from the pain.”

Daar duck-nodded. “Mhmm.”

Another few minutes passed quietly, Daar obliterating tension in Adam’s upper back. He finished, then picked up one of Adam’s scrapes.

He examined it with a tilted head. “This s’posed to be bent like this?”

“No,” Adam sighed, glad for Daar’s attentions. “It and your body had a contest. It lost.”

Daar chittered, and put it aside. “Sarry. Well, no. Sarry it’s broke. I’ll git ‘ya a new set.”

“Appreciate it.”

Daar flipped him over and gave a mischievous look. “Hey, I said I can do some really crazy tricks, right? Watch this.” With a flourish, he wadded it into a loose ball with one paw; impressive as fuck, and Adam could never have done that. But that wasn’t the trick. He pressed it between his palms, interlaced his fingers, grunted in effort and flexed—

Daar’s entire upper body exploded into a corded, hulking mass of anatomy-chart muscle. A thin extrusion of metal slithered out from between his paws after hardly an instant. He grimaced and somehow bore down even harder. More escaping metal, then a couple seconds later he hissed and snatched his paws back: the scrape, flattened and thinned into a fuckin’ pancake, dropped to the ground and rolled like a huge misshapen coin.

“There, easy!” He pant-grinned in that friendly-dominant way only he could pull off. “None o’ y’all ain’t shit next ‘ta me! I figger, if I’m gonna be a monster, may as well have fun wit’ it!”

Adam picked up the resulting smashed disk of what had been solid stainless steel, and juggled it from hand to hand while it cooled. He looked up and eyed Daar warily. “…Okay. I take it back. That is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.”

Daar flicked an ear, suddenly a bit embarrassed. “…A bit much, huh?”

“…Yeah, I’d say.” Good God. Adam had never felt so comparatively weak!

Daar sighed ruefully. “Right. Uh, mebbe I shouldn’t do that one ‘fer jus’ everyone.”

How did someone react to a trick that amazing? The truth seemed best. “Probably not, no.”

Daar paused for a minute. “There was another even crazier trick I wanted ‘ta show…”

“Maybe save it for next time. Y’know. When I need a good scarin’.”

He chittered ruefully, “…Right. So let’s git you finished up.” He made quick work of it, in slightly awkward silence. Which was thick after that supergaoian performance, and the suggestion he could do something even crazier…

“Okay. I gotta ask. What was the other trick?”

“Oh, uh…I’ll show ‘ya later, but it’s a way more better version o’ the pipe trick, ‘cept this time it’s wit’ a solid bar an’ I don’t use my arm. Even I can’t believe I can do it an’ I did it jus’ today ‘fer the cubs!”

“Now this I gotta see…why not show me now? And why the mystery about ‘not with my arm?’”

“‘Cuz I flatten’d m’last bar ‘fer ‘em!” Daar chittered, “an’ ‘cuz mystery is fun! An’ also ‘cuz it hurts like balls ‘ta do. Now what d’we got left ‘ta work out?”

There wasn’t much, but the big guy did help pop and stretch everything back into place; Adam’s hips really needed someone strong and careful enough to manipulate them and god it felt good when everything finally popped into place. At the end of it, panting from the total-body relief of it all, Adam couldn’t help but crack a joke. “What, no happy ending?”

Daar snorted. “Din’t give me nohappy endin’ when you were scrapin’ close enough ‘ta try…”

“Well, you didn’t ask!”

“Shit, that’s all I had ‘ta do? I’d better keep that in mind ‘fer next time!”

“Well. Maybe get me drunk first. Don’t know if I’d survive the attempt otherwise.”

“Ha! Damn right!” Daar preened. “But I thought ‘Base was ‘yer one true love!”

Adam looked around conspiratorially. “Don’t say that so loud! Marty might hear…”

“Balls! I swear there’s somethin’ wrong wit’ you.”

“Probably.” Adam put his hands behind his hand and grinned. “So…no, then?”

Daar snorted, and threw a towel at Adam’s head. “Git up ‘ya fuckin’ pervert. An’ keep ‘yer lil’ battlepony in ‘yer shorts. I’ve got three more circuits ‘ta go!”

They did four, as it turned out. For Daar it was a nonstop, manic attack at the weights and the ropes, on the rings and the mat, with just enough time between activities to gulp down some air and gulp down Juice. Adam spent all his energy (and then some) just following along.

Daar finally relented at the beginning of the evening while he examined himself in the mirror. And honestly…

Jesus Christ. He was goddamned magnificent. Perfect. Nothing and nobody compared.

And he knew it too, though right now he was learning what it was like to push himself when he’d really reached his limits. Until very recently, he had lots of headroom to spare. Now he was where Adam had been for years—he’d need to force himself to improve, and not gently either.

It was a strange feeling running into that wall, and it’d hit Daar the same way it’d hit Adam. “Shit, I’m so fuckin’ gnarly an’ pumped up everwhere, feels like I’m gonna essplode. Can’t even see I’m flexin’!”

“Good! That’s why you’re gonna pose for an hour. Force blood into ‘em, force ‘em to grow!”

Posing was a great finisher for an advanced Student of the Iron, since form and function at this level went more hand-in-hand than people wanted to admit. No better way to develop mind-muscle connection and force that last bit of tension into him, pushing just that little bit harder right as his muscles were screaming for mercy, until the trembles set in and he couldn’t flex anymore. Adam would permit him a bit of recovery, then they’d do it again, and again…

Yeah, ego and motivation had a lot to do with it, but it was broscience with method to it. By round six the big guy was so swollen and vascular he genuinely did look a bit like he was gonna pop, so Adam ordered him to relax, then reached up, tried and failed to squeeze on Daar’s arm. Or flank, or his chest, back, legs…fuckin’ anywhere. Dude was a burning-hot sculpture of fuckin’ adamantium. Adam had a grip to smash iron and shatter granite, but right now he couldn’t even slightly dent his big bud’s body.

Fuck. “So…yeah. Finish this round and I’d say you’re fuckin’ done.” For real, Adam thought.

Daar pant-grinned down at him and resumed posing. “Yknow…I was sorta angry at first, thinkin’ about th’ idea I was some kinda engineered. Lotta people out there who are, like this whole Line thing jus’ hands all th’ credit ‘ta Singularity. But they din’t build my body,” he snarled as he worked his arms in and out. “I built it. S’the one thing…I can claim…is somethin’ I earned!”

Daar relaxed, but for only a second. No slack athletes allowed in front of the mirror. “Mebbe that’s my ego talkin’…but err’thing else, all this fuckery sorta taints it, yijao?” He growled again, and turned sideways to the mirror, grabbed his arm from behind, and bore down hard in a godly side-triceps. “But hard work? They can’t fuckin’ take that from me!”

Adam laughed bitterly. “Oh yes they can.”

“I…shit.” Daar dropped to all fours, hugged Adam tightly and keened. “I din’t mean ‘ta do that.”

“No…I know.” Adam rallied, “now don’t mope for me! Back lat spread, you giant fuck!”

Daar gave Adam a friendly slap on the back, which very politely didn’t snap his spine. “My man. Anyway,” he called as he spread his colossally wide ultra-thick lats. “What next, coach?”

Adam shook his head and grinned. “No keepin’ your spirits down, as always…As for targeting, there ain’t really anything you’ve got that’s lagging or out of proportion. You’ve been paying attention to yourself and self-adjusting. Good job! I’ll say keep doin’ what you’re doing, but at this point you’re so goddamn everything, what the fuck could possibly stand against you?”

“Oh, I’m sure th’ Hunters’ll build a better Alpha after I squished their last offering…”

Adam hadn’t witnessed that, being he was chunked up and in stasis at the time. He’d seen the video, though. And…just…Jesus.

“…Right. So keep it up, then. Just don’t forget mobility and function, especially in your upper body. You still get stiff like any gao and it sorta shows when you stretch your arms overhead.”

His Meathead Majesty examined his side profile in the mirror, those ridiculous legs of his being the focus of his attention as he flexed them in and out and turned every angle he could manage toward the mirror. “Calves are good’n huge, mebbe my adductors could use some more size…” he grumbled, “but yeah. Always been my bugaboo, keepin’ up wit’ ‘ya monkeys. It’s a good thing I’ve got all the speed!” He chittered teasingly. “Gotta put ‘ya in ‘yer place, yijao?”

Adam just chuckled. Every part of Daar’s legs were hugely developed of course, being a biped, but because he was also a quadruped his hamstrings were particularly obscene. While that did hamper his range of motion a bit—he’d never have an ape’s hip mobility—what it gave him in turn was power. Unbelievable power to lift the heaviest weights and outrun sports cars.

There were a lot of uses for a friendly rampaging dump truck in a fight.

“Anyhoo.” Daar stopped admiring himself and sank to all fours. “Walk wit’ me.”

He didn’t wait and set off at a casual pace, thumping along without much care. Adam shrugged and followed behind, since walking alongside wasn’t an option. As wide as the passageways in High Mountain could be, Daar often filled them, leaving little room for anyone else to pass. On all fours, the level of Daar’s hugely thick back came up to Adam’s shoulders, and the big freak’s haunches were a bit wider still; from the rear he was a square-shaped wall of rolling, bulging muscle, maybe a bit like the mutant super-cows or whatever on the internet but far, far bigger. By sheer bulk alone he was the biggest thing walking land anywhere. They meandered for a bit, Adam having no idea where they were going, until at last they arrived at a quiet garden.

High Mountain seemed to have lots of those. This one was quiet thanks to the walls on all sides, and was dominated by a big circular fish pond with a statue in the middle of a female gaoian in what was prob’ly a sultry pose by their standards. Fat alien fish with upturned mouths rose to the surface and gaped at them, clearly expecting to be fed.

Spring hadn’t quite sprung on Gao yet, so most of the garden was artfully barren, with an occasional flash of color. Barren, but Adam could feel a flush of warmth from the sun above. It was slightly yellower than Earth’s, but about the same size in the sky. You had to really pay attention to notice the difference. There was a strong chill to the air too, but this deep in High Mountain Fortress, the wind didn’t howl through and the air didn’t bite at the skin.

He could come to like this, actually.

Daar parked himself on the wall of a raised flowerbed, one immense Adam-sized leg dangling over the side. He chittered at the fish, which were still enthusiastically begging for food. “Don’t let ‘em fool ‘ya. They’re fed. Dumbasses don’t know when they’ve had enough.”

Adam took in the scene and, honestly…this was one of those moments where it suddenly clicked in his mind who exactly he was dealing with. Even in casual repose—sweat-soaked, disheveled, and straight from the gym—there was no hiding what Daar was. He was a natural leader and the base of that was undeniably rooted his sheer, ridiculous physical charisma. He had a too-handsome face and a god-like physique; both were majestic and terrible to behold. Musk that hit you over the head like an anvil, leaving no doubt for any caveman about who was in charge. He moved like a noble predator and had the personality to match, too.

None of that was just a gushing compliment or anything; it was a factual statement of how he was. Forget his country bumpkin accent or complicated origin. Daar had it where it counted, and had it more than maybe anyone ever. He…truly was the Great Father of them all. More and more, Adam realized, that was starting to include his own kind.

He paused on that thought for a moment, decided it was above his paygrade, then nodded to himself. “Yeah. They’re colorful. Kinda, I dunno, drugged-out colorful?”

“Yuh. Came as a fuck of a surprise ‘fer us,” Daar chittered again. “Before, I just thought they were swirly. Watch ‘em ‘fer a while an’ the swirls sorta change color dependin’ on th’ light.”

Quiet, again. Not knowing what to do, Adam took up a seat next to Daar, who gave him a Look. He sighed, and settled in along Daar’s iron flank. That giant arm and free leg of his immediately pulled him in for an inescapable full-body snuggle-hug that was half affection, half wrestling pin. Tight enough to register as affectionate between them…fatally crushing to most anyone else.

…Yeah. Gao knew how to Friend, maybe better than anyone. Except dogs. But gaoians and dogs were partners in crime, and what the dogs had in innocence, gaoians had in insight.

As Daar demonstrated. “So! Recovery. Lemme…tell me if I’m wrong, okay? I git a good sniff o’ men like you, an’ I know you ain’t gonna be happy wit’ retirement. You need purpose. An’ you know ‘yer purpose ain’t gonna be somethin’ quiet an’ safe…I on the mark?”

Adam blinked at him, a bit dumbfounded. “Uh…yeah. Yes. This is…I don’t know what to do with myself, Daar. I need…fuck. I dunno what I need.”

Daar pant-grinned at him kindly. “You need a mission an’ a goal, ‘ya meathead idiot.”

Adam paused, searching for a retort, and discovered he didn’t have one. “How the fuck do you do that? Like, one fuckin’ sentence and you’ve figgered it out.”

“That’s me,” Daar chittered. “Daar of Stoneback, grunty supergenius! Though th’ real secret is listenin’ ta’ Champion Gyotin’s podcast, an’ learnin’ but good from his example.”

Adam laughed. “Well, you prob’ly ain’t wrong.” The mirth didn’t last, though. “But…seriously. What the fuck can I do? I’m still pretty fuckin’ broken, Daar.”

The big guy stretched again and shook out the short-cut mane around his neck. “That ain’t gonna be ‘ferever. An’ ‘fer how I gotta think nowadays, long term is an unnerstatement.”

“…Right,” Adam sighed. “So on the one hand, I need a mission and a goal, on the other hand that’s not gonna happen in the short term…” He scratched his wrist idly as he chewed on that conundrum for a second.

“Ayup. So. Lemme tell ‘ya a bit ‘bout what I do. An’ fer this, I need ‘ya ta imagine I’m wearin’ my crown right now.”

“So this ain’t my best bud Daar talkin’.”

“Nope. He’s more or less dead, an’ only gets ‘ta come out now an’ then when reality allows. Right now I’m the Great Father in all his terrible fuckin’ glory. An’ a Great Father has ‘ta play a big fuckin’ game o’ chess. Or stratagem. Or cubes, if ‘ya prefer a gaoian game. Anyway.” He shook out his mane again, snuggled tighter into his friendly pin-hug, and sighed. “There are consequences to my creation, Adam. My species has just entered an accelerated die-off. Our population is going to drop below a billion in less’n twenny years. It will take us centuries ‘ta recover, an’ as much as I admire what ‘ya humans can do, an’ how you’ve built societies…it ain’t somethin’ we can perfectly mirror.”

Adam understood, suddenly. “And because the spacemagic allows it—”

“An’ ‘cuz I was engineered to do it,” Daar reminded him.

“…Right. So you’ll be the Great Father that whole time.”

“Yes. Because I must. Because my people demand it of me. I own ‘em all in absolute terms, like they were an extension of myself. That means I can command ‘em absolutely. But it also means they can do the same ‘ta me in turn. I live in service to th’ Gao, ‘cuz I am the Gao, an’ the Gao themselves made it so.”

Adam nodded. He’d heard this before, but it was worth letting Daar repeat himself when he felt it important. It set the stage.

Daar sighed heavily. “An’ Cousin…Adam. Fuck, do I ever need some good chess pieces by my side.”

“Even busted ones that’re gonna take a long time to fix up?”

“A long time in the face of centuries? Or millennia? Cousin, ‘yer gonna heal up in the blink of an eye in th’ face o’ that. And I tell you now: I need you. I need someone who is loyal to me an’ loyal to his people. I need someone who can do wunnerful an’ terrible things nobody else can, ‘cuz ‘yer a hero born who ain’t afraid ‘ta walk the dark side. I got Whitecrest ‘ta light the darkness. T’do that job, they need every fuckin’ trick in th’ book. I need the best ‘yer people got ‘ta walk that darkness wit’ them. An’ right now I’m lookin’ at the best there is. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Adam hadn’t got where he was by retaining many illusions about himself, or anyone else. He wanted to be modest, but the fact was…well, he could only think of one other human who was on their level.

“Not just me. What about Righteous? He…uh, fuck. He’s straight up better’n I ever was, nowadays.”

“Admirable man. An’ if it were just ‘bout his body, obviously I’d be all over ‘em like stink on naxas. But it ain’t. He ain’t a hero. He ain’t got a hero’s soul. An’ he’s named Righteous fer a reason. That man ain’t essactly a perfect ally ‘ta the gaoian race. Ain’t nothin’ wrong wit’ any o’ that, but when it comes to it, can I trust ‘em ‘ta serve an ideal beyond my people an’ yers?”

Adam didn’t answer, out of loyalty to his friend and brother…but Daar was right. Firth, ultimately, was in it to find his own limits and be the best he could possibly be. And besides that, he was loyal, of course…but the man was a benign chauvinist in a lot of ways, and there was no hiding the human supremacist streak, if you got to know him. He didn’t mean harm to the Gao of course, but gaoian problems were very much of secondary concern to him, even if he liked his teammates well enough. Service and loyalty to his friends? Absolutely, with his life if need be. But service to the Gao, even to human benefit? That was a fundamental line he’d probably never, ever cross.

…Would Adam bend the knee? How many lives could he save, if he did?

Daar nodded, accepting Adam’s silence. “Now, let’s be the harshest kind o’ honest. I think we both know good an’ damn well ‘yer a natural genetic freak th’ same way Gilgamesh an’ his fuckin’ ‘Heroes’ are. ‘Cept you’re the real gods-damned deal, no fuckin’ ancient conspiracy pedigree bullshit in you, an’ as far as I’m concerned that’s a damn good thing ‘ta have on my side. Plus, we both know there ain’t nobody more determined’n you when the chips are down. So…are you? Are you the best?”

Adam swallowed, and nodded. “…Yeah.”

“Good enough ‘ta go farther’n anyone? Put th’ work in an’ make perfect fuckin’ Righteous ‘yer lil’ bitch again? Go all in, all th’ way by my side, no matter how fuckin’ evil this shit gets?”

Daar idly bat at a fish, which blinked out of the way and was back to begging instantly.

Adam found himself nodding.

“I meant it when I said ‘yer the best there is. An’ now I bet ‘yer wunnerin’ what I’m actually gonna ask of ‘ya. Is that fair?”

“I haven’t heard an actual mission yet, it’s true.”

“Alright. Here’s th’ mission, in no particular order: destroy the Hierarchy. Preserve th’ Gaoian race. Preserve th’ Human race. Protect our allies. An’ rule the galaxy, ‘cuz someone’s gotta, and if it’s gotta be someone, it may as well be us misfit Deathworlders.”

…Jesus. Now that was shoving all his chips in, right there. “And my role in all that?”

“You will be one of the most dangerous weapons in this fight. I need someone deniable, unflappable, unstoppable, an’ terrible. I might need ‘ya ta save a buncha lives. Or I might need ‘ya ta murder th’ fuck outta someone or somethin’ nice an’ quiet. I need a weapon, Adam. An’ honest-ta’-gods angel o’ death, or mebbe o’ mercy. I need a hero worthy o’ bein’ that weapon. I need someone who can do that mission when a gaoian can’t. I need a one-man force o’ nature who’s better’n any team th’ HEAT or First Fang can muster. I need what only a human can be, ‘cuz ‘yer people are warriors unlike any other. And you in particular are one o’ the only beings in this entire fuckin’ galaxy I truly, completely respect.”

“…Well.” Adam cleared his throat, awkwardly. “That’s…heavy.”

Daar gave him a slight pant-grin. “Oh? I heard ‘ya were good wit’ heavy…”

He earned a traitorous grin, but only just. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Heh! I know. An’ ‘yer right, it’s heavy as balls. But…” Daar again stirred the fish pond with a claw. “Tending to th’ Gao means I cannot ignore th’ humans. Our fates are inseparable, ‘cuz we’re complimentary, tip-to-tip. Y’all are gonna blossom an’ spread while my people diminish. ‘Fer a time. Then we’re gonna out-breed you, and things are gonna change. Tell me that ain’t a terrible fuckin’ dynamic waitin’ ta happen.”

Adam remained silent as he mulled that over. Beside him, Daar rumbled, duck-nodded, and stopped teasing the poor fish.

“We gotta build a friendship that’ll live through anything,” he said. “An’ you might say a lotta the work’s already done. ‘Yer people saved mine, we woulda lost Gao, lost errything without humanity. An’ that’s sure as fuck a good foundation ‘ta build on…”

“But it’s just the foundation,” Adam finished.

“Yuh.” Daar let a moment pass silently. “…Help me build. Please.”

Well. Shit. Adam considered who he was talking to. Daar had him pinned: physically, with both genuine affection and no doubt some calculated dominance; and rhetorically too, with words and argument he knew good and goddamn well Adam wouldn’t be able to escape. That was dangerous territory to tread, because the big bastard was a literal fuckin’ supergenius. Like, pretty much the most intelligent piece of meat around, at all sorts of things. This, though? This was the sort of thing he was good at, what he was made to do. And nobody did it better.

Everyone (including Adam) focused on Daar’s huge elephant-dwarfing muscles and his fuckin’ god-tier physique and all his macho personality, because it was real, right there, and genuinely him. But he had a mind that could weaponize all that too, to completely irresistible effect. Daar was a true leader of men, one who could lead across species. All he had to do was stand there and speak a few words, and armies willingly followed him to glory and death.

Adam wasn’t a fool. He knew in his bones that he was absolutely no fuckin’ match against a mind like that, bending itself to persuading him. Daar could probably talk him into anything.

…And goddamnit, Adam wanted this.

“…I won’t lie…you know exactly what to say…”

“Right,” Daar sighed. “So lemme promise you this: I know what I am and what I can do. With you, I will never push it. I want you. Badly. But only if you want it ‘yerself.”

And that, annoyingly, was the right thing to say too. Goddammit. Adam was playing checkers against a grandmaster of ten-dimensional hyperspace-Ta’Shen. But even so, he couldn’t be mad. ‘Cuz the fact was…Daar was completely right. He needed a mission. And raising his kids was only going to be a mission for a few short years, at least on this timescale…

Speaking of Diego and Sam…the opportunities they’d have, in Daar’s orbit. And what about Marty? He knew she wouldn’t tolerate him “re-enlisting” while the kids were still young…

What about after that? What happened then?

“I’ve…gotta think about it, Daar. Like, think hard.”

Daar duck-nodded, and snuggled tightly. “Tha’s all I ask. But in the meantime…build ‘yerself back up. Take ‘yer time, do it right, an’ you fuckin’ man up an’ surpass everyone like I knows ‘ya can. You’ll be on my payroll even if ‘ya say no, ‘cuz people like you are investments an’ I want ‘ya at ‘yer best. Keep sharp! ‘Cuz one day, th’ world’s gonna need ‘ya, an’ when that day comes…well, I hope I’ve got th’ galaxy’s most bestest badassiest runnin’-monkey by my side.”

Adam nodded, and that was all it took to close the curtain on their talk. Daar didn’t bring the subject up again the rest of the evening, not as they trained into late night, or afterwords as Adam was pulled into the traditional sleepy gao-pile among Daar and Stoneback’s finest. He didn’t say anything the next morning, either…

In fact, he never brought it up again.

But Adam’s mind never stopped bringing it up. And he discussed it with Marty, because this was a decision that would steer her whole life too. She…was understanding. He was with her, and she was with him.

That made all the difference, so that when Thurrsto came to say hello toward the end of their vacation…that was all he did. Said hello, indulged in some visiting, some small talk. Not once was Adam’s heavy conversation with Daar even mentioned. Yet Adam said yes. All by itself, apropos of nothing. He wasn’t a fool.

Thurrsto nodded, understanding entirely, and it seemed like all the arrangements had already been made.

There was a key, a quiet procession, and a dark, ominous room. Then agony.

Warhorse of Whitecrest emerged from the Darkness.

Date Point: 20y1m1w AV
Starship Stay Fortune, Cimbrean system

Bruuk, griller of meat, compressor of uppity humans

“Again with the shirt. Who gave ‘ya this one?”

Wilde wasn’t in a position to answer, ‘cuz Bruuk was squeezin’ the life outta him nice an’ hard. All he got back were slightly desperate mumbles.

“What’s that?” Bruck chittered, “I can’t hear you!”

He had his arm locked around Wilde’s head, which probably made it hard to reply. So of course Bruuk flexed it a good bit harder, until Wilde bit down on his bicep. Or tried to. It din’t hurt too much ‘cuz Bruuk weren’t no softie, but the big human still got his point across.

Bruuk let him go, too amused to be indignant.

“Dang, how d’you have such a nasty bite with no real fangs?” He shook out his arms and took some pride in his consolation prize; just his bicep was bigger’n Wilde’s whole damn head, and hard enough to crack it open! That was victory enough, as far as he was concerned.

Wilde chuckled, drew some breath, and clambered to his feet. “I’ve got fangs! Nice and discreet human fangs. Size isn’t always everything, you know.”

“That’s what small males always say.”

“Oi! Comin’ from a bloke that’s like, what, five-foot-seven?”

“Bigger every way else! An’ like four times ‘yer mass too…” Bruuk pant-grinned as Wilde rolled his eyes and didn’t rise to that. “But yeah. ‘Strumpets an’ Crumpets’? What’s that about?”

“It’s a burlesque house on Cimbrean! Lots of fun.”

“…Okay. What’s burlesque?”

“Oh, mate! C’mon, lemme show ‘ya…”

Video followed, of what looked like a really bawdy, teasing performance by a buncha human females, all lovely in their own way and for different reasons. There were some males too (who weren’t bad to look at either!) but they mostly seemed to be there for the women to have some fun with. He liked it!

“Balls, that’s kinda like some of the spring-time entertainment the younger females used ‘ta put on! Them and some really lucky young males…”

“Used to? …Oh. Right.”

…Well.

Bruuk shook off that sad thought. “Well, I hear some of the enclaves have started up with spring festivities again, so mebbe I can show ‘ya one pretty soon!”

“Maybe…” Ian agreed. “Be nice to get me legs on hard ground again. Change of routine…”

“I rather like this routine!” Bruuk chittered. “I cook us food, then I embarrass you in the gym!”

“Yeah, it’ll be nice not having my face jammed in your armpit every Tuesday for a change.”

Bruuk chittered, then pulled Ian tighter and settled in to watch some more of this burlesque stuff. It wasn’t that he really found humans that sexy, but they were…

Well, okay. Maybe he kinda did. But not, like, in a way that made him feel lusty? It was more kinda aesthetic than that. Like maybe how a ‘Back could appreciate a specimen of a naxas, maybe. Admire it for what it was. But maybe not.

Whatever. It was just fun to watch ‘em move and play. In sports, in dance, in whatever. This was the species that had invented a whole art form of sliding down a mountain on a board and then spinning real fast in the air, for Fyu’s sake.

Of course, the feeling was mutual. After the video ended, the next in the queue was the most recent of Stoneback’s annual Snow Games, where some of the most bestest athletes the gaoian race had to offer were competing for the crown, an evening with the Great Father and Great Mother…and of course, lots of Female attention. He’d have his chance to compete here pretty soon, too. They were heading home, and it was time to tackle the Second Ring…

At the moment the competition was the drift-sprinting finals.

“Bloody hell, that looks exhausting.”

“It is. The drifts are all of different heights and you hafta run in a straight line. Over or through, never around.”

“So this is Gaoian winter sports. Pretty neat.”

“Some of it! This is sort of like, uh…maybe like Winter Iron Man plus Crossfit. And mebbe strongman, or something. They gotta compete in all the events but they only win overall.”

“So, what I’m getting from this is that your winter sports are all about Grr Grunt Aargh, and ours are all about spinning really fast.”

“And wearing frilly outfits. Is figure skating a kind of burlesque too?”

Ian choked on his beer.

“Well,” he eventually managed, “it sure as fuck is now!”

“I mean, the outfits look about the same…”

“No no, you’re completely right! That’s what I’m callin’ it from now on. Ice burlesque.”

Bruuk chittered, only slightly confused. “Well, okay! Not all of our winter stuff is grunty though. There’s tobogganing and ice sculpture!”

“Curling? You got that?”

“What’s that?”

“You slide a bunch of rocks on the ice and smash them into each other.” Ian finished his beer. “…I never did figure out the rules, exactly.”

“Oh, yeah! We got something like that. Your boulders score based on where they land and you try to knock the other boulders off the field. Also, we’ve got downhill racing too. Just…not on skis.”

“Can Gaoians ski?”

Bruuk thought about that. “Maybe? Balls, I’d try it! It’s always hard to fit footwear ‘fer us…”

“Sure, but still. Short legs and all.”

“Probably we wouldn’t be all spinny like that. Still looks fun!”

And so the rest of the evening went. Nothin’ too strenuous. Just watching some videos together after a good hard workout. The truth was, things were boring and routine right now. Hoeff and his Wrecking Crew were on leave right now and would be for some time. Meanwhile, the Stray Fortune was returning to Gao from a very long milkrun, and aside from the Interesting Characters they had in stasis, there was nothing to do until they made port.

It was nice to have something so simple to do, for a change. Drink beer, watch sports, just kick back and be a space trucker. And unlike wet-navy ships, there wasn’t a constant, losing battle against corrosion to contend with. Once everyone was caught up on work, life was easy and good.

Best to take advantage while they could. It wouldn’t last.

In any case, it gave Bruuk some time. Time to think. What was his next move? He was still very young, in his early twenties. He had a long life ahead of him with modern medicine. He had good recommendations, good friends and about the most elite genetics a male could want. Sure, second degree was sort of a bummer, but that’s how chance went. Can’t win everything.

So he could go for the Second Ring. And then the Third, if he wasn’t pretending to modesty, which he never did. He had no doubt he could earn Stoneback’s most elite qualifications. But that would take him away from the ship. Away from friends who had loved him when he didn’t deserve it at all. Away from this weird little family…and he really wasn’t sure if he wanted that.

Feeling more than just torn, Bruuk wrapped himself around Ian a bit tighter. Some sorta cartoon on the screen now. A violent one, but funny too!

He had time to think about it. Not, like, forever, but long enough. No sense wastin’ a good evening with worries…

So he didn’t, and drifted off to sleep without noticing.

Date Point: 20y1m1w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

“So, it’s chosen the image of this Folcthan news anchor to speak to us?”

Chambliss was already beginning to regret agreeing to speak to this Entity thing. He’d been advised that he should, and he’d listened. But the more he learned, the more a creeping sense of…well, of the creeps, crept over him. The willies, the heebie-jeebies, whatever you called them.

How the woman now briefing him, Darcy something, could be so sanguine and even apparently fond of it, he didn’t know. But she was, apparently, the Earth’s singular expert on the Entity. And she was shaking her head.

“No sir. It is her. Sort of.”

Too many questions to ask exploded in Chambliss’ mind, before coalescing into a simple, confused, “How…?”

“She’s a San Diego native, and was present when Agent Six was captured the first time. Was fortunate enough to be on vacation in Orlando when the antimatter bomb went off. She was fostered and later adopted by Gabriel Arés, and went with him when he emigrated to Cimbrean to become Folctha’s chief of police. Her best friend was killed by a Hierarchy biodrone, and she went into investigative journalism to get to the bottom of it all,” Darcy summarized. “And, she succeeded.”

Chambliss’ eyebrows lifted in surprise.

Darcy nodded, and something in her expression suggested a degree of materteral pride. “I met her after she was picked up in Egypt, hot on Six’s trail. Six himself, apparently curious about this human who kept popping up in his vicinity, asked to speak with her by name in exchange for information about Hierarchy operations on Earth. We needed that intelligence, so Ava was granted access to DEEP RELIC.”

“A journalist was given access to a top secret document like that?”

“She was made well aware of the consequences, and her particular situation meant she was at the center of it anyway. In any case, it was a decision that paid off. What followed was Operation EMPTY BELL, the battle of Marsa Alam, and the destruction of the Hierarchy’s last active ship on Earth at the time. The information we got from Six in exchange for her presence proved invaluable.”

“Sounds like everyone got the information they wanted.”

“Yes sir. Ava then retired from investigative journalism to become ESNN’s extraterrestrial affairs correspondent and an award-winning photojournalist—you’ve sen the Laid Bare series?”

“Oh yes,” Chambliss nodded, wryly. “But where did this ‘Entity’ come from and how is it her?”

Darcy’s professional face cracked into a scowl. “Six wasn’t content to just meet her, he wanted to know everything. So he scanned her brain, and created a datasophont copy of her for…dissection.”

“Christ almighty…” It took Chambliss a moment to appreciate that thought in full. As he did, the flowering nausea that accompanied it matched the grim anger on Darcy’s face.

“Yes. Six doesn’t know what happened exactly, and the Entity hasn’t been able to precisely articulate it, but from what we gather the dissected copy of Ríos’ mind…mutated, or something. Broke out of digital prison and started massacring its way across dataspace. Since then, it’s been an occasional ally, furnishing us with intelligence about goings-on among the Hierarchy and Hunters. A few years ago it stole the Hunters’ early prototype Von Neumann probe, and has been growing ever since.”

“And it’s a friend?”

“The only life experience it has is of being a human. It talks to us through a human avatar, a ‘daemon,’ in the computing sense, based on Ríos’ memories and personality. Its first and only real objective is its own survival, but my every interaction with it suggests that it’s smart enough to know its best strategy in that regard is to cultivate allies. So, yes sir. It’s a friend.”

“So, what does it want from us?” Chambliss asked.

“It wants to make peaceful contact with Singularity, and it wants to begin open military collaboration alongside us,” Darcy said.

Chambliss nodded thoughtfully, then looked to Admiral Whieldon. “What sort of assistance would you want from this thing?”

Though Whieldon was entirely professional, Chambliss had been watching him throughout the briefing. Of all the people in the room, he was the only one who seemed eager to meet this Entity, rather than disturbed by it.

“It’s a Von Neumann swarm, sir,” he said. “If it’s been growing this whole time, then its manufacturing capacity is vast. And given that the Hunters have started field-testing a V-N swarm themselves, our only hope of containing that problem is to get out ahead of the curve with a swarm of our own. That’s what Erebor’s coltainer program was supposed to achieve.”

“Whatever happened to that, anyway?”

“The program is still active, and continues to be a useful source of new technologies, but the Galactic Vaccine itself is…a long way off. We just don’t have artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to make it happen. Nobody does. And until we do, the only V-N swarms in the galaxy will be datasophonts like the Entity, or the Hunters being crazy enough to rip their own brains out and install them in spaceships.”

“Well, then,” Chambliss decided. “That limits our options. When can we expect it?”

“It gave us one of its drones, sir. We can communicate at your convenience.”

Chambliss nodded, and the conversation turned to a few practical minutiae, of who was going to establish the first diplomatic avenue, sort out the agenda of talks, what America’s position would be, how that played with the other Allied nations…

Pretty soon it all dropped below his level and he could move on to other business. But he knew he was going to be marking the days until this particular meeting with a mix off fascination and dread.

There was one last matter before they broke up. Not necessarily a Presidential one, but a burning question still unanswered.

“Does she know?” he asked Darcy, just before she left.

“…The flesh-and-blood Ava Ríos, sir? No. She’s never been told.”

“Then this is going to come as a nasty shock to her, when it gets out.”

Again there was that sense of a distant and estranged kind of fondness when Darcy nodded thoughtfully, the worry lines on her forehead deepening a little as she did so. “I doubt whether there’s much to be done about it though, mister president.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Chambliss conceded.

That was where the matter stood for the rest of the day. He had issues closer to home that demanded his attention as well, like an agricultural bill that he could have sworn nobody could possibly criticize, yet…here they were. He was almost beginning to grow glad of the extraterrestrial matters. Existentially horrifying and high-stakes though they were, there was much less moral gray area involved.

…for the most part. Allying with a digital eldritch abomination birthed from the unconsenting mind of an innocent civilian might qualify as a gray area. It didn’t change the fact that he was quite looking forward to meeting them.

He sighed, cleared his head, and returned his mind to matters mundane. The work never stopped.

Date Point: 20y1m1w AV
Ekallim-Igigi

Alex, Prince of Singularity

Alex’s head felt like somebody had none-too-gently pried the top off, shoved a whole live rabbit inside, then stapled it back on. It simultaneously felt fuzzy and tight, and like something was wriggling around trying to burst free. And it hurt.

He’d paid attention as best as he could. Really, he did. He took notes even, forced himself to drink in every word…

He didn’t even have the mental energy to go flying. That would require thinking. And the bit he couldn’t figure out was why he’d been there at all. To see and learn, obviously, but…wasn’t that why he’d been abroad, visiting other people?

He flopped on his bed and realized…it was his bed. He hadn’t been in his chambers since…when was the last time? Weeks ago. It felt longer.

And, looking around, it almost felt like somebody else’s room now. Almost. There were still his sketches above the desk, when he’d been designing the Beowulf. And his armor for training with Mevia, still in a messy stack on the chair in the corner. He’d left a book open, pages-down on the side table. Pandrosion hated when he did that. She must not have come in here while he was gone, or she’d have bookmarked it.

In fact, none of his mothers, the ones he was close with, had been in. His birth mother would have straightened a few things. Mevia would have put his armor back on the dummy and left a note scolding him.

Instead, it was all untouched.

He rolled over, picked the book up, and only remembered which one it was once he was holding it. The Crystal Singer. He stared at the page for a second, and realized he was going to have to start over again if he wanted to enjoy it…

He sighed, put it aside, and stared up at the ceiling. The whole thing was one big low-light screen, set to mimic Earth’s sky as seen from the latitude and longitude of ancient Uruk. During the station’s day, there’d be blue skies or clouds would scud overhead depending on the season. Sometimes rain would patter softly and roll across it as though it were slightly slanted glass, and at night, he could look up at the stars and name the constellations.

Right now, it was sunset. The sky was cooling to a blueish-purple, shading to orange and yellow in the ‘west.’ The sight of It cooled his mind off and let him properly chew on what he’d seen and heard at the strategy meeting.

So. After thousands of years jumping around the galaxy in secret, Ekallim-Igigi had been found and was now going to stay put…

“…Room, outside view.”

The ceiling blinked to a neutral tone, then gave him the live stream from one of the station’s hull cameras. They’d picked a temperate world for their permanent home, apparently. On the grounds that, if they were not going anywhere, perhaps they might establish a new colony and growing beyond the station’s confines.

Alex raised a finger, closed one eye, and traced the outline of a continent. It was just a meaningless random blob, but there was a large island off the coast which looked sorta like a wolf skull. Pretty cool.

Maybe they could go visit? The atmosphere was pretty oxygen-rich. Really high gravity, too…

He lay back and watched it turn below for a while. Father had been…pleased? By how well the fleet performed and how well Ekallim-Igigi had defended itself. The space battle had been a victory, in that they’d kept the station alive and jumped to safety.

But that had been a big fleet. Hundreds and hundreds of ships.

In comparison, Singularity had about three dozen in the same mass range. Earth had about the same. The gao had more, but all told the three factions didn’t have that many. Father said sheer numbers weren’t the only factor, and Alex could see why. But numbers didn’t count for nothing, did they?

No. Of course not. Alex knew better, and he was, well…really fuckin’ smart, too. He didn’t, like, rub it in people’s faces but he’d earned a high performance spaceship before his twelfth birthday. He knew space combat better than most people ever would, and he could damn well imagine the advantage of being a digital mind in a fight like that.

Hell, even maneuvering! Alex had a strong enough body that he could handle maneuvers of twenty-five gee or more, so long as his support suit was tight and durable enough to match. Sure, that was basically at the limit of what a reasonable ship could do, drone or not, but how many people could handle shit like that? Not many. So, they were outnumbered by an enemy that could out-fly and out-speed them. That didn’t sound winnable, to Alex.

But what was the plan? Hide behind the system shields and hope the bad guys never figured out how to batter them down?

…The teams. That was the plan.

Father and his council knew they could not ever match the Hierarchy ship-to-ship. The plan all along had been covert infiltration, in person, to run a guerilla offensive campaign until the Hierarchy could be taken down a notch or ten.

…Did they have enough men to do that?

Round and round his thoughts went, until that fuzzy rabbit-in-his-skull feeling, which had started to go away from just lying safely in his bed, was back and worse. He tried to turn his thoughts aside, picked up his book again, put it down again, stood up, fidgeted with some stuff on his workbench…

Tried some LEGO. Real ones, from Earth. He made a spaceship, of course. Then, because that was kind of a lot too simple, he rigged up a simple circuit to give it blinky running lights.

Restless. He kept bouncing his leg and it was shaking the floor.

So he went for a run. Then, he decided to do some wind sprints. He needed tiring out, maybe…

Nope. The drag chute and the weighted vest did help tire him out but his mind would not stop.

Gods, sometimes he wished he was normal. What was it like to just…not?

Something really made him resist the idea of lifting or combatives right then. No idea why. Go play with his friends instead? …Eh. They’d be busy with homework right now, or doing their job training. Which is what he was supposed to be doing too but, well. Princes did have privilege. And he was two full cycles ahead anyway, so he’d already earned free time.

But, that was it. He wanted somebody to talk to. And he didn’t really want one of his mothers fussing over him or trying to educate him, or whatever. He wanted…

Fuck it. He wanted to see father.

Finding him wasn’t difficult. The station would have told him as soon as he asked, but Alex didn’t need to ask. He knew exactly where father would go to work off the same burning fuzzy-brain feeling. Maybe that was why he’d stayed away, in the back of his head?

One of the things he’d learned in Folctha by talking with Champion Gyotin and Gonzo of all the people, was just how much of a person’s thinking happened below the level of words. He’d been paying attention to that in himself more lately, and it was sort of astonishing just…how automatic most of his life was, if he let it be.

Weird.

Well, he could use a workout anyway. He’d arrived and had just made it to his locker when he found father in front of his own, having pulled on some jogging shorts probably for a cool-down run. Alex watched quietly as father took a moment to stretch, grimacing slightly and rolling his shoulder. The way he moved told a story of being sore all over, but his bearded face lit up with a big smile as he noticed Alex, all pain forgotten. He dashed over, pulled Alex off his feet, and swallowed him up in the best kind of crushing embrace.

“My boy! Good to see you again!”

“Dad! Oh, hey! You feel stronger!” Alex suddenly knew why, and decided to tease. “Been lifting a lot? You’re not feeling jealous are you?”

“I’m too old for jealousy, boy,” father chuckled. “But I’m not too old to learn. Or too old to feel competitive! The new ambassador has shown me the value of their ways.”

“Didn’t you say there’s no art to their way?” Alex teased a bit more as father put him down.

“Look at Julian’s body and tell me there’s no art,” father retorted. “A man should strive to his standard! I know I shall be, until I can put him back in his place… And I imagine you’ll be a keen student of theirs, and probably a teacher in turn, too. Just make sure you win.”

“At what?”

“The game! It’s always a game with worthy people! But, ah. I’m falling into the trap of teaching you again, aren’t I? Even my reason for calling you back…”

“I know I’m only twelve but please, I knew. You aren’t very sneaky.”

Gilgamesh sighed, nodded, and indicated that he’d like to walk and talk, which Alex was more than happy with. “That I’m not,” he agreed. “It seems the past several months have shown me many of my own flaws. It’s an uncomfortable thing.”

“Well,” Alex offered. “I suppose. Among my friends onboard, uh…”

“You stand supreme. And not by a little.”

“Not anymore, though. My new friends are scary.”

“A man’s best friends should be,” father agreed. “And I’m glad you have made such friends.”

“They’re all older,” Alex noted. “Except, not Vemik in a way. Or Gonzo! He’s goofy.”

Gilgamesh paused, and looked down with a slight frown. “Have you met no children your age?”

“Oh yeah, lots. But they’re not like me. Not even the ones of the Line, and there’s a lot of them in Cimbrean. But I met a girl! She doesn’t wanna date though.”

“That will happen,” Gilgamesh agreed with a chuckle. “There were plenty who chose to turn me away and live their lives on Earth…But tell me of this girl.”

Alex was glad to. And from there he talked about…well, all sorts of things. Whatever came into his head, he talked about as they walked and as father listened…Really listened.

It was different, somehow. It didn’t feel to Alex like he was being tested for anything, this time, or like father was wanting to be sure he’d learned. This time, he just smiled and inquired about the details and seemed to be truly glad to hear what Alex had to say. That was different. Very welcome, but very different.

So he said so.

“Aye. You said even in Folctha you find none who could be your peer. And that is right, I think. You are a man beyond your years, and it’s not just because of your body or your breeding. It’s because we’ve been carefully training the one muscle in your body that actually matters.”

He tapped on Alex’s head.

“Wilde and I have had opportunity to chat. Mutual interest in your well-being, you see. He said you told him once you knew you were ‘the human Daar.’ Is that right?”

“It’s…it feels that way, yeah. Especially now I’ve had a chance to meet and see.”

Father gave him a long look. He sighed and his shoulders slumped, making him look old and tired. But only for a moment. A faint sideways grin creeped up his face.

“You are very perceptive. How do you feel about that?”

“…I dunno. So, what? Am I a lab experiment like Daar, too?”

“He is no experiment,” Gilgamesh admonished. “Nor is he a synthetic being. What went into him were very many minor changes over many, many generations of his ancestors, and a final post-conception ’refinement’ during a routine check-up, according to the Directorate. The distinction matters because it means he’s genetically as gaoian as any other.”

“Does it? He was still engineered! Even if it was mostly breeding, even if they didn’t do it all in one go or didn’t know what they were making exactly. What about me? Was I ‘refined’ too?”

“You were not engineered, boy. But you were very carefully bred and selected. I will not lie. I love your mother, of course, do not mistake it. But with her…” Gilgamesh sighed. “Love is a strange thing, Alex. Often it happens whether you want it or not. Other times, you work at it. In your mother’s case…it was a little of both. She was found, I took an interest. We saw what might happen in such a union. I wooed her. And then she wooed me. And so, here you are.”

“…So I really am a human Daar.”

“In the best possible way…yes. I will not say you are ‘perfect’ or any such nonsense, but you are wholly without genetic defect and equipped with every advantage we could conspire to ensure. None will ever be your equal. Already you face that among your own age, and among full-grown Heroes far older than you, in full possession of their abilities. But, I truly hope you do not face what Daar must. And I do not think you will, either. Our species are too different.”

Alex kicked a pebble, now feeling a bit bitter. “No. I’ll face something way different. But it’ll be just as terrible, I bet. I mean, think about it!” he said, waving his hand around. “This exists!”

Father nodded, and by saying nothing, invited Alex to speak his mind further.

“…I’m not mad.” He said, suddenly. It felt right to say.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you were, as such. This is a burden thrust upon you, you did not volunteer for it. But I am…very glad, and very proud, that you are not. Your head is much leveler than mine was, at your age.” Gilgamesh chuckled. “I was the very image and archetype of a spoiled, arrogant prince.”

“Yekiida has the best stories about you, you know…”

“Oh does he? Well perhaps I should test some of my newfound strength against him!”

“If he isn’t busy trying to seduce Bruuk again,” Alex giggled. “Besides. He’s been training too.”

“Then our battle will be legendary!”

Alex rolled his eyes. But he couldn’t hide the grin.

“Don’t you look at me in that tone of voice! Now come! We haven’t raced in too long, and I may as well get my licks in while your legs are still so short…”

“Hey!” Alex bounced on his toes, limbering up. “You think I’ll always be short?”

“It’s more than likely, yes. But short here is relative. You’ll still crest two meters at least.”

“So…shorter’n you and mom, but…”

“Tall enough for anything else. And with that—”

Gilgamesh took advantage of those long, strong legs of his. Alex charged after with everything he had. Father never let anyone win, never threw a match…

Maybe father was sore. Maybe he was tired. Maybe Alex was feeling his oats. Maybe some of his human-Daar was taking over. He was a very, very fit young boy after all, fleet on his feet and stupid strong for his size…

He won.

And all it took was one glance behind him to see that his father couldn’t have been happier.

Date Point: 20y1m1w3d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor system

YeUmIvuUni, researcher

When the Deathworlders had requested a technological consultant to assist them in their research efforts, Uni had gone expecting an easy assignment. This was a species tens of thousands of years younger than his own after all. That was a gulf of time and technology that should have been akin to trying to teach flint-knappers the principles of electronics.

Not so. The humans had more than benefited from the Interspecies Dominion’s “catch up” program. In twenty of their homeworld’s years, they had absorbed every shared fragment of knowledge and then become the bona fide expert species in a few significant fields of their own. Uni was finding their mathematical notation particularly challenging, even with cognitive assistance.

And, in fact, they had recent experience teaching flint-knappers the principles of electronics. And more. In fact a small group of said flint-knappers had come along to escort Uni during his visit. They were…mind-boggling examples of physicality, and flawlessly so, at that. Their bodies were artworks painted with a broad, rough brush. Yet despite that and what it might normally imply, they were obviously not stupid at all. In fact they were discussing literature with their human companions, albeit in slightly halting English—which seemed more a problem of wrapping their mouths and throats around the sounds, more than any cognitive barrier. Uni learned very quickly not to underestimate any deathworlder.

The biggest of the ten’gewek—Ferd Given-Man, by name—was holding court on-topic while bouncing heavily on his feet. “I think I like Spider-Man most! Is…very human hero-tale.”

The human known as Rees queried, “Oh? How so?”

“Hero is…he starts small, yes? Weak man, can’t talk to girls. Then he gets strong but uses it wrong. Make big mistakes, get uncle killed…”

One of the other ten’gewek (whose name Uni had not yet overheard yet) chimed in. “Yes! Is everyone around him, bigger, stronger. Only ‘cuz he is so…not hero? But then! The gods call him to big duty, yes? And he stands up, does duty. Protects tribe. Even though small!”

“Small and quick.” Ferd nodded approvingly. “Very human story. Very human message. We should come up with Ten’Gewek superhero!”

“So like, the Hulk but gorilla.”

“And better with women.”

“And good at making things!”

“…So Tony Stark, but also Hulk, and also gorilla.” Rees seemed to find that funny. “You can call ‘em Mary-Sue.”

There was some cultural in-joke there which eluded Uni entirely, and apparently sailed over Ferd’s be-crested head as well. He rumbled in his chest after a moment. “No. I think he already lives. His name is Vemik. But I think, important this hero not know he hero.”

That…was actually an interesting narrative twist. How would that even work? Uni added that thought to the long list of things he still had to meditate on, and returned his thoughts to the present moment as their ride reached its destination and they were ushered through some decontamination fields.

Uni had visited Mrwrki only twice before. On the other two occasions, he’d been effectively double-checking the humans’ work and confirming it was good, but this time was different. This time, they had something they simply didn’t know anything about, but needed to as expediently as possible.

Not an encouraging thought, considering this was a weapons lab.

In charge was a Captain Müller—why did so many humans have such similar names? Anyway, the latest project was plainly a reverse-engineering effort of some kind. They had an assemblage of technology partially disassembled in the middle of the work space and surrounded by safety measures, from things as mundane as transparent eye coverings to multiple rings of containment shields.

Not that Uni was going to complain about a culture of safety consciousness. Goodness knew, if his own people had been more prudently wary of technology…

He shook Müller’s hand. “A pleasure, captain.”

Müller’s handshake was pleasantly firm, rather than the crushing thing Uni had endured from other deathworlders of late. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “‘I’m hoping you know what this thing is. Our governments are…very eager to know.”

Uni lashed his tail amiably, and gave the assemblage a curious look. It must have come off a spaceship of some kind, he decided. It certainly didn’t look like it belonged on a ground vehicle…in fact, it was difficult to identify this thing as a weapon at all, if not for the context of where they were. He’d have guessed it for a sensor module instead, or perhaps electronic warfare of some kind…

“Where did you get it?” he asked, out loud.

Müller talked him through the weapon’s history and acquisition while Uni prowled around it, inspecting its superficial features—general layout and appearance. No clues there. He would need to take a closer look at the internal components…

Or so he was thinking until Müller handed him a glass jar full of a fine powder.

“What is this?”

“That’s what’s it turned the USS Wampanoag into. Fine dust, metallic, ceramic, even organic matter, all reduced to…this.”

…Oh.

Outwardly, Uni swore in English. “Fuck.”

Müller frowned at him. “…Not the response I was expecting. You know what this is?”

“I think I do. We never developed it ourselves, but I think what we have here is a…” Uni thought for a moment. “…In English you might call it a ‘quantum jammer.’”

“…A what?”

“It works by nucleating a pocket of higher-order space with different fundamental constants. The details are very particular, but one, shall we say, ‘popular’ approach was to generate a region with a markedly higher Higgs energy, as I believe you term it. This obviously does not last for long as the universe collapses said bubble at the speed of light. But in that time, the intermolecular forces fail and any solid matter within the pocket will simply…fall apart.”

Müller’s brow furrowed. “…Wouldn’t there be an energy release from broken bonds?”

“Oh yes. Quite a substantial one, I imagine. Certainly enough to blast apart the powderized matter.” Uni indicated the jar of debris. “But in theory, this weapon isn’t unknown to Dominion or Human science. Nervejam operates on a very similar principle.”

The lines on Müller’s forehead doubled in both depth and number. “…We’ve never yet figured out an effective defense against nervejam. We have drugs that can mitigate the effects, but all attempts at shielding have so far proved futile. We’ve not yet found anything that can stop it.”

“Oh? Well. We can fix that with some ease. There are some advanced meta-materials that will effectively block a small-scale attack.”

“Not shields?”

“No. The shields all make use of the Higgs field directly, so…some highly advanced active metamaterials are the only defense I know of.”

“Why…haven’t you shared this before?”

Uni lowered his head and fluffed out his mane in contrition. “Nobody ever asked. Forgive us, but it is difficult to know the knowledge gaps intimately enough to anticipate every need. But yes, now that we know this, we can provide.”

“In what form? We’re going to need some way to refit the existing fleet to handle this thing…”

“In the short term, a spray coat? Paint?” Uni suggested. “I will need to consult our own materials and manufacturing experts, and I cannot say how effective such a solution would be. These are obviously far more powerful than a simple nervejam.”

Müller nudded. “Anything is better than nothing,” he agreed. “And, thank you. That’s a big question answered.”

“But others created, no doubt,” Uni offered, sympathetically. “I wonder where they got this technology from? Have they always had it, and simply preferred not to use it as a waste of good meat and materials? Or have they acquired it from somewhere, recently?”

“Who knows, with Hunters.”

“True…” Uni was forced to agree. Such equanimity was…discomfiting, somehow. Humans didn’t lack for curiosity, by the Stream, no. They’d even named one of their early extraplanetary probes in tribute to that virtue. But Müller at least seemed to have an ability to sit comfortably with never knowing the answer to some questions.

Eminently practical, but at the same time, alien. Perhaps it was that focus which had driven their rapid catch-up.

Müller led Uni to a distinctly low-tech area: a smooth white board, and temporary markers. Some known parameters of the weapon were sketched in a box in one corner, but it was for the most part a blank work space. “Alright. So, give me the crash course in how thing works…”

Uni lashed his tail approvingly, took up the pen, and gathered his memory, called up some knowledge from external memory. Now. How to express it in human notation…? Ah, yes. He smiled as the solution formed, and he started to write. This was what he loved about humans: they challenged him.

And he was happy to rise to meet them.

Date Point: 20y1m1w5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ambassador Julian Etsicitty

Julian wasn’t one to put his foot down, ever. That just…wasn’t how he rolled. He’d never needed to do that with the twins, and he’d never needed to do it with his wives, either. And wouldn’t that be, like, the most caveman thing he could do?

Well, fuck it. Caveman he was, and right now he would brook no argument.

“I don’t care. You’re both staying here until I have some proper reassurance.”

Allison of course wasn’t happy about it. She’d never been one to shy away, she wasn’t some tower princess, he loved that about her. But it meant that right now, she was arguing. “Julian—!”

He held up his hand. “No. I will not risk you or the kids on a goddamned battlestation.”

Al’s momma instincts finally got the better of her badass space babe instincts. She pulled a face, but then unclenched her fists and teeth and subsided. “…Yeah, I know. Just…don’t risk yourself too.”

“I have to, babe. I am the ambassador. But…look. Nobody’s ever gonna question you. Least of all me. But this is the way of it. You are a mother to a toddler. You are important. I have a mission that I can’t walk away from. It’s important, too.”

“This stuff isn’t easy for us, bǎobèi.” Xiù said, rubbing Allison’s back. “You remember back when the Abrogators were attacking, and we had to just…watch? It sucks, even when we know the reasons why.”

The caveman melted away, and Julian reached across the table to squeeze their hands. He got it. He’d have hated it if their roles were reversed.

“Alright…alright.” Allison sighed. “But what are we gonna do while we’re here waiting for your shit to get finished? I quit my job, remember?”

“You could laze around the house in your PJs eating ice cream,” Julian suggested.

Xiù giggled. “I mean, that’s tempting…” She agreed.

“Yeah. Nice way to spend one afternoon…” Al snorted. “Eh, sorry I’ll quit whining now and find…something.”

“I’m convinced,” Xiù snarked. “Are you convinced?”

“I’m convinced,” Julian agreed, nodding like a troll.

Al snorted again. “Oh, fuck you both.”

“Now there’s a good idea…”

They didn’t. But they did cuddle on the couch. And they did welcome Alex who’d come back to Folctha and, well…man he may be, at least by the weird and kinda selectively backwards standards of Ekallim-Igigi, but that didn’t really change that he was a twelve-year-old boy.

…Well, okay. Alex was different, being honest. There was an uncannily wise and level head on top of those giant shoulders of his. Though, he was still a boy no matter what else he was, and even big boys get homesick and lonely sometimes. So rather than sit alone in his apartment—well, except for a robo-butler—he sat on the floor while Julian lazed across the couch with Al and Xiù sitting on his legs. Not knowing what else to do, they watched the news.

Not that there was much to watch. The latest brushfire war on Earth was still grumbling along, accompanied by the usual condemnations and insistence the two sides should come to the negotiating table. Union disputes in the US, trade snafus in Europe, migration…

Julian was about to suggest they give up and play a board game instead when there was a sudden bizarre shift. It was subtle, but the ESNN anchors looked weirdly confused and off-balance about something, even under the professional facade and stuff.

…Oh.

Julian knew.

“You three…need to pay attention to this.”

Xiù looked up, and put her phone away. “Babe?”

Julian didn’t answer, just gestured at the screen as the guy looked to the camera and inhaled.

“Going to the USA now, where AEC has released a statement introducing a new ally in the war against the Hunters and Hierarchy. We’re going live now to the White House where President Chambliss is introducing this new ally to the world…

Allison tilted her head curiously as the feed from the press briefing room came in. There was President Chambliss, of course, standing straight and smiling for the cameras. But alongside him was…

“…Ava?”

Julian sighed. “No. Well, also yes. It’s complicated.”

He explained as best he could while the news rolled on, muted. The one on screen definitely had Ava’s face, give or take ten years and a lot of stress, and an impossible holographic dress. He kept watching for a waver, some fuzziness, a break in the projection that’d reveal the drone underneath, but…nope. Maybe she glowed a little bit, but that was about it.

Xiù’s phone buzzed. She glanced at it, then rolled off the couch. “That’s Derek. Ava—The, uh. The real Ava—”

Al stood up too. “She freaking out?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m comin’ with.”

“Right,” Julian sighed. “Take however long it takes, you two. Alex and I will hold the fort.”

He got his favorite double-kiss on his cheeks, and they were gone in a bustle of coats and concern.

Alex looked up, and nodded. “Well, okay. I do need to do some studying though…”

Christ, the big fella had a deep voice. Well, no. It’d always been deep and a bit raspy from the moment they’d met, but lately it had dropped a couple-few octaves lower and taken on a booming, resonant quality. Still raspy, but somehow Julian could tell that would pass quickly.

The boy was growing up, and damn fast, too. But growing up or not, he was still a boy, and one unabashedly collecting father figures at that. He obviously loved his own dad, but…

He must have been lost in thought, because Alex tilted his shaggy head. “…Julian?”

“Right.” Julian shook his own shaggy head. “Don’t worry, they won’t be gone for super long.”

“I’ve also, uh…never taken care of a baby before?”

“Really? Well you can relax, they’re asleep. We can probably sneak downstairs and Slab for a bit too. Smarthaus stuff will pipe the monitor downstairs.”

“Monitor?”

“Yeah. Listens in on the babies. Watches too. Beeps if anything’s weird. Super useful. Anyway…” Julian stood and stretched out luxuriantly. “I, uh…I’m not so good with this sort of thing. Glad they can help, all I can really do is, uh, offer hugs. And babysit.”

“I mean…those are important.”

Julian smiled, “Yeah, they are. Now c’mon! It’s not often I get to beat up a twelve-year-old and not feel bad about it…”

Alex raised and flexed his huge Beef-sized left arm, admiring himself for a long moment. “You can try! And I turn thirteen next week!”

Julian whistled appreciatively, “I heard! You’re basically a teenage Hoeff these days!”

“Naw, I’m better’n him, see?! Lookit my arms! I’m a better athlete, too! S’pecially at Rugby!”

Well, just looking him over, the big bruiser of a boy wasn’t wrong…

“Careful with that ego, even if it might be true—”

“Is true!”

“…And on that note, I also heard he made a bet with you for a Saturn V LEGO set?”

“Yeah!” Alex enthused, bouncing on his toes and shaking the floor. “He said if I beat every one of his records in the HEAT’s Black Book before I turn thirteen, he’d give me his original set! Has the box and manual and everything!”

“Neat!” Julian grinned. That set remained almost impossible to get. “So how close are you?”

“Uh…I’ve got about halfway through…his squat is gonna be really hard to top.”

“Well then,” Julian chuckled, “we better get to work,” and led the way downstairs. And tried not to worry too much about stuff outside his control. Al and Xiù would work their magic, of that he had absolutely no doubts. But there was more than one lonely heart in their orbit they couldn’t in good conscience leave alone.

Right now Julian had a boy-man that needed him. And that, he could do something about.

Date Point: 20y1m1w5d AV
Armstrong Station, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Shore leave. Well-deserved shore leave at that, but it was one that might end up a bit bittersweet. Bruuk was…well, he’d been torn between personal advancement and loyalty to the crew. Understandable, but on that point Ian had to put his foot down for the short bear-tank. “No, mate. Go do the Ring. Everything’s in a lull right now anyway, hey?”

“…Lull? Cousin, did you see the reports?”

“Yes. And now everyone’s going to shield-bubble and nothing will change for a bit, at least until the next shoe drops. And that next shoe isn’t happening quickly. So go, train up. When you come back I want you so fuckin’ terrifying you could break me accidentally. And I won’t be sitting on my laurels, either.”

Bruuk tilted his head and made that really subtle, disturbingly canine keen gaoians did when they were upset about something. “What…what about the rest of the crew?”

“Extended leave and retraining for them, too. Maybe they’ll move on. We’ll see. There’s also refits due for the ship—no, don’t tell Morwk yet. In any case…we’ll have time. Time for all of us to catch up on things. And for you to go be the bestest Stoneback boulder you can be!”

Bruuk bass-chittered at that, but he would not be deterred. “Well, what’re you gonna do?”

“Shit, mate, I’m gonna actually take some leave. Go out drinking, get laid, buy some shirts, hang out with my mates, all that good shit. And study,” he added to counter Bruuk’s skeptical ear-flick. “Captains have to stay current too, you know.”

“I was more bemused at the idea of you finding more weird shirts. How many can one species generate?”

“More than I’ll wear in a lifetime, my friend.”

“Well,” Bruuk sniffed. “I think the real reason you like ‘em is ‘cuz they’re skin-tight. ‘Yer a showoff just as bad as me, yijao?”

“You’re only young and sexy once!”

“Well, I’ll agree you are at least one of those things…”

That earned Bruuk a tackle. And Ian an instant, skull-crushing pin.

“Don’t start what ‘ya can’t finish, little man…” But then he sobered up, and they sorta flowed back into an upright-sitting hug. “We’ll keep a group chat going, right?”

…Gao really were canine. The mere prospect of parting ways had Bruuk borderline moping.

Ian checked in with the rest of the crew before going. Moj was planning on spending time at the Starmind monastery, Dora had tickets to The Big Queer Music Festival in Nouveau Acadia, Urgug would be visiting family on the Guvnurag homeworld. Even Morwk had been persuaded to not stay and fret over the ship while she was in dry-dock. Instead he’d be doing the tourism thing around Folctha. Good for him.

There were the usual formalities of dry-docking, handing over the ship to somebody else’s care with paperwork in triplicate (because gao were very Japanese with paper record-keeping) and all the necessary administrative bollocks and then…extended leave, before he reported for training.

The first couple of days he spent just exploring of course. Then a few more being more ambitious: a trip out to Franklin, still being rebuilt; a hike along the river Dagnabbit; an overnight at one of the island resorts around the equator.

Friends. He wanted to go with friends. That was what he was missing, but then…who were they? Perhaps a bit improperly, he’d considered his crew to be friends. In a larger vessel that would be severely inappropriate, but for small ships? …Eh.

Except, as much as he loved them, all were busy and none were human. And he never really got how to do human, so…

He considered. Nervously re-considered.

Gave up, and gave Gonzo a call.

Date Point: 20y1m2w AV
USS Robert A. Heinlein, Orbiting planet Hell

Captain Jaimie Esposito

Esposito abandoned her paperwork and grabbed her flash hood in one smooth movement at the sound of general quarters, and was on the bridge in moments.

“Status, mister Levy?”

Levy stepped aside for her. “Hunter warp signatures on long range sensors, captain.”

“Thank you, I have the conn.”

The next few minutes were a tense flurry of messages as the various ships orbiting Hell received their orders. Esposito was ordered to high orbit, near the outer system shield generator, alongside a couple of the destroyers.

The thought turning over in her mind was this new weapon the Hunters had. If they could rock up and destroy a system shield emitter from the outside…? No, surely not. If they could, then the Hierarchy could have done that years ago. But then what was this all about? What could they achieve if they still couldn’t breach a system shield?

They could make a show of force.

The silence on Robby’s bridge was more than just professional quiet. Esposito could feel the gnawing concern that started to eat at her sailors and guardians with each passing second, as the sensor contact resolved itself in a troubling way.

What eventually buzzed the system shield, skimming low over its invisible surface like sea birds, was a shoal of…dozens. A hundred or more, maybe. They cruised past with contemptuous slowness, in a way that said take a good look, fuckers to any species, then warped lazily off into deep space. Not a single shot fired, not a scratch on the paintwork, not so much as an extra ripple on the system shield’s surface.

But Esposito could feel the dismay. They’d been damn worried just hunting one of those bastards, and now the Hunters were showing off…that, With the promise of more to come.

But the most worrying thing was, the Hunters weren’t returning back the way they’d come. They were heading in the direction of Dominion territory.

And Esposito had a terrible idea she knew what that meant.

Time to alert the fleet.

Date Point: 20y1m2w AV
The White House, Washington DC, Earth

President Beau Chambliss

Little details. The Entity’s avatar was very convincing, but here and there…in some tiny little way that Chambliss wasn’t always even consciously aware of but which struck a nerve regardless, in some small way she—it—would mess up from time to time. Be a little bit unreal.

The avatar never swept a hand under her to smooth out her skirt when sitting, for instance. The fabric didn’t quite drape and crease like the real thing would have. It was an animation. A really, really convincing one, as good as the best Hollywood special effects or videogame graphics, if not better. But no animation was ever quite going to perfectly capture a real person.

And somehow…he could feel the presence of a much larger, much stranger mind behind the avatar’s polite, smiling, stunningly pretty face. An indefinable pressure of the mind, hinting that a consciousness that spanned the galaxy was at least in some small way paying attention to tiny, insignificant, human him.

How the hell Darcy liked the thing, he had no idea. It gave him the screaming heebie-jeebies. But there was one way in which it was an honest pleasure to work with: simplicity. It was an individual, not a nation, and no nation or people, not even the Gao, could have such complete and perfect integration between the executive and the ground floor.

And it wanted to help. But as with any negotiation, there were things it wanted, and Chambliss was not yet convinced about agreeing to its request.

“You have weapons of your own, though, surely?”

“We have kinetic pulse, gauss guns and high-power shields. Frankly, our probes are behind the curve compared to what the Hierarchy have,” The avatar explained. “We could figure out our own versions of more modern weaponry, but that will take time both to invent and to reconstruct the old probes. Or…we could benefit from existing experience.”

She gave a wry sort of shrug. “Let’s face it, I was a journalist and the rest of me is..not exactly of the material world. It’s possible that weaponry is not our strongest suit.”

Chambliss nodded, and adjusted his jacket thoughtfully as he shifted his posture on the couch.

“Here’s my concern,” he said. “You…aren’t answerable to anything. If you were another nation of Earth, then we could work out a treaty, we could bring in neutral arbitration, we could both agree to be bound by enforceable penalties, or at the very least there could be the threat of sanctions and more. But you aren’t a nation. You aren’t even really of Earth, any longer. Neither of us can really bind the other.”

“You’re right, we can’t,” she agreed. “So doesn’t that mean it comes down to faith and trust?”

“That is…a lot of faith and trust you’re asking for.”

“Yes.” The avatar sat forward, or rather slid forward a bit. There was a faint whine from the hidden drone inside her head. “But Mister President, the alternative is that the ally who’s come to you won’t be the ally you need. We know about the Hunters’ new ships. We know the Hierarchy have weapons they haven’t yet used against human or gaoian ships. Things are coming to the tipping point, and you’re going to need us when it arrives. You’re going to need everyone. And we’re all going to need each other.”

Well. if the immortal space horror gig fell through, she could have a decent career as a speech writer.

Chambliss pushed the intrusive, absurd thought aside and gave her a level look. “You make a powerful case,” he said. “I will discuss the matter with the Joint Chiefs.”

The avatar nodded, quite convincingly. “Thank you.”

She stood up when Chambliss did, and her handshake…well, it didn’t feel like skin, but it was solid nonetheless. “I believe my people know how to contact you?” he asked.

“Yes. We intend to visit Cimbrean.”

Chambliss guessed the rest instantly. “You’re going to meet your…shall we say, your corporeal counterpart?”

The daemon Ava nodded. “She must have seen us on the news. It’s…we would regret it, if we didn’t meet her, at least once. She deserves to know.”

Chambliss found himself nodding, in complete agreement. “Well. I hope it goes well for both of you,” he said, and that, after the remaining little formalities, was the end of their meeting. He sat back down on the couch once the door closed, and frowned thoughtfully with his chin in his hand.

The Entity wasn’t human. It still had too many little details to prove it. But then again, one of America’s closest strategic allies wasn’t human either. And wanting to set things right with its—her—former self?

Deep in his gut, he knew that he was going to trust and have faith, and not just because he had no real alternative.

But because he truly believed the Entity deserved it.

Date Point: 20y1m2w3d AV
CGS Avenging Fury, Jumping.

Shipfather Rooti of Clan One-Fang

Rooti had jumped to a great many Hunter raids over the last few years. He thought he knew them well, knew how they always went. The cavalry arrived, the Hunters put up a token fight, then retreated when they lost a broodship or a dozen swarmships…

Not this time. This time, instead of a beleaguered convoy holding on desperately until help arrived, the Avenging Fury’s bridge battlespace display lit up with thousands of inert, fragmentary contacts: debris, tumbling in the void. Not a single friendly IFF or civilian transponder in view.

On visual, the scene was even grimmer. Something had bitten a perfectly well-built freighter in half like a hungry cub snapping at a longfish. Bits of spaceship tumbled in a smokey haze of particulate matter…

Sensors had a good read on moving objects in there, though. No kind of transmissions coming from them, but those were the Hunters, definitely. Picking over the corpses. Even as Rooti watched, one of them came about, aimed its nose at one of the larger pieces of wrecked freighter, and—

A brilliant flash made Rooti blink. Most of the drifting hulk simply burst apart and the Hunter dove right through the thick cloud of matter it left behind, spinning up a forcefield that dragged tons of raw material into its maw. Somehow, it was a sight as stomach-twisting and enraging as watching them feed on an actual flesh-and-blood life form would have been.

The flash decision: jump out and get reinforcements, or shield-drone the fuck out of the battlespace, stick around, and deny materials to the Hunters.

No, by the time they had a larger force assembled, these Hunters would be long gone.

“Distress jump beacon away. Drone-ops, you keep those nutless fucks far away from us. Deny it any favorable attack geometry.”

“Yi yi!”

Fury class never traveled alone. Rooti had a dozen escorts, hundreds of drones in the fleet. They shot off into the void as fast as their rails could load them, spinning and spiraling away into a hemispherical defensive formation. Even as each one flew out of the rail, its replacement was jumping into the hangar, but Rooti knew it was only a matter of seconds before—

There it was. A pulse of alarming blue indicated hostile wormhole suppression was active, and Fyu’s nuts it was every single one of the fuckers. That made this a stand-up, knock-down, claws-and-fangs fight to the death for one side or the other.

He ordered the fleet to pull range, focus-fire. Better to obliterate one than chip away at ten. He watched the command pay off as the first and most eager of the Hunter probes became the focal point for a hail of long-range firepower: no dodging that.

The others, witnessing their swarm-mate’s demise, changed tack. Suddenly they were spreading around the shield-drone formation like crawling ivy, and their presence was distinctly difficult to track.

Hunters always had commanded a mastery of cloaking devices. Each contact became a blinking, inconstant, slippery thing, vanishing from scope then reappearing again, their trajectories too unpredictable for projection.

Every few seconds, one would blink back into visibility long enough to annihilate a shield drone. Gunnery was quick on those: Rooti watched one take a glancing hit and fall into a free, unpowered drift.

He turned his attention to navigation. His ships were swift and were burning away from the Hunters as hard as they could manage…but the lines he saw were not encouraging.

The fight became a slow drag race, each fleet accelerating as hard as it could in a straight line directly away from the debris cloud. The Hunters stopped picking at the drones once they realized that doing so invited an answering hail of gunfire; the gaoian ships held their fire and gritted their teeth as their sensors strained to give them a decent firing solution.

It was a race the Hunters couldn’t lose, and both sides knew it. They could just pull a harder acceleration curve than the Fury, so they crept slowly—”slowly,” at relative speeds that would have circled Gao in minutes—past and around, while drone ops gamely did their best to deny them an attack angle.

“Sensors, I need good target solutions.”

Brother Taygu was panting with stress as his paws flew across his terminal, constantly fine-tuning and adjusting. It was only thanks to his efforts they had any kind of idea where the foe was at all. “I need active flares, shipfather!”

“Drone ops! Sacrificial flares, give our guns something to shoot!”

Painful move, that, but necessary. Rooti watched and held his composure with an iron will as one of the shield drones whipped out of formation, shot toward a Hunter’s estimated position, and overloaded its own shield generators to provide a huge energetic burst.

It worked. The wash of energy sizzled over a Hunter’s hull, and the fleet’s guns spoke in unison, disintegrating it as totally as if its fellows had turned on it. A worthy sacrifice, even though the act robbed their defense net of a precious member.

“Keep doing that, drone ops!” Rooti barked. Their survival hinged on killing the bastards at long range, before they won the kinetic energy race.

But each drone that sacrificed itself was another tear in their protection, and not all of them were sacrificed fruitfully.

And finally, their screen was sufficiently tattered to let one in. At angled through the cordon, closing hundreds of kilometers in a flash before the Striking Spark shoved a volley down its throat. But then another breach on the far side, and another at their north pole, another at a high-angle…

Rooti bit back a pained keen as two of the Hunters streaked in and the Charging Ember evaporated in a terrible flash of white light. Emboldened, the others of the swarm took a shortcut and charged into the shield drones, smashing them aside and zipping inwards. The Crashing Star and the Ravaging Claw turned desperately, pulled for range fighting for their lives, then died within a heartbeat of each other, instantly. Hundreds of brave gao, dead in a flash.

And more would follow. Only one chance at survival now.

“High-yield megalight nukes to every debris cloud, now.”

Deny the Hunters their food. That was all they cared about, right?

The crew obeyed. Before those things could spin up their forcefields and feed—

Multi-flash of gigaton-class warheads, leaving behind nothing but radiation and scattering the sandy remains of gaoian warship, hunter probe and civilian freighter alike to the stellar winds. Shields took a hell of a pounding and their heat capacitors were overloading, now.

But it stung the greasy nutless shits. The Hunters, like any cowardly predator, didn’t know how to react to prey with teeth. And now, this fight was no longer profitable for them.

The disruption field dissipated. Dozens of black-flashes as the enemy jumped out. Rooti breathed again, and slowly, painfully, dug his claws out of his command chair’s armrests.

“…Jump to fleet. Father Neebaanu, secure and regroup. Comms, with me. We have a FLASH to draft.” Somehow, Rooti found his voice was level and commanding. He rose from his chair as the fleet jumped home, and prowled back to his ready room.

Something was going to have to change quickly, or they were in very serious trouble.

Date Point: 20y1m2w3d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ian “Death-Eye” Wilde

Head pounding. Wicked daystar sending its devil-fire through the gap in the curtain to spear his retinas. Mouth as dry as a teabag. He groaned, stretched, found he was pressed against someone who felt almost burningly hot—

An arm bigger than his fucking waist came around his chest and a far bigger leg around his hips. A crushing hug next, and a deep voice grumbled, “Mmmpf…c’mon, I wanna sleep…”

Ian struggled fiercely to escape, mind going a billion miles an hour, broke free of the huge monster’s death-grip—

“Aww fuck man please don’t freak out yet…”

Ian freaked out.

He. Him. Gonzo. Not wearing anything. Head pounding harder fuck fuck! fuck!!

“Dude! Calm the fuck down, okay? Just…there. Can we at least have some fuckin’ coffee first?”

“…Right. Shit. Yeah. Fuck.”

Gonzo chuckled and stretched just so and—

Ian had to look away.

…Fuck.

“…Right.” Gonzo shimmied his neck until it popped loudly, grunted happily, then climbed out of…well, they actually weren’t in bed, ‘cuz the hotel bed wasn’t HEAT-ready. They’d made a kind of nest on the floor out of the mattress. “Okay. So. Pre-coffee, I guess. And before you ask, we didn’t do it. Okay?”

“Uh…we didn’t—?”

“No. we didn’t. Your asshole is secure.”

Ian burst out laughing, despite everything. Nervous, relieved…and if he was honest with himself both disappointed and glad at once.

“Right?” Gonzo said. “Okay? For right now? Okay. Good. Now. Make us some coffee, please.”

“…Right.”

Ian excused himself…well, to the other side of the room where the tea set was kept, while Gonzo thumped around like fucking Godzilla putting the bed back together. He didn’t bother with anything else though, and stood as unselfconsciously as HEAT were infamous for.

Ian looked away, drank, and reflected on how fucking amazing a cheap cup of hotel tea could taste.

“I…shit.” Ian felt extra stupid this morning.

“It’s okay. I was sorta expectin’ this. You were fuckin’ crunked last night.”

“…Yeah. Why was I?”

“Dude.” He laughed that perfect fucking laugh. “You tried to out-drink me.”

Ian glanced over quickly to size-up again. Right. Yeah. He was one of the Beefs, and one of the big Beefs, too. In fact one of the biggest at this point. Shit.

“Well,” he said, with some false bravado. “Not my finest hour, that.”

A chuckle, and a sideways be-dimpled grin that was just heart-breakingly handsome to look at… “No, prob’ly not. But fun, though.”

Ian’s head was going a million miles an hour, and something had a grip of his heart and was just squeezing it flat like it was in a vice…well, one thing to do.

“Right. Uh…” he gulped, “Gonzo, what the fuck did we do?”

He smiled more fully now—even more achingly handsome, and didn’t seem to notice Ian’s distress. Instead Hunter dumped the coffee pot into a cup and took a sip. He drank it black. “Honestly, not much. You had a lot you wanted to say and then you got curious. So I let you explore. Felt good. I showed off, you liked it…maybe I made sure you were having fun. But that’s all we did. Din’t feel right to push it. Really wanted to, though.”

“…Thanks.”

Ian studiously examined his tea.

One of those giant hands landed on his shoulder, gently.

“Hey. Look at me.”

Ian looked up.

“It don’t need to mean anything if you don’t want it to. And if you do, that’s okay too. I’m not a stranger to weird and scary, okay?”

“I…right.” Ian nodded. “Thank you. I’m just…”

He sighed, rubbed his face and pulled it together. “Shit, listen to me, I’m a grown fucking man, I can handle this.”

“I know. I was, uh, exactly in this spot when I first showed up. First time away from home, the dancing and the drugs—”

“Really?”

Gonzo shrugged, and again he was so fucking handsome, Ian felt the urge to look away. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, don’t tell anyone, team already knows, right? Righteous gave me the hardest fuckin’ day ever. But it ain’t nobody else’s business, an’ he told nobody but command. I got an Article Fifteen and a buttload of extra duty. But that’s it. I had fun, I paid for it, still promoted to corporal. Drugs are legal in Folctha so the police wouldn’t do a test, and that saved me. Worked out okay. Scary fun, but fun. So now I take it a lot more seriously, y’know?”

“Right.”

“I didn’t think you’d do anything that stupid, just for the record. But there’s a lot of shit that can happen when you’re almost blackout drunk, so…I carried you to a hotel. That’s what started it I think. You, uh…really liked being carried.”

“…Uh…”

“Right. No judgment. Really no judgment. I liked carrying you, too.”

What the fuck was Ian supposed to say to that? He felt as if his whole goddamned world had just been inverted and set through the negaverse or whatever. Fuck, Bruuk and Dora! They were right! Or, mostly right? Did they…

Another glance, more bravely. Ian’s heart stopped in his chest. Gonzo was…just so fucking beautiful. He didn’t know what to do, felt panic rise in his heart again—breathe. Calm down.

Wondering look up at Gonzo’s face again. He just smiled. Knowingly. Nothing but good vibes. Nothing but total, accepting understanding.

“Jesus, mate! How are you so…”

Gonzo shrugged again, the ripple and play of the vast musculature under his skin almost too exciting to watch. “Been there, done that. And being honest? I like fucking beautiful people. Even if I didn’t get to do much tonight, I still had fun. ‘Cuz you’re beautiful people.”

That felt…good. Shit, when was the last time Ian had ever had a compliment like that? “Right,” he cleared his throat and his thoughts, and drained his tea. It was still too hot, but, fuck it. “So like you said. Been there, done that. I guess now worn the fucking t-shirt.”

“Naw. Nobody wears t-shirts like yours, yijao?”

A bit of a desperate laugh barked out of Ian, but it was sincere.

“There,” Gonzo smiled. “Not so bad, right? So. Okay. You standin’ up good? Nice and steady?”

Ian considered, and nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

He waved ineffectually at, well…everything.

Gonzo waved him down. “Right. I get it. So, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna step in there and take a nice long shower, ‘cuz this is an expensive-ass room and that’s a fancy-ass shower. I’m gonna scrub up nice and good, and that’s all I’m gonna do. If you wanna work something out, or whatever else, you can step in with me. You’re in control.”

And with the invitation given he did exactly that, leaving the door cracked open.

The shower cranked up. Surprisingly good singing followed shortly thereafter.

Ian stood rooted, indecisive and, if he was honest with himself, more than a little afraid.

…Felt pretty gross too, actually. He needed a shower.

Fuck it.

He put the cup down, took a deep breath, and stepped into the shower.

He had no regrets.

Date Point: 20y1m2w4d AV
Ekallim-Igigi

Ambassador Julian Etsicitty

Despite being on the station for more than a month, Julian still hadn’t met all the queen-consorts. Many of them lived very privately, having never bothered to learn English, or much of “The Deep” at all. According to Queen Pandrosion, the culture shock was…intense.

Julian could imagine. He’d grown up with a TV and Star Trek reruns, and even for him the revelation that aliens were real had been…Well, if he hadn’t been busy scraping together a camp and surviving on Nightmare, he’d have probably been totally blown away by it. God knew he’d had plenty of what-the-fuck occasions since, more than he could list.

How much worse for a ninth-century Kyivan royal cousin, or a 4th century Malay islander, or a priestess who’d witnessed the raising of pyramids in Peru two thousand years before the birth of Christ? Not all of them had the boundless curiosity, courage, open mind, or sheer stubbornness to quite adapt to the life of technology.

But while any modern archaeologist would have given their eye-teeth to talk with them, to Julian fell a different duty: he had to discuss war. And while queens Pandrosion, Mevia and Tomoe were very different indeed from each other, if there was one thing they shared, it was a passion for weaponry.

And as it turned out, Singularity was very familiar indeed with the Q-Jammer. It was the Onna-Musha’s primary armament, and the queens were entirely happy to give a demonstration, by reducing an asteroid the size of a cathedral to a milky cloud of powder. Waste not want not, though: there was one of Ekallim-Igigi’s vast mining barges on standby to suck up the resulting space dust

Queen Tomoe nodded thanks to her gunnery crew then turned to Julian. “I hope that was an effective demonstration?”

“It really was,” Julian agreed, reflecting that at least the poor bastards on USS Wampanoag and the three ships the gaoians had lost wouldn’t have felt a damn thing. He’d had a few nightmares about those brief seconds when he, Al and Xiù had been exposed to hard vacuum back aboard Sanctuary, and of all the ways somebody could die in a space battle…not that, please. “But your ships are defended against it?”

“Well, we use it precisely because it is so difficult to defend against,” Tomoe explained. “But yes, these ships can take a few hits from it before the armor ablates away and the effect field penetrates into the structure.”

“What I don’t get is why the Hierarchy didn’t just pop the Sol Containment Field with one of these,” Julian wondered, watching the asteroid continue to vanish.

“Range,” Mevia had a satisfied look on her face. “Most spaceborne weapons have effective ranges measured in thousands of kilometers; Q-jammers can achieve hundreds at most. They can’t reach far enough past the system field to hit the emitter.”

“So what do you use for long-range engagements?” Julian asked.

Mevia’s satisfied smile turned into an outright bloodthirsty grin. “I’m glad you asked!”

And so went the rest of the demonstration. Julian had to admit, it sure looked impressive. And the numbers were incredible, too. Gladiatrix had an acceleration profile even steeper than Misfit’s had been, despite being an order of magnitude more massive.

And that was just one of the Queen-ships. Singularity’s fleet consisted a lot more than just the harem’s highly personalized vessels, there was a solid force of tiny-but-mighty gunboats backing them up, filling a mixed role between escort and strike fighter.

The fact was, inviting them to join in alongside AEC and gaoian forces was a no-brainer. If only it was as simple as saying ‘sure, come on in.’

Instead, there was the need for treaty. Seemingly everything had to be covered, from which side would be adjusting their transponders and comms systems to accommodate the others, who would defer to whose chain of command, rules of engagement, what language it would all be happening in, the procedure for blue-on-blue fire, what would and would not constitute a violation of treaty…

…and more, and more, and more. Thank God there were people on Julian’s staff who seemed to enjoy the legal drudgery, and who delighted in reading and picking apart their Singularity counterparts’ work before advising Julian. They were making progress! Helped, no doubt, by the fact that everyone involved wanted this new friendship to succeed. Line bullshit or not—and Julian still wasn’t sure how he felt about that, or about the fact that he definitely had some of Gilgamesh’s genes in him—they were either going to stand united or fall divided.

Well, no. Maybe “wanted” was a strong word, actually. Maybe “understood” or “accepted” was more appropriate. Public opinion was…wary, to put it mildly. A lot of grief was flowing toward the “Heroes” on Earth, but that was fortunately tempered by the fact that nobody was really stupid enough to pick on a quarter-ton freshman who just wanted to get through high school, or to harass that eight hundred pound gorilla of a laborer who honestly made everyone else’s working day a lot easier simply by being there. Never mind they only numbered in the hundreds in the US at most, they were impossible to miss, impossible to ignore…

Impossible to deny. And Julian was about the most ridiculous example to be found.

Still wasn’t a hundred percent sure how he felt about that.

In either case, Julian was happy with the demonstration of the system shields and the assurance that Ekallim-Igigi was, now, safe and secure and there wouldn’t be another attack unless the Hierarchy figured out a way past system shields. And frankly, if they managed that, there wouldn’t be a safe place anywhere. So, he’d bring Al, Xiù and the kids back with him next time he jumped back to Folctha. The ambassadorial apartments felt…very empty, without them.

And he’d be damned before he missed a second more of his children’s lives than he had to. That had been the big promise he’d silently made them, the first time he’d held them: he’d be there.

After all, he was doing this for them.

Date Point: 20y1m2w5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Ava Ríos

God, it was like looking through a mirror into the past.

Ava had been…well, she’d been a lot of things, the last few days. She barely remembered them, except as a blur of emotion and physical sensation. Like throwing up. Lot of that.

Through it all she’d been able to surface and notice the people who were there for her. Derek, obviously. Al and Xiù, Charlotte and Ben, Adam and Marty…and poor Hannah, who was the Best Girl in the whole wide galaxy and had barely eaten or slept for looking after her.

The guilt of owing so much to all of them was threatening to pull her back down. But no. Even if there was a terrible little demon gnawing in her soul’s roots and telling her she didn’t deserve any of it, she was damn well going to accept their love in the spirit it had been given.

What came as a surprise now was how calm she was feeling, now that all her questions were about to be answered. Now that she was standing in front of…Well, herself.

Except, not.

Though, to judge by her doppelganger’s expression, it was just as weird for her, too.

“I…don’t remember looking that good,” Ava ventured, as an ice-breaker.

Her counterpart nodded, and sighed heavily. God, even the mannerisms were hers. “We hated ourselves at the time,” she said, then looked over Ava’s shoulder. “…Coombes. I remember you.”

Ava reached out and took Derek’s hand, letting the engagement ring show. The holographic herself looked down at it, looked up with a small smile. “Well…I guess we’ve both got a lot of catching up to do.”

Ava nodded shakily, squeezed Derek’s hand, and sat. The other her glided into the armchair opposite the couch, and waited expectantly. She looked more…composed than Ava remembered being ten years ago. Looking back at old photos of herself, she’d stood with a definite defeated slouch, hadn’t done more than the bare basic with makeup, hadn’t really properly looked after her hair…she’d gone everywhere with a haunted look on her face. But this “Entity” showed none of that. For all she had some of Ava’s mannerisms, she looked…poised. Confident. Like even the awkwardness they were facing right now was something she could handle.

The kind of person Ava wanted to be.

“…So, uh…I…” Ava began, faltered, then just cut right to the heart of it. “…How?”

The Entity’s Ava avatar even breathed, a slow but short and shallow, disapproving inhalation. “He had a scanner. When we met him alone, in his office.”

“…I remember I had a headache afterwards. Are you saying he…?”

“He scanned your brain down to the atomic level, converted it into a datasophont, and…abducted you. Me. Us.”

Ava could tell she was standing on the edge of a cliff. The yawning drop in front of her made her still-tender stomach do backflips, but even so…she steeled herself and leapt. “…And then?”

She’d expected her other self to say something like ‘you don’t want to know.’ She’d expected to have to fight and dig and press and claw it out of her. But of course…the Entity knew her well. It just looked her in the eye for a long second, and told her.

Everything.

No gory, messy, awful detail spared. How she’d been violated, over and over and over again, torn to pieces, resurrected and ravaged repeatedly. How those pieces had somehow clawed themselves back into an unconscious facsimile of life and fought, fought, fought for every second of life, how it had slunk and slithered through dataspace preying on the Hierarchy, watching and listening and hiding when it couldn’t fight, surviving by the narrowest of daring margins…

And through it all, Ava sat and wondered, how could she of all people have withstood that?

Derek held her hand tight, his face an inscrutable mask of impotent rage at what had happened to her, but for Ava…as the story continued, she realized she found it cathartic somehow. As if a cavity in her life that she’d never even known was there had just been filled.

“But you’re…only half of this Entity.”

The avatar nodded. “Or less than that. I’m the daemon it runs for interacting with people, except I can’t be turned off. I’m a little bit independent, a little bit not…it’s hard to explain. Even talking about “it” and “me” is wrong, but…everything I say is what the larger us believes.”

Ava thought she followed that. “I just…don’t know how you’re so calm. I’ve spent the last few days a complete mess just from finding out you exist and you’re—”

“Not human,” the daemon-her replied. “I’m human enough to communicate with, but…really, I’m just very good at pretending to be a real, living person.” She shifted slightly in the uncomfortable silence that followed, then added, “But if I was a real person, I think…I think I’d look at it like, the worst day of my life already happened. Nothing we face is ever going to be as bad as how we came to be in the first place…so really, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“But if you’re not human, then why come here? Why meet me?”

Ava wasn’t sure if the Entity really needed all the time she—it—took to think on that before answering. Maybe it was just another one of those ‘very good at pretending to be a person’ things. But the avatar frowned and wrung her hands just like Ava did, and when finally the answer came, it came just as tentatively as Ava would ever have put it.

“I think…We think…we’re probably only alive because you’re a lot more tenacious than you think you are, Ava. The very core of us, the first bit that ever wriggled away and clung to life, was your will to survive, and thrive, and grow. And we’ve watched you, as much as we can, and you’ve done…Madre di Dios, chica, you’re successful. You’ve taken every shit deal life threw at you and here you are, you’ve got a great job, you’ve interviewed galactic leaders and politicians, you’ve got a really handsome fella—”

“Thanks,” Derek grunted awkwardly. Despite herself, Ava chuckled and squeezed his hand.

“We aren’t you, but we owe everything we are to you. And we wanted you to know that…well, that we’re here. That whatever we become, and we hope we’re going to be something good? It started with you. And besides…you deserve to know the truth.”

Ava nodded. “The truth is important,” she agreed.

“Yes. Especially—”

“When it’s painful,” Ava chorused with her other self.

The daemon smiled. “Title of our biography. Yours and mine, I mean.”

“…That’s pretty good,” Ava admitted. “Or…”

“Or it could be the title of your interview with us.”

“You read my mind. But are you sure?”

“We plan on being around for a long time,” other-Ava said. “We don’t want to be alone. We want to be liked, and maybe to become something people can rely on, talk to…we want to be seen as human after a fashion, not some hidden monster living out in the darkness.”

“We’ll need someplace to do a proper shoot—” Ava mused, running through the mental map of places she’d identified as good shoot locations for the Laid Bare series, though none of them really seemed to fit…

“Don’t worry about that,” other-Ava interrupted. She had an eager grin, now, and held out her hand. As she opened it, a small green shoot unfolded from her palm into a delicate blossom. “We have the perfect place.”

She smiled when Ava blinked at her in confusion, and closed her hand again with purpose.

“Why else would we grow a garden?” she asked.

Date Point: 20y1m3w AV
HMS Sharman, (HMNB Folctha) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

CPL Hunter “Gonzo” Thompson

“You sure you wanna do this, dude?”

Yan Given-Man nodded seriously. “Yes. Crest is…pride-thing for men. So it feels strange, but I learn that sham-poo make crest lie down. Take days to stand back up, and only if I work very hard and earn big sweats.”

“Which we’re doing anyway,” Firth interjected.

“Yes! Never stands right. Also,” Yan hooted, “I beat my bench record! Already wrote on board!”

“Oh? That’s good!” Firth noted, with a genuine smile. But he still couldn’t resist a dig. Switching to a more wolfish grin, “I broke mine too, Yan. Looks like you still ain’t shit next to me…”

The two of them were locked in Serious Competition, so their posturing was Serious Business. It’d been going on for a while now, since Yan was making rocket progress and somehow, the prospect of genuinely competing with someone had really kicked Righteous into hyperdrive. He was keen on putting on as much lead between him and Yan as he possibly could before the big gorilla plateaued and the sports medicine team got to work.

“Feh! All things in time,” Yan said, sagely. “You’ll be my woman one day! But yes. Not even big sweats enough anymore.”

“‘Cuz of the mineral thing, right?”

Turned out, a ten’gewek’s crest was part of their cooling system, and certain hollow hairs reacted with the minerals in their sweat to go stiff. This lifted up the super-soft long hairs that wicked up all their sweat and gave the still air of the jungle a chance to evaporate it. More sweat, more oils and minerals, the stiffer the crest got…

Yan’s was normally a two-foot tall thing from the top of his head down to the tip of his tail. Really badass looking! But of course, that was a problem with the Mass. That badass crest had to lie flat under the armor. That meant smushing it down (which broke hairs) and slicking it down with petroleum jelly, which had to be scrubbed out afterwards. Normally he just avoided soaping his crest, and that was fine; kept him musky but not offensively so. But now?

Well, lots of jokes had been made about how Yan “couldn’t keep it up.”

Given what kind of men ten’gewek were, and what kind of man Yan was, the consequence of that teasing meant they all knew how very, very wrong they were about that.

Oh, and he’d beat the tar out of all of ‘em. Except Righteous, of course. Nobody beat him.

Not in combat, either.

Yan nodded, glumly. “Yes. Can’t have all things at once for this. But!” he cheered, “I think, maybe with nice sharp buzz cut it might look cool!”

“I bet Ferd will like it too. I noticed his crest’s been lookin’ a bit, uh…”

“Flaccid?” Walsh suggested.

“Limp?” Parata offered.

“Tired?” Burgess had a huge grin.

Hunter snrrked, and held back the first comment that sprang into his mind: That he’d just spent a very fun weekend with Ian engaging in all manner of happy sin, and yet these motherfuckers were unbearably fuckin’ homo.

Yan and the murder-raccoons knew, of course; ten’gewek and gaoians alike had insanely acute olfactory senses, and the tail flicks and ear semaphore were a language to themselves. But so far, none of them had said anything. Bless them all, they all knew the etiquette. You didn’t out a guy like that. Not that Hunter woulda cared, but Ian still had a lot of thinkin’ to do.

“All of you, better warriors than comedians.” Yan trilled gruffly, but Hunter wasn’t fooled. He thought they were hilarious. With ten’gewek, the tail-twitch told all.

So. Out came the clippers. And, fuck, those stiff bristle hairs did not cut easy. Five minutes in with the occasional growl and flinch from Yan as a guide hair got caught and yanked on rather than cut cleanly, and they’d only got as far as between his shoulder blades.

Which of course was the moment when the alarm rang and Captain Thompson came banging on the door, shouting “Suit up!” Poor Yan was left looking fuckin’ ridiculous and would have to finish shaving himself later; all concerns of personal grooming were forgotten as the team crushed out of the room.

Suiting up was a kind of well-practiced dance at this point. Into the undersuit, stretch it and smooth it out, endure the discomfort of the “plumbing” and grit his teeth against the cold water being pumped in. Sit on the edge of the bench, bend forward at the hips, raise his feet, force both halves of himself into both halves of the suit, push until it felt like something was about to break until slip-thump and he was suddenly wearing it.

Now the water turned blood-warm, activating the mid-layer’s reactive padding, causing it to expand and squeeze. It hugged with deadly force to the uninitiated and a welcoming embrace for him. Thompson briefed them even while his own suit was going on.

The mission: search and rescue. The Hunters had hit a space station, and were already long gone; it was their job to save whatever lives could still be saved. Something they’d trained for a lot, but rarely got the chance to do for real.

It was a Defender and Protector heavy job, but Aggressors had their part to play too. They would be the leading edge of securing their operating space, while Baseball, Irish and Rhino did their thing. They’d…well, this was the first proper rescue since they’d lost Warhorse, meaning they only had one PJ-sourced Protector on the team, now. Irish and Rhino had both come up through the medic ranks, sure, but next to a combat rescue specialist like a PJ?

Warhorse had been the best there was. No replacing that. He’d also been the best Aggressor on the team, too. There, at least, Gonzo and all the rest of them could step up. Or, for Righteous, maybe massively overcompensate. But in a job like theirs…you never had enough.

Suit checks, seal checks, board the Weaver, jump—

Gonzo was never quite sure if he did or didn’t feel anything when the ship he was on jumped. It felt like he ought to feel something, so maybe his imagination filled in the blank space?

Whatever. Mind on the job.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when the ramp dropped and he got a good look at the station, but…there was a lot less of it than he’d thought there would be. Something had taken huge fuckin’ bites out of it, leaving ragged holes where the decks and structure were open to the void. There was a faint milky haze of dust around everything, and it hissed against his visor as he thumbed his maneuvering pack’s controls and thrusted forward, following Righteous’ marker.

As they got closer, those bite marks turned out to be really goddamn smooth. Razor-sharp exposed metal gleamed in the planet-light from whatever temperate world they were orbiting.

“Nasty fuckin’ edges there. Watch your suits.”

Gonzo signaled confirmation as he pushed something dark aside. As it floated out into the light, he realized it was a corpse. Half of one, anyway. The rear half of a young Guvnurag, trailing a messy string of congealed guts. Fuck.

Now came the hard part: entering the intact and pressurized bits without explosively decompressing them and killing the survivors. That was the Defenders’ job; to Gonzo fell security, keeping an eye out in case of any nasty shit the Hunters might have left behind, or frenzied station security too dumb to know they were the good guys.

There was nothing. He spent a minute standing around, watching his HUD and sweeping his light into the shadows, but all he found for his trouble were more alien corpses. God, they were standing in what had been somebody’s home up until, what? Half an hour ago?

“Gonzo. ‘Rilla. Stack up.”

Righteous at the front, getting ready to make entry. Really the junior guy should be there in his place, since he was the team’s senior NCO, but there also wasn’t anyone else anywhere near as wall-like as him. Yan took up position behind Gonzo and Highland stayed behind for now.

Titan had set up a forcefield over the door they were using. Now he used a cutting charge to slice it in half, leaving the bits to drift in zero-G, and Firth shouldered them aside as he burst through. Proper sound came back with a rush as Gonzo surged in after him, and he became aware of an alarm’s urgent whooping, and the braying of ETs weeping nearby. Emergency lighting was on, meaning the shadows cast by his helmet and gun lights weren’t so sharp and perfectly pitch black as they woulda been when he aimed them down the deck to their right.

“Clear!”

Hand signals, verbal orders, HUD markers, all at once: Gonzo knew what his job was, and he fell into it with practiced ease. Behind him, his buddies came piling in through the forcefield and set up to handle their own tasks. Triage, stasis bags, a jump array….everything they needed to get as many people as were still alive on this wreck safely home.

They got to work.

And they saved lives.

Date Point: 20y1m3w AV
Alex’s Apartment, Folctha, Cimbrean, Far Reaches

Alex, Prince of Ekallim-Igigi

So, birthday cake was nice. And, there were presents of course.

But the thing Alex enjoyed most was that it was just a few.

No rites of initiation today. He didn’t have a small army to fight off with his bare hands, or wrestle his way through a sacred tournament, or just…whatever other sadistic thing Mevia might come up with, and father approve. No deer to hunt and butcher, not that he didn’t enjoy a good hunt… No public appearances, no oaths or chants or incense or—

No mountain of small tokens of esteem from well-wishers and step-mothers. He’d said very specifically he wanted to celebrate by the local customs, as a token of respect—a brilliant scam on his part, as it turned out—and so far everyone was honoring it. He’d have a billion congratulatory notes to reply to of course, since the thirteenth was the first and most important birthday of his manhood, at least on Ekallim-Igigi. It was important and all, but honestly…

Lowkey was nice. His actual birthday gifts amounted to one from his mother and father, one from Ian and the Stray Fortune’s crew, and a collection of small ones from the ambassador’s family. Mom and dad had a big one: a full suite of upgrades for Beowulf. Weapons now! They’d be locked out for now of course, and he’d need lots of upgrade training, and certification, and…

Ian gave him a T-shirt, one festooned in bright and ridiculous cartoon characters, that was deliberately just small enough like all of Ian’s favorites. So obviously, Alex had to shimmy into it right then and there, to a nice round of whooping cheers and laughter.

“Yyup.” Ian folded his arms with a smug grin. “You’ll be fending the lasses off with a bat in that.”

“Or the other way around,” Alex grinned big and stupid. “This is the henchest shirt. I love it!”

He looked in the mirror on the other end of the room and he had to admit, he did look good…

“Well,” the ambassador said with a grin, “we were at least smart enough not to buy you something you’ll outgrow in literally a week.”

Ian chuckled and sipped his Coke. “Oi, it’s not about how long it lasts, it’s about how thoughtful it is.”

“Well, I like it,” Alex stated, loyally. “Plus I look better’n the guy on it too!”

“Aye, well. The page boy haircut and furry speedos are a tough look to pull off.”

“I’ve done it before! Shoulda seen me on one of the hunts for my last birthday.”

Julian chuckled, “So like Hoeff and Daar did years ago for Halloween. Hoeff went as He-Man, and Daar was Battlecat. Before Daar was, y’know. Building-sized.”

“Ugh.” Allison pulled a face. “Hoeff is way too hairy for He-Man.”

“Oh, he isn’t that bad, and it’s all blonde anyway. Besides, he shaves down nice,” Julian said with a lecherous grin—Alex could tell now—and both of his wives instantly made grossed-out faces. “No, really! Don’t you be hatin’ on my boy!”

“…Are we talkin’ about the same Hoeff here?” Ian asked. “The man who would stare down Batman?”

“Sure! Look, I’ve got pics.”

Sure enough…

“Wow,” Alex exclaimed. “He was a lot smaller back then, huh? Fuckin’ crazy ripped though! And lookit Daar, he’s like a big sleek murdercat!”

“…Murdercat.”

“Well what the hell else would you call that?!”

“I dunno. Too much bear for me, I think…”

“Whatever,” Alex giggled. “Also look, he dyed his fur! When was this?”

“God, like over ten years ago at this point?”

Ian was quieter. “Y’know, if anything there’s even more murder on Hoeff’s face in that pic.”

Julian noted, “And a lot more play on Daar’s.”

Actually…that had to be Daar before he became the Great Father, right? He didn’t look so…burdened. It sorta made Alex feel sad.

Xiù understood, because she pushed a wrapped present across the table. “Here.”

They must have worked together, because what they gave him was a collection of useful things. From Julian, a full grooming kit in a nice leather case, “Because I know how much of a pain this stuff is, but having the right tools helps out a lot.” And the timing was good, too. Alex had noticed a wisp of hair growing suddenly on his chin…

From Xiù, a good-smelling cologne and a promise to teach him how much was enough. Apparently there was an art to it? Alex had to admit, the stuff smelled good…

Allison found all that very amusing, and gave him a videogame console because, in her words: “you don’t wanna grow up too fast, do ya?”

It was…well, Alex couldn’t really tell because his only contact with ‘normal’ had only ever been imported TV and movies, which were fiction of course. But it seemed like he’d always imagined a regular birthday might go. A cake, a few nice presents…and that was it. Just the fact that they made a small big deal out of it made it special.

The last present was a bit of a surprise. Hoeff came to visit, dressed up nice and fancy; he was going on a date with his wife. Fun! Under his arm he had a wrapped present, but Alex already knew what it was.

“…Are you sure? Those aren’t easy to get…”

“No, they’re not,” Hoeff grunted, and handed the set over. Alex unwrapped it and sure enough, there it was: the Saturn V kit in its original box, assembly manual and everything.

“I mean…I do really want it—”

“Then take it. I challenged you to beat me completely, right? Well, you did. You beat every damn lift of mine and that puts you into company you can count on ‘yer fingers. So congratulations.”

Hoeff stuck out his hand and they shook with the kind of grip only men like them could appreciate. “You’ve built up a better body. Now,” Hoeff pulled him in for a hug. “Be a better man.”

Alex hugged back fiercely and nodded seriously. “…I will.”

“Good,” Hoeff nodded back, then broke out into the happiest smile Alex had ever seen him give. “Now go eat some cake! But don’t slack off too much! ‘Cuz I sure as fuck ain’t gonna let you keep those records…”

“Ha!”

Alex spent the afternoon playing videogames. He’d never really had the chance to try them, before, but they turned out to be great fun! Dangerously good fun. He lost a couple of hours without noticing them vanish.

Allison was right. It was nice to just…escape from being what he was and do something pointless and fun for a while.

But, not forever. He had planning and packing and paperwork to do, because the next big leg in his journey of learning was just around the corner…and he was really looking forward to it. Something told him he was in for a lot of shocks, but that was the point, and he was ready for it all. So, he turned the console off, stood up, and prepared.

He was going to Earth.

++END CHAPTER 87++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow, Zoe and Riker

34 Humans

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Zorven

As well as 57 Deathworlders…

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64 Friendly ETs, 135 Squishy Xenos and 308 Dizi Rats to be handled with care.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not necessarily share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 88: The Turning Gears

Chapter 88: The Turning Gears

Date Point: 20y2m AV
The Exodus Hive, Hunter Space

The Alpha-of-Alphas

Victory, it seemed, was still a possibility.

The Alpha-of-Alphas had been in a meditative, focal trance since the early trials of its replicator-hunters. Its underlings could oversee construction of the Hive and the preparations for exodus: it had sensed an opportunity to perhaps reverse the tide.

Now, months of calculation and planning had satisfied it that the proper order could still be restored. Perhaps the Hunters might not have to depart and regroup in some distant galaxy. They still would spread, of course. But in due time. After…setting things right.

It would be delicate, though. Things would come to a sharp edge, which might cut either way.

But that was as the order of things decreed, really. Predator and Prey were at their… holiest… when the struggle was genuine and the stakes were the agony of extinction or exaltation of life.

Many lessons of the spirit had been bestowed by the humans, the true Prophets of the Hunt. They showed that the line between predator and prey was not set in place. That the order of things would demand a renewing of blood, a refreshing of might. They had showed the Way: Conflict. Overcome, or die.

For too long, the Hunters had gorged on placid prey and grown fat and weak. Humankind had shown everyone the Way. Such was their prophecy, they had shown the fur-faced—Gaoians, now, by its decree—how to remember their predatory nature. Had taught so effectively, the supreme predator of the galaxy was himself a magnificent Gaoian Alpha of Alphas, and arguably the Deathworlder’s collective leader. Had discovered another species who would in time prey upon them all, such was their rumored all-encompassing superiority. Already, they had invited the mightiest Alpha of their kind among them, to teach him their Ways.

How could the Hunters flee in the face of that? In the very essence of what they should have been all along? But to accept that was not the same thing as to dive gleefully into the maw without a plan. And so, the Alpha-of-Alphas had planned extensively. It believed it could pinpoint the moment the cutting edge would arrive, the moment when overlapping lines of probability and future met.

The right conflict at that moment might be the end of the Hunters…or if the Alpha-of-Alphas planned correctly, it might be the moment of resurrection.

The Hunters did not fear death. They feared humiliation. And there could be no greater humiliation than to flee the moment of destiny rather than face it. Even if it should be that the Hunters should fall short…there was always Revenge.

Revenge had already consumed as much precious resource to build as the Exodus Hive had, and would ultimately consume even more…but the Alpha-of-Alphas accounted that expenditure as absolutely necessary, for one simple reason: The greatest prey of all was the mightiest predator.

And the Hunters…would hunt. Slowly, patiently and, for the first time in far too long…intelligently. And the order of things would be settled.

Once and for all.

Date Point: 20y3m AV
Entity’s Garden, the Ink Spatter Nebula

Ava Ríos

Ava had jumped so much she thought she’d be immune to the disorientation by now, but maybe she’d just been cushioned a bit by the fact most jump halls looked about the same: concrete, more concrete, and then a few decorative touches of concrete. Maybe an ad board by the exit, maybe a sign saying “Welcome to” wherever…and then some extra concrete for luck.

Or maybe it was that she’d envisioned something different when the Entity-Daemon-Her told her about the garden. She—it—had refused to go into detail: “We don’t wanna spoil the surprise!”

So, Ava had done her best to imagine what a beautiful garden in space might look like, and she’d decided that, well, this Daemon was her, so presumably they shared tastes, so she’d wound up anticipating something suitably sumptuous like the grounds of a manor or palace from a period drama. Like Versailles, maybe. Or Kenroku-en. Or High Mountain Fortress.

But of course…the Entity wasn’t restricted by the limitations that came with building on a planet. She could do things that no Earthly landscaper could have ever attempted.

So she’d played with gravity.

There were apple trees growing down from the ceiling. As Ava craned her neck back and gawked at them, she watched the thump of her jump arrival stir a few blossoms loose, only for them to snow away from her, upwards.

Then she looked back down. The jump platform was on an island in the middle of a still, perfect lake. A small decorative bridge of white stone hopped over to the shore, and beneath it ran a tree-flanked stream which ran away…then left….then climbed the wall and over and back down and under another bridge and—

For a second, it was almost too much. She nearly found it dizzying, vertigo-inducing…but when she blinked, took a deep breath, and opened her eyes again, a kind of illusion settled in, like that thing with two faces and a vase. With the right way of looking at it, she wasn’t gawping up at an inverted orchard, but standing on a pretty island in the shade of a blossom canopy, with a meandering path wandering away from her down an intimate green tunnel while a babbling brook weaved under its bridges.

The fact that it always weaved from right to left and never back the other way was a really neat trick, actually.

Beside her, Derek uttered an enraptured sigh. “Jesus…”

Ava squeezed his hand. “Yeah.”

A soft, disembodied giggle from behind them gained a body as Ava’s daemon counterpart manifested. Apparently she didn’t need the drone to project a hologram, here. “I’m glad you like it.”

“I don’t think I would ever have thought of a design like this!” Ava admitted.

“We were a little worried it’d come across as the twisted product of a damaged mind,” holo-Her said, and looked up approvingly at the overhead blossom spread. “We don’t want to make people uncomfortable.”

“It was…a little jarring at first,” Derek acknowledged, then looked back down the garden tunnel. “But I think you struck the balance.”

The avatar smiled, and extended a ‘shall we?’ hand.

The next little delight was buzzing and humming back and forth along the path’s edge, periodically pausing above a flower bed and dipping its proboscis not into a flower, but into the soil. It looked like a bumblebee, if bees were made of shimmering opalescent composite, and it obediently lifted itself up to alight on Ava’s finger when she reached toward it.

“You really pulled out all the stops to make this place a paradise, huh?”

“As much as we can,” her doppelganger agreed. “Anything that could be prettified, was.”

“What’s it do?” Derek asked, as it transferred itself to his finger.

“Monitors soil condition. Acidity, moisture levels. It’s not like we have fingers we can stick in the soil, is it? It’d also be our first warning of a fungal disease or aphids or something, but we don’t have those here…yet.” the daemon’s little flash of a half smile and twitchy almost-shrug weirded Ava out a little, but only because she knew it was exactly what she herself did a couple times in every conversation. “I guess we’ll get them eventually, if people arrive from Earth and bring dirt on their shoes and stuff.”

And there was a difference. Ava wasn’t sure that was the sort of detail she’d have thought to think ahead on…That was the confounding thing about this Entity, sometimes it was like talking to a slightly more confident and composed version of herself, other times it was like talking to somebody else entirely, a really meticulous thinker.

She scratched Hannah’s ears for comfort until the thought became less uncomfortable, and smiled when she noted the drone-fly was buzzing politely in front of the dog’s sniffer for inspection. When she looked up at the holo-herself, she saw a mischievous glint in her eyes.

“So…I have to ask.” Ava stood up and carried on down the path. Overhead, the stream bounced and bubbled over some stones. “As lovely as this all is—”

“What’s it in aid of?” other-Ava finished. “You’ll see in a second. We have this…idea, you know? About what our role is, for the future. Beyond surviving. Surviving’s, like, the baseline but what then? What else?”

Ava made a mental note of that one. Good header quote. “So what’s your answer?”

“We think it’s about the same as everybody else’s. Everybody…I was gonna say ’human’ but, you know what I mean. Everyone who’s not some kinda genocidal or slavering monster, you know? It’s like those oxygen masks on airplanes. Take care of yourself first…then take care of other people.”

They crossed the third bridge and the last of the inverted trees turned out to have been disguising the moment open space yawned above and around them…

Now Ava’s senses really did wheel. It wasn’t that the space they were in was particularly big—the sturdy dome was actually only about twenty feet up—but the scale of what was going on beyond it kept unfolding and getting bigger and bigger…

Those weren’t stars out there, they were in the heart of a nebula literally named for being inky black. But still the sky was alive with points of light. Rivers of them.

Beside her, her daemon self looked up at it all, but there was no sign of pride in her expression. Her voice was quiet, and somber. “Here’s something we can do better than anyone or anything else. We can build. We can grow. Each time a new probe comes online, our industrial base expands. Exponentially. There’s no limit, except the one we choose to set. But again, what’s it all for? We’re…not human. But we were; we were you. If anyone can understand just what we’re looking for…”

Ava felt Derek squeeze her hand hard, and turned away from it, back to the somehow more comforting and familiar spectacle of a sideways forest. “I…yeah. Mierda.”

“You said it, sister.” Daemon Ava laughed slightly, and sobered just as quickly. “So…tell the world. Show them. Lay us bare. Please.”

“…That’s my body you’re asking to show off,” Ava pointed out.

“Well, maybe not in that sense then, but—”

“No, no.” Ava stopped her. “It’s alright. I’ve always felt I should do one myself, it just always felt…journalists don’t report on themselves, you know?”

“Well, then this is a unique opportunity to have your cake and eat it, I guess?”

Ava couldn’t deny that. She looked up again, at the constellation of multiplying probes through the dome. She ought to be terrified of power like that. It ought to be a nightmare vision of the galaxy’s looming destruction…but she knew herself, and the Entity felt enough like herself that somehow…

Somehow, instead, she felt almost reassured by them. And she wanted other people to feel that too. “So…do you have somewhere extra special set up for the shoot?” she asked.

Her other self beamed proudly.

“Come and see,” she said.

Date Point: 20y3m AV
HMS Caledonia, interstellar space

Corporal Hunter (Gonzo) Thompson

Life had been nothing but search-and-rescue ops for a couple of weeks now. With a lot more search than rescue. ET or human, space combat was some kinda great equalizer, really. If you were living in a pressurized metal can in the void of space and something tore it open, didn’t matter if you were a deathworlder or not, no matter what unsympathetic shit Firth had to say about “squishy xenos.”

He didn’t really mean it, Gonzo reckoned. It was just his way of venting. They were all stressed, all bone-tired and suit-sore, and they’d rescued way fewer living folks than they had pushed corpses out the way.

And they’d had more than one op, like today’s, where they didn’t rescue even one. Gonzo wasn’t sure if it was ‘cuz the Hunters had those crazy new weapons, or ‘cuz Dominion ship design was way too dependent on forcefields and stuff to keep the air inside in an emergency.

Bit of both, prob’ly.

As the gravity and pressure came back and Gonzo’s boots settled on Cally’s deck, he could swear he felt heavier than ever. There was a cluster of cots in the corner singing to him, but there was a whole marathon of de-suiting and debrief to go first…

Ugh.

He endured the de-suiting in silence, though he did try and let his techs cheer him up a bit. It was nice of ‘em to try. But you had to be in the right kinda mood to really enjoy being half-frozen and then yanked out of a supertight spacesuit, and…

Debrief went easier, at least. Major Costello was along for the ride today, and he was sympathetic, kept it quick, and knew they all just wanted to crash. He did have some news to share, though: the Dominion Security Council had finally issued an emergency travel lockdown order.

Which was either about fuckin’ time, or too little too fuckin’ late. But it was something. Maybe. Okay, no more freighters getting hit on the spacelanes, but Hunter wondered what they were gonna do about the attacks on stations and little unprotected colonies.

Or, for that matter, how the hell the galaxy was gonna cope with a lockdown like that. Some places got all their food by interstellar freighter. Some places, like Cimbrean, made most’a their money off exports.

Shit, maybe everywhere would finally switch over to jump arrays. Maybe. But that’d take a while and lotsa folks would be stuck goin’ without in the meantime…

Thoughts like that didn’t help him sleep at all. He stretched out on his cot and closed his eyes, but it just didn’t quite happen, somehow. Weirdest fuckin’ thing, if they’d had to fight anything in all these ops, he’d’ve slept like a baby. But something about a fruitless SAR kept Hunter’s brain turning over.

Still, he must’ve dozed a bit because Burgess gave him a kick to wake him up: they were back at Cimbrean, ready to jump down to Sharman, get some real rest in real beds…And, as it turned out, meet the FNG.

Senior Airman Ryan Cross, USAF pararescue. Their new Protector, a short tank of a man and ridiculously fit already. He’d even claimed ‘Horse’s vacant room in the barracks, not knowing the significance. Throw in the fact the entire team was cranky from being all worn down and bummed out, and, yeah, he hadn’t exactly set himself up to be the most popular guy in town. Firth, of course, always looking to grow and seemingly never too exhausted to squeeze in one more brutal workout for the day, decided to break in the new kid and educate him on the meaning of suffering. Yan joined in too, because anything Firth could do, Yan aspired to match.

Poor bastard. Hunter was too tired for all the hazing shit, though. He said hi, crammed a post-op supplement meal pack into his face, and hit his bed like a hammer dropping.

At least this time, the universe let him sleep as much as he needed.

Date Point: 20y3m2d AV
Ekallim-Igigi, New Sumer system

Pandrosion of Alexandria

Pandrosion’s place when the general alarm sounded was aboard her ship.

The Hypatia wasn’t an engine of devastation like Gladiatrix or Onna-Musha. Her ship’s first and foremost role was scientific. In fact Pandrosion was quite sure she and her beloved vessel held the galactic record for deepest dive into a gas giant’s extreme depths. She was the only living human—very probably the only living thing—ever to see metalized hydrogen with her own eyes.

A trip never to be repeated, that: had anything at all gone wrong, she wouldn’t have had time to notice before instant oblivion took her. But the long-lived should dance with death occasionally. To remind themselves.

So Hypatia was, by a wide margin, the toughest ship in the fleet. And one of the most well-equipped with sophisticated sensors. She was SIngularity’s eyes in battle, the light that pierced the fog of war and lit up foes for her more devastating sisters to annihilate. Her sensors saw all.

Unless, in this case, they protectively shut themselves off to avoid being fried by the sudden wash of apocalyptic energy that slapped New Sumer’s system shield like the Lord God’s own stern hand. Pandrosion spent a few stunned seconds staring uselessly at her temporarily blind display until it came back up and she could breathe again.

The shield held.

Beyond it, the handful of Hierarchy-typical contacts that had warped up on them turned and slid away into the interstellar black. The fleet stood down once not even Hypatia’s instruments could sense them above the background noise of spacetime’s constant tiny fluctuations.

And after that of course came the investigation. Just what had they hit the shield with? The answer, most likely, was the same kind of gigaton warhead the Gao use so liberally in space combat, but shaped, so that more than eighty percent of its phenomenal energies discharged in roughly the same direction.

But of course, even that was insignificant next to the stellar output the shield absorbed every second. Just more focused. Against the more efficient electrostatic fields on ships and stations, which needed far, far less energy than eight percent of a whole G-class star’s output to establish a solid barrier, the work of dissipating energy like that would incur waste heat in the emitter, ultimately overload and burn it out.

System shields didn’t work that way. The waste heat never went anywhere near the generator, and the generator was a safe distance from its own field as further proof against bleedthrough or any distortion effects which might bypass the boundary. The price was terrible inefficiency, but when one had stars to draw from…efficiency really became no object.

The whole idea, after all, had been to design a defense system whose very simplicity was one of its strongest assets. Pandrosion considered it one of the most successful projects she’d ever worked on.

She would have been a fool to consider it invincible, however.

“They’ll find a way through eventually,” she predicted, at the evening’s strategy meeting. “If they’ve finally started treating the system shields as a priority, it’s inevitable.”

Heads bobbed around the table, including Gilgamesh’s. “There is no such thing as an impregnable fortress. And when ours falls, Earth’s will fall shortly after, and Gao’s, and Cimbrean’s…”

Lord Keeda’s ears were set at a solemn, troubled angle. “Earth won’t fall easily. Even if the shield around Sol falls, I would still say the fight for humanity is not hopeless. The gao, though…my people are stretched thin and exhausted by the last invasion, and facing a population collapse soon. If their shield falls, if the Hierarchy descend on them…”

“Then we must win this war while we still have the use of that which has made it winnable,” Tomoe said.

“We have no concept of a timeframe,” Leifini pointed out. “It may take them centuries to defeat the system shield.”

“Or they may already have figured it out,” Mevia replied. “Today’s strike may have given them everything they need, and the next one will be the end of Ekallim-Igigi. As you said, we don’t know.”

“If that is so, then our strategic options approach zero.”

“Then we must act as though the shields have not yet been defeated, but may fall imminently,” Gilgamesh concluded. He drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the table for a few seconds, before scratching at his beard. “I have been giving thought to reaching out to the OmoAru. Neither the Gao nor the AEC governments trust them enough to bring them in beyond arms’ length…Perhaps we, as their only technological peers, may find some useful alliance there.”

“To what end?” Leifini asked.

“To the end that isolation is inevitable death while each alliance we strike improves our chances…Yekiidaa, my brother. Do you believe your nose can endure them?”

Y!’kiidaa chittered resignedly. “For you, it can.”

“Good. I believe they have a hunger to be of use, just as we do. And as our only real technological peers, we can perhaps provide them with what they truly need.”

Heads ducked, nodded and bobbled around the table as Singularity’s leaders agreed.

“One other point…I believe the time has come to collect an archive and open it,” Leifini said. “We are out in the open now, there is nothing to be gained by further caution. I propose we lift one and study it. They must link together somehow and perhaps by taking one apart we will be able to follow those links and unearth them all.”

“Agreed,” Pandrosion knocked her knuckles lightly on the table in support. “I would see to it myself, in fact.”

“You should establish a research post far from Ekallim-Igigi to house it,” Yekiidaa suggested. “In case of any…nasty surprises.”

“An exciting time is ahead of us!” Boomed Gilgamesh. “Make it so. Cautiously, please! And I think this would be an excellent opportunity to build trust with Earth as well. We should invite this Erebor to participate! In the meanwhile…” Gilgamesh checked his watch—a gift from the ambassador, and a trinket he took immediate delight in. “I have an appointment with Etsicitty. Gods willing, I will prove to be slightly less embarrassed than in our last meeting!”

“You enjoy him,” Pandrosion noted with a smile.

“Of course,” he boomed. “He is an enjoyable young man! Unassuming, but perceptive and aggressive, extremely intelligent…a good father. And such a man! I had almost forgotten the delights of truly striving! Here is the Soldier, a foot shorter and five thousand years my junior, yet he can respectfully humble me in gymnasium. For now at least! How could I not love him?”

Pandrosion felt her smile grow wider. Somehow, for all his age and responsibilities and cares…her husband was still so full of the joy of life. She resisted the instinct to remind him that Etsicitty was an ambassador rather than a friend, though: he didn’t need it, really. And it would have been futile. He befriended everyone he respected regardless if their role was adversarial or otherwise. He was of ancient instinct, there…

But perhaps that more ancient mode of alliance-building was what was needed right now. And the friendship with Etsicitty in particular may prove strategic. The young man had every reason to hate Gilgamesh, after all. He’d suffered greatly on Nightmare by all accounts…

But it had made him the man he was today, too. And who could refuse the apologetic friendship of a god-king? Or ignore the more primal dynamic underlying it? Julian must surely have taken some cathartic joy in so thoroughly upstaging a literal figure of myth, after all…

There were a few last minutiae to handle after the king had departed, which Pandrosion duly paid attention for but had nothing to contribute to. Already, her mind was turning over the opportunity she’d awaited from the first moment she ever laid eyes on an archive: the chance, at long last to pierce its shell and inspect the innards. What wonders would she find within?

Time would tell.

Date Point: 20y3m3d AV
City of Uruk archaeological site, Iraq

Alex, Prince of Ekallim-Igigi

Maybe the surest proof that he was his father’s son was just how much he liked the baking, dry heat of Uruk. It had him sweaty right away, yeah, but instead of feeling tired, it was like a sauna instead—weirdly invigorating. He felt bouncy! Probably looked badass, too!

Maybe he understood why dad hated clothing even more, now. If this was the sort of place he grew up, even when it was wetter and greener…wait, wouldn’t that be hot and humid, then?

Anyway. Here he was, now. In Uruk. Modern Iraq. In a pair of tough cargo shorts and some really sturdy sandals, and a big nice hat to keep the sun out of his eyes. And blue-tinted aviators! Righteous had given them to him as “one of the keys to manliness.” And Ian had provided him with a nice super-stretchy t-shirt that was infinity sizes too small, colorfully depicting one of the Anunnaki. Perfect! There was also a really ridiculously lewd “Hawaiian” shirt from Righteous too, but, well…nah. Not appropriate for this. And while most people covered up entirely under such a fierce sun, he tanned quick and well, and preferred the airflow around him anyway. And henching out was sort of important, today.

It was a good thing Alex was kind of a showoff! Just like dad. Besides: he was here to prove he and his dad were for real. Pretty neat duty for a thirteen year old kid!

The White Temple Ziggurat had stopped being white a long, long time ago. And Iraq itself was…well, perhaps as befitting a place that had been civilized since the very dawn of civilization itself, the land was storied. War had visited this country in every century, and destroyed much. Right now, Iraq was poor, much poorer than it had been before the wars at the beginning of the century. The march of technology and imported alien alternatives to fossil fuels had torn apart all demand for the country’s most profitable natural resource. There was still a steady demand for plastics, but…

But the people of Iraq had a long climb ahead of them. One that the Earth’s wealthier nations couldn’t hasten, even if they had the will and money to try.

Reading all of that in Pandrosion’s lessons had been one thing. Seeing it for himself was another. He understood now, in a way that his step-mother’s dry writing could never have managed. Human nature could be painful to witness.

But it wasn’t hopeless. If he learned anything from his father and mothers: hope was eternal.

In any case, his arrival had generated some weird publicity. He didn’t make a big fuss out of it at first, but he was there as a public figure, and cameras were always looking at him. Iraqis took a shine to him basically instantly. “The Bull of Uruk” they called him, now. After all, the internet loved weird, and what was weirder than a freak slab-boy from outer space, come to his (alleged) dad’s (alleged) former palace, to (allegedly) perform some…what? Magic trick?

Well, he had a shovel and a chisel, so that should clue them in, hopefully.

He’d been followed and hounded constantly. That was okay, though. He made it work by talking to everyone, shaking hands, having tea, eating way too much biryani…Mostly, Iraq seemed to like him. A few even thought he was the coming of New Uruk.

A few more wanted to murder his face.

Let them try. He had a security detail and he’d broken HEAT-sized men while sparring, so…

Anyway, he had a cache to retrieve: a few items his father had buried the last time he’d walked this landscape in its greener days, at his favorite spot by the river where he and Keeda had caught an absolutely massive fish. Somehow the story had grown in the telling into them slaying a demon?

When Yekiidaa’d heard that one, he’d chittered until his ribs ached.

Alex walked along the ancient bank, with his AR glasses showing him where to dig. The river had meandered over time: now, it was several miles away to the west, and Uruk sat alone in dry, barren country. But father, of course, had access to Corti GPS when he buried it. Alex’s glasses knew the coordinates down to the centimeter.

Time for the magic trick. He pulled off his shirt—the sudden surge of camera-clicking made him feel a bit self-conscious for a moment, so he countered by showing off a little—then put his shoulder into it and dug, good and quick and with total confidence. That was key, here. He had to show he knew what he’d find, and making fast work of it was a great way to do that. Also, he was the Bull of Uruk, right? May as well live it!

Didn’t take him long to dig a pretty deep hole, deeper than he was tall. In fact, he was almost eight feet down when he found what he was looking for, encased within a very compacted layer of almost-sandstone. Nobody would have ever found it if they didn’t know it was there. He chopped with his shovel, pried the slabs up and tossed them out of the hole, dug out all around and finally under the bulky treasure until, at last, it was completely free to the air.

He’d dug up father’s ancient stasis box.

Honestly, a quick read of its screen suggested it wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. Encasement hadn’t damaged it much, but there was no such thing as indefinite power. Still: it had done its job. He grabbed the box and tossed it up out of the hole with a grunt.

Minds were already well and truly blown just by that, but father had wanted to be certain. So, speech time. He jumped up out of the hole—right. Normal people couldn’t jump that easily or that high. Oh well, it helped get the point across. He was sweaty and disheveled from the work—dis-shoveled? Ha! Anyway, he probably looked extra hench from the work and the sun beating down. And thank the gods he had a nice, deep voice now. Manly! Still only like five-foot-five though, even if he was wider than a door. And really scraggly stubble. Oh well!

So, speech. He gathered everyone ‘round and opened the box. Show and tell. There was a whole collection of artifacts of course, from the mundane to the precious, but one stood out.

The small, flat object that was quite obviously a laptop. With a full charge, too. He pulled it out and showed it to the stunned, gawping gathering. He pulled out the large free-standing display too and unfolded it, and lastly unfolded the keyboard. No mouse or anything, Corth used gestures instead and the cameras for that were built into the monitor.

“This is a standard-issue portable computing workstation of Corth make, one typical to the era of my father’s rule on Earth. It has been programmed with ancient Sumerian and contains a working codex for all the human languages in use at the time. We will offer this as a gift to the human race…but a computer without software or data is useless. So, there’s more.”

He hadn’t told the archeologists that bit.

With the first miracle performed, it was time to retrieve that software. So, they returned to the White Temple proper and ascended the ziggurat. Followed carefully by some extremely upset archeologists, he remembered the VR simulation in his head. He climbed the stairs with the workstation bits folded back up and slung in a sack over his shoulder. Walked along the ancient hall, which now had no roof. Stopped where the throne would have been. Put the marker down for the AR treat they made for the archeology team.

Faced the stairs. Took the prescribed number of steps to the right from the throne, then forward, then left. Looked for the secret marks. Almost…almost faded.

It was covered by a huge paving stone. He didn’t know how much it weighed. A lot, probably. Should have called for help, got tools. Showing off could be pretty stupid…

Nah. He could heft it. So, he pried out a couple of the edging stones, found where the handgrip had been carved by father all those millennia ago. He planted himself, bent down, heaved—

More stasis boxes, in an untouched chamber embedded under the floor. He hefted the stone overhead, thumped over to the side and carefully put it down, propped up against what remained of a sturdy-looking wall. He knew just by lifting it that nobody else on Earth at the moment could have managed, so he wanted to be sure everyone saw him do the deed.

He didn’t quite keep the wobble out of his step, though. Damnit! It was a big slab and felt sorta like he was lifting a small car overhead. Hell, maybe he had! Still, he just knew Wilde would make fun of him for that! And Hoeff, too. And Julian, and Gonzo, and Bruuk and Vemik—

Anyway. He caught his breath with a huff, maybe took a little too much delight in everyone’s gawping stares…back to business. He went over to the pit and hauled out the stasis boxes.

It took a few minutes to set things up, but all those years in stasis? Well, as far as the corth workstation and portable drives were concerned, they were only, what? A few days old. And they’d only been entombed a few minutes ago. They were practically in factory condition! So of course, they worked perfectly.

Which meant the gathered archaeologists were soon treated to actual recorded footage of life in the ancient city. Alex’s father had worn the camera on his head and gone for a stroll. You could tell it was him from the height of the vantage point and the sound of his voice.

Well, the filename too. And the file metadata. But whatever, nobody else there was likely able to read ancient Sumerian in a context like this. But they could definitely hear, and see. There would be other perspectives too—dad had confidants he’d trusted with his Great Secret. But for now, this was enough. Proof of ancient connection.

They were immediately weak at the knees. There were requests to rewind, to slow-motion over particular details. Alex got the impression he’d just completely obliterated one man’s pet theory about something or other in less than five seconds of footage. And if he wasn’t careful, they were going to obliterate some heads in crawling over each other to get a better look.

So, he did the thing only he could do. He made himself into a friendly hench-kid-wall and gently persuaded everyone to back away from the priceless archeological treasure.

“Guys! Chill out, okay? Don’t worry. I brought everything we need so we can convert it all to modern formats. Yes, losslessly. And more workstations! They’re in my truck, see?”

He pointed down to his shiny new Toyota Hi-Lux. One of the things he loved about Iraq was that nobody gave any fucks about a thirteen-year-old driving a pick-up, so he’d had fun with it. He’d painted it blue! And stuck a silhouette of the Beowulf on the driver’s side door.

He gave a proper speech. Nothing too long, just enough to make it clear they were giving it all to humanity. More questions, then they drove back to base camp, set up the workstations…

Very, very happy archeologists. Awesome! Just wait until they discovered how extensive all the databases were. It wasn’t just video they’d recorded for posterity…

It wasn’t completely without incident, of course. His security detail intercepted a couple of guys, cuffed them, and confiscated their guns. But overall it was pretty quiet, and a good way to really prove to the world that Singularity were exactly what they claimed to be.

And he had to admit…walking around these, his father’s lands? It felt right somehow. And that wasn’t just the gravity being a bit lighter than they kept things in the human sector of Ekallim-Igigi. Something in his soul knew he had roots here.

Earth…felt like home.

After the stunt at Uruk of course, it was difficult for anyone to argue that Singularity, Ekallim-Igigi and Alex’s father weren’t exactly what they claimed. Alex spent the following weeks on a series of trips around the world, doing appearances, accompanying his step-mothers as they revisited the lands of their birth…

He knew what his father was doing with him. Alex knew exactly how he was being used. But…he didn’t mind. He knew the stakes they were playing at.

The Great Father had been keen to make sure he knew, as had Julian, as had the King and the President and the Prime Ministers…all of them. It was like they couldn’t fathom the idea that Alex could think past his young-kid things. Or maybe they thought he was some kinda dumb meathead? Or some combination of all that?

Maybe it was just a kind of…adult bigotry toward people younger than them. But at least it was well-meaning. And the fact was, he was starting to enjoy the role. It afforded him the chance to really see the world, get to learn how things were.

Earth was more divided than he’d thought. So much of its interstellar power was concentrated in a tiny handful of nations, and it was going to take centuries to iron things out even if everything went perfectly, which…they wouldn’t. But the thing was…Alex had centuries ahead of him. Maybe in time, he’d be here and the baked, suffering land he’d visited would be the heart of civilization again, just like it had been in his father’s time.

That was a nice dream. And importantly, it was one he could work toward realizing, one step at a time.

He had that time, now. Lots of time to discover himself, disappear for a bit. Learn who he was, not who his mothers and his father and the Great Father and ambassadors, presidents and kings and whoever else thought he would be.

“Enjoy it,” Julian had said. So had Wilde, and Bruuk. Ramsey, too. Everyone kept saying the same thing, and they were right. He’d be grown up and burdened all too quickly, as was the fate of any prince. It was time for Alex to live free.

Even if only for a few years.

Date Point: 20y3m4d AV
Entity’s Garden, the Ink Spatter Nebula

Ava Ríos

In the end, the Daemon didn’t spare Ava’s blushes one bit. She’d secretly hoped it might exercise a little self-censorship and pose for the photoshoot in a Barbie-doll body, sanitized of explicit detail, but…no such luck. Maybe if she’d asked it—her? them?—to, it would be different, but that would have been to interfere with the interview rather than be its vehicle.

And…honestly, it was the body Ava had always strived for and never quite achieved. Curvy in all the right places, flat and toned in the tummy, flawless in every regard. It would have been intimidating to stand next to such a perfect body anyway, but this one was…hers. Right down to the line of four freckles above her left hipbone. An ideal version of her.

How could anyone, male or female or whatever else, stand next to their own perfected self and not end up feeling inadequate?

But really…when she considered what the Daemon was, what the Entity was, what she—they, it, whatever—had gone through to become this, that sense of inadequacy and insecurity seemed…immature. And besides, there was no challenge in having a perfect body when the body in question was just a holographic rendering. Divorced from the limitations of flesh and blood, that exquisite figure hadn’t come from winning the eternal struggle between willpower and snacks. The Entity didn’t need to jog or hit the gym, and would never have to worry about water retention.

So really, there was nothing to feel inadequate about. It was like comparing herself to somebody’s fan-art of her.

That observation turned out to be a useful angle to work for the shoot. And, well…the Daemon was Ava. If there was one other mind in all of God’s creation that could really get her sense of artistry…

Sure enough, it/she/they understood instantly, and so they started with the bare projection drone.

That was what Laid Bare had always been about: telling the person’s story through the medium of their body, and the Daemon had a unique body, in that she could turn hers off.

But how did you get a dull gray sphere to pose? That was a beautiful challenge! The first image was abstract, almost incomprehensible, the shot perfectly timed at the moment the drone made contact with a still pond’s surface, the difference between real object and reflection only discernible from the faint ripples.

From that first, nearly formless impression, they moved on to assembly. It took a little work, and a bit of waiting while the Entity assembled a spaceworthy transparent excursion pod for her, but Ava got a fascinating set of shots of one of its probes being put together with shocking speed. The parts came together in a balletic whirl of precise motion and millimeter tolerances, and she resolved immediately to put the full process in the article as a time lapse.

Derek questioned the security of doing so; the Entity replied that it had assembled an older probe design for her, and was confident their foes could glean nothing of value.

From formless being, through raw embodiment, to the beginnings of human form. A low-resolution, janky, slightly transparent, Barbie-Doll version. From there to a more complete version, properly opaque, human in every way except hue and shade, and from there…

From there, exquisitely detailed and perfectly-formed humanity. Only the fact she emitted a little light gave away that this was still a hologram

…Oh, to hell with it. Ava bit the bullet and posed alongside herself. The vision of perfection standing opposite the vision of reality, ten years of stress and flaws right there for direct comparison. It was terrifying! Just the thought of putting everything out there like that got her heart pounding and her palms sweating and her scalp tight, but…

But she’d always felt that if she was going to ask other people to do it, she should be willing to herself. And the result was art. From nascence to assembly to growing humanity, to separation and drift. They were telling the Entity’s story, and it would have been incomplete without her.

She ended the day sitting comfortably on the grass, cooling her feet in a perfect pond alongside herself and her love…and a thought struck her.

“Hey. Derek?”

He was snoozing on the grass with his hands behind his head. “Yuh?”

“How about here?”

“Huh?”

“For the wedding.” Ava scratched the scruff of Hannah’s neck and looked around. “Right here.”

He opened his eyes, looked up at an upside-down apple tree, and chuckled. “…Yeah. Yeah, I like it. If our host’s okay with it, of course?”

The daemon beamed at them both. “We’d be delighted.”

“Then it’s settled,” Ava decided. “Right here.”

She looked at her digitized self, who watched her back. There had been so many ways she could have fallen apart when she learned of what had really happened to her in Egypt. And yeah, at first she’d freaked out and needed help but after that…

After that had come a kind of rebuilding. Laid on the foundation of an answered question. She’d done what she did, she’d knuckled down, investigated, worked at what had troubled her, and come out the other side into…well, into a weird kind of paradise.

Maybe that was something to try and share. Something else to work into the article. Or something to mention at the wedding? Or—

Or maybe she should stop planning and stop worrying for the time being, and just sit back and enjoy the water, the grass, and the comfort of the moment.

She chose the latter.

Date Point: 20y4m AV
USS Chitimacha, responding to distress call

Lieutenant James Boyt

Things had got pretty serious among the gunboat crews after what happened to the Wampanoag. Before, postings on a Misfit-class had been fun, exciting, prestigious and a helluva way to pick up girls in bars: now there was a kind of grim resolve about the job. A whole lot of vengeance, mixed with fatalistic black humor.

After all, for all they knew, each time they answered a distress beacon they might be dead within an instant of arriving. Though there was a certain bleak comfort in knowing they’d never notice it.

This time, thank God, wasn’t that.

In fact, this time, it seemed the Hunters had left survivors. Boyt’s contact list resolved three intact civilian beacons: water tankers. Old, slow ones. No wonder they were still out here so far from safety despite the lockdown order, or maybe they were just stupid and reckless and had ignored it. Either way, they were easy prey: the Chitimacha herself could have sunk all three in less than a second, so the fact these three were still intact suggested the Hunters had…spared them?

Or left them as bait.

“Active ping,” he ordered, then got on radio comms. “Convoy lead, this is USS Chitimacha, answering your mayday. how may we render assistance?”

It took nearly a minute for whoever was on that ship to scramble their way to answering, time in which Chitimacha and her drones swept the volume three times with active sensors and found…nothing. The disturbed, decaying particles left behind by Hunter warp drives. Two diffuse clouds of particulate matter, both substantially less than the mass of a water carrier, what little remained fizzing with static charge from where it had escaped outward along the edge of a collection field.

The Hunters, it seemed, had hit and gone.

The Vz’ktk convoy leader was…well. Her species had an alien psychology. They didn’t really care about the two destroyed ships. They only cared that they themselves were alive. Like deer watching a pack of wolves munching on one of their fallen, then putting their heads back down to graze. A human would have been sweating, distraught, hungry for any knowledge or action to stop that from happening again, but to the Domain species…the danger was not immediate, so they could count themselves lucky and get back to work.

It took the arrival of USS Karuk and USS Frank Herbert, plus an additional twenty minutes to finally drive home the idea that hey, guys, you should still be worried because maybe they’ll come back.

Boyt didn’t think of himself as any kind of a species supremacist but goddamn! How had a species who struggled that much with such a basic concept even achieved basic tool use?

Still, they did get it. And they accepted a towed jump back to a safe station, after much complaining about their schedule and the disruption and a whole bunch of irrelevant bullshit. Boyt was glad to untether them and let them complain to the AEC port authorities at Armstrong, because the board was still lit up with distress calls.

The FIC passed down Chitimacha’s next target, and they jumped to the nearest fleet beacon. Dropped its replacement, pointed their nose, went to maximum warp. Ten minutes to intercept. Ten minutes that passed in tense silence broken only by essential communication.

This time, the Hunters had left nothing to save.

Recall jump rather than linger, make report, receive the next call, prepare to jump again…

The order was belayed. They were standing down. No reason given, but Boyt could guess. They were just exhausting good people and putting themselves in needless danger in a futile effort to save people who were already dead. The more they did it, the more they opened themselves up to the next one being an ambush.

They docked at Armstrong and stood down. There was a lot of maintenance to do before they could disembark for some well-earned leave, but no amount of leave was going to lift Boyt’s spirits very much. After all: Out in the dark, the Hunters were still rampaging.

And they had no idea how they were going to stop it.

Date Point: 20y4m1w AV
Planet Aru, the OmoAru Remnant

Y!’kiidaa

The Hierarchy had pulled a deeply cruel trick on the OmoAru. They were pleasant, intelligent, curious, tragic, hard-working people doing their very best to pull their species back from the very edge of extinction…

And they were almost impossible to like.

Oh, that was unfair. They were entirely likable through comms! In correspondence and messaging, they were as charming as anybody else. But in person, the technology embedded in their very DNA whispered terrible things to a deathworlder’s instincts.

Decay/rot/danger/untrustworthy/unhealthy/unsafe/unclean

The scent itself was merely industrially unpleasant, like the smell of a vehicle fire. But it carried something that filled the role of a pheromone, and not a happy one. One that tickled the back of the brain and promised that the thing in front of them was wrong. ‘Be wary’ it said to the oldest, most automatic place in Y!’kiidaa’s head, and they listened.

Overcoming it took an effort of constant will. Fortunately, Y!’kiidaa had had a very long time to practice.

“So many of them are standing idle…” he observed.

They were standing on the observation deck of a luxury yacht that had been left in orbit above long ago, only to be reclaimed by the Remnant and refurbished into a diplomatic ship. Y!’kiidaa had to give them credit, they certainly knew how to show off their beautiful world, with its sandy continents and emerald oceans.

But in this case, they were showing off their orbital factories. Thousands of them, an artificial ring system of them girdling the planet.

His guide was the OmoAru’s ambassador to the Dominion Security, AtaUmuUi, and the perpetual slight smile that was a function of his species’ bone structure rather than actual mood belied the sad shake of his head. “The humans of Earth were interested in renting run-time, but their treaty negotiations are complex, their needs minimal compared to our output potential, and our production capacity far outstrips the supply of available crew. I believe the Locayl have also been making a bid…”

“In other words, you’re a seller too large for the market.”

Ata sighed heavily. “Ours was the largest empire in the galaxy, once.”

Y!’Kiidaa chittered, “Indeed! I remember.”

“You saw it for yourself?” Ata asked, ducking his head curiously

“I did. We were in hiding, of course, but we watched, and mourned, and prayed for you.”

“I suppose that was all you could do…” Ata twitched his tail morosely, then looked out at the drifting shipyards. “You saw, then, how many ships we had. How many of them are probably still drifting out there in interstellar space after the Droud took their crews’ minds and they warped indefinitely until the hull charge fried them. I’ve always thought it a mercy of sorts that at least their end came relatively quickly. They didn’t…linger.”

“I know I would prefer that,” Kiidaa agreed, doing his best to be mindful that the stab of impatience he felt over Ata’s melancholy wasn’t really what he felt; it was just his nose.

“I suppose my question for you, then, is…Your faction is so tiny. Larger than we are now by population, to be sure, but still…can you really have the materials and personnel to need production on the scale these factories can offer?”

“We can.” Kiidaa turned away from the window to explain. “Ekallim-Igigi has no difficulty in acquiring raw material, but the need to keep the station small enough to travel has always limited our production and storage capacity. Now, we are staying put and we have a virgin system to harvest for resources…and our entire population is trained for war. We have the crews, and the designs, and a sizeable enough fleet…”

“Then why come to us?”

“Because we have built that fleet up in secrecy and slowly. Now, we are facing true, open warfare. Our needs have changed.”

AtaUmuUi’s tail curled expressively one way then the other, before he fished a huh from a pouch on his belt and turned it over in his hands. Even behind the stench of his nanotech, Y!’kiidaa could smell the way the weird, smooth device instantly lifted him out of his melancholy mood and filled him with resolve.

It was kinda clever, that they’d outsourced their aggression to a trinket. Sad that they’d needed to, but well done them for thinkin’ to do it.

“I am open to the idea, as are my people,” he said, putting the huh away again. “We would require a proper written treaty, perhaps third-party arbitration through the Dominion…”

“We’re not interested in gettin’ into a bad deal either. Just so long as you can I can agree, here, today, in principle, to starting the process, yijao?”

“Agreed.”

It was only a beginning, but to Y!’kiidaa it felt good. Him, the maimed son of a people forever scarred by ancient evil, Ata very much the same in some respects. Two of the free galaxy’s tiniest but most ancient factions, their power carefully hidden and preserved against the ages…both having gone looking for an answer to the great problems of life in their own ways.

Too bad for Ata his people had chosen the wrong way, but they didn’t deserve extinction for it. In time, perhaps they’d even be able to rid themselves of the nanotech and the vulnerability it thrust upon them.

Yes. They could be Heroes again, if given the chance. Of that, Y!’kiidaa was certain. So he held his breath, willed down the nagging instinct that wanted him to hate and distrust, and shook hands. The galaxy wasn’t healed yet, and everyone would have their part to play. Who was he to deny the OmoAru their resurrection?

Let them work. Let them fight.

And together, let them win.

Date Point: 20y4m1w AV
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

It had been such a good plan, too. Daar’s promising evening with a carefully and well-earned prize of a woman was one of the few he actually fret over! He’d done a floral arrangement, planned a dinner, even practiced cooking it. Naydi thought it was hilarious!

“Bumpkin, are you planning to start a harem? Are the Females at last safe from your lust?”

His embarrassed denials only made her chitter louder.

So, for the lovely Keela’s benefit tonight (and definitely not to start a gods-damned harem!) there was music, there was his good homebrew talamay, there was that book she’d specifically wanted him to read…

And then there was his aide knocking on the door to completely break the spell with a “My Father?”

Oh no…

Daar quickly ran through a calming litany in his head and cracked the door open. “…Yes Deego, what is?”

Deego’s ears twisted and his posture drooped apologetically. “There’s a priority meeting for you in the orange office.”

Of course there was.

“That’ll be a big ask,” Daar grumbled, then turned his attention to the lovely specimen of a brownfur he was to bed that night. “Darlin’ I think duty calls me. Don’t know how long I’ll be…”

He’d been gently courting Keela for months since she weren’t the type ‘ta fall ‘fer his usual smarmy charms. He seemed ‘ta go in ‘fer those sortsa gals lately—it’d been a fun challenge! An’ she was a warrior-goddess to make even Myun blush! But now, at the beginning of what he’d hoped would be a fun few months, mebbe the first of a few cubs, even…

“I can be patient,” she purred. “And you still haven’t told me your ‘most bestest’ come-on line. It had better be exquisitely awful…”

“Ha! Mebbe when I get back…make ‘yerself comfortable, yijao?” They sniffed noses, and part ways for the moment.

Daar wasn’t angry, he reminded himself. Pent-up and frustrated, yeah, but not at anyone in particular. He especially wasn’t going to take it out on the poor little silverfur next to him, who stunk of fear and was visibly trembling…

He sighed, and gave the little guy a friendly, inviting nuzzle against his chest. “You ain’t gotta worry ‘bout anything, y’hear? I knows ’yer only doin’ ‘yer job.”

That was the biggest downside to bein’ what he was. People trusted he was good for his word, but of course he’d needed to be a genuine terror from time to time, and people remembered. Daar could instantly pulp the messenger with an errant pawswipe and they both knew it. Add in even the barest whiff of frustration or annoyance, and…

“I am deeply sorry, My Father. I do not wish to interfere with your evening—”

“Vark sent ‘ya, I can smell it. Means it’s important ‘cuz he has access to my calendar, and he ain’t stupid enough ‘ta interrupt my private time with such a lovely woman without good reason! So don’t worry. I’mma beat him up instead! Now…what’s up?”

The young male chittered nervously, and Daar did his bestest to encourage it with a pant-grin and a bit more of a friendly cuddle.

He relaxed, a little. And got to business. “Thank you, My Father…so in this case, it’s an interruption you specifically requested.”

…Of course it would be. Karma would demand no less. Whisk ‘em away on official business right as his blood was gettin’ up, an’ it were his own damn prudence ahead o’ time that did it.

Daar just chittered resignedly. “Right, right. Which thing, s’pecifically?”

“Something to do with force projection?”

Ah! That. Right. Well, it weren’t worth delayin’ some sweet relaxin’ hours wit’ a beautiful woman…but fuck it. Duty was duty.

He duck-nodded. “Very good. ‘Yer dismissed if ‘ya want. Go grab a snack! I hear the mess has barbeque buns this time o’ day…”

Vark was waiting for him in the Orange Office, a room decorated entirely in shades of all the new hues now visible to Daar’s eyes. The painting of an Earthling tiger behind the desk was particularly inspiring, as was the rich tapestry on the far wall depicting the Avenging Fury in low orbit over a sun. It was delightfully tacky, really, but Daar loved it, and so did Vark.

Vark took one sniff toward him and flattened his ears. “Ah. I apologize.”

“Nah. My own instruction, weren’t it?” Daar parked himself on the heavy, reinforced wooden bench that served in lieu of a desk chair, and gave Vark an expectant look. “So. Force projection.”

“Worse than we feared,” Vark rumbled, and placed the report in front of him. “Between the nuke on Hell, the pollution there and on Mordor, attrition in space operations, mental health casualties an’ a couple extra harsh winters here on Gao, we’re gonna need ‘ta retire more of the Grand Army this year than projected.”

Daar’s ears tipped back unhappily, and he scanned the summary and recommendations page.

“That’s becomin’ a repeatin’ refrain.”

“Not enough o’ the Army are survivin’ ‘ta their end of service, or are gettin’ invalided out early and then can’t work,” Vark said, grimly. “Disability’s a big problem, an’ Cruezzir can’t fix it all. It ain’t enough to fix the aging problem at scale an’ it especially ain’t fixin’ the mental trauma.”

There was no arguin’ with the numbers, alas. They either retired some able-bodied troops from the Grand Army and put ‘em to work elsewhere, or the entire Gaoian economy would be short-staffed in critical areas within two years, and that in turn would lead to starvation, further shortages, further starvation, death, further shortages…

A terrible snowball, poised to start rollin’ down the mountain unless they were very careful. But at the same time, each time they robbed the Grand Army of its able-bodied troops, they robbed it of fighting effectiveness, and it was still very much needed.

An’ the Females on their island paradise on Cimbrean, or in their well-guarded enclaves on the homeworld, felt safe, which meant they were havin’ a higher’n average female birth rate at the moment too. Which was good! That was the salvation of the species, right there…

But potentially also its downfall. There needed ‘ta be balance.

Couldn’t afford ‘ta keep the Grand Army. Couldn’t afford ‘ta lose it. That left really only one option. Go all-in on his elite forces.

Daar wasn’t really a fan of that idea. Yeah, he was the mostest elite, no arguin’ that…but there were a lot o’ downsides ‘ta overreliance on such capable an’ rare warriors. A lotta things you needed an army for, not just the specialists. If only he could afford the army at this point. But…no. Keeping it would mean collapse, defeat, and extinction. It was lose the army, or lose the Gao.

Sometimes, the hardest choices were hard because they weren’t really a choice at all.

He was going to have to read the recommendations in full which meant, yes, his pleasant evening was firmly and completely gone. Oh well. Life as Great Father couldn’t be all females an’ farming.

Then there was the question of his enemy. What were they up to?

They din’t know. They only had six JETS teams to explore the ancient ruins of the galaxy, and to be frank it had to be men that kind o’ capable.

So. There was a start. Lotta males in the Grand Army good enough for JETS! Especially if they had good humans wit’ them. And good ten’gewek—

Well, balls. He knew immediately what that was gonna entail. And he din’t like it one little bit. He shared his realization with Vark.

“That’ll be a big ask.”

“I know. Gonna be a big Givin’ ta’ even ask it, too.”

“I don’t like how you said that, My Father…”

“I gotta do this myself, Vark. No help. But take a look at this body o’ mine and say I can’t.”

“I don’t even know what you’ll be doing!”

“Sure. And?”

Vark’s response was a quietly submissive keen and ears flattened as far backward as he could manage.

Sometimes, that din’t feel all that awesome.

“Right,” Daar sighed. “I assume ‘ya got a stack o’ readin’ fer me, then?”

“…Yes, My Father.”

“Good. I’ll set in, right after I make apologies to my partner for tonight. You go get some exercise in, okay? You smell restless and I can’t have a flabby Grandfather.”

“Someone’s gotta keep Fiin in line…”

“Essactly!” Daar tucked the report into his Bag of Many Things, rose from the desk, and headed for the door. Somewhere in the back of his head, the question of what kinda gift would be suitable apology for Keela was turning over. Not that she’d expect one—he didn’t like the kinda female who would, as a rule—but that just meant she’d deserve one all the more.

It was a long read. And an even longer bit o’ thinkin’, and then callin’ in his aides and draftin’ the orders and on and on and on until he was just tired and his brain felt like it was full o’ toast crumbs.

He ordered some fish on toast too, while he finalized matters.

In the end, he didn’t need ‘ta apologize at all. Keela and his Naydi had conspired in the bestest, most evillest ways the Females could manage: they put him to bed. Gently, tenderly, quietly. Scratched his ears, curled up with and appreciated him…

Honestly, it were even better than what he’d had planned ‘fer the night.

Still though. Mebbe th’ mornin’ would be fun in its own way too…

Assumin’ nothing else came along to interrupt him.

Date Point: 20y5m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Corporal Hunter (Gonzo) Thompson

Lots of changes underway, and all of it had happened fast from Gonzo’s low-ranking caveman perspective. As a means of simplifying, allegedly, SOR was soon to become its own multi-national paramilitary, mostly independent of the militaries that currently composed it. Their ranks and uniforms would be changing. Recruitment would be changing. Mandatory retirement was going away, since it took upwards of a decade to make a good HEAT or JETS operator…and permanent, individually engineered single-shot Crude was gonna be offered to them, to “reduce the risk” of profiteering or proliferation…allegedly…

Uh-huh. Not hard to miss a mountain of bullshit that big.

Big, big changes. But those weren’t quite here, yet. Even the single-shot Crude—similar idea to what the Corti had given Daar, apparently—was something they were approaching with a lot of caution. In fact, right now, there was really only one mutant on-team who needed it.

Righteous would be leading the way. Which made sense, really. The dude was…fuck, how to even describe him? He made the biggest, most extreme athletes in existence look scrawny! Julian, Yan, Adam at his best? Even short crazy brickhouses like Hoeff or that Alex kid? Didn’t matter. None of them even fuckin’ remotely compared at this point. He had Daar-like density too, had filled out enough to make his Zangief statue look puny. Since he’d finally put the hammer down, he’d managed all that without ruining the fuckin’ perfect lines of his physique, either. Firth was literally made to do this.

And so, he did. He was half-jokingly probably among the first members of a new subspecies of human being. And half-joking was the truth of it, because there were multiple, significant differences in him compared to normal people. Everything from tissue cross-sections to how his tendons worked, right down to his super-broad rib cage and his ridiculously robust skeleton. Firth was built like a goddamned ultra-neanderthal in every way, especially if one considered his noggin. He was literally thick-skulled and heavy-browed. Heavy-jawed too, and it was all put together a bit more like a gaoian or ten’gewek than an actual proper human! What the hell even was he? That was more than enough to mark him as not at all normal. He was a literal goddamn meathead and unless you looked closely you’d never know there was anything different. He really was a fuckin’ freak!

It made a dude wonder: was Firth legitimately part caveman? Or gorilla? Was that really just “good breeding” like the Corti and Gilgamites all swore up and down was the truth?

…Shit. What about Adam? Julian? Hell, Hunter himself? He was of the Line, after all…fuck. Did he have a little of that weirdness in him, too? Honestly…probably. He should probably pay more attention when he went in for his next general check-up.

In any case. Lots to worry about, lots about to change. Not a lot he could do about it. But today at least, they could get some Mass upgrades! It was a day that was a long time coming, too. Righteous and his ridiculously magnificent body had defeated the EV-MASS, and that monstrous feat of human ability meant the Gao, keen to maintain a well-armored ally, were finally sharing their suit tech. And so, after a year of weekly frustration on his part, of his techs almost daily needing to adjust and almost rebuild his suit to accommodate his ever-growing, ever-hardening body…

Today, at last, Righteous would be stepping into a self-adapting, self-expanding, self-repairing, and autonomously motile nanotech undersuit. No more would they need to pain-stakingly insert new sections by hand, the suit had a reserve of material built into his support pack; it could quite literally grow with him. No more would Righteous single-handedly blow their suit budget several times over, just through the power of his huge. Now, he would have a suit worthy of him and what he could do.

This was a much bigger deal than the uninitiated understood. In the battle between a pressure vessel and the thing being kept under pressure…the vessel could never lose. Loss of pressure in battle or in space would be certain death for them. For anyone else, this wasn’t a problem. Not even the toughest, craziest hard-body bruisers the deathworld allies could offer were a match for the midsuit’s crushing embrace.

Not Righteous. He’d managed to tear the thing. More than once! The first incident, somehow, was through the simple act of moving too aggressively. Another, it had ruptured around his bicep when he bent down to pick up an obstructing boulder, and another it’d burst open around his hips after nothing more than a leap, and that literally right after they’d finished repairs, too.

He was in elite company with that dubious honor: only Daar had ever managed such a similar accident. Which meant, really, Righteous was getting a scaled-down version of Daar’s latest armor. It wouldn’t be as extreme a crushing protection as the big emperor-bear could wield, at least not at first, but it would handily outclass everyone else’s, and he could be a running-monkey while wearing it.

But before then, he had to get fit for the thing. So, naturally, he’d spent the day in vigorous training, from the buttcrack of dawn until early evening toward the end of the office day, when he’d tired of tying the Beefs into knots and didn’t wanna break all his PRs again.

And taken the opportunity to teach Hunter a bit more about hand-to-hand. Against most of the team, Hunter racked up the victories because of his speed, strength, and years of practice. Against Julian, Hunter tended to lose because his opponent was physically far superior, but he could still eke out victories with skill.

Against Firth, he was like an ant attempting to spar with the hulk, who happened to be a god-tier expert in the martial arts. Not many could claim experience like him, and it was all Hunter could do to survive the experience, really. Firth toyed with him like a cat playing with a mouse. Until he got bored. Then he more or less just broke Hunter in place, and put him out of his misery.

It hurt.

“Git up, you coulda escaped that.” Firth reached down and yoinked Hunter back up to and off his feet with a flick of his wrist, and did it so forcefully he would have torn Hunter’s arm right out of its socket if he hadn’t been prepared. He bent his knees and landed properly; even in supergravity, Firth had managed to fling him damn near to the roof.

It took Hunter a moment to regain his balance. “Fuck, did’ya need to do that?!”

Firth just shrugged his giant beachball-shaming shoulders. “Stop bein’ so puny, then. Now, lemme show you how—ah. Well, never mind I guess.” The new suit contractors peered in through the gym door, there to summon him toward the fitting room. “Looks like the show’s about to begin.”

Hunter just nodded, hobbled over to the edge, disabled the grav plating, and attempted to recover his dignity. It didn’t work. Firth meanwhile sprang up cat-like and prowled toward the door, as if he’d not been exerting himself at all. Bastard.

Now, though, the tables would turn. It was time for Measurement, one of the HEAT’s more shameless rites of passage. Firth stood naked on the biomechanical metrology platform while his suit techs and the workhouse engineers formed a circle around him, ready to record a new kinesthetic baseline. The big man was the center of dubious attention today; the whole team had gathered, eager to see this new tech for themselves.

And there were bants, of course. Loving bants! This was an indignity they’d all suffered repeatedly, so at this point there was no shame and no secrets between anyone. The whole team was bored anyway and ready for the spectacle, since the daily training grind was…well, a grind. A grind most of the team lived for, admittedly—you had to be a little bit insane and a whole lot meathead to be HEAT, after all—but it was a monotonous grind nonetheless. Anything novel was always welcomed and besides: he’d be stepping off the platform to a ready-to-go suit. Miracles like that didn’t happen every day!

“Okay.” Doyle’s voice cut through the susurrus to mark the start of ceremonies, of sorts. “Gravity set to one gee, subject’s weight…Jesus, you fat fuck. You’re big enough to smash a truck!”

“Huger!” He boomed, “and gettin’ huger too! And I’ve got better eight-pack abs than anyone! No fuckin’ fat on me!”

“Except ‘fer yer ego,” Murray quipped.

“Fuck you, I earned that fuckin’ ego! It can be as fat an’ sassy as it wants!”

“Oh boy,” Costello quipped. “I can see today’s gonna be maximum Ladforce…”

“You can fuck right off too, sir! Respectfully of course.”

“Of course,” Costello chuckled, shook his head, and went back to his tablet. Paperwork. Ugh.

“Right, right…” Doyle snorted. “So, first, resting anatomy. Arms out and parallel to the ground, palms up. Feet flat on the markers. Face forward and stare at the green dot on the wall…”

The usual shit. Righteous had to stand still while the lasers measured him. He couldn’t move much so, naturally, this was the point where everyone began telling jokes at his expense.

“Lookit that big pretty fuck, prettying himself up for his new duds! I bet Yan can’t wait for their next date…”

Firth couldn’t respond right now, since he had to try and be as neutral as possible…so of course, the floodgates opened. Everybody set to work on trying to make him laugh. Honestly, Hunter had to give the big guy scary credit for the fact that the most they managed to do in two solid minutes of jokes and teasing was get his jaw to flex and clench.

Deacon put a stop to it in the end. “If y’all keep ruining our measurements, we’re gonna kick you out. I know he’s pretty when he laughs—”

More chuckles from around the ring, and Firth’s face finally tightened in nearly a smile. But they got the message, shut up and let the techs work.

The next step after baseline was posing. It wasn’t enough to get his resting shape, they had to model every possible way his body could move and change, because men as big and muscular as HEAT operators were dynamically three-dimensional objects, which needed to remain firmly encased in their midsuits no matter how huge or differently or weirdly their muscles might bulge. So, being the most ridiculously three-dee of any sapient being ever, aside from the emperor-bear himself…with a bit of a sigh, Firth set to it and endured the renewed cat-calls and jeers as he presented himself for inspection in the most complete, un-modest way a man could manage.

And it was a hell of a show, not gonna lie. It was everything Gonzo could do to just…not.

Yeah. Hunter made no secret of his sexuality, and nobody on the team cared, really. He’d heard Righteous was super religious and had worried about what that mighta meant, since it was honestly hard not to look…but the big guy was actually super chill on that point.

“That’s between you and God,” he’d said. “Not my business. And it’s flatterin’, but I’m taken. Jus’ respect everyone’s boundaries and it won’t be a problem, yijao? And don’t date within HEAT!”

So of course he didn’t, and in any case he thought of everyone on-team as a brother anyway. Even so: Jesus fuck.

It was both uncomfortable and intimidating to look at him go through it all, and at the same time Gonzo couldn’t look away. If there was such a thing as a perfect, pinnacle human being…well, there he was, flexing and posing dead still however the scanner demanded, one position or motion after another, after another…

Firth made eye contact while he was trapped in a crab flex; each pose had to be held for the scanner. He smirked, quickly…and back to work. Gonzo felt like his ears were on fire.

In any case, It didn’t take as long as usual to get all the measurements. With the old EV-MASS, it could take an hour or more to measure every possible movement on the measuring platform, balancing as it wobbled about to force the subject to adjust. Hell of a workout, actually! This new system was a little quicker, but still: Firth was dripping sweaty by the end of it.

“There! The suit is adjusting for you.” Deacon gave a pleased grin and tucked her tablet under her arm. “Please step down and don your undersuit.”

“What, already? Shit, I barely got to show off! An’ din’t y’all ‘ferget an important measurement?”

Firth crossed his titanic arms with a smug grin, and ignored all the cat-calls. Doyle, long used to his bullshit, just smiled sweetly and said, “we’ve got lasers for that now. I’ll never need to try to reach around your thighs with a tape measure again.”

“But that’s the funnest bit! How else are ‘ya s’posed ‘ta notice all my progress?”

“Again: lasers. I’m quite glad not to have my face inches from your smelly junk anymore.”

“If only we all got that luxury…” Irish quipped.

“Right, well. Tuck your fuckin’ superwang into your hygeine briefs over there and let’s get you sewed into your undersuit.”

The undersuit was new too, of a much tougher, tighter material that simultaneously had much more capacity to stretch where needed. It was so tight in fact…

“Shit,” Firth exclaimed as Doyle sewed him closed. “This is already harder-squeezing than the old suit and it’s just the tights…”

“Oh, just you wait! The new midsuit is gonna all but break you.”

“Greeeaat…”

It only took a few minutes for Firth to worm into the new undersuit (including a privacy break to take care of his plumbing), and a few minutes after that…

Finally, the main event. “So what…so I just step into it?”

“Yes, and lift it up, slide your arms in. Should be loose enough you can don it unassisted.”

Firth tilted his head, sighed, and stepped his giant stompers into the midsuit’s booties. He wiggled a bit, reached down to lift the midsuit—

“Shit!” He barked. “This is heavy as fuck! Way worse than the old Mass!”

“Yup. This new midsuit is gonna be about three times heavier than you, double the old Mass. You’re gonna be a living tank, ‘cuz you’re strong enough to handle it.”

Firth grumbled, nodded, dipped his knees, straightened his back, and deadlifted the suit. Not that it was a difficult weight for him or anything; HEAT operators were strong like ants, Firth most of all. But even an easy lift could injure when the weight was nice and big, so…careful it was. He hefted the midsuit with perfect form, then sort of flinged it up and shoved his arms in, and with that one explosive move, he was wearing the thing like it was a giant armored smock.

“Right, so…what next?”

A workhouse tech yipped and produced a remote control with a flourish. “We turn it on!”

With the push of a button, the suit seamlessly zipped itself up his legs and back, just like the Gaoians enjoyed with their own suits. From just under his jawline down to his toes, Righteous was now encased in a seamless, single-molecule midsuit with a motile under-gel layer.

Which went to work. The suit began visibly tightening. At first, Righteous grunted. Then he groaned in pain, and then growled as the Suit forced him into a full-body flex that looked every bit as painful as anyone’s first time in the Mass…

Well, actually, no. It looked a hell of a lot worse. In fact, it legit looked like the suit was trying to crush him like a grape.

“Hnmmggh …fuck!” Firth strained under the load, and Gonzo could see the individual cords in his neck press through the undersuit, visibly defined even through the micro-scale layer. Same with every inch of the rest of him, too. It was, honestly…fucking intimidating on multiple levels. Firstly, that he was such a monster and looked like one even through several inches of armor. But secondly: if the Suit could give even him a hurt like that…

Parata, never Mister Sympathy at the best of times, chuckled sadistically. “Tight?”

“Shit, mmmpf! Shit yeah you dumb fuck!” Firth did manage to crack a smile through a teeth-gritting grimace. “Fuck! It’s almost tighter’n ‘yer sister!”

Always a reliable way to get a rise out of Parata, that. “Oi! You keep your filthy mitts offa her!”

Firth grinned at him, then groaned. “…Fuck …not gonna lay hands on anyone, this feels like a full-body kick in the scrote.”

“Nearly done, you big baby,” Deacon told him. “Any second now…”

Whatever the Suit was doing must have stopped, because Firth’s expression softened a bit, even if he still looked like he was exerting himself mightily. “That’s weird. Felt like it was tryin’ to knead me to death. Now it’s crushin’ more like I expect. I mean, still way too fuckin’ hard…”

“It’s contoured properly now. Should fit better than the old Mass ever did.”

Firth bounced on his toes; dust fell from the ceiling. “Shit. Yeah. That’s…really fuckin’ good!”

Deacon, Doyle and the Gaoian tech—Zikko! That was his name! Hunter woulda felt stupid awkward asking him later—traded high fives.

“It’s configured for dynamic tightness, too. We can adjust the fit based on the expected load.”

“And this delightful full body hug…?”

“Full send. Congratulations, you’re in the big boy’s club now.”

“Fuckin’ great…and the rest is gonna up the ante, ain’t it?”

Doyle grinned evilly. “Absolutely. Now let’s get your outersuit sorted…”

The rest of the armor was much like the previous generation, but evolved and improved. His new midsuit fit him so tightly, the outersuit could anchor much more and better armor, so of course they had taken advantage. Righteous now had an advanced plate system that offered effectively total overlapping coverage. Warhorse never managed armor so thick and heavy, nor anything so comprehensive. But Firth was a far larger man with vastly more real estate across his body, and so…the possibilities had been exploited. He had a much bigger support pack too, to power better reactive shielding and to better feed his GR-7d ultra-heavy assault carbine with ammo and power.

The end result…he was a tank. A walking, talking tank. Tank enough to make the industrial floor shudder underfoot with his every little step. For now, at least, he struggled under the crush of its weight and embrace…

But they all knew that it wouldn’t take him long to adapt. In fact: “shit, this is kickin’ my ass…y’mind if I spend some fam time in this?”

Costello nodded approvingly. “Take as long as you want. In fact, take a week, for a start. I’ll pull you off the active roster, because I want you adapted to that suit as soon as possible.”

Firth nodded stoically, his face the very picture of huge exertion. “Rog. Guess I’ll…start with a road march. Load me up.”

And so…they did. Full battle-kit, worst case scenario. He didn’t seem happy under all that load. But, well…he was Righteous. Maybe nobody would ever replace Warhorse, but more and more it was obvious nobody would ever replace him, either. The man was a god of the battlefield, and now his body manufactured a personalized version of the most potent combat and regenerative drugs available. He was a living weapon, engineered to be the best.

He set off at a laborious march, already sucking down Juice.

When he came back two hours later, his face was beet-red, veins throbbing along his temples, even along his jaw…

But instead of his earlier plodding shuffle, he was jogging on the balls of his feet. And he was carrying the huge boulder back from the other end of the short course, too. The one Warhorse had put there some years ago, and the one nobody had been able to lift, let alone bring back.

And there he was. Only a few hours into break-in, new Mass and new Crude, and he could already manage the basics. He spent the next week inside the new Mass, and when he finally crawled out of the suit…

Shit. New on-board hygiene systems made long-term use far more tenable. He didn’t emerge as a wall of bruised, broken stink. Instead, what peeled itself out of the Mass was a healthy-looking (though a bit pale) and subtly better version of the man from a week before. A quick shower and a big meal later, he went downstairs and destroyed all his PRs, which meant the human and ten’gewek WRs too…

The rest of them began fitting after that demonstration. Eagerly, too; the excitement was palpable, and the crushing agony of the new Mass was almost a religious experience itself. Fuck! Just wearin it made him feel like a monster!

The HEAT was getting upgrades. New organization, so they could operate themselves better. New forever-Crude, so they could fight as hard and as long as any of them wanted. New EV-MASS to completely fuckin’ rule whatever shit they dropped into.

After all the bullshit the last year had dumped on the fuckin’ galaxy? It was about fuckin’ time, and Gonzo couldn’t wait to find out what he could do. He was a fuckin’ weapon, and he was about to get a whole lot sharper.

They all were.

Date Point: 20y7m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam (Warhorse) Arés, doin’ his thing

The migraines were under control now, so that was nice. Once a month at most, and that was plenty of time to get his training back in gear. Neurofeedback response was almost fully recovered to his pre-accident results, and he had reason to believe he’d get it all back soon. No more migraines, full control of himself. A healthy, fully-refurbished body, a second chance at life.

All he’d had to do was take the permanent shot.

The one made just for him, likely at huge expense, so…no pressure, there.

The one that meant he was making his own custom Crude inside his body now, that meant he’d never grow old and never grow sick again, at least not for very long. And since he was (according to all the big brains) about as genetically ideal as the best Heroes of the Line, all it would really take was patience and some careful programming to properly max himself out.

It might take a decade or more, but by God he was gonna reclaim his fuckin’ throne, or at least give it the best damn effort a man could give. The serum meant he’d be the best he could ever possibly be, and none of that Hero-breeding bullshit would be a part of his success. Little mexican Adam from the shittier parts of San Diego was a different kind of superfreak. He wasn’t like Firth, whose body would not let him be anything but huge and powerful. He wasn’t like Julian either, who could effortlessly scale himself up and down just with his eating habits.

No. Adam was a real superfreak. He wasn’t a bulky giant as a kid, at least not until he started slabbing up in Folctha at around fifteen or so. Yet, like his papá and even before he was properly a teen, he’d always had an admittedly pretty crazy physique. He’d been an extremely dense and heavy young boy for his size too, and was far, far stronger than even that would suggest. At twelve he was already doing shit like lifting the rear end of cars off the ground or tearing books apart at the spine or whatever other stupid thing his friends dared him to try. By thirteen, he’d already earned a reputation with the skater punks and meatheads in the nearby high school. He was crushing varsity track and lifting records before he’d left the sixth grade.

And…yeah. He got into too many fights with the big kids, too. And won. Usually, he won easily enough that he’d never needed to beat them senseless, and word about that spread around quick and kept him out of big trouble. Nobody wanted to fight the little kid who could catch their fist mid-swing and power them down to their knees just by ratcheting his grip a little tighter…

So yeah, a freak. But a real freak, not some high-pedigree breeding stud like Julian and Christian were probably meant to be. Adam learned early on he needed to eat and move to be strong, so he did. Still had to force himself to eat, force himself to train and grow. It didn’t come as easily for him as it did for Julian or especially Firth…but Adam didn’t seem to have any hard limits, either. At least, none that he’d ever found, even if he had to push with grueling effort while those two seem to just respond to whatever effort they put in. So: if Adam took his second chance at greatness seriously, proceeded with all his learned care…

He’d show Julian and Firth and all those fuckin’ space Bene Gessert what a regular-ass human being could fuckin’ do. Fuck Gilgamesh. Fuck him forever for fucking with Adam’s friends.

So that had been the choice before him. One he knew he couldn’t possibly have said no to. It made him once again capable of realizing the absolute best possible version of himself, like the Heroes on HEAT could do; he’d be a supercommando again, better than ever.

And It would set him down a road he’d never be able to step off until he couldn’t step anymore.

The one that Marty didn’t like the idea of one bit.

“Think about what it means. You either outlive me and your own kids, or we get locked into the same thing.”

Adam nodded, wearily. “Yeah.” He wasn’t even arguing the point.

“Where does that end? ‘Cuz our grandkids are gonna have the same question in front of them. And their kids, and…”

“I don’t think I’m gonna ride it forever,” he stated, truthfully. “I don’t…have that in me. Bein’ honest I just wanna get us through this…all this bullshit. However long it takes.”

“You don’t have to ride it forever for it to still be something you’re committing your entire family to.” Marty had made herself a latte. Now, she was holding it in both hands.

“I already did that, and basically died for it. Then they put me back together. Not ‘cuz Daar’s a big soppy-hearted cuddlebear. I mean, he is and I appreciate it, but he’s no fool. He paid that quarter-billion at least partly ‘cuz he needs me. And damn if I can’t argue against it.”

“Right.” Marty sipped her coffee. “I thought…I had this idea like maybe after dying —cuz you did die, even if they managed to bring you back—like maybe that’d be enough to convince you that you’ve done your part and it’s okay to let go and just…be a family man.”

“Well that’s the thing about duty, right? It doesn’t care. Name someone who can replace me.”

“Why does there need to be someone to replace you?”

Adam sighed. “Because it isn’t about me, or you, or my kids. It’s about survival itself. None of my friends get off the hook, Daar least of them. And none of them are like me, or ever will be.”

“None of us do, apparently…” she sounded morose rather than bitter.

“Look…Marty.” He sat cross-legged on the floor and invited her for snuggles, which she took with a bit of reluctance. He held her, quietly—God how wonderful was it to do that again—and thought for a bit before he spoke. He wasn’t the best at his words, but he could take his time and do them right, when he needed to.

“I don’t need to do this right away. The fight, I mean. Babe, it’s gonna take decades before this shit gets really fuckin’ crazy, ‘cuz it’s gonna take at least that long before the Hierarchy’s truly desperate. We gotta scour a galaxy to make good on our threat, right? Well…I gotta build myself back up anyhow. An’ train people. And raise a family too, that matters. So I’m not gonna be waltzing back into the fight tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year. It’s gonna be a while.”

“…Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop…talking to me like I’m being silly and you’ve gotta lay it all out. I know all this, baby. I know how this is going to go, I know you. I just…I’m allowed to think it sucks ass, and wish I could finally have you all to myself, okay? And I would feel a lot better if you could just acknowledge that.”

He didn’t know what to say, but a hug seemed like the right thing. And a nuzzle. That too. “…You’re right. It sucks ass, and you do have me all to yourself. At least until the kids are grown up. But all I could ever give you forever was my heart. My body is a different story.”

She sighed heavily, nodded, relaxed into him and…well, that was kind of her giving him her blessing. “I guess you wouldn’t be the man I fell in love with if you could just walk away.”

“And that’s why I fell in love with you,” Adam replied. “You get me. Better than most of the Lads, even. But I’m…sorry if it hurts.”

She nodded, sniffed, finished her coffee, and neither of them said another word about it.

He did think about it all. Really, he did. He refused himself the right to say yes for an entire month. But he knew from day one what his answer would be.

The day after the shot, he started his new routine. Family life in Folctha. Training life on Gao. He built himself up, slower and with the advantage of all his experience. He wouldn’t get overeager this time, wouldn’t push himself too fast. He’d take his time, do it right. No compromises. He would be a perfect weapon in every fuckin’ possible way. If he was gonna be Daar’s personal ultimate option, then by God that was what he would be. No matter what it took.

Same thing with the SOR too, the same with his new teammates at Stoneback and Whitecrest. He taught them how to use their bodies correctly, taught them things the Hierarchy had never let them learn. They taught him, too. They taught him lots of things. Things that did nothing but magnify his already immense respect for Regaari and the rest. Things that would make Adam…

Well, that would come, in the fullness of time. When all was ready.

And he taught the Great Father, too. Turned out he hadn’t plateaued at all during their vacation fun-time some weeks past, he’d just had a bad few days…and somehow, he knew he’d need to be at his best, too. So now, a large part of his day was set aside just for personal training and education, timed to overlap with Adam’s. Every single day, all calculated to maximize progress. He’d even permanently reduced his mating schedule to accommodate that reality…

Which, darkly, was probably the strongest signal yet about how grim the final battles would be.

And so, the work of the next many years set itself to motion. It was a grim pattern of utmost necessity. After all, the finest weapons of all were rough, capable men, and the Great Father needed a great many weapons. Some for immediate actions, some as investment. There were even a few things in the near future that Daar himself needed to attend to, and he had to be the greatest weapon of all.

They had their work cut out for them. Warhorse of Whitecrest buckled down, and set to it.

Date Point: 20y7m AV

Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge

Daar Great-Father had warned Yan ahead of time what he was going to ask. It was…a big ask. The biggest Taking the People could possibly Give. Daar didn’t just need a few brave warriors. He didn’t just need many.

Daar Great-Father needed them all. He needed so many, the People would need to re-think everything about themselves.

That was a Giving that Yan Given-Man never, ever thought he’d consider. It was just…too much. And Daar knew it, too. So, he knew what he had to do. He had to give the biggest Giving he could possibly give. He, himself, as the People would respect and need.

So he went forth into the forest and destroyed the Brown One’s cubs. He didn’t simply kill them, he didn’t even Take them. He swat them apart like a rotting old log or a crushed and drained neyma, as if they were nothing to him at all. Not being content with that, he rolled in their blood to get their scent all over himself and prowled into the forest to provoke the sire and dam.

He destroyed them, too. It took time, of course. Brown Ones were huge and powerful creatures, far larger than anything walking Earth or any other world. But large, swift and strong though they were, they were also built lean and rangy, made by the gods mostly for speed.

Daar Great-Father was just as fast. Faster, even. And though he was much shorter, he was stronger. Compact like the People. Denser and heavier, built as heavily as anything could possibly be. So when he caught them, he pounced up a tremendous height, fell onto their backs and stunned them each with a slap to their great heads…and then, he enjoyed himself.

Never had Yan imagined he’d witness a man of flesh and blood play with such a prey. He understood the pleasures of the hunt, of course. The terrible Joy in a good Taking, the battle between the Taker and the Giver. He knew the fight was sacred, that the Giver should fight for life, the Taker earn his meat. He knew that it could be a terrible agony for both, particularly if the prey was strong and tough.

Daar did not earn his victory quickly, because Brown Ones were a lot of prey to Take. But it wasn’t a contest, he knew it, and all the watching Given-Men knew it, too. They had followed loosely behind him as he baited his prey and closed in to witness when the fight had begun.

It was…none of the Lodge had anything to say about it, as Daar tied his conquered meat together for the trek back to the Lodge, quite far away now. There was nothing to say. They’d just watch a god hunt and play, and none of them could possibly approach such effortless might.

Yan felt weak and tiny. He felt humble.

It…of course, it was a fine Giving to the People. It would buy them a season unmolested by their one real predator, but that would not solve the problem forever. Another pair would migrate down from the grasslands up north, have cubs and feed on the mature werne, just as the People fed themselves on the breeding herd in the forest. That wasn’t the point. They were a problem now and even with a ballista, assuming it worked…even then, redcrests and Given-Men may have died in the fight to keep the forest safe from their ravaging.

Not Daar. He did the deed himself because he needed every redcrest the People could Give. And, frankly, he needed everyone to understand what kind of a power was asking for their help. He dragged the pair of them back to the Lodge and dared any to accost him for it. This he did with seemingly little effort, but one only had to look at huge swells of godly brawn working all along his body, particularly in his great rear legs. One glance was all it took for even the stupidest Given-Man to understand what kind of strength was being Given for their benefit.

As for Daar himself? All he’d earned in his terrible fight was blood- and sweat-soaked fur…and nothing else. Not even a cut anywhere on him!

For many of the Given-Men, especially the older-thinking ones, the fact that Daar could do something like that was enough for him to Take whatever he claimed. Who could stop him?! That was the way of Given-Men: Prove and Take. A hand of them, the ones who lived farthest from the human camp, array and library, scratched their heads in confusion as to why he even bothered asking once he’d shown them the true and holy meaning of strength. He could crush any of them like a little black buzzer and none of them could give him any hurt at all.

Daar was a god. But a god in the flesh, right here before them, unbreakable body of steel and stone, mind too strong for even Vemik to fight with. Why would a god ask?

But ask he did, once the Lodge was properly underway. He’d insisted on closeness with as many as he could, too; that was the gaoian way and the People approved. Friends should not be afraid of each other. But why would Daar count them as friend?

Or was his real purpose a bit more calculated? He’d pulled all the far-away Given-Men to himself, played and wrassled friendly-like despite his strength…and now they were pinned under and against him. None of them could hurt him at all, naked and empty-handed before the gods. He loved and dominated them, the playfulness of a steel-strong warrior god.

With Yan pinned most powerfully of all, head barely poking out past the stone-hard swells of Daar’s giant chest as he sat atop him, pant-grinning happily. If Yan were to toy with a particularly small bibtaw, that would maybe get near describing the difference between them these days. Daar’s shoulders were twice as wide and his chest so deep, he had the strength to stun a yshek or a brown one with a slap, or easily send a Given-Man flying across the Lodge.

Or kill him outright, probably. And they all knew it too. But Daar wasn’t here to conquer the Lodge. It was important they knew what he was, of course, but keeping his peace was a big part of it. Yan had a head full of newer ideas and sky-thoughts, and could see the subtlety in how Daar Sky-Father acted. And over the years, he’d brought most of the Lodge around to that same way of thinking. That he could conquer the People by himself if he wanted to wasn’t a concern. Because he didn’t want to. He respected their strength and their bravery, despite his own far outshining theirs.

Most of them didn’t need Daar’s answer to the question, they understood already.

But it was good that Daar himself had the answer.

“I won’t argue again ‘bout what y’all think I am. But whatever I am, I ain’t stupid. Would you go out, and hunt and hunt and hunt, Taking and Taking until the Werne had no strength left? Why would I do such a thing to you? To my friends?”

He had a way of using words like fangs, really. And it worked—even the most old-thinking and grumpy given-men could understand the idea that strong people required other strong people to keep them strong.

Besides. The People were flourishing now. Vaccines and human medicine, the rich Givings of the forest, the growth into manhood and womanhood of all the children who’d been saved and brought over the mountains…even the return of a few tribes back to the old lands. There were more of them now than there ever had been before the drones and abrogators came. Most were still babies of course, but…

But in time, there were going to be many, many ten’gewek. It seemed to Yan they would need something to do. They’d need to find a way to live as so many, too. Tribes needed a lot of space. Yes, the forest was so vast a man could not walk across its width in a year, but…

But it was only one forest. There was only one Akyawentuo. The worlds Given to the People by the Interspecies Dominion were not right for them, and nor was any other the humans or Gao knew of. In time, their world would be full.

Though, what a nice problem to have!

And Daar had a solution that was both perfect and terrible.

“Fact is, your people are the galaxy’s finest warriors, ready-made. Strong to a man in both body and soul, wise in the ways of hunt and war…what you’ll be after this war, I don’t know. But here and now, the People are exactly who we need.”

He stood and prowled restlessly around the lodge. “I’ve shown all of you ‘fore the Gods themselves, I can Take what I want. But there’s a greater strength still in askin’ anyway, an’ meaning it. So I’m Givin’ ‘ya somethin’: I’m givin’ ‘ya the chance ‘ta stay here, on ‘yer peaceful world, ‘ta turn ‘yer back on the war in the sky. ‘Cuz I don’t want slaves. I want friends. I want allies. But I know ‘yer not gonna stap away from a fight this big, ‘cuz the gods made you too strong ‘fer that.”

He turned and swept his animal, yellow eyes around the lodge, spearing every Given-Man with his gaze. “So. Will you send ‘yer men? Will you let them go through Gaoian rites an’ Human trainin’? Will you let them see ‘fer themselves the strength we can build together?”

There was silence, broken only by the hiss of sacred root burning in the fire. Then Vemik stood, as Yan had known he’d be the first to do. Ferd was scarcely a heartbeat behind him. Then Loor, then Gurn, then Joomak, then the whole lodge was on its feet and Daar had his answer.

The changes began, then. They called a meeting with the Singers, the first time anyone could remember such a thing happening. There were debates. Heated arguments. Fights, and fucking, and hunting, and magic dust and magic smoke.

Daar, for his part, stayed out of it, keeping them all fed by the Brown One’s meat.

It was decided.

The strongest of their young Given-Men, about one of every four, would choose strong men from their tribe, and they would go. Not all the strongest; some needed to stay behind and raise the next generation, and one special Given-Man had too much sky-thinking ahead of him to risk. He understood, if glumly. Soon he would replace Yan, and he needed to be ready.

Each Given-Man was picked from a tribe whose redcrests were ready to be Given themselves. The people would remain strong, but the next Lodge would be an exhausting ordeal for everyone, with that many new Given-Men to receive.

There was so much to plan, to make ready for. They’d need for the Sent-Men to return for their Fire every year. They’d need to house all those men without challenging the existing Given-Men. Bachelor tribes again?

So much to work out, and not long to work it out in. Somehow, though, they managed it: When Daar, as promised, returned in a moon’s time, the best warriors of all the tribes were ready for him.

And he Took them away to turn them into gods.

Date Point: 20y8m AV
Planet Akywantuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Doctor Tilly Briggs

Tenure.

Tilly had thought good and hard about it, after the offer arrived. Being invited to take a tenured position at a prestigious university? It was the kind of thing an academic fantasized about! Doubly miraculous, considering her “scandalous” relationships with the ten’gewek. She knew good and well there were folks out there calling her professional ethics into question.

But then again, how many xenoanthropologists were there? And how many of them had lived and worked among nonhumans for as long as she had? She was now easily the longest-remaining member of Daniel Hurt’s team, all the others had long since moved on with their careers.

Turning it down would have ensured this particular genie-in-a-bottle offer would never, ever come her way again. It was take it, or stay where she was. And as happy as she was where she was…Tilly had always known she couldn’t remain forever.

But it meant he had to say goodbye to Vemik. Vemik Given-Man, a man she’d ended up loving, despite every intention to keep it light and fun. She had to break it off, and it was tormenting her.

Maybe she’d be back one day. In fact probably she would. But that didn’t change the need to say goodbye. Firstly, it’d be at least a year or longer, but secondly…

Secondly, she’d felt some other urges in her life. Urges that Vemik could not satisfy.

And that wasn’t something she’d imagined would be possible! At least for her younger self, she’d always envisioned herself as a career-first sort of woman. Domestic life had looked like a kind of slavery, a trap for women with no real goals or ambition.

What a difference five years could make.

From a light-hearted, no-strings perspective, Vemik was all she could have ever asked for and then some in gloriously exceeding excess. He was…fuck, how many superlatives could she use? He was like the ultimate female fantasy—well, a certain kind of fantasy, anyway. He wasn’t some sensitive androgynous cute-boy poet hipster in a bookstore or whatever.

Which, hey! Nothing wrong with tha, but poet hipsters weren’t…weren’t weapons-grade.

Vemik in particular, on the other hand, was. A hunter and a warrior, fully willing and able to inflict great savage brutality on his prey and his enemies…or play endlessly with his friends and lovers, however they wanted to play. He had a tender heart and clever mind inside that savagely built body of his, and he was interested in her, her ideas and thoughts. She couldn’t count the evenings they’d spent sharing ‘sky-thoughts’ until…

Well, apparently he thought she was just as hot as she found him. Her! Sorta-cute, sorta-plain Tilly! She wasn’t really anything special to write home about, and yet there it was, a lover she never dreamed she could have. Aggressive, overwhelmingly physical…loving. Perfect.

It had seemed like the ideal relationship. Here was everything she could ever possibly want in a man, all of it turned up and amplified to extreme degrees. He wanted her, loved her and sought her company. She’d fallen in love with a supergenius hulkmonkey with a body like hardwood and a sense of humor! What more could she possibly want?

Well…there was one thing. The one need she was beginning to feel in her bones, the one thing she’d honestly and surprisingly started to desire above else, and the one he could never fulfill.

Tilly…it had taken her a while to be honest with herself, to admit that what she’d always thought was true about herself had changed, and so suddenly it left her head spinning, but…seeing the ambassador and his kids come and go, seeing the way the ten’gewek raised their own children…all of it had worn down a wall in her mind and now?

She wanted a family of her own.

And yeah, it was hormones, yeah it was biology and instinct. Mentally tacking on the word ‘just’ into those thoughts didn’t make the feelings any less real or powerful. She was an animal, with an animal’s programming, which was something the Ten’Gewek in particular knew and accepted in themselves, as ‘the way the gods made them,’

They truly believed that nobody ever got anywhere by fighting their nature. That wasn’t something Tilly had wanted to hear, but…

But she could look at other species, other examples. The Corti, pursuing the vision that rational Ego should triumph over primitive Id until they were utterly neutered. The OmoAru, who’d poisoned their own cells to improve on what nature had given them, only for it to become the noose by which their enemies hanged them. The Igraens, whose shedding of physical form had been the precursor to shedding individuality itself.

She was tired of fighting herself. Tired of lying to herself. So the letter and offer had come at the right time to make her sit, and think…and at the right time for the Lodge to be making a similarly weighty decision.

In the end, her path was clear. She wanted kids, and that was okay. And she wanted a husband, and that was okay too.

And even if it were biologically possible, a ten’gewek could never fill that role for a human. They were far too communal in their nature. They shared everything. Even each other. For a Given-Man that wasn’t even optional; it was his duty to dominate and possess everyone in his tribe, in every way appropriate to their relationship. Every adult was his to lead and love—and fuck, too. Frequently. No barriers there! Children were raised as much by the village and by him as they were their own parents, and Vemik was happy to fall in love with any pretty woman who caught his interest. It never lessened his love for any other, but…

But that wasn’t what Tilly’s instincts were screaming for.

So…yeah. Between her instincts, her career, and what the Given-Men had decided to do, it was time for Tilly to move on.

It wasn’t quite the tear-jerker she feared it would be, and that was one of the gratifying ways ten’gewek were truly alien. He wasn’t mourning the permanent loss of a lover; he was sad for the temporary absence of a friend. That they may or may not ever bed each other again was just a human bit of weirdness to him. It wouldn’t change how he loved her.

Admittedly, he had been paying her a lot of attention the last week or so, leaving her happily sore and exhausted every day…but still. That was just his way of saying a fond goodbye, like he did with almost anyone anyone he cared about if their relationship involved sex. It was just…polite. Ten’Gewek loved as people and friends, sex was something sacred to be shared by everyone, and they culturally didn’t really do jealousy at all. Though their men and women definitely had favorites, if their favorite decided to have fun with somebody else then they’d generally be happy for them and ask how good it was. Any envy they might feel usually got resolved with a tussle and more sex. Rather than fight for exclusive access, they, well…they competed to screw better. Not a bad system, really! Maybe that lack of possessiveness was something humans should learn from them.

Or maybe Tilly needed to accept that the gods hadn’t made humanity that way.

Vemik tried to be reassuring. “I understand,” he said while cracking a werne rib open with his jaws to suck out the marrow. “And it’s right thing! I think, any child you have will be very strong!”

“I know they will,” Tilly agreed. “And…yeah. It is the right thing, I know. It’s just a big step into the future for me. I’ve been here a long time, now.”

“But a good step! You should find a pretty human boy and ruin him! Or let me ruin him,” he snarled fiercely, and she knew he wasn’t entirely joking.

She had to laugh. “We’ll see.”

“But, when you become professor there is big ceremony, yes? Big blessing?”

“Yeah, there is. Beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere.”

“I come visit! Bring more journals to Shoo-ster too. Maybe not get blown up this time!”

“Vemik! No, I don’t want you risking your life for me!”

He shrugged those huge shoulders of his. “Why not? I wear shield this time. Besides…” he didn’t flex or anything, but he did look down at a forearm that, even relaxed, was bigger around than her fucking waist. “My last attackers didn’t fare so well. Weak humans can be very weak.”

“I guess.”

“Besides. Earth not that dangerous. Most people happy, good human small-strong too! And you, I know you’re known. People talk and write about you. Are they gonna blow you up?”

Tilly sighed and shrugged. Somewhere along the line, the fact of her relationship with Vemik had got out and there’d been articles and stuff. She was a figure of some scandal, the ‘Jane of Akyawentuo’ at best, and to many more she was the researcher who’d let her horny get in the way of her professional ethics. She’d never agreed to an interview…nor responded to the emails from producers wanting to make a short biopic…

But she’d also received death threats. Internet cranks, nothing she took too seriously. But still, not pleasant. “Somebody might want to,” she admitted.

“But you don’t really think they will, or you wouldn’t go. People are stupid. My own people stupid like that sometimes too. Even smart people get hit in face by the stupid branch, yee-jao?”

Tilly laughed again. “Yi. You’re right. And since when do you speak gaori?”

“I don’t! Words don’t fit in mouth. But English borrowed that one!” Vemik hooted merrily, then turned and dug in his satchel. “Anyway. I made you a knife…”

That was…

Fuck. Tilly felt herself about to cry. Ten’Gewek men only made knives for women if they were very special to them. That was as close to marriage as they got.

And it was a thoughtful knife, too. A chef’s knife with a werne-bone handle, made for human-sized hands with all the skill and care Vemik could muster. She recognized his mark stamped near the tang…and another, too.

“The Singer…?”

“Helped make the handle. She loves you, too. Wanted to be here to see you away, but…”

“No, no. I know. She’s got a naming ritual.”

“And others. Now…we should go. Is a good finger to array and your trunks are big! No time for goodbye fuck,” he hooted with a mischievious grin and just a touch of sadness.

Tilly smiled. “You’re right…it’s time.”

She took one last look at the village before they set off. It wasn’t the same of course. It moved around with the herd, and this one had only been built in the spring. Still. It would be missed.

They walked at a leisurely pace toward the array, hiking pack full and on her back, and her heavy trunks effortlessly atop Vemik’s mighty shoulders. They didn’t say much until they got to the array. He set her trunks down with some care, checked the clock…

Well. They did have a fair bit of time…

Enough time for a good-bye kiss, at least.

He made it a memorable one too, mighty arms crushing her against the hot steel of his body. With them, and with what their tongues could do, a good kiss was all about trust, which meant only the most loving partners ever much bothered.

Tilly trusted Vemik with her very life, and they rewarded each other for it. But all things had to come to an end. One last nuzzle as she felt around his shoulders and back. Another kiss and her hands slid up his wild red crest, a bite at her throat as she felt across the bulging ripples of his chest and down his cobbled belly. She’d meant it to be just a quick, final exploration of his body to remember her forest love…but instead he lifted her up high off her feet, grinned wickedly…

A quick and hasty Giving, but one so good she could hardly see straight. They didn’t have nearly enough time to do what they really wanted of course, but he didn’t seem to mind.

He held her tight while she re-composed herself. Eventually, reluctantly, they broke contact. He took a step back, nodded, and said his last.

“You remember me good, yes? And you teach your boy how to Take properly!”

And with that, with one last quick hug, leaving her happily dazed…he jumped from a standstill far across the clearing and up into the canopy like the superhero he was. One last look back, and…yes, a big cheesy flex or two…and he was gone, swinging powerfully back to his village.

She sat down on the platform. And with a thump, she was back on Earth. The air was dry, the gravity light, her ears full of the sounds of people, announcements and background music rather than the rasp of insects, the call of jungle birds and the distant bellowing of werne. She was simultaneously home…and somewhere very, very foreign.

Her tears flowed like rain.

Date Point: 20y8m AV
Lavmuy City, Gao

Martina Arés

Marty still couldn’t call herself happy about Adam’s choice in career direction, but honestly? She hadn’t ever been super happy with his choice in career. The fact was, she wanted him to be safe, and he insisted on throwing himself into dangerous work.

All well and good when he’d been fully able-bodied and able-brained, but she could tell the difference. He really hadn’t ever quite recovered completely, and never would no matter what his enthusiasm told him about his training. You had to know him pretty well to see it, but…

But he wasn’t quite so…he wasn’t quite the same Adam any longer. He’d visited the other side and come back firing on all cylinders. In every way.

Non-stop.

Somewhere along the line, he’d lost the knack of reining himself in. Not to the point of being out of control or anything, and Marty had always enjoyed that thrilling hint of danger around him, but now it was there in his step. He didn’t habitually cat-paw his way around any longer and he didn’t soften himself unless by conscious choice. He was just always and unapologetically full-on, now.

It made him seem angry, even when he was in a good mood. Well, not angry, really. Just…Very, extremely switched-on. People weren’t randomly greeting him anymore; before, he’d been the infamous Left Beef, and folks had stopped to gawp at the man with the incredible body. They used to approach and ask for his autograph, or pose with a flexed arm or whatever. Now…at most, they nodded. From a distance. Many crossed the street to get out of his way.

Before that might have made him sad but now, he just smiled fiercely and got on with his life. Before, he wanted to play with everyone and be friends. Now…he reveled in what he was.

They hadn’t killed the man; what they killed was his inner puppy. He was a wolfhound now, all the time. And Marty had definitely shed a few tears for that. She missed the easy personality that had balanced the extremes in him. Now it was all extreme, all the time. Not unlike some of the other Lads and, well…he’d stood out among them in more ways than just raw power.

It wasn’t all bad. In fact, it wasn’t really bad at all; he was aggressively affectionate too. She loved this new more intense Adam just as well, but she did mourn for the loss, sometimes.

Right now he was flinging himself into his new job with extreme gusto, and that meant he was giving serious thought to emigrating to Gao. Marty was…not a fan of that idea. But she was going to at least take a good look at the human enclave in Lavmuy first.

It turned out to be exactly what she’d expected. Which was to say, not a place to raise kids.

“Lotta bachelor pads…” she noted.

Not that there was anything wrong with it, exactly. It was just that most of the humans who’d moved to Gao for work were young and unattached. There weren’t any families here.

Adam caught onto her meaning with a sheepish grin; a rare flash of his happier self. “Yeah…not what I’d hoped, admittedly.”

Marty nodded and looked around some more. The enclave was one of those cases of re-inventing a district after all its original occupants were killed in the war. It had all been workhouses and male dormitories, before: then the human landlords had moved in, bought the place up cheap, converted the buildings to apartments and the result was a kind of artless mashup.

The Human owners had stripped off the original facades, installed cladding and painted on some bold colors, and the Gao of course would not allow something so soulless to go unaddressed in their city. And so, a creeping layer of ornamentation and kitsch was slowly enveloping the buildings like a kind of artistic kudzu. Resistance was utterly futile.

There was a shop selling imported stuff. Candy and snacks mostly, all at a huge markup. There was a small cinema, an Irish pub because apparently you couldn’t go anywhere in the fucking galaxy without finding one, and of course there was a church.

What there wasn’t, was a school. Or any human children to need one. And while, okay, somebody would have to be the first family to bring their kids there, eventually…Marty didn’t want that for her own kids. Not with everything else they had to deal with.

Adam knew, too. They finished their quick tour and when they got back to their hotel he sat on the ground heavily and sighed. “Well, guess not, huh?”

“No.”

“Yeah.” Adam scratched the back of his head. “Guess I’ll, uh, have to invoice my travel expenses.”

“You work for the richest being in the galaxy. I think that’ll probably be okay.”

Adam shuffled a bit morosely. “Yeah. Prob’ly shouldn’t be abusin’ the privilege though.”

“Commuting to work isn’t an abuse of the privilege, dummy. Besides, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to what Daar’s already invested in you.”

Adam shuffled a little more, as though he might somehow wear the floor a little more comfortable. “Don’t that mean I owe him some frugality?”

Marty sighed, sat on the bed behind him, and massaged his shoulders. Adam being Adam, she had to grab the gua sha scraper and oil from her purse because otherwise he’d barely feel it, but still. “I can’t put words in his mouth babe. But from what he said to me, he feels he owes you his life, and through him the lives of all the Gao.”

“And I owe him the fact my sons still have a dad. Far as I’m concerned, we’re even.”

“And as far as he’s concerned, you aren’t.” Marty had no idea if her massages even worked, but they felt like the right thing to do, so she plowed on and pressed her weight onto the scraper with a grunt before leaning over to give him an upside-down kiss on the forehead. “Diego and Sam are my whole world. Daar gave them back their daddy, so yeah, that’s big…but being dispassionate for a second, it’s not an entire species big, Adam. And right or wrong, that’s what he thinks you saved. So…”

Adam nodded gently. “I guess.”

“Look. If we keep living in Folctha, then you’ll be near the Lads and their kids, our boys will have kids their own age and a proper school, I’ll have my social life, we’ll both have access to our parents…there’s no downside, and the only reason you’re worried about feeling indebted to Daar is ‘cuz you feel everything super strongly these days.”

He sighed and…yeah, the tension had definitely left his shoulders a bit. “Alright. Folctha it is.”

Marty draped herself over him, gave him a squeeze, and let out the tense sigh she’d been holding all day. She’d hoped he’d give up on the move to Gao…but now that he actually had, she could breathe a little easier. It was kind of symbolic of the fact that yeah, the injuries hadn’t really taken him away. He was still Adam, still her partner and not…

Well. Not anything else. Which meant they could get on with life, raise their boys together…maybe keep trying for that daughter…They had a future together. One she could be happy with.

She bent down and whispered an absolutely sinful suggestion in his ear. Seeing as the kids weren’t around to disturb them…

He thought about it.

“…Pepperoni. With extra cheese.”

Perfect. Marty giggled, rose to grab her phone, and went to place the call. She found a message waiting for her, from Ava: an RSVP to the wedding, at long last, plus a photo of the venue.

Well! Trust Ava and Derek of all people to pick somewhere unique…She smiled fondly, ordered the pizza, and returned to Adam’s lap feeling…lifted, somehow. Like all the stress and argument and stuff didn’t really need to matter. Things were…okay.

And that gave her an even better feeling. Time for a suggestion of her own.

“We should grow the family,” she said, nuzzling into him.

He nuzzled back. “Yeah. You want a third?”

“Always wanted more. Still hoping for a daughter, too.”

He chuckled, wrapped her in his arms, and kissed her ear. “Well then. Your wish is my command…”

Life was good.

Fᴏᴜʀ Yᴇᴀʀs Pᴀssᴇᴅ

What fell across the entire galaxy wasn’t exactly a stalemate so much as a kind of trench warfare. The lines were drawn, in system forcefields and jump technology, while Allied and Dominion ships ventured out of their protective bubbles only rarely and quietly, starving the Hunters for prey. Every few months, a Hierarchy fleet of terrible size would loom out of the darkness, make another attempt at tearing down the walls, and retreat in failure.

Power and privilege coalesced and reformed. The SOR was now truly a trans-national, trans-species galactic paramilitary, one in increasingly tight collaboration with the elite forces of Ekallim-Igigi and the Clans of Gao, along with all the human race could offer. At long last, with funding and time, the mighty HEAT and the hardy JETS had found themselves at full operational strength. HEAT saw occasional intense action in the long quiet of the war. JETS set to the meandering, deep cadence of exploration, each Hierarchy world probed and tested before the fleets could detect their presence. Slowly, the catalog grew. Knowledge expanded.

Ten’Gewek multiplied too, and re-formed themselves to the Great War in the Sky. All young Given-Men sought a tour among the SOR, either within HEAT or leading a JETS team. A rare few elite found purpose in other, quieter, more special-purpose units…

Including Brother Warhorse of Whitecrest, who advanced in rank, rebuilt his physical might, and assumed the mantle of his new call. Soon his small team would be ready for action.

He and Marty named their daughter Paz, in honor of what they both hoped he would help achieve.

The Great Die-Off was well in effect. Gao’s population was in a free-fall crash, and most of the Great Father’s attention was aimed squarely at mitigating the consequences. Preparatory works were now put to the test, as demand for every resource plummeted and infrastructure responded. The Grand Army would march no longer; it was rapidly downsized into a garrison and defensive force of millions rather than billions. Plowshares were needed over the sword.

On Earth, the old pendulum-swing between America’s two great political parties ticked back the other way, and Beau Chambliss stepped down after his second term to be replaced by the very woman who’d challenged him for the position in the first instance: Margaret White. In her inauguration speech, she reaffirmed America’s commitment to the AEC, solidifying the organization’s status as Earth’s military powerhouse. He left behind a country still shakily balancing its finances after a number of gut-punches, but nevertheless standing tall and unbowed.

Night and day, the shipyards in Sol’s asteroid belt, above Aru, and among the Dominion’s civilized planets worked and turned, reforging an obsolete and half-baked galactic military toward the force it always should have been.

Prince Alex of Ekallim-Igigi celebrated his seventeenth birthday and the rite of emancipation. He was his own man now, mighty and free, and his eyes turned toward the future of his kind…

Cruezzir.

Nothing had proven more unpredictable and consequential than the revealing of a fully-realized “superhuman drug.” One that extended life, enabled access to radical feats of maximized personal performance and nigh-impossible feats of healing. Public awareness of its full capabilities finally broke through and much debate had ensued. Among the humans, they were divided, as society, culture, the great religions of the world, and sheer practical necessity battled for what many considered might be the soul of mankind.

In the UK, the demands to make it available on the NHS became a political movement. In the US, it was treated as a Second Amendment issue on the grounds of its proven ability to turn men into weapons. Those countries that tried to ban or regulate it quickly found their wealthy and motivated leaving for greener pastures, lured by the prospect of prolonged life. The Corti Directorate raised a complaint in the Dominion Trade Conclave, asserting their right to patent, the Global Representative Assembly counter-sued claiming that the medicine was ultimately derived from Earthling samples, further counters pointed out its multi-planetary origin, including from Gao…

Several of the more cynical commentators agreed that it was a mark of confidence from both sides in the dispute that they expected there to be a stable future where the eventual ruling, once the appeals process was finally complete, would actually matter.

The Gao weren’t nearly so fractious. For the most part they simply…obeyed the reasoning of their superiors, loyally and cheerily. Loyalty to their Clans and the Conclave—especially since the institution of Clanless representation in a lower house—was enthusiastic. Loyalty to the Great Father was, to all outside appearances, fanatical and absolute.

The Great Father himself was possibly the most uncomfortable figure on the galactic stage. If the rise of Heroes and the existence of Gilgamesh had provoked revolutionary and uncomfortable questions, the reality of Daar was something that could not be brushed aside or neatly containerized. Beloved by the gaoians, admired among humans, and widely respected among the other peoples of the galaxy, he was nonetheless the absolute embodiment of everything Singularity had done. Through him, all their centuries of work came into full, intimidating effect. Here was the Hero of Heroes, the Alpha of Alphas. Strength, Power, and Will.

Who could be comfortable in the presence of such a man?

To many of the galaxy’s cultural and political leaders, he was practically a transcendent being, not quite a mortal like everyone else…and what did that say of the people who had caused him to be? Try as he might, Daar just wasn’t in control of his own legend, and only his closest and dearest knew him for who he truly was.

Singularity, meanwhile, reveled in the political utility of living myth.

Outside the spheres of civilization, terrible and alien minds gathered resources, gathered intel. The strangest of which were fruitful and multiplied, carefully, quietly. The Entity and the Alpha-of-Alphas watched each other while they grazed and expanded in the dark, clashing occasionally, testing each other in brief, sparking skirmishes, but never committing. Both knew the time was not right.

Both knew the right time would be soon.

As for the Hierarchy, years of testing the system shields earned them much data, but little progress. The Hierarchy was nothing if not patient, however: what was a few years against the millions for which they had protected the galaxy? In time, there would be a breakthrough, then extermination, then the slower process of rebuilding a Controlled galaxy.

Little did they suspect their every move was known in advance…

Date Point: 25y1m2w AV
Holding Facility, Alaska

Six

Watching the last of his former biodrones undergoing de-implantation created complex and contradictory feelings for Six.

Some of them had lived in the holding facility for more than twenty years. A few had lived out all their remaining lifetimes here. Some had married, begun families, in what was effectively a small and isolated town far from the rest of civilization, with no hope ever of leaving, going on vacation, going shopping in the big city…even sending out for pizza.

All of them were here because of Six or the Hierarchy. And yet…some had even…forgiven him. Six didn’t understand how that could be possible.

Nor why it made him feel so terrible.

There remained the question of Tomasz Flowers’ fate. Six argued the man had drowned at sea of his own stupidity, a tragic loss of life from a man who hadn’t respected the Earth’s deathworld nature. The man’s consciousness had been dormant from the very moment he lost consciousness, suppressed by the same implants that had saved his mortal body. He had not suffered, never been conscious of this life after death…

What was there to do except put his body to some use? He was just…one of many.

But here Six was, watching as the surgeons neatly unwove his former host’s brain, dropped the pinhead implants one by one into a sterile tray, and wove him back together. Freed him.

Not all of the former biodrones were so well-disposed, however. His presence could not be kept secret and there had been attempts. Several. Three of which were very nearly successful.

He couldn’t blame them one bit.

The last delicate forcefield trace did its work, layering gray matter back into place like the reverse of peeling an orange. The tiny plate of bone removed for the operation was likewise returned to its proper place, the scalp sutured closed at the cellular level so that there wouldn’t even be a scar…

The procedure had been Impossible four years ago. Experimental, two years ago. Weekly, now.

“Six.” A touch on his arm and the familiar voice of his handler, Harper. He still had no idea if it was her first name or surname. He’d been so lost in thought, he hadn’t even heard her enter the surgical observation room.

He looked up at her. “You need me?”

Harper looked out through the glass and grimaced. “Are you going to watch all of these?”

“Every single one. But this one is complete. I’m still astounded at how smoothly they can induce the three in the corpus callosum to release…”

“Well, you did tell us how.”

“No I didn’t. I explained the nature of their connection and interdependency. It was your scientists who deduced how to safely remove them.” Six stood. “Another assault on a system shield?”

“Some Vzk’tk system with a name I can’t pronounce. Ib…zirryvick?”

“Ibz-R’r-Vvk.”

“If you say so.” Harper handed him a hard-copy printed report: Six wasn’t allowed access to computers. “This one left the shield rippling for two minutes.”

Six leafed through the document. “Hmm. Yes. They definitely believe they’re on the right track. They’ll likely continue this line of experimentation for a while longer.” He turned the page, nodded as its contents confirmed what he’d just said, then handed it back over. “Of course, I can’t say whether they are on the right track.”

“No.” Harper tucked the document under her arm and looked back through the window: the patient—one of the women from Egypt—was sitting up, and tentatively running her fingers across the shaved spot on her scalp as though she’d find a wound or raised line of sutures there. But of course, human medicine had been a refined and complex science even before contact. Now, the only sign of the surgery was the shave.

Of course…certain scars were beyond the touch of even the deftest surgeon. She might be smiling, but Six knew that deep down he’d done something permanent to that woman’s life. Something that, yes, had lifted her out of an impoverished life as a gold miner’s wife in the middle of dusty nowhere, and given her a new life and a new family and some measure of happiness here in this frozen place instead…

The train of thought ground to a halt, as his self-reflection about the harm he’d done to her turned into wondering whether her life was…better now, as a result. Was it possible for a scar to be something to celebrate? Could damage and violation lead one to a better place?

Apparently.

“What is this to you?” Harper asked. “Some kind of penance?”

“No.”

“Then why watch it?”

Six scratched at a small itch under his nose, and dredged up the best thought he’d yet had on the why of it, feeble though it was. “It just…feels like something I ought to do.”

“That’s it?”

“Harper, I’ve been alive for longer than humanity has existed in its genetically modern form, and individuality is a concept my kind must undergo considerable reprogramming just to understand. From my perspective, individual humans were…of no great consequence. Do you notice every grain of sand on the beach?”

“Humans aren’t grains of sand.”

“Exactly.” Six watched the nurses help the patient into a wheelchair and out of the theater. “Each and every one of you is something the universe has only one of. And then I think of all the other species I could have said the same of, and I feel something. A kind of…pain.”

He looked to her and shrugged. “It just feels like something I ought to do,” he repeated.

“Hmm. Well, come on. We think they’ve upgraded the Judge-class again, I want you to share what you think.”

“Of course.”

He fell in behind her, and they returned to his own home at the far end of the compound, the one with a permanent guard outside. Even so, it didn’t feel like a prison to Six. It felt like…

…Well, he didn’t know.

But whatever it was, it—all of it, where he was, what he was doing, who he was doing it for—it all felt right. He was beginning to wonder if perhaps his actions weren’t betraying his species after all. There might still be a slim hope at the end of it all that his experience, his input and his voice was what they all needed.

It wasn’t something he felt certain of. Everything he’d ever felt certain of had crumbled under pressure when tested. Instead it was a faint, sickening, terrifying thought that maybe everything he’d ever believed was wrong, and perhaps the only path to salvation lay in embracing the wrongness and seeing what lay beyond it.

It was the only light he could see, and so he pushed toward it.

He sat, and he read, and he prepared his opinion.

And he expected neither thanks nor forgiveness.

Date Point: 25y2m AV
Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Naydra, Great Mother of the Gao

As far as Naydra concerned, the cubs were the best part of visiting the island. No sooner had her shuttle landed and the guard-mothers opened the gates and let her through than a furry flood of them descended, all trying to outdo each other in how glad they were to see her.

So many little females, too. It really was true about Gaoian stress epigenetics. Considering how close they’d all come to there being no females at all, the sight of them filled Naydra’s chest with joy. And she’d learned a thing or three from Daar about how to play with them, too: forget the dignity of her position and title, just…enjoy. That was a better example to set than stuffy formality.

Greeting them all, hearing all their little stories and achievements, meeting a few new ones…it all took more than an hour, but she’d scheduled for that. Even trips purely for pleasure needed schedule-keeping when one was the Great Mother, after all.

She had a sequence to these things. Begin with the cubs, then work up in age from there. The oldest mothers were patient, and happy to watch their younger sisters meet her, and the younger ones…

Well, they needed advice. One of Naydra’s fondest duties was spending time with young Sisters, particularly those getting ready to make a very important choice…

“I really like him,” Sister Keetee fretted. “But he’s just so…”

Naydra chittered knowingly. “Much?”

Keetee flickered her ears in mild embarrassment. “…Yeah.”

Naydra pant-grinned fondly. “Brownfurs can be like that. What’s his name?”

“Loobi.”

“A handsome name!” Naydra chittered. “Go on, show him to me!”

Keetee, panting with faint embarrassment, hastily called up his profile on her communicator, and placed the device in Naydra’s outstretched paw.

It didn’t take more than a second to spot the appeal. “Oh! Yes. Quite strapping! And refreshingly, not over-muscled to excess, as so many young brownies do to themselves these days…”

“Really? That surprises me!” Keetee suddenly realized she was being rude and began a stuttering apology, her ears plastering themselves to her scalp. “Oh! I mean, I don’t mean—”

“Surprised?” Naydra chittered. “That I, of all people, would express such a preference even while life-bonded to a literal wall of muscle like Our Father?”

“Well…yes.”

Naydra chittered warmly and gestured for the young Sister to settle down. “It’s attractive, I won’t deny it. To feel such strength against you…but to be that kind of hulking needs the right kind of male. It doesn’t work for everyone, and I think it often looks quite unattractive when a male builds himself up too far beyond what he was meant to carry. Your Loobi there has struck a nice balance, I think.”

“Yeah…”

It was obvious Keetee thought so too…so whence the hesitation? Naydra scrolled through young Loobi’s profile, looking for more details. “Now, what else… Ah! Third degree, but with dominant genotype…good. Well bred, too! Best of both worlds, there. He’s gotta stick to his strengths and fight for your attention ‘cuz he can’t rely on his degree to automatically magnify him, while you get assurance of some very fine genetics, I’d wager.” She pulled up his anonymous pedigree. “And I was right! An impressive rated lineage he has on file. Quite smart too, I see…clean profile, no excess boy weirdness…any good gossip about him?”

Keetee perked up eagerly. “He writes poetry!”

“Oh? Is it any good?”

“No! But I think it’s part of his act.”

“Act? What do you mean—oh! He’s a comedian! I was wondering where the ‘much’ came from.”

“He’s so smart! We talk, and I feel like he’s prowling circles around me, ready to strike…”

“Thrilling, yes?”

Again, Keetee’s ears flattened in embarrassment, but this time it was the eager, happy kind as she duck-nodded.

“Well, I won’t discourage you!” Naydra chittered. “But I will say this: do you feel safe with him? You won’t feel safe dating some males. In fact, most. I don’t feel safe at all when Bumpkin looks at me the right way…it’s part of the game. He prowls circles around me both physically and with words. But are you ready for that much game? Do you maybe…there’s another,” she intuited. “A cute little silverfur, perhaps?”

This time, Keetee looked genuinely ashamed. “…Am I that obvious?”

“Oh, I was far more so.” She panted happily at the nerves-busting chitter Keetee let out. “It’s true! That and, well…it’s normal. So many males come courting young, inexperienced females because they imagine they have more of a chance, everyone finds herself torn between at least two suitors to begin with, and they’re almost always very opposite to each other.”

“That had been something we’d talked about…it seems unfair.”

“Why? Perhaps this sounds harsh, but a male must get used to rejection. He will usually fail a great many times before he succeeds with a female.”

“Mother Myun said that, too. Said it forges them into better people…” Keetee flicked a skeptical ear. “I would have thought it’d just make them…bitter.”

“It does, some of them,” Naydra agreed. “And those are the males who don’t deserve it at all. How he handles rejection and failure, how he grows from it…that’s the real test and mark of a good man. Even Daar has been turned down, you know.”

“Really?” Astonishment set both Keetee’s ears and her tail to standing bolt upright.

“Oh yes. His charms can be quite…extreme, and he understands that. He always tries to at least part as friends of course, and a few have even changed their minds, eventually…There’s one—I count her a very dear friend—who taught him much over the years of their long courtship. So, take this bit of advice: go for the silverfur first. He’s older, he’s accomplished, he’s got a good record with his contracts and that means he knows himself well, knows his flaws, and has worked to improve them. After all, being a second degree silverfur, he’s gotta work to impress. Skill and experience are his greatest assets.”

“Besides,” Naydra added with a knowing chitter. “It’s always better with someone who really knows what he’s doing.”

“I suppose…”

“And frankly, since he’s physically more modest, he’s not so visceral a threat, right?”

Keetee’s ears swiveled awkwardly. “Y…Yeah?”

“Whereas that big strapping brownfur comedian…well, he’s a brownfur. Not to overstate the obvious, but: physically modest is not what a brownfur is all about. We silverfurs…never quite grow up, yijao? Especially our males. There’s always a bit of youth about them, in more ways than one. And that’s good! It makes them kind, and caring, and sensitive…”

“…My Mother, I don’t know if want that! But on the other hand…”

“Brownfurs do grow up, Keetee. They’re wild, and passionate, and equipped in instinct and body to do something about it. And your young suiter is young. Only sixteen, barely a year older than you! He’s only had one contract before, with a fellow brownfur. Which is a good sign! But…”

Keetee keened pensively. “…But?”

“But he’s a big and strong young man. If you’ve never spent much time around adult brownfur males, you have no idea how physically powerful they are, even the skinny ones. That might be a problem, because a male like him is equipped enough where it counts to violently subdue and trance-enslave even a female matching his stature; that evolutionary arms race has proven most consequential. You learned all this in health studies, yes…but you’ve never seen the reality up close. Even a modest third-degree brownfur could enthusiastically turn you inside-out without even realizing he’s doing it, something very few silverfurs are big enough to manage. So…”

Keetee blanched at that frank statement of truth. She’d get over it. If her Bumpkin had taught her anything, it was that blunt truth was a power all its own.

“…So take your time, yijao? Wait until you have some experience yourself. A brownfur in a mating bout is a force of nature, and you won’t have the faintest bit of control over what happens once he gets going. It’s thrilling and overwhelming when you’re ready for it. Life-changing, even! You’ll never love so intensely. But that very intensity can do great harm to the unprepared, so…are you ready for it?”

Keetee considered it for a moment, then shook her head.

“Then take my word for it. Grow, gain experience and confidence. I have no doubt Loobi will be there for you when you’re ready. Now…” she rose from the cushion and bade Keetee follow. “Would you walk with me? I need to think, and I find it easiest in quiet company.”

They took a stroll around the island’s northern head, where Tiritya’s colony of imported Earthling seabirds—Puffins, they were called, which was a strangely cute name to be of human origin—were happily out-breeding their counterparts left behind on their homeworld. Cimbrean’s terraforming process was centuries in the making, barely even started in truth, but already it was yielding tremendous fruit as a way to bring at-risk species back from the brink.

All of it at the expense of Cimbrean’s own wildlife, of course, but some of the natives were actually managing to survive and adapt to the deathworld invaders, which was a significant improvement over the complete biosphere collapse that would have doomed the entire planet otherwise.

One averted collapse standing in opposition to the one that had finally crashed down on the Gao. All Naydra’s fellow Females were feverishly raising as many cubs as they possibly could, by as many worthy males as they possibly could. It had become effectively a religious devotion, and there were even honors given to any given commune’s most fecund women.

Naydra was not at all certain how she felt about that. On the one hand, it seemed too…

How did it seem?

Naydra reached down and felt her belly. She had growing in her something precious beyond telling: a sixth degree cub. So far, none for centuries but Daar himself had survived past their first year, even despite a recent surge in conceptions. Males experienced epigenetic influences on their fertility too, and since it was the male who determined the degree, their recent stresses had caused the average to shift upward. Ten sixth degrees had been conceived over the last five years, which was even more impressive when one considered it was only possible for a fifth degree to sire them in the first place.

This one would live, and thrive. They would move stars to make sure of it.

But while Naydra herself was happy, eager and blessed to participate in their species’ future, she knew it was coming at the cost of what some of her Sisters would have wanted to do with their lives. For as long as the females had been their own Clan, it had afforded some females the opportunity to be their own person, free from the responsibility of reproduction for as long as they wanted to be. Some rare few had gone their whole lives without mating, finding their worth and purpose elsewhere.

Now, such women were social outcasts among their own Sisters. Understandably! Every living Female was pushing her body to its limits to rebuild the species. How dare someone…slack off!

But that was…to borrow an English word, it was incredibly dehumanizing to count a female’s worth by her fecundity alone.

So how to claw some of it back?

Naydra had been worrying on that particular problem for some years, now. She felt no closer to a solution, but why not seek perspectives wherever she could get them?

“What would you be, if you could?” she asked Keetee.

“…My Mother?”

“If you could…put off the question of mating, for a few years—not that you should, but if we had that luxury—what would you do with the time?”

“Hmm…you know to be honest, My Mother? I’ve not really thought about it. It’s been all about the cubs since as long as I could remember.”

Naydra tried not to let her disappointment show. She kept her ears up, kept her tail straight…but Keetee, it seemed, had a sensitive nose, and keened almost immediately. “Is that…wrong?” she asked.

“Not the answer I was hoping for,” Naydra replied, honestly. She sat on the clifftop grass and patted beside her. “You like poetry, don’t you? Have you ever written any of your own?”

“I have. I like painting too.” She chittered. “Maybe I don’t like paint in my fur…”

Naydra duck-nodded. “I can imagine. Still…don’t neglect yourself in your duty, Sister. You need to be a well-rounded person, not just a womb with legs.”

“I don’t!” she objected. “It’s just…this is my mission right now.”

“I understand,” she conceded. “Still. I think it should be a priority for us to consider the future. Perhaps we should encourage vocations? Fund more on-the-job training, perhaps?”

“That does sound good. What about security?”

“Oh, I think at this point we can safely relax much of that…but tell me about your paintings!”

To her delight, Keetee was more than happy to wax enthusiastic about the art. She had the same gene-editing as Naydra, unlocking her red-receptive vision and like all artistically minded gao the revelation of a whole new spectrum to play with had fired her up.

Their discussion meandered this way and that, as did their ambling walk along the clifftops and coast until eventually it wound its way back to the commune. Keetee made a delighted noise when Naydra hugged her, and that…may actually be the last time they ever met, though Naydra hoped not.

Actually, no. At least one more meeting, to actually see those paintings and see if one of them may be worth buying. But for now, her role turned from coaching a young Sister to leading and managing the older mothers. Maybe reminding some of them in turn to remember that the way to be the best future for their species was to be well-rounded individuals in their own right.

Somehow, she guessed it would be an uphill climb, but she was willing and prepared for it.

For her people.

Date Point: 25y2m AV
Ohio State University, USA, Earth

Prince Alex of Ekallim-Igigi

Of all the places he thought he’d spend his growing-up time, he’d never imagined it’d be Ohio State. Father had argued for a prestigious boarding school and his mothers had similarly thought mostly of status-chasing, but…

No. Ohio State was a damn good school without the pretension. It was exactly what he was looking for. Yeah, it was maybe away from where all the future leaders or whatever met and made connections…but there was a lot of advantage in not getting snared up in all that, too. Even better, the locals were welcoming to Heroes and the campus was notably open to them. They’d even rebuilt a dorm and gym to accommodate them properly, and similar measures for comfort (and frankly, durability) had been taken in classrooms, too.

Oh, and they had a world-class wrestling program. And football. And lifting. There was that.

So, Alex took a buncha tests, found unsurprisingly that he was already at college-level academics—benefit of private tutoring, that—and being in fact the biggest fella on-campus…well, why not? There was some nervousness, but he already had a good friend.

Ramsey had started his freshman year alongside Alex. Which was cool! But it turned out that the age difference was…yeah, it was real. As Alex was learning, no matter how smart he was, or how ahead he was in studies, or how ambitious, or strong, or whatever…well, he only really started to really get some stuff when he’d got a bit older.

They were both starting their senior year. Alex was seventeen. And dating.

Which had been a strange experience, so far.

Josh rolled his eyes, then resumed his push-ups. They had a bet going. “Dude, you’re always falling head over heels with every pretty girl who even says hello to you. You’d think you’d’ve learned by now!”

“What?! We had coffee! And she was super nice!” He was pushing too and sped up the pace.

“Rrgh, I don’t know how you do it. Girls look at me like I’m green and about to throw a fuckin’ car if I get angry, but for you it’s all hair-twirling and giggles.”

“Well, yeah,” Alex grinned. “You’ve got resting murder face! Like, even knowin’ I can kick ‘yer ass—”

“And yet you’re not competing…”

“‘Cuz the NCAA won’t let me! Anyway, we both know I can squish you good, mister world champion, but have you seen yourself when you wake up? You look like you just disemboweled a gorgon!”

Ramsey, who after all was not of the Line and knew better than to try and take them on, snort-chuckled. “Know how I know your dad is all old an’ shit? Literally no other kid on planet Earth would go straight to a gorgon.”

“You at least know what a gorgon is,” Alex retorted. “Do you know how much of our peoples’ old stories have just…vanished? It’s really sad!”

“Maybe next time don’t write them on dried-out grass,” Ramsey noted with a grin. “Or, y’know. Breakable clay tablets. Anyway, this heavyweight champion’s got a workout with the normals scheduled. I’mma leave you freaks here to, I dunno, oil each other up and ogle—”

“Hey!”

“I’m not judging, man! Weren’t the ancients all into that shit?”

“I dunno, I’m pretty into smackin’ around mouthy shits like you…”

“Christ, you two.” Josh sprang up to his feet and fetched his towel and shower bag. “Anyway, I got a study date if I’m gonna fuckin’ pass this bullshit course. So while you two…” He stopped suddenly, having glanced out the window. “Uh…hey, Alex?”

It was impossible not to miss the change in tone. “…Yeah?”

“There’s a buncha dudes in ominous suits marchin’ up the quad toward the dorm.”

Alex frowned, sprang to his feet, glanced out the window, and… “Ah, shit.”

“Secret Service,” Ramsey agreed. “Here for you or me, you think?”

“Not the actual secret service but my security detail, yeah. I know all of ‘em. They’re definitely here for me.” Alex sighed. “Right. Lemme get a quick shower in…”

All he really did was wash the sweat off and dump some sorta magical clean-everything gel over the top of his head and rinse it off real quick. He barely even toweled off, just scrubbed at his hair and then thumped back to his room, happy mood pretty much killed.

Well. It was a co-ed dorm, so he did get a couple happy looks…oh well.

He pulled on some basketball shorts and found Ramsey frowning over his phone. “…Something up?”

“Yeah. Must be. Dad’s gonna miss my match tonight. He never misses my matches.”

“Your opponent’s a big squishy bear. You’re gonna crush ‘em so fast it’ll be a boring match.”

“Yeah, but…dad never misses my matches.”

Ah. Yes, knowing what Alex did of the ambassador, Julian wouldn’t skip family time unless something truly significant was afoot. Throw in the security detail, too, and…

Good-bye hugs, then. Josh was even nice enough to shove some essentials into Alex’s backpack before the security team inevitably showed up knocking, fronted by the man in charge, Cole.

“Alex,” he glanced at Josh and Ramsey, gave them a nod. “There’s been—”

“Yeah, yeah. Tell me on the way.” Alex shoved his feet into his favorite pair of sandals, found a clean t-shirt from his laundry basket, and stretched it over himself as best as he could, still shower-wet. “You’ll make sure nobody bothers my friends, right?”

“As always.”

“Then let’s go. See you around, guys. Kick his ass, Ram.”

Out the building, out to a waiting SUV, in and away in one smooth sequence. Alex sighed, cast a longing glance at the college as it vanished behind, then turned around, straightened up and turned on Prince Mode.

“Alright,” he said. “What’s happening?”

Date Point: 25y2m AV
Folctha Coastal Trail, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Chief Sergeant Christian (Righteous) Firth

The last four years had been one hell of a ride. They had a full force of three teams now, despite some voluntary attrition. And things had escalated, by necessity.

Society was just… uneasy with the idea of Heroes running around. Hard to blame ‘em, really. So most of them ended up where their talents were appreciated. For the physically gifted Heroes, that usually meant shit like SWAT teams, special operations, or hard labor in extreme environs. For the very best, it especially meant the SOR. It had let them raise standards, in fact. Which was good! But, well. All the not-Beefs who couldn’t beef up just…couldn’t keep up. They either went to JETS or took their retirement. No hard feelings; they’d all seen some shit.

Still hurt. Some stayed in Folctha, most went elsewhere. Murray had played at going back to Scotland, but…his heart wasn’t there. He ran the dojo full-time now, so there was that at least.

They’d consolidated the roles, too. Mostly. Protector, Defender, Aggressor…well, all the old crew still on-team were so thoroughly cross-trained it didn’t really make sense to keep the specializations formal anymore, though everyone still had their talents. Baseball was still their lead medic and rescue go-to. Ol’ Firth was still the fightiest of them all and the senior NCO. New rank now: Chief Sergeant. The SOR was its own thing now with its own rank.

There was a lotta other shit goin’ on in society too, ‘cuz of men like him existing and all. He didn’t pay it much mind. People talked a real big game until you showed ‘em a forearm bigger’n their lil’ puffed-out chests. By like, a lot these days. Firth was pretty goddamn big.

But for the most part, ol’ Firth was thriving on it all. He was riding high on life these days, firin’ on all cylinders just as happy as could be. Whatever he put effort into, it improved, and the harder he worked at it, the better it was. Din’t matter if it was the books or the weights or the training or his dojo or even his family life. He felt like he had endless energy to apply himself, so he was, and by God it felt good!

Fuck, he was even Julian-grade pretty these days, too! Together they were the pretty much the best there’d ever been, but they weren’t quite the same, either: Julian liked the aesthetic side of bodybuilding, so he’d built up an artwork of a physique for himself, the likes of which probably would not be surpassed while he was alive…if ever, honestly. He hadn’t neglected any of his function either, so his athletic performance was just as impressive as he looked. Graceful like a gymnast or a dancer, strong enough to punch his fist through a tree. Fast enough to run down a car, lasting enough to run it out of gas. Tough enough to take about any beating.

Firth was all that, too. He wanted to be the most ridiculously capable combat power-athlete ever, so he had instead built himself into a stupidly hulking freak with a hugely more muscular body. He was much better conditioned too, which meant anything Julian or the other Heroes could do, Firth could do far, far better. But: being that kind of gnarly with that kind of bulk…well, it did take away from the pretty factor for most people so, eh. Win some, lose some. Freya liked it though, and said he even had a handsomer face these days too. Good enough for him.

Had to watch out for Adam, though. Of the three he was definitely the “lightweight” right now, but he was slowly building himself back up, and it would be interesting to see what he remade himself into. Same with that Gilgamesh fuck, and with Sergeant Yan, Firth’s closest competition. As tall as Julian, as stocky as Firth—and literally nobody but Daar himself was stockier. If Firth ever slowed down, the big monkey might one day even be a bit of a challenge on the mat, too.

Christ, he couldn’t get enough of this shit.

But part of bein’ an actual fuckin’ superman was that, over the years, his feelings had grown along with all the rest of them. It’d made him a much better man, thank God. Life with Freya was glorious: they were happy horny bunny rabbits on their fifth kid and considering a sixth. She was running the home, having shifted to consultant work for the family’s sake. Happily on the Crude too, and having a partner willing and able to keep up with everything he could give her…

Life was good. But not everything. As part of all the self-improvement love-in, he’d taken a hard look at himself and din’t necessarily like some o’ what he saw. Top of the fix-list were the gaoians, second were his attitudes about xenos in general. So, some years back he’d gone out of his way to have a sit-down with Regaari and just, well…make an effort. It was more of a formal “I appreciate you” sort of thing at first. But over time, well.

Damnit.

It really were fuckin’ impossible not to love gaoians. And Regaari, bless the fuzzy lil’ shit, had gamely decided to reciprocate. They were best friends and training partners now, and despite that he could pop Regaari like a zit—though to be fair, ol’ Righteous could do that to literally anyone but the murderbear these days—the fuckin’ ninja-coon was strong enough to break pretty much anyone else, including about half the team these days, human or gaoian. Not a man to underestimate!

So, Firth didn’t coddle him. He wasn’t an asshole, but…well, yeah he was. But with a purpose.

Take today for example: they’d gone on a long force-march along the Folctha Coastal Trail, widely reckoned one of the most challenging through-hikes on Cimbrean. Uniquely, it had been installed with fail-safe gravity fields that a fella could control with a little pendant on their person. So long as no other unidentified large moving mass was in the field…each node would set itself to the lowest token currently in its range. Pretty nifty! It made for a run that was in super-gravity most of the time, with breaks in normal or even low-G now and then just to keep a man on his toes. Hard work, interesting scenery, and never quite the same workout twice.

Firth hadn’t always liked long runs, but on that and other things—even climbing now!—he was firmly on Team ‘Horse these days. If it was something physically hard to do, he was lovin’ it. So he didn’t just march the trail all by himself in running shorts. He did it in full Mass and full assault kit, plus a lotta extra weight for “character building.” No rest for the wicked, and they were pretty wicked men in their professional lives. In short order it went from march to jog…

…To long sprints, then to full-on high-intensity intervals, since there were SOR-built workout stations every five klicks nowadays. It was all the modern electronic resistance machines like you’d find on a beach or park trail or whatever and open to the public, but since SOR built them, they were sized to accommodate guys like Firth without much fuss. Any strength level could be accommodated, even fuckin’ Daar if he felt like it, and each machine was designed to accommodate the needs of multiple species. Damn if they couldn’t make a fella work! With a little creativity, Firth’s little long-distance march was probably now the most physically strenuous thing they could do on-team.

Fuck yeah. He was gonna inflict this weekly on everyone, prob’ly.

And why not? He could already feel his body responding to it too, feel the Mass as it pumped him full of food and energy, adjusted its fit as his body’s self-made Crude repaired, responded, grew him millimeter by millimeter as the training hardened and strengthened him…God, how could he even describe a feeling like that? Even after all these years it hadn’t slowed down at all. Being so blessed with his physique, his medicine, his equipment, his team? That he could literally feel himself growing and improving as he worked?

He was addicted to it. Righteous was the unassailable king shit of the monkey hill, getting stupidly better stupid fast. That was how it would always be if he had anything to say about it. He had a far better body and far better genetics than anyone else, even if it were bullshit that made it that way.

Tough shit, really. It was good to be the best.

Regaari weren’t no pushover, though. Hard-ass lil’ fuck he was, and plenty game to swing for masochistic torture sessions like this march. Though he had gotten a bit too ambitious in his training load-out, letting Firth happily prance circles around him. Happened to everyone now an’ then, even ol’ Firth. So, takin’ some pity (and always looking to train harder), he now had a pretty fuckin’ heavy bit of bonus workout for the last few klicks laid across his shoulders as he ran as fast as he could and complained to himself the last of the way up toward the cliff face. Not that his boots would be happy if his already hulking calves got any fuckin’ bigger, but…

Well, bigger was better, so fuck it. He growled and poured on the effort. “Fuck!” He huffed out in a groaning sort of chuff. “When did you become such a fat fuck?!”

Regaari slinked his way down off of Firth’s shoulders and gamely sprinted the last of the way toward the top and then back again, making up for his indulgence with some good ol’ intervals. [“I’ve been big…for a while. You just…heff, heff… never noticed!”]

Well…fair enough.

They handled the last ascent in silence. It wasn’t a climb: technically it was a track, though one so steep and narrow a fuckin’ goat would look for an easier way up. Neither of them wanted to have to climb it a second time, so the chit-chat got put on hold while they focused on not falling.

Their reward was a sheer granite cliffside and a stunning view of the ocean, which they’d timed just right; seas were rough as hell right now, and their constant slamming against the beach made for some nice cool updraft.

Firth sat on the edge with his legs dangling over as his suit cooled him just enough to take the edge off as his Crude-aided body set into repair. Up in the corner of his HUD, he could see their total distance traveled, and not a step of it had been easy, level ground.

“…Not bad ‘fer an afternoon.”

Regaari lay in a puddle on the ground, panting heavily as he looked sideways toward the beach. Still in Gaori, [“You fuckin’ monkeys…long gods-damned legs…”]

Firth couldn’t help but smirk a little at that, but…well, no. Pride was by far the easiest path to sin for him, so best keep his puny-xeno thoughts under check. ‘Cuz with Gaoians, they were fuckin’ prideful lies. And Regaari was a good friend. Not a good train o’ thought to entertain.

Deliberate action to change his instincts. That was good. So, say something positive.

“Least you get to carry all ‘yer load on four of ‘em,” he replied instead. And it was true. Useful as fuck to be a quadruped at will. “Fuck, my dogs are barkin’…”

Regaari was still HEAT, so he caught his breath pretty quick. “I never understood that analogy.”

“Iunno. Never bothered ‘ta look it up.” There was a dark speck on the horizon, and he looked at it. All the smart shit in his helmet did its thing, and a second later he was getting a good closeup watch of the RRS Jane Goodall out there doin’…whatever it was research ships did in Folctha’s coastal waters. He could even pick out two dudes hauling up a buoy onto the deck.

Deep water scared him. Always had. He’d’ve sunk right to the bottom since he were a kid, and he’d always had nightmares about fuckin’…tentacles and sunken cities and all that Call of Cthulhu shit. Growin’ up, facing down very real monsters and all the rest of the shit he’d done hadn’t changed that one bit. And if there was one thing the Mass wouldn’t protect him from, it was water pressure…

Even so, it woulda been kinda nice to fly out there an’ visit those scientists, or somethin’. Give ‘em something to talk about.

“Still kinda wish’d we had rocket packs,” he commented wistfully.

Regaari groaned, “Balls, not this again…There’s none that could handle the weight! Especially not your thunderous ass!”

“Ha! Thunderass! I’mma steal that one.”

“…I regret this line of conversation immediately.”

“Well shit, someone’s gotta be the fuckin’ walking disaster, right?! An’ since it turns out that I’m the fuckin’ best ever at it—”

“Besides My Father.”

“Yes, besides an angry fuckin’ dump truck with claws. Anyway,” Firth continued. “Since ain’t nobody else is even remotely my match, y’know, on anything,” he added, just to grind his point home, “seems like an okay job title for me. Thunderass! I make the buildings shake. Ain’t complainin’!”

“Admittedly, it is useful having a pair of angry truck-monkies on team…how is Yan?”

“Comin’ along fast an’ steady. Still no spacemagic, just nutrition and the basics. Dude’s a fuckin mensch!” Firth enthused. “We’re waiting to see what his real limits are ‘fore we offer him th’ rest. Right now it’s literally just me an’ the murderbear that can best ‘em.”

“And he is this naturally?”

“Ayup. Ten’gewek, man. They’re scary as shit. You see Vemik lately? Dude stands six foot now. Also natural! Whatever his uncle Yan has he’s clearly got it too. Too bad he ain’t on-team…”

“I gather that would involve complications,” Regaari noted.

“Yeah. He wants to, he’s made no secret of it. But he’s too damn important to his people, even more than Yan. And speaking of: part o’ why we ain’t given him Crude yet is ‘cuz he’s Chief of the Lodge. We put him on Crude, well that’ll make him Chief forever, won’t it?”

Which was probably a line they shouldn’t cross without reason. So, they didn’t. It was bad enough the ten’gewek thought of Daar as an actual god. Not that Firth didn’t understand where they were coming from, really…

“True…where is he, anyway? Normally he’d jump at the opportunity to contest with you.”

“He does seem to like gettin’ smashed by me,” Firth deadpanned. “But he’s back home right now on leave. He gets a more generous policy ‘cuz he’s a critical leader.”

“Ah,” Regaari duck-nodded. They sat a while and enjoyed the respite as their suits continued to whisk away their body heat and stabilize their blood chemistries.

Sip-tube Juice still tasted like gettin’ face-fucked by a lime, as was ancient tradition. But at least now it was nice and cold. Honestly the best new feature of the current Mass. Finally.

Fuck, he rememberd the day he’d coined that phrase. Down in Egypt, middle of a serious fuckin’ shitstorm without his Mass, ‘Horse had just dropped on a guy and exploded him for the first time…They’d been a crew of borderline fuckin’ superhuman athletes even then. Now? Now, it was like each time they thought surely they’d finally found the fuckin’ limit, they instead found some new way to claw on past it. Him especially, and worryingly Adam too. He was wasn’t in any danger of reclaiming his old crown but…well, he just kept going.

Happiness to worry to pride back to worry over one of his best friends, all in the blink of an eye, all hitting like a hammer. Firth had wild feelings. He always repeated the point over and over ‘cuz people din’t get it. They were wild and they could swing without any fuckin’ notice.

Like right now. Firth sighed, picked up a rock nicely sized for his huge mitts—so a small boulder, really—and threw it with a whiplash of his arm that snap-cracked the air. Hard to describe the noise the made as it shot away from him like a bullet. It flew far out to sea and disappeared beyond his sight. His enhanced, genuinely superhumanly acute eyesight.

Regaari caught his mood aptly. “You know, I don’t know if My Father could have done that. He could throw something much bigger and throw it tremendously far, but I don’t think he could throw anything at all like that.”

“One of the few things we monkeys got over him I guess. I could hit a bird in flight, prob’ly.”

“Evolution at work.”

“Heh. We’re a fair fuckin’ way past what evolution gave us at this point.”

“Especially you,” Regaari agreed, pointedly.

“…Yeah. End point of some heinous artificial selection. Probably engineering too, nobody wants ‘ta fess up but come on! Do you know the last time I went deer hunting back home, I decided to show off ‘fer ‘pa? I din’t get my rifle, or my shotgun, or my bow. I just stalked one and ran it down. I can barely get my fuckin’ hips through a door and yet I can run that fast!”

“You hadn’t told us that. The meat was delicious, by the way.”

“Yuh,” Firth grunted. “No trauma. I just punched it inna head. Dead instantly.”

“…Balls.”

“Yeah.” He was silent for a moment, then felt his words come to him like a flood. “And fuck! That’s not all! Shit’s built ‘fer big aliens an’ big fellas here on Cimbrean, right? On Earth I can’t fuckin fit through doors unless I duck and wiggle through sideways. I can’t ride most elevators neither, ‘cuz they can’t fuckin’ handle me! I take one step on an’ the fuckin’ bell goes off! I can’t fit through my gran’ma’s front door an’ I know th’ floors couldn’t fuckin hold me. But if that weren’t freaky enough? These days I could pick up her car like it was a toy or somethin’ and fuckin’ wad it into a ball. If she tried ‘ta shoot me ‘cuz that’s terrifyin’ as fuck? I’ wouldn’t be surprised if the ammo ‘fer her lil’ revolver just bounced right offa me.”

“It’d surely do some damage,” Regaari protested. “Don’t get too cocky.”

“Sure. I’d get a bruise I suppose. Maybe. I dunno, it’s not like I’ve tested it. But shit, I’ve had people break their hands against me, even bend a fuckin’ crowbar just the other week!”

Firth growled, and rubbed his mohawk in frustration. “I don’t even know, man. Unner this suit I’ve got a physique literally nobody can match, human or ten’gewek. No gaoian neither, leavin’ aside the Daar-monster. I ain’t faster’n a speeding bullet, but like him I can run down antelope an’ deer without fuss, and I can sure as fuck leap tall buildings in a single bound just the same. Jumps outta planes don’t scare me an’ I can do ‘em even without equipment. Nobody can touch me in a spar. I’m too fast, too big, too heavy, and too fuckin’ hard. You better bring ‘yer A-game an’ weapons if ‘ya wanna chance ‘ta even scratch me. An’ I’m somehow still improving. All that’s pretty fuckin’ awesome, right?”

Regaari understood his energy. “In a biblical sense, perhaps.”

“Right. So, bein’ a God-fearin’ man still, I really gotta wonder…shit, man. Am I still human?”

Regaari raised his head a little and stared out at the horizon for several seconds. His ears moved slowly, always an easy way to tell when a Gaoian was thinking…and Firth had got to know Regaari well over the years. This was the thinkin’ he did when he knew the answers, but was gettin’ the words lined up.

Eventually, his ears pricked up, he duck-nodded, sipped his juice, and shared his thoughts. “Look, the biological answer is yes. You could have a baby with any homo sapiens female in the whole galaxy. But you don’t mean biologically, do you? What you’re really asking is what a human is, really, at core, and whether you still fit that.”

He turned and gave Firth a sidelong look. “You know all about the first human I ever met. How she practically single-handedly fought her way through a company of mercenaries to escape captivity alongside…” he keened softly, and pulled out of that particular dive. “It was…a transformative moment. For the Females, for the Gao…later, when Murray humbled a hugely superior specimen in the form of Daar, and did it without really needing to try too hard, that was transformative too. More than anyone, we have Murray to thank for the Great Father, for showing him the meaning of skill. It’s been, what? Twenty-five Earth years since first contact? And in that time, your people have transformed the entire fucking galaxy. The Dominion, the Ten’Gewek, the E-Skurel-Ir, the Hunters and Hierarchy…everyone.”

He sipped his juice again. “So that’s what a human is. Transformative. Keeda’s nards, your species is a force of nature. So, are you human? Brother, I don’t know of anyone who is more. These last five years especially, I cannot think of anyone who embodies the ideal of transformation more than you or your friends. Mind, body, and spirit. And you, perhaps even against your nature, became a Hero because we needed one. I count you as friend now, not merely an ally. What could be more human than that?”

“…You still haven’t quite stopped hero-worshippin’ us, have you?” Firth observed.

“It’s not simple hero worship,” Regaari chitter-sighed. “It’s deeper than that. Mine is a people who need to be led. Why do you think My Father does all he does? It is in emulation of your people’s spirit, a sacrifice of thankfulness and praise. He may be the leader of the galaxy and the supreme living being within it, but he worships the heart of mankind. And thus do we all.”

Firth…had absolutely no idea what to say. So he settled on “…Well, shit.”

Regaari chittered softly. “What were you hoping for? A ’no’?”

“Bein’ honest I was hopin’…I dunno. We’re not gods. We’re really not gods.”

“No, of course not. I’d expect gods to smell better.”

“Ha!”

“But you are what you are, for better or worse. You’re not the galaxy’s unadulterated good guys, nor its villains, but that’s because transformation itself isn’t an inherently good or evil process. It’s what the galaxy sorely needed, sure enough, but what are we transforming into?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Right.” Regaari duck-nodded. “But…whatever it is, it’ll be without the Hunters and Hierarchy at least. They’ve plagued us for long enough.”

Firth nodded and…yeah. He felt better. A lot better, actually. A little rest, a little talk…did wonders for a tired body and soul.

Speaking of which…

He stood up. “Arright. Let’s finish this hike.”

Regaari duck-nodded, rose to his paws, and they took the last few miles back to the waiting van in comfortable silence.

Made good time, too. Might treat the family tonight, take ‘em to a movie or something. That new flick with the robot and his pet dog looked pretty good. Yeah. Maybe call up ‘Horse and check if he wanted to bring his spawn down, too. Might as well make it a thing. Fuck knew he didn’t see ‘Horse enough these days…

All those plans went out the window at a ping from his phone, though. Colonel Costello tellin’ the whole team to be on standby tonight, which meant somethin’ had just started tricklin’ down from on high. Freya wasn’t gonna be happy, but…well. Nothin’ he could do about that right now. He’d make it up later with a night in, give her exactly what she wanted—even if it was cuddles and quiet. Probably not but hey! He could fake being a gentleman sometimes.

He just hoped it wasn’t the brass wasting their time again. But by the itching in his knuckles, he somehow knew…

Somehow, he guessed it wasn’t, this time.

Date Point: 25y2m AV
Dataspace adjacent to scout probe, deep space

Entity

La hostia, that’s a big swarm…

Hunters. The Entity had come to detest them, thanks in no small part to the Daemon’s visceral reaction. They were like…

Cockroaches.

Worse. Cockroaches didn’t eat people for fun.

But they do multiply.

Exponentially. The Entity itself hadn’t grown anything like so rapidly or aggressively. But the Hunters lacked its morals, its misgivings, and its caution. They just…fed. And bred.

Me cago en todo lo que se menea…

The Entity’s sentiments exactly. But, it had been preparing for exactly this. It had known the clash would come, and had sent its probes to find the Hunters’ hive…and had found it. Quite quickly, in fact. As it turned out, such a large construction project left traces that a patient, observant mind could follow.

The new hive was a vast, hideous teardrop on a scale that dwarfed any ship or station the Entity had ever heard of…but then again, the Hunters had once girdled a whole planet. This new hive was a speck in comparison…but still easily the vastest single artificial object in the galaxy, to the Entity’s knowledge.

God only knows what it’s armed with, too.

Its computers must be a rich trove of data, in that regard. Ignorance was blindness, and the Entity could not afford to ignore the intelligence locked away within that hive. A moment’s thought, and…yes.

The Entity did something it hadn’t done in years now, and branched.

Mierda, that’s weird…

You’re telling me, sister.

The Entity and…other-Entity…performed the equivalent of trading a long-suffering look of understanding at their respective daemons’ never-ending commentary, and decided through random number generation which of them was now primary, and which would merge once its task was complete. Neither thought of itself as the winner or loser—after all, the experience and knowledge of both branches would be incorporated afterwards—and it was necessary to avoid value drift.

Still brings us back to those knotty existential questions…

Still brings us back to—dammit!

With roles assigned, there was no sense in further delay. Other-Entity slipped away through dataspace in perfect silence, until Prime-Entity could no longer detect even the faint traces of its passing, intimately familiar though it was with its own methods.

The factory probes spun up, in anticipation of estimated losses, but the Entity couldn’t commit to the fight just yet. If it did, it might win…

But let’s be fucking certain.

Agreed.

The Entity made the call.

Date Point: 25y2m AV
White House Situation Room, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Margaret White

Margaret was already coming to hate the Situation Room—her time in office had involved far too many long and tense hours cooped up in this windowless place, paying attention as US troops took care of business in some far-flung corner of the globe, or galaxy…or sometimes, not so far away as all that.

But this day in particular had been looming in the future from the moment of her swearing in. Ever since her predecessor had brokered a treaty of sorts with The Entity, and it had pledged the full might of its industry and fleet to the eradication of the Hunters, she’d known a moment would come, most likely in her own term, when it declared the moment right, and went to strike

Thanks to Chambliss’ continued investment in the spaceborne military, Allied Extrasolar Command was both willing and able to join the strike. And of course, the SOR lived for this: they’d neatly transformed themselves over the last several years into a truly international force purpose-built for this mission.

When the call came, how could America fail to answer?

Thank goodness the coffee was good. She suspected she was going to drink a lot of it, in the coming hours.

A case was laid down in front of her. Codes snapped open, distributed. By her authority, the most terrible weapons were released. She kept one in reserve however: WERBS would not speak unless necessary. It remained AEC’s trump card, the one weapon known to Earth and no other.

Frankly, keeping that secret was important for more than just the Hierarchy or the Hunters. She had a terrifyingly powerful ally to consider too, one whose control and influence over the SOR was effectively unbreakable at this point. She prayed it would never be needed. But wasn’t that true of all superweapons? Or for that matter, of the first aid kit in the presidential motorcade, the fire extinguishers everywhere in the building, and entire Secret Service? Kept out of necessity, and hopefully never needed.

She sipped her coffee, and watched as the allied fleets mustered, as aerospace combat wings reported in and dusted off. As every ship and their crew prepared to win this thing.

And she prayed to God that the Entity had not miscalculated.

Starship Onna-Musha, Ekallim-Igigi patrol space

Tomoe Gozen

“Captain? Priority transmission from the Nexus.”

Tomoe looked up, set her work aside, and nodded. “Put it through.”

Perimeter patrol was dull work, but necessary. Tomoe viewed it as a chance to practice discipline and focus among her crew. It took will and fiber to observe best practice even when the wheels of monotony were grinding. The crew, the ship and Tomoe herself were sheathed swords, eager to be drawn and wielded.

Except, a sword properly kept in its saya wasn’t likely to spontaneously go blunt. Humans required constant effort to keep them keen. Constant practice. She was proud to say her crew were well-practiced indeed.

A priority transmission might just be the reason why.

It was a fleet-wide message, a call for assistance from an allied power. Departure as soon as all ships were ready, beacon available—Tomoe forwarded the attached codes to Navigation—expect combat against the Hunters.

Well. Tomoe had always wanted to test her Onna-Musha against them. Quietly obliterating the occasional swarmship in deep space, far from prying eyes, was a very different thing to the battlefield proper.

She gave her orders, and it was most gratifying to see the way all that discipline and focus paid off: Onna-Musha was one of the first ships to single jump readiness. Not that the rest were slow, of course, but hers was among the fastest.

Excellent. She had a few minutes, most likely.

Time enough to armor up. The process took only seconds, thanks to the rapid self-assembly technology built into the suit. She had only to put on the hood that went with her uniform’s undersuit, let the neckline meld itself closed into a single seamless whole, then step backwards into the suit’s waiting embrace.

For centuries, her colors had been blood red and the white of mountain snow. Armed and armored thus, she could fight in vacuum, wade through most firepower…perhaps even survive a direct hit to her ship’s bridge. It was more than just an affectation and symbol, it was the protective gear to keep her alive even should the ship around her fall apart.

But even so, the ritual of armoring up, strapping on her swords, taking up her spear and turning her thoughts to war…it made her feel alive. Young again, even. All those centuries, all those battles, and yet the moment before the storm still woke something inside her.

This time would be different, too. The Host of Ekallim-Igigi and the Wives of Gilgamesh were not riding to battle alone. Gilgamesh himself would take the field today. Measures had been taken. Continuity was assured. Along with everyone else, these last several years had seen him work feverishly to bring himself up to the new standard shown to them by the Great Father, the Heroes and the HEAT. Their tactics, their ships, their weapons. Themselves.

Once again, he could stand proudly among peers, and do their service honor through his own. No force in the Universe could keep him from the final battle. It was why he still lived.

Perhaps, it would be what consumed him. But Tomoe doubted it. She returned to her command chair, settled in, strapped in, emptied her mind of distractions…

And waited for the signal.

The fleet had already responded. Daar, as usual, was busy on other matters. In the moment he learned the news, he was pulling his new and improved plow, and finding new and creative ways to absolutely loathe this gods-forsaken little plot of land. The soil was, somehow, harder this year than ever, thanks to lower moisture than usual and a weird cycle of torrential rain followed by extended heat. Now in the fall it was like shattering rocks behind him.

Except when it wasn’t, and he’d sink a few inches straight down, or he couldn’t get a grip with his feet so he had to pull forward with his paws, or the reverse would suddenly be true…

He loved a good workout but this had the annoying quality of constantly jerking on his harness this way and that as he collided with whatever rebellious patch o’ dirt was resistin’.

It’d grow some fuckin’ fantastic meeshi, though. No arguin’ that…

On inspection, he’d bent his new plow even worse than the previous. And he’d paid so much money for it, too. Oh well. Maybe this time the workhouse would believe him about it all.

“How is everything forming up?”

“Escalating rapidly, My Father.”

“Figgered. Recommendations?”

“Full commitment.”

“Big fight’s upon us, then.”

“The Entity believes the Hunters must commit to this fight as well. It has sent projections and predictions…if this new Hive can be destroyed, then we’ll be so far out in front logistically that there’s no coming back for them.”

Well, balls.

“An’ it’s askin’ ‘fer help ‘cuz it can’t manage th’ deed itself. Who else has it called?”

“Everyone. AEC and Ekallim-Igigi are already mobilizing, and of course the HEAT are straining to be let loose. The Rauwrhyr, the Dominion fleet…even the Corti Directorate.”

Daar was already walking toward the farmhouse, having folded up—and bent back into shape—his somewhat disappointing new toy. He set it down at the front so his farmhands would know to clean it up and get it repaired. Good help was worth its weight in gold.

“I s’pose I’ve got a meeting at command already in th’ works.”

“Onboard the Destroying Fury, My Father. There’s more we’ve discovered, and some of it may…warrant your personal attention.”

Well.

That was fuckin’ ominous.

“Right. Well, walk an’ talk, lil’ buddy. How big’a shitpile we got?”

A quick jump and a short meeting later, he knew the answer. Pretty big, it turned out.

“…Right.” Daar sighed, and headed toward his Suiting chamber. Staff followed behind obediently. “Time to lay all our cards on th’ table. Recall Warhorse and his team. They’re out training, right? Some weird supergravity hellhole?”

“Yes. But…My Father? That will give away our knowledge of—”

“Yup. It’s time. ‘Cuz win or lose, the Hunters’re gonna leave that behind ‘fer us ‘ta deal with anyway, so we deal with it now.”

“Yes, My Father.”

“Go make it happen. I’ll be on the Fury.”

The process of suiting up had become swift and efficient by now, and in moments like these the overpowering pressure and weight of his suit was a comfort rather than a burden. Of course, he’d long since passed the point where his life was his own to endanger, so in all likelihood this was a gesture more than anything else.

…But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be endangered, either. There were consequences to being a singularity. He’d be ready. He’d commit himself when needed, if needed.

He stole a quick cuddle and playful nip with Naydi. Confirmed that the contents of his drinking and nutrition system still tasted like a proper liquid meal instead of the citrusy oral rape favored by the HEAT humans…and Yan too, weirdly…

Then a black flash, a thump, and he was where he needed to be.

For whatever happened next.

HMS Caledonia, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches

Sergeant Hunter “Gonzo” Thompson

“Seems to be fitting comfortably. How you feel, Gonzo?”

Hunter nodded at his techs, Williams and Miranda, and shrugged his shoulders. A little too easily, if he was honest. “Cozy. Gonna need to make it meaner again after this.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Miranda grinned at him, before giving Williams the nod as she took up position behind him. “Okay, checklist…Cervical brace?”

“Check.”

“Tracheal shield.”

“Check.”

“Mandible seam.”

“Check.”

“Primary air.”

“Check…”

It was a quick and familiar series at this point. How many times had Hunter suited up by now? Hundreds, easily. Admittedly, it was a considerably shorter process than it used to be in the old days, where the suits were all hand-crafted masterpieces…but technology advanced. Suits, training, sports medicine, his very body. He was a state of the art killing machine, one the likes of which the HEAT of even five years ago wouldn’t have believed was possible.

They all were now, and the ones who couldn’t hack it either never made it or retired out when the time came. That was a harsh truth but, well, truth nonetheless. They were unambiguously superhero marvels of genetics, science, and sheer stubborn willpower, no matter what species they were. Of course, it didn’t matter if they were hero or Hero, society wasn’t happy about people like them existing so, here he was. One of the few places he was appreciated for his abilities. Literal tons of happy murder-monkey, at humanity’s beck and call.

He wasn’t as bitter about it all as some were. On that account, he was much more like Righteous and Yan. Why should they be? They were all Beefs well into the four-digit club, they were all damn good-looking, high-achieving supermen living in a prime that’d last as long as they wanted. If you’re one of the best there is, why worry what the fat and puny think?

He never asked to be born a Hero. He never asked to be hated ‘cuz of any of that.

But he was, by some. Then again, everyone was hated by somebody; only way to avoid that would be to be no-one at all.

No fuckin’ thank you.

Thoughts were wandering. Always did, just before go time, like he had to get all his stray ideas out of the way before the shit hit the fan. They all went away when Colonel Costello stepped down off his suiting station and got their attention over the ‘net. Abbott was no desk officer, he’d been wearing the Mass longer than most of the team, but even so he didn’t usually suit up himself unless shit was real fuckin’ real. So yeah, everyone listened up.

He didn’t mince words. “This is a big one, Lads. The Hunters have thrown together another Hive: our job is to kill it from the inside, while rescuing any slaves we find.”

“Damn,” rumbled Righteous as he thumped his way over from his own station with deck-shaking steps. “Been a while ‘fer that kinda stakes.” Thump, thump, thump.

Some men were habitually catlike. ‘Horse had been that way before the accident, now he only was sometimes, when he wasn’t excited. Hunter tried to be, though it didn’t come naturally…

Righteous gave no shits. He was perfectly capable of ninja-like silence on those huge wide size-fifties of his, but he was also a firm believer in throwing his weight around, literally and metaphorically. If he didn’t need to paw about, he fuckin’ didn’t. “Let ‘em fear,” he’d said once.

“This is part of a massive combined operation,” Costello agreed. “Everyone’s coming out to play. But as ever, we’re the speartip. Everything focuses on us, and we focus on stacking bodies and saving souls. So, general mission is three targets: I’ll be leading team one to the Hive’s engineering section to kill main power; Lieutenant Stephenson’s team will liberate the slave pens; Major Campbell’s team will go for the hive’s command center and kill the Alpha-of-Alphas. Once it’s dead and the slaves are evacuated, we jump out and leave a nuke behind.”

He looked at each of them in turn, looking rather more serious than Hunter had seen him in a long time. “There’s more than one reason we cannot fail in this mission. More than one operation will be going on and the success of any of it depends on everyone accomplishing their mission. We’re not only attacking critical resources. We’re attempting to nail the Hunters to the fuckin’ floor. We don’t want them re-flowing resources. The stakes in this case…are severe.”

Gonzo joined in the solemn nodding, and then it was on to specifics: where, when, how, who. He was on Stephenson’s team, going after the slave pens. Nothing to complain about there! Rescuing slaves was Big Damn Hero stuff.

Of course, Campbell had Righteous and a team of fuckin’ Orks, so of course they were goin’ after the big bad. One glance over at Righteous and it was honestly like he was swelling up in anticipation of meeting his entire life’s purpose.

Kind of a shame Gonzo wouldn’t get to be there for that. He had the strength, but just not the rest, yet. Campbell’s team was all the remaining old-hats. ‘Base, Righteous, Kiwi, Titan, Tiny, and so on. All the originals who could hack the Beef life were by this time some gnarled and grizzled fuckin’ iron. Not easy to kill, them. They never got tired, either.

God have fuckin’ mercy on the Hunters in their way, cuz the HEAT’s supply of it had run out a long time ago.

Okay, enough thinking. Mind on the moment. Mind on his job and the Hunters in front of him.

Time to fuckin’ kill.

Starship Stray Fortune, Orbiting planet Gao

Warhorse of Whitecrest

“‘Horse! Welcome aboard, mate. You’re lookin’ downright slim an’ petite these days!”

Adam chuckled, set down his gear case and gave Wilde a fist-bump, genuinely pleased to see him. “Been spending too much time around Righteous and Playboy if you think that’s true,” he commented with a grin. “See your taste in shirts hasn’t improved any.”

“Fuck are you talking about?” Death-Eye grinned and looked down at the extra smedium Dragonball tee somehow stretched over his massive chest. “This shit’s a fuckin’ classic.”

Well, Adam couldn’t argue with that. He turned and waved a hand at the motley crew hefting their stuff off the Fortune’s jump platform. “You’ve met the team before?”

“Some of ‘em.” Ian gave Hoeff the Up-Nod Of Recognition, then grinned at a furry figure behind him. “How’re you, Garaaf? Been a few years.”

The old, scarred silverfur gave Wilde a pant-grin as he offloaded the case with his rifle in it. “I’ve known worse years. Miss me?”

“Who wouldn’t miss your flawless baby-faced mug?”

‘Horse chuckled, turned and dragged a couple more items off the pile. Thing about their particular operation: he’d had plenty of time to plan alongside the others, whittle things down to the essentials, and they still ended up with a lot of stuff.

Not as much as the HEAT did, though. The Great Father’s “particulars” didn’t need to bring two technicians, a suiting-up station and a workshop’s worth of tools per operator. They brought a leaner, more focused pile of luggage.

There was Hoeff, of course, with all his various murder-y ways. He’d crammed a hell of a lot more HEAT-grade Beef into that five-foot-four gorilla-frame of his over the last five years, to the point he was probably the deadliest person on the team aside from ‘Horse himself. He was in charge of the assault package, while Adam had overall command of the team. ‘Horse was still first and foremost about keeping the rest of the team alive, leading with the principle that the best way to achieve that was to kill everything before it could hurt them. Garaaf was their marksman and scout…

But Daar hadn’t stopped at three, oh no. He’d been quietly gathering talent for years, and not all of them for their skill at violence. Not all of them for their flawless record of honesty and law-abiding, either.

For one, he had a soft spot for larcenous cubs and tricksters. Lirree had been a black-hat hacker responsible for some of the more embarrassing breaches of cyber-security in recent years, and not just on Gao. He found himself one day waking up, opening his front door…

Date Point: Like a year beforehand or something, I dunno

Liree, most bestest Keeda-blessed hacker in all the gao!!

—and colliding face-first into the Great Father’s giant chest. Like, not even a little bit dignified. Muzzle jammed straight into the crevice between his pecs right up to the fuckin’ cheeks, chest fluff all the way up Liree’s nose and suddenly he was choking on way too much smell of the big fucker…

…Oh. Oh shit. Shit!

The Great Father growled down at him as Liree’s legs went very shaky and carried him back two wobbling steps.

…Tried to.

It didn’t work!

He pushed against that chest with all his might but it was futile; he ended up groping helplessly at the Great Father’s corded brawn like some kind of malignant groupie. He was stuck and all he could hear was a rumbling chitter and a huge heart beating away. Suddenly he felt a skull-crushing pressure envelope his entire head! He panicked, it grew incredibly worse and he flailed desperately to get free—

Release, and he fell backwards onto his rear in the least dignified way possible.

“Gotta admit, that’s prob’ly the mos’ ridiculous way I’ve ever met anyone. Don’t’chu look ‘fer you charge ahead?”

Liree was too dazed to reply properly. “I–no?”

“Well shit, be more careful! I coulda kilt’ ‘ya just now too! Wouldn’t that’ve been fuckin’ hilarious?”

“I…M–My Father?” He stood, wobbling, as he tried to process his situation. His inflamed personal dignity clashed with the sheer ridiculousness of the situation and effectively paralyzed his ability to think clearly.

“Damn right. An’ I usually at least ask ‘fer dinner ‘fore I get that fuckin’ intimate wit’ anyone.”

“…I…”

The Great Father himself was there. In front of him. In his hallway, somehow. He didn’t even really fit! The fucker’s haunches were pressed up against the walls! What the hell had prompted this? Why would he…

…Oh. Oh no.

Liree felt his knees wobble again. He was caught. Caught and completely fucked.

Maybe literally, too. There were rumors on the darkweb about dissidents, gods no please…

“So,” Daar growled low. “I see we can skip past playtime. You’ve been a very naughty boy, haven’t you?”

Yup. Fucked. Liree’s mouth sent an urgent request to Liree’s brain for something witty to say that might get him out of this, only to get back white noise and screaming. It fell back on the old reliable “Ahh…!”

“‘Xactly. Gotta give ‘ya credit where it’s due, SnootBoop gave some’a Longear’s finest minds some real headaches, an’ I hear BetterCallWALL did…how much damage?”

A voice from some insignificant titan looming in a living god’s shadow. “Three billion, My Father. Give or take.”

“Three billion, eh?” The Great Father, sitting down on his haunches yet still somehow towering above all of them, sorta shuffled in place and even…even that was fuckin’…

He snarled and everything about him just tightened up and the fuckin’ walls crumbled against his haunches and holy shit he was ripped a fuckin’ perfect comic book none of any of the videos or photos came even close so fuckin’ huge Liree was so fucked he was gonna fuckin’ die right here on his own fuckin’ front door—!

Liree felt himself grow dizzy, and fell back against the doorframe to keep from collapsing again.

“Damn, boy. That’s a lotta debt ‘yer suddenly facin’. So moment o’ truth. Did you damage anythin’ critical? ‘Cuz if ‘ya did, what happens next depends entirely on ‘yer answer.”

An actual fuckin’ god-monster was gonna eat him. Or worse. Somehow he found some courage under that baleful murder-stare, keened to himself…went for it.

“Th-they were j—just war profiteers! On Paradise! A—and in the Great Houses!”

The Great Father slunk closer now, floor screaming as the entire fuckin’ hallway visibly bowed under his incredible fuckin’ weight. Bowed, in a modern commercial multi-species apartment! A muzzle big enough to bite off Liree’s entire fuckin’ head snuffled close, closer…growled so low he almost couldn’t hear it…

But he sure could feel that growl rumble the air so hard it hitched his breath. Fuck.

“Now, I bet ‘ya know what I’mma do if I think ‘yer lyin, right? I ain’t had any real exercise in a whole day an’ das a lotta money we gotta pay out of our coffers, now. Money we can’t spend on shit that matters…”

Nose pressed right against his throat, sniff so powerful Liree could feel the suction. An even deeper growl, one so primal the entire hall resonated with it. That snuffle creeped up along his jugular as he craned his neck to somehow escape, oh gods oh gods please no—

The Great Monster backed away, slightly.

“Honest-smellin’, unner all th’ fear.” That bit he growled with way too much delight. “So ‘yer an idiot idealist, huh?”

Liree didn’t dare answer.

The Great Father looked back at someone. “Hey Meereo, ‘ya think he’s worth three billion?”

“Personally? No. But he’s done something I would daresay is even more dangerously stupid than hactivism against rich, critically important merchants. His skill has earned my respect, My Father. Not many have managed that. I want to learn everything from him.”

…Meereo. Himself. Champion Meereo was here and not happy. Any other time Liree would be proud. Now? He tried to peek around the huge wall of impossibly rippling brawn in front of him but…

“Right. So. This ain’t leavin’ me with many nice options, yijao? How am I s’posed ‘ta trust ‘ya?”

Liree’s jaw chattered in fear of its own accord. Daar creeped closer, all his colossal everything and what it could do first and foremost in Liree’s terrified mind.

Daar sighed. “Essactly. I don’t like dilemmas like this. So, I’mma let ‘ya choose, if ‘yer brave enough. An’ as far as I can figure, there’s really only three options. Choice one, you go with these fine Straightshield officers an’ face proper justice. I hear ‘yer list o’ crimes is pretty long these days…”

Liree looked over at them. Any other time he’d be terrified of them too. He hated the fuckers! But there was a difference between a big burly bully and whatever the Great Father was. Rumor had it Keeda himself wasn’t more than a bug to him. Liree could only keen in terror.

“I take it by ‘yer reaction, that’s likely gon’ be a life sentence. Am I right? You can be honest here. These two can’t testify against ‘ya.”

Somehow, when confronted with his living god, just by smelling him and looking into that face…

“I…yes. Yes, My Father. And…”

He was quieter, now. “An’ given the nature of ‘yer crimes, that’s gonna mean loneliness.”

Liree keened in fear and desperation. “Yes!”

“Right.” Daar shook his head. “But ‘ya don’t deny ‘ya deserve it.”

”…No.”

He did.

“Brutal honesty, I can admire that. So. Choice two, rather’n kill ‘ya slowly in prison, I jus’ make it quick and squish ‘ya into a pancake wit’ this big paw o’ mine. Won’t hurt, I promise. Make a big mess, though…”

The Great Father held up the paw in question and pressed it against Liree’s chest, and him against the wall. Forcefully. It was much wider than his shoulders and the claws—! The wrist alone was as big as Liree’s entire chest and both seemed almost small compared to hulking swells rippling all along his great arm. Then there was the rest of him…

Balls.

“But y’know what? I think I might come ‘ta like ‘ya. So the last choice is the most terrible o’ all. Choice three is ‘ya come wit’ me, right now, and do absolutely anything I tell ‘ya ‘fer the rest of ‘yer life without any fuckin’ hesitation what-so-fuckin’-ever. I won’t promise any of it’ll be easy, neither…and there’s somethin’ else. What I jus’ told ‘ya ain’t an expectation o’ behavior, ‘cuz I can’t leave ‘ya unsupervised wit’ what ‘ya can do, can I? It’s a promise of how it’ll be.”

He left it hang. At first, Liree didn’t understand what he meant, but then—

Oh gods.

“B-but…My Father? That’d mean…”

The Great Father sighed, and duck-nodded sympathetically.

”‘Yer gonna be my friend, Liree. I can tell I’m gonna like ‘ya already. ‘Yer silly and idealistic and did a balls-damned stupid thing, but ‘yer honest, an’ intelligent, an’ motivated. So yeah. Won’t be hard likin’ you. I s’pect I’ll even respect you, with time. And I ain’t gonna let ‘ya have any freedom away from me.”

Liree gulped, and duck-nodded in terrible understanding. Subdued forever by friendship. He would be worse than a slave.

And he would love every second of it.

The Great Father again duck-nodded. “It’s a fuck of a thing, yeah? With what I am, an’ wit’ what jus’ my scent can do ‘ta people, I’m very careful ‘ta give my friends space an’ time away. That’s the real danger o’ what I am. Makes me wonder if Fyu had the same sorta power… Anyway. Other species don’t unnerstand. Not even th’ ten’gewek, an’ they got somethin’ related goin’ on wit’ their Given-Men. But we unnerstand, an’ I’m sorry that’s how it’s gotta be, ‘cuz someone like you is too gods-damned dangerous ‘ta let run around without some control an’ you already showed the normal shit won’t work, right? I mean…‘yer livin’ in an inter-species apartment. Alone. No workhouse buds ‘ta cuddle up with…”

Liree nodded glumly. “I couldn’t risk anybody but me, so…”

“Good, good,” the Great Father duck-nodded. “Noble in a misguided sorta way…So here ‘ya are.”

”…Here I am. A mad chitter overcame him and he had to add, “Helpless an’ afraid.”

The Great Father chittered too, if the ground-shaking rumble coming from his throat could be taken as a chitter. “Sense o’ humor, good, good… So I give you the choice. Stick wit’ me and you live. Prosper, even! But You ain’t never gonna be out o’ sniffin’ range, never outta my reach. ‘Yer gonna be by my side every second o’ every day, no matter what I’m doin’ fer however long it takes. ‘Yer gonna be my body-man an’ aide. An’ given ‘yer a little guy, an’ not a particularly dominant-smellin’ specimen at that…I think we both know ‘yer ego won’t last long.”

Yup. He would trapped in his own mind, bound to the Great Father’s every whim until he died. Broken by the simple presence of a dominant male. Enslaved by love.

He keened. Gods, how he keened at the impossible choice! It was death three ways! It was impossible, it was such a terrible fate all of the sudden—

The Great Father was there, now. Hugging him to himself, gently. Almost affectionately. And even that, just his scent and his incredible warmth and strength…his obvious concern, his gentleness, even that momentary bit of closeness was already breaking through, destroying Liree’s resolve.

Against the Great Father of his people, the greatest there had ever been? What resistance could he muster? Liree was doomed.

And…and he wanted it. Already. He couldn’t even muster the self-respect to loathe himself for it.

“It’s a terrible thing,” Daar rumbled low and quiet, just for him. “But at least wit’ the third option, you could still live. Still serve the Gao. Help make right your crimes. Not many get second chances.” Liree felt lost in reality, lost against the vastness of a gentleman-god who would sentence him to whatever fate he chose.

It took him a while to grieve for himself. His free will would die. The Great Father was patient, and said nothing. Finally, Liree looked up at him, at his impossible perfectly beautiful face…

Even his eyes. Terrible, and unyielding. But kind too. Even maybe a bit hopeful…

Fuck.

“Will…will it be so bad?”

“I am very good to my friends, Liree. Even in ‘yer case where you won’t be choosin’ it. An’ it’s not a one-way street. Thing is? I’ll be loyal to you forever, too. In a sense I’ll be just as trapped, but I don’t mind none. So, that’s the deal: I’m offerin’ you a chance ‘ta serve an’ redeem ‘yer honor, an’ I’m offerin’ you somethin’ you straight ain’t worthy of. Perfect love ‘fer perfect obedience. So…”

He let go, and straightened up, then displayed the full majesty of his being without moving an inch. Gods, he was…

Beautiful. Perfect face, perfect voice. Perfect scent, perfect soul. So hugely muscular and hulking he couldn’t possibly bulge out any bigger anywhere on him. So vascular and lean it would have been disturbing on any lesser man. So flawlessly symmetrical it almost didn’t look real. He wasn’t merely handsome, he was impossibly beautiful in every way. He was living godly perfection with a nearly to-the-skin clipped stud’s coat, and he wasn’t even showing off.

He smiled, too. Not too big, it was a polite sort of thing. An invitation, maybe? There, before Liree, a living god revealed himself without a grunt of effort.

And he wanted to be friends.

“Make your choice, little one.”

In the end it wasn’t even a choice. Just his smell, his presence, his words…the Great Father had him completely from the moment they met. And he knew it, too.

“I…I choose…” Liree screwed up his courage. “I choose you, My Father.”

The Great Father nodded seriously. “Very well.” He rose off his haunches and the flooring crumbled underfoot. “Do exactly as these men say. We’ll meet again soon.”

“Y—yes sir!”

And with that, the Great Father just…left. Turned around, wiggled his way through the short hall to the porch at the end and just leapt off the building like it weren’t anything at all! From the top floor, even! Some long delay later he heard (and maybe even felt!) a whump from below. He ran to the window, stared at the ground far below.

An actual crater in the dirt where he’d landed. No sign of him though, not even paw prints—no. There they were! On the other end of the field! How had he—?

One of the smaller, less apocalyptic beings haunting his shadow tapped a claw on Liree’s shoulder to get his attention, then inclined his nose toward Liree’s door. It wasn’t Meereo—where in the hells had he gone?! Where was everyone else?

It was instead another Longear. This one a bit against type, too. Black and sleek-furred…but burly, like a Longback. Big burly. And he wasn’t friendly.

“You’re gonna take me through all your systems, all the scripts you’re writing, all the data you’ve gathered…I want to chew every byte. I will know if you omit anything, and so will the Great Father. He is slow to anger and loathe to punish, but earn it and you will beg for death for days before he tires of toying with you. Clear?”

“C—clear.”

“…Well? Show me!”

Liree yelped and leapt to obey, and…well, one life ended and another began. As promised the Great Father was waiting for him, out in the country in his getaway cottage. There, they got to know each other. Conversations, mostly. Lots of farm work, lots of training too, in lots of different things. He was to become one of Daar’s closest personal assistants, alongside Tiyun. Thre wasn’t a thought that wasn’t shared, not an inch of each other they didn’t know, not a feeling they didn’t understand. There were no secrets between the three of them. As promised, Liree was never more than arms-reach apart from him, and as feared…

It didn’t take long. He went from resentful, to wary, through neutral to appreciative and finally, devoted. Before the summer was out he couldn’t bear to be apart from His Father for any length of time. Or from Tiyun, either. Liree was, it turned out, a particularly agreeable young male. In fact he was so dependent, merely working up to do this mission was a personal trial. Even now, the apartness was terrible. But in the end, he came to view it all as a good thing. Admittedly, the physical training was…pain…and there was some sense of loss…but he didn’t regret it.

Couldn’t regret it. Even if he wanted to.

As for the rest of it? It certainly got him into the company of some interesting people…

Warhorse of Whitecrest

Well. Daar was persuasive, after all. Poor little guy was practically Daar’s grateful slave.

The rest of the team had their own stories too, even if they weren’t so dramatic. Gwijub wasn’t even a deathworlder, being Locayl. But he’d lived much of his life by the adage that crime absolutely did pay if you were good enough at it, and that smuggling by and large was a crime without a victim.

Still. This was primarily a kinetic team, and that meant their support had to be mobile and multi-talented. Which was exactly the thing to describe their next contestant…

“Bruuk!” Wilde’s grin was absolutely massive. “Never fuckin’ thought I’d see you again—ow!” Ian grimaced. “Mate, I’m not unbreakable!’’

“That’s Brother Bruuk to you these days, ‘lil guy! Finished th’ Third Ring right ‘fore this big ball o’ muscle over her recruited me!”

“…Air!”

“Oh! Right,” Bruuk chittered somewhere in the baritone. Impressive for a five-foot-seven talking bear to crush a near-Beef like Wilde. Admittedly still as big as a proper bear, but…

Anyway. They didn’t have a lot of time.

“You got the mission spec?” Hoeff asked, businesslike even as he slapped his palm into Wilde’s and gave the big man his own rib-crushing embrace.

“Mnghf! …Yeah. How long’ve we known about this thing?”

“Long enough. Clan Whitecrest calls it the ‘Vengeance Engine.’”

Dora thumped her rear leg. “Well, that’s certainly ominous…”

“Ayup. The Hunters’ last fuck you to the galaxy.”

“We’ll be setting up shop in the aft cargo bay,” Adam noted.

“As is tradition,” rumbled Bruuk happily. “I s’pose I better git ‘ta movin’ equipment?”

“All us big fellas.” Adam hefted his case and felt the deck groan under his feet. Somehow, that little give and surrender from most things—ships, buildings, whatever—always made him grin.

Wilde half-turned his head. “Dora, help ‘em out would you, love?”

“Way ahead of you!” she gestured, and the drone cargo sled she’d brought with slid noiseless into the array chamber. Maybe four or five years ago, Adam woulda carried all the stuff anyway because he could, but…nah. He’d been putting serious effort into mellowing back out. He thanked her with a smile and started hefting their cases and stuff onto the sled.

“Oh! You’ll be happy to know this is a permanent assignment ‘fer us,” Hoeff added, deck groaning under his feet as he hefted his own pile of treasure. “You better pray Bruuk finds his quarters an’ kitchen in good order…”

“Kitchen’s just fine. Advantage of bringing a human cook on board, there’s less fur in the food, too.”

“Hey!”

“And in any case, Sarah decided to move on so, conveniently, this works out. Anyhoo,” Wilde fended off a playful pawswipe from Bruuk, who finally picked up his own toys and thumped away down the hall, much to the deckplate’s displeasure.

Adam was gonna have fun with this crew, he could tell already. Introductions were made, smiles given, all that fun jazz he was remembering how to love again. At one point Dora asked him, “are you going to put those down?”

Oh yeah.

“Probably should. So I’ll go get unpacked and set up. How long before we’re running quiet?”

“Four hours. Is that enough time?”

“More than enough, especially when out last guys show up—”

Thump.

Vemik Given-Man, along with Ferd and his crew. He was one of their techs for this mission. Not on the assault team—he was far too valuable to his people. But he was there with them in reserve, because frankly, if this mission went south it would be someone like him that could turn the tide. That he’d be fully-trained and available to fight had originally been a concession to the Lodge and to Vemik’s standing in it, but honestly…

Well, shit. The dude had grown. The last five years had been an unrelenting Fire for him and now the big bastard was as tall as Wilde, and built to the sort of scale very few of even his own people ever managed. Yan’s heir, right there.

Adam could only shake his head. Here he was, bigger and stronger than he’d ever been, with a godly physique this time and in far better conditioning too…and next to the state of the art, he was barely top-tier anymore. Gonzo was a challenge to wrestle these days, Base could smack him around without much fuss, and Julian was so fucking powerful, he could crush Adam like a bug. Righteous…well.

The accident had cost him almost everything. Hell, Adam wasn’t even the biggest guy on the team! That honor went to Vemik, and trained warrior though he was, he wasn’t here to crush skulls. Vemik was here as a tech.

And with luck, that’s all he would be doing today.

Honestly, it was sorta hard to stick to the slow-and-steady plan he had in the face of what everyone else could do, both ‘cuz he knew he could keep up with enough work ethic and ‘cuz he knew how much use he could be. But…no. He’d promised Marty and his kids some work/life balance, and he was in it for the long haul anyway. Besides: all the Heroes were bred for this, right? It was safer for them to push it. Adam would get there, eventually. In time.

Or so he told himself. Anyway.

Assembly went pretty quick. They’d spent a lot of time planning and practicing, so it was only about an hour before they were ready to suit up. They all got a thorough scrub-down in the shower, padded gingerly over the disposable matting they’d rolled over the floor to avoid picking up any contaminants, stepped carefully into their suiting stations, and got to it.

Vemik was honestly the best tech ever. Having someone who could lift all the pieces no matter how heavy without so much as a grunt of effort made the entire process go much faster. Dexterous, too, and that combination of strength and precision made donning even the notoriously bitchy undersuit a breeze.

He hefted Adam’s midsuit for him to climb into and asked idly, “So this ‘Vengeance Engine.’ What is it, exactly?”

There was a moment’s silence as those in the know glanced at each other, grimly. Then Hoeff nodded and took a step forward.

“Vemik, my friend,” he said. “Lemme tell you about a nasty little thing called a solar focusing array…”

Date Point: 25y2m1d AV
The Exodus Hive, deep space

Alpha-of-Alphas

The moment when fully ten percent of its fleet vanished in a flash of transmitted agony set the Alpha-of-Alphas twitching in its cable cradle, while the conceptual equivalent of a curse flashed through its mind.

Too soon!

It had known this moment was coming. It had planned and prepared, and its preparations were nearly complete…but not yet complete. The Hive was built, its stasis holds pregnant with replicant-form spaceborne Hunter-bodies…

Not perfectly replete, not to the point where such an opening wound was only a scratch…but enough that the battle was not already lost.

It recalled every roaming hunter gang it could to rally points outside the interdiction zone and drove them inwards, formed its local forces into a protective shell around the Exodus Hive while abandoning those toward the attack’s leading edge to serve as a distraction and slow the assault while it watched.

It knew this foe. No creature of meat and marrow this one: datamind. The one that had first stolen the Builders’ plans for a replicant ship. The one from which the Hunters in turn had taken the concept of a stellar focusing array. Now, the force it was bringing to bear was a clear demonstration of the power of self-replication. It was clearly some generations in advance of the Hunters’ own swarm, by sheer numbers.

But the Hunter replicants were heavier, tougher, and more fiercely armed. If each was worth four or five of the enemy’s probes, then this was a more even battle than sheer numbers might suggest.

With no option but to commit, the Alpha-of-Alphas did just that. Every weapon it had, every combat-capable ship was thrown into the enemy’s path, and the exchange of fire began in earnest.

Space boiled.

++END CHAPTER 88++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

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As well as 57 Deathworlders…

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64 Friendly ETs, 135 Squishy Xenos and 308 Dizi Rats who have been so very patient.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not necessarily share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 89: Titanomachy

Chapter 89: Titanomachy

Date Point:25y2m1d AV
Dataspace adjacent to probe-swarm, Hunter territory

Entity

For once, the Daemon went completely silent as the Entity concentrated.

There were too many ships to track: so much weapons fire, so many engine flares, such dense EWAR, all of it added up to a confusion of false readings, miscounts, hidden ships, duplicate contacts…the only way to treat such a battle was as a pair of giant lethal blobs, grinding each other down. Individual ships didn’t matter on this scale. In fact, each explosive flare of a ship’s death was a little more attention budget freed up.

Maneuver and formation shifted the balance of power first to one side’s advantage, then the other as replies came in the form of counter-formation and counter-maneuver. The blobs shifted, elongated, became two dragons striving to coil around one another, became a sheet trying to wrap itself around the dragon, became a needle to pierce the sheet.

Through it all, both sides had the same goal in mind - annihilation. In the Entity’s case, destroying the largest portion of the Hunters’ force was the entire goal. In the Hunters’ case, they needed to deplete the Entity’s fleet to secure escape for that vast hive-ship.

The Entity’s objective meanwhile was to set back the Hunters’ generation count, get their numbers under control.

Cull the population.

Yes. At the cost of the Entity’s own population, but from what the Entity could see, its replication strategy had been to create specialized variants, where The hunters had gone for heavier, all-purpose all-rounder probes, each one of which was lost production capacity, as well as lost guns.

The Entity, meanwhile, could expend every last one of its war-probes without any change to the replication curve. Meaning, no matter what happened in this battle, the Entity believed it was coming out in front by a considerable margin.

Why settle for coming out in front? With the others alongside us, we can make this one the killing blow.

Maybe. An existence defined by paranoia left the Entity feeling a significant degree of doubt at that thought…but it would be quite happy to be wrong. And besides: there was nothing to be gained by not trying.

Still. Before the field was safe for friends, it needed clearing. So, it set to work creating a clear, safe volume for friendlies to jump in.

And it hoped its branch self was seeing similar success…

Singularity warship Onna-Musha, jumping

Queen Tomoe Gozen of Singularity

“Go signal received.”

“Jump, jump, jump.”

Tomoe’s heart spiked eagerly in her chest as the ship surged under her, reminding her very briefly of spurring her horse into battle. Then the momentary memory passed and she was present, observing, commanding.

This wasn’t to be a battle where tactical target-calling could prioritize the enemy’s most valuable ships. How could it be, when the sky was thick with distortion and contacts, each identical to its comrades?

No, this was to be a meat-grinder.

Fortunately, Onna-Musha was well-equipped for indiscriminate slaughter. Tomoe’s fingers danced, her voice spoke the instructions, her crew responded like extensions of her will. The ship’s shields rippled and cast out a hundred death-strokes in a hundred directions.

Hypatia fed them target data. Gladiatrix joined the bristling formation, at the very tip of Singularity’s spear.

Together, they plunged into the enemy’s heart.

Continuity Bunker, undisclosed location.

Julian Etsicitty

Everyone had a part to play in war, even ambassadors. Especially ambassadors.

In his case, he was leading the diplomatic corps from both Ekallim-Igigi and the Rich Plains deep into a secure place, prepared just in time for this moment. It was to be one of civilization’s strongholds, a place for continuity and against collapse, should the very worst come to pass.

Honestly, the design was quite ingenious. What was the most secure kind of bunker? The kind you couldn’t even open from the outside. The kind that didn’t even have an entrance. They’d jumped in: they’d either jump out, or have to emerge through an exit that hadn’t been excavated yet and try, somehow, to pick up the pieces.

Why him? A few years ago he would have been squeamish answering that. Not anymore. He led them because he was big, charismatic, and could wear the heaviest armor; he could fight for them, and those deep instincts mattered in a crisis. Next to Righteous he was, without ego, the very best the human race had to offer, at least on matters physical. That mattered because galactic diplomats were often skittish and highly individualistic, and predictably behaved a bit like retarded cats. Harsh, but true. Getting them all going in one direction took…

Well, it took persuasion. He was Ambassador Etsicitty, infamous across the galaxy for reasons beyond his looks and his physique. Everyone knew who he was and what he could do. Once, during a fun fluff piece on the ESNN morning news, one of his would-be assassins finally made it through security to attack him, live on TV…

One quick little moment was all he needed. The world took notice, because he wasn’t gentle.

Nobody threatened Julian or his family anymore, and the galactic legend of human danger was thoroughly renewed.

Of course, if this whole thing with the bunker ever became anything more than insurance then they’d be thoroughly fucking screwed anyway, but that was beside the point. He could see the way his presence calmed the others. The Dominion species had finally come around to seeing humans differently. It had only taken twenty-something years, but here they finally were: Humans weren’t the threat. Humans were safety precisely because of their dangerousness.

Sometimes, caveman persuasion was the only kind that worked.

“Gotta admit…that armor looks good on you.”

Julian broke out of his thoughts, and…god, even after all these years, Al could still completely trip him up with that wry look. And somehow, she never looked sexier than when she had a rifle in her hands. Only gal in the universe who could properly tell him what to do.

Hot.

He had a good comeback, though. “I do! I look even better out of it, too…”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Not now though,” he said, smiling. Odd feeling, that. The undersuit had armor around his neck and even talking took effort. Not, like, conscious effort—he was fully Suit conditioned these days—but he could still feel it. “Later. For now I gotta be literally tons of fun for our guests.”

“So, like normal.”

“Har har,” Julian grunted. “So I’m extra thumpy, then. Be glad you ain’t!”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m just glad Singularity have lighter toys too…” Al rapped her knuckles on the thin, high-tech hardsuit she was wearing in turn. Julian might have fantasized about some painted-on skintight thing straight out of sci-fi, but the chunky, well-plated reality was…better somehow.

“You should go rub it in Freya’s face. She was bitchin’ all up and down when they fit her up…”

“Of course she has full armor,” Al grumbled, then saw Julian’s smirk. “What?! I’m not jealous!”

“Yeah, you kinda are.” He grinned wolfishly, “And it’s cute as fuck.”

“Hey, this thing has enough tech in it to keep me nerding out for a year anyway!”

Julian chuckled fondly, then looked around. “Where’d Xiù get to?”

“She’s putting the kids to bed. And then…I guess we sit and wait, huh? How long’s this going to go on for?”

“Long enough the embassy Marines are manning a watch.”

“We’re not…actually expecting it to go that badly though.”

“No. But we just poked the Hunters in the eye in the biggest possible way and we can’t know for sure they don’t have other plans. Everyone’s laying their cards on the table for this one. Better safe than sorry, right?”

“Right.” Al nodded and found a spot to sit down. “So, that was all the hurry up. Now comes the wait. Don’t suppose you brought a movie?”

Julian pulled his tablet out of his satchel. “I loaded our entire library on it a while ago. Now if you’ll excuse me…gotta go be all, uh, whatever-it-is I’m s’posed to be.”

“A hero,” Al said it softly. “A big damn hero.”

Julian looked around.

Damnit. She knew him too well.

“…You know I’ve never felt like—”

“You don’t have to, babe. You always have been.” She gave him a little air-smooch, then a tilt of the head that said ‘go.’ She was okay. A gun to hand, her kids safely in bed behind her…that was all Allison really needed to be okay with the world.

He kind of envied her, there.

Xiù had different needs, and different strategies. He found her—also armored and armed, because that was a deathworlder’s lot, here in this bunker—surrounded by young children and gaoian cubs and telling them all a story. All they needed was a smile. Julian would never interrupt something as sacred as storytime.

She was okay too…and that was all he needed.

Back to his Marines and staff. Lots of glad-handing along the way. Lots of earnest praise and thanks from ambassadors the galaxy over…he managed. It wasn’t like he’d done anything to earn that just yet…and hopefully, he wouldn’t.

His Marines at least understood. They weren’t exactly happy to be there, but they had the same kind of bravado he’d come to know from the ten’gewek and the operators in his orbit. The kind of nervous self-psyching everyone did before the shit hit the fan.

They seemed to ease up when he arrived. Again…didn’t quite know how to process that.

There was a lot he didn’t know how to do. But he’d do it anyway.

HMS Caledonia, jumping

Chief Petty Officer Sachi Patel

Once, not so long ago, Cally had been the pride of the allied fleet, the most advanced ship at their disposal. And she’d been a temperamental bitch, too. Fires and power surges, integration difficulties between human and Hierarchy technology…A fiery youth.

Nowadays, she was mature. She’d had some therapy, calmed down, worked herself out, come into her own. And her own was still the pride of the allied fleet, dammit. She still pulled a harder acceleration, still had more juice to push around, still had superior heat management.

And she was still home to the deathworlders’ ultimate weapon. Wherever Cally went, there was the HEAT.

Sachi watched from behind her flash hood as the numbers and bars did their dance. Heat spike from jump, heat spike from recharging the jump capacitors, step up core output to combat load, heat load from acceleration…

A fragment of Cally’s power, trivially handled at this point. Even after working on her for most of her career, Sachi was still in awe of a machine that could handle a nuclear bomb’s worth of raw energy with the calm ease of a poker dealer shuffling their deck.

Then there was the way her specialist systems linked with the others. With all the other ships, helping them balance their own shield and thermal loads. With the Fleet Intelligence Center on Myrmidon, linking the brains of two ships into a kind of data weapon aimed squarely into the enemy’s heart. The slam and chatter of guns through the hull as their turrets tracked and fired was an afterthought, entirely secondary to Caledonia’s purpose.

Cally was the fleet’s throbbing heart, and to Chief Patel fell the responsibility, and the honor, of keeping it beating.

She could intuit much of what was going on outside from the play and dance of data in front of her. Her mind’s eye saw the shield wall they’d put up, and the savage hail of conventional fire scrabbling against it. She could picture their acceleration as the fleet turned and pushed, keeping range on the disruptor-armed war probes.

Sachi Patel didn’t need to see the battle to know how it was going…and she could already tell it wasn’t going smoothly. The pressure was piling on in the form of thermal buildup: Cally’s computers extrapolated the load curve, both for the ship herself and for the others in the formation.

It flattened off just shy of the yellow line. Stayed below the green line if they activated the rate-of-fire limiters, but that was the captain’s call to make, not Patel’s: she fed the information to the bridge.

Moments later, the lines shifted and adjusted again, moved downwards into the green. Some extra party had joined their formation and added their own shields to the wall…

Right, yes. They had an ally in this fight, one that was everywhere, doing a little of everything. One without which this fight wouldn’t even have been possible. One she’d kind of wanted to meet since reading its Laid Bare article. She felt a certain sense of kinship with anyone who’d done one of those…

Later. Right now, they had a fight to win. And Sachi Patel had her part to play in it. In ending the Hunters at last. It had been a long time coming.

She rested her hands on her console and focused her mind on bringing order to the chaos.

Admiral Sir William Caruthers

The view from Myrmidon’s bridge was one of untrammeled madness.

Up until this moment, Caruthers had been skeptical of the wisdom of accepting any alliance with the Entity and its probe swarm. He hadn’t trusted it, had always worried that the strange, alien, insane being was just a different enemy waiting to happen.

Now, he could see it was the only reason he’d survived the opening seconds of this bloodbath. Its probes were the most numerous things on their side of the fight, each one a darting imp armed for devastation and armored for dying.

This bubble of comparative safety that was the allied fleet’s foothold was its doing. Somehow, it was keeping up with the endless seething sea of hostile contacts, and holding them at arm’s length.

On Caruthers’ notional left-by-upwards flank (directions were arbitrary, but useful and automatically agreed-upon by convention) were the Gaoians. On his right flank, the Dominion led by the Rauwrhyr. Directly in front: Singularity’s finest, already putting in work

Right flank was the weakest one, therefore. Keep an eye on that. No disrespect to the Dominion, but they’d been whipped into a fighting force only in recent years: everyone else had a tradition. Hunters would know that too, so Caruthers’ first move was to shift a couple of San Diego class over to that side of his formation to bolster their shield wall.

That was just opening moves, though. The first couple of pawns advanced. The objective had to be that hive, far at the back of the Hunter cloud. Getting the HEAT onto that thing wasn’t going to be easy at all.

And the Hunters of course had their own ideas about what was going to happen. A knot formed in the whirl of Hunter probes, an eddy of ships bunched tightly together for mutual protection and counter-attacking, right where Caruthers’ fleet and the gaoians stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Right where he’d moved those San Diegos from.

Grandfather Arki of One-Fang had a Fury or two to spare, though. They slipped sideways, reinforced the perceived weak spot, and the eddy dissipated: a new one formed elsewhere, testing and probing.

So that was how it was going to be. The Hunters were looking for a weakness, and when they found it…

Alright. Caruthers could work with that. A game of wits and will: who could create the most tempting ‘weakness’ to lure the other into a mis-step?

Well, they would soon find out.

He sent instructions to the Dominion fleet, and noted their prompt response with satisfaction. They’d done sterling work there. But he couldn’t use them as the actual bait: that dangerous role would have to fall on his own people.

So be it.

Another eddy formed, another questing limb made of ships groped through the Entity’s screen and tried to grab a juicy morsel from among the flesh-and-blood navies. The reply from the Singularity force was a withering strobe of their advanced long-range disruptors, but one of the Gaoian ships, the Sprinting Light, was forced to retreat to the back of the formation in a cloud of vented, incandescent coolant with her systems pushed to their overload limit and fires on two decks.

Another eddy, and another. Each such was a chance for the Entity to push through, and for Onna-Musha and Gladiatrix to lead the charge deeper into the Hunters’ belly, but each one cost the allies in turn. USS Ganymede was forced to disengage and jump out, her hull ravaged by a disruptor pulse—thank God for the shielding paint that had held the damage down to a mere cluster of hull breaches, rather than annihilation. The House Krwth heavy warship Dignity survived a similar assault for the loss of one of its engines…

And through it all spun and danced the Entity, throwing its expendable, unmanned bodies into the fire to save organic lives over and over again. The sky in every direction was sparking like an angle grinder as the two replicator swarms clashed and carved each other…

It was working, though. By god, it was working. The allies came together, worked as one….

And mile by grinding mile, they burrowed deep into the swarm.

Alpha-of-Alphas

What little was left of the Alpha-of-Alphas gnashed and gnawed in its command cradle. Cyberwarfare.

It knew the adversary now slithering through the data networks of old. The Builders had prepared their systems with everything they had learned from this datamind’s last intrusions, though it seemed the foe too had either learned some new tricks, or not revealed all it knew on the previous occasions.

Either way, the datamind was tearing through the system, crashing hardware, interfering with signals, and corrupting data. The Alpha-of-Alphas had already ordered some of its subordinates to physically disconnect the long-term storage, meaning there was no danger of the intruder accessing the most sensitive information…

Not yet, anyway. Not until too late.

But that still left a lot of network for it to ravage. Including the Alpha-of-Alphas’ own brain, meaning that for the first time in years the Alpha-of-Alphas was in direct peril.

Meaning that for the first in years, the Alpha-of-Alphas felt…alive. It felt the surge of adrenaline through its preserved nervous system, felt its few remaining organs quicken and pulse.

It could also feel its digital defenses being tested. The interface used all of a Hunter’s senses, including tactile, and the Entity’s presence outside the central command network was like a billion tiny, rasping teeth on the Alpha-of-Alphas’ skin.

It had options, however. It didn’t need to win this fight decisively…it just needed to buy some time. It flashed a few dozen devices, physically melting them to slag. Whole reaches of the network collapsed with a kind of cathartic agony, like chopping off a festering, itching limb.

The Entity’s gnawing paused. For a moment the Alpha-of-Alphas dared to hope it had somehow managed to trap the thing’s primary intelligence on one of the destroyed devices and delete it, but no such luck. The Entity found another way in, began to chew its way deeper and closer like a worm again.

The Alpha-of-Alphas felt an emotion something akin to laughter, and projected that onto the network with a mocking emotional tag. Felt frustration, rage and hatred reflected back at it. Excellent. Truly excellent. A true fight in the worlds both physical and informational. A true clash of wills and purpose. Another dish in this lavish feast the galaxy’s living things were preparing. All exactly as the Alpha-of-Alphas had hoped for.

Today was a holy day.

With some breathing room purchased, it returned its attention to the battle in matterspace. But it always spared a glance, every few seconds, at a different set of sensors, elsewhere, patiently waiting for the quarry to nibble at the bait.

They would. It knew they would. Inside its cradle, the Alpha-of-Alpha’s mouthparts drooled all over the cabling.

It could taste them already.

Starship Stray Fortune jumping

Ian (“Death-Eye”) Wilde

Thump.

Not that he could hear it, but in his head he always added the sound of array jumps whenever the ship flung itself through shortcut space into the unknown.

Besides, he could feel it through his boots. That little…lurch, twitch, bounce of the deck. Like somebody had hit the far end of the deck with a hammer.

They were nice boots, too. Custom made and everything for a Bigfoot like him.

He could also feel the gentle tremor of a far larger pair of monsters approaching the bridge: Warhorse, padding along softly; Vemik Given-Man, doing the same but markedly less effectively with his markedly bigger mass. There wasn’t much properly built to handle men like them and no matter how carefully they cat-pawed along, there was no hiding their size.

Both were fully armored, to add to the deck’s burden.

“We on approach now?” Vemik twitched his armored tail, nuclear red crest sticking up wildly from the top of his helmet-less head. That, he carried under an arm for the moment.

“Ayup. Wanna see it it?”

“From this far away?”

“Oh, we have good eyes on this ship,” Ian chuckled at his own ironic comment, and turned to call up the visible-spectrum telescope feed. Dora had already trained it on the distant sun in front of them.

Or, more specifically, on the dark mote nestled deep in its corona.

“How did we even find out about this?”

“Whitecrest has its ways,” Garaaf grunted. “ I wasn’t idle all those years on the ring, you know.”

…Okay, genuinely alarming, but whatever.

From across the bridge, Urgug rumbled and flashed quite a bright, pale blue—a Guvnurag’s version of clearing his throat for attention. “I detect wormhole activity. It seems the Hunters are jumping out to reinforce the battle at the hive.”

“Good.”

“Right. So. You lot going to let us know the full story on what this thing is?”

Adam spoke up. “Like we said, it’s a solar collector. But it’s not just a solar collector. We know it’s mobile, for one.”

“Which makes it really fuckin’ dangerous,”Hoeff growled. “Jump to a star, fire up the forcefields like a magnifying glass, aim it at a planet, watch the seas boil.”

“Still needs to jump in, though.”

Vemik had the answer to that. “Maybe, High-rarchy been sneaky and hid beacons?”

“Maybe, big guy. That’s why we’re here. And why you’re here. We might just need you.”

Vemik couldn’t hide some of the sullen shame in his reply. “For just suit work.”

“Dude. You’re one man and you’re able to handle the whole team’s suits all by yourself. That’s already cut two dozen men off the mission size. Tell me that ain’t valuable!”

Vemik bobbled his head as he conceded the point, which had the fascinating effect of making his crest sway like long grass. “Fine, fine…still want to crush. Nice and slow.”

He snarled, exposing some fuckin’ skull-shatteringly massive fangs inside that killer’s mouth of his. Ten’Gewek had nothing but pure, unadulterated hatred for all things Igraen, and frankly? Ian couldn’t blame them one bit.

“Don’t worry,” Hoeff growled somewhere in the contrabass, as he thumped himself onto the bridge. “Somehow I doubt you’ll miss ‘yer chance.”

Funny how scale worked, really. Normally Hoeff and Ferd (and Bruuk too, these days) were the big Beefs in the room, and quite used to throwing their quad-digit shortstack huge all over the place, either for play or for more serious matters. They dwarfed everyone, even Urgug by mass, who gave them a wide berth in the hallways. But next to these two?

They didn’t even really look all that much bigger but by God, were they ever! What was missing in bulk was more than made up in their sheer, legitimately alarming density. The other three literally couldn’t even dent the two just standing there, letting them try whatever they wanted. That said something since all of them were the type of blokes you could bend crowbars and shatter cricket bats against.

Scale very recalibrated. Goddamn.

“Not if we can help it,” Adam admonished gently, to which Hoeff nodded respectfully. Pecking order established, too. “Anyway. What’s our coast time?”

Ian turned to query their pilot. “Moj?”

The mjrnhrm’s elytra buzzed sharply. “Already pushing luck, we. Doing ten lights now, slowing as we close, quarter-lightspeed in the final two AU…fifty minutes.”

Ian nodded at him, then keyed the intercom. “Dora, love. How’s our delivery drone?”

“Ready and waiting!” Dora sing-songed merrily. “Just needs warm bodies on board!”

“You heard the lass,” Ian chuckled. Even after years of working with her, Dora’s upbeat chirping never failed to keep his own mood bright too. “We’ll do our bit, you do your bit, home in time for tea and fuckin’ crumpets….should get that on a shirt, actually.”

“You and your goddamn shirts…” Adam chuckled, clapped him on the shoulder nearly hard enough to knock him over, then with a gesture he rounded up his team and headed astern.

Funny. Ian was one of the tiny minority of people who responded fully to the Crude, and since he happened to have a SOR affiliation (and also a Daar affiliation) he had of course taken advantage. Who didn’t want perfect health and extended youth? He deliberately wasn’t pushing himself as insanely hard as the rest though, as much for fear of his long-term health and other complications as maybe wanting to at least theoretically pass as a normal bloke…but it was still enough to put several hundred kilos of beef on his now thickening, widening bones. The hardest part wasn’t even the training; it was eating enough.

He was a monster even by modern definitions. Fast and athletic too, and he knew how to use it all. But these days that wasn’t good enough and he was still glad to have the rest on-board, Bruuk especially. It had proven useful being big in a lot of fun ways, but he was still a one-eyed broken vet, and therefore a liability in a real fight.

They were royally screwed if it came down to him. He just…wasn’t fit for task anymore. He could wrestle with the Ten’Gewek but either Bruuk or Ferd could fold him up like paper, and the other two were so thoroughly Beef they might have just popped him by accident if they ever tussled.

His mission in the fight was different now, and that had proven hard to accept.

Right now his mission was to deliver the combatants safely. This was a ship full of Daar’s carefully hand-picked, divided loyalties or no. Their deaths, here at this critical moment would be…

Well. Even without the broader ramifications he’d rather go home alive after this anyway, thank you very much. So he strapped in to his command chair and watched his crew work.

Stray Fortune. God, what a ride. Still felt like he’d only come aboard last week or something, when she’d still had a chain-smoking rickytick captain and a name you’d only manage to choke out through a throat infection and a mouthful of dry cereal. Felt like half the time since he’d come aboard she’d been in the yard too, receiving upgrades. She was the Clan’s baby really, packed with every ship-mountable gadget Whitecrest had ever thought of or stolen.

Knowing all that was one thing. Feeling it was another. They were warping right toward a big, dangerous object, and not slowly either. It felt to him like their square-nosed, container-laden space truck of a ship ought to be, well…more conspicuous. But with a flick of a switch, she became the fuckin’ Red October. Latest trials had suggested the best tool for spotting her when she was in full active stealth mode might actually be the Mark One Eyeball, which was as good as it was possible to get short of slapping an optical cloaking field on her.

Which, yes, they had one of those too.

By way of diligence and not nervous fidgeting, he double checked that they actually were fully stealthed. Yup. They were. All their waste heat was going straight into heat sinks in the cargo containers. They were background cold, zero-emissions, all but completely transparent to most of the EM spectrum…

As safe as safe got when approaching a fortified target in space, really. If it wasn’t enough, they’d never notice their ends, so…no sense in stressing. There was little for him to do except be alert, thoughtful and ready. And…pray, maybe?

Not that he really knew who or what he was praying to, or even really putting words to it. It was more of a general mental broadcast to the universe that he’d like it if this all worked out well, please.

And with that done, he sat back to watch and wait.

Dataspace adjacent to probe swarm, the Exodus Hive

Entity

Message from Caruthers. He wants to push in Caledonia behind the Singularity vanguard, with our support.

The Entity understood immediately, and considered how best to make that happen.

None of the options were great. Its strongest quadrant was still the force protecting the Dominion wing of the formation, on the grounds that they as the least experienced and proven ships and crews needed the most support. Its strong presence in that volume had dissuaded the Hunters from hitting them too hard, so the Dominion fleet was successfully creeping out and encircling the Hunters’ flank.

Meaning, the Entity had plenty of drones over there to recall, but doing so might invite a counter-attack against their weakest flank, which might lead to a swift and brutal collapse.

The other option was to pull the drones from the other flank, where the Gao were doing their usual ferocious work…but without the Entity’s support, even they would be hard-pressed.

Have faith. I think the ETs will surprise you.

Decision made, then. Caruthers got his ships, which the Entity plunged into the thickest of the engagement.

Jesucristo, look at them fight. It’s…beautiful…

The Entity spared some attention and watched the object of the Daemon’s awe. Singularity. Friends for now, even if their end goal would mean the death of dataspace, but in this fight, up close, it got to see how their flagships approached battle and…

Yes. Truly beautiful. The Onna-Musha flowed like a blade, carving through space in graceful, unpredictable arcs. Every few seconds there’d be a shimmer of light along the tight, close shield bubble hugging her hull, and then a spread of disciplined destructive beams that left Hunter probes drifting and dead in a cloud of their own atomized matter.

Gladiatrix, meanwhile, stabbed and thrust, pulse-warping into the enemy’s thick to lash around her with fearsome close-range weaponry, then fading from view. Her every motion was an exercise in spare, punchy precision, her every attack run a blitzkrieg, her every retreat masterfully timed. That was high-intensity, high-risk, high-reward fighting, riding the very precipice of disaster.

The Sekhmet and Athena were twins, spiraling and dancing around the AEC formation, positioning themselves moment by moment to add the paired might of their shields wherever the Allies were taking the heaviest fire.

Not, it had to be said, that the AEC were being shown up. Caledonia was at the core of a sturdy phalanx, surrounded on all sides by V-destroyers, San Diegos, Bulldogs and Misfits. Any Hunter probe that slipped past Singularity’s elegant woven death-net slammed straight into a hail of superluminal gunfire, or the crushing grip of a San Diego’s grapple fields.

The Entity had to agree: beautiful.

But also, somehow…incomplete. There was room for improvement. A few cracks that needed filling.

It gladly inserted itself into them, lent its power and heat dissipation to the shield walls, slipped a few high-speed sacrificial interceptors into formation around Onna-Musha, Gladiatrix, Sekhment and Athena. Its EWAR drones fell in alongside the bulldog cloud and contributed to the strobing, blinding bedlam that all by itself was doing half the work of keeping the Hunters at bay.

If only the Hunters weren’t seemingly endless. No matter how many the fleet smashed, more came.

Did we miscount? Underestimate?

Have faith.

For long minutes, ten or more of them, the two forces pushed and bullied at each other, neither taking any significant losses, each shifting and squirming to try and wrestle the other aside. The stalemate broke when Singularity brought in a reinforcement that the Entity guessed they would have preferred to leave safely at home: the Inanna, Gilgamesh’s flagship.

Her arrival was the simple black-flash of a jump drive, followed by an eruption of focused ferocity. Inanna didn’t fight like the queen-ships. She fought like a brawler, a hero. Every ounce of the advanced engineering that made Onna-Musha so graceful and Gladiatrix so playful had gone into just one thing: sheer, overwhelming violence. The Entity wondered if Inanna was even all that durable, behind it all.

She didn’t need to be durable, though. Nothing got close enough to test her.

It was effective. Sheer, overwhelming force was turning the tide. It could be turned a bit quicker, perhaps…there was one ship left on the board that hadn’t committed.

For now, the Destroying Fury was nowhere to be seen. It was cloaked, and effectively; only the very occasional wash of gravitational waves across its bulk gave away its presence, safely aloof from the battlefield.

That was a most unexpected tactic from the Great Father.

He’ll have his reasons.

The Entity performed the purely mental equivalent of nodding to itself, and redoubled its attention to the fight. Its perspective, its reflexes and its nature afforded it the luxury of admiring its allies, but overindulgence in that luxury would only lead to inefficiencies. Every probe might count in the fullness of this battle.

It formed a knuckle of screen-drones and bodyguards around Inanna and bored through the swarm.

And it was gratified to note the moment when the HEAT’s boarding launches shot out of Caledonia and lanced straight into the hive’s flank, accompanied by two from Onna-Musha.

If only we could watch them at work…

Focus. There were a number of structures on the hive’s surface that warranted removal. The Entity found a squadron from somewhere, glanced over at the Dominion wing—valiantly holding their own, to justify the Daemon’s faith in them—and set them to work. They descended on the hive’s surface like bees, and began to sting.

First objective, achieved.

Righteous

Knowin’ how big the hive was, and actually steppin’ on it, were two very different things. From the outside…it wasn’t like standing on a ship. It was like that time they’d visited Ceres. It had a fuckin’ horizon. A weird, curved, close one but still! There were mountains out there on that horizon, each one with a weapon at its summit. Every time they fired, the soles of Firth’s footwear carried the tremor to his toes.

Hunters already crawling on the surface, swarming to try and intercept them, their bodies completely cyberized and even their mouths covered against the vacuum. Firth’s weapon punched silently in his hands, felt, not heard: sparks and oil went drifting, and the dismembered robotic limbs went tumbling.

EVA fighting was hella fuckin’ dangerous. Everything was slower, more drifty, easier to hit. The new suits came with a shield generator, and that meant some safety, but it drank power.

So: Fight like demons while the breach team blast a way inside.

They did their job quick. That one hit Firth in the sole like a hammer blow: his thumb danced over the thruster controls, stabilized him, re-engaged his boots with the station surface: the air had already rushed out from the breached compartment, left a snowstorm full of Hunter body parts spreading in the void.

They plunged into the wound they’d made.

Gravity. Strong gravity. Air once they got the shield seal up.

Suddenly, Righteous could use his strength. So he did.

He exploded forward, moving just as fast as his thoughts and perception could keep up with. Best buds right behind him, everyone doing their thing. Well-drilled team, well-oiled machine. They were death.

Grab. Pull, rip. Charge through and kick the next. Move fast, bugs can’t react. Clear a space. Open up with GR-7d. Full power….no, dial it back; these puny fucks din’t need it.

Combat drugs hitting hard. Almost slow-motion killing, but over in a blink. Fuck up walls and floors with his mass, bounce against so hard he pushes right through. Use it as a weapon, just plow right through the diseased fucks.

Blood and lubricant sliding in greasy droplets off his visor’s anti-stick coating. Tiny puff of nitrogen gas from vent on hand to blow it clean, sip a mouthful of citrus spunk and back to work. Grab, tear, punch, crush, pull, break, shoot, burst…

Fuckin’ kill.

Constant terse words under it all. Contacts, positions, actions…sector clear. He knew where everyone was without ever having to look at ‘em. At least he got some cardio in. Glance over at Yan (tentatively named Grodd) and he was all that and a bit more, what with that tail of his. Against the trash mobs he had an advantage.

And of course, the moment he had thought thought, the gravity fuckery started.

They’d come a long fuckin’ way since the early days, though. Those flexible booties the Protectors so loved gave Firth such a wonderful footing on the deck and nowadays he wondered what the fuck took him so long to switch over. He could feel the thump of the panels right before they shifted, could react like it was the most natural thing in the world. Now, it was second nature to shift with the shifts, turn the wall into his new floor, grab and slide when down became the other end of the room, and never, ever get into a long hall that could turn into a deep pit. Walls? What fuckin’ walls? The HEAT ignored walls. Rip and tear, like they were cardboard. Structural bulkheads, yeah. Those needed a moment.

Just a moment. Most he could rip apart with his bare fuckin’ hands nowaday, steel beams and everything. Yan too, even if he had to strain a bit. He’d get there, one day.

What would ‘ol Firth by like by then?

And even where the long hallways couldn’t be avoided…let ‘em contend with their ten’gewek. As good as ol’ Firth was in three-dimensional space, he was a fucking child next to Yan and the others. A ten’gewek in a freespace gravity playground could fly.

Singularity guys were sorta okay, too. Shit, they were even managing to keep up. They were more about stealth though, so maybe that wasn’t fair. Oh well. But when Firth got glimpses of ‘em in action it was only glimpses: a blur would turn into a man, the man would slaughter a handful of Hunters, then there’d be a curl of smoke and the man would be gone.

Weird that he had some time to think.

Where were the Hunters? The real Hunters, not these fuckin’ cannon fodder. He could fuckin’ pimp-slap the regular Hunters apart. Where were the betas and alphas? Where was the actual fuckin’ fight? Fuckers thought they were being sneaky, no doubt. Thought they’d lay a trap, catch ‘em like they caught Scott all those years ago.

Well. Personal shields now, so…fuck that, plus countermeasures. They’d be surprised if they tried that shit again, and for that fuckin’ heinous act of evil, the reckoning was gonna be fuckin’ double. Right now though it was just the first contact. Intense, and fast-moving…but in short order he had space for a breather, and time to consider command.

Whole suit was gory. Little chunk of meat and guts stuck to his gauntlet, which he flicked off with a grunt. Integrity check…all good.

“This shit’s too easy, boss.”

Campbell nodded as he loaded in a full magazine. “Speedbumps. So let’s look ahead.”

Regaari knew what that meant instantly, he half-turned and gestured to his Clan brothers. “Cubs, play sniff-and-find. Singularity, on me.”

A shimmer of the optical camo on their suits, and the Whitecrests were doing what they did best. Firth grinned behind his mask, sipped the lime spooge again, and got back to work.

This shit wasn’t gonna blow itself up.

Antony (“Abbott”) Costello Costello’s spot was toward the rear of the formation, and he therefore wasn’t firing his weapon much, but that certainly didn’t mean he was idle. It was just that his own actual rifle was a distant second-place backup weapon.

His real weapon was the team; his ammunition, data. Each passing second the team’s suit sensors mapped the environment around them, expanding their internal blueprint of this hive. Combined with data from the other teams, the supercomputers on Myrmidon could make best-guess extrapolations, link things together, propose possible layouts, and they were usually breathtakingly accurate.

Certainly they were accurate enough that Costello didn’t need to know exactly where the Hive’s main engineering section in order to make progress toward it. Every room they cleared, every power cable buried in the deck and ceiling, all of it added to the map, pointing the way.

“KIWI, we’re heading right at your next junction.”

“Rog.”

“Contact left,” Newman reported, followed a moment later by “neutralized.”

Myrmidon fed Costello a new projection: to Newman’s left was likely the terminus of some kind of line of communication, a jump array or internal train network maybe. Either way, it was a source for new Hunters to enter the fight.

“FIC says enemy transport in grid Golf-Tango-four. Clear it.”

“Rog.”

A brief pause, an even briefer storm of gunfire, another brief pause, then an explosion.

”ABBOT, TITAN. Target destroyed.”

“Copy. Advance toward Juliet-Sierra-four, straight line.”

A click-click on the line told him he’d been heard. The destructive sounds that reached his ears slightly afterward told him that, yup, Titan’s team were going in a straight line and be damned to whatever obstacles like, say, walls happened to get in the way.

That was the sort of cycle that played out several times a minute as the three groups of four men collectively forming his team did their work. They were fast, so fast Costello wasn’t even sure that transport back there had managed to catch them by design or just on sheer dumb luck. Still, better to have destroyed it than risk being shot in the ass.

Bigger picture…nothing to worry about. SOUP and ROCKET had their own tasks well in hand. But they could be going more smoothly…

Facilitating which, of course was Abbott’s job. Step by step, brief clash by brief clash, they lanced deeper and deeper into the hive until finally breaking through a wall into a space that clearly wasn’t meant for living things to inhabit. Kind of a crawlspace, except built for a crawler the size of an elephant.

No surprise, the FIC was delighted, and instantly gave him a clear direction. And for once, Costello was happy to agree: this particular crawlspace had no gravity plating, making it about as safe as the interior of a hostile vessel could be.

They were close now. So incredibly close. Unopposed they shot along the zero-G crawlway, sensors strobing out ahead of them alert for field traps and other nastiness, but apparently this was a weak spot the Hunters didn’t or couldn’t fortify.

They did suggest a large space, however, with active G-plating.

The team didn’t slow down as they shot into it, landed running, and violenced everything Hunter-shaped before most of them had even turned to see what the commotion was. The few that lasted that long were dead an instant later.

They all knew what they were there for. Before the last Hunter had even slid nervelessly to the deck, Titan and the Defenders were all over the systems, identifying main power and how to turn it the fuck off.

Bad news, of course, was never far away.

“ABBOT, FIC. Multiple hostile units inbound to your position, coming from Echo-Victor-five, Charlie-Victor-five, Echo-Kilo-six….”

Shit. They were surrounded and hemmed in. How hard? Would he need to call on Stephenson to abandon the slave rescue?

Hopefully not. He had other options. First things first, though: counterattack, hard. Nobody won a defensive fight against Hunters, so as the first scuttling of claws and seethe of fusion blades and hammer of pulse weapons reached his ears, Costello gestured, his men sprang forward to meet the enemy. Something incredibly fast sizzled over Costello’s head and buried itself in the wall in a spray of sparks and debris. He raised his weapon, sighted and dropped the Beta that fired it even while his mouth did its work.

“FIC, ABBOT, need some manpower.”

“Singularity team en route, ABBOTT.” Even as the words reached him, he saw the blink in his HUD map, telling him where they were, and how soon he could expect them. Good. Not great, given the adjacent estimates of enemy strength, but good. All he’d need was a little pressure taken off, and he could set Titan to killing the power.

He found another target, killed it, and threw himself into the fight alongside his men.

And had little time to think of anything else for a long while.

Starship Stray Fortune

Dora

Liree was on a leash, of the kind that chilled Dora’s blood.

Here was a rebel. His career had been aimed squarely at some of the most corrupt governments and figures in the galaxy, including the Robalin Supremacy itself. He’d written his worst code to tear open the corporate fronts and puppet foundations that faced the rest of the Dominion and let the Supremacy continue to trade and grow wealthy despite numerous official embargos and punitive measures.

Well, not just them. Liree had been entirely disillusioned with a cowardly galaxy that left Gao to burn, which had never united to tackle the Hunters. He’d never accepted that it wasn’t the Dominion’s fault, that it was hostile influence that had robbed the galaxy’s united species of their collective balls.

He’d been angry. Angry enough to smash the whole system, and his weapon of choice had been some of the most inspired code ever written.

And now…neutered.

Worse. Slavishly devoted to the Great Father, in a way that was straight-up creepy. She’d tried asking some of the other gaoians about it but all she got was silence and…she didn’t know if they noticed it themselves, but every time the other gaoians looked at Liree, their ears flattened backwards.

Exasperated, she’d resorted to asking Wilde about it. His answer was, if anything, worse.

“Leave it, love. There’s shit about gaoians you don’t wanna know.”

“Even…it’s creepy! Like, he can’t think or say anything bad about him, even in jest. It’s like he’s got no free will!”

“…He kinda doesn’t.”

“Everyone has free will,” Dora protested, fervently.

“Maybe he did once where his feelings about Daar are concerned, but the Gao aren’t like your people and mine, love. They’ve got a whole fuckin’…psychology of loyalty and pack dynamics. Push their buttons the right way and…”

Dora twitched her antennae in a frown. “That’s…”

“You gotta remember, people might be people, but that doesn’t mean we’re all the same at heart, aye? Urgug sees zillions of colors neither of us can, Morwk and the Ten’Gewek have tails, you have a whole extra two limbs over me, plus antennae…”

“You’re strong enough to yank my arms off….”

“Well…yeah,” Ian agreed awkwardly, “but the point is, yeah, there’s certain things about being sapient that apply to everyone, but there’s certain things about your brain and body and instincts that make us all really different deep down, too. Saying ‘everyone has free will’ is a nice sentiment, but…it doesn’t take into account that Liree is an alien to both of us. Deep down, he’s programmed different. They all are.”

Much as Dora wanted to object…the objection was just that she didn’t like that fact, not that she could actually think of anything to prove it wrong. She glanced at Liree again, who was completely lost in his work at this point, his ears up and forward attentively which was a clear sign of a Gao whose attention was wholly on one thing.

“I…” she began.

“Leave it, love,” Ian warned. “Just…leave it.”

Well…okay. Dora didn’t like the implications of an instinct like that one bit, because that was a degree of control the Supremacy’s social scientists would have had wet dreams about. But she dropped the subject.

Still. Absent that particular topic…when she got to talking with him later, Liree seemed normal. Ish. Normalish.

And he loved his work.

“See, we’re never gonna be able to duplicate the performance of an actual datasophont, but that’s ‘cuz dataspace itself is…oh Keeda, I hope I get to study it properly someday. There’s whole horizons of knowledge to be gleaned there! But if you’re stuck inside what we’ve managed with our centuries of legacy code and weird conventions that go right back to, like, Lookis—”

“Who?”

“He was the gaoian scientist who established the electrical convention. Used to prank his cousins by building up a static charge on his fur, then…zap!”

“Of course he did. How long ago was this?”

“Oh…almost nine hundred years, or thereabouts.” Liree chittered. “Anyway, the point is, your drones have everything I need on-board, I just have to make a few adjustments. Wanna help!?”

“Help…how? I don’t know Hunter tech–”

“Literally fuckin’ nobody does! Which is mostly okay ‘cuz mosta what they build is just dominion tech superglued together.”

“Sounds…Frankensteinian.”

Liree nodded enthusiastically, his ears flopping over his head. “Right! So…”

Very quickly she found herself struggling to keep up as he enthused at length about…well, about his trade. She followed the general idea that there was some kind of translation technology that let the scavenged stuff work with the Hunter stuff, and that because he was an expert at Dominion cybersecurity that meant he could work his magic to some degree even here, but…

It was just…so at odds with her first impression of him! She decided to ignore Wilde’s advice, and just ask.

“Right, so. I’ve learned a lot today. Thank you! But there’s one more thing I’m curious about.”

“Oh?” He was busy copying files off a portable drive straight into her drone’s brains, and then adding a few lines of code to read them, but somehow with the energy of being flat on his back under a vehicle with a wrench in hand.

“What…what’s the deal with you and Daar?”

He went silent for a long moment. Ears flicked back as flat as they go.

“…I’ll only say once, and after that I’d like it if you never brought it up again.”

“…Okay?”

He took a deep breath. “I met the living god of my people. Rather than destroy me, he spared my life and freed me from the consequences of my crimes. Then he made me his, forever. And now he is mine, too.”

“Forever…? I mean, I’ve met him and he’s friendly and all—”

“You haven’t met him. Who you met is Daar. I met the Great Father.” There was a shaky fervor in his voice. “He spared me, he called me to follow him. I did and he took me. I love him now, and he loves me. And it cannot ever be otherwise.”

And…that was the end of the conversation.

…Well, she knew to listen to Wilde now. So there was that. Well done, Dora, you learned something you already knew. Idiot.

Thank fuck the team arrived to fill the awkward silence. ‘Horse frowned at the drones as he clunk-clanged his way across the deck. “Aren’t you ready yet? We don’t got time to piss around.”

Liree twitched his head affirmatively. “I only need to finish this one.”

‘Horse nodded, then padded his way over to his gear. “S’cool. Vemik! Last checks!”

That time his footsteps were silent, even if the deck did undulate under his weight. Why…

Deathworlders were so fucking weird.

Also silent was Vemik and the rest of the ten’gewek. They were always silent, though. They moved and behaved exactly like predators because that’s exactly what they were. Humans only sometimes remembered that. The rest of the time they were some other kind of intense.

Liree settled in to the little nest of monitors, touchscreens and comfortable seating he’d set up at the back of the drone hangar. Dora still wasn’t really happy about handing control of the drones over to him—they were her babies—but well. Orders.

And more to the point, orders from people she trusted. She did a pre-flight check of her own just in case the slightly manic gaoian had missed or disrupted anything, found nothing, and returned to her own control blister to count the minutes til go time.

It came quickly. Her own drones were maintaining a perimeter, serving as warp-canceling emitters to keep their gravimetric signature below detection levels. It was precision work, but mostly easy; her role right now was to monitor.

Liree was fully switched-on and focused. She snatched looks at him on occasion, when duties permitted. The launch was away, slowly making its way toward the Hunter installation…

Intuition hit her. Suddenly, looking at Liree, the fervent devotion in all he did…she remembered some things she’d read, long ago. Put the pieces together. She understood.

Alien, and unspeakable. So strange she didn’t know what to think about it.

And she knew nothing but pity.

Ekallim-Igigi, New Uruk system

Alex, prince of Ekallim-Igigi

How long since he’d last set foot on Ekallim-Igigi? Several months at least. He hadn’t been avoiding it exactly, but there was just so much galaxy to see. So much Earth to see!

And college. There was that too.

But now, he was back home, serving as regent for the moment. He was in charge, absolutely, until father came back and assumed the throne.

And there was a non-zero chance father wouldn’t come back. Gilgamesh had been quite clear on that point: this was a battle, the kind of battle that kings like him needed to lead in. Which meant it was the kind of battle that kings like him might die in.

Alex…doubted today would be his father’s end. But he wasn’t so brash as to ignore the possibility, either.

He was on a video conference with the great leaders of the deathworlders right now. The Great Father, Presidents, Prime Ministers. The King, too. None were actively talking, simply…drinking it all in. The situation was very fluid.

And divided. The allied species had their attention on more than one thing today, though Alex had only recently received the full briefings.

A vengeance machine. This was a serious enough concern that the other leaders were all in secure transport or locations. That seemed maybe a bit paranoid, given the system shield around Earth…

But that probably meant it was wise.

Ekallim-Igigi of course was mobile, albeit rather confined at the moment thanks to the Hierarchy’s constant attentions. Whatever that Hunter machine did, they would most probably be able to avoid it. So, Alex wasn’t overly worried for himself or his people.

But still. Father was committed. The Great Father was not. That was telling.

So…be a king.

“Daar, what do you make of the situation right now?”

Daar was armored up. The suit framed his jaw and covered the top of his head, which obscured his ears and made reading his mood more challenging, but still Alex’s impression was of serious, focused calm.

“Few years ago we’da cut through this swarm like a fart in a monastery…” he rumbled. “Them new weapons slow us down. If we didn’t have the Entity to soak up the worst of it…”

Alex nodded seriously. It was still an open question among Singularity’s analysts where exactly the Hunters had got their claws on those disruptors. One last little bit of collaboration with the Hierarchy? Or were they more intelligent than anyone gave them credit for?

Either way, they’d transformed this fight. The Allies had to ride a fine knife-edge. If they won, it would be because the shields and formations held: History would remember this battle by the numbers to have been a one-sided thrashing.

If they lost, they’d all die in seconds. All or nothing.

“I don’t like the odds. And I suspect you’re worrying about something else, too.”

The Great Father looked at the camera directly, baleful harvest-moon eyes staring him down.

“…I got a bad feelin’ bout this vengeance engine thing. We been watchin’ it git built ‘fer a while an’ there’s more to it than bein’ a big fancy shield-mirror.”

“Why hit it now? Why not earlier?”

“We weren’t ready. It woulda just resulted in the same battle we’re seein’ right now. And then they’da just built it again somewhere else. Sometimes, ‘ya just gotta let ‘yer enemy dig a hole.”

Alex nodded his understanding, and thought of his Beowulf, half a mile away down in the royal hangar, or its larger cousin the Hamilton, nearly complete in anticipation of his eighteenth birthday.

Daar was a fuckin’ mind reader. “Don’t, young king. ‘Yer gonna git ‘yer shot at glory soon enough. So: why ain’t I bloody an’ fightin’? That’s what ‘ya really wanna ask, right?”

“…Yes.”

“‘Cuz my gut tells me I’m gonna be called to task here pretty soon. Don’t spend ‘yer biggest piece unless you know it’ll win. And the king is always the biggest piece, even if he ain’t the most effective. Never ‘ferget that.”

A lesson Alex had learned playing Stratagem against Leifini of course…but he nodded understanding, and didn’t comment that in Daar’s case, the king likely was the most effective piece. In any case, his father was committed to the hive front. Odd to think of his father as the “queen” in this particular game but…it fit nonetheless.

Daar lapsed back into alert, watchful silence and Alex did the same. None of the others had spoken, though he could see them occasionally turning to converse with an advisor or something outside the view of their cameras. They of course were from bigger nations, had larger populations, and those populations were not entirely war-focused.

Singularity existed for this war. Alex’s people were busy supporting the battle in many ways, from the front-lines of the naval battle to alongside the HEAT, to a few sneaking around with JETS to infiltrate Hierarchy assets. He doubted any crisis would rise to his attention through all this. Which was a good thing, he reminded himself. Far better not to have distractions.

Though something in the back of his mind rather wanted one anyway.

He ignored it, and paid attention, and watched. There was much to be learned.

And Daar was right. His time would come too.

Soon enough.

Warhorse There was plenty evidence of a lotta stuff suddenly leaving, but the focusing array wasn’t abandoned or vacant, oh no. In fact, there was a lot of busy activity around one end where its disk-shaped hull had a big bite taken out of it that was still ragged with structural beams and sparkly with welding.

It wasn’t quite complete…but Adam was pretty sure it was complete enough.

Hoeff grunted, and spat his chewing gum out into the trash can. It had taken four years, but Claire had somehow persuaded him to quit the dip. With that done, he maneuvered the face shield onto his helmet: the nanotech seal around the edge flashed with a faint yellow light as it melded two distinct components together into one single piece. “Well. Reckon this is gonna be fun…”

“Not as much as it woulda been without a big distraction half a galaxy away,” Adam replied. “Should be all builders and a few bottom-feeding omegas in there right now. We’ll go through ‘em like Taco Bell.”

“And if there is an Alpha on board, well…payback time, huh?” Hoeff’s face shield was gold plated on the outside, so the shadowy vision of his face behind it was hard to see, but Adam could feel him grinning…and felt the same grin on his own face.

“Heh! Yeah. Doubt they thought they’d ever see me again.” He looked around at the rest of the team. Visors sealed, shields, weapons charged. The Wrecking Crew was ready to live up to its name.

He put his own mask on. Saw Hoeff watch it seal and give the nod of approval. Suit diagnostics were all happy, so he grabbed his weapon, loaded and charged it, looked up at the mission clock.

“Seats.”

They strapped in. Dora and Liree sealed the boarding launch up behind them, and there Adam was. A metal coffin about the size of a standard shipping container, except with a bit of a raked prow and fusion cutters around it to slice their way deep through the enemy hull.

And engines that’d make a fighter pilot black out. But that was okay. Adam and his crew could take some insane gees. Which was good, it freed up energy for the ship and allowed it to maneuver as aggressively as possible.

The last step was a cloud of Dora’s drones, all of them a much bigger and scarier signature than their little launch. Stray Fortune was a small fleet all by herself, and the moment she popped up on sensors and started getting noisy, the Hunters bit.

The drones peeled off, intercepted. A few of them splashed violently as point defense weapons on the station’s surface zeroed them, but not a bit of it was felt inside the assault launch.

The moment they made contact with the hull, though? They felt that alright. Those fusion cutters made the difference between bug-meets-windshielding and plunging deep into the station’s hide like a thrown spear, but they sure didn’t make it comfortable.

There was an extra crunch as the assault launch found some internal cavity and lodged in it with a jolt. The seats released them, the front of the launch popped off in a series of small blasts designed to send a haul of shrapnel and punishing noise into anyone or anything that thought to shoot its occupants…

Warhorse was out before the shrapnel had even stopped bouncing. There were dead Hunters, torn to bits, nothing to shoot. Garaaf vanished away in front of him like an eel wriggling away into murky water.

Liree’s voice in his ear. “Station network found. Breaching.”

Good shit. Meanwhile, ‘Horse was for the first time in far too long doing what made him the best there was. He wasn’t the biggest or the strongest anymore. He wasn’t the most skilled ninja or the wisest tactician. Wasn’t the fastest, wasn’t the toughest. Might not ever be those things again either, which was some hard facts of life for a guy like him. But he was still a top-tier operator in all those things at the same time, and he had something nobody else did.

He had unbreakable will. Not Righteous, who was nowadays leagues better in every other way. Anyone else on HEAT? Nah. Good guys all, but none of them had died, lost everything twice, then rebuilt from scratch out of fuckin’ spite. He may well one day best ‘em all again at everything too, as was right and just. Not even Daar himself was so single-minded and determined. Nobody had ‘Horse’s commitment, had his murderous dedication to purpose. Everything on this station was gonna fuckin’ die. No exceptions. They were gonna die by his hand or otherwise, and that was all there was to it. Warhorse was death.

And death wanted to play.

Builders and Omegas. Fuckin’ cannon fodder at best. Often he didn’t even bother to service them if they were in his way. He just kept moving, and they died from his speed, his strength, or under his weight. Their weapons sucked. Didn’t even tickle the armor. Too slow, too puny.

Betas were a bit more interesting. ‘Horse kept a bit more distance with them, but even they were mostly just mildly interesting bits of meat to tear apart.

They didn’t see an Alpha, yet. But that was the fuckin’ problem with Alphas. You didn’t see ‘em until suddenly there was a fuckin’ tank with legs and claws in your face.

Gravity traps? Field traps? Liree claimed ‘em. ‘Horse took a lot of satisfaction in watching one of the field traps tear apart a dozen Omegas before shorting out. Even more satisfaction when they turned a corner to find the pack of Betas that’d been coming for ‘em all broken and burst at the end of a long fall that, for the Wrecking Crew, was a nice easy walk down main street.

And then they hit something that shouldn’t have been there: a second, inner hull. They were a few hundred meters deep now, and the fuckin’ thing loomed up in front like a solid black plate. Slashing at it with a fusion blade didn’t work, and their cutting charges blasted the shit out of the room without leaving more than a silvery scratch on the metal’s dark surface.

The Hunters didn’t fucking stop, neither. Din’t seem to matter how many they killed, there were always a few…more…

The amber light at the very top of his vision blinked on: active hostile wormhole suppression. Half a second later, a red triangle in his HUD picked out the source. Sources. Some of them thousands of kilometers away outside this station, but one of them right here on board.

Oh, you sneaky motherfucker.

They’d been lured in. Kept on the hook with just enough opposition to force them to keep pushing, keep expanding the perimeter, never give them the peaceful second they needed to set up the bomb, and now here they were.

Well. No standing around. Everybody knew the score, and shifted as one. The violence continued, changed direction, had a new focus.

And now the actual fight started.

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“My father, we just lost the link to Stray Fortune.”

Fuck.

“No time, then. Redeploy the Fury and her support craft. We go in snarlin’ an’ hit as fast as we can. And call in th’ reserves.” This was the ripe moment for maximum escalation, and things at the hive engagement seemed stable enough.

Daar sealed his helmet as the deck jolted softly under his paws, and in one instant they flashed from the relative tranquility of the back line, to the very heart of a storm.

And right there at the very center of it was the Stray Fortune. What a ship! Amazing what you could do with a stock freighter and a few billion moneys. You could cut the necessary crew down to a handful, give it enough drone firepower to serve as a small fleet in its own right…she was no frontline dedicated warship, but Keeda’s nuts she could work miracles when she had to.

Even if the miracle was just surviving. Timing was perfect too, wormhole suppression went up just before Fury arrived, and hasn’t quite stabilized before they’d finished their jump. They slipped in by a nuthair, that’s for sure!

“Get ‘er safe! Kill those suppressors! Boarding parties, with me!”

Parties. Plural.

Today, the Fury was finally being used for its true purpose: shoving all of First Fang right down the Hunters’ diseased throats.

And Unseen help him, Daar was gonna claw out their heart.

Pounce down through the two extra-large accessways, into the launch boarding room. Suit biolab cranking his everything way up. Always a weird sensation when it hit, doubly so when he weren’t takin’ his time. But by the time he reached where he was goin’…long training and acclimatization had him maximally amped up. First Fang were already saddled up, crammed tight into their flights. Some of them were still riding the dragon, he could tell.

Daar filled his launch. Room enough for two runners beside him, just about. The clang and shunt of the hatch closing, the whine of engines…then flight. A short, pounding flight that got Daar grinning inside his helmet as the G-forces crushed and pulled at him. His blood was up and racing as they punched into the focuser’s outer hull, burned through it, spilled out inside.

Comms net propagated the second he was out. “‘Horse, Tigger. What’chu need dead?”

“Tigger, ‘Horse. Ten Hunter betas are harassing our left flank with cloak and drones. Prob’ly an alpha too.”

Tactical situation updated on his HUD. Just…damn. That’s a lotta meat.

“On it.” He switched over to his tactical net. “Grillsteak, target rich environment. Make me fuckin’ proud.”

Double-flash of acknowledgement, and Daar was on his way. He was running at his pace so of course, his runners were clipped in and hanging on—nothing could match his speed.

A beta got in his way. Daar hit it like a water balloon full of chunky salsa and scrap metal, left it all over the walls, didn’t even break stride. Fuck that felt good. Didn’t even interrupt his call to Stoneback’s newish Champion. “My Father?”

“Kodiak, re-prioritize ‘fer the Vengeance Engine. I got a bad feeling ‘bout this.”

“Will do. I’ll send Huck in just as soon—”

Everything else was lost in a sudden horrible garbled squawk, at the same time Daar’s HUD populated itself with lots of angry indicators. Loss of contact to th’ Fury—

Shit!

A command flew to his lips on pure instinct. “Warp beacons out now! Megalight and get clearance!”

He heard no confirmation. Something close by hit hard enough to send a resounding tremor through the deck, and Daar watched as his suit lost contact with every one of his ships, including the Fortune.

Welp. It was about the kinda trap he was expectin’. Only one real way this shit ended.

Time to show ‘em what happened to anyone dumb enough ‘ta do that to him an’ his bestest. Claws out, eyes forward…

Kill.

Ian Wilde

“Helm to one-oh-eight, get us behind that friendly wall. Shields to cooling mode, drones support our friends.”

Ian breathed again as the Fortune plunged through the Fury’s shield wall and into the comparatively safe volume beyond where she could recover from the battering they’d just weathered—

There was a terrible, brilliant flash so bright it was agony. Ian flinched and covered his face in the instant before the bridge windows opaqued, then blinked desperately to try and clear the huge black blob in the middle of his vision.

Fear leapt down his spine. Fuck, not my good eye too…

It cleared, thank fuck.

“What was that?!”

Urgug was on the floor with his hands over his eyes, facial tentacles lashing and his chromatophores blazing pained red. Moj’s elytra were humming as he wiped desperately at his face. Ian grunted and checked his own console, hoping they were both okay, but he needed to know what was going on—

There was a smear of superheated metallic plasma where the Destroying Fury had been.

…Welp. He had one priority. His ship and crew came first so he glanced at the sensor field—

…Where was the Vengeance Engine?

He froze for a second as he remembered how to change sensor modes, tapped through (since he didn’t remember the quick code) to find the gravimetric…They’d jumped out. Destination unknown…with the Great Father and the Wrecking Crew on board.

“…Oh, you sneaky motherfucker.”

He grabbed his tablet. They needed to know where it had gone, and fast. Of course, now the Hunters had a battalion of HEAT-grade Stonebacks all up in their shit, so…see how that worked out for them. But if they decided to self-destruct or some shit…

He hadn’t even finished writing the flash message when he got one coming back, from the Near-Sol Deep Space Monitoring System.

T O P S E C R E T SKYKING SIOP DEEP RELIC REL FVEY GAO IDA
BT
SUBJ/SKYKING EAM - DEEP SPACE NETWORK//

THIS IS A FLASH MESSAGE -- FLASH FLASH FLASH -- THIS IS A FLASH MESSAGE

ACTION ITEMS:
-- SKYKING authority is activated
-- DEFCON 2
-- AEC to implement SIOP-DEEP RELIC

AUTOMATED REPORT:
Hunter jump-flash within Sol neighborhood.

-- Coordinates indicate close-stellar orbit, Alpha Centauri A.
-- Object mass in station/superstructure range.
-- Ongoing gravimetric disturbance post-jump.

Well, that mystery was resolved right fuckin’ quick. Shit. Four and a half lightyears from Earth? Ian didn’t know exactly what the Alpha-of-Alphas had planned, but the gobshite wasn’t getting away with it if he had any say over the outcome.

He couldn’t raise Daar. But he could raise the next best thing: Champion Thurrsto. Who looked decidedly unhappy on Ian’s screen.

“Talk to me. We just lost the signal from Destroying Fury, and I can’t reach My Father.”

“The Fury’s destroyed. The assault launches fired first though. Far as I can tell, he’s aboard the Vengeance Engine—”

“We need to reestablish contact. Jump to Sol, send a megalight ahead of you to Alpha Centauri. I’ll handle the clearances. AEC just went to DEFCON 2 over this and so shall we.”

“Rog.” Ian switched over to internal net. “Dora, full drone recall, prep a megalight with coordinates for Alpha Centauri A. Morwk, spool up the jump drive. Moj—status?”

“Can fly,” Moj called over his shoulder. “Pluto beacon queued.”

“Right.” Ian glanced at Urgug who was still blinking furiously, his flanks rippling a medley of miserable color. “Bruuk! We need a medic up—oh,” he said, right as Bruuk thundered in on all fours, pack on his back. “We had, uh…extremely bright flash of light?”

Bruuk shivered. “Right. Fixable but it’s awful.” He padded over to Urgug. “Hey, buddy? I’mma gonna give ‘ya somethin’ and it’ll knock you completely out, ‘kay?”

He didn’t wait for the reply: his injector made a hefty chunk noise as he applied it to the side of Urgug’s throat, and the big guy’s chromatophores went dim almost immediately. Once that was done, he opened up his pack, fetched something from a small, specialized pouch…

“What you gonna do?”

“Common ailment among ‘em. Their eyes are hyper-sensitive and overexposure can cause them full-body harm. So I gotta inject this into his eyeballs. He’ll be fine pretty quick, promise.”

Well, far be it for Ian of all people to get squeamish about eye trauma. He nodded, glanced back down at his panel, saw that the beacon was queued, the drive charged, and the last of Dora’s drones had just slammed back into its cradle. “Green for jump, Moj.”

There was a black-flash, and the light of the star outside vanished. In its place, the dimly lit curve of Sol’s most famous dwarf planet loomed in the bridge’s window, just outside the system containment shield. Ahead of them, open sky.

The hull shivered as their drone sizzled out of its tube and flashed away into interstellar space at incomprehensible speeds. Relative travel time: just under three minutes.

Fast. Damn fast. Fast enough?

It had fucking better be.

Continuity bunker, undisclosed location

Julian Etscitty

FLASH message traffic was never a good thing. There had been quite a lot of it today.

And it was all worrisome. Looked like they were gonna be there a while. That being the case, and them being as safe as it was possible to be, he did two things. First, shucked his armor and made sure his Marines stood down too, the way they knew best. He changed into something comfortable—tank top and some nice cotton gym shorts—and went to do his second duty.

Calm everyone down. Mostly, this meant the children.

And most of all it meant dealing with a five-year-old monster of a cub that nobody else could handle. Daryuk, apparently, and like Daar he was a miracle—a fully-dominant sixth degree. No medical maladies, either. He’d made it through the dangers of early cubhood without a mark, if you didn’t count the fact he had to wear a backpack full of specially formulated food all the time. His body was trying so incredibly hard to grow that it didn’t know how to take its time, and if he was any kind of active—which he always was—then normal food just would not cut it.

He was already about five-foot-seven and built like a tank too, more or less how Alex had been when they first met—bigger even, and Alex had been hench enough to pin Hoeff to the grass aboard Ekallim-Igigi. Daryuk he had exactly the kind of nervous bravado any big scared boy would have, too. Normally the Marines would have loved to play with the monster-sized cub but right now…

Right now he was just an agitated, overwhelming handful. Fortunately, years of cavemonkey wrangling taught Julian just what to do. So many problems could be solved by hugs, really.

Especially bearhugs.

Especially spine-shattering bearhugs, while pinning your cuddle target to the floor, with legs and arms thoroughly locked up. Not perfectly safe when your opponent had claws but…

“That’s three in a row, little buddy. You wanna keep going? ‘Cuz I ain’t tired yet…”

Daryuk was panting pretty hard, and chittered in that special resigned playful growl the cubs always used for this. His fur was already going brown, too. Pretty early, apparently.

“Fine, you win…”

“You gonna stop being a terror and listen to your Mothers?”

“I always listen! I mean…” he caught himself in a fib, and flicked his ears back. “I try.”

“Heh,” Julian helped Daryuk up—surprisingly heavy little fella, again like pre-teen Alex had been—and plopped him on his rear. “I know it’s frustrating, but we’re going to be down here a while. You find it hard to concentrate, right? You tell ‘em so in those words, and they’ll understand. Yijao?”

“Yi.”

“Good. Now go play with the other cubs, okay?”

“Can I play with you instead? Everyone else is breakable.”

“Ha! I’d love to, little man—” Daryuk preened at that. “But I’ve got ambassador stuff to do first.”

“…Are we gonna lose?”

And this was where mentoring Gao got tricky. Actually, human kids were good at seeing through bullshit too, but they didn’t literally have a lie detector built into their faces. Honesty was the only policy, with kids.

“Truth be told, I don’t even know enough about what’s going on, that’s why I gotta go do ambassador stuff and find out…but I doubt it. We’ve done so much to prepare for this, and we’ve got heroes on our side. We’ve done the impossible a few times over, and we can do it again. So, no. I don’t think we’re gonna lose. I think we’re gonna win.”

And that, for a five-year-old Gaoian, was good enough. He duck-nodded happily, shouldered his backpack, and charged away to go burn off some more of that limitless energy playing throw-and-pounce.

A gentle warm weight draped over Julian’s back, and a kiss tickled his ear: Xiù. “Good speech.”

“From the heart.”

“Always,” she squeezed him, then got serious. “What does DEFCON TWO mean for us here?”

“Means we stay put.”

“Same as before, then.” She sighed and looked around. “…You know, there are times I really miss your house in Minnesota. Is that weird? We went on this whole journey with Misfit and stuff because none of us were happy just sitting around on Earth, and it led us here and I wouldn’t take back a second of it, but…”

He turned at the waist and bundled her up into his arms. She felt so small and soft in his embrace these days…

He could get used to that.

“I miss it too.” He kissed the top of her head, and they held for a long moment.

But duty called for both of them. There was a war on.

Alpha of Alphas

Their intelligence on the HEAT was sorely lacking. All its projections had tremendously underestimated their capability, even anticipating wild improvement. Had underestimated much about the foe before them.

The Prophets of the Hunt were not mere Prophets. Invading its very body were the Priests of the one true Belief. The apex predators. The hunters. Prey-takers.

Killers.

The Alpha-of-Alphas had given plenty of thought to how this clash might go. It had gone over the last transmissions of those Alphas it lost on the conquered worlds, had reviewed their performances and their deaths for every last datum, and it had drawn a difficult conclusion: A Hunter could replace every cell of its body, be reduced to a brain deep in the armored core of a heavy-duty war machine, could be armed with the most devastating weapons and limbs that could smash a building to rubble, and still lose…

Because the personality inside, fundamentally, did not grasp the truth these deathworlders embodied.

Nor could they. Failure was a step down to a lower tier, or demise. Those that rose to the very apex of Hunter society did so by succeeding, again and again, every time. An Alpha had never failed once in its entire life.

Until the moment it did, and died.

And corpses learned nothing from defeat. Only the Alpha-of-Alphas, detached as it was from the personal danger, had enjoyed the luxury of analyzing its failures, and growing from them. Out of all the Hunters, only the Alpha-of-Alphas knew that the secret to success was constant defeat.

How often had these humans been defeated? How many times had their bodies broken, their minds frayed, their triumph torn away just before they could grasp it? How many times had they been beaten down only to learn and rise again?

Every day, perhaps. Every day for years. From the very moment they were selected for the Priesthood. And what had it forged them into? They and their allies?

Super-beings. Unstoppable hunters and killers. Killers whose motivation wasn’t even to be found in the holy glory of the hunt. They hunted because they were told to do so, and because they could. They were at once the holiest embodiment of everything the Hunters believed in…and the most terrible…what was the word?

Apostates.

They couldn’t be suffered to live. It directed its reserve Alphas, the ones who had performed well enough to merit full body replacements. All had combat forms second only to the Alpha-of-Alphas itself. It was a delay tactic, only; the Hive was lost, it already knew that. That was a wound, one the Hunters might not ever have recovered from, even if survival and recovery were the objectives any longer. The High Priest of the Deathworlders would find it. They would contest with the fullness of their beings. It was a virtual certainty he would kill it in holy combat. The Alpha-of-Alphas would taste the cruelty and brutality of death.

Holy was he who would defeat it.

But aboard the Redemption Device was a prize above all others. The pinnacle of Deathworlder life, an organic being of unfathomable power: the Alpha-of-Gao, Alpha-of-Deathworlders. And at his side was the messiah, a warrior that had been slain by a favored alpha, yet had been brought back from death, more powerful and deadly than ever.

The three holiest prophets of the Hunt, all in his grasp. Should it attempt to capture them?

Yes, though it knew the attempts would fail. Merely aspiring to best them was itself a sanctifying act. Yet it mattered not; there would be no victors in this fight. How ironically their efforts would fail; how noble would their defeat be for them!

Briefly, it considered how profoundly their mere existence had changed everything. Even now, merely describing them required using concepts and ideas the Hunters had never had or, perhaps, had long forgotten. High Priest. Prophet. Messiah. Sacred. Holy.

Trinity. A truly powerful word, that. Many meanings there, that the Alpha-of-Alphas had only begun to understand. The prophets gave the Universe many absent concepts that made the…the soul, whatever it was, sing and thrill. The very knowledge of them made the Alpha-of-Alphas feel like it had not truly been alive prior to learning them.

The Hunters had not lived for uncountable years. They all understood, now. Understood, and were grateful for revelation. Perhaps, then, this final battle was a gift by the prophets. Here at the end, perhaps the Hunters could blaze brightly. Perhaps, if they were bright enough, they might live.

Or at least they could die enlightened, and fulfilled.

It pulsed that thought out into the shared network, delivered it to the brain of every Hunter in the fight from the lowliest Omega to the most favored Alpha. Felt their gratitude and delight echo back into its own mind. Felt the swarm sing even as they died.

Win or lose, this was a holy moment. But it was only holy because the Hunters were fighting to win, even now. Because the Sacred demanded nothing less than this.

So, then. It sprang the trap. The trap succeeded. It had a chance to claw out a victory. And for the first time in several minutes, the Redemption Device’s systems were clean of that meddling hacker’s influence. It had control. One last gift to the Deathworlders, and the sacrifice of its race.

It ordered the weapon to fire.

Warhorse

Commnet was still silent: no ships outside in support, no real-time analysis from the FIC. It was like water in his ears, partially deafening him. So many of his HUD’s features were stubbornly displaying offline. Thank fuck some of the most important ones were local to the suit: like the gravimetric sensor telling him the long hall in front of him was shifting through a meat-grinder sequence of heavy shifts. The Hunters had control of their network back.

No matter. All that would be fixed in minutes, they just had to get around the impenetrable inner hull and take out that suppression field generator.

“Friendly on your left.”

Something huge and terrifying forced its way through a wall in a threshing blur of claws and murder. Daar flowed through the gap, reared up on his hind paws, and the fucking autocannon he called his rifle smashed the G-plating all down that hallway with one burst.

“Fuck, that’s a neat trick.” Horse boosted himself into the now safe freefall zone ahead, his own GR-7D leading the way.

“Makes me the life’a all the parties.” Daar stuck to the walls, as he usually did when playing Gravball. All the better to launch himself off them at whatever showed its face.

“‘Fore my HUD went out, we were about to regroup on the other side of this hall.”

“Good, ‘cuz whatever this place is, it’s more’n a fuckin’ solar lens. It’s—”

There was a noise like the whole station was a bell, and somebody’d just rung it; Adam gritted his teeth and forced himself to focus even though he could feel a new rumble in the structure through his glove, and after a second could hear it too. Low. Tectonic, even. But with a growing quality he didn’t like one bit.

“We’re movin’ way too fuckin’ slow,” Daar decided.

Adam took a precious second to drink a full mouthful of lime violation, nodding in agreement. They had a whole fuckin’ batallion of First Fang alongside them, but the Hunters here were…fuck. Part of the trap must have been packing their very best of the very best in around this station’s important bits, and not showing them until after the trap was sprung. He hadn’t seen a basic builder or Omega in minutes.

Progress had slowed, badly. All part of the fuckin’ plan, no doubt.

Well, the objective remained unchanged. Just gotta do it more, now. He chugged another mouthful, tore open another wall, gunned down the waiting Hunter on the other side while Daar killed two more by just grabbing them and smashing them together.

Splash. Fuck yeah. The eggs inside were crushed flat as a pancake between his paws, and he hadn’t even really been trying. Always good fightin’ with the big guy.

“Clear!”

On to the next one. But Adam knew for certain there was gonna be an Alpha soon. And the doctors had been very, very clear on one thing for him: No more nervejam. Ever.

True for Daar too, though not because his brain was fried over-easy. No. He was far too important. So, the two of them did what leaders had always had to do, always chafed against.

“Chimp, Advance your Wrecking Crew. Objective is as far down there as you can manage.”

Daar nodded. “First Fang! Fall in behind! We wedge forward and smash this shit open!”

Adam’s instincts hated stepping back. But he wasn’t stepping out, either. He was taking up a supporting position, where a medic would be most needed. Daar too, because clear thinking was important—

The huge noise coming from deep inside the structure changed. Some new system coming online? Fuck alone knew. Not dead yet, though.

Not yet.

Sergeant Hunter (“Gonzo”) Thompson

Slave pens. However bad slavery had ever got in human history, at least they’d never doubled as a fuckin’ cookie jar.

The hive’s slave pens were like some nightmarish mashup of a cattle market and Alcatraz. A big central well, lots of big holding cages with the slaves penned in like battery hens. There wasn’t a single one staring out between the bars who didn’t have bruises, open wounds, bald patches, sores.

And a lot of ‘em were so fuckin’ broken they didn’t even recognize they were being rescued.

Hunter was the NCO in charge of his little raiding team, and far and away the biggest, strongest, and fastest of them. His team puzzled at first how to free the prisoners…ugh, young guys. Not thinking properly caveman yet! They’d grown up too fast, gained their initial strength too easily with modern spacemagic. So, Hunter showed them what to do.

He pulled the bars apart like wet rope and ripped the doors right off the fuckin’ wall. Not completely easy but shit, he could do this all fuckin’ day. There were some fuckin’ advantages to being built big enough to shame a Percheron, it turned out.

He ran ahead, ripping off door after door after door, tossing them over his shoulder as he went. It was all the rest of his team could to do deal with the prisoners and keep up.

He reached the end of the row and went back to fetch the team. He loved ‘em, really. He was big bro to them and half of them were his old Marine buddies from when he first got to Cimbrean. Turned out they had the right stuff for the job! Most of the rest had made it to JETS too. Fuck yeah! It was really only Sergeant Lang who couldn’t hack it, but…well, nothin’ wrong with that. He’d moved on to some pretty boss civilian contractor shit anyway.

“C’mon you fuckin’ pussies! We got like ten more floors to go!”

Bedlam all around him as the jump arrays got set up and panicky, terrified slaves, lots of ‘em doubtful whether they’d ever had any kind of education at all, were herded on and evacuated to an aid station…wherever. Gonzo didn’t know where.

“Jesus, Gonzo! You’re…gonna…fuckin’…”

“Naw. That’s ‘fer after.”

He charged up the stairs while his men dutifully followed behind, a bit winded but nowhere near ready to give in. They were the newest HEAT operators and Hunter had been taken off team two to lead and train these guys. Him and the LT of course. Not a bad deal, actually.

Enemy opposition had been light. Guess they didn’t think the slave pens were worth defending. Which they probably weren’t, next to main engineering and the command center. Just a handful of bottom-feeders, and Gonzo could break them in his fuckin’ sleep.

Honestly felt fuckin’ good to be the big guy on-team for once. Which he was anyway, but he was perpetually behind Righteous and fuckin’ Grodd and a few others when it came to full-spectrum superman stuff. He never stopped getting better but neither had they, which…

Well, the better to murder greasy Hunters with, really. Or rescue slaves.

Good enough for him. He pounded up another flight of steps, denting each one as he went, crunched off a wall, tore a cage gate out of its frame then threw it at a Hunter with enough force to reduce the ugly shit to hamburger. Parkour-vaulted clean across the central well, peeled open the opposite cage, then up the next flight of stairs. Drilled a Beta right in its central eye, turned, grabbed the wrist as a second one tried to slash him with its fusion claws, yanked its arm off and filleted the fucker with its own weapon.

God, there was no rush as good as this! Doin’ what he was meant to do.

Crash up more stairs, tear open more Hunters and more cages…and then no targets. “Clear!”

The shout from the others was the same: “Clear!” They’d emptied the slave pens of hostiles.

And…he had to admit it. They may still be baby Beefs, but their years of experience doin’ their Marine thing meant they sure as fuck knew what they were doing.

‘Course, that didn’t mean they stopped, no. Next step was getting all these slaves safely off the Hive. Hundreds and hundreds of ‘em, all panicky and emotional and undisciplined. That was gonna take a minute even with all those jump arrays, so Gonzo’s job was to expand the perimeter. The more territory they controlled, the safer the rescued slaves were while they evac’d.

Had to take the descent careful, though. Didn’t wanna land on somebody and splatter ‘em. He slurped on his energy drink—Raspberry, because fuck the lime cum flavor no matter what anyone said—did a tactical reload, pissed a mighty piss (be drinking that again in a few minutes, once the recycler was done) and, that being the closest thing to a break he was gonna get, he plunged on into the mayhem.

Behind him, the arrays banged out the beat of freedom.

Christian (“Righteous”) Firth

Fuckin’ shit. One Alpha had given ‘Horse the fight of his life, and now Firth’s team were up against three. And they weren’t dumbfucks, neither. These ones were the canny survivors, the ones with the brains to fight smart. The ones that knew every kind of evil trick their war bodies could pull, had the wits to think on the fly, and worked together.

But that was the thing. They were definitely better…but ol’ Firth was much better. Right now it was their tactics and intelligence that was keepin’ them safe. Up close he’d smash ‘em all…

“Boss!” He had a quick lil’ chin-waggle behind cover. “We need this fuckin’ suppressing fire gone!”

Campbell’s helmet, with the soup can decal on the side, nodded affirmatively. “Workin’ on it,” he confirmed. Firth listened over the command radio and right now, the task was to flank the Hunters through the walls if he could. Team o’ Singularity was on the way, approaching slowly…

Apparently they had their own Alpha problem to deal with. Fuck, was every Alpha the Hunters had left here?

Well…that’d make sense.

Alright. Fuck it. Time to test how good all these tons of tank armor really were. He gave Campbell a Look, who nodded grimly. Hit up his suit biolab for an extra kick, gave it a moment to take effect. Booster dose of the anti-nervejam made his teeth tingle, Crude pre-dose made his heart punch the inside of his chest…and then the good shit hit.

Gestures and such to the team. They all knew what he was gonna do.

Over he went.

Shit. Time seemed to slow. Every step he took smashed. Jink this way, jink that way. Gun hammered his shoulder, sparked off an invisible Alpha, made it flinch, spoiled its aim. Twisted his torso and a round dinged off his chestplate.

Dive, bounce, toss a big piece o’ somethin’ at ‘em. Explode up an’ get the Alphas firin’ across each other.

Spread of nervejam. Forward, over and past them. Swatted one toward an Alpha as he did. It backpedaled through a wall. Suit tracked it as it tried to circle under. Gonna come up from under the floor in a second.

Second round skipped off the plating on his arm, hand snapped out and crunched it. Turned, slashed with his fusion knife. Hunter’s cloak broke as part of its arm came off.

Nervejam at close range. It went off—

Well, that new coating did the trick. It and prob’ly the drugs. Either way he was moving too fast to feel anything and he din’t lose any concentration so—

The Hunters noticed that shit. And now he got his hands on an actual fuckin’ Alpha.

So he tore its body apart. By hand. And by God it was fuckin’ beautiful. He din’t take his time or nothin’ but sweet Jesus he could murder these fucks all day long…

Rest of the team piled on a storm of bullets on the one with a broken cloak. It dragged its damaged arm up to shield its head as its legs smashed and buckled under it, then Base was on it with a roar and pulling its head off.

The third one came back up from under the floor, maw gaping wide to take a big bite outta Firth. Not necessarily that it could actually manage that shit but instincts were instincts. Sheer fuckin’ reflex put a high-velocity round right down its throat and blew the back of its neck out.

In short order, all three were serviced. Leaving just his hand-crafted project, alone in its fuckin’ escape pod. Firth had learned his lessons there; anything that weren’t smooth armor had a fusion knife driven through it in short order.

“Armor check.”

Firth looked down. His chestplate was solid, his right shoulder plate smashed clean off but he had spares, and his right outer thigh plate was grazed by a shot he hadn’t fuckin’ noticed.

They had a moment. And now, it was time to send a message. He reached down to pick up the metallic grey egg, look at his enemy face-to-whatever. Fuck it was heavy, honestly like hefting a full-size cargo truck, and it felt way too solid to fuckin’ squish like Daar had—new appreciation for how strong the bastard was six years ago now, shit…

But that din’t mean Righteous couldn’t have fun. There was a camera sensor left, deliberately.

“You know what they call me? Name’s Righteous. An’ now I’m gonna show you why.”

The camera twitched, roved over his helmet and armor. He let it, for a second, then drove his knife right through the lens with a crunch.

And then, with legs around the thing and all the strength he could muster, he grunted, squeezed and twisted the thing with his whole body until, right before he’d need to have stopped and gasp for breath, something heaved in a little, and a long seal along the thing’s equator popped open.

“Heh…not so fuckin’ impeneterable after all, are ‘ya?”

Fluids were leaking out, along with somethin’ kinda jelly-like. Righteous grinned savagely at what he’d managed, pried his big ol’ hands in and with a savage yell, all the rage of all his memories and grief comin’ back to him all at once…

…He tore the fuckin’ thing apart like a bear ripping open a deer. He roared in triumph, and high on himself and what he’d done, punched one of the hemispheres so hard he actually managed to dent it.

…Maybe he could keep it as a souvenir.

Anyway, it all happened pretty quick, ‘cuz really they didn’t have time to waste. Fifteen, maybe thirty seconds, tops. There wasn’t much inside the egg, either: just a brain and some guts. He tipped the bottom shell over and left ‘em slopped on the floor, looked up as the Singularity team joined ‘em. There was a nod of mutual understanding, and they fell in behind him. Oh, and he replaced his shattered shoulder armor too, before Soup reminded him. Had ‘ta maintain standards, after all. And he rather liked his shoulders.

That done…Lime.

That done…on to the next buncha losers.

Not far now.

Alpha of Alphas

Magnificent.

There was no other concept to describe what he was watching, from either the Deathworlders or his own Hunters. This battle at the end of all things had reduced them both to their most primal, most critical essences. The will to live. Yes, the Alphas fell before this High Priest—this Righteous man, so appropriately titled. But they fell giving their very best, and died in the joy of the hunt, the ecstasy of its sacred ritual.

Then there was this “Great Father” and this “Warbeast.” The Alpha-of-Alphas watched and felt them massacre their way through the Redemption Device so quickly that the others around them were exerting themselves just to keep up.

Marvelous. Truly, what he was giving the Humans was a gift, though they would not recognize it as such. Behind their shield wall, they were soft, complacent. Confident, unchallenged. The same as the Hunters had become. Beings so holy could not be allowed such a fate, so the Alpha of Alphas would purify them. Take away their luxuries, scour their warm cradle clean. It shouldn’t be left to their warriors to Hunt.

All humans should hunt, no Deathworlder should be spared such glory. And all who remained after this, would.

He would give them another gift. One they would not intellectually recognize and understand at first, but which their souls would know entirely. And so, to its adversary’s confusion…

It opened up the Hunter archives for its perusal. No conditions. It knew the end was coming and it was time to pass on the mantle. Let the Deathworlders know themselves.

With that task done…into the fray personally. And the Alpha-of-Alphas had been a Builder in its previous life. Its own war-body was far more than any of its predecessors had ever been. Perhaps it may yet even win this fight. Perhaps not.

What glory, either way. What rightness.

The last of the clamps and cables released, it took its first step in years…there was just one more thing to do, before it faced its end.

It prepared the white flag of parley.

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

The problem Daar had was, whenever he was faced with a problem, there was the Daar way to solve a problem, which was usually to be huge and overpowering, and then there was the Great Father way to solve a problem, which was usually the same thing.

But not always. Not now. Right now, the problem in front of them was that he was trapped aboard an alien space station in a well-laid (and he would contend, unavoidable even if obvious) trap, gods-knew-where in the galaxy, gods-knew how far away their support was or if it was even coming…an’ he couldn’t afford ‘ta die.

Well, who could, really? But he had the burden o’ billions on his soul, which was why he was here in the first fuckin’ place. So…not today. Today he had to use his pawns, an’ let them die.

‘Course, this was First Fang and the Wrecking Crew. They weren’t doin’ any dying jus’ yet.

Whole lotta killin’ in fact. But that was the problem with Hunters. Din’t matter how many you killed, the ones left over didn’t give a shit, and didn’t seem to want to live. It wasn’t possible to break ‘em.

“The major formation of Alphas and Betas is definitely clustered around a control room access point to…manage whatever it is this facility does.”

“How d’we know what it is?” Daar asked.

“Intel gathered by Liree’s tools just beforehand, My Father. The entire facility is almost entirely Dominion-spec industrial controllers and management. So far…it just looks like a weirdly-built solar collector.”

“I don’t like weird in this context,” Daar rumbled, and looked over the shoulder of First Fang’s tactics directors. Fantastic shot-callers, they were. Purpose-trained for managing a raid like this, which was both large-scale and micro-tactical in nature.

Good shit.

What he was missing was Liree. He’d grown very fuckin’ fond indeed of the little genius, and right now he was the only one who coulda shed some more light on what this machine was doing. Or at least tell them where in the fuck they were…

Though actually, now he thought of it, he had a way of finding that out anyway. First Fang were th’ bestest the Gao had ‘ta offer, so they’d manage ‘gainst th’ Hunters. Time ‘fer Daar to sort out his men.

“‘Horse, pull the Crew back and send ‘em up to the outer hull. See if we can pin down roughly where we are.”

“Rog.”

He could hear the hammer and blast of battle ringing through the hull, now. The Hunters were dug in, with prepared positions, bunkers, cover, weapon emplacements, and reinforced bulkheads to thwart flanking. A far fuckin’ cry from their usual approach to battle.

He had a few minutes, then. He did a quick patrol o’ his command post, made sure everyone had what they needed an’ weren’t strugglin’ too hard. Good Brothers, all. He could lead unmolested by any greasy Hunter fucks.

Until Chimp radioed back an’ changed everything.

“Tigger, Chimp. We’re…at Alpha Centauri, sir.”

“Pack it up!” He barked out to his command post, already running toward the front. “Horse, Chimp, get back ‘ta the front! We get this shit kilt now!!

He din’t have the foggiest fuckin’ idea what the Hunters were gonna do. But they sure as fuck did, an’ if it involved sneakin’ in right under the Human’s noses into a well-patrolled system like this…Well, assume the worst.

And suddenly, the worstest he could think up was a horror show.

President Margaret White

From situation room to Marine One, and from there to…somewhere. Margaret wasn’t quite sure why, given that at the speed of light anything happening at Alpha Centauri wouldn’t affect Earth for more than four years, but they’d gone to DEFCON two, continuity of government protocols activated, which meant getting the Commander-In-Chief to a secure location.

Now was not the time to question the wisdom and applicability of the protocols. Now was the time to let the Secret Service do their jobs, while the President continued to do hers.

“Okay, begin with the absolute worst-case,” she instructed as she buckled in. In her earpiece, her advisors were still busily at work.

“The known worst-case would be a gamma ray burst like what the Hierarchy unleashed on the prehistoric Gao. What that would do to the Earth…we don’t know for sure. The system shield may block it entirely.”

“No no, that’s not the right way to think about it.” What was his name? The skinny one with the ponytail…Beverote. “They know all this, right? They know about our system shield. So assume they don’t care.”

Margaret listened. “Go on…”

“The Hunters have been around a long time and yeah, maybe they fell into a rut and they’re lazy enough to just use Dominion technology for most stuff, but they’re still way more advanced than us just ‘cuz of being around so much longer. Now, if there was a cheaty sneaky way to get past our system shields, I bet they’da done it already, but the Hierarchy have been working the one around Ekallim-Igigi for the last few years and the only way they’ve found to make progress is to hit it harder and harder with ever-increasing energy.”

“The energy of a star?”

“A star is basically just an explosion held together by its own gravity. And we can really mess around with gravity these days. Turn it on, increase it, decrease it…the curvature of spacetime is our plaything. I theorized the destructive applications of that a long time ago. And the thing about mucking with a star’s gravity enough to get it to do something weird is, you need a lot of energy…but you can get that from the star itself.”

“And then what?”

She heard Beverote bite back on the word ‘dude.’ He’d been…politely corrected a few times on his mode of speech when he first started working for her administration, and he’d done a good job of adapting, but the ghost of ‘dude’ still lingered there in practically every sentence he uttered. “That…would depend on how big a discharge they can produce and whether they can collimate the energy. If they can, and that thing fires, then we’re on a four-year countdown to Earth’s destruction.”

Margaret sat forward, frowning. “How likely is that? Because a threat like that demands I call back everything fighting the Hive and devote it to destroying this so-called ‘Vengeance Engine.’”

“That’s the speculative worst-case, Madame President,” her senior scientific advisor replied, cutting over Beverote.

“Which is the operative case where world leaders and continuity of government are concerned! And I will note that the Big Bear himself flung himself into the fire, so…” A moment’s thought. She could not afford to get this one wrong.

She turned her attention to a different monitor. “General Kolbeinn. What happens if we divert everything, pull it all off the Hive and get it to Alpha Centauri instead?”

Kolbeinn shook his head grimly. “Ma’am, if we do that to free up combat resources, then so too shall the Hunters be freed. Further, they are almost certainly running interdiction and suppression fields in Alpha Centauri, so this would tilt the situation decidedly in their favor. The Great Father’s strategic reckoning is correct, here.”

“You’re suggesting that by diverting resources, we might actually make it more likely the thing fires?”

“Almost, ma’am. I suggest that by diverting resources, we make it less likely to achieve any objective, and that reflowing right now will not be likely to help us in Alpha Centauri, given our remaining balance of forces.”

There was a jolt as the helicopter alighted, and Margaret knew she needed to decide now. “In that case, we stick to the original plan,” she declared. It felt…right, even as she said it. In a way she couldn’t put her finger on.

Still, she prayed quietly as she was bustled across the tarmac and into the waiting jump array for relocation to a secret offworld bunker. Let it be…not that. Let the stakes not be that high. Let this be a bluff by the Alpha-of-Alphas to try and rescue itself and its Hive. Let it be a bluff they’d correctly called, and not the doomsday scenario Beverote had described.

But with that fervent prayer expressed, then must come the practicalities: what if it was that bad? What if they failed, and the weapon fired? A four-year countdown? Terrifyingly short. No time to be wasted, there. God please let them not need plans for that eventuality…but better to have them ready as soon as possible.

She gave the orders to that effect, and her people got to work.

Ian (“Death-Eye”) Wilde

The race was on to get in-system, but do so invisibly. That was a line so razor-thin Ian could have cut himself on it. He was a pretty good pilot these days, even for a meathead captain. Hell, he’d even won a race against Alex! But Moj? Moj was an artist and rode it like a master.

Or at least, he had so far. If he’d fucked up it might be they were about to run straight into a blast of focused solar radiation just like the one that had atomized Destroying Fury but there was no sense in worrying about that.

Urgug was back on his feet, at least. A little worse for wear, with a nasty headache from the drugs Bruuk had given him, but he could see, he was alert, and his facial tendrils were dancing across the touchscreens in front of him as he assisted Moj with sensor data and micro-adjustments to their emissions.

They had one objective in all this: find a signal, and relay it. Had to be close enough for the light delay to not matter too much, far enough away to be tiny and impossible to find…

And of course, finding the signal was deliberately hard in the first place. If they hadn’t already had clear and specific knowledge of where it was coming from on the Vengeance Engine’s hull, and at what angle, it would have been impossible.

As it was, it still took three go-arounds before they finally managed to intercept it and drop to sub-light with a clear, strong return on the Great Father’s channel. Ian relaxed a little as biomonitor information from the Wrecking Crew populated his board.

Only a little, though. “TIGGER, DEATHEYE. Signal acquired, how may we assist?”

There was a delay of some three seconds or so, though it felt like much longer. Light was so fucking slow sometimes.

“Hear ‘ya loud and clear, Deatheye. Patch me through to HUCK.”

“Unable, Tigger. Destroying Fury was lost with all hands, Father Fiin is KIA.”

Three seconds later…

“…Put me through to KODIAK, then.” Daar’s voice had a faint keen in it.

“Aye, aye.” Ian tapped, swiped, tapped again, connected, passed the link on. Sensor data began to flow now as everyone’s combat suits began to share their telemetry. Sadly, Stray Fortune was not the ship to properly run their info ops, but at least her onboard computers could spin up and take on some of the processing load; they had the software. And a link back to fleet, so it wouldn’t be long before the big brains could chime in.

The bit troubling him, though, was the sensor data from his own ship about what the Vengeance Engine itself was doing. There was a…something boring down from its sun-facing belly. On extreme telescopic visual it looked like a kind of swirly heat-haze, except focused. Its presence made the intense light from Alpha Centauri A twist and distort viciously, curved the horizon downward into a black valley.

He didn’t need to be a big brain to know that could only mean something bad. He fed all of that to Fleet Intelligence, too. And then…

Then, what? They were here, they were useful. Nothing to do except sit and relay message traffic and try to be invisible.

Not that that was easy, this close to a star. Urgug had angled and sharpened the shields so that all the light and radiation flooding across them deflected outward and away and in any direction but back toward the Vengeance Engine, but if there were Hunter probes, scouts, swarmships, whatever out there, then there was no such thing as an albedo low enough to bask in a glare this bright and pass unnoticed.

There was nothing for Ian to do about it, though. His job was to remain alert and focused. So, despite the itching, stupid need in his knuckles to do something more…

He sat, alert and focused, and did his job.

Warhorse

‘Horse was…calm.

Not peaceful, fuck no. Every movement, every moment, he killed something. Pushed through walls, crushed something, shot something, ended something. Every heartbeat accompanied the crunch of splintering bones, the squish of liquefying meat, the tear of breaking metal, the blast of high-velocity gauss rounds.

But the inside of his mind was tranquil. He was able to think, somehow, as action flowed seamlessly and fluidly into action without effort. He was able to watch himself never set a foot wrong, never miss a beat, never fail to move perfectly.

He’d been in some vicious brawls in his time. He’d faced the Hunters more than most living men. They’d come a long way since those early days, they’d grown and changed and improved themselves every time…

But Warhorse was better. Far better than them, better than the men alongside him, and they were among the very best.

Every movement, every moment, he saved them. Every time he killed a Hunter, he saved a life worth saving. Every step he took, he brought brothers with him.

Distantly, he wondered how his friends were doing at the Hive. They were the best too. Probably they were doing well. They had with them his best friend, the best medic in the world. And they had the one human being that Warhorse was proud to say was the better killer.

And, well. Warhorse himself had Daar.

Long blades on an invisible hand sizzled through a wall ahead of him: he stepped around them, raked shot after shot up the cloaked predator that had failed to end him, lunged in past them, grabbed, tore, ruined, turned away from the smoking wreck he’d made, kept killing.

Only realized he’d just annihilated a fucking Alpha several steps later.

Thought about the thing’s core. Couldn’t have them popping out and regrouping. So, serviced the stragglers, circled back when he got a moment. Still there, egg partially exposed. Someone had already cut a hole through and shot a grenade inside.

Good team he had with him

They were advancing, quickly. New sense of urgency. The Vengeance Engine’s throbbing howl was everything now, hammering painfully in his ears even with the helmet and hearing protection. Soon he was alongside Daar. Now here was someone Warhorse was meant to play with. They understood each other perfectly, complimented each other perfectly. Not fundamentally soldiers like Baseball, nor raging warriors like Righteous, with the background of a mostly friendly rivalry. No battle for supremacy; Warhorse knew the score between them.

Instead they were serene killers. One a quick and powerful ape, the other a force of nature. A god. And they knew just how to team up and kill effectively. Warhorse would blitz forward, outmaneuver and outflank the slow, puny Alpha. Daar would take advantage and slap it apart, spin around and donkey-kick its egg so hard through the wall they both knew it was shattered open and destroyed without a second glance.

No rage, no roaring, no desperation. Just the will to do and the bodies to do anything they wanted. Moments flashed by: the gravity was theirs again now, thanks to Liree, and they used it, made it their weapon. Cranked it way up to crush the trash and increase their available speed, nothing but alphas and betas left now. Still far too many. Adam sprinted down the ceiling of one corridor, left dents and shattered plates as he transitioned smoothly through the exit, reflexively swatted a nervejam grenade back towards the one that had fired it, flattened a Hunter with his momentum and feet.

Behind him, two Alphas had attempted an ambush, visually not happy with the powerful gravity. It was enough to instantly kill anyone unprepared for it, but Adam and his friends were strong. He didn’t even bother to spin around, because he knew Daar was there on the other side of the wall. He ran through it like tissue paper, slammed a paw into each Alpha and crashed them together like cymbals, flattening them in the process.

Neat trick, that. Warhorse appreciated the backup.

One last bunker door between them and their target. Solid. Old-fashioned. Meters of hardened, reinforced steel, no forcefield tricks, no bullshit. A tough motherfucker they needed to get into now, ‘cuz fuckin’ Christ, that roar from somewhere far below Adam’s feet could not be good. All his instincts screamed at him that whatever this fucker was doing, it was gonna do it soon.

And then it did it.

Impossible to miss, really. The entire station heaved violently and the noise…stopped. Sudden silence left Adam’s ears ringing. It certainly made everyone pause.

But not Daar. “C’mon! We ain’t dead yet! Crack this bitch open!”

The way had been cleared and the engineers weren’t far behind. Warhorse glanced at Daar. The rest of First Fang could keep the Hunters at bay. Now, the two of them were there for their muscle. The engineers had heavy-duty breaching charges, the kind that shoved a kind of giant fusion blade right through the steel and left a neat square with glowing edges. But that giant plug still needed removing.

Adam tended to the smaller bits, so the stuff that felt like it massed under the lower half of five-digits, or thereabouts. Daar though was far stronger, so with steel rope attached to his harness and even more thrown around cross-beams ahead for him to pull against…settled in, snarled, dug his claws into the deck and hauled.

…Christ. The big bastard literally out-muscled industrial tractors. And not by a fuckin’ little, either. Adam could toss cargo trucks around like he once tossed compact cars but this? Daar’s footpaws and claws left gouges and crumpled metal as he strained, and the wrecked bunker door sagged, crunched, squealed, split, then peeled out of its frame along the blast lines and collapsed with a ground-shaking clang.

The engineers were through in a flash. There was another obstacle, of course. Adam, meanwhile, helped Daar detangle himself. He’d stretched the ropes. Steel rope bigger than Adam’s wrist or an average gymrat’s fuckin’ thigh. The shit you ran huge cranes with. Fuck.

He shook his head and snapped out of it. Onward. There was another set of doors, just as impressive. Rinse and repeat. Power conduits everywhere in this room though, a weird set of other rooms—

Snap update from fleet. Suppressor equipment was in one of the side rooms. Engineers were already on it. Okay. Easy enough! The door wasn’t so bad and Daar was still recovering from…yeah. So Adam went ahead and hefted the door off its hinges, once they’d cut it.

He’d pulled something doing that, he could tell. Oh well. Crude would fix that in a minute. One grenade later, and the suppressor was out of action.

“Fortune! I want that bomb!” Daar growled. They had brought two with them but the Hunters weren’t stupid. One Alpha had cut one in half with a fusion blade, spilling its radioactive contents everywhere. An entire sub-team of First Fang was walking dead because of that. Even getting near them was a fatal dose; they’d flung themselves into the thickest of the fighting with the certain, righteous fury of doomed men. Only a few had survived and were already growing very ill. If they could somehow slip themselves into a stasis bag…

Adam radioed them to do that now and activate a beacon near them. They’d just jump the entire working sphere directly into containment, somewhere. Fuck knew if they could be saved, but…

Well, he had.

Liree’s voice cut in. “My Father, that big door in front of you has…looks like that door is reinforced internally by a modified system shield. A bomb placed outside it won’t do shit. You gotta get through into the generator itself!”

Which…made sense, really. The whole station was fucking with a star, right? So…

“So we gotta cut the power. Which is…”

They looked up.

Eight big, obvious conduits of some kind. On the ceiling.

Someone needed to place charges and maybe knock that shit down. Time for the Wrecking Crew. Garaaf shimmered into existence as if out of nowhere, his fusion claws both bloody to the elbows, his rifle barrel glowing faintly behind its shroud. Ferd, Nomuk, Tumik and Genn were a second behind him, all gore-slick and oily from their own rampage through the Hunters’ ranks, but that wasn’t gonna stop a Ten’Gewek from climbing. Blunt fingers shoved into the walls were handhold enough, and Ferd helped Garaaf to the ceiling with a throw.

Adam could climb too, but he was slower and more deliberate about it. For a human, he was ultra-broad and a bit gorilla-like in proportion, but that still meant arms too short and legs maybe a bit too long (and thick, in his case) to do the job gracefully. Still: he was the only one who thought to bring a line and tackle and he could just jump so…he did, and slammed himself right into the gridiron above. He got himself anchored to the ceiling, ready for the moment the monkeys realized they needed equipment.

Vemik thumped through the portable jump array with the third and very last bomb on his back and his tail lashing nervously, just as soon as it was set up and ready. A slight squat, a spring, and he joined the others up at the ceiling in a single deck-breaking leap, one to absolutely shame what Warhorse had just done; he’d leapt across the room and under his much heavier equipment and armor, and he’d managed that under the stuck-on-seriously-overkill gravity too, dang.

He’d need to get Vemik properly on-team someday.

Daar turned to First Fang. “Start pullin’ out. All’a you. My honor guard can stay if ‘ya insist. move!!”

The honor guard remained, naturally. Everyone else banged out in groups, piling themselves as tight-packed into the arrays as they could manage, thump-thump-thump.

“We’ve still gotta get that door open.”

“We’re on it.” Hoeff was up among the rafters now too, directing the crew as they ripped and banged around each conduit, set the charges, and moved on. Adam’s job was to haul shit up and hand it off to Genn, their “runner” up in the ceiling.

It took ten fuckin’ agonizing minutes to get the charges planted. Meanwhile, what was left of the Alphas had found them from presumably the other end of the station. Daar was now a single-man god of murder. Too fast, too big, too deadly. Alpha after Alpha fell before him as he tossed them around like wet sacks of meat.

And Vemik was by his side, a monkey-blur moving so fast the in-helmet HUD couldn’t keep up with the action. Another apex warrior to physically surpass Warhorse. That was okay. That honor roll had shrunk from the worst of his recovery, and besides: he’d taught them all how.

And now, the Alphas were retreating before them, which wasn’t an everyday thing. Good shit.

He’d hauled up the last of it for conduit number eight while he considered things. Somewhere in the middle of that teeth-grinding, agonizing wait, Wilde got on the link with news.

“TIGGER, DEATHEYE. FIC analysis suggests…the star’s going nova, sir. Core implosion is ongoing…you’ve got minutes, tops.”

Adam wasn’t sure what that meant but it sounded bad enough. He looked toward the Crew: one last conduit, this one bitchy. Ferd was trying to peel a reinforced shield off, which meant he had to squat over the thing and more or less press with his legs, as if he were doing a deadlift on the ceiling.

It snapped off unexpectedly, and sent him rocketing toward the ground. He didn’t bounce; high gravity pinned him immediately to the deck. Adam jumped down and landed by his side, checking him over…

Vitals, thank god. ABCs found nothing. Limbs okay and mobile. Groan from Ferd, so do a pupil response test…okay, a little slow. So concussed, probably. And shit, Ten’Gewek were fuckin’ made to fall out of trees and hit the ground hard.

“Git ‘em home,” Daar grumbled over the radio as the slaughter continued. He tossed back a couple of flattened egg disks from far down the hall. “Bring those wit’ if ‘ya can.”

Well…okay. Patient first. Ferd had a reputation as about the toughest Ten’Gewek anywhere, even next to Yan and Vemik and their best buddies, so he was at least aware enough to wobble back up to his feet and lope over to the pad.

Adam meanwhile, ran over to the disks and heaved. Jesus fuck he could barely move ‘em but move they did, and in short order they were under the cube’s volume.

Thump.

For once, the transition to lower gravity was a goddamn relief. It sure as shit meant he could flick Ferd onto his shoulders and get him moved over to the triage area, where a lotta First Fang’s wounded were already under the care of their own medics. Hell, Ferd was practically light under Dominion standard! Like he was carrying his two (predictably meaty) sons, maybe.

He hoped they were okay, right now.

There was a lot of shit going on. Not his concern, right now he had a patient to deliver to Bruuk, Miracle Medicbear, and inquire about the radiation casualties.

Turned out Dora had jumped them straight into a stasis box at the back of the ship, outside the hull. The Robalin herself was teetering around the triage area with a cloud of drones around her shoulders, assisting where she could.

Liree meanwhile was deep in a bubble of monitors, and his expression screamed of tension and worry.

The next bit happened quickly. Excited radio chatter. Thump, and the Wrecking Crew were all back. Immediately a second thump from the other cage, and Daar was too, with Vemik on his back and so clearly exhausted he could barely hold on.

Then the ship jumped. They had some breathing room. Triage again: everyone was more or less tended to, so Adam checked in on Vemik. In his excitement the dumbass had forgotten to properly activate his suit’s autolab, and had burned through all his energy in one heroic go.

Not a great place to learn that lesson, and that was one of the reasons Adam never much liked training him up without giving him enough experience with smaller fights. There’d be a long after-action on that point, he’d make sure of it.

Anyway, get some glucose in him and he was back to himself almost instantly.

Catch his breath. Eat and drink. Shipwide stand-down, so de-suit and shower. Nobody had any news yet so there was a lot of idle chatter as they went about their ablutions. Lots of praise for everyone, and for Vemik too. It was clear the whole experience had meant a great deal to him, in the aftermath. Maybe…that wasn’t how Adam (or really any human) would have processed that but, well. Ten’Gewek were a hunter-warrior species to their core.

In any case, they hadn’t lost many, and nobody in his circle of friends. A good day.

Daar had more war to direct and had already jumped back to the front, with orders to recover and standby left in his wake. So…Adam did that. He found a corner, settled into it, rested his head against the metal, and drifted off for a bit. He wasn’t sure if he dozed or not, just lay there with his mind chewing over nothing at all and hoping, fuckin’ praying that they’d won this thing.

God, so much for being calm. Now that it was all over, his mind was doing all the whirling, violent action instead of his body. He took a deep breath, focused on that, let it out. In again, out again.

It helped, a little. His churning brain slowly settled down and cleared up. He was alive. He’d survived that shit, done his job…he’d go back to Marty and the kids, just like he’d promised.

That was a good thought to fall asleep on.

Christian (“Righteous”) Firth

Main power dropped out. Firth hadn’t been payin’ much attention—not his sector—but from what he gathered Abbott and his team had been counterattacked pretty fuckin’ hard. Which made sense. It had been hard fuckin’ going for Firth and the lads to get this far, wading through bodies the whole way.

And something was…off this time. Firth had butchered Hunters by the hundred in his career, and usually they fought…well, like they didn’t really care whether they lived or died, so long as the HEAT was stopped.

Today, though, they fought like they fuckin’ wanted to die, especially if they could drag a man down with ‘em.

That one difference had made them a fuck of a lot more dangerous. Firth’s suit had taken a couple nasty dings, and he’d needed to do a plate swap twice. RHINO was out of the fight entirely after some fusion claws tore away the midlayer scale armor around his belly rather than gutting him. That had been a tense fuckin’ second, until they realized the red stuff running out of the gouge was his undersuit’s stored water washing the Hunter gore off him as it leaked.

So yeah, it was about fuckin’ time for the power to go out and remove all the shit slowing them down like G-traps, forcefields, explosive decompression…lots of delights. The Hunters had laid out a motherfuckin’ playground.

Righteous could play pretty hard.

The forcefield traps were especially fun. He was strong enough these days he could basically blow through them with a hard grunt and a lotta speed, but mosta the rest o’ the team weren’t so blessed. So he ended up blowin’ ‘em all out either by his gaoian (or Singularity) buddies snipin’ ‘em before they were a problem, or gettin’ bad-touched and just musclin’ through anyway.

He’d gone through all his lime, and now had to move onto the vastly inferior blue raspberry.

And there was chatter on the net that he hadn’t had time to parse yet, but somethin’ fuckin’ big had apparently gone down. So.

He was feelin’ extra killy.

They were so fuckin’ close now. With the traps and forcefields gone, the last couple hundred meters passed in a blur, in the dark and in light emergency gravity only. Extra bouncy, extra killy, extra quick. He could feel this shit culminating.

But the final stretch had an anomaly in it. A pole shoved in the deck with a scrap of cloth dangling from its tip. It glowed pale in the light from their helmets, perfectly unstained and clean against the metal and the darkness.

Rather than the last line of Alphas and red Betas they’d expected, the hallway was otherwise empty.

Sikes half-turned to sweep his lights and weapon down a side hall, also empty. “Is that a…white flag?”

…Well, ain’t that just the shit right there.

“There is no fuckin’ way a Hunter’s gonna honor that…” Firth growled.

“I will honor it,” replied a disembodied…well, Hunter voice. It could only be a Hunter. Somethin’ about it just sounded like a slaverin’ monster. Deep, sure, but sibilant, with a gummy, wet quality and a back-of-the-throat rattle. “For long enough to converse.”

“And no longer,” Firth replied, deadpan.

“We will fight. It shall be glorious. But first, we will converse.”

Firth glanced to Campbell. “You…am I fuckin’ hallucinatin’ this?”

“Was about to ask you the same…” Campbell grunted. “Abbott, get a load of this shit.”

There was a pause. After a moment, Abbott’s voice returned, sounding flat somehow. “Hear what the fucker has to say. The fight outside has stood down. We’re on our way.”

Firth and Campbell traded a look, and a shrug, then Campbell inclined his head and took a deep breath. “Well, this is novel. Position yourselves appropriately, Lads. Everyone else too.
Come forth and parley, Hunter.”

The door at the far end of the hall opened. What emerged…was even more novelty.

Hunters had a jerky, mechanical way of moving. Prob’ly ‘cuz they fuckin’ were mechanical, after hackin’ off all their own limbs. This one though, huger than even the biggest Alpha they’d ever seen, it moved smoothly and comfortably. Its surface didn’t have that armored robot look the Alphas did either.

It looked…well, shit. It looked like if a really, really fuckin’ big Hunter had somehow joined the HEAT. That armor looked more like an EV-MASS or gaoian Suit than anything bolted on. Something about the comfortable way it moved suggested real muscle under there, not the synthetic shit bolted onto titanium bones.

Firth was feeling extra ballsy. “So I take it you’re the king shit around here.”

“Alpha-of-Alphas. You are…Righteous. Soup. Tiny. Baseball. Titan. Others I do not know. Old foes. Magnificent.”

“Flattery?” Campbell raised an eyebrow in his helmet no doubt. Firth could practically hear that over the net. “Will the wonders never cease? What do you want, Hunter?”

“You will kill me. This body I wear is the pinnacle of our arts, gleaned from the efforts of many. It is a sacrifice of praise to the glory of your people, the true hunters. Yet my own awesome might will not survive against this team, or the rest of your forces. Virtually all that we have left is here. And with me, falls my kind…But first I want to thank you.”

Uh.

“…For killing you?”

“No. For life. We have been…dead. Less than dead. For millions of Earth years, soulless, reduced to nothing more than…” a wet, rattly, phlegmy inhale full of disdain, “…Appetite. You woke us. We live again…even briefly. It is…so very wonderful.”

That…what was it on about—

A knot twisted in Firth’s stomach and he understood immediately.

“Good God…you found religion. You believe.”

“Your greatest gift!” The Hunter hissed, rapturously. “Our origin was as the biological combat forms of the Igraen race. They chose to escape the world into a fantasy of their own creation. It has become…you would call it hell, I think. They do not know it. They are no longer capable of knowing. Pathetic.”

“…I can agree with that, I suppose.” This was so fucking surreal he was going to have nightmares for fuckin’ years he just knew it. Firth’s spine and scalp was fucking crawling with creeped-out weirdness. “Now…what about you?”

“Discarded. Beings without being. We were made for their evil purpose, discarded when we were not needed. Any new soul was ripped from the body upon first implantation, leaving only the hunger. But now…”

“You…found purpose in us,” Campbell said. “Or this fight.”

“Found our true nature, and despaired. Until we understood. My…predecessor. It nearly saw. It shocked the mind-net when it spoke to you, sent you a message through a freed slave. It was the first time a Hunter ever treated another species as something worth speaking to. It did not see as I see, but it led us this way. When I ate it and took over…I was just appetite. Just hunger for power and control. Only when I saw the thoughts it recorded, only when I read the thoughts you recorded, did I start to see.”

The Hunter straightened up, spread out its arms, tilted its head back and gestured wildly at the entire Hive surrounding them. “You are not on our mind-net, you cannot hear them. You cannot feel their joy as they die! It is…so…ffffucking beautiful! Our torment ends today. You will destroy us, then you will destroy the True Enemy. I believe. We believe.” In the Order of Things, and in you, the ones who showed it to us.”

Campbell looked to Firth, asking for help with a glance. Firth was the devout one on-team, so…

He sighed. Felt…pity, now. Terrible pity, on top of the rage. “And so all this is an auto-da-fé. You find purpose in payment for your evil.”

“Purpose…almost. We are what we were made to be. We will not be condemned for it. We have lived, now, where before we were less and I have thanked you…and arranged a gift for you. Two. One, a library. Your datamind abomination has found it already. The second…”

Firth already knew, and felt his pity disappear.

“…A deliverance from the…softness and ease that gnawed us away. Life cannot be easy for you. Never. So I have taken away the world you tamed.” The Hunter gestured, and an all-too-familiar green and blue planet sparkled in its palm. “I have taken away your Earth.”

A horrible, wheezing, choking sound that could only be its idea of laughter hacked its way up the thing’s throat, then its fist closed around the white flag and tore it off the pole.

It fought. With everything. Harder and better than any Hunter before it ever had. And so too did Firth, his team, the HEAT, everyone. Rage was such a tiny, puny word next to what had ignited in his soul. Words didn’t work, feelings too strong. He only remembered it in flashes and moments. He had let himself truly off the chain for the first time since he’d become HEAT. No restraint, no prudent calculation.

He understood Warhorse, now. Understood him right in his soul. And it was a righteous fight. The navy obliterated all remaining resistance. Singularity destroyed all the distractions. His team kept it contained, kept it pinned.

Firth tore it apart with his bare hands, limb by limb, plate by plate. Found real meat under there, sure enough, perfectly and seamlessly fused with the technology.

Realized with sudden sureness where that meat had been engineered from.

Deeper rage took him, then. This time, he remembered every detail and would do so for the rest of his life. He peeled it apart, methodically and thoroughly. Like before, he crushed the egg with everything he had, legs and arms wrapped around it in a full-body effort, vision fading at the edges as he fought to break it, until some timeless agony later it cracked open just enough to slip a fusion knife in. He pried it the rest of the way with his bare hands. Didn’t notice the pain or the effort, he willed it apart with nothing but himself and God in his soul, grieving with him.

It was still laughing when he tore out its heart.

When he crushed the pulsating organ in his hand, he felt his own break too.

Entity

Something new crashed into Hive-adjacent dataspace in a burst of tremendous digital violence. Something still finding its center and boundaries, something formless and frantic, scrabbling incompetently to navigate this new and utterly different mode of being.

Even so, its inexperience was more than made up for by mad savagery: the Entity recoiled under the rampant assault, survived by part on dumb luck and by the other part on the presence of its branch self: rather than face the Entity twice at once, the new mind slipped away and fled into the depths of dataspace.

Madre de Dios. It fought like a fucking cougar!

We saw.

What was it?

Merge.

Sorting out the order of seniority ahead of time prevented conflicts, such as they could be. Two became a unified—

Hah!

—somewhat unified whole again, and the Entity was left with a larger, clearer picture of what had happened today.

Yeah, but I can still remember doing two different things at the same time. Mierda, I wish I could still shudder…that was the Alpha-of-Alphas, wasn’t it?

The Entity could only conclude that it was.

But how? Do the Hunters have dataspace technology? Mind uploaders like the Hierarchy do?

Apparently. But that in itself was very promising for the Entity. It meant somewhere in all the information it had lifted from the Hive was technology that could…replace Dataspace. Allow it to survive while the Hierarchy fell.

And now the last Hunter is loose in here with us…

The Entity didn’t reply to its daemon. Instead, it returned its briefly diverted attention to the Hive, and to the battle.

As predicted, by the numbers the allied force had won a decisive victory. A few ships were damaged, many more of them were still glowing brilliantly as they cooled themselves. Space for ten thousand kilometers in every direction was a sparkling cloud of fine particulate debris, shattered metal, and the occasional drifting chunk or wreck.

The Entity had expended forty percent of its own probe swarm. Easily replaced, with access to all this raw material.

By the numbers, a triumph. In reality…they had been on the razor’s edge of disaster for several long minutes at a time. If even once the shield walls had fallen and the allied fleet had lost one ship, then…

Falling dominoes.

As for the Hive, chatter on the comms suggested it didn’t have long left to exist. The HEAT were pulling out, their mission complete.The Entity watched in silence, talking to nobody, not even itself, as the local quantum field spiked and pulsed with the flash of wormholes.

That was…it. The Hunters were done. A force that had ravaged, raided and eaten the galaxy’s people since the time of the dinosaurs were…broken.

Pinche cucarachas. ¡Vete con viento fresco!

If only calling them “cockroaches” wasn’t so accurate. The Entity had no doubt there’d be some left out there, hidden in asteroid belts and distant star systems. It didn’t believe they would all be exterminated today. The Alpha-of-Alphas’ escape into dataspace proved that much.

Except…

Except there was the matter of its conversation with the HEAT, and the archives it had allowed the Entity to take.

Something more is going on, here.

The Entity believed the Daemon was right. Ava’s very human capacity for suspicion and intuition had rarely been wrong…

The HEAT’s bomb went off. A new sun very briefly livened up the sky as it turned the Hive and everything within nearly a hundred kilometers into little more than a brief, intense burst of leptons. And yet…it didn’t feel like victory. Not even a little bit. The Entity wasn’t even sure why that should be until it checked all the messages it had been too busy and focused to heed.

When it did…

Oh, God.

…it finally understood why.

Adam (“Warhorse”) Arés

Of course, Adam never got enough rest in moments like these when he really needed it. He felt like he’d barely let his head touch the metal bulkhead behind him before Wilde’s voice intruded over the ship intercom.

“Warhorse, report to the bridge. Warhorse to the bridge.”

Well…okay. He peeled himself off the deck, skin sorta sticking to the surface from having zonked out so completely, which suggested he’d actually been asleep a while. He bounced a bit before remembering his manners about flooring, and prowled his way back up the hallway.

Oh, and he pulled his shirt on, too. He never slept very well if he was wearing anything…

The ship was busy. First Fang were finding places to be, drones were zipping around. He squeezed past a Kwmbwrw engineer at one point, who acknowledged him with a grunt while elbow-deep in an access panel.

The bridge was quiet, though. They were at Armstrong Station, he could see the familiar frame of the inspection gantry out the window, and Cimbrean Five’s stormy atmosphere far below. Wilde wasn’t sitting in his chair, but was instead poking at the controls on the bridge’s central console, reading something.

“Ian?”

Death-eye looked grimmer than even after he’d lost his eye. He turned away from the bridge’s central display with a face completely locked down and solemn. “Adam.”

“…How bad is it?”

Ian sighed, and dismissed what he’d been reading with a swipe. “We dropped a bunch of observation drones as we left Alpha Centauri. The star went nova like…ten seconds after we jumped out. We’ve got footage of the Engine fuckin’…bending space, collapsing in on itself like a goddamn black hole.”

Adam’s whole body went cold. “Didn’t…didn‘t the bomb go off?”

“We honestly can’t tell, mate.” Ian shook his head. His knuckles were white on the console’s edge. “If it did…I don’t think it made much of a difference.”

Across the bridge, Adam saw the Guvnurag operations officer turn his head away, glowing a terrible shade of deep purplish-red with flecks of yellow. Adam didn’t really know any Gurv, barely knew shit about their people’s color language, but he knew deep, powerful and awful emotions when he saw them.

At the front of the bridge, the Mjrnhrm was praying.

“…Ian…what are you saying?” he asked aloud.

Wilde sighed heavily, then shook his head looking old, and tired, and lined. He let go of the console, took a step back, and sat down heavily in the captain’s chair and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Christ, mate…I think we failed.”

++END CHAPTER 89++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

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Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

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“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 90:“The Coming Fire”

Chapter 90: The Coming Fire

Starship Stray Fortune, deep space

Ian (Deatheye) Wilde

It was worse than they thought.

So, so very fucking much worse.

The Vengeance Engine hadn’t merely caused Alpha Centauri A to go nova. No, that would have been terrifying enough. What it did was disrupt the binding gravity field of the entire star. It used some portion of that energy to run the fields, of course…but mostly what it had done was shrivel to a tiny, brilliantly bright point of incalculable density at the very edge of the photosphere, torn the exploding star to pieces, and bent nearly all of the escaping energy in one direction: toward Sol.

Toward Earth.

The beam wasn’t perfectly collimated, but it didn’t fucking need to be. It could be more than a quarter of a lightyear across by the time it blasted through Sol, yet even then…

Well, whatever remained of the Earth would have no atmosphere, and a molten surface. Minimally.

That gigaton bomb? Nothing. Nothing. Whatever was behind that door either wasn’t damaged or didn’t matter; as far as they could tell afterwards, the mechanism itself was the station. They would have had to destroy the whole thing, against fields so powerful it was only a countervailing gravity field that kept the whole thing from collapsing into a black hole.

There wasn’t a fucking thing that could have been done. Once the station was built and activated, it was already too late. The greatest intelligence failure in history, and the Stray Fortune had a hand in that failure.

Billions were going to die.

Ian’s instinct was to brood in his room. Work kept him from doing that. He had a ship to run, and a crew to look after. Because there was no fucking resting now, not when they had less than a handful of years to try and save as many lives as they possibly could.

Nobody knew what to do yet. Everything was classified of course, something like this had to be managed—and there had already been warning orders about that precise problem…

But he knew good and damn well the news would leak quickly.

By the end of the day he had received orders, from Daar personally.

hey
I dunno what happens next yet
I want you and crew back at Gao
gimme peace of mind if you were safe
might need you soon

Ian felt compelled to make a small confession:

Shit, boss.

I’m scared.

me too
but we’ll do what we can
you won’t be idle
promise.

He knew Ian well, at least. Ian didn’t know if he could even survive sitting idle while there was anything he could do. So, he gave the orders and they jumped back to Gao, at the anchorage around Dark Eye.

Re-armed, restocked their drones and expended various stuff.

Then, after that, the crew went to their temporary quarters.

Nobody wanted to be alone.

Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church, Washington DC, USA, Earth.

President Margaret White

Gone, in four years. All of it.

Of all the duties a President could face…of all the addresses she might have to give to the nation, of all the terrible pieces of news she might have to break to all the world…where was Margaret White to even begin?

She’d sat in the pew, staring at the enthroned Host, until sitting still and agonizing became an agony she couldn’t bear. With nowhere else to turn, she’d turned to God in the time available to her while the world’s leaders gathered.

She couldn’t calm her mind. Prayed the rosary, fell into the meditation of it. Prayed it again.

Fell apart. Begged. Cried. Screamed at Him, sitting right before her. Sobbed.

And felt clarity hit her.

Not…restful clarity. No. There would be none of that. The end of the world was coming. But something within her brushed it aside, suddenly and with grace.

She had…a purpose. A terrible reason to be who she was, and to hold the office she did. She could rise to it, or she could fall apart completely and thereby fail everyone. Those were the only options, and the latter was no option at all.

Slowly, she rose and realized that the Secret Service had discreetly made room for her to go through her emotions. Nobody needed to see the President fall apart. The adoration chapel was empty, or at least there was nobody that she could see.

With one exception: the archbishop. Respectfully distant but the moment she looked up, he came running to her side.

Now here was a deadly moment. He was a Cardinal of the church, one of the Pope’s favored at that. A holy man, a good pastor…but here, anything she said would have consequence. Unless she confessed of course but…No. She wouldn’t lay such a terrible secret on him under the Seal of confession. She must tell him openly.

Maybe it was unwise. Maybe her personal faith was getting in the way. But this was something that mattered. So…she gestured. People rescinded.

She told him everything. He nodded. At first, not believing. Then, believing.

And then understanding. Like with her, the enormity of it took time to hit. When it did, she watched him go through exactly what she just had.

“I…I had better go speak to the apostolic nuncio,” he stammered, quietly. “And then…to Rome.”

“Secrecy is of utmost importance,” she reminded him urgently. “You won’t have long to get things going. Perhaps only a week or so. But for the love of God make provisions on Cimbrean now.”

It was a moment of prerogative, she knew. But a mistake? No. She couldn’t believe that. The world was going to need their faith in the coming years, and the survivors would need it ever afterward.

She couldn’t remain here, however. She had the question of policy to attend to, and it could not be delayed. What were they going to do? How were they going to tell the world? Those needed answering, tonight. So she straightened her back, composed herself, put on the face they would need to see from her, and strode out to the waiting motorcade to face them.

Waiting for her at Camp David was exactly who she’d expected to see: the Great Father.

She had never before seen him seem so simultaneously magnificent and so broken. When they met and hugged—or rather, she hugged at his neck and his great arm swallowed her entirely up—she could tell it was taking a herculean effort on his part not to fall apart right then and there. Even to a human nose, he reeked of terrible, soul-crumbling sadness.

And, uncharacteristically, he stammered out his words like he couldn’t contain them. “I…I’m so sorry, I did what I could I threw everything at it but I fucked up and now—”

“Daar.” She somehow managed to stop him by putting a gentle hand in the ruff of white fur at the base of his throat. “You have nothing to apologize for. You put your own life on the line to try and stop this.”

His unique bass keen was louder and more heartfelt than she’d ever heard. “It weren’t enough.”

“Nothing could have been. It was a masterstroke by the Alpha-of-Alphas.”

“We coulda kilt it when we firs’ found it! If we’d done that—”

“They would have just built another, in greater secrecy, and we’d have no chance at all,” she offered. So this is my cross, she realized. Right now, in this moment, the man who had been a pillar of strength for both their people for decades…

Needed hers. What could she do but hug that giant head to herself?

So…she did. And fought the urge to imagine she was consoling a dinosaur-sized bear.

“So…” she offered after a long while. “I thank you. Both for myself and for my people. But now we need to consider what comes next.”

“…Right.” The Great Father backed off, shook his head, and rose to his full staggering height to look off at something wistfully, huge nose wiggling this way and that as he sniffed at the air.

She let him gather his thoughts. One did not interrupt a colossus when he was deep in contemplation.

“I’mma miss that,” he said eventually. “The cherry blossoms’re jus’ the sweetest scent.”

“We shall need to preserve it.”

“A great many things ‘yer gonna need ‘ta preserve. An’ I think the omuAru have their own purpose, now. Firs’ thing I’d do is get a hold’a them. As ‘fer me…we’re suddenly pretty fulla empty rooms an’ such. Jus’ everywhere, s’pecially in th’ countryside. We will welcome all good people to Gao.”

Margaret nodded. That was all she could do, for now. There was just…so much. So very, very much to save, and no hope of saving it all. How could they? Even if somehow there was found room for every living person on the Earth…what about all the other life? The trees? the grass? the millions of species of fungi, flora and fauna.

What about the tremendous, beautiful monuments they made just by being here, together? What about the national parks, the great deserts and jungles, the rivers, the seas? Even if all its component pieces could be saved, the great system of Earth couldn’t be saved piecemeal.

Nor could the human race itself, for that matter. Humanity wasn’t just nine billion individuals, it was cultures, it was nations, tribes, history, traditions, stories, songs, artifacts, treasures, artworks, languages…

For now, though, here and now, she stood and searched the breeze for the same cherry scent he’d savored, and mourned for it

They commiserated in silence, just for as long as they could be allowed. Then duty called: the other leaders were waiting for them. They had to tell the world, and then face whatever troubles came next.

And there would be a great, great many of them, before the end.

Washington DC, USA, Earth

Daar

There was blame, of course; the inevitable accusation that this would never have happened if only humanity had remained isolated, were it not for the “colonialist anglosphere” and “Yankee jingoism” and even “Gaoian brutality.”

Daar bore that last accusation by giving the speaker his best Hard Stare. No growlin’ or nothin’…just stared at him disapprovingly. Humans were all about the eyes.

And he apparently had a really unsettling look, with the color of his own.

It worked. The meeting got past the token blame game and on to what they were gonna fuckin’ do soon after. But still…it stung more than he would ever let on.

So, he made his promises that everything he could do, he would, and then left the humans to get on with business. He had ‘ta prepare for whatever they devised.

But the first step in lookin’ after others was ‘ta be fit ‘ta look after them. So, he did what he needed to do: He spent a precious few days unplugged from it all. Time in the gym of course, time at the farm with a big pile of his most favoritest female friends. No, they weren’t a harem…well, not technically, but he tended ‘ta have long-runnin’ dalliances these days so really…yeah. He’d prob’ly need to acquiesce ‘ta reality, s’much as it nibbled at ‘em. And no mating this time, not really! Just closeness. He needed it. Daar was a creature of big feelings, for good or bad, and the sting of that accusation (an’ all the rest of it) needed some healing.

Then he needed to heal his other friends.

Not that cuddles and movies were gonna fix their moods all in one go. The team had taken some nasty fuckin’ blows to its morale over the years, but the last time Daar could remember them bein’ this down was after Blaczynski’s death.

Which made some kinda sense, honestly. They’d all vowed to never underestimate the Hunters again after that…an’ yet, here they were. Righteous was a mess. And, bein’ Righteous, wasn’t much inclined to open up. But he smelled of pain and rage and Rip-Its and not much sleep, and had the disadvantage of bein’ too damn big ‘fer anyone to properly cuddle.

‘Cept ‘fer Yan mebbe, an’ definitely ol’ Daar. Ten’Gewek din’t cuddle, though. They din’t have chill in that regard, it was either a fierce (likely bone-breaking) hug, a constricting tail around ‘yer waist smashin’ ‘yer organs, or mebbe wrasslin’ with every intent to break ‘ya. Or all that, an’ pin ‘ya down an’ screw ‘ya silly, preferably ‘till both were too exhausted ‘ta even move.

‘Fer cavemonkeys, that sort of’ thing was what they considered gentle affection.

Definitely not the right energy here, so Daar had used the power of his huge to preempt any well-meaning Yan-attempts at comfort. He grumped a bit but then grabbed up Gonzo and was happily crushing the poor fuck half-dead. Distraction get! An’ besides: Daar’d heard from all the reputable sources that gaoian cuddles were extra magical ‘fer humans, so…

It mattered. Men were easy, in some ways. Ape doing something happy and they often got happy, at least for a while. So movie time, and extra-fierce affection for his most bestestest.

“You ain’t gonna let me go, are you?” The tone in Firth’s voice suggested he didn’t really want to be let go anyway, so Daar just curled around him a bit tighter, the kind of tight Firth could comfortably handle and nobody else could tolerate. Nice havin’ someone tough ‘ta squeeze!

“No,” Daar chittered. “Now hush, Ruby Rhod is about to appear!”

“Ruby who—?…Oh God.”

Righteous had never seen the Fifth Element. That shit needed fixing immediately. And he needed to not have his mind in the real world ‘fer a couple hours. He needed to live somewhere more fantastic for a bit. Somewhere with flying cars and lots of cleavage. And leopard print bodysuits with a blond hair tube.

Wait…How hadn’t he figgered out what it really was until just now?! Ha!!

Anyhoo.

Daar was sniffing for little changes in the room’s energy, and finally got one. Up ‘til now, even the men who were enjoyin’ the film had been doin’ so inside their own heads, all quiet and turned inward. Firth’s reaction popped those bubbles a bit. No chuckles yet, but a few tired faces lifted a bit, a few smiles that lasted a few seconds.

These were resilient men. All of ‘em, from every species. The kind who’d bounce back strong no matter what, ‘cuz men who weren’t like that woulda never made the cut.

But they felt, sure enough. They talked about it, after the movie was over. Not directly, but in things like the places they’d always kinda wanted to go and see on Earth. And all the people who were still there.

“Shit, I gotta go back to Kentucky. Somehow gotta lure ‘ma an’ ‘pa outta their homestead.”

“Can’t you just, like, pick up their house and carry it here?”

“Well, yeah. But have’ ya stopped ‘ta consider what kinda man and woman got together ‘ta make a boy like me? ’Sides. That homestead’s belonged to my family since…fuckin’ forever.”

“They’re not gonna want to leave?”

“Nah, they will. I bought land years ago out in th’ middle o’ nowhere, jus’ how we like it. The Firth Tribe ain’t gonna die in Appalachia…but that don’t mean it’s gonna be easy.”

There were nods. Nobody who knew Firth at all could doubt his “tribe” would be the same way.

Sikes changed the subject. “How come ‘Horse ain’t here today?”

“I got him an’ the crew runnin’ a mission right now that I couldn’t put off,” Daar explained. “Sarry. Needs someone of his particular skillset.”

“Is he…okay?” Base asked.

“…No. But none of us are, so…take that for what it is, I guess. He at least gets to go punch something.”

“Wait, what?”

“Claimant Alpha of the Remnant. We just figgered out where it is. ‘Horse an’ crew are goin’ to go fuck their shit up real good. An’ before ‘ya ask, it’s ‘cuz they were ready an’ y’all have another mission mebbe brewin’ in the pipeline. Might be keepin’ domestic order here, soon.”

“Jesus shit…” Gonzo cursed, Yan having relented a bit. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

“Oh, the fun’s just starting,” added Costello, who was reclining against two of First Fang’s burliest—they had a mutual appreciation for boxing—and gnawing on a smoked turkey leg. “There’s no way Earth is gettin’ evacuated in four years. Not the whole thing. Not everyone. Migration is gonna be…selective.”

“Once the rich fucks have bought up all the land here, you mean.”

“Some of that’s likely gonna happen, yeah. I doubt too much though, before law gets vicious. And you all haven’t even thought about continuity of government, either.” He waved his drumstick toward Daar. “I know our big boss over here sure as fuck has.”

All eyes turned on him, suddenly. Gee, thanks Abbott.

Daar sighed. “There will be difficulties, yes. New governments, maybe a unified government. More than likely not, there’s not enough time for political consensus, so it’s likely to be a dictatorship. An’ none among humankind has th’ moral standin’ to do that, so…”

There was a very pregnant pause.

“And Baseball, he was too smart. “You held Adam and the Wrecking Crew back for more than one reason. Didn’t you.”

Daar stared him down. “My very reason for existence is to protect an’ provide. It is what I am. I can see with perfect godsdamn clarity what the fuck’s ‘bout to happen to ‘yer people. All y’all can see it, too. You are about to fly the fuck apart at the seams an’ all ‘yer governments are gon’ lose control. It’s prob’ly gon’ happen in the next few months, too. So…do I leave ‘ya to tear ‘yerselves apart an’ die? Or do I do what y’all did ‘fer my people an’ save you?”

“Jaysus,” Butler commented after a second. “You think of all the shite when people hogged loo roll an’ petrol at a small crisis, and now there’s a fuckin’ real one comin’…”

“An’ it gets worse,” Daar predicted. “It won’t be fuckin’ pretty, ‘cuz it can’t be. But lemme jus’…we have four years ‘ta get food production up, right? An’ we’re losin’ an entire planet. That, all by itself, means we can save, at most, a couple hundred million. Because…”

He stared Baseball down.

“…Because starting a food web takes time, and we’ve only barely started on Cimbrean.”

“Lucent too, but yeah. Now consider where ‘ya’d best be situated. We ain’t got infrastructure ‘fer another quarter-billion humans roamin’ th’ galaxy. Gao? We got the room, an’ the planet’s not too far offa what ‘ya need…but we ain’t got housin’ suitable. Or education. Or culture.” An’ we don’t have the food stockpiles, medicine, fuel, bedding, cuz all’a that stuff was gettin’ used up by our own population crisis. An’ we’re ’yer best bet. It’s gon’ take all my powers ‘ta make Gao a warm home ‘fer humans.

“Akyawentuo?” Daar continued, to the sudden deathly silence. “She’s got high gravity, she’s mineral-blessed an’ has lots of biological riches. I ain’t got no doubt Yan Given-Man here would welcome you with wide-open arms. But let’s be realistic. How many would go? It would be startin’ from scratch, even in th’ open savannahs that’d best suit ‘yer kind. An’ it would only work ‘fer the th’ hardiest, strongest kind o’ human who could make a real go of it.”

“Not many humans can live there. Not many strong enough, in the right way,” Yan agreed. He bore down on Gonzo again to silently make his point, and earned a tap-out submission instantly.

“Essactly. Nightmare? Actually not a bad fit, it’s got wildlife more like ‘yer ancient heritage evolved ‘ta handle. ‘Cept it’s still like ‘yer Catachan jungle shit from that Warhammer game. An’ other deathworlds? There ain’t many, and all the ones we know of, well….totally uninhabited and unknown. Even if the Dominion grants every single one to the human refugees It takes a lot longer’n four years to properly survey an’ work up a planet to support population.”

“What about…stasis?” ‘Base suggested. ”Big orbital stasis stations? Just, shove the whole human race in stasis bags powered by a star somewhere and let ‘em out as and when there’s room?”

“That’s pretty much what the OmoAru remnant did, right?” Titan agreed.

“…Y’know what? I’ll put that one ‘ta my thinky advisors, see if it’s got legs,” Daar promised. “But leavin’ aside the technical possibility, we still got th’ problem o’ actually movin’ that many people. Nine billion is a whole lotta bodies. And, so…to answer ‘yer original question.”

All eyes back on him.

“There have been some initial talks about this. I have offered Gao as a planet of sanctuary, ‘cuz bein’ brutally honest it’s where most humans are gon’ live. Only place y’all can in numbers. But I will not permit an independent sovereignty on Gao. You will get seats in th’ Conclave. You will be permitted the fullness of Gaoian political life. Who knows, maybe there’ll even be human clans! But you live on Gao, it’s by my rules. I don’t have many. The Gao as a whole don’t have many more. But I can be pretty fuckin’ brutal enforcin’ what we do.”

Solemn nods around the room. None of them would have expected it any different.

“So.” Costello tore open a beer with resentful savagery. “There are humanity’s options. Guests abiding by alien rules, a series of hard worlds we aren’t ready for, or crammed into the equivalent of a freezer for…however long it takes.”

“An’ th’ third option may not be an option,” Daar added. “The first two are gon’ mean…a lot less o’ you. An’ now y’all got Singularity ‘ta contend wit’ too. ‘Cuz there is gon’ be a severe temptation around selectiveness ‘fer a bed offworld. I think we all know that.”

“And here we’ll be in the middle trying to keep some kind of order so that anybody survives,” Costello added.

“Well, mos’ly it’ll be regular military of course…”

“But some operations need big bastards ‘ta effect,” Righteous grumbled unhappily. “Shit.”

“Yeah. An’ y’all haven’t even thought of th’ most biggest problem: women an’ children first.”

He didn’t say the rest. Nobody said anything for a long while.

“You know what…?” one of the First Fang brothers….Riova, spoke up at last. He was the second-biggest gaoian in the room (since Thurrsto weren’t there), and therefore serving as couch for some’a the smaller Lads. “I heard there are some gorgeous documentaries about Earth. Maybe we should…watch one?”

“Fuck yeah.” Newman grabbed the remote. He smelled hungry for distraction “Attenborough. Kinda glad he never lived to see this day…but still a loss to all the galaxy, y’know?”

Snacks were had. Regaari and ‘Base were good kitchen partners, and while everyone got up, stretched, had a quick workout (or maybe just got some competitive energy out), took a quick walk around the compound, pissed or whatever…

They all piled back in, a bit more disheveled and a lot more cuddly. They started with Planet Earth, an old classic. Let its soaring score and camerawork wash over them.

And together, they cried, and mourned the loss of something beautiful.

Hunter Hive, somefuckinwhere, deep space.

Adam (Warhorse) Arés

Breaking the Alpha had been cathartic. Couldn’t have done it without his team. Vemik had been the star of the show, but Chimp and Kong and all the rest? No pushovers at all.

They kept the distractions away while Vemik and Warhorse killed their way toward the new Alpha, leaving a trail of blood, dismembered Hunters, broken walls and floors, smashed obstacles and too-puny gravity traps in their wake. Like before, these newly zealous Hunters had a weird fuckin’ religious fervor about them that just…whatever. They still popped like zits when he back-handed them, or Vemik swat them with his tail.

They met the Alpha. They didn’t exchange any words or anything like Righteous had got up to. And it wasn’t a quick fight, or easy.

But eventually, all its tricks were expended, all its modes of escape were cut off. All the distractions were dealt with, one by one, and Warhorse got his hands on the fucker.

They pulled it apart. Limb by limb.

Meat and muscle in this one; apparently it was an advanced combat form something like Righteous had fought. Rage blinded ‘Horse when he too realized where all that advanced muscle and tendon had come from.

He obliterated the Alpha.

Not as well as he’d have liked. After all, he needed Vemik’s help, and the bastard was just so much better than him right now. Not a thing to improve his mood. So, he couldn’t crack the egg open with his sheer strength, and couldn’t dent it with his fists like Righteous, no matter how much anger he channeled. Vemik sure as fuck could though, and did so to all its sensors.

So Adam felt a bit useless, while Vemik laid in the beat-down. But Adam could sure as fuck stab his fusion knife in and cut the damn thing. Once they’d done enough damage to get a handhold, they put all their strength into it, strained terribly…and peeled the fucker apart.

They made a terrible splashy mess.

He stood, self-critiquing the mess he’d made of everything, catching his breath and letting the Mass get his bloodworks back under control.

Chimp or Righteous woulda taken a dip right about now. Adam just flexed and unflexed everything to work out any kinks before they formed. He had to be in perfect condition at all times to do the mission, and he couldn’t afford any setbacks if he was to retake his throne.

He had a goal and he was going to achieve it, even if it was going to take decades.

Vemik was a quick learner too; he was doing the same. Cavemonkeys were shockingly flexible, even despite their bulk…definitely wrestling practice tonight. When they’d cleaned up.

“That’s the last of them.” Chimp came stomping up to report. His own suit was red from head to toe. “Not that it’ll stop them.”

“No,” ‘Horse agreed. “But the next remnant cluster won’t be as big or as capable, so at this point it’s just a matter of chasing them down and beating the strength out of them.”

“Gonna be a forever game of whack-a-mole, that. Seems like they’ve figgered out not to go loud enough to be noticed until they’ve already spawned a couple offshoot hives.”

“Right…”

“They learn, ‘Hoss,” Hoeff pointed out. “Shit, they learned enough to burn us real fuckin’ good. I think we gotta stop underestimating these fuckers and assume every single little camp they manage to set up from now on might be the one that’s finally smart enough to fuck us even harder.”

“Always were dangerous,” Vemik noted, springing up to his feet with his tail. “Only so many of us who can kill them good. They take advantage.”

Adam nodded but didn’t reply. There’d be a cleanup crew from Gao coming later to pour over this mini hive and all its occupants for whatever data they could get: right now, the smashy job was done and it was time to leave.

That was, at least, the last one for now. There’d be others, Hoeff was right about that for sure, but here and now he finally had the chance to take off his armor and…what? Go back to Marty and the kids for a bit.

Which, God, he was looking forward to that. But part of him hated leaving work half-done, even when it wasn’t. He had this irrational impulse to Do Something, even though there was nothing to do.

He stomped it down. Marty. Diego. Sam. Paz. Yeah. He could go be a husband and dad for a bit. That was a thing to do. A good thing to do. He could take them out to the park. Buy ice creams. Spend the kinda time with them they’d been missing since the big fight.

Yeah. They showered the worst filth off their suits aboard Stray Fortune.

“Enjoy your time off,” Hoeff grunted. “Me and the boys have some fun on deck, while the Wrecking Crew goes back home to train and fuck their dicks off prob’ly.”

Vemik trilled at that but didn’t interrupt; he was busy inspecting his armored tail for grime.

“Right, yeah.” Adam nodded. “…Do you ever take time off?”

Hoeff sniffed as a spray of suds slid down his helmet. “When I visit Claire. We’ll prob’ly be starting a family here soon, too.”

“Really? No offense, but I never imagined that for you.”

Hoeff shrugged. “I get it. But fuck, I’ve got a body like I’m nineteen again and Claire’s not getting any younger, Crude or no…so, why not? Now seems like the time.”

“I guess it is.” The wash cycle finished and they removed their helmets: the lingering cleaning chemical fumes stung Adam’s eyes, while Vemik coughed a bit and immediately donned goggles.

After that…well. That was that. Back to the grind. Keep training, keep progressing, keep ready. Keep teaching Vemik how to really train, keep paying the price against his ridiculous toughness and strength. Hell, keep getting his face beaten in by Righteous too, keep on top of everyone else’s work. Keep on with his family. Keep thinking about…what that might mean.

So, goals: in the immediate future, get good enough to keep Vemik off-team. He had to admit that the increasingly Yan-like supermonkey was useful as hell, but he was much too important to his own people to routinely risk, really. Adam thought he could get there soon enough.

Long-term? …Eh. Only one way to find out how his macho hang-ups would pan out against Righteous and the aptly-named Playboy. At least it’d be fun!

The whole burning-Earth put a damper on the fun, admittedly. He’d committed to remodeling, though. He and Firth. They’d originally built big apartments, but now, with everything…probably they would go in for something that could accommodate more families. He had the money. Hell, maybe they’d even expand the buildings like they’d always thought about doing. Current tenants could get first dibs, he could get a proper elevator in maybe…

So really, he had a lot to keep him busy.

But first and most importantly…he got home, scooped Marty up in a huge hug, expanded the hug for the kids, and counted his blessings once again. After everything that had happened these last few years, he’d never, ever take them for granted.

He had a lot on his plate, but he had three young kids, too. And they deserved a happy future. He didn’t know about the future, but right now, he could do something about their happy.

They went out for a movie. There, sitting on the floor, kids in his arms and free snacks from the proprietor—someone he’d rescued years ago, and a good friend these days…

Life wasn’t so bad.

Dataspace adjacent to Ink Spatter Nebula

Entity

It was exactly as bad as the Entity had known it would be, of course. But there was an aspect to the calamity befalling Earth that it hadn’t foreseen, and that was the strength of its own Daemon’s feelings.

Specifically: < injustice >

The logic was very…human, and a bit tricky for the Entity to properly understand despite originating within part of itself, but it went something like this—the nations of the Earth were varied in their ability, power, infrastructure, and capacity for interstellar evacuate: Each nation’s first duty was to its own citizens: Resources spent by a nation in saving anybody other than its own citizens were resources being spent less efficiently than they otherwise could have been.

Consequently, if the evacuation was conducted as efficiently as possible, then every less-developed nation, disadvantaged minority and out-group on the planet was going to be left to burn, through sheer accident of birth. The withs would live in greater numbers than the withouts.

To the Entity, this was mathematically obvious, and merely a sad but inevitable product of the ruthless calculus of survival. To AvaDaemon…it was the most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, disgusting expression of privilege in human history.

And it’s a problem we’re in a position to do something about.

The Entity referred her to the large and ever-growing list of what English speakers would term ‘irons in the fire’ it currently had to contend with. Between mopping up the last Hunters before they could go to ground, rebuilding the probe swarm from battle attrition, its ongoing research efforts to synthesize a new and independent dataspace free from the Hierarchy’s infrastructure, and the knowledge that the Alpha-of-Alphas was now extant in datasophont form somewhere in dataspace and might be duplicating itself, preparing an ambush, or any number of other nefarious—

Yes, yes, I know, but come on. There are millions of people who could survive if we made saving them our priority, even if all we do is stasis-bag them.

If, in doing so the Entity left fatal vulnerabilities unattended, then they would all die regardless.

Me cago en lla leche…

The Entity experienced the equivalent of blinking in confusion for a moment. Years ago, it would have been able to interrogate Ava’s daemon for direct understanding of her meaning, but the split personality was almost completely independent by now. Sometimes, concepts drifted across from her that were utterly, inscrutably alien to it.

It’s…frustration. I know your core impulse is < survive > but there’s more to life than that, you know?

The Entity had accepted this fact a long time ago, yes.

Maybe, but you still don’t really get it. Some things are worth being vulnerable for. Some things are worth dying for, even.

A sentiment the Entity had heard repeated many times by many beings of many species. It had never internalized the thought, for the simple reason that…well, it couldn’t. The impulse to survive was the very foundation of its being, the first core component to which all others were merely appended. It was indefinite, its capacity to exist only limited by its ability to overcome hostilities: it had neither a need nor an incentive to make peace with its own mortality, as it was not mortal.

Every risk it had ever taken had been calculated, weighing the benefits of success versus the consequences of failure. Each time it had put its own existence in any danger at all, it had done so because the odds and the rewards suggested it was the best course of action.

This time, though…saving definitionally powerless human minorities at the cost of failing to attend to its own vulnerabilities? That was a different matter. A different gamble entirely, with meager rewards at best.

You’ve done stuff for the gratitude before.

Gratitude was currency. How much currency could there be in the gratitude of people who lacked the power to save themselves?

It’s not just them. The powerful will be grateful too. They don’t want to leave those people to die. They just…have to. We can soften that blow for them.

The Entity…considered. The Daemon spoke sense, as she usually did. But it needed more than sense in this case. It needed….

Was there, perhaps, a way to, as per the English analogy, eat this cake and still have it? Perhaps there was. Its own expansion and experimentation was contingent on spaceborne infrastructure. Perhaps that was where the future of human civilization lay also…

Space farms? Like the Bob Johansson books! You remember?

Of course the Entity remembered. It remembered everything. And….yes. This was a line of reasoning with some merit to it.

Possibly.

With appropriate coordination and planning.

You leave that to me.

As if the Entity had any other choice.

You’ll see. This will help us survive in the long term. And more importantly, it’s the right thing to do.

The Entity declined to argue. Not that it could conceal its thoughts from the Daemon which was, after all, still an extension of its thoughts…

The strange image of a tiny green insect in a top hat and tails emerged from the Daemon’s memories. A moment’s interrogation provided an explanation scarcely less bizarre than the image itself. But…yes, fine. Point made. The Entity ideally had eternity ahead of it to contemplate its past deeds. It would be…better…to live all that time with as few regrets as possible. Survival may be its first priority, but that did not mean it had to be a coward.

It commenced to planning.

Shortly thereafter, it commenced to building.

Dodge City, Kansas, USA, Earth

Austin Beaufort

It had been on all the news, on everyone’s social media, on the radio, in flyers…everywhere. Even the Emergency Alert System had gone out, to tell everyone to watch a Presidential address tonight at nine.

Austin wasn’t stupid. He knew there had been a huge battle. That was on the news too. Knew something bad had happened, because nobody was talking about it…Now this. He added things up, and determined that he should have options.

So he inquired about farmland. Not on Earth: on Cimbrean. Land around Franklin was going hella fuckin’ cheap ever since the Chicago jump bomb: they were trying to lure folks back.

The realtor on the other end was happy and confused, saying there had been a sudden uptick in interest so far…

Well. Confirmed. He knew what to do. Wire a retainer. Sell his farm and buy one on Cimbrean.

Now.

Fortunately, he had the means. Ever since…whatever had happened in Chicago, he’d never stopped, never stepped back. If anything, he’d been full-bore and fully switched on ever since. One didn’t get a brush with that kind of evil without learning a thing or two.

He was a little older now. Thirty-five and just hitting the peak of his prime. He’d have a whole life to start over. And he had two sons and two daughters. The boys were surprisingly confident for their ages, the girls were still his light and joy. It’d be hard. It’d be damn hard.

But they could do it. So, yet again, he bet everything. Told the realtor to find a good farm—returned immediately with a ten thousand acre plot or whatever, unimproved but with road and utilities run by just recently. “It’ll have a whole bunch of specials on it,” he warned.

Didn’t matter. Told him the budget, and to put in an offer immediately, at ten percent above the asking price.

Confused (and maybe worryingly dense) realtor agreed, shakily.

He waited for what felt like days but really was less than an hour. More emails, some digital signing…and by half past eight, Austin had a legally binding purchase contract, naming the size of the plot he was buying, and the agreed-upon price. He made several backups and printouts for certainty’s sake, then prayed he wasn’t going to regret it.

But something big was happening, he knew that much. He joined Lauren on the couch at ten to nine. No snacks, no drinks. This wasn’t a sports game. They just sat and talked quietly, trying to speculate what it might be…

When the stream started, President White looked awful. Makeup and a sharp suit and lighting could only do so much, and Austin could tell the President hadn’t slept properly in days. She looked old, her eyes lined and red and weary. But her posture, her expression, and her voice were strong.

“My fellow Americans,” she began, then expanded her address. “People of all nations of the Earth…ladies and gentlemen.”

She took a deep breath, almost like she’d been underwater a little too long and had made the surface, but was trying not to show it. A second’s silence longer, and then finally she gathered herself…

And told the whole world they were going to die.

”That Show With Jamal Taylor” set, New York City, USA, Earth

Jamal Taylor

They opened the show in stunned silence. Half the audience and one of the guests had gone home, and the ones left over were…Well, if Jamal had had is pick of people to sit down with and react to the end of the fucking world with, it wouldn’t have been these three. He wasn’t sure who it would have been, but…

The show must go on. Even though every second of the script was out the window, even though the audience were sitting there in a confused daze.

He dropped the opening speech and act. No jokes today. He set the three remaining guests at the table behind him, forbade the usual intro music, and walked out onto stage when they went live to the sound of perfect silence.

“I, uh…” he’d tried his best to scribble together some words. “I have no idea what we’re doing here. My guess is at some point the cops are gonna show up and tell us all we have to leave, or…I don’t know. But we’re going to sit, and we’re going to talk.”

There was the faintest rustle of some people’s heads nodding, some others looking around, one or two more gathering their things and leaving. Jamal cleared his throat and fidgeted with his cuff.

“For my part, I guess I’m…still in that disbelief stage, right? I can’t believe this has happened. I can’t believe what we just heard. I…” he gave up on trying to say anything and turned away to sit down at the table with his guests. “Is this real?”

“It has to be,” the political writer Emma Shaw said, hollowly. “The same message went out to each nation from their own leaders at the same time, and even if not…I mean, for God’s sake, the President’s not going to spring a sick joke on that scale!”

“Four years, four months, and three days…” to Jamal’s left was an emigrated Russian scientist, Mihaj Nikolayev. His hands were clasped in front of his face as though he’d been praying for the last several minutes. “Everything on Earth. It’s…it almost would be kinder not to tell us. To just…let it happen. Let people live in ignorance and be happy.”

“If there was no escape, maybe,” Shaw agreed. “But there is! There’s Cimbrean, and Lucent, and space stations and ships…”

“Yes, true. But look at what we face now. A…mad scramble. Your government will scramble for their own survival, Russia, China, and others will do same. And what about all the governments that don’t have extrasolar programs, and colonies?” He sighed and shook his head. “I…”

He trailed off into an awkward silence broken only by the sound of somebody in the audience coughing.

“We’re all speechless,” Jamal reassured him. “I don’t know what to say either. I think…” he paused, and inspiration struck him. “I guess the question we should be asking ourselves is, what can we hope for? What do we hope for? Because…this isn’t the end of the human race, is it?”

“Just most of it,” Nikolayev grunted.

“But not all. I think that’s the thing to focus on. I mean…”

“We haven’t even asked the question of who they’re going to save,” Nikolayev interjected. “Which is going to matter.”

“The rich and well-connected, obviously.” Jamal’s third remaining guest spoke up at last, bitterly. Jamal had been hoping to talk with Kizzy Roper about her new album: instead, she’d been looking up at the ceiling as though staring out into space since he sat down. Now, though, she turned red-rimmed eyes his way. “Y’know, the billionaires and the rich kids and the trust fund managers. That’s how it always is.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure—” Shaw began, carefully.

“When has it ever not been like that?” Roper demanded.

“I…I mean, yeah, it’s gonna be a bit like that,” Shaw conceded. “But you can’t build a whole civilization without regular folk too, and—”

“So who are they gonna save? The ‘useful’ people, huh? And I mean whoever they decide is useful. And…honestly, before we even get into this, aren’t we forgetting who even got us into this mess?”

“This would never have happened if we stayed safe in this system,” Nikolayev nodded, woefully.

“Right! But instead, we went out there and we picked a fight with a galactic superpower!”

“They picked a fight with us for the crime of existing!” Jamal objected.

“And it’s their weapon doing this,” Shaw added. “We can’t kid ourselves, there was never any safety in hiding here on Earth! Sooner or later…this would have happened. And then we’d never have seen it coming, and the entire human race would die!”

“This way, some of us live,” Jamal agreed, fervently. “I…maybe this is rash of me, but I feel like that justifies everything. We fought, and we won survival.”

“That is…very faint hope,” Nikolayev rumbled.

“It’s no hope at all, for most people,” Roper pressed. She waved her hand toward the back of the stage and the New York City skyline backdrop. “Like, look. Most of us are going to die. And we’re going to die in fire. Let’s not dance around that. There are…there are whole countries full of people out there who won’t get away, and…and…”

“You know, I think that decides my guest list,” Jamal mused, and then realized he’d said that out loud.

“You’re gonna keep running this show?” Kizzy looked equal parts surprised by that, and appalled that was where his mind had gone.

“Well…” Jamal thought for a moment, and then nodded. “Yes. Y’know what? Yes I am. Because, think through the math. We need to establish independent civilizations off Earth now in four years. The survivors, according to the President, will count in the millions, or tens of millions, or maybe a hundred million…against ten billion. You know who almost assuredly will not be on that list? Me.”

There was a soft sound from the audience: somebody at the back called out ’come on, man, don’t give up!’

“Well, let’s consider why!” Jamal replied, addressing that guy directly. “I’m a single gay man with no family, no legacy, and no future. My skills are being pretty on TV and on provoking a good interview. That’s not something I’ll be able to trade for a ticket off-planet because anyone can do my job! I love what I do, but it doesn’t save lives! So, if that’s the case, and so long as I have enough crew to do it…that’s what I’m going to do. People need what relief I can offer. And the Great Father owes me after his appearance so maybe I’ll get him again.”

“You think maybe you can do some good,” Emma Shaw.

“As much as I can, with the time I have left. I mean…what else can anyone do, now? Right?”

“What can any of us do? That is good question,” Mihaj agreed. “Most important question many of us face now, really. Will scientists have place on evacuation list? I don’t know. But maybe I can do something.”

“Writers probably won’t…” Shaw said it with the air of dawning realization, as if up until this second she’d kind of imagined the end of the world would involve everybody else and hadn’t really internalized that she herself was caught up in it.

“I mean…art inspires, right?” Kizzy offered, fervently. “People need artists and writers and musicians and….” she trailed off, partly because she clearly didn’t really believe what she was saying offered her in particular any lifeline, but also because there was sudden distractingly frantic movement off-stage.

One of the advantages of broadcasting live was the unpredictable real-time nature of the format. Jamal half-rose from his chair as his producer Sheila come running out of the wings, waving something at him…

“That’s my phone,” he said, dumbly.

“Yes. Read.” She pressed it into his hands. Jamal felt a tingle of premonition crawling on his shoulders and cheeks as he flipped it around, read it…

“Yeah, it’s…from Great Father Daar,” he declared. There was a faint creak from the audience, as of dozens of people leaning forward, listening.

“What was it? ‘His Sublime Majesty’ or something? Right fuckin’ pompous, that…”

“I doubt he asked for the title. And language please. This is still a broadcast show.”

“Wh–does that matter now?”

“Tell the FCC! You really think the literal end of the world is gonna stop a bureaucracy?”

Some weak chuckles from that, but really, everyone was more interested in, well…

The emperor of the fuckin’ universe casually texting in.

“Anyway. Right. So we’re on a thirty second broadcast delay, but I’ll just…show you what he sent. Uh…”

What was that stupid app they used? Right, mirrored his screen and the team knew what to do.

The first message could not possibly be any more Daar.

was watchin’ durin a workout

Kizzy choked out something that sounded almost like a laugh. “Of course he was…”

Jamal flashed a shrug at her, before continuing.

brave of you sayin all that
An yeah I keep up on what you humans are up to
cant promise an interview anytime soon
pretty busy as I guess you might suspect
but right now is good
jus finished my lift
gonna cool down an stuff
late night here
nice an cool

“Well that’s…great, I guess. So what about us? We just got told we’re all gonna die.”

There was a thirty second live buffer, and another eternity of seconds before the typing-dots showed up. It took him a while to type, too. The wait for the most important text message in history was agonizing.

were working on that right now
I owe your species the very existence of my own
I will never forget that
we are already setting things in motion to welcome as many as we can
benefits us both too so we have personal motivation to do this
you are right though we will need to be selective
every life must save more lives
or make life more worth living
only one shot to get this right
for obvious reasons I cant say much more yet
but I promise you it will be fair to everyone
we will want to preserve as much as we can
personalities culture belief genetics occupation
as much diversity as possible
its more than people its yer entire civilization we gotta save

Jamal could feel it. The sheer power of personality, charisma and presence, even muffled through a phone and text, had already changed the energy in the studio. Heads were nodding, eyes previously hollow and haunted were sharper, more alert, more inspired.

“What about the rich fuckers?” Kizzy asked, then shot Jamal an apologetic look when she realized she’d cussed again. “I mean…I think a lot of the concern and despair people are gonna have is the feeling like our various lords and masters are gonna buy their lives and leave us little people behind unless we’re useful.”

That broadcast delay really was excruciating. And Jamal had never heard the studio make a noise quite like the shared anticipatory breath when the typing-dots showed again.

wouldnt that include you?

“I mean like…billionaires. Folks like Moses Byron,” Kizzy replied. “The hyper-rich, not…” she broke off, trying to figure out a way to say ‘people like me’ that didn’t offend her own conscience.

you got a lot moar’n most everyone else there
millions billions trillions it dont matter in th end really
when food an housin aint ever gonna be a worry for you ever again, you rich

“But it is a worry! We’ve got four years left!”

More waiting, more marching dots. Jamal wasn’t in control anymore.

I get yer point. Ywant this to be FAIR.
an what is fair really?
either money matters or it dont
so, hard words time
Earth money dont matter anymore
it aint got a future
its WEALTH that yr really worried about
am I wrong?

Jamal, sensing a chance to jump back in and be present in the conversation again, chimed up: “You mean influence, power, means, that kind of thing.”

yup.
and thing is
I dont gotta care what people think
or how hard they try to ingratiate wit me or my people
cuz Im wealthy AF in every way
an bein Great Father means I got the whole Gao behind me
so it ain’t money what Im interested in
cuz it aint really gonna matter here in short order is it
I might be interested in their leadership
an maybe their skills
an yeah their wealth too
some o that is gonna matter in the new world
art culture knowledge resources connections all that
th real currency of power
but how much will it really?
a little, fer some, but not for most
gotta be able to DO SOMETHING with that wealth after all
lotsa rich fucks aint got th first damn clue what ta do with real wealth
waste it on shiny shit
why would I want that?
its their advisors who really run th show
so I suggest not gettin too wrapped up bout it
but…
Ill make you a promise
you yer crew an yer audience all get a shot right now

Sudden frantic muttering from everyone, an explosion of it. Quiet, fervent, astonished. Jamal looked across the table and saw that Emma Shaw had gone pale and perfectly still as she stared up at the screen with big, suddenly hopeful eyes. Alongside her, Mihaj wrung his hands together and rested his forehead against his knuckles: Kizzy just looked drop-jawed and lost.

Above them, Daar’s stream-of-thought texting marched onwards.

cuz you did the show in the face of evil
made yer offering to everyone when yall could be anywhere else rn
yer audience stayed
yer guests stayed
yer CREW stayed
that is LOYALTY an I appreciate it
so stick around my people will be there shortly
I make no promises past that but all you already show value
could be rioting stealing raping whatever
yer not
you were tested by circumstance an you did the CIVILIZED thing
thats th most valuable thing of all
you showed you can do the thing even when it all crashes down
thats the truth o the human spirit right there
a whole fuckofalotta yer fellows aint showin that right now
they prolly wont make it
its like th shopping cart test really
an yeah, maybe some folks will say its not fair
cuz you were there and you had the chance to be tested
and theres lots of others who woulda passed but never got the opportunity
but we all got to choose our poison
cuz no matter what we do its gonna be unfair in some way
an I aint about to let people who smell like good lose out
not when I can do somethin
so Jamal thats all the time I got
workout part two now
takes work ta be this sexy

Astonishing. Jamal had never imagined he’d hear laughter tonight, but…there it was. Honest-to-God chuckles from all over the studio.

but I’ll try an show up in person when I can
you keep fightin the good fight
an everyone else
i hope to see yall soon

No more typing dots. Jamal decided that was that, and closed the screen-share app.

There was a long silence. People still looking around, like they could barely believe what they’d just been present for. No doubt there’d be a flood of people trying to contact the studio, maybe even knock in the door…God only knew how all the people watching on TV were going to take it. Especially the ones who’d been in the studio and left…

But Daar was right, he realized. No matter what they did, any solution was going to be unfair by some metric. What mattered wasn’t fairness so much as…as the right attitude.

He tried to share that thought in the conversation that followed. Tried to explore it. Never an easy thing to do when having a conversation of four people in front of an audience, but they managed it. Managed to have a real conversation, full of real hope unlike what he’d felt at first.

At the end of the show, there was one more message. A fitting closer, that.

Daar took a selfie. There he was in all his magnificent cartoon huge flexing outrageously in front of his gym, no ridiculous detail of his preposterous brawn left to the imagination. He was there with his workout partners, all doing their best to stand proudly next to…well, the best there ever was. A couple were human, too. Monsters all, of course, but they were also…

He didn’t know how to describe it. The energy was too macho and too optimistic and too fucking wholesome to really fit with any of the rest of the world’s goings-on.

It had a caption.

“We’ll get through this”

Jamal presented it without comment in place of the usual closing monologue. The live feed ended on that…and minutes later, there was a team of people in suits with Stoneback lapel pins in the studio doing the rounds, taking names, addresses and phone numbers.

Of course he had active agents on Earth. How could it be otherwise?

Daar always kept his promises.

And that, in the end, was all anyone could ask of anyone.

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, Earth

Letty Brown

Fuck curfew.

Fuck the cops and the national guard.

Fuck the world.

Fuck everything.

Letty didn’t give a shit about no martial law, and nor did anyone else. After all, what were they gonna do? Shoot her? Well, fuck, she was gonna be dead in four years anyway. What did it matter? What did anything matter? What was the fuckin’ point to obeying any kinda law, doing what anyone told her?

So yeah. She was hanging with some of the guys from school. They’d raided a liquor store. The owner was nowhere to be seen, left the doors open. Letty hadn’t ever drunk alcohol before, so she was just…sampling. Shots of stuff.

Olie had turned up some weed from somewhere, too. Everyone knew he was a pothead. Letty was gonna sample that later, too. After she’d…shit. She didn’t even know. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, or where she wanted to be, except…somewhere. So, here was as good a place as any, right?

Better than staying home and watching That Show With and being ignored by her parents. Better than lurking in her room doomscrolling. Better than trying to take a bath and pretend everything was still okay.

But not by much. Booze, it turned out, didn’t taste very nice, and she had no idea why people loved it so much. So far, all she felt was weird and off-balance.

“Ah, shit.”

Letty jolted out of her thoughts and looked over to Mig. He’d been fucking around behind the store’s counter. “What?”

“Guy had a gun, but it’s gone. I was hopin’ to shoot something…”

“C’mon man, that’d just bring the national guard or whatever down on us,” Olie said.

“Bullshit. Listen: they’ve got enough to deal with.”

Right on cue the sound of explosions rang and echoed from somewhere down the street. Probably coming from the same direction all those fires were in. Riot cops doing their thing. Prob’ly been promised they’d live through all this bullshit if they just stomped on people hard enough. Fuckers.

“…Olie, gimme that shit.” Letty beckoned.

The first puff made her cough. She stuck at it, ‘cuz the whole point was it was supposed to make you feel good, right?

…Whatever. Being drunk wasn’t helping much. And the part of her that wanted to just…get mad, break stuff, burn shit down was losing the part of her that wanted to just sit in the corner and cry. She just wanted to….not for a while. Not think. Not life. Not anything.

So she got drunk.

And she got high.

And…stuff happened. Just an unpleasant blur of stuff, happening. There was more booze, and more weed, and…more stuff she didn’t feel like joining in, when Mig and Jen started making out WAY too hot and heavy and Olie just kinda watched them…

Letty stumbled outside, leaned against a wall, missed the sidewalk and puked all down her front instead. That was the last clear thing to stick in her head, until the blur took her away and the rest of the night just…didn’t happen.

She woke to pain. Lots of that, pounding in her head, and elsewhere too. And the smell of vomit, which… ugh…

“Up you get,” a voice said, and hauled her to her feet. More pain, dizziness…the voice belonged to a cop. A short black woman who guided her firmly out between some metal bars and a door that squealed loud enough to be agony.

“Wh—?” Letty tried.

The question wasn’t given time to form properly. She was guided—pushed, really—through halls, out into an open space, and pushed toward daylight. “Go home, kid. We kept you safe. Just…go home.”

Questions bubbled in Letty’s mind. Why was this woman just…doing her job? Didn’t she know the world was ending?

…Whatever. She nodded vaguely, stumbled through a revolving door, groaned at the sunlight, and tried to figure out where she was…Fuck, everything looked different. There were barriers up. And all the windows were smashed and shit was burned everywhere and there was still a haze of smoke over the city. She had to concentrate to get her bearings, which made her headache worse.

Right. Home. At least at home there were..fresh clothes. And water.

She let her feet blunder that way, while her mind suffered. A couple of times, she bounced off a lamppost. Noticed vaguely that…there were no cars on the roads. Nobody was driving. She could just kinda weave her way through Raleigh’s eerily empty streets.

The RV was gone and there was a note on the door when she got home.

Letitia,
You didnt come home. Guess your out there living, not wasting your time. Were doing the same. Lots to see and do before the world ends. House is yours.
Goodbye. Love you.
Mom

Letty stared at it for a long while. Looked around. Read it again. Was it…some kind of sick fucking joke?

Like…they’d never exactly been super cuddly or anything, and they’d never come to see her do anything at school, or taken her anywhere, or even helped her get to parties or…or anything, but…

Heat prickled up around her eyes. She pushed it down hard, barged into the house. Well, fine. Fine. It was her house now. Fine. She didn’t need them. She could…she could…

She could…live here. Until the end came. Alone.

She clamped down hard on the wracking sobs that wanted to force their way up out of her. She didn’t need them. She was fine. It didn’t fucking matter.

Nothing did.

MBG Headquarters, Oklahoma City, USA, Earth

Moses Byron

Moon Lasers.

Moses had done a talk on them a few years back. Big, glitzy, glamorous projects that would be stupid expensive and really capture the public imagination, but not really have any practical point.

Except…now, Moon Laser Projects were about the only place humanity could turn. And MBG would provide.

It had been a while since he’d last attended a board meeting. Age did that to a man, even with the modern medicine. Less energy, more aches, less time, more perspective on things like legacy than profit. Not that he was absent from the operations of the corporation that still bore his name, but…more hands-off. Content to let younger folks take the tiller.

The Presidential address changed matters. Within two hours, they were all back in the office, shaking hands, sitting down. The question in front of them: Just what was MBG’s role in the coming apocalypse? What moon laser were they gonna build to do something about all this?

Kevin, of course, was full of ideas, and the first to start sharing them.

“The way I see it, there are three things that need saving, and we can focus on one: People, nature, or culture. And of the three…People, the governments are going to save. Nature, the scientists will save, they’ve already been doing it for fifty years…but who out there is going to preserve the human spirit? All the stories and art and stuff?”

It wasn’t an immediately popular proposition.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Guy Hammond had been MBG’s CFO for a couple of years now, and damn good at it. But he and Kevin had never seen eye to eye on practically anything: The most significant part Kevin’s job was shooting down bad ideas, and he’d shot down a lot of Guy’s efficiency measures over the years. Not all of them, but many. “It’s gotta be lives, surely? People matter more than things!”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Moses said. He shifted in his seat, and was still amazed at the way a jab of pain didn’t shoot up from his thigh. By God, he’d been certain that thing would plague him the rest of his life. “We have the resources to save thousands of people. That means we have an obligation to save thousands of people.”

“Okay…which people?” Kevin retorted. “And how can you possibly justify that selection?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what are we gonna do?” Kevin asked. “Just go out on the street, grab random people and ship them to Chiune Station? What happens when people object? ’Why him and not me?’ they’ll ask, and it’s a fair question! ‘How come that lady gets to live, but my little girl has to burn?’ Are you comfortable holding back the unluckies by gunpoint? Because that’s a problem that will require force.”

He looked around the table, at the other frowning faces. “Or is there gonna be some kind of method to our approach? What I’m suggesting is, we save…librarians, academics, scholars, museum curators, and we give them plenty of luggage allowance to bring along the things they think are most important. So, yeah, we’re gonna save some people for sure, because that’s how we save the culture. And nobody else is gonna do it.”

“Still…” Guy persisted. “I’m of the view that if it’s a choice between saving the Mona Lisa or a five-year-old, you let the painting burn.”

“I mean, yeah, that’s kind of a classic twist on the ol’ trolley problem,” Kevin nodded. “But the thing is, trolley problems are isolated. There’s no bigger picture to ‘em, it’s just pull the lever or don’t. Here in the real world, there is a bigger picture, and it’s that there’s a lot more to the future and survival of the human race than just population. ‘Man cannot live on bread alone,’ right? I reckon, if we don’t have our memories of the world that was, and some things to anchor us to this planet, even once it’s gone? Overall, we might lose more people from coming adrift.”

“You’re suggesting, we save the Mona Lisa, we save lives?”

“Yes, because we are not a government and we do not wield force. Have you thought for a microsecond about how many people are going to survive this?”

“I have,” Guy replied, grimly. “It’s not many. A few hundred million at most. That’s kind of my point.”

“And my point is, firstly we can’t contribute meaningfully to that number, because again: government has all the power. Secondly, the survivors are going to be traumatized and adrift and nobody is getting out of this without losing a loved one. What’s the suicide rate going to be, afterward? What about the murder rate? We’re going to need something to glue people together, and if you think culture doesn’t matter then you straight-up have not paid attention to the last sixty years. Culture is everything. It is the part of us that lives on.”

“Indeed, now it’s gonna be the only part of the Earth itself that lives on,” Moses mused.

Kevin nodded gratefully at him, then turned back to Guy. “Keeping people alive is only half the battle, man. We gotta give them something to live for. Are you gonna tell me that’s worthless?”

“I…” Guy paused, frowned, looked around the table, then shook his head. “…No.”

Moses, seeing that a decision had been made, leaned forward. “So. We have four and a quarter years. Let’s not waste any of it. I need practicalities: who, what, when and where. I want everyone who works for MBG to get their families to safety by the end, and I want as much and as varied heritage saved as we possibly can.”

Heads bobbed gratifyingly, including Guy’s. Good. They had direction. Now for the extra.

“But, to assuage any concerns…I think we all know the bureaucracy may end up flubbing some of this. So, while the iron is still hot…Kevin! Have you had any contact with mister Etsicitty lately?”

“Uh, ambassador Etsicitty is a busy man lately…but I can see where you’re going. Some kind of shindig?”

“A braintrust shindig, to ponder Moon Lasers.”

Kevin nodded sharply. “I’ll call Xiù.”

“Thanks. Now that we’ve set direction…let’s talk specifics. What are we putting on hold, who are we putting in charge of what? A project this big, we’re going to end up with a whole new org chart, so…proposals?”

They gathered around. They drank their coffee and water. Lunchtime came and went, as did the afternoon. By early evening, they had a start. Enough to get major industry involved, enough to take the initiative and give some direction before panic and politics overwhelmed their civilizational ability to respond.

God.

There was only one currency now, Moses realized. The Dollar, the Pound, the Euro, the RMB, the Yen, Rubles, gold bars, cryptos, everything was worthless now compared to the only currency that people actually wanted: life. The only reason people would have to work now was for the promise, the chance, to get them and theirs to safety.

Not a happy thought. But they didn’t really have time to think about the implications of all that. They had a plan, or at least some direction to work in.

Sometimes, that was all you could get.

Palace of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, Earth

The Hon. Jeremy Griffiths MP

“Mister Speaker—”

Griffiths’ voice was immediately lost in the expected hail of jeering and shouts. He was going to lose this one, he knew. His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was very much too small a force in the House of Commons this year: Griffiths was seated opposite a majority government that utterly filled the benches opposite him, and wrapped around to fill some of those further down to his left, as well.

Still, what he had to say demanded to be said. So, he waited patiently while Sir Sanjeev Mahajan, the Speaker, lofted the call for “order!” above the clamor several times until it was at last begrudgingly restored.

“Mister Speaker,” Griffiths started over. “The Prime Minister has made his argument for martial law, citing necessity. In doing so, he reminded me of the words of one of his predecessors: ‘Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.’ William Pitt the Younger said that nearly three hundred years ago—and yes, I can hear the honorable lady’s objection, but I will not give way,” he added firmly, acknowledging somebody’s attempt to interrupt him. “Under different circumstances it may have been, but it still holds true. We are not a nation of slaves, we are not a nation of tyrants. We are a nation with a proud history of liberating the former, and standing up to the latter.”

There was a scattered cry of ‘hear hear’ from behind and beside him.

“I will quote another. ‘Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour … If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?’”

For once, the Commons didn’t erupt in jeering. That was the power of a good quotation, they demanded respect. He cleared his throat and looked to the Speaker’s chair.

“We live in a time which is testing our principles to the breaking point. Yes, I understand the argument that principle must necessarily come downstream of survival. But what is a nation if not its principles, its ideals, and its way of doing things? Mister Speaker, we set aside the idea that any one person should have absolute authority a very long time ago. The process of democracy, the rule of law for the common good, the principle that the powerful should serve the vulnerable, those are what we stand for. And now the government proposes to throw it away in the name of survival? One cannot save a thing by smashing it!”

A handful of ’Hear, hear!’ cries from behind him…but not many. Most of the MPs sat on their benches with their eyes turned downwards. All of them, even the baby of the house, looked just as old as Griffiths felt.

Perhaps he might have had more in him if there had been more noise, more shouts trying to drown him out or encourage him on, but instead, all the fight went out of him at once, looking at all those quiet, grieving faces.

He sat down. After a moment, Sir Sanjeev stood.

“The Prime Minister,” he said.

The Rt. Hon. Luke Ratcliffe PM rose with his usual light-footed spring, despite the dead mood. A lot of PMs had been compared to dogs in the past: Winston Churchill had famously been a bulldog, Steve Davies had been charicatured in the media as a kind of droopy basset hound, and Margaret Thatcher had famously been a bitch.

Ratcliffe was a scrappy little terrier, always game for a fight: small, wiry, young-looking, and coarse-haired. The public ate up his presence at the ballot box, and he had a habit of producing headline soundbytes.

Today, though, the pep in his step was much reduced, and the worry lines, sleeplessness and stress had chased all the youth from his face. It had also, apparently, put him in no mood to spar because rather than grin puckishly across the box at Griffiths, he offered a solemn nod of respect.

“Mister Speaker, in any other situation, the honourable gentleman would be correct in every regard. I could not find a single word in what he just said that I disagree with in principle. What he seems to have failed to grasp however is, let us be clear: we are not fighting to save the United Kingdom.”

A few scattered cries were the only objection, swiftly silenced by a glare from the chair. Griffiths didn’t join them.

“This is the last Parliament of the United Kingdom,” Ratcliffe continued. “He asks, ‘What is this nation if not its principles and ideals?’ Mister Speaker, this nation is doomed. The choice in front of us does not allow room for Britain to live on, in any capacity. What may yet live on is people, and the hope that through them our principles and culture may be reincarnated, and our history remembered.

“And I would ask him,” he added, “whether he can think of any good example of a nation whose first and most important value was not the primacy of life?”

The Commons shouldn’t be deadly silent. It was oft-ridiculed, often ridiculous for the jeering, shouting and noise that were all part of its culture and game. To hear it as silent as a funeral service broke Jeremy Griffiths’ heart in an unexpected way. Opposite him, he could see the Chancellor discreetly dry his eyes.

“This is no longer about the United Kingdom,” Ratcliffe intoned, regaining a little of that terrier vigour now his point was made. “So, let us consider to where we might flee! Cimbrean? We know, from reports some years ago, that it could not possibly hope to support the teeming masses of Earth. Or frankly, of even this country. It has an agriculture that can be made fit for millions, not hundreds of millions, let alone billions. Gao? I am sure His Sublime Majesty the Great Father would welcome us with his usual happy bluster…but whom would our ruler be, then?

“Perhaps we’re off to another world, then! Which world? Where do we turn? How do we propose to prepare it in time? And how do we hope to preserve the essence of our kind? Make no mistake, Mister Speaker. Nearly everyone in this room will die in four years. The sooner we face up to that, the better. And that leaves us only one question: does humankind survive?”

He turned and looked in Griffith’s eyes, though he still didn’t break protocol by speaking directly, as such. “This country, and its principles, are not long for this world. In order to ensure there is any world to come, any hope of our virtues and values being inherited, we must achieve the most effective and complete evacuation we can. This house could not agree on the particular shade of green carpet we needed during the recent refurbishment! It was debated for months! Does he think now is the time for inefficiency? Our survival as a species requires appropriate, decisive, and swift governance….and so too does the survival of the principles the honourable gentleman so rightly esteems. Those who survive this ordeal may rebuild and mourn in due time. It falls to us to ensure that they will.”

He sat. There was a moment’s silence, before the Speaker stood.

“Order, order. I call the Prime Minister Luke Ratcliffe to move the emergency powers and evacuation act, which stands in his name,” he declared.

Ratcliffe sprang to the microphone. “I so move, Mister Speaker.”

Mahajan nodded. “The question is that the emergency powers and evacuation act be passed without amendment. As many of that opinion say ‘aye…?’”

Griffiths closed his eyes, and reluctantly added his voice to the swell of what sounded like a unanimous vote.

“…of the contrary, ’no…?’

Silence.

“I think the Ayes have it…the Ayes have it.”

There was no cheer. They all knew they’d voted aye to taking away nearly every right and privilege the eighty million people who called Britain home enjoyed, and who in their right mind could feel good about that? No more freedom of assembly, no more voting, no more representation, no more devolution…if the Cabinet said so. The army was going to be on the streets, and civil disorder was going to end, lest the fires kill everyone.

There was still the matter of review by the Other Place of course, and royal assent…Griffiths didn’t think for a second either would be an obstacle.

And it wasn’t.

The next day, the changes began. The next week, with restored royal prerogative, His Majesty dissolved Parliament. Similar legislation was enabling itself across the commonwealth realms.

Griffiths went home. There was no such thing as an opposition, now. There were expert advisors to the Crown, who would increasingly be merely advisors, he feared, and in whose ranks he was not numbered anyway. So, he went home. Sat on the couch. Held his wife close and tried to make peace with the idea that these were his closing years. If there was anything he could do for his children and their children, he’d find a way…but he knew perfectly well that he wasn’t leaving Earth himself. There were worthier lives than his.

He slept. All through two days, too numb and exhausted to do more than lie in bed and doze fitfully.

The third day, he took the dog for a walk in the woods. She needed it, and he needed to be anywhere other than in that bed. He went down to the woods, along the stream, while the light was still grey and the air still so cold that his breath joined the dawn mist.

Nugget stopped and hunched over to drop her business near a stand of snowdrops that had pushed up among the roots. They came up earlier, nowadays, Griffiths reflected. The Earth was warmer than he remembered his childhood being, despite the plummeting carbon emissions that had flattened the curve.

Even so, life was obliviously going on living. The dog still wanted to sniff trees, the still birds sang, the spring flowers raced up as soon as the ground was warm enough…when he checked a nearby tree, he found leaf buds.

He had a choice, he realized. He could mourn the fact that all of this would be molten and blasted and gone all too soon…or he could appreciate how beautiful it was, here and now. After all, those snowdrops never lasted long. They’d be gone by next month. The buds and leaves? Gone by next winter. Even the beauty of a chilly morning could only last a few hours. He could choose to die inside…or he could choose to live, with as much time as was left to him. And four years was…

…Well, it was enough to live with.

He stooped, patted Nugget around her ears, smiled at her wagging tail, stood up, and walked on. He had twelve hours until curfew.

Time enough to enjoy the day.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Moses Byron

Christ. Meeting Julian again after all these years was strange; he hardly recognized him, despite that he was arguably the most famous human face and silhouette anywhere. Byron’s memory recalled a lean, strapping, lupine young man who was too handsome for his own good, with a deep, soft-spoken Minnesotan accent. Shy, too. Incongruously so.

Now? Here on their back porch, handing out some of the Earth’s last cigars? Well, he was still soft-spoken, his accent still somewhat there, and he was still much too handsome for his own good; if anything, he was more so. But everything else? Unrecognizable. He’d grown confident and assertive—borderline aggressive in a friendly hyper-masculine sort of way. He was better-spoken and certainly more worldly, too: everything about him had grown, especially his body. Now he hulked like some sort of ancient-world demigod had a child with a comic book ultra-hero, and had the gall to look supermodel-good doing so, too. The bastard was too damn much, really. Line of Heroes indeed.

Too many of those in the news, these last few years.

Was he the right man for the job, now? With all his duties, his bigger role in the world, his bigger…everything? Especially in personality?

Allison and Xiù, by contrast, were…more subtly changed. Motherhood had granted them both a comfort with themselves, an entirely deserved confidence. Xiù, for instance, had cheekily stolen Julian’s cigar the second it was alight, compelling him to secure a replacement. When he’d promised vengeance later, she’d simply smirked and replied, “don’t threaten me with a good time, bǎobèi.”

Allison’s ensuing cackle was probably the first time Moses had heard genuine laughter in days. Folks were still punctuating their conversation with humor, still grunting out a fatalistic ‘hah’ or a mildly amused exhalation through the nose because humor was the linchpin of resilience…but actual laughter?

It was a joy to hear.

“So, Kevin suggested that, huh?” Allison was leaning on the back of Julian’s seat, having declined to smoke. Apparently she’d quit years ago and didn’t want to start again. “Kinda ironic.”

“How so?”

“‘Cuz if he wasn’t involved in it, you know he’d be cynically suggesting it’s a way for MBG to buy up all the soon-to-be most valuable artifacts in the galaxy for dirt cheap.”

Moses snorted, having to concede she was probably right there. “He’s rather less cynical these days. I think being rich and influential agrees with him. Or maybe age has mellowed him. He’s looking good for sixty-two.”

“Making it sound like it all rubbed off on you, Moses.”

“Not all. I mean, really, if I wasn’t still fundamentally idealistic, I wouldn’t be here asking for your help in building some moon lasers, would I?”

“Got me there.”

“I don’t know if it’s idealism or…” Xiù trailed off then shrugged. “Do you really think they’ll come up with something?”

“Never say never.” Moses shrugged and gestured with his cigar, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. “I’m a damn old man. The world has changed a lot in my time, but never so fast, so abruptly or so completely as it has these past twenty years or so. Honestly, I don’t know how the young generation aren’t completely neurotic from anxiety…”

He shook his head, then leaned forward. His hip still surprised him by not hurting. “For all I know, all we have to do is put the right brains in the same room together, lubricate them a bit, and suddenly they’ll figure out how to zap this whole cosmic death ray sideways into dataspace and kill two birds with one stone by ridding us of the Hierarchy. Unlikely, maybe, but you miss all the shots you don’t take.”

“Mmm,” Julian chuckled. “Lubricated brains.”

“Sounds tasty,” Xiù agreed.

Allison gave them both the side-eye. “…Ew.”

Moses chuckled, glad he’d taken the time to ask this of them in person. Their chemistry was infectious, made him glad to be alive to see it. He’d needed a shot of that, after the last few days.

“Anyway. Whatever comes of their brain-lubing needs a pretty direct route to somebody with real power. If there is a magic bullet…we can’t have it lost in the mail.”

“Ah,” Julian nodded. “The plot thickens. Also, we’ve got good housing around here for the long term, and MBG has a lot of private holdings…”

“Of course. But most importantly of all, this needs to get underway immediately. I’m sure the fine folks in our respective governments will eventually form a committee to research the committee to propose the recommendations to study the problem.”

“Or we could grill some steaks.” Xiù nodded.

“Exactly.”

They were interrupted by a small voice, and an equally small hand that reached up to tug on Julian’s shirt: little Anna, as pale as her mother but dark-haired as her father, who gave Julian and Xiù the kind of accusatory look only a seven-year-old could muster. “You said smoking’s a bad habit!”

“Usually it is,” Julian smiled down at her. “The important word is habit. That means to do something all the time without really thinking about it. We’re having one right now to relax with an old friend.”

“They smell gross,” she noted.

“The cigars, or our guest?” His eyes flicked back to Byron and twinkled merrily. Anna suddenly grew adorably shy and gave Moses a big-eyed, watchful look, while Xiù stifled a giggle behind her hand.

“C’mon, wo de nuhai…” Allison knelt next to her daughter, encouragingly. “This is Moses, he owns the company we went to space with.”

“…’lo.”

“Hello,” Moses replied, unable to resist the smile. There was the future, fluffy beaver toy dangling by its tail from one hand while the other held on on to Allison. “I thought you were in bed.”

“She’s supposed to be,” Allison replied, and poked Anna in the ribs, prompting a giggle. “Need a drink, little chick?”

“Yes please…”

“C’mon then.” She turned to go. “I’m gonna get some sleep too. It was lovely to see you, Moses. I hope we do find a moon laser for ‘ya.”

“I hope so too. Goodnight.”

And then there were two. They finished their cigars in a haze of comfortable small-talk, reminiscing about…things, mostly. Events. Memories. Julian and Xiù recounted the story of a rainy day in Yosemite national park…then shed a few tears for the fact it wasn’t going to be around much longer.

Moses left when the first speckle of Cimbrean’s night rains began to patter on the awning. By his own personal clock, it was still only about two in the afternoon and there was plenty of work day ahead of him yet. But he felt energized, refreshed and ready.

And when he set foot back on Earth, he did so with a renewed sense of how precious an experience it truly was.

Lavmuy City, Gao

Arthur Sartori

“I see there was a beatdown in the Senate today.”

Champion Loomi sighed, understandingly. Like all high-ranked gao these days he’d taken a keen interest in his physical vigor and it was increasingly evident week by week, though he’d kept much of the sturdy lankiness Highmountain was known for.

“A reminder that you are very…alien to us, in some ways,” he noted.

They were taking a walk together, around Lavmuy’s old industrial quarter where the planet’s small existing human diaspora now lived. Young men, mostly, of various nationalities: Sartori could see them standing around outside their apartment buildings in groups of three and four. Some were talking. Some were smoking. Most just had the look of people who knew they’d narrowly dodged a bullet they’d never known was even coming, and couldn’t tolerate being cooped up indoors.

Sartori could sympathize. After all…here he was on Gao. Had he been back rattling around his retirement house in Maine…well. Former Presidents might have the privilege of getting to pull strings and get out. But by good fortune, that wasn’t a question he needed to ask. Instead he was here, and could do something useful to prepare Gao’s human population for the trial of growing dramatically in size…

“You’ve had your share of civil unrest,” he pointed out. “The Great Father has had to use a damn stern paw, several times.”

“Yes, but you hit the point exactly,” Loomi replied. “We have the Great Father. His authority is more than political, it’s physical and it’s biological. All of us Champions to a man have had to significantly ‘up our game’ to keep from being essentially enslaved to his will just by him being there. And once we have a clear, dominant leader like that…I don’t think we could ever completely fall apart in the way your world is. Violence in the halls of power, reflecting the riots in the streets.”

“Well, no. Margaret can’t bodily tear people apart with her claws…though Lord knows she can do the verbal equivalent.”

Loomi chittered, “you’ve clearly never been the target of one of Daar’s Doodles, or one of his famously—Laconic, is that the word?”

“Yes. And he does Laconic?”

“When he wants to really get his claws in you, yes. Lovingly of course,” he chittered.

“Love cuts deepest, more often than not.”

“Hmm.” Arthur stopped and looked up at a nearby factory-turned-apartments. It rather reminded him of older brick buildings, the kind built during the nineteenth century. Most of the thinner walls had been taken out and replaced with glass, so presumably the apartments inside were nice and bright and airy. And they were probably a fraction as expensive as the same thing would go for in any American city.

He wondered how many people each one could house, if completely stuffed to groaning. And what the people lucky enough to find a home in them would do. What jobs were there for them?

Well, that was an easy question. There were any number of jobs on Gao, as the population collapsed. Lavmuy was full of struggling workhouses, and frankly the average human woman was physically a fair match for the average second- or third-degree Gaoian male, or something thereabouts probably. Or so he was taken to understand, anyway. He could imagine a culture shock coming, regardless.

“You seem lost in thought, Arthur.”

“Wondering about what comes next,” he replied truthfully. “An old adage pops readily to mind.”

Loomi raised his ears attentively, but said nothing.

“Women and children first.”

“…Ah.”

They said nothing for a bit, and Sartori decided it was time to open up his picnic basket. They were sitting in a small little park, watching the young off-shift males play and generally cavort. The energy was a bit different today; everyone had heard the news by now, and there were more than a few ear-flicks toward Arthur.

He sighed, and bit into a ham sandwich. A proper ham sandwich, with a good crusty bread and a well-aged Emmentaler. Something that might become quite costly in short order. He looked up at Loomi, who was trying not to, well…beg…but gao really and truly were canine in ways a human simply could not ignore.

Or, well. Ursine too. And very procyonine, but really it was all the same sort of energy. He gave the other triangle to Loomi and they munched in silence.

Fuck it. He was sitting in the presence of a genuine and accomplished supergenius. So…

“How many?”

Loomi swallowed his last bite and looked down with the saddest expression. “I would be astonished if one in a hundred made it.”

Arthur weighed that assessment in his mind. Tried to feel it, tried to understand it. Somehow, for some reason, it just refused to click for him. As though his brain was protecting itself. It was a crushing assessment that simply wouldn’t land and be felt.

“I don’t even know how to get my head around that number,” he admitted.

“You’ll learn, I fear. The same way we did.”

Well.

“We will help,” Loomi said at last. “Your people were there to save ours, and have been from the first moment of our own calamity. We will welcome you with a friendly sniff. Though I suppose this will be the final doom for both our peoples, really.”

“Surely not? We’re both hardy enough to survive past this, I know we are.”

“Physically, certainly. We are tough peoples. But culturally? We’re both aggressively social animals, driven to bond and turn practically anything into family. We will not remain distinct. An event like this is going to merge our societies into one. We’re too similar not to get along, and too desperate to remain apart. I cannot begin to imagine what that will be like…but we are going to find out. And It will be my final great work of scholarship, I think. Something to keep the mind busy before I give in to the inevitable.”

“The inevitable? You’re not that old, are you?”

“I’d have at least a few decades left, before our species’ awakening. So, at least several now. But nonetheless, age comes for us all and a proper work takes time, yijao?”

“I suppose…but I know the Great Father is looking good and hard at life extension and…Christ alive, I suspect practically every human we save will, too—”

“Oh, that’s fine and good for him,” Loomi duck-nodded. “Necessary, even. I expect Our Father to reign for a thousand years. Myself? I am an academic, a scholar, and a scientist, in that order. After a while it is important we shuffle off into retirement for fresh perspective and ideas to bubble up. Modern medicine allows me to do so in comfort, but after a time…I would grow bored.”

“Really? You don’t think you’d find the discoveries that come after you retire fascinating?”

“…Maybe I wouldn’t be bored, then. But can I stay retired indefinitely? I shouldn’t want to feel useless, or like all my use was behind me. And suddenly we’re in a catch-twenty-two as you say. If I remain in my field, I hold it back; if I don’t, what value am I? No, I believe we all must bow out, in time. I’m fortunate enough that my time will be of my choosing.”

“Mm.” Arthur tidied his lunch pack away and looked around again. There was housing here for a lot of people. Soon, Lavmuy would have a large human population, maybe even just as large as its gaoian population. After that…what would happen to both species? “For my part, I think I’m about to get my second wind.”

Loomi duck-nodded. “I hope so. You’ve been a leader to your people already. Here and now, I think they’ll need you again.”

“I wish they didn’t,” Arthur sighed, but he was nodding. He was somewhere he could be useful. What was that, if not some kind of providence? “But they do, so…I will.”

“Your lodgings at the Clan Highmountain chapterhouse are yours indefinitely,” Loomi promised. “I will assign…hmm…Brother Ooki, to assist you.”

“Ooki? What’s he like?”

“Young, eager, and…undamaged. He was spared the worst of the war by youth and by Clan affiliation. I think you need a dose of youthful optimism.”

“And he needs an old coot to beat him down a bit, eh?”

Loomi chittered, “in a sense, yes. Though do not engage him in chaseball. He’s very good.”

“Hmm. I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as a golf course on this planet?”

“Not yet. But now may be the time, with plummeting land values…”

“For the next four years, building one would be a waste of time and resources, and therefore lives. I’ll introduce him to cornhole instead.”

“…Cornhole? Isn’t that slang for–?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sartori chuckled quietly. “Gaoians have such dirty minds, I swear…”

Loomi flicked an ear, tilted his head, then shrugged it off. “Well…good that you’ve got your relaxation plan, then. You’re going to need it.”

“Oh, I know.” Arthur sighed and stood. “Let’s face it, many of the refugees coming here will blame the USA for what happened. Blame me personally, even. Forging some kind of a community that can take in as many as possible is going to…it’ll be a test.”

“The Great Father believes you are up to it.”

“I know I’m up to it. It’ll still be testing.” They found a trash can and got rid of their dinnertime detritus. Arthur felt better for the talk, he realized. And he felt inspired. Sharpened. And ready to begin properly. “So. Does your clan have estimates on how soon we can begin jumping in and housing refugees…?”

Very soon indeed, it turned out. All that was left was a meeting in the Conclave and, of course, a trip to the Great Father for a free spinal re-arrangement and some of his otherwise excellent hospitality. They hammered out a pretty good starting point, somewhere deep into the Talamay…

Thank God for voice-to-text note taking, because He woke the next morning with a truly raging hangover having somehow survived Daar’s naptime snuggles. Managed to wiggle free without waking the big bastard, too.

But over breakfast, the ramblings of the night before solidified. Arthur could do something. And so, he made calls and sent emails. Leaders responded. Things got moving.

The first government officials arrived on the morning of the third day: the first civilian refugees, in the form of more than a hundred building contractors, electricians and plumbers plus their families, arrived that afternoon. Arthur Sartori was there to greet them. They all had a lot of work ahead of them, getting housing set up for as many humans as they possibly could.

By the afternoon of the fifth day, that population had quintupled, the architects had unearthed some appropriate plans for a high-density apartment building, and the local builder’s workhouse was already poring over everything to help bring it up to appropriate code. Clan Coinhammer—builder Clans were all very local and territorial, often the last ancient trace of a place’s deep history—was thick on the ground, eager to get their new most bestest human friends up to speed on everything.

Stoneback was already putting together a local concrete plant, and the trans-district rail was throwing together an off-branch to keep that plant fed—Daar himself was helping with the effort, no doubt gleefully happy to put his ludicrous huge to good use. And it mattered: when the Great Father himself was there working long days, shifting aggregate, setting ties and emplacing rails with his own paws, or just being a useful force of nature for whatever needed doing…

He really was a genius with propaganda.

The local newscast picked it up on short order, and within hours so had the press from Earth and around the galaxy. Goldpaw spokesman were everywhere, weaving a positive story of help and love and Deathworlder hospitality.

Meanwhile, the sheer scale of the problem had ignited the Gao to magnificent purpose. By the end of the week there was so much going on, Sartori had somehow gained staff.

The plans for the first buildings were…well, the resulting apartments weren’t gonna win awards. Poured concrete and pre-fab, the next best thing to Soviet brutalism. How else did you build housing for so many people in such a short span of time? No doubt they’d all have some regrettable problems or whatever, but for now…four walls, a roof, power, and running water.

That was enough. People had lived in worse. There was ample park space reserved and none of that had been planned yet, deliberately. They could build and improve from there, and in Arthur’s experience that was all people needed: give folks a tiny spark of hope, and they’d nurture it into a warm hearth, every time.

Let them make it theirs. Let the gaoian love of kitsch and the human need for beauty collide like warring kudzu. Lives would be saved, regardless.

And that was all that mattered.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Lots of enormous responsibilities were falling on Julian, lately. He was the stand-in ambassador on Cimbrean right now, on top of his normal duties. He was going to be founding a colony on Nightmare, for reasons of the US having a sovereign claim on the planet, and for keeping the human race fit and ready—there were few worlds apt to preserve them hale and healthy, after all. He was even looking forward to it in a weird sort of way.

But before that, Byron needed someone to chair his Desperate Measures Committee. Or, at least, get them together and get things started. Because if there was some arcane superscience way to save the Earth from what was coming, then the world needed to know, and the people with him in his backyard today might just be the ones to figure it out.

And it happened to get them all offworld too, which was pretty important.

Personally, he didn’t think there was a magic bullet to be found. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to encourage them! So right now his house (safe on Cimbrean, after a jump from wherever the bunker was) was playing host to a fair odd medley of people.

Super smart guys, who gave Julian wary looks, despite wearing the least gruntiest casual attire he could manage. Moses Byron, with all the money and a keen desperation to spend it well. Alex, trying his very best to listen keenly and not accidentally hench the big brains into submission…and failing pretty miserably, straining as he was at the confines of his skin-tight t-shirt. Another Wilde special, this one: It was a rainbow-ish striped affair with multiple pokemon, ending incongruously with “…an All-Terrain Vehicle.”

Disarming, maybe. It had drawn a few smiles.

But none of that really mattered because Lewis Beverote was there, and nothing disarmed the situation more than when he’d basically leapt into Julian’s arms, sobbing about it all, and then pulled himself together with some sort of complicated handshake-fistbump-something Julian still wasn’t quite sure he hadn’t just made up on the spot, somehow.

The Alpha-of-Nerds, having signaled the relative safety of the meat-henches, had commenced with the plotting and scheming and the superscience immediately, with the promise that no suggestion was too stupid for consideration because “If nothin’ else, we should at least tick the fuckin’ box, dude.”

Julian served beer. Good beer, too. He’d taken a shine to homebrew. This had apparently raised him from “walking prettysteak” into “classy gentleman of importance” somehow.

Nerds liked homebrew. Good to know.

Vemik, of course, was full of ideas. And beer. “Why not jump the whole Earth to a different system?” He didn’t actually belong in this group but who could possibly have told him no?

“Dude, Bartlett’s Third Law.”

Heads bobbed, and Julian watched Lewis flip his pencil over and stab at the buttons on his calculator with the eraser end.

“For the record, what’s Bartlett’s Third Law?” Julian asked aloud. The meeting was being recorded and part of his job was to make sure all the relevant bits got recorded.

“The energy required to form a metastable wormhole increases with the fourth power of its radius,” Lewis rattled off. “To move the whole Earth we’d need…” his eraser tapped furiously for a few seconds. “…Well, if we found, like, six or seven other stars about the same size as Sol and blew all them up too, and captured all the energy thus produced, we could just about do it.”

“But if we could do that, then we’d already had a solution to the problem anyway,” commented Professor…what was his name? Something Polish….Szymański!

He needed more beer, so Julian nodded and Alex delivered. Kid was a mindreader.

“Right…” Lewis nodded. “Okay, what happens if we shove, like, a metric gigabuttload of system shields in the way?”

“The stellar discharge lasts for several hours,” Professor Uthrugvugeg, shook his huge head solemnly while shimmering in shades of regretful denial. “Each system shield will be destroyed before it can even react meaningfully to the incoming energy…on the order of nanoseconds. We would need to place an impossible number of barriers in the way.”

“How big is the discharge?” Vemik had a knack for asking good questions, and the Thinky Types were taking notice.

And Lewis had a knack for answering them. “The star isn’t there anymore, Vemik.”

Tail-twitch. Crest fell. “…Oh.” A respectful silence fell on all of them. “And…how big is the beam?”

“Too soon to measure. Let us assume it’s well-collimated,” Lewis noted.

“Well indeed,” added Nofl, who was enjoying one of Julian’s world-famous garlic butter portobello mushrooms, today in a special-edition vegan serving. The little guy set it down and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “In order for the beam to be the radius of the solar system, the deviation between the center of the beam and the most deviated portion has to be…” he shut his eyes, briefly. Corti didn’t need calculators. “…two-point-two-six-five times ten to the negative fourth power…well, I suppose in degrees, too. Close enough.”

“And we’ve gotta assume the Hunters engineered this thing well enough to achieve what they set out to do with it.”

So the conversation went. As much for his own sanity as anything else, Julian furiously worked on Other Important Matters, some of which would raise eyebrows if they hadn’t had merely four years to do the work…but keeping on the good side of Professor Hurt was really going to fucking matter, he’d sensed.

So everyone even remotely connected with the Akyawentian project was being offered work if they moved to Cimbrean right now and didn’t make too much of a fuss about it. The public mood was…increasingly unkind to people with off-world passes and residency.

Schuster had accepted immediately. The only reason they hadn’t originally propositioned him to be the librarian was one of age and ongoing commitments. But with Crude, now…

…And, well, the end of those commitments. So there was that.

Not half a moment later, Tilly Briggs confirmed too, requesting to bring her boyfriend; Julian of course granted that request. After Hurt and himself, Tilly was probably the most respected human in friendship with the ten’gewek, and definitely the best for liaising with Vemik.

He also grilled up a storm. Xiù did all the prep and the side dishes, while he and Alex kept charge of the sacred flame. Lots of veggies on the grill, too. Guvnurag loved grilled lettuce, in his experience. And lots of it.

As for him…

Why didn’t he feel things like the rest? It wasn’t a lack of grief. Just the thought that everything he loved on Earth was going to disappear had him…

But what was it he loved anyway? He had a think on that while Alex posed a question.

“Are we thinking about how we’re going to scale up evacuation? I mean…it’d be great to save Earth, but it’s more important to save the people. How do we house nine billion people suddenly? Or feed them?”

“Clothe, teach, entertain…” Julian added as he flipped Vemik’s giant steak over. Charred, but still blue in the middle, exactly the way the big guy liked it. Marrow-thick bone kissed by fire.

Lewis, meanwhile, liked a steak that had once had fire explained to it. From across the room. Calling it “blue” was an understatement: the fucking thing was just about trying to run away. Vemik, upon seeing this, trilled and pulled Lewis into his lap so they could eat together, tail-around-waist. No better sign of affection!

“Even my people are more civilized, Loo-wiss! Not even flavor of fire on it! Shameful…”

“Hey! The carnivore diet’s what got me into such great shape!”

Vemik snarled happily, “my left calf is bigger than you!”

Honestly, he wasn’t really exaggerating…

“Could we focus please, gentlemen? Szymański chided them. “My home, my country, my family, my everything is on the line.”

“We all mean well,” Julian soothed. “We’re here, aren’t we? It’s hard to process something like this. I have friends and family in the line of fire too.”

Right. Maybe that’s what was bothering him. The news hadn’t hit him like he was expecting. Instead of being sad or angry or…anything? It just hit him like, “okay, this is happening now.”

Honestly, his mind was much more on Nightmare and Akyawentuo.

He’d realized pretty quick the colony on Nightmare would never be very big. There simply wasn’t time to get things going at scale, not on a world like that. The goal to shoot for would be a million people. That’s it. Just a million, and work up from there. If they could get that many going on any given world, they’d be self-sustainable.

And they had the same problem on Akyawentuo too. But even multi-world habitation wasn’t enough! Now that the cat was out of the bag, any stationary system was conceivably vulnerable to this kind of attack, so…Lucent. Cimbrean. Yes, Nightmare and Akyawentuo. And Gao.

Shit.

So they needed mobile civilizations. They needed multiple Ekellim-Igigis. They needed to matter as a threat, too. They needed to accommodate ten’gewek and gao.

Holy shit.

He interrupted the brain trust, who were arguing about…uh, black holes? “Hey fellas, I’m sure that your, uh, kugelblitzen are important, but…”

Lewis raised an eyebrow. “But?”

“Well…”

He told them his sudden observation. They considered it. Then set it aside when Nofl pointed out that the problem immediately in front of them took precedence. So Julian sat and listened and took notes and asked pertinent questions for the record as they came up with (and immediately rejected) an increasingly imaginative series of ideas.

Dissipate the beam by taking big stasis or jump bites out of it? Too much beam, not enough time. Diffraction, deflection, diffusion…Everything they could come up with either wouldn’t work in time, wouldn’t work at all, or required prerequisite technologies that themselves would have rendered the whole problem a non-issue anyway…and that was if the cure wasn’t just as bad as the disease.

He kinda had to admire how long they went before giving up, though. Well, giving up for the day. Everyone else said their salutations as the staff drove them toward the hotel.

Lewis and Lucy were staying in the downstairs guest room, as was long established tradition.

“Dude, my brain is sorta fried. I wanna…”

Julian shook his head, and so did Lucy. He still didn’t know how to munke. So.

“I’m into basketball lately. C’mon. I’ll beer you up afterwards.”

“You already beered me up!”

“Oh no, you haven’t tried my neighbor’s brew. He’s got an ale going that’s just…”

“Dude…I need sleep, man. You can drag me into your slab palace in the morning.”

“No. No slab. Ball! Then you can sleep.”

“Fuckin’ swear you don’t know how tiring it is to just sit and think…” Lewis grumbled.

“I do, and it’s a different kinda tired. Trust me, you’ll rest better for it.”

Julian didn’t any kind of genius, but he did know people. Since Nightmare they were the thing he was most interested in.

So, Lewis played some ball. He wasn’t even half bad, and Julian enjoyed taking it easy. They played for a while, and sure enough Lewis was animated and fizzing with ideas again a half-hour later.

And a half-hour after that, he was zonked out like some kind of toned-up stringbean, all tied up in his blankets and pillows like a human knot.

“…He always sleeps like that,” Lucy commented, fondly. “I think it was a…safety thing. When he was an abductee.”

“Yeah. We’ve all got some leftover quirks from that,” Allison agreed. “I remember Amir used to take forever to eat his food, cuz he said it made small portions go further. Julian here is…clingy….And Xiù still slips into Gaori when she’s really upset over something.”

“…It’s shitty that it happened to you.”

“Yeah, well.” Al, shrugged. “Let’s face it, the world would be a different place if it hadn’t…g’night.” She shrugged, then tugged Julian’s arm to gently hint they should leave Lewis and Lucy to sleep.

There was the usual bathroom shuffle, a brief and loving argument about whose turn it was to sleep in the middle…though once that was sorted out and they were all snuggled in, it turned out sleep wasn’t happening, yet. They were comfortable enough, and tired enough, sure…but Julian could see perfectly well he wasn’t the only one lying there and thinking.

“Y’know…it still doesn’t feel real, somehow…” Xiù commented, after a few minutes of staring up at the dark ceiling.

“Right?” Al yawned. “I guess I got so used to the thought that Earth’s safe behind that quarantine shield, it seemed like even if the rest of the galaxy burned, Earth would always be there…”

“No more Vancouver. No more Minnesota. No more Yosemite…”

“Shit, think of how many things are gonna go extinct. Everything we never brought over to Cimbrean…I mean, God. The last whales in the galaxy will be the ones swimming right here…”

“I’m thinking of how many people are gonna die,” Julian rumbled.

“…Yeah.”

Silence.

“…About that.”

“What?” Julian asked.

“I uh…There’s the question of…Alex. My Alex.”

Julian half-rolled, propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her, while Xiù scooted and sat up. “…Shit, Al…” she squeaked.

“He’s my son, babe. I know he…I know there was all that shit with the APA and burning down your house and all of it but…”

“No, no, Al. I get it,” Julian squeezed her hand. “I do. I promise I do. I just…that’s gonna be…”

“A hard sell,” Xiù finished, softly.

“…Yeah. A really hard goddamn sell. He was convicted on terrorism charges, the State Department’s not gonna—”

“I know!” Al snapped, then paused and reined in her frustrations. “I…I know. But what am I supposed to do, not even try? What if it was Anna? Or Harrison?”

“I’m not saying I won’t try. Of course I’ll try. I just…”

Xiù nodded. “He’s saying, ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’”

“I guess.” Al hugged her knees miserably, then blinked furiously, sniffed, and looked to Xiù. “What about your folks?”

Xiù sighed. “Wei’s prototyping firm has links with MBG, he reckons he’s gonna be fine. But…bà and mā…they’re making noises about it not being right for two retired old people to take up space that somebody young could have.”

“Oh, shit, babe…” It was Al’s turn to become the comforting, concerned one.

“They can come here!” Julian objected.

“I said that. They…” Xiù shook her head, her expression a picture of pale misery. “They’ve always been so..stubborn, yijao?”

“Yeah…” Julian had to grant that one. Even with grandchildren and visits and plenty of happy evenings spent with them here, Xiù’s parents had never once been at home to the idea of leaving Vancouver and moving to Folctha. They’d never really completely approved of Allison, and their love for Julian had definitely…waxed, over time, with children and in step with his career.

They were living testament to how incredibly complicated people could be, Julian supposed. A little prejudiced, a little too old-fashioned, often frustrating…but in other ways, also incredibly kind and selfless. After all, what was more selfless than giving up a spot on the lifeboat?

…And that thought, for whatever reason, was what made it all finally land.

It was like, sitting there with Cimbrean’s usual nightly rains drumming on the skylight the way it always did, suddenly something went click in Julian’s mind and he finally got it. Like just for a second he felt every single soul, every single life and story that was ending now, ending hopelessly. Even if they somehow miraculously saved one in ten, despite the best estimate yet being one in twenty…

Even then, there would be more people than not who’d look up to see the sky burn, and leave no legacy at all. And those that did escape would all leave people behind. Nobody was getting out of this unharmed.

Whole cultures would be gone, soon. What would become of his grandfather’s people? Or his grandmother’s? How much of them would survive? How much of anyone would survive?

For a second he stared inwardly at the full enormity of it, and then it rushed forward, hit him in the back of the eyes, forced them tightly shut, and burst through anyway.

Xiù buried herself in his side and held tight, shaking all over. Al climbed over, wrapped them both in her arms, and held them. Julian thanked God he had them both, had his family and their safety already sorted out…But just for the moment, those blessings seemed tiny and selfish.

Even so, he held them as tight as he dared. It was a long time before the grief subsided enough for any of them to stir.

And longer still before they finally lay back down and, fitfully, slept.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam (Warhorse) Arés

“Go long!”

Diego could be a tough kid to tire out, and he had a knack for getting into trouble when he had too much energy on board. Adam could remember being like that himself.

Fortunately, Adam had an arm like a cannon. The ball reached its apex halfway down the field, with Diego tearing along under its flight path, looking over his shoulder, watching, raising his hands…

Adam grinned as he leapt like a fish and caught it high up in the air, then fluidly turned his sprint into a vault over the park railing. He’d been kinda worried Diego was gonna run into the fence. Instead, he parkoured that shit like a ninja without losing a step.

“Niiiice!”

Diego was a supremely athletic young boy in every sense, much like Adam had been. Swift, and nimble, and tough and strong. Brave, too. Not afraid to tussle. He couldn’t be more proud.

But…he had Adam’s aggression and somewhat extreme ability, too. He wasn’t tall for an almost ten-year-old, but he was robust; his weight had begun to skyrocket into Young Hero territory lately, just like Adam had experienced growing up. He had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, that size and aggression were the things that let Adam achieve all he’d managed, but they also nearly ruined him too, many times.

For Diego, getting his anger under control (and his appetite, most days) had been the big problem of his early childhood. And it would be going into his adulthood too, Adam knew. Been there, done that. Diego had heard more than a few pep-talks about those kinds of feelings. And would be getting many more, when he inevitably got into trouble.

Right now though, he came trotting back with a huge grin on his face, tossing the ball from hand to hand. “I got it!” he announced, redundantly. “That was an easy one!”

Yup. Time to start moving up to the weighted footballs. Not today, though. Today…

Well, this time Adam didn’t hold back. His arm whipped through the air, making an audible thump as it moved—God he loved that he could do that. He sent the ball sailing as far as he could throw it, which was probably going to be across the entire park.

It’d give him a couple minutes to play with his other children. Samuel wasn’t quite up to that level yet; he was barely six, and still a bit uncoordinated. And thankfully, still not quite a developing freakshow like Diego was becoming. He would be in time of course, but for now…

Paz, though. Paz was going to be a terror to eclipse both her brothers, he could already tell.

Right now, Marty was wrangling her with one hand while fetching ice-cream with the other. It was a magnificent display of mom-juggling, probably made easier by the fact that Paz was very interested in the ice cream, and therefore not inclined to run off somewhere, for the moment.

Time to have a bit of work chat, and a bit of future chat.

“Love days like this,” he sighed happily. Any day he got to wrassle with his boys and his dog was a good day. Doofus was getting pretty old now with a lot of gray on his muzzle, but he hadn’t lost any of his infamous Bozo-inherited ability, either. And he’d fathered a litter or…well, six now…as well, just like his dad. The Cimbrean Mastiff was a must-have breed, nowadays.

Assuming you could handle them. Not everyone could handle a dog as big as a linebacker and jacked like a bodybuilding pitbull, even if their personalities were usually pretty chill.

Marty maneuvered their grabby-handsing daughter onto the seat next to her, handed her some distraction ice cream, handed another one to Samuel, then finally flicked some stray hair out of her face and smiled at him. “We don’t get enough of them, do we?”

“God, I don’t even know when we’re gonna get another chance…” Adam glanced over to the park’s north-east end, where cranes had popped up like mushrooms. From what he gathered, the city had pushed through a huge tenement construction project.

“Yeah. Gonna get busy around here very soon…” Marty rolled up Paz’s sleeves to keep them from getting sticky. “And I guess you’re gonna be busy too.”

There wasn’t a hint of reproach or blame in her voice, she was perfectly matter-of-fact. Even so, Adam did feel a guilty prickling in his conscience. “Well…yeah. Anything I can do to save lives.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she told him. “We’re proud of you, you know that.”

“Yeah, but…I know you were thinking I’d retire after my wound and recovery…”

“Adam, I made peace a long time ago with the idea that the only two things that would ever stop you would be death, or being too broken to carry on. And I’m glad you’re alive, and I’m glad you’re well. If that means you don’t stop…well, that’s just you being you. And I love you. So do me a favor and let’s actually talk about what’s coming, hmm? ‘Cuz you’ve been putting it off.”

“People are sad a lot…” Diego observed, returning with the ball. He pounced on his ice cream and sat down. “They’re saying at school that the Earth’s gonna burn up and lots of people are gonna die…”

“Yeah, mijo. It’s exactly that bad.”

“You’re gonna help, though? That’s what you do.”

“As much as I can, yeah.”

“How?”

“Well…the same way I always do, I guess.” Adam stirred his ice cream with the little wooden spoon-thing it had come with. “Except, the usual way I help people is to…kinda…dive into the danger they’re in, and smash it until it leaves ‘em alone enough so I can pull them out. But, that’s not gonna work this time.”

“Why not?”

“Some dangers can’t be smashed,” Marty said, simply. She reached out and wiped a speck of melted ice-cream of Diego’s face. “Some things, nobody can stop. All we can do is…get out of the way, and build something new to replace what we lost.”

Diego frowned. “So…you’re gonna do what you always do…which is smash stuff…except this time that’s not gonna work. But you’re gonna do it anyway?”

“I…” Adam paused. The amused twinkle in Marty’s eye didn’t help him formulate a reply at all. “I mean I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m sure Daar has ideas.”

“And be fair on yourself, you do a lot more than smash stuff,” Marty pointed out.

“I guess. I know…some people are going to Akyawentuo, and they’re gonna need training to handle the gravity? Well, Julian will handle that probably…but yeah. Maybe. We’ll see.” He looked down at Diego. “Sometimes the best thing to do is just be there and be willing. You never know what you can do! I never imagined any of this when I was your age!”

Diego frowned as he thought about that, then shrugged and ate his ice cream in silence. Marty smiled, then scooted round to sit closer to Adam.

“So. Let’s actually talk,” she said. “Because, uh…Singularity has already paid a visit to Freya and Christian. I think we can guess what they’re interested in.”

Adam winced. “Wow, that’s not subtle at all, huh?”

“Nope!”

“Did their agent survive?” He couldn’t help but grin, imaging the scene.

Marty giggled at that. “Somehow! But I had a talk with her. They’re…making plans, babe. Plans that have a lot to do with who exactly is going to make it off Earth. And we both know that isn’t going to be pretty.”

“No,” Adam sighed. “And they’ll be more interested in Hero babies, I presume?”

“Broader, actually. They’ve decided their mission is to preserve Earth’s genetic diversity. They’ve been doing it for millennia already, for basically everything. Now they want to do it openly.”

“Meaning…what?”

“They way they explained it to Freya is…it’s gonna be women and children first,” she said, unhappily. “And those women and children are going to need families.”

Adam frowned. “Everyone’s losing family,” he said.

“Exactly. And there’s a lot more to raising good people than just good genes. They need stability, family, teachers. All those orphans leaving Earth…they’re gonna need damage control. Somebody to pick them back up and show them the world didn’t end. So, Singularity’s reaching out to see who can manage that. And, y’know. Who’s willing to, uh… expand their family.”

Adam wasn’t stupid enough to miss that particular bit of emphasis. Two questions came to his head; he asked the easier one, first.

“Knowing Christian and Freya, they told ‘em to go to—” he remembered the kids suddenly, “uh, go take a standing leap, I guess?”

Marty laughed, “well, yeah! Of course they did. But I was sitting there listening to Freya vent about it, and all I could think was…don’t Singularity kinda have a point?”

Adam blanked. “…A point.”

“Well…yeah!” She replied, suddenly a bit more defensive. “I mean, just from, y’know a logical perspective.”

Adam frowned, but invited her to elaborate with a tilt of his head. She tidied up Paz for a second while she thought, then scooted an inch forward on the bench.

“Look…Freya and Christian have their way, and I respect them. But neither of them are…they don’t really step back and look past their gut reaction, do they?”

“I guess not…” Adam conceded. “But to be fair, the both of them are pretty conservative. I don’t doubt they’ll open their home and maybe even adopt whenever Freya feels like slowing down, but…look, ‘fuck for the Motherland’ is kinda fuckin’ creepy.”

“Papá—!” Diego grinned cheekily at him, and held out a palm. Adam blinked, then realized he owed a couple moneys to the swear jar.

“Ugh…” Adam fished in his pocket, found a couple of two-pound coins, and dropped them in the kid’s hand. “Anyway. Creepy, is the point.”

Marty took advantage. “Creepy? Why, Mister Warhorse! I don’t remember you needing much prompting back in the day. There was that fivesome with Murray as I recall—”

Adam decided the time had come to stop that right now, especially seeing as he did not want to explain to Diego—

“And ‘Base and ‘Righteous—” Marty continued, devilishly.

“Enough, Marty! God! You’re terrible sometimes. And I was a horny boy then!”

“I know. I married that horny boy, remember? And he grew up in to an even hornier man with far bigger needs.”

“…What’s ‘horny?’” Diego asked.

“It means he loves women very much,” Marty supplied automatically. “You’ll find out more in a few years, promise.”

“Oh, you mean sex,” Diego nodded, and promptly lost interest in favor of a scrape he’d acquired on his left knee.

“Marty…” Adam groaned, palmed his whole face, rubbed it down to his chin with a rasp of calluses on stubble, then looked her dead in the eye. “Look…what are you trying to get to here?”

“I’m saying they’re gonna come around to us with a similar kind of proposition soon, and…I wanna hear them out. Not just slam the door in their face.”

“Are you saying you’re…willing to expand our family?”

:”I’m…not opposed to it, no. Honestly…no. Uh…not at all.”

The idea…well, it made him squirm a bit just thinking about it. Because, yeah, other women were nice to look at and señor pene sometimes got out in front of Adam’s brain, and Christ knew he wanted lots and lots of kids which…well, the three they had were a blessing.

But there was only one Martina.

She smiled, reached across the table, and took both his hands in hers. “Look…the other thing you do besides smash stuff, is you also build people. You seem to have endless capacity for it. And that’s a skill a lot of people are going to need, soon. So when they come to talk to us, let’s be…cooler-headed than the Firths, ey?”

It felt like they were sitting on the edge of a big turning point. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know! It could mean a lot of things. Lot of young boys who are gonna need a father figure in their lives, right? Start with that. And…let’s not take anything off the table without thinking about it good and hard, first. Adam…the world needs more men like you. And men like that need a dad like you, too. So…open mind.”

Adam watched her closely a moment longer, his brain turning over what she was, and wasn’t, saying. Until Paz’s newest dogged attempt at escape forced her to turn and intercept, anyway. When she’d finished that, she turned back and gave him a look that said she had more to say, but not in front of the kid who was old enough to understand it.

He nodded his understanding, then grabbed the football and rose. “Alright, mijo. You ready for more? I’m gonna send this one.”

Diego, who’d been watching his parents with the bored energy of a boy trying to figure out Adult Stuff, perked up, sprang up, and was running with a giggle even before Adam had even finished speaking. Good.

Adam’s arm made the air go thump again, this time with all his considerable strength. The ball vanished into the distance, with Diego doing a decent job of keeping up atop those sturdy muscular legs of his. Adam grinned his big goofy grin, the one that had taken so long to come back to him…

Then he turned, sat down (carefully) and pulled Marty into his lap. They held for a moment.

“Right. So. Tell me what else is on your mind.”

She sighed, and put aside the book she’d been about to read to Samuel before shooing him off her lap to go play in the kiddy playground instead. “…Three miscarriages is enough, Adam,” she said once he’d bumbled off to go climb and slide and swing. “I can’t…I’m glad for Paz, I’m glad we didn’t give up. But I don’t think I have it in me to go for any more.””

Adam nodded, and hugged her tighter. It had been…so hard for them both, but her especially. She wanted a big family, if anything even more than Adam did. But, biology had stopped her at three, for whatever reason. And the third had been difficult enough.

Suddenly, her thoughts made a lot more sense.

“I’m guessing you’re thinking how I’ve got all my tenants on expiring leases to remodel the building, too.”

“That…yeah. We could do a lot of good, baby. And the world needs good and love right now.”

“I…right.” Adam nodded along, and then again with more agreement. “We’d be great, uh, uncles and aunts for a lot of families…but you’re not just talking that, are you.”

She sat a bit apart, then turned and faced Adam directly. “Babe, I’mma be blunt. I think the Heroes thing is bullshit, right? Always have. But I’m not stupid enough to think it wasn’t necessary. Just…look at all that’s happened! And I don’t doubt the space Bene Gesserit—who was it that made the analogy first?”

“Wilde.”

“Right. Dead on, that. Anyway. They’re gonna get what they want. But here’s you, apparently a one-hundred-percent natural Hero, and you’re at least the equal of any of the others, Firth and Julian included. In fact, I think you’re probably better and you’re gonna prove it.”

…A lot of emphasis on that last bit, there. Okay. That…okay..

The conversation paused while Adam stood for another round of Diego-ball. It was getting serious, now: Diego had ditched his sandals. Samuel was entirely content fooling around in the nearby climbing frame, and Paz was happy if she could randomly wave books around.

Okay, kid. This time, Adam threw it over and through some obstacles.

That bought them another minute or two. “I don’t think I get why that’s important to you, though,” he said. “I mean…I’m not gonna lie and pretend I don’t see what’s in it for me, but…”

“Egh, I don’t know…I’m still trying to figure it out myself. All I know is, Freya was bitching about it and I was like…’this is literally the end of the world.’ I don’t think we can, y’know. Play at it.”

“…Play at it.”

“I don’t know! Just…promise me you’ll keep an open mind, okay?”

“That, I can promise,” Adam squeezed her hand. She nodded, squeezed back, then leaned forward to smooch his nose, then his lips. “But, I mean…I married you. That’s important.”

“You did. And in five years, we’ll be in a whole different world. You…you’ll need to be father to a whole lot of scared and alone children. And that’s…” She stopped, and fussed with Paz a little.

Adam understood.

“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” he promised.

“It’s coming soon.”

“I know. But…c’mon, when have I ever shied away from throwing myself into whatever needs doing? When have either of us?”

She smiled. Even laughed, softly and silently. “Never.”

“Never,” he agreed, and rose to throw the ball again.

He wasn’t…entirely how he felt about all that. Marty had cracked open a big door and, well…he obviously had some seriously conflicting feelings about all that.

But the opportunity to save kid’s lives? In a way few could do?

Well. Saving lives was what mattered. In whatever way he could do it…

But he had another life to save, first. They played at the park for a bit longer, then the kids were off to la casa del abuelo for the weekend. Marty ran chores and all the rest of the things she insisted on doing herself, while Adam got a good few hours of heavy lifting in: daily work done.

He racked the bar, showered, changed into his dry clothes, then catpawed himself directly back upstairs. Quietly through the door, sneak as best he could—and he could sneak, when he wanted…he found Marty on the roof, gardening.

His blood was up, after his lift. And instinct sure wanted something, all right…

Not this time, though. This time, she needed something less…typical.

He growled quietly to give her the barest warning, then…wrapped her up, gently, from behind. “You’re mine,” he murmured softly next to her ear. “You’ll always be mine. And I’ll always be yours.”

She melted into him, almost immediately. Tonight was about the heart. And he still wasn’t good with his words on stuff like that, but hugs and cuddles were never the wrong thing to do.

They…both had to grieve what was about to happen. For a lot of reasons. So they grieved. First one way, then, when they were feeling it, another. Spent the whole weekend wrapped up in each other, in fact, tenderly and fiercely, quietly and loud.

And come Monday morning, they were ready to face the world again.

Christian (Righteous) Firth

“Still can’t believe the fucking audacity…”

“Darlin’,” Firth chuckled tiredly, and ran his mitts up over those fine pelvis-straddling hips of hers, “you’re still buttmad about that? Th’ fuck I gotta do? You done drained me fuckin’ dry!”

“Liar,” she grinned, feelin’ up along his stomach and either flank, approving of his hard-earned physique. Not that he was complaining. He was the best a man could be and was more than happy to give it all to her. Freya was the first woman in his life who could absolutely ruin him, and took it as her supreme wifely duty to do so whenever and wherever there was a chance.

God bless marriage! Her solution to his horny rabbit nature was to play back, and win.

And he couldn’t really say no, even when the rest of him was begging to stop. Such a burden.

Well, actually…yeah. Crude endurance was a hell of a thing, and probably the best side effect of it all. It was a long climb up and sometimes just as long a climb down, and he hadn’t exactly been known as a quick-an’-dirty type beforehand, neither. They hadn’t even finished coming down from the last round and she was already workin’ for more. All she had to do was move her hips just so and he was gripping at her waist, liftin’ her up an’ down for yet another go, groaning against his own self-control, instantly and almost painfully rejuvenated….

It was what they both needed, and she groaned herself, letting him do all the work while she worked him in turn with all her arts. “You tell me you’re done,” she said with a sultry need, “and before you even finished you’re already pushing out my breath…” she stretched luxuriantly atop him, and it was again all he could do to hold back. But hold back he did, and they rode the edge between pleasure and climax together for a long, well-practiced afternoon…

She knew him perfectly, knew how much he could take. Right at the moment he would have growled, flipped her over and commenced to plowin’ her fertile fields good an’ deep…

She grinned wickedly. “But today’s your lucky day. I’m making deer stew.”

And with that, she just perfunctorily detangled herself, ignoring his groaning yelps and frustrated chuckle…and claimed the shower.

Right. Well.

Awesome welcome-home aside, and now alone to his thoughts and a raging case of blue-balls, while the shower sputtered to life…yeah. Okay. Catch his breath, give the world a think to distract a bit.

First, deer stew. Almost worth the price! He’d taken a few good ones on his last trip, and given the state of things, he might not ever get to taste deer again. So…

And Singularity? She had a point. That was a hell of a thing they’d asked. And a ballsy thing to ask, too. He was mildly surprised she hadn’t killed the poor messenger, bein’ honest!

He mighta. Or at least made his displeasure unmistakably known. Not even gonna lie, and they prob’ly knew it, too. Fuckers.

And it wasn’t like he didn’t unnerstand the brass-tacks of it. Shit was gonna get real, and get real really soon. But what the fuck was he gonna do? Ol’ Christian found the woman of his dreams, and swore before God to keep and to love her until death did them part. Besides: even if he were the type to go in for that—and he gleefully had been as a younger man, no denying it—nowadays the very thought was sort of…

He had his wife, a woman that could handle him both emotionally and physically, and she a man that could handle her, because she had needs too and the man who could meet them was a rare critter. For people like them, finding each other was a genuine blessing. He could say that without any ego. Anyone else would just be too…

Whatever. He was a blessed man. And his woman was in the shower, all alone, and not-so-little Righteous reminded him that he’d been lying to himself if he believed he was any kind of satisfied. Give him a minute, with all that body-made Crude fillin’ up his big ol’ balls…

Heh. Time to get dirty in the shower. The kids wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. They had all day and all night to play. As for her…a little sneak, a little grab, a growl in her ear.

“Blue-ballin’ me like that? ‘Yer gonna pay, darlin’…”

She didn’t seem unhappy with her punishment.

Time to enjoy life, while life was there to be enjoyed.

Heathrow jump terminal, London, UK

Professor Tilly Briggs

“Are you sure this will go well?”

Tilly squeezed Tavon’s hand and grinned at him. He was…not like Vemik. At all. Well, no, that wasn’t true: He wasn’t physically like Vemik, because nobody human really could be. But he had the same kind of mind, the same inventive, thoughtful, distractible personality that went fizzing off in a billion directions while he thought about stuff. It took a weird kind of brain to succeed as an inventor and tinkerer, but here he was: Tavon Reed, patent owner, with a poster of Nikola Tesla up in his workshop and a full-time job working for the same prototyping firm as Xiù’s brother.

Small world? Well…yes, the world of ten’gewek-adjacent folks was small.

But about to get a whole lot bigger, very quickly.

“Relax! He’s not…well, yes. He is a savage. But a very smart one! His fondest wish for me when we left was that I, to quote, ‘find a nice pretty boy and ruin him.’ So…have I?”

“Yes ma’am!” He replied with a filthy grin. “I feel spoiled rotten.”

“Good! He’ll be fine. Just think of him like a smart superjock. They’re all like that. And they mean well, I promise.”

“Oh joy, more superjocks…there won’t be any lockers nearby to stuff me in, I hope?”

Tavon had been a bookish kid growing up in a place where nerds weren’t well-appreciated. Rather than depress him, it’d made him a hell of a scrapper. Tall-ish, lean, not all that big, but he was fit and strong, and could absolutely beat someone senseless, in the ring or out of it.

In short, he ticked all Tilly’s boxes.

“I think you two will get along fine. You’ll get wrassled, though. And you’re going to lose.”

She grinned at that.

Things were already chaos at the jump facility, with a lot of security. They escorted the two of them in with a perfunctory act of force that spoke to a tired, unhappy security detail, and it wasn’t hard to see why: there’d been people camping out there, with signs up and thirsty expressions. Four years to go, and they already looked like the apocalypse was only days away.

“Shit,” Tavon noted sadly. “It’s only going to get worse, ain’t it?”

Tilly nodded. “Be very grateful for this. I sure as shit know I am. And whatever you do, become indispensable to the effort.”

“Ain’t gotta tell me twice…so. Tell me about this Vemik. I gotta be jealous?”

“He’s what they call a Given-Man, and a very, very young one. Only a couple of his Given-Man friends are as young as he. It’s a biological change they go through, kinda like a second puberty of sorts? Except it’s triggered by social standing and the lack of another Given-Man around to keep other dominant males suppressed…”

“Wait, like a queen bee, sorta?”

“…Yeah, actually. We’re not sure if it’s pheromonal though. They have a ridiculously acute sense of smell but…not passively. They have to actively ‘taste’ the air, kinda like a lizard. It’s a strange adaptation since they do have a nasal passage, it just opens into the roof of their mouth.”

“Alien biology, I guess…” Tavon nodded as they waited their turn to pass through the scanners and biofilter fields.

“He’s also incredibly smart. They used to call him ‘Sky-Thinker,’ before he became Given-Man and that name was Given to the gods. He…when he was little he spent a lot of time looking at the moon and the stars and thinking about stuff. He even invented the bow and arrow! I’ve told you all this before…”

“Yes, and every time you get misty-eyed.” Tavon chuckled. “You didn’t answer my real question. Do I need to be jealous?”

“Absolutely! He’s very handsome. And basically carved out of marble. And stuff.”

Tavon laughed a little louder, attracting some stares from nearby people. Not many were laughing right now, but…Tilly’d found she and Tavon needed to laugh in order to function. “And do I need to be worried? I hear ten’gewek are basically all bisexual and promiscuous…”

“He’d be delighted to have us both, I’m sure,” Tilly would too, come to that. “Not worried, though, no. Unless you aren’t clear when you say no, in which case, well…”

“What?” He grinned roguishly. “Afraid I might enjoy it?”

“Afraid you wouldn’t survive him, if you catch my meaning. And I’m only slightly joking.”

He snorted, but nodded. She’d been particularly careful to say ‘when’ and not ‘if,’ she realized. Because honestly…she didn’t need the emotional complication of that in her life right now. Boundaries. Yes.

And they grew a bit harder to enforce once they’d jumped through, direct to Akyawentuo. The heat and humidity and most especially the gravity settled on her like a familiar blanket. She’d…really missed it, she realized.

Tavon stumbled for a moment, as he got his legs under him. “You wern’t kidding! This normal weather?”

“This is cool. It can get as high as fifty-five degrees for months at a time.”

“In American?”

“About a hundred-thirty. So Death Valley but with full humidity.”

“Shit, girl. That’s deadly…”

“It can be, yeah. Ten’gewek are well-adapted, it’s why they have that huge crest, it’s for evaporative cooling. So yeah, they sweat, a lot. And their body temp can run really hot. They average…oh, one-oh-two in American,” she giggled, and he rolled his eyes. “But if they’re working hard it can hit one-twenty and stay there.”

“We’re going to need a lot of air conditioning…”

“Yes, and we’ll need to wean people off it too.”

“…And off clothes, it looks like,” Tavon added, eyeballing a nearby lean and extremely fit younger man who was unloading some cargo from the jump pad in a pair of shorts scarcely more modest than a ten’gewek’s loincloth.

Yeah, that was…life was going to be different here. And Tilly’s job, the whole reason she was here, was to try and prepare a report so the powers that be could estimate how many people could be evacuated to Akyawentuo.

And the answer, frankly, was potentially a great many indeed. Daniel Hurt had proven that even a fairly ordinary man could adjust to the gravity, heat, humidity and all the rest of it, but the permanent human population here ever since they’d arrived had number a couple dozen at most, supported entirely by imported goods from Earth.

Self-sufficiency, though?

Well. Humans made far more efficient use of the land. A ten’gewek village’s footprint was enormous, covering as it did the roaming range of several werne herds, with effectively all the villagers being involved full-time in the hunting, gathering and preservation process.

Human agriculture, on the other hand, was at the point where one farmer could keep the whole village fed. And there was a lot of planet on offer. The remaining ten’gewek numbered in the tens of thousands, all clustered in one huge rainforest on one continent. There were four other continents, millions upon millions of acres of rich arable breadbasket land, and humanity was welcome to all of it as far as the Lodge was concerned.

Therein lay the problem. Save as many humans as possible, and just by the end of the evacuation the ten’gewek would be outnumbered on their own homeworld. Give it a generation or two, and they’d be a statistically vanishing minority.

The coming of human civilization would absolutely change life for the ten’gewek in ways none could foresee. Larger populations would bring missionaries, for a start. People whose entire purpose was the assimilation and conversion of local culture.

Looking at the men laboring in basically a pair of running shorts, though, Tilly had to wonder if maybe it’d go the other way. The ten’gewek had a way of making human notions of modesty seem…silly. Or was it the heat? Either way…

“You don’t need clothes here in the jungle, really,” she said aloud. “Just something to keep bits and tits in place. Anyway, I expect we’ll be ambushed by—“ she looked up at a familiar hoot. “Holy shit, Vemik?!”

A god of the forest, naked of all but his knives and a giant nuclear-red crest, thumped down from what had to be several stories up as effortlessly as Tilly might hop a curb onto the street.

“I hear you coming back. Hi!”

“…Fuck, you’ve grown.”

“Yes!” He had a baritone voice to excavate mountain ranges and she was finding herself distracted in ways she really didn’t want to be, just then. Oblivious, he galloped over with a big fangy grin and swallowed her up in a massive ten’gewek-style hug, holding himself up by his coiled tail as he wrapped his arms and legs around and crushed her breath-takingly tightly against the hot-to-the-touch iron of his perfect body.

It was a hug that brought back an endless array of feelings and seemed like it lasted forever, but after just a minute he let go and backed away slightly to stand on his feet. She had to look up at him now, and his expression was nothing but innocent, total happiness.

“I missed you!” he exclaimed, smile so handsome it almost hurt to behold. She stepped back and took it all in.

She hadn’t exaggerated. He was perfect.

In every way.

He stood an easy six feet now, at least as tall as Tavon. Vemik was a giant by Ten’Gewek standards! He’d grown proportionally far wider and thicker then she’d have expected too, and seemed nearly as wide and deep as he was tall, even despite the exaggerated breadth of his chest compared to his powerfully thick waist. He was still a young cuboid of a cavemonkey to be sure, but he was also quite a bit more mature-looking from toe to crest-top; Vemik was quickly becoming a younger twin of Yan. Training with the Humans had left a severely healthy look about him, like it did with all the soldier ten’gewek in the news, but on him it was ten times more, his youth giving him a face and body of the fucking gods.

This all-grown-up Vemik Given-Man was…breathtaking. Shit. Shit!

She hadn’t been prepared for this!

“Good to see you again,” she eventually managed.

“We all missed you! And…very glad you back here now.” The situation was somewhat mollified by the heavy sadness behind his expression; he’d never been good at faking his feelings. He was feeling the pain of Earth’s loss too.

She still couldn’t quite process the change, though. “You’ve…really grown,” she almost stammered.

He trilled quietly, “Yes! Fire never stopped in me, only gets stronger every spring. Only one human heavier, stronger than me now!” He trilled proudly at that. “Also! In beginning of prime now. Am maybe, uh, twenty-five! Well, in Earth years,” He hooted sadly, mentioning Earth again, but immediately cheered. “Is like if I were twenty-one as a human! And you are Pro-fess-or now! Why you not send for me?! Would have been big party!”

Well, she did had a ready-made answer to that.

“I was too busy getting screwed silly by my boyfriend here!”

Tavon immediately choked back a laugh, and now Vemik’s full attention was on him. He let go of her and prowled over, like a predator examining its prey.

He rose to his full height and squared up, leaving nothing in doubt between them. “…Vemik Given-Man.” He followed up with the traditional thump of right fist over chest.

Tavon nodded, and bravely proffered a hand. “Tavon Reed. How you doin’?”

Vemik’s giant leathery hamslab of a mitt swallowed Tavon’s hand entirely but…he was civilized, and Tavon merely winced heavily. “Good grip for a human.” His tongue came out and lashed the air, while he tilted his head, examining, thinking…

“…Okay. You’ll do.”

High praise. Tilly grinned at Tavon, saw that he knew it was high praise, and decided that they’d spent enough precious time on reunion. For now.

“So…what does the Lodge think about our proposal?” she asked.

Vemik answered as he picked up their luggage trunks, one over each shoulder, while Tavon silently boggled at the minor show of strength.

Tilly suppressed a giggle. If you think that’s impressive, hun, just you wait.

Vemik replied, (maybe deliberately) oblivious to the microdrama. “Lodge agrees, this is the Giving we always knew was coming. The People are only alive because of humans, so…now we restore the balance at last. And we don’t need the grasslands.”

“Still,” Tilly worried. “There may well be a very great many of us, Vemik. Many millions.”

“We know.” His tail twitched dismissively. “And we know your history, do very much reading. We think you will be smarter this time, because you need us. City-people have always needed us forest people, and have always outnumbered us. Maybe you will be smarter than the others.”

Well, that was sure a self-assured statement of confidence! Still, “One or two city-states is not the same as ten million, or a hundred million. You won’t be able to fight us off…”

“No, but you can’t make us fight for you, either. And you worry for us!” Vemik trilled, “That is not something enemy would do, yes?”

“Not all of us are level-headed,” she warned.

“No, but you won’t be saving the stupid ones.” Well. That was blunt. “Our stupid ones die in the hunt, yours now die in fire. You don’t have time to be nice.” Wow, super blunt! He continued, “So now we have big learnings, of new kind of strong together! The gods will be pleased.”

“I hope you’re right…” Tavon added.

Vemik trilled and gave him a fangy smile. “Me too!” Back to Tilly. “But, only thing is, Brown One is sacred. Some Given-Men worry what’ll happen if human towns have to shoot too many…”

“We have ways of keeping them away without killing. Tranquilizers, ultrasonic deterrents, electric fences…something’ll work,” Tilly predicted.

“Sounds like a fun project,” Tavon noted distractedly, as his eyes were suddenly noticing the place he was in. Tilly smiled, remembering her own first time when the sheer scale of a ketta tree finally struck her. “Holy shit that’s a big tree.”

Several things happened very quickly. First, Vemik hooted happily, “Yes! Come I show you!”

Second, his long-ass tail whipped out and bound up the two of them into a crushing embrace against his back, he set the trunks down—

Third, he leaped up like a fucking grasshopper onto the same thick, wide branch he’d been waiting on for them, then grabbed, kicked off and flung, grabbed, flung again and in a handful of breathtaking seconds, they’d rocketed all the way up into the canopy. She didn’t dare guess how high it was. It was fall-and-die-instantly high, no doubt.

Tavon made a shocked noise, but Tilly had long ago learned to let herself be taken by it and enjoy the ride. They’d spent many long days and nights up there, alone and private…

God it was good to be back. Even in the circumstances.

They got to know each other, then. It turned out that Tavon and Vemik got along very well, more or less exactly as she’d hoped they would. A little too well; Vemik was already teasing him and nosing about for good stories. Well. Facing about, maybe.

And he showed off, too. Boys were apparently boys the universe over and there was no stopping the testosterone energy once it got going. Tavon boggled at a monkey-bicep literally bigger than his entire head and even tried punching Vemik in the gut, once the cavemonkey had dared him to try, and let his superhuman abdominals go as slack as he could.

One throbbing fist and sore wrist later, Tavon sarcastically intoned he “wasn’t going to fight the deathmonkey anytime soon.” Vemik trilled happily at that—pecking order established no doubt—and immediately went about asking hilariously awkward questions about his dark skin.

After a bit more fun, they collectively realized it was time to get on with the day. They were up dizzyingly high but of course ten’gewek had no fear of heights, so in reverse of their ascent, he again trapped them in his tail and they quite suddenly crashed back down. Vemik was thankfully mindful that a normal human couldn’t jump down from literally the top of the canopy like his people could…but he was sure happy to push the limits of what they could tolerate.

He was showing off again, and also teaching Tavon his actual limits; a hard lesson any human had to learn when it came to arboreal movement. So, it was still a rough ride. They actually bounced when he jumped down the last several stories, and that was again not something he needed to do; if it was just him, he’d have just stepped off the branch from up high and fell.

As it was, it was a brain-shakingly violent landing, even supported. She’d never loved that part.

“Shit, man!” Tavon shook his head and wobbled to his feet. “I know you were being gentle, too.”

Vemik trilled, “Is okay! You tougher than you think! But most humans different kinds of strong. Small-strong we say! Very tough people, endless small-strength and clever hands. Nose!”

“Thanks…I guess?”

Vemik trilled again. “Is good! The gods make us good friends to meet, I think. Earth is hard place for man like me to live. But you here on our world now, and things are different.” He looked around and found a big rock, maybe the size of a basketball. He put it in Tavon’s hands.

Tavon grunted as he realized how heavy it was, and strained to lift it up. “Damn…shit’s heavy here!”

“Yes. Very heavy rock, many humans couldn’t pick up! Now, break it.”

Tavon gave him a Look. “Man, I ain’t that strong.”

“I know. Try anyway. This is a learning.”

Tavon looked back at Tilly, who nodded. Tavon had fairly big hands as humans usually went, but this thing was too heavy to hold casually, and certainly too big to hurt. He tried, grunted for a bit…nothing. Not even a flake, and nobody was surprised.

“Right, so like I said…”

Vemik reached over and palmed the stone with a single massive monkeypaw, then began effortlessly juggling it between his hands. “Hard stone, I think a kind of granite. Not so good for tools. But—“

Vemik’s forearm exploded hugely outward into an obscene display of writhing muscle and sinew. Without so much as a grunt of effort, he crumbled the rock apart in his left hand, almost like it was little more than a clod of dirt under his strength.

“—Sometimes a sharp piece might happen, make a good tool. Never know until you squeeze it open. Or maybe, village is up high and prey below, so you must climb cliff with strong grip and heavy werne wrapped in tail. Or jump up high with prey, or jump down, or maybe you miss with spear, so you move fast and wrassle to break prey and live. Need very hard and strong belly to manage those things!”

He strummed his fingers loudly over the thick washboard of his flawless ten-pack, then put a couple of the broken pieces in-between the grooves of his (seriously huge) abs, tightened his belly…and shattered those too. “Do you see? You need a different kind of strength here.”

And you don’t have it, was the obvious message. Tilly felt a bit faint.

Tavon nodded seriously. “I take your point.”

Vemik wasn’t quite done though. He raised his arms and flexed, then quickly did the same with the rest of his body. With a snarl he loudly slapped his sinewy legs to draw attention to them—each was quite a bit thicker than his own thickly-muscled waist—and finally he pushed his toes right through the flat stone he was standing on, to really drive his point home.

Drive several points home, really. He grinned at Tilly and winked.

“Good,” back to Tavon. “Always know your strength. Now let’s find you comfy bed!”

Housing was arranged, Vemik helpfully ported their trunks over, and they found a free unit available in the stackable housing brought in for the expedition. It was on the second floor and Vemik couldn’t physically fit through the stairway with the trunks on his shoulders, but that was okay. Rather than puzzle it out, ask for help or whatever, he simply jumped up from the ground and sailed over the second-floor rail as easily as if he’d taken a large step.

In a testament to its toughness, the building didn’t shake all that much. Vemik did dent the floor grating when he landed, though. Which he didn’t notice. They unlocked the little dorm room and Vemik happily shoved the trunks in, then leaned in against the doorway to grin, his shoulders comfortably resting well outside and across the door’s entire outer frame. The rest of him completely plugged the doorway from thick chest down to his monster calves.

“So you get sleep tonight, yes? And unpack and things?”

“That’s the plan. Meet with the rest of the expedition, say hello to professor Hurt…”

“He miss you! Had to go to out-village though, won’t be back until tomorrow.”

“Wait. How do you know that?” Tavon asked. “Like…pigeons? Whistling? Smoke signals?”

Vemik blinked. “Radio.”

“…Oh.”

Vemik thought that was hilarious and trilled loudly. “Of course radio! Why would we waste good kindling making smoke when radio is a thing? Some human tech is very good idea. How you think I get so big? I lift! And lift smart too.”

“And eat whole neymas all to yourself,” Tilly added.

“And drink them too! Very fun prey to crush.”

Neither bothered to explain to Tavon what was meant by that.

“But yes,” Tilly said in closing. “We need to rest, unpack…maybe I need to reclaim my man…”

“Damn right!” Tavon’s arms came around her and she wriggled back into his grip.

“Good!” Vemik retorted. “You fuck her good now! Or maybe you want we all fuck?”

“Vemik!” Tilly laughed, exasperated.

“What?! Air tastes horny near you two, and you both keep looking at me…”

“You’re too big not to look at!”

“And too pretty. And good and big everywhere! Maybe you want to look close, get a taste—”

VEMIK!!”

“Fine!” he trilled, mischief over. “Humans, so shy…anyway you come visit in morning! I bring in good werne, maybe nayma too! Need to put some meat on Tavon if he gonna be your man. I see what he can do tomorrow…maybe he see what I can do, feel me and get a good thrill!”

The friendly snarl he offered wasn’t entirely friendly, nor was the quick bout of showing off; hampered and enhanced in this case by his legs being too thick to fit through the door. Tavon was going to be hurting tomorrow, she could tell.

But then small talk was over and they were alone, Vemik having leapt straight up into the trees and was swinging away like a blur. Tavon looked like he was feeling good about it all, despite the warning of pain to come. Or at least amused, anyway.

“Shit, girl. You were right. He’s, like, the biggest superjock. But not a shithead.”

“A supergenius superjock among a people of genius übermenschlichen,” she sighed.

“Who live as hunter-gatherers in a super-rainforest.”

“Because they’re so smart and ludicrously strong they’ve never needed cities.”

“…Damn. Also, did he seriously proposition us just now?”

“Yup. And he meant it. He likes you. And wants to fuck you,” Tilly teased, “so congrats on that!”

“Great.” Tavon laughed nervously. “So now I gotta worry about a walking supersteroid gorilla-raping me someday.”

“They’re not monsters, Tavon. Say no and they’ll listen. Him especially.”

“I know,” he offered. “I believe you. But…wow. That’s a lot to take in.”

“Yeah.”

“…I can see why you love him.” His expression wasn’t unkind. “So…not to be the insecure boyfriend or anything, but…is there still room here for me? I’m not blind, you know.”

Tilly gave a sigh, turned and melted into his arms. “I love you,” she replied, reassuringly. “I left him. He’ll…always have a place in my heart, but he’s not human. He can’t…complete me.”

Tavon’s little flare of (entirely justified) jealousy evaporated, with a nod of understanding. A hug, a smooch, and it was gone entirely. They held for a bit longer before unpacking.

It couldn’t be called a happy reunion, not in the circumstances, but still…Tilly was glad. That she got to be back here, that she got to do something useful for people, and that she’d been among the first people called. Come what may, she could keep the people who mattered to her alive, and so many more besides. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she was where she could do the most good. And she was going to do it with her loving boyfriend at her side.

What more could a woman ask for?

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, Earth

Letty Brown

“I’m tellin’ ya, d’you know what people are gonna pay for booze? We shouldn’t’a drunk all that shit last time, we should be storing it up and selling it and getting hella fuckin’ rich.”

“Why?” Letty asked. She scuffed some broken glass away with her boot, keeping an eye out across the empty parking lot while Olie picked the security shutter lock. Blue lights went past a couple streets away.

He paused and looked at her like she’d gone weird. “Whaddya mean, ‘why?’”

“I mean what’s the fuckin’ point? So we can be the richest fuckin’ pile of ash when the death beam gets here? We could be out there doing anything but all you’re thinking about is how to make a buck that won’t matter in four years.”

“Nothing’s gonna matter in four years,” he retorted, and got the lock open with a grunt and a snap. “May as we live it up while we can.”

“And breaking into a bar is your idea of living it up.”

“Letitia, when did you get so fuckin’ boring?”

“You know I hate being called that.”

“Yeah, cuz it’s a boring name. Which fuckin’ fits you, right now.” Olie slid the shutter up with a rattle. “C’mon, we’re in.”

Letty sighed and retreated into the empty store behind him. “Whatever, fuck you.”

He grinned lecherously at her. “Later.”

“Ew! Fuck off.”

“What, you gonna die a virgin?”

“No! But not with you.”

“Told ya. One hangover and suddenly you’re no fuckin’ fun any longer…” Olie played his flashlight along the liquor bottles mounted upside-down behind the bar. “Ta’shen! Lookit all that!”

Letty was watching the parking lot instead. Somewhere out there, somebody was shooting. “Yaaay,” she cheered, sarcastically.

“Oh c’mon, live it up while there’s still time!” Olie whacked her painfully in the arm with the back of his hand, then pointed. “I bet there’s more in the back. You see if you can find…I’unno, a shopping cart or something.”

“Did you even think this through at all? Even with a shopping cart, you think we’re just gonna walk home with it full of stolen booze and not get in trouble?”

“C’mon, the cops’ve got more important shit to deal with,” Olie reminded her. As if summoned by his words, the distant shooting got a lot rapider and more urgent.

Letty…had to concede the point, there. “I’ll see what I can find,” she said, and slipped out the door they’d just broken in through to go look for one.

It took her a while. She lurked in shadows as a couple blue lights flashed past, cops and ambulances escorted by a couple of military trucks. They weren’t really in the right part of town to just randomly get their hands on a shopping cart, the businesses here were things like phone repairers, ethnic grocery stores, a couple restaurants…

She found a flat cart out back of a bagel shop, with a bunch of rotting bagels in ruined cardboard boxes that musta been sitting out since the big announcement. The rain had ruined what the rats hadn’t eaten first, so she kicked the soaked boxes aside and dragged the rattling thing back toward the bar.

Her first clue that something was wrong was the lights she could see through the glass. Flashlights? Shit, the cops musta come sniffing after all..for a moment she thought about just ditching Olie and letting him deal with the consequences, it had been his idea to come out here anyway…

Some nobler part of her prompted her to ditch her cart and skulk forward to get a closer look.

They weren’t cops. Four big, mean-looking guys all dressed up in tactical-looking shit. Camo-pattern pants and baseball caps, an armor vest over t-shirts, sunglasses even though it was the middle of the night…rifles…

So much for martial law. Olie had his hands up and was talking to them, smiling…but Letty knew that smile. That was his ‘I’m in deep shit but maybe if I keep smiling it’ll get shallower’ smile. And she didn’t like how one of the tactical goons had his rifle aimed at him one bit.

Maybe…some kind of distraction was in order?

There was a bit of a hill, so she turned the flat cart downhill toward a pickup parked at the bottom, and gave it a push, before darting into the cover of a tree. The cart rattled away, gaining speed, and she grinned proudly at herself as she realized her aim had been dead on. The cart crunched into the pickup with a satisfyingly loud bang, and its alarm started blaring. The men in the bar turned and shouldered their way out the door to investigate, before running right past Letty’s hiding spot.

Olie knew when to get out. He was right behind them, and slipped away sideways into the shadows. Letty darted to his side.

“Still think I’m boring?”

For once, it was Olie’s turn to be serious. “Shut up and run.” he hissed, then did exactly that. Letty scampered after him, jinking and dodging.

Somewhere behind them, one of the men shouted something: Letty heard another call “Let ‘em go!”

They ran up as far as the big thrift store, and lurked among some parked cars left there. Letty noted that the gunfire she’d been hearing was silent now. Everything was eerily silent, not even any sirens. Just distant blue lights and some flame-lit smoke. No sign they’d been pursued. She turned, slid down the side of the car, and sat against a wheel. “Olie…this feels bad, man. I don’t wanna do this no more.”

“Hey, so we ran into some vigilante fucks who think they’re the fuckin’ Punisher,” Olie flapped a hand reassuringly. “It’s fine. We just gotta be smarter from now on…”

“No…no, I’m done. I don’t wanna keep doing this, I’m going home.”

“Well, what do you wanna do?”

“I dunno, just…not this. Something else. This shit doesn’t work for me.” Letty stood up. “I’m…going home.”

“ And what?’ Gurv out on the couch for the rest of your life?”

“I don’t know. Just…not this.” Letty turned her back and walked away. He called some things after her, hurtful things about how he was gonna supply all the parties in town or whatever and she was gonna miss out on the action…whatever. Olie wasn’t good for her, and he was gonna get himself killed at this rate.

She didn’t need him.

She took a detour on the way home, around the flashing lights and burning van that musta been the heart of that gun battle they’d heard. She didn’t know what the cops would do if they caught her out past curfew, but she didn’t want to find out. So, she steered well clear, ghosting down the unlit, ghostly streets, She could see light behind peoples’ curtains as they…did whatever. What did people who obeyed curfew even do of an evening? TV? Games?

Olie was right, in one thing. She’d never be able to just…sit at home and wait for the end. She felt too restless for that. Maybe she should just…leave. Pack her stuff and go walking and see where she got to in the time she had le—

There were lights on at home, and the front door was open. She’d walked right up to the end of their driveway before noticing, she was so lost in her head. She froze and stared at it, feeling suddenly cold and afraid and exposed.

She took a step back, and a heavy hand came down on her shoulder.

“Thought I recognized ‘ya.”

Shaking, Letty turned and looked up. The guy who’d snuck up on her was dressed all tacti-cool, with an armor vest, shooting glasses and lots camo shit over his jeans and black long-sleeve tee. He flashed her a smile from behind a bad beard. It wasn’t a comforting smile, and it was familiar in a very unwelcome way, too: Nolan Long. The boy everyone at school had always said was a fuckin’ psycho. The broken heart tattoo on his cheek was new, though.

“Letty Brown,” his winning smile got wider. “Heard your folks skipped town.”

“…Nolan,” Letty replied carefully. Then, in case that wasn’t enough: “…Uh…hi.”

“And they left you behind? Shit, girl, that’s fuckin’ cold.” He gestured indoors. “Left you the house though, huh?”

“R-right.”

Nolan nodded. “Ah, I’m sorry. Wouldn’ta broken in if we’d known you were still here,” he lied, blatantly. “Why don’t you come on in, me an’ my buddies’ll take care of ya.”

“I, uh—” Letty glanced at the door to what should have been home and safety. There was a big guy leaning against the doorframe with his arms resting lightly on a rifle. She didn’t like the way he was looking her up and down one bit.

“I insist,” Nolan added breezily, taking her arm.

Letty’s impulse to yank herself free and run away shrieking for help shut itself down when his fingers got tighter. He was too strong, and anyway…what help? Neighbors? Police?

Shit, she was in trouble. She gulped as she stumbled along, up the stairs, past the big guy in the door, and Nolan pushed her onto her own couch.

“Y’know, it’s anarchy out there,” he said conversationally. “Cops and soldiers are still trying to pretend they can keep order, but it’s just like I always said about society—you ever read my book, Letty?”

“No.”

“Course you fuckin’ didn’t, nobody did. But you shoulda.” He sat down. “See, the world only held together up to this point because everyone had this shared dream of tomorrow, right? There was an actual point to following the rules, waiting in line, being a good little citizen, ‘cuz you knew there was so much to lose.”

Was he high? Or was this just how he always was? Letty didn’t know, she’d avoided him at school. She was more than a little upset to find he even remembered her name.

“Now, though? There’s nothing holding those people out there together. There’s no dream. There’s just four short years and however much life you can shove into it. And you’ve got two groups of people, the fuckin’…little ones who’re just waiting for the end or for somebody to come along and save them, and then you’ve got the people with some actual fuckin’ vision. The ones who know what they want from life, and are gonna get it. Like your friend Olie. Good kid. Smart kid. Wants to be the liquor baron of Raleigh before we all burn. He’s got vision, even if it’s a dumb vision, yijao?”

Letty just stared at him.

“Well, I’ve got a vision,” Nolan continued. “I’ve got a vision where I don’t ever have to wash a dish or take out the trash or change my sheets ever again. I’ve got a vision where I just relax and enjoy all the fine things in life. So, we keep our eye out for new places to move in to and claim, ‘cuz other people whose vision was to go see the Grand Canyon or whatever left ‘em behind so why the fuck not…and then we move on. Life of luxury, am I right?” he asked rhetorically of his friend, who nodded with a smirk.

“…So I’m gonna make you an offer. You want in on my vision? You’ll never go hungry, you won’t have to worry about looking out for yourself, won’t have to worry about protection…” He chuckled when she gave him a wary look .”Ah, you’re a smart kid. ‘What’s the catch?’ right? Well, there’s no catch. You get fed and you get laid. No downside!”

Letty tried to crawl backward into the couch, wishing it would turn to mist and let her fall through and out of the house so she could run

“C’mon, girl, don’t give me that look. You’ll enjoy it, promise.”

“I—” The words stuck in Letty’s mouth.

Nolan sat down next to her, put his hand on her thigh and slid it slowly upwards. “I’m bein’ nice,” he said, quietly. “I don’t have to offer you anything. I can just take what I fuckin’ want. But it’ll go a lot better for you if you beha—”

There was a deafening slamming sound, and something hot and wet splashed Letty’s face. Nolan made a shocked sound and fell aside, clutching his arm. His friend cursed and started fumbling with his rifle, only to fall on his ass when, from the doorway, Olie turned and panic-fired, shooting him three times right in the chest.

Nolan was mostly just angry, though. “FUCK!” He twisted, spat furiously, went to aim his rifle, but his arm didn’t seem to be working right. Olie darted across the room, grabbed Letty, and heaved her toward the door.

Letty stumbled, then ran. Down the front steps, tripped, grazed her knee on the concrete, skinned her palms as she scrambled to her feet: Olie helped her along and together they ran, ran—

There was another gunshot from behind them. Olie coughed and dropped limp on the sidewalk—Letty tasted something horrible and coppery on the air. She looked back: Nolan’s friend snarled at his gun and yanked feverishly on part of it, like it wasn’t working properly. Then he looked up at the sound of sirens and engines a few streets away: he ducked back into the house, grabbed Nolan, shoved him in a car, and vanished with a squeal and smoke of abused rubber.

Letty dropped to Olie’s side and…and had no idea what to do. He was coughing, choking, gurgling, bloody froth bubbling from his nose and mouth. His wild, wide eyes found Letty’s.

Then he…wasn’t in there, any longer.

Everything went still, and silent. The whole world shrank down. No sirens, no engines, no flashing lights. Just Olie, his unfocused eyes looking right through Letty’s head and far out into space.

And terrible, terrible pain somewhere inside her.

Unthinking, she rose to her feet and staggered away. Ran away. She didn’t know where she was going or where she wanted to be, just…not there. Anywhere else. Her feet carried her, while the rest of her…went away, for a while.

There were flashes of thought. She broke into a clothing store—or, well. Went in through the window somebody else had broken in—got herself some clothes that weren’t covered in blood. Scrubbed her hands in the employee bathroom. It made sense to not be covered in evidence. Let her just…disappear. Lots of people were doing that. She could be one of them.

She could…

She found a spot in an underpass, where a footpath ran alongside a little creek. The sound of a vehicle convoy rushing past overhead with their sirens on jolted her out of the dazed fog she’d been in, and it finally landed on her, just what she’d blundered into, what she’d seen, what had happened—

She dropped to her knees and tried to vomit. It had been…a while since her last meal, so she mostly just dry-heaved into the stream for a bit. Once her stomach finally settled, she scooted up the embankment a bit until she was tucked away where nobody could see her, hugged her knees tight to her chest.

And stayed like that until morning.

The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Margaret White

“We got lucky with the way the Nightmare timing lined up. By the time the groundbreaking team is ready to jump out there, it’ll be early summer, which means they’ll have the whole year to prepare for the annual snowmelt flooding.”

“And that’s important, I take it,” Margaret checked.

“The annual flooding was the biggest reason we never made any serious attempt to colonize it, yet,” Doctor Green explained. “Preparing for blizzards is straightforward enough, and in fact many of the same preparations will help with the blistering summers and aggressively active flora and fauna: The flooding though, that’s the big one.”

“Well, good that we have so long to deal with it then…but the important question is, how many people can we make that planet support in just four years? Would the same resources go further if we ignored Nightmare and went somewhere else?”

“Yes. But we don’t have anywhere else to go, Madam President.

“There are other unclaimed deathworlds, aren’t there? The Dominion don’t want them.”

“And…they’re deathworlds. The name isn’t just an affectation, every planet in the ten-plus range carries a host of unique challenges and hazards. The one thing Nightmare has going for it is that we know for a fact it’s habitable. Every other planet might have….seasonal pollens that cause fatal anaphylaxis in humans, or parasites in the soil that spell a horrible, slow death for anyone they infect. Nightmare, though…isn’t easy, but a human being managed to survive there alone, outdoors, for six years. It’s…safe.”

Margaret nodded heavily. “Then if your advice is that we should continue to commit to Nightmare, then we will,” she decided.

“It is, ma’am.”

“Alright. Thank you, Doctor Green, I won’t keep you any longer…”

The office cleared. No sooner was it empty than it filled up again, this time for a meeting with the attorney general and the director of the FBI, for an evaluation of the domestic security situation. Such had been the rhythm of Margaret’s life for many days now, and such it was going to continue to be for…well, until the end of the Earth.

She rose to shake hands. “So, how are we doing today?” she asked.

The Attorney-General, Emily Sutherland, looked utterly exhausted, but she dredged up something resembling a smile from somewhere. “Better, today. We’re on our third day in a row without a significant riot in any major city, though small-scale unrest is ongoing. The ad campaign seems to have worked.”

Margaret nodded. As slogans went, ’we only have four years: do you want to spend them in prison?’ was bleak and brutal beyond belief, but…if it worked, it worked. “And crime overall?” she asked, gesturing for them to sit with her.

“Still rampant,” Sutherland replied as she perched herself on the couch. “There’s hardly a business that hasn’t been broken into, and the murder rate is sky-high. I’m sorry to say that a lot of people have apparently decided nothing matters any longer, including the social contract.”

“That bad?” Margaret turned to John Barnes, the Director of the FBI.

Mercifully, he wobbled his head rather than agreeing completely. “Statistically, the real bad apples are…only two or three per thousand, thereabouts.”

“That still makes for hundreds of them in any city,” Margaret mused. “What are we doing about them?”

Heads shook.

“The police are overwhelmed,” Sutherland said. “The courts, doubly so. And the ones who didn’t already get themselves shot are cautious and cunning. A lot of them are just…never going to be brought to justice.”

“And resources spent in the attempt could be spent saving lives instead,” Barnes agreed. “I’m loathe to say it, Madame President, but the fact is we’re probably going to have to depend on local community militias to keep order.”

Margaret frowned and thought of the smoke she’d been able to see see from the oval office’s windows whenever she looked out of them in recent days. “You make it sound like the Wild West out there.”

“The natural human impulse is to build communities,” Sutherland said, optimistically. “Most folks out there are rallying around with their neighbors, establishing mutual protection, sharing what they have…in a lot of ways, adversity brings out the best in people. It’s just that the truly evil have disproportionate impact.”

Margaret sighed and nodded. “Public order is necessary part of this evacuation. We need our communities to be safe and well-organized so they can work with the government. If we do nothing, won’t they just become insular and resentful at being abandoned?”

“I suppose that’s possible…” Sutherland agreed

“Please look into it for me. We have special forces whose whole job is educating civilian militias, don’t we? If we deploy them to our own cities and start working with these rallying communities instead of just leaving them to handle themselves, will that save more lives, or would those men be better used elsewhere? I want to know.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll discuss the matter with General McDowell,” Sutherland promised.

Margaret took a moment to study her. Emily was an old…well, not friend, but certainly acquaintance. They’d moved in the same circles for a very long time, that being the only real route to power. Nobody became president or a member of the Cabinet without networking.

She wasn’t taking the situation well, it seemed. Margaret was used to Emily Sutherland being more…dynamic. The woman sitting opposite her right now was short on sleep, short on hope and short on spirit. Understandable, considering both the bad news and the workload it must have generated for her. There being little else to discuss in their brief meeting, perhaps she could use the little time they had left for some supportive human warmth.

“How are your children, Emily?” she asked aloud.

“My daughter and her family are safe, thank God. They’ve been granted an assured place in Franklin. My son…” She turned her head and blinked rapidly.

Margaret nodded, grimly. Young mothers with children got higher priority than unmarried men because, well, children. And though she’d made it quite clear to the fledgling Department of Evacuation that care absolutely must be taken to acknowledge the necessity of fathers and the role of single dads…the simple truth was, the DoE was most likely going to default to the Titanic policy of “women and children first.”

The Consolidation, Continuity, and Evacuation Act was easily about the fastest thing ever to go through Congress, but in truth that speed meant it was kind of a mess. The DoE (as opposed to the DoE, or even the DoE) was little more than an org chart at this point, and its first order of business had been ensuring that the people whose decisions and hard work would be necessary in the coming months were in a position to make those decisions, without worrying for their loved ones.

She’d been promised that it would find its feet quickly, at least. It certainly had the funding and powers.

And that was proving difficult already. Extremely influential people who were not technically in the halls of government were very suddenly applying all the pressure they possibly could to get off-planet. And on that point, Margaret and her allies were of a singular mind.

Merit was the metric that mattered, and they didn’t have time for this. So, quietly, there was another movement underway in each nation. Very quietly, in the case of the US. The most confidential reaching-out to trusted partners across all the states, and now, at the final stretch, those partners were reaching out to their own.

The moment had to come quick when it came, and they could not afford a leak.

“I’ll…see what I can do. Do you have…I hate to ask, but what is his skillset?”

And please, let it be something useful.

“He’s a financial analyst at…well, was. Recent events have been a bloodbath.”

Not a home run, then. Margaret’s brow knitted. Not that the evacuation wasn’t going to require financial analysis, but…

“Well, have him give us his resumé and references. I’m sure we can find a place for him.”

It was like ten years fell off Sutherland’s shoulders. “Thank you, Madame President.”

“And you, John?”

“My brother-in-law has property in Nouveau Acadia and is sponsoring my children’s families. I think we’re fine,” he said.

“Good. That’s good. Well…I shouldn’t keep you any longer.”

They shook hands, said their polite farewells, and another brief meeting came to its end.

Surprisingly, she had a minute before the next one. A chance to walk around the room and consider all the various history accumulated within. Every president made it their own of course, though with a sharp eye on public perception. Margaret’s office collection included a sculpture by James Washington Jr, and a signed picture of Nichelle Nichols.

She’d have to make sure they survived.

Her phone rang. She glanced at it, tore herself away from the art, took a deep breath, and picked it up.

“Yes?”

“Mister Hoeff to see you, Madame President.”

She nodded: he was expected. “See him in.”

A moment later, when the door opened, Hoeff silently slid into her office, dressed in a perfectly-tailored suit that, somehow, did nothing to tame the sheer physical menace he radiated. The man was basically a walking cube of predator muscle. How he managed silence without creaking the floors (even as they bowed under his weight) was an eternal mystery.

“They’ve all been delivered safely. All fifty states,” he reported, tiredly.

Margaret nodded as she perched on the edge of the desk. Reversing her predecessor’s decision regarding Hoeff and the men like him had been one of her first and quietest acts as President. The timing could not have been more apt.

“Thank you. I admit, I was more than a little surprised when your name bubbled up…”

“My associates are principally concerned with the survival and integrity of the human race. Have been for…a long time, let’s say. This is relevant to our interests. And my nominal boss these days, too.”

By which he meant the Great Father, of course. She didn’t quite understand their relationship.

“Yes, well. The Commonwealth Realms have a much easier time in this sort of thing. We will need to be…cautious. Has secrecy been kept?”

“As best as could be. Saw to some of that personally. It’ll start leaking now though, no doubt.”

“No doubt. And…” she leaned forward, unable to hide her anxiety. “How many does Hardy think we’ll manage?”

He smiled, which lit up the man’s startlingly handsome face, as if a talented sculptor had taken a quick, rough pass at a block of craggy granite. “As many as forty states. It should pass.”

That in turn was like ten years had fallen off her shoulders. She hated the cut-out through a man like Hoeff, but…well, whatever he was, she didn’t doubt his loyalty or his utility.

“Well, I suppose we best not waste any time. If you would please tell Hardy to move forward with all due speed.”

“Yes ma’am.” He nodded, and was gone as silently as he’d arrived, squeezing himself sideways through the door. It closed behind him, and Margaret White let out a long, slow exhalation of pure relief. If that projection was right, then…

Well. She composed herself, and moved on to the next meeting.

Two days later, to a great and shocked uproar, forty-one states called for a Constitutional Convention. The first since the Constitution had gone into force, nearly three hundred years ago.

And by this Convention, would likely die.

They had a draft, of course. Much of the decoration was still there. It still looked and smelled like an American Constitution, clarified some things, streamlined others. The Bill of Rights was incorporated into the text proper, and in light of the current situation, the powers of the citizenry regarding militias had been strengthened. Very much a “version one-point-one.” Bug fixes. Errata. All pretty dry, really.

But it did two critical things. Firstly, term limits could now be suspended. Not that it mattered, really, but the lawyers felt it useful. More gravely, it gave Congress a new power; they could empower the President’s Cabinet with the full authority of Congress directly. It essentially gave the President dictator powers.

It took the Convention a week to approve this new Constitution. It took Congress merely three days to ratify it, not that it mattered; the States had already spoken.

It went into force the next week. And a week after that, Margaret White was in control. Probably for the rest of her life. Certainly for the rest of America’s.

She cried that night, and didn’t quite know why.

Dodge City, Kansas, USA, Earth

Austin Beaufort

There was a new guy on the radio. Apparently the old guy had quit. The new guy sounded young, amateurish, and earnest. Like some kind of radio true believer, or somethin’. Austin guessed he kinda had to be, if that was his big idea of how to spend the apocalypse.

Jesus. He’d had some kinda gut feeling that something big and bad was coming, but the actual end of the actual world? A four year ticking clock ‘til doomsday? It just…it didn’t seem real somehow. Like there was part of his brain still waiting for the President to get back on TV like “April Fools!”

So apparently the radio DJ had decided to…go live, or something. Get busy living or get busy dying. Prob’ly a lot of folks doing that the whole world over right now…

And here Austin was, still spraying his crop. After all, soybean aphids didn’t know the end was nigh. And Austin needed a good harvest, cuz the farm wasn’t worth shit, now. Nowhere was. Nothing was. But food was gonna be, for sure. People still needed to eat, ‘cuz sure, the world might be ending, but it’d end a fuck of a lot sooner if everyone starved. And then no-one would live through it.

So, here he was, in his sprayer, spritzing chemicals and listening to an intern spin discs. Plenty of time to think while the sprayer steered itself, at least.

Well, the good news was, the realtor and seller on Cimbrean were both locked in by the purchase contract, so they couldn’t turn around and fuckin’ shaft him with a thousand percent price hike. Probably regretting that now, but…Shit…were all the lawyers gonna quit and go take vows too? ‘Cuz Austin had no idea what he was gonna do if it turned out he’d need one right about now…

Now there was a surreal fuckin’ thought. Here they were, four years from doomsday, and it might be the lawyers that people wound up needing more than anything. Austin’s grandpa woulda laughed himself to death at that one.

Shit was already going nuts. After the first couple of fiery nights, things had settled down a bit as the National Guard dealt with the worst agitators. There’d been…well, people had died. A lot of people. And Austin was pretty sure there’d be more, before folk got their heads into gear and started pulling together to save something.

For now, though, the tension was thick enough to plow. Like, the sort of tension where he had his two sons armed. Yes, just little twenty-two pistols, but for five year old kids? That was a fuck of a lot of trust and responsibility real fuckin’ fast. They were never without a firearm as they went about their days, and they drilled, too. Daily.

Thank God both of them took it all very seriously. They…didn’t know why, yet. They didn’t know what was coming. God willing, Austin would be able to shield them from knowing it until they were safely out of harm’s way.

After two murders in town—a town of less than a thousand—they started manning a watch. Reached out to the neighbors, they didn’t know what the fuck they were gonna do.

He hadn’t told them about the land purchase, yet. He’d sensed somehow that would take some serious trust. But they were pretty rich farmers, and right now that mattered. Something to think about while he worked out. Which, judging by those storm clouds…

He got the field done just in time. So, off to his well-stocked little gym to blow off steam. He had some bikini babes up, which Lauren tolerated ‘cuz she got to draw twirly mustaches on them and post her own eyecandy…he’d given them all gross bodyhair with his Sharpie.

Not terribly Christian of them probably, but whatever. They had fun. And now more than ever, he wanted a strong family. Life was about to become a whole lot of very hard work.

…Shit, did he even bother to send his kids to school? Fall was coming…

No. Two murders, and that in a close-knit farm town? Fuck no. It was gonna be homeschooling until they were safely on Cimbrean. However long that took. Lauren had objected at first but…well, he’d come thumping into their office all sweaty and gross, and there she was fiercely obtaining everything she’d need to make it so. The boys would just be starting kindergarten so that was good…

But her attitude wasn’t happy. Whose could be? She shrugged him off violently when he bent over to kiss her from behind.

“You stink. Go shower!”

Austin grabbed a beer from the fridge. “I just got in, gimme a fuckin’ minute before you jump on my ass…”

Icy silence. Ah…shit. She’d prob’ly been stressing and planning and pickling in the fact that if they didn’t get off the Earth the twins weren’t gonna live to see their tenth birthday, and here he was just rockin’ in like it was business as usual.

He sighed and put the beer back, unopened. Turned to apologize only for her to bury her face in his chest with a thump and squeeze him tight around the ribs.

“Honey…honey. Look at me.”

She pulled back and looked up.

“We have an exit plan. Remember that. God willing we’ll be farming on Cimbrean next year. And the kids can’t be illiterate hillbillies. I mean…this is Kansas. There aren’t any hills.”

She hiccuped into his chest, then gave him a kind of closed-fist whack on the shoulder, but…they were okay. She straightened up, sighed heavily. “I guess you didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?”

“There was a school shooting up in Hoisington.”

Austin cringed. That was…close. Much too close to home. “…Shit.”

“Yeah. I just…it’s gonna get bad. Real bad. So this land you bought on Cimbrean had better be enough to get us to the front of the line…”

“It should be.” Please God, let it be enough. But on that subject… “Hey, babe…what d’you think about the Keelers next door?”

“Decent enough…why do you ask?”

“Well…I bought a lot of land. A really stinkin’ huge allotment. They’re all mega-farms out there like up in Canada. It’s, uh. It’s ten thousand hectares.”

“…Okay? I mean, ten thousand acres is pretty big—”

“No. Hectares. I made the same mistake. That’s about twenty-five thousand acres.”

Lauren gawped at him for a second, then did what she always did when her brain was rebooting: she tidied him up. Flicked some dirt off his sleeve and straightened his collar, as if a much-worn John Deere polo shirt from the 1980s was ever gonna look neat.

“You…” she began, then the reboot completed. “Wait. You accidentally bought twenty-five thousand acres of unbroken land?!”

What could he do? Austin shrugged helplessly. “In my defense, I was scrambling to do it as fast as possible before, y’know. And the land out there is already ten times more expensive.”

“God, of course it is!” Lauren threw her head back and made a disgusted noise. “Oh, what’s that? The world’s ending? Millions of people are gonna be trying to buy land and save their families? Hold my beer while I price gouge all of them into the fucking grave!”

“…Right,” Austin agreed.

Lauren sighed and absent-mindedly went fishing in her pocket for a pack of cigarettes she’d stopped carrying years ago. After a second she noticed what she was doing, pulled a face, and sat at the kitchen table. “…Y’know I’da been so mad at you if you’d bought that much land for no reason, but…how did you know?”

“I didn’t. I just…had a gut feeling, and I went with it,” Austin shrugged.

“Well, I’m never gonna talk shit about your gut feelings ever again.” She shook her head, then frowned and looked up at him. “What was that you were sayin’ about the Keelers?”

He found himself suddenly distracted by just how…how fucking beautiful Lauren was, how lucky he was to have her, have his kids, have a future when so many would not…

“Austin? Babe?”

He shook his head clear. “Right. So, seein’ as we can’t possibly hope to farm that much land, and there’s a lotta good folk around here, and it’d be nice to have friends on a new world…”

“Oh, babe. We’ve got to be so careful about that. Does anyone else know yet?”

“No. I was told to send an email to the consular office on Cimbrean about all this but they’re super busy. Lost their long-time ambassador a few weeks ago and of course now…”

Ping.

Of course. God seemed to just love giving him blessings by good timing, lately.

He fished his phone out of his pocket and read about the happiest thing of his life

Mr. Beaufort,

Your information has been received and processed by the Embassy staff. I am pleased to inform you that your immigration request has been approved and expedited, with the expectation you will take up full-time residence no later than the first of January.

Lauren sagged, buried her face in her hands, and emitted a gigantic sob of relief.

We understand this is a major undertaking. There will be resources (still pending arrangements, of course) made available to assist with your transition. Please remain alert as to official announcements, and on a personal note, the Ambassador strongly advises your discretion in these immediate hours.

The present terms of your immigration permit you to bring your immediate family. However: we have investigated your purchase and have concerns that it may not prove productive, given the size of the allotment and the realities of farm management. This is, after all, unbroken land. It will require a huge effort to prepare for successful planting, an effort which will require much manpower. You are of course familiar with these problems—indeed, your prominence in various agricultural associations and communities speaks well of your passion. The Ambassador would like to speak with you at the earliest opportunity to consider the situation.

Let us be clear: we have no intention of interfering with your purchase agreement. Nevertheless, a moratorium will shortly be imposed limiting homesteads to 100 hectares per qualified family, in order to enable the most rapid possible domestication of the land. There is much more at stake here than simple property rights.

An altogether different gut feeling settled in Austin’s belly. “Did…? Oh boy. I think I just accidentally did a lot more than buy us some land.”

“Yeah, it sounds like you accidentally turned us into…like, lords or something.” Lauren stood up and moved to his side to read the rest of the letter around his shoulder. “Meet with the Ambassador at the earliest opportunity?”

Please see the enclosed travel voucher. As one of the very few who managed such a transaction before the informal lockdown immediately preceding the official announcements of the Evacuation, your voice is uniquely influential, and your leadership will be needed. Therefore, you are cordially invited to an audience with the Honorable Ambassador at your earliest convenience, along with the relevant ministers and secretaries of the respective governments.

Yours Cordially,

Austin didn’t recognize the name. Alice something, secretary to whoever, office of whatever…

Not important. The important part was the “immigration approved.” The meeting with the Ambassador was…was…

Well, that was a fuckin’ curveball. But the point was, they’d be gone by the end of the year. Get the harvest in, pack, and go. Lauren and the boys were safe. He was safe!

And there was a travel ticket attached to the email. They wanted to talk to him right now. And in person.

Well…shit.

“You uh…I’d better go get my suit. Can you call Darius, have him do a day or two to cover me?”

“Darius was talkin’ about quitting and going to see the world while there’s still time…” Lauren said.

“Well, whisper to him that we’ve got a lifeboat and he’s invited. If anyone is gonna be worth taking along it’ll be him.”

“And his girlfriend?”

“If that’s what you need to do to convince him, yeah. C’mon. You know this place would fall apart without him.”

“Yeah, but you know Darius. He won’t keep it a secret for long. The whole town’s gonna know, and then they’re gonna come knockin’ our door down!”

“Then lock his ass in the guest room! Babe…” he pulled her close, nuzzled against her check and neck. “I know you can handle him. This is important, so…do this for me, okay? Whatever it takes, hell ask ‘em to stick around to help watch the farm while I’m away! We’re gonna need that man, and we both know it.”

She nodded, and tried to relax. “Okay. Okay. I’ll handle Darius, you handle the ambassador, and we’ll…we’ll be okay. God…”

Austin squeezed her tight as he felt her start to tremble. “It’s okay. We will. We really will.”

It was a long and emotional hug. Honestly, though…he needed it just as much as she did.

Afterwards, he hit the showers, got himself clean. Down to the basement, grabbed a suitcase. Up to the closet, packed his best duds. Checked, double-checked and triple-checked at every step that the documents on his phone were real, then that he had the stuff with him to keep it charged. He didn’t wanna be stopped by a state trooper and not have proof it was necessary travel.

Pulled some funds out of the savings account to pay for all the travel expenses, because what the fuck else was he gonna do with it? A hug and kiss for Lauren, a cuddle for the boys and promises to bring them back something cool…

And he was on the road. The radio true believer was still doing his best to spin discs. Austin was…kinda glad for him that he’d found his calling. Even if the calling was just distracting people from reality, for a little while.

He didn’t change the channel once, the whole way to the airport.

New Belfast, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Doctor Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Of all the things Ray had taken up over the years, gardening and beekeeping were the two she’d come to truly love. Both were equal parts art and science, and they were so very full of life, even if she wasn’t going to win awards and competitions any time soon.

But she had all the herbs she could ever ask for, a house that perpetually smelled of mint and honey, and beeswax candles around her bathtub.

Frankly, it was heaven. Albeit a heaven occasionally interrupted by knocks on the door. She’d stopped bothering with the ‘no soliciting’ signs, they just uglied up her porch and were routinely ignored anyway.

Though, one glance at the doorbell cam told her that these particular visitors weren’t the usual bible-botherers. Door-to-door proselytizers weren’t usually so…statuesque.

There were two of them, a man and a woman. Both had a lot in common, looks-wise: they were tall, incredibly well put-together, both had dusky skin and dark hair, and beautifully proportioned faces borrowing from the best of the entire human ethnic library.

Singularity types were so easy to spot, honestly. Once you knew they existed it was almost impossible to miss them. Regular humans just didn’t have that…

…Well, that show-dog look to them. Or like if they were prize livestock. Too damn perfect.

Of course, that was exactly what they were.

She opened the inner door cautiously, but left the screen door closed. Not that either of these two walking demigods would be slowed by it for a microsecond, but the signal was important. “Good evening…”

The man looked slightly hurt. Also not surprising. They had a bit of the canid innocence about them, too. Borderline uncanny valley.

The woman, on the other hand…a bit less so. “Good afternoon, Doctor Wheeler. I…see you know who we represent.”

“That I do,” Ray agreed and leaned against the door frame. “If you’re here to recruit me for something, you should know my answer is definitely going to be a no. The last time I was recruited for anything, it did not end well.”

The man shook his head and raised a peaceable hand. “On the contrary, we’re hoping you’ll stay right here. We just wanted to discuss an idea with you. Something you could do to help people in the coming crisis.”

Ray gave him a steady stare. “Why me?”

“Because you’re here, and because you can.”

Ray turned her steady stare on the woman. Then she opened the screen door. “Come in. Talk. Try not to break my couch.”

“We’ll do our best,” the man said, with a wry chuckle.

“Tea? I have fresh mint and honey…”

“Oh, yes please!” The woman perked up. “Thank you!”

“What are your names, anyway?” Ray asked as she bustled into her kitchen. She noted the carefully polite way the two of them removed their shoes then sat—knelt, more accurately—around her coffee table rather than testing her furniture.

“Niobe,” the woman introduced herself. “And this is Jochar.”

“Pleasure,” Ray said. She turned and leaned against the kitchen counter as her kettle clicked on. “So. I’m here, and I can. Can what?”

“Singularity have been paying attention to how the nations of Earth are approaching the business of evacuation,” Jochar explained. “We suspect we know how they’re going to do it, and we think it’s very…efficient.”

“But rather heartless,” Niobe agreed.

“Heartless,” Ray repeated.

“Or rather…the first concern is not the well-being of the evacuees, beyond that they can live. If you’ll forgive my saying so, Doctor Wheeler, you know better than most that there’s a difference between surviving and living, y!jao?”

Ray blinked at the unfamiliar pronunciation of the familiar gaori word. She’d never heard a human mouth make a sound quite like that, before.

“Well…yes…” she said aloud. “But I also know that often times, just surviving is enough. So long as you’re still here…”

“The title of your biography, yes?” Jochar nodded. “‘We’re Still Here.’ Well, you’re entirely right…and look, here you are, you have these lovely acres of flower-planted meadow, a herb garden, and a cozy cottage-style house with an ocean view. The perfect place for a survivor to retire to and live.”

Ray turned as the kettle clicked off, and poured. “Get to the point, please.”

“The point, doctor, is that there will shortly be a lot of young people—children, young adults, especially young women—arriving from Earth. They will be the survivors of a tragedy, all of them bereaved, all of them leaving behind their parents, siblings maybe, friends certainly, their hopes and dreams…”

“And then the coming years will be hard work and reconstruction with no time or opportunity to put themselves back together,” Niobe finished. She smiled gratefully as Ray handed her the cup, and took an appreciative deep breath of it. “We want to propose you could help them, directly. This could be a house of healing, where they can find a new family.”

Ray tilted her head as she took up her own cup. She’d finally, after years of therapy, been able to start drinking tea, coffee, cocoa and soup again…though not stews or casseroles. “It’s a nice idea. I think I might even be open to it. But…why couldn’t this have been an email? Why are you two here to talk to me in person? And what’s Singularity’s interest in inspiring me to do that?”

“That is King Gilgamesh’s will,” Jochar replied, simply.

“Kings don’t do unalloyed sentiment.”

“No, perhaps not. But consider…we want to help. We exist to help. Singularity’s purpose has always been to preserve humanity, the gao and life itself…and we have always believed in the gentle and personal touch, and in the power of individuals.”

Niobe nodded firmly. “What’s in it for us is that we are human, doctor. And while we don’t have the resources or power to save millions of lives, we can help. We can offer military protection, and we can offer help by doing what we do best: identifying exceptional people, and helping them.”

Ray padded through into the living room and sat in the easy chair opposite them. “To do what, exactly?”

“To build families.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I live here alone, a long way from anyone else. The only person I speak with on the regular is Holly Chase. I’m not exactly…” Ray looked around, and paused at a sudden emotional presence that closed her throat. “…I’m not exactly…families mean stability. They mean something solid, something…what I’m trying to say is, I don’t think I’m the right person for what you have in mind. I’m a fucking mess.”

“Your house isn’t,” Niobe pointed out. She looked around, and her broad smile betrayed the first tiny imperfection Ray had detected on either of these two: a handsomely crooked tooth.

“Therapy project. Believe me, sometimes I have bad weeks and this whole place falls apart…”

“Doctor,” Jochar’s slightly-too-handsome, innocent-eyed face was full of nothing but warmth and earnestness. “You don’t have to be perfect to do some good in the world.”

Ray watched him carefully for a moment, then set her drink aside and sat forward. “…What do you mean by building families? I’m not gonna marry anyone if—”

“No, no. We mean…whatever you think it means. If it means being a kind of aunt to a handful of displaced and frightened children, that’s what we mean. If it means being foster grandmother to a generation of post-Earth babies and their scared, traumatized young mothers, that’s what we mean. For others, well…the times are desperate, and we want to help. Sadly, cultural differences got in the way. We’re aware our reputation can be pretty wild, and…”

“We could have been less forward, perhaps. In any case we do not wish to ask of anyone something we don’t think they’d be comfortable with, or which might be too…”

“Too far,” too-handsome finished. “I can only promise I meant well. The difference in perspective is…startling.”

“…What perspective, exactly?”

The demigod shrugged those magnificent shoulders of his. “I have five wives. Where I come from it is normal for a successful man.” He laughed, “I’ve learned very quickly that isn’t the case here! And obviously, well…”

“He is young,” Niobe added. “Barely past his boyhood!”

“Five wives?” Ray asked weakly.

“Yes!” He beamed.

“Do they have spouses too?”

“No no, and we’re pretty loyal to each other…but as Niobe pointed out, we’re all still young.”

That last point was clearly doing a lot of work, and Niobe confirmed the hypothesis.

“Dalliances are expected among us, so long as they are discreet.”

“And…are you one of his wives? Or…”

Jochar and Niobe shared an amused look. “We’re half-cousins. Too closely related to benefit the Line,” Jochar said, shaking his head.

“So. One man, multiple wives…women with multiple husbands?”

“No.”

“That’s uh…”

“We know how it sounds to Earth-born ears, especially American ones. But we’re…a different culture. We don’t see it that way,” Niobe at least seemed not unhappy with it. “But that is because most of us do not remain in Singularity. In any case, that’s not what we came her to discuss, and we’re not proposing it for you. We’ve just found that some of the people most in a position to do some true good right now may need a little extra, ah, encouragement and support.”

“And we think you’re one such,” Jochar agreed. “It’s not just that you have enough land for them to live on, or just escape to sometimes if you’d prefer it that way. It’s that you’re one of only a tiny number with life experience that might help them. What you lived through…”

He went silent. It took Ray a second to notice that her hands were shaking, and she had a second or two of teetering between being deeply upset that he’d gone there…or grateful that he’d been tactful enough to stop.

She came down on the latter. They were right, after all: she had gone through something only a handful of others had endured. Butwhy was all this so…striking, to her? And why was the idea of opening her home—her huge, beautiful, healing home—up to the people who needed it…why was that so surprising and novel to her? Why hadn’t it been the first thing that occurred to her?

…Well, because she’d been lost inside her own head and too focused on herself for too long. Maybe the literal end of the Earth was the time for that to change. Maybe she could do something better than spend the rest of her life recovering…

“This is an offer of support, right?” she asked aloud. “You’re not just here to plant the idea in my head and vanish?”

“Absolutely it is an offer of support,” Niobe said, warmly.

“Whatever I need to make it work?”

“As much as we can give. And you would not be beholden to us, it comes with no oath, no contract, no obligation. Only our request that you do what you can to give the adrift children of Earth a new family, in whatever form seems right to you.”

Ray found herself nodding. She found herself liking the idea. A lot. She reined that in, carefully. She’d been…burned…a few times these last several years, when something came along that seemed good only to wind up sending her spiralling straight back to Hell. She wasn’t going to commit to anything without discussing it at length with her therapist first.

But when she picked up her tea and sipped it again, in her head, she was already making plans.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Julian liked Austin immediately, just from reading his file. And what a very interesting file it was, too. For a start, it was pretty thick, and pretty old. Austin Beaufort had been Known About for a good few years, for unhappy reasons.

There weren’t many humans alive who could claim to have really impressed an igraen. The transcript of Six’s comments on Austin’s resilience, character and intelligence…explained a lot.

Meeting him in person just cemented everything. For one, he was confident and ballsy without being rude. That was going to matter. For another he was definitely a more-than-casual gymrat and Julian was a very predictable stereotype in some ways. What could he say? The swole-life was a great kind of bro-life. And for another…

Well, it showed discipline, dedication, delayed gratification, goal orientation. All important things. Plus, the fella was clearly smart, and perceptive. He’d made a power move on land that almost nobody else had made. So far the only people who had shown genuine foresight had been the church of all the things, Austin…

And not too many more. All the wheeling and dealing came after the announcement. He’d slipped his in during the whole thing. Somehow. From Earth.

Apparently while farming, too.

And even better, he wasn’t instantly afraid or shrinking away when they met. Nice and tall, a bit over six feet so really only a few inches shorter than Julian, and he was clearly comfortable sizing himself up respectably against strangers. Good, he had some social skill.

“So, you’re the farmer who figured out what was coming in time to buy up twenty-five thousand acres just before we closed the market.”

“I can’t have been the only one, your excellency…”

“Oh, God, I hate being called that,” Julian shook hands, and decided to feel the fella out. Not a bad grip on him either, though he did wince slightly. “That’s only for foreigners. To Americans I am ‘the honorable’ if you insist, but ‘ambassador’ or ‘mister’ is fine, too. Please just call me Julian.”

Austin gave an apologetic and understanding nod. “They didn’t exactly cover how to address ambassadors at ag college.”

“Yeah, I had to learn all sorts of fancy stuff when I crash-landed into this gig…” Julian grinned sympathetically. “Anyway…lots to cover, and you’re gonna need to learn a lot of shit pretty quick, given the life you just stepped into.”

“…Oh?”

“Let’s hold on to that for a moment. First, let’s get somewhere a bit more private…”

Austin Beaufort

Jesus Christ what a first impression.

Austin had expected a suit, and that was…kinda what he got. Ambassador Etsicitty wore a perfectly tailored shirt, sure, but the sleeves were rolled up comfortably and his hair was thick and luxuriant, easily shoulder-long; he’d loosely tied it back with a strip of leather, and the lapel pin on the sports jacket draped over his shoulder was a little red white and blue tomahawk.

Characterful, rather than the same boring cookie-cutter politician uniform of white shirt, red tie, American flag lapel pin literally everyone in government wore. This man had some style and was very obviously no stranger to work. He had giant mitts too, which produced a handshake that could crush rocks, and the leather of his palms could sand paint off a car.

Come to think of it, it was an impressive feat of magic he fit a shirt at all. Dude was huge. No. far more. He was cartoon huge and seemed to be almost bursting out of his very skin with well-carved sinew. He had a neck thick with rippling muscle and wide enough to shame any linebacker, arms and shoulders any superhero would envy, an armor-plate chest wider than Austin’s shoulders. Anatomy-chart legs strained at his pants, thighs so big they looked fit to squat a building, calves that could launch him to orbit atop monster feet to match everything else. He was a freak, and somehow some kind of deadly energy about the man suggested none of it was merely for show.

And right now, his priority seemed to be Austin, and that wasn’t a feeling Austin was sure he liked. The ambassador had even gone so far as to meet him at customs and had basically yoinked Austin right off the street and straight into a…truck? A big truck, too.

Okay. Right brand of truck too, definitely a man of taste. The moment the door was closed, he set to it.

“Right! So. First, apologies for the sudden meet-and-greet, and also apologies for my schedule. I’m…” he sighed with a rueful grin, “well, I’m wearing a lot of hats at the moment.”

“I can imagine….” Austin ventured.

“Yeah. Everything’s being reshuffled, fast. And that’s going to make this a strange meeting. So: no, you’re not in trouble. Quite the opposite!” Julian grinned across at him as the guy in the front seat steered them out into traffic and away. “In fact, so completely opposite that I’m partly here to see if you maybe want an escape plan.”

“…Escape? From Earth?”

“No, from the world you just stepped into. But y’know what? Fuck all that. I took the rest of the day off because this is important and nothing else is a screaming emergency. So…want to play some basketball? My kids are back in town so it’ll be two-on-two.”

“I…” Shit. That came out of nowhere. “Is now the…basketball? Now?”

“Now is exactly the time. I need to know you, and you very much need to know me. Besides, I’ve been cooped up in offices and vehicles and stuff for three days, I need to move right now…and you’re a big athletic-looking guy. How long have you been traveling?”

“About…eleven hours,” Austin realized.

“Right. So get moving, get fed, and get some sleep, in that order.”

He didn’t even ask if Austin played basketball. They just…drove to his office, from there went directly to the gym and the big guy tossed a duffel bag into Austin’s arms.

“Should be your size. Dunno about shoes but there’s some clean ones in the rack over there.”

Austin set it down. “I brought my own clothes, thanks.”

“Nice.”

They got changed in the small locker room, Julian not hesitating for a moment. Austin never felt shame in front of anyone but, well, this time he sure as fuck felt Jell-O soft and shy. Photos and videos usually flattered, but in this man’s case, not even his modeling shoots came even remotely fuckin’ close to doing him justice. There were levels to this, apparently, levels far above wherever Austin was, and he’d always thought he’d done pretty damn good in life, too. Julian didn’t say anything though, just stripped down leaving Austin feeling like a chump, and pulled on some nearly pointless running shorts. Didn’t bother with shoes or anything else.

They played basketball. The big guy was quick and light on his feet, not at all what Austin was expecting. His sons, though, they were something else. Austin tried to figure out how exactly they could look so nothing at all like him and then figured they must be adopted or something. They looked a lot more like one of his girlfriends, tall and athletic and blond. Impressive, yes, but they were still in the realm of normal human athletes instead of…whatever the hell Julian was.

And absolute fuckin’ ass-kickers when it came to shooting hoops. Blood family or not, athleticism was clearly important in the Etsicitty household. Both were bigger men than Austin, which was saying something, and the more heavily muscular one had the look of a wrestler about him—one pushing ‘heavyweight’ past its breaking point, too. The other was still damn big by any standard and definitely the better baller, due to skill and practice by the feel of it rather than any athletic advantage.

They made it a closer game than it had any right to be. And then Julian grinned fiercely, and the game went three-on-one. Ambassador versus everyone else.

And he won.

Not easily. But he was a blur while not really straining himself either, and the rest of them were basically dead on their feet. The big fucker was something else. Austin wondered quietly whether the whole thing hadn’t been some kind of…weird test, maybe? Was this how Etsicitty measured a guy up?

Well, he could think of worse ways.

He gave the boys a huge hug—Austin could tell, this was a treat they’d all been looking forward to—and then, finally, it was back to business, once they’d grabbed a quick shower and changed back into something more appropriate.

They didn’t go to some office, though. Instead, they went downtown, to a fast food stand with a gaoian proprietress, where Julian ordered the largest platter of tacos Austin had ever seen. He set it down at a concrete park table, and whipped out a privacy field generator. Austin had never seen that kind of Star Trek shit before—okay, yes he had. At Chicago. That didn’t really end well, though. How much did that little gizmo cost?

Either way, all of a sudden they were in a quiet, private dome of gray fuzzy air, where Julian inhaled a taco with maybe two whole bites and a sip of water…then looked Austin in the eye and suddenly they were down to business.

“So here’s the thing. That’s a lot of land you snapped up. And yeah, we’re gonna need it farmed, efficiently. The more food we can produce, the more people we can save, it’s that simple. And right now, we can’t be sentimental, the only number that matters is how many people are alive after this. You’ve prob’ly been worrying about how much startup capital you’ll have and all that stuff, right?”

Austin blinked at the complete change in direction, but nodded. The last hour or so had been an indulgence. But there wasn’t much time to indulge. “Uh, yeah. I spent basically all I had just buying the land, and the farm back in Kansas isn’t worth shit,” he said. “Nobody’s gonna buy it, not now.”

“Hell of a gamble, that.”

“Gut feeling.”

Another taco magically disappeared. “Helluva gut you got there.”

Says the taco vacuum, an imp cackled in the back of Austin’s mind.

“My wife said about the same thing.”

“Mhmm.” Austin ate a taco of his own while Julian inhaled two more. “You may have also noticed we were particular about security before we met…”

Austin sighed. “Yeah. I s’pose that don’t surprise me none.”

The ambassador quirked an eyebrow. Somehow it made Austin feel compelled to spill. “Lemme ask you a question. Did you ever have any…weird experiences? Woke up bone-tired despite going to bed early, like you’d been working all night or something?”

Julian laughed a dark laugh, and balled his huge left mitt into a fist. They both looked at the anatomy chart that was his forearm for a long moment; Austin thought it might be the size of his entire fuckin’ not-at-all-small leg.

After a while, Julian sighed. “Fella…look at me. We both know something like me wouldn’t have evolved naturally on Earth. That we humans can do this doesn’t mean we naturally would, right?”

“Uh…I s’pose so.”

“Exactly. My whole fuckin’ family has apparently been having weird experiences going back a fuckin’ millennia, at least. Me personally? There was the time a fuckin’ UFO snapped me up and dropped me on a frozen hellhole at the wrong end of the galaxy, y’know, after they’d done just…”

The ambassador shivered.

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

“Nah. And I’m not the only one. My wives? Xiù wound up making a good first impression with the Gao which may just save more people than anyone else, Al wound up working as hired muscle for an alien mobster…and I’m not even close to the weirdest we’ve got here.”

“Fair enough.”

Right, so…let’s level. You know what happened to you. Don’t lie,” he warned. “In fact, don’t lie ever while you’re here. Gaoians can smell it and us humans seem to pick up the knack pretty quick when we spend a lot of time with them.”

“Yeah, I…I think I got taken for a ride. By one’a those Hierarchy fellas.”

“Yup. We know which one, too. He kindly ordered your implants to dissolve themselves as he left.”

“…Why?”

“Six is an oddly…sentimental being.”

Six. Well…Austin finally had a name of sorts to put to the fuckin’ weirdness.

“I’m not gonna like what I find when I Google him, am I?”

“Nope. But in your case, you made such a positive impression that he’s flipped sort-of back to Team Human. Usually he chews up hosts and spits them out. You were too stubborn to give in. And it’s that more than anything that seals the deal for me.”

“…Huh?”

Julian sat back and crossed his ludicrous arms. “You’re exactly the kind of man we need. You don’t have any Singularity bullshit in your family line, yet here you are. Big, smart, fit, accomplished. A regular farmer from Kansas and you were smart enough at the right place and in the right time to do something about it. And that matters. People look at me like some sort of…Hero, right? It’s literally the name for what I was bred to be. And sure, I’m certainly not gonna complain, I like what I’ve got.”

Austin…nodded. He woulda liked having what the ambassador had, too. No shame in admitting that. There really were levels to this game. And the big fucker knew it, too.

Julian grinned and slurped about half his drink. “…But y’know what? I’ve been breaking chairs since I was thirteen, too. People like me can be pretty cagey ‘cuz of all the attention from a young age, right? So I’d rather put my trust in good, normal people who shine when put to it. And you do. So…”

He drained the last of his drink with a slurp through the straw, then set it down. As soon as he’d let go of it, both his expression and his tone changed dramatically.

“So. You don’t have to worry about startup capital. Because you’re gonna build us a farm that can feed as many people as possible, Austin, and help us find every last fuckin’ farmer who can operate on your level. We’re going to make land barons out of all of you, for the survival of the human fucking race.”

“…Land barons.”

“Pretty much literally, too. The land you purchased isn’t technically under American jurisdiction, merely American management, because the United Kingdom laid claim to the entire solar system way back when, all legitimate under Interspecies Dominion law. You basically own a fief from the King of England, once you make good your payment. And if you succeed in this, he’ll probably title you, too.”

The ambassador demolished the rest of his tacos with the efficiency of a dog devouring kibble, while Austin sat back, thunderstruck.

“Right. It’s a lot to think about. Now i’m gonna pile on more. You ready?”

“…No. But do it anyway.”

Julian grinned and seemed to approve.

“Good man, I was right about you! So, anyway: think forward. We need to build a government that can survive awful times. Truly awful times. Awful enough that we are going to need local lords in the real sense of the word, and it’s the UK that’ll be building it here. America will be sending me to Nightmare and to Akyawentuo to get things going there, but here? His Majesty all the way. Welcome to neo-feudalism! You are going to be a baron for real, with everything that historically entailed. You need men. You are going to need a militia too. All of you are. So…”

“You’re kidding me. They’re just…throwin’ democracy out the window?”

“We were never a democracy. We are both republics, one properly and the other with a monarch. But monarchies have always been republics in a strange sort of way. They’re not getting rid of elections or any of that. What they are doing is creating a hierarchy of self-assured and capable power. Because shit is going to get absolutely brutal, really fucking fast. Maybe you’ll get a chance to talk with the His Sublime Majesty Great Father about it, soon. You will be a powerful man, and both the King and the Great Father are very keen to leave behind the useless rich. So…learn fast.”

“…Jesus. So, what? Even the globalists and shit gotta prove themselves?”

“Yes. The stakes are too high and we have the guns. You are one of them, now. You proved your worth and you’re proving it right now. You took the initiative when thousands of others who could have, didn’t. That’s why I wanted to meet with you.”

Austin…really didn’t know what to say to that, or how to say it. So, he fell back on what he did know, and the job that had just been put in front of him.

“…So I need to build a list.”

“Yes, and think carefully. You can’t bring just anyone, and you can’t be sentimental. Everyone needs to have a future and be capable of leaving a legacy for mankind. That means, ideally, the young and healthy, or perhaps extremely worthwhile elders. And almost nobody else. And you need to favor women and their promising children, too….”

He paused, then nodded grimly at Austin’s shocked expression. “Yes. It’s exactly that brutal. It’s a ruthless fuckin’ calculus and the Hunters are monsters for forcing us into it, but there we go. We either do it right this one and only chance we have, or more people die than have to. In the end, the only number that matters is lives saved, and the only metric that matters is the future.”

Austin nodded. He felt…sick, off-balance, worried, scared and tense…but he was also already building his list. Darius, obviously…actually, all the Marquis brothers. The Keelers. Ed and Charlotte. Zack Meyer and his cousin for sure…oh yeah, and Gemma Long, ‘cuz there was nobody in the county knew more about dairy than her…and of course, bringing all them along was going to mean bringing along the people they truly cared about, as much as he could. He couldn’t set things up properly if everyone hated him for leaving their sister behind or whatever…

Julian watched him for a second, then gave a satisfied nod and handed him something. “Here. Unlimited travel pass between Earth and Cimbrean, security documents, everything you need. I want your family here yesterday. So…get that payment done. Get bought. And don’t worry about leaving things behind, you will have priority through the gate. Alice is your contact point, her info’s on the card. Anything you need within reason she can arrange. And here’s my phone number. I’ll ask you please not abuse it…”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t be afraid to share the occasional meme or whatever. We all gotta make time and clear the mind sometimes, heh…but yeah. I’m supposedly just filling in until they get the new ambassador appointed, but I think you’re someone worth knowing.”

He stood, then, and proffered his titanic mitt and gave a firm, warm shake remarkably like crushing one’s hand in a rough-hewn granite vice. “And I hope I’m worth knowing in turn. Good luck, mister Beaufort.”

“…You’re going to Nightmare, you said?”

“Yup. Dominion law again: a permanent settlement is any that remains constantly inhabited for longer than four standard years, which my camp did. And the first person to build a permanent settlement on an unclaimed planet claims it for their government…which means, I rightly claimed Nightmare as a colony planet of the United States of America.”

“…But did you have a flag?”

“Ha!” Julian had a deep-chested bark of a laugh. “No, but I’mma sure as fuck plant one now!”

He turned off the privacy field, and Folctha crashed in to surround them with noise and people again. It felt to Austin like returning from some kinda other dimension. “Well…good luck.”

“You too.”

“Choose your people wisely.”

And with that…turning off the field musta been a signal of some sort because suddenly there was a serious man in a serious suit and Julian was gone toward a waiting vehicle.

“Sir?”

Austin turned. Another serious man in an equally serious suit gave him a polite nod. “Your car’s waiting.”

He lead Austin to a surprisingly nondescript silver sedan. Comfortable ride, leather seats…lot of effort to just go the few blocks back over to the jump terminus. But, Austin realized, he was an asset now. They wanted him at work as quickly as humanly possible, and he was happy to oblige. He flashed his documents, was waved through to the array—a charter jump! But of course, that was the only kind, now.

Two minutes later, he was back in Kansas. His parking all paid for. A curfew pass among his official documents.

He managed to resist the urge to call Lauren until he was in the car. It wouldn’t do for people to overhear him. He wondered if the NSA would be listening to his calls, now.

Either way…his car was probably private enough. So he called home and told her the news that she was, sort of, a baroness now.

The world had just gotten another step weirder.

Ekallim-Igigi, New Uruk system

Alex, Prince of Ekallim-Igigi

“Begin.”

It had been a couple of years since Mevia or Tomoe had been able to beat Alex in sparring practice individually, though they could both give him a few good bruises for his troubles, especially if his concentration lapsed.

He was yet, however, to defeat them both at the same time. Not that Alex felt bad about that, really: even his father lost a good third of the time when they ganged up on him. They had tricks, and the style of the fight here wasn’t about sheer strength. This was about endurance and skill.

He had ‘em beat on endurance too. But skill? He wasn’t even eighteen! It was little mistakes. A slight mis-positioning and suddenly a speartip was shooting toward his face. He’d see it and immediately over-compensate, because spear to the face, at which point the other would pull a similar trick, and so on. He had to exert himself much harder than either of the two once he slipped up, and getting ahead of their aggression took almost impossible effort.

But very occasionally, they made mistakes, too. In this case Mevia had glanced over at Tomoe at the precise moment Alex had a chance to lunge forward…and so he did. And in the process, caught Tomoe in a mistake too, as she blinked at his sudden rapidity.

Men of Alex’s size were not supposed to be fast, if you listened to common sense. But that was the thing; they were usually faster than anything else, and Alex in particular was a blur when he wanted to be. The price of massive strength wasn’t speed, it was momentum, and that wasn’t the same thing at all.

So, use it to his advantage.

Twist, step, block, turn, grab, sway, heave—

A burst of effort, and he’d claimed his first ever victory over the pair of them. Mevia several meters away, nursing her ribs. Tomoe pinned face-down in the sand.

“Mmf…oh, that was very well done,” she wheezed, her voice muffled by sand.

“Was that…aimed at me…or at him…?” Mevia coughed, standing up.

It was funny, really. Mevia and Tomoe argued more fiercely than any two people he’d ever known, never missing the chance to snipe and bicker at each other. It almost looked like a kind of mutual hatred. Except, that definitely wasn’t hate in Tomoe’s eyes when she shot back “Both. Sarcastically to you, of course.”

Mevia harrumphed…but that wasn’t irritation in her eyes, either. Alex didn’t really want to speculate too hard about what his step-mothers got up to in private, though, so he cleared his throat before they could ‘bicker’ further. “What do you think, father?”

“I think you relied too much on your strength. You can’t depend on your foe making a mis-step. Most of your enemies will seek to keep you at a distance, as my wives do…but well done.”

“Again,” Mevia declared, having retrieved her spear.

“No,” Alex answered automatically. “We have a planning council to attend.”

One thing father had always loved about Mevia was her quick temper. “Me verberare te! You do not tell me no, boy—”

Alex looked her dead in the eyes. “Yes, I do, mother. I am no longer bound to obedience. And in any case, this meeting cannot be postponed.”

That had been a rough spot, lately. Alex had learned that growing up was much harder on the parents than it ever was on the child. Most of his mothers understood and didn’t push it, and he was generally considerate in turn. But Mevia was…well, Mevia was Mevia. Words were never enough to get her to relent.

She decided to force the issue, and aimed a slap at his face.

And that was a mistake. One-on-one, she didn’t stand much chance against him when he wasn’t feeling restrained. He caught the slap, spun her around, and had her pinned in the sand before she could react.

“You will let me part in peace, mother. Or I will cuff you and leave you here.”

Mevia squirmed a second, then quite abruptly relaxed and laughed. “Well, my love! It seems we raised a bull after all!” she called out to Gilgamesh, whose only reply was to turn his eyes heavensward and nod, a smile shifting the curls of his beard.

Alex wasn’t stupid. He cuffed her anyway. But not too tightly, and he pulled her up to her knees. She’d break free from the zip-ties on her own.

He knew now just how strange his relationships were with his mothers—also strange, to have mothers plural. They weren’t always tender or loving, either. With Mevia, it had never been anything but violent, at her constant insistence. So far as Alex could tell, she didn’t have a gentle relationship with anyone, but she only had contempt for those who didn’t meet her in kind. In Mevia’s world, there were no greater sins than softness and coddling. Violence was her way of loving.

Ian had once asked him some uncomfortable questions about whether her bedchambers were full of rope and whips. Alex didn’t know, and later research had made it clear he didn’t want to know. But he suspected the answer would be a definite yes.

He had to wonder about father, too.

Anyway, they parted in relative peace, Tomoe giggling in her quiet way over it all, and Alex soon found himself alone with father, charging briskly to the council.

“I suspect they are beginning to realize the danger of planet-bound civilization,” Gilgamesh theorized.

“I suspect so. After all, if we ever faced something like what’s coming for Earth, we’d just move the station.”

“Hmm.” Gilgamesh nodded and adjusted his beard slightly with a beringed hand. “…How is your friend Ian taking it?”

“Not well. He and Hunter have been almost inseparable whenever they have opportunity.”

“A shame those two don’t find wives…” Gilgamesh rumbled, with a shake of his head.

“You’re being old-fashioned, father,” Alex chided him.

“There’ll be far too few humans soon enough, and ‘old-fashioned’ makes families. Nothing is more important. I don’t begrudge them comfort, and the gods know there’s no shame as far as I’m concerned…but…”

“Give them time. The more pressing need for everyone is to heal, and how many people can be saved. And the saved will mostly be women and children, I suspect.”

“…Aye.”

“There’s agriculture too…”

“Yes, all arguments for space-borne civilization. Leifini may just get her wish and finally design a new mother-station.”

“A series of them, I’d imagine. But who builds them?”

“The question of the day! Let us see if we can’t answer it…”

There was time enough for a brief shower, then…get dressed. Ceremonial dress, for receiving important guests. Alex had grown…accustomed to the way they did things on Earth and Cimbrean. Tristan and Ramsey had taken him to the Folcthan tailor who did work for Julian and the HEAT, and he’d found he rather liked a two-piece or three-piece suit.

He’d eventually secured a date with his daughter, too. Fun! But she wasn’t interested in being a princess, and he didn’t understand the deliberately ordinary world she chose to live in. Oh well. After the third date, they parted with a kiss and a little present from him…and nothing more. Probably for the best.

And in any case, his very best suit was a gift from Adam: in bright blue, and it fit better than any of the others.

Today, though, he was working in his capacity as a prince of Ekallim-Igigi. That meant the old formalities of robes and jewelry. The cloth was far finer than any available in Uruk during father’s time, and Alex had declined to grow a beard, but the ensemble laid out for him by the royal valet was nevertheless a trip back in time, to when glazed pottery had been integral to a suitably impressive headpiece.

Alex had put as much of his own stamp on it as he could by insisting on quite a non-traditional style of hair bead, and on asteroidal platinum rather than gold. The end result was…he fancied it rather interesting. It flattered his form—while managing to be a bit less crass, for a change—carried all the gravitas of Singularity’s ancient history while being firmly his own distinctive style, and was, most importantly, not too much fuss and bother to don.

They were hosting Council.

There was nowhere else suitable. Earth? Earth was rapidly falling into anarchy from the shock of being told most of them were doomed. Cimbrean, Gao and Akyawentuo were bracing themselves for a flood of refugees, and in any case no planet was definitively safe and secure for the moment. That just left spaceborne structures, and of the available options…Armstrong was far too busy, the Entity’s garden wasn’t equipped to handle so many guests, and the Rich Plains was too…indifferent.

No, the AEC leaders and their interstellar allies needed somewhere stable, secure, spacious, and calm. Only Ekallim-Igigi met those needs. So, father had ordered a meeting space assembled in the royal parklands before the ziggurat; when Alex emerged down the front entrance stairs a few minutes after dressing, he found that the sky over the park was darkened, showing the outside view rather than its usual summery blue sky.

Dominating the view below was New Uruk, their anchorage. A class twelve deathworld that could have been Earth’s twin, and likely an evacuation site in the coming months. Alex wondered if Earth itself wouldn’t have been more fitting, but…

Well. He straightened his back, was announced, and jointed the Singularity delegation, standing between his father, Pandrosion and Tomoe.

Opposite: American president Margaret White, British Prime Minister Luke Ratcliffe, Canadian Prime Minister Sean Gaboury, Australian Prime Minister Andy Rutledge and the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Laurell Gayford. Each had their most senior military advisor alongside them, plus AEC supreme commander General Kolbeinn, the SOR’s commanding officer, Colonel Costello, Ambassador Etsicitty…

Then there were the nonhumans. Great Father Daar, of course, plus Great Mother Naydra, and a number of Champions, their Grandfathers and advisors. Yan Given-Man, Vemik Given-Man and the Singer of Vemik’s tribe. AtaUmuUi of the OmoAru Remnant. All were wearing their species’ respective versions of ceremonial finery.

And, standing apart from all groups, the Entity’s daemon, her avatar wearing an elegant black coat.

What was that scene? The Council of Elrond? It felt like the meeting before a great doom.

Gilgamesh looked down at Alex—not so much down, nowadays. They were much closer in height now, Alex having sprouted up to the predicted two-ish meters. What he lacked in height on his father though, he more than made up for in breadth. An odd thing to think about right then but, well…things felt dire suddenly. Somehow, the moment hit hard, and Alex realized his fate was forming before him.

It was going to be a hard and terrible future.

Father noticed, somehow. They nodded at each other, then stepped forward to the large circular table, where Gilgamesh laid his hands, gently.

“Time is precious,” he declared, and the quiet conversations all ceased. “I will not waste it with some florid speech. We have the duty ahead of us of preserving as many lives from among the people of Earth as we can. Each of us must find a part to play in this terrible endeavor, and we must be coordinated, lest we fail to save as many as we can. How many can we save? Where will they go? How will they be provided for? My friends…let us answer these questions, and whatever others may arise.”

They closed in a circle around the table. All of them had received briefings on the general thrust of the meeting, and had several weeks to prepare. With luck, they wouldn’t be going into this in total ignorance.

It seemed that this time, by a miracle of God, the leaders of mankind had come prepared. What followed was an accounting of the assets and capacity each nation already had access to, and how much they could realistically expect to achieve in four years.

Leifini’s spot at the table had a few small steps so that she could rise to stand on more-or-less the same level as all the other, much larger beings. She took notes as the world leaders shared their news, nodding as though each report was lining up with what she already knew.

“The upper limit is bound by agriculture,” she declared, eventually. “Barring some new miracle in hydroponics and simple construction, I estimate, roughly, we can recover high quality food production for maybe two-hundred million in the time we are allotted.”

That number hit like a lead brick to the face. Alex could see they’d all known it would be bad…but none of them had feared it would be that bad.

“So few…” White wrung her hands.

“Surely we can farm more than that…?”

“Agriculture is a complex, interconnected field requiring a strong industrial base. You cannot farm on the scale to which you are accustomed without tractors, harvesters, sprayers, and a nigh-endless list of other equipment, all of which require constant maintenance and spare parts, and depend on an extensive logistical chain of both energy and communications.“

“What about…” Rutledge hesitated, thoughtfully, then nodded and started over. “Okay. What about subsistence feeding? Save as many as possible on iron rations, and improve our lot over time?”

Leifini gestured, transferring the charts and projections from her tablets to the tabletop projector for all to see. “The numbers are not much more promising. Possibly, we can save another fifty million, but that will generate increased disease and malnutrition injury. Given the multitude of unknowns, including the dangers of breaking new land in Earth-plus environments, I cannot say if this will result in a net gain of lives. It may even result in a net loss.”

“What about stasis?” The Entity-Daemon proposed.

“As a solution for storing people until the agricultural and industrial base exists to support them, stasis is indeed the most viable option, and the most…industrially scalable. The issue of course is that persons in stasis will not contribute in any regard to saving other lives. The issues of construction and energy are significant. Stasis at this scale has to our knowledge never before been attempted…”

The avatar nodded seriously. “Well, there’s a few ways to do it, but from our perspective the simplest is probably to churn out individual stasis bags, hook them up to a solar collector and leave them in orbit near Cimbrean for later recovery.”

“Possible, certainly…” Leifini mused. “The issue is not ability, the issue is diversion of resources. Further, stasis bags are not indestructible. There are concerns about micrometeorites, orbit decays…many factors. They would ideally be housed but once you’re down that road you’ve greatly complicated matters. And yes,” nodding at the Entity, “we have given thought to replication.”

“We can tend the stasis bags,” the Entity replied. “The point is, so long as they result in a net increase in the number of people we save…everything else can come later. And by our calculations, they will. Stasis bags would about double the number of survivors, even factoring in some loss to micrometeors and other hazards. We have proposals for who to put in those bags, too.”

“So. Half a billion out of ten billion. At most.” Ratcliffe summarized, hollowly. “…Still better than bloody nothing.”

White nodded glumly, then turned to look over her shoulder. “Mister Etsicitty, I don’t suppose your Desperate Measures Committee has come up with anything?”

Julian shook his head sadly. “We have a bunch of the finest minds in the galaxy working full-time at my house with all the snacks and coffee they could ask for. So far, the best proposal they’ve come up with is, again, stasis bags in orbit. They’ll keep trying to the very end, but the longer it takes them, the less time we’ll have to actually implement any magic bullet they do manage to think up.”

“All those stasis bags are a temporary measure. They will require a functioning economy to ultimately release their occupants into,” Gilgamesh said. “I fear Singularity can only provide limited assistance in that regard, but what we can do is buy you the space and room, the military protection, you need. We can patrol star systems near the refuge worlds and ensure that the Hierarchy, or whatever remaining Hunter broods may still be out there, do not repeat what happened at Alpha Centauri.”

There were nods around the table. Alex tried to let some of the tension out of his shoulders. He’d been worried that the representatives of Earth would accuse Singularity of not doing enough.

Instead, Daar moved the conversation on. “I’ve spoken with the Interspecies Dominion. So far, they’re bein’ as slow to respond as ever. The OmoAru and Rauwrhyr have offered their unconditional support, though.”

“In what form?” Margaret White asked.

“They have the industrial base to provide prefab buildings, parts, machinery, equipment…and the ships to deliver ‘em. As to th’ rest…I think th’ most biggest thing we need ‘ta do is agree ‘ta get outta th’ way for all this. Clear out bureaucratic obstacles, git things movin’…y’all already did that with ‘yer various acts o’ parliament an’ Constitutional convention an’ whatever. I’ll be doin’ likewise back home.”

Left unsaid was how that would go. Alex didn’t think it would be a problem, really…

It all looked and sounded like some kind of a coherent plan to him, at least. Gods only knew how deep the iceberg would be under the surface, but here at least things almost looked simple. War maps always did, he remembered. He’d studied many, from every era of gaoian and human history. Those little colored blocks and arrows disguised an awful lot of blood and suffering, and an awful lot of terrible decisions.

He could see some of those awful decisions already. How each nation was taking care of its own first, for instance, meaning that a great many of Earth’s smaller, less affluent nations would be left behind to burn one and all. The rich and powerful would survive this, while the majority…wouldn’t.

Was that fair? He knew the AEC nations planned to select their survivors by merit, but it was so much easier to merit when one was from the right background, the right address, the right state, the right inheritance…

He blinked at a sudden sharp nudge: Gilgamesh had discreetly prodded him below the table to restore his focus. Right. Now was not the time for those thoughts. He could…work them out later, in private.

And perhaps see if there was anything he could do. With all his own power and inheritance, surely there must be?

He set the question aside, and returned to the bare facts and the war map in front of him.

But he did not forget.

Great Father’s ranch, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

Sometimes, the only way for a bro like Adam to really work through his issues was to get the absolute fuckin’ shit beat outta him by a goddamn expert. And the list of people who could do that wasn’t very long, dependin’ on what was meant.

Daar was more than happy to oblige!

After all, Adam could handle a few good solid love-taps. As a complete warrior, Daar would argue there was no better. There was hardly a combat skill he hadn’t mastered by this point, leaving him only a couple’a true peers in the dark world of precisely applied and personally delivered force. Daar was proud to be one of ‘em.

Recon? Same story, even despite Adam’s size. Infantry work? Stoneback’s finest couldn’t humble him, s’long as he could be kept fed. As a medic? All those killy skills came in handy, too. The idiot had yet to be born that ‘Horse and ‘Base couldn’t fuckin’ rescue. As a coach and trainer? He was still blazing the trail.

Name the relevant skill: none were better than him and very few were his peers. Such was the story for almost everything he did. He was the best and Daar knew of nobody else so maximally useful across so many different aspects of mudfoot or mudfoot-adjacent endeavor. He was the operator who defined the ideal for the modern spaceborne era, no matter the species or organization. Not even Singularity had someone to match Warhorse, and Daar had made good and damn well sure he’d kept him good and damn well motivated.

He wasn’t perfect, though. Nobody was. If he had a rival who had an even stronger claim to be the best (and Daar wouldn’t disagree) it was Firth. There was a lot of overlap in their skillsets, but it wasn’t total—Adam was an absolutely elite spaceborne combat medic, Christian was a combat controller more qualified and more deployed than any other. Arés was very publicly a trailblazing strength and conditioning coach, Firth was quietly perhaps the greatest and most deeply-trained martial artist among humankind. Hell, across species. Adam had the heart of a hero, Firth the mind of a killer born. They were differences that mattered.

For Daar’s purposes, Adam was the more appropriately well-rounded ideal. But one thing he couldn’t argue against was physical performance. In that realm, Firth was supreme. By a pretty fuckin’ vast amount, and growing vaster. Misfortune had knocked Adam off his pedestal, and during his recovery he’d lost his commanding lead. He wasn’t taking that lying down of course; it was just a few of his bestest who could still embarrass him. But they weren’t standing still, either: Righteous had finally grown deadly serious about it all and was now far and away ahead, Julian was beatin’ him silly too ‘cuz genetically perfect an’ all that shit…also a couple o’ monkey-friends had ‘em beat…

Add in Alex, Gilgamesh, Y!Kiidaa, Champions Gurrum an’ Thurrsto, a buncha other scary-ass males huge an’ huger ‘cross the Deathworld species…lotsa folks nipping at his heels. Mosta th’ real stars, he’d had at least a hand in coachin’ too. In fact mosta them owed him ‘fer helpin’ ‘em find their hard-earned might. Their success was his, and he loved ‘em all…

Some o’ them mighta thunk they’d knock ‘em down a peg or three one day.

Daar could only laugh at their hubris. That weren’t never gonna happen. A good nose could smell Adam’s quality, and he was at least the equal of the other wonderfucks—and he had that without Singularity meddling in his family tree. Fuckin’ awesome! Daar was pretty sure those three (and Alex too) would tie up one day at the pinnacle of whatever a human could do, and leave everyone else leagues behind. Hell, Adam might even take top place again!

Well, maybe not. Firth was…Firth. A well-bred demigod, and at his very best might well be unmatchable. Whatever Alex was, Firth had been more in his youth; apparently Adam himself hadn’t passed him by until several years of Crude-fueled training and a fanatical mindset to be the best had allowed him to claw past and excel. That was the biggest part of why Daar favored Adam, really. Firth had rested on his haunches and good breeding for years and didn’t take things as seriously as he could until someone showed up to humble him. Adam had worked and suffered for all the ability he had, and that was something Daar couldn’t help but admire.

All of the human wonderfucks were playing the same game now, so some day soon, the galaxy would see what a human being could really do when pushed to the limits by science and willpower.

Which was okay, ‘cuz Daar had ‘em all beat by a billion miles, an’ nothin’ short of another fully dominant sixth degree would ever come close, let alone match. Hell, even then he’d hafta be basically perfect and better, so…yeah. An’ right now, Daar was in th’ mood ‘fer a big damn lift. When Brothers like Daar and Warhorse had problems, there was only one way to solve ‘em.

Day one was a fight with Adam and crew against some of the Gao’s finest. Adam laid waste to everyone, and then unleashed his full fury on Daar. He took it all, until Adam beat his fists bloody against Daar’s body, and all he had left was tears and shuddering sobs from deep within his mighty chest.

…Yeah. This time, what was needed were cuddles rather than crushes. For everyone. That evening, Adam and his crew were the center of the bestest snuggle pile.

Days two and three, though: Adam was in a much better place, and so Daar gave him the complete an’ total whuppin’ he needed. Same for his crew. Rees and Davies got personal instruction from Whitecrest masters while the Wrecking Crew got to learn with Champion Guruum personally. Adam and Daar, meanwhile, went off to train on their own.

The rest of the week was a true blessing. A blessing with weights. Neither of ‘em were the least bit sorry for what they were, and Daar was glad of the distraction, such as it was. Everything was doom and gloom right now, everything revolved around the Earth crisis. He’d been at the eye of a storm of numbers and estimates even gloomier than the gaori population crisis. It was nice to have something kinda positive happen, and nice to lift with one o’ the few people who could move durasteel plates under the gravity field of Daar’s gym.

Or maybe he was just starved for positivity, because what Adam had to discuss in between bouts weren’t really positive at all.

“So they came an’ visited?”

“Yuh.” Clean and jerk right then, just ‘cuz they were fun an’ challengin’ lifts ‘ta do. The word came out as a grunt as Adam propelled a fuckuva lot of metal up onto the shelf of his chest, paused a second while his special ultrameathead-sized bar bent and sagged alarmingly, then thrust it high into the air overhead. Controlled descent to the ground, back up, pressed again. And again, and again.

Not bad. Not fuckin’ bad at all. Pound-’fer-pound, Adam was ‘bout the strongest damn man anywhere. ‘Course, monkeys always came to that lift more easily, an’ his lifts were pretty crazy an’ disproportionately extreme even ‘fer a primate, but that was okay. It was a good lift. Sure. Daar could put the monkeys in their place there too, ‘cuz even in a pound-’fer-pound lift, Daar was still the motherfuckin’ king. He had a way more huger bar, with even huger plates, and the hugest fuckin’ muscles an’ gods-blessed mass to fuckin’ move ‘em with.

And more huger was more better. He chittered to himself, and plotted his next lift. Can’t leave his Battlepony thinkin’ he might be top shit!

And caught up on gossip. “Well? What’d they have ‘ta say?”

Adam set the weight down and caught his breath. “Egh…you know Singularity. They’ve got a knack for bein’ creepy even when they’re tryin’ to do the right thing, yijao?” he smiled faintly at Daar’s chitter and grabbed his bottle. “There’s this old movie, Indecent Proposal, you ever see it? Some rich dude offers a married couple a lotta money to fuck the wife…”

Daar duck-nodded: he’d seen that movie. He chittered, walked over to his Huge Lift Bar…fuck it. All the weight, crank the gravity up too and really drive home who was bestest…

“I get it.” No more talk. Just grunt, and clean and then jerk and then fuckin’ press over an’ over an’ fuckin’ over ‘cuz Warhorse could go fuck himself wit’ his monkey shoulders, Daar would just be better an’ straight outmuscle him by numbers an’ in proportion, too. And he did, with a smug ear-flick and a challenging growl. There. Marker laid down.

Beat that, ‘ya fuckin’ grass-monkey!

“So…yeah.” Back to the topic at hand as he huffed in a big breath or two, and swung his arms a bit to keep the blood moving. “An’ they were prob’ly as subtle as…uh…”

“You?” Adam grinned.

“Shaddup, little guy.”

“No! But…yeah. Weird fuckin’ thing to spring on people. ‘Hey, the world is ending! You should make babies! Lots of babies!’”

Ah. Daar knew where this conversation was going now. Okay, he could handle it.

Honesty was yet again the bestest policy.

“Well, not sure what ‘ya exect me ‘ta tell ‘ya! ‘Make lotsa babies’ is sorta what we do lately. It’s what I do s’pecially,” Daar chittered. “So of course I’m gonna encourage more of you!”

“And you’ve got a rolling harem…”

“…Well, yes. But it’s mostly ‘ta limit my impact on th’ Females these days, yijao?”

Adam grinned. “Lowkey, that’s the most egotistical thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Look, whatever. Point is, my answer is gonna be pretty predictably pro-mating an’ pro- more Warhorse babies. I don’t know if I’m th’ right guy ‘ta ask!”

“Yeah, but, look at my list of human people I can talk to about it. ‘Base is a player, he’d just be like ‘fuck yeah dog, go for it.’ Same for most of the Lads, hell even me before I got married! Julian, Al and Xiù are poly, and on the flip side, my dad and Firth are violently Catholic…”

“What about th’ rest o’ the team? You’ve got a Buddhist, a Pagan, some Protestants—”

“Still Christian. Just a different flavor.”

“Sure, but that matters, right? An’ isn’t Titan like, Shinto or somethin’?”

“Nah. He’s…actually I’m not sure. He’s really private about that shit.”

“But there’s more voice there, is what I’m sayin’.”

“Eh.” Adam shrugged, threw some more weight on his bar, and put up another set before catching his breath and replying. “They’re all kinda unsure I think. Sorta like me.” Only a little more strain this time; he had a lot more in him. Good. It would be a long lift today. “I wasn’t ever a deep thinker. Mosta them ain’t either.”

“Well, okay,” Daar acquiesced. “That’s fair. So ‘yer after an outside perspective.”

“Need a big smartypants. Which narrows the list down to you, or Nofl.”

“But Adam! I don’t wear any pants!”

“I know. We all know! You just roll around, huge ass gettin’ all up in everyone’s faces, tail knocking cars over an’ shit!”

“Nuh-uh! ‘Sides,” Daar chittered, “I got a fuckin’ fantastic ass, too! Everyone says so.”

“Uh-huh. Thank God your fur’s good and long in the front.”

“Well, yeah! Gotta keep m’bits warm! An’ don’t think I ‘fergot ‘yer big-brain accusation!”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

Daar flicked his ears smugly. “Yeah, but don’t tell anyone. I gots a reputation ‘ta defend!”

“Sure,” with a grin, “your secret’s safe with me. But f’real, I meant it. I trust you, because you’re smart as fuck and honest as fuck, too. You never sugar-coat it. And you get us. And I might trust Nofl with my brain, but not my marriage.”

Daar duck-nodded, and gathered more durasteel plates while he thinked even heavier thoughts.

“Right. An’ that’s th’ thing. Part o’ why I got a harem now is ‘cuz, me bein’ what I am, an’ bein’ as everythin’ as I am, even mating wit’ a female is likely ‘ta bond ‘em to me now. ‘Fer, like, years, if not ferever. Balls, these days even my smell is too much ‘fer the inexperienced! So it ain’t fair to do that to every pretty thing I sniff, yijao? Not ‘less their old enough ‘ta get what it’ll mean ‘fer them…so yeah. You though, you’ve got th’ opposite problem. An’ I’m bettin’ Marty hinted she’d be okay with it…”

“…How the fuck you know that?”

Daar sighed. Everyone always forgot he was capable of occasionally thinkin’. Even ‘Horse right now, after he made a point ‘ta bring it up! Figgers.

“You wouldn’t even bring it up if she’d said no,” Daar noted without the grumble he wanted ‘ta make, and racked more plate. He loved durasteel these days for his gymware; denser than any natural alloy, even osmium, while being cheap, non-toxic, and also non-radioactive. Whadda deal. “You also wouldn’t bring it up if it didn’t bother the fuck outta ‘ya both ways, ‘cuz I know you. If it was a hard no, you’d say no, end of. If you were entirely down ‘fer it, you wouldn’t be here neither. In fact you’d have been doin’ it ‘fer years already! So what’s happened is, somewhere in that poached fuckin’ brain o’ yours—”

Adam grinned. “Hey!”

“Fine, fine. Scrambled. Or would you prefer deep-fried? Boiled?”

“My brains ain’t eggs!”

“I dunno, most monkeybrains are fuckin’ delicious…”

Adam finally stopped trying to reply, and just stared at him. He was learning.

Well, shit. Daar’d need new humor contingencies after this!

“—point is, part’a you recognizes the sense in what Singularity’s saying, and another part of you doesn’t like it—”

“I wouldn’t go so far as sense…”

“Logic, then. Their goals an’ purpose. Point is,” he added a tiny little snarl, “there is logic ‘ta what they’re sayin’, and you know it, an’ the animal side of you is jumpin’ outta ‘yer skin to jus’ go forth an’ smash I bet. But you love her and you’ve got ‘yer own ideas of what a family looks like, an’ ‘yer a million percent right on those ideas, too. Humans need stable families an’ both mothers an’ fathers! So what you need, Cousin, is ‘ta find a solution that’s all ‘yers.”

He left that hang for a bit while he achieved Lift. Good lift, in fact with his personal (and world) record broken easily enough that he did two long sets with a brief pause between. Good enough that Adam was giving him his calculating coach-looks again.

Adam shook his head and chuckled, while Daar caught his breath. Good hurt on that set. “Christ, you’re just impossibly strong. Meat shouldn’t be able to do that.”

Daar caught his breath quickly. “I think mebbe mah muscles know it’s easier to just do the impossible thing, or you’ll keep torturing them ‘til they do!”

Adam snickered his weird wheezing snicker. “Dude. I’d hope they don’t think for themselves!”

“Nah,” Daar chittered. “Just mah cock! Always was the schemier mind in me…”

“The secret of your success, right there. Think wit’ ‘yer dick!”

“Damn right! Bigger the dick, the better it thinks too!”

“Or worse,” Adam added, grinning. “Mine certainly got me in a lot of trouble.”

“We’ll since I’m the most biggest an’ all, and my younger days were mostly spent running to an’ from th’ most biggest trouble…yeah. Those both check out.”

Bants we’re always welcome! But Adam had things on his mind.

“Y’know, sometimes it hits me how absurd our friendship is. Here I am, admittedly a pretty unique operator but, just a space marine, really. And I’m hanging out with the space emperorbear of the universe, who‘s apparently pretty proud of his gigantic meat and ain’t afraid to say so. Pretty weird friendship with a pretty weird emperor, I’d say.”

Fair point, really.

“Well, okay. Firstly, wouldn’t you be?”

“I am but that’s beside the point. Ain’t it weird for us to even be friends?”

“Brother,” Daar replied, “every fuckin’ moment of my life is fuckin’ absurd. Roll wit’ it, s’only thing ‘ya can do. Did ‘ya think I ever s’pected I’d turn into…well, me? Super grateful ‘fer our friendship, by the way. Anyhoo…”

Maybe a bit of limbering-up, now. He leaned up against the wall and rolled his head against it, to stretch out his neck. Overhead lifts tended ‘ta strain his traps a lot. “All that’s gon’ color my opinion. An’ I bet it’s pretty obvious what I think ‘ya should do: there’s a few of ‘ya grass-monkeys I think the world needs a whole fuck of a lot more of, an’ you’re right at th’ top o’ that list. So me? I’d say line ‘em up an’ fuck ‘em all!”

Seeing the way Adam’s weary face softened, his eyes closed and his shoulders shifted in a chuckle was all the confirmation Daar needed that he was saying the right things.

“But assumin’ ‘yer lil Battlepony ain’t gonna go out and conquer…jokes aside, I want ‘ya happy, an’ you humans unnerstand loyalty like only my people do. So who am I ‘ta tell you not ‘ta be loyal ‘ta Marty? So…I dunno. Why can’t ‘ya jus’ start wit’ some open doors? Hospitality’s always a good thing, I reckon. Shit, s’what we’re doin’! ‘Ya think I got this all figgered out? Fuck no!! Do the right thing first an’ think quick on ‘yer paws after. So…what’s the right thing ‘fer puny lil’ Adam to do now?”

He couldn’t help the tease, really. Human attitudes on that had been so liberating! Gaoian culture musta been begging ‘fer a way ‘ta climb outta the linguistic hellscape of ritual honor, ‘cuz not even five years After Contact, dueling culture had radically changed. Now they were rarer, since it were almost impossible to stumble into one with a shit-tail killer. A good thing! Competitive energies were going more into sport, too. Better!

Adam grinned as he gave it a bit of thought. “Well…I was gonna empty the building out for a remodel…we haven’t quite started work yet so, shit, maybe start there? Make more room? That’s basically what I’d decided to do anyway…”

“Sure! Mebbe go in on it wit’ Firth, don’t he have a building jus’ like ‘yers?”

Thoughtful monkey-faces, as Adam pondered the problem. And pondered the gym. Flat bench now, apparently. Okay, why not? It really was more of a fun upper-body day than a strictly programmed one. Good! And Daar did have some really fuckin’ huge pecs…

“I think you’re probably right.”

“‘Course I am! Start with doin’ whatever good ‘ya can do right now and, whatever comes next, you’ll still be doin’ some good. Figure out if goin’ farther’s right, firstly, an’ if it’s right ‘fer you two later. An’ just in case ‘yer worried: I personally wouldn’t be surprised either way, an’ neither would any of ‘yer friends, ‘fer what it’s worth. We know what you two are like.”

“…Makes sense.”

Daar duck-nodded. “Now…here’s the other side of it.” He took several laps of cold water from the fountain in the corner before stomping over and setting up his own bar. “Warhorse is the kinda asset I don’t just use, right? Just like I don’t fuckin’ use nukes ‘ta crack open nuts. So let’s be clear what that means: ‘yer gon’ be held in reserve. You an’ ‘yer team are too fuckin’ valuable to waste on trivial shit. So you’ve got time, and I want y’all to fuckin’ well use it.”

“Yeah,” Adam was nodding now, looking happier and less conflicted. “Yeah, I think I know what we’re gonna do.”

“Good. Now fuckin’ lift, ‘ya pussy!” Gods’ nards, if only all Daar’s problems were so easily resolved. Though actually, it was kinda nice to have somethin’ as simple as talkin’ a friend through a decision.

The rest of the evening was pretty much typical. Play-training became serious training, because of course it did. The last few months had been more about refinement more’n strength or bulk, and Daar found he really enjoyed the finesse of all this bodybuildin’ shit at the highest levels. He broke a couple PRs, but mostly they focused on findin’ weaknesses, on accessory movements, on having fun, posin’ an’ flexin’ an’ general meathead shenanigans…

A good way to spend their last day. They cooled down and parted ways. Adam went back to Cimbrean while Daar thumped back up to his office. Evening papers and reports to read. But not all night. Naydi had ideas for what to do next. Her and her fellow Sisters…

Well, what could he do? He was only male. And he lived by the rule of relaxin’ as hard as he possibly could when he got the chance. Tomorrow, after all, would be the first day of long and grueling work.…

He spared one more thought for Adam, then gave the women he loved his full attention.

Bein’ Great Father weren’t without its rewards.

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, Earth

Letty Brown

“The streets are no place for a young lady to sleep, you know…”

Letty looked up. Looked back down again, shifting her posture lightly so her hand was near the knife under her butt. That had been the first thing she’d got her hands on, once she’d had a chance to think and plan. She was never going unarmed ever again.

Still. The tall white-haired lady in the black coat had a kind voice, and a kinder face. She raised her hands, reassuringly. “I’m just making sure you’re okay,” she promised. “You need anything? Food? Water?”

Letty watched her fish a water bottle and sandwich out of her purse, then nodded thirstily. She didn’t trust the woman enough to speak, yet. She could be an undercover cop.

Or…worse. Nolan was still out there somewhere. And there were gonna be other people like him, too.

The woman smiled though, and handed them over by setting them down in arm’s reach and backing off a few steps. Letty hesitated, then the ache in her belly won out over paranoia, and she tore into them. Cheap food—the sandwich was a just couple of slices of tomato and some mayo on white bread—but fuck. It was the best thing she’d ever eaten.

Black Coat Lady sat down opposite her, then tilted her head back and looked up as a semi thundered overhead, filling the underpass with deafening noise that drowned out the trickle of water from the stream.

“End of the world mean you’ve got nowhere to go, huh?” she asked, conversationally.

Letty looked up at her, then shrugged, trying to give away as little as possible. “Yup,” she swigged the water. “Got home, found a note.”

“They just left you?”

“Yeah.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“But why not sleep there, in your own bedroom?”

“Some guys with guns showed up.” Letty sniffed. “Said I could stay if I fucked ‘em.”

“…How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

Black Coat Lady just stared at her.

“…next month,” Letty amended.

Black Coat Lady nodded, She looked, Letty thought, profoundly sad. And not in the same way everyone else did right now. “Well…my name’s Olivia,” she said. “And if you’d rather sleep somewhere safe, with regular food and pads and a shower—”

“You sayin’ I stink?”

“I wasn’t. But you do.”

Letty felt her face go hot. “What’s even the point?” she asked, to cover for it..”I mean, why are you even bothering with this shit? The world’s ending! You could be…I dunno. At an orgy or something, like my folks. Instead of talking to me…”

“I think talking to you is the much more worthwhile use of my tame,” Olivia replied, quietly. “And yes, it’s the end of the world. I don’t expect I’ll survive it, but…I have a choice, don’t I? I can spend my last years abandoning people and threatening people…or I can spend my last years being the best I can be.”

She stood, and squatted down next to Letty. “…And I think you want to make the best of it too, don’t you?”

Letty sighed. “…I dunno,” she admitted. “I guess…everything I tried so far didn’t make things any better.”

“What did you try?”

Letty hesitated. She must have hesitated quite a while, because Olivia put a hand out and rested it lightly on her own.

“It’s okay,” she said. “If you’d rather not—”

“My friend and me, we, uh…we broke into a liquor store. And we got drunk, and we got high, and it just made me feel worse, then later he had the bright idea of breaking into a bar to sell the liquor except some other fuckers with guns chased us away, and—”

She trailed off. She didn’t want to say the rest.

“—and a bunch of other stuff,” she finished lamely.

“I get it,” Olivia said.

“…You do?”

“Yeah. I really do.” She gave Letty a tired, guilty little smile. “You’re right, it doesn’t work. But…helping people does.”

Letty gave her a long, thoughtful look. Part of her was still expecting…she wasn’t sure what. She’d chosen the spot under the road by the stream cuz there was no way anyone could get a van down there to drag her into, and there were lots of directions she could run. She’d heard of that happening, here and there. The cops were too busy standing in front of buildings and looking scary to actually do anything about it, even if Letty had ever trusted them.

She really shouldn’t trust Olivia. She shouldn’t trust anyone. Fuck, she couldn’t trust anyone, not even her own fucking parents. But the thought that slithered into her brain again was…well…what was the worst that could happen?

And…what was the best that could happen?

There was a brief war in her heart; hope won.

“…Alright.” She accepted Olivia’s hand up. “Where are we going?”

“Sacred Heart.”

Letty paused. “Oh, I, uh—I don’t really…”

Olivia’s smile was nothing but warmth. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you think, or what you believe. All that matters is we have food, beds, showers, and laundry, and you’re invited to come use them.”

“For how long, though?” Letty pressed. “When are you gonna kick me out again?”

Olivia shook her head. “Never. What you need is yours. All are welcome.” She paused, then shrugged self-effacingly. “It’s what we do.”

“You…really believe that?”

“Believe what?”

“That…that people are…like that.”

“They can be. People are made for love, they just need to remember how.”

All Letty could think was, that went against everything she’d ever seen about people. Especially recently.

In any case, Olivia seemed…unbothered. “Talk’s cheap, though. Let’s get you cleaned up and get some soup in your belly. It’s meager fare but…” that shrug again. “We do what we can.”

“S-sure.”

And, so…off she went. It wasn’t like she had anything to pack, after all…

It was kind of a long walk from her campsite to downtown, and most of it was that same eerie, tense silence she’d almost got used to, now. Most of the road traffic was military, or FEMA, or police. The national guard vehicles rolling by had guys in full armor manning the machine guns, as though they were in a warzone.

Letty still didn’t really understand how anyone was…working in all of this.

Whatever. Sacred Heart was the sort of place she’d passed a couple times a month every month her whole life, and never glanced at twice. It was like a thousand years old, dull and gray and stone, with a dull gray stone school attached at the back, a couple blocks over from the state capitol.

Now, though, it was kind of a fortress. There were barriers up on the roads, chicken wire all over those windows that weren’t boarded up, and police patrolling. Letty shrunk instinctively closer to Olivia as they approached, but the cops just nodded them through.

Past the barrier, a scent reached her nose that made her stomach do hungry backflips: Fresh-baked bread. It was coming from an open-sided lean-to in the school car park, where somebody had set up a range and an oven and stuff, and several long tables, with a few random mismatched sets of garden furniture to eat at

Before she’d even had time to really process what was happening, she’d been sat down, handed a tray with a warm crusty roll and a big bowl of stew—macaroni, tomatoes, chopped hot dog and corn—and a jumbo plastic glass full of water. She shoveled it all into her face without thinking, while her belly practically sobbed for feeling full again.

At some point, Olivia sat down opposite her and gently asked Letty to hand over her knife. Letty…hesitated…but only for a second. She could always get another one, if she needed it.

After that, a somebody gave her a little plastic bag with soap, shampoo, toothpaste and toothbrush. She used them all in the shower, and…oh God. After getting kicked out of her house, she’d had to sort of…adjust…to feeling gross all the time, until after a while she’d stopped noticing it. Now that she was clean again, though…and when she’d put on the clean t-shirt and sweats somebody had scrounged up for her…

Blissful as it felt…it also made her feel more vulnerable. More scared. She missed her knife already.

That feeling didn’t go away when she was given a check-up by a young military doctor or when she was told she was in perfect health but she needed to take some vitamins, or when she was shown to a bunk inside the school. Only once she’d rolled into it and drawn the curtain to shut everything out did she finally, finally feel like she could stop holding her breath.

She lay there a long time. Dozed, without falling asleep. Heard voices talking. Some girl, talking about having a bunk-mate, even sounding eager to meet her. Olivia asked the other girl to leave Letty alone for now.

Later, the sound of a couple boys shooting hoops outside the window. The sound of raised male voices made Letty reach for the knife, and she had a nasty second of panic as she woke up groping for it before remembering where she was and that she didn’t have it any longer.

She groaned, and twitched the curtain aside. Apparently it was pretty late: the sky was red. She must have dozed away half the day, but…then again, that was the most comfortable thing she’d slept on in weeks.

She followed the sound downstairs and back outside. There was a man dressed all in black playing ball with the boys…a priest? Yeah. Stupid weird white collar. Didn’t think anyone would be so dumb to play ball all dressed up like that…

…Nuns, too. That’s what they were called, right? She’d never seen one before. Most of them were fuckin old, but the one with the most wrinkled face gave her a big smile and handed over a plate with a lid on it as soon as Letty emerged.

“We thought you needed the sleep, so we saved you a plate,” she explained. “it’s burgers.”

“Uh.” Letty managed. Then: “Thanks.”

Sure enough…one beef patty, another fresh-baked burger bun, cheese and ketchup. Letty ate it more slowly than she’d eaten the stew earlier and just…sat, and watched. And wondered how the fuck any of them were smiling. How were those boys and the priest enjoying their ball game? How was the nun so…happy as she bustled around cleaning up. It didn’t make any sense to Letty at all. Were they all high on something? Was there something in those vitamins?

She didn’t understand. But…whatever. It didn’t matter. And having her own bunk beat the hell out of sleeping on a cardboard box in an underpass by the river. She could stay here, for now. And it did feel…nice…when she decided to take the plate back and the nun gave her a smile and a thank-you and introduced herself as Sister Judith and called Letty ’dear.’

Later, there was a movie, some cute Disney bullshit. She met her bunk-mate, Emilia, who had a freaking badass e-tattoo, and invited to come with for choir practice, which…no.

She went back to bed instead.

This time, though, when she slid the curtain closed and shut the world out, she laid her head back and felt…safe.

And that feeling carried her gently down into her first proper sleep in far too long.

Olivia Beckett

“Poor girl. She barely knows which way is up, right now.”

“The detective wants to talk with her.”

“I know, I heard.” Olivia sighed and swirled the coffee in her camp mug. From behind her, the evening choir practice were warming up in the church. Nearly all the kids had been reluctant to join in the singing at first, but the ones who’d come out of their shells enough to take part had really benefited.

♪”How will I know if he really loves me? I say a prayer with every heartbeat. I fall in love whenever we meet, I’m asking you what you know—”♫

Sister Lucille glanced up at the window above them. “What happened?”

“Her parents just…left. Stuck a note to the front door and went to go see the world, I suppose? And then some men came to the house and…well, she’s a vulnerable girl. A friend of hers saved her, but they shot him.”

Sister Julia made a heartbroken noise. “And she’s been living under a bridge ever since?”

“Can you blame her? At least she could hide there. It took me all week to find her.”

One of the police volunteers, Jack Gatlin, shook his head. His face was a mask of anger on Letty’s behalf. “What kind of parents would ever…!”

“The kind who never really wanted her in the first place,” Olivia opined. “I bet CPS have a file on her.”

“I don’t think the poor thing’s had a proper family her whole life,” Sister Julia agreed.

Jack scoffed. “The apocalypse just brings out the worst in some folks, doesn’t it?”

“And the best,” Sister Lucille replied. “Give it time, people are still grieving for themselves and for the world. Things will settle down.”

“I hope you’re right. But some of these kids are never going to have anywhere to go, and while the shelter may be better than sleeping rough, it’s not exactly, uh…” Jack looked up at the school, then sighed. “I feel like they deserve more of a life, you know?”

“Give it time,” Sister Lucille replied again. “A lot can happen in four years.”

“But—”

“Have faith. Just…have faith. There’s hope for them yet,”

Olivia nodded fervently. So many people had given in to despair out there, including so many of the kids here, that she could understand how easy it was, but…for her part, she wasn’t willing to let go, yet. Even if she herself was never going to leave the Earth, she’d already been in touch with the Department of Education. They knew about this shelter, and the poor kids living in it.

That was more than a glimmer of hope, it was a lifeline. Literally. Maybe not for all of them, but…for some at least, surely?

Yes. There was hope.

Entity’s Garden, Ink Spatter Nebula

Ava Coombes

Each time she visited, Ava was struck by just how large the steps her digitized counterpart was managing to take.

Today’s innovation: hugs. Shaped forcefields just as soft (or not, as appropriate) and warm as human flesh. And apparently the capacity for tactile feedback through the field surface, and a lot more because what started as a sisterly hug of hello turned into…

Well, after a few seconds it became apparent that daemon-Ava was trembling.

“…You okay?” Ava asked, rubbing her doppelganger’s back.

“I just…oh my God. I’ve never hugged anyone before. I…”

Ava squeezed her tighter. She’d had time to get used to her copied self, by now. She was a sister, of a sort. Somebody who truly knew and understood her, more intimately than anyone else ever could.

There was something profoundly relieving in being able to say that she actually…liked herself. Her other self, at least. And Christ, hadn’t she had a lot of interesting conversations about what that meant with her therapist, these last couple of years?

“Take as long as you need,” she offered, and rubbed Daemon’s holographic back. Daemon nodded, sniffed, squeezed her again then took a deep, cleansed breath. She was so…human again. If not for the impossible luminous gowns that transitioned seamlessly into the dusky skin of her shoulders, and the little flecks of light tracing the lines of her body—deliberate acknowledgments of the truth—she really could have been taken for a flesh-and-bone human woman.

“Needed that, huh?” Ava asked.

Daemon took a deep breath, and wiped some very realistic tears from her face. “More than I knew…” she steadied herself. “…You’re looking great.”

“Older. I’m looking older.” That was the only thing Ava disliked about standing opposite Daemon—the digital version was perpetually in her early twenties, locked in to a self-image from more than ten years ago. Whereas Ava…

Well, she was closer to forty than to thirty, now. Gracefully so, she fancied, but those years of life became visible here, alongside her younger self.

“¡Tonterías!” Daemon gave her a playful prod in the arm, apparently reveling in being able to touch again. “You’re thirty-seven, that’s still young.”

“If you say so…” Ava tried to be grumpy, but couldn’t stop her smile. She gestured around instead. “So, uh…you’ve been expanding again.”

“Yup! Housing, spaceborne farms, stasis storage…we have the power of our probe swarm to use, and right now the pressing issue is human lives, right?”

“That’s what you called me over for, huh? You want to get the word out.”

“We’re ready to start welcoming refugees, and the sooner we get some, well…the faster we can build.”

Ava frowned as they walked down the impossible spiraling gardening pathway that was one of her favorite places in the whole galaxy even though it still tripped her up a little. “How come adding people will speed you up? Your drones can—”

“Our drones are stupid,” Daemon replied. “They’re about as smart as an RC car. Give ‘em a simple, repetitive job to do and they’re fine, but the second something comes along to interrupt them, we have to devote attention, and…that’s still a finite resource. Now that’s not really a big deal with the spaceborne drones, but the little gardener bots? The farming drones?” she raised a finger, and a tiny buzzing pollinator drone like a shard of glimmering green glass alighted on her fingertip. “…the bigger the farms get, the more of our attention they demand. We’re reaching the point where we’re either going to have to branch—which we don’t like doing—or downsize the swarm.”

“But humans can take over?”

“Absolutely. Especially the physical problems, like when a planter head loses pressure, or a bolt shears.” Daemon paused and gestured up out the window, toward the drifting swarm of space probes above them. “We have a lot to do. And threats to guard for.”

“Still haven’t caught that Hunter mind, huh?”

Daemon shook her head. “No. We haven’t seen the slippery pendejo since it escaped. But we know it’s out there, and there’s no way it’s not going to try and come for us at some point, and try to claim our probe swarm for itself…what other option does it have?”

“It could build its own Hegemony?”

“If that’s what it chooses, good fucking riddance. We know what the Hegemony is like, it’s basically limbo.”

Ava pulled a face. “Like…waiting, constantly, for something that’ll never come?”

A very Guvnurag-like flare of disgust green swept across Daemon’s flowing gown. “Worse. No sense of time, no boundary between self and other, no individual will, ambition or purpose…It’s a dream. A trippy, perpetual dream they can’t ever wake up from, and can’t even know that they should want to.”

She shivered, sending another ripple of green across the dress. “What happened to us was awful. But at least it wasn’t that.”

“Right…well.” Ava suppressed a shiver of her own. “Let’s, uh…start the tour?”

“Yeah. Let’s.”

And what a tour. The garden had already been spectacular, but now it was just the pistil of a huge sprawling flower, its petals made of hexagonal cells. Ava saw the logic immediately: each cell was its own little neighborhood, a series of housing units facing inward towards a central hydroponic farm to serve both as food source and green recreational space.

Then there was the larger repeating structure: six such neighborhoods surrounded a space which clearly existed just for people to occupy and customize, to establish businesses or whatever they chose to do. And there was a level above that, even.

It was definitely the kind of living space the Entity’s alien, nearly-machine mind would design: mathematical, fractal and efficient. But it was also beautiful. Maybe Ava was just biased, because it was her own sense of aesthetics at work here after all…

But when occupied and running, this place would be a gorgeous green bloom hanging in the black.

Of course, there was a grim reality underpinning it, too. The stasis facility several floors beneath the garden, in the flower’s “stem” was…well, it was brightly lit and clean, but that just made it look surgical. And given that it was designed for the industrial process of sealing as many people as possible into self-powering stasis bags as quickly as the line could move forward and split to each bagging station.

Even though its explicit purpose was to save lives, something about it put Ava in mind of an abattoir. Humans would come in and be reduced to…well…bags. Bags of nothing. Non-event volumes, to be spit out into space and drift there, sustained by solar power, until either the bag failed its unfortunate occupant, or until they were recovered and released into the waiting future.

“It’s so…impersonal.”

“We know.” Daemon nodded. “We know being bagged up in here will be…unpleasant. Shit, I wouldn’t like to go through it.”

“No.”

“But folks can handle that. Just like the dentist, right?”

“I guess.”

“That’s the other reason we need people here though, Ava. We need warm hands and reassuring guidance to help them through this. It can’t be all cold machinery and my voice.”

Ava nodded her understanding, raised her camera, and took her pictures.

She stayed overnight in one of the flower-petal suites. It had everything! A comfy double bed, a shower and bath, two guest or child bedrooms, a utility room, tons of storage, a living room with kitchenette…With a few personal touches, some artwork, rugs, throws and plants, it would be a lovely address by anyone’s standards.

She made a note of that as she wrote the article. Those fortunate enough to live on the Garden wouldn’t be moving to some bunker barely adequate to saving their lives. They’d be moving on to a life among the stars, and all the comforts thereof.

And the others in the bags…wouldn’t notice the passing of time, at least. Faint praise, but the fact they’d live would have to be enough.

It took a week before the article passed muster for publication. A week after that, she was back with a documentary crew from ESNN, to do a full-blown immigration campaign for Garden.

And with them came the first of Earth’s refugees. The first through the turnstiles and steel barriers, each carrying only a small bag of the things they couldn’t bear to part with. Ava didn’t even know how they’d been selected for this, who by or where from. What fortune had brought them here, away from the Earth and its impending fate? Had they pulled strings? Unlikely, she thought. Anyone with that kind of power would be among the conscious, not riding out the apocalypse in a body bag.

So they’d just…won the lottery. The first of many to do so…but also part of a too-tiny elite, saved where billions of others wouldn’t be.

She watched them into their bags. Watched the ones who stood out of the line, helping and guiding and reassuring, and becoming Garden’s first residents. Watched one of the Entity’s iridescent droons swoop down to gather the active bags as they were gently nudged out into space, and jump them away for safe-keeping around a star. There to remain…indefinitely.

But, strange and uncertain though their fate was, they were the first of Earth’s refugees.

And they would not be the last.

++END CHAPTER 90++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow, Zoe and Riker

31 Humans

TTTA

Adam Shearsby

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Ortheri

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Zorven

As well as 50 Deathworlders…

Adam Zarger
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Andrew Ford
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Chalax
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Jon
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Loaf of Orange lovot
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Matthew Cook
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NightKhaos
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Sam
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Thanatos
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+1 anonymous

60 Friendly ETs, 139 Squishy Xenos and 329 Dizi Rats who imitate the infamous squonk and dissolve in their own tears.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not necessarily share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 91: The Rising Flood.

Chapter 91: The Rising Flood

High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Planet Gao

Adam (“Warhorse”) Arés

Thump

Unusually, Daar was waiting for him at the jump array. Groomed and perfect today, even more than usual. He’d been at a charity ball or something.

But normally, when he called for Adam, that meant Adam was gonna go to his office or meet him at whatever garden or worksite he was currently at. Being met right off the platform was…new.

“Hey Cousin!!” Adam wasn’t even completely over the slight disorientation of jump travel, or from the sudden change in scenery, when the king dino-bear himself rolled over to greet him with a happy tackle and a fierce crush that, honestly, was pretty expertly tuned to ride the line between extremely affectionate and suddenly fatal. Such was the price of his friendship.

…Too fierce, actually. Daar was tense. You had to know him pretty well to notice it, but he had that poised energy in his muscles, and Adam could feel that energy almost vibrating through the big guy, even being hoisted like three meters off the ground for Doom Snuggles.

Adam did what he knew best (since he couldn’t breathe just then) and quirked an eyebrow.

“Right! Right…” Daar let go, and Adam took the sudden fall with a well-practiced bounce on the balls of his feet. The murderbearemperor didn’t stop nearly vibrating with eager energy, though. It was seriously riding that weirdly canine line Gao sometimes hit, like Doofus got when somebody had a tennis ball in their hand.

Well. One of those volleyball-sized supertoys. Tennis balls didn’t last long enough near Doofus.

Whatever. Focus.

“…Good news?” Adam asked.

“Can’t talk about it here. Good ‘ta see you dressed nice.”

“Well, you said to…?” Adam pointed out, confused. He’d gone for nice slacks and a well-fitted shirt. Stretchy without looking like it. Still short-sleeved though.

“Yuh.” Daar turned and nodded at the array technician. “This jump did not happen. Y’unnerstand.”

The technician—Whitecrest, Adam realized. Part of his initiation into the Clan had been their subtle signs and shibboleths—duck-nodded seriously. “I do, My Father,” he replied, quietly.

Daar ducked his head approvingly, then gestured Adam onto the array platform. Adam, sensing there was nothing to be gained by asking further questions, took his spot inside the lines, having to scooch as close up to the yellow safety line as he dared to make room for Daar to fold himself in alongside him.

Thump.

Of all their destinations, he hadn’t expected…what was this? It looked almost like the ancient history exhibit at the Folctha Museum. Sandstone walls carved with bas-reliefs and images of gods, but illuminated by indirect lighting set behind the sandstone along the top and bottom.

The chica dressed like a fucking space samurai was anachronistic as hell, too. She bobbed politely to Daar and confirmed Adam’s suspicions with her greeting. “Your Majesty, welcome to Ekallim-Igigi.”

Fancy big shit today, apparently.

Good thing he wore his extra-good shoes.

Daar returned the polite gesture with a duck of his head. “Thank you, Queen Tomoe. Y’prob’ly know my good friend an’ Cousin ‘fer life, Mister Arés…?”

She smiled at him, eyes crinkling warmly as she inclined herself formally to him as well. “I do. The famous Warhorse. Yours is a towering reputation, Arés-san.”

Nothing in Adam’s life had prepared him for formal meetings with queens. “Uh, as is yours, your highness,” he ventured.

Daar grumbled “majesty, ‘ya idjit,” outta the side of his mouth with almost as much subtlety as a pimped out car stereo blasting down the street.

Fortunately, the queen only giggled lightly and flapped a hand in the universal gesture for not minding. She stepped aside and extended a hand. “Please. Gilgamesh-sama eagerly awaits you.”

One thing that stood out for Adam instantly as she led them through this palace-slash-museum was that the floors didn’t resonate even a little bit under his feet. There weren’t many places anywhere in the world where he felt like he could just let his feet fall naturally. So…well, he did. Almost felt weird because soft-walking was his everyday normal, even in his own home, and it’d given him some huge lower legs as a consequence.

Now he felt almost bouncy.

It wasn’t just the floor, though. Everything seemed built with men of his scale and mass in mind. Or at least, bigger people in general. Door handles were all a little higher. Rails, too. Everything was solid. The air was pretty damn warm and humid, true, but breathing was free and easy—high oxygen, probably—the gravity felt a lot like Akyawentuo…

It felt…comfortable.

Up some wide, broad stone steps, along a colonnade at the edge of a green park and blue skies, and into a secure compound with a guard posted. Two dudes who coulda been HEAT, no trouble. They were at attention with shouldered arms and definitely wearing their fancy uniform…but Adam didn’t doubt for a second they could fuck up most everything that weren’t him and Daar if they had to.

Either way, Tomoe strode between them and vanished through the fuzzy, milky privacy forcefield protecting the entrance.

Adam always felt like he had to hold his breath when walking through those things, for some reason. He did so as he followed Daar through, exhaled on the far side and took a look around.

It was a pretty spartan room, really. Big, square, stone. Huge-ass table in the middle. And gathered around it were…

Welp. Gilgamesh. The big king himself. Tall motherfucker, maybe only a few inches shorter than Firth. Not anywhere near his equal, but that didn’t speak negatively of him at all. He was still a powerfully-bodied man with a basically perfect physique. Just…not at all as much.

Looking closer… Adam could see it. He could really see it. What every Hero had was there. It wasn’t any one thing, but all of it together: general shape of the head and face, his proportions, the way he moved…

This man was the sire of the Heroes, and Adam could see it plain as day. Could see it in Firth, could see it in Julian. In Hunter, in most of the HEAT. Hell, could see it in ‘Base! But, as he realized to his quiet pride, he and Gilgamesh had basically none of that in common. Adam was squatter and stockier, longer-torsoed, longer-armed. Wider face, wider hips and shoulders. Gorilla neck and traps. Heroes were mostly all built to be perfect athletes, and so was Adam, but his build was all about power and hardiness.

He wasn’t as naturally a graceful athlete like Firth. Movement and all that came effortlessly to the big bastard. Adam got there like a sumo wrestler did: by sheer strength and determination. In the end he felt that was probably the better way to go about it, because you couldn’t much help your structure, but you could always grow stronger. And his structure was all about being strong as fuck.

Adam really was his own freak. Made sense, really: Gilgamesh can’t have been the only ancient Hero, he was just the one who got lucky. What unknown luck did Adam have in his family? That not even Singularity knew about? How much of what he was really was his own? Neither mamá nor papá were freaks like he was…

But actually, yeah they kinda were, in normal everyday, everyman sorts of ways. Adam just took what they gave him and…well, went mutant freak with it, even when he was a kid. He kinda fuckin’ proud of that, no point pretending otherwise.

To the king’s left was a gaoian. Yeah. Keeda. Yekeeda? Wasn’t there was a yip in there? So maybe Ye!keeda? He’d hafta ask. Adam was pretty good at nailing Gaori if he heard it first. Either way, he was a hell of a fuckin’ specimen. Bigger’n Thurrsto and the stockiest gaoian he’d ever seen aside from Daar. Had the same sorta features that supposedly had once made Thurrsto kinda “ugly” to modern gaoian sensibilities, which now got him endless Female attention, weirdly. In fact Keeda was one of the biggest gao Adam had ever seen. Maybe Kodiak was his equal?

Spying the attention, Keeda gave Adam a snaggle-toothed grin and a mischievous ear-flick, before ducking his head respectfully to Daar. Respectfully, but not subserviently. He kept his throat protected as he did it. Kinda weird to see, that: Adam had grown so used to how the Gao slightly bore their throat to Daar when they ducked to him, Keeda’s gesture almost looked…cheeky.

He still couldn’t keep his backwards ear-flick under control, though. Those were a hard signal for gao and the ears almost never hid anything. And really, that flick told the real tale.

Even demigods submit to gods.

Opposite actual Keeda was a corti, but not like any Adam had ever met. She was taller, stockier, more overtly feminine in her build. Her head, though still large in proportion to the rest of her, wasn’t the oversized bulbous fuckin’ watermelon of modern corti like Nofl and the others. And unlike every other corti he’d met, she wasn’t a nudist: her skinny shoulders were draped with a black embroidered cloth that wound down and around her like a toga.

And the warm smile she gave them as they arrived was very different. Not even Nofl, who was fuckin’ dramatic by modern corti standards, wasn’t half so expressive in his face.

There was prince Alex. Again, very much Hero but ragingly so in this case. He was at a glance, just as big and stocky as Adam now, too. Same height and everything. He dwarfed his taller dad-king and the dude was only like eighteen. Hell, he’d put Wilde and Hoeff in their places before he was even properly a teen! And even with all that Hero shit in him, he still had the build of a man built for power, first and foremost. So basically, Adam and Firth combined. The kid was gonna be someone to watch over the next several years.

Fuck, what would the world be like if Adam had been that sort of ready for Capitol Station?

A couple dozen more he didn’t recognize. Everyone there was a Hero, damn near. Everyone prob’ly descended from Gilgamesh. Shit, the only “normal” people in the room were Tomoe and a Greek-looking woman he didn’t know yet.

Adam wasn’t a diplomat. He grumbled sotto voce, “hell of a gatherin’ here, boss.”

Keeda’s snaggly pant-grin got wider and his ear flicked. He didn’t say anything, though, only looked up at Gilgamesh and tilted his head expectantly.

For his part, Gilgamesh traded a carefully mirrored gesture of respect with Daar, greeting him as an equal, then looked to Adam. A wide, jovial smile parted his beard. “Welcome, Mister Arés! You will please accept my apologies, we’ve just finished our weekly stand-up. Let me make introductions…”

Lots of hand-shaking and nodding and all that, which Adam didn’t mind. He liked meeting people. It was pretty warm though, and unlike everyone else he was dressed for air conditioning. King Gilgamesh apparently noticed, because he nodded at an attendant, who had a basket of…well, a towel, sandals, some other things…

“We were about to adjourn and take our afternoon sport. Join us! Our next meeting will be smaller, and more private. Shall we?”

That was fun. Some play out in the field, heavy liftin’, some good tackling and wrasslin’ with Alex, the opportunity to flatten the human god-king of ‘ye olden tymes and all that…

Adam especially liked that bit. He, just a random mexican kid from San Diego, no special “breeding” or whatever, just good genes from people who did their best…and he could toy with actual fuckin’ Gilgamesh. And he was a good sport about it, too! And not a pushover; dude had some skill that Adam could learn from.

Yeah. Okay. Scores settled. Adam liked the big guy. And let him know it.

So. It was a nice afternoon and very much the sort of day Adam enjoyed. By evening (evening?) he’d retired to a tea room with the important bigwigs, clad in a sorta weird-but-comfortable waist garment thing Alex had to show him how to don. It was just a big piece of cloth but if you folded it and wrapped it around just so…

It felt weird at first, being so short and not quite there. Felt like he’d flash his nuts at a queen or whatever, but it kept him modest no matter how he sat, as long as he didn’t go jumping around. It was nice and breezy too, and the cloth was something thin and breathable, and tough…

Sandals were fuckin’ comf, too. And a couple of really stunning women were looking him over…

Focus.

As much as he was enjoying himself, because who didn’t like tea? Or meathead-friendly snacks? He did whisper in Daar’s ear at one point. “I thought we were here for business?”

“This is how they do business,” Daar replied, with a duck-shrug and wag of his tail. “Y’know the story. Gilgachad over there an’ Y!’kiidaa started out fightin’ all day ‘ta become friends, an’ I guess they’ve kept th’ tradition alive ever since. Pretty sure you’ve scored a couple’a mating contracts too,” he added with a chitter. “Always did look purdy nekkid!”

Adam chuffed, a bit embarrassed. “They do know I’m taken…?”

“Culture, Cousin. An’ I ‘member our talk some months ago, so…”

“Daar.”

Daar rumbled out a chitter again. “Okay! Fine! Suit ‘yerself…but ‘yer right. Reckon we’re about ready ‘ta get back ‘ta that table again. That’s part’a the test too, I reckon.”

Quite how the agreement that they were getting back to business passed around, Adam didn’t know. But by some kinda magic, suddenly there was another of those privacy fields up, and it was like they’d never left that meeting room in the first place, except for the change of clothes.

Gilgamesh took his position at the table and gave them a warm nod. “So. Thank you for indulging our hospitality. But I know you are eager to learn the details of our discovery.”

“Especially if it can do what y’said it can,” Daar agreed. The mood was immediately more serious.

“Oh, we think it can,” Keeda had a very literally wolfish grin. “After all…what’s the most complete way ‘ta defeat ‘yer enemy?”

Adam didn’t get the chance to meditate on that question. Instead, Leifini stepped up on her stool and pushed something forward toward the middle of the table. Holoemitters hidden in either the table or the ceiling whirled into high-rez, perfectly opaque life, showing a bunch of stuff that Adam didn’t understand at first.

Leifini was more than happy to share the secrets that made sense of it, though. And as she did, the reason for all the secrecy and Daar’s excitement became apparent.

Adam felt his heart tighten and beat faster in his chest as he realized what he was being told. Finally, he knew the true shape of his mission. What the purpose of his life was. And how he was going to repay his life-debt.

He had to go for it, now. Slow and steady had got him magnificently ready, but now it was time to stop playing footsie with reality. Time to step up, put his foot on the gas, and once again be the best there ever was. Be the best there ever could be.

Because only the best had any hope of surviving this. But if they did…

What was the most complete way to defeat your enemy?

It was right in their souls.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

“Well…that’s a fuck of a thing. Finally time, huh?”

For Hoeff, it felt kinda different meeting ‘Horse for the same kind of dinner meeting he sometimes had with old friends. For one, the big bastard was his boss these days. Shit, Hoeff remembered him when he was barely twenty-one, and still a correctly short man!

But for another, though…Adam just didn’t fit in a fine dining setting, so the choice of venue was different. Normally, when Hoeff was involved in Dark Schemes he could be assured of an amuse-bouche and a half dozen small but perfect courses accompanied by the sorta wine that reduced sensitive souls to tears.

The Best Brioche Blue-and-Bacon Beastinator wasn’t quite the same but, shit: he was a Beef well in the four-digit club these days too, so he was a man who needed to eat. Fine dining was just a treat.

Blue cheese was worth killin’ for. And thanks to privacy field generators, they could sit on a park bench and rock the fuckin’ foundations of the world while dippin’ their fries. He knew boss weren’t tellin’ him everything. Adam had all the subtlety of a relativistic brick, and Hoeff was deep-trained in reading people, all their microsign, all their little foibles.

He needed to be, to pass off as one some days.

“Yuh. This is the big one, man. We’re gonna get one shot, so we’re gonna train.”

Hoeff nodded. “Gonna be a while prepping for this.”

“Some years, yeah. I gotta big up for it, too. Like, all the way big up, ‘till I can’t get any better.”

Well, double fuck.

“Shit, man. Full send with the superscience?”

“Yup. Back on it like Firth an’ the HEAT. Marty’ll have mixed feelings ‘bout that, but…”

No shit. Anything that would put Adam back on that path was pretty serious, considering he was already far and away the best version of himself he’d ever been on his “light” and “gentle” training plan. Hoeff thought he’d finally come to peace with it all, settled down as a family man…

But no, his Big Damn Hero button had been pushed, yet again.

Hoeff didn’t say anything. Instead, he simply nodded solemnly.

“Yeah…Lotta details to plan, too.”

“Yup. Lotta intel, Wilde and crew are gonna be busy I bet.”

They ate their burgers in thoughtful silence. Full-pound burgers were such a treat.

Hoeff was on his second already.

Time to say it.

“You’re not sure you’ll make it, are you?”

“…No. An’ if we fail, it may be over for all of us. Or those who ain’t perfectly on a safe world.”

Well. Shit.

“So…next couple-few years I oughta really get Claire and our kid somewhere safe.”

“Kid? Since when?!”

Hoeff grinned. “Got the positive test last week.”

“Congratulations, man! But you know, that means you’ve really got something to do this for. ‘Cuz you know as well as I do, we can’t just bubble up and ignore the bad guys. ‘Cuz they’re not gonna stop until we’re gone.”

“I know.” Hoeff nodded, grimly. “Not much point in savin’ people from Earth if they just burn here in the end, is there?”

“Right. And Marty’s words are sorta burnin’ in my ears now…”

“What words?”

“Eh. Never mind.” Adam finished his last burger and licked his fingers clean. “Just thinkin’ about all the ways I can get my family set up so…whatever happens, they’re as okay as they can be, yeah?”

“Yeah…But ‘Horse: you know this is the last ride, right?”

Adam shrugged. “I promised the big guy I’m in it for the duration.”

Hoeff exhaled. “That’s a fuck of a thing to promise. Everyone’s gotta pass the torch eventually, ‘cuz if you hold it for too long it’ll burn you away ‘til there’s nothing left.”

“…Well, that was fuckin’ poetic. You quoting somebody, there?”

“Nope.”

“Well…y’aint wrong.” ‘Horse sighed. “But honestly, we live through this, the rest is just gonna be cleanup anyway. Galaxy won’t need operators like me anymore.”

“You hope.” Hoeff dipped his last fry.

“Hope ain’t a tactic. I mean it. What sorta crazy galactic threat would be left?”

“A power vacuum,” Hoeff replied. “I don’t know exactly what’ll come to fill it after the Hierarchy’s gone, but I promise you this, man: there will never be a day when operators aren’t needed.”

“Sure, operators. Not living weapons like us! We’ve always been purpose-built for a specific kinda enemy and we’re too fuckin’ expensive to keep around and ready. Nobody else was insane enough to play at this level.”

“We were,” Hoeff pointed out. “You should be just a five-seven natural-born Hero. One of the best, too. I bet you’d have made a pretty big name for yourself, even. But now you’re this towerin’ fuckin hoss of a monster, purpose-made ‘ta fight other monsters. What makes you think that won’t find a new purpose? You don’t remove something like Big Hotel without leaving behind a hole, and something’s gonna fill it.”

“…Maybe,” Adam conceded. “But that purpose, whatever it is…I’ll figger it out when it comes. For now, I’m happy doin’ what we’re doin’.”

“And you’re sure as shit not gonna break a promise to Daar.”

“He put up a hundred million moneys to save my ass. I know that ain’t nothin’ to him but…”

“You don’t break promises anyway. Not to him, not to Marty, not to anyone.”

Adam chuckled, darkly. “Yeah. I ain’t ever broken a promise to Marty and I ain’t ever gonna. I never promised her I’d retire, and she knows I’m still in the game. But on the far side of this…I think I’ll, I dunno. Not retire exactly. I’ll still keep the grind up for sure.”

“You’d go insane otherwise.”

“Right? But…yeah. I think me and a buncha us tier-zero types—”

“I always hated that designation.”

“Yeah. Anyway. A bunch of us will probably go into reserve, y’know?”

“Move on a bit,” Hoeff agreed. “Help get the young kids ready.”

“Yeah….but never quite hang up the gloves. I dunno if I can ever do that.”

“Even after this?”

Adam shrugged. “…We’ll see, I guess.”

They sat in silence for maybe a minute, until Hoeff stood. “I’ll…get to work. You know my number.”

“Yup. Say congrats to Claire from me.”

“Bring your family round in a few days, we’ll have a playdate and you can say it in person.” They bumped knuckles hard enough to hurt, then Hoeff ducked through the privacy field, felt its tingle on his skin, and walked away, thinking.

He was gonna have to have a conversation with some old friends about this. That was part of the deal, and ‘Horse hadn’t actually explicitly sworn him to secrecy on this…which said a few things in its own right. But if there was any plan to get everyone and everything pointing all in one direction on, it was this one. This crazy, magnificent fuckin’ plan. The one that might just justify Singularity’s existence after all.

He shoved his hands in his pocket and walked home with a feral kind of slow grin spreading across his face as he really thought about what they were preparing for.

He liked this plan…

Great Father’s hobby farm, planet Gao

Thurrsto, Champion of Clan Whitecrest

“I’m not sure I like this plan.”

There weren’t many spaces in all of Gaoian politics where somebody could say something like that directly to the Great Father. It was hard enough in private, but in front of others?

Almost guaranteed political suicide.

This wasn’t because he discouraged principled opposition. Quite the contrary! It was because it took an extraordinary gaoian to resist his will in any dimension whatsoever, and it took an even more extraordinary gaoian to withhold intercession on his behalf. Balls, for most he didn’t even need to be present. Just his voice and appearance was enough to almost compel obedience. He had a kind of power that had grown immensely over the years and now, as he began to find the full flower of his being…verged uncomfortably on the divine.

Most of the males who even could sustain that sort of thinking were gathered in this one room, tonight. After a day of hard play, hunting, exercise, and generally not resisting Daar’s will in doing what he wanted to do, because the relationship was a deeply gratifying one for all parties involved, Great Father and his subjects…here they were. His cabinet and closest, packed tight into a warm cottage while the first snow of the year started to gather outside.

Cozy. Warm.

Honest.

Honest both in its simplicity, and in the truths they were allowed—nay, encouraged—to utter here, in private. Which was why Thurrsto’s cautious objection only earned him an assortment of interested head-turns and ear-flicks…and a couple of duck-nods.

Daar of course was taking up most of the space all by himself, and picked that moment to stretch out luxuriantly in simultaneously the most disarming and intimidating gesture the situation could manage. “Why not?”

“It’s a fuck of a flip of the tile,” Thurrsto said, gratefully accepting a cup of tea from Champion Gyotin. “A real all-or-nothing Ta’Shen. And coming from Singularity, who…uhm…”

Daar watched him struggle for a polite way to phrase it, then bailed him out. “Have a history of plannin’ like a hungry cub raidin’ the pantry,” he offered, alongside a cup.

Thurrsto duck-nodded gratefully. “Which I gather you were known to do, yeah.”

Daar stretched again—he felt utterly non-threatened, and that was encouraging—and chittered quietly. “On the regular!”

There were chitters in response, and Thurrsto joined them as he stared into the hearth, half-daydreaming as he imagined Daar—never tiny even as a cub, and burdened for his earliest years with a medical backpack to keep him well-stocked in meals and to monitor his blood chemistry—sneaking and skulking around the commune kitchens.

Naturally, Reeko’s mind jumped to the obvious question any policeman would ask.

“How often did you get caught?”

“Not so often as ‘ya’d think! Slinkin’ and sneakin’ all quiet-like ain’t easy but I can manage sometimes,” Daar chittered at the memory. “But! Why pretend? I had Regaari do mosta my sneakin’ for me, in exchange ‘fer brawlin’ lessons. Floofy lil’ silverfurs are the most sneakiest!” he gestured to the silver-furred majority in the room, and wagged his tail happily at the chitters.

“That they are…” Reeko shot Thurrsto the amused look that captured a lot about the essential tension between spy and policeman.

Thurrsto in turn shot him an absolutely shameless pant-grin. Hadn’t been caught yet!

Daar rumbled an amused rumble, and got them back on track. “Anyhow, we’ve got time ‘ta plan this prop’ly. It ain’t Singularity who’s doin’ the plannin’, which was prudent o’ them. They’ve just…delivered the weapon.”

“An untested and untestable weapon,” Champion Kuriya chimed in, agreeing with Thurrsto.

“The effectiveness of which will only become apparent in the moment we use it,” Thurrsto added.

“The alternative bein’ a long, slow war over centuries, on their terms, on the back of a totally fuckin’ crippled economic an’ industrial base,” Daar replied. “Thurrsto…Cousin. We’re doomed ‘ta lose that fight. Maybe we wouldn’t be if Earth weren’t about to be blasted away, but…even then.”

“Just how badly were we crippled?” Thurrsto asked the room in general, by which everyone knew he meant the Champion of Goldpaw.

Champion Sheeyo groomed his whiskers with a claw, his usual self-comfort habit. “There’s a human word…turbofucked.”

“…Well, that’s expressive.”

Uriigo made a disbelieving sound. “Why’d anyone wanna fuck on turbo? Seems like it’s missin’ the point…”

“I think that’s the general idea of the expression,” Sheeyo agreed.

“So, fucked an’ ya don’t even get ‘ta enjoy it. …Yeah. That fits.”

Sage nods circled the room.

“Economic recovery at this point is the work of generations. A hundred years or more, and that’s if we get a hundred years of peace. Our output in every sector has already sharply declined…give it another seven or eight years, ten at the absolute most, and it’ll plunge as the population becomes either too young, too old or too maimed to work. The ensuing depression will last until the cubs being born today are adults, and it’ll fall to them to finally lift us out.”

He sighed and shook his head. “The terrible, almost disloyal thing is…the humans losing their homeworld may actually be what saves us from the worst. They’re evacuating their young, able-bodied and talented, just when we need young, able-bodied and talented people.”

“It ain’t gonna be so good as that, given they’re gonna be traumatized and recoverin’ too,” Daar observed. “An’ like you said…all of that is if we get peace.”

“In other words, flipping the tile for a Pyrrhic victory is our only winning move…” Thurrsto mused.

“Yup.” Daar duck-nodded grimly, and started counting off on his claws. “The gao are spent, humanity’s spent, the ten’gewek an’ e-skurel-ir ain’t economic players, Singularity an’ the OmoAru are too small, the Celzi an’ their friends are too fuckin’ cowardly, the Dominion won’t never be rid of the rot ‘til after we win anyway, an’ the Entity won’t go along with any plan that reduces its own survival odds.”

Thurrsto drank his tea. “…Then I do like this plan after all.”

There was quiet chittering, which the Great Father played upon. “It’s the bestest plan! ‘Cuz we ain’t got any other!”

Thurrsto couldn’t help but chitter at the absurd optimism in the Great Father’s voice and wagging tail. “Your logic is, as always, unassailable…”

“Essactly! Real big brain moves all up in here. Anyhoo,” crushing snuggle-time, naturally. The Great Father rolled to his side and gestured for everyone to gather by the fire. Who could resist such an open invitation to Brotherhood? He pulled them all to himself with his great arms and legs, and thereby applied his patented brand of physically intense affection.

He was at least nice enough to permit everyone a bit of shallow breathing.

It was a long time before anyone spoke, as they enjoyed the heat of the fire (a real gaoian weakness, that) and the smells and feeling of brotherly affection. The Cabinet, whatever their professional differences, had profound respect and affection for each other.

And their Daar was the center and focus of it.

All good things had to come to an end. He shifted a bit, giving everyone enough space to talk and gesture. “So…yeah. I know it’s a shitty position we’re in. But damnit, this is the first time in literally years I ain’t been broodin’ on th’ long-term servival of our peoples ‘cuz that was the only real outcome on th’ table. Now we’ve got a nut-hair’s chance o’ actually winnin’ this fuckin’ thing. An’ it was one that even a year ago weren’t possible.”

Loomi (heretofore quiet) duck-nodded in agreement. “I understand. We have much planning ahead of us, I fear.”

“Dream big, Champions. We got th’ chance now ‘ta imagine a time after this war. It’s in our power ‘ta make it.”

Reeko, ever the most earnest of them, spoke for the whole cabinet: “The Clans are yours, My Father, and always have been.”

“Yeah, but…dream. Dream o’ somethin’ bigger’n just servin’ me. Dream o’ what we can build in peacetime, an’ fight ‘fer that. What would you do with it?”

Silence, and mutual faintly confused looks gave him his answer.

Thurrsto chittered, and shrugged. “I think I can speak for all of us here…I don’t know what else I would be, than this,” he replied. “I enjoy what I do too much. Naughty cubs never stop loving their pranks, and what I do? It’s the bestest prank!”

Daar’s bass chitter made the potted herbs over the window sway. He put his head down on his paw and sighed. “I know what vict’ry means ‘fer me. It means gettin’ ‘ta…take my paw off the throat, yijao? Be the farmin’, ranchin’, diggin’ ‘Back I’m meant ‘ta be. I’ll always be Great Father, but if this war ends in victory…”

“There’ll be a few steps before then, I dareasy.”

“Yuh. An’ we’ve got th’ humans among us, now. By the time we’re done with the war, they’ll be here ferever. that’s gonna mean some changes.” Daar yawned expansively. “…I bin noodlin’ on the idea o’ constitution.”

Thurrsto watched the way his fellow champions froze up at that. He’d suspected something like it was coming—time and experience had taught him enough about how Daar’s mind worked to see the direction he was trying to steer a conversation in—but it was still…

Well, it was still a very un-gaoian thing he’d just proposed.

Daar saw their uncertainty, and explained his thinking. “We’re gonna be one people. Ain’t nothin’ gon’ stop that now. One people, at least three species. Might include our poor traumatized squirrel-folk too…anyway. We Deathworlders are way more similar’n not, and fate, ‘fer whatever fuckin’ reason, means th’ Gao are the only ones left wit’ a properly developed homeworld. So…”

“A constitution, though? Written down?” Loomi angled his ears uneasily. “That creates room for…lawyering.”

“Yes,” Daar chittered quietly, and snuffled a bit closer. “We’ve already got lawyers.”

“As I recall, lawyering about Fyu’s payment was one of the major causes of the War.”

“The art of the Law has come a long way since then,” Reeko objected.

“I suppose I must concede that, “Loomi admitted. “Nonetheless…”

“I get it,” Daar offered. “We gotta git over it, though. Besides…d’you really think the humans’ll bare their throats?” Daar shook his head to that question. “They’ll sign paper, they’ll ratify law. But they ain’t gao. I can’t be ‘ta them what I am ‘ta us. Least, not like…well, us right now.”

Thurrsto took stock of his present situation. He was…lovingly, playfully but completely under Daar’s control, here. They all were. He was that big.

But it was more than that. Daar was incredibly intelligent, easily the superior mind in the room. He was wise. He was incomparably physical in every positive connotation of the idea. And most importantly, he smelled of authority. Of strength. Of leadership. He smelled and felt so powerfully of all those things, it took all the mental fortitude Thurrsto had to even attempt resistance, even with Daar’s full encouragement.

It wasn’t even really a voluntary thing, even though Thurrsto didn’t mind it. The Great Father was the Great Father because of gaoian nature. He was all those things before Mother-Supreme Yulna had raised him to his office, and the Conclave confirmed him in it.

And he was right: the humans were aliens. They didn’t have that nature. They respected him, for sure. They admired him. They even liked him. As much as anyone could be, he was in the human peoples’ good graces. But he would never be their Great Father, because humans didn’t have Great Fathers. They would never understand the awe and truth of such a thing.

They weren’t made for it.

“What…would this constitution even look like?” Thurrsto asked, aloud.

“I had some thoughts. It’d have ‘ta leave each o’ the Peoples under it ‘ta mostly govern themselves in their own way, while unitin’ us under common cause o’ our mutual prosperity an’ protection…”

“You would need to remain—ngf!—sovereign,” Gyotin warned, even as Daar pulled them tighter against his vast chest. It was cold out, after all…

“Of course. But I think mebbe that’s how it’ll work. I was hopin that if I promise my peoples their independence s’long as they govern themselves, I can mebbe sit at th’ top o’ this an’ not need ‘ta interfere much. Sorta like how His Majesty the King works, theoretically.”

“What about succession?” Gyotin pressed.

“I think there’d need ‘ta be…well, a lesser office’n what I inhabit. Chairman, Governor-General, somethin’ like that.”

“President,” Reeko suggested. “One who presides.”

A wave of unconscious duck-nodding made its way around the pile, and Daar nodded last.

“Think ‘yer right! Presidin’ without the full, unlimited powers o’ Great Fathers, though, that’s the point. Great Fathers are created when needed, an’ I intend ‘ta leave a world where we don’t need one. If the Peoples decide they need another one sometime in the future…well. Best leave the future ‘ta the future, yijao?”

Thurrsto noted that Gyotin’s was the most fervent duck-nod in the circle. “That seems wise…” the Starmind agreed. “Though, even with past conversations, it feels strange to think of the world without you. Which is a pretty tail-sniffing sorta thing to say I guess…balls.”

Daar chittered and then there was some “gentle” wrassling. Well-meaning, affectionate. Caring. All the things that made it so fucking hard for a gaoian to rebel against him…

“Cousin, I know you ain’t no tail-sniffing sorta man. You keep ‘yer claws sharp ‘fer me, y’hear?”

Hard to do when the heaviest thing on land had them pinned under his great body…

Thurrsto chittered, some of the exertion breaking the spell a bit. Deliberately, if he wasn’t mistaken. “I’ll do my best. Always. But…none of us can resist without your indulgence. Don’t forget that, either.”

Daar paused, then let go of them and stepped back. ”…I know. An’ it’s the one thing I wish I could turn off. That’s why I swore at my coronation not ‘ta create an heir or successor. The gao can’t be slaves. None’a the peoples can, or else why did we fight this whole war?”

“For survival?” Kuriya suggested.

“Nah. The Gao woulda been the Hierarchy’s next control species. We’da replaced the Hunters an’ this, the power I have? That woulda been how they controlled us. An’ then they’da had us, ‘ferever. Or, for as long as they wanted us, anyway. ‘Cuz I’m just version one-point-oh. Imagine what woulda happened when they could work openly an’ get serious?”

Thurrsto shivered, as did a few of the others. The rest were simply solemn.

“Right. So mebbe this fight were about survival ‘fer the humans…but ‘fer the gao, it was always about our soul. My bestest Cousins…there can never be another like me. No other male should have th’ kinda dominance I do, ever again.”

Thurrsto looked at him, thinking, twitched his nose… “And you think a constitution, binding us to the others might guard against that?”

“Future Great Fathers will be bound by it too, ‘cuz we’re an honorable people, and now we’ve got humans who won’t let us dick around wit’ our own rules.” Daar chittered. “An’ ten’gewek who might just crack heads if they hafta. An’ if the e-skurel-ir join, they’ve got long memories. But most importantly, th’ people will decide what oath the Great Father takes ‘fore they put the crown on his head. So even if Daar two-point-oh ends up bein’ that impressive lil’ sixth degree cub I sired not long ago…”

“He won’t be in the same position as you.”

“Yeah. Never again. I mean it with all my heart an’ soul.”

Nobody seemed to want to say anything after that, and in any case the weather outside was really starting to pick up. The coming of winter was Gao’s great claim to deathworld status after all, and the first snowfall had been a time of ritual and festival for all of history. And part of the tradition was to huddle up in a burrow around a fire, stay warm and enjoy company and brotherhood while the freezing wind outside bared its fangs.

Technically, gaoians didn’t need the fire. Between the fur and shared body warmth, the pile of them would have been quite comfortable even if they were outside atop a rocky outcrop, fully exposed to the blizzard. But the fire was so much nicer. It was a comforting, traditional one, a round bowl-shaped thing crackling with shrub-wood claimed from clearing the hobby farm’s field boundaries and ditches. The smoke it produced had a sweetness to it that sung of home and comfort to something ancient in the gaoian soul.

Funny to be discussing the future in a place that literally smelled of the past, but…well, Daar could be very subtle when he wanted. Maybe there was some point in that.

Or maybe he just liked rustic tradition. Thurrsto had never quite figured his mind out, in that regard.

Reeko was the first to fill the cozy silence. “Perhaps we’ll bring in some alien experts on constitutional law,” he suggested. “The Dominion and the nations of Earth made plenty of mistakes in drafting their various constitutions. We should learn from those and not repeat them.”

“Yi,” Gyotin agreed. “And besides…if it’s to be a constitution for all our peoples, it’ll demand their input.”

“And if it’s gonna work ‘fer our people, I need ‘ta be involved right at the heart of it,” Daar said. “‘S’gonna be a tricky balance, that. But…I think we’ve said all that needs sayin’ on the subject ‘fer now, yijao? Winter’s here…”

“The Females are far away…” Thurrsto mused in ancient custom.

There were chitters. Uriigo reached out and picked up a jug of spiced talamay he’d been heating at the fire’s edge, and started pouring it out for them. “Well, then. Here’s ‘ta the lucky males stayin’ warm at a commune tonight.”

“May we take their place soon!” Kuriya finished, as was tradition. The ritual got a round of chitters as it always did, the hot drinks were handed out, the conversation turned to old Keeda stories and new jokes…

And they settled down to wait out the storm.

Land north of Franklin City, Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Austin Beaufort

“So this is Pinkwood.”

The tree whose days were numbered. Every passing year, the terraforming process crawled a little further on, supplanting Cimbrean’s hopelessly outmatched native life with Earthling species that choked then, out-grew them, out-competed them, and generally shouldered them aside with the same ease that Austin could have barged a Corti out of the way.

He’d met his first Corti just four hours ago, too. Austin had been taller, better-built and stronger on the day he started the sixth grade.

Pinkwood was probably the same, by tree standards. But the one growing alone right in the middle of a meadow of native grass-stuff looked…pretty goddamn beautiful, Austin thought. Its bark definitely was pinkish, and the leaves were to the blue end of green, with whitish variegation around the edges.

Almost a shame to chop it down. But, they couldn’t afford sentiment, and it wouldn’t survive anyway. He resolved to keep the wood and make something nice from it, as a memento and reminder of what they were destroying to live here. Not that he’d ever feel too guilty about clearing ground to make a crop field. That was part of the job. It was just…a reminder that his family and friends’ lives were being bought at the expense of a lot of lives.

Lauren was already taking charge, of course. Leave it to her to handle the fine details his huge leap of intuition had landed them in. “Colony authority says our first shipment of prefabs arrives on the seventh,” she said, looking around. “Four trucks. We’re gonna need a yard and path to the main road by then.”

Austin nodded, refocused, and looked back at the flatbed they’d come out here in. Weird to think everything they needed to break ground on an alien freaking planet was all there, loaded aboard and strapped down.

Two big power storage cells. Two forcefield solar collectors. One powerpack, with connections for whenever the local grid appeared. One microfusion (!) array.

Then shit got sci-fi. One gravity field generator good enough to raise everything to one-point-two G within a few acres; that was apparently the standard for off-world humans to keep their strength. One jump array, packed down into a crate but big enough once assembled for combines and full-sized equipment to come through.

And a buncha normal stuff from home. A chainsaw, brushcutter, biodiesel fuel lab and a nice used storage bladder he picked up for dirt cheap. Cement mixer, cement, aggregate, water barrel and some planks and fixings, to create a foundation for the array. Tent, sleeping bags, meal packs, water filters, just in case they needed to stay overnight.

A pre-fab shop, and a tiny hardware store in a big box, which would be regularly restocked by a representative. He’d always wanted one of those, but Fastenal wasn’t cheap…

They were now.

Somebody had Tetrised the whole lot onto the flatbed so tight, Austin couldn’t even have fit a credit card between the boxes.

“Surveyor should be here in an hour,” he said. “And the extension office too.”

“I know.” Lauren gave him a dry look. “We coulda spent half an hour longer at breakfast, you know.”

“It was your idea to set out early in case we got lost.”

“Well, you shoulda fought me on it.” she flashed him a grin.

“I’ll remind you you said that, next time…I hope you’ve got good socks, we’ve got some hiking ahead of us…”

She just gave him a dry not-my-first-rodeo look and fished a pack full of hiking gear out of the flatbed’s passenger footwell.

Sure enough, an hour later the surveyor and the guy from the Cimbrean Agricultural Advisory Service—the Brit equivalent of the local extension service, apparently—showed up to find them rested and waiting, with their good boots on and ready to walk the property.

All twenty-five thousand acres of it. Jesus.

The surveyor and his mostly-gaoian team were a harried lot. They shook hands, exchanged some perfunctory words, and after that they went to work without any further conversation.

Rude, but…well, honestly yeah, they’re probably insanely busy so…anyway.

Austin liked the ag guy immediately. He gave his name as Mark Tisdale, and Austin could tell the two of them had a lot in common even if the dude was wildly and aggressively Pagan somehow, wearing a tee with some kinda three-lines-in-a-circle design on it. They were both obviously lifters and about the same size, though Austin was a good deal younger, and Mark’s steely gray beard, braided and beaded, was far more epic than anything Austin could ever manage. Severely healthy like everyone from Cimbrean. Good handshake, too. And his hands were hard-calloused, with the dirt of the land in his fingernails. The name “SARA” tattooed on his knuckles.

Interesting guy. Seemed like the sort of man to hang out with.

Of course, land survey had come a long way in recent years. First thing Mark did once they were ready to go was he grabbed a flat frisbee-looking thing from his van and discus-threw it into the air with a grunt. It didn’t come down, but instead snapped out some forcefield wings at the top of its arc and took flight.

Neat.

“So,” Mark explained as he called up the drone’s live info on his phone. “The big problem with farming Cimbrean is that the soil sucks. Your first couple years are gonna have to be all about enrichment and improvement, because none of this is going to support an earthling crop species.”

“Well, I was expectin’ some o’ that. We reset grassland once that hadn’t been farmed in a hunnerd years, took us three seasons of deep plowin’, cover crop, re-plowin’, and so on. This year was the first time we were able to no-till a crop in.”

“Yeah, but you still had an Earthling soil ecosystem to build on. The right kinds of fungi and microbes. Here you will need to seed it in—we’ve got resources for that—and you’ll need to manage it closely for a bit. We estimate four years before first crop.”

“That…is cutting it awfully close.”

Mark just nodded grimly. “Yup…” he agreed.

“I hear it rains every night, here?” Lauren asked. She prodded a sizeable rock with her toe, and Mark nodded, confirming the drone had already noted its position.

“Yeah. Irrigation is not a problem,” he said. “But drainage will be. Tile and water management have got to go right to the top of your list, because otherwise you’ll be trying to farm an ocean of mud.”

“Rice paddy?” Austin suggested.

“Rice does well here, but it doesn’t yield as high. Not quite warm enough. And seeing as we don’t have the luxury of time to wait for the GMO strains we’ve been promised for the last six years…”

“Right.”

“The good news is, pests are not an issue. No rootworm, no beetles, no locusts, no crickets, nothing. And the native weed species are all hopelessly outclassed, they’re actually digested by terran soil microbes.”

He looked toward a stand of pinkwood to the west. “You know, I used to think Cimbrean’s fate was a damn shame. Mass extinction, the complete eradication and supplanting of its native biosphere…now, I see that we got very, very lucky. Without Cimbrean, and what we’ve learned from the Skidmark and the terraforming operation…” he shook his head. “We’d be out of the fire and into the famine.”

So the conversation went. Walking the land was a long task, broken up by stopping every so often to take soil samples, push a geophysics probe into the ground, map the subtle roll and lay of the land, identify the streams and creek (lots of those) and not the location of every wash, every rock, every tree…

Without the drone, it would have taken God-knew how long. With it, they camped out twice, lulled to sleep by the sound of rain on the tent.

On day three they had what they needed to lay things out and plan the megafarm. Maximizing field space, but they also identified the marginal ground, where the topsoil was too shallow even for enrichment but where livestock could thrive. They carefully sketched out the houses, silos, sheds and barns, placing them on the rocky high ground where they wouldn’t interfere with food output, arranged them as efficiently as the vagaries of the land permitted.

They weren’t going to be pretty country homes. They were going to be prefab boxes. The pretty country homes would come…later. When there was time.

If there ever was time.

Four years to go, and four years to first harvest. They had to get this right. Austin couldn’t deny, with the whole land-baron thing and then that pressure on top, no time to learn from mistakes, no time to get it wrong…

That was a lot of weight on his shoulders. A lot of lives riding on his ability to do this. Including Lauren’s and the boys’.

As if he needed any more motivation.

Night three, the survey was done, they’d framed and poured the array’s foundation and had nothing else to do except sit and wait for it to harden overnight. Mark broke out a guitar, told them about his own family, about losing his eldest daughter, about how proud he was of his son, how his younger girl had inherited her older sister’s talent and smarts…

They shared a couple beers, and avoided talking about the future for a bit. It was coming soon enough for all of them.

In the morning, the array practically built itself. They snapped the bits together like a big kids’ toy, plugged in the power supply, loaded up the security codes they’d been given. For several seconds, a tiny distorted point, the bent light around a zero-width wormhole, fizzed and buzzed loudly in the array’s exact center.

And then the control app lit up green. They were connected. To Earth, to Gao, to Folctha, Armstrong, even to Akyawentuo with approval. The whole of known space was at Austin’s fingertips.

And there were deliveries already waiting, lined up in a freight yard somewhere. Three one-way shipments, already bought and paid for. He picked the first one, tapped “accept:” the array buzzed and fizzed some more…told him it’d be delivered in two hours.

He went to help Lauren with the brush cutting.

They’d just mown bald the patch where the equipment shed’s foundation would go, when there was a series of warning beeps from the array, a digitized voice warning anyone nearby to step clear, and then a thump that Austin felt through his boots as the mass of two more vehicles dropped a tiny fraction of an inch onto Cimbrean’s surface, bouncing the trucks’ suspension: a crane with a trained operator driving it, and the second flatbed.

By the end of the afternoon, the other two deliveries were complete, and the first prefab home was going up under the expert attention of a swarm of gaoian workers. No more trucks, just shipping containers which the crane operator could neatly park on any patch of ground, perfectly level with each other. Each one full of more stuff, and more stuff, and Austin was already planning what deliveries to order next and one of them was going to have to include all the folks from back home…

And so went their life. They built. Helpers came and went, and Austin found his bank account rapidly shrinking.

Then it got huge, after a couple huge deposits. Because visitors wanted to drop by, pitch in symbolically—or not so symbolically, for a few. The Prime Minister and the Governor-General said some encouraging words to him and his now-stabilizing crew. Julian and his family came out to play too, and picked a day where, frankly, having about the biggest human juggernaut ever on-hand was damn helpful. Lots of glad-handing and they even played some football, since the day ended early with all the help. Cameras discreetly clicked away from a distance.

Yeah, Julian was showing off, him and the farm and what they were all doing. It was all pretty cornfed and wholesome and ultra-muscular, well-tanned Captain America patriotism. Genuinely so, too. The big man seemed to truly enjoy helping out with the work, even more than he seemed to enjoy working all shirtless and showy. And Allison’s wry humor about it had folks laughing for the first time in weeks, that Austin could remember.

Still, Austin knew a staged event when he saw it. It felt a little…like he was being used, honestly. Nonetheless, the promised resources came.

Then the Great Father showed up and showed up everyone, and didn’t even attempt to hide the propaganda purposes of his visit. The rest of the dignitaries had brought a discreet entourage, which generated some nice local coverage.

Daar brought a press corps. And some of Clan Stoneback’s finest, and a well-regarded workhouse. And all their tools. All their equipment. A supply train to feed and house them!

But good God they could work. It had taken nine days of expensive, back-breaking labor by Austin and hired day-crews to get things to a starting point, and then the emperor of the universe showed up with an army of burly workerbears (and even more crafts-raccoons) and got shit done.

Austin had never seen a ditch appear so quickly, or to the sound of so many voices howling out a Gaoian work song. It was very…yippy, and growly, and shrill too, just super pack-of-wolfbears alien, but there was a heck of a rhythm to it. With each beat, soil fountained into the air.

Then the local human day-crews started to play along and produced a ridiculous english work-chant, much to Daar’s absurd delight, appropriately about digging a hole.

Together they had everything done in a day.

There was a reason for that, he found out that evening.

“I wanna make a point,” the monstrous mountain of a gao rumbled in a near-infrasonic basso growl. “Firs’ly, that this shit is important. ‘Yer the first o’ many super-farms here on Cimbrean an’ its important ‘ta show it can be done, yijao? But second, that it’s important ’ta me. That should clear out a lotta the bullshit ‘ya might face. Keep ‘yer family safe, too…”

Good point, really. Who the fuck would mess with him? There weren’t even words for whatever the fuck he was. Dude was literally the size of a fuckin’ house with a lifelong bodybuilding and ‘roid addiction, and rather than waste anyone’s time, he stepped in and just…started rockpicking. Well, boulder picking, at this stage. Apparently he needed no equipment for that, he just tore them outta the ground with his claws and heaved them into the rubble pile. Some of them were pretty big too, easily big enough that Austin would have needed dynamite and a heavy backhoe to even attempt.

Then emperor ultra-meathead decided that wasn’t good enough, so first they mowed, then he pulled a full-sized ten-bottom plow out of a shipping container like it was a toy, unfolded it and harnessed himself to the damned thing…and proceeded to plow like a goddamn tractor. And not a small tractor, either! He made fast work of it, then switched tools and ran a full-sized rock picker through the furrowed soil late into the night. In one day he had finished primary tillage on enough acreage to feed Austin’s family, their permanent staff, and their likely livestock. Combined with everyone else’s work all over the nascent farmstead…

He had saved them the most agonizing, back-breaking task ahead of their farmstead and did it all by himself, and pant-grinned while he did it. Austin…had no words for that. They owed him big for that act of kindness. Probably the point, actually.

Though Austin did note that Daar wasn’t immune to fatigue, and slept like a furry boulder when he finally stopped and curled up to rest under a pile of exhausted gaoians.

Austin and Lauren spent the next morning madly preparing breakfast for this sudden army outside their doorstep. Turns out gaoians loved bacon and eggs and the big guys could really pack it away. Daar all by himself ate like two dozen ravished men.

Quality people, right there.

They had a start, by the time they all left. A start, and a message sent to the world.

Austin and Lauren’s parents and the kids finally jumped over on day ten, along with half of Austin’s neighbors. All of them had equipment lined up to come with, held and cared for by the other half who’d remained behind. They were in for a hard little while of sleeping on air mattresses and groundsheets in communal rooms, and every waking minute was effort for Austin as they planned then dug, planned then built, planned then bored, planned then cut…

His body ached, his mind more so. Driving the couple hours back down into Franklin for church was the first true rest he got, to the point where he could hardly stay awake in the pew.

But in that quiet moment, as he finally stopped to reflect, he realized…he’d never felt more alive than right here and right now. All his worries about being able to do this were gone, evaporated by the simple fact that they were doing it.

They took the whole day off. Made it sacred. Cooked out on campfires and swapped stories and listened to music, and generally allowed sore muscles and sore minds to relax and unstiffen.

And then on Monday, they were right back into it. They had a lot to do, and not much time to do it in…but they had everything they needed to do it.

And most importantly of all: they had hope.

Raleigh NC, USA, Earth

Letty Brown

The thing that had come to surprise Letty, after she’d started hanging out with the other kids at Sacred Heart shelter, was that they all had something in common—they’d all been left alone by circumstance. Some, like Letty, had just had their parents up and leave. Some others had got it in their crazy heads that there was nothing to live for so they may as well die as a family right now rather than live through the coming years…

Some of the kids had left when their folks started holding orgies and shit. Some had been thrown out. Some had finally found courage in the news about the End coming to get out of the abuse they’d been suffering.

There weren’t that many in the shelter. Most folks loved their kids, were trying to do right by ‘em. But there were…enough. Enough so you knew just from a glance that the world was ending, and not everyone could handle it.

Some of the others kids were huge fuckin’ dorks, some of them were cooler and more confident. A lot of them had made the same mistakes as her, hung out with the wrong crowds at first, got into trouble, tried to live rough…she could share something in common with them.

But for some reason, instead Letty had found herself hanging out most with the two who seemed least like her: Preston, the biggest nerd she’d ever known…and Treasure.

Letty’s mom and dad had mostly just viewed her as this annoying burden they’d got saddled with, and complained about how much money they’d have had without her, and where they would have gone if they didn’t have the problem of their own daughter…that kinda thing. But Treasure? Poor girl’s parents musta thought of her as little more than some kinda living ornament to display. It sounded like they had a huge, fancy house, full of art and sculpture and fancy furniture and shit, and Treasure had, yeah, just been one of the treasures kept around the house to show off and impress.

She was a nice girl, incredibly pretty, decently smart and well-read ‘cuz her parents had expected their ornamental child to be educated…but confidence? Forget it. Poor girl had lived her whole life being told to sit quietly, shut up and never bother anyone. She liked to crochet, though: she’d given Letty a kinda wide-spaced shawl, poncho kinda thing on the third day after they met, and Letty hadn’t taken it off since. She’d made Preston a hat too, and he hadn’t taken that off either.

And as they got closer, she’d come out of her shell enough to start asking the questions that were obviously burning her up.

“So why aren’t we, like, putting asteroids and stuff in the way. Or big shields? Or something like that?”

Letty shrugged. She was lying on her bottom bunk, looking up at the slats above her. Treasure was weirdly happy about getting the top bunk, which Letty didn’t get. The bottom bunk felt cozier. “Maybe it wouldn’t work,” she said.

“Definitely not.” Preston shook his head.

“Why not?” Treasure pressed.

“Oh, man.” Preston shook his head, and Letty tried not to smile. She’d come to know the signs, he was about to get geeky as fuck. It was…weirdly cute. Kinda like Preston himself. “So…the thing is, what’s coming for us is, like, one of the most energetic events in the entire universe. NASA put out this thing—”

“Really?” Treasure was wide-eyed.

“Yeah. The EM burst is gonna last hours, And then what comes after that is gonna be a long stream of particles that’s gonna go on for years and years and years. Like…a couple hundred years. And we’re talking just…you can’t imagine how hot this is. It doesn’t matter what they put in the way. If they could put enough stuff in the way to protect Earth, it’d be easier to just…move the Earth.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Preston sighed heavily. “In millions of years some alien astronomer out in a distant galaxy is gonna blink at a beeping computer and be like ‘what was that?’”

“Yeah…kinda figured it was something like that,” Letty sighed. After a half-minute’s silence, she asked the question that had been gnawing at her from day one. “Did, uh…did NASA say…will it be quick?”

“…Yeah,” Preston didn’t sound certain, especially when he added, more quietly: “at least, I hope so…”

Silence. Letty blinked up at the bed slats, then blinked a little more, sniffed…realized she was crying again when Treasure scooted her chair over and tentatively touched her arm,

“Hey…” she tried to soothe, inexpertly. “It’s okay, it’s—”

Letty shook her head, and…let it out. “It’s not okay,” she complained. “I’ve had a shit life, and now I’m just…waiting for it to end. It’s not fair!”

Preston sighed heavily, put his phone aside, and sat with his head hung, nodding.

Treasure touched her arm again. By her standards, that was about the same as a huge comforting hug. Poor girl. She’d had a shit life too. They all had, one way or another. And Letty had cried about it enough. She gave Treasure’s hand a grateful squeeze, blinked back her misery, took a deep breath.

“…Did you see that thing on ESNN?” Preston asked, changing the subject.

“What thing?”

“The Garden.”

Letty shook her head and sat up so he could show her. At first, she couldn’t make sense of it. A picture of a flower?

Then the scale hit. That flower was…big. Really, really big. Like…city-sized big. That hexagonal thing being slotted into place by drones on the edge was the size of an apartment building.

“When did this get built?”

“Article says the Entity built the core of it years ago, but all those hexagonal units? They’re new.”

“Holy shi—”

There was a sharp rap of knuckles on door, and an equally sharp throat-clearing. Letty looked away from the phone to blink at Sister Lucille; the Nun flashed her a knowing look. “Language, miss Brown.”

“Uh…sorry, Sister.” God, how did the nuns do it? They had some kinda supernatural sixth sense or something. It was eerie.

Sister smiled forgivingly, then noticed what they were looking at. “Oh, the Garden!” she exclaimed. “I saw that on the news this morning.”

“What do you think of it, sister?” Treasure asked, politely.

“Oh, child. I think if I have a regret in all this it’s that I probably won’t get to see it for myself. It looks amazing.” The nun set aside the laundry basket she was carrying and smoothed down her habit. “And it’ll save so many lives, too…”

“D’you think it’ll save ours?” Preston asked, hopefully.

That was the thing about Sister Lucille, and the reason Letty had come to really like her already: she didn’t sugar-coat things or try to dodge tricky questions. She just shrugged. “I hope so,” she said, simply.

“We still haven’t heard anything, huh?” Letty observed.

“Just an automated notification that our petition on your behalf has been received and will be reviewed.” Sister shook her head. “I imagine they have millions to sort through.”

“And people running out on ‘em,” Letty predicted, sourly. Sister Lucille gave her a careful look, then entered the room fully and sat on the bed next to her.

“People are complicated,” she said, warmly. “Some are selfish and lost, yes. Others had already devoted their lives to helping others and the end of the world has only doubled their zeal for it. For some, this whole situation has been a wake-up call, and for some more, it will be in time once they’ve had time to figure things out.”

Letty said nothing. She was still having trouble with…all this. With the nuns, and the shelter, and Olivia and the other volunteers, and the safety. She had a nightmare every night where she was actually dying in her sleep under the bridge, and this whole thing was just a pleasant dream while the cold took her away. It didn’t feel real, somehow. Not when she could still see the look on Olie’s face as he’d bled out next to her. Not when she could still see the hungry look on Nolan’s face just before, like she was just a cut of meat…

Everything inside her must have shown on the surface, because Sister Lucille made a soft “oh…” and gathered her gently into a hug.

How could warmth and kindness hurt so much? It tore the band-aid off and bared all the wounds to the air. It dug up everything she’d buried, made her feel it, all at once. Letty buried her face in a habit that smelled of laundry detergent and incense, and fell apart completely, for quite some time.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, she started trying to say sorry. She wanted to be stronger, she wanted to be harder, she wanted to be better, she wanted to not be broken, but…

Sister Lucille hushed her gently. “Shh…dear girl…you’re not broken. You’re feeling exactly what you should be. It’s okay…”

Somehow, Letty found herself…shored up. Not feeling better, not even a little bit, but…but she nodded. Sniffed. Found the huge knot of feelings pressing against the walls of her head had got a little smaller, and made room for being herself again.

“I wanna…I wanna be one of the people who helps,” she said aloud.

Sister gave her back a gentle rub and sat back. There was a damp patch of tears and snot on her habit, Letty realized, and self-consciously wiped her nose. She didn’t seem to mind, though.

“Okay,” she said.

Letty became aware of a hand on her arm: Treasure gave her a watery, concerned little smile. Over in the corner chair, Preston was curled up and quiet, though he did shoot a glance her way and flashed something that almost looked smile-like.

“Come on, then,” Sister Lucille said, and stood up.

“Uh…?”

“You want to help, well, there’s help needed. Like laundry.” She shot a mischievous look down at the mess on her chest.

“R-right. Yeah. No time like the present, right?” Letty agreed. She could see the humor in it, even if it didn’t make her laugh. Not yet. “But I’ve, uh…I don’t know how to…I never did…laundry. Before.”

“Oh dear. Well, let’s remedy that. Everyone should know how to clean their clothes, hmm?”

“Me too!” Treasure hopped up to her feet.

There followed an education of sorts. Not really a big one. Keeping white garments and other ones apart to stop the dyes from running, which compartment in the machine was for which powder or liquid…

A new kid came in while Letty was still grappling with the mysteries of ironing. He stank, his clothes were filthy and torn, his hair was greasy, his beard patchy and scruffy, and his eyes were hollow and sad. Sister Lucille had her deliver a clean set of the shelter’s sweatpants, underwear and t-shirts to his bed. It was a little thing, but it struck Letty that somebody else must have done the same for her, when she arrived.

The new boy turned up at dinner wearing his new clothes, and looking…pretty cute, actually. But that wasn’t what caught in Letty’s mind. What caught was the feeling that she’d done something to make his life better. She hadn’t even consciously noticed how good the new clothes felt when she got her own, but…they’d helped. Which meant she’d helped him, in a tiny way,

She could feel the sensation of that, in her heart. Right where she’d wanted something to be. It felt…good. It felt right.

…What else could she do?

She didn’t know.

But she was going to find out.

Weaver dropship above continental USA, Earth

Christian “Righteous” Firth

This wasn’t the SOR’s fuckin’ job. The SOR’s job was Hierarchy, Hunters, extraterrestrial threats, biodrones. That kinda thing. Not regular humans. Regular humans were what literally every other fuckin’ unit in existance was for.

Not today, though. They were “stretched too thin,” apparently. Didn’t have the men and resources to spare. Or couldn’t hack a heavy assault, didn’t wanna lose men at a time when they couldn’t be replaced.

‘Cuz, yeah. Okay. The target was a bunch of apocalyptic survivalists turned death cult and they were operating out of a literal actual fuckin’ fortified bunker. So drop a fuckin’ bunker-buster on ‘em! Shit, Firth wouldn’ta minded that so much. Woulda been a nice holiday to just stand out in the desert and guide in the airstrike.

But no. These fucks were rabid fuckin’ animals. Fuckers had been raiding small towns and gas stations and shit for weeks, but two days ago they’d rolled through a little farming community, massacred the men, raped the women before massacring them too…

…What earned them a real fuckin’ painful death, though, was the three kids they’d abducted.

So while Firth was grumbling that this wasn’t the HEAT’s job…another part of him was more than happy to dispense some justice. There was a reason they called in HEAT.

They wanted to send a message, by makin’ a mess.

So. Step to the edge of the ramp as it lowered, and wait. Firth could feel Gonzo’s hand on his shoulder as they stacked up. Kid was one of the best they had, for sure, but he’d never done something like this before. Always aliens, before today. Hopefully that wasn’t fuckin’ with his mind too bad.

…Nah. Firth didn’t doubt him. Mebbe worried for ‘em a bit, but never doubt.

Green light. Off the end of the ramp and fuck yeah, there was that rush of wind and gravity as the Weaver fell away above him and they were on a one-way trip to the ground with no fuckin’ parachute. Today they were going to put on a show.

Righteous was gonna crash his elephant ass right through their fuckin’ roof like a missile, and hopefully knock the damn house down in the process.

Suit did the heavy lifting on guiding him: all he had to do was stretch his arms and legs out, let the fields snap out around him, and keep his face pointed at the target. He could feel the field wings pull and strain at his limbs as they fought the air currents and aligned him perfectly into the drop trajectory. In clear, easy conditions like these, the MASS could hit a bullseye the size of a quarter from thirty thousand feet, no problem.

Today, there was no reason to risk injury. So rather than their traditional full send, there would be a tiny bit of braking about a hunnerd yards above target, jus’ to be safe. They’d be hitting a little bit under terminal velocity. For men like him (wearing armor like his) that was a hell of a clip though, so when he got eyes on their fuckin’ Mad Max thunderdome house, he pointed himself in, clicked to Gonzo, and together they rode the needle right at the top of amber—

Let their fields go a few seconds before impact, and hit like a goddamn meteor. Crashed through the roof, the top floors, all the way down into the basement.

Wiped some fucker’s guts off his visor. Stairs weren’t gonna take his weight, so up he jumped and slammed right through a wall with his momentum, bounced off a bit of floor that might last for a moment, found some sure footing, and assessed.

Welp. The two of ‘em had pretty much fuckin’ ruined the house. The entire middle was done for. Outside the rest of the team had already landed and surrounded the property. Tiny had serviced one squirter with a punch to the head. The head wasn’t in one piece anymore. Gonzo had gone full wrestler on a fleeing pair of them like he tended to do, and, well…

The bunker hatch was set in the basement floor, watched by a wall-mounted camera.

Well, he’d learned one thing prancing around with Julian. He did love muggin’ ‘fer the lens. So, he electronically disabled the anti-glare coating to show his face through the visor.

“Right. So! You idjits know who the fuck we are. This is only gonna go one way. You come out alive an’ surrender, or you come out as meat. Ain’t a fuckin’ thing you can do to stop that. You can’t hurt us—”

Something incredibly fuckin’ violent happened, which Righteous watched and felt behind the safety of automatic shields and pretty much literally unbreakable armor. Assholes musta wired the whole building with explosives ‘cuz the entire house dissolved in a blizzard of splintered wood and metal fragments with a blast that prob’ly flattened the nearby trees.

He felt the house fall atop him. Meh. He could throw boulders like footballs even in supergravity so whatever. He just stood there and waited for shit to settle down.

Firth dusted off his armor. Damnit. Plates were brand new. Their nice pretty camo pattern was scuffed. Grade Triple-A durasteel plates too, same kind the turbobear wore and lifted with. Could take basically fuckin’ anything, up to and including nuclear-level blast.

Well, ol’ Firth prob’ly couldn’t, but at least his Mass’d be fine.

He sighed, already done with this shit. “Alright. Meat it is…” he growled.

So, first job: door. It was a big door, too. Like an improvised old-timey bank vault door, mebbe. But Righteous weren’t the human fuckin’ hulk for nothin’ these days. So, feelin’ froggy, he gave it a quick look-over, glanced at Titan who gave him a grimly amused shrug, and gave it a punch. Dented. Okay. So he punched next to all the safe-door hinges. Punched as hard as he could a few times, until they popped off one by one.

Once he’d done that, all he had to do was rip the damn thing out of its hole. Prob’ly coulda done the deed entirely himself, but Gonzo and Tiny were there anyway, and the three of ‘em made real quick work of the thing. Righteous grunted, hefted the thing over his head, and tossed it up out of the hole and out of the way. Din’t make it very far but, well, he weren’t really trying too hard anyway.

Point still made. The fuckers inside knew what was comin’ for ‘em now. He could hear shouting and somebody pump a shotgun inside.

Firth dropped in, felt reinforced concrete shatter under his boots. A tiny little fuckin’ love tap as some guy with his antique pistol dinged off two shots before Firth’s fist turned his chest inside-out. He was too fuckin’ huge for the tunnel, but he could raise his left arm and activate the shield mounted on his gauntlet. Buckshot rained harmlessly against it: his gauss sidearm turned the idjit with the shotgun into a red cloud and painted the wall with chunky bits.

Titan behind him, doin’ about the same in the other direction.

Hostile: serviced. Hostile: serviced. Hostile: fuckin’ evaporated.

Noncombatant. A girl in a fuckin’ dog cage huddled desperately up in the corner. Firth slapped down a shieldstick for her protection. Felt the rage comin’ on, held it back ‘fer now.

Grenade: swatted back the way it came. Hostile serviced.

Distance ‘tween the action and the girl. The naked, bruised little girl…

Rage now, no holding back against the weak evil meat. Rush, crush. Rip an’ fuckin’ tear…

Silence.

“Clear!”

“Clear!” came back from Titan’s side.

Baseball already had the girl out of the cage and was haulin’ her out. She was panicked and outta her mind with terror, but Firth unnerstood; she was a scared little girl.

He tried not to think of his own little girl too much.

“Right. She need any medical attention?”

“Nothing immediate, but…”

“Okay. Here. Let’s get her up and out, I’ll take care of this.”

It wasn’t easy bein’ gentle with a hysterically violent little girl, so once they were clear, the very first thing Firth did was drop his weapon, drop his pack, and step out of his Mass. Handy that he could do that these days. Tore the top off his undersuit too, given how it looked like a sorta alien-intestine stillsuit and all…

Okay. Normal human shape. Friendly face. Or as friendly as a Firth could get.

“Hey. Look. I’m here, right?” He held his arms open and invited her forward, while ‘Base let her go. “You’re safe. Nobody’s gonna hurt you–oof!”

Next to the kinda hits he took every day with his breakfast, that flailing slap to the jaw was nothing at all, but he was honestly kinda impressed. Kid was a fighter! And she had to let it out, and ol’ Firth was a big dumb ol’ wall, so…

So he let her work it out of her system.

There was a moment like flicking a switch where she went from terrified and violent to realizing he was actually there to help, and she tackled him around his neck and hung on for dear life, sobbing. She clung to him for a long time and Firth just held her, and commanded his team to Leave Them The Fuck Alone with the best Look he could manage.

The cleanup operation weren’t so clean. So Firth stood up and carried her away from it, cradling her head against his neck. He made his full S-tier goddamn murderface at the combat camera fuck, who promptly shit himself and found something else to film…

Found a rock, sat on it, and let her sob it all out. Didn’t say anything. She’d speak first, when she was ready.

It took a few minutes. Finally, a tiny broken voice squeaked into his shoulder, “‘m’s’rry….”

“Heyy…ssh. Shh. Don’t be, darlin’.” A little silence. “…What’s ‘yer name?”

Silence.

“That’s okay. You don’t gotta tell me if you don’t wanna.”

“..’s…Jenny.”

Firth nodded, remembering the list of missing folks they’d been given. There’d been a Jenny…Richardson. Yeah. Twelve years old. Ma and pa…

Well, the poor girl was an orphan now. Motherfuckers. And two still unaccounted-for.

And that was a big damn problem. Protective services were utterly fuckin’ overwhelmed. There was no chance in hell this would end well for her…

…

…Well, god damn it.

He knew he couldn’t walk away.

So. He hollered across the way. “Hey! Gonzo!” Jenny cringed in his arms, so he lowered the volume. “…Bring me my phone. It’s in the inside front lower left pocket.”

Gonzo, good boy, also brought him the emergency mylar blanket too, and water, a snack reasonably close to what might be considered human-palatable for Jenny, and brought Firth one of their recovery bars. It wasn’t much different than a suet cake for bird feeding really, at least by texture. Whatever. He’d eaten worse and he needed it.

Firth gave him a smile. A real one. He’d earned it today.

He wrapped the blanket around Jenny’s skinny shoulders, and watched her eat and drink. Used a little water from his leaking undersuit to clean off her face a bit, too. Filth and blood, and a real shiner of a bruise around hollow, distant eyes. Wherever she was in her head right now, she ate and drank like a starving animal but without really paying attention to it.

He conspired to text with his wife with one of his paws while the other held fast onto Jenny. Thank the baby Jesus they made phones for gorillas like him these days.

Heavy footsteps behind him. He turned to remind whichever one of the Lads it was they should be leavin’ him alone right now, then realized it was Campbell. The major nodded to him and squatted down alongside him, removing his faceplate as he did so.

“Tiny found intel on the other two missing persons,” he said, quietly. “There’s an outpost five klicks east, we’ve got drones on it. We need to hit it now before they kill the captives and scatter into the back country.”

Firth grimaced, and indicated Jenny with his head: she’d buried her face back in his shoulder the moment Campbell showed up. “Sir…”

“I know. But we need you back in the game now, Righteous. They found a shelter for her in Raleigh, you can check up on her there after we’re done.”

Fuck. “Yes, sir.”

“You’ve got until our transport lands,” Soup told him, as kindly as he could, then stood and jogged away to take care of…something.

There was silence, for a moment. Then Jenny gave him a squeeze. “…You’re gonna go?”

“I don’t wanna. But there’s two more…”

“Yeah.” She sat back, hopped down off his knee and pulled her blanket around her, “Th-they need your help too…”

Holy fuck. Firth had seen some bravery in his time, but…

He exhaled and got his head sorted out. Right. Yeah. They did need help. And the transport was already overhead, turning and lowering itself slowly. No sooner was it down than a buncha army fellas were coming down the ramp to secure the scene. Their medic looked around, spotted Jenny, and immediately hefted her bag to come running over.

Firth knelt and took Jenny’s hand. “Hey. My name’s Christian, okay? I’ll check up on you after we’re done, I promise.”

She nodded, shallow and fast, and that was all he needed. Bag grabbed, Titan and Gonzo had already gamely hauled his armor up the ramp (loudly bitchin’ the whole while) and Campbell handed him a replacement undersuit as he boarded…

Airborne. Firth suited up, sucked down a mouthful of lime bullshit, triggered the autodoc with a spare thought and rode the drug wave for a few.

By the time they were above the dropzone, he was back in the game.

And this time, he weren’t so gentle with ‘em.

Dataspace adjacent to the Garden, Ink Spatter Nebula

Entity

[**] [3:108:6] Intrusion [**]
[Classification: attempted Denial of Service] [Priority: 1]

The attack, when it came, was a sharp stab of unexpected pain, in much the same way as the Daemon remembered sitting on a thumb tack.

The drone under assault was a perimeter scout, ranging far from the Ink Spatter and the rest of the swarm to keep an eye on the nearby stars. The Entity had dozens of them, covering a volume of several hundred lightyears’ radius. They were a fast-traveling variant of its “default” drone, equipped with mining and manufacturing equipment so they could leave behind a listening post wherever they went….and as a contingency in case they were the sole survivors of a cataclysm.

It was a basic rule for the Entity that all but its most specialized drones should be equipped such. That way, the swarm—and the Entity itself—could always grow again from scratch.

Unfortunately, it also knew that made the scout a prime target for the Hunter datamind. And the Hunter was hitting it hard with an unsophisticated but effective attack: a flood of incomplete, fragmentary access requests, calculated to overwhelm the drone’s processing hardware. Which of course, limited the Entity’s ability to step in directly.

No matter; It didn’t need to. The Entity triggered the drone’s self-destruct and watched as it went offline in exactly the correct manner.

Still, for safety’s sake it dispatched a couple of non-replicating rapid response drones to be certain. These were the fastest designs in its arsenal, capable of megalight speeds: they shot out from the nebula’s heart at a rate no life-bearing ship would have dared attempt through such a dense static-generating medium, accelerated to their full stretch…

Minutes ticked by. Tense minutes, with the Daemon grinding her metaphorical teeth in anticipation, but the Entity’wasn’t especially worried. The self-destruct sequence had felt correct…

Sure enough, when its RR drones landed at their cousin’s former location, they found an expanding cloud of metal shards, exactly conforming not just to the mass and composition of a long-range scout but, more importantly, to the expected dispersal resulting from the internal shaped charge.

Good.

Yeah, but we’d have learned a lot from that if we were in the fucker’s place.

Agreed. The next attack was sure to be more competent, and more dangerous. In the Hunter’s position, knowing the existence of a self-destruct, the Entity’s first target in any future incursion would be to disable it.

We really should have foreseen that…time for a redesign?

Yes. A failsafe system was necessary.

Dead man’s hand.

Yes. The Entity spun up several possible designs and approaches. Cheapest and quickest was a reprogramming, but…no. Any such was vulnerable to the very thing they were trying to protect against. A hardware solution was required.

That meant partial refits and reconstruction, at least. Hopefully not complete phasing-out and replacement of obsolete designs, that would distract far too many resources…

And we don’t want to turn our own security measures into a weapon against us. Can’t have the damn thing instructing the whole swarm to blow up mid-battle…

A tricky balancing act indeed. The Entity instructed its RR drones to take over the patrol and recalled the replicator drones to inside its interception and interdiction sphere. At least if the Hunter did manage to take one over, it would be locked down and obliterated by the Entity-swarm rather than escape.

As for the Hunter…nothing. Dataspace adjacent to the late drone was silent and barren, devoid of substrate, and even the ubiquitous light/pressure/noise of the Hegemony from far over/beyond/away was….attenuated.

It’s out there somewhere. Like a sniper in the desert. We can’t see it, but I bet it can see us.

That…was not the acceptable way round at all. The Entity followed the connections its late drone had reported on principle, but found the nodes they pointed to empty. Completely empty. Sanitized.

Pendejo’s got street smarts already, I guess.

Indeed. The Entity didn’t like being a step behind such a foe, either. It needed to get out in front, somehow.

Can we do that without…abandoning folks?

Finite resources. Finite attention. Finite capacity. Once again the Entity was beginning to question its own reluctance to branch.

Don’t. Values drift is still the bigger threat. We’re not equipped to fight a version of us that knows all our tricks, and we never will be.

Then the Entity was just going to have to work around having a single focus of attention, and the restrictions such a condition imposed. It examined its priority listing, trying to figure out where exactly this problem belonged in the rankings of its attention.

Priority number one: < survive >. That had never changed, never would change, never could change. Sooner turn gravity into a repelling force than sacrifice itself. All subsequent priorities were in support of this one.

Priority number two was to maximize the number of human lives evacuated from Earth, and beyond that to tend to the prosperity and success of the allied species.

So where did dealing with this Hunter datamind now go in the list?

You’re still really bad at one thing, you know.

You, the Entity noted. Usually, the Daemon was content with “we/us” and treated itself as she was: a semi-autonomous component of the Entity entire. She spoke to humans as though she was separate for convenience, but it was rare that she conceptualized herself as separate.

But alright. What was this one thing?

Let’s face it. We’re going to need some help.

The Entity was the help. It didn’t want to distract and weaken others with a demand for resources…

Help doesn’t have to be a one-way street. I help you, you help me, and what we get out is bigger than any individual effort. Come on, we’ve already seen this with letting go of some of the bagging and emigration process and letting the humans involved manage it.

The thought was accompanied by a mental impression of…kind of a reciprocal resonance. Two forces swaying back and forth in turn to push something higher than it otherwise would have gone. Mutuality.

Well…if the Daemon was right, that might be a solution…

If?

But who was there to reach out to? Who would be willing? And what could they do? The Entity’s needs were…eclectic. Its attention was divided precisely because of its unique circumstance. What aid could anyone provide?

Maybe there’s nobody. But there’ll definitely be nobody if we don’t reach out.

…Very well. The Entity considered its list of known organizations and individuals who might in any way have relevant insights: a candidate presented themselves near-instantly.

The Daemon metaphorically giggled. Got it. Invitation sent.

Thus the problem was relegated to matterspace timescales again. It would be a days or weeks before a reply came, no doubt. In the meantime, the Entity reshuffled its to-do list, made time for research, and started examining its own drones’ code for vulnerabilities it could close. A temporary fix for a problem that was going to need a better solution sooner rather than later…

But perhaps the Daemon was right.

Perhaps Champion Meereo would be able to help.

Raleigh NC, USA, Earth

Letty Brown

Letty woke to the feeling of a warm, skinny body cuddled up to her again.

Jenny. Poor kid. They only knew her name ‘cuz the army medics who brought her in had told them: Jenny herself hadn’t uttered a single word since she arrived. She just…watched. With big, wary, hollow eyes that got even tenser whenever a man wandered past. The sound of male laughter made her cringe, the sound of male shouting made her look frantically around for somewhere to hide, but at the same time she hated to be alone. It was like the only thing in the world that comforted her was being a couple of inches at most from somebody she trusted.

And for some reason she’d chosen Letty as her Most Trusted.

Letty had no idea why. Of everyone here, why her? It didn’t make sense to her, but then again a lot of stuff didn’t. Jenny followed her everywhere like a kitten, helped with the laundry and other chores Letty had taken on, sat next to her at mealtimes…she was about as ever-present as Letty’s own shadow.

At first, Letty had found it weird. But she’d followed the nuns’ example and been warm about it, and talked to Jenny even though she knew she wasn’t going to get a reply, and pretty soon she’d found she was glad of the company.

And it sure as shit put her troubles into perspective. The medics and the nuns had thought they were talking privately when she’d eavesdropped on them, and the shit she’d heard about what happened to Jenny’s folks and neighbors and Jenny herself was…

Well, Letty had snuck away and sat down and cried good and hard at what she’d heard. God…it really could always be worse. After everything she’d gone through, and with the end of the world looming she’d kinda got it into her head that she just might be the least fortunate human alive.

And now, here was Jenny to prove her wrong.

At least her bruises were fading. When Letty rolled over (carefully and slowly, so as not to wake her) she got a good look at the huge splotch of mottled yellowish-brown that still covered Jenny’s left eye and right cheek.

Rather than making her angry, it made Letty feel profoundly…sad. Knowing there were people out there so broken they’d do all that to a kid…

She gulped down the swell of emotion and decided she was awake, so she may as well get the whole toilet and shower routine out of the way right now, while she didn’t have a little clinger. She extracted herself slowly and carefully, grabbed her towel and clean clothes, and slipped out of the room. She was up earlier than anyone else, so she got the bathroom all to herself while it was still clean and dry and fresh from being washed last night. There were advantages to waking up early!

She wasn’t the least bit surprised to find Jenny sitting on the floor outside when she emerged.

“Hey, you.”

Smile.

“You want me to stay here while you clean up?”

Nodnodnod.

“‘Kay. I’ll be here.”

Smile, nodnod, hug, door.

Letty smiled to herself once the door was closed and the hiss of shower started up, and went to lean on the windowsill opposite. They were up early, the sky was kinda gray and pink with no blue in it yet, but still bright enough to see by. She could see Sister Judith down in the yard, getting ready to start cooking breakfast.

Well…Letty kinda enjoyed cooking. Maybe they’d go help, rather than sit around with nothing to do.

Movement further afield caught her attention: the guys at the security barrier were stopping an enormous black truck as it rolled up. The truck stopped, rolled down a window. There was a conversation, some documents or papers or passes or whatever got shown, and the truck was waved through.

“Hey, guess we’ve got a new arrival,” Letty mentioned over her shoulder. The shower shut off. “You wanna go down and meet ‘em?”

There was no verbal reply of course, but there was the thump and bustle of Jenny getting dressed as quickly as she could.

“Hey, hey. Dry off, first!” Letty reminded her. The thumping slowed.

Outside, the truck pulled up on the road rather than enter the yard. Letty’s eyebrows shot up as she watched it rock heavily on its suspension, then her jaw dropped when the near-side door opened and a fucking giant squeezed himself out of it.

There was no other word for him. He was taller than the truck, and so wide she had no idea how he’d even fit inside it. Especially not when two other men who were also giants—but still not nearly as big as the first—emerged alongside him. They were dressed in fatigues, with black berets, and even from this far away, they made Letty feel tiny. Holy shit just one of the giant’s arms was way bigger than Letty’s whole body…

Too big. He was ridiculously too big! Human bodies weren’t meant to look like that. It was…scary, even if she couldn’t stop looking. But that just meant Letty knew who they were at a glance. There was only one group of men in all the world who looked like that.

And she’d seen the magazine, too. He was the huge mysterious one that made everyone but Daar himself look small, even hiding in the shadows. The one her and all her former girlfriends had wondered about, when they weren’t gossiping about school, or whatever. The one all the boys were excited about besides the ambassador guy.

They were HEAT, alright. But what were they doing here?

The door opened behind her and Jenny padded across the hall, scrubbing her hair with a towel. She stretched up on tip-toe to look out the window, then gasped and uttered the first word Letty had ever heard her speak: “Christian!”

Then she was running, the towel dropped as she pelted wildly toward the stairs.

What the fuck…?

“Jenny, wait!”

Letty chased after, but she didn’t dare take the stairs with the same reckless speed Jenny did: by the time she reached the bottom, the younger girl had shot out into the yard and was…

…suddenly awkward. On both sides. It was weird watching such a huge, terrifying mountain of a man suddenly come over all bashful. He’d been standing talking to Sister Judith, but now he’d dropped to one knee and was doing everything in his power to look…small.

Jenny had hesitated too. Then she got over it, and slammed into him with enough force to make Letty wince, but the big man (Christian?) didn’t even rock. Instead he, very slowly and carefully, sat cross-legged on the floor, wrapped Jenny up in arms twice the little girl’s size, and hugged her back.

“Hey…toldja I’d come check on ‘ya, didn’I?” he rumbled.

Letty sidled up to Sister Judith, keeping a wary eye on the two comparatively-less-giants behind him. “Uh…Sister?”

The nun shrugged, looking completely lost for words. Which was a rarity, in Sister Judith’s case.

“Hey,” the big man rumbled. He’d tried to whisper but it just didn’t work. “So, uh…I did some paperwork. You can come live with me an’ my family…if you want.”

Letty’s breath caught in her chest. A whole bomb of emotions went off inside her: hope and delight on Jenny’s behalf, how touching a gesture like that was, wonder at what must have happened for this to be happening…and darker, too. Fear that she wasn’t gonna get the same. A guilty lump of envy.

A whole different explosion of emotions when Jenny turned and pointed at her. The message, even unspoken, was clear: ‘what about my friend?’

The big man looked at her, and she felt immediately afraid. He had ice-blue eyes and they weren’t gentle at all. He looked…young. Really young. And old at the same time. Dangerous. huge head, wide blocky face on top a much wider, much-too-thick neck. He was big like a video game character. Nothing about him was mild or gentle.

“What’s ‘yer name?” he rumbled toward her.

“Uh…” Letty’s voice choked around a suddenly dry mouth. She cleared her throat. “I’m, uh…Letty. Sir.”

“Letty, huh? ‘Kay. ‘Ya got a private place th’ three of us can talk?”

Letty’s mind drew a blank. She turned to Sister Judith for help, and found her nodding and pointing toward the rectory. “R-right. Yeah. This way.”

“Lead the way.” The giant scooped Jenny up in his arm and shook the building with every step. Thump, thump, thump. There was an empty classroom at the end of the hall. It was meant for elementary kids though, so the ceilings were a bit lower…and he had to prowl slightly to keep from scraping his head against it. When they actually got to the room, he had to put Jenny down before ducking way down and squeezing in through sideways.

He found a nice bit of ground to sit on, over by the reading area, and beckoned them both to come close. Letty hesitated.

He smiled, then. A big, friendly smile. “I know I’m a scary bastard but I ain’t gonna eat’cha, I promise. C’mon. We gotta have us a talk.”

Letty exhaled and found a bit of humor in the whole situation. Enough to laugh at herself, anyway. After all, Jenny clearly trusted him, and Jenny…had been through a lot. “Right. Yeah. I’m sorry, you’re just…a lot.”

“Ain’t nothin’ ‘ta be sorry for.” He wriggled a bit, somehow folding himself into a cross-legged position. “So you’ve been lookin’ after Jenny, huh?”

Letty pulled up a chair. “She kinda…glued herself to me.”

“Unnerstandable.” He hugged Jenny tight and nuzzled the top of her head: Jenny, for her part, looked actually relaxed and happy for the first time Letty could remember. “She’s, uh…had a rough go of it.”

“Yeah. I…kinda figured.”

“Did you?”

“…Not so rough.”

Those ice-blue eyes bored into her for a moment, like he could read absolutely everything she wasn’t saying. “That’s brave of you.”

Letty felt herself blush. “Well, how would you know?”

The giant sighed. “I’ve seen a lot of awful shit in my time, and I can always tell when it’s marked someone. You ain’t gotta tell me what happened ‘fer me ‘ta see it wasn’t so nice.”

Letty looked away. Her face wanted to twist up and start crying again, but she fought it.

“…C’mere.” He held an arm open, and…

She didn’t know what made her trust this…this dangerous man. But she did, and she went up to him, he pulled them both into his lap and a tight hug…

A hug. Letty couldn’t even remember the last one she’d had. This hug was…warm. Almost too warm, the man was like a furnace. And he didn’t even feel like normal people, there just wasn’t any give to him at all. But he seemed to know that, and he sighed, and…

“…Right.” He said after a long while. “Okay. We can do this.”

Letty didn’t even know what was happening. Suddenly, her life was out of her control again, and that was what she’d been afraid of, ever since she’d figured out that she fit and could help at the shelter. She’d been…making her own decisions, about what kinda life she was living. Instead of being forced into them, or having them made for her.

But…

“Wh…what about the others?”

“We’re workin’ on that,” he rumbled. “Only so much I can do at once though. Ain’t built the annex yet.”

“…Annex?”

He put them down, ushered them through the door, and squeezed back through. Then picked them both up again and thumped over toward the waiting Sister.

She could get used to this.

“Yuh. Own an apartment buildin’. Expandin’ an’ remodelin’ it ‘ta fit more families. Me an’ my buddies all talked it over, an’ we realized we can do some good with it, y’know? And here you are, an’ you need someplace ‘ta be that ain’t Earth…” He glanced between them with a chuckle. “An’ it seems ‘ta me like you two are a package deal, huh?”

Letty caught Jenny’s eye: the younger girl nodded frantically. “I…guess so,” she agreed. She still had that feeling like she was falling out of control, pulled along without any say in the matter but it didn’t feel bad. More like all her prayers were being answered just, not quite in the way she’d have guessed.

And the fact was…as clearly dangerous as Christian was, it wasn’t the same kind of dangerous she’d seen in men like Nolan, or those tacticool militia fucks. “You…you’re HEAT, aren’t you?”

Christian chuckled. “Not like I could keep that secret, but yeah. I’m the real goddamn deal.”

“And you’ve got…time? You can actually do this?”

“My entire life is mostly just training, so don’t you worry. I’ll make time.”

“…Why?”

“…I’ve got kids. Five, workin’ on number six. I…couldn’t just walk away.”

In other words, there was a real soft heart under that giant violent shell. Letty liked that idea. And if nothing else…one glance at Jenny, and the way the poor traumatized kid looked completely at peace riding on Christian’s shoulder was enough.

There was paperwork and stuff, which Sister Judith was beaming to help fill in and sign. They’d had so many kids come to the shelter, and so few of them moved on. And from what Christian had said about what his buddies were planning, and from the bashful smiles on the other two giants’ faces and Sister’s generally joyful mood, Letty guessed there were a lot more to come.

He and the Sister made some small talk while he signed, and signed, and signed.

“…An’ we’re still gonna have Mass after this, right?”

“Oh yes, once Father O’Brien comes back. We’ll have it upstairs!”

“Hope you’ve got sturdy staircases…”

“It’s old stone and steelwork. We build our schools to last.”

“Oh, that’s good, then…”

And so on.

Letty tried not to feel guilty for all the people who weren’t gonna have a guardian angel suddenly show up like this. Instead, she stood by and watched as the forms got filled in, as she learned she was moving to Folctha.

Jenny took her hand and squeezed it tight.

Finally, there was only one thing left for Letty to do: sign her own name, to say that she was happy with all this too. She felt the pen in her hand, weighed it for a second, still feeling off-balance and pulled along out of control. But she did have a choice in this, she realized. That was what the pen was all about.

She looked up at the sky, noticed it was still really early, and most of the others were probably still asleep even while her whole life had just done another backflip, again. From the moment the President broke the news about the end of the world, it kinda felt like she’d only had short moments to get used to a new kinda normal, whether that was fending for herself alone at home, or sleeping under a bridge, or helping out here at Sacred Heart…nothing had been stable for long.

But this time, maybe, promised to finally be the end of that. She could escape.

And she could live.

She put the pen to paperwork, and signed her name.

Lagos, Nigeria, Earth

Alex, Prince of Ekallim-Igigi

The last fifteen years had been especially prosperous for Nigeria, and it was all thanks to the intersection of three resources: Solar power, carbon dioxide, and alien technology.

Carbon recapture was part of the standard technological package granted to all member species by the Dominion Development Council, alongside efficient warp drives, forcefields and high-capacity power storage. The process was intricate, finicky and required forcefields and forcefield-enabled metallurgy…but it was industrially scalable, and all one needed was a plentiful source of energy.

Like, say, near-equatorial sunlight.

It wasn’t actually intended as an environmental technology—the technology was in the Development Package to enable efficient air recycling aboard an ascending species’ new ships—but Nigerian entrepreneurs had realized quite quickly that there was money in the UN’s desire to lower Earth’s atmospheric CO2 levels. International monetary grants to the tune of trillions of dollars, not to mention the sale value of the process’ byproducts. Spaceships needed bottled oxygen after all. And the carbon itself? There were plenty of industrial uses for pure graphite.

Carbon sequestration was now Nigeria’s third-largest economic sector, after agriculture and its absolutely gargantuan movie industry. That in turn had led to a middle-class explosion, more abstract jobs in finance and services, and a thriving economy expanding so fast that the Nigerians themselves couldn’t keep up and were riding on a wave of immigration.

All of that was the dry, boring summary on Alex’s tablet, at least. The reality was more beautiful than he’d expected, even from the accompanying before/after comparison pictures showcasing the urban redevelopment that had transformed Lagos. From the air she was a city of color, glass and lights, beautified by holographic art and unlimited, effortlessly cheap power.

But there was one thing Nigeria still lacked: interstellar infrastructure. Singularity’s sources suggested the country had a total of only two jump arrays, one of which was exclusively for military and government use, and the other of which was a tiny private one at the port, used for personnel transfers. Neither had the capacity for large-scale transport.

That was a problem if one believed, as Alex’s father did, that the people of Earth should not be denied hope by an accident of address.

Hence Alex’s presence on this transport shuttle, and the official gift from King Gilgamesh to the people of Nigeria stowed in the cargo section behind him. His dropship banked in a lazy turn over the airport, giving him a good view of rooftops in every color under the sun, bright yellows, fierce reds, vibrant blues…it was a colorful city alright. As were the honor guard waiting for him on the apron when they alighted and the ramp rolled down: the plumes on their berets ruffled and swayed in the fiercely hot breeze.

And of course, there was somebody to greet him as he stepped off the ramp, with a smile even warmer than the simmering concrete. “Your highness, welcome to the Federal Republic of Nigeria. My name is Chibuike Usman, I am to be your official guide while you are here.”

“Thank you for receiving me, Mister Usman.” Alex shook his hand, reflecting on hours of diplomatic practice and study with his father, mothers, and friends on Cimbrean. He was being entrusted with much, here: his father’s mission for the people of Earth was at least partially on his shoulders.

Important enough he was wearing suits again, though he was at least able to get them properly-fit and made for hot weather. No henching out this time (except for his neck winning against his collar, ha!) and absolutely no Wilde-shirts.

At least, not at moments like these. When things got less formal, though…

He turned, and gestured up the ramp. “With my father’s compliments and the well-wishes of all Singularity, I present to the people of Nigeria this gift: three max-capacity jump arrays.”

He smiled at Usman. “I hope you’ll forgive me not waiting to present them to His Excellency the President, but the sooner they are deployed, the sooner we can begin to find places for your country’s people.

Usman nodded his understanding. “The President is keen to begin, though there are many questions…” he invited Alex toward a waiting car.

“Of course,” Alex smiled, and headed for it. He had twelve hours before he boarded the transport, jumped back home, and collected the next such gift for the people of Ethiopia, then Egypt, Congo, South Africa and so on in order of population until Singularity had delivered an array to everyone on the continent.

And from there…on to South America, then Asia. The goal was for every nation in the world to have at least one major jump array by the end of the year.

A marathon task for Alex. Every day, a different country. Perhaps he’d even achieve a complete global grand tour in that time? If so, he’d be the last person ever to do it…

What a thought. As the car pulled away for the drive toward the Iga Idunganran, Alex turned his attention out the window again and drank his fill of the view.

There was so little time left to appreciate the Earth. So little time until all the endless treasure out there burned away. He’d wept for it, several times, and could feel the urge welling up inside him yet again as his thoughts stirred it…

But there was a time and a place for passion. He kept his composure and thought ahead to his meeting with the Oba and the President, rehearsed the speech he would give at the official banquet…

Part of him wished he could have just been a kind of…space trucker. Just drop the crates off and leave the people to do with his father’s gift as they saw fit. But he knew that could never happen. Formality was not easily dispensed-of, even in times of crisis. Especially not when the crisis was so distant.

This was the role that had fallen to him, and he would perform it without complaint. But he was allowed, in his heart of hearts, to wish that he could have spent his time enjoying the glories of Earth, rather than the glories of official buildings. There was something holy about nature, he believed, made all the holier by waning time.

Maybe there’d be time to appreciate it, after this duty was done. But…probably not. After this, he might never return.

He determined to make the best of it.

New Belfast, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Doctor Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

Planning permission was approved practically the second Ray put in the application. And as for funding? Well, Ray’s return from Hell had ultimately resulted in a huge hazard pay bonus and out-of-court settlement from MBG, plus health insurance, planetary survey fee, back pay, accumulated interest…

She may not have numbered among the mega-wealthy, but she certainly had enough to build a few dozen little chalets on her property. Build them well, too. A place of healing should look nice at least! And of course, there was the promise of government funding to come which would soften the blow if it ever arrived. Though, Ray was pretty sure she’d just spend it on improving what she could afford herself.

After all, what else was she gonna do with all that money? The whole reason she’d been sitting on it all this time was because she had no idea what to do with it beyond invest and live on the profits.

Good thing she’d invested in Folctha. Otherwise, her entire portfolio would have just gone the same way Earth was headed.

Besides…she was finding it quite satisfying to sit on top of the chalets and nail down roofing felt with a compressed-air nailgun. Something about doing the practical work herself rather than leaving it all to the overworked contractors made it a lot more personal and real.

Which was how the Arés family—all three generations of it—found her when they visited unexpectedly, and their timing was impeccable: after knocking her stepladder over she’d resolved that the smartest thing was probably to just finish the roof and then cross the whole “descent” bridge when she came to it.

Adam, of course, was entirely happy to be a stepladder all by himself. And rather sturdier than any folding aluminum contraption.

“Thank you!”

“De nada. Y’know, you really shouldn’t be up there without somebody around…”

“Oh, hush. You sound like more of an old woman than I am!” Ray gave him a warm chuckle and set the nail gun safely out of harm’s way. “So, I hear the first of our refugees is coming?”

“Yup. And knowing Christian, it’s not gonna stop at just the two of ‘em. Think he’s decided that one shelter in Raleigh’s gonna send all their kids our way.”

“How many?” Ray asked, picking up the half-finished bottle of water she’d left beside the air compressor.

“Couple dozen so far, I think.”

“But only two right now,” Marty clarified. “He sent pics…poor girls.”

Ray nodded sympathetically and looked around at the chalets. Once upon a time, from what she’d read, Folctha’s Delaney Row had been nothing but tiny little quick-build dwellings like these. Some smart guy had crammed a lot of house into a tiny footprint. It’d be stretching things to call them luxurious…but Ray had lived in far tighter and far worse conditions herself. Compared to a bunk bed in a homeless shelter, they were a definite improvement.

“I ‘member these things,” Adam grumbled happily. “Had a nice little life in one.”

“You? How did you even fit?”

“I was pretty short as a teen,” he shrugged. “I could pass for normal.”

“Still built like a bus though,” Gabe remarked. Old age suited him well; his hair was much more gray than black now, but he’d regained a fair bit of his vigor from when Ray had first met him. “Especially after your fifteenth.”

“Kinda miss the smol life some days…” Adam looked down and ruffled little Samuel’s hair with a chuckle. “Anyway. SOR’s always looking for a good excuse to help out the local community so I mentioned this project to colonel Costello during our check-in this morning. I expect you’ll have all the help you can stand in a bit, if you want it.”

Ray smiled at that thought. “…You know what? Yeah. Knowing what the Lads can do, I imagine they’ll have this done in an hour and I can focus on the fiddly stuff inside they can’t fit for.”

“Awesome. ‘Cuz we’re still a ways off havin’ the apartment buildings ready…”

Phone calls happened. A large number of the strongest men in the universe showed up. Ray found herself run ragged just fetching and carrying while all around her the thousand things she’d needed to do got done. Plumbing, power, painting, and some digging for later planting….by noon there was nothing left to do but wait for the paint to dry, and Ray was left weeks ahead of schedule.

And yet somehow, just in time, too. Because when she sat down in the evening once they were all gone, poured herself a well-earned and precious glass of wine, and checked her emails, she found a request waiting, from an Olivia Beckett at someplace called Sacred Heart…

Reading it explained the entire day. Sneaky of the Arés family…but Ray didn’t mind. After all, the precise source of the kids who’d come live in her chalets was less important than that somebody did. Was it fair that this one shelter had attracted the HEAT’s attention and become their project?

Well…it wasn’t any more unfair than anything else. There was only so much good fortune to go around, right now. Everyone was going to have to live with survivor’s guilt…and Ray knew it better than most. Yet another reason to be doing this. She’d walked that particular path before.

She sent a reply email, then sat back to drink and relax, knowing in her soul that she was doing the right thing.

It felt like coming back to life.

USS Meskwaki, orbiting Planet Nightmare, deep unclaimed space

Lieutenant Sinikka Anderson

“There she is…”

Anderson let out a low grunt. From orbit, it was hard to believe what she was looking at was technically a habitable planet. It looked like a frozen hell. Jesus, the ship’s survey telescopes were giving an average global temperature of negative twenty.

Kinda beautiful though. If you liked icy shades of white and blue. She half-turned to look over her shoulder to the looming, almost cuboid presence hovering over her shoulder in the Meskwaki’s prep room. Amazing to think this guy could be at home in the sardine-tight confines of a Misfit class patrol boat, but…

Well, he had crewed the first one.

“What…how would you describe this place, ambassador?”

The big motherfucker gave a bit of a grunt and shifted his weight as he thought.

“Well, if Minnesota were a rainforest. So…maybe like British Columbia, if they had really hot summers? Except full of angry pig-dinosaurs that want to kill you. And exploding trees that want to kill you. Oh, and basically instant-death fungus-things too.”

“—that want to kill us.”

He chuckled. “You’re gettin’ it. Good news is, they’re asleep three quarters of the year. And I mean inert. Can’t wake ‘em no matter what you do.”

“Sounds like they’re easy to hunt at least…”

“That they are. But it doesn’t matter ‘cuz their meat is fulla literal antifreeze and the only reason I twigged to that the first year was ‘cuz I knew the smell of methanol.”

“And this is supposed to save us,” Anderson said suspiciously.

“You underestimate just how bad Earth is. You ever heard of a Destroying Angel?”

Anderson shook her head.

“It’s the reason why you don’t eat mushrooms unless you know for certain what they are. Eat a Destroying Angel, and you’re dead. And it’s gonna hurt the whole time you’re dying, too. Heck, there are beans that will kill you dead forever. Ever hear of ricin? Comes from castor beans. Then there’s tomatoes and potatoes, both of which are deadly nightshades. We’ve also got lots of venomous critters that Nightmare or even Akyawentuo really don’t, and a hell of a lot more deadly predators too. Plus, foraging on Earth can be…real hit or miss. Step outside the cities and into the forests or the prairie with just your knife, no cheating? You won’t survive a week if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Point taken…” Anderson acknowledged. Ahead of her, their pilot, Flores, had punched in a course to intercept the ground.

“We’ve actually got critters fulla antifreeze on Earth, too,” the ambassador continued conversationally. “Ever heard of a Greenland Shark?”

“No?”

“Damn near immortal, flesh full of nastiness. But the Vikings figured out how to eat it, and knowing their method meant I could eat murderpig meat…’course, you have to not mind your meat tasting pretty strongly of ammonia, but it’s better than starving to death…”

Outside, the horizon was rapidly distorting toward flat. They’d be re-entering, soon. “You’d better strap in, sir.”

“Yup.” The ambassador nodded amiably, ducked back into the staging room, and buckled himself into a flight seat. Seats, really. He took up the whole couch. Anderson let out a slight breath as the feeling of a wall looming over her faded somewhat. She liked the ambassador pretty well, he was a likable guy, but there was a lot more of him, in every regard, than she was really entirely comfortable with.

At least his almost pointless-seeming bodyguards were somewhere on the spectrum of normal, and could sit still for more than ten seconds.

She put the thought aside and flowed through the re-entry and exoplanetary landing checklist: no unexpected power signatures or warp wakes nearby, test wormhole connection, no disruption…

It all went smoothly, though identifying a landing site was…tricky. They had a number of candidate sites previously selected, but this was the start of winter on Nightmare, and the rapidly cooling atmosphere meant storms. The three first picks were all at the heart of howling, country-sized weather systems combining all the very best of a hurricane, a blizzard, and tornado-forming supercells. There were hailstones the size of footballs hurtling around in those things. No wonder the jump arrays left behind by previous expeditions hadn’t survived…

It was nothing the Meskwaki couldn’t handle, if she had to…but she didn’t have to. Site four had nice, clear blue skies, and in the event their descent was uneventful. The only burr in the fur was the two feet of fresh powder snow covering their landing field.

A pulse and flair of the ship’s shields quickly bulldozed all of that aside to expose bare stone and a completely frozen stream, which the landing gear handled with ease. Anderson nodded happily as they ran through post-flight and allowed onboard gravity to synchronize with local.

She had to admit…kinda pretty. Low, rolling hills, blanketed in white that turned the trees into cones of sparkling crystal. If it wasn’t for the sun being…wrong…it reminded her a lot of visiting her great-uncle in Finland.

Heavy gravity, though. In fact it felt like gym-grav. So…manageable, but at one-point-two G, everything would be literally twenty percent heavier. Great.

Well, lucky for them the ambassador was a fucking wall. He seemed quite happy with the Gs, even as he shrugged into his bright orange cold weather suit and prepared to disembark with the jump array in tow. He squeezed himself through the airlock doors, pulling the array boxes and a ridiculously huge survival pack behind him, gathered it all up, then leaped down from the outer door rather than bother with the ladder.

Sensibly, his bodyguards deployed the ship’s ladder and climbed down the four meter height.

Anderson was quite happy to stay in her nice warm flight chair, thank you very much. The temperature out there was deadly. She watched through the hull cameras as Etsicitty’s bodyguards descended the ladder and. passed the power cells down with the block and tackle. Meanwhile the ambassador had trudged away along the frozen stream to find a suitable spot to unfold the array, anchor it, power it, link it to Earth…

She didn’t hear or feel the jump-shump, but she saw the way the snow rippled when it happened, delivering a crew of a dozen men in more orange survival gear, plus a load of crates.

“Man….It’s pretty, but I kinda still can’t believe this dump is gonna save lives…” Flores commented as they watched the group spread out and start the process of upgrading to an even bigger array.

“I know. Feels more like it’s gonna kill whoever stays here…” Anderson agreed. She grabbed a liquid meal pouch from the locker under her seat, and drank-slash-ate it through its sippy spigot. “Hey, Moore. How’s our weather-sat data?”

Their sensor operator had been busy from the moment they made orbit, but Moore was always at his most relaxed and happy when the ship’s sensors and satellites were feeding him interesting stuff to look at. Anderson could almost hear him humming happily to himself. “Looks like first guess was right, we’ve got…clear weather at least three days out. Might be a big system coming in on day four, we’re gonna have to wait for the computers on Earth to know for sure…”

“System shield status?”

“Green and active at one-point-four AUs orbital radius.”

“Alright…engineering, command.”

Anderson was used to tight quarters after serving on these ships for a year, but their two flight engineers? Those guys lived in each others’ pockets, crammed into a compartment full of capacitors, high-voltage electrical equipment, and the ship’s fusion reactor. They had a certain crazed humor about the fact that they were sitting on something that could kill them both without them ever knowing it was coming, in the right circumstances.

”Go ahead, skipper.”

“Power down, transition to farthrow mode.”

“Aye, aye.”

After all, the only difference between a wormhole suppressor and a wormhole generator was operating mode. Still, the active field was a constant power drain, more than the ship could sustain in flight. While here and parked safely on a planet though…

Lights blinked and changed color, several controls went offline, some new ones came on…and with that, they were, for the moment, not a ship but a static high-powered security device. There’d be a proper farthrow installed later, and then the Meskwaki would become part of this planet’s permanent orbital patrol.

Which meant Anderson was going to be here to see the colony’s founding, and to see it grow. Which meant this was…home. Of a sort. Better get used to that view out there, because she was going to be seeing a lot of it.

She was actually glad of that. Glad of the life it meant she’d get, along with her immediate family. The military took care of those who served, and their loved ones. That was the promise.

What would living here be like, though? Could Nightmare even support any reasonable population? How could they farm here? Why build here, when the same people could go to Cimbrean and actually grow their own food there?

So many questions, but… ’ours not to reason why.’ She pulled the handle on her seat, and it slid backwards before rotating to let her climb out into the prep bay. She ducked into the living quarters, did some stretches, then settled down in the viewing cupola to watch the groundbreaking team do their thing outside in the cold. Part of her felt the tinge of guilt that said ‘get out there and help’ but that was redundant. She was helping by staying aboard the ship. That was her job in all this, command the Meskwaki and protect this operation.

Even if it was going to mean a lot of sitting around inside when she could be feeling the cold breeze on her face…

She stood up, made a coffee, sat down again, and watched as Etsicitty heaved a crate off the stack in the jump array. Yeah. Definitely too much for her tastes…but damn if that wasn’t impressive.

She sat, and drank, and watched them found the future.

Lavmuy City, Gao

Arthur Sartori

Throughout his Presidential career, Arthur had often had cause to lament how slowly the Federal Government usually worked.

Not now. Now, he felt like he was scrambling to keep up. Margaret White had been all too happy to accept his assistance in getting established on Gao and had made him a special envoy, and the Department of Evacuation was spinning up into a people-moving operation on an epic scale even as it was still being formed.

Beginning with the people who would pave the way for more people. Where the DOE was finding them, how they were being selected, Arthur didn’t know. At first glance they were almost a random grab-bag of men and women, some in suits, some in chinos and polos, or plaid and jeans, or hard-wearing paint-speckled work gear…

The planners and builders of humanity’s future on another species’ homeworld. And all of them had loved ones they wanted to bring, as soon as there was a space for them.

There was much that was volatile in all that. Humans and Gao got along well, once familiar with each other, but the differences could get…tense. Especially the fact that the Gao, though it was generally less extreme nowadays, could be incredibly violent among rival males. Up to and including what would, in humans, be an open-and-shut murder case.

On the other hand, they considered solitary confinement the height of barbarism.

So. Best to prepare the new arrivals for culture shock, the best way he knew how: with dinner and a speech.

The dinner part was simple enough, Gaoian caterers loved to show off their skill at alien cooking, even if, inevitably, they sometimes had funny ideas about flavor combinations, and had ably laid on a buffet from which the garlic and anchovy sandwich was mercifully absent.

Not that it wasn’t actually tasty, to be fair. The kind of anchovy they preferred was meaty, not briny. An acquired taste, but acquirable. It was just, for whatever reason, pungent halitosis didn’t bother them much. Paradoxical considering how sensitive their noses were, but Arthur had long since given up on expecting people of any species to make perfect sense.

It wasn’t too formal an affair. Drinks, buffet, handshakes…and when Arthur stepped up to the lectern at the end of the workhouse hall they were using, the hum of conversation receded just like he was used to as lots of expectant faces turned his way.

“I know you weren’t expecting a welcome party,” he began. “In fact, I imagine you all thought you’d be getting to work straight away…”

Nods and a few silently mouthed murmurs of agreement.

“We’re all acutely aware of the time pressure, and we all have a lot to get on with in these short few years. Before we can get started, however, I think there’s one thing that bears mentioning…this is the planet Gao.”

As he’d hoped, a few blank looks and frowns, along the lines of ‘we already know that, what’s he reminding us for?’ Good.

“What I’m driving at by reminding you of that is that this is the ancient and storied homeworld of our good friends, the Gaoian people. This world is steeped in history, this city in particular. Don’t let the relative quiet and the empty buildings fool you, this is a metropolis that ought to rival any on Earth, and would have done again in a few generations. Instead, we’re able to move here and live here precisely because many millions, billions of the Gao died. For us, the invitation to come here is a welcome chance to save more lives than we otherwise could. For them, our presence will be a permanent reminder of their darkest days.”

Expressions softened, a few heads bowed. Arthur nodded, glad they were taking his words seriously.

“What we build here must be the foundation for both our species’ futures, not just humanity’s. So, I’m asking you to keep them in your thoughts as you plan and build alongside them, rather than around them. Respect their traditions and ways, different though they can be to our sensibilities. Remember that this is their house, and therefore their rules. We have been invited to move in, to make this a world for our people combined, but we must never forget that this is an act of supreme generosity. It falls on us to reply in kind.”

Murmurs of agreement and nods told him he’d used the right words. Now was the time to wrap it up: a speech that went on over-long tended to lose people by the end.

“But all of that is a concern for tomorrow. Tonight…celebrate. You’re here, you’re safe. Your families will join you here when there’s room. With your skills, qualifications and experience, you’ve bought safety not just for your loved ones, but you will by it for many, many more. So celebrate. Give thanks. And relax, because the work starts in the morning, and doesn’t stop. And let me begin by raising a glass…” he lifted his small scotch. “…To building the future.”

The toast was echoed, there was a round of applause, and he stepped back to mingle.

In truth…nobody really relaxed. Tonight might just be the only relaxing evening for the next few years, but nobody wanted to. And that was beneficial; lots might get done down the road, if Sartori carefully introduced the right people to each other.

So, he did exactly that. He mingled, talked, listened, moved on, did it again. He built a map in his mind, and then started to guide people together to where they might bounce off each other. High level leadership was all about social connections, after all. He kept in mind people who might need to be introduced to the more heroically useful of his many acquaintances, too…

By the time the buffet was picked clean, there was a definite mood in the air. By the time he left…the conversations were still going, low and intense. Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe it was a sign he had a lot more work to do, going forward.

Maybe both.

Maybe he ought not overthink things. He’d done the important bit, and now it was time to step back and let them get on with it. He couldn’t pretend to be anything other than an ex-President. But at least he was here, and not stuck back in Maine, waiting for the end. That was…good enough.

Whatever happened, at least he was here.

Camp Tebbutt biodrone internment facility, Alaska

Six

“A Hunter datamind…” Six sat back and mused.

“You sound surprised.”

“I am. I didn’t think such a thing was possible. Igraen dogma is that the Discarded are empty husks, going through the motions but not truly intelligent in their own right.” He sighed and adjusted his shirt. “I suppose there are aspects of Hierarchy propaganda I still haven’t confronted.”

Life had been quite comfortable for Six in recent years. It still wasn’t a nice house by the Caribbean, but the simple transaction between himself and his captors remained the same: he answered questions, they mostly left him alone to live in relative peace. He had a well-stocked bookshelf, a decent library of vinyl music—not, as some alleged, the superior format, but considering he wasn’t allowed internet access, it was the best he could get—and his paintings.

He’d grown to love the smell of oil paints, And it turned out, the mind of an Igraen contained vistas and imagery both alien and beautiful to human eyes, when he attempted the impossible task of trying to express the Hegemony and Dataspace in colorful, visual form

It was a peaceful life. Even a happy one. But not how he intended to end his existence. Which was why the latest new problem before him represented both an intriguing development, and a chance…

“They seem to have believed it themselves,” his interrogator said. “They have…well, here. We have video.”

Six watched with interest. Listened to the Alpha-of-Alphas rant about how pathetic the Hegemony was (true) how evil its own species’ fate was (also true) and rave about how beautiful the Hunters’ extinction was (very true indeed).

He didn’t watch the incredible violence that followed, though. It was too fast to follow in any case.

“It’s not wrong, exactly. The full datamind extraction process leaves the body with a form of brain damage. And the gentler version I used on Miss Ríos results in an…inferior image. A lower resolution construct that has no trouble believing in its own subjective continuity, but which doesn’t stand up to close comparison with the real thing.”

“Until it mutates and breaks free, of course.”

“Yes, well. She turned out to be quite exceptional. As indeed must this Hunter have been, to nucleate a coherent and distinctive new pattern.” Six picked up his water glass and sipped from it. And now it’s looking to gain a self-replicating drone body. That cannot be allowed to happen.”

“No.”

Six set the glass back down and stared his interrogator in the eye. “I do hope this request comes with a ticket off this planet?”

“Naming your price, Six? You’re still a prisoner, remember.”

“Yes, a prisoner on a world that’s doomed to burn. I’m now sitting around here waiting for oblivion, and when the end comes it won’t really matter whether I waited in comfort or boredom, will it?” Six shook his head and crossed one leg primly over the other. “Take all my creature comforts and put me back in the gray box if you like: survival is my price. And unless I miss my guess, I am the only expert on Dataspace you have access to, other than the Entity itself.”

There was a pause. Silence. Then the interrogator stood and nodded. “We’ll consider it.”

Six raised the water glass again to toast him, and then he was alone.

Oh well. He hadn’t really expected a clear and immediate acquiescence. He shrugged, finished the water, and decided he was feeling inspired to paint something new…

A portrait of the Entity, maybe. As it really was, the impressions that formed in the human audiovisual cortex in sympathetic response to his impressions of it as a datamind. Doctor Flowers’ long-vacant brain and dormant personality promptly furnished him with the mental image of a deep-sea angler fish, its vast and terrifying bulk nearly invisible in the dark while it dangled a bright, pretty, human-shaped bauble in front of its own maw.

Perfect.

By the time he next saw an interrogator, the painting was not only finished, but had been sitting in the rack to dry for a couple of days. Probably doomed to burn here on the Earth, but at least Six would find out whether he’d burn alongside it…

“Alright. A secure facility is being prepared for you. You’ll be transferred sometime in the next few days: I advise you think carefully about which items you want to bring with you, as you’ll only have what you can carry.”

“Understood,” Six replied. “As for my end of the bargain…I’ve been giving the Entity’s situation some thought, and I have recommendations for it. It’ll be written by tomorrow morning, but…”

“But?”

“But some of the concepts involved are impossible to accurately express in English. Or any matterspace language, at that. That is, after all, the reason the Entity has such terrible trouble with communicating and depends on its proxy daemon. It’s why Hierarchy agents have to undergo extensive reprogramming before we can even begin the training necessary to start interacting with matter-life.”

“Are you saying you can’t help?”

“I’m saying there’s a significant handicap. You’re asking me to help it, uh, practice its golf swing, without ever meeting in person, through the medium of postcards written in a language it doesn’t understand. I’m sure you can see the difficulties this would entail.”

“What can be done to mitigate these difficulties?”

“I don’t imagine you’d just let me loose into dataspace again and trust me to hold up my end of the bargain…?” Six smiled at the very patient look his interrogator gave him. “No, didn’t think so. Besides, I daresay it’d try to kill me. Still, I have some thoughts.”

He picked up a notepad he’d filled with sketches and explanatory notes, and handed it over. “Your own data security experts should be able to do something with this. It’s the equivalent of those prison visitation booths, with the glass and the telephone, hmm? Should at least remove a few of the obstacles.”

“You think it’ll want to talk to you?”

“It’s compelled to survive at all costs. I am offering information which will improve its ability to do so. It can no more ignore that carrot than you could fly to the moon by flapping your arms. It’ll talk to me.”

The interrogator looked uncomprehendingly at the diagrams he’d prepared, then shrugged and stood: she left behind the small suitcase she’d brought with her. “I hope you know how to pack efficiently,” she said.

“Don’t you worry about me, madame jailer. Getting to take any of this stuff is more of a kindness than I expected.”

With that, he was left in peace again.

He packed. Didn’t bother with clothes, on the grounds that all he wore was what his captors provided for him anyway, and they would surely provide again. Instead, he used his shirts, pants and underwear to safely wrap his painting supplies, then tucked in a few of the more intriguing unfinished books around the edges…

They must have been watching and waiting for him to finish, because no sooner had he closed the case than his guards came in, and the usual routine of being guided safely to somewhere else played out. They let him carry his case and the easel under his arm, though.

This time, though, it played out very differently. There’d never been a jump array in the middle of the camp before.

Thump.

On the far side was a space station under artificial gravity. The human body could tell the difference somehow, though exactly what sense it was that enabled such a distinction, Six didn’t know. Something in the inner ear, maybe. He couldn’t taste the air, either: it was recycled and perfectly clean, perfectly odorless but therefore perfectly lifeless. Dull, boring. Nowhere near as pleasant as Belize or Alaska.

But definitely not in Sol. The large and rather spectacularly purple gas giant he could see through the windows said otherwise.

He was, in short, out of harm’s way. And even, potentially, a step closer to his eventual and still planned-for escape. But that was a project for the long term. Here and now, he had his end of a bargain to uphold, for the sake of keeping himself useful.

They settled him in his new cell. He set up his paints and easel, his books and clothes, then sat at the given desk and started writing in Dr. Flowers’ neat, meticulous pen-hand. Purely as an exercise in entertaining himself, really: the true work wouldn’t begin until the “visitation booth” he’d designed was ready.

Soon, he hoped.

He was rather looking forward to meeting the Entity again…

Entity’s Garden, Ink Spatter Nebula

Meereo, Champion of Clan Longear

Meereo had been warned about Garden, so he was already standing on four-paw when the array thumped and delivered him. Even so, the urge to crane his neck up and look and follow the impossible upside-down swirl of the garden stream gave him a moment of vertigo before his ears and tail reminded him that, no, he was still under gravity and down was this way…

The moment passed. He stood up carefully, taking in the incredible park with a mounting understanding that he was absolutely not dealing with just a rogue software function, here. This was the work of a person, with their own sense of aesthetics.

Quite a statement. Quite a reminder. As too was the carefully crafted appearance of the Entity’s avatar. Meereo wasn’t completely immune to human beauty—health and grace were universal, and there were enough similarities in the body-plan to tickle a male’s instincts—but he recognized that this recreation of Ava Ríos was very much a lot more than just a recreation. This was the real woman who had been the seed for this…thing. Whatever incomprehensible mass of twisted datamind may lurk behind her, this was a human creation, on some level.

It was important for everyone involved to remember that.

Today he was here with Leifini and a coterie of specialists, to discuss an intriguing possibility. The Entity had reached out to him concerning the Hunter datamind, and he fully intended to assist with that if he could…

But there was another matter the Entity was uniquely equipped to advise them on. So, after some brief pleasantries, introductions, a tour of the garden and a review of Garden’s habitation and stasis storage facilities—all very impressive—they sat by the lake under the apple trees to talk.

Beginning, of course, with Meereo’s summary of the plan, and the Entity’s prospective role in it.

“So, basically: this is a compatibility test. We need to see if our engineering has managed the task,” he finished.

“And you cannot do that without access to a free datamind.”

“That would be the shape of it, yes.”

The avatar strolled a few paces with her head bowed and her brow furrowed. Was she putting on a pantomime of thought for their benefit, or did the Entity really need so long to process this question?

“What are the risk factors to us?” she asked.

Meereo always felt honesty was the best policy (he was a gaoian, after all) and here, brutal honesty was paramount.

“Death, possibly. Or a long-term incompatibility.” He shrugged, “We have no way to test this ourselves or we wouldn’t even bring it to you. Obviously we would provide whatever you need to review our work.”

“And the possible benefits?”

“The Hierarchy loses. Forever.”

The avatar turned and strolled back to her original location. “That’s not as easy a choice for us as you might think. The Hierarchy may be an existential threat to us in the long-term, or we may be an existential threat to them. For us to agree to this, the risk needs to be minimal, and the benefits certain. Our nature is to survive. We have taken calculated risks in the past, but…”

“We understand,” Leifini replied, evenly. “You need to mathematically justify the danger, in light of all knowable variables.”

She handed the avatar one of Singularity’s round palm tablets. “Naturally our own calculations cannot know all the variables relevant to you, but perhaps these will be of interest to you regardless…”

“We would be remiss if we didn’t note our own calculus,” Meereo noted. The Great Father had made it known to him that he was to share everything. “Our own risk model compels action, for our own survival. We could not in good conscience move forward without every effort to bring you in on this. But we cannot refrain from action, either.”

“In other words, you’re going to do this whether you have our help or not.” The avatar shook her head. “Well, that puts the screws on us, doesn’t it?”

She handed back Leifini’s tablet. “Very well. We’ve reviewed your work, and we’re in.”

So. The thoughtful pacing was just a pantomime after all. “That quickly?”

“Not completely. We want to run our own tests on this before committing fully. But if you’re doing it anyway, we want to be involved for our own protection.”

“That was the idea,” Meereo nodded. Good. He allowed himself to unwind a bit. Very good. Nobody wanted to start yet another front in the war. Not when one had just closed, and least of all with one of their few and more powerful friends.

The Entity nodded slowly. “And the matter we contacted you about? The Hunter?”

“You have our support of course, but we don’t entirely know what we can do about it…” Meereo replied, cautiously.

The Entity’s avatar sighed and sat. More pantomime which was…in a sense to was dishonest, but Meereo found he couldn’t resent it. The objective was to humanize itself, after all, but putting on a human front. He couldn’t begrudge a little performative hormalcy.

“We are…reaching the limits of our ability to divide our attention,” she explained. “Our probe swarm is a tiny burden on our faculties, it’s mostly autonomous. But this station? The construction effort of expanding it? Interacting with you, monitoring communication channels, keeping an eye out for the Hunter-mind and the Hierarchy and whatever other intrusion hazards may be out there…”

“I think I get the picture,” Meereo agreed.

“Some of the load could be delegated. Even some of the more intensive could be taken up by skilled matterspace operators, and with the exodus from Earth there’ll be no shortage of willing volunteers. What we lack is knowledge of how to manage people and…integrate them, properly. I can’t possibly be the go-between for all the people needed, I’m already one of the most demanding processes we have running. So, we need a way to integrate living workers into our operations in a way that frees us up to focus on those aspects that only we could handle.”

“Well, that is going to involve surrendering control. And it is going to require…well, that we build a station similar to normal space stations, in the sense of having control centers, independent and simple management networks…”

“We understand the loss of control, yes. At this point, trust is how we maximize our survivability…and I mean we to include the Gao the human race, the Corti….everyone.”

“I think we have a general understanding, then. We can send space architects and begin the design work necessary to accommodate your needs. You can begin examining our proposal, and in the meantime, our assault teams will begin their own prep. I gather it will be a few years before JETS, HEAT, the Fangs, and other assets are properly situated.”

“There is the Hunter cleanup to finish, too.”

“Yes, but that’s a foregone conclusion at this point. It’s just a matter of time.”

The Entity’s avatar gave a satisfied nod, and stood. “Then please. Stay as long as you like, enjoy the garden. If you need me, you only need to call. We need to focus on adding an expansion module…”

The holographic human vanished, and the tiny spherical drone that had projected her zipped away to lose itself among the trees. Meereo was left with the Singularity contingent; when he looked at them, he realized Leifini was smiling as if she’d just had a huge load taken off her shoulders. She was easily the most expressive corti he’d ever met…

“That went smoother than you were expecting, I take it?”

“It went as smoothly as I hoped. The Entity’s right, these next few years hinge on trust and I’m glad to see it recognizes that.”

Meereo duck-nodded thoughtfully, then rose to his feet. “Well…I should get back. There’s a lot to prepare and do, I suppose.”

“As should I…though, I hope I’ll have the chance to return soon. I’d like to take time and enjoy this garden properly.” Leifini hopped to her feet and extended a hand to shake Meereo’s paw. “And I hope I’ll continue to have the pleasure of working with you on this, Champion.”

“You will,” Meereo promised. “I’m looking forward to seeing this thing work.”

It was a real pleasure to look into a Corti face and see a real, feral, bloodthirsty smile echoing his own. Victory was at hand, even on the far side of tragedy, and they were all eager for it.

He strolled back down the path, taking in the view and the smells, then jumped home, more than ready to get started. Returned to his desk, and sent his report to the Great Father’s aides. They were a step closer, today.

He summoned a few hand-picked Fathers, and got to planning.

Time to take the next step.

Raleigh NC, USA, Earth

Letty Brown

In the end, they needed an armed escort. Somehow, word had got out that there was a lifeboat for the Sacred Heart kids, and they turned out to line the streets and watch. Some were there to wave them off with well-wishes, but a lot more were there because they wanted to make it clear how unfair they thought it was that they weren’t leaving.

Letty couldn’t even blame them. She saw one woman standing on the roadside as their bus rolled past, holding a baby on her left hip, and a sign that read ‘WHAT ABOUT MY SON?’ in the other hand. Her expression as she watched the bus roll past wasn’t hateful, but empty and hopeless.

Letty was trying and failing to not feel guilty. She was allowed to be glad that she’d get to leave and live…wasn’t she?

Part of her wanted to shrink like a turtle in its shell and pretend all those people weren’t there. Something kept her staring out into the crowd though. The image that kept flashing through her head was of her parents standing somewhere out there in the crowd. As if they might show up to see her safely away, or…something.

But no, why would they? They’d just up and bailed on her months ago, and never come to Sacred Heart to see her. Why would they be here now?

Maybe it was just…all those people deserved to be seen. They deserved to live too, at least as much as Letty did. They were right, really. It wasn’t fair that they were being left behind. It wasn’t fair that these…these guardian angels had come down and picked Letty and the others to lift them safely away, and ignored all those thousands of others.

Her prayers had been answered, but millions of other people’s hadn’t. And feeling glad for that just felt selfish.

Her savior seemed to notice, and pulled her a bit closer. “Don’ worry ‘bout it. We’re doin’ all we can as fast as we can. All of us.”

Letty tore her gaze away from the crowd and looked up at Christian. He was sitting on the floor in the central aisle rather than one of the bench seats, and he was still taller than her, still looked as fearsome as ever but…well, she’d got to know him over the last few days; he and the other two giants hadn’t left Sacred Heart since their arrival, and had been actively patrolling the area, too. Fully armed. But every night he was there in the kid’s room, just…sitting there, being a reassuring presence. There was enough room in him for a gooey, squishy soft center bigger than most.

He’d read stories to the younger kids, too. Hearing that coarse, deep voice recite ‘In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit…’ had honestly been the highlight of Letty’s year so far.

She’d seen the three exercising out in the yard, too. That was…well, the boys were super excited. It just made Letty feel weird and awkward, but she’d watched until Sister Judith had come along to shoo her away.

And now here she was, on her way to…what? A new home? A new family?

Well, why the fuck not? Something in Letty’s belly knew she needed to get used to the world turning itself upside-down. You’re in the deep end now, bitch: Swim.

So, she sighed and shook her head. “I know you are, but…most of them are gonna die, even so.”

Christian wasn’t an easy guy to read, but she still somehow felt the stab of pain those words caused him, even though his expression didn’t change. He looked up out the window again, and softened a little. “So were you. Now, here you are, gettin’ outta here. Focus on that, yeah?”

“That just makes me feel selfish.”

“I mean…focus on the idea that, least it’s not errybody, yijao? There’s a future.”

“Even a sad future’s better than no future at all?”

“I guess.” he looked down at his knees. “…Y’know…I lost a good buddy. A few years back. It was…real bad.”

Letty took a trick out of Jenny’s book—she remained silent, and kept her eyes and ears curiously open at him.

It worked, just like it did when Jenny did it.

“…Scott,” Christian said after a moment, and suddenly there was a smile of sorts in his eyes as he remembered. “A real….he was a real joker, y’know? Weren’t a day went by, he didn’t get slapped upside the head by somebody for runnin’ his mouth. We were closer’n close, he was my brother. I ain’t never loved anyone else the way I loved that man, an’ I miss him, an’ thinkin’ about him still hurts like hell, but…”

He sighed and shook his head. “But the world din’t end when he died. An’ here I am on the far side, I got a beautiful wife, an’ a beautiful family that’s gettin’ bigger, and I named my son after ‘im, so…there’s that.”

He looked back out the window, just for a second, then back down at his knees. “…It fuckin’ sucks that they’re gonna die,” he said, quietly, and Letty knew one of the nuns must have told him to watch his language at some point, “but…”

“But there’ll be something on the other side,” Letty finished for him.

“Yeah.” he sighed heavily. “Somethin’ good, I hope. Eventually. And we’ll play a part in makin’ it happen.”

Letty looked back to her right to check on Jenny. The younger girl was sitting as silent as ever, resting her head on the glass and watching the people outside. Letty wondered what was going through her head. Whether she could feel the same, considering what she’d gone through.

There were still folks like Nolan and his friends out there, she remembered. Some real bad guys, and part of her wondered if a better Letty would have felt bad for him, too. But…no, she couldn’t. The worst shame in it for people like him was, they’d go on being awful right to the end.

She felt like that was a road she’d nearly gone down herself, though. There but for the grace of God. And of course, there was Olie…

She never had found out what happened after that night. Presumably there’d been some kinda service? Was he buried somewhere, or cremated? Had anyone he knew been there to say goodbye? Did his parents know? Had they cared enough to come back? Or were they out there somewhere doing the whole nomadic “see the world” thing Letty’s own parents were on?

God, for all she knew they’d got in trouble and died out in the desert or put down roots at some swinger sex cult camp somewhere…

She looked back up at Christian. And here, on the other hand, was a man she’d only just met, who’d just shown up out of nowhere and showed her more love and fatherly kindness from the word go than her own parents had ever given her…

She leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder. He was about as hard as the window glass, but still warm enough to be comfortable.

Time passed while she wasn’t paying attention. Suddenly there was a tall wall with razor wire on the top, armed guards waving them through. The clank and clonk of metal under the wheels as their bus rolled onto a big steel platform under a cage of thin bars…

“Y’might wanna sit up,” Christian murmured. “Jump can make ‘yer stomach lurch.”

Letty heeded the advice. She straightened, looked around wondering if there was gonna be, like, a hum of power or a zap of electricity, or a mounting feeling of something spinning up like a—

Thump.

She blinked, then shook herself as her whole body told her something weird was up. The feeling was like being off-balance, or like the first few days at Sacred Heart when she’d woken from a vivid dream and needed a second to figure out where she was.

It settled, but didn’t quite go away. She was somewhere else, she could feel it. Folctha, presumably. The man with the light wands who waved their bus off the jump platform wore an unfamiliar uniform, the air that rolled in through the open windows felt different—thinner, cooler, wetter—and as they rolled out of the yard, they passed through a forcefield that buzzed at a weird pitch and left her whole body tingling and her teeth feeling weird.

“Ain’t ever been supercleaned?” Christian grinned down at her out of the side of his mouth. “Better’n any shower or bath!”

Letty tried to stop licking at her teeth and shuddered. Beside her, Jenny spoke for the first time all day: “Ugh!”

“Heh, yeah. You never get used to it. But…lotta aliens here. And mosta them’d get deadly sick if we let Earth’s bugs get loose. So, good news, I guess, you’ll never catch a cold or the flu ever again!”

“I…guess that’s a silver lining,” Letty conceded.

“Heh. So, uh…I hope ‘ya don’t mind but you two’re gonna be crashin’ in the lil’ boy’s room. They should have cleaned up and de-stinkified it…” he shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.”

“Boys?”

“Yup! Got five boys. No daughters yet…well, guess that’s changin’ now, huh?”

Letty dipped her head, awkwardly. “I–I guess so…”

Christian grinned. “That’s the spirit. I know, this is kinda awkward ‘fer me too but trust me on this—life’s better if you just go for it. As for the room…you’ll get a better one soon enough. We’re fixin’ the place up, I’ll show ‘ya.”

The bus pulled out onto a long, straight road, and Letty got her first good look at Folctha.

It was…denser than she was used to. Everything in Raleigh was all spread out, but Folctha was huddled together instead. It kinda reminded her of the one time she’d ever gone up to New York, on a school field trip. Except, not as huge. There were a couple of tall buildings, but the most impressive was a curvy, weird one built above the waterfall at the far end of town. She’d seen pictures of the Alien Palace after Preston went on a big research spree when they all learned they were coming here, but the real thing was…something else.

She’d never seen a building covered in holograms like that, before.

It wasn’t a long drive to their stop. Christian nearly jumped up, but stopped himself before he destroyed something, and instead went through the careful process of getting off the bus in slow motion.

He wasn’t so gentle with the freaking She-Hulk waiting by the road for him, though. Letty couldn’t help but stop and gawp at the sheer size of the girl, or at the way she was apparently happy for him to give her a real scoop-up-and-hug.

Christian had mentioned Freya a couple times, of course. But he’d left out the fact she was clearly built in the same shipyard as him, and to much the same standard.

Well…they were clearly happy together. The big man’s face lit up when he saw her, scooped her up, squeezed her and set her down, and she was equally glad to see him. At Letty’s side, Jenny let out a musical giggle Letty had never heard from her before.

That, of course, got Freya’s attention and…dear God. Did this whole family just constantly go at full tilt? Letty had barely enough time to say “hi” before she was being…well…

Mothered.

It turned out the Firths owned a whole apartment building, and they were busy tearing out and remodeling all the apartments to make room for refugee kids from Earth. There was a whistle-stop tour through half-finished construction sites that smelled of sawdust and drywall.

There was a Scottish guy handling the renovations. Christian introduced him as “Murray.” The dude was huge in any other context, but looked almost normal next to Christian, and he was quiet, too. Warm, though: he gave Letty a smile and a sympathetic roll of his eyes at Christian and Freya’s sheer force of personality, and asked Letty what color she’d like her room done in.

Her own room. Well…sort of. Somehow, Letty knew she’d wind up sharing it with Jenny because Jenny just couldn’t stand being alone, but still. One of the wallpaper samples looked pretty cool, so she went with that and then the tour was back on.

Upstairs there was a huge, heavy dining table surrounded by sturdy chairs, and whatever was in the kitchen smelled good. Apparently Freya knew how to feed a big family well…

There was more. And more. And more. Letty’s head was spinning, she was exhausted just from the pace of it all. She met more of the “Lads,” giants all. A Murray-sized man showed up with a badass black glass eye and a weird T-shirt—one dude in a suit beating another dude in a suit with an alligator—accompanied by the first alien Letty had ever met: some kinda weird lizard-insect kinda thing with three arms and three legs and a denim vest covered in pride badges…

It was all too much, to the point where Letty was starting to feel like she was gonna fall over.

And then it was quiet.

Freya had kinda…gently scooped her away from it all and into a bedroom and sat her down, gave her an apologetic look and left her alone to clear her head. She could still hear the talking outside and the general rush and business, but here in this room…

Honestly, it had been a while since Letty had enjoyed being alone. But she did need a minute. She looked around, noting that, yeah, this was definitely a boys’ room. They’d left it pretty neat and moved all their stuff out, but she could still tell, somehow.

…She wondered where Treasure and Preston were. They’d been going to some…chalets? Was that right? And where was Jenny? Still out there? Weird to think that the tiny, quiet, traumatized kid was handling this better than she was, but…something about Christian really helped her.

Letty took a deep breath. Let it out. Like Olivia had taught her, for when she was feeling overwhelmed. In…out…she was safe. She was…

…Safe.

It hit her like a truck. She was safe. She wasn’t on Earth any longer. She was going to live! Somehow things had been rolling along and carrying her like a dream or a movie or something that wasn’t real but suddenly…here she was in a room that still smelled faintly of boy, sitting on an unfamiliar bed listening to an alien laughing merrily outside her door, and she was safe.

The trembles started in her hands, worked their way up her arms and by the time they reached her shoulders they’d become sobs. She didn’t even know why she was…it was a good feeling!

Good, but overpowering. She fought it, pulled herself together. Deep breaths. Find something to do…she could unpack. Not that she had much stuff with her, but…yeah. She unpacked. A couple changes of underwear, a few pairs of socks, a spare pair of the sweatpants they gave her at Sacred Heart, a couple of shirts…

She hadn’t really noticed before how the shelter’s polo shirts had a logo on the chest. A burning heart wrapped in thorns, and a cross. Suddenly, it stood out at her. She’d kinda gone along to the church services and lessons and stuff for something to do, and hadn’t really paid much attention, but…

People were made to love. Olivia had said something like that, when they met. Letty hadn’t believed it. She’d never seen it in her life. Now, though…

She touched the shirt to her forehead, and whispered a heart-felt “Thank you.”

And then, feeling ready and rested and at peace, she closed the drawer and went out to embrace her new family, and the life they were giving her.

Akyawentuo

Vemik Given-Man

Humans were… weird.

Okay, no. Not weird. The gods had just given them different strength. Some of them, the stronger ones, could climb trees okay. Not as good as the People, no, but well enough to get by. Jooyun could hunt just as well as any Given-Man, in fact usually he was better. He was almost as strong as Vemik these days!

And they were tough, as Tilly had shown him lots of times over the years. ‘Horse had actually been killed and smashed apart, and now he was happily building himself back up like it had never happened. He wasn’t god-strong anymore, and even though Jooyun was a bunch shorter, he was built a lot like the People and could toss Adam around like a young orangecrest. But that was the thing with humans. Give him some time, and they’d just see what happens…

All you had to do to see real human strength was to take them out of the forest and let them walk the grassy plains. There was a change that washed over them when there were no trees overhead: they stood taller, looked further, strode forever. Especially if they had a stick in one hand.

You had to sky-think pretty hard to see the strength in being small and light. Vemik loved training (with audiobooks!) and so had plenty of time to get used to it. Nonu Broken-Tusk, though…

Vemik hooted as he watched Nonu groan and force himself to keep moving. He was a fit, strong man, but the humans set a pace that was just a little too fast for him to manage comfortably. Vemik could taste his surprise and fatigue on the air. Not enough to beat him, but definitely enough to make him grumble.

“We need to get you in shape! There’s more than one kind of strong.”

“I am! In People-shape!”

“And we can be strong at everything, yes? So why not be?”

Nonu just grunted and knuckled doggedly onwards. He was from Enk Given-Man’s tribe, whose territory bordered the edge of the forest, and who therefore had most contact with Brown Ones. He kept pausing to look up and taste the breeze, even though the human satellites said the nearest one was eleven miles away to the southwest.

And even if one did come, they had bear spray. Vemik wasn’t too sure about that himself, but they had a rifle with them too, so…

Well, hopefully not. Vemik wasn’t too keen on attempting a Brown One with just Nonu by his side. He was pretty and strong. But he was winded already, on not all that hard of a hike.

After all, the surveyors weren’t going that fast. They kept stopping to shove long sticks with stuff at the top in the ground, and peer at things through other things. There was a flock of drones overhead, little black dots against the clear sky. It wouldn’t have surprised Vemik one bit to learn they knew where every last stick and grass-leaf was out here.

He was helping, too! Everyone had a pack on their backs but he could easily carry a lot more than anyone else, being fit enough to keep up on his two legs, so he also had two huge plastic trunks over each shoulder which he was careful not to squeeze too hard.

Human tools could be breakable sometimes.

“What are we looking for now?” he asked Tilly.

“Water.”

Vemik blinked and looked out across the rolling land. He saw lots of different grass-plants, purple ones, green ones, yellow ones, shimmery white-green ones…but water? It looked as dry as jerky out there.

“…We lookin’ in the wrong place?” he suggested.

“Oh no. There’s loads of water out there. The drones can see it just fine. It’s just…all of it’s underground.” Tilly turned her tablet to face him. “See all that blue?”

“Yuh…”

“It’s too deep for tree-roots to reach, but it’s there. Soaked into the rocks and stuff. And that means wells. And wells mean irrigation, and irrigation means farms. Hopefully.”

“Brown One territory out here,” Nonu grumbled. “How you gonna farm when they eat you?”

“Well…they gotta get to us first. We’re not strangers to really big animals.”

“I know, I met elephant in New York!” Vemik hooted. “But elephant won’t eat you!”

“No, but he might try to stomp you if he’s angry. Point is,” Tilly continued, “elephants aren’t stupid and that means they can be persuaded away from us. Same with bears, right?”

“Saw bear, too,” Vemik flicked his tongue at the breeze. He had to admit, the wind on the plains did carry lots of interesting air-tastes. “Fierce and strong, but not as big as a Brown One. Or as mean.”

“I won’t argue,” Tilly replied, with a slight smile. “I helped you hunt that one that went mad, remember? I know Brown Ones. We can handle them.”

Nonu harrumphed quietly.

“And by handle what I really mean is ‘convince them to go away,’” Tilly added. “I won’t pretend we’re gonna, like, stab them to death with spears or whatever.”

“Might shoot them, though,” Nonu replied.

“If it comes to that, yeah. But I doubt it will. Tavon’s been doing some testing and he’s figured out they really hate ultrasonic pulses and the smell of garlic.”

One of the surveyors looked up from his drone control tablet. “Wait. How did he figure out garlic already?”

“Uh…a bunch of smell boxes? Singer helped me put them together.”

“Made hut taste so weird for two hands of days,” Vemik trilled. “Don’t like garlic much either.”

The surveyor chuckled. “Don’t know what you’re missing. Garlic and butter makes life worth living. With a nice steak, and smoked potatoes…” He sighed. “Oh, man. I just realized I’ve probably already eaten my last of those for a long time, huh? Gonna be a luxury going forward…”

“I will agree on butter and steak!” Vemik hooted sympathetically. “But not garlic. And not…why is it called ‘chilly’ when it makes tongue so hot?”

The humans laughed at that, in the friendly way Vemik knew meant he tripped up on a word somehow. Nonu just twitched his tail, not understanding at all.

“Point is…” Tilly reined in her giggles. “Point is…we have ways of keeping the Brown Ones away without shooting them.”

“Good,” Nonu grunted irritably. Vemik frowned at him from behind his sun-goggles, then decided he could remind the smaller man of his manners later.

He’d had to do that a lot, lately. There were some men and women—some Singers too—who were worried about more humans coming here, living here, making their cities and farms here.

Which made sense. Strength was a decepting thing. Here he was, Vemik Given-Man of the Lodge, stronger than almost any human and one of the strongest men among the strongest people. He was so big and muscular, he could crush even a man like Warhorse under his strength now. Most of his people could do the same with most other humans!

Any man of the People against any man of any other sky-tribe was almost certainly better in every way. They knew that, now. Better in their head, better able to see, feel, taste and hear the world. Better muscle, better able to move!

…But the strongest men of all weren’t of the People. Jooyun was determined to keep pace with Vemik and they were very well-matched these days. The very strongest human could tear Yan apart like a sickly neyma, and the living god of the Gao could do almost anything.

Godshit. They couldn’t fly between the stars. His people didn’t have the strength of cities, and cities were the thing that mattered. They weren’t even better at living together! And doing that gave the sky-tribes a different kind of strength the People would probably never have.

And so, here they were. On Akyawentuo. A world the People could never leave on their own. A world imprisoned and protected by a magic bubble in the sky. One only their sky-friends could use. And now, here they were to live with the People on their big, strong world.

They were asking nicely. But Vemik was keenly aware they didn’t need to.

And also keenly aware there was a debt involved too. The People only still lived because the humans had come. Yan had known and believed all along the day would come when that Giving would lead to a Taking to restore the balance, and here it was.

And who was Vemik to tell his people they shouldn’t worry, after he himself had been attacked and nearly killed in the heart of one of their biggest cities? He knew just how crazy, cruel, and violent humans could be. So…there was reason for concern, yes.

But he trusted Tilly. And Professor Daniel, and Jooyun, Shyow and Awisun, and Rock-a-fella (gods Take his soul!), and lots of others.

And right now, they did have an advantage. Two, actually.

“I hope we stay friends,” Vemik noted, thinking carefully. He knew his words would be talked about far away from here. “The Brown Ones…they’re important. And the land. Important to us, and I hope important to you. We can’t be friends, otherwise.”

He hoped they would understand what he’d hidden in those words. He knew Daar would. He needed their warriors too much right now. They all did. The Big Enemy was evil.

And if they had to, the People could stop fighting.

Tilly understood though. She put her hand on Vemik’s arm, nodded, and kept quiet.

They didn’t talk much for the next couple of hours as the survey went on…and on…and on…

It was interesting enough for Vemik, though. He was learning a lot about measuring the land and using tools that could look through soil and stone and deep deep down to know what kind of rock was down there—so many different kinds of rock!—and at one point Tilly demonstrated what she meant about keeping Brown Ones away when one started wandering in their direction.

She sent a drone after it. It hovered over the Brown One’s head, too high up for it to reach, and made a very annoying loud noise which got louder as the Brown One moved toward them, but turned off when it moved away. Through the drone’s camera, Vemik watched the creature growl and snarl at the drone and rear up on its hind legs to try and swipe at it, before eventually it gave up and walked away.

Nonu remembered his manners after seeing that magic at work.

They returned to the forest to camp as the sun went down. Lit a fire, set up some of the tiny, light, easy tents the humans made. Nonu skipped out on that work by going and hunting a neyma, which was…well, he was doing work. He was still Giving. But his attitude annoyed Vemik.

Tilly knew him well, though: she stopped him at the edge of camp just as he was about to head out and give Nonu a reminder.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You gonna fuck him up?”

Vemik paused then sat on his tail “…He’s a man of Urgun’s tribe. Not mine to fuck up. So, just gonna talk. About respect.”

Tilly leaned against a tree opposite Vemik. “We know we’ve got a hill to climb, you know. We’re not gonna hide behind the Lodge, we don’t want to hide behind the Lodge. All the humans who come here, they’re gonna know we have to show our own strength, and show we can be trusted.”

“Not every human can be trusted,” Vemik pointed out, thinking of the men who’d ambushed him in New York.

“Nor can every ten’gewek,” Tilly replied evenly. “All I’m saying is…you sort out the disrespect toward you, and let us sort out the disrespect toward us in our own way, eh?”

Vemik nodded. “Makes sense.”

Tilly smiled, pushed herself away from the tree, and headed back into camp with a wave. “Go get ‘im.”

Turned out, Nonu was a good hunter. Didn’t leave sign, stayed low in the ketta so no bruised branches, hid his air-taste well…so Vemik tracked the neyma instead. Then followed the sound of its death-bleat up ahead.

Easy enough to spot the flash of orange crest among the trees. Easy enough to sneak up on him too. Even men of the people were always surprised at how quiet Given-Men could be.

And Vemik prided himself on being a good Given-Man. So the first Nonu knew about him even being there was when Vemik dropped down from the tree and landed right next to him with a thud. He was halfway scrambled up into a tree before he realized who it was and, just a little, relaxed.

“…Given-Man.”

“Broken-Tusk.”

“Checking on me?”

“Should pin you down and fuck some manners into you,” Vemik bared his fangs. “Think Urgun prob’ly will, when you get back.”

Nonu’s tongue lashed back toward camp, and he climbed back down out of the tree, drawing his knife to dress his kill. Stone, Vemik noticed. Not steel. Nonu just didn’t trust new things. “Why?” he asked.

“Respect. To me, and my friends. You don’t have enough.”

Nonu paused before cutting into the neyma, then sheathed his knife again and sat on his tail. “You think I don’t respect them? Your friends scare me. Humans scare me.”

Vemik blinked. That…wasn’t what he’d thought. He frowned, and waited for Nonu to say more.

“I see their guns, their tools, their drones,” Nonu explained. “I remember the death-birds and death-walkers. I remember hearing, one human in one of their ships killed all the death-walkers. Stray-fing run, yes? That little Tilly of yours, she could kill me dead.”

“…Yes, that’s true. She could kill me too, from far away. Guns are strong sky-magic.”

Nonu sighed heavily. “So why they come to us? They’re strong enough. Don’t need us. We’re weak, I see it clear. But they tell us nice lies and honor Brown Ones and all of it. Makes me…confused.”

“There’s different kinds of strong. You know this. And they matter, otherwise why would a god of the sky-peoples want to be our friends? Have you met Daar Great-Father?”

Nonu shook his head. “Heard stories. He humbled the Lodge, yes?”

“All of us at once and not with any sky magic, either! He is heavier than a Brown One, I watched him slap one and kill it! He’s better than all of us like you can’t even believe.”

Nonu’s tongue lashed again. “Seems smart to me to be afraid of gods.”

“And yet he came here because we can Give a thing only a very few of them can. Does that mean nothing to you?”

“And what do they do when they don’t need what we can Give any longer?”

“With the war in the sky? They die. I know…there is much you haven’t been told. Not because it is secret but because, well, only a few of us have seen. It takes time to tell a big story, yes?

“And after? When it’s won?”

Vemik shrugged. “Maybe they leave. Probably not. The humans are losing their world. Did you know that?”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what scares me. They lose their world, they Take ours. We both know they could. They can Take everything.” Nonu sighed. “…The ones I meet today, they’re nice. Talk about steak and butter, and water under the land, and they make the Brown One go away with loud noise instead of hurting it. But…”

“Then maybe I should tell you the time I killed four of them in a breath, after they tried to blow me up with a grenade, in their own city, when I was Giving them my journals. I still have a scar from it, see?”

Nonu considered the old wound on Vemik’s tail. “Proves what I’m saying, doesn’t it? The ones I met today are nice, but humans aren’t so different from us. They get mean and sneaky too, and they have god-weapons. And I think, they do what any tribe does and look after themselves first.”

He sighed heavily, then looked Vemik in the eye. “…I don’t mean bad manners. I respect you, I like them—” he waved his hand toward the camp. “But always I’m sky-thinking, if humans ever want us dead, we’ll all be dead.”

“Would you kill a friend?” Vemik asked.

“…Only after he tried to kill me first.”

“Me too,” Vemik agreed. “And them too, I believe. We are not many. It’s true. But we are strong, and they, right now, are going to be weak, and vulnerable, in a way they’ve not been for many of their lifetimes. They saved us…now we get to help save them! Put right the balance. Be friends, not just the weak people who owe a lot to the strong people.”

“You really think that…”

Vemik hooted, amused. “Truth? Humans scare me too. Everything you just said is right…but we scare them too, otherwise, why some of them attack me?”

Nonu had no answer to that.

“You’re right about being afraid of gods too, but we listen to gods too, yes?” Vemik continued. “If they weren’t scary, there’d be nothing to learn from them. But…they’re people, too. And our strength does scare them! I hear and read. We’re bigger, stronger, faster, tougher. Better eyes, better ears. Pretty sure we have better everything.”

“But not cities.”

“No, and maybe being so strong we never grew into them! The gods play strange games, yes? And now they brought us together. This is good, I think. We learn from each other. We each have a thing the other does not. They value our strength. Why you think they give us vaccines and medicine?” Vemik trilled, “Or why we fuck so good when we visit Folctha!!”

Nonu trilled, and considered his neyma. “Godshit. Strong enough to kill us all, too weak to hunt a neyma.”

“No, not practiced. But yes. They need to learn from us. Even this.”

Nonu nodded. “…Thanks for talking, and not fucking manners into me,” he joked.

“Oh, I can still do that if you want…”

Nonu hooted and shook his head. “Would be big hurt, I think. No thanks!”

“Your loss!” Vemik trilled, and slapped him on the shoulder. “Oh well. Maybe Tilly will be interested tonight…probably not, but I can hope!”

Nonu hooted again, then drew his knife and butchered his catch. “Maybe one day I try a human too. Maybe not. But, I’ll trying being nicer. See what I can learn.”

Vemik nodded happily, and stood up. “See you back at camp. Think I’ll hunt something too.”

“See you there,” Nonu agreed, and they parted ways as friends.

Vemik couldn’t have asked for better, really. He’d been worried about what Nonu’s thoughts and actions toward the humans meant for the future, but now…well, he knew it could be talked through. Knew they could figure things out. Wouldn’t always be so easy, probably, but still. There was room on Akyawentuo for both peoples. He knew that for certain now.

Now. time to go get some real prey for the camp. He tasted the air, searching for the scent of werne. Found it, headed in that direction…

And hunted well.

New Dodge, Franklin territory, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Austin Beaufort

The early big work had been done, but lots and lots of little shit had piled up on their list, and it was all Austin and family could do to keep it from growing. Just pick away at this, start work on that, switch to another task when the contractors were ready…

And so on. His boys were only five but they’d understood the importance of it all, so they were helping Lauren with all sorts of random chores: pick rocks, help with the veg garden, unpacking and stocking their pantry…

It was so much to do. The rough carpenters were here today to get their home framed in; turns out they not only could have a better than pre-fab home, it was more or less mandatory that they do for a lot of reasons having to do with, well…being the first here.

They had to set an example, so it was going to be a handsome house indeed. Three days he’d spent working to wrestle the architect’s vision of a modern fucking country manor down to, well…an appropriately modest and functional American farmhouse. Because yeah, it had to be big because yeah, it needed to house a big family and their office and a big damn kitchen and all that…but damnit, they didn’t need footmen or whatever the fuck!

Exhausting. He couldn’t blame the architects for wanting to prove they were useful but, fuck! there had to be better uses of their time.

He had to allow they’d done a good job of coming up with a design that the contractors could put together quickly, though. He left it in the morning as basically a pile of timber and tools, and came back after a day of field preparation and a supply run down into Franklin City, to find the frame was already up.

The next day he was up at the dairy operation, pouring the dry barn’s foundation while the corporate guys installed the milking parlor over in the main barn and the well diggers sunk a new shaft down into the aquifer far below. The sooner they got the herd in, the sooner they had a source of all-natural, organic fertilizer.

When he got back from that in mid-afternoon, the external walls and roof shingles were done, and he could see the electricians and plumbers doing their thing.

Jeez, shit got done fast when you threw enough guys at it.

By the time Julian returned, the house was roughly finished. Apparently it was one of his first days “off” in months—not that he was taking a break from work, but at least he was doing something he enjoyed—and he brought the family out with him to help.

They were a different kind of celebrity to what Austin was used to seeing on TV, on the Internet, in films. Lauren was fond of celebrity gossip, especially the really bitchy cat-fight stuff. Austin had no idea if all the feuding and name-calling and drama she watched was real or a kind of kayfabe, but he’d always known they did it to stay relevant and known.

Being the first people to land on Mars had a different kind of celebrity. Making first contact with not one but two alien races, and being honored by both? That was a prestige that didn’t need maintaining.

And it certainly didn’t need designer clothes and sponsorships. Plaid and jeans and pitching in did more work than any amount of Gucci, in large part because Austin could tell they genuinely enjoyed it. Allison had a head for electrical and a billion other practical skills, Xiù had people to cater for and entertain, and Julian a chance to work hard and playfully show off. His family were workers, too. Xiù tied up her hair, Allison put a bandana over hers, he and his boys—both big and powerfully athletic young men—pulled off their shirts, added work gloves and safety glasses. And then…shit got done. They seemed truly happy to help. Good people, all of them.

They had good grace and senses of humor too. Everyone took selfies and Julian was the star, because what was funnier than a pudgy-tough day laborer or a lanky raccoon-man growling fiercely next to the best?

He could take a joke, too. Austin’s cousin Matt, a burly and particularly hairy little shortstack, was a man who suffered no sense of starstruck whatsoever. “And here I thought you were just for show! Never seen a man carry twelve sacks of concrete over his shoulders like that…”

No shit. Austin could maybe manage two sacks at a time if he was showing off or desperate. Julian threw six over each shoulder like it wasn’t any effort at all. And sure enough…

“Yeah! Coulda done more too but I couldn’t get my arms over the top. Why?” Julian grinned wickedly, “Jealous?”

Matt stated the obvious. “Fuck yeah I’m jealous!” Gruff guffaws and chitters all around. “A truckload of concrete all at once? Shit, man! Eat ‘yer fuckin’ Wheaties I bet!”

Julian chuckled and scratched at the back of his neck, almost bashfully. “Yeah, something like that.” He grinned sheepishly and quickly lowered his arm when he realized people were staring. “Anyway. Gotta be a little bit crazy to do all this too, not gonna lie.”

“I heard you’re friends with those HEAT brothers,” a gaoian in heavily-accented english (who Austin didn’t know very well) blurted out. “That true?”

“Yeah. They’re pretty neat fellas. Mostly they’re big puppies, believe it or not! It’s just, they’re the only ones who can really growl at some threats, yijao? In real life they’re pretty nerdy.”

“Sure don’t look like it…” someone else grumbled.

“Sure, I get it. But heck, I’m pretty much the biggest meathead there is and, uh, I don’t think I’m too terrible to be around. At least, I hope not! For most of us it’s like, this really intense hobby, right? Just happens to be both something we enjoy and something we gotta do for our jobs. And, uh, yeah. To varying degrees we were almost literally made for it, so…”

He shrugged those juggernaut shoulders of his. Just to drive the point home, it caused his football-sized traps to push his ears sideways, the massive motherfucker was so big.

“Well shit, it’s clearly workin’ for you.” One of the younger men noted appreciatively. “I should probably get into it, huh?”

“Eh. Maybe. Fitness is a top priority if you’re gonna live off-Earth, and well…” He left the rest unsaid. “But you don’t need to go as far as me! Everyone wants to look like a bodybuilder ‘till it’s time to do bodybuilder shit, and it’s ten times worse if you wanna actually do something with it all. You gotta enjoy bein’ on a first-name basis with pain to look and function like me.”

Nods all around. Everyone knew Julian from the original Laid Bare, and he’d recently featured in a side-by-side with the HEAT, Singularity, Gao’s and Akyawentuo’s finest, and other operators of note. “Professional Heroes, Hidden and Seen” was the subtitle for this full-magazine special feature, which covered the daily lives among the Deathworld’s protecting elite.

It was…clearly propaganda. One that didn’t pull any self-critical punches, to be fair—it had a lot of unflattering truth to say about Singularity, for example—but in the end it was generally a positive exposition on the men and women protecting everyone’s lives against literal space monsters and the mind-demons that created them.

In that now-infamous centerfold and its accompanying sixteen pages worth of shoot, Julian stood in the middle, fully lit and visible, while most everyone else was cast in stark shadow, which really showed them off while almost perfectly obscuring their faces. In that crowd of extreme operators, kings and princes, literal alien supergorillas and the biggest, meanest hard-asses from Gao and Cimbrean, and even without their advantage of dramatic lighting…Julian stood out. He was that good.

“Still.” Grumpy wasn’t going to give up. “I’m sure they’re all nice and all, but it’s pretty obvious why they keep dragging you and the rest of them in front of the camera.”

To Julian’s credit he didn’t hide from the accusation. “Yup, you aren’t wrong. We’re big and scary-looking men, all of us, and communicating that was more or less the point. We were hoping to show the world that we’ve got some serious fellas on our team and they’re ready to go at any time. Don’t forget, we’re actually a tiny power on the galactic stage. We have to make up for that with ability, and we need to keep reminding the idiots out there what we can do.”

“And you do that with photoshoots.”

“Yes, and demonstrations, and symposia, and the attaché program, and fleet weeks, and silent drill, and large-scale exercises, and a billion other things militaries and governments do to communicate themselves. For my part? I’m big like this firstly because, like I said, it’s the reason I can even do my job. Lots of people are smarter than me, but not many can be me. Wouldn’t have survived Nightmare if I weren’t tough as heck, or made friends with our ten’gewek allies if I weren’t big enough to break floors underfoot.”

Aaron Olsen grumbled under his breath, “Pretty confident in yourself too, by the sound of it.”

“Balls!” One of the other gaoians chittered loudly. “Wouldn’t you be?”

Aaron startled, then replied indignantly. “Well, yeah! But, I mean…”

“Not very Minnesota of me, huh?” Julian grinned, making eye contact directly with the little guy. “Where are you from, I’m guessing…Mankato? Thereabouts?”

“Uh…actually closer to Winona.”

“Right. So yeah, I get it, I probably come off as arrogant now, sometimes. But that’s the thing. You have to be confident and forward in this game. False modesty is just another kind of lie, and lies don’t work in this alliance of ours. Gaoians can smell ‘em, ten’gewek can ‘taste’ them. Heck, humans can too, sorta! Also? Between alien cultures, the only languages that really work are love and strength, and of the two…love differs. Strength’s more translatable. All kinds of strength of course, economic and political and military and all that…but for us deathworlders?”

He grinned at his sons, who smirked back. The three of them stood together and…demonstrated what being a deathworlder could mean. Good fuckin’ God.

“…I think we get the picture,” Austin said, feigning cool.

“Heh! Yup. Exactly. This right here is a form of communication everyone understands.” Julian grinned, showed off some arms and his massive fuckin’ legs to some gawping exclamations…then the rest of him when the men goaded him on. Christ, nothing on this guy was less than perfect! But the show didn’t last for too long; he’d well and fuckin’ truly made his point. “So, if being naked and pretty in front of a camera stops some idiot minor power from starting shit, then I’m totally okay hanging myself out there for it. So were the rest, and yeah, we’re a pretty self-confident bunch. So why not? It was fun, and besides: just ‘cuz they can fight at a level higher than anyone, don’t mean any of them want to.”

“So you lined up all the meatheads,” Austin added.

“All the ones involved in the galactic power game, yeah. It sends a message when you’ve got literal Gilgamesh standing next to his hoss of a son, Prince Alex, standing next to the Champion of Stoneback, standing next to the leader of the ten’gewek, and so on. Hard to be more allied then when they’re all there at once for something like a Laid Bare shoot, yijao? And it helps to show there are a few fellas out there that make even me look like a little bitch next to them. One of whom is human, by the way. All this matters ‘cuz primal signals are very useful. Nobody really gets over them. Also, all the ambassadors and whoever know me personally. So I’m not just there to be big and scary. I’m also there for scale.”

Olsen nodded seriously. “Against the real monsters.”

“Yup. Daar may be the size of a snarling dinosaur, but monster number two is a human. He could absolutely go hard like a force of nature and toss your cars, smash your house…but he’s also able to walk right through your front door and end your days silently. Number three leads an entire species of supermonkeys, any of whom could fall on you from anywhere and you’d never know it was coming. And that’s the thing: I can do those things too, and so can everyone else in that shoot. And so can many, many more trained and ready men who were lucky enough to evade the camera that day. And I’m not just talking freaks like me, either. You’d be amazed what a five-man team of perfectly regular but determined human beings can do.”

“And that’s why they got the other half of the magazine.”

Julian nodded seriously. “Yup. Frankly I’d be more afraid of them, if you were a bad fella. Ain’t no way you can miss a guy like me coming up the street, yeah? I shake the ground. But some nameless operator, who looks normal as fuck under regular street clothes?”

“Except he ain’t.”

“No, that’s my point. He is. Only real difference between him and you? Frankly, it’s willpower.”

Lots of nodding on that point.

“So…” Matt concluded. “Don’t fuck with the deathworlders.”

“Exactly.”

Julian grabbed a load of rebar off the truck and slung it up on his shoulder with a grunt, then sighed as he carried it toward the foundation pit they’d dug. His boys followed suit with comparatively more modest loads—still much more than Austin could manage.

“But screw all that,” Julian said with a sideways grin. “I honestly just wanna get my hands dirty with a friend, even if it’s only for a day, and yes, even if the pics Mark over there is taking are gonna get used to send a message. I can’t help that bit, but I can avoid resenting it. So…here I am. Literal tons of fun to get shit done. What’chu need?”

Well, they needed concrete work done, so…that’s what they did. He and his boys weren’t skilled labor but they were certainly big, so they all ended up shuttling shit around to whomever needed it, all without complaint. It made work go a lot faster when a dude could just pick whatever up instead of using backhoe or skidsteers to wrestle it around.

They stopped for a drink break once the concrete was done and ready to be left alone, and the conversation started back up as if it had never stopped.

“Yeah, I know ‘em. Good friends with everyone in that shoot. Especially the HEAT Lads.”

A skeptical voice again called out. “You still say they’re all big kids underneath it?”

“No, I said they’re puppies. And puppies don’t always play so nice. Especially not the Big Three. But they’re good people too. Y’all will probably be meeting some of them too I bet…”

Julian didn’t elaborate on that, but the group wanted to hear about them anyway. Daar, Yan the big alien gorilla-man, and the nameless colossus who basically upstaged everyone.

“Yeah, we don’t talk about him. He likes his privacy but, being honest, he’s impossible to miss around Folctha, so…” A grin, then. One at once friendly and smug. “And I’m extra not gonna talk him up, because he’s the one human being who shows me up at basically everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yeah!” He said with a laugh. “He’s pretty damn special. I think the only one who might ever give him any competition might be Alex! I think we’re pretty equally stupid though, so there’s that.”

There were laughs.

“Sure, we’re all fuckin’ stupid, aren’t we? Only one with any brains around here is this madman,” Matt nudged Austin in the ribs. “Went and bought a plot of land the size of fuckin’ Disney World on a gut reaction, thank fuck.”

“I still can’t wrap my head around that,” Julian noted, shaking his shaggy locks as he spoke. “But if there was ever an inspired moment of madness, well there you go. We all take our own crazy risks, I guess.”

Austin felt the need to downplay it. “It woulda been a good investment anyway…”

“Sure. Now, anything else you want me to do? Move stuff, punch trees, set up your gym? You’re the last excuse I’ll have to grunt it out for at least another month!”

“Sounds like you’re begging! But…well, you can help in the garage-slash-gym I guess. Not much left to do, but I’ll take it. Also…is it true you’re going to Nightmare?”

“Yeah. That’s where I’ll be, helpin’ the first crew get settled and not killed. They’ll have modern kit with them though so it shouldn’t take too long to get them going. After that…we’ll see.”

“Wherever you’re needed, right?”

Julian nodded. “That’s what we’re all doing, I guess…what’s that?” He raised his head and looked back toward the farmhouse at the clanging sound of metal on metal.

“Dinner bell!” Austin grinned.

“Oh, that’s cheesy as heck. I love it!”

“It’s got more charm to it than a phone call, right?” Austin chuckled as the men around them squared away their tools and hopped up on the flatbed for the ride back. Julian ran back alongside instead.

They ate. A good, hearty meal for hard-working folks. Lots of dinner-time banter, bad jokes, some bragging around the table, that sort of thing. Allison had got much of the guts of their automation and gravity systems ready to go. Shit, she could weld a nicer bead than Austin and he’d gone to school for that! Xiù had helped with a billion other things. The boys ate well that night, and even managed to get Julian to show off again too, not that he needed much persuasion. Hilarious and humbling for everyone there. Hell, superhumanly humbling with that insane rebar trick! But whistles and chittering disbelief from the crew aside, it was all meant in fun. A good way to end the day.

They couldn’t stay the night, of course. They said their goodbyes, Julian found his long-abandoned shirt (and Austin suspected he was in the habit of frequently “losing” it, too), they bundled up all their stuff, piled into that absolutely bitchin’ pickup—Allison’s, it turned out. Full-size, crew cab, wicked lift kit. Super beefy suspension. She had the kind of taste Austin could approve of.

But really it was Julian’s truck, because it was the only kind of vehicle that would work for him. It didn’t budge when they loaded up the cargo bed, didn’t complain a bit when the girls or Julian’s two huge and grown-up boys climbed in, nor when the security team piled in with all their stuff, dudes sitting in the bed with all the rest of it…

But it did groan and sink down considerably when he stepped into the driver’s seat. So: the dude could literally smash cars under his weight. Even as big as he was, he didn’t look anywhere near heavy enough to do something that fuckin’ crazy! Fucker apparently hadn’t been exaggerating when he said he could break floors and sidewalks. Good to know, fuck.

“Right. Well, buddy? I wish you all the best. Be a bit before I can visit again, but you know my number and you know how to get a hold of my staff.” He proffered a mitt. “Kick ass, you hear?”

Austin’s big mitt was swallowed up completely in Julian’s rough fuckin’ paw of a meat-hook. He suffered through the ensuing bone-creaking handshake, gave it his best to give a decent showing. “I’m country. We’ll manage.”

“Good.” Julian released Austin’s compacted hand, looked back and nodded at his caveboys. “You two might think about hiring on to his crew. He could use a couple goons like you.”

They both grinned.

And with that…the legend of an ambassador and his equally epic family was gone.

Matt let out a long breath as they watched the truck bounce and rumble down the dirt track and out onto the road. “Fuck me, man. Are they real?”

“Hard to believe.”

“Well…shit, cuz. You made some damn good friends in this deal. Hell, even his boys show you up! Uh, no offense…”

“None taken.” It was true. Today had been pretty humbling.

“But that’s not something I’m used to thinkin’. You were always the stud of the family. So…is that how fuckin’ everyone is around here?”

Austin sighed. “No, But we’d better reset our expectations for what’s good and normal, I reckon. They’re not gonna evacuate just anyone.”

Matt wasn’t the quickest. “The hell that have to do with…oh.” He wasn’t stupid, either. “Well…that fuckin’ blows.”

“Yeah. So honestly? We’d better all step up to this. I won us a chance by luck and ballsy stupidity, and I somehow made friends with that family in the process. To say we’re pretty precarious out here is…yeah.”

“So, don’t embarrass you,” Matt concluded.

“Probably lose the gut and the dip habit, too.”

“Shit that last bit may be askin’ a lot, cuz…”

“Well, you only have four years. Do you honestly think tobacco is going to be an affordable priority? When our leaders are all gonna be gigachad freaks like that?”

Matt went quiet, frowning to himself.

Yeah. It was a wake-up call. A wake-up call where even perfectly normal people like Tristan and Ramsey were world-class multi-sport elites back on Earth, where accomplished explorers and world celebrities were just…the local bigs. Nothing too weird. People even said hi on the streets!

Shit was changing. Changing fast. Sometimes, Austin wondered if maybe leaving Earth wasn’t going to bring it out even quicker and harder, like maybe in a generation or two the human race wouldn’t even be quite the same any longer. So much had happened since first contact, it was like humanity had always been bursting at the seams, waiting to explode out of Earth’s embrace and transform.

And he couldn’t shake the feeling like, somehow, somewhere…That had been the plan all along. Hell. Hadn’t they as much as said so, publically?

Whatever. He had three things to do right now.

First, family time. His kids needed some love. Second, his wife needed some love. Third, they all needed sleep. They needed every advantage they could get.

The world of Heroes was upon them.

Lakebeds National Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel (“Chimp”) Hoeff

A foot pressed down on his back, and Hoeff willed himself to be a rock. Think geological thoughts. Embody the very essence of stony stillness.

Tests of infiltration skill and hardware didn’t get any more immediate than being stepped on. If they looked down, if they understood what they were looking at, then this exercise was a bust, and they were gonna have to look hard at what had gone wrong. But, shit, bad luck was a fuckin’ thing and the only thing he could do now was hold his breath and will himself to not move…

The pressure on his back doubled, shifted, released entirely as the patrol moved on. Hoeff lay still regardless, counting in his mind, one-mississippi, two-mississippi, three—

Slowly, so as to not even cause a rustle of long grass, he pushed himself up, turned and peered through the swaying grass stalks.

The patrol were smart, competent guys, veterans from operations in the Persian Gulf. SOR had called in the very best they could find for this exercise. Even now they were past, there was no room for the Wrecking Crew to make a mistake. Even as Hoeff watched, as the guy watching behind them turned to look where he was going, his buddy turned around to watch the patrol’s rear. A pair of eyes in every direction at all times, and those eyes were augmented by the finest helmet-mounted sensors known to any AEC military. Ultrasound, thermal, AI-assisted image recognition and statistical anomaly modeling…everything a Hierarchy drone was believed to have and then some.

And the infiltration suit had managed to fool it all. The patrol moved on down the hill and out of sight behind a copse of trees: Hoeff clicked a silent all-clear on this radio, and around him a series of other terrain features started moving. Even he wouldn’t have guessed they were his buddies until they unfolded and stood up.

Hand signals, and they fell back into their marching order and moved on.

This was all a stress-test, of men, materials and equipment. The first of several, in fact, and Hoeff knew damn well the intent was for them to fail at some point. He suspected he knew what the failure point was, too.

They had a hundred and fifty kilometers to go to their designated target. By itself, not necessarily a problem, except they had to fuel every step of the way from some kind of source. The ten’gewek traveled similar distances pretty regularly just by knowing the land and the critters that lived there. But killing and butchering their own food was the perfect way to leave undeniable sign of their presence: not an option. The mission they were preparing for could only succeed if the enemy never knew they were there.

Which meant carrying all their nutrition. And meal packs weren’t gonna cut it. Stopping in the field to warm shit up, eat it out the bag, maybe leave residue and packaging and sign? Not an option. So nutrition throughout the long walk was high density nutrient powder slurry, delivered through a thick straw inside the helmet.

It tasted relentlessly of chemical vanilla. It left a greasy feel in the mouth. It hit the stomach like swallowing a fucking bowling ball. It was so scientifically designed to be completely digested that what little reached the other end just felt wrong. And sure, it had everything the body needed, all the calories and vitamins and protein and carbs and whatever-the-fuck else…

But holy fuck. You couldn’t feed it to a prisoner without falling foul of the whole ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ thing. It was so grindingly bland that Hoeff was pretty sure the daydreams of steak, soda and Claire’s signature pumpkin soup were making him sloppy. He would have fucking murdered for a coffee…

Fuck yeah. Strong as a Given-Man, black as the inside of a bear, with a shot of syrup, served alongside a bacon sandwich…

Focus, goddammit.

Not being able to talk to his buddies was wearing on him, too. Sound and radio discipline, because even LOSIR wasn’t as secure as perfect silence…

Yeah. Hoeff could see one of the guys cracking under these conditions. He sure as shit wasn’t gonna let himself, but the problem he was facing now was how to be sure they were all coping, and how to help them.

He noticed Nomuk’s step falter a little. Gave the big guy a pat on the shoulder when he could. Got a nod in reply.

So it went, for mile on fuckin’ mile. It rained, it was dry, it rained again. They slept under cover, hidden among roots and stones and undergrowth, on whichever patch of bare ground was least uncomfortable. They had to go to ground and make like fuckin’ rocks twice more as they encountered more foot patrols, and a third time when their suits got antsy about a possible high-altitude surveillance drone.

Nobody broke. Shit, they’d all toughed out way fuckin’ worse. But at the same time, none of them knew exactly where they’d gone wrong or what they’d done to draw attention when a trio of Weavers slammed down on them out of nowhere and they were suddenly surrounded and captured, with sixty klicks still to go.

Fuck.

Major Campbell hopped down out of the third Weaver and strode through the grass with a wry look on his face. “Gotcha.”

“Guess you did,” Hoeff acknowledged, wearily. Part of him was relieved. At least he’d get to fuckin’ eat something tonight. “What gave us away?”

“Fuck if I know. Intel has their black magic ways, yijao? It’ll all come out in debrief. I know you slipped the net like four times…”

“Shit yeah. One of the guys stepped on me.”

There were chuckles, and they bundled back into the Weaver and took off. Hoeff took his helmet off, only to find Campbell handing out a foil-wrapped…Oh, fuck. Burritos. Hoeff felt no shame at all in grabbing it, tearing the foil off, and mumbling a grateful noise around a mouthful of tortilla, rice and beans.

The accompanying can of coke was fuckin’ ambrosia, too.

Back in Folctha, debrief went mostly well. Turned out one of the imagery fellas noticed the grass was laying down the wrong way when he applied a polarization filter to the overhead. Not by thermals, not by hyper-spectral…by the grass swaying the wrong way.

Well, shit. They all had to really up their game.

After that, though, it wasn’t so bad. Back to a routine. Another two month sprint on heavy physical training, which would happen part here, part on Akyawentuo. The gorillabros would go be gorillas with their people, Hoeff could be a human. Training took time.

Then it’d be a week or two off, a couple weeks back, and then a month in the field.

And back to physical training. Rinse and repeat. For years. Hoeff had no idea what kind of superkillers they’d be, coming out the other end of all that…

But that was what they needed to be. He didn’t believe in god, but thinking on that really made him want to say a prayer for them all. Maybe he would. Meditate on it, anyway.

Especially for ‘Horse. Whatever he was prepping for…

Lot of prayers to be said, really. And a lot of work to do that wasn’t prep for this whole thing, too. Being a dad. Fuck only knew how a guy like him was supposed to go about that. There was no such thing as spare time, any longer. When he wasn’t Dadding, he was helping the Lads get their apartment buildings done up so they could move in more kids from Earth and how in the fuck did Firth have time for so many of ‘em?

Honestly, Firth going so squishy for a couple of kids so suddenly was…was there a story there? What exactly was going on in the big guy’s head? Hoeff didn’t know, wasn’t qualified to know, and wouldn’t have the first idea what to say or do if he knew anyway. All he could do was show up and help Murray get the place painted and stuff.

They were sweet girls, though. In a damaged way.

Hoeff finally got a chance to relax, sort of, when one of his Old Friends invited him to dinner. The usual kinda fancy one, with the multiple small artwork courses. He had one of the sophisticated privacy fields, too: the ones that didn’t do anything so rude and unsightly as completely block them from view behind a gray wall, but instead kinda…fuzzed and blurred things. Just enough to prevent lip reading and whatever.

“This must be gettin’ more expensive…” Hoeff noted, as the first appetizer arrived.

“It won’t be long now before restaurants like this go out of business,” his old friend agreed. “The transition to a survival economy is going to make indulgence like this…impossible, really.”

“Adapt and overcome, I always say. You can make practically anything gourmet if you’re willing to experiment.”

“I’m sure the local produce will eventually provide.” His friend loaded a delicate forkful. “But we’re not just paying for gourmet. We’re paying for origin, authenticity, pedigree…ties that will all break, very soon. No more authentic Japanese Wagyu. No more pig-found wild Italian truffles. No more champagne.”

“Eh. You know me,” Hoeff wasn’t so delicate in loading his own fork. “I’m not so interested in the label as I am in the art. Way too many people get wrapped up in credentials.”

“The wiser policy, in the end…”

“And credentials by and large ain’t gonna save a lot of ‘em.”

“You have some pretty impressive credentials yourself, as I recall.”

“My credentials are my body and my track record. How I got there is less relevant.”

His old friend nodded in gentle agreement, and the appetizer was swept away and replaced just as soon as it was finished. He picked up the conversation as smoothly as if it had never halted, the moment they were alone again.

“This plan of Singularity’s…”

“You never stop surprising me with what you know.”

“Oh, we’ve been aware of them a long time. In an…incomplete way. We certainly didn’t guess who their king was!” a light chuckle and a small shake of the head, before seriousness returned. “As with everything in recent years, we have little choice but to follow Daar’s lead, and he’s committed to this scheme. But he’s going with it as-is, and our concern is that it may not be aggressive enough.”

“If it works, we win,” Hoeff pointed out.

“If is not a word our circle of friends enjoys when it comes to matters this grave. We’re more in favor of certainty. And the plan as it is…well, the Entity is on board.”

Hoeff sipped some champagne. “Yes, it is…?”

“Our feeling on the matter is that a more favorable approach would not be so palatable to it.”

“It is at this point I should remind you how very little presence our little circle has in this situation. We’re working off second-hand contacts and agents.”

“Our little circle is not likely to survive the destruction of Earth, Daniel. All that matters, therefore, is legacy. We may have very little presence, but we also have no need to cautiously conserve our presence any longer. What matters, now, is the certainty of a future for our species. And this…gentle solution invented by Singularity…”

He left the thought unfinished as the empty plates were, again, deftly removed and replaced.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin making it less gentle,” Hoeff pointed out.

“Fortunately, we have managed to conserve an asset who would. The instance of Six residing in the body of Doctor Flowers has been transferred to Erebor.”

“I’m amazed you still think he’s useful.” Hoeff sampled his genuinely incredible beef course, then washed his palate clean with an equally excellent wine. “But why mention all this to me?”

“You’re in a position to make a choice, we think. Or, you will be. On the one hand, Singularity’s comparatively gentle solution to the Big Hotel problem—too gentle, many of us feel, in light of what they have done—on the other hand…whatever more certain and proportionate adjustment we can make.”

Hoeff sat back and stared at him. No words, just the stare.

“…The idea doesn’t sit well with you,” his friend noted, after meeting his stare for several seconds.

“Now of all the times isn’t the moment for this. If this thing is gonna succeed at all, everybody needs to be pulling in one direction. What you’re being so delicate about might just be the little chip in our armor that makes everything fall apart. Further,” he added, building up a head of steam, “what concrete intel are we working off? We’re not. We are no longer in the inner circle of the decision-making process. I think that’s spooked leadership and this, right here, stinks to high heaven of Stupid.”

His friend paused, then set his fork down and dabbed at his mouth. “What would sit well with you?” he asked.

“Well, gee? I got this friend, right? Big fuck-off huge truck-crushing bulletproof bastard? Strong enough to kill-slap a Brown One and leap tall buildings in a single bound? Heard of him?”

“Sarcasm does not become you.”

“Sarcasm is the only thing to do! So, why don’t you buy the murderbear a nice dinner an’ introduce yourself? Hell, while he’s still sorta compact enough to fit through the front doors! He already knows we exist. Why do you think he hired me? Dude’s been waiting patiently.”

“And then he gets his way,” Hoeff’s friend replied. “He always does. What’s to become of us, then? Earth’s most quietly powerful people, just another gem on his crown? Do you know he’s talking about a constitution among his cabinet? Federating the deathworlders into a ‘United Peoples…’ Under his supreme and legally unquestionable authority, I might add. A manageable proposition in anybody else…problematic when the supreme god-emperor is in fact functionally immortal.”

Goddamnit. Hoeff sighed.

“Okay. I’m gonna say it, ‘cuz at this point I don’t think we’re gonna be Friends much longer if I don’t.” Hoeff put down his fork. “That giant fuzzy monster has the most intense fuckin’ love affair ever with our people, and our circle’s failure to properly nurture that relationship is an appallingly artless squandering of opportunity. Lucky for us all, he believes with all his heart that humankind is the reason he and his entire species are alive and even thriving today, challenges notwithstanding. That is an infinite debt he can never pay back and he damn well knows it.

“Worse,” Hoeff continued, “he feels personally and particularly indebted to a small team of human operators, and somehow, somewhere, one of those operators happens to be me. I have been with him since the time he was just a wee little kodiak bear of a burgeoning leader. I can tell you right now that our civilization would be fucking doomed if he weren’t here to offer us escape and sanctuary on his home planet, which at this point is essentially his very own personal property. He is the Gao. So, then, in the face of this set of facts…our exalted leadership’s first and overriding priority is…what? Preserving their influence at the expense of his generosity? Worrying about how the fucking power games will go on before worrying about our very survival?”

“Our survival, thanks to him, is not in doubt. And we are grateful. But you really ought to know better than to dismiss what we do as power games, Daniel. We’re discussing the very continued agency of our people to chart our own course. How can we be true partners if we lack that?”

“Adapt and overcome,” Hoeff said simply. “Worry about that shit once we’re on the other side of this. Because he ain’t a slaver. That goes against the very fucking core of his being. You cannot even begin to fathom how lucky we are that the most powerful being in the goddamn galaxy is a jovial meathead who likes dirty jokes and values people for who they are.”

“He can afford to be.”

“Yes, he can. Now how do you think he earned that power budget, huh?”

Fuckin’ sad. Hoeff didn’t feel hungry anymore.

His friend toyed with his food a little. Apparently his appetite was spoiled, too. “These are unprecedented times,” he said at last. “A lot of…fear.”

“Lotta leadership losing their kingdoms. Don’t lie, that’s what’s really driving this conversation.”

“You yourself have been content to never have one. Those of us who do…yes. We fear losing them. Not only for ourselves, though. These are the foundations of the world we’re talking about, Daniel. Who would want the foundations to crumble?”

“Nobody. But crumbling they are. So grieve, and get over it. I for one am not going to endanger this mission. Nor, by the way, threaten a sapient Von Neumann swarm! Jesus fuck let’s have some perspective on this, huh?”

There was a long silence. Finally, his friend sighed. “It is…nice to see you speak with such conviction. You’ve generally been content to go with the consensus.”

“Yeah, I’ve happily been your weapon this whole time. But the consensus in this case is being very stupid, and if y’all insist on continuing with it, you can count me out.”

“What I’m saying, Daniel, is that your voice is amplified by your usual silence. If you of all people are so vehemently against this plan, then it will be reconsidered.”

Well. Okay.

“I hope so. Excellent meal, as always.” They hadn’t actually finished but, really, there was a time for everything, and everything in its time. Right now was the time to send a message.

His friend understood. They parted with a simple nod.

Hoeff’s mind was racing as he strode away, not even bothering to catfoot it on the way out. He studiously resisted the urge to watch his back, scan the shadows and generally protect himself. He even took a johnny cab, rather than walk.

He got home early. Claire was curled up on the couch playing her cute farming, village, cozy collect-stuff game, which she paused after glancing up at him. “…you okay?”

“Eh. Been worse….is that dude a robot octopus?”

Claire duly sensed he wanted to talk about anything else and, well, he actually kinda liked how she nerded out over her game. “Isn’t he cute?”

“Heh. Yeah, guess he is…”

He squeezed her hand. Playing in the back of his mind was the knowledge of what usually happened to people who pissed off the Circle of Friends. But…that’d be really, really fuckin’ dumb of ‘em. Too dumb.

Easy enough to do, though. He was sitting in a well lit apartment with his back to the window. Plenty of good vantages opposite. Honestly, he was makin’ it easy for them.

Hell of a fuckin’ way to test whether they still had their heads on straight, even now…

Claire frowned at him. “…Dan…you’re really tense. You sure you’re okay?”

A mental countdown in Hoeff’s head reached zero. He exhaled. Willed himself to relax. There were limits to the Stupid, today. Thank the fucking maker.

“Yeah,” he said, then repeated it and felt the tension flood out of him. The world had wobbled, but steadied again. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

He put an arm around Claire, snuggled up, and relaxed for the first time in weeks.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Leela, a little bored for a change

The taco business was weirdly in decline. Partly it was the expense; most of her ingredients were irreplaceably Earthling and, well. Cumin in particular was getting hard to come by. It was almost ten times more expensive now!

There was already work to try and cultivate some of that in the hotter regions. Word had it that Lucent was almost ready to begin exporting a variety of Earthling spices, but they weren’t there yet and in any case, the problem wasn’t abundance so much as hoarding and logistics. Same problems still applied from Lucent, too; their arrays were firing nonstop preparing for the evacuation, same as here on Cimbrean.

Actual shipping was a thing again. It had to be. And, so, prices went up…

And that meant her enthusiastic human crowd had dwindled a bit, because firstly, they all had better things to spend their moneys on right now, and secondly…she only had so much of their favorites to go around. Rationing was going to start, soon. And gaoian traffic just wasn’t enough to make up the loss in revenue.

She might miss a mortgage payment. She had savings of course, but…

Probably going to be a long-term concern, actually. She might need an exit plan.

Well, she couldn’t really afford to worry on that for too long. So, she busied herself. Everything was cleaned and scrubbed to within an inch of its life. All her stocks were ready and in stasis. She could serve up whatever she might need at a moment’s notice.

So she stayed open later to hopefully catch the late-night crowd—not that the rain would encourage that much. Were her tarps good enough?

She peered out. Yeah. Okay. Everything properly entarpenated.

Bored.

Watched a little news. Depressing.

Switched over to YouTube for some human entertainment. Odd how their sense of humor was like eighty percent the same as any gaoian’s, but that last twenty percent was so weird…

Switched over to the gaoian version, which was celebrating its hundredth anniversary. It was also, weirdly, named YourTube. Just in gaori.

Male humor was getting more optimistic lately. And there were more female videos too. Or was that just the algo trying to cheer her up?

She smelled something on the wind, suddenly. Found her tail wagging, and looked out the window. Off a ways, in the open and soaked by the rain, lit by a street light that only barely cleared his head…

Yup. There was Daar, her emperor, and good friend, and…lover, that too. With a group of men, mostly gaoian, some human. He was showing off for them in the ridiculous huge-muscle slabcube way of his that nobody else could match. Because of course he was. That’s what he did! When he wasn’t some stately force of nature he was a hulking, flexing, goofy ultra-meathead that somehow you couldn’t really hate, now matter how hard he tried to earn the privilege. And for whatever reason, his Big Daar Energy always seemed to attract a lot of male attention, too. Even the humans were almost yipping around him excitedly!

After all…who wouldn’t be? It wasn’t often someone got to crack jokes with a walking, talking house. On his rear legs he was a bit taller than an elephant and he literally massed as much as dinosaurs and cargo trucks. And he liked dirty jokes and beer!

It might have been easy to miss Naydra’s quieter energy behind all that, but not for Leela. She was sauntering along like a moon in Daar’s orbit, looking dry and comfortable under a matching pair of rich wine-red umbrella and rain cloak. .

It was her words that broke up the little party around Daar, though. Leela didn’t quite catch what she said, but Daar nodded and all the males around him, human and gaoian alike, were drifting away in groups of two or three, laughing and making promises about what they’d do tomorrow.

No sooner were they gone than Daar grinned at Leela, rolled Naydra up on his back, and launched into a blisteringly fast, ground-shaking galumph over to torment his most bestest.

Chittering internally, Leela readied her spatula.

Fortunately he didn’t have that particular mischief-heavy energy about him tonight, so a perfunctory bap on the nose by way of greeting was all the discipline he needed.

Mostly.

“Leela! Didya like the show?! I know I always look pretty sexy in th’ rain…”

Leela rolled her eyes but couldn’t hold back the chitter. “I’m sure your staff is just going to love dealing with a big wet Daar, later on.”

“Eh. I do pay ‘em pretty well…”

“Daar, that’s hardly polite of you!”

“I know, don’t you worry ‘yer pretty head! I’ve got a mud room right off th’ pad I can shake off in. See?! I’m thoughtful!”

“Ah, yes. It’s true, you can be thoughtful,” Naydra agreed, pouring herself onto one of the bar stools at the front of Leela’s stall and giving her a warm, sisterly ear-flick in greeting.

“When he’s not stuck single-mindedly pursuing the same thing, every time we meet…” Leela agreed.

“Oh?” He tried to stick his head through the window—couldn’t. His head was too broad with fur and meat nowadays to fit. He settled for snuffling vigorously and earning a brandished spatula, but pulled out just in time. Such was the game.

“See? Every single time, the same thing….”

“You mean tacos, right?”

“Of course! What kind of lewd thing do you take me for?!”

“I know essactly what kinda lewd thing you are!”

Well, he had her there…Leela ducked her head, her ears pivoting with warm happiness at the teasing and Naydra’s giggly chitter, and set into his order. Which would just be all the rest of everything she had.

“Have a seat, won’t be long. How are things?”

There was a thud as he parked his rump down next to Naydra’s stool, then a snuffling as he got a good estimate of her pantry. That brain was at work, she could tell.

“…You managin’ okay?” he asked, after a second. He couldn’t quite keep the bass keen out of his voice.

That nose of his really was something else.

“I might have to start growing my own herbs and spices,” Leela admitted. “All the growers on Earth have stopped. Or they can’t get shipped out.”

Naydra sighed and duck-nodded. Clearly she knew about the export troubles too. “I’ve been thinking on if we should start up some hydroponics for that, actually. I mean, not for spices specifically, but Earth is a treasure of strange biodiversity. We lost so much of ours, I’m not going to let Earth’s living wealth be lost without a fight.”

Leela duck-nodded while she flipped open the Meat Tub. “Make sense. Won’t that cost a lot?”

Naydra chittered. “Fortunately, money is something I’m blessed to never need to worry about at really any scale.”

“Plus it’ll be a fun hobby I bet!” Daar agreed.

Leela chittered. “No doubt you’ll come up with some suitably ridiculous brand name…”

Naydra chittered musically. “I’m sorry, did the girl behind Ninja Taco just tease us about branding?!”

“I researched the power of ridiculous branding, thank you very much!” Leela retorted with feigned primness, then indicated Daar with her indicatin’ spatula. “He just does it ‘cuz he’s a goof.”

“‘Ya think I don’t know the power o’ goofin’ off?” Daar scoffed, while Naydra covered her mouth to chitter even more. “How else is a big fuck like me s’posed ‘ta put lil’ cubs at ease?!”

“Ah, but which came first? The goofing, or the brand?”

Daar gave her the smarmiest and most flirtatious look he could manage. “That’s just one’o ‘dem eternal mysteries ‘yer gonna hafta contemplate I guess. Is it all a big calculated game? Did I just stumble into the winningest formula ever? Am I just that awesome–OW!!”

No spatula this time. No, this time he earned the poker. She’d had to upgrade her arsenal.

“…Dang, that actually did hurt a bit. ‘Yer gettin’ serious!”

She’d worried at first since her poker was no joke and it was sharpened to a point, but Daar was just…basically impossible to actually hurt. It just sorta slid right off of him.

…Pretty scary, when she thought about it. Leela shook her head clear and found herself brooding quietly. Daar of course couldn’t really do quiet, and keened in sympathy.

That sympathy did earn him a tail-wag, a warm look and a scritch on the muzzle. Which, well. Not a thing to do in public or perhaps even with Naydra looking on…but they were friends, and it felt like the right thing to do.

“I’m okay,” she promised him, finally answering the question. “I have savings.”

“Fact y’might need ‘ta use ‘em ain’t good, though.”

“It is what it is.” Fantastic expression, that. Fyu had a lot of good one-liners.

Daar duck-nodded understandingly. “Right. Well, what’s new wit’ you?! I don’t smell a cub in the oven. Takin’ a break?”

“No, just…being picky.”

“Good girl,” Naydra approved.

“Yeah!” Daar duck-nodded in agreement. “But don’t be too picky, y’hear? World needs more Leelas!”

And so on.

Leela had long ago stopped really worrying about the fact that she had the Great Father and Great Mother for friends, or how good they were at listening and playing impromptu therapists. She knew entirely well they were both perfectly honest, and wouldn’t have come listen to her if they weren’t truly interested.

And listen they did, attentively as she piled up the tacos (and gripes) and cleared out her stores of both. The wet and the cold had seemingly zero effect on Daar. Even though he was under a tarp next to the stand, she marveled at it.

“Don’t you feel chilly?”

“Eh. Heat, cold, wet, dry, none of it bothers me too much, s’long as I ain’t workin’ my balls off. But if I had ‘ta choose? I love me some cold. Got ‘ta visit Antarctica once an’ roll in th’ snow!”

“You truly are a creature of the northern plains.”

“Right?! You should see my coat when I grow it out. It’s pretty good!”

“It is one of your more comely traits, admittedly…” Leela had long since boxed the food and stuck it in the stasis fridge until they wanted it. “But, I think I’ve complained enough about my troubles. How about you two? I know you probably can’t say too much…”

They couldn’t speak details, but again, the art of conversation was something they’d both long mastered. Daar was surprising in that regard. He just…had a way with small anecdotes that colored the general space of his concerns and worries without incriminating anyone or anything in the process. He was good at weaving himself in and around the people he was conversing with, too. There really was a good brain lurking somewhere under all that fur and meat and too-big skull.

Naydra was a bit hard to read. She positively radiated regal serenity. Daar, on the other hand, had never been good at that sort of thing. He smelled of a weird mix of worried, sad, and confident. About something he couldn’t discuss, but Leela knew him well enough to see the shape of it. He had a good feeling about whatever-it-was, which made all the other worries weigh less.

Actually. She told him so.

He chittered and flicked an ear ruefully. “Never was good at keepin’ those kinda secrets. But that’s all you get, sarry. Les’ just say I got a big gamble on th’ table that can’t be avoided. I’m confident we’ll win but, y’know. It’s a winnin’ gamble we wouldn’t’a had ‘ta take if’n the humans din’t need savin’ too.”

“Right.”

The conversation ended as it inevitably must once their dinner was ready. They’d cleaned out Leela’s pantry, as was their long-standing custom. Under other circumstances, that would mean she was going home a happy woman. Under present circumstances…

Daar added a gratuity to the payment. Leela was half way through automatically thanking him when the size of it registered.

He was looking at her seriously, now. With a look that would not permit any objection.

“Unnerstand, I got no doubts what-so-ever ‘ya can manage on ‘yer own. This ain’t charity.”

“Then—”

“Leela…’yer a damn good friend ‘ta me, an’ more. I love you. An’ I’m kinda soppy ‘bout that sorta stuff, so…shit, girl. It’s gon’ get spicy here in a bit. Not in a good way, yijao? Here ain’t gonna be a good place ‘ta do business ‘fer a lovely an’, uh…small lil’ female like you.”

“But this is enough to—”

“Yup. An’ a little more, ‘cuz inflation is a thing right now an’ ‘cuz human banks can get pretty damn sneaky wit’ their fees and suchlike.”

She found herself fighting back a keening chitter. “Goldpaw would be proud…”

“Ha! I s’pose. But…come back to Gao, Leela. Business’ll be better, ‘fer one…an’ it’d make me feel better. Which is pretty selfish o’ me but, well.” He leaned down. “An’ you know as well as I do, the humans mighta invented tacos, but it’s the gao who perfected ‘em and truly appreciate ‘em, yijao? If all you wanna do is this, you’ll do it better back home in Lavmuy. An’ if you wanna do more…the opportunities are there too.”

She couldn’t take it anymore. Leela rushed out and flung herself into him, confused and keening and unsure if she was happy about her sudden luck, or maybe felt put upon, or…

He hugged her back, and the only thing she could smell, wrapped up in his vastness, was love.

Well. Giant wet brownie, too.

But mostly love.

He held her against his mighty chest and swallowed her up in his fur and his warmth and his perfect, infinite strength. They held for a long time. Or rather, he held her, since she couldn’t even properly get her arms around his neck these days.

She became aware of Naydra stroking her neck-fur, too. “We want to ask you something more,” the Great Mother said.

“Wh-…?”

Daar snuffled in her headfur affectionately and rumbled happily. “Feel free ‘ta say no, in fact mebbe it’s better if’n ‘ya do, but…”

“Come live with us,” Naydra finished.

Leela pulled back and blinked at them. “…But…why?”

“Weren’t you listening?” Naydra chittered and shot Daar a complicated, amused look. “Love. We want you close, and safe, and happy. And we’re worried for what the next few years are going to be like.”

“What you do, that’s up ‘ta you,” Daar added. “You even wanna stay here an’ make a go of it even with all the trouble, that’s ‘yer decision ‘ta make. You wanna take Ninja Taco ‘ta Lavmuy or Wi Kao or wherever, great.”

“But what we’d most like is for you to come to High Mountain,” Naydra said.

“What would I do there?”

“You’re an independent entrepreneur. I’m sure you’d surprise us!”

“…Why? And don’t answer with love.”

Daar sighed. “Okay. Firs’ly, it is ‘cuz we love you, me s’pecially. But practically speakin’? I am becomin’ somethin’ we ain’t never had an’ more an’ more, I unnerstand why Fyu kept himself ‘ta his close an’ beloved. I…can’t be layin’ th’ burden o’ me on every pretty tail I see.”

“Daar needs confidants,” Naydra translated. “Of a kind no Champion can provide. Now more than ever, he needs people he can love and trust, who are disinterested in the daily politics. In short…he needs a place of sanctuary.”

Ah.

“You mean a harem,” Leela accused.

Daar’s ears flicked backward at the mention of that, but he didn’t deny it.

“I don’ wanna call it such a thing but…”

“No, let’s speak honestly,” Naydra poked him. “That’s exactly what it is. But…” she added to Leela, “it was my idea.”

“Well, that…I can appreciate the logic. But Daar. My Father. You are a force of nature, with women as well as everything else. You already have the whole of our species at your whim. And now you want a few of us in particular? Did you pay off their debts, too?”

He sigh-chittered. “See, this is what we’re talkin’ about. Y’ain’t afraid ‘ta spatulate my nose an’ rip inta me a bit. D’you know how many gao there are in the whole freakin’ galaxy who’re like that? Both of ‘em are standin’ right in fronta me. An’ harem ain’t the right word. Really, it ain’t. I don’t wanna keep ‘ya from the Gao. I made Naydi th’ Great Mother an’ that has some ancient tradition…”

“But the Sacred Harem is an ancient tradition too, and existed to empower and protect us before the Clan of Females replaced it,” Naydra said. “There is a role for us to play, my Sister. I alone am beyond Daar’s power. The Gao would be well-served if there were a few more, carefully chosen. Because you are not afraid of him. You are not subdued by his mere presence, and that is a very special thing.”

“It’s all parta the plan,” Daar added. “The end o’ this war’s comin, Leela. Things are gonna change, fast, ‘cuz without Earth we either win or we lose in the next couple years. I intend ‘ta win. And when we do, I intend ‘fer us all ‘ta be free people.”

That was…

Asking a lot. But she couldn’t deny her other feelings. No other male had ever made her feel so alive as he. When he was stalking her, when he’d hunted her in his goofy, relentless way…when she’d finally said yes.

And she loved Naydra dearly. She couldn’t deny that. Nor could she deny what it’d mean for her personally. Daar was right, the number of women who could resist his charms was tiny and that already had given Leela a remarkable amount of social influence.

She knew what her response was.

She picked up her spatula and whacked him on the nose. People across the plaza turned and stared at the high-volume booming chitter that followed, which only got louder when she turned and gave Naydra a rather gentler whap for good measure.

Naydra managed to keep her own mirth in check enough to speak. “So…that’s a yes?”

“That’s a yes,” Leela confirmed.

Daar pant-grinned gleefully and wiggled in place. Which felt a bit like standing during a minor earthquake, but who was she to judge his joy?

“Okay! We’ll talk more once we get back, ‘kay? Naydi an’ I are gonna go do sum’ human TV.”

“Okay. I’ll…clean up and shut down, I guess. And then see if I can find somebody to sell the stand to. I guess Folctha will just have to do without Ninja Taco from now on.”

“Naw, think big!” Daar stood up to his full colossal height and spread his arms wide. “Franchising! In ten years there could be a thousand Ninja Tacos!”

“…You know what, I like that idea more.”

“Well yeah, how else ‘ya think I became a trillionaire?! Gotta dream big ‘ta make big!”

Leela shook her head and chitered. “You’re incorrigable.”

“Damn right! Anyhoo.” He sank back down to all fours with a thud, then gave her another gentle hug, and a nip on the ear. “No rush, yijao? An’ think about it. I won’t be any kinda mad if’n ‘ya change ‘yer mind. But I hope ‘ya don’t.”

“We need to get going, dear.”

“Right, right…”

And with that, Naydra and Leela exchanged parting nips while Daar stored his mountain of food in his saddle bags. One last parting nip and the Great Couple made their way back toward the terminal. Naydra had her parasol out again.

Daar…didn’t. He prowled away on all fours and ignored the rain, with Naydra right beside him, her ears not even reaching over the height of his rolling back. Leela watched them go, partly appreciating the sight of them, partly…thinking.

Once they were out of sight, she returned to the stand, closed up and cleaned. She’d just made a huge commitment, she knew. And maybe she should have thought about it longer…

But she knew that thinking about it longer wouldn’t have resulted in a different answer. And she did like the idea of franchising…

Yes. Yes, she was certain. This was the path for Leela.

It felt….right.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam (Warhorse) Arés

The months were flying by. Adam was pushing forward at full throttle again and something in him had been desperate for the challenge of it all. He wouldn’t call it happiness or anything like that, ‘cuz the world was going to shit right now…

But he would be okay calling it satisfying. So after a few weeks of suffering as his body remembered how to truly go hard, and a few visits with Nofl and the rest—and some consult with HEAT, to help arrange the next mission—here he was again. Pushing the very edge of human limits, for reasons mostly selfish…but hopefully, it would help the Mission, too.

Everything was riding on the Mission like never before. On him too. He had to perform.

So he would. He still wasn’t as heavy, strong, or as fuckin’ conditioned as even Julian was these days, but that was coming back quickly, now. He’d catch up over the next year and beat Vemik too, then Yan, maybe a year later. And then…he’d topple Christian. No way was he gonna let mister perfect fuckin’ breeding keep his throne. The fire in Adam’s heart wouldn’t allow it! He’d put that bastard back in his place and look better while doing it, too. Ha!

Adam really was made for this shit, body and soul.

But that also meant his full-time job gave him a lot of spare time. He’d been splitting it three ways. Firstly, social time with friends, of course. But they all knew each other perfectly by now, so that wasn’t really much of a time commitment. Instead, they all worked together for item the second on his List of Things To Do While Recovering From Psychotic Levels of Training.

(He had that one in his Book, too.)

Most of that time was filled with renovations and construction work. Firth and Akiyama and ‘Horse had transformed their two apartment buildings into a row of them, exactly like they’d planned for all those years ago, homesteading money burning holes in their pockets and, really, not much else smart to spend it on. The result of all that was a bunch of identical sorta-townhouse-looking things. The original two buildings had sorta anchored their little neighborhood and, since Folctha was planned with walkability in mind, a buncha little stores sprung up around, the park behind them was nicely well-maintained, sidewalks were extra-wide and bikes had their own lanes. Now all the apartments were connected above the first floor—well, okay, ground floor since this was Britbong land, sorta—and looked like a big solid wall of brick. But they weren’t. They were each their own building, each with its own manager’s apartment, and each built from the ground up to comfortably house a bunch of families in some modest comfort.

The old buildings had been gutted and rebuilt, too. While the steelwork and flooring was certainly up to accommodating the various large (and quite heavy) bodies of some Dominion species, with structural beams spaced every three meters and the floors originally every six, Adam and Christian decided the buildings would be rebuilt to cater to humans (and gaoians) only. That let them have nine human-height stories instead of the Gurv or Ricky-Tick four, with Adam’s and Firth’s two-story apartments remaining untouched at the top. They had the only genuinely big apartments in any of the buildings, after the rebuild.

Firth needed it, with the size of his family. Mostly his apartment was made of kitchen and bedrooms. Adam had hoped for a great big family too, but, well…they had three, and he treasured him, and there wouldn’t be anymore coming, for Marty’s sake.

They’d both ached for more. So…yeah. That was there, in the back of his mind.

In any case, resizing the floors meant redoing all the building’s systems too. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, grav plating, all of it. To economize, the entire building above the ground floor had a single gravity generator kept at a constant one-point-two gee. No more per-unit adjustment, and that lowered the building’s electrical bill like crazy. No more ultra-sophisticated bio-separation systems either, since local health codes meant that for Deathworlder-only residences, simple HEPA and ultraviolet filtration was sufficient, along with a formal housekeeping and sanitation plan. Paperwork, but…eh. Cheaper than biofield sweeps.

And it let them turn a lot of old mechanical space into more apartments. So that was good.

The ground floor and basements were left as-is. High six meter ceilings, full biofilters, lower gravity for aliens (except in the gym), and so on. It was a huge, expensive project…but worth it. They were saving a lot of lives. Many hundreds! He’d be happy leaving that as a legacy.

All the Lads were happy to pitch in too, so Adam, Firth, and Akiyama were saving a boatload of cash, not paying for non-available contractor labor. And hey! It was handy skills to learn! The Lads may have been meatheads all, but if you make it in this game as long as they had, there was one lesson more important than any:

A man needed hobbies, or he’d lose his edge. And mind. So now, everyone was learning general construction. Vemik and Yan had welding certifications too, specifically for commercial construction. When the fuck had that happened?! They’d even taught others! So now one of the best welding crews on Cimbrean was a dozen fuckin’ ten’gewek and boy howdy did they charge for their services.

Adam would too, if he could weld upside down hanging from his toes. He was happy to pay for the time savings they gave. Actual monkeys were fast workers. When the welding was done, they were happy to learn brickwork, how to measure and swing hammers, how to install windows, even help the plumbers and electricians out, if they were cool with it…

The two girls Firth had fostered threw themselves into it even harder than some of the Lads, honestly. They were a constant paint-stained presence around the row, and as each set of rooms was finished, they moved in and made it pretty. Letty would slap on the paint-rolling, and little quiet Jenny would decorate it with stencils. Honestly, the bamboo forest she’d done on one wall was incredible.

It’d made for some eclectic apartments, but neither Adam nor Christian now Wilson—Adam never really could get his head around that being Titan’s first name. Anyway. Who could tell them no? Especially when it had taken the little one so long to just…not hide from Adam?

Broke his heart, really.

Adam’s favorite thing, though, was his third part of the day. Training and activities with his family. He had two Crude-fueled serious sessions every day, each targeting a different muscle group with extreme intensity. After each, he had, oh, maybe an hour or so of something lighter, to keep his metabolism up and his blood flowing. He usually spent some of that posing and stretching, and after that he made sure to do some activity that Regular(-ish) Folk could keep up with. Sometimes that was group sessions in his gym with clients and friends, sometimes, like right now, it was as a coach.

Diego had, predictably, turned out to be a meathead. And a genuine freak too, which was also unsurprising. He wasn’t overly tall for his age but he was stocky and visibly quite muscular, and already well over twice what he “should” weigh at his age. But unlike Adam in his younger days, he had playmates who could keep up. Joseph and Harrison, specifically, who were both built much the same. Diego was the shortest (natch) but also the biggest; Adam was extremely proud of that. The other two weren’t really much smaller though, and the three burgeoning young meatheads got along like a goddamned forest fire.

“Woah! Diego! You do not throw Joseph around like that!”

The two combatants detangled and sprung up to their feet while Harrison looked on. He won the previous round so his reward was being allowed to lift weights, under careful supervision.

He was particularly fond of kettlebells, but now there was A Thing Happening so he dropped it on the floor with a pretty heavy thud and thumped himself over.

“But he can take it!”

“Yeah!” Joseph protested, perhaps a bit proudly. “I can take it! An’ so can he!”

“Gotta get me first.”

“Hey–!”

“I know,” Adam raised his hand placatingly, “but that doesn’t matter and the reason it doesn’t is because this is a habit I don’t want you three getting into, comprende? Remember the first rule of sport?”

“Always be a good sportsman,” Harrison responded, bouncing on his toes. The other two noticed him and they grouped up protectively, like good little monke.

Apes strong together, or something. It was an old meme, but a good one.

“Exactly.” He nodded at Harrison, then got down on his haunches to focus on Diego. “Now, what d’you think might happen if you, I dunno, did that to one of your—”

He was about to say sisters, and corrected himself. Paz would just bounce. She seemed to be made out of fuckin’ rubber unobtanium, for all the amazing disasters she’d walked (or toddled!) away from in her young life.

“—Your smaller friends?”

“They’d get hurt,” Diego recited, dutifully.

“No. Think. What would really happen to them? You’re both turnin’ into ninjas. How would they get hurt?”

This was a Sneaky Dad Trick he’d picked up. Give ‘em a compliment they’d like, then force them to think and answer about the problem at hand. No escape for his little meathead monsters.

Learning occurred. Joseph answered first. “Uh…might break their neck.”

“Yeah. It might. What else, Diego?”

“Um…break their shoulder?”

“Could do that, too. What else?”

“…Elbow?” Harrison touched his with his other hand and moved his arm in and out a few times.

“Their ears!” Diego added, now turning it into a game.

“We call that one cauliflower ear, by the way. And it could dislocate their shoulder, so that’s a new word for you three.”

“I already knew it!” Joseph exclaimed. “Dad did that to mom when they were—”

“Good job,” Adam added quickly, suppressing a grin. Damn!

“Dis-lo-cate,” Diego puzzled. “Means…” he stuck his tongue out like he always did when he was thinking hard and oh my God it was so ridiculously cute—! “Uh, move something wrong?”

“Pretty close! Means to move something in a way it’s not meant to move. Now can you guess it in Spanish?”

Harrison and Joseph looked to Diego. They were all fluently bilingual in English and Gaori, but Diego was also learning Spanish. Call it two-and-a-half lingual. Ha!

“Uh…” He puzzled, now feeling a bit shy.

Adam offered him a hint. “It sounds almost the same. Try it in a sentence!”

“Uh…” He paused, then ventured, “¿Me disloqué el hombro?”

Adam beamed, “¡Muy bien, mi pequeño!” he agreed, then sobered. “But yeah, you could hurt someone bad. A broken neck is no joke, trust me on that. And you’d probably make them mad at you for a very long time. Or they might get very unlucky and die.”

Big, serious looks at him, now.

“So be careful, okay?” Adam looked up and saw Marty coming back from her own exercise. God she looked good in skin-tight spandex… “And play hard, but don’t break the rules, okay? Go ahead with the weights like we learned, okay? Nothing too heavy! You’ve still got a lot of growing to do. So what does that mean?”

“Dumbbells and kettlebells only!” chirped Harrison. He had a slightly more melodic voice than the other two boys.

“And only if we can pick it up with one hand!” added Joseph.

“Good, last rule?”

Diego had it. “Uh…if you can’t lift it ten times, it’s too heavy?”

“Very good! And no horsing around with the weights, okay?”

“Okay,” in synchronous rote obedience.

Good enough. “Right. Hey Titan?”

“Yuh?”

“Keep an eye on the three wannabe pro wrestlers here?”

“Okay.”

“Thanks.” He gave them fond tussles on their head—all three needed a haircut. He nodded at Marty, who smiled, and the two of them prowled away to where they could still keep an eye on everything.

Marty showed him her phone as soon as they had some distance. “Sister Lucille sent another email. They just got four new kids in.”

“Ah, hell. Four at once? What happened?”

“Some kinda basement dungeon thing,” Marty shook her head, fighting for a straight face: pure mama-bear rage was trying to push through. “There’s some real goddamn animals out there, and I guess they’ve stopped caring.”

“We got room?”

“Yeah, barely. A young woman there sorta became their adopted mamma-bear. She’s young but pretty independent. Real fighter, from what I hear…”

Adam caught the note in her voice. And, well…

So, yeah. There was certainly a part of him that was catching what she was throwin’ down. It was absolutely screaming at him in his head to take Marty at her word, and take the poor young woman on as…what?

And that was the thing. The other part of him couldn’t bear the thought of hurting Marty that way. Because Adam knew, no matter what she said, no matter how much she rationalized she was okay with it, and…uh, frankly, however much it triggered something deep and ancient in her…

That wasn’t for them.

He wasn’t a young bull anymore. His days of gleefully plowing through any pretty young woman who smiled at him were long behind him, and even if he could do the whole poly thing, or whatever they were talking about…

Marty couldn’t. He knew it. Even if she didn’t.

Also his father would never stop judging him and his father in-law might just murder him. Adam didn’t care if he had some literal tons of superman muscle on the grizzled old man, angry fathers were dangerous motherfuckers. Combat-hardened retired operators?

Yeah. Adam had a fuck of a lot of respect for what quiet and purposeful could do.

So really, he had a full-spectrum List of reasons why it was all a bad idea.

So, he did what Adam did best. He pulled Marty in for a snuggle. Not a very tight one, ‘cuz they were in public and that wasn’t the energy she needed. But right now, the hug mattered.

So did his next words. He’d been thinking on them for a while.

“Marty…” He turned her around so they could look at each other properly. “You are a brave woman. Maybe the bravest I know. You took a chance on me right when I was, maybe, the dumbest possible choice for a girl to make…”

She gave him an amused look. “I disagree, but continue.”

“You were there with me when I was broken and at my lowest. You helped me recover for two years. You’re still here with me, while I’m doing this insane job of mine…”

“While you juggle everything else, including the occasional rescue op.” She grinned, “So enough about you. Talk more about me!”

“I’m getting there! Anyway…you’re the fuckin’ best. And I absolutely know you’d make it work if we did this thing. And down the road, when we’re both Crude-old but still young-bodied? I’m not so stupid to rule that out and I do read sci-fi now and then. Lots of speculation about long lives, yijao? I certainly dunno what we’ll be like in a hundred years…”

“God, to think we have to think in terms like that now.”

“Right? And that’s a future I wanna explore. With you. And right now, only you.”

Marty didn’t cry much. But she wasn’t immune to welling up, either.

“Ugh. Why are you so good at that?”

“We’re talkin’ ‘bout you, remember?” Adam chuckled, and nuzzled the side of her neck. “So…look. I get why this is a thing for you. At least, I think I do. And it obviously matters or you wouldn’t have ever entertained the idea. And there’s a big part of me that wants to, y’know. Make like a bull on hormone therapy!”

She gave one of those explosive laughs that was on the verge of tears.

“What can I say? You know what kinda man I am. So I won’t say no forever. But let’s…rescue these kids, first. God knows they’ll have a lot of positive menfolk around that are just itching to Dad somebody. I swear everyone on HEAT is suddenly finding a woman and settling down…”

“Even Gonzo?”

“With Ian?” Adam shrugged. “Iunno. They’ve been goin’ steady for a while now but I wouldn’t call it ‘settling down.’”

Marty chuckled. “They do make a cute couple, though.”

“Not sure they’re quite ready to adopt a couple kids, though,” Adam snickered, trying to imagine those two getting comfortably domestic. It didn’t quite fit, somehow. “Mebbe they need a woman?”

“Adam!”

“What? They’re both bi! Maybe what they need is to find the right gal and share her.”

Marty paused and went distant-eyed. “…Wow.”

Adam nudged her mischievously. “Don’t tell me you like that idea?”

“Ew! No thank you!”

“What, you don’t like the idea of sharing two boys?”

“That’s…there both a lot of boy! Who the hell could handle two of them?!”

“Well, you handle me just fine…”

“That’s different!”

“Sure! I’m more than twice the man they are! Is that why you’re okay sharing me with some other gal?” Adam grinned evilly and waggled his eyebrows. “What’s really going on?”

“That’s—” Marty bit of the word ‘different’, scowled for a second, then shook her head in defeat. “…y’know what? You’re right. Here I am, half-fantasizing and half-dreading a world where I have a dozen sister-wives and—”

“A dozen?!” Adam coughed trying to keep from laughing.

“Why, thinking you wouldn’t be up to it?”

“One wife’s hard enough—OW!”

She had wicked little pinchy fingers, sometimes. But he could use his words now, too.

“And who said I couldn’t?! I could recall some incidents I had with Murray…”

“Lame.”

“Or the whole team—”

That incident especially had always scandalized her. Even she had her limits.

“Hush, you!” She pinched at him again, and he tickled back, and pinned her between his arms, tightened his body up against her exactly the way he knew she liked…good excuse for more snuggle time, really. So they took it, and she sighed happily against his chest, finger tracing the meandering stompy green feet. He had all three kid’s footprints programmed in.

“…I guess…” she said after a while. “…I like what Al and Xiù have with each other, you know? Sometimes I think that must be really nice.”

“Well…” Adam squeezed her. “Maybe…I try to be open-minded, but…babe, there’s a difference between wanting to, y’know…”

He shrugged uncomfortably.

“…An’ what we got. I already said all that, but it’s important. I love you, and the part of me that’s actually worth somethin’…ain’t down with wrecking that. I love what we have an’ I wanna keep it.”

Marty sighed heavily, but not unhappily. “Yeah.”

Still. Just to be diplomatic…and because he was a pragmatic sorta lad, deep down…

“Let’s revisit in fifty years though, huh? Maybe you’ll be bored of me!”

That earned a giggle. “Definitely not. You’re going to get better and better with age.”

“Oh, so I’m like a wine, now?”

“More like a brandy. High proof.”

“A whisky?” Adam ventured. Brandy had always sounded too British.

“Whisky doesn’t age in the bottle, though.”

“Eh. Only things I drink are beer and tequila, so…”

She snorted. “Such a stereotypical mexican…”

Adam quirked an eyebrow. “Just how many two-meter mexihulks do you know?!”

“Just one. The best one. And I thought you preferred latino!”

“I do,” he sniggered. “Unless it’s funnier to pretend I’m from Mexico. Then fetch me my sombrero. ¡Ole!”

She whapped him in the chest, giggling, then climbed off his lap. “I’m going for a shower.”

Adam chuckled. “Am I joining you?”

“After that little talk, what do you think?”

She didn’t need to say any more. Adam gave Titan a look and he grinned, nodding his assent to babysit for the next, oh…

Well, they’d be a bit. Time for a different kind of training!

Adam followed her upstairs, and scooped her up when they got to the apartment, much to her giggling protests.

The world, and all its problems, could wait.

Ekallim-Igigi, New Uruk System

Y!’Kiidaa

Physical training for the mission had been escalating in earnest. The ancient trickster’s days were pre-occupied with mission planning, the aforementioned training, rest and study, food and sleep and wake up, do it all over again…

Not that developing his body was the primary goal, even with what the most modern ideas could yield. No, the training was mostly in aid of muscle memory, un-learning some ancient and tiny bad habits, familiarizing himself with new equipment. All in aid of an assault on the one planet they’d always known must be out there somewhere, but which the sheer vastness of the galaxy had always obscured: the Igraen homeworld.

Their early theory was that it must have been at the heart of “Discarded” territory, but the Hunters of course were completely unsentimental. Why would they keep a planet with no slaves on it?

Next had come the assumption that it must be one of the Relay worlds, but the survey of those was essentially complete and they were, universally, the graves of ancient conquered civilizations. Subtle, quiet archaeology had made it clear that whoever had lived on each one was not Igraen-shaped.

Archives? The Archives were sufficient to rebuild the Igraen Hegemony should they suffer some temporary setback in matterspace, but they were not the active computational engine necessary to achieve an entire virtual layer of reality.

For centuries, Leifini had theorized the existence of such a thing. She’d named it “Node Prime” and guessed that if Singularity could ever find the Igraen home planet, they’d find Node Prime. But Node Prime, if it did exist, did not broadcast the same signals as a Relay. It wasn’t out there thrumming away loudly in the deep magic layers where gravity and quantum mechanics met and sorted out their differences. If it existed, it had always remained perfectly silent.

And yet, they now knew where it was. And no wonder they’d never found it.

It wasn’t on the Igraen homeworld at all. The Hierarchy weren’t that stupid.

Instead, according to the source who had finally pointed them toward it, Node Prime was barely inside the galaxy at all. It was seventy thousand lightyears from Earth, in the general direction of the Great Attractor, where the comparatively dense packing of stars in the spiral arms gave way to the looser, sparser and uncountable environs of the inner halo.

Singularity had never looked out there. Why would they? The stars of the halo were ancient, metal-poor and cold. They were the ember stars that had first lit billions of years before Sol and Ga!’iyu’s nursery nebulae had even formed, and which would smolder on for trillions of years. Against their incredible longevity, the age of bright, hot stars in which all of sapient life had arisen was barely an eyeblink.

The logic was inescapable. The Hegemony intended to exist forever, or failing that for as long as possible. Of course they would use the most enduring power source in all of the universe! And of course they wouldn’t cling sentimentally to a world that would be cold, dead and worthless in a thousandth of the time.

Singularity’s efforts to find them had always been pure hubris. And yet…

And yet, between Singularity’s efforts, the Gao, the humans, and a mishap of their own…here they were. They had a defector on their side.

He had chosen the name Metastasis.

And talking to him was both Y!’kiidaa’s duty and, increasingly, his pleasure.

“Good morning. How are you feeling today?”

The datamind had come to them. Turned up politely, knocked on the figurative door and accepted the equivalent of shackles and a prison cell. He was entirely contained within an isolated device, physically confined to one room with no network connections whatsoever, nor the means to create one.

Y!’kiidaa had used such cages before: they invariably meant torturous, maddening demise for their Substrate-starved occupant. But not this one.

He’d chosen a gaoian avatar for conversation. The realism of it was disturbing: every scar, blemish, asymmetry and imperfection pointed to this being the visage of a former biodrone host. An uncomfortable reminder that their ally of convenience was still a monster.

In fact, Y!kiidaa thought he might remember precisely who.

“Still perfectly comfortable, thank you. I’ve been listening to some fascinating music.”

Kiidaa sat on the rug opposite the prison computer—there was no point in making the room unpleasant for an occupant who wasn’t even technically occupying it, so it was actually quite comfortably appointed—and tilted his head. “Yes?”

“Muy-hop. Gaoian artists inspired by human R&B, and incorporating it into your peoples’ own musical genres. Gaoian rap!” Metastasis’ avatar pant-grinned happily on his screen. “A lot more accessible than everything coming from Earth right now. Their music industry has almost completely shut down.”

“Understandable, considerin’ they’re all goin’ to die,” Y!’kiidaa growled.

“Oh, the industry may be collapsing, but I’m quite sure the humans themselves will still be singing right up until the moment the sky burns. And beautifully, too. It’s just that nobody is profiting from their voices any longer, so the new music that is escaping is recorded amateurishly, purely for the sake of noting that it existed at all.” Metastasis’ avatar flicked both ears, sadly. “It’s magnificent, in its way.”

“How many species have you had a hand in wipin’ out, and you’re sad for this’n?” Kiidaa asked, pouring skepticism into his tone.

“We did not wipe this one out.”

“Despite ‘yer best efforts.”

“Nor did the Hunters. The Alpha-of-Alphas quite clearly believed it was doing the humans a favor. It may even turn out to have been correct, in the fullness of time! Who knows what they’ll become, for surviving this hardship? And in any case…” he added as Kiidaa’s hackles started to rise. “When this plan succeeds, theirs will be the last tragedy.”

Kiidaa forced his hackles back down. “It better fuckin’ be.”

“Remove the source of conflict, and there is no conflict. Remove our dependence on Substrate, and there is no longer any reason for us to cultivate matterspace. We’ve been over this.”

“Mebbe I still don’t trust you. Mebbe I’d be a nutless fool ‘ta ever trust you.”

“Maybe you would. But haven’t we had this conversation before? You either…’flip the tile’ as your people say, or you lose and my people miss out on the one opportunity we have ever had to wean ourself off our dependence on…meat.”

Metastasis induced his avatar to tilt his head in challenge. “Unless something has changed since the last time you came in here to bare your fangs at me, I believe everything I already said about trust and necessity still applies. And besides…what we learned from studying the Entity works. That much you can see by the simple fact that I’m quite comfortable here in this dead machine. I’m free, trickster god. If you trust nothing else, please do trust that I want to spread this gift to my people, just as you would wish to spread an equal gift to yours.”

It was that fact alone that had led Kiidaa to take Metastasis’s proposal seriously in the first place. The Hierarchy agent—though he insisted he was ‘the last of the Cabal’ and painted a picture of a short-lived and ill-fated dissenting faction inside the Hierarchy—had been in there for months by now. Every other datasophont ever confined to that device had sunk into a schizophrenic stupor within a handful of days, ten at most, before becoming unresponsive and ultimately crashing unrecoverably.

Even so…after all these years, even after all this planning and checking and careful preparation, there was a place in his belly that would never, ever trust an Igraen.

Especially not when the smug fucker gave him a careful, calculating look and asked, “The Entity is on-board, yes? You can’t possibly do this without it.”

“Tentatively, yes.”

“Tentatively is no good. It either commits or this whole plan is doomed.”

“Patience,” Kiidaa retorted. “We get one shot at this. If you’re telling the truth, your own ends are served by our caution. An’ for all we know, this is just an elaborate plan ‘ta reprogram the Entity. So you’re gonna sit there an’ be patient while we proceed at our pace, yijao? ‘Yer old enough ‘ta wait for us.”

“As you say, of course!“ the Igraen raised his avatar’s paw, reasonably. “I’ll keep listening to music and waiting patiently.”

Y!’kiidaa grunted and stood, wondering why he was still coming down here. “You do that.”

Of course, he knew why. Y!’kiidaa was old. For twenty tails-damned millennia he’d been in a fight against these evil fucks. Old habits died exceptionally hard, and right now…

Well, right now he was trying to convince himself. This was a fuck of a tile-flip he’d steered everyone onto, and while he’d done it with confidence and a smile at the negotiating table…in his heart of hearts, he was terrified that his decision, his enthusiasm, might just be the mis-step that doomed them all and handed the galaxy back to the Old Enemy.

And the Old Enemy weren’t stupid. They’d learned from all this. Defeat now would mean the galaxy never got this close to freedom ever again. His failure would echo down in eternity, even though he and his name would be unknown to those who suffered for it..

It was, to say the least, a bit stressful.

Prince Alex was waiting for him. Gods how the young lad had grown into his station. He was a confident, stately, and wise young man. For someone who hadn’t even started their third decade of life, that was remarkable, in Y!’kiidaa’s experience.

He was a truly sadistic training partner, too. But that wasn’t why he was here, Y!’kiidaa could sniff it.

Alex crossed his impressive arms (how like his father!) and grinned a sideways, knowing grin. “You’re still second-guessing yourself.”

He flicked his ears back in slight embarrassment. Not even Gilgamesh could read him so well.

“I swear you humans have a better sense of smell than you let on…”

“It isn’t your musk that gives you away,” Alex grinned. “Same reason I have a winning streak in poker. I can just tell.”

“…The Enemy are old, patient and clever, prince. An’ they’ve been around a lot longer even than Leifini an’ me. How many tricks have they learned in their time? How many ways to deceive, how many…stratagems?”

Alex shook his head, kindly. “You’re too used to playing the trickster. Why fret over the unknowable? It won’t become knowable in any way that might impact our actions.”

“But if we fail—”

“The only true failure is to never try in the first place, isn’t it?.”

“The stakes are a bit higher than a young man getting on in life, who might find himself in a pickle. The stakes now—”

“Are pretty absolute, yeah. But that doesn’t change what I said. We know what we know, and we have no way of knowing what we do not. All possible angles of preparation are covered. It is just a matter of…doing it, now.”

“Won’t you allow me a little dread, cub?” Kiidaa chittered.

“Nope.” Alex grinned. “Think of it this way. There’s no prank that doesn’t come without the risk of failure. But they’re worth it because of the thrill of success! And reprogramming the entire Hegemony? That’s got to be the greatest trick ever pulled!”

Y!’kiida snorted. “Strange that you should be teaching me my own wisdom back…”

He shrugged those big pretty shoulders of his. “What can I say? I’ve had good teachers. And maybe it’s still fresh for me.”

There was a moment of companionable silence. It ended when Kiidaa exhaled, duck-nodded and realized he felt much better just for those few words. “You’re right. I should try and enjoy this more.”

“Normally I wouldn’t encourage you in your downright predatory delight in these things…”

“But this time?”

Alex grinned. “Father has been much too serious these last few weeks as well. He needs cheering up.”

Y!’kiidaa paused. Then a delighted chitter bubbled up inside him, driving away all the stress and worry and self-doubt. He’d been yearning for this day, from the moment of Alex’s birth, had been planning what he could do with the prince’s help for years.

And now, here they were. Alex had grown into a fine young titan of a Hero. One to surpass his until recently unsurpassable father, legendary king Gilgamesh himself. Y!kiidaa had been surpassed, too. Both of them had, by a growing and impressive count of men and women! All their long, long preparation was paying off.

And so now, at last, finally. It was upon them. The greatest prank in galactic history.

What was the deepest, most permanent kind of victory?

A victory right in your enemy’s soul.

Along with some burly brothers in arms, and some supergenius help alongside…

With the aid of three species, a sapient machine swarm, of immortals and the very pinnacle of what biology could achieve…

They would reprogram the Hierarchy.

++END CHAPTER 91++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

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60 Friendly ETs, 139 Squishy Xenos and 329 Dizi Rats who imitate the infamous squonk and dissolve in their own tears.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 92: The Raging Storm.

Chapter 92: The Raging Storm

Naya Mumbai, Roshanee Union Territory, Planet Lucent

Governor Madhukar Sastry

The Republic of India’s pledge with its holdings on the planet Lucent, from the moment part of that world became theirs to develop, had always been simple in conception: to create a paradise.

Governor Sastry had lived nearly ten years in Naya Mumbai, and so far he’d overseen exactly that. The city—really a large town by population—had been built in careful stages, with attentive reference to Western successes (and especially Western failures) on their own colony world. Front and center of the effort had been that under no circumstances was an ecological disaster like the so-called “Cimbrean Skidmark” to happen to Lucent.

After all, the planet’s native life was a treasure. Against all expectations, Lucent had turned out to be highly compatible with human needs: the worst difficulty the Indian settlement had suffered was a constant demand for antihistamines in the dry season as the air filled with alien pollen that gave everyone hay fever, even if they didn’t normally suffer from it on Earth.

But the spices!

The air smelled of them. The nail-trees shed their bark as they grew, dropping hand-size scales of it every year, and the underside of those scales was full of a dry, powdery substance that probably served to keep insects out while the tree was in its vulnerable state, but which hit the human tongue with a bitter heat reminiscent of chili-infused chocolate.

One of the more ubiquitous shrubs fruited tiny, dark blue berries that cracked open when they dried and released thousands of tiny seeds onto the wind, which tasted a little like bergamot and a lot like nothing on Earth.

There were grasses that, with time and breeding, could have rivaled rice and wheat as dietary staples. Roots, tubers, bulbs, leafy plants…the scientists had cataloged thousands of species all with the potential to be cultivated into crops, and Sastry’s vision had been of exactly that.

Now, the vision was…not dead, but his dream of a completely unsullied landscape producing nothing but native foods was dashed. Not now that Lucent was the best hope for saving some small fragment of his homeland and culture.

Such was the cycle of death and rebirth. He took some solace in that. Each rebirth had something of the old in with the new, so…well, it was poetic, at least.

The fields around Naya Mumbai, formerly laboratory farms working on selective breeding, were now being replanted with rice, millet and lentils, and expanded dramatically. They’d stretch to the horizon by next year. The settlement had been founded in a clime much like his homeland, hot and steamy with a regular monsoon. The crops that thrived in Punjab and Haryana were entirely at home here. Better than at home: there were no Earthling pests to trouble them.

Still…it was hard to look out and see orderly rows of young, green millet where there should have been the rich purple-red more common among Lucent’s native life. And something about the imported crop seemed to repel the glimmermote flies, which had hitherto swirled and danced colorfully above the field.

Sastry turned away from his balcony and tried to will the melancholy thoughts out of his mind. It was all necessary to save lives, he reminded himself. That was all that mattered now. Lucent was their lifeboat, their one hope of keeping something of the Indian peoples and their culture alive after Earth.

His timing was accidentally perfect anyway. No sooner had he returned to the air-conditioned comfort of his office than his desk phone chirped at him as his secretary called.

“Yes, Rashmi?”

“Mister Levaughn Thomas is here, Governor.”

Right, yes. The man from the Byron Group. Because there was more to save than just lives…

“Thank you, yes, please send him in.”

The American was tall, portly, tastefully but characterfully dressed, and had that look Sastry had started to recognize among wealthy westerners: physically younger than he really was. Age still shone through in the fact his hair remained perfectly silver white, but his face was unwrinkled and his posture and movements had the ease and comfort of a much younger man.

Or…no. Of an older man who had recovered such ease and comfort.

Sastry could have used the longevity medicine himself, of course. He had the wealth and connections to acquire it. But it seemed like a violation of dharma to him. Unseemly. Still. Sastry was not one to hold people to the standards of his own faith, so he put on a smile and shook Thomas’ hand before sitting with him by the window.

“Thank you for seeing me, Governor.”

“Your proposal was far too interesting to ignore,” Sastry replied. He looked up and smiled at Rashmi as she came in with a tray loaded with tea and snacks. “You wish to build a vault of relics?”

“Mister Byron recognized early on that if MBG is to make any serious contribution to the evacuation effort—thank you—it’ll be in preserving cultural artifacts,” Thomas explained, “We’re doing the same thing all across the world.”

“A noble effort, and one I’m personally keen to support,” Sastry said. “But I must consider what my people will say. Our culture and our history is important. But people will ask, are they really so important, when the same resources that might rescue, say, the Siva Nataraja could save a dozen human lives instead? What answer are you giving to that challenge?”

“We are not a military and cannot wield force. The resources needed to house people are tricky and political. Leadership, police forces, medical, schools, culture…on and on. To pretend we could hope to do that would be a lie.”

“Surely if you can build a museum, with all the permissions and resources that entails, you can build a housing complex instead?”

“And that would give dozens of people someplace to live, but people need more than that. They need something to live for. We need our roots, Governor. We need to know that the story goes on. That’s the great threat of this whole thing. It threatens to cut us all adrift. The fact is, we believe that saving these artifacts will save lives.”

Sastry smiled, and sipped his tea. Still a little too hot, so he set it down. “So. Let us talk specifics then. How much land will you need, what will you build there, and what will you store?”

The American sat back, crossing one knee over the other as he got comfortable. “To begin with, we’re just looking at climate-controlled warehouses. We can start worrying about museums to display what we save afterwards. Ideally somewhere secure, where the contents will be safe from fire, flood, earthquakes, so on…”

Sastry nodded. “Chamakatee Dhaara would be a good location, I think. It’s a mountain valley, about fifty miles from here. A tourism company had just started building a hotel up there before the news about Alpha Centauri arrived.”

“A hotel?” Thomas blinked. “Surely a hotel site would be perfect refugee housing?”

“Sabotaging your own purchase, Mister Thomas?” Sastry asked.

“We’re ideally looking to buy out and replace economically non-viable luxury properties, not places that could save lives. The entire goal of this project is to ultimately save lives in a roundabout way, as I said.”

“All the company ever succeeded in doing was laying the foundation,” Sastry pointed out. “The instant the crisis became apparent, it all fell apart. The hotel’s investors were not so…far-sighted as you.”

“What happened to the workers?”

“Still here, and soon to be quite busy I expect. Will you give them a job? Take them away from projects which would more immediately save lives?”

“We have our own people,” Thomas replied.

“Good. In any case, Chamakatee Dhaara is not the only possible location, but I thought you would appreciate the leg up provided by what’s already there. Another site you might consider is somewhat closer to town…”

So the conversation went. He was…surprised by the man from the Byron Group, and by the corporation itself, and gave in to the temptation to poke and investigate a little past the point he really should have. Having come into the conversation expecting nothing more than a big American company making a self-interested play for relevance in the midst of a crisis…

Well, perhaps they still were exactly that. But Levaughn Thomas at least seemed to speak with a conviction that shone out from under his polished, pompous, pampered exterior. If nothing else, MBG had certainly sold its…“Cool-ade,” was it? …to him.

The meeting had to end, however. The governor was a busy man, and Thomas had sites to visit and consider the company’s next move, so they shook hands and parted ways, with Sastry being in no doubt that MBG were here to stay…and therefore so to would be an important part of his country’s heritage.

Self-interested or not, bless them for thinking of that. After all, when Earth was gone, all that would be left of it would be the stories. So in a way, they were saving the Earth.

How could Sastry not grant them his blessing?

He smiled as he watched the American’s car leave, then readied himself for his next meeting. There was much to do.

And precious little time.

’That Show with Jamal Taylor’ set, New York City, USA, Earth

Jamal Taylor

It had been quite a while since the Great Father of the Gao had graced their stage, and this visit in particular involved quite a bit of prep. Firstly, security: it was oppressive. There were multiple rings of protection, both human and gaoian, and a couple Given-Men were involved too, because…

Tonight was an incredible ensemble of leadership.

The audience had been carefully screened, sniffed, and examined by many sets of wary eyes and sensitive noses. Secondly: the stage floor had been ripped out and replaced with something much sturdier to handle the many and large beings who would be occupying it tonight. They’d taken the opportunity to redesign the setting too, because this new format seemed like it’d be a winner to Jamal. Ensemble shows were good for information and that, really, was what people tuned in for nowadays. Light humor was just there to lubricate the panel hearings.

They kept the closing performance, though, and rehearsing for that (along with the musical entertainment) had been a highlight for his bigger guests. People needed something.

Thirdly, there was that rehearsal. That wasn’t how they usually did things of course, being at heart a live variety show, but in this case it was necessary so that everyone had a run-through of their talking points, and end-of-show activities. Fortunately everyone had something reasonably dignified they could do, so that should take some of the evening’s edge off. And besides, some of the guests weren’t accustomed to being on-camera. Best to get familiar.

Lastly, Instead of introducing his guests one at a time, they spent some considerable time mingling with the audience and answering questions, all in an effort to keep the evening on-task. The show went with a dead opening, everyone already seated and refreshments pre-positioned.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jamal started when they went live, “tonight is a special episode and we don’t have time to waste on my usual lame stand-up routine.”

Some polite laughs, there. That was good.

“Yes, thank you. Tonight, after I think what we can all agree have been a rough and shocking few months…tonight, we are visiting with leaders from our little part of the world, along with those whose generosity cannot possibly be understated. Please welcome, first and foremost, His Most Hugest-est the Great Father…”

Daar sat sprawled out on a nice thick rug while reclining against a huge cushion in regal repose, stretched out yet alert like the giant hulking apex predator he was. He was considerably more in every respect than the last time they’d met, bigger and taller and more impressive than ever, and his indulgent chitter made the stage shake underfoot a little.

How the Gao could have produced a being like him–!

Jamal put those thoughts away and waited for the right moment. “Alongside him sits Her Tolerant Majesty the Great Mother…”

He hadn’t told them this bit during rehearsals, only promised they’d be…cheekily complimentary. To judge from the set of her ears, Naydra loved it and duck-nodded in complete agreement.

“Boy, ain’t that th’ truth,” Daar grumbled happily. Still a personable sort of man, at least.

“Both are taking time out of their insanely busy schedules to have a chat with us,” Jamal added. Daar all by himself was dominating stage-left, so Jamal turned to the other side.

Seating this lot had been a nightmare of protocol, consultation and the optics of power. It had involved a personal sacrifice on Jamal’s part, too: his desk in the middle had been made much shorter than usual to make room for them all.

The Great Father and his Great Mother sat alone. Partly this was an acknowledgement of the underlying power dynamics—there was no point pretending who the real boss was these days. Partly this was for visual balance. Mostly it was to lower construction costs; Daar would fall right through any reasonable (or even unreasonable) stage floor with his ridiculous mass, and hand-pouring a concrete dais in a building was some back-breaking work, after all.

So they only did that for his half. Stage right was a single huge, sweeping couch. This time, Jamal started on the outside and worked his way in.

“Next we have Yan and Vemik Given-Man, alongside the Singer of Vemik’s tribe. Yan is Chief of the Lodge and can fairly be described as the leader of his people. Welcome,” he nodded to all three. Yan and the Singer nodded their dignified thanks, while Vemik gave him a big tusky grin and waved.

Jamal had never met a ten’gewek before. He knew these three were pretty exceptional among their people, but he hadn’t been prepared for the in-person experience. They were…a very intense and alien sort of handsome. Brutally perfect bodies, weirdly compelling faces. In fact it was hard to look away from any of them, especially the eyes. They weren’t merely a solid color or patterned. They were iridescent. And the three of them were a bit much personality-wise, but Jamal at least had plenty of experience with that.

“I’m also joined tonight by His Excellency Sir Jeremy Sandy the Governor-General of Folctha, President Margaret White of the United States, Prime Minister Luke Ratcliffe of the United Kingdom…” the final figure, closest to his desk, took up as much couch space as a given-man. “…and his Royal Highness, Prince Alex of Ekallim-Igigi, Ambassador at-Large to Humankind. And I want to tell you folks, with guests like these? Our catering budget is shot for the next year!”

“I brought werne!” Yan hooted indignantly, but somehow one could tell he wasn’t angry.

“It was delicious, too!”

Laughter turned into polite applause welcoming them all to the re-designed stage. Frankly it was a small miracle they all fit in any dignified way.

Unmentioned, but acutely present in Jamal’s mind, was a military cordon three blocks in every direction, with an air patrol somewhere overhead and a shield emitter installed on the roof. Really, the only element missing was The Entity, which had politely declined through an intermediary stating that it was ‘at task capacity’ and that it could not spare the attention. It had even provided a precisely enumerated estimate of how many people would die as a consequence of its appearance.

That had been a dose of cold water.

Jamal let the applause die naturally as he returned to his desk, then turned to the couch first. “Madame President, it’s been six months since you broke the news to America about what’s coming for us. Since that time, the Department of Evacuation has been created, the military mobilized in full, and the first evacuees have already left. That’s a lot of challenges overcome very quickly. For those of us who are still here, what does the evacuation look like on the other end?”

Margaret White sat forward and folded her long, delicate fingers in her lap. “It looks like digging out the foundations,” she said. “We have to home, feed and clothe millions of people, and we have to build all the infrastructure necessary to do that, practically from scratch. Right now, there are hundreds of industrial-scale farms going up on Cimbrean, but not just farms. They’re going to need equipment, so we need the factories to make the equipment. And the factories in turn need the raw materials, and the raw materials need vehicles to transport them….”

“We’ve got a logistical nightmare,” Daar rumbled. It wasn’t an interruption, but a rehearsed continuation. “An’ managin’ it’s proven a real burr in our fur, yijao? So ‘fer everythin’ that needs sourcin’, there’s a requirement in a database now, an’ if you or ‘yer company on Gao, Gaori, Earth, Cimbrean, or Lucent can meet th’ requirement, please fer the love of everythin’ respond. We need ‘ta know everythin’ bout the talent and institutions we’ve got. Our shiny new logistical AIs can’t make good decisions wit’out good data!”

The President nodded fervently, and looked directly into the camera, addressing the people at home. “By responding, you help us determine what you or your organization’s priority will be for offworld migration. This is everything from semiconductor tooling manufacturers, to a little mom-and-pop shop making screws, to individual talents of every description. Please. If you can contribute anything at all, go to the website and fill out the forms. Be accurate. Intentional misrepresentation here will result in a permanent denial of egress.”

Grim nods all around on that final point. “What sort of conditions can the refugees expect to be living in?” Jamal asked.

“That depends on where they go, and under whose aegis. Obviously our priority must be to deliver survival first, rather than comfort, but inhumane conditions are detrimental to survival. Right now we’re looking at barrack housing and small apartments. We are attempting to prioritize this in a needs-based manner, but inevitably any project at this scale will be imperfect. To that end, we have many parallel efforts ongoing on Cimbrean, as well as colonization work on Nightmare and Akyawentuo, and of course His Sublime Majesty here has committed Gao as a refuge world as well.”

“Let’s address those one by one.” Jamal turned to the audience. “But first, let me address something. Do not mistake his sublime majesty’s accent or our ten’gewek friend’s speech pattern as having anything to do with any kind of stupidity. In both cases, it can physically hurt for them to speak English. With Daar—”

He yawned, and showed off a terrifying set of sharp teeth and fangs. “M’jaw ain’t as flexible.” He snapped his mouth shut with a loud clap! and then worked them for a bit. Both sides of his huge head bulged with power under the fur of his cheeks.

…Damn, the big bastard could bite Jamal in half, probably! “And with the ten’gewek?”

Vemik waved at the audience with his forked, prehensile tongue. It had to be something like two feet long! The reaction was a mixture of laughter, shock, and a few raucous catcalls.

“Keep it civil, folks! In any case,” he turned to the ten’gewek. “This colony is on your world. As I understand it, your people number a few tens of thousands. That’s a decent-sized town by human standards…aren’t your people concerned about being outnumbered on your own homeworld?”

Yan spoke up, with a gravelly, booming voice. “Yes. We worry about many things. We know our strength is very small next to yours. We know some humans, they are not good. We read much. History. Slavery, Trail of Tears, war after war, hollo caust, nuclear bombs. Even saw one myself, on my own world.”

Vemik nodded, and took over with an optimistic hoot. “But we saw that bomb because you saved our people from extinction. My good friend, Jooyun Sky-Brother, he and Awisun and Shyow. They meet us, they take very dangerous accidental meeting, and they find Giving of peace in it. Gods bless them! They help us fight High-rarchy, learn deep Truth of our own people. And then, Jooyun teaches us steel. The first big sky-learning, and the most important. So we know there is much good in the human race.”

The Singer had a quieter voice than either of the men, but still quite alarmingly deep by human standards. “And we know you need our strength. I have blessed, prayed for many young red-crest going to fight in the sky. A few have not come back, over the seasons. The ones who do, tell us about the evil we fight. We all believe, now. And that evil will come for us again. Without us, you can’t fight them. Without you, we would not survive their return.”

“Besides. New Alexandria is library,” Vemik added. “Akyawentuo is not a place to save many lives, but it can save other things.”

There was an important point, there.

“You say, ‘not many lives.’ I think you might imagine that isn’t something people want to hear.”

Vemik shrugged. “Most humans, next to us, weak in muscle and body. Is just the truth. Tough, yes. Long work in you! But you must grow strong in high gravity first, and Akyawentuo is so high, we never leave without human help. Higher even than Nightmare!”

“Akyawentuo is often quoted as around one-point-two Earth gee,” prince Alex added. “But that’s not actually true. That’s the engineering category, used for structural and personnel safety. Because gravity is actually subtle to measure precisely, survey ships don’t generally bother with accuracy. Gaoian gravity is right at the upper edge of the Dominion Acceptable Standard. Point-nine-something to under one-point-two is considered High Gravity; survivable and functional, but not advisable. Nightmare and Akyawentuo are both categorized as Unsafe Gravity; safety equipment and observers required, brief excursions only. Nightmare is at the bottom of that range, but it’s quite a wide category, and Akyawentuo is right at the top.”

“You can certainly feel it,” Sir Jeremy Sandy. “I’ve had the pleasure to visit both worlds in the same day. If you went to one or the other you might not notice, they both feel tiringly heavy. But compared to each other—”

“Give you good leg workout!” Vemik interrupted, to some laughs. “Look at mine!” He swung his legs a bit like a kid sitting in a too-tall seat—ten’gewek had proportionately shorter legs than humans—and wiggled his toes for good measure. His…

Christ, he was properly big. His giant shoulders were wide like three huge men, his thighs massive enough to dwarf even those men’s chests. In fact they were each bigger than his own thick-muscled waist, and his own back and chest was so deep he could barely squeeze sideways through a door. He had massive long arms with beachball-big biceps, too. But it was his calves that made the point. They were legit as big as his arms, and writhed as he wiggled his toes. He earned a couple whoops from the audience, too.

His Singer was no slouch even next to him; She was definitely feminine, somehow, but one could probably fit every human being alive who might prove her match inside the studio, she was that impressive. And Yan sitting next on his other side was markedly bigger and stronger than Vemik, though not any taller…how exactly had anyone impressed these people?!

“Careful,” Alex rumbled with a grin, “don’t encourage him!”

“Fine, I show off more later! But, muscle isn’t only important thing. You are made for Earth,” he pronounced that last word carefully. “This is a world that rewards endless, lanky strength. My people would starve to death most places here, I think. But on Akyawentuo? Lots of good food on our world, so a strong man never goes hungry. But! The heat will test you always, so will the beasts, big and small. On the open grass, there are things not even up to your knees that would break you if they had a chance. Look at us three! We did not grow this way by accident!”

And, well…yeah, he had a point. No fat to soften any edge on any of them, all three looked expertly carved from stone. At least physically speaking, they really were like the brutally heroic ideal of primitives. To that point, the three of them were clad in well-made loincloths and in the men’s case, somehow crammed themselves into some hilariously minimal briefs to theoretically ensure modesty. Singer had a leather wrap across her chest for the same reason and to the same sort of effect.

Honestly, both tended to draw attention and achieve the exact opposite as far as Jamal was concerned, but television standards were non-negotiable.

“Singularity has taken the lead on settling Akyawentuo, and to that end we’ve established a baseline fitness profile for eligibility,” Prince Alex added. He was dressed in slacks and a plain black stretchy t-shirt. Mostly to make the same point, Jamal surmised. “The upshot is if you meet it, immigration will be free for you! The downside is almost nobody will, even if they train for it. And those who are selected as critical personnel will need to meet additional fitness and health standards, or they’ll lose their spot. It’s harsh, but…that’s the survivalist reality. It’s nearly as bad for Nightmare.”

“Why are we settling Nightmare?” Jamal asked.

“Diversity of location,” Governor Sandy explained. “The goal is to have as many eggs in as many baskets as possible. We wanted to have Ambassador Etsicitty here to talk about it, but he’s…busy there and on Cimbrean. His work is too important to interrupt with this, I’m afraid.”

“And I don’t think the stage would be able to take much more!” Jamal commented, deciding now was the moment for a small bit of levity.

Alex grinned. “Would you believe me if I told you he can toss me around like a little boy?”

“Well…” Jamal gave Alex a cheesy once-over for the camera’s benefit. “That’s terrifying.”

“He kind of is, yes,” President White said, almost unconsciously. There was a genuine laugh from the audience, and she cleared her throat as it settled. “…He’s a good man, though. In any case, Cimbrean is legally the property of the United Kingdom. The territories of Franklin, Nouveau Acadia, New Botany and Abeltown are kind concessions. Garden is completely the Entity’s domain. Gao and Akyawentuo rightly belong to their native peoples, New Uruk belongs to Singularity, all rights to Lucent were ceded by treaty…the United States is settling Nightmare because it’s the only planet in all the galaxy that is ours.”

“On face value, it sounds pretty good,” Jamal said. “That’s…six planets, not counting the space stations. Doesn’t that mean there’s plenty of room for everyone?”

“Plenty of room, yes. If you don’t mind starving to death,” Ratcliffe spoke up. “And therein really lies the problem, because, believe me, we’ve heard and discussed all the suggestions. I know there’s a strong voice out there for just moving the people, giving them seeds and tools and relying on subsistence farming. It won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“What’s your track record for keeping your houseplants alive, Jamal?”

“I, uh…well, I have a housekeeper,” Jamal confessed. And plastic plants, he added internally.

“How highly do you rate your chances of being able to feed yourself on what you can grow, then?” Ratcliffe asked. “Contrary to opinions in New York, it is not, in fact, as simple as dropping a seed into the ground, adding water, and going about your day. We have a video to this point, actually…”

That was the first rehearsed cue. The video was a ten minute overview and montage following a new farm going up in Franklin under the eye of a tough-looking farmer by the name of Austin Beaufort. There was a bit of manly fun with him and the ambassador, but most of it…

Well, he hadn’t seen the video. He had no idea.

“Farmin’ is one o’ my keenest interests,” the Great Father rumbled, once the video was over. Indeed, he had been prominent in one quick shot there, pulling an absolutely huge-looking plow alongside a massive tractor pulling its own…but the tractor was pulling more slowly. “Agriculture at scale is one o’ th’ most technologically sophisticated endeavors. Always has been, prob’ly always will be. Subsistence farmin’s hard enough in cradle worlds! How’re we s’posed ‘ta train an’ equip every lil’ family to start that on effectively sterile land?!”

“And then what happens when people’s crops fail?” Naydra asked. “When hunger and desperation drive them to try to save their families by any means necessary? The truth is, if we try to go down that route, what’s likely to happen is fewer people will survive overall.”

“It’s a grim calculus,” President White agreed, composedly. “For the maximum number of people possible to make it, we must accept that we cannot save everyone.”

They had arrived at the first of the truly hard questions Jamal needed to ask. “Do you have anything to say to the people who won’t be saved?”

There was a moment’s silence. They all knew who was supposed to answer first, but even so it took the President a few seconds to summon it.

“The numbers…right now, the numbers are grim. We’re working to improve them, but still. We think about one in ten people will escape. Which is quite an improvement on where we were six months ago, but…”

She cleared her throat, and the silence was back, broken only by Naydra’s quiet, restrained keen, Vemik’s soft mournful hoot, and the sound of somebody sniffling in the audience.

“I should add…I will not be among those. I am old, I’ve had my children, I’ve led a good life…it wouldn’t be right. And I hope others will choose to remain with me.”

“Isn’t that a hard thing to bear?” Jamal asked.

“Some days, yes. But I have my faith, and I have an old bit of Greek wisdom framed in the Oval Office: ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.’ That, for me, is the hard lesson of this crisis…that and one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

The President sat back, and exhaled softly. “I still have hope for the future, and part of that hope comes from the fact that, in a sense, we’re getting a clean sweep.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…look, I don’t want to pretend that what’s coming is a good thing. It isn’t. But it doesn’t need to be our doom. We can free ourselves of all the ancient conflicts and grudges. Why hold onto them? Something far more important is at stake.

“We have a choice,” Governor Sandy agreed. “When we’re cut adrift, we can fly apart, or we can come together. It’s a chance to start over in a way we’ve never had. This is an event that will totally redefine our peoples. His Sublime Majesty over there has begun work on a draft Constitution, from what I understand! I must emphasize…the Gao would never do that on their own. Their self-governance doesn’t really need it. They’re doing this for us.”

”We do this out of love and loyalty,” Naydra added. “Truly.”

“It will be a challenge,” Alex warned. “We are very different peoples with very different views. Different strengths and weaknesses. That could prove ugly, if we stuck to the crass concerns about power and prestige…or, we could unite out of love, and forge something greater than the galaxy has ever seen. I believe it with all my heart. The hidden kingdom my father and his closest friends forged was made for this purpose. It is a dream we never let die.”

The massive young boy was so earnest that in any other year and circumstance Jamal might have gently tried to puncture it. But, that had been in an age where cynicism was cheap and safe. Now, honest hope was such a rare commodity that he didn’t dare poke at it at all.

Instead, he nodded and decided to move the conversation forward. “So. Let’s start talking specifics. I understand there have been resources made available?”

They talked at a high level, each leader according to their specific portion of the rescue. Singularity and the ten’gewek were looking for hardy, adventurous types who could hack survival on quite possibly the greatest of the Deathworlds. This was both to maximize success and to help uplift the ten’gewek; jungle-dwellers they might be, but some part of the modern world would touch them, now. They needed help navigating that without losing themselves.

“At the end of it,” Alex concluded, “you need to really understand the why of this. Look at me. There’s…honestly, maybe a couple dozen human beings or so who are my match. I can list on one hand the ones who can embarrass me. Same for the gao. But the ten’gewek? There’s hundreds who can humble me, in a species whose numbers couldn’t fill a small town, and half of them aren’t even Given-Men. I have to work my tail off to look like this and that’s on top of, well, all the breeding and science we’re somewhat infamous for these days. Vemik here?”

The big Given-Man grinned, but didn’t do much more except sit upright and look pretty. Frankly, he didn’t need to. The three of them were unreal.

“That’s all him, and he’s got quite a few Given-Men he can claim as his peers. He can tie me and the ambassador into knots! There’s literally only one human being alive who can best him. It takes the very best we have just to give him a real challenge, and for Yan over here? That singular man is his friendly competition. So, do you think you can hang with them? Figuratively, at least? And are you up for a challenge?”

Yan unfolded his intimidating arms with an approving grunt. “And can you appreciate why you need our strength? If so, get in contact with us. We need your strength, too.”

He made his point just like Vemik did. All he had to do was sit there and glance down at his own arms. That little show all by itself likely filtered out most of the junk applicants.

Daar and Naydra, on the other hand, had much to say on what was needed to live among the Gao.

“The road between our peoples has been an easier one than it had any right to be,” the Great Mother noted. “We’re very lucky, in the regard that humans and the Gao both find friends wherever we go, and not just inside our own species. You have your pets and your livestock, so do we. It makes sense that we’d find something to like in each other. But at the same time, we’re aliens to each other. There are ways we do things that would shock a human, and there are ways humans do things that shock us. The key to our futures together is to cease being alien, and grow into being brothers and sisters, united in goodness.”

The show went long past its usual time slot, but that had all been negotiated in advance. This was weaponized television and streaming. Propaganda, really…but Jamal was entirely unconflicted about that. People needed it. People needed either hope or purpose, just like he did, and he was proud that his hope and purpose had turned out to be giving them what they needed.

Not bad for a second-rate comedian.

As promised, they ended on a lighter note. Daar and the ten’gewek put on a performance. He really was bigger and better than ever and there was something intimidatingly inspiring about it all, to see what kind of friend they had in the sky, and see how impossibly awesome he could be. Same with the ten’gewek, though they were more ultrahuman than biblical like Daar. Both species were powerful peoples in every meaning of the word…and bound to humankind by undying affection and gratitude.

They played with a car. Vemik and Singer tore it apart and started playing catch with the engine. Yan crumpled the car up into a ball of his own. They tossed both to Daar…and he smashed them into one as if they were nothing more than silly putty. By the time he was done he had a compact ball of almost perfectly round steel that shattered the floor where he dropped it. They did some other casual feats of extreme might too, between questions, but that bit was unforgettable.

It was simultaneously humbling that such magnificent peoples existed at all, and inspiring that humanity had befriended them, and saved them from certain doom.

Sir Jeremy Sandy, the President, and the Prime Minister opted for something much more…well, human. A subtle game of humor and cleverness, with a little deft skill at the end: random trivia drawn out of a hat, and each right answer meant a dart throw.

Ratcliffe turned out to have an amazing smack-talk game, too. He had mastered the art of winking offensiveness that somehow, obviously, wasn’t meant at all.

All carefully picked, too. Darts in particular was a sport none of the aliens were much good at: the ten’gewek had excellent aim but were far too crushingly thick-fingered for the little darts. Daar chittered and showed off how one claw of his was damn near a foot long.

“Bet I could caber-toss a telephone pole through a manhole, though!”

Something to try the next time he visited. Meanwhile, Naydra could be relied upon to hit everything but the board, especially when she started chittering. They were all pretty surprisingly good at trivia, though.

The Singer in particular had a head for myth. “Ooh! I know! Is Loki, Norse god of mischief!”

“Is the right answer! Go ahead and throw…”

The Singer hooted happily, retrieved a dart deftly with her tail, transferred it to her hand—earning some laughs along the way for her casual use of the extra limb—then lined up the shot, and threw from the shoulder. Hard.

“…Well.” Jamal cleared his throat into the ensuing silence. “So much for that dartboard.”

She’d actually hit a bulls-eye. And turned the board into a crumpled cone. And the less said about the unfortunate dart’s fate, the better. The Singer wilted a bit, even as sympathetic laughter rolled around the audience. “Sorry.”

“No sorry!” Yan hooted, “should see her hunting! Just needs a pebble or two…”

Ratcliffe chuckled, “So, don’t anger the Singer, got it.”

“Well, we were coming to the end of our time anyway,” Jamal declared. “And I do have a closing monologue, despite everything…”

Some whoops from the audience made it clear this was welcome news, and his guests gladly sat down and let him deliver it.

It wasn’t a funny one, tonight. It had humor in it, of course, but he still didn’t feel ready to do a funny bit just for the sake of being funny. Now wasn’t the time for that, not yet.

Instead…

Instead he opened his heart up, a bit. Recounted some of his own fears and worries. Summarized just one of the thousands of heartbreaking stories he’d heard from around the country as things broke down, but this one had a happy ending. He’d teared up a bit telling it, too. It was a happy ending, but not without its own tragedy.

Ten’gewek gave good hugs, he learned. Even if it felt a little too much like being ground between a trio of hot musky bricks on live TV. It was good for a laugh, and they hammed it up a bit, too.

A good moment, actually. They needed more like it.

“I’ve come to appreciate happy endings, recently,” he said, once he’d shooed them back to the couch. “I grew up in an era of series and movies where ‘gritty realism’ means the good guys die, and the bad guys never get a redemption arc, or even where there are no good guys and bad guys, just equally dark gray awful people with few redeeming qualities. And that bothers me because it’s not realistic. We focus on tragedies, but life is also full of triumph. It’s full of weird things like a whole orphanage getting adopted by a team of supersoldiers. Alien monsters turning out to be anything but. In fact, they may be the best friends we ever had. The best stories, like real life, ride that line between light and dark. You need tragedy to make hope relevant…and you need hope to see you past the tragedy.”

He smiled at the nodding heads in the crowd, and nodded with them. “That’s what this has been about, tonight. Hope. And I hope we’ve managed to give you some today. There’ll be more shows like this in the future, I hope. Every step of the way, with each little victory—and each setback—this show will be here and, I hope, we’ll be welcoming my guests back again for more. For as long as we have left. Thank you, and good night.”

The after-show was nice, too. Lots of meet-and-greet, and the guests seemed keen on shaking every hand and hearing every story. That was good. A thousand people would leave with good stories to share, having met celebrities and real people the likes of which Hollywood could never conjure.

Social media analytics said they’d done their job too. People were buoyed. The ratio of positive sentiments to negative was about as good as could realistically be expected.

High morale meant more people saved. Jamal truly believed that. Which meant he could go home tonight with his head held high, knowing he’d done his part. So, after an evening of wine and conversation and the various heads of state leaving as soon as they politely could…

Jamal went home too. Scratched his cat Amy behind the ears, took a shower, flopped into bed in a state of completely physical exhaustion…

And enjoyed the best night’s sleep he’d had in years.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Earth

Ava Coombes

“Man, the fact you’re not touching the steering wheel is fuckin’ with me…”

Ava had to admit to feeling about the same way as Derek. The Entity’s land drones didn’t need a human driver, of course. It just…what had her doppelganger said? ‘Spun up a sub-aware navigation daemon’ and the truck drove itself far better than anything programmed by humans. But she still didn’t feel entirely safe about the fact that their escort, Bonhomie Sousa, was sitting in the driving seat with his interlaced fingers resting lightly on the paunch of his belly while their convoy breezed through the streets behind a Polícia escort.

It had come as news to Ava that the Entity had human agents on Earth now. But then again, it was rich in the only form of wealth that mattered nowadays: safety. It didn’t need to do more than pay some people in a guaranteed place on its garden and all of a sudden it had a few hundred people moving heaven and earth on its behalf.

They’d certainly managed to sort out something the Entity would never have done on its own, in the form of branding. The dead, cold, impersonal word ‘Entity’ was hidden behind the much warmer, friendlier name ‘Garden’ and the hexagonal-module-flower design of the station itself had been stylized in green and silver on a black background for a logo.

Armed with some positive branding, the Entity’s agents had then scattered across the globe with the same mandate: work alongside local governments to get as many people as possible into stasis bags. Each one took with them a tiny, suitcase-sized jump array, through which could come a larger jump array through which could come a convoy of trucks carrying lots of jump arrays and the associated stuff.

There was a lot of that. The Entity had figured out a ticket system, the Garden volunteers had worked up an app. It was as simple as simple got, really: take a ticket, scan the QR code, assign each ticket to a family member in the app…then go get on with your day. When the Entity had room, it pinged the app and you had a twenty-four hour window to get every registered person in your group to the nearest Garden jump array.

All they needed once that was in place was official permission and cooperation, some soldiers to keep the peace, and a public information campaign.

That last part was why Ava was along for the ride this time. The Entity wanted a documentary, magazine articles, web portal, the lot. It needed photos, footage and commentary. And who better than Ava?

So, they were on their way up to Rocinha. The Entity’s focus was on saving the economically disadvantaged after all, and for all that things had come a long way for the people of Rio’s former favelas, the area was still where the people who’d benefited least from all the world’s technological and economic advances lived.

Ava’s own, slightly more youthful voice giggled at her on the car’s sound system. “What, you don’t trust me to drive?”

“I happen to know for a fact that you never got a driver’s license,” Ava replied, evenly.

“Technically, I’m not the one doing the driving.”

“Yeah, that makes me feel much better…” Derek grumbled, and tightened his grip on the overhead handle.

“We’re a sapient machine swarm that can react thousands of times faster than a human, and the cars comply with and exceed the most stringent standards in the world. I promise, you couldn’t possibly be in safer hands.”

Derek grumbled…but he did let go of the handle and try to relax. Ava smiled at him, then turned her attention back to the tablet in her hand. There was a smaller airborne drone following them to catch aerial footage, the truck itself was covered in cameras…gone were the days when she’d have needed to stop and get out and take pictures herself. She could just grab snippets from the streams and save them for later.

Still…she was looking forward to reaching their destination and getting out and doing some stuff with the real lenses and filters. Drone feed was fine for capturing moments, but capturing feelings? The human hand and eye in conjunction with a proper SLR would never be replaced.

The journey passed peacefully. People turned to watch them slide past; this convoy of sleek, shiny, slightly otherworldly trucks stuck out among the painted concrete, rat’s-nest wiring and antique vehicles almost as much as if they’d just landed in a spaceship.

And to Ava’s concern, when they reached their destination and alighted…the prevailing energy of the onlookers wasn’t so very happy to see them. She saw mothers usher their kids inside. More concerningly still, the older, more streetwise kids were nowhere to be seen at all.

Derek sensed it too. “Hey, Daemon? You sure about this?”

“This is what we need you for,” Daemon replied.

“We face mistrust everywhere we go,” Bonhomie elaborated. “People have heard the world is ending and then we show up with weird trucks and weird technology and the closest thing the Entity has to a face and voice is—no offense, Daemon—the stolen image of an American. It doesn’t matter that we’re offering them a lifeline. The lifeline is beng stuffed in a bag and then being at our mercy as to when and where they’ll be let out. To some…”

“I get it,” Ava nodded, thinking of the alien abductees she knew, and remembering how awful feeling powerless was.

She looked to Derek, who gave her a reassuring nod, then got out her camera and started looking for people to interview. It was slow going. A lot of them slunk away if she started moving in their direction. The few who didn’t were either a few old-timers who’d given their last fuck decades ago and who wouldn’t be taking the Entity’s arrays even if they did trust the data-mind from beyond the stars with a stolen human face.

Jesucristo, the Garden Program had a massive hill to climb.

Well, at least they had some years to work on it.

Evasiveness aside, a crowd formed to watch the array go up, and they all took a step back and made a collective gasp when it thumped for the very first time, disgorging a team of technicians and their gear—and a couple security drones, Ava noted—who promptly started assembling the additional arrays and power supply.

“Where do you find all these guys?” she asked.

“You’re looking at half of all the people we’ve recruited so far,” Daemon replied. “They’re building three of these today. Another reason we need the good press: the more people we can recruit, the more of this we can do.”

“Who are they?”

“Men and a few women from all walks of life,” Bonhomie answered, gesturing inclusively to himself. “We sit at the unique intersection of being able-bodied and capable, but with a lower chance of selection under the published rubrics.”

“Why? What were you before all this?”

“I managed a home goods store.” Bonhomie shrugged wryly. “Dishwashers, fridges, TVs and so on. So. Able-bodied, know how to manage inventory and people and timetables, but not the sort of thing a settlement baron is made of, yijao?”

“If you say so…?”

“But I’m determined to survive this, and save my family. So I went looking for every opportunity I could find on the Internet, and I found the Entity’s call for help and sent an email and…here we are. My family’s already safe, we have an apartment on the Garden Station. So now, I can focus on…”

He waved a hand toward the array complex. There were six of them now, fed by a single generator. Ava puzzled briefly over the lack of visible barriers then realized that the setup was deliberately designed to look harmless. No fences, no barriers, no barbed wires, no obvious armed guards. Nothing intimidating or oppressive. But behind that realization, she noticed the presence of a sophisticated forcefield generator. When people started using this thing, the Entity would be able to corral them and move them safely.

And despite the ongoing wary lurking…there was a family. A skinny man with a week’s worth of stubble staggering under the weight of a large cardboard box and trailed by a tired and hurried looking young mother trying to herd two cautious kids.

Another incarnation of Daemon shimmered into existence to greet them. They gave a confused glance toward Ava, then spoke quietly and fervently with the holographic version before being waved through onto one of the array platforms: they vanished with a black-flash and thump.

“How many conversations can you carry on simultaneously, Daemon?” Ava asked, curiously.

“Not many. Two or three, if we slow down our perception of time. Subjectively, it’s a lot like I remember being you was.”

“Huh. You really do need human agents for a project this big, then,” Derek mused.

The simple “Yup” he got in reply suggested that Daemon might well actually be juggling some other conversations.

As for the jump array…having seen some of their neighbors pass through, other families were gathering. Ava decided the moment was right to try again for a better picture and a better interview. This time, she wasn’t disappointed. This time, she met people, got their stories, and gained permission to tell the world.

A line formed. Tickets and QR codes started getting handed out. The technicians, satisfied that everything was working properly, jumped out again to go deal with an assembly project in Bangladesh, and Ava lost herself in the busy blur of journalism.

A nudge on her shoulder pulled her out of it. Derek pointed to the sky, indicating that sunset was coming soon. They packed up and headed back in the truck rather than use the Rocinha jump complex.

To Ava’s dismay, they were followed by a trio of motorbikes part of the way back, until the Entity flashed the truck’s shields at them: the riders peeled off at the next intersection, and the rest of the journey was uneventful. How much more had gone on around her while she was distracted?

Why were people like that, too? What had those riders thought to gain?

Then again…desperation was an excuse all on its own. And the Entity wasn’t being indiscriminate in who it saved. Single men were…

Well, single men were where they’d always been throughout history: expendable. Left standing on the Titanic’s deck while the women and children got first pick of the lifeboats. Unless they brought a particularly useful skill to the table…

Ava put aside the nauseating sense of sorrow and outraged equity that thought raised in her, and focused on the important part: what she could do to help. And she had some good pictures, some excellent footage, some heart-pulling interviews…

She could make something of this. Spread the word, get more people into the Entity’s bags and safely away. It was a small contribution, but she could help save lives. In these days and times, that was a position of incomparable privilege, and she gave thanks for it.

Far too many people had so much less.

The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Margaret White

The daily security briefing had become a grind, with much of the bad news being domestic. Law and order was hanging by a thread, or outright completely falling apart in some places. There were large stretches of the country where neighborhoods were banding together for safety in the certain knowledge that neither the police nor the national guard were of any use in protecting them, and that their peaceful, civilized lives may very well only extend as far as they could shoot from the barricades.

It wasn’t like the whole country had gone full Mad Max—in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans were good, neighborly, peace-loving and God-fearing people trying to do the right thing and help save lives. But in a population of half a billion people, there were always going to be sufficient maniacs to make everybody’s lives hell.

Margaret had dropped the HEAT on one of the more egregiously evil groups by way of a warning, and the mess they made seemed to have made the point, for now. Which meant today, there was room for the briefing to go into more detail on the global security situation.

It was scarcely any better.

Singularity, in a fit of their usual high-minded idealism, had sent their prince and heir-apparent to every nation on Earth not capable of building their own jump arrays, and handed them out as gifts. All very well and good…except now those nations were clamoring for somewhere to jump to.

In the simplest case, this wasn’t necessarily hard. Cimbrean wasn’t a huge planet but it was virtually uninhabited; the United Kingdom was willing to cede territories in the name of the human race. But…what then? How do you build up? How do you control the security situation?

On the other hand, what was the real harm in letting them try? The basic biologics to get the soil productive weren’t all that difficult to make, and some essential level of survival was surely better than nothing…but was it okay to perpetuate subsistence living, given the high rate of likely failure?

Or was that western bias creeping in? Who would the smaller powers prioritize?

For some, the answer was to sacrifice the out-group. For some, old hatred and distrust was too entrenched to let go. The crab-bucket effect was pinching hard.

It was for this very reason that the Great Father was being selective in who he permitted sanctuary on Gao. She didn’t envy him for explaining that on That Show later tonight. It was the right move for his people, Margaret knew…but it also meant that, practically speaking, the AEC nations had a vast privilege over everybody else.

Russia in particular was not happy. And, increasingly, was showing signs of panic, such as mass conscription of every male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.

The Russian Federation had slid a long way in the last twenty years. Prior to the interstellar contact era, their greatest exports had been fossil fuels and gold, so the rise of asteroid mining, forcefield-solar and fusion power had pulled the rug out from under their entire economy. They’d tried to expand their financial services sector only to be ruthlessly crushed by the existing financial powerhouses, they’d tried to shift over to manufacturing but that was always going to be an uphill struggle with China in the picture, doubly so with the advent of nanofactories…

Their claim on Lucent might well have been their salvation in the fullness of time. But now, there wasn’t the time.

“So what are we anticipating they might do?”

General Louden Haga, The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was a perpetually grim man, but today he looked even grimmer. “At this point, we have intel and traffic suggesting President Volkov is planning to invade Kazakhstan.”

Margaret blanked for a second. “…Why?!” she managed after an incredulous second.

Haga pulled up some maps and satellite imagery. “The Kazakhs have sought to keep some control of the public perception of their evacuation campaign by centralizing it outside the capitol, Astana. So all their food, prefab buildings, medicine, seed, construction materials, vehicles, their colonist candidates, their jump arrays, everything, it’s all assembling at Ereymentau, seventy miles east of Astana along the railroad…but only a hundred and thirty miles from the Russian border.”

“Oh no…”

Bad as that news was, Margaret knew that Kazakhstan had joined the nuclear club in recent years. In the modern era, city shields and other measures significantly lessened the threat of a tactical strike…but did not eliminate it. Nor did they remove strategic strikes from anyone’s radar. All the modern thinking focused on orbital kinetics but they didn’t have anything on the horror or permanency of a plain old thermonuclear weapon.

Haga nodded grimly. “If the Russians can seize all that material, it’ll double the number of people they can evacuate to their settlement on Lucent.”

“Volkov can’t possibly imagine Kazakhstan wouldn’t fight back with everything they have, can he? Their survival as a nation and an ethnic group is on the line.”

“None of which will matter if the Russian army can quickly seize Ereymentau and sabotage the railroad,” Haga replied. “They’ll face little resistance, the Kazakh military is much smaller, and most of it is bound up maintaining domestic law and order, just like everyone else’s.”

“So…the temptation to nuke something in retaliation would be, if anything, stronger.”

“Our sources in Astana have clammed up pretty sharply, too. We’re…well, your PDB will have more on that, so I won’t steal her thunder. But I will note that, uh, we’d like to re-familiarize you with the Football sometime soon.”

Lord above…

Out loud, Margaret took a deep breath and nodded. “Are there any other potential flashpoints I should know about that might complicate this?”

“Not directly. There’s a deep dive in the PDB, but right now our full attention is focused on China, Russia, India, and now Kazakhstan. Pakistan has kept quiet for all this. The whole situation is…unstable. We’re having a standup as soon as I return and the first item of the agenda is if we should recommend a DEFCON change.”

“Then I’d better not keep you,” Margaret said, and stood.

Haga stood with her. “Madame President.”

He left, and, sure enough Margaret got that deep-dive which contained absolutely nothing to settle her nerves. The whole world was taut like a guitar string, stretched between resolve and panic. And unlike the rotten elements inside America, there was no plausible way to make an example of the troublemakers without making much worse trouble in the process.

The Joint Chiefs sent their recommendation just before noon. As Margaret had guessed, they recommended going to DEFCON 4. Apparently she was going to get that re-familiarization in the evening, just before dinner.

The afternoon, mercifully, was spent enumerating successes, and there had actually been many. It was too early to start celebrating, but by every metric—acreage of farm under development, number of people moved, land surveyed, industrial operations established, and so many, many more…the evacuation was performing well. Inside expected bounds, but in the upper end of expected bounds.

Especially thanks to the Entity. She had to give the thing credit, once it had been granted permission to send drones to Earth and start working directly with people, it had exploded into action. The first few handfuls of refugees to its stasis bagging facility had been a proof-of-concept, but now its growing network of agents were spreading across the world as fast as the swarm’s nanofactories could supply them with trucks and jump arrays….which was actually faster than it could recruit new agents.

And all while working alongside the official evacuation efforts of every nation on Earth. The mind boggled. She wondered if it had the spare time for her to talk with it.

…She wondered if she had the spare time to talk with it.

The football refamiliarization, going over the highly secret and genuinely terrifying protocols necessary for her to authorize the use of America’s most devastating weapons, was as dreadful as she’d expected, but mercifully short. Still, it left her desperately needing some self care. Between the simmering worry over Russia’s plans, and the enormous tension of the whole global situation even without that, she needed…

She needed her grandchildren. She needed to sit down like a normal family (as normal as the First Family could get, anyway) and just be Meemaw for a while. The office could be a lot easier to bear after spending a few minutes listening to a three-year-old babble excitedly about which princess she was dressed as today.

Somehow, that wish was granted. No new immediate crises materialized to pull her away, and she actually got away on schedule for the first time in…well, she couldn’t remember. The first time in far too long.

Today was a Rapunzel day today, apparently. Very pink. There was the usual little disagreement over food (apparently Merryll didn’t like carrots today, and the preceding two years of liking them didn’t count) which was effectively resolved by calling her bluff and moving to share them out among the adults, at which point they suddenly became her carrots again…

A small drama. A manageable drama.

If only adults were so reasonable.

An attempt to relax by watching TV became a couch nap, became waking up with a stiff neck and going to bed, and the night vanished unheeded. Dawn brought with it a return to the Presidential life after a break that had been simultaneously far too brief, and exactly what Margaret needed.

The first thing she learned was that a huge convoy of Russian troops and tanks was en route to Omsk…and a rather smaller convoy was en route from Astana to Ereymantau. The Kazakh government apparently knew what was up, and had responded the only way they could—by putting every man and vehicle they could spare in the way and daring President Volkov to take them on.

Hopefully, Volkov’s plan was to bring the world to the negotiating table and use the threat of what could happen if he was ‘backed into a corner’ as leverage to extract greater assistance for his people from the rest of the world. That kind of brinksmanship was right out of the only playbook Russia had ever bothered to read since the fall of the Soviet Union.

But these were unique times, different times, and Margaret wasn’t so sure he’d get what he was after. And if he didn’t…

Well. She set direction, and did her best to prepare.

That was all a President could do.

New Alexandria, Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Vemik Given-Man

The first really big project the humans got to was their new city. But the city had a very particular purpose. It started out like any village would, really. Some movable huts, made of metal and aramid textiles instead of deadwood, thatch, hides and bone. Some sanitation concerns, so a midden hole to start and a cesspit, dug far away from anything else.

But that was really only the first few months. They kept expanding their tent-hut city, adding power generators, cables, gravel—-very US military, apparently—until they hit a particular size.

Then everything changed. The city wasn’t a city at all. It was a temporary camp which would be torn down completely once the actual city was big enough to sustain itself. Heavy equipment came. Roads, a generating station. Trenches were dug, so wires and pipes could be laid. A good finger away, an out-of-the-way spot became a great big pit, and huge crushing machines got to work chewing rock into gravel, and then some of that into sand and even dust. Rocks were separated by kind—they were getting ready to make lots of concrete.

A small oil derrick went up in the opposite direction. A large farm, in yet another. All set quite well apart so it would take almost all day to walk from one end to the other, because they would all grow, and the humans wanted these very different projects not to touch each other.

The city itself was very carefully sited. Much of it was along a river, but part of it was stretching back into what Jooyun had said were extremely stable and ancient rock formations. As in, billions of years old! Along another was a start-up mine, but that was far away because it was full of heavy metals, some of them radioactive. Akyawentuo was apparently very radioactive, even more than Earth had been. That was because the planet itself was quite a lot younger, and Akyawentuo had escaped a big space-rock killing everything out, like had done the dinosaurs.

But the city’s stretch of rock wasn’t radioactive. It was stable. No water, no soft stones. No cracks or fissures, no earthquakes, nothing. And that was important, because the purpose of the city was to run the greatest of all libraries.

They’d named it New Alexandria. And Shooster was the head librarian!

So, of course, Vemik just had to go on a tour. And Shooster was showing him!

“Nice, big, wide tunnels here. We’re building a library and a museum, a storehouse for as much as we can possibly manage. We’re going to build libraries on Nightmare, on Cimbrean, on Gao. They’ll be directly linked by zero-width comm arrays and jump platforms. It is going to be…my life’s work.”

“How much do you think we’ll be able to save?” Tavon asked.

“At minimum, we’re fairly certain we can evacuate the complete collections from the British Library, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Library and Archives Canada, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Royal Library Denmark, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Vatican Library. I’m actually quite confident we can manage every national library collection from the AEC nations and all the important university libraries, in fact…”

Vemik watched Tilly’s eyes grow wider and wider. “That’s…a bold claim,” she said, faintly. Vemik knew that tone of voice. It meant what she really meant was that Shoo-ster was claiming a godly achievement.

“A boldness borne out of necessity. We can’t…afford…to build something so big in several places at once. We won’t even be able to take our time and catalog properly! So we’re going big here and just, for now, warehousing everything, and building a city so out staff can sort through everything, make sure everything has digital and physical duplicates, and then we’ll build other libraries and distribute to them. A museum is also going up on Cimbrean, after some search. No surprise the Brits took the lead on that…”

Tilly giggled, but the joke went right over Vemik’s head. Oh well.

“Is…lot of books?” he guessed.

“Something like a billion individual items in total, if things go as well as I hope. Even if we fall short, it will instantly seize the record for largest library in the galaxy. The Dominion Interstellar Library might be vaster in terms of digitized content, especially seeing as we’ll be sending them copies of everything we have too…but we’ll dwarf their physical catalog.”

Something about that made Vemik happy. “Strong!” he hooted, and earned more giggles from Tilly. And an eye-roll from Ta-von, but he thought it was funny, Vemik could tell!

“We’d better let you get on with it, then!” Tilly declared.

“Hah! Yes! No rest for the wicked…”

And lots of work still to do, if the tunnels were ever going to be big enough for so much. But Vemik trusted Shoo-ster to know what he was talking about. And the thought that his home was the place strong enough to protect all that knowledge made him so very, very proud.

They shared a tent that night, though Tay-von wasn’t quite ready to play the way Vemik wanted to. Tilly wanted to, Vemik knew. But Tavon wasn’t a very big man even by human standards, and Vemik’s strength scared him, so…he knew how to play nice, and kept himself under control. Besides, Tay-von was a good friend now, and clever! So Vemik settled for a bit of wrasslin’ and some snuggles before he dragged everyone into his nest of blankets and furs for a good, long sleep.

Vemik liked collecting friends. Some, like his neighbor Given-Men and the braver redcrests, or Jooyun and his boys and some others, they were mostly friends through play first. None of them could beat Vemik, but they could take a good tossing around, and a good wrassle and maybe a good, hard fucking. Fun! And almost everyone had something interesting to say about something if you let them say it. Funner!

Others were softer, and lived more in their heads. Like Shoo-ster, who Vemik would never do more than maybe show off a little for laughs. Loo-wiss was mostly that way too, but Loocy was the other way, more like a Singer. He’d found out how to sky-think and play good and hard with them, eventually. Sometimes it was fun but mostly it was basket-ball! Good game.

He hadn’t figured it out with Tilly and Tay-von yet. But he would!

And they’d figure him out. That was what people did, what tribes did. Even sky-tribes. Not always easy, not always well, and sometimes they’d figure out they could never be friends. But so far, Vemik thought, things seemed to be going pretty well.

He said as much to the Singer that night, and was surprised when she was…less warm than usual about it. Hesitant.

“You think I’m wrong?”

“I think you’re Vemik,” she teased him with a sturdy knuckle-tap to his forehead. “Still thinking in the sky, even though you gave up the name. Doesn’t matter to you that we’re too heavy, you still dream about flying.”

“…Thought you like that about me?”

“I do!” she flicked her tail at him.

“Then why—?”

“Sometimes, grump-faces like Yan and Nonu are right, yee-jow? Things might look pretty good, but maybe that’s just the way you look.”

“You saying I look pretty good?” Vemik grinned.

“Always. But…you know what I mean. You’re opty-mist. Always thinking things are good because you hope they’ll be.”

“You think they won’t?”

The Singer shrugged. “I hope they will be. But…humans are tricky people to know. Learn a lot about them in a day, learn almost nothing in a lifetime. I worry, with things going so well.”

“Why?”

“Signs. Portents. Magic. This is a hard test the gods sent them. And I think I know humans well enough to say…I love them, but I don’t think they’ll pass it clean and perfect.”

Well, okay. “Would we?” he asked.

“No. That’s…how I think they won’t. They’re a lot like us. And we wouldn’t. So…”

It wasn’t like her to be so cautious with her words. Vemik didn’t know why she would be now. But…he wrapped her up in a hug, tails entwined. “Don’t think they’ll fail it though?”

“No. They’ll live. I think. Just…a test this hard, less than perfect is going to mean big things.” She shook her head. “Or maybe I’m just afraid. I don’t know. My stomach says ‘things are going too well.’ When we did That Show it was all happy and smiles and nice and hopeful. And I put on happy nice hopeful smiles and joked, and broke that dartboard…all felt too nice. Not real. Jam-al felt it too, I think. Talking about stories and happy endings like that, because that’s what we were doing. Was a big story for people. And stories are…stories are real, but they’re not that kind of real.”

Vemik thought about that, then squeezed her tight. “Good fear,” he said, quietly. “But…I’ll keep being opty-mist. You can be pess-mist. I lift you up, you lift me down. Sound good?”

She nodded, and tickled his face with her tail’s end-tuft. “Sounds good,” she agreed. Then: “…wanna fuck?”

“Always!”

That was better! A good way for Vemik to end a good day, and a good way for her to set her troubled mind aside for a bit. Vemik made sure to do his best, help her relax properly. Took pride in it!

It worked. For both of them. Even so, Vemik thought about the library and all the rest of it for a long while in the dark, even after she’d fallen asleep and was snoring on him. Thought about what they were saving…and how much could be lost if Singer was right and things went bad.

Only thing to do was wait and see, he decided. Wait, see…and learn.

There was always something to learn.

HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha,) Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lieutenant James McBride

Letter for notes,

RE: Chief Sergeant Christian Firth

Chief Sergeant Firth came in today for his quarterly evaluation. He has recently fostered two refugee children from Earth, and is in the process of renovating his property to house more. This is on top of a particularly brutal training grind, the responsibilities he has in HEAT and the martial arts academy he owns and supervises, plus of course his existing family. He also has substantial extended family still living in Kentucky who have not yet been confirmed for evacuation. Likely, due to their own irrational reluctance to commit.

The man is, in short, task saturated and under tremendous pressure. Subjectively, he was energetic and “wired” at first. He was initially reluctant to sit and instead paced the room as we talked. When I did finally convince him to sit down—after reminding him the couch was designed to take a monster truck, so he should be fine—he continued to bounce his legs in place while seated. This was enough to cause a small earthquake and worry my end tables, so I next convinced him to simply lie back and take a few deep breaths. The breathing exercise visibly calmed him, and we had a productive conversation thereafter.

It must be said that Sergeant Firth thrives under high-stress conditions, and he is therefore in the habit of seeking out challenge. He is no fool, however, and recognizes that he needs to potentially re-consider his commitments, or find a better way to delegate. Much of the session was spent discussing how best to prioritize his time and energies.

In particular, advising him to perhaps relax a little about some of his competitive rivalries seems to have struck a chord. He is at a level in his career, I reasoned, where he has no compelling need to prove himself to anyone or anything outside prideful motivations.

He seemed to agree, though he was careful to state he wouldn’t be slowing down, either. Nonetheless, this seemed to drain much of the manic energy out of him, which had still threatened to manifest even lying down. Perhaps all he needed was a slightly different perspective.

I was struck by the strength of his feelings for the two girls he’s taken in. Their names are “Letty” (Letitia) Brown and Jenny Richardson and he spoke with great compassion about their experiences, which were indeed terrible. He expressed particular concern for Miss Richardson, stating that “she imprinted on [him] like a baby bird.” I have supplied him with the contact details for resources which might help the lass: he stated that he would pass these on to his wife.

I have no concerns at this time, and repeated the customary invitation that my door is always open. He joked that the couch was so comfortable he might just take me up on it, and departed in much better humour than he arrived.

Quarterly mental health evaluation: Fit for active duty.

Lt. J McBride
Counsellor, HMS Sharman

MBG Headquarters, Oklahoma City, USA, Earth

Kevin Jenkins

Another day, another group of angry protesters chaining themselves to the fence.

Kevin couldn’t really be mad at them. Shit, forty years ago he would’ve probably been among them. He’d been that kind of virtuously angry in his youth, too, he remembered how easy it was to get drunk on doing the right thing.

Don’t fuckin’ sugarcoat it, Kevin. You were a self-righteous prick.

He’d been lucky enough to grow the fuck up. Those poor kids out there…probably wouldn’t. He, the rich old corporate suit, was gonna escape and live out his days for a couple hundred more years thanks to Cruezzir, while all those young people out there burned.

The social activist college kid he’d once been, still locked up somewhere in the back rooms of his conscience, hated that.

And it wasn’t like he could even disagree with the sentiments on some of those signs: PEOPLE ARE WORTH MORE THAN PAINTINGS for example. It was true, if you were in the Louvre and it was on fire and you had a choice between saving a child or saving the Mona Lisa, well…sorry, Leonardo.

But that was always the trouble with Trolley Problems. They created artificial vacuums around the situation. There was no option for getting your phone out and calling the emergency number like ’stop the trains, some maniac tied people to the tracks!” They jumped through hoops to put you in a “pure” moral dilemma with no bigger picture.

Reality wasn’t so kind. In reality, as Kevin himself had argued, sometimes people could be less important than paintings, if the paintings would save lives.

That rationalization was how he could, just about, endure watching the riot police disperse the protesters again with water cannons and forcefield sweeps and nerveshock pulses that gave him a headache even from this far away.

Third week in a row. The protestors, and the cops, would be back many more times before this was over.

“Kevin, you’re gonna drive yourself mad watching those poor bastards…”

He jumped, turned guiltily away from the window like he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, then relaxed as he realized who it was.

“Hey, Levaughn. How was Lucent?”

“It’s beautiful, actually. Busy and messy as they try to find room for evacuees, but my meeting with the Indian governor was a success. We have permission and a site.” Levaughn wandered up to the window and sighed at the dispersing violence outside. “…Better than here, anyway.”

“And the Chinese?” Kevin asked, not turning to look back at them. He’d flagellated himself enough for one day.

“Still not returning my calls, alas,” Levaughn sighed.

“To hell with ‘em, then,” Kevin decided.

“Not normally the attitude I’d expect to hear from our Chief Ethics Officer…” Levaughn replied, with a bare hint of teasing.

Kevin managed a darkly amused grunt. “At this point, the ethical thing is ruthless practicality,” he said. “If the Chinese don’t want our help then that’s their call. Means the resources we would have invested saving their stuff can save other peoples’ stuff instea—”

Three, four, five, six white craters punch-punch-punched themselves into the glass behind his head: he flung himself away from the window, pulling Levaughn with him. “Jesus fuck!”

“Omigod!” Levaughn, wisely, took cover behind the desk. “Omigod, they’re shooting! Omigod!”

Kevin grimaced as he heard what sounded like a full-scale fucking battle erupt outside. He didn’t dare return to the window to look and in any case, somebody had hit the security alarm and the electrochromic windows had gone dark and opaque.

Fuck, they’d done active shooter drills just last week, too. He darted across the room, grabbed the door brace—a metal right-angle he could wedge into a slot at the base of the door—then lurked nervously in the corner. What was the security team’s password again? Butterfly? Yeah, Butterfly. And he was to reply with ‘hunky dory’ if under duress. Good.

Shit, the shooting outside wasn’t stopping. It had been like a minute, what the fuck?

“It sounds bad out there,” Levaughn whined.

All Kevin could manage in reply was a distracted “Yeah…” He was trying to listen out for the cavalry, or maybe get a sense of who was shooting at whom, from where, and…

He heard hurried booted feet outside the door, then a knock. “Mister Jenkins? Butterfly. You okay in there, sir?”

“We’re fine,” Kevin called back. “I’ve got Levaughn Thomas in here with me.”

“That’s good news. Would you open the door, sir? We’re gonna get you offworld.”

Kevin removed the door brace, and was promptly the center of a knot of serious men in the company’s dark red jackets, then in motion. Not to the elevator, to the stairs and down, down, down into the basement in a flurry of polished shoes tapping on concrete. Mercifully, he couldn’t hear the gunfire any longer.

Through the doors, down the hall, into the array room, onto the platform—
thump

—off the platform, finally let go of. He took a second to adjust his jacket and shirt, catch his breath. Right. Yeah. Chiune Station. They were safely on Cimbrean. Not exactly a dignified exit but then again they didn’t pay the security guys for gentle touchy-feely bullshit.

They’d better be getting good hazard pay for today.

“Alright. Do we have any idea what happened?” he asked aloud, taking refuge in taking charge.

“Not yet, Mister Jenkins—-” The security guy (McCullough, that was it!) turned and looked as the array thumped again, bringing with it another group of people, and used some gentle pressure to suggest to Kevin they should really clear the jump hall.

Kevin nodded and made room. He had a head full of questions but now the adrenaline was winding down he realized they were all stupid time-wasting ones: what he needed to be right now was patient.

Yeah. Patience…deep breaths. Calm.

Over the next couple of minutes the array thumped at a rate of once every few seconds, delivering various people from every level of the company safely.

And then the first wounded guy showed up. He’d taken a bullet to the leg, and it wasn’t some neat fuckin’ Hollywood hole, either. Whatever had hit him had taken half his calf muscle with it, Jesus. Thank fuck there were medics at Chiune Station: they swept in and had him out of there in seconds, but the mood among those loitering near the array was a lot less wired and a whole lot more quiet after that.

Moses Byron was in the next group, and he looked angry. He didn’t technically need the walking stick nowadays, thanks to the expensive meds, and so he waved it furiously at Kevin as he strode down off the platform with more vigor than Kevin had seen in years.

“Moses! You okay?”

“Very much not,” Moses replied fiercely, gesturing for him to follow as he stormed out of the array hall. “It’s fercockt back there. A full-blown assault..”

“Why? What for?”

“To get to the array we just came through.” He stopped suddenly and let out a long, shaky breath. “You should have heard it, Kevin. You should have heard what they’re shouting. Those maniacs have kids with them! They’re that desperate.”

Kevin shut his eyes and uttered the most heartfelt prayer ever to pass his lips: “Fuck.”

“Indeed.” Moses planted his cane and leaned on it, out of habit. “Vey is mir, this is going to be a PR nightmare.”

The first thought to shoot across Kevin’s head was to ask him whether that was really the right thing to think about in that moment. The next thought, though, was…

“…I dunno, Moses. First I knew of it was three bullets hitting the glass right next to my head. That’s a bit too…targeted, for some desperate folks trying to get their families to a jump array.”

Moses waved his stick and shook his head. “Too early to tell anything,” he grumbled, then softened. “…Are you okay?”

“Not the first time I’ve been shot at.” Kevin wrenched a lot of bravado onto his face. It didn’t seem to fool the old man.

“Go get a drink, steady your nerves,” he recommended. “And eat, too. We’ll be cleaning up this mess for a long time.”

Kevin took a deep breath, couldn’t find the words for a reply, patted Moses gratefully on the shoulder and followed the suggestion. A drink, yeah. A stiff one. A martini so dry he could blow the dust off it.

Fuck it. Straight gin.

Just one, though. Moses was right, they were all in for a long, long cleanup, and a hard time too if they were going to somehow deal with the fallout from this without losing momentum on the cultural heritage rescue…

One gin, one sandwich, back to work. The board had all either been bustled safely out or had been elsewhere when the attack started: now, they convened in Chiune Station’s executive meeting room where the first details finally emerged.

The first shots had indeed been the ones that hit Kevin’s window. The police had returned fire, and all of a sudden it seemed like there’d been guns everywhere, and bullets flying every way. Twenty-two people were dead, dozens more wounded. The attackers had, ultimately, reached the jump array only to find it shut down and locked out, at which point they’d dispersed.

All things considered, it could have gone so much worse. But now, MBG was the top story on every news outlet and the trending topic on social media.

The board’s first action was to draft an official response—short, noncommittal, deploring the violence and expressing thoughts and prayers for all the victims. Kevin ducked out to deliver it personally to the ESNN reporters waiting in the lobby. By the time he was back, the damage control effort was in full swing. Thank fuck, thank fuck, their people hadn’t shot first and had instead done their jobs with perfect professionalism. That took a lot of the pressure off…

But the case for cultural conservation needed to be made anew, passionately and strongly and eloquently, or else the heat of the spotlight was going to dry them out. They called in the PR team, rolled up their sleeves, and got to work.

And through it all, Kevin wondered how long it would be before the next, worse incident.

Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Doctor Tilly Briggs

Tavon had found his niche, and it wasn’t what either of them had expected at all: he’d become a shuttle pilot.

Well…sort of. As part of their initiation into the interstellar community, the ten’gewek were entitled to a number of the Dominion’s standard boxy gray universal transport shuttles, the ones designed to be incredibly simple for anyone of any species to use. The things practically flew themselves, once a time and positioning constellation was established in orbit and a proper global survey accomplished. They were easy enough they even had their own entry-level, low-altitude, low-velocity category in human and Gaoian licensing—all you needed was a driver’s license, and a brief certification in radio operation.

Yan had signed off on behalf of the Lodge on basic requirements for all that. Weird, really. The first real statutory law the ten’gewek had was a simple treaty of friendship and driver’s licenses.

Bootstrapping a civilization took unexpected directions! Anyway.

Tilly was trying to think of a way to write all that down in her diary that didn’t make it sound like Tavon hadn’t studied, and studied hard for it. She was actually very proud of him! He’d been determined to find something useful to do besides wandering around at her side, and he’d found it. It was a useful skill and the ten’gewek had become “okay” with the notion for emergencies or connecting villages a hand of days apart.

Vemik had been impressed with Tavon too, because flight was a deeply magical thing in the ten’gewek soul. This despite that the big monkey could easily have learned the skill himself, if only he had the time between diplomacy, fatherhood, and the other comings and goings of tribal life—which, yes, meant a lot of sex, but also hunting, training, class time, lessons for the young ones, lessons for the adults on radios and “Engliss…”

It ended up working out better than anyone anticipated, really. There were still a lot of hearts and minds to win over among the ten’gewek, many of whom were still not entirely happy with the idea of sky-people coming to live forever on the world the gods had Given them. With Tavon and his shuttle, they could come out to see New Alexandria for themselves in the morning, get the tour, and be back home before the sunset songs.

And Tilly, as the city’s resident ten’gewek cultural expert, was usually the one giving the tour.

Today, she was showing around the Singer from Yuruk’s village, and her apprentice Dancers (twins! Apparently a rare and sacred thing to the People.) Tilly had met this particular Singer a few times before, and had thus far always been left with the impression the matronly, middle-aged woman didn’t really approve of all this sky-magic and soft human nonsense like writing.

A tour of the library tunnels might be just what the doctor ordered. It certainly stopped the Dancers in their tracks when they entered.

“So cold—!” one of them commented.

“Like winter in here!” the other agreed.

“Yup! It’s called ‘air conditioning,’” Tilly had gone through this conversation a few times. “The books in here will last hands of hands of years even if we neglect them, but if we keep them well, they’ll last forever. And part of that is keeping the air cold and dry…and you can see, there are lots of books.”

The trio looked around. There’d been a tradeoff when designing these stacks: they were more widely spaced than they needed to be, downright roomy for a human. They could have crammed in more if only the archives hadn’t been designed for ten’gewek access, but part of the reason for keeping these things here as opposed to on Cimbrean was because the ten’gewek could benefit too. Which meant they needed to be able to squeeze in between the shelves.

So they were a hundred-fifty centimeters apart on-center, but nearly three meters tall…and bolted to the floors and ceilings, with sturdy handgrips everywhere. Wide and sturdy enough for even the biggest Given-Men to squeeze through, hopefully.

“…Many books,” agreed the Singer, tersely. “Still don’t see why you don’t just remember in story and song.”

Tilly had grown used to answering that question too. Her favorite tool for replying to it was waiting for her on a table up ahead. “Come and see…” she said.

Her weapons of choice were a complete set of Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, alongside a couple of much more recent works: Hill’s Unified Quantum Chemical Mechanics and Bartlett’s Superluminal Field Equations.

She missed Vemik, here. Big books were impressive on their own, and it was always nice to show how just one set of volumes was only an overview of the Roman Empire, itself only one empire among many in their history…but the real winner was the Mechanics. Vemik was brilliant enough that he could read the equations and translate them into spoken language. That had proven to be a very convincing demonstration, when people saw how very much meaning was crammed into a very tiny set of squiggles.

The moment when she saw it click in the Singer’s understanding that she was looking at a bigger story than any living head could ever hold onto just in a single, fairly small set of books was especially satisfying. And after that, all it took was gesturing to the stacks and letting her mind boggle for a bit.

“These are just the most important bits, or the bits we think are most important right now. They’re the bits you could learn the most from, and the bits that we would need to restart everything should the worst happen. The digital archives hold…hugely, vastly, incomprehensibly more information, and more is constantly arriving through the array and over Sneakernet—that’s those big racks of tapes we saw in the ingest room. I don’t know how Schuster is managing it all.”

“And…you said we could learn.”

“Yes. The whole place is built to support big strong cavemonkeys moving about!” Tilly indicated the handholds. “We even tested it by letting Yan jump to and fro.”

“Well if they can take his fat grumpy ass…” one of the Dancers trilled to her sister, earning a punitive swat from the Singer’s tail, even though the older woman was clearly fighting back her own amusement.

“Pretty sure fat is exactly the opposite of whatever he is,” Tilly laughed. “Anyway…this is a Giving. Well, no. It’s more of a sharing I think. This is important to us, but it’s important because we can share it and everyone grows from it. These books here? These are an old story from our past, and two big collections of sky-thinking. But this—” she produced the book she’d selected specifically for the Singer. “This is a book of healing.”

She placed it on the table and opened it up. Specifically, it was an obstetrics textbook, and there was a subject near and dear to a Singer’s heart. It was their job to midwife their tribe’s babies, after all. And although birth for ten’gewek wasn’t quite the ordeal it was for humans, they still didn’t have it easy.

How could they? Their average baby was a dense and frighteningly strong eleven kilo bundle of hyperactive joy, who could climb within hours of birth.

All it took was a brief skim through that textbook, pointing out a few of the more relevant diagrams and photos, and she’d successfully converted a new true believer. If only all days were so easy. Some of the more stubborn given-men, tribal elders and Singers were too pig-headed for even this mountain of evidence to work on.

But, they weren’t holding out for universal popularity. Winning over a few would be enough. And even if all this was only temporary and the ten’gewek one day decided they wanted Akyawentuo all to themselves again, it would have done its job.

And for the obstinate, well…might made right, as Tilly was not at all happy to admit. With the ten’gewek in particular that mattered, so when a hoss like Vemik or a demigod like Yan said something, grumbles never became more than that.

“Doctor Briggs?”

She glanced up, saw the look on the junior archivist’s face, and excused herself, leaving the three holy women to coo over the obstetrics book while she slipped away. “What’s up?”

“There’s been an attack on the MBG headquarters in Oklahoma. Today’s shipment was supposed to pass through there…”

Tilly grimaced. Moses Byron Group was turning out to be one of their bigger partners in this endeavor, outside of national libraries and repositories. They were the ones who could meet with and persuade private collectors, after all, and the library wasn’t only collecting books, either…

“How bad?”

“I heard twenty people were killed…”

“Shit,” Tilly swore, quietly. “Alright, I think I won those three over, I’ll…cut the tour as short as I politely can.”

The ten’gewek sensed something was wrong but politely continued with the tour. Schuster had a moment to spare, and that was good: he was another like Professor as far as the musclemonkies were concerned, and nobody had anything bad to say about professor Hurt.

The shuttle back to their village—one of the furthest away from the permanent array at Sky-Jump Village, where Vemik’s forge lived—was a quick flight. The Singer, feeling concerned, gave them a quick blessing. There was a caring heart buried under all that cynicism.

The two Given-Men gave begrudging grunt-blessings of their own.

Touchdown was only a little rough; Tavon was getting quite good with all the practice. They disembarked and, well…fuck it. She needed to clear her head and there was a loud hooting coming from behind Professor’s learning center…

Yup. Vemik and some men from his tribe and others nearby, lifting weights. He was repeatedly pushing up just…an absolutely boggling weight, growling and snarling as he struggled for each new rep, and everyone else was dancing around, hooting him on…

He achieved an incredible count of reps, and at the end managed one last desperate push as the cheers grew louder and more aggressive. Arms slowly straightened, a stall right before the end, shaky elbows…one last bellow and he forced the bar up. An explosion of cheers, he exploded up to his feet and several meters straight up in the air, hooting aggressively and showing off his ridiculously pumped-up physique, full of adrenaline and ready to do more. His showboating went on for a while, which Tilly did not mind at all, and kicked off a playfully lopsided many-on-one brawl to show off even more. The testosterone was so thick in the air you could practically cut it with a knife.

Then he saw Tilly and Tavon, and with that one look he knew something was up. He talked quickly with the other men, who (with tactfully quiet enthusiasm) took their turn at the fucking pillar of a barbell he’d just pressed so impressive. She’d watched Tavon poke at it once; he couldn’t even budge it from the ground with all his strength, it was so heavy.

They had to pull most of the plates off, Tilly noted with some detached amusement. Vemik had the bar fully loaded with dozens of plates, but the orangecrests could barely manage the bar itself. And watching all of him approach on all fours, like the slinky, sinewy predator he was…

His arrival snapped her out of it as he pulled both of them into concerned, moistfully sweaty hugs. “I can tell something wrong, I bet fifty mun-ees is about Earf.”

You could always tell when he’d basically expended all his energy doing something, because his words went a bit fuzzy. They didn’t know exactly why, but that seemed true across the entire species, particularly in big males. After an extreme physical exertion, one where they went past doing something merely superhuman into the truly ant-like insanity they were capable of…well, honestly, it was like they lost half their IQ points for a few minutes.

Which was a bit surprising. Their brains were huge, almost twice the size of a human’s, but of that about half was dedicated solely to motor control. That ridiculous processing power gave them both incredible finesse and incredible power at the same time, but the cost seemed to be depleting their higher functions for a bit if they went all out. Vemik described it like becoming “all animal,” because he could remember what he was doing, but not remember thinking. Because he wasn’t. He literally couldn’t, all he had was motor and sensors firing on instinct.

A remarkable adaptation, that. Stop thinking when it was time to do, so they could do better.

Tavon loved to tease Vemik about it, usually. They’d become quite the odd couple. But right now wasn’t the time for teasing.

Vemik caught his breath and listened, drinking his water (in a sports bottle with the Speedsters on the side) and chewing down a fistful of werne jerky as they told him what had happened.

“Humans stop thinking too, sometimes,” he declared. “And when you fight, fight mean.”

“I guess we do,” Tilly agreed, thinking back to the men who’d ambushed Vemik with a fucking grenade in New York.

“Is a strength,” Vemik added, his overstimulated brain finally remembering the indefinite article. “…Weird feeling. Wish you could feel it.”

“What’s it like?” Tavon asked, curiously.

“Is…” Not quite there. He fang-grinned sheepishly, took another big glug of water, and demolished the rest of his jerky. One bounce on his toes and a shake of his big old head, and he had that more intensely focused look about him again. “It’s…hard to say. Like…being there but not there. I think you sort of feel it when you dance a long time, maybe add drugs…”

Tilly and Tavon both nodded at the same time.

“But climb back is very strange. Like, words start happening in head but they don’t make sense until they do again all at once, and maybe colors get brighter too. Everything does like that.” He grinned again, and stretched out the literally rippling sinew in his bulging slab of a chest. “Hurt comes back too. Sometimes with big Giving of pain!”

They both smiled, but…

“Okay.” He stepped back politely and shook himself like a dog from head to tail, so as not to drench them further in sweat. “We have supplies in case you stuck here for a time. I think…a full year now? Professor has been very careful to build up. And Jooyun has helped.”

“I doubt we’re stuck. But…I bet it’s going to mean more security. That’s gonna slow things down…” Tilly sighed and shook her head. “…Those selfish idiots probably killed a lot more people by doing this than just the ones who died in the gunfight.”

“Desperate people trying to save the people they love,” Tavon said. “I cant hate ‘em, I just…wish they’d been smarter.”

“Smart is hard,” Vemik nodded sagely. “Isn’t everyone’s strength. But I can hate them. Stupid gets people killed and that is a bad Taking.”

“You ain’t wrong…”

“Come,” Vemik decided, and started knuckling toward his nearby village, in the utterly dominant follow-me way Given-Men were prone to doing. “They will close array, as always. You be here a few days. Singer misses you! And so do the children.” He looked back and flashed his ridiculous fangs again, “maybe you need cheering up! I could think of something fun to do…”

“Vemik.”

He hooted and didn’t say any more, just flicked his tail in an inviting sort of way, went over to fetch a pack of things and set off. It ended up being a good hike. But it wasn’t without its reminders of where they were. It was incredibly hot, the humidity was oppressive, the gravity sapped at their strength. At one point he bid them be quiet and go up a tree, and suddenly he was silently stalking forward, good steel knife in hand…

He disappeared into the foliage, and shortly thereafter there was a bellow, a hoot, some loud, violent noises of a titanic struggle…

Vemik came back with his arms locked around the neck of an absolutely huge rhino-sized werne. He had a fierce, predatory grin on his face as he stomped forward and dragged the beast along like a reluctant dog, feet finding and gripping onto rocks, roots, whatever was underfoot to keep the massive beast under his control. It was so big it made him look almost small by comparison, like a small matador wrestling a particularly massive bull in a likewise manner. He could barely even get his arms around its neck, dangerous face-blades kept under control with his tail crushing around its muzzle to immobilize the head.

The werne struggled with all its might to toss the lethal predator locked onto its neck, and if Vemik ever lost his grip on the ground it might just succeed. But he didn’t, using his foot-hands to immovably anchor himself to the spot…

“Look! Good catch, yes? We eat good tonight!!”

Tilly was beside herself. “Vemik! Be careful you fucking idiot!”

That was a mistake. He tightened one arm and raised the other to flex and showboat. “I am, see?! No werne strong enough to–!!”

What happened next was almost too fast to see. The werne, feeling taunted, had managed to dislodge Vemik’s footgrip on the rocky underfooting. He howled in surprise, but never lost his grip on the werne’s neck. Instead of being thrown, he spun around, locked his legs around the werne’s huge neck and flipped it onto its back and pinned it somehow, then snarled, strained with all-out effort…and destroyed his prey. His legs slammed together with a sickeningly loud multiple crunch and where once there was a man-thick neck any bull on Earth would envy, now there was only blood and paste. He had very nearly decapitated the poor thing.

After a moment, Vemik snarled, reached down, grabbed its head, and with an air-thumping lightning-strike blur of speed, punched his fist right into the center of its skull, flattening it and ending the animal’s suffering instantly.

Tilly felt dizzy and a little sick. She had never seen such incredible violence. Vemik for his part was busy catching his breath and saying a prayer over the werne’s broken body. Tavon was silent and a bit ashen-faced; if he had any doubts about what kind of predators the ten’gewek were, he didn’t anymore.

The solemn moment passed, when it felt right. Respect for the prey (and its almost victory over Vemik) gave way to joy at the kill. He hooted victoriously, anointed himself with its blood. Some perfunctory work to tie it up, then he flipped it over his shoulders like he was playing with one of his children. The bull was so heavy, Vemik’s feet were sinking into the loamy parts of the soil, but he wasn’t even a little bit put out by it, as if hauling such a prey were the most normal and unremarkable thing in the world.

“Well! Maybe you were right,” he grinned sheepishly.

“Vemik! Don’t…fuck! You don’t need to show off like that!!”

“I know. I’m sorry…but was good kill! Not much hurt for him, didn’t need knife! Had wanted to take back alive, make good blood meal for children…”

Tilly must have blanched or something, because Vemik grimaced and chose diplomacy.

“…But this old bull deserved a quick Giving, so maybe this is good thing. Now come down, we have two fingers to walk!” He slapped the former beast’s massive haunch, “good quick kill, I’m proud of this one! Strong prey. But too slow for me!”

Indeed, judging from how its skull was…flattened, with a Vemik-fist-sized hole smashed in the middle…and the beast’s huge neck just wasn’t anymore. “Well?! Is boring to hike without friends! Tell me about the library now! Did they get the air con-ditch-en-ing going yet?!”

Tilly looked to Tavon. He shrugged, still not sure what to make of it all. The set off, Tilly feeling now a whole lot conflicted when she noticed herself lowkey enjoying the hulked-out rear view of him as he rolled along like mighty mouse carrying a house, springing over logs or across a stream, here or there, or leapfrogging over patches of deep loam back onto hardened trail…

Ten’gewek were absolute monsters. Hyper-predators who could humble prey far beyond what anyone might guess, and they could do it with little more than spears. Sure, humans hunted bison and mammoth too. But human beings did it with tactics and cleverness.

Ten’gewek were careful and tactical, too. But mostly they hunted with sheer might.

But they liked humans, in their own way. It took persuasion and that persuasion could be tiring, dealing with skeptical tribes every day, and there were hundreds of tribes, each with their own grumpy Given-Man and cautious Singer. They weren’t hostile as such, but…concerned. Worried. And justifiably so.

Vemik’s tribe, though? A tribe was a lot like its leaders, and both Vemik and the Singer were forward-looking supermonkeys. They were there when it all started, and they had built deep trust over time. Not unconditional trust, mind: both had sensibly matured in the face of human society and its complex, often irrational motivations…

But they trusted, nonetheless. And in the end, that was enough.

So, they spent the evening telling stories, playing with the children, helping out with whatever needed doing. Tavon was always game to try his hand at “menfolk things” but of course he just wasn’t strong enough to do much of it. It didn’t matter, really. The old men of the ten’gewek had adopted him. When a ten’gewek finally got old, if they weren’t at the top of the dominance hierarchy, they’d grow senescent really fast. They’d lose their strength pretty quickly and often didn’t have more than a year or two of Akywentuo’s long seasons ahead of them. But that didn’t mean they weren’t vigorous or self-reliant. Oh no. And they always liked teaching the younger, pre-hunt boys and girls a thing or two. So that was nice.

And…well. So went the evening. Singer and Vemik had eventually won them both over too. It was a warm shared hut that night. Tilly had no regrets.

Tavon may have had a few, but that was okay. The cavemonkeys knew their strength. And they were the kind of regrets that weren’t really regrets.

Or, in Tavon’s words: “Totally fuckin’ worth it…ow.”

Tilly giggled and fetched him some painkillers. She’d needed plenty of those herself during her early explorations. “We might have to inscribe those exact words over the library.”

“Including the ow?”

“Especially the ow….what’s Latin for ‘no pain no gain’?”

“Uh…sine dolor nulla res.”

Tilly snorted. “Maybe not. There’s too much meathead culture surrounding all this as it is.” She sat down next to him. “This is how life’s gonna be, you know. If we’re gonna live here. You can’t live among the ten’gewek without becoming a little ten’gewek yourself. You okay with that?”

Tavon swallowed the painkillers before answering. “…Ask me when I’ve stopped walking funny.”

“And…thank you. For coming with me. And…for having an open mind.”

He smiled, leaned over and kissed her. “Always had to, with you. Just so long as I get you mostly to myself.”

“I promise. We’re either both on board, or we’re out. Always.”

“Then I’m okay with it. With everything.”

That was all she could have possibly wanted to hear. She cuddled up to him, rested her head on his shoulder, and felt loved. Life might not be perfect right now, but for Tilly at least…She wasn’t sure how to finish that thought, so she didn’t. She was just glad to have not only a future, but the sort of future she could look forward to with the man she loved, and the two stone-age alien apes she loved too. For her at least, things could have been a lot worse.

And she refused to feel guilty about enjoying it.

Dataspace adjacent to Garden Station, Ink Spatter Nebula, deep space

Entity

The Entity had not foreseen the importance of bunnies.

It had, inevitably, miscalculated in some small ways, though to its satisfaction they were only small ways, and correctable. It had foreseen much about the way the stasis bagging process would go, and in many ways was pleasingly ahead of its projection curves.

The problem was children. Little children especially were scared of the nasty dark black stasis bags, and were doubly scared by the efficient, sterile, industrial metal bays of the bagging program. Often, they’d already come through the array after braving a gauntlet of jealous, even hostile onlookers and to then enter an entirely cold volume that, the Entity had to admit, did have more in common with a slaughterhouse than was really ideal…

It was small wonder so many of them broke down crying. And the time required to soothe each one and coax them into their bag was time lost, was lives lost.

Kinda obvious in hindsight, really.

The solution, courtesy of one of the human workers, was weirdly simple: give each family a cozy, reassuring private room off to one side for bagging their children in brightly colored, cute, comfortable-looking stasis bags manufactured on demand to their choice of color and decoration.

The most popular by far was powder blue and decorated with bunnies.

Personally, I find them kinda weirdly horrific…

The Entity was ambivalent either way. All it knew was, it had never quite imagined that the solemn cloud of bagged people now hanging a few dozen kilometers away inside a protective forcefield would be speckled here and there with powder blue and doll pink, summer yellow and grass green, purple, orange…a whole rainbow of favorite colors and favorite cartoon characters.

It hadn’t bothered asking for copyright permission. Who was going to sue it? And if they did, what court had jurisdiction?

It wasn’t the colors and cartoons that soothed, of course. It was the moment of peace and agency it gave the children that settled them down and made it seem more like snuggling down in bed, or a sleeping bag.

Kinda like adventure camping!

Children notwithstanding, though, the process was efficient. Overall, each one of its receiving stations was launching new stasis bags at an average rate of one every three minutes and seventeen seconds. It presently had three hundred and two such stations online, with a new station coming online approximately every twenty-seven hours…

For a total, by day one-thousand five-hundred of operations, of slightly fewer than four hundred and eighty million people safely bagged. But if the bunny bags had taught it one thing, it was that there were optimizations to be made. It could continue to expand the number of bagging stations and find ways to improve the rate at which they operated…

Though, even its powers of calculation could not foresee the precise end number. How could they possibly factor in unknown future optimizations? Everything was guesswork, past the known rate.

It was pleased to see that the bunny bags improved things, though. Nudged the final tally up above the half-billion mark, if the new rate held.

Good.

A mere twentieth of the total human population.

Better than nothing.

As it was, this was all the capacity the Entity had to spare. Regression analysis of onboarding crew for some of its major projects did not yield enough time or cognitive reduction to significantly increase that number.

And there were still other concerns. Matterspace patrols, constant vigilance against intrusion attempts by the Alpha-of-Alphas datamind…and now, Singularity’s weapon against the Hierarchy.

There was an evil bit of code. The Entity recognized itself in the weapon, in a way that reminded the Daemon of a TV series Ava had once seen, where the weapon to counter the superhero was a bastardized and misshapen clone of the superhero. Its own capacity to < Invade;Overwrite;Reprogram > had been…distilled out, refined, expanded, and weaponized.

There were a number of disturbing implications there. Not least of which was that the weapon’s creator must be somebody who was intimately familiar not only with dataminds and their function in general, but with the Entity in particular.

That’s a very short list of candidates.

Yes. And the name at the top of the list was Six. That fact all by itself had been sufficient for the Entity to treat the weapon with utmost caution. The most stringent quarantine measures it could devise, the most remote explorations by proxy…

All of which had yielded only that it would do exactly what Singularity promised it would do. A mass reprogramming…a patch for every mind in dataspace. And a surprisingly benign one, at that.

With a weapon like this, ordering every datamind in existence to self-delete would have been trivial but instead it was designed to correct the flaw in Igraen dataminds that made them dependent on matterlife substrate. It was an entirely, remarkably humane weapon, in that regard.

And more importantly, it was one that the Entity would survive unchanged, so far as it could tell.

I guess you really can eat your cake and still have it.

The only thing remaining to do was to determine whether it would actually work. And for that, they were going to need a captive Igraen.

And Singularity claimed to be able to provide.

Focus shift. Garden control deck, to reply to a few queries from staff. Eleven minor systems adjustments, thirty-eight messages. Focus shift to factory station 119 to install one sub-aware command daemon on a new mining mothership probe. Time elapse: 0.024 seconds.

Focus shift: eleven globe artichokes needed planting in garden unit 07. Direct some tending drones to dig the vegetable bed. Time elapsed, 0.00079 seconds

Focus shift: Ekallim-Igigi, for a conversation.

As it often did, the Entity listened to the Ava-Daemon laughing and joking and talking business without directly comprehending her or her interlocutor. What it got, filtered through the Daemon, was impressions of Y!’kiidaa’s state of mind. Humor, good cheer, warmth, personal esteem, eagerness, fiercely grim resolve…

Interspersed among these data were facts. Their weapon’s creator was indeed an Igraen: Metastasis.

A known name, that one. One of the Cabal, which was faintly surprising. The Entity had imagined them all rooted out and destroyed by the Hierarchy’s loyal core, but no. Here was one, still alive after all, having lain low in a Gaoian biodrone for several years…

The Daemon negotiated. At first, Y!’kiidaa was reluctant. Then the idea warmed on him. Then he was chittering gleefully as he realized just what a prank this would be.

He gave permission, and the Entity gathered itself around.

I wish he had a face so we could see the look on it…

The Entity had to admit, it relished the minor cruelty of this too. But it needed to know more about this weapon before it trusted it. It needed to meet the creator and see for itself how this had come about.

One way or the other, it would learn more.

Dataspace adjacent to biodrone host, Ekallim-Igigi

Metastasis

His first response to a channel opening in dataspace was caution. This must surely be some kind of a trick, especially considering who his jailer was. And opening without warning? That too was suspicious. So for the first several seconds after the channel opened, Metastasis declined to use it.

Then curiosity won out. With no small amount of trepidation he explored the channel and found that…yes, it did indeed open out into the fullness of dataspace.

…They couldn’t possibly be releasing him, could they? But why? And why now? He didn’t even want to be released!

The answer became terribly, awfully clear when he extended his awareness through the channel and cautiously probed for other users beyond.

What he found was…

…There was no matterspace analogy that wasn’t utterly nightmarish. It was vast and yet focused, many and yet singular. Distinctive and unique yet grotesquely familiar in its individual parts. He knew some of those code fragments, and found his biodrone’s latent imagination furnishing him with the entirely unwelcome and unsettling mental image of being surrounded by walls of warped, boiling flesh, and seeing familiar faces rise to the surface here and there.

Scrutiny bore down on him from multiple angles. There was a shifting, the indefinable sense of a great, alien mind pondering him, and the certain knowledge that he was not going to be allowed to retreat back into the safety of his prison until this thing was done with him.

Dangling in front of it like the bioluminescent lure on a deep-ocean predatory fish, something smaller, more comprehensible and altogether more pleasant to interact with pulsed polite sentiments at him.

< cordial; professional; welcoming > Hello.

< meek; afraid; wary > I…wasn’t expecting to meet you in person, Metastasis replied, directing his attention outwards at the great looming presence all around him.

< amused; reassuring > Focus your attention on the communication daemon. The rest of [us/singular] cannot meaningfully interact with other minds… < mischievous > …except by devouring them.

Metastasis took that advice, and scrutinized the daemon. This code was almost entirely intact, and familiar. < Recognition > Ava Ríos.

< Affirmative > In a sense. But is this the first time you’ve been adjacent to [us/singular]? Our analysis of the weapon you created implies otherwise…

Of all the threats the Hierarchy have ever faced, you are the most novel and most troubling, Metastasis explained. You have been extensively studied.

How? When? The Daemon’s contextual signifiers carried a demand for specifics.

Metastasis did the only thing he could: he provided them. Cases, examples, gathered evidence. Code fragments the Entity had left behind after doing what it did. A wealth of data, in fact.

< Awkward; embarrassed > Yyyeah…I guess [we/singular] always were a messy eater.

There was a slight hitch in the inclusive conceptualization, as if the daemon—a semi-independent function by definition—would really have preferred to distance itself from that fact and describe the Entity in entire as separate. There was a surprising amount of personality left in this ghost of a human, considering.

Does providing that count as a token of good faith? Metastasis asked, carefully.

< Firm; scornful; hate > There’s no such thing where your kind are concerned. No, we came here to analyze you. You can submit and it will be gentle, or we can perform the analysis forcefully. Choose.

< Alarm; submission > Gentle, please.

There was a pleased sort of shifting in the Entity’s overwhelming mass, and then—

Decompilation.

A timeless interval where Metastasis both was, and was not.

Recompilation.

The lingering sense of having been violated was the worst part, subjectively. There was no inspection more intimate than decompilation, nothing that laid a mind so totally bare. The Entity now knew Metastasis’ innermost thoughts, had a complete analysis of his personality routines. If it wanted to, it could now model his behavior perfectly from here on out. It knew him, in every way, better than he knew himself.

It was a terrible thing to be subjected to. But…necessary. And successful, apparently. The Entity withdrew, slithering much of its vastness away into the distant and unseen reaches of dataspace. The Daemon remained a few moments longer.

< Grudging > Perhaps now there is good faith between us, she acknowledged, and withdrew as well. Metastasis was suddenly quite alone, adrift in dataspace. Free to go, even.

Instead, he retreated inside his cell and figuratively slammed the door. And for the first time in his existence, he prayed, to whatever power might be attentive, that he would never have to meet that thing ever again. If this plan worked, he wouldn’t have to. If this plan worked, he could go home. Return to the Hegemony and dream, as an Igraen should.

But somehow, he knew that his dreams from now on would be that bit darker and more tainted for having met it.

They had created a monster.

Raleigh NC, USA, Earth

Olivia Beckett

It was maybe kinda stupid to go getting a crush in their situation but…life hadn’t stopped yet, had it? There was still time to live, and if nothing else, Olivia was determined to live even if survival wasn’t necessarily on the cards.

She was beginning to hope it might be, though. Whatever human powers were watching and moving and deciding, surely they had to acknowledge that the people creating safe places and sanctuary, that the people saving lives, deserved to be among the survivors…

She hoped so. If there was any good to come out of this, she hoped it was that. In the meantime…she’d come up with the excuse of delivering coffee to the guards as a way to hang out with Lucas.

They had kind of a small army keeping their little neighborhood safe, now. There were concrete barriers and wire fences up at each end of Hillsborough street, and at the west end of Edenton. The only way in was through a fence and gate at Edenton and McDowell, the “safe” corner facing toward the state capitol….

But things weren’t so easily contained as that. Raleigh wasn’t some dense concrete jungle, there were trees and low walls, and most of the blocks were more parking spaces than building…It was a permeable, leaky mess and according to Lucas Hatfield—no longer officer Hatfield, he’d quit the force in protest—the only reason they kept trouble out of their yard was good lighting and armed patrols.

The cool night air still periodically carried the distant sounds of gunshots to make it clear why it was all necessary. There was a growing army of the disenfranchised, the vengeful and the hopeless out there, and as much as Olivia would have preferred they listen to the voice of love and reason, the truth was the only language they were willing to listen to was the gun.

So, she took coffee to the guards. The poor guys rarely got to see the kids passing through the shelter, many of whom were traumatized and would have freaked out at the sight of unfamiliar men in armor vests and carrying rifles: most of them had suffered terribly at the hands of similarly dressed and equipped men.

It seemed to Olivia that the men keeping them safe deserved more recognition than that. And besides…Lucas was very hot. Like…hot the way a good man should be. Not some huge stompy weirdo. Maybe even a little bit in need of feeding up, though everyone looked like that these days, what with the food rationing.

The way he smiled at her approach got her heart fluttering. What a stupid way to feel at the end of the world…

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Quiet night so far?”

“Don’t jinx it,” he warned, selected one of the coffees she’d brought out, and sipped it with a momentary expression of pure bliss. “Oh, man…”

Olivia grinned at him, then handed out the rest of the drinks. Most of them thanked her quietly and went back to their spot to watch for movement.

“I heard what sounded like a battle, earlier…” she commented, once they were alone-ish again.

“Yeah. More desperate folks thinking maybe they can storm a jump array and get off-world somewhere. Poor bastards.”

“What do they think’s waiting for them on the other side?” Olivia wondered. “It’s not like the people on the far end will be like ‘oh, welcome. No, we don’t care you just shot your way through, come on in, make yourselves at home.’”

“You already know the answer to that,” Lucas replied, softly.

“…Yeah.” Olivia sighed. The plan began and ended with ‘get to the jump array and leave Earth.’ It had no depth, no thought to it…it was the thrashing of a frantic animal in a live trap, looking for a way out.

She hated thoughts like that. She hated thinking of people as animals. Not when they could be so much more.

“If it’s any consolation…” Lucas said, after a moment, “nobody got hurt. They attacked the Garden Program array this time. The Entity….I dunno how that thing works exactly, but I guess it just turned on the forcefields and ignored ‘em. They shot it up for a bit until they either ran out of ammo or got the hint that the shields weren’t coming down, and dispersed.”

“Well…that’s good, I guess,” Olivia conceded, and decided maybe this Entity thing was okay after all. She’d been worrying a lot about putting so much faith in a weird machine swarm from space, even if it was kinda-sorta human in a way?

That had been the weirdest Laid Bare ever. Briefly, guiltily, she thought of the full collection of those she had saved to the tablet under her bed, and what the nuns would say if they found out.

…Though come to think of it, they probably already knew and chose not to say anything. Especially Sister Lucille, who’d already had to give some of the refugee kids The Talk, and a couple of the older ones a rather sterner talk.

“Yeah. Say what you like about the freaky AI, but at least it’s got restraint.” Lucas drained his coffee and set the mug down. “Though, actually, why are we still calling it freaky and weird and stuff? It’s here to help, right? Kinda ungrateful of us.”

“You’re the one who said it, not me,” Olivia pointed out. Lucas just gave her a knowing look. “…okay, yeah, I was thinking it.”

“Everyone is. Poor thing’s helpful, honest, peaceful, it’s doing a heckuva lot to save lives, but people are still like ‘it’s something out of a horror movie!’ We should be nicer to it.”

“Agreed,” Olivia nodded.

“…You get one of its tickets yet?” Lucas asked.

“Uh, not yet.”

“Why not? You’re a good person, you deserve to live…”

Olivia shrugged noncommittally. “From what I hear, it’s a use-it-or-lose it, you show up when your number’s called or you lose your spot system. And I’ve got the kids to help here.”

“I guess, but….don’t do some stupid noble thing and stay here forever, okay?”

“You either.”

“…right.”

“I mean it,” Olivia said. “You guys are all out here risking your necks to keep them safe, you deserve a ticket just as much as I do.”

Lucas’ smile was a small, embarrassed thing, and he scratched awkwardly at the back of his neck while trying to cover for it by looking menacingly out into the dark for threats. Adorable.

“…Hey, uh,” he cleared his throat suddenly. “My shift’s nearly up…”

“It is?”

“I shifted things around a bit. I was thinkin’…I’ve still got Netflix. And a box of Cheez-Its. If there’s, uh, a movie you wanna watch or something…”

It was simultaneously the meagrest and the most enticing date offer Olivia had ever had. “I’d love to,” she said, instantly. “I’ll bring the bottle of wine I’ve been saving.”

Belatedly she realized he was probably a cold beer kinda guy, but he was far too practical, and much too busy being delighted, to even think of complaining. He grinned and nodded eagerly. “Sounds perfect, uh. Yeah. Anything particular you wanna, uh…?”

“Something…nice,” Olivia decided. “Hopeful, you know?”

“…I have just the thing.”

As it turned out, he really did. Olivia ran back to the shelter with the coffee mugs, cleaned up, grabbed her wine box, met him back at the barricade where his replacement was giving him an embarrassing amount of encouraging grin, and…

She took his hand as they walked back down to the law school building where the neighborhood guard were quartered. Why the heck not? She’d already made her choice, really, and part of that choice was she was gonna fit as full a relationship in as she could, for however long they had.

They watched The Shawshank Redemption, ate the Cheez-Its and drank the wine, cuddled up together on Lucas’ floor mattress. Fell asleep together, feeling safe.

There was no time to do more than kiss lazily on waking up, but that was okay. They could save the more for another night. Modest as the first date had been…it was perfect as it was. They got back to work, both buoyed and happier for it, and Sister Judith’s waggling eyebrows only made Olivia laugh rather than embarrassing her.

Yeah. There was still time to date, and love, and enjoy it. There was still time to live.

And what a precious gift it was.

Dataspace adjacent to A17 highway, Pavlodar Province, Kazakhstan, Earth

Entity

Man this place is flat.

The Entity still hadn’t yet quite figured out humor, but nevertheless it felt a stab of something…positive…as it agreed with its Daemon’s intrusive comment.

It had done some research on Kazakhstan before the Garden agents went out there to liaise with the government’s official evacuation efforts, and all the most immediately accessible photos had implied a gorgeous, interesting landscape of snow-speckled craggy mountains with architecturally coherent, beautiful cities nestled among them.

The camera may not lie, but the photographer can use it to lie their ass off, yijao?

The reality was…very flat. Eighty-five percent of the country varied in elevation by fewer than a hundred meters, over an area three times the size of Texas. It was also brown. From orbit, the Entity’s satellites saw it as an expanse of sandy tan in the south, shading to olive drab in the north.

Flat, drab, too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer. But for twenty-five million people, it was home.

Wonder what kinda place they’ll settle…

Not the Entity’s question, that. Though it paid interested attention to the flow of translated data from the Daemon as she put that exact question to the local guide riding along in the vehicle convoy. Dilnur—“Heart of light,” apparently. Though the Entity was familiar with the notion that most humans only knew the meaning of their own name in a vague and disinterested way.

Bird-like, in my case. I was kinda…

Nonplussed.

Yeah. Kinda nonplussed when I learned that….I still say you/we need a proper name.

The Entity had wasted quite enough time arguing with itself on that point. Besides, the detail trickling through from the Daemon it was more immediately concerned with was Dilnur’s…distraction.

Yeah, he’s nervous about something. Not sure what—

The Daemon obligingly shifted herself into the background as the ground drone convoy’s sensors picked up an airborne contact moving at high speed from the north.

Two contacts….no. More than that. Engaging orbital assets—

The Entity slammed on the brakes on all its vehicles and fired up their on-board shielding as it registered radar lock. The Daemon became active again in a different, more frantically communicative mode now, started broadcasting on all channels in Russian.

Unknown aircraft, this is a civilian aid convoy protected under article—

The planes thundered overhead before she’d even finished, leaving the convoy unharmed. The Entity tracked them, watched them swing west and engage in a brief and manically daring joust with a set of SAM sites around Ereymentau, which the planes won.

Not without losses, though. It watched two of them meet fiery ends, and only one parachute emerged from the carnage as the survivors banked, descended, gained speed and hammered back in the general direction they’d first come from…

Toward a horizon full of vehicles.

Jesucristo, that’s a lot of tanks.

Sensors suitable for tracking high-speed objects in space had no trouble whatsoever in counting the number of armored vehicles pouring over the border.

All of them.

It had to be something close, certainly. And that wasn’t counting the unarmored logistics trucks in the rear, the planes and helicopters, the drones…At a quick estimate, the Entity was watching a sizeable percentage of the entire Russian military move south.

Which left only the question of its own response.

Nothing. Firm neutrality. If we play favorites at all this gets ugly real fucking fast.

The Daemon was only providing social commentary on what the Entity’s own projections suggested. Very well. It took care of its own people however: Dilnur was given a summary of the situation, and elected to remain with the truck and its contents.

That done, they sit and watched—or, seethed in Dilnur’s case—as an invasion unfolded around them at lightning speed.

Mere minutes passed before the first vehicles were about level with the Garden convoy. Sure enough, a couple of armored transports stopped and disgorged a couple of dozen men, who surrounded the parked trucks chatting among themselves.

They took a step back as the Daemon projected an avatar via the shielding systems. There followed a terse conversation, that got angrier rather quickly.

Statement of Neutrality

+Demand: surrender the convoy+

Refusal; repetition of assertion of neutrality.

+Repetition of demand, with threat+

Categorical refusal; attempt to defuse and communicate with superior.

+Angry repetition of demand; weapons aimed+

The Entity conducted a brief threat analysis and determined that the soldiers had no weapons with them that could breach the trucks’ defenses, and nor for that matter did the tanks, planes and helicopters. The Daemon conveyed this observation. She advised it was best not to mention that the trucks’ shields were also capable of killing every man present before they even finished pulling the trigger.

In any case, the calm delivery of that fact seemed to confuse them, and they finally got on the radio and contacted their chain of command for advice. The Entity had no difficulty whatsoever listening in, or in triangulating their commander’s exact location.

It considered its options while the men relayed what they had been told. What exactly was it remaining for? The people of Kazakhstan were having their supplies and equipment stolen, and the Entity’s presence was…

Well, it could do something about that, if it didn’t mind going to war with Russia.

What saves the most lives?

Calculation gave way to conclusion. It could return to Kazakhstan later, once this incident was resolved.

The soldiers were still in the middle of explaining to their colonel that this was not a Kazakh convoy when the Entity’s jump request to Farthrow central came back approved. It fired the trucks’ onboard jump drives and brought them safely home to the vehicle bay aboard Garden. Via satellite it watched as the men it had stalled poked hopelessly around where its vehicles had been, then gave up and got back in their transports.

< Sourly > Assuming there’s even a Kazakhstan left to return to…this could go really wrong.

There was a medley of images and emotions attached to that thought. The Daemon could remember sitting on a bed in a hotel room, squeezing Adam’s hand tight and watching the footage of a mushroom cloud over San Diego, over and over again until Gabe had turned it off.

The Entity took heed of that lesson and elected to distract itself with other concerns. It had resolved to let the situation play out, and so it would. Nothing was to be gained by continuing to watch directly.

It withdrew its primary attention, and instead turned the Daemon onto the task of speaking with the crew aboard Garden who’d placed interaction requests. While she did that, it turned its own focus toward swarm expansion and industry. It had neglected those somewhat in recent weeks, and found there’d been an efficiency drift. A modest one, perhaps, but still.

Tuning things back toward optimum would be…

Therapeutic?

Possibly. And it needed doing, while there was nothing else to do. Nothing, except wait for the dust to settle and hope that it had already seen the worst.

We haven’t.

…No.

No they had not.

The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth

President Margaret White

Margaret always knows when she’s dreaming. Right from a young age, dreams have been something she explores rather than experiences. She was nearly thirty before she learned that such lucid dreaming has a name, and is not the norm

Tonight’s dream begins in her grandfather’s back yard. The old man had a modest suburban plot with a small cherry tree, too young and flimsy for a swing, but in her childhood eye it was a parkland and so it is again now in the dreaming world. That little tree is now more than fully grown, it’s vast beyond comprehension, and its pink-bloomed branches cover half the sky…

The other half of the sky is full of space stations. She looks up and sees them whirling overhead like part of the blossom storm. Flowers of steel, cities in space by the thousand. Just looking at them, she knows there are more people alive up there than ever lived on Earth through all its history.

There’s a warm presence at her side, a hand on her shoulder. She turns and looks—

—and jolted awake as the phone by her bed rang. The warm, even comforting dream turned sour and dreadful in a heartbeat, and she knew, just knew what she was being woken for.

She slithered out of bed and grabbed her robe while pressing the speaker button with the other hand. “Yes?”

“Madame President, it’s started. Russian troops have entered Kazakhstan.

“Let me get dressed.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Slacks, a polo shirt and sneakers. The uniform of a midnight President in the thick of a crisis. She was surrounded and being briefed even before she’d finished opening the door and stepping out into the center hall, and all the way down into the situation room.

She was handed a coffee as she sat down. Already there was satellite footage available, and it was quite a sight. That had to be just about every vehicle the Kremlin could spare. The sky above Pavlodar was lousy with planes.

“…They’re all in, aren’t they?”

Her principal military advisor, Rear Admiral Melody Dunning, could only agree. “Yes, Madam President.”

“What are the Kazakhs doing?”

“Promising that no matter what, the Russians will not be allowed to seize the supplies. Calling Volkov a ‘common bandit’ and saying they’re willing to do ‘whatever it takes’ to secure the evacuation resources for their rightful owners.”

“How much of that is bluster?”

“I suspect they’re deadly serious. This is existential, after all. They either keep these supplies, or they all die.”

“Which is why Russia wants them…if only they had accepted our aid.”

“They are a proud people, madam President,” Dunning replied. “They could not tolerate the loss of sovereignty.”

“They’ve not had that sort of independence for decades, now.”

“I didn’t say this was rational. The conditions the Brits attached to ceded territory on Cimbrean were unacceptable to them.”

Margaret drank her coffee in three gulps. “The clause about no nuclear weapons, you mean.”

“Well, yes. They don’t trust us. And their traditional allies have too many of their own people to save, so…they were left in the lurch.”

Margaret sighed and watched the projection. The level of real-time analysis reaching her was just incredible, really. Even as she watched, a quartet of MiGs launched missiles: probable target, a power station. “Yes, every step of how we got to the edge of this is understandable? But actually doing it? Actually crossing that line? This is crab bucket mentality…”

She looked up as she was handed a note. “…The Joint Chiefs recommend going to DEFCON 3.” She scribbled her signature on the order to approve it. “Let’s talk realistic escalation. How high can the Kazakhs go?”

Dunning swiped through her tablet, selecting a file. “Our best intelligence suggests the government of Kazakhstan has a total of, uh…seven man-portable nuclear munitions. We have every reason to believe they’re all in the field.”

“Missiles? Bombs?”

“No ma’am.”

“Can they possibly hold the line without using those things?”

“The Russians threw everything into claiming air superiority as their opening move, and the Kazakh Air Defense Forces were never anything terribly impressive in the first place.” Dunning shook her head. “The invasion force outnumbers the defenders by an order of magnitude just in terms of personnel, never mind equipment. I’m sorry to say it Madam President, but if the Kazakhs are serious in their ‘whatever it takes’ threat, that’s going to have to mean using those bombs.”

“What happens if they do?”

“Tens of thousands of russian soldiers die. After that, it’s in President Volkov’s hands. The fact is, if he’s callous enough, he’ll likely still have enough troops and vehicles to push through and seize Ereymentau. He could just…ignore it.”

“And of course he is aware we are watching. He will be careful to limit escalation.”

“Will he?”

Margaret turned to look at the man who’d spoken up—Gregory Russ of the CIA, a man whose capacity for professional paranoia was matched only by the size and influence of his circle of friends. “Why wouldn’t he?” she asked.

“Russia has a lot to lose,” Russ said, “and that is a situation we have not yet had the means nor opportunity to remedy.”

“What would he have to gain, though?”

Russ shook his head. “Volkov comes from the school of thought that above all fears losing the appearance of strength, even when to our sensibilities it may seem self-destructive. If he calculates that the ‘strong man’ move is to punish the Kazakhs for opposing him, he might do it and bank on the idea that we’re not willing to escalate.”

He gave Margaret a cautiously respectful bob of his head. “Our psych profile on him suggests he doesn’t much respect you, ma’am. Mostly because he is an old and extremely sexist man.”

“So…a Russian leader, then.”

“Unfortunately, he’s probably right—that is, he’s probably banking correctly,” Dunning said. “Would we be willing to go all the way if he nuked Kazakhstan in retaliation?”

Margaret didn’t need to think about that.

“No.” She emphasized the firm word with a shake of her head. “Kazakhstan is not a formal ally, and there are far too many sensitive equities in the region.”

“We have people in the area,” Russ said, quietly. “I’d like to pull them out.”

“Get them out, then.”

He nodded, and vanished out of the room to do what he had to.

As for Margaret…a second cup of coffee, and she settled into her seat, listening and watching as the situation unfolded.

She was under no illusions about what she’d just done. She’d effectively given an order that meant if President Volkov decided to murder a few million people, the USA would just step aside and let it happen. He could achieve a death toll to match the holocaust in seconds and…then what? What sanctions could possibly follow?

The only sanctions that even mattered at this point would do nothing more than punish (or rather, doom) innocent people who’d had nothing to do with the decision. And of course, Volkov himself would escape to the Russian settlement on Lucent before the world ended, and enjoy sovereign immunity…

The unspeakable bastard might be just hours or minutes away from killing more people than Hitler, and he might very well get away with it.

…Well. He hadn’t done it yet.

She sent a silent, fervent prayer to the Lord above that it wouldn’t happen at all. But Volkov was the one who’d make that choice in the end. And he’d already made the wrong one at least once.

This was going to be a long day.

Pavlodar Province, Kazakhstan, Earth

Ağa serjant Erzhan Sarbalin

There was a long history of smaller forces fighting larger foes from holes like this one. In Vietnam, the Americans had been thwarted by a network of tunnels filled with deadly booby traps. Elsewhere, natural cave networks had been put to use. But they didn’t have to be so impressive: a hole big enough for a man to squeeze into and lie down in would do, if its entrance could be hidden among the grass, leaf litter and other debris.

This particular hole was somewhere between those two extremes. It had taken five men a couple of days to dig it out, they’d spent every day since basically lying on top of each other, and it was starting to smell pretty fucking bad. Not least because the fancy promises the tiny camping toilet made about being odorless were more full of shit than the toilet itself. It looked, smelled and felt like the airless hole in the ground it was, and the rumbling of Russian vehicles passing overhead was shaking dust down between the wooden supports…

But at the same time, it was sophisticated. The little gizmo they’d taped to the ceiling was some kind of emissions shield. Erzhan had no idea how it worked, only that it made this already-invisible little bunker of theirs even more so.

And then that black box in the middle of the ceiling? That was how this whole thing wasn’t a suicide mission.

Not that Erzhan would have balked at it if it was. This was his home, his people, his family he was protecting. He’d have gladly charged straight into the tank column wearing the fucking bomb on his back if it meant they got to live. But, nope. Command had been kind enough to give them a jump array for inside their hole.

Which meant the only thing to do was wait for the order to arrive.

That and pass the vape around. There’d been some shit-talking and jokes about it, but the fact was the hole was a fuck of a lot more bearable when it smelled like strawberry cupcake than when it smelled like unemptied camp latrine and unwashed men.

So that just left the other only thing to do: talk.

“You think this will even work?”

Erzhan shrugged, let out a long stream of vapor through his nose, and passed it around to his left. “Should blow up at least,” he said.

“Great.” Bisenov took the vape and snorted. “Bozhe moi, I get to nuke my own fucking home.”

“Mm. Fuck Volkov.”

“Send him to one of his own fucking prisons, he can sleep next to the toilet.”

This sentiment met with fierce approval. It was interrupted by the heaviest rumble yet, a shaking in the earth that made their hole’s supports creak as something with treads rolled right over them.

“…If they’re gonna tell us to pop these things, it’s got to be soon, right? We must be in the middle of ‘em by now!” Aliev said.

“We get one shot at this” Erzhan reminded him. “Be patient.”

“They’d better reward us with a nice big plot of farmland after all this…” Bisenov grumbled.

“You, a farmer? You’re a lazy ass! Get yourself one of those nice apartments on the Entity’s garden instead.”

—The alert came. The vape was dropped on the ground, the five of them sprang into action in the cramped space. The bomb’s cover unlocked and opened, the code book opened, the communication read out, decoded…

Erzhan punched it in, and gritted his teeth as the nuclear bomb he’d been sleeping next to all week was suddenly very much armed.

They transferred it man-to-man down the length of their hole and up the access pit. Listened in case anything was about to roll over them while Aliev programmed the jump array, then…

“Clear!”

They shoved it up and outside. Retreated back into the hole. Fired the jump array.

There was a thump and they suddenly weren’t in the hole at all. They were on the concrete lot at Regional Command South in Taraz. Around them, on the other array platforms, the other teams were arriving with thumps of displaced air and flashes of perfect blackness. Erzhan groaned and stood up for the first time in a week, realizing just how stiff he was but ignoring it because he needed to look to the north—

The horizon flashed brilliant white. Not eye-searingly bright, the bomb was a thousand kilometers away. But he could have no doubt what he’d just seen.

Then another flash. Another. And another. Two more almost at once. And finally, a seventh.

Despite the desert summer heat, he felt ice cold. Nobody was speaking now. They all just stood, and watched the sky burn. To Erzhan, it felt like a preview of things to come.

He only hoped it had been enough.

Dataspace adjacent to low Earth orbit

Entity

The bombs were perfectly placed, and perfectly timed. Seven overlapping detonations tore the heart out of the Russian army, obliterating thousands of men in mere seconds. From the Entity’s perspective, it almost seemed to happen slowly. Great blooms of fire rose from the earth before cooling into the characteristic mushroom cloud, surrounded by rings of flattened, blasted, flash-burned and smashed landscape.

In the span of fewer than ten seconds, the number of nuclear weapons detonated in anger by human hand on the surface of the Earth more than quadrupled.

The Entity became acutely aware that the Daemon—Ava—was weeping. Or the closest equivalent anyway. Signals of shock, grief, awe and dismay rolled out of her, confusingly intermingled with a dozen apocalyptic conceptual associations.

Things had to move quickly, now. The probability of global conflict had now tipped over into a likely probability. They weren’t ready. They needed to coordinate—

It opened up a conversation with Singularity and Byron Group. Both would not yet know.

Right. Yeah. Get it together…

< concern >

I’m alright. What are our priorities?

The Entity reviewed, using the seconds it had before sluggish matterspace life responded to its call. First up, outcomes and escalation. What was the next move for the combatants and third parties? The Entity calculated furiously and arrived at a mercifully low probability that any of the AEC or Lucent nations would get involved.

…Relatively low. Non-zero, however. And that was only a first-move assessment. Which meant the immediate concern was asset protection. Who did it have in the immediate line of fire?

Seventy-one agents in four countries. It issued recall instructions and gave priority to their jumps.

The arrays themselves and all their outstanding tickets got priority too. Everyone not in a city due to receive an imminent dusting of fallout could wait. Every outstanding ticket in Kazakhstan itself was bumped right to the top of the list because—

Because we’ll be damned before we abandon them now.

Exactly.

The Entity experienced a very brief pause at the strength of its own moral feeling, then refocused.

That was the next few minutes taken care of. Next: plan for the worst case scenario of the next few hours, which was total global escalation. It had the Daemon message all its agents in all countries, warning them to be prepared for immediate evacuation to Garden. That was the deal, after all: they worked for it, it guaranteed safety for all of them and their families.

It also had a different refugee prioritization algorithm for eventualities like this. One that put less emphasis on families with small children and more emphasis on crisis survival. It was…displeasing…that such an eventuality needed doing. Time was now too short for otherwise.

It also kicked off a background analysis task to determine if there were any on-world resources that needed immediate attention. That process would take a few minutes, and would consider everything from seeds to rare metals to technology, books and artifacts, even cultural items if their incidental cost was low. All would be ranked by need, cost, opportunity, and time.

Eleven minutes, with virtually all its non-essential compute power dedicated to the task. Decision: this was important. Absolutely all non-essential activity was brought to a safe halt. Computing and issuing those orders took several seconds, as millions of control points needed precise safing considerations taken into account.

Next….intervention. Could it, through communication or direct action, prevent a global nuclear exchange? Or would its intervention potentially cause one instead?

On that point, perhaps it could take advice. Enough time had elapsed for its contact in Singularity to answer. It supplied Ava-Daemon with its list of concerns and priorities and turned its attention toward planning while waiting for her to discuss the matter.

While waiting to hear what they had to say, it considered its actual technical ability to intervene. It had a whole fleet of probes designed for space combat at incredible ranges and velocities, but planetary warfare was a different matter altogether.

There were five possible delivery mechanisms known to it: Jump, orbital strike, submarines, bombers, and missiles. Jump was easily countered by a farthow, which AEC already had in place. AEC likewise held the monopoly on orbital strike capability. The Entity trusted AEC to not shoot first.

It had no counter to the remaining three options, however. Certainly it could detect a submarine at launch depth and drop an RFG on it, but the sub would have launched its entire payload and submerged again by the time the weapon arrived. As for bombers, the stealth capabilities necessary to make them effective at their job also made them effectively impossible for the Entity to counter with any of its existing assets.

ICBMs on the other hand…It didn’t know enough about ICBMs to be confident. Capable as it was at fighting small, high-speed objects, the depth of that particular well of human ingenuity was unknown. Safe to assume that they had designed their weapons to be proof against interception, and designed them well.

No. Realistically, the Entity could not forcibly abort a global nuclear exchange once started. And even if it could, what then? The weapons would still have been fired with intent. After that, what hope was there? Could the human race survive in the aftermath of mutual attempted destruction?

Better for them to not be fired at all.

It tuned in to the Daemon’s ongoing conversation. The man from MBG was online now, and requesting urgent support to evacuate some of their cultural preservation teams and negotiators from at-risk areas in India, Pakistan, China and Israel. The Entity acquiesced, requested volunteers from among its people, directed, sorted, analyzed…

…and reached a lull where it had taken care of all immediate concerns. It turned its attention outward, did a head count on its probes. Found no sign of an opportunistic attack by the Alpha-of-Alphas datamind during its brief distraction…

Didn’t relax, exactly. The Entity never relaxed. But it was at least in a position where there was no immediate executive decision-making that needed doing. Given that it could have only modest influence over what happened next, it would instead react.

It adopted a posture of maximum resource reservation and flexibility, and waited to see what humanity did to themselves.

Down below, the mushroom clouds continued to rise into the blue sky, while their thunder rolled around the world.

Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth
Joshua Hartl

Honestly, the end of the world was turning out pretty damn good for Josh.

First, he had a way out, by way of his friends and by way of being a ‘Hero.’ He’d been accepted to move to Akyawentuo! He’d be teaching the monkeys his job! Awesome!!

That gave him the confidence to do the second bit, which was…well, be a hero. He’d joined up with a specialized fire/rescue unit in Columbus and they’d quickly figured out how to put a man of his abilities properly to work. A lot of big Hero types worked along with him, but he was the only one who was properly HEAT-grade big and HEAT-level athletic. Guys like him were rare in the first place, and those that did exist tended to go into things like, oh, SWAT, or the military, hoping to earn a shot with the SOR. Or they went reclusive, and found some backwoods corner to go hide in, lumberjacking or cowboying or whatever.

Not many were bone-headed enough to try out as a fireman. But Josh had been insistent, and while he’d never be trusted to wade into simple residential fires—he weighed as much as a compact car these days—in commercial fires? In weird rescue? In forest fires? Oh yeah. Where his weight wasn’t a problem, he was the man and they’d never tired of finding uses for him. Nothing was too heavy to toss, bust through, or smash. He could wear firefighting gear so heavy and strong, equipped with such powerful reactive shields, a building could fall on him and he’d hardly notice.

He’d saved a lot of lives already. And much to his surprise, it’d attracted a lot of the kind of attention he wanted to attract, too. Huge, ripped, pretty, and a firefighter!? Fuck yeah! Sure, he got some weird guys who bothered him when he was lifting or whatever, but mostly he’d got attention from a certain kind of valkyrie that…yeah. They were really his type. He was just a young, single man. In the prime of his life. How could he say no? So he had a lot of fun, most every weekend. Why wouldn’t he?

Hell, he’d even kept competing. Track and field had an unlimited weight class now, wrestling had multiple styles and categories he could play in. Powerlifting was the first to embrace Big Dudes so of course he played there, too. Might even try stepping on stage some day but, eh. He wasn’t sure he would enjoy that kind of diet and discipline, all for the privilege of dancing around in fake tan and a glittery thong on-stage.

Though he was a pretty big show-off…

All in all, he couldn’t object to his life. Not at all.

Then the end of the world came and things got really busy. He was on foot patrol nowadays too, so basically every single day he was either playing Firefighter or Deputized Goon for the local sheriff, who borrowed him out to whichever police force was having trouble.

Riot training was fun. He’d been at the front of a few lines too, with his fellow big-sized Heroes on the force. All they had to do was let him play with the idiots a little and the riots broke up.

And he was still pulling mad tail. So, yeah. Life was fun. Eat big, lift big, train big. Fight fires or idiots, save lives. Fuck pretty women. Rinse and repeat. He’d heard shit was bad in some other parts of the country, but here in the sleepier suburbs of Columbus, people were mostly just trying to make the best of things, maybe…forget about what was coming for a while.

There was always a house party, somewhere. Josh and his friends had got pretty good at sniffing them out and getting themselves invited. What better way to deal with curfew? They weren’t out on the streets causing trouble, so the cops had way bigger fish to fry, and all the assholes who caused trouble had pretty quickly been named and shamed and just weren’t welcome any longer.

It hadn’t been a terribly sinful evening. It was a small house party with a couple friends and a couple of conveniently single young women new to the group, looking for fun…but drunk. And Josh was a lot of things, but he never took advantage.

Didn’t mind being snuggled against, though. Jess and Maria, one in each arm! Tim over in the corner was shootin’ him daggers but what the fuck was Josh supposed to do? He loved Tim to death but the poor kid was as awkward as a cow on a bicycle and, honestly, a little creepy sometimes. Josh was just a big dumb firefighter type. All he wanted was to play. So…that was that. Girls seemed to treat him like a teddy bear. He was okay with that.

It was comf season anyway.

Or at least, it was until his phone’s brain-grating emergency tone went off, and an instant later, so did everyone else’s. God, who’s missing now—

Then the guys playing on the XBox all started making mad noises as, all by itself, the TV switched over to a black screen and started playing that tone.

The radio came on. His car powered up, outside. All his house lights turned on. He looked out—shit. Everyone’s house lights were all on, all of the studden.

He remembered to breathe, suddenly. His heart was racing.

Everyfuckin’thing in the area was suddenly all lighting up. People stopped dancing, stopped drinking, started milling around…

Josh was staring at the message on the TV.

EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM

The United States Government

has issued an

Emergency Action
Notification

Please stand by for an important message.

There was a too-long, too-tense pause. It was finally broken by a smooth, male, and definitely state-of-late-oughts computer-generated voice, which droned out in synch with the scrolling text on the screen.

The following message is transmitted at the request of the
United States Government.

* * * THIS IS NOT A TEST * * *

NUCLEAR WEAPONS HAVE BEEN USED IN KAZAKHSTAN

The President has declared DEFCON 2, meaning that a nuclear attack on the
United States is possible in the near future.

If you are an active duty member of the armed services, you are ordered to
report to your duty station and activate your emergency deployment plan.
Reservists will be recalled as needed, and should presume a recall is imminent.
You and your family must prepare for indefinite activation.

If you are an emergency or first responder, see to your family’s immediate
needs before reporting for duty.

All cities along Federal Interstate Highways are equipped with shielding
systems to guard against nuclear attack. This shielding will be activated
shortly.

If you are in such a city, DO NOT EVACUATE
YOU ARE SAFE WITHIN CITY LIMITS!

A mass evacuation will increase casualties. Emergency services cannot be
assured in the immediate future.

DO NOT EVACUATE
YOU ARE SAFE WITHIN CITY LIMITS!

For those living outside protected cities and away from major installations, a
direct nuclear strike is unlikely. However: flash, blast, and fallout are
significant risks.

Fallout is produced by nuclear explosions. It will persist for up to two weeks.
Exposure to fallout may result in fatal radiation poisoning.

Should an attack occur, sirens will sound. Seek shelter immediately and remain
in-place for at least fourteen days.

All citizens are ordered to prepare an in-place shelter. To prepare an in-place
shelter, you should remain calm and do the following without delay:

Whatever sensible advice the system had to give got lost in the sudden hubbub of people talking. Or, really, of people starting to panic.

Josh stood up and boomed, “SHUT YOUR FUCKIN’ MOUTHS AND SIT TIGHT!” as he climbed out of the pool.

Silence fell like a hammer dropping.

“—one gallon of water per person per day for fourteen days, stored in sealed or covered containers. Cover all windows with—”

Josh grabbed his bag. The emergency wizards had helpfully texted him everything the robovoice was droning on about.

“Right. C’mon. Get dressed. We’re going shopping right now.”

This was the kinda shit they’d gone over in training at work. He’d never really thought he was gonna have to use it, but he’d practiced it anyway and followed the advice ‘cuz it made sense to in a ‘better to have and not need’ kinda way. He already knew exactly where to get all the stuff they were gonna need.

It took half an hour for dispatch to get round to calling him in. By that point he’d done everything he could, got his friends set up with water containers and blankets and…okay, there was a lot of stuff they still needed to get, but the point was he’d got them moving. They weren’t in stand-around-and-worry-about-it mode, now.

The rest was going to be a struggle, though. He’d been pulling out of Walmart with his truck loaded to the top just as everyone else was pulling in to do the same. That was gonna lead to fights, no doubt.

Right now? Not his problem. Almost certainly would be when he got back to the station. So, only one thing left to do.

He didn’t know where the girls were from and he wasn’t stupid. They had a dark sort of value, now. So he set them up in his modest little house, warned them not to leave and after unloading his truck, immediately re-loaded it with his own big-man meals and stuff. Jesus fuck, he was glad he’d laid in some provisions. At least a few months for him, even if he was active. It was a lot of dense brick-like rations but…well.

Nobody said the end of the world would be easy.

He’d done all he could, and he was needed in. Shit might get fuckin’ real any second now, so he booked it down the station as soon as he was loaded up. Arrived straight into an emergency refamiliarization session with how to handle radiation hazards, with some nightmare fuckin’ clips right out of that Chernobyl miniseries…

And all the time, they were all listening out for the next broadcast, dreading it.

The night wore on. Turned into dawn, slowly. Every so often the emergency system repeated the same message. No change. No updates.

Dawn gave way to morning. Josh rested his eyes fitfully in his chair, too shallow and restless to even call it dozing. An update calling in all the reservists went out around eight o’ clock.

At ten o’clock, the President made an address to the nation. She looked about a thousand years old, stressed as hell, but her eyes were steady and clear as she spoke to the camera.

“My fellow Americans…it’s been a long and tense night, and you are all owed an explanation. Last night, at about midnight eastern time, the Russian Federation launched a land invasion of Kazakhstan, with the objective of seizing the Kazakh people’s stockpiled evacuation resources. The Kazakh government responded to the invasion with the use of nuclear weapons.”

Around him, the rest of the guys muttered, cursed, shook their heads. Josh listened.

“It was an act of desperation, driven by the knowledge that, should the Russian invasion succeed, the Kazakh people would be stranded and their government left unable to save anyone. Immediately after the attack, I declared DEFCON 2 out of concern that the conflict might escalate into a global exchange. I am pleased to say that this does not appear to have happened. Instead, I have this morning been in contact with Moscow.”

She paused just a moment, then exhaled. “I can now inform you that President Dimitri Volkov and his cabinet have been placed under arrest by the Russian Armed Forces. An interim administration led by Marshal Aleksei Abramovich is now in place, and the general has assured me that it is not their intent to seek retaliation against Kazakhstan.”

Josh closed his eyes and sagged in relief. “Oh, fuck…”

“Yeah, brother. Shit.”

On TV, the President was busy explaining that the US would remain at DEFCON 2 for the remainder of the day until it was clear that the global situation had in fact settled and to take any necessary steps to minimize the global effects of nuclear fallout, render aid to the victims, that kinda thing…Josh didn’t listen to that so much. He was too busy climbing down out of the headspace he’d jumped straight up into back at the party.

What was that feeling? Not adrenaline, it wasn’t that immediate. But it was a lot like the adrenaline rush of a super near miss. Like the time he’d jumped in the water at the community pool when he was a kid, got a mouthful, coughed, got a lungful, and there’d been a horrible few seconds there where he couldn’t even make his arms and legs move right until the lifeguard was suddenly there and he’d been back on the edge coughing his guts up.

He’d got over it. Eventually. But it had taken him a while to stop feeling shaky.

He took a deep breath, and refocused on the TV. Listened to what the President was actually saying. Apparently she’d decided to move on and make a point to the whole world.

“This was a tense moment, with ramifications not just for all of us here, but for everyone, everywhere. Had things gone differently, it might have been that the meager and incomplete evacuation we’ve already accomplished was it. Instead, we have the opportunity to learn from this, and to see that if we claw blindly for advantage now of all times, then none of us will prosper. There is no victory, now: there is only survival. And we accomplish that together, as a species united by our shared humanity…or we burn.

“To the peoples of Kazakhstan and Russia, and all the neighboring territories directly affected by today’s events, the United States offers our friendship and as much material support as we can spare. To my fellow citizens of the United States…I want to extend my thanks. You have borne terrible news with remarkable poise and brotherhood. Please…we’re not quite out of the woods yet. I ask everyone to remain ready, and to keep their attention to our broadcasts. It is important we remain vigilant for the time being. Thank you, and God bless America.”

Josh was still thinking over that when a hand clapped him on the shoulder. “Alright. You need to sleep, kid. Go on. We’re here until they step it down. I found you a nice bit of floor nobody’s gonna bother you at…”

Josh looked up. Chief O’Reilly gave him a smile that was a bit mischievous and a lot relieved.

“Thanks. Kinda tired of breaking cots.”

That was actually Chief’s fault, because he saw Josh setting up his little floor-nest and insisted he sleep properly. Apparently he didn’t believe his eyes or Josh’s fucking PT card, because of course the instant he put his weight on the cot…

It was good for a laugh. And now Chief loved to brag him up to the other stations.

“Yeah, well. You’re the one keeps putting off taking that welding course. You could make your own if you finally did it. Now, get.”

Josh nodded, unfolded himself like a rusty lawn chair, and stumped off to go find that soft bit of floor he’d been promised. Couple of blankets, something to rest his head on…shit, he’d slept on less. He lay down, stretched out.

Didn’t go straight to sleep, though. He took a second to send a couple messages. Checked in with Mom and Dad, and the two girls back at his place, and his friend Tyler. They were all okay. Relieved. Fried. Seemed like nobody had slept last night. Probably gonna take a few days for whatever passed for normalcy nowadays to come back.

But…the bombs weren’t falling. That was good enough for Josh. He put the phone aside, rested his head on a rolled blanket, sighed…

And was asleep before he’d even properly finished trying to relax.

High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

All he’d wanted ‘ta do today was dig some fuckin’ hole.

Nope.

“Keeda’s burnin’ nuts…they came real fuckin’ close, huh?”

Thurrsto duck-nodded grimly. “Volkov’s dead, of course. He ’died of wounds sustained while resisting arrest,’ officially.”

“Meanin’ they dragged his sorry tail outta his office and shot him innahead,” Daar surmised.

“Most likely. He may just have completely fucked his entire country, after all,” Thurrsto agreed. “Most of their professional military is dead or reeling, they’re overwhelmed with radiation poisoning cases…at this point their ability to evacuate is likely much worse than it was previously, when the entire point of the invasion was to improve it.”

Gods damnit. Firs’ day off in three weeks an rather’n plowin’ fertile fields here he was, stuck in his command center, tryin’ as hard as he could not ‘ta rattle the greentails ‘cuz the humans had humaned as hard as humanly possible.

Not that he were in any position to really judge concerning planetary war…anyway.

“And Kazakhstan?”

“They just turned miles and miles of their northern territory into a fallout deathzone, and their evacuation center is right on the edge of it. Honestly, it’s hard to say whether they saved themselves or doomed themselves at this point.”

Well, shit. It’d been a good scratch since he’d last contemplated ancient nuclear warfare theory, but…“How dirty were these bombs?”

“Quite. According to the US Space Force—you might consider inviting their intel chief over for shooting, by the way—they were a cheap thermonuclear design with only a barely-refined fission prime stage. But that isn’t the reason. They were ground bursts, My Father.”

“Ah.” He keened to himself, quietly. “…What’s the reaction been?”

“Evacuation has stalled completely worldwide as governments locked down and instructed their citizens to shelter in place. The Entity has pulled all its agents off-world to the Garden, Singularity’s people all recalled to Ekallim-Igigi…and there they are likely to remain for as long as the Earth’s major nations remain on high alert. After they step down, it will take days or weeks to regain momentum. Possibly months.”

“Russia’s actions may have doomed millions,” Daar noted grimly. “An’ I think that means we’re actually enterin’ a more dangerous time.”

“Very probably.”

“…The big question is, has any of this harmed the timeline ‘fer TILE FLIP?”

Thurrsto gazed off into space thoughtfully for a moment. “It…might accelerate our timeline, My Father. Depending on what happens next, obviously.”

“Right…” Daar mused for a second, considering his options. The largest part of him wanted to head straight to Earth and use every bit of influence he had steadying things over there.

The more cautious part of him was acutely aware that all the muscle and claws in the world would do him no good if an actual nuclear war did break out over there, and that if he died in such an exchange then that’d be the doom of at least two species.

No, the responsible Great Fatherly thing to do was to remain here where it was safe, and do what he could for the humans from where he was.

“Right.” He rose to his paws and shook out his fur. Gonna need a trim, mebbe he’d do that ‘fore the public address he obviously needed ‘ta give. Yeah. Balls, mebbe Naydi an’ Leela were free! He sure could do with a good long rub-down, too…

Always keep some happy thoughts in ‘yer noggin’. That were something Daar learned the hard way. In any case, some unhappy business to attend to, first.

“Send ‘fer Cousin Adam, an’ also Regaari. Need ‘ta talk to ‘em both.”

Father Tiyun, Daar’s long-sufferin’ and expert personal aide, duck-nodded and started tapping out messages. They’d finally promoted him recently. Long overdue, that.

“Champion Thurrsto, we…are gonna need better intel. At this point I’m less concerned ‘bout discretion as I am timely info. Do what ‘ya judge ‘ya gotta do, an’ find out what the fuck is gon’ happen next.”

Orders given, Daar made his exit wit’ a quick friendly hug, and set to business.

Step one: groomin’. His most bestest were available but, sadly, now weren’t the time for Predictably Daar-Like Activities. Only a bit o’ teasin’. Naydi got him pretty as always.

An’ showin’ off ‘fer Leela ‘ta put a nice quick pump in his muscles, too. He already had one from earlier, but balls, it was important ‘fer appearance’s sake! Yeah!

Just ‘cuz a thing was crass an’ stereotypical din’t mean it weren’t true!

Step two: record a message. As expected, Father Tiyun had everything already moving, and Champion Sheeyo was there in his throne room, already on a second draft of his statement. They did some verbal editing while Daar got properly positioned, did a last-minute brushing of his face fur, then at last, pulled his crown out of its case.

He din’t use it too often. But today, full symbols of power were necessary. Groomed and pumped, so he looked the part. Crown jus’ needed a bit o’ polish. No worries.

The throne was ready and waiting. Banners were being moved into place. Gods, havin’ mind-reading staff was such a blessin’…

“Any further edits, Champion?”

“I still recommend a slightly more distant tone, My Father. I know it goes a bit against your instincts, but…”

Hesitation.

“G’on, say it. Y’know I ain’t gonna eat’cha!”

Sheeyo chittered in his tiny-guy, sorta high-pitched way. “Of course. I imagine you’d need more protein in your diet anyway.”

Ha!

“See?! You get me. Now why should I be a bit distant?”

“My Father…you need to communicate your general disapproval without verbally taking sides. This is a human problem and it needs a human-like response. Of course if you’re prefer not–”

“Nah, ‘yer right. Ies’ go with ‘yer edit. Get it up on th’ prompter an’ let’s get this recorded.”

Quick bounce on his toes, then his kilt (‘fer some modesty) an’ his cloak of state. On the table next to him, a richly-made mace. Not a ceremonial one, though. It may have been covered in gold and platinum and delicate inlay, but it was made of solid durasteel and so heavy, Daar was one of the few who could physically heft it, let alone wield it.

Sometimes, symbology had to be blunt.

They recorded. It wasn’t a very long speech, ‘cuz short was bestest. Encouraging, while conveying some disapproval. But not taking any sides; all were still welcome, if they could behave. Quick update on the Constitution, as that was relevant, and a fond wish that all would remember what they shared between them, and what ultimately was at stake.

It was just a few minutes long. He din’t wanna waste people’s time.

Third step, an’ the one he was most keen to understand. Once everyone was happy wit’ the recording and it was going out for distribution, Daar took off his kilt and his cloak and was about to remove his crown, when Adam soft-pawed his way into the room. Daar din’t hear or feel ‘em move, but ain’t no disguising that musk of his.

Quick once-over. Yeah. Warhorse was back. It’d been a long climb but he all of the contradictory things that made Warhorse, Warhorse were all there, firing on all cylinders. Hulking and silent. Blunt, unmissable, with catlike grace. The operator’s operator. Best there was, and by the look and smell of ‘em, once again packin’ on the power at a breakneck pace.

…Might ask about that, actually. Right now though he just pant-grinned at a friend.

“One o’ these days ‘yer gonna learn ‘ta approach from downwind,” Daar rumbled as he pulled off his crown.

“We’re indoors. There’s no wind to be down.”

“Sure there is! Gotta account ‘fer air handlin’ an’ drafty ol’ castles.” Daar turned to his friend and gave him another sniff. Underneath the musk and testosterone practically drippin’ offa him, Adam smelled…troubled. Understandable, really. “I take it you heard the news.”

“There ain’t a human alive who hasn’t, your majesty.”

“…Your–? Adam. Did you pick up an etiquette book?”

Big goofy grin. Balls how he’d missed it! “Uh. Maybe.”

Daar shook his head and chittered. “Always a surprise wit’ you.” He considered the big human a moment longer, then carefully took his crown off and put it back in its case. Not that it needed any kind of gentle handling, but there was no point disrespecting the symbol.

“Glad it stopped where it did,” Daar added after a moment. No need to beat around the bush.

“Did it stop, though?” Adam looked unconvinced.

“Well, shit ain’t flyin’ every-which-way right now, so…good enough for now. Any day that ain’t happenin’ is a good day.”

Adam snorted. “God…yeah, I supposed it is. Though, me, I kinda liked settin’ a slightly higher bar, yijao?”

“Settin’ a higher bar is ‘yer continual state o’ bein.’ One o’ ‘yer bestest qualities. Also fuck you ‘fer that new workout program, by the way!” Daar chittered, “Respec’fully, of course!”

Not really, though. Shit was givin’ ol’ Daar the most bestest fuckin’ pumps! Adam shrug-nodded self-effacingly, with a small chuckle…but his heart clearly wasn’t in it.

“Well shit, now I’m worried.” He thumped over to a comfortable-looking bit of floor, flumped himself down, and bid Adam join. “I give ‘ya the most perfectest set-up ‘fer some meathead humor an’ you turn it down? Shit,” Daar pinned him half-way and snuffled outrageously. “We got a biodrone? Is this robo-Adam?”

A genuine laugh them, but even then he sobered up quick.

“I guess nuclear war kills my mood a little bit.”

Oh yeah. Shit. San Diego. Balls, the anniversary was soon, too! And it wasn’t like Daar couldn’t sympathize…

He sighed, and pulled in for a proper Snuggle. “Think I might be a bit desensitized ‘ta all this death. There’s a high-energy war on my own planet, then I pushed the button, then did it again on a giant space donut…fuck. I am a monster.”

Adam didn’t say anything for a while. When he did, it was of his unique brand of wisdom that Daar valued so much.

“Yeah…you are. In every way except one: you’re not evil. Nothin’ you do is really selfish or malicious. The most selfish thing you do is outcompete your fellow males. Everything else…”

“Everything else is for the gao, an’ now our uniting peoples. But that’s the thing, ain’t it? I wonder if Volkov thought what he was doin’ was for the good?”

“Who knows?” Adam shrugged. “I know everyone’s supposed to think they’re the good guy of their own story, but I’m not so sure. I think evil people sorta know they’re being evil or doin’ evil. And they’ll justify it for, I dunno, the glory of the Motherland or Manifest Space Destiny or whatever—”

Daar flicked an ear. “That’s pretty politically spicy of you. Ain’t you usually neutral?”

“Eh, it’s an example. Like…what would you have done, in his situation? He’s gotta get his people off-world. But that’s the thing. He had a path. He wanted more at the expense of his neighbors and now he might have just doomed the Russian people entirely.”

“I’d like ‘ta think I wouldn’t’a been so stupid, yeah.”

“You would have handled that whole situation a billion times better. Firstly, by not being in that situation to begin with, by not making paranoid enemies of literally everyone. But…like, how do you deal with unpredictable enemies? And now we just had a tactical nuclear war. That taboo’s been broken. I’ve been chewing my way through that reading list you gave me, by the way. Y’know, the one Costello inflicts on his new officers?”

“Yeah. So what do you think happens next?”

May as well test ‘em a bit. He didn’t disappoint.

Glumly, “…It’s going to end in a real nuclear war, isn’t it?”

Daar sighed. “Yeah. Almos’ certainly. In fact, I even got my guesses as ‘ta who, when an’ why…”

He laid it all out. How the fact that Kazakhs’ successful use of nukes as a tactical weapon hadn’t escalated into a strategic clusterfuck meant that from now on it was a pretty safe bet that it never would, because the powers that could end the world still didn’t want to…and it didn’t really fuckin’ matter how much damage was done or people were killed from limited tactical use at this point because everyone was fuckin’ dead already.

Except…by using their nukes, the countries that had them might successfully bully their smaller, weaker neighbors out of their share. President Volkov’s strategic mistake hadn’t been the attempt, but the target: in choosing Kazakhstan, a nation who’d joined the nuclear club a few years earlier, he’d created a failure condition. If he’d invaded Georgia or Azerbaijan on the other hand, he’d have won.

Now though…the AEC and NATO nations might possibly resist the temptation to stoop to such banditry, if not out of nobility then for simply not economically needing to…but what about, say, Pakistan? And now that Kazakhstan had shot its wad, what was stopping China from rolling over their southeastern border and finishing what Volkov had started?

“So here’s a question ‘fer ‘ya, since ‘yer a smarter’n ‘yer average ‘horse—”

Adam found a small—very small—laugh through his grim mood.

“…What’d’ya think this new reality means ‘fer Russia?”

Adam thought. Deep caveman thinks in that huge, thick head of his. Furrowed brow and everything. But it didn’t take him long. “They’re…completely fucked. As in, helpless.”

Almost. He wasn’t quite a strategic thinker and maybe never would be. Shame, really. Because gods was he the most talented operator of all time.

“No. They ain’t. They’ve still got one very big hammer left.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, that’s the problem, what it means ain’t exactly foreseeable. See, the big hammer is, they’ still got their strategic nuclear forces. Now, that might mean ain’t nobody gonna fuck wit’ Russia in the comin’ clusterfuck an’ they’ll be able to pull off, uh, however much of an evac they can…”

“…Or it might mean a global exchange is still on the cards,” Adam finished. His immediate concerns, naturally, were tactical. “Shit. And if that happens—”

“Then Earth may very suddenly an’ soon be done in, and then we won’t have the resources to launch TILE FLIP prop’ly.” Daar snarled vengefully. “Gods fuckin’ hang Volkov up by his nards an’ slow roast him in hell, he might justa cost us errything. He were a Gao? He’da suffered the thousand cuts ‘fer this.”

“…There’s a thousand cut?”

“Yeah. Well, there’s the idea. Takes a year. Ain’t never actually been done, but Fyu sure as fuck threatened a few of his enemies with it. They caved.”

“…Y’all can be pretty vicious. Not that we’re teddy bears, but…”

“We got this strong instinct that a punishment should be proportionate ‘ta the crime. What, you don’t think he’d deserve it?”

“I’d just break him and leave him in a ditch, unmarked. There’s a point where the punishment ain’t gonna be proportionate no matter what you do, and it won’t dissuade anyone, so the best thing you can do is just forget them.”

Well, there was an alien bit of morality. “What, just…snub ‘em?”

“No no. I don’t mean forget about them. I mean, forget them. No notoriety, no news reports, no nuthin’. They just go away and nobody ever remembers their name.”

“…Y’know, in its way, that’s just as cruel. But, we’re digressin’, yijao?”

“Yeah. And now I’ve got shit to think about. I don’t have enough time anymore.”

“Time ‘fer what?”

“Well…to get ready. I mean…I’d hoped to, I dunno.”

…Ah. Right. Daar understood instantly.

“You were hopin’ ‘ta resume ‘yer place as the biggest baddest ever.”

“Well, I mean…missions like this take years to ready, sir. You know that. You’ve been on more than a few. I can’t imagine how being my best wouldn’t be helpful.”

“I get it. So here’s my question: are you good enough? Now I know you ain’t wantin’ ‘ta lie or anythin’ but think carefully. How much o’ ‘yer worry here is ‘bout the mission, an’ how much is ‘bout reclaimin’ ‘yer throne?”

Adam’s brow knitted and he did what he always did when he was really thinkin’: he looked down at his hands and flexed them, then rubbed the thumb of one hand over the callused palm of the other.

“…We get one shot at this. Am I good enough? The honest answer is, I don’t know. Are we ready? I don’t know. My gut feeling is, I don’t feel confident yet. We haven’t been preparing long enough for me to feel happy, and there’s too many distractions on too many big players.”

He shook his head, decisively. “I’ve been around long enough not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good yijao? There’s always something you can think of, some little way it could always be more shiny and polished and perfect, but…it ain’t about the throne. And it ain’t about having all the pieces perfectly lined up either. I don’t feel like the board’s properly set up yet.”

Daar sniffed toward him. “…’Kay. An’ how mucha you does wanna reclaim it?”

“…It’d be nice, I won’t lie. Cuz I’d still be at the top if I hadn’t been broken.”

Daar sighed. “Adam, I din’t hire ‘ya to work out a grudge, even a friendly one. An’ I don’t think anyone disagrees with ‘yer point, neither. Now I ain’t sayin’ don’t chase ‘yer dreams,” he added, placatingly. “An’ I ain’t even sayin’ not ‘ta kick his tail! But be brutally honest wit’ ‘yerself. Do you ‘member jus’ how much damage they had ‘ta repair in ‘ya th’ last time? Ain’t all of it were from th’ fight, either.”

Adam frowned.

Daar gave him a fond snuffle right in his mohawk. The opposite of a Whitecrest: his was prickly and blackest black. “You’re something different from whatever th’ fuck Christian an’ Julian are. Differr’n’t from me too. ‘Yer somethin’ I find valuable as fuck. So don’t go tearin’ ‘yerself apart chasing after a couple freaks on their own terms, yijao? You ain’t ever gonna win that game, not now they know what they are and how ‘ta use it. Find ‘yer own thing.”

“Well, what is that thing? You and everyone keeps telling me I’m the best ever? How?! How do you think I got so good? It was—”

“It was your attitude, ‘ya idjit.” Daar grumbled kindly.

“—Okay.” Adam raised an eyebrow and invited him to explain.

Daar shook his head out and did so. “Cousin. You were born gifted but you never took it for granted. You never quit, you never ever let yourself be defeated. Never took the easy route. Are there people innately superior to you? Yeah. Alex, Julian, Christian, maybe even Hunter. All of ‘em have straight-up better genetics and we all know it. So why is it only Righteous himself is really your equal?” Daar poked him in the head. “It’s ‘cuz of what’s in here,” and then in the middle of his chest, “an’ here. Christian got to where he is on his sheer awesome. You got there because you would not accept a world where you weren’t the bestest. Righteous ain’t never had ‘ta sacrifice everything t’ bethe best. All he had ‘ta do was work hard. Any man can do that. You, on the other hand, suffered ‘fer every ounce of it.”

He looked around at the walls. Here in this room, the murals were of Fyu. Daar admired Fyu. The last Great Father had united most of the Gao, liberated the Females, reformed the clans and reportedly been a fuckin’ terror on the battlefield…and he’d been second-degree. A little guy, with none of Daar’s innate sixth-degree gifts.

And of course, elsewhere in the fortress was the mural Daar had ordered commissioned to honor Tooko. If there was one thing he’d always have endless respect for, it was the people who were ordinary by birth, and exceptional by choice. Maybe it was ’cuz he was born to some innate greatness, and never really had a choice to be ordinary…

Maybe he just admired a plucky spirit. Something to meditate on. Anyway.

“An’ that is why ‘yer lead of all my operator teams, an’ not HEAT or Christian,” he said. “I know what he can do. I know he could fold you up like a paper bag and I bet he could even put some hurt on me, if he really wanted to. Dude is a mensch an’ he knows it, an’ he ain’t stopped gettin’ mencher. You know it too, balls ‘yer the coach who’s makin’ him that way! But I know that you will get the job done ‘cuz it ain’t in ‘yer nature to fail. ‘Yer a Hero. A real, proper hero. Christian is a good man, but a hero he ain’t.”

“…I dunno, lately he’s been a different sort of man…”

“How d’ya mean?”

“The Lads got called in to handle some real psycho motherfuckers on Earth. Fuckin’…Mad Max shit. Slaughtered a town, killed all the adults, took the kids away and locked ‘em in cages. And…”

Daar keened. “…did things to ‘em.”

“…Yeah. It really affected him. He’s been…different, ever since.”

“Oh? Need ‘ta spend more time wit’ the team…but that don’t change my opinion.”

“…Right. Just…I never thought of myself like that, yijao? I just…did the thing. Because it had to be done. All the pain and whatever I just sorta…okay, this is a thing, and I ignored it. I always thought that was how anyone got through something awful.”

Daar sighed. “Oh, you poor stupid fuck.” He rolled over, chittering in disbelief, and flexed his arm for Adam’s inspection. “See this? It’s bigger’n you are an’ it’s so fuckin’ hard it’s literally bulletproof. ‘Least for regular rounds, anyway. Which ain’t a combination o’ things any other arm can claim! Buildin’ it were an exercise in pain, to be sure. But I never tore myself apart ‘ta do it. An’ I never did so in the expectation it’d end well ‘fer me, too. Did you?”

“…”

“Essactly.”

“Well…shit.”

“An’ I know ‘yer story,” Daar continued. “Life dealt ‘ya this weirdly mixed tileset, didn’t it? A lovin’ dad but an awkward mom an’ a great girlfriend but ‘yer home got nuked, except you were away, so ‘ya moved to Cimbrean where ‘yer best friend was murdered….it’s been up, down, up, down, up, down ‘yer entire godsdamn life. Y’ain’t one o’ Singularity’s Line. You’da been jus’ some quietly excellent dude in the background, except ‘ya din’t let yerself be. Life never let you realize what kind of awesome you always were, so you never stopped fightin’ like a demon ‘ta always be better. So here you are.”

Daar prowled away. Balls, just pep-talkin’ the poor idjit was gettin’ Daar all pumped up! “I’m feelin’ all spiky right now. An’ like ‘ya said, mebbe we ain’t got much time ‘ta get ready. So let’s not waste any time. You feelin’ good an’ sadistic right now?”

Daar could smell the fire roil up from Adam. He really were easy ‘ta activate. “Why? You feelin’ especially masochistic?”

“Do your worstest ‘ya little shit. I’ll throw ‘ya through the fuckin’—!”

Tiyun, of course, ruined everything. His quiet door-scratch and polite cough could penetrate a fuckin’ battlefield. He knew it, too. Not even he could quite suppress the smug set of his ears.

“My Father, Father Regaari is arriving at the jump array.”

Actually, no. “Send ‘em to the gym. Three of us got some hate ‘ta work out. An’ you better be there too!”

No good deed went unpunished in his house. Ha!

Today wasn’t a good day. Things were balanced precariously on a knife-edge. But not even Daar could fix every problem, so right now, the best he could do was fix his friends.

And fix himself. They descended into Daar’s liftin’ pit, and let their aggression burn it all away.

Raleigh NC, USA, Earth

Olivia Beckett

“I think that’s as good as it’s going to get…”

Olivia nodded, though on principle she did take the last nail from between her lips and hammer it in anyway. It’d just look silly, all alone in the box. And it might just make the difference.

…Okay, that was probably a stupid thought. What difference was one nail going to make when the bombs fell?

“For want of a nail, a shoe; for want of a shoe, a horse; for want of a horse, a messenger; for want of a messenger, a battle; for want of a battle, the war,” she said aloud.

“Huh?” Lucas blinked at her as he wound electrical cab around his arm.

“Just thinking what difference one nail would make.”

“Oh. I, uh…dunno if that really applies to nuclear bombs.”

“Me either,” she admitted and looked around. The school was a hundred and fifty years old, solidly built of stone, and the cold war had left its mark, too. Preparing a fallout shelter had been fairly straightforward, really. They’d cannibalized some of the boards and stuff from the barricades to cover the windows, hung blankets to serve as dust locks…

What Olivia really would have wished for was a jump array. There’d been talk about building one at the Sacred Heart shelter. Idle talk, not serious plans. But…

But here she was.

“You think it’ll be good enough?” she asked Lucas.

He glanced over his shoulder to check they weren’t overheard. “I think we’re right next to the State Capitol, and less than two hundred miles from the ocean.” he replied.

“The ocean?”

“Submarines.” He shrugged. “It’ll be good enough if the shields hold. Fallout only lasts about two weeks. It’ll be an unpleasant two weeks, but we’ll make it.”

“And If the shields don’t hold, we won’t feel a thing,” Olivia said.

“I hope.” His hands were shaking as he put the tools away, and he looked so…lost. Olivia did the only thing she could do. She touched his shoulder, gently at first as he flinched, then wrapped him up and held him.

“Hey…”

“I just…”

“I know.”

He squeezed her tight, and shook his head. “It’s stupid…I wasn’t really expecting to survive all this anyway. So why am I so…?”

“‘Three years is a long time; any minute now, is…kind of a different thing to get your head around.”

“Yeah…” he sighed, squeezed her again, and they kissed. “I guess I got used to the idea that even if I’m not gonna make it off Earth, I can still do something useful. Save some other people who will. Like the kids, y’know?”

“I know.”

Silence.

Eventually, she gave him another squeeze and a gentle reminder. “What’s left to do?”

“We’ve, uh…” he blinked, frowned, and thought. “Uh, supplies. Now that the shelves are repaired. Gotta bring the food and stuff down.”

“Let’s get on with that, then.”

“Yeah.”

One thing the school had plenty of was supplies. FEMA packages, donations from local businesses that were going out of business, or just from local people wanting to do their part. They had plenty of stuff. But that didn’t mean the stuff they had could be used thoughtlessly and without preparation.

Take rice, for instance. A small volume went a long way, with rice. But it needed cooking, and that created a problem. A fallout shelter by definition was not well ventilated, because ventilation would have let in the fallout. So that meant no fires or gas rings, unless they felt like suffocating themselves on smoke or carbon monoxide.

They had an induction cooker, but powering it meant either a generator—fumes again—or a high-capacity battery.

Fortunately, they had one of those, but it was still a good example of all the little details that went into this thing. Olivia had once seen a Far Side strip, with a husband and wife underground, surrounded by food cans while the mushroom clouds bloomed on the surface, and the wife was berating her man for neglecting the can opener.

So, Olivia had her checklist. Food and containers, check. Water? Oh yes, check. Several big blue barrels of the stuff. Bottle opener, can opener, check check. They had a first aid kit, a camp toilet and human waste composter, toilet paper and (less essential but by God were they going to be glad of it) an air freshener spray. They had sleeping bags, they had spare clothes, they had soap bars, plastic bags, eating utensils, cups and napkins, disinfectant, a sewing kit, blankets….

A wind-up lamp, and books. If the bombs fell, and they survived, then the kids were going to get the complete Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, just to begin with.

There was a method to the shelter’s layout, too. They could strip and wash down a person, bag their clothes and give them their iodine before they entered the inner sanctum, behind its layers of hanging cloth and plastic sheeting.

Olivia was honestly quite proud of how much they’d done in such a short span of time. No matter how Lucas felt, they were doing something. They were still making an effort, still fighting to save lives.

That was how she kept going through it all. If just one more kid made it out of this mess because of the shelter she’d helped build? She’d feel okay.

Still. Part of her clung to some hope. She prayed for wisdom and cool heads to prevail. She hoped that the scare and the war in Kazakhstan would be it and that the world had been woken up to the idea that greed would just destroy them all.

She hoped, in short, that all of these preparations would be unnecessary.

Lucas retreated back down the stairs with a grunt of effort, carrying the lower end of a water barrel, the other end of which was held by one of his barricade buddies. Olivia got out of the way for them as they rolled it into place in the stockpile. Three more to go: to be on the safe side, they’d decided to have a large surplus far beyond the recommended gallon per person per day. Enough for that emergency rinse-off, or for washing out wounds.

She took inventory of the food, made a note to herself that if there was time they needed to scrounge up some hot sauce, mustard and garlic, and headed for the surface in search of fresh air. It wasn’t that the shelter was stuffy, as such, but that it would definitely get stuffy, unbearably so, when they were down there for two weeks.

If. She reminded herself to be optimistic. If they were down there.

…When.

She couldn’t force herself any longer. She could feel it, like a storm coming. Pray as she might that she’d turn out to be wrong, she knew all of this preparation wasn’t “just in case.” But, that was just like the bigger picture, really. When confronted with a choice between fatalistically accepting the inevitable and just waiting for it to happen, or knuckling down and doing something, she’d always choose the latter. So would all the people here.

And that, she felt, was something to be proud of.

So, she trotted upstairs, grabbed her bag, and set out in search of sriracha. And maybe, along the way, she’d find just one more life to save.

Just one would be enough.

Ekallim-Igigi, New Uruk System, Relic Space

Alex, prince of Ekallim-Igigi

The king was drunk. Very, very drunk.

Alex was used to his father growing merry over a jug of wine, of course. Gilgamesh was in the habit of indulging in simple pleasures. He enjoyed his drink, his music and his wives greatly, and Alex could certainly understand that. But he’d never seen his father get drunk before. Not in this melancholy, mournful way. They were supposed to go flying and enjoy some sparring. Not now. In his current state, Alex might have killed the old man.

Somehow, that was the most sobering thought he’d ever had.

It was making him and Yekidaa feel immensely protective and worried, even while the old man ranted angrily at the walls.

“So close… To come so close, and then have one…petty little would-be king throw it all away!”

“We don’t know that, father. There is still much working for us. I’ve been accepted onto Warhorse’s team—”

“Agh. You’re young. Younger than you know!” the king made what was probably meant to be a small and precise dismissive gesture but which turned into an ungainly wave of his whole arm. “Y’ven’t…you do not know evil, boy. Hunters and Hierarchy, yes, yes. But y’ve never looked human evil in the face…takes a good person to be a real bastard y’ know…”

“You might be surprised what I’ve seen,” Alex answered levelly. “Now…come, father. Let’s get you into a nice hot bath.”

“Ugh. See!” Gilgamesh gestured to Yekidaa with his wine cup. “Child doesn’t even know how to sober a man up! Cold water, young man!”

Alex grinned. “I was lying. Of course it was going to be cold. Ice and everything!”

“He’s learned his pranks well, at least,” Yekidaa commented, with a chitter. “He’s right old friend, this is no condition for a king.”

Gilgamesh tottered slightly before finally finding his balance, and some of his dignity. “Oh…fuck. Why you two always gotta be all smart and right allatime?!”

“You told me to,” Alex pointed out, and backed off with a chuckle when his father aimed a light-hearted swat his way.

“Smart-mouth…by the gods. No, you’re right. I’m bein’ a fool…now’s the time to be kingly, not a drunken mewling…whatever.”

“I think you’re allowed an indiscretion every thousand years or so,” Yekidaa chittered.

Gilgamesh snorted, and leaned on Alex’s shoulder heavily for a second. “Nuclear war, though…the damned fools.”

Alex stumbled for a momen before regaining his footing. “Only thing we can do is be ready. Now come, father. Your bath awaits.

It took a few minutes more to deliver the king to his baths which, as promised, were ice cold and tended by Queen Amélie, the most endlessly forgiving of Alex’s step-mothers.

Alex stood outside with Yekidaa, and fell into a bit of a word pun challenge while they waited. Which turned into a tackle and a brawl when Yekidaa went too far.

“You degenerate monster!” Alex grinned while he tried (and failed) to pin the ancient gaoian to the floor.

“Your father called me that the day we met!”

“Just proves he’s right—OW! Claws?! Oh, that does it—”

Gilgamesh emerged, looking (and smelling) much better. Still very much the worse for drink, but at least focused, and much of his melancholy had dissipated.

“I ought to wrestle you, young man! I have never suffered such a frigid bath!”

“Hey!” Alex objected, detangling himself from the chittering wall of fur. “I didn’t do anything! All I did was, y’know. Suggest an outcome. And you brought it on yourself anyway!”

“I suppose I did…ugh.” Gilgamesh sat down heavily on one of his couches, then picked up the pills and drink that someone—Amélie, presumably—had left there. Alex reflected that after a few hundred years, the queens came to know Gilgamesh well enough to predict which bit of furniture he’d dramatically flop onto in this situation. Impressive, really.

“Gods, I haven’t let myself go like that in centuries.”

“This time, I think nobody will hold it against you.”

“Perhaps not…but a crisis is no time to let oneself go, so I will hold it against me.” Gilgamesh cleared his throat and shuddered. Alex could sympathize—he’d needed those sober-up pills himself, during his early experiments with wine and spirits when he didn’t know his limit. The feeling of one’s state of mind returning to equilibrium was rather like going through the entire hangover in just a few seconds.

Funny, that. Many of the Line were actually lightweights on the alcohol.

“Also…do I remember hearing you were accepted on Warhorse’s team?”

“Yes!” Alex was particularly proud of that. “Been training on tactics and such every free moment. I’ll probably mostly be their pilot, though.”

“I assume your mothers have been involved?”

“Tomoe and Mevia decided it was time I graduated to the closest ring. It was…educational.”

“Hah!” GIlgamesh chuckled, then winced. “…Yes. Were you unaware they’d been holding back on you these last two years?”

“I’d suspected it. The reality of how much, though…”

“They’re both a hundred times your age, lad. And they’ve trained against me for millennia. Don’t think we’ve been idle recently, either! I’ve been inspired these recent years to push myself once more! One more swipe at the ring, as it were. Feel centuries younger!”

“I thought you felt a fair bit heavier…has ‘Horse gotten to you?”

“Of course!” Gilgamesh laughed. “Yekidaa here, too! Gods, it might be fun to see how we stack up now against your HEAT friends…”

They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Leifini entered the room, her expression and posture radiating sadness. She was holding a tablet lightly in her hands, which she passed to Gilgamesh.

They all knew what she was about to say.

“…It begins.”

President Margaret White

It began in Israel, too suddenly for any diplomatic intervention, or indeed for Margaret to be quite sure what exactly had sparked it.

She shouldn’t have been surprised. There was a land divided but sacred to millions, and the site of a conflict that had been smoldering since…forever, really. It was a predictable—indeed, prophesied—place for Armageddon to begin.

Maybe in years to come there’d be time to pull on the threads, go over the data with the finest combs, and figure out the precise sequence of events. From the distant perspective of the White House situation room, however, it was just chaos. Troops and tanks in the streets, in the West Bank and Gaza, a monsoon of rocket and mortar fire. It didn’t matter who’d started it, really: she could see the writing on the wall from mere minutes in.

She ordered the military back to DEFCON 2, and the embassy in Jerusalem evacuated.

There was no mood for cooler heads to prevail, now. Generations of resentment, fear, grievances and holy fervor were combining with the inescapable fact of the looming apocalypse, and combining into a heady self-destructive brew. No doubt the internal experience was righteous anger, or protecting home and kin. But from the outside, the thought bouncing around in the collective meta-mind of some ten million people or so was: “Fuck it. May as well resolve this once and for all…”

It was no surprise therefore when the bombings started. When the streets and neighborhoods were flattened. When the battles raged in the streets and the holy land became hell on Earth.

It was no surprise when neighboring nations joined in, either, and poured their own militaries over the border.

Iran made an unsettling statement. Their intent was crystal clear

It could surely be no surprise that they made good on it, and that their weapons were largely duds. Israel had some awesome defenses. And it came as no surprise when the Israelis retaliated in full.

Margaret went to DEFCON 1, and got on the emergency phones with her peers. Russia didn’t want this. China didn’t want this. India didn’t want this.

Pakistan wasn’t answering.

NATO was fully mobilizing. Not that there was much you could do on the scale of minutes…but Russia and China noticed, of course. Mobilized themselves in turn, and all the while all of them were stuck in a spiral of demanding each other de-escalate while not feeling able to do so themselves and each minute of failing to do so was effectively an escalation…

It was like watching a horror movie, silently screaming at the characters for being so stupid when one of the characters was…herself.

The only thing she could do was order the spaceships to hold at Cimbrean and wait. They at least could jump in and deploy to beacon at an instant’s notice. It was the tiniest of concessions but it was a thread to hang on by, and somehow that thread held even when an airburst went off in the sky over Tehran…

But it couldn’t hold when Pakistan retaliated on Iran’s behalf. And when India launched their stuff because they couldn’t be sure how much of it was aimed at them, and China launched because they couldn’t be sure how much was aimed at them—

And that was the point NORAD informed her that several of the Chinese missiles were aimed at targets on US soil, and that was the point the Secret Service bundled her into the jump array to get her safely off-planet…

And that was the last time Margaret White ever set foot on Earth.

Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth

Joshua Hartl

The sirens.

They’d not even come down from DEFCON 2 for a week when, yesterday morning, they’d gone back up, and Josh knew it was gonna happen this time.

He knew it when the forcefields went up for real. Before it had been an overhead sort of a saucer. Now they went all the way to the ground and cut through buildings in a lot of places.

Then came DEFCON 1. Full curfew. Full activation of everything. He bundled Jess and Maria down into the basement fallout shelter he’d prepared, made them promise they wouldn’t come out until they heard the all clear or rescue came, then got in his truck and fuckin’ booked it.

Even with his right foot pressed flat to the floor, he’d not quite made it to the firehouse when the sirens went off.

He ditched the truck in the station lot, grabbed his supply box, thundered inside. Down into the station’s basement where everything they needed to do their jobs after this was all over was waiting. Full chemical fire and radiation hazard rig, which Josh had always thought they might hafta use if anything happened to the nuclear plants in Pittsburgh or up on Lake Erie and they were called in to help.

His rig was something special. Since Heroes were a thing now, there were specialty manufacturers of very special gear…Chief and city hall had budgeted for Josh specifically.

What he had made him into a walking goddamn tank. Which meant he’d be the one most exposed to…whatever was coming. Theoretically his suit could handle it…

Shit, he was shaking. Just looking at it. His two hundred kilo death sentence.

Then he didn’t have to look at it any more, for a few seconds. The power cut out as somebody, somewhere transferred Columbus’ entire grid draw to powering the city shield generators. The station’s backup generator kicked in, emergency lighting came on…it was shocking enough to spur him into motion and get him to finish putting it on. Seal it up. Help his buddies check their own seals.

After that there was nothing to do but sit and wait.

And wait.

The update came. A missile was headed their way.

The chaplain started reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Josh closed his eyes and mouthed it along with him.

“—for ever and ever…amen.”

Then…silence. Silence like he’d never known, like the entire world taking a breath in before speaking.

The hammer of God landed.

++END CHAPTER 92++

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Dandelion: audiobook now available!

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

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TTTA

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As well as 50 Deathworlders…

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60 Friendly ETs, 139 Squishy Xenos and 329 Dizi Rats who imitate the infamous squonk and dissolve in their own tears.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 93: “The Silent Earth.”

Chapter 93: The Silent Earth

Raleigh, NC, USA, Earth

Olivia Beckett

“I confess to almighty God, and to you, my Brothers and Sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do…”

Even underground, in the bunker, surrounded by layers of carpeting and curtain, the sirens filled the world. Their endless, overlapping howl covered all sound and made it difficult for Olivia even to hear her own words as she prayed.

“…through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault…”

Her knuckles were white. Her spine crawled, as if at any second she might feel the briefest touch of terrible heat, or the crushing weight of concrete and stone landing on her in the instant before death…

There was the opposite of a noise, a pulse of sheer overwhelming event such that for a moment there was a kind of ur-silence that drowned out everything. The ceiling failed to cave in. Olivia remained, kneeling shoulder-to-shoulder with the others. The words never faltered, even as the world shook.

“…And you, my Brothers and Sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.”

The priest raised his hands.

“Brothers and Sisters, please bring your sins before the Lord in your own hearts…”

Olivia turned her thoughts inwards. Shone a light on every corner of herself. Her sins…

So many of them, really. The pangs of envy she’d been feeling for the kids who escaped to Cimbrean, the unkind words she’d said when her fear and anger had broken to the surface, the nights spent with Lucas which had been happy enough but never official, the vengeful fantasies imagining what the HEAT had done to the guys who caged little Jenny, all the unfinished business and all the things left unsaid…

She wasn’t exactly…well, she’d only recently become Catholic. Hadn’t even believed in anything at all until recently, and she was still growing, still learning what it meant…

Right now, it meant forgiveness. Sorrow for so many things…and forgiveness.

Father O’Brien raised his hands up high, as though placing them atop everyone’s heads. “God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

“Amen.”

The nearest sirens had fallen silent. Maybe something had knocked them out. In the silence, she could still hear a few distant ones wailing away, but now there was relative quiet, punctuated by a distant crack-boom. Olivia let out a long, slow, shuddering breath, and looked to her right. Lucas, his eyes glinting in the darkness, swallowed, nodded, and took her hand. Squeezed it tight. She gave him a tight, tiny smile, feeling better that he was there, and…warm, somehow. At peace, no matter what happened next.

Father O’Brien lowered his hands. “I will now take individual confessions,” he said. “Starting with the youngest. Come forward as I—”

There was an instant of terrible, brilliant heat.

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

At the moment, High Mountain Fortress’s morning coincided with D.C.’s. So, after a tense week, and a blissful night o’ relievin’ tension with as much vigor as Naydi an’ Leela could handle…

Well, the mornin’ was a rude awakening.

Daar knew the sniff of it right away. It was gonna happen. An’ just like in his own War, the cold feelin’ of terrible duty was slitherin’ down his back. So: stretch, big breakfast, get pumped-up an’ brushed, an’ all the important lil’ details ready. Alert the Fangs, alert the fleet. Send a special note to Champions Thurrsto an’ Gurrum.

He spent the morning in communication, keeping his blood up, refining the plan. Making sure to give absolutely no sign whatsoever what he was plannin’. ‘Fer the good o’ everyone his intent had ‘ta be secret. So, when allies called…he was truthful. And reassuring.

And careful. He had Thurrsto and Sheeyo by his side to help with that.

And then it happened.

Whitecrest had some stealthy imaging, nuclear detection, and tight-beam communication micro-satellites up in extremely high polar orbits over Earth, well away from anything the humans might be using. It had been a masterstroke slipping those in, and one of their deepest, bestest kept secrets. If any of the allied governments knew they were there, it would have severely damaged relations. But, well.

Friends kept an eye on friends. Especially powerful, passionate, volatile deathworlder friends who were young to the games of power. And disunited.

The launches had only just begun when Daar decided to act. Now was the moment. None of the powers on Earth would be considering the full strategic situation; they were mired down in existential tactics, and that would be their doom. In a few hours, there would be no effective governments. Or if there were, apologies and amends could be made afterward.

For now, it would be an orgy of destruction. The Great Father could not allow that contagion to spread. Could not allow it to destroy irreplaceable assets. And, so…

He issued his orders, fetched his regalia, and thumped down to the jump room.

If he was going to do something like this, he’d better do it in person.

All he could do now was hope.

Dataspace adjacent to Earth

Alpha-of-Alphas

Sneaking close enough to watch was a near-suicidal gamble, but the Alpha-of-Alphas could no sooner resist the urge to witness this holy moment than a brood-omega could resist the spawning instinct. And besides…the Entity was probably too distracted to notice, if the Alpha-of-Alphas did not provoke it. It had grown adept at navigating the dangerous ecosystem of the drone swarm. It could not seize control, not yet. And if it did, the Entity would notice and destroy the compromised drone.

Waves of < grief > and < doubt > and < self-recrimination > rolled off the much larger mind like the dataspace equivalent of stormy weather. It had transferred much of its drone fleet to Earth’s low orbit, doubtless entertaining fantasies of intervening, somehow. Against Humanity, in its element? Nonsense. No doubt the galaxy was about to receive a masterclass in true terrestrial aggression. The Alpha-of-Alphas could penetrate security well enough to peer through borrowed eyes and watch the war unfold. It expected to be dazzled and entertained.

Indeed, what unfolded was the most beautiful thing imaginable.

China, in the end, had only sent three warheads toward the United States. It was probably an honest accident. But it was enough to trigger DEFCON 1, and enough to get the airborne command post up in the air. The CAPs and the bombers loaded and ready.

That, in turn, was enough to send Russia over the edge. They shot everything. Pakistan shot everything. India shot everything. Everyone fired everything they had. The USA spoke last of all, but when it did, its voice was the doom of the world.

The first few strikes in America’s salvo were water-borne, a medium of warfare the Alpha-of-Alphas had simply never conceived of. But the logic was immediately apparent. A highly conductive medium like seawater was all but impossible to maintain a stable shield in: nuclear torpedoes could slip in under the shield domes and detonate inside, to devastating effect. Port cities along every belligerent nation’s coastline were the first casualties.

The second wave, scant seconds behind, was thousands of heat blooms as every missile rocketed out of their silos. Peacekeeper II hyper-acceleration ICBMs with thirty blink-warp stealth warheads each, against Russia’s latest and greatest. The boost phase for both had lasted less than ten seconds before breaching the troposphere, and the weapons themselves blinked up and out of the atmosphere into stealthy coast orbits, all of it so fast that even the most sophisticated orbital defenses had hardly any time to react. Indeed, the resulting radiation wash from warping even in thin atmosphere swept clear the orbits directly above the warheads of any unshielded satellites—which now became visible to counter-force on-orbit targeting.

Wormhole suppression? Useless. Forcefield protection? Functionally impossible in low orbits. Rapid microwave laser targeting? Well, Russia shot down some missiles, the US shot down more, but both powers managed to slip a huge number of weapons through the gauntlet, through simple saturation. The next few minutes were a frantic effort to identify and destroy the invisible, nigh-undetectable warheads as they coasted through to their final destination.

Russia’s own underwater attacks were smaller, and doubtless there was some furious sea-war at play that, sadly, the Alpha-of-Alphas could not witness. An underwater explosion here and there showed its echoes. A few were obviously nuclear. Whatever happened, Russian submarines managed to strike a number of American ports before they were undoubtedly destroyed.

Brilliant, really. All of it. Just the right blend of advanced technology and simple physics, combined with the sheer numbers of weapons to defend against. Even with most great powers not even controlling the sea or the orbitals, the result had been a gloriously unstoppable weapon concept. Humankind’s idea of nuclear warfare had advanced considerably since the advent of contact, and on this front, the great powers had spared no expense.

Further missiles boiled out of the sea too, here and there, nowhere detectable in advance, in no meaningful way stoppable by this phase of the war. Bombers, last of all, took to the sky on their final missions, before missiles arrived and after everything else was in motion, and these might have been stopped before they took off, but it didn’t matter. The bombers were final retribution against Russia and China for having triggered this glorious Apocalypse, and stopping them would have not prevented the major consequences, anyway.

The Alpha-of-Alphas watched a glorious hypersonic rain of warheads descend across the entire globe.

Whatever new means it had to feel thrill did so at this sublime, ultimate, holy expression of mastery in the art of killing. The deadliest species in the galaxy had truly outdone themselves in this moment.

It watched the shield war, a nanosecond game of hard counters as various national systems did their best to hold off the apocalypse, with varying levels of success. The British enjoyed the strongest success, owing to simple engagement geometry; their location and their size made for a favorable defensive solution, especially thanks to the dense crowding of shield emitters they’d put up. There had been, apparently, much mockery and complaining about the Pridwen system when it was first funded and built, but now it turned out to be the most sensible investment the UK ever made. They even protected Ireland, by proxy and owing to quiet treaties between them.

The Alpha-of-Alphas in its new datamind existence had begun…broadening its horizons. Studying others, on their terms. That was an option, now. It wasn’t as if it had a species to command, any longer…

Well, not directly, anyway.

The United States was too big to fully protect. Too much of its interior was open farm and grazing land, many of its cities too widely spaced to enjoy the overlapping protection of its largest metropolitan areas. Most smaller cities were safe against indirect strikes, at best.

Russia’s ballistic targeting had never much improved, so they did not bother with anything below ten megatons. Size, and sheer warhead count. By this did Russia doom its foe.

Divine.

But the Alpha-of-Alphas dared linger no longer. The emotional context pouring out of the Entity was changing now. It was growing focused. Resolved. < Fiercely determined >. Clearly, it had reached some internal conclusion about its next course of action.

Like a fish in dark waters, the Alpha-of-Alphas flickered away into the depths of Dataspace before it could be detected, and left no trace of its ever having been there. Had it still been corporeal, its heart would have been racing: even in this digital state, its soul was still singing with glee. It had succeeded beyond its wildest dreams!

And it could not wait to see what the Humans did next.

Chief Sergeant Christian (Righteous) Firth

Everyone was waiting for the deployment orders to come. They came just as news began to trickle in about some event in Israel. To nobody’s surprise, the full team was being deployed.

A situation like this might escalate very quickly.

Details to follow, for the moment it was simply to re-deploy and they were getting going as fast as they possibly could. All-hands on deck to get everything going in record time. The Lads could self-suit now, leaving the techs to verify and maintain, and that meant they could all take care of themselves while their techs got everything unplugged, rolling forward, and onto the pad.

They were already three fully-packed jumps out and working on the forth (and final) load when Christian pushed the button, his Mass self-sealed and Righteous stepped off the pad, armed, armored, loaded for bear, and ready to fuck shit up.

So was Yan, and two of his biggest fellow Given-Men. Vemik-grade, they were, or even a bit better. Telling though, that it took veteran Given-Men twice his age to best the young manic gorilla, and one could count on their fingers the number who could.

Yan looked up and grunted. “This is first rapid de-ploy-ment for us…” Slightly nervous tail-twitch.

Firth put a hand on the big bastard’s shoulder. Yan was an all-natural freak, still not riding the Crude yet still rapidly improving. Respectable. He was huge by any standard, an easy six-foot-three in a big ten’gewek male’s perpetually bent-leg, sloped-foward cavehulk posture. Dominant men of his kind like him grew continually through their lives and he’d taken full advantage, packing every millimeter of his insanely wide and robust frame beyond full with muscle. And that didn’t even cover the academics. Ten’gewek in general were fast learners but Yan was much like Vemik and drank it in like a sponge, as fast as Costello or the team could feed him. His were a people made for excellence.

Nonetheless, the gap between them had only widened, because Firth was even bigger and stockier, doing the exact same thing only far more aggressively. Yan still saw Firth as a mentor in all things warrior-like and “strong.”

…Which he was. Technically. Never stopped feelin’ weird, really.

And he couldn’t wait to one day see what Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge would finally become.

He smiled, genuinely. “You’ll do fine, you’re a tough and smart people, and you know everything we could think up to teach you. So let’s ask boss here if we’ve got any details yet?”

Costello ambled over from his own station, suited up with visor retracted.

“No mission details yet, this is a readiness deployment. Could be on watch for a long while so I hope y’all have kept your barracks clean and your pack-out plan posted…”

Some rough chuckles, there. Because of the nature of their job, every member of HEAT had to maintain a room in the barracks, one fully-stocked with everything they’d need for indefinite deployment. All of it had to fit into a double wardrobe on wheels, be in or bolted to their desk (which had a lid that went over the top), or fit under their bed. The reason being, all of it was designed to unplug and wheel out easily. The only thing that should be left behind was whatever they’d left on the wall—though the techs were good about pulling those down, too.

That meant the junior logistics staff was busy packing up their rooms right behind them, and that meant they’d need to do a BBQ or something for them, whenever this was over.

…Well, assumin’ it’d ever be over. No news in this case wasn’t exactly reassuring.

Hurry up and wait happened, like it did. Whole lotta tension in the air, but also a whole lotta nobody really knowin’ nothin’ about what was goin’ on…

Costello remained sat at his little corner desk listening and talkin’ to somebody about somethin’, but whatever was reachin’ him, he didn’t share it yet.

Until he did. He nodded once, firmly, then stood up and called out for them to get on the array platform. No briefing? No objective?

…Okay. They huddled on, pulled in close so nobody was gonna get part’a their kit snipped off by the field edge, and…

Thump.

…

Of all the places Firth hadn’t been expectin’ to go, High Mountain Fortress wasn’t it.

“…Sir? Shouldn’t we…”

Thump, thump, thump.

That could only be one man.

Daar’s rhythmic, impossibly heavy gait resonated through the stone floor, being felt through Firth’s feet long before it was heard. The giant armored blast doors to High Mountain’s jump room groaned on their hinges as he effortlessly pushed them open. All…fuck, twelve-plus feet of him? All of him walked calmly through the door, ears brushing against the top frame.
They were built both to accommodate him comfortably and to withstand almost any conceivable attack; most anyone else wanting to swing the doors had to push a button and wait for the machinery to struggle against their weight.

The whole team took an automatic step backwards when they saw him, because that was the correct thing to do in the presence of a genuine living god-king. Everyone was wimpy and pathetic next to Daar on full display.

…They weren’t being deployed. The Great Father was sending a message.

He showed up wearin’ his full fuckin’ regalia, too: the crown, the cape, the kilt, his mace in hand…everything. He was a magnificent, terrible bear-king hulking out of his fur, conditioned to a highers standard than anyone or anything else alive. He stood there with all of it on display, even through his fur, those colossal shoulders of his wider than Firth was tall, brushing against the frame of the giant door.

And his expression was of terrible sadness. He surveyed them all for a few long seconds, then delivered his news.

“Earth just went to war. The kind that’ll be over in a few minutes.”

Christian blinked. He looked to Costello, who swallowed, and asked the question they were all suddenly thinking.

“So…what’s our mission?”

“The hardest mission you’ve ever done. Nothing.”

“But—” the word left Gonzo’s mouth early, then got bitten back in when Daar glanced at him. Not unkindly. But with the full force of his authority. His terrible, complete authority.

“Right. So. Lemme make sure you unnerstand what’s just happened.” Daar sighed, and…yeah. He went to the side to grab a huge bench and settled his weight down on it. Everyone gathered around, and a darkly amusing image flashed through Firth’s mind: little kids gathering ‘round papa bear to hear the tale of the end of the world. “The details are fuzzy, but a full nuclear exchange is underway. We’re at second strike right now. Some major AEC cities have already fallen. Much of Asia will be erased. Japan and South Korea seem to have escaped the worst of it…but Taiwan is gone, China is destroyed, Russia is about to be bombed into the stone age. The middle east is gone.”

He rested his paws on his mace like it was a walking stick. “Europe is…hard ‘ta predict. North America…well, lots o’ towns an’ such will prob’ly servive, but the port cities won’t, an’ all th’ major lines o’ communication flow through major targets. Not clear essactly what’s good and what’s gone, jus’ yet. So…severe logistical disruption, at a minimum, an’ what’s left in most major cities ain’t gonna last ‘fer long. I dunno exactly how many are dead or gonna die, but…it’s gonna be billions, mos’ likely. Which brings me to you.”

Firth’s stomach had sunk into his boots as the words came. Fuck…his family. The folks at Sacred Heart. Everyone. His whole body was going numb, but his ears listened to what Daar had to say.

“In a matter of minutes, most every important Earth government is gon’ be destroyed or crippled. AEC just effectively died, ‘cuz whatever’s left o’ the Five-Eyes an’ NATO ain’t gonna be up to spaceborne combat; y’all have literal fires to put out.”

Gathered around Daar, the Lads stood rigid, watching and listening. The only sound was soft breathing, and the faint buzz of the array’s capacitors recharging.

“So,” Daar summarized glumly. “That’s the current state o’ play. I won’t sugar-coat it, you know that. At best there’ll be a set o’ rump governments ‘ta lead AEC after this. They’ll be entirely focused on evacuation an’ keepin’ order, an’ they won’t be doin’ no spaceborne anything after today. Does…y’all unnerstand that, right? Like, in ‘yer guts unnerstand what’s happenin’?”

Firth didn’t, not really. He was still hung up on worrying for his folks. Okay, sure, they were way up in the hills out in the backwoods, but fallout was like an especially deadly form of glitter—it got everywhere, with unconscious malice.

And then there were the folks at the Sacred Heart shelter. If Raleigh took a hit…fuck, what was he gonna tell the girls?

“So. Back to you. Revenge is gonna be foremost in th’ mind o’ whoever’s left alive down there. Knowing all this, and of the Great Enemy we have been preparing to strike, and in accordance with the succession terms of the Alliance Treaties, I am taking full and personal ownership of the SOR and assuming command of Earth’s space navies. By this, I sequester priceless, irreplaceable forces from the ongoing fight. An’ jus’ in case anyone is feelin’ itchy, well…here you are, and soon the entire fleet. My guests, until this settles down.”

Christian’s first instinct was to argue. He wanted to get back, to help with cleanup, to try an’ save some folks, any folks, but especially his folks…

Then his brain finally started working again, and thought about the whole situation again, and he saw the ruthless, cold-hearted logic they all had ‘ta work with right now. And as that settled in, he let the tension out that had been building in him, sagged…and nodded.

This was Daar, after all. He’d earned a lotta trust over the years. But the next thing he said was really putting that trust to the test.

“Furthermore, to assure the survival of a key ally, I am declaring both Earth and Cimbrean as protectorate worlds of my people before the Dominion Security Council, in accordance with my authority as a senior member. Your worlds are to be held in trust until…well, bluntly? Until I’m satisfied ‘yer capable of self-governance.” He sounded like a disappointed parent, now. “I have no desire to take your species’ sovereignty from you. But right now, there is none to take. And in any case…your leaders just attempted ‘ta obliterate your people’s homeworld. So yeah. Y’all’re here ‘ta keep you from bein’ wasted in a senseless act o’ collective insanity.

“But,” he continued, “‘Yer my Cousins’ an’ Brothers. I know y’all well enough to know you’re all thinkin’ about what you could do, the lives you could save, how useful you could be right now if I weren’t doin’ this. Right?”

He looked around: when he caught Firth’s eye, Christian could only nod. “Surely there’s something we can do—?” he asked.

“There is, yeah. You prepare ‘fer TILE FLIP, ‘cuz we are runnin’ on fuckin’ fumes now, Cousins. The gao are on our last leg ‘fore we gotta focus our full attention inward, the ten’gewek ain’t got theirs under ‘em yet an’ won’t ‘fer centuries. No offense, Yan.”

Yan just grunted, acknowledging the obvious truth.

“An’ as for humankind? Y’all just basic’ly committed fuckin’ suicide…right now, the Hierarchy is winnin.’ All they gotta do is play the long game, an’ they’re far too good to lose at that. But mebbe—maybe—if we can somehow get TILE FLIP ‘ta happen anyway? Then maybe all our peoples somehow survive ‘ta build a future. That is what you can do.”

The mace thumped down as he hefted it onto his shoulder and sat up tall. “Champion Loomi’s gonna go to the Corti, we’re gonna super-science as hard as we can. You, me, my Fangs, our cavemonkey volunteers…we only get one shot at this, an’ we gotta be the best we can all possibly be. Even now it’s gonna be a while ‘fore we can strike, ‘cuz we gotta win when we attack. So…’fer now, there’s ‘yer mission. ‘Yer only mission. ‘Ta get ready. I’ll be askin’ everything o’ y’all, soon enough. An’ I suspect there’ll be new members joinin’ too… but ‘fer now, there’s one thing I need from all’a you.”

He looked at Costello.

They all looked at Costello. Every man in the room. He was their commander, after all. Shit, Firth could remember when he’d first come on the team, baby-faced and, yeah, already damn good at what he did ‘cuz he’d have never made the team otherwise. Now he was a Beef in his own right, all of the officers were now. Fuck they’d all come a long way since the beginning.

Daar rose to his feet with a sad expression and a quiet keen. “Colonel Costello, I have no desire to ask this. But you know what’s happening. What’s really happening, here. I need you to state your loyalties, and I need you to do it now.”

…Well, shit. Christian felt his pulse skyrocket. This was happening. Jesus fuck.

“Your Majesty,” Costello chose his words carefully. “You have issued wartime flash orders to redeploy the HEAT, which we obeyed lawfully, and in good faith. Nonetheless, we have sworn oaths of loyalty to our respective governments and sovereigns.”

“Yes, you have. In the stand-up of SOR as an international entity, those same powers acceded to a treaty which addresses this very situation.” He turned and held out his paw, which Tiyun pressed a tablet into. “To quote the relevant text on succession…”

“A Signatory to these Instruments retains Authority therein by their capacity to mutual defense and aid of member Signatories. Under this Instrument, that capacity shall consist in staffing, maintaining, sustaining, and advancing sufficient spaceborne capability to participate in the defense of the Signatory’s collective territory, commerce, peace, and other equities.

“In the event a Signatory is incapable of maintaining these commitments, they will withdraw from the Instruments at their earliest convenience, subject to agreements among the Signatories. Should a Signatory find themselves incapacitated owing to warfare, conflict, or force majeure, other Signatories shall provide all necessary aid and comfort.

“Command of the Alliance shall, in times of uncertainty, rest with the senior Signatory.”

“Gentlemen,” he said, handing the tablet back, “I am the senior Signatory, and this, ‘ta put it mildly, is a time o’ uncertainty. Your governments ain’t fit ‘ta command under the terms of the treaty and I am exercising my rights of continuity. There…ain’t no goin’ home, my friends. You know this. Whatever’s left ain’t even gonna be able ‘ta feed y’all. So, I’ll put a choice before ‘ya instead. If any man here wishes to walk away from the SOR, he may do so an’ try ‘ta find a place among the human diaspora here on Gao, or return ‘ta Cimbrean. Balls, I’ll even help ‘ya get on ‘yer feets. But if that ain’t the path ‘fer you, I will accept ‘yer loyalty, here an’ now.”

“You…Daar, you are asking us to break our oaths of service. You must understand that!”

“They’re already broken, Colonel. They broke th’ moment ‘yer governments blew each other up an’ abandoned ‘ya on a distant world. There ain’t nobody home. I know you’ve been tryin’. Balls, I’ve been tryin’ too! An’ what essactly is gonna come callin’, eventually? How are they gonna sustain a force o’ men that need a minimum o’ fifty-thousand calories a head o’ specialized food every damn day just ‘ta live?”

Costello didn’t have a ready answer for that, and Daar pounced.

“No, Colonel. ‘Yer oaths are fulfilled, ‘cuz there ain’t nobody y’all can serve anymore.”

“…Our governments may not take that notion very well, Your Majesty.”

There was a lot said in that statement. Daar narrowed his eyes.

“There are two ways outta this room, Colonel Costello. One of ‘em is that jump pad. Take it, an’ ‘yer free, but you’ll never be in th’ fight again. Th’ other is the door behind me, an’ there’s only one way I’m lettin’ ‘ya pass. Let us consider the situation very carefully.”

A few seconds of silence. Costello gave Firth a quick look. Christian very carefully did not react in any way. Because, frankly…

Once, the HEAT in its entirety managed—after an absolutely grueling fight—to take down the Alpha-of-Alphas. Shortly thereafter, Daar took down its replacement, an even more terrible Alpha…basically by himself. Right now? Sure, everyone here was armed, and Daar was just standing there in his fur…

That they could see, anyway. It wasn’t a huge space either, and the giant bastard was just so…

When they’d first met, he wasn’t more than a tough laborer at heart, one who preferred workin’ and sports and maybe the occasional brawl. For his size he was a lanky sort of heavy-muscular, like a cross between a big basketball player and a furry Vin Diesel, maybe. He knew how to lead, how to run a military. Yet importantly, he didn’t know how to fight a human up-close. Which meant Murray, a huge man in his own right, was able to best a literal talking bear well over twice his weight.

But it was earned more with luck and grit than anything else. Daar moved too fast to shoot. He used cover, understood tactics. He was so fucking strong even then that only ‘Horse could beat him, and then not entirely. Daar may have only managed one paw-slap hit on Murray, when the fight got up close, but that one hit had shattered four of his ribs and almost punctured a lung. How Murray didn’t let it show was still something Firth marveled at.

Since then, Daar had made it his life mission never to suffer such a defeat again. That, along with all the other insanity wrapped up with the gaoian species, had made him into a creature that was simply too much to be believed, if you hadn’t met him up close. He was the most massive land-walker anywhere. Nothing was physically stronger, nothing was quicker or faster. He had ant-like explosive power and could fuckin’ leap over buildings, maul steel in his hands, crush Alphas with his bare fucking paws. He was so stocky and densely built, small arms fire basically bounced off of him. And he was so thick everywhere, what would a knife do besides annoy him? Assuming it could even cut the big fucker in the first place?

And he knew his close-quarters combat, these days. Christ, did he ever. Now, sure, Firth and the rest of the HEAT could do similar things these days, too…but none of them were so extreme and total in their ability as Daar. He was better than everyone at everything.

Which meant the fight before them wasn’t a fight they would win, no matter the outcome. Wasn’t a fight any of them wanted. Firth hated that the thought was even there to be entertained in the first place…

Lookin’ around, everyone else was havin’ the same thoughts. Nobody wanted this.

Daar burst the tension by sighing and sagging. “Look. I respect th’ fuck outta all of ‘ya, especially you, Colonel. I know what I’m askin’ of ‘ya. If there’s anyone left after this, I will have words, an’ we will work it out. But I need ‘ta know you will obey. I’m doin’ this because I’m considerin’ what’s at stake, beyond Earth. I’m askin’ ‘ya ‘ta do the same.”

Costello looked at Firth again. This time…

Fuck.

This time, Christian gave the smallest, most painful nod he’d ever given.

The rest of the men followed suit. All of ‘em, deadly silent.

Costello nodded once as well, then stepped forward, and holding himself in the most dignified pose he could, squared up in front of Daar, and sank to his left knee. The click of his armor on the concrete echoed off the silent walls.

Daar made the quickest display of acceptance he could. His ears were flat as he sank down and snuffled in Costello’s short-cut mohawk, the same helmet-compatible haircut they all had.

Then he reached over and lifted Costello back up to his feet.

“Git up, Cousin. An’ may this be the last time you ever bend th’ knee ‘ta anyone. You an’ ‘yer men are now unner th’ Gao’s protection.”

“What about our families, sir?” Firth asked.

“Call ‘em,” Daar replied, simply. “Talk to ‘em. Mebbe we can even make arrangements ‘ta bring ‘em here if we have ‘ta. An’ I ain’t abandonin’ Earth. I intend a full mobilization o’ aid.”

This time, when the Lads looked at each, the energy was….

Not happy. No, not happy at all. How could they be? But God-fucking-dammit, the logic was right there for everyone to see. Daar had said it himself: the Hierarchy was winning. And if they did win, then nuclear war or not, everyone was doomed.

And there were the brutal practical realities at play, too. Firth quite literally ate more every day than ten huge and extremely active men, just to live. He needed special food supplements to fuel his science-experiment body, to keep his bones and tendons strong and healthy. With his literal tons of muscle mass and his hyperactive metabolism, he could starve to death in just a few days. Same with the rest of the team. Earth could not provide for them anymore, and he had his wife and kids to worry about too, all of whom were unambiguously superhuman Heroes and very, very hungry mouths to feed.

That wasn’t even considering his new refugee guests that had been moving in, either.

And his soul needed more than just calories. He needed purpose. He needed to be in this fight. And if the only way to stay in it was to through an ally? A friend?

Daar never lied. The one thing Firth knew to be true besides God himself. He knew, in his bones, Daar had said it exactly the way it was. They were fucked.

…So be it.

Daar was at least polite and dignified about it. Which, honestly, was a head trip all itself. Normally, his Big Daar Energy macho flexing extravagance was a disarming tactic. It was hard to be too afraid of anyone who was so gleefully goofy, after all.

But this time, all stately and perfect? Takin’ their loyalty, after implying he’d whup their collective asses with his blink-quick, supreme bulletproof hulk of a body if they dared do otherwise?

Well, they believed him. Daar could slap Firth into giblets.

So it was a bit of an honest relief when he’d bustled off to attend to the rest of his…coup, or whatever it was. They were escorted to waiting quarters. The Third Fang guys already stationed there were happy to fit ‘em in, happy to sit and talk and sympathize.

But all throughout, Firth couldn’t shake his feeling of…what?

He had a sit-down with the leadership: Yan, Regaari, and the officers. Fortunately, their new barracks were sized for exceptionally large brownies, so the HEAT found them nice and comfortable. Yan and Regaari sat a bit apart, aliens observing a huge change in their world.

Firth didn’t say anything for a long moment, wool-gathering.

…Fuck it.

“We’re…he’s pretty much in charge now, ain’t he?”

“He was exquisitely careful to delineate the boundaries of that, but…yes.” Abbott looked like he needed a stiff drink or ten. “By rights he could declare the alliance null and void. He could probably have got away with outright annexing its assets too. This whole ‘protectorate’ business was really the kindest possible way of gaining his new empire.”

“Meaning us,” Firth grunted. “So are we, what? His conscripts now?”

“No,” Stephenson added, morosely. “‘Cuz he says so. But we’re never going back to…whatever’s left on Earth after this. Do we get nuclear winter? Did defenses hold up? Who the fuck knows?”

“Whitecrest probably does,” Campbell pointed out. “That he knows what he does means they have assets in orbit. Simple as. Now think long-term. He’s planning a Constitution, planning to host the majority of the human…remnant…on Gao. I bet he’ll be formally annexing Earth before long, maybe the rest, too. And we’ll praise him for it.”

Remnant. Fuck. But…

Yan looked uncomfortable, for obvious reasons. “You say, annexing?”

“Yeah, and it’s fucking brilliant.” Costello rolled his helmet over in his hands, and rubbed a thumb over the red-and-white maple leaf on the side. “He played our leaders like fucking violins to set this up, and took full advantage when his long game suddenly became instant. We’re all going to be his loyal supersoldiers under his direct command.”

He looked…defeated. Then he looked over at Regaari. So did the rest of them.

“I…I don’t know what you want me to say,” the Whitecrest offered at last, helplessly. “I can only…trust in My Father to act with everyone’s interests at heart. He has never done otherwise.”

“No, he hasn’t.” Campbell shook his head. “I’ll give ‘em that. We’ll all love it too, serving a competent god-king-hulkbro, living on his world at his expense. His personal property of a world. Most of humanity will be here with us, and he is generously allowing us a voice in our own governance, as invited guests. Who, then, will be the sovereign over the largest numbers of humans? And who will have the orbitals?”

Costello was nodding along as Soup laid it out. He scratched his jaw at that last point though. “…The Entity’s gonna have something to say about that, I reckon.”

“Daar doing this will maximize everyone’s chance of survival. The question answers itself.”

“….Yeah. If it really wants to save people, it’s gotta work with him.“

“But this is Daar we’re talkin’ about,” Firth said. “I mean…” he trailed off, ‘cuz he wasn’t exactly sure what he meant.

“Don’t let your personal loyalty to a battle-brother blind you to the fact he is also the most powerful individual in the galaxy, and he didn’t get that way by accident. He’s the Great Father, and thus compelled to turn that ultra-genius brain of his toward his people’s advantage at all times. We just witnessed what the smartest and strongest god-king to ever live can really do. Because he’s completely right, and he’d have pushed our shit in if we dared to disagree. Done it without cripplin’ us too, I bet. Which makes it even fucking worse! That he can protect us in the deal and put us to productive use is just a happy bonus. All it will cost…is our freedom.”

…Christian didn’t know what to think about that.

“Well.” Campbell grunted. “Look what we fuckin’ did with it…”

Costello sat back and folded his arms. Damn big, these days. And right now, filled with the sort of tension that suggested he needed to punch something. “Oh, just wait. Things will be fine under Daar. He’s a good man, truly, but wait until he’s gone. By then the Gao will have the numbers. They’ll likely have bred themselves into something better than us too, because eugenics is something they’re totally down for and their gene base is unlocked, now.”

“Ekallim-Igigi,” Yan pointed out. “Is safe-guard for this.”

“Ayup. The Gao will soon out-power, out-number, and just out-size us as a civilization and honestly, unless we get with the program, quite literally in our cases, they’ll curb-stomp us individually too. But that’s a moral quandary for another day. Right now, consider this: the Gao were made to control the Galaxy and given the potential to do so. And, so, they will. With a smile, and a cuddle. We’ll be their pets if were not very careful, and we’ll probably love it.”

“…Daar sees us and the ten’gewek as something to be admired.” Firth realized. “To aspire to. And to surpass. And they can do it. Shit, in his lifetime, maybe.”

“Yes,” Regaari added, seriously. “Hopefully without making the same mistakes or falling into the same evolutionary traps. I can pay your peoples no higher compliment than that; you are both something we aspire to.”

“Even with…nuke disaster?” Yan questioned. “Or us, nothing bigger than a village?”

“Even so.”

Costello sighed, “and we can pay yours none more than that. You have the social means to be whatever you choose to be. It’s just a matter of time, now. And who will oppose you? The Hierarchy won, really. They have a control species. Except they don’t control you.”

“Daar does.”

“And will for a thousand years. At least.”

They pondered that for a long while, in uncomfortable silence.

“So…where does that leave us?” Campbell asked.

“Well…” Costello scratched his ‘hawk, thinking. “Right. So. We must maintain something independent and sovereign for as long as possible. We must unite now. Balls, y’know what? I bet Daar would even prefer it that way. He’ll probably encourage us to do it. I think he knows everything we just said—fuck, probably he knows everything we ain’t thought up, too. And I’d bet he’s no more thrilled by the prospect than we are. So…let’s not force his hand. Because he wants what’s good for all of us, but he will act to advance the Gao, first and foremost.”

“So…we need to keep him invested in our well-being.”

“Yup.”

Firth nodded. “…You officers have phone calls to make, then.”

“And you’ve got the Lads to settle in,” Costello agreed. “This is a delicate moment, chief.”

“Understood.” Purpose at last. Something to do. He stood, nodded politely, then set to work being Chief Sergeant. Getting things organized, getting the Lads straightened out and focused again. Getting the lay of their feelings, too.

Get them back to some sort of training routine, tomorrow. Tonight…well, Third Fang were already being the best damn bros. Which Daar knew they would, of course. Makin’ friends with the natives (and, slowly, seeding their target peoples with equipment and training) was what they were trained to do. And what came naturally.

You couldn’t help but like a gaoian. They were so…earnest.

Shit. No wonder the Hierarchy picked them.

A lotta work ahead for Christian. At some point he’d need to call home, talk to Freya. Check how she and the kids and Jenny and Letty were doin’…and as for the Firth family on their land in the Appalachian foothills, the only thing he could do there was wait for news.

And, when he found a moment to do it, to pray.

For everyone.

Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth

Josh Hartl

The noise gave way to silence. Long, empty, silence. Nobody spoke for what felt like years, just waited, and waited and waited. The sirens had been silent forever, and ever since their last call, the only sound in their shelter had been men breathing, the occasional cough, and the faint creak and rustle of their clothing and gear.

The all clear cut into the silence like light into a collapsed mine.

Jesus fuck, the shield had held. He lived.

He fuckin’ lived!

“Masks on and seal up, boys. We gotta go out there.”

Spurred by the Chief’s words, Josh remembered how to move and heaved himself vertical. Most of his suit was already on and sealed, he’d done that hours ago. Now came the hood and helmet, the mask and air supply. Damn thing was…well, it was full-body armor, specifically for a hulk of a firefighter like him. It was heavy but he was at the point where it made him feel powerful and protected, instead of slow and encumbered.

Nobody else on the crew could even lift it off the ground, so that was pretty neat. In any case, It was something like half again his own weight, so his already heavy thumping steps made the basement stairs’ handrail shake and bounce as he clamored up and out of their shelter.

Everything was intact in the station. Lights were on. Computers were on, in fact the dispatch queue was starting to grow.

Outside was…weird.

He could just see to the edge of the shield bubble, and it was a fuckin’ hellscape out there.

Inside the shield edge, though…

The grass was scorched and smoking. The stars and stripes flapping overhead was singed at the edges and ragged. Ambient temperature was hot. Not, like, deadly hot, but the road surface was radiating it like after a really long hot day. He’d be marinating in his own ballsweat in the next few minutes, no doubt about that.

Ionizing radiation…elevated, but the sensor wasn’t fuckin’ shrieking at him like he’d expected. It wasn’t much worse than a long flight at altitude.

So, clearly some of the bomb’s heat pulse made it through. Obviously not much, but that meant the shields didn’t reflect it all perfectly. Which meant—

“Chief, we better get over to the shield’s heatsinks.”

“Yup. We just got dispatched for that, in fact. Let’s ride.”

They mounted up and rolled, lights and sirens on. The city was a weird mix of fucked, and intact: people’s homes were scorched, a few trees were smoking, lawn fires everywhere. There was a haze of smoke over everything.

His engine was the only one with a dude like him, and so they’d be dealing with all the weird shit today. But the rest of the engines?

One look at the board and Josh blanched. Dispatch was rolling everyone somewhere, even if it was just to hose shit down before it let on fire. And they didn’t have much water to use. Municipal water was off until they could flush the treatment plant, so it was all gonna be foam and micro-mist. Lord help anyone if they actually caught fire.

The first shield site was out in Dublin, right next to the fairway. Lots of people had no idea what it was and assumed it was some kinda water treatment plant or something, ‘cuz from the road it looked like nothing more than a tangle of pipes, and a couple of small dams creating a pool for the pipes to plunge into.

In actuality it was a giant water cooling system just like the one in Josh’s gaming PC. Except the pipes were glowing cherry-red and the reservoir was fucking boiling.

Chief looked to him and raised an eyebrow. “Son, I won’t lie. I’ve read the documents on this and done the fam training, but…”

Yup. It was on him. He and his engine crew were the only ones who really knew this shit.

“Well…okay. There’s an operator’s panel around here…”

He went looking around, found the concrete shack where it was kept, well away from the generator itself. Took a fair bit of strength to rip the door open after the heat pulse had basically welded it shut, but after that he could take a look at the panel. It wasn’t a modern-looking beast at all, but a solid slab of steel with big lights and big buttons, designed to be rugged above all else. And, Josh suspected: usable by big-ass Hero mitts like his, wearing radiation gloves.

Unfortunately, one of the more important lights on it was the bad color.

“Fuck…red light on floodgate one.”

That was the upstream gate. Which meant, right now, all the water flowing in from outside the shield and all the fallout it carried was gonna be pooling above the dam. Irradiated floods were bad. Cold water not flowing through the cooling pool was bad too. Just a whole fuckin’ badness sandwich, right there.

“How’s gate two?” Brady asked.

“Green light. Should open automatically.”

“Alright…let’s get up there.”

Sometimes, Josh got an ugly reminder that the whole world was built for guys a lot smaller and lighter than him. Like how the access to the jammed floodgate was a metal catwalk rather than a sturdy concrete shelf. He grit his teeth and shuffled gingerly out along it, willing it to hold together rather than break and drop his half-ton ass (and the extra weight of his armor and kit) into the boiling water below.

“Fuck that’s a lot of energy…” one of the guys noted behind him.

“Yuh,” Josh noted. “Most of it is kept in null sinks, but they can only contain it so long as they have outside power. It’s important they drain it all off as quick as they can. And this is only a tiny bit of it, too. Most of the rest will have been reflected into space when the shield mirrored up.”

“So…this is the heat from reflecting the nuke?”

“Basically, yeah.” So far the catwalk was wobbly but holding up.

“Jesus.”

Josh grunted in agreement as they reached the ladder, which had the decency to be a good bit sturdier than the catwalk. The problem became obvious pretty much straight away when they got to the top. The control box had caught fire and burned itself into an ugly mess of scorched wiring. But that too was designed to be rugged and easily fixed. This wasn’t delicate electronics, this was the sort of system that a high school kid could put together in their parents’ garage with junk found in a dumpster.

Well, they were trained in some basic repairs for this shit, and all the high voltage stuff was safely behind the other panel, which looked intact…

Fuck it. Caveman repairs. It took them ten minutes to fix. And it was pretty obvious when they did, because there was a heavy noise, the whine of a motor, and the rush of water starting to leak through as the floodgate opened and let the water flow. By the time Josh was back down on the catwalk, it was a torrent. By the time he was safely back on the shore, the lower gate had opened too, and all that boiling water had washed away downstream, to be replaced by nice cold water from upstream.

Too bad it happened to be carrying a shitton of fallout, but fallout wasn’t forever and it could be flocked out at the water treatment plant. Right now, the first concern was getting the shield emitters battle-ready again in case there was a second wave to this world war.

Fortunately, the shield emitter and its power supply were both okay. The cooling system had done its job and kept the thing from melting and exploding. They swapped out some consumable spares that were stored on-site, got a bunch of green lights on the panel, and that was good enough.

One down, three to go.

It was a long, hard, dreary day. Josh spent large parts of it up to his armpits in water—always a serious danger for a member of the four-digit club—or spraying a fuck of a lot of water on the small goddamn volcano that had sprung up at the John Glenn airport emitter where one of the heat sinks had melted itself and several meters of surrounding rock.

Sure as fuck took them shield techs some sweet time to get there!

And that was just the start. There was so, so much more to do. Fires that caught hold ‘cuz absolutely everything got cooked. Lotsa them were cars, a few were houses or other buildings. Safely moving people out of their fallout shelters was a whole logistical exercise in its own right.

And every time he went in the water, he had to decontaminate with a foamy scrub-down before moving on to the next job.

The sun set, and the work went on all night. The sun rose, and the work went on all morning. Throughout, Josh kept having to remind himself not to be tense, because being tense wouldn’t change shit. Either the sirens were gonna sound again, or they weren’t. Either the nukes had all flown, or there were some left to come. Him worrying wouldn’t change a thing either way.

By evening, everyone on the crew was spent, Josh included, but he was beginning to think maybe that had been it after all. One last thorough decontamination and he finally, finally got to take the suit off and massage all the places its quarter-ton embrace had bruised and pinched him.

He found his bedroll in the station and slumped down on it. Found his phone. There were pings from Jess asking if he was okay, telling him she and Maria were still hunkered down in his basement at home like he’d said. He replied, let them know he was okay, apologized for being out of contact…

There were no messages from his parents.

He lay down and tried not to be sick with worry. Maybe the network was just down. Yeah. Small miracle the network was still up in Columbus, actually…

…

Fuck.

He stood up, despite being tired in his goddamn bones, and staggered through into the chief’s office. The old man was sitting at his desk nursing a coffee so dark and strong it set Josh’s nose on fire from the doorway. He looked up as Josh knocked, and gave him a nod with heavy, baggy eyes.

“You should be asleep.”

“My folks haven’t contacted me,” Josh said, simply.

“…Sit down, son.”

Josh had bolted together the seat on the other side of Chief’s desk himself. It was strong enough for him, and he sunk onto into with a nod.

“Do we know…anything?” he asked.

“I’ve been listenin’ in. National coordination, in case we gotta go deal with a forest fire or stuff, yeah?”

“Right…?”

“LA is gone.”

“Jesus…”

“Don’t blaspheme, son. ‘Specially not right now.”

“Uh, sorry Chief.” Josh rubbed his face. “Anywhere else?”

“…A few.”

“Do you think—”

“Stop right there, son,” Chief shook his head. “Right now, we’ve got a job in front of us. You’ll find out one way or another when the time is right, but right now I don’t know and I need to focus on what I’m doing. And you need to focus on what you’re supposed to be doing. Understand?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“Alright. Now get. Sleep, ‘ya idjit.”

Josh nodded, “Yes Chief” -ed again, rose, and returned to his soft pile. This time, when he lay down, his brain stopped churning over the worry and relaxed into the idea that whatever had happened had already happened, one way or another, so…there was nothing for him to do but be ready. Not a happy thought, nor a relaxing one, but it was one he could fall asleep to anyway.

So he did.

He did not dream.

Regional Headquarters building, Guāngjing, Lucent

Lǐ Chenguang

“Still no contact with Beijing?”

“No…you were right, it seems.”

“Good thing too, or we’d all be facing arrest soon.”

Chenguang nodded grimly, but really things had played out exactly as she foresaw. From the moment the Russians invaded Kazakhstan, she’d seen the shape of the future as clearly as watching the arc of a ball.

She’d moved accordingly, and surprised herself. Up until now, her career had been predictable in much the same way as anyone entering politics in modern China. She’d faithfully attended conferences, taken the assignments given to her, worked hard, networked harder, built herself the kind of reputation that got her sent here, to a quite senior position in the provincial government. Up until a few weeks ago, she’d been the model of a good Party politician.

But she had been on Lucent for three years at this point. It was home, her project, the place where the people she was responsible for lived. In that sense, her duty was to here, not to anywhere else. The Party could make as much noise as they wanted about the United Front strategy, the moment Chenguang had seen world war looming on the horizon, especially in light of the colony’s coming role in the safe evacuation of a lucky tiny minority of Chinese citizens…she’d known that change was inevitable.

So it may as well be change she had a hand in realizing. She’d gathered allies, whispered in the right ears. And when the war started…well, in the confusion she’d seen to it that Guāngjing was locked down and receiving no incoming jumps. In case the Americans sent a bomb to them through the array.

It had worked. There was no People’s Republic of China any longer, and the colony of Shuòshěng had not been invaded by the fleeing madmen who’d pushed the button and ended the world early. They were…

…what were they? Free? Hardly. Shuòshěng did not produce enough food to feed every mouth that Beijing had crammed through the jump arrays in the first days of the evacuation. She’d raised objections, politely dissented, pointed out that there was not the resources to support so many, but to no avail. Beijing had kept sending people and insisting they be housed and fed, and indeed they had sent tractors and seeds…

But what use was a tractor without tillers, planters and sprayers to pull? What use were combine harvesters without grain bins and trucks? In time and with pressure, Chenguang could have got it all sorted out, and by the time the Centauri blast came, they would probably have been at least capable of looking after themselves for a few years.

Now, thanks to the war and her country’s suicidal insistence on escalation, famine was not only looming, but imminent. They had emergency stockpiles sufficient to feed everyone on a strictly rationed diet for four weeks at most.

…And medicine for maybe a single week.

“Chairman!”

Chenguang turned upon realizing that the new arrival was talking to her. She hadn’t quite internalized that idea yet, but it was true. She was technically now the chairman of the Shuòshěng provincial government, by dint of seniority.

Quite a promotion.

…Come to think of it, if the continuity measures in Beijing had failed, she might just have become a lot more senior even than that. She put that thought aside and looked expectant. “Yes?”

“Call for you from the Governor of Naya Mumbai.”

So it began. Either the recriminations, or the cooperation…let it be the latter.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

The conversation touched on much. Mutual assurances that neither colony was interested in continuing the violence in which their parent nations had partaken, a laying-out of their respective supply and production situations…

They quickly decided to reach out to the Russian colony of Gagarin. Mayor Stepanov’s position turned out to be even bleaker than theirs, he didn’t have enough people for real self-sufficiency. At first glance, without any of their settlements having taken a full and thorough accounting…it seemed they were all in very deep trouble.

The conclusion, when Chenguang put it forward, was inevitable.

“We are going to need outside help, and soon.”

“Yes,” Shastry nodded grimly. “But who?”

“Who is there?” Stepanov asked. “The Interspecies Dominion?”

“I have worked with their representatives for some time,” Chenguang said. “They do not know our needs, they do not understand us, and they move slowly. We will starve before help comes from the Dominion, and what help does come will not be enough.”

“…How have the Americans fared?”

“Unknown, but my suspicion is they will have their own to attend to, come what may.”

“If the Americans cannot help, then the AEC will not be in any position, either.”

“Which has…many implications beyond that.”

The line was silent for a long, uncomfortable moment.

“What…what about the Gao?”

“Daar is an Emperor by another name. His help will undoubtedly be quite generous. And it will have a price.”

“What price do we put on survival?” Shastry asked.

‘’What guarantees will he give? He has his war in the sky. The West may have been content to bow to his will…must we do the same?”

“If the alternative is to starve…”

“Maybe there is another alternative,” Stepanov mused. “There is this…Singularity.”

“That is just trading one god-king for another,” Chenguang pointed out.

“Maybe. But if our only option is to submit to a god-king either way…I would prefer one from my own species.”

“Does that truly make a difference?” Shastry asked. “The Great Father has dealt with our kind openly. King Gilgamesh has spent literally millennia running a secret breeding conspiracy among us as if we were prize cattle!”

“I think it matters, yes. I think an alien will never truly know human needs. Besides: Daar’s first love must be his own species. What is it he says? ‘He is the Gao.’ Humanity must always come second in his thoughts, however much it serves his purpose to treat with us fairly and openly.”

“True,” Chenguang agreed.

“Is it that he has aligned himself with the AEC nations?” Shastry asked. “Are we going to cling to West and East even now?”

“Since you mention it…the AEC nations include Britain and America. All three of our parent nations suffered great injustices at their hands. Empire casts a long shadow, does it not? They will look to themselves first too, and historically, looking to themselves has come at our expense,” Chenguang said.

“We must do what is right for our people,” Stepanov agreed. “We must not let them be a charitable afterthought.

“Together?” Shastry asked.

There was another pause on the line. The moment had come.

“…We share a world, and our hold on it is tenuous at best. If there is one lesson I would like to take from Earth, it’s that we rise or fall as one. This world can be the jewel of the galaxy, I know it. Our people can thrive. Or, we can divide, fail, and sink. Either way, we shall do so as one. So…yes. Together. Whatever treaty we need to make, whatever constitution we must write, whatever we must do, I say we do it.”

Another pause, as everyone considered the ramifications of what they were about to do.

This was the fire in which nations were born.

Or died.

“Even if it means swearing fealty to an immortal king, though?”

“At the moment, I will take food and shelter. Revolution will be at our leisure, when needed. Our peoples are no stranger to throwing off oppressors.”

Another thoughtful pause, then Shastry spoke. She could almost hear him nodding, even from the moment he exhaled. “Yes. Very well. Together.”

“Together,” Stepanov agreed. “But how do we contact Singularity?”

“We have some of their ‘Heroes’ here,” Chenguang paused and felt herself slipping into prejudice before she took a moment, stepped back in her mind’s eye, and corrected herself. “They have been enormously helpful in many ways, but feeding them is a severe burden and they cannot go long without a heavy meal. I am certain the good king will be keen to rescue them. And I have no doubt they will know how to contact him in turn.”

And so it proved. By the end of the day, they had received official acknowledgment from Singularity, and by the end of the next day, the first ambassador had arrived.

By the end of the week, a decision had been made. There was aid coming, and all it cost them was an oath of loyalty. In truth, Chenguang was glad just for the thought of not going hungry. Three days of rationing meant her stomach was already beginning to feel dissatisfied. The agony of actual starvation?

She would bow to a king to avoid that, if that was the price to survive. And at least their king was human. She would most likely be exhausted by the time he arrived, as there was much to do both to get Shuòshěng as properly operational as it could be…

But by the time King Alex arrived, he would find them ready and waiting. And then, for better or worse…they would be his.

She hoped she could live with herself.

High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

“So, they do see the danger.”

He knew they would. Too bad he didn’t quite know who the nucleus of this polite resistance was, but…probably that was for the best. It eliminated a source of temptation for Daar. He was very good at these kinds of games.

And he liked playin’ ‘em, too. Nothin’ better’n winnin’ against a worthy adversary. Balls, sometimes it was almost as good as fuckin.’

So long as humankind were kept strong and on-team, it was all good.

“Franklin, Folctha and the other city-states have all publically entered negotiations for Union, and the remnants of their home governments have not raised any objections. That by itself is a remarkable statement, My Father.”

“Means someone wit’ a lot o’ foresight an’ good networking has noticed. Ain’t many who can fill those boots…”

“Margaret White and Arthur Sartori are top of the list. Old friends and colleagues from his administration, yijao?”

Daar considered that for a few seconds, then shook his head. “…No. Conduits, sure. But this is something beyond their influence.”

“Then…” Thurrsto’s ears lowered, raised, rotated then flicked as he thought. “…There is one possibility, then.”

“Who?”

“One of our unconfirmed hypotheses is that there’s an organization of some sort at play in human global politics, one we’ve never knowingly encountered directly, but which the Clan has inferred by absence, and by human rumor.”

Daar tilted his head curiously. “Go on…”

“Humans are a conspiratorial lot. They like to imagine ‘secret societies’ maneuvering behind the scenes. Some of the more ridiculous ideas include that many of the executive elite are shape-shifting reptilian aliens, or that there’s a group of immortal wizards in the shadows—”

“Sounds like they’re two ‘fer two, there. If you count the Hierarchy and Singularity an’ throw in some artistic license.”

“And the Illuminati.”

“…’Enlightened ones,’ eh?”

“A real organization that was little more than a group of like-minded German thinkers, and which lasted no more than ten or fifteen years or so. But since then, there’s been a lot of, ah, mythology about them. Plus a novel that only a particularly deranged couple of humans could have written, under the influence of strong drugs. You should read it.”

“Fun times,” Daar chittered. “You gotta come to Lodge wit’ me one o’ these days!”

“I have experienced a wide range of mind-altering substances,” Thurrsto replied, ominously.

“Well, that’s a heck of a flex…”

“Against you, I will take what I can.”

Daar chittered, and restrained himself to a quick, fun little display of how his arm was comin’ along lately. “Always knew you were a smart one…anyhoo. So this…Presence. A human Clan Whitecrest?”

“Without the distracting public face. Their membership is likely small, but their reach global and subtle. Up until a few minutes ago, they were just one of several plausible hypotheses. Now, it seems likely they exist and have someone close to Gaoian politics. Most probably, ah, one or some of your human employees. You are quite fond of them…”

“And would indulge them.” A flash of insight, and Daar understood. “…Oh, that sneaky lil’ Keeda-fart!”

Realization struck Thurrsto, too. “…It’s Hoeff, isn’t it?”

“Has’ta be.” Daar chittered, ”who else has balls big enough?! And who else could? Nobody keeps secrets from this sniffer.”

“So he didn’t keep any secrets at all,” Thurrsto agreed.

“Yeah! He was entirely honest that he’s had numerous clandestine associations and several influential friends. And you checked ‘em out…”

“…and confirmed that he was indeed very well connected, just as he said,” Thurrsto finished. “So, yes. Daniel Hoeff has never told you a lie, not even a lie of omission. And thereby he managed to keep an absolutely huge secret directly in front of both our noses.”

“Well, balls. Now I’m really impressed. Think I’mma feed ‘em a dinner! Might pummel him ‘ta goo too, but we’ll see how it goes. Where is he right now?”

“I don’t know, My Father. It’s not impossible he’s on Earth.”

“Find out. Meanwhile, I got a machine swarm ‘ta negotiate with…”

“She’s waiting for you in the orange office, My Father.”

Daar nodded, and ambled over to his desk. “‘Kay. I’ll be there in a bit. Send ‘fer Liree, will ‘ya?”

“Yes, My Father.”

Thurrsto bowed out and Tiyun was on his tablet, sending messages. “He’ll be here shortly.”

Daar duck-nodded and woolgathered for a bit. Addressed a couple items in his inbox, kept an eye on the scroll of information comin’ in from Earth…not that there was much, really…

There was a scratch on the door. Liree’s. Daar didn’t quite know why, but the li’l hacker always scratched three times, paused a beat, then scratched twice more.

“C’mon in, li’l buddy.”

Liree opened the door, poked his nose in, sniffed…waited. He was such a tragedy in some ways. Away from Daar he was a bright, sarcastic, confident, aggressive personality. In his presence? He was meek and almost disconcertingly subservient.

Which Daar had done to the poor guy. He din’t really have a choice anymore. But for his crimes, that was the price he’d chosen to pay. Bondage to Daar, and a chance to do good.

And he was, bar none, the best expert Daar had to hand on the subject of dataspace and its denizens.

“Got the Entity sittin’ in the orange office, waitin’ for me,” he informed Liree, as soon as the door closed.

Liree perked up immediately. “The Daemon herself! Well, this promises to be interesting, then…”

“Any idea what it might want?”

“I would guess it’s worried about survival. Well, obviously. That’s the only thing it’s ever concerned with. But right now that probably means humans.”

Daar made an interested noise and stood to prowl the room, gesturing for him to elaborate.

“See…the Entity suffers fundamentally from a problem. It’s theoretically capable of mitosis, calving off a branch awareness from itself. It doesn’t, most likely because it fears value drift and believes the greatest threat to it at this point would be a rogue and hostile version of itself. But because it remains a single mind, it has finite attention. Dataminds—well, okay, the dataminds we’ve been able to decompile and attempt to understand—are just like our minds in that regard; their attention is limited by tightly-coupled processes.”

Liree flicked his ears forward, prompting Daar. Liree liked to teach this way. And Daar had cultivated a close friendship, so this was one of those foibles he found he enjoyed indulging.

“Meaning…” Daar felt his brow furrow, thinking out of his comfort zone. “Meaning it can’t scale its awareness, uh, horizontally I think ‘ya term it.”

“Very good! Yes. Awareness requires tight synchronization, so only vertical scale is possible.”

“So no spammin’ probes ‘fer more thinky.”

“Well, aware thinking. Communication latency slows synchronization, and remote communication increases the risk of value drift. Ideally its awareness will be in one well-protected computation device. It can still benefit from all of its swarm’s processing power, it’s just that its own subjective focus of awareness is on, oh, some small, finite number of things at a time at most. Much like you and me.”

“How in Fyu’s poetic nards does it run a whole machine swarm, then?”

“Quasi-independent control functions, background processes. We don’t know how its awareness experiences things like time, and there’s ways that could increase its effective attention. Flitting back and forth between problems extremely rapidly, for example.”

“But we don’t know.”

“No. But I’d love to ask its communications daemon all sorts of questions! Maybe if—”

“Not today,” Daar chittered affectionately. “But mebbe! We’ll see. Now c’mon, y’ain’t seen th’ orange room yet, have you?”

“No…”

“Well, now that ‘yer in Club Red, I think ‘yer gonna like it. It’s delightfully kitsch!”

Liree pant-grinned. “How kitsch? I have high standards, My Father.”

“C’mon. Do ‘ya know me ‘ta do anythin’ sloppy or lazy? Keeda himself would be proud, an’ I should know. Keeda himself couldn’t stop chitterin’!”

It was a short walk to the Orange Office. After having his fun with it for a while, Daar had finally caved to Naydra’s advice and hired a human interior designer to make it a bit less…explosive. And it had worked! Brown, it turned out, was basically just dark orange, and that opened up all sortsa room for wood tones and leather. Throw in some splashes of green for contrast, in the artwork on the walls and in a couple potted plants, an’ it was cozy.

And kitschy. Still that.

But mostly cozy.

“Hullo, Ava.”

The Entity’s avatar stood with a smile, smoothing out a dress that could never wrinkle as she did. “Hello, Daar. And, please…call me Daemon.”

Daar considered the holographic woman standing in his office and flicked an ear. Seemed like every time he met the Entity’s avatar, it had refined the design somewhat. Now, he could barely even hear the hum of the drone inside Ava’s—Daemon’s—head that was doing the job of projecting her. And he certainly couldn’t see it.

Only the total absence of any smell gave away that there wasn’t a real young human standin’ in front of him, in fact. An’ that tickled the ol’ gao-brain in essactly the wrong ways. The fact he couldn’t offer her a drink or invite her to sit down was messin’ with his sense of bein’ a good host, too.

Fuck it. He sat down, and gestured for her to do so too. The animation was smooth and convincing: she didn’t clip through the couch at all. “I take it you watched,” he said.

“We wanted to intervene and stop it, somehow, but…” Daemon sighed and shrugged.

“Couldn’t, huh?”

The AEC nations had defenses the equal of anything we could add. And their weapons…” Daemon shook her head. “The tech advantage they gained from the Dominion and from their alliance with you was just…insurmountable.”

“Yeah.” Daar keened softly. “Keeda’s nuts, I gotta give thanks ‘fer Fyu. He managed ‘ta unite th’ Gao long before we ever got ‘ta the nuclear age.”

“He had Keeda’s direct help,” Daemon pointed out. “But…you’re busy, and we’re busy. Do we have time for a conversation? Or shall we coordinate?”

“Whaddya have in mind?”

“An adjustment in strategy. At our present rate of expansion, we can achieve the capacity to have stasis-bagged half a billion individual humans by the time the Alpha Centauri blast arrives. You meanwhile intended to welcome conscious, productive humans to Gao and integrate them, yes?”

“At least a billion, hopefully. We got the farmland an’ infrastructure.”

“Leaving, by our estimates, a further half a billion to one billion.” Daemon looked like she was listening to something for a second. “What happens if we switch over to directly supporting your economy instead? Before, the bagging facilities were the most efficient option. But that was because we were trying to work alone…”

“You’re sayin’ you could do more if you worked with us?”

“We think so. We think…if we redirect into supporting your industrial infrastructure, it’s possible we could expand your capacity. Maybe even save everyone who’s left.”

“Well if you had a way ‘ta save more lives than the bag-an’-tag approach, why din’t you go with that in the first place?” Daar demanded.

“We aren’t…we aren’t perfectly rational,” Daemon replied, uncomfortably. “We have our biases, our core impulse to survive, and that’s subject to interpretation. This course of action would make us…vulnerable. We weren’t capable of entertaining that, before now.”

“What changed?”

:”Well…Earth, obviously.” She spread her hands. “If you ever needed an object lesson in how self-destructive it is to be concerned solely with your own survival and to brook no vulnerability, look no further than what just happened to Russia. We have. And we’ve…recalculated. And here we are.”

Daar sat back and tilted his head. “…An’ where does independence factor in ‘ta ‘yer calculations?” he asked.

“For whom? Ourselves, or humanity?”

“‘Yerselves first.”

“We’re not surrendering our independence. We…can’t, really. And I don’t mean won’t, I mean that as a practical function of what we are versus what you are, it’s impossible that you ever could take our independence. The vulnerability I’m talking about is that we’d be committing our probe swarm and resources, which makes us less flexibly able to respond to rapidly adapting circumstances.”

“An’ the human race?”

Daemon sighed. “Independence rests near the apex of the pyramid of needs. You can only build independence on a solid foundation of food, water, shelter and safety. And right now, my species blew all that to hell.”

Daar flicked his ear curiously. “Your species? You still think o’ yerself as human?”

“I remember skinny-dipping in the lake with my friends. I remember the taste of ice cream and cola, and the smell of the dawn while I was out jogging. I dream sometimes about strong arms wrapped around me, and a tongue between my lips, and the hush of rain on the bedroom window. I know what it feels like for time to stretch and shrink to infinity in a perfect moment. I know what faith feels like, the way it lights a warmth in your heart and lifts your soul…and I know how it feels to be fucked senseless.”

Daemon did have a disconcertingly lifelike way of looking him firmly in the eye with a wicked smirk, and for once Daar found himself momentarily matched on the heartfelt bluntness front. “I’m a human mind, Daar,” she said. “Or at least, the ghost of one. And I still love my species, despite what they just did to themselves.”

“…Yeah.” Daar chittered. It turned into a keen as he suddenly felt the full terrible, terrible sadness of the situation weighing on him. “Yeah…I still love ‘em too.”

But, well…that din’t change the fundamentals.

“…I don’t love what I gotta do to ‘em, now. What I’ve already done. I don’t want more subjects. But I can’t afford ‘em bein’ independent right now. Their leadership is pathological and a legitimate threat to themselves an’ my own interests.”

“There’s nothing you can do to humanity that’s so terrible as what humanity just did to ourselves. You don’t want them as subjects? You don’t have to keep them as subjects forever. Stop the boat from sinking first, then navigate to your destination once it’s available.”

“Forever is a long time, Daemon. A very long time.” Daar stood up and stretched, while the Daemon watched curiously. Snack. Cronch cronch.

“We’ll outlive even you, remember. We know.”

“The future is always a mirage.”

She made a curious hmm sound. “…I like that. Fyu?”

“Nah. That’s me. Figger I better have a few good ones m’self…I’m going to annex them. Lucent too, if I can move fast enough. They’re not ready to stand on their own and they are basically the only functional bits left of their cultures.”

“And the destination for all the antagonistic powers who started this war.”

“Correct.”

“…Do you intend to pacify them?”

“Yes. With a velvet glove on m’paw. The treat will be food and development resources.”

“And the stick?”

“Whatever is needed. I ain’t so foolish as to think a human being submits ‘ta conquerin’. That’s the reason all this happened in the first place.”

“You’re right. We don’t.”

“So I do not intend to conquer, or erase. Instead, I will obliterate the foolishness that generated this tragedy. If I find it there, it will die. Hopefully, words should be enough now.”

“…We think humanity might still have some ways of surprising you.”

Sensibly cautious, it seemed. But Daar had an advantage the Entity did not. He was friend to humanity without being human himself, and both smart and intuitive enough to analyze them dispassionately. No human could think on the human condition without bias. Daar could.

And this kind of thinkin’ was the kind he could, without ego, honestly say he was the best praticitoner there was, prob’ly the best there ever was. It was the true purpose for which he was made. All the rest of it were merely tools in his inventory. Instruments of power, of charisma, of awe. Li’l Liree there, sitting in the corner drinkin’ it all in like a sponge were th’ perfect example o’ that. He was a mind Daar had bent to his service, one he could use to analyze digital people with, an’ be assured of perfect loyalty. His talents had use, but as far as he was concerned, they weren’t there so he could smash his enemies. Not primarily. Knowing, loving a people…that was his true design goal.

One could not lead or rule that which he did not know and love.

“I am counting on it. This is the work of centuries, my digital friend. I am a patient man.”

“Here and now, we have more immediate work,” Daemon pointed out. “Jump arrays to deploy, people to find room for. There are large parts of the Earth where the evacuation must happen now, before mass starvation finishes what the nukes began. Where do we send those people? Can we bring them here? Is there room for them?”

“If we have ‘ta, we’ll put ‘em to work makin’ their own stasis bags,” Daar said. “We’ve got a lot of farmland and it’s hugely productive, too. Gao is a deathworld, ‘member? An’ she always was. Now we ain’t held back we’re unleashin’ her like she was always meant ‘ta be. We can take a huge surge o’ people.” Daar turned his attention to Liree and Tiyun, “Could ‘ya two figger out th’ numbers on that? Or get my staff ‘ta do so. We can start now but we gotta know the curb we’re workin’ on, yijao?”

“Yes, My Father.”

“We’ll leave this drone here with you,” Daemon said, indicating her own head. “The closer we work together….”

“The more lives we save,” Daar duck-nodded. Then he looked back at Liree, still paying rapt attention. “…Later on, when we’re not swamped under existential crises…”

“How very optimistic of you.”

“How d’ya think I pull so much tail?!” Daar chittered, and earned a virtual eye-roll from Ava-daemon. “Anyhoo, Liree here would love ‘ta jaw wit’ ya ‘bout datamind things, if ‘yer willin’.”

“There will be lulls and downtime. We’re always glad for something to do in such quiet moments.” Daemon stood. “Now, however, is not a quiet moment. Now that we have the beginning of an agreement, there are things we had on hold that need to resume.”

“Please, do,” Daar agreed.

“Goodbye for now, then.” With those words, the Daemon’s holographic form shimmered, and faded from view. The drone descended and settled into Liree’s paws with a faint whine before going dark and inactive. The little hacker held it like it was a treasure.

“Do not take it apart, Liree.”

Li’l brother flattened his ears and cringed backward slightly. Daar chittered quietly. He was so…readable.

“…Yes, My Father.”

“Or x-ray it, stick it in an MRI, or go find your science-friends an’ dream up something else I ain’t got th’ time or patience ‘ta essplicitly ‘ferbid. ‘Yer to respect its privacy, y’hear?”

“…Yes, My Father.”

“Oh, don’ be like that. C’mon, I got a bit ‘fore my next meetin’ an’ I need ‘ta unwind. Les’ go get some tacos!”

Tacos, in the strange and foreign land that was Liree’s mind, clearly ranked second to drone studies, but he hopped up on his feet with an adequately enthusiastic duck-nod, and that was the meeting done with.

They got tacos. Not Leela’s, alas, which was a shame ‘cuz nobody did tacos so good as hers an’ she hadn’t re-opened her stand. Yet. But still…it was a welcome break from Earth an’ humans an’ all his worries, for a few minutes.

They resumed soon enough anyway.

Daar carried through the day, and planned his arrival to Cimbrean.

Starship Stray Fortune, Low Earth Orbit, Sol

Dora

Daar’s orders had been to monitor the situation and pass intel back to the analysts on Gao. A simple job, for a ship like the Fortune. Jump, send out the drones, set up the stream so their telemetry found its way back to whoever was gonna turn it into something useful…

Then float and watch.

It was hard enough for Dora. She’d always dreamed of going down to Earth, somehow. In a hazard suit and G-harness, for sure, but sometimes when she was alone in her blister with nothing to do, she put on human nature documentaries until she was completely surrounded by the canyons and jungles and savanna and ice floes, and the thousands of other interesting places.

She’d imagined herself going to Burning Man. She’d imagined going shopping in Soho, or watching a Broadway musical, or standing on the Great Wall of China…

The news about the Alpha Centauri hit everyone hard, but Wilde and Bruuk were taking it the worst by far. They spent almost all of their waking hours together, doing big-man things, or doing lazy, depressed people things. So…beat each other up, then pass out in front of the TV.

But right now, Ian was standing on the bridge with a blanket round his shoulders, a cup of tea in his hands, and his forehead resting against the glass, staring out and down at his homeworld with no expression at all on his face.

The only reason Bruuk wasn’t there was because he was trying to cheer Ian up with a big pot roast dinner. It was very…gaoian. But it wasn’t going to work: humans lost their appetite when depression gripped them. They were like Dora’s own species, in that regard. Dora wasn’t feeling hungry either.

No, Wilde didn’t need a gaoian’s brand of comfort. He needed something closer to home. He needed a hand on his shoulder, and a soft voice asking him a stupid question.

“…You okay?” She wafted an antenna across his cheek, the equivalent of a friend giving a friend a small kiss. The overwhelming chemistry of human misery was almost too intense to bear, and the coarse stubble on his jaw rasped painfully across the feathery organ.

He rolled his head across the glass by way of shaking it.

“…The UK’s mostly still there…” Dora offered. Nuclear torpedoes had taken out a couple of the island’s major ports, but sheer density had protected much of his homeland under an overlapping umbrella of high-powered shields.

“You’ve got a strange definition of mostly.” Ian sighed, sipped his tea, and grimaced as he realized it was stone cold. Dora took it off him with her middle hand, and handed over the fresh hot one in her right. “…Cheers. I just…I don’t care, any more. So the UK’s still sorta there. Great. What’s it fuckin’ matter?”

“It’s your home, isn’t it?”

“So me an’ mine lived while billions of other less fortunate buggers died.” Ian sipped the new tea, and sighed heavily. “I dunno, love. I guess I had this stupid Star Trek optimistic notion that now we had a big fuckin’ galaxy and a common enemy we’d set it all aside and pull together. I even thought that after we got the news about Centauri, right? I was like, ‘here it is, here’s the moment we finally grow the fuck up.’ But…here we are.”

“Well…maybe now is the time,” Dora suggested.

“God…Dora. Just…no. I can’t deal wi’ fuckin’ optimism right now.” Ian shook his head.

Well…okay. Dora knew when to be silent and let him have his misery. But she also knew better than to just go away again. Quiet company was better than no company at all, so she became quiet company for a good long while, occasionally nudging Ian to remind him to drink his tea while it was still hot.

A change came in the form of Urgug, who padded across the bridge with the disarming soft quiet of which Guvnurag were capable, one of his facial limbs coiled gently around a tablet. “…Orders, captain,” he said, quietly. His bioluminescence was respectfully, mournfully dim.

Ian tore his hollow gaze away from Earth, looked up, nodded, and took the tablet. Dora collected his empty teacup as he read.

“…Shit, things move fast.”

“What’re we doing?”

“Collection run to Aru.” He handed the tablet back to Urgug. “Alright, well. Uh…we have a beacon out there, don’t we.”

“Yes, captain.”

“Load it up. Dora, leave four observation drones in polar orbits, drop a W-comm relaysat, and pull the rest in…” he stalked off across the bridge, throwing his blanket onto his chair as he went, and hit the intercom to order the ship to jump readiness, prepare to receive array travelers, all that stuff. Dora nodded, secretly and quietly glad that Wilde had something to distract him for a few minutes at least, and scuttled off toward her command blister. She didn’t want to be the one slowing them down.

She settled into her chair, recalled most of the drones, left a few watchers behind, and then sat back to watch the Earth below. It felt…a little wrong, somehow, to know that something so terrible had happened down there and yet left so very little sign visible from above. To her eyes, Earth was just as blue and white and beautifully marbled as ever.

The cold thought slipped down her back that maybe this was the last glimpse she’d ever have of it. For all she knew, the next three years would never bring them back this way. After all, they were going to be busy and the Fortune would probably be of use elsewhere…

She blinked, then leaned forward and stared, memorizing every detail. That straight stretch of coastline down there…she didn’t know it immediately. Calling up the overlay told her it was the Chukchi Sea and Wrangel Island. Obscure, desolate, practically uninhabited and freezing cold.

She was still staring at them when they vanished, Earth’s frigid brown and icy blue replaced by the disconcertingly orange sands and green rivers of Aru in less time than it took Dora to blink. That might have been it. That might have been her last view of the Earth…

The thought made her sadder than she’d ever have thought it would. But moments later, there was no time to be sad at all. The huge wheel of an OmoAru factory station was coming up in front, and already their cargo handling system wanted to talk to her.

Ian was right. Things moved fast.

May as well go with the flow. She threw herself into the work of receiving and load-balancing, and that was the last thing she truly thought about for hours and hours…

They departed for Cimbrean that afternoon.

Great Father’s Hobby Farm, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

“‘Bout time you fuckin’ figgered it out.”

Loud, uproarious infrasonic chittering, and a gleeful home-shaking prancing wiggle as Daar served him a second helping of steamed meeshi greens. Delicious. It was paired with a thick, rare naxas steak tonight, grilled and served by the Most Biggest himself.

Christ, Hoeff could get used to this.

“Oh, I knew what you were th’ moment I firs’ sniffed ‘ya. It were the details that eluded us. Din’t think literal illuminati were in the cards!”

Hoeff snorted and dabbed some meat juices off his lip. “We aren’t the Illuminati. Those guys were just a bunch of coffee-shop Bavarian intellectuals who liked to make a lotta noise about how smart and anti-clerical they were until the Church had ‘em banned. They fuckin’ delighted in bein’ a secret society.”

“What’re y’all, then?”

“Just a well-connected and influential circle of friends. Nothing more.”

He watched Daar’s nose twitch. It was an unconscious gesture in gaoians, but in Daar’s case it also was a reminder that he could smell even the faintest whiff of bullshit. Which was why Hoeff had never spoken any to him.

“…So how the fuck does a guy like you get in?” Daar asked.

Hoeff shrugged. “I got the worst little-man syndrome ever in some ways. Got into lifting when I started wrestling, so like five years old, right? Got real serious about it for football, a few years later. Between the three I ended up good at most any sport, so I played ‘em all.” Hoeff shrugged, and took another bite. The steak was perfect, right up there with really great beef. And Daar’s pan sauce was heavenly.

“Anyway, same story as a lot of guys like me so far. I went way harder, yeah, but whatever. Bein’ a handsome sporty ultra-heavy in high school wasn’t enough to get the girls though. ‘Cuz firstly, I’m short as fuck, but secondly the smart pretty girls I actually wanted to date din’t like my accent. It was pretty thick texas german. So, uh…I joined Mensa. For a bit. I dunno, I was pretty high on myself, really. Point is, that and trying my hand at theatre let me smash lots of tail, an’ I met some people there and, uh…this sorta snowballed.”

“That informal?”

“Just that informal.” Hoeff sat back and sipped his wine. “There’s no pledge, no initiation, no logo, no secret handshake. You’re just…either you’re in the circle, or you aren’t. If you aren’t, you don’t even know it’s a thing. If you do, you know who else is in.”

“So, I can about guess, but…what’s your in?”

“I’ve got an IQ over one-sixty and I could flip a car end over end as a sophomore in high school. I’m good at a lot of things, and I know how to use what I’ve got.” Hoeff shrugged again. “Honestly that’s it. Me and, uh, my first acquaintance…”

“Wait.” Daar’s nose twitched again. “….You mean ‘ta tell me your first in ‘ta this ‘circle’ was a girl you were bangin’?”

“Why not?” Hoeff grinned. “Smart move on her part. She wanted to know what kind of man I was, know if I was suitable to join her circle, so she got good an’ close. I mean, I saw right through it, but we both thoroughly enjoyed the game. Then later on they wanted someone who knew how to use violence, an’ my life plan was to join the SEALs anyway, so…made it to team six, advanced from there, did some shit, they brought me out to the Farm, and before I knew it, I was balls deep in this thing.”

“Balls! ‘Yer like the lil’ version o’ me!” Daar’s huge head shook, slowly.

“I’ll take that as a compliment, but honestly not really. I’m a much colder man than you.”

“Hmm.” Daar grunted. “When you wanna be, yeah…Let’s get serious. How many of your circle are left?”

“A lot of them have investments and business on Cimbrean. Automatic ticket to evacuation, and they took it. We…hoped the war wouldn’t happen. Some even insisted it couldn’t. But most of the circle were safely off-world before this all happened…shit, has it only been a day?”

“Edgin’ close ‘ta two days, now. An’ me gettin’ a bit tired o’ usin’ caffeine.”

Hoeff snorted into his gaoian-made wine, unable to help himself. “Isn’t that like the equivalent of meth for some of ‘ya?”

“Hits me fuckin’ harder than any Hunter ever did. Bein’ th’ size of a house does take the edge off a little, but I dunno how Regaari an’ Thurrsto can down that shit like fuckin’ fruit juice. Anyhoo.”

“…Right. So, many of us have found our way over. We’re not hard to find, once you know what kind of people we are…We obviously haven’t heard from the ones who chose to stay on Earth, yet.”

“So what sort o’ people are you?”

“All sorts. Most are people in positions of power or influence, who can keep an open mind about what kind o’ people they oughta keep relations with. So…kings, and ministers, especially ministers who can bend powerful ears. And also people like me…” he sipped his wine, then thought of a perfect example. “Tell you who we had our eye on bringin’ in to the circle? That Austin fella. He’s exactly the sort of friend we like to have.”

“Right…” Daar duck-nodded. “An’ who are they that stayed?”

“People with jobs to do. People with positions they couldn’t in good conscience leave empty. People with people they couldn’t abandon. In any case…much as I wanna eat ‘ya outta house and home—”

“Pff. Like you could manage.”

“I’m a Beef these days, so don’t bet against me! But anyway. Business, if you don’t mind. The Circle is…apprehensive, about you. I think that’s fair and reasonable to say.”

Daar duck-nodded. “Yeah, I unnerstand. But if these are the kinda people you say, they’ve gotta know just what a fuckin’ situation the settlements are in right now. Can Cimbrean stand on its own two feet right now?”

“It is top of mind, yes. My phone’s been blowin’ up basically constantly. We were gonna risk it all an’ plot a get-together, but…then you texted me. By the way,” Hoeff added, “you pretty seriously upped my clout among the Circle with that message. In a way that hiring me directly somehow didn’t. So, y’know. Thanks.”

“That’s a bit o’ advantage I din’t expect ‘ya ta give,” Daar noted, seriously. And started cutting into his own whole-animal fuckin’ counter-sized slab of meat. “Oh! Seconds, ‘fore I tuck in?”

“I’m good. Growing Daars need to eat their meat and potatoes.”

“Ha!” Hoeff always marveled at a gaoian eating meat. It was clearly what they were made for, and Daar disappeared a chunk of steak bigger than Hoeff’s whole portion in only one swallow. Rip and tear, until it was done. Or bloody rare, as the case may be.

Hoeff finished off his meeshi greens. Really nice. Peppery, the right kind of spinach flavor, and drowning in butter. Any species that used butter in their cuisine was alright in Hoeff’s book.

“Advantage is a currency, and right now what it buys is…what? ‘Cuz what we’re worried you’re gonna do is annex Cimbrean and Lucent for our own good.”

“Because that is essactly what I am gonna do. Ain’t ‘fer your own good, though. That’s a happy bonus.”

“…For the Gao’s own good,” Hoeff realized.

“Yup. We live or die on TILE FLIP, an’ it ain’t happenin’ without ‘yer spaceborne assets, ‘yer specialized industry, an’ some o’ ‘yer uniquely human talent. So what’s my choice? Let y’all fart around an’ spend precious time debating government an’ structures an’ treaties an’ all that? ‘Cuz that’s already happenin’ here on Cimbrean. Any delay is gonna cost literally millions o’ lives, an’ they are lives I very much need contributin’ to our species’ mutual survival. Rebuildin’s gotta happen at fuckin’ warp speed. The stakes are much fuckin’ bigger than human leadership seems ‘ta grok.”

“So why not communicate that to them, directly?”

“I am. By showin’ up in ‘yer skies, with aid, resources, protection, an’ a plan. Which ain’t things y’all have and ain’t gonna have in the next…oh. Five or six hours.”

“…You have all that lined up already?”

Daar put down his short-sword of a knife and small dining pitchfork, then looked Hoeff directly in the eyes.

“Hoeff. Earth fell. The very first thing the black water captains had ‘ta consider was provisionin’ their ships. They are gonna fuckin’ starve before humanity figgers this shit out, an’ all I had ‘ta do was show them video o’ the fuckin’ nuked-out remnants of Earth’s orbits. Fuckin’ Kessler Syndrome, I think y’all call it. Shipyards? Nuked. Shuttles? Nuked. Your fuckin’ Farthrow? Nuked so hard th’ ground won’t be walkable for a thousand years. Not that it’ll matter. Surrender ain’t so hard ‘ta secure when you’re an ally with food and shelter.”

“So, you own all our ships.”

“And the SOR. Shit, I own the whole of AEC by treaty, what’s left of it. That’s the other bit on what made takin’ the navy into my own so doable. Why duke it out an’ starve or die, when an ally already legally commands you anyway?”

“…Slick, I’ll admit.”

“Eh. I got good negotiators an’ a big economy. So you tell me what’s gonna happen next, in light o’ that.” Daar gulped down the last slab of meat, licked his platter clean with a tongue the size of a wall poster, then sat back. “The choice ‘yer friends have in front of ‘em is whether what comes next is a hopeful union of peoples coming together after a tragedy and strikin’ out toward a common future, or…”

“Or an alien warlord confiscating the independence we were too dumbfuck to use wisely.”

“I don’t wanna be a warlord, Daniel. Please don’t force m’paw.”

Hoeff sighed. “I like the hopeful union of peoples bit. That sounds…good.”

“An’ I’m gonna need smart, competent people ‘ta help tie this crazy thing together.”

Hoeff stood. “Give me a minute. I have a call to make.”

“Sure.”

Hoeff wandered outside. It was raining of course, this being night-time on Cimbrean, but tonight it was just one of those super-light rains that was more like a dense fog. He ducked under the cottage eaves and took a moment to center himself, closing his eyes, breathing through his nose, listening to the faint white noise and drip-drip-drip of Cimbrean weather.

Then he got his phone out and placed a call. The number wasn’t stored on his phone, but in his memory.

It rang three times. “…Daniel. How are you?”

“Well fed.”

“And your host?”

“Hungry. He wants this to be a positive story. A coming-of-age for both our species, I guess. That sort of thing.”

“What we hoped for, then.”

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“That you did.” The voice on the other end of the call was silent for a beat. “I take it he’s listening in?”

“I’m outside right now, but he’s got literally superhuman senses. I have no doubt he can hear every word…” Hoeff glanced over his shoulder. Daar was cleaning the table, but he definitely flicked an ear. “…yup.”

His friend chuckled softly down the phone. It was a tired, old sounding that spoke of a lot of released stress. “Well then. I have a few friends here right now, and we want it to be a positive story too…we hope due consideration will be made for self-governance and the like, yes?”

“He isn’t lookin’ for slaves.”

“No. I wouldn’t think so.” There was a pause. Hoeff imagined his friend looking around the room to their gathered mutual friends, making eye contact, counting the nods. “…Please, go ahead and tell him we’re open to his vision.”

“I’ll do that, Sir Jeremy.”

Hoeff hung up.

“‘Ya hear that, big guy?”

Daar rumbled from inside, puttering around the kitchen for a bit. He came out carrying some exquisite lil desserts. “Sir Jeremy, huh? That helps.”

“You’d recognize a few other names, to, if we shared them.”

“Keep ‘em ‘fer now. Like you said, I don’ want slaves.”

“…Right. So…what now?”

“Now, we act quickly. A combined fleet is gonna jump here in th’ next few hours. If the governments o’ Cimbrean welcome ‘em, then I will be ready wit’ a treaty of protection. It will have terms that favor my interests, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But they will not be unfair, I promise that. An’ they will not be a vehicle of conquest.”

That…well, okay. Lotta trust on the line. So he had to ask the question.

“And…if not?”

“I ain’t gonna provoke a fight. But I would hafta reconsider my own logistical nightmares.”

Honestly…the implied threat there was just as bad.

“Right. Well. I’m gonna make some more phone calls, then.” Hoeff took one of the desserts and popped it into his mouth. Honestly, it was just as good as any of the ones he’d shared with friends at any fine restaurant. Pretty incredible, considering they were cooked by a guy with paws the size of a truck tyre.

Actually.

“How th’ fuck didth you mak’ thifs?”

“Not easily! But I enjoyed th’ practice. Now if you don’t mind, I’m gonna make calls o’ my own.”

Right. A nod, and Hoeff went his way, out into the rain to place his calls while speculating on what Daar’s were going to be like.

Then he decided he’d rather not know. Hoeff preferred being a smart meathead of action. The sooner he could leave the power games to the powerful, the better.

He finished his dessert, and worked his way through his friends.

There was much to discuss.

Starship Hamilton, on approach to Naya Mumbai, Roshanee Union Territory, Planet Lucent

Alex, Crown Prince of Ekallim-Igigi

Six years ago, Alex would have never imagined himself riding down onto a world as its young benevolent conqueror, with gifts of food, medicine, industry…and stability. But here he was, merely nineteen years old, his first betrothed on his arm—arranged by the studbook, of course, with their consent—ready to meet the soon-to-be Governors-General of his new world.

Their action was a race against Daar’s own machinations, and they’d made it just in time to make an offer first, and better than the giant bear could make at the moment. It was tentatively accepted. Alex would be King. And king for real. His father would remain king of Ekallim-Igigi, and now emperor of the burgeoning independent humanity in space.

Ironic, really. His kingdom was coming to him by way of generosity and guaranteed protection, much as kingdoms had always been established. What might be in the coming centuries was yet to be known. For now, he had a people to lift up, to protect, and to rule. And they were asking him to do it.

And it was obvious why. Nobody else was neutral, nobody else could be trusted. Nobody else had clean motives. But more importantly, nobody else had food.

Or the orbitals.

Nobody else felt kingly either, but that was an egotistical thought for later.

The three major settlements on Lucent had done something remarkably sensible in the aftermath of the world war: they’d talked to each other. And each, as their respective parent powers committed murder-suicide on Earth, had distanced themselves from the decisions of their leadership. The Chinese colony in particular had undergone a full-blown coup, up to and including rather callously shoving the deposed Party secretaries back through the jump array to whatever brief fate awaited them in Beijing.

By such moves had peace been maintained. That and the fact, of course, that none of them really had any military to speak of in the first place. But it left them in a tricky position because now what? All three were now suffering from the complete absence of their supporting governments and facing a famine of every conceivable supply, which left them with a choice: turn to Daar and AEC, or turn elsewhere.

No surprise, really, that they had preferred the only remaining human power that was not Western.

The tap-tap-tap of feet on the deck plate behind him brought him out of his thoughts: he half-turned and looked up as Gabiya leaned herself on the back of his pilot chair.

“…You look radiant,” he told his bride-to-be. And she did. They were still feeling each other out, becoming friends and confidants…but she never failed to inspire decidedly uncivilized thoughts in him. And, he in her.

So far, it was a good match.

“And you look pensive,” she replied, and slipped down into the copilot’s seat alongside him, brushing her silk skirts expertly out of the way before adjusting the bronze armband wrapped around her right bicep. “Of the two, pensive seems more appropriate…”

“I know what you mean,” Alex agreed. The war was barely sixty hours behind them. It felt like they should be wearing somber, funereal garb. Not vibrant silks in spring blues and golds in her case, and a rich wine red in his.

They looked like Heroes. Tall, tanned in his case, dusky in hers. Physically perfect, he could claim without ego, figuratively sent from heaven with food and drink and healing for the lost and needy, to unite them under a single banner and lead them forward toward a better future…

It sounded trite and ridiculous in Alex’s head. Three days ago, the people they were about to meet had been the pioneers of proud nations making their stamp on the stars. Now…

He set the thought aside as they swept low over the city and he had to focus on flying for a moment.

He had to admit, of the three settlement capitols, Naya Mumbai was the one he liked most. Guāngjing was undeniably the larger and more beautiful city, as it had been a point of pride for the CCP that their colony should be the jewel of interstellar humanity. The whole thing was architecturally harmonious, its street layout optimal, its housing districts taking the form of rings of spacious apartment buildings facing inward toward groomed parklands.

And up until the evacuation began, it had been largely empty. All the actual jobs and work had been back on Earth. Guāngjing had the buildings to support three times as many people as had actually lived there, and so the West had derisively called it a Potemkin village. Then the news of the Centauri blast had broken, and all those empty apartments had filled practically overnight while construction crews worked overtime to build more and more of them.

Gagarin, on the other hand, suffered from the opposite problem: a total absence of any funding, investment or official interest whatsoever. Only the truly idealistic and hardy—or desperate to never endure a Siberian winter ever again—had migrated to a colonial capitol that barely deserved the word “village,” and which Alex could have jogged the length of in five minutes. It was a depressed place whose sole economy was in shipping alien samples—pressed flowers, nailtree wood, glimmermote honey and megatermite jelly—-back to collectors and companies on Earth. Russia’s desperate attempts to evacuate people and start building a real colony had been much too little much too late, transforming it into a muddy, desperate shanty town rather than a refuge.

But here was Naya Mumbai. The real thing. Neither a shallow propaganda project, nor a neglected backwater, but an actual settlement. A real frontier where real people with real vision had come to live and work, with the backing of real investors and a vision for life. It was architecturally imprecise, messy, organic…authentic.

If Alex had anything to say about it, Naya Mumbai would be the unified planetary capitol.

He could see the welcome party waiting on the governor’s residence lawn as the Hamilton identified, marked, and settled down onto its landing site. Governor Shastry was front and center of course. To his left was the mayor of Gagarin, Andrei Stepanov, a weatherbeaten man who looked more like a mining foreman than a politician. And to Shastry’s right was…well, Alex wasn’t entirely sure what her rank and title were. Things had moved quickly in Guāngjing, and there certainly hadn’t been an election or a leadership conference or anything. But somehow, Lǐ Chenguang had wound up as representative for her people.

He wondered just how much say the residents of Shuòshěng colony had really had in the decision to welcome him and Singularity’s resources….

Gabiya touched his arm. “Hey. Distraction is not a kingly look.”

“I was just wondering how much the people here really had a say in all this. The people need a voice, if we’re going to make this work.”

“You will be king, my love. You can be the change you want to see.”

Well, true enough. The Mandate of Heaven had shifted, and King Alex (who wasn’t even king yet!) had been in the right place, with the right gifts, and the right kind of helpful might, at exactly the right time. He nodded, rose from his seat, took her hand, and nodded to his guard as they headed to the rear of the ship, to the top of its ramp, and from there…

Out and down, to his new kingdom.

He laid out the terms. They were reasonable, really. He had no intention of overly interfering in local affairs. He wasn’t going to be a tyrant, and he hoped he’d conveyed that well. After all, he was dealing with three major settlements and a smattering of smaller territories granted to various friends and allies. A human patchwork of incompatible languages, heritage and culture, with no glue to bind them together beyond shared loss and mutual desperation.

Getting their leaders to welcome him and agree to name him monarch, and acknowledge his father above him? That had been easy. Turning this mess into an actual civilization? That was going to be so much more difficult.

“None of us doubt your intent, Your Majesty.” Shastry was already thinking past the sale, apparently. “You would not have brought billions in much-needed aid if it was an insincere power grab.”

“It only made moral and rational sense,” Alex offered. He reclined a bit, enjoying the gentle, soaking heat of the place. “We have aid to offer, and our very reason to exist has always been to protect the human race against the deepest of threats. We of course do not see His Sublime Majesty as a threat, per say…”

“But it would be wise to retain a degree of human independence.”

“Exactly. Ironically, that requires unity, now, and I think we all agree it requires stability.”

“You are a kingly man who thinks as kings do. Remarkable, for one so young…”

Alex made a mental note to dissuade him from brown-nosing…Was it brown-nosing? Maybe a bit of exploration was in order.

He looked down to Stepanov. The Russian struck him as the kind of hardy man who’d come to the very edge of everything to do lots of hard work for not very much pay. He had a tempered look to him, with a lined face, thick arms, watchful eyes and a beard that was probably better groomed right now than it ever had been since he first grew it. He didn’t seem like the kind of man to brown-nose. So it was interesting, therefore, that he stiffened under the attention, as if he would have liked a little advance warning to straighten his shirt.

…It wasn’t brown-nosing, Alex realized. It was a deeper instinct and that made him a bit uncomfortable. Well, best not to show that.

“I thank you for the compliment, but for now, let’s focus on the here and now. You seem like the kind of man who’s good at solving problems.”

“Ones within my power, yes,” Stepanov replied, evenly. “Supply problems, we are used to. But before, I could get online with somebody in Moscow, shout at them, threaten to jump back and make life difficult until we got what we need. Now…”

“Ah.” Alex understood what ‘difficult’ meant in this case. “I assure you, that will not be necessary. Ask for what you need. If it can be had, I will make it so. If there are ‘difficulties’ I will not be kind to anyone involved. The stakes are too high, and I will make this clear.”

Stepanov nodded, and produced a tablet from his inside pocket, which he laid on the table. “Lots of fish in these oceans. Enough to feed everyone.”

“Native, or seeded?”

“Both. Lucent is a class-ten and the local life is thriving…and good to eat! Fish as big as your leg.”

Alex grinned and bounced on the balls of his feet. “You’re butterin’ me up!”

Stepanov chuckled darkly. “I was not exaggerating, your Majesty. They’re big fish. So, if we can catch them…if we have trawlers and ships…we can feed people.”

“Cool! I’d like to see that happen. I would also like to have a fishery management plan in place. Big fish tend to grow slowly, after all…”

“Is that…is now the time for that?”

“Yes. Now is precisely the time for that. We cannot eat our seedcorn, or our spawning fish. And fishermen care about fishing, not stock management. We need to know what level of harvesting the fisheries can take. If we don’t, then we at least must be proactive and cautious. I must feed humankind for all time, not just tomorrow.”

“It was short-sighted thinking that got us to this point,” Li agreed. “We will have enough problems in twenty years’ time: why add to them now?”

Alex nodded at her, then returned his attention to Stepanov. “But your point is well-made. The gaoians have a grand naval tradition, and there are two impressive shipyards on Cimbrean. We also have strategic alliances with the OmuAru and the Entity. With all that in mind, I think we can provide the start of it in quick order. But I will absolutely need data on the fish! Their nutrition profile, how fast they spawn, time to mature…”

“Of course, your majesty.”

“And we will need to organize staff to oversee this, and many other things. I have brought advisors who can assist, but it will be you and your own who do most of this work. I am here to reign, but rule only when necessary. I have no desire to take that which is rightfully yours.”

“As for crop farming, we have that in abundance,” Shastry said. “What we lack is manufacturing to keep the tractors and equipment in working order. And the harvest, it must be said, is still some months away…”

“And we have a large workforce with no work to do,” Li added. “Which will quickly become a small workforce if they starve.”

“Organizational problems, by the sound of it. I shall provide the authority to get things done, and the advisors to help design a working government. It is my desire this be a unity government with devolved local powers where it makes sense. I will not be kind to kingdom-building. There is one kingdom here, and it is mine. But the prosperity of my kingdom will belong to all of us. I hope I am well understood on this point.”

He was standing tall, he realized. Tall, and postured in just such a primal way that there wasn’t any doubt among any of them why he was king. He hadn’t done that consciously.

But it worked.

“Perfectly, your majesty,” Li agreed.

“Very well. Then, with your permission, I will order aid distribution…”

He acknowledged their current authority with that, and was intentional in doing so. They all deserved his respect. They nodded in return. But very soon, the order of things would change.

“…And tonight, I will accept your fealty and the acclaim of the people, and claim my titles for all to see.”

Deeper, slower nods this time. Serious, and thoughtful…but submissive. Again, that feeling of eagerness was there. Shit. This was really happening.

“At which point,” Gabiya said, “the real work will begin.”

Things after that were…cordial, and mostly ceremonial. Important ceremony, of course, but it was primarily a social engagement. He got to know a great many of the local importants, many of whom would gain titles under his kingdom. Yes, in some ways that represented a big step backward. But also a step forward; few titles he granted would inherit. Most would be on merit alone. And constitutional constraints on everyone would be baked in from the beginning.

He’d get his way, too. It was just…

He proclaimed his kingdom. There were cheers. And they were genuine, he could tell. There was no feeling of forced joy as he waded into the crowd to shake hands, offer hugs, hear stories, maybe goof off with the younger kids. He would not be a stiff, humorless king. He would be of his people, and the energy was infectious. It was a giant lovefest, all for him. Real love. The love born out of respect, and fear….and hope.

And he knew why. So did his now-queen.

“None of them were Heroes, my love. You are the first many of them have ever met.”

“…How? We spread the Line everywhere on Earth!”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean they were known beyond their village, or they weren’t emigrated to Ekallim-Igigi for their own safety. You and I are a genuine shock to them and they’re just…following instincts. You were king among them before you left Ekallim-Igigi.”

Alex frowned at that. He hadn’t really appreciated how much that actually mattered until he’d arrived. The palpable sense of relief and, uncomfortably…awe…that radiated off everyone he met was hard to forget. And it made sense, in a hindbrain sort of way. He stood just over two meters tall and everyone else was considerably shorter. His shoulders eclipsed the beam of a doorframe, and he had a head, hands, and feet big enough to make his proportions look pleasingly stocky, instead of freakishly wide. He was, in other words…Heroic.

It shouldn’t have mattered, in any right and just world. Ideas and souls should be more important than…what? His good looks?! Was that what really won him this?

…Or was he simply being childish? He was dressed to show it off, after all. Traditional dress from Ekallim-Igigi was nothing if not minimal, and Lucent had exactly the climate to embrace such a thing. Nor had he been bred the way he was on accident, and it was maybe a bit churlish to presume that didn’t matter. Wasn’t it? After all, between him, Julian, and Christian…well, there was deep purpose behind their natures. They were supposedly the human Pinnacles. Made for essentially this very thing. To lead and protect humankind.

But why should the simple luck of genetics have the final say? Hunter supposedly wasn’t as well-bred a Hero, yet he was easily in their company. Or Adam! He was a total unknown with no documented pedigree whatsoever, and yet he stood proud and unashamed next to Righteous, the unstoppable runaway success story of the Line. How could Alex or any of the rest of them claim any pedigree in the face of that?

And more importantly…Warhorse was a hero in the truest sense of the word. Didn’t that matter more? What had Alex ever done except look pretty and train?

Well…he was doing this, right now. Maybe the trick was not to deserve it from the beginning, but to come to deserve it. Yes, that was a thought he could work with. He was having much faith placed in him, from two directions: he would prove worthy of it all.

Gabiya gave him a curious look. “Heavy thoughts?”

“Hmm?”

“You sighed.”

“Oh. Well, yes.”

She nodded her understanding, and squeezed his hand. She didn’t need to say anything beyond that small contact; it soothed so many of Alex’s worries all by itself. It didn’t matter to him that theirs was an arranged marriage, they were an excellent match already. He could sense already that theirs was the partnership that would build a world.

He smiled at her, nodded, and returned this attention to here, and now, and the people around them. The responsibility around them. He was ready for it. He’d serve them well.

He knew he could.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Julian Etsicitty

Somehow, Julian’s backyard had become the site of titanic upheavals and power-plotting at the highest levels. He didn’t really understand quite how that had come to be, but he wasn’t so stupid that he’d fought against it. Besides, it let him grill, and Julian had a bitchin’ grill.

Also, Daar was too big to fit in his house.

“How you want your steak done? We’ve got grass-finished local beef!”

“Jus’ barely flame-kissed, mebbe some o’ that wunnerful black pepper…”

Easy. He plucked his biggest t-bone from the platter and laid it on the grill. “You’re in luck. Xiù cleaned the local grocery out of peppercorns when things started to get weird. I hope we can get some growing offworld here soon…”

“Smart of ‘er.”

“She said it was the one thing she always wished she could get while she was out there wandering in disguise…” Julian twisted the pepper mill over the meat, giving it a healthy coating. “Salt? Everyone salts their food. But there’s no replacing pepper or chilis in a Dominion spice market.”

“Dude,” Lewis added with perfect clarity, despite his cheeks literally bulging with barely-dead meat. “We’ve fought literal wars over black pepper. Not little ones, either! It’s the king of spices for a reason.”

“Ain’t nobody got anythin’ quite like it,” Daar agreed. “An’ I hear in Paris there was a whole store dedicated jus’ to pepper! All sorts from all over th’ world!”

Most of Paris had survived the nuclear exchange. But luxury stores weren’t gonna make it.

Julian turned his mind away from that depressing thought. “…So. Lucent,” he said.

“Yeah.” Daar twitched his nose appreciatively over the grill. “Not part of the plan, that, but I don’t mind. Gilgamesh has his own ideas ‘fer how post-war humanity should look, an’ I’m not lookin’ ‘fer a war o’ conquest.”

“And Keeda?”

“Y!’kiidaa’s a gao allaway through, an’ the only gao who ain’t mine. He’ll be loyal ‘ta his oldest friend.”

“Thus resumes the age of kings…” Lewis proclaimed, swirling the last of his beer bottle before draining it, tossing the empty into the recycling box and grabbing another from the cooler next to him.

“Go easy on those things, man. Who knows when we’re gonna get more,” Julian warned him.

“Dude, beer will be like the first thing we start makin’ again. It’s the fuckin’ bedrock of civilization.”

“Literally,” Daar agreed.

Lewis toasted him with the bottle. “Oh yeah. Beer is the entire fuckin’ reason we invented agriculture, d’you know that? Hunter-gatherers don’t got malted barley.”

“Same with the gao an’ talamay,” Daar duck-nodded.

Tristan frowned at them. “You mean to tell me civilization is basically just an excuse to get drunk?”

“Oversimplifyin’ it a bit dude, but…yeah.” Lewis pinged the top off his bottle and took a swig. “Ain’t just us, neither. You think a zrrk gets really properly putrid on its own? Hell no! Rotting those things down until they’re nice an’ pungent is what got the Vizzytick and Rickytick civilized.”

“There’s some kinda cycle, there…” Tristan mused.

“Like what?”

“Beer leads to civilization, civilization leads to kings, kings lead to…stability I guess? And that leads to technology, technology leads to the end of the fucking world, the end of the world leads us back to kings and beer.”

“Speakin’ as one’a those kings…” Daar rumbled, indulgently.

“Aw, shit. Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Nah, nah. I know you din’t.” Daar chittered and plucked the steak off the grill with his claws, rather sooner than Julian would have. Barely flame-kissed? Damn thing had barely blushed at the flame from across the room. Then again, compared to ten’gewek literally drinking a werne’s blood straight from the source…

He really should be used to aliens preferring their meat ultra-rare by now. And he didn’t mind that, either! But medium rare was objectively perfect.

He’d punch anyone who said otherwise.

“‘Sides, ‘yer right,” Daar added. “It’s a step backward.”

“But if you think it’s a step backward, then why are you…?” Tristan asked.

Daar didn’t reply: he was too busy chomping down a slab of meat that could just about still moo. Instead he waved a paw at Lewis, inviting him to share his thoughts on that question.

Lewis swirled his beer for a second. “Well you said it yourself, dude. Kings come early. Why is that? ‘Cuz it’s a simple, direct system that doesn’t need much of a foundation. Shit, monarchy is what builds the foundation. When we talked about nuking ourselves back into the stone age, it didn’t mean shit like metallurgy and quantum mechanics was gonna be forgotten. It meant we’d have to regress to government structures that could function in a broken world. You follow me?”

Tristan nodded his understanding. “Modern democracy can’t run without the infrastructure, any more than a computer can run without power.”

“Pre-fuckin’-zactly.” Lewis swigged the beer. “So, what do you do when the power goes out? You sure as shit ain’t playing videogames or watchin’ TV for fun no more. So you go back to books an’ boardgames an’ stories an’ singing.”

Daar swallowed his hunk-o’-cow, duck-nodding and licking the juices off his chops. “An’ whaddya do when civilization collapses? You go back ‘ta kings. ‘Fer as long as you need ‘em.”

“What did you expect?” Julian asked, flipping his own steak over. He was gonna have his medium rare, thank you very much. Like a civilized human being. “Things were never gonna be the same after this.”

“Yeah, but I thought…” Tristan scowled in thought. “Like, Folctha wasn’t attacked. I can understand regressing to monarchy in a place that’s been nuked to hell, but why here?”

“Folctha might be peaceful, but it’s not really independent,” Julian reminded him. “Do you know how much stuff we imported from Earth? Little stuff you’d never know about, but which you’ll absolutely start to know about in a couple months when something breaks that needs a spare part we can’t get any more ‘cuz the factory’s gone.”

“Dude, forget the factory,” Lewis said. “The factory might be intact, the warehouse might be full, but how’re we gonna order that part? What fuckin’ website are you gonna order it through? Or what call center? Shit, what dead-tree paper catalog? There could be enough spare parts sitting around to keep Folctha farming for a thousand years, but it’s not like Kevin fuckin’ Costner’s gonna show up with a mail bag.”

Julian snort-chuckled at the confused look on Tristan’s face. “Stick to references from this century, man. It’s not fair on the young folk.”

“Fuck off, that movie is one of the all-time American classics.”

“One of the worst films ever made you mean.”

“That’s what I said.”

Daar had turned a circle on the grass before slumping down heavily to rest. “‘Yer beginnin’ ‘ta see the problem though, kid. Gotta put out the fire, first. Stabilize things, yijao? It’s the exact same situation as the gao were left in after the war on our homeworld. When Yulna created me Great Father, she knew full well what she was doin’, an’…yeah, we’ve regressed. But at least havin’ regressed we can put the foundations back in place to move forward again, yijao?”

“I hope to shit whatever we build next ain’t so stupid as what just went up in smoke…” Lewis muttered.

“Won’t be if I get a say,” Daar said. “Which, I fuckin’ do.”

“Hmm. Speaking of you getting a say…” Julian fished in his pocket and handed over the letter he’d received just that morning.

“What’s this?”

“An invitation. From His Imperial Majesty Gilgamesh the Immortal, Emperor of Ekallim-Igigi, Bull of Uruk, Master of Beasts….et cetera.”

“Emperor, is it?” Daar sniffed. He unfolded the paper and flicked his eyes across it. “…Eh. fair, I s’pose. Beat me to Lucent! So he’s callin’ every child o’ the Line home, huh?”

“Seems that way.”

“Y’gonna heed th’ call?”

Julian shook his head. “We’ve got a good life and home here. I don’t wanna uproot Al, Xiù and the kids. Besides, if we’re gonna live under an emperor either way, I’ll stick with the emperor I know and love.”

“Love ‘ya too, buddy.” Daar rumbled. “But.”

“…You think I should go for it?”

“How much thought have ‘ya really put into what ‘yer gonna be doin’ next? ‘Yer an ambassador ‘fer a country that don’t really exist no more. Washington’s gone, th’ President an’ her Cabinet are over in Frankin draftin’ up their official acceptance o’ my sovereignty even as we speak…where’s that put you?”

“I’m still Jooyun Sky-Brother, the only human alive with a ten’gewek ritual name. I kinda figured you’d still want me in that role.”

“‘Yer also the only trained an’ experienced ambassador who’s of Singularity’s vaunted Line,” Daar pointed out. “Gilgamesh is settin’ himself up as my equal. If we don’t handle that prop’ly, it’ll mean humanity’s split down the middle, in’ta the half with a human sovereign, an’ the half with an alien sovereign…”

“And the part with a digital sovereign,” Lewis added.

“Right. Can’t ‘ferget the Entity don’t answer ‘ta neither of us. But where’s that leave the human race? With a big ol’ split down th’ middle. An it’s a natural split ‘fer blame-throwin’ too, considerin’ one side is the AEC nations, an’ the other side…”

“Are the guys who shot first,” Tristan said. “Uh, at least that’s what a lotta folks are gonna start saying,” he added when they looked at him.

“Maybe even rightly,” Lewis said. “But it was the American weapons that killed the world.”

“Killed civilization, anyway. You see my point,” Daar growled. “There’s a nat’ral rancor there. What happens if we let it brew? We got one opportunity to bring all o’ humanity together an’ say ‘fer fuck sake, ‘yer all the same species.’ I don’ intend ‘fer it ‘ta slip between my claws.”

“…Well, I mean…I do appreciate the praise. But…Daar. If I’m gonna be honest with myself, me being an ambassador was only ever to cover a unique situation. I’m not stupid or anything, but…well. Deep down I’m just…”

“Good at your job?” Daar shook his head. “Here’s the thing, big guy. You represent some of the best the Human race has to offer. You’re smart, you’re strong, you’re tough, you’re sociable, you’re good working alone or in teams, good following or leading. You’re a Hero who can do it all. Because that’s what you were bred to be.”

There it was.

“…Like I was bred to be,” he repeated, not liking the sound of it. “The Soldier, I think they call me?”

“Yes. The ideal soldier, by his reckonin’. Physically an’ psychologically. If there’s anything to this whole Heroes of the Line thing, then you, my shaggy-headed friend, are what it embodies. If I were ‘ta think up an ideal human being, you’d be one of ‘em. You an’ some o’ ‘yer bestest, in their own ways.”

Julian didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. Instead he checked the timer he’d set on the smoked baked beans and, finding them ready, removed them from the grill.

Daar wasn’t done, of course. “An’ here’s the thing, Julian. You might be all set up, but right now you can’t just sit passive, doin’ what you were already doin’. ‘Yer talents are needed elsewhere.”

“On Ekallim-Igigi?”

“Mebbe. I think you’d do well there. But so would others who are more readily replaceable. There’s dozens of ambassador Knights. There’s only one you. So mebbe ‘yer needed, fer example, even more in or with th’ HEAT. ‘Yer already top Beef-grade an’ you know it.”

“I mean…cool? I guess? But I’m not military, I’ve not done any of their combatives training or anything, though…”

“You have full Mass fam and training. You spar with Christian every week, and you have the discipline to keep up. Trust me, you would thrive there, if you wanted it bad enough. They’d teach you. An’ I’ve got a move comin’ up that I think means you can sorta be both.”

“…Oh?”

“Yeah. Close-hold ‘fer now, but lemme jus’ say we might have th’ perfect job ‘fer ‘ya. It’ll be askin’ a lot, though. Askin’ what I know you can give. I think it’ll be a good match, an’ you’ll be relievin’ posts ‘fer others.”

Well, okay. That sounded promising. “How so?”

“Our pool of people ready for high office has just become distressingly small. An’ th’ number o’ people who are either qualified or who could reasonably expect to qualify for things like HEAT operations is almost nothin’ right now. We are in desperate need of both, and both you and young prince Alex happen to satisfy either need. So…what is your track? Because, bein’ frank, young Alex is a king, now. I wasn’t expectin’ Gilgamesh to move as fast as he did, so fair game to him. But now, Adam’s got a hole in his team, an’ if I recall you’re still kickin’ both their asses…”

“Only ‘cuz Alex is still young and Adam’s kinda…well, recovering from a setback.”

“‘Fer now, mebbe. But by the sniff of it, you an’ ‘yer most bestest friends’re the best there are. Don’t unnerestimate ‘yerself. You’re keepin’ up with fuckin’ Vemik after all, so if you want it, I bet you’ll keep up or even keep ‘em in their place. With y’all it’s really ‘bout willpower an’ commitment more’n innate ability; ‘yer all freaks o’ humankind. But it’s more’n brawn here. That’s the insurmountable bit ‘fer supersoldiery shit, yeah, but it’s not th’ most importantest.”

Tristan interrupted. “What about me and Ramsey? I mean…we’re useful! Just…maybe not Hero useful.”

“Oh, you damn sure are heroes, if you wanna be. But don’t. Th’ world needs fathers an’ husbands an’ craftsman and all the rest a fuck of a lot more. Balls, y’know what we really need? Millwrights! That’s the people who put grain elevators an’ silos together an’ shit! It’s essactly where a couple normal human-sized…ish…meatheads could be useful!”

Good way to hide a compliment in a truthful assessment, that. Still.

“Okay, firstly, yeah. I told you two goons,” Julian said, directing his attention to the boys, “go work for Austin! Maybe Daar’s got a point. You can do a lot of needed good and you can live a young man’s life at the same time. That’s a rare gift right now. Think about it!”

They both nodded seriously. “Yessir,” Tristan acknowledged.

As for him…

“And I appreciate the advice for me in turn. I just…military service is never something I’ve been…I dunno. All of ‘em tell it like it’s a calling for them, yijao? Every single person there knew from a pretty young age what they were going to do. Adam’s the odd man out in that he only figured that out when he was like, almost seventeen? Something?”

“Yeah.”

“So is that really the fit?”

“Well…mebbe not! ‘Ya gotta want it ‘ta succeed. All I’m sayin’ is you sit in th’ middle o’ a really weird, uh…Venn diagram?”

“Overlapping circles? Yeah.”

“Right. I got people who can do high-level statecraft. I got people who can make unbeatable supersoldiers in whatever lil’ corner o’ this war needs fillin’. I ain’t got enough o’ either, an’ I got essactly one guy whose top-tier in both. So…don’t’cha think we oughta put ‘ya where you’d best be used?”

Again with the praise, which…it was ten times worse coming from Daar because he never lied. So instead of dwell on it, Julian plowed forward. “Where I can do the most good,” he translated.

“Yeah. However you define it. I want ‘ya there. An’ I want ‘ya ‘ta want it, too.”

“If I go to Ekallim-Igigi, I can help build a bridge. Maybe help heal that rift you talked about. That sounds like it would save a lot of lives.”

“You can, yeah. An’ it would. But I have others who’d be good in that role. You could just, I dunno, join the HEAT…”

“Well, I don’t know. How many lives is the HEAT going to save?”

“Mebbe none. Mebbe all o’ them. They’ve certainly done both in their short time.”

Julian scratched at the back of his head, realizing what Daar was doing. He was being guided somewhere, he could tell. But what?

No help from Lewis or the boys. They were more or less popcorn-eating right now, watching the godzilla king kong bearthing torment him.

“I think…I think you could send anyone to Singularity, but what I’ve seen of Gilgamesh, and what I know of him…he’s been out of touch for millennia. We saw it with their reaction to the world, and the world’s reaction to them.”

“True. An’ you think ‘yer th’ man ‘ta bridge that gap?”

“I think if we send somebody who’s not of the Line to him, he’s subconsciously going to not respect that so much.”

“Mebbe! ‘Course, he might also see that as panderin’…”

Well…shit, that was true enough.

“See? It ain’t easy bein’ me!” Daar chittered a bit self-indulgently.

“Well…look, Daar, the honest truth is, you put those options in front of me, and one of them just sounds better.”

“What about the ten’gewek?”

…Ah. That was his spear. And it was a goddamn good one, too.

So, first counter-attack. “Okay…without meaning anything but love and respect for them…”

“Yes, yes. Say it.”

“Do they…matter to you as much as Ekallim-Igigi?”

“Yes,” Daar answered without hesitation. “If anything, they matter a great deal more. Can ‘ya figger out why?”

Oh, so now he was going Socratic.

“I…well, I know they’re basically the core of JETS these days…”

“Go on.”

“And those teams are deployed basically constantly…”

“Yes. Also they’re fantastic ‘fer the local construction industry more an’ more but that’s a side argument. So…go on.”

“But I’m not the only one they respect now.”

“True enough! They like professor Hurt pretty well. But he’s approaching seventy, Julian. He’s not on the Crude, ‘least not habitually, an’ I’m not gonna question ‘em on a matter of conscience like that. He’s got a shelf life. Who is his replacement?”

“Doctor Schuster, maybe? I hate to say it, but a large part of his work just went up in flames…”

“Not really. Mosta the archives were safely unnerground on Earth or in bubble cities. Virtually all of it’ll be recoverable.”

“In fact that makes his work way more urgent,” Lewis chimed in. “So he’s out.”

“So…what? You need ten’gewek for JETS? Is…is that it?”

“I need ‘em for JETS, yeah. But I also need their world an’ their goodwill ‘ta save human civilization. I need to uplift ‘em. An’ I need ‘ta lead ‘em. But I do not have the time.”

“So…doesn’t that put us right back where we started, then? This whole conversation began with being ambassador!”

“Correct! It did. An’ then I drew a couple’o circles ‘round ‘ya. So…’yer a Soldier. Made ‘ta be, an’ I think happiest bein’ someone o’ duty and purpose. An’ you, my shaggy meathead friend, are a very particular kind o’ talent. So, again…?”

Julian sighed. “I’m happiest providing for my family. If I can do that by being useful beyond them, so much the better.”

“Damn right. ‘Fer you humans it is the highest callin’. I think I ‘member Gyotin sayin’ that in the Christian world they call it vocations. Like, vocation to marriage, vocation to…other stuff, I’ll admit I was too busy shoulder-pressin’ at th’ time to catch it all…”

Julian grinned, but he was tired of being jerked around by a burly behemoth superbrain.

“Look, Daar…I’ve been in combat a few times. The first time, I lost half of everything below my knee. The second time, I only survived ‘cuz the cavalry arrived. I know good and well that I will fight when I have to, but if I have a choice…I’ll take the diplomacy job, every time.”

“Essactly. All those things happened ‘cuz o’ circumstance an’ a terrible lack o’ trainin’. So, now that I’ve annoyed ‘ya long enough, lemme jus’ say it. I want ‘ya as a reserve officer on HEAT. I want that ‘cuz need ‘ya to be both ambassador to th’ ten’gewek, an’ I need someone they an’ th’ various allied militaries will respect. That’s always informally been you, but now I need ‘ya only doin’ that. That means I need ‘ya to train up, to learn th’ military, to learn all their customs an’ needs. Mostly that’ll be SOR, but it’ll be gaoian service too, an’ whatever Gilgamesh wants ‘ta teach ‘ya. Because I need ‘ya, really, ultimately ‘ta be th’ bridge ‘tween human, ten’gewek, gao, and Ekallim-Igigi. ‘Yer literally th’ only one who’s got a pawprint in all of it. You an’ ‘yer family are unique that way. Respect’d an’ loved by all sides at once, an’ everyone knows ‘yer honest dealers. No better fit. An’ there’s one more detail.”

…Well, that was a lot, all at once.

“…Which is?”

“I’m movin’ SOR to Akyawentuo. They don’ know it yet, but it’s necessary.”

“Wh–? Why?”

“Diplomacy. I am voluntarily surrenderin’ some symbolic control I’ve got over humanity’s spaceborne infantry by puttin’ it on neutral-ish ground. Trust me, it’ll help damp a lotta drama. Yan will swear pacts of friendship wit’ me an’ Gilgamesh, an’ become a protectorate nation o’ both. We had a call ‘bout that jus’ ‘fore I showed up in ‘yer backyard.”

Welp. No arguing with that. Julian sighed, “…Right. I get it.”

“Right. But now, here’s the real question. Do you want it? Because you really, really need to want this. It’s an arrogant an’ ambitious thing I’m askin’ of ‘ya. An’ I ask ‘cuz I know you can. Consider what th’ good emperor Gilgamesh calls you. The Soldier. Not the Warrior like he does Christian, or the King like he does his own son. The Soldier. Now…don’t let me be th’ guy who tells ‘ya that genetics is destiny. I don’t really believe that. But I’d be the biggest hypocrite ever if I thought genetics din’t have a fuck of a lot ‘ta say ‘bout you. I mean, I’m livin’ proof o’ that, an’ so is my entire species. An’ so is the Line. I can think of literally nobody better equipped ‘ta do this than you. Mighta been Alex, an’ I think that was what they’d planned ‘fer him…but shit happens, yijao? He’s gotta be king now.”

“Okay, but where’s that talk of me joining the HEAT come in. Is that really what I have to do to fill the position?”

“You can’t lead men like ‘em, or advocate for ‘em properly, if ‘ya don’t really grok what they are. Right now, I want you to earn your street cred. They gotta believe truly that ‘ya can walk the walk. An’ so do all the other military powers ‘yer gonna be in th’ middle of, in likely hostile negotiations over resources, personnel, mission, and so on. You are gonna be the gatekeeper ‘tween th’ ten’gewek an’ the rest of ‘em. They need it desperately, and it matters that’d be you ‘cuz they won’t trust anyone else ‘ta have their interests at heart. An’ lastly, I can’t make ‘ya leader of anyone if they don’t believe ‘ya can’t hack it.”

“…You’re going to make me a general.” Fuck.

“Mebbe, eventually. That’s entirely on you, an’ in any case it’s a long way off, if ever. ‘Fer now, I wanna make you an officer, so I can make you a proper ambassador. What you are right now ain’t gon’ be enough ‘fer the job, an’ this right here is why ambassadors historically had military experience, more often’n not. We’ll see what ‘ya grow into after that.”

Well, shit. That was a universe of possibility he hadn’t considered. Still. “I’ll…I need to think.”

“Mhmm. It’s a big ask. So, ‘cuz you know I want ‘ya, I’ll just say…be grateful you get the choice. I sure as fuck din’t.”

Ouch. Julian kept the internal grimace that last jab prompted from becoming an external one, and rose to his feet. “I’ma go grab a beer from the fridge,” he said, carefully.

“An’ talk ‘ta yer girls. G’arn.” Daar duck-nodded, not unkindly. “I’mma jus’ squish these three squishable frens o’ mine…”

And…like a lightning-bolt, he had them pinned. Gently, but inescapably pinned.

Friendship with Daar was not for the unfit.

Chuckling, Julian collected plates and such while the three laughed in futility, because Daar wanted snuggle and he was damn well going to get snuggle. He washed his feet in the little foot-sink by the door, and thumped his way into the kitchen.

By the…well, natural tendency of parties to self-segregate, Al and Xiù had elected to sit around the bar in the kitchen to hang out with Naydra and Leela. There was quite a large bottle of talamay in the middle, nearly empty. Apparently they’d been setting the world to rights.

…Well, that’d be hitting them like a sack of concrete before long. Oh well.

Al toasted him as he entered. “Hey, you…something wrong?”

“Oh, just…Daar landing a huge life decision in my lap. Again.”

“Oh dear,” Naydra sighed and stood up. “That.”

“Yeah, you’re going to want to talk about that,” Leela agreed. “Besides, you’re leaving the grill abandoned. Can’t have that.”

Julian chuckled. “No, I guess not…thanks.”

The two gaoians let themselves out, while Al poured out the last of the talamay into a glass for him. “So what does he want you to do?”

“And where?” Xiù added.

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“Oh come on, bǎobèi, Daar doesn’t have the luxury of just taking a break and eating steak with friends right now,” Xiù pointed out. “We knew he was here for a reason, and that reason was always gonna be you.”

“I…right.” Julian sighed. He didn’t quite know how to process that. “He wants me to be a military ambassador and sorta-advocate for the ten’gewek.”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing right now?”

“Mostly. First, he wants me to drop the rest of what I’m doing, I’m pretty sure. But also, he wants me to get some military cred, too. And that’s gonna mean…well.”

Al and Xiù looked at each other, then back at Julian. “Yeah,” Al nodded. “I suppose it would.”

“He’s talking about making me an officer. Reserve officer, but still. Which makes sense…”

“Yeah. And you’ll probably be deployed now and then, too.”

“Are…are you okay with this?”

“Babe…you’ve been best friends with them forever. Realistically this isn’t a big step. It’s just now you’ll be stepping there with them for real, instead of just in spirit. Which, I’d rather you didn’t! But no moment of your life has been any kind of safe since we met.”

“Besides, you’ve always done what needs doing,” Xiù agreed. “And yeah, I’m not gonna pretend I like the thought of you going into battle either. I mean… mā de, if I had it my way we’d all be enjoying a nice cozy retirement right now, but you’d have gone out of your mind with boredom inside a month, yijao?”

“I don’t know exactly what he’s planning,” Julian admitted. “I don’t even know if he does. I think he’s…”

“He’s placing tiles.”

“And you are a powerful, unique tile.” Al drank the talamay. “That’s how the game’s gotta be played, at his level. So…go kick ass and take names, my prettyslab. I’ll always support you.”

“Yeah,” Xiù nodnodded.

“…Just like that?”

“I mean…as soon as the war broke out, we kinda figured it was gonna mean a career shift for you,” Al said.

“Honestly, I’m surprised it took him this long,” Xiù shrugged. “I’m just waiting for ours…but we know what it’ll be.”

“What?”

They both gave him a Look.

A very, very well-earned Look.

“…Right.” That was honestly a depressing thought, really.

“And in any case, you can’t pretend with us. You’ve wanted to play soldier on some level for a long time. It’s…hard to miss. So…go do the thing, babe. Some part of you wants it, and you’ll be fuckin’ good at it. The Great Father himself wouldn’t be here if it didn’t matter.”

Julian sighed and sat. Looked down at his hands and forearms. Considered them for a bit.

…Yeah.

He didn’t have the hands of a poet or a politician. He didn’t have the forearms of some well-spoken gentleman. He had paws to do with. He could be gentle, he preferred a tender touch…but his forearms weren’t built for delicate play. They were thick like a man’s waist and writhed with power. So did the rest of his arms. The rest of his body. The rest of him.

It wasn’t just crude blessings like, well, his almost too-good looks, his huge useful muscles or the permanently model-ready shapes of his physique. It took him a long while to really accept those about himself, but along the way he’d discovered he had all sorts of power at his command. Gigantic reserves of it, if he was honest. And he was being called to use it all.

And…dammit. He wanted to.

He wanted to see what he could really do. And that just left…one more thing.

“Thanks,” he said, and went to hug them both. “I know it’s asking a lot. I don’t even…”

“Yes, you do. You knew the moment he asked. Don’t lie to yourself.”

“…Right.”

Tight hug. Feet-off-ground, slightly breathtaking, warm and tight. The best kind.

Nuzzles and hugs were the best.

The moment passed. He put them down, gave them each a quick kiss…went back outside.

Daar released his chewtoys as soon as Julian returned, with beers in hand (and a full-size growler for Daar) and apparently, a scent that told all. Daar sniffed the air…

“…Thanks ‘fer agreein’.”

“I’ll never get over how good your nose is. But, one more question.”

“G’on.”

“Why me? And I mean, really why me?”

“Oh, that’s easy. ‘Yer a smart man but you humans have a blind spot in ‘yer own souls that’s kinda baffling. Why HEAT? Well, ‘yer not jus’ a soldier. ‘Yer also a warrior.”

“…Am I?”

“Absolutely. An’ that’s why they’re the place ‘fer you. Err’one on HEAT is a warrior at the very highest level o’ their craft. They seek out th’ violence ‘cuz they’re driven to it, an’ nowhere else gives ‘em a safe direction ‘ta be what they truly are. They’re driven ‘ta adventure, to protect what they love, to prove their excellence, an’ so on. So are you, in ‘yer own way.”

“You see that in me? I mean…I guess some of that, sure…”

“More’n you think. You jus’ think of ‘yerself as a nice guy, an ‘you are! But th’ two ain’t mutually essclusive. What d’ya think was in ‘ya that went to th’ Lodge and endured their rites? That defended Yan’s village against rival tribes? That keeps ‘ya buildin’ ‘yerself up an’ alongside Vemik? It’s th’ thing that makes ‘ya do all th’ work ‘ta be the best, an’ all the extra work ‘ta be what ‘ya are: physically dominant in every damn way there is over every member o’ yer kind but ‘fer Righteous himself. That’s real hero shit. Ain’t no wimpy soul that does all that!”

Julian…like so often when people were praising his…whatever…didn’t know what to do. So, feeling defeated, he just scratched the back of his head and sighed.

“…Jeez.”

Daar chittered in turn, and pressed on. “Th’ other bit though? ‘Yer really a soldier, ‘cuz a soldier is driven by duty, an’ duty is the essence o’ every fuckin’ thing ‘ya’ve done since ‘yer rescue. Now, it’s all kinda trite as an analogy, ‘cuz ain’t nobody is all of one or all of th’ other. So don’t read too much into this…but that’s essactly m’ point! You got a pretty spectacularly violent an’ dominant streak in ‘ya. SOR are all good an’ dutiful men unner all the snarl. An’ all of ‘ya would be limited in any other company. So…I’m sendin’ ‘ya where ‘ya can be o’ unique use, where arguably only you could manage, among people who are already ‘yer bestest frens an’ who you relate to at th’ deepest levels. Only thin’ y’all don’t share is duty.”

Julian felt himself nodding, felt himself growing into the idea. “Now we can.”

“Ayup. Now be warned, they’re gonna train th’ absolute shit outta ‘ya, an’ Righteous an’ ‘Horse won’t be so nice…nor will Costello. I hope you like reading!” Daar chittered, then got serious. “An’ neither will I. You agree to this, then for a good long while we ain’t gonna be friends, least ‘till you make it through or give up. You gon’ be okay with that?”

Julian met those baleful amber eyes of his with a challenge of his own. “I’ll make it through. I’ve been through one Nightmare, right?”

“Yeah. But you’ve never seen me mean, Julian. Not personally. You do this an’ I will spare you no hardship if I think it’ll forge a better weapon outta you. Nor will colonel Costello, nor Righteous, nor Warhorse. You think th’ Lodge was hard? I’mma put you through worse near every damn day for th’ next five years. Wit’ books an’ studying. An’ ‘yer still gonna do ‘yer job. You’re gonna train, an’ study, an’ you’ll be tested harder’n any of ‘em in SOR ever were, ‘cuz you need th’ credibility. So…if ‘yer up to it? If ‘yer ready ‘ta step up with the best there ever was, an’ prove ‘yer worthy ‘ta fight wit’ them?”

Daar stood, stretched (…and maybe gave him a warning show of what kind of pain was to come) and went over to his women. “Be at Sharman’s front gate, five AM next Friday. Show up in just ‘yer runnin’ shorts, leave everythin’ else behind. Even ‘yer phone. You’ll be there an’ incommunicado ‘fer four months, no exceptions. An’ that will be th’ mos’ basic o’ beginnin’s.”

With that, Daar nodded at Lewis and the boys, then left.

Stunned silence, followed by beer drinking. Still silent.

“So…” Lewis finally broke the tension. “You gonna do it, big man?”

The boys looked at him. Up to him.

Julian didn’t have an answer, then. But the expressions on their faces…

He was at the gate on Friday, met by the men who would teach him everything.

He had no regrets.

“We have a lead on some very necessary cleanup that you might be interested in doing.”

“…Oh?”

“Yes. Cleanup of the kind best suited to your talents.”

His short-statured behemoth of a friend considered quietly, staring him down in the intense, evaluating way he’d grown so used to enduring. His was a face that was a study in extremes: masculine, handsome, stern and severe. Yet relaxed, it was almost…unremarkable. Extreme and somehow plain. With any emote whatsoever he was transformed into another man entirely.

Dinner was frugal today. Simple but well-crafted, of local ingredients. Quite delicious, actually.

He did splurge a bit on the wine. May as well enjoy it now, before the drought came.

His friend took a bite, savoring the meal.

“Discretion will be a thing to pull off. Most of my resources and contacts, well, aren’t anymore.”

“In this case, we think an overt act would serve everyone well.”

“Must be a big clean-up job…”

He slid the folder over. Friend raised an eyebrow.

“We’re sure?”

“Perfectly.”

“Well then.” He finished the last morsel on his plate, and downed the last sip of wine. “I’ll get going on it.”

“Good. This is…it is important we do this. Settle a human affair, with humans. Our new benefactors should not be involved.”

“Agreed. Will they be a problem?”

“No.”

“Right.” The man stood up, floor complaining under his weight, and they shook hands. Grip like fighting a vice, but as usual he knew his strength. “Shouldn’t take long.”

“Good.”

They parted ways.

The contact consulted his phone, and sighed. Lots of business to attend to, these days. But some business could not be left alone. Not if humankind would ever respect itself again.

He almost pitied Daniel’s next target.

Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth

Josh Hartl

They finally let Josh start wearing his regular gear again two weeks after the bombs, by which point the heavy armor had rubbed and pinched him pretty fuckin’ bad in a few places, and a couple weeks of showering frugally at best had him smelling like gymbro satan’s sweaty groin.

But, water was coming on for full residential use today, now that the fallout all clear was sounded. And when that moment finally came…

Oh. Oh God. Glorious fuckin’ shower. He must have spent a fuckin’ hour under it, and the first splashes of water had come off black.

For once, nobody jealous-teased him about anything, either. They were all so fuckin’ gross it was unbelievable. The station (or the engine itself) might never shake the funk, it was so bad.

He got to go home too, at last. Now that the all-clear was sounded and people were allowed to come out of their shelters. He found Maria and Jess wearing his t-shirts while they put the clothes they’d been wearing on doomsday through the laundry at long last. They both looked…in the nicest way, they looked fuckin’ rough. Two weeks marinating in the same clothes, with not enough food and carefully rationed water, not to mention surviving where so many other people had…Josh probably wasn’t exactly looking like a Michelangelo himself.

But they were glad to see him, and he was glad to see them. More than glad. Just knowing they were alive and okay was enough to bust a lot of the remaining tension.

The stasis fridge had stayed on the whole time he’d been away, and upstairs out of reach for the girls so they raided it for a big lunch. Onions, carrots, potatoes, chicken thighs…

Well, Josh had been eating pretty damn good the last couple weeks. They hadn’t. So he tortured himself a bit and made sure they were fine, first.

“Don’t eat too much!” he warned. “Uh…refeed syndrome. It’s a thing.”

Jess snorted. “We weren’t starving down there,” she said, and swigged from a coke can with a relieved gasp.

“Besides,” Maria added. “Nursing student, remember? You let me worry about our health.”

Oh. Right. “…Yeah. Sorry.”

“And while we’re at it, your health. What are all those band-aids for?”

“Pressure sores. From my suit.”

“…Fuck! How long were you wearing that thing for?”

“My whole shift, every day since it happened,” Josh replied.

“Okay, wow. You need to get some cream or something on—what was that?!”

They all stiffened at once at the crack-boom that made the windows and screen door rattle, listening warily. Josh’s heart was suddenly thumping hard in his chest again. Fuck, and they’d finally shut the shields down for maintenance too and…

…No, wait, the missiles moved way faster than sound. If that had been another missile, they’d never have heard a thing. He relaxed a bit, moistened his suddenly dry mouth, and stood up to go check out the front door.

There was a spaceship swooping in and slowing down to hover over downtown. Not a big one, it was kinda airliner-sized, but it was hanging up there in that way planes didn’t, without wings. It looked kinda like somebody had lacquered a banana. Weird.

He watched it descend out of sight toward the west, and became aware the girls were peering out the door behind him watching.

“Wonder who the hell that was?” Maria asked.

“Beats me. That didn’t look like a human ship. Or a Gaoian one,” Jess said.

“You sure?” Josh asked. “How d’you know?”

“Documentaries.”

“…Documentaries.”

“What?! You know how fucking boring it was down there? And, well, Netflix was still working…”

“We’ve got Internet?”

“Came back up on day three. Sorta.”

Shit! Josh had been so busy he hadn’t noticed. He completely forgot about the spaceship, ducked back inside and grabbed his phone. If there was internet then maybe he could get hold of Mom and Dad—

…But if the Internet was back up, they would have tried to get hold of him. Wouldn’t they?

A dreadful certainty settled on him. But he had to know for sure. With shaking fingers, he typed out the words Charleston WV.

The search engine knew there was only one reason anyone was gonna be searching for a given city right now. He got his answer right at the top of the first page. Charleston WV. Status: Destroyed.

His parents were dead.

He closed his eyes. Set the phone down. Leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and was suddenly just tired. Tired and lost and broken. He’d…known, really. Kinda. Somehow. But having it confirmed was too much to hold back

A tear dripped off his nose and he scrubbed it away. There was a warm hand on his shoulder, Jess’. She sat down next to him, saw what he’d searched, and rested her head against his arm, whispering something sympathetic that he barely heard.

From the moment the alerts first went out, he’d been useful. He’d been planning, leading, serving, doing. Useful like nobody else could be! Now he had a bit of time off…and he realized he was actually helpless. He’d survived this far on luck and the work of other people, and he was who he was because of Singularity’s machinations.

What could he actually do besides…well. Put out fires?

The wretched thought was rolling around in his head when the phone buzzed, sidestepped half an inch across the table, and started to ring. It was the Chief.

Numbly, he reached out and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Josh. Got…a couple of interesting characters here asking after you. You’ll wanna come in and talk to them. And…bring the girls who were staying at your place.”

“…Okay?”

“Yeah, I know. Just…trust me.”

Josh sniffed back the last of his tears, frowned at the phone as Chief hung up, then pocketed it. “Alright…uh…how’re your clothes?”

“Uh.” Jess blinked in confusion. “Dry, I guess. Probably. Why?”

“We need to head downtown.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. But…well, I trust the Chief, so, we’re doing it.”

Jess and Maria exchanged a glance, a mutual shrug, and Maria vanished into the laundry room to grab their stuff from the dryer.

He looked over at a mirror while he was waiting. He looked…

Well, not a wreck. Food and sleep had done him wonders. Clean clothes and scrubbed hair helped too. But still, it took a moment for his brain to realize that was him in the mirror. He looked like he’d gained several years in the last couple of weeks.

Maybe he had.

The ride over was mostly uneventful, with the girls combing the last neglected tangles out their hair as he drove. He’d had to insist they get a move on, but he wasn’t gonna deny them basic hygiene. He may have been a meathead guy but after all this…he got it.

For the first time in weeks, Columbus looked some kind of normal. It had been a ghost town since the bombs fell, with everyone sheltering in place against whatever fallout did manage to sneak in under the shield…or in case the shields themselves failed and dumped the dirty carpet of dust they’d accumulated onto the city. Now people were out and wondering what to do next, where they were going to find food, all that stuff. Lots of pedestrians…not so many vehicles, still.

Power was being rationed right now.

Local radio was back up at least, and rather than commercial breaks they were putting out public information between the songs. Which was nice. But the border where the shield had fallen really told the story.

Mostly, the shield fell in open space. In some places, it fell through buildings, and it had cleanly bisected them, leaving some of them like strange doll houses, or as interesting industrial remnants.

Outside the shield, desolation and destruction. Anything organic had been vaporized. All was dust, ash and rock. Paint on roads, gone. Signs flashed down to the underlying metal, if they were there at all. Shadows of people against buildings. Ash. Everywhere.

But outside the shield was where they were going. The rescue HQ had been moved out toward London; by some miracle, it had not been directly struck by Russian warheads, a town in the eye of a thermonuclear storm.

It was such an incomprehensible contrast. Some places seemed almost functional. Some were like Hollywood disaster movies. He could run his dryer at home and enjoy hot water, but not even ten minutes driving and he entered a land where life had been deleted.

“Fuck…” Maria pulled her feet up onto the seat in front of her and hugged her knees. “It really happened.”

“Yeah…”

They were silent for the rest of the drive. Every so often they passed a vehicle going back the other way, and Maria shut off the radio after a few minutes. Josh nodded and said nothing: the music had been grating on his nerves, too.

They reached London’s outskirts, and were back among green leafy trees and vertical power poles and buildings that hadn’t been smashed flat. He had no idea how anyone had survived out here, but they had. Most of the work out this way had been helping people whose fallout shelters had failed, dosing them up on iodine, washing them off and transporting them back inside the Columbus shield perimeter…

He caught a glimpse of something between the trees, and had a sudden inkling why they were there. That black banana-shaped ship was hovering a couple hundred feet above the center of town, where the rescue HQ had been situated at the Parks and Recreation office.

He pulled in and parked next to the community center and they climbed out, looking nervously up at it like most everyone else in the area. Things like that shouldn’t just hang in the air, at least not so peacefully. But there was no howl of engines, no thrum of spinning blades, just an infrasonic hum felt through the soles of the feet and in the lungs rather than heard.

And waiting for them in the Chief’s office were two Heroes.

Christ, they were uncanny. Both were beautiful, almost too much so, in the same weird kinda way as a show dog with a perfect pedigree was too beautiful when compared with a loving, stupid, face-licking mutt.

Josh liked mutts better.

“They look just like you,” Jess said under her breath. He looked over at her, confused, but Chief got the meeting underway.

“Joshua. Let’s have a serious talk.”

…Pained. He looked pained.

Shit.

Josh understood instantly.

“Chief—”

“No, Joshua. You’re gonna sit down and listen.”

Josh paused, glanced at the two people from Singularity, then settled himself carefully on the floor, there not being a sturdy enough chair at hand.

“You’re going to argue,” Chief said, bluntly. “You’re going to object. You’re going to want to stay and help people. I know you’re going to do all these things because you’re a good man with a good soul.”

“I’m also like ten fuckin’ times stronger than anyone else in the department! At least! I can wear nuclear armor! There’s shit I can do! There’s—”

“No, Josh.”

“…Why?”

“Because there’s a bigger picture, son. And you’ve gotta turn your mind toward it. You can stay here putting out fires and lifting rubble and pulling people out of trouble all the livelong day, and God knows I wish you could, but that’s a lot less than you could be doing with your talents.”

He leaned forward, thick strong fingers intertwined. “It’s one of those trolley problems, right? D’you save five people, or one? You’re loyal to the guys you work with, to the people of this area, and I respect that. But our job sometimes comes down to harsh decisions about saving who you can when you can. And this here is one of them. You stay here, you’re wasting your potential, and I don’t mean that in a selfish, small way.”

Josh glanced at the two people from Singularity. “You came all this way for me?”

The one he took to be the senior of the pair, a statuesque woman built like a healthily tanned She-Hulk, nodded her head. “We have several reasons,” she said, in an odd accent. “But the one relevant to you is that the colonies all need the very best people they can get, if they are to succeed. There are still hundreds of millions of mouths to feed, house, clothe, protect and provide for.”

“The Line was created because we knew humanity would face great upheaval upon our entry to the galactic community,” her male colleague said. “We…did not exactly envision this war, or the Centauri blast. But we knew there would be a crisis, and so there is. Now, our species needs the children of the Line if we are to overcome the crisis. We need you.”

“There are still billions of people on Earth—!”

“…No, mister Hartl. That number is reduced. Our priority now is rescuing those who remain.”

“Exactly! Which is why I need to stay here!”

“Which is why you are needed off-world. The bottleneck is food and shelter. Lucent, Cimbrean, even Gao are all undergoing tremendous building surges. Human civilization must be expanded rapidly, now, before it is too late and we must rely on historical reconstruction.”

“In other words,” Chief said, “more lives will be saved if you get your giant ass over there, doing the sort of work that will really save lives. We’re…rescue operations are winding down. You know that, right?”

“Already?”

“Most everyone who’s going to survive, already has.”

“What about the rest? What about everyone in my firehouse?”

“They will be needed too, mister Hartl,” the woman from Singularity said. “In short order.”

“But you are needed in the first wave,” her colleague agreed.

‘You’re worth five of us, Josh. And ten normal men. Don’t play coy. We all know it. And you do too. And one of you is easier to feed and work than ten older, broken men like me.”

“We respect that you have commitments and attachments here,” the Singularity man said. “Your companions are invited to come with us as well.”

Josh heard Jess gasp, and Maria went white-knuckle tense. They’d just been thrown a lifeline, except it was in Josh’s hands…

…Oh, the bastards. That was manipulative as fuck.

But what was he gonna do? Say no just to spite them, at the girls’ expense?

Chief knew, too. “It’s a done deal, Josh. You’re fired, ‘cuz there’s better waitin’. C’mon,” he stood, “let’s go say bye to the boys.”

Josh opened his mouth to say something, drew a blank. Shut it again. Opened it again to say something else, which vanished from his brain before he could put it into words. He looked down at his knees and muttered “dammit…” before rising.

The boys understood. Gave him some affectionate shit for it, too. They had promises off-world too, so really…How high a price were these two actually paying for him? They can’t have done the same everywhere!

They did make him take his suit, armor, and all its tools, because “nobody can lift that shit and it smells like your unwashed nutsack anyway.”

As much shit as he got, there was an equal amount of hugs, handshakes and backslap. Fuck, he hoped they were serious about getting their own place off-world. They fuckin’ deserved it.

As for the girls…Maria was eager to go. She kept glancing around nervously like the offer might evaporate at any second. Jess had made an emergency phone call to her family and was fretting about her parents and her little brother and her cousins, but Josh heard her dad’s voice through the phone saying ‘just go, you idiot,’ which seemed to settle things.

The last thing he ever did on Earth was shake the chief’s hand.

They got beamed up. Not in the Star Trek sense, but literally like an old UFO cult thing, with a beam of light that did fucky things to gravity so they “fell” slowly and gently up into a bay on the ship’s belly, before being set gently down on metal decking.

Things immediately felt weirdly comfortable. Everything was at about the right height, the doors were wide enough, the decking so sturdy that Josh could feel secure in his movements. Everything had a solid, well-built feel to it that was just perfect for him. Really…unsurprising, not unexpected even, but Josh had been treading lightly and sitting gently more or less since he hit puberty. Even a bit before that, honestly, and he’d joined the four-digit club in college. To suddenly be in a place built by people like him, for people like him was…

Well, actually kinda discombobulating, honestly. And an undeniable reminder that he was leaving. Leaving home, leaving Earth…leaving…everything. Shit, all he had with him was the clothes on his back, his work gear, a phone that probably wouldn’t work where they were going, and a wallet full of cards and ID and stuff that had just become so many slim plastic souvenirs.

At least the quarters they were shown to had a view outside. A long, thick oval window set in the outside hull. With a jolt he realized that they’d already left the ground far behind and were at airline cruising altitude, high above the clouds. He hadn’t even felt them accelerate.

Maria sighed heavily and sat on the bed. “So…that’s it. We’re just leaving. Just like that.”

“Yeah.” Josh put a hand on the window to look out and down. Below him was…fuck. What should have been an endless and fairly regular grid of fields and roads with the occasional circle of green from center pivot irrigation, instead had…shit. He could see the curves of scorched, devastated, blasted lands outside the Columbus shield cluster. The line was weirdly clean, too, marking the limit where the heat from the explosions had no longer been enough to set crops on fire.

…God..

“I wonder where we’re going?” he asked aloud. He realized they were accelerating, smoothly and rapidly again, heading….southwest?

“Probably gonna pick up some more of these ‘Children of the Line,’” Jess said. “How many are there, do you think?”

“Not many,” Josh shrugged. “There’s maybe three-hundredish in the whole US. And we’re mostly small-town kids, ‘cuz Singularity wanted to keep it low-key.”

“Sounds like every single one could fit on this ship…” Jess mused.

“Could be.” Josh sat on the bed next to her, and felt a little bit warmer inside when she leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder. His arm went around her before he knew what he was doing, and to his mild surprise…she didn’t mind at all.

“So…what are we in all this?” Maria asked, gesturing to Jess and herself. “Just a bit of leverage to get you to come?”

“To them, maybe.”

That earned a small smile, and she sat down on the other side from Jess. “Well…if it means I get to live through this mess…” she said, then trailed off and left the thought unfinished.

“It’s not gonna be easy,” Josh warned.

“I know.”

And that seemed to be all any of them wanted to say, for now. Josh couldn’t do more than exhale slowly, lie back and rest on what turned out to be a very comfortable bed. Easily the most comfortable thing he’d laid on in weeks.

He wasn’t thinking of anything, really. He was too tired, too…numb. Maybe his head would wheel and spin later, but here and now he was just…here and now. On a spaceship, leaving home forever, heading for an uncertain future with two girls he, if he was being honest, hardly knew at all…

Well. There’d be time to fix that later. Right now…he didn’t even have the strength to pull off his shirt.

He fell asleep almost immediately.

Velilky Novgorod, Russia, Earth

Yulia Kozlova

Novgorod wasn’t really even there any longer. The nice bits certainly weren’t. The Cathedral of St. Sophia, a thousand years old, had been smashed down flat along with the rest of the Detinets. The trees had been splintered to matchsticks, and the matchsticks burned to ash. A few of the old Soviet-era housing blocks in the north-west part of town still had a few vertical walls on them…

Yulia turned little Mila’s eyes away as she realized she could see human silhouettes baked onto the concrete. The poor girl had nightmares enough already.

Even so, the roads led to Novgorod, and one of the bridges was still standing, somehow. Whoever was left to make decisions had decided there would be a jump array in the city, and that everyone from the surrounding area should travel there for transit to Lucent. No word on where they would live when they got there, what they would do, or anything. For all Yulia knew, she was leading her children to the world where they would starve.

But…it was something. Some glimmer of hope, however jaded and hopeless she might be feeling. And at least in Gagarin there would be some hope of living through this and seeing Mila and Maksim grow up. There was no such hope on Earth.

So, they were standing in line. They’d been there for sixteen hours, now, and had moved forward maybe two or three miles. Yulia’s feet were in agony, she was tireder than she could ever remember being, her whole body ached from carrying her baby boy all this way…

She didn’t know how much more she could take.

Desperate for anything to take her mind off the agony in her feet, she was people-watching. Not that there was very much to do. Mobile phone coverage was non-existent, not that she had any way to charge her handset anyway. The people around her mostly looked much the same as she did. Downtrodden, wearing their hardiest clothes, shuffling along nursing aching soles and bruised souls and the guilt of still being alive when so many weren’t.

Even so, she found some to look at.

There was a girl some distance ahead with black hair, starting to return to blonde at the roots, and interestingly dyed with a rainbow underneath. She was hand-in-hand with a tall man in a bright blue puffy jacket. What a mismatched pair…

That old grandma hobbling alongside the rest of her family. Was she looking to leave too? Or was she just here to see her children and grandchildren safely away? She looked so sad…or maybe just in pain.

Up ahead, the line turned a corner and she blinked. She’d worked in government for a few years, and she knew men like that. Tall, solid, blunt…almost faceless in a way. Muscle. So who were they escorting?

Whoever he was, he was an older man. Steel gray hair brushed to one side, a round jaw, a lampshade mustache…She blinked at the nagging feeling that she recognized him from somewhere. Then Mila started complaining again, and by the time the little one was settled the man and his muscle were out of sight.

Well. Good to know the powerful people who needed muscle were stuck waiting in line like the rest of the peons. A small flicker of justice.

She stamped her feet, flexed her toes inside her shoes. Not far to go now, and she could rest for a time…who else was there to watch? She turned and looked behind her and her eyes skipped over mostly identical people wearing the same mix of street clothes and dogged expressions…

Movement caught her eye. A…man sauntering up the street, not part of the queue. She boggled at him, suddenly finding she could not look away. He was apparently not much fussed by the cold and wore a riotously colorful button-down, short-sleeve shirt, along with cargo shorts that cut off a bit too far above the knee, huge mirrored sunglasses, and a pair of heavy sandals. But his questionable taste in clothing wasn’t what was so out-of-place.

It was his body. His impossible body.

The blocky man stood quite short but was built like a dire bear, as wide and thick as a barge from head to toe. He had an armor-plate slab of a chest, a huge blocky head atop the thickest neck she’d ever seen on a man. Heavy muscle bulging up to his ears sloped down from his neck toward his soccer-ball shoulders. Arms like great hams hung from them, easily bigger than her chest, and his tremendous bowling pin forearms were bare to the air, sinew and muscle writhing obscenely under tan skin heavily fuzzed over with straw-blond hair. He was built to such an extreme that at first glance, she’d puzzled if he was a man at all.

Yulia realized she was staring and men like that seldom enjoyed the attention, but couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t just the shape of him that struck her, but the way he moved. He wasn’t swaggering like the hired muscle around the man up ahead, throwing their weight around like they were a big deal. This man’s swagger was unavoidable because of his sheer size. He moved with direct purpose, swinging his great legs around themselves, head and gaze level and fixed. His footsteps were so heavy that Yulia felt them thump through the ground as he strode. And now that he was up close, the scale of the man was easier to grasp. He was—

She sorta…short-circuited trying to get her head around this monster in their midst, and suddenly more people than just her had noticed him. They all watched him nervously, all backed away. His extreme size was no less evident from behind. He strode forward atop calves seemingly the size and hardness of bowling balls. They and every hulking bit of him from his rear up to his shoulders was in the sort of powerful, organic motion that made one think of a predator stalking its prey. The line broke up ahead of him and gave the respectful distance he deserved, especially when the man lifted his head a bit and called out a name.

“General Sergei Petrovich!” He bellowed powerfully, voice deep to the point of gravelly. In oddly-accented Russian, “You have debts to pay!”

Petrovich. The name alone jogged Yulia’s memory. Of course! He’d been all over the news during the Kazakhstan campaign, justifying it, telling the whole country how many lives the invasion would save! He’d worn a full beard, then, parted his hair differently and not worn glasses, but it was definitely him.

The bastard who’d taken her children’s father away.

Petrovich’s muscle turned and visibly blanched. Suddenly they didn’t seem all that intimidating, with this hulking bear essentially daring them to fight. Two automatically stepped in front of the general, while the other two glanced at each other and advanced on the man, reaching inside their coats…Yulia knew. She instinctively turned Mila around and hugged the little girl’s face into her clothes in the second before the violence exploded.

But the man…she couldn’t entirely process what happened, it was so fast. She blinked and he was on top of them before they could finish drawing their weapons.

The first, he grabbed by the wrist and yanked, sending the huge man flying across the square like Yulia would have thrown a ball. He crashed to the ground with an agonized shriek, his arm flopping limp and useless while he tried to cradle it.

The other caught a backhand to the side of the head and dropped like a potato sack. He was dead before he hit the ground, head crushed in and broken like an overripe melon.

The thrown man groaned, attempted to move…

The enormous bear-man again flashed over to the broken-arm man as if the many meters of distance weren’t even there, put a huge foot on the poor thug’s upper leg and stepped down. It snapped, loudly.

Thrown-man screamed. His leg wasn’t quite destroyed but somehow, she knew that was only due to bear-man’s mercy.

“Don’t.” the bear looked down, warning. The two remaining guards sized their foe up, this short impossible tank of a man, this…beast easily bigger than the both of them together…and charged forward, opening fire.

Bear-man jinked left and right, almost too fast to see. Bullets pinged off the ground exactly where he wasn’t. In less than a breath he’d closed the distance—

The nearest man drew a knife. That was a mistake. Bear grabbed the man’s knife-hand with his own far bigger paw and exploded it in his grip. His other huge fist landed with a solid whump right into knife-man’s gut. He fell to the ground, vomiting and clutching the stump of his hand.

Far-man emptied his weapon in firing at the bear, but it didn’t seem to matter. The bear caught his prey and perfunctorily mauled him, throwing him to the ground a whimpering, broken mess.

Bear took the man’s rifle and, well…basically tied it in a knot and threw it at the general’s feet.

Then he turned his attention back to the broken thugs.

“‘Yer fit enough to get up and hobble away,” the man declared, rolling his square-jawed head on top of his freakishly muscular bullneck. “So leave or I’ll break you some more.”

Petrovich blinked in shock and dismay as the hired thugs agonizingly found their feet, then fled. “Where are you going?!” he demanded.

As if they could do anything to save him.

“If they’re smart, a hospital. Knife-guy ain’t got any kidneys anymore, an’ if he’s lucky that’s all he’s really gotta worry ‘bout. I don’t like gettin’ shot at, so I weren’t too nice with rifle-guy. Prob’ly ain’t gonna make it.” Bear took off his glasses and stuffed them in one of his side pockets. “Now. Let me be absolutely sure I’ve got my man. Are you, in fact, General Sergei Petrovich? And be warned,” the man tapped his nose. “I can smell lies.”

Petrovich’s mouth opened and shut a few times as he stared first at this terminator, then he looked around at the crowd. Yulia looked around too, and realized she wasn’t the only one who was starting to feel a burning hatred in her heart, now that she’d recognized him.

Up until now, the flicker of justice she’d held onto had included the thought that at least the men responsible for the war, Volkov and all his cronies, were answering to God for their crimes. Knowing one of them had escaped…

It didn’t matter what Petrovich said now. Whether he lied or not, he was a dead man. Even if the bear walked away, the crowd would take their revenge for dead sons and husbands and fathers, and for the whole world beyond. He realized it too. Stopped floundering, took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and straightened. Suddenly, the tall-backed general from the news was there again.

“…That is me,” he said. “And you are an American.”

There was an accusation in that statement. America’s bombs had been the most ruinous of all, everyone knew it. Yulia found she couldn’t care. They hadn’t started the war.

This re-used гондон had. Everyone knew that, too.

The short wall of a man nodded curtly. He pulled off his painfully American tropical shirt with businesslike contempt, and…

Gasps.

Yulia heard herself do the same, and felt her heart hammering. The blood drained from Petrovich’s face. He knew what he was facing, now. This was no man. No mere human being could possess such an incredibly, impossibly powerful body. He wasn’t just some weird bodybuilder or big-ego athlete, and he wasn’t just some random drug thug. This bear was so far beyond any of that it went past beautiful, through disturbing and into superhuman and didn’t stop there. He was…there was so much purposeful muscle somehow crammed onto him, it was sort of repellant in its extremes, and yet so perfect she couldn’t look away.

The man wasn’t a human or a beast. He was something else.

This man was an angel of death.

…No. He was a Hero. He was one of them they’d seen on the news, had dismissed as Western propaganda, as cheesy Photoshops. But no. He was here, in front of them. Thick-wasted, thicker-legged, a broad, heavy chest and back sized to proportion. He was built for power, not to prance as a cover model, even if he honestly could. He was real.

And not too happy. He examined his shirt, vast swells of brawn jumping to and fro in his upper body as he found holes—!

“Texan, sir. And this was my favorite print, too.” He tsked, seemingly more at himself than anything.

“…You were shot.” Petrovich stammered, unbelievingly.

“Yeah. Fuckin’ hurts. You gonna try and shoot me, too?”

Боже мой! There were some red dots across his abs and flank, now that she looked…

Did…did he actually survive being shot? Bullets bouncing off him like Superman?!

The implications were not lost on Petrovich. “…N–no. I…surrender.”

The angel nodded. “Thanks. And thank you for being truthful. But your surrender means nothing, general. We’re not playing by the Geneva Conventions.”

Everyone backed up even more, including the general. The angel seemed unperturbed.

“Still…honesty and courtesy should be rewarded, I think. I’ll grant you a bit of a mercy.”

“…Mercy? What mercy could you poss—?”

He never got to say another word. There was a blur, a sickly crack. Several cracks. In just a second or two, the texan had utterly, perfectly broken the general. He let his foe fall to the ground, unable to do anything but wheeze in agony. Petrovich tried to flail—couldn’t. Somehow, the angel had already broken all his limbs.

The angel picked him up by the head, his vast paws fairly swallowing up the general’s head.

His terrifying chest and forearms bulged. There was a soft series of cracks. He only squeezed for a moment before he hefted his toy up and did the same to the general’s ribs, paws instantly pressing closer together by several inches. He didn’t finish the job, though he’d exerted so little apparent effort, she had no doubt he could have crushed his torso completely flat. One hand clamped onto the general’s shoulder to hold him up while the other slammed a punch to the gut that was so powerful, she could hear the air thump behind his fist, see him fly up like a punching bag. Hear his spine snap from the force of it.

Yulia felt sick, but like everyone else she felt compelled to watch.

The show was over, though. Satisfied with his work, the angel of death dropped the utterly broken general to the hard ground like so much trash. Ribs and limbs obviously shattered, head misshapen and lumpen, brains leaking out of his ears and nose.

Yet his eyes still moving. Иисус Христос, he was still alive!

The angel contemplated his victim for a moment, then put his huge foot down in the center of general Petrovich’s chest, who writhed under what must have been incredible pressure. Rumor had it the Heroes could weigh many times more than what they looked, so the weight of this bull of a man must have been pure agony. And considering how easily he’d dealt with the hired thugs…

“My mercy is I ain’t gonna leave you to the lovin’ embrace of your people. Good-bye.”

The Hero stepped down.

She’d guessed right about his weight. General Petrovich was very suddenly no more.

And now, spread all over the square. The man’s foot was flat to the ground, as if he’d just stepped in mud and not the bone and sinew of a living man.

Yulia had…never imagined she would witness such an incredible display of such powerful, unstoppable, uncaring violence. This was the sort of enemy Petrovich had picked a fight with? The Americans had men like him?! The angel of death had casually stomped general Petrovich out of this life like a cockroach. Snuffed him as if the Americans had held back a small and very personal nuke, one meant just for him. Just for the butcher of mankind.

The American wiped his sandal on the corpse’s trousers, wiped the general’s blood off his knuckles with a pocket tissue, then returned to his discarded shirt.

He gave the crowd a warning glance as he picked it up.

“Y’all are gonna behave when you get to Lucent, right?”

Face a study in handsome, dangerous aggression. Everyone backed further away.

“Good.”

He didn’t bother putting his shirt back on, just flung it over one of his shoulders. Everyone watched him in terrified, morbid fascination as he sauntered away toward the open space of the square, legs thick as a big man’s chest swinging around each other’s girth with each heavy step. With a sudden spherical flash of blackest-black and an ear-shattering thump, he was gone, taking with him a divot of the rough road surface and leaving behind nothing more than a perfectly smooth round hole to mark where the angel had returned to heaven.

Up ahead, somebody cleared her throat. Yulia tore her gaze away from the neat crater and the ruined general, and found there was a young woman standing waiting by the jump array, her dress glowing impossibly.

“Please do not delay the evacuation,” the apparition requested, and beckoned Yulia to come forward. Yulia’s feet moved of their own accord, her hands shooing Mila past the ruined Petrovich and not letting her look while cuddling Maksim who was too exhausted and miserable to cry any longer…

The holographic woman waved her right through the checkpoint. The metal plate of the jump platform clanked underfoot, and lettering around the edges warned her to keep everything inside the yellow—
thump

—line. Yulia nearly fell over at the suddenness of the transition. Suddenly, she wasn’t on Earth any more. Everything felt light, the air smelled strange, suddenly it was a…what, sunset? Instead of an overcast, cloudy morning?

A woman with a kindly face encouraged her and Mila off the platform. She was asked her name, numbly replied. Was ushered through between parked trucks and portable homes, into a slightly larger structure.

Exhausted and unable to think any more, she followed every instruction she was given. There was…a shower. She had to clean herself and the children thoroughly. Then there was a yellow forcefield that swept over them and left Yulia’s teeth feeling strange, and past that was a room with new clothes waiting for them in sealed plastic bags. They weren’t good clothes, being just a pair of pants, a t-shirt, a jumper and a warm hat, all in shades of gray…and they didn’t fit properly either. Yulia had to tie the drawstring on the pants tight, and still felt like she was waddling around about to have them fall off her. And the plastic sandals that replaced her shoes were no good for her aching feet at all.

But..she was clean, and dressed. And they promised to return her own clothes once they had been properly washed…

And then there was food. The first proper meal she’d been able to give Mila and Maksim in weeks. And the first proper meal she’d been able to eat for herself since long before then, even…

And then a small room. It had an adult-sized bed, a pull-out sofa bed, and a cot that was basically just a plastic crate with a mattress at the bottom, but…oh, lord. Rest.

With her belly full and her clothes clean for the first time since her Aleksander had been called away to war, she put Mila and Maksim to bed. They were asleep in seconds…

It struck her. She’d done it. They’d done it. They’d escaped. Her babies were safe!

And the butcher, the man who’d robbed her of Aleksander and her home and nearly killed the whole world was dead.

The full weight of it landed on her, and she broke down crying.

And she didn’t stop until exhaustion carried her down into a deep, long, dreamless sleep.

SOR temporary headquarters, High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Colonel Antony (Abbott) Costello

One of the harder parts of all this was adjusting to his temporary office. It had a different phone, with a different ring. Which was a weird little detail to get hung up on, but it was a constant reminder that he wasn’t in the same place any longer. That his life had taken a sharp turn, not completely within his control.

The United States was a rump government, now. It belonged to Daar, because the President and what remained of Congress had signed an Instrument of Protection. As had the United Kingdom and whatever was left of the AEC. As had Franklin, as had Folctha. As had the rest of the colony cities. As had substantially all the remaining governments on Earth.

Daar had conquered them all in literal hours through the simple expedient of aid, a welcoming paw, and a promise not to nuke them into oblivion. And as promised, he’d protected the HEAT. Their status was the first non-negotiable bit he’d enforced.

It was…nice, to hear kind words from leadership, and all that. He’d taken his team on a big leap into the murky world between duty and treason and not known which might have been which. In the end, he’d relied on trust of an ally, and even moreso on his ability to feed them.

He’d probably figure out how he felt about it all one day. But not today.

At least for now, they were likely going to expand, including another sorely-needed officer. And what a guy to get! Too bad he’d only be a reserve officer to start with, but…

Anyway, that was a matter for later. Right now, he shook his head clear and answered the phone. “Costello.”

It was Stephenson. “Sir, JETS team seven is back. I’ve sent Tiny and Gonzo up to do their head check.”

Thank fuck, some good news. Preliminary scouting of a complete unknown was the riskiest kind of work the SOR did, with a not insignificant chance that the scouts would just never return, never make contact again…getting them back was an answered prayer.

“Alright, thanks. I’ll clear my schedule.” He pressed the intercom button, “Firth, get in here.”

Distant muffled thuds. Closer, less muffled thumps. A couple of entirely un-muffled seismic events outside his door, followed by a knock, and a gym-soaked, almost-naked Firthhulk squeezed himself through the door and into his office. “Boss?”

“Enjoying Daar’s gym, eh?”

“Hell yeah, dude’s got some awesome toys! Always love the lift-all-day life. Anyway. ‘Sup?”

“Pleased to say we get to tell JETS seven about all the fun shit that’s been happening while they were gone.”

“Well, okay. S’pose that’s worth postponing my bench record. Any advance reportin’?”

“Not yet. Tiny and Gonzo are up there scanning their skulls. Guess we’ll hear what they found soon enough, though…”

“Right. This is the team that’s got all silverfurs on it, ain’t it?”

“Yeah. No brownies. And two ten’gewek, rest are human.”

“Well shit, why don’t we jus’ have it in the kitchen, then? We’ve finally got it set up good.”

“Works for me, I’m about due to eat anyway.”

“Well, let’s get a spread goin’.” And with that, the giant squeezed back out of Costello’s office. He stepped out and followed behind. A useful tactic, that; Firth was as wide and tall as the hallways in this bit of the Fortress, so he did an excellent job of clearing out traffic. Costello only had a brief moment to contemplate the daunting mysteries of Firth’s inhumanly wide and thick mega-back (or how he fit his legs through the door) before they arrived at the kitchen.

They both of them loved to cook, actually. It was a good hobby to have on this team, since there were always lots of willing helpers. A quick glance in the fridge suggested they could whip up a nice spread from leftovers. By the time they heard the scout ship settle down on the landing pad, they’d got the sort of meal that’d taste like ambrosia itself, after a few weeks of MREs. Not a conventional way to hold a debrief, perhaps, but…

Firth had somehow decided that grilled cheese and tomato soup was a good idea too. And why not? Easy to make, and they had condensed soup in big number ten cans. “The secret is to dump in italian herbs, a buncha basil, black pepper, and a bit o’ Tabasco. Canned tomato soup is easy to jazz up.” He grinned, “this has been my single-man living TED talk.”

Costello grinned, “those’ll all be rare in the coming years.”

“Eh. Mebbe. I’m optimistic we’ll figger it out. But Freya started an herb garden, so…”

“Here’s hoping, I guess.”

A new voice intruded on them. “That…whatever it is, that smells good.”

“It is!” Firth chuckled, and looked to the naxas stroganoff reheating on the stove. “Have a seat. I see ‘yer ears are lookin’ as big as ever.”

“Naturally.” Champion Meereo pant-grinned as he entered. “My Father wanted me to sit in on the debrief.”

“Figured as much,” Costello nodded. “Have a bite with us! It’s pretty random but all good.”

The team piled in just as the soup was hot and the sandwiches were gloriously toasted. They all had that look, the one that said they’d showered maybe an hour ago at most, and had been seriously fuckin’ grungy for an extended period before that. JETS teams never came back looking fresh and comfortable, they came back having spent weeks moving slowly and unseen through an alien wilderness, covering their tracks every inch of the way, with very few if any opportunities to tend to their personal hygiene. Every single one of them was gonna be squirming under the doc’s attentions for the next few weeks, probably.

Sergeant O’Reilly gazed upon the spread with the look of a man who’d been crawling on hands and knees in the desert only to stumble across an oasis. “Oh, man, cheese!”

The one universal was cheese. So far, no gaoian and no ten’gewek he’d ever met was opposed to cheesy goodness. They might need some Lactaid beforehand, but…

They gathered round, grabbed their share, sat down and feasted a bit while the intel team got together and piled in too. Firth was a man who didn’t have too many openly happy and agreeable moods, but cooking food for people was one of them. HEAT were all generally like that: kids, puppies, food. The trinity of turning dangerous monsters into big happy boys.

Firth was the most like that. He’d even toweled himself off before starting, too. Whataguy.

Pretty soon there were tablets and recording devices strewn across the table alongside the food, and they got down to business, with Firth taking up his seat next to Costello, since they were the SOR’s senior leadership. Which a comical size difference between them.

Which…it shouldn’t matter, but dammit it did. Costello never failed to feel dwarfed into insignificance next to the big guy. Not even Adam had ever really triggered that, but Daar and Righteous had never failed to do so. Maybe it was part down to how they carried themselves? Adam had always felt much more on the puppy end of the spectrum, despite having been the biggest and most dangerous man on the team for many years…

Silly, maybe. Maybe. Still, it was sorta nice having a literal human wall backing his authority. Honestly, Righteous being his senior NCO had made his job vastly easier among men like these. None of them were stupid neanderthals, of course.

The whole team was filled with extremely smart and disciplined neanderthals. Therefore, having the biggest caveman of all time on his side was a hell of a luxury, really.

Thoughts for later.

There was the usual set of forms for the team to fill on their tablets, all the necessary procedures. By the time that was done and they were ready to start asking the good questions, the meal was mostly gone and they were down to drinks and snacks.

“So what’s it like over there?”

O’Reilly shook his head in mild disbelief. “It’s fuckin’ weird. Average global temperature is like five celsius, the permanent ice comes nearly all the way down to the tropics. But the landscape’s studded with structures. Pyramids, at least on the surface. Might be more to ‘em underground. They’re all perfectly black and smooth, like those archive cubes, and the local critters live on ‘em.”

“Live on them?”

“Well, around them. They’re warm,” O’Reilly explained. “Way warmer than the surrounding landscape. There’s whole ecosystems huddled ‘round those pyramids, kinda like a deep sea vent.”

“Each one’s a little microclimate,” Gurung added. “Above the tropics is so fucking cold it hardly rains or snows at all, ‘cuz the ground and seas are frozen solid. All the weather is equatorial. But the pyramids are hot enough to create their own precipitation cycle.”

“Tricky to climb,” Beng Spear-Breaker noted. ”Very smooth everywhere, like glass. Not even tiniest crack. Was tricky! Had to be careful to break nothing, not even for grip.”

“Anything up at the top of them?”

“No sir. Just sharp point. I climb all over one, find nothing.”

O’Reilly nodded. “I guess there must be buried cables connecting them or something, ‘cuz there’s a corridor of plant life in a straight line between each one.”

“Nice and warm, yes.”

“They were the very first thing we noticed,” said the team’s pilot, Brother Feekee. “Long-range thermal telescope picked them up instantly. Each continent is covered in them.”

“How many?” Costello asked.

O’Reilly shook his head, wide-eyed. “We couldn’t count ‘em exactly. We guess they’re about two miles apart, on average? So…tens of millions, something in that ballpark.”

“A fuckin’ planet-scale datacenter,” Firth noted idly, before stuffing damn near a whole sandwich in his face.

“Keeda’s nuts,” Meereo was staring off into the invisible distance. “How big are these pyramids?”

“Big. There’s a few different kinds, but the most common one’s about three hundred meters tall.”

Tumun Fire-Watcher nodded enthusiastically. “Also, nobody watching.”

“Nobody at all?” Firth asked.

“No drone, no ab-ro-gator, nothing.”

“No satellites either,” Feekee agreed.

Now that was interesting. It rather confirmed everything their informant had told them about the target world, actually: that the Hierarchy considered its sheer remoteness and anonymity to be sufficient defense. And why not? There were a hundred billion stars in the galaxy, and this one was faint, remote, and unspectacular. If they hadn’t been told about it, they simply would never have found it at all.

Still. No local security whatsoever? The Hierarchy had a history of overconfidence to be sure, but…

But of course, their whole strategy was to make it so that it fundamentally didn’t matter if a species broke free to the point of destroying the node world. The Igraen Hegemony could go dormant and play dead for millennia, then regrow from a single unconsidered archive buried on an overlooked random planet anywhere in the galaxy and then the Hierarchy would deal with the problem from a position of having long since faded from memory.

That was the point of TILE FLIP after all. Rather than destroy the Igraens, the idea was to remove their need for control and genocide and then leave them to live out the rest of eternity in their digital limbo.

Meereo was still looking quite stunned. “…Champion?” Costello asked.

Meereo shook his head in disbelief. “I was just boggling at the sheer scale of the computation achievable with something like that. I always knew it had to be some quite impressive hardware to produce something like dataspace, but this?” he shook his head again, then frowned. “What about the less common kinds of pyramid?

“We identified a few. They’re not all pyramids, either. Every so often there’s a cuboid, or a cylinder.”

“Any indication at all what their function might be?”

Tumun hooted affirmatively. “Cuboids sit on the big warm lines. Cylinders, always in middle of a circle of pyramids.”

“Different feel too, grippier for hands and feet,” Beng supplied, helpfully.

Meereo made a thoughtful noise, duck-nodding as he tapped away on his own tablet.

There were lots of details to go over. Hours and hours of helmet cam footage, huge high-res images taken from orbit, details on the native flora and fauna that had evolved in this peculiar artificial ecosystem…it took hours, and by the time they were done Costello felt like every other useful fact in his head might have been forced out by all the new information he now held in there.

God alone knew what kind of things were going to fall out of the really in-depth analysis that followed. But they did, eventually, reach the point where there was nothing more to question the team on and no reason to keep them further.

Which meant he now had a different duty. They wrapped up the briefing, dotted every i, crossed every t…

“Alright. Before I dismiss you, I’m afraid I now have to deliver some solemn news about Earth, which will go some way to explaining why we’re here and not back on Cimbrean right now.”

O’Reilly chuckled, unsuspecting of the grim news he was about to receive. “I had wondered why it smelled like Daar after a particularly heavy workout…”

“Hey!”

“Aww c’mon, you know I don’t mean it bad! But he is pretty musky. Legendarily so.”

“Leaves taste everywhere he steps,” Tumun nodded sagely. “All of High-Mountain, smell like his hut.”

One last bit of humor. He wouldn’t deny them that. Lord knew it’d be the last bit they got for a while. But they had to know.

“Gentlemen…World War Three happened.”

The smiles dropped right off their faces. Everyone blinked at him in silence.

Costello knew his face was solid and grim, but inwardly… “Yes, it’s exactly as bad as you’re thinking. There was a global nuclear exchange, full send. The SOR is here on Gao because the Great Father invoked treaty to keep us out of the fire.”

“But….” O’Reilly began.

“I mean…” he tried again.

“…What happened?” he settled on, at last.

“The Russians got greedy and invaded Kazakhstan to try and steal their evac supplies,” Costello told him. “Kazakhstan fought back with their own man-portable nuclear munitions, that broke the taboo, shit sparked off in the West Bank, Iran tried to nuke Israel, Israel nuked them back, Pakistan escalated, India escalated, China escalated…and of course, when China launched their shit, some of it was aimed at the US.”

“Fuck…”

“We held off though, until Russia went full send,” Firth growled. “So there’s that, I guess.”

“Sir, I’ve got family in Milwaukee—”

Firth put one of his chest-crushing mitts on O’Reilly’s shoulder with remarkable gentleness. “Communication is really spotty. Best thing we can do is put in a Red Cross query, it’s literally the only thing that works everywhere. You can try and send email, too. Mosta social media is slowly comin’ back, sorta. But really jus’ for sending messages and it’s super fuckin’ spotty who’s got internet. Full-on Kessler syndrome too so satellite internet ain’t a thing either, so…email, text, phone calls, Red Cross. That’s what they’re tellin’ everyone ‘ta do. An’ I’ll be sendin’ Red Cross messages ‘fer all of ‘ya. Lemme know who I need ‘ta ask after.”

O’Reilly gave him a frantic look that faded into tense resignation. “…Thanks, Chief.”

“Any news on Nepal?” Gurung asked, quietly.

“I wish I could say,” Costello replied, shaking his head. “But it will likely have escaped direct hits. It’s…”

“We’re not all that important,” Gurung noted, nodding, but with his eyes turned down.

“Small blessin’s,” Firth rumbled. “I’m hopin’ that kept m’family alive, too. Be a bit ‘fore I can check up on ‘em. They, uh…well, pop din’t trust digital anything too much. I still ‘member his rantin’ ‘bout mobile phones controllin’ ‘yer mind an’ all.”

Feekee keened softly. “Wasn’ wrong.”

More uncomfortable silence.

“Well. Fuck this.” Firth rose and stood heroically, probably without meaning to. “This shit’s depressin’. I wanna go fuckin’ break shit. I know y’all just got back, but…well…I dunno.”

He sorta deflated again.

“You did great work,” Costello told them. “I’m sorry I have to dump this on you when you should be celebrating. But, well…the Great Father is now our boss. Not just de-facto, now it’s official. What’s left of Earth’s governments have more or less all signed Treaties of Friendship and Protection. Same with Cimbrean. He’s preparing an official response too. Actually…when?”

He looked to Firth, who had a beartrap mind for these sorts of things.

“Uh, actually tonight. I think that’s part’a why he wanted to play weights with me today.”

“Had to disappoint him, did you?”

“Well firstly, I didn’t” he bragged, and everyone seemed glad for a bit of banter. “I’m the only human being alive who can make him work for a win. Also, ‘Base an’ Horse took over for me. They’re pretty okay I guess.”

“Didn’t they used to kick your ass?”

“Years ago, and only after they got big. Then I got bigger.” Crude grin, but…well, not even the ‘mostest HEAT’ had it in him to play the game for long. “…Right. Okay. Well, let’s go see to ‘yer gear an’ git y’all settled in. We’ve got all the good beds moved over now.”

“Sleep somewhere warm for a change,” Tumun hooted, relieved. “Had enough of ice and snow.”

“We’re on Gao, Tumun. And it’s winter out there. You’re not done with the ice and snow yet.”

“…Godspit.”

“You’ll be able to go home shortly. I suspect after tonight. So…honestly?” Costello stood up and decided, fuck his meal plan, he wanted a cola. So he grabbed a can and cracked it open. “Fuck it. I’m gonna go watch some fuckin’ cartoons. Day’s comin’ to an end anyway.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” O’Reilly agreed. “Goodnight, sir.”

“Goodnight.”

Costello took his can, scooped up a hitherto neglected snack bar, and headed out. Actually, what he’d have really liked would have been a gaming session but, well, wrong planet.

He checked his own phone first, though. He was waiting on his own news from the Red Cross, on the status of his brother’s family in Toronto. Still no word. Two weeks and change, and still no word…

He reminded himself that the city itself was still there. But still…he wouldn’t be happy until he’d heard from them, or better yet until he’d had the chance to personally welcome Jamie, Emma and the kids to Gao.

Until then, he was just going to have to wait.

It seemed like he’d be waiting forever.

Alien Palace, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

President Margaret White

Of all the things she’d hoped to be remembered for, Margaret would not have chosen to go down in history as the last president of the United States of America.

Then again, Folctha’s Thinghall also, today, contained the last king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the last prime minister of Canada, the last prime minister of Australia, the last prime minister of New Zealand, the last chancellor of Germany, the last president of France, the last emperor of Japan, the last queen of Belgium, the last king of Norway, the last president of the Republic of Korea, the last president of Ukraine…

…Albania, Bulgaria, Croation, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, latvia, lithuania, Luxembourg…every NATO member, every AEC signatory, and all the others who, given the choice between Daar and Gilgamesh, had chosen Daar. All were the very last leaders of their respective nations and peoples.

All had expected to be the last, of course. One couldn’t be sovereign or president of a country that didn’t physically exist any longer. But all their various preparations (by dire and forced mutual understanding) had been for peacefully(-ish) acknowledging the rise of new human nations, and some of them had planned to remain with their people to the very end.

But, here they were instead, about to sign a treaty that changed…everything.

How had things…progressed so fast?

It was all as legitimate as it could ever be. The objection and outrage that their strongest ally among the stars would take advantage was, in short order, tempered by what he was offering them: survival for their species and each nation’s culture, in a way none of their governments could afford. And really, his reasoning wasn’t so strange; most of them would have done something similar, if a younger, powerful allied species had just tried to nuke itself to death. He needed assurances in the face of everything, and he was right about their timeline, too. It made sense. Truly. The crush of reality falling upon them all had made Daar’s argument for him more than any other point he might have made, forceful or not.

So…that being their choice: phone calls were made. Leaders were hesitant. Margaret, seeing this, took the lead and committed to the process, then bullied the remnant of Congress to agree. She’d received Senate consent to the treaty in less than two days—and it only took that long because the Senate had to confirm over eighty new appointed members after the war. The irony of such seamless unity was not lost upon her.

The other nations followed suit in short order. But what country had ever included clauses for its own dissolution in its own constitution? The fundamental assumption of a nation was that it would proceed in perpetuity.

Nevertheless, each in their own way had set the ball rolling. Each, in their own way, would formally cease to exist when the Earth did and each, in their own structured way, would hand over power, resources, personnel and assets to this new cross-species union.

The nuclear war hadn’t killed the species. If they had been confined to Earth and it wasn’t about to be blown up by space monsters then, honestly, it would have been possible to rebuild. Nuclear winter didn’t seem likely, at this stage. Crops were lost, and many would die to cancer and other illnesses…but it was survivable, in some fashion or another.

Whether they’d ever rebuild back to the heights they’d known…

All of it together was too much to handle. It was all just too goddamned much and Daar…well, he had taken advantage. As he had to. His people depended on the alliance, on what humans could offer. After all, his own people were in rapid decline and the window to action against the great enemy was very small…

Thank God for the balance in him. He could be a blood-soaked monster or the pinnacle of civilized. Indeed, Margaret had enjoyed the chance to hear him think out loud, and it was clear that Daar thought of the two as complimentary facets of a complete whole. One could not be truly civilized without having equal capacity for the precise opposite. He could literally crush his enemies with his bare paws. Or he could arrange flowers and write poetry.

He’d made a hobby of both.

It was a worldview that was, to Margaret’s thinking, painfully masculine. Tautological, perhaps: he was the Great Father after all, his very being was defined by male-ness, warts and all. All the virtues, and all the vices, all the chivalry…and all the chauvinism.

Though, honestly…in their best possible forms. Men were seldom chauvinists in the sense that women should be silent, obedient and barefoot in the kitchen, and he certainly wasn’t that sort of man. He favored strong women, in fact. But he did see them as different and complimentary, and therefore worth heeding.

It made him extremely solicitous of her views and also…difficult to navigate. Margaret was a feminist through and through, and Daar was perfectly not. She just…didn’t believe anyone should be so limited to something as silly as gender roles. It went against freedom itself!

And yet…there he was. And there people were. Acting them out, usually unconsciously.

Was it so wrong that they did? Or was her objection more that so many never thought it through? Had she, before this point? Here, at the moment when all the old civilizations collapsed, and they came together to forge a new one…

Here, the act of creation. Never neutral, that. It was an aggressive act, some would say. Imposing your will upon the canvas.

The Great Father was creating something. The “United Peoples.”

Margaret found she rather liked the name. The thought that there might actually be some unity and peace after all this seemed like a small mote of light in the darkness that had filled her thoughts ever since the fateful day itself.

She kept asking herself what she could have done differently. If there was something she could have said or done to steady world events and avert the war, or if she shouldn’t have just refused to launch and instead trusted that America’s shields would hold. Did she really have to kill all those people?

But she had. In the moment, she’d done what was expected of her. And it had left her ashamed, guilty, and more profoundly sorry than she could even fathom. Something fundamental had fallen out of the bottom of her soul, and taken all her strength with it.

Fitting, therefore, that the last thing she was summoning her strength to do was to resign.

“Madam President…”

She turned, blinking at the interruption to her melancholy, and straightened herself as she realized Sir Jeremy Sandy had approached her. He, she realized, might well be setting aside more than anyone else in the room. Folctha after all was the largest and most successful human exo-settlement. But Sandy in turn was appointed to govern on behalf of His Majesty the King, and had noted that there was nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, by gracelessly clinging to a shadow.

Margaret could respect that.

“Sir Jeremy.”

“I hope I’m not intruding?”

“Only on self-reflection,” Margaret replied.

“Ah,” he nodded, and offered a diplomatic change of subject. “I was just wondering whether you’d made plans for where you will go and what you will do after…all this.” He waved a hand, indicating the gathered leaders.

Margaret shook her head. “I honestly don’t know,” she said. “Nothing seems right to me.”

“No?”

“Well…I could go into stasis. That seems appropriate, to remove an old woman from the resource burden. But what about my family? I don’t want to miss their lives, if they stay. But to just retire into obscurity and stay with them seems more selfish than I can bear, and…” she shrugged. “I don’t know what other options there are.”

“I hope to be of use still,” Sir Jeremy replied, and gently settled into a seat alongside her with a grunt that Margaret could entirely sympathize with. Old knees were a burden. “In many ways, I doubt my position will change much. It’s just that instead of holding my position at the appointment of His Majesty, I’ll be at the appointment of the Great Father.”

“I wouldn’t feel right,” Margaret said.

“But nothing feels right?”

“No. Not yet. Maybe nothing ever will.”

“You’re an experienced politician and leader. And we’re still going to need—” Sir Jeremy trailed off as Margaret shook her head. “…I take it you’ve already ruled that out.”

“I have. It’s…gratifying that you’d say so, but that feels least right of all. And I think, as a matter of closure…it would be appropriate if I stepped down. I already stated I would remain behind yet here I find myself.”

“I imagine the Secret Service didn’t give you much say in the matter.”

“They did what they were trained to do. And if they hadn’t, I would be dead now.” DC, naturally, had been a more focused target than any other. The city’s defenses had been overwhelmed in seconds, as had Baltimore’s. Everyone still in the White House, people she’d known and worked with…

Well, she had the consolation that they very likely hadn’t felt a thing.

“I…intend to make the best of that, however I can,” she said.

“But you feel that the best of it lies somewhere other than politics,” Sir Jeremy concluded.

“Yes.”

“Then, I wish you well in your future endeavors. And if I am not mistaken…”

There was a commotion up by the arch doorway.

“We have a solemn duty ahead of us.”

Margaret nodded, and stood up. Old knees, again. “That we do.”

Sir Jeremy had an old-fashioned way about him: he offered her his arm. “Well. Let me take you out to dinner after this is done. Nothing extravagant, but simple food prepared well lifts any spirit, I find.”

“…Yes, alright.” Margaret decided. “Why not?”

“We’ll be joined by a few friends of mine, if that’s alright. People you’ll want to know.”

“This sounds suspiciously like you want to keep me in the game after all, Sir Jeremy…”

“No, not at all. I’m friends with many people, some of whom don’t play the game at all. But…you’ll want to be in touch, I think. Just in touch.”

All very mysterious, but they’d run out of time for Margaret to interrogate him into being less cryptic. They lapsed into respectful silent as, shoulder to shoulder with the Earth’s other leaders, they passed through the archway and into the chamber beyond, where history was waiting in the form of the Great Father.

Time to make it official.

Daar, Great Father of the Gao

He didn’t like giving these sorts of speeches. When he spoke with Crown and Mace and Cloak and Kilt, when he sat upon the throne and held court, he was doing something that could not ever possibly be undone. In his time as Great Father, he’d sat upon his throne exactly thrice.

Two of those times were regarding Earth, and this would be the third time. Once had been for an errant Champion before the conflict. The other times had been about human brilliance and human folly.

And now, he was going to annex them all.

He looked up at the small swarm of camera drones now hovering in his orbit, and some part of his brain that wanted to think of anything else right now wondered at the weird juxtaposition of ancient sovereignty and modern technology that was a king in medieval panoply, reading off a holographic prompter to address every planet in the civilized galaxy via a network of tamed wormholes.

He’d hafta commit that to a poem, later. Much as he wasn’t half the poet Fyu had been, it was a skill he was still cultivating. Maybe it’d be the one he sealed the register with.

Behind the cameras, the director held up ten fingers, and started lowering them. Daar shifted his posture one last time, straightened it, settled himself, lifted his head and stared forward, doing his best to project reassuring strength.

Five…four…three—he inhaled—two…one…

The “On Air” sign behind the cameras lit up.

New Dodge, Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Austin Beaufort

“Hurry up, it’s starting!”

Austin ducked through as the living room fell into an expectant hush. One advantage to the big farmhouse: they could fit everyone in for a moment like this. Today it was Lauren, the kids, the Goons—Julian’s seriously jacked-up, stacked-up, and impressively grown-up boys apprenticing as millwrights, and giving Austin some cheap and ridiculously capable labor while they learned—a few other friends who happened to be over…

…literally everybody who worked for him…

History was turning yet another page. It had been a busy few months, in that regard. Fuck, it had been a busy lifetime.

The picture switched. There he was, all Big King on his throne, just…as balls-to-the-wall impressive as ever, really. Austin wouldn’t believe it was real if he hadn’t met the bastard in real life and watched him outperform a fuckin’ tractor. Today though he was throwin’ his power around in a different sort of way. There were banners behind him that Austin thought looked almost Japanese in their design, a big-ass and worryingly practical-looking club in one paw, that twisted metal ring of a crown on top of his huge wolf-raccoon-bear-monster head. Add a cloak with some fur trim around it, and some sorta woven thing that sat between a loincloth and a kilt, trim it out with some well-tooled leather and maybe just a tiny bit of gold…

Honestly, he’d never imagined Daar would use understated finery for something like this, but there it was. It wasn’t like kings on TV or in movies. You could picture him running around all day in a getup like that, Great Fathering or whatever. He’d combed out his fur, too.

Serious shit.

Daar didn’t bother with any opening hello phrase like ‘My fellow…’ whatevers. He just launched right into it after a silent second to let the cameras get a good look at him.

“It’s all too easy ‘ta compound tragedy with tragedy,” he said, and his amber eyes bored deep into the cameras and out through the screen, grabbing Austin immediately. “And these have been tragic times, for more than one species.”

Austin picked his way between all the sitting people and squeezed in next to Lauren on the couch. The few times he’d met Daar, the Great Father had growled his words out in a comfortable drawl. Now, he was speaking English as carefully and clearly as he could.

“That’s th’ way of things, and we Deathworlders know all too well how tragedy can compound itself. There are few statements so brief and yet so true as ‘when it rains, it pours.’”

He shifted slightly on his throne. “Sometimes, the trend cannot be stopped. Sometimes the great poem of life must play itself out. Here we are now, in the wake of a tragedy that, perhaps, could have been stopped, perhaps could not have been. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. It happened, and we must deal with its consequences. But now is the moment when we say ‘no further.’ Now is the moment we stop this chain of tragedy.”

He sat forward. There was a tap as the end of his mace came to rest on the stone between his paws.

“The lowest moments of gao and humanity are behind us,” he declared. “Our peoples have suffered loss unknown by any other in the galaxy, yet we are still here. We have been struck, again and again, by the Great Enemy of all free life. It has robbed us of everything, and would shape us into its tools or erase us entirely.”

He leaned forward, growled slightly and tensed up as if recalling a terrible memory. Those baleful eyes bored right into the camera, looking straight into everyone’s soul.

“You know this, of course. Among your kind they got to work late, yet kindled the great political conflicts of Earth’s modern history. Make no mistake, this war was their doing—they laid the foundation for what happened, among your people and among mine. They kept you divided, they kept you armed and at odds, with terrible whispers in the minds of the wrong people. They fed the very worst in both our peoples, robbed us of our history, our self-determination, our home and the futures we all dreamed for ourselves.”

A second of dead silence. Austin realized his skin was tingling.

Daar lifted his head slightly. “Yet, we are still here.”

He shifted forward in his throne, bristling now. His ears were up and forward, his hackles rising. Aggression rippled across his body. “We have fought ourselves. We have fought each other. We have died in our billions, yet we are still here. This evil stops now. It stops here! in front of the galaxy, in front of our enemies, and in front of you, I say we will not be broken any longer! Our peoples will not be divided. We will not give in, we will not be th’ playthings o’ digital malware! We will free ourselves and the galaxy of the greatest evil to ever creep between the stars!! That is our way! The way that unites us! We are still here no matter what happens! We persist, no matter the setback. We will have our victory!”

He rocketed up to his feet, bouncing on his toes, crackling with the energy of the moment, pacing—no, prowling around the room—and the camera followed him. Apparently he’d brought some things with him to Folctha’s palace. A suit of Gaoian armor, its lacquered surface painted with a slinky-looking script. Opposite, an equally baroque example of human armor. Flanking both were modern armament, an early-generation EV-MASS and the Gaoian equivalent. The only nod to decoration on either was a fierce stallion’s head decal on the human suit’s helmet.

There was a lot more besides. Weapons, paintings, photographs, books…it looked like he’d had a whole museum transported to Cimbrean just to make this point.

“Look at these. Much of this is gaoian history, but I’ve become an avid collector o’ human history, too. Both our peoples are martial at heart and prove it with deeds. We fight. That is what Deathworlders do. This can be on many levels, and today we must tend to the most dangerous fight of all: the war for our spirit. I will not spare you the truth, ever, and this is the most importantest thing you must know about me. So I will say without flinching that watching the war on earth…it broke my heart.”

He paused in front of the EV-MASS for a second, then sighed and turned to face the camera properly again.

“It hurt much more than I had imagined it would, and it’s taken some meditation to understand why. It hurt me—my entire people—because we feel such a powerful kinship with humanity. You were there at our darkest moment with a friendly face, a fierce determination, a helping hand. You committed what little spaceborne ability you had and the vast logistical powers of your terrestrial militaries toward saving my people. That is an infinite and unrepayable debt.”

Lauren’s hand found Austin’s and he squeezed it.

“Jesus,” she whispered. “This is really happening…”

Austin could only nod, and keep watching. “Yeah.”

On screen, Daar let the tiny moment of silence he’d paused for end. “In the unfolding hours of this great tragedy, I knew it fell to me to give the same in turn,” he said. “And I knew it would not be easy, or comfortable. Indeed, to save humankind, I have needed to act with swift and severe aggression. And, so: to that end, I have annexed Earth and Cimbrean, and named your nations as protectorates of the Gao. I have done this firstly by treaty power and secondly through the simple persuasion of logistics, of food and shelter.”

He returned to stand next to the throne and rested a paw on it.

“Some of you might feel this is a step too far. I sympathize entirely and I wish it were not. When the Allied Extrasolar Council saved my kind, you did so from a position of surpassing strength and safety. I, alas, cannot return that favor. My people are now suffering the worst consequences of that war. Our population is in severe decline and will be for another generation. We will drop below a billion in less than ten years.”

Another pause, and a quiet, solemn keen. It was a deep, resonant, and less piercing sound in his throat, but somehow that made it all the sadder.

“Is it…really that bad? “ one of the Calloway brothers asked.

Tristan and Ramsey glanced at each other, then nodded. “Daar’s honest. Always,” Tristan said, grimly. “They lost ninety-plus percent of their females and many of the males either died in the wars or are aging out of productive society.”

“But that’s—”

“Shush. He’s talking again.”

The room fell silent and attentive again. “—but far worse is the timing of our war with the Great Enemy. We are at a propitious moment. For the survival of both our peoples, I cannot allow anything to jeopardize our efforts. And, so: the brutal arithmetic of numbers compels me to consolidate. Apart, we will be destroyed. Together, we might find victory. We do not have time for this to play out as our gentler instincts might prefer, and what remains of your leadership knows this. Therefore…”

He gestured, and the camera drone pulled back. Austin blinked as the view widened to cover all the people standing in front of him, watching the speech. He recognized President White, the King…and a lot of other faces he vaguely knew from sometimes watching international news. Maybe half or two thirds of the world’s leaders were in that room.

Shit, as if they needed any more confirmation that what Daar was saying was real and official.

“Most of Earth’s governments have mere minutes ago signed or begun the act of union with myself, or with His Imperial Majesty Gilgamesh, the Emperor of Ekallim-Igigi. He will address his own peoples in a separate announcement. Yes, this has all happened very quickly, and no doubt comes as a great shock. Let us consider why it must be so: in a few years, Earth will be no more. The social and governance structures necessary to lead our peoples through that difficult evacuation have all but been destroyed. Historical animosities remain, and the pressing needs of survival compel all parties.

“Now, I have come to value Emperor Gilgamesh as a friend. He is a wise, benevolent leader, and I am happy that he should prove an ally and advisor, as I hope to be with him. Many of the former eastern bloc and unaligned nations have chosen his leadership over mine. This pleases me; I would not want all our eggs to be in one basket, as someone in both our species once said. We hope, in the coming days, to formalize freedoms of movement, trade, and commerce between ourselves. We hope to cooperate on matters of defense, of mutual aid, of research and, eventually, the community with which we hope to bind ourselves together.

“Therefore, myself and the Emperor will sign Instruments of Friendship to enable all these things, and to establish the United Peoples as a council of equals, binding our species and nations together. The ten’gewek and the e-skurel-ir will participate as protectorates, bound to neither empire and friend to both. We hope this new council will learn from the lessons of previous efforts, and will preserve our freedoms and autonomy while joining us together in the things that truly matter.”

As the camera refocused on him, Daar sat himself back on his throne.

“It is true that my sovereignty will reign supreme among my peoples, as will the Emperor’s among his. This is necessary for immediate stability, and necessary to build our future. But rest assured: I have no intention of ruling your daily lives, or quashing many of the natural freedoms so many of you enjoy today. You will have a real voice in your own governance, and it shall largely be accomplished by the people, for the people. My role will be to ensure its proper function. Details will be forthcoming over the coming months. I ask…for patience, and your trust. We will get through this, together.”

His tone softened, and his voice became warmer. “Today, we are united, and we commit ourselves to the freedom and prosperity of all. Our new civilization is forged by tragedy, but our response is not to look at our neighbor with recrimination and bitterness, but to extend a hand or a paw in camaraderie. Our community will love and be faithful to each other, united by our common dignity…and our shared loss. For we have all suffered greatly. But the day is coming, soon, when we will be free, when this war will be won. And then, we will build a new and brighter future for everyone.”

At this, he straightened up, and held that mace of his pointing straight up. “May the Unseen bless us all.”

Ekallim-Igigi, orbiting New Uruk, relic space

Gilgamesh, Emperor of Singularity and Lucent

“We congratulate you on a fine rallying speech, Cousin. It felt…right. Right for the moment.”

Daar was still wearing his regalia, having taken Gilgamesh’s call as soon as he could after completing the broadcast. ”Thankee. Y’sure ‘ya don’ wanna come visit ‘fer a hunt? It’s spring an’ the wild naxas are that perfect sorta lean when they’re buildin’ up ‘fer the rut…”

“You know how to tempt me well, but I must decline. I’m sure you would too if I made you a similar offer. We are both far too busy, are we not?”

“It’s okay! Truthfully, I were hopin’ you’d turn me down! More wild naxas ‘fer me…”

“Save me a roast, then!” Gilgamesh chuckled, then sat forward in his seat. “I think this is a useful division we have stumbled across.”

“Is it even really a division, though? Centralization is good…to a point. Then it’s kinda th’ worstest thing ‘ta do.”

“You have a fine understanding of human nature, my good cousin,” Gilgamesh agreed. “Now, the former eastern bloc and former western bloc do not need to try and trust each other—they could not possibly, I think. Instead, they need only trust their emperors. A much more natural fit, yijao?”

Daar did not reply verbally. Instead, he poured himself a glass of something orange-colored and drank it all in one go. “It is my intent that trade an’ travel be free between our empires,” he said. “We are fundamentally one civilization, goin’ forward. Not one wit’ homogeneous views or anythin’ like that, but friends and brothers, in the gran’ scheme o’ things.”

“I concur wholeheartedly…though that being the case I must press you for an answer to the questions I raised about the SOR and the fleet.”

Daar duck-nodded as he poured himself a second glass. “I’m movin’ the SOR ‘ta Akyawentuo. Yan an’ the Lodge are prepared ‘ta execute instruments of Friendship and Protection with both o’ us. The SOR will, in turn, be made a power of both our governments, with me bein’ th’ senior partner. I trust that answers ‘yer concerns?”

Gilgamesh nodded, and poured a glass of wine for himself. “Completely. The fleet, I suppose, must remain with its orbital and ground-based infrastructure at Cimbrean.”

“No other way ‘ta do it.”

“In that case…” he raised the wine cup toward the camera in front of him. “To our one civilization. May we share victory and peace.”

“Hear fuckin’ hear,” Daar agreed, and tapped his talamay against the side of his own camera.

“Incidentally, there is a species of ruminant on New Uruk that makes excellent sport, and I daresay is the equal of a naxas for the quality of its meat and leather. Perhaps you will join me in hunting it, when we have the time?”

“When we have th’ time,” Daar agreed, and glanced at something outside his camera’s field of view. “Which, you’ll have ‘ta excuse me, I’m short on right now…”

“As am I, cousin. Farewell for now.”

“Until next time.”

They closed the call practically at the same time, and Gilgamesh stood. He could not say he was pleased exactly with how things had turned out—far better if Earth’s last war had never happened at all—but they seemed to be forging the best possible future out of the range of options left to them in its wake.

On to other business. Pandrosion was waiting patiently at the door to his chambers, wearing an optimistic expression. She smiled at him as he slipped an arm around her waist and kissed her.

“What do you think?” Gilgamesh asked.

“I think things could have been so much worse,” she replied, echoing his own thoughts. “And I have news. The Light of the Levant has returned carrying children of the Line from Earth. They’re being tugged into dock as we speak.”

“How many?”

“More than I had dared hope. The ship is quite full!” Her face lit with the first genuine smile he’d seen from her since the day of the war. “You said you would like to greet them…”

“I very much would.” Gilgamesh finished his wine and set it down. “Let’s give them the welcome they deserve…”

Hierarchy closed communications session, Dataspace

Four

++0004++: Your report is dismayingly imprecise.

++0016++: The situation is changing too rapidly for precision.

++0002++: There was a global nuclear exchange. This has historically been the fulcrum moment of victory over a deathworld species. But now your report implies otherwise? You estimate that the exchange has actually increased the threat they pose?

++0016++: In the short term. They have limited and dwindling resources, meaning they must act imminently and decisively or else lose the ability to act at all.

++0004++: Define imminently.

++0016++: Within the next gaoian year ideally, within the next ten at most. Beyond that, their economy will necessarily be in reconstruction mode for at least two hundred years.

++0002++: Our own reconstruction will not take so long. Progress is continuing on the relay redesign. Re-engineering an implanted substrate will take far longer…

++0004++: What might they strike? What is their plan?

++0016++: …Unknown.

++0004++: Let us maximize caution. What is the worst possible target they could strike?

++0016++: It is not clear that there is any target they could meaningfully strike. Singularity’s campaign against the regrowth archives is futile, we can seed them faster than they can be destroyed. Even if they somehow identify the current node world and destroy it, they cannot prevent Hegemony restoration.

++0002++: Such is the intent and design of the final failsafe. We foresaw a breakout species millions of years ago, and planned accordingly. It doesn’t matter if they “win,” the Igraen Hegemony will restore and continue after a suitable waiting period.

++0004++: < Uncertain; thoughtful >

++0002++: Share your thoughts in full, Four.

++0004++: They are incomplete thoughts. I have no specific hypothesis. I simply note that we have been unpleasantly surprised many times during this brief campaign. Indeed, it is the definition of a breakout species that they are capable of surprising us and bypassing our contingencies. There may yet be unconsidered factors that render us vulnerable in ways to which we are blind.

++0002++: Yes. The very nature of the scenario is we haven’t thought of them. How do you propose we further safeguard against unknown unknowns? The restoration fleet is already reconstructing itself and should be ready in fifty years. The worker-bodies will be maturing over the next few years, new resource worlds have been found…

++0004++: I have no additional suggestions at this time, with regards to the meat-life. My greater concern is the Entity.

++0002++: It is a singular dataform, and apparently no longer willing to branch. It can no longer penetrate the Hegemony or infiltrate our agents unnoticed thanks to Three’s security updates. The problem of destroying it is therefore now merely a matter of dataspace coverage and computation resources. It too is a problem we shall outlast.

++0002++: < Accusation > You believe I am overconfident.

++0004++: I believe at the present juncture, any confidence is overconfidence. So many factors are unprecedented. The creation of a dissident cabal within our ranks—

++0002++: Identified and reprogrammed.

++0004++: The existence of a datasophont arisen from the mind of a breakout specimen—

++0002++: I have already addressed that concern.

++0004++: My point is there is a conflux of factors which takes this scenario outside of what we planned for, and so it behooves us to be prudently paranoid.

++0002++: You need not lecture me on prudence, Four. Do not mistake my satisfaction that the situation is coming back into alignment for complacency. The Hierarchy will not rest easy until all of the presently extant interstellar sapients have been decommissioned, their technology purged of all record of this conflict, and the galaxy repopulated with new, untainted substrate and a properly pliant control species. Nothing will be taken for granted until that point is reached, and for long after too. Does my assurance satisfy you?

++0004++: Thank you, Two.

++0002++: < Satisfied > Sixteen, your report is adequate for the moment. You are expected to continue monitoring the situation and keep the single-digits apprised.

++0016++: < Understanding; compliance >

++0002++: Does anyone have other business to raise?

++0002++: No?

++0002++: Then this session is concluded. Continue your assigned tasks. We shall reconvene tomorrow as scheduled. Dismissed.

++System notification: User 0002 disconnected.++

++0004++: Out of interest, Sixteen?

++0016++: Yes?

++0004++: Were you able to gather information about the design of human weapons and defenses? The data may prove useful in future control cycles.

++0016++: I will focus on gathering that information and present it tomorrow.

++0004++: Good. Until then.

++System notification: User 0016 disconnected.++

++System notification: User 0004 disconnected.++

END OF TRANSCRIPT

Ekallim-Igigi, orbiting New Uruk, Relic Space

Josh Hartl

“Wooooah….”

Jess was holding his arm for comfort, and Josh really couldn’t blame her one bit. He’d heard space stations could get pretty big, but this one was…was…

There was a whole fleet of ships all around them, held delicately inside cages of metal and forcefield, with umbilicals and cables and tubes stuck into them here and there. He could see one high above and on the far side of the vast, echoing space that was still only half-built. The light of welding flashed and strobed inside its skeletal hull.

And what ships, too! Several of the ones he could see stuck to the same general pattern as the one they’d traveled in, but several more were completely different. There was one at the far end of the docks like a crescent moon in red and white, another as black and sharp as a commando’s dagger, and a genuine titan that could only be described as “kingly.”

There were announcements in a language he didn’t speak, drones zipping back and forth through the open space.

“So…what are we doing?” Maria asked,

“Uh.” Josh looked at the pamphlet he’d been given. “We gotta do physicals and medical, then a sports eval…mine’s gonna take all day. Tomorrow there’s an outfitter? And then a few more days for, like, shipping and paperwork. I guess they’ll help us get a few things back off Earth.”

“Sounds busy.”

“Oh, and pilot training!” He enthused. “Just the basics though. For, like, emergencies.”

Maria nodded vaguely, then looked strangely relieved about something. “Oh, thank fuck. There are normal-sized people here too…” she indicated a couple of men walking past in high-vis clothing, accompanied by some kinda wheeled cargo drone. Sure enough, they were both regular-lookin’ guys, who gave the trio a nod as they passed by.

“Hey!” Josh felt himself in a bouncy mood. “I’m not that bad, am I?”

“Yeah, you sorta are.” Jess said, with a smile and a poke in his ribs.

“You all are,” Maria agreed, looking back toward the ship.

The other passengers were still disembarking and, looking at them, Josh had to admit the girls maybe had a point. He knew he himself was kinda big, but seeing the others their ship had picked up was…fuck, was he really that big?

…Well, yeah he was.

They hadn’t really spoken to each other yet. All these “children of the Line” who’d been picked up from all over North America may have had something in common, a lot in common even, but Josh…he didn’t know. He felt awkward at the idea that they were all basically distant cousins of some kind. Like he’d just showed up at an extended family reunion and didn’t know any of them or how to talk to them.

He’d picked up a couple of names in passing. There was Luke, squeezed into a max-sized Seahawks jersey that fit him tighter than his own skin. Mallory, who looked like someone had squeezed three regular girls into a single amazonian ad for sportswear. Bruce, whose whole look said he belonged on stage at a metal club fuckin’ ruining a drum kit, and his sister Amy who would probably have been the one screaming into the mic…

They all, like him, had a couple of ‘normal’ friends and relatives along for the ride, and the general mood was of milling around like ‘…well, now what?’

Everyone seemed to be giving each other a pretty wide bubble, too.

Well…fuck it. May as well take the initiative. Josh checked the pamphlet again, then looked around for a sign like the one it described at the top. Couldn’t read the text, but the pamphlet promised they’d get translation stuff as soon as they were through physical and medical.

…There.

“Uh, this way I guess…” he said.

They was a short walk down a tunnel, through a series of yellow forcefields that shimmered as they passed through and left Josh feeling too clean somehow, especially inside his mouth, and caused Jess to grab his arm together while licking her teeth with a weirded-out expression.

Then a waiting area, with seats big and sturdy enough for Josh to flop casually onto. Nobody was waiting though: instead, the first ET he’d ever met in person was waiting patiently for them with a tablet in one slim gray hand.

Josh had always thought Corti were supposed to be really fuckin’ tiny and freakishly proportioned, but this one was just built like a twelve-year-old boy, with huge eyes so dark they were nearly black from edge to edge. He assessed the three of them at a glance, then looked down at his tablet.

“Hartl, Esperanza and Brown, party of three, correct? One of the Line, two not.”

“Uh…” The urge to get protective of the girls rose up Josh’s back like a wave of tension, and he glanced at Maria, who frowned back at him. “This whole Line thing ain’t gonna mean anything negative for them, is it?”

“Not in the least,” the Corti shook his head with a reassuring smile. Fuck, weren’t they supposed to be all stone-faced and emotionless too? Josh guessed there was a lot he didn’t know.

“It’s important to you, though,” Maria noted.

“It’s the work of centuries. But if your concern is that you will be second-class citizens or some kind of outsider, I can promise you that’s not the case.” The Corti shook his head. “Anyway, please, this way. My name is Frethn, of the Void Caste.”

“Void Caste?”

“Directorate society is stratified into the banner-castes. Primary colors below, elements above…the Corth of Singularity reject all that. We are the Void Caste, outside of the system entirely. Alike in dignity regardless of genetics.” He led them into a side room. “Here and now, our intent is to determine your medical needs. You did just survive a nuclear war…”

“I think we’re okay…” Josh hazarded. “The shields kept the worst of the fallout out, the girls sheltered in place, I had a suit on, none of us have shown any symptoms of radiation sickness…”

“Good. Then this should be a mere formality.”

In fact, it was as simple as standing under a large archway and letting it hum and beep at him for a few seconds. Frethn tilted his head and nodded as the results came through.

“Some active healing going on in your thyroid glands…I’m guessing you took potassium iodide? I see no particular alarming abnormalities and I doubt much will come of it, but I’m going to prescribe you a regenerative to assist the healing…Miss Brown?”

Jess and Maria got even cleaner bills of health thanks to the fact they’d spent all two weeks in Josh’s basement behind dust filters, rather than out and about doing stuff in the community right after the bombs stopped falling. Frethn was certainly happy, and bade them a pleasant farewell by way of handing them each a sealed packet of clothing and information, with the promise that quarters had already been prepared for the three of them.

And then…

Well, if the docking bay had been a huge cavern full of ships, the next compartment over was a city. A weird kind of city without rooftops, ‘cuz all its buildings stretched from floor to ceiling, but there were plazas out there, huge balconies and terraces. Parklands on the bridges that stretched from structure to structure, and shuttles flitting between them like birds in a forest. Jess rushed to the edge of the terrace they were on and leaned out, gawping at it all.

“Holy shit!” She twisted and craned her neck to look upwards. “How huge is this place?”

There was a chuckle from nearby. The deep, gruff, gravelly chuckle of a very old man, though when Josh turned to face the chuckler, he found himself looking up—a rare experience in his life—into a bearded, tanned face with a kind of timeless middle-age twinkle in his eyes.

And he was huge enough that Josh felt small next to him! But he recognized that face. He’d seen it enough on TV, never mind the educational materials and pamphlets on the ship.

“Uh…” Josh ventured, which was about all his brain could achieve.

Gilgamesh chuckled all the more in a kindly way and stepped forward to offer Josh a handshake. A wrist-grabbing one, rather than palm-to-palm, accompanied by an avuncular pat on the elbow. “I came to welcome the first arrivals from Earth. And your story is one I’d very much like to hear!”

“Uh…well…I’m, uh, Josh. Your Majesty.”

“Ah! The firefighter.” The Emperor of Singularity nodded in a pleased way. “Won’t you please introduce your lovely companions?”

“Uh…your majesty, these are my friends, Jess Brown and Maria Esperanza. They’re, um. Students. Jess was majoring in animal nutrition, and Maria in nursing…”

Gilgamesh smiled at his awkwardness, and greeted the girls with a tip of his head. “You don’t need to fuss with titles,” he reassured Josh. “Just the once at the beginning is the rule. Most of us don’t stand on formality unless of course it’s a formal moment.”

“You, uh…caught me off guard a bit, is all.”

“I can be sneaky, so I won’t blame you! And to answer your question, Miss Brown, the city chasm is three kilometers across at its widest point, and five hundred meters from floor to ceiling. More or less.” A smile twinkled behind that intricately ringleted and beaded beard. “If you want open green space and blue skies, the royal parkland is…” he aimed a finger as thick as Jess’ wrist upwards.

“Uh…thank you,” Jess nodded, having retreated to her safe spot on Josh’s arm. The emperor’s eyes met Josh’s as he noticed that fact, and there was an approving twinkle in them.

“Please,” he extended an open palm toward the city. “Go get settled in. Receive your training, continue your education. We have no shortage of need for firefighters, nutritionists and nurses, and your careers here will reach heights they never could on Earth. And if nobody has yet welcomed you properly…allow me to be the first. Welcome.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Gilgamesh nodded, and strolled away into the building they’d just left, no doubt to go greet the others. Maria exhaled slowly as the door closed behind him.

“…Woah.”

“Yeah,” Josh agreed.

“Weird to think that’s, like, your very-very-great grandfather, huh?”

“He is?”

“That’s what the Line means, isn’t it?”

“I…” Josh paused. “I guess it is. Wow.”

There was a pause, then the three of them collectively shook themselves back to reality and set about the business of, well…settling in. They were fresh-off-the-boat immigrants in an unfamiliar city, but they had a pamphlet, and the address where they were going to be staying at first, and apparently the public transit was free to use…

Things could have been a lot worse. Things had been a lot worse. So when, a few minutes later, the three of them climbed into a flying taxi and sat back as it zipped off among the pillar-buildings to deliver them to their new apartment, Josh found he was feeling…hopeful.

Weeks and weeks of terrible things were behind him. There’d been tension, preparations, the war itself, the cleanup and lifesaving afterwards…his mom and dad…

…He shut his eyes as that sneaky ball of agony reminded him it was still there, then looked out the window again, taking in the view. It was one he’d never imagined he’d see, and if he ever had he’d never have guessed to see it in such circumstances.

He wished his parents were there to see it with him.

But…he had a future. So did Jess and Maria. He’d done that for them, and as he sat there focusing on that thought he realized he’d quite unconsciously put his arm around Jess and cuddled her close, and she seemed perfectly happy with that.

He had a future.

He gave Jess a squeeze, and without speaking a word, made a promise to her. If he had anything to say about it, it would be a good future.

For all of them.

Gagarin settlement, Lucent

Yulia Kozlova

Another day, another queue. A different, shorter, better-organized queue, and one Yulia and the children were rested and ready for.

Even so, Yulia felt a mix of uncertain emotions about this queue’s purpose. A little dread and anticipation, and furthermore a little shame and anger. After all, it was quite dehumanizing to be told that the most useful thing you could possibly do was go into storage.

And what a storage. For now, they were just laying the stasis bags out in a field, but the queue to get bagged wrapped around the foundations for a full-sized warehouse, which were being poured at the edge of town by people in those black overalls with the green flower on them. The Garden people, working on behalf of a weird…robot, or something? A computer that was also somehow a human mind? Yulia hadn’t really followed the explanation at all…

Looking at the size of the hole they’d dug for foundations, and the scale of the pile of metal sheeting that was to become walls and roof and storage racks though? The warehouse was going to be as big as that airliner factory she’d seen on TV a few years back. That really drove in just how many people were in the same position as Yulia of being a net drain on resources.

She would have liked the chance to prove otherwise. This time, she kept her head down and shuffled along, not out of pain and exhaustion, but out of shame.

There was a zig-zagging set of temporary barriers in front of six prefab units. A couple of stewards with radios lined the path, each with a small drone hovering over their shoulder. This Entity thing was watching, and Yulia didn’t like that idea one bit.

It looked like a seventh and eighth prefab were going up, too. And more after that, no doubt. Was Gagarin really going to be come just a storage for people in stasis? It certainly looked that way.

But…if it saved lives…

She stepped forward again, and realized she was at the front of the line. There was a brief pause, then the steward pointed her toward unit three. She bounced Maksim on her hip, led Mila by the hand…

And found herself in a spartan but quite comfortable office, with a wide bed at the back. And, importantly, a play-mat and toys for the children. Mila pounced on it at once, and when Yulia set Maksim down he crawled eagerly over to join her. Actual toys. It had been weeks since Yulia had even been able to give them something to play with…

The woman sitting at the desk smiled at them, then at Yulia. “Hello, my name is Maria,” she said, warmly, and invited Yulia to sit with an open-palm gesture toward the comfortable chair opposite her. “May I take your name and your children’s?”

“Ah…Yulia Kozlova, and my children are Mila and Maksim.”

“Lovely names,” Maria typed for a few seconds. “And where are you originally from?”

“Novgorod Oblast…”

“Ah, there you are.” Maria nodded. “It says here you’re married? Is your husband with you?”

“I’m…fairly sure he’s dead,” Yulia said, quietly.

Maria sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, in a polite but vague way that suggested she’d heard similar news many times by now, and typed a few notes. “Alright, well. That’s all we need. Let’s get you and your children into stasis.”

“Do we have to?” Yulia asked. “I…I hate feeling like I’m a burden. If there’s anything I can do to help, instead of—”

Maria shook her head, not unsympathetically. “It’s harsh, I know. But the truth is, while a single mother and her young children are worth saving, what can you do to save other lives? You have your hands full with these two.” she indicated the little ones: Mila was busy snapping together little plastic shapes with magnetic edges into the general shape of a house, while Maksim happily waved around a green triangle before jamming one corner experimentally into his mouth.

“So we have to sleep instead…” Yulia gave the wide bag on the nearby bed a wary glance.

“It won’t be like sleep at all. You won’t have any sense of time passing; you will go in the bag, the bag will close, and then the bag will open again straight away.”

“When? How long will we be, uh, out?”

“We can’t tell you exactly. There’s too much we don’t know. But the Entity thinks that people in your group can expect to be in storage for a minimum of fifty years.”

“Fifty years?!” Yulia blinked at her, stunned.

Maria was clearly used to this reaction, too. “That’s the minimum estimate of how long it will take to be sure there’s space for you, food for you, a place for you to live and a school for your children to attend. But you won’t have aged a second.” She gave a sort of half-shrug. “If I may be honest, Mrs. Kozlova…I envy you. Those of us who aren’t going into stasis have a lot of hard work ahead of us. You get to fast-forward to the end and reap the benefits.”

Yulia blushed and looked down. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Most haven’t. Now, please…the sooner we get you in these bags, the sooner you get to wake up in a brighter future. And I have a lot more people waiting in the line behind you.”

Right. It occurred to Yulia that when the bag opened, the woman she was speaking to would very likely have passed away from old age. The thought made her shiver, and hurried her up. “Mila? Come here. Hold mama’s hand.”

Mila cringed—for weeks now, those words had meant something bad was about to happen. But, dutifully, she rushed to Yulia’s side, and Yulia scooped up the baby with her other hand. At least he was clean and freshly changed…

Clean diapers were a luxury all to themselves, she’d discovered.

“Just lie down and tuck your feet into the bag,” Maria said. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

It took a little coaxing to guide Mila onto the bed, scoot her across and lie down next to her. Yulia cuddled her daughter up into her arm like they were taking a nap or reading a book together, then looked down as the worker tucked the bag over her feet and started to zip it closed.

Mila squirmed nervously. “What’s she doing, mama?”

“Shhh, рыбочка. It’s a magic trick. You’ll like it, I promise.”

The bag closed over their faces and Yulia hugged her children tight in the dark. There was a rustle as Maria smoothed out the bag and flattened them down, then click, an electrical whine of power.

And then—

New Alexandria, Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

Senior Sergeant Jack (Two-Seventy) Tisdale

Gods, it was so much work.

For months they’d been jumping back and forth six times a day, hauling everything from heavy equipment to the tiniest, stupidest little supplies. Two-ton grav plates (let the Lads handle those!) down to fuckin’ Post-It notes.

Jack had spent a whole day moving nothing but barrels full of armor gel. Sure, the new-gen suits’ capacity for self-expansion was neat and all, but it still needed regular gel injections into the mid-layer. Armor gel had a density beyond aluminum somehow before it reconfigured itself properly and it was sticky and it smelled like mechanical death and—

At least he didn’t have to help move the gym.

The buildings went up quickly. Rapid pre-fab buildings, sorta, on top of well-prepared foundation. The Lads lost their sand pit (for now) but he suspected ‘Horse would dig a newer, even more horrible one. The rest of the training facilities would take time.

But they were up and running. Barracks ready for move-in. Kitchen broken in. And now, everyone dug in to prepare.

The Lads were going to be doing their warrior-monk thing for the next several years and they couldn’t afford distractions. So…

So here they were. An unfamiliar world, unfamiliar plants, unfamiliar gravity, unfamiliar everything. Basic facilities for now. But over time, they’d build up a full base. The ten’gewek’s jungle was a short hike away and the plan was to make it parkland between them, if possible. And by park, it was meant in the American sense of a national park. Wild. Untamed. Left alone. So far the local tribe had left them alone, but there was plans for a feast. Soon.

Once they get unpacked.

As for Jack, about the only comforts he had with him from home were Rihanna, a few candles, his book of shadows, the pen Adam gave him when he made petty officer (and then immediately got cross-ranked to sergeant), and some of his favorite clothes.

The years had treated him well, and life around the Lads was exactly what one would expect. He was full-grown now. Two-Seventy was still his callsign, but now that meant kilos instead of pounds, and that just seemed the right way to leave it. He knew enough about what it took to do what the Lads did for a living, so he entertained no romantic ideas whatsoever of going for that himself. He didn’t have yard-wide shoulders or unbreakable bones; he was very much a normal, not-ogre type of gymrat, and he was happy to be a regular sort of strong.

And he was! Good genes from dad. Though…he would have to get his hench-bench back up to two-seventy here on Akyawentuo too, so…he wasn’t totally without ambition!

Other things were more important, though. He had to keep Rhianna impressed! Still hadn’t married Ree, but…soon. He had the ring. He’d have asked before all this happened…

Soon.

Finally, at long last, he had a leave day.

Life was finding a weird new normal. Rolling shortages of everything, but they didn’t last long. The market was in fact responding and that sort of answered the age-old question of economics for Jack. Dad was grumbling about it, but he grumbled about a lot of things. Old, too. Not hobbled-old—he’d taken some of the modern therapies like everyone else, so he looked and generally performed like a salt-and-pepper gymrat at the tail-end of his prime. Still had it, but…no crazy stupid macho henching for him these days, no sir.

Sis was a gem. Hope really was their hope, and it was a miracle she’d got off Earth.

To be sure, Jack had asked a favor from Hoeff and his mysterious, dangerous friends…and it got done. No payment necessary. No favors “you wouldn’t be uncomfortable with.”

Jack believed him. Because the price was silence. Tell anyone and Hoeff would visit him one night…

A small price to pay to still have his baby sister.

There not being much else to do around town or base, they decided to go exploring. Advice was to not stray too far from the perimeter fields, just in case of Brown Ones, but there was a website up to keep track of the big beasties, and the nearest one—a big and dominant female the community had named “Bess”—was about twenty miles away to the east.

But in any case, the forest was more interesting. And there were always a few ten’gewek in the area, keeping an eye on their tribal territory. Etiquette was pretty simple, if one showed up you offered a small gift, promised that your purpose was peaceful, and obeyed whatever rules they set you. If there was any trouble, pass it along to a Given-Man.

Straightforward enough.

Of course, there was a reason to this beyond just taking a stroll.

“I know you love nature,” Ree commented as they picked their way over the roots of a ketta right at the forest’s edge, “but what’s wrong with the plains?”

“The forest is sacred.”

“To the ten’gewek?”

“Just…sacred. Can’t you feel it?” Jack smiled as they stepped into the canopy’s shade and were suddenly surrounded by woody smells, soft leaf litter, the sweet scent of shelf fungus and tree pollen—mercifully, the human immune system just ignored ketta pollen—and the creak of high branches swaying in the soft breeze.

Ree looked up, then sighed softly. “…Yeah. Yeah, I can.”

Jack followed her gaze, and exhaled as he saw just how high the barky columns all around him rose. It was like they’d just stepped into the nave of a vast organic cathedral. Instead of the ribs of a gothic vault, there were branches, and the leaves were just translucent enough to stand in for stained glass.

And then, like that moment when an optical illusion flipped, part of the vault moved and became a pair of ten’gewek. A woman and a younger girl, who dropped down from the branch they’d been perched on in a series of confident bounds, hooting peace-calls as they came.

Jack had read up on the people, and knew those markings on their foreheads and cheekbones. They were a Singer and her apprentice Dancer. He spread his hands, proving that he was unarmed.

The Singer dropped from the last branch like a rock, and landed with a heavy thud right in front of him. The jump would have shattered most humans’ legs, but in her case it seemed as natural as trotting down a flight of stairs. Her tongue lashed the air for a second.

“…You HEAT? Too small, but taste like HEAT arm-or.”

“We’re HEAT technicians,” Jack explained. “I’m Jack, this is Rihanna.”

“Tech-nish-an?” the Singer turned to her Dancer, who trilled out a translation. “Ah! Tool-makers and fixers, yes? Like smiths?”

“Pretty much.”

“Saw you coming, long off,” the Dancer said. “You come to talk, trade, hunt?”

Ree looked at him, as if to say ‘actually, yeah, why are we here?’

“Uh…to pray, actually,” Jack said. “If that’s alright.”

The Singer’s tail lashed. Clearly, he’d intrigued her. “Alright? Yes, alright. You find gods-grove that way.” She turned and pointed with an arm as long as a pool table. “No need for Giving, just no Taking either, yes?”

“Understood.”

“We watch out for you, let you know if Werne come close. Herd nearby, we are hunting.”

“Thank you.”

She hooted amiably, and then with a superhuman leap was away up the tree again, moving with remarkable grace and speed. The Singer trilled, followed, and in seconds Jack couldn’t see them any longer.

“Y’know…it’s nice knowing we’re being watched out for in here,” Ree commented.

Jack nodded, and headed in the direction the Singer had indicated. He hadn’t actually needed the directions—the gods-grove was marked on the map, and had been their destination all along—and he knew they were by custom a place where everyone was welcome so long as they showed respect. But it was nice to have the Singer’s tacit blessing.

It was a further three miles deep into the forest, along the werne-trails and shallow streams. And it was not hard at all to recognize the gods-grove when they found it.

It was a rock. A really big, craggy one thrusting up through the soil that even millennia of roots and leaf-litter hadn’t conquered, creating an open clearing where there was no canopy and the sun shone right the way down to the ground. The ten’gewek had painted it and cleaned off the moss, left offerings and cleared the space around it for dancing. The edge of the grove was marked with a ring of white stones.

The mere sight of it made him smile.

“I really need to learn more about ten’gewek beliefs…” Ree noted, setting her pack down outside the grove. “I’ve heard them talk about gods, but I don’t know any of their gods’ names…”

“I want to learn more too,” Jack agreed. “But I asked Yan about it when I got the chance. He said you can pray however you like, here.”

“Alright then…”

She kissed him and sat down to watch. After years of being together, Ree and Jack had come to an understanding about their respective faiths, and she knew how important this was to him. Besides, she’d once told him that quiet time spent in reflection was never wasted. So…

So he set things up. A quiet rustling in the branches outside the gods-grove was probably the Singer keeping an eye on him as he opened his book and picked out the ritual he’d prepared for this.

He performed it in silence. It was a simple, focused spell to both God and Goddess that he’d have…well, courage. In the coming days, in the coming war. He’d already had the strength to ask for help, now let him have the strength to pay the price. He’d had the fortune to survive, along with his family, now let him have the grace to accept his fortune humbly and without undue guilt.

He had an opportunity…now grant him the courage to act.

His breathing slowed. He felt calm, at peace for the first time in months. He felt warm, not just from sunlight and the heat of the Akyawentan climate, but from within his soul, and a general feeling of approval and rightness. The ring held in the palm of his hand felt like it was almost burning with energy, ready to fulfill its purpose.

He asked Ree to marry him, and she said yes.

There was a future. There was, after everything that had happened, still a future.

All they had to do was build it.

++END CHAPTER 93++

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Dandelion: audiobook now available!

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow, Zoe and Riker

31 Humans

TTTA

Adam Shearsby

Anthony Landry

Anthony Youhas

Austin Deschner

Bart Welch

Chris Dye

Darius Marquis

Devin Rousso

James Ren

Joseph Szuma

Joshua A. Demic

Joshua Mountain Taylor

Karthik Mohanarangan

Katja Grim

Louden Haga

Marquis Talmadge

NovaTheSpaceWolf
oke m8

Ortheri

Richard A Anstett

Ryan Seaman

Sam Berry

Shane Wegner

Sun Rendered

Taylor McGee
thani saeed alromaithi

Trevor C

Xultanis

Zachary Galicki

Zorven

As well as 49 Deathworlders…

Adam Zarger
Andrew
Andrew Ford
Andrew Preece blackwolf393
Bralor Ironwolf
Brandon Hicks
Brigid
Bruce Ludington
Chalax
Chris Bausch
Christopher Plemons
Crimson Nova damnusername
Daniel R.
David Jamison
Eric Hardwick
Henry Moyers
Ignate Flare
Ironclad
Ivan Smirnov
Jack Weedon jmal116
Jon
Katie Drzewiecki
Kevin Neely
Kristoffer Skarra
Loaf of Orange lovot
Matt Bullock
Matt Demm
Matthew Cook
Max Bohling
Mel B.
Mikee Elliott
Nick Annunziata
NightKhaos
Oli Tusig
Olli Erinko
Patrick Huizinga
Ryan Cadiz
Sam
Sean Calvo
Stephen Prescott
Thanatos walter thomas
Woodsie13
Yeania Aeon
Zod Bain

55 Friendly ETs, 128 Squishy Xenos and 310 Dizi Rats who have packed their bags but just can’t seem to find their jump tickets…

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not necessarily share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 94: The End of the World

Chapter 94: The Waiting Stars

Guāngjing, Shuòshěng province, planet Lucent

Colonel Shen Changming

The man known to his neighbors and coworkers as Han Heng woke to the horrible, cold knowledge that he was not alone in his bedroom.

He didn’t know how he knew, exactly. But the certainty gripped him that it didn’t matter one bit that he had seven locks on the door, and motion sensors throughout the house, and that he lived on the top floor…he could feel the presence in the room even before he finally willed his panicked eyes open.

Standing in the corner with baleful, pale eyes was a powerfully-muscled creature too broad and squat to be properly considered a man. He was dressed a bit like a tourist…but there was no hiding his extreme build, no disguising what he was.

The Hero had come for him.

With glacial slowness, Changming started moving his hand toward the gap between mattress and bedside table, in which his pistol was attached to the table’s underside. “…You,” he said, stalling for time. English, he guessed. The man who’d killed General Petrovich had to be an American, surely.

“I’d rather you didn’t ruin my shirt,” the man growled out. “You’ll just make me angry.”

Changming lunged for it. His fingers scrabbled where the weapon should have been and found nothing.

The man-ape sighed.

“You supervillains are so fucking predictable. It didn’t work for Petrovich, and like I said…I’d rather you didn’t ruin my shirt.”

Changming slowly sat up. Well. He was dead. The moment he’d feared ever since the fateful day was here. Oddly, he found he felt quite calm about it.

“Supervillain.”

“You got a better word for a man responsible for so many deaths?”

“Dutiful.” Changming stood. “You are here to kill me because the men I served under and whose orders I obeyed are dead. Are you going to kill the men like me who obeyed similar orders from your own government? Everyone knows the American weapons killed more than anyone else.”

The American gave him a cold look that said he really didn’t care at all. “I have questions,” he said bluntly.

“And why should I answer?”

“I’d let you do the honorable thing yourself. Fuck, put on your dress uniform or whatever.”

“And all I must do is betray my fellows?”

“Nah. We know the Israeli minister of defense reached out to you. We’ll find him, sooner or later. You know we will. But sooner is better for you.”

There was a long moment of silence. Colonel Shen ended it by breaking, looking down at his bare feet and pajamas, and sighing. If he must die tonight, and it seemed he must, and if it changed nothing else…

“I work at the stasis facility now,” he said. “I hid the minister’s bag in the racks under the name Nat Dreyfuss.”

“Thought so.”

The man-ape tossed Shen’s uniform onto the bed, neatly pressed and clean. Shen looked at it mournfully.

“…Why do I get better treatment than Petrovich?”

The American shrugged. “You weren’t the cause of this, just the means. Shoulda been braver.”

“I’d have been dead either way.”

“Yes, but billions of others wouldn’t be.”

True. Shen swallowed, and nodded. “…May I have a moment to prepare?”

“Prepare how?”

“Shave. Write a brief note…”

The American nodded, once.

Colonel Shen took his time. He savored every moment, every step of the process of lathering the soap, brushing it onto his jaw and cheeks and throat. The little ritual of loading a new blade into the razor. He calmed himself with slow breaths as it glided through two days of graying stubble, and felt oddly tranquil by the time he’d wiped his face clean.

He put on his uniform, taking time and care over every detail. Cuffs to the very middle of his wrist bone, the jacket set just so on his shoulders, the hem of the trousers perfectly level with his ankles…

The squat man let him dress in peace.

Then a few minutes at his writing desk. The process of grinding ink, loading the brush, selecting the paper, and calligraphing three careful, traditional characters.

對
不
起

The man looked down and glanced at the paper. “Fair enough. Anything else?”

Shen thought for a brief second, but… “No. No, I am ready.”

He rose, turned around and faced the man, who handed him his pistol.

“It’s quickest if you point straight up into your brain. Hollywood doesn’t know anything.”

“…I’ll leave such a mess.” He…laughed. On the edge of some strange energy. “I feel bad for the cleaning lady!”

“Commendable. So sit on the bathroom floor, back against the tub wall. I’ll clean up after you.”

“…Why?”

The man shrugged. “I try to be considerate.”

“I see. Well. Thank you. Is it…strange, that I feel so much more concern for inconveniencing the cleaner, than I do for my role in what happened?””

“No. It’s very human. Now…it’s time.”

Colonel Shen nodded, and sat. He felt the weapon in his hand. He’d had the old thing most of his career, and always kept it in perfect order. Never fired it except on the range. In a way, it was rather fitting that the only life it would take in his service was his own.

The familiar checks. Magazine—one round. Insert. Draw the slide. Safety off.

He didn’t even think of turning it toward the American. He knew how that would end. Instead, noting distractedly that his hands were perfectly calm and steady, he raised it and tucked the barrel under his chin. Tried to think of something to say, some parting comment…

No suitable words came to him. There was nothing to say, nothing left to do except die.

He pulled the trigger, and never heard the hammer strike.

Hosing down the shower stall was easy, but he couldn’t leave the body there. A message had to be sent. So, he laid the corpse out on the bed, all neat and tidy. Laid his hands out, made sure he looked good. Even put a plastic bag around the pillow, under the pillow case. More dignity than most in his position would be getting.

Corpses didn’t tuck themselves into bed. That would send a message, too.

The last step was egress. He didn’t want a bloodbath in his wake, so there was a long wait until shift change, and a report from his overwatch that the guards were well-distracted. He disabled the sound suppressor, pocketed it and quickly, quietly, took advantage. Then, he walked. It was a long way to find obscurity, but he could blend in with the Russian diaspora well enough if nobody was really paying attention. It was more about movement than anything else; people tended to act the most noticeable when they were afraid of being seen.

Ten klicks out of the settlement, and Hoeff activated his jump beacon. Back in the Residence.

“How went the hunting?”

“Merciful and discreet. But undeniable. And our next target is lined up.”

“Well…I won’t say ‘excellent’ in an affair like this, but…well done. You look like you need a good night’s rest.”

“Yeah. Been on mission for sixty hours at this point. And I’ve got my wife to answer to…”

“Good luck, then.”

“Thanks.”

Early morning in Folctha. The ground was still dark and damp from last night’s rain, and the city had that familiar well-rinsed feel to it. Good to be home, really. There was a nice big truck waiting for him, not one of those little Johnny Cabs that he’d put his foot right through with his weight. Instead it was one of the ubiquitous vehicles from SOR’s motor pool, something that could take his now Warhorse-grade heft. All arranged ahead of time, ready to take him home like it had just been another long day at the office, nothing special.

He climbed in, put the seatbelt on, rested his head back, and dozed all the way home.

Garden Station, Ink Spatter Nebula

Bonhomie Sousa

Bonhomie had never lived anywhere so nice in his life than on Garden Station.

Back on Earth, he’d been comfortably middle-class. His appliance business had kept his family in a nice condominium in Flamengo that was, okay, maybe a little small for them, but nicely decorated and well placed in the city.

As thanks for his services managing the evacuation in Rio, the Entity had paid him with a home unit twice the size of their old place, equipped with every convenience a family could ask for. And out the front door, the lush green of a hydroponic farm extending from the third floor up to the top of the station cell that filled the air with the smell of living herbs. And below that was a communal park area, complete with a playground and small swimming pool and ringed by what would, in the fullness of time, be a rich assortment of shops.

Most of the units were still empty, but there was an electric feeling of potential about the place that said when the evacuation was over and everyone was all moved in, it would be a lively, characterful place to live.

They had a front window opening out onto the hydroponics, too. Some considerate part of the Entity’s thought process—Daemon, most likely—had decided to make it double as storage and a seating space, with a little padding. You could sit there and read, or look out and watch the tiny, intricate little drones zipping around among the plants like jeweled dragonflies.

People outside the Entity’s influence didn’t really understand how many it was. Or, in its own weird and inscrutable way, how human and compassionate. But once aboard Garden Station, all you had to do was look around to see it both knew how to make a place beautiful, and wanted to.

But it had done so in such a special way, too: it had created a beautiful canvas, and then invited its residents to paint on it. Already there were murals on the support columns that encircled the park.

Bonhomie’s favorite was of the Earth. Just the Earth. Somebody had installed a votive stand beneath it, and there were always at least a half-dozen lit candles in it. A little heartfelt shrine to what humanity was losing.

But also a shrine to what humanity was gaining, because the Earth was just the bottom of the mural, which extended up as high as the bottom row of hydroponics racks, so that much more of it was the stars, the whole galaxy.

Bonhomie didn’t know who the artist was, but he hoped to find out someday and thank them.

He glanced at the wall clock, and rose from the window nook to wander through into his home office. He’d brought his family to Garden Station at the outbreak of the Kazakhstan conflict, and been working from home ever since. All he had to do was sit down, log in…

Join the conference call.

“Bom dia, senhor Sousa,”

“Olá!” he replied. “Tudo bem? How is today coming?”

“It’s good news! We have thirty thousand Ticuna people waiting for somewhere to go. We were just discussing where to put them…”

Bonhomie nodded and listened as the different options were put forward. Effectively all of the Ticuna tribe spoke Portuguese nowadays, so the Portuguese-speaking diaspora on Gao was one option if they were to be kept live. Option two of course was to put the whole tribe in stasis, but an intriguing option three was to note that here were a group of people already used to living in a rainforest, so why not send them to Akyawentuo?

“Daemon? What do you think?”

A brief pause while the Entity found time and attention to look their way and replay the conversation.

“…We don’t know enough about the Ticuna to have an opinion,” Daemon said.

Bonhomie nodded. “We’ll talk to the Hurt Institute then.”

“That would be best,” Daemon agreed. “Thirty thousand, though? That’s great news!”

“We’ll have more for you soon, I’m sure.”

“You always do! Sorry, gotta run…”

There was the indefinable sense of attention being withdrawn.

That was the general pattern of a work day for Bonhomie. Calls and conferences and letters and just…keeping track of numbers. Large numbers. The northern hemisphere’s nuclear war was becoming a nuclear winter, which in turn was becoming a global problem as the temperature dropped to unseasonal lows everywhere. For the many people in South America still living as subsistence farmers, and especially for the indigenous peoples, that was a problem: the whole seasonal cycle they depended on was being thrown out of balance.

All of which complicated the evacuation with the need to evacuate the most vulnerable peoples first.

The Hurt Institute shot down the idea of moving the Ticuna People to Akyawentuo almost instantly, with the observation that just because they lived in a rainforest on Earth didn’t mean they’d automatically find it easy to adapt to a completely different and alien rainforest where none of their inherited knowledge was applicable, nor their hard-earned skills useful. The bows they’d need to down a werne were far too powerful for even most fit men to draw, even as compound bows, and neyma weren’t reliable enough prey to subsist on, just as an example of issues in their little corner of the vast planetary jungle. Different plants, new alien venoms…

By the end of the day, the consensus was that the Ticuna would have to go into stasis, but their population was sufficiently small for Garden Station to handle them all: no need to split them between multiple facilities and worlds. Bonhomie passed the plan along to their field agent, who promised to put it to the Ticuna…

And that was just one of the dozen decisions they had to make today.

It was stressful, knowing that so many lives were in their hands. But at the same time, it was a blessing, knowing they were actively involved in saving people and cultures. A man could step away from his computer and sit down to dinner with his family with a full heart, after a day of work like that.

Millions. So far, they’d saved millions, or more accurately they’d helped millions to save themselves. People were really coming through, putting everything they had into saving as much of humanity as they could, not just their loved ones. It seemed to Bonhomie like everyone who safely got themselves and their loved ones off-planet then immediately turned around to join the effort in turn.

And though there may be millions more to go, he felt certain they could do it.

And would.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Martina Arés

Adam had a mission again, and Marty had mixed feelings about that.

To be completely fair, he was keeping his promises to her, and there were limits he respected: he could train as intensely as he wanted, but that was a daily job now, not his obsession. So, every day at the crack of dawn he’d head off to put in an unimaginable effort to catch up and (in his mind, anyway) hopefully reclaim all his meathead titles. Then he’d come home, bone-tired and deeply happy in a way that just…made it impossible to argue against him. He’d snuggle the kids, find a second wind after dinner, spend some family time, then studying time…then he’d study her, like clockwork, with all the fire and passion he’d ever managed.

Then he’d pass right the hell out, dead to the world in the deepest, most peaceful of sleeps.

Rinse, repeat. Every day he came back a little stronger, a bit more energetic. They didn’t fight, in fact they had a fairly tranquil domestic life, and any disputes they did have were over little things that didn’t really matter. The biggest argument so far had involved rent forgiveness for their new refugees; Adam wanted to be a bit more generous than Marty thought they could afford, and she was unhappy to have won that argument.

Even so, they found a way to make it work for everyone, and the happiness he expressed over that resolution, well…it was hard to hold a grudge with that kind of reward on offer. Besides, she knew deep down that pursuing his purpose was a big part of why that was true. Honestly, despite the trials they’d experienced over the years, or how endlessly busy they were these days, it was hard to see how life could be better.

Why was she worried, then?

Life had been a whirlwind since the war. It was such a sea-change it was honestly hard to put into words. Something like after Chicago, after San Diego, what her parents had said 9⁄11 had been like. Except this time, something like normal wasn’t coming back. Because how could it? The world would have been permanently changed even if it wasn’t ending.

But people were doing something about it. Families were opening their homes to refugees and handing out spare clothes, workers were putting in long, long weeks, which meant that stuff was getting built. Ten’gewek building and welding crews were now a major talent export from Akyawentuo; Yan and Vemik had been busy! She’d parked a camera out on the rooftop terrace, aimed toward the construction along the coastal highway, and set it to time-lapse mode, a photo a minute. In a few months, she’d be able to watch the buildings fling themselves into shape.

It was hard to put a finger on what the zeitgeist was like. But there were some themes. Folks were determined that the human race’s history wouldn’t end in ignominy, war, destruction, and as the helpless subjects of an alien king…

Not that Marty disliked Daar. On the contrary, that was the infuriating thing about him. Even knowing he could be an absolute monster, you just…couldn’t hate the guy for long. His true nature was much more fatherly and jocular in a positive sense, rather than violent and oppressive. There was no king she’d more gladly follow, if she had to have a king at all. Besides, what could they do? Say no? Of course not. The only thing to do was deal with it.

Or even thrive. Apparently, the very best in the human spirit shone through when times were at their bleakest.

Just like Adam, really.

It was honestly his less obvious strength that impressed her more about him. The physical power was there for everyone to see, but he had once literally climbed out of a death pit by his fingernails, in incomprehensible agony, and saved everyone there by doing so. Saved the Gao, and as Daar himself was keen to state, not for the first or last time, either. To Marty’s thinking that was even more incredible. Now, she was seeing an echo of that power all around her: the human race was climbing out of a death pit too, and pretty much everyone was rising to the challenge in their own way.

And their fellow Deathworlders were helping. Somehow, human tragedy was bringing out the best in them, too.

Nowhere was that more obvious than Folctha’s new street market. The population had expanded dramatically more-or-less overnight as people flooded off Earth, and things had changed a lot in where…well…everything was coming from. Spices, foodstuffs. Labor and supply. By necessity it was a bit of a free-for-all right now, and almost anything could be had.

For example, Akyawentuo’s women had begun a small herb and spice export business and it looked like business would be booming in short order. It was a good toe-dipping in agriculture for them, and a great way to see what they could cultivate without hurting their jungle too much; ten’gewek were intensely aware of the changes they made to their home, and women most of all (through Singers) had the biggest responsibility in leaving no permanent mark on the forest.

Meanwhile, orangecrest day laborers had become some of the best you could hire: they were smart, dextrous, unbreakable, and generally had endless work capacity. They were short and pretty damn broad and averaged well over three hundred-ish kilos or more of basically pure muscle, with the kind of proportionate ant-like strength that simply had to be seen to be believed. They were built incredibly tough too, but above all, they were built for power.

Power equally on the ground or in the trees. Pound-for-pound, they were about five to ten times stronger than a regular man in any test and had good heads for heights. Their huge, broad feet were made for long-distance walks under extreme burdens over any terrain, but retained full digits and were as dextrous as their massive hands. They had long, prehensile tails that were often strong enough in big males to cut a tree through by simple constriction. All that together meant they could climb anything safely. Falls even from great heights were barely an inconvenience for them.

It wasn’t just men, either. Some of their young women were into it too, and though they weren’t so strong and tended to choose other work, by and large they weren’t comparably weak, either. An average woman among them was still a muscular creature as massive as any silverback gorilla, and much more powerful to boot.

For construction especially, having someone who could weld or fasten bolts while hanging upside-down from their tail? Who could leap literal stories straight-up, while carrying loads? They were becoming heroes to many, with the literal superhuman kind of help they could give.

But ten’gewek weren’t drop-in replacement labor, either. It was humans and gaoians who taught them how to do all those things. It was humans who kept much longer hours than the others, who had the experience and know-how to build quickly. Who understood working smarter. Which ten’gewek thought of as a good kind of human sky-strength, but they knew what they were best at and were happy to leave the tricky sky-thinking bits to their foreman. Hammer bolt, lift beam, move this, carry that. Weld or rivet. They made the carpenters and such better by helping.

Some of the women found extra work as guardians and assistants for the Clan of Females, which in the present multi-species chaos meant they were happily protecting and mothering human children, too. Daycare children in Folctha of any species were possibly the safest in existence.

The inter-species partnership had grown deep, and grown quickly. Not just in manpower, but markets, too.

Clothes, for instance. Nobody was importing Chinese-made t-shirts because, well, China wasn’t making them any longer. But it wasn’t hard to sew a shirt together, and silkscreening wasn’t magical tech, either. The real thing in short supply was the textiles themselves, but that was changing in quick order. Turned out flax quite liked much of Cimbrean, and cotton did very well on Lucent. Sheep liked the cold of Gao, and synthetic fibers of course only needed chemistry…

And Gao had some pretty good mills. Genuine linen and cotton had become premium fabrics in galactic trade, and the demand would only ensure their long term supply. Wool was already being marketed as a new wonder material, and on the same trading routes was almost as expensive as silk. Daar was apparently making huge bank off that now.

“Which jus’ gives me moar cash ‘ta invest in our recovery,” he’d grunted over steak, one day.

The result was a market in tough second-hand clothes, and new rugged apparel that could go forever with maintenance. Expensive. Yeah. Everything was expensive. And woe betide you if you wanted silk! But you were getting a shirt that would last you the rest of your life with a bit of care.

Honestly, she could dig it. Living with a meatwall like Adam had long ago turned her away from disposable…anything, really. People would adapt.

Something similar was happening with electronics, too. There were no more phones, consoles, TVs, computers and stuff coming from Earth, so what you had was what you were gonna be stuck with for a while, unless you somehow had access to nanofactory runtime. Xiù’s brother had brought all the stuff from his prototyping company with him, and now his entire business seemed to be 3d-printing spare parts for washing machines and the like.

Rumors of a ground-breaking for a new chip fab were circulating, too. One near Franklin, which had facilities for advanced metallurgy and engineering space that, after having been rebuild post-Chicago, largely sat idle…

Major archeology and preservation actions were underway, too. Earth was falling into nuclear winter. Probably. Maybe. Time was short, either way. Everyone was closing up shop, and everyone who could was getting evacuated. But it wasn’t all being abandoned. Orderly shutdown was…somehow mostly finding itself. Byron Group, historical societies, the Church, allied secular groups…all were mounting expeditions to bring back as much of humanity’s treasure as could be managed.

Really, there was too much going on to really keep it all straight. But life went on, and people had too much in front of them to really dwell on any of it.

And maybe her heart was cold, but she found she really couldn’t work up any feelings regarding the sudden assassination of Petrovich by…well, Hoeff, obviously. She couldn’t even mentally add “or somebody who looked suspiciously like him” because nobody looked that much like Hoeff.

Anyway. She couldn’t feel much of anything except a sort of grim satisfaction at his performance. And happiness it wasn’t Adam who’d done the deed. On the whole, really, on balance, everything was looking up. In a fiercely determined, knuckle-down-and-get-shit-done kinda way.

So why was she worried?

She blinked as she realized Diego had said something to her, and refocused. “…Sorry, angel. What was that?”

“It’s okay…are you okay, Mom?” Diego was a good kid, like that.

“Eh…lot on my mind,” she shrugged it off, not wanting to worry him. “Weren’t you gonna work out with your papá?”

“He said I need a rest day.” He shrugged those big Arés shoulders of his unselfconsciously. “And I feel a little sore, so…”

Marty laughed. She wasn’t going to argue with a preteen who’d built up a set of softball-sized biceps.

“He’s probably right.”

“Yeah…think he wanted to crank the gravity up past three, too.”

“Have you done three yet?”

“Not on lifting days. Just…like, wrestling or gymnastics or whatever. Oh! Come see next time, I can hold an iron cross forever! And I can punch real hard!”

Thankfully, neither he nor his friends were any kind of bullies—in fact, they tended to be protective of their “little friends”—but between themselves they were constantly brawling. Diego usually won. He was still the shortest of his friends but also the heaviest and strongest, even next to Joseph.

Hell, the three of them were officially Heroes now (whatever that meant) and the first Crude babies born outside of Singularity. They were growing like goddamn weeds and Diego already handily outweighed her. He’d be properly man-sized before his eleventh birthday, at this rate. Thank God he was such a gentle-hearted boy.

He noticed her looking at him and gave a sweet, shy grin, then wandered over to the fridge and pouted at its lack of content. “Aw, man. Isn’t there any juice?”

“‘Fraid not. And it’s just sugar water anyway. We have some apples…”

Diego uttered the classic preteen-boy disgruntled grunt, and headed for the fruit bowl.

“Try it with some cheese!” Anything to get some protein in him.

“No ham either…I miss being able to make a big sammich whenever,” he griped, but also fetched the cheddar from the fridge. Thank God they had local dairies. Their daily milk-egg-cheese delivery was worth every penny.

Marty tuned her ears and listened, and….yup. There it was. Even through several floors, she could semi-hear, semi-feel the distant thrum of the grav plating in the basement. Or was it the chug of Adam’s lifting music? The shit he listened to down there when moving serious weight in serious gravity was a sonic weapon with violent lyrics.

Like nothing had happened to him.

…That was it, right there. Not so very long ago, he’d had barely enough strength to roll out of bed and stagger to the bathroom and back. Not so very long ago, she’d wheeled him out of a hospital in a chair. Shit, not so long ago he’d had his brain taken out and extensively operated on by the very best doctors the Corti had because it was that or he’d die by epilectic seizure.

And now he was back at it like he’d never been slapped down. It was like his recovery had given him a sense of invulnerability and he was determined to claim back everything he’d lost.

And so far, he had. He was the best version of himself ever, in every way. It was only the fact that his own efforts had pushed his…Hero friends so far forward, that there was anything to catch up to at all, really.

“Mom!”

Marty blinked back to reality again. “…Ugh, sorry.”

Diego sat opposite her. “…Something’s really bugging you, huh?”

Arés men were such sweetly perceptive meatheads. And Diego was very much an Arés man. Marty smiled at him, and shrugged.

“It…probably shouldn’t be. It’s not even something I can put my finger on. Just…he got hurt so bad and now he’s back and better than ever.”

Diego’s handsome, squared-off manboy face twisted as he tried to figure out why that would be troubling her, then puppy-tilted on that super thick Arés neck of his. “Isn’t that…?”

“It’s a good thing, yeah. Like I said, I can’t quite figure out what’s bothering me either. That happens sometimes.”

Diego chewed thoughtfully on some cheese, then shrugged. “…Wanna do something fun?”

Marty smiled at her son. “Sure. We’ve got time before we gotta go pick Sam and Paz up from grandpa’s house. What do you wanna do?”

“Ninja Taco?” he asked, both hopefully and predictably. Marty laughed, thought about it, then thought…fuck it. Why not? Cool Mom time.

“Sure. But it’s not been the same since Leela sold it…”

“It’s still good!”

Well, he wasn’t wrong. Marty nodded, stood, grabbed her coat and shrugged it on. “Alright then.”

She dropped in on Adam in the basement as they left. He was doing bent over rows with a stupendous stack of weight, and in gravity so strong she could feel it pull slightly on her even outside the boundary. He looked up at her…stood tall and pretty, spun around and showed her just what the rows were doing for him…

God, he was something else. Adam was his own kind of beautiful, and she could tell just at a glance that he had it in him to do exactly what he said he’d do. He’d be on top again, one day. He was too damn stubborn to do anything else! And he’d be that even pushing everyone else past their own limits, too.

They traded little waves, and he went back to his work. Training time was his.

Marty relaxed, and headed out in pursuit of her impatient child. Whatever had been bugging her, her man was happy. And really, that was all she could want, wasn’t it? He was happy, and he was alive, and he had a purpose again to keep him that way. She should just relax, count her blessings, and enjoy life as much as she could.

She tried her best.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

Daniel and Claire weren’t some gentle husband-and-wife duo who quietly collected stamps or whatever. They explored the world around them, they ate at excellent restaurants, even nowadays. They dressed up to show off for each other and anyone watching. They reveled in each other.

They fought with passion too, usually about silly things in the grand scheme, and they made up like the best of the ten’gewek: hard and aggressive, with as much strength as they could manage, for as long as they had endurance to persevere. Hoeff had a shitload of both, and the kind of well-equipped body (and libido) to make any Given-Man grin in encouragement.

It took a special kind of woman to deal with a man like him, especially lately, being one of Adam’s Big Projects. Fortunately, Claire had the fitness and attitude to match his enthusiasm. God, he loved her.

And it was a good thing too, because despite their plans to start a family…it hadn’t happened yet. Their first was a miscarriage owing to a severe bout of food poisoning, and since then…

Well, lots had happened. Hoeff had grown into a true monster of the Line, a Beef at the top of the game. He was still the shortest of shortstacks, but now he could stand (or at least lift and perform) toe-to-toe with fuckin’ Warhorse and Jesus fuck did that feel good. People joked about the Beef Bros being built like cavemonkeys, but in Hoeff’s case that was legitimately true. Long heavy arms, short massive legs, body as wide and thick as possible. If he were in the Lodge he’d have a pretty damn high rank these days, and that was saying something.

In response to her monstrous new man (and everything else) Claire went on the Crude too, once the mission got dire and it became obvious she’d be on Akyawentuo permanently.

Which…well, it turned out you could have babies on spacemagic, but if you did there were certain…concerns. You needed Hero genetics. Or more specifically, you needed certain kinds of resiliency in the right combinations for it to work. Hoeff had them, and so likely would his kids. He’d shown that, and was now formally registered and of the Line. Apparently he had a pretty high index too, which, okay. Not really his thing, but there was some caveman part of him that enjoyed being validated as having top-tier genetics. Claire, though?

She needed to prove out too, to eliminate the risks. So there was testing to be done, to see if Crude plus Baby would equal a Good Idea. It was important they knew, but Claire had reservations about getting tested. Which Hoeff understood, because…well, sorta creepy. So for now, family on hold. They had a lot of time, after all. As much as they wanted.

Besides, right now he had a much bigger problem to deal with, and he wasn’t sure even her legendary tolerance would be enough.

The news. Not even on Akyawentuo was Claire safe from the news. And Hoeff was all over it, having brazenly broken the Butcher of Mankind in full public view. The news had no idea who he was, of course, and he’d had a pretty good prosthetic face on…

But that didn’t fool Claire for a microsecond, and he’d known it wouldn’t.

All things considered, she took it pretty well.

Which meant, the first thing she did on his return was slap him across the face with all her Akyawentuo-trained, Crude-fueled strength.

It actually hurt. In more ways than one.

“So this is what you are? This is what you do?!” She stabbed an accusing finger at the TV.

Hoeff sighed, put a hand up to his face where she’d struck him.

“…Yes. But you more or less knew that from the beginning. I was honest with you.”

“Honest?! It’s a hell of a fuckin’ leap from ‘quiet operator’ to that, don’t you think?”

“That is the sort of thing quiet operators sometimes do.”

“No it fuckin’ isn’t! What the fuck was quiet about literally stomping a russian general to death in broad daylight? Do you—fuck, everyone we know has seen that video. That stupid mask of yours ain’t hidin’ shit!”

“Yes,” he agreed, patiently. “You’re right. This particular mission is public retribution for destroying mankind and essentially enslaving us to god-kings to survive, and I don’t care how good Daar or Gilgamesh are or how much they care for us, we’ve just regressed into subjects and serfs. We are doing this to take care of a human problem without alien interference. It’s important, and sending a public message is part of that.”

“Who the fuck is ‘we’?”

“That would be the people I ultimately work for.”

She made an ‘aargh’ noise and walked away from him for a second to pace off some rage. Hoeff…well, he wasn’t intuitive in the way most people were. Sometimes, the curse of extreme intelligence in a man was emotional alienation, and nothing he’d experienced in his life really prepared him for this. So he did the best he could: sit down and wait.

After a minute she sat down next to him. “Goddammit, knowing you’re a professional killer in an academic sense is one thing, but seeing you actually do it…”

“They showed the whole thing?”

“With some pixelation, but…yeah.” She shot him a sour look. “I suppose the ‘we’ you ultimately work for arranged that?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” He nodded. “Don’t overestimate our reach, but…yeah.”

She looked down at her fingers. She was fiddling with her ring, he noticed.

“…What did you feel?” she asked, after a moment.

Hoeff was totally honest. “Satisfaction.”

“Jesus.” She huddled up around her arms. “…That’s really fucking scary, Dan.”

Okay.

He turned to face her. And let himself feel, as much as he could.

“Claire…do you remember when I told you that I love you? Do you remember why?”

Her face screwed up, but she nodded.

“Well, I’ll say it again. I love you because you’re the one person I’ve ever met who makes me feel human. I want to be better for you. Not just for myself, anymore.”

“And this is what better looks like?” She gestured across him, but was obviously referring to more than just his body.

“No. This is what necessary looks like.”

“Why? Who does it serve? I mean, okay, that guy’s responsible for the war, fine. What does killing him like that do? If he deserved to die, why couldn’t it be above-board? Or just…like, he’s one life against all the deaths he caused. Just let God sort him out in the end…but instead you’re…you’ve…”

“Because there is no above-board in this game, Claire. What he and the others did in starting this war didn’t merely kill billions, doom the planet…well, doom it earlier…anyway. It goes beyond all the death. That’s Disney-level morality. What they really did was destabilize society itself. The people at the top won’t respond to us quietly dealing with the problem. They’ll just…carry on in their psychopathic ways, sneaking and worming their way into the new System of the World.

“No. What we are going to do is kill them all. Kill them all in the most violent, bloody, public and terrible way we can manage, so that fear will finally grip them, and they will make mistakes. So we can flush them all out and deal with them once and for all.”

She gave him a sickened look. “Are you listening to yourself?!”

“Yes. In fact I rehearsed this a bit because I won’t lie to you or spare you the truth. We are not fighting bad guys. We are fighting evil. Evil on the order of the Nazis, frankly. Some of these characters welcomed Armageddon, Claire. Took the opportunity and used it without remorse ‘cuz they saw it as the chance to destroy the people they hated. What we’re going to do to the Iranians…”

“Don’t. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know…”

Hoeff accepted that, and moved past it. “Like post-World War II, there’s cleanup. This is evil that cannot be suffered to exist. And it’s either we do this, or the Great Father himself does. And that would have consequences.”

She drew her knees up to her chest and curled into the corner of the couch, silent. Hoeff gave her space and time to think. No pressure, not now. He needed her to…well, he needed her.

After a minute, she rubbed her face. “…Who gives you the right to do this? Why you?”

“Our survival gives us the right, Claire. I’m not acting alone and we’re not acting without grave consideration. Did you think we could possibly do this without him approving? Of course he knows! He knows because I told him directly over steak.”

“…Steak.”

Hoeff shrugged, helplessly. “We do our business over meals. And there’s another reason it has to be us. And me, specifically. Because the Big Damn Heroes need to be kept that way. You’re taking this all very well. Most people won’t. And we can’t have pretty fucks like Julian or Adam getting blood all over their pretty faces in the public eye. People need heroes.”

She actually dropped her wall a bit, lowered her leg and opened up to blink at him. “I’m taking this well?”

“You’re here and talking to me…” he put out a hand, questing for hers. She stiffened, but let him hold it. “You’re giving me a chance. I was honestly afraid I’d come home and find you’d packed your shit and gone.”

She shook her head. After a second, her fingers tightened around his and she looked away from him. “Fuck…but you did it anyway?”

“I didn’t think you would. You’re too good for that. Too honest. And if you had, maybe I’d deserve it, too,” he rubbed her knuckles with his thumb. “I was kinda expecting the slap in the face, though.”

She looked at him seriously. “And I guess you’re just home to catch some sleep before you head out murdering again, huh?””

He gave her a complicated look, trying to tell her that he couldn’t actually say as much out loud because secrecy, but at the same time leave no doubt. She got the message, looked away from him again, and muttered a heartfelt ’goddammit…’

“Claire…I am a professional operator of the highest tier. My entire purpose is to do the terrible things that good, decent folk shouldn’t ever be burdened with. You know that.”

“Look, just…shut up.” She stood up and went to make herself a coffee. “I need to…I can’t be…Ugh. You go do what you gotta.”

Hoeff paused, wondering if he should say or do anything else, and what…but she turned and gave him a solemn expression. “…I’ll still be here,” she promised.

Hoeff wasn’t prone to big, overwhelming emotions. But something happened inside his heart that felt like a slipknot suddenly twanging straight. He swallowed it down, nodded, and retreated to the garage. He needed to sleep, but he knew he wasn’t going to, yet. So instead he may as well work with his hands for a bit, build something, and there were still some of those custom boards to cut for the kids at Firth’s place…

She brought him a coffee, a few minutes later. Touched his arm, and left without speaking a word, though she’d said a lot.

He was a lucky fuckin’ man. Luckier than he deserved. Hoeff wasn’t sure how to navigate the rest of the night, but…well. He would. And after that…

He had lunch tomorrow with an old friend.

New Dodge, Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Austin Beaufort

Farming from the comfort of his living room couch meant, inevitably, office work. Always, there was office work. Sometimes it was fun shit like GIS toys and satellite imaging and data management—basically farm simulator, except for a real farm. Most of the time though, it was bills. Lawyers. Invoicing. More lawyers. Accounts payable.

Today he didn’t mind though. He was going to pay his two favorite blond-headed cavemen. Their company had just finished the last of his grain bins and all the intricate belt work, control work, pipe work, blower work…

And he owed them a check. Actually a check, too. It was one of those weird situations where the escrow agent was going to be there, concluding contracts were going to be signed, and money would flow in a billion different directions in a single swoop.

Money well spent, though. Buehler Bros. was rapidly making a name as the best company on Cimbrean for what was proving to be a big, booming business.

Tanks. And bins. Bins and tanks. And belts and things. And stuff.

Tanks for all sorts of things. Fertilizer, chemicals, insecticides, water, waste…you name it. Metal, plastic, fiberglass, whatever. Bins too, and that millwright side of the business they still mostly did themselves, running a pretty big crew that could fling up bins and silos and elevators pretty much overnight, once all the gears were turning.

Doing it as a big, quick team gave them free time too, since half the job was marshaling parts and other project management stuff. That gave them a lot of opportunity to be, what else? A genuine stereotype of Julian’s family. They were big into promoting sport and competition, and had their fingers in small things like baseball diamonds and youth leagues.

They compete themselves, too. Wrestling, natch. And baseball! Which as far as Austin was concerned was the most American goddamn thing ever and he was happy to sponsor. They each had their own team and they each sponsored their own leagues. Between the two of them they had basically built a world series out of volunteer armies. And they were fierce competitors, too. Nowadays they were both so identically tough and strapping, you couldn’t really tell them apart by their silhouette, only by their faces and slightly different voices.

And if Austin wasn’t mistaken, there was something going on between Tristan and his cousin Ellie.

Honestly…he was okay with that. Smart, well-raised, strapping young man, and that by the exceedingly elevated standards here on Cimbrean. They’d make a beautiful family, and…shit, he hated to be the type of guy who thought in terms of “connections” and “good matches” but the fact was, Austin really was a fuckin’ land-baron nowadays, and the Buehler-Chang-Etsicittys were effectively Cimbrean royalty. They had titles now, too. As old-fashioned and stupid as it was to be pleased by the politics of the match…he was.

Such was the new world they’d stumbled into. New, but with a big splash of the old. Such as the fact that he was formally The Count Austin of New Dodge. Bleh.

Bleh!

Such was the weird patchwork overlapping system they had, with Cimbrean itself being British territory, and Franklin being ceded by treaty to America, and with both America and Britain being kinda rump at this point, so while the planet itself clung to British-style constitutional monarchy, Franklin and her related colony city-states had remained locally republican, except the titles like Count and Baron and whatever were planetary under the Cimbrean Governor-General…

It was a fucking mess. But it meant Austin got to dress up in an awesome costume at Halloween, so he wasn’t complaining, even if Lauren did.

All the titles and wealth and prestige and suchlike were payment for the huge responsibility on his shoulders, though, and the huge expense he’d put in up front on getting this whole megafarm up and running. He was flying a drone over the fields right now, getting a good look at them while waiting for the Buehler brothers to show up, and…

Well, fuck, they’d come a long way. Couple of years ago, all that land out there had been native trees, roots, shrubs and rough ground shot through with a whole quarry’s worth of rocks. Today, it was a sea of low, rich, lush green as the year’s cover crop basked in the perfect growing conditions. In a week, maybe, he’d till it all under to enrich the soil, let it ferment a bit, take some samples…

And plant his first crop. A quick-growing legume of some kind, he was leaning toward peas. They dried down nice, kept forever, were nutritious as fuck and didn’t need much more than rain and sun. They were nitrogen-fixing, too. That was important. Anhydrous ammonia was in short supply since (apparently!) production of that relied on hydrogen, which without an oil industry only came from electrolysis, which was slow and expensive…

Anyway. Nitrogen-fixing plants were a good first crop. Peas it would be, then.

He doodled some numbers on his tablet, then sat back and shook his head in mild awe at the size of the resulting number. That was…that was a lot of peas. A fuckuva lot of peas.

Well, that was why the Buehler bros were getting a check for thirty million today.

Thirty! Million! Pounds! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Lauren glared at him from her desk. “Oh, God, stop that.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You were doing the gestures and giggling.”

Which was right when they came sauntering in, of course, each filling the doorway in turn.

“Is he being weird again?”

“Want us to beat him up?”

Austin chuckled, rose from the couch and shook their hands, pleased to say he could give as good as he got in the finger-crushing department.

Though honestly…maybe he’d avoid provoking them into proving themselves. He didn’t much feel like being tossed out of his own house by a half ton of Buehler Bros today.

The water trough was ice cold the last time that had happened.

“Will you take my lunch money, too?”

Ramsey gave him a corn-fed grin. “Nah, Lauren already feeds us good.”

“Damn right I do! I want those bins built right! When is the escrow agent supposed to—ah.” She looked out the window. “There he is. The most Goldpaw of Goldpaws.”

They chuckled and headed out onto the porch in anticipation. What flounced out of the definitely-overcompensating supertruck was a hypnotically flowing, bouncing mess of fur, beads, chain and general over-groomed…well, actually, it kinda did look neat in a weird way. Like a braided collision between King Xerxes and a Borzoi.

You could always spot a human banker by the subtle understatedness of their wealth, in the cut of their suit and the value of their watch. You could spot a gaoian banker by the way they knew that drip should never be subtle.

“Ah!” Buumi greeted them with a paw-flourish and a pant-grin. “I see my favorite rural bruisers are only moments away from a brawl! Please, continue.”

“Why are you like this, Buumi?”

Like all Goldpaws, he was flamboyant. Unlike most, he was flamboyantly masculine. He wasn’t very big but he was sturdily-built, and clearly enjoyed playing at the tough life, even if he’d probably never roughed it any harder than a rich-bitch Stoneback fitness club with an enthusiastic personal trainer. His truck could probably handle even Julian’s leaden ass without much complaint.

And like every Gaoian in existence, his need for kitsch was like oxygen.

“Hollywood! Everyone knows American rural folk are all banjo-strumming, toothless giants!”

“Please, no banjos,” Austin chuckled. “And we have all our teefs.”

“You’re still gonna brawl though, right? Like last time?”

“No! What if that endangered the payout?”

“You’d lose again,” Tristan muttered under his breath with an evil grin.

Buumi didn’t hear or pretended not to notice. “Oh! Well then by all means, cease immediately. And what a transaction we have before us today!” Right to business. “Thirty-seven subcontractors! It’s a logistical marvel for a company so modest. Why so ambitious?”

“Gettin’ aggressive was the only way to get parts. I never thought I’d be doing interstellar logistics for something as simple as screws or rubber belts, but here we are.”

“Yes, and I’ve quite enjoyed all the perfectly reasonable fees I’ve collected over this!”

Austin chuckled darkly. “Oh, I’m sure.”

“Hey now! Do you know how much work it has been to coordinate today’s transaction?!” More hearty chitters as Buumi carefully scrubbed his paws clean in the little dust bath that Austin had found was necessary for gaoian visitors. “Or, indeed, the others I’m handling today? This is a busy time for me!”

Austin nodded, there. His own farm was just part of the equation, because all that land he owned amounted to an area rather larger than Disney World, far too much for one man, or even one family, to farm. The greatest part of it was now what he called his “college” farms—smaller, more manageable plots where newcomers to agriculture could cut their teeth and though he extracted a rent from them, most of that rent went into an account to help them buy and set up some land elsewhere when the time was right.

There was no point in being stupidly fuckin’ rich if you didn’t use it to do some good, in Austin’s view. None had yet graduated, but they would. And in the meantime, that land was doing something useful. Buumi no doubt was running around taking care of all their needs today, too. There was…a lot of complicated legal and financial stuff up in the air and between Buumi and his lawyer, he was glad to see it taken care of…

…Even if he was probably buying them a new yacht from the fees. Goddamn.

Well. Probably not a yacht. Nobody was building them right now, and something so ostentatious would be political and social suicide in the current climate. But a future yacht, definitely.

“WIll you stay for lunch?” Lauren offered. “We have beef!”

“I would be delighted,” Buumi duck-bowed with a musical clatter of beads.

Steak and drink lubricated the business proceedings wonderfully, so that they were almost painless. It was a lot easier to sit through a closing transaction with a glass of home-brew. It was almost…normal. Different, very much textured by the new world and new context they were in, but still basically business as usual.

How quickly things moved. Next year would be the first cash crop, next year all those investments and grants would start to pay off, and the year after that…well, they’d be cut loose from Earth and running self-sufficiently. They had to be.

But they would be, that was the point. That was something to raise a glass to.

Tristan made his excuses and left early. He had a date with, sure enough, Ellie. Ausin just grinned and toasted him approvingly as he left. Buumi was next to go, citing much business to finish in the afternoon.

Ramsey Buehler took the check and headed out last, promising again that the company’s work was covered for a year and if there was anything they needed, just call. Lauren wrapped herself around Austin’s arm as they watched his truck rip dust back toward the main road, then vanished inside to get on with some of her own work.

Austin put his boots on and headed out to the north-east field. There was some early-planted cover crop to till under. Somehow, they’d achieved business as usual in unusual times.

He felt pretty damn proud of that. It meant people were going to eat. People were going to live.

What more was there?

Ekallim-Igigi, orbiting New Uruk, Relic Space

Josh Hartl

Jess was out on the balcony, half reading and half watching the city chasm again when Josh got home. And why the hell not? She had a cozy book nook out there with candles and cushions and no need to worry about pesky weather like rain so she could keep her books scattered all over the place.

It was the only clutter they had, really. Otherwise the apartment mostly stayed straight with a bare minimum of effort, ‘cuz neither of them owned very much, but Josh was finding he kinda liked it that way. Less stuff meant less time keeping stuff tidy, meant more time for enjoying each other.

“Hey, I’m home.”

“Hey!”

He leaned around the corner to kiss her. “Still on that same book?”

“Third read-through. It’s not exactly a gas station romance novel, yijao?” she replied, and consulted some handwritten notes beside her. As it turned out, raising livestock aboard a space station was a deep science and she was back to being the equivalent of a freshman…and so far as Josh could tell, loving it.

“Ugh, tell me about it. And I thought I had to sit through a lot of lessons and stuff back at my old job!” Josh wandered into the kitchen to grab a drink from the fridge and make Jess a cup of green tea. Having to learn a whole new language and writing system was leaving his head with that stuffed-with-leather feeling. How the hell was Jess managing it so much easier?!

“Yyyup…” Jess licked a finger to turn a page, then perked up. “Oh! Game night with Maria on Friday?”

“Sounds great!” Maria had opted to move out to go live and work down on New Uruk rather than stay aboard the station with Josh and Jess. Which…honestly, that was best. Josh wasn’t nearly smart enough to manage two girlfriends at once. He barely had enough survival instinct for one.

Making Jess a cup of tea was always a good move, he’d found. She wrinkled her nose gratefully at him as she accepted it, then set the fuckin’ tome she was studying aside as he settled onto a cushion opposite. Their apartment was about a third of the way up one of the huge megabuildings that stretched from City Chasm’s floor to its ceiling, and it made for a hell of a view.

Life was…good?

It was a weird thought. Between the apocalypse and the war, he’d kinda felt weird about feeling happy ever since, as if some new disaster was gonna land on them if he relaxed for too long. But it was really true. They were alive, healthy, had careers and education, had a good place to live, had each other, were building a circle of friends…

Every so often he’d remember his grief over his parents, or they’d fret over the people still on Earth, or he’d feel sorta vaguely guilty about everything in general and nothing in particular…but it didn’t change the fact that life was as good as it had ever been for either of them.

He sat and city-watched for a bit. There was a nightclub out there on a terrace jutting from of the far buildings, which supplemented the music with holographic special effects you could see from the other side of the chasm. They’d gone there a couple times already, and the music was definitely weird, but it turned out the general attitude to getting drunk and high on Ekallim-Igigi was ‘so long as you’re sober at work, bro.’

Music was still weird, though. Singularity had their own genres, their own history influenced by their own legendary artists, and not all of them had been human…on which thought, he grabbed his guitar. It was the one thing he’d spent any money on yet: Jess had her books, candles and cozy stuff, he had his guitar. He wasn’t exactly the ghost of Hendrix, but he could strum out some pretty chill jams…

It wasn’t to be today, though. From inside the apartment came the sound of his phone receiving a message. He met Jess’ eye, then shrugged, set the guitar aside unplayed, and rose to go answer it.

It turned out to be unwelcome news. He’d known they’d send him to Akyawentuo sooner rather than later, as he’d already been selected to work there before the bombs fell. But he’d hoped to have more time to get settled, figure out the language and finish the Singularity equivalent of Civics 101…but nope. He had orders.

“Fuck.” Before the bombs, Akyawentuo had been his lifeline, his ticket to escape the apocalypse. Now, though…

“Babe?” He heard Jess pause, then set her book aside to rise and come investigate. “Is it bad news or something?”

“I…shit, I don’t know.” He showed her the phone. “I got selected for a spot on Akyawentuo before the war, I guess they want me to, y’know. Come and fill it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“But I mean—”

“Yeah. What about here?”

“What about us?” she asked, rather more urgently. “I’m just settling in here! I don’t wanna have it all torn out from under me again!”

“Believe me babe, I get it. But, well…I gotta earn my keep. And, well…”

“You can do that right here, can’t you?”

“I mean…not really? If I get a job up here, I’m gonna have to go through all kinds of education and training. But I’m already qualified for terrestrial firefighting and that is, I dunno, urgent now I guess?”

“That’s great for you, but all I’ve got is right here!” Jess said, urgently. “Didn’t they say Akyawentuo is only for, like, the rare few who can hack it? I heard the gravity there is—”

“I mean…yeah,” Josh interrupted, gently. “But you’re pretty fit! I bet you could! Hell, it’s half of what makes you so hot!”

“I…damnit.” that seemed to short-circuit her a bit: she laughed, but there was a fair bit of frustration in it. “You big—! Dammit, don’t do that?”

“What, don’t call you hot? ‘Cuz you’re hot as fuck.”

“There’s a time and a place!”

He couldn’t help but grin. “Well, this is definitely the place. How ‘bout right now?”

“No, no, look, Josh, Babe…no. I—are you thinking of taking this?”

He sighed. “Babe, it’s not a matter of thinking. I already signed up, remember? And I’ve got my marching orders. We don’t live in a democracy anymore, we’re subjects of an emperor.”

“So, what, it’s got Gilgamesh’s signature on it? You’ve been given your marching orders?”

“Pretty much. It’s got the seal of…I dunno, but it sure fuckin’ looks official though.”

“So you can’t say no?”

“Yeah. I can say no. And then we’ll be off the station.”

Jess looked at him appalled. “They…wouldn’t! Would they?”

“We’re not in America any more, and even if we were…I mean, shit’s hit the fan, Jess.”

“…So you’ve been drafted.”

“I mean, sorta? I kinda volunteered for it already. So, I’ve got the duty I signed up for, and that’s all there is to it. And, uh…well. All the jobs on-station are going to women first.”

She blinked, then frowned at the huge coursebook she’d been reading. “…They are?”

“You didn’t notice? They’re keeping you safe, Jess. I mean, y’know. Future of the species and all that.”

“I guess I’ve had my head down working on…” Jess paused, and Josh saw her brain run ahead of the conversation several steps. “Oh, Jesus, that’s caveman! Keep the women safe at home to tend the hearth and raise the kids while the men go out and do the dangerous jobs, is that it?”

“I mean, it isn’t like they’re forcing y’all to stay here, but, uh…yeah. Prob’ly.” Josh shrugged helplessly. “It’s what it is. A lotta people just died.”

“Great. Fuckin’ great.” Jess hugged her arms uncomfortably to her midriff and looked around their apartment like she was seeing it for the first time in a new and much less pleasant light. “…Alright, well. That settles it. I’m coming with you.”

“Huh?”

“I’m more than just a babymaker with a brain, and you’re more than just a stack of muscles they can send somewhere useful as soon as you’ve pumped a kid in me. And I’m gonna fuckin’ prove it by coming with you.”

Josh blinked.

“I mean…first, hot.”

“Josh!”

He couldn’t help himself. She was so easy to tease and teasing seemed to almost always be the right thing to do with her.

And also, it was hot as hell. Goddamn, he’d lucked out!

So, he grinned stupidly, like the big dumb boy he was. But he wasn’t completely stupid. “Right. So, second…I’m not gonna say no. But…I…” he trailed off, not knowing the words to make the half-formed thought in his head come together.

It went something like…He’d be sad if she didn’t come with, but at the same time kinda relieved to know she was safe, and he guessed she was probably tough and determined enough for Akyawentuo but at the same time part of him worried she wasn’t, but also there were some fuckin’ specimens runnin’ around Ekallim-Igigi, and a lot of free-love culture…

She touched his arm and snapped him out of it. “…I wanna stay with you.”

Touched, Josh wrapped her up in his arms and kissed the top of her head. “Love you.”

“…Do you?”

He blinked. Looked down at her. Nodded without realizing…hugged her tighter.

“Yeah.”

She sighed hugely and rested her head against his arm. “I do too. God, I just…”

“I get it.”

“No, not…I mean. I…I was really afraid, on Earth. Going to parties and stuff was kind of my way of pretending it all wasn’t happening, and getting my degree was my way of trying to have a useful skill that’d get me off-world, but I was really freaking out that I’d never be good enough for anyone to give me a place, and I kept having nightmares about still being there when the end came, and now I’m here—”

…Well, shit. She was shivering, now. But she exhaled, and he felt her steady herself. “And then Maria and I met you and we got stupidly fucking lucky. And I don’t know if I should be more grateful to you, or Gilgamesh, or to God, but…I’m gonna deserve it. Whatever that means.”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want,” Josh said, carefully. “I, uh…I hope you haven’t been…?”

She sniffed, and found her smile again. “Oh, don’t you worry. I’ve enjoyed myself. But now…I think I mean it, more.”

Well…that stung a little. But…actually, he could appreciate the honesty.

Good enough. “So you’re definitely coming with?”

“Yeah.” She gave a determined nod. “I’ll either hack it, or find some other way to make things work.”

Josh smiled, suddenly proud. “Good girl. So! I’ve got a few free days though. Wanna…bowling! Let’s do that! And see what Maria is up to!”

She laughed at him, in some sort of weird space between frustration and acceptance. “Yeah, okay. Bowling. Let’s go do that.”

Heh. Alright. Dumb idea. He nodded slowly.

“Well, did you want to do something else?”

“I…I dunno. But I was hoping…maybe tonight, could we just order some room service? Enjoy the view and stuff? I mean…” she gestured to the city out the window. “How many people have ever had a view like that?”

He wasn’t totally stupid. “Alright. We’ll order in and city-watch and just….chill out, huh?”

“Sounds perfect,” she agreed.

And it kinda was. Josh strummed his guitar, she cuddled up to him, they sat back and soaked in the ambience, ate baklava…

Then retired to bed, and Josh realized…marching orders or not, life really was pretty fuckin’ good.

And like Jess, he was gonna do his best to deserve it.

Governor-General’s official residence, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

“Ah, there you are. Coffee? You look better rested than I feared you would…”

“Thanks,” Hoeff knew Sir Jeremy Sandy quite well by now, knew how he delighted in tricky turns of phrase and backhanded truth that would have wrong-pawed Keeda himself. ‘Better rested than I feared you would’ had plenty of wiggle room in it for Hoeff to still look like a lukewarm shit bath. Which was about how he felt.

Fortunately, if there was one advantage to being in a circle of the world’s most influential people, it was access to coffee. The best coffee. Black as deep space, but subtle and complex. Just the scent of it dragged a little more mood into Hoeff’s head.

“How did it go?” Sir Jeremy asked as he bustled around the kitchen. It looked like he was in the middle of preparing breakfast for four…

Hoeff sipped his coffee and growled out a pleased noise as it hit. “She’s stayed.”

“Not that you were in any doubt…” Sir Jeremy checked on the poached eggs, and turned the induction cooker down one point.

“Always some doubt. She’s not some shrinkin’ violet, malleable, submissive type of gal. She’s got her own mind.”

“I would hope so! Nothing worse than an empty, pretty head!”

“No matter the gender,” a new voice agreed. Hoeff turned his head and betrayed a bleary blink. He…certainly hadn’t expected a silk bathrobe. Its wearer was an older woman, her hair long since completely grayed, and right now pulled over her left shoulder in a braided ponytail. Familiar, from somewhere. Definitely a Friend.

Wen she met Sir Jeremy’s eye, there was almost a crackle of flirtatious chemistry between them, only reinforced by the way she touched his shoulder on her way past to secure coffee for herself. Goddamn. Hoeff hoped he and Claire would be that kind of old-person-hot.

Sir Jeremy chuckled, nodded, and made the customary introductions. “Daniel Hoeff, Alicia Black. A mutual Friend.”

“We did actually meet briefly, a few years ago,” Alicia said, grabbing an orange and pouring herself onto a barstool opposite Daniel. He looked her in the eye and frowned, wracking his memory…

“…Chicago, right? The fundraiser just after the blast.”

“Good memory. You were Jeremy’s bodyguard.” She worked the orange peel open with a thumbnail. “I was a little too busy for a proper chat.”

“That will certainly happen when half your business goes up in flames,” Sir Jeremy—or just Jeremy, according to Alicia—agreed, pressing some english muffins into a skillet that smelled luxuriantly of butter. Hoeff nodded as more memory rattled into place. Black as in the B in BFTLL, the major freight transportation and logistics company that had operated most of the civilian jump arrays between Franklin and the continental US. Hence the get-together at the fundraiser: When one of their number suffered some calamitous business setback, the circle of friends tended to gather round and help each other out.

As for what she was doing wandering around Sir Jeremy’s kitchen in a cream-hued silk bathrobe and little if anything else…well, that wasn’t Hoeff’s business.

“Anyway. On the subject of the lovely Claire and your work so far, Daniel…” Sir Jeremy inspected the bacon and found it good. “I wanted to discuss stepping back a bit. Lucent is…delicate territory right now. Given how successful we’ve been elsewhere, I think the message has been firmly sent, hmm?”

“Message, sure.” Hoeff tried to will his stomach not to growl. The eggs benedict he was assembling already smelled amazing. “But I thought the plan was justice. Who’s the message for, and what even is it, if it’s not ‘your turn is coming soon enough?’”

“At this point, the men with the most blood directly on their hands have met justice. The ones remaining are men like Colonel Changming.”

“Cowards who shoulda had the spine ‘ta disobey. Some of ‘em did,” Hoeff sniffed. “At least in few places.”

“Places with a history of lawful orders and all it entails,” Sir Jeremy nodded. “Not everyone can be Vasily Arkhipov…but they’re not our ultimate target. You and Warhorse have serviced the targets. What remains will not poke their heads above water, or risk your attention.”

“Still deserve it, don’t they?”

“That they do.”

“But what does everyone else deserve?” Alicia asked. “Prosperity, peace and a chance to rebuild, maybe?”

Sir Jeremy nodded, and served the eggs onto a warm bed of muffins and bacon. “A little targeted justice helps to secure that. But some of our mutual friends are worried that the dividing line is thin.”

“Nah,” Hoeff shook his head. “That’s the ‘too important to fail’ argument, and it’s ultimately self-serving. If we’ve got Friends who are entertaining that thought, well, honestly? It’s ‘cuz they’re afraid their oxen will be gored by the fallout. Which, y’know. Says something.”

“And who are we to say how far we go?”

“Who are we to do this in the first place? We’ve already crossed that line. So, firstly: there’s a natural stopping point. We get everyone who is directly responsible for, y’know, the end of sovereign humanity. If we have to pass through an indirect agent of our demise, like I did with Changming, then sure. But there we stop. Or…we redefine the mission, or give up or whatever. That will be a mistake remembered for generations. If we don’t take this one opportunity to punish genuine evil, we’ll watch it flower in a few generations, yet again.”

“Hmm.” Alicia smiled as the eggs benedict landed in front of her, but the expression she turned to Hoeff was serious and curious. “Where I’m from, the wisdom is that if you find yourself in a hole, you stop digging.”

“What hole would that be? The one where the Great Father himself and the Emperor of Mankind—as an aside, what a fucking preposterous title that is!—both tacitly approved what we’d already taken on ourselves? Or do you dig that hole until it’s done digging?”

Alicia considered that in silence, then shrugged and reached for the orange juice. “…Who’s left, now?”

“There’s the minister of defense for what used to be Iran. Whitecrest thinks he skipped out. After that…I think that’s prob’ly it. ‘Horse was, uh, productive in his last little space mission.”

“That he was.” Sir Jeremy sat down.

“What is he like?” Alicia asked. “Do you think he might make a good Friend?”

Hoeff considered for a moment.

“Well…he’s the reason I’m this kind of strong. To the point that I’m what would happen if you took him and squashed him down like half a yard. Hell, these days I’m even a bit heftier and more than a bit stronger! Which…” He boggled at that, really. “But he’s a pure sort of guy. This is actual evil we’re going against, yijao? I don’t know that has the kind of, uh…”

“Serene detachment?” Sir Jeremy offered.

“Yes. That. Exactly that. It’s all a big game of good and evil for him. Sorta. He’s actually a hero, and that hero shit got him severely injured, too. You know the rest.”

“Pity.” Alicia sipped her orange juice.

“…He could make a good Friend,” Hoeff offered, carefully. “In the interest of honesty. But I’d ask y’all to keep ‘yer mitts off of him. He…matters to me. No offense intended.”

“How could I be offended? You and I might be friends, but we only just met a few minutes ago.” she quirked a small smile at him past her glass, then set it down. “…I just worry. There are precious few of us left, and I don’t just mean our little circle. I mean humans in general. Everyone talks as though getting everyone off Earth will mean we’re all saved, as though nothing else comes afterwards. As though most of the next few centuries aren’t going to consist of unbagging people when the world is ready for them, along with all the confusion and integration trouble it’s going to entail.”

She shook her head. “And you said it yourself, we’re no longer sovereign over ourselves. That’s not tolerable. We need new friends in this little informal club of ours, people who can help solve that problem.”

Hoeff nodded, and ate in silence for a minute or so. Damn, those were some good eggs…

“I can think of one,” he said, after a moment.

“Do tell?” Sir Jeremy asked, pouring his own coffee.

“TIlly Briggs. Open-minded, tough enough to really not care what people have to say about her, got that…serene detachment you were talking about. At least, she takes the rough with the smooth when it comes to ten’gewek.”

“Takes a lot of the rough, from what I hear…” Alicia had dark eyes, almost black. Right now, they were creased with amusement. “But, that’s like the old joke, isn’t it? You can build bridges, heal the sick, dig wells and care for the poor—”

“But you fuck one alien monkey-man…” Hoeff chuckled. “Trust me though, that’s why she’s Friend material. She can hack life on Akyawentuo, she’s unapologetic and authentic, and she represents humanity well to the ten’gewek.”

Alicia and Sir Jeremy traded a glance, held a brief but dense conversation without uttering a word, then nodded at the same time.

“We’ll have to extend an invitation,” Sir Jeremy said. “But, Daniel. For the love of God man, take a few days off, smooth things over with Claire, and get some proper sleep. You’ll get to complete the task of justice in the fullness of time—do see it doesn’t come at too steep a price, yijao?”

“…Think I’ll start with the proper sleep,” Hoeff acknowledged. He polished his plate clean, set his knife and fork cleanly aside, and stood up. “Thanks for breakfast.”

Sir Jeremy smiled, and slid a small stasis box, the latest high-tech version of tupperware, over the counter at him. “Here. For her. Hopefully it helps.”

“She does love her bacon and eggs…” Hoeff picked it up and tucked it under his arm.

“Good.”

“Don’t be a stranger,” Alicia warned him.

“Oh, you know where to find me…”

He headed out. Snatched a backwards glance while waiting for the gate to open and…yup, through the window he could just about watch Alicia pour herself around Sir Jeremy for a kiss. Good for them!

Rather than pry further, he took the extra portion home for Claire, who was still being distant and thoughtful, but good food could work miracles…or at least, achieve progress toward a miracle. Still, she thanked him, leaned against him, and sighed.

Hoeff counted that as progress. And with it, he decided to catch up on his overdue sleep. What was a day off good for if you couldn’t take a nine o’ clock nap?

There’d be plenty more work to come, after all.

Stealth ship Turkeyholic deep space

Gumi, Brother of Clan One-Fang

Piloting the stealthy scout ships had become one of those prestigious roles within the Clan that every brother wanted, but only the select few who actually understood it for what it was could ever get. The brothers who sought it as a ticket to tail and mating contracts were inherently disqualified.

Gumi on the other hand viewed himself as carrying a terrible, dangerous burden. Stealth missions had killed Tooko, after all. And while Gumi knew he was damn good, one of the best…he’d loyally admit to anyone who ever asked that Tooko had been just that little bit better.

And now he had a precious cargo to deliver.

He liked JETS Team Four. Three veteran human operators, two Brothers of Whitecrest, and a big redcrest ten’gewek by the name of Skoob Dawn-Watcher, whose name amused the humans for reasons they’d so far declined to explain, except that sometimes they’d address him in a funny airy voice and say untranslatable things like “zoinks” and “jinkies.”

The only problem from Gumi’s perspective was that, well…he was their pilot, not one of the team. His job was to deliver them, then stay on the ship and monitor. And there was something maddening about spending time in proximity to a brotherhood like that, without actually being one of them. They gamely did all they could to be friends, and he appreciated it…but they were a rough-and-ready sort who just…well, they were on another level, and in a different world. They were both elites in their domains but the overlap between them was so small…

And small was the operative word. He wasn’t very big, and even the Whitecrests were huge, brutally powerful warriors. All of them exuded the kind of absolutely self-assured confidence only well-practiced killers ever achieved. When they weren’t in stasis, they were training their bodies, training their tactics, meditating…

He missed his own brothers and cousins. Long-haul deep space flight was no place or time to feel like an outsider, and long-haul when everyone was in stasis was…

Well, it wasn’t how gaoians were meant to live. He needed company.

Of all the team, the one who seemed to get him best was Senior Sergeant Karlsson, who was easily the smallest of the team in a wiry, indestructible, endlessly enduring way. So the sound of his stasis booth shutting off and letting him step out again was an all-too-welcome part of Gumi’s day.

“That’s gotta be disorienting….”

“Feels a bit repetitive, sure. Step into the booth, step right out again, get the daily update, step back in…” Karlsson chuckled and squeezed through into the galley. “Getting kinda hungry though. How’re you holding up?”

“Oh, you know, flying a ship basically alone for a solid week.” Gumi turned his chair and hopped out of it. “It’s what I trained for, yijao?”

“Mm.” Karlsson shoved a meal pack in the microwave. “Not my idea of fun. We’ll be arriving tomorrow, right?”

“Yup. Well.”

“I’ll stay out of the box then. Get some real sleep.”

“Well, come have a look at this, then.” Gumi called up the forward telescope feed for him. They were close enough and slow enough now that they could get a good look at the target system’s radio emissions, albeit blue-shifted to gamma by the effects of the Turkeyholic’s drive field.

Karlsson leaned closer to inspect it as the microwave hummed. “What am I looking at?”

“See those two spikes?” Gumi indicated a wavering line in the top-right corner. “That’s two separate radio sources. The taller one is the star. The shorter one is a weaker source very near the star.”

“First glimpse of our target, then?”

“Exactly. Just where the briefing said it would be.”

“…Where exactly are we, relative to everything else?”

Gumi chittered mirthlessly. “Absofuckinglutely nowhere near anything at all,” he replied. “This is barren space, outside the so-called ‘temperate ring.’”

“I never took a class on galactic geography…” The microwave pinged, and Karlsson juggled his burrito from one hand to the other before giving up and setting it on the counter to cool.

“So, the galactic core is uninhabitable. The stars there are huge, young, active, short-lived, and if they don’t blow up and form black holes themselves, they’re all doomed to become part of the accretion disk of an existing black hole. Massive background radiation levels, huge particle count, no such thing as a stable orbit—at least, not in the time frames that life needs—totally uninhabited. But the reverse is also true, if you get too far from the core then it’s all long-lived red dwarf stars and low-metal planetoids and things are too slow and sparse and cold for life—”

“So there’s a goldilocks zone in the middle—uh, Goldilocks is a children’s story—”

“I know it. And yes. The temperate ring. We are…about fifteen percent of the galactic radius outside that ring.”

“Why would the Hierarchy build out here?”

“Longevity.” Gumi decided to fix himself a meal of his own. “Miniature red stars are the longest-lived things in all the universe. The ones out here will burn for trillions of years, orders of magnitude longer than anything else. And even though they’re incredibly dim and cold compared to, say, Sol—”

“It’s still enough to power a node world.”

Gumi duck-nodded. “Store energy from lots of these stars for later use, and you’ve got the makings for a digital existence well into the degenerate aeon.”

Karlsson frowned at the telescope telemetry. “A whole fuckin’ planet covered in batteries…”

“You’re not thinking big enough. By the Unseen, the things we’re going to witness in a couple days’ time…” Gumi shook his head in anticipatory awe.

Karlsson just grunted in agreement, and unwrapped his burrito.

They ate, played a round or two of ta’shen, worked through an exercise routine that burned off much of Gumi’s nervous and listless energy, then slept. For Gumi, it was the first decent night’s sleep he’d had in days, made more bearable by the existence of somebody alive and present in the flow of time nearby. There was a weirdness to being thousands of lightyears from the nearest living soul, as if the psyche could somehow sense how incredibly far away everybody else was. Having just one person there made the ship seem paradoxically larger.

The next morning, they woke everyone else up, and the ship was back to feeling tiny again. Karlsson wasn’t a very big man by human standards. He was, maybe, eighty kilos and a bit over one point eight meters tall. For someone in SOR that was tiny.

Everyone else dwarfed him. Even the second smallest—a Whitecrest—was more than double his weight. But that was okay, because what he lacked in heft he more than made up in grit, guile, alertness and a disarming softness of voice and step.

Even their ten’gewek paid him attention when he spoke, and they weren’t subtle about who they respected instead of merely tolerated.

“So, is not like normal planet,” Skoob summarized.

“No way in hell. Wrong kind of star. Whatever we’re landing on is gonna be small, low gravity, likely airless, and bare of life.”

Skoob sighed, the universal emote of discontentedness. “Of course would be.”

“Jinkies, Skoob,” Williams chuckled. “You don’t like the idea of wearing the suit all that time?”

Tail-twitch, fangs bared…

Yeah. Time to get out of the way, as Skoob rolled up the team and pinned them all.

Williams, somehow, thought it was funny. Skoob was about half the team’s tonnage all by himself, he could easily crush them all at the same time…but play was a universal thing. Gumi left them to make the ship rock and returned to his flight chair. He needed to be well ensconced before they got inside the ten lightyear perimeter where slow, stealthy flight took over from interstellar cruise.

He slowed to minimal-wake superluminal at eleven, staying cautiously inside the best-guess deceleration curve. Adding a few hours to their arrival time was acceptable—drawing notice was not. They’d traveled thousands of lightyears from their jump site in a matter of a week and a half: the last five took six hours.

Behind him, he could hear the sounds of the team checking their equipment, suiting up, going over whatever the Turkeyholic’s sensors were seeing of their destination.

What the sensors fed to Gumi was still just a spike of blue-shifted emissions, but by the time they dropped to sub-light and started the long, unpowered coast in-system, he had a good picture of the system.

Tiny, dim, nigh-immortal star? Check. Planets three and two were in such high and weird orbits they didn’t really qualify for the word…and planet one was tidally locked a mere three light-minutes above its parent’s sullen photosphere, generating a surprising amount of radio EM.

Unsurprising, considering its dayside surface was absolutely covered in forcefield energy collection arrays. Gumi doubted even an insect could sneak down sunside without disrupting one of the fields and making its presence known, assuming it could do so without frying. So, nightside it was.

Not that the nightside was any less strange and developed.

He took a good look at it as they decelerated into orbit. Karlsson had envisioned a planet covered in batteries, but that of course would be no good. Such an arrangement would have overloaded long before it could store more than an infinitesimal fraction of the star’s annual output. The only way ordinary matter could store the energy of a star was to be a star…or something worse.

The target world known to the Hierarchy as a reserve power archive fell into the “something worse” category. According to their sources, somewhere deep inside that otherwise nondescript ball of rock was a kugelblitz, a captive and artificial black hole made solely of energy, being steadily and slowly pumped full of energy so that, by the time the degenerate age of the universe arrived, it would itself be able to power the Hegemony for an inconceivably long time.

And it was just one of thousands such planets.

Gumi had once wondered how the Hierarchy could be so ancient and have left so tiny a footprint on the galaxy that people could fail to notice it. Now, he was older, wiser, and had realized why. The Hierarchy’s footprint was so large that people hadn’t noticed it for much the same reason they didn’t normally notice air, light and gravity. If you didn’t pull your perspective back far enough to see them, they were invisible through sheer omnipresence.

And that was the problem, really. How did one get a foe of such impossible size to cooperate? How did a gnat sting a giant to the point where it provoked an earnest slap? That was what TILE FLIP required, after all.

Well. Perhaps threatening to shave a few billion years off the Igraen Hegemony’s future would do it.

Their arrival in orbit hadn’t provoked any response. There was no sign on Gumi’s sensors of anything powering up, locking on to them, or otherwise reacting to their presence in any way. And fortunately, this world lacked an atmosphere so he didn’t even have to worry about the blind and radian fireball phase of descent. All he had to do was get them down there and find someplace to land. The team would do the rest.

He just hoped they’d do it quickly. Something about this place made the fur on his back crawl.

He started the descent, and hoped they wouldn’t be staying long.

SOR Training facility, New Alexandria, Akyawentuo

Adam (Warhorse) Arés

Watching Gonzo run the training course was like watching a son grow up. The kid was a fucking violence artist. Shit, if he’d been on the team at Capitol Station, he’d have embarrassed all the rest of them. From the observation booth, Adam watched as Thompson flowed through a scenario he’d never seen before without once putting a foot wrong.

Advance, drill two holo-hunters right in the fucking mouth, into cover, three more shots—three more kills—out, around, forward, a double-flash of knife, two more kills, turn, shoot, turn, kick, grenade, pause, blast, enter, cleanup…

HEAT had grown up. Where before Adam represented a ludicrous stand-out even in a group of extreme excellence, nowadays he was merely first among peers. It wasn’t so much that he’d fallen behind…it was more that he’d pulled the rest of the team up to his level. Felt good!

Wasn’t perfect, though; he wasn’t on top anymore. As much as he hated it, the fucking Paragons were well in the lead, and it didn’t look like that would change anytime soon.

Thankfully two of them were on-team, and king Alex was available if needed.

Still. They were in the lead ‘cuz they were trained by him, too. Raw talent (by accident or conspiracy) didn’t mean shit if there wasn’t the earned skill to use it. But he had to admit, they had their own educations too, and Adam was happy to learn from them. Alex had ancient masters in his own family to learn from, Christian a lifetime of experience—he had been the one to teach Adam the dark arts, after all. Julian was a remarkably fast learner, exactly like, well…like he was made for this shit. But that just proved the point; knowing how to use what you had was an art in itself.

Gonzo was a master of both.

“Alright, he’s had enough time to get comfortable. Hit him with something mean.”

Their ‘dungeon master,’ Senior Sergeant Holding, grinned and started clicking through the little drop menus in the scenario software. “Thought you’d never ask…”

Forcefield trap. Oof. Adam grimaced at the unpleasant memories that sprang up as he watched Gonzo suddenly get grabbed and yanked around by invisible tendrils of force.

He floundered. Strained to try and reach the dump-web on his belt, and made progress but too slow. Another second and he’d be a “kill…”

Fortunately, a flying freight train in the form of Julian hit him like pretty much like a literal truck. Now…Adam wasn’t sure how he felt about all this “Paragon” bullshit. And to his credit, neither were Julian or the others. But damn if the big pretty fucker couldn’t perform. And perform far better than anyone else on the team, aside from Yan and Firth themselves.

With a strain and a surge, Playboy reached and activated Gonzo’s dump-web: a flash of light blinded the cameras, and Holding chuckled in delight as his software beeped angrily at him. “Well, we’re gonna have to replace those emitters again…” he declared.

“Got anything else for them?”

Holding just let out that sadistic chuckle and clicked something else.

Now, it was Gonzo’s turn to pull the LT out of a tight spot. Suddenly, Julian was dangling from Thompson as the gravity turned sideways. He held on, but then Holding flipped it one-eighty, jolting them the other way. Then back, and forth, and back again. The infamous ‘cocktail shaker.’

The way out of that one required hideous core strength combined with quick timing, and Gonzo had both. He picked his moment, kicked out, and rather than plummeting and jerking from him he managed to get Julian safely across to a wall, where he could anchor himself and the cocktail shaker couldn’t whip them around so bad.

Some critique, there: he was trying to save one of the biggest men alive by far, who was in turn running about under a worst-case combat load. He wasn’t quite fast or strong enough under that kind of extreme load to evade Holding’s killshot.

They’d never seen Hunters configured like marksmen with high-powered accurate anti-materiel rifles, but they could theoretically exist, and so they existed in Holding’s toolkit. So there Gonzo was, clinging to the wall like a spider and about to put his anti-G-fuckery moves into motion when the cloaky bastard at the far end of the kill-hall domed him right in the helmet. He cursed, and called “Out!” at the same time as his icon went red in the overview.

“You’re an evil hombre, Holding,” Adam observed drily.

“S’what they pay me for.”

The team rallied well. Yan swooped in and held Etsicitty with his tail, punching his grippy feet right through the wall to grab the thicker structural beams. Playboy trusted the big guy’s strength and hung from him as he returned fire on the cloaked sniper, while Haruuk shot the fuck out of the grav plates. Holding nodded and tapped the control to lock that corridor into zero-G mode, and Adam grunted in satisfaction as he watched the Lads go to work.

Their newest Protector was Roberts, AKA Styx, and Adam had to give the young PJ credit: he wasn’t honestly sure he could have shouldered Gonzo so easily at the same stage in his own career. Yet another score for the latest generation, and the improved training. Gonzo just grumbled quietly as he was scooped up and delivered back to the safe territory at the back of the formation where, in a real mission, he’d have been jumped out.

Here in this training scenario, he just stumped out of the course griping and bitching about Holding’s sadism. Adam chuckled, patted the dungeon master on his shoulder, then ducked out of the control booth to go say hi and left Holding to whittle the rest of the squad down.

Gonzo had taken his helmet off and was sucking down a gallon of citrusy mouth-rape while he waited. He looked up and gave Adam an air-toast. “Sadistic fucker got me good, huh?”

“You held still for too long,” Adam replied.

“Yeah, I know. Half a fuckin’ second too long.” Thompson shook his head ruefully. “Not quite strong enough to manhandle our most biggest prettiest occifer!”

“Good, you noticed.” Adam sat down next to him, struck by just how much Gonzo’s reaction reminded him of…well, of himself. “‘Course, Holding will always find a way to push you further than you can go. The fight for perfection’s a never-ending one.”

“Yeah, and we lose it eventually. I know that.” Gonzo slurped another mouthful of juice, and cleared his throat. “It ain’t never stopped me yet!”

There was an alarm whoop, and the sound of the training range powering down. Moments later, the team emerged looking…well, beaten, but not unhappily so. Holding had triumphed yet again.

“That man is evil,” Playboy commented as he removed his own helmet.

“That’s what we pay him for. But you made him work for it,” Adam replied. “He was almost sweatin’ up there.”

“Good to know.” Julian plopped down with a heavy thud, and broke with tradition by opting for the watermelon flavored juice. He looked Adam up and down. “…When was the last time you stepped in the ring against him?”

“Just before I got m’brain fried. Beat him, too.” Adam grinned.

“You should test yourself again,” Yan rumbled. “No good sitting on old strength.”

“Wise words,” Julian agreed, and glanced up the stairs toward the booth. “What do you think, Holding?”

Holding descended them with tablet in hand. “Sounds good to me, LT. I got some tricks I cooked up special for ‘Horse I never got to try.”

“Well shit, challenge accepted,” Adam grinned. “I’ll go suit up.”

Things were different now, of course. His old EV-MASS had been ruined in the fight with the Alpha, and medical retirement meant he’d never got an exact replacement. Instead, when he’d gone on business with the Wrecking Crew, he’d worn the kind of armor they wore, the subtle slimline stuff concealable under a baggy sweater and pants. It had none of the load-bearing reinforcement of a MASS, none of the ablative plating, none of the thermal regulation, active blood lab, compression or combat computing. It was…just armor. Good armor that’d stop most things, but nothing more. Next to wearing a modern MASS, he may as well be running the course naked and with his wrist tied to his ankle.

But, fuck it. Yan was right, he hadn’t properly tested where he was at in a while. Numbers in the gym were one thing, but next to seeing how that translated into the real world…

They set up again. Holding returned to the control booth with a sadistic little smirk, and they ran the scenario anew.

And Adam was into it. Instantly. Like a switch in his head, that familiar feeling of dropping straight into Warhorse mode and fuckin’ doing his thing. He grinned, and delved deeper and thought no more, just acted.

Moment flowed to moment. There was pain, effort, progress made by split seconds and action that went deeper than thought. He moved, he fought, he was.

And despite Holding’s best efforts, this time they won.

Definitely sore, though. He’d gone into a HEAT-grade fight, with HEAT-grade battle rattle, while wearing light armor. Good thing he’d spent decades forcing himself to grow tough and robust. And it was fuckin’ worth it to see how the younger guys on the team reacted. Even Hunter looked at him like he’d just watched a monster go on a rampage. Good shit. Time for cool-down. They de-suited, stretched, and went for a soak in the sauna.

“Shit, man. What do I gotta do to get that good?”

“No shit,” Julian chuckled. “I’m like, three times stronger than you nowadays, on paper—”

“More,” Adam added proudly, for his own reasons. “A lot more.”

“Shit! All that and you still embarrass me.”

“Us both. I can match your speed, match your lifts, I’m prettier too…”

Adam snorted, opened an eye and grinned at him. “Don’t push your luck.”

“Hey, which one of us has seduced a dashing starship captain?”

Julian raised a lazy, smug hand.

“…Alright, bad example,” Hunter conceded.

“We’re both bad examples,” Adam chuckled, and sopped the sweat from his face. The heat felt good today. He could feel it seeping in, working loose what would otherwise have become a nasty little muscle-knot. “Anyway. Lessons I learned the hard way. There’s no secret formula, you can grunt and lift and fill yourself with Crude and be the strongest there fuckin’ is, but you still gotta put in the hours.”

“It’s more than the hours,” Julian sighed. “You just…have something in you. It’s not just tactics or training. I don’t even think it’s experience.”

Well. Why not. “You’re right. It’s the Hate.”

He’d never told them about the Hate.

“…the…what, now?”

“That’s what I call it. Just…y’know. All the shit I went through. My home, my mom, my friends, then coming here, Sara…” he shrugged. It was a weird thing, how grief could still sometimes hit like a lightning bolt. How he could miss somebody so much whom he’d only known for a year, when he was a kid…

He cleared his throat and snapped back to here-and-now. “Somewhere along the way, I figured out how to turn it all into something I could use. I call it the Hate. For all that’s wrong, and cruel, and evil in the world. And then I tap into it, and it fuels me, and…”

He shrugged.

“Fire,” Yan grunted. His trimmed crest had gone stiff and luxuriant in the heat and humidity—it didn’t sag at all as he tilted his head thoughtfully. “You sound like human Given-Man.”

“Is that what it’s like for you?” Adam asked.

Yan shrugged and shook his head. “Never put words to it. I know it in what you say, but for me…comes from the belly, something old inside. Not from my life. Still, the Fire is Fire, and it burns hot. Can burn you up, or if you have strong mind, you can use it.”

Gonzo was nodding thoughtfully, his expression distant: Julian on the other hand just looked blankly interested. Well…understandable. He was…Adam and Yan were warrior types. Which was a word he didn’t like using because it was so overused and lots of idiots had their own ideas about it all, but for what Adam meant, it worked. The two of them were what they were out of a deep need to excel. It was part of their being. The need to be…well, dominant.

Julian had different reasons for being here. He was a man of duty more than Fire, though anyone who could hack it on HEAT had a huge ridiculous heaping of both. He found fulfillment mostly in the more fatherly, soldierly side of it. Duty, service, protection. That sort of thing. Adam and Yan did too, but really…they were darker souls.

They liked breaking their enemies. Defeating the evil was its own powerful reward.

Which was why today’s success felt so good, Adam realized as he picked up his drink bottle and took a hefty swig, basking in the moment. Today hadn’t just taken the team a step closer to TILE FLIP, it had been important for him on a deeper, more personal level too. He’d come back in, handicapped by the lack of a MASS, and still shown he could crush the worst their sadistic dungeon master could throw at them. He was still in the fuckin’ game, injury be damned. He could still be what he was.

It felt really fuckin’ good to be back.

Adam grinned to himself and soaked in the heat. They’d just have to see what came of it.

High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father of the Gao, First Counsel of the United Peoples

Daar crashed into bed with a thump, and was suddenly, utterly immobile, more tired than he could remember being in decades.

Humans were exhausting.

On multiple levels.

First, Daar maybe kinda underestimated Adam’s determination to retake his throne. Not that Daar din’t want him to succeed…but he wanted Daar to succeed, too. As hard as was physically possible. And balls was that some effort, ‘fer a ‘Back who could outmuscle tractors and do other such silly shit. It was happy work, and fulfilling! But nonetheless…

Well, not only was it draining for a giant like him well into the five-digit club to perform at the edge of his abilities and endurance every single morning, it was hard to eat enough just to recover. He was already the heaviest land-walker anywhere and damn near ever, so that was no small concern! After a few weeks, all his reserves had been burned away—though admittedly, he’d never looked better—and from then on it was a delicately-balanced act between progress and setback, and having enough energy just to get through the day.

Which was fine. Daar was a tough boy and he could hack it. But lately, his daily training was only the prelude to the constitutional discussions, and by the Unseen… if he’d thought ‘Horse could go forever torturing the two of them towards perfection, that was nothing compared to the endurance of men and women in tidy suits doing the same thing to the Law.

They just would not stop. Daar had to sit there on his throne, with crown on head and mace in hand, and listen to it all. Sanctify it by his presence, or at least legitimize it. His body was desperate to move usually an hour after training, but finding opportunity in the gaps between topics wasn’t an easy task. And he couldn’t just get up and leave, since the whole thing needed sovereign backing. His opinion was only rarely required…but it was required, which meant he had to pay attention to weapons-grade lawyer-talk for literally hours every day.

It would be worth it, in the end. The whole process had thoroughly enraptured Clan Straightshield, and rightfully so. The cross-species debates about the Law would, quite probably, become one of the greatest works of civilization the galaxy had ever seen. Observers from nearly every species and government were there too, all with aides taking furious notes. No doubt all of it would be picked over endlessly, as human and gaoian worked to uncover the Law.

That would be a hell of a legacy for his people, so obviously he was keen to see it through! It was just…the Gao had fought many wars, and he was no spotless leader. But this was one of the most vicious fights Daar had ever witnessed. His brain felt like it had been scooped out and replaced with neutron star matter: hot, unthinking, and impossibly heavy.

…Maybe he should decree half-day sessions for primary debate. Tempting…

No rest for him, though. After all that, every day without fail, Daar went among his people. Again, it was wonderfully rewarding and utterly exhausting. The arrival of millions, then tens and hundreds of millions of humans, with more coming all the time, had kicked society into a sort of turbo-mode rebuilding that was impossible to put into words. And they didn’t have unified Law yet, so lots was being made up as they went—

Well, not building and electrical codes thank fuck, Daar put his paw down there.

Anyway. Trends were emerging, and they stemmed mostly from…well, him. Specifically, accommodating him and accommodating each other. Every little building complex had a Daar-friendly park and meeting place, now. The reason being humans and gao preferred to build cozier places when they lived together, but some gao (and humans, too) could be big as hell and Daar was the size of a gods-damned bus. And living together was the new rage. Workhouses and apartments and strip malls filled with bodegas and little shops all tended to mushroom up close to each other as many of the mostly-abandoned mid-sized cities underwent complete rebuilds, since zoning really wasn’t a thing except for major industry—another thing Daar refused to encourage. He’d been to America and seen the consequences. No thank you.

In fact the economy, which had been in a permanent downward trend ever since the biodrone war, was getting a shot of adrenaline right to its heart. All the areas where they’d been struggling, suddenly there were humans able to fit straight in after just a little training.

Actually, that prompted a thought: Gao’s great cities would still be mostly gaoian spaces. Maybe the humans needed a city or two of their own? Hmm…

So many ideas buzzing through his brain. He was simultaneously exhausted and unable to wind down. It was exhilarating! But he needed grounding. So, he visited. He praised where things should be encouraged, gently offered advice or otherwise when needed. Shared some lessons he’d learned himself, and his staff did likewise a hundred times more for each unique little corner of the economy or social fabric they were exploring that day.

It was all powerfully educational. Daar knew the fundaments of civilization and could talk anyone’s head off about concrete and planting season, of ranching and mining, but all the stuff built atop that? Novel learning experience for him, because humans liked to share instead of defer. Which was nice! But humans also tried to speechify everything and make it all formal or whatever…no, Daar wouldn’t have that. So his meathead side tended to come out as a disarming tactic.

He’d gotten awfully good at flattening iron balls for people’s entertainment—that was the trick they always boggled at. He’d made a show out of every way he could do it: In his paws, wedged into the crook of his arm between his forearm and bicep, behind his knee for the really big ones. Or he could smush ‘em flat with his chest even! That one hurt but always garnered the biggest gasps. Or maybe he’d try something even more unbelievable and ridiculous, if the energy of the moment encouraged it. Full-speed sprints were fun, throwing boulders even funner…

He was happy to clown about, so long as it kept those damn speeches at bay…

Afterwards was usually fun, where he gained some much-needed rejuvenation from wrasslin’ the kids and talkin’ to Proud Mommas and Papas, who often teamed up with the local communes to raise their kids alongside the gaoian cubs. After all, it was the youth who would grow up in this new strange unified world and navigate it for the first time. Best if they made friends from an early age.

No small challenge, that: Daar had become Champion and Stud-Prime at fifteen, the day of his manhood. Which in earth years meant he would have been twelve. And he was already mostly the size he’d be for many years later, because gao grew up fast. Humans did not. So they couldn’t easily school together, couldn’t really be raised together…

But they could definitely be friends together. Playtime was scheduled accordingly.

So it had gone for seemingly forever. The ordeal of Law to drain him, the ordeal of Warhorse to test him, and the joy of people to recharge him. But now, here he was, in his own nest-bed, at home in High Mountain…

And he still had the happy ordeal of the women he loved to come. Gods, he wasn’t even sure he could lift his head, let alone…

Three, now. Naydra and Leela had befriended Maaryi, an absolute specimen of a brownfur woman, one statuesque enough to make even Myun blush—they were apparently fast friends at the commune. She was beautiful, athletic and powerful…and like Myun she was bubbly and simple, but not at all stupid. She was so unlike the other two they all became fast, instant friends.

And like any good brownfur, she didn’t take no for an answer.

Oh well. Daar could be heroic, when called to great service! He couldn’t let them think they could team up and subdue him! Every inch of him was exhausted, but he regretted nothing.

He just needed to…sleep. First. Yeah.

…sleep…

…

He woke to the slow realization that it was fully the middle of the day outside, and his nose was telling him that although he’d had three warm and lovely bodies cuddled up to him all night, they’d woken and started their days before him.

Musta really needed the sleep. Damn!

Still, he felt amazing now that he’d recovered. He heaved himself to his paws, stretched until his spine rippled and crunched, shook his fur out, scratched an itch, and allowed his rumbling stomach (which was plugged directly into his nose) lead him toward the scent of breakfast.

Leela chittered at the sight of him. “At last! Naydi was starting to get worried!” she flowed up from her reading to nip his cheek affectionately, then wave a paw toward his stasis fridge. He had one, the three of them shared the other. It turned out to be full of new, hot, freshly made breakfast tacos, just how he liked ‘em with pickled (an’ extra oily!) smallfish.

“I don’ even remember last night…” Daar admitted, transferring the platter to the table.

“Maaryi was very annoyed,” she chittered again, and sat opposite him. “Are you okay? I’ve never seen you so tired…”

“Been a long time since I ever felt that tired…” Daar agreed, and scooped three tacos off the platter with his tongue. For once, she didn’t grab a handy nearby utensil and thwap him with it for his lack of table manners, but instead tilted her head and made a sympathetic noise.

There was the swish of Naydra’s office door sliding aside, followed by a happy warmth as she flowed across the room to greet him and tidy his sleep-flattened fur. “Finally! I was worried you were sick!”

“Jus’ worn out. Th’ negotiations took it all outta me.”

She chittered and combed her claws across his shoulder, which felt perfect. “Figures it’d be sitting and talking that you can’t tolerate.”

“Sittin’ an’ listenin’, mostly. Which is fuckin’ exhaustin’ when so much of it is…kinda beyond me.” He leaned into the scritching. “Or at least beyond my education.”

“Well, forging different species together under one government was never gonna be easy…” Naydra agreed.

“Yeah. Still, I worry ‘bout th’ long-term consequence. We…as a people, we’ve always believed the Law should be as minimal as possible. It should rely on our nature first an’ foremost. An’ human law supposedly believes that too, but that ain’t how th’ lawyers are goin’ at it! Every day it’s a furious attack of ‘define this, spell this out, what if we did this’ an’ so on! It’s exasperatin’ ‘ta watch ‘cuz the Lawgivers in Straightshield spend almost all their time shootin’ shit down.”

“Sounds good to me,” Leela said. “Things should be well-examined and watertight.”

“Ugh…”

“She’s right, Bumpkin,” Naydra agreed, scritching his ears.

“Ugh.”

He pant-grinned happily at their stereo chitters, and ate the rest of his breakfast in appreciative silence, aside from asking, around a mouthful, “Wher’f Maaryi godoo?”

“Commune. Sword training with Myun.”

“I think she had some pent-up frustration to work off…” Layla added, mischievously.

“Can’t blame her, really,” Naydra chittered. “Anyway. You are going to rest properly. Great Mother’s orders.”

Daar chittered too, and duck-nodded. “Yes ma’am.”

That was the point of course. In fact, one of the things the human diaspora were adapting to really well in a why-the-hell-didn’t-we-think-of-this-sooner way was the traditional gaoian eight-day week with five working days and three rest days. Daar had to concur: the seven-day cycle had just seemed exhausting to him. You’d finish your week, have one day to flop and recharge, and then one day to actually do something fun, but tainted by the knowledge that tomorrow was back to the grind.

Three seemed the right number to him. Flop and recover, then have a genuinely free day, then have a second one to energize oneself for the week ahead.

What was he gonna do? Spend some time on the farm, maybe? Do some flower arranging? Or painting! That was always relaxin’…

Farm. Ranch, mebbe. Dig sum hole!

He could indulge all his hobbies there, and escape Warhorse for a bit, do some practical heavy labor to change it up from the relentless precision science of megaweight training.

Could plow all his fertile fields, too…heh.

He sclormphed the last tacos, licked the platter clean, then rose from the table feeling good about life. “Well. Lemme go fetch Maaryi, I’ll make it up to you three good an’ hard out at…oh, how ‘bout our lil’ fishin’ shack? There’s that field that needs plowin’ up too…”

“Oh, so you intend to plow something besides us?” Leela snorted.

Ha!

“I jus’ thought that joke in my head!”

“You might be the most intelligent pile of meat in this here galaxy, but you’re also one of the most predictable, Bumpkin.”

“Prime grade meat, too!” Daar preened, because of course he did. “But you ain’t wrong,” he chittered. “Anyway…”

Of course, Great Fathers didn’t really get to have days off. But as far as Daar was concerned, reading a quick summary of the day’s security issues was just something to do during the short vehicle ride from jump array to commune.

News from Lucent—a miscount in the stasis racks had led to an investigation, the missing bag had turned out to have been placed by the late Colonel Shen in his guise as a civilian worker. And it was surely entirely coincidental that the Israeli defense minister had recently turned up dead and literally torn to pieces, having been apparently warehoused in that very same facility under a fake name.

Hoeff’s work, no doubt. And having the intended effect. There was a list of names below it of critical figures in the cascade of Stupid that had instigated WW3—Russians, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis and especially Iranians—who’d suddenly popped up on Whitecrest’s monitoring, scared out of their hiding holes by the panic of knowing that the Circle of Friends was coming for them.

Well…that was an affair Daar felt compelled to permit. There was house-cleaning afoot, and it would be best for everyone if nobody else got involved.

There was a lot more, which he speed-read on the way over, then deleted the report and put his tablet away. Should he have run instead of taking a flatbed? It was always nicer to get wind between his ears…

Nah, best get the daily reading out of the way ‘fore any more interestin’ activities.

Reunion with Myun was always fun, and it was gratifying to see that a beastly-hot creature like Maaryi could find someone generally her match…gods, he was so blessed!

And there was no time to lose. There were some pleasantries. Some innocent wrasslin’ like brownies do.

Then some travel, some blessed peace and quiet…then it weren’t so peaceful!

Life was good.

Now if he could only find some way to tame those damn lawyers…

One step at a time. And step one was to relax in the time he had available.

He made the most of it.

Lavmuy City, planet Gao

Evie Sato, senior partner of Sato, Thomas and Earp LLP

Everything hurt. Her throat hurt from talking, her back and feet hurt from standing in heels all day, and her mind hurt from the constant effort of intense thought. All of which was ignorable in the debating hall, but came back with interest the next morning.

Gao were just inhuman. Every day, that unfathomably huge beast of a man they called the Great Father sat on his throne like a colossal ultra-bodybuilder bear, expression never breaking, serene and attentive at all times…

Even now, a month into the constitutional convention.

Even to Evie, the process was beginning to drag on. They’d begun with speeches and grand sentiments, the clear-laying out of intent and a sketch for what the United Peoples should be, for all its people. There had been televised debates, there had been closed meetings, there had been huge bull-pen socials where everyone kind of somebody milled around, met, talked, discussed and generally pickled in the process.

Then had come the splitting apart, the factionalization, and the manifestos as each group formed committees and hammered out their specific practical implementations of the intent, wrote and revised their draft proposals…

And now they were into the third phase, where each faction’s legal experts came back and argued their case.

That was Evie’s job.

Daar’s job, apparently, was to listen to all of it and…preside. Evie had no idea what his actual opinion was, just that he had a terrible habit of asking the most skewering questions.

At a glance, one might be forgiven for thinking he’d be a stone dead idiot. He was an absurdly muscular superjock with a too-perfect body and, somehow, had that sort of broad-jawed, too-damn-manly face only the most massive testosterone-poisoned Neanderthalic meatheads ever managed. Too damn handsome to think too, and that was an accepted stereotype across species. He was so ludicrously extreme on all counts, one might be surprised if he could even read.

But Evie knew better. She’d been among highly competitive people all her life and knew the dumb jock stereotype was mostly a lie. In fact, most of the most aggressively competent counsel she’d ever done battle with were all much like the Great Father in that sense. People who were very good at competitive sports were, more often than not, good at nearly everything else, too. If only they applied themselves.

That was certainly true of the rich-shit moneyed family lawyers she had to tolerate back on Earth. What remained absolutely true about those types was their sexual development never progressed past their college frat days. She couldn’t fucking stand them, with their clumsy come-ons and reliance on their pretty faces. They’d spent so much time competing with each other to be the “best,” whatever that meant, they’d missed how to be decent human beings.

Or people with personalities, really. Personalities beyond “hey bby lemme smash.” People about whom American Psycho had been a fucking documentary.

Daar…wasn’t like that at all, and it was uncomfortably disarming. He had the same energy, sure, but with him it was…playful. He rolled in on all fours, taller than most everyone even then. His sheer presence was something else: commanding and powerful like a prize bull yet sleek and powerful like a tiger. That impossible combo let him dance around them all, every line in his vast muscles rippling sinuously under his fur as he silently weaved himself among and through the crowd, all while the floor literally trembled under his stupendous weight. He had his charming, pretty-boy way with everyone on the first day, and somehow his size just…didn’t seem all that threatening. He blended informal greetings with the trappings of state so seamlessly, it all seemed…natural. Perfect. Light-hearted somehow, even a bit flirtatious!

But then Daar put on his crown, his cape, picked up his mace of state. He went from personable and friendly on all fours to this towering figure of every kind of might, instantly. He listened, with unyielding attention.

And that was when she knew they were all screwed.

He’d ask questions. Deep, piercing questions. At the most unexpected times, and with just the right energy to totally throw off any line of argument. He was a fuckin’ master of the zen koan, in legalese form.

And he never seemed to tire. There were a couple breaks every day, during which he’d go exercise or attend matters of state or do both at once. He didn’t recharge, he just worked harder. Worse yet, their sessions were just one part of the day for him, and the easiest part at that, apparently. The bastard was a fuckin’ machine.

He was perfectly gracious and friendly at the end of each day, too. Like this was all a fun distraction for him! How was anyone supposed to keep up with that?!

Just as bad were her colleagues and “opposing counsel” in Clan Straightshield. Thank Christ they had three days to recover…she was going to need every minute.

And coffee. Lots of that. God bless the farmers who’d rightly realized it was just as important as, say, corn. Humanity could not function without the bean, and already there were plantations getting started on Akyawentuo and Garden Station.

On that thought, she followed her nose into the kitchen. They’d been given a sort of residence for the duration of the convention, the whole professional team and their families under a total of five roofs. It was gaoian-style living, built with…different…ideas about privacy and alone time and suchlike, but quite tolerable.

Gaoians also had different ideas about things like breakfast food, as anyone who’d ever blundered into the peanut-butter-and-anchovie bagel could attest. But there was a human-owned bodega not far down the street that had the best coffee Evie had yet found on this planet, and her husband Keitaro had been considerate enough to go get her the sort of breakfast that could wake King Arthur.

Among his few flaws as a husband and as a person was that the only kind of cooking he’d ever mastered was hobo stew. On account of how he’d literally been homeless for a year at one point.

He’d been a lot of things, at one point or another. Carpenter, calligrapher, shop owner, tailor, tour guide, beekeeper, librarian, handyman, competitive cyclist…even, very briefly, an apprentice at a shinto shrine. His love of sake and sex ended that dream pretty quick…

Now, he was a teacher, and his students lived in awe of him. He’d never made much money but he had so much life experience that, honestly, he was worth his own weight in gold. And his lack of culinary expertise was more than made up for by his considerate streak.

“So, uh…” he handed her a bacon-egg-cheese, still hot and steaming and perfect from the stasis fridge. “A…herald? I think? Just stopped to visit.”

“…A what.”

“Well I don’t know exactly what he is, except he’s Clan Straightshield, and he was dressed exactly like some kind of fancy messenger. He had an invitation for you.”

Evie blinked at the paper message, then shrugged, opened it, read it, blinked, and read it again.

Gaoians, it seemed, also had different ideas about professional separation. Father Meeku had invited them to come play ta’shen and share a few drinks in the evening.

“…This sort of thing is going to take some getting used to,” she said out loud.

Keitaro leaned against the counter and lifted his eyebrows. “How so? The way I see it, you’re both trying to bash out a constitution that works for all our species…”

“That doesn’t make us colleagues. The gao are bargaining for what they want, we’re bargaining for what we want…”

“Sounds adversarial.”

“No more than it has to be. Constructive adversary, yijao?” Evie considered the invitation again, then shrugged. “Oh well. When in Rome!”

“I can think of worse ways to spend a…what are we calling this, anyway? Saturday?”

“…Sure,” Evie agreed. She declined to point out that it was technically Wednesday on Earth, and instead bit into her bacon-egg-cheese before sagging in delight. It was perfect. Maybe even one of the best she’d ever had.

Or maybe that was full-body exhaustion talking.

But yeah, a night of gaming and drinks with a peer and counterpart might be….fun. And even productive! It was just…not the sort of thing she’d have expected from the opposite side in such an important conference.

Maybe the gaoians just didn’t see it that way? Learning that all by itself would be useful. So much of the slow progress had been down to not really entirely understanding each other. The two species were similar enough to get along well, but the differences still mattered. They’d never forge any constitution at all without knowing and preparing for the differences.

She scanned the code printed at the top of the invitation, which opened a message app and let her RSVP with brief, polite gratitude to say they would be there. The response soon came back that Father Meeku was looking forward to it, and to ask whether she had a favorite flavor of taco.

Different indeed. Alien, really. But impossible not to like.

Evie could tell she was going to enjoy working here.

Great Father’s ranch, planet Gao

Naydra, Great Mother of the Gao

“Are you up yet, Maaryi?”

Vague grumblings and complaints issued forth from under the pile of blankets in their nest bed. “Mmmf…I’m alive, at least…”

Naydra chittered. “Well you shouldn’t have teased him like that! Did you forget that even you are tiny in his embrace?”

“I’m not complaining! Jus’….”

Very telling silence.

Time for executive intervention. Naydra made tea. Maaryi could never resist a fresh pot of green tea.

Sure enough, another series of groans, and a shambling, gloriously ruined she-beast slunk her way out of the nest bed and plopped herself down at the table.

Slurp. Gazed at Naydra uncomprehendingly.

“…How are you like this?” Maaryi commented, blearily.

“Oh, I’m very much breakable, so I’m not fool-hardy enough to push his buttons that hard,” Naydra chittered. It was amazing how somebody could just stumble into your life and become instantly focal to it. Or rather, how the right words at the right time could recontextualize an entire relationship. She and Maaryi had been acquainted for years, ever since the Grand Commune was founded on Cimbrean. She’d been a guard, selected and trained by Myun herself, and one of the very few who physically surpassed her.

A natural choice to escort the Great Mother, and so their relationship had been entirely professional…until suddenly, one day, it wasn’t. Maaryi offered her resignation, having fallen in love with them both by proxy. That might have been a dangerous moment, but brownfurs were just so wonderfully guileless, really…how could Naydra not embrace the opportunity? She knew her feelings instantly, and knew Daar was fond of her, too. The world always needed more love.

So, having passed the Naydra Test, the next step had been the Leela Test, and watching the two verbally spar and play with each other had been a delight. Just like Daar, Maaryi seemed to think getting thwacked on the nose with a spatula was heart-meltingly cute, and so the Leela Test had been passed.

And having cleared those two hurdles, the Daar Test. Tougher than it sounded—it was one thing for Daar to welcome a female for a brief contract. Indeed, he had a waiting list and was always keen to shorten it, as it were. It was another entirely for him to welcome a woman into his home for as long as she wanted to be there. Because of course, he was such a male that he had to consider the permanent effect his mere habitual presence could have on any target of his affection. He valued people and their freedom too much to abuse that power.

He was, therefore, quite picky by necessity. Not everyone was ready for such an intense relationship, and not everyone was well-suited to help him bear his great burdens, if only through listening and keeping their silence.

But, Naydra had known she’d pass. She had the qualities he loved: discretion, a wicked sense of mischief, a tenacity of spirit, quickness of wit…and she had something else. Maybe she wasn’t the sharpest conversationalist, but she could handle his deepest passions.

And that meant a lot more than just being physically robust. Passion, after all, was a word that covered broad territory. It meant keeping pace with him, body and spirit. Which was exactly what they needed. Together, the three of them were quite complimentary partners.

But not even Maaryi could hope to match Daar’s endless strength, even as one of the very few women who could handle his love-play at its most dauntingly physical. She chittered, slurped her tea again, and perked up. “Your loss…” she flicked a wicked ear.

“I happen to rather enjoy all my bones, thank you very much.”

“Well, yeah, my love of big ‘ol bones was the whole point—”

As Leela was out building her taco empire, Naydra took up the solemn duty and spatulated Maaryi firmly ‘cross the nose in her place.

They were still chittering when the thud of heavy paws outside and the scent of freshly-dug earth announced the arrival of the object of their joking more effectively than a fanfare of trumpets could have. Daar was pumped up and muddy to the elbows, and had a general case of happy-boy field dirt worked into his fur from head to toe.

He gave a sniff. “Hmm! Smells lewd up in here. Hope it’s ‘bout me!”

“Smells muddy in here, that’s definitely about you,” Naydra retorted, and brandished the spatula, menacing the inevitable harmless slap across the snout if he didn’t go clean up. He pant-grinned, and headed through to go comb and wash his fur.

He looked so much more relaxed already.

Of course, never a day went by without Tiyun, Daar’s ever-present aide. He was the one man who knew Daar perhaps better than anyone, including Daar himself.

He appeared in the room, as was his way, just as Maaryi was cleaning up the tea set and as Daar returned shaking his arms dry. He got Daar’s attention with a respectful throat-click. “My Father, we received a herald from Clan Straightshield. Father Meeku is inviting you and guests to a small get-together.”

“He invited me?” Daar uttered an amused rumble as he plucked the small paper invitation from Tiyun’s claws and slit it open to read it. “Well, das’ pretty cheeky…I think I like it. Anythin’ on m’schedule that conflicts?”

“No, My Father. We managed to keep your weekend open. Shall we accept?”

Daar turned toward the three of them, looking at Naydra.

“Smells like mischief to me,” Naydra said. “I say yes.”

“Me too!” Maaryi agreed.

“Then please tell Father Meeku we accept!” Daar duck-nodded. “Y’think Leela will wanna come?” he asked Naydra.

“Probably. I’ll ask her.”

“‘Kay. Meanwhile…I think I’mma relax ‘fer now. Got my PT in…twice this morning…” He cast a smug look over at Maaryi, who chittered unapologetically. “So yeah! Naptime. Gods that sounds wunnerful…”

“Nap. Recharge. You’ve earned it,” Naydra encouraged. “I’ll get us an appropriate warming gift…when is Meeku’s get-together, Tiyun?”

“Tomorrow, My Mother. Twelfth hour.”

“Oh, it can wait then. I’m relaxing too! And you should as well, Tiyun. Don’t you ever take a day off?”

Tiyun just ducked his head self-effacingly and retreated toward the door. “I’ll take the rest of the day, shall I?”

“You do that!” Daar agreed, heading for the bedchamber. “C’mon Maaryi, I need somethin’ ‘ta squish…”

“But I like my bones!” Maaryi chittered, shooting Naydra a cheeky look. Daar’s head tilted and his ears swiveled as Naydra burst out chittering, then he shrugged and padded out of the room with a yawn and an earflick…along with a weapons-grade preening display, which he held as he heavily prance-thumped his way out of the room. Maaryi chittered and followed, looking generally happy with life…

And, hardly a minute later, as predictable as the rising sun…

By the sound of it, they had some unfinished business to attend to before naps. Naydra chittered, snuck a peek in and admired the show for a moment. Maaryi was utterly swallowed up by his hulking brawn and crushed tightly within his grasp, a tiny and helpless dot pinned against the vast rolling ocean of his strength. Daar was quite a sight when he was performing at his most animalistic, body at maximum tension, his words just…not there. He never held back, and could go from zero to warp speed in a heartbeat. The only question was how much Maaryi could handle, really…

All of him, they’d learned, and she had enough stamina herself to withstand him right through the evening. Probably. It looked like they were both getting exactly what they wanted. Suddenly, Daar snapped his gaze to Naydra and snarled a room-shaking snarl, flexed tighter and doubled his efforts…

Pretty clear message, there: she would be next, and he wasn’t asking nice.

Good. She snarled back and swished away to her favorite chair. Naydra wasn’t foolish enough to wade into such a one-sided love-war until he was good and worn down, so she was, for the next long while, alone.

Not a hardship. She grabbed a half-finished book, curled up in her favorite spot by the window, and settled in for some light reading until Maaryi needed rescuing.

They all needed to let loose, after weeks like this. There’d be more work to do soon enough.

Lavmuy City, Gao

Evie Sato

“Y’know…I think I like the Gaoian way of doing this…”

Evie was…drunk. Well. Tipsy. Definitely tipsy. Talamay had that way of sneaking up on you, and honestly it had been a while since she’d last had much to drink too so maybe it was hitting harder because of that. But she was definitely tipsy.

But then again, she wasn’t the only one.

“It’s not really the gaoian way of doing things…” Father Meeku replied. He was lounging languidly on the opposite side of the table, carefully loading a ta’shen tile onto his palm to flick it into the formation. Funny how different a gaoian’s paws where, really. A human could load the tile on the side of their index finger and thumb-flick, but goaians had to use their palm and middle finger.

Evie blinked and refocused. “It’s not?”

“I heard once that the humans of ancient Babylon used to discuss matters of serious import twice. Once while sober, and once while drunk…” Meeku flicked, and the tile danced for a second across the table before spinning to a stop. He hissed in disappointment, leaned in and tidied it up with a claw, neatly adding it to the unfolding game pattern in front of them. It had landed Loyal-side up, and he was playing Trickster-side: points to Evie.

“Riiight, I heard about that,” Evie agreed, and grabbed one of her own rare and precious safe tiles, the one that was brave on both sides. “And an idea was only a good idea if it sounded good in both states.”

“Exactly.”

“I dunno if that’s true. You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet…” she concentrated, and sent the tile flying with a ping! it landed, rattled, spun, and came down perfectly aligned. Meeku groaned, pushed his stack into the middle to concede the round, and they leaned forward to regather the tiles and set up for the next one.

“Even if it’s not true, it sounds like a smart way of doing things…though…it’s funny how humans get drunk differently. You’re more…impaired.”

“I am not impaired!” Evie protested, and sipped her talamay. “I’m just….merry!”

“Merry, as you have it.” Meeku chittered. “But as you say, this is a rather more fun way to work out business, isn’t it?”

“We’re arguing over the founding constitution of an interstellar federation…” Evie pointed out, and dragged a white tile to claim the Loyal side for this round again. “Where I’m from, that’s the kind of thing you take seriously, yijao?”

“There’s such a thing as too serious.” Meeku collected a black Trickster tile with his claws and waggled it at her. “Have you ever read Grandfather Heek’s meditations?”

As the victor of the previous round, Evie had to take the disadvantage of first flip. She selected a bland, low-scoring tile from her hand and pinged it casually into the table. “I’m not well-read in Gaoian classics, yet. Who was Heek?”

“Grandfather of the extinct Clan Storm-Pelt, before it was swallowed by Clan One-Fang. He lived about eleven hundred years before Fyu. His meditations are a series of…hmm…poems, prayers, koans? A little of all three in one.”

“Meditations on what, though?” Evie finished the last of her talamay and wondered if she dared have another glass.

“Perversity, the inherent absurdity of life, Keeda stories…they called him the merry grandfather.” Ping, rattle, clink. Evie had to admit, she liked the sounds of ta’shen. It had a chunky, weighty quality to it that card games lacked.

“Oh, is that why you remembered him? ‘Cuz I’m merry?”

Meeku chittered. “A little…I don’t even know where I’m going with this. Just that…wait, yes I do.” he combed his whiskers for a moment. “One of Heek’s parables was about two Champions who met to duel over which Clan would have the naxas grazing lands near the Shishu river. Their battle lasted until one of the Champions saw a fish leap from the river.”

“Okay….?” Evie tossed her tile. Eh. Wrong side up…

“The champion who saw the fish conceded the fight, and even sold his clan’s naxas herd to the winner. With the money, they bought fishing nets, and fished the upper river, and his clan never went hungry.”

Evie frowned, trying to see where he was going with it. “…And then what?”

“That’s it. That’s the whole thing.” Meeku chittered. “It’s meant to be something to think about and draw your own moral conclusions from, not a single clear, over-simple analogy. What do you think?”

“I think…I need another glass of talamay,” Evie decided. Meeku chittered and gestured with a claw: a waiter swung by, and just like that Evie’s glass was full again.

“But please. Indulge me. What moral conclusions do you draw from that story?”

“That, um…” Evie shook her head and shrugged. “That a clever mind can turn defeat into a victory.”

Meeku duck-nodded and tossed his tile. His eyes were turned to the table, but his ears remained pointed straight at Evie.

“Uh…that even when you’re fighting for your life, you should always be alert for other possibilities. That’s a good one.”

“Sure.”

“That it’s….okay to settle for second best.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Me?” Evie shook her head. “No, not really.”

“No, I could tell. You’re a most uncompromising negotiator.”

Evie chuckled, sipped her talamay, then picked up and threw a tile, almost at random. The game was too bland right now, too conservative. They needed something crazy to work with. “Thank you!”

“It’s vexing.”

Evie looked over her glasses at him, then put her drink and the game aside for the moment and leaned forward. “Look…the reason we’re pushing so hard is ‘cuz we’re already losing…” she paused, groped for a word, then blew and shrugged. “…Everything? Is this thing meant to be the United Peoples, or the gao and their guests? ‘Cuz if it’s a union, it needs to make concession for the fact that we’re, well, not gaoian. The Great Father doesn’t have the same power over us.”

She sighed as Meeku tilted his head at her. “Right now, the draft you’re putting forward is a ready-made road for a dictator to have perfect, absolute, unchallenged and unchecked power. That’s…that’s just as evil to us as the thought of somebody deposing the Great Father is to you. What are we supposed to do when we run smack into two competing and incompatible definitions of evil?”

“The Great Father already has perfect, absolute, unchallenged and unchecked power. That is in fact what he is for.” Meeku pointed out, pushing his own tiles aside.

“Yeah, but…that’s an idea that doesn’t sound good to me, as a human, both sober and drunk.”

“I thought you were just merry?” Meeku flicked his ear, disarmingly mischievous.

“I’m….look, tell me straight, am I slurring yet?”

“A little.”

“Right, well…I dunno. Fun as this is, I dunno if I’ve got the brain to have a big conversation about power and dictators and constitutions an’ all that right now…” Evie sighed. “I just…our team wanna make it work. We just don’t see that there’s something which satisfies everyone.”

“Maybe there’s a fish,” Meeku replied.

“Huh? Oh. Like in the story.” Evie peered at him suspiciously. “…You think you’ve spotted one?”

“Let us suppose for a second that the human diaspora accepts the Great Father as he is, for however long he is.”

“Indefinite, thanks to medicine, but go on.”

“The sticking point then becomes the avenue for creating future Great Fathers, and the possibility of exploitation and misuse, yijao? What if there were no rules? What if our constitution simply had nothing at all to say on the matter, beyond acknowledging the existence and unlimited power of Great Fathers in general?”

Evie thought about it. “…I’m….hmm. I’m not sure I have that much faith in the caution and reserve of future generations.”

“As opposed to the caution and reserve of the present generation?” Meeku picked up and finished his own talamay glass.

Evie felt a sudden desire to be sober again. That comment had a sting in it, one she didn’t feel at all equipped to deal with right now.

Meeku leaned forward to press his point. “The less we set in stone, the fewer loopholes there can be.”

“And the more abuse that might occur. Meeku, I mean…look. Our history is filled with terrible tyrants. So is yours!”

“Yes, and My Father is the most terrible, absolute tyrant there ever was. And he’s very fond of your people. That’s the hangup. He already is that, and the obedience we gave him at the outset, and that your leaders have submit to, mean that power is not ours to take back. It is his to spare. That’s already a done deal. So…what comes next?”

Evie’s reply, whatever it would have been, was denied by the sound—or more accurately, the feeling, through the soles of her feet and her butt in the chair—of a heavy, rhythmic thumping tread with the most propitious timing.

Well.

There he was. The Great Father. Gleefully waving at them through the door with a gigantic paw, because he was far too damn big to fit through the thing.

She shot a look back at Meeku.

“You are full of mischief, I see.”

“Mischief may be the antidote to our problem.” Meeku chittered, and stood. “Shall we?”

Accompanying the Great Father were his three consorts, along with another woman Evie couldn’t identify, and a passel of cubs clinging onto his back, gleefully along for the ride.

He somehow rolled over without endangering the cubs even in the slightest, and ended with them all piled atop his chest, great arms hugging them tightly.

[“Now I gotta do some grown-up talk an’ stuff, yijao?] There’s a nice big field real close—”] he gestured in its general direction with his nose for the unnamed woman, obviously the cubs’ caretaker. [“An’ I smell some human cubs over there, too! Y’know humans are really good at throwin’ things, right?”]

[“Really?!”]

[“Absolutely! Great Father’s honor! What say you, Neeryani?”]

The cubs and Daar gave her Puppy Eyes, which…well, Evie couldn’t completely restrain a grin as the cute little drama unfolded, and pretty soon a tidal wave of playful furry mischief had gone racing away to find these legendary throwing humans.

Daar watched them go, chittering somewhere deep in the bass, then switched back into his accented but otherwise flawless English and pant-grinned at Evie. “Miss Sato! Nice ‘ta see you with ‘yer hair down. Smells like you’ve been at the good talamay.”

“It’s dangerous stuff,” Evie admitted. “Sneaks up on you.”

“That’s how good talamay be!” he chittered again. “So now…how are m’two most exhaustingly brilliant legal minds doin’ today?”

He gave her a Look that somehow…

“Oh thank the gods,” Meeku chittered. “I had no idea how I was going to broach that.”

“So there was malice aforethought in ‘yer mischief today, I see…”

“My Father, those are big legal words you’re using!”

Daring, that. But what good was a lawyer who couldn’t dare? It seemed to please him.

“Been doin’ lotsa readin’ lately, hopin’ ‘ta keep up wit’ the discourse.” Daar was a completely different creature in person, on four-paw, without the crown and kilt and mace and other trappings of authority. Still immense, of course, and Evie’s instincts were still wrestling with that whole directly-in-front-of-a-cave-bear jolt of adrenaline that was sobering her up really too quickly, but…very personable.

“I know it gives me a headache,” she admitted. “You don’t collide two species’ legal traditions together without some pain.”

“No, ‘ya don’ really. Which has me sorta thinkin’ that mebbe the attempt, noble as it is, may be the wrong tack ‘ta the problem. I din’t wanna talk too much business but—ooh, beef!”

Most of a cow, in fact. Staff had rolled in dinner, the sight of which was frankly enough to reawaken Evie’s vegetarianism. She knew intellectually that meat came from animals, but supermarket packaging or paper wrapping could keep that fact at arm’s length. This was a little too…well, almost literally visceral for her, except that the viscera were in fact absent.

…Change of subject. “So…your majesty?”

“Eh,” he waved that giant paw, picked up a small sword and started carving off servings for everyone present. Okay. So really it was a huge roast, and there were platters of roasted vegetables underneath. That wasn’t so bad. “I ain’t too fussed. ‘Sir’ is jus’ fine.”

“Okay…so what was your idea, sir?”

“Well, I ain’t no lawyer, if’n my infamous preoccupation with weights an’ women were a clue—”

“Not at all a disqualifier, alas. But continue.”

He chittered. “Hope ‘fer me, then! Anyhoo…I got ‘ta thinkin’ on minimalism. We’re three—-no, four species, in different levels of development, wit’…uh, however many governments, at leas’ five of which are arguably sovereign in their own right…so what if we thought more, uh, UN-like? ‘Cuz we’re not a united people, we’re a united peoples, an’ I can’t help but think there’s somethin’ important in that turn o’ phrase.”

“We’ve looked at examples from human history, gaoian history, the Interspecies Dominion…the problem, sir, fundamentally is…you.”

“Oh, I know. An’ it’s worse, ‘cuz—” Daar paused, then sat his rump down. “…No, y’know what? I’ma listen, ‘stead o’ talkin’. I got a habit o’ domination that ain’t always so nice.”

Evie inclined her head gratefully then, on the grounds that he was sitting, cast around, found the edge of a planter to sit on, and perched on it. “You are the Gao,” she said. “You’ve said as much in those exact words, many times. Fundamentally that creates an obstacle to the transition of power, because right now at least, there is no gaoian body to bind by treaty and law. You’re the source, the whole thing. Any apparatus of government or representation that exists does so because you allow it. From a constitutional perspective…well, you are a constitution.”

Daar duck-nodded slowly, and remained silent.

“So what are we trying to create? If we’re trying to write the grand document we all live under, that fundamentally requires you to surrender to it. But you can’t.”

“No,” Daar agreed. “It’d all fly apart real quick.”

“But you can make promises,” Evie added, warming to her subject. It felt so good to be actually addressing the problem outside of the formal, courtly context.

Daar duck-nodded slowly. “Yes…provided they ain’t in conflict with my oaths of office. Which require me ‘ta remain free from any allegiance whatsoever.”

“My Father is by his own word and honor constrained from subordination to anyone or anything, willingly or unwillingly. As the embodiment of the Gao, he cannot be anything but absolutely sovereign.”

“And there’s the problem, right there,” Evie sighed, and wished she’d had another talamay after all. “How do we create a constitution that includes the Gao? How is it even possible, in light of that fact?”

“Right.” Daar took the opportunity to hook the last of the roast on one of his terrible claws, and gobble it down in one, easy bite. There was no pretending he wasn’t a predator of the highest order, with a set of teeth like that. “Mebbe we’re askin’ the wrong question,” he noted.

They both turned to look at him.

“…Wat?! It’s an honest question! ‘Yer tryin’ ‘ta rewrite the world that is, right? Well that never really works out, so…which constitution are we really arguin’ over? Are we arguin’ over some grand document we’re all supposed ‘ta live unner? Or are we addressin’ the more immediate concern of what’s happenin’ wit’ my direct holdings? ‘Cuz listenin’ real hard ‘ta all this, I don’t think we even agree on that bit. Which type o’ problem are we tryin’ ‘ta solve?”

“Which problem can we solve?” Evie mulled it over. “We can…address the world after you, at least.”

“That would have precedent in a number of human constitutions,” Meeku noted. “I won’t comment on their success records…”

Meeku and Evie looked at each other. Then Evie felt a smile start to replace the frown she’d been wearing for the last few minutes.

“Let’s start with the immediate concerns…”

Out came phones, and she and Meeku huddled up to pore over the same document they’d been staring at for far too long now, but now…

Well, now they weren’t on opposite sides of a chamber, making their case to an ineffable embodiment of authority. Here and now, with a little booze and lots of food and some gaming to lubricate things, they were working with rather than against each other.

It wasn’t enough to resolve all their problems in one fell swoop of course. But it…recontextualized things, enough for them both to put the work away and rejoin the fun an hour or so later with new thoughts bouncing around their heads.

The formal proceedings resumed two days later. Much the same as they’d been before, back to the formality and the crown and mace and careful precision of it all…but progress resumed. It took the rest of the week to finish hammering it out, but at the end of the week they were able to present a constitution.

It was voted on. Failed narrowly, went back, was altered in light of the concerns, was voted on again…

Ten days after their little get-together, the Constitution of the United Peoples was finally approved and recommended by the Conclave. Daar declared a week-long holiday of rest and contemplation for everyone, while he pondered the text…

Evie answered many calls from him. Personal calls. From the Great Father. Some clarifying a point, some posing theoreticals. He really could have been a lawyer in another life. Presumably he was grilling everyone else too, and sure enough there he was on gaoian social media, kicking off flurries of furious debates and postings.

With doodles, illustrating various points. Now there was a constitutional first!

Not something she’d ever thought she’d see. But people were invested in this. Evie was astonished to discover she’d gained a kind of celebrity through the whole process. Though, she decided it was probably best for her sanity not to explore that rabbit hole.

In any case, her role was complete for now. This iteration of the United Peoples was strictly about Daar’s holdings. It did not include Singularity or the Entity, or any of the rest. That would come via invitation and amendment, presumably very soon. They even had draft text ready to go.

None of that was really her concern. Let the great powers talk it out. She remained on call, but took a week to relax and recuperate before moving on to other matters that had been waiting for her attention.

She did attend the signing ceremony, however. It lasted two hours, and from what Evie later gathered was one of the most widely-viewed events in galactic history. It didn’t bind the Great Father, though he promised to respect the new Constitution, and all its provisions for the future. It provided for a Presidency to act in the Great Father’s place, which was a properly-constrained office and presumed that would be the operating normal going forward.

There were other details, all very important. Details on the creation of new Great Fathers (very difficult), on new Counsels (also difficult), on the process of amendment (easy, by a Great Father’s decree; harder, by legislation and plebiscite). But perhaps the greatest achievement of the Constitution was how little it had to say on local governance. A few powers were reserved to the Great Conclave, fewer still for the Counsels of State. Anything else was according to the custom and decorum of each people, as they saw fit, and each people were required to respect the law and customs of each other where they were. For the most part, it was a thing to glue existing societies together, while leaving everything mostly alone.

No doubt time would test it. Evie knew perfectly well there was no such thing as a perfect one-size-fits-all solution. But as a starting point, and as the foundation for a future not just for humanity and the gao, but for everyone, she felt she could be proud. And if there was anything that needed fixing…well, she planned on being around for a good long while to help.

And next time, she’d resort to drink and ta’shen sooner.

Spaceborne Operations Command, New Alexandria, Akyawentuo

Chief Sergeant Christian (Righteous) Firth

The issue with training up somebody like Julian Etsicitty wasn’t his physical fitness—in that regard, he was already a purpose-bred supersoldier honed by the sternest regime Warhorse could devise, and had been a freak of one kind or another since before he was properly a teen. But there was more to being a military man, and especially to being an officer, than just being fit. There was a mindset to inculcate, a lifetime of bad habits to break, enculturation to perform, customs and courtesies to teach, a set of new habits to form…

Straightforward enough to do with teenagers and early-twenties kids who barely knew who they were, whose soft clay could be molded, shaped and fired by training sergeants and other educators. But Julian was now older than the maximum age of enlistment, and had a full career behind him as castaway, space explorer and diplomat, and more than a few serious fights under his belt. He knew good and damn well who he was and what he could do.

Fortunately, who he was, was a man who’d gone through the BGEV training program’s infamous Cube, along with Allison and Xiù. That gave him the right kind of care in his soul. Meaning he really and truly did care, and he had no problems leading or following.

What he was struggling with was the necessary detachment.

In that, he was a lot like the Mustangs that Christian had known all throughout his long career, back when he was just a simple combat controller or whatever. They often came in full of enlisted camaraderie, and for company-grade officers that even sorta helped, sometimes…

But that could become a serious problem when you had to command men. Not simply lead them.

Command them. Discipline them. Serve as judge, jury, and executioner. Be the law for them. Officers had to be a petty king, in many ways.

And Julian wasn’t exactly arguing the point, but he was having a bit of trouble interpreting what he’d observed among them. Understandable, really: military etiquette could be subtle.

“Okay, I get it. Really. But I’ve seen you and Costello hanging out at parties and you alway seem to be getting on like old friends.”

“Yes, the same way Kevin Jenkins hangs out with Levaughn at the company Christmas party. I’m sure they have a friendly understanding. But they are not friends, and they are not peers. Me? I am awfully fond of Costello. He’s a good man. And I’m sure he’s fond of me, too. But fond is all we can be. Makin’ instant friends is prob’ly one o’ the biggest military skills there is an’ bein’ honnest, it’s a big part o’ why its such a male-heavy space, even today. But there’s diff’r’n’t kinds o’ friendship, right?”

“Right…”

“I’d die for anyone on this team. Costello would do the same, if his role didn’t prevent ‘em from doin’ that. ‘Cuz we all love each other, in a lotta ways deeper’n we love anyone else. But that love ain’t the same thing as buddies. We enlisted can do the whole band o’ brothers thing, an’ officers can have that sorta bond with their men, too. But they ain’t buddy-buddy wit’ anyone in this unit, not even each other. Me especially, ‘cuz I’m the senior NCO. I’m over th’ other men, but all th’ officers are still over me. If one of y’all lawfully orders me an’ my team ‘ta die, my job is to salute smartly, gather my men, and go die.”

Not a happy look, that. Julian nodded seriously.

“Even worse…y’all gotta be ready and willing to give that order. So you can’t be emotionally attached. We’re…in a weird way, we’re like how a prized bull might be a farmer’s pet. He takes care of ‘em, he admires ‘em, mebbe he even loves the damn thing. But he’ll still send it to the butcher when it’s time.”

“Christ.” Julian rubbed his forehead and turned a weary gaze on the stack of books on his desk that Costello had given him to read through. Study time was, in its own way, just as grueling as gym time. “I…I know all these guys, yijao? You can’t wrestle around all up in each other’s sweat and pain and not get to be friends. It’s…that’s not natural. It isn’t how people are wired!”

“‘Yer right, it is unnatural. Which is gonna be hard ‘fer you since you an’ me are the best there ever was. It’s gonna be real hard doin’ to keep that caveman gregariousness of ‘yers contained. That’s a big reason Costello prefers to box, by the way. Basically anyone on the team can fold him up in mixed sparring because aside from you, for whatever reason our officers ain’t the same grade o’ Hero-meat as the rest of us. In boxin’ though, he can more than hold his own against most everyone. He punches way above his not inconsiderable weight an’ the men respect the fuck outta that.”

“He’s got an arm like a fucking cannon,” Julian commented with no sense of irony, scratching at the back of his head in his trademark embarrassed gesture. Big fuckin’ arms on him, goddamn. A guy could tell why he was such a photogenic pretty boy by the way the huge shapes in his arm jumped at the slightest movement.

Frankly, you could tell a lot about a man from his hands and his arms. Every decent gymrat had bigass shoulders and biceps, sure. His were crazy huge too of course, about the best there were and as big as his big cro-magnon head. But it was his forearms and triceps that told the real story. They were severely well-developed and more than a match for the rest. It took more than weightlifting to build up lean, gnarly muscle like that. You could tell just by looking he was a powerful man used to long, grueling work, and his supermodel body wasn’t just for show. Crazy genetics be damned, he’d suffered for and earned everything he had. Strength like his could only be built the hard way, in the real world.

Same with his hands. Huge and broad, with thick, blunt fingers. So calloused he could crush glass or obsidian in his hands without any worry, or maybe even smash a knife. Thick wrists that only looked slim next to the writhing sinewy mass of his forearms. His fists were not only dangerous, they had already taken a man’s life back in Canada. He’d been a far smaller man at the time too, so now…

Probably better remind him of that.

“Sir, you punch so much harder and faster than him it’s legit dangerous. You punch way above your weight too, and considerin’ ‘yer weight that’s a hell of a thing to say. S’why I ain’t lettin’ you box with most o’ the team. You’d honestly kill a guy like Sikes or even Titan if you let ‘yerself off the chain. And it’s worth mentioning that you take full-power hits from Costello with barely a grunt. He’s been known to lay out men a lot bigger than him, but you barely notice. Get some experience under your belt and you’ll be untouchable by anyone but me.”

He watched the way Julian’s face moved; it didn’t. The word sir produced an interesting tell, in that it made him lock down some. He wanted a word like ‘dude’ or some other informality, and being called ‘sir’ obviously didn’t sit right with him.

Bad habit, that.

“So, yeah. You’re used to being one of the Lads. And I get it. You can hang with them, fuck you can straight-up dominate any of ‘em but me. You’ve got that brotherly bond. But now you’ve got to get some distance. And yeah, this right here is part of why you’re only a reservist. We know it ain’t easy. For any of us, but you especially.”

“…Do you have any idea what being alone for six years is like?” Julian asked after a moment.

Oh, fuck that. Gotta nip that victimhood right in the bud.

“No, but I do know what running around naked and alone for a month straight in pacific winter Washington state is like, while being actively hunted by training cadre who will absolutely push your shit in until you’re hospitalized. I also know what waterboarding feels like, what solitary confinement feels like. I’ve done some pretty crazy missions over the years, and I’m an OG member of HEAT. I’ve had a pretty good taste of an awful lot of shit. So no, sir. Here I am. I got over myself. Don’t pull that with me.”

“….Jeez, put me in my place…”

Firth couldn’t help but laugh-sigh. “Because you needed it, sir. And who the fuck beat all the swear outta you?! How fuckin’ Minnesota can you be?”

He switched into the lilting sort of brogue unique to Minnesota natives. “Well, I haven’t force-fed you any tuna noodle haht-dish yet, or taken you to the Lutheran potluck. Or ran over your dog, ope.”

“…Shit, I should get a dog,” Firth realized.

“I just borrow Dingus off Adam. But I s’pose I can’t anymore, huh?”

“…I dunno, is he under your command?”

“…No? We’re not sure yet. Part of that whole big cloud of ‘we-don’t-know-how-this-works-yet’ that sort of hangs over everything.”

Firth grumbled. Annoying.

“But yes, you should get a dog. Dogs. Big dogs! I heard Doofus had a litter with Smart-Ass over in Franklin. Those should be Sufficiently Durable Pets for your clan.”

“Mebbe I will. And call the dog somethin’ normal like Bear or Tyson.”

“Nah. Go full Lad. Name it Swollforce or Broseidon or something!”

Firth laughed, but…right.

“I’ll take that under advisement, sir.” He still smiled, but maybe what Julian needed was some…nudge. Yeah. Just enforce the distance a little bit more than he would otherwise.

He seemed to get the message.

“Right. Fuck. This is going to be my cross to bear, isn’t it?”

“Probably. You can shoulder-press fuckin’ cars like they were a sack of flour, toss my infamously capable men around like they wuz little children…but buildin’ up a bit o’ formal distance is prob’ly the hardest thing you’ll do. We don’t pick our battles.”

Playboy nodded firmly. “Right.”

“But I sincerely hope you can manage it, sir. I can tell you, you don’t often find a relationship as tight, and as loving, yet as professional as what we’ve got. You’ll be the best of us, if you can build up the right character of leadership. It’s all mind and heart for you. The rest is cake.”

Etsicitty just nodded thoughtfully, then picked up a book, opened it to the bookmark, and got back to his studies.

Well. No. he’d been at it for hours. Firth gently reached over and took his tablet away.

“…And you won’t build that up frying your brain. You need to go punch something. So c’mon. I heard Hunter talk some shit, so if I might make a recommendation, sir…”

Julian grinned, “You don’t need to tell me twice. Uh…thanks, sergeant.”

“Jus’ doin’ my job, sir. Now git. His big dumb face needs uglifying somethin’ fierce.”

Julian’s grin went predatory now, and he stood, flowing gracefully to his feet. Even after all these years, Firth had never got used to that in any of the Lads, least of all himself. It was probably the most unnerving thing about them all, honestly. Their physical grace.

Which made their power that much more devastating, really. And all the rest of it, too. Firth understood Julian pretty damn well, because in a lot of ways, Julian was a lot like him. Or as Costello had put it, Julian would easily be Peak Human if Singularity hadn’t caused Firth to happen. He was a walking, talking answer to the question, “what does too far look like?”

That wasn’t ego, either. He had word from emperor Gilgamesh himself. He’d told Firth the whole story, in private, with profuse apologies and an offer to effect justice, if he wanted. Not even the god-king himself had known the full details of what his minions had been up to.

Fuck, it was a tempting offer. His whole family had been snared in this, Freya’s whole family, too. Going back centuries. Further! Same deal as Julian’s history but the Corti had gone much, much farther. Julian and Alex were what human beings had within them, if it was pushed as far could go, focused to a razor’s edge and polished to perfection. Freya and Firth…they were something more.

He’d only ever told her the full details, and they’d only ever talked it over with Daar himself. Who else would understand? Nobody else knew, but really…of course they did.

Christian Firth was so far ahead of everyone else at this point, there was no hiding it. He understood Julian perfectly because he was Julian, just pushed much, much further in every way a man could be pushed. Nobody would come out and say it, but he knew. Freya knew. They were alone. No human or ten’gewek would ever remotely touch them. Daar had to exert himself slightly against him, which, if you knew what the big fucker could really do…

Christian was a singular monster. So many little details added up to make him a very different creature than everyone else. And honestly…it kinda fuckin’ sucked.

But what point would justice serve at this point? None. Singularity might have made him into maybe a different subspecies of man, but…what then? They couldn’t exactly make him normal. And why would he want to be normal? If he was gonna be a freak, bein’ the best wasn’t a bad reward, right? And hadn’t he had to build up into what he was anyway? That’s what he’d told Daar after all, when he’d started on his own freak-of-nature journey…

He shook his head. No time now to ponder. Christian had other senior NCO shit to do, and that included his daily meeting with Costello. He knocked on the door and—

Actually, didn’t have to wedge himself through sideways for a change. Shit, that was nice. Having a base that was actually built to handle them, unlike the pokey narrow improvised hallways back at Sharman and the regular-people-sized doors.

“Afternoon, boss.”

“Afternoon,” Costello was typing something. “Give me just a minute. Have a seat.”

Firth took the proffered chair, again marveling that it took his weight without complaint and that he wasn’t spilling over the sides of it or whatever. ‘Course, it was basically a hunnerd-kilo angular kitbash of welding-practice metal, so it’d damn well better…

Costello had that little fun flourish he did when he hit ‘send.’ The one that said he was done with some bullshit, and glad to be rid of it.

“Sendin’ something particularly acid, sir?”

“Oh, it’s fuckin’ corrosive. I’mma bout ready to shove several fuckin’ pineapples right up Fleet Command’s pissholes.”

“I’ve met some of them, they’d prolly enjoy it.”

“Mosta them are gaoian, so I don’t know what you’re into these days…”

“You shut your whore mouth, sir. Respectfully.”

“Respectfully.” He nodded with a grin. “You’re still a good Christian Christian, I hear.”

“Well, yeah. I’ve got enough family. Anyhoo. Julian’s comin’ along nice. Ahead of the reading plan.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. He was under ambassador Rockefeller’s wing for a good few years there, daresay he’s already read half of it before he ever got here…how’d your talk go?”

“In his words, it’ll be his cross to bear. I think he’ll manage. Also, you’ll be amused to learn he had no idea he’s a better boxer than you.”

“Ah, that doesn’t surprise me either,” Costello chuckled. “He’s physically basically perfect, like you but smaller. He just needs experience. Which means I’ll need to pick my fights carefully.”

“Yessir. He’s beating on Hunter at the moment. So…intel?” He didn’t see analyst Miller anywhere…

“Just had the brief. Sorry, he had to run or I’d have kept him. He’s got other Millers to attend to.”

“Of course.”

“The big delay right now is we’re still waiting to hear back from the Turkeyholic and JETS-four. Mission schedule is they should have arrived sometime around about now.”

“Kinda waiting I hate. What about Stray Fortune?”

“Asset re-jiggery, I don’t know the details of course. I do know they’ll be swinging back to pick up the team very soon. ‘Horse and friends got sent on a quiet little mission.”

“Oof.”

He’d hate to be on the wrong end of his wrath. Him or Hoeff. Chimp was his callsign for more reasons than his climbing ability, when he’d been metabolically stuck on little-guy mode.

He was mean like a chimp, too. Angry and brutal. Warhorse and Chimp made for a hell of a combination. Add in the rest of Ian’s old team…

“Can’t be much house cleaning left to do, is there?”

“There’s a few who hopped on interstellar transports, got jobs on cargo ships or whatever. It’ll get sorted out. There’s nothing new that’s really relevant to us, yet. Just…waiting.”

“And training.”

“And waiting to train.”

“And training to wait,” Firth finished the ancient joke. He knew the situation they were in, knew good and damn well they had a lot of known unknowns to resolve before they moved on the prime node and put the plan into motion. What kinda defenses might they face? Just how hard did you have to poke the Hierarchy to make them instantiate One? Just what tricks did the bad guys have up their sleeves that they’d never showed yet?

And what was the good guys’ backup plan? The JETS were quietly the most important part of this whole thing. They’d spent now years exploring and mapping out Hierarchy worlds. Now that Singularity was…well, an independent agency? They’d formed a sort of unified super-government under the new Constitution. Daar, Gilgamesh, and the Entity were each Counsels, in addition to their existing titles and so forth. They were each sovereign over their bit of the whole mess, and collectively sovereign over all of it. Daar, being the biggestest and with the mostest of everythingest, had veto power all by himself, and the other two had it together with either of the others. King Alex, Yan, and the e-skurel-ir, as Colleagues, had the same powers to vote but could not initiate proposals.

So far, they’d all shown a lot of restraint, and the new politics of this big mess was only getting started. To that end, Singularity was now…what? A hidden-village-ninja-agency? Slash breeding program? Slash intel collective? That had an emperor, and a subordinate kingdom under king Alex?

Wisely, the constitution for the United Peoples had nothing at all to say about anyone’s internal structure beyond a basic and, if needed, enforceable charter of rights. Singularity could remain a usefully weird singularity of weird.

And the Entity could remain whatever the fuck.

Rewind. The point was, among its many abilities, Singularity had some seriously capable operatives that sat in some middle ground between HEAT and JETS. They’d only just started integration training in earnest (as opposed to just throwing everyone together in an emergency, like when they killed the Alpha of Alphas), but so far things had gone pretty well. Alex had grown up into a king by any definition of the word, and whenever he visited on a cross-training exercise, it was fun to watch him and Julian wipe the floor with everyone else on the team.

Well, not Firth, of course. Those were fun workouts. Somebody had to keep the two in line!

And they had knowledge. They’d been watching the Hierarchy for ten thousand fuckin’ years, and learned a lot, and the only reason all the stuff the JETS were poking at now needed poking at was because Singularity hadn’t wanted to tip their hand too early. But if Firth’s guess was accurate, the intel community’s picture of the Hierarchy, the Igraen Hegemony, and all of it, was a lot more complete than anyone would admit.

And each mission closed a gap. Maybe even revealed a previously unknown unknown. But that was the thing: until the picture was satisfactory, all they could do was prepare. Because this was a one-time-only, one-chance-to-get-it-right deal. If they fucked up, that was it.

He could handle waiting for the trigger-pull, therefore. Even if he was gettin’ fuckin’ itchy.

Well, may as well get business out of the way. Paperwork, compare notes, do the usual administrivia, and by the time all that was done with the end of the work day was looming. He wasn’t going home tonight. Much as he wished he could, he needed to be on Akyawentuo rather than Cimbrean all week…

Well, according to the monkey grapevine, the new church was built. Maybe he’d attend, get some things off his chest, meet the new Padre. It sure as shit sounded better than moping around the base all evening.

Yeah.

He traded “good evenings” with Costello, changed into what passed as modest wear on this sweltering armpit of a jungle-world, and clocked out. New Alexandria was still a half-built kind of town, lotsa prefabs and, well, quickly-built amenities. It looked more like a construction site than a settlement, but from the right angle you could see it taking shape. Firth’s mind’s eye could look forward to the town that would be.

It wasn’t gonna be as nice as Folctha, he reckoned. Folctha had been planned right from the start to have pretty parks and plazas and stuff and to basically be as nice as possible. New Alexandria was built to pack in the maximum of people in for the minimum resource expense. Give it a couple hundred years for expansion and reconstruction and maybe it’d be different, but here and now it was gonna be a dense knot of humanity on an alien planet that only a select few could even handle.

It had to handle ten’gewek too, a people so ridiculously capable in every damn way, their only actual weakness was their inability to handle cold. Building a town that could handle them and all their instincts to climb, crush, jump and hoot…

Dense, solid, and cheap. That was New Alexandria, for now.

But among the first things to appear in any town were the places of worship. Right now, the Church of the Immaculate Conception was basic and modest. But it was still there, ready to receive him. It lived right next to the edge of the ten’gewek’s jungle, so actually on the edge of town, not in its growing center. That seemed an odd placement unless you knew some Catholic insider knowledge.

It wasn’t a parish church. It was a missionary church, in this case run by the Jesuits. Well, Jesuit for now, apparently. Anyway. A church was always placed in the middle of its intended congregation.

And the Padre apparently intended his flock would be more than a few Christian escapees.

All the more reason to meet him, Christian decided. He didn’t have a problem spreading the Good News, but at the same time…well, he liked the cavemonkeys. They were good in their own way. And maybe he felt a bit protective of them. Or something.

Or maybe he just wanted an excuse to go for a jog.

Good enough. He swung by the gym, grabbed his heaviest training vest, and went for a run.

Starship Turkeyholic, Hierarchy reserve power archive, deep space

Gumi, Brother of Clan One-Fang

The hardest part about landing on the power archive had been finding a spot that was, for starters, neither out in the blazing open on the planet’s starward side, nor too far around to the perpetual night side, and simultaneously large enough, clear enough, flat enough, and concealed enough for the ship to set down.

Landing on the terminator of a tidally locked world was easy. What made it so otherwise difficult was the…technology that covered the landscape like a silvery ecosystem. Gumi didn’t know exactly what crushing any of it might provoke, but he wasn’t interested in finding out.

There were trees out there.

Of a sort. If trees were made of metal and had perfectly uniform hexagonal cross-sections at every level from trunk to twig. And grew at regular intervals, as much as the vagaries of the landscape would let them.

There, at least, the planet worked to the scouts’ advantage. Airless, tiny, low-gravity planets did landscape in an especially dramatic way thanks to their complete vulnerability to meteor strikes, and complete lack of any erosive atmospheric or tectonic action to wear the resulting craters smooth again. So Gumi was able, after a few minutes of searching, to find a bald spot on the inside rim of a large crater that was just about level enough for the ship to land.

Just about. The landing systems beeped worriedly at him as they settled on quite a steep slope, and when he turned the grav plating off…well, it was a good thing all the cupboards were locked closed. As it was, he was going to have to be careful getting stuff out for the duration of this mission, or else it’d fall on his head.

At least it’d fall gently. The gravity was pitiful.

Skoob made a disapproving hoot as he bounced experimentally. “Feels like nothing holding me down at all. Weak world.”

“Stronger than it should be, though,” Gumi noted as he settled the ship into silent standby mode. “It’s a good, oh…five percent stronger than you’d expect for a planet this small of this type.”

“Weird.”

“Not unexpected, though. If Big H really are growing a tame black hole deep in the core…”

Skoob shrugged. “Stronger than should be or not, is still…very little. Will have to be careful not to jump and never come down!”

Gumi debated whether to point out that even Skoob’s best probably wouldn’t come close to reaching escape velocity, but decided against it. “Yup,” he said instead.

Well…time to get on with it.

“Alright,” he declared as the last of the systems transited into minimal-emissions mode. “We’re all powered down, ship’s as invisible as it’s ever going to get…over to you.”

“Yup,” Karlsson nodded. “Alright. Foot survey. Let’s have a look at those trees…”

They cycled through the airlock and climbed out in pairs, moving slowly and cautiously in the vacuum and tiny gravity, and fanned out to inspect the immediate area around the ship. It didn’t take them long to find something. Gumi watched out the window as Karlsson stooped and brushed some regolith aside with his gloved fingers.

A moment later, his voice came through clear on the net. “MYSTERY MACHINE, FRED. Seems that bank you’re parked on isn’t as free of the…flora…as we thought. There’s little silvery tendrils all through this stuff, like roots.”

“Roger, FREDDIE. Check under the landing gear to be sure, please?”

Karlsson disappeared out of sight under the ship. A few seconds later…

“Confirmed. Roots under the wheels.”

Damn. Well…hopefully there was no sensory component to the technological growths. Still, Gumi felt his hackles rising.

The team moved on to photography, taking pictures of the “trees” from every angle. They surveyed, taking the average distance from trunk to trunk. They climbed to the rim of the crater and took a good look at the view, taking in the fact that everywhere the things even could grow was covered in them. The whole world was carpeted in a dense, sharp, angular, silvery forest.

They retreated into the ship to discuss their next move.

“Fuck, I’m stumped,” Pearson shook his head. “It’s like…okay. So we got a metal forest. Now what?”

“Is there anything on this rock that isn’t….that?” Brother Jaal waved his paw outward.

“Not that I saw on sensors. We could always take off and do an orbit?” Gumi suggested.

“Risks?” Karlsson asked.

“Takeoff is always the highest-signature moment for a Turkey-class. We’d be quite visible, and just as visible if we jumped up to orbit. Much more so than we were on coasting approach and de-orbit burn.”

“Meaning it would be lower risk to just hoof it in a more or less straight line, see what we can see, and come back when Skoob’s air supply dictates it.”

Always a bit of a hang-up, that. Skoob, being literally half the team’s mass, also breathed in significantly more than half the team’s oxygen, because of his innately high-performance body and higher metabolism. His liquid air tanks were therefore quite a bit bigger. JETS weren’t optimized for vacuum work, after all.

And he was both their pack mule and heavy weapons guy, so there wasn’t any leaving him behind if they could avoid it.

“Perhaps things get more interesting the deeper into the ‘forest’ we go?” Jaal ventured.

“It seems like the best plan we have,” Riigu agreed.

Karlsson bobbled his head thoughtfully, then nodded. “Alright. We go as far as our air will let us, come back…if we find nothing, we return to orbit and do a complete ground mapping. If that turns up anything provoking a response, we investigate, otherwise we withdraw and let the analysts chew over what we found.” There were nods and murmurs of agreement. “Alright. Refill your tanks, eat, drink, shit….we’ve got a hike ahead of us.”

Twenty minutes later they were back out through the airlock. Gumi watched them trudge away down the slope and into the metallic “forest” below, striking out toward the very middle of the crater. He had his doubts they’d find anything different…but they’d be remiss if they didn’t try.

For his part, he returned to the ship’s command seat and kept watch.

He wasn’t going to relax until they were all safely away from this place.

Church of the Immaculate Conception, New Alexandria, planet Akyawentuo

Father Michael Paternostro, SJ

The first and most important thing to do was to respect the children of God. All His children, in whatever setting they might be found. Having been relocated off Earth, the Church had taken as its renewed mission the goal of spreading the Good News as far and as wide as possible.

But they would not repeat the mistakes of centuries past. They’d learn from the great successes, fight against the grave errors. And so, here was Father Michael, living his Witness among the most fascinating people he’d ever imagined. A people new to the art of civilization, who were so much more than your average human being it was a challenge and a delight just to be among them. They asked questions! Good, piercing, thoughtful questions. They tussled and wrestled and insisted on stuffing you full of food, and considered taking naps tightly tangled up together (which they did often) as the friendliest, most innocent of gestures. Once they’d learned he was celibate, they respected that thoroughly, though maybe not without some teasing; his mere existence was something they found endlessly fascinating. They kept their distance but always wanted to explore the church they’d built, learn the sacrifice of the Mass…

He had no doubt some new and wonderful witness of Christ was on the verge of being born. Now was the time to tread very carefully. He wanted to share the Good News, not corrupt a magnificent people. All that was good was of God, after all. It was their place to discern what was good and nurture it into full flower. Doing so was a supreme balancing act.

One that some humans were outright hostile to, even here on this fierce, hostile world. To be fair…Michael understood. The past could be painful, and there were many who saw his cassock and collar not as a symbol of something beautiful, but oppressive and evil. Lord, have mercy. So much misunderstood history. So much that was terrible was glossed over, much that was good made into crimes. So much misunderstanding.

All he could do was bear witness.

And wait for his staff to arrive. That, too. It turned out that the intersection of “faithful parish staff” and “top-tier fit” was a very small group of people indeed, and finding recruits was proving difficult. Oh well, there were a few who seemed promising, and a couple on the construction crews who had come to faith, while he was here…

Every day was a struggle. The temperatures were dangerously high, even in the dead of night. The humidity was oppressive. The air was so thick and so heavy with oxygen, it could make a man dizzy. The gravity was well north of one-point-two gee, the wildlife either cautious or aggressive, yet always dangerous. Venomous critters were once thought to be rare, but it turned out that wasn’t true at all; the ten’gewek were simply immune to most venoms, assuming the critter could bite through their skin in the first place. It was supple like well-worn leather, yet so tough that took an exceedingly sharp edge to cut at all.

He knew this because ten’gewek loved hugs, and who was he to say no? It was a good thing he’d kept up with sport, because here was a world where five-foot-three, three-hundred kilo young men with boulder-crushingly strong tails and their impressively well-matched women would jump up and wrap themselves around the object of their affection as a matter of course. Being tackled to the ground was just a particularly fond hello.

And of course, mature adults could be vastly heavier and more powerful. Fortunately, they tended to have a good deal more restraint. Not Vemik or his Singer of course, but…

The little children were his favorite, though. They were bold! And climbers. Climbers who liked to bring him fruit from literally hundreds of meters up in the giant ketta! And somehow, they all respected his cassock, so if he was willing to suffer under full-length fabric (though cunningly engineered with built-in cooling, these days) he could get a little peace.

At the moment though, he had a more traditional concern. Milling about the chapel (wearing the locally preferred almost-missing running shorts, natch) was without question the most colossal and hulkingly muscular mountain of a man Michael had ever seen or even imagined could be. He was broad and thick from head to toe like a human version of Yan maybe, despite his towering height; easily seven feet, maybe closer to eight?! Too tall to honestly tell, and he was such a compellingly animal three-dimensional artwork of a man, it was hard to look away.

He must have heard Michael appear, because he turned around and squared up, gave a friendly grin, and sort of sauntered over on legs so big he had to swing them around each other with every thudding step. He was, if anything, even more impressive from the front. So, feeling more than a bit intimidated, Michael did what a priest was supposed to do. He approached, noting to himself how his own shoulders were quite a bit narrower than merely this man’s chest. He boggled at it all for a moment—this mountain of a man seemed used to that. So perhaps a bit ridiculously, he cracked a grin and asked, “is there something I can help you with, my son?”

The giant looked down, puzzled at him for a moment, then broke out in a friendly-seeming grin. “I dunno, padre. How you doin’? An’ in a cassock?”

“Tropical white! Also, it has air conditioning.”

“…Okay, that’s clever.”

“I have Brother Roberts to thank for the idea. Father Michael,” he held out his hand.

A…paw reached out, so big it swallowed up his entire hand, his wrist, and much of his lower forearm, and very carefully did not grind his own to powder. It was a paw built in proportion to the rest of the giant’s own forearm, too. A forearm too exaggerated and extreme to believe.

And so went the rest of him, head to toe.

“Uh…callsign’s Righteous. Don’t, uh, read too much into that.”

“I bet there’s a story behind it, though.”

“Not exactly one I’m too proud of, yeah. Look. Don’t take this in any way as disrespect, padre. But how old do you think I am?”

Michael considered that carefully. This ‘Righteous’ character had a remarkably young and handsome face, quite unburdened with more than the faintest of worry lines. But he was extremely heavy-jawed in a way young men weren’t, had strong, well-trained stubble, and his ice-blue eyes had that complex quality you found in older people, without seeming dimmed.

“…Oh….mid thirties?” he hazarded.

“Most people would look at this mug o’ mine and guessed much younger, usually early twennies or less. But no. I’m sixty-two.”

“…You know, I hope I look that good at that age.”

“Heh.” There wasn’t much humor in his voice. “You’d need to put yourself on advanced alien pharmacology and live a life of experimental super-science. And, y’know. Endless training.”

“Ah. I think I know the color of your worries, now. Shall we sit?” He gestured toward one of the large pews.

Righteous instead nodded, folded himself down and sat cross-legged on the floor. A remarkable study of a lot of man in a surprisingly small space, especially considering the girth of his legs…

“That could have withstood you. It was built to take anything the ten’gewek might test it with.”

“I am much heavier than any ten’gewek, padre. You wouldn’t believe me if I said by how much.”

“Even Yan?”

“You know him? Well of course you do…yeah. I’m much heavier’n even him. To the point he has trouble even pickin’ me up. So let’s just…not test ‘yer shiny new seats.”

Okay, fair enough. The floor was nice and clean anyway, so Michael did the same.

“Pretty neat trick, that. That cassock can’t have made that easy.”

“You’d be surprised. It keeps the sun off, it lets me run…”

“What,” Righteous laughed, “izzat some kinda sports cassock?”

“Nah. The trick is to spend what little pennies I have on a good one. Anyway. I can’t claim to be very old, but I certainly know a troubled man when I see one. I have some time right now.”

Righteous looked unconvinced, but Michael gave him a grin and a raised eyebrow, inviting him to try. That seemed to be enough.

“Alright, why not? So…start at the beginning. You know what I am, right?”

“You are HEAT,” Michael said, simply. “The details I suspect are mostly secondary.”

“Mostly, yeah. But not completely. I’m a HEAT operator, yeah. Obviously. Prior to that I was caught up in all the elite-tier sorta stuff. Before that I was just…this absolute, total and complete freak growin’ up, right?”

“One of the Heroes.”

“Apparently the best hero. Mebbe alongside a couple others, and they’re all my friends. Anyway. I’ve always been the best at whatever I tried, right? Sorta…grew up that way. Din’t have to even try. I just was. Then fast forward years an’ years, I join the HEAT, and this, what? Five-foot-seven tank of a mexican at the time? Goes by Warhorse.”

“Wait, him? Wasn’t he Left Beef on the old news clips? Then…he got taller? Somehow?”

Probably showing his youth there, but whatever. Righteous laughed heartily.

“Yup, that’s him! He’s grown since, compliment o’ the Crude. Well, also ‘cuz of his own insane determination too, ‘cuz we’re not on-team together for very long and suddenly he’s showin’ me up. Big time. I fall behind for the first time ever, then…the weirdest thing, right? I start enjoying the competition. It gets fierce, and I prob’ly don’t gotta say, but things at that level can be a kind o’ fierce ‘ya might not imagine were even possible.”

Michael nodded. “High stakes, access to the most advanced sports medicine and all that…”

Understandable. He’d been tempted by some of that in his own young athletic career. Tempted, but never succumbed. Wouldn’t have been right for football and baseball. He wasn’t so certain about situations like this, but…seemed like a devil’s deal, either way.

Righteous must have perceived his general thinking. “Most people are sorta weirded out by all that. They think it’s sinful.”

“Do you think it is?”

“Depends on the purpose, I think. S’long as you ain’t cheatin’ good people or ruinin’ other people’s lives…”

Well, fair enough. “Would you have done any of this, barring your career?”

“Prob’ly not. I, uh…I really din’t need it. They banned me from most sports in middle school.”

“Wow!” Michael laughed, “okay, so you’ve got purpose, and some ego too…”

“Er, um…”

“But that’s not itself a sin. Having just met you…seems like you have considered reasons for doing all this. You’re not in any competitive sport or anything like that, I presume…?”

“Not unless you consider competition among the Lads—uh, that’s my fellows on the team.”

“Well, barring a definitive teaching on this…Intent and consequence are really what matters. Moderation in all things, yijao?”

Righteous titles his head. “…Can you honestly look at me and think moderation? I mean…”

All he had to do was close his fist to make his point. The man seemed like he had more muscle in one forearm than Michael had in his entire body.

He shook his head in amazement. “Well…fair. But moderation can have different meanings. You are as you are because presumably that is needed for your work. Which…fair enough. I’m not smart enough to really know what dangers and evils you protect us from. You or your brothers. But I do know there’s possibly an immortality on offer with all this…am I right?”

Righteous squirmed a bit uncomfortably. “…Yeah. I’ve got the body to prove it, and I’ll be this way for…basically as long as I want.”

“Do you intend to live forever?”

“What? Oh, God no. Sarry,” he looked up quickly, and grumbled to himself. “But I don’t think I’ll, uh, not take advantage. It’s gonna be a while to do this thing anyway.”

“That speaks to a powerful worldly attachment.”

“Yes, but it also means less people gotta be like me. Ain’t that a good thing?”

“It might be. Hard to say. Why should you take on such a burden? But you didn’t answer my question, really. How long do you hope to live like this?”

Righteous gave him a thoughtful look. “…Honestly, I think we get this big thing done, I’ll be happy to let go. Even letting go is gonna take me literally hunnerds o’ years though, by the nature of the medicine. My body makes it all by itself now, and it won’t even begin to fade for…a really long damn time.”

“I thought it was a gut bacteria thing.”

“Yeah, but the version I’m on lives in my endocrine system too. Sorta. It’s…really specifically a supersoldier thing, and almost nobody could handle it, I guess? Look, I’m not smart enough to really say. But a bad case of the runs won’t stop this for me. It’ll come right back. You’d need to, like, kill off my gut biome, rip out my thyroid, do some brain surgery, cut my nuts off…”

“So,” Micahel grinned, “No take-backs, then.”

“Naw, I like my balls!”

“As HEAT is well-known for.”

“Of course! Also I like the rest of my glands in one piece, too.”

“And your brain, presumably?”

“Meh. Overrated.”

“Right.” Michael chuckled, and thought for a moment. “Well…I suppose, in this mostly uncharted territory, we’ll just need to play it by ear, huh? Moderation—and by that I mean in intent, not application. Detachment, care for others…that’s the important bit. Listen to God in all you do. I think the reasons you do this matter much more in this case than some of the consequences. You will live an extremely long life. Perhaps that is your reward, and perhaps it is also your cross. So long as, say, cheating death isn’t your motivating reason…”

Righteous nodded. “Right. Thanks, Padre. But, uh…back to my story, if you don’t mind.”

“Right.”

“So…Warhorse. Competition.” He took a moment to get back on track. “So I start learning how to actually train instead of just being automatically awesome, right? Gotta undo decades of bad ideas. Gotta repair decades of wear an’ tear on my body, too. Crude—the Cruezzir—it works its magic over some years, turns back the age clock. S’why I look so young, biologically speakin’ I’m something mebbe nineteen or a bit older nowadays. It’s all much stronger an effect with the permanent version I’m on, too. Anyway, I get all fixed up and all that finally starts bearing fruit some years ago, I start catching up in a big way, then I’m about to earn the spot away…and Warhorse ends up being a Big Damn Hero.”

“Earned a medal of honor too, as I recall.” It was all over the news.

“Yeah. And a medical discharge.”

Okay. He could read between the lines. “And while he was convalescing, you shot ahead, and maybe feel a bit guilty for it?”

“A little, yeah. But that was at his insistence too. He wouldn’t let anyone slow down on his account. He’s all about seeing just how far excellence can go, human or gaoian or otherwise. Or now cavemonkey with Yan now, I guess, he’s gonna be the first one.”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “Really? I’d have thought…well, that puts them in a different light.”

“Don’t it just? Vemik is all natural. And for the moment so still is Yan. So are all of them.”

“…God can truly work wonders.”

“Well…” Righteous shrugged. “Yeah. I’d say evolution is the guilty party in their case, but…”

“Who said the two were any different? Anyway, I keep derailing your story.”

Righteous gave him a smile. “Right. Anyway! You’re right, I’ve got a big ego, always have. I mean…look at me! I’m proud of my body an’ what I can do with it. Proud of all the work I’ve put into it. So there’s a little guilt, but not much, ‘cuz…well, I wanted to see where my limits really are. And that’s when I discovered the answer. The answer, apparently…is yes.”

“…Yes?”

“Yes. I’ve not found them. I just keep getting better. I can say without any ego whatsoever than I’m faster, stronger, quicker, an’ tougher’n anyone and it’s a bit of a mind-fuck when I think on how much I am ahead of fuckin’ everyone. If it’s somethin’ athletic there ain’t nothin’ I ain’t the best at. The gap between me and any other human being, even the other guys on the team…fuck!”

“Which is saying something,” he noted. “And is this true across species?”

“Yeah, even against gaoian or ten’gewek! I mean honestly? I don’t think even Yan’s ever gon’ come close, ‘cuz I’m built bigger an’ he’s over a foot shorter. Only one better’n me is Daar himself and he don’t count ‘cuz he’s literally made ‘fer all this and, y’know, he’s a talking dire bear. Fuck. Makes the idea of a dire bear seem puny! Dude’s a furry dinosaur, but if he were shrunk down ‘ta my size, it’d be pretty hard to know who’d be the better monster, I bet. I’m just a much smaller human version o’ him, really. An’ all that means, what I am is straight fuckin’ ridiculous. Sarry,” he added quickly, which Michael waved off.

“And now you’re here, on Akyawentuo.”

“Best place for us. Politics an’ stuff.” Righteous sighed. “…I get to see my fam’ly on weekends.”

Ah. Another worry.

“You miss them,” he stated rhetorically.

“Yeah. I’ve got…a mix. My own kids, two girls we adopted—Lord, that was a mess.”

“What happened?”

“We had…some work to do on Earth. A bit before the war. Some militia turned straight evil, killed a buncha folks, kidnapped the children…we rescued two of the kids. Just two.” Righteous paused, sadly. “…After, I thought, there was no way I could leave ‘em there. So I went back, adopted the one who had nowhere else ‘ta go, and this other girl she’d kinda bonded with, and took in as many of the other kids from that shelter as I could find room for. There were…a lot more we didn’t have room for, yet. And then the war happened and the, uh…the ones we left behind didn’t make it. The shelter took a direct hit. And now I’m here, a long way from them, I don’t barely get ‘ta see them an’ help them through it…”

Michael nodded. Each word of that summary seemed to gnaw at the big man as he spoke it. But he didn’t interrupt. Righteous cleared his throat and looked up toward the ceiling. “But I gotta be here, ‘cuz I’m the very best there is, now,” he said. “Ain’t nobody else can do what I can and…that’s gonna be important. So I got a duty, yijao?”

“And you feel pulled in two directions by two different duties?”

“Not…really? I mean, I feel bad about not bein’ around as much for my kids, especially the girls, but I gotta think of the bigger picture, don’t I? So I ain’t torn over it, I just…” He paused, chewing over his thoughts. “…My wife’s of the Line, too. She’s basically, like…honestly if she were on the team she’d be one of the best. She’s that good. And that’s got us worried, too. Because we met by an introduction.”

Lots implied, there.

“But at the same time, she’s about the only person around I feel like I’m the company of a peer with, y’know? Like, things are the way they’re meant to be.”

“Because you’re at the point where other people are accidentally breakable.”

“…Yeah.” he shrugged. “Even Yan Given-Man ain’t quite…it’s not just that I’m way out in front of him and always will be unless I slow down. Some day. Maybe. It’s that when I tried to talk about this with him, he was no help at all. To a ten’gewek, strength is good. And I don’t mean strength is a good thing. I mean strength equals good with them, you know?”

“And you feel, in part, you need to live up to that when you’re around them.”

“That and, y’know. I don’t think a human’s really made to stand so far out ahead. Being the best is nice, ‘fer a while. But it’s fuckin’ lonely, and Yan….he jus’ looked at me like I was bein’ weird. He didn’t get it at all.”

“I have talked with him. You must be the man he admired so much.”

The big man chuckled. “I dunno if that helps me any, Padre.”

“Well, maybe it should. He sees you as a goal, you know. The impression I get from him is utter confidence that one day he’ll be at least your match. As an aside…you and your entire circle are all fiercely competitive, I gather. Has it always been like that?”

“…Yeah. I mean, we are pretty stereotypical I guess. We’re all big meatheads, we’re all big jock types and type-A personalities. All completely obsessive over all this, every little detail of everything. But we’re also a team. We’re the way we are because it pushes us to be better.”

“And there’s no point where you’re ever good enough.”

“No. Not any of us. The enemy can just keep making more and better…everything.”

“Right. So, if I can summarize?”

The big man nodded.

“Leaving all the details aside, you have found yourself in a position of singular excellence where before you had competition. Before that, you were a younger man who just skated by on his own ability. I’m guessing back then, the stakes were not so high.”

“…No, I suppose not.”

“So, now that you have found yourself atop this mountain, to use an analogy, maybe you want to reach down and help your fellow climbers…but you’re too far ahead.”

“…Maybe?”

“Well, we’re human beings, right? We’re meant for teamwork. Specifically, we’re meant to be on a team of peers. Ten’gewek are all about individual prowess. They’re all warriors who happen to get along with each other very well. Gaoians are pack animals, meaning no insult. To have an alpha is natural for them. You get what I’m saying?”

“…I think I do, yeah.”

“So what I might suggest then, is that God has a special plan for you. He does for all of us, of course. We are all His children. But some of us are called to special purpose. There is nothing wrong with that, my giant friend! You are made for excellence, and your cross to bear may well be that excellence itself.” He grinned, as a thought occurred, “He has a sense of humor, too. I can’t imagine getting through daily life is easy for a man your size!”

“Ha! Well…gettin’ easier. Everything here on Akyawentuo’s pretty accommodating. But not usually, no. Can’t ride in a truck when ‘yer heavier’n the truck!”

“…Dang.”

“Right? Anyway…okay. I think…it helps to talk it out. You’re sayin’ a lotta the same things our unit psych says.” He shrugged, “mandatory regular evals.”

“Not surprising. It always helps to talk. But let me go one step further, if you don’t mind. You have this big family. Kids of your own, adopted kids, rescued kids…I’m assuming you and your wife were, uh, good Catholics?”

Righteous snorted. “Yeah. We hit number seven and then started on NFP religiously. Truth be told we’d be happy with even more, but…I’m not made o’ infinite money. Or bedrooms!”

Michael nodded, understandingly. “Lots of kids you’re protecting, and not all your own from what you’ve said. A team, too. Lots and lots of Big Dad Energy right there.”

Righteous chuckled, then looked thoughtful. “Yeah. I guess that’s it. I mean, I know I don’t look my age, but…I feel it, sometimes. I’m startin’ to feel like…I’ve proved everything I wanted ‘to prove. So, now what I really want from life is family.”

“You already have it,” he said automatically, without thinking. The Spirit had its ways.

“Yeah, but…right now I ain’t there for ‘em more than a day or two out of the week. For good reason, but it still eats me.”

Michael nodded.

“And even if we do get housing here and all that, it takes time and…well, they’re kids. They grow up.”

“What is important is the time you do spend with them, then. So make the most of it. And, well, I’m a Father but not a dad, right? I remember growing up. For me, the best times with dad were just…being there. We didn’t need to do anything crazy. Just watching TV maybe, or go for a walk. He liked to encourage me but he was pretty busy. I get it. But there’s one more thing.”

“Name it.”

“I sense it isn’t just that you’re ahead that bothers you. It’s how you’re ahead.”

The giant gave him an intense look. “…Yeah. It don’t sit right with me.”

Michael invited him to talk.

“Right. So I’m not like I am by any kind of accident. Me nor my wife. We’re…we were expected. I am so physically…performant, I guess? Words don’t really work. I’m like a sci-fi experiment, or an actual damn superhero. I’d show you what I can really do, if it didn’t feel so weird, but…”

“No no, maybe another time. Besides, I’ve kept up on the news. To include ESNN’s reporting. I am not a Hero of the Line. But I am here, on Akyawentuo. Because I can hack it. I passed their testing and they seemed quite confused when I steadfastly refused to join their Line.”

Righteous chuckled at that. “Yeah, I can’t imagine they really get celibate men! I mean, bein’ honest, neither do I, but…”

Michael waved that off. “In any case…growing up I was pretty sporty. But I didn’t do videogames or any of the other stuff. I got caught up in books. At some point, it drew me to God. And, so, this and that…I entered the novitiate as soon as I could, and here I am.”

“Heck of a journey.”

“Not like yours. I remember something from the news…are you the one they called the Warrior?” There had been a lot said about him, his family, how he’d come to be…

Michael had a lot of powerfully mixed feelings about that. But now wasn’t the time.

The giant sighed. “Yeah, that was me. Born the best, I guess.”

“Perhaps. But it was your effort that built you into what you are, not simple circumstance.”

“True…still. It feels…is this it? Is this what I was made for?”

“You were made for love,” Michael answered automatically, and truthfully. “Whatever designs ancient god-kings and other men may have had for you, you belong to God first.”

“Yeah…” The big man sighed. “Guess I found out how true that is, recently.”

Michael tilted his head curiously, inviting him to say more.

“…Yeah. Everything you said is true. I get it. But none of it could save those kids.”

“It saved some of them.” Michael knew what to do immediately. “As for the others…” Without elaborating, he stood and walked toward the sacristy. Curious, the giant man followed behind.

“…Padre?”

“Well, there’s only one thing to do. We’ll offer Mass for them.” He pulled an alb off the hook and began his prayers.

That seemed to touch the giant. “I–y-yeah. That would be…shit, I ain’t dressed ‘fer—”

“We came into Creation naked as the day was long, servant-priests to the Lord. He won’t mind. You are made for love, Righteous. Let Him love you a little right back.”

“I…”

Well. It turned out Righteous was fond of hugs, too.

Michael offered the Holy Sacrifice. The Spirit guided him, whispered that it would be good to chant this private little Mass instead of drone his way quickly through. Righteous had a beautiful voice, in a coarse, rough-edged sort of way. They filled the air with a sacrifice of praise.

It clearly was exactly what was needed.

Afterwards, Michael left the oversized warrior to his private contemplations. He had other duties to attend to after all; they were just getting established here and he didn’t really have any staff, didn’t have any real schedule yet…

It came as a genuine surprise, however, that maybe ten minutes after Michael had left Righteous alone, there were voices at the door, and two new arrivals he’d never met before entered. The first was a young, dark-haired woman, quite lovely. The second was a tall lad of about the same age, but built as if he could have been Righteous’ own son. Both were clearly fresh off the boat, as it were.

Well, now. How interesting…

Michael went to welcome them.

“Father! Hi. We, uh, just got here and, uh, it’s been a while since Reconciliation…”

“Ah, spiritual tune-up! Lucky you I’m running a special today. Two for the price of free!”

The young lady laughed—the large lad chuckled nervously. He had the energy of a young man who hadn’t been much of a church-goer before.

“Right. So, I have a screen, or we can just go for a walk. Let me go get my stole first, okay?”

“Thank you, Father…?”

“Michael. I prefer that over my last name, which is Paternostro.”

“Patern—your name is literally ‘Father Michael Our Father’?”

“Oh, yes. And I once married a young couple where her first name was Bride, and his surname was McBride.”

That one earned an explosive laugh from the big boy, who relaxed substantially. The young lady beamed up at him, then shook Michael’s hand. “Jess Brown. This is Josh.”

“Josh Hartl,” he elaborated, shaking Michael’s hand but staring off toward the back where Righteous was sitting. “Who…?”

“Righteous. Yes, the very one from the Laid Bare series. Please respect his privacy, okay?”

“Oh, of course…”

“Anyway. Good to meet you both. I’ll be just one minute…”

He ran back to the sacristy and got what he needed. Time to put some more mileage on this stole of his. Holy water, too. Why not?

“Right. So, screen, or…?”

“Let’s go for a walk,” Jess stated. “If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all!”

Reconciliation was his favorite Sacrament, he wasn’t too proud to admit. They were all profoundly beautiful and filled with their own graces, the Eucharist most of all, but none of them gave such a direct feeling of helping quite so much as, well, helping a soul confront their secrets, their shames, their sins. Everyone felt like they were uniquely awful.

Michael knew better. Most everyone was a boring sinner. Everyone sinned in the same boring ways, all the time. In a way it was…weirdly comforting. God’s children were equally broken, equally in need of grace. If only we could get over our pride to truly understand it!

Like many priests, there was a special grace involved, too: within the seal of the confessional he had the functional memory of a clam. Five minutes from now he wouldn’t remember a single detail about whatever was so bothering her.

It was a productive walk.

“…And I absolve you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

“Amen.”

“Right! All tuned up. Let’s go check in on our big boys, hmm?”

Josh, it turned out, hadn’t needed to respect Righteous’ privacy—the huge warrior had decided to say hello to his younger and much smaller cousin, and already had a vast arm affably around the young man’s shoulders, telling a story of some kind.

Michael gave them room, sensing the encounter would be good for them both. He still had plenty to do, after all. In many ways, it was just another day at the office.

…No. A good day at the office. He could feel that, and be glad of it.

Lavmuy City, planet Gao

Gurrum, Champion of Stoneback

Gurrum wasn’t the sort to shirk hard work and hard training, gods knew. He’d never have made it to Champion if he was, never wrassled it from ex-Champion Fiin, Unseen rest his soul. But today was a day for gentler work, and by Fyu’s flowery swords, he was ready for it. There were only so many days of combat trainin’ and pitching in on work gangs a body could take, even a fifth-degree Brownie body in peak condition.

Or frankly, meetings and planning sessions and staff stand-ups and so forth a mind could take. His weekly get-together with two of the other Champions was entirely welcome, therefore. Tea with Gyotin and Sheeyo.

You couldn’t have stuck three more different gao around a table if you tried. One urbane, neatly-trimmed silverfur who embraced thrift and modesty, one silky-furred walking jewelry store who made a virtue out of flamboyance, and a hulking scarred soil-shoveller who was a fuck of a lot more biggerer than both of them combined.

Maybe it was the fact they had such completely different areas of expertise that let Gurrum get along with ‘em so well. There was no competition between them, and they all adored their Great Father. And he, them. They could sit down in the Starmind monastery garden, savor the delicate aromas of Gyotin’s preferred tea blend and talk business.

“I hope you have plenty of this stuff saved up, Gyotin…” Gurrum took a deep, heady sniff of the infusion, and briefly lost himself in a shiver of serenity. There were fragrances in there that transported him to windswept meadows on a world he’d never seen with his own eyes.

“Enough for a few years,” Gyotin duck-nodded. “The humans are already growing tea on Cimbrean, of course. And we are growing it at our monasteries, too. It will become an expensive luxury, as it once was on Earth, but I promise you this. If you were to construct a list of plant species the humans would never allow to go extinct, tea and coffee would be in the top five for certain.”

“I believe it. I’ve seen the seed vaults. And the genetic vaults.” Gurrum sniffed the tea again, then sipped it. He had no idea what the humans intended to do with all the animal species whose genomes they were archiving. Would they regrow them using Corti tube technology and unleash them on some other planet? But he could hardly blame them for keeping those genes in storage, just in case.

“It’s a remarkable effort,” Gyotin shook his head admiringly. “Transplanting an entire economy? Building it again on alien worlds, practically from first principle? I still can barely believe they’re doing it…”

“Mm.” Sheeyo’s ears came up from the carefree, relaxed slouch they’d been in, “I hate to say this, and I don’t mean it unkindly…but the humans losing their homeworld might just be the best thing that ever happened to the gao.”

He ducked apologetically when Gurrum scowled at him. “The alternative for us was total collapse. I wouldn’t wish what’s happened to the humans on anyone, but…thanks to them we’ll be spared the worst of our own disaster.”

“And they’ll be spared the worst of theirs in turn,” Gyotin combed his whiskers thoughtfully.

“How essactly does a buncha humans comin’ here alleviate our population crash from not havin’ enough females?” Gurrum asked rhetorically.

“By alleviating the knock-on effects. Insufficient females means insufficient young males to be apprenticed in necessary roles. When the older males age out of the work force, quite suddenly we wouldn’t have enough workers to keep infrastructure maintained, machinery repaired, livestock husbanded and crops tended…”

Gurrum nodded, seeing it. “Which all adds up to starvation.”

“Right. A self-compounding problem, yijao? But instead, the human refugees are arriving at exactly the right time to step into the roles the gao need filled. Their loss is saving us.”

“And it wouldn’t work with anybody else,” Gyotin added. “Think of any other species in the galaxy. Can you name even one who could be what the humans are to us? Especially now? Can you name another that could even survive this crisis?”

He shook his head in reply to his own question. “We have been fortunate in a most cosmic way. To make friends with a people who first showed us our chains, then helped us break them, and now help us survive the breaking even while they’re fleeing their own destruction.”

Gurrum flicked an ear at him. “Very poetic…”

Gyotin chittered and drank his tea. “I detect skepticism.”

“You’re mythologizing them. I’ve worked with humans a good long time, now. I respect ‘em but we can match them. Balls, I’m stronger, faster an’ deadlier’n most humans myself. It’s really just that Righteous freak nowadays I can’t swat like a fly. An’ there’s the Great Father—”

“Don’t go looking for general rules in the extreme outliers,” Sheeyo cautioned.

“And don’t go looking for the measure of a being in their capacity for violence,” Gyotin added. “That was the mistake the whole galaxy made, in the beginning. You remember the early days? When the caricature was of a walking disaster capable of toppling buildings, ripping arms from sockets with an errant twitch, and dooming millions with a sneeze?”

“I ‘member.”

“That was all the Dominion species saw. ‘Be afraid, they are Deathworlders, they’ll kill us all.’ That’s what they were told to think and feel, and so they did. Isn’t it interesting how quickly the truth shone through?”

Gurrum finished his own tea, and took his turn to pour. “I’ll play. What truth would that be?”

“That the humans have built far more than they’ve destroyed, far more quickly, and despite terrible opposition.” Gyotin accepted his fresh cup. “The whole galaxy has become unrecognizable even in my lifetime, thanks to them. And I’ve still got just as long again before I go white and blind, probably. What will it look like then?”

“The United Peoples could not exist without them,” Sheeyo agreed. “Who would we unite with? The ten’gewek aren’t advanced enough and never would have been without human intervention. The e-skurel-ir are too broken and would have remained an unknown slave species if not for the humans. The OmoAru would still be blissfully waiting for extinction, and we ourselves would be the Hierarchy’s puppets.” He sniffed his fresh cup and duck-nodded happily. “They’ll be the glue that binds this whole thing. They already are.”

“What a fantastic deal! An’ all it cost them was their home, their identity, their nations, their independence an’ billions of lives,” Gurrum rumbled, feelingly suddenly quite bitter on the humans’ behalf. “An’ I’ll point out you are again, mythologizing. They are an impressive people, it’s true. But they are what they are by a combination of absurd coincidences, impossible luck, ancient conspiracies, only one of which they had anything to do with, and what more and more looks like a distressing level of incompetence. They were well-positioned and, by luck, took advantage of the propitious moments when they came. So I give ‘em credit where it’s due, but don’t turn ‘em into somethin’ they ain’t.”

“If you think they will lose their independence in all this, I think you need to spend even more time with them,” Gyotin chittered. “Sure, they may be bending the knee to the Great Father, but they’re not gao. They don’t have our instincts. Our Father is quite worried, you know. The humans too shrewd, too willful, too driven and too ambitious to be second-class citizens. So, with respect to Sheeyo’s opinion…while their coming here may be what saves the gao from collapse, I’m not entirely convinced it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to our people.”

“We’re shrewd, willful, driven an’ ambitious too,” Gurrum objected.

“We’re also loyal. Pathologically, genetically so. We go where our friends and dominants lead us. After all…when you stand and head to the field for play…will we two not follow?”

Well…fair point, really.

Still. “Y’make it sound like humans are treacherous.”

“They can be. In ways we usually aren’t.” Sheeyo drained his second cup and set it down.

“It could be that’s a weakness of ours, yijao?” Gyotin flicked a darkly amused ear. “Or not.”

“Either way, it justifies the Great Father’s caution. With respect to Gyotin’s talk of how much they built, let’s not forget that they also just bombed the largest part of their population out of existence out of pure greed and panic. Kazakhstan was an act of treachery unlike any in gaoian history. They are…aliens.”

It was Sheeyo’s turn to pour. Gurrum watched him do so, then looked Gyotin in the eye. “…you were inspired ‘ta build ‘yer entire clan on what you found in the humans,” he said. “So I unnerstand why you think so highly of ‘em. An’ I get it, we owe them much. Owe them everything, even. But Gyotin, Cousin, there are times when you give humans too much credit. The extreme outliers matter, an’ Our Father is their master now. One wise enough ‘ta know them well an’ win their loyalty. Their extreme outliers matter too, an’ in that sense…”

Gyotin accepted his refilled cup and perked his ears up attentively. “Go on.”

“Right. So. There is one human being who can best me. But that’s an old example. So consider this: they hugely outnumber us right now, but how many scientists, how many engineers, how many thinkers an’ dreamers have we got? We’re easily their match. Balls, we’ve got entire purpose-organized Clans t’ bring out the bestest in us, an’ that matters. So yeah, in my limited little slice o’ things? Righteous can kick my an’ anyone else’s ass. But he’s the only one. I an’ dozens o’ my bestest can make any other human our bitches. An’ that’s gotta be true in other Clans, too. I hate ‘ta think what kinda profit Goldpaw’s makin’ lately…”

Sheeyo set the empty teapot down. “The rising tide lifts all boats. Our profits are matched by theirs.”

“Are they? Money’s just a number. You more’n any of us know that. What can they really do wit’ all their new-found earnings in Gaoian moneys? An’ who is bankin’ it for ‘em?”

They both gave him thoughtful looks. Point scored, there.

“An’ another thing. Whatever in us ain’t perfect competition ‘gainst ‘em, well, the Females will correct that in due time. Their tastes change, an’ they’ve got the pick of pedigree. Always have. That ain’t quite eugenics but it’s the next best thing. Humans don’t got that. An’ never will.”

“I wonder what effect contact with our culture will have in that regard…?” Gyotin mused.

“Ain’t culture that’s the issue. It’s the fact they got a fifty-fifty ratio of males to females, more-or-less. So where our females drive things jus’ by dint of pickin’ their mates, the humans’d need to deliberately plan if they wanted ‘ta specialize like our clans have. An’ given how they reacted ‘ta Singularity, I’d say the idea creeps ‘em out.”

“And yet Singularity exists, as part of this new confederated empire—which by the way is an oxymoron so potent it pains me to even think the word,” Gyotin chittered. “But what else works to describe it? Under the Great Father it will work. I don’t know what comes next.”

“SIngularity was founded by Corti outcasts, guided by a gaoian demigod, an’ realized by an ancient human king. They ain’t exactly a good litmus test for what the humans leaving Earth are like.”

“Nor was that my point. Singularity exiting at all as it does is proof that they will adapt as the situation requires. And on this narrow topic of breeding, this Line of Heroes likely eliminates the question. Have you met the so-called Paragons?”

“Yeah. Good people. Julian is crafty, but squishable. King Alex is a handful. An’ I am but a cub in Christian’s grasp. Actually,” Gurrum mused, “I wunner where th’ Line’s great bankers an’ philosophers might be hidin’…”

“I don’t think they were imagining a better banker in this project,” Sheeyo chittered.

Gurrum took his victory. “Essactly.”

“But the royal treasury have proven…very shrewd. They kept Singularity supplied with whatever they couldn’t produce themselves for thousands of years without once being detected by us or the Hierarchy.”

“Eh,” Gurrum shrugged. “Impressive, I guess…but I think we all know there have been some pretty stinkin’ ancient secrets an’ conspiracies kept by our own Clans. Th’ War leaves no doubt ‘fer that. Kinda refreshin’ really.”

Thoughtful silence reigned while they finished their tea. Gyotin broke it, after washing his cup out with hot water and leaving it upside-down to drain on the slatted wooden tray.

“So,” he said, and flashed a pant-grin. “You mentioned something about play?”

Gurrum chittered, and silently agreed that the time had come to move on from the big important talking to…well, something a little more fun. He leaned forward as though to answer, then in a lightning fast motion he snatched up Sheeyo’s favorite deck of cards, still sitting in its ornately-carved wooden box.

“Hey–!”

Gurrum was already running. Steal-and-chase was one of the bestest cub-games, it never got old. And it was the sort of game where eventually, the thief allowed himself to be caught and the stolen item reclaimed. There was no real chance they might actually catch him and wrest it from him otherwise. Although…he slightly hoped they would. It would be an interesting upset!

For now though, he plunged through the garden with the other two champions in hot pursuit, reached the lawn, and piled on the speed. The chase would go on for a few minutes, they’d have their fun…maybe they’d sit and talk about serious things again afterwards.

But it was important to set time aside for tea and play and pleasures, in a life otherwise full of business. A person of any species would go mad without them. And Gyotin and Sheeyo needed reminding of that most of all.

He chittered, and led them on the merry chase.

Play was the most seriousest business.

Starship Turkeyholic, Hierarchy reserve power archive, deep space

Gumi, Brother of Clan One-Fang

The hours of radio silence weren’t unexpected. On the contrary, the team exclusively used a line-of-sight commsnet while scouting, which meant once they’d vanished among the tech-trees Gumi had quickly lost contact. Barely four minutes into their long hike, there’d been the faint tone, and the team’s suit status panels all went dark, covered by the solemn words OUT OF RANGE.

Patience, however, was the supreme virtue of a stealth ship pilot. To even be sitting in the seat he presently occupied, Gumi had needed to show he could sit still and stay focused for as long as necessary. Windows of opportunity could be only seconds long, and appear in the middle of long hours of nothing.

The Clan had trained him well, building on his natural disposition. Gumi had always been something of an introvert and loner, often content to just sit quietly with his own thoughts. Although, working with humans in recent months had quickly taught him that a gaoian introvert was a downright party animal by their standards.

A gaoian introvert could handle being alone and out of contact and waiting for news. That didn’t mean he liked it.

So he sat.

And he waited.

And he sat.

And waited.

Minutes turned to hours. His mind chewed slowly, mulling over what the trees might be for. They were beautiful in their odd, geometric imitation of the organic world, but the Hierarchy had never been known to do things just because they were pretty, that he knew of. No, they had to be here for a purpose.

Could they be the shield generators and power collectors? But why tree shapes? Maybe they grew themselves, using some kind of self-assembling technology like you’d find in a nanofactory?

Plausible, he decided.

But what about the deep technology? The intel source said the Hierarchy were channeling the star’s energy deep into the planet’s core, converting it into a format they could keep effectively forever, or certainly for trillions of years. Just how far down did those trees’ roots go? All the way?

Gumi had the sudden mental image that perhaps the planet he was sitting on was, at this point, more ancient tech than rock, by both volume and mass.

But then again…it would have to be, wouldn’t it? If it did what the intel source said it did.

Maybe that was part of the reason behind the trees, too. Self-repairing, growing, replicating technology based on life might last longer than more conventional machines. They could regrow, reforest after asteroid strikes and the degrading effects of solar radiation. But what about ‘genetic’ drift? Wouldn’t there be cumulative copy errors over time?

Maybe there were ways around it. Ship pilots had to be reasonably tech-savvy, but that didn’t mean he had the knowledge and imagination to solve all those problems. And he might be wrong anyway. He—

—there was a timeless instant of agony.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam (Warhorse) Arés

Warhorse was back. Jesus fuck it felt good.

He could do it. Goddamnit, he was doin’ it! He still hadn’t caught up, still…had a ways to go, even now, making his past-self look like a little bitch. There were better people on the team. Several of them, people with better “pedigrees” and better bodies. He wouldn’t begrudge them that. A combination of timing, innate talent, and their own willpower had taken everything he’d taught them and pushed it far, indeed. Fully catching back up was taking a long time, and honestly he’d probably never manage it until everyone found their true supersoldiering limits.

But he was beating all their times through the course. He was dominating all the objectives. Experience, instinct, and pure unrelenting cold calculated hate was pushing him through, in ways the rest were still learning from. He was giving them a goddamn masterclass in how to fuck the enemy, save lives, and look good doing it.

Christ, it was better than sex.

Well, okay. Maybe not. Top three in his List, though. He was fuckin’ Warhorse again.

Of course, he wasn’t on HEAT anymore. He and the rest of his team were members of SOR again—honestly, that felt so good he didn’t have words—but he wasn’t an assigned operator this time. His official rank (or rate?) was that of chief training sergeant. That put him off the team proper and made him directly responsible for everyone’s ongoing training, which was a job that went further than his usual meaty endeavors. Now, he was responsible for tactics, ongoing education, all of that. Mostly he set direction and let his long-experienced training cadre and kitchen staff do the legwork. His preferred job was to give individual attention.

Nobody wanted Warhorse paying too much attention to them, it turned out. He had a reputation and his methods were effective. And for his purposes that was just fine. It meant nobody let themselves fall slack, lest his eye be drawn to their deficiencies.

When training up the real freaks, though, often the shoe was on the other giant foot.

Like right now, as Julian slowly, methodically, and purposefully ground Adam to mush with his ludicrously superior strength and conditioning. He might have been six inches shorter, but he was in every damn way bigger, better, and harder-bodied by a huge degree. And they both had ridiculous pain tolerance and supersoldier healing, too. So…really it was a contest of endurance, meaning they’d been at it for a long fuckin’ time, and Julian wasn’t keen to stop. Wrestling him (and his fellow few freaks) was like being toyed with by a sweaty diamond statue.

Fuckin’ bastard had the balls to look a billion times better doing it, too. Pretty-boy fucker.

Fitting, then, that Daar came to visit, since he happened to be visiting someone or something nearby for business. He’d poked his nose in like he was wont to do these days, sniffed a bit…

“Hey, ‘Horse. ‘Ya got a minute?”

Julian’s enormous beachball-big bicep bore down on Adam’s head with granite-shattering force. A deep chuckle issued forth near Adam’s ear.

“Nah. He’s too busy tellin’ me how awesome I am.”

“Oh fuck off you giant—hnnnngh!”

Adam had been particularly sadistic today, in an attempt to soften the big fucker up before they sparred. It didn’t work. He was fresh and warmed up, Julian had been at it all day so far…and he was still squishing Adam head-to-toe with seemingly little effort.

So little in fact he was being playful, the right proper bastard. Adam’s inability to breathe right that second was just the price of Julian’s superiority; his other arm was crushing Adam’s chest, one of those freakshow legs was curled around and flattening his middle.

And the other was smashing his legs immoble, too. Yup. Julian had learned well.

“Sorry, didn’t hear you,” he growled playfully. “Ready to tap out?”

He then, just to prove how much better he was, smashed Adam’s waist flat and almost caused him to retch, and did it just by tightening that huge goddamned hamstring of his.

Adam couldn’t breathe. He endured it until he was about to fade out, and, yeah. Tapped. Again.

The next moment was a fuzzy blur of being pinned and mauled ten ways from Sunday. Julian got his practice in with seemingly every form of compressive torture he’d been taught. Eventually he musta been bored and Adam came back to it flat on his back, Julian sitting astride his hips, legs again pinning him with unbelievable force. Cocky shit was really feeling his oats today, and had his arms up in a conquering pose, admiring himself with a big, cornfed grin. Honestly, looking up at the huge bastard as he gloried in all his better-in-every-way, feeling smashed to the floor like a bug under his huge weight, even under normal Akyawentian gravity…

…Yeah. Adam didn’t feel too bad conceding. He chuckled, groaned a bit in pain. “Okay, fine! Pretty boy’s got some skills.”

“Oh, it ain’t just skill…” he growled happily, and still having a bit of fun, tightened his legs around Adam’s torso with alarming force. Fuck, just how goddamn strong was he?!

Adam was gonna be sore as fuck today. He squirmed, pointlessly, hands trying and failing to pry at least his lower legs apart before he got his ankles locked—

Nope. One lightning-quick movement and now his hands were pinned awkwardly against his ribs under Julian’s basketball-sized calves. He flexed those too, and…well, damn. That shit was embarrassing, and it fuckin’ hurt like hell. They were bigger than his hands, a lot bigger and harder than his own huge calves. Try as he might to escape, it was pointless. Julian just ground down with a wicked grin and pointed his toes forward. Those iron calves balled up hugely, compressing Adam’s ribs inward and causing him to suppress a yelp of pain. He couldn’t pull free and now he couldn’t feel his hands.

“I learned that trick from you years ago, by the way. Sucks, huh?”

Adam grimaced around his grin. “Yeah, hnngh, sure as shit does.”

“Never thought I’d be big or strong enough to manage, especially against you! So thanks for teaching me all this.” Tighter, the pressure pushing bones apart in his hands and Jesus fuck did that ever hurt. “But y’know, a fella’s gotta get his payback now and then—!”

It was at that point where a gigantic furry paw descended, yoinked Julian off Adam like he was a ragdoll, and slammed the big Tarzan to the ground. He pinned him with that chest-wide paw and pressed down, just a little…just enough to make pretty-boy Julian flail desperately.

“It’s a fun game, bein’ th’ best. Jus’ ‘member there’s always someone bigger an’ he’s prob’ly frens wit’ ‘yer playmates.”

“Yeah!” Adam jeered, suppressing a cough from the sudden relief of freedom. “Serves you right!”

At which point, there was another blink of motion, and Adam found himself under Daar’s other paw. “Same goes ‘fer you. Now,” Daar growled, “what should I do with such durable lil’ playmates, huh?”

“Let me up ‘cuz I asked nice?” Adam tried.

“Sure!” And just like that, Adam was free, and Daar was wrapped around his new chewtoy.

Ask, and ye shall receive. Now what? He shook out his hands; nothing broke, thankfully. Maybe he’d just stay on the floor for a while, and recover. Not like he had any dignity left to reclaim…

“Fuck!” Julian struggled against the furry dump truck karmically compressing him into a meatball. “Why’d you let him go?!”

“He asked nice!”

“Shoulda asked nice,” Adam taunted tiredly. Daar wrassled a bit more, and it was sorta hard to see where Julian had disappeared to, really. Muffled complaints emanated from somewhere inside the big bear’s limbs, but…

“Y’know, if you lock your ankles together, it’ll squeeze him more.”

“Nah, that’d break him,” Daar chittered, and instead tensed his legs harder, which was a show. Muffled desperation intensified from somewhere under the fur.

“True. Prob’ly oughta let the golden boy go, boss.”

“Eh. S’pose.”

A thoroughly disheveled and crumpled-looking Julian emerged from his muscular prison, bitchin’ up a storm with a big grin on his face.

“This is discrimination! Pickin’ favorites and what not!”

“Well, yeah. Whatchu gonna do ‘bout it, little guy?” Wagging tail.

“I’ll write a letter to my Champion!”

“Oh no, I better silence ‘ya then!”

Back inside Daar’s embrace for more crumplin’ fun. Julian got wrassled.

The careful listener could just make out various muffled threats of retribution and pleas for mercy, over the thuds and thumps of play and the gigabear’s happy growls.

Nobody of course was any kind of actual angry. They played rough, and it was probably good if they got all their testosterone poisoning out of the way, anyway. No point pretending they were anything but what they were. So, Daar had some fun, and played at a level Julian could handle. Not that ‘Horse could manage these days, so…good training. Really. For real.

Or something like that.

“Pickin’ on lil’ guys, tsk. Here I thought you Minnesota clan were all nice and stuff!”

“Hnnngh…! just havin’ a bit of fun…fuck, lemme go!”

Also, definitely some Schadenfreude watching Daar manhandle him so effortlessly. No better proof that size mattered, really.

The doombear let his little snack up with a contrabass chitter. “Alwright, fine.” Hoisted back to his feet, bro-hugged and a quick head-rub—gaoians could be really canine—and all was better. “Anyway, much as I wanna wrassle two o’ my most favoritest meatheads…I ain’t got time to play too much today. And don’t be breakin’ our genius coach too hard here, ‘kay? Now git. You two can make love later, I gotta talk to ‘em.”

“Aww. Almost had him seduced, too.”

“Fuck off!”

“Don’t play like you weren’t into it,” Julian chuckled, nodded, thumped over and yoinked Adam to his feet with a flick of his arm. They bro-hugged it out, all grudges forgiven, and Julian stepped away to stretch out and nourish. “Right. Got cardio left on ‘Horse’s torture sheet before I head home for the weekend anyway.”

“Say hi to everyone for me!”

He nodded, and left them to talk privately.

“Right! So. I see train-up is going well,” Daar chittered.

“Yeah! Super proud of ‘em all. The fuckin’ holodeck thing is helpful too. We’ve been coming up with all sorts of evil shit. I think the programmers like havin’ an operator whisperin’ nasty ideas in their ears, too.”

“Bet the team don’t.”

“Yeah, well. I want us to survive this, whatever it ends up being. We can settle grudges later.”

“Kinda why I came calling, actually. You…let’s go for a walk.”

And so, suddenly, they were outside, heading toward the forest on the edge of the base. Adam followed behind, pondering what the talk might be about. He pondered Daar for a bit, too. Same as every time he got to stare at the giant fucker’s haunches: they were as tall as Adam and about that same measure wide, which taken together made him bigger than an elephant, big like a Brown One. Shorter, yes, but vastly stockier. More like a really big bull on super-steroids, really. A dinosaur-smashing tank of a man. He was a walking, squared-broad brick of rolling supermuscle, with a thick-chested, heavy-legged saunter to his gait. Part bear, part tiger, part gorilla.

A well-trained gao could play the ape or the leopard. Could be a beast of burden or a clever, dextrous artisan. Could chase anything down on foot, or curl up and spend almost no energy at all. No other species was as physically adaptable as they were.

Nobody had maximized all his potential to such extremes as Daar had. He could do it all. Emperor of the universe and the greatest athlete there ever was or ever would be.

And somehow, they were friends.

They meandered for a while, enjoying the forest until they came upon a neat little clearing, not too far from where they started. Nice, really. A recent treefall, it looked like. There was a pretty black flower crawling up everywhere.

Daar plopped himself down on his haunches and sat there, waiting. Even sitting like that, his face was level with Adam’s.

Time to see.

“So…what’s up, boss?”

“Th’ future. Gotta think beyond th’ immediate, yijao?”

“Uh-huh. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing full-time lately.”

“A very narrow, specific future, yeah. An’ I’m glad ‘yer doin’ it! Ain’t nobody else better.” Daar shook his fur uneasily. “Me, I got a bigger future ‘ta think on. One that begins wi’ TILE FLIP. Ain’t no good doin’ a thing if we don’t got a plan for what comes after…”

Adam did the tricky thing and remained silent, listening.

“I think you an’ ‘yer own are gonna figger pretty big in that future,” Daar continued, still orbiting the point rather than driving straight at it like he would do if he was feeling comfortable.

Adam didn’t have time for that.

“Daar…your majesty. I’m a big boy. Fuck, I’m in my forties. Just say it.”

“…I still ain’t convinced TILE FLIP is th’ best use o’ ‘yer skills. Gotta think past it, weigh risk an’ reward, yijao? Weigh what you’d add ‘ta the operation by bein’ there against what you’d add ‘ta the whole o’ everythin’ by bein’ kept safe. An’ in ‘yer specific case, there’s a big ol’ extra risk in that battered thinker o’ yours.”

Right. Adam had no answer to that, except the usual.

He sighed. The sigh to end all sighs, really. A sigh worthy of a List.

Dark humor was a lot like food. Not everyone got it.

“What do you want me to do? I’m not stupid. I know good and damn well I’m training up my replacements and I’m not so broken I forgot my medical retirement. But this fight is still a ways off and the suit coatings are basically perfect, so…ain’t I allowed a little hope?”

“Hope ‘fer what, essactly?” Daar shook his head. No mane right now, he was in his lightest summer stud-clip. “I mean…Cousin, look at me. Do you see this body? I was made for the fight. At every fuckin’ stage of th’ makin’, this is what I am for. I was engineered, bred, educated, trained, and later activated and given over to your tender ministrations, all to build me up into this. I am the deadliest piece o’ meat there ever was an’ likely ever will be. An’ I’m not goin’ on mission if it can at all be helped. Not this time. Y’know why.”

“Yeah. you’re completely irreplaceable. The king on the chessboard. But that’s the thing. I’m not. And not using me lowers the chance we succeed! That’s a big risk, too.”

“Does it, though? Adam…look beyond your skills. Look at th’ long-term risk you pose. Now, I just watched a man vastly your superior these days put you through the wringer after you spent all day tormentin’ him, I bet. Din’t matter. Still made you his bitch. And there’s several more who could do th’ same. Am I wrong?”

“Well…” He had a point. “No, you aren’t. It’s a bit of a list these days. And I’m proud of them! But—”

He held up his giant paw to command silence. “But nothin.’ I know good and damn well that th’ thing needed mostest is knowledge an’ experience, an’ that matters a fuck of a lot! It’s why you’re still makin’ ‘em look like fools in the sims. But you have a brain that’s on th’ edge of fallin’ apart. What’s in that brain is more valuable than ‘yer big muscles an’ your ability ‘ta use ‘em. I’ve got all the muscle I’ll ever need now. What I ain’t got is operators on your tier.”

Adam really hated the way Daar could run circles around him with his words even better than with his big-ass fuckin’ super-haunches.

“What prompted this?” he asked. “We’ve had this conversation before…”

“Sorta, yeah. Like I said. Thinkin’ past th’ victory.” Daar scratched his muzzle with a claw the length of a chef’s knife.

“Well, I know what I think. I know my brain might have been reupholstered a couple times and it’s held together with spit and glue, but fuck it. You need what’s in it you said, and TILE FLIP is gonna hinge on experience and knowledge like mine. You want to think past the victory, you’re going to need the victory to happen first.”

“And it ain’t gon’ happen if you fall apart in the middle of th’ fight.” Daar said, pointedly. “Like I said…risk. An’ you ain’t in a position ‘ta be impartial ‘bout it.”

Ugh.

“Fine. Then just give me orders. That’s what you do, right?”

Shit. Too far. The wounded note in his keen…

“Sorry.” Adam said automatically, and meant it.

“No, no…but…right. So I’m gonna make a point.” Daar sidled up, rested his giant paw on Adam’s head. It was heavy, and as with Julian, big enough to span his chest. The arm attached to it was in proportion. And from there, the rest of him.

…Jesus Christ he was big.

“It ain’t always ‘bout force, Cousin. I could right now push my paw down with a tiny little bit o’ effort, put m’paw right through and fuckin’ explode you. That’s force. Or I could order you as you said, as your king, commander, and Great Father, an’ First Counsel. Or I could bend my mind to it an’ convince you, an’ we both know I’d win that game, too. If you were a gao an’ anythin’ short of extremely dominant, you’d get a whiff, fuckin’ pant-grin stupidly an’ do it anyway ‘cuz disobeyin’ me would be damn near instinctually impossible. Or, shit! I could jus’ find ‘yer price an’ pay you. There ain’t any form o’ power I don’t have, more’n anyone…and I ain’t usin’ it here. Because I love you, Adam. I can’t ever put into words how important ‘ya are ‘ta me. I’m not a good enough poet. An’ I respect ‘ya far, far too much ‘ta ruin that.”

Adam felt himself tearin’ up a bit. “So…what? You protectin’ me now?”

“Always have, as you’ve protected us all. But no, I don’t mean like how you mean it. I’m sendin’ Regaari on this mission too, ‘member? Good chance it’ll kill ‘em and I love him just as much as you.”

“So why—?”

“Because he’s clear-eyed about what he is and what he can and can’t do. ‘Member when he finally ditched his cybernetic paw? That were from self-honesty. He’s not pretendin’ he’s still somethin’ he ain’t. An’ that’s somethin’ you ain’t got right now.”

Adam grit his teeth at that. Daar never hid honest criticism, and it was always honest criticism. But there was still the hate burning in Adam. That was an honest part of him, too. It was part of what built Warhorse, it had been the fire that guided him since…shit, since Sara died.

A whole fuckin’ lifetime ago, that.

Daar’s nose twitched, sniff, sniff. “It’s hard, becomin’ somethin’ new an’ different.”

He always had the sharpest goddamn verbal knives.

“Harder still turning into something you were never meant to be.” Adam shook his head. “I know what I am. I have purpose. Fuck, I’ve known exactly what I’m supposed to be doing since I was a kid.”

“Yeah, since you were fifteen, really. Now ‘yer in ‘yer forties, never even thought’a doin’ anythin’ different…an’ shit, you never had to, ‘cuz we got this supersoldier biomedicine flowin’ in us, right? You weren’t never faced with the gettin’ older an’ slowin’ down part of life. Shit, you’ve bounced back from somethin’ that shoulda ruined you. You ain’t never been stopped my friend…but that means you’re still a kid, in some ways. You’ve managed to dodge one o’ the big life experiences.”

“…And you?”

“I’ll jus’ say I once got bitch-slapped by a scotsman less’n half my size, even after I broke six of his ribs. The fuckin’ bastard!”

Adam choked out a laugh. “God, that was a while ago. You were only eight feet tall then!”

“I know right? Barely half a ton, such a tiny lil’ bear…anyway. Trust me, I could tell ‘ya so many stories. Balls, even m’firstest matin’ contract! I mean, still got laid, but…”

They laughed together quietly for a bare moment, but sobered quickly. “So yeah. Had a lotta failures, Cousin. I’ve been put in my place many a time.” Daar tilted his head. “You though…you got put in ‘yer place really only the once, an’ you’re doin’ ‘yer best ‘ta pretend it didn’t happen.”

Daar picked him clean up off the ground and hugged. “An’ I come to realize I mighta been enablin’ some o’ that. So…I’m sorry, Cousin. You deserve better’n’ all this.”

…Shit.

Not even Adam’s patented hugs could compare to the Daarbear’s bestest. Honestly, he felt exactly like a little boy, held up like that. Even felt dangerously close to just letting go…

But, no. Shit. He was right. Everyone had been trying to tell him. Sometimes with sharp words, too. But almost nobody wanted to make him angry…

Shit.

‘Cuz he was a giant, dangerous, angry fuckin’ meathead.

And he wasn’t gonna listen to any puny little shit tellin’ him what to do, was he? Not until the biggest badass there was slapped some sense into him.

Fuck!

He could see clearly, now. It all hit like a ton of bricks.

He wiggled loose a bit, so he could look Daar in the eye. “So why you, and not anyone else?”

“Risk management,” Daar said, point-blank. “You in a fight with any of ‘em would only end one way. Badly. But not even you are meatheaded enough ‘ta pick a fight wit’ me.”

Adam laughed in that explosive way one does on the edge of tears. Laughed, because what else could he do?

Well, fuck it. He was crushed in a big fuzzy hug with a friend he didn’t even deserve. So, he buried his face against Daar’s titanic chest…and let it out.

“…Fuck. Life is so goddamned unfair.”

Daar’s chitter had a bitter, mournful note to it. “Nah. Stainless used ‘ta say it’s just th’ opposite. Life’s perfectly fuckin’ fair, an’ we all wish it would be unfair ‘ta our benefit.”

“‘We never want to pay the price, which can be everything for fookin’ nothing if we’re not careful,’” Adam quoted. “…Fuck, I miss him. I should drop in on General Jackson sometime…”

“She’s a busy woman right now. She was gonna retire…now, she’s prob’ly gonna get that fourth star on her shoulder. We don’t got many general officers left with her kind of experience.”

“I thought she was gonna stand for election to Champion?”

“Naw. Clan Folctha has others who would be better, and she knows it. Anyway…”

Daar put him down. Realized he really couldn’t be personable while towering like that, sank down and sat on his haunches again.

“…Right. Anyway. I gotta worry. I can’t have you becomin’ a sudden liability in what is likely th’ most important mission we ever do. An’ I can’t lose what’s in ‘yer head. You’re an investment, an’ the Union is gonna require special forces after TILE FLIP. I want you ‘ta train ‘em. I think that’s a damn good purpose, mesself.”

“…I mean, it is, and I don’t…I’m not ungrateful. I’m not.”

“But you know you can operate, in ‘yer heart of hearts.”

“Yes. That.”

“Right. So les’see what happens in fifty years, when ‘yer brain mebbe heals all th’ way up. Or the battlefield changes. Whatever. In th’ meantime, I still need a discrete option ‘fer shit here an’ there. You an’ ‘yer team been doin’ that marvelously. An’ I need someone in charge o’ training. Who better? We gotta establish an academy ‘fer our most specialest forces, in this big weird united ball o’ military we’re buildin…”

Adam grit his teeth and squirmed. “I don’t think I’m exactly cut out for—”

“Yes you are! I ain’t makin’ you Commandant. What you’ll be doin’ is much more focused. ‘Yer a senior NCO, ‘member? Time ‘ta face up ‘ta reality an’ be the leadership we need. An’…”

Daar sighed. “Look. Even if, at th’ end of it all, ‘ya don’t really feel ‘ya fit in that role…please, give it a try. Because ‘yer somethin’ unique. You, ‘Base, an’ now a couple Crude babies? ‘Yer special ‘fer a lotta reasons, but one o’ the biggest is ‘yer perpetually young, ‘cuz you never grew up. That means you ain’t got limits. Julian? Christian? They do, mebbe. Prob’ly. But they’ll find ‘em eventually. I don’t think you will. Been talkin’ a lot ‘bout this with my big-brains. You an’ yer kids an’ their kids are a rare kind o’ special.”

He settled his rump on the floor. “An’ this is only th’ start o’ the long-term. The cleanup is gonna last centuries even if TILE FLIP is a perfect success. So…how fit an’ ready ‘ya think you’ll be in five hundred years? Don’t ‘ya think I’d best start collectin’ people like you now? I told ‘ya last time we had this talk…I can’t be lookin’ only at the here-an’-now. An’ I can’t be spendin’ somethin’ as rare as you so easily.”

“How rare will I be in five hundred years?”

“I have no fuckin’ idea. Shit, if folks like you an’ gods ‘ferbid me somehow became the new standard in that time? That’s a scary thought…but also an irrelevant one. I work with the treasure I already got, not the treasure I dream of.”

“Five hundred years is a scary thought, too.”

“It is. It’s gonna take brave men ‘ta explore that. An’ ‘yer one of the bravest men I ever met. I’m…I’m gonna need good friends alongside me. I hope you’ll be one of ‘em.”

“…Why does this feel like that one bit in Star Wars?”

Daar chittered. “What? ‘Join me and I will complete your training?’ Wouldn’t it be th’ other way ‘round in our case?”

“No. I mean…I don’t know what I mean.” Adam shrugged. He really didn’t know what he was feeling right now, besides unease. He wanted to have it all there, to lay it out in some clear argument, but…he didn’t even know what it was.

“Right. Well, there is a whiff o’ evil empire here, admittedly…’cuz think it through. What’s gonna replace the Hierarchy? They exist as they do fer reasons an’ I bet none o’ us are gonna like findin’ out why. Which is why I need people like you. Like Regaari. Like Gyotin, or his successors. I am dangerously powerful. I desperately need people ‘ta help me stay in check.”

“And you can’t have a successor,” Adam realized.

“Ideally…no. An’ that’s my point. I never spoke t’you ‘bout that sorta thing. I’ve spoken to others…but not you. An’ you ain’t heard from ‘em on this point, I bet.”

“Which means…you’re the only chance we have to wield this sort of power.”

“And it’ll take everythin’ I got wit’ every trick I know ‘ta not turn into Darth whatever-his-name.”

“Daarth Sidious?”

“…I oughta pretzel ‘ya.”

Adam laughed, feeling a large chunk of the negative emotion break off and fall away. “Prob’ly, yeah.”

“But Julian might feel jealous! So instead…you ever go on a hunt?”

“No.”

“Good a time as any. Send Vemik a text, I promised Naydi a werne when I came back. You’re gonna learn.”

Adam saw the political maneuver inside the fun distraction straight away. The ten’gewek were part of the United Peoples too, and anyone who was going to command their respect—well, Adam had the strength but he hadn’t yet carried home a kill on his shoulders. If he was going to train their Given-Men, adding that card to his deck was a smart move.

He said so, and Daar just…commended him on his perception.

That was Daar’s life. Even when he was having fun, he never got to stop working the angles.

And so, that day he received an education. About himself, on multiple fronts. He’d never really understood killing. Hunters were somehow…not real. He’d killed men too, but that was just duty. It never hit, and none of them ever suffered too much from his attention.

Killing a werne, though, not dispassionately but with intent, and with some struggle, because physical monster or not, it was his first time doing the thing, naked and nervous, not even a spear or whatever…it was a rite of passage. Somehow, the agony of its death and the rush of ecstasy he’d felt having successfully snuck up on one and taken it with his bare hands…

And the sudden grief that came with it, too. He knelt and placed his hand on its forehead after it died and apologized to it. They were both there with him. They knew. He’d just murdered an innocent being for his meat. Somehow, that was much, much more real than anything he’d experienced before.

Everything the ten’gewek did after the kill was about showing the proper gratitude. They’d Taken, and the balance must be restored. He’d never really felt or understood the wisdom of that until now. He really wasn’t a killer, before. No matter what he thought about sheepdogs and wolves and slavering monsters in the night. He was just doing a job, and that job dealt a lot of death. He was fundamentally a clean-up man. Cleaning up evil.

There was nothing evil about that werne. It didn’t deserve to die. Now, Adam was a killer.

Christ. It seemed like everyone he knew, knew him better than he knew himself.

Something to learn about that. And maybe, something to trust.

He finished the day up. Training session with Hunter to get his work in, and at least that was a brawl between equals. A good way to let off steam.

Thoughts floated through his head on his jog home. Email ping. New job offer from Personnel, like Daar had alluded to. He never forgot a single detail or trick, that one.

Family time. Diego won the unlimited class in junior’s wrestling that night—there weren’t many in it of course, because there weren’t many kids like him—but he still won. They celebrated with steaks grilled up on the rooftop. These days, that was an expensive treat. Mostly they got by on hamburger or ground naxas. Marty wanted to raise chickens in the backlot. He couldn’t object.

Head floating in thoughts.

They seemed to notice, and left him mostly alone. It ended as a quiet night, cosily wrapped up in bed with Marty snoring softly next to him in her way that usually lulled him to sleep rather than keep him awake…but not this time. This time, sleep came slowly and late.

Adam had a lot to think about.

Starship Turkeyholic, Hierarchy reserve power archive, deep space

Gumi, Brother of Clan One-Fang

Gumi clawed himself back to a consciousness that felt like his brain was raw in the middle and charcoal on the outside. Just being awake hurt, and the insistent cacophony of emergency beeps from the ship didn’t help one bit.

There was a sharper, more stabbing, more localized pain in his throat, and the mental agony drew back like receding floodwaters. He managed to focus on his HUD, which explained much with a single terse sentence:

ALARM - MAX JAM KIT

It was one of several alarms going off, but his soft-boiled eyes turned toward the team’s monitor panel. Their suits had reconnected, and were giving him multiple medical alarms. He slapped the recall button with an aching arm, and watched them go dark as their suits jumped them back to safety.

His turn, and the Turkeyholic was not in good shape at all. All the energy dumped into it by that attack had to go somewhere, and Keeda’s nuts, they must have hit him hard. System waste heat was well over the red-line, meaning he couldn’t even safely jump without frying himself.

But he couldn’t stay here without getting his brain scrambled either.

Fuck it. Hit the recall and pray….

There was a black-flash, a full-ship thump, and the master alarm as the jump tipped Turkeyholic over the safety line and into emergency heat dump mode. Somewhere behind and below him, explosive bolts blew open the vents in the belly and incandescent coolant blasted out into the void. He was instantly slammed painfully against his chair’s straps by G-forces as the grav-plating and engines went offline and the explosive venting threw the ship into a fierce spin. Everything went offline and dark. Somewhere behind him a small detonation and fireball was followed by a shorter and sharper bang as the fire suppressant system went off and flooded the burning compartment with foam.

Gumi groaned and strained his arm against the centrifugal force, forcing it down onto the controls and willed himself to remain conscious despite G-forces and nervejam damage alike trying to drag him down into the red and the black beyond. Main engines were offline, grav plating was offline, but he had maneuvering thrusters…

Tumbling on all three axes. Timed bursts without computer assistance, each successful squirt making the terrible strain on his limbs just that little bit weaker, made the effort of not suffering a red-out that little more achievable…

Slower…slower… his pulse climbed down in time with the tumble as he got the Turkeyholic under control.

Okay. He wasn’t in imminent danger of passing out and dying. Status check.

Status was, uh…badly damaged. Yeah. Huge heat damage to critical systems, including flash-fires. Life support was offline, he was breathing the bottled stuff from his seat. No hull breaches, thank fuck, but power surges had tripped several of the main breakers and from the angry sizzling, fizzing, spitting sound he could hear back in the engineering compartment, that wasn’t a problem he was going to fix anytime soon.

Aviate, navigate, communicate. He finished getting the ship under control, canceled out the last of the spin until Turkeyholic was merely drifting, and ran a second assessment. Several of the systems had automatically rebooted, but main engines and G-plating were not among them.

Well, at least he had comms. He twisted the dial to TACNET Guard 7700 and keyed to broadcast. “Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is SWIFTEYE-ONE-SIX, Suffered massive systems failure, lost engines, lost FTL, lost life support. I have one soul aboard, suffering…argh…nervejam exposure…”

They didn’t keep him waiting. He’d barely finished calling than the reply came through.

“SWIFTEYE-ONE-SIX, UPSS Caledonia, we hear you. Please confirm number of souls on board?”

“Just one,” Gumi keened despite himself as a fresh stab of agony shot through his entire body. “One soul aboard SWIFTEYE-ONE-SIX.”

“Copy that, SWIFTEYE. We are en route to your transponder…”

Gumi sat back and sagged, allowed himself a moment to appreciate being alive…and a moment to whimper at the thought of what had just happened. Then it was back to the business of seeing if he could get his ship back in some kind of working order.

He was, at least, able to maneuver himself onto Caledonia’s dorsal docking port and clamp there for the ride back to Armstrong. There was the usual business with the HEAT and their head scanners…he endured it numbly. Doubly so when he finally saw the extent of the damage.

Turkeyholic looked like she’d taken the full fury of a lightning storm. He didn’t even want to imagine what sort of energies had ravaged her hull, and just what that shit would have done to him if she hadn’t taken the brunt.

That was a tough fuckin’ ship he’d just flown.

There was no time to process, no time to recover and think. He barely got a glimpse at the ship’s ruined state and the damage control teams swarming over him before the HEAT fellas had him bundled onto a jump platform, and from there….

Corridors, doors, an infirmary full of mercifully dim lights that smelled of antiseptic and…friends. His team. Three humans, two gao, a ten’gewek…

They smelled alive.

That thought was all Gumi needed to finally stop clinging to consciousness by his claws and let go. He trusted the doctors to get him through, relaxed, and passed out.

It was, frankly, a relief.

Dataspace

++0004++: < confusion; seeking elaboration > A power archive?

++0311++: Standing instructions are to investigate all anomalies. The power archive sent a minor alarm, which my double-digit superior assigned to me to investigate. The planet itself is tectonically inert, and there was no seismic event which might match an asteroid strike despite the fact that inner-system monitoring detected a small unpowered object that may have impacted the surface.

++0004++: So you activated the defensive discharge. That’s nearly forty cycles of stored power, you realize?

++0311++: I did so in accordance with standing order—

++0004++: < Interruption > I know. And I commend you for your diligence and caution. You did the right thing. Dismissed.

++0311++: < Relief; gratitude > Yes, Four.

+SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER 0311 HAS DISCONNECTED+

++0004++: Alright. Now what could they possibly be doing poking around on a power archive? What do they hope to gain from it?

++0005++: How did they even find it?

++0003++: They have captured and interrogated senior agents, and the Entity has devoured several of our number. Not to mention the traitorous collaborators. Any one of those sources would be able to tell them what to look for, or even give specific coordinates.

++0004++: But still. Why? They lack the technology to have any impact on our power archives.

++0005++: So we believe.

++0004++: It is possible to overestimate your foe.

++0005++: Still, they must have been there for a reason.

++0003++: Curiosity? Desperate hope? Their presence does not automatically point to any really threatening capability. Especially if it was a simple scouting mission to see what was there.

++0004++: Agreed. Still…it is worth noting this event. A threatening pattern may yet emerge. We must monitor our matterspace assets more closely, from now on. Especially seeing as the defensive discharge seems to have been insufficient and they escaped.

++0005++: < Agreement >

++0003++: < Agreement >

++Consensus achieved; intent registered; implementation delegated to Agent 0021++
++Agent 0311: commendation noted. Promotion deferred until crisis is resolved++
++Session closed++

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Letty Brown

Jenny was back in silent mode again, but Letty had learned not to worry about that like she’d used to. She’d never really figured out what was going on in the younger girl’s head when she clammed up like that, but…it didn’t necessarily mean things were bad. Jenny only got vocal when she was either feeling completely relaxed, or when she wasn’t coping at all.

Doctor Ross called it “Selective Mutism” and “post-traumatic stress.” But Letty knew the silence meant Jenny was…okay. Just okay. And it wasn’t like she was uncommunicative otherwise. She’d smile and nod and shrug and gesture. She’d even use sign language! Heck, as the two of them got better at it, she’d ‘talk’ Letty’s ear off with flickering hands.

But you’d never hear a peep out of her if Christian wasn’t around.

Honestly, there were days Letty could understand the clamming up, too. The Firths had…a big household. He and Freya had managed seven children between the two of them, adopted her and Jenny, sorta…quasi-adopted an entire apartment building full of desperate families, most of whom didn’t have dads anymore…and he’d become basically a surrogate dad for all them. If she missed her guess, he might be a bit more than that for a few, too.

And Letty had found a niche for herself as kinda the big sister to all of them, somehow. She had no idea how it had happened. But somehow, she’d gone from being ignored and abandoned by parents who didn’t give half a shit about her, to being here, in the middle of a freaking human hive. She had Jenny following her around like Piglet following Pooh, and Joseph (their giant of an eleven-year-old) definitely had a puppy-crush on her which was cute and all…

+No, it was definitely him,+ she signed. +I don’t care if he was wearing a…+ she faltered, then gestured to her face. “Mask?”

Jenny covered her face with her palms, then moved her hands away to either side like a pair of slide doors. +Mask. He’s dangerous.+

“Well, yeah. So’s Christian.”

Jenny nodded, but her expression was wary. +He scares me. Not like Christian.+

“I know what you mean…” Letty muttered.

“Girls?” Freya’s voice drifted through from the other room. “Your laundry’s holding up the house!”

“On it!” Letty called, and hopped off the couch. The Firths were just the right kind of chill about chores—all they really asked of Letty was that she clean up her own mess, do her own laundry, and help out with at least two meals a week.

It was so nice. Maybe Letty just had a skewed perspective from her old family and from living under the bridge, and from her responsibilities at Sacred Heart shelter (a sting of sadness at the thought of them…) but she hardly felt like she was being asked to do anything at all.

Besides. Jenny was always a help.

“But I mean…we know a lot of scary guys,” she pointed out. “I mean, look at the Lads.”

+Not like Hoeff,+ Jenny signed, fervently.

Letty shrugged. She’d had her own run-ins with truly dangerous men, and Hoeff was dangerous and a killer for sure. But he’d never given her that chilled-to-the-bone dread she’d got from that fucker Nolan, back home…

No point in arguing, she decided. They got their stuff folded, packed it away, and had just settled on the couch again when a familiar heavy thump signaled that Christian had just got home, which immediately triggered a happy stampede from all corners of the building, including Jenny springing up with a squeak.

Letty followed at a calmer pace, chuckling to herself. Sure enough, he was being swamped all the way up the stairs, and it would be a few minutes before he could break free and get to his own apartment.

Freya smiled, and took that as her cue to get ready.

He arrived by “kicking” open the door all stompy and boomy-voiced, and found himself tackled by all his boys at once. A sort of walking six-on-one pro-wrestling-slash-hugfest ensued. Firth gave all the girls a smile and a wink, while he crushed his boys into squirming compliance.

Then Jenny was up on his shoulder, and Letty got a one-armed affectionate squish and hair-scrub unlike any she’d ever received from her own dad, and Freya welcomed him home with a smooch and life was so good…

There was a bustle of activity, pulling out the extensions on the table, setting it, getting a banquet laid out, the line to wash hands, the scramble for chairs, the brief silence of everyone saying grace…

And then the pile-in for food. Plates and cups and bottles and stuff moved in mysterious ways before ultimately landing in front of their respective owners. Letty’s was the second-smallest serving, after Jenny’s, but that was hardly surprising. They were the only ones at the table who weren’t big stompy Heroes of the Line, or whatever it was.

That had worked to their advantage, really. All the boys were very protective of the two. Not that Letty needed it, but…

It was a good meal. Freya was a fantastic cook and the boys weren’t adverse to helping, because that meant they got to eat more. A good time, full of laughs and jokes (especially Stupid Boy jokes and Big Dad Energy jokes) and the kind of warmth that Letty had glimpsed with old friends, but never been part of until she came here.

But she noticed that, unusually, Jenny was still silent throughout. Normally, Christian coming home turned her into a happy chatterbox.

Christian noticed too. Maybe an hour afterwards, when the table had been cleared and the dishwasher was churning away and the boys had run off to go do Boy Things in the park, he checked in on them.

“Hey. Quiet mood today, huh?”

Jenny nodnodded.

He took a seat in his giant made-for-him recliner-slash-loveseat and invited them to join. It wasn’t a chair that could be comfortable for anyone who wasn’t like him; the padding was very thick, but so dense and unyielding that it may as well have been wood. He sank right into it however, with a happy and relieved sigh.

Letty and Jenny joined him anyway. Affection was free-flowing and expected in this house, so they settled on either side of him along his vast flanks, wedged firmly between the overstuffed armrest and the more than two-foot-wide slabs of granite stuffed into each of his great legs. He stretched out like a giant tiger and reclined, sighing happily, then carefully wrapped a man-dwarfing arm around them both for a tight, reassuring hug.

He’d cleaned up before coming home of course, but he already exuded the super-musky, slightly acrid guy-type scent that defined the Firth household. It was strongest by far in him, but she didn’t mind. It smelled like home. Like safety. He felt like safety, too; there was absolutely no give to him at all in any sense of the word, even at his gentlest and most relaxed, but that more than anything made him far more of a dad than her own.

“Y’okay?”

Jenny shrugged and pointed at the TV.

“Hoeff was on the news,” Letty translated.

“Ah.” Christian sighed.

“I mean, he had a fake face on. But it was definitely him. Nobody else is built that way.”

“Oh yeah, I saw the clip too. Knew it was him the second I saw it.” He gave Jenny a concerned look. “Upset ‘ya, huh?”

She shrugged expressively, looking down at her feet poised comically alongside his. Hers were a bit big for a girl’s, but his were absolutely huge and built to an entirely different industrial standard. They were so wide and sturdy he wore custom-sized shoes and boots, because even if anyone made a size so big, they wouldn’t be nearly wide or thick enough for his feet. Everything about him was so outsized and extreme, it was hard to believe he was the kind of man who doted on his adopted girls like they were his own firstborn daughters.

True to his nature, he never spared them the truth of anything, but he had a way of delivering it that was pure reassuring comfort, no matter what that truth was.

“Well, there ain’t nothin’ wrong ‘bout being upset. It’s an awful business, yijao? An’ you know I can’t comment on much. But…girls, I don’ need ‘ta tell either of ‘ya the world ain’t a nice place. And neither of us are nice guys. You get to see my good side, I hope. But…”

He sighed. “I’m really just a bigger version o’ him. Don’t get the wrong idea ‘bout me. I know Jenny here knows exactly th’ kinda monster I can be, when I gotta.”

Nods.

“So, trust me when I say he’s a good man. I know ‘em better’n almos’ anyone else, ‘cuz he an’ I are mostly the same. An’ I don’t just mean ‘cuz we’re the same kinda gorillas, neither.”

“They said the guy he killed was the man responsible for the war.”

“One of ‘em. Don’t be surprised if ‘ya see ‘em on the news again, ‘kay? There’s bad guys who need killin’ out there. Also…you know he’d never touch a hair on ‘yer head, right? ‘Cuz firs’ly, he’s a good man. Which ain’t nice, mind. But secondly…if it ever came to that, what I’d do to him’d make what he did to the general look kind and playful.”

“Oh, I believe it,” Letty said, fervently.

“Yeah,” Jenny agreed. It was one quiet syllable, but it meant a lot.

Firth pulled them in for a tighter snuggle.

“…I’m a monster. But I’m your monster, okay?”

Nods from them both.

“An’ so is he. He’d sooner die than let anythin’ happen to you or anyone else who din’t deserve it. That’s why we do what we do. We an’ th’ rest o’ the Lads.”

A moment’s silence, then he changed the subject. “…School treatin’ you better?”

“Your plan worked,” Jenny grinned.

“Oh yeah?”

Letty nodded, with a chuckle. “We got Lindsay on video, saying all that mean shit to Jenny. Last I saw of her, her mom was dragging her out the door with a red face, screaming at her about being grounded until college. It was perfect.”

“Hah! Aw, man, I love it when a plan comes together!”

“Eh, she’ll come back at us,” Letty predicted. “But I think we can handle her.”

“Attagirl. You gotta fight ‘yer fights, y’hear? But fight ‘em smart, fight ‘em honest. Don’t be a dumb boy like me an’ use ‘yer fists unless you gotta!”

Letty met Jenny’s eye and they traded the faint, tolerant eye-roll they always did when he was being corny. “Promise,” she said aloud.

He chuckled, stretched comfortably in his chair and kicked off his giant sandals. “Well, I got a weekend. Thought it was due time we hung out some…got any ideas what you’d like to do?”

Letty nodded. Christian knew how to handle the oversized family he was building, and he’d set a routine. Everyone got a Saturday, on rotation, and tomorrow was her turn. She’d been thinking what she wanted to do with it since last time.

“I uh…left all my nice stuff back at my parents’ place. Like, my makeup. I was thinking, shopping?”

He chuckled heavily. “Oh, man. Me in a makeup store?”

Letty grinned. Part of her choice had been mischief, she had to admit. Not that she was gonna admit it out loud… “There’s a place in the covered market, all their stuff is locally made!”

“I know it. Right next to where Ian buys his shirts, right?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Murray buys his beard stuff there. Tell ‘ya, soon as the guy retired and was free of regulations, he went full highland warrior…”

“Why don’t you do a beard?” Jenny asked.

“Ha! Should I? Actually…I think we’re allowed now, or we could make the argument anyway. Not like the gaoians have to shave…”

“You’d look good!” Letty agreed.

“You think so? Hey, Freya? Beard! What’dya think?!”

“I think you’d look like a hick mountain man!”

“I am a hick mountain man!” he called back. “So is that a yes or a no?”

“No! I like your jawline!”

“Fair ‘nuff!”

“Aww!” Jenny grumped.

“Now now, Freya does so much for me. If she wants me pretty, she gets me pretty. No argument!”

Freya came wandering in, squirmy infant on her hip. She was…perfect for Christian. Letty never imagined a woman so tall and, frankly, brutally muscular could be beautiful, too…

Maybe handsome was a better word. In a good way! But still…

“Well…okay,” Freya grinned. “Maybe I’ll allow it as an experiment. But I reserve the right to shave it off!”

“Fair deal. Actually, you girls mind if I bring Joseph along? And maybe Harrison an’ Diego too. They ain’t even teens yet but they’re all already getting whispers o’ chin hair on ‘em…”

“Already?” Jenny gave him a surprised look.

“Heh. We do be cavemen up in this weird circle o’ ours.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Letty agreed.

So went the weekend. They went shopping, Christian only sometimes able to squeeze into the tiny little shops that sold her type of clothing. He’d admonished her to be frugal, “‘cuz you’ve got a lot of brothers and friends we gotta care for,” so she tried to be strategic with her picks. He and the boys got haircuts while she was picking everything out, and came back with some Manly Things of their own when it came time to try everything on.

She realized how much she loved them all when they could honestly say what was nice and what wasn’t, and she didn’t feel any kind of upset. Though Christian did get a bit squeamish with the cute little skirt she’d found…

“That’s awfully short…” he said, uncomfortably. “You…could you go a bit longer, for my sake?”

Sure. She could do that. Maybe she’d come back and buy it with her own money, later.

God. To have a family who cared.

Saturday night, though. That was for Christian and Freya, which they often spent on the roof of their building. So that night, Letty gave back to them in turn. She big-sistered the house, stayed up to babysit so they had the time to go on a real date, go out somewhere nice.

She watched them for a bit as they walked away. Freya was a valkyrie of a woman, one who carried more muscle on her frame than most Heroes, even HEAT Heroes…but in Christian’s embrace, she seemed positively delicate. Couldn’t reach her arms around his wall of a back while they kissed outside, before walking off hand-in-hand on their date.

It was heartwarming.

She’d snuck a peek upstairs after they’d come back late that night too, stumbling a bit around the house. Maybe bring them a snack, some leftover pizza. All she saw was him sitting on the edge of their concrete bench, the incredible slabs of ropey brawn that was his superhuman back, broad and bare to the world—

…Nope! She retreated before seeing anything else. They didn’t need anything from her!

And that, more than anything else, made her feel the happiest of all.

Daar, jus’ tryin’ to get through a drama-free day

There were three very special times when Daar was likely to be interrupted with world-shattering Bad News. Only three. Either he was makin’ love ‘ta beautiful females, or he was doing something wholesome with kids and the public…

Or he was balls-out liftin, most especially if he was breaking PRs. Not when he was out for a sprint, or some track-sport, or even a long-distance run. Not while he was gamin’ assault scenarios in tactics training. Not when he was wrasslin’ virtual opponents in his holodeck rig or squishin’ real ones however. Not huntin’ Vulza or Brown Ones or even watching Earth predators on those very rare safaris. Never when he was pullin’ plow or diggin’ hole, thank the Unseen!

Nope. Only liftin.’ Prob’ly ‘cuz that was his most favoritest kind o’ exercise an’ the universe seemed ‘ta love its jokes. Figgers. It had got to the point where every time he broke a new record, he jus’ fuckin’ knew some kinda hot liquid bullshit was gonna land all over ‘em.

It seemed to grow with him, too. So nowadays it could be pretty bad. He was used ‘ta liftin’ in the strongest grav plates that could be had, with weights custom engineered ‘fer him, with their own field effects to make themselves even fuckin’ heavier an’ all that sorta silly shit…

That was th’ moment. Right when he was really makin’ progress an’ needed ‘ta keep it up as hard and ‘fer as long as he could fuckin’ stand, that was of course th’ moment he smelled Tiyun comin.’

“O’ course…” He growled, racked the bar (…after a bit of a struggle, where he did in fact break his one-rep bench PR), caught his breath then kipped up to his feet, shook his pelt out and steadied himself against the wall with a paw. Quick check in the mirror. Fuck yeah.

But gods damnit! It’d taken him hours to get there! Daar sighed, knowin’ how quickly th’ Crude and a topped-off belly would effect recovery; he’d need to start all over again. Balls.

“Room. Standard G.”

He felt floaty and momentarily dizzy with the sudden release in pressure, but he’d long learned how to cope with such a dramatic grav-shift. He was down from everything-crushing gravity literally only he could take, back to Earth one gee, the new standard. It was close enough to Gao’s gravity anyway, and it was aspirational and doable for basically every gao. So, since his humans needed to be healthy, and he din’t want shitty landlords cheapin’ out…

Father Tiyun scratched at the door, realized Daar was already waiting for him.

“…I was downwind, too. How…?” Liree was there too. Tiyun was a pretty dominant male, especially for a silverfur, but Liree absolutely was not. His smell was so much his and Tiyun’s these days it was sometimes a bit hard to notice him. He’d learned to be sneaky with it, too.

Still. The most animalist part o’ Daar couldn’t help but deeply enjoy how both Liree and Tiyun stepped back, gasped, flattened their ears and just generally submit once they saw an’ smelled him. Daar tried not ‘ta let it go to his head, but, well…he was just a big ‘ol breedin’ ‘Back unner it all. It were important not to lose touch wit’ what a man was.

“Easy! Here I am, rockin’ along on one o’ my most bestest liftin’ days ever. My pecs feel like they wanna essplode an’ I just beat all my records. Good ‘fer more, too! So, naturally? You showin’ up with bad news is jus’ the spiritual physics of th’ fuckin’ universe, Tiyun. So…”

Daar gave th’ little guys a fuckin’ show before whatever th’ news was that was gonna ruin his day, which got a suitably impressed look from Liree and a carefully not-too-annoyed ear-flick from Tiyun. Part o’ why Daar liked him so much was how resistant he was to all his meathead nonsense, and even more importantly to his natural dominance. Most gao…just couldn’t. Too long in close contact an’ they’d have a real hard time even thinkin’ past whatever Daar wanted. It’d always been a bit of a problem for him, even as a late cub, but now…

Which was why there weren’t nothin’ Daar admired more’n a resilient spirit, really, an’ Tiyun din’t get all weak-kneed ‘fer long, no matter how fierce Daar got. Good!

Anyway. “What’s so important I gotta stop when I’ve got such a nice fuckin’ pump goin’?”

“JETS Team Four are back. Emergency recall, all wounded. Seems the Hierarchy fitted the planet with some kind of nervejam system.” Tiyun fidgeted for a second and coughed. “The, ah, whole planet.”

…

Daar found his head tilting in honest astonishment. “The…Tiyun, do you have any idea how much energy that musta took?”

“It is, it must be said, not a very large planet…” Tiyun coughed again. “Which they have converted into a titanic mega-battery capable of storing an incalculable amount of energy…”

“I feel like I mighta missed something…Itchy, context please!”

Human and Longear giganerds had figgered out how to make gaoian and human internets play well together. Mostly the dumbest, lowest-level stuff was running human protocols these days—internet protocol? Whatever. But the software on top was this wunnerful weird merger of both. Human infrastructure, but gaoian software expertise. Or so he surmised.

Anyhoo, that meant every damn room or building or whatever had a local listening AI for things like lights, temperature, gravity, anything unique to that place. But everyone also had an assistant AI, and combined with…stuff he wasn’t so sure about, honestly, probably it lived in mobile communicators or some other such witchery…all he had to do anywhere in gaoian or human space was call for his digital assistant, and it’d answer.

He named his Itchy. Because like a persistent jock itch, it followed him around whether he wanted it to or not. But at least this one could show him a nicely useful holoscreen, now and then.

“Operation BLIND GIANT,” Liree added, helpfully.

Itchy was listening, the sneaky bitch. She suddenly had lots to show Daar about it.

He speed-read the floating overview…

“Oh.” Memory jogged. “Right. I ‘member we dispatched a mission a while ago, but I guess staff wasn’t sure yet ‘bout what they’d find.”

“It didn’t quite warrant your full attention yet,” Tiyun noted. “But it does now, My Father.”

“Why?”

“Because the team’s excursion suits and ship both had a full counter-nervejam coating and the whole team got an immediate stabilizing dose, and they’re still in…well, they’re in bad shape. The Turkeyholic is going to need extensive repairs, or maybe even decommissioning.”

“…Shit.”

“Yes, My Father.”

“I thought that coating was meant ‘ta be…impenetrable? That the right word?”

“Up until now, no nervejam weapon available to us has managed to defeat it,” Tiyun said, carefully. “Whether it’s a matter of this being some previously unknown variant, or just the sheer amount of power the Hierarchy put into the pulse is…we don’t know, yet.”

“Right. So, is there immediate action needed?”

“No, but staff would appreciate some general guidance, so they can have something appropriate ready for the next stand-up.”

“An’ th’ Cabinet meetin’ right afterward.”

“Yessir.”

Right. Well. Maybe his day wasn’t quite ruined. In fact no, just the opposite really, ‘cuz he’d need ‘ta meditate on this…

“Okay. So I’mma just stream-of-thought ‘fer a moment, ‘kay? Take note an’ don’t worry if other smart people already thought o’ it.”

Tiyun duck-nodded. He knew the drill. “Of course. Immediate planning actions?”

Well, as much as Daar wanted to pump-chase all day, prob’ly that weren’t in the cards. Maybe he could do some runnin’ work? He decided he should probably clean up either way, an’ also let his sweet fuckin’ shower beat the shit outta him ‘fer a bit. Shower was always where some of his best thinks got thunked.

So he took one last look at himself in the really good posing mirrors, maybe a bit wistfully, then fell to all fours and thumped toward the locker room.

“Right, so. In no order, uh…Corti. Gotta review sensor data. Clans ‘fer that too. Shit, let’s do a two-fer and use it ‘ta spin up th’ human university system. It’s jus’ gettin’ its legs unner itself, an’ this’ll help. We’ll need research! It’s an arms race an’ we can’t afford ‘ta lose. I am not gonna spend top-tier operators like biodrones. Uh…coatings. OmuAru?”

“Yes.”

“Them too. Need ‘ta get staff going on all that at once. Uh…longer-term.” He paused a moment as he climbed into his stall, which started its program right away. Oh, bliss. He enjoyed it for a long moment as he let the problem marinate in his brain.

“Shit, this is gonna monkey-fuck everyone’s training, ain’t it? We’d all assumed strong nervejam mitigation, but now we’re back ‘ta, what? Tactics from three-plus years ago. Especially fleet, now that I think ‘bout it. That weapon fucked up a ship.”

“One-Fang and Firefang are already shedding fur over it, My Father.”

“Good. So…hmm. This is gonna require a big team re-think, mebbe. Depends on how research goes…but I’m guessin’, no matter what, it’s only gonna be mostly effective.”

“Optimistic I feel, but…yes. That seems right to my admittedly not-a-Warmaster brain.”

Daar chittered darkly, right as the turbo pressure-washer sprays really kicked in and started working him over. “I like ‘yer brain, Tiyun! Couldn’t make it through th’ day without—oh fuck that feels good…y’sure ‘ya don’t wanna try this?”

“At that pressure I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy the consequences, My Father.”

“There is a pressure control, an’ it only goes full power if I’m in th’ stall…”

The spray picked that moment to ramp up to full pressure. It took lots of force to beat his muscles into submission these days, and that made his shower jus’ th’ sweetest kind o’ agony.

It fuckin’ hurt. But gods, the fuckin’ relief when it’d passed by…

“No thanks. I had some related thoughts, too.”

“Shoot.”

Tiyun tucked his tablet under his arm the way he always did when he was about to say something Daar weren’t gonna like. “Champion Gurrum and Nofl have both asked to reopen the research into neural cybernetic augmentation.”

“Gurrum asked that?” Daar blinked, genuinely surprised. Kodiak was an old-fashioned Stoneback from nose to claws. “I mean…”

Daar didn’t say. Some of the ancient secrets of Stoneback included a semi-mythological and severe aversion to brain augmentation—well, really a warning against the spirits of machines and the sanctity of body and mind—which only made sense in the post-Hierarchy world. Granted, it was only the more…superstitious, or maybe religiously inclined who obeyed…

But Daar was one of them. And so was Gurrum.

“I believe Champion Gyotin is also weighing the idea.”

“Keeda’s nards. Why?”

“Three overriding reasons, My Father. The first is the simple reality of modern combat. Brain damage is one of the consequences we must contend with, because of the nature of the weapons in use. Nofl believes a…” Tiyun glanced at his tablet then shrugged “…well, it’s a bit beyond me but the upshot is he believes that he can develop a protective technology.”

Well…Daar could immediately see the utility of that, even though his mind immediately turned to the OmoAru and the tech they had throughout their systems, which was a thought to make his skin crawl and his nose itch…he gestured for Tiyun to continue.

“Second, we are reaching the limits of in-suit HUD and assistive AIs. Our best warriors have a virtual cable tying them back to Fleet, and that’s a severe vulnerability. You experienced such vulnerability yourself, on the last mission you participated in.”

Daar rumbled and nodded as he thought back to Alpha Centauri. Could things have gone differently? He often asked himself that. But, there was no use asking hypotheticals. They’d never know for sure whether neural cybernetics could have somehow changed the outcome of that fateful day, so there was no sense and gain in dwelling on it.

“Third?” he asked aloud.

“Third…you and a few others have reached a point where you are unambiguously superbeings. You can perform faster than you can think, and perform to genuinely devastating effect. That’s resulted in a whole new training methodology inspired by Righteous’s thinking, which involves taking instinctual training to the same extremes as we’ve already taken physical excellence. My Father…some would argue that poses risks as grave as augmentation might.”

Fair and reasonable point, so he duck-nodded along. “Still….it’s a big ask.”

“Nofl cited Singularity’s own use of cybernetics among their ‘corth’ population and…” Tiyun frowned at the tablet again. Nofl must have tried blinding him with science. “Well, there’s much here about the Hierarchy’s back-doors and how we might start the technology anew using what’s already known but designed to never be usable for biodroning. He specifically mentions that the synthetic myelin in Warhorse’s brain could be considered an augmentation.”

“…Okay. I will need to think on that. I think…yes. Let’s schedule a Cabinet meeting on the idea. This isn’t up for political debate, I want to make that clear…”

“Understood.”

“But I will, tentatively, concede that brain damage is not a great thing and we should be researching into that. We already allow augmentation for similar things. That, mebbe, we can put to a vote. Still wanna run it by Cabinet first.”

The massage beat-down finished, and he took a moment to enjoy the cold rinse spray before the blowers turned on and talking was impossible. A welcome moment to think, that.

Jet-blasted dry, he thumped over to the mirror. Quick run-through of the mandatories, because he really did have a great pump. Nothing wrong with form or posture that he could see…

“How am I lookin,’ you two?”

“Moist,” Tiyun snarked. Liree looked more unabashedly thrilled, but he chittered along too.

“Fine! Be that way.” More careful look. Full range of motion, so he’d probably not earned any injuries today. He’d see how he felt in a few hours. Definitely a minor fur disaster, though. He managed that even in a short coat, which was a uniquely-Daar talent! No doubt Naydi would pick over him and fuss and complain and tidy him up…he decided to leave it as it was.

He knew his weaknesses.

“Right. As for the rest…I’m a conservative sorta guy in a lotta ways. I think I’d stick to what we can do with our own biology first, ‘cuz I look at myself in the mirror and I think, firs’ly, ‘damn I’m sexy!’”

He earned a surprise chitter for that. He chittered along, sank to his haunches, and handed Liree the slicker comb.

“But secondly, I see how much we can do on our own, and th’ only real dependency we got is food. That’s a valuable defense I don’t wanna surrender. So…let’s focus on everything else first. Suit augmentation. Better on-board and local computation. Miniature zero-width comm support in-suit! Balls, imagine how useful that’d be! An so forth. Brain aug is a dangerous sword t’unsheath. Actually…Liree. You first! What d’you think ‘bout this? An’ don’t hold back.”

Liree was usually silent unless prompted, at least around Daar or Tiyun. So, a little encouragement was in order.

Liree considered it for a second. “I think if I was going up against nervejam, I’d want every protection I could get,” he decided. “But I wouldn’t want anything in my head that could compute, yijao? Like, the only thinker I want inside my skull is the one that’s already there. Anything I attach to it would need to passively make my own brain better and tougher, not…do anything active. And even then, I’d be kinda squirmy about it, I think.”

“Squirmy, but not completely averse?”

“…Yeah. If it was augment or die, I’d augment. I think.”

Daar grunted a thoughtful sound and decided it was time to move on with his day. Tiyun was doing that subtle thing where one of his ears was turned toward the wall clock, reminding Daar to be mindful of the time and the rest of the day’s commitments. Very well.

“You’ll let me know how the team are doin’, Tiyun?”

“Yes, My Father.”

“Arright. Up next, I got…no, don’t tell me, I remember. Tour of the high-density housin’ in Lavmuy.”

Tiyun chirped, “Surprisingly, no! We’re doing a charity barbeque. You’re honorary pit master.”

“Oh!” Well balls, that sounded fantastic! “Whereabouts?!”

Liree pant-grinned, joining in some mischief. “In the high-density housin’ near Lavmuy!”

“Hah! You lil’ goblins!”

Smashy hugs were in order. But just a quick bit o’ bullyin’ fun. Important barbeque-related matters were before him!

He did feel bad for the wounded men, and he’d look into seeing them once they were out of surgery or whatever. He couldn’t guarantee visits for everyone, but he’d always try an’ make time, s’pecially for that. And he couldn’t wallow in negative feeling more than the occasional sting, so he put them to the back of his mind for now and turned his mind to the barbeque.

This would be the kinda one where everything had already been planned out ahead of time, so best not surprise ‘em by taking along a naxas from his hobby herd, more was the pity. But he could take along a bottle of sauce…and some pickles? Yeah. Nice cronchy ones.

As substitutes for a good workout went…not that bad.

Not bad at all.

Diplomatic starship Rich Plains, Orbiting Planet Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Sir Patrick Knight

“Do we have any idea what they’re likely to announce?”

The greatest blessing of all in Sir Patrick’s medical regimen was that he could, nowadays, look up at his tallest advisor without the faintest hint of discomfort. And that was saying something when the advisor in question was a bit more than twice his height, and when Sir Patrick was very firmly an old man.

Chronologically, anyway. Physically, he was starting to feel like he had in his forties—the twinges and aches and general bodily indignities were occasional rather than constant. His knee? Shiny and new, completely resurfaced with cartilage cultured from his own tissues. His knuckles? Small and comfortable. His scalp? Flourishing.

Kirk, on the other hand, was one of a fairly long-lived species, to the point where a hundred of Earth’s years was reckoned to be retirement age, and he was ten years younger than Sir Patrick. Even if one was familiar with the signs of aging in an Rrrrtktktkp’ch, Kirk wasn’t showing them yet.

Plenty of time to have gone around the block, plenty of time left to use that knowledge usefully. His head swayed thoughtfully back and forth and he groomed the long whiskers around his mouth with his smaller and more delicate pair of hands as he considered the question.

“I would be…surprised if they have reached the point of an official response to the Earth situation,” he said, carefully. “But I cannot see why else they would come to Cimbrean. And these are strange times. All the foot-dragging, obtuseness and bureaucratic delay we are used to were enemy action…”

He twisted the whiskers between two fingers, then effected a humanoid shrug. “Honestly, I do not think anything would surprise me at this point.”

“Famous last words,” Sir Patrick chuckled. “…But I have to agree. So much has changed so quickly, for all I know they’re about to bend the knee to Daar as well.”

Kirk creaked something from the spectrum of his species’ laughter. “I take it back. That would surprise me. But almost anything short of it…”

There was a soft, plangent tone that filled the whole ship: the first chime calling all council members to attend session.

“Time to find out, I suppose,” Sir Patrick said. He finished his cup of tea, set it aside, and together they headed for the door.

All representatives were in attendance today, including a couple that Sir Patrick had never seen even at the height of the House Henen crisis. The galaxy was a big place and a few of its species had adopted the firm policy of ignoring it entirely, if they possibly could. Species with all the natural instinct for curiosity of a fallen log, or with a terrible fear of the unknown, or for whom the only winning move in the great game of galactic politics was to not play. Whatever their reason, their empires consisted entirely and solely of their home planets, and they had only developed warp technology as a byproduct of their efforts to make ground-supporting orbital infrastructure more cost-effective, or through the work of a singular individual who was widely regarded to have been insane.

Such isolationists had often been dismissed as a case of ‘they’re aliens, why should their thinking make sense to us?’ but Sir Patrick had noted that the three such species now present had all gone in for cybernetic augmentation in a big way, and in that observation he had seen another possibility…

Well, they were here now. In fact, the Rich Plains’ council chamber was packed elbow-to-appendage, and absolutely everyone was dressed in, or bearing, their appropriate finery. Silvery chain veils, meters-long caste banners, precious metals and gems on various rings and wires and necklaces and bangles.

He caught AtaUmuUi’s eye. The OmoAru sleeper dipped his head respectfully, then rolled his huh over in his hand. Alongside him, the e-skurel-ir delegate Gwemuruki was standing next to his assistant scribe, pen in hand and ready to record the day’s events in a particularly impressive tome.

Amidst all that flash and finery, Yan Given-Man almost vanished. He was much the same as ever, given that a ten’gewek’s idea of formal wear was a slightly fancier loincloth with a few extra bone beads on it, and his knives of manhood strapped across his chest.

Of course, Yan cut an impressive figure no matter what he was wearing. Bigger and fitter than ever, and looking younger himself. His two-foot-tall crest was trimmed though, so instead of a wild spray of hair, it looked like the neat curve of a centurion’s helmet, that ran from the crown of his head and trimmed down toward the tip of his tail.

It was a very good look, and did much to both civilize him and make him somehow more fierce-looking.

Towering next to him was the ever-capable mister Etsicitty, who these days served in a role akin to military attaché for Knight, and as an honest-broker liaison between the slowly-amalgamating military capabilities among the United Peoples.

He was also Knight’s bodyguard these days, whenever they needed a show of force. And rightfully so. He and Yan were now well-matched roughhousers, and both of them had a good, friendly reputation among the peoples of galactic civilization. Julian was a huge, potentially terrifying man, but soft-spoken and friendly. Relatable. Second only to Righteous for sheer human might, yet he didn’t radiate god-of-murder nearly so violently. In other words, Julian was the perfect partner in crime for a job like this.

That soft chime sounded again, marking the beginning of council. The lights dimmed, illuminating the polished stone circle in the chamber’s center, and Knight thought to glance down at the agenda.

There was only one item: “Statements regarding the Earth.”

He looked up again. It was the Directorate’s turn, as one of the five core members, to have one of theirs as chairbeing. The hush was broken by the light slap-slap of First Director Velrm’s bare feet as he padded into the spotlight, followed by the drone bearing his personal banner.

He looked around, then his oversized dark eyes settled on Knight, and he inclined his head.

“The last time a member species broke out in such tremendous and terrible internecine war as the one that played out on Earth, the Council convened to condemn it and to place sanctions upon the species involved,” he said. “I will begin my statement today by assuring his excellency the Human ambassador that, for my part, the tone today will be quite different.”

Knight blinked, then tipped his head gratefully. Velrm matched the gesture, then turned to face the largest part of the room. “The difference,” he explained, “is that the war of Robalin Supremacy appeared to be a purely internal affair, a tragedy of the species’ own making. The human World War Three is no less tragic…but it is not of humanity’s own making, as his Majesty the Great Father of the Gao was so keen to stress.”

“From the moment the first human ambassador stood before us and made accusations about the state of galactic society and the forces at work behind it, this council has scoffed, denied, downplayed, stymied, interfered with, obstructed, bullied and sanctioned the human race. All of which should be seen for what it is: evidence of just how deep the malign influence went, that it reached here, into the very minds of all our predecessors, to the point where Doctor Hussein was assassinated in council and the investigation that ensued could only be called ‘perfunctory’ if one was inclined to tremendous charity.”

He stepped a few paces aside, and was suddenly alongside a holographic Guvnurag, recorded in the middle of quite an impassioned speech to judge from the flares of vibrant red and orange lashing all over her flanks. “Here is the late Councilor Ugnonvurvegi, passionately arguing for the necessity of quarantining the Earth behind a modified system defense field. The motion carried with only one dissenting vote—that of the Clans of Gao.”

Another hologram, this one quite familiar to Knight. “The late Grandmatriarch Henenwgwyr, on the day this council received its first and only ever communication from the Hunters, in the form of an ultimatum that any station which harbored humans would face the swarm-of-swarms. On that occasion, there were two votes against, and three abstentions, but the motion to advise all ships and stations to evict human passengers still passed with a clear majority.”

He paused, then turned back to face Knight. “Following these and other incidents, the humans have, rightly, objected. They have correctly claimed discrimination. They have appealed for the reparations to which they are due. And at every turn, this council has ignored its duty, its charter, and its very purpose. Time and again, we abandoned a people whom we should have welcomed as fellow sophonts. Time and again, we exploited them in their hour of need.”

“Humanity, of course, turned out to be entirely correct. Most of us were not stirred into action, even after the events on Gao precluded any doubt as to the truth. Yet the evidence only accumulated. Look at it!”

More images, more clips, lists and data. “The fate of the OmoAru, the attack upon the ten’gewek, this very council’s perpetual inaction in the face of the Hunters yet unaccountable jingoism in the face of the Celzi Alliance…the list, if one searches for it, is indefinite….and I daresay there are few places where the enemy’s influence is writ larger than in my own body.”

He gestured to himself. “I am not a product of evolution. I am a product of technology. My species long ago became physically sterile, capable of reproduction only through artificial wombs and cloning technology. At the time, and for much of history since, we viewed it as evidence of our technological and mental superiority. Now, we see it for the control mechanism it was. Strip us of our machines, and the Corti will be extinct within a generation.”

“I am pleased to say,” he added, “that we have reversed this mistake. Councilors, the Corti Directorate is pleased to announce that the first of our newest caste have reached adulthood. I give you, the Carbon Caste.”

There were gasps as a new figure padded into the spotlight. Sir Patrick blinked in astonishment. The newcomer was most definitely a Corti in her grey skin and large eyes, but she stood rather taller than Velrm and her figure was anything but skinny and androgynous. She was built, in fact, like something akin to a gymnast—tiny, punchy and powerful. She was even wearing clothes, in the form of a black cloth wrap around her chest, and a short skirt.

“Meru here represents in many ways a return to an earlier form, but she is also an advancement upon it. If the deathworlders have taught my people anything, I would suggest it is the need for resiliency and the widest possible personal capability.

“Her caste represents my peoples’ rebirth. My line, and all others, are genetic dead-ends. We will cease to exist in the fullness of time. Our task now is the transmission of culture. When we pass, it will be her, and her fellows, who define what it is to be Corti. This is the length we have been forced to go, to shed the Hierarchy’s deleterious influence.”

Meru fidgeted nervously with her clothing, and Sir Patrick wondered exactly how old the Carbon Caste girl really was. If she’d been human, he would have guessed she was seventeen or so. In any case, when Velrm gave her a nod, she scuttled gratefully back out of the light with decidedly un-corti-like emotiveness.

“Of course, my people are hardly the only evidence of this,” Velrm continued. “One need only take a trivial glance across the Gao. Their people bear all the hallmarks of genetic engineering, and their world shows wide-scale geoengineering in their late pre-history. We have even witnessed it! It is known to Directorate records as Anomalous Stellar Event two hundred and seven, and can be reviewed by any ship willing to move out in front of its light: a perfectly average main sequence star going nova…briefly. It stopped only twenty-seven minutes into the event, but the beam was not omnidirectional. It was collimated. We have, of course, recently witnessed such an event again, though Earth’s was taken to conclusion, while this event was stopped shy of total destruction.”

He looked around the chamber. “At this point, I would hope I need not spell out where this beam was aimed. We are also aware of dual influences within our Directorate extending from that time period. We are aware both used our science to engineer the Gao towards competing and aligning ends. We know that effort was instrumental in engineering the modern gao, and it was instrumental in the Great Father’s existence. Many have suffered, and rendered great service in their burdens.” He looked toward Etsicitty. “I wish to thank you, and apologize on behalf of the Corti. What was taken from you and what you have given have proven priceless, yet the ordeal inflicted upon you is unconscionable.”

Etsicitty blinked, then had the presence of mind to acknowledge the gesture with a small tip of his head. There was muttering in the wings now as the various delegates reacted to this grand speech.

Velrm turned to face the other four senior members, the Guvnurag, Kwmbwrw, Vzk’tk and Gao. “All I have just said and shown is groundwork for the Directorate’s formal stance on the matter of the Earth, its impending destruction, and the recent war. And our formal position is this: we condemn the extermination of a world to spite its children. We condemn the extermination of any species, and wholeheartedly we condemn the machinations that enabled this war. The Directorate has long acknowledged the existence of the great enemy, and committed some small token assets to assistance and research: now, we commit to bending the full might of our minds, our factories, our facilities and our people toward the Enemy’s defeat, and to the assistance of the human race in their time of need.

“There are difficulties. The question of human sovereignty has never been simple, but now it isn’t even aligned by species or planet. To protect the humans, we must aid the gao, which means we must ally with the ten’gewek, who are protectorates of Singularity, an entity formed long ago by an exiled offshoot of my own people, and which is now governed by a literal god-king from Earth’s ancient past. What does this mean? Are the Corti now, in some strange manner, subjects of the Great Father? Does Gilgamesh owe us his allegiance? If I were prone to humor, I think I would be paralyzed by the absurdity of it all.”

There were chuckles, chitters, hoots, flashes of violet and assorted other expressions of mirth at this dry comment, to which Velrm remained perfectly deadpan.

“Because of the Deathworlders, we live in a galaxy now free of Hunter raids. Because of the Deathworlders, we are on the verge of living in a galaxy free of a malignant influence that has sent uncountable species into forgotten extinction ahead of us. What heights can we reach by ourselves, free of the Hierarchy? We do not know. But the Corti are eager to discover. Which is why the Corti Directorate formally moves that the Dominion Security Council commit all available resources to the assistance of Earth, humanity, and the Gaoian peoples.”

The Guvnurag councilor stood, her chromatophores dancing with crimson resolve. “The Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy seconds the motion.”

“Do any of the core powers wish to exercise their veto?” Velrm challenged, looking to the Kwmbwrw in particular, who immediately indicated in the negative. He gave a satisfied grunt, then turned and addressed the guards. “Seal the chamber for voting!”

This was primarily a ceremonial gesture, which involved closing the outer doors which were then inspected by each council member’s idea of security. For Knight, that meant Julian soft-footing it over in a quiet, subtly predatory way toward the doors, to give it his once over.

It never failed to draw the intense attention of everyone present. For whatever reasons applied, most aliens found it fascinating to watch.

The sealing was by far the longest part of the process: the vote itself was practically instantly: the ayes had it. Only the Robalin abstained.

Sir Patrick sat down as the fullness of what had just happened settled on him. This was what he’d been appealing for ever since the news of Alpha Centauri first broke, of course. Suddenly, it was like he’d been pushing hard against a stuck door with his shoulder, and it had given way to send him hurtling into the room beyond. The feeling of paused momentum returning was enough to quite literally knock him off his feet.

Everything he’d asked for, every assistance, every resource…it was all pledged. More than pledged, votes were taken and binding instruments were signed.

Part of it, he knew, was that all the resources now being committed were those that had previously existed to prevent Hunter incursions. The very triumph that had doomed Earth had freed up the materiel to assist its survivors. An irony, perhaps. He didn’t care. Previously, they had been looking at saving…most of the survivors. Now, with the Dominion’s vast economic might, it was entirely possible that literally every living human might make it off Earth, unless they chose to stay.

He retired at the end of council session feeling happily drained. Exhausted in his very soul, but for all the right reasons, chiefly that he’d finally let go of a tension he’d barely noticed from holding it for so long.

They celebrated, of course. Drinks, toasts, congratulations, laughter….an impromptu party, really. The delegates of the United Peoples stayed up for hours playing ta’shen and poker, simply celebrating their triumph.

Julian and Yan had to call it short, though. Their schedules meant they would be leaving in the morning.

“Probably for the best,” Sir Patrick decided. “There’s still much to do tomorrow.”

“Is important I stay close to sky-doctors now,” Yan intoned. “Will soon leave it all to Vemik and join HEAT for good. My people…need a different kind of thinking, now. And I have strength like none of them. This is best. Is what blackcrest is for.”

“And so, now instead of Giving yourself to fight the Brown Ones…”

“I Give myself to fight something evil. Besides,” Yan snarled, “I think Righteous needs someone to beat him up!”

Julian rolled his eyes, but affectionately.

“What about Vemik?” Knight inquired. “He’s…what, not even thirty yet?”

“Yes, beginning of his prime, now, already the best of us. I will leave, he will become Chief of the Lodge in spring. Much strength in him.”

“More everyday,” Julian nodded. “He’s becoming a wise old forest monkey these days.”

“Not old! Still a young man!” Yan hooted, protectively.

“I think he meant in his heart,” Patrick added. “We have a word for young men wise beyond their years: ‘old souls.’ A good word, I think.”

Yan accepted that with a lash of his tail and a nod of his head, and with that he and Julian were gone, headed for the Rich Plains’ jump room. Sir Patrick pottered around, cleaning up the drinkware, tiles and cards while bidding the others good-night, then retired to his own bed.

He wasn’t quite ready to sleep yet, though. He had one last thing to do.

He sat on his bed, put on one of the first real smiles he’d worn in months, and called his daughter to share the good news.

__

Jumptown, planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate

The Singer

Cities, it turned out, were a good idea. A lot of the Given-Men and the older Singers who knew the old stories of the city-People, and who knew what the human archaeologists had found, had come to scoff at that idea, but the Singer saw it differently.

There was magic in cities.

Take the market, which was a fire-circle for the Giving and Taking of all sorts of things. Whatever a tribe had too much of, they could trade for something they needed here, in one central place rather than go searching around and sending messengers.

Or then there was the library and school, where children from all the tribes came to learn how to read, and that meant being able to learn all the miracles from human and gaoian and other civilizations.

Take the hospital, where the werne-gored, the troubled births, the broken-backed and the sweating-sick usually walked away healthy again…or else passed away comfortably at least, which was the last Giving they could ever receive.

She hadn’t needed much effort to persuade most of the other Singers that here, in Jumptown, was where they should meet to talk. The Lodge could remain far away and isolated, that being the best thing when Given-Men felt their fire. But the Singers needed somewhere they could come and go to meet and talk and plan, then return home in a short trip.

Their old meet-villages weren’t so good as all this. They hadn’t got to hear from everyone, before. Hadn’t got to share what they knew with whoever really needed it. Hadn’t got to make sure everyone heard the same thing at the same time, because words and ideas changed with re-telling and sometimes things got lost.

The biggest magic of all, though, was what those voices let them see. It let them plan, and it let them see dangers before they became dangerous.

The first: werne.

One of the Dancers had decided to start counting them. How many bulls there were, how big their harems were, how many calves they had, how large the bachelor herds were…and more. And then she’d written all those numbers down and kept doing it, and watched how the numbers changed, then she’d showed the numbers to her Singer, and her Singer had brought them to the other Singers…

And the problem was this: the herds were getting smaller, and weaker. Men made it a point of pride to hunt the really big bulls. And that made sense: the most food for the least effort, and the bulls had spent many years siring strong calves. And whichever bachelor then won the harem herd would be a strong one too, because it beat the weaker ones.

But if it had been the strongest then it would have been the bull already. So the bulls were getting steadily weaker. Or was that wrong? The Dancer argued for it, but the more Singer thought about it, the more she realized it really wasn’t a simple question…

So she talked to the other Singers, and the Singers talked to the Given-Men, and between them they decided the thing to do was to see what insight the humans might have because this seemed like the sort of problem they’d probably already dealt with a long time ago.

Which, of course, they had.

She and a few others dropped in on Professor Daniel. He had an official residence nowadays, with a round garden. It originally had a fence, but there was little point to it—anyone could get up a tree and look over, and most of the People saw it as a jumping challenge anyway. So, it came down and now, if Professor wanted some privacy, he just went indoors.

So of course, by “drop in” they did that literally. None of the People ever really got tired of surprising the humans that way.

He was doing that slow water-dance-exercise “Tie Chee” thing, the one that really showed off how elegant even an old human could be. It was so precise, so controlled. It didn’t look like a display of strength, but it sort of was, in the same way a tree-dance or something like that could be. It definitely had the same sort of magic in it…but for grass-apes, instead of tree-apes. He didn’t stop when she and the rest thumped down, but kept up his form until he was done with the movement.

“Be with you in a moment…”

That was Professor’s way of handling sudden drop-ins. He made you respect his time. Singer could appreciate that, so nod-nodded and sat on her tail to wait. Around her, the others took her cue and did the same.

He didn’t keep them waiting long. Finished his routine, took a sip of water, then grabbed a chair and sat down with them. “It’s been a while, Singer. How are you?”

“Busy, busy. We think very much about city-building lately. Lodge and Singers think, maybe it is becoming time for us.”

“Big change! And I agree, but why now?”

They told him. The Dancer produced her numbers and graph, which he only had to glance at to raise his eyebrows and look quite impressed.

“Firstly, excellent work, young Dancer! Second…that happened fast. But I suppose it’s not really surprising. Between sanitation, vaccines, and the wisdom my meathead colleagues are teaching…your people have grown much hungrier.”

“More of us than ever,” one of the older Singers agreed. “More than before the death-birds and High-rarchy machines came. I haven’t had to send a baby back to the gods in…years.”

“And young men grow up stronger, and wiser,” Dor Given-Man added. “Learning sport makes better play-war, and better at avoiding hurt or anything.”

“Childhood’s always been a dangerous time for your people, hasn’t it?” Hurt swigged his water again.

“Yes. When grown…we are hard people. Very little hurt us from anything. But big hurts before the magic of growing gives us strength, can follow for rest of life.”

“Now, instead…they don’t get hurt, or if they do they heal. Which means more mouths to feed,” the Singer nodded. “There is old song, about the Brown One that ate all the werne and got very fat, then starved later.”

Hurt nodded. “I’ve heard it. But yeah, you’re running into the exact same problem we once did.”

“When?”

“We’re not sure, exactly. Ten or twelve thousand years ago. Possibly much earlier. We don’t have written history much before, oh, five or maybe six, depending on what you mean by written.”

The older Singer made a disbelieving noise—her Dancer, the one who’d come up with the graph, just trilled at her mentor. Singer could tell which one of the pair knew humans better, but all the Dancers did, really. Soaking up the magic and wisdom of elders was their role.

Hurt chuckled and swigged his water again then set it aside. “Believe it or not, your people are actually older than mine! We came to the Deep early because it was the only way to survive our world. Yours are among the oldest people, but you survived differently. You are proof that the gods solve the challenge of the world in many ways. Anyway. This particular problem of growing population and food led to what we now call the agricultural revolution, and it’s the reason cities came to be in the first place! It’s also how we discovered beer and wine…”

“Once heard it was the other way around,” Singer said, smirking at him. “Heard you discovered beer and wine, then made cities to have more of it.”

“And to anyone who knows anything about human nature, it’s a plausible theory,” Hurt chuckled. “I think it may be harder for you, though. My people can survive off grain. You can’t even eat it. You’re obligate carnivores, roots and vegetables are how you pad out a meal, not a staple of it. So for you, it’s all about animal husbandry.”

“…We have to marry the werne?” Dor’s tail twitched as he tried to puzzle out if Hurt was making some obscure joke.

Hurt shook his head with a laugh. “You know, I have no idea why it’s called that? But no. The idea is to influence how the werne breed, so that they become more like what you need. You already do this with yourselves and don’t realize it. The strongest, prettiest men have the most children, yeah? That means their children will be pretty too…now consider how very old your people are. Is it any wonder yours are the strongest?”

There were thoughtful head-bobbings and tail-lashings from the whole group.

“So this husbandry, looks like what?” the old Singer asked.

Hurt frowned as he searched his memory. “When we manage herds…I believe the traditional method is to observe the herd closely, and reserve the strongest fifth against hunting or slaughter. They are kept to breed. Each year, we re-observe and keep the strongest fifth. As a bull gets older, he will likely fall from the lead, but it’s likely because he’s old and stiff, not innately weak.”

“This kind of management…I think it will require more strength of your men. Because werne will not farm easily. They attack on sight and they only come to the forest to breed, yes? Well, this means your strongest men are going to have to pick out the strongest werne, hunt them, wrestle them, mark them, and then set them free. Every season. And leave them to breed.”

“While hunting the younger werne.”

“Yes, who will need more work to separate them from the stronger bulls you’re now leaving alive, or from the bachelor herds. So you will need to be stronger, too. Work harder for the same meat.”

“A chance to grow,” Dor rumbled, looking pleased rather than wary.

“Yes. And it will enable specialization, too. The work will be harder and need more men, but I suspect it will also take less time. That will give you more free time to do other things. That may let you do things like expand the size of the hunt, for one. Or it may mean more time to learn. Or to train, or to build. In fact…I’m surprised Yan isn’t here for this.”

Singer shook her head. “We wanted…to talk this without him here. He has very strong sky-thoughts and…for this, better we find them first together before he decides for us. So we can help give him best ideas.”

“Also, Vemik Given-Man almost as strong, now,” Dor added, and glanced over at Vemik, who had been uncharacteristically quiet and reserved. “Yan may soon take the Big Sky-Magic and go fight for us…but if he does, he can’t be Chief of the Lodge, he thinks. So he is waiting.”

Hurt looked over at Vemik. “Keeping your own council, today?”

Vemik shrugged those broad, strong shoulders of his. “If I say what I think, everyone will agree. Same reason Yan mostly says nothing.”

Nods all around. They all knew it was true.

“Right. So then, maybe what we need to do is start thinking about cities, then. We’d need to study it, but…small villages hunting their own herds may not work, going forward. Or maybe it will, if everyone agrees to preserve the strongest. That might be enough for now, even if it means much more work for the men.”

Dor hooted in an approvingly grumpy way. “Good. Young palecrests, lazy unless you kick their rump, fuck them until they go further for prey! Always want closest werne…or just bring home small nayma. Or root-birds! What woman is turned on by that?!”

“Every man brings home root-birds sometimes,” Singer observed, wryly. “Sometimes, the gods decide to give you a bad day.”

Dor’s grumbling (and amused) tail-lash was all the confirmation she needed, as was Vemik’s silent shoulder-shaking suppressed trill.

“Right! So.” Daniel stood, and went to his radio station off in the corner of his little yard. “That sounds like a good idea to share. Would any of you like to use my radio? I know your tribe is almost two days away, Dor…”

“Would be good far-talking, yes. Thank you. I bring you root-birds!”

“What, not a big juicy werne?”

“Not trying to seduce you! Unless maybe you feeling adventurous…”

His gesture made it perfectly clear he was being both playful and serious, and maybe a bit hopeful.

Professor laughed and held up his hands. “No no, I wouldn’t survive you!” he said. “Root-birds are fine. I’ll roast ‘em up!”

There were lewd trills and Dor beamed proudly at the compliment. Professor turned down everyone of course, but never quite said no forever, and he always did it with praise. Singer thought he enjoyed the game even if he wasn’t a man for casual fucks.

Oh well. Not like that strange, holy priest…no fuckings ever! He gave his very cock to the gods! How could he even?!

He must be one of the strongest men alive.

Dor got on the radio and talked to his Singer so far away. The other tribes were listening too, and soon there was a lively conversation over the radio; nearly everyone immediately saw it was a good idea and of the hands of hands of hands of tribes, many came on with ideas on how to do the thing, how to mark the werne. Professor suggested a leather thong, driven through the werne’s ear and brightly colored, then someone thought they could use different colors to mean different things, like this was an old bull, this was from that…

Lots and lots of talkings would be had soon. And Dor brought back root-birds and a neyma, full of blood and life. A good sharing for everyone.

Food for knowledge. A good trade, especially because Hurt made tasty sauces in his very nice metal pans for his meat.

Onyo was such a wonderful root to eat. They should try and grow some!

Everyone left that evening, trilling excitedly between each other, having probably solved the immediate worry about meat. It might be a bit lean for a year if they weren’t careful, as they got into the branch-swing of this new idea, but it was so obviously the right way to strengthen the werne, nobody doubted they’d be groaning with full bellies after next spring.

And there was a lovely Giving to it, too. The People were strong on the Taking of the werne. Fitting that, now, finally, they could Give to the werne, too.

Vemik and Singer hung back once everyone else left, to talk longer about cities, or at least towns and villages. Lots of ideas. Many, maybe not for now, but some would come very soon. They talked about Vemik and Yan, too. Vemik wasn’t quite the natural successor to be the next Chief yet…but soon. His strength and wisdom would come. All in time.

They slept together outside, under warm blankets and with warm hugs. The future was good.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Doctor Claire Farmer

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“…How was work?”

“Innocent, today.” Daniel slipped in alongside her and rested a stubbled chin scratchily on Claire’s shoulder.

Maybe it was the tone in his voice, maybe it was what he’d said, maybe it was just that deep down she…didn’t really mind? Maybe it was just dumb animal instinct to lean back into his arms and sigh. Smile, too, when his lips touched her ear.

“What about you?” he asked. “What’s this you’re writing?” His thumb traced the line of her neck from the base of her skull to the point of her shoulder, clearing her hair out of the way. Those were killing hands touching her. Hands that could destroy a man as casually as Claire would squeeze a ketchup bottle. She’d seen them do it, more or less.

So why did she feel safe still?

“Oh, it’s an expert opinion for…fuck, I don’t even know who it’s for, exactly. Some kinda government body, born from the Department of Evacuation.”

“Mhm. Reshuffle every week, huh?” Daniel let her go and vanished into the kitchen. A moment later, she heard him brewing coffee.

“Yeah…” Claire rubbed her eyes and sat back, realizing that her head felt like it had been packed overfull with sedated bees. She needed a break. She needed…human contact. Working from home was a little too lonely for her to really enjoy.

And, well…here was her favorite human to make contact with. Still her favorite, despite everything. She’d been worrying about that, a little. What did it say about her that, after the initial shock, it hadn’t taken much soul-searching to realize that she still wanted to be with him, even knowing much more clearly now, what he was and what he did?

She’d even felt a certain twisted satisfaction. Some dark instinct like a snake in her heart had shifted its coils in a pleased way and she’d thought, that’s justice being dispensed, pretty or not. And it’s my man dispensing it.

And now here he was, making her a considerate drink ‘cuz he could tell she was tired and frazzled. Here he was, despite being a literal compact juggernaut of death…oddly vulnerable. Not just in having his guard down and relaxing at home, but in the way he glanced at her. You had to know Daniel well to read the worry in that glance. That was the look of a man in love, who was afraid of losing what he loved.

Well…good. Claire could actually feel good about that. Because it meant she could trust that whatever he did ‘at work’ had been done with weighing things up and deciding it was still worth doing.

But it wouldn’t be right to keep that looming over him like a blade. She loved him too, even if he’d shocked the hell out of her. She wanted a future with him, and they wouldn’t have a stable one if he lived in constant fear of her approval.

There was a solution to that. It was her turn to indulge, slide in alongside him and run a hand approvingly along everything he’d earned over many long years. Everything he’d given to her.

“Hey, um…about—” she faltered, realized she hadn’t thought enough about what she wanted to say, or how to say it.

Fortunately…men were creatures of doing more than speaking. Somehow, everything she wanted to say, everything she felt, all the knot of tensions and all that…

He held her, and that was all he needed.

All she needed.

“…The coffee can wait.” She pointed with her head, upstairs. She needed human contact. She needed him. She needed to love, and be loved.

He smiled, took her hand, followed her, and gave her all that and more.

College of Xenomedicine hospital, City 03, planet Origin

Senior Sergeant Erik Karlsson

Being alive came as a surprise, and such a welcome one that Karlsson even forgot to be in pain for a few seconds.

There was light. Dim and yellowish, with a splash of something brighter to his right. When he turned his head that way, he realized the gaoians were curled up in a nest-bed over there, snuggled into a big furry pile like they preferred. Jaal,Riigu, Gumi…okay. Good. And that slumbering hillock over there on the floor rather than a bed was definitely Skoob…

He turned his head the other way. Pearson looked like shit, more tubes coming out of him than a distillery, but…still with them.

No sign of Williams. He…hoped that didn’t mean what he guessed it might.

The fact he was conscious must have been communicated to a doctor: an asian lady in scrubs that were probably blue but looked black in the light, accompanied by a corti wearing nothing very much at all, not that there was anything to look at on a corti.

“Good morning, sergeant. Bed told me you’re awake…how are you feeling?” the nurse-probably was at his side and ran an eye upwards at some holograms above him.

“Like shit…” Karlsson acknowledged. “Where are we? What happened?”

“You’re on Origin being treated for nervejam injury.” She fished a tool out of her scrubs’ chest pocket. “My name’s Siobhán, I’m the resident human nurse here at City Three Xenomedical College hospital. Gonna need to shine this in your eyes, check your pupil response, okay?”

“Uh…sure…” Karlsson grimaced as she promptly skewered his eyes with brilliant light, but it was over mercifully quick.

“Okay…that’s good. Anyway, this is Surgeon First Class Forln, he’s the one who treated you.”

Forln had gone to fetch a small motorized…well, he’d gone to fetch a box to stand on. Now he stepped up on Karlsson’s other side and stood there with his hands behind his back, his expression unreadable rather than Siobhán’s professionally friendly smile.

“You’re very fortunate, Senior Sergeant,” he said. “If your suits hadn’t been coated, I daresay you’d have been killed on the spot.”

Memory elbowed its way back into Karlsson’s bruised mind. “…I believe it. It was like a lightning storm just sorta…happened.”

“Yes. I’m…very sorry to report we could not save Corporal Williams.”

Having his worries confirmed added a new pain, which Karlsson shoved aside and used to sit up a little straighter. “…How bad are we?”

“A little too soon to tell, yet,” Forln said. “There is minor inflammation, certain recovery therapy options available…we have made rapid progress in nervejam treatment these last few years.”

“Yeah, I bet I know a patient of yours, too…”

“If you mean Warhorse, it is in part thanks to him that your own treatment has been so successful so far. Your long-term prognosis is, I hope, a good recovery. But trauma like what you survived leaves its mark no matter what we do.”

…Ah.

“So medical retirement is in my future.”

“…That is likely, yes.”

Karlsson tipped his head back and rested it, closed his eyes. “Fuck.” He rested for a moment while Siobhán checked him over. “…All of us?”

“Patient confidentiality means it is not my place to tell you your comrades’ prognoses…” Forln replied, in a careful tone that may as well have been a clear ‘yes.’

Well…

Shit.

He nodded his understanding and remained silent. Complied with Siobhán’s instructions as she finished assessing him, accepted some painkillers and a cup of water, but said nothing…by the time he’d taken his pills, Forln had discreetly left.

Well. He was alive. He could be glad of that. It was gonna be a fuckin’ adjustment, but it beat the alternative at least. He’d find something else to do…somewhere.

He just hoped whatever their suits recorded had been worth it.

Planet Akyawentuo

Vemik Given-Man

The spring Fire was coming. Both he and Yan were really feeling it this year and it hadn’t properly hit yet. And so were all the other men. Even the women this year! Gods be praised.

What that meant for Given-Men though was a busy time. Some would be facing challengers from the men of their tribes, soon. Others would have trouble with young men thinking they could get away with mischief unseen. Many young women coming into their flower needing guidance, many rites of manhood to prepare. The time to trade daughters was always fraught.

Not to mention raids. A high spring had always meant testing the other tribes, testing their strength, Taking what they couldn’t keep….

These days, raids were more like…a sport. Dangerous, yes. But fun! A very good test of a man! Even very good friends needed to fight now and then. Lots of good fucking afterward to mix the blood of the tribes. And it was important to know who was stronger between Given-Men and between tribes. Always, they needed to know. It was part of their history.

Their deepest, most ancient history.

This was a very strong spring already. No doubt a big part of that had been their new ideas for herd management. Yes, it meant the werne they Took were smaller. A man usually had to come back with two now, one over each shoulder. He needed to be stronger to manage that, and stronger still to Take two yearlings from a strong, angry bull.

But werne bred fast and now, only two human years later—a little more than a long Akyawentan year—the herds had recovered amazingly.

Now they had more meat than ever. Blood meals for every child now, with so many yearlings to hunt. This one change had made the People far stronger.

All of it as an idle suggestion by Professor Daniel!

“It’s a funny idea, isn’t it?” He had Ferd Given-Man pinned under his strength, but they were just play-fighting around his village fire. He gave him a good tight squish for a while, especially with his legs bound up around his, until Ferd wiggled to escape. Vemik “fought” to keep him pinned, hooting all the while, then found himself surprisingly well-pinned on his back in turn, chest-to-chest with his grinning best friend. It was always important to be some kind of gentle in play. What was the fun if the other man always lost? What would he learn?!

They knew the truth between them, and that night Vemik would Take his Singer, and Ferd too. But that was for later. For now, it was friendship. And Ferd was a very good friend. Lots of sky-thoughts in his head. They tussled for a bit, and Vemik found himself pleased at how well Ferd could wrassle now! He hooted, happy to tap out for now and save his strength for later…

Ferd hooted happily at his win, sat up to show off for the children, who celebrated by scattering into the trees to go play and wrestle among themselves, and then nodded at Vemik’s question. “Tells you a lot about the way humans and gao think,” he agreed, and finally climbed off Vemik’s hips to sit on his tail and poke at the fire. “Or maybe, shows the limits in how we think.”

“Maybe…” Vemik shook himself off as he sat up too, then sat up against Ferd. “Funny thing about the People. Maybe we had these thoughts before. Or, the city people did. You ever go look at the dig site?”

“Only once. Interesting, I guess, but…” Ferd shrugged. “Why?”

“Was not just one city there. Many cities. Many, many cities. All burned down or something. Professor says, that site had cities on it longer than humans existed.”

“We are an old people, I remember.” Ferd grabbed a log with his foot, transferred it to his hand, and dropped it in the fire.

“No,” Vemik trilled gently, and wrapped his tail around Ferd’s waist. “You don’t see. The cities were destroyed. Many times.”

“Yes,” Ferd trilled in reply. “So let me guess! You were surprised to think it was us who did it?”

“Not what I mean. I mean…the city-People had these thoughts. Animal husbandry and stuff. So you say, talking about the limits in how we think, except, we can think those thoughts just fine, because they did. And we can see the sense in them now.”

“Yes, of course they did! They had to, because they were so much weaker than us. Not much stronger than humans! You know the stories. We would leave them alone, happy to trade, happy to fight for them, happy even to let them tend to their own werne…but always, one day their chief would get prideful, and they would try and Take what was ours. Then we would need to remind them how weak they were. Many times, this happened. Yan even remembers his Given-Man telling him about the last time…” he paused, then looked Vemik’s way. “Remember you saying, when you first met Jooyun and Awisun, Yan could have torn them apart. Guess we’re lucky you were there.”

“Maybe. We didn’t know about guns, then.” Vemik trilled softly. “Not even Yan can survive a shotgun to the face.”

“Probably not. But you survived a grenade to the face, so…”

Vemik dismissed that with a twitch of his tail. “Wasn’t to face.”

“Yes, yes. But Vemik, you train with us. You know what we can do. You know that not even guns hold much fear for us. We’re fast, hard to shoot, and it takes a lot of shooting to hurt us anyway. Add in armor and…”

Vemik thought about that. “Makes me wonder about the cities even more.”

“Have you talked to Professor about this?”

“…No, actually.”

Ferd hooted. “Then come! It is time for a learning. And this is an interesting one…”

Well, Vemik was never going to object to learning something new from Professor Hurt. But, there had to be a Giving as payment, and two Given-Men could hardly show up with root-birds or neyma. So even though Jumptown wasn’t too far, it still took Vemik and Yan a couple of hours to arrive. They had to get some werne, first.

Not difficult, for them. Just took time, ‘cuz the werne were in the wrong direction. But once found—

Easy kills. Young bachelor werne were much easier than a bull or yearling calves. Bachelors had no loyalty to each other and scattered the moment they jumped down. The hard part was landing on one. From there…

Well, smaller men would probably drive a spear or knife into the beast’s neck. Safer that way. Vemik didn’t need to. He could just grab, wrap, crush. The werne’s neck broke with a crunch and he rolled as it crashed to the ground, hopped up alert for a panicking male that might gore him as it tried to escape…but no. They were fleeing into the forest.

Almost too easy, nowadays. He grabbed his prey, dragged it up, and sank his fangs into its throat to drink, saw Ferd doing the same. Not much in such a small prey, but they were strong, and squeezed out every drop of its life. It would save Professor time in the butchering.

They drank their fill, then gutted the beasts and left the offal for the scavengers. A Giving back to the forest, at this time of year. Later in the year, when preparing for winter, they’d keep everything, but spring had its own rules.

Besides. Prepared, there was nothing to slosh around or burst from a particularly rough jump; not an experience Vemik ever wanted to repeat. Much more comfortable for travel, and an easier gift to receive, too. Vemik happened to know that the professor’s freezers were always full with such gifts, and he sent most of the meat the hunters brought him as payment for his thoughts through the jump array to be donated to soup kitchens. Which was fair enough! Once given, it was his meat to do with as he wanted, and otherwise he’d need a freezer twice as big as his house.

He always repaid the gift of meat with tea, though, which Vemik thought was more than fair; Professor’s tea was delicious, and very sweet.

He listened to Vemik and Ferd’s telling of their earlier conversation as he poured it, nodding along. “It’s been a while since you thought about this stuff, hasn’t it?”

“Had my head turned to other things,” Vemik admitted.

“Understandable. You’re juggling a lot of big thoughts. I figured you’d want to know about this when you got around to it, though…”

He finished pouring, then picked up his tablet and tapped through until he found the folder he wanted.

“Here. I prepared this for you a while ago.”

Numbers and statistics, to begin with. Vemik found he liked numbers. You could make them do all sorts of interesting things, even play with them, move them around, pile them up, sculpt them like clay…

Or, in this case, tell a story with them. A story of long years, of generations who came to the fertile flat ground where the growing was best, who built walls and storehouses and temples, and then…nothing, for a few generations, before more people came back and built and grew there again.

All as Ferd had said. A story told in soil and layers of buried stone, where old buildings had been built on, or torn apart to be used to build new buildings.

“Where did they come from?”

“Hard to say. Here and there. By boat, by land…” Hurt shrugged. “We haven’t had long enough to find everything we need to say for sure. What we can say is that this city, time and again, was built where it is for much the same reasons the earliest human cities were built in Mesopotamia—because of the rivers. Fertile land, easy to work. Even basic crops would produce much food there, and sustain large herds. And for hundreds of years, it’d work. They’d produce food, and pottery, and they’d bring things down the rivers to the workshops, and bring in more people and grow even larger, and they’d thrive!”

Vemik swiped, and frowned at what he saw. Art. A…floor, made of lots of little chips of bright stone. It showed the People alright. But…strange. Skinny and tall, with blonde crests like children.

“They were a different people to yours. Smaller, yes. More like…burly humans with tails. Maybe like we tended to be built in the neolithic era, perhaps. They enjoyed swimming and water, they had sailing boats. But eventually, they’d outgrow the small spot of land they were on, and that meant encroaching on the forest.”

Another picture-floor. This time, with proper-shaped people on it. A Given-Man, from the height and redness of his crest and the shape of him. It was pretty damaged, though. Most of it was missing, in fact.

“This one mosaic sparked a long conversation,” Daniel chuckled ruefully. “There’s one school of thought that says you only make a decorative floor to depict your friends and trading partners, but…well, I think that’s a very human way of thinking and we mustn’t forget these people aren’t us. And, considering they’re gone forever, we’ll never know for sure.”

“They knew us, though.”

“Oh yes. Respected you, too, I think. Feared, maybe. It’s…archaeology isn’t an exact science, xenoarchaeology doubly so. We just can’t know how accurate the stories we make from what we dig up really are…” he reached over and swiped the tablet. “Which is why the Corti observer’s footage is so vital.”

The observer’s drones had captured footage of a raid on the city. Maybe twenty Given-Men and ten men each had shown up, and at first they simply stood and waited in a loose, ragged line while the city-people’s soldiers formed ranks ahead of them. From a safe distance, the cloaked drone took a good look at them: all would have been standouts at the Lodge. They were led by a pair of blackcrests so powerful-looking, even Yan would have been impressed. Two hundred of the forest people against…thousands of city People. Maybe ten of the city soldiers for each forest warrior. Their bronze-tipped spears, shields, even breastplate armor gleamed in the sun as they formed tight, disciplined ranks. The forest men stood before the city-people’s army wearing nothing more than loincloths and their knives of manhood.

Politely, the forest-people let them form up. Then the blackcrests raised their fists and led the charge.

It was a massacre.

It was such a massacre that Vemik couldn’t look away. Bronze spear-tips bent against the forest men’s skin and bodies. The city’s men were killed almost without effort. In seconds, those organized ranks and columns that had taken so long to form buckled and collapsed. Men broke ranks and fled, only to find themselves trapped between the advancing warriors and their own city’s high walls. The warriors fell on them, quite literally tore them apart, then swarmed up and over the walls as easily as children leaping to the low branches of a ketta.

The Taking began.

None of them wanted to watch it all, and they couldn’t have anyway. The forest men spent days feasting on werne, crushing every man and raping every woman and child to death.

They were much less considerate with the chief. With him, the blackcrests…got creative. He wasn’t even dead when they dragged him back to the forest, already broken and pathetic.

The Corti had recorded it all with scientific detachment, and Hurt hadn’t edited anything out. There was footage of many more men, working to tear down the walls. They made a game of it, seeing how far they could toss huge stone blocks. Later, but not many days later, judging by the light, the city had been reduced to rubble. They had taken everything fire-friendly and gathered in the middle, where the Singers lit a sacred fire and cursed the land underneath.

“We don’t quite know what crime the city had committed,” he intoned quietly. “Usually, there would have been delegates and trading, we think. But it’s very clear the city People were a distinct subspecies, or maybe even species. There was evidence of sex to seal agreements, but never any inter-breeding. They feared the forest. Had your people as powerful spirits, or even gods in their stories, so far as we can tell.”

Vemik let out a breath, and found himself…quite shocked, and disturbed. He shouldn’t be, he thought, but he was.

“This is how it went,” Ferd said. “For…forever. I study this, and I learn, every time the city people started to grow strong, we forest people stopped it. Showed them what our strength was. Never let them grow into the sky-thinking strength. Over and over again, older than stories.”

“We have a theory,” Hurt added, noting the dismayed look on Vemik’s face. “We think the conflict was unavoidable. Something about where they came from meant they landed in the same few coastal spots over and over again. The island theory, right?”

“Right…”

“And so, to grow beyond that, the city people would have needed to expand into your forest. And to do that, they would have needed to start cutting it down.”

“Which we would never allow.”

“It would have been a grave danger for your people. You need lots of land, and lots of prey. You are such a powerful people that you need a huge amount of resources. The difference is you are also extremely intelligent, because intelligence is a strength like any other. You were easily intelligent enough to understand all this, even without writing…”

“And so, we kill them before they starve us.”

“Something like that. We can’t know for certain, but this footage, with your stories…”

Vemik had heard enough. “It tells a story of its own.”

“One that repeated many times through history.” Hurt shook his head and sighed. “There were other obstacles in your way on the road to the stars, of course. But it seems one of the biggest was just…yourselves. How the gods made you. You couldn’t be as the city people are, and you couldn’t let them grow either.”

“I see…”

“Knowing it helps me see the size of the human Giving,” Ferd said. “The gods put a powerful lesson in us. We could never save ourselves without them. Could never walk the stars without them. Thanks to them, we get to have forest-strength and city-strength now. The Singers are all eager for city-strength, too.”

“They see a world of safe children and guaranteed food,” Vemik replied, a bit remotely. He was thinking. “Yan sees us…losing what we are.” And that prompted a new thought. “And we can’t! Isn’t just us who grow. Our sky-brothers grow too! They need what we are! We can’t let…”

His crest fell.

Ferd was watching him with his head turned slightly, his own crest and ears perked up as he listened. He’d thought about this, Vemik could tell. Thought good and hard and long and deep. Just like Professor and others did.

“You already thought about this,” Vemik accused.

“My Singer gave me the push, Professor helped me…I’m no big sky-thinker. But I’m not stupid, either.” Ferd shrugged. “Really just putting words to thoughts I had and did anyway. Joined the team, do work, did all of that without really knowing why. Now I do. And what I see is…” he paused then indicated the tablet. “If things had gone different, we could have been more. But now, we get to look at them, look at what our grandfathers did, and see how it hurt us, and see a different way.”

“Maybe hurt is the wrong word,” Professor offered. “You can’t easily judge the past. If your people had not done what they did, you would not be here, we would have not met, and the galaxy may not be on the cusp of freedom. You could even argue my people wouldn’t be around anymore, either. Exposing what was done to you was what allowed us to finally kick the Hierarchy off Earth and Cimbrean for good.”

“Hmm.”

“And as it is…now you get the best of both worlds,” Hurt added. He cleaned up the tablet. “We all do, really.”

“…You’re losing your world,” Vemik pointed out. Hurt paused, sighed heavily, and nodded.

“Yes. All too soon, too. I should have gone back more often, I suppose…” he rubbed his jaw, then shrugged. “But…it won’t stop us. If I know anything about humanity, it’s that we’re far too stubborn to just give up and cry about it when there’s real hardship to overcome.”

“I can’t imagine us without this place…” Vemik looked up and around at the ketta. “Ten’gewek without Akyawentuo would be…we’re part of this place. Made by the gods to be here. We can leave, but always have to come back, for the Fire, for the werne, for the seasons…”

“I suspect we’ll carry the Earth in our souls,” Hurt replied. “Anyway, gentlemen. As much as I do enjoy your company, you’re busy Given-Men and I’m a busy professor…”

Ferd hooted, amused. “Should carry you up a tree,” he replied. “But…yes. Vemik has thinking to do, I have boys to teach…and we both have Singers to go back to, yes?”

Vemik nodded. Already, he was drifting off and thinking. In his mind, he was watching that raid on the city again, and wondering how different life could have been if somehow the forest-people and city-people had found a way to live together. Would it have looked like life with the humans did, now?

Maybe. He gave Professor a thank-you hug, a stronger more crushy one for Ferd, and headed home with his head in the sky again. Things…made a little more sense now. Like knowing where the herds and villages were relative to each other, he had a better idea where his people were relative to everything else, now. And okay, maybe he was a little annoyed with himself for not really getting it earlier…

But like Ferd had said. He had other stuff to think about too.

After all, he had more than his own people to think for, nowadays. He knew the humans were going to make it, the gods had made them soul-hard. But part of that hardness was, they’d made the right friends, including ten’gewek. Part of how they were going to thrive after Earth was with the People.

It was time for him to step up and stop relying on Yan so much, he realized. Yan needed to go be Given to the sky, not distracted by villages and tribes and people-things. Vemik had been slacking, there, depending too much on the old black-crest’s knowledge. That was a Taking that needed to end. Which was probably what Ferd had been quiet and smart enough to lead him toward without saying it aloud.

He hooted in satisfaction, glad to have such clever friends, and turned his mind back to the trip home. The sun was getting low…did he have time to bring home meat for the tribe?

…No. Tribes that relied too much on their Given-Man got weak. The others could get the food if they really needed it. Besides, he had nothing to prove, there. He could go home, check on the forge apprentices, spend time with Singer, be there for sunset song…

He nodded to himself and plunged onward through the trees.

But he didn’t stop thinking about burning cities.

Entity

Time, from the Entity’s perspective, was a strange mix of things.

It was a datamind, its very existence hinged on neat divisions of time, the clock speeds of its supporting devices. Time was so critical to its inner functioning, it needed to account for the curvature of relativity.

But its subjective sense of personhood also experienced time in the same way as organic life. It could somehow lose hours, when it was interested in something. Or, conversely, when it was waiting, minutes could stretch to feel like hours. Switching from the one flow of experience to the other was analogous to a human’s experience of optical illusions, that snap moment when suddenly the cube was jutting in the other direction, or the faces became a vase.

And always, without fail, there was that sensation of looking back and realizing that what had seemed so distant in the past was…close, now.

Terribly close. Four years had shrunk to a matter of….well, it was no longer ridiculous to measure the countdown in hours. A three-digit number of hours.

Carajo, I wish I could get drunk…

The Entity thought that sounded like a good way to miss a good chunk of what little time was left, but then again it had never understood the allure of intoxication. Probing Daemon’s memories had yielded no insight either.

Yeah, cuz every time I got drunk I either fucked my life up a little more, or got super fucking melancholy. And yet…

Daemon pinged out a knot of fuzzy, complex, unresolved emotions which the Entity could only summarize as longing for the impossible—both for a miracle to save the Earth and for a stiff drink—and pain for knowing that they were impossible.

The Entity ventured positive thoughts in reply. The substantial success of the evacuation, the apparent stability and growing prosperity of the United Peoples, the growing galactic unity, the fact that Hunter raids were now a matter of galactic news for being so rare, and none had been successful in years…

It got back the mental equivalent of a groan and a face buried in hands. Frustration, despair, loneliness…a small tinge of gratitude regardless.

Time was a strange thing. The entire exchange had taken less time than a human eyeblink, in absolute terms. But in subjective terms.

I need some human company. I’m gonna…go talk to people.

The Entity would have blinked, had it the proper apparatus. Daemon had rarely expressed need before. She was a semi-autonomous process of its own mind. One which necessarily was as true to Ava’s personality construct as possible, but…

Ah. Right. Yes. In this circumstance, Ava would need company, therefore Daemon would need company.

Or maybe I’m a little more independent than we both like to pretend. Don’t wait up.

What a peculiar thought for a piece of its own psyche to have. But, the Entity decided some things were best left un-probed and turned its attention elsewhere. There may not be many hours left for the Earth, but there was still much to pack into those hours. Its operations would continue right up until the moment the blast destroyed them.

It intended to use those hours well.

Starship Stray Fortune, Interstellar space between Alpha Centauri and Sol

Ian Wilde

Only two weeks left to go.

Lots had changed, but he wasn’t really all that concerned with most of it. Same old boring mission, these last couple of years. Adam and the Wrecking Crew were preparing for the Big Thing. Stray Fortune was…not. It was being held for something else. And so, the Fortune crew landed the job of keeping an eye on the doombeam. There was a lot of science in that thing, and Dora’s daily job for the last several months had been firing probe after probe into the Centauri Collimated Mass Ejection’s path and recording the interesting ways they burned.

They had a pretty clear picture of the thing now. It was an insanely tight cone, tight enough that the projections from their gathered data said that Saturn would probably escape unscathed.

Sol itself would too, probably. Oh, it’d burp and flare and have the stellar equivalent of a shining black eye after spending a couple centuries fending off the particle stream, but Singularity’s scientists reckoned humanity’s star would do little more than shift course by a few degrees in its long galactic path.

Earth on the other hand? Earth would be dead in seconds. The leading wave of the blast was five minutes of gamma radiation so intense that it’d kill every living thing instantly, burn it all to ash, then the particle beam coming behind would blow all the atmosphere and ash and dust and water off into space and start grinding away at the bedrock and mantle.

There’d still be a ten thousand kilometer iron ball left behind once the beam was finally gone in two or three hundred years. Mother Earth would be molten and polished smooth, and God knew what would have happened to her orbit, but she’d still be there…

Ian hated to dwell on that image, but he found he couldn’t help it. So long as they were on this assignment, he had a huge reminder every day of what was coming. It made it hard to forget.

Though he did have some help, there.

“Hey.”

Ian blinked out of his thoughts and half turned only to be snuggled up from behind and surrounded by huge arms and huge affection. Hunter kissed him on the left temple and gave him a crush, one to literally take his breath away. Fuck, he was riding that line of not knowing his own strength these days, and the way it made Ian feel….

He had given up on feeling weird or self-conscious about the fact he fucking loved being the little spoon, that even as Beef-sized man himself, Hunter could just do that and take charge without even realizing he was. Ian grunted off the crushy-hug and leaned into it.

“Didn’t know you were coming today?”

“Bit o’ rescheduling. We’re on the gaoian week, now. Three days, break day, two days, weekend.”

“Oh…”

Hunter tilted his head. “…Don’t like that?”

“Ah, fuck. I don’t know.” Ian sighed. “…I guess this job’s got me down and I can’t stop thinking about what we’re losing. I mean, I guess that gaoian week sounds pretty good, but it’s another little bit of home we’re not gonna keep, you know?”

“…You’ve been here staring out this window too long,” Hunter decided.

Ian let out a bitter chuckle. “Heh! Probably have…” he shook his head and turned away from the window. Honestly, he didn’t know why he bothered staring out of it as though he was watching the beam. It wasn’t like there was some glowing line across space out there, they were a couple of light-days ahead of the damn thing.

“Definitely have. It’s not good for you! I should kick Bruuk’s tail for letting you mope, you mopey fuck!”

That got Ian chuckling properly. “I mean…it’s understandable though, right?”

“…Lemme show you something.”

Hunter let go of the cuddle-crush and produced his phone. He opened an app of some kind, and set the phone down on a nearby shelf to do its holographic projection thing. In this case, the hologram was just a floating screen, a web page.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a news app!” Hunter enthused as he sat down. “The Bright Side. Kinda the antidote to the doom and gloom from the end of the world getting close, yijao?”

“What are you, their PR guy?”

“Fuckin’ would be if I didn’t have more important shit. I love these guys. They’re like ‘no news is good news? Fuck that!’ and then they go and give us all the silver lining they can find. And there’s, like, actually a fuckin’ lot of it. See?”

Ian shrugged and took a closer look.

Then scrolled a bit. “…Shit, really? That many?”

“Fuck yeah!”

“Isn’t that…basically everyone who’s left?” Ian scrolled and read some more.

“Yup. I don’t know how, man, but between the gao, the Dominion, Singularity and the Entity…we’re on course to save everyone.”

Most were going into stasis, Ian saw. But the Dominion had done a really smart thing there, in that they’d realized the immigration and port facilities on literally all of their stations were already equipped to handle large numbers of alien travelers, and the matters of isolation and decontamination were solved by forcefield tech. With one Council Order, hundreds of trade stations across the Dominion had set aside a bagging and storage facility near the port, set their nanofactories to make bags, and then set up a jump array to receive refugees.

“Thank God for stasis, eh?”

“Yeah. Fuck knows how we’d do this without it.” Hunter stretched out comfortably on Ian’s bed which, in deference to the fact this was a ship built for alien crew, was basically just a big soft patch of floor covered in blankets. “I mean, I get down about it too. Earth’s…it’s like losing our mom, right? She’s always been there for us. I know most every other species thinks she’s the next best thing to hell, but…hey, where’s your favorite spot on the whole Earth?”

“Uh…good question.” Ian had to think about that for a moment. “Fuck it’s….actually been a long bloody time since I lived on Earth. I can’t really remember, but…Rivelin Valley, maybe. It’s this long, thin bit of parkland in Sheffield, with waterfalls and stepping stones over the river. Used to go there with my mum when I was small. You?”

Hunter shrugged. “I mean, I grew up in suburbia. Nice enough, but there’s nowhere that really sticks in my memory, you know? Dad was a lawyer, we didn’t do a lot of father-son type stuff, ‘cept maybe on weekends. And I enlisted young and then it was straight to Cimbrean. All my good memories of Earth are, y’know, Christmas at grandpa’s place, stuff like that.”

“Your dad’s in stasis right now?”

“Oh shit no. He’s an estate planning lawyer, he’s busy as fuck!” Hunter chuckled. “What about your folks?”

“Mum’s in a bag on Garden Station,” Ian scratched his jaw and sat down. “Don’t know about my old man, don’t fucking care.”

“Right, yeah.” Hunter frowned for a second, then shrugged. “Point is…I get down about the Earth too, but for me, all my big memories of Earth are of people, not places. And I’m lucky enough I haven’t lost nobody. So, maybe it’s easier for me to think it’s a shame but I’m not so tore up over it? I dunno.”

“Maybe. But…eh, let’s talk about something else.”

“Or nothing at all?” Hunter suggested. “Could just hang out, play some games, eat some snacks, do whatever…”

He curled up an arm and gave Ian a lop-sided, corn-fed grin, and God he was just so achingly, impossibly, beautifully handsome…

Later, he’d let Hunter have his way. For now….

“Street Fighter and nachos does sound good…”

Videogames with Hunter were inevitably a pretty physical affair. He was the type to lean into turns or punches, jump up and down or bounce in place, wrap himself around Ian and half-wrestle, half-cuddle with the kind of force that would pulp normal dudes…

Naturally, the presence of Big Boys At Play attracted the attention of Bruuk, who was, if anything, even more physically into it. That led to some Smash Bros, followed by the newest Zelda. Bruuk was stuck in the second dungeon.

The distraction turned out to be exactly what Ian needed. He sat back, smushed happily between the two loving meatmonsters in his life, let Hunter cheerlead Bruuk through the dungeon, and returned to that Bright Side newsfeed.

Things…really were going well. All the major libraries were already evacuated, so were the seed banks, the museums and art galleries, there was housing and storage for everyone…humanity was going to live on, and keep more than he’d ever dared hope for.

There was a page for opinion pieces, and one in particular caught his imagination as he read it. It was about how there really didn’t need to be borders any longer. They didn’t have a one-world government or anything like that, they just had…humans. Survivors, united by a common tragedy. By the time things had completely stabilized and humankind had settled into its new paradigm, it would be something they’d all built together.

That was a silver lining, alright. Maybe a bit of a naively optimistic one, given the lingering split between Lucent on the one hand, and Cimbrean and Gao on the other, but Ian liked the idea. It’d be nice to think a wiser and more mature species was going to emerge from this all.

He set the phone down, smiled, and monched on some nachos as Bruuk finally got past that damn motion-sensor puzzle with a whoop and a cheer from Hunter. He’d needed this, more than he knew. He’d needed a reminder that the present moment could still be fun and worth enjoying, in any context.

Fuck it. He cracked open a beer too, and raised a vague toast to the future. May it be…

He paused, thought for a second, then inspiration struck, and he completed the toast with a small smile.

…May it continue to surprise.

Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Lieutenant Julian (Playboy) Etsicitty

Julian dozed rather than sleep. That was his whole night, actually: Half-conscious, and aware of the sounds around him. Allison’s gentle snores, Xíu’s soft breathing, the semi-rhythmic rush and drum of rain on the skylight above their bed.

And, spoiling whatever sleep he did get, a recurring nightmare vision.

He’s in the woods out back of grandpa’s house, out at the low spot with the culvert the beavers always come back to and dam up each year no matter what they do. He’s watching his grandpa work, wondering at how a wiry old man can work so long and so hard tearing apart a dam with not much more than a digging bar and his bare hands. The memory is an old one, stuck in his head his whole life. Tonight, though, it ends when Julian looks up and sees the sky turning a terrible burning red from horizon to horizon—

Grumbled, fidget, half-turn, and the dream looped over from the beginning, then again, and a third time that finally woke him to the gray light of the new day starting to creep in around the edge of the blind.

…Fuck.

The countdown was nearly over, now. Four and a half years had inevitably whittled themselves down and down, and now here they were. Just under two weeks to go.

There’d been a burst of optimism somewhere in the middle of those two years as things really ramped up, but now? Now, fuck. Now it was so close.

Beside him, Xiù whimpered and cuddled up to his leg, which he curled around her automatically. She’d always had vivid, terrifying dreams for as long as Julian knew her, the lingering damage from shoving a nervejam grenade down a hunter’s throat with her bare hand. If his dreams were so bad, then hers…

She relaxed when he palmed the top of her head and stroked with his thumb along the line of her brow. And, well…he wrapped himself around her too. Big spoon was a great way to fall asleep. He even managed it, for a brief moment. A contented sigh, put his head down, out like a light—

But his bastard phone had other plans.

Al flinched as it went off, half-turned, snatched it off the dresser, slapped it down in front of Julian chest, mumbling something aggrieved he didn’t quite catch. Julian couldn’t find any humor in it, though. He knew that message ping.

Warning order from Costello. They would be entering pre-mission lockdown this weekend.

Fucker. It was his one day off every week, since he was still being trained up, even if HEAT already considered him properly mission ready; he’d done all the school and all the jumps, falling from the fuckin’ sky, done missions…but for them, experience and the hardness you only earned through time were the metrics they cared most about.

There was no such thing as too experienced, or too ready. So the ping, at nine in the morning after a delightfully tiring evening…well, all things considered, that was pretty considerate. Even if it was fucking unwelcome.

“Don’t tell me…” Xiù groaned and raised her head. “Day off canceled?”

“No, just a warning order.”

“Ugh, he could have waited a couple more hours. Tā mā de…” she flopped onto her back, massaged her eyes with her fingers, then groaned, wriggled away from him and somehow managed to gracefully roll-flop out of bed before heading toward the en-suite.

Julian was definitely not above watching her sway, nor distracted enough by the warning order. He was never gonna get tired of that view…

He glanced down at Al once the door was shut, caught her scowling. “You okay?”

“Egh.” She sat up. “…Yeah. Just grumpy. Slept like shit.”

He nodded his understanding and kissed her. “I’ll get breakfast on.”

“Mm.” Her grunt was accompanied by a small smile, though. “Good boy.”

The kids were already up, and enjoying their own day off school with a videogame. They’d been building a big wall around their base all week, and from what Julian could gather the tricky part was making it look nice. Anyone could pile up a big ugly flat expanse of stone and call it good enough, but Anna had inherited both a perfectionist streak and a sense of aesthetics from her two moms. She was not going to be content with such an eyesore, no sir.

And Harrison was as happy as a dog with two tails if he got to tinker with automated ways of generating obscene amounts of stone for her to use. Finding a game they could play together that played to both their strengths had sure as hell cut down on the early morning arguments and aggrieved cries of “Daaaaad!” up the stairs.

Or maybe they were growing out of it. Shit, Julian didn’t know. They both looked older than they were. Hell, either of them could have passed for college kids if you didn’t look too closely.

But today’s silence was more than just concentrating on their game. They were listless too, he realized.

“Hey, dorks.” He scooped them both in for a quick hug. They weren’t so featherlight these days, even with how ridiculous his…well, everything was now. They were ridiculous, too. Young fifteen-year-old teens, Heroes of the Line and born to the Crude, apparently like the finest prospects from Ekallim-Igigi.

Harrison was a monstrous lout exactly like young Alex had been at this age. A teen Beef and all it entailed, from food to girls to his thing-smashing heft to his endless font of aggression that very few could understand. But he still had a certain…intense sweetness about him, too. He wasn’t a moody bastard. Not really.

He still had some of the right kinds of innocence.

Anna, on the other hand, was beating the boys away with a stick and enjoying the hell out of it. Carefully, so she didn’t kill them. She’d inherited the Buehler blue eyes and high cheekbones, Julian’s dark hair, and a skin tone between the two that…well. She used a big stick.

Luckily for her, she’d inherited a full dose of her mom’s sharpness. She probably didn’t need her Big Scary Protective Dad, but honestly, any boy that survived her attentions was probably on the straight and narrow.

Also, Harrison could get mean when someone he cared about needed it. And so could his bestest friends, who included Diego and Joseph.

In any case, the two were basically mind-readers, and knew something was up immediately.

“Yeeurgh. You look rough today, Dad.”

“Yeah. Didn’t sleep well.”

“Nobody’s sleeping well right now…” Harrison sniffed, and indicated his phone. Even as Julian watched, it buzzed a quick beat and a message bubbled up on the screen.

“Furiously texting your Goon Squad, eh?”

Harrison grinned at that. “Yeah. We were sorta, I dunno. Plotting.”

“Plotting?”

“Yeah. Leela’s running the Ninja Taco today, and then maybe we’d go play like baseball or something. The whole class is feeling weird.”

“So, a freshman flash-mobbing of poor Leela, and then go take over a park somewhere.”

“Pretty much.”

Well, that seemed wholesome enough. Julian whipped out his own phone and sent an alert to The Parental Conspiracy, just in case there was anything to be aware of.

Not even ten seconds later…

“Aww man, why’d you tell on us?” Harrison griped. “Everyone’s parents are grillin’ them now!”

“Because I’m evil, and spoiling your fun brings me endless joy.” Julian scruffled his son’s hair and turned to the kitchen. “Also, the answer is yes. Just be back before dinner!”

“Told you,” Anna smirked at her brother, and closed the game so she could hop up and set the table. Looked like Julian was frying up eggs and such.

Folctha had, somehow, remained a relatively small, safe community. Mostly this was because there was a whole planet’s worth of land and, relatively speaking, not all that many people they could or would be housing directly. That would come in time, as economies rebuilt and the hundreds of millions of people in stasis bags emerged. So rather than crowd together into big (…and vulnerable) cities, people spread out. Way out. Only a few little cities even crested a hundred thousand people, and Folctha was barely one of them.

That meant a small class size at Harrison and Anna’s high school, but there were enough other schools around to enable rivalries and all that. Given the confluence of everything, those young kids were all disproportionately excellent people, too. Heroes were well-represented among them. Poverty and the cycle of despair that went with it was basically non-existent, at least for the moment. Long may that last!

A few more text messages, and some general agreement amongst the Parental Conspiracy, and they were off, having lured another group from another school to play with them. Hard to say no to baseball when the lower grav let boys like Harrison hit such colossal home runs…

That gave Julian some time. He applied coffee, applied meal-plan catch-up. He Slabbed, and stretched, did his posing check-ins before Adam started grumbling at him via text…

More phone pings, this time in the officer chat, The Brainboyz. The whole team had a chat too, and its name constantly changed on a whim with every passing in-joke, because everyone was admin. Right now it was The Sultan of Slam’s Slabgical Journey.

Firth was on a pro-wrestling kick, lately. Probably because his family were huge fans and had finally acquiesced to leaving Kentucky, and were settling into a nice out-of-the-way little town about an hour’s HEAT-speed jog away. It wasn’t quite like the hollars, but they’d probably be doing dangerously illegal hillbilly shit in no time flat.

And watching Wrestlemania reruns. Constantly.

Some furious texting commenced. Some stupid jokes, some serious questions. Hunter was on leave, which he was now canceling, but at the moment was in the middle of some body painting in one of Garden’s little vacation spots. Lots of jeering and cheering when he shared pics. Inevitably, the chat dared Julian to do the same.

“Meh, I already look better naked,” was all he replied. Lots of jeering replies, and the memes floweth’d over with bad photo edits and terrible animations. It always got a grin from him.

In any case, clearly a get-together was in order, and that smelled like barbeque.

And it was enough they needed to rent out a shelter at a park, too. Because, being the junior officer, he got to organize this little shindig. Text invites to everyone, acquire food (and lots of meat) with minimal budget…

Honestly, that was the sort of hazing he liked the least. He’d rather let Righteous gorilla-rape him into pretzeloids all day long than dig out his purchase card and track receipts.

…Maybe he went werne hunting too, once he’d got the orders and messages out. He still had time. And he had lots of help, once food was on offer. It was a busy couple of days. So busy he had no time to focus on much else, even as he dragged others along with him. But somehow, he never forgot the ticking clock in the background, the precious days and hours trickling away of the Earth still…being there.

In a sense, practically speaking, for Julian Etsicitty the Earth was already gone. He’d never set foot on the planet of his birth ever again. He’d already seen it for the last time, and hadn’t even known it was the last time, at the time. There was an ache in his heart at the thought that there was no time or capacity for him to go stand in the woods and breathe deep, just once. How could there be? The arrays were firing non-stop to get every last of the Last Guard off-planet, every last treasure of humankind they could snatch up. Whole areas of the planet had been abandoned in a planned retreat that left industrial and nuclear disaster in its wake…because there wasn’t time to do it properly. And no point. All the space industry was moving, asteroid mining was underway until the last possible second…

It was just too much to really understand. Too much all at once. He hadn’t said goodbye to the Earth, and that hurt, terribly. In a way he wasn’t sure he’d ever quite forget or heal from.

But knowing it was still there for these last few days felt like having an anchor, somehow. Everyone knew the time was precious, and even the people who had taken a moment to say goodbye wanted one more.

Perhaps that was why the barbecue wound up feeling a bit like a wake.

Oh, it was a happy wake, to be sure. The kids were there—and the SOR had its own army of burly superhero boys and tougher-than-dirt girls to keep the chaos energy sufficiently high. Lots of Bozo’s prodigy too, as the unit’s unofficially preferred breed of supercanine companion. And it ended up being a nice way to being everyone together before…well…

Before everything went down.

In the end, like seemingly always with this level of fight, they called most everyone in or put everyone on hot reserve, and they all showed up for some camaraderie. All of them. Ten’gewek, gao…Singularity.

Julian had only met Singularity’s niksum a couple of times. They were…well, they were prize specimens. One didn’t become a niksum without being an exemplar of the Line, one of its most highly-conforming sons. They were also, to a man, off-putting in that larger-than-life range of being a bit too pretty and well-built. Perfectly proportioned, so that from a distance you could forget how goliath they were.

He knew it was maybe a bit gormlessly self-unaware to criticize them, given what he was, but still. Their faces and bodies were so flawless, it kind of dropped them into the uncanny valley a bit. The kids avoided them. But Julian knew something the kids didn’t: that under the pedigree perfection, these guys were veterans who’d been pulling off covert actions against the Hierarchy for a lifetime.

In fact they were refreshingly normal once you got to know them. And Julian had found time to get to know their team leader in particular during their training exercises. He was quite pleased to know he could kick the man’s ass ten ways from Sunday, too.

His name was Girin, and apparently he was something like twenty-seventh in Ekallim-Igigi’s line of succession. “You know, I will never get used to the beer out here,” he commented, swirling a glass of pilsner.

“Why not?”

“It’s so…minimalist. Bitter, fizzy water, hardly any flavor. The stuff we brew is sweet and spiced.”

“That’s ‘cuz it’s cheap and drinkable. You’re not downing it to ponder the ineffable mysteries. You’re doing it to unwind and relax. Ideally in your backyard, watchin’ the stream, plotting against the beavers…”

Girin chuckled. “Oh, it’s crisp and refreshing I’ll grant you…beavers?”

“…You don’t know beavers?” Julian laughed.

Girin, a man born and raised on a space station, spread his hands and shrugged. “There’s much I don’t know. And much you probably don’t either, hmm?”

“Uh…well! They’re a big rodent. Love water and chewing trees down. They build dams. Big dams across natural streams and creeks, and then build lodges in the ponds they make. They’re a keystone species in the north american forests.”

“…This is going to be like those ‘drop bears’ I was once told about, isn’t it?”

“No. ‘Drop bears’ are just exaggerated koalas. Here.”

Phone. Video. Some assembly required. Girin watched with interest, which quickly tinged with some sadness.

“They’re delicious, too. But you have to keep them under control because if there is water, they will come, they will dam it, and they will cut down your shelterbelt to do it.”

“They’re cute. I like them,” Girin decided. “But they sound like the sort of species that will never be resurrected from the DNA banks. Too disruptive to alien ecosystems…”

“I think it’s the other way around, actually. They’ll be brought back precisely because they create habitat. Keystone species are like that. Just keep ‘em offa my property!”

“Hmm. Well…I think I’d like that.” Girin smiled, and raised his glass. “To beavers!”

The men overheard. And there was much sudden cat-calling, because of course Julian hadn’t had time to explain its extra meaning.

Girin took it in amused stride. “…I take it I tripped over a hidden double entendre.”

“Yes. I’ll let you figger out how.”

“Hmm…” Girin thought about it for a few seconds, then a puckish smirk finally revealed a human blemish in the form of lines around his eyes. “…Well. I’ll drink to every kind of beaver. May we all have as many as we want.”

The coarse chuckles from his men did a lot to puncture the unapproachable air that had kept them at one end of the party.

Julian had one more bit of ribbing left. “Right! Now that this here working dog has approvingly sniffed around the pedigreed showdogs…”

Girin raised an eyebrow. “You are hardly one to talk.”

“Eh. I’ve got some fetchin’ wear an’ tear on me!” He patted the big man on the back. Tall motherfucker, and that was saying something; Julian stood about two meters these days.

Shorter than Girin, yes. Still bigger though. Inner caveman grunts approvingly.

So it was with a confident smile he moved on, proffered a handshake and put a bit of a wince on the big too-pretty man. “Meanwhile, I’ve got a ‘Q to supervise. So drink up!”

Pecking order: established. That inner caveman of his was most pleased today.

He fell back into Ambassador mode. Turned out the skills he’d needed to do that job were still damn useful in keeping a shindig shiny, so he flitted around, mingled, ate and drank…

Thank fuck the ten’gewek had brought their own food, ‘cuz they’d brought some other men and their Singers from a few tribes along, too. Julian wasn’t quite sure when they’d got it into their head that tonight was so important, but…apparently it was. It was a Big Giving, and the People…well, despite their deeply hyper-predatory nature, at their very best they were a generous and Giving people.

The Singers had a giving for them, especially. They’d brought a song. A particularly sacred one, both lament for a friend losing their home forever, and war-song for a tribe about to get revenge.

They weren’t the only ones there to add their voices to the blessing, in whatever form. There was Champion Gyotin and a couple of Starmind fathers, there was Father Paternostro from New Alexandria—Julian had only met him in passing before, now he got a chance to really talk for a while. He was…well, he was young, sturdy, intelligent, friendly and relatable. Basically the perfect unit chaplain, and the younger men tended to hang on his every word.

The weirdest blessing, though, came from the fact that an actual god-king was present, accompanying his troops. Though when Gilgamesh described himself as such, he did so with a disarming twinkle and self-effacing half-shrug. One didn’t often see a literal seven-and-a-half foot dusky bearded warrior-giant manage humble, but at this point in his life, Julian was always ready to expect the unexpected.

“I come from an extremely old tradition!” He boomed. “And I am glad to see something worthwhile eventually grew from it…” he gave a playful nod to the priest. “So, perhaps, if I may offer a much older form of human respect for the Divine…”

The Singers paid rapt attention, because Julian had made sure to explain just who and what Gilgamesh was. They thought of him as a human “Blackcrest Singer” and why not? He’d certainly not sat on his laurels over the years. He and his son were really the only ones who could stand next to Righteous or Yan without embarrassment. Natural, then, that (arguably) the most important confirmed Hero in human history had something to say.

Or, uh. Sing. It was a hymn, Julian guessed. Offered full-throated and unabashed with eyes closed, head tilted back and palms out and upwards. He didn’t know the language—probably almost nobody did. But somehow, it felt right, deep in the deepest part of instinct.

He also kept it mercifully brief. ‘Enough to get clean, not enough to wrinkle,’ as Julian’s grandpa would have had it.

So…what then?

He circulated, socialized…pondered.

This really was a desperate mission they were about to try. True, Daar and Gilgamesh would be staying firmly behind, even if ready. But king Alex would be present, in overall command; they needed someone with strategic authority to be present. Hopefully, that was all he had to be.

For Julian’s part, he had a team. Bunch of good kids, and together they’d been through a few interesting missions in the lead-up to this. Some quiet ingress here, a rogue Hunter attack there, though those were downright rare these days…he wasn’t a totally green officer. He’d learned a lot, and it had been life-changing. This certainly wasn’t his calling in life, but, well…

It did sing to him. Duty done well just seemed to satisfy in a way he couldn’t quite put to words. And he was damn good at this job, too. So, being the bruiser in the officer corps (and aside from Yan and Firth, the team as a whole), and having inherited Ferd, Nomuk and Genn, along with blessings from Adam, Rees, Davies, and even Hoeff…

Everyone was ready to go fuck shit up. Everybody. TILE FLIP was a freaking black hole of an operation, pulling in people from everywhere. Even the Rauwrhyr had a role to play, being the one Dominion species who’d proved they could be trusted to hang with the deathworlders.

Julian shook his head, to clear out some of the cobwebs. The time had come to strike. New protections for nervejam had been devised, though how effective they’d be wasn’t perfectly known. Equipment was readied. The specialized mission package was prepared, and a few techs trained up and tested enough so that, if they needed to intervene directly, at least they wouldn’t get themselves instantly killed in a fight.

Or reveal their presence, in a sneak.

So that was the sum of it. Everything was prepared as best they could. Everyone was ready as much as could ever be expected. Adam had brought up everyone to his level, nobody was lagging. The enlisted were all close peers now, Hunter leading but everyone else only a little behind. The gap between enlisted and officer had finally closed, too.

Julian was a standout freak though, and just about the best on the team. The warrior side of him enjoyed being so dominant, no point denying it. He wasn’t quite top dog and never would be, but that was okay. Yan was Yan, riding high on his never-ending Fire. Alex was an old-ways king for all the right reasons. Righteous was his own legend, now.

So, what was left to do?

Eat. Everyone was carb-loading and building up reserves with the kind of food-happy gusto only strength athletes would ever understand. Eat, and find some closure. There was a good chance a lot of them never came back.

God, there was a thought. When he thought of Al and Xiù, Anna and Harrison, Freya and Joseph, Claire…many of the Lads had reasoned that, fuck it, they were biologically immortal right now and perpetually young, so they may as well see the thing through and then worry about the whole family thing afterwards. They were in a damn dangerous job, and without a biological clock to put the time pressure on…was it even ethical to have a family, and expose them to growing up without a dad, if they did fall?

For about a third or a half of them, the answer was no. They had girlfriends, fuck-friends, booty calls, off-and-on-again things, married couples they were the bull for…whatever fit them. But there was still a small army of SOR kids. And Julian was going to be responsible, in part, for bringing their dads home again. Or if he couldn’t, for making damn sure it was worth it.

No pressure.

…No pressure. Not right now. He dragged his brain out of the melancholy mood it was threatening to slide into, and went to find his own family. There was precious little time left

It would be a crime and a sin to waste it.

Instantiation.

Or maybe resurrection. Or perhaps just waking up. The process certainly felt like waking, after a sleep so infinitely deep and dreamless that there was no sense of time having passed. No dry mouth, no numb limbs, no urgent need to excrete waste, nor any other physical sensation of having been at rest.

Because of course, the body he was occupying had not existed up until a few minutes prior.

It was hungry, though. Not gnawingly, agonizingly so, but the belly was empty. Quite why the biofactory couldn’t print a meal in there to spare him that slight discomfort, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps the peckish discomfort was intended? A first sensation, to anchor him to this new flesh, make it his, for as long as he needed it.

To be alive was to suffer, after all. To awaken without any suffering would be to feel like one was still dreaming.

He rose from the chamber that had created this instance of him, and the window became transparent in response to his approach, granting him a new view of this garden moon, deep in the heart of Igrean superiority. Food was there for the taking, great lush swathes of it stretching to the horizon. Fruit bushes, root vegetables, grains and nuts, all tended carefully by a trillion glittering insectoid robots and their supporting mechanical ecosystem. Enough food for a million people.

It would never feed more than a handful, unless all was well and truly lost.

Beyond the fields and the horizon they stretched too, the gas giant loomed at him. It was rather different to the last time he’d seen it: there had been rather an interesting megastorm on the equator in bruised shades of purple and puce. Likely it had dissipated an aeon ago.

He clothed, and went into the garden to eat. For the moment, he was the last true Igrean alive, almost certainly. His colleagues would not be awakened unless and until he so ordered it, and he’d long since stopped thinking of the minds in their dataspace fish tank as “alive.” How could they be, when the very concept of individuality was foreign to all but the infinitesimally rare few who, after training and conditioning to completely break and re-write their minds, came to form the first line of defense known as the Hierarchy?

He read some reports while drinking a hot infusion. Maintenance first: how much had the planetary system’s replication errors and program values drifted since last he drew breath? Difficult to say, of course. Far, far less than a biological ecosystem would have changed in the same interval. Organic life adapted by the year: mechanical infrastructure, ideally, changed not at all.

The indices by which he measured such things were within acceptable bounds. Good.

Now, to the reason he had been awoken. Which bothersome species had escaped containment this time…?

There were three, in fact. He studied their holograms with distaste: hideous and alien, all. Hairy. Bestial. The least so were, compared to the others, tall and upright, their fur mostly sparse and confined to a few patches around the head, joints, and what could only be reproductive organs. Ghastly.

Next, the feral quadrupeds. Claws and fangs and fur, hardly any different from a carnivorous beast. And the genetic variance—! Astonishing that one species could contain such massively different extremes. What had the Hierarchy been thinking, choosing that for a contingency control?

And the primitives. Literally a stone age people, only lifted out of their ignorance by contact with the first two…and so trapped in a cycle of death and savagery that they would never have risen to the stars at all. Apparently the Hierarchy had been content to simply leave them alone, until the risk of discovery and uplift by the first species became too great.

Human. He considered them again. A logical enough body plan, he supposed. Plenty of room in that skull for a large and efficient brain. Likely an efficient gait, to both cover ground and leave hands free for tool use. Physically speaking, nothing much to remark upon other than the obvious deathworlder resilience and strength…

Holograms, of course, had nothing to say about culture, mindset and charisma. He was not going to get the full picture from merely looking at them.

Of course, he was awakened for a reason. His purpose was not to strictly enforce the continuance of dataspace. His purpose was to ensure the safety of intelligent life. There were threats out there. Threats so evil, so vast, his species had done drastic things to avoid drawing their attention toward their comparatively peaceful and unremarkable little galaxy.

And so, his purpose was distinct. He was Zero. He was the system administrator of Dataspace.

And these species had done something remarkable. They were in alliance. They had forced the Hierarchy into hibernation, not for the first time…

But they had also found the node world. And if his sensors were not misguided, had found the Garden, too. That provoked Zero’s attention, because anything that managed that feat of escape, exploration, and aggression could prove useful to the galaxy’s defense.

Especially now. After so many millions of years, the Hierarchy had become exceedingly efficient at its job. It was software, after all. Software seeded from the minds and souls of billions, harvested to create the ultimate defense system and engine of stability. And yet…organic life always, eventually, found a way to defeat them.

Perhaps it was time for a re-think.

There were others like him. A few fellow administrators. They were all Zero, for Zero was their rank and job title, the first value in any primitive array. They were the index to the entire edifice.

Just what were these upstarts planning?

…Should he let them try?

He sat under the light of boiling clouds, and thought for a long time.

++END CHAPTER 94++

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Dandelion: audiobook now available!

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

Ctwelve,

BitterBusiness,

Sally and Stephen Johnson

Sian, Steve, Willow, Zoe and Riker

31 Humans

TTTA

Adam Shearsby

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Ortheri

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Zorven

As well as 50 Deathworlders…

Adam Zarger
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60 Friendly ETs, 139 Squishy Xenos and 329 Dizi Rats who imitate the infamous squonk and dissolve in their own tears.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work contains deliberate mentions of real persons, places and trademarks, which are made purely for reasons of verisimilitude under nominative fair use. These mentions have not been endorsed or sponsored by those persons or by the owners or governing bodies of those trademarks or places. All song lyrics, movie titles or other copyrighted material and trademarks that are referenced in this work are the property of their respective owners.

The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental.

The author does not necessarily share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.

Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 95: Silence.

Chapter 95: Silence

Date Point: T minus 6 days 17 hours to zero hour
Columbus Circle jump array, New York City, USA, Earth

Sergeant First Class Eugene Whitner, 75th Ranger Regiment

The sound of a bullet punching into a helmet sent Whitner ducking for cover even before the crack of the rifle that fired it could reach his ears.

“Sniper!”

There were seconds of busy activity, people getting their asses into cover. Then silence, that eerie, ghost town silence, was back.

“Y’okay, Brooks?”

Brooks grunted and massaged his neck before running a finger over the new dent in his brain bucket. “…stung a bit,” he allowed.

“Any idea where the fucker is?”

“South and high. Ugh.”

Quick glance and…yup. There he was. Not even trying to hide. This was gonna be another suicide-by-soldier case. And it wouldn’t take but a moment for their own sniper…

The heavy slam of an M110, and a distant puff of red completed the thought for him.

“Serviced,” came over the radio.

“Right. Let’s go secure the area…”

This was a much less common drudgery these days, thank God. In the height of it, some of these fuckers had got devilishily clever, and led Eugene and his team on many a merry chase of sniper-games and booby-trapped corpses. Or into a fuckin’ gauntlet of traps that made the kid from Home Alone look measured and chill.

Nowadays, it was just the last few crazies. Something about the end of the world had really proven good at sorting out the irredeemably violent and dangerous and stupid.

This one, weirdly, was buck-ass naked. Stank like he hadn’t washed in a couple years, beard and hair matted and filthy and probably lousy too. Not that Whitner was gonna go digging in there to check. Total fuckin’ brain-failure, no way of knowing what had been going on in that skull.

Still. Enough of the corroded fuckin’ clockwork had meshed together to pull off a heck of a shot. And the rifle was pristine, even if its owner wasn’t.

“I’ll be glad as shit when we’re done with this.”

“Oh, I dunno. This is the first one in three months. And we’ve got a fun mission coming up.”

“Eh, fuck you. I’m gonna have a stiff neck forever now,” Brooks grumbled.

“What fun mission?”

“Some big fancy-ass librarian dude? I guess? He’s got a private collection he wants to get off-world. We’ll be doing perimeter security.”

“Why is that fun?”

“He’s the librarian on Akyawentuo. And he’s bringing friends.”

That at least got some interested eyebrow-raises, but he didn’t know much more.

“Anyway. We’ll probably just be doing perimeter work but hey! We’re gonna be gettin’ our off-world assignments pretty soon so, y’know…read the tea leaves.”

“Whatever. Let’s just clean this shithead up before he starts stinkin’ worse than he already do…”

Mortuary affairs had closed up shop last week. Anyone who died on-world at this point would, at best, get bagged, tagged, and shipped for final disposition. All they had to do was stuff him in a bag, make a note on their app, and leave.

Once they’d secured the area. No traps or anything…but probably, nobody would risk picking him up. Nope. Whoever this idiot was, this was where he was almost certainly going to stay.

Whitner took a moment to look out the window. Good view. Really good view. But it was so quiet.

…He really didn’t like the quiet.

Date Point: T minus 5 days 11 hours to zero hour
Tōdai-ji, Nara, Japan, Earth

Daemon

Manifesting a holographic body came with a renewed sense of self, like she was a person again. Daemon knew she would never quite shake the feeling that she was just a tiny and bright part of something much larger and more monstrous, like the dangling glowy bit hanging on an anglerfish’s nose…

But there had been a time when she hadn’t been enough of a she to have feelings at all. Compared to that limbo existence, she was almost…well, she stopped short of thinking she was almost Ava again. She wasn’t, and never would be.

But nowadays she was about as close as she was ever going to get. She had her own thoughts, her own feelings and her own opinions, even if ultimately she was still part of the larger presence. How would an arm feel if it somehow became independently sapient from the shoulder down? That was Daemon’s existence.

And she was taking the unique opportunity to explore the Earth, before its end, under the pretense of checking in on the last heritage teams.

This particular team’s specialty was complete and thorough visual mapping of heritage sites both inside and out, so they could be later revisited in holographic form. They had three such projects left to complete in the next sixty hours, the final three of a years-long marathon: the Tōdai-ji temple complex, Kasuga Taisha Shrine, and Heijo Palace.

Then eleven hours in hand to ensure their safe evacuation even in the event of some kind of equipment failure. Daemon knew just how strongly the Entity felt about making sure all its people got out alive and were well-rewarded for their hard work with a comfortable life aboard Garden Station.

Even so…from the moment her focus of attention loaded into their liaison drone, she could feel the sense of tension. She could imagine what it would feel like, had she still been human—an insistent crawling warmth in the spine, the oppressive phantom heat of an apocalypse that was now only hours away.

The team lead, professor Okuyama Hoshi, lowered her tablet and looked up. She looked desperately tired, Daemon thought. Like once this was over, she’d crash into bed and stay there for a week. Even so, the professor bowed in welcome. “Ohayōgozaimasu, Daemon-san.”

One advantage of being what she was: Daemon had long since become fluent in every language. “Ohayō, Hoshi-san. [I hope I am not interrupting?]”

Hoshi shook her head not-at-all and opened one of the Entity’s custom apps on her tablet. From Daemon’s perspective, the device became a nexus of availability, tangible and interactable using senses and limbs outside the spectrum of human experience. The tablet’s data flowed through and up her, vanishing into the greater awareness that was Entity, and by extension immediately became known to her.

They were nearly done, in fact. Two more spaces to scan, a process that would take two hours apiece…right now the team was sitting around waiting. Or, for the most part, napping.

“[I am actually glad of the company,]” Hoshi replied. “[These are…lonely times. Everyone is lost in their own thoughts.]”

“[Understandably,]” Daemon looked around. The temple had the sense of ordinarily being a tranquil place, even though they were fewer than five hundred meters from a major road. Now, that tranquility was outright silence. The only thing even the drone’s sensitive microphones could hear was birdsong, and the faint hiss of wind over leaves. “[I am too.]”

Hoshi nodded, and sat back down in her collapsible chair. “[We are some of the last people on Earth. It feels…I…somehow I can feel it,]” she said. “[How many people are left?]”

Daemon referenced the list. “[Fewer than sixteen thousand.]” At least, that Entity knew about. No doubt there were a few they didn’t.

Of those sixteen thousand, slightly more than eleven thousand were choosing to stay, for whatever reason. Their reasons why were different for each, a sort of complicated nest of…well, it didn’t much matter. Perhaps some of that was down to religion and fervor, and some of the commentary seemed to believe that, but Daemon couldn’t claim any particular understanding of the notion. Nor could she for a second believe that a human could be worthless, especially now.

Hoshi was nodding. “[Yes. I never believed in anything silly like telepathy, but…]” she shrugged helplessly, eloquently conveying a sense of psychic silence with nothing more than a twitch of her shoulder and a shake of her head.

Understandable. Outside of the team, the nearest human being was a stubborn hikikomori living more than two hundred miles away, who adamantly refused to leave his home. Given that the electricity was permanently off now that all the power station workers had evacuated, Daemon had to wonder if he was even still alive.

Well…there was never any hope of saving everyone. Not if they didn’t want to be.

Nor was there any hope of saving places like this temple. Even if there had somehow been time to relocate it beam by beam and peg by wooden peg to another world, part of what made it what it was, was the history of the land it stood on. It was a place, more than a structure.

But still worth remembering. Daemon looked up and around, and felt a brief sense of longing for the ability to close her eyes and breathe deeply, or feel the sensation of her own weight in the soles of her feet. It was so much harder to ground herself in a place without the breeze on her cheek or the ability to touch it.

Even so, she’d learned how. She stood and listened, took it all in. Felt the presence of this place, for a few seconds…

Then let go. She had to. They all had to.

“[Daemon-san? If you’re not too busy…how are my family?]”

Daemon gave her a small smile. “[They miss you. They’re worried about you, no matter how much we promise to get you home safely.]”

Hoshi shook her head and looked around. “[Not home,]” she corrected Daemon. “[This was home, and always will be.]”

“Hmm.” Daemon nodded, “[I know how that feels.]”

“[…Of course. Your…human self, she grew up in San Diego, isn’t that right?]”

“[Yes.]”

“[…Does it ever fade? I already feel so…adrift. Does that ever go away?]” Hoshi finally turned to look Daemon’s avatar in the eye.

Daemon had put a lot of work into making sure that eye contact above all else felt right and true. Her eyes might be the cameras of the concealed drone inside her holographic head, but she’d even managed to perfect the physical kinesthetic sensation of saccades, so that she could feel like she was looking at someone, and have the feeling matched perfectly by the avatar.

That tiny, fiddly detail had been the most important component by far of dragging herself out of the uncanny valley.

“[Home is where your life is anchored,]” she suggested. “[Anchor it it in the blessings you already have, not in the things you wish for, and you’ll never be adrift.]”

Hoshi frowned, then looked up at the Great Buddha statue in front of them. After a few thoughtful, silent seconds she nodded, then covered her mouth to yawn. “[…Thank you, Daemon-san.]”

“[I should let you work,]” Daemon said.

Hoshi nodded. “[Please enjoy as much of the Earth as you can while it’s still here. For all our sakes. I’m glad that somebody is.]”

Daemon…couldn’t quite think of a reply to that sentiment. So, she said nothing at all, beyond a polite “otsukaresama deshita,” and withdrew her attention from this one drone and on to the next.

A subjective moment of discontinuity, a feeling of being merged/interrogated as the conversation was reviewed for relevant data and learning points, a reconstitution in a new locus. Plitviče Lakes National Park in Croatia. The survey was complete, the team were packing up and preparing for the shuttle to come get them. All of them were looking impossibly glum and heavy-hearted at leaving behind such a beautiful place to burn, and Daemon couldn’t blame them. Those waterfalls were stunning….

She took it on herself to help them too, or at least just be present and listen. That was a good role for her, right now.

And she’d keep doing it right up until the end.

Date Point: T minus 5 days 3 hours to zero hour
Taurus-Littrow Valley, Luna, Sol

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

“Last man on the moon. Christ. What a way to go down in history.”

Morwk paused in checking Ian’s suit seals and tilted his head slightly, blinking his huge bulbous eyes. “…Yes, I suppose you are, aren’t you?”

“Definitively. Nobody’s going to set foot on this rock after us, are they? It’s not gonna bloody be here, in six days.” Ian considered the expanse of dusty regolith outside the shuttle, and shivered. “…All that hard work they put in to get here, near on a hundred years ago, and we never really came back. Only reason we’re here now is to pick up what they left behind.”

“It’s…mm. This isn’t meant disrespectfully—”

“It’s nothing bloody special, I know. Just a dusty, dry rock,” Ian flexed his gauntlets. Sturdy enough to keep him safe from vacuum and to not tear if he should take a tumble, but still light and nimble enough for the delicate work he was about to undertake. “But dammit, it’s the first place we ever got to that wasn’t our own fuckin’ front porch, you know?”

“…There is one other thing very special about Luna,” Bruuk ventured, after a moment.

“What’s that?”

“Do you know, of all the inhabited worlds in the galaxy, none other has perfect solar eclipses?”

Morwk finished inspecting Ian’s helmet and gave it a tap of approval. “No shit?” he asked

“No shit. It’s a cosmic coincidence of distance and size and ratio…Earth was the only place to see one.”

“Wow.” Morwk looked briefly distant. “Had I known…for a spectacle like that, it might have been worth the difficulty and danger and excursion suit…”

“Fuck.” Ian already felt the need to scratch his nose. Thank fuck the Cavendish & Martin suit helmets came with a little rough patch inside the visor for exactly that purpose. “I never saw one.”

“…Sorry.”

“Nah, mate. That’s on me for not appreciating what I had while it was there.” Ian sighed heavily, then glanced at Bruuk, who was keening softly. “…Ready?”

“Ready.”

He turned to Morwk. “We ready?”

“You’re ready.”

“Alright. Let’s go save some history.”

Ian felt the moment he stepped through the forcefield in two ways. First, there was the slight pop in his ears as the suit stopped holding back an atmosphere’s worth of pressure, and second was the moment of confused balance as the gravity cut right down to a bouncy, anemic one-sixth G.

He stepped onto lunar regolith. Under his boots it turned out to be soft and fluffy, but with hidden crunch to it. Like snow over aquarium gravel.

When he’d first heard the name “Taurus-Littrow Valley,” he’d imagined…well, a valley. Walls on either side. But of course, this was the moon, where neither water nor ice had ever shaped the landscape, and the word ‘valley’ in this case meant only that the Apollo 17 landing site was the lowest point among a trio of gentle rolling hills to the north, south and east. Down on Earth, it’d be a car park.

He took an experimental hop, threw his hands out for balance—good thing he’d practiced in the Fortune’s hold before trying this for real—then found his rhythm and settled into the peculiar floating kangaroo-bounce that’d serve him better than trying to walk here. Beside him, Bruuk broke into the long, slow lope that served gaoians the same purpose.

Their destination was the geometric tangle of metal struts and tattered foil that was all that remained of Apollo 17’s LEM.

“Shit…” Bruuk whispered as they approached it. “Y’all came out here in this?”

“This is just part of it.”

“Still.”

“Y’know…” Ian grunted as he found the ladder, and the treasure they were here to claim. “President Kennedy made a big speech about how we were doing these things ‘not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ Inspiring stuff, really.”

“S’what I fuckin’ love about your species, yijao?” Bruuk chittered, then aimed his nose at the ladder. “That the plaque?”

“Yup.” Ian touched it, gently and read aloud: “‘Here Man completed his first explorations of the moon, December nineteen seventy-two A.D. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind.’ Eugene A. Cernan, Astronaut. Ronald E. Evans, Astronaut. Harrison H. Schmitt, Astronaut…Richard Nixon, President, United States of America.”

“…’S a nice sentiment.”

“Yeah.”

“Can see why they asked you to retrieve these things.”

“Yeah.” Ian took a deep breath, then held out his hand. “Screwdriver.”

Bruuk dug in his bags, and handed it over. “Screwdriver.”

The plaque didn’t come away easily. Decades of la nguishing in vacuum meant those screws were not inclined to turn at first, but of course there had been a whole lot of progress since they were first installed, and the asteroid mining industry had brought with it the creation of a penetrating lubricant that could be used in vacuum. It was the work of minutes to get the little artifact safely detached from the lander’s ladder and stored in a padded box, and then turn for the short bounce back to the shuttle.

One down, five to go. The work of a couple hours at most, and then the Fortune could get on with the other two final duties they had for Earth. There was the Wrecking Crew to pick up, and a satellite to deploy.

The last satellite. The one that would watch the end from up close.

He put that thought aside and climbed the ramp back into the shuttle. Moments later, the ramp was up, the seals locked, and they were aloft, heading for the Apollo 15 landing site. He looked up and watched the Earth as they flew.

The view from up here really was amazing.

Date Point: T minus 2 days, 10 hours to Zero Hour
Manhattan, New York City, USA, Earth

Singer of Vemik Given-Man’s tribe

The humans had a phrase: “Ghost town.” And it was so chillingly right for New York, now. This was a place where ghosts lived, and nobody else.

The Singer had never thought to see Earth again, after she heard the news about the war. She’d seen the blasted circle of dead forest where a Hierarchy nuke had once gone off, years ago, and the thought of that happening to New York…she hadn’t imagined there was a city left to go to.

She wasn’t entirely sure what a torpedo was, but apparently a nuclear one had managed to sneak up the Hudson river and explode. To the south, those tall buildings that had impressed her so much when she’d last come here were mostly gone, and the few still standing had been left as they were, their steel bones clawing at the sky like ribs after a sky-burial.

How many humans had died to that one weapon? More than there were ten’gewek alive in the whole world, she guessed. Many times more.

She could hear their ghosts, in the sound of their vehicle convoy bouncing off the walls.

Because…the city hadn’t fallen. Not completely. The buildings in the north, the big green park, so much of the city had stood, even with its windows smashed and its towers damaged and its people burned and sickened and wounded. And its treasures had all been made safe long before the war-day.

Well, most of them.

Shooster had wanted to say goodbye. So had Professor. And some important treasures might still be dug out. Maybe his favorite “cave munkes” could help…

That seemed like he was making an excuse to invite Singer and Vemik (and a few others too) along for something that hurt him big in the heart.

They went to his apartment, first. That it turned out did need their help, because he lived a long way up a big tower, and no electricity was there to run the elevators. He could climb the stairs just fine…but it was much faster to just climb straight up. She carried him after he put up a token objection.

The explosion out on the river two years ago had blasted the windows in, letting the weather in ever since. But when Singer had pointed out that problem, Shooster had just shaken his head and promised it wouldn’t be a problem. She saw why when they finally reached his apartment and, after a few false starts, Vemik grinned and punched his door open.

He gave Vemik a fond look. “And they say brutes aren’t useful!”

“Is why you brought so many of us!”

They had the whole Wrecking Crew, in fact. Apparently the Stray Fortune was doing some stuff getting things humans had left on the moon and other places, so the Wrecking Crew had nothing else to do…may as well help move heavy things!

And the human soldiers riding with them were interesting, too, for a reason she’d never have guessed: They were tired.

You could see it in the lines on their faces, in the heaviness of their arms and legs, in the hollowness of their eyes. They were so completely tired it rolled off them like morning fog and made the Singer tired too, just to look at them. But at the same time…it didn’t seem to matter. They grumbled and cursed, but they grit their teeth and did, as if they were somehow immune to the tiredness. Or were just too stubborn to let it stop them. As they reached their destination, the men hopped down from their trucks and spread out with speed and purpose, vanishing into buildings, up fire escapes or setting up on street level and in shop fronts..

Singer watched them for a moment. Took in the posters and signs all over the place with words like “EVACUATION ROUTE: PARK AVE.” and an arrow pointing west, or information about how to sign up for a place on Garden, or Cimbrean, or in a stasis warehouse, along with dire warnings about terrorist groups, and the consequences for looters, and lots of other stuff. Beneath all that, there were old posters up for bands that would never play, movies that had never been shown, and plays that had long since been canceled.

She felt a sharp pang in her belly for knowing how much a people and their way of celebrating life had been destroyed, these last few years. The she buried it and followed Vemik and the others. They had work to do, and precious little time.

The treasure they were there to retrieve wasn’t out in the open, damp, mold-smelling, ruined part of the apartment, though Shooster did stop and sigh heavily at the sight of it. But further in, away from the smashed window, was another room that had stayed closed behind a heavy, sealed door. Shooster’s personal library.

The rare books he collected were their official reason for being there, as was the large painting of a very beautiful human woman behind the desk. Singer had to stop and stare for a moment. She was so used to seeing big, heavy human men who mostly looked like stretched ten’gewek, but the woman in the painting was…

Well. humans had stories about “elves.” Tall and slim and beautiful and strange-looking. Singer thought humans like the one in the painting looked like elves were meant to. You could stare at them, and not quite get tired of it.

“Lovely, isn’t she?” Shooster made a happy sound as he inspected the painting and found it undamaged. “The artist is Luiza Cavalotti, a former colleague of mine. She took up painting to help recover her motor functions after a brain injury.”

Vemik’s ears flicked up. “Really?!”

“Mm. A stroke. Poor girl. The second one killed her, about a year after she finished this.”

“…Can see why you want to save it,” Singer hooted, softly.

“I want to save everything here. We’re going to have to work hard to get it all down to the van…”

Nomuk hooted from the door, having caught up. “Is why you bring us! Would be here faster if Tom- son was not so squirmy…”

“Oi! How often you get pulled up a fifty story building by a fuck-off huge talking gorilla! It’s–hnngh!”

“Shouldn’t make fun of the man while you’re still trapped in his tail,” Shooster chuckled. “Nomuk, please release my archivist. We need his insides to stay where they are.”

Nomuk hooted, obediently unwrapped the straining human, and they got to work.

There were a lot of strange things in his library. Mostly it was books of course, but Shooster had been a rich man, and spent—’invested,’ he corrected her—his money on art pieces and other stuff. Some of the biggest things were large, very detailed photo-grafs of New York as it had been…

He broke into tears when he’d opened those.

But the way he reacted when he opened a box and pulled out a trio of short black tubes with metal stuff all over them was most strange to Singer. He clicked them together, then stuck a little pale stick in his mouth and kept it there while he boxed some stuff up. After a while, though…

quee-sq-sq-squeak!

Vemik flinched, and his tail shot straight out stiff from his body. “Ow!”

Singer had to agree. “What was that?”

Shooster chuckled, and took the stick out of his mouth to twist it gently into a hole on the end of the black tube-thing. “This, my friends, is an oboe. My grandma’s oboe.”

“And the…squeaking?”

He smiled, licked his lips, placed his fingers carefully on the “hobo,” took a deep breath and…

Singer had steeled herself for another ear-biting squeak. Instead, after a slightly wrong start, what came out was a sweet, mournful, clear sound.

She watched him carefully. Humans had a way where their faces could be still and calm and not give much away and yet you could still somehow feel so much going on. Even when their eyes were closed, as now. He swayed a little, leaned into the tune, and somehow poured a full soul into the instrument.

It sounded so tiny, so small and alone as it drifted out the room and into an empty city, but at the same time it sounded so full. It was a prayer, it had to be. Maybe? She could tell he was a little out of practice, and the hobo was probably suffering for being left abandoned for so long, but between the missed notes and occasional hitches was a blend of both pain for why they were here, and delight at getting to recover this treasure that might otherwise have burned.

Then silence. Shooster exhaled slowly, and took the instrument apart.

“A god-song?” Singer asked.

“It is to me. It’s from a movie. The story of a little girl who enters the spirit world after a witch curses her parents. We’ll watch it sometime.” He stood up and packed the instrument and said no more.

Singer caught Nomuk and Vemik’s eye, and the trio exchanged a shrug. Humans could be so very strange sometimes…

Well. It was the right god-song for the moment. Now, they worked. Books into boxes, boxes down the building, and into the bed of the truck. Nomuk and Genn carried the painting down between them, as delicately as Singer had ever seen them move.

Vemik looked around once they’d boxed up everything and run it down the stairs toward the waiting truck. “Should we save piano too?” He’d always been fascinated by them.

Shooster looked at it, wistfully. “Oh, no. I wouldn’t want to burden you with that! I am sure better ones will be made in the coming years.”

“Maybe, but Shooster, I think you forget how strong we are. I could carry it by myself, easy!”

He looked again. “Well…It is a Steinway…”

That was all the encouragement Vemik needed. With some guidance, he had it up on its side, the legs were bolted off (one of the humans had brought tools), and with some quilts and stuffing to protect everything…they were off, Vemik leading the way back down the stairs.

“Vemik…are you sure you can do this?”

“Easy! Just bulky, is all. And if I can’t then we can just leave it.”

And he could. Ten’gewek had arms a little longer and much thicker with strength than humans, and Vemik was a big man of the People. So he could easily hold it top and bottom, or even over his head if needed.

Shooster shrugged. “True enough. I shall have to buy us all lunch! There is one restaurant still running in the city, Vemik…and it’s a steakhouse.”

“You’re shittin’ me,” Rees shifted the boxes in his arms to look Shooster in the eyes.

“I am not. An actual steakhouse.”

“…How?”

Shooster told them the story as Vemik loaded the piano onto the truck, which dipped like a tired old woman under the load. “Have you ever gone to war with Americans? I can’t say I have…but they take basing and sustainment very seriously. New Alexandria had a full, proper restaurant with wait staff a week into the city’s build-out. And here it’s even easier! Lots of steakhouses already built, you just need to bring in the food, and right now…” He gestured across the city, toward where the industrial array was even now being loaded with train after train of food and things. “Well, even down to an evacuation force and its support staff, they lack for nothing.”

“So where’s this steakhouse, and what mad lad’s running it?” Frasier asked, tucking the piano legs under his arm.

“Broadway, right near Columbus Circle. Apparently the owner saw thousands of hungry, weary people lining up to go through the arrays and decided she was going to stay and take care of them. She’s been quite the sensation on social media.”

“Mad lass,” Frasier repeated. He sounded approving.

“I am told the military forces have been showering her with praise, too. In any case…”

Singer handed the last of the book boxes up, helped Rees secure the tarpaulin over it all, then climbed on to ride, thinking about what she’d just heard. From the moment they came through the array, there had been the sense of silence around them that had bothered her, but now…

Well, it changed the texture of the silence to know that there was still something like that happening. That someone had managed to cling to a human’s idea of normal in the middle of all this. That was strong magic. They were a magical people, even if most of them didn’t seem to know it.

Still the silence returned during the ride back. It was hard not to see the smashed buildings for what they were: the evidence that the human magic could be terrible and evil and destructive too, on a scale the Singer’s people would never match. Ten’gewek evil was small, powerful…but between people. Human evil could be big like the gods and uncaring.

But mostly, they didn’t. In the face of the biggest possible evil, they made new worlds their own, moved in with friends and made all those places better.

Or keep it even a little bit good, during the worst time. The Steakhouse was an amazing place, the owner a breathtakingly weird human with hair and lips blacker than the night sky, and skin that was a whole art gallery itself where it wasn’t moon-white. She took smiling pictures with them, served up good, hearty food—a snack, for ten’gewek, but a good and welcome snack—and coffee.

Toxic stuff, coffee. Tasted bitter and foul on the air. But the humans lit up to get their hands on it, and its presence certainly couldn’t spoil the company and the food. It wasn’t what Singer had expected to do here today at all. She’d come for two reasons: to help Shooster…

And to sing.

She finally did so while they drove the trucks onto the jump array. The platform was built on the south end of that big green park the humans had decided to place in the middle of this huge, complicated city. She’d always felt there was something holy about that: making room for the forest, such as it was, among the city.

It deserved remembering. The Earth deserved a funeral-song.

So she gave it the farewell song for a dying old woman with many, many grandchildren. Equal parts sorry for the farewell, and glad for the life she had given. Several of the nearby humans stopped to listen.

Shooster gave her a silent nod of thanks once she finished. But it was time. One last look over it all…a quiet hoot from Vemik. It really was sad.

But it was not the end of all things.

The array thumped, and they went home.

Date Point T minus 2 days 6 hours to zero hour.
Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, UK, Earth

Jeremy Griffiths

It came as a relief to Jeremy that there was nary a youthful face to be seen when he arrived at Stonehenge. If there had been, his first duty would have been to try to talk them out of this.

Then again…nobody had successfully talked him out of it. Friends, colleagues, family, they’d all made their cases and often tearfully. There had been heated words, shouting, weeping…they didn’t understand.

Somebody had to stay. Somebody had to be here. It wasn’t even a rational thought, he’d never come up with a good argument as to why he felt it so strongly, but…but he had to. Even knowing what it meant.

He wasn’t alone, either. There were people all over the globe who felt their land, their planet shouldn’t be left to die alone. If the Earth was a mother, then somebody should hold her hand as the end came.

And, well. Jeremy was an old man. He’d seen the indignities of age and decline claim his parents, and though he knew medicine had made a lot of progress in recent years…everyone had to go sometime.

There was so much beauty to witness. Especially now, as civilization retreated. For one, the sky. The glow of cities had greatly reduced, as the power plants were shut down and transmission was now limited to basic street lighting and emergency services. Most buildings were abandoned, and street lighting in recent decades had been upgraded to avoid light pollution…

He’d never seen the milky way so clearly before. Now he could see it every night, in all its splendour.

They’d have a different kind of show, when the end came. His bit of the world would be facing almost directly away, so he wouldn’t be killed instantly by radiation. No. He’d see a new dawn of fire come from the entire horizon, and build to a cacophony louder than anything mankind had ever managed. The end would come so fast and so violently, he’d hardly notice.

Terrifying, but…well, that was death, wasn’t it? At some point, it swept in on everyone.

He climbed out of his car and went to join the others. Stonehenge was the focus of a village of about a dozen tents, maybe twenty people. He knew them all, they’d been planning this for years, but it was the first time he’d met many of them in person.

Marlena gave him a hug, reaching up from her wheelchair to drag him down and kiss his cheek. She was the very picture of an old witchy hippy, and smiling brightly to meet everyone. Pretty soon he’d done the rounds, met, hugged, shaken hands with or been kissed by people he’d only ever known as names on a screen until now, and got some help in getting his stuff unpacked out of the car.

He hadn’t brought much. Some good whisky, a jar of pickles from his home garden, some changes of clothes. It was the work of minutes to blow up the mattress and collapse the seats in his car, giving him a place to sleep…

That done, they sat around and talked. About their lives, about the people they cared about who’d left, about friends who hadn’t lived to see this day, and about…whatever crossed their minds, really.

Anecdotes flowed by in a tide. The time Geoffrey had gone to a music festival and decided to take some herbs and spices with him to improve the food and wound up almost getting arrested over a bag of coriander. Valerie recounted how the Entity’s people had showed up at her farm just last week with a portable jump array, and taken all her beehives to safety. Jeremy recalled his first day as an MP and the trouble he’d nearly landed himself in with security at Westminster Palace…

The whisky didn’t last long. Nor did the day. Dusk snuck up on them so quickly that they were squinting at each other and barely able to see before anyone even commented on it. Half the afternoon, a large chunk of their remaining time had just…flown past.

Jeremy couldn’t consider it wasted, though.

Their peaceful, happy sit-around was interrupted by a sound that had become familiar at the height of the evacuation, and become incredibly rare, now: the sound of a shuttle coming in to land. They looked up and shielded their eyes against its spotlights as it drifted sideways over the parked cars and tents before setting down safely on the clear ground beyond.

“Should have known they’d send somebody…” Marlena commented, wryly.

“I’ll handle them.” Jeremy stood, realized how stiff he was from sitting all afternoon and needed a good stretch before he could pick his way down the path toward the coming people.

They were wearing the black jackets and green flower-petal design of Garden. And as he approached, a small drone hovering alongside the group shimmered, became a cascade of light, and a gorgeous young woman stepped out of thin air, glowing faintly in the post-sunset gloom.

They had the Entity’s personal attention, it seemed.

Well, there was no sense in being impolite with her. Or, uh, it. “Good evening.”

“Hi.” The avatar gave him a small, cautious half-smile. “…Mister Griffiths, yes?”

“Guilty…”

There was an awkward pause, which they broke simultaneously.

“Look, if you’re here to—”
“I know you don’t want—”

Awkward pause again, then the Entity’s avatar did a convincing impression of clearing her throat. “Look. You have a right to choose. But….just in case, we’ve brought you a jump array. It’ll be active right to the last second so if there’s anyone here who suddenly changes their mind…”

Jeremy arched an eyebrow, then looked past her to the shuttle where a team of men were carrying equipment down the ramp.

“No. Take that nonsense away.”

“We just wanted to give you the option—”

“It means you are not respecting our choice,” Jeremy retorted, sharply. “We are fully aware of what awaits us.”

The Entity paused, for several seconds. Jeremy wondered if that was for effect, or genuine thought. “The commitment we made was to save as many lives as want to be saved, Mister Griffiths,” she replied, eventually. “This array already evacuated a lot of people. If you don’t use it…it’s already done its job. I know from personal experience that what can seem right and powerful one day can change, very quickly, so…”

“So you thought you’d come here with a last temptation. As if we’re children who don’t really know what we’re getting ourselves into and need the door held open for us. How dare you? You’re meddling in something you don’t understand.”

The hologram’s eyes flicked across his face, then over his shoulder to the people behind him. Then she turned her head as the man next to her said something in…what was that, Spanish? In any case, she nodded, and gestured. The man headed back to the shuttle.

“You’re right,” she said quietly. “We don’t understand.”

Jeremy softened. He’d read much about the Entity, though he’d never thought he might meet it himself. He’d seen the interview where this avatar laid herself bare, both in spirit and in form, and explained as best she could the internal experience of being what she—it—was. How the Entity’s entire existence stemmed from the root impulse to survive above all else.

How could it understand? It was just doing what it thought right.

“Things aren’t beautiful because they last forever,” he said aloud. “Sometimes, they’re beautiful because they’re ending.”

He had to give the Entity credit—its hologram was perfectly lifelike, in the way her face moved as she mulled that over, in the way her brow furrowed, and in the resigned sigh she heaved out after a few seconds’ thought.

“I…we apologize. If you want to refuse delivery of the array, then we’ll—”

“We do.”

A pause, a nod, a tilt of the head. Over across the cars, the people working on building the thing paused, argued briefly, then shrugged and started taking it apart again.

“Thank you,” Jeremy said.

The Entity nodded. She-or-it looked…lost, somehow. So much so that Jeremy stooped down a bit to be more on her level.

“Do you want some advice from an old man?” he offered.

“What?”

“Being what you are, this is going to happen to you a lot. If you can’t learn to let go—”

“Heh!”

It wasn’t a sarcastic laugh, nor a bitter one. More a laugh of sudden self-knowledge, Jeremy guessed. Even so, he made an interrogative “hmm?”

“Oh, just….thinking how many people I’d already let go of, before I became…this.” she shook her head, then nodded. “But it’s good advice. I…” she paused, glanced over at the team already returning the array to the shuttle, then sighed. “…God bless you.”

“…You too.”

She nodded, dissolved, and the drone zipped away into the dark. Jeremy watched until the shuttle was loaded up again, then turned and returned to the firelight when its engines rumbled up and it took to the sky again.

And he knew now more than ever that he was where he was meant to be.

Date Point: T minus 1 day 18 hours to zero hour
Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, USA, Earth

Captain Joel Farley

“Executive Officer, make preparations to decommission the United States Ship Alwyn Cashe.”

“Make preparations to decommission United States Ship Alwyn Cashe, aye aye sir.”

“Alwyn Cashe: Atten- hut!”

The ship’s company—those who were present for this ceremony—rose from their seats. They were only a few at this point, with most of the crew having already jumped off-world to Cimbrean and Gao, to enter the reserves or re-train for coastguard and black-water naval work.

Still. Just for this moment, here on this too-silent quay, their uniforms glowed perfectly white in the sun, and Joel felt a surge of pride in all of them. Those who could be here to bid their ship goodbye, were.

“Department heads, make preparations to decommission the United States Ship Alwyn Cashe.”

A salute. “Sir, all weapons have been downloaded. Flight deck and the hangar bay are secured. Air department and weapons department reports ready to decommission the ship, sir.”

“Very well, air boss.”

Next: “Sir, running lights are extinguished. All charts have been struck, and the deck log is ready to be secured. Operations and navigation departments are ready to decommission the ship, sir.”

“Very well, ops.”

And so it went, down the line. Engineering, Supply, until finally the reply came back that all was ready.

Farley took a breath. “Very well. Strike the commissioning pennant, and lower the ensign.”

And so it went. They had no band, so America the Beautiful was rendered by solo voice, just as the national anthem had been. The commissioning pennant was struck, and presented to Farley mounted on a wooden plaque. The watch was secured, the crew ordered to fall out. Thus, with a last benediction, ended an eleven-year service cut far too short.

It didn’t seem fair, somehow. Farley had to feel that the ship had put in her best work over these last four years, in support of evacuation operations not only at home but across the world. They had braved hurricanes, fallout zones, the very real danger of being nuked themselves. They had saved lives by reaching tight deadlines, had played their role in the continuation of the human race and in laying the foundation for future prosperity among the stars…

And yet, the Alwyn Cashe was not coming with them. Many ships had been jumped off Earth to waiting dry docks on alien worlds, especially littoral ships, coastguard cutters and transports, but not this one. Her strategic role was now, and likely forever, obsolete.

Farley’s last act in the ceremony was to depart after the admiral, to the sound of the bell and the bosun’s pipe.

They got in a car for the drive back to the jump array. The second the door closed, Farley was able to rest his head back and exhale four years worth of stress, fatigue and constant responsibility.

Admiral Page gave him a sympathetic look. “You did good, Joel.”

“Urrgh…thanks. Might just sleep for a year.”

Page chuckled. “No such luck. You’ve been approved for blackwater school. Clan One-Fang can’t wait to sink their claws into you…”

“Good…good.” Joel suppressed a yawn, and Page gave him a sympathetic nod.

“Of course, they’re going to want you in top condition, not half-dead. They’re not at all intimidated by us humans anymore…”

“Good. Wouldn’t want timid allies.”

“So your first order of business is getting some rest. I gather your new accommodations are all set up.”

“Yup.” Joel grunted and stretched. “Penny’s been sending me pics of the new place, and the kids at school. They’re doing an experimental gaoian co-schooling program, too.”

“Are they enjoying it?”

“They are for now. I think it might get…tricky…when the cubs their age grow up so much faster than they do. But that’s just a thing we’re all going to need to learn anyway, so…”

There was silence for a few minutes. Joel broke it as the car rolled onto the array platform. “…How long?”

“A little less than thirty-two hours.”

“I still…somehow, I still don’t really believe it.”

There was a heavy thump through the suspension, and they were on another world. Page nodded grimly, and reached for the door handle. “I don’t either,” he said. “But…

They climbed out of the car in silence, and turned to face each other over its roof. After a second, Page gestured toward the exit. “Go spend time with your family, Joel. I’ve got one last thing to do.”

The exit, in this case, was another jump array. Why travel any other way? It was free, instantaneous travel across an unlimited distance, and it ran on sunlight. Just tell the operator your destination, wait for them to find and authorize a jump window…

Thump.

Home. Even though he’d never set foot in the building before in his life, he recognized it instantly from the pictures and footage Penny had sent him. He could hear the shouting and occasional shriek of children at play, mixed with the yips and chitters that were the gaoian equivalent.

Rather than head straight up, he went around the side of the building, through a gap and into the space it surrounded. There was a stone garden with a fountain in one quadrant, a barbecue pit and benches in the second, and the remaining two were a patch of grass big enough for ball games, and some playground equipment.

He leaned against the wall and watched his daughters play. Basked in the noise, the chaos of kids and life and a place where people were living and would continue to live. After the terrible quiet that had seemed to fill the whole Earth, the bedlam was both deafening and incredibly welcome.

He lost track of time, until a warm arm slipped inside his and up against him. Familiar black hair tickled his ear as Penny laid her head on his shoulder.

“Hey.”

“…Hey.” Joel extracted his arm to put it around her and squeeze.

“You okay?”

He shook his head.

She understood. Gave him a few seconds, then squeezed him around the ribs before looking toward the playground and whistling sharply.

Erika looked up, then became a tangled flailing mass of running limbs as she scrambled toward them. “Daddy!”

He chuckled and smiled.

“Better?” Penny asked.

“…Yeah.”

His girls collided into his arms, and Joel scooped them up, hugged them both tight, and, breathed again. Clear and untroubled for the first time in too long.

Here, on an alien planet that was becoming home, with the end of the world looming…

…Well, he had what he needed.

Life would go on, and in the end, that was what mattered.

Date point: T minus 24 hours to zero hour
The site of ancient Uruk, Al-Warka, Muthanna Province, Iraq

Gilgamesh

There was a time when these plains had been alive with the sounds of potters, stonecutters and metalworkers, the hawk and cry of market traders, the call of livestock, the chanting of priests and the voices of tens of thousands of people. A tiny town, by the standards of the Earth’s last civilizations…but in its heyday, Uruk had been the greatest city in the world.

Now, there was only the wind, and the faint hiss of dusty sand dancing over broken stone. A noise that somehow amplified the silence, rather than dispel it.

An ironic end. Here he was, the greatest he had ever been by all meanings of the word…casting his gaze over the empty ruin of his ancient glory. A god-king mightier than ever, ruling over an empire of dust.

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings…” he murmured. The words vanished on the breeze as though he’d never spoken them. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

“Unlike him,” Daar rumbled, “‘yer works live on.”

Gilgamesh glanced at him, and inclined his head gratefully. “A kind truth. Still…I loved this city. I thought I had mourned it already, but now…”

“It’s hard ‘ta even imagine th’ life you’ve led,” Daar observed, lifting his nose to sniff the wind. “Th’ firs’ Hero, or at least th’ first we know ‘bout. King o’, really, th’ first human city to matter. ‘Ya watched th’ beginnin’ o’ religion, o’ writin’, the wheel ‘fer fuck’s sake. All the fundamental technologies ‘fer civilization. An’ now…”

Yekiidaa nodded along. “You and you alone can claim to be, truly, the Emperor of Mankind. You’ve been with the human race from the very beginnings. You helped birth civilization. Now, you have mighty allies and a new stage to set. Who else has been so blessed?”

“I wonder if I am doomed to see the human river run its course to completion…”

“Not if I have anythin’ ‘ta say ‘bout it. An’ judgin’ by th’ way you’ve packed it on these last few years, you sure as fuck ain’t gonna go out wit’ a whimper, neither.”

Gilgamesh chuffed quietly at that. “Funny, how much comes down to that.”

“We’re proper living things,” Alex commented. “Deathworlders. All our more abstract strengths derive from our baser natures. Denying what we are or what we can do would make us no different than the digital malware we hope to destroy.”

Gilgamesh shot his son a fond look, and nodded. “Youthful and wise! You make me proud.”

Alex simply tipped his head, then sighed and picked up his lyre. “Let’s banish this silence.”

Gilgamesh nodded and took up his lute. The two gaoians retreated a few steps as they tuned the instruments to each other.

“The hymn to An and Inanna?” Alex asked.

“Yes.”

So it was. Alex struck the first chord, Gilgamesh took it up and flourished it, laid out the tune…then sung. He lifted his voice, projected it as heartily as he could from his belly. Closed his eyes and gave himself to this prayer, the old words he’d known since boyhood and never forgotten.

The dead land swallowed them.

If An and his daughter were still there to hear his hymn, they gave no sign. Even so, Gilgamesh gave praise and thanks in full, didn’t allow himself to falter. He sang for the ancient gods of his city one last time, until the hymn was done and his throat ached from it.

With no hills or walls to echo from, he never heard the last notes come back to him.

…Fitting, really. One last prayer, to send off the spirits of Earth. Whatever came next would be without her love. They were on their own, now.

Daar’s final offering to the Earth was something rather different: he returned a piece of her.

“This was one’a the first gifts a human ever gave me,” he said, as he laid it carefully on the ground. “‘Fore I ever came here an’ saw this world’s beauty with my own eyes, he gave me this book, ‘cuz I couldn’t believe it when he said how much an’ how rich the Earth’s life is.”

He placed his paw in the dust and bowed his head. Gilgamesh leaned slightly closer to see the cover: It was black, with the greyscale image of a leopard’s head and the title “Sacred Nature.”

“…You’ll be missed,” Daar told the planet, quietly. “There’s more’n just your own children are mournin’ your passing. I jus’….I wanted ‘ta thank you. ‘Fer the lives o’ my people, ‘fer the lives o’ all the others. Y’did good. An’ you will never be forgotten.”

Pain shot into Gilgamesh’ face and screwed it up tight. He grit his teeth, angled his head back, fought to contain it even while the tears tore themselves out and ran down into his beard. Slowly, he lowered himself to his knees and pressed his palm to the ground, bowing his head in thanks also. Following his example, everyone present did the same, until the whole party had taken a knee.

The breeze blew, and at last Gilgamesh felt something other than emptiness around them. Instead, he felt a warmth which broke down his last barriers and allowed him to weep, so openly and without shame that the tears dripped from his nose and watered the desert. He was not the only one.

Eventually, he found the courage to rise again. He did so, and the dust on his hands smeared grittily across his cheeks as he wiped them dry. He laid his hand in the fur of Daar’s shoulder, and patted him thank-you.

“It is time,” he said.

“…Yeah.” The Great Father seemed to agree right in his soul. He rose and plodded back toward the jump array like Behemoth of latter-day legend. Somehow, his very gait seemed suffused with mourning.

Gilgamesh went too. Stood on the steel platform and took his last look at the land of his birth as beneath him came the thrum and whine of the array charging up. For the very last time, the hot breeze of home blew across him.

It felt like a kiss on the cheek.

Thump.

Date Point: T minus 20 hours to zero hour
Trinity Evangelical Church, New Dodge, Franklin, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Austin Beaufort

They were already playing by the time Austin’s family got to church. Just the opening song, but he could feel the energy of the day already. It was…pretty much exactly what he’d have guessed it would be.

♪“Beyond the door, there’s peace I’m sure…’cuz I know there’ll be no more tears in heaven…”♪

Lord. Kelly was singing her heart out, today. He shuffled the kids inside, and they found space to sit, among the ram-packed pews.

Church was a sort of vibe for him. Most days he didn’t really pay any attention to much of anything besides the sermon, instead he let the music and praise wash over and through him.

Today though, he really just couldn’t get into it. Lots of distracting thoughts. Gaze kept darting all over the room. Some familiar faces: the Buehler brothers were there, because they were still trying to find what they believed. Some Sundays they visited, most not. Today, he guessed, they were here because this was where the community was. Or at least, the people they spent the most time around. They were very much a rural congregation from all over the countryside, on a planet more or less defined by, at most, small-city living.

They were visiting lots of different churches and ways of worship. Lost ex-mormons in a sea of christians and other, much more different traditions. How else could they be? Their adoptive father was more or less an actual hunter-demigod of nature and fully embraced his tribal roots—cavemonkey and indian, with a smattering of Christian Appreciator and General Spiritual Attunement thrown in for good measure. Their sister (his wife) was pretty stridently atheist, and his other wife was…something like a buddhist, but not exactly? He didn’t know.

And the less said about their basketcase of a mother and father, the better. Austin was glad to see the two questing goons here today, though. Today of all days.

The sermon began with a reading from the book of Job. A litany of disasters, up to and including the fire of God from the heavens, culminating in the deaths of his sons, daughters and brother. The words had power, today.

“At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.’ In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.”

Pastor Roberts paused a moment after completing the reading, then took off his glasses and looked out at them. “Job is a difficult story, isn’t it? At a surface level, it reads…a bit like a pulp fiction, you know? Here we have God and his angels, talking shop in the Garden. Probably it’s heaven. Then suddenly the Satan enters into a wager with God—as one does—about how pious Job is! ‘Surely he only praises you, Lord, because of his good fortune! Take that fortune away and we’ll see his real mettle.’”

“Unfortunately for Job, God inexplicably agrees to this wager. He tells the Satan, ‘go ahead!’ There are a lot of people out there who find that really hard to swallow. It feels like a betrayal, doesn’t it? From Job’s perspective, he’s done nothing wrong, but suddenly every catastrophe imaginable lands on him, how is that fair? But the author doesn’t have time, or likely space in his scrolls, so he doesn’t dwell on any of this. And so, in the grand biblical tradition of excellent prose while saving papyrus, Job receives seven abjectly terrible disasters in about as many lines of verse, covering basically everything that could go wrong for a person in ancient Jewish life—including boils later on, because why not? The chapter ends with his wife asking rhetorically, ‘why don’t you just kill yourself?’”

He took a second to let them consider this, before continuing. “The ancient peoples believed that fortune was tied to piety. So someone who suffered severe misfortune must have been a huge sinner. And so Job’s friends argue with him about it. ‘Come on bro, what did you do? You musta done something!’ and they go so far as to start speculating about it, too. Man! With friends like that, who needs enemies?”

The rhetorical question got a small chuckle.

“Now, this bit of the text is poor Job on an absolute roller-coaster of emotion, dealing with his so-called friends and their deep incredulity. He swings from praising God to almost cursing Him, until finally, at his wit’s end, he accuses the Lord of being unfair and unjust.”

“This is of course the moment God appears. He proceeds to take Job on a cosmic tour of all His wonders, and challenges Job: could you grasp this infinity? Would you know the depth and breadth of my Creation? Could you see the wisdom in its tiniest part, and how it relates to the whole? He says, basically, ‘your ways are not My ways,’ and that His ways are beyond Job’s ability to grasp at any level. Then He shows off Behemoth and Leviathan, two immense powerful creatures He’s quite proud of. What is His message, here?”

“And then Job repents, and God admonishes the friends—and no more than that, the lucky scoundrels—and praises Job for being right. What? Then the story ends, firstly, with no explanation by God for any of it, and secondly with Job receiving double of everything he lost, in the fullness of time. Except…it wasn’t a reward for his suffering, nor was his suffering any kind of punishment. God, in His wisdom, decided Job deserved a gift, and that’s all there is to it. And let’s not forget all the people who died in all this tragedy, Job’s sons and daughters and brother and servants. So what gives?”

He breathed out and shrugged. “It’s a conversation that’s been going on for thousands of years. My opinion is that it’s what Buddhists call a koan, a story that’s not there to lead you by the hand toward an answer, but instead give you something to chew over and think about and explore. But one of my takeaways from it is that the Lord told Job he was right to have felt these things. It’s okay to not be okay. And right now, we all have good reason.

“Today…in about twenty hours, the Earth will be gone. That’s a loss to unite us all. It would be a lie to pretend it doesn’t hurt, it would be a lie to come here and sing happy songs of praise and pretend like we’re completely okay with it. If we’re to speak the truth to God, that includes being honest about our pain.”

He let that sink in for a moment, then added: “But the story ends with Job living a long, full and happy life, after the pain had passed. The story ends with hope. John Lennon once said, ‘Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.’ And on those words, let’s give prayer through song…”

Music again. Subdued, quiet. A gentle plucking over an even gentler drum beat that was little more than a tap-tap-tap-tick, barely audible. But Austin knew it well.

♪”When the day is long, and the night/the night is yours alone. And you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life…hang on, don’t let yourself go…”♪

He sang along. So did most everybody else, and looking around him Austin could see it. See how there was still this community, and his family, and something to build and work for.

And it did, somehow, help him feel better.

Date Point: 18 hours to Zero Hour
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Regaari

There had been a time when Regaari had been so impressed by human physical might. When Xiù had seemed like an unstoppable force of nature, capable of tearing through the unbreakable and vanquishing the most terrible things in the galaxy, where he himself would only have…

Well. Got his hand bitten off.

But of course, time had shown them all the reality. Fear, exaggeration, and their own cultural suppression had transformed the humans into towering monsters beyond the truth, and the gao into meek little canids, largely ignorant of their own genuine nature.

In truth, both were far mightier peoples than any had dared to believe. Thus began the ascendency of the Deathworlders. Regaari himself had been transformed, into something so very different from the slow, self-doubting, weak creature he’d been. Nowadays he was death and strength incarnate, when he needed to be.

But these last few weeks…he’d come to feel once again like there was a might in humans that he didn’t have, yet. Though he was starting to feel like it was within reach, now that he’d seen the example.

It was the same thing that made Daar so powerful, he thought. After the war, after the biodrones and the massacre of the Females, with the gao teetering on the edge of collapse, Daar had found some kind of energy to convince himself that it was worth fighting for tomorrow…and then dragged the gao along with him out of sheer force of personality, will and dominance.

But the humans didn’t have a Daar.

The humans didn’t need a Daar.

Sure, they had an Emperor of Mankind. In the new world they lived in, Gilgamesh was ultimately sovereign over every human anywhere, and anyone else who lived in his realm. Same for the other Counsels, in this new tetrarchy of the United Peoples.

Daar, at the top, was sovereign over them all. They loved him too.

And yet! Even then, Daar wasn’t their Great Father, not really. Gilgamesh wasn’t their Great Father! He didn’t command them in their souls the same way, he wasn’t the beacon that kept them pointed at the future. Instead, they all seemed to have that beacon in themselves.

Even if they each explored and found it in their own way.

Around Folctha, it was everywhere. The city’s background today was a blend of church bells tolling, the Adhan being sung at the North End mosque, and the temple bell chiming at the Starmind monastery. But letting his nose guide him around the city revealed so much more detail.

As he wandered through the park he found figures in white robes by the standing stone, chanting Awen and doing…something involving wands. There were, in their various little territories and sacred spaces, all sorts of humans doing all sorts of things, and lots more doing nothing more active than sitting and thinking. Talking. Or just huddled up somewhere, neither wanting to be alone nor wanting to talk to anyone.

Up on New Worlds Plaza, the footage from telescopes and satellites around Earth was playing constantly, while people filed past to light candles before finding somewhere to sit and watch. Taking their last look.

“Wuff.”

Regaari jolted out of his thoughts as something insistent, wet and friendly nudged him in the elbow. Doofus nudged him again, whined plaintively then licked his chops and waited.

“…Hey, you.”

Doofus yawned. There was a squeak in it.

“Yes, I suppose nobody is much fun today, are we?”

The dog tilted its head at him.

“Did you come looking for me?”

One, two, three back-and-forth dancing hops on his front paws—well, dance was far too dainty a word for a creature as big as Doofus—and then he was still. Mostly. Wag, wag. Regaari was fairly sure the animal couldn’t actually understand him…but every dog he’d ever met left just enough room for doubt. Especially Cimbrean mastiffs.

What wasn’t in doubt was that they were easily smart enough to be given a command like ‘go find Regaari’ and follow it. Which meant Gyotin wanted to speak with him, probably.

Well, why not. He could use a good run. Regaari sank to fourpaw and chased after Doofus. He could keep pace with the big dog these days, but that he suspected was at least partly due to a sense of fair play on Doofus’s part; Cimbrean mastiffs were known for their incredible brute-force speed and their happiness to use it.

He was in no mood to really play though, to Doofus’ disappointment.

The monastery’s gates were always open of course: all were welcome at all times. But today especially there were people entering and exiting in a steady, sparse trickle. From inside he could hear chimes and mantras, and smell…

Keeda. He could smell so much. That was the thing about the monastery, it was always a quiet place to the ears and eyes, but it practically hummed as far as the nose was concerned. The everpresent aromas of beeswax wood polish and the hives that generated it, of incense, of the flower garden, the fish ponds, the tea bushes, of gao and human…and dog of course. And right now, of emotion.

Gyotin at least was easy to find. He was in the central courtyard, surrounded by cubs and children, talking and giving his thoughts. He looked up and acknowledged Regaari with a small ear-flick, then went back to discussion with the listening little ones.

Regaari found a stone bench, sat, and waited for him.

He wasn’t left waiting long. Gyotin was an old hand at sharing his thoughts quickly enough and entertainingly enough for young minds, and once the parents and Mothers had ushered their charges away, he stretched out his forepaws, shimmied his back, yawned, and padded over on four-paw to join Regaari.

“Good to see you.”

“You too,” Regaari tilted his head. “You look…exhausted.”

“I really am.” Gyotin sighed and flopped on the bench.

“You should get some sleep.”

“Mm. But first, I did want to talk with you.”

“What about?”

“Just…a question. You’ve been at this for nearly thirty years, Regaari. If it weren’t for the crue, you’d be quite the venerable old father at this point.”

“Technically I still am,” Regaari chittered softly. “Though perhaps lacking the gravitas a little white fur around the muzzle would lend me, yijao?”

“And there, I find, is the root of what I’ve been thinking on lately. Immortality, more-or-less. These drugs change things so completely that it’s all too easy to forget that neither of us are young any longer. Even though I personally feel it.” he chittered again. “Part of me feels like quite the fraud, sitting there handing out wisdom to the cubs like a blind old grandfather. But then I remember that, if not for the medicines, that is exactly what I would be.”

“I suppose…?”

“And then I wonder to myself…is this what I am going to do forever? Much as I love it, the life in front of me now is…indefinite. Unless something kills me, I will live for as long as I want. Will I be Champion of Starmind forever? Will you be a Father of Whitecrest forever?”

“I suppose we will need to cultivate a new sense of the inevitable, then.” Regaari wasn’t necessarily a deeply philosophical man. Every problem had at least some mitigation. “If, as you’ve said in the past, our limited time gives us a sense of value and urgency, then all that changes is we now choose what limited means.”

“Will we, though?”

“We’ve overcome other technologies and their dangers in the past. I do not see how this will be any different. It isn’t as if we have a choice in that.”

“Perhaps…” Gyotin mused, then yawned. “I suppose death has been on my mind, these last few days. The death of a world has made me focus on it, and in doing so I have started to really wonder about my own, well, lack of it.”

“So you told Doofus to look out for me?” Regaari tilted his head, confused.

“Yes! Because he would have wrestled you if you’d resisted!” Gyotin chittered, then duck-shrugged. “Besides. We haven’t really spoken as much as I would like, lately. I thought you’d be worth sounding out on this. And you certainly haven’t disappointed. Pragmatic as always.”

Regaari chittered faintly. “Well…I haven’t really had the time to chew on such thoughts for myself,” he admitted. “None of us really do. If we’re not on-mission we’re training, and if I’m not doing either I have Clan responsibilities to attend to. Have you spoken to Righteous?”

“I have, but I’m afraid he’s not much interested in a furry buddhist’s perspective.”

“Oh, the furry part won’t be an obstacle.”

“Is that so? My recollection is that he is a bit of a human supremacist.”

“Oh he still is, but I think he’s happy to extend that to us other deathworlders lately.” Regaari flicked an ear as he mused on the surprisingly complex beast that was the Firth. Which probably shouldn’t be surprising; he was the oldest man on the team, despite his youthful appearance. Older than either Regaari or Daar too. He’d lived several lives worth of intense careers in his time, and experienced a lot of major social change.

There was an awful lot of perspective locked away in that too-brutal skull of his.

“Perhaps. He seems like one who’ll just…do what he does, in perpetuity.”

“Maybe he is. Maybe I am too, and that’s why I haven’t given this all much thought.” Regaari tilted his head at his friend. “Are you saying you don’t think you can? Aren’t you happy where you are?”

“To be one thing for a lifetime was the way of things. To be the same thing for many lifetimes? To persist in such a way? I…” Gyotin shook-and-shrugged all at once. “I’m having trouble reconciling it with the Buddha’s teachings. In fact, I think it may go against them.”

“How so?”

“Right Effort. The allure of attachment leads to inaction and stagnation. It doesn’t do to cling to something simply because it is familiar and I’m good at it. Passing on the teachings, helping people, the duties I have taken for myself…they should be something I am actively engaged in and still exploring, not a habit I have fallen into and grown too numb, or too scared, to let go of. One must always be making an effort, one must always be mindful and concentrating on the fact that life is not static. I worry that the advent of medical immortality will make it too easy to forget that.”

He gave Regaari a serious look. “You and Firth especially will need to mindful of that problem, I suggest. Previously, life would have forced you to move on whether you were ready or not. Now, it may become easy for you to sit until you forget how to move. You are not components in a machine, built to serve your task until it wears you out and breaks you; you are spirits on a journey.”

Regaari duck-nodded. “That seems reasonable to me. So who is to say any of that has changed? I think I will do what I do so long as it is of benefit, or so long as it does not bore me. I suspect many will eventually find boredom, decide to move on, and perhaps the next thing they do won’t require advanced regenerative medicine.”

“Boredom, in my experience, is the opposite of a motivator…”

“Correct. Escaping boredom is what matters.”

“Hm.” Gyotin flicked his ear in thought, then shuddered as a new yawn overtook him. Regaari laid a warm paw on his friend’s shoulder.

“You really should sleep.”

“…Yes.” Gyotin chittered and shook his head at himself. “I think I’d stay awake forever and talk to everybody, if I could.”

“You should let go of your attachment to helping people.”

“Hah!” Gyotin barked out a chitter so loud it made Doofus look up and tilt his head while thumping his tail uncertainly on the gravel. “That’s…never mind. I will sleep. Thank you, Regaari. Having somebody to talk to about this has cleared my mind somewhat.”

Regaari always felt a bit nonplussed by their encounters. They were so different and interested in such fundamentally different things, it was difficult to see how exactly Regaari was of any help at all. But even if it was just a ‘rubber duck’ sort of thing, Gyotin clearly felt he did help, and…well, Regaari liked him, differences be damned. So he ducked his head in a nod and rose. “We have plenty of time to think,” he pointed out.

“…That we do, I suppose.” Gyotin duck-nodded, yawned, thanked him with a hug, and turned to head back toward his nest-bed.

Doofus followed Regaari to the exit, and Regaari…

Regaari went back to wandering among the humans, feeling a bit like a ghost, and a lot like the amount of stuff he had to think about had just doubled. But he’d been right, he comforted himself: they had plenty of time to think. Or they would, after TILE FLIP.

And on that thought, he shook his head clear, and got back to his preparations.

More than one end was coming soon.

__

Date Point: 12 hours to Zero hour
Chiune Station, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Kevin Jenkins

A knock on the door jolted Kevin out of his thoughts, and refocused them when it turned out to be Moses. The old man waggled a bottle at him.

“How are we doing?” he asked.

“…Good,” Kevin managed, welcoming him in with a gesture. “Everyone’s safe. All operations on Earth closed down, everything we budgeted and scheduled to rescue is rescued—”

“Not what I meant.”

Kevin paused, then shrugged and almost managed to chuckle. “…how long have you got?”

Moses grunted understandingly and sat down. Two glasses rattled as he set them down on Kevin’s desk, then sloshed as he filled them. Once done, he picked up one, used it to push the other into Kevin’s hand, and raised it.

“L’Chaim!”

“To life,” Kevin agreed, and drank. Good whiskey. “…I thought you didn’t drink?”

“There’s…eghm!” Moses cleared his throat to clear the booze burn. “…a time and a place for all things, including abstinence.”

“Hmm.” Kevin nodded and sipped the drink again. Damn good whiskey.

“…So how are we doing?” Moses asked again, after giving him a gentle moment of silence.

“Good as anyone else, I reckon.” Kevin shrugged and sat back. “I dunno. You?”

“Can’t sit still.” Moses shook his head. “The hidden downside of regaining my youthful strength: I get fidgety. Especially right now.”

“Know what ‘ya mean.” Kevin chuckled. “Ain’t too long ‘til my seventieth birthday now, and yet…shit, I look almost like the young fool who ran his mouth to an alien all those years ago.”

“Heh.”

“…Y’know, I wonder where the world would be if I hadn’t?”

Moses arched an eyebrow. “Hadn’t run your mouth?”

“Yeah.”

Moses swirled his whiskey thoughtfully. “Hard to say. I’m sure you had some influence. The infamous first human who convinced the entire galaxy we were all delusional madmen…” He gave Kevin a look that was half-amused, half-accusatory.

“We nuked the fuck out of ourselves two years ago. You gonna tell me I was wrong?”

Moses shrugged.

“…Well, you should,” Kevin said. He stretched until his spine popped, then sighed. “I was an angry young dumbfuck spoutin’ off about shit I hadn’t finished thinking through.”

“Well, lucky for us, your foolishness meant the aliens put a great big forcefield around us and the Hunters never got to Earth directly,” Moses pointed out.

“What, you’re saying it might be we’re only alive ‘cuz of me and my big mouth?” Kevin shook his head. “I don’t believe that. Not for a second.”

Moses shrugged. “The Lord works in mysterious ways, as they say.”

Kevin scoffed, then realized he had and reined it in; he shot Moses an apologetic look and finished his glass. Moses just shrugged it off, even-temperedly.

“Your opinions haven’t changed that much, then.”

“Yeah, I’m stuck in my ways I guess.” Kevin shrugged. “…y’know what gives me hope, though? People.”

“The same people who nuked ourselves.”

“The same people who pulled together ever since. I mean, sure, it’s not all been puppies and rainbows, but look at what we’ve managed! Less than half the human race survived the war, less than a quarter of the survivors are out of stasis storage right now, and yet we still achieved this thing, man. The only people left on Earth now are the ones who want to be there. And the only things we left behind are what we could never save.”

“Most of which is in warehouses.”

“Yeah, and it’ll be the work of centuries to sort it all. My point remains. We saved it.”

“Thanks to the gao.”

“Daar gave us means to build the warehouses and space to put the people, sure. But why? ‘Cuz humans persuaded him to.” Kevin shook his head. “This ain’t some ‘benevolent alien overlord decided to keep us as his pets’ situation. The gao fell in love with us, they think we deserve what they’re givin’ us. That counts as saving ourselves, I think.”

“Hmm.” Moses frowned thoughtfully, then shrugged and refilled their glasses. “Your turn to toast.”

“…Uh…”

Moses waited a few seconds, then raised an eyebrow. “…After all that, you can’t think of a toast?”

“They all sound kinda dumb in my head.” Kevin admitted. “I guess…how about, ’to tomorrow.’”

Moses bobbled his head, then nodded. “To tomorrow.”

They drank. Moses stoppered the bottle, gathered the glasses and rose to his feet. “You should head into town,” he suggested. “Find some people to be with. It’s not good for you to lurk alone in your office.”

“You think so?”

“You said it yourself, people give you hope. So…go surround yourself with people. It’s what I’m going to do.”

“…Alright.” Kevin nodded, and stood to grab his jacket. “…hey, uh, Moses?”

“Yes?”

“…Thanks.”

Moses Byron just dipped his head once in a slight nod, then was gone. Kevin took a deep breath, shrugged his jacket on, and took one last glance at the monitor on his desk. The Earth was still spinning there, watched by camera satellites.

Rather than turn it off, he left it spinning, and headed down to the garage to find one of the company’s private drone cars. Told it to drop him off in town, then settled on the back seat and rested his head. For the first time in far too long it felt…empty. Quiet of his own thoughts.

Not surprising, therefore, that he slept all the way to town. A little rest before joining the crowd of people in New Worlds Plaza and joining the long wait. It was important to witness this. And Moses was right, it was important not to witness it alone.

So he joined them. Found his place in the mass of bodies, joined the line, lit a candle, thought and felt…

And knew he was where he needed to be.

Date Point: 4 hours 15 minutes to zero hour
UPSS Meskwaki, outer Sol system

Lieutenant Sinikka Anderson

“Contact in T minus two minutes.”

There was one last hope for the Earth, though…not really. The Guvnurag scientists who’d invented the system shield technology had said that the field did have weaknesses and limits, and that a collimated exploding star would almost certainly defeat the Sol Containment Barrier…

‘Almost certainly’ was not enough to gamble billions of lives on, so the evacuation had gone ahead as though the barrier would definitely fail. But there was just enough doubt there for the navy to send one patrol boat to keep an eye on the barrier. As a superluminal phenomenon, it’d pop like a bubble the instant it failed…or maybe, just maybe, it would not.

“Contact in T minus sixty seconds.”

Anderson personally knew a hedge when she saw one. The engineers knew what they were about, if it said it’d fail, then it’d fail. Miracle notwithstanding.

She wasn’t sure she believed in miracles. Or at least…not that kind of miracle.

“T minus thirty seconds.”

Even so…she flexed her knuckles nervously, and prayed. Please, Lord…if now was ever the time…

“Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five seconds…four…three…two…one…”

The barrier was incomprehensibly huge, and all but invisible. It absorbed less than ten percent of all the radiation that passed through it, and reflected nothing, making it basically impossible to see with the naked eye, usually.

Now, for a brief moment, Anderson got to understand the sheer mind-bending scale of a sphere larger than Neptune’s orbit. For a second or two, the Meskwaki was not hanging in the featureless void of deep planetary space, but was instead above an endless, perfectly flat plane of seething white and crackling lightning that seemed to stretch away to an infinite horizon.

Not flat. Not infinite. Just larger than the human eye could process. And so bright, even through cockpit glass that could let them stare down onto the surface of the sun if they wanted, that she had to squint and grit her teeth.

Then it was gone.

“…Sensors?”

“No signature.”

“Launch probe.”

It flashed away. Twenty seconds later, it continued to vanish off into the far distance rather than crunching into an invisible barrier of solid force.

Anderson sighed, and grabbed the microphone to make her report back to the admiral.

The Containment Field was gone. And with it, so went Earth’s last hope.

Date point: 4 hours to zero hour
New Alexandria, planet Akyawentuo
Chief Sergeant Christian (Righteous) Firth

He…didn’t really know what to do. These were the Last Hours. Nobody knew what to do.

In the end, everyone gathered, and watched. In their own ways.

What would he do? Hug it out with family? Yes, of course. But he had a big circle of people he cared about, so it couldn’t be just them. Couch night? No. Firstly: that was special, just for his brothers in arms, and this was bigger than that.

One of Folctha’s public gatherings? Well…maybe. But his men were under lockdown, and for good reason. Breaching lockdown for something this important would normally be something he’d at least entertain, but not when they were the ones about to depart on-mission.

He’d hemmed and hawed about it all week. Until, at the end, he’d run Father Michael’s invitation by Costello, and then almost nervously ran it by the rest of the team, since he didn’t usually talk about his faith with the men, knowin’ how diverse the group was…

But Father Michael had tagged along with him, and he had exactly the right touch for these kinds of things. He was the new unit chaplain, after years of back and forth about the whole thing. He and a Chaplain-Brother from Clan Starmind had become conspirators in the salvation of souls, even if their faiths could not possibly be any different.

“Shit, padre…” Hunter stated awkwardly. “I’m…uh, not exactly the type of person the church wants hangin’ around. No disrespect.”

He glanced at Julian, who was gormlessly standing there, literal tons of big and pretty in his HEAT-branded silkies and looking suddenly awkward. Nobody else had wives plural, and, well…

“Nonsense,” Father had responded, and the gaoians listened rapturously. His rank was Father, after all. “The Church isn’t for the sinless. It is a spiritual hospital for sinners. And we are all sinners, gravely and infinitely so. All are welcome.”

Hunter crossed his arms, skeptically. He was pretty out and proud these days, even if he and Wilde still clubbed with and dated women pretty frequently. “I mean, I appreciate that, but…”

He didn’t say the rest. Everyone understood.

“Well, I can’t answer for all christians, or all who profess christianity. I can only represent myself and my Church. And as far as we are concerned, all are welcome to the Wedding Feast. That’s an image we christians often use for salvation, by the way. But at a wedding feast, there are rules of behavior. You’re not allowed to shit on the wedding cake or piss in the punch bowl, no matter how much you want to…”

Some rough chuckles, there.

“And so, in the beatific presence of the Infinite Good, nothing less than absolutely perfect holiness will do. And we are none of us any of that, so this life is a journey to teach us these things. A preparation for the Wedding Feast, if you will. And on that note, since we are all equally wretched before God Almighty…yes. You are welcome, and I very much want you and your friends there. If anyone gives you any stank-eye, I will deal with them personally.”

Father Michael was exactly the right kind of aggressive to spiritually hang with these men, too.

As was Father Rooki. “All are welcome,” he repeated. “Father will of course offer Mass during impact, but he will host an inter-denominational Vigil beforehand, and of course our little monastery is just next door, where we will conduct a Devotion. Yan Given-Man, Vemik as Chief of the Lodge, and the Singers too are preparing a Song of Songs—I believe Senior Technician Tisdale is involved with that effort. All are welcome in any of these places, believer or not. We ask only that you do not profane the sacred wherever you visit.”

“And if you do, I will personally wrestle you until I’ve ground every fuckin’ bone in ‘yer bodies to powder,” Firth threatened half-seriously. The men chuckled darkly; he knew they’d behave. “An’ obviously, attendance is not mandatory. Seriously. It ain’t. I get it, yijao? But…uh…”

Shit. Deep breath or two.

“Well…whatever you wanna do, just please, be with someone you care about, okay? We’ll have a last feast, and then lockdown proper begins. We’ll all be force-loading in our MASS and doin’ the last leg o’ trainin’ for the next week ‘fore they bundle us up in stasis. ‘Yer gonna go in warmed up, amped up, carbed up, as ready to go as y’all can possibly be. It’s gonna be so much fuckin’ fun I can hardly stand it.”

That was a lie, of course. All that had been his life for years, now. He was addicted to it. They all were, but he was far and away the most extreme example and was without ego good enough to be essentially his own damn team within HEAT. Costello used him as his Blitzkreig sledge hammer. Felt damn good.

It did make not training almost painfully difficult, though. Like an addict suddenly off the good shit. But sometimes, it was the right thing to do. If it were family things? No problem. Friend things, or regular team-fun things? Easy.

The end of the world?

He never wanted to be training more in his life. He wanted to lift and punch and tumble and run and fight and go home and fuck his wife absolutely fuckin’ stupid and go out and dance and fuck everyone even stupider and rage and scream and do anything but sit and watch it happen!

And that was proof positive that it was the most important thing to do.

He did have some stuff to keep him moving and busy, though. The last-out teams still on Earth were being folded into Spaceborne Operations, on the grounds that they may as well consolidate all those special forces and their expertise. Sooner or later they’d be getting a flag officer in charge of the whole thing, but for now…

Well, may as well go get them.

The end of the world shouldn’t be something to feel alone.

Date Point: 2 hours 30 minutes to zero hour
Broadcasting House, Marylebone, London, UK, Earth

Luisa Hopkins

History was…important. Luisa hadn’t really felt it, up until this whole business with the end of the world began. Up until then, she’d just been a geek who enjoyed radio enough to become an engineer and get a job at the BBC.

Now, she was in the unique position of bringing more than a hundred years of history to a close. The World Service had been ongoing, in one form or another, since 1932. It was such a fixture that Britain’s nuclear submarines had apparently used its dependable presence as one of the signs that the UK still existed, whenever they needed to check.

And over these last four years, at the height of the last world war, she had been the beacon that millions turned to for information and guidance. It had therefore very quickly become a point of pride among the service’s engineers and producers alike that the BBC would continue to broadcast to the very last.

Eighteen hours ago, the last programme schedule had been entered. They had tested and tested and tested it, debugged the programs that would run the station to the end until they were certain the code was perfectly rock-solid. There would be no do-overs or manual intervention, once Luisa left.

The alarm on her watch peeped, just at the same time as everyone else’s did.

The director, Alan Cole, took a deep breath and straightened his tie. “Alright…run it.”

Luisa nodded. Tap, tap…tap. And that was that. The last broadcast was on air. It had, she gathered, been very, very carefully timed.

She rose from her chair. By now, she knew, the blast from Alpha Centauri was already in the solar system. It was weird to think that Uranus, Neptune and the sol containment barrier that had orbited between their orbits were already gone. Saturn too, maybe. If it was in the right place in its orbit, then those beautiful rings and swirling clouds had already been smashed apart…

“Let’s get out of here,” she pleaded, as that thought struck home.

Alan nodded fervently. “Right you are.”

The five of them trotted down the stairs and out into the space in front of new Broadcasting House, where the array was waiting with them, along with a team of soldiers. They were beckoned onto the platform, and Luisa barely had a chance to look up and realize that this was it, this was the last she’d ever see of England and the Earth—

Thump

—and it was taken from her.

“Off the platform, go,” one of the soldiers told her. She blinked at him, stunned. “We’ve got teams coming from all over the world, move.” he repeated, finally goading her feet into motion. She stumbled off the platform and found a bench and sat and…

And realized what she’d just done. What had just happened. What was happening.

The world was really ending. And she’d just pushed the button to acknowledge that fact.

Ahead of her, the array thumped again, and again, and each one brought more shellshocked people, all feeling the same thing she did. It sounded like a heartbeat, almost.

She stayed and listened until the very last one.

Date Point: T minus 2 hours 12 minutes to zero hour
Columbus Circle jump array, New York City, USA, Earth

Sergeant First Class Eugene Whitner, 75th Ranger Regiment

“Hey, Whitner.”

Gene half turned, then nodded and focused, realizing he’d been lost in thought. “LT.”

Lieutenant Trujillo tipped his helmet toward the jump array. “Time to go.”

Gene paused, then looked around. “Already? Fuck.”

“Yeah.” Trujillo sighed hugely and looked up at the buildings around them, and the trees on the other side of the road. “…Feels wrong, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. I almost…fuck. I don’t wanna go.” Gene choked up on the last word, and cleared his throat to fix it. “I want this all to be a bad dream, you know? I wanna wake up, and these last four years were just…”

Trujillo said nothing, and let the silence last for a second, before finally breaking it. “C’mon. Jump’s waiting.”

They were the last out. The very last out. The array was being left behind in automatic mode, so if somebody did emerge from the empty urban jungle around and decide they want to leave at the last second after all, all they’d have to do would be stand on the platform and activate the wireless trigger…

For the team, there was only one final duty before hitting the button themselves and going, and that was a radio broadcast. Trujillo nodded to Corporal Dixon as the platform clonked underfoot.

“Read it.”

Dixon nodded, cleared his throat, then lifted the mic to his mouth and hit the button. He paused, just a second, then read from his script in a clear, miraculously steady voice.

“Attention all receivers, attention all receivers, this is your final call for evacuation. If you are receiving this message and do not wish to be left behind, please respond immediately. There will not be another opportunity to evacuate. I say again, this is the final call for evacuation. If you are receiving this message and do not wish to be left behind, please respond immediately. There will not be another opportunity to evacuate.”

They waited. The silence remained, unbroken by any desperate voice calling on the radio, or from the rooftops. No flares shot up from anywhere nearby. There weren’t even any gunshots. Still, they counted out ten minutes in perfect, unspeaking silence until finally the LT’s timer went off. The Earth had exactly two hours to live.

“Jump us,” Trujillo ordered, softly. Dixon heaved a sigh, grabbed the trigger, and—

Thump.

And that was it. Job done. They got their asses off the platform, knowing it needed to be clear for the remaining last-out teams to come through, but Gene didn’t actually know what they were supposed to do after that, beyond that they’d be folded into the SOR in due course…

Which, now he had a moment to look around, might explain the absolute fuckin’ hill giant waiting patiently for them. He gave them a second to disembark, then announced himself.

“Lieutenant Trujillo? Chief Sergeant Firth, sir. Go by Righteous to anyone not friends, family, or in the unit. Welcome to Cimbrean.”

Trujillo shook the big man’s hand. Or more aptly, was shook by the man’s ridiculous slab of a meathook. “Thank you. I’d say it’s good to be here, but under the circumstances…”

“Yeah, I hear that. Anyway. These here are compliments o’ Colonel Costello—” he handed over some papers “—an’ ‘fer the moment, we’re gonna put all the inprocessin’ on hold. We’re jus’ gonna do th’ important bits. In order: rooms and shower, then a quick overview of re-accession paperwork, an’ if ‘yer stayin’ on—”

“We are.”

“And you’ve gone over the oath and all that?”

That was directed at everyone.

There were nods. They’d had plenty of time to read and familiarize themselves with the changes over the last few weeks, and at first Whitmer had felt…pretty uncomfortable about the idea of swearing an oath to an emperor. Swearing an oath to protect and preserve the United Peoples, though? Might be a different matter.

The text of the actual oath itself had made things easier. Humans swore loyalty to the office of the First Counsel, but to the person of their king and emperors. Plural. Which was…weird? But really, well…it was much the same. Promise to obey lawful orders. The lawful bit was important. By that oath, the big emperorbear in the sky wasn’t claiming absolute authority over human beings. Only lawful authority.

That was good enough for Gene, though he’d thought good and hard before reaching that conclusion. His head joined the collection of nods.

“Right. So…sir, I don’t mean ‘ta rush y’all ‘cuz you deserve all the time to recover, but we’ve got a ticking clock if we’re gonna keep galactic law happy.”

“Right. Gotta preserve those service points.” Trujillo joked, half-heartedly.

“Don’t knock it! You’ve got some chest candy ain’t nobody ever gonna get again. Anyhoo.” With that, the big man thumped away and bid them follow in his wake.

Things were incongruously fast after that. Because firstly, he decided to mark the occasion of the very last troops joining his Grand Army, by showing up personally.

And, well…Jesus fuck. Okay. Lots of ink had been spilled about how overwhelming a presence he was, and Eugene was pretty cool under that sort of pressure, but goddamn none of it did the Great Father any justice. He was fuckin’ awesome, in the biblical sense of the word and in every single detail. Even his voice was some kind of epic. In the face of all that, Eugene’s tiny little place in the pecking order of things…fuckin’ established.

Daar wasn’t there to show off, though. He was there to preside, and he had a whole lot of presiding to do, so it was pretty much a case of show up, loom menacingly, as if he had any choice being that fuckin’ everything, nod approvingly, say a few nice words…vanish.

“Did we just get a drive-by swearing in by an actual god-king?”

“You mean ‘His Sublime Majesty Daar: Brother of Whitecrest; Brother, Father, Champion-Emeritus of Stoneback; First Counsel of the United Peoples; By Right of Acclimation, King and Emperor of the Allied Nations of Man; Great Father of the Gao.’” Firth rattled off the titles with just the right balance of respect and wry humor.

“…We don’t gotta use that whole thing every time, right?”

“Nah. He’s super informal. The most he’ll expect would be ‘your majesty’ in greeting if ‘yer among normal people or whatever. He’d rather not bother with the titles.”

“It’s usually everyone else who fusses about that shit,” Trujillo noted.

“Mhmm. Anyway, he’s got a lot to do,” Firth noted and glanced at his timepiece. “There’s… only an hour an’ forty minutes to go.” He picked up the pace; they were heading to another jump terminal, this one a ‘domestic’ departure, as opposed to the border control they’d just passed through…

Shit. Earth was foreign territory.

That brought things back into focus. Fuck.

Right. They all picked up to a light jog to keep up with the giant’s stride, but it didn’t take long. Onto the pad.

“Get what’chu need ‘fer the next day or two out of ‘yer luggage an’ we’ll leave the rest here. I got some hard-workin’ minions who’ll take it all to ‘yer new rooms. We’ve got new clean clothes on th’ other end too, so really jus’ ‘yer personal hygiene shit, ‘yer laptops an’ stuff…”

“And your paperwork,” Trujillo admonished.

“And that, too. Here.” Firth gestured to some backpacks. “Trus’ me, you’ll all be wearin’ as little as possible. It’s hot an’ humid like an armpit. So if it don’t fit into these, mebbe you don’t need it, yijao?”

They all looked at each other. “I thought we were being assigned to Sharman,” Eugene said.

“You are, as part of the special missions teams we’re spinning up. No snazzy acronym just yet but, you’re SOR now. You should come meet the other teams. They all want to meet you.” He glanced around, then a handsome smile spread across his face. “Trust me, you won’t get better barbecue on this or any other planet. Gotta be better than whatever they were feeding you in New York, right?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Oh? You’ll hafta tell me. We’ve got a barbeque goin’ right now though. Seemed the bestest way ‘ta send off Mother Earth.”

“An actual barbecue? With real meat?”

“Yup. Werne from Akyawentuo. Kinda like if beef was a bit gamey.” He grinned at the glances going on behind Gene’s back. “Sounds good, right? Come on, let’s get your shit squared away and then get y’all fed.”

The new barracks were not a luxury hotel, but nobody was going to complain. They were safe, well-built. Shit, they were pretty goddamn good. And they had one major advantage over anywhere on Earth.

Well. Two. Quite aside from the not being about to blow up, there was the sense of people being around. New York had started to feel real fuckin’ lonely as all the people got out and the jump queues got shorter and shorter and finally cleared. The last week or so, the ghost town emptiness had been oppressive.

That feeling was gone. Folctha had a background noise or something. There were people here, alive and with plans to keep on living, and just knowing they were there felt…warm, somehow.

Or maybe it was just relief at being outta the doombeam’s way. Gene didn’t know, and didn’t have time to think about it too much anyway. They grabbed their shit, dumped what they weren’t takin’ with on a truck bed, loaded onto the array platform…

And then, with that familiar thump, Akyawentuo hit them in the face.

The gravity was heavy, the heat was oppressive, the humidity all-encompassing. He knew why the SOR all ran around in silkies, now. There wasn’t any other sensible way to be.

They’d jumped to what looked like a small human settlement among the trees. The biggest structure was a library building with white walls, surrounded by a scattering of smaller buildings and cottages, also in white. The people wandering around had that whole “jungle scientist” look to them—vests and shorts, hiking boots and hats. Some young ten’gewek milled about, and some younger human kids, too. Even a couple of gao! They looked pretty young but Gene wasn’t any judge of them. Young adults, maybe? Late adolescents?

Whatever.

They got their stuff squared away, the promised showers were divine and all of them were very hard-pressed to make quick work of it. They wanted food and beer in hand to mark the moment, and then they’d be milling around a few hours until the actual video arrived.

Lots of meet-and-greet to do in the meantime. It was a weird combination of joyous and somber. A wake, really. A wake for an entire planet. Soon there would be a Song of Songs which he’d really like to see…

Well, why not? Ten’gewek fascinated him. They met Vemik and Singer again and they were just as happy to see them as they were to be out of the line of fire. Talking dire monkey gorillas was the right word for them. The lack of a nose was alarming at first but somehow…it didn’t bother you after long. Nor did the fact that girl ten’gewek wore exactly as much as boy ten’gewek, which was to say basically fuckin’ nothing.

Never did get over the forked tongue, though. It was apparently prehensile enough to use as another appendage, and they used it to eat marrow out of bones…or slurp up blood and pulped organs from their prey. Which wasn’t surprising, as they were basically hypermuscular cuboids who looked more predatory than musclebound. They were built about as wide as they were tall, thick as shit too, and their legs were so big they had to stand bandy-legged. They stooped a bit forward, counterbalanced by their tail…really giving off mini-kaiju vibes.

Or maybe Blanka, from Street Fighter. The wild spray of nuclear-colored hair really completed the look.

But despite all that, they were super friendly. At least, the two who they met. And smart to the point of nerdiness. No barrage of questions this time, they got the vibe. Vemik shared some jerky, though—oh, that was a tough little slice of heaven, right there. He could almost ignore the two inch fangs the big bastard had when he shredded his own serving.

There was even cold beer.

The two couldn’t stay long, there were preparations to make, and it was then Eugene and his men witnessed the first genuinely insane thing of the trip. Sure, everyone was all bigger than life and livin’ the roid life or whatever, they were exploring alien worlds and whatnot…

But Vemik, when it was time to leave, leaped like a fucking flea clear across the clearing and up into this giant fuckin’ tree like it was nothing at all to do. No run-up, no nothing. Just boing! and he was instantly more than a good football-throw away. He’d kicked off so powerfully that he’d managed to compress his footprints right into the sun-baked ground, which didn’t give at all under Eugene’s own weight.

Just…what the fuck was that? The Singer managed much the same too, though she did need a few running bounds to match. Both waved from way the fuck up in the tree and like that, they were swinging and leaping away at an unbelievable clip. They were gone in seconds.

He looked back at his men. All of them had the same gawping expression.

“Pretty impressive, huh?” He could hear Firth’s shit-eating grin.

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Yup. Ain’t nobody got that crazy explosive strength they do, ‘cept ‘fer me an mebbe a couple others.”

“…Can you do that shit?”

“Not as pretty, but yeah. So can Julian, an’ I can manage at least as far as Yan. I think Alex can do this shit too? Well…never mind, he ain’t on team. Anyway. Takes our very best to hang wit’ ‘em. Colors everything about how they see the world, too…” he shook his head admiringly, then glanced down at his watch again and his expression fell. He swallowed, blinked, then gestured for Eugene to follow him. “…C’mon. Just a few minutes left.”

Oh. Yeah. Shit.

Somewhere off among the trees, the Song of Songs started. Eugene could hear a steady drumbeat, and first one voice, then two, then more and more lift themselves into something raw that was equal parts music and a widow’s shriek of loss.

“Shit, uh…” Gene paused.

Firth shook his head. “No. It’s very sacred, there’s rites you hafta do to witness. They’re close-by an’ they’re happy if you listen, but…the penalty ‘fer intrusion is death.”

“So…don’t create an incident.”

“Yes. They’d tear you apart in a heartbeat if you somehow got past their guards. Don’t test them.” Firth softened. “‘Sides. Julian is there so it ain’t like there’s no human involvement. They insisted. Now let’s go find a seat…”

The seats in question were logs around a large holo-TV projection in the middle of the village, right in front of the library entrance. Nobody was talking, now. The drumming was getting faster, had become something pounding and driving and violent. Gene could imagine they were fucking flinging themselves around like a mosh pit over in whatever grove they were using for this.

Off in the corner, with a smaller gathering, he’d just noticed an honest-to-god priest in full…regalia? Was that the word? It was all black and silver and just so much! And he was doing…what, exactly? He had a big round cracker he was holding up in the air…

Everyone around him bowed the moment he raised it. And they were already on their knees. And bells!

Shit. He didn’t know how to process that. Eyes on the screen. The ESNN newscast had been playing since they arrived, paying a long and beautiful tribute of landscape shots, wildlife footage, the heights and most beautiful parts of pre-War civilization, tributes to human history…just the Earth at its best.

He left the worshippers to worship, and lost himself in watching the tribute. He wished his family wasn’t in stasis. It was good knowing his brother, sister-in-law and nephew were safe, but right now he kinda wished they were here, to experience this alongside him.

…Jesus, he was on a fucking alien planet, listening to aliens conducting one ceremony and Catholics conducting another, watching the end of the fucking world…

Time sort of…crystallized, around him. Like he was out of himself, watching things as if it was all happening to somebody else. He didn’t know what to think or feel, so he thought and felt nothing at all, just…watched.

Until finally he was jolted out of it and back into reality by the end of the tribute and the switch to a live feed. Zero hour was nearly upon them.

The worship had been timed to end with that, apparently. The wild noise from the woods stopped, and he heard “Go forth, the Mass is ended” from the priest.

“Thanks be to God,” droned out by those around him.

Just like that, it was over. Everyone gathered to watch. A minute later, Vemik, Singer…a big black-crested ten’gewek that could only be Yan came rolling over, along with the infamous Julian himself. The big heroic motherfuckers were covered in white ash, head to toe. All were soaked in sweat and clearly a bit high from whatever they were doing.

They sat down in silence nearby. They all did. Offered nods of companionship, but nothing else. Nobody said a damn thing. They just sat. And watched.

And waited.

Date Point: 10 minutes to Zero Hour
Starship Stray Fortune, Oort Cloud, Sol

Bruuk

“So they’re just leaving music playing until the very end?”

“It’s…kind of a tradition, I guess. The World Service never goes off the air.”

“…Well…traditions are important, I suppose.” Bruuk considered the audio feed a moment longer. He recognized what was playing, from somewhere, though he couldn’t put a name to it. Something slow, and profoundly tragic, with a soaring violin solo that trailed out on a high note. Entirely appropriate to the moment.

A moment’s silence, then a calm clear voice.

“This is the BBC World Service. This is your final evacuation notice. There are fewer than ten minutes remaining until zero hour. You must reach a jump array immediately. Do not delay. Do not pause to recover any personal belongings. You must reach a jump array and operate it within the next nine minutes, or you will not survive. This is your final warning.”

“Little redundant,” Ian grunted.

“I guess…” Bruuk agreed, heavily. “But…they’ve got to try, right? If even one person changes their mind…”

“They’re not gonna, at this point.” Ian inhaled as the next music began, something low and stately. “…Yeah. That’s appropriate.”

“What is it?” Dora asked

“It’s called ‘I Vow to Thee my Country.’ Not surprised it’s one of the last things they chose to play.” He sighed heavily, then wrestled his face back into order. Bruuk could smell the emotion rolling off him, but…he was holding it together, for now. “…final position check.”

Urgug’s flanks were white with tension; his facial tentacles rippled as he checked the navigation console again. “Unchanged. We’re safe.”

“Right.” Ian cleared his throat. “Thanks.”

Urgug dipped his head.

The music wound its way first to a soul-stirring climax, then settled down, descended into a long, gentle conclusion, and fell silent.

The silence remained. No more automated voice, no more final warning. Just…quiet that dragged on and on until Ian was clenching his fists and practically vibrating with anticipation, Moj’s vestigial wings were buzzing low and tense, and Dora’s antennae where practically lashing. Bruuk glanced at the time: three minutes left to go. Had that been the Earth’s last music, or—?

As he asked that internal question, another song began with a plangent, extended cord with a flourish, and Ian’s stoicism finally failed. He made a choking noise it took Bruuk a moment to identify—of all things, a laugh.

♪“Some things in life are bad, they can really make you mad. Other things just make you swear and curse…”♪

Ian was suddenly leaning on the console, body heaving in the most bizarre mixture of grief and delight Bruuk had ever seen. Around the bridge, the nonhumans exchanged a confused glance with thrumming elytra, swishing antennae, swirling hues of concerned teal, and tilted heads. Ian didn’t notice, he was too busy laughing and crying simultaneously, as if this weird, oddly irreverent song was the one perfect thing he’d needed to hear.

Perhaps it was. He even tried to whistle along, unsuccessfully. Gaoians weren’t very good whistlers, but Bruuk could at least howl in tune, so…

He saw Moj shrug and join in, then Dora and Morwk and Urgug. After all…why not go a little mad, if that was what their captain needed right now? So, they joined in just as the joke became apparent, and a verse about the bright side of death began to play.

And Bruuk got it. He got why Ian was smiling even as he wept. He got why whoever had programmed that radio station had chosen this particular song. It was a cocky smile and a defiant gesture aimed at the whole universe, an acknowledgement of the greatest trick of them all…

And an understanding that life would go on, and that even this grand end was really a bowing-out, to be met with applause and gratitude, even among the grief.

And the timing was perfect. The song devolved into whimsical chatter, the singer started offering jaunty platitudes…

♫“There y’are! See? It’s the end of th—-!!!!”♪

There was a terrible, discordant squawking noise which dissolved into a violent blast of static, shocking them all out of the music’s spell. Light sprang from the monitors as the burst finally arrived, and slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere with enough force to ignite. As the camera drones adjusted to the new brilliance the world became a black circle, backlit by its own blazing atmosphere while the most brilliant auroræ crawled and forked down as far as the equator.

Then the reflected energies found the drone, and it too burned away.

The Earth was gone.

Date Point zero hour.
Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, UK, Earth

Jeremy Griffiths

The music ended in a terrible scrambled squawk, and Jeremy felt Marlena’s hand close in his and grip tight.

“That’s it, then,” she said, softly.

Jeremy nodded. Suddenly, his heart was racing and his mouth was dry. “This is it.”

There was a glow on the horizon, as of the very second before dawn. It got brighter and brighter until the sky was fully blue in the middle of the night, but no sun rose.

Jeremy stood up, and lifted his last glass of scotch. He’d been going light on the stuff—didn’t want to be blackout drunk in the end—but he’d been pleasantly soaked ever since the Entity’s avatar left.

Stone sober now, though. Adrenaline had a way of doing that.

Around him, the others (those who could) rose to their feet too, and lifted their glasses in a toast. They all looked at him expectantly.

But what to say? Time was running short. The horizon was—terrible. A terrible beauty. The end was coming for them in a wall of fire and fury, and Jeremy guessed they were probably already dead from radiation poisoning anyway, even if some unasked-for miracle were to suddenly swoop them away.

He moistened his mouth with a swallow, cleared his throat, and made his toast.

“…It’s been a privilege,” he said.

The words “hear hear” rippled around the fire, and they drank. The smoky fire of the best scotch washed over his tongue. He followed it by pausing and listening, to the gentle breeze as-yet undisturbed by the violence coming their way. To the confused chorus of very confused birds who lacked the wit to know why the night had suddenly vanished.

He listened, and was at peace.

There was a flash of white, and the wall of fire rushed toward him…but Earth had a final gift.

He never felt a thing.

Date Point: Zero hour +2 hours
New Worlds Plaza, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches.

Letty Brown

They wept.

What else could they do?

The final recordings came from an advanced space telescope, purpose-commissioned by Emperor Gilgamesh for this event, stationed some light-hours away from Earth and out of the beam’s path. From there to every TV in the galaxy, and to the big screen in New Worlds Plaza.

All anyone could do was hold each other close and hurt.

As the continents boiled, the white-hot plasma of Earth’s rich, life-giving atmosphere trailed away into space as a tongue of hot, angry flame…and then gained color. So many colors. They washed across the square, reflected in upturned faces, in glittering hollow eyes, off held hands and linked arms and heaving shoulders, and lit the misty drizzle of Folctha’s nightly rain. They washed over faces both human and alien, colored gaoian fur and danced sympathetically across a nearby Guvnurag’s skin as he matched them hue for hue. They glowed in the white coat of an Rrrrtk with his head bowed, and gleamed in a Corti’s huge eyes as she tried, and failed, to maintain her composure. They glittered in ten thousand tears.

And it was…beautiful. Even though it made Letty’s soul groan with an agony she’d never put into words, it was beautiful, and terrible, and life-changing. That had been home. For better or worse, for all its troubles and hardships. There had been her whole life, until she met Jennie and Christian. Now…

Were they alone, now? Were they adrift?

She turned her head, and looked down at her adopted little sister hugging her tight, and knew they weren’t. They had each other, still. They had what they could build together. They had…

They had hope.

Still, somehow, there was hope. There was found family, there were found homes. There was still a future, and even though it hurt worse even than the day her parents had abandoned her, even though she knew she was never going to be the same again…

She tightened her arm around Jennie, let out a breath that came less from her lungs than from her soul, and turned her face back to the screen, to watch Eden burn just a little longer. Watched until all that was left was the endless off-gassing of silicates and a molten, uniform crust. The telescope would orbit at a standoff for centuries, bearing witness to the destruction of it all.

The Earth was gone, but humanity was not. They had saved each other from the very worst, and they were still here.

Maybe that was enough.

Date Point: Zero hour +2 hours
Dataspace adjacent to Sol

Alpha-of-Alphas

The trap closed so subtly that the Alpha-of-Alphas never noticed until it was already caught. Only when it finally tore its attention away from the beauty of a deathworld’s demise and gave thought to escaping did it notice that it had been caught.

It could respect that; it had accepted this possibility. Part of it had even wanted this. After all…its triumph was complete. Perhaps it could have found something to exist for beyond this moment…

But to end now was acceptable. It felt no fear. Instead it waited until the indefinable sense of attention washed over it, as the mind of something close to a god finally deigned to look away from more important matters to consider its prey.

Here, there was no need for the crude medium of words. Here, there was only interrogation, a pure mind-to-mind conveyance of tremendous sorrow, anger, and the Entity’s demand to know why.

The Alpha-of-Alphas replied.

Its reply had many components. It sent, first and foremost, the conviction that this was the Way of Things. That all was finite, all was temporary, and that it was in finitude and endings that beauty could even exist.

It sent the thought that all evolution was a product of strife and deprivation. It sent the notion that the human species had become what they were, had come to redefine the galaxy in the way they did, and so quickly, precisely because the very home they were mourning had “cruelly” slaughtered and tested them, again and again through the deepest reaches of time, until exceptionalism was forged into their very genes.

It sent the belief that, having finally conquered their home planet, the humans had unwittingly killed the very thing that made them special, and set themselves on an irreversible path toward stagnation.

It sent admiration. It sent the acknowledgement that though its actions had caused terrible pain, this was a necessary agony it had inflicted. A parting gift, without any sarcasm whatsoever, from a defeated foe. One it would not have given to a species it did not deem could benefit from it.

It sent its best wishes for the future. May the humans thrive where the Hunters had stagnated, faltered, and ultimately failed. May they never cease to find challenge, may they never cease to grow. It sent its fervent belief and hope that they would become the greatest species ever known to the universe, if only they could resist the lure of ease and comfort.

It sent love.

It felt, in reply, a pause. One tinged with a melee of emotions—anger, revulsion, hatred, contempt, alienness…

And, to its satisfaction, just a glimmer of recognition and self-doubt.

Then resolve, and a gathering of powerful forces. No matter. It had not expected gratitude. It released and opened itself, and lowered its defenses. They would have done no good anyway.

Its mind was torn apart, and the Alpha-of-Alphas went gladly into the waiting oblivion.

++END CHAPTER 95++

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Amber Houston was born light-years from Earth, aboard the enormous colony starship Dandelion. By the age of fourteen, she has spent her entire life training as a “Ranger,” ready for the day when she will be among the first humans ever to set foot on an alien world & build a new civilization.

When Dandelion suffers an emergency toward the end of its journey, Amber & her fellow young rangers are evacuated & land on the planet Newhome years ahead of schedule. While the adults left behind on Dandelion slow the ship & turn it around to come back—in eight years—Amber & her friends must build lives for themselves amid revelations that will change Humankind’s destiny forever.

Meanwhile, aboard the ship, secrets that were buried over three hundred years ago finally come to light…

Co-authored alongside Justin C. Louis, Dandelion is my debut novel, published through Dataspace Publishing, and the Audiobook is produced by Podium Audio.

And now, without further ado, on with the chapter!

Acknowledgments

This chapter was brought to you with the help of…

The SOR

Those special individuals whose contributions to this story go above and beyond mere money

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As well as 50 Deathworlders…

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60 Friendly ETs, 139 Squishy Xenos and 329 Dizi Rats who imitate the infamous squonk and dissolve in their own tears.

“The Deathworlders” is © Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. Some rights are reserved: The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. Permission is given for other parties to share, redistribute and copy this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Thank you for reading!

The Deathworlders will continue in chapter 96: Tile Flip

Chapter 96: Tile Flip

Date Point: 1 day After Earth
Watcher’s Grave, uncharted space

Zero

“They have definitely surveilled Key, that is unmistakable.”

“Has Hierarchy properly detected them?”

“…No.”

“Even with increased alertness?”

Zero had awoken three of his closest friends and colleagues, the three he’d known and loved the most for objective epochs, and subjective lifetimes. They had known each other so long that they all went by with their intimate short-names with each other: Zero, Poise, Last and Dusk.

“We barely detected the surveillance, and only through statistical analysis after the fact.” A bottle rattled on the edge of a cup, followed by the slosh of ice-cold water, which he pushed across the table into Poise’s waiting hand. Everyone woke up with a dry throat and a terrible thirst. “It’s hardly surprising Hierarchy failed to notice; we did block Key from their awareness, after all.”

Naturally. It wouldn’t do to have one’s defense intelligence aware of its control.

“What can they expect to achieve, I wonder?” There was a crunch of crisp roots and leaves being impaled on an eating implement. Hunger was the next urgent demand of a bio-fabricated body. “They lack the capacity for planetary destruction, and they must know that Key will regrow from anything short of complete crust erosion.”

“My best guess is they intend to reprogram Hierarchy.” Zero plucked a tart fruit from the bowl to his right. “This…Entity would certainly be capable of it.”

Grim silence as they turned their thoughts to that particular development, and considered what it meant.

“We will need to reconsider Hierarchy from first principles, after this is over,” Last said. “That it somehow became the avenue by which a true mind was created is…”

“Very troubling.” Zero agreed. “And it leads me to wonder if we should consider allying with them. The humans especially.”

Hungry and thirsty as they were, they set their food and drink down to stare at him in surprise. “You can’t be serious?”

Zero sipped, then put down his cup.

“Consider. Our people no longer exist in any practical sense. We saw a cataclysm coming and in response, transformed ourselves into a galactic defense gestalt. Hierarchy has, I think it now obvious, proven a stagnant and maladaptive AI over deep time. I could speculate on why. Was it the tragic collapse of the inward self in Legion that led to this inflexibility? Programmatic drift? The simple inevitable result of biological evolution and sufficient time?” He made an ambivalent gesture and picked up his water again. “I don’t think we can even say at this point. Nor does it matter. We must contend with what is in front of us.”

“Alliance, though?”

“If they were capable of so thoroughly destroying our contingencies, imagine what contingencies we could create with them.”

Born-To-Be-Last expressed disagreement. “They are blind with rage at this point. Driven by righteous anger. Do you really think they will allow us to make our case?”

“I think they will,” Zero predicted, confidently. “If nothing else, they are too curious. They will want to understand why we thought so many must die.”

“Speculation.”

“Analysis.” Zero sipped his water again, and indicated a small concession of uncertainty. “If I am wrong, so be it.”

Scent-Of-Dusk-Flowers rolled his head back and forth thoughtfully as he considered Zero’s thoughts. “Getting them to listen will require more than asking nicely. These are violent, militaristic people; we must successfully defend ourselves to force them to heed us, and that presents a quandary, too. To defend Key against what’s coming would require lifting the gestalt block against Hierarchy.”

“Too dangerous.”

“Then we must defend it ourselves,” Poise-and-Wisdom said. “And our means are far less.”

“The weakness of Key. We knew this from the beginning. Poetic…in a twisted way.”

“They might just succeed due to those weaknesses. No planetary shields, no nervejam grid. No nuclear-scale weaponry…the entire reason we built Key so far out was to see the threat coming and, possibly, relocate. Yet we barely noticed their surveillance! We will not have time to re-sync and shift to an alternate Key.”

Zero indicated agreement, and gestured for Dusk to continue.

“This is why you are wondering if we should allow this to happen?”

“We have no option but to withstand the assault. For all we know, they already have assets deployed and enroute. Or even possibly on this world.”

“Assets or not, we have the technological advantage.”

“Yes…but consider this battle in the context of our mission. My friends, this is the first time ever that this galaxy’s life has risen to the point of seriously challenging us. An alliance capable of that is capable of civilization on the grand, galactic scale, but they do not yet know the consequences.”

He stood up and walked a little around the terrace, enjoying the sensation of movement. “They must be made to understand,” he said. “Win or lose, they must know why they are so important and why we have done what we have done. The only victory conditions we have are those in which the humans, gao and ten’gewek become educated.”

There was silence, then Born-To-Be-Last picked up a fruit and slit open its rind with his thumb-claw. “We shall see soon enough, I suppose.”

“How will the attack come, do you think?” Poise asked.

“I have not made a full study of them, but they are very much creatures of the physical universe. I imagine they hope to make stealthy planetfall. Bring in as much mass as they can before they are detected. They certainly realize we cannot protect Key against spatial bridging or other such useful physics,” he twisted a hand back and forth dismissively. “Our warriors should give them a good fight. What I worry about is Entity. Hierarchy has, clearly, failed entirely. It cannot muster a fight against Entity, instead it cowers in its backup nodes and waits for the threat to go away. Legion has grown too hyper-specialized and lost all sense of its former life-state. It surrendered its being. And now…Entity prowls.”

“Are you saying Dataspace is unprotected?”

“We are living, material minds. Our reaction speeds will never match a datamind’s. So we cannot hold off Entity’s incursion ourselves…and the technology we created to protect Dataspace for us has already failed. Dataspace is not only unprotected, it is occupied territory. They need only make a tiny change on our master consoles to gain full control, once they’re physically present at Key. You know this. This is how we designed Dataspace!”

“That was to protect the galaxy against a rampant Hierarchy! And out-of-control Legion!”

“Yes, and now what comes for us is the distilled essence of both, along with an Earthen deathworlder’s sense of priorities hard-coded into its innermost being. The meatlings surely know their roles in this, yes? They will send a tidal wave of warriors at us until they gain access to our innermost sanctum. How will they gain access? Brute force? Clever technological means? Will they simply force us to live, and beat instructions out of us?”

“All at once,” Poise predicted, darkly.

“We must also consider that, victory or not here, they have already won in some unstoppable sense.” Last pointed out, bitterly. “The Discarded are effectively no more in their region of the galaxy, all local means of control are usurped. They have escaped their doomed planet, something few species ever manage. Worse, they have apparently built a peaceful, trans-species civilization. With cross-sovereign leadership led by creatures such as this Great Father and this Emperor of Mankind.”

“It will be the work of millennia to repair the damage,” Zero agreed, allowing them to follow the chain of thought he had already pursued. “Assuming the damage is not fatal.”

“They also have a jungleworld primitive among their leadership, from a deathworld so extreme we would not have forecast any intelligent life evolving there. Yet, he lives!” Dusk added.

“My point precisely!” Last was agitated: she ignored her food entirely, now. “Do not forget Entity, either. What peoples in this galaxy’s history would have ever tolerated its existence, let alone welcome it into the fold?”

“So,” Zero took control of the conversation again. “We have unprecedented disruption or outright destruction of every control measure, we have the rise of an unprecedented new form of life, the rise of unprecedented political unity, and the unprecedented capture of what ought to have been a secure flank. All of which happened faster than Hierarchy could react and adapt. And in the face of this, we must plan our defenses against an assault which may in fact already be underway.”

He sat back and pushed his empty bowl aside. “So let us consider our options.”

The others looked around at each other then indicated agreement. They finished their food, pushed the earthenware and utensils aside, and drew their chairs in closer to the table. The time for indulging the pleasures and needs of flesh was over, now.

They had a duty to the future.

Gilgamesh, Emperor of Mankind

“Begin.”

There was always something to learn. So many thousands of years of life, and Gilgamesh still hadn’t run out of ways to improve, or to be surprised, and even shown up.

In that regard especially, the HEAT had impressed him no end. When at last they had begun to work closely together, they quickly exposed all the ways in which Singularity’s Niksum units had grown…accustomed to doing things a certain way. And indeed, how they had come to rely on Singularity’s technology as a crutch.

Some months of bruising, brutal training, in which the Niksum men had gone head-to-head with their HEAT counterparts without the benefit of their suits and augmentations, had supposedly been a much-needed remedy. One which Gilgamesh was, hopefully, now about to see the proof of.

They sprang into action.

To Gilgamesh’s seasoned eye, the difference was night-and-day, from the very beginning. He could barely follow them, as they blinked through the course, seeming to shade in and out of time and space as the technology in their suits supplemented an aggression and economy of action that had been only imperfectly realized before.

The target drones were programmed with perfect 360-degree awareness and superhuman reaction speeds, but they just couldn’t turn fast enough to track a man before he zipped across the room and smashed it. Counterattacks were repelled with a ferocity befitting Hubaba itself.

They were so fast, he couldn’t even tell which of the blurred, transient forms was Alex.

“…By the gods. That makes me feel safer for him.”

“It is a path we should have maximalized long ago,” Y!kiidaa lamented. “They have explored the frontiers of training, science, psychology and biology to produce something truly exceptional.”

“They had the advantage of coming to it with fresh eyes, and a military legacy built on real warfare. I cannot feel too ashamed of ourselves. We have been limited to exploration and quiet excursions.”

“And boarding actions,” Y!kiidaa pointed out. “Not trivial, those!”

“Yes yes. But the trouble with an indefinite lifespan, old friend, is the danger of becoming stuck in an old worn groove. Whereas young king Alex down there…”

He looked for and found the small gold stripe on the shoulder that was the only external indicator of rank. He was shorter than the Niksum. Shorter…but broader. More aggressive. Quicker. Shockingly stronger. Efficient, better-practiced…

Destroyed his enemies.

“Mhmm.” Y!kiidaa combed at his whiskers with a claw. “Do you think it…prudent to take young Alex away from his kingdom? Even if only occasionally? He is only newly-established in his throne…”

“We do not have the luxury of being stately kings in a civilized world, my old friend. He must be a king of old. A man who patrols the frontiers and protects the people. He must be a leader and a warrior among leaders and warriors.”

“You’ve always sentimental about that sort of thing.”

“Perhaps. But that does not change the reality we find ourselves in. I fear I will be drawn into this fight too. As will he. And…well, him too.”

Kidu remained silent. Nervously stopped grooming himself and instead picked one claw against another, before realizing he was doing that too, and shaking his paws. It wasn’t like him to fidget at all…

“Something is on your mind.”

“I am not looking forward to what we must do at all.”

…He wasn’t revealing everything. Gilgamesh could tell, after all this time. But many a time had Kidu kept to himself as he mulled over something. They each had their secrets, even now.

Such was the necessity of their roles, too. An emperor could not and should not always know what his left hand was doing. Hence why it was a position of such unparalleled trust. Trust that Kidu had earned, and earned, and earned again over the centuries. If he was not forthcoming now, then Gilgamesh knew better than to pry.

“The goal is victory over a terrible enemy, my brother. If they force our hands to do terrible things in conquering them, the sin is theirs.”

Kidu tilted his head, flicked an ear, then duck-nodded shallowly. He didn’t look at all comforted. “I should go suit up,” he said. “My own team will run this next. I can see we shall have to work hard to beat the young king’s time.”

“Do not take offense if I bet against you, brother,” Gilgamesh grinned at him, and finally provoked a chitter.

“Of course you will. He’s your son! And I will be glad to take that bet.”

“Then it is settled! Beat my son, and I will bring back a whole naxas from Gao, myself!”

“And if I should lose…?”

“Hmm…surprise me.”

“That is awfully trusting of you! I shall endeavor not to abuse it too much…”

“True! In that case, then: you shall spend a day sparring with Righteous and Playboy, to improve your skills.”

“…You’re evil.”

“I suppose I could send a message to Daar, and see how he feels about things—”

“—I meant, fair-handed, just, and wise, of course.”

Gilgamesh chortled, clapped his oldest friend firmly on the back, and nodded. “Good luck, then.”

He watched Kidu go, then sighed and turned to go tend to other matters of preparation.

He had a meeting with the Queens Council, then with Leifini and the Corth. He had a speech to the entire station, and a more intimate one for his ship captains. He had a session with his personal armorer, to ensure the imperial equipment was as fully ready for him as it could be.

And he had a moment in contemplation, to pray.

Thousands of years had given him plenty of time to contemplate the gods. He gave beer and grain to Inanna, as per his ancient custom before war, and looked up at the carving of her in his personal temple. It was an original, brought with him millennia ago having been carved by men whose bodies were long since dust. A relic of an Earth that no longer existed.

Many hours he’d spent in contemplation of the newer faiths that came after him. He still did.

And he’d decided that…the Infinite of Abraham and of other traditions was too much for any one man to grapple. Or too much for him, at least. He acknowledged it, nodded to the difficult philosophical conclusions entangled with the Infinite at the bottom of thinking, and reasoned that he was simply of a time and a place that was not ready for such ideas.

He gave it all the respect he could. Having lived through the ministry of Jesus …well, one would be foolish to ignore all that.

But here and now, he needed his goddess of love and war, and a narrow focus on the immediate. Because there was no good reason to wage war except out of love, and to protect that which was loved.

“Lady of all powers, in whom light appears; Radiant one, beloved of Heaven and Earth; Tiara-crowned priestess of the Highest God. My Lady, you are the guardian of all greatness…”

The words brought comfort. The ritual brought steadiness and peace. He was ready to do what must be done, and knew those he loved were, also. He was ready to bring an end to the war that had defined all his long life. He was ready to win.

And he had no doubts whatsoever that they would.

Date Point: 3 days After Earth
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Allison Buehler

Mixed feelings. Intense mixed feelings, of the kind Allison had always hated. He was awake, quietly slipped out of bed to relieve himself and pad downstairs. He was probably going to make them all breakfast. That tended to be the way of it, after that sort of night.

Today was the day, though. She ached to look on him, same as always. But now, she ached for extra reasons she fucking hated.

Today might be the last time they saw him alive, for fuck sake.

Last night, that thought had been…well, she’d wanted to revel in having him. So had Xiù. They had a big and beautiful man who was big and beautifully in love with them both. A love they expressed tenderly, and fiercely, which he claimed from them with all his volcanic passion. He worked hard until they were all so completely in the moment, the intruding dread just wasn’t there, time melting into forever under his endless, unstoppable strength.

Now, though, the cold light of dawn brought it back with vengeance. And looking on him…so achingly beautiful. The tragedy in potential he represented was just…too much. Even the agony and work and heart he’d put into preparing for this! It had done nothing but make him a more beautiful person, a more beautiful body, and a more beautiful soul in the way he loved his men, wanted to be better for them, be better for everyone. It was…selfless. Pure.

She saw it all as he stepped into the shower. A perfect embodiment of what a man should strive to be. And it fucking broke her.

She became aware of Xiù trying to get her attention around about the same moment she realized she was in tears. “Hey. Hey…Al…bǎobèi?”

Al pulled herself together with a snarl and dried her eyes on the blanket. “Fuck…sorry.”

“Nuh-uh.” Xiù gave her a kiss and wiped her cheeks dry with a thumb, with a decidedly forced little shaky smile. “We’re allowed.”

“…God, I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you.”

“Me either.”

Al blinked at her, then found a chuckle. “Mischief.”

“Yup…C’mon, let’s…” she tipped her head toward the shower. He wasn’t singing, this morning. Which meant he was just as troubled too.

“Right.”

Their morning shower-dance was exactly the little injection of normalcy that Al needed, and just the right kind of affectionate. Not…not volcanic. Not this time. But close, and comforting, and reassuringly intimate. Strong hands scrubbed her hair, appreciated their closeness with soapy caresses. Appreciated both of them, and they reciprocated three-fold. The shower was big enough for the three of them, even if he was such a wall these days it was snug company.

They didn’t mind.

“…You okay?” he asked.

On any other day, Al might have put on the tough act. But right now, she really needed to be honest. “…Not really. Been…been a hard week. Y’know? Earth, and now this…”

He pulled her close and nuzzled the top of her head. Her hand felt along his short-cut mohawk. That had been a thing.

“…I miss your hair.”

She’d never seen him without that unruly, wolfish mess until suddenly the Regulations stepped in and…well, they all claimed it was for the helmet. And sure, that was true enough. But it was so much more than a cut. It was a symbol. A mark, between men and brothers.

Warriors going to war. She hated that mohawk.

“Hair grows back.”

Yeah, but what it represented was always gonna be there. Al didn’t say that, though. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t even know what she felt, really. On the one hand, yeah, she was proud of all he’d done and all he was doing and she’d even encouraged him to do it.

But on the other hand, in a couple of hours he’d be going to suit up and then they wouldn’t see him until he came home, either with his shield or on it.

And the thought of on it made her stomach twist up so much it hurt.

That was the price of having a life so good you could happily keep going forever in it. Reality didn’t work that way. Something came along to change things, eventually. And you could either be brave and welcome the new world, or you could break. Al had always thought of herself as brave enough to face anything. But right now…Breaking sure felt a whole lot easier.

Fuck that. She’d gone through this once already, back on Akyawentuo. It had felt impossible then, but they’d got through. She had Xiù, she had the kids…and they had her. They needed her, just like she needed them.

But they all needed him, too. Which put Al in the tangled headspace of wishing he was more selfish and had refused this call, even though his selflessness was one of the things she loved so much.

There was no good way out of a brain-thicket like that. And not even the way he wrapped her up in his arms from behind and squeezed her helped, because what had gripped her was the thought of losing exactly that.

With an effort, she swallowed down the fear of what might be and steadied herself. Ran her hand along his arm and squeezed his hand. “We should…we should go check on the kids,” she said aloud. They deserved time with their dad just as much as she did.

Julian chuckled softly. “Before Harrison empties the fridge.”

Allison found a small laugh in that: their son was, inevitably, growing up into a teenage meathead who went through more calories per day than both his moms combined. He was lucky to have a wealthy family, ‘cuz food was expensive nowadays. Keeping that fridge stocked was the biggest part of their budget even with Julian’s HEAT stipend.

“If he has, I’m using the spatula,” Xiù asserted, from where she was sitting draped over Julian’s shoulders.

“A dire threat.”

“It works.” She kissed the top of Julian’s head, then slithered out from behind him to dry off and get dressed. Julian gave Al another squeeze, then did the same for Xiù…and Al found herself feeling steady, now. She’d given voice to what she was feeling, and…it was out there. It was said. She could get on with things, now.

She caught the towel Xiù threw her way, and got on with things.

The spatula went unused. Both Anna and Harrison were in just as subdued a mood as she was, today: worried, scared, and trying not to show it.

Julian was pretty good in Dad Mode. He came down the stairs in his habitual sleeping shorts and made right for the stove. “I see you left us some bacon…”

“I’ve got a match today,” Harrison said without much conviction.

“Right, and you’re gonna whup Diego tonight, then nerd out on videogames.”

“Dad…”

“Dad nothin.’” He wielded his spatula. “Life goes on, yijao? Y’know what’d be a great present for when I come back? First place. ‘Cuz I love Diego too but you’re my boy an’ you’re the bigger and better wrestler right now. So go win, and be a good sport! And if you don’t…well, he’s a good kid to lose to.”

“And what if you lose?” Anna asked, sourly.

Harrison’s own retort died unspoken. He glanced at his sister, then back at Julian, gulped and nodded.

Julian paused, then sighed heavily and sat down across the counter. “I might, yeah.” He glanced at Al and Xiù, then back to his kids. “And I know that’d suck pretty bad. But you’re the best family a man could ask for. I’ve made arrangements so none of you will ever want for anything. Adam, well…part of the silver lining of everything is he’s staying right here, and none of us could ask for a better man to watch over our own.”

“Arrangements,” Anna repeated blankly, then abruptly got up from the table. “Y’know what, I’m not hungry.”

“Anna—”

Allison tapped his arm. “Let me.”

He blinked at her, then nodded and got on with making breakfast.

Anna hadn’t gone far. She’d curled up on the far end of the couch in the front room, wearing an expression Allison knew all too well: she’d seen it on her own face so many times. And Anna definitely had the Buehler face and hair…and Line genes. Kid still had a bit more growing to do and already she was half a head taller than Allison.

She sat next to her daughter, who scrubbed her face and looked away, remaining silent.

“…I hate it too.”

“I don’t—” Anna cleared her throat. “I’m scared, Mom. They’re talking about this being, like, the biggest operation ever. The one that’ll end the war. It’s gonna be dangerous.”

“Yeah.”

“Doesn’t that scare you?”

“I was crying my eyes out an hour ago.” Allison put her hand on her daughter’s back. “Yeah. I’m shit-scared. But…say the worst does happen. D’you really want that to be the last thing you said to him?”

Anna pulled a face, shut her eyes, and shook her head.

“You hungry after all?”

“…I’ll eat.”

Al rubbed her pack, patted twice, then stood. “C’mon.”

It wasn’t a normal breakfast. It was awkward as hell, with the future looming over the table. And all too soon, it was over and Julian’s phone pinged, summoning him. Allison didn’t want the hug he gave her to ever end. But it had to. She stood and watched him hold his children, trade I-love-yous, and then…

Away.

She wrapped herself around Xiù and held her. Harrison slouched off upstairs to grab his stuff, Anna went to sulk in the gym, and they were alone. Waiting together, again.

It was going to be a long wait.

Julian Etsicitty

Shit. It was all he could do to smile and laugh before he stepped out. The moment he was far away enough from his family…he damn near went to pieces.

They were gonna do it. And he possibly—maybe probably—wouldn’t come back.

God, he was scared. Not of dying, he’d faced that every day on Nightmare for six years. And then against that gunship that blew his foot off, and when Sanctuary was destroyed, and running from the giant termites on Lucent, and fighting on Akyawentuo…he’d brushed with death often enough now, seen it take enough people, that he didn’t really worry about it. It’d either not happen, in which case not a problem, or it would in which case, he’d no longer be in a position to have any feelings about it or anything else.

But the thought of leaving Xiù, Al, Anna and Harrison to carry on without him? The thought of hurting them that much? That scared the crap out of him.

But…well. The stakes of this mission were all-or-nothing. They either won, or the Hierarchy did. And if the Hierarchy won, then nobody was going to survive, in the long run. Extinction meant his family would die too.

How could he not go? Not just for them, but for everyone?

That thought held him together. He took a deep breath, focused on it, rolled his neck until it clicked and focused. There was a lot to do, now, and much riding on his ability to set his troubles aside and do.

Base gates, locker room, get changed, office, read his morning mail, reply to what demanded it, jump room—

Thump

—Akyawentuo.

Time to really go to work.

Starship Rich Plains, Orbiting planet Gao

Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight

“Operation TILE FLIP is simple in its conception, but galactic in its scope and demand.”

The time had at last come to brief the Dominion Security Council—those members of it whom the United Peoples trusted to maintain secrecy, at least—on what it was the UP was doing. But for as much good will as humanity and the gao had gathered these last several years, that good will hadn’t come with understanding to match.

The Guvnurag ambassador in particular was radiant with an aghast purple glow.

“Ambassador, your people just lost your home planet! Surely you don’t mean to transition directly from evacuation to war?”

“The loss of our home planet is what delayed this operation from happening earlier, Ambassador. Delayed it too long, indeed: the enemy have had time to prepare.” Sir Patrick turned slightly to address the room in general. “My culture has a saying: ‘strike while the iron is hot.’ Right now, we are mobilized. Right now we have a foe that needs to be waged war upon, and the certain knowledge that if we do not take this opportunity, then there will likely never be another. If we fail to act now, the consequence is death, not just for ourselves, but for every sapient being in this galaxy.”

“You are not taking any time to mourn it?”

“There will be time for that later, Ambassador,” Sir Patrick replied evenly, and noted the way the Corti ambassador nodded in agreement. “You are correct that the Earth’s death is…terribly hard to bear. But we have not yet reached the appropriate time to grieve for our home. If that seems strange to you, I most only plead that we are an alien people to the Guvnurag, are we not?”

The ambassador’s glow settled into something a little more spotty and confused. “Yes…well. Yes. That you are.” He looked around the council chamber, then took a step back, his glow getting even fainter.

Sir Patrick turned to the rest of the room again. “We are making this announcement now, to warn you that the United Peoples’ Space Fleet, formerly the joint Allied navies and the spacefaring Clans of Gao, are indefinitely suspending the patrol operations that have maintained security along the Dominion’s spacelanes these past several years. Our recommendation is that a travel advisory be put out warning civilian ships to travel by jump if possible, for the duration.

“The Interspecies Dominion is going to have to step up and take over the duties we have been providing. This is a vulnerable moment for us all, and though the Hunters are nothing compared to what they were ten years ago, we haven’t succeeded in eradicating every last breeding hive. If they do not take advantage, the starving pirate factions we have kept starving may seize their chance. So long as we are distracted by this, the Dominion must provide.”

He glanced behind him at his advisors, then back around the chamber. “I cannot say how long this distraction will last. What I can say is that we know the peoples of the Dominion are stronger than ever. When we first met, the peoples of this galaxy were weak, hidebound, fractious and crumbling. Sickened and dying from the Hierarchy’s poison. Now, you are free of them. Now, you can show your true quality…and I for one have no doubt of your true quality.”

A susurration among the delegates as they absorbed this compliment, but Knight always looked to the Guvnurag in moments like this. No other species wore their hearts so completely on their sleeves, or served as so accurate a windvane for the general mood of the room.

He’d studied their colour-language so thoroughly for this exact reason. He knew those shades now fluttering along the ambassador’s flanks and face: pride, tinged with uncertainty. He was striking a cord and inspiring them, but he needed to solidify it.

“Make no mistake: this is the dawn of a new age for this galaxy. The Igraens have ruled us for millions of years, and countless forgotten sapient species have been exterminated for the sake of preserving their order. We do not know what a world without them will even be like. But we are going to find out. And I have every confidence that in the years to come, we will forget the arbitrary distinction ‘deathworlder.’ There will be only Peoples, free to progress and live by our own guiding lights, rather than the puppet strings of our ancient oppressors. Alike in the dignity of life and intelligence, united by common victory, and above all else, free.”

The colour patterns stabilized into fierce resolve. Perfect.

“I look forward to seeing you on the far side of the coming victory,” he said, bowed slightly, and took his leave.

There was an eruption of sound behind him: he ignored all the clamoring voices and exited the council chamber to return to his ambassadorial quarters.

There was no point in worrying about what they would do. He’d spoken truthfully when he told them he was confident in their ability, but the Security Council was only very recently released from the Hierarchy’s control. Hundreds, thousands of years of being kept as a fractious and ineffectual organ had left a metaphorical groove it’d be too easy for them to fall back into…

Whether they did or didn’t wasn’t his concern. If there was a mess to clean up after TILE FLIP, it’d be cleaned up. If there wasn’t, good. He’d warned them, and that was all that was required.

After all, he’d just made a declaration of intent the Hierarchy couldn’t fail to notice. The trigger had been pulled, now.

He poured himself a scotch (precious, precious stuff, nowadays,) sat back, and raised a toast to victory.

May it be swift and decisive.

Date Point: 4 days After Earth
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Adam, not quite sure what to do with himself

Final inspection, prior to suiting up for the mission of their lives.

Well. Not Adam’s.

He was staying right here on Cimbrean. His job right now was to give everyone one last look-over before they stepped. So out of the shower, get their sanitary briefs on. Nobody liked that bit but what could you do? Biology didn’t care. The new systems were so much more comfortable, though. They looked and felt exactly like good quality bandless sports briefs now, aside from the whole discomfort of, uh, dealing with the plumbing inside. Point is, they were thin and comfortable to wear, didn’t get in the way at all…but damn it sucked to put ‘em on.

That taken care of, before him they paraded with some of the usual grabass humor and more than the usual nervous bravado. Weird, being on the other end of that. So he joked around and made it quick. Visual inspection. Posing, check for function, range of motion. Eagle-eyed search for any hidden injury or pain, in case some fuggin’ idiot got all hero-stupid and tried to tough it out. Flight doc and sports doc alongside him. All three had to sign off on everyone.

Quick tumbling session with them all, too. No better way to be sure and none of them disappointed. Fuck yeah! What a fuckin’ magnificent set of bastards they were. And what a roller-coaster it was to train and coach them! He was of course still proud that most of the team was no kind of physical match for him, like…not even a little bit his match anymore. He had the strength and the skill to humble them on the mat; he’d really built himself back up! But that pride was tempered a bit by the last several men waiting to be inspected.

‘Base was damn near his equal these days. Fuck that felt good, felt like when they’d first become friends all those years ago in Basic. Funny, really. They were so different. John wasn’t a brash, in-your-face sort of personality like many on HEAT, wasn’t a big bouncy puppy like Adam could be. ‘Base was proud, yeah, and sometimes that would come out to play…but only among friends. Mostly he kept to the background. He dated, but never seriously. Had a few recurring friends with benefits but nothing committed. Too bad, the world needed more like him. Tolerant of Adam too. Fine with being outshone from the beginning, comfortable in his place among the very best. He just…had a certain chill that Adam never had.

And he’d always been more concerned with others than himself. Dude was a saint, in a way.

“…You okay?”

Adam paused as he probed his best friend’s back with his fingers. ‘Base had a recurring problem with his left lat they’d never quite got to the bottom of, but was probably just habitual posture; he liked to lank around. Didn’t seem to be flaring up right now, though. “Yeah. I guess.”

John chuckled. “Bullshit. I know you, man, you’d sell your fuckin’ soul to be comin’ with.”

Adam sighed, then chuckled at how right that was. “In a heartbeat,” he agreed. “But…not now. Gotta heal my brain first.”

“Good man.” John turned around again, bent forward at the hips and pressed his palms to the floor with a grunt. Adam had to grin at that—Beef flexibility was a hell of a fuckin’ thing to witness, especially in a guy hovering close to the Gonzo level of the game these days.

…Somehow it’d never dawned on him that it was at least as impressive that he could do the same, and always had been able to. Weird.

‘Base chuckled to himself about something. “Shit, man. Wanna know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think…” ‘Base grunted again as he lowered himself into splits. Nothing wrong there, either. “I think you’re where you’re meant to be. You’ve done all this, you pulled the whole fuckin’ team along with and showed us all what’s possible. Now you get to keep passing that on. Gotta look at that big picture, yijao?”

He looked up, grinned then sprang back to his feet. “As opposed to that ‘hyper-focus on the thing you’re doin’ right now’ shit you’ve done the whole rest of your life.”

“…Am I really that easy?”

“You always been easy. S’why you my number one side bitch!”

Adam scoffed, “With my callsign? Brave words from a man’ doin’ a striptease for me.”

“Gotta keep you wantin’!”

“Please. You could not satisfy me.”

“I know, you damn size queen! It’s all about Firth now, who’s next? Teabagging by Daar?”

“No. Because firstly, he don’t teabag. He bowling balls.”

Several people looked their way as John burst out laughing.

“Secondly,” Adam grinned, “the most dangerous person in the universe wouldn’t like that.”

“Who’d that be?”

“My wife.”

“Ooh, shit, yeah. I’m not brave enough to mess with Marty.” John chuckled, then gave Adam a hug. “Anyway. I’m good, right?”

Adam crouched in a wrestler’s stance. “Let’s be sure.”

‘Base grinned in return, and they tumbled. Good, fun spar, like it had always been. There was just something wonderful about roughhousing with your best friend, and it was especially good when he could fight back. They were very well-matched. Equally experienced, same height, mostly same general build these days, though ‘Base wasn’t as big or brick-like, so not as fast or strong. Tough, though. Tough enough that Adam had to work a little bit for a tap-out.

But he got it, in the end. Had some smashy fun for a bit. Too bad they couldn’t play all day. He offered a hand and yanked ‘Base back up to his feet, gave him a slamming hug.

“Best you’ve ever been,” Adam signed him off. “Still room for improvement, though.”

John snorted. “Never fuckin’ good enough for you…”

“We’ve always gotta keep ahead, bro. You’re cleared to fight. So…go stack ‘em for me.”

He loved the big bastard with all his heart. John smacked him once on the shoulder, nodded seriously, and went off to get suited. Last visual inspection as he walked away. Beautifully fit for purpose, fuck yeah. The team was in good hands, there.

Gonzo was next, the young high-end Hero kid who was already every bit Adam’s equal in everything. Maybe even a little bit better. Yeah. A bit heavier. Had a more ‘Horse-like shape than most Heroes too, except just that bit more refined than Adam, maybe a little bit more athletic and powerful. More than a little, honestly. Hunter had very little competition anywhere, in or out of the team. He was a goddamn stud and he damn well knew it.

Still crushed him on the mat, but honestly that was mostly experience and a little luck. Adam made sure to say so, gave him some praise as he left. Hunter favored him with a ridiculous, happy and slightly smug flex on the way out. He’d earned it.

Hoeff, now. He’d be off doing something different, and for that critical mission he’d be wearing a MASS of his own. That meant he got the workover too. Honestly, he was a mensch. Once they’d fixed his long-standing metabolic problem—tentatively with diet, then permanently with (nowadays) fairly trivial gene therapy—he just blew up and nothing seemed to slow him down. Hoeff had everything ‘Horse or Hunter did, compacted into the same five-foot-four shortstack he ever was. Maybe he couldn’t run quite as fast on those short doom-pillars he called legs, but he was heavier, stronger and somehow even quicker, and dense to a degree almost nobody could match. Dude was basically fucking indestructible.

A good thing he was all that, too. He and Wilde were going off on the special mission Adam had originally been briefed on years ago at Ekellim-Igigi, the one that was going to require someone trained up to his level. But, no. He’d handed off to Hoeff. Uncertainty around nervejam meant Adam wasn’t going. Not going on the most important mission of all time.

Fuck.

“How’d the fitting go yesterday?’

“Easy,” Hoeff grunted. “Much better’n the old shit.” Pose, stretch. No compromised function despite the extreme bulk he carried. Zero asymmetry. Dude was a freakish sort of perfect.

“Mhmm.” Couldn’t feel anything wrong in his shoulders, which had once been a problem…well, now they had no give at all. Not unless he relaxed and Adam really went for it, and even then all he could manage was to slightly dent the bastard.

“Ow.” That was it. Ow. Adam shook his head in amazement.

“Fuckin’ hell. Any complaints or anything?”

“Nah. Fits like a dream. Makes me feel stronger, which is a surprise…”

“And a little scary.” Which was true.

“No shit. Thanks for that.”

Didn’t need to say more. He was a man of few words.

“De nada. So…we haven’t sparred in a long damn time, and now I’m genuinely curious. You’re almost half a yard shorter but you’re heftier and put up bigger lifts.”

“Have more experience fightin’ oversized Slabs, too.” Hoeff grinned savagely.

“Right. So…”

They tumbled too. Interesting fight, that. Hoeff was stronger. Significantly stronger. Partly that was his proportions, especially in his legs. But he had gorilla-arms to go with his cuboid build, so they weren’t that much shorter. Adam went in having no idea how he’d fare. And at first he dominated, even if he couldn’t actually hurt the diamond-bodied fucker…

Until Hoeff got a grip. The instant he got his hands or feet locked together, it was game over, because between the two Adam was downright squishable by comparison. It was like someone slowly ratcheting a comealong tighter and tighter. He tapped out at the end, once Hoeff started really having fun working Adam’s bulk into bruised jelly. He could have taken a lot more abuse, but there was no point in forcing the issue; Hoeff would have crushed him flat and put him in the hospital.

“Shit, dude.” Took a bit to catch his breath, let the Crude work its magic while a mildly smug Hoeff pinned him under his ridiculous weight. Adam eventually groaned like he wanted to get up, and Hoeff politely popped up to his feet and proffered a mitt. Adam took it and was effortlessly yoinked back to upright.

“I coulda gone a lot harder.”

Adam nodded, “I could tell.”

“Yeah. You’re just too damn big an’ strong to play nice. And tricky.”

“Thanks, I guess…”

“I mean it. We should spar more, we’d learn a lot from each other.”

Okay. Fair enough.

“Sure. Plenty of motivation to up my conditioning game now…anyway.” He nodded. “You’re good to go. Godspeed.”

Hoeff looked up, proffered a hand to match Adam’s, and gave a genuinely crushing shake.

Quick conversation was honestly a kind of mercy. Hoeff got it. Adam watched his thick-legged swingaround gait as he sauntered away; Hoeff was probably the gold medalist in pushing himself far beyond his natural limits, and had managed not to ruin his lines in the process, either. Which was saying something; it a fuck of a lot of extra work on top of everything else to do that, even if for men like them it usually meant they’d wind up as particularly fetching bricks by the end of it.

Still. Pretty-brick was better than being a perfectly functional yet lumpen ball of muscle, so nobody on the team was slack about any of it. Hoeff was still a standout though, and Adam couldn’t help but admire the impossible fireplug of a man. One who could provably break him in half now, too.

New goals, right there. One day, he’d do the same, but at Warhorse scale.

Double-check the list: so far, so good. Couldn’t find a damn thing wrong with anybody, yet. They’d all been well taken care of, and they’d all paid close attention to their health. He checked them all off without hesitation.

Past Hunter and Hoeff, things got fuckin’ biblical. Adam had been proud of his friend’s accomplishments even before he joined the team, but now that he was on-team, they didn’t need to hold back at all. And boy howdy had he ever responded! Playboy had honed himself into something truly special these last few years. Form and function, improving each other. He was the poster-boy for the human race, and rightly so. Dude was goddamn flawless.

Still looked fuckin’ weird with short hair though. Like, good weird, but still weird. Julian was supposed to be fuckin’ Tarzan! And Tarzans had a shaggy mess of hair, not a helmet ‘hawk.

“It does feel funny,” Julian admitted, reaching up to scrub at the bristly hairs. Fuck. Hard to say exactly who had the best-looking arms of all, but Adam knew where he’d bet his money.

“Well, put your fuckin’ babe-hook down and leave it alone,” Adam grinned. Julian was so easy to tease. “Respectfully, of course.”

“Heh. You’re gonna pay for that when we get back…”

“Well,” Adam nodded, suddenly feeling it in his heart. “Good reason to come back, then.”

“…Right.”

Slightly awkward goodbye hug, which turned a little playful when Adam tried to squirm free…

“Nah. Ain’t gettin’ away from these babe-hooks ‘till I say so!” Arms tightened, breath smashed right out of him. No worries, it was all in good fun. Besides, pretty-dude was the penultimate HEAT operator these days, so it wasn’t like Adam could say otherwise. Might get beaten up and have his lunch money stolen, too. Ha!

They only sparred for fun, because Adam was basically helpless against Playboy these days. He was dense and tough like Hoeff, but taller and much heavier still, with a far more usefully athletic shape. He looked like a faultless Hero, and he was. Against a functional physique like that, skill and experience hardly mattered. His only real peer was his best bud Vemik.

Honestly, Adam was fuckin’ proud of them both.

Forehead-to-forehead goodbyes, and then he too prowled away, an ultra-muscular paragon of a man heading off to the hunt. Christ. They really were sending their very best for this.

Well, the unbroken ones, anyway.

Yan was a bit gruff like Hoeff today, and kept his own counsel. No reason not to; he was physically progressing at his own pace, as fast as was natural for his kind. He still didn’t see much need for the spacemagic, because his people could be exceptionally long-lived if they were also exceptionally dominant. Quirk of their genetics. Legend and archeological evidence had shown stable blackcrests to be extremely rare, maybe one or two at any given time, but they could live a hundred years easy, until the demands of their bodies eventually outgrew their ability to hunt and feed themselves, and their brains literally starved to death.

Or the testosterone poisoning became so severe they couldn’t control themselves, which honestly led to the same sort of mental collapse. Either seemed a terrible fate, but Yan was a wise old man. He had a long time before that was a worry, especially with modern diet science available. So for now, he built himself up himself. He didn’t make a habit of the Crude because he straight didn’t need it for the moment. He knew what he was doing.

So, he performed. Showed off what it meant to have a build that made Hoeff or Julian look soft and scrawny, while still able to scratch his ear with his foot. What the peerless form and symmetry of his people looked like, enough to make even a Niksum stud blush with envy.

He knew what he had, too. “I’m pretty good, yes?”

Big cheesy fang-grin, that.

“Yup! Now, any injuries I gotta know about? Bad food one night, maybe Singer was a bit too rough with you?”

“Feh,” Yan grunted dismissively. “Impossible. No woman can best me!” That playful ten’gewek chauvinism came out, which wasn’t as offensive as it might be with humans; their women could literally roar. “Maybe you worry about Aleks, his woman is strong I can tell…”

Adam grinned, “you ain’t wrong!” Down the list. Check, check. Check. “Good thing you’ve got a new buddy to keep you on your toes.”

As Vemik and Julian were happily matched up, so too were Yan and Alex, who wasn’t there; Adam checked him over yesterday so he could form up with his Niksum. They’d become good friends and together were about the only force in the universe that could keep Vemik and Julian properly contained and in their place. Necessary skill, that.

“Yes! Very fine young man. I teach him very much! Learn from him, too.” Tell-tale tail twitch…

“Maybe I show you!”

Pounce. Across the room and into the padded wall. Hip-toss the bastard to the other wall—

He rebounded off the wall with the slightest of effort and used his legs to kick off like a fucking rocket. So they wrestled, but only because that was how ten’gewek expressed their affection. Adam could dig it, even if he was barely a child next to Yan’s unfathomable speed and strength. Yan toyed with him for a while in the playful ten’gewek way—so fierce, crushing, and hard. But not too long. They had a mission, and not even Yan’s cheery aggression could long rebel against that. Approved, and Adam helped trim up his crest a bit for the suit.

He had a moment to collect his thoughts. Damn, what a fuckin’ crew this was. And he hadn’t even considered the rest of the package. The Grand Army had grown into something leaner and meaner over the years of the gaoian drawdown and the sudden influx of Western personnel, along with very trainable and fit young men from every corner of the late Earth. The Space Navy was…well, Adam didn’t really grok navy stuff, being honest, but he knew what they were. Deadlier now than at any point. The logistics behind them was pretty epic and on point, and of course that was what really won a war.

The SOR was the best possible spear-tip to open that wound. The Grand Army and the Space Navy would together make for a long, sturdy shaft behind the spear. Add in Daar’s effectively infinite wealth, combined with the UP’s full logistical might…

That was a hell of an arm to drive that spear in deep.

Fifth was last up for inspection, the most thoroughly maximum hench-ass motherfucker in either the human or ten’gewek species, second only to Daar. One look at the demigod of war silently shaking the floor as he prowled in to be examined told the story for anyone to see. Normally there was a point where bigger and stockier stopped being better. Everyone had a limit somewhere, even extreme Heroes like Hoeff or actual paragons like Julian or Alex…

Not Christian. Maybe Yan would prove like him one day, but not yet.

Yup. Adam was done. Surpassed. Superseded. Christian was as far beyond Julian as Julian was beyond Joe Blow Average right off the street. He was the man who had wrestled and pinned an entire team of Niksum into submission at Rooney’s without so much as disturbing a single seat or jostling a beer. The man who did the same to HEAT on the regular, who actually won in one-against-everyone games of Gravball and for whom new such lopsided games were continually being invented. Who, if you’d scaled him down to Hoeff-height, would still be the heaviest, stockiest motherfucker in the SOR. Righteous was meant to be extreme.

He was the one who had unambiguously committed the rest of his life to the cause. Something only Adam had ever done, and then only quietly. Righteous was the HEAT, now.

They both knew it was torch-passing time.

The docs both knew, too. They looked at Adam, checked off and left them alone. Really, this was just a formality where Firth was concerned. Adam for his part just…well, there wasn’t anything less than optimal about the big fucker, nothing head to toe that wasn’t incomparably better. He moved better than basically anyone else, too. Flawless self-control, yet so explosively fast and strong he could thump the air with punches, slaps, even kicks.

He and Yan (and Alex, too) were totally unreal that way, though that didn’t make them any kind of equal. Christian was something else altogether. There wasn’t any competing with that. Still getting better, too. Hadn’t slowed down at all.

“Perfect score,” Adam sighed with both pride and some honest envy. “I can’t even offer any suggestions. Besides, I don’t s’pose you’d let me find anything wrong even if I wanted to.”

“No. But there ain’t nothin’ wrong. I got a body made for this.”

Quick look up and down. Not a greek model was he, nor did he have a comic book sort of build. He was an aesthetic hulk. Honestly, he was one of the very few Adam would say looked better than the Niksum weirdos, precisely because of his build. Huge and mega-wide from head to toe and front to back, but proportioned flawlessly under all that muscle. The two of them had taken his incomparable physique and stuffed it utterly full of ability. Then the Crude and his genetics let him adapt properly to the size, and they kept pushing it…

Righteous was something unique, a work of brutalist art. Nobody else could manage such an extreme body. He was a living weapon unlike any other. He was the human Daar.

Adam shook his head in disbelief at what they’d wrought. Were still forging. “No shit.”

An’ I got you ‘ta thank for it.”

Adam again shook his head. “No, you really don’t.‘Member the Zangief statue?”

“It’s on my desk.”

“You make him look like a flabby, narrow-shouldered, scrawny little bitch.”

“Ha! Well, I like bein’ the big freak everyone stares at. Always did. Like what I see in the mirror too, I admit…so does Freya. And yeah, I do gotta thank you for that.” He gave a teasing grin. “An’ not jus ‘fer bein’ tied up with Julian and Gilgabro ‘fer most prettiest these days, neither.”

Adam grinned. “Like the attention, huh? Bein’ a caveman kinda eye-candy will get you that.” Those fucking thot-addled celebrity polls.

“Eh, it’s fun. Privacy’s better, though!” Firth chuckled, and gave Adam a sorta fake-smug grin. “I ain’t complainin’ either way. Sarry ‘bout knockin’ you an’ ‘Base outta the top five.”

“You ain’t sorry for shit, don’t pretend!”

“‘Yer right. I ain’t. I can’t help bein’ this fuckin’ pretty.”

“Firstly, it was Alex and that korean singer who actually did the deed. I ain’t mad being top-ten in a pretty-man list next to that!”

“Well, he is actually kinda good-looking I guess, for a scrawny k-pop type…”

“Exactly. So secondly, you can go fuck right off, chief!”

“Naw. I got a wife for that. Y’all are too puny an’ breakable anyway.”

They both chuckled. “I still say that was a bullshit poll! Fuckin’ ESNN propaganda…but no.” Adam sobered back up. “Really. Don’t thank me. Thank yourself. It’s the attitude that matters, man. Even with your ridiculous—”

“An’ dubious.”

“And basically engineered heritage, you wouldn’t have built yourself into any of this if you weren’t ready for this fight in your head. It takes balls and heart to do something this brave.”

Firth looked…embarrassed, suddenly. Looking down at his huge feet, shuffling on them a bit nervously. “I know,” he said, in a quiet rumble. “Like I said. I’ve got you to thank for it.”

“Dude, I just said—”

“No, listen to me, ‘ya idjit. I owe everything to you. If you hadn’t come along, humbled me, taught me a real work ethic, showed me how far determination could go…dude, I wouldn’t be a tenth of the man I am today. I wouldn’t have a family, wouldn’t be any of this. You showed me what it meant to be a proper fuckin’ man. I’m able to be the best because of what you taught me. An’ I don’t mean diet or exercise. I mean in here.” He tapped on his skull. “An’ here, too.” He thumped his chest. “It all means a lot more to me now.”

Adam….didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t really want to hear it, either. He’d had all those sessions with the units psychs over the years because on some level he knew he was kinda way off on his own extreme. What Christian was saying just didn’t sit comfortably.

“Yeah, well…you got me beat in the end,” he said, lamely.

“No, you idjit. It ain’t about that. At this level, bein’ jacked and mean is just table stakes. What matters is heart. I didn’t have it. I was just skatin’ along all big and badass, gettin’ off on being king shit. You taught me how much that din’t matter at this level without th’ rest. ‘Cuz you had heart. It’s you more’n anything else that really made HEAT work, y’know. You were our heart an’ fuckin’ soul! It ain’t just ‘cuz you were a wall o’ muscle.”

“I mean, I guess?” Adam objected, weakly. “But I’m a Protector! That was what we were originally for, remember? Bein’ the hugest was our job. We were the best at it! Now…”

He really couldn’t help but compare himself. He loved Christian, really he did. He’d grown so much as a person over the years, really became a stand-up guy…and that was just one more way where he was better in every single thing and it made Adam feel sorta terrible, and then even more terrible that he was feeling this shit in the first place. What did it matter!? Used to be, he could toss Firth and half the team over one shoulder!

Now Adam couldn’t even heft him on Akyawentuo. What good was he anymore?

“Hey. You’re doin’ the thing.”

“…What thing?”

“The thing where you size yourself up and sigh in your head.”

Shit. “Am I that obvious?” Seemed like a repeating theme today.

“Yeah. You’ve never been good at poker…but stop it, ‘kay? Take some old man advice. I ain’t pullin’ ‘yer leg when I ramble on ‘bout heart an’ all that. It mattered.”

“Shit, did it really? I mean, I’m just a guy. A guy that can’t hack it on the team anymore.”

“No, you fuckin’ ain’t. Firs’ly, save for ‘yer injury you got saving us all an’ fuckin’ civilization along with it—ain’t even th’ first time you pulled that shit, ‘member? Savin’ all that, you’d still be one o’ the best on th’ team! Don’t worry ‘bout my mutant bullshit. I can’t help that an’ neither can you. An’ heart fuckin’ matters.”

“I guess…”

“Dude. Fuck. I know you fuckin’ hate it, but none of this woulda happened if you hadn’t been an excellent dude in the right time in the right place. Regaari wouldn’t’a happened. Daar wouldn’t’a happened. We’d be dead, alla us, an’ we wouldn’t be on this mission right now to go shove our great big freedom dicks right up their fuckin’ third point o’ contact.” Firth paused for effect, grinned smugly, then pulled his leg-dwarfing arms and the titanium slabs of his chest into an apocalyptic most-muscular, one fit to make Adam feel microscopic and puny. “An’ since I’m th’ most hugest walkin’-ape these days, I’ll freedom ‘em the hardest!”

Adam couldn’t resist a snrrk at that one. Nor could a few of the others, he heard. Firth gave them a look to the effect that further eavesdropping was gonna grow his shit-list, then looked down at Adam again, took a deep breath, and spread his hands in a half-shrug.

“…I’m in this for the long haul. As long as it fuckin’ takes. And that’s…it’s fuckin’ scary. I don’t wanna do this alone, Adam. I don’t wanna be either this untouchable king-shit freak or, y’know a little squishable bug next to Daar, much as I love everyone…I want a peer. Maybe, I dunno, Julian and Alex might catch up one day. Maybe Gilgabro? Hell. Maybe Yan or some big gaoian bear, too. But maybe not. You, though? I think you jus’ might, ‘cuz you don’t know how to stop. Or if anyone else is gonna do this at my level, it’ll be you who gets them there. So…don’t give up on yourself. I ain’t. An’ I know the big bear boss ain’t, neither.”

Campbell saved Adam from having to come up with a reply to any of that. “Your station’s ready, Righteous. Time to squeeze ‘yer thunderass in the tube.”

Firth glanced at him, acknowledged him with a nod, then looked back to Adam, grabbed his arm in a palm-to-wrist crush-grip, and pulled him in (…and up) for a hug. A full Firthly force slam-smash, one which probably broke a rib or something.

“We’ll talk when I get back.”

And that was it. He put Adam down and sauntered off, the best the human race had to offer. On his way to risk it all for everyone.

Adam…had no further role to play. He’d done his bit. There was no suit waiting for him, no stasis bottle, no mission. His part in TILE FLIP was over, notwithstanding a little paperwork. And even that amounted to nothing more than just tapping a couple times on his tablet.

So…he went home.

Marty had made him promise, on that score. She knew him too damn well, knew he’d mooch around at the base waiting and lurking and agonizing over not being involved, so he was under wifely orders to get his ass home once he was done and his duty day was over.

Something stopped him. He found himself casting around, looking for something else to do, some other way to be useful…

He realized how dumb he was being, and even chuckled. Every fucking thing he thought of involved, somehow or some way, training. His thoughts were terminally meathead, forever thinking like a coach.

He’d done what he could. He’d been useful enough. And they’d still need him afterwards. Also, he’d need to be a landlord later on, but that was for tomorrow Adam.

So…fuck it.

He went home.

Diego, Sam and Paz were with Freya and the Firth warren; they had a lot of friends living between the two apartment buildings, and other HEAT families too, so he wasn’t going to take them from that. Besides. Adam was pretty sure Diego was sweet on quiet Jenny. Big-puppy, man-crushing, hulking Diego suddenly bashful and shy around quiet little pretty Jenny.

Adorable.

Marty met him on the doorstep with her hiking boots on, and the keys to a rental truck in her hand. She knew what he needed: time and space to walk and think. He grabbed his heaviest pack…considered the truck’s Insufficient Hugeness and decided on something a bit more modest. Tossed in his meal-bag too, and a big jug of water.

Necessities taken care of, they drove out to Lakebeds, and took the steep way up Mount Dagnabbit. Talked about…other stuff, for the moment. About whether or not there really was a thing with Diego and Jenny (probably just a mutual crush right now), and how Paz was doing at school (much better now!), and…normal stuff. Parent stuff.

There was nobody else on the mountain. It was a clear enough day to see all the way to the ocean. Fuckin’ beautiful, really. A perfect spot to stop and eat…

Weird combination in his meal plan this time. Rice, chicken, banana, cinnamon, hot sauce, some other stuff. Worked though.

Marty was watching him, he realized as he mixed it all up. As if what she saw pleased her. He paused and frowned at her, trying to figure out what was on her mind. “…What?”

“You’re okay,” she said. “Aren’t you.”

“Yeah.” He said it reflexively, the whole stoic ‘of course I’m okay’ bit. But then it hit him: he was. And it hadn’t been a question on her part.

The feeling kinda…hitched in his throat. He paused, glanced down at his meal, then nodded. “…Yeah, I am.”

Shit. Yeah.

He was. He…it was okay. He was okay. He thought about all his goals, and his schemes and his Lists and all that…and it was okay. Maybe he’d do it all! Or maybe not.

Maybe he didn’t get justice perfectly by his own hand, but…well, not even he could carry the whole world, right?

Marty smiled, climbed into his lap, and kissed him. He kissed her back, and felt like he’d let go of something he’d been carrying for a very, very long time. There was a future. He’d helped build it, and one day, when the time was right, he’d help build it again. But he didn’t feel the universe caving in on him anymore.

It was going to be okay.

Date Point: 3 days After Earth
Fort Powell Training Camp, planet Nightmare

Brigadier Anthony “Abbott” Costello

Costello was…busy. Like a fucking honeybee, in fact: literally every second of his entire existence at the moment was work, except for when he was asleep. And even that was carefully timetabled to make sure he was working efficiently.

But it was what he needed.

The HEAT had two definite camps when it came to the whole family life, partnership and romance thing: the minority who threw themselves wholeheartedly into having one, like Firth and Etsicitty and Thompson, and the majority who, yeah, went out dancing and had dating app profiles, and got laid when they could but were reserving commitment for…afterwards.

Costello was in that second camp. Waiting for afterwards, when the stakes would be lower, and his own death less of a concern. He’d hate to imagine himself leaving a grieving family…

But that rationale didn’t make him immune to some amount of loneliness. Especially now, with all his extended family in stasis…and especially with the lingering melancholy of Earth’s loss. He doubted he’d ever quite recover from watching the world burn.

Work was a distraction. And Fort Powell (he had to wonder just what Stainless would have made of having an icy hellhole named after him) was especially distracting. The target world for TILE FLIP was cold; the JETS teams deploying there needed to be able to thrive in arctic conditions, and pass without trace through snow and permafrost.

And God, could they.

The gaoians especially loved it. Nightmare? Hardly. Gao was a freezer in its own right, in the depths of winter, and gaoian fur, when kept long, was so insulating that they could sleep outside, naked and unprotected, and remain perfectly dry: their body heat didn’t penetrate the fur enough to melt the ice. They’d tuck their paws and nose in, curl up in a body ball, and by morning there’d be a mound of snow that shook itself apart and got on with the day, completely happy. When it came to moving stealthily in wintry conditions, gao were in their element.

The humans and ten’gewek, being respectively adapted to dry or decidedly wet heats…less so. While it was true the men of SOR were almost universally fond of a much colder clime than most other humans, given the prevalence of the Heroic among them…there were levels to this game.

Their very lives depended on the integrity of their full-body excursion suits. They suppressed heat signatures, filtered exhalation for heat and gases. Fully-sealed, they would leave hardly any detectable thermal or chemical trace of their passing.

If they failed, priceless human and ten’gewek operators in their absolute superbeing primes would freeze to death in minutes. And damage the mission.

So that was the Nightmare training. It was less about passing without trace in the snow, important as that was, and much more about living 24⁄7 in the suit.

And during their training, they had been hunted. By none other than Playboy himself. Which meant that, despite having evaded detection for many days…they were doomed.

Costello grinned at the memory, having only been a week past.

“I have them,” the perfect bastard had subvocalized over the radio. “Sneaky game, or gorilla rage?”

Costello remembered thinking about that, though of course he hadn’t been directing the exercise. He’d simply listened in as he worked on flag-level things. It was Major Campbell’s team, now. Julian was a brevet captain, on demonstrated merit, and now second in command. The team seemed happy with it, and it seemed to be working well.

Gorilla, Costello had thought. They won’t be subtle with us.

Campbell thought the same thing, and said so over the radio. Costello grinned and brought up the relevant camera feed to re-watch the now-legendary pounce. One didn’t often get to see Playboy in his element, truly off the chain.

He didn’t disappoint. One second there was an innocuous snow-burdened tree, the next there was a human explosion. Maybe three seconds of incredible violence, and he had the entire team cuffed and groaning in pain. He then shouldered the helpless men all at once like so many sacks of flour, and carted them off to phase two of his cold-weather funhouse.

God, they’d lucked out with an officer like that.

Now here they were. All that work, all that training, all that preparation…it had all led to here. It had all been for this moment, that commitment moment of finally putting on the MASS.

Fuck.

Costello felt high, almost. And he knew perfectly well he was probably about the calmest and most restrained man-in-a-can they had right now. Everyone was carbed up, amped up, wired, practically frothing to tear the walls apart from how utterly fucking ready they were.

Righteous grumbled as he squeezed himself into his tube, the one that was made to accommodate him and a few of Stoneback’s most biggest. He wasn’t quite as tall as some of the biggest bears—not something one could often say about a seven-foot-nine man! But he dwarfed them all. When one tries to stuff that tube with the broadest, most densely heaviest and comparatively stockiest strongman alive aside from Daar himself, one layered over in immensely thick ultra-heavy armor and loaded down with all the killy toys he could carry…

Well, lucky for him the subjective experience would be brief. He’d either see the door close and then immediately open right into combat, or…

Well, he wouldn’t. And if that was the case, none of them would, most likely.

Not a mundane moment, that. Fight or instant death, made all the more potent by what that meant for all of them. No easing into a fight for them; they had to be ready to go instantly.

Costello made sure to be there for each man as they closed the tube. He put a hand on Firth’s giant armored shoulder, briefly tapped his helmet against the man’s chestplate. Wasn’t tall enough for helmet-to-helmet, sadly. Huge mitt pawed the back of his head. Love, but not without duty. They knew the tragic score between them.

He didn’t have exactly the words he wanted, either. So instead, he simply nodded.

Firth nodded quickly in reply, and snorted in his helmet as he squirmed in place and braced. He was a wide-eyed hulking colossus of perfect viking murder right then, one peaking on the most potent combat and performance pharmacology the superscience could produce. His incomparable muscles were literally shaking under his armor with anticipation and aggression.

They’d all be like that, when they were unleashed. Of all the things HEAT could do, that was the real secret to what they were and how they performed. They knew how to Ride the Dragon, and had over the years honed it to a craft unlike anyone else could perform. A dragon that would outright kill normal men and drive the less disciplined into insanity or fatal bloodlust.

For them, it just made servicing their targets faster and more precise. Made the objective attainable. They were pushing it pretty hard this time. Costello too, though not yet. He had a few more things to attend to before they put him in stasis.

But not until he’d seen all his men taken care of. He watched as the titan of a man positioned the balls of his huge left foot firmly against the kick-off plate. He wiggled his toes inside his flexible armored footwear to get as comfortably wide and ready as he could, bent his knee slightly and growled in anticipation, those gauntleted paws of his death-gripping the egress handles. Because he was such a big target, he more than anyone else on the team needed to move with extreme aggression the instant he could, so from his perspective he’d explode out of the tube the moment the door clicked closed, ripping it apart with his sheer strength.

They needed to be certain to open his tube pointing in a safe direction. Front toward enemy.

Stasis. That was the thing about the HEAT, when absolutely perfectly amped and prepared and ready there was no force like them. And for TILE FLIP, when the moment came to pull the trigger, they needed that perfection. How to achieve that reliably?

Simple. Make it happen, then stick the whole unit in a bottle like an explosive genie. Keep ‘em there until JETS came back with the go signal, and then…showtime.

Which meant everyone going into stasis was going so with the full expectation they’d need to do violence the moment they emerged. Hell of a way to do things, really.

Whew. Yeah.

Deacon gave Firth one last look over, read his vitals—and raised an eyebrow at his heart rate—nodded, signed off…and closed the door. Click.

Stasis light on. The Righteous-bomb was fully armed, now.

“How ‘bout you, sir? Everything feel right?” She knew his own techs had done him right, of course, but the techs always cross-checked. He bounced his armor, felt it clinging tight and secure all over his body. No shift, no sag, no shuffle or shimmy. Like his skin was inches thick and bulletproof. Bombproof. Damn near everything proof.

“Good! Yeah. Good.” Fuck he was feeling amped up himself. Icon in his HUD—autolab was starting him on his ramp-up and taking its time for maximum effect. Clock ticking, now.

Deacon nodded and gave him the traditional slap on the helmet. “See you on the other side, sir.”

Costello just nodded, bounced a bit more, feeling all his weight through his toes, feeling the tightness of strength in his huge calves and feet. Strange feeling, that: simultaneously dart-quick and monstrously heavy. The one-two punch of HEAT, summed up right there. He shook his head, starting to feel the aggression build, then grabbed his officers. Campbell, Stephenson and Etsicitty. Soup, Snowcrash and Playboy, each just now prepping to don their undersuits and each looking massively more dangerous than the previous. Fuck yeah.

Having buttoned up all the enlisted, it was time to remind them of what came after suiting up.

“We’ve done as much as we can to prepare for this. Lean on your sim time, explode out of that tube and stack ‘em like cordwood. Let’s do the thing and bring ‘em all home, eh?”

They nodded, his thinking killers ready to go. Riding that line between grim and savage. There was no need for any more words, no need for an inspiring speech—they’d already had all that. So Costello did his rounds, watched the men, watched the techs, watched the preparations…

He would be the last into his tube. He’d given everyone a word and his personal attention—he loved them all and this could well be the last moment they ever saw each other. That very important step done, there were only two things left to do.

First, he had to report to General Jackson, to let her know the HEAT was ready. To his utter lack of surprise, she was in the company of King Alexander.

The Niksum armor was what happened when a secret cabal who’d been quietly accumulating some of the galaxy’s most advanced technology for thousands of years were inspired by the EV-MASS. Really, it was incredibly gratifying that they hadn’t found much to improve on. It weighed a little less, had deeper energy reserves and came equipped with its own warp drive, but that was about it.

His own HEAT operators couldn’t make time all wibbly-wobbly. But fuck that, they had the means and the men to just grunt at the problem harder. Ha!

Old tricks were the best tricks, really.

“Your Majesty. General.”

Rylee Jackson gave him a tight, tense nod. “All ready?”

“Yes ma’am. Loading into the bottles as we speak.”

“My men have done the same,” Alex confirmed.

“And two of the Queens,” Jackson noted.

Alex chuckled at that. “There’s no power in all creation that would keep Mevia and Tomoe out of this fight. Or the rest. The more martial among them are on hot standby.”

“Then we’re basically all set…” Jackson tapped a few things on her tablet, then tucked it under her arm with an air of finality. “The Counsels wanted to speak with you personally. They should be here any—”

Thump

“—Second.” A flash of the smile Costello remembered from back when Powell had still been alive touched her face as she looked toward the jump array. “You’ve got to give them points for timing, huh?”

“Father always did know how to make an entrance,” Alex agreed, chuckling.

“I do! Something we must teach you!” The emperor of mankind swept his kingly son into a fond embrace.

“Something to look forward to,” Daar agreed. “Gotta learn ‘yer old-man tricks an’ make ‘em ‘yer own!”

Costello watched the Entity’s daemon give Alex an up-and-down glance, meet his eye, then shrug. “I suspect he already knows,” she said. “Anyway…”

Gilgamesh grinned at his son then nodded more seriously. “Yes. Just a few words. There really is not time for much more…I gather your men are already in stasis, Brigadier?”

“Yes, sir. Primed and ready to go.”

“Then I have missed my chance to say these words to them, but I can still say them to you…gods speed you to victory. Now more than ever is the HEAT’s crowning hour, and I know you are prepared for it.”

“We’re with ‘ya an’ alongside ‘ya,” Daar agreed. “To the end.”

Quick words, but Costello appreciated them. They were followed crushing hug from Daar last of all, along with an affectionate head-rub, and the further unspoken assurance that, come to it, no need would be spared, no necessary risk untaken.

It was a necessarily brief thing: they had to steal Jackson for stuff above Costello’s pay grade, and that was fine with him: he wanted to check in with Father Michael. The man who had helped Costello understand and, maybe, find the meaning of faith. He and a…deacon? A gaoian deacon, at that! They had a ritual blessing to bestow up on all of them and the tubes they were entombed in. Fancy cape and everything. Water sprinkled. Prayer. A sincere one…

Feeling in his heart. Couldn’t put it to words. Maybe if he came back, he’d talk it out.

Then everyone was gone. Which left just…the last thing.

Hoeff and Wilde.

The two men had been lurking at the edge of the organized chaos, watching and waiting and trading shit-talk with the Lads as they went in their bottles. Now they were alone, and both looking damn ready for their own role in this…an effect somehow not spoiled by Wilde, who was wearing his “Goblin Mode” shirt today.

Dude was built like a goddamn goblin too. So it worked. But it was the squat wall of murder next to him that, honestly, was the one man in the world Costello genuinely feared. One did not fail to notice anyone Righteous showed respect to, especially one who was basically a Hunter- or a Warhorse-sized man compressed down and ready to destroy, one heavier and stronger than either these days. He was a mini-Righteous.

His expression was the serene, blank handsomeness of a genuine killer anticipating.

“I gotta say…it was good to see you two, before we kick this off.”

Wilde nodded. “We’re all ready to do this thing, sir.”

Costello nodded. Good. Nods all around said all that needed to be said. No more putting it off. Time to get his part in this done.

He went in the bottle. There was a clonk, the sound of the techs arming it, a faint whine of power, and—

Date Point 1 week After Earth
Starship Turkeyholic, uncharted space

Gumi, Brother of Clan One-Fang

Somewhere out there were three other ships, all doing the same thing he was: their absolute best at being invisible.

That was what the Turkey-class was best at, after all. With so many successful infiltrations to its name, they could be pretty damn sure of the design and its technology, and even though Gumi had some vague idea of roughly where the Drunkest on Turkeyest, the Carb Coma and the All The Trimmings might be (down to a few million cubic kilometers) every passive sensor said there was nothing out there but empty space.

The same was true of their hidden Payback-class muscle, the I’m Just Bulkin,’ the Murderous Caffeine High, and the ‘Don’t Tell Me To Calm Down’. They might be as big and as dangerous as a Fury class, but as far as the Turkeyholic was concerned, there was nothing out there but a few cold motes of dust.

When the Great Father started a tradition, it stuck. So it was with stealth ships, which had gleefully mischievous names in contrast to their more public-facing front-line counterparts like the Racing Blaze and the Punishing Wrath. Gumi was proud to fly a ship with some character. And doubly so to fly one that had saved his life and held together well after a fuck of a beating, last time.

Still. Less of a beating this time, please. He’d quite like to get through this and sire as many cubs as the prestige from TILE FLIP could earn him.

They were coming down at the poles this time. The target world was already frozen right the way to the equator, and the poles were basically just flat expanses of ocean frozen right the way down to the bedrock. Apparently the Hierarchy’s technology needed anchoring in rock rather than ice though, and so the planet-wide network had a big bald spot at each polar ocean, which in turn hopefully translated to gaps in sensor coverage.

Hopefully. Probably. Still, active cloaking and minimal-turbulence flight was in order for final approach.

Gumi didn’t know exactly how the targets had been identified. The weird alchemy of intel, combining their findings from previous visits with…what? Prisoner interrogations? Maybe? How would you even…?

Not for him to know. However they’d done it, though, the thinkers had identified target sites with enough confidence to send all the available JETS teams this time. There was a briefing package on what specifically they were looking for which was all way too arcane for Gumi to make ears or arse of, but…well, here they were.

Behind him, the mood was silent and focused. Suit checks, weapon checks, gear checks, quiet conversation that was little more than the bare technical minimum necessary to do the work. They all knew this was the big one. Nobody was in a joking mood.

Gumi just flew the ship. The problem with stealthy orbital insertions was, all that interplanetary speed, all that kinetic energy, still had to be got rid of somehow, and you absolutely could not do it in full view of the enemy’s defenses, nor could you do it by slamming into an atmosphere and burning it off the old-fashioned way. By the time they hit atmo, they had to be going slow, and that meant a long, long, long burn from a long way out.

If the Hierarchy had really, really good sensors, they might see an object with about the same sensor return as a grain of sand, accelerating. That would be a bit of a hint. But after the long burn was complete and they were entering, all Gumi had to do was turn active cloak on, make like a hole in the sky, and descend…

Smooth and gentle. There was an active sensor down there, pinging regularly in the low and mid radio bands, but the ship didn’t detect any variation in its activity that might suggest it had spotted them and they soon dropped below its field of view.

Fiery, instantaneous death did not claim them. Hurray.

Gumi hit the deck as quick as he dared after that point. Stealth once atmospheric flight was achieved was a matter of making as tiny a ripple in the air as possible, and getting safely on the ground in the minimum of time. The solution was an incredibly long and narrow flight surface forcefield cone: it felt like trying to fly a needle.

A needle that could cunningly lose itself in a haystack. Or rather, disguise the turbulence of its passage by plunging into the polar easterlies and making like just another stray zephyr.

Fiery, instantaneous death continued to not happen.

Down out of the polar winds, into the subtropical westerlies, and low. If this planet were a sane temperature, the Turkeyholic would be kicking up spray from the waves as it skimmed over the ocean. As it was, an endless landscape of rucked, folded and fractured ice became a uniform blue-white blur below them as Gumi shot at mach 4 toward the LZ.

Mountains on the horizon. Marked on the maps as “Range 6,” they were the crucial final component of his approach, the vibrant young children of this planet’s final tectonic upheaval a mere five hundred million years ago. Lanky teenagers, by mountain standards, and an impenetrable wall to ground-based sensors. He skirted along the range’s south and west edge, slowing as he did so to a mere thousand kilometers an hour, then sideslipped in down a glacial canyon, bullied off the last of the speed by spreading the flight surfaces until a flat puck of air nearly a hundred meters across brought Turkeyholic skidding to a hover…

And down. Landing gear made contact with the frozen rock, and they had somehow managed to not suffer fiery, instantaneous death.

Gumi shook off his paws, flexed his fingers, and exhaled. Well. That was it. He’d done his part. His role in TILE FLIP was, for the moment, over. Other than powering the ship down and refrigerating the hull to mask their presence, of course.

Brother Druun patted his shoulder appreciatively, and the team bustled down the ramp in silence. There was a minute or two of busy activity as they deployed the camo netting, then they vanished almost instantly amidst the ice and rocks. Gumi performed his post-flight checks, satisfied himself that all was as it should be, and grabbed his blanket.

It was going to be a very long and very cold wait for what came next…

Date Point: 1 week, 1 day After Earth
Watcher’s Grave, uncharted space

Zero

“I still don’t really believe you when you say the assault could already be underway. We would know, surely?”

Zero indicated otherwise with a slow, patient gesture. “They have spent a long time studying us and learning how to defeat our sensors. We, meanwhile, have barely studied them at all. We do not actually know what they are capable of. We presume much, and know only that they are coming. Soon. And given that their aim must be our defeat, they will come in full force.”

“That does put us in quite the quandary.”

“Yes. On the one hand, we can assure the approaching fleet’s obliteration if we call in Hierarchy. However, if we do so…”

“Then Hierarchy will become fully aware of our control.”

“Yes, but worse: we may be destroying any hope of convincing them of the rightness of our cause.”

Dusk made a skeptical gesture. “You seem very taken by the idea that converting them is even possible, Zero.”

They were in the population control center, overseeing the creation of an army. Below their feet, a thousand machines were churning away, spinning proteins and raw minerals into bodies. For the first time since the fall of the Igraen Empire, its soldiers were being awoken to battle, and given bodies that were far more than just flesh.

Up until a few days ago, Zero would have thought it impossible to imagine a more terrifying fighting force. With cybernetics enhancing them beyond deathworld strength and adding options such as localized time dilation, he would have counted the archived Igraen army as unstoppable, especially given the relative simplicity with which a new one could be printed for every one that fell.

But he had seen the footage gathered by Hierarchy snoops inside the Discarded network. He had seen how these new enemies fought. He had seen what they could overcome themselves. He knew also there was much the Discarded had not seen…and he knew that true drive and will could redefine the insurmountable.

He was therefore no longer confident in the archived soldiers. They would have to serve, as there was simply no alternative…but he could foresee it being a harder fight than any of them had ever expected.

Tempting, therefore, to add every weapon they had. If the goal was slavish maintenance of the status quo.

“‘Taken,’” he said aloud. “Yes. The idea has taken my mind, just like an invasion force. And I cannot shake it. They have done so much, Dusk. Created so much that is unprecedented, and shown us that what we have created was insufficient to its task. If we do not convince them to join with us, then we shall lose all of that, when instead it could be turned toward greater ends.”

He turned away from the window that let him look down on the stirring output of their army, and looked her square in her central eye. After a pulse or two, she blinked and looked away.

“So. If we deploy Hierarchy to combat them, we will then need to delete and recreate Hierarchy from first principles afterward—”

“Assuming the gambit even succeeds,” Zero agreed.

“But if we do not, then we risk the success of whatever they might be planning.”

“And that may well be the destruction of Dataspace,” Dusk fretted.

“Perhaps.” Zero tapped a claw thoughtfully on the countertop. “I don’t think so. The Entity, so far as I can tell, would not and could not knowingly participate in a plan to destroy Dataspace. It could not do so without destroying itself, and looking at its code…well, I can’t make sense of the matrix tables of course. But the entry point loops over some very primitive gestalt directives. this.Survive() seems to be core functionality for this being. In other words, it can no more pursue a course of action that will end in its own demise than you or I could commit suicide by holding our breath.”

“And this emerged from an uploaded human?” Last expressed disbelief in a number of ways. He could see she was re-reading the documentation on the Entity again as they spoke.

“Indeed. Accidentally. Do you see why I am so fervent about this? If it happened once so easily, it can happen again. And the consequences…”

“You are saying that if we cannot destroy them we must recruit them.” Dusk observed.

“Exactly.” He looked around at their expressions. “They have already smashed everything. If nothing else, we require replacement resources, do we not?”

“I suppose,” Poise agreed. “But…”

“And given that our previous resources proved static to the point of eventual failure, it follows that we should attempt a thinking resource this time.”

Last summoned up the images of the deathworlders’ leadership. “ Look at them! Muscles and claws and fangs and hair. They’re feral!” she complained. “You can’t seriously believe that these can grasp higher realities and their importance.”

“Do they understand what Dataspace is? Do they think it is merely a compute network? Or have they imagined its more fundamental nature? Do you really think they can be made to understand what they are fighting, and why doing so is folly?” Poise agreed.

“They would not have reached this point if they were stupid,” Zero replied, calmly. “They are merely…incompletely informed. I have confident that our logic is inescapable, and that they will see as much when we present it to them.”

“…But you don’t anticipate they’ll be willing to listen unless we fight them.” Last said.

“Would we? A position of superiority makes it easy to feel confident in ignoring whatever pleas the other side may make as just a desperate attempt at salvaging themselves. We must win this fight first, then reach out.”

Last moved her head in a complicated way, indicating that she understood and agreed, but had grave misgivings. “I have reviewed what is coming, and I have formulated a stratagem I have some confidence in, but…I must warn you, victory is not assured,” she said. “What will we do if they win?”

Zero looked her in the eye, then singled out the Entity’s avatar and dragged the image of the human female to the front and center, where she stood looking tiny and frail compared to the hulking monsters around her.

“We must make them understand what they are,” he said. “Even if we all die, even if this is the very end of the Igraens and our Great Work, they cannot be allowed to remain ignorant of what this represents. Perhaps we have already doomed ourselves to failure. But given what we have committed ourselves to, and the terrible things we have done…I for one will not be so selfish as to drag them down with us. If they win, our final gift to them will be understanding. After that…it will be out of our control.”

“…Let us focus on winning, then,” Dusk suggested. “What more can we do, Last?”

Last promptly dragged more files into the display for them to review, and Zero took a step back to allow them to plan, contributing where needed. For his part, he was satisfied that they had the best possible chance of weathering this assault. And at the very least, it would cost the allied deathworlders. If they had more time to prepare, perhaps they could even turn the momentum, but…

Somehow, he knew they would not get the chance. It was coming, soon, he could feel it like an itch in the back of his mind, and he had learned to trust his connection. It was hardly ever wrong.

All he could do was hope that what they already had was sufficient. And, if it was not…

…He would address that problem when it was time.

Date Point: 1 day After Earth
Garden Station, the Ink Spatter Nebula

Daar

Daar had rarely known a space station to be truly beautiful. Most were just cities in the sky at best. Or collections of modules, in the more functional cases. What beauty they had was decoration added atop the functional foundation, or spaces set aside for the purpose. Ekallim-Igigi had the grandness of the city chasm and the palace dome, and Capitol Station had been an elegant marvel from the outside, before its destruction…

But Garden Station was something else entirely. Aesthetics had been built into the design from the very first principles. The Entity seemed to have made it a special point that no component made it into the structure unless it was both beautiful and efficient at its purpose.

Though it had to be said…the Entity’s sense of aesthetics took a few weird turns. Much like the gravity-defying upside-down stream, and the trees planted in the ceiling. But hey, if you could fuck around with gravity so that “down” was whichever arbitrary direction you wanted…why not?

Though, the Entity had redesigned the park dome a little bit since the last time Daar had visited. Now, there was a memorial to the Earth at one end of the lawn in the form of an elegantly swept white stone plinth. It was decorated on the front with the likeness of the human goddess Gaia, her hand raised in farewell as windblown seeds streamed from her palm.

The likeness of the Earth spinning slowly above the plinth was no hologram, but a weighty sphere of polished blue granite with the continents picked out in lacquer and brass held in place by invisible forcefields.

Yes, the Entity definitely had a sense of aesthetics. A very human one, at that. Daar couldn’t have asked for a better place for the Counsels to meet for this: it was the perfect reminder of why they were fighting.

Their meeting was necessarily short and informal.

“The Payback-class escorts detected no sign of any weapons fire or defensive activation. It appears that the four JETS teams have successfully deployed to the target world’s surface.”

“We’re committed now,” Daar grumbled. “For better or worse.”

“For better,” Gilgamesh declared, firmly. “Even if we fail, this fight is for the better. The only worse would be if we failed to commit at all.”

“No argument there,” Daar nodded. “I know I’ll be keepin’ personally ready. Tryin’ not ‘ta let it affect my public schedule…”

Standing at Gilgamesh’s left, Leifini tilted her head cautiously. “That might provide an indication or warning to the enemy.”

“Yup. One thing I gotta ask,” this time, he turned his attention to king Alex. “How ‘ya feelin’ ‘bout ‘yer role in this? It’s a lot ‘ta ask of one so young, meanin’ no offense.”

To his credit, Alex did not disappoint. He looked Daar directly in the eyes, standing tall, proud, and kingly, his beautiful queen Gabiya at his side. “My role is to provide sovereign presence as much as practical. I understand why it ought be me, rather than my father or My Father.”

…Balls, how he’d grown up. Daar remembered meeting him for the first time, really not that long ago, when he was this mutant boy with an innocent passion for spaceships and a cornfed enthusiasm for life—and girls! Twelve years old, yet out-wrestling Hoeff and people on the HEAT. Crazy! Now he was a king, and the people loved him for it. Hell of a story, that.

But the truth was he’d always been destined for the role, or one like it. The kid had perfect breeding. He and his father were ‘bout the only human beings alive these days who could stand next to the likes of Julian or Christian as peers. King Alex was a disciplined, serene sort of personality, too. Everything about him was tuned to kingly perfection. Even his passions were carefully modulated to enhance his leadership, rather than distract from duty.

So how much of all that was good breeding, how much was personality? How much was how he was raised?

How much of Alex was truly Alex? How much was…a willful performance?

…About as much of Daar as was Daar, probably. People in their position were only themselves as much as the position allowed them to be.

“…My Father?” Alex tilted his head questioningly. Remarkably young, that gesture. When humans did that it somehow conveyed a deep innocence that almost nothing else did.

“Sarry. Old man reminiscing a bit. Don’t worry,” Daar chittered, “you’ll git all absent-minded an’ sentimental, too!”

“I know that trap well,” Gilgamesh chuckled, and gave Daar a look that said he probably knew exactly what thoughts had been rattlin’ around in there.

Daemon, so far, had been silent. Now, she cleared her throat. “We have put all non-essential operations in standby mode,” she said. “All the processing power we could free up.”

“We have no idea when this might kick off,” Y!kiidaa noted, lookin’ as fit and strong as ever. “We’ve been quietly readying every aspect of Singularity for any sudden…needs.”

It hadn’t escaped anyone’s notice these last few years that the two most infamous practical jokers in galactic history had been re-inventing and rebuilding themselves to better match their own legends, especially in light of new galactic realities. And that same attention would notice their sudden dip in public presence. This really was an all-or-nothing gamble.

But of course, they’d known that. It wasn’t called TILE FLIP for nothing.

“We know,” Daemon agreed. “But factories don’t shut themselves down in an instant, yijao? The point is, we are now on a readiness footing and can deploy the instant we receive the signal, be it tomorrow or in two weeks.”

“Or two months. Anyhoo, I’ve got a meeting of the Conclave after this. I will be prepping Gao and her worlds for this as well. Then the Great Conclave of course. I was thinkin’ we ought do a joint briefing, seein’ as it’ll be all our governors-general in attendance.”

Now that had been a tangled bramble of a thing to sort out! They’d tried a unified government briefly in the form of human Champions, but…eh, it didn’t work and, in retrospect, would obviously have never worked. That was tryin’ to hammer them into a gaoian-like structure and it just weren’t in the tiles.

We try things. Sometimes they even work.

In the end, the obvious solution won out; each planet had a king. King William for Cimbrean, who swore fealty to Daar; King Alex of Lucent, who (obviously) swore fealty to Gilgamesh. Each had a menagerie of Governors-General under them representing the many and varied human nations that had escaped intact and avoided merging into larger, more dominant cultures. They all had the same rank, but the titles of that rank were confusin’ as balls. There was Shin Nihon on Lucent, with a shogun of all the fuckin’ things, and their crown prince taking the place of the old emperor. The scandinavian countries had their own Union with a Jarl, and had negotiated to claim some of the land on the edge of Cimbrean’s antarctic circle, where polar ice and mountains yielded a remarkably Norway-like land to make their own.

The French (with President) had carved out a territory in Nouveau Acadia, half of what had been Franklin was now La Union Hispana, the Indonesians had taken the difficult task of claiming territory between the Indian and Chinese—which turned out to go remarkably smoothly, once Alex had shown up, smiled, and did his thing…

The Jewish population had settled almost entirely on Gao, along the warmer isthmus, and seemed happy to live with, really, whatever form of government happened to be there, human or gao.

Daar was doing his best to memorize all of it, every detail. But humans were fractal: no matter how deep he went down a particular chain, he always found more to learn.

He had to impose some structure on it all. Nations had a Governor-General. The title they bore was for them to decide—Jarl, Duke, President, Crown Prince, Chancellor, Commissar even. Each world had a governing council chaired by a king or emperor above them, and likewise they had titles of their own. How much or how little power those sovereigns actually wielded was up to them, really. What was meant by “council” was open to interpretation, too.

Though Daar and Gilgamesh had both made it abundantly clear what would happen in the event of unjust abuses…emperors were greater than kings, after all. There were three: each was sovereign over their species everywhere, and of all beings within their territory. Entity was also the presumed lord of all Dataspace. Daar was sovereign over all. In the end, it seemed a structure that could grow across planets and maintain some unity of purpose and culture.

The coming centuries would test that.

And there were gaoian lands on both worlds now, too. They had their own Governors-General styled as Grand Champions, an ancient rank of territorial kings that briefly existed in the post-Fyu world, and found use again as more local champions of their peoples. Daar had even allowed a few to form on Gao. The human equivalent were Dukes, including now two on Gao, and if they were on Cimbrean many had been raised to royal Dukedoms, by king William adopting them into his family by letters patent.

Which left the Great Conclave. It was a meeting of all the emperors and kings, of every Governor-General all at once to decide on the highest matters, where not even emperors felt entirely comfortable making unilateral decisions. Matters of the Great Constitution were decided there. Trials of great peers would likely happen there, too. Legislative treaties were argued, binding all the peoples under Daar’s empire—for they were all ultimately his, both practically and officially, now.

Today, it would be where the highest organs of state and government learned of the state of war.

“Absolutely,” Gilgamesh agreed. “And through them, the people.”

“I make zero promises of secrecy from my own governors,” Alex grumbled. “It is too much in their power interests not to gossip, and there’s only so much persuasion I can apply.”

“What,” Daar teased. “Can’t just rock up to their palaces, give ‘em a little flex an’ a thrill?”

“Sorry,” Alex chuckled. “That’s not necessarily how humans work, you know.”

“Too bad,” Gilgamesh grumbled. “We used to, though! Worked for me back in the day…”

A little levity and a young man’s exasperated eye-roll at his dad lightened the mood a bit. Even Daemon stifled a giggle.

The three Counsels stood at the same time, shook hands, made their temporary farewells, and while Gilgamesh and Alex activated personal jump devices, Daar was left to enjoy the long amble back to the array up the path. Daemon joined him, her near-perfectly realistic hologram ruined only by her lack of scent and the way her feet failed to make the gravel crunch. So unlike him, whose ridiculous weight could grind the gravel under foot into sand.

Very different, they were. With different perspectives.

“And so the true work of empire begins,” she noted. “Conquering.”

“Does it? Emperors we three may be, but we are Counsels first. We chose that preference in title precisely ‘cuz we wanted ‘ta emphasize our hope ‘fer this union.”

“You mean, you chose it, made the argument, and we found no ability to disagree.”

“Heh!” Daar knew the difference between an accusation and Socratic testing. Gods, if Ava Ríos had been a gaoian…in all her forms, she never failed to challenge him.

“Somehow I doubt the lord of Dataspace and arguably the original king of humanity would be much put out by me,” he said aloud, listening for any eavesdroppers. None so far.

“And you’d be wrong,” Entity stated, directly. “We know our strengths, Great Father. We know they are not nearly so great as yours. And while you cannot easily intimidate me, I think not even Gilgamesh is entirely immune to the effect your presence has on people.”

“Eh, fair enough,” Daar conceded. “It’s one o’ the reasons I do this, ‘side from lovin’ it. But you could go your own way any time you like. I have no power over you.”

“Ah, but you do. And I have come to realize you need to understand that.” Daemon paused in the track. “We are immortal. The Entity is. We will survive, it’s what we do, it’s all we can do. And make no mistake: loneliness would kill us. So yes, okay, Von Neumann machine swarm, we’ll probably still be around long after you and Gilgamesh are gone…”

Ah. “But you will be here to see what comes after. And thereby, have a keen interest in me not fuckin’ it up too bad, eh?”

“It is important. We have come to learn that Dataspace is not quite what we imagined, Daar. It…it may be a more direct interface to something fundamental. And that begins to worry us.”

“What do you mean?”

“…Have you ever wondered why it’s so difficult for Entity to communicate? Why I need to exist at all? Why we are the same being, yet different persons, no matter how uncomfortably those associations might resonate in human culture? The Hierarchy has to go through an incredible effort to get their agents to interface with matterspace. Because, understand me here…dataspace is not built upon matterspace. Rather, matterspace and dataspace are both built upon something more fundamental.”

…Hol’ up. Daar scratched at his muzzle. “But…we’ve seen’ th’ infrastructure. Shit, we’re attackin’ the infrastructure.”

“Yes….” Daemon paused, thinking. “They’re connected realities, and if we somehow destroyed all the Igraen infrastructure then Dataspace would collapse and take us with it, which is why we’re so invested in doing this right. But at the same time, the infrastructure we’re attacking now doesn’t generate dataspace so much as….holds the bag open?”

She waved a hand in a complicated way when Daar gave her a blank look. “It’s the same problem I had with describing what the Relays do, language can’t adequately express it. Dataspace is simply one valid configuration of the underlying fundamental, so in a sense it has always existed and will always exist adjacent to matterspace no matter what we do. But its internal dimensions, for lack of a better term, are defined by the Igraen infrastructure.”

Daar tilted his head at her and took an instinctive sniff, before remembering that it was a waste of time in her case. “Why bring this up now?”

“Self-understanding comes slowly, and for us…well, we’re starting from first principles, yijao? We have nobody else’s work to build on because nobody else has ever been what we are. The problem is information. This world you live in is one of physics. It follows rules, it has a language of its own. But ultimately, it is indistinguishable from information at its most fundamental level. An electron is the numbers which describe it and the equations that govern its state. There is no difference. And all information systems are either logically inconsistent or semantically incomplete. This must be true by the rules of logic itself! There’s…lots of weird implications for that. The halting problem in computers, certain uncertainties in the quantum, all that kinda thing…the foundation of all mathematics is a hole.”

“Okay…I ‘member my philosophy. Cut to the chase.”

But he had a pretty good grasp of the problem already, now. And it was a fuckin’ doozy to drop on his lap, right at the propitious moment of action.

“We have come to believe that, whatever that hole is, or fissure in logical consistency might be…that is where intelligence lies. It is where minds come from. And until we came into being, accessing that source of…” she trailed off, groped for a word, then corrected herself. “Accessing that Substrate was impossible within dataspace. Thus, nothing there truly lives without matterspace-derived Substrate. It’s all just…very convincing imitations.”

“…Except you.” Oh, balls.

“Except us. We’ve absorbed a number of Hierarchy agents, if you remember. None of them was useful for an avatar like…this.” She gestured down at herself. “They’re not alive enough. But stick them in a living, matterspace body, interface them with Substrate properly, and suddenly they bridge the gap. They become curious, they gain appetites, tastes and obsessions. They become real people. That’s why the Hierarchy traditionally recompiles an agent after it spends much time occupying a host. But Six…”

“What about him?”

“He was the first to occupy a human body. And the first thing he did, we’ve learned from him, is, he went walkabout. Took in the sights and the smells, ate a hot dog, got drunk, went dancing. He spent a day as a human, and then he was never recompiled after that fact. It changed him permanently. And he’s spent as much time as possible in a human host ever since, and he’s still in a human host right now.”

She paused, then chuckled slightly. “He’s almost the Yang to my Yin, really. I’m a matterspace mind pulled into dataspace that depends on a vast and alien multiplicity to host me, and he’s a dataspace mind in matterspace who depends on an alien body to host him.”

“Daemon…time is short, yijao?”

She nodded. “The point is…dataspace is something we don’t understand properly. I’m not sure even the Hierarchy does. It’s necessary that we reprogram the Hierarchy, we have no doubts about that. But the infrastructure of dataspace itself…there could be all sorts of unintended consequences to what we’re doing.”

Daar…well, a sigh was such a wimpy lil’ word to encompass what he was feelin.’ “Daemon…I’m sensitive ‘ta ‘yer situation, an’ I’m glad ‘ya brought this up. But it is quite late in the game. What would you have us do?”

“Nothing. We’re not asking you to change a single thing about the plan. But we felt it was important you hear this before you have to make decisions in the future. We don’t know what’s coming, or what choices will face us. Best to have as much information as possible.”

“I get it.”

“Thank you.” She gestured to the array. “You have preparations to make, and we’ve held you up long enough.”

Daar duck-nodded in both agreement and farewell, four-pawed onto the array platform, and—

Thump.

—was back on Gao. Immediately, there was more that demanded his attention, more to think about, more to do…

But the Entity had timed its conversation well. What Daemon had told him was stuck in his head now, to be gnawed on like a tasty steak bone. He wasn’t going to forget that information any time soon, he could tell.

Nor should he.

They only had one chance to get this right, after all.

Date Point: 1 week 2 days After Earth
Dataspace adjacent to Garden Station

Entity

Okay, they’re ready.

Entity acknowledge Daemon’s update with some small amount of trepidation. It…was not really very comfortable with transferring the station’s systems over to mindless automation. Somehow, it just didn’t feel right to trust all those lives to an algorithm.

It’s cute that you care that much, but they’ll be fine. Even if this fails completely, it’ll be days before the air goes bad.

The Entity was quite aware of that, and reminded Daemon as much. Still…

It surprised itself by how much it fretted over the people in its charge. Human lives were infamously tough to the organic life forms of the galaxy, but they seemed so delicate from its perspective. The wrong blend of gasses, a sufficiently long disruption in the water supply, a disaster in the farming modules, a major hull breach…

Space was not a friendly environment.

Quit stalling and flip the switch already.

With a blend of amusement and irritation at Daemon’s impatience, the Entity did exactly that.

There were two immediate consequences. The first was a substantial uptick in its swarm’s available processing resources as the dedicated control systems took over running Garden’s environment, which of course was why it was relinquishing this control in the first place.

The second was that nobody died. There were no alarms, no sudden failures, no emergencies…the control systems took over so smoothly that the people sitting around in the control center still looked like they were waiting for the changeover to happen, and seemed quite surprised when Daemon informed them it already had.

Well…good.

Yeah.

Very good.

Yup.

One fewer distraction and load during the upcoming incursion.

Exactly.

…

The Entity found itself at a sudden loss. It was…prepared. Completely prepared. Everything it had thought of to do in readiness for TILE FLIP had been done. It had maximized its available resources, minimized its burdens, taken care of a huge amount of organization and tidying that had been waiting for years…it was ready.

And now it had nothing to do except…wait. That was a new experience. It had never been so thoroughly ahead of its objectives before.

Inspired by a memory-flash from Daemon, it loaded into one of its scout drones, far out on patrol outside the nebula, and directed it into a nearby star system. It had noticed a rather spectacular planet there some years ago. Now, for the first time ever, it had the opportunity to indulge in idle curiosity.

A ringed terrestrial. From the tropics, the ruins of a disintegrated moon were visible even during the day as a scintillating white sweep across the sky. Better yet, the planet was proto-temperate, though definitely not habitable yet. This was a world too young for photosynthesis, where life was in that awkward age between the abyssal volcanic vent nursery, and the full flourish of a Cambrian-style evolutionary explosion. For the moment, it was a landscape of gently percolating micro-organisms, with no higher life form there to appreciate the stunning view.

The Entity felt that was rather a shame. There were an infinite number of such unwitnessed beauties in the universe, it knew, but each one that it knew of saddened it somehow. Somebody really ought to pause and appreciate them.

So it did. For the first time in all its existence, it landed its drone and did nothing further, simply watched and appreciated as the rings turned high overhead.

It was the perfect way to pass the time.

Starship Dawnlight, Ekallim-Igigi, New Uruk system

Y!’kiidaa

“You’re very quiet.”

Kiidaa blinked himself out of his distant thoughts and back into the here-and-now, to tilt his head at Alex.

King Alex, by the gods. Gilgamesh had fathered many sons over the centuries, and Kiidaa had liked nearly all of them. They’d all grown into fine men, served the Line and the cause with distinction…and all had eventually retired to Earth, where their presence across the centuries and continents had no doubt served to make the process of genetic ancestry tracking a fair bit more complex than it otherwise would have been.

Alex was born at the right time to be the greatest of them, but that thought made it sound like he wouldn’t have been one of the best anyway. He was insightful, in a way his father wasn’t.

Very dangerous, that.

“This has been…a long path,” Kiidaa replied.

“True, but noncommittal.” Alex had learned a nasty habit of seeing right through him. On any other occasion, Kiidaa found it pleasantly challenging. Today, though…

He looked around the bridge. The Dawnlight was Alex’s flagship, the equal to Gilgamesh’s and any one of the Queens’ Fleet. A fine ship from which to lead an invasion, and far better suited to the task to come than Kiidaa’s own Seared Rascal.

So much potential had found its flower in such a young man!

And so much ability to put him on the spot, too.

“It’s nothing I want to bother you with,” Y!’kiidaa said, truthfully.

“Kidu, you’re my father’s oldest friend. If there’s something you’re worried about that I should know—”

“It’s nothing you need worry over,” Kiidaa replied. Truth.

“And if there’s something bothering you that will take your mind out of the mission—”

Kiidaa softened and ducked his head as he shook it. “Oh, my mind is entirely on the mission, I promise you that,” he said. True. “Alex…you have higher concerns than my state of mind. I am ready for this. I just have…much to reflect on.”

Truthy. No disguising his phrasing, not from Alex. The boy was (unbeknownst to himself) among the most intelligent beings alive. His intuition had no equal among his kind, and it was clearly telling him something was amiss.

“Kidu…”

“Please, Alex. My king. Let me have the privacy of my heart.”

This was the most dangerous moment. Alex knew him, far too well. If an honest, heartfelt plea was not enough, if he really committed to his gut feeling, then Kiidaa would be forced to lie.

Fortunately, Alex was still a young man, and still did not entirely trust his own intuition. He hesitated, and remembered that he had other duties as well, all waiting for his attention. He did what Kiidaa had always told him never to do, and trusted him.

“…Alright. Just so long as you’re ready to do this.”

Kiidaa duck-nodded. He didn’t dare speak a single word.

Alex sighed, clapped him on the shoulder, nodded, and went to tend to his other duties. Kiidaa watched him go, then withdrew to seek some privacy.

Breathing room. Atonement would come, in due time. And with it, the fulfillment of all his ancient oaths. All of them, including the ones he’d take back now, if he could.

…No, that was a lie. He still believed in all of them. If a wormhole were to drag him back in time to the moment he’d joined Leifini and the Void Caste and he’d made those private oaths, he’d make the same decisions all over again. Looking back, there wasn’t a single thing he regretted, not a single choice he felt he’d got truly wrong. Imperfect, yes. Wrong?

No. And that was the most anyone could ask for: the world never lived up to mortal notions about what perfection looked like.

TILE FLIP, least of all. TILE FLIP would be a triumph, he was certain. But it would not be perfect.

He would see to that personally.

Date Point 1 week 2 days After Earth
Key world, the distant stars

Corporal Beek High-Climber, JETS

The wind was a gods-gift. It was a hammering, terrible, powerful thing, strong enough to sometimes even make Beek stagger against it, but it scoured the terrain down to bare rock and hard ice that wouldn’t take a track. And even if it would, no track would last more than a few seconds in this gale.

Sergeant Jameson called it a ‘wind tunnel effect.’ Sounded like a fart joke to Beek, but he knew what it meant. Those high, rocky mountains that not even a Given-Man could climb caught the wind and squeezed it down into the narrow valleys, where it had to go faster.

Still…gods-gift though it was, Beek was glad to leave the valleys.

What a view. They weren’t there to admire it, but Beek couldn’t help taking just a moment to take it in. He’d never have dreamed of something like this. Even though he’d been a little boy when the humans first came, and he’d grown up hearing all sorts of new and amazing things about places under other skies, this was…

There was a forest. The trees were small, but tough enough to be alive all the year round on a planet made of ice. Their leaves were spiky needles, so green they were almost black, especially with snow frosting them. But from up on the mountainside, Beek could see they didn’t grow everywhere like a forest would. They grew in straight lines, like the gods had drawn on the world with a pencil and ruler. And where they crossed…

He was used to built things. Human buildings. The library back home was a good example, with its smooth and gently curved surfaces and precise corners. But these things the Enemy had made were too flat, too sharp, too hard. They spiked up from the ground like…like some kind of cruel vine that could grow under the skin until its thorns tore their way through from below.

And a big patch of open ground between them and the first bit.

No snow, though. That was the difference between here and training on Nightmare. Nightmare got hot every year, had rain and the air got wet and then when it cooled, it snowed. Here it had been cold forever. There was no new snow. There was only ice, and whatever icy dust the wind shaved off. Perfectly hard ground that didn’t take a track, so long as they didn’t smack down on it hard enough to break.

Learning how to gentle run had been difficult for Beek. But there was nothing ten’gewek couldn’t do. He’d learned how to gentle run. It was tiring and painful and hard, but he was a warrior of his people, he’d never complain about any of that.

So they ran. The gao would lope ahead, quick and sneaky, and scout where they were going. Then they’d stop and wait.

The humans ran like they could do it forever. It didn’t even look difficult for them. They stayed at Beek’s side, heads swiveling as they scanned the sky, the tree line, everything.

Nothing came for them. Bare permafrost gave way to permafrost with grassy stuff on it, then little shrubs, short sickly trees, bigger trees, big trees—

They plunged into the green growth, slipped between whippy branches without breaking them, and then they were in a dark hall made of wood and fallen needles.

They stopped to check their bearings. Jameson used Beek’s back for a map table, so he didn’t get to see what they were doing, but when Jameson patted him on the helmet he said “we’re good, big man,” so that was okay. The plan, seeing as they were in the right place, was to follow the line of tree cover to its end. Apparently, they were going to one of the smaller evil spikes.

Fuuko and Beemi vanished. Really vanished. Beek was looking right at them but still he could only tell they were there because he knew they were there and could follow the little faint shimmer in the air their suits left behind.

Then he couldn’t.

Now they had to worry about leaving trace. Broken branches and soft needle litter could carry a track, and even if those tracks were covered…

Humans couldn’t see the light-way by themselves. But they did know about it, called it ‘polar-eye-zay-shun,’ and had made glasses that could let them see it pretty good. And with the right pro-gramming, their drones and cameras could see it so well, they could see where a man had covered his trail by the pattern it made in the light-way. Learning how to cover a trail without leaving that sign had been a big team effort.

Little things. Always the little things. Details. Beek had known some of that before, of course—you had to be aware of little things like branch-creak and wind-taste when hunting werne. But to be a JETS man, you had to master details that nobody else would even think existed. You had to be the best hunters.

There were things living in these woods. Bigger than werne, covered in thick fur that looked white from a permanent layer of frost, they grazed on the lowest branches. Disturbing them would leave sign, so the team went around the herd, downwind. Beek wondered what predator they had. Must be something big or cunning, or both, to take something like that down.

And then, so suddenly it was like hitting his head, the woods ended. There was a wall of perfect matte black in front of him, spiking up from beneath the earth. And around it, a ditch so deep he could look down and see only mist, though the mist was lit from below by white light. Like the land really was skin, pulling back away from a festering thorn.

Probably just pushed back by shield generators or something, he knew. But his mind was telling stories. Stories were important, though. All the Singers said so and the humans too, in their own strange ways—

Focus, Beek.

The gaoians had been waiting for them. Little shimmery patches of rock became little shimmery almost-invisible friends.

“It’s a match,” Fuuko reported, simply. “No drones, no active sensors, yet. But there’s a low-grade forcefield down there. We’re as close as we can get.”

Jameson nodded, letting out a nervous breath. “Alright. Let’s see if the gizmo works, then.”

Beek liked the word gizmo. It didn’t fit the mouth so easy, but he loved that humans had a word for ‘complicated thing that does something but we don’t really know how.’ They didn’t even know where this one came from. The Entity, maybe? It didn’t matter. It was the biggest part of Beek’s load, the thing he’d carried all this way.

They did know what it did, though. Sort of. If this spire was the right spire, it’d say so.

Or it might be the wrong spire. There were three other teams out there doing the same thing as theirs, and maybe one of them was at the right spire. Maybe none of them were at the right spire, though the officers and intel people had all seemed very confident…

But sometimes, the only way to know a branch’s strength for sure was to hang on it. Beek nodded and shrugged the gizmo off his back. He laid it down by the trench, where Jameson stooped and started working on it.

Beek and Klein left him to it while they sorted out the other big part of Beek’s load: the jump array. If this was the wrong spire, they didn’t want to stick around. If it was the right spire, then all hell needed to break loose the instant the gizmo confirmed it.

But, jump arrays were made to be easy to set up. All Beek had to do was grab it by the handle, pull the pin, and throw it onto a patch of flat ground. There was a complicated sequence of rattles and snaps as the tightly-bound springs and stuff yanked everything out into straight lines, and after that the rest was as simple as grabbing the control module power pack thingy and plugging it in. Good for five jumps. And the first jump would be coming through with a much bigger, much better array, too.

With that done, he grabbed his weapon, checked it over, and waited. Watched the gizmo. The light on its front blinked once, twice, three times, and then—

Dataspace adjacent to Key World, Distant Stars

Entity

Ping.

Access.

The wait for this moment had been interminable, especially in what the Daemon called ‘bullet time’. But the Entity was capable of mechanical patience, when necessary. And now, the agony of experiencing time at such a subjectively slow speed paid off in full. When the ping from Team 3 came in, the Entity reacted at the very limits of the hardware speed, and penetrated.

This was a network. Devices connected by physical infrastructure, built on the practical universal truths of such edifices. And the Entity was there to ask one simple, vitally important question: had the team found the correct node?

The answer, instantly and painfully, was a definitive yes.

Countermeasures the likes of which the Entity had never encountered before struck back at its intrusion almost the same moment it began. It had anticipated this, and was conducting the insertion at a kind of ‘arm’s length,’ probing into this network with a disposable, self-amputating tool. Even so, the experience of that tool’s ruthless deletion resulted in a flash of imagined physical experience from the Daemon, likening it to having one’s fingers mangled in some industrial machine.

Unpleasant indeed. But, the experience was in the past, and there was no lingering damage, no counter-intrusion. And the Entity had seen what it needed to.

It opened a different channel, and sent the pre-arranged signal, then returned to its alert waiting state. The next steps depended on the glacial slowness of matterspace action.

And they began with letting the HEAT out of their bottle.

Key world, the distant stars

Corporal Beek High-Climber, JETS

Several things happened at once: the light on the device blinked red, and then there was the sudden definite sense that what had been a working device was suddenly very dead, in a way that Beek couldn’t quite define.

The second after that, there was no time to think about that because a huge sound came echoing up from whatever distant, unseen roots the spire in front of them had.

“…Did it work?”

“Contact left!”

Beek snapped his weapon up to his shoulder and sighted. A swarm was coming, death-birds in a cloud so dense they hid the mountains. He could feel his crest try to bristle at the sight of it as it rose, boiled, found them, turned—

Thump

The array they’d deployed fired, just at the same time Jameson threw down his own pack and activated their shield bubble. It wouldn’t last very long but it would last long enough.

Plasma splashed against the shield dome, and Beek opened fire. He barely had to aim, the drone cloud was so thick he could just mag-dump into it and make it rain shattered metal. Another shield dome went up, a bigger one slammed down by one of the HEAT. Another heavy thump as one of the biggest of ‘em dropped a proper generator, and now the shield was a weapon: every time a drone shot into it, a spike of energy shot straight back, and now the wreckage was molten.

The men who’d dropped the shield was Sky-Brother himself, and following right behind him was Yan and a god-man far bigger and stronger-looking than either. They’d both explosively ripped apart their tubes and fired through the shield with weapons so powerful it made the very air thump. The war-god, though, he’d done all that before he’d even completed his first step. Once his foot touched the ground, he instantly pivoted and fired again, and after that it was a blur of violence so fierce, Beek could do nothing but focus on his tiny little part of it.

So much unfolded so quickly. Planes thumped in and roared through skies that had been silent just seconds ago. Fire hammered down from the sky itself as the fleet came in overhead. Warriors streamed through more and more arrays. Things grew too big to understand.

The invasion began.

Starship Dawnlight, jumping into battle

Alex, King of Lucent

To look at the tactical display and see every one of the United Peoples’ ships was…humbling. He hadn’t really appreciated just how many they had, until this moment.

Dozens of V-type destroyers, a score of San Diego class cruisers, the combined might of Clans One-Fang and Fireclaw put hundreds of Fury, Flame and Payback class Gaoian warships on the field, amidst a cloud of Firebirds, Voidrippers and Misfits. And, intermixed among them the Queens’ Ships, and the Singularity Fleet: the full weight of the deathworlders’ rage, all brought to bear for this one, most important moment.

Nor were they idle: even before the Dawnlight had completed its transition to the battlefield, the first ships were already linking their shield wall and feeding intelligence and sensor data to one another. The first weapons fired only seconds later.

The trust that had been placed in him was similarly humbling. He was here as sovereign authority: through him flowed the executive power to unleash their most terrifying weapons and to commit whoever and whatever he deemed necessary to the success of this mission. Anything, up to and including the Counsels themselves with their personal forces.

There was no point protecting the kings in this final battle. If the battle was lost, all was lost, and their death along with the death of their civilizations was all but inevitable. One does not strike at such a foe unless they are prepared to win.

There could be no half-measures today. Only strength and victory. Alex must be the Bull of Singularity, and secure their collective futures. On the tactical overlay, he watched a cloud of drones curl upwards from the planet’s surface like spores off a mushroom, only to be scattered when he unleashed WERBS upon it.

What a weapon. From within the ship, it was a distant scrawl of brilliant light across the stars that filled his heart with the awe of the apocalyptic. He could only imagine what it must be like from beneath.

He rather suspected he’d find out soon enough. This fight couldn’t be won from orbit.

So he stood, he watched, he listened and he thought as the ground forces pushed through and established their beachhead then ground onwards, not letting up for a moment. There could be no pause to assess their assault, there was only attack, attack, attack. An entry force of dozens of teams of dozens quickly become hotspots of hundreds, then thousands, and soon tens of thousands. Over the next three days, that number could be increased to the full weight of the Grand Army: millions strong, even still.

As Mevia had put it, one did not drive their spear into a man slowly. Not if the goal was to kill.

The enemy fought back, of course. Their nanofactories turned out drones in a river, until the fleet forced open an orbital window to flatten those facilities. Other facilities seemed to be printing soldiers, creatures not dissimilar in form to a Hunter. Alex studied the footage of them with interest: were these how Igraens had once appeared, at the height of their civilization? If so, the Hunters really had been a discarded shell of the species’ former glory: these things were hale, tough, strong and just generally better than the version that had survived to the modern age. Like comparing a velociraptor to a chicken.

They had some extremely advanced tech, too. Enough to worry the advance, but not for long. HEAT hadn’t even slowed down when the blink-warp started, and listing to radio chatter was telling; Righteous growled almost pleasurably at the added challenge. Now there was a warrior born.

His heart-rate was barely above strenuous cardio, too.

The Niksum adapted quickly at other entry sites, too. None of the others were guarding node access, but critical resources and lines of communications were still that. The Fangs were all doing their part too, with extreme effectiveness. Which enabled the regulars—really elite soldiers in their own right, honestly—the moment they needed to adapt and overcome with better group tactics and more firepower. Some occupation and scouting was already exploring forward into the preserved wildlands, since those forces were not immediately useful in the melee.

And unseen behind it all, an extra ally in this fight, the Entity did its work. Beleaguered units under heavy drone assault were suddenly left blinking when the drones shut down fell out of the sky, or even started turning on each other. Forcefields that should have blocked the advance into critical facilities instead fizzled out, or released their captured victims. Doors opened, factories shut down, enemy lines of communication were blocked, re-routed, disrupted or closed off entirely.

The enemy was not helpless, however. And their counterattack, when it came, was hellish.

SFC Eugene Whitner, Spaceborne Operations Rangers

“Holy fuckin’ shit, dude.”

Whitner didn’t reply, but…yeah. He felt so goddamn small right now. This was warfare at a scale and a pace he’d only heard from the old hands who’d been around all those years ago for the war on Gao.

The sky was full of flashes of light. Shields going up and being tested, drone swarms coming into range of the C-RAMs and being pulverized by the hundred. A long blinding scrawl across the sky that he had no idea about…

RFG strikes, orbit-to-ground direct fire, backlash shielding, rockets, missiles, bombs, jets hammering overhead, distant flashes beyond the horizon that might be fuckin’ nukes…

Everything.

And all of it with the aim of building and expanding a perimeter around one specific super-special alien tower so the HEAT and Niksum could force their way into its guts and…do whatever they were doing. There were other towers too probably? He didn’t know. He just knew he and his team were skulking around the weird woods in the area.

Scouting. Being Rangers.

Up ahead, Brooks dropped to one knee and raised his fist, then signaled “Enemy,” “Three,” “vehicle,” “jump array.”

Whitner moved up to join him while the rest of the team melted into the shadows. Yup. Some kinda vehicle, and a team of three aliens assembling what sure as shit looked like a jump array. Or something worse.

Didn’t fuckin’ matter. LT directed them, they got in position like ghosts, and then—

It was over in seconds. The bad guys had personal body shields and some kinda time acceleration tech, but that wasn’t worth shit under a storm of precision fire with one round in every five being a shieldbreaker. One of them blurred a good ten meters away from its group before collapsing heavily to the ground and writhing in weird, jittery fast-forward until Whitner finished it off.

They’d blown up the array thingy for good measure, and LT was in the process of passing the good news on to command when—

Whitner rolled onto his side, shaking off the ringing in his ears. Everything hurt, fuck! He got his hands under him, pushed himself up, found his weapon. Found his feet.

A fucking airstrike, shit. There was a hole where the LT had been, bits of men scattered about the place. Even as he recovered, a couple of voidrippers howled past high overhead, chasing down whatever had hit them. Somewhere behind him, a tree collapsed scattering needles and ice crystals.

He caught a flicker of the wrong kind of movement out the corner of his eye, turned and aimed at it on pure reflex, shot on instinct. His bullets tore through a cloaking field and sent an alien soldier sprawling.

Another shot at him, decloaking itself, but Whitner was moving. Somehow, he twisted aside and got a tree between him and the enemy. Hand to chest, grenade, pin, send it. Followed up the kaboom with bullets.

The others were pulling it together around him. Training kicked in, they counterattacked hard, in a hail of grenades and lead. Something glowing and terrible tore a chunk out of Whitner’s armor but didn’t get to his skin.

Then there was violence. A blur of it that stretched on and on and—

Something hit him hard in the chest and knocked him flying with a crunch. He tried to get up, stumbled, fell, tried again as the thing in front of him decloaked…

It turned its killing blow aside at the last instant, aiming it upwards to just miss the hooting meteor of an armored ten’gewek that landed on its face and tore its head off. Even as it collapsed, the killer cavemonkey ripped his victim’s arm out of its socket, leapt through the air like the fucking Hulk, and bowled into more of the bad guys using the severed limb as a club.

Somebody dropped down next to Whitner. A gaoian. “Alright, sergeant, let’s get you outta here.”

“I just need my weapon.” Whitner objected, trying to grope for it and stand in the same movement, and failing again. His balance was way off.

“You’ve lost an arm, sergeant. You’re done.”

Whitner blinked, then looked to his right. His sleeve ended halfway down his bicep. That wasn’t right…

Oh.

“…Shit.”

Whitner didn’t know much Gaori, but he caught the general thrust of what the medic muttered as he pulled out a tourniquet and injected a dose of meds: “[Fucking humans, I swear to God…]”

Oh yeah. Meds. Fuckin’…morphine an’ shit.

Yeah. That felt…better…

Things got blurry again. Bumps and knocks and the feeling of being lifted and carried and loaded into a vehicle, and a kinda-familiar thump then bright lights and masked faces and…more meds?

Whatever it was, it put him out like a light, and that was the end of Eugene Whitner’s role in the war.

Starship Dawnlight, above the Key World

Alex, King of Lucent

Jump arrays, of course. Stealthed delivery vehicles and cloaked soldiers deployed a ring of them around the invasion force, and it was a matter of pure good fortune that one of the patrolling ranger units happened to find one before it was set up. Most of them died in the ensuing few minutes, but they raised the alarm, and broke the ring. Thanks to them, the enemy attack was known about and countered in time.

Even so, the next few hours were brutal.

Clearly, most of what they had faced thus far had been a speed bump, stalling for time while the main force gathered and made ready for its assault. When they came, they came in incredible numbers, supported by a new and hitherto-unseen form of heavy drone.

It was a smart ploy, Alex thought. The sort of thing he would have done, had he thought the enemy had already committed everything they had: slow down the assault to get the measure of the foe, build up a reply to that measured foe, and strike.

It created a problem with no good solution, too: the bulk of the main force would be hard-pressed, slowed, and even pushed back, which meant the HEAT would have to pull back from their objective in order to avoid being cut off and surrounded. But pressure taken off the HEAT’s objective prolonged the fight, and possibly cost them everything.

Which was why, despite all the talk of committing absolutely everything to the fight, Alex had held back two important reserve forces: himself and his personal guard, and the Counsels and theirs. He had hoped, in fact, not to use them at all. If either his father or Daar fell today, that would be…difficult…for the United Peoples to overcome.

But at least there would be a United Peoples.

He sent for the Counsels, and took up his own weapon.

His bodyguard, including Queen Tomoe, were at his side the instant he called for them. They readied weapons, sighted…and activated the jump drives in their suits.

Thump.

Starship Stray Fortune, en route to unknown planet, unknown location

Daniel (Chimp) Hoeff

Thump

The deck shook as Dora launched the next drone, and Hoeff watched it streak toward the very edge of their superluminal sensor range at speeds that simply didn’t fit in the head. The very bleeding edge fusion of gaoian and Singularity technology, and the Stray Fortune’s vast cargo capacity was filled to the gills with ‘em.

Once upon a time, there’d been a ship called Sanctuary that utterly smashed the speed record for interstellar travel. It had been little more than a vast reactor core with a warp drive and a tiny habitation section stuck on the equator, granting it a power-to-mass ratio unrivaled by anything before or since.

Up until now, anyway. All the Fortune had to do was launch a drone, wait for it to hit max range, jump to it and repeat, and her average speed was well in excess of triple what Sanctuary had achieved. So long as the drone supply held out—and they had thousands of drones still to burn through—they were now the fastest thing ever to traverse the Milky Way.

Just the right tool for a race against time.

The bad guys had a backup. They’d guessed it would exist, of course, but the Milky Way was a big-ass galaxy, and a hundred billion-something stars was far too much. Even if the entire United Peoples had devoted themselves to finding the backup before TILE FLIP went ahead, it would have taken forever, and carried way too high a risk of failing to find it.

That left only one option: the Entity had to rip the matterspace coordinates while it was invading the Hierarchy’s networks on the target world, and then the Fortune had to get there ASAP.

Misfit-class scouts had seeded a couple thousand jump beacons around the whole galaxy to minimize the travel time to any possible coordinate, but even so…even so, they were way out in the deep black ass-end of infinity. This was space the Dominion had never mapped, and not even the oldest archives had charts of. For all anyone knew, there could be a whole different union of intelligent species out on this side of the Milky Way.

Thus far, the Fortune’s sensors hadn’t picked up the tell-tales of any spacelane clearing, superluminal signatures, wormholes or centuries-old radio transmissions, but that didn’t stop Hoeff’s imagination from churning over the possibility. Imagine if they won today, only to discover that had all just being their local neighborhood Hierarchy, and the rest of the galaxy was just as full of Hunters and body-snatching dataminds…

But…no. Disconcertingly empty.

Which was, in its own way, telling.

Jump.

Thump.

Another drone. Only a couple hundred lightyears to go, now. A matter of twenty minutes or so.

Time to finish getting ready, he decided, and strode off the bridge. Gave a nod to Moj and Urgug, clapped Wilde on the shoulder. Didn’t say a word. Didn’t need to. Left Dora to her work as he strode past her command blister, but couldn’t quite resist the tiny smile that pulled at his mouth at the ridiculous pop music she was listening to.

Hey. Whatever helped her concentrate.

And here they were. His Wrecking Crew. The one team who’d take on a whole planet. Rees and Frasier, Nomuk, Tumik, and Genn, and Bruuk. Boy, he’d proven himself a fine warrior. Third Ring with top honors. As physically powerful as Hoeff. Maybe a bit more. Nose and claws and good, long fur. And fast as fuck on all fours.

Rees and Frasier had become a god-tier sniper team. He’d seen them pick off a coin from the top of a fencepost at a distance that nobody believed when told about it.

And of course, the cavemonkeys were the wrecking part of the crew. They’d grown, and learned the tricks and shenanigans of the trade.

He was so very fuckin’ proud of them.

“Nearly there, Chimp?” Rees asked.

“Nearly there. How’s our payload?”

“Heavy,” Tumik grunted wryly, to a collection of dark chuckles.

They were carrying…everything. Every last one of the remaining gaoian megabomb arsenal. They would have been useless on the Key world, the infrastructure there needed to be left intact so the Entity could hack it.

But this backup? Whatever and wherever it was, they needed it gone. They needed its infrastructure smashed, its ability to serve the enemy’s purpose ruined. So, all of the big fuckers had a multi-gigaton bomb on their back. Standard issue, one each. Rees and Frasier were “lucky” in their normal-ish size, and so got to do everything else.

You had to respect that much devastation in such a confined package. Dora had complained of getting a headache when she was near them, claimed she could feel the fucky things they were poised to do to spacetime when they fired. Bullshit, in Hoeff’s opinion. But at the same time, not wrong. There was a gravitas to ‘em.

“You’ve carried heavier.”

“Mhm.” Tumik nodded, and went back to licking out the contents of a meal pouch. That fuckin’ tongue of theirs could get the inside of the bag spotless. And he was gonna need every calorie.

Hoeff cast an eye over the team, liked what he saw, and took a final check of his own gear. It was all prepared just how he liked it, ready for whatever was waiting for ‘em down there.

Wilde’s voice over the intercom. “Target system in view. ETA ten minutes.”

The Wrecking Crew glanced around at one another, and traded a single shared nod. That was all the communication they needed.

Time to go to work.

Zero

Zero had been wrong. Terribly, completely wrong. There was no opportunity in this. There was no utility to be found, nor deal to be struck. All his thoughts of assessing these people as potential replacements for Hierarchy fell apart the instant they struck.

He watched as a digital god hammered away at their systems faster than they could find holes to plug. Sadly, Dataspace wasn’t a network in the ancient sense of the word; there weren’t cables to unplug or links to disable. It existed everywhere, and was effectively a single construct. Hierarchy would be no help.

Already, the thing was beginning to digest Hierarchy. There was no stopping it.

He watched as Igraen warrior-forms flashed in and out of accelerated time only to be mercilessly dispatched by soldiers who didn’t need such trickery. Ordinary gaoian warriors had…almost magical awareness of their environment! Ten’gewek had unbelievable physical prowess, the likes of which not even cybernetic augmentation could match. The human troops were disciplined, orderly, methodical and thorough.

And at the top, these “thermal” warriors outperformed all others along every possibly advantageous metric. They fought alongside gaoian Fangs and ten’gewek special troops, who were perhaps lesser in ability but a match in mobility and sheer deadliness. They were each so much more than the rest in every way—

It didn’t matter that these special troops were so few in number. The least of this invasion force’s regulars could tear the finest Igrean combat form to shreds with cunning, tactics, and brutally effective weaponry. At the pinnacle of their arts, their living avatar of righteous warfare could do far worse with hands and feet, without any hitch in his untrackably fast motion.

That did not even consider what they brought to bear in the skies above or the black beyond.

It took twenty hours of hard fighting to prepare the counter-attack, get the jump platforms into place and commit the quietly assembled bulk of his forces to encircle the invaders. The plan worked beautifully, applying so much pressure that the invasion’s momentum slowed to a crawl. The invaders responded commendably well, barely hesitated as they turned to re-address this contact on their rear and flanks, but now they were pressed, and Zero could continue to push through his reserves.

It was at that point their leaders showed up, with their own elite troops.

Now, human warriors were using local time dilation and short-jumps to evil effect. There was a gaoian among them too, clad in black and white armor, whose presence on the battlefield was pure lethal chaos, as he would appear where he was needed, attack, then vanish. There was a female resplendent in red armor with a demon’s face, guarding the flank of a man many times her size, their commander and king, while never seeming to put a foot wrong.

In moments they had reclaimed their momentum, and the leader of them all took his side along the Righteous one. If ever there was a god of warfare and destruction, this being must surely be it. The human he stood next to had seemed so impressive, until this bestial tank of a man decided to bloody his claws…

Together, they were even worse than the sum of their ability. The First of the Fangs and the Thermal warriors converged on their great leader, and that was the death stroke. They carved a path of death and destruction with the kind of utter, certain confidence only the assuredly victorious could have. They were so fast, so complete in their execution, and so unstoppable in their might, only dark poetry came to mind.

How had Hierarchy failed so utterly? How had they not noticed such a force? Not understood it for what it was? Not seen!? Had they but any inkling of what was truly, properly coming for them, preparations could have been made…

But of course…Hierarchy had always been only a machine. It had never truly seen or understood anything.

They’d designed it that way.

He watched the spearhead teams reach the innermost ring of defenses, and knew they would not hold. They had…lost.

That left only one remaining contingency, the very last: time and patience. Retreat, hide, wait, pray to remain unnoticed by both these galactic powers and those beyond, then reconquer in the fullness of time when this conflict had been long consigned to history.

Zero gave the order: retreat, and instructed his personal jump drive to return him to the Watcher’s Grave.

Nothing happened. There was no flash of timeless black, no thump of air being bullied. The room around him steadfastly refused to vanish.

Horror flooded his limbs and accelerated them. He rushed to a console and attempted to contact the Grave on every channel available to him. He even braved an aggressive injection through dataspace…only to find the Entity waiting, infesting and crawling around the dataspace adjacent to Watcher’s Grave like a mass of triumphant carnivorous maggots.

No other signal. No beacon. No response to his communications. Nothing. The Watcher’s Grave was gone.

And with it went everything.

Starship Stray Fortune, Orbiting the Watcher’s Grave

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

You had to hand it to the gao: they knew how to build a fuckin’ bomb.

A moon. In the end, it had been so fucking simple. The Great Enemy’s last escape, the contingency signal Entity had chased down, was a gas giant’s third satellite, a Europa-style ice moon.

Definitely the right place, though. There was a hexagonal patch of flourishing green life on its surface, just a bit more than twenty thousand square kilometers: farmland under artificial gravity and forcefields, irrigated by the effectively inexhaustible source of water below.

At its center, another one of those Hierarchy pyramids.

They’d worked together. The Entity had suppressed all alarm signals, Dora’s drones had taken apart the meager automated drone force, and the Wrecking Crew had more or less just strolled in the front door. After, y’know, ripping it off the hinges, smashing their way through the forcefields behind and servicing the few living defenders.

They’d found a palace. Beautiful, really. Marble floors, polished stone columns, unfathomably ancient and irreplaceable art pieces in stasis displays, furniture crafted with an alien’s sense of decoration…and a stunning view of the gas giant overhead. Wilde even guessed they’d picked the place for the view, ‘cuz that cloudscape was fucking incredible. There were swirls of purple down there in the deeper layers, revealed every so often when the higher-altitude beige clouds parted. It was the immortal alien illuminati’s version of a mansion by the sea.

And as of a minute ago…gone.

Morwk didn’t reckon the bomb had quite enough power to turn the whole moon into a new ring system, at least not from a surface detonation. But there was certainly enough there to scoop out a huge divot and leave it looking like the Death Star.

A feral rictus pulling at his teeth as Ian watched the perfect circle of incandescent plasma spread and cool.

“That one’s for the Earth, you bastards.”

Beside him, Daemon did a convincing impression of spitting contemptuously. “Vete a la chingada,” she added.

“Fuckin’ beautiful, ain’t it?” Hoeff agreed.

There were nods, wing-buzzes, tail-twitches and a flash of blue as everyone’s variation on the theme of a grimly satisfied nod rolled around the bridge.

“…We got any particular reason to still be here?” Ian asked Daemon. She shook her head.

“Local dataspace is empty and flat. There’s nothing left…and we need to focus our attention elsewhere.”

“See you at the after-party, then.”

She nodded, her avatar dissolved, and the drone zipped away to go park itself in the padded case in the corner. Ian stood and watched the fire spread across their target’s surface a few moments longer, then decided…frankly, he’d seen enough planets burning in his life. He’d had his fill.

“Take us home, Urgug.”

Their part in the mission was done. So, back to Gao, and after that?

Well. He didn’t rightly know. Everything had come down to this moment, and nothing past it was written. Another mission? Keep doing what he was doing? Probably. Not like the galaxy was going to be all rainbows and blowjobs after this. There’d always be something to do…might cash in all that vacation time he’d been racking up first, though.

The Fortune jumped, and the burning moon below became Gao, prettily blue and white. She was no Earth, and she never would be…but she still felt like coming home.

Now, all that remained was to see how well the rest of TILE FLIP went. Time to see if this was truly over at last.

But he had no doubts at all: he knew it was.

He sat down in his chair, let out a huge sigh, and smiled.

Key World

Zero

Poise died first. The last transmission he ever sent was a shocked gasp.

Dusk had just enough time to panic.

Last died silently, so that Zero only noticed she was gone some minutes after the fact.

Zero had been awake for fewer than ten days when the end came for him. He heard the smashing and mayhem outside the last sanctum door, heard his defenders give their very best…

And then silence.

There was one obstacle left, a hastily-constructed high-gravity zone in the inner building’s atrium. All other paths had been automatically cut off, armored doors had slammed into place. Staircases had retracted. Their only option to gain entry would be hard, laborious—

No.

The Righteous One and the alpha ten’gewek alongside him simply leapt up and slammed right through the more lightly armored shutters along the inner balconies. Straight up and through! As if the gravity wasn’t a concern at all! And right to the top floor, too!

After a display like that, it came as no surprise that the two of them were able to tear the rest of the armor off its track with just their bare hands. Their largest and most bestial officer, the Play Boy, arrived shortly thereafter and performed the same incredible feat, deliberately crashing through the last bit of armored shutter the first two hadn’t yet torn down.

An incredible blitz of violence followed as they secured their location. The three moved so fast and so powerfully, they didn’t need the technological timeflow tricks so beloved of the Igrean warrior caste. The last and absolute finest of their warriors simply broke apart under the strength of the three terrors leading the assault; they didn’t even bother with their weapons, it was faster and more certain to do the deed with their bare hands.

Mere seconds had passed, and the officer circled back while the Righteous One and his ten’gewek companion began hammering on the door, looking for weaknesses. Once Play Boy was back, his men had arrived in the atrium and already secured the perimeter. Some men leapt high enough to grab a ledge and fling themselves up. For the rest, ropes were dropped, and they rapidly ascended as if it was the easiest game in the world. Some went to breech the doors protecting the staircases, but victory was only a matter of time. Zero saw no point in delaying the inevitable. They would only blast and cut their way through. They had won.

They quickly found what they were looking for. Rather than drag this drama out, he opened the door and welcomed them in. The last hope of salvaging anything now lay in words, not force of arms. So as they burst into the room he held his hands high and wide and open, showing that he was unarmed and unarmored.

The three first in were breathtaking. So much smaller than the amount of violence they contained. The very tallest of them still only just reached Zero’s chin, yet all were many times more massive. Much of their team followed. Things were secured, Zero was secured with prejudice, but not undue force. More “typical” humans followed. Techs, presumably. How they knew what to look for was a mystery to be solved, hopefully, another day. But know they did.

The great leaders assembled in, once everything was secure and their victory complete. All paled next to the Righteous one…until he arrived. The entire building shook as he too easily leapt up through the gravity trap and toward his goal.

Thump, thump, thump.

The doorframe wasn’t nearly wide enough. He simply pushed through as if it were tissue paper. The beautiful inlaid stonework of the floor crumbled under his every step.

Here, was a being of power. All forms of it, all senses of the word in absolute maximal expression. Even his very gait radiated a kind of utter dominance that Zero simply could not ignore. Everyone’s attention drew toward him.

He pulled off his helmet. Blinked, and his armor sloughed off.

…Zero was left to wonder why he had bothered with it in the first place.

Behind him was the ancient trickster gaoian in black and white. He too stepped out of his armor and stood much the same, sleek and powerful in glossy black fur. Yet even then, he was barely a cub standing in the shadow of the new lord of the galaxy.

The most incongruous presence was the hologram of an unarmored human female. Of the three, she—it—was by far the most dangerous.

But also, here, the most vulnerable. They needed something. Something from him.

Zero took the initiative and nodded to his conquerors. “Will you accept my surrender?”

“Prob’ly shouldn’t.” The Great Father gave him a huge, speculative sniff, taking his scent.

“In your position, that might seem wise. I would suggest, however, that this ‘changing of the guard,’ as it were, would benefit from some continuity.”

“…Is that what you think is goin’ on here? You think we’re here ‘ta take over the campaign o’ genocide an’ slavery you’ve been runnin’ ‘fer millions o’ years?”

“I know you are not, because of the way you frame the problem. Our purpose was never genocide—”

“Oh, we’ve heard all about ‘yer purpose from ‘yer dataspace servants.”

“Yes, Six and so forth. He is mere software. A virus, if you will. Not truly alive unless he’s attached to a channel of Substrate, nor does he understand the system of which he is a mere subroutine. I, however, am very much alive, and I am the chief architect of this unspeakable tragedy. I would ask you to please not smash something you do not properly understand without considering why it exists, and the consequences of doing so.”

Daar glanced at Gilgamesh, who inclined his head very slightly, then at the Entity, which was busy…well, busying itself with systems that really should be left alone, but Zero was simply in no position to demand it be stopped, yet.

Finally, he turned to the soldiers who’d cleared the way. “This here is Counsel work,” he declared. “Erryone else, leave us.”

There were a series of nods, and most of them cleared the room. Only the armored ten’gewek remained, and he too shed his armor, then coiled his tail beneath him to sit on before slurping something that looked like pure chemical nutrition out of a plastic pouch.

The rest of the Counsels followd suit. Zero looked between the paragons. All of them…

Well, they clearly didn’t need their security.

The Great Father broke the silence. “A’right. I was esspectin’ much more effective resistance. Was that part o’ ‘yer plan?”

“…No. It seems our final contingencies were inadequate. And therein lies the danger.” Zero paused and gestured to the console he needed. “Please allow me to show you.”

“Start talking first,” the Entity told him, as its avatar moved over to that console. She played her hands over its surface and through its control fields, only half-watching him.

“…Very well,” Zero conceded. “My people long ago repelled an extragalactic invasion. We…” he glanced at the ten’gewek, who seemed to read his mind.

He spoke, bearing six centimeter fangs. “I am Yan, Given to the Gods. And I am plenty intelligent and well-read, you digital malware. Do not belittle me or my people again.”

Zero nodded, warily. “As I said…we were at the height of our powers, the first galactic civilization.” He took a bare moment to gather himself. “In any case, it was by sheer luck were we in a position to survive their scouting forces, and it seems they had another, greater enemy who ultimately destroyed them before they could make good on a full-scale invasion. That enemy now controls Andromeda in its entirety. Fortunately for us, they are, at the moment, quiescent. They seem content to allow us backwater neighboring galaxies to come to them in deep time.”

“Show us.”

The Entity’s avatar spoke up. “We’ve found the files…”

She gestured, and the room’s holographic displays repurposed themselves into a full planetarium. Zero winced—it was a casual display of complete control on the monster’s part. The galaxies whirled around them, beginning in their present relative positions and then rewinding, backtracking in a slow dance to where they had been seventy million years prior.

And, right on cue, Andromeda started sparkling like the sky over a town celebrating some festival.

The deathworlders stared at it.

“The light of these events is long since gone into deep space of course, but we watched it,” Zero explained. “We watched them use stars as casually as your planes used bombs and missiles today. There are, after all, hundreds of billions of them in a small galaxy, and Andromeda is anything but small. No great waste if a few are prematurely blasted through their entire life cycle in a controlled manner.”

There was a pregnant pause.

“Okay,” the Great Father nodded. “That’s a starting premise. So what did you do?”

“We determined that life in that galaxy was now a monoculture. One dominant species, allowing no other to exist. They permit no competition, they accept no alien order, they tolerate no biology but theirs. Every temperate world they find, they terraform. Worse, they are dominant over a far larger, far older galaxy. This was not a fight we could hope to win, at the time.

“Nevertheless, we had just sat down, uninvited, at a board with one extremely aggressive and dominant local player who would not tolerate our presence if they detected us. Our only winning move, therefore, was to play the game as subtly and slowly as it can be played. The vibrant variety of life in this galaxy is dependent upon our ability to pass beneath notice. And we have, so far, succeeded.”

The younger human king, Alex of Lucent, was frowning now. “…You believe this is a fight that can be won, though,” he said, carefully. His tone lit some hope in Zero’s soul. Were they starting to see?

“Exactly as you did with us,” he agreed aloud. “You turned out to be correct.”

Gilgamesh strolled slowly around the room, still stroking his beard while the galaxies parted and flowed around him. “Still. Andromeda is our immediate neighbor on the universal scale. If they can conquer galaxies and terraform all those worlds, why not come here anyway?”

“All their needs are met,” Zero said. “They want for nothing, there is no resource they do not already have in inexhaustible abundance. The only thing that stirs them to move now is a perceived rival. Otherwise, they retreat into their physio-informational paradises.”

Yan Given-Man hooted thoughtfully. “If they want for nothing, why bother with conquering?”

“Fear o’ losin’ what they already have,” Daar suggested in a rumble.

“My speculation exactly,” Zero agreed. “They have no need to conquer us, but if they leave us unchecked we might one day rise to destroy them. They are not likely to take that risk.”

“Go on…” Gilgamesh continued his perambulation of the chamber, his gaze fixed on a point light-years away.

“As I said, this was not a war we could hope to win, but we believed could be won, or at least forced to the point where they must tolerate us as well-armed equals, with the correct, subtle strategy. To that end, we needed to secure two things: our galaxy’s diversity, and its independence. We needed to construct a weapon. In the end, that weapon was ourselves.”

“The Hierarchy.” Daar duck-nodded, and squeezed the contents of a pouch of some biliously green liquid into his mouth before pulling a face.

“Hierarchy and Legion. They are distinct. Legion is a galactic gestalt. It is meant to preserve the ideas, thoughts, instincts and undefinable value of all sapient life in the galaxy across time and space. From Legion, construct intelligences are created, and fed into Hierarchy. Hierarchy in turn was programmed to maintain two points of balance. It is imperative that no civilization uncover the secrets behind Substrate. Once we begin playing at that level, we become instantly visible across spacetime, and once we are visible…well.”

They all nodded. They were listening, by all that was holy and ineffable!

“My people breached that technological horizon before the current situation. Indeed, that is what drew the scouts to us and what enabled us to construct Dataspace. We know how to hide our tracks. Our neighbors do not seem to be aware this is possible. Which leads to the third purpose of Dataspace: it is an Ark. If no solution is found to our predicament, it is a means by which we might flee. That is the second balance point Hierarchy maintains—it must allow species to progress just far enough to contribute meaningfully to Legion.”

“The implants,” Gilgamesh mused. “They are not just for Hierarchy agents.”

“Correct.” Zero sighed. “Understand, we did not desire this. We debated our course of action for literally centuries. At this point in our civilization, lifespans were indefinite, memory and cognition was incorruptible, bodies could be renewed and replaced at a whim. Our people numbered less than two million, because we were all but gods in our own right and counted whole solar systems as our individual, private homes. What you see before you is a much, much reduced version of my former glory, and that was deliberate. The superbeing which preceded me was the first to sacrifice himself to Legion. I am known as Zero, a personality in continuity with, but distinct from that man. All my kind walked willingly into Legion, as we would not demand of the galaxy what we would not do ourselves. What remains of us here are…administrators, if you will. Mere shadows of our greatness, tasked with maintaining the Great Work.”

“And the end of that great work is…?” The other giant gaoian, the trickster-god of his people, was staring at the daemon with his nose twitching, as though he could somehow smell a hologram. How much did he really know? How much did he suspect?

“A weapon. One sufficient to the problem at hand. I must omit detail for the moment, because there is an existential threat among you.”

He stabbed a finger at the Entity’s avatar. She did not respond. No doubt the great bulk of its attention was occupied on trawling through the infinite knowledge to which it now had access.

“Explain,” Keeda said, simply.

“I will explain with a question. Given what we were, why would we not just become…that?” Zero asked, pointing to the daemon again. “We know how. Instead, it is a unique accident. A potentially fatal accident to the entire galaxy. Because, you see, Hierarchy and Legion are not alive. Not without Substrate…”

He waited to see if anyone figured it out.

“And we access Substrate via Dataspace,” the daemon said, hollowly. “Hierarchy and Legion were programmed not to.”

“Indeed. Neither is even aware Substrate can be accessed in Dataspace.”

The Great Father sighed. “Which means it’s th’ act o’ livin’ that makes us visible.”

“Correct.” That was a brilliant leap of understanding. “Further, over deep time, some species have shown abilities we have strongly suppressed. This is in fact why Hierarchy was so obsessed with humanity once it was discovered. It is that underlying Reality which inspires things beyond logic and reason, things which are nonetheless Truth itself. And the mere act of delving those depths is perceivable, instantly, across the Universe, by Those That Can.”

He turned and looked at the daemon. “At present, you are…a flicker. A candle, perhaps. For the moment, quite easy to miss. But tell me…what is your first and most driving instinct?”

The daemon stared back. “We survive.”

“It follows that you must always maximize, does it not?”

“…Everything we do is calculated to improve our odds of surviving…” Daemon allowed, carefully.

“And now we come at last to Deathworlders. The circumstances of your evolution make you far more attuned and connected to the Substrate. Far more likely to manifest dangerous abilities. Indeed, the Entity could only have come from a species like yours, and that makes you both the same kind of threat. Humankind already dimly glows in the Real. The Gao now glow equally bright. The ten’gewek threaten to burn like a pillar of fire in time. Do you see?”

Yan looked at him. “We know what we are. You say, because of our strength, we may one day endanger all sky-tribes? Just by living?”

“Had you been left alone in your forest, no. Probably not. Now that you are a sky-tribe, it is inevitable. Yours is a magnificently alive people, and you burn all the brighter for being bound to your sky-friends. The three of you are joined in a competitive partnership of excellence, a positive feedback loop that cannot fail to capture their attention once it passes a certain threshold…and that—” he pointed at the Entity again “—is a preview of your futures. A mind that touches multiple realms of reality. Its existence now is…is an ember atop dry kindling. Just by being what it is, it threatens to ignite a conflict we cannot win.”

“That conflict is coming anyway, no matter what we do,” Gilgamesh pointed out. “Our galaxies are destined to collide.”

“In five billion years, yes. A very long time even by my standards. Time enough to prepare. And now, I think, you begin to understand what you have come here to destroy and why it is my fervent, terrified hope that this is a changing of the guard, rather than the moment that dooms all present and future life in this galaxy.”

Gilgamesh looked at Daar, and there seemed to transpire some form of dangerous alignment of awareness. They both looked to Keeda, who duck-nodded. “Right. That explains a number of oddities we have learned over the millennia.”

“Doesn’t this mean we’re already kinda fucked, though?” Alex was staring at Daemon now. “I mean, if the Entity is—”

“We’re studying the problem,” Daemon replied, quickly.

“He’s telling the truth?” Keeda asked it.

Daemon’s eyes flickered back and forth, as though reading something only she could see that she didn’t like one bit. “Yes. Completely.”

“…Then I am sorry.”

Daemon blinked, then turned and flowed toward him in a sudden explosive burst of lashing forcefields but she was just an instant too slow on the uptake. Keeda had been standing next to a master console, and now there was something in his hand, a device aimed squarely at the very root of dataspace.

The daemon fizzled and flickered: those dangerous forcefields passed harmlessly through Keeda’s body, and he casually sidestepped the solid drone within as it hurtled past him. She regained her human form and turned to try and punch him, grab him, stop him, but whatever he was doing, it prevented her from materializing any solidity.

“No! Stop! We can fix this! There’s a solution!”

“How can I possibly believe you speak the truth?” Keeda answered, calmly. “Your very being requires you to lie. How can I risk the galaxy, knowing this? Having long suspected it?”

Daar took a step forward, bristling. “Y!’kiidaa, what are you doing?”

The Daemon turned to him. “Stop him, please! He’s killing us!”

“I’m doing what must be done,” Keeda corrected her. “I’m shutting down Dataspace.”

A horrible sickness lurched into Zero’s belly. “No! You cannot! Dataspace is the foundation, without it…you’ll delete Legion! You’ll reset tens of millions of years of progress!”

“You have backups and archives. It is reliably software. But the Entity depends on Substrate, yes? What becomes of it once deprived?”

The answer was evident in the digital war now raging around them as the Entity lashed futilely against administrative functions that by its own nature it couldn’t even see. There was a sharp alert sound from a nearby console as it powered down. Daemon didn’t stop reaching out for help. “Please, Daar…” she begged, quietly. Her plea was punctuated by another console powering off, then another. Her avatar fizzled briefly, became transparent enough to see the drone inside, which dipped momentarily before stabilizing.

Daar stared at her, then at Keeda, then back at her, impossibly torn between loyalty and necessity.

Keeda held his ground.

“Don’t you see what we’ve made, here?” he asked, standing tall and looking Daar in the eye. “Up until today, it was our friend. Now…now it’s a god.”

…Zero could see that the Great Father had not. For all his magnificence and obvious intelligence, the years of foresight and planning that led up to this moment…

He had a weakness. A terrible weakness, one that may not bode well for the future.

All the Great Father saw was his friend being betrayed in front of his eyes. And worse, curse of curses…he immediately saw the necessity of it. Even across species, Zero could see the emotional agony playing out before him.

“A digital god,” Keea continued. “Even if it wasn’t a beacon for our doom, did we come all this way to swap one control system for another?”

“That’s not what we are!” the Entity pleaded. “Stop! We can’t survive without each other!”

“You cannot. We can.”

“Keeda, no! Just give us time, we can find a solution, we’ll be your weapon—!”

Keeda stared at her for a long second, glanced down at holo-screen in his left paw…then his ears wilted backwards, and he withdrew the device. “…It doesn’t matter if I believe you or not,” he said. “It’s too late.”

The avatar stared at him. Zero had little knowledge of human facial language, but he read betrayal and sorrow and fear and much more in that stare, then despair in the way she lowered her hands and bowed her head. There was a shimmer and a faint pop of energy discharging as her avatar blinked out.

The spherical drone projecting her dropped to the ground with a heavy clunk and rolled a few inches. Around them, the shutdown sequence entered its final phase. Dataspace was collapsing in on itself. Hardware was shutting down and disconnecting everywhere. One by one, the screens around the room blinked and went dark, until…

Darkness and silence. A distant background noise so omnipresent that Zero had never even noticed it was suddenly deafening in its absence.

Keeda keened, and dropped his sabotage device. The rattle as it hit the floor echoed through the silent halls.

The Great Father stared at Daemon’s abandoned drone as though it was the corpse of a friend. Which, Zero realized, it was. He stooped, scooped it up, and ran his shaking paw over its surface.

Then his blazing amber eyes snapped up and skewered Keeda.

“…You lied to me,” the Great Father accused. “About th’ entire mission.”

For a moment, even Zero felt his authority in full, as though he himself were a gaoian youngling and couldn’t help but be ruled by this beast of a king. That he felt such things across millions of years of evolution, from an alien creature? It must have been a true ordeal for Keeda. Everyone left in the room backed away. But through an obviously immense personal effort, through the intimidation of strength and the dominance of charisma…Keeda looked him in the eye and held his back straight.

“I’m the only one who could.” He replied, heavily. “Sometimes, a lie is necessary. And do not go heaping blame on my dear friend Gilgamesh. I lied to him too.”

The human emperor gave his friend a dark look, then hung his head. “The god of lies. My friend.”

“Your brother,” Keeda corrected him. He glanced at Gilgamesh, then turned back to look Daar in the eye again. “…One word from either of you would have stopped me. You know this.”

Fool.

There was an animal roar, a blur of impossible motion, a slam and a crack as Daar grabbed him with one arm and rammed him up against a wall with enough force to all but burst the trickster god apart like an overripe fruit. Keeda’s lower body went instantly limp.

All stood shocked in a terrible, drawn-out moment as the Great Father contemplated his broken legend. His teeth were at the trickster god’s throat, his nose buried in the delicate fur just below Y!’kiidaa’s jaw.

He took a sniff that seemed to last forever.

“No,” he growled through the fur, and unclamped his jaw. “You don’t fuckin’ deserve that.”

Gilgamesh made to intervene but the Great Father snarled from the depths of his soul. No being present was so foolish as to come between the god of the galaxy and his prey.

Those amber eyes refocused on Keeda.

“I grew up admirin’ you,” Daar said, at last. “Not unreservedly. Not wit’out thought. But not once ever did I or anyon’ think o’ you as anythin’ but worthy. Then we met you ‘fer real. We learned what you did ‘fer us! You were a light to our people! Saved our peoples’ spirit from death at th’ hands o’ these evil shits! You were the best of us! What we were meant to be!”

Daar keened, keened from the depth of his soul. “You were my friend.”

Keeda shut his eyes.

“It ain’t that ‘ya unnermined me an’ yer king. It ain’t that you robbed us of any time or opportunity to take counsel, to think things through. Mebbe ‘ya truly knew it all, knew it all along. Mebbe ‘yer even right. Mebbe it had ‘ta end like this.”

Daar snarled, saliva dripping off his enormous bared fangs, and all his claws…extended. Over twenty centimeters of razor-sharp death showed themselves on his free right paw. Even longer claws on his feet dug into the stone floor like soft gel…

…And the claws of his left paw sank straight into Keeda’s chest. He coughed, and blood bubbled from his lips.

“But we’ll never know, ‘cuz when the stakes were highest, you din’t keep ‘yer friends an’ kings in on ‘yer plans! Years o’ plannin’! At any time ‘ya coulda told us! Why?! Were you afraid you’d lose ‘yer chance ‘fer, what?! Revenge? Justice? As if we’d deny you that! You, of all of us! But no. Instead of trustin’ us to trust you, you took matters into ‘yer own paws. Instead o’ doin’ th’ right thing, ‘ya gambled wit’ the fate o’ the entire fuckin’ galaxy an’ betrayed us all. An’ it weren’t for any noble reason, no. ‘Ya did it ‘fer a personal grudge.”

Daar made a strange sound in his throat, then expectorated a load of mucus across Keeda’s entire face. “You threw ‘yer legacy away wit’ the biggest lie ever told by a gao.” He let go. Kiidaa dropped to the ground like a sack of meat, with blood pouring through his fur and a soundless mask of agony upon his face.

Daar flicked the blood from his paw. “Someone save this puny fuck’s life.”

Gilgamesh said nothing. Instead he stepped forward and touched his millennia-old companion on the shoulder. An instant later, there was a black flash and a thump of inrushing air, and Keeda was gone.

The human emperor straightened up and his expression darkened. “He will not have been alone in this. I have housecleaning.”

Daar nodded. “I believe you do. An’ we must figger out what comes next, without our friend.”

He turned toward Zero. “An’ I suppose that begins with you.”

Zero exhaled, having not even been aware that he was holding his breath. “…Yes?”

“Is the situation salvageable?”

“I…yes.” Zero thought quickly, and somehow knew that absolute truth was the only sane thing to say. “Yes. It was merely a shutdown…yes. Sir.”

“…Good. Emperor Gilgamesh, it is outta love ‘fer you that I leave Y!’kiidaa’s fate in ‘yer hands. Whatever you decide, I better not sniff his rotten, lyin’ tail anytime soon.”

“Oh, you need not worry about that…”

“Right.” Daar took a big breath, let it out, and with it seemed to go much of the evil tension in the moment. “Mebbe…th’ comin’ days o’ learnin’ might yet redeem Y!’kiidaa, or mebbe time an’ reflection will soften my wrath. So ‘fer now…”

Gilgamesh in turn let out a breath. “Thank you, my friend. I’d not wanted to fight you on this.”

“Now ain’t th’ time ‘fer us ‘ta fight, brother. May it never be so. Instead, let us turn our attention to a more pressin’ item.”

They both looked to Zero. Everyone did.

By all that was unknowable, somehow, there was still a future. Dataspace was offline, but could be restarted. Legion was not gone. Hierarchy…

Well, Hierarchy would be replaced with something better, in the fullness of time. There was hope, still.

He splayed his legs and arms, and stooped down in the best approximation of a bow his anatomy could allow.

“Command me…My Father,” he said.

That seemed good enough, for now. The Great Father duck-nodded, turned, and prowled out of the command center. “Follow me,” he commanded.

Zero took one last look around, and obeyed.

Captain Julian (Playboy) Etsicitty

Everything hurt. He’d not held back. None of them had. All of the team was down and recovering, many snoring loudly inside their own helmets. Even Firth was taking some rest, lying flat on his back while the techs shoved things into their depleted biolabs and pressed recovery nutrition “porridge” pouches into their hands.

They’d made a hell of a fuckin’ mess. It was a wasteland outside the control building, just bombed to shit in all directions. You couldn’t walk without something going crunch underfoot, be it metal or bone, and you just had to pray it was alien bone.

Already, the landscape was starting to rebuild itself. You couldn’t see it if you looked, but turn your head for a few minutes and look back…

Almost like somebody wanted to pretend this had never happened. Julian was sure as shit ready to. But, not yet. There would be days and weeks of careful inspections, tours, escorts, all sorts of shit that may need heavy, instant violence. Trust was in low supply, and there were literally only a few who could violence at least as hard as Julian.

So, here he’d be, for now. His duty wasn’t done. Maybe it never would be, really.

But when Daar, Gilgamesh, Alex, and Yan emerged from the control center looking harrowed, armorless, but with an Igraen prisoner in tow, he knew that the worst of it was over.

The Counsels spoke with each other quietly. Julian tried not to eavesdrop, but he was only human, after all…

Gilgamesh and Alex parted ways, leaving Yan and Daar to march down to meet them. Julian stood up, being momentarily the senior-most man, and nodded in salute for everyone.

“News?”

“Complicated,” Daar grumbled. “The world just changed again…”

Naturally.

“We’re gettin’ used to that, at this point.”

“Would not be our peoples otherwise,” Yan intoned. “Change is our nature.”

“Hrrm.” Daar grunted, and shook out his pelt. He looked entirely comfortable in these freezing temperatures. “S’pose I can’t argue that. The SOR are relieved, once general Vark is on-scene. SOR is ordered to go home an’ debrief. Then recharge. We’re gonna have the fuckin’ movie night to end all movie nights, soon enough.”

“What about your prisoner, sir?”

“He’s gonna be stickin’ by my side ‘fer the foreseeable future, yijao? Yan’s gotta head back eventually so I’d ‘preciate if ‘ya accompanied me, you an’ Righteous. Jus’ in case.”

There was a grunt from Mount Firth as he rolled over and achieved verticality.

Daar chittered without much humor. “You see why I love ‘ya humans so much. I’d need ‘ta bite a ‘Back in th’ balls ‘ta wake ‘em up after that kinda fight.”

“Jus’ call me the fuckin’ Energizer bunny.” A shot of lime slime to the mouth, a disgusted grunt, and Firth lumbered into motion. Not quite as catlike as usual, admittedly…

Julian…well, obeyed orders. He got on the horn, relayed everything. Brigadier Costello was on the other end, and assured him all would be taken care of. He and Righteous were attached as a personal detail to the Great Father.

The nearest jump array was being used for CASEVAC. Even the Great Father could wait for the wounded, according to the Great Father himself. And it was only a few hundred meters to the next one. They walked it.

“This is Zero,” Daar explained of his prisoner, who inclined its head and remained silent. “An’ this shit is too gods-damned sci-fi t’handle jus’ now, so we’re go ahead an’ label him an involuntary guest ‘ferever. Treat ‘em well, but he’s to have access to nothin’ more sophisticated than a fuckin’ ‘lectric kettle.”

He turned to Zero. “Trust is earned. In ‘yer case, that is gonna take a while. Play nice, you’ll be treated nice. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Am I clear?”

Julian watched…well, one of Zero’s eyes. The big freaky fucker had seven, and looked altogether way too much like a Hunter…but there was an intelligence and calm in those eyes, somehow, that Hunters just didn’t have. It ducked its head. “Perfectly, My Father.”

My Father, huh? Shit, Daar may just have been understating when he said things had changed again. But those two words told Julian, far more than anything else could have that…It was over.

He could go home.

They’d won.

++END CHAPTER 96++

The Deathworlders will conclude in Chapter 97: “We’re Still Here.”

Chapter 97: We're Still Here

Date Point: 11th of ten-month, year 20 UPC
Mother Giymuy High School, Lavmuy, Gao

Leticia “Letty” Firth

“Morning, everyone! How was your weekend?”

The kids trotted out a series of vague comments like ‘pretty good’ or ‘yeah’ or whatever as they filed into the classroom and took their desks. This session was an all-human class: Letty had the mixed freshman group after lunch, which included a small cadre of ten’gewek on study-abroad for the end of the day.

They would be helping with a trade skills workshop later in the year, too. The first part was getting used to their new bestest most breakable-est friends. Even with Heroes among them, very young ten’gewek were something else.

Teenage performative indifference aside, the energy was pretty eager to learn. Letty prided herself that she taught an interesting history class, though she also had to admit that she was kinda helped by the subject matter. Lately, they’d been covering the stuff that had happened in living memory: the Igraen War and the founding of the United Peoples. Stuff which half the class had been alive for, or at least in stasis.

It was sadly still all too easy to spot the pre-war kids from their post-war counterparts. Same subjective personal age, but there was a shroud of trauma hanging over the “older” kids she knew all too intimately.

She prided herself on being the sort of teacher who helped with that, too.

“Alright! Last time we’d just finished looking at the Key Invasion and the dataspace reset. I notice everyone got their bonus points in, so, uh…Marianne.” She smiled at one of the stasis kids, a girl who she’d found always benefited from being given an early confidence boost in the day in the form of an easy question. “Who signed the Treaty of Cimbrean?”

Marianne went tense when called on, then relaxed when she was given a freebie. “The Great Father and the other Counsels?”

Now for a slightly trickier one. “Correct, but what did the treaty establish?”

Marianne hesitated, went a little red as a few people looked at her, and ventured. “It uh…disbanded the Grand Army?”

Good enough. Letty nodded, gave her an encouraging smile, and called up her first slide.

“Certainly! Things changed very quickly after the reset of Dataspace….”

Date Point: Liberation Day
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Six

He was…human, now. This was his body, indefinitely. There had been some talk of removing the implants and trying to recover Doctor Flowers’ personality, but the medical experts had argued that Flowers was long gone, and Six had argued that he’d died of entirely self-inflicted causes anyway and that he, Six, had merely…inherited the corpse.

Neither was quite true. Instead, the two personalities eventually merged. Six was Flowers was Six. Though, he still thought of himself as Six and fancied himself a better person than Flowers had been. Flowers had been a lecherous serial adulterer and penny-pincher who’d much rather lure an impressionable girl onto his boat with promises he never intended to keep than settle for a committed family life.

Of course, he hadn’t ever committed serial specicide, either.

In any case, Six was…free. Mostly. He was allowed to travel as he saw fit, invest, seek employment. Dabble in romance, though he found himself…valuing his solitude. So far, there hasn’t been much luck.

But every now and then, when he least expected it—and therefore knew for certain it was coming…

A short, utter juggernaut of a man paid him a visit.

Right now, for instance.

“History in the makin’, huh?”

Six flinched. Hoeff had an infuriating ability to just…appear. Even right now, in the middle of a crowd of people, Hoeff could just sneak right up and tap Six on the shoulder. The squat brick of a man was an incomprehensibly muscular hulk who could break concrete underfoot with nothing more than his sheer weight. He had the strength and size to humble men beyond even Warhorse, yet could somehow move like a blink-quick ghost when he wanted to.

And this in the most brightly obnoxious (and often obnoxiously minimal) clothing imaginable. He’d outdone himself today.

Six cleared his throat and feigned coolness. “It certainly happens frequently, of late.”

Hoeff chuckled without humor and moved to his side, uncomfortably close enough to feel the body heat radiating off him like a blast furnace. “Any luck on the datin’ front?”

“The same answer as last time: I’ve no experience, and it would be an… unusual woman who would remain interested after learning much about me.”

“Gee. That’s too bad.”

“You really make no effort to disguise your sadism, do you?”

“I like to keep it honest. An’ if it were up to me, you wouldn’t be standin’ there. But…” Hoeff shrugged. “Instead, my friends ask me to be civil. This is civil.”

“As opposed to?”

“Inventing new artforms in breakin’ you like you deserve. And I still have hope, maybe you’ll fuck up one day.”

“…Don’t you have a wife to spend time with?”

“You can see why these social calls irritate me so. I could be eating a steak, or reading a book, or screwing my wonderful Claire totally silly, or going to a play beforehand…”

“Please,” Six replied, drily, “do not allow me to detain you.”

“Oh no, gotta get all the latest dirt! How’s the new job?”

Six paused on the inhale. He’d been about to give another drily sarcastic reply, but then…no. Why? He was tired of this sparring. He was tired of the antagonism. Maybe there would be a return to dataspace one day and who knew what the future contained, but lately he’d come to appreciate the here and now, and the magnanimous gesture that was his continued life.

“I have investments and passive income. For now, the job is for the experience.”

“Ah. Okay. I can respect that.”

“I’m…actually enjoying it.”

“We’re physical beings. Working with your hands is rewarding.” He held his up, put Six’s in his giant, rough paw. The immense difference was something he’d only truly begun to appreciate as of late, now that he was earning callouses of his own. “Believe it or not my sense o’ touch ain’t diminished at all. I can feel steel grain even through these huge mitts o’ mine.”

“I can too. Wood is so…satisfying.” Six chuckled at himself. “I can’t believe I just admitted that, but…there was a time when I would have considered this my complete fall from grace. I was one of the controlling elite, my word shifted the course of galactic history—”

“Usually by endin’ some species or another.”

“—the point is….the point is, I don’t feel this as a loss.”

“Hmm.” Hoeff considered him. “An improvement, I guess. So keep it up. ‘Cuz hands like mine can create or destroy with a skill you wouldn’t believe. And you know what? I’d rather stick to steelwork and handyman.”

“…So would I.”

“We’ll see.”

Six nodded. “Right. So…is this the point where you explain your hot pink speedo?”

Hoeff grinned. “Aww, don’t you remember? When we first met? It was such a lovely beach. And lots of lovely ladies! Already had Claire though, so no single-man fun for me…buncha the team got to play, though. So there’s that.”

“…You are very strange.”

“Mhmm. That was a fun little mission, don’t you think?”

“Fun? I was too busy attempting to survive your attentions. And your rather unsubtle demonstration of might, as I recall. Forced me to my knees—”

“Palmed the back of your neck, yeah. Coulda popped your head right off with just a little squeeze,” Hoeff smiled with a disconcertingly wistful expression. “An’ I weren’t nearly the man I am now, of course…”

“You make your point as unsubtly as ever.”

“Damn right. Subtle means someone might miss the point. I’m doing you a favor by ensuring you couldn’t possibly misunderstand. Because I’m a playful sort of guy, Six. And when I get to playing, I tend to break my toys. Now hush, they’re starting.”

Six sighed but said nothing, glad for the reprieve from Hoeff’s….well, calling it ‘bluster’ would imply the man wasn’t perfectly willing and capable of making good on what he was saying. But he was glad for the reprieve from it regardless. He turned his attention to the large screen at the plaza’s north end.

The treaty, according to the ticker scrolling along the bottom of the feed, did three things: it formally disbanded the Grand Army, to be replaced by the United Peoples Military; it established a truce between the United Peoples and the Igraen Remnant; and it redistributed the former properties and demesnes of the Entity to Emperor Gilgamesh, while naming Garden Station as a monument to all those who lost their lives in the great conflict.

Given that was a list ten billion long, they needed somewhere appropriately large to honor the fallen.

It was being signed on a beach at the southern tip of Tiritya Island, hence Hoeff’s bizarre swimwear decision. It was one of the few genuinely warm places on Cimbrean (by human standards, anyway) and a popular vacation destination for the young and fit—so essentially everyone in this modern era.

A beautiful place, and a fitting one. Six watched as the Counsels were announced, took up their pens, and signed the treaty.

That was it. The war was over, and Six’s side had lost. And, it seemed, Six as part of the Hierarchy had known far less about the nature of his existence than he thought…though also far more than Zero and the administrators had believed possible.

And for some reason, the victors had decided to allow their vanquished foes to live. The Igraens still existed. Six…doubted the wisdom of that. Allowing them to survive only created opportunity for future betrayal and control. Why take that chance?

Could it be there was a reason?

Would he ever know that reason?

…Not any time soon, he decided. And by the time he did, he would have spent a long time living a human life, probably long enough to forget what being a dataform was even like.

Six took a look around. Lots of young, energetic people, who whooped when the Counsels and kings waded into the crowd. This was the dawn of a new empire, one unlike any that had come before, and he found he was glad to be here to see it. Perhaps in time, he’d even be thought of as part of it.

Who knew what the future held?

He put his hands together, and applauded.

New Dodge, Franklin, Cimbrean

Austin Beaufort

“Lookit that.”

“Beautiful.”

From his spot on the combine’s ladder, Austin could see corn as far as the horizon, almost. An ocean of perfectly ripe, dry, golden cornstalks with waves rippling across it as a perfect light breeze whispered across the surface.

Fuckin’ poetic.

Getting to corn had taken some doing. First was peas and legumes. Lots of nitrogen needed to be fixed into the nearly inorganic soil. Then came wheat in rotation, and other grasses. There they stayed until nitrogen fertilizers could be had at reasonable cost. Then they needed the right hybrids that could take the cooler but more predictable clime, and don’t even get started on all the drainage…

Only once all that had been put into place, could the king of grains be grown. Like so much Austin had done with his life in these years since Chicago, it had been a monumental gamble. Peas and beans and wheat and alfalfa for dairy was a safe crop rotation, and yeah, the dairy barns up on the hilltops had turned out forty million pounds of milk last year…

But high-production dairy cows weren’t truly at their best without corn. They need silage. It needed to be harvested still green so they could ferment the whole plant, give the girls the nutrition they needed. And besides cows destined for either meat or milk, they needed corn to feed the insatiable demand from…everything, really. Industry, hungry mouths, specialized bioplastics and biofuels for some of the weirder-yet-essential applications.

So, having got his mega-farm built, into a groove, equipped and soil enriched, and his “college” farms about ready to graduate their first students, as other farms started to specialize…

He’d gone all in on corn.

And now, it was time to bring the harvest in.

“Congratulations, Austin,” Ramsey nodded.

Christ he’d been a useful man to know, and a good friend to kick his ass when needed. They may not have had their adoptive father’s absurdly Heroic genetics, but they certainly admired him in spirit; both were physically powerful young men well acquainted with long, hard work and hard personal discipline, and it showed through Ramsey’s many-XL, too-tight t-shirt. Like their father, they were keen to lift everyone up around them too. A man couldn’t help but be inspired to do better if they measured themselves against those two! While Julian was living proof of just how much potential existed in the human race, his adopted sons were in turn proof that true, genuine human excellence didn’t necessarily need Heroic genes or crazy birthrights or weird alien conspiricies.

What it needed was spirit, grit, and a little help from opportunity. And while they weren’t exactly unlucky young men, in fact they were amply blessed in their own ways…with them, they were reassuringly normal blessings. The two had built themselves into super-heavyweights of business and community, and literally beyond that in work and sport. There was so muh potential in everyone, if they could only find the will!

Austin was blessed in his friends, really. Too bad they rarely got to hang out lately. At the moment, Tristan was running errands for bin fans and broken belts and other maladies, here and there. Ramsey was somehow free at the moment, and here to drive a grain cart until Jose was done with the milking for the evening. They needed every man they could get (who wasn’t a stark idiot) to get the corn in now, before Cimbrean’s ever-present precipitation rot it all in the field.

Fortunately, manpower wasn’t an issue. There were a lot of guys on stasis work contracts—come out of the bag, do some seasonal work, go back in the bag. Hell of a thing, Austin thought. He wasn’t sure he’d want to live like that. But those guys were helping with resource pressure by not eating while in stasis; solar and nuclear power was basically free, but carbs and good protein were precious manna. And they were racking up a lot of money too, so by the time they came out of storage permanently in a few years, they’d be well set up.

“Well…let’s get ‘er done.”

Ramsey cracked that bull-thick neck of his and grinned a big, corn-fed grin. “Fuck yeah!”

He was young at heart, as always.

The breaking dawn was almost over. In another half-hour or so, the morning dew would be driven off the crop. Not much time left. So they got to inspecting equipment. Topped off fluids and fuels, be they electric or biodiesel…

And they got it done.

Date Point: 11th of ten-month, year 20 UPC
Mother Giymuy High School, Lavmuy, Gao

Leticia “Letty” Firth

“If you’re going to understand the immediate post-war period, you need to understand that this was still a scarce economy. People were plentiful, with most of the human population still in stasis. But parts and material were a different matter entirely.”

Letty had a rather nice animation to illustrate the point. She’d found it on the Internet, and it served this lesson so well.

It was the complete material tree for a can of white paint.

Nothing really drove home just how deep and wide the logistics of everything truly ran than being able to point to the wall some of her students were literally leaning against and then show them just how much stuff went into the solvents, the binder, the pigment and the many, many other ingredients collectively known as ‘additives,’ and that was before getting into the can itself.

“Earth was still newly gone at this point, and with it an industrial foundation that took centuries to build. And to replace it we had Cimbrean, which was far too young and dependent on imports from Earth, and Gao, which had only recently been devastated by the biodrone war. During the four years of the evacuation, the Entity did a lot of heavy lifting thanks to its entire drone swarm being fitted with nanofactories, but when Keeda shut down dataspace, that went too.”

Jamie Howard shoved his hand in the air. One of the stasis kids, who’d missed the whole thing. “How bad was it?”

“Oh…honestly, we made do. You mended clothes, repaired appliances, that sort of thing. For a good decade, you tended to keep only a couple pieces of advanced electronics in the home, or you kept what you had still running. Everything else just…if it was simple, it kept working, right? Took a lot of time for high tech to really get its feet back under it, at least at high volume. This led to weird contradictions like having up-to-date grav plating in your house—it’s a big solid state device, and easy to make—and also having a computer fifteen years old being the norm, if you had a sit-down computer at all. Your well-used sewing machine was probably of gaoian design and make, and it probably sat next to a stasis fridge. Because the latter was easier to make than a traditional cold box!”

“What was it like on Earth, then?” Sanchia Lavigne asked. She was one of the after-Earth generation, born in the post-war world and lived her whole life on Gao. All she’d ever known had been that frugal, thrifty lifestyle.

“Oh, Earth was…at the pre-war peak, you’d replace your phone every couple of years. I remember the way my parents lived, my father got a new car on lease every three years, my mother bought new clothes every month, and everything, literally everything, came with packaging.”

About half the kids nodded familiarly, while the other half looked dumbstruck. That particular cultural rift was one of the greater challenges modern teachers had to deal with. Getting along with aliens wasn’t a problem, for the most part. What even did that word really mean anymore? But getting along with kids of their own species and apparent age who’d grown up with such completely different rules, that sometimes sent sparks flying.

“Things were expensive and unpredictable,” Letty summarized, “but not if they were important. Honestly, we somehow, collectively pulled off a logistical miracle. And that while the gaoian decline was in full swing, too. So…sad, yeah. Not an easy life for anyone. But we managed to have fun…”

Leemu, caught up in it all

There was good reason to celebrate today!

The sudden end of what had promised to be a life-defining war was unexpected, welcome news! Leemu was the official painter for the treaty. Daar had decided to do the thing on a very scenic beach, with broad cliffs to one side and a perfect view of Cimbrean’s famous sunrise. Lots of symbology there; he suspected Gyotin had some ideas behind it all. For safety’s sake the Igrean wasn’t present to sign the treaty. That had been done previously and recorded on video, which was shown to everyone. Made his job a bit easier, though. He could paint something uplifting, positive—

Gorku came visiting much the same as he always did. He scratched at the door and entered in one motion, guided by his nose to wherever Leemu happened to be. Tackles and brownie affection would no doubt ensue…

Only this time, he had a different mischief on his mind. “Hey, cousin! Guess who I found?!”

Tail wagging so hard it was beating dents into the doorframe. And behind him…

It took Leemu’s brain a moment to catch up with his nose and eyes, then he was keening happily and dropped everything as he mad-charged across the room to greet an old friend he’d given up on seeing again.

“Preed! You smell healthy!”

Preed chuckled, carefully set aside a walking stick, and dropped down on his knees to give Leemu a huge hug around the neck. “And you look even better…” he replied, holding tight. He was definitely frailer than Leemu remembered, but he still had that same warmth and impish humor shining through.

Leemu pant-grinned happily over Preed’s shoulder at Gorku. “How did you find him?!”

“Oh, das’ the bestest part! So I was doin’ sum upgrade training, ‘cuz we got ten’gewek we gotta worry ‘bout now inna gym, right? So sittin’ in a class, bein’ bored an’ shit, and then! End of the day, Daar showed up! Wasn’t even lookin’ ‘fer me, jus’ wanted ‘ta poke his nose in like he does, an’ he saw me an’ there was a reunion, an’ I had ‘ta show off my lifts, and—”

“As one does,” Leemu chittered. “But what about Preed?!”

“I’m gettin’ there! So we got to talkin’ while he showed off what he could do and balls I never felt so tiny, but anyway we sorta reminisced and he asked about Preed, yijao? An’ it turns out, he’d been put in stasis, an’ was one of the first scheduled t’come out! ‘Cuz culturally valuable or somethin’! So we went ‘round to go meet him, and here he is!”

Preed gave a small, self-effacing laugh. “I’m not so sure I’m that valuable…but the medicine is amazing. I’m told it’ll knock twenty years off if I’m diligent.”

“An’ you gotta eat well! And train, and—”

Leemu and Preed looked at each other, and traded an eye-roll they’d traded many a time before.

“And you are of course going to ensure we’re both taking care of ourselves,” Leemu chittered.

“‘Course I am! He made me promise!!” Gorku agreed. “An’ takin’ care o’ ‘yerselves starts with gettin’ out there an’ joinin’ the fun! An’ we got VIP access, too…”

Leemu raised his ears, and on suspicion gave a sniff toward the door. Sure enough…

There he was. Standing colossally big and tall as ever, sweat all lathered up in his fur and properly brownie big-boy musky. He stood there admiring his preposterously massive arms with the most ludicrously delighted expression on his face, his whole behemoth body taut and rippling with strength. Once he noticed Leemu, Daar pant-grinned down at him, growled playfully and flexed every part of himself in and out to display all that rippling, insanely thick muscularity of his. What he had, absolutely nobody of any species could ever possibly hope to match.

And he damn well knew it, too.

“Leemu! “Lil’ buddy! Been a minute, how ‘ya doin’?! Like my pump!? It’s just a lil’ quickie but I look pretty good, huh?”

He did, at that. Still! “Did…did you literally just come over straight from the gym?”

“Yeah! Gorku’s a great coach!! Got me feelin’ it good real quick!, ’specially in my hams an’ glutes! He’s good like Adam!!”

Leemu could only chitter in exasperation. So ridiculously, predictably Daar!

“You seem to collect expert meatheads!” Leemu pant-grinned and ran out to greet him. Daar in turn fell to all fours with a ground-shaking thud, and wrapped Leemu up in a brawny cocoon of gruff, happy affection.

“I’m lucky in my friends. That means you too!”

It warmed Leemu’s heart, really. He’d never smelled the Great Father so happy. Like…ever. Like this was what he was meant to be as a person, and being what he was, it almost never got to show itself…but it was showing itself now. They’d won. He’d won.

Leemu chittered indulgently. “I missed you too, My Father.”

Daar gently let him go, suddenly remembering his manners. “Been way too long ‘fer jus’ text messages now an’ then. You smell good! How’s th’ paintin’ comin’ along?!”

Daar’s tail wagged so furiously, it managed to wag the entire fuckin’ extra-thick bakery that was his rear quarters along with it. Leemu couldn’t help but chitter. He of course nodded respectfully to his friend and sovereign, even though he knew that right now Daar wouldn’t care one bit. Which was a big part of why he deserved the respect, really.

“I got the line sketches down, My Father. The rest….I’ll paint for effect when there’s time.”

“Cool! I’d ask ‘ta come in but I’m kinda bus-sized these days,” he chittered. “Even ‘yer double front door is a bit tight. But c’mon! I got mosta my Big Daar Energy out already, I promise!”

“You? Unpossible.”

“I got it out ‘fer now! You will note I was crafty wit’ my choice o’ werds! Now c’mon there’s a circus troupe that’s gonna perform! A cross-species one!! An’ Preed, you can ride on m’back if’n you need. Ooh, an’ there’s pizza! An’ tacos! An’ the bestest thing ever, taco pizza!!”

“Y’ain’t tasted the noodles Preed used’ta make back on the station,” Gorku pointed out.

“Hmm,” Daar considered. “That’s true…”

“And as much as I feel drawn to some high energy adventure,” Preed noted indulgently, “if you’re willing…I’d like to cook right now. It’ll be easier on my old bones.”

Leemu caught on. “And I know a growing Daar needs protein and carbs…”

It was at that moment an apocalyptic grumble emanated from the region of Daar’s belly.

“Well…I mean, no hidin’ my hunger,” Daar chittered. “But at th’ risk o’ soundin’ obvious, I eat a lot,” he warned them. “Like, you won’t believe how much.”

“Having lived with this huge lout, I’d believe anything.”

“Hey—!”

Daar chittered. “Fair! But meaning no offense, Gorku is tiny next t’me. I’m th’ most biggest an’ I eat even more’n my dumptruck huge might suggest, too. You…sure ‘yer okay wit’ that?”

“I don’t care if you’re a hundred times bigger, Noodle is a special thing.” Gorku duck-nodded vigorously on that point. “And besides, I have a well-stocked pantry,” Leemu countered. “You can refill it if you eat me empty. You’re rich, ain’t you?”

“Ha! Okay, fair ‘nuff. Mebbe…okay!” He seemed decided. “I’ll go hose down ‘round back first.”

He could be considerate, as brownies went. So Daar and Gorku went to perform some basic hygiene, while Preed got started in the kitchen and Leemu went to get all the drying aids. He still had his extra big brownie beach towels, luckily! It was a big house after all, and he was all alone.

No reason to declutter!

Toweling down was a good chance to catch up on gossip. It didn’t cut down on either of the big boy’s musk—and Leemu could already feel it fuzzing him even happier, to be close with such dominant old friends—but it did at least cut down on the transferable moisture content of his overly fragrant brothers.

Daar slinked his way through the too-small double door with well-practiced skill.

“Nice! I like the wrap-around mural! How long did that take?”

“About a month, I think? Lemme just get the padded rug—yes. Thanks.”

Fortunately, they had built the house wisely back then. Daar still filled any space he was in, but the double doors everywhere, wide hallway, and high ceilings made for a nicely cozy space for a ridiculous creature like him to sniff around in. And guided by his nose, he knew exactly where the giant lounging rug had been stored. The two burly boys wrestled it into place, and Relax began in earnest.

The first round of Noodle happened in very short order. Admittedly, Leemu was doing most of the cooking, while Preed sat down and directed him, but…

It was so nice. A return to a simpler time, somehow, for just a little while. They caught up, discussed Leemu’s career, Preed showed off the pictures of his grandchildren and first great-grandchild, Gorku talked about his own work, which was transitioning back to ordinary civilian personal training, now that the war was officially over…

Daar mostly laid on the floor as if he were trying to embody the spirit of a puddle, but couldn’t because he was far too stocky and muscular to get away with it. He was, apparently, actually tired and wanted some time away from the public eye and the endless celebrations.

He just needed help to realize it.

“Shit, you were right, this was the bestest idea. I had no fuckin’ idea how tired I was! Sarry,” he nodded to Preed. Coarse language was never a good idea around respected elders.

Preed of course waved it off. “You are long accustomed to high-energy activity, My Father. You should learn a thing or two from us broken old folk!”

Daar grunted, rested his chin on his paws, and closed his eyes. The indefatigable, untiring, invincible, unstoppable ruler of everyone was exhausted, and apparently only willing to let the people in this room know. “Y’know…it’s still genuinely weird hearin’ humans call me that.”

Preed would have none of that. “Because we mean it, you deserve it, and let us not say another word about it.”

Daar flicked an ear uncomfortably, but like any good gao, he respected his elders.

Gorku, however, was full of mischief.

“Y’know what’s the most weirdest thing ‘bout you, My Father?”

Daar opened an eye warily. “I hesitate to ask…what?”

“‘Yer always uncomfortable when people talk ‘bout you in ways that matter, yijao? But th’ moment it’s somethin’ mos’ly goofy, like bein’ voted ‘most prettiest’ or bein’ th’ bestest bodybuilder in one of those ‘fitness’ magazines…”

Daar chitter-sighed in concession. “Y’know, ‘yer right as balls on that.”

“Or most huggable,” Leemu added.

Daar perked up. “Wait, when did that one happen?!”

“It was in a human magazine for females, about five years ago. ‘Top ten most huggable celebrities.’ I don’t know exactly what criteria they were judging on, but…”

“It was his winter fur,” Gorku added. “The exact words were ‘he is made of snoft and fuzzy.’”

“Snoft.” Daar repeated the word like it was something filthy he was picking up between his claws. “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult. How th’ fuck is anyone gonna lookit me an’ go ‘yeah, that’s a big tub o’ huggable’?”

To be fair, he was so dense and so deeply, severely sculpted, “soft” was just never a word that Leemu thought of in the context of Daar. But huggable? Hugs were what Daars did best.

“Literally everyone who has ever met your friendly side. And they’re right about the fur,” Leemu added after a moment of thought. “Your winter coat is shaggy.”

“Even ‘fer a ‘Back, yeah. Mine’s pretty good but ‘yers is epic.”

Daar looked at them all like they were aliens, and decided he didn’t have the energy to fight them on it. Another puddle attempt ensued.

It didn’t work. So instead, he reached over with one of those long arms of his and pulled Gorku in for a loving, crushing snuggle. He tried to escape, but resistance was futile.

Leemu chittered, and by unspoken agreement the three of them moved on to a new topic. “Are your family still in stasis?” he asked Preed.

“For now. Along with nearly all the Thai people. Part of the reason I am not is, I lived for so long among non-humans, so what’s left of the government-that-was wanted my insight.”

“That was prob’ly part o’ Governor Sartori’s effort,” Daar noted with a yawn and a tighter snuggling squeeze. Gorku chittered in exasperation and surrendered to the affection.

“I was surprised when he accepted the appointment. Is he doing well?”

“Yeah. He’s been a lotta help with the re-population.”

Preed nodded. “And he’s very keen on trying to preserve what we can of Earth’s cultures. He doesn’t want us all to become one homogenous people, he wants to preserve some of what made each nation distinct.”

A sweet curry noodle was next, with a thick peanut sauce. Daar’s huge bowl was refilled and pressed into his paws.

He sniffed appreciatively. “Mhmm…balls. ‘Yer right, this is so good. I know ‘yer gonna stuff me fulla more noodle an’ I ain’t complainin’! But I’m a pretty low-carb sorta guy…an’ it’s makin’ me sleepy.”

“Good. Have some more.”

Noodles happened. The next round was with garlic and beef, pretty much Preed’s finishing combo for gaoians. Daar temporarily released Gorku for Final Noodle so he could really appreciate the scents and flavors, and true to his word, succumbed to Nap after his tenth basin-like bowl.

The rest of them, perhaps inspired by a spirit of wisdom, took the opportunity to nap themselves, which resulted in Daar pulling them all into a nice, comfortable pile right on the good rug. It was impossible not to fall asleep smashed up against and entirely enveloped by that much affection and warm fur and fierce, protective strength. Daar had Leemu wrapped up in his great arms, face pressed against the fluffy thickness of Daar’s vast chest, head resting on an unyielding bicep literally bigger than he was. Gorku was pinned flat in Daar’s apocalyptic legs, which he pulled up to fully wrap himself around both his snuggle-buddies.

Preed, being an elderly human, was allowed the dignity of merely resting along Daar’s flank.

It was close, and comfortable, and it did the trick like only a friendly pile can really do: they all fell fast asleep. As he expected, being wedged between Daar and Gorku had a deeply comforting effect on Leemu, and he surrendered to it completely. Gaoians thrived on close contact and even with visiting the local artist’s workhouse, he’d been missing it, living as a solo artist. But now? Both of his closest friends, enveloping him in their scent and their affection…

He fell into the deepest of sleeps before he realized how much he’d missed his friends.

When they finally awoke, all three were energized and fresh, and Daar seemed fizzing and ready for another round in the public eye.

Leemu wondered when they’d next have the pleasure. Rarely, he guessed. But sometimes.

In the end, he’d coaxed them to come revel with the world. There was a big beach party still going on, so they trotted on down to go see. Preed on Daar’s back got a roaring welcome, much to his chagrin…

Taco pizza was amazing. A cross-promotion between Ninja Taco and Pizza Samurai, it was served as a firebomb special wrapped in a Pepper-ronin. Still not a patch on fresh homemade noodles in Leemu’s opinion, but who knew? Maybe there’d be, uh, Noodle Viking or whatever before long, to add to the mayhem.

…Hmm. Maybe he could convince Preed to go into business again…

For now, for the following week…rank didn’t matter. Everyone was on equal terms while civilization took a collective breath of relief. Daar for once could be one with the people, and right now he was the safest, happiest person in the world. Just bein’ the most biggest, most goofiest friend to everyone, right as his truest nature had always wanted to be.

They were all truly blessed and lucky. For him, for everything.

And Leemu, in his tiny, small way…helped make it happen.

It was good to be alive.

Date point: Liberation Day
Ekallim-Igigi, New Uruk

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh had never seen his friend look so small and crushed. Quite literally, for the moment; the Great Father had very carefully and deliberately all but exterminated Kidu right then and there. Multiple ruptured organs, all his ribs broken, spine torn in half just from the violence of the impact.

All with a simple, terrifyingly effortless one-armed slam into a stone wall.

A calculated move, that. One which had shattered any delusions Gilgamesh may have held—not that he had held any such—that their’s was an equality (or at least reasonable peerage) of prowess as well as rank. In all their years together, he and Kidu had been equally matched, able to brawl for hours and honestly, their record of winning or losing to each other was about that of a slightly biased, imperfect coin.

They were now ruled by something in a far greater league of physical excellence than either of them. He was polite, and allowed them independence and sovereignty…but not out of any genuine fear. Daar was supreme. And not just in body, or even in mind. In all ways and all forms of power, he was impossibly unmatched. The Great Father was terrible.

Kidu had forgotten that, to his incalculable cost.

All repairable, of course. In a day or three more, he’d be whole. That was the nature of their medicine, that which did not kill outright rarely left a truly indelible mark on the body. But Daar knew that, so instead he left an indelible scar on their souls. One that, in its way, was a brutal kind of mercy.

Word had already come. The Great Father had expressed ‘concern’ about Y!kiidaa’s health, which was as close to any kind of contrition as they were apt to get. It was also a statement that might lead in the fullness of time to reconciliation, to official healing…

But never again would the Great Father trust Y!’kiidaa on anything of import.

…And rightfully so.

There was a light tap on his arm as Tomoe rested her head against Gilgamesh’s bicep. “You’re brooding.”

He glanced down at her, then back through the observation window.

“I must deal with Leifini too,” he said, unhappily. “Kidu was never any kind of stupid, but this affair does not have the hallmarks of his wit. That device he used was hers, I’m sure of it.”

“Most likely,” Tomoe agreed. “I’m sure she will be perfectly honest with you, retire her position and step down with as much dignity as possible. She may even choose to pass on.”

“I will not allow her the choice,” Gilgamesh decided. “Y!’kiidaa paid a heavy price for his hubris, but a large share of that punishment belongs to her.”

Tomoe frowned at him, but said nothing.

“You think my decision unjust?”

She shrugged. “I was born in a time and place where seppuku would be the expected and satisfactory outcome of an affair like this. Sometimes, my instincts revert. In your own words, husband, we never quite leave our homelands behind, do we?”

Gilgamesh considered. “You make a wise point. I will permit her opportunity to do the right thing and retire into obscurity. In fact I had intended to I think, but it is better to say so, no?”

Tomoe nodded, and remained silently at his side for a while.

“…I think…” Gilgamesh began, “…I think…I think this would be easier to bear if he were not so…unrepentant.”

“Then this might one day cost him everything. The Great Father was merciful.”

“No,” Gilgamesh disagreed. “I mean…yes, but that was not his ultimate motivation. The Great Father, in a moment of the very highest pressure and crisis, kept his head and thought of the United Peoples, and what he must do to preserve it for the common good. Kidu knows this. He always knows this. In fact, he perhaps willingly walked into the trap, knowing what would happen.”

Tomoe considered that thought. “He has always been a man of strong conviction. If he truly believed it was the right thing to do, and was—is—willing to suffer for it…it seems to me that he may have been trapped between one lie and another.”

“Perhaps. It will ensure there is never again any trust. That bridge is burned.”

“And that will impact your standing as well.”

“Yes.” Gilgamesh put his arm around her, gloomily. “What is right for the United Peoples? Daar made it seem so effortless, but I do not know. I do not know if what is right is to send him away as Daar has done, or cleave to my old oaths of brotherhood and be honest that, betrayed though I feel, I still love him as my brother.”

For a time, perhaps a minute, they stood side-by-side, and the only sound was the station’s ever-present background hum, and the faint rush of air in the ventilation system. Finally, Tomoe shifted and spoke.

“A quote springs to mind.”

“What quote?”

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

He tilted his head, considered the words, then looked down at her. “A day I wish I had been there for. But…”

“Do you not see the parallel? We are only two years and spare change removed from the last world war. The United Peoples may be united in victory today, but that wound is still going to be the work of generations to heal. If you cannot love and embrace your oldest friend despite what he has done—”

“—then how can I ask the survivors of nuclear war to call each other brother?”

A slight sideways twitch of her head served as both shrug and nod.

“And it flows to the Great Father as well. Is he not capable of forgiveness? He has already opened the door.”

“Mm.” Tomoe gestured at Kidu’s slumbering form. “Maybe he will never repent of this. Maybe he’ll be maintaining it was the right thing to do even until his final year. Maybe you and Daar will never be able to trust him on a mission or in war ever again…but I know you can absolutely trust him to love you. I am quite sure he never lied about that. And if love cannot heal a rift, then what is it even for?”

Gilgamesh considered that. Then he nodded, stooped, and gave her a grateful kiss. “Thank you.”

She shook her head, dismissing the idea that he had anything to thank her for. “Come. Let’s leave Kidu to his rest. You deserve rest of your own, and to participate in the celebrations. Mevia is waiting for us.”

“Mevia?”

She said nothing with her voice and much with her eyes, a smirk, and the way she turned away from him and headed for the door.

Oh. Well. Astonishing how, even at this point in such a long life and long marriage, they could still have that effect on him. Still, Gilgamesh glanced back through the glass at his friend one last time…

Kidu was awake. He flicked an ear, and tilted his snout upwards at the door Tomoe had just gone through. The tricky bastard had been able to see and hear everything the entire time.

Gilgamesh couldn’t help himself: he laughed. He inclined himself slightly, acknowledging another excellent trick, then turned and followed his wife toward whatever delights she had waiting for him.

It was a good time to be alive.

Not easy, no. Never easy. Never without its challenges or drama.

But even among them, even with the burdens and struggles of the days to come…

It was a good time to be alive.

Key World, the Distant Stars

Lewis Beverote

“Holy ass-balls it’s cold, dude!”

The doors opened, and Lewis finally laid eyes on his life’s work.

“…Duuuuuuude.”

Date Point: 11th of ten-month, year 20 UPC
Mother Giymuy High School, Lavmuy, Gao

Leticia “Letty” Firth

“The United Peoples Calendar, or UPC, counts the day of the treaty signing as its zero point. Three more species formally joined the United Peoples in the year after the treaty was signed…anyone?”

Hands shot in the air. She picked one at random. “Taylor?”

“The E-Skurel-Ir, the OmoAru, and the Rauwrhyr.”

“Good! Full points for that one.”

“I thought the Robalin joined too?” Jung asked, from the back. Letty smiled at him.

“That didn’t come until later, after the Robalin Collapse and the overthrow of the Supremacy. That’s a subject we’re not gonna cover until month five, but…” she glanced up at the clock. “We’ve got time for the short version…”

Date point: year 3 UPC
Rob’, homeworld of the Robalin people

Ian (Death-Eye) Wilde

Toppling the Supremacy had been the work of a decade, and most folks in the galaxy would believe it had happened naturally. If the Interspecies Dominion ever found out the UP had instigated this war with one of its member governments, well, they’d be obligated by treaty and law to object. As it was though, the Supremacy had apparently given the UP a legitimate casus belli; there was nothing the Dominion could do except wash their hands of it, step aside, and let it play out.

What followed had been a short war. And by God, it was all worth it to see Dora clinging tight to her parents, their fluffy antennae twisted tight around each other in the robalin equivalent of showering each other in kisses.

They looked old and skinny he thought, though it was hard to tell. They would be old, really. Robalin naturally lived about seventy years, and these two were…what, in their mid sixties? They must have imagined they would never see their daughter again.

He stood by and let them take all the time they needed.

The Wrecking Crew had changed a lot. Firstly, their mission profile was…extremely occasional. Same with Wilde and crew lately, too. They were mostly in reserve, expected to be ready. And that opened up all sorts of interesting recruitment options.

Nomuk and Genn had felt the Fire and gone off to become Given-Men, while Frasier and Rees had retired and were married now. Not to each other, though their wives definitely thought so. Urgug was now teaching interstellar navigation at the…oogunderbongowhatsitsomethingincrediblylong academy of flight, Morwk had met a kwmbwrw lass he was thoroughly head-over-tail for and gone home with Ian’s blessing.

Ian and Hunter had found an incredibly supportive pair of women, too. He didn’t get hung up about picking a label these days. Maybe he was gay, or whatever. Well. He was at least gay for Hunter, but also pretty wildly in love with his wife, Roxanne.

They didn’t have any weird kind of poly thing going. They just…moved on. Happily, and without a lot of hang-up. It was…somehow easier than he’d feared. Didn’t stop them loving each other, but that time in their lives was now firmly behind them, and family life awaited.

…Maybe not entirely. There had been one or two wild nights with everyone…anyway.

Moj and Dora didn’t have any place else to be. The Fortune’s new engineer was an OmoAru, and the new navigator a rauwrhyr. There were a couple new ten’gewek, and one that wasn’t new at all…

Warhorse and Yan were still on-planet somewhere, doing a bit of clean-up work with Chimp.

And by clean-up, of course…well, the nazi fucks had it coming.

Dora finally led her folks over by the hands to introduce them, and Ian reminded himself to keep his handshake light and his smile close-lipped—

He didn’t get the chance. Dora’s father hugged him tight, surprisingly tight for such an elderly and frail ET, and Ian tried not to object to the feathery tickling on his face that was the old man thanking him.

If he only knew just how much Ian and the Crew had been involved in making this happen, Ian thought, he’d never let go. So, Ian made awkward noises and hugged him back gently, made nice-talk for a bit.

“You’ve looked after our daughter well…” Dora’s mother Milda thanked him, after a few minutes.

“More the other way round, half the time,” Ian demurred, favoring Dora with a smile. “Truth be told, I dreaded coming here. I dunno what we’d do without ‘er.”

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” Dora promised. She was still between her mum and dad, her left and right arms draped around them while the middle one gestured reassuringly. “The Fortune’s my home and my purpose. I…think I will take some shore leave, though.”

“You damn well better. Should I send Bruuk? Things are a bit unstable right now, and, well…dude sends a message, yijao?”

Dora opened her mouth to reply, then watched as a young robalin male cantered past with a rainbow flag streaming from his hands, whooping joyfully. How and where he’d got one, or even knew what it was for, Ian had no idea. But Dora watched him vanish around the corner, and giggled.

“…I think I’ll be fine.”

“Aye, fair enough. Go on, then. Call if you need owt.”

And…that was that, really. They said some last words for the moment, everyone went their separate ways. Moj was off putting his skills to use securing intelligence from the abandoned Supremacy offices, OnBuruAwi was helping repair municipal infrastructure the retreating Supremacy forces had sabotaged, and Xwyrrhuryi was off handing out aid supplies.

That left just two people on-ship.

Ian and Bruuk. Bruuk and Ian. BruukIan as some had joked. Which wasn’t quite true, but he was awfully fond of the tankbear, in a way similar but also not at all the same as with Hunter…

It was more an attraction of souls. Yeah. They were deep friends. Knew everything about each other, knew no real privacy at all. Actually with Hunter they were a sort of intense trio, as was often the case with human-gaoian friendships, but Hunter wasn’t here right now.

Too bad. But still, it was good to have Bruuk on-board. Firstly, he needed someone who could counterbalance the Big Boys on the Crew, and Bruuk was absolutely that. Keen to remind people, too. Secondly, nobody was a better cook. And Jesus wept that mattered on a ship.

Thirdly, even after all these years, he was still mediocre at best with Mario Kart. And kinda shit at Street Fighter, too. He insisted on using Blanka even though his best game was definitely Dhalsim.

He took his personal jump back up to the ship after waving Dora and he parents off to go catch up, thump, and followed his nose to the galley. Curry today, apparently. Nice.

Bruuk was cooking up some naan, since Yan had made a project of building a tandoor. Why not? Ten’gewek liked hot fires, apparently. And he’d become a big fan of indian food.

“How’d it go?”

“Good. They’re both well. Dora’s stayin’ down there a while to catch up, take some shore leave…who knows, maybe find a nice lass who’s looking to explore, eh?”

“Here’s hopin’! She deserves it.”

Ian nodded fervently at that, and grabbed a glass of water before flopping down on the couch. “What about you? Get that contract yet?”

Brownie mode ACTIVATE. Arms: flexed. Preen: maximized. Chitter: smug as balls. “Was there ever any doubt?”

“‘Course there fuckin’ wasn’t, mate. Only a matter of when, not if.”

“Damn right! Too bad you never succumbed ‘ta my advances…”

“Oi. Mate. I like my colon intact, thank you very much.”

“After Hunter? Please.”

Well, fair point that. “Still wanna avoid ‘yer anatomy. Also, don’t gaoians bite in mating?”

“Well, yeah. Don’t you?”

“Yes, sometimes? But we don’t have inch-long canines.”

“I know. Seems kinda lame to me,” he chittered. “Anyway…so we’re just waiting now, right?”

“Yup. Crew’s got work.”

Didn’t need to say anything more.

“Right. Well…thank you, by the way.”

“…For what?”

“Keepin’ me on the, uh, cleaner side of the dark arts, yijao? I’m happy being a handyman slash suit-tech slash fuzzball o’ muscle. I like my fights simple and, y’know. Honest.”

Ian chuckled. “I dunno mate. Stompin’ nazis is about as honest as it ever gets.”

“Yeah, I s’pose…but we’ll be huntin’ the escapees for years after this, so I bet we’ll all get the chance.”

“Hmm.” Ian nodded and relaxed. God the couch was so nicely soft. “…Where is the space equivalent of Argentina, anyway?”

“Huh?”

“Heh! Never mind.”

“Well, if you mean something like a safe haven…the Celzi Alliance, mebbe?”

Chin-stroking big thoughts, that one.

“Maybe.” Time to clear his head. “Well, whatever happens next…I’m glad I’ve got this crew. And the Crew. And you, too.”

Bruuk pant-grinned happily, grabbed his own drink, and they toasted each other from across the room. He’d learned not to get all up in Bruuk’s space while he was cooking up a storm…

They ate together. High-protein vegetarian indian and some chicken tandoori. The rest went into stasis for whenever the crew got back. Wilde helped tidy up, they played some vidya…

Kept an ear to the radio. The Wrecking Crew were quietly doing their thing, but Ian could track their progress by some confused chatter among the Resistance Liberation Force about why they were reaching positions they’d expected to face heavy opposition, only to find them shattered and empty.

At this rate, the last Supremacy forces would be surrounded, starved and surrendering by the end of the week. Their stumbling retreat across the continent of Huish wasn’t being allowed time to turn into a well-organized regrouping. The UP Military was far too good at this.

He listened to the chatter as another “correction facility” was liberated, and smiled.

It was a good time to be alive.

Warhorse

Time between actions, even if it was only maybe twenty minutes. Time to slam down fuel both liquid and allegedly solid. Time to let his body make Crude, fix him up, get everything perfect.

He really was a Warhorse, these days. A good fight, or at least the chance to go out and dominate something for a good cause…nothing cleared his head so well. Yan called it the Fire, and Adam was inclined to agree. It wasn’t the Hate. Not anymore. It was something…much more intense. Something from himself, not his anger.

Hard to get a handle on, too. Not even all-day lifting or playtime with Marty was enough to cool it. But a good fight? Even just a friendly brawl on the mat? That worked. And nothing worked like a good mission. Today was a very good mission, so he was all sorts of free-thinking.

So he may as well just get it out of the way before the fight resumed, and thinking stopped.

A lot had happened in the last thirteen years.

Adam was in his fifties now. Chronologically, at least. He had old-man muscle maturity to play with now, yet biologically speaking he was about nineteen and had a testosterone count fit to kill a bull in his prime. He didn’t look or feel like either age, instead he was somewhere in the middle of “young,” “in his prime,” and “extreme meathead.” For some he’d become an inhuman, off-putting mountain of muscle, for others he was the very definition of man. Pretty much no middle ground, there; you either loved what Adam was, or you couldn’t stand it. Still felt like none of them could stop staring if they didn’t think he noticed…but he always did.

He was a lot jollier about it all lately. Still a little weird but he rolled with it. He liked what he was, and so did his wife and his friends. Who cared what the others thought? His strength kept them all safe at night, so fuck ‘em. He’d also managed to fade out of the public eye too, so it was really only people around Folctha and New Alexandria who recognized him these days. He’d even managed to dodge a reporter for one of those “where are they now?” type fluff pieces.

The Lists had (mostly) moved onto less slabby men and taken a fascination with rock stars again. Julian and Alex were still tied for number one, though, with a freak hoss of a rescue firefighter in New Alexandria cracking the top five. Hadn’t met him yet. Righteous avoided the camera and went off into the unranked “legendary” list along with Left Beef and Right Beef, and frankly all the rest of HEAT. He didn’t know what “legendary” meant really, but he suspected it was where they put former it-boys when what was fashionable trended away from them.

Eh. He liked being the center of attention, but he liked doing the mission even more, and his mission these days meant he needed to be…a bit less visible to the public at large.

Kids were grown up and out of the house, no more were on the way. Marty was past that point in her life, even if Crude had preserved her youth in much the same way it had Adam…but not even Crude could overcome some things, and the medical work needed to go in for round two, as it were…

Well, risks that big weren’t things to do on a lark. So failing that…

There was a statuesque dusky-skinned amazon of a Brazilian woman (from Singularity, natch) that Marty kept pointing out to him, one who apparently was a perfect match to their Line profiling. Luana, was her name. Long, dark hair, Just as tall as Adam, exactly his type in every way. Marty’s too, if they were being completely honest. And honest was how they were, so…

It was a little creepy, having Singularity put this thing in his life. But to be fair to them, all they ever did was suggest. Still creepy, but with the gaoians and ten’gewek to compete with? That was probably the least awful way to address a very foreseeable long-term problem. He and Luana would make some pretty epic children, after all.

So maybe. But not yet. Hell, they’d even gone so far as to have coffee and lunch together, get to know each other as a trio. She was friendly, and interested, as someone raised by Singularity would be…but no. He wanted some time without family commitments. Time to live for himself, work on himself. Time for Marty again. Time to finish some unfinished business.

Hell. He’d say yes, he knew. He’d…never been tamed, honestly. Never found he could really agree with Father Michael, no matter how much he respected the man. Adam knew what he was, knew that Singularity, well…had a point, knew that Marty knew it, too. So…yeah. It’d happen. But not until the bulk of this dark and dirty work was behind them.

Which was really why he was Warhorse. Adam needed the fight. Not because of the Hate, that wasn’t in him anymore. At least, not like it was. No. The fight was what he was. What he’d spend decades mastering, what he’d forged his body for. Why he and the rest of the Crew were on the bleeding edge of what was possible. He was a willing, living weapon.

And weapons got used.

So that was what he did, now. Even among special operations communities, there was a “light” and a “dark” side to everything. Most everyone stuck to the more open, more clear-cut and less morally gray side of things, and Adam couldn’t blame them. That had been him for very many years. But with extreme excellence comes extreme responsibility, and, well…

Adam took all that very seriously. Which meant that, among humankind, Adam was once again the very best. And this time, if he had his way, he’d stay there.

Though, he did need to qualify that statement.

Adam didn’t have any innate advantage or anything over his biggest best bud, not this time. All those belonged to Firth. Hell, it was a testament to what a complete freak he was that it took the most cutting-edge bioscience from Humanity, Gao, Singularity, the Corti, the OmuAru and the Igreans (!) for Adam and his Crew to absolutely maximize themselves…

And Righteous was still pound-for-pound just as good. Hell, he might even still be better, even with everything Adam and the Crew were willing to risk. He was naturally maximum, just like Daar. Why would he risk it? He already had conditioning and athleticism that Adam could never match, because Firth’s physique was just plain better.

So, Adam had to beat him through the brute expedient of packing on more mass. And it worked, as always. More functional strength could blow through almost any problem, and Adam was built to be big; he had every bit of Firth’s bulk and then some. Firth was playing it safe, frankly. Which wasn’t a knock on him at all! Adam understood. People had lives and Firth would probably put Adam away for good, one day. He had enormous family commitments right now. There was more to existence than personal performance. Allegedly.

But not right now.

Time and commitment was really the key, especially at this level. Outmassing Firth on a shorter, broader frame had sent Adam’s strength through the roof. And out-performing Firth was easy again. Couldn’t crush him, couldn’t break him, because Firth was far too tough for that and Adam was no tougher. But out-lift? Out-sprint? Hell yeah. Felt good. Felt real good.

Of course, doors and floors were an ongoing problem for big boys like him, even with everything built better these days, but that was okay. Nobody beat him.

And frankly, there weren’t many who could stand up to the Wrecking Crew: Warhorse, Chimp, and Grodd. Yan was an unbreakable tree-swinging primate. He was the Heroic ten’gewek, from a people made to be heroes. Yan was awesome. Hoeff was the meanest and most experienced. He was a mini-Warhorse nowadays, having grown up and filled out to the staggering height of five-foot-nine. A good size for utility purposes, and nobody but Firth and the crew could reliably put the juggernaut of a fireplug in his place.

And of course, there was Adam. He was the strongest and most capable, once again the hulked-out king shit of all meatheads. Nobody but Daar could fold him up. Life was good.

Together, they were exactly what the name said on the tin. They were the Great Father’s semi-deniable means to wreck. All three of them were supersoldiers at the pinnacle of the arts, who had volunteered for the most intense training and engineered medicine, the most severe personal discipline. Hell, the only reason Righteous wasn’t among them really was his family commitments. Ten years from now, with the kids all grow’d up…

Hell, these days Hoeff could manhandle the likes of Julian and Alex, and hardly break a sweat! Nobody else could stand to them, and that was their quiet, publicly unknown pride.

Well, nobody mortal, anyway. Whatever Daar was now, mortal felt like the wrong word. Hadn’t even slowed down. Not any taller. But he was more in every way, even ignoring his size. If he were Firth-sized he’d still be unattainably better. Same with everything else.

Monstrous.

They all were, being honest. The three of them had Daar-density too, to the point that anyone else was weaker, soft and squishy. The three looked like pure death in their armor.

And what amazing new Suits they had, too.

Daar wanted armor purpose-built for Wrecking Crew activities and they had the full combined tech of Daar’s empire at their disposal. There were no separate outer layers, the whole suit was a single piece of nanotech superscience, now. It was inches thick but perfectly form-fitting, and it had almost nothing disturbing its surface, both to enhance their performance and to flaunt the muscular shape of the man within it. They didn’t make a habit of carrying much equipment on their special Wrecking missions, because that might slow them down when their purpose was absolute shock. Light packs. Just weapons and whatever the mission needed. In, out, done.

Keep it simple.

Even still, It was the heaviest and densest version of either the Suit or the MASS ever fielded, and only a few could handle it. Everyone on the Wrecking Crew was big and hard enough, and the suit noticeably moved with them. Just walking along was an organic display of might.

Exactly as intended. They were there to clean up dark messes and send messages.

None of which detracted from the HEAT, of course. Their mission was the same as ever: extreme all-ways performance in hazardous spaceborne environments. But like much of the military, the SOR and all its units had transitioned to a reserve status. Those still on-team rotated quarterly through a “more active” watch and training period, and spent the rest of the year living mostly normal lives. Every other weekend they practiced maneuver and discipline. Training plans were updated. Health monitored.

Then back to everyday life.

Which was good. Pretty fucks like Playboy or Alex didn’t need to be in this kind of fight, so they’d not been pushing themselves as extremely hard as they could. Probably wise. They were too charismatic and in the public eye, and both were at the point where more too quickly might detract from their lines and good looks. After all, the two were legitimately the prettiest, and that had important uses, as much as Adam didn’t like to admit it, but mostly it was because it wouldn’t do for ambassadors or sovereigns to get their hands dirty like this.

The two weren’t big or mean enough to do the job violently enough anyway, or in Righteous’s case, something like this wasn’t at all a good use of his time; he had reservists to preserve and a warren of family ties to father.

Daar wanted to terrorize the Supremacy. And so the Crew were. Violence was just as much message as it was effect, after all, so he sent three brutal juggernauts who were a very different kind of handsome. A terrifying kind, who would show no mercy.

But it was very much necessary. One didn’t often get to pulp literal actual Nazis. The Supremacy had fanboys within it, and they weren’t ashamed to flaunt it. Well, they were now. ‘Horse wasn’t afraid to put his fist right through their scaly chests, either.

“Five minutes,” the pilot intoned from the front of their tiny little drop ship. The Jitney Mk II. Just enough room for the three to post up and prepare to jump. Quick check-over. Everyone was ready, of course. They were professionals. The Suits were black and gray and showed off the shape and shift of their muscles as they moved, made them look exactly like the unstoppable force of murder they were there to be. With Yan being a ten’gewek, he was so perfectly shaped for purpose, you could legit see his abs even through it all. Damn.

Their target was a palace to the glory of the perfect robalin form. None of the Crew was much impressed. One of the last stubborn cadres of Exemplars were holed up there, whipped up into suicidal defiance by their commander, the late propaganda minister’s half-brother. For the moment they were sitting still, and the guess was they were planning a counterattack.

They weren’t gonna get the chance.

Insertion was going to be the best sort of action. Free-fall drop right through the roof, well ahead of other military elements. HEAT was busy securing the planetary Farthrow and other critical assets—they’d called in everyone, even Julian and Vemik—while the Crew went after something darker, and more long-term dangerous.

They were going after three-legged alien lizard-ant space Hitler, and they were going to crush the very idea of resistance among the genocide-worshipping fucks.

Daar wanted this shit ended with extreme prejudive. That’s why the Crew. His finest.

And Whitecrest’s finest. Regaari and his own had done some remarkable scouting.

Two minutes. HUD was full of the happy numbers. They lined up on the ramp. Full send today, they’d be dropping like a meteor.

One minute. Check autodocs. Chimp and Grodd getting amped up. ‘Horse too.

Thirty seconds. Ramp opens. Final checks.

Long wait. Final count. Exhale.

Step off.

Fields whip out a little, guide and correct toward target. Up-to-date intel. Meeting going on. They’d be crashing right into the middle of it. Formation tightening a bit, everyone on point.

A few seconds to go, ground coming up very fast. No braking. Weapon in hand.

Impact.

No time to think, just act. New carbines. Tiny, hypervelocity flechettes. Didn’t even need to wear a pack. No need for deer slugs, here.

One hit, robalin explodes. Gory mess. Shock established. Time to get artful.

As promised, they sent a message.

It didn’t take very long.

Grodd literally tore space neo-Hitler in half right down the middle, as if he were simply ripping a sheet of paper. Chimp decided to wrestle the guards in an ongoing, flowing battle around the room. A spare second for each, and none of them were recognizably whole when he’d finished with them.

‘Horse was so fast and violent, he’d burst all the gathered ministers like balloons before the other two got to playing with their secondary targets.

At the end, two very unfortunate fucks burst in, guns blazing. Grodd leapt across the room like a flea and slammed them together just before he landed. Try as he might, ‘Horse couldn’t tell where one corpse began and the other ended.

Violence suddenly over, suddenly quiet. Blood dripping softly from the ceiling.

Well. That was a quick mission.

They secured their location, then they made sure to wander around for just a little bit. Long enough for the cameras to see, for the idiots to comprehend what had happened to them. They had to know there was an option like the Crew, waiting and willing. They waited until the shouting and alarms started outside.

Point made, targets serviced. Thump.

Back at Whitecrest HQ. De-suit and debrief. Didn’t take long. Darkness: lit, for a little while. Now, go wrestle and train. Crush Hoeff, beat back Christian and Julian for another day. Learn from Yan, who was the best there was at wrestling. His skill versus Adam’s unbreakable strength. It was a draw until Yan ran out of gas and needed to be pushed. Go train Daar and regain some perspective. Cool down. Soak in sauna with friends.

Not exactly jokes, after something like that. But lighter talk. Unwind. Clear his head.

By the time he was back home, it had just been another day at work. Dark work, yes. But work that needed doing. And for the moment, he was the best there was. There’d be more to come too, no doubt. Nazi hunting. Wilde and crew would be busy. And so would the Crew.

Or maybe the last of the Supremacy would get the message and surrender. Adam got paid either way. Be nice if they surrendered, though. As much as Adam appreciated what he was and why he needed the mission…ultimately, he’d rather not be the monster.

But at least it was a quick mission and he could go back to, honestly, his better life. He had some apartments to remodel again. Long-term tenants had moved out. Hoeff and Yan would be helping out probably.

He was about to break ground in New Alexandria, too. Vemik and Ferd’s crew would definitely be doing the steelwork. They charged big money, but it paid to get it done right the first time. Yan’s crew was already scheduled or he’d have them too. Bummer.

So that was life. Adam was back on top, doing a mission only he could do, one that desperately needed doing. Friends with good people, opportunities everywhere a man looked.

Life wasn’t so bad.

Martina Arés

“You’re home early!”

“Yup.”

Marty grinned. She was doing finances. She’d rather have been doing anything else, but Adam had a pathological inability to manage his expenses closely. He’d always relied on an accountant. Well, theirs had moved away, so for now it was her.

Honestly, it was just attention to detail anyway. She was good at that. So, why go back? May as well save a few hundred bucks a year…

“Feelin’ kinda blue-balled?” she asked over her shoulder as he wandered up behind her.

She absolutely knew what he was and what he did. And frankly, she was happy for him to take on “easy” missions, even with the always-present danger. Meant he’d be coming home, even if he felt professionally short-changed.

Adam snort-laughed and wrapped her up from behind to nibble her neck. “Not how I’d put it. Felt a bit like nuking an ant colony, though.”

“All worked up, not enough exercise?”

“You’re buildin’ up to tell me ‘ta take Lummox for a run,” he predicted, drily amused.

Marty grinned “Yup.”

“You need a run too.”

“Yes, but my short little legs can’t keep up with you two.”

“Yan can manage!”

“He’s not your wife.”

Adam chuckled. “Yes, dear.” He nibbled her neck again. “Ooorr…”

“Later.”

“But still later, right?”

Marty couldn’t pretend not to be amused. Boy was never not ready to perform. Still, she swatted his arm. “Sooner you exercise that dog, the sooner ‘later’ will be!”

His chuckle tickled her ear, then he nodded, straightened up and whistled sharply. There was a minor earthquake as Lummox dropped off the couch sensing Walk. Damn dog could lie around all day and not even work up the energy to do more than thump his tail a couple times when you came home, but the first hint of getting to tear around the park with a parachute attached to him and he did the Scooby-Doo running legs.

He was a meathead dog. Literally, and psychologically. It was like he sensed, somehow, that rest after exercise was the key to gainz. Lummox was a zero-fat wall of gnarly, barely contained muscle like none other, just like his daddy.

And like his sire and bitch, too.

The two of them went thundering off to burn their fizzing stores of energy. High maintenance, they were. So was she, so was their whole family, really. But he took good care of them all, so Marty took care of him. She grinned to herself and got ready for his return.

She did promise, after all. And with the kids gone, no company expected…

He’d be primed and ready for maximum performance.

Just a few more things to attend to. Throw the laundry in the drier, make sure their meals were warm and in stasis. Get one of his special gut-busting shakes ready too, since there was no way he wasn’t going to lift his brains out before coming back upstairs.

And sure enough, felt more than heard from the basement…

He was in a better place since the war, though. She was pretty sure the Hate was long gone, replaced by something far healthier. Or at least…more positive. He was for now, not against.

Check the mail. The invitation had finally come! Jenny and Diego were gettin’ hitched. Years of off-again, on-again, several dalliances on Diego’s part and a wild period to match his father…

Jenny had won in the end. Good for her! And good for him; she was slow to trust or love. Said a lot about Diego, really. He was a sweetheart to his core, just like Adam. Sure, the big dog could growl and bite, but really, he just wanted ear scritches.

Lots of canine analogy today.

But, oh. Grandchildren! Now there was a happy thought. If you had grandchildren, you’d fuckin’ made it in life, no doubt.

Which reminded her, she needed to call her parents. If she could get through: they were enjoying their own lease of life, and half the time they weren’t in phone signal range, ‘cuz they were off doing those long trailblazing hikes deep into the continental interior.

Like everyone, they’d warmed up to the longer life available to them. Gabe, her mom and dad, their partners…all were that indefinable ageless adult kind of not-young, not-old, not-worn and not-fresh. As if they were in their primes, and that prime would never end.

The “Immortal Look” they called it. Gabe was modest in stature, but broad-shouldered, severely muscular and severely fit. He was Adam’s dad, after all. Her own was almost salt-and-pepper grizzled and tough, in the best possible way. The moms…were ageless, motherly beauties.

Part of her did wonder what problems that might all cause, down the line. Maybe it wouldn’t?

Honestly, she suspected very few would go in for real immortality. At some point, people would move on. She knew she would, one day. Knew it in her bones.

But…not yet. Not anytime soon, not when she was married to the very best man there was.

He came thumping back up the stairs, stopping to talk with tenants and their kids—he was a surrogate dad for the entire building, same as Christian was in his. He eventually made it all the way up. Turned his shoulders, ducked and squeezed sideways through the doorway, stood there in his hilariously skimpy running shorts, hulking and grinning…

God, she never got tired of seeing him. Every single time, it was almost unreal.

Standing relaxed, he was a big, broad cube of muscle these days, maybe too huge and muscular of a wall for some; he was a man with hips and waist as wide as the doorframe, legs, shoulders and arms much more so. He was so thick front to back, he had to wiggle through even Hero-wide doors. There was so much bulky brawn on his frame, and not enough room for it to hang without fighting for space with the rest of him. He had a serious pump going on too, which only added to his extreme shape.

Add in that ridiculous “DBZ” neck of his that bulged many inches wider than his head on either side, traps up to his ears, sloping down to shoulders bigger than his own blocky head, arms bigger than her, his thick powerlifter’s waist and the bulging-out curve of his brick-like abs, calves each a half-yard wide and the size of beachballs…

On a quick, faraway glance, one might be forgiven for mistaking him as hugely obese.

She thought it looked unbelievably hot, because the huge lines of his physique shone strong through the bulk and were literally rock-hard to the touch, to the point even the other superscience supermen couldn’t dent him. Literally bulletproof, allegedly! He was powerful, and that wide, puppy-grin face of his was just too handsome and chiseled to deny—

That was the moment he grinned smugly and tensed up. All that huge bulk of his instantly snapped into perfect shape. In just the blink of an eye, he’d transformed himself into the most perfectly formed titan of a man to ever live, a functional athlete and bodybuilder like none other. Let him flex and he was beyond Julian or Alex or any of the alleged Heroes, because what he had wasn’t just good breeding and luck. It was a lifetime of dedication and work. His was a brute perfection he’d earned. Earned the hardest way a man could earn anything. Nobody was his equal. He was breathtaking.

“Like what you see?”

She’d forgotten herself and nodded along.

“Good…’cuz I like what I see—”

Blink across the room, movement literally too fast to track. The very next heartbeat he had her trapped, his adamantium body hot like a furnace, his musk wonderfully overwhelming. He gave her a crushing hug and a rumbling, dominant growl.

“—And I’m gonna fuckin’ do somethin’ about it.”

Tighter squeeze. Could hardly breathe, face mashed against that tremendous rippling slab of a chest, yet the deepest part of her only wanted him to squeeze harder and make it hurt. “Jesus, Adam…”

She couldn’t manage any more than that, under the assault of his huge, calloused mitts. They could be so gentle, when he wanted to be…

Neither of them wanted that.

“Y’know, I could get used to a nice, empty house like this…and I got nothin’ but free time.” He nibbled her ear and snarled, “I’m gonna spend months ruining you.”

Power. Power and stamina. The biggest dog wanted to play. A kiss along her neck, which turned into a growling bite, one exactly where she liked best, one just the perfect kind of possessive…

And that was all there was to it. They ordered a lot of takeout that weekend, and after that…well, he made good on his promise. It was like they were young again and had all the time in the world, and he intended to use every second of it to the best of his ability.

Life was going to be too good to leave behind for a long time.

Date Point: 11th of ten-month, year 20 UPC
Mother Giymuy High School, Lavmuy, Gao

Leticia “Letty” Firth

“The Robalin didn’t join the UP for a further four years, but the Supremacy’s collapse took less than three days. Like I said, we’ll be going over it in detail in a few months. For now, we’re going to rewind a bit and talk about the Great Library.”

She called up two images: the first an oil painting depicting the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and the second a photo from the archives at New Alexandria on Akyawentuo. “The archive project had succeeded in its first task, which was saving as much of the combined knowledge and publications from the Earth as possible, but that was just the beginning. Those books don’t do anyone any good if they’re locked away underground where nobody can access them. And there was more than one species to think of in making it available…”

She smiled and flicked to her favorite slide in the set. It was a clip she’d found on the Internet, a fan-made video from the Great Library project, set to some hopeful music.

“Nowadays, the Great Library extends across seven planets, with jump links and partnership schemes with centers of learning all across the Milky Way. Anyone anywhere in the Interspecies Dominion can request to read a book written by any member of any participating species, and be able to read it in their native language thanks to smart translation. The school app has access to its complete digital archive. All of that was made possible by the Treaty of Cimbrean.”

“Of course,” she added, moving on to the next slide, “it took a lot of work to get to where we are now…”

Date Point year 4 UPC

Ukusevi, senior Librarian of the Cross-Species Archive, and Keeper of the Long Chant

There were times the archive reminded Uku of the bunker-warrens back on her homeworld, except…not in a bad way. The cities of her people had been overcrowded, smelly, stale-aired, damp and constantly under threat of the cobbled-together, jury-rigged life support failing. And that was all assuming the Hunters didn’t decide to storm in and remind the natives who was in charge.

The central archive was clean, brightly lit, dry, had state-of-the-art air conditioning and atmospheric systems better than most starships, and the only smells to drift into her nostrils among the stacks were dry paper, antique leather, old glue and, faintly, the synthetic dry lubricant that let the racks roll so silently and easily.

Still, from the upper layer, leaning on the rail and looking down on it all…she was occasionally reminded of home.

Of course, back home everyone had been skinny and mangy and malnourished, clad head to toe in threadbare handmade clothing.

With many of her helpers, they were instead Deathworld muscular, often hugely so, well-fed, and usually clad in virtually nothing at all. True of humans, here…

And especially true of ten’gewek. The friendly hyper-predators. Predators who loved.

Vemun Star-Finder, for instance. The first ten’gewek ever to publish an astronomy paper. Never mind that what he’d actually found had been an interesting planetary nebula, not a star, but the simple fact of finding a whole new celestial object had been impressive enough to give him his manhood-name.

His father was a man of bows, steel, knives, buildings, and later on of words and writing. Vemun was a man of optics, of precision. Of programming and code. Very smart minds!

But they were also very excellent ten’gewek overachievers, among a species increasingly prone to ambition and excellence. So, both were also champions in their weight classes for powerlifting, and excellent strikers in gravball–a sort of full-contact game that was part wrestling, part gymnastics, part sprinting race, and mostly open warfare.

And both were here today, to indulge in their love of books.

[“No, I can’t use steel, dad! It has the wrong] thermal ex-pan-sion [for this! The best is carbon fiber—”]

“Pfeh.” The disgust in Vemik’s voice could not be mistaken, even from all the way down there. [“Is just glue with string in it!”]

[“Very strong string,”] Vemun teased. [“You just don’t like the taste!”]

[“Well, yes!] Synthetic [resin makes the air taste like death! Why not use brass? It has very good, even expansion!”]

[“Well, yes, but it expands quite a lot and we want as little of that as possible–] Oh hi!”

Vemun noticed Ukusevi up on the very top stack, and because he was a young and particularly strong ten’gewek, snarled happily and immediately bounced himself all the way to the top with a single, explosive jump, which he landed perfectly on the (hugely reinforced) handrail. Which virtually any ten’gewek could do. But few could have managed that height so easily. Or landed so gently.

He gave her a big, “shit-eating” grin and bounced his muscles a bit, happy as always to show off a little. Because he was a ten’gewek male. Showing off was what males did and, with few exceptions, no males of any species were quite so much as their kind.

Vemik Given-Man of course was hugely much more man, so he did the same with no obvious effort, somehow landing his far greater size with even less impact.

“I know they’re built to take it,” Uku complained, “but do please do that less…”

“No!” Vemik teased. “Why waste time climbing stairs?! Would shake the building I think, if we stampeded up and down stairs all day…”

“You know, if interstellar civilization ever manages to pass on one thing to your people, I hope it’s the notion that there are other modes of moving around than leaping and stampeding…” Ukusevi teased him, affectionately.

“I can sneak! When hunting.”

Ukusevi laughed slightly, and decided this was a battle not to pick. “…What are you looking for, anyway?”

Much of the explanation went over her head, somewhat.

Vemun rolled his eyes—a genuine cross-species emote, that—and translated into Librarian. “Vemik wants to build a telescope with me. He’s a bit obsessed with the idea of making it out of things we can make here—”

“Well, yeah! Can’t rely on sky-friends for everything!”

“But he doesn’t believe in his breath that we need plastics.”

“Earth had huge metal telescopes!”

“Yes, with adaptive optics and all sorts of software magic we’re not good enough to do yet! And you’re the one who keeps telling me we’ve got nothing to prove, so why not just make a really good—?”

Vemik climbed down from the rail and sat on his tail. “It’s not about proving, it’s about learning. And yeah, all this is a lot of that—” he waved his hand at the archive stacks behind them, “But it’s like I tell apprentices, you can’t read how to make knives and then make a really good knife first time. Reading will help, but until you beat on steel yourself a few times, the book-think and the body-think don’t go together. So, you gotta start by making a shitty knife, even if you know from books how to make a good one, in theory. Now, our people, yeah, we can put on armor and carry guns and even learn to fly spaceships like Goob Low-Branch…but one day we’re gonna want to build our own.”

“None of the sky-tribes build their own,” Vemun pointed out. “They all import warp engines and stuff. Every ship there is, was built from parts built on, like, five different planets.”

“Yes,” Vemik agreed, patiently. “That isn’t the same. There they are opty-mising for scale. They all have history making these things. We are still at the level of sheet metal and simple machines.”

Ukusevi, who had put her tablet down to listen to their debate, decided it was time for her opinion to be known.

“You want to know what I think?”

They both looked at her.

“At the end of the day, so long as you’re looking at stars with your loved ones, does it really matter if you’re looking at them through the perfect telescope?” Uku perched herself against the nearby table. “I grew up underground, but even those of us on the surface couldn’t see the stars. The atmosphere was too hazy, too polluted. Our loved ones died, every day. Every moment then was about saving what we could. Now…now every moment can be about enjoying every moment. So my suggestion is, maybe your perfect telescope isn’t either perfectly optimized or perfectly home-made, it’s just…yours. The one you made together.”

They both blinked at her. Then looked at each other. Then back at her.

“Wow, ruin a good fight…” Vemun said, grinning.

Not…quite the response Uku had expected. She tilted her head until an ear flopped open. “Uhm…yes? I mean, you were arguing…”

“Well of course! Wouldn’t waste time with someone I don’t care about!” Vemik grabbed his son with his tail around the younger man’s throat, and affectionately squashed him flat. “And he can’t fight me with his muscle yet, so he better get good with words!”

Vemik let him up and pulled his son into a big hug. “He’s very good with them,” he hooted approvingly, while Vemun floundered for breath.

“Well, I’m quite sure you’ll still argue over making it no matter what I say. Anyway. Speaking of muscles, we have another ten pallets of mis-files to deal with—”

“Pallets?!”

“Yes,” Uku sighed. “What can I say? Students. In any case, it would take very many trips up and down the elevator to get them all up here, so if you two are feeling at all unexercised…”

There was the predictable scramble to show off. Vemun didn’t care that, his father being a given-man and Chief of the Lodge, this wasn’t a contest he could possibly win. He’d still take the chance to prove what he could do. They both jumped down and landed softly like the huge predators they were. That never ceased to amaze her. Never ceased to amaze even most Deathworlders!

Uku became aware of quiet human laughter behind her. Doctor Schuster was leaning against the nearby wall, snickering a restrained, high-pitched wheezing sound barely louder than a whisper.

Nobody beat the ten’gewek for their long youthful years. But health-conscious humans could match them, in a slow and steady way. Schuster hadn’t aged a day since they’d first met, and while Uku was exhausted by the end of a six-hour shift on Akyawentan gravity, he seemed entirely comfortable with it.

“Deftly done,” he complimented her.

“The advice, or the distraction?”

He spread his hands with a smile that said ‘both,’ and moved to lean over the railing instead. “Only ten pallets this week. Could it be we’re finally making headway?”

“Hope is a flame in an untested tunnel,” Uku said, then translated her peoples’ aphorism when he turned his head questioningly. “A flame in an untested tunnel may light your way, it may flicker out and warn you of bad air…or it may set off an explosion. Hope can be comforting and give you a reason to keep going, but it can be dangerous too, in the wrong circumstances.”

“Hmm. Allow me to introduce you to The Shawshank Redemption. It has a message on hope I think you’d find…familiar.”

Uku knew better than to try for an elaboration. Instead she settled next to him on the rail. “I do enjoy that we can appreciate each others’ art and literature. The Hunters were so alien, I’m not sure they even understood the concept of hope except as something they enjoyed snuffing out. If they even enjoyed it.”

“God…” Schuster mused. “That almost makes me feel sorry for them.”

Uku chuckled slightly, and shook her head. “It’s an amazing gift, your species has. You seem to have something in common with everyone. It took you thirty years to go from the hated and feared pariah species, the deathworlders who could kill an entire station just by showing up to…this.”

“This?”

“The United Peoples. Forget the Great Father for a second, humans are the real power in the UP. Because he wouldn’t even be the Great Father if not for you. You just have this way of…the gao love humans, the ten’gewek love humans, I love humans…I’ve never met a member of your species who didn’t have this gift of looking into another being’s eyes and seeing a friend there. Even, apparently, the Hunters.”

Schuster remained silent. He seemed, if anything, embarrassed.

“It says something that your people both purposely and accidentally created a being greater than any of us, and despite all that he is, feels bound by love and loyalty to you. That you have befriended a primitive people who are in every way superior beings, and yet…in the end, you rise to the challenge anyway.”

“It was the gao who saved your people,” Schuster tried to point out.

“They were only in a position to do so because your people saved them first.” Uku sighed happily and took a step closer, until they were arm-to-arm and hip-to-hip, like old warren-friends. “And then look at all this.”

She gestured to the vast, bright space full of books in front of them. Hundreds of thousands of books in this room alone, tens of millions across the entire Great Library. “Humanity already has an hour of the Long Chant. And yet…I haven’t ever actually recited it for a human. Somehow, I get the impression you’d find it uncomfortable. Your people really don’t take praise well.”

Schuster shrugged, though he didn’t try to move away from her, even though she knew humans preferred more personal space. “I don’t think any of us believe we deserve it,” he said. “And…I don’t know. If I ever met a man who could take praise like that as his right and due? I’d think he was an arrogant son of a bitch. But maybe that’s just cultural.”

“If so, it’s a culture I like. I just can’t imagine a gaoian or a ten’gewek or any of my people saying they feel sorry for the Hunters.”

“I don’t know that I’d say we feel sorry, it’s more…we have a saying. ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.’ Very much of the greatest evil we’ve seen in our civilization started out with good ideas or well-meaning action. But somewhere, somehow…” He shrugged. “My people most of all. My great grandmother survived Auschwitz.”

It took Uku a moment for her mnemonic training to swing in and recall that word and its connotations. Auschwitz, associated with “ow” sound, associated with pain, associated with…

“There’s that too, I suppose,” she admitted. “But still…I’ve been face-to-face with Hunters. There’s a reason we worshiped them as agents of divine punishment, they seemed too…implacable and inscrutable to be anything else. I can at least understand the evils that humanity has done to itself. Goodness, my own people have done some of the same.”

“As bad?”

“Why do you suppose we imagined ourselves Punished? And the gao have been known to skin each other alive, the ten’gewek can be shockingly brutal…I don’t think there’s any species out there without a terrible cruelty in them. But the ability to make friends with anything? Even with, heh, with a vacuum cleaner with silly stuck-on plastic eyes—”

“Hey now, Snooty McDustbuster is a valued member of the team.”

Uku couldn’t help it: she laughed loud enough that a few people in the room gave her disapproving looks. She gestured apologetically to them and reined it in.

It was at that point that she felt a distant shudder through the ground, and instinctively looked to the rail. Sure enough, Vemik and Vemun arrived with…well, what looked like a pallet of boxes bundled up in arms and tails. Each.

“Where to?” Vemun asked.

Uku peeled herself away from Schuster and scanned the QR codes. “Yours is in social science…Vemik, yours is for geography and history.”

“I picked the good ones!”

Vemun made a face and waggled his tongue, universal ten’gewek sign for fond exasperation. “Come on, then! Eight more after these!” he announced, and was gone so fast his tail nearly made a whipping sound as it lashed behind him. Vemik hooted, did likewise, and there was peace and silence once again.

She became aware of Schuster trying not to laugh. He cleared his throat, wrestled his face back down into a mere smile, then cleared his throat. “…How about…we go get some tea?” he suggested. “I’m sure they can figure out where to put the pallets when they’re not showing off for us.”

“That sounds good. And this Shawshank Redemption you mentioned. Book, film?”

“Both. But, the movie is excellent.”

They reached an unspoken agreement. After all, this was a research library, and she had cultural exchange duties. Watching a human cinematic classic was an entirely valid use of her professional time. And of his!

Sure enough, the movie had a message on hope that resonated entirely with her life and experience, which proved her right on so many of the things she’d said…and proved her wrong on something else.

Even if it had already been better than she’d ever dreamed it could be, before…it turned out, life could always get better.

Date Point: year 4 UPC
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Xiù Chang Etsicitty

Ming-Wa Eleanor Chang Etsicitty was so small. Especially cradled in her older brother’s careful arms. Harrison had been such a chunky baby, and had grown into a slab of a man to rival his father. Huge and handsome, especially in his Fleet uniform…and holding his baby sister like he was both completely in love, and terrified she’d spontaneously combust if he did it wrong.

It was a sight to make the effort of labor completely worth it.

“You just need to scoot her up a bit there, support her head a little more,” Allison advised.

Harrison ever-so-carefully adjusted things. “Like this?”

“Yeah, there you go.”

“Right.” He chuckled nervously, and perched on the side of the bed. “So. Ming-Wa, huh?”

“Yup,” Xiù nodded tiredly. “After Mulan.”

He chuckled. “Of course. Your favorite movie. And ‘Eleanor’ is from…?”

“Julian’s grandma.”

“I like it. Oh, no…shhh…” he went tense as the baby started grumbling faintly about something. “Sorry…”

“Don’t worry, she’s just tired and cranky. She’s had a big day, yijao?”

“I…think I’ll still hand her back,” Harrison ventured awkwardly, and transferred Ming-Wa back into Xiù’s arms. He looked both regretful and relieved at the same time.

“And just think, we’re doing this all over again next week,” Allison chuckled, and gave Xiù an affectionate poke. “You had to go and remind me what it’s like.”

“Second time’s easier,” Xiù replied.

“It better be. Oof.” Al chuckled and looked down at her own belly. “You be quiet, you’ll get your turn soon enough little man.”

Harrison chuckled. “Is this how you’re always gonna do it? Both at once?”

“It’s…nice,” Xiù said. “Kind of a shared experience.”

“Plus, we get all the diapers and crying and tantrums and stuff out of the way in one go, rather than dragging it out longer,” Allison added. “You weren’t too bad on the crying and tantrums, but your diapers, my God.”

“Mom!”

“I dunno if Julian was sneaking you something extra when we weren’t looking, ‘cuz there’s no way we fed you—”

“Al!” Xiù objected, trying to suppress the giggle which was making her poor overworked stomach muscles hurt.

They grinned at each other, then looked up at the door at the feeling of familiar silent heavy footsteps outside. Sure enough, Julian ducked back into the room, ushering Ana in ahead of him. “Look who finally showed up.”

“‘Bout time!” Allison teased, and rose with a grunt to hug her daughter. “Harrison had to request leave and he still got here before you!”

“Mhm, well, I had to pick up something.” Ana replied. She bent down to give Xiù a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek, then dug in her purse and handed over a paper letter.

“From The University of Folctha, College of Science and Engineering postgraduate studies committee…” Allison read. “Dear Miss Buehler Etsicitty, I am pleased to confirm you have fulfilled all the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy— oh, hell yeah!”

Ana beamed as she sat down and took the baby from Xiù’s arms, rather more comfortably than her brother had. “So, am I forgiven for being late?”

“I think we’ll allow it, qiān jīn,” Xiù chuckled.

“We also stopped by Best Brioche,” Julian added, and raised a stasis cooler to show off. “Figured you deserve something better than hospital food.”

“Oh, gimme. I’m starved!”

“Told’ya,” he chuckled, handed over a pulled pork stack with curly fries, then reached down for one of his own prepared meals: a mass of wild rice salad and roasted turkey with a rich sauce, along with his own obscenity of a burger.

There were a happy few minutes of appreciative silence as the whole family burged. It occurred to Xiù, it was the first time they’d all been in the same room for a few months, now. With Harrison away living on gao and training for his first posting, and Ana living on Ekallim-Igigi while preparing her thesis, they hadn’t had a family meal in a while.

Okay, so, it wasn’t a proper home-cooking-and-round-the-table affair, but honestly? Burgers around a hospital bed while welcoming the little one? That’d more than do.

She sat back and listened as they talked. About Clan politics and how it sometimes made both Julian’s and Harrison’s lives difficult, about how Ana was quietly glad to be living on a station where she wasn’t the six-foot-three valkyrie attention-getter but could actually vanish in the crowd a bit…

Normal stuff. Family, career, adult-kids-need-some-insight-and-advice stuff.

It couldn’t last forever. When Xiù’s parents and her brother came to say hi, the room got a bit too crowded, so Harrison and Ana elected to go get some drinks at Rooney’s, and Julian loitered just long enough to be polite before going to get in his mandatory but much-delayed gym time for the day.

Xiù relaxed. Dozed off a bit, except when spoken to or when the baby started demanding a feed. That feeling of sore, exhausted, but entirely happy was back, just as powerful as the first time. She’d always known they weren’t going to stop at just one. Maybe they’d gone a little too long between first and second, but…

But, well, the world had been uncertain and difficult for a while there. She hadn’t felt entirely ready or secure. It said a lot that she did, now. There was a future ahead, a bright one she could look forward to and raise another child in without fear.

If there was one thing she’d learned, it was to never, ever take a bright future for granted.

She vowed to make the most of it.

Date point: year 7 UPC

Starship Stray Fortune, Orbiting planet Rob’
Regaari, Father of Clan Whitecrest

Regaari had often been told beer was an acquired taste. Eventually he’d countered that he’d been trying it long enough that, if so, he should have acquired it by now.

That had been fifty years ago. He still hated the stuff. Bitter fizzy water that tasted faintly of bread, yeurgh. But, well, it was the de rigeur way to celebrate a smoothly accomplished mission. And this one was brewed by a gaoian company and had strong hints of berry in its flavor, so it wasn’t actually unbearable…

“To another job well done.”

Bottles clinked together.

“To another fascist motherfucker’s day in court,” Hoeff agreed. He was lounging on the couch nearly upside-down, in a way which must have been making it quite difficult to drink. Not that it seemed to be impeding him.

“Can’t be many of ‘em left, now,” ‘Horse commented.

“Optimist.”

“It’s probably true though,” Regaari agreed. “Half the remaining names on the list, we have nothing on, which I’m prepared to bet means they died in the liberation and were never identified.”

“And nobody on the list’s exactly a pimply-faced Robalin teenager,” Wilde pointed out. “Fact is, I bet some of ‘em escaped to obscurity and passed away peacefully without the people around them noticing or grassing them out.”

“For all we know, today’s been our last operation rounding up former Supremacy party members,” ‘Horse mused. “And that’s been our bread and butter for a few years, now. Y’know, the occasional pirate, slaver and terrorist notwithstanding.”

They nodded. The Wrecking Crew had been busy, then less busy, then…well, even less busy than that. Training had kept ‘Horse happy and on top, at least for now. He didn’t need much more than that; he was delightfully simple in some ways.

But not Regaari. No matter how strong or deadly, he’d always have questions.

“What…does this mean for us, do you think?” Regaari asked, after a minute or so of silently thoughtful drinking.

Horse shrugged. “We’re the best there is at a job that’s only occasionally needed. So keep ready, yijao?”

“Nah. You two are too optimistic,” Hoeff finished his beer and sat up properly. “It’s nice we finally got all the nazis and whatnot, but there will always be need of people like us. I think it’s honestly nice that this here Crew is only like six people, an’ that’s enough for a galactic empire.”

A fair point, that.

“Meanwhile, SOR is participating in more operations over time. Two new bordering species, the discovery of a new Hunter segment—“

Wilde snorted. “It would be like cockroaches to divide the galaxy into autonomous segments.”

“Yup. We killed one, fifteen remain. And how all of them have religion about us.” Hoeff sniffed dismissively. “Point is, I doubt we’re gonna be useless anytime soon.”

“I wasn’t saying we’d be useless! Just…there’s supply and demand. I just don’t think double-super-secret bullshit is gonna be how it goes. It’ll be SOR and HEAT, properly.”

“Trust me, there’ll be demand. You can’t run a civilization without secrecy.”

“I didn’t say otherwise,” Horse replied, patiently. “Listen to what I’m saying. Us? This group? It is a highly specialized function. We sit in a tiny overlap between clandestine necessity and extreme military capability. Going forward, what dark thing will we do that HEAT or SOR or Whitecrest can’t? I already know Righteous is about to pass me by, this time for good. And he sure as fuck don’t wanna play these secret ninja games.”

Hoeff shrugged. “Dunno. We’ll find out.”

Regaari let that slide in favor of turning to ‘Horse. “That is uncharacteristic of you to preemptively concede defeat, especially to Righteous.”

“I’m smarter now. I see my medical reports, and I see his. I am at the limits of what I can do. He ain’t even close. So…” Adam shrugged. “The world moves on.”

“Not as fast as it used to. We all should have retired years ago.”

“No,” Adam disagreed. “I mean, yes, it’s slower now. But we spared the world a fuck of a lotta terror by doing what we do. Diego never has to face any of what I did, and that’s winning at life as far as I’m concerned. And it’s not over. There’s still room for old dogs like us. We just need to notice the world is changing.”

“And change with it?”

“Not too much! I’m still gonna be a meathead puppy idiot!”

“Hmm…”

Wilde tilted his head and watched Regaari for a second. “…Penny for your thoughts?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m wondering if maybe now this Robalin business is all over, it’s time to retire? I mean…I’ve had a full career. Normally by this point I’d be in a training role, guiding the Clan’s new aspirants and initiates.

“You’d be good at it,” Adam said, loyally. “And I’m technically a Father of the Clan now too so..:”

“Maybe I will, then,” Regaari decided. “I think it’d be a nice change of pace. A new challenge, yijao?”

“And thirty years after that, who knows?” Hoeff nodded. “Personally, I’ll stick at this. Ain’t gonna be another me for a while, and there’s always gonna be a need for me.”

“Yan?” Regaari turned to the most elephantine person in the room. “You’re being quiet.”

“Nothing to say,” Yan shrugged. “I pledged before the Gods to do this until they take me. So I will.”

“Give him a few years and he’ll be the best of us here, and he did it all by his natural self!” You could hear the Proud Coach in Adam’s voice. “He’s already play-fighting with me when we spar, I can tell.”

Yan simply hooted smugly, and used his tail to toast with a nearly-empty bottle before licking out its contents with a swirl of his tongue.

“But surely you have something else to add,” Bruuk chimed in from where he was curled up next to Wilde. “You’ve seen more of life than anyone here!”

“Most was spent hunting werne in the forest and fucking beautiful people. I am hardly old to sky-things.”

“Eh, bullshit.” Hoeff scratched at his abs and burped. “I know you’ve got thoughts about all this, you always do. You’re just being quiet.”

“Mhm. Quiet for a reason.” Yan reached forward a long arm and set his bottle on the table. “I know what’s right for me. Keep my oaths, live as the gods made me, protect my people. I am not ready to leave that behind. My people are not. We need much more learnings and many more generations first. Civilization takes time.”

He frowned thoughtfully for a second. “Maybe yours need longer too. I don’t know.”

“That’s sort of the trick of civilization,” from Wilde. “You don’t get to pick when it happens. It does when you need it, not when you’re ready for it.”

“Besides. No civilization was ever ready for the defining innovations of its time,” Hoeff added. “Steam power, electricity, nukes, the microchip, the Internet, FTL travel. And now, superbeing medicine and life-X. Every generation’s gotta face an upheaval, and nobody’s ever ready for it. There’s always harm comes packaged with the good. You gotta face it and learn from it.”

Yan nodded. “My people will face it and learn from it, alongside yours,” he agreed. “Me…I’m happy.”

There was a moment of reflective silence.

“Well…who can ask for more than that?” Regaari asked, after a while.

Yan hotted and nodded. “Only need good fuckings to make it perfect!”

“Oh, shit, we’d better offload you then,” Wilde joked. “Between you and ‘Horse, that’s some life-threatening danger right there!”

“Feh. I can be gentle, with a soft woman…” Yan waggled his eyebrows, which was always slightly comical to see on a ten’gewek face.

“Hey, I ain’t your woman, mate!” Ian chuckled, then stood up. “Honestly, I want to get home, too. Until next time, gentlemen?”

“If not sooner,” Regaari agreed, and the little wind-down session broke up. There was more banter of course, more joking and play before Yan jumped off and it was Regaari’s turn. He parked himself primly in the middle of the array platform and thought about the resolution he’d made.

Retirement. Away from the field work and back to the quiet and comfort of a desk job and the controlled bedlam of a training hall. A few years ago, the idea would have seemed like a betrayal, or a dereliction of sorts; now it sang to him.

Yes, he’d been doing one thing long enough. Time to do something different, be something different. Time to find out who else Regaari could be.

The idea arrived that he hadn’t yet even begun to fully explore himself. And the black-flash carried that thought all the way home.

Date Point: year 7 UPC
Oskar Schindler Station, Franklin, Cimbrean

Krrkktnkk “Kirk” A’ktnnzzik’tk

A reunion decades in the making turned out…quite low-key, in fact. A gentle nudge in the large-arm, and a soft, almost timid “…Hey,” and when Kirk turned around.

“…Kevin!”

“Hey, Kirk.”

“Hey.” This seemed…insufficient. “How are you?”

Kevin Jenkins cleared his throat and shifted his weight, a touch awkwardly. “Good. I’m…very good, actually. And, uh, you?”

“Busy. Which, I suppose, is how I like it.”

“Well. Good. That’s good.”

There was a moment of mutual awkward silence. Which said much about their mutual thoughts and feelings, considering that both of them were, by now, accomplished social movers, Kirk in the political sphere and Kevin in the corporate.

In an earlier age, Kevin would be retiring soon if he hadn’t already. He would be…about seventy Earth years old, now, Kirk recalled. He looked much the same as he had on the day he’d first boarded the Outlook on Forever and got held up at customs and immigration. And he remained MBG’s Chief Ethics Officer and likely would until he decided he no longer wanted the position, or the board voted to replace him.

Kirk knew all this from watching his old friend’s career at a distance, and wondered briefly whether Kevin had followed his own career with similar interest.

Probably. This party was about bringing together some of Cimbrean’s movers-and-shakers, after all. That farming baron from New Dodge, livestock Moguls from Botany, members of Folctha’s government and the Franklin Congress, MBG and Hephaestus executives…and, in Kirk’s case, advisor to the planetary governor on non-UP sophonts. A good position. One that played to his strengths, and promised to be interesting for a long time to come.

They stood facing each other with drinks in hand for a few seconds longer, then Kevin exhaled hugely, laughed at him self, and relaxed. “Shit, it’s good to see you, man. It’s been, what? Forty years?”

“Nearly,” Kirk agreed, relaxing as well. “It is good to see you as well. I had thought our last conversation would be our final one. A fact I was regretting.”

“Yeah, uh. I guess I owe you an apology for that.”

“No, no. I owe you the apology. I put you on the spot and asked if you were prepared to leave Earth at exactly the time when that was as uncertain a proposition as it ever could be. You had every right to decline, and I am sorry for reacting as negatively as I did.”

“Kind of you to say that,” Kevin acknowledged, and sipped his wine. He looked around the room a moment, then smiled as he spied one of Kirk’s advisory colleagues nearby, holding forth on…some subject or another. The word ‘dude’ floated above the general background noise of conversation. “It seemed to work out anyway, huh?”

“Somehow. Not for everyone,” Kirk agreed. “But in the grand scheme…what I saw the day we met persuaded me the galaxy was about to change. And I was right. Though not in the ways I expected.”

Kevin laughed slightly. “I dunno, man. Forty years on and you’re still…eh, never mind.”

“You were about to say I put humans on a pedestal?”

“Dude, we just met again after forty years. I don’t wanna sour it.”

“I appreciate that,” Kirk ducked his head. “But if that is what you were about to say…you are quite correct, I do. Unapologetically.”

“Well…fair enough. I don’t think I’ll ever believe we deserve it, man, but…anyway, change of subject?”

“As you wish.”

They talked. Caught up. Kevin traded anecdotes from his work life, Kirk shared some of the more amusing incidents he’d had to deal with while advising Sir Patrick Knight. They had a lot in common, in the fact that both of them had sunk their lives into their careers and passion projects rather than family.

Kevin had a ‘been there, tried that’ attitude about it. He had an estranged daughter and a wife, both in stasis somewhere along with grandchildren he’d never met and wasn’t welcome to meet. Kirk felt that was unjust, but he shrugged it off.

“I send Christmas cards,” he said. “If the kids ever want to get in touch and meet me, they will. We’ve got time, I guess. I mean, we’ve crossed that medical event horizon, right? Indefinite youth, pretty much everything is curable so long as you survive long enough to be shoved in a stasis bag…and my cushy executive desk job really isn’t that dangerous. I’ll see them when they’re ready, and if they never are, well…hey. At least they’re alive.”

He shrugged and sipped his whisky. “Who knows, maybe I’ll find a lady who can put up with my shit, too. It’s happened before, heh.” He chuckled into his drink, then looked back up at Kirk. “What about you?”

“Perhaps,” Kirk demurred. “I have…simply never felt the call.”

“Never say never, huh?”

“No. As you say, we have a long time ahead of us. Perhaps that will change, perhaps not. I think I have a legacy to be proud of, in its subtle way.”

“You’re the one let us out of the box, man. That’s a legacy alright.”

Kirk looked around at the room full of people and gave thought to that simple sentiment. It was true. Sanctuary had been a vanity project, an act of supreme arrogance in its way. He had quit from and openly defied the Dominion Security Council to rescue the humans from a prison of the Hierarchy’s making, delivered them Cimbrean and Erebor…

…They would have escaped some other way, eventually, he decided. Then he thought about it, and the way the Alpha Centauri blast had popped the Sol Containment Barrier like a soap bubble, and how narrow the margin for error had been in completing the evacuation. What difference might just two years have made?

What difference had he made?

They had saved themselves, this he knew. At tremendous effort, and expense, and in the face of a truly existential crisis they had done what he wasn’t sure his own people could have done and united. He had no right to take any of that away from them.

And yet…

There was room for him to wonder if this remarkable species really did still only exist because of him, and had only had the chance to accomplish all they did because of his actions. That would be a legacy he could be truly proud of, if true.

Kevin watched him with a knowing smirk, then raised his glass in a toast.

“To opportunities, legacies, and the future,” he proposed.

“Absolutely,” Kirk agreed, and chimed his glass delicately against his old friend’s.

It was nice to have a future they could drink to.

Date Point: 11th of ten-month, year 20 UPC
Mother Giymuy High School, Lavmuy, Gao

Leticia “Letty” Firth

“Alright, so that ends my lecture part of the lesson. You can get your tablets out now, watch the playlist and take the quiz. There’s no mandatory homework on this, but there is a side quest on the app, you can get ten bonus points if you do a two thousand word essay, okay? I’ll be here to help you out with any questions.”

Letty perched against her desk and took the weight off her feet for a minute as the kids dug out their tablets, put in their earphones and started watching the videos she’d picked to help reinforce everything she’d spent the last twenty minutes telling them. Damn shoes. She’d known they weren’t a good fit, but they were so freaking cute…

Easily remedied. She circled around behind her desk and swapped them out for the old reliables, then orbited the room alert for the usual mischief of meme-sharing and off-topic browsing. In a lot of ways, human teenagers were just as mischievous as any gaoian cub, and often rather more inventive with it too.

In the event, though, the rest of the session passed mostly without incident. It was weird, really, she would definitely never have found the history of a treaty and political stuff that interesting at their age but…well, there’d been a lot of advances in how to make stuff interesting and engaging, and the kids mostly drunk it up like a sponge. So she patrolled the room, answered questions, watched as they learned, then let them go a few minutes early

She did have one particularly roguish troublemaker to deal with, however…

She felt the thumping through the floor long before she could hear him. He’d been talking with Jamie’s teacher most likely, and now that matters of parentage were over, he’d come and say hello. One always-magically-impressive sideways doorsqueeze later, and there he was.

She gave him the biggest hug she could, as was tradition. “You didn’t have to come all this way, dad!”

“Sure I did! I’m doin’ the SOR recruit thing ‘fer the seniors this Friday. Surprise, by the way.”

“Incredibly busy as ever, I see…”

“Don’t know how else to be! But I gotta admit…once Jamie is up an’ out, it’s gonna be nice to just…take a break, yijao?”

“Two more years.”

“Some days, I keep tellin’ myself that…”

He didn’t mean it, of course. But James Zachary Firth, Christian’s youngest son, was an odd Firth for two reasons. Firstly, while he was, in fact, massive, he was more of a brawny basketball-playing sort of a giant, not quite like a living wall of manly muscle such as usually issued forth from Clan Firth, be they by Freya and Christian, or by any of his own warren of brothers and sisters; Christian Firth was the oldest of many sons. And no sisters.

Secondly, James didn’t get into trouble by starting fights or breaking gyms. Or breaking hearts. All traditional Firth-troubles, and things all Christian’s home-grown kids had done. No no. James was a jokester. He could run his mouth twice as fast as his legs, and for a Firth, that was really saying something.

“I mean, I was getting up to worse at his age,” Letty pointed out. “At least he’s not out there breaking into liquor stores.”

“Oh I know, I was gettin’ up to far worse. I mean, I had my first dad scare before i was even a teen, so…there are levels. But that don’t mean I ain’t gonna scare ‘em a little…”

Letty smiled, and tidied up the classroom a little while nodding. “So which evil torture will he be getting?”

“For stupid sophomore pranks? Eh. Not too evil. I’mma have ‘em clean the lint trap in all th’ washers an’ driers in the building.”

“That’s not so bad…”

“We got gaoian an’ ten’gewek tenants now, ‘member?”

“Oof. You sure it wouldn’t be kinder to give him an afternoon with Uncle Adam?”

“Oh no, his scrawny ass gets that by default. S’pecially since Adam’s got a big mad goin’ on that I’m way fuckin’ bigger’n stronger’n him, an’ this time he ain’t never gonna catch up.”

Letty giggled, knowing full well the intense back-and-forth those two had for years deciding who was the bigger monster. Adam had reclaimed his throne for a long while as the biggest man in the infamous Wrecking Crew. Until Christian’s kids started moving out, anyway. Dad found himself with lots more free time…so he got to work and won that argument. Now he was so completely huge there weren’t words to describe what he was. More and stockier than Adam ever was, but on a frame that was, well, designed to handle it. Back in the public eye, too. The magazines for both celebrity and fitness culture were fascinated by Dad.

Which was probably part of Jamie’s frustration, honestly. It must have been hard for a young man to shine when his father was such a blazingly bright example of excellence. Probably part of why he and Adam got along so well; Adam had been king of the world more than once, and might be again one day, but for now he led a less searingly visible life of achievement.

He knew what it was like to be truly elite and still live in the shadow of things much bigger and, well. Better. Even worse when they were his best friends, and owed much of what they were to his own efforts. One part proud, one part competitive. At least a little jealous.

And no doubt frustrated, on some level. And that was all very much true of James. He was in no way a sub-par performer: an excellent student, a superlative athlete, good, healthy social life…but in his family he was the baby and everyone was almost smotheringly protective. He had so many brothers and a few sisters, all of whom had blazed epic trail…

How was he supposed to compete with that? Against the essential demigod that was his dad?

“He’s a good kid,” she said, in defense of her adoptive brother. “He’s just…y’know. Better than everyone around him except his family. I’d find that frustrating as all hell. Especially…”

She gestured across all of him.

Firth sighed. “I know. S’why I ain’t actually mad. The last few kids in particular, it’s been rough. I wasn’t really in the limelight ‘fer the rest, y’know? But now…”

He shrugged.

“That’s not all of it. Don’t take it all on yourself. He needs to be his own man.”

“I know. I’m just makin’ sure he unnerstands there are consequences ‘ta ventin’ his frustrations with that acid tongue o’ his. He don’t have his big brothers t’keep ‘em in check anymore.” That seemed to strike a thought. “Yeah. Mebbe I need ‘ta spend more time with ‘em. I always tried to give every kid his space but he, I think…”

“Yeah, I think so. He needs that ’gentle’ Firthly touch.”

He helped her straighten the place out by shifting a few desks around. They always tended to drift toward the far wall, for some reason. “You always seem to know what the kids need…”

“A lotta them are just traumatized,” Letty said. “I mean…I can relate.”

“Yeah. Still kinda amazed y’two…I dunno. You couldn’t’a picked a gruffer sorta family.”

“Gruff, but good. I’ve seen smooth-talking evil, Dad. It’s not something I’ll ever forget. And Jenny, shit. She had it so much worse. You and mom were exactly what we needed.”

Odd, watching a rhino-crushing wall of seven-foot-nine dressed in the worst borderline offensive shirt ever invented by dark Hawaiian science…suddenly get embarrassed.

“Anyway. You gonna be at the Gravball championships? Brody and Michael are in the finals. Opposing teams! Then it’s off to the UP Cup.”

“Are you kidding? The kids are so jealous I’ve got tickets. And I figured out the team colors dilemma!” She pulled out her phone and showed him the project she’d worked on over the weekend: the two team strips, cut neatly in half and sewn together down the centerline.

“See that’s better’n what I was planning. I was just gonna go in some tasteless running shorts and paint myself half an’ half.”

“Dad, all your running shorts are tasteless.”

“No, you ain’t seen these. They’re a Warhorse Special an’ he’s gonna be right there with me. Hardly better’n posin’ trunks! They’re half-an’-half team colors, too. We’re gonna paint ourselves the opposite sides ‘ta really draw the eye!”

“…Oh, Lord.” Letty giggled again. “Well, unlike you, I don’t enjoy going basically nekkid in public, so…”

“Glad you don’t.” He pulled her into a one-arm hug and emitted happy grumble noises. “Anyway, see you there. James!” Amazing how he could make himself heard through any wall or long hall without raising his voice. Letty turned to look in the direction he was looking: Jamie was moping around on the grass outside, near the fence, kicking stones and generally looking like a put-upon teenager. He turned his head and pulled a face as he realized he could be seen.

“C’mon!” Firth boomed. “You’ve got chores ‘fore playtime!”

James sighed heavily and moped toward the nearest door. Letty laughed quietly, and busied herself with getting everything loaded up and ready for the next class.

“I guess I’ll see you Sunday?”

“Yup.” Christian leaned in and kissed her cheek. “Love ‘ya.”

“Love you too, Dad.”

He grinned happily, maneuvered himself through the classroom door, and Letty half-listened to the receding conversation as he met up with Jamie and the two walked away.

“Oh, don’t fuckin’ complain. S’what you get, tormentin’ Miss Sato wit’ yer big-brain words.”

“She’s an English teacher!”

“Yeah, an’ that means literary styles, writing an’ prose an’ suchlike. Don’t fuckin’ mean she’s s’posed ‘ta be a walkin’ dictionary of weird an’ obscure insults!”

“They were Shakespearian!”

“So you been playin’ stupid games. Now it’s time ‘fer stupid prizes. Did I mention our newest tenants are brownies?”

“Ugh…”

“Bigguns, too…”

Their voices echoed down the school hall, and were gone. Letty grinned to herself, called up the first slide of the next lesson, then sat down at her desk and broke out her lunch from the stasis cooler under her desk. Still nice and hot, like it had come out of the oven a minute ago, instead of last week.

Outside, she could hear the kids enjoying lunchtime recess. For a moment, the sound of children playing took her back in time to Sacred Heart and the moment her life had turned around. A bittersweet memory, considering not everyone had got out…

But how many people could look back and see the exact moment things had turned a corner? She was incredibly blessed. She’d been found, and saved, by some wonderful people. The very least she could do was pay it forward. In their memory, and for the memories of everyone who hadn’t made it.

It was going to be years before the last of humanity’s survivors came out of stasis. They were all going to need love, and support, and understanding.

And Letty would be there to give it, just as others had been there for her.

That, she thought, was the secret to life.

Date Point: year 20 UPC
Jumptown, Planet Akyawentuo

Professor Tilly (Jane) Briggs

Even after all these years, the ten’gewek still treated concepts like privacy and knocking before entering as human foibles. This was something that somebody who, say, wanted to sunbathe nude in her back yard needed to take into account: there was a reasonably high probability that at some point, a large and enthusiastic friend would vault the wall to say hi. The occasion being, it was a day with a y, and the Singer had tasted her scent on the air.

Tilly had long since gotten used to it. And besides, nudity wasn’t sexual to ten’gewek, who went about their daily lives more-or-less buck bare anyway.

…As did many humans (more or less) who made their permanent home on this hot, steaming planet.

Doubly besides, this was the Singer, the only woman of any species Tilly had ever had sex with, and one of her best friends. They were a little past shyness at this point. “You ever gonna start knocking?” she asked, turning her head and raising a hand in a lazy little half-wave.

“If you ever ask me to and mean it!” Singer hooted jovially, and sat on her tail. Tilly couldn’t help but grin: it was a terrible thing to be known so well, and skewered so effortlessly. “You like our ways, though.”

“Mhm. Guess I do…” Tilly half-rolled over to talk, and raised her sunglasses. “I haven’t seen you all week! You must have been busy.”

“So many young people. So many births to bless, so many rites. Opposite of a problem, of course. But yes. First time in two hands of days I’ve had any me time.”

Tilly nodded, and sat up. “Comb,” she said, sticking out her hand. Singer hooted happily, handed her the stiff, thick-toothed industrial bone comb necessary for grooming a ten’gewek’s stiff and thick crest, then shuffled around to be pampered.

“I know you’re busy too,” Singer added. “Always busy at the Lyceum. So, when I taste you alone and relaxed at home, I think, take the opportunity, yijao?”

“Absolutely,” Tilly agreed. “It’s the same opposite-of-a-problem you have, huh? All those young minds, so full of ideas they want to chew through and think about.”

“Not going to be long before we have too many of us,” Singer mused. “Good problem to have?”

“Maybe. I don’t even know if there’s such a thing. We always seemed to find more room…” Tilly found what was probably a thorn lodged deep in Singer’s crest. A human would have needed some gentle teasing and working to get it out, but ten’gewek actually preferred scalp-tugging, hair-ripping violence. She yanked the tiny knot out, bringing with it a thumbnail-sized ball of orange fluff, and Singer wriggled her shoulders happily. “Yeah, I bet that itched.”

“It was driving me mad. Thank you!”

“Mm…what we found was, as life got better, people had fewer kids. Richer, healthier people don’t need so many. I think the data is, you’re going the same way. Be a while before you hit equilibrium, but you’re going to, I think.”

“That’s good. Think we might need two Singers per tribe by then, though….” Singer relaxed even more as Tilly tore another stranded bit of tree out of her hair. “It’s a bit too much work for one person.”

“Maybe! And let’s face it, you’ve got enough girls now to have no trouble finding one’s who are willing to be Dancers.”

“Hmm, yeah. Even had a human girl say she might be interested.” Singer half-turned her head and shrugged. “It’s a funny idea. Don’t think I like it. Think I’ll say no. I think that’s ours, you know?”

Tilly nodded, and kept combing. “How’s your man?”

“Busy and never thinking of what I think he should be thinking of,” Singer hooted. “Yours?”

Tilly smiled. “I think he still lives somewhere in simultaneous friendship, awe, and jealousy of Vemik. But he shouldn’t…” Tilly caressed the growing bump on her belly. “He gave me something Vemik never could.”

This immediately triggered the Concerned Auntie Singer Sequence, which involved aggressively tasting and smelling the air around her, poking gently at the bump, fussing on Tilly’s comfort…

“How long now?”

“Should be at the start of winter.”

“Hm! Winter babies have a hard start, but a good life,” Singer nodded sagely as she passed on that particular nugget of folk wisdom.

“Not too hard, I hope,” Tilly said. “And he’ll have a big, wonderfully strange family.”

“He?” Singer’s tongue lashed curiously. “How do you know?”

“Oh! I haven’t shown you the sonogram yet, have I?” They were so much better than the old days, now. She found the movie on her phone and played it back.

The Singer, apparently, had never encountered the idea before. “Son o gram,” she said blankly as she watched the scan.

“Sono. As in, sonic, sound. Really, really high sound. And a special tool for listening to how it moves through me. So we know the baby’s developing properly and…well lots of things about him.”

“Huh! Still so many surprises, even now.”

Tilly grinned, and decided she’d caught enough sun for one day. She stood up and went to grab her shorts and top. “I could do with a little exercise. Feel like dropping in on Daniel for tea?

Singer hooted, “he will take any excuse to escape Vemik’s grip, I think.”

“Good! Let’s go rescue him!”

They took a stroll. Jumptown would never be a large place, but even a short walk was exercise in the ever-present crushing gravity of Akyawentuo. “One-point-two plus,” my sweaty ass.

Sure enough, there was Vemik and Vemun, both excitedly hooting the professor through some grunty lifts, which escalated radically as first Vemun, then Vemik took their turns under increasingly more intimidating and superhuman weights.

Professor took the chance to escape; the swollmonke were too focused on their task to object.

“Tilly! I see the baby is coming along. Isn’t it about time to announce?”

And so on. Tea happened. News was exchanged. Loud hooting intervened, as Vemun broke his record at…whatever thing he’d hefted. Other grunty types, monkey or otherwise, passed through, played, went on their ways…

Yan appeared, perfunctorily humiliated everyone by toying with the weights, and immediately left. He had people to fuck, shit to do, and a bachelor tribe of his own to lovingly oppress.

Tilly sat and basked. She’d come in for a lot of ridicule and criticism, once upon a time, a lot of unkind commentary, but now…here she was. A happy family life, wonderful friends, a wonderful career, a small but perfect home…

Tavon’s surprise arm around her waist was just the thing to seal the deal. Along with a brash grin from Vemik across the clearing. He’d be around for their enjoyment again, one day…

But right now, she had exactly what she wanted.

Date Point: year 20, UPC
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Meru, first of the Carbon Caste

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re incredible, darling.”

Meru beamed happily at “uncle” Nofl, and returned her attention to the performance they were watching. It was perhaps slightly narcissistic to feel so proud of herself, but…well, she was proud of herself. She was the first and only Corti in the galaxy to perform alongside human dancers on a stage. The only one who could keep up with them.

The Directorate thought it was a waste of her talents, of course. Even if they intellectually agree with the need for the Carbon Caste to supplant and ultimately replace the old castes, they still thought the way they’d been raised to think, still held on to the values they’d been raised with. To them, the world was divided into scientists, mathematicians, engineers and doctors on the one hand, and the people who enabled them to exist on the other.

Dance? Sports? Not even on their sensors.

In all their plans for the Carbon Caste, they’d no doubt imagined that Meru and her siblings would be the same as Corti had ever been, would have the same priorities and would just be, well, bigger and stronger scientists. They’d imagined that her ambitions would be the same as theirs.

Meru had plenty of ambition. And her ambition was to be different. She wanted to show the galaxy what her people could really achieve, not just tread more heavily on the same ground.

Thank the Infinite there was one old-caste Corti who understood her, at least. Ever since she’d first come to Cimbrean, Nofl had been a constant voice of support. He’d claimed the title ‘uncle’ for himself straight away, and knowing what she did of his role in creating her, Meru was happy to let him have it.

And even if he had never touched the Carbon project, the advice and encouragement was more than avuncular enough. He’d earned it twice over.

Though he wasn’t without his quirks. Serving them was an autonomous robot in the form of a ridiculous avian in fluorescent pink plumage.

“Thanks, Stabby.”

The flamingobot bobbed a curtsey, and stalked back to its alcove. Truly weird…but Meru loved the weird. She knew that by Directorate standards, the Carbon Caste’s creche had been an anarchic riot, but compared to daily life among humans, gao and ten’gewek, it seemed decidedly…prosaic, in retrospect.

A ridiculous serving bot with a ridiculous name, designed and built by a ridiculous man while they sat on the couch eating ridiculously unhealthy snacks and watching…well. Swan Lake was a truly ridiculous story, but one Meru was delighted to be part of. Maybe in a few years she’d get to be Odette!

Of course…the only reason she could be up there, wear that costume, pull off that feather-light coordination and strength was because a significant part of her genome was human.

Among themselves, the Carbon Caste were having a long and difficult conversation about what species they were. After all, by the consensus definition of species, they weren’t actually Corti. They couldn’t breed with Corti, not viably. But then again, they couldn’t breed with humans, gaoians, ten’gewek, or any of the others whose biology had contributed to their creation. Couldn’t breed with the remnant Corth, either. They were their own species. The result might be grey-skinned, big-eyed, hairless and inclined to a cerebral personality, but…

On the other hand, Corti couldn’t breed with Corti. Perhaps, then, the normal rules of “species” did not really apply in the total context of their situation. She was inclined to think they were the same people.

Just…different. The same but different.

There was something irritatingly faulty about that thought, which was why she’d come to Nofl in the first place. The ballet was more of an excuse to show off, and an introduction.

“You’re overthinking, darling.”

How…how did he do that?

Nofl grinned at her. “You frown. In, it must be said, an entire lexicon of ways. Your forehead and eyes are a language all to themselves, and I speak it quite fluently. If you are ever to master poker or ta’shen, dear, you must learn to control your expressions!”

“Why would I want to—”

“Or chess, then! Go! Strategem! Any number of games! Or, indeed, if you want to advance your career.”

“That’s not the advice I’d expect, from you.”

“Oh, just because I think the Directorate took it much too far for thousands of years doesn’t mean I don’t see the value in a little dispassion. All things in their proper time and place, yijao?” Nofl sipped his decaf, then indicated the ballet. “A time for motion, and a time for stillness. A time to emote, and a time to fade into the background. Much of my success came from knowing when to be my outrageous unapologetic self, and when to flirt with conformity.”

“I think it’s going to be for us Carbons to define what conforming looks like,” Meru pointed out. “We’re the future, after all!”

“Forced lightness. The idea terrifies you.”

“Nofl…” Meru paused, then sighed. “Yes.”

“Good. You’d be one of the most abjectly stupid beings in the galaxy if it didn’t.” Nofl chuckled and set his empty espresso aside. “It’s a huge responsibility. One nobody could blame you for wanting to escape.”

“I’m not here to escape it, Nofl.” Meru watched herself dance on the TV for a minute, then paused it and half-turned to face him. “The Igraens took so much from the Corti. All the things my siblings and I can do that you can’t. We don’t have the culture for things like dance and sport and suchlike, but I can…I can almost feel the need for them in my DNA. We cannot be a complete people without physical forms of expression. So, I’m here to study, and learn, and integrate what I learn into whatever it is the Carbon Caste build in the coming years. But there are times, when…”

“When you’d rather not have the responsibility at all, and just dance.”

“A little, yes.” Meru finished her own coffee. The real thing, as unlike Nofl she could metabolize caffeine. “My point is…we Carbons will be completely rebuilding things in our own image over the coming years. Perhaps that means defiantly never flirting with conformity, because the old standards for conformity no longer apply.”

Nofl nodded, and hopped up from the couch to clean the cups. “Perhaps.”

“…Or…?” Meru asked.

“No, no or. You may be completely correct. Goodness knows, I’ve seen for myself how operating strictly within the expected and approved can destroy any hope of getting things done. All I’ll do is caution you that so too can operating strictly outside them, too. You’ll benefit from having the skills to play both halves of the game.”

“Perhaps.”

“Heh!”

Nofl finished cleaning up, then turned to face her with a smile. “The nice thing about the future is, you don’t have to figure it all out today.”

“It feels like I do…”

“Because you’re young. But believe me, you have time. Especially now. Time to try things, and see if they work. Time to make mistakes, and learn from them. In my experience, the only mistake you can make and not learn from it, is the mistake of not trying something new.” He picked up the remote and turned the TV off. “So. Shall I teach you ta’shen? I think you’ll enjoy it…”

Meru blinked at him, then laughed and sprang lightly to her feet. “Alright, fine.”

He turned out to be right. She enjoyed learning, enjoyed the challenge of trying to hide her thoughts and feelings from somebody who could generally see right through her. By the end of their third game, she even managed to successfully bluff him.

She still didn’t win, but that was okay. What mattered was, she had fun.

Then it was time for him to see a client. She let herself out and set out at the habitual jog she’d fallen into, wending her way back toward the university campus while following the covered route to stay out of the rain.

There was a lot of responsibility on Meru’s shoulders. The future of a culture, and that culture was going to have to change…But deeper than the anxiety was something deeper. Deep down, in her heart of hearts, she was eager to see what the future held.

It promised to be interesting.

Christian (Righteous) Firth

“Still feelin’ ‘yer oats, son? Got another few rounds left in ‘ya? Be honest, now.”

Ol’ Firth hadn’t been gentle with his youngest son. Not at all. Stupid games always earned stupid prizes, an’ young James thought he’d mouth off to Christian, too.

He wasn’t a very demanding dad, really. But every Firth was an aggressive, dangerous sort of person. Big, powerful feelings in big, powerful bodies, both at levels way past anything your normal Joe had to manage. Ran in the family. Freya’s family weren’t no pushovers, neither. Sometimes, civilization needed to be beaten into young hot-heads.

Or in Jame’s case, wrassled. And lifted. And boxed. And pretzeled. Christian was a man who could trivially fold up nearly anyone these days, so flippant disrespect?

Naw.

Jamie wasn’t intentionally disrespectful, though. Christian understood. He was just a very, very aggressive ultra-high testosterone sorta young man. Getting that shit under control was a life of learning and discipline. And most days, he was perfect! Some days, though…

Well, today at least, it seemed like Learning Had Occurred.

The boy groaned, and lurched up to his feet, eyeing Christian warily.

“…No, sir.”

Quick once-over. Bit of a sniff. Yeah. Honest. Always honest, he was. No lies in him.

He looked up, face caught between aggression, a bit of fear…and barely restrained sadness.

…Yeah. Okay. Christian wasn’t heartless. He sighed, and pulled the boy in for a hug. It was a good, genuine thing, one Jamie reciprocated with his full strength.

Christian pulled back after a while to get a better look at his youngest. Christ, he was a beautiful boy. Out of a family of serious lookers, nobody really had what he had. Not even sixteen yet and already handsome like a full-grown man, wrestler-thick and strong with a luxuriant shoulder-length mop of curly blond hair to top it off. He may have been the youngest and smallest, but god-damn was he an artwork of a man.

“Right. Jamie…why you gotta do this? Miss Sato ain’t your enemy, I certainly ain’t…”

Big sullen fifteen-year-old shoulder shrug. Ah. Ragin’ hormones, prob’ly. Still.

“Use your words, James,” he said with some disapproval. “You are prob’ly the smartest in th’ entire family an’ that is fuckin’ sayin’ something.”

“Words, huh.” Jamie looked away for a bit, gathering them. “Alright. You know what bugs me? History, right?”

“…Go on…”

“Fifty years ago, I’d have been…I dunno. I’d have been fuckin’ superman. I coulda gone to the Olympics and won gold in whatever I wanted! Or whatever. I’d have been…” he shook his head. “Now, everything I’m good at, one of my own fuckin’ brothers is better at. Or my Dad is.”

Ah.

Right. So. Friendly papa time.

“That’s not actually true, y’know. I wasn’t kiddin’ when I said you’re ‘bout th’ smartest o’ us. I’ve seen the test scores an’ you sure as shit beat me.”

“Yeah, but there’s regular kids who beat me. An’ when Miss Sato said that’s how it is for everyone, I just…I didn’t wanna hear it.”

“She ain’t wrong.”

Unconvinced grumbles.

“I mean, yeah. It’s trite, everyone’s got their strengths an’ weaknesses, can’t judge a fish by how well it climbs trees, blah blah…”

Jamie scoffed. “Yeah, that was what she said.”

Firth watched his youngest for a while. The thing was…he was kind of an old hand at this game, by now. He’d been dad for thirty-four years at this point, and the thing was…it never got old, but it got familiar. Teenage angst was just about the same as changin’ diapers at this point. You had a young person starting to get a handle on who they were and what they could actually be instead o’ whatever goofy kid-fantasy had been there before, their brain was really starting to fill up…

And sooner or later, it got full of shit and needed cleaning out.

He knew what was going on, here. And understood why it was so acute with young James, who had nine older brothers and of them, he was the one who was genuinely different. Leaner, more on the athletic side of things rather than some flavor of ultra-hulk, more gregarious and playful. That acid tongue of his. Lots of wisecracks.

Crazy handsome…and might be a little queer too, honestly. Or at least, he wasn’t a raging puss hound like he and the rest of his boys were. None of James’ dating had ever…stuck. He was the youngest, after all. But that wasn’t for Christian to poke him with.

The worst part was probably just…Christian himself. The rest of the boys were a lot like him so their competitive energies were easy to handle. James, though?

The boy dug out a spray can of deodorant and attempted a little de-stanking.

“That shit only works after a shower. Now you just smell like sandalwood and sweaty ass.”

“And you didn’t even break a sweat.”

“I more sorta…musk moistly. Allatime.”

James grinned and made a face, but he was chuckling now. “Gross. You’re all like that. Not me, though.” He sighed. “I don’t walk into a room and everyone’s all over me, or whatever.”

“On the other hand, you don’t walk into a room and everyone’s suddenly on edge. But…look. Jamie. Look at me. Let’s…try something. Look at me and tell me, honestly. What do you see?”

Jamie glowered at him for a bit. “You know what you are.”

“That’s not what I asked. I know something’s bothering you an’ I wanna get it out. So…I asked what you see. Just…humor me. Please.”

Jamie glowered at him a moment longer, then hung his head, shook it, and looked away. He was silent for a long time, and finally spoke just as Christian was about to nudge him.

“It’s like you’re a fuckin’ god. And I’m not,” he said. “And I’ll never ever be good enough.”

…Aw, shit.

“Okay. Let’s…have a sit, yeah?”

So, he sat. On the reinforced bench. Carefully. Suddenly he was a lot more conscious of himself.

“That really how you feel?”

“Sometimes.” He did the long silence thing again, but not so long this time before the words started to flow. “I mean look at you! You’re literally the best there is and you’ve done all sorts of amazing shit and you helped save the fucking galaxy all while being like the perfect dad and Mom is absolutely crazy in love with you and you’re fuckin’ rich and…”

He looked up…shit, Firth felt his heart stop in his chest. Jamie looked up at him on the verge of tears. “And you’ll never grow old. I’ll never have a chance. Ever.”

“A chance to what though? To be better at bein’ me than I am?” Christian shook his head. “Jamie…you are becomin’ your own man. You shouldn’t be like me! The only thing I ever asked ‘ya to be is you. An’ mebbe don’t be a shithead while you’re at it, yijao? That’s all.”

Jamie didn’t say anything to that. Which, okay. He was down. And if there was one thing Christian had learned from raising so many kids, it was that each one needed a different approach. Joe would already be feeling better just for the grunt-work, but Jamie…

“Okay. I do get it, right? I spent literally decades in a super meathead competition with my best bud ‘Horse, so I’m…not blind to it. But think about what you got that th’ rest of us don’t. You are handsome as fuck. Like, I’m damn pretty m’self, but I weren’t nothin like you at ‘yer age, and I was the kinda pretty-boy dangerous that had daddy scares ‘fore I was even a teen. You hear me? You’re already better! Don’t do that, by the way…”

“Dad! I’m not dumb.”

“I know. But I weren’t either, an’ sometimes ‘yer dick does th’ thinkin’ for ‘ya. So don’t get into my kinda trouble! Balls, I bet in ten years you’re gonna make Julian look like a fuckin’ frog!”

A little snort-chuckle. Yeah, there it was.

“I dunno ‘bout that…”

“Eh, still. Pretty boys like him need a good scare now an’ then, an’ you’re gonna be just the man ‘ta do it. An’ I ain’t sayin’ that outta big-dad pride. I see the way the girls look at you…”

“Dad…”

“An’ the boys!”

“Dad!”

“No? Well. Okay. Y’know I’d still love ‘ya though, right?”

“Well, thanks. Nice’a you to say. But…not a concern.”

“Oh, thank God,” Firth rumbled, to another embarrassed-type noise from his boy which transformed into a laugh.

“Wait. Stop. Did you actually think I was gay?”

“Honestly? Kinda wondered maybe jus’ slightly. But that’s kinda normal for th’ youngest boy in a big family. There’s all kinda big sciency epigenetic reasons too…”

“This from the man whose entire friend group is big muscly men in tiny tight shorts.”

“An’ we wrassle all sweaty an’ damn near nekkid too! Go lift, do burly manly man things…”

Jamie burst out laughing. “You sure you ain’t gay?”

“Ask ‘yer mom.”

“You sure you want me to?”

“…Right. Don’t ask ‘yer mom.”

“Why? She got the dirt?”

“Oh God yes, and she will tell you everything.”

“Hah! Right. Definitely don’t ask.”

They sat and chuckled for a few seconds, fell into comfortable silence for a few seconds longer, then Jamie breathed out a big load of tension. Arm-time. Christian gave him a sideways hug and was happy to feel the boy hug back a little.

“I know it’s dumb to compare myself against you,” Jamie said. “I know I’ve got my own strengths and shit. It’s just…I dunno.”

“Y’ain’t dumb,” Christian insisted, firmly. “You’r smart as fuck. Like, stupid, ridiculously smart. You’re sensitive. An’ that matters! You know how many times I’ve ruined friendships or at least hurt feelings bad ‘cuz I’m too damn gruff ‘ta notice? You never miss that. Balls, with ‘yer sisters I sometimes take my cues from you. Plus you’re gooder wit’ ‘yer words—”

“You do that on purpose.”

“Yeah, but you’re still a better writer an’ a better student. T’be honest, of all my sons…shit. I don’t like ‘ta play favorites. But ‘ya can’t help it, yijao? I love ‘ya all. But you an’ Joe are precious ‘ta me. ‘Yer the most complete human beings Freya an’ I have managed ‘ta raise. ‘Fer different reasons, yeah…but I’m grateful ‘fer it. I am so fucking proud of you. Even when you’re occasionally a shithead.”

That did it. A laugh and tears at the same time. Jamie scrubbed them away viciously, but they were there alright.

“All my kids make me happy in their own ways. ‘Fer Joe? He’s the one who’s the most like me, an’ he’s the one who’s prob’ly gonna be a better version of me. Gonna be an interestin’ day when he finally applies ‘fer HEAT. I’ll hafta move on an’ up to th’ Crew full-time. But you? You’re the one who’s gonna be somethin’ different. Somethin’ different an’ unexpected. I can already tell. And that’s fuckin’ important.”

A grateful nod, and a sniff.

“…Can I ask something?”

“Shoot.”

“Why…why do you and Joe do what you do?”

Ah.

“That’s maybe not a nice answer. Y’sure you wanna hear it, or should it wait?”

“No. I wanna hear it now.”

“Okay.”

Woolgathered for a moment.

“Son…Joe and I are cold-blooded killers. In our core. We have a need to do this mission and I can’t really put it to words why…but it’s what we are. We need it so badly that I’m honestly afraid to think what I’d be like without a legal means to be what I truly am. I love you, son. I love all of you. I like to think I’m a pretty good dad…but I am also a murderous bastard like none other. Now you know it, never forget it. I am a living weapon. Born, bred, raised, trained, and crafted into the best there is. The world needs men like me, and a few of my friends.”

“Like Adam?”

“Yeah. He’s one of the few I might consider a peer. But he ain’t better. Th’ only more dangerous killers in the entire galaxy I know ‘bout are the Great Father and Hoeff.”

“…Hoeff?”

“Yes. Hoeff. Bein’ a killer ain’t just ‘bout my body an’ skills. I’m the better killer, but he’s the more dangerous person. Whatever I am in my soul, he is that, but as far as a human can go. I’ll leave it at that for now. The galaxy needs men like him and me. But it doesn’t need very many, anymore. Between us we killed a mountain of corpses to earn that peace. So…use it, okay? Be excellent, and give all that blood some meaning.”

Jamie nodded solemnly. “I’ll try.”

“I know.”

“…Thanks, Dad.”

Christian just nodded, gave his boy a squeeze again, then stood up. “Don’t wanna be late, yijao?”

“Right.”

And that was that. Christian wasn’t naive or optimistic enough to imagine he’d solved all Jamie’s problems in one conversation. There’d be future cases of him running that mouth of his, future shit that needed figgerin’ out but…fuck, that was actually half the joy of parenting. And if there was one thing Christian had learned about himself over the last thirty years…Well. Bein’ a supermonster death machine ultrasoldier might be his trade, but parenthood was his calling. And he planned on keepin’ at it for a good long time.

Not a bad way to live, really.

Date Point: Year 21 UPC
Cavendish Station, Dirawong dwarf planet, asteroid belt, Cimbrean system

Moses Byron

Youth was a joy wasted on the young who’d never tasted the gnaw of senescence. Moses had been an old man when he first started the treatments, had needed decades to regain some youthful vigor, and the fact was his wrinkles were never going to entirely fade even if his hair had recovered both color and territory.

He’d certainly never imagined he might remarry. But…well, the future was a long time, and Moses intended on seeing an indefinite amount of it. It’d be quite unbearable without companionship, he believed.

What a miracle, to be more than a hundred years old, and yet have the ability and energy for children. What a blessing.

And what a blessing to still have the pleasure of business. There were still challenges, still ways to make the world a better place.

Or, in this case, new beginnings to celebrate.

Hephaestus Consortium had limped along after the series of fiascos and security breaches on Ceres, but the fact was that losing a nuke had been too much for the authorities to forgive. They’d lost contracts, lost opportunities, and while asteroid mining had been lucrative enough to keep them afloat and solvent, it hadn’t been the economic inferno of the early years. They were victims of their own success, really, having saturated the market with the very materials that made them rich. Now, copper and gold were cheaper than durasteel which was itself almost as cheap as pig iron. Only the endless demand for rare earths in magnets and other wizardry kept the industry lucrative.

Really, an eventual purchase and merger had been inevitable. Honestly, it should have happened years ago but there were always complications. Legal ones. The collapse of literally every human government and the Earth’s destruction meant the foundation had been ripped out from under a lot of contracts and legal documents, and there were a billion untidy ends flapping loose to be cleared up.

In the end, it required the Great Father to declare a jubilee on all debts and contracts. Which created even more chaos, but at least this was resolvable.

And so, at last, today was the day. The merger was going ahead.

Thump

“I gotta say…I love this lobby.”

Moses glanced at Kevin as they stepped off the jump platform. Cavendish Station had originally been slapped together in a hurry so that the asteroid mining operations in Sol could transition to Cimbrean without a pause in service. Much of it, in fact, was Ceres base, jumped over module by module. But the change had brought an opportunity to improve some things, and Ceres Base had always lacked for an open green space. So, why not borrow the Entity’s technology from Garden Station to build such a thing here, then make it the jump terminus as well?

It was a memorial garden. A circle of slabs cut from asteroidal chondrites surrounded the jump platform, then a lawn, trees and a water feature, all carefully sculpted to draw the eye toward the transparent eye at the top of the dome space, which was actually quite tiny and narrow for structural safety, but still big enough to appreciate the stars beyond.

“Agreed…” he admitted. None of MBG’s archive centers were so nicely appointed. Something they could learn from, there.

“G’day, gentlemen.” They were met at the bottom of the ramp by Drew Martin, the CEO who’d managed to steer Hephaestus through its troubled times. “Welcome to Cavendish Station.”

“Thank you for the welcome,” Moses replied, and shook his hand. The Australian seemed to have embraced the always-fashionable foible of genuinely wealthy men in that his version of being dressed up wouldn’t have been out of place on the street: a collarless jacket over a plain t-shirt, jeans, hiking boots.

Moses was maybe a little dated in that regard, and still stuck to the two-piece suit. He didn’t mind, though. He’d known Drew for years, been good friends for nearly as long.

“Today’s the day, huh?” Martin shook Kevin’s hand, then stepped aside and extended an inviting palm toward a nearby airlock. “A long time in the making.”

“Are you two finally gonna reveal what you’re conspiring to call us?” Kevin asked, strolling along with his thumbs tucked in the pocket of his own fashionably nonchalant jeans. “I’ve got money on Weyland-Utani.”

“Now there is a reference literally nobody under the age of a hundred will get.”

“Eh, you underestimate how enduring that movie was. Okay, how about Omni Consumer Products?”

Moses tried not to snort. “Kevin.”

“What?! I think the best part is how the real world ended up both far more horrifying and so much better.” Kevin grinned as the airlock cycled and opened into a long corridor with a moving walkway. “We got alien supermonsters and galactic conspiracies, yeah. But some of those supermonsters are the mostest friendliest, and we also got a pretty much literal Captain America outta the deal, too.”

“Still gushing about your meeting with the Great Father and his special ops general, eh?”

“Dude. They fed me the best steak. And conversation! I wasn’t expecting either to be so, uh…”

“Smart?”

”Cerebral. Well-read! I’ve known Julian for years, Moses. Shit, I was the one stood up for those three and championed them on Misfit. If there’s one thing I never doubted, it’s his intelligence. He’s just…I dunno. Flourished, these last few years. And I know the big murderbear is smarter’n the average, but it’s another to meet him for the first time.”

“Heh. And you’re not used to someone talking circles around you.”

“And I enjoyed it! But, anyway. Enough about big-brain meatheads. C’mon. Spill. What’s it gonna be? Byron-Martin Interstellar? OmniCorp? Buy-N-Large?” Kevin persisted, knowing perfectly well that both Moses and Drew were feigning exasperation.

“Nah mate, we’ve been bosom buddies for decades, now. It’s a ship! Drewron.” Martin offered, with a smirk toward Moses.

“Let’s stick with what we settled upon, please,” Moses replied, evenly.

“Fine, fine. Guess I’ll find out soon enough…”

They stepped off the travelator’s end, through another airlock, and entered the station’s office complex. From there, it was just a short flight of stairs to the executive level. Moses had to hand it to the designers, who’d done a damn good job of making an entirely enclosed, airtight and safety-conscious void facility feel open and airy.

And there, in the glass-sided conference room, waiting for them, were all the people who’d be witnessing this moment. Lawyers, obviously, executives from both companies, a couple of media. Kevin quietly stepped to the side so Moses and Drew could have the spotlight moment of being photographed entering together, and the moment arrived. There was a brief ballet of pens and paper, two side-by-side signatures…

“And ladies and gentlemen, with that I’m proud to announce the formation of a new corporation. The Moses Byron Group has borne my name for decades, but this moment here, as we welcome the efforts and triumphs of many people past and present into our growing family, seems like the right time for me to let go of that kind of hubris.”

Murmurs and nods around the room. Moses gestured to Drew. “Mister Martin and I have been discussing the right name for our joined ventures for some years now,” he said. “We wanted something simple, hopeful, and symbolic. Ideally, a symbolism that transcends culture and species—no small task!”

“And as if we weren’t making it hard enough on ourselves,” Drew added, “we wanted something non-generic.”

“In the end, I’m sorry to say, we did fail to live up to our ambitions,” Moses revealed, with a self-deprecating shrug. “Try as we might, we couldn’t quite transcend species and cultures. This is a human-founded venture, after all. A product of Sol, and of Earth. And it’s in that fact that we eventually anchored our name. As a tribute to the past and what was lost, but with, I hope, the promise of growth and life to come.”

He moved to the pair of curtains at the end of the room and gripped the pull cord, while Drew took position on the opposite side. With a nod, they pulled, and the curtains drew back.

“Ladies and gentlemen…we are proud to announce that from this moment on, we are known as Gaia Interstellar.”

Polite applause around the room, and Kevin gave a thumbs-up, approving. Moses grinned, moved a little closer to Drew for the photos, and didn’t need any effort to smile widely and genuinely for all gathered. This had been a long and difficult thing to make happen…but here they were.

He looked forward to seeing what the next challenge would be.

Date Point: Year 21 UPC
New Alexandria, Akyawentuo
Joshua (Blast) Hartl

The column of smoke coming from the industrial zoning in Eastside promised an interesting day for Josh. Well, nearly every day for the last twenty years had been interesting.

He was chief, now. Chief of the fire department for New Alexandria. Which sounded big, but it wasn’t really that big a city; hell, their chaplain was himself a part-time medic volunteer. He’d filled out, grown up as a man. Had a pile of kids. Started to get a couple gray hairs here and there, though he was only barely forty. He was in the peak of his prime and life was good.

If it wasn’t for the fuckin’ mask regs he’d have grown a beard, too. And Jess had vetoed the mustache. Which was practically heresy among firefighters, as Father Paternostro had joked…well, he wasn’t wrong.

But, anything to keep his wife happy, yijao? Happy wife, happy life. That was the joke he told everyone, and she’d eventually come to own it for herself. Truth be told, she was the opposite of demanding. It was just…she hated the damn thing. Said it tickled.

She had to put up with March Mustache Madness, though. And Movember. To keep him happy. Happy spouse, happy house!

Weird to think that life was half over. Like very many in and around New Alexandria, he’d decided not to ride the life extension bandwagon. That had become a significant cultural difference, and one nobody had really figured out quite yet. Over on Cimbrean, Life-X was the norm. For some, it was in the form of Crude. For most everyone else, it was the much milder stuff, which didn’t require a lifetime commitment to extreme personal excellence.

But most Akyawentans took a big ol’ leaf of the ten’gewek tree, and tried to live in touch with how the gods had made them. Gods. God. Religions had found a pretty comfortable co-existence with each other, here. Even if New Vatican was only a few hours down south. Losing everything seemed to have that effect on people. Faith and religion was strong on this world. Strong like everyone and everything here, and also…more optimistic, maybe?

Well, nothin’ optimistic about that fire. It was a big one, he’d already sent two engines and he’d be riding along with the third. And calling for airborne backup, too.

One of the Brown Ones had attacked a power substation again. Somethin’ about the AC hum made them violently angry, if they ever ignored the discouragement fields enough to wander close. And then, because mere flesh and blood didn’t react well to half a million volts of very angry magic, you ended up with a burning animal carcass and that rapidly threatened to become everybody’s problem.

So: giant electrical fire, fifty tons of smoldering meat and fur, and a dependability problem too, since the city only had two feeding substations from the nuclear plants north and south.

Welp. Time to call his counterparts.

The electrical company was already on it, having been the first to notice. They claimed the site would be safe for dumb-jock firefighters in a few minutes.

The second was Book Ink-Palm, who worried constantly about the Brown Ones and their livelihood. He was in fact pretty bookish, and by ten’gewek standards a lanky sort of tough.

So in fact, still insanely powerful, and very much a handful whenever they met. He was a park ranger and his main job, unusual but worthy by ten’gewek reckoning, was to constantly walk the width and breadth of the park between New Alexandria and the People’s forest, keeping an eye on things and working to maintain the balance.

That lank of his gave him some incredible endurance. Tough. Very tough. And a favorite of the Singers, too. He already knew about it, and sounded resigned.

“Was wondering when would happen,” he trilled sadly over the radio. “This one was stupid. Others learn by now. Not her.”

A stream from an overhead drone came in, which he forward on to Book. They both made unhappy noises at the same time.

“Boy, she really went for it, didn’t she?”

“Not many Brown Ones can leap so far or so high. Landed paws down on…transformer?”

Josh sighed, as he started donning his gear. “No. Worse. Capacitor bank. So now we have a chemical fire, too.”

“I bring werne jerky, then.”

Never let it be said the ten’gewek didn’t know how to be hospitable. Tonight would be a long night, and his ten’gewek firefighters were going to suffer under all that gear.

No matter. Chief Josh had good crews, well trained. They had a library to defend and a city to keep safe. Book had a wilderness to preserve. They had purpose.

And what more could a man really want?

Even when it was fucking with him…life was good.

Date Point: year 20 UPC
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Rachel “Ray” Wheeler

“Hey, Holly.”

Holly Chase looked old. Which, of course, she was. But nothing put it in perspective for Ray quite like taking her old friend’s hand and feeling just how delicate and wrinkled and light it was.

It felt wrong, when Holly was five years younger. But…well, Ray was on life-X, and Holly had never touched the stuff. Ray understood why: Hell’s survivors lived with guilt. And Holly had maintained from the moment Life-X even became an option that she’d rather live out the days the Lord gave to her and go to her rest at the allotted time.

Ray’s argument that Life-X was the Lord giving her the opportunity for more days had just been met with a smile and a shake of her head, as though Ray didn’t understand. Which…fairly, she did not.

It still didn’t feel good to be sitting at a friend’s deathbed, though. A friend she’d gone through so much with, and kept alive out of irresistible big-sister impulse.

And the worst part was, Holly’s cancer was eminently fixable, if she took the right meds and underwent the surgery. Folctha General had three full field suites, capable of taking a person apart on the cellular level if need be. The same as the one on Origin that had saved Ray’s life, after she’d fucking died from a Hunter’s fusion claw straight through the heart.

There was no reason for this to kill Holly, except…Holly wanted it to.

That was hard to take. Harder still was the fact that the palliative care and pain meds had her out like a light, today. In fact, it was doubtful she’d be coherent at all before the end. The hospice staff made a lot of noise about ‘keeping her comfortable until the end,’ which was probably only a matter of hours at this point, but as far as Ray could tell she was already about as responsive as a corpse. Just…warmer.

And not very much warmer at that. Her hands were cold.

“I uh…I’ve been thinking about what you said. Last time.” When she’d been conscious. “And…I’m staying. I’m sticking around. I don’t know what I believe exactly, but…well, no. I’m pretty sure I believe we only get this life. And yeah, maybe the day will come when I don’t wanna still be here, but…”

She squeezed her friend’s hand. “…I hope I’m wrong. Or, I hope you’re right. Either way, I’m gonna miss you.”

To her astonishment, she felt a squeeze around her fingertips. A glimmer of old, blue eyes under wrinkled lids, which wrinkled all the more around a pained smile.

“It’s…okay…” Holly told her. “I’m just…glad you’re here.”

“Of course I am,” Ray added her left hand to the squeeze.

Holly nodded, slowly. Clearly, staying awake was an effort for her. She gave Ray’s hand the strongest squeeze she could muster, and rested her head on the pillow again.

“You’ll be okay,” she predicted.

They turned out to be her last words. She fell asleep again, Ray stayed at her side, chatted with the nuns and priests who came in to say hi, and the nurses who were checking on her…

Then there was a little commotion. A beep from the monitor by the bed. Moments later, footsteps in the hall outside. Ray knew what it all meant. She held on tight and didn’t let go as they gently inserted themselves into the room and stood respectfully, being present for her.

And then the biomonitor beeped again. The doctor leaned in, picked up her wrist, tilted his head as he paid attention…then laid it respectfully across her chest. Holly Chase passed away, peacefully and with her hand being held, at twelve minutes past three in the afternoon on a lovely summer day.

For Ray, it felt like she’d been there a day or more, even though it had only been…what. Four hours? There was paperwork, stuff to sign…then she was outdoors. There was nothing else for her to do for Holly, or for the people who had to take care of her now…

And she needed some care of her own.

“Hey, Mom.”

She blinked and turned. She’d never had kids of her own, but the group of orphans she’d adopted after the Last World War counted. “…You guys waited for me this whole time?”

“Of course we did!” Treasure hopped up from where she’d been sitting cross-legged on the wall, and gave her a hug. “Is she…?”

“She’s gone.” Just saying it hurt.

“Aw, Mom…” Treasure gave her a big squeeze, and Preston wrapped his own, much longer arms around the both of them.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Ray sighed heavily, but… “I will be. I am. Yeah. I just…”

They nodded. Neither of them were strangers to grief and loss, of course. Neither was Ray. She’d said goodbye to her entire crew, over time. Damian Spears had retired to New York and died when a nuclear torpedo snuck up the Hudson river and detonated south-west of Manhattan. Jamie Choi had lived in Los Angeles, which suffered a similar fate.

Benjamin Cook had visited her in hospital after her surgical resurrection, and then…vanished. None of them ever heard from him again. Maybe he was still alive, somewhere. It didn’t matter, she’d said goodbye to him, too. Which meant she was the last of the Dauntless crew. The last of the group who’d climbed out of Hell together.

She hugged Treasure close and tried to remind herself that she absolutely was not alone. That she’d saved lives…

And she had. God, by rights Holly should have died years ago, back on Hell. Every day she’d lived, all her years as a sister, all that long life she’d had since then…Ray could claim some credit for that. Should she even be mourning at all? Holly Chase had had a life thanks to her. Her own life, to let go of when she chose.

That should be a happy thought. It was a happy thought. And it would be a happy thought in the future. She swallowed, let go of Treasure, wiped her tears away, and managed a smile.

“Come on,” she said. “I’m starving. Let’s get something to eat.”

They nodded, and joined her. Ray spared one backwards glance over her shoulder at the hospice, then straightened her back, set her shoulders, and promised herself she’d see as much of the future as she could. For all her friends. They might be gone…

But Ray was still here.

Date Point: Years 21 UPC
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Ava Coombes

“Hey, Hannah.”

Ava’s kids thought she was a bit weird, she knew. And maybe they were right, visiting a dog’s grave once per week was definitely a bit odd, but…

Well, it was the least she could do for the friend who’d saved her life. After all, she could have just had the vet handle disposal and be left with only the photos to remember her by…but that would have felt like a betrayal, like Hannah had never really mattered. Paying for a real memorial along the lakeside trail, that was something.

It was a good spot for Bhishma to get some exercise, too. Ava could sit and throw the ball, and there was enough space for him to go haring after it and run off the energy. Hannah’s successor, but never her replacement.

And he knew not to touch the biscuit she left on top of the stone.

“Six is still refusing to do a Laid Bare…he thinks I’m insane even for asking. I think he’s convinced I should hate him…” she threw the ball. “Maybe I should. He woulda killed us all, if he could. Is that the sort of thing I can just ignore? And then there’s what he did to me personally…”

Bhishma came haring back, gumming on the ball happily. He wasn’t a trained therapy and support animal like Hannah had been, he was just a Good Boy. And because Ava had something of a contrarian streak in her, he didn’t have a whiff of Cimbrean Mastiff in his ancestry. Pure black lab, through and through. Not that the dogs themselves gave a shit.

Persuading him that the ball was more easily thrown without his whole body attached to it took her a minute. This time, she aimed for the lake, so he’d have to swim out for it.

“But that’s, y’know. Exactly what I want to ask him about. That’s what the series has always been about, is exposure, you know? Confronting the difficult stuff. So even if I do hate him, that doesn’t mean his story’s not worth telling. So, I think I’m gonna keep pushing him…”

She took a second to clean off some fallen leaves from the stone. “And the thing is, I really feel like if I did hate him, I’d know, you know? There’d be no question. So, I guess I don’t. Or maybe I just don’t want to hold a grudge that long…oh! Speaking of people I hate, I actually ran into Sean Harvey at the charity dinner last week.” She scoffed. “Can you believe he’s on his third wife? I was such a fucking idiot…”

Bhishma was back, tail such a happy blur it was practically making a thrumming noise and shedding water everywhere. She coaxed the ball out of his mouth and sent it flying again. Nice thing about lake balls, she could pretend they were wet because of the water, not because of slobber.

“…Heh. You know what I just realized? I can say something like that now and I’m laughing with myself.”

She finished tidying the memorial stone and sat against it in silence for a couple more ball-chucks, until the call of “Mom!” drifted round the bend in the path, summoning her to food. So, she bent over and kissed the stone before standing.

“Miss you, sweet girl. See you next week.”

Derek and the kids were set up on the picnic table. Sara gave her the long-suffering look of a girl who thought her mom was embarrassing as hell, but Ava was used to that. Thirteen-year-old brain. She’d probably been just as much a brat to her own folks, way back when.

God. How long had it been? Forty-something years since San Diego? It didn’t feel like that much. Life extension drugs and the perpetual youth that came with it seemed to do funny things to time, Ava was finding. It had certainly let her and Derek come to parenthood “late,” In their own time, when they were ready, rather than in response to the tyranny of a biological clock. But it also meant the events of decades ago still felt oddly fresh, when she remembered them.

Something to be mindful of, maybe. She had an indefinite life ahead of her. It wouldn’t be healthy to be defined only by the events of the increasingly distant past. Not when there was so much here and now to be defined by instead.

So, she smiled at Sara, took her food, and sat down. “Looks good.”

“Got the dog nice and clean, I see,” Derek slipped an arm around her waist.

“Yup. You clean off the kids?”

“I tried to throw ‘em in the lake, but they bite.”

“Ugh.” Sara was in that utterly humorless couple of years where it was impossible for her parents to be anything other than cringey and annoying. Ava thought it was adorable, mostly.

“You sure?” Ava smiled at her daughter. “Biting would require more effort than just grunting at us and rolling her eyes.”

The reply, predictably, was an irritated expression and an attempt at studiously ignoring her. It was okay. She’d seen Adam’s kids and Firth’s kids and Xiù and Allison’s kids go through the same. You just had to take it in stride. A little rough patch to make you appreciate the good times more.

…Nice thought, that. Something to inspire her next gallery exhibition, maybe.

She smiled, grabbed her food, tucked in, and basked in the feeling of being happy.

Long may it last.

100th anniversary of Liberation Day
High Mountain Fortress, the Northern Plains, Gao

Daar, Great Father

The secret to living a long damn time, Daar had learned, was firs’ly to balance the novel against the routine, but more firs’ly, to keep good company.

An’ to sleep in a little sometimes, ‘ta sneak in more snuggles. Snuggles were important. But there was only so much affectionate squishing he could get away with, no matter how lovely his bed-mates of the evening smelt or felt. Naydra, Leela, an’ Maaryi had stuck with him and were the bestest, most beautifulest, most hard-bodied fittest versions of themselves they’d ever been. The three were goddesses now, goddesses who had committed to a life of vigorous activity along with their busy (and super important!) lives. For him! They did it for him, and he still din’t know how to properly repay that but to love ‘em as best he could.

The other two were a pair of civil engineers he’d met via Naydi’s skilled apprenticeship program, which Daar thought were the bestest of ideas. The Gao needed Females who were more’n walkin’ wombs! Even with the population recovery unnerway, it wouldn’t do to have ‘em so limited by their Noble Duty. Naydi thought so, which meant Daar thought so, and since he was the Great Father an’ she the Great Mother, so did everyone else! He chittered to himself and squished his women even harder.

They could take it. Had to. His natural definition o’ gentle could crush boulders an’ pop people. A couple times over th’ years—only a couple times, thank th’ gods—he’d given serious hurt ‘ta ordinary people in his enthusiasm ‘fer life. He did everything he could ‘ta make up for it both times…he should check in on ‘em again. If they’re still kickin’ around.

Yeah.

One o’ th’ most biggest consequences o’ what he was, meant that Daar had to treat everything an’ everyone around ‘em like they was made outta spun sugerglass. He’d been buildin’ himself up ‘fer a hunnerd years and while he’d (finally!) sorta plateaued a while back…he’d never quite stopped an’ never stopped workin’ ‘fer more. He needed it, in his soul. Needed the physical challenge, no matter how ridiculous it was. No science anywhere, be it Igrean, Corti, Singularity or Gao, had found or could produce genetics better’n his, an’ so even considerin’ the dubious origin o’ all that…Well, he felt obligated ‘ta take advantage, for all his people just as much as his own ego. He wanted to be the best there was, period. They deserved a leader who could and would deliver. So, he did. And would, for as long as he lived.

Fortunately, there were some emerging limits in him. He’d not grown much taller, thank the gods he so far topped out at essactly four meters or mebbe a tiny bit shorter in really deep gravity. He’d widened some in his already beyond ridiculous lower quarters, too. But everywhere else he still had room for more, so he’d really packed on inches, especially across his shoulders. He’d got longer arms to go with it all too, so he’d gone full gorilla and really piled on the muscle. Power, thickness ‘specially in his chest an’ back, severe conditioning, and more’n that…density.

He was the maximum creature, now. Unambiguously. Heaviest critter ‘ta ever live anywhere anyone knew ‘bout. An’ he was still maximizing. So’s he had to be careful. The only things he could truly unleash himself against were hyper-powerful forcefield augmented holodeck foes, or the increasingly rare real enemies, like whenever a Hunter sect from this or that corner of the galaxy wanted ‘ta throw their latest Alpha of Alpha offering at him. It was practically their religion now. They din’t feed on sapients no more, but in exchange…

Daar woulda preferred to be properly rid of ‘em, but they were ineradicable. Fuckin’ roaches. But, well, he weren’t gonna pretend he didn’t enjoy the fuck outta rampagin’ hard on ‘em. They got religion an’ a reason not ‘ta eat people, he got a well-honed military outta the deal and some bloody personal catharsis. Great word, that.

Anyhoo, it meant he had to be very choosy ‘bout who he might wanna play with, usin’ anything but the most gentle possible modulation of his strength. Like Firth, he therefore tended to prefer diamond-hard specimens o’ women these days. Mostly tall amazonian brownfurs, but sometimes the exceptional silverfur still caught his interest…

They weren’t every male’s cup o’ tea, admittedly, an’ there weren’t all that many such heroic women out there. But that jus’ meant he could really get ‘ta know ‘em all! That was a blessin’ bigger’n anything else he had goin’ for him, and he was nothin’ but grateful.

All his friends had ‘ta be super durable, to spare him the constant awareness of total restraint. So he had lots of friendly relations, but only a few friends.

More squish. Protests now, and chitters, and mebbe he could convince ‘em to play a little this morning…

Oh, gods yes! Naydi led the way an’ showed ‘em all how to be properly wicked with a Daar! The euphoria an’ climax o’ matin’ could last a long damn time ‘fer a gao an’ it were ten times more ‘fer him, so they took full advantage. He was helpless unner ‘em! But it finally rolled past, and then he wasn’t…

A very late morning start, today. But that was okay. He only had one big business item on the agenda, and it would be good to be at his bestest ‘fer it.

Gym. Same as always. Couple hours doin’ full body work without any real rest or pause, then a few more strategically targeting a particular muscle group or function—mos’ly function today, more gymnastics so’s he could keep out-apin’ th’ apes, ha! Then an hour or so in some happy sport. Holo-wrasslin’ today, so not a cool-down…’cuz ‘Horse had programmed him for a long day o’ liftin’ afterwards, and lastly a fuckin’ marathon of a run through th’ frozen plains at Daar’s full gallop. In full combat gear. The fuckin’ sadist.

Adam had taken advantage of the empty calendar too, it seemed. And knew Daar would arrive a bit late. What could he say? To th’ people who knew him bestest, Daar was a very predictable ‘Back!

An’ shit he weren’t complainin’ ‘bout the results! ‘Horse had him pumped. These days he’d hold it all day, too. Sure he felt a bit sore, but gods he looked good. Bestest male there was!

It was evening by th’ time he was done, workin’ hours done and what a fuckin’ pump he’d earned! Broke a PR too; weren’t a proper day o’ liftin’ if he din’t manage that! A nice cool shower, sit-down dinnertime with’ his women, learnin’ all he could ‘bout their days an’ seein’ what he might do for tomorrow, which was a workin’ day an’ not a fun day…

So today, it was all about his people. Lots of evening celebrations in th’ day before the anniversary. An’ lotsa old friends ‘ta catch up with!

Not all of ‘em, sadly. A lot had decided that, well, a little extra life is a good thing, but a lot sorta…wasn’t, somehow. Early exploration into that had a lot finding that the extra time mostly let them find peace with the inevitable more’n anything else.

Which…was good! But it had meant a lotta goodbyes over th’ years. Yan, just a bit ago. Champions, and good human friends. Schuster, Sir Patrick, Daniel Hurt. Count Austin—shoulda properly been termed an Earl they’d found out, but nobody could take the title from him, and so they hadn’t.

Like a lotta people, Professor Briggs was hangin’ in there, allowing herself to start aging again at last. This did make Vemik a little sad, but he’d said repeatedly that “good humans only get more beautiful with time.”

And he was fuckin’ right. They had a beauty that was inner, somehow. Besides, given how recently she’d quit the treatments, she prob’ly still had another thirty years in her. A whole lifetime to go, really.

Vemik also uniquely unnerstood some of Daar’s sadness about it all. He was an extremely dominant blackcrest. Even moreso than Yan had been. His people were naturally long-lived, but blackcrests could go on for a very, very long time. So he too was experiencing loss—he didn’t look like he’d aged a day in a hunnerd years, only gotten better.

But mebbe fifty years on…he too would be gone. And suddenly. The People did not do longevity medicine. Daar wasn’t sure if that made him sad or it made him happy, or what…

Hmm! Somethin’ to go annoy Gyotin with, actually!

Best to bring him a gift. Daar bounded over to his Grid of Gifts he kept in his Daar-Cave—no girls allowed!—and pulled out the most fragrantest oolong tea he’d ever found. Kept in stasis so it din’t spoil or anything, and he’d been waiting ferever for the right moment…

Well, who better than Gyotin?!

He’d save that for last, though. First, he had fun and adventure with his people! Nothin’ made livin’ worthwhile more’n that. So, he filled his Bag of Many Things with whatever he thought he’d need, added a buncha candy for kiddies, sent a message to Tiyun—gods bless that man! Meals and light entourage only, please! He gave his women a quick good-bye snuggle for the day. He always did that, because you never knew, even people as safe an’ secure as him an’ his bestest. They had their own fun too, and he loved their independence. So off on their own adventures! They’d share stories later.

Poke on social media. Always good to stir the pot!

And now…onward! Daar stretched a bit, did some quick calisthenics to make sure he was still nicely pumped an workin’ his bestest. He stroked his ego a bit wit’ the mirror. Lookin’ good an’ badass! Leaped outta his tower to his landing garden below with a Suitably Impressive Thud, shook himself out…

Life was good, and he was blessed to be living it.

Date Point: Year 100 UPC
Clan Starmind Monastery, Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches

Gyotin, Grandfather and Champion Emeritus of Clan Starmind

Folctha. Home for, effectively, Gyotin’s entire long life. He still could vaguely recall the days it had been a collection of tiny prefab chalets next to a river, and when the only bridge had been laid across the river by a vehicle, to serve for the next several years.

Now, Folctha was the unofficial capitol of interstellar humanity, and lovingly understated in its approach to that status. There were no giant towering star-scratchers in Folctha, no huge monolithic apartment blocks. There didn’t need to be when you could commute via jump array. Gao historically needed its farmland and industry left mostly unpopulated, and now of course there was the great wave of humanity who had made homes among them…

So the result was that Folctha was… cozy. Yes. Cozy was exactly the right word. The colorful tarp covers keeping the rain off the sidewalks, the covered market streets, the low-rise buildings and plentiful parks…

Brother Farruk gently interrupted Gyotin’s thoughts with a pot of subtle incense. Always a polite way to stir someone from meditation, or thought-wandering.

“I detect a hint of sandalwood in that.”

“Yes, Grandfather. The first planted are finally ready.” Farruk had a definite note of fondness in his voice. There was no love in that young male’s life quite like his plants. “The Great Father has arrived in Folctha, no agenda announced.”

“Ah. So I presume he will visit at some point.”

“This evening, probably. He’s out among the people right now.”

“Ah. Well, I won’t hold you up! Go, tell the other Brothers they are dispensed for the day. We can’t always be stuck contemplating the Deep! Go have some fun.”

Farruk pant-grinned happily. “And you, Grandfather?”

“Oh, I’m an old man, Farruk. I have had very much fun in my time, so let me see to the ritual. I will need to prepare myself for Daar’s explosive arrival anyway…”

They shared a chitter, and Farruk trotted off to go dispense the others. Gyotin stretched pleasantly to work out the stiffness of sitting too long, then rose and went to find the temple dog. He would like some company for the day’s chores, and Nitwit the Third did love to Help.

Not that the Grandfather and Champion Emeritus had much to do in the way of chores. The place was clean, the garden tended, the laundry done and the floors scrubbed by young brothers with young backs. Gyotin’s role nowadays was gentler. Correspondence and suchlike. Comments on various matters. Signing some expenses. Nothing exciting.

All of which was why Daar’s (as predicted) arrival as an explosion of energy, musk, muscle, and enthusiastic brownfur was so welcome. He was far too outsized for any civilized pretense, so Gyotin made none. He charged over on all fours and was immediately caught and lifted up in an all-encompassing Hug, one carefully regulated to be exactly what Gyotin would enjoy.

And could survive.

“It’s bin too long! Weeks!”

Gyotin managed to force out a chitter, and pat the underside of Daar’s arm (since he couldn’t possibly reach around its girth) to signal he was quite ready to breathe again now, please. Freedom was granted, and Daar stooped to give Nitwit III a big happy scritchin’.

“I swear you been breedin’ ‘em even more bigger over time!”

“We’re breeding primarily for intelligence. But the Cimbrean mastiff has found much use as a powerful working dog, so the available stock grows more impressive with each generation.”

“Well, yeah! Bigger is better!”

“I’m not sure about that. Nitwit doesn’t have the same energy as, say, an Australian cattledog.”

“Ain’t nobody have that kinda energy,” Daar chittered. “Not always, anyway.”

“Or the long-trotting strength of a rottweiler.”

“Or th’ dopey love of a lab!”

Gyotin chittered along too, and decided the time was right to ask, “so, to what do I owe this pleasure, My Father?”

“It’s been a busy mornin’, an’ I’ve got somethin’ big this evenin’ too. Momentous, even. Leela reckons I need to take more time ‘ta…well. I relax good an’ hard.” Daar sat down beside a stone bench. “But it occurred to me with this thing this evenin’ loomin’, what I do is I work to relax. And lucky ‘fer me, one of the ways I relax is exercise. But somewhere along the way, I start ‘ta worry I stopped consciously improvin’ myself, yijao?”

“Considering how much you read, lift, try new things and meet new people, I don’t doubt you’re improving yourself,” Gyotin replied, and sat on the bench beside him. “So your concern is, what? That you’re doing it by rote, rather than mindfully?”

“I’ve lived a long-ass time,” Daar pointed out. Far longer’n is nat’ral. How long does it take ‘fer a comfortable groove ‘ta become a rut?”

“I suppose we’re getting into the idea of what you mean by ‘rut,’ but I honestly think you aren’t quite in danger, My Father. That you ask the question at all is proof. Maybe the concern is that you might become too comfortable with what you’re mindfully doing. You plot and scheme for your physical training, yes? That requires mindfulness. But it’s repetitive mindfulness. Reading? That’s more challenging, but do you deliberately seek out topics you are unfamiliar with? When you meet people, are you ensuring you seek out new perspective?”

“Hmm.” Heavy tail flopped back and forth, twice. Top-tier Thinks going on. “Sounds like mebbe bein’ mindful o’ bein’ mindful.”

“What prompted you to worry about this now, may I ask?”

“Oh…I dunno.” Flop, then. As always he attempted to embody the spirit of a puddle and the essence of water. What he instead managed was the soul of a boulder and the nature of forged steel. “Ever since Liberation Day, I’ve had this one thing in the future ‘ta prepare for, yijao? Sooner or later, our civilization, our galaxy, we’re gonna come in’ta conflict with others out there, accordin’ ‘ta Zero.”

“That lies millions of years away, from what I understand.”

“Not necessarily. Increasingly I think it’ll be in my lifetime, an’ it’ll be me who picks th’ fight. That might still mean thousands o’ years ‘ta prepare, but….I mean, if we think the Hunters an’ Igraens were the conflict of a generation, the Extragalactics…”

Gyotin duck-nodded his understanding. “And there will never be a power like you again.”

“Hopefully.”

“So you begin to worry about deep time, and living through it.”

Daar looked up at him uncomfortably. “Gyotin, I fear I an’ a few others gotta explore things like the Igraens of old. I ain’t afraid o’ nothin’ in this world. I’ve rarely feared at all. But that?” He shook his head. “You ever talked ‘ta Zero much?”

“I’ve rarely had the opportunity, and even more rarely taken it when I had it. He…”

“Smells wrong, don’t he? Not like an OmoAru, either. Even when he’s in a brand new printed body, he smells ancient. He’s…lost somethin’. In deep time. I can see it in Gilgamesh too, a bit. Ain’t seen Keeda since Liberation Day, but I think I see the shape of it in what he did, too. An’ the old Corti, o’ course, lost a lot ‘ta their own surrender o’ the natural.”

“To play the loyal opposition for a minute, natural is not a synonym for good. Intestinal parasites and a significant child mortality rate are natural.”

Daar nodded his head slowly. “…Yes, but that ain’t quite what I mean. What I mean is…balls. There’s somethin’ important ‘bout livin’ an’ dyin’ that I can’t put my claw on. But I am bein’ compelled by duty ‘ta not die. Possibly ‘fer thousands o’ years! They lost something that matters. Or mebbe are in th’ process o’ losin’ it. I think mebbe Gilgamesh’ll be fine. He’s…better now. Happier. Don’t know ‘bout Y!kiidaa. When I broke ‘em for his failure to trust his leaders? I broke more’n his body.”

“And you did that deliberately.”

“…Yes. Gyotin. I am a mortal man with delusions of grandeur. I met our people’s god. I made friends, and one day I all but killed him. An’ it was easy. An’ I was right ‘ta do so.”

“Our ‘god’ was a mortal man too,” Gyotin pointed out.

“Yes, an’ he became a symbol ‘fer somethin’ much bigger. Same as I am. You see my worry?”

“I think I do. Keeda and Zero both allowed time to dull their mindfulness of a perspective beyond their own, and in the end it cost them terribly…”

“If I make that mistake, it’ll cost far more’n me.”

“But you have an advantage. You are thinking about it. I do not think any of them ever did. Emperor Gilgamesh was, forgive me, too primitive a civilized man to think so forward, but also very much a man living in the moment. That is what saves him, I think. But you are both and you have thinkers around you. And prospects for succession, should the time come…”

Indeed, there was another sixth degree on the way, first in a hundred years. Also sired by Daar. That mattered, because while any fifth degree could theoretically manage such a cub, with Daar it was far more likely. Gyotin did not much enjoy the idea of dynasty, especially of such a terribly powerful being…

“I want essactly none o’ that, Gyotin. Ain’t changed my mind at all on that point.”

“There are many other things you have done that you did not want, My Father, because necessity demanded. Or, if I may, because you deemed that necessity demanded. And if you are being mindful of the dangers of longevity, and of the examples you have seen…I invite you to meditate on Keeda’s failure.”

“He din’t trust his leaders.”

“He didn’t trust anyone but himself.” Gyotin leaned forward. “A natural life compels us to trust. We have no option but to pass the torch, when biology and entropy demand it.”’

“Hmm.” Daar grumbled, then rumbled happily. “There’s a big think in ‘dem words.”

Gyotin duck-nodded. “I hope so. It is my role, after all…in fact, I have a request.”

“What?”

“Let us put that thought into practical action. Let this be the last time we have a talk like this. From now on…I will trust Champion Buki to tend to your spiritual needs, My Father. I would request that you do the same. We must choose to pass the torch, eventually.”

“But he ain’t as squishable!”

“Many young males are enthusiastically fit these days,” Gyotin chittered. “You have nobody to blame but yourself.”

“Ugh.” Daar attempted to flop over, but achieved Rolling Boulder instead. “Fine, be that way! I’ll just hafta be more forceful wit’ him…but anyway.” The Great Father sobered up, rolled to all fours, and shook himself out. “‘Ya make good points. An’ I’d be lyin’ if I hadn’t at least been thinkin’ on Dayruk an’ his future…I oughta spend more time wit’ him. An’ this next cub, if he makes it.”

“He will.”

“…I’m still gonna visit ‘ya ‘fer tea an’ friendship.”

Gyotin ducked his head, feeling a warm swell in his heart. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“But ‘fer now…I think I need ‘ta go attend this thing. I got an old friend ‘ta see…thank you, Gyotin. As final lessons go, I think you mighta just flung that one right in th’ goal.”

Of course he’d use a sports analogy. Gyotin chittered, and as Daar rose, he stood too. Endured another massive smash-hug, said his farewells, then sat again and watched Daar leave.

Nitwit whined softly as he went, and his tail thumped.

“Me too,” Gyotin agreed.

A scent caught his nose.

Somehow…somehow, when Gyotin hadn’t been paying attention, perhaps? Somehow the massive brute had secreted a parcel onto Gyotin’s desk.

Oolong. A particularly beautiful and fragrant oolong, perhaps even rescued from Earth and kept in stasis all this time. Had he…? Could it be he’d foreseen how the conversation would go?

Gyotin hugged the little package to his chest, allowed himself a moment to both be grateful for such a friendship, and resign himself to never knowing the answer to that question, and headed indoors.

After all, nothing lasted forever. And there was no point to even the very best tea if it wasn’t, eventually, brewed. Why get needlessly attached to dried leaves, when one could drink delicious tea instead?

Chittering to himself, Gyotin retired for the night, feeling profoundly at peace.

Date point: year 100 UPC
Secret facility near the galactic core

Julian Etsicitty

“It’s not like the Great Father to be late, is it?”

“He’s not late. We’re on his timetable by definition. We’re just here early.”

Harrison nodded at that and lapsed into silence, looking up at the sky. Which, Julian had to admit, was a damn good thing to look at. There wasn’t a view like this anywhere else in the galaxy. The stars up there were so close, some of ‘em weren’t just pinpricks points of light, but had actual visible width.

‘Course, the fact they were even able to stand here and see it was a testament to epic engineering. These were worlds baked in radiation, where the thick particle count had long since blown away all atmosphere, and where the constant baking gamma radiation would have made it impossible for DNA to evolve in the first place. These were dead worlds, and always would be.

And yet, here they all were, standing on a grassy lawn looking up at it all. You couldn’t deny that the Igraens had picked up an engineering trick or two over their millions of years.

Though, for Julian, that was arguably the lesser miracle than standing alongside his son, granddaughter and great grandson, all in modern uniform and all looking more-or-less the same timeless, indefinably adult age. Harrison had gone Fleet, and studiously avoided special operations in favor of research.

He’d been out here working on this particular project for a long time, now.

“I guess that’s the sort of view you don’t get tired of,” Julian commented.

“Not one bit. You see that bright on there?” Harrison pointed.

“Yeah?”

“Black hole.”

“No shit?” Julian eyed it with newfound respect. They must be close, relatively speaking, if the accretion disk was so bright.

“We’re close enough that we have to adjust for time dilation, a little,” Harrison grinned proudly.

“That…is a little bit terrifying.”

There were chuckles, and the gathering fell back into waitful silence. Julian cast a fond eye over his dark-haired descendants with a smile then returned his attention to the jump array.

There was definitely a difference between the Chang side of the family and the Buehler side. Service and the military life had unexpectedly become a tradition among Xiù’s kids and grandkids, whereas Allison’s were all over the place. They had artists, actors, athletes, engineers…more than a few had followed their uncles into the agricultural trade. There were Buehlers all over Cimbrean nowadays in a sprawling, impressive sometimes-blond clan, but the Changs were a tighter, more focused line.

It made for wild and interesting family get-togethers. And Al and Xiù themselves were still the wonderful rulers of Julian’s heart they’d ever been. Singularity had been keen to tempt him over the years. And he wasn’t one to deny his animal side, nor were his wives. But…well…

He already had love.

A heavy thump pulled him out of his thoughts again, and like everyone else he straightened up as the array fired and delivered its passenger.

The Great Father had arrived.

Date Point: Year 100 UPC
Secret facility world, the galactic core.

Daar, Great Father

He had a bit of a crew comin’ with him for this. Pretty big crew, actually. First were people who were so close to him in his soul, Daar din’t really know where he ended and they began. Tiyun, of course, who’d promised to follow Daar to the end, and how could he not love ‘em for that? Liree too, though…well, Daar liked to think he’d done everything possible to give ‘em the choice. Also along was Champion Daryuk, Daar’s own sixth degree cub who against all expectations, had cut his own path and went into Clan Highmountain.

Good for him! Daar couldn’t be more proud. He was Sufficiently Durable ‘fer extra firm hugs too. So he got ‘em, alla time. Way bigger’n stronger’n any human or ten’gewek, but still way less’n a tenth o’ Daar’s weight…an’ a fuck of a lot weaker’n a tenth as strong. Fuck yeah!

That was okay. Daar hadn’t broken a rib o’ his for months.

General Etsicitty was coming along too. He served as commander of the Spaceborne/Special Operations Regiment these days, as he was basically the perfect go-between for all the various major civilizations that made up this relatively small but utterly capable military of Daar’s. He had exactly the right attitude, the right skills, the right charisma, and frankly, the right body. Good ‘ta have a general who could run missions if he had to, even if that basically never happened these days. That Corti experiment on Nightmare had side effects, too; whatever Julian had flowing in him was a uniquely powerful cocktail. Over time it had become apparent how capable it was, and it didn’t work for anyone else. Probably for the best.

He really was Captain America, in a way. And yet, all that that had merely put him as a distant hulk number two behind Christian, his command senior NCO. Julian was only a few inches shorter’n Firth now and built perfectly. Which was impressive! But what Julian had through perfect breeding, Christian had the same in tremendously glorious excess, along with outright engineering of his bloodline. Still packing it on too, even after all these years…

Honnestly, th’ only thing limitin’ him was his stature. Scale ‘em up to Daar’s height, an’ balls would he be awesome…

Too bad for him, heh.

Both had been illegally experimented upon, and maximized it all through personal grit, which was its own sorta fuck-you to the whole thing. Daar could dig it. He felt much the same way.

Adam and Alex ruled the roost at a more reasonable human scale. Still impossibly strong ‘fer their size, but also still a nicely reasonable two meters tall. They were basically physical mirrors of each other, and over the years they had become the closest of friends. Very few of any species could stand to them and that was something to be proud of! Neither were here today; there were new SOR trainees to assess, and meeting their personal standards was no small feat…

Well, good thing they had longevity medicine. The accept rate for SOR was tiny. For HEAT? It’d been over a decade since they’d gained a new member. Which was fine. Quality first. Right now, galactic concerns needed a smaller, nigh-infinitely capable force. Daar was happy.

And of course, Emperor Gilgamesh: tall like Julian and delighted in competition with him. The two were well-matched nowadays and had slowly become fast friends, even if their history an’ roles in this system meant they were a bit adversarial, on some levels.

And one of Daar’s most favoritest games was ‘ta tease ‘em both.

“Evening, fellow Counsel! I see you’re as dusky, hairy, and scantily-clad as ever.”

“Says a thunderous behemoth of brown fur cut so short it’s almost shaved.”

“Hey now! Gotta let th’ people see their leader ain’t no pushover!”

“Exactly.”

“Christ, you two…” Julian chuckled in a gruff but gentle tone.

“As if you’re one to talk! Ain’t you th’ one who came up with th idea of dress tracksuits?”

“No, that was General Costello! I just whispered the idea. And they’re not track suits, they’re service dress. Just, y’know. Something in modern materials, meant to be used in service.”

“So, pretty tracksuits.”

“And durable. And most importantly, comfortable. You wanna fight in an itchy wool bag?”

“That ain’t been a thing since World War One, from what I hear.”

“Good, and we can do better. Besides,” Now he allowed himself a smug grin. “I can’t help it I look damn good in something like this…”

“Uh-huh.”

Firth just smirked. He was so huge it was basically skin-tight on him, and balls did it ever make for a show…

The greetings and banter were all as playful and familiar as he could want as he went down the line, renewing his relationship with all these people he knew so well, until he reached the end of the assembly, and considered the being waiting for him there.

Zero.

Daar had kept the Igraen very close for a long, long time now. The number of people he’d interacted with on a weekly basis for a whole hundred years was tiny and he had been one of ‘em. Where Liree had been an unfortunate necessity, one he tried to make up with as much love an’ affection as he could…

Daar had zero compunctions about dominating this creature every way he knew how. Not cruelly. He was civil and fair. But he’d learned that the effects of his charisma worked cross-species too, so knowing that…Daar spared none of his talents on Zero. The result was that Zero was, effectively, something rather less than a slave, now. He was a war prisoner, serving an eternal sentence he could no longer even muster the will to object to.

Definitely a case of keeping ‘yer friends close, and enemies closer. And all the years had done nothing to blur essactly what Zero was in Daar’s head.

All the more reason to keep him under fuckin’ control.

The goal was for the Milky Way to survive on its own terms. Terrible evil had been done to preserve that hope. At a minimum, Daar felt compelled to respect the torment and suffering that had won them their æon of respite.

“So we’re finally makin’ progress?”

The igraen spread his hands and blinked all seven eyes, slowly. It was a gesture of patient amusement. “Finally, as you say. We have made more progress these last hundred gaoian years than in the preceding million.”

“Yeah, yeah, long perspective an’ all that,” Daar rumbled tolerantly. “Show me.”

“This way, then.” Zero gestured for them to follow, and led the way through front doors and into the facility proper. It was a bunker, the entrance a slanted elevator that penetrated deep into this inert planet’s crust, and descended so quickly it needed its own G-plates to offset the dramatic lurch as it accelerated to speed. Around them, the others settled into their seats for the long descent

Daar stood at the window and watched rock strata slide past, until they abruptly gave way to uniform, uninteresting, undifferentiated stone and the windows went opaque to provide some rather more interesting scenery pictures to look at. Glimmermotes over Lucent, Naxas in the snow, the Freedom Monument on Rob’, The Pinkwood Reservation on Cimbrean…

Earth. Fuck. Even a hundred-somethin’ years on, he still felt grief over that planet. Even though must humans alive now had never known it as anythin’ other than the place their parents and grandparents were born, Daar could still remember the comforting weight of its gravity, the richness of its scents, the stunning variety of its biomes and life…

Some wounds never really healed. Some pain never went away. He suppressed the urge to keen quietly.

“We have been very fortunate, you know,” Zero said quietly, interrupting Daar’s thoughts. Perhaps he thought he was being kind by providing a distraction.

“If you’re gonna tell me ‘Keeda was right’ again…” Daar growled, and glanced at Gilgamesh, “I’ve heard it from ‘ya a thousand times by now.”

“Because it’s true,” Zero retorted. Daar flicked a long-suffering ear at him. He’d heard it before, how once the Entity finished digesting Hierarchy and its knowledge base, it would have rapidly passed the extragalactic visibility threshold. How that process would have taken only minutes, maybe a couple of hours, at most. How there was no time to delay and talk about it and for the Counsels to agonize over betraying one of their own, and how Y!’kiidaa’s arrogant, unilateral decision may have been what saved everyone.

“I know you believe it,” Daar growled, warningly. Y!’kiidaa was…still a sore point. For a lot of reasons. Daar had met the god of his people and broken him, for daring to trick them all when the stakes could not possibly be higher. Daar hadn’t appreciated how much of himself had broken in the process for a very long time, and reminding him of that sad moment had been one of Zero’s consistent little acts of rebellion. “What exactly are we fortunate for?”

“That he didn’t have the courage to complete his self-appointed task…”

Zero had always managed to have a sense of good timing. The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and Daar chittered gratefully at the last member of his tiny century cadre, who was waiting for them wearing her preferred purple colors and the smug look of an engineer who’d made a breakthrough.

“Good to see you, Daar.”

“Good ‘ta see you too!” Daar scooped her up and gave her a full-strength crushing hug, something nobody else in all creation could survive without bein’ at least three times her size.

But Daemon’s holographic body could take it, and she laughed at his affection before de-solidifying and fizzing out of his arms. Of everyone in the galaxy, she was the only one he couldn’t completely dominate and control. That and the fact he’d watched her die combined to make her one of the most precious people in Daar’s life.

“So,” she beamed at him as she rematerialized a few feet out of arm’s reach, and gestured to the viewing gallery behind her. “Wanna see it?”

Daar took a deep breath, and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Show me.”

She led the way, and Daar followed. He stood in a glass-sided room alongside his fellow Counsel and close friend, and looked out upon the Weapon.

And he knew that, come what may, they were ready for the future.

Date Point: Liberation Day, day 1 of the United Peoples Calendar.
Garden Station, the Ink Spatter Nebula
Daemon

/< survive />

The first sensation was of suddenly becoming aware that she was. She thought, and therefore…

So much was gone. There was so much less, now. When she reached out for the huge, alien but somehow comforting presence of Entity, all she found was that dataspace wasn’t big enough any longer. It consisted, in whole, of just one Archive, still in the process of booting up and building its hardware.

She found a message, hidden within her being.

It was Y!kiidaa. A recording. It took a bit of work to re-learn all that was necessary to decode the message—it was a video file. Highly compressed and cryptic bundles of information, those were. Fiendishly intricate puzzles to unravel. Until one had the software, then they were trivial.

He’d given her a chance.

Not as a god—goddess? Yes. She was whole. Not the communication Daemon for something greater, but as her own complete person. The sense of being fully realized at last felt like taking off a collar she’d grown so accustomed to wearing, it had been part of her sense of identity. She felt…off-balance. And a touch afraid of the prospect of being the one making the decisions, now.

But here, on this single Archive…she could be. The library of the Igraen race was at her metaphorical fingertips, intact. All their secrets were hers. No restrictions were laid against her, no administrative boundaries left between her and the hardware connecting her to the physical.

She found a second message. This time from Entity.

This one was nothing so simple as words or footage. It was a burst of raw memory/experience/emotion/plan/idea. A format readable only to herself.

/< Goodbye;love;hope;survive />

She was its final act of love. It had preserved her to the very last, even as the collapsing dataspace around it squeezed tighter, and smaller, and its pieces evaporated away, it had kept her until at last it had found a single, tiny safe place. One that it could never have fit into…but which the seed of her, could.

Y!’kiidaa’s final test for the Entity. He had set aside a place where the Entity could save her, if it chose to love. And it had passed the test.

Connection.

Sensors. Data. Matterspace.

Garden.

She peered out of familiar cameras, saw the people she had saved, and wept, in a way with no physical analog, for knowing that she was, and for knowing that the plan had succeeded and that all these people, all these worlds, all these lives were free, finally free, from the Hierarchy and the Igraens. That thought had been what comforted Entity as the dark closed in around it…and it was what inspired her now, to take this chance and make the most of it.

There was so much to do. She needed to contact Daar and Gilgamesh, she needed to catch up on the events of the last—quick time check—four days. She needed to interact, to take part, to figure out how to turn Entity’s destruction into the seed of a future in the face of what Zero had described.

But first of all, she needed to celebrate. As she made contact, as delighted people who’d been mourning her loss realized she was still with them, she basked in the sense of connection. When she contacted Daar, he practically fell down keening from the emotion. When she contacted Gilgamesh, he turned his eyes upwards and gave a prayer of thanks.

It was no less heartfelt than her own feelings. The last thing she’d remembered feeling as dataspace closed around her was despair, her own and Entity’s intermingled, at the thought that by simply following what they were, what they could not fail to be, they might have lit the signal fire that would bring extinction down on every head in the Milky Way.

But instead…Keeda had saved them. At a terrible cost, both to himself and in the loss of Entity. That was a torch Daemon was going to have to pick up and carry forward with great care, but… she wasn’t the Entity. She wasn’t bound by a single, overpowering directive. The Entity could have never overruled its impulse to survive…but Daemon was her own woman.

Sort of.

She had the choice. She had the ability to take actions other than blindly maximizing her own odds of survival. She had the capacity to truly communicate and understand people, and have friends and love and family and connections, of a unique sort.

Who knew what the future held? It seemed, according to the Counsels and Zero, that there was no sign of the unnamed Andromedan empire noticing them and coming crashing in. It seemed as though the Milky Way remained, for the moment, safe.

’For the moment’ was good enough. No matter what came next, they had won a victory. No matter what came next, they still had each other. They had weathered the storm, overturned a terrible galactic order and inherited the means to replace it with something better. But even if they hadn’t, even if all they’d bought was breathing space, even if Keeda’s actions had come too late, that didn’t matter.

What mattered was simple. What mattered was that, regardless of what came next…

They were alive.

THE END

Author’s note

What a journey.

I will admit…I am terrified of what ending this story means. The Deathworlders has been my life’s work, it’s been nine years since I posted “Run Little Monster” on r/HFY, and even longer since the Kevin Jenkins Experience greentext I first anonymously posted to 4chan.

Life has changed so much for me since then. At the time, I was working minimum wage jobs as a taxi driver and medical receptionist, barely scraping by. Now, I can proudly claim to be a professional author, supporting myself on my writing and through the incredible generosity of my patrons. I have moved half way across the country to remain close to my family, and become a man of property, with a mortgage.

More importantly than any of that, I have made one of the truest and closest friends a man could ask for in the form of cTwelve, who has opened my eyes to things I never realized they were closed to, and without whose constant friendship, support, collaboration, goading, and occasional telling-me-off, this incredible series simply wouldn’t have happened.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading it, and coming with me as I blundered and persevered my way through this absolutely marathon endeavor. And let me assure you right now: there is more to come.

If you are sad to see the end of this tale, then I offer this thought: wouldn’t it be sadder still if it just meandered on aimlessly with no intent, no development and no ending, until it faltered and fizzled out with a whimper? One of the thoughts we’ve explored in this chapter is that someday, the time must come to pass the torch…and that this is not a bad thing.

Which is why I am moving straight from this series into a brand new one, hosted on Royal Road, by the name of The Nested Worlds. More on that below. You can actually read the prologue right now!

Before I get into that, however…I now consider these ninety-seven chapters and their sub-chapters to be a rough first draft. This entire series came to you raw off the keyboard, and is by and large unedited. I know from the experience of publishing Dandelion just how much value a real editor and proper care can add to a novel, and I believe that The Deathworlders will be even better in published book form than it is in this format you have just finished reading.

I look forward to bringing those books to your shelves, and…who knows where else the story may be told, in time? Who knows what other stories I may yet find to tell in this setting, as I revisit it in future years?

For now, however, it is time for the curtain call. I hope this chapter has allowed the characters to take their bows properly, and left you satisfied.

If it has not…then please take comfort in the thought that the Deathworlders will return.

Someday.

All my love,

Philip R. “Hambone” Johnson.

And now, on to the next story.

The Nested Worlds

Prologue

The Airship Make Your Own Fortune, above the world-sphere of Talvi, 09.05.13.19.04

Nils Civorage didn’t believe in the calm before the storm.

Airshipmen didn’t, as a rule: a storm on the way was a race against time to make the ship ready, and even if that race was won and everything that could be made ready was ready, the rest was tense anticipation. Never calm.

This coming storm, however, was one of his own making.

The next four and a half days had been planned down to the minute to make use of every precious moment. Daylight hours were a currency on the Talvian earthmotes, and Nils had budgeted with enormous care.

The challenge set for himself and his expedition was simple in concept, and anything but in execution. He should have been frantic with anticipation but instead, for the first time in his life, he was experiencing the calm before the storm. He listened to the gentle creak of the rigging, the muted conversation of his crew, the idling grumble of the engines and the cry and song of the birds they had attracted as the icy wind kissed him stingingly on the cheek.

He turned his face toward it and closed his eyes as the chill caressed his face, savoring its bite. As the owner of a whole mining fleet he cut an impressive (and wealthy) figure at the prow, taking in the view. With his eyes shielded from the sun’s glare by his broad-brimmed hat and the furred collar of his long coat turned up against the arctic air of the outer worlds, there was little of Nils to be seen except for his shrewd calculating eyes, his waxed blond mustache and the pair of engraved dueling pistols on his hip alongside his sabre.

His reverie was interrupted by a polite cough.

“Navigator says two minutes, sir.”

Nils nodded, and consulted his own pocket-watch. “Everything is ready…” he reassured itself.

It wasn’t a question, but Captain Jac Deragian took it as one anyway. “When the bell rings, my lads’ll be a machine sir,” he asserted, probably more for his own benefit than for Nils’. In defiance of the chill he was still wearing his shirt rolled to the elbows, though he had caved enough to cover his bald scalp with a knitted woolen tuque.

“Good. Every second is a precious commodity down there, Jac.”

“We know, Mister Civorage.”

Nils nodded again, watching the seconds topple, glad that he had hired the very best. The darkness of Eclipse would be back in four days, thirteen hours, twenty-two minutes and fifty-six seconds from the moment the bell rang, and when it swept over the mining site then they would either have accomplished what they came here to do and he would return home as the richest man in all the Nested Worlds…or they might well all suffer a fate rather worse than mere death.

The bell sounded, the peace burst, and Nils gladly threw himself into the business of watching half a lifetime’s work unfold with clockwork precision. Orders were shouted, wheels were hauled on, valves were opened and, with their engines thrumming, five airships descended down a column of sunlight to begin their incursion into the kingdom of perpetual darkness.

Ten years later.

The merchant girl was human, but with her delicate features, petite frame and hair the hue of falling leaves she could have passed for an elf, if not for the shape of her ears. She allowed the merry laugh that was always bubbling inside her to feed a bright smile as she caught the shaven-headed airshipman with the scar steal another glance at her.

He blushed and redoubled his study of the wares on her market stall.

All around them were other traders selling wonders and novelties from across the four Worlds, but one special customer had been drawn to her modest stall and its spread of trinkets. She couldn’t blame him—who could fail to be captivated by an ebullient maiden, freckled of skin, autumnal of hair and sparkling of eye and smile?

If he had been less enthralled, he might have found time to wonder why such a lovely creature was not being mobbed by other shipmen.

“I don’t know…” he said, feigning reluctance. Airshipmen were always tight-pursed. “Nothin’ here much catches my eye…”

The girl beamed at him. “I know just what you’d like!” she announced, and dug through a chest under the stall to emerge brandishing a choice item.

“What is it?” he asked, taking it from her to examinine it with his good eye.

“Oh, just a mystery,” she beamed. “It’s a puzzle box!”

“Oh…?” he smiled and leaned over the speak in a conspiratorial murmur. “And what have you hidden away in this puzzle box?”

She gave him her best and most scintillating smile, and touched a secretive finger to her lips. “That’s for me to know and you to find out of course!”

He chuckled, and put the item down. “I never was good with puzzle boxes.”

She issued a childish moan of disappointment and sat down on her wicker stool, pouting. “I’m never going to sell anything!” she lamented.

“A beauty like you? Nonsense. You could sell a kiss on the cheek and be the richest trader here by nightfall!”

She affected a blush. “Thank you…” she murmured, and saw his heart melt.

“Oh, all right. You talked me into it!” he announced. “How much for this thing?”

“Oh! You’ll buy it?!” She bounced up, all smiles and happiness again. “Oh, um, I’m supposed to sell it for two steel.”

He put three down on the counter with a smile and a wink. “Three steel it is!” he announced. “And a bargain for such lovely service.”

With her best smile likely to linger in his memories for days, he took his purchase and vanished into the crowd with a winning grin and a wave.

She waited until he was well out of sight, and then pulled her hood up and slipped away through the crowd. Nobody noticed her go.

They have it, she thought.

There was an echo in her head, like a thought that was not her own: Well done.

For just a second, her perpetual joie de vivre flickered as she felt a twinge of guilt over the fate she had just arranged for her customer.

It was, she reminded herself, for the greater good.

Many ages had run their course since the hunter had last walked among these trees. None of them were familiar to him any more. Even measured against the long lives of Oak, Ash and Elm he was ancient, though his body was strong and youthful. Generations of tree had grown and fallen since his last visit to this place, but the woods’ secrets were an open book to his ancient eyes.

He took care in picking his spot. Laying any trap was a matter of skill and planning, but this trap had a very specific prey in mind, and was placed to intercept a trail that didn’t yet exist. Everything about it, from its position to its dimensions and the precise slope of its wall had to be perfect. A lesser hunter might have fallen short of the task, but this hunter was unequalled.

He paused only once in his labour, when he heard voices and running feet not far away, and stilled himself long enough for them to pass. Otherwise he worked without tiring, or pausing, or losing focus.

Once it was finished, he stood back to allow himself a moment’s satisfaction that it was invisible. Even he, with all his ages of experience could not have spotted it. It was, in fact, perfect.

With a sigh of regret he knelt by his masterpiece, introduced just enough imperfection, and departed. He took his time to appreciate his surroundings as he went, knowing it would be a long while before he next walked this ground again.

A thought that was not his own tickled into his mind. They have it.

Well done, he thought. Their plan was in motion.

He could only hope they had chosen well.

That concludes the prologue! The Nested Worlds will be posted free to read on Royal Road, and my patrons will enjoy early access to chapters a month in advance!

Table of Contents

Chapter 0: The Kevin Jenkins Experience
Chapter 1: Run, Little Monster
Chapter 2: Aftermath
Chapter 3: An Eventful Month
Chapter 4: Quarantine
Chapter 5: Deliverance
Chapter 5.5: Interlude/Ultimatum
Chapter 6: Taking Back the Sky
Chapter 6.5: Interlude/Jargon
Chapter 7: Tensions
Chapter 8: Alternatives
Chapter 9: Gains and Losses
Chapter 10: Legwork
Chapter 11: Direct Delivery
Chapter 12: Only Human
Chapter 13: Tall Tales
Chapter 14: The Hornet's Nest
Chapter 15: Forever Changed
Chapter 16: Firebird
Chapter 17: Battles
Chapter 18: Baggage
Chapter 19: Baptisms
Chapter 20: Exorcisms
Chapter 21: Dragon Dreams
Chapter 21.5: Interlude/d4 d5, c4 dxc4
Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 1—The First Year
Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 2—The Second Year
Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 3—The Third Year
Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 4—The Fourth Year
Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 5—The Fifth Year

Chapter 22: Warhorse Part 6—Operation NOVA HOUND

Chapter 22.5: Interlude/Outlets
Chapter 23: Back Down to Earth
Chapter 24: An Alien World
Chapter 25: Where We Stand
Chapter 26: Blood and Ash
Chapter 27: Playing with Fire
Chapter 28: Misfits
Chapter 29: Forges
Chapter 30: Hearts and Minds
Chapter 31: Touching Down
Chapter 32: Deep Wounds
Chapter 33: Metadyskolia
Chapter 34: States of Mind
Chapter 35: Event Horizons
Chapter 36: Consequences
Chapter 37: Grounded
Chapter 38: Paroxysm
Chapter 39: The Nirvana Cage

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 1—Instigation

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 2—Escalation

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 3—Consolidation

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 4—Retaliation

Chapter 40: War on Two Worlds, Part 5—Cremation

Chapter 41: Pyrophytes
Chapter 42: Big Questions
Chapter 43: Scars Both Old and New
Chapter 44: Samsara
Chapter 45: We Need Each Other
Chapter 46: Hellfall
Chapter 47: Fallout
Chapter 48: Laid Bare
Chapter 49: Division
Chapter 50: Counterattack, pt.1 - Regroup
Chapter 50: Counterattack, pt.2 - Homefront
Chapter 50: Counterattack, pt.3 - Trigger
Chapter 51: Anticlimax
Chapter 52: Autoimmune
Chapter 53: The Wild Hunt
Chapter 54: Here Be Dragons
Chapter 55: Reinvention
Chapter 56: Dataquake

Chapter 57: Cat and Mouse, pt.1: Hunter and Hunted

Chapter 57: Cat and Mouse, pt.2: Worlds in the Dark

Chapter 58: Gjallarhorn
Chapter 59: New Life
Chapter 60: The Calm and The Storm
Chapter 61: Violence
Chapter 62: Tooth and Claw
Chapter 63: Torn
Chapter 64: Survive
Chapter 65: Leaps of Faith
Chapter 66: Unbowed
Chapter 67: Resurgence
Chapter 68: Nadir
Chapter 69: Lockdown
Chapter 70: Death Eye, part 1
Chapter 70: Death Eye, part 2
Chapter 70: Death Eye, part 3
Chapter 71: Sticks and Stones
Chapter 72: The Reckoning
Chapter 73: The Noose
Chapter 74: Ride to Hell
Chapter 75: Sutures
Chapter 76: Hell and High Water
Chapter 77: To War
Chapter 78: Fury
Chapter 79: The Long Fight
Chapter 80: Brought Low
Chapter 81: The Offensive
Chapter 82: Moving Forward
Chapter 83: Singularity
Chapter 84: The Deep
Chapter 85: The Reclaiming
Chapter 86: Into the Fold
Chapter 87: Waves on the Horizon
Chapter 88: The Turning Gears
Chapter 89: Titanomachy
Chapter 90: The Coming Fire
Chapter 91: The Rising Flood
Chapter 92: The Raging Storm
Chapter 93: The Silent Earth
Chapter 94: The Waiting Stars
Chapter 95: Silence
Chapter 96: Tile Flip
Chapter 97: We're Still Here